Some Christmas stuff
plus a discount
To celebrate God becoming a human, here’s another discount for annual subs.
If you’re bored at Christmas dinner and want to distract yourself from your uncultured, philistine family members, check out some of our past Christmas content.
Enough of the war on Christmas (Newsweek)
The United States, some hold, is a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values. Those pushing to demonize the greeting of "Merry Christmas" in favor of "Happy Holidays"—the argument goes—are seeking to undermine that foundation and replace it with a secularist, atheistic one. Yet this narrative conflates Christianity with reactionary neoconservative politics, a political stance undergirded by a deeply individualistic, neoliberal worldview, whose economic platform and general philosophy whiffs more of Enlightenment ideals than religious ones.
Such shallow culture war battles have been characteristic of the Religious Right ever since the Reagan era, and have only proven to intensify America's exaltation of both moralistic sentimentality (think the "Christmas spirit" a la Love Actually, the Hallmark Channel, and Salvation Army dancing Santas) and hedonistic consumerism.
As Pope Benedict XVI once said, "being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction." Christians would be more prudent to, in the words of Benedict's successor, invest themselves in spreading the "joy of the Gospel" through their way of living, rather than engaging in dour arguments and polemical battles. What is needed more than culture warriors fighting ideological battles is an army of "witnesses," exemplars who live out what they claim to believe in.
We can start by looking at the example set by Dorothy Day and the followers, past and present, of her Catholic Worker Movement, for whom the Christmas spirit is neither sentimental nor polemical. As their works of charity and hospitality demonstrate, the Christmas spirit is tangible, carnal—an "event" as concrete and dynamic as the first Christmas two millennia ago in Bethlehem. By entering the world as a helpless baby in a manger, surrounded by the support of a humble yet loving community, God revealed through the first Christmas that all human beings are designed to live in communion with him and with our neighbors.
Mariah needs to chill with the Christmas shtick (Daily Beast)
Carey deserves respect as a singer, writer, producer, overall diva, and, above all, as a human being who’s gone through her fair share of hardships, suffering racism, abuse, and scrutiny by the press (much of which she detailed in her excellent 2020 autobiography). I’ll always be indebted to her music for helping me at my lowest points and leading me further along my own journey toward self-discovery.
None of this to say that Carey’s Christmas music is not up to par. She’s churned out some real holiday gems, namely “Joy to the World,” “O Holy Night,” “When Christmas Comes,” and “Miss You Most (At Christmas Time).” But at the end of the day, the writing is on the wall. Her holiday hijinks have become excessive, and only distract the public from the fact that she’s a versatile and gifted artist who is much greater than the meme she has turned herself into.
Of course, it’s understandable for a superstar of her caliber to fear fading into irrelevance, especially after having spent over half of her life in the spotlight. But my dearest Mariah, your work and legacy are more than timeless. I say this as a lowly subject under the reign of your queenship. It’s time for you to celebrate the fruits of your labor. Enjoy your time with your kids and loved ones. Make your famous shortbread Christmas cookies and go on your annual reindeer ride in the snow with Roc and Roe. But please, for the love of Jesus (at least as a favor for him on his birthday), stop churning out endless Christmas content. We’ve had enough.
Fun fact: this is the only article I’ve written that provoked the Twitter mob to attack me!
I’d rather “find” Christ in Christmas (OSV)
Since I was little, I couldn’t wait until after Thanksgiving to start setting up the Christmas tree and lights, to play Christmas music and to buy presents at the school’s holiday shop. I remember rolling around in bed on Christmas morning, unable to sleep, anxiously waiting to see if Santa ate the cookies I left out, and to unwrap the gifts under the tree.
Once gifts were exchanged and I got to playing with my new toys, around midday, it all hit me at once: the season that had filled me with such anticipation and excitement is now over. That joyful day was always tinged with sadness. Christmas disappointed me because it led me to the peak of a mountain only to throw me back down. “Now to wait until next year …” I’d groan to myself.
My experience of Christmas started to change after I had a meaningful encounter with a community of friends in college who inspired me to enter the Catholic Church. I remember my first Midnight Mass as a Catholic. By the singing of the Gloria, my heart welled up with joy. For the first time, I recognized what I had been waiting for all those Christmas mornings during my childhood. The decorations, food, music and gifts were not really what I was waiting for, but they were signs — road markers along the way that pointed us closer and closer to the moment that is really worth getting hyped up over.
…
While the greeting of “happy holidays” does little to fill the emptiness and sadness that many of us feel as soon as the festivities start to die down, I feel like the billboard/bumper sticker campaign to “Keep Christ in Christmas” won’t help that much, either. For me, instead, I’ll choose to “Seek Christ in Christmas.”
It’s a terrible life (American Mind)
This year a handful of my students were forced to watch Frank Capra’s 1947 classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Their reaction was: that’s bulls**t.
“So life is wonderful because you have a family and friends, and God sends guardian angels to watch over us?” exclaimed one of them. For my part, I do believe that life is wonderful. I even agree with the film’s conclusion that it is a gift. But not exactly for the reasons Capra presents to us. In fact, if the promises of meaning presented in the film were the only ones available to me, I would be clamoring along with my students about life’s emptiness.
Benevolence is agape minus communion…out go the ties of dependence on God and community. We may “respect” God and neighbor, but by no means is our atomized existence ontologically intertwined with theirs. Christmas, once the celebration of incarnational mysteries too deep to fathom, is reduced to sentimental, moralistic trappings.
This rejection of the “sources” of humanistic values, claims Irish journalist John Waters, is “deeply damaging to our children’s chances of peace and happiness.” Speaking specifically about the form of “post-Catholic” spirituality that has emerged in Ireland over the last few decades, Waters concedes that “it may be possible for an individual to live a hopeful, meaningful and free life without God” or with a therapeutic view of Him. But “there is no evidence,” he argues, “to suggest that this can be achieved by a society. And the irony is that the ‘hope’ atheists claim to feel may well derive not from their own philosophical resting place but from the background radiation of hope deriving from the residual effects of intense cultural faith.”
Those who “piggyback” off the few who maintain their ties to the ultimate Source of hope run the risk of taking for granted that said hope “always existed and will remain in spite of it all,” which is a “folly akin to sawing away the branch we are sitting on.” As the society as a whole continues to sever these ties, the remaining “buffers” will eventually wear away, leaving us “doomed to a form of collective depression.”
Capra leaves us with the message that “no man is a failure who has friends.” In the midst of financial instability, marital conflict, political corruption, and our individual moral failings, we need not despair. Nor need we turn to money, pleasure, or power. All we need is to look around at all the people whose lives we have touched. But what is it that sustains the possibility of real, meaningful, and lasting connections with our fellow human beings in light of our and others’ limitations (and inevitable mortality)? What some call Capra’s “fantasy of goodwill” leaves us without answers to these foundational questions.
We are now past the point where we can pretend that post-Christian trappings make for plausible Christianity. Frank Capra’s easy assumptions and borrowed symbols no longer carry persuasion. The relativistic and sometimes nihilistic air of postmodernism that young people breathe in might be disheartening, but in the least, it’s refreshingly honest. They are right to toss out the claim that in themselves these realities are enough to “save” us.
This piece got me in a lot of trouble. If I could rewrite it, I would add a bit praising the film’s the depiction of subsidiarist/communitarian economics. More on my position in the latest
pod ep.