Author: Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 249

The vin­di­ca­tion of a vil­i­fied mis­sion­ary, thoughts about the mur­der of Ahmaud Arbery, and pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives.

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 Mis­sion­ary on Tri­al (Ariel Levy, The New York­er): “Accord­ing to a study pub­lished in 2017 in The Amer­i­can Jour­nal for Clin­i­cal Nutri­tion, four­teen per cent of chil­dren treat­ed for severe acute mal­nu­tri­tion at Mula­go Hospital—Uganda’s best facility—died. The study notes that the over-all mor­tal­i­ty rate in Africa for chil­dren with S.A.M. is between twen­ty and twen­ty-five per cent. Dur­ing the years when Serv­ing His Chil­dren func­tioned as an in-patient facil­i­ty, its rate was eleven per cent.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed. If you want to dig deep­er, last Octo­ber a Ugan­dan tele­vi­sion sta­tion did a twen­ty-minute sto­ry on this case which also dis­cred­it­ed the missionary’s accusers. Proverbs 18:17 wins again.
    • I see a sim­i­lar dynam­ic in some stu­dents who are feel­ing angst over their faith. Upon con­ver­sa­tion, I often learn that they have been told untrue or mis­lead­ing things about mis­sions, the his­to­ry of the church, and the present sta­tus of the church in the world. Always remem­ber that crit­ics might have motives beyond sim­ply estab­lish­ing the truth. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lis­ten to them, but it does mean that you don’t treat their com­plaints as axioms. When this reporter flew to Ugan­da and talked to peo­ple on the ground she quick­ly learned that the inter­na­tion­al­ly-accept­ed nar­ra­tive was not right.
  2. Why We Opened a Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty in Iraq Amid ISIS’ Geno­cide (Jayson Cas­par, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There was an unwrit­ten under­stand­ing that the Chris­tians would not overt­ly pros­e­ly­tize and share the gospel, but be indi­rect and not offend sharia law. But after ISIS and the lack of any real response from the Mus­lim world, Arch­bish­op War­da says that this agree­ment is now fin­ished. That as we go for­ward, we will no longer be shy. We are going to pro­claim the gospel, pro­claim the teach­ings of Christ, and who­ev­er comes to us will come…. There may not be many Chris­tians in Iraq. But as an old priest said once to me, ‘Well, remem­ber Christ only had 12, and every­one want­ed to kill them, too.’”
  3. Exquis­ite Scan­dal (Nan­cy Lemann, Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly): “The famil­iar the­o­ry at the tri­al was that the peo­ple of Louisiana would rather be enter­tained than served with ethics. Some would call this a Gal­lic atti­tude, to be blind­ed by charm at the expense of integri­ty, and indeed the cul­ture of Louisiana is his­tor­i­cal­ly French Catholic. And as the Catholics might say, the fall from grace is inevitable, a mys­tery to be endured rather than a prob­lem to be solved. And some in Louisiana would pre­fer a smart crook to an unin­tel­li­gent oppor­tunist masked as a cru­sad­er whose ambi­tion blinds him to his own stu­pid­i­ty. Such a one could be just as dan­ger­ous, if not more so, than a crook.” As some­one born in Louisiana, I very much enjoyed this arti­cle. 
  4. Gre­go­ry and Travis McMichael face mur­der charges in con­nec­tion with Ahmaud Arbery case (Steve Almasy and Angela Bara­jas, CNN): “Two men involved in the fatal shoot­ing of Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, Geor­gia, have been arrest­ed and face mur­der and aggra­vat­ed assault charges, accord­ing to the Geor­gia Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion.”
    • It is amaz­ing to me that it was not the video evi­dence that led to their arrest, but the pub­lic out­cry in response to the video evi­dence. 
    • A Vig­i­lante Killing in Geor­gia (David French, The Dis­patch): “When white men grab guns and mount up to pur­sue and seize an unarmed black man in the street, they stand in the shoes of lynch mobs past.”
    • Think­ing Chris­tian­ly About the Ahmaud Arbery Lynch­ing (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “If we are to be peo­ple who act just­ly and pro­mote jus­tice, which is that each per­son receives their right­ful dues, then we must right­ly dis­cern what has hap­pened in the case of Arbery. This was a lynch­ing. It was an act that God hates. And so we must rec­og­nize that and we must call it by its name and speak out against it and against all such acts of injus­tice.”
    • Relat­ed in the abstract: How to Pun­ish Vot­ers (Josie Duffy Rice, New York Times): “It’s well known that vot­er sup­pres­sion has tak­en the form of the clos­ing of polling places, new restric­tive vot­er ID laws, vot­er roll purges of thou­sands of eli­gi­ble vot­ers and nine-hour lines at the polls. But Ms. Pearson’s case is a reminder that it can also take the form of the aggres­sive pros­e­cu­tion of indi­vid­ual black vot­ers for polling-place offens­es — which in many cas­es appears moti­vat­ed less by a sin­cere desire to address fraud than by a desire to intim­i­date.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • The Covid-19 Rid­dle: Why Does the Virus Wal­lop Some Places and Spare Oth­ers? (Han­nah Beech, Alis­sa J. Rubin, Ana­toly Kur­manaev and Ruth Maclean, New York Times): “The coro­n­avirus has killed so many peo­ple in Iran that the coun­try has resort­ed to mass buri­als, but in neigh­bor­ing Iraq, the body count is few­er than 100. The Domini­can Repub­lic has report­ed near­ly 7,600 cas­es of the virus. Just across the bor­der, Haiti has record­ed about 85.”
