Until the middle of the twentieth century, lavish and costly burials—complete with ornate coffins and elaborate grave markers—were the American ideal in funeral rites. Mid-century critics, including Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Death, disparaged such funeral practices, arguing among other things that interment was unnecessarily expensive and that it used up precious land resources. Perhaps as a result of such criticism, funeral industry experts say that today cremation is rapidly replacing burial as the preferred method for disposing of the dead. In 1996, about 22 percent of the dead in America, and in some states as many as half, were cremated instead of buried.

For some scholars, the switch from burial to cremation signals an ominous trend in American society. Richard T. Gill, author of Posterity Lost: Progress, Ideology, and the Decline of the American Family...