Christians traditionally have had something substantive and important to say about death and afterlife. Yet the language and imagery used in sermons about life and death have given way to language designed to comfort and celebrate.

In "Preaching Death," Lucy Bregman tracks 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...

In "The Ecology of Spirituality," Lucy Bregman surveys the many and varied religious, psychological, and sociological definitions of spirituality on offer. Spirituality has been made and remade many times over in the hope of fitting it to some new cultural need. Bregman argues that a better understanding of spirituality is instead rooted in specific professions and practices, and she demonstrates that it is not an irrevocably ambiguous pop cultural phenomenon, but is embodied in historic virtues and practices of a craft.