A TikTok user named Annie made a thought-provoking post on October 28, 2024, asking people to consider holiday toy drives from the perspective of those receiving gifts. This resulted in some pushback from those who believe the recipients should be happy just to get a gift. However, Annie understands the perspective of those who receive gifts during holiday toy drives because she adopted three of her four children and once lived in a children’s home. “I think there's an idea, a concept, that people who are low-income should just be grateful for whatever they receive. Whatever we give them, they should be thankful for it. Whatever gifts kids have to open they should just be thankful for it because we gave it to them,” she said. “If you have not been on the receiving end of some of that, you may not have a full understanding of what that looks like.” She urged people to buy quality toys for children because low-cost gifts may bring them more heartache than joy. Annie says many kids are disappointed when they get the “Dollar Store Barbie” that breaks in 24 hours while being told to be grateful for the gift. “That is about the giver feeling good and not about the receiver. If we're going to buy things for people for Christmas, if we are going to donate to toy drives, if we are going to adopt a family, if we're if we're going to take that step of empathy and compassion can we fully consider the people we are purchasing for and what matters to them?” she asked. @mom.behind.the.scenes This applies x10000 to children in foster care. The expectation of gratitude isnt an appropriate way to give. #gratitude #holidays #adoptafamily #charity Annie received angry comments from people who disagreed with her post, saying, “Nah beggars can’t be choosers boo” and “If you’re not teaching your children gratitude, you’re teaching them entitlement.” However, many supported her belief that low-income kids shouldn’t be treated as second-class citizens. “I volunteered somewhere once that had a motto of quality = dignity, and I think of that a lot,” one commenter wrote. “Oh, I like that,” Annie responded. Annie returned with a follow-up video a little less than a month later, sharing an important point about when she was a child asking for toy drive gifts. “None of us were asking strangers for those gifts,” she said about her time in a children’s home. We were asking Santa or a church or angels.” @mom.behind.the.scenes Replying to @?daayyysiiiiᏔ⃝ “These kids are not asking hard-working people for money. They’re asking miracle workers, imaginary beings that can produce anything. We are asking the children in need not be able to believe in Santa.” #angeltree #christmas #mutualaid #donate #community Ultimately, Annie’s post was about protecting the innocence and dreams of children, which can be a real challenge for those who are low-income or in the foster care system. “Children that just ask for the bare minimum are children who no longer have the ability to dream,” she said. “These kids are not asking hard-working people for money. They're asking miracle workers, imaginary beings that can produce anything because that's what we teach them. We're asking the children in need to not believe in Santa. There's really no beauty in a child not asking for something.” She ended the video by stating that children in need should still be able to dream, just as she did. “I'm sobbing thinking back to my children being young and in need, back to that children's home I lived in and I wonder did those people that donated to me did they complain that these children in this children's home wanted BMX bikes and Cabbage Patch dolls and ventriloquist dummies?” Annie asked. “Did they call our parents names? Did they call us greedy and selfish? I really hope that wasn't the case and I don't think it was. But children should never have to pay for the mistakes of their parents.”

A clear connection. The post Did Horsegirl capture the aesthetic of Wes Anderson on ‘2468’? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The George Michael-written 'Last Christmas' has been a frequently played holiday staple on radio stations since it was released in 1984; so much so that it spawned the 'Whamageddon' game. Do you play it? Some like the song so much that they won't!

by Frank Bergman, Slay News: Top epidemiological researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have admitted that Covid mRNA “vaccines” are harmful to young children and unborn babies. The CDC officials conducted a study, published in the peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open, to investigate mounting reports of adverse post-vaccination reactions to the injections among […]

