Tag: justice

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 451

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 451, which feels like it is maybe a prime num­ber but it turns out that 451 = 11 · 41.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Was Paul a Slave? (Mark R. Fairchild and Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Rec­on­cil­ing the Phar­isee, Hebrew of Hebrews, Ara­ma­ic-speak­ing zealot Paul with the Roman cit­i­zen, glo­be­trot­ting, Greek-speak­ing Paul seems impos­si­ble. Unless, that is, we con­sid­er the ear­ly church’s rec­ol­lec­tion of Paul’s upbring­ing as a child in an enslaved fam­i­ly. ‘The man­u­mis­sion of Paul’s father solves these prob­lems,’ Ries­ner told me.”
    • The title is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing — the ques­tion is real­ly whether Paul was born a slave and lat­er freed (they do explain Acts 22:28, “When Paul told the com­man­der in Acts 22:28 that he was ‘born’ a Roman cit­i­zen, that word, gen­nao, can refer to birth or adop­tion. Freed Roman slaves were often adopt­ed into their master’s fam­i­ly and giv­en a Roman name and cit­i­zen­ship.”
    • The authors are schol­ars with rel­e­vant exper­tise. The mid­dle sec­tion of the arti­cle is where all the meat is and makes some good points. The open­ing and clos­ing felt like fluff to me.
    • Unlocked.
  2. Stuff about the col­lege protests
    • For most peo­ple, pol­i­tics is about fit­ting in (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple are try­ing to fig­ure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both direc­tions: peo­ple can be attract­ed to a group or neg­a­tive­ly polar­ized by it.… Notice what’s miss­ing from my list? The notion of pol­i­tics as a bat­tle of ideas.”
    • Col­lege pro­test­ers seek amnesty to keep arrests and sus­pen­sions from trail­ing them (Joce­lyn Geck­er, AP News): “Petocz said protest­ing in high school was what helped get him into Van­der­bilt and secure a mer­it schol­ar­ship for activists and orga­niz­ers. His col­lege essay was about orga­niz­ing walk­outs in rur­al Flori­da to oppose Gov. Ron DeSan­tis’ anti-LGBTQ poli­cies. ‘Van­der­bilt seemed to love that,’ Petocz said.’ ”
    • What Stu­dents Read Before They Protest (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[Read­ing the syl­labus explains] the two things that seem so dis­pro­por­tion­ate in these protests and the cul­ture that sur­rounds them. First, it explains why this con­flict attracts such a scale of on-cam­pus atten­tion and action and dis­rup­tion, while so many oth­er wars and crises (Sudan, Con­go, Arme­nia, Bur­ma, Yemen …) are bare­ly noticed or ignored. Sec­ond, it explains why the atten­tion seems to leap so quick­ly past cri­tique into car­i­ca­ture, past sym­pa­thy for the Pales­tini­ans into jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for Hamas, past con­dem­na­tion of Israeli pol­i­cy into anti-Semi­tism.”
    • In an Online World, a New Gen­er­a­tion of Pro­test­ers Choos­es Anonymi­ty (Nicholas Fan­dos, New York Times): “On cam­pus­es from New Eng­land to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, stu­dents lead­ing one of the largest protest move­ments in decades have increas­ing­ly strapped on face masks and check­ered Pales­tin­ian kaf­fiyehs in a polar­iz­ing bid to pro­tect their anonymi­ty even as they demand uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ments be held to account. The choice rep­re­sents a sharp break by many, though not all, of these stu­dents from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions of uni­ver­si­ty activists, who gained their moral force in part by putting their words on record and their futures in jeop­ardy for a larg­er cause.”
    • How Pro­test­ers Can Actu­al­ly Help Pales­tini­ans (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “…this may sound zany, but how about rais­ing mon­ey to send as many of your stu­dent lead­ers as pos­si­ble this sum­mer to live in the West Bank and learn from Pales­tini­ans there (while engag­ing with Israelis on the way in or out)? West Bank mon­i­tors say that a recent Israeli crack­down on for­eign­ers help­ing Pales­tini­ans, by deny­ing entry or deport­ing peo­ple, has made this more dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble. Stu­dent vis­i­tors must be pru­dent and cau­tious but could study Ara­bic, teach Eng­lish and vol­un­teer with human rights orga­ni­za­tions on the ground. Pales­tini­ans in parts of the West Bank are under siege, peri­od­i­cal­ly attacked by set­tlers and in need of observers and advo­cates.”
  3. Some stuff about gen­der:
    • The Bat­tle of the Sex­es Needs a Truce (Thomas Adamo and Isabel­la Griepp, Stan­ford Review): “We must acknowl­edge how soci­ety has lied to both men and women since they were boys and girls—lies that have done noth­ing but bring about dishar­mo­ny between the sex­es. In seek­ing to empow­er young girls, par­ents and teach­ers have de-empha­sized the innate dif­fer­ences between the sex­es. And, any dif­fer­ences between the sex­es were explained in terms of how men had his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed women, rather than the unique and valu­able char­ac­ter­is­tics that men and women inher­ent­ly pos­sess.”
      • The authors are stu­dents in Chi Alpha.
    • The Mas­culin­i­ty Pyra­mid (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A man who is over­ly con­cerned with how he is dif­fer­ent from women is miss­ing the holy instinct of Adam, who first notices the same­ness of Eve and sec­ond notices their dif­fer­ences (Gen 2:23).”
    • Scripts for Healthy Mas­culin­i­ty (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “…men ought to be dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed from God, ani­mals, boys, and women. When prop­er­ly con­sid­ered, those four dis­tinc­tions yield the four core mas­cu­line virtues of humil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from God), dis­ci­pline (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from ani­mals), respon­si­bil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from boys), and chival­ry (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from women).”
  4. There’s Real­ly No Good Rea­son to Use Tik­Tok (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Tik­Tok is, in my view, a social media plat­form devoid of pos­i­tive ben­e­fit. I do not mean by that that it is whol­ly evil or can­not be used except sin­ful­ly. Rather, I think Tik­Tok sim­ply lacks any mer­it as a plat­form and is only use­ful in the sense that it is pas­sive­ly enter­tain­ing. This is also how I would describe things like soap operas, pro­fes­sion­al wrestling, and the nation­al hot dog eat­ing con­test. The dif­fer­ence, though, between Tik­Tok and those things, is that Tik­Tok is 1) addic­tive, 2) active­ly cor­ro­sive to think­ing, and 3) mar­ket­ed to and con­sumed by an enor­mous num­ber of chil­dren.”

