Tag: hong kong

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 507: kindness, China, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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. How Kind­ness Became Crim­i­nal­ized (Anas­ta­sia Boden, The Dis­patch): “Three years ago, the city of Tempe, Ari­zona, was cel­e­brat­ing Austin Davis as a hero. It even gave him an award for his char­i­ta­ble work, which includ­ed dri­ving the city’s home­less peo­ple to addic­tion or men­tal health ser­vices and putting on Sun­day pic­nics, where he shared food with those who were hun­gry. Last sum­mer, he was jailed for the same work.”
    • This arti­cle is very much worth your time.
  2. The Mass Trau­ma of Porn (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her child­hood, when she men­tions, some­what casu­al­ly, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He intro­duced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had got­ten her first peri­od, with­out her par­ents know­ing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time some­thing more extreme. By ten it seemed nor­mal. By eleven, she was watch­ing reg­u­lar­ly on her own. She is calm about this, reas­sur­ing you that this has hap­pened to most of her friends. Would any­one think this was nor­mal? Part of com­ing-of-age, her healthy devel­op­ment? Explor­ing her sex­u­al­i­ty? Or would we call this abuse? This is exact­ly what is hap­pen­ing to chil­dren today when we hand them a smart­phone. But instead of one stranger intro­duc­ing them to porn, it is a bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try, prof­it­ing from their trau­ma.”
  3. Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be old­er than thought, experts say (Nico­la Davis, The Guardian): “While some scrolls were radio­car­bon dat­ed in the 1990s, Popović said schol­ars did not tack­le the prob­lem of cas­tor oil con­t­a­m­i­na­tion – a sub­stance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the man­u­scripts, but which could skew results.”
    • The schol­ar­ly study is avail­able at PLOS One: Dat­ing ancient man­u­scripts using radio­car­bon and AI-based writ­ing style analy­sis
    • Note that when the arti­cle says stuff like “Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be old­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, with some bib­li­cal texts dat­ing from the time of their orig­i­nal authors” it means some­thing dif­fer­ent than I would mean. When I talk about the orig­i­nal author of Daniel, I mean Daniel. That’s not the assump­tion they’re work­ing under. Set­ting that aside, the big take­away is that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly old­er than we thought, and that should encour­age Chris­tians because it shows that the tex­tu­al evi­dence for the Old Tes­ta­ment is even stronger than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized.
  4. Some Chi­na-relat­ed news
    • Why Tai­wan Is the West Berlin of Our Time (Jay Sophal­kalyan, The Dis­patch): “At this junc­ture, Tai­wan occu­pies that same fate­ful role West Berlin did. It stands unbowed along the fault line between tyran­ny and liberty—a free soci­ety that, by the cold arith­metic of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, ought not to exist. But the stakes are even high­er.… this small island nation is an irrefutable repu­di­a­tion of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s ide­o­log­i­cal creed. It proves that pros­per­i­ty does not neces­si­tate repres­sion, and that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is nei­ther a West­ern impo­si­tion nor a cul­tur­al anomaly—it is a uni­ver­sal aspi­ra­tion spring­ing from the shared yearn­ings of the human spir­it.”
    • Fac­ing a Pre­car­i­ous Future in Hong Kong (Peter Maize, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chan believes that Hong Kong church­es are with­in a 10-year grace peri­od before the gov­ern­ment impos­es any sig­nif­i­cant changes. He says Flow is will­ing to coop­er­ate to a cer­tain degree. For exam­ple, he would put a Chi­nese flag on their stage if the gov­ern­ment requires it. Yet for require­ments that go against the Bible, ‘we will fol­low Jesus,’ Chan said. ‘We will not com­pro­mise our faith. We’re men­tal­ly pre­pared for the future.’ That prepa­ra­tion includes a delib­er­ate deci­sion not to keep a data­base of mem­bers and an expec­ta­tion that the Flow Church might dis­ap­pear soon.”
  5. Come to Me, All You Net­work­ing Techies (Natal­ie Mead, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s not easy to be a Chris­t­ian in the Bay Area. I’ve lived in San Fran­cis­co for 12 years. But it’s often imprac­ti­cal, even impos­si­ble, for Chris­tians to put down roots here.… I know many techies whose faith didn’t sur­vive the pres­sure to suc­ceed, the mon­ey, and the cul­tur­al indoc­tri­na­tion. Mine did only by God’s grace. So when a friend on the East Coast shared a recent New York Times sto­ry about a Chris­t­ian ‘revival’ occur­ring in Sil­i­con Val­ley, I groaned—not because I’m against revival in the Bay Area! I was just skep­ti­cal of its sup­posed locus: the tech indus­try.”
  6. Fel­low­ship in the Fiery Fur­nace: Do Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion Nar­ra­tives Tran­scend Racial Divides? (Brook­lyn Walk­er & Paul A. Djupe, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “In this arti­cle, we show that reli­gious threat, or beliefs that your reli­gious group is the tar­get of per­se­cu­tion, can actu­al­ly bring togeth­er peo­ple across America’s deep and per­sis­tent racial divide. As polit­i­cal sci­en­tists con­tin­ue to wres­tle with the mean­ing of racial dif­fer­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, our work sug­gests that oth­er types of iden­ti­ties, like reli­gious iden­ti­ties, and the threat that makes those iden­ti­ties salient, should be an impor­tant part of the con­ver­sa­tion.”
  7. How Cer­tain Are Cler­gy of their Faith? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “There’s a state­ment in this sur­vey, ‘My reli­gion would be the best one for all peo­ple no mat­ter their back­ground or cur­rent reli­gion’ that real­ly gets to the heart of the mat­ter. This is a great exam­ple of how the evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of reli­gion dif­fers from oth­er faith groups. In this sam­ple, 93% of the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors said that their reli­gion was the best one for all peo­ple. That was 22 points high­er than Black Protes­tants. It was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than Catholic priests and main­line Protes­tant pas­tors. For the Catholics, 58% thought that they had a supe­ri­or per­spec­tive and it was a bare major­i­ty of the main­line at 51%. I do want to note that the non-Chris­t­ian cler­gy had a much dif­fer­ent approach here — a major­i­ty dis­agreed that they had a supe­ri­or world­view.”
    • Lots of fas­ci­nat­ing stats in this brief arti­cle.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 455



