Between Routine and Singularity: The Reformed Pastor and the Death of the City

By Lilo Roost Vischer
English

Urban death today leads to a distribution of professional tasks. Research work conducted in a German-Swiss protestant town revealed tensions between a professional routine and the requirement for respectful singularity. By the dead person’s closest and nearest death is dramatized, while it is trivialized by professional actors. Pastors’ main task about death is to console the family in the quasi sacred places that are crematories. They feel therefore a growing dissatisfaction with the major constraints inherent to the practice of burial. New ritual forms are searched in which routine and individualization processes could be mixed.

Keywords

  • death
  • town
  • pastor
  • burial
  • Switzerland
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