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 391

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 391, which is a prod­uct of two of my favorite prime num­bers. 391 = 17 * 23.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Facts Don’t Care About Your Heal­ings (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, ‘jus­tice’ is about law. There’s an objec­tive given­ness to it that tran­scends per­son­al nar­ra­tive or expe­ri­ence, which helps to explain why jus­tice his­tor­i­cal­ly has been right-cod­ed. But this is no longer true. ‘Jus­tice’ is left-cod­ed because it has become nar­ra­ti­val. Jus­tice is what peo­ple talk about when they talk about their per­son­al expe­ri­ences. Jus­tice is the sub­text of peo­ple speak­ing their truth.”
    • This is an excep­tion­al­ly acute bit of cul­tur­al analy­sis. Rec­om­mend­ed for its core insight.
  2. Amer­i­ca’s Cul­ture Is Boom­ing. Real­ly. (Ted Goia, The Free Press): “Con­sid­er the fact that there are now 36 YouTube chan­nels with more than 50 mil­lion subscribers—each of these has far more reach than any record label or news­pa­per.… Can all this trans­form our cul­ture? The sim­ple fact is that it already has. And it will con­tin­ue to do so at an accel­er­at­ing rate.”
    • There are some shock­ing stats in here even if you already know the broad out­lines. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. The Bit­ter End of “Con­tent” (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “So long as adver­tis­ing is the dom­i­nant fund­ing source of the online world, any and every cre­ative plat­form will be a race to the bot­tom. Peo­ple will find ways to abuse the sys­tem to receive atten­tion and mon­ey based on noth­ing more than manip­u­la­tion.”
    • This essay is built around a real­ly impor­tant insight. It’s worth read­ing.
  4. More on Asbury. I find it inter­est­ing that the New York Times, CNN, and the Wash­ing­ton Post all pub­lished rel­a­tive­ly sol­id arti­cles about it.
    • ‘No Celebri­ties Except Jesus’: How Asbury Pro­tect­ed the Revival (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “By evening the crowd had grown to about 3,000, and the uni­ver­si­ty had to set up over­flow rooms. At the same time, an unco­or­di­nat­ed infra­struc­ture of sup­port began to appear. An Asbury stu­dent set up a table and start­ed hand­ing out tea and cof­fee. She said Jesus told her to. A woman in Indi­anapo­lis baked choco­late chip cook­ies for a full day and then drove down to give them away. A pro­fes­sor went and got cas­es of bot­tled water. Piz­za appeared, unbid­den, along with home­made pota­to soup, cake, a table of pro­tein bars, and what one vol­un­teer called ‘all the Chick-fil‑A.’ Some­one vol­un­teered to start orga­niz­ing hous­ing and put up signs with QR codes that peo­ple could scan to start the process of find­ing a place to sleep.”
      • I’ve unlocked the pay­wall for this one. Rec­om­mend­ed for the behind-the-scenes info. Also, the “all the Chick-fil‑A” line made me chuck­le.
    • ‘Wood­stock’ for Chris­tians: Revival Draws Thou­sands to Ken­tucky Town (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The uni­ver­si­ty esti­mates that the revival has drawn more than 50,000 peo­ple to Wilmore, a sleepy town of 6,000 peo­ple where the gro­cery store hosts a week­ly Bible study and police cars read ‘In God We Trust.’ Asbury was found­ed in 1890, and its roots are in the Methodist and Wes­leyan-Holi­ness tra­di­tion, which has a his­tor­i­cal empha­sis on trans­for­ma­tive move­ments of the Holy Spir­it.”
      • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this arti­cle. Includes details that are not in oth­er arti­cles I have read.
    • Why Stu­dents in Ken­tucky Have Been Pray­ing for 250 Hours (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “It all start­ed on Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 8, when Zach Meerkreebs, a vol­un­teer soc­cer coach who had addressed the stu­dent body only twice before, gave an impro­vised ser­mon about love.… In a final, kind of corny throw­away line, he said: ‘I pray that this sits on you guys like an itchy sweater, and you got­ta itch, you got­ta take care of it.’ Meerkreebs told me he was cer­tain that he had ‘total­ly whiffed’ the ser­mon, and imme­di­ate­ly got off stage and texted his wife, ‘Lat­est stinker. I’ll be home soon.’ ”
      • What a won­der­ful anec­dote.
    • A non­stop wor­ship gath­er­ing at a Ken­tucky school echoes an old Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion (AJ Will­ing­ham, CNN): “The Asbury Revival, as it has been called, has cap­tured the atten­tion and imag­i­na­tion of every pos­si­ble cir­cle in the expan­sive Venn dia­gram of Chris­tian­i­ty. Among their end­less debates are some ques­tions like­ly shared by those on the out­side, look­ing in at the com­mo­tion: What in the world is going on here? And what, exact­ly, is a Chris­t­ian revival?”
    • Opin­ion: What is Revival—and is it Hap­pen­ing at Asbury? (Craig Keen­er, The Roys Report): “Calvin­ists dom­i­nat­ed the First Great Awak­en­ing, the Hebrides Revival, and the West Tim­or Revival. Wes­leyans dom­i­nat­ed the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing, the Azusa Street Revival, and the 1950 and 1970 Asbury Revivals. Wit­ness­es from the West Tim­or Revival report­ed a sound like a rush­ing wind. Wit­ness­es from the revival at Pan­di­ta Ramabai’s orphan­age in India report­ed tongues of fire. Mirac­u­lous signs accom­pa­nied evan­ge­lism in the Shan­dong Revival. Why should an infi­nite God fit our box­es?”
      • Keen­er is an emi­nent New Tes­ta­ment schol­ar at Asbury Sem­i­nary (and, I might add, a grad­u­ate of my own sem­i­nary — AGTS).
    • Non­stop wor­ship ser­vice at a Ken­tucky col­lege is spread­ing through Tik­Tok (Amber Fer­gu­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Asbury Uni­ver­si­ty is no stranger to revivals but thanks to social media the lat­est gath­er­ing has sparked both nation­al and inter­na­tion­al atten­tion, attract­ing groups of stu­dents from at least 22 col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to descend upon its cam­pus, and even gain­ing the sup­port of for­mer vice pres­i­dent Mike Pence, who tweet­ed his sup­port of the move­ment.”
      • Pence appar­ent­ly got saved while vis­it­ing Asbury years ago.
      • Also, the byline is sur­pris­ing. She’s not one of their reli­gion beat spe­cial­ists.
  5. Time to Think by Han­nah Barnes review – what went wrong at Gids? (Rachel Cooke, The Guardian): “Han­nah Barnes’s book about the rise and calami­tous fall of the Gen­der Iden­ti­ty Devel­op­ment Ser­vice for chil­dren (Gids), a nation­al­ly com­mis­sioned unit at the Tavi­s­tock and Port­man NHS Foun­da­tion Trust in north Lon­don, is the result of inten­sive work, car­ried out across sev­er­al years.… As Barnes makes per­fect­ly clear, this isn’t a cul­ture war sto­ry. This is a med­ical scan­dal, the full con­se­quences of which may only be under­stood in many years’ time.”
    • Not much new here if you’ve been fol­low­ing. But the info is becom­ing more and more wide­spread.
  6. Sell­ing a Pos­i­tive Cul­ture War Mes­sage (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The high-sta­tus way to oppose wok­e­ness runs away from con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, which are not only false and stu­pid, but have the added effect of por­tray­ing one’s oppo­nents as extreme­ly smart, suc­cess­ful, and com­pe­tent. High-sta­tus oppo­si­tion to wok­e­ness is not only bet­ter elec­toral­ly, but will bring high­er qual­i­ty indi­vid­u­als to the cause that will be will­ing and able to focus on mak­ing impor­tant pol­i­cy changes.”
    • Most­ly about pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Vivek Ramaswamy, but also about larg­er issues of pol­i­tics. Quite inter­est­ing.
  7. Do masks work? (Kate­lyn Jetelina & Kris­ten Pan­tha­gani, Sub­stack): “The sci­en­tif­ic ‘arc’ of mask dis­cov­ery is ongo­ing. Sci­ence is always evolv­ing. Do not let any­one con­vince you of a one word answer to the ques­tion: Do masks work? It depends.”

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 New Research Shows Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Dri­ves Human Flour­ish­ing – And Why This Mat­ters Now More Than Ever (Chris­tos Makridis, Real Clear Reli­gion): “…reli­gious lib­er­ty is an inte­gral pre­req­ui­site for demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance, aid­ing the process for civic engage­ment and women’s empow­er­ment and reduc­ing the poten­tial for pub­lic and polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. From vol­ume 270.

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 371

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 371, which like its imme­di­ate pre­de­ces­sor is one of four three-dig­it nar­cis­sis­tic num­bers, mean­ing that it has three dig­its and when you raise each dig­it to the num­ber of dig­its (in this case, to the third pow­er) they sum to the orig­i­nal num­ber:  33 + 73 + 13 = 371.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Har­vard Is Real­ly Like (Olivia Glunz, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Pres­tige and influ­ence require class dis­tinc­tions; in a tru­ly equi­table world, Har­vard does not exist. Thus, Har­vard will con­tin­ue to cham­pi­on progressivism—but nev­er enough to endan­ger its own future. Har­vard stu­dents of all polit­i­cal stripes per­ceive this hypocrisy; if any­thing, they grad­u­ate not more lib­er­al but more cyn­i­cal. So much for the for­mi­da­ble brain­wash­ing machine.… Despite the preva­lence of sec­u­lar­ism and cre­den­tial­ism at Har­vard, faith and friend­ship were cen­tral to my joy­ful first year. In fact, Chris­tian­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholi­cism, is alive at Har­vard.”
    • Short but inter­est­ing, and rel­e­vant to life at Stan­ford.
  2. Why the music of Rich Mullins endures, 25 years after his death (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Mullins had all his roy­al­ties and wages go direct­ly to his accoun­tant, whom he asked to issue him an allowance equal to the aver­age work­ing-class salary at the time. The rest of his earn­ings were giv­en away, most­ly to char­i­ty. Smith tells me that Mullins ‘was scared for his own soul.’ It wasn’t that he wasn’t tempt­ed by mon­ey and fame. It’s that he knew he was tempt­ed, so he ran from it.”
  3. Rev­o­lu­tions Occur When a Sig­nif­i­cant Por­tion of Elites Defect From the Exist­ing Regime (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Social move­ments are typ­i­cal­ly led not by some­one from the under­class or the poor, but by sec­ond-tier elites. Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Che Gue­vara, America’s founders, etc. were rel­a­tive­ly edu­cat­ed and at least mid­dle-class. They were not near­ly the poor­est of their soci­eties. Far from it.  Which is why their crit­i­cisms of the elite with­in their soci­eties were so astute. They were, fig­u­ra­tive­ly speak­ing, close cousins—they saw their flaws up close.”
    • This one is real­ly good. Relat­ed but long: Diverse and Divid­ed: A Polit­i­cal Demog­ra­phy of Amer­i­can Elite Stu­dents (Eric Kauf­mann, Sub­stack): “A quar­ter of stu­dents are LGBT, and there are rough­ly equal shares of Chris­t­ian and non­re­li­gious stu­dents. LGBT, Non­re­li­gious, and Chris­tians are set to become more impor­tant polit­i­cal groups among America’s future lead­ers.”
    • The data in this lat­ter one is inter­est­ing, but it is so long you should def­i­nite­ly skim and not read.
  4. Relat­ed to jus­tice:
    • A Jury Acquit­ted Them of Var­i­ous Charges. They Served Prison Time for Them Any­way. (Bil­ly Bin­ion, Rea­son): “Can you do prison time for a crim­i­nal charge of which you were nev­er con­vict­ed? I’d ven­ture that most would assume the answer is ‘no.’ They would be wrong. Known as acquit­ted con­duct sen­tenc­ing, the prac­tice allows judges to bloat a prison term when sen­tenc­ing a defen­dant by pun­ish­ing them for a sep­a­rate charge or charges on which a jury deemed them not guilty.” Out­ra­geous. I hope the Supreme Court squash­es this 9–0.
    • Thou­sands were released from prison dur­ing covid. The results are shock­ing. (Mol­ly Gill, The Wash­ing­ton Post): “To pro­tect those most vul­ner­a­ble to covid-19 dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the Cares Act allowed the Jus­tice Depart­ment to order the release of peo­ple in fed­er­al pris­ons and place them on home con­fine­ment. More than 11,000 peo­ple were even­tu­al­ly released. Of those, the Bureau of Pris­ons (BOP) report­ed that only 17 of them com­mit­ted new crimes. That’s not a typo. Sev­en­teen. That’s a 0.15 per­cent recidi­vism rate in a coun­try where it’s nor­mal for 30 to 65 per­cent of peo­ple com­ing home from prison to reof­fend with­in three years of release.… These 11,000 releas­es were not ran­dom. Peo­ple in low- and min­i­mum-secu­ri­ty pris­ons or at high risk of com­pli­ca­tions from covid were pri­or­i­tized for con­sid­er­a­tion for release.”
    • Stock Trades Report­ed by Near­ly a Fifth of Con­gress Show Pos­si­ble Con­flicts (Kate Kel­ly, Adam Play­ford and Ali­cia Par­lapi­ano, New York Times): “The poten­tial for con­flicts in stock trad­ing by mem­bers of Con­gress — and their choice so far not to impose stricter lim­its on them­selves — has long drawn crit­i­cism, espe­cial­ly when par­tic­u­lar­ly bla­tant cas­es emerge. But the Times analy­sis demon­strates the scale of the issue: Over the three-year peri­od, more than 3,700 trades report­ed by law­mak­ers from both par­ties posed poten­tial con­flicts between their pub­lic respon­si­bil­i­ties and pri­vate finances.… The 97 mem­bers who were flagged by the Times analy­sis amount­ed to more than half of the peo­ple who report­ed trades, and near­ly a fifth of Con­gress. The group was split almost equal­ly between Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans.”
  5. The amaz­ing pow­er of “machine eyes” (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “While there are far sim­pler ways to deter­mine gen­der [than study­ing reti­nas], it’s a 50–50 toss up for oph­thal­mol­o­gists, which means there are no vis­i­ble cues to human eyes. But now two mod­els have shown 97% accu­ra­cy of gen­der deter­mi­na­tion from neur­al net­work train­ing. That was just the begin­ning.… That work has now extend­ed to detec­tion of kid­ney dis­ease, con­trol of blood glu­cose and blood pres­sure, hepa­to­bil­iary dis­ease, a pre­vi­ous study on pre­dict­ing heart attack, close cor­re­la­tion of the reti­nal ves­sels with the heart (coro­nary) artery cal­ci­um score, and, pri­or to the new report above, the ongo­ing prospec­tive assess­ment and track­ing of Alzheimer’s dis­ease.” Wild stuff.
  6. A Nuclear Zugzwang? (Anusar Farooqui, Sub­stack): “Pre­cise­ly because Rus­sia is so weak rel­a­tive to Nato, any Rus­sia-Nato war will even­tu­al­ly esca­late into strate­gic nuclear war, the only lev­el on which the Rus­sia enjoys par­i­ty with the Unit­ed States. So, any counter-esca­la­tion by the Unit­ed States would be fraught with esca­la­tion risk and nuclear dan­ger.”
    • The author has a PhD in math­e­mat­ics but writes exten­sive­ly about for­eign pol­i­cy. I have had mul­ti­ple smart peo­ple rec­om­mend this arti­cle and final­ly gave it a read.

