TORONTO (RNS) Talk about an unlikely course in an unlikely place.

The main chapel at Jesuit-run Regis College at the University of Toronto is adorned with stained glass windows, icons of Mary and Joseph, and the Stations of the Cross.

The eight-week course, which meets every Wednesday afternoon, is on atheism. Or more precisely, "Responding to 21st-Century Atheism."

It's an attempt, says the Rev. Scott Lewis, for people of faith to understand and come to terms with the increasingly muscular secularism and atheism that has arisen in Western societies over the past generation.

Atheism "has become militant, aggressive and proselytizing," said Lewis, a Jesuit scripture scholar, who teaches the class with three other scholars. "It's made great in-roads and is now socially acceptable. If you're young and educated and believe in God, you're (seen as) a jerk."

While the course examines the increasing polarization between non-believers and people of faith, it will not be about confronting secularists or engaging in polemics, Lewis stressed before the first class of about 155 students in the adult-education program.

Both sides need to lighten up, he said.

"One idea for atheists to leave behind is that people who believe are stupid or naive," Lewis suggested. "And perhaps we should leave behind the idea that an atheist is someone who is not ethical or a good person.

"A person can be a believer and be quite intelligent. A person can be an atheist and be quite a morally upright person."

It's the first time in memory that a Catholic academic institution in Canada has formally explored non-belief, but it nonetheless reflects the times. Five universities in the U.S. have secular humanist chaplains, and the University of Toronto now has two.

"I think it's very natural to offer this course," said one of the two Toronto chaplains, Mary Beaty. "Universities are encountering more and more students asking these types of questions."

A study last autumn by the Pew Research Center found the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace: One-fifth of the U.S. public, and a third of adults under 30, are religiously unaffiliated today, "the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling."

The study found that in the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15 percent to just under 20 percent of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6 percent of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation.

Other polls have suggested that as many as one in 10 U.S. adults are atheists.

Canadian census data show that atheists, agnostics, humanists and those with no religious affiliation account for 16 percent of the population, up 4 percentage points over the previous decade. They now represent the second-largest religious group in the country.

A Canadian Ipsos Reid poll released in 2011 found 30 percent of respondents did not believe in a deity.

However one parses the numbers, nonbelievers are undoubtedly getting bolder and even celebrated, as evidenced by best-seller lists in recent years. Lewis and other instructors conceded they will find it hard to avoid mentioning "New Atheist" authors Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, but said they would not dwell on the trio.

Lewis said he'll look at both sides of the debate. "What we will be focusing on is our response to individuals who have thrown down the gauntlet and say'To believe in God is not to be believe in science, and to believe in science is not to believe in God.'"

"There's a little fundamentalism on both sides of the aisle."

Central to the course will be the question of suffering -- "the oldest religious question in the world," Lewis said. "Why, if there's a good God, do we have suffering, especially of the innocent?"

As for science and Darwinism, the biblical book of Genesis "is not a science book and should not be read as one. Our faith does not rise and fall on the age of the Earth." And people of faith are at a threshold moment: "We cannot continue thinking of God in traditional ways and still accept Darwinian science."

Lewis said it's not uncommon for Catholic thinkers to believe in evolution. The course will include the work of the Rev. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest who was also trained as a paleontologist and geologist. Teilhard de Chardin accepted Darwinism as fact as early as the 1930s, but his writings were condemned by the Vatican.

The course comprises two lectures from Lewis; a look at psychology and atheism from Jesuit psychologist Rev. Joe Schner, who will examine whether the human brain is hard-wired for religion; an examination of suffering by Michael Stoeber, who told the introductory class that the "New Atheists" tend to overemphasize "the underbelly of the Catholic Church"; and a theological and philosophical perspective from Jesuit Gordon Rixon

Credit :

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/25/regis-college-catholic-atheism-course_n_2554116.html

A little over five years ago, Alison and Doug Kirk held their 9-year-old daughter's hand as she lay on a futon in their Nashville living room, told her they loved her, and watched her take her last breath.

The Kirks had known for a long time that their little girl, Caroline, would die. In her last weeks, she was under hospice care, lived off an oxygen machine, was fed through a tube, and spoke only in small murmurs. It was the normal course for a child born with Niemann-Pick, a terminal disease that gradually leads to the breakdown of the nervous system, brain and lungs.

