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Entry: The Empty Manger Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_empty_manger#12547 Post contents: Beautiful, John Z, and mostly true and wise. Here are just a few quibbles, and as I admire you and your writing so much, it's a good exercise for me to consider your occasional mistakes sometimes; even Francis of Assisi made some blunders and occasionally was willfully blinkered. So: "This tiny stranger, who shares with them some chromosomes..." As Jesus shared chromosomes with all descendants of Adam, that should be a reminder of the poverty of eugenics and of the temptations to confuse race with being born of the spirit. The Holy Spirit has no DNA. "They abandon the cultural richness and beauty of cities, and take to the desert—willingly inhabiting the soulless “sprawl” which consumes ever more of our landscape every year." Sorry but I see absolutely no virtue or even the slightest dignity in anyone's collaboration in the rape of the land. Those ghastly suburban developments and McMansions have nothing to do with defense of Christianity, and everything to do with a profane contempt for the ancient blessing of the land. "And for what? To shield their offspring from chaos, crime, and corruption." Those aren't the only reasons, and it's very dubious whether they're the principal reasons. The White Flight to suburbia - the abandonment of America's cities which began in the 1950s - was inspired largely by wanting to get away from "the niggers", and one could argue that the proximate cause of the chaos, crime and corruption of America's cities was the consequent to the choices of Whites, through their irresponsible abandonment of the cities, and the chaos and crime broke out later (yes, largely among Blacks) because of the economic violence done to the cities by White Flight. Furthermore, most of the Blacks who moved into America's major cities WERE Christians, so you can't say "White Flight" was intended principally as a way of preserving Christianity. And I can't resist taunting JZ a wee bit, in a friendly way, about this line: "Any healthy creature or culture shows two signs of life: It reproduces itself, and it fights off intruders." Yep. Just like England fought off the attempted intrusion of the King of Spain and the Pope in 1588. ;-) And finally, a serious theological quibble with this: "The family he fathered with that blood, the Church..." Nope. Shedding of blood does not create life; shedding blood can only save life. The Church was fathered by God the Father, through the Holy Spirit. Christ is not our Father; Christ is the Son of the Father, and confusing Christ's blood with an agent of "fatherhood" confuses the identities of the Holy Trinity. But all that said, Merry Christmas, John Zmirak. I'm having one shot of Irish whisky just to toast you and your extraordinary command of the written word (and exposition of the Word) in English; as one wag said (was it Yeats or Joyce?), "first the English invented the language, and then the Irish taught them how to use it." Sent at: 2008 10 13