Christmas

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Why do 'people' celebrate Three Kings Day, as opposed to Epiphany and Theophany?

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Why do 'people' celebrate Three Kings Day, as opposed to Epiphany and Theophany?

I have to admit that I experienced a sense of excitement, mixed with dread, when I saw the following headline this weekend, care of the Gannett wire here in Tennessee: “Why is Three Kings Day celebrated? Epiphany? And what does Rosca de Reyes have to do with king cakes?”

Most of the time, the contents of The Knoxville News Sentinel is dominated by University of Tennessee sports, coverage of bad Republicans doing bad things and updates about business and real-estate news in downtown neighborhoods favored by hip readers.

Coverage of the Feast of Epiphany — which follows the oft forgotten 12 days of Christmas — had the potential to offer unique details about traditions in local churches. But stories about Christian holy days are hard for many newsrooms, since they involve lots of picky facts about, you know, “religious stuff.”

OK, so what is wrong with this lede?

People around the world will celebrate Three Kings Day this weekend.

That lede could have said “Christians” and that would be vague, but OK. But, “people”?

Let’s keep reading, because things get a bit better and also rather strange at the same time.

In Hispanic communities, the day is known as Día de Los Reyes and is celebrated on Jan. 6 which is Saturday this year. The day is meant to honor the story revolving around the Three Wise Men or Magi who came to bring baby Jesus gifts after his birth. For those of the Christian and Catholic sects, it is known as the Epiphany.

The Hispanic reference is helpful, since Día de Los Reyes is a big deal and it’s totally appropriate in many zip codes to stress that. But what, in heaven’s name, is the point of this: “For those of the Christian and Catholic sects, it is known as the Epiphany.”

Think about that for a second. Catholicism is a “sect,” as opposed to being the world’s largest ancient Christian communion? And what are the other “sects” we are talking about here?


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Podcast: A.M. Rosenthal kept calling for accurate coverage of religion and persecution

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Podcast: A.M. Rosenthal kept calling for accurate coverage of religion and persecution

Does anyone remember fax machines?

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) focused on a sad, but very old reality in mainstream news coverage — the lack of mainstream news coverage of the massacres that take place year after year in Nigeria at Christmas.

To put this trend in context, I backed up to an “On Religion” column that I wrote in 1996 that opened like this, focusing on a tragedy that was unfolding in Sudan:

It's possible to buy a Christian slave in southern Sudan for as little as $15.

Last year's going rate for parents who want to buy back their own kidnapped child was five head of cattle – about $400. A boy might cost 10 head. An exiled leader in Sudan's Catholic Bishops Conference reports that 30,000 children have been sold into slavery in the Nuba mountains. In six years, more than 1.3 million Christian and other non-Muslim people have been killed in Sudan – more than Bosnia, Chechnya and Haiti combined.

A Jewish activist, Michael J. Horowitz of the Hudson Center, faxed my column to the legendary A. M. Rosenthal, the retired editor of the New York Times and a former foreign correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting. This led to many “On My Mind” columns at the Times, including one in which Rosenthal noted that Horowitz “screamed me awake” on the undercovered reality that is religious persecution.

That fax contact led to some conversations — via email and telephone — in which Rosenthal and I talked about the journalism realities behind a global story that was shamefully undercovered then and that remains the case to this day.

When Rosenthal died in 2006, I wrote a column (“Rosenthal refused to remain silent”) that noted:

Some human-rights activists are convinced that one of the reasons he lost his column and was forced to leave the Times was because he wouldn't stop writing about the persecution of religious minorities around the world.

Rosenthal couldn't understand why so many journalists just didn't "get" that story.


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When is Christmas? CBS has no idea how complex that question is right now in Ukraine

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When is Christmas? CBS has no idea how complex that question is right now in Ukraine

Christmas is complicated, if you sweat the details. At the gym I frequent here in Oak Ridge, the management took down all of the Christmas decorations on December 26th.

I asked why. I was told: “Christmas is over.” I asked if they had heard of the “12 days of Christmas.” A staffer said, “Yes,” but assumed that was before the 25th. Another staffer quietly said that she would leave the decorations up until January 6th. It’s safe to assume that she attends the local Catholic parish or another liturgical church.

Hang in there with me. I am working my way toward a stunningly one-sided CBS News report that ran with this headline: “Ukraine snubs Russia, celebrates Christmas on Dec. 25 for first time.”

The key is that America has shopping-mall Christmas and then liturgical-calendar Christmas. Several years ago, I wrote an “On Religion” column noting that when Siri is asked, “When is Christmas?”, an Apple iPhone answered: "Christmas is on … December 25, 2012. I hope I have the day off." Then I asked, “When is Advent?” That led to this “conversation.”

Siri searched her memory and said: "I didn't find any events about 'Ed Fant.' "

Trying again: "When is the Advent season?"

Siri cheerfully responded: "I am not aware of any events about 'advent season.' "

After several more "BEED-EEP" chimes the Apple cloud ultimately drew a blank when asked, "When does the Christmas season end?" Alas, Siri didn't understand the term "Christmas season."

