Today’s holiday culture wars continue an ancient struggle, as Nat Parry explores in this adaptation from his new book, How Christmas Became Christmas: The Pagan and Christian Origins of the Beloved Holiday.
This excerpt is from the author’s newest book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison.
The hijackers who carried out the attacks on 9/11, like all radical jihadist groups in the Middle East, spoke to the U.S. in the murderous language it taught them.
Andrew Latham begins with the Antonine and Cyprian twin plagues, which ravaged the Roman Empire and gave rise to Christianity.
An all-Christian American crew used the steeple of Japan’s most prominent Christian church as the target for an act of unspeakable barbarism, writes Gary G. Kohls.
The time for the followers of Jesus to publicly protest injustices such as wealth inequality is at hand, argues retired Baptist minister Rev. Howard Bess.
President Trump has set loose several competing – and contradictory – strands of foreign policy with the big question now whether he can avoid tripping himself up, writes ex-British diplomat Alastair Crooke.
There is a profound contradiction for Christians who celebrate the “prince of peace” at Christmas and then return to the business of endless — and expanding — war the rest of the year, as the Rev. Howard Bess observes.
Though Christianity began as a religion of peace, it soon became a cloak for genocidal violence, such as the incineration of defenseless civilians in Nagasaki, including many Japanese Christians, 71 years ago, writes Gary G. Kohls.
Ideology, in the hands of true-believers, tends to reject facts in favor of some grander “truth,” an especially dangerous tendency when mixed with religious conviction and certainty, as Lawrence Davidson explains.
