Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 31

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world.

To that end, on Fri­days I’ve been shar­ing articles/resources I have found help­ful recent­ly in think­ing about broad­er cul­tur­al and soci­etal issues (be sure to see the dis­claimer at the bot­tom). May these give you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar. Past emails are archived at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links

With­out fur­ther ado, I give you the inter­est­ing things:

  1. Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it!
  2. I’m Think­ing It Over (The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive, Alan Jacobs): this is real­ly good advice for social media. Bonus: it name-drops a leg­endary Stan­ford pro­fes­sor. Read­ing this arti­cle made me feel good about not send­ing this email out over Christ­mas break.  🙂
  3. Can You Glo­ri­fy God As An Econ­o­mist? (Chris­t­ian Post, Napp Naz­worth): tl;dr yes.
  4. Across The Race Divide (Gospel Coali­tion, Kevin DeY­oung) — some­what long but worth­while. Dif­fi­cult to excerpt in a way that won’t tempt you pigeon­hole the piece.
  5. Can Hob­by Lob­by Buy The Bible? (The Atlantic, Joel Baden and Can­di­da Moss): the fram­ing is alarmist, some of the claims about tex­tu­al crit­i­cism are dubi­ous, but the arti­cle is quite engag­ing. The alle­ga­tions of arti­fact smug­gling seem most­ly the byprod­uct of naivete to me and I hope they prove to be so. The authors are pro­fes­sors at Yale and Notre Dame.
  6. The Quixot­ic Adven­tures of Roy Moore (The Atlantic, Matt Ford) — I was most inter­est­ed by the begin­ning of the fifth para­graph: “While that may be tech­ni­cal­ly cor­rect…”  Heh. I think the best jour­nal­ism on this was actu­al­ly done by The Mont­gomery Adver­tis­er. It blew away the NY Times, NPR, etc by actu­al­ly inter­view­ing peo­ple with dif­fer­ing opin­ions. If you want the sto­ry, read Moore Tar­gets Same-Sex Mar­riage (Bri­an Lyman, Mont­gomery Adver­tis­er).
  7. Quick Links (short­er pieces):

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

Leave a Reply