International trade is constrained by eight primary maritime chokepoints, hard realities imposed by immutable geography. The United States has long recognized a vital national security interest in ensuring freedom of navigation through each of them. This strike helped protect those interests.

Half of these eight global chokepoints are dispersed widely. Only one each can be found in Europe (the Strait of Gibraltar), in Africa (the Cape of Good Hope), in East Asia (the Straits of Malacca), and in the Americas (the Panama Canal). Unfortunately, the other half of these critical chokepoints are all concentrated in a relatively small region where southwestern Asia meets Europe and Africa: the Bosporus Strait, the Suez Canal, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz. This area also happens to be the most important single source of the energy required to sustain global economic growth. Those two facts explain why US presidents keep rediscovering the need to focus disproportionately on the Middle East, despite their often-heartfelt desires to do otherwise.

Today, the greatest threat to these chokepoints is Iran and its proxies. The regime in Tehran has long threatened to shut down Hormuz and repeatedly attacked shipping in the area. Most recently, it even threatened to shut down Gibraltar. The Houthis, Iran’s partner and proxy in Yemen, had repeatedly attacked ships transiting the Bab. The Biden administration recognized the threat, laid the diplomatic predicate, assembled the multilateral coalition, deployed the assets, issued clear warnings, and then took action. This is what professional policymaking looks like. One hopes that the right lessons will be learned in both Sanaa and Tehran.

Read it all.

The US can no longer afford to underestimate the threat posed by the Houthis, much less the threat posed by the wider network that supports Iranian malign behavior, writes @ACMideast’s @WillWechsler.

Read more. ⬇️ https://t.co/OX8fyHaik7

— Atlantic Council (@AtlanticCouncil) January 12, 2024

It is notoriously tricky to synthesize data from all the world’s weather stations into one measure of global warming, but all of the major efforts to do so for 2023 are now in, and they are also all in distressing alignment: Last year was the warmest recorded in modern history, and it broke that record by an exceedingly large margin, one that conventional climate science has not yet managed to adequately explain.

The big data sets are now all in, and one of them, published by Berkeley Earth last week, contained what counts as an eye-popping assertion even against the backdrop of the record-setting year: The global average temperature was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level. (Other models had it just below.)

When climate scientists and advocates talk about the risks of breaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — as they have somewhat obsessively at least since it was established as the ambitious climate goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement and since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change described the consequences of exceeding it in its 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C — this isn’t exactly what they mean. That threshold describes a long-term average rather than a single-year anomaly. But because it describes a multidecade average, the measure will always be backward-looking, with the precise moment the world crossed the 1.5 mark clear only in retrospect. This year a handful of prominent scientists have suggested that when we do look back to mark that time, we may well circle 2023.

Read it all.

How hot was it last year?

Read: https://t.co/zfXKwLBnE2

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) January 18, 2024

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it’s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it … Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was … Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

Read it all.

Alana Newhouse in Tablet "Everything Is Broken: And how to fix it". https://t.co/TF0xr1olos Will be interested to see if anyone does not agree that it is very significant

— Edward N Luttwak (@ELuttwak) January 15, 2021

Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Americans are encouraged to volunteer to honor the legacy of the late civil rights leader. The federal holiday was officially dedicated to volunteerism in 1994 under the King Holiday and Service Act in a bid to motivate the public to do good in their communities.

While the holiday is a popular time for civic service, the volunteering rate across the US is at record lows, following a steady decline since at least the 2010’s.

The latest official data on community service, released last year by AmeriCorps through the Census Bureau, revealed a particularly steep decline during the pandemic. Less than a quarter of Americans age 16 and older said they formally volunteered through an organization between September 2020 to September 2021, down from 30% in 2019 and the lowest rate recorded since the organization began the survey in 2002. The decline is prevalent across various states and demographic groups, according to the data.

Read it all.

Americans are volunteering less than ever, as service work rates hit a record low https://t.co/8zvV1SOtTc via @citylab

— Bloomberg (@business) January 15, 2024

Advanced artificial intelligence models can be trained to deceive humans and other AI, a new study has found.

Researchers at AI startup Anthropic tested whether chatbots with human-level proficiency, such as its Claude system or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could learn to lie in order to trick people.

They found that not only could they lie, but once the deceptive behaviour was learnt it was impossible to reverse using current AI safety measures.

