Funerals and tech -evolution?

Having now outlived both my parents, I find myself wondering more about funeral arrangements in a more personal way. And it is notable to me, being involved as I am, from time to time, in the funerals of university students, that funeral practices are changing. And then covid-19 arrived and introduced further changes, which may be to some degree permanent. it is poetically expressed by an Episcopal priest, Padre Angel of Boston, Ma.

 A smartphone is no longer an intruder into the numinous, but an acolyte in service of the sacred. The tablets have transubstantiated into pallbearers: holders of the moment, and not transgressors of it.

It has been a forced development, but now it's happened, perhaps it will mean that it will not feel so odd or sacriligious for remote viewing or even more active participation to take place.

On the other hand...

Mr Collier watched a ceremony live-streamed from Kerstin’s garden. “I feel like I witnessed it,” he says. “I don’t feel I took part.

On the other hand, some notice that the reduction in numbers being able to attend personally has meant a return to something that has been downplayed in recent years.

During the pandemic — particularly during lockdown, when numbers were so small — funerals got back to their original purpose of being allowed to grieve. And we’d almost forgotten that in funerals before then. The interesting thing will be what the long-term impact of that is, whether we’ll hold on to that. We want ritual, but we’ve got to reimagine ritual,

It seems to me that it is still too early to tell how this will play out. It is plausible that a hybrid might emerge: funerals becoming normally smaller, more immediate, affairs where bodily action is at a premium: being able to touch one another and perhaps the coffin or the body being more central possibilities. But those smaller events might be 'attended' also virtually by more people whose relative emotional distance means that it 'feels' okay to pay respects by viewing online. It may even be that others, more distanced by geography, could participate more actively by video interaction.

My question is about how this would all play out into ritual and the staging of memorial events. I suspect that the recent trend towards foregrounding the 'celebration of the life of...' someone may continue in later events. This life-celebration has probably had the effect of moving the grieving elements out of public view (understandably) and into more private spaces. Perhaps more intimate funeral services are allowing ostensible mourning back into the now-semi-public space of a church building.

My concern in it all is that what happens enables people to mourn. It is important that people are allowed and given supports to enable them to recognise their own grief and losses and to express them helpfully. 

I do still worry that the unspoken conspiracy to keep public things positive and upbeat is not doing us any favours in relation to processing loss, grief and even rage.

Drawing initially from this article: Funerals in 2020: better for mourners?:

'viral vicar' wedding dance flash-mob

First off, declaration of interest: this woman was a student at the college I was a tutor at during my time there. She also came from the parish I served my curacy at -though our paths did not cross at that time.
If you need filling in as to what the fuss is about, well....


Of all the comments in the media, probably this (Vicky Beeching in the Independent) is among the best:

why aren't these twenty one thousand spiritual seekers beating down the doors of their local parish church instead of driving to Stonehenge for their spiritual kicks?
My hunch is that it has a lot to do with the style of church gatherings. In this digital age, participation has become our natural way of life; the internet has moved from "1.0" to "2.0" and the formerly passive experiences of reading a static webpage of text has exploded into a multi-directional, fluid exchange of views and user-generated content. We don't just consume or passively receive information any more; we comment back, we contribute, we change things. We aren't just receivers; we are shapers of the digital environments we inhabit.

Of course the problem is that she probably doesn't realise that there's far more of this interactivity going on than the image of church allows for. Things like Messy Church, Alternative Worship, Cafe Church ... and even more 'ordinary' services where there are more interactive elements at various points.

But the problem beyond that is that such things tend to get shot at from two directions. One is the press condemning 'trendy' religion. It is refreshing to see Ms Beeching's article actually being positive about it. The other side that it gets negative press from is those who think it's not proper church, or it's unbecoming.

Personally, I've done things that would go at the more 'interactive' end of the spectrum (and even involving dance -I helped create a short-run series of dance services in a nightclub in the 90's) But it should be said that people have to be up for it and I note that Kate and the couple actually planted quite a few people in the congregation to join in. Had they not done that, I suspect that it would have fizzled damp-squid-wise as the clash of expectations between 'church wedding' and 'celebratory moment' would have kept most people in their seats for fear of embarrassment and a sense of cultural dissonance.

