A May 16, 2013, piece from Stateline exploring the effects of Oklahoma’s law that states “patients who are disabled, elderly or terminally ill cannot be denied life-preserving treatments if they or their health proxies want it.”

A May 2013 Huffington Post and YouGov poll found that 50 percent of Americans think physician-assisted suicide should be legal, while 29 percent think it should be illegal.

Courts in Montana will reconsider the state’s current lack of rulings on physician-assisted suicides, explains a Billings Gazette story published June 12, 2013. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Montana stated that nothing prevented physician-assisted suicides from being legal, but did not say clearly whether they are or not.

The Most Rev. Wilton Gregory is Roman Catholic archbishop of Atlanta. He served as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2001 to 2004. During his term the bishops developed new policies on clergy sexual abuse. He also has written about the death penalty, physician-assisted suicide and African-American liturgy.

Read “The Cry of the Oil-Soaked Pelican: How the birds mired in the Gulf oil spill teach us to properly grieve,” a June 9 essay at Christianity Today relating the disaster to man’s fallen nature.

This story, published on May 14, 2013, in the New York Times, explains how Vermont became the first state to pass a legislative measure allowing physicians to administer lethal drugs to terminally ill patients in May 2013.

James W. Jones is an expert in the psychology of religion and teaches in the religion department at Rutgers University. He is the author of Blood That Cries Out From the Earth: The Psychology of Religious Terrorism.

Mohammed M. Hafez is a visiting professor of political science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He wrote the book Why Muslims Rebel: Repression and Resistance in the Islamic World, and is currently working on a book to be titled,”Suicide Bombers: Politics, Reason, and Faith in Extreme Violence.”

The 2006 Baylor Survey of Religion found what it termed a “surprising level” of paranormal belief and experience, although “those beliefs and experiences tended to be confined to people outside traditional religion,” the report states. The survey was funded by the John Templeton Foundation and conducted by the Gallup Organization from October to December 2005. It found […]