Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 304

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.

This is the 304^th install­ment, an inter­est­ing num­ber because it is the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes. 304 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Sin­ning in the Rain: Weath­er Shocks, Church Atten­dance and Crime (Jonathan Moreno-Med­i­na, The Review of Eco­nom­ics and Sta­tis­tics): “Based on a pan­el between 1980 and 2016, I find that one more Sun­day with pre­cip­i­ta­tion at the time of church increas­es year­ly drug-relat­ed, alco­hol-relat­ed and white-col­lar crimes.” Fas­ci­nat­ing. The author is a Ph.D. can­di­date in econ at Duke.
2. Amer­i­ca Los­es Reli­gion, Some­what (Lyman Stone, Nation­al Review): “Amer­i­cans today are more like­ly to be part of a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty than they were in 1800; the change over time can be char­ac­ter­ized nei­ther by a grad­ual decline from a reli­gious­ly pris­tine past nor by the onward march of ratio­nal think­ing.”
3. Some thoughts on race in Amer­i­ca:
   • When Our Fore­fa­thers Fail (David French, The Dis­patch): “Human­i­ty has not trans­formed its fun­da­men­tal nature in the last 100 years. A nation full of peo­ple no bet­ter than us can do great good. A nation full of peo­ple no worse than us can com­mit great evil. Remem­ber­ing our nation’s virtues helps give us hope. Remem­ber­ing our sin gives us humil­i­ty. Remem­ber­ing both gives us the moti­va­tion and the inspi­ra­tion nec­es­sary to repair our land.”
   • T. D. Jakes on How White Evan­gel­i­cals Lost Their Way (Emma Green, The Atlantic): ‘Where I’ve tried to focus is on the white pas­tors who spoke out and tried to say some­thing pos­i­tive that was mis­un­der­stood. And I lit­er­al­ly got on the phone with some of them and encour­aged them to keep talk­ing. Their imme­di­ate reac­tion was “I got it wrong; I’m not going to broach that sub­ject again. I’m going to stay away from it. I’m just not going to talk about it.” And if we do that, we’ll nev­er get bet­ter. We have to keep talk­ing.’ The title is pret­ty mis­lead­ing — that’s def­i­nite­ly not the vibe you pick up from the arti­cle itself.
   • What Hap­pens When Doc­tors Can’t Speak Freely? (Katie Her­zog, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “‘Whole research areas are off-lim­its,’ he said, adding that some of what is being pub­lished in the nation’s top jour­nals is ‘shod­dy as hell.’  Here, he was refer­ring in part to a study pub­lished last year in the Pro­ceed­ings Of The Nation­al Acad­e­my Of Sci­ences. The study was cov­ered all over the news, with head­lines like ‘Black New­borns More Like­ly to Die When Looked After by White Doc­tors’ (CNN), ‘The Lack of Black Doc­tors is Killing Black Babies’ (For­tune), and ‘Black Babies More Like­ly to Sur­vive when Cared for by Black Doc­tors’ (The Guardian). Despite these breath­less head­lines, the study was so method­olog­i­cal­ly flawed that, accord­ing to sev­er­al of the doc­tors I spoke with, it’s impos­si­ble to extrap­o­late any con­clu­sions about how the race of the treat­ing doc­tor impacts patient out­comes at all. And yet very few peo­ple were will­ing to pub­licly crit­i­cize it.”
   • Those Who Did­n’t Make the List (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I absolute­ly believe that we can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly build admis­sions sys­tems that increase diver­si­ty and inclu­sion, includ­ing specif­i­cal­ly for Black and His­pan­ic appli­cants, with­out per­pet­u­at­ing oth­er kinds of injus­tice. I just have zero faith our actu­al­ly-exist­ing uni­ver­si­ties and employ­ers will put them togeth­er. Why do good when it’s so much eas­i­er to appear to be good?”
4. COVID per­spec­tives:
   • Why the Lab Leak The­o­ry Mat­ters (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “First, to the extent that the Unit­ed States is engaged in a con­flict of pro­pa­gan­da and soft pow­er with the regime in Bei­jing, there’s a pret­ty big dif­fer­ence between a world where the Chi­nese regime can say, We weren’t respon­si­ble for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re deca­dent, and a world where this was basi­cal­ly their Cher­nobyl except their incom­pe­tence and cov­er-up sick­ened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.”
