As a supervisor at a Washington Mutual mortgage processing center, John D. Parsons was accustomed to seeing baby sitters claiming salaries worthy of college presidents, and schoolteachers with incomes rivaling stockbrokers’. He rarely questioned them. A real estate frenzy was under way and WaMu, as his bank was known, was all about saying yes.

Yet even by WaMu’s relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer.

Mr. Parsons could not verify the singer’s income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi outfit. The photo went into a WaMu file. Approved.

“I’d lie if I said every piece of documentation was properly signed and dated,” said Mr. Parsons, speaking through wire-reinforced glass at a California prison near here, where he is serving 16 months for theft after his fourth arrest ”” all involving drugs.

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Crowds of thousands swept into the streets of cities around the Middle East on Sunday to denounce Israel’s air assault on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.

From Lebanon to Iran, Israel’s adversaries used the weekend assault to marshal crowds into the streets for noisy demonstrations. And among regional allies there was also discontent: The prime minister of Turkey, one of the few Muslim countries to have relations with Israel, called the air assault a ”crime against humanity.”

Several of Sunday’s protests turned violent. A crowd of anti-Israel protesters in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul became a target for a suicide bomber on a bicycle.

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In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

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A long-awaited property- settlement decision in Fairfax Circuit Court apparently will not be the end of a two-year-long conflict between a minority group of conservative congregations in the Episcopal Church that broke away from the church to join the Anglican District of Virginia.

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It’s been a fascinating but worrisome year for journalism. There have been cutbacks just about everywhere. The giant Tribune Company has filed for bankruptcy. Some publications have completely folded. Some have stopped the presses and moved to the Internet.

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins host Jacki Lyden to help us sort out where journalism’s been and what’s ahead.

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Families gather at Christmas. And this weekend the Sunday after the feast is devoted to recalling the family in Nazareth, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It is an opportunity for appreciating what our families give us. For Christians the family is the original source of social life. But we should be wary of facile sentimentality. Our homes are filled with memories. Many are joyful, but some are not.

The old saying tells us that charity begins at home. That may be true, but not because the family setting is always one where life is easy and conflict unknown. On the contrary, it is much easier to star as the perfect guest when staying for a few days with friends. We can hold our breath and be charming and considerate for a weekend.

The family as a school for loving is a much tougher place.

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Elsewhere, the U.N., British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and special Mideast envoy Tony Blair all called for an immediate restoration of calm.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi urged Israelis and Palestinians to “look for a different way out, even though it seems impossible.”

The United States urged Israel to avoid civilian casualties, and said Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel.

Russia also called on Hamas to halt the rocket attacks, and urged Israel to halt its military operation in Gaza.

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“The Admiralty had demanded six ships: the economists offered four: and we finally compromised on eight.”

–Winston Churchill on naval appropriations as quoted by George Will

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it’s Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa….

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Read them all (toward the bottom of the page).

The most thoughtful and interesting debate of the two-year-long presidential campaign occurred last August at Saddleback Church between John McCain and Barack Obama, moderated by Saddleback pastor Rick Warren. So it is notable that President-elect Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his Inauguration next month has brought forth hyperpartisan invective from the Democratic left. It has spent the past week conveying to the world its disappointment and disgust with the choice of Pastor Warren because he opposes gay marriage and abortion.

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Back then, instead of relying on a few megadonors, the Jewish community relied on donors like my dad. He favored charities in Jerusalem, and regularly would dispense two-figure checks of $10 or $20 to his pet causes — orphanages, trade schools, even a bride’s fund designed to help orphaned girls obtain wedding dresses and veils for their big day.

It would be lovely to see the return of little checks — the donations everyone could afford to give and often did. Neither they nor the pushkes require the fund-raising galas and the elaborate administrative structures that have become the norm across the Jewish charitable world.

