Fundamentalist Family, Secular Christmas
Today’s post is from Susan Campbell, author of Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl. Campbell’s writing has been recognized by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors; National Women’s Political Caucus; the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, and the Connecticut chapter of Society of Professional Journalists. She was also a member of the Hartford Courant’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news.
Los angeles new years eve
while other families lit advent candles, my brothers and i gathered to hang red bulbs on a fake silver tree that came with a color situation that turned its branches from red to blue to green.
And we had stockings. They held oranges and a handful of walnuts still in their shells. Looking back, I know now that walnuts were just filler, but back then I could only puzzle as to what use a 6-year-old would have of a walnut still in its shell.
We had gifts and glitter and candles, too. What we didn’t have was Baby Jesus.
As members of a fundamentalist Christian church, we did not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday. The Bible led us to believe that Jesus was most likely born in the spring — the shepherds being outside the night of his birth was our first clue. Then, too, the census that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem in the first place most likely wouldn’t have been conducted in December, so we saw the winter holiday as little more than creeping Catholicism, a state against which we were constantly on guard. Choosing willy-nilly a date on which to celebrate Our Savior’s birth was, to us, yet another example of how far people had strayed from the True Message.
And so we didn’t participate. At least, we didn’t participate fully. Instead, we had an entirely secular holiday, complete with a tree and fudge and family gatherings, but no carols, no manger scenes, and certainly no mention of Jesus’ birthday. We talked about the spirit of giving (a good lesson any day of the year) and the need to look out for those with less than you (ditto). But we who prided ourselves on our utter holiness missed this one opportunity every year to flaunt it. We treated Christmas like any other day off from work or school, except we got up early and gave one another presents. And then, come the spring, we turned around and did it all over again with Easter. We had the baskets and the nice hats and dresses, but no mention whatsoever of Jesus’ burial and resurrection.
It’s hard to live so far afield from the rest of the world — or what seems, when you’re 8 or 9, like the rest of the world. But walking that fine line between religion and the secular world at such an early age taught me to split hairs. It taught me to look at things for others’ perspective. I can still split them with the best of them, but it strikes me as a big waste of time. You either celebrate, it or you don’t. These days, I hang my Jesus ornaments and I smile. Does it really matter, the actual date of Jesus’ birth? I can’t imagine that it does.
You may also be interested in Susan Campbell’s post on the media coverage of Sarah Palin’s religion. Check out Campbell’s blogs at the Hartford Courant and her Dating Jesus website.
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Tampa Bay Realtor Featured In duPont Registry’s Distinctive Realtor Registry
A select few Realtors make this highly selective list of those who specialize in selling the finest luxury and waterfront real estate in existence. (PRWeb Jul 6, 2006)
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Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/07/prweb406917.htm
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Finish Power Eccentric in Bleach 340
fantastical more!!! full read lighten chapter 340 after read online red skim bleach 339 now with detail next chapter anticipate if power finish come to chapter finish but be undoubted last quarrel sword. in bleach new 340 manga of week seriph2 say: “about his unusual profit by of shikai and why it isnt a sword type release or why we dont see him releasing, that can simply be explained if you recall the pro formas required to get everyone underwater the influence of his shikai he stated that everyone from that point on was permanently secondary to the influence of his shikai so it was at most required to be put on display once for the effect. so my guess is his shikai works sort of take a shine to ichigo’s in the sense that once it has been used on someone there is no need for a release and it has a permanent release effect on people that be subjected to witnessed the function.” read detail of bleach 340 today enjoy manga in bleachfinder the blog of bleach info “we find you read”.read: bleach 340 wrestle with to finish
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Your NFC Wild Card Picture is In Focus
while you watch the chargers hammer the hapless broncos, take some time to ponder the nfc wild car-card games that will caricature place next weekend: philadelphia at minnesota atlanta at arizona knee-jump reactions: tough not to like the eagles - better defense (slightly, based on statistics), better qb, better motor coach, better special teams. but we think everyone will …
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Dollhouse - 2 New Season 2 Promotional Photos
(click to enlarge)
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“You love cars? AND you love working with your…
“You love cars? AND you love working with your hands.”
Doc, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. But if you call now, who knows?
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I make money in the “classes” I offer. Diesel Mechanics? Fucking goldmine.
inothernews:
Yours is better, Doc. But Doc, they wrote “800″ instead of “900″. How do you make money from the former?
thedoctr:
“Resistance is futile. Call now!”
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inothernews:
“why stay? this is a perfect time to call.”
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Eartha Kitt with Friends Santa Baby (video)
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Find more top entertainment news, videos, and blogs on ShowHype: Celebrities, Eartha Kitt, Friends
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More Information Than You Require: John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton Take Manhattan
Our collective love for both John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton has been pretty well documented here on Tor.com. I’ve officially declared Coulton’s new album, JoCo Looks Back, to be the greatest thing since sliced bread (specifically, bread made out of Soylent Green, then fed through a slicing apparatus by a crazed cyborg, that is). And, as Joshua Starr writes, Hodgman’s new book More Information Than You Require is an absolutely brilliant collection of absurd trivia and bizarre anecdotes, picking up where his first volume, The Areas of My Expertise, left off: mole-men and hoboes and hook-hands and all.
