New Jersey's new law allowing assisted suicide, effective Aug. 1, "points to an "utter failure" on the part of government and indeed all society, said Bishop James F. Checchio of Metuchen.

Callahan was an independent scholar working at the frontier where ethics meets medicine, law and religion.

Kristen Arnett’s novel is about intimacy and wanting what is forbidden, about childhood and family, about absent parents and absent lovers, and about the secondhand self-destruction that can be wrought by ignoring cries of the heart.

Vincent Lambert, who suffered serious brain damage more than 10 years ago, died after years of court battles.

Opening the Vatican tombs of a princess and a duchess July 11 in a search for the remains of a young Italian woman missing for more than 30 years, the Vatican found no human remains at all.

The complex process of examining bones and extracting DNA will be crucial in determining whether the remains in a small Vatican cemetery belong to Emanuela Orlandi, a young woman who disappeared in 1983, a Vatican-appointed forensic anthropologist said.