Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 489

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. To Hate the Vulnerable: Roe at 52 (Nadya Williams, Mere Orthodoxy): “Do we as a society realize that we tell some people outright: Your life is not worth living.  You do not deserve to live. Your child does not deserve to live. What kind of monsters does this make us?”
  2. Winning The Lottery (Kasen Stephensen, Substack): “Ultimately, what I learned at Stanford was how to think for myself. Confronted with a culture foreign to my own upbringing and desperate to belong, I looked to my fellow students for guidance and at times lost sight of the lessons I learned from my family and on my mission. While I appreciate my new analytical skills and blossoming ambition, I reject the premise implicit at Stanford: that your worth is measured by your income, the prestige of your job, and your family’s connections. I rediscovered the key lessons from my mission: happiness, for me, is found in intellectual curiosity, acts of service, and genuine relationships with others, whether with friends, team-mates, family members, or the woman I would marry.” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus.
  3. The Best Argument for Protestantism Is Its Catholicity (N. Gray Sutanto, Christianity Today): “…Ortlund highlights how the Reformers defended their overarching theology in a surprising way. Not only, they argued, were Protestant positions more biblical than their non-Protestant counterparts; they were also more catholic—in the sense of furthering the goal of a unified church. In their view, Catholic theologians were the ones departing from apostolic and patristic, or early-church, teaching. As Ortlund notes,’“the early Protestants argued on catholic and historical grounds,’ not merely theological grounds, against a host of Roman Catholic doctrines.” 
    • A solid review of an excellent book (What It Means To Be Protestant by Gavin Ortlund).
  4. Can religion make you happy? Scientists may soon find out. (Julia Flynn Siler, National Geographic): “A team of scholars, in partnership with polling firm Gallup, has begun a five-year study of over 200,000 participants from 22 countries, to figure out what leads to what researchers call flourishing. To flourish is to be more than merely happy; it’s a metric meant to show if people are ‘living in a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good.’… That data isn’t in yet. But the results obtained so far back up what Pew and other researchers have found. The average flourishing score was 0.23 points higher for someone who says that religion is an important part of their daily life than for someone who does not – and 0.41 points higher for someone who attends a religious service at least weekly.”
  5. NBA greats think this D‑II coach is a basketball genius. So why don’t you know who he is? (CJ Moore, The New York Times): “Crutchfield, a former math teacher who never played college basketball and coached tennis before getting his big D‑II break at West Liberty University, sees the game like a math problem and has created his own calculations.… When he graduated from West Virginia in 1978, Crutchfield wanted to be a high school basketball coach. A year later, he had given up, returning to his alma mater to go to law school. ‘Too big a dream,’ he thought. He passed the LSAT and rented an apartment in Morgantown. Then he got a call out of nowhere, offering him the boys basketball coaching position at a small school in the state’s northern panhandle. He’s not even sure who recommended him. Crutchfield sold his law books, lost the deposit on his apartment and moved to Cameron, W.V.”
  6. The Case Against Drinking (Sam Kahn, Persuasion): “From as far back as I can remember, my plan had been to be a kind of low-intensity alcoholic. I hoped that it wouldn’t make me beat my family or wet myself at work, and that it wouldn’t lead to organ failure in the end—always the question, isn’t it?—but it seemed a gamble worth taking. The social life of the West is built almost entirely around the copious consumption of alcohol, with its professional life closely adjacent to that.” 
    • A solid essay that (correctly) defends Prohibition and makes many good points. I do not think drinking is always a sin, but I do not drink myself and am happy to encourage you not to, either.
  7. I used to think my peers were antisemitic. Now, I’ve changed my mind. (Julia Segal, Stanford Daily): “‘How many of you have heard about this before?’ I ask the wide-eyed cluster of Stanford students in our hotel conference room. A few seconds of silence go by as eyes dart around the room. Finally, scattered hands go up — approximately half the room. The thing I was asking if they’d head about? Oct. 7. The massacre of roughly 1,300 people in Israel, in the small farming villages and at a music festival. The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Earlier this year, I would have been surprised that half the Stanford students in the room had never heard about Oct. 7. But I was coming off the tail-end of dozens of interviews for a trip to visit the Nova Exhibition in L.A., where the typical answer to ‘What have you heard about Oct. 7?’ was ‘to be honest, not much,’ and sometimes even, ‘I hadn’t heard about it until I saw your email and googled it.’” 
    • I’m genuinely shocked and it puts some of last year’s campus activism into perspective.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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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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