The stories began as images in their author’s mind: a fawn carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sleigh, a magnificent lion.
But they became much more than that.
There wasn’t anything Christian about “The Chronicles of Narnia” at first, C.S. Lewis has said — but as they developed, “that element pushed itself in of its own accord.” Thus, whether or not they realized it, the movie-goers who packed theaters in 2005 for the film version of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” — the series’ first book to be published — were, in fact, seeing a story that mirrors the core elements of Christianity.

Religion in brief for May 17, 2008

For Cliff Akins of King City, Mo., the hardest part of having cancer isn’t the cancer itself.

For Melissa Robinson, cancer started with a cat scratch.
The Trenton, Mo., woman diagnosed herself after the scratch drew her attention to a lump in her left breast. Her doctor confirmed her suspicion, and the next day, she underwent surgery. The first of eight rounds of chemotherapy came the next month.
It all happened so fast, and like anyone else in her situation, she was scared.
“I never thought about the word cancer,” she says. “You never think about it coming home to you.”

Healthcare notes for May 13

Dark clouds and the threat of damaging storms hung in the sky the evening of May 1 — the day observed across America as the National Day of Prayer.
But the noise rumbling over the parking lot outside St. Joseph’s Riverside Church wasn’t thunder. It was drums and guitars and voices, joining together under worship leaders from seven churches and lifting up words that came to characterize the night.

Religion in brief for May 10, 2008

Politics and religion: They’re two items often on the top of the list of things not to talk about if you’re trying to avoid controversy. Put them together, and controversy seems inevitable — or at least it has been in the case of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, to which U.S. Sen. Barack Obama belongs. Speaking to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., last week, the Rev. Wright made a presentation and addressed journalists’ questions about views he’s expressed in sermons about issues such as race and the American government. But what is perhaps a bigger question for many is how much — if at all — political views should be expressed from the pulpit.

Phylecea Smith lives in one of the poorest parts of a very poor country, where $30 is a week’s salary and the primary mode of transportation is a pair of feet.
But Phylecea can’t walk far. She can’t keep up with her friends. She can’t run without gasping for air.
Or she couldn’t, at least, until a few weeks ago — when the efforts of two Heartland Regional Medical Center doctors and a number of other people changed her life forever.
Dr. Thomas Alderson and Dr. Francisco Lammoglia met Phylecea during a medical mission trip they made to Jamaica in November 2006. In a makeshift clinic set up in a church’s concrete auditorium, an echocardiogram machine revealed an artery in the 15-year-old’s heart that should have closed at birth remained open. As a result, her heart constantly pumped a portion of her blood out to her body without first sending it to her lungs for oxygen.

A $7 million construction permit secured last month by Heartland Regional Medical Center is the next step toward the hospital’s plans to provide long-term acute care.