Science & Tech Quote by Ralph W. Sockman

Sockman frames Christmas less as a date on the calendar than as a civic technology for restarting the inner life. The opening move is canny: he doesn’t promise moral improvement, he promises youth. Not the sentimental kind sold in storefront window displays, but the psychological youth of wonder - the ability to be pierced by the world again. In a modern culture that trains us to be efficient, skeptical, and perpetually “in on the joke,” wonder becomes a scarce resource. By making Christmas a ritual that “renews” it, Sockman elevates the holiday from tradition to necessary maintenance for the spirit.

The phrase “most pregnant human faculty” does heavy rhetorical lifting. It’s not just that wonder is pleasant; it’s generative, a womb for creation. Sockman’s triad - art, science, religion - is deliberately ecumenical. He’s arguing that the deepest human enterprises share a common origin: the moment something exceeds our categories and demands response. That’s a strategic pitch from a religious leader in a pluralizing, increasingly secular 20th-century America: defend faith not by fencing it off from reason, but by seating it at the same table as discovery and beauty.

Subtext: Christmas is being offered as an antidote to cynicism and a rebuttal to the idea that maturity equals disenchantment. If we lose wonder, Sockman implies, we don’t just lose a mood; we lose the engine that makes a culture inventive, questioning, and meaning-making in the first place.