Star Tribune
At St. Olaf College, talking about death is on this ‘cafe’ menu
NORTHFIELD – Gloriana Ye wonders why her parents no longer wanted her to help clean her ancestors’ tombs back in Taiwan.
Sitting in a small circle inside a stately classroom at St. Olaf College, Ye told a handful of other people how growing up, her family followed an April tradition where they’d visit cemeteries bearing gifts to honor dead relatives and cleaning supplies to tidy their resting places. She doesn’t go along anymore, though: As she got older, her parents kept telling her they’d take care of it instead.
“I wish I can go,” she said. “I wish I can learn more about my ancestors’ legacy and be there to send my respect.”
Talking about death and dying isn’t easy, but St. Olaf students and faculty have tried to make it easier in recent months. Ye and other organizers have put on so-called “death cafes” in an effort to help people deal with a topic that’s too often off-limits.
“It follows people,” St. Olaf senior Grace Tillman said. “People bring that trauma with them all the time.”
The concept started in 2004, when Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz decided to host a “café mortel” to create public discussions on the subject. His own wife died in 1999. The gatherings grew as more people adapted Crettaz’s ideas; Jon Underwood brought death cafes to the United Kingdom in 2011 and created a website to spread the model.
A death cafe follows four general guidelines: They’re always not-for-profit. They’re held in a comfortable, confidential space. Organizers never lead participants to any sort of conclusion or action; the discussions flow on their own. And they always involve treats, preferably cake.
Ye brought the idea to St. Olaf, Northfield’s resident Lutheran college of more than 3,000 undergraduate students on a bluff overlooking the Cannon River. A senior seeking her nursing degree, she worked at a nursing home where she heard many of the residents discuss dying and was struck by how little her college peers talked about death.
“It seems like there’s a taboo when people talk about the questions of how and why lives end,” she said.
The cafes have been a hit since Ye proposed the idea last fall. The university’s Lutheran Center for Faith, Values and Community embraced it, providing space and funding for five cafes thus far. One was held just for medical students studying cadavers, while the others were open to the public.
The last one this year is scheduled for May 1.
“This space invites people to bring their whole selves, which includes their religious identity, their spiritual sensibilities, but it’s not an explicitly religious space,” said Deanna Thompson, director of the Lutheran Center. “Those spaces are where students can feel like they can explore these questions and figure out what it is they believe.”
Ye and other interfaith fellows at the center run the meetings, asking open-ended questions for more than an hour on how people define death and what topics they’d like to discuss.
At Wednesday’s meeting, a group of nine adults talked about the finite, inevitable end death brings to us all. They discussed what it feels like to watch a loved one die, what a good death means to them, what people should do to prepare for their deaths.
One person described how her grandfather’s sudden death changed how her family planned for their future, and how her parents entrusted her with their burial plans. Another told a group how a grandmother drifted in and out of hospice care for a decade before dying at 104 — and what a relief it was for family members who no longer wanted her to suffer.
Yet another talked about how her son’s church organized singing groups for people on their deathbeds, sending them off with song. And one person even pondered how she was going to follow her dad’s burial plan to have a Viking-style funeral by setting fire to his body on a boat, which is illegal in Minnesota.
“People our age, we feel like we’re invincible,” said Caroline Anderson, another cafe organizer and senior majoring in psychology. “But death enters into your life at any time. You can’t prepare for it.”
College officials say they plan to continue the discussions next year, long after Ye graduates to take a nursing job at a cardiovascular ward in a Chicago hospital. They hope the lessons students take from these talks help them as they navigate their careers, their adulthood, and the rest of their lives.
“I definitely think we need a different way to talk about this in our culture,” Ye said. “We’re trying to reduce the friction so people aren’t afraid to initiate these conversations.”
Star Tribune
Books ‘Undivided’ and ‘Circle of Hope’ show how two churches tried to grapple with racial issues
Han was just as committed. Her reporting on Crossroads, a Protestant megachurch, produced 1,471 hours of audio and video recordings. Her book spotlights another major trend: While small churches struggle, most of the country’s 1,000-plus Protestant megachurches (defined as having 2,000 members) are growing, according to recent surveys.
