Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 163

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Chi­na and its creepy facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy tar­gets Uighur Mus­lims (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “China’s Mus­lims are akin to Germany’s Jews in the 1930s; a group of hap­less peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent reli­gion that the gov­ern­ment gets to exper­i­ment on. They’re already shov­ing rough­ly 800,000 Mus­lims into intern­ment camps and oth­er Mus­lims world­wide aren’t real­ly notic­ing.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing.
  2. There was quite the clam­or recent­ly about anti­semitism at Stan­ford.
    • Stan­ford Stu­dent Threat­ens Vio­lence against Pro-Israel Stu­dents (Dov Green­burg, Nation­al Review): “In mid July, Hamzeh Daoud, a stu­dent at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, pub­licly post­ed on Face­book: ‘I’m gonna phys­i­cal­ly fight Zion­ists on cam­pus next year.’ If his mean­ing wasn’t clear enough, Hamzeh con­tin­ued, ‘And after I abol­ish your ass I’ll go ahead and work every day for the rest of my life to abol­ish your pet­ty ass eth­no-suprema­cist, set­tler-colo­nial state.’ While not reflec­tive of Stanford’s val­ues, the sen­ti­ment of this hate­ful post reveals the state of con­tem­po­rary life on cam­pus­es.”
    • Daoud resigns from Nor­cliffe RA posi­tion (Julia Ingram and Hold­en Fore­man, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Hamzeh Daoud ’20 has resigned from his Res­i­dent Assis­tant posi­tion in Nor­cliffe House, he announced in a state­ment to The Dai­ly on Fri­day after­noon.”
    • Op Ed: State­ment from Hamzeh Daoud (Hamzeh Daoud, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “After spend­ing a few hours away from Face­book, I read over my post again and real­ized how infused it was with the same hatred that has caused my own fam­i­ly so much suf­fer­ing. It was the antithe­sis of why I chose this path in life. A slop­py com­ment made dur­ing an emo­tion-filled reac­tion to yet anoth­er lay­er of trau­ma, the com­ment did not con­vey my val­ues, who I am cur­rent­ly, or who I hope to become.”
    • I know some of you know Hamzeh, so this prob­a­bly feels a good deal more per­son­al than many of the arti­cles I share. Please remem­ber that what you put on social media actu­al­ly mat­ters. James 1:19 is a use­ful mem­o­ry verse for every­one with a Face­book or Twit­ter account: “My dear broth­ers and sis­ters, take note of this: Every­one should be quick to lis­ten, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
  3. At Prayer Break­fast, Guests Seek Access to a Dif­fer­ent High­er Pow­er (Ken­neth P. Vogel and Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Some describe the gath­er­ing as sim­i­lar to the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, except that Jesus is the orga­niz­ing principle….With its rel­a­tive lack of diplo­mat­ic pro­to­cols and press cov­er­age, the prayer break­fast set­ting is ide­al for for­eign fig­ures who might not oth­er­wise be able to eas­i­ly get face time with top Amer­i­can offi­cials, because of unsa­vory rep­u­ta­tions or a lack of an offi­cial gov­ern­ment perch, accord­ing to lob­by­ists who help arrange such trips. They also con­tend that it is eas­i­er to secure visas when the break­fast is list­ed as a des­ti­na­tion.”
  4. Jeff Ses­sions announces a reli­gious lib­er­ty task force to com­bat “dan­ger­ous” sec­u­lar­ism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Vox): “In a bold speech deliv­ered at the Jus­tice Department’s Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Sum­mit, Ses­sions char­ac­ter­ized the task force as a nec­es­sary step in fac­ing down the pre­vail­ing forces of sec­u­lar­ism. ‘A dan­ger­ous move­ment, unde­tect­ed by many, is now chal­leng­ing and erod­ing our great tra­di­tion of reli­gious free­dom,’ he said, which ‘must be con­front­ed and defeat­ed.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Jeff Ses­sions thinks Chris­tians are under siege in Amer­i­ca (Christo­pher Shea inter­views Nel­son Tebbe, Vox): One part stood out to me: “The Supreme Court has not decid­ed a reli­gious free­dom case in a way that’s adverse to the inter­est of Chris­tians for the past few terms. I can’t think of a sin­gle reli­gious free­dom case that they’ve lost.”
