"Conflagration: How the Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice"

Dear Tig,

Please see my interlinear notes below as they relate to the questions that your fellow student, John Bowman, put to your scholarly professor, Rev. John Buerhens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Buehrens 

Someone should update Buerhens' Wikipedia entry to include his recent remarkable book which you so kindly gave me:

"Conflagration: How The Transcendentalists Sparked The American Struggle For Racial, Gender, And Social Justice"  

https://www.amazon.com/Conflagration-Transcendentalists-Sparked-American-Struggle/dp/080702404X 

On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 12:35 PM Nancy Hardies  wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Buehrens 
Date: Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 9:02 PM
Subject: RE: Questions
To: John Buehrens
Cc: Undisclosed

See below.

From: John Bohman
Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2021 7:39 PM
To: John Buehrens 
Subject: Questions

1.      Why has the story of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke remained a significant source still linking us to Christmas as we know it? 

Good storytelling goes a long way! Once Jesus was considered the Messiah (Matthew), much less the Son of God (Luke), people wanted to know about his parentage and birth and childhood.

 

Alan: In the Spanish-speaking world, the baby Jesus is routinely called El Nino Dios. I love this unmediated fusion of "Child God."  "Unless you become like children..." "Suffer the children come unto me." "Of such as these is the Kingdom of God." This fusion of homo sapiens with deity is so remarkable that it is easy to overlook the built-in assumption that a human child and God are merged in a single identity. If you are unfamiliar with the theological category of "theosis," I encourage you to take a look: 

Compendium Of Pax Posts On Theosis, The Limits Of Religion And A New "Christian Science"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2017/08/compendium-of-pax-posts-on-theosis.html

2.      Why has Christmas stayed such a big deal in our culture?

Christianity has been quite adept at taking over the sacred observances of earlier, Earth-based traditions. Easter, for example, is named for the Norse pagan goddess Oestera, celebrated at the spring equinox. Christ-mass took over the Roman pagan celebrations at the winter solstice, especially the festival of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, part of the cult of Mithras, a religion followed by many soldiers recruited into Roman legions. 

 

Alan: I have long been impressed that the greatest celebration of the ecclesiastical year is Easter, a word that derives from a pagan fertility goddess! Wow. 

 

3.      Why do most UU congregations still celebrate Christmas so much?

Because we are liberals! And if there was ever a liberal holiday in post-Reformation Christianity, Christmas is it! Liberal in many senses. The Puritans, as good Calvinists, considered Christmas both Papist and pagan. (Right on both counts, I’d say.) They forbade celebrating it. Unitarian liberals in 19^th c. New England rebelled against the prohibition. They decked the halls. They put candles in Beacon Hill windows. They wrote Christmas carols. I could give you a long list! Charles Dickens, after having been softened to liberal Christianity by his 1842 encounter in Boston with Wm. Ellery Channing, wrote his story, “A Christmas Carol,” about how he stopped saying, “Bah! Humbug!” like Scrooge, and then became more generous (i.e., liberal) is saying, with Tiny Tim, “God bless us everyone!” As Sophia Fahs wrote, “Every night a child is born is a holy night. . . 

Alan: 

"A Christmas Carol" - My Conversion From Alistair Sims Version... To Disney's Rendition!?!?!

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-christmas-carol-my-conversion-from.html 

 

Alan: Only the first of the following links is directly pertinent to Buerhens' observation (above), but the others also reveal the revelry that resides in the pagan side of Catholicism, which, after all, is the ground for Carnival -- Carne vale... "Farewell to the flesh" -- an attempt to party so heartily immediately before Ash Wednesday (i.e, Fat Tuesday) beginning Lent that it would take 40 days to "get over the hangover," thus making fasting and abstinence that much easier.

It Was Christians Who First Waged War On Christmas

(And Seventh Day Adventists Still Do)

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/11/it-was-christians-who-first-waged-war.html

St. Apollonia And A Hundred Medieval Holidays 
https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2021/01/st-apollonia-and-hundred-medieval.html

The Lost Art Of Catholic Drinking

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-lost-art-of-catholic-drinking.html

The Phenotypic Expression Of Religion Matters More Than Its Dogmatic Genotype

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/02/the-phenotypic-expression-of-religion.html 

4.      The opening of John's gospel baffles me.  Many words and phrases do not make sense. Why did the Catholic priests in the past read it at the.end of Mass?

“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word with God, and the Word was God.” This combines the two streams of thought that make Christianity: Hebraic and Greek. In the Creation story of the Hebrew Bible, God does not create the world through violence, the way most Near Eastern mythologies (cf. Gilgamesh and slaying of the dragon of chaos, Tiamat) had it. God simply speaks, and there is light, etc. In Greek, the word for Word is “Logos.” Several strands of Greek philosophy felt that between the Creation as we have it, and the Pure Source of All, there must have been an intermediary, a “demiurge,” who got some of the instructions wrong. Hebraic thought declared that G-d used Hokmah or Wisdom to shape the Creation, but that She (Wisdom, Sophia) was no longer much listened to here on earth. (Ain’t that the truth!)

The recitation of the first 14 lines of the Gospel of John at the end of the Catholic mass began as priestly devotional practice (more or less, “I hope I have spoken your Word, God, in saying this mass and preaching my stumbling homily). It then became part of the pre-Vatican II ritual. It is now only rarely included.

Alan: I had forgotten this element of pre-Vatican II liturgy. And I never linked the immediacy of the Judeo-Christian Godhead "speaking" "the world" into existence as a circumvention of demiurgic intermediaries. Wow! 

John Buehrens