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 Porn Restric­tion for Real­ists (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…a world where the tube-sites are gone and peo­ple must go back to pay­ing for their porn is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over the world we live in now. This world is pos­si­ble: it exist­ed two decades ago. Tech­no­log­i­cal change is part of what hap­pened, but only part. Just as impor­tant in the cre­ation of the new, porn-flushed world we live are legal pro­tec­tions giv­en to web­sites like Porn­Hub and X Ham­ster which allow them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for the theft their busi­ness mod­el is based on. It also allows them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for much worse sins.” From vol­ume 242.

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 358

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 358, a num­ber whose base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion ends in its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 3583 is 111021, and 3587 is 1021.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cul­ture War That More Chris­tians Should Be Fight­ing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “But the peo­ple who debate the moral­i­ty (or lack there­of) of Dis­ney or Hob­by Lob­by rarely dis­cuss how much paid time off these com­pa­nies pro­vide employ­ees or whether they pay a liv­ing wage or what the wealth dis­par­i­ty is between their top and bot­tom earn­ers or whether they have ade­quate mater­ni­ty leave poli­cies or how much a cor­po­ra­tion finan­cial­ly gives back to a com­mu­ni­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Sur­pris­ing Case for Mar­ry­ing Young (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Our analy­ses indi­cate that reli­gious men and women who mar­ried in their twen­ties with­out cohab­it­ing first — a pat­tern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a ‘T’ — have the low­est odds of divorce in Amer­i­ca today.”
  3. I should have loved biol­o­gy (James Somers, per­son­al blog): “In the text­books, aston­ish­ing facts were pre­sent­ed with­out aston­ish­ment. Some­one prob­a­bly told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoul­ders, say­ing how crazy that was.”
  4. Con­cern­ing abor­tion and the Supreme Court:
    • Chris­tians Should Rejoice Over Dobbs (Carl True­man, First Things): “Nobody of whom I am aware, for exam­ple, regards the lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz in 1945 as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing. No child freed that day was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that his lib­er­a­tors were mem­bers of the Red Army, act­ing on Stalin’s orders. Yet the Red Army was engaged in a mil­i­tary action that, in the long term, would lead to the noto­ri­ous Iron Cur­tain divid­ing Europe. Nobody regards the fall of Hitler as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing, even though it was only made pos­si­ble by the Amer­i­cans and the British strik­ing a deal with Joseph Stal­in. Yes, Trump is obnox­ious, but he isn’t Stal­in, and he did deliv­er on the abor­tion issue. Dobbs is a moment for joy.”
    • Here’s the Sur­pris­ing Back­sto­ry of the Down­fall of Roe v. Wade (Mark Hem­ing­way, Real Clear Inves­ti­ga­tions): “…con­ser­v­a­tive activists have long argued the pro-life move­ment was a moral cause on par with the civ­il rights move­ment – and ignor­ing the strate­gies com­mon­ly used to get the Supreme Court’s atten­tion would amount to uni­lat­er­al dis­ar­ma­ment in a lot of impor­tant legal bat­tles.”
    • SCOTUS Jus­tices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cit­ed Her Boss­es to End Roe (Kara Voght & Tim Dick­in­son, Rolling Stone): “In the shad­ow of the high court, across the street from its cham­bers, sits a clus­ter of unas­sum­ing row hous­es known only to the ini­ti­at­ed as ‘Min­istry Row.’ The strip is host to evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal groups that have spent the past sev­er­al decades push­ing Belt­way con­ser­v­a­tives to embrace the reli­gious right’s polit­i­cal caus­es…”
    • In a Post-Roe World, We Can Avoid Pit­ting Moth­ers Against Babies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, New York Times): “The first per­son to see us was anoth­er ultra­sound tech­ni­cian. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heart­beat. ‘It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,’ she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice soft­ened a lit­tle, ‘You don’t have to think of it that way.’ For her, part of pro­vid­ing care was deny­ing there was any room for grief. But when the sur­geon came in, he began by express­ing his con­do­lences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby.”
    • There’s a fol­low-up at My Ectopic Preg­nan­cies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to write about Camil­lian to describe not just what is allowed but what can be offered to par­ents who are los­ing their child when the doc­tors acknowl­edge their child as a child, rather than min­i­miz­ing their loss.” This one is a sad reminder of how cru­el peo­ple can be.
    • Angry about Roe, many jour­nal­ists focus on cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters as vil­lains behind it all (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Like, the CPCs have out­wit­ted the abor­tion clin­ics when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what many preg­nant women real­ly want and it’s clear the abor­tion facil­i­ties have suf­fered finan­cial loss­es as a result. How about ask­ing peo­ple at the lat­ter hard ques­tions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad mar­ket­ing deci­sion that was? Hint: It might have to do with the free ultra­sounds offered by the CPCs. Offer­ing this ser­vice was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it real­ly cried out for cov­er­age. But, you know. That wasn’t news.”
    • ‘The Pro-Life Gen­er­a­tion’: Young Women Fight Against Abor­tion Rights (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Young women whose activism is not con­nect­ed to reli­gious belief are rel­a­tive new­com­ers to the move­ment, where they make up a small but bois­ter­ous niche. Kristin Turn­er start­ed a chap­ter of a youth cli­mate group in her home­town, Red­ding, Calif. Her Insta­gram bio includes her pro­nouns (she/they) and sup­port for Black Lives Mat­ter. She describes her­self as a fem­i­nist, an athe­ist and a left­ist. At 20, she is also the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for Pro­gres­sive Anti-Abor­tion Upris­ing, whose goals include edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about ‘the exploita­tive influ­ence of the Abor­tion Indus­tri­al Com­plex through an anti-cap­i­tal­ist lens.’”
  5. See­ing Like a Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins and I hope he is cor­rect.
  6. Why I’m Giv­ing Up Tenure at UCLA (Joseph Man­son, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Grad­u­al­ly, one hire at a time, prac­ti­tion­ers of ‘crit­i­cal’ (i.e. left­ist, post­mod­ernist) anthro­pol­o­gy, some of them lying about their beliefs dur­ing job inter­views, came to com­prise the department’s most influ­en­tial clique. These mil­i­tant fac­ul­ty mem­bers recruit­ed even more mil­i­tant grad­u­ate stu­dents to work with them.”
  7. Trans­gen­der-relat­ed:
    • Trans­for­ma­tion of a Trans­gen­der Teen (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Mar­tin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of jus­tice,” said Falls Church Angli­can rec­tor Sam Fer­gu­son, who has spent time with mul­ti­ple tran­si­tion­ing young adults and their fam­i­lies. “The Bible also envi­sions the long arc of redemp­tion, which aims at the res­ur­rec­tion of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the begin­ning. Our Cre­ator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chro­mo­some, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemp­tion, not against it.”
    • Pro­nouns and Cas­es Involv­ing Trans­gen­der Par­ties (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “For a bit of the fac­tu­al back­sto­ry, which may be rel­e­vant because it may illus­trate how use of pro­nouns might col­or read­ers’ per­spec­tive: Peti­tion­er C.G. was found to have sex­u­al­ly assault­ed a 14-year-old boy (whom the opin­ion calls Alan, a pseu­do­nym) who had been ‘diag­nosed with autism’ and who was appar­ent­ly work­ing in school at three grades below his age lev­el. At the time, C.G., who was 15 and who would a year lat­er be 300–345 pounds and 6’4” or 6′5″, was appar­ent­ly per­ceived by peo­ple, or at least by Alan, as male.” For a lit­tle more on the case: No First Amend­ment Right to Legal Name Change (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Uh oh! (The Far Side)
  • Study Finds 92% Of Cal­i­for­ni­ans Who Flee The State Don’t Sur­vive First Win­ter (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Clas­sic (The Far Side)
  • Magi­cian Dan White Proves Fate Real­ly Exists (The Tonight Show, YouTube): ten and a half min­utes.
  • Fright­en­ing But 100% True Facts About Guns (Baby­lon Bee, YouTube): four min­utes. The first part is the fun­ni­est, it drags a lit­tle at the end.
  • Tru­ly Hum­bled to Be the Author of This Arti­cle (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and espe­cial­ly if you’re around the high-sta­tus world of the achieva­trons, you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must nev­er tweet about any event that could actu­al­ly lead to humil­i­ty. Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I went to a par­ty, and nobody noticed me.’ Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I got fired for incom­pe­tence.’ The whole point of humil­i­ty dis­play is to sig­nal that you are hum­bled by your own mag­nif­i­cent accom­plish­ments. We can all be hum­bled by an awe­some moun­tain or the infini­tude of the night sky, but to be hum­bled by being in the pres­ence of yourself—that is a sign of tru­ly great humil­i­ty.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 313

