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Matter Matters
“It’s all gonna burn!” Many times I heard this exclamation in my early days as a Christian. Those who said it to me intended it as an interpretation of Jesus’s exhortation to avoid laying up treasures on earth, where things get stolen and destroyed (Matt 6:19). I imagine 2 Peter 3:10 also had some influence on such thinking about earth: “But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief. Then the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and the very elements themselves will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be found to deserve judgment” (NLT). So people told me…
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Christmas: So Much More Than Celebrating a Birthday
Because I’m gearing up to co-teach a grad course in Medieval Spirituality and Art, I have spent a total of about four weeks in Italy in the past year. And something I discovered as I worked to increase my visual literacy by “reading” cathedral art was that artistic depictions of “Madonna and child” are not just mother-child manger-ish scenes intended to remind us of Jesus’s birth, or even over-elevations of Mary. Rather, for mostly-illiterate audiences such art was originally designed to depict the incarnation of Christ: God came in the flesh! I overheard someone talking today about how the point of Christmas is to mark the beginning of the best…
