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. […]

As a native South Carolinian, I have not been looking forward to the sesquicentennial of the dumbest, most self-destructive move in the long and checkered history of my home state.I refer, of course, to the Palmetto State’s boneheaded decision to attempt secession from the United States of America on December 20, 1860.  The knuckleheads behind […]

Here at Via Meadia we are preparing for the Christmas holidays, and will be firing up the traditional Yule Blog tomorrow for the 13 posts of Christmas in a hallowed holiday tradition dating all the way back to 2009.Meanwhile, in the spirit of the season, the Gallup organization has a new poll out suggesting that […]

From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, an unassuming and rather pedantic German scholar was at the center of passionate international debates in Protestant theology. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) was a well-known New Testament scholar. Bultmann was a professor at the University of Marburg, which was an important center for historical studies of religion and the […]

In my last post I argued that Blue State Liberalism, the form of liberalism that dominated most of the twentieth century in American life, doesn’t work anymore as a political philosophy.  That argument gets some powerful support from the latest Gallup polls: only 21% of Americans consider themselves liberals; 40% of Americans consider themselves ‘conservative’, […]