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

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.

Leave a Reply