Church calendars mark December 28 as Holy Innocents’ Day, the day we remember the deaths of the babies in Bethlehem who were murdered at Herod’s command.

Gregory Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God attempts to argue that the Old Testament accounts of God’s “violence” are not true portraits of the character of God. In another era, this 1,445-page project would have been called heresy.

Cultivating the garden of world order includes tending to the tasks that uphold public safety, execute justice and promote human flourishing.

Christians must always have a tentative relationship toward nation-states. They are finite entities that came into being out of historical contingency and, barring Christ’s return, will fade back into the annals of history. It is Christ and his Kingdom alone that are everlasting.

Christmas is important to Christians because from their point of view the Baby Jesus is the meaning of Christmas, and the meaning of Christmas is the meaning of life.

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.

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.

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?

The Christmas story suggests that we can somehow try to be loyal members of our nations, our families, our tribes—and to reach out to the broader human community of which we are also a part.