Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 282

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­day this week) 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. How Per­fec­tion­ism Has Made the Pan­dem­ic Worse (Miles Kim­ball, per­son­al blog): “I’ve noticed one reg­u­lar­i­ty in how the US (and many oth­er coun­tries) have han­dled the pan­dem­ic: per­fec­tion­ism has been get­ting in the way of a quick and pow­er­ful response. Every lit­tle bit would have helped reduce the repro­duc­tion ratio of the coro­n­avirus, but only things that were big bits were allowed.” The author is an econ­o­mist at UC Boul­der.
    • Pub­lic health bod­ies may be talk­ing at us, but they’re actu­al­ly talk­ing to each oth­er (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…when a large group acts as though a com­pli­cat­ed prob­lem is a no-brain­er, that doesn’t mean the solu­tion is obvi­ous; it means some­thing has gone bad­ly wrong.”
    • My vac­cine crack­pot­tery: a con­fes­sion (Scott Aaron­son, per­son­al blog): “I think [our fail­ure] will be clear to future gen­er­a­tions, who’ll write PhD the­ses explor­ing how it was pos­si­ble that we invent­ed mul­ti­ple effec­tive covid vac­cines in mere days or weeks, but then sim­ply sat on those vac­cines for a year, tick­ing off box­es called ‘Phase I,’ ‘Phase II,’ etc. while civ­i­liza­tion hung in the bal­ance.” The author is a CS prof at UT Austin.
    • Small Num­ber of Covid Patients Devel­op Severe Psy­chot­ic Symp­toms (Pam Bel­luck, New York Times): “[she] had become infect­ed with the coro­n­avirus in the spring. She had expe­ri­enced only mild phys­i­cal symp­toms from the virus, but, months lat­er, she heard a voice that first told her to kill her­self and then told her to kill her chil­dren.” Shared with me by a stu­dent who not­ed it is both inter­est­ing and freaky. This real­ly high­lights what a bul­let we dodged with this pan­dem­ic — can you imag­ine a plague whose main effect was to make peo­ple vio­lent­ly psy­chot­ic? Soci­ety would end. Full-on zom­bie apoc­a­lypse.
  2. Rick War­ren On The Year We Had (Cameron Strang, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “We have led over 16,000 peo­ple to Christ since March. We’re in revival. We’re aver­ag­ing about 80 peo­ple a day com­ing to Christ—80 peo­ple a day.… Of those 16,000 peo­ple who have come to Christ, over 12,000 of them have come through per­son­al, one-on-one wit­ness­ing by my mem­bers. Not led to Christ by my ser­mons. By one on one evan­ge­liz­ing.”
  3. East Africa fears sec­ond wave — of locust swarms (Navin Singh Khad­ka, BBC): “New swarms of desert locusts are threat­en­ing the liveli­hoods of mil­lions of peo­ple in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of con­trol efforts, the Unit­ed Nations has warned.” This is the lat­est news con­cern­ing an arti­cle from August an alum­nus recent­ly shared with me: The Bib­li­cal locust plagues of 2020 (David Nja­gi, BBC): “In 2020, locusts have swarmed in large num­bers in dozens of coun­tries, includ­ing Kenya, Ethiopia, Ugan­da, Soma­lia, Eritrea, India, Pak­istan, Iran, Yemen, Oman and Sau­di Ara­bia. When swarms affect sev­er­al coun­tries at once in very large num­bers, it is known as a plague.”
  4. Why You Can’t Meet God Over Zoom (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “The very inad­e­qua­cy of church ser­vices, Zoom and oth­er­wise, is a reminder we do not come into church­es to encounter a life les­son on how to raise our chil­dren or to learn to be good Amer­i­cans, what­ev­er that means. Our aim is much more auda­cious. We are attempt­ing to encounter God and, in so doing, find our­selves, pos­si­bly for the first time.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton Col­lege.
    • This isn’t real­ly a knock on McCaul­ley so much as an obser­va­tion and a hope: many Chris­tians who write for pub­li­ca­tions like the NYT lead with the neg­a­tives and slow­ly build to their point that “church isn’t so bad real­ly and maybe some­day you should check it out.” I won­der if that is a byprod­uct of the edi­to­r­i­al process or if it is sim­ply a selec­tion effect in the sort of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­al who wants to (and is per­mit­ted to) write an op-ed for a cul­tur­al­ly influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tion.
    • Think­ing about this puts me in mind of Eri­ca Camp­bel­l’s song I Luh God (YouTube, three min­utes). It swept through our min­istry a few years ago, I think because it scratched an itch in our stu­dents. Our stu­dents had dance par­ties to it after our wor­ship ser­vices. She sang with con­fi­dent joy: “I luh God, you don’t luh God? What’s wrong with chu?”
    • When we dis­cuss the faith as though it were a series of syl­lo­gisms we’re being fool­ish. Peo­ple’s ques­tions need answers, cer­tain­ly. But all the answers in the world will do no good if, at some lev­el, peo­ple don’t hope Chris­tian­i­ty is true. We must kin­dle hope before we go to the trou­ble of over­com­ing objec­tions to hope.