What happened after Caroline's death was anything but typical.

Alison and Doug carried Caroline upstairs to the bathtub, where they washed her skin and hair, dried her limp, 45-pound body with a towel and placed her head on a pillow on the bed in her old room. Alison slipped a white communion dress on Caroline, turned up the air-conditioning and put ice packs by her daughter’s sides. She put pink lipstick on the child's paling lips, and covered up Caroline's toes and fingers, which were turning blue at the nails, with the family quilt.

Caroline stayed in her bedroom for 36 hours for her final goodbyes. There was no traditional funeral home service, and no coroner or medical examiner was on hand. Caroline's death was largely a home affair, with a short cemetery burial that followed.

"We had taken care of Caroline her whole life," recalls Alison, whose other daughter, Kate, has the same disease and will also have a home funeral. "Why would we give her to someone else once she died?"

Each year, 2.5 million Americans die. For the majority, about 70 percent, deaths happen in a hospital, nursing home or long-term care facility. What happens afterwards is nearly always the same, with few exceptions for religious traditions: A doctor or nurse will sign a death certificate and the body will be whisked to the funeral home, where it's washed, embalmed, dressed, and prepared for a viewing and burial. A family usually sees the dead only a few times: when they die, if there's an open-casket viewing and in the rare case when a casket is opened during burial.

But a small and growing group of Americans are returning to a more hands-on, no-frills experience of death. In the world of "do it yourself" funerals, freezer packs are used in lieu of embalming, unvarnished wooden boxes replace ornate caskets, viewings are in living rooms and, in some cases, burials happen in backyards.

Nobody keeps track of the number of home funerals and advocacy groups, but home funeral organizations have won battles in recent years in states such as Minnesota and Utah that have attempted to ban the practice. Most states have nearly eliminated any requirements that professionals play a role in funerals. It's now legal in all but eight states to care for one's own after death. And the growth of community-based, nonprofit home funeral groups and burial grounds that are friendly to the cause point to an increasing demand.

The reasons vary from the economic to the psychological and cultural. The average funeral costs $6,560, while a home funeral can cost close to nothing. In a society where seeing death and speaking of it is often taboo, home funeral advocates are challenging the notion that traditional funerals are anything but a natural end to life. Instead, they assert, death and mourning should be seen, smelled, touched and experienced.

"There are people who get it and think it's a great idea. And there are people who have been so indoctrinated to think a different way, a less hands-on way, that they can't imagine anything else," says Elizabeth Knox, the founder of Crossings, a Maryland-based home funeral resource organization, and the president of the National Home Funeral Alliance. Knox travels across the nation to run trainings on do-it-yourself funerals and her book on her daughter's home funeral is what inspired the Kirks to do their own. Her group is one of several that have seen interest grow in recent years. They include Final Passages (California), Natural Transitions (Colorado) and Undertaken with Love (Texas). There are 61 organizations that are members of the NHFA, many of which are run by just one person.

"A lot of people don't want to do anything with touching dead bodies," says Knox. "They consider it creepy. But it can actually be the first step to healing and acceptance of death. Slowing down the process allows all involved to absorb the loss at their own pace. It's an organic emotional and spiritual healing not available from limited calling hours at a remote location."

Caroline's father, Doug Kirk, and her when she was five. It was four years before her death.

Caroline died at noon on a Tuesday. Through Thursday morning, her body stayed in her childhood home, surrounded by old dolls, stuffed animals and her favorite books. Friends and family came in and out to say goodbye. Some would get on the bed beside her body, stroking her face and hair. Others would sit across from her in a rocking chair.

"In the morning, I spent time with Caroline. At night, I spent time with Caroline. I would tell her goodnight. It was very calming to sit next to her. I touched her. I kissed her. And I felt like this is where she was supposed to be," says Alison. "I told her things that were happening. I said there had been suffering in the last few days, but it was a relief that she was not suffering anymore."

