When I was a child, we had a quaint kind of formula we would sometimes use in the playground to support what we were stating: we would say “Cross my heart and I hope to die”. We didn’t have the faintest idea of the literal gravity of these words, only that they sounded suitably solemn. I was recalling this memory in reading Hope to Die by Scott Hahn (Emmaus Road Publishing). Hahn, a well-known US biblical scholar and convert from evangelical Christianity, puts this aspiration in its proper context: the subtitle is “The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body.”