Bart’s personal comments and reflections.
Christmas Longings
So we have managed to make our way through another Christmas season. I had a number of posts leading up to the big day, and now I’d like to make a couple of others looking back upon it from this side. But first let me say that I hope all of you – whether fundamentalist (not too many of *you* on this blog!!), liberal Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, or none of the above – had a very nice, relaxing, rejuvenating, and fulfilling holiday. I did. In the opening chapter of my book God’s Problem, I talked about going to church on Christmas Eve in 2006 with my wife Sarah and brother-in-law Simon, in Saffron-Walden, a market town in England where Simon lives, not far from Cambridge. It was a somber but moving Christmas Eve service, and yet one that had the opposite of the intended effect on me. It made me realize just how estranged I was from the Christian faith, from the notion that with Christ God entered into the world and took [...]