Visual-tactile substitution glasses can take the visual input from a camera and translate it into vibrations on a pad on the person’s back. After about a week, blind users of the device “become quite good at navigating a new environment.” They actually begin to perceive the pressure on their backs as sight: “The apparatus reminds us that we see not with our eyes but rather with our brains.”

In Eagleman’s telling, there is no conscious learning how visual-tactile substitution works. There is no memorizing certain patterns that equate to visual descriptions of the environment. Instead, the brain simply figures it out. In his book Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson writes that our brain processes as much as 11 million pieces of information per second, while only 40 bits enter consciousness.

If we think of ourselves only in terms of what enters our consciousness—even if that is the most important—then we fail to understand much of who we are. As the head of Baylor’s Laboratory for Perception and Action, Eagleman is at the forefront of efforts to revise our understanding of human nature. For the last 20 years, technological advances have allowed scientists to be able to watch the brain at work. We’ve seen that many of the functions we ascribe to our core selves are dependent upon brain functions. We’re realizing how dependent our sense of ourselves is on our biology and its interaction with the environment, and we’re seeing how enmeshed we are with our friends and family, parents and grandparents, as well as our culture and faith.

Read the rest (if you have a subscription) at Books and Culture. 

It used to be different. People washed the bodies of their dead loved ones. They journeyed with them from the home to the church to the grave. They buried bodies in certain ways and refused things like embalming because they believed a person’s body was really important. After death it would await the resurrection to be reformed and reconstituted as that person.

Christians did this because they knew that the body was created in the image of God. The body itself–not the soul or the idea of the person–was sacred. These bodies, these temples of the living God, are due honor and reverence.

I came away from writing The Art of Dying with the question: What would it mean today if we better understood our bodies to be created in the image of God, as sacred?

I started reading about spirituality and the body, and I discovered God has endowed our bodies–not just our minds or souls–with spiritual significance. Especially interesting to me was the neuroscience of spiritual experiences. I learned that our brains seem to be equipped to experience God. Through a specific brain system, we commune with God. When we have powerful moments of prayer or even mystical experiences, the sense of closeness with God or even unity with him, is the function of a brain system. That system seems designed to experience God. Neuroscientists don’t say it this way, but to me, God has designed us with the equipment needed to commune with him.

But there is more than simply a brain system for prayer. When we do practice deep prayer (mediation and contemplation in the Christian tradition) or have a profound spiritual experience, we are also stimulating areas of the brain involved with practicing empathy and compassion for others. We are more socially attuned, and we are more caring for the needs of others when we practice regular prayer, especially when that prayer leads us to deep experiences of the divine.

My research following The Art of Dying led me to a profound conclusion. We have been designed to experience God and to respond to that by loving other people. In other words, we were created to fulfill the two great commandments, to love God with our whole hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

That is the subject of my new book, What Your Body Knows About God. How we have been physically designed to love God and serve others.

Please share your thoughts. What do you think about the body and spirituality?

Augustine of Hippo and his mother Saint Monica

My soul burns ardently to understand this most intricate enigma. O Lord my God, O good Father, I beseech thee through Christ, do not close off these things, both the familiar and the obscure, from my desire. Do not bar it from entering into them; but let their light dawn by thy enlightening mercy, O Lord. Of whom shall I inquire about these things? And to whom shall I confess my ignorance of them with greater profit than to thee, to whom these studies of mine (ardently longing to understand thy Scriptures) are not a bore? Give me what I love, for I do love it; and this thou hast given me. O Father, who truly knowest how to give good gifts to thy children, give this to me. Grant it, since I have undertaken to understand it, and hard labor is my lot until thou openest it. I beseech thee, through Christ and in his name, the Holy of Holies, let no man interrupt me. “For I have believed, and therefore do I speak.” This is my hope; for this I live: that I may contemplate the joys of my Lord. Behold, thou hast made my days grow old, and they pass away — and how I do not know.

Many pastors now visit their congregants at work to better understand their professional lives. Justin Buzzard, pastor of the Garden City Church in San Jose, Calif., wrote last year about ministering to professionals in his congregation. “It shows them that I care about their callings, how they spend 50-plus hours of their week.”

Organizations such as Corporate Chaplains of America and Marketplace Ministries have sprung up in the last 20 years to offer chaplaincy services and Bible studies to offices. And among a younger generation of Christians in business, working as financial analysts and engineers is itself Christian service.

Their mindset is captured by Dave Evans, co-founder of the videogame giant Electronic Arts and a design professor at Stanford. Mr. Evans talks more like a theologian than a former Apple engineer. He points out that Genesis says that humans were created in the image of God, so all of our work—not just church work—is holy. We are called to be co-creators, with God, of a flourishing life on Earth. “It is really a profound act of engaging the kingdom of God,” says Mr. Evans.

When he began work in the 1970s, integrating faith and business amounted to little more than being ethical and trying to make converts. Much has changed, he says, as a younger generation seeks to sanctify the corporate world. “The glory of God,” Mr. Evans says, “is humans fully alive. Work itself has value. It’s a huge countercultural behavior to train yourself to value work for its own sake and to see it as a service to God.”

