Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 521: mostly Charlie Kirk

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

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. A lot of articles about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even people who barely knew who Kirk was seem to have been deeply moved by his assassination. 
    • Student acceptance of violence in response to speech hits a record high (Ryne Weiss & Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, FIRE): “According to FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings survey, in 2020, the national average showed about 1 in 5 students said it was ever acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker. That number has since risen to a disturbing 1 in 3 students.”
    • How Great the Chasm That Lay Between Us (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Where to begin? The murder of Charlie Kirk feels different.… Charlie Kirk was not an elected official, but a private citizen. He was a commentator and media personality. Because of that, this killing feels wider in symbolism. Tonight, a lot of Americans feel like someone died on their behalf. And there’s some truth in that.”
    • Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.… In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project.”
    • After Kirk Killing, Americans Agree on One Thing: Something Is Seriously Wrong (Shawn Hubler, Edgar Sandoval and Audra D. S. Burch, New York Times): “No matter their politics, people said they were deeply unsettled after the killing of Mr. Kirk… Mr. Kirk’s death at 31 symbolized for many the collapse of what they thought was a basic, common-sense, need-not-be-debated American value: that people expressing a political opinion should not be shot for it.”
    • Je Suis Charlie (Bethel McGrew, Substack): “It is uniquely, viscerally horrifying: the political assassination of a young husband and father who held no political office, nor was he campaigning for one. He was a political figure, true, but still a private citizen. A private citizen who, to his killer, for the great crime of existing while vocally middle-of-the-road conservative, deserved to die. And not just in the eyes of his killer, as we quickly learned.” 
      • McGrew is a Christian essayist/journalist with a Ph.D. in math and I when I run across her content I usually find it helpful.
    • Conservative Christians Mourn Kirk as a Martyr (Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, New York Times): “‘I’m racking my brain trying to think of another political figure that had a similar impact and following who was assassinated, and the only person I can think of is Martin Luther King Jr.,’ Mr. Schilling said.”
    • If We Keep This Up, Charlie Kirk Will Not Be the Last to Die (David French, New York Times): “That’s one thing I respected about Charlie — and it’s worth emphasizing because the assassin attacked him as he spoke on campus — he wasn’t afraid of a debate. He was willing to talk to anyone. And when he was shot in the middle of a debate, the assassin didn’t just take aim at a precious human being, created in the image of God, he took aim at the American experiment itself.”
    • Hitting The Jugular Of Liberal Democracy (Andrew Sullivan, Substack): “…I [do not] think it is wrong to ‘politicize’ his own horrible assassination. Because it was an expressly political act. It was political because it struck Kirk in the core act of liberal democracy: debating his opponents. We don’t know the precise motive behind the murder right now, but that’s irrelevant. This was aimed literally and figuratively at the jugular of a free society.”
  2. One of our military alumni liked the “honesty tax” article I shared last week and sent me this monograph about the same dynamic in the military: Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession (Leonard Wong & Stephen J. Gerras, US Army War College): “For example, one colonel described how his brigade commander needed to turn in his situation report on Friday, forcing the battalions to do theirs on Thursday, and therefore the companies submitted their data on Wednesday—necessitating the companies to describe events that had not even occurred yet. The end result was that, while the companies gave it their best shot, everyone including the battalion commander knew that the company reports were not accurate.” 
    • This fact was striking: “In the rush by higher headquarters to incorporate every good idea into training, the total number of training days required by all mandatory training directives literally exceeds the number of training days available to company commanders. Company commanders somehow have to fit 297 days of mandatory requirements into 256 available training days.” It is literally impossible for them to fulfill the requirements they have to affirm they fulfilled!
  3. The Serial Killer’s Apologist (Zac Bissonnette, The Free Press): “He then led police to the bodies of young men he and Corll had murdered with the help of another accomplice, David Brooks. In all, 27 men and boys had been killed; Henley was tried and convicted on six counts of murder with malice.… Ramsland’s treatment of Henley represents therapy culture taken to its logical extreme. There is no villain so odious that he can’t be recast through the lens of a trauma framework—and a sympathetic explanation can always be found through extensive talking.”
  4. NASA discovers ‘clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars’ (Kasha Patel, Washington Post): “But the colorful speckles on the rocks pose an even more alluring mystery. These features are two well-known minerals made of iron, phosphorus and sulfur. One called vivianite — also sometimes referred to as corpse crystals — forms during the decay of organic material and is blue-green. The other, called greigite, shows up as a dull brown. But when these two minerals are found together in sediments on Earth, Hurowitz said, it’s usually a result of microbial metabolisms.… The authors acknowledge that these minerals could have formed without microbes — with the involvement of heat, for instance. But the new study determined the Martian rocks don’t appear to have been heated.”
  5. Strange Gifts of the Spirit (Sarah Killam Crosby, Plough): “Irenaeus, the great second-century bishop of Lyons, wrote that true disciples of Christ received and exercised spiritual gifts granted them through the grace of God. ‘Some really and truly drive out demons, … some have foreknowledge of the future, and visions and prophetic speech, and others lay their hands on the sick and make them well, and as we said, even the dead have been raised and have remained with us for many years.’ Origen likewise claimed that miraculous signs and wonders were still performed, though with greater scarcity, in the churches of his day, and Augustine’s City of God recounts several miracles, including healings and exorcisms. For these and other patristic theologians, it was clear that supernatural gifts of the Spirit were still present in the life of the church. These texts show that healings, prophecies, and other phenomena were viewed as part of the pattern which had been initiated at Pentecost.”
  6. Experiences Shape Beliefs. They Shouldn’t Determine Them. (Samuel James, Gospel Coalition): “When someone talks about why they’ve changed their convictions about something, they increasingly refer to negative experiences more often than persuasive arguments.… It’s not so much about losing faith in a creed, but losing faith in somebody. There’s a growing tendency to then identify the person in whom we have lost faith as the sum total of their beliefs, and change our thinking accordingly. ‘Because X person did Y bad thing, this must mean X person was wrong about Z idea.’”
  7. Tanks Were Just Tanks, Until Drones Made Them Change (Marco Hernandez & Thomas Gibbons-Neff, New York Times): “…Russia’s and Ukraine’s Soviet-era tanks rumble across the battlefield covered in anti-drone nets and spikes, dangling chains and unwieldy cages. The exterior transformations of these hulking vehicles are a testament to how quickly drones have changed the war in Ukraine in just over three years.”

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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