Trump's Presidency and White Evangelical and Catholic Voters: "Trumpism Is Basically a Religion at This Point"

Things I've read today that I'd like to share with you:

Advent: Meditating About "The Humorless Puzzle of Inequality and Hate"

Another Advent offering for you today from a log of quotations I've kept over the years as I've read: as with yesterday's set of illuminations, all of these feature a certain word about which I propose that we think with concentration these days, whether we're meditating as members of a religious tradition or are not connected to or hostile to religion: 

Richard Kim: Andrew Sullivan vs. Tony Kushner on Gay Rights — "Our Suffering Teaches Us Solidarity; or It Should"

Richard Kim writes in The Nation about the fundamental divergence between Andrew Sullivan's libertarian vision of what the movement for gay rights should be all about, and Tony Kushner's socialist vision: as he notes in his conclusion, if the movement for gay rights is all about rights for us and not for them, who needs it? If our suffering has been only about our suffering, what's it good for, in the last analysis?: