Elf Sternberg

I just finished reading Richard K. Morgan's excellent _Altered Carbon_, a futuristic noir novel. In it, people are stored in "stacks" installed in their spinal columns and can be "re-sleeved" - inserted into a new body - if their body is killed, or even restored from backup if their stack is destroyed. Most penalties for crimes are essentially temporal displacement - you get stored for a while, then re-sleeved.

In this world, the Catholics, refusing to believe that the stack could be the repository of the soul, refuse to be resleeved. This also prevents them from being needlecast (think ansible) out to the colonies, leaving them stuck on Earth, and generally leaving them behind as the rest of society lives longer and they don't.