Some Jewish leaders may blanch at my words. Prof. Wertheimer notes that “Jewish organizational life has become much more expensive — nickels, dimes and pushkes aren’t going to do it.” Though Mr. Kane at the UJA and others now hint at new strategies to broaden the donor base, some Jewish leaders are ready to return to business as usual, sending the message that we must get in some big checks to replace the money that was lost. But this scandal makes me wish we could remember the values of our shtetl and think small again.

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KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY): Well, I was fascinated of course by some of the things these guys have talked about, but also just the incredible role religion played on every front throughout this campaign. You had both parties actively reaching out to people of faith, and frankly for the Democrats, that was a new thing. You hadn’t seen that in quite awhile. You had a Democratic candidate who was religious and comfortable about talking about his faith. But you also had questions about whether a Mormon could be president; you had questions about whether a Southern Baptist pastor should be president; what about a Muslim, and all the, you know, rumors about whether Barack Obama was a Muslim or not. You had questions about evangelicals and are they going to stay with John McCain. Controversial ministers. Every time you turned around religion played a key role, and that was really fun to watch.

Mr. [E.J.] DIONNE: I think that’s a really important point Kim makes. I mean, for Democrats, I’ve joked that Democrats discovered God in the 2004 exit polls. You know, they realized that religious Americans were very important in George Bush’s victories, and I think Barack Obama more than any Democrat in a while really tried to speak directly to religious Americans, including those he knew were going to vote against him. You know, he gave a very powerful speech in ’06. The speech he gave after the Jeremiah Wright controversy had sort of important religious overtones, and so I think we’re going to have a different conversation about religion going forward.

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The values and disciplines underpinning our societies’ massive accumulation of wealth were largely Judaeo-Christian. But for most, the religious part has been privatised, confined to individual observance or simply ignored. Neither Christianity, as it developed in the centuries after the Reformation, nor Judaism stigmatised wealth (Islam has a more complex attitude to capitalism still) – so long as it was virtuously acquired and used for the benefit of others.

That caveat – on virtuous acquisition and charitable giving – is crucial. The virtues of hard work, orderly life and honest dealing inculcated by religion – the life cultivated by the Gabriels – have been put to service to create once-unimaginable riches. Now that such accumulation is seen as an expression more of greed than of virtue, will there be a turning back to the values that produced the preconditions for the making of the money?

It was not much in evidence when times were good.

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In the past decade, China has invested upward of $1 trillion, mostly earnings from manufacturing exports, into American government bonds and government-backed mortgage debt. That has lowered interest rates and helped fuel a historic consumption binge and housing bubble in the United States.

China, some economists say, lulled American consumers, and their leaders, into complacency about their spendthrift ways.

“This was a blinking red light,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “We should have reacted to it.”

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Natalie Hickey left her small hometown in Ohio six years ago and aimed her beat-up Dodge Intrepid for the West Coast. Four years later, she realized a long-held dream and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in photography from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara.

She also picked up $140,000 in student debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 18%. Her monthly payments are roughly $1,700, more than her rent and car payment combined.

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When Barack Obama takes the oath of office in just over three weeks, he will be confronted with the worst economic crisis since the Depression. NPR News Analyst Juan Williams talks about President-elect Barack Obama’s plans for the economy.

Listen to it all from NPR.

So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said ”” again ”” that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven ”” dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt ”” and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

What on earth does this mean?

One very plausible explanation is that Americans just want good things to come to good people, regardless of their faith.

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The religious makeup of the incoming 111th Congress roughly matches the overall American religious landscape, with overrepresentation among Jews and Mormons, according to new analysis by the nonpartisan Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Just over half (55 percent) of House and Senate members who will take office on Jan. 6 are Protestants, compared to 51 percent of the U.S. population. The second-largest group, Catholics, make up 30 percent of lawmakers, compared to 24 percent of all Americans.

Among Protestants, Baptists lead in the House and Senate, at 12 percent, followed by Methodists (11 percent), Presbyterians (8 percent), Episcopalians (7 percent) and Lutherans (4.5 percent).

