Appendix A
A Reader's Guide to the Evidence, the Research, and the Conversation
A book that leans on near-death events, deathbed visions, and the soul's life beyond death owes its readers a clear road into the research. This part of the book is that road. Here you will find the major works we draw on, grouped by topic. Each entry tells you what the work is, what it claims, and why it matters.
I want to say a word about how to use this guide. You do not need to read every work listed here. Most readers will want to start with one or two books in a group that draws them. If you came to this book because of a near-death event you or a loved one had, the first two sections will matter most. If the soul question drives your thinking, start with the dualism section. If you want to think about how Christians should weigh these events, the discernment section is the place to begin.
I have tried to present each work fairly, including the critics. The case for NDEs and deathbed visions is strong, but it is not without challenge. A fair reader will want to hear both sides. This guide helps you do that.
Where a source is talked about at length in the body of this book, I note the chapter. Where the full text of a work was on hand for me to check, I note that too. Works marked with a star (*) were read from the project texts. For those, I drew my notes from the real content, not from secondhand reports.1
The modern study of near-death events began in the mid-1970s. Before that decade, scattered reports of dying visions showed up in medical journals and memoirs. But no one had gathered a large body of cases, named the pattern, or asked what it might mean. Three researchers changed that. Their early work set the terms every later study would use: the tunnel, the light, the life review, the being of love, and the return. Whether or not you find their claims strong, their words are the starting point for the whole field.
Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon — Survival of Bodily Death. Atlanta: Mockingbird, 1975. Reprint, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001.
This is the book that started the modern NDE talk. Moody, a thinker and doctor, gathered over 150 accounts from people who had been called clinically dead or who came very close to death. He found a set of common parts: leaving the body, passing through a dark space, meeting a being of light, looking back over one's life, and coming back. Moody coined the term "near-death experience." The book is popular, not clinical. It makes no number-based claims. But it gave a whole age of readers and scholars a shared language for something many had lived through in silence.2 Moody's later works, such as Reflections on Life After Life (1977) and The Light Beyond (1988, with Paul Perry), grew the case and answered early pushback.
Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980.
Ring was the first to bring a clear method to what Moody had mapped out. He spoke with 102 people who had nearly died and used numbers to track the parts they reported. His study backed up the core pattern: a sequence of peace, leaving the body, entering the dark, seeing the light, and coming to a place of beauty. Ring found that about 48 percent of his subjects reported some form of NDE. His later work, Heading Toward Omega (1984), looked at the long-term changes in NDE survivors. Lessons from the Light (1998, with Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino) turned to the hands-on effects of these events. Ring also co-wrote Mindsight (1999, with Sharon Cooper). That book looked at NDEs among the born blind. Since the blind have never seen, their visual reports during NDEs carry special weight for the question of whether the soul can see apart from the body.3
At the Hour of Death: A New Look at Evidence for Life After Death. Rev. ed. New York: Hastings House, 1977. Reprint, Mamaroneck, NY: Hastings House, 1986.
Osis and Haraldsson conducted the first large cross-cultural study of deathbed visions. They gathered reports from over 1,000 doctors and nurses in the United States and India. Their findings cut across the two cultures in striking ways. Dying patients in both countries reported seeing deceased loved ones and figures of light. The visions did not match what the patients expected. Indian patients sometimes reported seeing Western-style figures, and American patients sometimes saw beings they did not expect. The study weakened the claim that deathbed visions are simply the brain playing out cultural scripts. This work sits between the NDE studies and the deathbed studies. It predates the modern NDE field and helped lay the ground for it.
Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.
Sabom, a heart doctor, brought a clinician's eye to the field. His first book reported on his "Atlanta Study." He compared the out-of-body accounts of cardiac-arrest survivors with their real medical records. The match was striking. His patients described details of their own rescue that they could not have known by normal means. Sabom's second book, Light and Death, is central to this book's case. It gives the detailed clinical account of the Pam Reynolds standstill case. This is still the best-documented veridical NDE in the whole field. Her body was cooled to sixty degrees. Her blood was drained. Her heart and lungs stopped. Her EEG was flat and her brain-stem readings were absent. Yet she described the bone saw used to open her skull and a remark about her leg vessels. Both were confirmed by the surgical team. Sabom is careful: since Pam lived, she was "never dead" in the full sense. But his record of what she saw during a state of deep clinical shutdown is a landmark. (See Chapter 6 and Appendix B.)4
The word "veridical" means truthful or checked. In NDE research, a veridical case is one where the person reports details during the event that are later confirmed to be right. These are the cases that matter most for the question of whether something real is going on. A feeling of peace is real but private. A correct account of a surgical tool you have never seen is public, checkable, and very hard to explain if nothing left the body.
