Christmas Mythologies: Sacred and Secular

Christmas - Philosophy for Everyone: Better Than a Lump of Coal

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 59-69

  Bennett Hunter, Guy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

"secular" mythology, the story of Father Christmas; Christmas mythologies sacred and secular; Christmas, "the virgin birth of the Messiah in biological terms" creation of the world as a "magic act"; Jewish tradition, miraculous conceptions that angels impregnated human beings; Sacred Christmas mythology and the virginal conception; Santa mythology, belief in its literal truth growing out of us in adulthood; Second, "sacred" mythology religious reason why Christmas was ever celebrated as Christmas; Secular Christmas mythology The Santa Story; T. S. Eliot's description of culture as "the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people"; The figure of Santa, in early Christian bishop today being more secularized

Indexed keywords

EID: 82855176048     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9781444325386.ch5     Document Type: Chapter

References (11)

1. E. Gosse, Father and Son (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 31.
2. R. Barthes, Mythologies, ed. and trans. A. Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), p. 110.
3. H.-G. Gadamer, "Religious and Poetical Speaking," in A. M. Olson (ed.) Myth, Symbol and Reality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), pp. 86-98.
4. Genesis 6:4.
5. R. Gledhill, "It's All a Christmas Tall Story," The Times, December 20, 2006.
6. T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), p. 28.
7. D. Hume, "Of Miracles," in Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals [1777], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 109-31.
8. Joshua 10:12-14.
9. B. Russell, "Is there a God?" [1952], in J. G. Slater (ed.) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament 1943-68 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 542-8.
10. B. Russell, "What is an Agnostic?" [1953], in J. G. Slater (ed.) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11: Last Philosophical Testament 1943-68 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 549-57.
11. P. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 48ff.