Very sharp religion journalism at the New York Times about religious rites, death, and filial piety in China. Religion has less to do with such cognitive things as belief in and worship of gods and God and more to do with ancestor worship and other forms of social custom. All this is common enough in classical theories in the anthropology and sociology of religion going back to the end of the 19^th century. What this article does not neglect is to add timely factors relating to demographic pressures such as population explosion and mass migration from the countryside, and also the logic of capitalist consumerism and the role of technology as they play out on the revival of ancient practices.