The studies in this section tried to move the field from story to proof. They used planned designs, hospital-based rules, and large data sets. Their results vary in strength. Not every study got the clear proof it hoped for. But the picture they paint together is worth taking seriously.
Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperOne, 2010.
Van Lommel, a Dutch heart doctor, ran the first large planned study of NDEs in cardiac-arrest patients. He published it in The Lancet in 2001. The study followed 344 straight cardiac-arrest survivors across ten Dutch hospitals. Sixty-two patients (18 percent) reported some form of NDE. Van Lommel found no medical, body-based, or mental factor that told who would have the event and who would not. His book expands the Lancet study into a full look at the facts and what they point to. He argues that the brain may be a receiver of the mind rather than its maker. His "dentures case" is one of the most-cited veridical accounts in the field. In that case, a nurse took the dentures from a comatose patient during his rescue. Days later, when he woke, he pointed her out as the one who had removed them.5
Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death. New York: HarperOne, 2013.
Parnia, a critical-care doctor, designed the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) studies to test NDE claims under set rules. Hidden pictures were placed on shelves near the ceilings of hospital rooms. If a patient reported an out-of-body view, the picture would serve as a test: could they see what no one on the ground could see? AWARE I (published in Resuscitation, 2014) enrolled over 2,000 cardiac-arrest patients across fifteen hospitals. Of 330 survivors, 140 were talked to. Nine percent reported events in line with NDEs. Two patients reported checked visual awareness during cardiac arrest. But only one of those arrests took place in a room with a target. That patient's out-of-body view did not face the shelf. The study showed that awareness during cardiac arrest is real and more common than most thought. It did not, however, get the clean hit on the hidden target that would have been the strongest proof. AWARE II kept up the effort. Parnia's work is honest about both what it found and what it did not.6
After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021.
Greyson is the field's elder voice. He built the Greyson NDE Scale, the standard tool for scoring the depth and parts of near-death events. Clinicians use it around the world. Over more than four decades, he has put out over one hundred peer-reviewed papers on the subject. After is his first book for a general reader. It mixes case studies, the research record, and Greyson's own careful thoughts on what the facts do and do not show. He is measured in his claims and willing to sit with open questions. His input to the field is less flashy than some but deeply sound.7
The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five-Year Clinical Study. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008.
The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences: How Understanding NDEs Can Help Us Live More Fully. London: Watkins, 2014.
Sartori, a British nurse, ran a five-year study in an intensive care unit in Wales. She watched for NDEs among patients who had cardiac arrests or who came close to death. Her study is one of the few long-term, single-site clinical works in the field. She found that patients who reported out-of-body events gave more correct details about their own rescue than a control group asked to guess what happened. Her academic text is dense and careful. Her second book, The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences, is written for a wider reader and places the clinical findings in a broader human context. Both are worth reading for anyone who wants a nurse's-eye view of the data.
Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences. With Paul Perry. New York: HarperOne, 2010.
God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience. With Paul Perry. New York: HarperOne, 2016.
Long founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF). It holds the largest set of NDE accounts in the world. His first book draws on over 1,300 accounts. His second, God and the Afterlife, is central to this book. It reports on the "God Study," built from over 4,000 NDE accounts. Long works with numbers: he asks how often certain parts appear, compares reports across cultures, and tests for patterns. He found that 64.8 percent of those who replied reported a meeting with a bright light. Some 33.2 percent described a tunnel. And 77.7 percent reported "great peace." His life-review chapter and his findings on God-meetings across cultures matter most for our case in Chapter 12 and Chapter 13. Long calls NDERF "the largest scientific study of NDEs ever reported."8
Not every meeting at the edge of death happens during a cardiac arrest. Many dying people, still awake and still breathing, report seeing loved ones who have died. They greet figures of light. They seem aware of a world others in the room cannot see. These are deathbed visions and nearing-death awareness. They are quieter than NDEs. They happen in hospice rooms and hospitals, at bedsides and in nursing homes. The dying person turns toward something no one else can see, reaches out a hand, and speaks a name.
