thought exercise from matthew 1

When we turn toward Advent, the name on our lips is Emmanuel, God with us . So much in Christian faith relies on what the faithful actually mean when we say that name. Western Christianity has fo...

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

In this excerpt, Frederick Buechner shares a meditation on the vulnerability of Jesus’ birth: The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is...

To a twentieth-century mind the notion of a virgin birth is intrinsically and preposterously inconceivable. If a woman claims–such claims are made from time to time–to have become pregnant without sex...

On March 11, 1830, a young English girl was studying a lesson on the royal family with her tutor. As she examined the genealogical chart, she suddenly realized the astonishing truth—she was next in li...

Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165), the most renowned apologist of the second century, dedicated his life to defending Christianity as the one true philosophy. Engaging the Greek philosophers and intellectua...

The actress Brooke Shields has quite an impressive family mosaic. Hanging from her family tree are the likes of Charlemagne, El Cid, William the Conqueror, the royal houses of virtually every European...

Every year at Christmastime, the world looks back two thousand years to the birth of a baby. But for more than four thousand years, people living on the other side of that birth looked forward to the ...

The term patrilineal has to do with tracing ancestral descent (and therefore tribal affiliation and inheritance) through the male line. In Israel the possessions of a particular lineage were carefully...

During spring 1981, one of my favorite persons at the time, Chicago mayor Jane Byrne, made the announcement that she and her husband were going to move into my old neighborhood: the Cabrini-Green hous...

By stating that Jesus is “born of woman”—this Mary (as both St. Matthew and St. Luke attest)—St. Paul insists that Jesus is most emphatically human, the “firstborn of all creation. That this Mary is a...

One Christmas Eve in Vermont when my children were small, we did the things you do when your children are small on Christmas Eve. We stuffed and hung their stockings. We put out a draught of cider and...

So what did it mean for Joseph and Mary to accept the Word of the Lord, to say, “We embrace the call to receive this child. We will accept whatever comes with it”? What did it take for them to literal...

Without the incarnation, Christianity isn’t even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. “Be nice to one another” is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond ...

It can be great fun to put up a tent in your backyard to play in or sleep in. Imagine what it would be like for someone else to put up a tent in your backyard and begin living there—right in your back...

When he was a young boy, twelfth-century church leader Bernard of Clairvaux fell asleep outside a church while waiting to go in for a Christmas Eve service. In his sleep he had a dream, a kind of visi...

On a little study table in my office, there’s a card with a quote from Victor Hugo’s epic novel Les Misérables: My coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt...

Love is hunting for bigger game than happiness. Love is a union of souls. When one member of a couple suffers from Alzheimer’s, the other doesn’t just go away. Instead, as Lewis puts it, love says, “B...

There was a woman who was baking her Christmas cookies and she heard a knock at the door. She opened the door to find a man who was dressed in pretty tattered clothes, and he was obviously poor. And h...

One thing we often do as human beings is take for granted how our physical presence can impact those around us. Do you remember how big your parents seemed when you were a kid? They were massive! Over...

A century ago, men were following with bated breath the march of Napoleon and waiting feverishly for news of the war. And all the while in their own homes, babies were being born. But who could think ...