Welcome to Three Things.
This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbour and culture.
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Why is He Ebenezer Scrooge? And Why Do Kevin’s Booby Traps Never Really Work?
Mark Roberts and LuElla D’Amico on some favourite Christmas stories
Just as most of us can sing Christmas carols without ever thinking about the words, the below-the-surface profundity of our favourite seasonal stories can easily pass us by. Let’s consider A Christmas Carol and Home Alone.
First, the Dickens. Ebenezer Scrooge is the main character, but why Ebenezer? Bible readers will be familiar with the word as a stone of remembrance, set up by Joshua and the Israelites after crossing the Jordan River into the promised land. Dickens knew this. As Mark Roberts explains:
The final use of “Ebenezer” in A Christmas Carol comes on a literal ebenezer, Scrooge’s gravestone. This stone completes the transformation of Scrooge, showing him of how his life might end if he does not become a new man. … Ebenezer Scrooge was not only a man with a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping” character. He was also to serve as a monument for readers of A Christmas Carol. Dickens intended Ebenezer Scrooge to remind us of things we ought not forget, lest we end up like Jacob Marley and the other spirits who walked the earth in sorrow, dragging the heavy chains they forged in life.
Second, Home Alone. I (Phillip) assumed that this Catholic take on the 1990 John Hughes classic would be a stretch, but no. LuElla D’Amico, an English professor and mother of two, sees in Kevin McCallister a young man moving from spiritual desolation to consolation. He finds this not in becoming “a mastermind orchestrating the consequences for those who have wronged him”, but in being rescued by a member of his church family, the fearful old man called Marley.
This moment of grace is the precursor to Kevin’s reconciliation with his family, which mirrors the teaching of Jesus. As D’Amico writes,
When I visualize the scene from this parable, as I have many times as a Christian child and adult, I can easily superimpose Kevin’s joyous running toward his mother at the end of the movie to that of the Prodigal Son running toward his father. I invite you to use your imagination in this way now, to see the spiritual where perhaps before, like me, you may have been lost in the material.
Read Kevin's Suburban Panopticon?: Home Alone and the Christmas Spirit at Church Life Journal and Recalling Our Ebenezers over at
’s Substack.You Don’t Want to Live in a World Without Babies
Martin Gurri on the consequences of an unpeopled world
Advent anticipates the arrival of a baby, a child whose birth will bring hope to the world. “Hope is a child,” writes Peter Leithart. “Each child born is a sign that God hasn’t given up on the human race, that there are further generations to come.”
This is an increasingly unpopular idea. Widespread fear about climate change and population density are causing many young people to choose childlessness. This is framed as a noble ethical decision, but former CIA analyst Martin Gurri speculates about the unforeseen consequences:
For instance, the welfare state requires an endless supply of young people to produce more, consume more, and generate ever more taxes for bureaucrats to distribute. A prolonged shortage of young bodies will stress the social safety net to the breaking point. Expensive retirement and health insurance schemes are likely to collapse. The marginal will slip into poverty — the poor will grow desperate — but government will lack the funds to do much about it. The political consequences are unfathomable. My guess is that crime and turbulence will be a constant background noise but not revolution, since the minimum levels of testosterone needed for that kind of venture will be lacking.
Economically, a world dominated by the old will be less innovative, less dynamic, and more risk averse. The only way to compensate for a shriveled workforce will be through technology — but that’s just what you won’t get from the geezers in charge. …
But the most wrenching aspect of the transition will be social and psychological. Absent the binding power of children, the extended family will disappear, and the nuclear family will disintegrate. There will be few mothers and fathers, no siblings, no cousins, no aunts or uncles; whole lineages will flicker out. If family is the audience to the drama of life, each individual will perform in the chill of an empty theater. Isolation will leave the young, as a class, powerless and dependent. Loneliness will fill them with psychotic dread. There can be no exit, no escape to a better future. Repopulating the world will be a tough mathematical proposition. For generations, the old will smother the young the way one does with a precious possession, like a rare breed of dog.
Might it really be true that the birth of any child, as with the birth of Christ, is good news of great joy?
Read On Having Children over at
. For more on the topic, read Louise Perry’s article Fear of a Human Planet at Plough.What the Algorithm Does to Young Girls
Freya India on internet addiction and low self-esteem
A friend recently told me about a contract she and her husband drew up with their twin teenage girls after reading parts of this article to them. The terms? Your parents will give you $1,000 if you stay off social media until age eighteen. With their girls now at sixteen, it seems to be working. Is it overkill, though? Are they offering too much for something so small? Or, are they asking too much for so little a reward?
Gen Z journalist
would likely answer No to all of those questions. In a recent article at , she traces the affects of algorithmically generated content on her generation of teenage girls when it comes to personal appearance and mental health. She uses this metaphor:Algorithms act like conveyor belts. Show even the slightest interest, fear, or insecurity about anything—hover over it for half a second—and you will be drawn in deeper. Little by little, the algorithm learns what keeps you watching. And since the most negative and extreme posts get the most engagement, very often your feed will become an endless stream of content that makes you feel worse about yourself. You’ll find yourself on a continuous conveyor belt of apps, products, services, pills, and procedures to fix you.
As Generation Alpha comes online in this decade, India offers some stark advice to parents and kids: delay social media use until at least sixteen and get off screens as much as possible. Because the dangers are not the ones we normally expect:
I speak to many parents about social media; they worry that their kids will talk to predators or be exposed to explicit self-harm and suicidal content—which are, of course, real risks. But there is also something more pernicious and more destabilizing happening. Something we have to get ahead of. Because maybe it seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.
Read What the Algorithm Does to Young Girls at
. For more, listen to Russell Moore’s recent interview with Jonathan Haidt about how the move from play-based to screen-based childhood has created the anxious generation.
As always, thanks, guys. Peace to you and your little ones in this Advent.