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    Walters’s chilling encounter with the failed suicide bomber took place midway through a yearlong search for an answer to a question that has tantalized mankind from the beginning of time: What is heaven like, and who gets to go there? Even before beginning the project, a two-hour special called Heaven that aired on ABC, Walters had realized one indisputable fact: Most of us, regardless of our religious persuasion, do not think that life on earth ends here. We do not believe that this is all there is.
    There are some 10,000 religions in the world, and nearly all incorporate teachings of an afterlife. In America, nine out of ten people believe that heaven is a real place—and most have faith that they are going there at the end of their lives.
    Ask many of the faithful’s children to describe heaven, and you will likely hear of angels perched on puffy clouds playing golden harps. But Walters does not remember ever thinking about heaven. Growing up in Boston and New York, the daughter of an impresario who launched the famous Latin Quarter nightclubs, she was raised in a secular world. “I didn’t go to temple, and I didn’t go to Sunday school,” she says, “partly because my older sister was retarded and it would have been one more thing that Jackie could not do.” Her family did not celebrate Yom Kippur—“the holiday that everybody we knew celebrated”—and at Christmas there were presents and stockings but never a tree.
    While she unfailingly prays on planes, Walters spent little time devoted to spiritual matters as she carved out her iconic career. Dubbed “the alpha female of broadcast news,” she spent 13 years on The Today Show, becoming its first female cohost. She then moved to ABC as the first woman coanchor of the network Evening News, commanding a then-unheard-of seven-figure salary. She spent 25 years at 20/20, where she interviewed everyone from Presidents to Fidel Castro to Paris Hilton.
    When Walters stepped down from the post, she agreed to produce specials for ABC. She set her sights first on the big story she had not done already: God and heaven. “It seemed the right time,” she says. “There’s so much interest in spirituality. Why are we here? Where are we going? We have e-mail and cell phones and the Internet, yet we see life whirling out of control.”
    For the special, Walters approached the subject with her signature candor. Sitting with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington, D.C., in the ornate cathedral of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, she asked, “Is there sex in heaven?” He barely blinked. “That was a question they asked the Lord, and the answer was no.”
    In New York’s famed Abyssinian Baptist Church, Rev. Calvin Butts, who has had multiple visions of heaven, revealed that his grandmother had spoken to him during her own funeral. “What did [she say]?” Walters asked. The grandmother explained why she once gave Butts’s chicken and dumplings to the town drunk. “By doing good works, she was sending up a little timber for her heavenly home.”
    Whatever our vision, most of us expect heaven to be a better place. Evangelist Billy Graham has said he can’t wait to get there. “I look forward to the reunion with friends and loved ones who have gone on before. I look forward to heaven’s freedom from sorrow and pain.”
    Some, like Anthony DeStefano, author of A Travel Guide to Heaven, believe that in the afterlife we’ll be able to go fishing with Hemingway, study piano with Mozart and painting with Michelangelo. Provided, he adds, that those folks make it to heaven.
    To be sure, there is sometimes ruthless—even bloody—disagreement on exactly who gets in. When Walters asked the suicide bomber in Israel if she, as a non-Muslim, would be welcomed into paradise, his answer was swift and blunt: “No,” he