Part of the problem for the churches is that we can't uninvent a thousand years of history and culture. Whereas neo-Pagans and others have the chance to make it up afresh. That said, I would suspect that a closer examination of the usages of Stonehenge would show much of it to be just as constrained as a CofE traditional service and that many of those accessing it being far less 'free' to interact than it may look like. Let's be honest, for many people on the web, their interactivity and user-generated-ness is mostly at the level of comments and cat-photos. I'm an advocate of web 2.0 etc but I'm conscious that the practice of usage doesn't live up to the hype in many cases because the social and cultural factors don't (yet?) favour it. And people are still sensitive to the possible perceptions of their digital footprint.

One of my occasional projects is 'unholy praying' or 'praying in plain sight' where the idea is to pray conversationally together in such a way as not to alert people around us in a cafe (say) that we are praying. It quickly reveals how culturally constrained are our prayer habits and expectations.

So, I agree that the churches should return to their interactive roots (yes, read the epistles; they imply communities of interaction, gift-sharing, discussion, taking action together etc etc), but let's not kid ourselves that this will bring spiritual seekers flooding through the doors. We still have to become trusted to be wise and compassionate guardians of the stories entrusted to us. We still have to be people of emotional maturity and evident spiritual nous. An interactive environment will help.
Occasionally dancing will help ...

 The 'viral vicar' who led wedding dance flash-mob is a great example of how to make religion interactive - Comment - Voices - The Independent:

There's a generation gap in charitable giving

 I can't help wondering whether this has some link to the de-Christionising of our country:

 "young people are failing to keep up with their forebears in the generosity stakes". It seems the generation from which the "chuggers" who prowl our high streets are drawn is, paradoxically, less likely to give to charity. But, as the report makes clear, they're just the latest participants in a trend – rates of giving have been declining in the households of the under-50s for decades. Why there's a generation gap in charitable giving | Ed Howker:

 Other research indicates that religious people are more likely to volunteer, and I would link volunteering with giving; one's money the other time and effort.

The article, however, posits another issue:

But today they are wrongfooted on two fronts. For the left it is government's role to fix environmental problems, provide healthcare and address poverty. The right, meanwhile, looks to markets to improve health provision, trade carbon credits and raise standards of living at home and abroad. Both models undermine the value of the individual contributor, leaving him or her to wonder "what's the point"?

 I think I'd find this more convincing were it not for the fact that this same generation are not really getting involved in the political processes and, in my experience, seem cynical both of governmental and private enterprise ability to fix things. Perhaps that has extended also to charitable giving too? I think I still come back to the hypotheses that it is simply that most of them have not been raised with the idea that giving money is something to be encouraged or to be regularly intentional about. It's okay for charity fundraisers like Comic Relief but that hardly constitutes a sustained discipline of charitable giving which, frankly, I have learnt from Christian discipleship. Without a sustained encouragement, I contend, people tend (and I empahisise that; it's not a simple binary do or don't) not to 'self tax' voluntarily. I don't discount entirely a sense of passing up responsibility to state or market, but I think that more important is a socially reinforced vision and encouragement to at least counteract some of the worst of our foul-ups or even to try to make the world a slightly better place.

Atheist prayer for the soul of England

If this were the face of the new atheism, we'd hardly have a beef with it.
An atheist's prayer for the churches that keep our soul | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian The flavour of it is an appreciation of what faithful, humble contributions are being made to the common good by churches and clergy -even if one didn't believe our message.

Local England has reverted to the middle ages, with the clergy as its most public face. The clergy are the ones who tend to know who is in trouble, who is a villain, who a saint. Their workplace is a church. They apparently mobilise 1.6 million parish volunteers for what amounts to social work, from caring for the elderly to hospital visiting. This output must be worth billions to the state. And all the state does in return is impose VAT and health and safety regulations on church repairs.

It's just a shame that the stats hadn't been read a bit more carefully: Simon says,

This month, the census appeared to confirm a Religious Trends reportthat church attendance was falling so fast that by 2035 there would be more active Muslims than Christians in Britain, and by 2050 as many Hindus.

Thing is, the report is from 4 years ago and the census is reporting a drop in nominal Christianity while the active Christian population seems to be more stable than the earlier report indicated -in some places and organisations it is growing. My own diocese seems to be seeing more churchgoing even while nominal Christians fall in number. I suspect that journalists will need to think a bit harder about the cliched categories they think in about religion in this country.

Much better from that point of view is another Guardian article by Zoe Williams (who is an atheist also) in Comment is Free, who asks properly what people might understand by the rather blunt Census Question (which I actually felt constrained to answer in a way that would have made it hard to interpret -as a Christian with a streak of Reformed in me, I don't react well to the label 'religious').