This morning, I asked Siri: “When is Orthodox Christmas.” I was told that Christmas Day is on January 7th.

Ah, but that isn’t accurate in most Orthodox Churches in America. Why? That’s complicated and the fine details are relevant to the CBS News report about Ukraine.

Many people are aware that the Orthodox follow the ancient Julian calendar, instead of the Western Gregorian calendar. However, in many lands shaped by European culture, the Orthodox (this includes my parish) follow a modified Julian calendar that manages to put Christmas on December 25th, but Pascha (Easter) remains on the date that fits the Julian calendar.

Trust me, there is much more that can be said. But here is the key: This is basically a collision between cultures shaped by European culture and those shaped by eastern Orthodox culture.


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What would Seinfeld say? Concerning people without Christian beliefs who celebrate Christmas

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What would Seinfeld say? Concerning people without Christian beliefs who celebrate Christmas

QUESTION:

Should people who’ve shed Christian beliefs celebrate Christmas anyway?

THE RELIGION GUY’S RESPONSE:

The quandary above is not posed by The Guy himself but by Keith Giles in a December 5 piece titled “Deconstructing Christmas,” one of his Progressive Christian columns for the multi-faith site Patheos.com. Giles departed from his career as the pastor of a conventional church and now participates in an anonymous  “house church” with no salaried staff.

For purposes of this article, what’s pertinent about the writer is his vocation of encouraging people in the process of deconstructing their past Christian faith the way he himself has done, as expressed in his patheos columns, with “Heretic Happy Hour” podcasts, and in his books that include “Jesus Unbound: Liberating the Word of God from the Bible.”

So, what does a deconstructed Christmas look like these days? Giles is well aware from his past that in Christmas, believers are celebrating that the baby Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was God the Son come from heaven whose ultimate death brought salvation to humanity. That’s apparently at the heart of what “progressive” people shed,  the story as woven into those familiar carols that everybody sings (alongside all the Rudolph and Frosty and Santa tunes).

Think Charles Wesley’s 1739 phrases fused with Felix Mendelssohn’s 1840 music: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; Hail the incarnate Deity, pleased as man with man to dwell; Jesus our Emmanuel. . . Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth.”

For Giles, “almost everything about the Christmas story is worth deconstructing” and the result is that “many of us wrestle with celebrating Christmas,” which “can be a difficul time” for those who follow their newly deconstructed religion. Perhaps the family “puts pressure on us to go along with something we no longer believe in.” Or perhaps a progressive still wants to celebrate the day yet will “feel weird doing so” because people know the celebrant has left behind the beliefs involved.


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What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

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What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

There was a time, long ago, when it was easy to pinpoint the beginning and end of the "Christmas season."

In cultures linked to centuries of Christian tradition, the feast of Christmas -- the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ or Christ Mass -- was on December 25, the start of a festive 12-day season that ended with the Feast of the Epiphany. Many Eastern Orthodox churches continue to use the ancient Julian calendar, celebrating Christmas on January 7.

Then there is the "Christmas season" for the whole culture. One big change occurred on December 26, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- focusing on Christmas shopping -- signed a joint resolution of Congress defining Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. That established an official starting line for the dash to Christmas.

By the early 1960s, the name "Black Friday" was attached to the day after Thanksgiving, with armies of shoppers heading to downtown stores and, eventually, the shopping malls that replaced them. This brand of Christmas opened with a bang, with throngs gathering before dawn to grab "Black Friday" bargains, with police present to control the inevitable pushing and shoving.

Then came the Internet, with more changes in the size and shape of the commercial steamroller known as the "Holidays."

"It's safe to say that Black Friday has become a concept, not an event. We have ended up with Black Fridays all the way down" the calendar during November, said Jeremy Lott, managing editor for publications at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former editor of the Real Clear Religion website.

"Basically, we're talking about Black Friday after Black Friday everywhere, world without end. Amen," he added, in a telephone interview.


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Welcome to $$$$$$$ Easter: Lots of candy, booze and Jesus-free fun for half of America

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Welcome to $$$$$$$ Easter: Lots of candy, booze and Jesus-free fun for half of America

Easter is, without a doubt, the most important holy day in Christianity.

Christianity remains the largest faith group in the world.

There’s no way around the fact that Easter is the celebration of the doctrinal conviction that unites traditional Christians around the world: “Christ is risen!”

What a downer. This is a problem for people who decorate shopping malls and make the obligatory A1 holiday photo assignments for newspapers. There is more to this dilemma (ask Google) than struggling to photograph religious rites that take place at midnight or sunrise.

But people love fun, food, candy, parties, greeting cards, etc. Businesses love selling lots of stuff. And, in case you have not heard, a growing number of people in the mushy, old-mainstream middle of religious life — in America and elsewhere in the Western World — are cutting their ties to organized faith (“Nones” and others) and moving into a business, political and cultural coalition with atheists and agnostics.

This is a big $$$$$$$ deal.

This leads to this totally valid — even if rather depressing, for believers — headline at Religion New Service: “Adult egg hunts and kiddie pools full of gifts: Is Easter the new Christmas?”

