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I want to talk about a really uplifting topic, death, suffering, evil.

So our culture is interesting and unhealthy in some ways.

I think with respect to big important questions, not just about death and suffering and

evil, but about virtue and vice, about marriage, about love, about happiness.

We have a really constricted vocabulary.

And our political discourse is not helping because our political discourse is really shallow.

And we seem to have politicized everything, which means that we're in effect, to some extent,

losing the resources from outside of politics that we might bring into politics to perhaps

elevate it a bit. But it is important that we think about, and I think that Timistic Institute

gives us an opportunity to reflect upon some of

these things, it's interesting that with respect to death, Americans increasingly don't know what to do

or say as someone is approaching death and after someone dies.

Significant decline in funeral services across the country.

Some of this is COVID.

Some of it is the rise in costs of funerals. But a lot of it, if you read and I actually wrote a piece for the Dallas Morning News about this,

if you read up on the decline in funerals, a good bit of it has to do with people that is children,

spouses, relatives, friends of the deceased, really not knowing what to do at a funeral.

There will be people there I've never met, probably because sometimes the deceased

...