'Aristotle's Virtues and Homer's Doughnut'

The Vatican official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Tuesday congratulated The Simpsons on their 20th anniversary. It said that from the soporific sermons of the Rev. Lovejoy to Homer's face-to-face talks with God, religion appears so often on the show that one might devise a "Simpsonian theology."

The article "Aristotle's Virtues and Homer's Doughnut" specifically mentioned several religion-themed episodes (without reviewing the entire list documented by Wikipedia), including the one in which Homer calls for divine intervention by crying:

I'm not normally a religious man, but if you're up there, save me, Superman!

Homer's religious confusion is "a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith," and the piece also says:

Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong.

As well as the parentage of the Son of God:

Never mind the 1998 New York Times interview with "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening. He was asked about his views of God and responded:

I was very disturbed when Jesus found a demon in a guy and He put the demon into a herd of pigs, then sent them off a cliff. What did the pigs do? I could never figure that out. It just seemed very un-Christian. Technically, I'm an agnostic, but I definitely believe in hell -- especially after watching the fall TV schedule.

Regarding Groening's view of hell: Amen.

On sidewalks below the office window

Written by Willie Nelson and released in 1963 by Roy Orbison, "Pretty Paper" speaks of people we see and any of us may become:

Susan Jacoby waxes practical about the White House creche

Susan Jacoby is the token secularist at the Washington Post/Newsweek feature On Faith. Regarding whether President Obama "should display a crèche or a menorah or any strictly religious symbols during the holidays in the White House," she writes:

Who cares? With 40 million Americans having trouble putting food on the table and 10 percent out of work, there are more important things to worry about than whether the president, following the tradition of his predecessors, is disregarding the separation of church and state by displaying a creche in the White House. For the record, the White house should not have a creche, a menorah, or any other specifically religious symbol on its grounds. But it's not high on my indignation list. If that makes me a lukewarm atheist, so be it. This annual battle over Christmas is becoming as tiresome as that awful, ubiquitous ditty, "It's the most wonderful time of the year...." If I had to choose between getting rid of that headache-inducing song and getting rid of the White House manger, I'd choose to ban the song.

Of course J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, disagrees with Jacoby about the religious symbols and also argues that the president is free to do whatever he chooses.

He didn't take a stand on the song.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, reminds us that the presidential decisions about symbols are in fact nontrivial.

Robert Paraham of the Baptist Center for Ethics gets to the fundamental issue for Christians. It isn't the choice of White House decorations:

We love little baby Jesus, as NASCAR champion Ricky Bobby, in the movie "Talladega Nights," reminds us. We adore Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes, wise men bearing gifts, shepherds searching, angels singing. We love baby Jesus because he makes no moral claims on us. Instead, we get to project our hopes for the impossible possibility--that all things will be made right.

Yet the biblical story moves quickly from the manger to the man who makes moral claims on people of faith.

The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount calls Christians to be peacemakers, challenging those who want more war in Afghanistan. The Jesus of "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and God what is God's" challenges Christians to do the hard work of moral discernment in a pluralistic country and drop plans for an American theocracy. The Jesus of "love your neighbor" confronts lawmakers to rethink their commitment to the corporate greed of the health insurance industry and ideologues to abandon their social Darwinism. The Jesus of the Golden Rule calls into question Wall Street's deceitfulness and unmerited bonuses.

Lest anyone misunderstand, the debate is hypothetical. Christmas decorations at the White House include a crèche in the East Room.

With that in mind, please read all of the replies here.

For unto you is born this day ...

Jesus and Mary: Black Madonna of Czestochowska

Poland's holiest relic and one of the country's national symbols.

Fair Trade for Christmas

Anne-Marie Berger of Living St. Louis examined Fair Trade and its increasing in popularity.

Fair trade is a means of providing adequate wages to the individuals that make many of the products that we all use everyday.

This video tells the story of Dr. Wilman Ortega, who is a third generation coffee farmer from Guatemala who founded Beans for Hope where a portion of coffee sales go to schools in his home country.

Coffee isn't the only seasonal, fair-trade foodstuff.

Nor is refusal to countenance slavery inevitably a part of choosing fair-trade products over others.

Import Peace is non-profit organization that sells high-quality, fair-trade, USDA organic olive oil produced in Palestine.

It was founded by a group of 100 Presbyterians in response to the frustration, pain and poverty of the people of the Palestinian Occupied Territories during a 2006 trip with the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program.

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