Tag: football

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 390

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.

This is volume 390, which is the number of unique ways to sum up to 32 (in other words, 32 has 390 distinct partitions).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Concerning Asbury:
    • Asbury Professor: We’re Witnessing a ‘Surprising Work of God’ (Tom McCall, Christianity Today): “By Thursday evening, there was standing room only. Students had begun to arrive from other universities: the University of Kentucky, the University of the Cumberlands, Purdue University, Indiana Wesleyan University, Ohio Christian University, Transylvania University, Midway University, Lee University, Georgetown College, Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, and many others.… In previous revivals, there has always been fruit that has blessed both the church and society. For instance, even secular historians acknowledge that the Second Great Awakening was pivotal to bringing about the end of slavery in our country. Likewise, I look forward to seeing what fruit God will bring from such a revival in our generation.”
    • a quirky but positive take on Asbury by Lyman Stone (Twitter)
    • Another interesting take by a PhD student at Asbury Seminary (Twitter)
    • A nonstop Kentucky prayer ‘revival’ is going viral on TikTok, and people are traveling thousands of miles to take part (Jake Traylor, NBC News): “The setup is simple. No projector screens or high-tech integrations, just wooden sanctuary chairs filled with people, and an open altar call with an invitation to prayer that still hasn’t ended. That equation has been a powerful recipe on social media. On TikTok and Instagram, videos hashtagged ‘Asbury Revival’ are racking up millions of views. At the time this article was published, the hashtag #asburyrevival had 24.4 million views on TikTok.”
    • The Revival at Asbury (Thomas Lyons, Substack): “For what it’s worth, it’s my initial evaluation that this is the real deal. None of the hallmarks of manufactured revival are present. And I’m not alone in this evaluation. As Lawson Stone, an Old Testament Professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, recently stated on social media, ‘The old saints know.’ Arguably more significant for the evaluation of the revival’s authenticity than the opinions of revival scholars are the testimonies of the prior generations who were present at similar moves of God within the community.”
    • The author is a scholar whose dissertation focused on revivals.
  2. No Hookups, No ‘Talking,’ and No Breakups: A Better Way to Date (Charles E. Stokes, Institute for Family Studies): “My wife and I have served as relationship mentors now for 10 years, and as a family scholar and professor, I’ve paid attention to every nugget of wisdom I could glean—not only from academics but from many of my students. I have been able to craft a better approach to dating that I believe improves the chances of success for singles desiring a lifelong monogamous relationship.”
    • The author is a sociologist at Samford. I am deliberately not including his proposed solution in the excerpt because it’s worth reading in full. If you read his suggestion out of context you’ll probably form an opinion about it too quickly.
  3. ‘Honoring’ Your Father and Mother Isn’t Always Biblical (Karen Wong, Christianity Today): “But does the Chinese understanding of filial piety really mean exactly the same as the biblical description of honoring parents? And can an emphasis on obeying the fifth commandment overlook or even rationalize parent-child relationships characterized by contention, pain, disrespect, and suffering?”
    • Not paywalled — I have unlocked it for you.
  4. Why America Needs Football. Even Its Brutality. (Ethan Strauss, The Free Press): “Modern life might be unfulfilling, but the fact remains you’re unlikely to die on a beach separated from your entrails. Still, the old imperatives remain. We have war within us, whether or not there’s one to wage. And the NFL gives Americans that war, as spectacle, week after week.”
    • Recommended by an alumnus. I am still skeptical American football can survive moms pulling their kids out of the sport and directing them to safer athletic exploits.
  5. Contra Kavanagh On Fideism (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “In a free society, at one or another point in your life, you’ll actually have to form your own opinion about something. You’ll do better at that if you have some practice forming opinions. When experts have strong opinions on something, this is a good opportunity to practice your opinion-forming skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, figure out where you went wrong. This requires people to have some tolerance for others doing this.”
    • Started off quite uninteresting and then quickly ramped up. The question under consideration: how to balance deferring to experts with investigating things on your own.
    • A follow-up Trying Again On Fideism (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “I come back to this example again and again, but only because it’s so blatant: the New York Times ran an article saying that only 36% of economists supported school vouchers, with a strong implication that the profession was majority against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actually, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not responding. If you are too quick to seek epistemic closure because ‘you have to trust the experts’, you will be easy prey to people misrepresenting what they are saying.”
  6. McCullough’s Mistake, and Ours (Adrian Gaty, Substack): “As long as education stays true to its past and cultivates faith and virtue, McCullough’s mistake doesn’t matter. But once education becomes unmoored from its origins, once it becomes openly hostile to religion, we betray our own origins – and condemn our future – by continuing to ’emphasize’ schooling. Our founders, pioneers like the Reverend Cutler, spread the gospel of public education not for its own sake but because such education in turn spread the Gospel. To achieve that good government and happiness they envisioned, our task today is not to encourage public education as it currently exists – it is to remake it in His image.”
    • Recommended by a student.
    • This is a follow up to the also interesting This is… Science! (Adrian Gaty, Substack): “These are profoundly anti-life, anti-human movements – yet they advance by manipulating our humanity, our tenderness, our hatred of suicide. Spoiler alert: the doctors and ethicists making these claims about abortion and affirmation are 100% on board with doctor-assisted suicide (which killed over ten thousand Canadians last year). They don’t hate suicide, not in the least — but they know that you do. They are using your compassion to create a culture of death.”
  7. In Defense of J.K. Rowling (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called ’20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.’ After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, ‘I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.’ On Twitter she declared, ‘You’re burning the wrong witch.’ ”
    • The tide is turning on Rowling. She’s not where I am ideologically, but watching her be tarred and feathered for saying common sense things has been dismaying.

