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Flunking Sainthood
The Yucky Underside of the Nativity: Or, What You Won’t See in Next Year’s Christmas Pageant
By
Jana Riess
A friend of mine recently pointed out that tomorrow is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Don’t know what that is? Neither did I. In a nutshell, it marks that icky, violent part of the nativity story that every Christmas pageant blithely ignores: Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding…
Thoughts on sainthood with a Lower-Case S
By
Jana Riess
No grand cohesive post today, just a couple of musings on what it means to be a saint. What I’ve found through researching (read: screwing up) and writing Flunking Sainthood is that many people (read: my friends and I) have an odd and ultimately damaging idea of what Sainthood is. We like to think of…
Busy Women, Advent Conspiracies, and the Countdown to Christmas
By
Jana Riess
I love this post from Ellen Painter Dollar over at the Introverted Church blog. She hits upon something fundamental about the irony of December: the Advent season encourages us to slow down and embrace silent reflection even as the wider culture eggs us to speed up and get ready for Christmas. This is particularly true…
Bonhoeffer, Week 3: “Your Redemption Is Drawing Near” in Advent
By
Jana Riess
In Week 3 of Advent, our Wednesday devotion from Bonhoeffer brings ever closer the question of redemption: what does it mean for us? Clearly, we’re looking for “something different from the anxious, petty, depressed, feeble Christian spirit that we see again and again” each December . . . but what does that look like? –JKR…
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