Religion Dispatches
Secular holidays, actually constituting a quasi-sacred calendar, span the entire year: From New Year’s Day, the King Holiday, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veteran’s Day, and now, at long last, Thanksgiving Day.
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One sign of success is leaving your mark on society, making an impact; being famous brings you out of the anonymous masses and bestows celebrity, a status that affords you to an afterlife that most will never achieve; individual biographies of lives lived are more compelling than questions of postmortem judgment or the possibility of reincarnation—these lists of the dead convey profound lessons about what counts in life to the living in twenty-first century America. And nothing teaches a profound moral lesson like a corpse.
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When a serious philosophical lecture on the origin and meaning of Santa Claus is interrupted by the tinkling of bells, jovial laughter, and the mysterious delivery of a case of beer, our writer has the chance to muse on his own former Christmastime convictions.
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Shopping is an ethical act. Today we live in a culture of cheap. We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping—whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee—we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless individuals whose backbreaking and unjustly paid labor produce the goods we consume. What we buy and where we buy it is a political act. It is also, I argue, a religious act.
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Is Easter drained of meaning if we acknowledge its borrowed practices and mixed origins? Is there a limit to how porous the boundaries between traditions should become?
Read MoreWhy is the right launching a War on Easter?
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If King could have conceived of this day, with the coincidence of a holiday in his honor and the swearing-in of the first president of African descent, he would surely have marveled. And then he would have set us all to work.
Read MoreGhouls, ghosts, goblins and Halloween Hell Houses; Traditional Values Coalition’s shameless Video Voter Guide; More on Sarah Palin’s religious affiliations; Hagee hears a Who-mageddon; No candy, no soda, no birth control!
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This Halloween, apart from your garden-variety ghouls, skeletons, monsters, witches, vampires and zombies, Americans will be visited by the ghosts of past presidents, the spirits of dead soldiers, and by the souls of those who endured slavery. It is a season of reckoning, both social and political. The election, on the other hand, is about life, today, now. Or is it?
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Don’t hate me because I prefer stories about my father butchering The Temptations’ version of Silent Night to dressing my kids in kente cloth.
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