Read it all.

AI can easily be trained to lie – and it can’t be fixed, study says
https://t.co/r5rx8DNJUA

— Brendan Tierney (@brendantierney) January 15, 2024

In a dispiriting sign of the times, barely more than a quarter of Americans say the American dream still holds true — about half as many as said so 13 years ago.

Defined as “if you work hard you’ll get ahead,” just 27% in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll say the American dream still holds, down sharply from 50% when the question first was asked in 2010. Eighteen percent now say it never held true, up from 4%.

The rest, 52%, say the promise used to hold true but no longer does, up 9 points. Taken together, 69% say the American dream does not hold true today, up 22 points. And that’s in comparison to a poll taken in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Read it all.

In a dispiriting sign of the times, barely more than a quarter of Americans say the American dream still holds true — about half as many as said so 13 years ago. https://t.co/M7SfeWawOA

— ABC News (@ABC) January 15, 2024

I also came to see that liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man’s defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.

In spite of the fact that I had to reject some aspects of liberalism, I never came to an all-out acceptance of neo-orthodoxy. While I saw neo-orthodoxy as a helpful corrective for a liberalism that had become all too sentimental, I never felt that it provided an adequate answer to the basic questions. If liberalism was too optimistic concerning human nature, neo-orthodoxy was too pessimistic. Not only on the question of man but also on other vital issues, neo-orthodoxy went too far in its revolt. In its attempt to preserve the transcendence of God, which had been neglected by liberalism’s overstress of his immanence, neo-orthodoxy went to the extreme of stressing a God who was hidden, unknown and “wholly other.” In its revolt against liberalism’s overemphasis on the power of reason, neo-orthodoxy fell into a mood of antirationalism and semifundamentalism, stressing a narrow, uncritical biblicism. This approach, I felt, was inadequate both for the church and for personal life.

So although liberalism left me unsatisfied on the question of the nature of man, I found no refuge in neo-orthodoxy. I am now convinced that the truth about man is found neither in liberalism nor in neo-orthodoxy. Each represents a partial truth. A large segment of Protestant liberalism defined man only in terms of his essential nature, his capacity for good. Neo-orthodoxy tended to define man only in terms of his existential nature, his capacity for evil. An adequate understanding of man is found neither in the thesis of liberalism nor in the antithesis of neo-orthodoxy, but in a synthesis which reconciles the truths of both.

Read it all.

“Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” #MLK #MLKDay2024 #MLKDay #MLK95 #ShiftTheCulture pic.twitter.com/F6UhkDNqcI

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) January 15, 2024

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Read it all.

I wouldn't be where I am today without the dedication, vision, and sacrifice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I honor him for being a voice for equity and what is right.

Dr. King is an inspiration! I am dedicated to continuing his legacy through my work in underserved communities.… pic.twitter.com/i6FDnx7wzk

— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) January 15, 2024

As a white evangelical Christian who is also an academic historian, I face three questions as I think about King: (1) How should I understand King as a historical figure, in the context of his own time and place? (2) How should my understanding of King affect my own understanding of Christian theology and the Bible? and (3) How should my understanding of King and Christian theology affect my response to issues of racial justice today?

The first question is the easiest to answer: King was a complicated figure, but it seems clear that his theological and political views differed substantially from those of white evangelicals both then or now. To understand King’s views, we have to understand the history of the Black social gospel, as theological historian Gary Dorrien has argued.

The second question is more uncomfortable: Does white evangelicalism’s resistance to the ethics of King show that we’ve gotten our theology wrong, and should we therefore become converts to the Black social gospel?

We need to choose our Christian theology based on our understanding of biblical truth, not merely on our attraction to a particular way of life or our admiration of a Christian principle in action. But whenever we find evidence that our own theological tradition hasn’t adequately rejected a given sin, like racism, we should identify the theological blind spots that kept our tradition from seeing that evil. We should adopt instead a theological corrective that includes not only our own understandings of the Bible but also whatever biblical truths we find in other Christian traditions, including King’s theology and the theology of other Black Christians.

Regardless of our understanding of King, we also need to answer the question of how we should respond to racial injustice today—and whether we should appeal to King’s words when we do so.

Read it all.

An insightful reflection from Daniel K. Williams on the relationship of evangelicals to MLK, Jr. and how it has shifted over the years.

