Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 243

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. Recov­er­ing Friend­ship (Devo­rah Gold­man, Pub­lic Dis­course): “And then you go at it, ham­mer and tongs, far into the night, night after night; or walk­ing through fine coun­try that nei­ther gives a glance to, each learn­ing the weight of the other’s punch­es, and often more like mutu­al­ly respect­ful ene­mies than friends. Actu­al­ly (though it nev­er seems so at the time) you mod­i­fy one another’s thought; out of this per­pet­u­al dog­fight a com­mu­ni­ty of mind and a deep affec­tion emerge.”
  2. In God We Divide (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “The more reli­gious­ly engaged a white vot­er is, the more like­ly he or she will be a Repub­li­can; the less reli­gious the vot­er, the more like­ly to be a Demo­c­rat. But, as we shall see it’s not that sim­ple: The deep­er you go, the more com­plex it gets.”
    • Note the adjec­tive “white” in the first sen­tence — almost all dis­cus­sion about the pol­i­tics of reli­gious peo­ple focus­es on white vot­ers. The piece lat­er acknowl­edges vot­ers of col­or but doesn’t explore how their faith influ­ences their votes. Instead non-white evan­gel­i­cals are usu­al­ly treat­ed as though faith is irrel­e­vant to their polit­i­cal views, which is absurd. All that to say: the arti­cle has inter­est­ing insights but bear in mind its crip­pling lim­i­ta­tion.
  3. Is Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal in Israel Myth? Or Real­i­ty? (Ralph Hawkins, Logos): “When I was work­ing on my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion about the Ebal site, I spent a week with Zer­tal. One morn­ing while we were dri­ving to the site, he told me his crit­ics had accused him of try­ing to prove the Bible. They said he imposed a cul­tic inter­pre­ta­tion onto the stone struc­ture he had found. He explained, though, that he had been born and raised in Ein She­mer, Israeli kib­butz that was affil­i­at­ed with a sec­u­lar move­ment. He said he had grown up believ­ing that the Bible was full of myths. When he did his grad­u­ate work in archae­ol­o­gy, he did it at Tel Aviv, the most lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, where those views were rein­forced. He insist­ed he had not embarked on his exca­va­tion at Mount Ebal in order to prove the Bible. What he found there, how­ev­er, had a pro­found effect on him. He said, ‘I became a believ­er at Mount Ebal.’”
    • I love sto­ries like this. Archae­ol­o­gy and the Bible is fas­ci­nat­ing to me.
  4. Chris­tian­i­ty & Coro­n­avirus
    • When Coro­na Makes Us More Like The New Tes­ta­ment (Andrew Wil­son, Think The­ol­o­gy): “In a num­ber of curi­ous ways, the Coro­n­avirus out­break is mak­ing us more like the New Tes­ta­ment church.” See also Sam Allberry’s Twit­ter thread about God’s Pur­pos­es In Pan­dem­ic. It reminds me of Num­bers 11:18–20.
    • Coro­n­avirus, Courage, and the Sec­ond Temp­ta­tion of Christ (David French, The Dis­patch): “Shun per­for­ma­tive reck­less­ness. Do not pre­sume that our faith makes us immune to the laws of biol­o­gy and viral trans­mis­sion. At the same time, believ­ers should not shrink from pur­pose­ful and sac­ri­fi­cial per­son­al risk. There may come a time when you must care for those who are sick. Do so with­out reser­va­tion, but do so pru­dent­ly with the knowl­edge that you should not impute your risks to oth­ers.”
    • Can­celed Mis­sion Trips Expect­ed to Have Long-Term Fall­out (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Approx­i­mate­ly 20 per­cent of all US-based inter­na­tion­al mis­sion work each year is done by short-term vol­un­teers, accord­ing to an analy­sis by soci­ol­o­gist of reli­gion Robert Wuth­now. That trans­lates to 1.6 mil­lion US church mem­bers annu­al­ly going on inter­na­tion­al mis­sion trips and doing work val­ued at $1.1 bil­lion (not count­ing prepa­ra­tion time and trav­el days).”
    • Church as a Non-Essen­tial Ser­vice (Matthew Schmitz, First Things): “Judg­ing by the response of many reli­gious lead­ers, church is a non-essen­tial ser­vice. We are capa­ble of tak­ing pru­dent mea­sures to keep our super­mar­kets open, but not our sanc­tu­ar­ies. Coro­n­avirus has shown what we val­ue. In Penn­syl­va­nia, beer dis­trib­u­tors are deemed essen­tial. In San Fran­cis­co and New York, cannabis dis­pen­saries are.” This is actu­al­ly a con­tri­bu­tion to an online dust­up but I find it more inter­est­ing than the dis­pute itself.
    • Dig­i­tal Com­mu­nion: His­to­ry, The­ol­o­gy, and Prac­tices (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “A few weeks ago, I post­ed a graph­ic that attempts to show that the ele­ments of a ser­vice that are trans­ac­tion­al or broad­cast ori­ent­ed are usu­al­ly the eas­i­est to move online, but the rela­tion­al parts of church are often the most challenging—and most overlooked—elements of dig­i­tal church.”
    • In Leviti­cus, an unex­pect­ed les­son in sur­viv­ing quar­an­tine (Rachel Sha­ran­sky Danziger, For­ward): “Before, I could nev­er under­stand why we should learn in so much detail about every lit­tle rit­u­al in the Taber­na­cle, and who does what, and when. Now, as I work hard to make our new­ly claus­tro­pho­bic home into a place of calm and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, I under­stand the book’s insis­tence on such details.” A Jew­ish per­spec­tive.
  5. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus Com­men­tary
