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: 

Opening Doors or Closing Them? Anthea Butler Comments on Pope Francis and Donald Trump

Anthea Butler, writing at Religion Dispatches today:

Questions Trump's Fascist Demagoguery Raises: Why Do We Have This Problem? Can It Happen Here? Why Can It Happen Here?

Just a reminder #p2 #tcot pic.twitter.com/0yLsk1atr4

— R.Saddler (@Politics_PR) December 9, 2015

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: An Eye-Opening Dialogue About Pope's Year of Mercy and Catholic Gay-Bashing

One Purgatrix Ineptiae, responding* to Joshua McElwee's article at National Catholic Reporter noting that Pope Francis has opened a Jubilee year calling for a church that puts mercy before judgment:

Advent: "Darkness and Death Take Different Forms in Every Generation, But the Challenge of Gathering the Forces of Light and Love to Oppose Them Remains the Same"

An Advent offering for you, continuing the themes of the meditation I posted yesterday: illuminations from many different books and poems I've read over many years, and have recorded in my quotation log: 

As Trump Goes Full Fascist, Thoughtful Testimony from Various Witnesses: "Repudiate Him, or Become His Monster"

Where our world is heading, if we American citizens, who wield enormous global influence and power at a global level, don't soon wake from our slumber: 

An Advent Meditation: The Struggle for Hope As Dark Rises and Light Shifts, and Churches Become Trivial Cultural Adjuncts of Affluent Values

It's that time of year in which the waning of the light really does put us into a new — a different — space emotionally and spiritually. We wake these days to bleak darkness, and long before bedtime, the sun has vanished below the horizon. During the day, it comes into the house at new, and sometimes challenging, angles as it moves itself to the southern side of the sky.