Walter's excellent study looks at the split between continuing belief in Heaven among Western industrialized persons, and the lack of public space and attention for this belief. In other words, instead of a simple "secularization" model, he shows how different facets of religion thrive or endure while others do not. Moreover, some of the practices of the 20th c., especially cremation, encourage changed visions of an afterlife and subtly discourage traditional Christian views of "resurrection of the body." It is those views that most theology has tried to re-state, but apparently without popular success. This is one of the most thoughtful studies of death and death-related practices I have come across, and the theories of religion it employs are far more adequate to the data than those of run-of-the-mill sociology.