Advent in Bethlehem: Reflections on Scripture and Bethlehem Today

This book may be used to accompany private Advent devotions, but can also provide a basis for reflection, exploration, and prayer in church and other Christian fellowship groups.

Readers are invited to delve beneath the sentimentality and commercialism of secular festivities, which frequently overwhelm Advent as well as Christmas. As they discover and appreciate something of the lives and struggles of real people, living and historical, Scripture may be opened to them in new ways. The occupation, ever-threatening dispossession, and arbitrary violence of today illuminate the Nativity story and the lives of people of biblical antiquity. They call Christians to share in the prophetic vocation of the Church and to bear witness to Christ’s Incarnation in the world today.