Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 325

Vol­ume 325. Since 3+2=5, I con­sid­er that aus­pi­cious.

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 vol­ume 325, which I think is kind of cool since 3 + 2 = 5 (I am, as they say, eas­i­ly amused).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some faith & pol­i­tics con­tent. The last two are a bit par­ti­san.
    • A Chris­t­ian Defense of Amer­i­can Clas­si­cal Lib­er­al­ism (David French, The Dis­patch): “There is no per­fect form of gov­ern­ment on this side of the new heav­ens and the new earth. But the alter­na­tives to clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism suf­fer by com­par­i­son to the imper­fect sys­tem we pos­sess. When post-lib­er­als mag­ni­fy the pow­er of the state, they risk degrad­ing the dig­ni­ty of the indi­vid­ual. When they trust the wis­dom of rulers, they neglect their own fall­en nature. Peo­ple are of incal­cu­la­ble worth, and we are stained with sin. Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism rec­og­nizes both real­i­ties. We dis­re­gard its pro­tec­tions at our pro­found per­il.”
    • The “Chop” and Lib­er­al­is­m’s Cri­sis of Mean­ing (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “With­out a coher­ent moral frame­work, con­tem­po­rary pro­gres­sivism has to con­stant­ly man­u­fac­ture norms and enforce them not through shared com­mu­ni­ty stig­mas but by author­i­ty struc­tures. The new norms, though, are not infused with mean­ing. Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty is Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy with rig­or mor­tis: the cold, clam­my remains of long dead Protes­tant social eth­ic.” That final sen­tence… wow.
    • The Cau­tion­ary Tale of Fran­cis Collins (Justin Lee, First Things): “[Collins] showed that it was pos­si­ble for an evan­gel­i­cal from a work­ing-class back­ground to rise to the heights of sci­en­tif­ic and bureau­crat­ic accom­plish­ment. His pres­ence in the halls of med­ical pow­er was also a tes­ta­ment to the har­mo­ny of faith and rea­son. Collins has cham­pi­oned the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of sci­ence and reli­gion and encour­aged Chris­tians to accept the­is­tic evo­lu­tion through his best­selling 2006 book The Lan­guage of God and a spin-off orga­ni­za­tion, BioL­o­gos. His wit­ness is sin­gu­lar, and sin­gu­lar­ly powerful—if we don’t look too close­ly.” I have con­flict­ed feel­ings about this arti­cle (I think it is undu­ly harsh on Dr. Collins), but it is a per­spec­tive I have encoun­tered sev­er­al times. I’m also not sure it belongs under the pol­i­tics bul­let point, but it’s at least adja­cent.
    • Faith trumps Trump in Vir­ginia (Tony Carnes, A Jour­ney Through NYC Reli­gions): “Youngkin goes to an evan­gel­i­cal Epis­co­pal church Holy Trin­i­ty Church and pro­vides a retreat cen­ter for FOCUS (Fel­low­ship of Chris­tians in Uni­ver­si­ties & Schools), an evan­gel­i­cal out­reach to prep school stu­dents. In UK Youngkin served on the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee of Holy Trin­i­ty Bromp­ton (the home church of the Alpha course). The GOP Lt Gov­er­nor-elect Win­some Sears is an African Amer­i­can who head­ed a home­less min­istry for the Sal­va­tion Army (as well as being vice pres­i­dent of the Board of Edu­ca­tion for Vir­ginia, an elect­ed offi­cial, and a Marine). Attor­ney Gen­er­al-elect Jason Miyares is a Lati­no Chris­t­ian, a mem­ber of Galilee Epis­co­pal Church, an evan­gel­i­cal lean­ing Epis­co­pal church.” Brief but super inter­est­ing.
    • Pence says James Madi­son and the Bible helped him cer­ti­fy elec­tion results against Trump’s wish­es (Tim­o­thy Bel­la, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The for­mer vice pres­i­dent, whose answer was met with applause from the Iowa City audi­ence, denied that he was advised it would hurt his chances of run­ning for pres­i­dent if he fol­lowed Trump’s plan. ‘Every­thing you’ve recit­ed rel­a­tive to me is false,’ he said to the audi­ence mem­ber. Pence, refer­ring to the oath he took to uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion, also cit­ed a Bible verse he said he leaned on: ‘Psalm 15 says he who keeps his oath even when it hurts.’ ”
  2. Pan­dem­ic restric­tions were a blow to reli­gious lib­er­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, NY Post): “Of all the unequal impacts of the pan­dem­ic, the costs of state and local restric­tions that fell square­ly on reli­gious house­holds seem under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed. Although every­one felt the effects of nation­al and state quar­an­tines, and Amer­i­cans strug­gled with men­tal health more broad­ly, my paper shows that reli­gious adher­ents, espe­cial­ly Catholics or oth­er Chris­tians, expe­ri­enced unique harm. Even more trou­bling is that the costs of shut­downs for places of wor­ship were not lim­it­ed to the con­gre­gants. Evi­dence from a Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty study led up by Byron John­son shows that faith-based orga­ni­za­tions shoul­der the bulk of the home­less­ness bur­den in cities, car­ing for the least for­tu­nate. In this sense, cut­ting off in-per­son wor­ship simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cuts off one of the pri­ma­ry ways that hous­es of wor­ship serve their broad­er com­mu­ni­ties.”
