If you have been reading about the arrests and trials of members of the Oregon Followers of Christ, you might be curious about the religion and about faith-healing generally.
There is some, though not a lot, of information available online, in the “mainstream web” (also known as the “I looked it up on the Internet” search method).
I did not include here results from a thorough literature search. Additional information can be gleaned by searching the deep web, and news, magazine, and subject-specific databases at your local public library.
But here are a few articles to get you started:
1) “Faith Healing And Criminal Liability In Oregon, by Kristin Ware,” Oregon Child Advocacy Project Fellow, February 2010
2) Book: Shawn Peters, “When prayer fails: Faith healing, children and the law” Oxford University Press, (2007)
3) Wikipedia, Followers of Christ (related topic: Faith Healing)
3) OPB Think Out Loud program: Of Prayer and Penicillin, Airdate: April 2, 2008: You can download the program from this website and link to additional reading. (The MP3 download works, but I couldn’t listen online. The “Show Archives” tab doesn’t work either, but you can go to the OPB On Demand webpage for links to archives.)
4) Faith-healing a First Amendment dilemma, by Robert M. Bernstein, First Amendment Center religious-liberty fellow, 03.24.10
5 ) All About God (and faith healing)
6) You can also search for more books and news stories using the usual search engine and bookstore suspects.
Note: I did not find any entries for the Followers of Christ in the following online directories, but these are only a small sampling of the religion education websites that exist:
MSU Study of Religions website