One takeaway: get better at seeing people from history in all their messy glory, not rushing to instrumentalize them.https://t.co/ypXy4T0dBF

— Trevin Wax (@TrevinWax) January 15, 2024

You can find the full text here.

I find it always is really worth the time to listen to and read and ponder it all on this day especially–KSH.

Almighty God, who by the hand of Moses thy servant didst lead thy people out of slavery, and didst make them free at last: Grant that thy Church, following the example of thy prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of thy love, and may strive to secure for all thy children the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

🧵 On his 95th birthday, I wanted to share some color photos of Daddy. It wasn’t that long ago… #MLKDay #MLK95 #MLK pic.twitter.com/DRNoVDEhbT

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) January 15, 2024

Mitch was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, on his 40th birthday (September, 2021) when vacationing in Portugal. He was rushed to the United States to seek treatment at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston and to be with his family. During his 27-month long journey, he fought for his life seeking many types of treatments as well as traveling to Germany for a custom vaccine, consulting with doctors at Dana- Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and at Duke’s Brain Cancer Center in North Carolina. Mitch’s persistent personality and determination to battle this cancer while continuing to maintain his routine and quality of life helped him to outlive the average glioblastoma patient. While undergoing treatment, he was quick to re-kindle time and make memories with family and friends.

Through his cancer journey Mitch became a strong Christian and was baptized. He became active at the Church of the Holy Cross on Daniel Island forming strong relationships with the community and men’s life group. Mitch wrote his testimony about his journey to Christianity and was passionate about sharing it with others. Through his ministry he reached many people sharing what he learned from his life and the message that it is never too late to seek God.

Mitch is survived by his parents, Jim and Wanda Petersen; his sister, Rebecca Petersen Leddy; his brother-in-law, Lee Leddy; his nephew, Logan Leddy; his nephew, Connor Leddy; his niece, Sophia Leddy; and his aunt, Sandra Garrison.

Read it all.

James Mitchell ("Mitch) Petersen II RIP https://t.co/YbqpOMM5MU #death #family #faith #parishministry #southcarolina

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) January 13, 2024

Imagine the kings, the caravans’ stilted procession
As they make for the cave, or, rather, three beams closing in
And in on the star, the creaking of loads, the clink of a cowbell;
(No thronging of Heaven as yet, no peal of the bell

That will ring in the end for the infant once he has earned it).
Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded
Immensely in distance, recognizing Himself in the Son
Of Man: His homelessness plain to him now in a homeless one.

Read it all.

Anonim după / Anonymus after
Rafael Sanzio de Urbino (1483-1520)
The Adoration of the Magi
16th century
Oil on canvas
Nostalgie. Amintire. Regăsire. Peisajul european și ruina în secolele XVI-XIX | Muzeul Național de Artă al României, Bucureștihttps://t.co/iH6Mf1pOd9 pic.twitter.com/1774sLInAB

— madalina potinc (@madalinapotinc) August 3, 2022

In the cold season, in a locality accustomed to heat more than
to cold, to horizontality more than to a mountain,
a child was born in a cave in order to save the world;
it blew as only in deserts in winter it blows, athwart….

Read it all.

Se pone entre tus manos el precio de nuestra salvación /Adorazione dei Magi (detalle), Cesare di Sesto. pic.twitter.com/JZr7V6rczC

— Paulo Medina (@goya1881) November 7, 2017

It might have been just someone else’s story,
Some chosen people get a special king.
We leave them to their own peculiar glory,
We don’t belong, it doesn’t mean a thing.
But when these three arrive they bring us with them….

Read it all.

Francisco de Zubaran ( 1598-1664 ) Adoration of the Magi 1639 pic.twitter.com/Kj7qHA0hIq

— BrindusaB (@BrindusaB1) January 6, 2024

Listen to and ponder it all–more than once.

You may find the full text there (note that the audio is TS Eliot himself reading the poem).

Follow the star to the feast of the Epiphany on 6th January!

BL Add MS 37472, f.r @BLMedieval pic.twitter.com/mXuszwSUKa

— Ennius (@red_loeb) January 5, 2024

How could they have known not to come
On what amounted to pretense? Everything
Their learning held, all their beliefs
Said regal gifts were needful for a king.

