Yesterday I mentioned that I’ve recorded 21 podcasts this year, including a limited-run series with Amy Poppinga called Pandemics and the Liberal Arts and new episodes of my sports podcast with Chris Moore and Sam Mulberry, The 252, and Nothing Rhymes with Gehrz, the odd little show in which Sam and I simply talk about … More Thursday’s Podcast: A 2020 Time Capsule
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” Matt 2:1-2 At this time of the church … More Twelve Days: King of Kings
Whatever else can be said of 2020, it’s been a busy twelve months for me as a writer. On top of publishing one book this year and writing a second, I wrote something like 225 blog posts: about two-thirds of them here, a couple dozen at our department blog, and the rest at The Anxious … More 2020: That Was The Year That Was
If Advent is a season of anticipation and Lent one of introspection, then Christmas is one of adoration, as so many of its best loved songs make clear. It’s a quiet time of tender reverence, as we imagine ourselves in the little town of Bethlehem (“how still we see thee lie”) on a silent night … More Twelve Days: “Heaven and Nature Sing”
Why is Christmas the shortest season in the Christian calendar? I think it’s partly because of a relative silence in the New Testament. The season that starts with the birth of Christ would naturally be the time to learn about the years immediately following Nativity, but the Bible says almost nothing about Jesus’ childhood, adolescence, … More Twelve Days: Jesus’ Sisters and Brothers
Despite what some members of my own family think, It’s a Wonderful Life is the best Christmas movie ever made. Not the cheeriest, but the best. But as I watched it again this Christmas Eve, it struck me that what makes it “the best” has changed for me over my own life. When I was … More Twelve Days: A Wonderful Life?
One of the Christmas Eve services I attended virtually on Thursday, the late one at my father-in-law’s church, began with chronology: (he’s a Lutheran, but this comes from a Catholic source) The Twenty-fifth Day of December… …in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees; in the … More Twelve Days: The Fullness of Time
If Protestants know that today is the feast of St. Stephen, it’s probably because of a rather odd carol, a Christmas song that makes no mention of Christ. As John Mason Neale’s “Good King Wenceslas” begins, it is December 26th, “the Feast of Stephen.” That night the medieval Czech monarch looks out and spots a … More Twelve Days: On the Feast of Stephen
Welcome to the start of another in my occasional attempts to blog through part of the daily lectionary. I’ll start this run of twelve Christmastide meditations on Christmas Eve, then resume on the 26th. My favorite moment in my current favorite TV series involves my favorite words from one of my favorite Christmas carols. In … More Twelve Days: Amid Bleak Winters
This week I introduced Anxious Bench readers to 1918’s version of pandemic Christmas. I failed to write anything at this blog, but in my defense, I did need some time to come up with this: And elsewhere… • Baseball doesn’t often make national news in December, but this decision certainly warranted attention. • Thomas Kidd considered the … More That Was The Week That Was
The Pietist Schoolman 