So I want to ask a journalism question on this Easter Monday morning (for Western Christians, since this Holy Week for Orthodox Christians and other Eastern rites): What was the Easter art featured in your local media this year? Here in East Tennessee, the major daily featured GOP racism and Earth Day.

But back to that RNS story. Why call it “totally valid”?

For a simple reason: It’s describing Easter in a growing segment of the American cultural marketplace. The question is how journalists can feature this reality — while also noting the rites and traditions of, well, the largest faith group in the world.


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Holy water and Orthodox memories of a mysterious vase of fresh flowers

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Holy water and Orthodox memories of a mysterious vase of fresh flowers

After the Christmas season and before Lent, Orthodox priests have -- for centuries -- rushed to visit church-members' homes to bless them with prayers and splashes of holy water flung about with a foot-long brush or handfuls of basil.

Droplets of blessed water end up on beds and bookshelves, TVs and toys, potted plants and paintings, along with everything else.

"It's a chance to start over," said Father John Karcher of St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Portland, Oregon. "We clean out the cobwebs of sin. … Then we make mistakes and muck it all up again. But we do this every year because God doesn't give up on us."

These rites flow out of the Feast of Theophany, which many Orthodox churches in America celebrate on January 6, or on January 19th for those using the ancient Julian calendar year-round. In addition to house blessings and liturgies, Orthodox clergy bless bodies of water -- rivers, lakes and oceans. In some parts of the world this requires man-sized holes cut into ice.

The feast's central message, said Karcher, is that "when Christ was baptized, he went into the waters and the waters didn't cleanse him -- it was the other way around. He blessed the waters and through them all of creation. … It's a beautiful thing. God responds to our prayers that he sanctifies the waters -- again."

In one rite, priests pray that the blessed water will provide "a fountain of incorruption, a gift of sanctification, a loosing of sins, a healing of sicknesses, a destruction of demons" so that worshippers will experience "the cleansing of souls and bodies, for the healing of sufferings, for the sanctification of homes and for every useful purpose."

The mysterious nature of these rites hit home a decade ago when Karcher led St. Innocent Orthodox Church in the Bay Area in northern California.


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Funny press release or valid news? Becket team salutes its 2022 public-square Scrooge

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Funny press release or valid news? Becket team salutes its 2022 public-square Scrooge

Religion-beat reporters (and columnists) get lots of strange press releases and letters from folks trying to get their pet issues covered.

My all-time favorite, during my Denver years, was a 50-page (at least) handwritten treatise on why superstar Barbara Streisand was the Antichrist. That created a steady stream of amused editors to my desk. I should have had the courage to write about it.

Most press releases are written by people who have absolutely no idea what newsrooms consider to be news or even what topics the reporter/columnist targeted with the release has written about in the past.

Christmas is a HUGE time for religion-beat press releases. This is logical because some newsrooms — those without religion-beat pros, ironically — struggle to find holiday story angles, year after year after year.

This year, I received one release that made me laugh out loud, in a good way. It came from a legal think tank that has made lots of news, in recent decades, with successful arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court. I have, for a decade-plus, received variations on this release from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, but this one (#GASP) really should have received some coverage.

It was about this year’s winner of the “Ebenezer Award,” saluting the “most outrageous and scandalous offenders of the Christmas and Hanukkah season.” This year’s winner: The government powers that be in King County, Washington. (Click here for previous winners.)

Here’s some of the press-release background:

King County's "Workforce Equity Manager" for the Department of Human Resources, Gloria Ngezaho, recently authored and issued a memo, titled "Guidelines for Holiday Decorations for King County Employees," where she states that workers may not "appear to support any particular religion" and bans them from displaying religious symbols in any "virtual workspace." …

King's County has refused to back down on their outlandish efforts to squash the religious expression of their employees during one of the most sacred times of the year for people of faith.

Did this story receive any mainstream press coverage?


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What's is behind the symbolism of shepherds and wise men worshipping newborn Jesus?

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What's is behind the symbolism of shepherds and wise men worshipping newborn Jesus?

THE QUESTION:

What’s signified by shepherds and wise men worshipping the newborn Jesus?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The world’s most-read and most-recited narratives are quite likely the two independent and contrasting accounts of Jesus’ birth that begin the biblical Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

A particularly striking difference is that Matthew has a Jewish flavor yet features Gentile “wise men from the East” of high status and Luke, aimed at a Gentile audience, tells us of humble Jewish shepherds. Intriguingly, neither Gospel knows of the other’s visitors who came to worship the baby of Bethlehem.

Several decades later, the Book of Acts records, the earliest Christians were busily converting not only Jews but a visiting Ethiopian official, hated Samaritans and Roman occupation soldiers, and then multicultural Gentiles across the Mediterranean region.

In the Christian understanding, the birth in Bethlehem fulfilled God’s promise in calling Abraham that “by you all the families of the earth will bless themselves” (Genesis 12:3) and the revelation to the prophet Isaiah that Israel would be “a light to the nations” (42:6, 49:6, 60:3).

By the early 50s A.D., the greatest of the early missionaries to Gentiles, St. Paul, would cite the universal call of Abraham as he taught believers that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Galatians 3:6-9 and 28-29).


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