Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 69

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. How To Pray A Psalm (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): prayer life need a boost? Give this a try. 
2. A Col­lege Is A Com­mu­ni­ty But It Can­not Be A Home (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): for­get col­lege. This whole world is not your home — 1 Peter 2:11; Hebrews 13:14.
3. Is Pla­gia­rism A Sin? (Ger­vase Markham, per­son­al blog): this is well-argued and rais­es issues I had not con­sid­ered before.
4. Split Over Don­ald Trump and Cut Off by Cul­ture Wars, Evan­gel­i­cals Despair (Lau­rie Good­stein, NY Times): an unusu­al­ly per­cep­tive piece from the often obliv­i­ous-to-reli­gion New York Times.
5. Sci­ence Denial­ism: Pot. Ket­tle. Black. (David Hed­dle, per­son­al blog): a nuclear physi­cist gives an stim­u­lat­ing sum­ma­ry of cos­mo­log­i­cal fine-tun­ing and how both the­ists and skep­tics often mis­un­der­stand it.
6. Eco­nom­ic Free­dom and Reli­gion: An Empir­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tion (SSRN): “Our cross-sec­tion­al dataset includes 137 coun­tries aver­aged over the peri­od 2001–2010. Sim­ple cor­re­la­tions show that Protes­tantism is asso­ci­at­ed with eco­nom­ic free­dom, Islam is not, with Catholi­cism in between.”
7. Can Islam and Lib­er­al­ism Coex­ist? (Isaac Chotin­er, Slate): an absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with Sha­di Hamid. “Dur­ing the course of our con­ver­sa­tion… we dis­cussed why lib­er­als have trou­ble tak­ing reli­gion seri­ous­ly, the future of Islamist pol­i­tics in Turkey and Egypt, and what the rise of Don­ald Trump has meant for Amer­i­can Mus­lims.”

Things Glen Found Amusing

• A New Debate For­mat (SMBC comics) — that bit about regres­sion to the mean was a nice touch.
• Dil­bert on Bad Deci­sion Mak­ing — more accu­rate than most of us would like

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.