For information on submitting an obituary, please contact Reading Eagle by phone at 610-371-5018, or email at obituaries@readingeagle.com or fax at 610-371-5193.
Most obituaries published in the Reading Eagle are submitted through funeral homes and cremation services, but we will accept submissions from families. Obituaries can be emailed to obituaries@readingeagle.com.
In addition to the text of the obituary, any photographs that you wish to include can be attached to this email. Please put the text of the obituary in a Word document, a Google document or in the body of the email. The Reading Eagle also requires a way to verify the death, so please include either the phone number of the funeral home or cremation service that is in charge of the deceased’s care or a photo of his/her death certificate. We also request that your full name, phone number and address are all included in this email.
All payments by families must be made with a credit card. We will send a proof of the completed obituary before we require payment. The obituary cannot run, however, until we receive payment in full.
Obituaries can be submitted for any future date, but they must be received no later than 3:00 p.m. the day prior to its running for it to be published.
Please call the obituary desk, at 610-371-5018, for information on pricing.
I am horrified by the murder of Charlie Kirk. Just as horrifying was how quickly his death was stripped of its human weight and turned into fodder for headlines, hashtags, statements and firings. Before sunset, people were tearing into one another online over a man they’d never met, their posts shepherded by algorithms into a stampede of collective fury.
I’ve seen mourning and disdain, martyrdom and celebration. None of it has the shape of humanity. It looks instead like performance, which is what our feeds demand.
We have chained our culture and collective psyche to a machine that harvests our reflexes, beliefs and emotions. It furnishes them in outrage and sells it back to us as spectacle.
Many have gained fame, wealth and power on the backs of this machine. Kirk was prominent among them. And there lies the symmetry. A man who understood and harnessed this system was, in the end, consumed by it. His death has become the same material he once thrived on: Content for outrage, profit for others.
The tragedy is greater than one life lost. We are all being used. We have been taken in by algorithms and charlatans. We mistake performance for participation and collective outrage for community. We make assumptions about neighbors we hardly know and hate them on the orders of news feeds and corporations, because of the posts that they make, or the signs in their yards. While we rage on at each other, this machine keeps feeding on us all.
Dave Ward
Wernersville