Last year at this time New York city was paralyzed by a blizzard; thankfully, I was visiting family outside the city when the snow fell and was able to hole up in my house upstate where I teach at Bard College.  There was plenty of snow up there, but up at Bard people know how […]

A worthless desert in South Africa, largely inhabited by drought-stricken sheep and a handful of marginal farmers, turns out to contain rich natural gas reserves that could bring a new wave of economic growth to South Africa and provide huge numbers of well paying jobs for poorly educated workers.The New York Times, of course, is […]

Earlier this week I blogged about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life. Human life amounts to more than eating and scratching our various […]

Now it gets tough. That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from […]

Hugo Chavez has a new theory: that the US has developed a secret technology and is using it to give cancer to left wing Latin American rulers that we don’t like.  After all, Fidel Castro, the Hero of Venezuela himself, the president of Paraguay, the current and former presidents of Brazil and now Cristina Kirchner […]

Five go-old rings!Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2011 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6.Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a […]

So: they ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.’  What is that supposed to be about?Manger is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes were used to wrap up […]

It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close. Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own: “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing […]

[The traditional Via Meadia Yule Blog continues today with the third of the Thirteen Posts of Christmas.  From Christmas Eve through to Twelfth Night (the feast of the Epiphany), we explore the Christmas story and the ideas behind the celebration.]In Matthew, the Christmas story and its immediate sequel runs from Chapter One, verse one through […]

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! We are having a tense morning at the ancestral Mead home today, jumping whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the […]