On December 2, The Voice kicked off the first night of the Season 26 live rounds, and Shye made a huge impression with a Brandi Carlile classic. The 17-year-old, who is with Team Bublé, sang The Joke for her Top 8 performance. And while fans will ultimately decide if she moves to the next round, the coaches were dazzled by her vocals. If it were up to them, she’d easily continue with the competition. After effortlessly hitting each and every note in the song, Gwen Stefani, Reba McEntire, and Michael Bublé immediately gushed over her talent. Michael Buble’ Added Shye To A List Of Musical Legends Reba admitted that Shye “mesmerized” her with the beautiful performance. Gwen said she could already see the teen’s first record release. Then Shye’s own coach compared her to music’s most legendary stars. “Barbra [Streisand], Adele, Celine [Dion], Shye,” cheered Michael Buble’. “No pressure, girlfriend. I never hear anybody in any competition that sounds like you.” Shye joined Jan Dan, Sydney Sterlace, Danny Joseph, Jeremy Beloate, Sofronio Vasquez, Adam Bohanan, and Christina Eagle for The Voice Final 8 competition. Tomorrow (Dec 3), the singers will learn if they’ll advance to the Final 5. Fans will choose the first four to move to the next round. The remaining four will then compete for the Instant Save, meaning they’ll each perform a new song, and voters will choose their favorite using The Voice Official App. The top five will perform during next week’s live shows, and the winner will be named on December 10th. Watch NBC’s The Voice on Mondays and Tuesdays at 8 PM ET. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post “The Voice” Favorite Shye Effortlessly Covers Brandi Carlile Hit appeared first on InspireMore.

As Christ's followers, we must also be FOR those who are in need, not content to live comfortably and blind to the spiritual war going on around us. 

