To understand what Christmas means, we need to know what Christians mean by God, His Son, and what on earth they think God’s Son was doing being born in the first place. We also need to ask why we believe our lives have meaning.

The slaughter of the innocents reminds us that God paid an obscene price for His determination to people the world with real people and autonomous moral actors rather than sock puppets. That is what we really celebrate at Christmas.

The Christian idea of the Virgin Birth is making at least two fundamentally crucial claims. One of them is about Jesus.

Both Matthew and Luke think it’s extremely important that Jesus was a Jew and that the story of Jesus is part of the story of God’s encounter with the Jewish people.

Hey! Hey! Unto you a child is born!

Providence is thrilled to become the new home of Walter Russell Mead’s Yule Tide Blog. Offering reflections on the meaning of Christmas and its relevance to the modern world, the Yule Blog has become a grand and important holiday tradition.

The most important needs so many Americans have are attended to by communities, not bureaucracies. The only institution that can meet these needs on anything like the scale required is the institution that the Boomers by and large neglected: the neighborhood church.