Hodgman’s style strikes a perfect balance between his utterly warped material and the sheer facetiousness of his pedantic, bone-dry delivery. In many ways, his work reminds me of Woody Allen’s late-60s and early-70s writing, and I mean this in the best possible way (for those don’t know, Woody Allen actually used to be a very, very funny comedy writer before he mutated into a weird old British lady who makes unsatisfying movies full of pretty people attempting poor Ingmar Bergman imitations. You can look it up). I first became a Hodgman fan when he began contributing to This American Life a few years ago, so I guess I’ve always thought of him more as a writer than as a performer, and it actually took me a while to make the connection to his Daily Show appearances, Mac ads and subsequent rise to ALL-POWERFUL CELEBRITY SUPERSTAR GENIUS, or whatever it says on his business cards these days.
His sudden rise to guest-appearance-on-Battlestar-Galactica-heights of fame just seems like one of those great, but rare, cosmic cases of Things Working Out Exactly As They Should, as does the fact that Hodgman and Coulton have been close friends and collaborators since they met as freshmen in college. As they did on the book tour which accompanied the release of The Area of My Expertise, JoCo and Hodgman have been traveling the country (hobo-style, probably) to promote the new book and album, and at long last they arrived back in New York last Friday, just in time to make what was touted on Hodgman’s website as their “FINAL APPEARANCE OF THE YEAR together at the Wired Store, a mysterious gadget emporium that appears but once a year in NYC’s ?Chelsea’ District.”
[Below the fold: Aliens, true love, revenge-cyborgs, code monkeys and Time Lords!!!]
Needless to say, I was ready to brave freezing cold and relentless snow sleet wintry mix and, if need be, C.H.U.D.S. in order to finally see Coulton and Hodgman together. So I set out with my fellow fan-nerd and Tor.com compatriot Pablo Defendini to find out what happens when geniuses collide. Well, not so much collide as “hang out and give a reading, play some songs, sign some books, whilst bantering wittily throughout.” We were not disappointed.
After Hodgman introduced him as his “feral mountain man friend,” Coulton kicked things off with some Book Tour theme music, after which Hodgman read a selection from the book titled “Possible Contacts With Alien Life” which moves from Enrico Fermi’s attempt to logically disprove the existence of aliens to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dune, Christopher Walken, and sinister Portuguese doctors, culminating quite naturally, if unexpectedly, in a truly sweet love story (a video of Hodgman performing the same selection can be found here). The piece demonstrates Hodgman’s remarkable talent for constructing a well-crafted story while showcasing the stupendous wealth of geek knowledge that he draws upon so effortlessly in the process of proving that, sometimes, True Love means not even caring if your spouse was abducted and replaced with a clone one sunny day in Portugal. And I think that’s something we can all agree on.
During the Q&A session, someone asked whether More Information Than You Require would be released as an audiobook (answer: probably, but it hasn’t been recorded yet), and Coulton got to talk about licensing his work under Creative Commons (w00t!) and whether he ever misses writing code. Apparently, he still writes a little code from time to time (A full-time musician who writes code in his spa
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James Franco Admits To Being ‘Jimmy Drakkar,’ Legendary Cologne Lord [Short Ends]
· “so funny story—i’m getting paid millions to push gucci, the same stinky toilet-water i inured to to swipe at macy’s and sell to my classmates. did i reference the gun-running and profoundly-ec hooker ring?”
· In case you were going to A Christmas Carol at the Kodak Theater tonight with visions of hologram Gene Wilders dancing in your heads, we felt the need to pass this message along: “Please note that Jane Seymour has cancelled due to illness and due to limited tech time, a special appearance by Gene Wilder in a hologram will not be used & a supporting actor will be playing Marley’s Ghost.” In an unrelated note, how awesome are those satellite space-pandas? We hope there’s enough tech time left over for them! · If you ever wondered what Pamela Anderson playing Amy Sedaris playing Pamela Anderson might look like, now you know. · 25-year-old trespassing Dunst-enthusiast Christopher R. Smith has been ordered to stay away from the actress. · Home Team 1, Satan 0. · For a second we were literally jumping around Defamer HQ telling anyone who’d listen that a woman had developed the most formidable cockfighting breed the world has ever known; then we realized it was just some crazy lady humiliating a giant, castrated poodle.
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Hallelujah! Alexandra is No.1
hallelujah the waiting is over. the x factor prizewinner alexandra burke was officially and predictably crowned queen of the christmas charts.
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CELEBRITY AUTOBIOGRAPHY Visits ABC’s The View 12/22
celebrity autobiography: in their own words, the critically-acclaimed, handle-prohibited show called “big-yuks entertainment” by charles isherwood of the new york times, will be featured on abc’s “the view” today monday, december 22, at 11am on the abc television network. kristen johnston, who appears regularly in celebrity animation movies autobiography, makes a guest presence on the betray, and is joined by “view” co-hosts joy behar and sherri shepherd, reading excerpts from the hit comedy sensation.
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