Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Montana has followed Oregon and Washington State as the third state to legalize "physician-assisted dying."

Or should I use, as the Christian Science Monitor does in covering the Montana story, the term favored by opponents of these laws -- "suicide" ?

The terminology is loaded, as one might expect when the topic is life and death and who decides when one is over.

In Brad Knickerbocker's story this weekend, he quotes the Montana State Supreme Court, which uses the phrasing preferred by supporters of this policy.

The majority justices wrote that they... :

"... find nothing in the plain language of Montana statutes indicating that physician aid in dying is against public policy. In physician aid in dying, the patient -- not the physician -- commits the final death-causing act by self-administering a lethal dose of medicine."

Opponents, calling it "suicide," pledged to head straight for the legislature to get new laws specifically prohibiting the practice.

Meanwhile the Monitor sticks with "suicide" to describe the act of choosing when to die if you are a mentally competent adult suffering with a terminal illness.

What's your call on this? Would you want this choice, however you called it, for yourself or a loved one?

President Obama, a mainline Protestant who currently has no home church, dominated much of the U.S. religion news. His inaugural address called the USA "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers."

In his first months, Obama lifted a Bush administration ban on federal funding for groups that offer abortion information and services abroad and expanded the policy permitting federal funds for embryonic stem cell research.

Scores of Catholic bishops called it a travesty that Notre Dame, a flagship Catholic university, awarded Obama an honorary degree and invited him to deliver the commencement address in May.

In his address at Cairo University in June, Obama told the Muslim world the USA is not at war with Islam. He pledged to ease the way for U.S. Muslims to make charitable donations as their faith requires.

Obama used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo to lay out the theology of a just war and the morality of standing for the good in a world where, he said, "evil exists."

U.S. Catholic bishops lobby

Church leaders revved up their fight on "life issues" on key battle fronts — with few clear victories, particularly on gay marriage.

Although it was defeated in New York and Maine, same-sex marriage was legalized in Vermont, New Hampshire and, pending a sign-off by Congress, Washington, D.C. Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl told the Washington city council that its approval of gay

Going to church this Sunday? Look around.

The chances are that one in five of the people there find "spiritual energy" in mountains or trees, and one in six believe in the "evil eye," that certain people can cast curses with a look — beliefs your Christian pastor doesn't preach.

In a Catholic church? Chances are that one in five members believe in reincarnation in a way never taught in catechism class — that you'll be reborn in this world again and again.

Elements of Eastern faiths and New Age thinking have been widely adopted by 65% of U.S. adults, including many who call themselves Protestants and Catholics, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released Wednesday.

Syncretism — mashing up contradictory beliefs like Catholic rocker Madonna's devotion to a Kabbalah-light version of Jewish mysticism — appears on the rise.

And, according to the survey's other major finding, devotion to one clear faith is fading.

Of the 72% of Americans who attend religious services at least once a year (excluding holidays, weddings and funerals), 35% say they attend in multiple places, often hop-scotching across denominations.

They are like President Obama, who currently has no home church. He has worshiped at a Baptist church, an Episcopal one, and the non-denominational chapel at Camp David.

"Mixing and matching practices and beliefs is as much the norm as it is the exception," Pew's Alan Cooperman says. "Are they grazing, sampling, just curious? We really don't know."

Even so, says Pew researcher Greg Smith, "these findings all point toward a spiritual and religious openness — not necessarily a lack of seriousness."

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers. The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely. These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself,' " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.
• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
• The percentage of those who choose a generic label, calling themselves simply Christian, Protestant, non-denominational, evangelical or "born again," was 14.2%, about the same as in 1990.
• Jewish numbers showed a steady decline, from 1.8% in 1990 to 1.2% today. The percentage of Muslims, while still slim, has doubled, from 0.3% to 0.6%. Analysts within both groups suggest those

Tough question, right? The Templeton Foundation, best known for massively funding research and programming in the realms of science and religion, took this on as one of its topics in a series of publications and forums on the "Big Questions" in modern times.

Three leading economic and philosophical intellectuals held a seminar today in London (I watched on webcast) to address, "Does the free market corrode moral character?"'

Gary Rosen of the Templeton Foundation began by reminding the audience that the foundation founder, the late Sir John Templeton, once said, "Through risk and challenge we grow both in worldly wisdom and spiritual strength."

Unfortunately, I'm not so far grown in wisdom yet. Much of the discussion went over my head. Even so, it was clear that there are rousing arguments among the global intelligentsia over markets and morality.

"All humanly acceptable economic systems are morally corrosive to some extent," said John Gray, an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism.