Our lives are busy, and our time is precious. Which of us wakes up in the morning thinking, You know, I wish I had more mid-20th-century German-speaking Marxist philosophers in my life? Well, if we care about our society, perhaps we should. Good luck trying to make sense of today’s culture wars without some grasp of concepts that passed from German idealism into what’s known as the Frankfurt School. That’s why Carl Trueman wants us, amid our hectic schedules, to care about what a group of theorists working at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt wrote and taught from the 1930s to 1960s. A tall order, perhaps, but I think he succeeds. Not least because his book To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse shows how grappling with these obscure Frankfurt School thinkers gives us deep insights into our society. Three Ideas That Shape Our World Trueman, professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, expertly lays out three big ideas that the Frankfurt School adapted from Hegel and Marx. The first is historicism. For Hegel, our understanding is deeply influenced by our historical and social context. What we think we know about concepts like justice and identity is shaped by the economic and political forces of the day, and often serves the interests of the powerful. The second big idea is emancipation. For the Frankfurt School, the point of critical theory isn’t just to understand the world but to change it, specifically to emancipate us from those powerful interests shaping our understanding. This means institutions like “science,” and the belief in the “naturalness” of identities and social hierarchies, need to be unmasked as part of an oppressive ideology. The third big idea is the importance of recognition. For Hegel, we all want to see ourselves reflected in the world and in the eyes of others: we want them to recognize and value us in the same way we do. This deep desire for recognition is understood by critical theorists as the key driver of social and interpersonal relationships. If we don’t have it, we’ll fight for it. Critiquing the Critique Trueman’s main take on the Frankfurt School theorists is that they’re consumed with critique, lacking any positive vision for society. Quoting Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, the book’s repeated refrain is that critical theory is “the spirit that always negates” (13). It negates traditional norms like family structures and national identities because they’re deemed oppressive. But when those norms are dismantled, it offers no alternative that can sustain a society in the long term. Briefly, though tellingly, Trueman contrasts this lack of a positive agenda with a Christian vision centered on grace, forgiveness, and the inherent dignity of every person—a vision that aims not merely to critique but to redeem and that is concretely lived out in the body of the church. Critical theory negates traditional norms like family structures and national identities because they’re deemed oppressive. But it offers no alternative that can sustain a society in the long term. Trueman’s critique of critical theory doesn’t stop there. He identifies three further ironies at the heart of its project and legacy. First, it replaces one set of dominant categories (like due process and meritocracy) with another set (like systematic injustice and privilege), which does nothing to disrupt the tendencies to arbitrary judgment against which it inveighs. Second, although critical theory champions marginalized voices, it was shaped largely by bourgeois white males from affluent countries. Third, the failure of the German working class to join a revolution after the First World War led to a notion that the marginalized don’t understand their oppression. Therefore they must, to borrow a phrase from Rousseau, be forced to be free by the intellectuals who understand their situation more clearly than they do. Meat and Bones? So what should Christians make of this influential tradition of thought? Trueman cautions us to avoid two unhelpful positions. We mustn’t think critical theory is simply a tool we can pick up and use as is, or even that Christians can “eat the meat and leave the bones” of critical theory (109). But neither should we dismiss it as irrelevant. Trueman acknowledges critical theory’s insights. Its critique of social injustices resonates with the Christian imperative to stand against oppression and uphold human dignity. Critical theory is on the money when it points out that capitalism is now attempting to solve problems it has created. Furthermore, the way modern media and consumerism reduce people to the status of things is “clearly something that a Christian should repudiate” (219). In short, Christians should “acknowledge the importance of critical theory but also . . . refute it” (225). In the spirit of this double imperative to acknowledge and refute, I offer a caveat to Trueman’s approach. I find his line of argument persuasive, yet as I was reading To Change All Worlds, I regularly thought, Yes, but . . . My hesitation isn’t with what the book says but with what’s lost in what it chooses not to say. The issue begins with Trueman’s genealogy of critical theory. He spotlights two main antecedents: Hegel and Marx. Understandable. Nevertheless, the genealogy he chooses to foreground has knock-on implications for the book’s direction and blind spots. The Hegel-Marx-Frankfurt genealogy is one piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle of a Christian response to modern critical theories’ complexities. It’s an important piece, but if it’s taken for the whole puzzle then Christians will have a lopsided, truncated, and unnecessarily dichotomized sense of the relationship between Christianity and critical theory. I’m not arguing that this book should say it all: such a demand would be silly. However, it’s important to read To Change All Worlds within the context of a critical theory, and a genealogy, that cannot be reduced to Hegel, Marx, and Frankfurt. Begin with Moses What if, instead of with Hegel, we began with the Hebrew prophets and their critique of their society’s excesses and abuses? Or what if we began with that first and defining work of cultural critique in the Western tradition: Augustine’s City of God? This longer view wouldn’t make the arguments in To Change All Worlds incorrect, but it’d show how they’re incomplete. What if, in Marcuse’s claim that history bends in the direction of freedom, we saw an indebtedness to an Augustinian (because it’s biblical) notion of time as linear and heading for a final judgment and righting of wrongs? What if we saw Karl Kautsky’s thesis that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions as derivative of Augustine’s argument—drawing heavily on Revelation—that the earthly city cannot sustain itself on its own assumptions and commitments? What if we began an understanding of critical theory not with Marx but with Moses, not with Hegel but with the Hebrews? Take the Long View Taking the long view in this way by no means leads to a Christian embrace of critical theory, or even to an “eating the meat and leaving the bones” approach. However, it helps us to elaborate a more richly and uniquely Christian critique, distinct in its tenor and content from recent secular critiques of the critical tradition like Bruno Latour’s essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” and Rita Felski’s book The Limits of Critique. The Hegel-Marx-Frankfurt genealogy is one piece of a much larger jigsaw puzzle of a Christian response to modern critical theories’ complexities. Taking the long view also opens the door to approaching critical theory with the rich, supple incisiveness to which Paul subjects the Greek search for wisdom and the Hebrew desire for miraculous signs in 1 Corinthians 1. He engages wisdom and signs as cultural tendencies to be both utterly subverted (“Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” v. 20) and transformatively fulfilled (“The foolishness of God is wiser than men,” v. 25). This view enhances but also transcends Trueman’s ambition to acknowledge the importance of critical theory while still refuting it. To Change All Worlds is a profound and valuable critique of some of the most important trends of our age. It offers a constructive call for Christians to reclaim a positive, lived-out vision of humanity amid contemporary society’s fragmented and often despairing voices. Providing we don’t mistake this jigsaw piece for the entire puzzle, Trueman’s book offers a crucial contribution to the ongoing efforts of Christians to understand and minister within our late-modern world.