Preaching Death

Christians traditionally have had something substantive and important to say about death and afterlife. Yet the language and imagery used to craft a weighty sermon about life and death have given way to language designed to comfort and celebrate. InPreaching Death, Lucy Bregman uses a wide range of sources to track the changes in Protestant American funerals over the last one hundred years. Early-twentieth-century "natural immortality" doctrinal funeral sermons transitioned to an era of "silence and denial," eventually becoming expressive, biographical tributes to the deceased. The contemporary death awareness movement, with the "death as a natural event" perspective, has widely impacted American culture, affecting health care, education, and psychotherapy and creating new professions such as hospice nurse and grief counselor. Bregman questions whether this transitionwhich occurred unobserved and without conflictwas inevitable and what alternative paths could have been chosen. Preaching Deathunveils the unique story of how Americans' comprehension of death shifted in the last century without notice or fanfareand why it's important to recognize how we arrived at this understanding so that we may find ways to move beyond it.