a dis­turbing­ly high num­ber of pan­dem­ic-relat­ed arti­cles

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.

313 is the 65th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • How the Pan­dem­ic Now Ends (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): “Here, then, is the cur­rent pan­dem­ic dilem­ma: Vac­cines remain the best way for indi­vid­u­als to pro­tect them­selves, but soci­eties can­not treat vac­cines as their only defense.”
      • First, this is a free arti­cle that won’t use up a pay­wall click. Sec­ond, this is dis­cour­ag­ing to read and makes me think Stan­ford is going to be way more restric­tive than I was hop­ing come fall.
    • What We Lose When We Livestream Church (Collin Hansen, New York Times): “The very word we trans­late from Greek as ‘church’ in the New Tes­ta­ment sug­gests we must assem­ble in per­son. The church wasn’t just a bridge of 2,000 years until human­i­ty reached Peak Zoom. It’s essen­tial for the reli­gion where God took on flesh and dwelt among us. It’s essen­tial in a faith that believes Jesus phys­i­cal­ly rose from the dead and then sat down to enjoy a meal with his stunned friends.”
    • Covid incom­pe­tence (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amaz­ing­ly the US pol­i­cy response is even more irres­olute than the first time around. Our gov­ern­ment is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sug­ar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wan­ders off fol­low­ing a pup­py.”
      • The author is a senior fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • “What Do Full Hos­pi­tals Real­ly Tell Us About COVID?” (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “The pub­lic argu­ment for spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals is more exper­tise and low­er costs because of effi­cien­cy. The real mod­el was no emer­gency room, and thus no way for un- and under-insured peo­ple to get into the hos­pi­tal. All of the finan­cial ben­e­fits of being a hos­pi­tal with­out any of the respon­si­bil­i­ties. So we get wom­en’s hos­pi­tals, ortho­pe­dic hos­pi­tals, etc., suck­ing the prof­itable work from com­mu­ni­ty hos­pi­tals, with­out tak­ing any of the bur­den of com­mu­ni­ty care for the indi­gent.… The hos­pi­tals in Louisiana which take indi­gent patients and patients though the ER—pretty much all COVID patients—are slammed. The spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals have lots of staff and lots of beds and don’t have much in the way of COVID patients, if there are any at all.”
      • I did not know any of that. Real­ly inter­est­ing. Writ­ten a law prof at Louisiana State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Porn­dem­ic? A Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Study of Pornog­ra­phy Use Before and Dur­ing the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic in a Nation­al­ly Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sam­ple of Amer­i­cans (Grubbs et al, Archives of Sex­u­al Behav­ior): “In gen­er­al, pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward over the pan­dem­ic, for both men and women. Prob­lem­at­ic pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward for men and remained low and unchanged in women.”
      • The excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing but also I think peo­ple are less like­ly to watch porn with their fam­i­lies around, which hap­pened a lot dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. I do won­der how their find­ings cross-check with traf­fic stats from porn web­sites. It seems like an obvi­ous way to do a sim­ple check on their find­ings.
  2. The Gap Between Law and Moral­i­ty (Helen Dale, Law & Lib­er­ty): “The planet’s two great legal sys­tems devel­oped in two Euro­pean civil­i­sa­tions, Rome and Eng­land. Their wide prove­nance is not only due to both peo­ples con­quer­ing great empires. It’s also because they worked: they did things no oth­er legal regime did before them, and those oth­ers are still inca­pable of doing now.… Incred­i­bly, these devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er. The Eng­lish com­mon law did not bor­row from Rome: when it first emerged, Roman law was lost.”
    • This is sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. In the words of an alum­nus, “This one was a sleep­er hit. Start­ed slow, blew me away by the end.”
  3. Why a Mas­cu­line Min­istry Rose and Fell (David French, The Dis­patch): “When coun­ter­ing a cul­ture that often attacks tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent vice, the answer isn’t to indulge tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent virtue.… Driscoll, in all his tough­ness and swag­ger, tried to make men out of Chris­tians. The church, how­ev­er, should make Chris­tians out of men.”
  4. Cor­nel West on Why the Left Needs Jesus (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “When I was in Char­lottesville, look­ing at these sick white broth­ers in neo-Nazi par­ties and the Klan spit­ting and cussing and car­ry­ing on, I could see the hounds of hell rag­ing on the bat­tle­field of their souls. But I also know that there’s greed in me. There’s hatred in me. Peo­ple say, ‘Oh, you’re so qual­i­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent than those gang­sters.’ I say, ‘No, I’ve got gang­ster in me. I was a gang­ster before I met Jesus. Now I’m a redeemed sin­ner with gang­ster pro­cliv­i­ties.’ It is a very dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at things than many of my sec­u­lar com­rades.”
  5. Crim­i­nal-Jus­tice Reform­ers Chose the Wrong Slo­gan (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Before the pub­lic sours on crim­i­nal-jus­tice reform more broadly—as it may amid ris­ing fears about crime and dis­or­der in cities—a new focus and ral­ly­ing cry are need­ed. And giv­en the spike in homi­cides that has afflict­ed the Unit­ed States dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly killing Black peo­ple, there’s an espe­cial­ly strong case for this over­due slo­gan: Solve All Mur­ders. Pre­cise­ly because Black lives mat­ter, peo­ple who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.”
  6. Assem­blies of God Grow­ing with Pen­te­costal Per­sis­tence (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s dif­fi­cult to pin­point exact­ly why the Assem­blies of God has con­tin­ued to increase over the past 15 years. Research shows that mem­ber­ship of the Assem­blies of God has become more polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and more reli­gious­ly active today than just a decade ago, but its own num­bers indi­cate that it has achieved incred­i­ble racial diversity—44 per­cent of mem­bers in the Unit­ed States are eth­nic minori­ties.”
    • Since the Assem­blies of God is the group with which I am ordained and is the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Chi Alpha, file under “arti­cles that make me hap­py.”
  7. We Need to Build Our Way Out of This Mess (Eli Doura­do, New York Times): “How did the most dynam­ic coun­try on the plan­et become so scle­rot­ic? We did it to our­selves. We enact­ed laws that priv­i­lege the sta­tus quo at the expense of change and progress. We lib­er­al­ly passed out veto rights to any­one with the mon­ey and where­with­al to hire a lawyer. If we want to reverse the dam­age and cre­ate a more pros­per­ous future, we must make it easy to build.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist at Utah State Uni­ver­si­ty.