    • Coro­n­avirus Could Dis­rupt Weath­er Fore­cast­ing (Hen­ry Foun­tain, New York Times): “…data on tem­per­a­ture, wind and humid­i­ty from air­plane flights, col­lect­ed by sen­sors on the planes and trans­mit­ted in real time to fore­cast­ing orga­ni­za­tions around the world, has been cut by near­ly 90 per­cent in some regions.” I must con­fess I did not see that com­ing. At all. 
    • Google App Cen­sor­ing Covid-19 Cours­es (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Google is a pri­vate enti­ty. It has the right to con­trol what goes out on its app plat­form. Whether Google is moral­ly cor­rect to exer­cise that right to sup­press any unof­fi­cial pan­dem­ic infor­ma­tion is a dif­fer­ent ques­tion — and a very impor­tant one. Google owns YouTube — how long will they allow these cours­es to remain on YouTube?” These are cours­es by aca­d­e­mics speak­ing with­in their areas of exper­tise.
    • Relat­ed: Who is Judy Mikovits in ‘Plan­dem­ic,’ the coro­n­avirus con­spir­a­cy video just banned from social media? (Katie Shep­herd, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The film is so ques­tion­able that social media plat­forms includ­ing Face­book, YouTube and Vimeo on Thurs­day scrubbed it from their sites. A Vimeo spokesper­son, for exam­ple, said that the com­pa­ny ‘stands firm in keep­ing our plat­form safe from con­tent that spreads harm­ful and mis­lead­ing health infor­ma­tion. The video in ques­tion has been removed … for vio­lat­ing these very poli­cies.’” A friend sent me a link to her video but it was pulled down. I have no opin­ion about the video because I haven’t seen it. But I do have an opin­ion about it being pulled down. I dis­like that intense­ly. I fear the risks of mis­in­for­ma­tion far less than I fear the risks of con­trol­ling infor­ma­tion. 
    • A pas­tor in the Bronx thought he knew hard­ship. Then his church saw 13 coro­n­avirus deaths. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Promised Land, in the poor­est con­gres­sion­al dis­trict in the nation, sees about 250 most­ly African Amer­i­can and Lati­no wor­shipers on a nor­mal week­end. Pub­lic hous­ing units line the streets near the church in the Mott Haven neigh­bor­hood, where city offi­cials esti­mate the pover­ty rate is about 44 per­cent.”
    • In Inner-City Black Church­es: More Grief, Few­er Resources, Stronger Faith (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Despite bear­ing the dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact of the out­break, black believ­ers have demon­strat­ed par­tic­u­lar spir­i­tu­al endurance. In a Pew sur­vey released last week, mem­bers of his­tor­i­cal­ly black church­es were more like­ly than any oth­er reli­gious tra­di­tion to say their faith has been strength­ened through the out­break. More than half (56%) say their faith has become stronger, com­pared to 35 per­cent of all Chris­tians and 24 per­cent of adults over­all.”
    • Clin­i­cal Study Con­sid­ers The Pow­er Of Prayer To Com­bat COVID-19 (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “Half of the patients, ran­dom­ly cho­sen, will receive a ‘uni­ver­sal’ prayer offered in five denom­i­na­tion­al forms, via Chris­tian­i­ty, Hin­duism, Islam, Judaism, and Bud­dhism. The oth­er 500 patients will con­sti­tute the con­trol group.” This study looks like a mess. How do they expect to keep the 500 in the con­trol group from being prayed for? I am pret­ty sure that if you are hos­pi­tal­ized with Covid-19 some­one is pray­ing for you. And my the­ol­o­gy leads me to believe those organ­ic, heart­felt prayers offered by peo­ple who actu­al­ly know the patients are going to be more sig­nif­i­cant than the “uni­ver­sal prayers” offered by the research par­tic­i­pants. I expect this study will lead inter­net athe­ists to claim that all prayer has been debunked when at most it will show that script­ed mul­ti­faith prayers offered on behalf of strangers do not move the heart of God. 
    • Food Banks Can’t Go On Like This (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Nor­mal­ly, ‘res­cued’ food—items that would oth­er­wise be thrown out as their sell-by date approaches—accounts for 97 per­cent of Feed­ing San Diego’s dis­tri­b­u­tions. Until the pan­dem­ic, the group was receiv­ing unpur­chased food from 204 Star­bucks loca­tions every night of the year. Most of those stores are now closed. The orga­ni­za­tion nor­mal­ly gets excess food from 260 gro­cery stores too, but con­sumers have been stock­ing up enough late­ly that many shelves are picked clean.”
  6. The UK Bless­ing — Church­es sing ‘The Bless­ing’ over the UK (YouTube): sev­en mov­ing min­utes. Shared with me by a student’s father.

