During Superbowl XXXVII, FedEx ran a commercial that spoofed the movie Castaway, in which Tom Hanks played a FedEx worker whose company plane went down, stranding him on a desert island for years. Looking like the bedraggled Hanks in the movie, the FedEx employee in the commercial goes up to the door of a suburban home, package in hand.

When the lady comes to the door, he explains that he survived ...

A churchgoer wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go to church every Sunday.

"I've gone for 30 years now," he wrote, "and in that time I have heard something like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can't remember a single one of them. So I think I'm wasting my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving sermons at all."

This started a controversy ...

Nien Cheng, an older Chinese Christian woman, has written a book entitled Life and Death in Shanghai. The author spent six years in a Red Guard prison and was horribly, brutally tortured. She survived the whole thing, living year after year in a bare, damp, dank, dirty cell, hearing the screams of people being beaten to a pulp.

She tells of watching a small spider one day as it crawled slowly up one ...