Are we seeing the revitalization of conservative civilization all over the world has been a massive backlash against globalization, its leftist leadership, and its anti-cultural liberal values, and it's just the beginning.

I'm Dr. Steve Turley. I believe the liberal globalist world is at its brink and a new conservative age is rising.

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This is Turley Talks.

Yeah, I thought tonight we could look at some of the fascinating timeless themes that we've just been spinning off of here, and those themes can be found as well in the Christmas Carol, and I just wanted to explore those themes to help.

They're so profoundly beautiful in terms of the truth of the beautiful, particularly in its Christian outworking, and I hope it really enriches your Christmas, your Hanukkah, and your future Christmases and Hanukkah's with just this amazing and timeless story of God's love for the world, as revealed through one of the most unlikely characters imaginable.

I have a lovely annotated Christmas Carol. It's annotated. Let's see if I can show you a little bit of, well, just the way I opened it up.

It's got a lot of engravings from the 19th century. It is a fellow named Michael Patrick Kern, H-E-A-R-N, if you're interested.

I picked it up at a used book store, and it gives you all these wonderful insights into what life was like in the 1840s England, and that's when this book was written, 1843, and so I've really been blessed by this edition.

One of the most interesting things you probably, a nugget you want to take away from the Christmas Carol immediately, is it was written during a time when Christmas festivals had largely ceased due to the 17th century Puritan influence. Puritans were very, Puritans were very suspicious of anything that distracted from a very inner experience of the Holy Spirit.

Puritans did not like external outworkings. They thought they were purely artificial, and they'd all be burned up in the end, and they don't have anything to do with eternity.

As an Orthodox Christian, I radically disagree with that. I think the whole purpose of, as I just explained, the whole purpose of Christmas is the redemption of the cosmic order, the time space order, that we, as co-creators, as creating the image of God, help manifest in the amazing decorations like that Hannah has in her home of Christmas trees, which is a tree of life restored.

Christmas tree is just an image of reality. It has heaven at its very top, usually at the star, and then it comes down like a mountain. And so the very, very top is the cherubim and the seraphim and the heavenly realm, and then it starts to make its way more and more and more physical and tangible and touchable, as it were, down to all the way to the bottom of the presence, where you devour and you consume.

And of course, we keep going and going down, you know, the abyss, we don't want to go there, but the point is the Christmas tree has this beautiful image of reality, and that image of reality is manifested in a redeemed vision of space and time.

Nevertheless, it was Charles Dickens who recovered that for England. It had been largely eclipsed by the Puritan movement. And so Dickens by ornamenting his story with all of these wonderful older Christmas practices that many of these readers heard about from an age gone by but hadn't really seen.

It created it helped to foster a Christmas Renaissance. And so this is why the English author, GK Chesterton, called Dickens the man who saved Christmas. So so many of our Christmas traditions that we do today actually come in many respects from the Renaissance that Dickens helped lead.

All right. So let's dive in here. And there are a week of event. I see you guys are chatting some of the TV or the movie versions. I really love the one with Patrick Stewart. It was a TNT version. And it really sticks to the script. It's really, really good.

That's an excellent one. There's so many of them. I love the Albert Finney musical. There's a 1970 musical called Scrooge. Now it changes it a bit, but it's it's for it's so it'll fit for a musical. And it's just love.

Finney is an amazing Ebenezer Scrooge. I mean, just physically the contortions. Well, that will get right into that here. All right. So let's dive in and let's see what timeless themes we can catch here with the Christmas Carol.

I've got my script here. The first sentence here is so interesting. It's a very first sentence of the story. Now keep in mind, this is a Christmas story, but the very first sentence is Marley was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. Marley was dead.

Now think about the bizarre irony there. You're dealing with a story centered on the celebration of a birth. But Dickens starts this story of Christmas.

Shrouded in death. And of course, we're going to see death stock this story. It's all over. And Dickens makes that absolutely clear in his opening lines. There was no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood or nothing wonderful can come of the story. I'm going to relay.

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