A bit of Easter reading for you: The Physical Future, an article on Theology Network by Paul Blackham, about the Christian hope for eternity. It's a hope that is clearly glimpsed by Jesus' body being raised back to life on Easter Day, and it's a hope that Jesus will return to put things right, and to enable us to live for ever on this earth in physical bodies.

The article includes a striking quote by 2nd-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr:

There are some who are called Christians, but are actually godless, impious heretics, and they teach doctrines that are in every way blasphemous, atheistical, and foolish… These who are called Christians, who venture to blaspheme the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob say that there is no resurrection of the dead, and that their souls, when they die, are taken to heaven forever; do not imagine that they are Christians.

How things have changed! Many Christians today would speak of "going to heaven forever" as their hope for the future. But it seems that in Justin Martyr's day, this was so obviously wrong that he would have assumed that anyone who spoke in those terms must surely not be a Christian at all! But compared with this kind of disembodied existence, the reality of the hope of bodily resurrection, as the article explains, is so much more exciting and so much more appealing.