Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 263

this one is short­er than nor­mal

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. Pan­demics Aren’t New—Just Look at Plagues in the Bible (Karen Engle, Logos): “With coro­n­avirus on everyone’s mind, ques­tions abound of whether the word ‘pan­dem­ic’ appears in the Bible, too. The short answer is no—’pandemic’ is not in the Bible. How­ev­er, the words “plague” and ‘pesti­lence’ are (no less than 122 times) and often ref­er­ence indi­vid­u­als or nations afflict­ed with a ter­ri­ble ill­ness.”
  2. ‘Chris­tian­i­ty Will Have Pow­er’ (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “‘Trump’s an out­sider, like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is. Is he a man of integri­ty? Absolute­ly not,’ he went on. ‘Does he stand up for some of our moral Chris­t­ian val­ues? Yes.’ The guys agreed. ‘I’m not going to say he’s a Chris­t­ian, but he just doesn’t attack us,’ his friend Jason Mul­der said.” Need­less­ly snarky at times, but one of the rare mus­ings on evan­gel­i­cal Trump sup­port in a promi­nent media source that gets a lot of things right.
    • An inter­est­ing counter-per­spec­tive: Chris­tians want pow­er? Sioux Cen­ter push­es back on New York Times sto­ry (Lee Pitts, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Our church small group [in Sioux Cen­ter] is more diverse than my small groups in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. We enjoy the com­pa­ny of three peo­ple from Mex­i­co, a gen­tle­man from Paraguay, a woman from Japan, an engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor from Ghana and a cou­ple orig­i­nal­ly from that exot­ic place called South Car­oli­na (that’s me). In fact, out of our 12-mem­ber small group, only two orig­i­nal­ly hail from North­west Iowa. Mean­while my D.C. small groups fea­tured all upper mid­dle-class White peo­ple most­ly sport­ing advanced degrees and flashy jobs inside the Belt­way. But the stereo­type would reverse that. My Sioux Cen­ter small group should be all White and my D.C. one would sure­ly be full of diver­si­ty, right? Wrong.” This arti­cle doesn’t real­ly rebut many of the reli­gious claims of the NY Times arti­cle, but it does under­cut some of the cul­tur­al ones.
  3. Wok­e­ness: old reli­gion in a new bot­tle (Sean Collins, Spiked): “What we’re see­ing now is an ampli­fi­ca­tion of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that has no out­let. There’s no way to see peo­ple kneel­ing, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or sway­ing while they hold up can­dles, and avoid acknowl­edg­ing that it’s dri­ven by a spir­i­tu­al desire. I per­ceived this when I wrote about Occu­py Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that is man­i­fest­ing itself more vio­lent­ly. Because to the post-Protes­tants, the world is an out­rage and we are all sin­ners.”
  4. How Megachurch­es Spent Coro­n­avirus Relief Funds (Luke Scorziell, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Accord­ing to Vaughn’s account­ing, the church spent 93 per­cent of the mon­ey on pay­roll. The addi­tion­al 7 per­cent went to rent and util­i­ties. The PPP rules say loans will be con­vert­ed to grants if 75 per­cent of the funds are used for pay­roll and the rest for spec­i­fied needs, includ­ing rent and util­i­ties. The mon­ey helped with more than just pay­ing the bills, how­ev­er. Because Palm Valley’s staff didn’t have to wor­ry about their job secu­ri­ty, they were able to focus ful­ly on car­ing for the church in the pan­dem­ic, Vaughn said.”
  5. Abol­ish the Police? Those Who Sur­vived the Chaos in Seat­tle Aren’t So Sure (Nel­lie Bowles, New York Times): “Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own may­or that the protests in his home­town were peace­ful, with ‘a block par­ty atmos­phere.’ But that was not what he saw through the win­dows of his Seat­tle cof­fee shop.”
    • Relat­ed: replac­ing police with social work­ers (Jes­si­ca Crispin, per­son­al blog): “If we do not have police, an armed squadron of men and women asked to inter­vene in sit­u­a­tions we our­selves can­not man­age, whether that be crime, acute men­tal ill­ness, or vio­lence, then who will we turn to in those sit­u­a­tions? One such pro­pos­al is to replace police with social work­ers. But as my friend R. said to me as we dis­cussed these ideas, ‘I don’t think these peo­ple have inter­act­ed with social work­ers.’ ” This is a per­spec­tive I had not heard before.
  6. Injus­tice, Out­rage, and the Prob­lem of Atheod­i­cy (Pub­lic Square): “In a world with­out God, there is no ulti­mate pur­pose in the injus­tice. And there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty of any ulti­mate prov­i­den­tial redemp­tion. It is just raw, rank, irra­tional injus­tice. And so what is the appro­pri­ate reac­tion? Out­rage! (And per­haps also despair.)” The author is a law prof at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego. Also, bear in mind that Pub­lic Square is the Mor­mon equiv­a­lent of First Things.
  7. Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Com­plete­ly Garbage’ (Steven Levy, Wired): “The major­i­ty of all US tests are com­plete­ly garbage, wast­ed. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reim­burse at the same lev­el, of course they’re going to take every cus­tomer. Because they are mak­ing ridicu­lous mon­ey, and it’s most­ly rich peo­ple that are get­ting access to that. You have to have the reim­burse­ment sys­tem pay a lit­tle bit extra for 24 hours, pay the nor­mal fee for 48 hours, and pay noth­ing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.”

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 Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

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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