Monday, January 27, 2024
7pm ET (NYC Time)
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COVID-19 fundamentally transformed Americans’ understandings of the relationship between death, spirituality, religious community, and trauma. The COVID-19 pandemic left millions grieving their loved ones without the consolation of traditional ways of mourning. Patients were admitted to hospitals and never seen again. Social distancing often meant conventional funerals could not be held. Religious communities of all kinds were disrupted at the exact moment mourners turned to them for support. These unprecedented circumstances caused dramatic transformations of not only communal rituals, but also how people make meaning after the losses of loved ones. This talk presents an intimate portrait of how COVID-19 changed the ways Americans approach, understand, and mourn death.

Through interviews conducted during the pandemic, this talk provides a snapshot of how people renegotiated their spiritual and religious traditions, their worldviews, identities, and communities during the deadliest pandemic in a century. COVID-19 affected a whole multitude of people, and this talk centers their voices—including funerary and medical professionals, religious leaders, grief counselors, death doulas, spirit mediums, community organizers, and those who lost loved ones to the novel coronavirus. Through highlighting these diverse and powerful voices, Natasha L. Mikles—author of Shattered Grief: How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America—tells the story of spiritual innovation, religious change, and the struggle to achieve personal and national self-understanding against the backdrop of mass casualties.

Natasha L. Mikles is assistant professor at Texas State University, where she teaches courses on hell, death and dying, and Asian religions. Trained as a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism with graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and University of Virginia, her research focuses on the relationship between death and dying, popular narrative, and spiritual self-understanding. She is the author of Shattered Grief: How the Pandemic Transformed the Spirituality of Death in America (Columbia University Press, 2024), which discusses the pandemic’s effects on a diverse, transforming American spirituality.

Image: The President of the Andalusian Government, Juanma Moreno, attended the funeral in memory and tribute to the victims of the Covid-19 coronavirus in the Cathedral of Seville, whose Eucharist was presided over by the archbishop, Monsignor Juan José Asenjo. Photo credit: Junta de Andalucía.