In their extraordinary collaborative effort to \u201credeem the funeral\u201d from its \u201cfailed and falling ways\u201d (28), acclaimed funeral experts Thomas G. Long, a preaching professor, and Thomas Lynch, a funeral director, call upon their professional peers to repent from aiding and abetting the metastasizing plague of vapid \u201ccelebrations of life,\u201d memorial services, and other tame tributes to the dead. This lively conversation\u2014neatly threaded with the common refrain that a good funeral is one that gets the dead where they need to go, and the living where they need to be\u2014epitomizes how an interdisciplinary work can offer constructive criticism and renewed vision for practices crucial for human flourishing, and, particularly, for thriving Christian congregations.<\/p>\n

As clergy and funeral directors hold these authors\u2019 claims up to their own experience, they will find themselves not only enlightened and emboldened, but also upbraided and rebuked. We have become \u201cour own worst enemies\u201d (113\u00a0ff.<\/em>). For while funeral directors have often stood between the dead and their mourners, peddling the nonessentials of \u201csealed\u201d coffins and prepaid funeral plans, preachers let themselves be blown about by every wind and doctrine, acting as \u201cspiritual but not religious\u201d gurus or affable chatterers quick to stuff raw human emotion into neat compartments. Eschewing the title of \u201cfuneral director,\u201d Lynch scolds his peers for their thoughtless trading of \u201ca serviceable and quietly sublime occupational title\u2014undertaker\u2014for a contrivance\u201d (114). Undertakers do not exist to profit from death, but \u201cto serve the living by caring for the dead\u201d (ibid.) Pastors are also undertakers, Long claims, for they serve not to make the funeral sacred, but as midwives who undertake the task of magnifying the sacredness already present in the funeral drama (174).<\/p>\n