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 Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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.

46 thoughts on my 46th birthday

Some thoughts from an aging man offered in the hope that a few of them help you.

Inspired by Kevin Kel­ly’s 68 Bits of Unso­licit­ed Advice, here are 46 thoughts which occur to me on my 46th birth­day.

These are not the most impor­tant things I believe nor are they ranked. They’re what came to mind, and I offer them in the hope you’ll find at least one or two nuggets use­ful. Yes, I am aware that many of these are not orig­i­nal to me.

  1. Lead­ers should be exam­ples and not excep­tions. Don’t impose rules upon oth­ers you are not will­ing to fol­low your­self.
  2. When you’re look­ing for men­tors, look for peo­ple at least a decade old­er than you who have suc­ceed­ed in at least two dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments. Some­one who suc­ceed­ed once often has a hard time dis­tin­guish­ing what was luck ver­sus what was wise. Some­one who has suc­ceed­ed more than once is more like­ly to have learned prin­ci­ples.
  3. Wis­dom is want­i­ng the right things, know­ing how to get them, and pur­su­ing them whole­heart­ed­ly.
  4. There are two ways to gain wis­dom: from your own expe­ri­ence or from the expe­ri­ence of oth­ers. Do as much of the lat­ter as you can. Read wide­ly, talk to inter­est­ing peo­ple, and in gen­er­al be a sponge for wis­dom.
  5. Ask peo­ple who have what you want how they got it. For exam­ple, I see sin­gle peo­ple talk­ing to each oth­er all the time about how to tell if some­one is right for them or not. That’s fine, but also ask some­one who is hap­pi­ly mar­ried how they made their deci­sion. I see new par­ents give one anoth­er advice on child rear­ing philoso­phies. I sup­pose that’s inevitable, but also ask the par­ents of admirable teenagers or grown chil­dren what they did.
  6. Peo­ple on the left dis­trust big busi­ness. Peo­ple on the right dis­trust big gov­ern­ment. Maybe we should be sus­pi­cious of all big insti­tu­tions and make sure they have prop­er checks and bal­ances.
  7. Most peo­ple who dis­agree with you polit­i­cal­ly are rea­son­able peo­ple who have had dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences than you.
  8. No mat­ter what you believe (about reli­gion, about pol­i­tics, about some issue with­in your pro­fes­sion), there are peo­ple smarter and bet­ter-informed than you who dis­agree with you. That doesn’t mean you are wrong, but it does mean you should be hum­ble.
  9. Amer­i­ca real­ly is a remark­able nation. Love it enough to keep improv­ing it.
  10. The deli­cious­ness of a cui­sine is gen­er­al­ly pro­por­tion­al to the num­ber of peo­ple who eat that cui­sine at home. This is why Chi­nese food is bet­ter than British food.
  11. The best hand­ful of books on a sub­ject can teach you most of what you need to know about it. You can often find great books on a sub­ject by googling “SUBJECT syl­labus” and skim­ming through four or five col­lege syl­labi and not­ing recur­ring titles.
  12. In col­lege take pro­fes­sors not class­es. Find the best pro­fes­sors and take what­ev­er they are teach­ing.
  13. You are not oblig­at­ed to fin­ish a book sim­ply because you began it. Give a book 100 pages minus your age to grab your atten­tion.
  14. The con­sen­sus view of well-informed peo­ple is usu­al­ly right, but when it is wrong it is huge­ly wrong.
  15. The cost of main­te­nance is far less than the cost of repair. Change the oil, brush your teeth, stay in shape, etc.  When rel­e­vant, put recur­ring main­te­nance tasks on your cal­en­dar.
  16. When a task is impor­tant, get the tools you need to do it right. Don’t just get by with some­thing that sort of works.
  17. Just get start­ed. Imple­ment and iter­ate. Begin­ning on a grade B plan now is (usu­al­ly) bet­ter than wait­ing to devise a grade A plan you can start on next year. If you just begin with an okay plan and improve it as you go along you’ll be doing some­thing far supe­ri­or a year from now than if you spent end­less hours dream­ing about The Best Way. The big excep­tion is things that are not eas­i­ly reversible (like tear­ing down a wall in a house – spend as much time think­ing that one through as you need).
  18. Mon­ey is a tool. Like all tools, there are a lot of prob­lems it can’t solve. But the prob­lems it can solve it solves very effec­tive­ly. Go read the Red­dit per­son­al finance wiki.
  19. Accept that writ­ing is revis­ing. It is okay if your first draft is hor­ri­ble. Just get your thoughts down onto paper and then you can work to make them bet­ter.
  20. Life is the lab­o­ra­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy. Just as in sci­ence, lots of the­o­ries sound good until they are put to the test. You will dis­cov­er that some things can be thought but not lived and you should reject them.
  21. Be gen­er­ous. Not only is it kind, it is pru­dent.
  22. A Chris­t­ian is some­one who believes in the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus from the grave and lives in light of its impli­ca­tions. Real­iz­ing Jesus has risen changes every­thing.
  23. Every­one is amaz­ing, at least poten­tial­ly. If you can’t see the awe­some (or the poten­tial) in some­one you prob­a­bly don’t know them well enough yet.
