My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method […]
An ongoing mantra of the left is that everyone is a victim, with a singular carve-out for white men. A large group of the female population has embraced this chant. While there may be a number of grievances put forth by this movement, there also comes a theme that is particularly dangerous: the feminist attack on […]
This just in from what was once the best state in the Union: Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearlyone out of five residents is poor. That’s according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of […]
Nothing scandalizes a leftist like the truth. Point out that women and men are different, that black Americans commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime, that most terrorist acts are committed by Muslims, and the Left leaps to its collective feet in openmouthed shock, like Margaret Dumont after a Groucho Marx wisecrack. This is racism! This […]
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 […]
