While debate continues over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, there seems little doubt that the classic film It's a Wonderful Life deserves that classification. The film has long been a staple of TV viewing during the holidays, in part because its copyright protection lapsed in the 1970s and the film entered the public domain. Released in 1947, it has just passed the three-quarter century mark. Yet the film, directed by the great Frank Capra and starring Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, was a box office flop.

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In a lecture on career and calling as part of a Baylor summer program in Washington D.C., George Mason University psychology professor Lauren Kuykendall stressed to the undergraduates in the audience the limits of introspection in discerning future paths for their lives. It turns out that gaining self-knowledge is a lot more difficult than we think, and figuring out career and calling is more a matter of trial and error, and learning from others, than it is just looking inside ourselves.

There's a lot of concern about today's youth. Much of it has to do with what might be called the failure to launch, a sense that today's youth are taking a lot longer to become independent adults.

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Today we remember a profound thinker who continues to remind us of the danger of instrumentalized art in the service of merely ideological ends—and the role of hospitality, personal influence, in the upholding of truth.

"On this particular day ... we had just said to one another that if our nature was so unhappy as to possess only a pseudo-intelligence capable of everything but the truth, if, sitting in judgment on itself, it had to debase itself to such a point, then we could neither think nor act with any dignity. In that case everything became absurd—and impossible to accept."

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It's been 40 years since one of the greatest upsets in NCAA tournament basketball history, when North Carolina State University beat the highly favored University of Houston and future Hall-of-Famers Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon in the title game. It's been 30 years since the coach of that championship team, Jim Valvano, delivered his famous ESPY Awards speech. Valvano died of cancer the following month.

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Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1970s, I was surrounded by multi-generational Irish families whose capacity for storytelling and singing left a deep impression on me. When, in the last few years, my parents died a year apart, the celebrations of their lives were marked by the presence of lots of Irish friends. In fact, their heartfelt Irish mourning was a model for others. After the funeral for my father, I received texts from friends asking me for copies of some of the toasts that were given. People were hungry for language that, at a moment of great loss, would help them to remember and mourn, to laugh and cry. The Irish, like many other immigrant communities, know how to respond to death — something we seem to be losing in our wider culture.

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