The manger scene these days really is the face of Christmas for most people and, perhaps not surprisingly, it is one of the aspects of the season that keeps causing trouble.
Walter Russell MeadDecember 25, 2020
In the old days, people kept a Yule log burning during the holiday season. From now until January 6, I’ll be Yule-blogging: reflecting on Christmas in ways that I hope will make sense to Christians and non-Christians alike.
Walter Russell MeadDecember 24, 2020
Christmas alone is perfectly congruous, for Christmas brings to the surface those imperishable values for which men in all this struggle of power are really groping. It focuses men’s thoughts, at least for the moment, upon the secret of ultimate power.
Christianity & Crisis MagazineDecember 23, 2020
For those worried about the Coptic Church’s future, the question is not that of a Christmas date or necessary adjustments for pastoral needs, but rather whether years from now we may look back at this decision as the first step in a painful schism that separates the Church in Egypt from its churches in the West, a separation of the daughter from the mother.
Samuel TadrosFebruary 5, 2020
History turned a corner with the birth of Jesus Christ, and while the written reports of that event don’t tell me everything I want to know, they do tell me everything I need. The Gospels occupy a kind of center point in human culture as a whole: products of a particular time and place, but comprehensible to all.
Walter Russell MeadJanuary 5, 2020
If we leave religion out of our national conversation, we end up with a vapid conversation that doesn’t address the deepest realities that move most of the people in this country.
Walter Russell MeadJanuary 4, 2020
To get any insight at all into what Jesus’ childhood and upbringing were like, you have to do something that sometimes makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary.
Walter Russell MeadJanuary 3, 2020
The flawed human race, trapped in a cycle of cascading pain and wrong, is what and who God is bound and determined to love; the question is, How can He do it?
Walter Russell MeadJanuary 2, 2020
The Christmas story doesn’t tell us how to reconcile the virtues and the vices of universal cosmopolitanism and local loyalty. But it suggests that we can somehow try to be true to both ideals: to be loyal members of our nations, our families, our tribes—and at the same time to reach out to the broader human community of which we are also a part.
Walter Russell MeadJanuary 1, 2020
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