A Circle of Faith Grows in Unexpected Ways

In yesterday's New York Times, Peter Applebome reported from Larchmont on Rev. Benedict J. Groeschel's forty-five year tradition of Christmas dinner, food and gifts for poor families around New York City.

He figures Christmas has long been in a struggle between the sacred and the temporal, between charity and marketing, tensions that are particularly out of whack now. But then that’s true in our society overall, where the notion of service to the poor that is the focus of the order he helped start seems as quaint as friars in cassocks.