Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 407

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 407, which is the sum of the cubes of its dig­its: 43 + 03 + 73

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Reli­gion Good for Your Health? (David DeSteno, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ongo­ing sur­veys like these, as well as more tar­get­ed stud­ies, show a strong link between reli­gion and bet­ter phys­i­cal and men­tal health. Of course, this doesn’t mean that reli­gion should be pre­scribed as a med­i­cine, either in addi­tion to or in place of oth­er estab­lished treat­ments. The choice to be spir­i­tu­al­ly active is a per­son­al one, and reli­gion is only one of many fac­tors that affect health. Nonethe­less, it’s time for health sci­ences to take reli­gion seri­ous­ly and con­sid­er what it offers the body and mind.”
    • The author is a psych prof at North­east­ern. In this essay he alludes to Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research which I have spot­light­ed on many occa­sions.
  2. Richard Dawkins’ Ex-Right-Hand Man Comes to Christ! (Liv­ing Waters, YouTube): fifty-five min­utes long (near­ly an hour!). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The tes­ti­mo­ny itself kicks in at 37 min­utes in.
  3. Trump’s Jus­tices Didn’t Doom Affir­ma­tive Action. Demog­ra­phy Did. (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “The arrival of large num­bers of immi­grants over the past half-cen­tu­ry has upset the log­ic of affir­ma­tive action in sev­er­al ways. For one thing, white Amer­i­cans no longer dom­i­nate the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem. (They make up only 22 per­cent of the Stan­ford class of 2026, for instance.) Ear­ly on, affir­ma­tive action was also extend­ed to Lati­nos, whose num­bers con­tin­ue to grow. In addi­tion, African and Caribbean immi­grants and their chil­dren now account for more than 40 per­cent of the Black enroll­ment in the Ivy League, which risks crowd­ing out the peo­ple that affir­ma­tive action was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to help.” 
    • Pay­wall is unlocked.
  4. Should Women Preach? Huge Majori­ties of Evan­gel­i­cal Think They Should (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I don’t know how many ways I can show this: the sup­port for women preach­ing on Sun­day morn­ing from behind the pul­pit is strong among evan­gel­i­cals. Even among those who say that the Bible is lit­er­al­ly true and attend church every week, 74% are in favor of women preach­ing.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. Uni­ver­si­ties Shouldn’t Be Ide­o­log­i­cal Church­es (Robert P. George, The Atlantic): “If aca­d­e­m­ic units are per­mit­ted to make state­ments on polit­i­cal issues, then the fol­low­ing will be the case: When con­sid­er­ing a job or tenure can­di­date, vot­ing fac­ul­ty mem­bers will antic­i­pate that he or she, if appoint­ed, will vote on future polit­i­cal state­ments. So they will per­fect­ly rea­son­ably want to know, and will take into account, the candidate’s ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ings and polit­i­cal views and affil­i­a­tions in decid­ing whether to sup­port or oppose the appoint­ment.… After all, vot­ing on polit­i­cal statements—if depart­ments were to be autho­rized to do so and chose to act on that authorization—would be one of the things a fac­ul­ty mem­ber is, as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, hired to do.”
    • Rob­bie George is a gem.
    • I would post more con­tent from The Atlantic but I don’t have a sub­scrip­tion and their pay­wall is pret­ty lim­it­ing.
  6. How Assist­ed Sui­cide Destroys the Loved Ones Left Behind (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The sim­ple, cen­tral argu­ment of the sui­cide activists is that the right to bod­i­ly auton­o­my includes the right to sui­cide, and that legal­iza­tion is nec­es­sary in order to reduce suf­fer­ing in soci­ety. The real­i­ty we see unfold­ing tells a very dif­fer­ent sto­ry. Far from reduc­ing suf­fer­ing, assist­ed sui­cide has become the cat­a­lyst for spread­ing it. In many if not most cas­es, a death by lethal injec­tion trans­fers tem­po­ral suf­fer­ing to heart­bro­ken loved ones who strug­gle to process what has tak­en place.”
  7. The illu­sion of moral decline (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “…two well-known psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na can com­bine to pro­duce an illu­sion of moral decline.… Biased expo­sure means that things always look out­ra­geous: mur­der and arson and fraud, oh my! Biased mem­o­ry means the out­rages of yes­ter­day don’t seem so out­ra­geous today. When things always look bad today but brighter yes­ter­day, con­grat­u­la­tions pal, you got your­self an illu­sion of moral decline. We call this mech­a­nism BEAM (Biased Expo­sure and Mem­o­ry), and it fits with some of our more sur­pris­ing results.”

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 What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine. From vol­ume 285.

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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