PRESENT AT THE HINGE:

In the old days people kept a Yule log burning during the holiday season; I'll be trying the modern cyber equivalent this Christmas with a Yule blog. From now until January 6, I'll be Yule-blogging: reflecting on Christmas in ways that I hope will make sense to Christians and non-Christians alike.

The meaning of Christmas is much bigger than the trite clichés that usually come up in this context; I won't just be writing about the Importance of Giving and the Desirability of Being Nice. Christmas, at least the way I was taught, is a lot more than a merry interlude in the darkest, nastiest time of the year. It is more than getting or even giving. It is more than carols and candy, more than wonderful meals with the people you love best in the world. It is much more than the modern echo of the pagan festivities marking the winter solstice and the moment when the sun begins to reverse its long and slippery slide down the sky.

For Christians, 78% of the American people according to a recent Gallup poll, Christmas is the hinge of the world's fate, the turning point of life. It is the most important thing that ever happened, and we celebrate it every year because it is still happening now. Whether we know it or not, whether we appreciate it or not, we are part of the Christmas Event that has turned history upside down. There's a reason why we date the birth of Christ as the year 1 and why traditionally the world's history was divided into BC, before Christ, and AD, anno domini, the year of the Lord.. (Actually, the monk who tried to calculate it seems to have gotten it wrong; Jesus was probably born four to six years "BC". He also did not know about the use of zero as a number; there is no Year Zero between AD and BC -- which is why irritating pedants remind people at every turn of the century that the "real" new century or millennium doesn't begin until 2001, for example, rather than on January 1, 2000.)

Non-Christians, including the 9% of Americans who adhere to a non-Christian religion and the 15% who claim no religion at all, need to know about Christianity too. Religious education has pretty much fallen by the wayside in American life today. That's a problem in more ways than one; I see the consequences all the time when students I teach - and policy makers and journalists I know - simply do not comprehend the cultural foundations of American politics and cannot understand the ways that so many people here and around the world are moved by religious values and ideas.

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