    • I say all that to say this: if you ever write an op-ed for the New York Times, do apolo­get­ics with­out being apolo­getic. Bring as much joy to it as you can and let your writ­ing be filled with win­some con­fi­dence. We need a whole flock of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­als with the swag­ger of a G.K. Chester­ton.
  5. High­er Edu­ca­tion Risks No Longer Being Worth It – Here’s How to Change Course (Chris­tos Makridis, Quil­lette): “For all the talk about racial equi­ty in col­leges, you would think that fac­ul­ty would be work­ing with local small busi­ness own­ers, espe­cial­ly minori­ties, to men­tor and equip them to dri­ve greater prof­itabil­i­ty and impact. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that rarely hap­pens.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  6. The Church Needs Prophets, But It Wants Lawyers (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian cul­ture is rife with con­gre­gants look­ing for lawyers, not prophets and not pas­tors. The church-shop­ping phe­nom­e­non puts us in church­es that make us feel quite com­fort­able, and the sheer num­ber of avail­able con­gre­ga­tions (espe­cial­ly in the South and parts of the Mid­west) makes us quite mobile.”
    • I almost did­n’t share this one because I thought it was more use­ful for min­istry lead­ers, but after I had men­tal­ly deep-sixed it a stu­dent emailed me and said: “I think it could be use­ful for Chris­tians who find them­selves frus­trat­ed by and unable to sup­port blan­ket crit­i­cism of the church and of orga­nized reli­gion from the left, but also dis­sat­is­fied by respons­es from the right that frame any crit­i­cism as part of a cul­ture war and triv­i­al­ize issues with­in the church as just a few bad exam­ples. I think for me it also was help­ful in think­ing of how I might respond to non-Chris­tians when these kinds of crit­i­cisms come up in con­ver­sa­tion and how I can be both defend Chris­tian­i­ty and the good parts of the church while acknowl­edg­ing con­tin­ued bro­ken­ness and need for improve­ment. It also hap­pened to tie in nice­ly with a ser­mon I heard on Sun­day about how Chris­tians have no prob­lem rec­og­niz­ing sin as the cause of bro­ken­ness in the world but often point to the sins of oth­ers, whether of peers, lead­ers, or past gen­er­a­tions, instead of their own sin as the cause of that bro­ken­ness. In that sense I think it both helped me think about how to process the fail­ings of promi­nent Chris­tians and talk about them with non-believ­ers as well as be remind­ed by these fail­ings to remem­ber that beyond defend­ing the church, my response as an indi­vid­ual should also be to iden­ti­fy and root out sin in my own life even when the dam­age is not as obvi­ous to my com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. WHAT HAPPENS ON JANUARY 6th (Ben Sasse, Face­book): “There is some vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle – and the media flat­ly declar­ing from on high that ‘there is no fraud!’ has made things worse. It has height­ened pub­lic dis­trust, because there are, in fact, doc­u­ment­ed cas­es of vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle. But the cru­cial ques­tions are: (A) What evi­dence do we have of fraud? and (B) Does that evi­dence sup­port the belief in fraud on a scale so sig­nif­i­cant that it could have changed the out­come? We have lit­tle evi­dence of fraud, and what evi­dence we do have does not come any­where close to adding up to a dif­fer­ent win­ner of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.”
    • Sasse is one of the Nebras­ka sen­a­tors and is also a for­mer sem­i­nary pres­i­dent. Mis­souri sen­a­tor Josh Haw­ley, who this seems to be aimed at, is also an out­spo­ken believ­er on Capi­tol Hill. Haw­ley, inci­den­tal­ly, did his under­grad at Stan­ford. He grad­u­at­ed the year we were launch­ing Chi Alpha, so our paths have nev­er crossed.
    • Haw­ley does­n’t have a state­ment as com­pre­hen­sive as Sasse’s, but here is an excerpt from his press release: “I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy the elec­toral col­lege results on Jan­u­ary 6 with­out rais­ing the fact that some states, par­tic­u­lar­ly Penn­syl­va­nia, failed to fol­low their own state elec­tion laws. And I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy with­out point­ing out the unprece­dent­ed effort of mega cor­po­ra­tions, includ­ing Face­book and Twit­ter, to inter­fere in this elec­tion, in sup­port of Joe Biden.”
    • I gen­er­al­ly avoid polit­i­cal posts like this because I find the minu­tia of pol­i­tics unin­ter­est­ing. In this case, the fact that two evan­gel­i­cals who are nor­mal­ly polit­i­cal allies are hav­ing a sub­stan­tive and pub­lic dis­agree­ment intrigues me.

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 Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot. First shared in vol­ume 215.

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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