Transubstantiate

In the New Year, we must view our time through a divine lens.

A month after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, a debate raged about the responsibilities of those of us turned safely inside. For those privileged enough to find their calendars suddenly cleared, what should we do with all this newfound time? Should we perfect our baking skills? Learn another language? Launch a business?

But in her article for Wired, writer Laurie Penny took issue with those “lucky enough to be able to shelter in place” who were “using that time to launch podcasts and personal projects and life-hack [their] way to some cargo-cult pastiche of normality.” In her essay, Penny defiantly opposed the idea that we were most optimized when we were most productive.

“‘Productivity,’” she argued, “is not a synonym for health, or for safety, or for sanity.”

In theory, I might have agreed with Penny. But busy had always been the most recognizable version of me. Like almost everyone, I counted motion as meaning. While I was getting things done, I felt useful to the world—even to God.

So, in the spring of 2020, I doubled down on time-management strategies. I read more books. I made longer lists. I cleaned every closet in the house, all in the effort to stem the tide of time-anxiety, a word to name the panic attached to modernity’s scarcest resource.

I felt worse and worse and worse.

Of the many traumas the COVID-19 pandemic inflicted on the world, its disruption to our experience of time is certainly one. Years have been entirely eclipsed from memory, time now cleaved into the before and the after. If for one brief and hallowed moment, we gained a sense of time as something to receive, not manage—perhaps …

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Innovation, evangelism, and other developments worth celebrating over the past year.

At CT, we’re people who love good news. Here are 10 examples of positive developments we got to cover in 2022, from laundromat ministries to a multimillion-dollar hit Bible TV show.

Here’s to effective strategies, new milestones, creative thinking, efforts to adapt and change, and other stories of hope that came in the midst of hard and heavy headlines. They’re listed in chronological order.

Check out the rest of our 2022 year-end lists here.

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From papyrus in Montana to ivory in Jerusalem, these are the discoveries that made scholars of the biblical world say “wow” this year.

Biblical archaeology is a slow process. Not only does it take years to dig and sift the artifacts of biblical history, but it also takes years to analyze and interpret the discoveries. The most important things unearthed in 2022 will not be widely known for years. But the past 12 months have seen some amazing announcements of findings that expand our knowledge of the world of the Bible.

Here are 10 of the most important archaeological finds that made news this year:

10. A papyrus in Montana

A scrap of papyrus framed and hung on the wall of a home in Montana was identified as one of a handful of Hebrew texts older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. The text is a little larger than a postage stamp, with four short lines of ancient Hebrew, including the name Ishmael. The unnamed owner said his mother was given the papyrus when she visited Israel in 1965. Israeli authorities believe it dates to around 700 B.C.

The owner agreed to donate the historic object to the Israel Antiquities Authority, so that it can be properly preserved and studied. Experts do not know where the papyrus came from originally, but they do think it’s genuine. Radiocarbon tests matched the paleographic dating of the writing style. Ishmael was a common biblical name going back to the time of Abraham.

9.Farm life in Galilee

Rural life in Galilee came into sharper focus when work on a water project uncovered remains of a farmstead. The farm was abandoned for unknown reasons about a century and a half before Jesus’ lifetime. The workers left behind implements and equipment, including pieces of a loom and large storage vessels, giving scholars insight into the average day at the time the Hasmonean kingdom, during the Hellenistic period, was expanding north from …

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In case you missed them, here are our most-read print cover stories.

Christianity Today’s print magazine cover stories focused on many of the evangelical conversations that happened in 2022: pastoral burnout, deconstruction, and the war in Ukraine. We also focused on telling people’s stories: from U2 star Bono to a little-known but trailblazing Bible translator. Here are CT’s cover stories ranked in reverse order of popularity online.

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Heresies, harassment, and Her Majesty’s death: Here are the stories Christians engaged with this year.

This year was all but predictable. With the war in Ukraine, historic court cases, and civil unrest around the world, Christianity Today’s readers came to our site for timely, faithful reflections and church-centered reporting.

The top article of 2022 was written by our own editor in chief, Russell Moore. His raw response to the SBC’s third-party investigative report was read by over 500,000 people and translated into six languages.

In addition to our SBC coverage, CT wrote about fantasy role-playing, Bono’s career and its connection to his faith, and pandemic fallout in the pews.

Our 20 most-read stories of the year are listed below in descending order, starting with No. 20 and ending with No. 1. You can find these and other top CT stories of the year here, many of which are also offered in CT Global translations.

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Check out the rest of our 2022 year-end lists here.

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Churches observing St. Stephen’s Day retain the charitable roots of December 26.

Among the carols filling the air in Britain at Christmastime is the story of a 10th-century king braving the snow—“deep and crisp and even”—to help a poor man gathering firewood.

“Good King Wenceslas” sets out to deliver food, wine, and logs, and the shivering servant who accompanies him finds that the king’s very footsteps are warm. “Ye who now will bless the poor shall yourselves find blessing,” the final verse promises.

The carol begins with the king looking out “on the Feast of Stephen.” St. Stephen’s Day falls the day after Christmas and honors the first Christian martyr, whose story can be found in the Book of Acts. John Mason Neale, the 19th-century Anglican priest who composed the words to “Good King Wenceslas,” was alluding to a long history of charitable giving on the day.

