Maria Shriver is an award-winning American journalist and author and she is the wife of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  A practising Roman Catholic, in 2007 she published a book for children called What’s Heaven?

In this book, children are informed that

Heaven is somewhere you believe in…it’s a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk to other people who are there.  At night you can sit next to the stars, which are the brightest of anywhere in the universe…If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go to heaven…when your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you up to Heaven to be with him…[and Grandma is] alive in me…Most important, she taught me to believe in myself…She’s in a safe place, with the stars, with God and the angels…she is watching over us from up there…

“I want you to know” [says the heroine to her great-Grandma] “that even though you are no longer here, your spirit will always be alive in me.”

Tom Wright comments that this nonsense is more or less what millions of people in the western world have come to believe.  The book had been sent to him by a friend who works with grieving children, and who describes the book as ‘one of the worst books for children’ and an outstanding example of what not to say.

See Wright, Surprised by hope, p24f.