This kind of proof matters to our book because it shows that the edge of death is not a single tick of the clock. It is a window. The meeting opens before the heart stops. And some of the strongest cases come not from people who were brought back, but from people who were dying and knew it.
Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic, Evaluating Death-Related Visions, Terminal Lucidity and After-Death Communications. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Miller takes a step-by-step approach to building the case. He sorts the proof into clear "lines of evidence," each weighed on its own merits. Line of Evidence #1 covers deathbed visions and the "Peak-in-Darien" pattern. In these cases, the dying see people on the other side whom they did not know had died. Line of Evidence #5 covers terminal lucidity, drawing on Fenwick and others. This is the sudden, striking return of clear thinking in patients with advanced dementia or severe brain damage, just before death. Miller cites Nahm's set of eighty-three cases spanning 250 years. He also notes Batthyany's early finding that over 10 percent of Alzheimer's patients may show this return of clarity. He also covers after-death contacts and children's deathbed events. The book is a careful assembly of proof. It serves as a strong entry point for readers who want the data sorted and weighed rather than just told as stories. (See Chapter 5 and Chapter 30.)9
Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife: A Multicultural Examination of the Literature. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia International University, 2019.
This is the scholarly base beneath Miller's published books. His doctoral work looks at death-related events across cultures and faiths. It builds a careful academic case that the brain-only view cannot explain the full range of what dying people report. It is written for a scholarly reader and gives the cross-cultural data that strengthen the case. These data show that the events are not just Western or just Christian. Readers who want the research at its most careful will find it here.10
Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying. New York: Poseidon Press, 1992. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Callanan and Kelley were hospice nurses with decades of bedside time. Their book gave us the term "nearing-death awareness." They coined it for the slow shift that many dying people show in their final days and hours. The dying often speak of travel, of going somewhere, of seeing people who have died. Callanan and Kelley say these words are not the babble of a confused mind. They are clear, on-purpose, and often deeply helpful to the family. Final Gifts is not a clinical study. It is a kind, watching account written by two women who spent years at the bedsides of the dying. Its value is pastoral as much as factual. For families walking the road of a loved one's final days, it is one of the most helpful books in the field.
Not all near-death events are peaceful. A real share of NDE accounts include terror, darkness, being alone, or meeting hostile beings. These are the cases that make the picture harder, and this book takes them very seriously. If the meeting at death is real, then the dark meetings are real too. They matter for the case in Chapter 10, where we look at what the darkness means and why a loving God might let some souls pass through it.
Insight: Dark NDEs are not a problem for the book's case. They are part of it. If God's pursuit of a soul sometimes begins with a taste of what life without Him is like, then the darkness is not a sentence. It is the first step of rescue. The staged approach we build in Chapter 23 makes sense of why some meetings begin in the dark.
My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Storm was an art teacher and a firm atheist when his stomach ruptured in Paris in 1985. What followed, by his account, was a terrifying fall into darkness. Hostile beings tore at him. He calls the event a true hell. Then, in the depths, he called up a childhood prayer and cried out. The darkness broke. A being of light came. Storm's life changed from that point on. He left his teaching career and became a pastor. His account is vivid and deeply personal. It is not clinically checked the way the Pam Reynolds case is. But it is one of the most widely read dark-NDE memoirs. The pattern it shows (descent, cry, rescue) appears again and again in the field. (See Chapter 10 and Appendix B.)
Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences. Cleveland, TN: Parson's Porch Books, 2012.
Bush is the most careful scholar of dark NDEs. She names several types. The flipped NDE has the same parts as a peaceful one, but the person feels them as scary. The void is a vast, dark emptiness. The hellish scene involves hostile beings and torment. She draws on decades of case studies and her own personal story. Bush does not force a single reading on the data. She lets the range stand and invites readers to sit with the discomfort. Her work is the best cure for the temptation to pick only the pleasant cases. For our case, her sorting of dark types helps us grasp what the dark passage can look like.11
Beyond Death's Door. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978.