  24. A fail­ure to appre­ci­ate beau­ty is a moral fail­ing. If you can’t see the beau­ty in some­thing that many oth­ers can, try to fig­ure out why. It may expose an area of poten­tial growth.
  25. Beliefs dri­ve behav­ior. If you want to change the way you act, first change the way you think.
  26. All behav­ior makes sense. If some­one does some­thing you don’t under­stand it is because they were think­ing some­thing you find incom­pre­hen­si­ble. To them it seemed like their best option. Fig­ur­ing out what they were think­ing doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly excuse their behav­ior, but it does make it sen­si­ble.
  27. Root for your team to win, not for the oth­er team to lose.
  28. Chester­ton was right: no one should be allowed to remove a fence who can­not explain why it was put there in the first place.
  29. In your pro­fes­sion there are a hand­ful of peo­ple you should stalk. You are look­ing for peo­ple who have the same basic strengths as you but who are oper­at­ing at a high­er lev­el with them than you are. Read every­thing they’ve writ­ten, lis­ten to every speech they’ve giv­en, and talk to every­one who knows them. If befriend­ing them is pos­si­ble, go for it.
  30. Some­day you will stand before the Judge, so don’t play the fool with Him now. Fear God like you fear elec­tric­i­ty or fire — respect His pow­er.
  31. Try­ing to be cool is like apply­ing for an off-brand cred­it card. Even if you attain it, you can’t spend it any­where it mat­ters.
  32. For my fel­low min­is­ters: the pur­pose of a ser­mon is to help peo­ple believe, under­stand, and obey God’s Word. You prob­a­bly nat­u­ral­ly empha­size one of these – be sure to delib­er­ate­ly include the oth­er two as well. Strive to preach so that your mes­sage is per­sua­sive to a skep­tic, com­pre­hen­si­ble to a new believ­er, and applic­a­ble to dai­ly life.
  33. A few years ago I heard some­one say you should argue like you are right and lis­ten like you are wrong. That’s pret­ty good advice.
  34. Bad news is like milk not wine; it does not improve with age. Open that bill, read that let­ter from the IRS, respond to that “we need to talk” text. You can only find the way out once you know where you’re start­ing from.
  35. Are you sin­gle? A first date is only an inter­view for a sec­ond date, so if in doubt ask them out. Have you been asked out? If in doubt, say yes. The ques­tion is not: “Do I think I could mar­ry them?” The ques­tion is: “Do I find them inter­est­ing enough to want to spend a few hours with?” The thresh­old for going from date 1 to 2 is a lit­tle high­er, and from 2 to 3 is high­er yet.
  36. Foot­notes are bet­ter than end notes. Side notes rule them all.
  37. There are a few books and authors you will see men­tioned repeat­ed­ly by the authors you respect the most. Lev­el up and begin read­ing the authors your authors are read­ing.
  38. Los­ing weight is very hard for some peo­ple, but don’t assume it is for you until you try it. Resolve that you will be okay with feel­ing hun­gry and set a sim­ple rule that you fol­low ruth­less­ly. For me, I decid­ed that I would not eat more than 600 calo­ries at any meal and that I would only eat three meals a day with no snacks. It worked real­ly well.
  39. One of the keys to a good beard is shav­ing your neck. Avoid neck hair.
  40. Inter­na­tion­al stu­dents are amaz­ing peo­ple. They left every­thing behind in pur­suit of knowl­edge. Get to know them and be excel­lent hosts to them.
  41. For­give­ness is about eras­ing debts. If you for­give a loan, that means that you don’t expect it to be repaid. Like­wise, to for­give an offense is to give up your expec­ta­tion it will be made right. When you have a hard time for­giv­ing some­one, ask your­self what it is that you believe you are owed. You might dis­cov­er you are still hold­ing on to expec­ta­tions (of an apol­o­gy, of resti­tu­tion, of changed behav­ior, of vengeance, of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, etc). Put your expec­ta­tions behind you and move on. If you find you can’t, pray for God to help you. If you can’t even do that then pray, “Lord, I am not yet will­ing to for­give them. But I am will­ing to be made will­ing. Help me.”
  42. For­give­ness is not the same as rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. You can for­give some­one with­out trust­ing them again.
  43. Not every­one should mar­ry. Sin­gle­ness is a noble lifestyle. How­ev­er, most peo­ple will mar­ry and who you mar­ry will wind up being far more impor­tant than what you do for a liv­ing. Do you know what you call a CEO with a fail­ing mar­riage? Mis­er­able. If you spend a ton of ener­gy and time prepar­ing for a high-impact career while assum­ing that a good mar­riage will just hap­pen you are being fool­ish.
  44. Cal­en­dars are bet­ter than to-do lists. When you get a task, put it on your cal­en­dar. If there’s no time on your cal­en­dar you’re just mak­ing a false promise by putting that task on your to-do list.
  45. Avoid temp­ta­tion. When temp­ta­tion does come your way, flee. Resist­ing temp­ta­tion is a fool’s game. Just as flow­ing water wears down rock, so con­stant temp­ta­tion can wear down the strongest willpow­er.
  46. We are sup­posed to wor­ship God, love peo­ple, and use things. But we often wor­ship things and use peo­ple or we idol­ize peo­ple and love things. Keep God first and every­thing else will fall to its prop­er place.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 248

