Last Saturday I found myself at a service in honor of the winter solstice.
We began by consecrating the space – turning first east, then south, then west, then north, promising to honor the virtues traditionally symbolically associated with those directions. We rose and sat together. We sang songs in unison – about the darkness of uncertainty, the vastness of nature, the promise of tomorrow. We extinguished LED candles, one by one, reflecting on death, and on what it meant to live in a broken and ontologically meaningless world...…

In a country where religious people tend to be happier than the 24 percent who identify as “religiously unaffiliated,” it makes sense perhaps that groups bent on optimizing human behavior would try to salvage what they see as the measurable good from religious experience.
To “hack the good” from religion, then, means taking away metaphysical truth or a higher power from religion so that it becomes fundamentally a communal activity designed to reinforce group bonds and, no less importantly, group values.
Those values include religious principles such as altruism, but members of these secular communities are invited in turn to commit themselves to scientific research to solve social problems, including death itself, if only by helping to fund such research. In doing so they affirm their membership in the group.

A new report released today by the Arkansas Department of Human Services shows that another 4,600 residents were stripped of their Medicaid coverage this month, bringing the total number of residents who have lost Medicaid coverage because of the state’s work requirements to approximately 17,000.

Instead, communism slaughtered and buried at least 65 million people over the century, not just in Russia (later the Soviet Union) but Eastern Europe, Africa and China, Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton professor of history and international affairs, writes in The Wall Street Journal. His chilling conclusion: “A century of communism in power — with holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China — has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. ... Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror — a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor, Joseph Stalin.”

As House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) delivered his farewell address on Wednesday after 20 years of relentlessly working to gut social programs for the poor and successfully ramming through "one of the biggest transfers of wealth to the richest one percent in U.S. history," progressives made sure to let the outgoing congressman know what they think of his legacy.

With the hashtag #GoodRiddanceRyan, progressive advocacy groups and commentators denounced Ryan for spending his 10-term tenure in the House pushing an agenda that rewards wealthy corporate donors at the expense of the American working class.

"He's a coward who sold our economy to the highest bidders," declared Patriotic Millionaires.

Howard Thurman, the theologian, author and civil rights leader, wrote a beautiful poem called “The Work of Christmas” that can help move American Christians from the commercialism of Christmas and into the heart of Jesus’ message for the world:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
Faith is work, after all.

Barbed wire and hundreds of cameras ring a massive compound of more than 30 dormitories, schools, warehouses and workshops in China’s far west. Dozens of armed officers and a growling Doberman stand guard outside.
Behind locked gates, men and women are sewing sportswear that can end up on U.S. college campuses and sports teams.

This is one of a growing number of internment camps in the Xinjiang region, where by some estimates 1 million Muslims are detained, forced to give up their language and their religion and subject to political indoctrination. Now, the Chinese government is also forcing some detainees to work in manufacturing and food industries. Some of them are within the internment camps; others are privately owned, state-subsidized factories where detainees are sent once they are released.

The sounds of the season filled the halls of the Scarritt Bennett Center at Vanderbilt University on a recent Sunday morning.
In the chapel, a congregation of about 80 people gathered, while the band launched into a holiday classic: “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”
They followed up with a cover of Tim Minchin’s “White Wine in the Sun.”
“I really like Christmas. It’s sentimental, I know, but I just really like it,” sang Adam Newton, host for the Sunday service. “I am hardly religious. I’d rather break bread with Dawkins than Desmond Tutu, to be honest.”
Welcome to the “Heathen Holidays,” a Christmas celebration for the nonreligious, hosted by the local chapter of the Sunday Assembly.

Citing a new poll that revealed 81 percent of people overall support the idea of a bold and ambitious 'Green New Deal,' Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez celebrated the simple political concept that when you push for policies that are good for a majority of people, a majority of people like it.

"Turns out," the Democrat from New York declared in a Monday night tweet, "everyday people like it when we fight for everyday people!"
The tweet included a link to a story published by Earther earlier in the day highlighting a poll by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University showing that more than 8 out of 10 respondents from "across the political spectrum support the progressive plan to combat climate change by rapidly weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels."

The incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), sent 51 letters on everything from Trump emoluments to Trump and White House travel as the investigative hammer is coming down on Trump.

Rep. Elijah Cummings said in a statement, “These are documents that even the Republicans on the Oversight Committee—at least at some point in time—believed we needed to conduct effective oversight, but when the Trump Administration refused to comply fully, the Republicans would not issue a single subpoena.

Many of these requests were bipartisan, and some are now more than a year old. As Democrats prepare to take the reins in Congress, we are insisting—as a basic first step—that the Trump Administration and others comply with these Republican requests.”