Author: Lance Garrison

Of all the qualities that the New Testament ascribes to God, compassion is among the most shocking.Compassion has nothing to do with power, with immortality or with immutability, which is what many people think of when they contemplate God’s qualities. The Greek gods of myth who lived on Mt. Olympus were defined by many things, but compassion was not high among them.“For much of antiquity feeling the pain of others was regarded as a weakness,” John Dickson, a professor of biblical studies and public Christianity at Wheaton College, told me. This comes to full flowering in the Stoics, he said,…

A lot has changed since then. Now part of Unite, one of Britain’s largest unions, the faith workers branch — predominantly priests but also rabbis and humanist celebrants — is fast approaching 2,000 clerical members, or around 10 percent of the clergy in active ministry. The numbers, in themselves, may not sound like much. But these members have joined from a nontraditional sector without any recruitment push from the union, in a remarkably organic process. The branch runs a help line and supports clergy members in disputes; in June, it submitted its first ever formal pay claim.Technically, clergy members aren’t…

This is the latest in my occasional series of conversations about Christianity, aimed at bridging America’s God gulf. Previously, I’ve spoken with the Rev. Timothy Keller, President Jimmy Carter, Cardinal Joseph Tobin and others. Here’s my interview with Beth Moore, an influential evangelical writer who broke with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.Nicholas Kristof: Merry Christmas! This is my favorite season, but I’m skeptical that Jesus was born to a virgin. Do we need to accept miracles to celebrate the Christmas story?Beth Moore: For people who believe Jesus rose from the dead,…

But old assumptions about how freely “Messiah” could be interpreted were beginning to change. An example of a stricter understanding of how to perform “Messiah” was the conductor Johannes Somary’s version with the English Chamber Orchestra in 1970. With its smaller ensemble, much faster tempo and marked sense of restraint by vocalists, it reflected the influence of the “historically informed performance” movement, which would shape recordings of a wide variety of classical music in the coming decades.This movement encouraged a greater fidelity to scores — in their earliest extant versions, not the received tradition of 19th-century orchestration that had survived…

“Munich” did poorly at the box office, especially by the standards of a Spielberg film, but then, what did the number crunchers expect? It was released in the anxious, skittery years of George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, when America was just over four raw years away from the attacks of Sept. 11, and here was a film giving airtime to the viewpoints of terrorists. Mr. Kushner was attacked at the time for perceived Palestinian sympathies. Reflecting on the film’s reception, he has said that movie critics helped save the film by steering the conversation, again and again, back to…

My mom loved Christmas so much, she would sometimes leave the tree up until April.She dyed a sheet blue for the sky behind the crèche and made a star of tin foil. The cradle would stay empty until Christmas morning; when we tumbled downstairs, the baby would be in his place, and the house would smell of roasting turkey.Mom always took it personally if you didn’t wear red or green on Christmas, and she signed all the presents “Love, Baby Jesus,” “Love, Virgin Mary” or “Love, St. Joseph.”(My brother Kevin was always upset that Joseph got short shrift, disappearing from…

No sooner did a jury deliver a nearly $150 million defamation judgment against the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani than he went out and again started smearing the two Georgia election workers at the center of the case. Within days, he filed for bankruptcy, shielding himself in the near term from having to surrender whatever assets he has to his creditors.His brazen thumbing of his nose at the jury and the legal system laid bare some unsettling truths about justice. Defamation law is one of the few tools that lawyers have to hold people accountable for using lies…

A generation after the Supreme Court stepped into a disputed presidential election, America is experiencing a creeping sense of déjà vu. Twenty-three years ago, a bare majority of the justices halted a recount in Florida, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush.The specter of Bush v. Gore, the case that stands as a marker of how not to resolve searing political disputes, looms large as the Supreme Court is being called upon to address controversies with profound implications for the fortunes of the Republican front-runner in 2024.The justices are feeling the heat nearly a year in advance of an…

Let’s consider a counterfactual. In the autumn of 2016, with American liberalism reeling from the election of Donald Trump, a shattered Hillary Clinton embraces the effort to pin all the blame on Vladimir Putin.She barnstorms the country arguing that the election was fundamentally illegitimate because of foreign interference. She endorses every attempt to prove that Russian disinformation warped the result. She touts conspiracy theories that supposedly prove that voting machines in Wisconsin were successfully hacked. She argues that her opponent should not be allowed to take office, that he’s a possible Manchurian candidate, a Russian cat’s paw. And she urges…

While the holidays can be a time of celebration and joy, they can bring up tough emotions for some people. These feelings, called the “ holiday blues ,” can be confusing to work through. But the good news is, there are plenty of ways you can protect your mental health this holiday season. In the WebMD webinar “ Holiday Blues: Protect Your Mental Health This Holiday Season ,” WebMD Chief Medical Officer John Whyte, MD, MPH, explained what the holiday blues are, how they can affect you, and ways to…