An archaeological dig in Nazareth, Israel, have uncovered what experts say is a home from the time of Jesus. Turns out, the entire city was about the same size as a city block in Philadelphia. Says Associated Press:
The dwelling and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of-the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres. It was evidently populated by Jews of modest means who kept camouflages grottos to hide from Roman invaders, said archaeologist Yardena Alexandre, excavations director at the Israel Antiquities Authority.
For me, this story came around at just the right time.
Maybe it’s just me, but the Christmas spirit seems to be a little off-kilter this year. Every day, I see another story of the season going south: Jesus shooting Santa in a holiday display. A priest advising his congregants to shoplift. Thieves robbing a daycare center of all its presents, food and even Christmas tree. And that’s in addition to our regular docket of news (Recession! Terrorism! Health care!). There’s so much noise and confusion this Christmas season that it’s easy — for me, at least — to lose sight of the fact that this is meant to be a time of joy and celebration.
But then, I hear about Nazareth, and I’m reminded about a world-size miracle born in the smallest of packages. I imagine how Nazareth might’ve looked in Jesus’ time — A handful of tiny houses huddled near places of hiding, filled with real people beset by problems big and small. I wonder … did Jesus, as a child, play in the streets with neighborhood kids? Did he crouch next to a wall and talk with his Father? Did he walk through the hills, counting the days as he neared his baptism, his ministry, his death, his life? Did the people around him know there was something different about him?
I initially read this story yesterday — Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year. While we Christians can’t know the exact date of Jesus’ birth, there’s no doubt as to why the early Church picked late December as when to celebrate it. How appropriate to be given a light in the darkest part of the year. How fitting we were given a spark of hope in the midst of winter’s sometimes hopeless chill.
We have not been relieved of our worries. Our lives are filled with strife, pain and pettiness. Frustrations and fears beset us from every side. But this time of year, we remember that our problems, as real and as hurtful as they are, are products of the darkness we live in. A glorious light has come to us, though. For unto us a child is born.
A California man is definitely in serious danger of landing on the naughty list.
Ron Lake of Nipomo, Calif., erected a Christmas display that features a statuette of Jesus standing over the lifeless body of Santa Claus with a shotgun. Lake says its a piece of art that comments on the commercialism of Christmas.
Neighbors are not pleased.
“I know it’s freedom of speech,” says neighbor Susana Cruz, “but it’s pretty disturbing and there are lots of children, that’s our main concern.”
According to the Pew Research Center, nearly a third of the world’s countries are home to some serious religious persecution, be it formally from the government or informally, from a faith-hostile populace. That equates to about 70 percent of the world’s population, since many of these persecution havens also are among the most crowded.
Most of the persecution, naturally, falls on religious minorities. In Islamic Indonesia, Muslims burned down a mosque belonging to a rival faction, according to an Associated Press story. The government of Singapore won’t recognize Jehovah’s Witnesses. Islamic countries tend to be among the most restrictive, both in terms of governmental and street-level persecution (Iran, Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan are among the world’s persecution front-runners), but China (technically atheist) and India (largely Hindu) also don’t do very well in Pew’s study.
Replica of the Loch Ness Monster. Photo by Stara Blazkova
Christmas is such a prickly holiday — at least for politicians. Is it OK to put up a nativity scene on public property? What if you’ve been doing it for a hundred years? What if you display other religious symbols, too? And where should we put the Festivus Tree?
According to the Associated Press, the pols in Kokomo, Ind., decided to bypass all the potential furor and slapped together a holiday display featuring none other than … the Loch Ness Monster. Yes, that slimy Scottish denizen of Christmas cheer, who when the children are all sleeping, wriggles down chimneys and leaves blurry, inconclusive photos of itself underneath the tree. The display also includes a fisherman, marching soldiers, a firetruck and candles.
“We’re following the advice of our attorney,” Dave Trine, president of the Howard County Board of Commissioners, told the Kokomo Tribune.
"Praying Hands" at Oral Roberts University. Photo courtesy the ORU Web site
Oral Roberts, one of America’s most influential charismatic pastors and perhaps the country’s first real televangelist, died yesterday from complications of pneumonia. He was 91.
