Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 186

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. Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter)
  2. Engi­neers of the Soul: Ide­ol­o­gy in Xi Jin­ping’s Chi­na (John Gar­naut, Sinocism): “In clas­si­cal Chi­nese state­craft there are two tools for gain­ing and main­tain­ing con­trol over “the moun­tains and the rivers”: The first is wu (weapons, vio­lence — æ­¦) and the sec­ond is wen (lan­guage, cul­ture — æ–‡). Chi­nese lead­ers have always believed that pow­er derives from con­trol­ling both the phys­i­cal bat­tle­field and the cul­tur­al domain. You can’t sus­tain phys­i­cal pow­er with­out dis­cur­sive pow­er. Wu and wen go hand-in-hand.”
  3. A Strange Argu­ment for the Com­mon­place (Cato Unbound, Agnes Callard): “We should not equal­ize the rich and poor, but rather endeav­or to make the poor of tomor­row wealth­i­er than the rich of today.” I’m includ­ing this link most­ly because of that quote. Also because it has some com­men­tary on Peter Singer which dove­tails with a con­ver­sa­tion I had ear­li­er this week.
  4. Most Teenagers Drop Out of Church as Young Adults (Aaron Earls, Life­way Research ): “Almost half (47 per­cent) of those who dropped out and attend­ed col­lege say mov­ing to col­lege played a role in their no longer attend­ing church for at least a year…. Among all those who dropped out, 29 per­cent say they planned on tak­ing a break from church once they grad­u­at­ed high school. Sev­en in 10 (71 per­cent) say their leav­ing wasn’t an inten­tion­al deci­sion.”
    • The title is a bit mis­lead­ing. Yes, a major­i­ty of young adults who pre­vi­ous­ly attend­ed church do stop attend­ing church for at least one year between the ages of 18–22, but if you look at their under­ly­ing research about 70% even­tu­al­ly start attend­ing again. Also, it doesn’t seem to ask whether any of these peo­ple were involved in an activ­i­ty that they might not char­ac­ter­ize as church (like Chi Alpha or Inter­var­si­ty). I know some of my Chi Alpha stu­dents are not cur­rent­ly wor­ship­ing with a Sun­day morn­ing con­gre­ga­tion, but it would be wrong to infer that their faith has been put on pause.
  5. Have Aliens Found Us? A Har­vard Astronomer on the Mys­te­ri­ous Inter­stel­lar Object ‘Oumua­mua (Isaac Chotin­er, New York­er): “Last year, I wrote a paper about cos­mol­o­gy where there was an unusu­al result, which showed that per­haps the gas in the uni­verse was much cold­er than we expect­ed. And so we pos­tu­lat­ed that maybe dark mat­ter has some prop­er­ty that makes the gas cool­er. And nobody cares, nobody is wor­ried about it, no one says it is not sci­ence. Every­one says that is mainstream—to con­sid­er dark mat­ter, a sub­stance we have nev­er seen. That’s com­plete­ly fine. It doesn’t both­er any­one. But when you men­tion the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there could be equip­ment out there that is com­ing from anoth­er civilization—which, to my mind, is much less spec­u­la­tive, because we have already sent things into space—then that is regard­ed as unsci­en­tif­ic.”
    • I am skep­ti­cal, but I find the con­ver­sa­tion fas­ci­nat­ing. Relat­ed: an arti­cle on the Fer­mi para­dox I shared back in vol­ume 159 and an arti­cle on gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tion of UFO reports from vol­ume 132.
  6. The mar­vel of the human dad (Anna Machin, Aeon): “But cru­cial­ly, dad has not evolved to be the mir­ror to mum, a male moth­er, so to speak. Evo­lu­tion hates redun­dan­cy and will not select for roles that dupli­cate each oth­er if one type of indi­vid­ual can ful­fil the role alone. Rather, dad’s role has evolved to com­ple­ment mum’s.” Dr. Machin is a pro­fes­sor of evo­lu­tion­ary anthro­pol­o­gy at Oxford.
  7. The Virtue Sig­nalers Won’t Change the World (John McWhort­er, The Atlantic): “Just as the first and sec­ond waves of both fem­i­nism and antiracism trans­formed social struc­tures, third-wave antiracism may seem par­al­lel to third-wave fem­i­nism in mov­ing on to a dif­fer­ent form of abuse, psy­cho­log­i­cal rather than insti­tu­tion­al. But this focus on the psy­cho­log­i­cal has mor­phed, of late, from a prag­mat­ic mis­sion to change minds into a witch hunt dri­ven by the per­son­al ben­e­fits of virtue sig­nal­ing, obsessed with uncon­scious and sub­con­scious bias. As noble as this cul­ture of sham­ing gen­uine­ly seems to many, it’s a dead end.”
    • A use­ful, detailed fol­low-up: The Per­ils of a Psy­cho­log­i­cal Approach to Anti-racism (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “If the phe­nom­e­non McWhort­er described is real, we should be able to find left­ists who intend to fight bias by call­ing out psy­cho­log­i­cal harms, only to fall into ‘hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ty, over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, and even a degree of per­for­mance’ as par­tic­i­pants sig­nal virtue in ways that help no one.”

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 Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

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.

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