In Austria, 206 years ago this Christmas Eve, one of the most enduring religious (as opposed to secular retail) Christmas songs was sung for the first time. In Athens, Ohio, 10 years ago, I did what I used to do every year after Christmas Eve midnight Mass (no longer held at midnight, I’m sad to say). Savoring, yes, the silence of the night, I would take a long walk through town, breathing it all in and thinking of a place now all buttoned up for (as Clement Moore put it in a poem published five years after the introduction of “Silent Night”) “a long winter’s nap.” Students mostly gone home, residents in their houses enjoying their own Christmas traditions, there were quiet and peace.
Does joy end when the clock strikes midnight, closing out Christmas Day? Tim Butler’s new twelve days of Christmas devotional booklet the Joys of Christmas, which is our Christmas gift to you, invites us to embark on a journey to “store up” Christmas joy well beyond December 25. Following the Medieval meditative list known as the Joys of Mary, often encountered through the carol of the same name, we will explore a total of thirteen “joys” that all of us can experience from the life of Jesus.
Here we are at the end of the year, a lot to reflect on, a lot to be thankful for, and one of those things is Thanksgiving itself. Who’s excited about Thanksgiving?
Unless you live under a rock, you know that the second most anticipated endorsement of the presidential election finally happened: Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris. Don’t hold your breath for the most anticipated: I won’t be making an endorsement. (And maybe you shouldn’t either.)
Society, even that of what once was Christendom, is not Christian. Exhibit A: the Olympics’ opening ceremony’s now infamous scene mashing up Greek mythology, Christian iconography and drag queens. If Christendom is now Inclusivedom, though, could Christians at least get a serving of the inclusivity pledged in this society’s creed?
As the multitude of cicadas sang briefly across the nation this past month, a storm blew one of them onto my path. Strange as it may sound, as I witnessed that little bug struggle through the aftermath, I was given a masterclass on dealing with my own storms.
I could have written this column, regardless of the outcome. Half the country has put its hopes in an all too human “savior.” Half the country has put its hopes on the defeat of that man. Today marks either a celebration or a catastrophe if one’s hopes rest on the state of President Trump. That tells more of our false hopes than anything else.
Who would have thought a National Review alum who has been a long-time Evangelical voice on politics, known for arguing for civility, would be a controversial choice to appear on a panel about politics in a conservative, Evangelical denomination? A few years ago, that’d have seemed absurd. Oh, for a few years ago.
You’re probably not a “big-C” Catholic. Most people aren’t. Some of us increasingly doubt that the pope himself is. We can’t tell, because he spends most of his public time being a fascio-leftist politician.
Easter is a week and a half away, and it seems a good time to bring up something I’ve pondered for decades, on which Roman Catholicism gave me a unique view.
What makes for genuine community? Everyone had to wrestle with that in 2020 when community as we had thought of it was abruptly severed. Four years later, we continue to grasp for the precise answer to the question in our moment.