Life

• Lovingly liberated: Paul's theology of the cross

  The story of Jesus, his cross and resurrection, is our own story.

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  Christmas cards featuring alcohol are reinforcing binge drinking as a social norm, say health experts

  Christmas cards and birthday cards that make light of drinking are reinforcing negative social attitudes around excessive alcohol consumption, experts warn in the British Medical Journal.

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  Post-natal depression in dads linked to emotional problems in teenage daughters

  One in 20 dads was found to have experienced post-natal depression, a condition commonly associated with mothers of newborns

• Who were the Magi and why did they come to worship Jesus?

  In the Western Christian tradition, they have been given names – Balthasar, king of Chaldea, Caspar, king of Tarshish, and Melchior, king of Nubia. But none of these are original.

• Christmas season left Victorian shop workers 'more dead than alive'

  Many of our festive traditions – from exchanging cards and pulling crackers to decorating trees – were popularised by the Victorians.

• Charles Dickens and the birth of the classic English Christmas dinner

  Charles Dickens popularised the traditional, English Christmas in 1843 in his novel A Christmas Carol, when Bob Cratchit and his family sit down on Christmas Day to eat a dinner of goose with mashed potatoes and apple sauce accompanied by sage and onion stuffing and followed by Christmas pudding.

• 'The Numinous Woman': How a Cornish poet caught the mystery of the Incarnation

  One of the most intriguing of Christmas poems is not as well known as it should be.

• Good news of great joy: Immanuel has come

  I remember my first Santa Claus doubts. How could a fat man get down a skinny chimney, not just at our house, but at the houses of little boys and girls all over the world?

• What has Isaiah's Immanuel prophecy got to do with the birth of Jesus?

  What's gone before is a picture of muddle and confusion, fear, politics, war, destruction and hunger. We skip all that and go straight to the nice bit.

• The lost message of Christmas: Why we need to read Matthew 1

  One passage that's never, ever read at the carol service is Matthew 1: 1-17.

• Why I don't care about putting on a perfect Christmas

  There is nothing wrong with excelling at hospitality and there is certainly nothing wrong with opening up our lives to share with others in need.

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  UK scientists are more atheist than the rest of the population

  Nearly half of the UK's scientists do not believe in God, researchers have found.

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  The more popular children are also more stingy

  Children who are popular are less likely to be generous with their friends when it comes to Christmas gifts, research has found.

• O come, all ye faithful: 5 reasons to sing Christmas carols

  From Australia to Argentina to Anchorage, the message of Jesus will resonate from the mouths of his people in the same melodies and lyrics that his people have been singing for centuries.

• Christmas is a spiritual eruption: What the West can learn from the Eastern Church

  Jesus' birth is not primarily an historical event, though it was that. It's a spiritual one.