Heaven Is for Real is more than just a field guide to the marvels of heaven. It’s the story of how God comforted a frightened child. It’s the story of God’s faithfulness to a grieving father.

What exactly happened to Colton Burpo””whether he actually experienced the glory of heaven or had a mere hallucination””will remain a mystery. But we live in a mysterious world, and we shouldn’t be surprised when we encounter the miraculous and the supernatural. We should approach tales like this with critical discernment. We can’t immediately accept them, but neither should we reject them haphazardly. We should test them under the light of Scripture, and we should celebrate the fact that God, who reveals himself through his Word, is faithfully active in our world, meeting us in ways that can’t (and sometimes shouldn’t) be explained.

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SIMON: You’ve written that serious chronic pain is a bigger problem than cancer, and for that matter, cancer, heart disease and diabetes combined.

FOREMAN: And you can even throw in AIDS. There are more people suffering from chronic pain than all those four other things put together. That’s 100 million American – American adults, by the way, not kids, not people military returning from the wars, or even people in nursing homes – so that may actually be an underestimate. That figure comes from a report in 2011 from the Institute of Medicine. They’re not all in excruciating, debilitating pain, but an estimated 10 to 30 percent are. So that’s a lot of people.

SIMON: Well, help remind people what that means for someone’s life.

FOREMAN: Oh, my God. Some people can’t get out of bed, or they can’t walk. Many people get very depressed, and it really is a life-wrecking thing. And in some cases, it’s a life-ending thing because what a lot of people don’t realize is that the suicide risk among people in chronic pain is twice that for people not in pain.

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Seven out of 10 Australians believe a child needs to grow up in a home with both a mother and father to be happy, despite growing acceptance of single parents.

The latest World Family Map, produced by the US Child Trends research organisation, found Australians were more progressive than Asian and Middle Eastern families but not as liberal as Europeans.

While two-parent families are still the norm around the world, a quarter of children in the US, Britain and New Zealand grow up with a single parent compared with 18 per cent in Australia.

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The Christian claim from the beginning was that the question of Jesus’s resurrection was a question, not of the internal mental and spiritual states of his followers a few days after his crucifixion, but about something that had happened in the real, public world.

This “something” left, not just an empty tomb, but a broken loaf at Emmaus and footprints in the sand by the lake among its physical mementoes. It also left his followers with a lot of explaining to do, but with a transformed worldview which is only explicable on the assumption that something really did happen, even though it stretched their existing worldviews to breaking point.

What I want to do here is to examine this early Christian claim, to ask what can be said about it historically, and to enquire, more particularly, what sort of “believing” we are talking about when we ask whether we – whether “we” be scientists or historians or mathematicians or theologians – can “believe” that which “the resurrection” actually refers to.

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I deny any knowledge whatsoever of the people in this photograph.

With increasing awareness of homosexuality within the Orthodox Jewish world, a common, barely challenged refrain has been that abstaining from sex is not a real option for frum (traditionally observant) gay men. Often, advocates for changing Orthodox attitudes and policies on homosexuality have discussed celibacy with language and arguments that are poorly reasoned and insulting ”“ even homophobic.

Yet traditionalists rarely respond convincingly, whether they would rather not discuss sexuality at all, are afraid of sounding bigoted, or simply have never heard cogent answers to such claims. This essay attempts to fill that gap….

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For those interested you may read a lot more about Camp Saint Christopher there.

These days, God is dead everywhere except at movie theaters. But rest easy, America, that doesn’t mean we’re spiraling into an amoral abyss or a lawless society. Indeed, by most indicators of anti-social behavior, things have never been better.

Even as polls and church-attendance records show the U.S. is becoming a more secular, less pious country, current films such as Heaven is for Real (based on a best-selling account of a four-year-old boy’s supposed trip to the afterlife) and Noah (based on the Old Testament’s account of the Great Flood) have done boffo business.

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The G7 group of nations agreed on Saturday to impose sanctions on Russia over its meddling in Ukraine, adding to international pressure on Moscow.

The move effectively adds the voices of Canada and Japan to Friday’s announcement by America, Germany, France, Italy and the UK that further sanctions were imminent.

The G7 group, which represents seven of the world’s major economies, said it hoped the measures would have a “significant impact” in persuading the Kremlin to stop stirring separatist violence in eastern Ukraine.

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The jihadist group’s escalating campaign of terror has claimed 4,000 civilian lives in just four years, and Boko Haram is now linked to the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls. But who are they?

Their name means “western education is forbidden”, and while the group has targeted many schools – and schoolchildren – it has also attacked churches, mosques, police stations, government buildings, bus stations and even a UN compound, as well as carrying out assassinations and kidnappings.

The sect claims to be fighting for a strict sharia state in northern Nigeria and is believed to receive guns and money from Salafist al-Qaeda-linked insurgent groups in the Islamic Maghreb and beyond. Boko Haram is estimated to have killed 4,000 people during its four-year-insurgency. The Nigerian military is estimated to have killed almost as many in its efforts to hunt down and kill the insurgents….

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You know those lonely nights and weekends when you’re left to your own devices and forced to entertain yourself? Maybe you ponder the meaning of life, maybe you tackle a creative project or maybe you — wait, let’s face it: You probably turn on Netflix. Well your dog faces the same lonely existential crisis and his solution is, naturally, solo fetch.

Hey, it’s better than destroying your shoes.

We put together a compilation above of pooches tossing the old ball/stick around by themselves, and uh, to themselves.

This is just wonderful–Enjoy it all–KSH.

The architects of the military takeover in Egypt promised a new era of tolerance and pluralism when they deposed President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood last summer.

Nine months later, though, Egypt’s freethinkers and religious minorities are still waiting for the new leadership to deliver on that promise. Having suppressed Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters, the new military-backed government has fallen back into patterns of sectarianism that have prevailed here for decades.

Prosecutors continue to jail Coptic Christians, Shiite Muslims and atheists on charges of contempt of religion. A panel of Muslim scholars has cited authority granted under the new military-backed Constitution to block screenings of the Hollywood blockbuster “Noah” because it violates an Islamic prohibition against depictions of the prophets.

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O God, the living God, who hast given unto us a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead: Grant that we, being risen with him, may seek the things which are above, and be made partakers of the life eternal; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

I will extol thee, my God and King, and bless thy name for ever and ever. Every day I will bless thee, and praise thy name for ever and ever. Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall laud thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts. On the glorious splendor of thy majesty, and on thy wondrous works, I will meditate.

–Psalm 145:1-5

This week, the layoffs and pending departures of two key staff members have shocked the Brooklyn Heights community and again have raised the issues of how costly the maintenance of that building envelope remains.

The Rev. John E. Denaro, rector of St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church, announced the layoffs of longtime organist and music director Gregory Eaton, and of one of the church’s two sextons (church building custodians). The Rev. Sarah Kooperkamp, who serves as associate rector, is leaving for different reasons, including the birth of her first child.

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The US says Russian military aircraft have entered Ukrainian airspace several times in the past 24 hours, amid rising tension in the east of the country.

A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC late on Friday that the incidents had happened mainly near the border with Russia, but gave no further details.

Earlier pro-Russian separatists seized a bus carrying international military observers, Ukrainian officials said.

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Religious believers who oppose such a move should look to the US, where faith has flourished alongside the country’s secular constitution. Indeed, in an interview with the New Statesman in 2008, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (who went on to famously guest-edit the magazine) suggested that the church might benefit from such a move: “I can see that it’s by no means the end of the world if the establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh synod, it didn’t have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that.”

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The Archbishop of Canterbury joined the prime minister in a staunch defence of Christian Britain yesterday, as Nick Clegg called for an end to the link between church and state.

The Most Rev Justin Welby said he had found it “quite baffling” to see the vociferous response to David Cameron’s “moving” Easter declaration that Britain should be proud of its status as a Christian country. “Judging by the reaction, anyone would think that the people concerned had at the same time suggested the return of the Inquisition (complete with comfy chairs for Monty Python fans), compulsory church going and tithes,” he wrote on his website.

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Yousef al-Khattab helped change the way young Muslims were radicalized by spewing extreme Islamist propaganda on a YouTube channel.

Now al-Khattab, who was born Joseph Leonard Cohen and was brought up in New Jersey and in Brooklyn in a Jewish home, tells NPR he made a big mistake and describes himself as a “failure.” He’s scheduled to appear in a federal court in Alexandria, Va., on Friday to be sentenced on terrorism charges.

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Mortgage lending declined to the lowest level in 14 years in the first quarter as homeowners pulled back sharply from refinancing and house hunters showed little appetite for new loans, the latest sign of how rising interest rates have dented the housing recovery.

Lenders originated $235 billion in mortgage loans during the January-March quarter, down 58% from the same period a year ago and down 23% from the fourth quarter of 2013, according to industry newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance.

The decline shows how the mortgage market is experiencing its largest shift in more than a decade as an era of generally falling interest rates that began in 2000 appears to have run its course.

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While “‘Heaven Is for Real” lacks the rich descriptions and striking imagery of many previous accounts of the afterlife, it provides an excellent example of a favorite modern view. Where Christians once longed for complete communion with God, many now think of the great hereafter as the best family reunion imaginable, where God is relegated to the role of guest star.

Journalist and author Maria Shriver says heaven “is a place that you go to and once again become reunited with those you have loved and lost. That vision is what keeps me from falling apart. . . . That’s what I have faith in.”

Surrounded by religious pluralism, scientific materialism and universalism, many evangelical Christians feel the church’s teachings on eternal life are under attack. Into that milieu, “Heaven Is Real” provides proof of the transcendental in the form of eyewitness testimony. That the eyewitness is a guileless preschooler only adds to the appeal.

Not everyone agrees, of course.

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The recent economic downturn and the increasing use of high-deductible insurance plans “has driven patients to want to put off paying their bills,” Michael explains. Whether it’s for a hip replacement or a broken bone, he frequently sees patients on the hook for a $3,000 to $5,000 deductible.

“We have to be able to be the creditor,” says Michael. “We’re essentially a bank at that point.”

Between 2008 and 2012, multi-specialty practices saw their bad debt go up 14 percent, according to a survey by the , a trade organization for doctor practices. That’s money that practices were owed but couldn’t collect. Some of them have begun to change their billing strategies to combat those debts, says , a principal consultant with the MGMA Health Care Consulting Group.

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Have you seen that new movie “Hell Is for Real?” Of course, you haven’t. Because it doesn’t exist. It’s heavenly counterpart, however, earned $21.5 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend.

Sixty-four percent of Americans believe in the survival of the soul after death, and a majority believes in both heaven and hell, according to a Harris Poll released in December 2013. But while most are comfortable discussing the afterlife and heaven, talk of hell can scatter the masses.

So why are Americans afraid to talk about hell?

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On Good Friday, the Labour MP David Lammy told Radio 4’s Any Questions?: “I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, actually, and assume he did it for noble reasons. I am a Christian. I read his article in the Church Times, and have to say I agreed with every single word of it. . . My faith has always meant a lot to me, and I think we should be able to talk about it in our public life.”

He cautioned, however, that Mr Cameron’s comments would lead to renewed scrutiny of his actions: “Some of what I see: asking landlords to check on immigrants, describing those who are most impoverished as scroungers, some of the changes in the way that we deal with benefits, bedroom tax, the list goes on, doesn’t feel to me to be particularly Christian, and that is why the leaders of our Christian community have been so categorically condemning much that we have seen.”

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[David Cameron’s]…statement has since drawn strong opposition, including a letter to a British newspaper from a group of more than 50 scientists, writers and others. Cameron’s comments “foster alienation and division,” the letter says, asserting that they are also not true. “Surveys, polls and studies show that most of us as individuals are not Christian in our beliefs or our religious identities.”

Both may be correct, depending on the data source. By one definition, England, at least, is a Christian nation: The Church of England is the official state church of England. Looking at the religious affiliation of the population, however, a more complex picture emerges.

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The Christian truth that the crucifixion reveals the heart of God is a scandal to those who imagine God as an aloof and implacable Creator, who lacks compassion for our frailty and is hostile towards our disobedience ”“ instead of being merciful.

As for those whose god is an impersonal intelligence, the cross is meaningless ”“ if not absurd.

Terry Eagleton’s book Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate is a penetrating critique of the reasoning of Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. In passing he considers the incongruity of a Saviour who is crucified: “Messiahs are not born in stables. They are high-born, heroic warriors who will lead the nation in battle against its enemies. They do not reject weapons of destruction, enter the national capital riding on donkeys, or get themselves strung up.”

Thankfully Terry Eagleton offers reasons why believing in a Christlike God is not a delusion ”“ unlike some commentators who have heaped personal insults on Richard Dawkins and demonised him.

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At the invitation of The Most Rev. Dr. Mouneer Hanna Anis of the Episcopal / Anglican Church in Egypt, His Holiness Pope Tawadros II, Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St. Mark inaugurated an art exhibition “The Way of Salvation” curated by Dr. Farid Fadel at the All Saints Cathedral Hall in Zamalek.

“The visit is historical,” Bishop Mouneer said, “because it comes three days before we celebrate the Feast of St. Mark on which All Saints Cathedral was consecrated.

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Almighty God, who by the hand of Mark the evangelist hast given to thy Church the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God: We thank thee for this witness, and pray that we may be firmly grounded in its truth; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.