Isaac says the idea of a Nativity scene amidst a pile of rubble comes from the distressing images he sees every day on television of the “children in Gaza being pulled from under the rubble.”

“We’re tired of these images, and the justification of the world to these images, as if our children don’t matter, (but) we see the image of Jesus in every child,” he says.

Reflecting on the dire situation in the enclave, Isaac insists, “If Jesus was to be born today, he would be born under the rubble in Gaza, as a sign of solidarity with the children of Gaza who are dying every day.”

Isaac says with the symbolic gesture, the church wants to convey a clear message to the world that “this is what Christmas looks like in Palestine.”

Masha Gessen:

We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible.

. . . One important objection I have heard to comparing Gaza to the ghetto: but there are no death marches out of Gaza and no death camps waiting for its inhabitants.

And this is why we compare. To prevent what we know can happen from happening. To make “Never Again” a political project rather than a magic spell. And if we compare compellingly and bravely, then, in the best case scenario, the comparison is proven wrong.

That is to say: Sometimes, being right means being proven wrong. Or at least hoping you are proven wrong.

David Dark:

Trying to get the Bible right is a very big deal. When we speak of it as the Word of God, we do well to remember that it is also the composition notebook of a centuries-long caravan of asylum seekers. In a time like Advent, we might be prone to skip straight to the baby Jesus and . . . whatever else we might find comforting. If we do that, we risk losing a sufficient sense of our own context as well as that of the people whose experience of God yields the Bible itself. We need to take it slow.

Kosuke Koyama:

But let me make one observation. I find that God goes ‘slowly’ in his educational process of man. ‘Forty years in the wilderness’ points to his basic educational philosophy. Forty years of national migration through the wilderness, three generations of the united monarchy (Saul, David, Solomon), nineteen kings of Israel (up to 722 BC and twenty kings of Judah (up to 587 BC), the hosts of the prophets and priests, the experience of exile and restoration – isn’t this rather a slow and costly way for God to let his people know the covenant relationship between God and man?

Jesus Christ came. He walked towards the ‘full stop’. He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. ‘Full stop’! What can be slower than ‘full stop’ – ‘nailed down’? At this point of ‘full stop’, the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is ‘slow’ yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.

The people of God were taught the truth of bread and the word of God in the wilderness as they walked three miles an hour by the three mile an hour God.

Fred Branfman, in 2001:

But while my efforts helped generate a flurry of attention for the victims of the illegal Laos air war — the most brutal and sustained bombing campaign against a civilian population in history — no one from the Nixon administration was ever brought to justice as a result. 

They had names, these people: Thao, Bounphet, Khamphong, Loung. They had treasured wives and husbands, children and grandparents, buffaloes and homes, rice fields and temples. And they had dreams — and as much right to these dreams as did any of the U.S. leaders who obliterated them.

It was a wrenching experience to hear these kind, decent human beings describe the extermination of revered grandmothers, burned alive by napalm before their eyes, to hear them weep as they remembered seeing a beloved 3-year-old daughter torn apart by anti-personnel bombs. Many of the children who survived carried the marks of the U.S. air war, burned flesh, missing limbs. 

These people had voices, too, although they were rarely heard back in the United States.

[…]

The Nixon-Kissinger holocaust from above continued to afflict the peasant populations of Southeast Asia until the end of the war. Although these two remorseless executioners were finally forced by the growing antiwar fervor at home to withdraw U.S. ground troops, they vastly expanded their bombing operations across Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Their goal was not, as they claimed, to protect the American troop withdrawal. The North Vietnamese would have happily escorted U.S. troops out of the country. Rather, Nixon and Kissinger used the bombing to prop up local regimes and avoid being seen as responsible for “losing” Indochina.

[…]

Nearly 4 million tons of bombs were dropped on the people of Southeast Asia while Kissinger orchestrated the war, over 1 million tons more than was dropped during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and twice the tonnage dropped on all of Europe and the entire Pacific theater in World War II. More than 1 million Indochinese perished and 10 million were wounded and made homeless.

[…]

If killing hundreds of thousands of innocent peasants by dropping million of tons of bombs on undefended civilian targets is not a war crime, then there are no war crimes. If Kissinger is not responsible for these crimes, then there are no war criminals.

[…]

Only a nation in deep spiritual and psychological disarray could honor a man with as much blood on his hands as Henry Kissinger. An entire generation was plunged into a moral abyss during the Vietnam War from which it has yet to emerge. …

It is not necessary, however desirable, to say we were wrong in intervening in Indochina, or even to admit that we were responsible for the vast majority of the war’s casualties. But we refuse at our peril to at least take responsibility for the millions of casualties we certifiably did cause, and seek to make amends to the relatives of those we killed. The Germans did so after World War II, not so much for the Jews as for themselves. Our failure to do so harms our society no less than that of the Indochinese.