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 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 299

so many enter­tain­ing tid­bits at the end — way more than nor­mal

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 the 299th install­ment of these emails. 299 is, I am told, the most pieces into which a sim­ple object (like a cube or a sphere — some­thing with­out a weird struc­ture) can be split using 12 straight cuts.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why You’re Chris­t­ian (David Per­rell, per­son­al blog): “…I’m a tepid non-believ­er myself.… [How­ev­er] I real­ized that society’s most pas­sion­ate crit­ics, most of whom claim to be sec­u­lar, usu­al­ly have the most Chris­t­ian val­ues of all. They’ve stud­ied in elite uni­ver­si­ties, they live in major cities, and they’re proud mem­bers of the intel­li­gentsia. Human rights, a cen­ter­piece of their moral out­look, is incon­sis­tent with the rest of their world­view. Though they pride them­selves on evi­dence-based think­ing, they’re intel­lec­tu­al­ly bank­rupt on the top­ic of human rights.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): What Became of Athe­ism, Part One: Wear­ing the Uni­form (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…if God exists then that is the sin­gle most impor­tant fact in the his­to­ry of cre­ation and noth­ing else can take its crown, ever. If a being exists, of what­ev­er nature, who cre­at­ed real­i­ty, exists with­in all of real­i­ty, set reality’s phys­i­cal and moral rules, watch­es over all of real­i­ty, judges all of us on how devout and moral we are, and deter­mines reward and pun­ish­ment based on that judge­ment, that clear­ly is the truth that trumps all oth­er truths. Strange to let it slip out of the debate qui­et­ly in the night. But then I sup­pose that’s cul­ture war; soon­er or lat­er the only ques­tion that remains is who is on what side of the line, and all the rest dis­solves.”
  2. Jus­tice-relat­ed thoughts:
    • ‘The Voice of Your Broth­er’s Blood Is Cry­ing to Me From the Ground’ (David French, The Dis­patch): “…we can artic­u­late three truths of sim­ple, indi­vid­ual jus­tice. First, a grave wrong cre­ates a moral and spir­i­tu­al cry for redress. Sec­ond, it is the role of gov­ern­ment to pro­vide that redress. And third, the gov­ern­ment must be impar­tial, treat­ing ‘great and small’ alike. All too many Amer­i­cans are com­plete­ly unaware of the extent to which the present struc­tures and habits of Amer­i­can law fail to meet those basic oblig­a­tions, espe­cial­ly when injus­tice is vis­it­ed upon the cit­i­zen by the state.”
    • Chau­vin Was Con­vict­ed. Some­thing Is Still Very Wrong. (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “For­give­ness doesn’t feel par­tic­u­lar­ly tri­umphant. It’s a gift no one wants to be in the posi­tion to give; it releas­es a wrong­do­er from moral debt — for their own good and the com­mon good, not for the sake of the wronged.… But I want to live in a world where it is pos­si­ble to for­give and to be for­giv­en. In fact, I think it’s nec­es­sary.”
    • The Real Rea­son to End the Death Penal­ty (Paul Gra­ham, Sub­stack): “But in prac­tice the debate about the death penal­ty is not about whether it’s ok to kill mur­der­ers. It’s about whether it’s ok to kill inno­cent peo­ple, because at least 4% of peo­ple on death row are inno­cent.” I find this a real­ly inter­est­ing line of argu­ment. Clear­ly we want to have a 100% accu­ra­cy rate in all crim­i­nal con­vic­tions. But is 96% accu­ra­cy out­ra­geous­ly intol­er­a­ble? To the extent that it becomes a per­sua­sive argu­ment against the death penal­ty isn’t that then also an argu­ment against impris­on­ment? Or vir­tu­al­ly any pun­ish­ment?
    • Unjust Sec­u­lar Jus­tice (Matthew Schmitz,First Things): “While in the colo­nial era most cas­es went to tri­al (and most tri­als last­ed a stun­ning­ly short thir­ty min­utes), more and more are now resolved by a plea bar­gain. Nowhere is our aban­don­ment of colo­nial ideas of crim­i­nal jus­tice more appar­ent than in no-con­test pleas that allow defen­dants to receive lighter sen­tences with­out any admis­sion of guilt.” This is an old­er book review (2013) but is quite good.
    • Out­rage Over­load (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “Mod­ern policing—or even polic­ing qua policing—owes far less to slave patrolling than NASA owes to Hitler’s rock­et pro­gram. And yet no one talks about the trou­bling Nazi roots of mod­ern space explo­ration, or asks Elon Musk if he’s exor­cised the ghost of Wern­er Von Braun from SpaceX. I have seen this slave patrol thing brought up count­less times in inter­views, and not once have I seen an inter­view­er say, ‘Real­ly?’ nev­er mind, ‘What the hell are you talk­ing about?’ It’s as bat­ty as any con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, and it’s a delib­er­ate attempt to heap innu­en­do on polic­ing in lieu of mak­ing an intel­li­gent argu­ment. And that’s what frus­trates me to no end. It’s the job of jour­nal­ists to call out B.S. when it’s being thrown in their faces.”
  3. Where Two or Three Are Gath­ered (William J. Haun & Daniel L. Chen, Law & Lib­er­ty): “Over 40 ami­cus briefs lam­bast­ed this embrace of open-end­ed gov­ern­ment surveillance—reflecting an ide­o­log­i­cal agree­ment so wide that NARAL Pro-Choice North Car­oli­na and Wis­con­sin Right to Life joined the same brief. On the sur­face, wide­spread con­sen­sus in favor of asso­ci­a­tion­al pri­va­cy is sure­ly wel­come. But this agree­ment masks equal­ly wide­spread, decades-long con­fu­sion over how and why the Con­sti­tu­tion pro­tects free asso­ci­a­tion.” Quite good, a bit dry. The authors are lawyers with the Beck­et Fund.
  4. “Wok­e­ness is a prob­lem and we all know it” (Sean Illing inter­view­ing James Carville, Vox): “We won the White House against a world-his­tor­i­cal buf­foon. And we came with­in 42,000 votes of los­ing. We lost con­gres­sion­al seats. We didn’t pick up state leg­is­la­tures. So let’s not have an argu­ment about whether or not we’re off-key in our mes­sag­ing. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jar­gon and there’s too much eso­ter­i­ca and it turns peo­ple off.” Carville is a leg­endary Demo­c­ra­t­ic polit­i­cal strate­gist and he is in full-on old man rant mode here.
  5. ‘This Is a Cat­a­stro­phe.’ In India, Ill­ness Is Every­where. (Jef­frey Get­tle­man, New York Times): “New Del­hi, India’s sprawl­ing cap­i­tal of 20 mil­lion, is suf­fer­ing a calami­tous surge. A few days ago, the pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate hit a stag­ger­ing 36 per­cent — mean­ing more than one out of three peo­ple test­ed were infect­ed. A month ago, it was less than 3 per­cent.”
    1. Relat­ed: ‘Death Is the Only Truth.’ Watch­ing India’s Funer­al Pyres Burn. (Aman Sethi, New York Times): “The Indi­an gov­ern­ment has ordered Twit­ter, Face­book and Insta­gram to take down dozens of posts crit­i­ciz­ing its han­dling of the pan­dem­ic. But the graph­ic images of mass cre­ma­tions have cut through this wall of noise, mis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da, cap­tur­ing what epi­demi­ol­o­gists call ‘excess mor­tal­i­ty’ in grue­some detail.”
  6. Colum­bia Stone (T.A. Kras­ni­can, Sub­stack): “This pub­lic for­get­ful­ness is the same indif­fer­ence that in 1938 inspired Adolf Hitler, after issu­ing orders for his Nazi ‘death-head for­ma­tions’ to ‘send to death mer­ci­less­ly and with­out com­pas­sion, men, women, and chil­dren of Pol­ish deriva­tion and lan­guage,’ to write the famous phrase, ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the anni­hi­la­tion of the Arme­ni­ans?’ Pub­lic ambiva­lence about human tragedy embold­ened him.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Indi­vid­u­al­ism is asso­ci­at­ed with hap­py coun­tries, but not peo­ple (Zaid Jilani, Sub­stack): “In a recent­ly released study, team of researchers stud­ied young adults across four coun­tries — Chi­na, the Unit­ed States, Rus­sia, and Italy — start­ing with the hypoth­e­sis that lev­els of life sat­is­fac­tion would be high­er among indi­vid­u­als who have indi­vid­u­al­is­tic val­ues. At the coun­try lev­el, this is indeed what they found. Coun­tries with a high­er index of indi­vid­u­al­is­tic val­ues had more life sat­is­fac­tion — that put Amer­i­ca on top, fol­lowed by Italy, Rus­sia, and then Chi­na. But an entire­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture emerged when they looked at the indi­vid­ual lev­el. There, they found that indi­vid­u­al­ism had no impact on life sat­is­fac­tion. Instead, life sat­is­fac­tion was pos­i­tive­ly cor­re­lat­ed with col­lec­tivism, regard­less of the wider cul­ture of the coun­try.” My take: Amer­i­cans are on aver­age hap­pi­er than the Chi­nese because of the free­doms which emerge from our indi­vid­u­al­ism, but the hap­pi­est indi­vid­u­als in each coun­try are those that freely choose to embrace fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty.