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 455, which is the result of 15 choose 3 — how many ways you can select three objects from a col­lec­tion of fif­teen.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What I’ve Learned From a Decade on the Dat­ing Apps (Kate­lyn Beaty, Sub­stack): “Dat­ing apps are not a neu­tral tool for find­ing love. Like all tech­nolo­gies, they act on us, even as we think we are in con­trol, act­ing on them. They shape how we see oth­er peo­ple, and our­selves, and roman­tic love itself. Accord­ing to the apps, love is the opti­miza­tion of traits that yield the high­est rates of mutu­al sat­is­fac­tion and per­son­al growth for two atom­ized indi­vid­u­als. This self-expres­sive mod­el of romance may be fine as far as it goes, but it’s a major depar­ture from the basis of love in pre­vi­ous eras.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • I also liked this bit: “It’s as if these apps don’t want users to find romance, because they are incen­tivized, to the tune of $5.3 bil­lion in 2022, to keep us swip­ing and search­ing.”
  2. Are Gaza Protests Hap­pen­ing Most­ly at Elite Col­leges? (Marc Novi­coff & Robert Kelchen, Wash­ing­ton Month­ly): “Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Count­ing Con­sor­tium and news reports of encamp­ments, we matched infor­ma­tion on every insti­tu­tion of high­er edu­ca­tion that has had pro-Pales­tin­ian protest activ­i­ty (start­ing when the war broke out in Octo­ber until ear­ly May) to the col­leges in our 2023 col­lege rank­ings. Of the 1,421 pub­lic and pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encamp­ments. By match­ing that data to per­cent­ages of stu­dents at each cam­pus who receive Pell Grants (which are award­ed to stu­dents from mod­er­ate- and low-income fam­i­lies), we came to an unsur­pris­ing con­clu­sion: Pro-Pales­tin­ian protests have been rare at col­leges with high per­cent­ages of Pell stu­dents. Encamp­ments at such col­leges have been rar­er still.”
    • Con­tains inter­est­ing charts.
  3. Spy­ing Arrests Send Chill Through Britain’s Thriv­ing Hong Kong Com­mu­ni­ty (Megan Spe­cia, New York Times): “This month, three men were charged in Lon­don with gath­er­ing intel­li­gence for Hong Kong and forc­ing entry into a British res­i­dence. While the men have not yet been found inno­cent or guilty — the tri­al will not begin until Feb­ru­ary — the news of the arrests threw a spot­light on many activists’ exist­ing con­cerns about China’s abil­i­ty to sur­veil and harass its cit­i­zens abroad, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who have been crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment.”
  4. Two arti­cles about sur­viv­ing can­cer:
    • Mar­i­tal Sta­tus and Sur­vival in Patients With Can­cer (Aiz­er et al, Jour­nal of Clin­i­cal Oncol­o­gy): “For five can­cers stud­ied (prostate, breast, col­orec­tal, esophageal, and head/neck can­cers), the sur­vival ben­e­fit asso­ci­at­ed with mar­riage was larg­er than the pub­lished sur­vival ben­e­fit of chemother­a­py. The impor­tance of this study is that it high­lights the con­sis­tent and sub­stan­tial impact that fea­tures of mar­riage, par­tic­u­lar­ly social sup­port, can have on can­cer detec­tion, treat­ment, and sur­vival.”
      • From 2013. Mar­riage is bet­ter than chemother­a­py. To be clear: if you have can­cer also receive med­ical treat­ment even if you’re mar­ried.
    • Tri­al results for new lung can­cer drug are ‘off the charts’, say doc­tors (Andrew Gre­go­ry, The Guardian): “Lung can­cer is the world’s lead­ing cause of can­cer death, account­ing for about 1.8m deaths every year. Sur­vival rates in those with advanced forms of the dis­ease, where tumours have spread, are par­tic­u­lar­ly poor. More than half of patients (60%) diag­nosed with advanced forms of lung can­cer who took lor­la­tinib were still alive five years lat­er with no pro­gres­sion in their dis­ease, data pre­sent­ed at the world’s largest can­cer con­fer­ence showed. The rate was 8% in patients treat­ed with a stan­dard drug, the tri­al found.”
      • Amaz­ing!
  5. Two arti­cles about the job mar­ket:
    • Why Can’t Col­lege Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some The­o­ries — and Fix­es. (Peter Coy, New York Times): “Even though the unem­ploy­ment rate is low, few­er peo­ple are quit­ting, so few­er jobs are becom­ing avail­able, accord­ing to Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics data. LinkedIn’s esti­mate of the nation­al hir­ing rate was down 9.5 per­cent in April from a year ear­li­er.”
      • The arti­cle con­tains oth­er sub­stan­tive insights, but that one stood out to me.
    • The case of the angry his­to­ry post­doc (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Why is no one hir­ing his­to­ri­ans? There are four basic rea­sons. The first and most impor­tant — which almost no one ever talks about, because it’s sup­posed to be so obvi­ous — is that the U.S. uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem is large­ly done expand­ing. The 20th cen­tu­ry saw a mas­sive build-out of uni­ver­si­ties, which required hir­ing a mas­sive num­ber of tenure-track pro­fes­sors. Then it stopped. And because tenure is for life, the depart­ments at the exist­ing uni­ver­si­ties are clogged with a ton of old profs who will nev­er leave until they age out. New hires must there­fore slow to a trick­le, since as long as the num­ber of profs is rough­ly con­stant, they can only be hired to replace peo­ple who retire or die.”
  6. Live by the Law or Die on the Cross (Jere­my Eng­land, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What would Jesus do if a Hamas fight­er held a Gazan Arab child up as a shield while fir­ing? Hard to say for sure, but any­one who argues that a prop­er­ly humane response is to die rather than to try to shoot around the child has ample basis in Chris­tian­i­ty. The image of the Cru­ci­fix­ion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accept­ing cor­po­re­al defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spir­i­tu­al vic­to­ry in the world of tomor­row. You will not hear Jesus men­tioned when West­ern lead­ers speak on how impor­tant it is that Israel adhere to inter­na­tion­al laws of war, but the con­cept of the inno­cent civil­ian enshrined in these laws grew prac­ti­cal­ly out of wars fought with­in Chris­ten­dom dur­ing the last sev­er­al hun­dred years.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who does not endorse all of the argu­ment but found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  7. A Redemp­tive The­sis for Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Andy Crouch with oth­ers, Prax­is Labs): “Like the Inter­net, elec­tric­i­ty, and agri­cul­ture, AI is a gen­er­al-pur­pose tech­nol­o­gy that can be har­nessed to many ends. Redemp­tive entre­pre­neurs can lead the way in demon­strat­ing that AI can be deployed — in fact, is best deployed — in ways that dethrone pride, mag­ic, and Mam­mon and that ele­vate the dig­ni­ty of human beings and their capac­i­ty to flour­ish as image bear­ers in the world.”

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 262

Hon­est­ly, this week’s col­lec­tion of arti­cles has some of the best I’ve seen in some time.