Rawlings, a heart doctor, said hellish NDEs are far more common than the early books let on. He believed that workers like Moody and Ring missed dark cases because patients pushed the memory away. Rawlings talked to patients right after they were brought back and found more accounts of darkness, fire, and dread than the later studies caught. His faith frame is plainly evangelical. He reads the hellish cases as direct warnings of lasting punishment. I do not share that reading (see Chapter 10). But Rawlings deserves credit for insisting that the dark cases not be hidden. His claim about memory loss has been debated, but it raised a question the field needed to face.
The NDE facts raise a question the facts alone cannot answer: what is the thing that sees when the brain is shut down? If Pam Reynolds saw the bone saw, something was doing the seeing. The faith and thought tradition calls that something the soul. The view that a person is a soul joined to a body, where the soul can exist and work apart from the body, is called substance dualism.
This section gathers the major recent works that argue for this view. They come from thought, faith, and Bible studies. Together they give the base for the claim this book makes in Chapter 6 and defends in Chapter 7: that you are a soul, not just a brain. And that the soul lives on after the body dies.
Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989. Updated edition, 2000.
Cooper's book is the go-to biblical case for what he calls "holistic dualism." He argues that both Testaments present the person as a body-soul unity. In that unity, the soul lives on after the body dies. He walks through the full range of Bible texts, from the creation stories through the prophets to Paul's letters and the Revelation. He also takes on the monist (body-only) readings offered by scholars like Joel Green and Nancey Murphy. He shows why he finds them lacking. Cooper's conclusion is that we "survive 'coming apart' at death." The soul goes on. This is not Greek thought forced into the Bible. It is, Cooper holds, what the Bible itself teaches. His work is the backbone of the dualism case in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.12
An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020.
Farris gives a wide-ranging guide to Christian thinking about what a human being is. He covers the past options, from ancient Hebrew and Greek thought through the church fathers and the Middle Ages to the current debate. His look at the soul and the state between death and rising (see pp. 243–247) speaks right to our case. Farris defends a form of dualism that takes the soul as a real, created thing with its own powers and its own life beyond the body. He is also aware of what is at stake: if there is no soul that lives past death, then the hope of any state between death and rising falls apart. And the case for any meeting between the dying person and God becomes much harder to make.13
Crowned with Glory and Honor: Human Rights in the Biblical Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.
Wilkinson's main topic is human rights, not NDEs. But his chapter on what a human being is includes a defense of what he calls the "Chalcedonian model" of the person (p. 333). The Council of Chalcedon defined Christ as one person in two natures, divine and human. Wilkinson says the human person follows the same pattern: one being in two natures, soul and body. The model gives a clear way to say that the person is truly embodied and truly more than a body. It is useful for readers who want to grasp how dualism works without cutting the person down to a ghost in a machine.
The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014.
Moreland is a thinker who has spent decades defending the reality of the soul. This book is his plainest case for it. He argues from awareness, free will, who we are over time, and near-death events. He answers the common claim that brain science has made the soul unneeded. His earlier and more technical work, Consciousness and the Existence of God (2008), makes the case at greater depth. Both are worth reading. Moreland writes for an evangelical Christian reader and is not afraid of hard thinking. He is one of the reasons the dualism talk is alive in current Protestant thought.
The Evolution of the Soul. Rev. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Swinburne, one of the most respected thinkers in the field of religion, gives a rigorous case for the soul. He argues from the nature of the mind, from personal identity over time, and from the limits of brain-based views. His key claim is that no amount of physical data can fully capture what it is like to be a person. That gap points to a real, non-physical subject: the soul. The book is more technical than Moreland's. It is written for readers at ease with close argument. But its core case is clear. Swinburne gives the strongest purely reasoning-based case for dualism in the current field.
Consciousness and the Mind of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Taliaferro's work is more about thought than Bible study, but it connects the two. He argues that awareness is best explained in a world made by God. The soul is a real thing, not just a side effect of brain work. His broader project includes The Golden Cord (2012) and Evidence and Faith (2005). Together they give a rich setting for the claim that minds are real, souls are real, and God is the ground of both. Taliaferro is a good fit for readers who want the thinking-based case rather than the Bible-based one.
