FAITH HEALING AND THE RESURRECTION: EVALUATING THE EVIDENCE

The other day I stumbled onto a video clip that featured a “faith healer” who was working to heal a subject who appeared to have one arm shorter than the other.  The subject was standing with his arms stretched out in front of him, his palms facing each other and touching.  But the subject’s palms did not match up.  Instead, it appeared that his left arm (on the side toward the camera) was about two inches shorter than the right.  The healer was frantically waving his arms over the subject’s hands, and as he did, the subject’s left hand slowly started to move to line up with the right.  When eventually the subject’s two hands coincided, the crowd, as they say, went wild.

A SECULAR DEATH

In early December of last year we lost my wife’s father.  By nearly every measure, Frank had had a extraordinarily long and interesting life, and we viewed his passing as cause for the celebration of a life rather than the mourning of a death.  I’m sure he would feel the same way.  I thought I would share here a few of my personal thoughts regarding our relationship and his passing.

FRANKENSTEIN SOAP AND THE BIBLE

I don’t know about you, but when a bar of soap gets down to a sliver, I don’t throw it away.  Instead, I press it on to a new bar so that I can use up the rest of it in the course of using the next bar.  But that’s not what my mother did when I was growing up.  She didn’t throw the slivers away either; that would have been wasteful and expensive.  Instead, she would save up a bunch of the slivers for months.  And when she had a big enough pile, perhaps 10 or 15, she would put them into hot water to make them pliable and press all of them together into one massive, misshapen lump—Frankenstein soap.