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.

David M. O’Leary is a Jesuit priest and a senior lecturer in comparative religions and medical ethics at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He contributed articles on heaven and hell to The Encyclopedia of Religious and Spiritual Development.

Read a July 12, 2009, essay at ReligionDispatches.org about the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death by Pauline Hope Cheong, an associate professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.

Read a June 29, 2009, post at the First Things blog by Richard Scott Nokes, who argues that the singer is “a martyr to our culture’s true god: Celebrity.”

Read a June 26, 2009, Beliefnet column remembering Michael Jackson by Deepak Chopra.

Read a June 26, 2009, commentary on Michael Jackson’s death at The Huffington Post by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the popular writer and a friend of Jackson’s.

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.