Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 130

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. There is a small but vocal group of skep­tics who claim that Jesus nev­er exist­ed. Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, a pro­fes­sor of ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, takes them down in a series of blog posts.
    • Why The Myth­i­cal Jesus Claim Has No Trac­tion With Schol­ars (Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, per­son­al blog): “The attempts to deny Jesus’ his­tor­i­cal exis­tence are, for any­one acquaint­ed with the rel­e­vant evi­dence, bla­tant­ly sil­ly.”
    • Focus, Focus, Focus! (Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, per­son­al blog): “Anoth­er read­er seems great­ly exer­cised over how much of the Jesus-tra­di­tion Paul recounts in his let­ters, and how much Paul may have known…. Paul ascribes to Jesus a human birth, a min­istry among fel­low Jews, an exe­cu­tion specif­i­cal­ly by Roman cru­ci­fix­ion, named/known sib­lings, and oth­er named indi­vid­u­als who were Jesus’ orig­i­nal com­pan­ions (e.g., Kephas/Peter, John Zebedee).  Indeed, in Paul’s view, it was essen­tial that Jesus is a real human, for the res­ur­rect­ed Jesus is Paul’s mod­el and pro­to-type of the final redemp­tion that Paul believes God will bestow on all who align them­selves with Jesus.”
    • Gee, Dr. Car­ri­er, You’re Real­ly Upset! (Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, per­son­al blog): “This exam­ple will ade­quate­ly serve to illus­trate why Carrier’s work hasn’t had any impact in schol­ar­ly cir­cles.  He gets him­self into a mud­dle.”
  2. Four Ques­tions About Amer­i­can Great­ness (Bret Stephens, New York Times): Dif­fi­cult to excerpt but good. Stephens says Amer­i­ca is great and that to retain our great­ness we must have a prop­er atti­tude toward immi­grants, inde­pen­dent think­ing, fail­ure, and glob­al lead­er­ship. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend — thank you!
  3. A Police Killing With­out a Hint of Racism (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “No unjust killing of a black per­son should go uncov­ered. But I sus­pect it would be in everyone’s inter­est if jour­nal­ists and activists paid more atten­tion to egre­gious police killings of white peo­ple. If you’re hor­ri­fied by Daniel Shaver’s untime­ly death, yet against Black Lives Mat­ter, con­sid­er that Shaver might well be alive if only the Mesa police depart­ment had long ago adopt­ed reforms of the sort that Black Lives Mat­ter sug­gests.” There is a fol­low-up arti­cle — Footage Of A Police Shoot­ing Jurors Chose Not To Pun­ish.
  4. The world is rely­ing on a flawed psy­cho­log­i­cal test to fight racism (Olivia Gold­hill, Quartz): “meta-analy­ses showed that the [Implic­it Asso­ci­a­tion Test] is no bet­ter at pre­dict­ing dis­crim­i­na­to­ry behav­ior (includ­ing microag­gres­sions) than explic­it mea­sures of explic­it bias, such as the Mod­ern Racism Scale, which eval­u­ates racism sim­ply by ask­ing par­tic­i­pants to state their lev­el of agree­ment with [racist state­ments].”
  5. Sur­vey: Evan­gel­i­cal Label, Beliefs Often At Odds (Bob Smi­etana, Bap­tist Press): “Few­er than half of those who iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cals (45 per­cent) strong­ly agree with core evan­gel­i­cal beliefs…. Only two-thirds (69 per­cent) of evan­gel­i­cals by belief self-iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cals.” This is impor­tant to remem­ber both when read­ing the news and when talk­ing with oth­ers — the label evan­gel­i­cal does­n’t mean what it should. Use­ful­ly illus­trat­ed in visu­al form on Twit­ter.
  6. The Ori­gin of Sil­i­con Valley’s Dys­func­tion­al Atti­tude Toward Hate Speech (Noam Cohen, The New York­er): “Cen­sor­ing a news­group, he explained to those who might not be famil­iar with Usenet, was like pulling a book from cir­cu­la­tion. Since ‘Mein Kampf’ was still on the library shelves, it was hard to imag­ine how any­thing else mer­it­ed removal.” The arti­cle is about Stan­ford, and it led me to entire­ly dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions than the author intend­ed.
  7. The Church’s Fate Is Not Elec­toral: Our Roy Moore Moment (Greg Forster, Gospel Coali­tion): ”There are no Flight 93 moments for the church; there nev­er have been and nev­er will be. Cer­tain­ly God’s peo­ple will con­tin­ue to face per­se­cu­tion from world­ly pow­ers, as we always have. But the idea that we have to com­pro­mise moral stan­dards in order to pre­vent the destruc­tion of the church reflects an appalling fail­ure to grasp where the church’s fate real­ly lies. The church’s fate is not elec­toral; it’s escha­to­log­i­cal. The church’s tri­umph over its ene­mies comes with the King’s return.”
  8. The Supreme Court heard argu­ments on Tues­day about the Col­orado bak­er who refus­es to bake cakes for events he find objec­tion­able — includ­ing gay wed­dings.
    • Argu­ment analy­sis: Con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty lean­ing toward rul­ing for Col­orado bak­er (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog): “Although mak­ing pre­dic­tions based on oral argu­ment is always dan­ger­ous, it seemed very pos­si­ble that there are five votes for Phillips among the court’s more con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tices, even if it is less clear how broad­ly they will rule.”
    • A Baker’s First Amend­ment Rights (Robert P. George and Sherif Gir­gis, New York Times): “You need the First Amend­ment pre­cise­ly when your ideas offend oth­ers or flout the majority’s ortho­dox­ies. And then it pro­tects more than your free­dom to speak your mind; it guards your free­dom not to speak the mind of anoth­er.”
    • We’re lawyers who sup­port same-sex mar­riage. We also sup­port the Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop bak­er. (Dou­glas Lay­cock & Thomas Berg, Vox): “The case tests the nation’s com­mit­ment to lib­er­ty and jus­tice for all. And we aren’t doing well on the part about ‘for all.’ Too many Amer­i­cans, left and right, reli­gious and sec­u­lar, want lib­er­ty for their own side in the cul­ture wars, but not for the oth­er side.” The authors are not just lawyers — they are pro­fes­sors of con­sti­tu­tion­al law.
    • How Not To Advance Gay Mar­riage (David Brooks, New York Times): “If you want to know why we have such a polar­ized, angry and bit­ter soci­ety, one rea­son is we take every dis­agree­ment that could be addressed in con­ver­sa­tion and com­mu­ni­ty and we turn it into a law­suit. We take every moral­ly sup­ple sit­u­a­tion and we hand it over to the legal priest­hood, which by neces­si­ty is a sys­tem of tech­no­crat­ic ratio­nal­ism, strained slip­pery-slope analo­gies and implied coer­cion.”

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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).

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

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