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. A Bib­li­cal Cri­tique of Sec­u­lar Jus­tice and Crit­i­cal The­o­ry (Tim Keller, Gospel In Life): “In the Bible Chris­tians have an ancient, rich, strong, com­pre­hen­sive, com­plex, and attrac­tive under­stand­ing of jus­tice. Bib­li­cal jus­tice dif­fers in sig­nif­i­cant ways from all the sec­u­lar alter­na­tives, with­out ignor­ing the con­cerns of any of them. Yet Chris­tians know lit­tle about bib­li­cal jus­tice, despite its promi­nence in the Scrip­tures.” The read of the week.
  2. The Church Forests of Ethiopia (YouTube): nine min­utes. This com­men­tary by Rod Dreher was what brought the video to my atten­tion. Watch the video before you read the com­men­tary. These forests are a beau­ti­ful pic­ture of the way the Church bless­es the world around it, and what the Church must do to thrive in the envi­ron­ment we find our­selves in.
  3. Lis­ten to Thomas Sow­ell (Cole­man Hugh­es, City Jour­nal): “…peo­ple pre­dictably line up on oppo­site sides of polit­i­cal issues that seem­ing­ly have noth­ing in com­mon. For instance, know­ing someone’s posi­tion on cli­mate change some­how allows you to pre­dict their views on tax­ing the rich, gun con­trol, and abor­tion. It’s tempt­ing to dis­miss this as mere polit­i­cal trib­al­ism. But Sow­ell con­tends that more is at work: that there are two fun­da­men­tal ways of think­ing about the social world, two sets of basic assump­tions about human nature, and two con­flict­ing ‘visions,’ from which most polit­i­cal dis­agree­ments fol­low.” Sow­ell is a senior fel­low at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  4. Some reflec­tions on the media:
    • The Truth Is Pay­walled But The Lies Are Free (Nathan J. Robin­son, Cur­rent Affairs): “You want ‘Port­land Pro­test­ers Burn Bibles, Amer­i­can Flags In The Streets,’ ‘The Moral Case Against Mask Man­dates And Oth­er COVID Restric­tions,’ or an arti­cle sug­gest­ing the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health has admit­ted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infil­trat­ing Ger­man insti­tu­tions, the rea­sons con­tact trac­ing is fail­ing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s under­cut­ting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the web­site a bit you’ll run straight into the pay­wall.”
      • This is a good arti­cle. For the record, I agree with his assess­ment of the New York Times: it often con­tains the facts, but some­times incor­rect­ly framed with fool­ish infer­ences built upon them. That burn­ing Bibles and flags thing Robin­son knocks, though? That real­ly hap­pened: Did Port­land Pro­test­ers Burn Bibles and Amer­i­can Flags? (Snopes)
    • How the Media Could Get the Elec­tion Sto­ry Wrong (Ben Smith, New York Times): “The coro­n­avirus cri­sis means that states like Penn­syl­va­nia may be count­ing mail-in bal­lots for weeks, while Pres­i­dent Trump tweets false alle­ga­tions about fraud. And the last bar­ri­ers between Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy and a deep polit­i­cal cri­sis may be tele­vi­sion news and some ver­sion of that mad­den­ing nee­dle on The New York Times web­site.”
      • This is ter­ri­fy­ing and is 100% worth using up one of your pay­wall arti­cles for.
    • How the Media Led the Great Racial Awak­en­ing (Zach Gold­berg, Tablet): “Dur­ing this same peri­od, while exot­ic new phras­es were enter­ing the dis­course, uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­niz­able words like ‘racism’ were being rad­i­cal­ly rede­fined. Along with the new lan­guage came ideas and beliefs ani­mat­ing a new moral-polit­i­cal frame­work to apply to pub­lic life and Amer­i­can soci­ety.”
  5. On the divi­sions in Amer­i­ca:
    • To unite the coun­try, we need hon­esty and courage (Robert George and Cor­nell West, Boston Globe): “Hon­esty and courage alone can save our wound­ed, dis­unit­ed coun­try now. We need the hon­esty and courage to speak the truth — includ­ing painful truths that unset­tle not only our foes but also our friends and, most espe­cial­ly, our­selves.” The authors (both Chris­t­ian) are pro­fes­sors at Prince­ton and Har­vard, respec­tive­ly. 
    • Remem­ber­ing John Lewis, and the Polit­i­cal The­ol­o­gy that Changed a Nation (David French, The Dis­patch): “What looks inevitable in hind­sight was any­thing but cer­tain. In fact, if you were plac­ing con­tem­po­rary bets on a polit­i­cal out­come, would you guess that some ver­sion of a three-cen­tu­ry sta­tus quo would pre­vail, or that the civ­il rights move­ment would achieve a legal rev­o­lu­tion near­ly on par with eman­ci­pa­tion itself? At the same time, can we even recall a mod­ern Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal move­ment so con­sis­tent with the upside-down log­ic of bib­li­cal Chris­tian­i­ty?”
    • This is Not The Amer­i­can Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Amer­i­cans are extreme­ly fond of exag­ger­at­ing the threat their polit­i­cal ene­mies pose. Histri­on­ics about Don­ald Trump end­ing Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy are every­where to be found; read­ers will no doubt remem­ber the pro­tes­tors who claimed that Dick Cheney was the sec­ond com­ing of Hitler, or that Barack Oba­ma was a stealth author­i­tar­i­an social­ist.” This is a reas­sur­ing essay.
    • Sec­u­lar­ism Can­not Sus­tain Lib­er­ty, a Response to Greg Forster (Al Mohler, Law & Lib­er­ty): “I believe that the project of civ­i­liza­tion in the West, and in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world in par­tic­u­lar, has brought the great­est flow­er­ing of lib­er­ties and the great­est oppor­tu­ni­ties for human flour­ish­ing in human his­to­ry. I also believe that this civ­i­liza­tion­al project has arrived at this moment of max­i­mum dan­ger after decades of both neglect and mount­ing oppo­si­tion. The most fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is the loss of the intel­lec­tu­al and moral pre­con­di­tions that make the project of ordered lib­er­ty pos­si­ble.”
    • Could Amer­i­ca split up? (Damon Link­er, The Week): “I often catch myself pon­der­ing exact­ly what it is that keeps our coun­try togeth­er. What do we hold in com­mon? What do we share?” 
  6. Church­es and the pan­dem­ic:
    • How Two Cal­i­for­nia Megachurch­es Kept Wor­ship­ing (Kate Shell­nutt and Nicole Shanks, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Two Cal­i­for­nia church­es were so eager to meet last week­end that when their ser­vices began, wor­shipers erupt­ed in applause. In Sun Val­ley, con­gre­gants fill­ing Grace Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s 3,500-seat sanc­tu­ary rose and cheered, some doc­u­ment­ing the moment with their iPhones, when pas­tor John MacArthur opened the sec­ond week in a row of in-per­son ser­vices…. An hour away in River­side, Cal­i­for­nia, wor­ship­pers at Har­vest Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship were greet­ed with cheeky pink and pur­ple signs that said, ‘Smile with your eyes (and wear a mask)’ and ‘Just leave room for your Bible—and anoth­er 5½ feet.’ It was the third Sun­day that Har­vest met in a white tent half the size of a foot­ball field to com­ply with state orders restrict­ing indoor wor­ship.”
    • Should Church­es in Cal­i­for­nia Defy Gov­ern­ment Restric­tions? A Response to John MacArthur (Gavin Ortlund, per­son­al blog): “To my mind, there are at least four bib­li­cal val­ues that should inform our deci­sion-mak­ing in this sit­u­a­tion: 1. the impor­tance of wor­ship (Hebrews 10:25), 2. love for neigh­bor (Mark 12:31), 3. obe­di­ence to gov­ern­ment (Romans 13:1–7), and 4. main­tain­ing a good wit­ness (Colos­sians 4:5–6). What con­cerns me about defy­ing the state order right now is that it seems to pri­or­i­tize 1 at the expense of 2–4.”
    • Mask­ing and Masks: A Hypo­thet­i­cal Inter­view (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “A free peo­ple should be jeal­ous of their lib­er­ty. And one of the best ways to be jeal­ous of your lib­er­ty is to require the gov­ern­ment, when­ev­er it exer­cis­es its author­i­ty coer­cive­ly, to be able to give a very spe­cif­ic rea­son. A gen­er­al rea­son is not good enough. The law should pro­hib­it steal­ing, for exam­ple, and when the cops arrest a thief, they should be able to say that they arrest­ed him because he was ‘steal­ing.’ Neg­a­tive pro­hi­bi­tions are the foun­da­tion of civic lib­er­ty, and broad, gen­er­al feel-good direc­tives are the foun­da­tion of tyran­ny.“ I am not opposed to manda­to­ry masks, but this is a good defense of the oppo­si­tion. 
  7. Con­cern­ing Chi­na:
    • The Tik­Tok War (Ben Thomp­son, Strat­e­ch­ery): “TikTok’s algo­rithm, unmoored from the con­straints of your social net­work or pro­fes­sion­al con­tent cre­ators, is free to pro­mote what­ev­er videos it likes, with­out any­one know­ing the dif­fer­ence. Tik­Tok could pro­mote a par­tic­u­lar can­di­date or a par­tic­u­lar issue in a par­tic­u­lar geog­ra­phy, with­out any­one — except per­haps the can­di­date, now indebt­ed to a Chi­nese com­pa­ny — know­ing. You may be skep­ti­cal this might hap­pen, but again, Chi­na has already demon­strat­ed a will­ing­ness to cen­sor speech on a plat­form banned in Chi­na; how much of a leap is it to think that a Par­ty com­mit­ted to ide­o­log­i­cal dom­i­nance will for­ev­er leave a route direct­ly into the hearts and minds of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans untouched?”
    • Books pulled from the library shelves, songs banned…it’s the new nor­mal in Hong Kong (Louisa Lim, The Guardian): “Put sim­ply, with­in a sin­gle month, Bei­jing has dis­man­tled a par­tial­ly free soci­ety and is try­ing to use its new law to enforce glob­al cen­sor­ship on speech regard­ing Hong Kong.”
    • Chris­tians Wor­ry Hong Kong’s New Law Will Ham­per Mis­sions (D. Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…Chris­tians liv­ing out­side of Chi­na now won­der: Is it still safe for them to com­mu­ni­cate open­ly with friends and col­leagues in Hong Kong? For years, the ter­ri­to­ry has served as a stag­ing ground for min­istry orga­ni­za­tions oper­at­ing across the region. But now, will they face pres­sure or per­se­cu­tion, as those in the main­land do? If they are crit­i­cal of Bei­jing on social media or in an arti­cle such as this, will they be denied entry to Hong Kong—or worse, detained and pos­si­bly impris­oned upon land­ing in Hong Kong?”
    • ‘Clean Up This Mess’: The Chi­nese Thinkers Behind Xi’s Hard Line (Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “While China’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty has long nur­tured legions of aca­d­e­mics to defend its agen­da, these author­i­tar­i­an thinkers stand out for their unabashed, often flashily eru­dite advo­ca­cy of one-par­ty rule and assertive sov­er­eign­ty, and their turn against the lib­er­al ideas that many of them once embraced.”
    • Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Penal­izes Chi­nese Offi­cials for Hong Kong Crack­down (Pran­shu Ver­ma and Edward Wong, New York Times): “The action is anoth­er in a series of mea­sures the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has tak­en in recent months to ratch­et up pres­sure on Bei­jing. Last month, the admin­is­tra­tion imposed sanc­tions on the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, includ­ing a senior mem­ber of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty, over human rights abus­es against the large­ly Mus­lim Uighur minor­i­ty.”

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 What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-written. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian. First shared in vol­ume 178.

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 252

There was an abun­dance of sad news this week, which match­es this month, which match­es this year.

