{"id":311,"date":"2004-12-09T10:38:38","date_gmt":"2004-12-09T18:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/archives\/2004\/12\/09\/christ-christmas-and-credit-cards\/"},"modified":"2004-12-09T10:40:57","modified_gmt":"2004-12-09T18:40:57","slug":"christ-christmas-and-credit-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2004\/12\/09\/christ-christmas-and-credit-cards","title":{"rendered":"Christ, Christmas, and Credit Cards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehouseblog.com\/\">Randy Jumper<\/a>, an old friend from grad school, just <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehouseblog.com\/2004\/12\/09#a185\">posted<\/a> a wonderful piece from&nbsp;NPR.<\/p>\n<p>Excerpt:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I\u2019m not fighting the commercialization of Christmas; that fight was lost ages ago. What I\u2019m after is more radical: Disentangling Jesus entirely from this blight on his good name. I\u2019m out to change the bumper sticker from \u2018Keep Christ in Christmas\u2019 to \u2018Free Christ from Christmas.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Heresy? Well, compare Christmas with Martin Luther King\u2019s birthday. On his birthday, nobody ever pays any attention to his birth. Instead, it\u2019s \u2018I have a dream\u2019 and his impact on society. We mark Dr. King\u2019s birth by focusing on what he said and did as an adult. Christmas, by contrast, has no time for what the adult Jesus said and did. Christmas keeps him safely shut up as a baby in the manger, where he can\u2019t make his usual noise about people repenting and living a godly&nbsp;life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I\u2019m not proposing that we cancel Christmas. I know, the economy would collapse without it. Fine. Keep the gift-giving and the jingle bells. Let\u2019s just subtract the remaining Jesus element from it and move that over into Easter. Call December 25th Solstice. Call it Retail Day. Call it Holiday Number Nine. I don\u2019t care, just leave Christ out of it. He was not born to be the patron saint of fourth-quarter earnings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Randy Jumper, an old friend from grad school, just posted a wonderful piece from&nbsp;NPR. Excerpt: I\u2019m not fighting the commercialization of Christmas; that fight was lost ages ago. What I\u2019m after is more radical: Disentangling Jesus entirely from this blight on his good name. I\u2019m out to change the bumper sticker from \u2018Keep Christ in \u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2004\/12\/09\/christ-christmas-and-credit-cards\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> \u201cChrist, Christmas, and Credit Cards\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-of-random-interest"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-51","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}