“No one knows what lies ahead, or what it will mean” Celebrating Advent in four tenses

Dr. Jim Denison: Many people are surprised to learn that Christmas did not become a Christian holiday until the fourth century. The date when Jesus was physically born was less consequential than the fact of his atoning death and triumphant resurrection, which is why Easter predated Christmas as a holiday by centuries. The abiding relevance of Christmas is not just that Jesus was born into a human family, but that because of Christmas each human can be “born again” into the family of God (John 1:12–13, 3:5). As St. Irenaeus famously noted, he became one of us that we might be one with him.

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Dr. Jim Denison. Credit – The Denison Forum [www.denisonforum.org]
Denison Forum

Dr. Jim Denison

Three stories are dominating the news this morning: yesterday’s Supreme Court hearing on transgender hormone regiments for adolescents, the continued fallout in South Korea over its president’s brief martial law declaration, and the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson yesterday morning outside a hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Each, in its own way, illustrates the unpredictability of the future, whether in cultural, political, or personally tragic ways.

After psychologist Philip Tetlock evaluated several decades of predictions about political and economic events, he found that “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” The recently-deceased Lance Morrow, one of my favorite journalists, said it this way: More Here

Christmas for a dark world

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