¶ “Been a hard Advent for me spiritually, between the police misconduct & deaths, the massacre in Peshawar, and the details about our torturing people. I think we should require that every nativity scene should have a Herod in it, don’t you?” North Carolina pastor Michael Usey wrote this to Dr. Bill Leonard, church history professor at Wake Forest Divinity School, who expanded the commentary: “Inserting [Herod] into every nativity scene might restrain our sentimentalized, ‘the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes’ rendering of the Christmas story, and compel an annual reflection on the ‘slaughter of the innocents,’ then and now, in ancient Scripture and on contemporary social networks. Indeed, the Times’ ‘Year in Pictures’ for Dec. 28 included a photo of sobbing Pakistani women ‘refusing consolation’ at the coffin of Mohammed Ali Khan, a 15-year-old Peshawar victim. —“Epiphanic moments,” Baptist News Global Today
Pictured at right: Feast of the Holy Innocents. The Massacre of the Innocents by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1515), National Museum in Warsaw.
¶ In case there’s still a question. The gulf between rich and poor people in America has hit a new record. An analysis released 18 December by Pew Research Center finds that the wealth gap between the top 21 percent of families and everyone else is the widest since the Federal Reserve began collecting such income data 30 years ago. Last year, the median wealth of upper-income families ($639,400) was almost seven times that of middle-income families and nearly 70 times that of lower-income families.
The findings follow another Pew analysis published last week which finds that U.S. wealth inequalities along racial lines have dramatically worsened since the Great Recession, with the gap between white and black people at its highest in 25 years. According to that study, which also looks at Federal Reserve data, in 2013 white household wealth was 13 times that of black households and 10 times that of Hispanic households. —Wealth Gap Between Rich and Poor Americans Highest on Record, Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams
¶ 2014 has been a gob-smack to a nation thinking substantial progress was being made on racial and gender justice—mostly, I suspect, because we still don’t understand the difference between personal bigotry and structural injustice. Civil discourse is rarely punctuated by use of the “N” word for African Americans or the “B” word for women. Yet sexual assaults against women have crowded news headlines, and we’ve learned that some 400,000 “rape kits”—collections of DNA evidence from victims—are waiting, sometimes for many years, to be processed. In my home county, the Humane Society (God bless them) operates on an annual budget of $1.8 million. The women’s shelter, providing refuge for victims of domestic abuse (and their children), has a budget less than half that amount. On black-white structural disparity, see the statistics above.
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•The US has spent some $1 trillion in waging this war. (For perspective: A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is not quite 32 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.)
¶ 17th century colonial Christmas culture war. “The Puritans of New England frowned upon the celebration of Christmas and outlawed it for more than half a century. They believed it was necessary, as Christians pursuing pious living, to separate themselves from the sinful behavior associated with the way the holiday was celebrated in jolly old England. And since few of these Christian American forefathers had anything good to say about materialism or commercialism, it is likely they would have similar feelings about the way we celebrate Christmas today.” —John Fea, “Was There a Golden Age of Christmas in America,” Pacific Standard, December 2013