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 No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

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 272

I cheat­ed when num­ber­ing a few of these

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 DC Church Shows How to Fight for Reli­gious Free­dom (David French, The Dis­patch): “Late Fri­day night a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., hand­ed down a reli­gious lib­er­ty rul­ing that I hope will echo through­out the nation…. It demon­strates how thought­ful Chris­tians can engage in the pub­lic square and defend their lib­er­ty with con­vic­tion while also car­ing for their com­mu­ni­ties and demon­strat­ing extra­or­di­nary patience with pub­lic offi­cials. In oth­er words, in one court case we’re watch­ing what it’s like when Chris­t­ian legal ends are pur­sued through Chris­t­ian moral means.” Excel­lent news with typ­i­cal­ly insight­ful com­men­tary by David French.
  2. Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“
    • Out­stand­ing. There are SO MANY quotable bits in this essay. 
    • Why Is Wok­e­ness Win­ning? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Crit­i­cal the­o­ry was once an eso­teric aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit. Now it has become the core, under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the major­i­ty of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, media, cor­po­ra­tions, lib­er­al church­es, NGOs, phil­an­thropies, and, of course, main­stream jour­nal­ism.”
    • The Fun­da­men­tal­ist War on Wok­e­ness is a War on Chris­t­ian Love (Michael Bird, Patheos): “The whole anti-woke and anti-crit­i­cal race the­o­ry trope strike me as not so much inter­est­ed in oppos­ing pro­gres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism and its divi­sive racial pol­i­tics, as much as it serves to deny eth­nic minori­ties have any griev­ances and white church­es have any respon­si­bil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.” Bird is a respect­ed evan­gel­i­cal the­olo­gian. 
  3. Some Stan­ford-relat­ed arti­cles I saw:
    • The Pre­science of Shel­by Steele (Samuel Kro­nen, Quil­lette): “Shel­by was the only sib­ling to reject the tenets of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism, and although he and his [twin] broth­er work on the same cam­pus and occa­sion­al­ly pass each oth­er (Shel­by is at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion), the two are not on speak­ing terms.” Not the most reveal­ing excerpt, but prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing to this audi­ence.
    • An open let­ter from a Stan­ford wrestling par­ent to the Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent (Sarah Traxler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When address­ing the rea­sons that the 11 sports in par­tic­u­lar are being dis­con­tin­ued, wrestling was cit­ed only in the cat­e­go­ry of com­pet­ing ‘with­out a full com­ple­ment of schol­ar­ships.’ One over-looked rea­son for this is that wrestlers often come from low­er income groups. As such, wrestling stu­dent-ath­letes often qual­i­fy for need-based finan­cial aid, reduc­ing the demand for the full com­ple­ment of ath­let­ic-based schol­ar­ships.”
    • My Brief Spell as an Activist (Lucy Kross Wal­lace, Quil­lette): “This was my first intox­i­cat­ing taste of empow­er­ment born from vic­tim­hood. I was vin­di­cat­ed; exu­ber­ant. None of it had been my fault. All my doubts and self-hatred and guilt could be laid to rest. I had been the vic­tim not only of cir­cum­stance and mis­for­tune, but of oppres­sion. The prob­lem was sim­ple, the solu­tion equal­ly so. I didn’t have to change—society did.” The author is a sopho­more at Stan­ford.
  4. A reminder that there are some hor­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing in this world:
    • How Turkey’s Mil­i­tary Adven­tures Decrease Free­dom at Home (Garo Pay­lan, New York Times): “After a decades-long fit­ful truce, the con­flict over the sta­tus of Nagorno-Karabakh — a break­away Armen­ian enclave in Azer­bai­jan — between Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia resumed last month, lead­ing to a large mil­i­tary deploy­ment, destruc­tion of civil­ian cen­ters and thou­sands of casu­al­ties. In this war, Turkey strong­ly sup­ports Azer­bai­jan, with which it shares eth­nic bonds, and Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan dis­missed glob­al calls for a cease-fire.” The author is a mem­ber of the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Azer­bai­jan’s assault against Arme­nia threat­ens democ­ra­cy every­where (Chris­tos Makridis & Alex Gal­it­sky, The Hill): “While Azer­bai­jan has attempt­ed to shield itself from inter­na­tion­al scruti­ny by rid­ing on the pres­ence of tense domes­tic pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States and a glob­al pan­dem­ic, we can­not ignore it any longer. The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must rec­og­nize that fail­ure to stand up for reli­gious minori­ties any­where is a threat to them every­where. Inac­tion cre­ates prece­dent and embold­ens dic­ta­tors.” One of the authors, Chris­tos, is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
    • Chi­na ambas­sador makes veiled threat to Hong Kong-based Cana­di­ans (Helen David­son, The Guardian): “Cana­da is among sev­er­al coun­tries that sus­pend­ed extra­di­tion agree­ments with Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s impo­si­tion of a sweep­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty law in June. Dozens of MPs recent­ly called for Cana­da to offer ‘safe har­bour’ to pro-democ­ra­cy pro­test­ers flee­ing Hong Kong, prompt­ing the warn­ing from Cong.”
    • Relat­ed from a few weeks ago: ‘You will be put into deten­tion’: For­mer ABC bureau chief tells sto­ry of flee­ing Chi­na for first time (Matthew Car­ney, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “We were instruct­ed to report to a facil­i­ty in north Bei­jing and told to bring my daugh­ter Yas­mine, who was 14 at the time, as she was now part of the inves­ti­ga­tion. This felt like a line in the sand for me. I could not accept that they would involve my chil­dren. At the same time I was fright­ened. It felt like part of the Chi­nese play­book: to go after fam­i­ly mem­bers as a way to exact pun­ish­ment and revenge.”
  5. ‘Hand­maid’ real­i­ty: Deeply reli­gious mar­riages have more spousal equal­i­ty (New York Post): “Reli­gious, home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples also report greater rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, and they are three times more like­ly than less-reli­gious peers to report a sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship. The women don’t appear to be repressed; in fact, they’re gen­er­al­ly more like­ly to say they’re hap­py and that their life has mean­ing and pur­pose.” And yet again research con­firms Bib­li­cal pre­cepts. Allow me to take his oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer a friend­ly pas­toral reminder to mar­ry anoth­er Chris­t­ian, should you mar­ry. 
    • Why Only Amy Coney Bar­rett Gets to Have It All (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “…to set the record straight, on hand­maids and beyond, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians must do their part to imag­ine a broad­er and more human­iz­ing vision for women’s place in the pub­lic square. Chris­tian­i­ty has always con­tained a lib­er­a­to­ry seed: one that tells women that the human desire to work, cre­ate and shape insti­tu­tions is as impor­tant, even as holy, as their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren. If Chris­tians don’t like the hand­maid stereo­types, now is the time to be clear on all that Chris­t­ian women can do and be.”
  6. How Chris­tians Should Think About Vot­ing (Michael & Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “When you vote in an elec­tion, with the excep­tion of a write-in bal­lot, you are not vot­ing for your dream can­di­date. Your vote is not an unmedi­at­ed expres­sion of your iden­ti­ty, your vote is a choice between options you did not choose your­self. If you view your vote as an unmedi­at­ed, pure expres­sion of your will, it can be debil­i­tat­ing.” The author is a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer. The arti­cle itself is very non­par­ti­san. 
    • Lati­no, Evan­gel­i­cal and Polit­i­cal­ly Home­less (Jen­nifer Med­i­na, New York Times): “When Pas­tor Rivera looks at his con­gre­ga­tion of 200 fam­i­lies he sees a micro­cosm of the Lati­no vote in the Unit­ed States: how com­plex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solid­i­fy cru­cial sup­port can fall short. There are not clear ide­o­log­i­cal lines here between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives. Peo­ple care about immi­gra­tion, but are equal­ly con­cerned about reli­gious lib­er­ty and abor­tion.”
    • Putting this one here is kind of cheat­ing, but I like hav­ing only 7 major top­ics. This is polit­i­cal enough that I’m jus­ti­fy­ing it to myself. The 1619 Chron­i­cles (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Jour­nal­ists are, most often, in the busi­ness of writ­ing the first rough draft of his­to­ry, not try­ing to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a low­er­case t, fol­low­ing evi­dence in direc­tions unseen, not the capital‑T truth of a pre-estab­lished nar­ra­tive in which incon­ve­nient facts get dis­card­ed.”
    • How the 1619 Project took over 2020 (Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Han­nah-Jones has fierce­ly defend­ed the 1619 Project. But today, she acknowl­edges that for all the experts she con­sult­ed, she should have sat down with addi­tion­al schol­ars with par­tic­u­lar focus on colo­nial his­to­ry, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and the Civ­il War, to bet­ter reflect the con­tention in the field.”
  7. For­get What Gen­der Activists Tell You. Here’s What Med­ical Tran­si­tion Looks Like (Scott New­gent, Quil­lette): “I write all this as a 47-year-old trans­gen­der man who tran­si­tioned five years ago. I’m also a par­ent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good inten­tions of par­ents who seek to sup­port their chil­dren, I have seri­ous con­cerns about reck­less acqui­es­cence to a child’s Inter­net-medi­at­ed self-diag­no­sis. Many old­er trans­gen­der folks share these con­cerns, too.”

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 Religion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65. First shared in vol­ume 195.

