Practical and sensitive guide for planning memorial services. Includes advice for creating a unique and appropriate service to fit any circumstance. Offers material on writing obituaries, alternative settings, the rural cemetery movement, interment of ashes, cremation and selecting monuments and memorials. Plus sample services to be adapted or used as they are.
I'm a Unitarian Universalist minister -- humanistic in orientation and steeped in Natural Religion. Since 1983 I've been minister of the Unitarian Church of Hinsdale, IL, a suburb fifteen miles west of Chicago.
I studied American history as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware and as a graduate student at the University of Vermont. I received my theological training at McGill University's Faculty of Religious Studies in Montreal. I lived in Canada for six years and am forever nostalgic for that wonderful country and its civil people. I've been a Unitarian Universalist minister since 1977. Through 1983 I was minister of the First Unitarian Church of Youngstown, Ohio.
I favor back roads and small towns throughout America, urban strolls in Chicago neighborhoods, ethnic restaurants and country cafes, and vegetarian food. Influences include Emerson and Parker, Twain, Jung, Fromm and Frankl, Steinbech and Sinclair Lewis, J. W. Krutch and Hal Borland. I adore Debussy. The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca are my nominees for top movies, but in the right mood, I'll vote for Cinema Paradiso, and sometimes for Blade Runner. In my estimation, James Lee Burke is a much underestimated American author and Ross Lockridge, Jr.s 1947, Raintree County, is the great American novel.
