Natural Burial

Hannah Rumble is Research Associate at the Centre for Death and Life Studies, University of Durham, UK. She has recently completed her doctoral thesis on British natural burial provision funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Douglas Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion in the University of Durham, UK. His numerous books on death and other aspects of Religious Studies reflect his combined skills both as an Anthropologist of Religion and Theologian. His publications include Theology of Death (Continuum, 2008), Death Ritual and Belief (Continuum, 2002, Second Edition), Brief History of Death (Blackwell, 2004), Encyclopedia of Cremation (Ashgate, 2005).

• Preface; 1. Funeral Forms, Life-styles and Death-styles; 2. Varied Sites and Changing Rites; 3. Options and Motivations: What People Say; 4. Self-Gift, Soil, and Society; 5. Spirituality, Theology, Self and Sense of Place; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

‘Davies and Rumble analyse natural burial and give it a spiritual re-brand through which they highlight the potentially meaningless death exemplified by conventional burial and cremation. Life-style and death-style are unified as environmental science is utilised to redefine the hitherto rotting corpse into an animate gift to nature, to fecundity, and to future generations.They challenge the very meaning of dead, challenge the church to create a new ecological litany, and challenge each of us to create our own life-death narrative. We must die to create a viable planet, but only if we utilise natural burial.'