    • The above point is very mud­dled. The things that keep going to the Supreme Court are pre­cise­ly the things we have a prob­lem with. Do you know what we don’t have a prob­lem with? Can­ni­bal­ism. We’ve got cul­tur­al con­sen­sus on that. But reli­gious lib­er­ty? That keeps going to the courts and get­ting suc­cess­ful­ly appealed to the very top because local and state gov­ern­ments keep try­ing to vio­late it. It is a sim­ple fact that sig­nif­i­cant voic­es in our cul­ture view reli­gious lib­er­ty with reac­tions rang­ing from sus­pi­cion to hos­til­i­ty. Exam­ples abound (includ­ing these two Vox arti­cles).
  5. How Catholic Bish­ops Are Shap­ing Health Care In Rur­al Amer­i­ca (Anna Maria Bar­ry-Jester and Amelia Thom­son-DeVeaux, FiveThir­tyEight): “Best esti­mates sug­gest that one in six hos­pi­tal beds and many of the nation’s largest non­prof­it health sys­tems are Catholic-owned or ‑affil­i­at­ed. From 2001 to 2016, the num­ber of Catholic-affil­i­at­ed hos­pi­tals in the U.S. grew by 22 per­cent, even as the total num­ber of hos­pi­tals in the U.S. shrunk, accord­ing to research by Merg­er­Watch and the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union.”
    • A response: Stan­dard Pro­ce­dures (Leah Libresco Sargeant, First Things): “When she lays out my options, there real­ly is just one option: the stan­dard of repro­duc­tive care. But I have two rea­sons to say no: I am a Catholic and I am a sta­tis­ti­cian. It was faith and rea­son, the two ways of know­ing that St. John Paul II called the ‘two wings on which the human spir­it ris­es to the con­tem­pla­tion of truth,’ that led me to dig in my heels dur­ing my third mis­car­riage.” FYI: the author used to write for FiveThir­tyEight.
    • Anoth­er response: What FiveThir­tyEight gets wrong about Catholic hos­pi­tals (Stephanie Slade, Amer­i­ca Mag­a­zine): “That the A.C.L.U. threw away its com­mit­ment to reli­gious free­dom in the name of abor­tion rights is bad enough. A jour­nal­is­tic enter­prise as osten­si­bly sane and data-dri­ven as FiveThir­tyEight­should think twice before fol­low­ing the same path.”
  6. “Hyp­not­ic Mass Phe­nom­e­na” (Flo­ri­an Schwab inter­view with Peter Thiel, Die Welt­woche): “The advanced tech­no­log­i­cal civ­i­liza­tion of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry is a com­pli­cat­ed world where it is not pos­si­ble for any­body to think through every­thing for them­selves. You can­not be a poly­math in quite the way peo­ple were in the 18th cen­tu­ry enlight­en­ments. You can­not be like Goethe. So there is some need to lis­ten to experts, to defer to oth­er peo­ple. And then, there is always the dan­ger of that going too far and peo­ple not think­ing crit­i­cal­ly. This hap­pens in spades in Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Spies Are More Com­mon, and Bor­ing, Than You Think (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “John Negro­ponte, for­mer direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence, admit­ted in 2006 that the U.S. was deploy­ing about 100,000 spies around the world. Giv­en that the U.S. is the world’s tech­nol­o­gy and mil­i­tary leader, and yet has a rel­a­tive­ly small share of glob­al pop­u­la­tion, is it so crazy to think the num­ber of peo­ple spy­ing on us is larg­er than that?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): 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! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

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.

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