From Christianity Today online.

A provocative article with which I couldn’t agree more. As a culture we have sanitized death, and I think that is not coincidental to the general abandonment of the Christian faith alongside the generally awful job of teaching about death and our Christian hope the Church has done of late.

We live in a culture that runs from true death. Sure, we see death all of the time in our movies, television, and video games, but rarely are we confronted with the actual death of another human being. Death has become more conceptual to us than physical. Even shootings on the news or military death counts can seem like faceless, bodiless numbers. They are deaths we too often don’t and can’t picture.

It takes great tragedy for us to come face-to-face with the physicality of death. There are our personal experiences, watching a loved one pass away or saying goodbye to their open casket. For us as a country, there was Sept. 11. We followed on TV as rescue workers searched for bodies in the rubble. More recently, of course, there was the Sandy Hook shooting, when horrific details emerged about the slaughter of 20 children and 6 adults at the hands of a mad man.

One victim’s mother, Veronique Pozner, has come forward to give voice to the grieving, describing her son’s body after he was shot multiple times in his first-grade classroom. This embodied, physical description of death is difficult for us, and the Jewish Daily Forward got complaints over the details they chose to publish in the story, including injuries to 6-year-old Noah Pozner’s face and left hand. We owe it to this mother to listen to her description of identifying her son, some say.

Check it out and see what you think.