A few dozen visitors came to the house throughout Wednesday. There was a guestbook in the downstairs hallway, and people would gather to chat on the porch. "Caroline is in her room, and if you want to say goodbye to her, you can do that," Alison would tell each guest. Most went upstairs for private visits in her bedroom. At least one couple decided not to visit her there.

In Tennessee, where the Kirks live, the laws on home funerals are relatively lax. After getting a death certificate -- Alison and Doug had Caroline's pediatrician sign off on one -- a family is free to do what it wants with a dead body within a reasonable amount of time. Alison had a funeral director, who was friendly to her ideas, on-call for urgent needs like figuring out how to patch up a leaking hole in Caroline's stomach once a feeding tube was removed. She also had him bring a hearse with a casket to her home.

For her first birthday, Caroline's aunt gave her a dancing figurine made of glass. Her parents commissioned a whimsical, bigger version of it to rest on Caroline's gravestone in Mount Hope Cemetery, about 20 miles south of Nashville.

"I did look into if we could bury Caroline at our own house. We could have," says Alison. "But it's not like we are on some ancestral ground that has been passed for generations." She opted for a cemetery. Mount Hope, about 20 miles south of Nashville in Franklin, fit her needs. It's small, with a "country feel," she says. "No big landscaping, and not this big uniform place."

On Thursday morning, the family carried Caroline back downstairs. They lifted her into a casket that was a simple, pine box. Alison putThe Little Engine That Could next to her daughter. Doug put in a small, leather keychain shaped like a vintage ink jar that he had used since college ("It was a continuity of presence," he says. "I pretty much had it on me or nearby for 26 years ... It was irreplaceable even though it meant nothing to anyone else but me").

He rode in the hearse with his daughter, and before the body was lowered into the ground, the hospice chaplain read "The Circle of Days," an adaptation of a prayer by Saint Francis of Assisi that honors God's creation of the elements, animals and the heavens. Doug sang Caroline's favorite song, one that would always soothe her in times of pain: "Big Rock Candy Mountain." It tells the story of a hobo's idea of paradise.

Afterwards, there was a memorial service at Vanderbilt University, where both parents first met. Religion in any formal sense was absent.

"We wanted a simple funeral because her life was simple," says Alison. "It was short and simple."

She also considers it one of the best decisions she has ever made.

It's not always as easy as the Kirks found it to be.

Richard Bentley, a 70-year-old retiree who lives in Tupper Lake in upstate New York, has tried twice to take care of his loved ones when they died. His dad died in 2008 of multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma cells, and, 13 years before that, his mother died of an aortic dissection.

New York is one of the few states that requires a funeral director to be present or to sign off on nearly every part of after-death care. Medical examiners and coroners have to turn over bodies to funeral directors, and the law says an undertaker has to personally oversee each funeral. (The other states with similarly restrictive laws are Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and New Jersey).

For his father, Bentley says the process was unnecessarily intrusive. He wanted a cremation, which would usually require a death certificate, transport of the body and a cremation fee in most states, but he had to meet with his hospice nurse, the town clerk and the local funeral director to arrange all the paperwork necessary. The total cost: $940. He reluctantly obliged.

"One doesn’t wish to think about things like cost and comparison shopping at the time of a loved one’s death," says Bentley. "At the same time, I do not believe, and my father before his passing did not believe, that some stranger should be entitled to walk off with a week’s wages or more in return for a few hours of work at the expense of the loved one’s spouse and children."

Because his mother was airlifted to a hospital in Vermont to have her heart condition treated, Bentley says he had a much easier time with her. She died in the hospital, where he had a family viewing in the chapel, and he was able to take her body -- stored in a box -- from the morgue to his car. He drove her to a crematorium near the Vermont-New Hampshire border (it would have been illegal to transport the body to New York state), where it was cremated over the next few days. Her boxed ashes later arrived via mail to his house, where he held her memorial.

"We would like to see New York state change its funeral law to allow family to handle such matters as filing death certificates, home viewing and preliminary care of the deceased, and transportation of the deceased without the intervention of a licensed funeral director as prescribed by current law," says Bentley, who's on the board of the Memorial Society of the Hudson-Mohawk Region, a group that monitors New York funeral laws and counsels families interested in home funerals. "There is no public need that is satisfied by such laws."

3 comments View Entry