Tag Archives: First Things

Joseph Bottom: The End of Advent

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Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.

Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.

More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales.

{Read it all}

H/T: Internet Monk

R.R. Reno interviews Joseph Bottom on "The Death of Protestant America"

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HT: First Things

First things has posted a link to the video below, of an interview conducted by R.R. Reno of Joseph Bottom on his essay “The Death of Protestant America: a Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline” (still available on their site to non-subscribers.)

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Ross Douthat on Joseph Bottom on the Death of Protestant America

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Recently Joseph Bottum wrote a very interesting essay in First Things entitled “The Death of Protestant America: A Political theory of the Protestant Mainline”, PSA+ turned me on to Ross Douthat’s response over at the Atlantic, and I think he’s teased out something important here:

The Norman Vincent Peale bit, I think, is particularly telling, because it gets at something that I think is often missed about the current religious landscape: Namely, the extent to which Schori’s theological premises are shared across the culture-war divide, by Christians who oppose gay marriage and abortion and voted eagerly for George W. Bush as well as by liberal Protestants who consider the contemporary GOP an abomination. Peale’s heirs occupy the pulpits of what remains of the Protestant mainline, but they preach from the dais at numerous evangelical megachurches as well. The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they’re imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush. Indeed, the big difference between the prosperity gospel that Osteen and his ilk are peddling and Schori’s liberal Episcopalianism has less to do with any theological principle and more to do with what aspect of American life they want God to validate.

Ross Douthat (July 24, 2008) – The American Heresy (Religion).