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 265

lots about race and racial ten­sion

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. Here are the things about race and racial ten­sion that stood out to me.
    • Why Did the Police Shoot Jacob Blake? (Trevor Noah, The Dai­ly Show): “I could tell you this sto­ry with my eyes closed by now. If I want­ed to I could pre­re­cord five of these seg­ments and go on vaca­tion and you would nev­er know.” Ten worth­while min­utes.
    • The Kenosha shoot­ing did­n’t hap­pen in a vac­u­um (Denise Lock­wood, CNN): “I am remind­ed of what Rod­ney Prunty, the for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Unit­ed Way of Racine Coun­ty, said to me dur­ing an inter­view: ‘If you have a pond full of fish and a few of them die, you ask what’s wrong with the fish. But when the pond full of fish dies, we ask what’s wrong with the pond.’ In Wis­con­sin, it’s time we talked about what’s wrong with the pond.”
    • Riots in John Piper’s Neigh­bor­hood (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Piper’s peo­ple moved in with­out a mas­ter plan, which was both con­fus­ing (‘What should we do?’) and exact­ly what When Help­ing Hurts authors would lat­er advise (start with build­ing rela­tion­ships, watch­ing, and learn­ing). Every­one end­ed up doing some­thing dif­fer­ent. But for decades, they’ve kept at it, work­ing through dis­ap­point­ments and chal­lenges, loot­ing and riots, bro­ken glass and home­less tent cities in the parks. They’re still doing it.” This is an out­stand­ing sto­ry.
    • Feel Good or Do Good (George Yancey, Patheos): “To gain the sup­port of real con­vic­tion we need the type of con­ver­sa­tions where we lis­ten to oth­ers as much as dis­cuss our point of view with them. We con­nect with oth­ers and get at the core of why they dis­agree with us. We under­stand their argu­ments and con­sid­er how to deal with the issues they bring up. We admit the valid­i­ty of those issues even if we dis­agree with them. Does this sound like any­thing that is hap­pen­ing with antiracism?” The author, who is black, is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bay­lor whom I have ref­er­enced sev­er­al times. 
    • Rule of Law Imper­iled (R. R. Reno, First Things): “The destruc­tion of prop­er­ty is not just an attack on another’s pos­ses­sions. It is a vio­la­tion of jus­tice. This is why riot­ing and loot­ing affects far more than those whose stores are burned. Cit­i­zens begin to wor­ry that they do not live in a soci­ety com­mit­ted to jus­tice. As we know from blacks who resent mis­treat­ment by the police, which is also unjust, this wor­ry can become explo­sive, even among those not per­son­al­ly affect­ed.”
    • Kyle Rit­ten­house, Pop­ulist Hero (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If I were a polling firm, I would run a nation­al poll ask­ing peo­ple who have heard of Kyle Rit­ten­house whether they think he’s a vil­lain, a hero, or don’t know. That would tell us a lot about the mood of the coun­try.”
  2. Unbe­com­ing Amer­i­can (Johann N. Neem, Hedge­hog Review): “A shared cul­ture is not a total­iz­ing one; indeed, it makes real plu­ral­ism pos­si­ble by giv­ing us some­thing larg­er to share regard­less of our many dif­fer­ences. Or so I believed. But when that shared world was rede­fined as white—and when white peo­ple, threat­ened by its loss, reclaimed it—I found myself an exile. A per­son los­ing his coun­try. I felt myself unbe­com­ing in more than one sense. On col­lege cam­pus­es, includ­ing the one where I now teach, the left impos­es new bound­aries on thought and speech in its effort to chal­lenge his­tor­i­cal bound­aries, while, in pol­i­tics, the right embraces bound­aries that we had hoped nev­er to see again.” The author, a man of Indi­an descent, is a his­to­ri­an at West­ern Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. I real­ly liked this arti­cle.
    • Fol­low-up inter­view: An Immi­grant’s Plea: “Don’t Con­vert to White­ness” (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “My biggest fear, actu­al­ly, is vio­lence. We for­get that social order is frag­ile. You don’t have to look far to see how preva­lent eth­nic or reli­gious vio­lence is around the world. If we form tribes, we will respond in hate­ful ways to each oth­er. Right­ly or wrong­ly, peo­ple will feel belea­guered. We will get angri­er and angri­er. There will be less empa­thy.” I share his con­cern. 
  3. Advice For Stu­dents In a Time of Strife (a whole pas­sel of Prince­ton pro­fes­sors, First Things): “Remem­ber, as an Amer­i­can col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent you are one of the luckiest—most privileged—people on plan­et earth. Do not fall into the trap of think­ing of your­self as a vic­tim or build­ing an iden­ti­ty for your­self around that idea. You can avoid the trap while strong­ly stand­ing up for your right to fair and equal treat­ment and bold­ly work­ing for reform where there are dou­ble stan­dards need­ing to be rec­ti­fied.” Tech­ni­cal­ly not a whole pas­sel, which con­notes a large but uncer­tain num­ber. I count 16 sig­na­to­ries!
  4. Chi­na Secret­ly Built A Vast New Infra­struc­ture To Imprison Mus­lims (Megha Rajagopalan, Ali­son Killing, and Chris­to Buschek, Buz­zfeed): “Down­load­ing What­sApp, which is banned in Chi­na, main­tain­ing ties with fam­i­ly abroad, engag­ing in prayer, and vis­it­ing a for­eign web­site are all offens­es for which Mus­lims have been sent to camps, accord­ing to pre­vi­ous­ly leaked doc­u­ments and inter­views with for­mer detainees. Because the gov­ern­ment does not con­sid­er intern­ment camps to be part of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and none of these behav­iors are crimes under Chi­nese law, no detainees have been for­mal­ly arrest­ed or charged with a crime, let alone seen a day in court.” I’ve shared sim­i­lar news this before. This arti­cle is fresh and espe­cial­ly damn­ing.
    • Part 2: What They Saw: Ex-Pris­on­ers Detail The Hor­rors Of Chi­na’s Deten­tion Camps (Buz­zfeed): “More than a dozen for­mer detainees con­firmed to Buz­zFeed News that pris­on­ers were divid­ed into three cat­e­gories, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed by uni­form col­ors. Those in blue, like Pari­da and the major­i­ty of the peo­ple inter­viewed for this arti­cle, were con­sid­ered the least threat­en­ing. Often, they were accused of minor trans­gres­sions, like down­load­ing banned apps to their phones or hav­ing trav­eled abroad. Imams, reli­gious peo­ple, and oth­ers con­sid­ered sub­ver­sive to the state were placed in the strictest group — and were usu­al­ly shack­led even inside the camp.”
    • Part 3: Blanked-Out Spots On Chi­na’s Maps Helped Us Uncov­er Xin­jiang’s Camps (Buz­zfeed): “Our break­through came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satel­lite imagery tiles load­ing in the vicin­i­ty of one of the known camps while using the Chi­nese map­ping plat­form Baidu Maps. The satel­lite imagery was old, but oth­er­wise fine when zoomed out — but at a cer­tain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp loca­tion…. We ana­lyzed the masked loca­tions by com­par­ing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the Euro­pean Space Agency’s Sen­tinel Hub, and Plan­et Labs.” This one will be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to CS peo­ple. 
  5. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez talks about trust­ing the news (Twit­ter): “…when you see a FACT that is report­ed, cit­ed, and ver­i­fied by sev­er­al rep­utable out­lets, 99.999% it’s going to be true. HOWEVER! There is a big dif­fer­ence between a fact and the STORY. And the STORY (often the head­line) that’s sur­round­ing the fact is fre­quent­ly stretched, mis­char­ac­ter­ized, or dra­ma­tized to get you to click.” She and I have a remark­ably sim­i­lar per­spec­tive on the media.
    • Relat­ed: Giv­en my time again, I would­n’t choose jour­nal­ism (Sarah Ditum, Unherd): “Being mad was impor­tant because the eco­nom­ics of this kind of con­tent required fast out­put (since time­li­ness is crit­i­cal) and high engage­ment (since this is how edi­tors, and writ­ers, mea­sure suc­cess). I write quick­ly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so peo­ple are more like­ly to share and react. Not every­thing I wrote when this was my main form of jour­nal­ism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dis­hon­esty that made me feel ashamed…” 
  6. Do Pro-Lif­ers Who Reject Trump Have ‘Blood on their Hands’? (David French, The DIs­patch): “Decades of data and decades of legal, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al devel­op­ments have com­bined to teach us a few, sim­ple real­i­ties about abor­tion in the Unit­ed States: 1. Pres­i­dents have been irrel­e­vant to the abor­tion rate; 2. Judges have been forces of sta­bil­i­ty, not change, in abor­tion law; 3. State leg­is­la­tures have had more influ­ence on abor­tion than Con­gress; 4. Even if Roe is over­turned, abor­tion will be most­ly unchanged in the U.S.; and 5. The pro-life move­ment has an enor­mous cul­tur­al advan­tage.“ Chock-full of insights. Despite the title, it is less about par­ti­san pol­i­tics and more about abor­tion in Amer­i­ca.

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 Facts Are Not Self‐Interpreting (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 184.

