A Response to Kitschmas

Winston Elliott offers counsel on how to transcend the Kitschmas in this brief and helpful blog post: The Christocentric Life – Beauty  In this season when the commercial nature of the Christmas season often confronts us with schlock and parodies of real beauty we can focus on the love of Christ as it is expressed in true [...]

Christmas is about suffering

When St. Paul was nearing the end of his earthly pilgrimage and sat in a Roman prison awaiting word on his fate, he wrote one last letter to a young man whom he had mentored and given authority over the church in Ephesus. The mother of our Lord, Mary, had only recently ended her own [...]

A Serious Question About Celebrating Christmas

A few days ago I mildly criticized kitschmas. One of the points I made was that kitsch doesn’t measure up to Camp because Camp tries to be serious while kitsch doesn’t even bother. Thus, it seems, Camp can give us a strange sort of just pleasure in that we can get the point even while the producer [...]

St. Nicholas of Myra Movie Coming Soon

This one has my attention. Want to learn some more about the project? Click here.

Christmas & Commercialism

Over the last several years, I have encountered an increasing number of articles and discussions about the “secularization” or “commercialization” of Christmas.  Recently, a local newscast conducted a street poll in which nearly every interviewee agreed that Christmas was “coming earlier and earlier every year.”  Christmas music starts too soon.  Stores bring out decorations too [...]

Some Christmas carols

Here’s a set of articles about the stories behind some Christmas carols. It’s the little things that make it interesting, like that Armenian Charles Wesley wrote “Hark how all the welkin rings” and his rival, Calvinist George Whitefield, changed it to the present version. Each story also has some music to sing along to. No piano? No worries. You’ve [...]

Choosing Heroes

We Christians have a different way of seeing things, of setting values, and that leads us to honor different heroes than those who see things more conventionally. We value God’s blessed creation, for example, so we honor those who make the great discoveries. But we don’t value it as an arbitrary, pointless thing that simply [...]