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. The Bible tells us to weep with those who weep, and this is a good week for that. I’ve had to share arti­cles about sim­i­lar wicked­ness too many times, begin­ning all the way back in vol­ume 4.
    • I think this 8 minute Face­book video by my friend Jamil Stell is good. He filmed it a few hours before George Floyd’s death, which is why he doesn’t ref­er­ence it. Jamil, who spoke at our fall retreat four years ago, is the Chi Alpha direc­tor at Cal State Stanis­laus.
    • I Specif­i­cal­ly Request­ed The Oppo­site of This (Imgur) — if a pic­ture is worth 1,000 words, a pic­ture with a great cap­tion is an entire trea­tise.
    • The Sor­rows of Min­neapo­lis: A Prayer for Our City (John Piper, Desir­ing God): dif­fi­cult to excerpt, quite good.
    • When the Law Does­n’t Con­tain All the Answers (Bob Driscoll, The Dis­patch): “The law, even applied cor­rect­ly, doesn’t rem­e­dy what we know is wrong. We can hope that the George Floyd killing can pro­vide some insight into the feel­ing of frus­tra­tion in many minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties sur­round­ing polic­ing issues, because we can see, or at least sense, the depth of the prob­lem. Assum­ing the sys­tem prop­er­ly tries and con­victs the kneel­ing offi­cer of some seri­ous offense, will you feel any bet­ter about George Floyd’s death? I won’t.”
    • George Floyd Left a Gospel Lega­cy in Hous­ton (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The rest of the coun­try knows George Floyd from sev­er­al min­utes of cell phone footage cap­tured dur­ing his final hours. But in Houston’s Third Ward, they know Floyd for how he lived for decades—a men­tor to a gen­er­a­tion of young men and a ‘per­son of peace’ ush­er­ing min­istries into the area.”
    • Did George Floyd and Then-Offi­cer Derek Chau­vin Work Togeth­er in Min­neapo­lis? (Snopes): “So while it’s true that Floyd and Chau­vin worked at the club at the same time, it’s unknown, and unlike­ly, accord­ing to the for­mer own­er of the build­ing where the club was locat­ed, that the two men knew each oth­er.”
    • Cooped up: A shame­ful Cen­tral Park encounter demands all New York­ers be bet­ter peo­ple (Robert A. George, NY Dai­ly News) : “In the lat­est episode of the every­day-fresh-hell that is New York City under quar­an­tine, one white female, Amy Coop­er, was caught on video call­ing the cops on one black male, Chris­t­ian Coop­er. Sor­ry, folks, I’d encour­age every­one to push back on the reflex­ive instinct to make this into a sto­ry about racism as it’s more a mod­ern para­ble of bad behav­ior between two indi­vid­u­als.” Super-inter­est­ing.
    • White Peo­ple Behav­ing Bad­ly (Zaid Jilani, Arc Dig­i­tal): “The truth is, mea­sured explic­it and implic­it racial bias has rapid­ly declined, inter­ra­cial crimes are rare, and whites are actu­al­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed com­pared to their share of the pop­u­la­tion in the FBI’s index of hate crimes. No racial group has a monop­oly on hate, what­ev­er anec­dotes ele­vat­ed to news cov­er­age may lead us to believe.”
    • Anger Is Jus­ti­fied, Riots Nev­er Are (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “Riots are bad. Riots are nev­er a coher­ent or moral response to injus­tice, they just mul­ti­ply injus­tices and the riot­ers them­selves often suf­fer more in the long run…. Riots dis­suade indi­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies, and busi­ness­es from stay­ing in or join­ing a com­mu­ni­ty. Who wants to raise their kids in the neigh­bor­hood where the police sta­tion had to be evac­u­at­ed before it was set ablaze?” Some research on the effects of riots The Eco­nom­ic After­math of the 1960s Riots in Amer­i­can Cities: Evi­dence from Prop­er­ty Val­ues (Collins & Mar­go, Jour­nal of Eco­nom­ic His­to­ry on JSTOR) and this Twit­ter thread by a Prince­ton pro­fes­sor.
    • A dif­fer­ing per­spec­tive: What the news does­n’t show about protests in Min­neapo­lis and Louisville (Jason John­son, Vox): “Night­time cov­er­age will sel­dom show a full city map demon­strat­ing that, two blocks over from a street that looks like a ‘city engulfed in flames,’ there’s a CVS still open for busi­ness. The press flock­ing to dra­mat­ic images as a protest metaphor is not a new phe­nom­e­non.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and jour­nal­ism at Mor­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • George Floyd protests: Pho­tos show upris­ings across Amer­i­ca (Jen Kir­by and Kainaz Amaria, Vox): strik­ing images.
  2. About Chi­na:
    • The Infi­nite Heart­break of Lov­ing Hong Kong (Wil­fred Chan, The Nation): “Some­thing pro­found has been lost. It is not democ­ra­cy, because Hong Kong was nev­er demo­c­ra­t­ic. It is not auton­o­my, because Hong Kong nev­er enjoyed self-deter­mi­na­tion. It is cer­tain­ly not the will to resist; as I write this, activists are already plan­ning a full cal­en­dar of mass protests, deter­mined to fight until the bit­ter end. What is lost is the feel­ing that Hong Kong’s future could be an open ques­tion.”
    • Pom­peo declares Hong Kong no longer autonomous from Chi­na (Car­ol Morel­lo, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘Hong Kong and its dynam­ic, enter­pris­ing, and free peo­ple have flour­ished for decades as a bas­tion of lib­er­ty, and this deci­sion gives me no plea­sure,’ [Pom­peo] added. ‘But sound pol­i­cy­mak­ing requires a recog­ni­tion of real­i­ty. While the Unit­ed States once hoped that free and pros­per­ous Hong Kong would pro­vide a mod­el for author­i­tar­i­an Chi­na, it is now clear that Chi­na is mod­el­ing Hong Kong after itself.’”
    • What to Make of Sec­re­tary Pom­peo Decer­ti­fy­ing Hong Kong Auton­o­my (Julian Ku, Law­fare): “Although Pompeo’s dra­mat­ic announce­ment drew head­lines around the world, his deci­sion should not have sur­prised observers, giv­en the new require­ments on any such cer­ti­fi­ca­tion imposed by Con­gress in Novem­ber 2019.”
    • ‘All-out com­bat’ feared as India, Chi­na engage in bor­der stand­off (Saif Khalid, Al Jazeera): “A video shot by an Indi­an sol­dier and shared on social media showed sol­diers from both nations engaged in fist­fights and stone-pelt­ing at the de fac­to bor­der, known as Line of Actu­al Con­trol (LAC). The inci­dent, which con­tin­ued until the next day, result­ed in 11 sol­diers being injured on both sides.” The head­line seems a bit over-the-top. I talked with a friend who has some rel­e­vant exper­tise and he is not that con­cerned. Still worth keep­ing an eye on. 
    • Chi­na-India bor­der: Clash­es raise fears of broad­er con­fronta­tion as Bei­jing pur­sues sov­er­eign­ty claims on all fronts (Anna Fifield and Joan­na Slater, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The rela­tion­ship between the two coun­tries remains tense, exac­er­bat­ed by efforts from both cap­i­tals to stoke nation­al­ist sen­ti­ment. The obvi­ous place for this to erupt is at the point where the two coun­tries bump up against each oth­er.” 
  3. ‘AKA Jane Roe’ and the humil­i­a­tion of the pro-life move­ment (Karen Swal­lows Pri­or, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Even before the film aired, head­line after head­line heaped humil­i­a­tion on pro-lif­ers. The Los Ange­les Times report­ed that McCor­vey had been paid to change her mind. This was mis­lead­ing: McCor­vey wasn’t paid to change her mind — she was paid to speak at pro-life events after she claimed she had changed her posi­tion.”
    • Relat­ed: FX doc­u­men­tary on Nor­ma McCor­vey omits key Catholic sources who knew her best (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Also, the doc­u­men­tary is coy about one impor­tant thing. To get access to McCor­vey, sure­ly they had to pay up too? We call that ‘check­book jour­nal­ism’ and eth­i­cal news orga­ni­za­tions don’t offer mon­ey to their inter­vie­wees. When pressed by the Wash­ing­ton Post, the film’s pro­duc­er admit­ted he paid her a ‘mod­est licens­ing fee’ for use of fam­i­ly pho­tos and doc­u­men­tary footage.” 
  4. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives:
    • Con­ser­v­a­tives who refuse to wear masks under­cut a cen­tral claim of their beliefs (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Refus­ing to wear masks] also under­cuts a more cen­tral claim of con­ser­vatism: that big, coer­cive gov­ern­ment pro­grams are unnec­es­sary because pri­vate insti­tu­tions could pro­vide many ben­e­fits that we think of as ‘pub­lic goods.’ For that to be true, the civic cul­ture would have to be such that indi­vid­u­als are will­ing to make seri­ous sac­ri­fices for the com­mon good, and espe­cial­ly to pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble among us.”
    • Reopen­ing church­es safe­ly: What pas­tors in Utah, Geor­gia have learned (Kelsey Dal­las, Deseret News): “The Rev. Leroy Davis wants his church to feel as safe as Cost­co. The ser­vice will hope­ful­ly be a lit­tle more per­son­al, he said, but the envi­ron­ment should seem just as clean.“
    • The Reg­u­la­to­ry State Is Fail­ing Us (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “It is impor­tant not to make this a par­ti­san con­flict. I do not view the admin­is­tra­tive state as extra-con­sti­tu­tion­al. That said, it has become far too inflex­i­ble, and not suf­fi­cient­ly focused on out­comes. It is time we woke up and real­ized that we have a sys­tem that sim­ply is not work­ing.”
    • COVID-19 Has Exposed Crit­i­cal Weak­ness­es in Glob­al High­er Edu­ca­tion (Chris­tos Makridis and Soula Paras­sidis): “While pub­licly avail­able data does not seem to exist to iden­ti­fy the source of the increas­ing pro­lif­er­a­tion of degree pro­grams, many stu­dents have been fun­neled into degree pro­grams with­out an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what they are going to learn and their post-grad­u­a­tion labor mar­ket prospects.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
  5. Have Pen­te­costals Out­grown Their Name? (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Names can be tricky. What do you call a Pen­te­costal who isn’t called a Pen­te­costal? The ques­tion sounds like a rid­dle, but it’s a real chal­lenge for schol­ars. They have strug­gled for years to set­tle on the best term for the broad and diverse move­ment of Chris­tians who empha­size the indi­vid­ual believer’s rela­tion­ship to the Holy Spir­it and talk about being Spir­it-filled, Spir­it-bap­tized, or Spir­it-empow­ered.”
  6. Conn. trans­gen­der pol­i­cy found to vio­late Title IX (ESPN): “Con­necti­cut’s pol­i­cy allow­ing trans­gen­der girls to com­pete as girls in high school sports vio­lates the civ­il rights of ath­letes who have always iden­ti­fied as female, the U.S. Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment has deter­mined in a deci­sion that could force the state to change course to keep fed­er­al fund­ing and influ­ence oth­ers to do the same.”

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 Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Indi­vid­u­als have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” The author just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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 251

Con­cern­ing the ben­e­fits of reli­gion, the virtue of intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty, per­spec­tives on the pan­dem­ic, the glob­al strat­e­gy of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and an unset­tling account of gov­ern­men­tal sur­veil­lance.

