Yeah, I know. I can be a bit negative when it comes to the Bible. That’s what people tell me, anyway—especially after my “Pete Ruins Christmas” series. No wait. That’s wrong. I didn’t ruin Christmas and I’m not negative about the Bible. I’m negative about how the Bible is sometimes presented—in ways that can be defended only with some […]
Now it gets tough. Yesterday’s post at the Yule Blog looked at what divides Christians and other theists from atheists; today we cut deeper and look at what separates Christians from believers in other religions. And the truth is that nothing separates Christianity from other religions like the two big holidays of Christmas and Easter. I will blog about […]
Yesterday’s Yule Blog featured an essay about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical, and even spiritual meaning as we encounter the world. Life, we feel, amounts to more than eating, buying cool products, […]
Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2017-18 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6. Yesterday, King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a sentimental holiday about sugarplums and […]
Everybody wants to reduce Christmas to a Christmas card: we’d like this to be a pretty and sentimental tale. But today, the third day after the present orgy beneath the tree, is also the day that the traditional liturgical calendar tries to slap us into serious reflection on the meaning of the event, jolting us […]
The specifically Christian idea of the Virgin Birth is one of the most controversial and confusing theological concepts around, and a Yuletide blog that didn’t take on the topic wouldn’t be doing its job. It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close. Mary has just replied to the angel […]
As we start to look at this whole Christmas phenomenon, it makes sense to begin with the basics. The first questions any sensible person asks about Christmas are pretty straightforward: What event is this holiday supposed to commemorate, and how do we know it happened? The short answers are that Christmas is a holiday commemorating […]
Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! Christmas is a tense morning wherever the Meads gather, as we jump whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other […]
“At the heart of every civilization, religious values are asserted.” — Fernand Braudel Even at this season that should be about spiritual re-awakening, it is hard to deny that we live in an increasingly post-religious civilization. Virtually everywhere in the high-income world, faith, particularly tied close to institutionalized religion, has been dropping for a decade, […]
