More forgo clergy-led funerals for those by secular ‘celebrants’
When Kenneth Kistner, 85, died in February, his wife, Carmen, didn’t call any clergy.
At the Detroit memorial service for the Marine veteran and retired educator, Kistner’s family read a eulogy — one that Kistner himself approved years earlier, when it was drafted by a secular “celebrant” near their retirement home in Largo, Fla.
A growing number of people want to celebrate a loved one’s life at a funeral or memorial service without clergy — sometimes even without God.
And that’s giving rise to the new specialty of pastoral-style secular celebrants who deliver unique personalized eulogies without the rituals of institutional religion.
