Ebook
Corpse Care relates the history of death care in the U.S. to craft robust, constructive, practical ethics for tending the dead. It specifically relates corpse care to economic, environmental, and pastoral concerns.
Death and the treatment of the dead body loom large in our collective, cultural consciousness. The authors explore the materiality and meaning of the dead body and the living's relationship to it. All the biggest questions facing the planetary human community relate in one way or another to the corpse. Surprisingly, Christian communities are largely missing in the discussion of the dead, having abdicated the historic role in care for the dead to the funeral industry. Christianity has stopped its reflection about the body once that body no longer bears life. Corpse Care stakes a claim that the fact of embodiment, this incarnational truth, this process of our bodily becoming, is a practical, ethical, and theological necessity.
Cody J. Sanders is associate professor of Congregational and Community Care Leadership at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota. He has published seven books in the area of congregational ministry and spiritual care and is a nationally recognized leader in LGBTQ+ spiritual care. He is a frequent lecturer in churches and seminaries across the country.
Mikeal C. Parsons is Professor and Macon Chair in Religion at Baylor University, where he has taught since 1986. He has authored, co-authored, or edited more than twenty-five books and numerous articles and essays. With Heidi J. Hornik, Parsons co-wrote the Illuminating Luke trilogy (T & T Clark). He also co-authored the Baylor handbook on the Greek Text of Luke and Acts and published commentaries on Luke and Acts in the Paideia Series, which he co-edits.