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. Reli­gious ser­vices may low­er risk of ‘deaths of despair’ (Chris Sweeney, Har­vard Gazette): “After adjust­ing for numer­ous vari­ables, the study showed that women who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 68 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair com­pared to those nev­er attend­ing ser­vices. Men who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 33 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair.” Those are HUGE reduc­tions!
  2. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • Amid the Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis, a Reg­i­men for Reën­try (Atul Gawande, The New York­er): “But, in the face of enor­mous risks, Amer­i­can hos­pi­tals have learned how to avoid becom­ing sites of spread. When the time is right to light­en up on the lock­down and bring peo­ple back to work, there are wider lessons to be learned from places that nev­er locked down in the first place.” This was quite good.
    • What African Nations Are Teach­ing the West About Fight­ing the Coro­n­avirus (Jina Moore, The New York­er): “Much of what Ger­ca­ma encoun­tered at the air­port had been designed to pre­vent Ebo­la. Since 2018, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of the Con­go, South Sudan’s neigh­bor to the south­west, has been strug­gling with the dis­ease. But local pub­lic-health offi­cials’ quick repur­pos­ing of Ebo­la pro­to­cols and infra­struc­ture impressed Ger­ca­ma, as did the work of rapid-response teams, whom she twice wit­nessed respond to sus­pect­ed coro­n­avirus cas­es dur­ing the week she spent in the coun­try.”
    • A Spec­tac­u­lar­ly Bad Wash­ing­ton Post Sto­ry on Apple and Google’s Expo­sure Noti­fi­ca­tion Project (John Gru­ber, blog): “A Wash­ing­ton Post sto­ry today on Apple and Google’s joint effort on COVID-19 expo­sure noti­fi­ca­tion project, from reporters Reed Alber­got­ti and Drew Har­well, is the worst sto­ry I’ve seen in the Post in mem­o­ry. It’s so atro­cious­ly bad — fac­tu­al­ly wrong and one-sided in opin­ion — that it should be retract­ed.” Ouch. Gru­ber backs it up. 
    • Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis: Ron DeSan­tis Got Flori­da’s COVID-19 Strat­e­gy Right (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “A cou­ple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decid­ed that Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis was a pub­lic men­ace who was going to get Florid­i­ans killed with his lax response to the coro­n­avirus cri­sis…. The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom has begun to change about Flori­da, as the dis­as­ter so wide­ly pre­dict­ed hasn’t mate­ri­al­ized.”
    • As more states reopen, Geor­gia defies pre­dic­tions of coro­n­avirus resur­gence. What’s the les­son for the rest of the coun­try? (Andrew Romano, Yahoo News): “That’s the bal­ance reopen­ing needs to strike if it’s going to work: few­er offi­cial restric­tions in exchange for more indi­vid­ual and com­mu­ni­ty respon­si­bil­i­ty.”
    • A con­trary per­spec­tive: It Sure Seems Like Flori­da And Geor­gia Lied About Their Infec­tion Rates (Luis Pra­da, Cracked): “Flori­da and Geor­gia are petu­lant, enti­tled quar­an­tine pro­test­ers embod­ied as states. Since this all start­ed, both states have been fran­ti­cal­ly search­ing for an excuse to end their quar­an­tines as fast as pos­si­ble and get back to life as usu­al despite a ram­pag­ing virus that’s killing peo­ple.”
    • Mis­sis­sip­pi church destroyed by arson was suing city over safer-at-home order (Ari­an­na Poindex­ter, WLBT TV): “A Mis­sis­sip­pi church at the cen­ter of an arson inves­ti­ga­tion is the same church cur­rent­ly in a bat­tle with city lead­ers over a COVID-19 safer-at-home order. First Pen­te­costal Church in Hol­ly Springs was destroyed by what inves­ti­ga­tors believe is an arson­ist. Inves­ti­ga­tors found graf­fi­ti on pave­ment in the church park­ing lot that reads, ‘Bet you stay home now you hypokrits (sic).’” 
    • Meet the ‘Gang Pas­tor’ Behind Cape Town’s Viral Coro­n­avirus Coop­er­a­tion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We reg­u­lar­ly stop while we are work­ing to invite peo­ple to fol­low Jesus. I’ve lost track, but maybe 5,000 to 10,000 have told us they’ve repent­ed and are turn­ing to fol­low Jesus. But I don’t call this suc­cess, it is just a small piece in the over­all cause of what we Chris­tians are called to do.”
    • Don­ald Trump Does­n’t Want Author­i­ty (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Great men and bad men alike seek atten­tion as a means of get­ting pow­er, but our pres­i­dent is inter­est­ed in pow­er only as a means of get­ting atten­tion.”
  3. Uncer­tain­ty (Howard Marks, Oak­tree Cap­i­tal): “The peo­ple who are always sure are no more help­ful than the peo­ple who are nev­er sure. The real expert’s con­fi­dence is rea­son-based and pro­por­tion­al to the weight of the evi­dence.” Shared by an alum­nus’ father.
  4. China’s Plans to Win Con­trol of the Glob­al Order (Tan­ner Greer, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “As Bei­jing sees it, China’s suc­cess depends on dis­cred­it­ing the tenets of lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism so that notions like indi­vid­ual free­dom and con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy come to be seen as the relics of an obso­lete sys­tem.” I found this piece to be very insight­ful.
    • Relat­ed: In China’s Cri­sis, Xi Sees a Cru­cible to Strength­en His Rule (Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “Mr. Xi, shaped by his years of adver­si­ty as a young man, has seized on the pan­dem­ic as an oppor­tu­ni­ty in dis­guise — a chance to redeem the par­ty after ear­ly mis­takes let infec­tions slip out of con­trol, and to ral­ly nation­al pride in the face of inter­na­tion­al ire over those mis­takes. And the state pro­pa­gan­da machine is aggres­sive­ly back­ing him up, tout­ing his lead­er­ship in fight­ing the pan­dem­ic.”
    • Relat­ed: Xi’s Regime Recasts Chi­na as the Good Samar­i­tan dur­ing Pan­dem­ic (Alan Dowd, Prov­i­dence): “Add it all up—the PR spin, the pro­pa­gan­da push, the pal­lets of aid, the preening—and in a very real sense, Xi Jinping’s regime is offer­ing a new, twist­ed ver­sion of the Para­ble of the Good Samar­i­tan. In Xi’s retelling, the road­side rob­bers who assault the trav­el­er lat­er return to res­cue him—and some­how expect to be hailed as heroes.”
    • An explo­sive sum­mer of dis­con­tent is brew­ing in Hong Kong (Shibani Mah­tani, Wash­ing­ton Post): “On Tues­day, Hong Kong author­i­ties extend­ed pan­dem­ic-relat­ed rules lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings to effec­tive­ly ban, for the first time, a June 4 vig­il mark­ing the anniver­sary of Chi­na’s mas­sacre of stu­dent demon­stra­tors in Tianan­men Square in 1989.”
    • Chi­na Push­es for New Hong Kong Secu­ri­ty Law (Kei­th Brad­sh­er and Austin Ramzy, New York Times): “The leg­isla­tive push in Bei­jing marks the most aggres­sive step by the par­ty to exert its influ­ence over the for­mer British colony since it was reclaimed by Chi­na in 1997.”
    • Seri­ous­ly — pray for Hong Kong.
  5. A Mis­sis­sip­pi pas­tor with eight kids and no pro­fes­sion­al music back­ground won ‘The Voice’ — and made show his­to­ry (Emi­ly Yahr, Wash­ing­ton Post): ““‘I’ve lit­er­al­ly nev­er per­formed. I just sing at church,’ Tilgh­man explained, intro­duc­ing him­self as a pas­tor. This sparked an attempt to prove who was the biggest church fan; Leg­end revealed his grand­fa­ther was a pas­tor, and Jonas one-upped him by boast­ing his father was a pas­tor.”
  6. Under the Rain­bow Ban­ner (Darel Paul, First Things): “In June 1999, Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton declared the first nation­al Pride Month. Twen­ty years lat­er, June is as teem­ing with rain­bows as Decem­ber is with rein­deer. The Pride flag flies above embassies, state capi­tols, and sta­di­ums. Rain­bow stripes adorn city cross­walks.”
    • In response: Queer Times (Carl True­man, First Things): “The debate over LGBTQ issues is not a debate about sex­u­al behav­ior. I sus­pect it is not real­ly at this point a debate with the L, the G, or the B. It is the T and the Q that are car­ry­ing the day, and we need to under­stand that the debate is about the rad­i­cal abo­li­tion of meta­physics and meta­nar­ra­tives and any notion of cul­tur­al sta­bil­i­ty that might rest there­upon.”
  7. Since I Met Edward Snow­den, I’ve Nev­er Stopped Watch­ing My Back (Bar­ton Gell­man, The Atlantic): “Some­one had tak­en con­trol of my iPad, blast­ing through Apple’s secu­ri­ty restric­tions and acquir­ing the pow­er to rewrite any­thing that the oper­at­ing sys­tem could touch. I dropped the tablet on the seat next to me as if it were con­ta­giou” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Grip­ping and dis­turb­ing.

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 Ian McE­wan ‘dubi­ous’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 248

One of the best expla­na­tions of reli­gious lib­er­ty I have read, along with arti­cles about the pan­dem­ic, UFOs, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with a pas­tor.

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.

