Green burial as an act of faith
A growing number of Christians are embracing natural burial practices.
(Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash)
When Beth Hoeltke starts talking about death, her face lights up and her eyes begin to sparkle.
“I’ve actually been called the Death Lady,” she says, laughing heartily enough to make the tiny silver hoops on her ears swing. “I wouldn’t call myself that. I like to discuss death and what it means and how we should talk about it—but I’m not the Death Lady.”
Hoeltke, who leads the graduate school at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, started writing about death about three years ago, motivated by the connections she was seeing between her academic research in the theology of creation and what seemed to her to be a gap in how Western culture addresses—or rather, doesn’t address—the way we die.
