{"id":3956,"date":"2006-12-15T09:26:03","date_gmt":"2006-12-15T09:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/christmas-in-bethlehem.html"},"modified":"2006-12-15T09:26:03","modified_gmt":"2006-12-15T09:26:03","slug":"christmas-in-bethlehem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/christmas-in-bethlehem.html","title":{"rendered":"Christmas in Bethlehem"},"content":{"rendered":"

A writer reflects on her 2005 visit, in the Tablet:<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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The benefit of staying in Bethlehem is being able to choose the time (from 5 a.m. to nightfall) to meditate and pray at the Church of the Nativity, to linger over coffee or a glass of wine in Manger Square and to spend unhurried hours reflecting and pondering. Bethlehem may be small, but it is home to the global Church across time, with the Orthodox, the Roman and the Eastern Churches in Communion with Rome, all sharing the same Arab Palestinian culture. Many liturgies are celebrated with chants dating from the earliest days of the Church: the Syrians use a dialect of Aramaic close to the language of Christ. I joined parishioners for Mass in the Melkite Church celebrating St John Chrysostom’s Rite – and then we had coffee in the church hall. Bethlehem’s heart is open to the world, and it belongs to the world – as expressed in the symbolic passport received last year by Pope Benedict XVI from the mayor of Bethlehem. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A writer reflects on her 2005 visit, in the Tablet: The benefit of staying in Bethlehem is being able to choose the time (from 5 a.m. to nightfall) to meditate and pray at the Church of the Nativity, to linger over coffee or a glass of wine in Manger Square and to spend unhurried hours…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nChristmas in Bethlehem - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/12\/christmas-in-bethlehem.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christmas in Bethlehem - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}