Tree lighting ceremony christens holiday season

With no snow on the ground and the temperature at a relatively mild 44 degrees, St. Thomas brought a little bit of Christmas spirit to its St. Paul Campus Tuesday evening.

Even though this is only the 13th year of the annual St. Thomas tree lighting ceremony, the nativity scene atop the arches has a history dating back more than 50 years.

Christmas carols sung by members of the St. Thomas choirs served as a backdrop while about 75 onlookers waited for twilight. Members of the St. Thomas community along with the Rev. Father Dennis Dease spoke at the event. Then just before nightfall, thousands of lights on trees in the Lower Quad and on the sidewalk connecting both quads lit up the scene.

Ashley Bolkcom can be reached awbolkcom@stthomas.edu

60 Replies to “Tree lighting ceremony christens holiday season”

  1. Kathryn,I’m having trouble following your argument because it seems to change with every post (this is not a bad thing btw). 
    I will assume your current argument is this…“The statue of Jesus should be taken down” because “portraying Jesus as white is benefitting the white students on campus, while simultaneously not benefitting non-white students on campus.”
    You haven’t corrected me yet, so I hope I’m doing an ok job extracting your main ideas. 
    Again, I have problems with this argument.First, you are assuming that Jesus being white is beneficial to my (and other white people’s) spiritual experience. This assumption is currently unsupported and hopefully untrue. It shouldn’t matter to anyone what color Jesus is, only that he is there.
    Second, it seems that by the same logic, one could argue that the University should not display any nativity scene. For doing so would be benefitting the Christian students on campus, while simultaneously not benefitting non-Christian students on campus. I’m not sure if you would be for or against that conclusion, however, the fact that this could be a conclusion from your supporting premise makes me unwilling to accept that premise. 

  2. Sorry, my post copy and pasted funny the first time… Here is a more readable version.

    Kathryn,I’m having trouble following your argument because it seems to change with every post (this is not a bad thing btw). 
    I will assume your current argument is this…“The statue of Jesus should be taken down” because “portraying Jesus as white is benefiting the white students on campus, while simultaneously not benefiting non-white students on campus.”
    You haven’t corrected me yet, so I hope I’m doing an ok job extracting your main ideas. 
    Again, I have problems with this argument.First, you are assuming that Jesus being white is beneficial to my (and other white people’s) spiritual experience. This assumption is currently unsupported and hopefully untrue. It shouldn’t matter to anyone what color Jesus is, only that he is there.
    Second, it seems that by the same logic, one could argue that the University should not display any nativity scene. For doing so would be benefiting the Christian students on campus, while simultaneously not benefiting non-Christian students on campus. I’m not sure if you would be for or against that conclusion, however, the fact that this could be a conclusion from your supporting premise makes me unwilling 

  3. I’m basing that last argument on your premise that depicting Jesus as different races is a reflection of the fact that he came to save everyone. Since Christians believe that he did come to save everyone, but that he did so as a Jew, leads me to believe that if portraying him as belonging to different racial groups is not motivated by racism in anyway, then it’s to help people identify on a personal level with their spirituality. If it weren’t, (and it’s not motivated by racism) then I think you would have trouble reconciling the reason you gave as to why the argument is important to you and why we don’t portray him in predominately white countries as belonging to other racial groups (and vice versa) and why he’s not portrayed as female.

  4. Sorry, that last sentence didn’t really make sense- the female thing is a separate issue with visual representations of Jesus being a reflection of who he came to save.

  5. I believe I said that the tradition of representing Jesus in art as different ethnicities reflects the message that Jesus came to save the entire world and not only Jews. 
    As you may or may not recall, whether or not gentiles could enter into heaven was a major issue for the early Church. To my recollection, no such controversy existed with respect to women. Thus the distinction was never needed (like it was needed with non-Jewish people).
    Also, at the moment, I can neither confirm nor deny that primarily white communities don’t portray Jesus as different ethnicities. But I’ll start carrying a camera with me.

    I’ve asked for clarification on a few things in the last few post, but your responses have not responded to them. I’ll ask that you read through the last few and comment if you feel it necessary. 

  6. Correct me if you’re thinking of a different controversy- but from what I remember the controversy was over whether or not to be truly Christian, one had to adhere to the laws and rites of Judaism, in particular circumcision. This wasn’t an ethnic or racial dispute, but rather a dispute about the religious observations required of Christians; in which case, depicting Jesus as belonging to various racial groups would have been far less helpful than depicting him as uncircumcised, or perhaps eating a pork chop.

    Please clarify this for me: you are saying that representations of Jesus as different ethnicities reflects a certain tenant of Catholic faith, and you are also saying that it shouldn’t matter what color Jesus’ skin was to anyone’s faith. If it doesn’t matter what color his skin was, then why reflect that tenant of Catholic faith through representations of Jesus as different ethnicities, particularly if it’s not beneficial to anyone’s spiritual experience to do so?

    If you want responses to all requests for clarification you’ve posted, feel free to e-mail me. There isn’t space to do it here.

  7. Btw, there is currently an exhibit in OEC that displays Nativity scenes from around the world. So, Saint Thomas, being a primarily white community, seems to have no problem portraying Jesus as other ethnicities (unless people are complaining and I havent heard about it yet). 

  8. I wasn’t trying to say that it’s not ever done, (note the two examples I posted above of black representations of Jesus in primarily white communities) but rather that it’s rarely done.

  9. “I wasn’t trying to say that it’s not ever done, but rather that it’s rarely done.”

    If non-white representations of Christ are executed often enough to exceed 11.7% of nativity scenes on the UST campus, then there can be no legitimate accusation of “white privilege” here.

    It might be worth noting to some of the more passionate posters that, even if UST decided to display the most historically accurate Jesus representation available, he would not be black. He’d be semitic. So he wouldn’t look like me, but he wouldn’t look like Brett, either. He’d look more like Ryan Persons. (No offense, Ryan.) I’m not sure this would strike quite the blow against our supposedly racist campus culture that Mr. Romero hopes for.

    Fundamentally, I think, people don’t want Christmas to turn into a political statement. Changing the skin color of the local traditional representation of Christ — which, I reemphasize, is inherently harmless — for strictly contemporary racial reasons would do exactly that. It’s not the idea of “black Jesus” or “Jew Jesus” or “Klingon Jesus” that I object to — it’s the shrill, politically-minded denunciations of “white Jesus,” which miss the whole point of Christmas and so injure it. Except for a tiny minority of irrelevant…

Comments are closed.