An Honest Death: Life's End and Humanist Funerals
by Matthew Engelke

An Honest Death is an intimate and moving ethnographic account of funerals for people who don’t believe in God or an afterlife. Focusing on secular funeral celebrants of the British Humanist Association (now called Humanists UK), the book examines how their ritual work is geared toward helping realize a secular world. There is a strong ethical commitment behind this effort, which is to face death with honesty based on the belief that this life is all we have. For the humanist celebrants and those they serve, this is what allows for a life with meaning and purpose.

Written in a vivid style, the book centers on the lives and the funerals of particular people, from a three-year-old child to a man in his nineties. Anthropologist Matthew Engelke, who trained as a humanist celebrant as part of his research, describes how these officiants try to craft “sincere” funerals, avoiding language and music that might suggest that the person who died had any religious beliefs. The book also captures the highs and lows for humanist celebrants of working in the funeral business—a business that is, for many of them, a kind of vocational calling.

Above all, An Honest Death draws out the tensions in secular humanist thought and practice between reason and the body, rationalism and materialism. Nothing matters more to the humanists than “daring to know” in the Enlightenment tradition, but nothing is so certainly known as the fact that we are finite and embodied creatures.

About the Author

Matthew Engelke is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. From 2018-2024, he also served as Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Trained as an anthropologist, Professor Engelke’s main research interests are on Christianity, secular humanism, media theory, materiality, and semiotics. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and in Britain. He is currently conducting research on the production and reception of James George Frazer’s classic, The Golden Bough.

About the Speakers

Courtney Bender, Tremaine Professor of Religion, Department of Religion at Columbia University, is the author of Heaven’s Kitchen: Living Religion at God’s Love We Deliver and The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination and is the co-editor of collective volumes on secularism and spirituality, religious pluralism, critical approaches to the sociology of religion, and other topics. She is completing a book on modernist projects to promote the religion of the future that developed in twentieth century architectural and urban planning projects.

Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life. He has also published widely on issues of technology and breakdown, piracy and intellectual property, the global circulation of cultural forms, infrastructure and urban space, sound studies, and Nigerian film (Nollywood).

Bruno Bosteels is Dean of Humanities and the Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities with a joint appointment in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia University. Her latest book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (Yale 2025), was favorably reviewed in the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement, featured on a number of podcasts and short-listed for the Kenshur Prize from the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University. Her first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Cornell 2010), won the Kenshur Prize.

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