Han crafts detailed depictions of Crossroads members, among them a Black pastor whose sermon about race angered some white members, and a white woman, raised in an unabashedly racist home, who gradually becomes an integral member of Undivided, Crossroads’ initiative devoted to hard discussions about race. “Philando Castile was my George Floyd,” she says, recounting how she became an outspoken anti-racist after Castile was shot to death by police in Falcon Heights in 2016.
Undivided (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
Evangelical Protestantism, Han notes, has historically “conceptualized racism as a problem of individual sin and prejudice and ignored the way it was tied to questions of power.” The fraught conversations captured in this book depict the “blowback,” as one member put it, that can follow when churchgoers confront institutional racism.
Both authors understand that, as Griswold writes, “churches are messy places where people seek many things, among them a common understanding of something larger than they are.” These excellent books demonstrate how hard that can be to achieve.
Kevin Canfield is a regular contributor to the Minnesota Star Tribune’s books coverage.
Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport won top honors for passenger satisfaction among the nation’s largest airports, according to a survey released Wednesday by the global consulting firm J.D. Power.
MSP regained supremacy in the “mega” category with more than 33 million annual passengers, handily beating Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, which came in second, according to the J.D. Power 2024 North American Airport Satisfaction Survey. The Motor City won last year, after MSP took the title in 2023 for the first time.
Last year, MSP served nearly 35 million passengers.
“Huge air travel demand has not slowed down in North America despite the steadily rising costs of flights, ground travel, hotel rooms and pretty much anything you can buy in an airport,” said Michael Taylor, J.D. Power’s managing director of travel, hospitality and retail, in a news release.
J.D. Power surveyed close to 27,000 passengers nationwide between August 2023 and July. Passengers were asked about their airport experience, including the ease of travel, the quality of terminal facilities and food, beverage and retail offerings, and airport staff.
Based on a 1,000-point scale, MSP racked up 671 points, with Detroit scoring 643 points — the segment’s average was 595 points. Newark Liberty International Airport came in last.
John Wayne Airport won top honors in the large category and Indianapolis International Airport ranked the highest in the medium category. The losers in those categories were Philadelphia International Airport and Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, respectively.
More broadly, 60% of the survey’s respondents said they enjoy spending time at their airport, despite record passenger volumes and widespread flight cancellations and delays. However, satisfaction levels at airports plummet if terminals are crowded.
Mahtomedi’s volleyball team started the 2023 season 3-7. But still, the Zephyrs peaked at the right time and made it to state for a second year in a row.
This go-around, undefeated Mahtomedi (10-0) hasn’t taken long at all to start clicking.
On Tuesday night, 14 kills each from senior outside hitter Kaili Malvey and senior middle blocker Silvie Graetzer helped the Zephyrs sweep visiting South St. Paul 25-17, 25-18, 25-10.
After the program’s first trip to state in 2022, then returning in 2023, the team is thriving. With seven seniors and five juniors on the roster and all its starters returning, Mahtomedi “started at such a higher point this season,” Graetzer said. “And now our end goal is so much higher. We’re not there to get to state. We’re there to do damage at state.”
Against South St. Paul (14-4), the Zephyrs dealt with injuries to two sidelined starters heading into the match and faced the Packers’ high-swinging outside hitter, senior Alaina Panagiotopoulos.
“[Our injured players, Sahar Ramaley and Katie Hergenrader] pushed us to play for each other, and I think we really executed,” Malvey said.
Nine digs and 14 service receptions by junior libero Claire Crothers, plus six blocks by Graetzer, helped numb the swinging sting of Panagiotopoulos’ eight kills. They prepped for her in practice, focusing on eye work in blocking drills and taking up space on the court.
Another offseason key for the Zephyrs took place 10 minutes down the road in Lake Elmo. While not all of last year’s starters played club, all of them participated in club training this year, with a big Zephyrs contingent at Kokoro Volleyball. Even if the Zephyrs weren’t on the same team at Kokoro, they saw each other in the weight room, learned similar schemes.
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Electric vehicles raise safety concerns as to whether guardrails can handle car’s excess weight
Fed expected to cut benchmark interest rate, providing relief to consumers