Paul Elie:

Wherever you go in Rome, countless others have gone before you. Everything has been seen, done, or sought by somebody else. The streets are made of stones that are broken before they are put in place. There’s not a church, palazzo, piazza, or staircase in the centro storico that hasn’t been rendered by a succession of ace photographers working with state-of-the-art gear—and by centuries of open-air painters before them. The only way to make things new with a camera in Rome, then, is to be fully present in the given moment, which is ipso facto unprecedented. You’re in a piazza with an old-school camera around your neck. A horse trots up right in front of you, so that its head—nose and neck, harness and reins—frames a young man and woman nuzzling on the steps of a fountain. The man has his legs around her, as if he’s pinning her in a romantic pose. There before your eyes is a moment in Rome: edgy, hard to read, unrepeatable. You focus and shoot, and then it’s gone. The city’s heavy history can be a source of freedom—the freedom to see the place in the here and now, since there’s no other way.

Quinn Slobodian:

The solace is that although Gates spends a great deal of money, there is growing scepticism about the intervention of billionaires as a panacea for humanity’s problems. One can see the often comical conspiracies around Gates (and the World Economic Forum with which he is often paired) as an exaggerated symptom of an actual overreach by private actors, who have over the past two decades sought to make policy from business class 40,000ft above democratic governments. That Gates effectively bought the silence of the journalists who could have been his most incisive critics only drives people understandably further towards marginal outlets that have the virtue, at least, of not being supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as they report on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This is precisely what separated the work of a man like Paul Farmer from this sort of helicopter philanthropy.

Ivan Šarčević:

Indeed, there are different ways we can relate to tradition and inherited identity. Each generation or its members can identify with that heritage to the point of vanishing as a group or individual, immersed in tradition, in inherited identity (fundamentalists in particular are prone to it). On the other hand, an individual can – though never completely, it seems – reject his collective identity, deny his belonging, always pointing out only his personal choice of identity. It seems that it’s never completely feasible because we human beings are not only our own products but social beings whom other people “classify” and identify even when we don’t want to be classified or identified as such.

Though coherent, identity is a variegated reality, a sum of belongings, or in terms of memory, a collection of remembrances that we keep dearly, but also those we are ashamed of or want to suppress and forget. Some of those recollections we happily evoke while some of that heritage we dismiss. Due to the dark side of memory and negative parts of tradition (especially crimes), some people renounce their heritage, deny or change not so much their identity as some belonging or some elements of their identity. However, there are also those who change their heritage and identities through life.

If we would qualify it in terms of values, then perhaps the healthiest path to developing identity (continued identification) would be to keep regaining the inherited identity, to keep re-engaging in a critical dialogue with it while creatively reprocessing it in freedom. Like the parable of the talents, in gratitude for the inheritance, with things he received an individual regains not only the equal worth of the inheritance but the chance to engage in creative work with the gifts and have them “double” in value.

Jadranka Brnčić:

As long as the memory of the “heroes” (and by rule those are “our heroes”) overshadows the memory of the victims regardless of their national or religious identity, memory will not reach history, and forgiveness will not reach reconciliation. On the contrary, history will move backwards from its full realization. As [Johann Baptist] Metz wrote: “Resurrection mediated by way of the memory of suffering means: The dead, those already vanquished and forgotten, have a meaning which is yet unrealised. The potential meaning of our history does not depend only on the survivors, the successful and those who make it.” A consideration of Metz’s mysticism of suffering unto God suggests that it is possible to face suffering without minimizing its negativity: “For an anamnestic reason, being attentive to God means hearing the silence of those who have disappeared.” […]

If there is no work to integrate the mourners into the political and religious body of society, mourners are recorded as collateral victims and missing persons as a number within statistics. But history’s remains are memory and mourning. There is no historical event as such, but only national and religious narrative identities in conflict and coming out of the conflict, both of which sometimes carry catastrophic consequences for the identity of a human being as imago Dei.

Roger Scruton:

We should not think that these changes in the world of art – which have been paralleled, too, in the worlds of music and literature – are without significance. What we look at, listen to and read affects us in the deepest part of our being. Once we start to celebrate ugliness, then we become ugly too. Just as art and architecture have uglified themselves, so have our manners, our relationships and our language become crude.

Without the guidance offered by beauty and good taste we find it difficult to relate to each other in a natural or graceful way. Society itself becomes fractured and atomized.

This official uglification of our world is the work of the ivory-towered elites of the liberal classes – people who have little sympathy for how the rest of us live and who, with their mania for modernizing, are happy to rip up beliefs that have stood the test of time for millennia.

What they forget is that ordinary people hunger for beauty as they have always hungered, for beauty is the voice of comfort, the voice of home.

When a lovely melody, a sublime landscape or a passage of exquisite poetry comes before your senses and your mind, you know that you are at home in the world. Beauty is the voice that settles us, the assurance that we belong among others, in a place of sharing and consolation. By contrast, the ugly art and architecture of today divides society rather than bringing it together.