Brendan Freeman is a Cistercian monk and abbot of New Melleray Abbey, a community of about 30 monks in Peosta, Iowa. The monks hand-make wooden caskets and urns that they bill as a “soulful alternative” to more elaborate caskets.

Michael Kearl is a professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and an expert on death and dying in America and around the world. He has maintained an extensive website on the sociology of death and dying that includes a good deal about funerals and burials.

Qadeer Qazi is a Muslim and a funeral director at Rahma Funeral Home in Dallas. He writes about Muslim burial practices.

Oliver Leaman is a professor of philosophy and Zantker Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Kentucky and co-editor of Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, which describes a history of American funeral practices.

Gayden Metcalfe is co-author, with Charlotte Hays, of Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral (Miramax Books, 2005). She lives in Greenville, Miss.

Christopher Leevy Johnson is a funeral director and was an African-American studies professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. He researches the role of African-American funeral directors in the black church, politics and community affairs.

Sarah York is author of Remembering Well: Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death (Jossey-Bass, 2000). She conducts workshops based on her book and is a Unitarian Universalist minister who lives near Asheville, N.C.

Karla Holloway is a professor of English at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and author of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (Duke University Press, 2002), in which she examines African-American burial and embalming rituals, funeral services and the undertaking industry.

Justin Holcomb is a lecturer in the sociology and religion departments at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is author of the essay “Contemporary Funerals: Personalizing Tradition” in  Death and Religion in a Changing World (M.E. Sharpe, 2005).