Richard John Neuhaus In First Things Today

This man can write:

With stunning abruptness we’re jostled from the Christmas Mass (the Christ Mass) to the feast of St. Stephen, proto-martyr. And then on to the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. It is an antidote to the sentimentality that inevitably attends devotion to the baby Jesus. A sentimentality, let it be allowed, that is not to be scorned. Others may make neat distinctions between “authentic sentiment” and sentimentality, but these days of Christmas are a time for the suspension of neat distinctions. Sentimentality is all too human, and all too human is what God became.