The things they brought were left behind,
Doubtless; or maybe traded for bread:
Impecunious Joseph with a family
To feed, a roof to put over his head.

Read it all.

Follow the star to the feast of the Epiphany on 6th January!

BL Add MS 37472, f.r @BLMedieval pic.twitter.com/mXuszwSUKa

— Ennius (@red_loeb) January 5, 2024

..[Jesus of Nazareth] was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”–he was God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace: it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

—Creed or Chaos? (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company,1949), page 4 (with special thanks to blog reader and friend WW)

Today's pick: Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn: The Holy Family with Angels https://t.co/nLizVvCuFK pic.twitter.com/Ii15mIg8gN

— Art and the Bible (@artbible) January 1, 2024

I have a friend who teaches in the upper peninsula in Michigan. He has one of those schools that run from kindergarten all the way up through eighth grade, including special ed. One of his students was intellectually slow, couldn’t do very well in classes. And when Christmas Pageant time came he wanted to have a part in the Pageant. What’s more, he wanted a speaking part. He wouldn’t settle for anything less.

So they made into the innkeeper. They figured he could handle that because all he had to do was say, “No room,” twice: once before Mary spoke, once after she spoke. The night of the Pageant, Mary knocks on the door he opens the door, and he says in a brusque fashion, “No room!” Mary says, “But I’m sick, and I’m cold, and I’m going to have a baby, and if you don’t give me a place to sleep, my baby will be born in the cold, cold night.”

He just stood there. The boy behind him nudged him and said, “No room, No room, say, “No room.’” And finally, he turned and he said, “I know what I’m supposed to say, but she can have my room.”

–Anthony Campolo in William H. Willimon Ed, Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p.294

Bernardo Cavallino is just the dreamiest. (Adoration of the Shepherds, Cleveland Museum of Art, c. 1650) pic.twitter.com/mg2hdaBlr2

— Jesse M. Locker (@JesseMLocker) December 24, 2019

Christmas teaches us this great mystery: the truth of Trinitarian love is so beautiful and heart-breaking that it could only be communicated in the form of a child. Being a father has driven home the reality of children in a new way. When my wife was expecting our first son, a friend told me: “Being married is joyful; having children is like mainlining joy.” I have found this to be true. Yes, having children is exhausting and self-consuming and all the rest, but my little son is a well of bottomless joy and wonder, right within reach. The sound of his voice and the touch of his hand are some of life’s sweetest delights. Léon Bloy writes that suffering brings into existence new places in the human heart, but so does joy. God came to us as a baby to show us that joy is more real than sorrow, that our deepest joys now are but a taste of his inner life.

Christmas is a season of gratuitous beauty, both in the sense of being excessive and being a gift of grace. When celebrated rightly, all the effort and cost become an extravagant gift, a sign of the lavish generosity and glory of God. Christmas is the feast when that glory is revealed as humble and self-emptying, when God condescends to become a beauty we can receive. “You can never stop looking at your baby,” my mother told me, and she was right. This is not because a baby is brilliantly truthful or morally good, but because he is beautiful in a way that nothing else is.

In her recent St. Margaret of Scotland Lecture at St. Andrew’s, theologian Jennifer Newsome Martin reflects on what our experience of beauty teaches us about the truth of God—in this case, the beauty of a garden of sunflowers she had planted last spring:

And I could not stop looking at them. I never grew tired of looking at them. . . . I regarded the sunflowers in a mode of absolute gratuity, contemplating without expectation those magnificent, endlessly fascinating heliotropes that followed the sun all day with their attentive, cheerful faces turned toward the corollary giftedness of its rays. . . .

To look at them—and I know saying this probably approaches cliché—made my heart soar. I could actually feel it in my chest. But it also, in a very real way, made my heart sore. The homonymic potential here between “soar” (S-O-A-R) and “sore” (S-O-R-E) is very apt, because in my own experience of beauty, if I am paying good attention, it really is something of both: a cocktail of bliss and pain together, and inextricably so.

Is this not our experience of the child Jesus and Christmas, too?

Read it all.

