This study examines the religious/spiritual referral patterns in hospice and palliative care. Religion and death are two highly intersected topics and albeit often discussed together in hospice and palliative care, little is known about how professionals respond to religious/spiritual needs of patients/families/friends and in relation to the chaplaincy team. By means of an in-depth interviewing method, this paper reports on data from 15 hospice and palliative care professionals. Participants were recruited from across five hospice and palliative care organisations, and the data was managed and analysed with the use of NVivo. Largely, participants were keen to refer patients/families/friends to the chaplaincy team, unless the former’s faith or lack thereof did not match the chaplains, in which case referrals to a religious leader in the community were favoured. This shed light to the tendencies to homogenise religious/spiritual beliefs. The paper concludes with some implications for practice and research.

Abundant literature has argued the significance of religion, belief, and spirituality at the end of life. This study aims to add to this literature by exploring palliative professionals’ views in this area. By means of an in-depth interviewing method, this paper reports data from 15 hospice and palliative care professionals. Participants were recruited from five hospice and palliative care organisations, and the data were managed and analysed with thematic analysis and NVivo (version 11). This study found three main reasons that make religion, belief, and spirituality important for patients and their loved ones when facing imminent death: the sense of comfort and security, meaning making, and closure. These reasons are not independent from one another, but complementary. This paper offers some implications for practice and concludes with a call for further research.

Organised by The Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS), the 13th biennial Death, Dying and Disposal conference was held at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK from September 6–9 2017. As a Commonwealth Split-site Scholar 2016–2017, I had the opportunity to be a part of it. This was my first Death, Dying and Disposal conference and in this review article, I throw light on the four days of this remarkable conference that brings together death researchers from all over the world every other year.

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This article aims to present the specificities associated with the Hindu liminal phase and the sacred associated with death through an ethnographic account of the death rituals of the Hindu Saryuparin Brahmin community. Through this ethnographic account, the author argues against a uniform liminal phase across different cultures by bringing to the fore aspects specific to the Hindu liminal phase in death. This aids in analyzing the Hindu cosmogenic world and the movement of the deceased’s “pret” or “ghost” within the same during the liminal phase. Building a connect between the liminal and the sacred in Hinduism, the author further discusses how the sacred is understood in terms of purity/impurity and life/death through death rituals. While exploring the sacred, the author contests the classical understanding of the sacred within the religious realm and presents its contextual nature by discussing the “context-based sacred.” This article is divided into three sections: (1) death rituals in the Hindu Brahminic tradition, (2) deconstructing the “liminal” in death in Hinduism, and (3) understanding the “sacred” associated with death in Hinduism.