Secularity and Belgium’s Death System, 1850–1950

Abstract

The newly founded Secular Studies Association Brussels (ssab)1 brings together scholars from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel with expertise in the philosophical, historical, political and legal aspects of secularism and nonreligion. As founding sabb-members, we decided to devote a theme section to one of the interdisciplinary research group’s main lines of research: the role of secularity and secularisation in shifting attitudes and practices surrounding death throughout history. As an analytical term, secularity refers to “forms and arrangements for distinguishing between religion and other societal areas, practices and interpretations”. Secularisation indicates the decline of religion’s cultural and institutional authority in other societal sub-domains (Kleine & Wholrab-Sahr 2016). With this introduction to the theme section, our aim is to link the history of death to ongoing sociological debates on secularisation and secularity.