Word: angelical
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...Ding's prosperity is shared with just about everyone living in Yiwu, China's very own North Pole. Thousands of vendors offer whirling Christmas trees with glowing fiber-optic needles, chicken-feather angel wings and that traditional favorite without which no holiday living room is complete: the plastic statuette of Santa playing electric guitar on the moon. All this might have confused Chinese consumers a few years ago, but Yiwu is feeding a ravenous demand by mainland consumers who think that the height of contemporary urbanity is to festoon the living room in December. "I'd always heard of Christmas...
...needed basis. These days, however, some feminist readers like Vanderbilt University's Amy-Jill Levine, editor of the forthcoming Feminist Companion to Mariology, are more interested in what might be called Mary's feistiness. After all, Levine points out, the handmaid line does not follow immediately upon the angel's tidings that "thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and call his name Jesus ..." Rather, Mary poses the logical query, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" Says Levine: "She asks, 'How's that going to happen?' And when his answer makes sense...
Other readers focus on Luke's ornate narrative context for the Annunciation. Before Mary gets the news, the angel alerts the family of her cousin Elizabeth that she, a barren woman, will bear "a child that will be great in the sight of the Lord"; that is, John the Baptist. After Mary's Annunciation, she visits Elizabeth, and the fetus in Elizabeth's belly miraculously leaps up in recognition of God's promised Messiah. Surrounding this and other subplots are a series of stunning poems, or canticles, which the church later gave Latin names like the Magnificat and the Benedictus...
Of all the miracles surrounding the Nativity, the central and essential one is Jesus' birth to a woman who had "never known a man." In Luke, the angel Gabriel explains to Mary about her son's conception as follows: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." Although neither of the Nativities marks a moment for the beginning of her ensuing pregnancy, Christians have long assumed it followed directly upon...
...have alleged that Jesus' birth early in Mary's marriage to Joseph was the result of her committing adultery; much later Jewish sources named a Roman soldier called Panthera. Those accusations, some scholars believe, account for the verse in Matthew in which Joseph considers divorcing Mary before his dream angel allays his doubts. Related notions of Jesus' illegitimacy have never totally disappeared. Jane Schaberg, an iconoclastic feminist critic at the University of Detroit Mercy, has long maintained that parts of Luke's introduction to the topic echo the beginning of an Old Testament passage on rape ("If there...