An Epiphany on a Hill. The Birth of Christianity. Plus. . .

It’s Thursday, December 25. We at The Free Press wish you a very Merry Christmas. In today’s The Front Page, we’re bringing you a bumper package of festive content.

Shortly before his 50th birthday, Martin Shaw saw a star falling out of the sky.

If that sounds strange to you, rest assured: It was strange for him, as well.

Martin is a mythologist—the author of such books as Courting the Wild Twin—so he’d spent a lot of time thinking about ancient stories. But then, on a cold winter morning, he encountered one directly. As he wrote in our pages yesterday: “I had gone out into the bush for 101 days, peered into the mysteries as deeply as I possibly could, and found—what? The mossy face of Christ staring back at me?”

Raised in a Baptist church, Shaw drifted from religion as a teenager, until at middle age, he found himself unmoored: “After 25 years of touring, publishing books, and teaching at some of the great universities, I was bushed,” he writes. “I needed tangible contact with something that wasn’t a lecture hall or publishing deadline.”

So, he disappeared into an English forest for months to, in his words, “reconnect to my roots.” He prayed some, although he wasn’t quite sure what he was praying to. One night, he asked the Creator for guidance, and moments later had an experience so moving, it changed the entire trajectory of his life. Read Martin’s extraordinary account of the night that brought him back to God:

Next we have Matthew Walther, the editor of the literary Catholic magazine The Lamp, and his rummage through what he calls “the attic” of American religious history: the largely forgotten religious pioneers and eccentrics who helped pave the way for our modern pluralism. Among them: Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims, as well as proponents of more esoteric faiths like Swedenborgianism.

Part of our America at 250 series, it’s an enlightening, entertaining trip through history that helps explain how America’s “version of pluralism has somehow proven capacious enough to accommodate and even to nourish religious traditions that are themselves formally incompatible with pluralism, from pre-Vatican II Catholicism to Haredi Judaism to the Legacy Baptist Church in Coolidge, Arizona.” Read it—you’ll learn something.

Think your Christmas is challenging? To put in perspective those annoying relatives or dirty dishes staring at you from the sink, read the latest installment of our new newsletter on this week in American history, by Jonathan Horn. He takes us back to December 1775. Christmas was weeks away, and George Washington wasn’t in the festive mood: His troops were fewer than 10,000, his guns unreliable, and the cannons he ordered nowhere to be found. The service and sacrifice on display during that winter would help define the American cause—and set the standard for generations that followed. Read all about it here.

Next, we turn the clock back further—2,000 years to the birth of Christianity. On the latest episode of Honestly, Bari Weiss talks to Paula Fredriksen, one of the world’s leading scholars of the historical Jesus. How did a small group of Jews who thought of themselves as history’s last generation become the first Christians? And when did Christ’s followers begin to see themselves as distinct and separate from Judaism? These are just some of the questions answered in this Christmas special. To listen to Bari and Paula’s conversation, hit the play button below, or subscribe to Honestly wherever you get your podcasts.

Finally, between the rush of travel, hosting, and endless to-do lists, this time of year can easily become a frenzy. Which is a shame, because year’s end is the perfect time to slow down and rediscover meaning. And what better way than with a good book? We asked a trio of leaders from different religious traditions—Rabbi David Wolpe, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, and Eboo Patel—to recommend titles that nourish the spirit, and may bring us all a little closer to God. Here’s what they suggested:

Want more? Here are some of our favorite pieces from recent days and Christmases past.

From all of us at The Free Press, have a blessed Christmas.

—The Editors

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.