Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 163

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. China and its creepy facial recognition technology targets Uighur Muslims (Julia Duin, GetReligion): “China’s Muslims are akin to Germany’s Jews in the 1930s; a group of hapless people of a different religion that the government gets to experiment on. They’re already shoving roughly 800,000 Muslims into internment camps and other Muslims worldwide aren’t really noticing.” This is horrifying.
  2. There was quite the clamor recently about antisemitism at Stanford. 
    • Stanford Student Threatens Violence against Pro-Israel Students (Dov Greenburg, National Review): “In mid July, Hamzeh Daoud, a student at Stanford University, publicly posted on Facebook: ‘I’m gonna physically fight Zionists on campus next year.’ If his meaning wasn’t clear enough, Hamzeh continued, ‘And after I abolish your ass I’ll go ahead and work every day for the rest of my life to abolish your petty ass ethno-supremacist, settler-colonial state.’ While not reflective of Stanford’s values, the sentiment of this hateful post reveals the state of contemporary life on campuses.”
    • Daoud resigns from Norcliffe RA position (Julia Ingram and Holden Foreman, Stanford Daily): “Hamzeh Daoud ’20 has resigned from his Resident Assistant position in Norcliffe House, he announced in a statement to The Daily on Friday afternoon.”
    • Op Ed: Statement from Hamzeh Daoud (Hamzeh Daoud, Stanford Daily): “After spending a few hours away from Facebook, I read over my post again and realized how infused it was with the same hatred that has caused my own family so much suffering. It was the antithesis of why I chose this path in life. A sloppy comment made during an emotion-filled reaction to yet another layer of trauma, the comment did not convey my values, who I am currently, or who I hope to become.”
    • I know some of you know Hamzeh, so this probably feels a good deal more personal than many of the articles I share. Please remember that what you put on social media actually matters. James 1:19 is a useful memory verse for everyone with a Facebook or Twitter account: “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
  3. At Prayer Breakfast, Guests Seek Access to a Different Higher Power (Kenneth P. Vogel and Elizabeth Dias, New York Times): “Some describe the gathering as similar to the World Economic Forum, except that Jesus is the organizing principle….With its relative lack of diplomatic protocols and press coverage, the prayer breakfast setting is ideal for foreign figures who might not otherwise be able to easily get face time with top American officials, because of unsavory reputations or a lack of an official government perch, according to lobbyists who help arrange such trips. They also contend that it is easier to secure visas when the breakfast is listed as a destination.”
  4. Jeff Sessions announces a religious liberty task force to combat “dangerous” secularism (Tara Isabella Burton, Vox): “In a bold speech delivered at the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Summit, Sessions characterized the task force as a necessary step in facing down the prevailing forces of secularism. ‘A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom,’ he said, which ‘must be confronted and defeated.’” 
    • Related: Why Jeff Sessions thinks Christians are under siege in America (Christopher Shea interviews Nelson Tebbe, Vox): One part stood out to me: “The Supreme Court has not decided a religious freedom case in a way that’s adverse to the interest of Christians for the past few terms. I can’t think of a single religious freedom case that they’ve lost.”
    • The above point is very muddled. The things that keep going to the Supreme Court are precisely the things we have a problem with. Do you know what we don’t have a problem with? Cannibalism. We’ve got cultural consensus on that. But religious liberty? That keeps going to the courts and getting successfully appealed to the very top because local and state governments keep trying to violate it. It is a simple fact that significant voices in our culture view religious liberty with reactions ranging from suspicion to hostility. Examples abound (including these two Vox articles).
  5. How Catholic Bishops Are Shaping Health Care In Rural America (Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, FiveThirtyEight): “Best estimates suggest that one in six hospital beds and many of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems are Catholic-owned or ‑affiliated. From 2001 to 2016, the number of Catholic-affiliated hospitals in the U.S. grew by 22 percent, even as the total number of hospitals in the U.S. shrunk, according to research by MergerWatch and the American Civil Liberties Union.” 
    • A response: Standard Procedures (Leah Libresco Sargeant, First Things): “When she lays out my options, there really is just one option: the standard of reproductive care. But I have two reasons to say no: I am a Catholic and I am a statistician. It was faith and reason, the two ways of knowing that St. John Paul II called the ‘two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth,’ that led me to dig in my heels during my third miscarriage.” FYI: the author used to write for FiveThirtyEight.
    • Another response: What FiveThirtyEight gets wrong about Catholic hospitals (Stephanie Slade, America Magazine): “That the A.C.L.U. threw away its commitment to religious freedom in the name of abortion rights is bad enough. A journalistic enterprise as ostensibly sane and data-driven as FiveThirtyEightshould think twice before following the same path.”
  6. “Hypnotic Mass Phenomena” (Florian Schwab interview with Peter Thiel, Die Weltwoche): “The advanced technological civilization of the early 21st century is a complicated world where it is not possible for anybody to think through everything for themselves. You cannot be a polymath in quite the way people were in the 18th century enlightenments. You cannot be like Goethe. So there is some need to listen to experts, to defer to other people. And then, there is always the danger of that going too far and people not thinking critically. This happens in spades in Silicon Valley.”
  7. Spies Are More Common, and Boring, Than You Think (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion): “John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, admitted in 2006 that the U.S. was deploying about 100,000 spies around the world. Given that the U.S. is the world’s technology and military leader, and yet has a relatively small share of global population, is it so crazy to think the number of people spying on us is larger than that?”

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 The Weight of Glory (C.S. Lewis): It was originally preached as a sermon and then printed in a theology magazine. Related: see the C. S. Lewis Doodle YouTube channel – it’s really good! (first shared in volume 36)

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.

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