Love and good wishes to all at Christmas (Nativity, Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) pic.twitter.com/KiEV9luoWM

— Andrew Davison (@AP_Davison) December 25, 2020

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Gloria in eccelsis deo, cries the angel silently. Stolen by the mafia in 1969, never recovered, alas! Caravaggio's late great Adoration of the shepherds. pic.twitter.com/KHMl5jeuxh

— Dr. Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) December 26, 2023

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Christmas time. Peter Paul Rubens, The Adoration of the Magi, 1628-1629. #galeriamiguelnabinho #christmastime pic.twitter.com/fwOxdT0YxO

— Miguel Nabinho (@miguelnabinho) December 26, 2023

My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichaean spirit of the times and suffer the much-discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is case for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

—Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969) pp. 33-34 [my emphasis]

Merry Christmas to all!!!

“The Nativity” (1776-1777) by John Singleton Copley pic.twitter.com/KEdKgL3OLD

— Isabel Azar (@izzyroseazar) December 26, 2021

Deeply penetrated with this sentiment I George Washington President of the United States do recommend to all Religious Societies and Denominations and to all persons whomsoever within the United States to set apart and observe thursday the nineteenth day of February next as a day of public Thanksgiving and prayer; and on that day to meet together and render their sincere and hearty thanks to the great ruler of Nations for the manifold and signal mercies, which distinguish our lot as a Nation; particularly for the possession of Constitutions of Government which unite and by their union establish liberty with order, for the preservation of our peace foreign and domestic, for the seasonable controul which has been given to a spirit of disorder in the suppression of the late insurrection, and generally for the prosperous course of our affairs public and private…

Read it all.

1 Jan 1622: The #Papal Chancery adopts January 1st as the beginning of the new year. It had been March 25. #OTD #HappyNewYear #history #Vatican #pope #NewYear #ad https://t.co/PRuD3HZBEz https://t.co/EsutcbQsyY pic.twitter.com/35BaU8iQo3

— Today In History (@URDailyHistory) January 1, 2022

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and
put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light
and safer than a known way.”

So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

Read it all. An excerpt from this poem was famously read by King George VI in his 1939 Christmas broadcast. For more about the author of the poem please read this.

Happy new year! Here is a page from the Sherborne missal open at Epiphany – complete with the adoration of the magi, assorted animals, and an abbot. I particularly like Mary and child in the middle of the page. #medievalmonday #manuscriptmonday pic.twitter.com/FYPxeLyY4P

— Dr Naomi (@BooksTeaFilms) January 1, 2024

so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are

Read it all.

🎆 Charting to the New Year with anchor-sized ambitions and the wind of possibilities at our backs. May your 2024 be as epic as a naval fleet on the high seas! 🌊⚓ #NavalNewYear #SetSailForSuccess pic.twitter.com/4u08oPUJa0

— U.S. Navy (@USNavy) January 1, 2024

I have a friend who teaches in the upper peninsula in Michigan. He has one of those schools that run from kindergarten all the way up through eighth grade, including special ed. One of his students was intellectually slow, couldn’t do very well in classes. And when Christmas Pageant time came he wanted to have a part in the Pageant. What’s more, he wanted a speaking part. He wouldn’t settle for anything less.

So they made into the innkeeper. They figured he could handle that because all he had to do was say, “No room,” twice: once before Mary spoke, once after she spoke. The night of the Pageant, Mary knocks on the door he opens the door, and he says in a brusque fashion, “No room!” Mary says, “But I’m sick, and I’m cold, and I’m going to have a baby, and if you don’t give me a place to sleep, my baby will be born in the cold, cold night.”

He just stood there. The boy behind him nudged him and said, “No room, No room, say, “No room.’” And finally, he turned and he said, “I know what I’m supposed to say, but she can have my room.”

–Anthony Campolo in William H. Willimon Ed, Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from “A Great Towering Church” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p.294

Second day of Christmas: Joseph takes a nap as visitors start to arrive to see new baby. Adoration of the Shepherds by Mantegna, 1450s. pic.twitter.com/Bbp8JlO5bV

— Dr. Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) December 26, 2022

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time
and of time,
A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history:
transecting, bisecting the world of time,
a moment in time but not like a moment of time,
A moment in time but time was made through that moment:
for without the meaning there is no time,
and that moment of time gave the meaning.

—T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”, VII, as found for example there (page 107).

Sandro Botticelli, The Nativity of Christ (Mystic Nativity), 1501, Oil on canvas, 11/21/23 #legionofhonor pic.twitter.com/YVo90CUW1M

— Sharon Mollerus (@clairity_org) December 24, 2023