The dead bodies of sinful men and women will (barring a divine miracle of incorruptibility) decompose and rot.īut that process is fundamentally different in earth burial and cremation. The fundamental difference between earth burial and cremation lies in the exercise of human agency vis-à-vis a human body. My purpose here is to focus on cremation as the act of deliberately destroying a human body. I have regularly criticized cremation for many reasons: see here, here, here, and here.
La mort en cendres: la crémation aujourd’hui, que faut-il en penser? ( Death in Ashes: Cremation Today-What Should We Think About It?) argues that the widespread acceptance of cremation as a legitimate method of acting toward the human body, even among Christians, represents a radical change in the way we regard incarnation and embodiment, and whose implications we have not thought through, even as we continue to embrace it.Īs Catholics enter November and think about Christian death, I draw upon Le Guay’s inspiration to challenge our assumptions about proper treatment of the deceased human body. Qu’avons-nous perdu en perdant la mort? (What Have We Lost in Losing Death?) questions how today’s funerary customs have erased death from human consciousness. Damien Le Guay is a contemporary Catholic French thinker and author of two important, but unfortunately untranslated, books.
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