Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 36

On Fri­days I share articles/resources I have found help­ful recent­ly in think­ing about broad­er cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

  1. The Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): this is a PDF of the 9 pages of thought­ful good­ness I ref­er­enced in my ser­mon this week. It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel — it’s real­ly good!
  2. Leave Chi­na, Study In Amer­i­ca, Find Jesus (Han Zhang, For­eign Pol­i­cy) — “U.S. uni­ver­si­ties are the first places that hun­dreds of thou­sands of edu­cat­ed young Chi­nese are exposed to dif­fer­ent reli­gious ideas, and invit­ed to con­sid­er them freely. Sens­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty, on-cam­pus Chris­t­ian fel­low­ships and church­es have gone out of their col­lec­tive way to help those fresh from Chi­na.”
  3. Uncov­er­ing the Assem­blies of God’s Black Her­itage (Dar­rin Rodgers, Vital Mag­a­zine): the Assem­blies of God is Chi Alpha’s spon­sor­ing denom­i­na­tion and the group with which I am ordained. Some neat anec­dotes here.
  4. Why Nepal Has One of the World’s Fastest Grow­ing Chris­t­ian Pop­u­la­tions (Danielle Preiss, NPR): my favorite bit, “a team were also in Nepal in Octo­ber help­ing rebuild the earth­quake-dam­aged house that belongs to the fam­i­ly of Sum­i­tra Pari­yar, a young woman who believes she was healed from paral­y­sis and seizures by her accep­tance of Christ.” I find the choice of words fun­ny: she “believes” she was healed from paral­y­sis by Christ. I’m pret­ty sure she knows whether she was par­a­lyzed or not. How about “a young woman who says she was healed from paral­y­sis and seizures by her accep­tance of Christ.” That’s just bet­ter jour­nal­ism.
  5. Reli­gious Free­dom Keeps Us Strong (Barack Oba­ma, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): yes, this is by Pres­i­dent Oba­ma. The thing I am most pleased about is his use of the phrase “free­dom of reli­gion” as opposed to the much less expan­sive “free­dom of wor­ship.”
  6. What A Super Bowl Ad Reveals About Our Abor­tion Cul­ture (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): this went in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion than I assumed it would. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  7. Some humor:

Why Do You Send This Email?

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. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

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 (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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.

Past emails are archived at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links

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