Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 17

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world.

To that end, on Fri­days I’ve been shar­ing articles/resources I have found help­ful recent­ly in think­ing about broad­er cul­tur­al and soci­etal issues (be sure to see the dis­claimer at the bot­tom). May these give you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar. Past emails are archived at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links

1. Fear (Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, NY Review Of Books): I don’t often find overt­ly the­o­log­i­cal pieces in the New York Review of Books, much less ones whose open­ing lines are, “Amer­i­ca is a Chris­t­ian coun­try. This is true in a num­ber of sens­es.” She’s gonna get some hate mail.
2. Some things that made me chuck­le:
   • xkcd: Unset­tling Gift (cf. Psalm 90:12)
   • Dil­bert: Char­ac­ter
   • The Ig Nobel awards were held last night. Behold the 2015 win­ners.
   • A news reporter los­es it when try­ing to report on a pig named Chris P. Bacon.
3. Why Do Good Uni­ver­si­ties Tend To Be Good At Every­thing? (Quo­ra ques­tion): Short but insight­ful.
4. What Stan­ford Taught Me About Grace (Seth Vil­le­gas, per­son­al blog): Seth is an alum­nus of our min­istry who is cur­rent­ly doing grad work at Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary.
5. Reli­gion and the Repub­lic (David Forte, With­er­spoon Insti­tute): the author (a law pro­fes­sor) explains the impor­tance of reli­gious speech in the pub­lic square. This seems like a good place to men­tion one of my favorite aca­d­e­m­ic papers: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy.
6. From the I‑know-I-shared-this-last-week-but-want-to-share-it-with-the-new-stu­dents depart­ment: How To Stay Chris­t­ian On Cam­pus (David Math­is, Desir­ing God): I expect­ed some­thing very dif­fer­ent than what I got. Rec­om­mend­ed.

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.