One of the best expla­na­tions of reli­gious lib­er­ty I have read, along with arti­cles about the pan­dem­ic, UFOs, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with a pas­tor.

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.

I’m a lit­tle hap­py because the num­ber 248 seems cool to me. If I ever reach 1248 I’ll think it’s even cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and the Com­mon Good (Nation­al Affairs, William Haun): “Many of today’s pro­gres­sives, con­ser­v­a­tives, and lib­er­tar­i­ans [can­not] explain why reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar and reli­gious exer­cise in par­tic­u­lar should shape the com­mon good, even when they go against the grain of sec­u­lar visions adopt­ed in law.” This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant link I’ve shared in quite a while. Not light read­ing but worth­while. The author is a lawyer for the Beck­et Fund.
  2. Erwin McManus: The Peace­able War­rior (Paul J. Pas­tor, Out­reach Mag­a­zine): “I talked to some­one last Sun­day who said, ‘I’m here because some­body invit­ed me. I didn’t want to come.’ [Laughs] She actu­al­ly said, ‘I’m mean, jad­ed and cyn­i­cal. I don’t believe in God or reli­gion. I think it’s all a sham.’ I said, ‘You’re real­ly dis­ap­point­ed, aren’t you?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you like us,’ I said. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to do with that.’ ” (the excerpt is actu­al­ly from part 2 of the inter­view and the sto­ry gets even bet­ter). I only stum­bled upon this slight­ly old­er arti­cle because it won a Mag­gie award for best inter­view of 2019.
  3. Coro­n­avirus News & Per­spec­tives
    • Com­par­ing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Com­par­ing Apples to Oranges (Jere­my Samuel Faust, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “When reports about the nov­el coro­n­avirus SARS-CoV­‑2 began cir­cu­lat­ing ear­li­er this year and ques­tions were being raised about how the ill­ness it caus­es, COVID-19, com­pared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emer­gency med­i­cine res­i­den­cy and over three and a half years as an attend­ing physi­cian, I had almost nev­er seen any­one die of the flu. I could only remem­ber one trag­ic pedi­atric case.” The author is an instruc­tor at Har­vard Med­ical School. Fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Takes Pics Of Peo­ple In Pub­lic From 2 Per­spec­tives And It Shows How Eas­i­ly The Media Can Manip­u­late Real­i­ty (Liu­ci­ja Ado­maite and Denis Tymulis, Bored Pan­da): “‘The prox­im­i­ty of peo­ple has wide­ly been debat­ed in Den­mark in the past weeks. Dan­ish politi­cians and author­i­ties have fre­quent­ly referred to images which they believed to show mem­bers of the pub­lic behav­ing in dis­agree­ment with the gen­er­al guide­lines.’ As a nation­al pho­to news agency that sup­plies visu­al cov­er­age on the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, ‘we became aware that our con­tri­bu­tion could be mis­read.’” A pic­ture is worth 1000 words, not all of them hon­est.
    • Seattle’s Lead­ers Let Sci­en­tists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not (Charles Duhigg ‚New York­er): “Con­stan­tine told me, ‘Jeff rec­og­nized what he was ask­ing for was imprac­ti­cal. He said if we advised social dis­tanc­ing right away there would be zero accep­tance. And so the ques­tion was: What can we say today so that peo­ple will be ready to hear what we need to say tomor­row?’ In e‑mails and phone calls, the men began play­ing a game: What was the most extreme advice they could give that peo­ple wouldn’t scoff at? Con­sid­er­ing what would like­ly be hap­pen­ing four days from then, what would they regret not hav­ing said?”
    • A Vir­ginia preach­er believed ‘God can heal any­thing.’ Then he caught coro­n­avirus. (Peter Jami­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the days after Lan­don suc­cumbed to covid-19, his death brought words of sym­pa­thy from peo­ple who knew him — and jeers from peo­ple who didn’t. The New York Post, the Dai­ly Mail and an athe­ist blog pub­lished arti­cles seiz­ing on his March 13 Face­book post. Lan­don was posthu­mous­ly attacked as a vic­tim of mis­guid­ed beliefs — in the assur­ances of his pres­i­dent and the pro­tec­tions of his God.”
    • Infor­ma­tion Can Do What Lock­downs Can’t (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Amer­i­cans, like peo­ple in almost every coun­try, were quick­er to under­stand the risks than most of the peo­ple who gov­ern us. Alas, had our lead­ers tak­en the threat seri­ous­ly a month ear­li­er, and com­mu­ni­cat­ed the risks to Amer­i­cans more explic­it­ly, COVID could have been a flash in the pan. Instead, many thou­sands of Amer­i­cans are going to die unnec­es­sary deaths.”
    • Why Did YouTube Remove The Doc­tors’ Brief­ing? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…I absolute­ly believe that it’s wrong to cen­sor what qual­i­fied med­ical pro­fes­sion­als (read: not quacks) are say­ing about the cri­sis, which is so unique in our expe­ri­ence as a nation. A strong lock­down was nec­es­sary at first. If there is good med­ical evi­dence that the lock­down, and relat­ed pub­lic health strate­gies, might be doing more harm that good at this date, then let’s hear that argu­ment.”
    • Relat­ed: The Inevitable Coro­n­avirus Cen­sor­ship Cri­sis is Here (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The peo­ple who want to add a cen­sor­ship regime to a health cri­sis are more dan­ger­ous and more stu­pid by leaps and bounds than a pres­i­dent who tells peo­ple to inject dis­in­fec­tant. It’s aston­ish­ing that they don’t see this.”
