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July 19, 2008 2:05:03 AM CDT

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Easter Defies Madison Avenue

Posted Mar 23, 08 8:00 AM CDT in Arts & Living 

(Newser) – Christmas’ religious meaning is lost in a sea of advertising, parties, and major retail dollars, but Easter has resisted becoming a “consumerist nightmare”—and that’s because its Christian origins demand serious thought, writes James Martin in Slate. While “the Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum,” Easter’s story of crucifixion and resurrection is “relentlessly disconcerting,” Martin observes.

Belief in the spring holiday “demands a ‘yes’ or ‘no’”--unlike Christmas, whose innocuous tale of babies and gifts can handle a “whatever," notes Martin. While anyone can happily open a card picturing a baby in a manger, “the image of a man being stripped, beaten, and tortured” isn’t such a welcome piece of mail. “Despite the eggs, the baskets, and the bunnies,” Martin writes, Easter is a holiday Madison Avenue can’t tame.

Source Slate

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A young girl admires a tree decorated with 9,000 Easter eggs in the garden of Christa and Volker Kraft in Saalfeld, eastern Germany, Sunday, March 16, 2008.   (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)
US soldiers read verses as they celebrate Easter with a sunrise service at Camp Victory, in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, March 23, 2008.   (AP Photo/Dusan Vranic)
Pope Benedict XVI, center, delivers the Urbi et Orbi (Latin for "to the city and to the world") address and mass in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, on Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008.   (AP Photo/Pier Paolo Cito)
Armenian priests consecrate some one hundred red eggs during an Easter mass in the town of Varna, north-east of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, Sunday, March, 23, 2008.   (AP Photo/Petar Petrov)
Children run for the eggs as 'go" is yelled out over the loudspeaker at the start of the city of Monterey, Calif., Easter Egg Hunt at Sollecito Park Saturday, March 22, 2008.   (AP Photo/ Orville Myers/ Monterey County Herald)
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religion  • advertising  • Christianity  • Christmas  • holiday  • Jesus Christ  • Easter  • consumerism  • resurrection  • commercialism


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