By Stan Friedman

CHICAGO, IL (December 20, 2013) — Many Covenanters routinely share links to social media articles and videos with one another that Covenant News Service believes may be of interest to others. Each Friday, we post five of them. Following is a sample of those submissions—their inclusion does not represent an endorsement of any views expressed.

A Ten-Month-Old’s Letter to Santa

Anyone who has parented young children can vouch for the accuracy of this posting. If you don’t laugh out loud while reading this, you may not have a sense of humor.

There’s a Reason for the Season—and the Upside Down Christmas Tree

I had never heard of Voskamp. (Does that make me culturally out of touch since her book One Thousand Gifts: Dare to Live Fully Where You Are was on the New York Times bestseller list for 60 weeks?) There are some interesting thoughts here, especially why the family hung a Christmas tree upside down. I just wish they had shown the tree. Voskamp’s most recent bestseller is The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas.

101 Christian Women Speakers

At a Christian conference earlier this year, only four of the more than 110 speakers were women. Did organizers not notice the disparity, or did they just not value women’s opinions? Maybe both. Popular author and blogger Rachel Held Evans was angry, especially after she and the chief conference organizer traded comments via Twitter.

Now Evans has assembled a list of 101 women with voices that need to be heard. (She points out that her list is limited for a number of reasons and asks for further suggestions.) At least two of the women are Covenanters: Kathy Khang and Helen Lee, who initiated a protest letter in response to recent public stereotyping of Asian Americans. To see a Covenant News Service story, click here. Readers responding also recommended Judy Peterson, North Park University campus pastor, and Covenant minister Diana Trautwein.

Be sure to read this earlier piece by Jonathan Merritt, who also did the Voskamp interview. After doing his own investigating, he discovered that among the largest evangelical Christian conferences only 159 of the 805 speakers were women, or 19 percent.

Fight Over the Mandela Brand

It’s not just Christmas that has become too commercial.

Jesus the New Yorker

Tony Carnes publishes an interesting and provocative online magazine called “A Journey Through NYC Religions.” It will be interesting to see how this project proceeds, especially in its approach to evangelical churches. The Covenant has several church plants in some of the poorest neighborhoods of New York, and they are doing some great ministry. One of the pastors told me that while there was much he agreed with, he took issue with Carnes using “post-secular” to describe the city. “A walk down any city street would blast that assumption to smithereens.  A look at the billboards in Times Square tell a different story.  A look at music, fashion, art, language that comes out of NYC says no to that assumption.”  I’m guessing the city’s as post-secular as the country is post-racial.