Overall, then, the structure of the question was deemed to have hoovered up a lot of people who were only Christians atmospherically, neither cleaving to its beliefs nor upholding its practices. Personally, I didn't mind that – one of the many joys of being an atheist is that you don't have to pretend to be inclusive. Organised religions have to take all comers. I am proudly exclusive in my belief system – I only want other people to be atheists if they're committed to not believing in God, and are prepared to say so. I don't want to scrabble madly among the "don't knows" for people who might be in my club on a particularly trenchant day. The Jedi Knights are welcome to them.

That's a good point, and at my university when the possibility of entrance documentation asking for religious information, I felt that it was important to put down a marker that the way that the census asked the question was not very helpful and that we might want to catch some nuances that would be more useful for guiding thinking in an institutional context.
In fact Zoe picks up a thought that is pretty much my own (here);

self-described Christianity is disintegrating – not because anything's happened to make God's existence less likely, but because, as a badge of respectability and cultural identity, it no longer cuts it.

Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change

Well, despite feeling that Postman is a bit curmdgeonly and dyspeptic in Amusing Oursleves to Death, I'd have to say I love the article of which the summary follows.
Neil Postman: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change:

... five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.

The reasons for my assessment of Postman can be seen in the above: he is disposed to see the downsides more readily and to assume that change is bad. While change can be bad, we should recall the first point about winners and losers. Sometimes the there is a more democratic spread of winners and the point about ecologic change (4th point) means that we need to be aware also that Fiske's (et al's) point that popular culture is adept at repurposing cultural artefacts and subverting hegemonic as part of the ecology. To be sure this doesn't erase hegmonic moves by the rich and powerful, but it does mean that they can't simply stand still or assume that things will uncomplicatedly work 'for' them.

Stayover relationships

Just as the Christian churches in the West seem to be getting a handle on cohabitation, along comes something else to make life difficult for working with principled relationships.
Trend in young adults' dating habits, committed relationships may not lead to marriage: "found that 'stayover relationships' are a growing trend among college-aged couples who are committed, but not interested in cohabiting. However, little is known about the effects of stayovers on future commitment decisions or marriage.
'A key motivation is to enjoy the comforts of an intimate relationship while maintaining a high degree of personal control over one's involvement and commitment,' said Larry Ganong, professor in HDFS. 'We see this interest in personal control nationally in more single adult households, and in the growing phenomenon of 'living apart together' (middle-aged and older monogamous couples who maintain their own households). It may also help explain why marriage is on the decline, particularly among young adults.'"
So how to evaluate? How to engage constructively and critically? How to disciple?
Any lessons from the last 30 or 300 years?

3 Cultural Trends Impacting Church Leadership

Intriguing reading mes ami(e)s: 3 Cultural Trends Impacting Church Leadership | TonyMorganLive.com
Here's the barebones, the flesh is in the article:

In: Influence Out: Power Way Out: Board Meetings ...
In: Creativity Out: Corporate Way Out: Red Power Ties ...
In: Networks Out: E-mail Way Out: Meet-Ups

I muse: apart from the last one, this list pretty much characterises my leadership style for about the last 10-15 years. WRT the email thing; I've actually, in the last 2 years been finding that my initial love affair with email (at its height between about 1997 and 2005) is palling: I'm finding that I'm almost instinctively going for eyeball-meetings because I'm getting fed up with the way that emails seem to be adding to the emotional miscegenation in the workplace. I think that email has become the new memo!

I also muse that there seem to be some facets of organisational life with which I am acquainted that seem to be latching onto the 'out' column stuff just as others are abandoning it ...

 

Skinny male mannequins, eating disorder?

Not sure that the apparent link with the female body image issue works with men, or at least not straight-forwardly. This is a salient bit from the report: Skinny male mannequins raise eating disorder fears | Life and style | The Guardian: "The company says the mannequins were modelled on teenage boys who were not anorexic, but were perfect for modelling the skinny jeans and slim tailoring made popular by stars such as Russell Brand. But eating disorder charity Beat said more men were suffering from anorexia and bulimia, and that the mannequins portrayed an unrealistic and unattainable image."
There are two related reasons why I think it may be more complicated than that. One is simply the way that in the gym age men with six packs, pecs and other well-developed muscle groups were/are a la mode. Skinny guys were out. So male body-image models have clearly got two desirable states at least in the west, only one of which involves starving yourself, potentially.