Gray argued that the modern version of the American free market died "from hubris and greed that promoted snatching wealth from pyramids of debt."

Jagdish Bhagwati, a professor of economics and law at Columbia University, added "ignorance" to black marks on the free market. He said the new financial instruments, such as derivatives packaging "toxic" mortgages, went beyond the knowledge of the central bankers. They took the brakes off regulation without ever understanding that this might become "a dagger at our throat," he said.

God either causes or allows “major tragedies to occur as a warning to sinners,” say 20% of U.S. adults.

While 43% say most evil is caused by the devil, 47% disagree–a statistical tie.

But most (68%) would not say human nature is basically evil.

So where does evil dwell–in the devil or in mankind? The Baylor survey allows for overlapping views; it finds 36% strongly agree with both statements.

“Those who believe God causes or allows bad things to happen did not speak in terms of tragedies being God's fault,” says Baylor sociologist Christopher Bader.

Bader says people told him that “tragedies are our fault. We have sinned as a nation and God has stood aside and allowed terrible things to happen.”

HARTFORD, Conn. — Ingrid Mattson knows the media drill well.

She has done the "We condemn … (fill in the terrorism incident)" speeches — as if, she says, that's all anyone needs to hear from the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

She has done the profiles of her as first woman/first convert/first North American-born head of the continent's largest Muslim group.

She has done the talk shows retelling how 20 years ago, she left the Catholicism of her Canadian childhood and her college focus on philosophy and fine arts to find her spiritual home in Islam.

"It's time now to move the focus back off me and back on the issues," says Mattson, a professor at Hartford Seminary, where she directs the first U.S.-accredited Muslim chaplaincy program at the Macdonald Center.

Mattson begins the second half of her two-year term at the society's Labor Day weekend national conference outside Chicago. The annual event draws 40,000 Muslims of every sect, culture, age, race and ethnicity for scores of sessions on faith, family and society and a massive multicultural bazaar.

But two weeks before the conference, sitting with two women in her tiny, book-stuffed office, Mattson has a moment to kick off her shoes. She sheds the long brown jacket stifling her tailored blue blouse, leans back and talks about her vision of American Muslim life

Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn’t laughing. Americans’ deep ignorance of world religions—their own, their neighbors’ or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir—is dangerous, he says.

His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.

Belief is not his business, says Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian and now says he’s a spiritually “confused Christian.” He says his argument is for empowered citizenship.

“More and more of our national and international questions are religiously inflected,” he says, citing President Bush’s speeches laden with biblical references and the furor when the first Muslim member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand on Thomas Jefferson’s Quran.

“If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they’re both Muslim, and you’ve been told Islam is about peace, you won’t understand what’s happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote

(article co-written by Dan Vergano)

Lost for centuries and bound for controversy, the so-called gospel of Judas was unveiled by scholars Thursday.

With a plot twist worthy of The Da Vinci Code, the gospel — 13 papyrus sheets bound in leather and found in a cave in Egypt — purports to relate the last days of Jesus' life, from the viewpoint of Judas, one of Jesus' first followers. Christians teach that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, but in this gospel, he is the hero, Jesus' most senior and trusted disciple and the only one who knows Jesus' true identity as the son of God.

"We're confident this is genuine ancient Christian literature," said religious scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He and others on the translation team spoke at a National Geographic Society briefing, where they released a translation.

The manuscript claims that Jesus revealed "secret knowledge" to Judas and instructed him to turn Jesus over to Roman authorities, said Coptic studies scholar Stephen Emmel of Germany's University of Munster, one of the restoration team members. In the gospel text, Judas is given private instruction by Jesus and is granted a vision of the divine that is denied to other disciples, who do not know that Jesus has requested his own betrayal. Rather than acting out of greed or malice, Judas is following orders when he leads soldiers to Jesus, the gospel says.

Other theologians, biblical scholars and pastors say this contrary text is not truly "good news" (the meaning of "gospel") and will make no difference to believers as Easter approaches. The Bible, they say, is a closed book, nearly universally accepted as the official church teachings since the fourth century.

"Just because you can date a document to early Christian times doesn't make it theologically true," said Pastor Rod Loy of the First Assembly of God in North Little Rock "Do you decide everything you read on the Internet is true because it was written on April 6, 2006? Fiction has been around for as long as man."

Found by a farmer

Radioactive-carbon-dating tests and experts in ancient languages establish that the document was written between A.D. 300 and 400, the team said. Written in Coptic, an old Egyptian language, the gospel was unearthed by a farmer in a "tomb-like box" in 1978, said Terry Garcia of the National Geographic Society. It is part of a codex, or collection of devotional texts, found in a cave near El Minya, Egypt.

