The concept is bizarre when you stop and think about it. Let’s take a couple of days off of work at one of the busiest times of the year. We’ll time our school calendars so that the semester break occurs during the holiday. For the month preceding the holiday, houses and storefronts will be decorated with fir trees, snowflakes, wreaths, lights, snowmen, reindeer, and a man in a red suit. We’ll write songs about it […]
Today (Dec 13) I am flying home after my first term at St Andrews. It feels like time has sped up ever since I arrived. An hour seems a bit shorter than I remembered in the States. Whole weeks have felt like insignificant blocks of time that pass by all too quickly. Why does time seem so relative? For others I’m sure time might appear to creep along slowly. As is often said, “time flies […]
For the reading audience, this comes as part three of a themed week focus on the tension between celebrating Christmas, as specifically Santa, alongside the advent of the Messiah. For those of you who have not read John’s misnomer[1] article titled “Why I Wouldn’t Teach my Kids About Santa” posted earlier this week, I would recommend giving it a read. In fact, it is the starting point from which these musings travel. It is a question that needs […]
The commercial and symbolic culture of Christmas has been lost on no one. The true meaning of Christmas has. In America, Christmas is a month-long celebration full of tradition. It’s more a season than merely a date on the calendar. Radio stations and department stores play nothing but Christmas music from late-November on. Houses and stores are strung with lights and other decorations. Fir trees are purchased from the Home Depot or the lot down the block that’s […]
As we find ourselves in another Christmas season, it is always good to return to the Gospels and remind ourselves why it is we celebrate. For me, that means returning to Matthew’s account of the birth of Christ, reading and pondering Matthew’s side of the story. But this story of the birth of a baby in Bethlehem has a much larger meta-narrative running through the background that transforms the whole of Matthew’s Gospel. The Beginning […]
I don’t actually have a problem with Santa Claus. In fact, I enjoy the general holiday cheer, even if it isn’t specifically Christian. I’m fine with songs like ‘Santa Claus is Coming To Town,’ ‘Frosty the Snow Man,’ ‘Silver Bells,’ etc… Its all good fun. But of course, I appreciate the Christmas songs that contain robust theology even more. Taken as a whole, I simply enjoy anything that is associated with the month of December […]
Over the past couple weeks I have attempted to lay a framework for the one-kingdom v. two-kingdom debate. I have done this by providing a brief sketch of crucial post reformation thinkers on the issue such as Abraham Kuyper and the later neo-Calvinists. Here we saw that while Kuyper was nowhere near an outright departure from earlier Reformed thinking, he did start to make some subtle changes to the two-kingdom framework that would later become […]
Confession: there is a part of me that hates Christmas time.* We might be quick to throw stones at Dr. Seuss’s scornful Grinch for his hatred of inarguably one of the world’s most celebrated holidays. And perhaps in part it is because his heart was 3 sizes too small. But regardless of his heart size, I contend there is certainly a tremendous amount of rational thinking that premeditated his Christmas heist. When we remember what […]
The NBA’s announcement this past Saturday that they had reached an agreement with the players on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) was reason for rejoicing among basketball fans everywhere (my apologies to college basketball enthusiasts, but the NBA is simply a far superior product). But while the real fun doesn’t begin till Christmas day when the season starts, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we learned during the lockout. Hopefully a […]
Last week I talked about advertising and evangelism. As a related issue, I also want to discuss the way in which Christians do Apologetics. How far can Apologetics take us? Do we assume that someone can be argued into the Kingdom? Is the goal of Apologetics merely to convince? Is being convinced the same as exercising faith? These are some of my general questions about the efficacy of Apologetics as a whole. Personally, I chose […]
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