Over the next few days, I’m sure eulogists will offer tributes to Roberts for all the great good he’s done, and I’m sure they’re all well deserved. For me, my first memory of the man — when he told his followers that God would call him home unless donors ponied up $8 million to shore up his school — forever mars his image in my mind. And I’m genuinely sorry about that. I wish I could appreciate him more, for there is much to appreciate. He influenced modern Christianity greatly — both for better and for worse.
Patton Dodd, my good friend (and former editor of this Web site), never met Oral Roberts, as far as I know. But he went to the school he founded for a time, documenting the experience with beautiful, brutal honesty in his book “My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion.” And, when I heard of Roberts’ passing, I recalled a passage where Dodd describes his first impression of Oral Robert University’s Tulsa, Okla., campus:
Pulling in, we see the welcoming structure: a forty-foot bronze statue of two hands clasped in prayer. “There’s the Praying Hands,” someone says, alerting me to the statue’s apt name. The hands are pointed upward so that their wrists form the base and their rounded fingertips form the summit. Everyone in the van becomes quiet at the sight of this megalith, and I wonder whether we are all thinking, Wow, what a moving symbol of our faith, or Wow, what a misguided caricature. I am stuck in between. I am committed to prayer — I am, in fact, a Prayer Warrior — but this. This is eccentric. Finally, someone emits a snicker, and we all relieve ourselves with giggles. It’s not blasphemous to laugh at the laughable. Really, it’s a good-natured giggle at our own expense, because it is faith like ours that results in statues like this.
Perhaps those praying hands are a fitting symbol of Oral Roberts himself, and what he stood for: Maybe we’re awed by what he did, what he accomplished, what he meant to so many Christians. Maybe we laugh a little. Regardless, the hands remain, clasped in prayer — reverent, ironic, forever challenging — a monument to a towering faith, and how it can lose something in the translation.
And we Christians wonder why sometimes non-Christians don’t trust us very much.
You may have heard that the Christian group Living Waters, led by New Zealand evangelist Charles Comfort, was handing out Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” on college campuses across the country. Comfort, naturally, wasn’t just interested in commemorating the 150th anniversary of the book: Rather, Comfort served up a nifty little rebuttal of evolution and also pointed out that Darwin’s work has been used to bolster racism. He was, in short, taking the classic tome of evolution and using it against evolutionists.
Turns out, Comfort was also allegedly taking someone else’s introduction.
Stan Guffey, a professor at the University of Tennessee, is a Darwin booster who, in 1997, wrote a three-page biography on Darwin that was handed out on campus and eventually was used on a pro-Darwin Web site. Now, Guffey alleges that Comfort just picked up his biography and used it practically verbatim in Living Water’s introduction to “Origin of Species,” according to Rikki Hall, writing for Metro Pulse.
Comfort put his introduction on the Web months ago, and several bloggers who monitor anti-evolution efforts noted differences in style between the biography and the rest of the introduction. A brief computer search uncovered the source, and they confronted the author and publisher about the apparent plagiarism months before the book was printed. Guffey says he was never contacted for permission to use the biography. Both the author and publisher declined to comment for this story. Contacted by phone, [publisher] Bridge-Logos publicist Shawn Myers said it was the first she had heard of matter, so she was unable to respond.
Now, I’m on record as saying that God and evolution can coexist quite nicely: Evolution doesn’t threaten my faith at all, and frankly, I think there are more pressing matters facing Christians these days.
But, if you’re going to take on the scientific community by utilizing their most “sacred” book, you gotta make sure that your behavior is above reproach. To plagiarize someone else’s work is a fine way to undermine the rest of the project, if you ask me. And it kinda violates the whole “thou shalt not steal” commandment, too.
Really, that whole “living above reproach” thing is a good motto for Christians pert near all the time, don’t you think?
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1 cor 12:12
An archaeological dig in Nazareth, Israel, have uncovered what experts say is a home from the time of Jesus. Turns out, the entire city was about the same size as a city block in Philadelphia. Says Associated Press:
