Word: christe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BETHLEHEM: Israelis and Palestinians agree on very little, but they usually manage to leave Jesus out of it. No longer: Representatives of Nazareth and Bethlehem are at each other?s throats over which town has greater claim to be called the home of Christ...
...challenge for the Palestinian Authority: ?You can see Jesus? birthplace in two minutes. After that, you need to eat lunch or dinner, to relax or stay in a hotel ? Bethlehem lacks these facilities, and we cannot attract tourists unless they are built.? In other words, 2,000 years after Christ?s birth, visitors to the town are still unlikely to find room...
...find my Grinch-like stance softening year by year. You can accuse the Christmas costumers of turning Christ's Mass into kitsch. Or you can see them, from a loftier perspective, as the only true celebrants of the original Christmas spirit, which we have tended to lose sight of in recent centuries. Check out the holiday's history: Dec. 25 wasn't chosen because it was the date on Jesus' birth certificate but because that was the time of the ancient Saturnalia, when all of Rome poured into the streets for days of public revelry. Even Christianity couldn't take...
...Bible plays like wild melodrama: a father commanded to sacrifice his child, an ark in a deluge, God's son betrayed and murdered and reborn. Ideal material for Martin Scorsese, as he proved in The Last Temptation of Christ, his mean-streets-of-Jerusalem story of a tormented Jesus. By contrast, Buddhist texts are static and serene, antidramatic. And the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet is the ultimate good fellow, not a goodfella. So what can Scorsese find to make his own in KUNDUN...
Even when a Christmas program is really supposed to be about Christmas, the Christ part gets downplayed. The Soul of Christmas, a special on PBS (various dates) features Thomas Moore, the author of Care of the Soul, and a group of Celtic musicians. With this show, Moore wants us to see Christmas as an occasion that can be celebrated by "people of all faiths or no faith." No one wants to be a spoilsport and criticize such ecumenism, but you wonder at what point a religion's symbols become so generalized that they lose all meaning. Still, Moore might have...