It is September 13th. I am already buying myself a tea advent calendar and hating myself for it. I am thinking about how much more offensive capitalist Christmas should be to Christians than secular Christmas.

One of the most famous photographs in the world is the Blue Marble, a picture of Earth taken from Apollo 17 as it made its way to the Moon. I learned something interesting about the photo today, though: Apparently (see here, among other sources, though I wish I could find a NASA comment on this), the photo was originally taken with the South Pole facing the top of the photo—and with the Earth not exactly centered.

I… didn’t mean to wait until the day before the Inauguration to post the text of my sermon on hope in the face of despair. The weekend I gave the sermon was also the weekend of a funeral and near a very busy end of semester, so blogging was on the backburner. Even if I had had more time, my website-to-social media setup was a bit borked and I’m just vain enough to not post things if I think my audience is going to be diminished.

I’m bookmarking this so I can sit with it and return to it. It is powerful, searing, and condemning.

I’ve been scheduled for a while to preach on hope during Advent. It was always going to be about hope in the face of bleakness, but I can see the tone changing a bit now anyway.

I am not great at observing the different seasons of the liturgical year. A good friend of mine once responded to this complaint with “Welcome to living a liturgical year life,” so I gather that to a certain extent, this is how everyone feels about it. It always feels a little frustrating to me, though, because I love the idea of the liturgical year. I attended a spiritual retreat sponsored by my congregation last Saturday, and one of the activities we did was to string together some painted wooden beads representing the different liturgical seasons as we read about what each of those different seasons represents.

As I’ve written before, I’m skeptical when Christians see the Middle East uniquely through the particularities of our beliefs and tradition—there’s so many ways that can (and does) go wrong. Yet, if we’re going to sing and preach about Bethlehem this year, we ought to use modern Bethlehem to get us thinking about a better world for the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza.

Kiddo’s awesome “advent calendar of magic” is prominently advertised as a STEM toy, and that’s been bugging me. Not because it isn’t true, but because things don’t need to be STEM to be valuable.

Love this article. This year, I’ve been craving Advent since Halloween ended, and I’ve seen a justice and peace element to Advent since I first started celebrating it, so there’s a lot for me here.

I did not read this book as one is supposed to. It’s a collection of daily Advent and Christmas reflections, but I listened to the audiobook well before Advent started and with no pauses in between individual reflections. I’m sure that takes away from the experience, but I enjoyed what I heard and plan to read more Bonhoeffer.