Cremation, Embalmment, or Neither?

This book documents todays rising rates of cremation in the West, and notes that these rates now include many deceased Christians, a stark contrast to Christians in the past who had consistently rejected cremation from their earliest years in pagan Rome to the mid-1960s. Christians opposed and spurned cremation for a number of reasons, discussed in this book. By mid-fourth century, Christianitys rejection of cremation influenced pagan Rome to abandon cremation. Earth burial became the only acceptable way to dispose of deceased humans, resulting in a major cultural change in the West. Converts to Christianity had to promise they would never be cremated. Graveyards were named coemeteria, Latin for where dead people sleep; from which we get the word cemetery, a name now contradicted by cremation.