Read an April 1, 2004, essay published on the Orthodox Union’s website about the split opinion on the death penalty in the Jewish community.

Michael K. Duffey is an associate professor of ethics at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He specializes in peace and justice issues, and his publications include Sowing Justice, Reaping Peace: Case Studies of Racial, Religious and Ethnic Healing Around the World.

Pew held a January 2002 conference on the death penalty that included reflections from a variety of faith traditions. The essays were collected into a volume, Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. The volume has the writings of 21 contributors representing a range of religious traditions.

Read a series of exchanges from October 2011 at The Public Discourse, a politically conservative site, between Christopher O. Tollefsen and Edward Feser, arguing over whether capital punishment is morally wrong or justifiable in some cases.

Read a roundup of the positions of various religious groups and denominations on capital punishment, posted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Read a July 11, 2013, news article about the possibility of death sentence for a man who kidnapped and held three women captive in his Ohio home.

Read a July 9, 2013, opinion piece by professor of theology Robert Olson arguing that churches should do more to oppose capital punishment.

Sandy Dwayne Martin is a religion professor at the University of Georgia in Athens. He has written about women’s roles in African-American denominations.

Teresa Fry Brown is an associate professor at Emory University in Atlanta. She is author of Weary Throats and New Songs: Black Women Proclaiming God’s Word and God Don’t Like Ugly: African American Women Handing on Spiritual Values.