Commentary

As I was driving home this evening from a massive amount of errands, the song “Little Drummer Boy” by Jars of Clay came on the radio. This is far from my favorite Christmas song, but the words came to a deeper meaning this particular holiday.

At 6:30 a.m., two members of Westminster UCC climbed to the base of the church's bell tower and rang the historic bell 26 times to remember those killed in the Newtown shooting.

Westminster joined churches across the nation in this memorial.

The horrible killings of last Friday in Newtown, Conn. instantly elicited a huge range of responses, as it should. It is a tribute to our collective psyche that we continue to be shocked, outraged, stunned by such events. In spite of their frequency we are not yet inured to them, but their frequency is growing. 

The U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to national health care legislation mandating contraception coverage was ranked the No. 1 Religion Story of 2012 by members of the Religion Newswriters Association.

Related to the top story, the top religion newsmaker was Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, who became the point man for Catholic objections to required coverage of contraception, sterilization and morning after drugs in Obamacare.

The shooting at the Sandy Hook primary school last week was a terrible tragedy, the second worst in U.S history.  The lives that were lost, the young and the old, are irreplaceable. Now the search is on for the reason.

A new report on global religious identity shows that while Christians and Muslims make up the two largest groups, those with no religious affiliation — including atheists and agnostics — are now the third-largest “religious” group in the world.
The study, released Tuesday (Dec. 18) by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, found that more than eight in 10 (84 percent) of the world’s 7 billion people adheres to some form of religion.

It is no longer a simple question, as more people become “unchurched” and the United States becomes even more diversified, there is a larger population that celebrate the holiday as a nonreligious holiday — an opportunity to party and give gifts.