Christmas is a time of full schedules but also rich conversations. Here are some of the events and issues that get repeated review in our circle of friends.

1. Treasured recipes and family memories. As we plan Leann’s mother Willa’s memorial service this week, we paged through the notebooks of her rich recipe collection and noted how many people writing condolences mentioned her peppernuts and her peanut butter pie. We do remember love and being loved through special foods, like our party last week to make David’s mother Stella’s mincemeat recipe, and we baked a pie in her honor. She has been gone 40 years now but the pie radiates her love.

2. Greta Thunberg is Time’s 2019 Person of the Year. Teenage climate activist and global voice of sanity, Thunberg is the youngest person of the year. She has become the face of a new generation of environmental activists challenging world leaders to do more to stop global warming and occasionally offending the recalcitrant with a sweetly combative tone when the stone wall of denial is thrown up in defense of wasteful and waste foolish profit. She does not “suffer fools gladly,” nor excuse the inability to comprehend the obvious.

3. Preacher’s Wife, by Kate Bowler. The Duke Divinity School professor who wrote the insightful book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved has now given us a wonderful account of the precarious power of Evangelical Women Celebrities, showing the closed and barred gates of patriarchy and the ways women found a side door to contribute. A provocative social history of women in “leadership” in the last century, read the book, or at least check our the interview and book review in Christian Century.

4. Hong Kong’s awakening. Jiayang Fan, reporter at large for The New Yorker, offers an insightful analysis of the situation in the former Crown Colony in this article. Our love for Kowloon and Hong Kong, its Mennonite churches, the seminaries where we have taught over the course of the last decade, and many of our favorite students who lead churches there, all keep us on constant watch for the next developments in the protest against the growing dominance of policy from Beijing. Self-determination promised and then given certain qualifications is of concern to so many friends. Lift them up when you pray.

5. We are all talking of the House debates and legal actions, and our extended family (this gives colorful meaning to “extended”) has members who are passionate about multiple sides (there are always more than two). The fancy footwork of Evangelical advocates for the “King Cyrus” texts and the reductionism to two litmus test issues arouses one group, the horrors of narcissism and moral laxity the other, and then there are the concerns about political integrity of Constitutional oaths and their importance in a democracy. What a Christmas conversation when opposites gather and apposition mounts.

David and Leann Augsburger are two semiretired people who co-lead a home-based church (Peace Mennonite Church, Claremont, California) and volunteer to welcome, care and connect people in the San Gabriel valley.