Mr. Evans will be speaking this weekend at a conference of 250 MBA students from the country’s top schools. Organized for the past six years by Yale’s MBA Christian fellowship, the conference marks a transformation in how Christians and other religious professionals seek to integrate their faith and their work.

The so-called faith-at-work movement has more than a century-long presence in American business, says David Miller, a former finance executive and now the director of Princeton University’s Faith at Work Initiative.

The full article is available at The Wall Street Journal.

Jeff Van Duzer, in Why Business Matters to God: (And What Still Needs to Be Fixed) (IVP), offers business people guidelines for how to think about their role in God’s plan. I spoke with the dean and professor of business law and ethics at Seattle Pacific University about whether the free market system is still the best provider of goods and services, and how churches can help business people face ethically complex choices.

Why does God want people to go into business?

Two answers: to provide goods and services, and to provide meaningful and creative jobs.

Those are two different purpose statements. One has an internal focus, and one, external. Externally, business is the only institution that creates economic value. A university provides intellectual capital but does not make things. Business takes the ideas and commercializes them. It relies on an array of values from other institutions, but it’s the only one that adds value into the system. Business plays a key role by creating products and services.

But not every product a business could make is equally valid in the eyes of God. So a Christian in business should ask not only what will maximize the bottom line, but also what product or service could be made, given the core competencies under his control and the assets he is managing, that would best serve his community.

The second piece is that God designed humans to work. They are made in his image: God is a worker. And God’s work is creative and meaningful. Business is not the only institution that creates opportunities for work, but it is certainly one of them, and this recent recession would suggest it is a very important one.

What is the purpose of business?

Please read the whole article atChristianity Today magazine.

Note: This article was first posted at TGC Reviews.

In 1834, the captain of a canal boat was gravely ill. His fellow boatmen called a doctor, who said, “There is no use. He’s a dead man.” John Clute, though pronounced dead, heard every word. “It then seemed to me,” he later said, “I died and heaven was opened and then I saw more human beings soaring through one another so happy.”

It was a classic near-death experience, one that between 4 percent and 15 percent of Americans claim to have had. For many Christians, stories like these have become powerful confirmations of their faith and their hope in the glorious life to come. They offer beautiful stories of reunions with family members, a feeling of indescribable peace, and visions of beauty surpassing anything on this earth. Readers, finding comfort and hope in these stories, have made bestsellers of books like 90 Minutes in Heaven, 23 Minutes in Hell, Glimpses of Heaven, and now Heaven Is for Real. This latest revelation has reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list.

But for the faithful, the story of the boat captain John Clute offers a warning to Christians about where we seek proof of heaven. Clute’s experience confirmed him in his prior unbelief. “I did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ,” Clute said of his theology before his beatific vision, “nor do I yet.”

If he was able to reach heaven without belief in Jesus, why should he change his views upon return to his earthly body? This is the dilemma that books like Heaven Is for Real confront Christians with. While they seem to provide heaven-sent assurances of the hereafter, they subtly undermine those assurances when others (as they have throughout history and among a variety of religions) claim to have the same experience.

Heaven Is for Real seeks to prove that element of our faith that is farthest from empirical proof. In the form of a 4-year-old boy, first his family and church and now all his readers are able to know for sure that heaven awaits us. The proof is here if we only but listen to it. Yet this is exactly what Jesus said would nothappen. In his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham tells the man suffering in hell, “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16:31). So what are we to make of these stories?

The Revelations

Colton Burpo was misdiagnosed while he was suffering from a burst appendix. After far too long, another doctor discovered the mistake, diagnosed the appendicitis, and immediately took him into surgery.

Colton shouldn’t have survived. More than a week since the appendicitis was first misdiagnosed, his gut was filled with poison and infection. However, after the surgery, he began a rocky but rapid recovery. And then, when the Burpo’s life seemed as if it had returned to normal, the revelations began.

The family was driving through the same town where doctors operated on Colton. They asked, jokingly, if he wanted to return, and Colton said he remembered the hospital as the place where the angels came to visit him. He said he had been to heaven where he sat on Jesus’ lap, and he also recounted seeing his parents in separate parts of the hospital. It was a stunning revelation, as both parents were in private desperation. Colton accurately described what was happening while he was in surgery, and later he even identified his long-dead great grandfather through a picture he had never seen before. While in heaven, Colton met his sister who had been miscarried, and who Colton learned about for the first time while in heaven. Colton both stunned and comforted his parents by revealing the gender of the miscarried baby as well as describing her appearance.

Much of the book is the slow unraveling of these stories of someone just returned from heaven. The place is full of bright light, given by God. And the light is full of color. People fly around with their wings, and some people’s wings are larger than others. It’s all very, well, weird the author repeatedly says.

Colton’s heaven seems to confirm every children’s Bible picture book and Sunday school lesson. And many stories confirm specific Bible passages or church theology. One time, Colton looks at his dad. “Did you know that God is three persons, Dad?” But Colton, at age 4, hadn’t yet seen illustrations of heaven or understood deep theology, his dad says. Colton’s stories are proof. Heaven is for real.

Colton’s dad, a pastor, describes what was so important about his son’s revelations.

