Advent

Pull Down Thy Vanity

There is something essentially comic about vanity. I ran into the phenomenon recently at the local fitness center where I have a membership. Everyone, I suspect, has seen the type: he lifts weights, often with a lot of...

In Search of the “Everlasting Man”

Of late I’ve grown rather cool toward Christmas. It’s a curious development. When I was a child, Christmas seemed the height of magic and mystery. Now when people ask me my favorite holidays, I answer...

Educate Your Friends This Christmas About Higher Education

Advent has only just begun but many of us are already thinking of Christmas. In one sense, this is fair enough. Advent is a time of preparation for our celebration of the...

Home and Hearth: A Cautionary Christmas With Washington Irving

In the 1820s, Washington Irving was credited with inspiring the romantic revival of Christmas in America. His Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman relayed sentimental tales of the British holiday with all its romance and traditions. The...

Advent and Melancholy

Nothing breaks through melancholy like a baby. During Advent, we wait for that moment of absolute newness that we need within but cannot muster, that moment when the whole of the divine nature, the whole meaning of universes beyond number, lies helpless before us...

A Military Chaplain’s Sermon for the Occasion of War at Advent

The challenge for the soldier at Christmas is to question his agency, and to reflect upon the birth of the Christ child as both the pronouncement of demise for those who intend to make war, and of salvation for those who suffer its symptoms...

“King Lear” in Advent

King Lear reminds us that only a love that cracks our hearts through loss can truly reveal the gift of the Incarnation… When John Henry Cardinal Newman writes about Advent in one of his sermons, he meditates on how this season of...

An Advent Calendar with a Difference

The best way of seeing the joy of Advent and Christmas is through the eyes of a child, which ideally should be our own. We should see the time of expectation, which is Advent, through eyes which...

No Room at the Inn: Celebrating Christmas in the Stable

Much has been written this year, indeed much is written every year, about the “war on Christmas.” A trip to the local Mall will show that the commercial stores are not only removing Christ from Christmas and forgetting...

An Advent Imbroglio and the Holy Trinity

On December 22, 1994, my new bride and I were enjoying our third day of wedded bliss at Myrtle Beach on our honeymoon when my pastor-parish relations chair called to inform me that a church member...

Advent 1955

The Advent wind begins to stir With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir, It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea, And in between we only see Clouds hurrying across the sky And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry And...