    • With US Bor­ders Closed by Covid-19, How Will I Afford Insulin? (James Stout, Undark): “Dur­ing months when I teach as an adjunct pro­fes­sor and am cov­ered by my university’s insur­ance plan, I stock up as much insulin as I can. Dur­ing the remain­der of the year, I do what thou­sands of oth­ers do: I cross the bor­der to Mex­i­co where, just 12 miles from my house in San Diego, I can buy the same med­i­cine at one-tenth of the price.” Sent my way by a stu­dent.
  4. UFO Sight­ings: They Deserve to Be Tak­en More Seri­ous­ly (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “The offi­cial release of some pre­vi­ous­ly leaked UFO videos tak­en by U.S. navy pilots has sparked renewed inter­est in the big­ger ques­tions. For sure those fly­ing objects are uniden­ti­fied, but how much atten­tion should we earth­lings devote to this issue? I am struck by the con­trast between those who see this as an impor­tant ques­tion and those who think the whole thing will turn out to be an error or some kind of opti­cal illu­sion.”
  5. On the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty: 
    • Chi­na Has a Post-Pan­dem­ic Dream for Hong Kong (Yi-Zheng Lian, New York Times): “But the recent devel­op­ments actu­al­ly are remark­able. For the first time, the tra­di­tion­al pan-dems are being treat­ed as ene­mies just like the sep­a­ratists. And for the first time, Bei­jing is vio­lat­ing the very let­ter of the Basic Law, which it itself has pro­mul­gat­ed; the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment typ­i­cal­ly only con­torts the law and dis­torts its spir­it.”
    • The End of the Har­vard Cen­tu­ry (Mat­teo N. Wong, Har­vard Crim­son): “Chi­nese offi­cials reg­u­lar­ly deliv­er com­plaints to uni­ver­si­ties host­ing events on sen­si­tive issues and even offer schol­ars mon­ey to mod­i­fy research crit­i­cal of Chi­na.… giv­en Harvard’s sta­tus in the inter­na­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic hier­ar­chy, Chi­nese author­i­ties may be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the Uni­ver­si­ty. ‘We’ve had Chi­nese cit­i­zens at Har­vard, who are clear­ly doing the bid­ding of the Chi­nese state, com­ing and sit­ting in on talks and tak­ing notes and report­ing back,’ Per­ry says. She sim­i­lar­ly sus­pects Chi­nese cit­i­zens of report­ing on vis­it­ing Chi­nese schol­ars’ activ­i­ties.” This arti­cle is quite long but fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Amer­i­ca is awak­en­ing to Chi­na. This is a clar­i­on call to seize the moment. (Mitt Rom­ney, Wash­ing­ton Post): “China’s alarm­ing mil­i­tary build-up is not wide­ly dis­cussed out­side clas­si­fied set­tings, but Amer­i­cans should not take com­fort in our dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly large mil­i­tary bud­get. The gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping doesn’t report its actu­al defense spend­ing. An apples-to-apples analy­sis demon­strates that China’s annu­al pro­cure­ment of mil­i­tary hard­ware is near­ly iden­ti­cal to ours; but because our mil­i­tary has mis­sions around the world, this means that in the Pacif­ic, where Chi­na con­cen­trates its fire­pow­er, it will have mil­i­tary supe­ri­or­i­ty.”
    • I was arrest­ed in Hong Kong. It’s part of China’s larg­er plan.(Mar­tin C. M. Lee , Wash­ing­ton Post): “Hong Kong peo­ple now face two plagues from Chi­na: the coro­n­avirus and attacks on our most basic human rights. We can all hope a vac­cine is soon devel­oped for the coro­n­avirus. But once Hong Kong’s human rights and rule of law are rolled back, the fatal virus of author­i­tar­i­an rule will be here to stay.”
  6. My Native Amer­i­can father drew the Land O’Lakes maid­en. She was nev­er a stereo­type. (Robert Des­Jar­lait, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mia’s van­ish­ing has prompt­ed a social media meme: ‘They Got Rid of The Indi­an and Kept the Land.’ That isn’t too far from the truth. Mia, the stereo­type that wasn’t, leaves behind a land­scape void­ed of iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry. For those of us who are Amer­i­can Indi­an, it’s a his­to­ry that is all too famil­iar.”
  7. By Biden’s Own Stan­dards, He Is Guilty As Charged (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “On Friday’s Morn­ing Joe, Biden laid out a sim­ple process for judg­ing him: Lis­ten respect­ful­ly to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or dis­prove her spe­cif­ic claim. The objec­tive truth, Biden argued, is what mat­ters. I agree with him. But this was emphat­i­cal­ly not the stan­dard Biden favored when judg­ing men in col­lege. If Biden were a stu­dent, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evi­dence pro­vid­ed, who was charg­ing him, who was a wit­ness, and no right to ques­tion the accuser.”
    • This arti­cle is about col­lege Title IX pro­ceed­ings using Tara Reade and Joe Biden as illus­tra­tions. If its inclu­sion comes off as par­ti­san, bear in mind that the author intends to vote for Biden.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Dol­phins swim in bio­lu­mi­nes­cent waves in New­port Beach (YouTube): three min­utes
  • Obvi­ous­ly Con­fused Amash Runs For Pres­i­dent Even Though We Already Have Two Choic­es (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Unusu­al­ly Heavy Call Vol­umes (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Lat­est Com­put­er Mod­el Pre­dicts Between 0 And 12.6 Bil­lion New COVID-19 Deaths By Sum­mer (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Steve Har­vey Gets Tie Stolen by Pick­pock­et Bob Arno (Steve Har­vey Show, YouTube): sev­en min­utes, rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent

    • Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

    Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have the provoca­tive read In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

    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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 247

Arti­cles rang­ing from how to share your faith dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to Amish health­care poli­cies to the lim­i­ta­tions of lock­downs. Enjoy!

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. The Amish Health Care Sys­tem (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by how many of today’s biggest eco­nom­ic prob­lems just mys­te­ri­ous­ly failed to exist in the past. Our grand­par­ents eas­i­ly paid for col­lege with sum­mer jobs, raised three or four kids on a sin­gle income, and bought hous­es in their 20s or 30s and nev­er wor­ried about rent or evic­tion again. And yes, they got med­ical care with­out health insur­ance, and avoid­ed the kind of med­ical bank­rupt­cies we see too fre­quent­ly today. How did this work so well? Are there ways to make it work today?”
    • I would say unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing except near­ly every­thing on Slate Star Codex is fas­ci­nat­ing; in fact, the more eso­teric the top­ic the bet­ter.
    • Fol­low-up: Employ­er Pro­vid­ed Health Insur­ance Delen­da Est (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Most of my patients have insur­ance; most of them are well-off; most of them are intel­li­gent enough that they should be able to nav­i­gate the bureau­cra­cy. Lis­ten to the usu­al debate around insur­ance, and you would expect them to be the win­ners of our sys­tem; the rich peo­ple who can turn their finan­cial advan­tage into bet­ter care. And yet bare­ly a day goes by with­out a reminder that it doesn’t work this way.”
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus News and Com­men­tary 
    • Amid Pan­dem­ic, Hong Kong Arrests Major Pro-Democ­ra­cy Fig­ures (Elaine Yu and Austin Ramzy, NY Times): “The virus has halt­ed protests around the world, forc­ing peo­ple to stay home and giv­ing the author­i­ties new laws for lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings and detain­ing peo­ple with less fear of pub­lic blow­back while many res­i­dents remained under lock­downs or observ­ing lim­its on their move­ment. But the arrests on Sat­ur­day in Hong Kong, along with a renewed push for nation­al secu­ri­ty leg­is­la­tion in the city, could anger pro­test­ers and rein­vig­o­rate mass demon­stra­tions that had tapered off.”
    • Lock­downs Don’t Work (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Lock­downs don’t work. These oth­er policies—travel restric­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its, cen­tral­ized quar­an­tine, mask require­ments, and school cancellations—do work. Because COVID is an extreme­ly severe dis­ease that, if left unchecked, will kill hun­dreds of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans, it is vital­ly impor­tant that pol­i­cy­mak­ers focus their efforts on poli­cies that do work (masks, cen­tral quar­an­tines, trav­el restric­tions, school can­cel­la­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its), and avoid imple­ment­ing dra­con­ian, unpop­u­lar poli­cies that don’t work (lock­downs).”
    • Lock­down Social­ism will col­lapse (Arnold Kling, per­son­al blog): “you can stay in your res­i­dence, but pay­ing rent or pay­ing your mort­gage is option­al…. you can obtain gro­ceries and shop on line, but hav­ing a job is option­al…. if you own a small busi­ness, you don’t need rev­enue, because the gov­ern­ment will keep send­ing checks.”
    • We Can’t Go on Like This Much Longer (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “…protests against our total shut­down, while puny now, will doubt­less grow. The psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age — not count­ing the phys­i­cal toll — caused by this deeply unnat­ur­al way of life is going to inten­si­fy. We remain human beings, a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly social mam­mal, and we ori­ent our­selves in time, look­ing for­ward to the future. When that future has been sus­pend­ed, humans come undone.”
