Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 20

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

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

With­out fur­ther ado, I give you the inter­est­ing things:

1. From the Glen-allud­ed-to-this-in-his-ser­mon depart­ment:
   • The David Fos­ter Wal­lace com­mence­ment address I quot­ed: This Is Water (pdf, the bit I quot­ed is on page 7). There is also a youtube ver­sion — jump to 17:54.
   • The researcher I quot­ed is Justin Bar­rett. The quote I read was from Chil­dren Are Born Believ­ers in God, Aca­d­e­m­ic Claims, with a fas­ci­nat­ing fol­low-up: Let’s Stick To The Sci­ence (which is a rebut­tal to crit­i­cism of Barrett’s research).
2. From the cur­rent events depart­ment
   • Boy, 12, among dozen tor­tured and cru­cifed by ISIS in lat­est atroc­i­ty, says aid group (Fox News). Bad stuff is hap­pen­ing.
   • South Car­oli­na Church­es Are Doing More Than Pray­ing For Flood Vic­tims (Huff­in­g­ton Post). Good stuff is hap­pen­ing in the midst of bad stuff.
   • ‘Embrace This Pain,’ Pas­tor Urges After Ore­gon Shoot­ings (LA Times). The pastor’s daugh­ter was one of the shoot­ing vic­tims (she was not killed, mere­ly wound­ed).
3. From the all-things-sex­u­al depart­ment:
   • I assume you have already seen the Stan­ford study. You might not have looked at the sim­i­lar nation­al study which came out recent­ly. You can read a sum­ma­ry (Near­ly 1 in 4 Col­lege Women Say They Have Been Sex­u­al­ly Assault­ed, Sur­vey Finds, Inside High­er Ed) or the full thing: Report on the AAU Cam­pus Cli­mate Sur­vey on Sex­u­al Assault and Sex­u­al Mis­con­duct (it’s a PDF). The authors state in the arti­cle that they have like­ly over­es­ti­mat­ed the preva­lence of sex­u­al assault because of self-selec­tion bias in the respons­es and do not know by how much. On a relat­ed note (from before this study was released), Megan McAr­dle — What We Don’t Know About False Claims of Rape.
   • Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty May Be Caused By Chem­i­cal Mod­i­fi­ca­tions to DNA (Sci­ence News, Michael Bal­ter). The study is not con­clu­sive, but is the kind of find­ing I would expect based on the research to date.
   • The Down­fall of the Ex-Gay Move­ment (The Atlantic, Jonathan Mer­ritt). Towards the end the arti­cle assumes that reject­ing a tech­nique is equiv­a­lent to reject­ing a hope. I know many min­istries that don’t believe in repar­a­tive ther­a­py that nonethe­less believe in trans­for­ma­tion. See, for exam­ple, No ‘ther­a­py’, but Jesus can change LGBT lives, say evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers (Reli­gion News Ser­vice, Cathy Lynn Gross­man).
   • Worth read­ing — Evan­gel­i­cals Won’t Cave (First Things, Rus­sell Moore): The sec­ond through sixth para­graphs are espe­cial­ly good. I see peo­ple mak­ing the mis­take he refers to con­stant­ly.
4. From the Stan­ford depart­ment: this Dai­ly op-ed caught my eye: Peti­tion To Stu­dent Activ­i­ties and Lead­er­ship to End Open Mem­ber­ship. There was a swift nuh-uh from the admin­is­tra­tion. The peti­tion itself is on change.org. For the record, Chi Alpha has no desire to exclude peo­ple from our min­istry. I do, how­ev­er, think that Stanford’s open mem­ber­ship pol­i­cy need­less­ly abridges stu­dents’ con­sti­tu­tion­al right to free­dom of asso­ci­a­tion. As a pri­vate insti­tu­tion, Stan­ford is allowed to do that… but it is unwise to do so.

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.