NYT Puffs "Heaven is For Real", but we've seen 4-year "miracle children" before
Bruce Wilson printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Wed Mar 16, 2011 at 05:48:34 PM EST
Ta da! It's a new breakout book sensation, "Heaven Is For Real", touted in a credulous March 11, 2011 New York Times book review. The plot? - When 4-year old Colton Burpo suffered a burst appendix, he had (so the book describes) a near-death experience in which the child ascended in spirit to heaven:

He woke up with an astonishing story: He had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that "were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle," Colton, now 11 years old, recalled.

Have we been here before?

As I covered in my recent Talk To Action story, Marjoe, The World's Littlest Child Evangelist!, in the late 1940's little four-year old Marjoe Gortner became a media spectacle, as the world's youngest evangelist who had been told by God to bring the good word to the peoples of the world. Or so the story went.

The reality, according to Gortner, was somewhat different; he recalls long training sessions in which his parents forced him to memorize what to say and, when his attention strayed, as G