Just a year ago, a nine-year-old Plano student had the temerity to show up at school with religious (i.e., Christian) messages inside the goodie bags he had intended for a "Winter Break" party. Whereby hangs a tale of plain old nuttiness such as you wouldn't think to encounter in the Lone Star State . Except that in Plano you seem to, and surely in other places as well.

Our poor third grader was pounced upon by his school's constituted authorities, who quickly set him straight on his constitutional trespass. He he had introduced a religious message -- something about the birth of someone named Jesus -- into the proudly secular environment of Plano public schools. Some innocent might get the idea Plano public schools actually approved of whoever this Jesus person was!

A bleak midwinter was getting bleaker from the standpoint of those unable to see why, in the Christmas season, Christmas' founder should have become radioactive. Well, lo, the pompous and prissy got their comeuppance, courtesy of a federal judge whose help two public interest law firms -- the Liberty Legal Institute and the Alliance Defense Fund -- had sought in behalf of the boy's duly outraged parents. U. S. Dist. Judge Paul Brown of the Eastern District temporarily restrained Plano from vetting student goodie bags in search of, shudder, religious messages. The lawsuit (Morgan, et al, vs. Plano Independent School District) remains active. The Liberty Legal Institute refers to it as "an ongoing case that has the potential of cementing many of the religious freedoms for our children that have taken decades to restore."

There's enough cementing to do to keep the legal profession occupied for several decades. We're reminded every Christmas just how far some of our cultural patriarchs have departed from normal understandings of the relationship between church and state "Normal" meaning, how can it be said that the singing of Christmas carols on, yes, public school property constitutes a menace to religious liberty when the truth is, seeing innocent religious acknowledgment as a menace undemines not only religious liberty but the delicately poised arrangements whereby the founding fathers sought to head off just the kind of controvery in which Plano engages.

Once upon a time, Plano , north of Dallas , was a normal Texan community of about 5,000 souls. Then the tides of population growth engulfed it from the south. Predominantly white and nominally (at least) Christian, modern Plano suffers from nicely-nicely-ism of the most suffocating and noxious kind. The city's excellent school system suffers accordingly. The idea is that Christmas can be Christmas outside the schools but not inside -- as if the schools were some cordon sanitaire between religion and irreligion.

No more Christmas holidays there! Now it's Winter Break:a frosty-sounding notion indeed. None of Christmas' traditional, pan-theological warmth glows from such a designation. A year ago, school officials patrolled the cordon sanitaire to make sure no red and green implements or party favors found their way to the Winter Break Party. Please, please -- white only! (Like snow, y'know?)

Plano is big on multiculturalism. "We have to be careful," one of its attorneys said last year, that Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic students "don't have their rights trampled on." By -- for instance -- a sudden glimpse of red and green.

Currently, Plano ISD's website features winning posters in the Holiday Art Contest, meant to foster "harmony, respect, tolerance, acceptance, and understanding among or between different racial, cultural, ethnic, and/or religious groups." Winners are selected by the district's Multi-Ethnic Committee. (I'm not making this up.)

The winning entry: Ninth grader Karen Chen's poster with a pair of ethnically ambiguous hands holding a snowflake. Close behind: 17 students, all very diverse, standing at the rim of the earth; a snowman and the inscription, "The Gift of Friendship"; a pair of purple mittens holding a round globe and the inscription, "Greetings [certainly not the Christmas kind of greetings] 2005." Ummm, very stirring -- the way this stuff always is.

Not to disparage the contest winners, or even those who preside over the thing, but this is such pallid stuff -- the hold-hands-and-acknowledge-each-other stuff -- that it's a wonder Plano doesn't keel over collectively from boredom and stupefaction.

Ah, and then there's the really feel-good project du jour. The web site informs us, titillatingly, that students and staff are "busy this holiday season [has no one ever informed the administration that "holiday" means "holy day"?] planning, shopping, collecting, and delivering thousands of gifts to needy North Texas families."

Well, yes, fine. But why? Just because? Or out of solidarity with the ancient Christian tradition of gift-giving and ministry to the poor in honor of Jesus Christ's birth? The website fails to inform us. We can't tell, accordingly, whether this gift-giving thing, up Plano way, is the new efflorescence of the philanthropic spirit or whether it's all pretense. Keeping up secular traditions, it might occur to the Plano ISD, if its let a non-secular thought enter their heads, is a harder thing altogether than continuing in the remembrance, year in and year out, of, shall we say, a Higher Call.

Seasonal secularism -- bah, humbug!

Have yourself, instead, whether the Plano ISD ap proves or not, a merry little Christmas.

Samuel Alito

Race has come to the forefront in the quest to rebuild hurricane ravaged New Orleans and race remains in the background in our efforts to rebuild the Cotton Bowl. My wife is of Creole heritage and her family has been in New Orleans since before the Louisiana Purchase. My wife lost her eldest uncle to Katrina. Her family has been displaced and their ancestral home located across the street from one of the nation’s famous Black colleges, Dillard University, has yet to be rebuilt. I have lived, done business, and visited New Orleans for over 25 years. In that time, I have met some of the city’s most powerful African-American political players and I believe you are not getting the whole story regarding the impact of race in the rebuilding of New Orleans. The real story has significant impact on race relations in Dallas and the rebuilding of the Cotton Bowl.

