Antiquitopia

An old NYTimes Op-Ed article by one of my old professors, John Anthony McGuckin: December 25, 2007 Op-Ed Contributor St. Nick in the Big City By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN  ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place? Well, it’s a New York story. In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the mess...

Evidently, an artist is seeking recycled Christmas trees in London in order to turn them into wood three-legged stools. See here . It is a good idea, but they are being sold for $621 a piece. Frankly, I think I could make my own Christmas stool.

Because it is my mother's favorite Christmas song, here it is: "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." What a beautiful view that default screen gives us!

On Narnia and Christmas: two things created out of a conglomeration of elements...but how old are they? An article from the NYTimes claims that MOST of our ideas of Christmas are...Victorian! December 18, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor It’s a Narnia Christmas By LAURA MILLER EVERY Christmas, I re-read C .S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The holiday seems like the ideal time for an excursion into my imaginative past, and so I return to the paperback boxed set of “The Chronicles of Narnia” that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 10. For me, Narnia is intimately linked with the season. I’m not alone. In Britain, stage productions of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” are a holiday staple, for good reason. The book rests on a foundation of Christian imagery; its most famous scene is of a little girl standing under a lamppost in a snowy wood; and Father Christmas himself makes an appearance, after the lion god Aslan frees Narnia from an evil witch who decreed ...

I just saw this cartoon strip in the NYTimes . It is a modern day Christmas story. Merry Christmas to all with pinecone necklaces.

In the previous post, having established a trajectory of economic redistribution in Luke-Acts (John the Baptist-->Jesus-->early Jerusalem community), some of Luke's alterations and absences make more sense. Although reading absences is often dangerous, having Luke's source (Mark) and comparing alternative versions of the same saying (Matthew) puts us on a bit safer methodological grounds. Although many out there like to read absences anyway. One of the most famous alterations of shifts is in Luke's version of the Beatitudes. So, while Matthew has Jesus say, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:3) Luke has Jesus say, "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God" (Luke 6:20). Matthew follows the contemporary Jewish circumlocution in order to avoid saying "God" and instead says "heaven." But the more important shift, for the present purposes, is that Matthew writes "poo...