Brel's music...remains glorious! --NY Post.

Exploring the Bible's teaching on heaven Mitigating popular views of life after death Showing the joys of this wonderful doctrine

Over half of Americans believe in a literal heaven, in a literal hell. Most people who hold these beliefs are Christian and assume they are the age-old teachings of the Bible. Ehrman shows that eternal rewards and punishments are found nowhere in the Old Testament, and are not what Jesus or his disciples taught. He recounts the long history of the afterlife, ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh up to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. Ehrman shows that competing views were intimately connected with the social, cultural, and historical worlds out of which they emerged. -- adapted from jacket

Way to Happiness (1953) is a short collection of essays on moral and spiritual principles by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. As he writes in the introduction, his goal for this work was to bring "solace, healing and hope to hearts; truth and enlightenment to minds; goodness, strength and resolution to wills" through his exploration of universal topics like happiness, love, and inner peace. Fulton J. Sheen was born in El Paso, Illinois, in 1895. After attending St. Viator College Seminary in Illinois and St. Paul Seminary in Minnesota, he received his ordination and was assigned to the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois. A student even after achieving priesthood, he received degrees at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and the Pontificium Collegium Internationale Angelicum in Rome. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Archbishop Sheen was a weekly speaker on the popular radio program The Catholic Hour. With an audience in the millions, he shared his wisdom and knowledge of the scriptures and faith-based morality to aid listeners through their daily lives. This public education continued through the 1950s and 1960s on the television programs Life is Worth Living and The Fulton Sheen Program. Archbishop Sheen won an Emmy for Most Outstanding Television Personality in 1952. During all of this activity, he found time to write dozens of books on faith. Way to Happiness was published in 1953, at the height of the archbishop's popularity. The book contains 37 short chapters on subjects key to daily life, including work and repose, self-discipline, the ego, and the spirit of giving. The book's short chapters make it a wonderful study for a month-long daily devotional. Readers will find a simple message-although one that is a challenge to put into daily practice. "Our happiness consists in fulfilling the purpose of our being," writes Archbishop Sheen. That purpose is to overflow with three things: life, truth, and love with no limits, in their purest forms. Our humanity makes us long for these things. But to find them, "...we must go out beyond the limits of this shadowed world-to a Truth not mingled with its shadow, error-to a Life not mingled with its shadow, death-to a Love not mingled with its shadow, hate. We must seek for Pure Life, Pure Truth and Pure Love-and that is the definition of God." The book is broken into eight sections, exploring themes of happiness, work, love, children, youth, inner peace, giving, and man. In each, Archbishop Sheen shares his warmth and wisdom, characterized by support from the scriptures and anecdotes from daily life. While he encourages the reader to eschew the ego and cultivate self-discipline, he never lectures. One gets the sense that he has had the same conversations internally many times over before he shared them with the reader. Indeed, he admits, "Our world is full of prophets of doom, and I would be one of them if I did not practically believe in God." The world of the 1950s was one that had faced two world wars, a great depression, the rise of Communism, and more dramatic changes in just the preceding 40 years. While the work takes an individual-level view of happiness and improvement, Archbishop Sheen is clear that the end result of personal betterment will lead to societal change. "Remake man," he writes, "and you remake his world." So while the true Way to Happiness may be walked alone, it was his hope that to walk it would lead the rest of the world to a better future.

Over 1 Million Copies Sold! Have you ever wondered . . . ? What is Heaven really going to be like? What will we look like? What will we do every day? Won’t Heaven get boring after a while? We all have questions about what Heaven will be like, and after twenty-five years of extensive research, Dr. Randy Alcorn has the answers. In the most comprehensive and definitive book on Heaven to date, Randy invites you to picture Heaven the way Scripture describes it—a bright, vibrant, and physical New Earth, free from sin, suffering, and death, and brimming with Christ’s presence, wondrous natural beauty, and the richness of human culture as God intended it. This is a book about real people with real bodies enjoying close relationships with God and each other, eating, drinking, working, playing, traveling, worshiping, and discovering on a New Earth. Earth as God created it. Earth as he intended it to be. The next time you hear someone say, “We can’t begin to image what Heaven will be like,” you’ll be able to tell them, “I can.” “Other than the Bible itself, this may well be the single most life-changing book you’ll ever read.” —Stu Weber “This is the best book on Heaven I’ve ever read.” —Rick Warren “Randy Alcorn’s thorough mind and careful pen have produced a treasury about Heaven that will inform my own writing for years to come.” —Jerry B. Jenkins “Randy does an awesome job of answering people’s toughest questions about what lies on the other side of death.” —Joni Eareckson Tada About the Author Randy Alcorn is an author and the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries, a nonprofit ministry dedicated to teaching principles of God’s Word and assisting the church in ministering to unreached, unfed, unborn, uneducated, unreconciled, and unsupported people around the world. A New York Times bestselling author of over 50 books, including Heaven, The Treasure Principle, If God Is Good, Happiness, and the award-winning novel Safely Home, his books sold exceed eleven million copies and have been translated into over seventy languages.

"In a Greenwich Village townhouse, a mysterious man named Colin, an orphan raised by sorcerors skilled in dark magic, awakens to find the talisman known as the Trine missing from its place of safekeeping - and an angel named Zoel impatiently ringing his doorbell." "In the death chamber of the Oregon Federal Penitentiary, Liz Russell, author of a bestseller on the serial killer called the Maneater, watches her subject receive the lethal injection that will end his life. But the Maneater has sworn that she will be his next victim - even if he has to claw his way up from Hell." "On the streets of Los Angeles, Terry Dane, a bodyguard with a dark and bloody secret, fights to protect his rock star client from a knife-wielding maniac impervious to pain and injury." "And in an Alabama backwoods clinic, a young girl gives birth to something monstrous and unholy, something that thirsts not for mother's milk but for the blood of all that lives." "Now it's up to Colin, with the assistance of Zoel and the demon Asdeon - aiding Colin for his own sinister purposes - to recover the Trine before its awesome power can be used to spark Armageddon. It's a struggle that Liz and Terry will find themselves part of as well, whether they like it or not. The only trouble is, without the Trine, Colin's magic is no match for that of his enigmatic adversary. And Zoel can be trusted no more than Asdeon to avert an apocalypse that may be as much God's plan as the Devil's desire."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Journey to Hell, Heaven, and Back In 1978, Ivan Tuttle was living a carefree life, going from one party to the next, from one high to anotherwhen his fun, free life was interrupted by a pain in his leg. Doctors told him he had a dangerous blood clot in his legbut Ivan didnt pay much attention to that. He was 26 and felt fine; blood clots were a problem for his grandfather, not him. Until the clock ran out. Ivan Tuttle suddenly found himself dragged down to hell for a horrifying lesson in the reality of eternity. He was spared and even saw Heaven before being sent back to earth with quite a story to tell.