Alan Franklin Segal was a professor of Jewish studies at Columbia University in New York City and author of Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. He passed away in 2011.

Dr. John Lantos is professor of pediatrics and associate director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. He is co-author of Neonatal Bioethics: The Moral Challenges of Medical Innovation and author of The Lazarus Case: Life-and-Death Issues in Neonatal Intensive Care.

Renee R. Anspach is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of Deciding Who Lives: Fateful Choices in the Intensive-Care Nursery.

Read a June 25, 2009, column at ReligionDispatches.org about the passing of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett by Anthea Butler, a historian of American and African-American religion who specializes in popular culture. In the piece, she describes Jackson as “a pop theologian.”

Read a May 1991 Time magazine cover story about Scientology. The church took great exception to the article, which went on to receive the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial journalism, the Worth Bingham Prize and the Conscience in Media Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Article requires log-in and payment to access.

The Tampa Bay Times published a three-part series on the Church of Scientology in June 2009. Read the second installment, published June 22, 2009.

Read a Feb. 21, 2009, Tampa Bay Times story about two wrongful-death lawsuits dealing with Scientology’s stance on psychiatry. One has been settled; the other was just recently filed.

The Religious Order of the New Compassionests is an interfaith animal ministry in Perryville, Ark., that accepts members and monks.

Chaplain of Pets is an interfaith ministry to pets and their people. It’s based in Stone Mountain, Ga.