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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Dumbing Down American Public Education

Dumbing Down American Public Educationby Glenn Fairman –
In thinking about how valuable education is in cultivating the next generation of Americans, my mind took me back nearly twenty years to when I was a graduate student functioning as a substitute teacher at La Puente High School in Southern California. On one assignment, I was to cover a social studies class of some old-timer; he had written down in his instructions that since his classes were on a field trip, my sole duty was to show a movie at 6th period to those who did not attend. What I found that day opened my eyes.

In a dusty corner shelf of the room was a set of thirty-year-old textbooks from the mid-1960s, and although my memory cannot now relinquish their title, their contents burned themselves into my brain. As I flipped through the pages, I was astonished to find what I would now consider an upper-level college textbook under color of what in the high schools used to be termed “civics.” This text contained a very detailed understanding of political theory, constitutional law, macroeconomics, American history, and comparative political systems. I spent the rest of the day in slack-jawed amazement, perusing what a student in a working-class town was expected to know before the mavens of education began tinkering with the curricula of our schools. [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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The Mythology Channel: Distorting American History

The Mythology Channel: Distorting American Historyby Phil Manger –
I should have known better than to expect anything like real history from The History Channel.  With the notable exception of some of their reality series like Pawn Stars, American Restoration, and Ice Road Truckers — all three of which I admit (somewhat sheepishly) to watching and enjoying — their usual fare consists mostly of dramatizations of history filtered hrough the lens of modern (which is to say, liberal) sensibilities.

At first it looked like The Men Who Built America, History’s new series about the great American industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, might be an exception.  In the first two episodes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie are treated somewhat sympathetically; they are even credited with providing real economic benefits to society.  There are omissions and factual errors, to be sure, and there are the usual annoying anachronisms that plague a lot of History Channel dramatizations (like 20th-century European locomotives pulling trains that supposedly were running on 19th-century American railroad tracks), but on the whole, I thought the series was off to a promising start.

That is, until they got to Henry Clay Frick. [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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Christmas Lights Go Out in Europe

Christmas Lights Go Out in Europeby Bruce Bawer –
The lights are going out all over Europe. The Christmas tree lights, that is. Not all of them all at once, mind you, but one at a time – one here, one there, one Christmas season after another.

Just the other day, for example, came the news about a co-op apartment building in Kokkedal, Denmark.

Not long ago, the co-op, which has a considerable number of Muslim residents, spent 60,000 kroner (about $10,000) to celebrate the holiday of Eid. Three days afterwards, however, when the co-op board, consisting of five Muslims and four unbelievers, got together to decide whether to spend approximately 5000 kroner on a Christmas tree – a tradition in the building – they voted the proposition down. [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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