    • That Dis­com­fort You’re Feel­ing Is Grief (Scott Beri­na­to, Har­vard Busi­ness Review): “There is some­thing pow­er­ful about nam­ing this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my cowork­ers I’m hav­ing a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emo­tions need motion. It’s impor­tant we acknowl­edge what we go through.”
      • Pas­toral aside: this is (some of) you. Paula and I have both talked to peo­ple who have been mourn­ing with­out real­iz­ing what they were doing. You are griev­ing. A few days ago I uploaded a two-minute video reflect­ing on Psalm 137:1 which touch­es on this.
    • Leisure in a Time of Coro­n­avirus (Nathan Schlueter, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Schools are closed. Sports and music lessons are can­celled. Every­one is at home. What are you going to do? Instead of allow­ing coro­n­avirus con­trol your life, why not plan for leisure? Use this time to do the things you are always wish­ing you had the time to do—or do bet­ter. Now you have that time, so do those things.”
    • Face Masks: Much More Than You Want­ed To Know (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Some peo­ple with swine flu trav­elled on a plane from New York to Chi­na, and many fel­low pas­sen­gers got infect­ed. Some researchers looked at whether pas­sen­gers who wore masks through­out the flight stayed health­i­er. The answer was very much yes. They were able to track down 9 peo­ple who got sick on the flight and 32 who didn’t. 0% of the sick pas­sen­gers wore masks, com­pared to 47% of the healthy pas­sen­gers. Anoth­er way to look at that is that 0% of mask-wear­ers got sick, but 35% of non-wear­ers did. This was a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence, and of obvi­ous applic­a­bil­i­ty to the cur­rent ques­tion.”
    • The Fog of Pan­dem­ic (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “The U.S. is fight­ing a war with extreme uncer­tain­ties. It may be weeks before we know whether we are flat­ten­ing the coro­n­avirus curve, and months before we know what kind of econ­o­my we’ll have in the sec­ond half of this year.”
    • When can we let up? Explor­ing how to relax coro­n­avirus lock­downs (Stat News): “The approach get­ting the most sup­port is one that experts have long doubt­ed could work with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus: aggres­sive case find­ing, con­tact trac­ing, com­mu­ni­ty sur­veil­lance, iso­la­tion of cas­es, and quar­an­ti­ning of con­tacts. Both Sin­ga­pore and South Korea used that, allow­ing them to make tac­ti­cal deci­sions about schools (most­ly open in both coun­tries) and pub­lic move­ment, spar­ing them from shut­ting down to the extent that the U.S. and many coun­tries in Europe have.”
    • Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic: We Need the Skep­tics (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “When a bad thing hap­pens to a good per­son, we are tempt­ed to rage at God. When innu­mer­able bad things hap­pen to half of every­one we know, we rage at each oth­er.”
    • On Coro­n­avirus, Rea­son To Hope (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): This week we saw FDA approval of new test­ing sys­tems from Roche and from Abbott labs that run tests ten times faster than cur­rent meth­ods. To give you an idea of what this means, Roche brags that their Cobas 8800 machine can process over 3000 tests per day. Until today, Louisiana hadn’t had a total of 3000 peo­ple test­ed. Roche is now mak­ing and ship­ping 400,000 test kits per week in the US, while Abbott is mak­ing a mil­lion of their test kits each week. Those sys­tems will be com­ing online this com­ing week…. And there are more com­pa­nies in the process of get­ting approval. In two weeks, we should be able to test 150,000 – 200,000 Amer­i­cans dai­ly, and that means that we don’t all need to stay home any­more.”
      • You can see the num­ber of tests admin­is­tered so far at The COVID Track­ing Project — this is one of the best indi­ca­tors to keep an eye on because it deter­mines the reli­a­bil­i­ty of every oth­er sta­tis­tic.
    • The World After Coro­n­avirus (Yuval Noah Harari, Finan­cial Times): “But tem­po­rary mea­sures have a nasty habit of out­last­ing emer­gen­cies, espe­cial­ly as there is always a new emer­gency lurk­ing on the hori­zon. My home coun­try of Israel, for exam­ple, declared a state of emer­gency dur­ing its 1948 War of Inde­pen­dence, which jus­ti­fied a range of tem­po­rary mea­sures from press cen­sor­ship and land con­fis­ca­tion to spe­cial reg­u­la­tions for mak­ing pud­ding (I kid you not). The War of Inde­pen­dence has long been won, but Israel nev­er declared the emer­gency over, and has failed to abol­ish many of the ‘tem­po­rary’ mea­sures of 1948 (the emer­gency pud­ding decree was mer­ci­ful­ly abol­ished in 2011).”
    • Safe­ty Pro­to­cols and Zones of Quar­an­tine (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In oth­er words, this part of the virus response should tran­si­tion to a health and safe­ty reg­u­la­to­ry con­cern that is impor­tant, but han­dled like most of the oth­ers. For exam­ple, poor food hygiene can also kill you, but gov­ern­ments gen­er­al­ly don’t respond by decid­ing which cuisines are essen­tial and which are not. Rather, any­one will­ing to fol­low the safe­ty rules can put up any menu they want. So it should be for eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties of all kinds.”

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 Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” First shared in vol­ume 150. 

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.

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