I’m recovering from a post-Christmas hard drive failure this week. I backed up a month or so ago, so everything except music and photos should be there, since I work primarily through email. But there’s all the reinstalls of Office, Macromedia, Adobe, etc.
And Santy Claus saw fit to give this good little boy an iPod for Christmas. So my first priority has of course been to load up all my CDs into my iPod. First things first. It’s been fun rifling through old CDs, though a trip to the used CD store is probably in order (if there’s still a market for Kenny Loggins).
Which means no time yet for the birthday redesign I had planned for this week. You can catch a sneak preview here for the time being. Please let me know what you think of it in the comments section below.
One more thing: I am happy to say that, despite some 37 CDs in my wife’s collection, there are absolutely no Ani DiFranco songs on my iPod, thank you very much. Nor shall there ever be.
More on the Christmas story from Philocrites and James Carroll.
The single most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas. The child who was born in Bethlehem represented a drastic political challenge to the imperial power of Rome. The nativity story is told to make the point that Rome is the enemy of God, and in Jesus, Rome’s day is over.
The outin-laws are on their way in from Texas today, and I’m home sick with a cold. Let that serve as a warning.
I’ve been alternately amused and annoyed by all the faux ecumenism this year: happy holidays, the true meaning of the season, and so on. Behind this celebration of a generic “holiday” and “season” was probably a sincere desire to include and to not offend. But when I watch evangelical co-workers trip over themselves remembering to substitute “happy holidays” for “merry christmas,” I wonder if it’s gone too far. Because their wishing me a “merry Christmas” is one of the kindest thing they can do.
We say “happy holidays,” but which holidays? Religious ones. We say “holiday season,” but which season? Precisely the season created by the confluence of those holidays—Divali, Ramadan, Hannukkah, Solstice, Christmas, and Kwanzaa—all of them the particular religious holidays of particular traditions.
That’s why I’m not sure that there even can be a “reason” for this ad hoc ecumenical “season.” It would need to be rather bland and abstract, making it little different from the secular adaptations of the meaning of Christmas—it’s “in your heart,” or worse, in the mall. (American Sentimentalist has a far better approach for secularist adaptation.)
Putting on my theologian hat, I see two potential ways out of this. Click to continue reading “What to do with Christmas?”
Folks are giving support for the controversial UCC ad by sharing their own stories of exclusion by Christian churches. Apparently some have called the add “dishonest and insulting to other Christian churches.” The comments offered would seem to show the opposite is true.
Here’s the story that hit me the hardest:
At a Sunday evening potluck dinner, a Hispanic woman had brought a tuna casserole. The women organizing the event refused to put her casserole out because it was “unsafe”. The woman was devastated and we never saw her again at church. However, just a few months later I noticed a tuna casserole at another pot luck dinner – however, since is was made by a “white” woman there was apparently no problem with “safeness” – and there it sat along with the other dishes for everyone to eat.
The Happy Tutor on the Gift Hub project:
You can see, friends, this is not your usual suck up to wealth philanthropic consultation. We do mean to reform the wealthy no less than the poor and to hold them accountable for their own salvation, that their influence be positive and the results be for the good of all, or provide them with the spanking they so richly deserve – and one to grow on.