The farmer sold the codex to an antiquities dealer in Cairo, without alerting Egyptian antiquities officials. In a secret showing in 1983, the antiquities dealer, unaware of the content of the codex, offered the gospel for sale to Emmel and another scholar in a Geneva, Switzerland hotel room.

Given a hurried half-hour to examine the codex, Emmel first suspected the papyrus sheets discussed Judas, he said, based on a hasty glimpse of the text, which was littered with references to the disciple in Coptic. But the asking price was too exorbitant, as high as $3 million, Garcia said.

For the next 16 years, the document moldered in a Hicksville, N.Y., bank safe-deposit box, deteriorating until Zurich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos purchased it in 2000, alarmed at its fragmentation, Garcia said. National Geographic said it did not know the purchase price.

In 2001, the codex was acquired by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland, Garcia said. The foundation invited National Geographic to help with the restoration in 2004 and also reached an agreement with the Egyptian government to return it after its restoration.

Restoration of the thousands of papyrus fragments has made 80% of the gospel legible. The National Geographic Society learned of the find 2½ years ago, Garcia said. The society recruited the scholarly restoration team and got a $1 million grant from the Waitt Foundation for Historical Studies.

The gospel "is an intriguing alternative view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas," Emmel said. It also has Jesus relating a new creation myth and account of humankind's origins to Judas, which suggest God didn't create the world, contrary to conventional Christian belief.

The key passage has Jesus telling Judas "'you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,'" Emmel said. The

Embryonic stem cell researchers are worried about the future of international cooperation in their field after a prominent scientist's surprise resignation from a fledgling stem-cell-sharing effort.

On Thanksgiving, South Korean scientist Woo-suk Hwang of Seoul National University resigned as head of the World Stem Cell Hub, a nascent international embryonic stem cell research effort he started. In 2004, Hwang's team was the first to clone human embryonic stem cells, master cells from which specific kinds of tissue arise.

Since then, Hwang's team has become the world's leader in stem cell research. This year, it unveiled 11 more cloned stem cell lines, and it cloned a dog.

But a team member, the University of Pittsburgh's Gerald Schatten, resigned this month. He warned of ethical breaches involving junior lab members inappropriately donating eggs for research.

Donor eggs are combined with skin cells in the cloning process. Hwang's 2004 paper said all eggs had been freely given by anonymous donors. But he acknowledged that a team doctor paid 20 women about $1,400 each to donate eggs. Hwang also confirmed Schatten's charges. Hwang acknowledged that he did not disclose these breaches upon learning of them.

"No question that people are taking a step back from interacting with the Hub," says Leonard Zon, former president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. "It remains for Dr. Hwang's colleagues to prove the future of the Hub can be maintained."

The organization will outline new ethics guidelines this week.

Paul Root Wolpe of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania points out that Hwang did not resign because he used eggs from his researchers but because he lied about it and brought shame "in a country where public shame is so powerful."

He is not the only one to note that Hwang's findings have not been compromised. "While ethical issues about (egg) donation should be debated and the process regulated, the scientific conclusions of Dr. Hwang's research remain intact," Schatten said in a statement.

The South Korean government says it will still pay for Hwang's work, and thousands of women have since offered their eggs, according to news reports.

"Korean bioscientists have opened a new era with cutting-edge technology, but I don't think there is any bioethics relevant to that at this moment here," says theologian Heup Young Kim of South Korea's Kangnam University. "We have our different social and cultural context, so we have to formulate our own bioethics."

One irony of Hwang's resignation is that South Korea's egg donation standards, and those of Hwang's lab, are now stricter than U.S. standards, says bioethicist Insoo Hyun of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The lab requires consent forms and psychological evaluations for donors. And earlier this year, South Korea outlawed paying for eggs, which is legal in the USA.

Stem cell researchers hope to create replacement tissues to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's. Opponents assail the destruction of embryos involved in gathering the cells. President Bush has restricted research money.

"I would hate to see the United States get on an ethics high horse as if we are moral and other countries such as Korea are not," says the Rev. Ronald Cole-Turner of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

"Which society is the more ethical?" he asks. "The one that at least has a standard or the one that can't find a reasonable degree of compromise to create a standard?"

The battle between secular defenders of evolution and those who believe in a divine Creator is more than a century old, yet there’s no lessening in its emotional and intellectual intensity. The latest wrinkle is intelligent design, a boundary-crossing belief that is the focus of a federal court trial on whether it should be taught in schools. A new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll sheds light on where Americans stand (53% of respondents say the Bible had it right). And USA TODAY religion writer Cathy Lynn Grossman and science reporter Dan Vergano look at the opposing sides to learn why each believes it cannot be wrong.