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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the Israeli air campaign was “criminal” and urged world powers to intervene.

Egypt said it would keep trying to restore the truce between Israel and Gaza.

Hamas threatened to unleash “hell” to avenge the dead, including possible suicide bombings inside Israel.

Hamas estimated that at least 100 members of its security forces had been killed, including police chief Tawfiq Jabber and the head of Hamas’s security and protection unit, along with at least 15 women and some children.

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Israeli warplanes retaliating for rocket fire from the Gaza Strip pounded dozens of security compounds across the Hamas-ruled territory in unprecedented waves of airstrikes Saturday, killing at least 155 and wounding more than 310 in the single bloodiest day of fighting in recent memory.

The vast majority of those killed were security men, but civilians were also among the dead. Hamas said all of its security installations were hit and responded with several medium-range Grad rockets at Israel, reaching deeper than in the past. One Israeli was killed and at least four people were wounded in the rocket attacks. With so many wounded, the Palestinian death toll was likely to rise.

“The operation will last as long as necessary,” declared Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, though it was not clear if it would be coupled with a ground offensive. Asked if Hamas political leaders might be targeted next, military spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich said, “Any Hamas target is a target.”

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As always Christmas takes us further than an unreflective acceptance of appearances, calling us to a deeper reflection as we go beyond the Christmas wrapping to search for the gifts inside. The birth of a child is always mysterious and wonderful, bringing out the best in all of us, even if that goodwill sometime fades quickly. But it requires an honesty and readiness to set aside our self-centredness, our imperial egos, to accept that this newborn Jewish child was and is the son of God. Joseph was present for the birth of his redeemer. This claim turns everything upside down. The world’s fulcrum is not the financial centre’s of New York’s Wall Street or London city, but a cave in Bethlehem.

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“God with us means more than God over or side by side with us, before or behind us. It means more than His divine being in even the most intimate active connection with our human being otherwise peculiar to Him. At this point, at the heart of the Christian message and in relation to the event of which it speaks, it means that God has made himself the one who fulfills his redemptive will. It means that He Himself in His own person ””at His own cost but also on His own initiative””has become the inconceivable Yet and Nevertheless of this event, and so its clear and well-founded and legitimate, its true and holy and righteous Therefore. It means that God has become man in order as such, but in divine sovereignty, to take up our case. What takes place in the work of inconceivable mercy is, therefore, the free overruling of God, but it is not an arbitrary overlooking and ignoring, not an artificial bridging, covering over or hiding, but a real closing of the breach, gulf and abyss between God and us for which we are responsible. At the very point where we refuse and fail, offending and provoking God, making ourselves impossible before Him and in that way missing our destiny, treading under foot our dignity, forfeiting our right, losing our salvation and hopelessly compromising our creaturely being””at that very point God Himself intervenes as man.”

–Karl Barth (1886-1968)

On that night, Christ divides history into two parts: since then, there is a before Him and an after Him. That which was impossible before Him, becomes possible. We celebrate today that blessed night that changed the course of history, hearts full of joy. We who come from different countries, some nearby and others far off, like the shepherds, we surround the Child in the Grotto this night in order to adore Him and thank Him for having illuminated our history through His Incarnation.

Welcome to this divine Child! Welcome to the Christmas message and the joy of Christmas and the Christmas presents which bring back the smile to the faces of both the little and the big. This new Child is the fruit of the love of the Eternal Father for humankind, a love which desires for us more than we desire for ourselves. It wants a peace that we have lost, a loss to which we have resigned ourselves; mutual love which no longer exists to the point that it has disappeared even from our vocabulary; respect and dignity, so often battered by maltreatment, by insults and the spilling of blood.

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”¦[T]here must be no weakening or obscuring of the saving truth that the nature which God assumed in Christ is identical with our nature as we see it in the light of the Fall. If it were otherwise, how could Christ really be like us? ”¦ God’s Son not only assumed our nature but He entered the concrete form of our nature, under which we stand before God as men damned and lost”¦.

