"In death, Enlightenment ideals of reason and individual autonomy come up against the rock face of matter. Engelke explores what it means to bridge an impossible dualism, to live honestly with finitude, to be secular. This is a beautifully written, humane ethnography of a community struggling to die and therefore to live with its beliefs." --Thomas W. Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains "Engelke's searching and elegant ethnography examines how the evolving secular humanist movement understands the finality of death as exactly that which gives life meaning. Although each of us will die, the Enlightenment yet lives. An Honest Death provides an unexpected balm in existential times, like a cup of good tea." --Shannon Lee Dawdy, author of American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century "In this engaging book, Engelke invites his reader into the world of humanist funerals in the UK, where celebrants help the grieving face the passage between life and death without spiritual consolation.

With a light theoretical touch, his compelling ethnography shows the persistence of ritual, symbol, and the tragic, even in a resolutely secular setting." --Pamela E. Klassen, author of Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America " An Honest Death is a landmark study of secularity, both a richly textured account of humanist celebrants' work with the dead and an incisive exploration of the tension between rationalism and materialism that defines the secular. In exceptionally clear and engaging prose, Matthew Engelke offers not only an essential ethnography of secular people but also a decisive argument for the critical importance of anthropology in studying the secular." --Mayanthi Fernando, University of California, Santa Cruz "Matthew Engelke's fascinating study explores how members of the British Humanist Association, ardent partisans of the Enlightenment crusade against religion, seek to invent a contemporary funeral service compatible with their rigorously secular commitments--a form of anticeremonial ceremony. A work of great analytical subtlety and insight, An Honest Death traces the difficult labor of crafting a secular funeral, in all its rhetorical, bodily, and organizational dimensions, one that remains faithful to the Enlightenment values of autonomy, honesty, and sincerity, while simultaneously giving expression to the existential significance of death for human life. The result is a profound reflection on the contradictions and challenges of secularism as a way of life." --Charles Hirschkind, University of California, Berkeley.