The other reason is the personally-related one. I was, before middle age metabolism kicked in, uber-skinny. So I know that some of us really were that way, without trying and healthy on it (I was right at the bottom of that graph for healthy weight to height ratio). That was a pain at first: the Charles Atlas, athletic look was fashionable. But Then, glam rock; skinny was 'in'. Glory! A way for us ectomorphs to have a bash at being envied or admired just for being ourselves!

Now one of my sons certainly has my erstwhile body type. Hates it. Can't help thinking that he'd feel a lot better about it if it really was likely to be in some way fashionable (again)...

$99 DNA test

Admittedly, it was only a time-limited offer, but the fact that it could be offered seems to indicate that the costs are likely to continue to fall. Today only: $99 DNA test: "oday only, the usually $499 DNA test from 23andMe is only $99."
Of course, it's not yet Gattaca -the Gattaca scenario clearly required a very cheap DNA testing system. However, we should consider the social and ethical ramifications of ever cheaper DNA testing: for example, paternity testing becomes routine and even could be done covertly, without permission (and once that genie was out of the bottle ...), or insurance companies routinely require them, surveillance becomes easier in some respects ....

Church attendance up

I was a little hesitant as I started to read this: there is a tendency for people to over-report and sometimes like-with-like comparisons are not there. However, this looks fairly robust: Baptist Times - Numbers increase: "The data reveals that 7.3m are now attending church once a month, an increase of two per cent from 2007." It's likely to be robust because it's a regular survey which is designed to provide year-on-year tracking using quite a large sample. The like-with-like factor is important in the sense that even if people do over-report, other things being equal, it should be similar from year to year (unless what we really need to be investigating is why people's over-reporting rate has increased!). And we should note that the figures are derived from pre-credit crunch surveying; so the effect that has sometimes been noticed of economic downturns on church attendance is not really a factor.

As with any data of this kind, the real trick is explaining it: coming up with a theory that explains the figures well. The article doesn't really give us that. I await seeing the report itself for indications of why this is so. Is it that many churches and initiatives are doing a http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbetter job of attracting people and helping them to stay with it? Or is there some interesting socio-spiritual something occuring? What sort of churches are involved? What sort of people? ... ?

There's a bit more detail here (along with a link to further details at TEAR fund's site).
From the latter we might note this: "The broader trend over three years since the start of the tracking, shows that churchgoing is holding up well:
* at least annually: Sep 08 recovery from low point of 21% in Feb 07 but still below Feb 05 level of 29%
* at least monthly: Sep 08 and Feb 05 are equivalent, at 15%
* at least weekly: Sep 08 and Feb 05 are equivalent, at 10% "
So the picture is of bottoming out in these figure (again crying out for a set of hypotheses to explain the data).
I'm particularly interested in these figures too.

The increase in annual churchgoing (attending at least once a year) between Sep 07 and Sep 08 has occurred in most demographic segments i.e across the board rather than only among certain sub-groups. However the largest significant increases from September 2007 to September 2008 are:
By age:
* 25-34 year olds: +7% 15% to 22%
* 65-74 year olds +6% 27% to 33%
* Over 75 year olds + 10% 29% to 39%
...
By denomination, in the ‘established’ church rather than smaller denominations:
* Church of England +6% 28% to 34%
* Church of Scotland +6% 39% to 45%

So I'm wondering whether this may be something about doing occasional offices well: christenings and funerals plus surrounding pastoral contacts. ...? That would seem to stack up with the church I'm currently most acquainted with ...

Divorce rate at its lowest for 26 years

Only the figures look a bit fragile and tenuous so perhaps it's too early to celebrate or learn much as yet. Go here to see more. Divorce rate at its lowest for 26 years | UK news | guardian.co.uk. One thing that would be needed to interpret is to compare with marriage rate and cohabitation figures. Perhaps, after a generation or two of people learning the new social rules, we are coming to a point where tacit knowledge on getting and staying married have caught up with the change social attitudes and conditions ... ?

Facebook. Tried it, didn't like it.

