Christianity

Christmas and Secularism’s Futility

Christmas Nativity of Christby Ray Nothstine –
Every December cultural warriors mourn the incessant attacks on Christmas and secularism’s rise in society. News headlines carry stories of modern day Herods banning nativity scenes, religious performances, and even the word “Christmas.” Just as a majority of young people profess they will have less prosperity and opportunity than their parents, many people now expect less out of Christmas. Continual bickering over holiday messaging in corporate advertising itself points to a shrinking and limited Christmas.

Yet these problems are signs on the way to important truths, if we have the eyes to see. Record spending and debt, whether in Washington or the home, allude to a society trying to fill an emptiness of the heart. Even our disappointment in poor leadership in America reminds us that we crave a true King and are expectant of a greater day. [Read more…]

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Calculating Christmas Not Based on Pagan Festivals

Nativity Christmas Starby William J. Tighe –
Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance. [Read more…]

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Churches, the Constitution, and Christmas Celebrations

Nativity Display Churchby SpeakUpChurch –
Every Christmas season, it seems that the “war on Christmas” begins afresh and with renewed vigor.  For some, the season that proclaims “peace on earth” seems to be anything but, with demands to remove any and all religious references to the celebration of Christmas. And this year is no exception.

For instance, Western Piedmont College in North Carolina recently replaced the word “Christmas” with the word “holiday” in a student club’s announcement of a Christmas tree sale designed to raise money for charity.  It was only after attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter to the college that it reversed its decision and reinstated “Christmas.”[Read more…]

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How to Speak About God to the Men and Women of Our Time

Pope Benedict Evangelize American Cultureby Pope Benedict XVI –
“How do we speak to God in our times? How can we communicate the Gospel to open the way to its salvific truth?” The Holy Father offered an answer to these questions in his catechesis during today’s general audience, held in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall.

“In Jesus of Nazareth”, the Pope said, “we encounter the face of God, descended from Heaven to immerse Himself in the world of mankind and to teach ‘the art of living’, the road to happiness; to free us from sin and to make us true children of God”.

He continued, “speaking about God means, first and foremost, being clear about what we must bring to the men and women of our time. God has spoken to us, not an abstract or hypothetical God, but a real God, a God Who exists, Who entered history and remains present in history: the God of Jesus Christ – as a response to the fundamental question of why and how to live.” [Read more…]

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Converging and Convincing Proof of God: If Truth, Then God

What is Truth, GODby Andrew M. Greenwell, Esq. –
“What is truth?” famously stated Pontius Pilate to Jesus who had proclaimed himself to be “the Truth.”  (Cf. John 18:38; John 14:6).  As an unbelieving pagan blind to the Incarnate Truth before him, the Roman procurator was oblivious of the irony in his words.

Pilate, it should be noted, was not asking Jesus the question as a philosopher or a religious seeker.  He was asking the question as a human judge, as the holder of authority, of temporal power.  “Don’t you realize I have the power either to free you or to crucify you?”  (John 19:10).

Truth, however, does not rely on human or temporal power.  Truth and temporal power are altogether different categories.  Whether freed or crucified, Truth remains what it is: Truth. [Read more…]

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Contemplative Prayer and Silence Needed in a Noisy World

Contemplative Prayer and Silenceby Fr. James Farfaglia –
“Where shall the word be found, where shall the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.” – T.S. Elliot

In our last reflection we considered how essential it is for us to be open to God in order to receive the gift of contemplative prayer. Another essential ingredient is silence.

Blessed Mother Theresa once said, “In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.” [Read more…]

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Sacrifice and Self-Interest

Sacrifice and Self-Interestby Jordan Ballor –
One of the complaints often rendered against the market economy is that it encourages selfish behavior. This picture of the marketplace is that of a kind of war of all against all, with each participant out only to maximize his or her own individual benefit. As American social gospel advocate Walter Rauschenbusch contended in his Christianizing the Social Order, “The trader has always been the outstanding case of the man who plays his own hand and sacrifices social solidarity for private gain.” This characteristic, claimed Rauschenbusch, has been exaggerated in the modern era, such that “the trading class has become the ruling class, and consequently the selfishness of trade has been exalted to the dignity of an ethical principle. Every man is taught to seek his own advantage, and then we wonder that there is so little public spirit.” [Read more…]

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Godly Character Is Formed in the Little Moments

Godly Character Small Moments Prayerby Paul Tripp –
“But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord my refuge that I may tell of all your works” (Psalm 73:28).
It is a grace to get it right, because so often I get it wrong. No, I don’t mean that I fall into gross and willing sin, and I don’t mean that I am seduced by the old arguments of new atheism. No, I don’t mean that I occasionally question the tenets of my faith or question whether ministry is really worth it. No, getting it wrong is much more subtle. Getting it wrong is not about the big, dramatic, consequential moments of life. No, getting it wrong is much more about the little mundane moments of everyday life.

It’s easy to let up your guard and be all too relaxed in these moments precisely because they are little. It’s also tempting to minimize the wrong choices that you make in these little moments. But the opposite is true. The little moments of life are profoundly important because they are little. Little moments are the ones we live in every day. The character and course of a person’s life isn’t set in three or four grand, significant moments. No, the character of a person’s life is shaped in 10,000 little moments. You carry the character formed in the mundane into those rare consequential moments of life. [Read more…]

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Election 2012: A Church Gone Astray

A Church Gone Astrayby Louie Verrecchio –
In the days following last week’s U.S. presidential election, a staggering amount of analysis has been focused on Republican messaging, demographics and core constituencies, but it misses the most fundamental point entirely.

If the Second Coming of Obama is evidence of anything it is the godlessness of a nation, the majority of whose citizens worship an idol who not only grants free license to practically every immoral impulse that one can imagine, but who also evidently demands human sacrifice to the tune of more than a million innocent souls each year.

This culture of depravity is the result of an underlying spiritual malady that has been allowed to fester and spread over the last five decades virtually unopposed by the only force capable of overtaking it.

The United States — a land wherein class-envy passes for compassion, same-sex “marriage” is accepted as fairness, and contraception is considered a matter of healthcare — is about to reap the just rewards, not so much of a nation that has abandoned the principles of its Founding Fathers, but of a Church that has abandoned its Founder and the mission He has given her. [Read more…]

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Hope in God, Do Not Despair

St. Cyprian of Carthageby Fr. Brian Mullady, OP –
There are those who despair and have no hope when things do not go their way in the political order. This cannot be a Christian attitude.
“The world itself now bears witness to its approaching end by its fading powers. […] The peasant is failing and disappearing from the fields, the sailor at sea, the soldier in the camp, uprightness in the forum, justice in the court, concord in friendships, skill in the arts, discipline in morals.”

Someone might think these words were written today in response to a decline in American society witnessed by the attempt to so centralize the government that the freedom of the Church is threatened. Yet these words were written by St. Cyprian, an early Church Father, around the year 250.

At the time, the Christians thought that the world was coming to an end as they knew it. Yet St. Cyprian, as all good Christians, was not moved to despair. [Read more…]

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