Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'christmas'

December 24, 2024

Bloody Sunday, Black Friday, and Christmas

In the opening track to their now-classic 1983 album, War, Irish rock band U2 sang about “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” I can’t believe the news today Oh, I can’t close my eyes and make it go away … Broken bottles under children’s feet Bodies strewn across the dead-end street But I won’t heed the battle call It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall Bono was supposedly singing about the “Bloody Sunday” of January 20, 1972, in which 26 unarmed protesters were shot by British troops in Bogside in Derry, Northern Ireland. Continue Reading...
December 25, 2023

Santa Claus vs. Artemis: A Christmas Story

As we deck the halls with boughs of holly this year, read the story of Christ’s Nativity, sing hymns and carols, exchange gifts, and light our homes in increasingly irrational competition verging on mutually assured destruction with our neighbors, we must not lose sight of the real “reason for the season”: Santa’s victory over the pagan goddess Artemis. Continue Reading...
December 22, 2023

Going My Way: An Enduring True Fairy Tale

Every Christmas, I try to write about Christmas movies, especially about old Hollywood, because the best directors at the time considered it worthwhile to make movies that would chastise and cheer up the nation, indeed remind people of the spirit of Christmas and thus try to fit Christianity into the new entertainment that dominated the American imagination. Continue Reading...
December 22, 2022

Sinners, Saints, and Grace in We’re No Angels

Michael Curtiz, famed director of Casablanca, made a Christmas movie in 1955, starring Humphrey Bogart, called We’re No Angels, about the power of innocence and moral decency to transform even hardened criminals—of whom Bogart is one, the other two played by the famous British actor-director Peter Ustinov and the American son of Italian immigrants Aldo Ray. Continue Reading...
December 17, 2021

Christmas in Connecticut: the holiday movie that promises you can’t have it all

I continue my series on old Hollywood Christmas movies. After a movie about church as a community, The Bishop’s Wife(1947), and the workplace as a community, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), I turn to a movie about family, the smallest but most natural community: Christmas in Connecticut (1945), starring Barbara Stanwyck, one of the great Hollywood stars, Sydney Greenstreet (the Fat Man from The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca), and Dennis Morgan. Continue Reading...
December 09, 2021

When bookshops were miraculous, romantic places

I began a series of essays on Christmas movies last week with The Bishop’s Wife (1947), a story about church, the community of the faithful, and spiritual responsibility. This week, I’m writing about a less lofty subject, the community of the workplace and the life of commerce, but a much better movie, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), one of the classics of old Hollywood, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as shopkeepers who fall in love over Christmas. Continue Reading...