Now it gets tough. That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from […]

Yesterday I blogged about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life. Human life amounts to more than eating and scratching our various itches, and […]

A dear friend, colleague and mentor, Harvey Sicherman, passed away on the evening of December 25 after a fairly brief illness. Times like these make me struggle yet again with the apparent impossibility of reconciling the intensity of feeling we know deep down to be real and of enormous importance with the coldness of a […]

Five go-old rings!Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2010 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6.Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically […]

So: they ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.’  What is that supposed to be about?Manger is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes were used to wrap up […]

Many retail stores depend on Christmas shopping for their survival.  Economists tell us that the current uptick of this seasonal shopping is good news for the recovery from the recession. Christian clergy and secular culture critics tend to have a more sour view of these facts.The theological objection to the Christmas bonanza is neatly summed […]

It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close. Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own: “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing […]

For all the attention it gets in the world today, Christmas is not that big of a deal in the Bible.  The name of Christmas is never used, the date of December 25 isn’t given and there is no record that any of the early disciples ever celebrated the anniversary of Jesus’ birth. The New […]

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! We are having a tense morning at the ancestral Mead home today, jumping whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the […]

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care at the ancestral Mead mansion; and as I settle down for a long winter’s rest I am taking a break from politics and war, sort of, to do some good old fashioned Yuletide blogging.In particular I want to blog about Christmas itself and what it means. […]