Creative History

  Construction on the grand cathedral in Cologne, Germany, began in the year 1248--when the Mongol Empire ruled half of the known world and when a young Dominican Friar from Italy named Thomas Aquinas had just begun writing his Summa Theologica- -a comprehensive compendium of all Catholic thought up until that point in history. It would not be completed for over 600 more years until 1880--the year when electric streetlights were first installed in the United States of America, in the relatively small town of Wabash, Indiana surprisingly, and when Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky completed work on his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov , which was considered a magnum opus on the relatively new nineteenth century doctrines of modern Atheism and Agnosticism. Cologne Cathedral is one of Europe’s finest surviving examples of gothic architecture from the High Middle Ages and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1996.  According to Wikipedia, Cologne Cathedral is Germany’s most ...

  It is December in the year 1223 in the tiny Italian village of Greccio.  Mendicant friar, ascetic, holy man, lover of animals and of all mankind, one day to be canonized by the Church as Saint Francis of Assisi, invites all to come and gaze upon what he calls “the Babe of Bethlehem”. Francis is too overcome by emotion and reverence to dare utter the name of the Lord Jesus aloud. The faithful flock to central Italy by the thousands to catch a glimpse of this living wonder. It is now only days before Christ’s Mass on December 25, one of the most holy days on the liturgical calendar, set aside to celebrate the birth of the One who was born to save us all. St. Francis, with both his name and his reputation for holiness preceding him, had recently petitioned Pope Honorius III for permission to recreate the birth of Jesus in living form to place emphasis back on, “Christ and not material things,” as he put it. Pope Honorius not only gave Saint Francis of Assisi permissio...