I did write about this before, but I'm even more getting to think like Maggi on this one. She says, "Honestly, I have a life already. You wanna say something? Just send me an email or ring me up like you did before."
Yep: I'm coming to the conclusion that Facebook doesn't give me anything I want, especially, that isn't easier to do direct via email, blog or other means. The only thing I like about it is seeing what other people are up to and even then it gets to be boring to see they're adding the functionalities that I'd decided were probably a waste of my time. What I most worry about is the way that it's 'privatising' services that used to be done more openly. It seems to me the equivalent of the shopping mall vs the High street. The former is private space opened to the public. The latter is public space with access to the private. I don't think we need more 'gated communities' where our relationships are within private space owned by someone else. We need our commons and our public spaces. Facebook seems to be an attempt to privatise the internet.
maggi dawn: Facebook. Tried it, didn't like it.:

10m more people in UK by 2031

Usual disclaimers: this is based on current trends and could be affected by events, government policies etc. But it looks like we should brace ourselves for further house-price rises above inflation, increased religiosity in society due to immigration of Christians and Muslims from the wider world. I would guess also that this will help to offset our pensions crisis somewhat but will put further strain on the environment. "long-term assumptions of future fertility, life expectancy and migration are higher than past projections. Researchers have raised migration estimates from a net rise of 145,000 per year in 2004 to 190,000-plus each year. They believe that almost half of the UK's population rise of 4.4 million over the next decade will be fuelled by migration. The study also revealed the changing structure of Britain's ageing society as people live longer."
The question I'm asking is how we should respond church-wise. We will have, in all probability, more aging members but also more minority ethnic group members. The need for 'fresh expressions' will continue and a premium will be placed on leadership which is able to be culturally flexible and perhaps even linguistically versatile (who'd have thought ten years ago that we'd need French-speaking liturgical resources in Gateshead?)
What else will these figures imply? Higher proportions of incomes tied up in housing and food bills (peak oil plus less agricultural land locally would push up food prices, probably) so finances for church activities might be harder hit. Therefore continuing to enable tent-maker ministries and low-resource forms of church will be important. The challenge of Islam both in terms of integration and combatting the Saudi-funded Wahhabi and Salafi versions will probably continue to be vitally important.
10m more people in UK by 2031, say researchers | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

The wiki way or how the internet changes things

Previewing a new book, we learn of this case-study in internet business. "

Goldcorp did use the internet to mine gold: in 2000, it abandoned the industry's tradition of secrecy, making thousands of pages of complex geological data available online, and offering $575,000 in prize money to those who could successfully identify where on the Red Lake property the undiscovered veins of gold might lie. Retired geologists, graduate students and military officers around the world chipped in. They recommended 110 targets, half of which Goldcorp hadn't previously identified. Four-fifths of them turned out to contain gold. Since then, the company's value has rocketed from $100m to $9bn, and disaster has been averted.

Now the really intriguing and insightful thing is this:

The received wisdom, among western economists, was that individuals should compete in a free market: planned economies, such as Stalin's, were doomed. But in that case, why did huge companies exist, with centralised operations and planning? The Ford Motor Company was hailed as a paragon of American business, but wasn't the Soviet Union just an attempt to run a country like a big company? If capitalist theory was correct, why didn't Americans, or British people, just do business with each other as individual buyers and sellers in the open market, instead of organising themselves into firms? The answer - which won Coase a Nobel prize - is that making things requires collaboration, and finding and linking up all the people who need to collaborate costs money. Companies emerge when it becomes cheaper to gather people, tools and material under one roof, rather than to go out looking for the best deal every time you need a few hours' labour, or a part for a car. But the internet, Tapscott argues, is radically lowering the cost of collaborating. Companies - certainly big companies - are losing their raison d'etre.

An example is given of the Chinese motorcycle industry:

A "self-organised system of design and production" has emerged - the kind of system we usually associate with phenomena in cyberspace, like Wikipedia, or software released without copyright, so that others can tweak and improve it, such as the web browser Firefox. The Chinese motorcycle industry, in other words, is "open source".

A really intriguing article which may just be flagging up an important future trend of some significance. Me? I'm looking at getting the book.

The wiki way | Technology | Guardian Unlimited:

Post Romantic?

maggi dawnMAggi, to avoid more hate-comments is having a comment holiday on her blog; so I'm reflecting here on this post.

In it she says: "we compared the Romantic setting to the postmodern,"
Been thinking about that a bit since we spoke briefly at GreenBelt. I realised I knew a bit more than I knew in that I have studied bits in foreign languages [French mainly]. I was putting this together with the observation that a lot of contemporary cultural artefacts [ie film, TV etc] seem to exalt in something rather like bits in Falubert's Madame Bovary where Flaubert is both using a romantic style and then -as if he can't quite take it seriously- puts in some 'back down to earth' details. Very resonant with what I keep noticing in contemporary culture of late. So While I think that it is true that there is a good deal of Romantic reprise in pomo, I wonder whether we are seeing something else happening; the reprise to the post-Romantic reaction?

Deserves some further thought, not least to gather some instantiations of this 'post-Romantic' come-down.