Christmas is beloved to me a season of new birth personally, as well as a celebration of Jesus’ birth. Over the years as a young adult Christian Scientist, raising our kids, teaching Sunday school, active with Adventure Unlimited and Principia, I found it harder and harder – along with my wife Donna – to reconcile Mrs. Eddy’s dismissal of Jesus with the “Come let us adore Him” spirit of Christmastime. We began to have a similar struggle around Easter each year. Somehow this gave me permission to dig deeper into Scripture, to visit (hungrily) the Christmas and Easter services at Christian churches, and to question more searchingly the whole framework of CS theology.

Christmas undid me – that’s the best way I can put it. Our Lord Jesus, the Hound of Heaven as he has been called, used those sacred times of year when “the manger and the cross tell their story” (an Eddy phrase!) to corner and capture me to himself at last.

In keeping with the custom of suggesting books for Christmas reading or giving, I offer the following list of titles that had particular impact for my own coming to the cross, during those years from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. A holy and merry Christmas to you. “God bless us, one and all!”