The infamous 9^th ward of New Orleans has vaulted into the world’s consciousness because of the massive devastation Katrina delivered to the area. Scenes of impoverished African-Americans vainly attempting to rebuild shanty-town type uninsured housing has given the nation a warped view of the 9^th ward. What is not being said about the 9^th ward is that a large part of it is the home of one of the nation’s most politically powerful Black middle class communities.

The 9^th ward of New Orleans is also the home of New Orleans East, a community comparable to the upper income Black areas of far Oak Cliff, Desoto, Duncanville, and Cedar Hill. Nestled quietly in New Orleans East, is the ultra exclusive enclave of Eastover, where houses start at $300,000 and the majority of its inhabitants are most of New Orleans Black political, professional, and business elite. Yet, this most influential African-American crowd remains as displaced and homeless as their less fortunate Black brethren. Most Black folks feel the white professional and business elite of New Orleans were quietly allowed to fill up the city’s hotels and apartments while city officials discouraged most of its African-American citizens from returning to the city too soon. In effect, whites had a head start in revitalizing their lives in the area. You might remember the dispute between Mayor Ray Nagin who was urging an early return to the city and FEMA officials who were discouraging an early return.

This race-based dispute has entered the news again concerning Mardi Gras. Mayor Nagin, bowing to the wishes of his African-American constituents many of whom are the foundation of the Black political and business class of the city, has been ambivalent on hosting Mardi Gras while many African-Americans remain displaced. White tourism officials in New Orleans are now upset with the mayor for not fully embracing a tourist boosting Mardi Gras.

Race is the 800 pound gorilla in the room in New Orleans and he will be sitting at the table along with his old friend, denial, when Dallas begins to determine just how we will rebuild a historic Cotton Bowl that sits in the middle of an underdeveloped Black community. Mayor Miller, who is soundly vilified in the African-American community, has the dubious task of convincing her old nemesis that she means them well while at the same time trying to convince a white electorate who has already voted down attempts to rebuild the Fair Park area that rebuilding the Cotton Bowl is good for all of Dallas. It really is good for Dallas. That’s how it is from South of The Trinity.

The opening weekend for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a roaring success as the new movie (based on C.S. Lewis’ first in his seven volume The Chronicles of Narnia series) grossed more than $67 million in its weekend opening. I reported last week in Dallas Blog that Denver billionaire Philip Anshutz had made a big bet (the movie cost $150 million to make) that there was a commercial market for a movie based on C.S. Lewis’ classic Christian allegory. (Link to previous commentary.)

Anshutz’s company partnered up with Disney in this Christmas release, and early signs are that it will be a very profitable venture for both companies.

With all the interest generated in The Chronicles of Narnia, there understandably has arisen a renewed interest in the writings of its author C.S. Lewis. Some of the usual suspects already have waded in with renewed attacks on Lewis and his writings. British fantasist Philip Pullman attacks the Narnia series for what he calls "their nasty little-Englandness and their narrow-hearted religiosity." Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnick finds C.S. Lewis "nasty", "a prig", and a "very odd kind" of Christian. The British polemicist Polly Toynbee wrote in a recent column that "here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America – that warped, neo-fascist strain that thinks might is right."

C.S. LewisIn responding to one of Lewis’ secular critics who are upset over what Adam Gopnik calls the author’s "conservative religiosity", here is what columnist Joseph Sobran has to say:

"I’m afraid Gopnik hasn’t read the C.S. Lewis millions of other readers have treasured. He has missed Lewis’s point – not a very difficult one, really – about the virtue of faith. Belief is something you have or don’t have; but faith is an act of will and fortitude, which is why we speak of "keeping" or "breaking" faith."

For the reader who wants to know the real story behind how C.S. Lewis came to write The Chronicles of Narnia which has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 85 million copies worldwide, there is no better place to begin than by reading the "story of Narnia" by Alan Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College and the author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. In an essay in Christianity Today, Jacobs recounts how the writing of the first volume of The Chronicles of Narnia took place at a very difficult, personal time in Lewis’s life.

It was the Spring of 1949. He was trying to help his brother, Wornie, who had recently been released from a hospital in Oxford. He was taking care of an elderly woman named Mrs. Moore who was confined to bed. And, he was trying to maintain "a grueling schedule of lectures, tutorials, and correspondence." All of this finally got to Lewis as "he collapsed at his home and had to be taken to the hospital. He was diagnosed with strep throat, and his deeper complaint was simply exhaustion." As Jacobs points out in his article, "What is remarkable is that in the midst of all his miseries, Lewis turned to the writing of a story for children. To read Alan Jacobs’ full story about how Narnia came to be, link to the December 2005 issue of Christianity Today.