The servers at the humming headquarters of The American Interest collapsed for about 12 hours yesterday, perhaps overcome with excitement that as Christine Russell points out today, New Year’s Eve this year falls on a blue moon.However, not to worry.  The-American-Interest.com is on top of the problem; we’ve reviewed the literature and are handling this […]

Now it gets tough.  That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from […]

Yesterday I blogged about how theists and atheists are the same; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life.  Human life amounts to more than eating and scratching, and we want to do something real with our lives.  […]

[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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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.  […]