Hypertext Magazine asked Beth Splaine, author of Devil’s Grace, “what percentage of Americans believe in an afterlife?”
By Elizabeth B. Splaine
The answer depends on whom you ask and when you ask. But when a team consisting of San Diego State University, Florida Atlantic University and Case Western Reserve University researchers reviewed the General Social Survey, in which up to 58,000 people are interviewed annually about a variety of factors, they concluded that millennials are the least likely age group to consider themselves religious but are the most likely to consider themselves spiritual.
They also found that in 2014, 80 percent of Americans said they believe in an afterlife, whereas in 1972-74, only up 73 percent did. Contrast that statistic against this: In 1998, 49 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds said they were moderately or very religious. By 2014 this had dropped to 38 percent. Clearly a belief in spirituality is on the rise while religious belief is declining.
Wrapping your head around religion and spirituality can be daunting, but what happens when you’re a physician whose entire career has been science-based and you’re presented with the distinct possibility that you’ve been visited by a ghost? Would you question your sanity?
That’s exactly what happens to Dr. Angela Brennan in the medical-thriller/spiritual-drama titled Devil’s Grace. Angela loses her entire family within twenty-four hours, and as she searches for the truth behind her daughter’s death in the hospital where she works, she’s confronted with irrefutable proof that she’s been communicating with souls who have passed.
Inspired by real events that involve the challenging problems of medical error, Angela travels a path that begins with utter devastation and ends with her accepting her new reality and finding compassion and forgiveness, for those who have harmed her, as well as for herself.
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Elizabeth B. Splaine spent eleven years working in health care before switching careers to become a professional opera singer and voice teacher. Six years ago she turned her creative mind to writing and hasn’t looked back. Elizabeth has written the Dr. Julian Stryker series of “Blind” thrillers, as well as two children’s books. When not writing, Elizabeth teaches classical voice in Rhode Island where she lives with her husband, sons, and her dogs.