  3. Bil­lion­aire Seeks to Build Large­ly Win­dow­less Dorm In ‘Social and Psy­cho­log­i­cal Exper­i­ment’ (Aaron Gor­don, Vice): “Accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent, 94 per­cent of dorm rooms in Munger Hall [at UCSB] will be tiny, win­dow­less pods that open onto a cen­tral com­mon area. And it will stuff so many stu­dents [4,500] into such a small space that Den­nis McFad­den, the archi­tect who resigned from the university’s review com­mit­tee, said in his res­ig­na­tion let­ter it ‘would qual­i­fy as the eighth dens­est neigh­bor­hood on the plan­et, falling just short of Dha­ka, Bangladesh.’ McFad­den said the uni­ver­si­ty had pro­vid­ed no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for ignor­ing estab­lished research that nat­ur­al light and views of the out­doors are vital to healthy liv­ing, except to say they were bound to Munger’s vision.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    1. Munger rebuts: Munger on con­tro­ver­sial UCSB dorm: Fake win­dows are bet­ter than real win­dows (CNN). He is total­ly and awe­some­ly intran­si­gent.
  4. What Hap­pened to Matt Taib­bi? (Ross Barkan, New York Mag­a­zine): “ ‘One of the moments that solid­i­fied in my mind the dif­fi­cult path I’d have going for­ward in main­stream media, and that pushed me toward the deci­sion to do Sub­stack full-time, came when I did a cam­paign piece on Biden for Rolling Stone,’ Taib­bi said. ‘I was notic­ing what every­one else saw, that the man was hav­ing trou­ble remem­ber­ing things, among oth­er issues. I called back some of the med­ical sources who were glad to vio­late the ‘Gold­wa­ter rule’ against diag­nos­ing peo­ple from afar to talk to me about Trump being crazy, just to ask for their assess­ment of Biden. None respond­ed, and one lit­er­al­ly hung up on me. Even off the record they wouldn’t talk about it. It hit me in that moment that Trump had so fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the busi­ness that even sources were behav­ing dif­fer­ent­ly, and I’d have to adapt one way or the oth­er.’ ”
  5. Katharine Bir­bals­ingh is right: chil­dren do have orig­i­nal sin (Theo Hob­son, The Spec­ta­tor): “When my son was about six he heard some­thing at school about slav­ery but was not quite clear what it was all about. So I spelled it out. I told him that a slave was some­one that some­one else owned and ordered around and prob­a­bly mis­treat­ed. I wait­ed for the prop­er response of moral hor­ror to show on his inno­cent fea­tures. Instead he said, ‘Cool, I want one!’” What a phe­nom­e­nal open­ing anec­dote.
  6. Lib­er­als Read, Con­ser­v­a­tives Watch TV (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “Con­ser­v­a­tive media per­fect­ing the ‘info­tain­ment’ genre of news com­men­tary brought peo­ple into pol­i­tics that a gen­er­a­tion ear­li­er would’ve paid more atten­tion to pro­fes­sion­al wrestling or mon­ster truck ral­lies instead. Lib­er­al­ism has cap­tured a com­bi­na­tion of an overe­d­u­cat­ed class with more desire for sta­tus than intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty along with men­tal­ly ill indi­vid­u­als who in the 1990s might have joined some apo­lit­i­cal sub­cul­ture instead of becom­ing pas­sion­ate about race and gen­der issues.” Very long and insight­ful arti­cle (9,000ish words)
  7. Sur­vey: One-third of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents have expe­ri­enced anti­semitism (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News): “…the most com­mon form of anti­semitism was offen­sive com­ments online. Only 1% of stu­dents were vic­tims of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence, and only 1% were threat­ened with vio­lence. In all, the sur­vey found 43% of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents had expe­ri­enced and/or wit­nessed anti­se­mit­ic activ­i­ty in the past year. Among those who wit­nessed it, the most com­mon expe­ri­ence was see­ing swastikas around cam­pus or van­dal­ism to Jew­ish fra­ter­ni­ties, soror­i­ties and cul­tur­al build­ings.”

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 How the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 165.

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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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