On Sunday, March 26, 2023, following the 10:30 am worship service, the Rev. Cody Sanders will speak about his new book, Corpse Care: Ethics for Tending the Dead (Fortress Press, 2023). Books will be available for purchase at $20.
The Rev. Cody Sanders, Ph.D., is pastor to Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Harvard Square. He also serves as American Baptist Chaplain to Harvard University and President of the Harvard Chaplains; Advisor for LGBTQ+ Affairs in the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life at MIT; and Affiliated Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology and Chaplaincy Studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of a number of books, including A Brief Guide to Ministry with LGBTQIA Youth (Westminster John Knox, 2017) and Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk (Lexington Books, 2020). Originally from South Carolina, he now lives in Boston with his partner, also named Cody, and two dogs, Buddy and Suzie.
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. Sanders and his co-author, Mikeal Parsons (Baylor University), 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.
This event will be held both in-person and on Zoom. Zoom attendees, please use the Zoom information on the Sunday worship page.