Yet for the vast majority in Britain today, December 26 is simply Boxing Day. If there’s a tradition covered in the press, it’s that of the Boxing Day sales, when bargain-seeking crowds descend on the country’s malls, akin to Black Friday in the United States.

Francis Young, a UK-based historian of religion and belief, points out that even the idea of shops opening the day after Christmas is a recent development. “It would have been known as St. Stephen’s Day certainly right down to the middle of the 19th century,” he said in an interview with CT.

The name Boxing Day can be traced to around 1830, but “Christmas boxes” associated with the holiday date back to the 17th century. These were clay containers with a slot for coins, like piggy banks. At Christmas, the collected money was distributed to servants as well as tradespeople …

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An Advent reading for December 25.

Read Isaiah 7:14 and 9:1–7

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.”

Isaiah 9:6–7

Celebrate Jesus’ birth with joy.

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How the fact of the Incarnation fulfills the hopes of every culture.

On All Saints’ Day, my wife and I often tell stories about the saints who have most impacted us. This year, I shared with my family the story of C. S. Lewis’s conversion.

For some time, he had been teetering on the precipice of faith, unable to resolve his intellectual difficulties with Christianity. On a late-night walk around Oxford with his friends Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien, he voiced his essential objection.

Everything that matters, Lewis said, belongs in the realm of myth.

Lewis had a great fondness for Norse mythology that went all the way back to his youth in Northern Ireland. For him, however, myth was about meaning making , whereas history was about unrepeatable facts, collected and analyzed in an empirical way. The great tragedy of human existence was that myth and history did not and could never intersect.

Like the German thinker G. E. Lessing before him, Lewis described the “ugly ditch” between history and theology. Irrespective of how radiant his life was, a man named Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago could never be anything more than an inspirational figure.

Dyson’s and Tolkien’s responses were electrifying: In this instance, they said, myth had become fact. Everything eternal and mystical—the deep magic of the world—was real and incarnate in the person of Christ. He was not simply a historical person but the Creator God enfleshed to save the human beings he had created.

With that riposte, Lewis was suddenly able to put the pieces together. As he wrote later to his friend Arthur Greeves, “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really …

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Because of Jesus, we are not like those who grieve without hope this holiday season.

Christmas has always been the most special day of the year for my family.

We enjoy New Year’s Day, Easter, and Thanksgiving and other holidays that come our way as the calendar pages turn. But there has always been something special about Christmas—with its well-established celebrations, personalized traditions, and faith-filled observations. And yet we recently learned a difficult lesson—that the most special days can also be the most painful ones, and that sorrows are often amplified in festive times.

It was just two short years ago that my son Nick was unexpectedly taken from us. He was a college student who was progressing well in his studies, a fiancé looking forward to his upcoming wedding, a faithful son, and a loving brother. But then, in an instant, he was taken—and our world was shattered.

Not a day goes by when he has not been on our hearts and in our minds. Not a day goes by when we do not miss him dearly and grieve him sorely. Not a day goes by when we do not long to hear his voice and see his smile.

And as this most special of days draws near, we feel that longing grow and that ache deepen, for we know that at Christmas we will sense his absence even more. It will be impossible to ignore or overlook—for there will be fewer gifts under the tree than there once were, fewer chairs around the table, one less stocking above the hearth. We know that on this day, of all days, he will be most deeply missed.

This Christmas falls on a Sunday and we will, of course, gather with the rest of our church to mark the day with worship—with songs and prayers and scriptures and preaching. How could we better mark Christmas than like this? My older daughter and her husband will be in town …

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An Australian court is weighing whether or not Brian Houston had a “reasonable excuse” not to report his father’s sexual abuse to the police.

The trial of Brian Houston ended on Wednesday after 13 days of testimony, evidence, and cross-examination in courtroom 2.5 in the vast Downing Centre courthouse in downtown Sydney, in the faded splendor of a converted department store.

The founder of Hillsong Church answered question after question about what he knew about his father Frank’s pedophilia, when he knew it, whom he told, whom he didn’t tell, and why. He admits he failed to report his father to police in 1999, as required by the law, but argues he is not guilty because he has a reasonable excuse.

Houston told the magistrate in the bench trial he didn’t go to the authorities because the grown-up survivor of his father’s sexual abuse told him not to.

He testified that the victim said, “I don’t want to be a big part of the church conversation. You know how gossipy they are. … You are not to go to the police. If anyone is going to the police it will be me, and I won’t be doing that.”

Houston’s legal advocate, Phillip Boulten, pointed out the victim never did file a report. He argued that, in fact, many people knew about and did not report the sexual abuse, including other church leaders, a Sydney Morning Herald reporter, and police who attended the church. Tens of thousands of people knew of Frank Houston’s offence, Boulten argued.

“You have to be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that [Houston] did not act without a reasonable excuse,” Boulten told the court. “The Crown”—how Australian courts refer to the prosecution—“has to prove that there is not a reasonable excuse that could be raised.”

Crown prosecutor Gareth Harrison argued, on the other hand, that …

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