How many times when I presided over a funeral had mourners delivered the usual well-meaning platitudes: “Well, she’s in a better place,” or “We know he’s looking down on us, smiling,” or “You’ll see him again.” Of course, I believed those things in theory, but to be honest, I couldn’t picture them. Now, with what Colton had said about Pop and about his sister, I began to think about heaven in a different way. Not just a place with jeweled gates, shining rivers, and streets of gold, but a realm of joy and fellowship, both for those who are with us in eternity and those still on earth, whose arrival we eagerly anticipated. A place where I would one day walk and talk with my grandfather who had meant so much to me, and with the daughter I had never met.

I have no reason to doubt this little boy’s story, or that of Don Piper, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven. But these bestselling stories, like Colton’s, are so comforting because they are also so familiar. And that is exactly what makes their popularity so troubling.

Whose Heaven Is for Real?

The stories of near-death experiences are not necessarily the spiritual proofs sought by readers of Heaven Is for Real. The boatman Clute is an example. Many near-death experiences offer comfortingly familiar stories of non-Christian afterlives.

Stories of near-death experiences are not limited to Christians. Similar stories are told around the world, often substituting local religious figures for Jesus. So if we are to find empirical or experiential verifications of our theology, should we then change our theology when non-Christians find the Buddha or other spiritual beings in their own versions of heaven?

Carol Zaleski in The Life of the World to Come writes, “Stories of people who return from death, bringing back eyewitness testimony about the other world, can be found in nearly every religious tradition, and although they have many similar features, such reports invariably portray this experience in ways that conform to cultural expectations.”

These experiences have been told and retold for centuries. In her review of near-death literature, Zaleski did find something unique—not about Christianity, but about modern accounts.

Most striking, of course, is the absence from most twentieth-century near-death accounts of postmortem punishment: no hell, no purgatory, no chastening torments or telltale agonies at the moment of death. . . . The possibility for loss is genuine in the medieval accounts—if one botches the second chance, eternal damnation is the likely result. Today it seems that there is scarcely any possibility for loss. Life and the afterlife flow together as an unending stream of fresh opportunities for personal growth.

Those Who Have Not Seen

So what are we to make of Colton’s story and those of others who have had profound personal experiences in which they seem to have been given glimpses of eternity? We have a particular challenge, because the Bible seems to countenance the experience. Paul said, “I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter” (2 Cor. 12:3-4). And, while on Patmos, John was in the spirit on the Lord’s Day when he received his vision.

At the same time, in his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Jesus suggests that stories from the afterlife are of no spiritual value. Moses and the prophets offer all the spiritual proof anyone needs. And as Jesus told Thomas, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

It seems that as Christians, we are to put no stake in these stories. But we must say something, not only because of the popularity of these accounts, but also because the stories themselves deserve to be set within the context of the spiritual life.

I don’t offer a full explanation or Christian theology of near-death experiences. But I do have two thoughts.

First, our extra-biblical stories of heaven—I prefer to talk about our future life with God—would be better if they were based on the accounts told by the dying, rather than the once-dead but well again. I cite no biblical support for this preference, but I believe it provides a more realistic context for the open window to eternal life with God.

Jesus is the resurrection and the life, but he also said a grain of wheat must fall into the ground and die before it will bear fruit. Those who work with the dying are full of stories of heaven as told by the dying themselves. They confirm our hope in eternal life. But they are usually told in the context of someone who has undergone a slow deathbed transition from here to there. In a sense, they exist in two spheres, and their accounts are less about golden streets and happy relatives. These narratives instead offer a sense of peace and an unmistakable certainty of the ongoing life of the person.

My second thought is this: Our access to heaven does not depend on our death. Rather than tell stories from beyond the grave, why don’t we instruct believers on experiencing eternal life here and now? While reading this book, I was also listening to Joe Carter talk about the African American spirituals on the NPR show Being. He spoke of a spiritual reservoir that the slaves sustained so that while they were in bondage, they were also free in spirit. He spoke of the line “fly away to Jesus” as conveying the sense of a literal escape to freedom in the north as well as immediate spiritual communion.

I wish that our yearning for life with God were not so easily satisfied by reading these stories of near-death experiences. I wish that Christians more and more sought not to witness the wings of the angels but to be in the spirit—on the Lord’s Day and every other day of the week.

Book lovers will know what I mean when I say that there are certain books that become deeply meaningful, almost sacred in their impact, in ways that one can hardly whisper about. I have not reviewed this book on line yet, in part, because I don’t really know how to sell it, what to say that will communicate what it is, how well it is written, how vibrant and real and alive it is. Will ordinary folks want to read a book about hospice care, about caregiving; can interviews about end of life care be that inspiring? Can a book about dying be beautiful? Of course. Do we all need such a book? Duh. There have been rituals and practices in times gone by that helped us all attend to “dying well” and there have been spiritual writings about “a good death.” Why do we not now hear of this much? How can we recover not a morbid sense of fear or sadness, but an awareness of Christian consolation. It sounds like a cliche as I say it, but this book on learning to die will help us learn to live. What an honorable book this is. We happily list it as one of the best.