1. Creationists
2. Scientists
3. Middle ground

In the past half-century, death has been transformed by scientific, technological and social changes. Today, about 80% of Americans die in a health care facility. Some milestones:

1950s

Respiratory support, particularly by ventilators, gains widespread use to sustain polio patients.

1960s

1963: Kidney dialysis invented in Seattle.

1965: Medicare increases access to medical care for millions of Americans, raising new ethical questions: How much to spend? How far to go?

1966: National Academy of Sciences recommends training physicians in the new lifesaving technique of cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

1965-68: National Institutes of Health revolutionizes research and treatment ethics, calling for informed consent for tests, surgeries and procedures.

1967: The first successful heart transplant prompts Harvard anesthesiologist Henry Beecher to seek a new criteria for death to allow transplants of vital organs while the heart is still beating.

1968: Harvard Ad Hoc Committee to Examine the Definition of Death adds brain-death criteria — irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain — to the traditional heart-death definition.

Oregon's law allowing a dying person to seek a doctor's prescription for a lethal dose of medication breaks with traditional religious doctrines:

The vocabulary of death and dying is elusive. Words raise questions about end-of-life decisions not just for patients and families but also for clergy, doctors, legal experts, ethicists and academicians.

Advance directives

The two best-known advance directives — an umbrella term for written or verbal instructions for medical care if someone is incapacitated and cannot make decisions — are the health care proxy, also called power of attorney, and the living will.

A living will can be a general indication of someone's wishes or a specific listing of types of care, such as a feeding tube, the patient might wish to reject under certain circumstances.

The proxy designates someone who knows the patient's wishes as the surrogate decision-maker.

But even though hospitals are required to ask patients whether they have these documents, health care researchers have found that living wills frequently fail because they are too often vague, confusing, expensive and not always enforced. A report last week by the President's Council on Bioethics called living wills "of limited value."

Autonomy

Bioethics experts who operate from primarily secular principles say a person's right to determine his or her own course should be the most important factor in making medical decisions. "In our pluralistic society, we go by the patient's values, religious or secular, and not necessarily our own," says Timothy Quill, professor of medicine, psychiatry and medical humanities at the University of Rochester

Americans talk endlessly about death.

We want a "good death," a "natural death," a "death with dignity," researchers say.

We'd like to say all farewells, repent all sins — or accept our karmic consequences — and then blink out like a candle.

We just can't agree on what that looks like, how it happens, even the very definition of "death."

Our society is splintered on when — or whether — to begin or end a bewildering array of life-support technologies that didn't exist 50 years ago. When the end is near, must we leave the timing to God or nature?

Today the U.S. Supreme Court hears a challenge to the Oregon law that allows doctors to prescribe a lethal overdose for a dying patient. Advocates for the law call it "physician-assisted dying." Opponents call it suicide — or murder.

The Bush administration will argue that Oregon's Death with Dignity Act violates federal drug laws; the case of Gonzales v. Oregon probably will turn on the fine point of state vs. federal authority.

But public debate has not been so confined. Opinion polls since 1973 suggest that most Americans have supported allowing someone with "an incurable disease" to end his or her life "by some painless means." In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll in 2004, 69% supported that view. But that could apply to people who refuse or stop medical treatment they consider futile. (Related link: 50 years of change)

When Americans were asked in a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll in September whether a doctor should be allowed to prescribe an overdose to help someone "end his or her life," 54% said yes. When the question used the words "help the patient commit suicide," 46% said yes.

High-profile voices from five bioethics centers across the country comment on the field of bioethics.

Any given Sunday morning, a bioethicist somewhere in America suits up for a TV appearance on the hot issue of the day or stands by a hospital bed to consult on a wrenching dilemma.

Should doctors prolong the life of a baby born without a brain? Should they be allowed to help the terminally ill kill themselves by prescribing a lethal drug dose? Should there be limits on embryonic stem cell research?

But who are these people opining on what we should do?

"Anyone who wants to," says Arthur Derse, chairman of Veterans' Health Administration's National Ethics Committee.

He's president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, which draws most of its 1,600 members from medical schools and academics in ethics and philosophy. Lawyers, theologians, clergy members, sociologists and others staff scores of bioethics centers and work in the pharmaceutical industry as well.

There are no standards or certification procedures, says Derse, an emergency medicine physician. And rarely are bioethicists questioned about the basis for their views or who pays for their work.

It's hard for the average person to sort out the political activists with an agenda or ethicists with a vested interest, such as those employed, directly or indirectly, by drug companies seeking an ethical halo for their products.