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 241

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. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus and Chris­tian­i­ty:
    • Love in the Time of Coro­n­avirus — Andy Crouch (Andy Crouch, The Prax­is Jour­nal): “…while gov­ern­ment at all lev­els can enforce a cer­tain amount of behav­ior change, for exam­ple through quar­an­tines and “lock­downs,” it is almost impos­si­ble for coer­cive author­i­ty to increase people’s capac­i­ty for love and ser­vice to oth­ers. This is the role of faith and above all, we believe, the Chris­t­ian faith. Equip­ping Chris­tians for moments like this is the role of Chris­t­ian lead­ers.” THIS. READ THIS.
    • What Mar­tin Luther Teach­es Us About Coro­n­avirus (Emmy Yang, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a cli­mate of fear sur­round­ing the out­break, I come back to Luther’s let­ter for guid­ance. As a med­ical stu­dent and a future physi­cian, I have a clear voca­tion­al com­mit­ment to car­ing for the sick—whether they have coro­n­avirus, tuber­cu­lo­sis, or influen­za. Pre­cau­tions I will take, yes. But I am remind­ed by Luther that they are indi­vid­u­als deserv­ing of care all the same.”
    • Here is an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Luther’s orig­i­nal let­ter: Whether One May Flee From A Dead­ly Plague: “Since it is gen­er­al­ly true of Chris­tians that few are strong and many are weak, one sim­ply can­not place the same bur­den upon every­one. A per­son who has a strong faith can drink poi­son and suf­fer no harm, Mark 16[:18], while one who has a weak faith would there­by drink to his death.”
    • Wuhan Pas­tor: Pray with Us (anony­mous, Chi­na­Source): “Thus, my broth­ers and sis­ters, I encour­age you to be strong in Christ’s love. If we more deeply expe­ri­ence death in this pesti­lence, under­stand­ing the gospel, we may more deeply expe­ri­ence Christ’s love, and grow ever near­er to God.”
    • How DC Church­es Respond­ed When the Gov­ern­ment Banned Pub­lic Gath­er­ings Dur­ing the Span­ish Flu of 1918 (Caleb Morell, 9 Marks): “Dur­ing one of the worst epi­demics to ever hit our coun­try, church­es respect­ed the direc­tives of the gov­ern­ment for a lim­it­ed time out of neigh­bor­ly love and in order to pro­tect pub­lic health. Even when church­es began to dis­agree with the Com­mis­sion­ers’ per­spec­tive, they con­tin­ued to abide by their orders.”
    • Should Your Church Stop Meet­ing to Slow COVID-19? How 3 Seat­tle Church­es Decid­ed. (Daniel Chin, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “After work­ing for WHO and then the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion in Chi­na, my wife and I moved to Seat­tle in 2015 to lead the foundation’s work to con­trol tuber­cu­lo­sis in sev­er­al coun­tries. For a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry, I’ve answered a call­ing as a fol­low­er of Christ to stop the spread of dis­eases and work to elim­i­nate them, and now I heed that call­ing to speak to my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ to take this epi­dem­ic seri­ous­ly and respond.” The author is an evan­gel­i­cal and a physi­cian who spe­cial­izes in infec­tious dis­eases.
  2. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus More Gen­er­al­ly:
    • How Much Worse the Coro­n­avirus Could Get, in Charts (Nicholas Kristof and Stu­art A. Thomp­son, NY Times): “What’s at stake in this coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic? How many Amer­i­cans can become infect­ed? How many might die? The answers depend on the actions we take — and, cru­cial­ly, on when we take them. Work­ing with infec­tious dis­ease epi­demi­ol­o­gists, we devel­oped this inter­ac­tive tool that lets you see what may lie ahead in the Unit­ed States and how much of a dif­fer­ence it could make if offi­cials act quick­ly.” Note that this is not pay­walled. Many promi­nent news orga­ni­za­tions have kind­ly made their pan­dem­ic news freely avail­able.
    • Why it’s so hard to pin down the risk of dying from coro­n­avirus (Marc Lip­sitch, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Sev­er­al esti­mates have sug­gest­ed that the risk of dying, for those infect­ed with covid-19 and show­ing its flu-like symp­toms, is around 1 or 2 per­cent. Elder­ly adults have a con­sid­er­ably high­er risk of both becom­ing infect­ed and dying, as do peo­ple with com­pro­mised immune sys­tems. The esti­mates might change as new data arrive, but the range of 1 to 2 per­cent for fatal­i­ties among the symp­to­matic seems to be the con­sen­sus for now. The over­all fatal­i­ty rate for peo­ple infect­ed with covid-19 will be low­er — pos­si­bly much low­er — when we know how many peo­ple are infect­ed but asymp­to­matic.” The author is a Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gist. 
    • COVID-19 Event Risk Assess­ment Plan­ner (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Now here is the most impor­tant point. It’s the size of the group, not the num­ber of car­ri­ers that most dri­ves the result. For exam­ple, sup­pose our esti­mate of the num­ber of car­ri­ers if off by a fac­tor of 10–that is instead of 20,000 there are just 2000 car­ri­ers in the Unit­ed States. In this case, the prob­a­bil­i­ty of at least one car­ri­er at a big event of 100,000 drops not by a fac­tor of ten but just to 45%. In oth­er words, large events are a bad idea even in sce­nar­ios with just a small num­ber of car­ri­ers.” (source code for the embed­ded graph is at https://github.com/jsweitz/covid-19-event-risk-planner) The code and the graph come from a biol­o­gist at Geor­gia Tech and the expla­na­tion comes from an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Track­Coro­na — COVID-19 Track­er and Live Map — one of the peo­ple run­ning the web­site is a Stan­ford under­grad. 
    • Coro­n­avirus: Why You Must Act Now (Tomas Pueyo, Medi­um): “Coun­tries that act fast can reduce the num­ber of deaths by a fac­tor of ten. And that’s just count­ing the fatal­i­ty rate. Act­ing fast also dras­ti­cal­ly reduces the cas­es, mak­ing this even more of a no-brain­er.”
    • How Chi­na’s “Bat Woman” Hunt­ed Down Virus­es from SARS to the New Coro­n­avirus (Jane Qiu, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Shi—a virol­o­gist who is often called China’s ‘bat woman’ by her col­leagues because of her virus-hunt­ing expe­di­tions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the con­fer­ence she was attend­ing in Shang­hai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle.
    • $1 mil­lion plus in Emer­gent Ven­tures Prizes for coro­n­avirus work (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I believe that we should be using prizes to help inno­vate and com­bat the coro­n­avirus. When are prizes bet­ter than grants? The case for prizes is stronger when you don’t know who is like­ly to make the break­through, you val­ue the final out­put more than the process, there is an urgency to solu­tions (tal­ent devel­op­ment is too slow), suc­cess is rel­a­tive­ly easy to define, and efforts and invest­ments are like­ly to be under­com­pen­sat­ed. All of these apply to the threat from the coro­n­avirus.”
    • COVID-19 reduces eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty, which reduces pol­lu­tion, which saves lives. (Mar­shall Burke, G‑Feed): “…dis­rup­tion is only like­ly to increase in com­ing days in regions where the epi­dem­ic is just begin­ning. Strange­ly, this dis­rup­tion could also have unex­pect­ed health ben­e­fits — and these ben­e­fits could be quite large in cer­tain parts of the world.” Real­i­ty is com­pli­cat­ed.
    • How social dis­tanc­ing for coro­n­avirus could cause a lone­li­ness epi­dem­ic (Ezra Klein, Vox): “Make no mis­take: The rapid imple­men­ta­tion of social dis­tanc­ing is nec­es­sary to flat­ten the coro­n­avirus curve and pre­vent the cur­rent pan­dem­ic from wors­en­ing. But just as the coro­n­avirus fall­out threat­ens to cause an eco­nom­ic reces­sion, it’s also going to cause what we might call a “social reces­sion”: a col­lapse in social con­tact that is par­tic­u­lar­ly hard on the pop­u­la­tions most vul­ner­a­ble to iso­la­tion and lone­li­ness — old­er adults and peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties or pre­ex­ist­ing health con­di­tions.”
    • The effect of trav­el restric­tions on the spread of the 2019 nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) out­break (Chi­nazzi et al, Sci­ence): “The trav­el quar­an­tine around Wuhan has only mod­est­ly delayed the epi­dem­ic spread to oth­er areas of Main­land Chi­na…. The mod­el indi­cates that while the Wuhan trav­el ban was ini­tial­ly effec­tive at reduc­ing inter­na­tion­al case impor­ta­tions, the num­ber of cas­es observed out­side Main­land Chi­na will resume its growth after 2–3 weeks from cas­es that orig­i­nat­ed else­where.”
  3. Keep It Sim­ple (Ed Fes­er, First Things): “Math­e­mat­ics appears to describe a realm of enti­ties with qua­si-­di­vine attrib­ut­es. The series of nat­ur­al num­bers is infi­nite. That one and one equal two and two and two equal four could not have been oth­er­wise. Such math­e­mat­i­cal truths nev­er begin being true or cease being true; they hold eter­nal­ly and immutably. The lines, planes, and fig­ures stud­ied by the geome­ter have a kind of per­fec­tion that the objects of our ­expe­ri­ence lack. Math­e­mat­i­cal objects seem ­imma­te­r­i­al and known by pure rea­son rather than through the sens­es.” This is a very inter­est­ing review of a book by William Lane Craig.
  4. Con­cern­ing Woody Allen:
    • Woody Allen: Issues and Prin­ci­ples (Steven Brust, per­son­al blog): “Pre­sump­tion of inno­cence in the courts is the legal reflec­tion of the prin­ci­ple that we need to be cer­tain some­one is guilty before inflict­ing pun­ish­ment, that, ‘it is bet­ter 10 guilty men go free than one inno­cent man be pun­ished.’ The prin­ci­ple pre-dates its legal reflec­tion, which, in West­ern soci­ety, we can find in sixth Cen­tu­ry Rome, as well as both Tal­mu­dic and Islam­ic law. The prin­ci­ple has always been fought for by the oppressed, and for good rea­son: it is the oppressed who are most vul­ner­a­ble, and most like­ly to be abused both by the legal sys­tem and bour­geois pub­lic opin­ion. Those who want to chuck the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence, whether in law or in the pub­lic are­na, are doing the work of the oppres­sors.” The author is a social­ist, which I men­tion because the next author is very con­ser­v­a­tive. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion. 
    • The Woody Allen Witch Hunt (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But we are not sup­posed to live in a soci­ety in which some­one who has mere­ly been accused of a hor­ri­ble thing finds him­self unable to pub­lish a book telling his side of the sto­ry, or silenced because the cul­tur­al winds have shift­ed. Thir­ty years ago, or less, chil­dren who made accu­sa­tions against pow­er­ful men were not believed. Women too. It is not progress to go from dis­be­liev­ing women and chil­dren as a mat­ter of course to believ­ing them reflex­ive­ly. We think we are advanc­ing jus­tice, but real­ly we are just rear­rang­ing our prej­u­dices.” The author is a very con­ser­v­a­tive, which I men­tion because the pre­vi­ous author is a social­ist. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion.
  5. How Many Nones Are There? Maybe More than We Thought (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “When you com­pare those who say they have “no reli­gion” in the GSS, to those who say they are either athe­ist, agnos­tic, or noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar in the CCES, a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence emerges…. The upshot is this: the share of Amer­i­cans who have no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion is near­ly a third of the Unit­ed States, not the 23.1% fig­ure which comes from the GSS.”

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 Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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.