The NDE field is huge, and not all of it is careful. Some accounts are played up. Some lack depth on the Bible. A few are fake. Christians who take the facts seriously also need to think clearly about them. The works in this section ask a pointed question: how should a thoughtful Christian weigh near-death and deathbed events?
The answers range from cautious embrace to structured testing. What these writers share is the belief that the events are too well attested to ignore and too important to accept without care.
Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Vol. 3 of Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023. Foreword by Gary R. Habermas.
This is the volume in Miller's series that matters most for Christian readers. He asks whether the NDE facts are friendly or hostile to the Christian faith. His answer is striking: across cultures and faiths, the figure of Jesus appears with surprise frequency. Anti-Christian parts are scarce. The broad pattern of the facts fits the historic Christian teaching about the afterlife, the judgment, and the love of God. Miller is not uncritical. He looks at the hellish and dark cases in detail (chapters 10 through 12). He faces the tension between NDE reports and standard teachings about hell. He knows that some Christians reject the facts and that some NDE fans use them against the faith. He steers between both dangers with care. Gary Habermas, the rising-from-death scholar, wrote the foreword. This volume matters most for the case we build in Chapter 12.14
The NDE Conspiracy: Separating Fact from Fiction in the Near-Death Experience Debate. Self-published, 2023.
Tabatt comes at the facts from a testing angle. He is a Christian host who has talked with many NDE witnesses and workers. His concern is hands-on: how does a believer sort the strong from the weak? He builds a nine-point framework for weighing NDE accounts. The framework asks about fit with the Bible, the teller's character and trustworthiness, medical proof, the content of the event, and several other factors. Tabatt does not reject the facts. He embraces them with discipline. His book is a fine fit for pastors and small-group leaders who want to engage the NDE field without losing their footing in the Word. (See Chapter 12.)15
Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality. 1998. Reprint, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004.
Habermas is known for his work on the history of Jesus's rising from the dead. Moreland is the thinker on the mind. Together they weigh the full range of proof for life after death. The book covers NDEs, but it also covers the case for the soul, the rising of Jesus, and the faith frame that holds it all together. It is not a specialist NDE text. It is a broad defense of the afterlife written by two scholars with deep expertise. Readers who want to see how the NDE facts fit into a larger case for Christian hope will find it here.
I said at the start of this guide that a fair reader will want to hear both sides. This section gives that. The writers listed here doubt the claim that NDEs show a soul, an afterlife, or a God. They think the events can be explained by the brain alone. Some are careful and worth taking on. Others are less strong. I have tried to present each at its best.
The skeptical case has real force on some points. No single NDE, taken alone, proves the soul exists. The brain can make vivid events under stress. Some reported details may be rebuilt after the fact. These pushbacks deserve honest replies. The case for the soul and the afterlife is built on weight, not on one knockout blow. It rests on many cases, many cultures, and many decades. (For the book's full reply, see Chapter 6.)
Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993.
Blackmore, a psychologist, gives the most sustained try at explaining NDEs in brain-only terms. She links the tunnel to random firing of cells in the visual cortex. She links the light to the brain losing its normal filters. She explains the out-of-body view as the brain's model of itself breaking down. And she reads the life review as a seizure in the temporal lobe. Her readings are clever and hold together on their own terms. They struggle, though, with the veridical cases. If the out-of-body event is a brain-made illusion, why do some patients rightly describe details of their own rescue that they could not see from where their body lay? Blackmore's book is the best single case for the skeptical brain-based view. It is worth reading next to the evidential studies.
Mortal Minds: The Biology of Near-Death Experiences. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005.
Woerlee, a doctor who gives anesthesia, argues that NDEs can be explained by what the dying brain does. He focuses on oxygen loss, excess carbon dioxide, and the effects of drugs given during rescue. He also suggests that patients who report correct details during cardiac arrest may have had brief, unnoticed moments of waking. His case is grounded in medicine. His reading of the Pam Reynolds case, however, requires guesses about leftover brain function that sit uneasily with the clinical record Sabom put together. Woerlee's best point is his reminder that medical readings must be ruled out before soul-based conclusions are drawn.
"Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences." Internet Infidels, 2008. Available online.
Augustine, a thinker, has written several critical essays arguing that NDEs are not real events but brain-made visions. He points to gaps in NDE reports, culture-shaped parts (Hindu NDEs differ from Christian ones in some ways), and the lack of checked out-of-body sightings under lab-like conditions. His essays are online and often cited by skeptics. His challenge about culture-shaping is worth taking on, though Long's cross-cultural data in God and the Afterlife offer a strong counter. Augustine forces those who believe in NDEs to be exact about what the facts truly show.
"Towards a Cognitive Neuroscience of the Dying Brain." The Skeptic 21, no. 2 (2008).
Braithwaite, a brain scientist, has argued that the parts of the NDE can be mapped onto known brain processes. His focus is on the temporal lobe and its role in producing the sense of a presence, out-of-body tricks, and waves of feeling. His work stands for the current state of the brain-science skeptical case. It is more measured than some popular takes. He grants that the inner reality of the event is not in doubt. What he questions is whether the event reflects anything outside the brain.
No guide like this can cover everything. The NDE field has grown fast since Moody's first book in 1975, and new studies come out every year. I have tried to include the works that matter most for our case and for the questions our readers are most likely to ask.
If you are a grieving reader looking for one place to start, I would point you to three books. Long's God and the Afterlife for the facts. Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting for the soul question. And Miller's Is Christianity Compatible for the Christian angle. Between those three, you will have a strong base.
If you are a scholar, the papers and sources cited in the footnotes of Chapter 6 will take you deeper into the peer-reviewed work.
And if you are a skeptic, read Blackmore next to Sabom. Read Augustine next to Long. Then decide for yourself what the weight of the facts supports. I believe the proof points toward the reality of the soul and the reality of what happens at the edge of death. But I wrote this book to help you think, not to do your thinking for you.
↑ 1. Works marked with a star (*) beside the author's name were read from project texts. For those works, the notes draw on the real content of the source. All other notes cite the published work at book level. Some of these sources live in a separate project and will be enriched with direct quotes when that project is loaded.
↑ 2. Raymond A. Moody Jr., Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death (Atlanta: Mockingbird, 1975; reprint, San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001). Moody's original study included over 150 accounts and established the vocabulary still used in the field today.
↑ 3. Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Look at the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980); Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (Palo Alto, CA: William James Center, 1999). Ring's Mindsight matters most for the question of proof, since the born blind have never had visual input to draw on.
↑ 4. Michael B. Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998). The Pam Reynolds case is developed at clinical depth in ch. 3. For the full case study, see Appendix B.
↑ 5. Pim van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (December 2001): 2039–45; van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010).
↑ 6. Sam Parnia et al., "AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study," Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (December 2014): 1799–1805; Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013).
↑ 7. Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021). For the Greyson NDE Scale, see Bruce Greyson, "The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–75.
↑ 8. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Long with Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016). The quoted statistics are from God and the Afterlife, chs. 1 and 2. See Chapter 5, Chapter 12, and Chapter 13 of this book for the argument that draws on Long's data.
↑ 9. J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic, Evaluating Death-Related Visions, Terminal Lucidity and After-Death Communications (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023). The terminal-lucidity data are in ch. 2, Line of Evidence #5.
↑ 10. J. Steve Miller, "Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife: A Multicultural Examination of the Literature" (doctoral dissertation, Columbia International University, 2019).
↑ 11. Nancy Evans Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (Cleveland, TN: Parson's Porch Books, 2012). For the typology of distressing NDEs (inverted, void, and hellish), see chs. 3–5.
↑ 12. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989; updated ed., 2000). Cooper's phrase "survive 'coming apart' at death" captures his thesis (p. 163).
↑ 13. Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020). The treatment of the soul and the intermediate state appears at pp. 243–47.
↑ 14. J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings, vol. 3 of Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023). Foreword by Gary R. Habermas.
↑ 15. Shaun Tabatt, The NDE Conspiracy: Separating Fact from Fiction in the Near-Death Experience Debate (self-published, 2023). The nine-point discernment framework is the book's central contribution and is discussed in Chapter 12 of this book.