–Karl Barth (1886-1968)

On Christmas day I weep
Good Friday to rejoice.
I watch the Child asleep.
Does he half-dream the choice
The Man must make and keep?
At Christmastime I sigh
For my good Friday hope
Outflung the Child’s arms lie
To span in their brief scope
The death the Man must die.
Come Christmastide I groan
To hear Good Friday’s pealing.
The Man, racked to the bone,
Has made His hurt my healing,
Has made my ache His own.
Slay me, pierced to the core
With Christmas penitence
So I who, new-born, soar
To that Child’s innocence,
May wound the Man no more.

–Vassar Miller (1924-1998)

Christianity neither condemns nor canonises the market economy; it may be an essential element in the conduct of human affairs. But we have to remember that it is a system governed by people, not some blind force like gravity. Those who operate the market have an obligation to act in ways that promote the common good, not just in ways that promote the interests of certain groups. The market economy will only work justly if it has an underlying moral purpose. But it is unfair to blame only one section of our community for the present crisis, and all is not gloom. Crises always give an opportunity to think again and re-evaluate our own priorities of what makes for a good life and a good society. All of us have an opportunity, each in our own way, to deepen our trust in other people. Because it is people who matter, who comes first. Trust begins in the family but it stretches out to people who live in villages, towns and cities all over our country. One of my hopes this Christmas is that you and I and people everywhere will be able to build communities based on trust, places more like villages than cities, where neighbours have names and faces, where their concerns gradually become our concerns. Basically, my dream is of a society that becomes more deeply human, more satisfying, more hopeful.

The inspiration for my dream is in the Christmas crib scene, the birth of a child in a cave in Bethlehem, bathed in heaven’s light. Most of the cribs I have ever seen focus on the way Mary looks at her son with such extraordinary tenderness and love. It is tempting to leave it there at the level of emotion, but the eyes of faith see her gaze as a sign of God’s love for the world He created, that love that tells us insistently how much we matter to God, how much we should matter to each other.

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In Bethlehem
On Christmas Morn
The lowly gem
Of love was born
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Bright in her crown
Of fiery star
Judea’s town
Shone from afar
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

For bird and beast
He did not come
But for the least
Of mortal scum
Hosannah! Christus natus est.
While beasts in stall
On bended knee
Did carol all
Most joyously
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Who lies in ditch?
Who begs his bread
Who has no stitch
For back or head
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Who wakes to weep,
Lies down to mourn?
Who in his sleep
Withdraws from scorn?
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

Ye outraged dust
On field and plain
To feed the lust
Of madmen slain
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

The manger still
Outshines the throne
Christ must and will
Come to his own
Hosannah! Christus natus est.

–Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Behold the father is his daughter’s son,
The bird that built the nest is hatched therein,
The old of years an hour hath not outrun,
Eternal life to live doth now begin,
The Word is dumb, the mirth of heaven doth weep,
Might feeble is, and force doth faintly creep.

O dying souls, behold your living spring;
O dazzled eyes, behold your sun of grace;
Dull ears, attend what word this Word doth bring;
Up, heavy hearts, with joy your joy embrace.
From death, from dark, from deafness, from despairs
This life, this light, this Word, this joy repairs.

Gift better than himself God doth not know;
Gift better than his God no man can see.
This gift doth here the giver given bestow;
Gift to this gift let each receiver be.
God is my gift, himself he freely gave me;
God’s gift am I, and none but God shall have me.

Man altered was by sin from man to beast;
Beast’s food is hay, hay is all mortal flesh.
Now God is flesh and lies in manger pressed
As hay, the brutest sinner to refresh.
O happy field wherein that fodder grew,
Whose taste doth us from beasts to men renew.

–Robert Southwell (1561-1595)

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world’s desire.)

The Christ-child stood at Mary’s knee,
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

–G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)