Remember last year’s YouTube video of the Hallelujah Chorus made by 5th graders in Quinhagak, Alaska? (Here is the video, with a little background on the kids and teacher who produced it.)
This year, kids in another small fishing village, this one in Mexico, have responded. Barra de Potosi is 25 miles away from Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, a large resort complex on the Pacific coast. Kids at a children’s library in the village, with help from the librarian and other adults, have put together their own video. Best listened to at full volume!
Here are a few interesting articles and videos I’ve run across lately. Most of them are hard news: a few, not so much.
The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday on an important case for freedom of religion. In Case #3 on my Top Ten List of SCOTUS cases this term, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC, the Court held–in a decision that was, amazingly, 9-0–that:
The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First
Amendment bar suits brought on behalf of ministers against their churches, claiming termination in violation of employment discrimination laws.
In plain English, the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom means that churches can pick–and fire–their ministers as they choose, without government interference, even if the case might ordinarily fall under the purview of employment discrimination laws.
Here is a fairly quick summary of and commentary on the decision from The Anchoress (Elizabeth Scalia, no relation to Hizzoner). Here is a long and meaty one from Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog.
The Christmas advertisements relentlessly suggest that Christmas is one long Kodak moment. Or would be, if only we bought [fill in the blank].
The reality, of course, is different.
“Life is pain, Highness,” says The Princess Bride’s Man in Black. “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
The real Christmas recognizes that. It isn’t about celebrating our perfect lives. The Christmas story centers, after all, around a single mom, a teenager, whose pregnancy certainly broke her parents’ hearts, and who was so poor she had her baby in a barn. She lived in an occupied country, and her baby’s birth resulted in the murder of a whole village-full of little boys.
Many of us are mourning our own losses and brokenness, and the losses and brokenness of the world around us. But that’s no reason not to celebrate Christmas. In fact, that’s the perfect situation in which to celebrate Christmas. In the midst of brokenness we can look forward to a time of justice and right relationships, when the poor won’t be oppressed, leaders won’t be corrupt, hearts won’t be broken, and death will be no more.
The words of the haunting and beautiful hymn, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, date to the 12th century, but its heart-cry goes back 29 centuries to the themes of the great Jewish prophets of the 8th century B.C.