I’m a lit­tle hap­py because the num­ber 248 seems cool to me. If I ever reach 1248 I’ll think it’s even cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and the Com­mon Good (Nation­al Affairs, William Haun): “Many of today’s pro­gres­sives, con­ser­v­a­tives, and lib­er­tar­i­ans [can­not] explain why reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar and reli­gious exer­cise in par­tic­u­lar should shape the com­mon good, even when they go against the grain of sec­u­lar visions adopt­ed in law.” This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant link I’ve shared in quite a while. Not light read­ing but worth­while. The author is a lawyer for the Beck­et Fund.
  2. Erwin McManus: The Peace­able War­rior (Paul J. Pas­tor, Out­reach Mag­a­zine): “I talked to some­one last Sun­day who said, ‘I’m here because some­body invit­ed me. I didn’t want to come.’ [Laughs] She actu­al­ly said, ‘I’m mean, jad­ed and cyn­i­cal. I don’t believe in God or reli­gion. I think it’s all a sham.’ I said, ‘You’re real­ly dis­ap­point­ed, aren’t you?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you like us,’ I said. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to do with that.’ ” (the excerpt is actu­al­ly from part 2 of the inter­view and the sto­ry gets even bet­ter). I only stum­bled upon this slight­ly old­er arti­cle because it won a Mag­gie award for best inter­view of 2019.
  3. Coro­n­avirus News & Per­spec­tives
    • Com­par­ing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Com­par­ing Apples to Oranges (Jere­my Samuel Faust, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “When reports about the nov­el coro­n­avirus SARS-CoV­‑2 began cir­cu­lat­ing ear­li­er this year and ques­tions were being raised about how the ill­ness it caus­es, COVID-19, com­pared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emer­gency med­i­cine res­i­den­cy and over three and a half years as an attend­ing physi­cian, I had almost nev­er seen any­one die of the flu. I could only remem­ber one trag­ic pedi­atric case.” The author is an instruc­tor at Har­vard Med­ical School. Fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Takes Pics Of Peo­ple In Pub­lic From 2 Per­spec­tives And It Shows How Eas­i­ly The Media Can Manip­u­late Real­i­ty (Liu­ci­ja Ado­maite and Denis Tymulis, Bored Pan­da): “‘The prox­im­i­ty of peo­ple has wide­ly been debat­ed in Den­mark in the past weeks. Dan­ish politi­cians and author­i­ties have fre­quent­ly referred to images which they believed to show mem­bers of the pub­lic behav­ing in dis­agree­ment with the gen­er­al guide­lines.’ As a nation­al pho­to news agency that sup­plies visu­al cov­er­age on the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, ‘we became aware that our con­tri­bu­tion could be mis­read.’” A pic­ture is worth 1000 words, not all of them hon­est.
    • Seattle’s Lead­ers Let Sci­en­tists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not (Charles Duhigg ‚New York­er): “Con­stan­tine told me, ‘Jeff rec­og­nized what he was ask­ing for was imprac­ti­cal. He said if we advised social dis­tanc­ing right away there would be zero accep­tance. And so the ques­tion was: What can we say today so that peo­ple will be ready to hear what we need to say tomor­row?’ In e‑mails and phone calls, the men began play­ing a game: What was the most extreme advice they could give that peo­ple wouldn’t scoff at? Con­sid­er­ing what would like­ly be hap­pen­ing four days from then, what would they regret not hav­ing said?”
    • A Vir­ginia preach­er believed ‘God can heal any­thing.’ Then he caught coro­n­avirus. (Peter Jami­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the days after Lan­don suc­cumbed to covid-19, his death brought words of sym­pa­thy from peo­ple who knew him — and jeers from peo­ple who didn’t. The New York Post, the Dai­ly Mail and an athe­ist blog pub­lished arti­cles seiz­ing on his March 13 Face­book post. Lan­don was posthu­mous­ly attacked as a vic­tim of mis­guid­ed beliefs — in the assur­ances of his pres­i­dent and the pro­tec­tions of his God.”
    • Infor­ma­tion Can Do What Lock­downs Can’t (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Amer­i­cans, like peo­ple in almost every coun­try, were quick­er to under­stand the risks than most of the peo­ple who gov­ern us. Alas, had our lead­ers tak­en the threat seri­ous­ly a month ear­li­er, and com­mu­ni­cat­ed the risks to Amer­i­cans more explic­it­ly, COVID could have been a flash in the pan. Instead, many thou­sands of Amer­i­cans are going to die unnec­es­sary deaths.”
    • Why Did YouTube Remove The Doc­tors’ Brief­ing? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…I absolute­ly believe that it’s wrong to cen­sor what qual­i­fied med­ical pro­fes­sion­als (read: not quacks) are say­ing about the cri­sis, which is so unique in our expe­ri­ence as a nation. A strong lock­down was nec­es­sary at first. If there is good med­ical evi­dence that the lock­down, and relat­ed pub­lic health strate­gies, might be doing more harm that good at this date, then let’s hear that argu­ment.”
    • Relat­ed: The Inevitable Coro­n­avirus Cen­sor­ship Cri­sis is Here (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The peo­ple who want to add a cen­sor­ship regime to a health cri­sis are more dan­ger­ous and more stu­pid by leaps and bounds than a pres­i­dent who tells peo­ple to inject dis­in­fec­tant. It’s aston­ish­ing that they don’t see this.”
    • With US Bor­ders Closed by Covid-19, How Will I Afford Insulin? (James Stout, Undark): “Dur­ing months when I teach as an adjunct pro­fes­sor and am cov­ered by my university’s insur­ance plan, I stock up as much insulin as I can. Dur­ing the remain­der of the year, I do what thou­sands of oth­ers do: I cross the bor­der to Mex­i­co where, just 12 miles from my house in San Diego, I can buy the same med­i­cine at one-tenth of the price.” Sent my way by a stu­dent.
  4. UFO Sight­ings: They Deserve to Be Tak­en More Seri­ous­ly (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “The offi­cial release of some pre­vi­ous­ly leaked UFO videos tak­en by U.S. navy pilots has sparked renewed inter­est in the big­ger ques­tions. For sure those fly­ing objects are uniden­ti­fied, but how much atten­tion should we earth­lings devote to this issue? I am struck by the con­trast between those who see this as an impor­tant ques­tion and those who think the whole thing will turn out to be an error or some kind of opti­cal illu­sion.”
  5. On the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty: 
    • Chi­na Has a Post-Pan­dem­ic Dream for Hong Kong (Yi-Zheng Lian, New York Times): “But the recent devel­op­ments actu­al­ly are remark­able. For the first time, the tra­di­tion­al pan-dems are being treat­ed as ene­mies just like the sep­a­ratists. And for the first time, Bei­jing is vio­lat­ing the very let­ter of the Basic Law, which it itself has pro­mul­gat­ed; the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment typ­i­cal­ly only con­torts the law and dis­torts its spir­it.”
    • The End of the Har­vard Cen­tu­ry (Mat­teo N. Wong, Har­vard Crim­son): “Chi­nese offi­cials reg­u­lar­ly deliv­er com­plaints to uni­ver­si­ties host­ing events on sen­si­tive issues and even offer schol­ars mon­ey to mod­i­fy research crit­i­cal of Chi­na.… giv­en Harvard’s sta­tus in the inter­na­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic hier­ar­chy, Chi­nese author­i­ties may be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the Uni­ver­si­ty. ‘We’ve had Chi­nese cit­i­zens at Har­vard, who are clear­ly doing the bid­ding of the Chi­nese state, com­ing and sit­ting in on talks and tak­ing notes and report­ing back,’ Per­ry says. She sim­i­lar­ly sus­pects Chi­nese cit­i­zens of report­ing on vis­it­ing Chi­nese schol­ars’ activ­i­ties.” This arti­cle is quite long but fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Amer­i­ca is awak­en­ing to Chi­na. This is a clar­i­on call to seize the moment. (Mitt Rom­ney, Wash­ing­ton Post): “China’s alarm­ing mil­i­tary build-up is not wide­ly dis­cussed out­side clas­si­fied set­tings, but Amer­i­cans should not take com­fort in our dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly large mil­i­tary bud­get. The gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping doesn’t report its actu­al defense spend­ing. An apples-to-apples analy­sis demon­strates that China’s annu­al pro­cure­ment of mil­i­tary hard­ware is near­ly iden­ti­cal to ours; but because our mil­i­tary has mis­sions around the world, this means that in the Pacif­ic, where Chi­na con­cen­trates its fire­pow­er, it will have mil­i­tary supe­ri­or­i­ty.”
    • I was arrest­ed in Hong Kong. It’s part of China’s larg­er plan.(Mar­tin C. M. Lee , Wash­ing­ton Post): “Hong Kong peo­ple now face two plagues from Chi­na: the coro­n­avirus and attacks on our most basic human rights. We can all hope a vac­cine is soon devel­oped for the coro­n­avirus. But once Hong Kong’s human rights and rule of law are rolled back, the fatal virus of author­i­tar­i­an rule will be here to stay.”
  6. My Native Amer­i­can father drew the Land O’Lakes maid­en. She was nev­er a stereo­type. (Robert Des­Jar­lait, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mia’s van­ish­ing has prompt­ed a social media meme: ‘They Got Rid of The Indi­an and Kept the Land.’ That isn’t too far from the truth. Mia, the stereo­type that wasn’t, leaves behind a land­scape void­ed of iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry. For those of us who are Amer­i­can Indi­an, it’s a his­to­ry that is all too famil­iar.”
  7. By Biden’s Own Stan­dards, He Is Guilty As Charged (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “On Friday’s Morn­ing Joe, Biden laid out a sim­ple process for judg­ing him: Lis­ten respect­ful­ly to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or dis­prove her spe­cif­ic claim. The objec­tive truth, Biden argued, is what mat­ters. I agree with him. But this was emphat­i­cal­ly not the stan­dard Biden favored when judg­ing men in col­lege. If Biden were a stu­dent, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evi­dence pro­vid­ed, who was charg­ing him, who was a wit­ness, and no right to ques­tion the accuser.”
    • This arti­cle is about col­lege Title IX pro­ceed­ings using Tara Reade and Joe Biden as illus­tra­tions. If its inclu­sion comes off as par­ti­san, bear in mind that the author intends to vote for Biden.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Dol­phins swim in bio­lu­mi­nes­cent waves in New­port Beach (YouTube): three min­utes
  • Obvi­ous­ly Con­fused Amash Runs For Pres­i­dent Even Though We Already Have Two Choic­es (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Unusu­al­ly Heavy Call Vol­umes (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Lat­est Com­put­er Mod­el Pre­dicts Between 0 And 12.6 Bil­lion New COVID-19 Deaths By Sum­mer (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Steve Har­vey Gets Tie Stolen by Pick­pock­et Bob Arno (Steve Har­vey Show, YouTube): sev­en min­utes, rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent

    • Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

    Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have the provoca­tive read In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