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 Does the Bible Pass the Bechdel Test? A Data-Driven Look at Women in the Story of Scripture (John Dyer, personal blog): “So does the Bible pass the Bechdel test? This short answer is: yes, there are scenes where two named women have a conversation not about a man. The longer answer is more complex, but also, I think, richer.” This is REALLY well done. From volume 268.

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). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent. 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. If this was forwarded to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 389

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.

This is volume 389, a prime number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. American Christianity Can Still Come Back (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “There was no such thing as monasticism—through which pagan Northern Europe was turned Christian—until there was. There was no Reformation until there was. There was no revival that turned Methodists and Baptists into culturally dominant forces in the midwestern and southeastern United States—until there was. There was no East African Revival, led primarily by African people, that helped turn Africa from a 9 percent Christian continent in 1900 into a 50 percent Christian continent today—until there was. Christianity, like its founder, does not go from strength to strength but from death to resurrection.”
  2. Is the Public Domain Just?: Biblical Stewardship and Legal Protection For Traditional Knowledge Assets (Ruth L. Okediji, The Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts): “The Article proposes a theological framework of ‘biblical stewardship’ rooted in imago Dei—the foundational concept informing Jewish and Christian understandings of human nature and social interaction—to address the socio-moral dimensions that are constitutive of TK [traditional knowledge] systems and the institutional context in which they unfold. The biblical stewardship framework focuses on the cooperative and kinship arrangements that enable and sustain productive capacity for TK.”
    • The author is a professor at Harvard Law and a solid Christian. I just heard her speak and the person introducing her mentioned this article as an example of how bold she is in integrating her faith into her scholarship.
  3. Some COVID perspectives
    • Surely Right (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “…the only sensible position is to advocate for early and widespread vaccine access, be highly critical of all the politicking about vaccine timing around the election, and to avoid mandates unless you intend to enforce them at gunpoint.… Because we live in a world where the default is not to vaccinate, politics poisons everything it touches, and the childhood mandates are historical accidents that could very well fall to concerted political action.”
      • A brief, fascinating read.
    • Why the Odds Are Stacked Against a Promising New Covid Drug (Benjamin Mueller, The New York Times): “By fortifying the body’s own mechanisms for quashing an invading virus, they can potentially help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and other viruses with the potential to kindle future pandemics.… For all of its promise, though, the drug — called pegylated interferon lambda — faces an uncertain road [due to the FDA].”
    • Not paywalled. Infuriating. Outrageous. Ridiculous.
    • Bureaucrats: “COVID is so bad we need to change every aspect of society to deal with it. But don’t change our bureaucracy. It’s not THAT bad.”
  4. Boston University provides update on CTE study, discovers brain disease in 92 percent of ex-NFL players analyzed (Victoria Hernandez, USA Today): “The Boston University CTE Center studied the brains of 376 deceased former NFL players and diagnosed 345 of them with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This is 91.7 percent of those studied.”
    • I’ve been saying this for about two student generations now, but football’s days are numbered in America. It’s hard to imagine the sport surviving the sorts of reforms that would be necessary.
  5. I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle. (Jamie Reed, The Free Press): “I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.… I’m now married to a trans man, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.… Given the secrecy and lack of rigorous standards that characterize youth gender transition across the country, I believe that to ensure the safety of American children, we need a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria.”
    • Not surprising if you’ve been following this topic, but depressing and with new anecdotes.
  6. ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (Ted Chiang, The New Yorker): “Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.”
    • This is a good analogy.
  7. A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell (Vincent Lloyd, Compact Magazine): “Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.… I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.”
    • The author is a professor at Villanova (which is not, to be clear, the location of this debacle).

