Taylor Marshall 
has published an great little e-book for the Christmas season, which only takes minutes to read. The title says it all: God’s Birthday: why Christ was born on December 25 and why it matters.
It may not be very long, but it’s packed full of information. I recommend it.
Oops. Mea culpa. I had the book freely downloadable from this blog, but that’s not actually in the spirit of Dr Marshall’s give away. To receive your copy, he’d like you to sign up to his e-mail list.
Incidentally Dr Marshall’s latest podcast covers many of the same things I recently blogged on. Dr Marshall is a great scholar, and a better teacher than me, but on this one we’ll have to agree to disagree. He thinks The Nativity Story verges on sacrilege; but I like the movie and recommend it. He defends the doctrine of Christ’s painless and miraculous birth; I tend towards a natural birth. He claims that the painless delivery of Christ is official Catholic dogma; I don’t dispute that the majority of saints and theologians who have treated this question endorse the doctrine, but it has never been explicitly defined by the Church’s magisterium.
Wouldn’t be nice for a priest to participate in the birth of a child – this way he can learn about Jesus’s birth in real terms – and also be an example for the endless fathers who “disappear” before their children are born.