There is a story told about Michelangelo that I have not been able to document–although the quotes that go with it are authentic. When a little boy, this tradition goes, Michelangelo was given a small Greek sculpture of a human form, half chiseled from the marble. For...
I collect everything I can on Jesus’ humor. During Lent he is remembered as a “man of sorrows acquainted with grief,” but we also need to remember that most of the time he was a man of joy, immersed in laughter and food and conviviality. Of course, Jewish humor...
There is an old tale about the time, many, many centuries ago, when the pope decided that a synagogue the Jews were using in Rome really belonged to the Vatican. So he told them to move. Rightly, there was uproar from the members of the synagogue. So the pope...
Almost two centuries ago Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) , the New England novelist and short-story writer, wrote a haunting story “The Christmas Banquet” about a rich man who died and left a strange bequest. He left money to be set in trust. The income was to be used...
The Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, is the source of the parable about a man who broke into a department store one night before Christmas. Instead of stealing items, he simply rearranged the price tags on them. When the shopkeeper and the customers came in the...
When prisoner in a Nazi internment camp in December 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a nativity play for a group of fellow internees, who were trying to make Christmas come alive for the prisoners. The least known of all Sartre’s works, “Bariona” includes this projection...