    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 228

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. A Tale of Two Church­es (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, NY Review of Books): “To many reli­gious peo­ple, there’s no such thing as coin­ci­dence: Pas­tor Jay and Pas­tor Der­rick felt acute­ly the prophet­ic nature of their union tak­ing place just the day before the shoot­ing. It felt as though, in the midst of the chaos and the con­fu­sion, God was using them to write a bet­ter sto­ry. The Lord had guid­ed them to their merg­er at exact­ly the right time to redi­rect the anger and pain in the com­mu­ni­ty to a high­er, holy pur­pose.”
    • This my must-read link of the week. SO GOOD. I almost cried.
    • Kind of relat­ed but only mar­gin­al­ly: Pray­ing for Hong Kong Can Be Polit­i­cal­ly Disruptive—Even in Amer­i­ca  (D Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dif­fer­ent ori­gins among eth­nic Chi­nese immi­grants can fos­ter dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views, with more Chris­tians from Chi­na sup­port­ing the poli­cies of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, and those from else­where often more crit­i­cal of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
  2. ‘Absolute­ly No Mer­cy’: Leaked Files Expose How Chi­na Orga­nized Mass Deten­tions of Mus­lims (Austin Ramzy and Chris Buck­ley, NY Times): “…one of the most sig­nif­i­cant leaks of gov­ern­ment papers from inside China’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty in decades. They pro­vide an unprece­dent­ed inside view of the con­tin­u­ing clam­p­down in Xin­jiang, in which the author­i­ties have cor­ralled as many as a mil­lion eth­nic Uighurs, Kaza­khs and oth­ers into intern­ment camps and pris­ons over the past three years.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. More Preg­nan­cy, Less Crime (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “More gen­er­al­ly, how­ev­er, there are pol­i­cy impli­ca­tion if we think beyond the imme­di­ate results. First, these results show that crime isn’t sim­ply a prod­uct of fam­i­ly back­ground, pover­ty and neglect. Crime is a choice.”
    • The orig­i­nal study: Fam­i­ly For­ma­tion and Crime (Max­im Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose, job mar­ket paper, pdf link): “Our event-study analy­sis indi­cates that preg­nan­cy trig­gers sharp declines in crime rival­ing any known inter­ven­tion.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Dat­ing Mar­ket (Tyro Part­ners, pdf link): “With the advent of online dat­ing, women in prime repro­duc­tive age are in the dom­i­nant posi­tion in the dat­ing mar­ket for the first time in human history.This comes with huge social ram­i­fi­ca­tions.” The authors are hedge fund guys. Inter­est­ing through­out and at times quite amus­ing. I espe­cial­ly com­mend to you the chart at the bot­tom of the page 5 con­trast­ed with the chart at the top of page 6.
  4. Thread on the protests in Iran (Shay Khatiri, Twit­ter): “Dur­ing its first 24 hours, it’s already been the most vio­lent protests in decades, if not ever. 1979 rev­o­lu­tion did not reach this lev­el of vio­lence.”
    • Amnesty Says At Least 106 Killed In Iran Protests (John Gam­brell, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Days of protests in Iran over ris­ing fuel prices and a sub­se­quent gov­ern­ment crack­down have killed at least 106 peo­ple across the Islam­ic Repub­lic, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al said Tues­day, cit­ing ‘cred­i­ble reports.’”
  5. Why Some Peo­ple Are Impos­si­bly Tal­ent­ed (David Rob­son, BBC): “…influ­en­tial sci­en­tists are much more like­ly to have diverse inter­ests out­side their pri­ma­ry area of research than the aver­age sci­en­tist, for instance. Stud­ies have found that Nobel Prize-win­ning sci­en­tists are about 25 times more like­ly to sing, dance or act than the aver­age sci­en­tist. They are also 17 times more like­ly to cre­ate visu­al art, 12 times more like­ly to write poet­ry and four times more like­ly to be a musi­cian.”
  6. 2019 Reli­gious Free­dom Index (Beck­et Law): “If Amer­i­ca is becom­ing less reli­gious, as some polls indi­cate, does that nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it is also becom­ing less sup­port­ive of reli­gious lib­er­ty pro­tec­tions? Are we, in fact, divid­ed on ques­tions of reli­gious free­dom?… With a cur­rent score of 67, the 2019 Index indi­cates strong sup­port for reli­gious free­dom pro­tec­tions. ”
  7. Why Did the Wall Fall, 30 Years Ago? (George Weigel, First Things): “Get­ting this his­to­ry straight is impor­tant, not just as a mat­ter of intel­lec­tu­al hygiene but for the future. Pub­lic offi­cials who do not grasp the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to the col­lapse of Euro­pean com­mu­nism and the emer­gence of new democ­ra­cies in cen­tral and east­ern Europe are unlike­ly to appre­ci­ate the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to free and vir­tu­ous 21st-cen­tu­ry soci­eties and to 21st-cen­tu­ry democ­ra­cy.”

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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 208

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. I Pray for Refugees Because I Was One. And God Was Faith­ful. (Sun­day Htoo, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When I was in the jun­gle and run­ning for my life, I felt that I would be safe. I felt that some­one I did not know was pray­ing for me. Some­one is run­ning for their life right now in Bur­ma, or anoth­er coun­try torn by war. Please pray for him, for her, for the chil­dren, for the elder­ly, and for a woman who may be preg­nant. Your prayer is full of mean­ing.” If you ignore every oth­er arti­cle to which I link this week, read this.
    • Rel­e­vant: Migrant chil­dren describe neglect at Texas bor­der facil­i­ty (Cedar Attana­sio, Garance Burke and Martha Men­doza, AP News): “‘In my 22 years of doing vis­its with chil­dren in deten­tion I have nev­er heard of this lev­el of inhu­man­i­ty,’ said Hol­ly Coop­er, who co-directs Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis’ Immi­gra­tion Law Clin­ic and rep­re­sents detained youth…. the Bor­der Patrol is hold­ing 15,000 peo­ple, and the agency con­sid­ers 4,000 to be at capac­i­ty.”
    • Also: Is it Chris­t­ian or ille­gal to aid migrants? A hung Tuc­son jury, a fork in the road of faith (Bri­an McLaren, USA Today): “reli­gious lib­er­ty means the free­dom to save refugees in the desert.” I met McLaren once and had a nice con­ver­sa­tion with him. There is zero chance he remem­bers me. There are parts of this op-ed with which I stren­u­ous­ly dis­agree, rec­om­mend­ed nonethe­less.
  2. The Illib­er­al Right Throws a Tantrum (Adam Ser­w­er, The Atlantic): “The Amer­i­can creed has no more devot­ed adher­ents than those who have been his­tor­i­cal­ly denied its promis­es, and no more fair-weath­er friends than those who have tak­en them for grant­ed.”
    • In response: Is The Reli­gious Right Priv­i­leged? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Polit­i­cal­ly, lib­er­al­ism has imposed via the judi­cia­ry, the least demo­c­ra­t­ic branch, a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion, a form of lethal vio­lence that the church oppos­es for the same rea­sons it oppos­es infan­ti­cide — and after 50 years of small‑d demo­c­ra­t­ic activism by pro-lif­ers, the pro-choice side seems to be hard­en­ing into a view that such activism is as un-Amer­i­can as racism. Legal­ly, elite lib­er­al­ism is increas­ing­ly embrac­ing argu­ments that would make it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for the church to oper­ate hos­pi­tals and adop­tion agen­cies today, and per­haps col­leges and gram­mar schools tomor­row. And in its inter­nal life, beneath the post-Protes­tant ten­den­cy I’ve just described, pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics is also nur­tur­ing a fash­ion­able occultism, whose rit­u­als may be prac­ticed some­what iron­i­cal­ly or per­for­ma­tive­ly but whose anti-Catholi­cism seems quite sin­cere.”
    • Relat­ed: Two Painful Truths of America’s Reli­gious Cul­ture War (David French, Nation­al Review): “Here are two painful truths: Sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment is break­ing its promise of lib­er­ty, and the Amer­i­can church is break­ing its promise of virtue.”
  3. What Real­ly Hap­pened to Malaysia’s Miss­ing Air­plane (William Langewi­esche, The Atlantic): “The idea that a sophis­ti­cat­ed machine, with its mod­ern instru­ments and redun­dant com­mu­ni­ca­tions, could sim­ply van­ish seems beyond the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty. It is hard to per­ma­nent­ly delete an email, and liv­ing off the grid is near­ly unachiev­able even when the attempt is delib­er­ate. A Boe­ing 777 is meant to be elec­tron­i­cal­ly acces­si­ble at all times…. All sorts of the­o­rists have made claims, ampli­fied by social media, that ignore the satel­lite data, and in some cas­es also the radar tracks, the air­craft sys­tems, the air-traf­fic-con­trol record, the physics of flight, and the basic con­tours of plan­e­tary geog­ra­phy. ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent (and, it seems, half the inter­net — this is wide­ly con­sid­ered a must-read arti­cle). The author is a pro­fes­sion­al pilot and a vet­er­an jour­nal­ist
  4. ‘Sing Hal­lelu­jah to the Lord’ has become the unof­fi­cial anthem of the anti-extra­di­tion protest move­ment (Ken­neth Tan, Shang­hai­ist): “Alarmed by reports of police bru­tal­i­ty, many church groups gal­va­nized to par­tic­i­pate in peace protests, call­ing on the author­i­ties to stop the vio­lence. Their pres­ence on the front lines of the protests were help­ful in mak­ing the demon­stra­tions look more like an out­door wor­ship ser­vice rather than the ‘orga­nized riots’ the gov­ern­ment said it had to crack down on to bring back law and order.”
    • Relat­ed: A new kind of Hong Kong activism emerges as pro­test­ers mobi­lize with­out any lead­ers (Alice Su, LA Times): “This time around, pro­test­ers are delib­er­ate­ly lead­er­less, Leung said. ‘It looks quite orga­nized and well-dis­ci­plined. But I’m quite sure you can­not find any­one man­ag­ing the whole thing,’ Leung said, adding that the pro­test­ers’ logis­ti­cal prac­tices — bring­ing sup­plies, set­ting up med­ical sta­tions, rapid mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion — were ‘in-built’ from the last few years of prac­tice. ‘It’s just like a machine or a self-learn­ing AI that can run by them­selves,’ he said.”
    • Relat­ed: check out this drone footage of the protests (3 min­utes, YouTube).
  5. Repa­ra­tions came up in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on June­teenth. Here are two tes­ti­monies that caught a lot of atten­tion:
    • Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Tes­ti­mo­ny on Repa­ra­tions (Olivia Paschal & Madeleine Carlisle, The Atlantic): “The typ­i­cal black fam­i­ly in this coun­try has one-tenth the wealth of the typ­i­cal white fam­i­ly. Black women die in child­birth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boast­ing the largest prison pop­u­la­tion on the plan­et, of which the descen­dants of the enslaved make up the largest share. The mat­ter of repa­ra­tions is one of mak­ing amends and direct redress, but it is also a ques­tion of cit­i­zen­ship.” (or watch the five minute video on YouTube)
    • My Tes­ti­mo­ny On Repa­ra­tions (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “But the peo­ple who were owed for slav­ery are no longer here, and we’re not enti­tled to col­lect on their debts. Repa­ra­tions, by def­i­n­i­tion, are only giv­en to vic­tims. So the moment you give me repa­ra­tions, you’ve made me into a vic­tim with­out my con­sent. Not just that: you’ve made one-third of black Americans—who con­sis­tent­ly poll against reparations—into vic­tims with­out their con­sent, and black Amer­i­cans have fought too long for the right to define them­selves to be spo­ken for in such a con­de­scend­ing man­ner.” (or watch the six minute video on YouTube)
    • Some­what, kin­da relat­ed: ‘Affir­ma­tive Action Is Not About Equal­i­ty. It’s About Cov­er­ing Ass.’ (Evan Goldstein,Chronicle Review): “What hap­pened is that I went through a trau­ma. I was accused of assault­ing a woman with whom I was hav­ing an extra­mar­i­tal affair. I was pub­licly humil­i­at­ed. I had to with­draw an appoint­ment as under­sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion in the last years of Reagan’s sec­ond term. I was a crack-cocaine addict; it almost killed me. My wife at the time, God bless her, stayed with me, and we sub­se­quent­ly had two fine sons. But at the time, I was dying. I found Jesus. I got my life togeth­er. They stuck with me at the Kennedy School, but I just couldn’t bear the feel­ing of con­de­scen­sion.” This is an inter­view with Glenn Loury, who was the first black tenured econ pro­fes­sor at Har­vard. He is now an econ­o­mist at Brown.
  6. Ide­ol­o­gy and Facts Col­lide at Ober­lin Col­lege (Daniel McGraw, Quil­lette): “It slow­ly became evi­dent that this case was not about free expres­sion and assem­bly or racial injus­tice and civ­il rights. It was about some­thing more banal. A cow­ard­ly col­lege admin­is­tra­tion picked on a small and vul­ner­a­ble busi­ness in an attempt to fend off accu­sa­tions of racism it was fac­ing from its own stu­dents.”
    • Hon­est­ly, this Twit­ter thread about it is even bet­ter. Jaw-drop­ping details. Read it first and then the above arti­cle if you want a more well-round­ed nar­ra­tive.
  7. How Should Chris­tians Have Sex? (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “I long for more robust cat­e­gories of right and wrong besides con­sent — a base­line, but only that — and more than a gen­er­al reminder not to be a jerk. I can get that from Dan Sav­age, but I also want to know what Jesus thinks.”

