Shattered Grief

Shattered Grief examines the shifting landscape of religious identity and liturgy through deftly woven stories and interviews with people who experienced loss in the pandemic. Mikles argues for a trauma-informed approach to both doing religion and studying it, and her observations resonate across traditions and scope. This book will be valuable to practitioner and scholar alike, but most of all, should make the reader feel a little less alone. -- Candi K. Cann, author of <i>Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-First Century</i> and <i>Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife</i> Shattered Grief is a remarkably powerful book, primarily because of Natasha L. Mikles's beautiful, and revealing, interweaving of intimate stories of death during the pandemic with more abstract, yet still compelling, concepts in the study of religion. She brings together careful, ethnographic details and astute insights about the larger cultural shifts in meaning and practice around death in American society. -- Gary Laderman, author of <i>Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America</i> A society’s deathways are notoriously resistant to change. In this needful book, Mikles documents through interviews with doctors, nurses, undertakers, grieving family members, and pastors, rabbis, sheiks, and swamis how the pandemic overcame that resistance. As COVID protocols stymied traditional American deathways, Americans of all religions (and none) improvised. Shattered Grief tells their stories with sensitivity and smarts. -- Stephen Prothero, author of <i>God the Bestseller: How One Editor Transformed American Religion a Book at a Time</i>