   • Media Group­think and the Lab-Leak The­o­ry (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “If the lab-leak the­o­ry is final­ly get­ting the respect­ful atten­tion it always deserved, it’s main­ly because Joe Biden autho­rized an inquiry and Antho­ny Fau­ci admit­ted to doubts about the nat­ur­al-ori­gin claim. In oth­er words, the right pres­i­dent and the right pub­lic-health expert have blessed a cer­tain line of inquiry. Yet the lab-leak the­o­ry, whether or not it turns out to be right, was always cred­i­ble. Even if Tom Cot­ton believed it.”
   • The Lab-Leak The­o­ry: Inside the Fight to Uncov­er COVID-19’s Ori­gins (Kather­ine Eban, Van­i­ty Fair): “A months long Van­i­ty Fair inves­ti­ga­tion, inter­views with more than 40 peo­ple, and a review of hun­dreds of pages of U.S. gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, includ­ing inter­nal mem­os, meet­ing min­utes, and email cor­re­spon­dence, found that con­flicts of inter­est, stem­ming in part from large gov­ern­ment grants sup­port­ing con­tro­ver­sial virol­o­gy research, ham­pered the U.S. inves­ti­ga­tion into COVID-19’s ori­gin at every step. In one State Depart­ment meet­ing, offi­cials seek­ing to demand trans­paren­cy from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment say they were explic­it­ly told by col­leagues not to explore the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s gain-of-func­tion research, because it would bring unwel­come atten­tion to U.S. gov­ern­ment fund­ing of it.” Long, detailed.
5. A Dan­ger­ous State of Affairs (Kevin Williamson, Nation­al Review): “In Dal­las, a recent class for those seek­ing a license to car­ry was well attend­ed in spite of the fact that Texas is about to imple­ment ‘con­sti­tu­tion­al car­ry,’ under which no license would be required to car­ry a firearm that the car­ri­er is legal­ly eli­gi­ble to own. Mid­dle-aged African Amer­i­cans made up almost exact­ly one half of that class. Black buy­ers account for about one in five of the guns sold nation­wide in recent years, and His­pan­ic buy­ers a sim­i­lar share. And about one in five buy­ers last year were first-time buy­ers.”
6. Woke Insti­tu­tions is Just Civ­il Rights Law (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The US seems to elect some of the most con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians in the West­ern world, but has per­haps the wok­est insti­tu­tions. Civ­il rights law makes all major insti­tu­tions sub­ject to the will of left-wing bureau­crats, activists, and judges at the expense of nor­mal cit­i­zens.”
7. I read two sur­pris­ing­ly com­ple­men­tary arti­cles about abor­tion this week:
   • Abor­tion as an Instru­ment of Eugen­ics (Michael Stokes Paulsen, Har­vard Law Review): “If the intu­ition of the wrong­ness of trait-selec­tion abor­tion has moral salience — the intu­ition that it is sim­ply wrong to kill a fetus for rea­sons of race, sex, or dis­abil­i­ty — it is because of the implic­it recog­ni­tion of the human­i­ty of the fetus. If killing a fetus because she is female (or Black, or dis­abled) is thought hor­ri­ble, it can only be because the human fetus is thought to pos­sess moral sta­tus as human — because ‘it’ is a baby girl or a baby boy, a mem­ber of the human fam­i­ly.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas. The arti­cle itself is very long. Unless you are in law school, read­ing the intro­duc­tion, sec­tion IV, and the con­clu­sion is prob­a­bly enough.
   • Dawkins is wrong – gross­ly wrong – about Down’s syn­drome (Simon Barnes, Tor­toise): “[Dawkins] is in the posi­tion of the bril­liant philoso­pher telling us that the table at which we are sit­ting does not exist.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Demo­c­rat Pilot And Repub­li­can Co-Pilot Argue Over How Fast They Should Fly Plane Into Ground (Baby­lon Bee)
• Luke Aikins No Para­chute 25,000 Feet Air­plane Jump Com­plete Video (YouTube): three min­utes. He jumped out of an air­plane at 25,000 feet with no chute on pur­pose. WHAT?

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How Can I Learn To Receive – And Give – Crit­i­cism In Light Of The Cross? (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “A believ­er is one who iden­ti­fies with all that God affirms and con­demns in Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion. In oth­er words, in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s judg­ment of me; and in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of me. Both have a rad­i­cal impact on how we take and give crit­i­cism.” This is based on a longer arti­cle (4 page PDF). (first shared in vol­ume 63)

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.