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 A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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 207

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. Eleven arrests, dou­ble the tear gas fired dur­ing Occu­py move­ment and 81 injured: police chief paints dis­turb­ing pic­ture of Hong Kong extra­di­tion bill protests (Ng Kang-chung & Christy Leung, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “In a post­mortem on Thurs­day of the clash­es between offi­cers and pro­test­ers who had sur­round­ed the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil build­ing and admin­is­tra­tive head­quar­ters the day before, Com­mis­sion­er of Police Stephen Lo Wai-chung said more than 150 rounds of tear gas had been fired – almost dou­ble that on the first day of the Occu­py demon­stra­tions – and about 20 bean­bag rounds, as well as ‘sev­er­al’ rounds of rub­ber bul­lets.” See also these relat­ed pho­tos from AP.
    • What Hong Kong’s Free­dom Means to the World (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Cir­ca 2019, Hong Kong is a study in the creep­ing pow­er and increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of autoc­ra­cy. While it is pos­si­ble there could be a Tianan­men-like mas­sacre in the streets of Hong Kong, it is more like­ly that its main­land over­lords will opt for more sub­tle ways of chok­ing off Hong Kong’s remain­ing auton­o­my and free­doms.”
    • Hong Kong and the Future of Free­dom (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “When Ronald Rea­gan called the Sovi­et Union ‘the focus of evil in the mod­ern world,’ one promi­nent lib­er­al writer denounced him as ‘prim­i­tive.’ But it was such rhetoric that gave courage to dis­si­dents and dream­ers on the oth­er side of the wall. What’s real­ly prim­i­tive is to look upon the oppres­sion of oth­ers and, whether out of defi­cient sym­pa­thy or exces­sive sophis­ti­ca­tion, remain silent.”
  2. The Pol­i­tics of Dystopia (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Lib­er­al­ism has nev­er done as well as it thinks at resolv­ing its own crises. America’s gravest moral evil, chat­tel slav­ery, was defeat­ed by an author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­dent in a reli­gious civ­il war, not by pro­ce­du­ral­ism or con­sti­tu­tion­al debate. The cri­sis of the 1930s end­ed hap­pi­ly for lib­er­al­ism because a reac­tionary impe­ri­al­ist with­stood Adolf Hitler and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary Bol­she­vik crushed him. The lib­er­al peace that fol­lowed may depend on fear of the atom­ic bomb.”
    • Relat­ed: A High-School Porn Star’s Cry for Help (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The prob­lem is that there are some very old human impuls­es that must now con­tend with porn. One of them is the ten­den­cy of deeply trou­bled teenage girls to act out sex­u­al­ly as a kind of dis­tress sig­nal, an attempt to get the atten­tion of adults who may not be get­ting the mes­sage that they’re in a cri­sis.”
    • Relat­ed? JON STEWART Goes OFF On Con­gress (YouTube): a remark­able nine-minute clip. The next day the bill was passed in com­mit­tee and now awaits a full vote.
  3. The restau­rant own­er who asked for 1‑star Yelp reviews (Zachary Crock­ett, The Hus­tle): “In 2014, chef Davide Cer­re­ti­ni adver­tised a spe­cial that would for­ev­er change his fate: Any­one who left his restau­rant a 1‑star review on Yelp would get 25% off a piz­za.” This is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Her Evan­gel­i­cal Megachurch Was Her World. Then Her Daugh­ter Said She Was Molest­ed by a Min­is­ter. (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Ms. Bragg said that all she want­ed was a church home that would care for her fam­i­ly. Evan­gel­i­cals in Dal­las are enam­ored with the Vil­lage, with Mr. Chan­dler and with all the church rep­re­sents, she said recent­ly. She start­ed to cry.”
  5. A Soci­ol­o­gist of Reli­gion on Protes­tants, Porn, and the “Puri­ty Indus­tri­al Com­plex” (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “What I found is that, what­ev­er we think pornog­ra­phy is doing, those effects tend to be ampli­fied when we’re talk­ing about con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants. It seems to be unique­ly harm­ful to con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants’ men­tal health, their sense of self, their own identities—certainly their inti­mate relationships—in ways that don’t tend to be as harm­ful for peo­ple who don’t have that kind of moral prob­lem with it.” Chotin­er is inter­view­ing Samuel Per­ry, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa.
  6. The Rise Of Pro­gres­sive Occultism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “For an increas­ing num­ber of left-lean­ing millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any orga­nized religion—occult spir­i­tu­al­i­ty isn’t just a form of per­son­al prac­tice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a meta­phys­i­cal can­vas for the Amer­i­can cul­ture wars in the post-Trump era: pit­ting the self-iden­ti­fied Davids of seem­ing­ly sec­u­lar pro­gres­sivism against the Goliath of nation­al­ist evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The arti­cle ends with an amaz­ing quote: “Back in 1992, Chris­t­ian broad­cast­er Pat Robert­son warned of the dan­gers of fem­i­nism, pre­dict­ing that it would induce ‘women to leave their husbands.…practice witch­craft, destroy cap­i­tal­ism and become les­bians.’ Many of today’s witch­es would hap­pi­ly agree.” 👀
  7. Is Chris­tian­i­ty los­ing to Islam? (Paul Seabright, Asia Times): “On a world scale – what­ev­er pop­ulists may say – Chris­tian­i­ty is not strug­gling; it is in more vig­or­ous shape than it has ever been. And the mar­ket­place is where most of the reli­gious action is going to take place in this cen­tu­ry. As in many oth­er mar­ket­places, there are large returns to economies of scale for those who can work out how to exploit them. That is why cor­po­rate reli­gion is here to stay – and why we should expect it to con­sol­i­date its dom­i­nance.” The author is an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor in France.

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 Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Indi­vid­u­als have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” The author just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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.