Favorite Christmas verse: “She gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne.” Revelation 12.5
How December 25 Became Christmas
“(W)e have Christians in two parts of the world calculating Jesus’ birth on the basis that his death and conception took place on the same day (March 25 or April 6) and coming up with two close but different results (December 25 and January 6)… Connecting Jesus’ conception and death in this way will certainly seem odd to modern readers, but it reflects ancient and medieval understandings of the whole of salvation being bound up together.”
Bishop (AKA “Saint”) Nicholas’s Present to the Arch-Heretic Arius: a Strike on the Face
Perhaps remnants of a more stout Christianity.
A Meditation on the Paradox of Christmas
Though a day late, still worth reading.
Christmas is Dangerous
“I do question whether we know what we’re getting ourselves in to when we presume to celebrate Christ’s birth… Christmas is dangerous. The baby in the manger is God. And the baby grew up.”
Christmas Truce
It wasn’t a “common humanity” that brought together warring sides. It was the Christ of Christmas – the Prince of Peace – that makes wars to cease. And it was humanism that tore them apart and slaughtered them.
T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
To the secular mind – as well as some forms of liberal Christendom – religion and Christmas represents “our struggle to hold on to our inborn capacity for wonder, that same essential faculty that fuels both science and spirituality.”
In Iraq, Traditions of Christmas Found Only in Memory
Christianity in Iraq is waning with the abolition of order and law. The tyranny of Saddam provided some peace for growth.
In 1881: L.A. Daily Times endorses Christmas
Even though the secular paper recognized Christmas way back when, yet it viewed it as a sentimental time having no mention of Christ.
Handel’s Messiah
Ross Hauck Tenor | New Saint Andrews Choir
