Today’s Gospel reading (Mark 5:21-43) tells us of Jairus’ plea to Jesus, that he go to his sick little girl, “My daughter is at the point of death. Please, come lay your hands on her that she may get well and live.”

Oh, that spoke to me; on a snowy, cold morning, with the arthritis screaming, I read that and thought, “me too, that I may move!”

Along the way to Jairus’ home, we read what is (for me, anyway) one of the richest and most powerful stories of Christ’s healings:

There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years.
She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors
and had spent all that she had.
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.
Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.”

I love this story because it very gently puts the lie to the increasingly popular idea that Jesus asks nothing of us — that he’s just our pal, our fluffy squeeze toy who doesn’t mind what we do and prescribes no rules except that we be nice and, you know, that vaguest of things, “a good person.”

There is no reason not to think the woman with a hemorrhage was not a “good person”, but the Christ she encountered still asked something of her.

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

I think it is so encouraging that, even with the scanty accounts of these amazing events that we have in the Biblical texts, people are still able to glean such rich lessons from them.

How much more will the world be able to appreciate the Master when they can read the full accountings that we have in The Urantia Book! And how many - like me - who only discovered the rich heritage of the Bible after discovering The Urantia Book...

See THIS PAGE from the illustrated "Great Jesus Stories"

THIS PAGE contains the full stories of both the woman with the scourging hemorrhage, Jairus' daughter, and the feeding of the 5000, with great detail...

One can also go to our search feature and plug in key words from these stories to find even more detail...

How does a college education affect one's religious beliefs? Given that college is a period of intellectual engagement and exploration, many scholars have believed that a college education weakens one's religious beliefs. In 1977 researchers David Caplowitz and Fred Sherrow wrote that college is "a breeding ground for apostasy." In 1983 sociologist James Hunter claimed that it was a "well-established fact" that education, even Christian education, "secularizes."

However, the secularizing effect of higher education has come into question in the past decade with new research suggesting that young adults who never enrolled in college are currently the least religious Americans.

In a study published in 2007 by the Social Science Research Council, sociologists Mark D. Regnerus and Jeremy E. Uecker reported on religious service attendance and religious dis-affiliation among young adults. According to their analysis of data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health: 

1. While 64 percent of those currently enrolled in a traditional four-year institution reported a decline in religious service attendance, 76 percent of those who never enrolled in college reported a decline.


2. Twenty percent of those who did not attend college renounced all religious affiliation, whereas only 13 percent of four-year college students did the same.

But behind this hard data lie rich stories of religious and spiritual transformation in college. HuffPost Religion put out a call to our community to ask how their religious and spiritual outlook changed during their college years. Click through the slideshow below to see their responses.

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

Believing in God is good for your health. Well, kind of. Researchers found that religiousness correlated with improved health, particularly mental health.

Brick Johnstone from Missouri University and his colleagues at MU, Samuel Merritt University in Pennsylvania, and Via Cristi Hospital in Kansas studied the results of three studies. The researchers attempted to discover a correlation between a participant's self-reported mental and physical health, personality traits and their spirituality. They found that there was indeed a correlation between mental health and spirituality. The type of religion in which that the participant believed did not seem to matter.

DESPITE THEIR trumpeting by a media determined to jump on anything to “prove” its God-is- dead, long-live-the-media thesis, the findings of this week’s so-called religiosity index poll are all but entirely devoid of meaning.

A Red C press release summarising the results of the WIN-Gallup “global index of religions and atheism” announced on Wednesday that Ireland now rates as one of the world’s “least religious countries”, with fewer than half of us describing ourselves as “religious”.

But what does this mean? The main question of the poll, asked of 51,927 people in 57 countries, was: “Irrespective of whether you attend a place of worship or not, would you say you are a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?”

What does the word “religious” actually mean? What, indeed, does “religion” mean? 

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

I thought this was a particularly interesting article, insofar as the author brings into question the exact definition of "religion." Now that polls everywhere strive to make sense of the increasing defection from organized religion, but the persistence of religion and spiritual experience, it is timely that someone should try to bring the concept of "religion" into sharper focus.

Of course The Urantia Book is all about religion, and we have a nice topical that will give you a good sampling of UB teachings on the subject of religion. Please see THIS LINK.

The Blues Brothers, who created a lot of destruction and good music in their attempt to save a nunnery, aren’t the only ones who have seen their work as a “mission from God.” So do more than half of religious Americans, according to useful studies cited in the Scientific Study of Religion.

It’s a good question for all of us, whether explicitly religious or secular-but-spiritual. Do we think we are serving a larger purpose in our salaried work or profession?

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

From The Urantia Book:

^155:6.11 Never forget there is only one adventure which is more satisfying and thrilling than the attempt to discover the will of the living God, and that is the supreme experience of honestly trying to do that divine will. And fail not to remember that the will of God can be done in any earthly occupation. Some callings are not holy and others secular. All things are sacred in the lives of those who are spirit led; that is, subordinated to truth, ennobled by love, dominated by mercy, and restrained by fairness— justice. The spirit which my Father and I shall send into the world is not only the Spirit of Truth but also the spirit of idealistic beauty. (Jesus)

^140:4.5 While light dispels darkness, it can also be so "blinding" as to confuse and frustrate. We are admonished to let our light so shine that our fellows will be guided into new and godly paths of enhanced living. Our light should so shine as not to attract attention to self. Even one's vocation can be utilized as an effective "reflector" for the dissemination of this light of life.

More young people are losing faith in God, according to a recent Pew survey.