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 Unconscious Learning Underlies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in People Who Can Unconsciously Predict Complex Patterns (Sci Tech Daily): “Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.” Shocker: people who see reality clearly are more likely to perceive God’s hand at work in reality. From volume 267.

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). And to the extent you can discern my opinions, please understand that they are my own and not necessarily those of Chi Alpha or any other organization I may be perceived to represent. 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. If this was forwarded to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 21

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. How big of a deal do you have to be for POTUS to interview you? President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation In Iowa (NY Review of Books). You might recall that Robinson is speaking at Stanford soon and also that I mentioned her essay “Fear” a few emails back.
  2. Wondering why people are fleeing Syria? Check out Syria’s War: A Five Minute History (a Vox video). This is really well-done. 
  3. There is also violence erupting in Israel. Foreign Policy asks Can Anyone Prevent A Third Intifada?  Incidentally, if you wonder why people are skeptical of the way news concerning Israel is reported, take a look at Returning to the Copy Desk, Briefly (Kevin Williamson, National Review). It is a takedown of a NY Times article showing how much bias can creep into an apparently objective article (this is from the right critiquing the left — for counterexamples search for clips from the Daily Show). Bottom line: it’s really hard to find trustworthy news about Israel.
  4. Lying About Our Religion, and Other Problems With Polling (Religion Dispatches). There really is a problem developing with polling, which is bad news because we rely upon polling in our national life to tell us what the public thinks. Nate Silver is also worried about this — Polling Is Getting Harder, But It’s A Vital Check On Power (FiveThirtyEight).
    • An insightful observation from the “Lying About Our Religion” article: “In a democracy with hundreds of millions of people, how do you know what the public thinks and wants? How do you figure out what binds them together, besides an annual obligation to the IRS and a love of fireworks? In short: how do you know what the public is? Like many hard questions, these problems have been rendered largely invisible, in no small part because “The Public” and “The American People” are favorite fictional characters for politicians and journalists, who speak of them without a trace of precision. So let’s indulge in a quick reality check. The Super Bowl—that national spectacle that unites us around the flickering LCD hearth—had 115 million viewers in the United States last February; in other words, nearly two-thirds of us weren’t watching it. The most-viewed political spectacle of the year, the State of the Union address, draws around 10% of the population. Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election with 62 million votes, meaning that fewer than 20% of us voted for him. The people have spoken…kind of.”
  5. Quick links:

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.