Rotten Epiphany: Mikeal Parsons and Cody Sanders talk Corpse Care

Currents in Religion

“What is the revelatory potential of the corpse?” That is the question that Cody Sanders and Mikeal Parsons seek to answer in their new book, Corpse Care: Ethics for Tending the Dead.

Here's the book's blurb: "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."

Dr. Cody Sanders is pastor to Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Harvard Square, and holds various roles at Harvard University, MIT, and Chicago Theological Seminary.

Dr. Mikeal Parsons is professor and Macon Chair in Religion at Baylor University.