Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: Christmas Future
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Hillsdale College
4.6 • 621 Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2024
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, Jeremiah and Juan discuss the biblical themes in A Christmas Carol before introducing Dr. Dwight Lindley.
By taking this course, you’ll learn profound lessons from the Ghosts of Christmas, explore the true meaning of Christmas through Scrooge’s surprising encounters, and discover how to open yourself to life’s many joys and blessings.
The lonely, pathetic deathbed on which Scrooge finds himself is a stark contrast with the mourning Cratchit family, who still find joy and comfort in one another after the death of Tiny Tim. After seeing these bitter Christmases to come, Scrooge begs for a chance to make amends.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan. |
| 0:12.3 | And I'm Juan Dabalos, and we're back with Charles Dickens at Christmas Carol. |
| 0:16.3 | On to lecture number five today, Christmas future. I hope to live to be another man. Lecture five focuses |
| 0:22.8 | on stave four, and it has a really fun device, one that you might recognize from It's a Wonderful |
| 0:28.2 | Life. Scrooge, like Jimmy Stewart, and It's a Wonderful Life, gets a chance to see what could happen |
| 0:34.3 | going forward. He gets to see the consequences of his actions. And just like in It's a |
| 0:39.7 | Wonderful Life, it causes him to want to make some changes, though I think a Christmas Carol is |
| 0:44.2 | a superior rendition of this vision of the future because of the depth of the spiritual instruction |
| 0:51.7 | that Scrooge gets. Yeah, I hadn't put that together, actually, |
| 0:55.5 | the connection with It's a Wonderful Life, but I think you're right, and they are both |
| 1:00.3 | conversion stories, but here in this, in Lecture 5, it's when we'll get to the heart of |
| 1:06.4 | Scrooge's conversion, and it's when a verse from scripture is brought up. The verse is, although |
| 1:13.7 | it's not mentioned what verse it is, in the book itself, but it's Mark 936 when it says, |
| 1:21.9 | and he took a child and set him in the midst of them. And it doesn't continue on to verse 37, but Dr. Dwight Lindley |
| 1:30.6 | reminds us that following verse is Mark 937, which is not actually mentioned in the book, but |
| 1:37.3 | Dwight Lindley reminds us that the readers at the time would have known that the verse is, |
| 1:42.7 | whosoever receives one such children, my name |
| 1:45.4 | receives me. |
| 1:46.5 | It'd be a little bit on the nose if Dickens had put that in the book, because as a reader, |
| 1:50.5 | just like Scrooge, we're supposed to realize that the character of Tiny Tim is a child |
| 1:55.7 | that Scrooge can receive and accept the grace of a heavenly child. |
| 2:00.1 | That's right, and that's when, you know, we're reading this in the time of Christmas. |
... |
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