Clinging to Hope

Nice think piece on the relationship between religion (hope) and materialism. By Tony Blankley.

As we enter one of America's bleaker winters -- though not so bleak as the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge nor the winter of 1941-42 after Pearl Harbor and then Wake Island -- please permit me to lapse for a moment from the secular and the material to an old memory.

I was out Christmas shopping with my 11-year-old daughter in empty stores last week, when the refrain of an old hymn, un-summoned, played in my head. It was a song from my youth that is not sung these days in the smart suburban churches we have attended (nor on the mall's Muzak):

"So I'll cherish the old rugged cross till my trophies at last I lay down; I will cling to the old rugged cross and exchange it someday for a crown."

Perhaps those words will remind you of the homely but touching melody that George Bennard composed to support this beloved hymn, "The Old Rugged Cross," almost a hundred years ago now, in 1913.

http://townhall.com/columnists/TonyBlankley/2008/12/17/clinging_to_hope