Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 226

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. I’m a Cli­mate Sci­en­tist Who Believes in God. Hear Me Out. (Katharine Hay­hoe, New York Times): “…I believe that evan­gel­i­cals who take the Bible seri­ous­ly already care about cli­mate change (although they might not real­ize it). Cli­mate change will strike hard against the very peo­ple we’re told to care for and love, ampli­fy­ing hunger and pover­ty, and increas­ing risks of resource scarci­ty that can exac­er­bate polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty, and even cre­ate or wors­en refugee crises.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Texas Tech and, as it hap­pens, spoke at Stan­ford last night.
2. Split the Cedars of Lebanon: Evan­gel­i­cals Bal­ance Prayer, Protest, and Pol­i­tics in Ongo­ing Upris­ing (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There can be no uni­ty with pro­test­ers curs­ing and hurl­ing hatred at the polit­i­cal class, he said, urg­ing Chris­t­ian sep­a­ra­tion from such behav­ior. If cit­i­zens are unsat­is­fied, they should vote their offi­cials out. And as for the eco­nom­ic trou­bles, he believes a great God will take care of their needs. Oth­er pas­tors have endorsed demon­stra­tions as a vehi­cle for change. Some have called for prayer and fast­ing. Either way, many of the pre­vi­ous­ly apo­lit­i­cal have become engaged.”
3. The New Par­ty of the Rich (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “The rich­est 15 per­cent of House dis­tricts are now rep­re­sent­ed by 56 Democ­rats and just 10 Repub­li­cans. In 2018, vot­ers in America’s wealth­i­est coun­ties, cities, and neigh­bor­hoods made a deci­sive turn toward the Democ­rats, and now America’s tra­di­tion­al par­ty of the left—whether it admits it or not—is the par­ty of the rich.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.
4. How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal.
5. The Church, inten­sive kin­ship, and glob­al psy­cho­log­i­cal vari­a­tion (Schulz et al, Sci­ence): “…we pro­pose that the West­ern Church (i.e., the branch of Chris­tian­i­ty that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) trans­formed Euro­pean kin­ship struc­tures dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages and that this trans­for­ma­tion was a key fac­tor behind a shift towards a WEIRD­er psychology.” This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.
   • Relat­ed: Can the Catholic Church Help Explain West­ern Psy­chol­o­gy? (Drew Pen­der­grass, Har­vard Mag­a­zine) — a non-aca­d­e­m­ic sum­ma­ry of the research.
   • Relat­ed: a Twit­ter thread from Tage Rai, a post­doc at MIT
   • Relat­ed: the com­ments at Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion
6. It’s Offi­cial: Pres­i­dent Trump Has Tweet­ed More Words Than James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Chris Wil­son, Time): “In the 1,020 days since he took office, Pres­i­dent Trump’s Twit­ter account has post­ed 266,055 words. Ulysses, which runs about 780 pages, has 264,564. That’s using the same mea­sure of count­ing words with the freely avail­able dig­i­tal ver­sion of the tome on Project Guten­berg. (How one counts words is slight­ly fun­gi­ble depend­ing on, for exam­ple, on how one con­sid­ers hyphens and con­trac­tions, but my fig­ure is very close to var­i­ous oth­er tal­lies).” Wow. That’s a lot of words.
7. The Dan­gers of Flu­ent Lec­tures (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “The study, involv­ing Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty under­grad­u­ates in large, intro­duc­to­ry physics class­es, com­pared stu­dents’ self reports about what they’d learned with what they’d actu­al­ly learned, as deter­mined by a mul­ti­ple choice tests. Stu­dents were taught using exact­ly the same course mate­ri­als — a key con­trol that many oth­er stud­ies com­par­ing active ver­sus pas­sive learn­ing have failed to estab­lish. But one group learned via active instruc­tion meth­ods for a week at the end of the semes­ter and the oth­er learned via lec­tures from expe­ri­enced and well-regard­ed instruc­tors.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. See a relat­ed link back in vol­ume 218.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Get­ting Off Suc­cess Moun­tain (Pearls Before Swine)
• The Talk (SMBC)
• Dark Mat­ter Iden­ti­fied (Dil­bert)
• Real­is­tic draw­ing of a drop of water (Gfy­cat): the end is quite star­tling
• Facts don’t care about your feel­ings, but they def­i­nite­ly care about your midterms (Stan­ford Dai­ly)
• Fires, pow­er out­ages, norovirus: Stan­ford hit hard with bib­li­cal plagues (Stan­ford Dai­ly)
• Mil­len­ni­al Wish­es There Were Some His­tor­i­cal Exam­ples Of Social­ism We Could Study To Have Some Idea How It Might Turn Out (Baby­lon Bee)
• Cop On Lap­top Pro­tect­ing Com­mu­ni­ty From Dri­vers On Cell Phones (Baby­lon Bee)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire), an essay built on this insight: “Thinking can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” (first shared in vol­ume 2)

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. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.