EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT HEAVEN --BUT NEVER DREAMED OF ASKING

Kreeft's problems in this longish pamphlet begin with that oh-no-not-again title and never let up. Philosopher and theologian by profession (Boston College), Kreeft bas done at least one good book (Love is Stronger Than Death) that combined serious thinking and a lively popular style, but this time he's stuck in a rein of something like pious whimsy. E.g., ""Out lives are a picture, and death is the frame. In Heaven we get off the picture and see it as it truly was. But time's was is eternity's is. All past times are present, all dead times are alive in eternity. Memory dimly foreshadows this; that is why it is so magically charming."" Such rhetorical flourishes are, if nothing else, less embarrassing than Kreeft's naive speculative flights into the nature of celestial sex (Christian belief in the resurrection of the body seems to imply some kind of erotic bliss, but Jesus said that the elect are ""like angels,"" so there's a puzzle here) or his fanciful reply to the question of whether there will be animals in heaven (you bet, only when we go beyond this life will we experience ""proper petship""). The simple fact is that neither the Bible nor Christian tradition has much to say about heaven, except in metaphors, and Kreeft's theological fantasia will sound rather flimsy to anyone except orthodox Christians with a strong imagination.