About 68 percent of Millennials say they never doubt the existence of God, a decline of 15 points since 2007, while the number of older Americans with a firm belief in God remains stable. Millennials are defined by Pew as those young Americans born in 1981 or later.

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

And, from The Urantia Book:

^195:10.10 If the Christian church would only dare to espouse the Master’s program, thousands of apparently indifferent youths would rush forward to enlist in such a spiritual undertaking, and they would not hesitate to go all the way through with this great adventure.

According to research, people who forgive are healthier and happier than people who hold grudges. Forgiveness is long known to be a spiritual practice. Forgiveness therapy is now being used by some mental health providers to help people recover from trauma, depression and anxiety.

Forgiveness is a choice to give up resentment and bitterness toward someone who has wronged you. Forgiveness does not involve excusing bad behavior, forgetting, justifying wrongs or sweeping painful memories under the rug. True forgiveness is an inner change of heart toward the offender.

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

And also see our topical; study on Forgiveness here...

Psychologists Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan aren’t trying to make mischief, but their latest work on the psychology of religious belief is sure to fan the flames of debate.

Their study, published in this week's issue of Science¹, offers evidence that when people engage in analytical thinking, they are less likely to express strong religious beliefs. In other words, the more you’re inclined to think a problem through rather than to rely on gut instinct, the less likely you are to capitulate to belief in supernatural agencies.

The authors, who are based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, are clear that they aren’t pronouncing on the value of religious belief, nor suggesting that such beliefs are inherently irrational (let alone that they’re untrue). 'We’re just saying', they seem to insist.

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

Can we be religious AND logical? From The Urantia Book:

^1:2.7 The existence of God can never be proved by scientific experiment or by the pure reason of logical deduction. God can be realized only in the realms of human experience; nevertheless, the true concept of the reality of God is reasonable to logic, plausible to philosophy, essential to religion and indispensable to any hope of personality survival.

^92:4.3 Evolutionary religion is sentimental, not logical. It is man’s reaction to belief in a hypothetical ghost-spirit world—the human belief-reflex, excited by the realization and fear of the unknown. Revelatory religion is propounded by the real spiritual world; it is the response of the superintellectual cosmos to the mortal hunger to believe in, and depend upon, the universal Deities. Evolutionary religion pictures the circuitous gropings of humanity in quest of truth; revelatory religion is that very truth.

^101:1.1 True religion is not a system of philosophic belief which can be reasoned out and substantiated by natural proofs, neither is it a fantastic and mystic experience of indescribable feelings of ecstasy which can be enjoyed only by the romantic devotees of mysticism. Religion is not the product of reason, but viewed from within, it is altogether reasonable. Religion is not derived from the logic of human philosophy, but as a mortal experience it is altogether logical. Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a moral being of evolutionary origin; it represents true experience with eternal realities in time, the realization of spiritual satisfactions while yet in the flesh.

In his Newsweek cover story, "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus," Andrew Sullivan dissects the crisis of American Christianity--it has become hypocritical and irrelevant to millions. Organized religion is collapsing; atheism is rising. The wounded, lapsed, and doubting seek shelter in spirituality, away from the buildings and traditions that once housed faith.

None of this particularly surprised me, as I wrote several weeks ago about the end of church, here on Huffington Post. My gloomy assessment of American religious life was drawn from my new book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, the first third of which covers the same ground as Sullivan. We come to the same conclusion: Christianity is flailing and failing. It needs to change--and fast.

...yet another writer trying to help religionists to make sense of the fact that their churches no longer attract and hold them. Her take on a new way to look at basic questions is good, but...

^195:9.8 The world needs more firsthand religion. Even Christianity—the best of the religions of the twentieth century—is not only a religion about Jesus, but it is so largely one which men experience secondhand. They take their religion wholly as handed down by their accepted religious teachers. What an awakening the world would experience if it could only see Jesus as he really lived on earth and know, firsthand, his life-giving teachings! Descriptive words of things beautiful cannot thrill like the sight thereof, neither can creedal words inspire men’s souls like the experience of knowing the presence of God. But expectant faith will ever keep the hope-door of man’s soul open for the entrance of the eternal spiritual realities of the divine values of the worlds beyond.

Every Christian knows the story: Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. But what did he do on Saturday?

That question has spurred centuries of debate, perplexed theologians as learned as St. Augustine and prodded some Protestants to advocate editing the Apostles' Creed, one of Christianity's oldest confessions of faith.

Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and most mainline Protestant churches teach that Jesus descended to the realm of the dead on Holy Saturday to save righteous souls, such as the Hebrew patriarchs who died before his crucifixion.

See "Link to External Source Article" below to read further.

Even the revelators of The Urantia Book have scant knowledge of what transpired between the Crucifixion on Friday and the Resurrection on Sunday, but we do have this statement.

We know from Urantia Book teachings that there is no place called hell, so these conjectures by the revelators may be closer to the truth than anything else.

As for the thief on the cross:

^187:4.1 One of the brigands railed at Jesus, saying, “If you are the Son of God, why do you not save yourself and us?” But when he had reproached Jesus, the other thief, who had many times heard the Master teach, said: “Do you have no fear even of God? Do you not see that we are suffering justly for our deeds, but that this man suffers unjustly? Better that we should seek forgiveness for our sins and salvation for our souls.” When Jesus heard the thief say this, he turned his face toward him and smiled approvingly. When the malefactor saw the face of Jesus turned toward him, he mustered up his courage, fanned the flickering flame of his faith, and said, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And then Jesus said, “Verily, verily, I say to you today, you shall sometime be with me in Paradise.”