The White House and the Christmas Bomber

[While I’m mostly staying away from politics over Christmas break, here are some thoughts on the White House reaction to the attempted bombing of the Detroit flight last week. ] A lot of the things that presidents have to do are hard.  That is all the more reason why they should do the easy stuff […]

The Meaning of Christmas

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 a pretty holiday about presents and elves.  Christmas is serious business, at least as Christians understand it.  The birth of the baby in the manger is connected with the murder of […]

The Hinge of Fate

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, as in ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger’ were used to wrap up the limbs of newborns so they […]

Born of a WHAT?!

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 I […]

The Real Story of Christmas: Rolling the Credits

For all the attention it gets in the world today, Christmas is not that big of a deal in the Bible.  The New Revised Standard Version that I mostly use is 1270 pages long; about one half of one percent of this text deals with the Christmas story.(If you want to read the whole thing now, […]

Christmas Gift!

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 Thirteen Blogs of Christmas

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.  […]

Yuletide Blogging Begins

Merry Christmas to those who feel so inclined and Season’s Greetings to the rest!Team Mead moves into holiday mode today; the halls are decked with holly and the wreath is on the door.We are celebrating the season by shifting focus; on Christmas Eve and all through the twelve days of Christmas to come, I’ll be […]

Ex-Mead Associate Rhodes Scholar Blogs Niebuhr

Scott Erwin, a former Team Mead associate, ditched his old friends at Team Mead and threw away a brilliant future as a lifetime Mead minion simply to chase after the illusory ‘prestige’ of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.  After several years of intensive study of the intellectual and theological links between Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln […]

Hitler Invades Hell: Blowback Reconsidered

Today as we observe the 30th anniversary of the Soviet move into Kabul, it’s useful to think about the concept of ‘blowback’: a term that originally referred to the unwanted consequences of covert action and is now often used to describe the ways in which foreign policy choices of the past come back to haunt […]

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