    • How not to say the wrong thing to health-care work­ers (Dorothy R. Novick, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…a per­son in any giv­en cir­cle should send love and com­pas­sion inward, to those in small­er cir­cles, and process per­son­al grief out­ward, to those in larg­er cir­cles…. Com­fort in, grief out.”
    • It’s Time To Build (Marc Andreesen, blog): “The things we build in huge quan­ti­ties, like com­put­ers and TVs, drop rapid­ly in price. The things we don’t, like hous­ing, schools, and hos­pi­tals, sky­rock­et in price. What’s the Amer­i­can dream? The oppor­tu­ni­ty to have a home of your own, and a fam­i­ly you can pro­vide for. We need to break the rapid­ly esca­lat­ing price curves for hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, and health­care, to make sure that every Amer­i­can can real­ize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.”
    • In response: Why We Can’t Build (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The insti­tu­tions through which Amer­i­cans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Fran­cis Fukuyama’s term, ‘vetoc­ra­cies,’ in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. It’s true in state and local gov­ern­ments. It’s even true in the pri­vate sec­tor.”
    • How to Pro­tect Civ­il Lib­er­ties in a Pan­dem­ic (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “In emer­gen­cies, [the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the ACLU] reflect­ed in an inter­view ear­li­er this month, gov­ern­ment offi­cials jus­ti­fy new pow­ers by point­ing to the extra­or­di­nary chal­lenges of the moment. Yet long after the emer­gency pass­es, they tend to assert those very same pow­ers as if they are the new nor­mal…. ‘We are still lit­i­gat­ing pow­ers in 2020 that were adopt­ed in 2001.’”
  3. Chris­t­ian Coro­n­avirus News & Com­men­tary
    • COVID-19 Is Not God’s Judg­ment (Jim Deni­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…bib­li­cal judg­ments through dis­ease are super­nat­ur­al in ori­gin. When God sent ‘boils’ on Egypt, they broke out instant­ly ‘on man and beast’ through­out the land. The ‘pesti­lence’ of Rev­e­la­tion will come by one of the ‘four horse­men of the apoc­a­lypse,’ not a wet mar­ket in Wuhan. Every­thing sci­en­tists can tell us about COVID-19 is that the virus evolved from oth­er virus­es. It is nat­ur­al, not super­nat­ur­al.” 
    • If Liquor Stores Are Essen­tial, Why Isn’t Church? (Michael McConnel & Max Raskin, NY Times): “It is not for gov­ern­ment offi­cials to decide whether reli­gious wor­ship is essen­tial; the First Amend­ment already decid­ed that. The ques­tion is whether, and how, it may be con­duct­ed with­out undue risk to pub­lic health.” McConnell is a Stan­ford law prof.
    • Pan­dem­ic Evan­ge­lism: Spread­ing the Gospel, not the Virus (Peter Cush­man, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “Step 1: Fer­vent­ly Pray for the Lost… Step 2: Tell the Lost You’re Pray­ing for Them… Step 3a: Tell the Lost about Christ: Rec­og­niz­ing Oppor­tu­ni­ties.” This is a series of blog posts which is not yet fin­ished. The indi­vid­ual posts so far → step one, step two, step 3a.
    • Covid-19 has killed mul­ti­ple bish­ops and pas­tors with­in the nation’s largest black Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Church of God in Christ, the country’s biggest African Amer­i­can Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion, has tak­en a deep and painful lead­er­ship hit with reports of at least a dozen to up to 30 bish­ops and promi­nent cler­gy dying of covid-19…”
    • Under fire from many, Samaritan’s Purse finds an unlike­ly cham­pi­on (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “In the course of the past four weeks, Tilson, who is not reli­gious and had nev­er heard of Franklin Gra­ham, the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian leader of Samaritan’s Purse, has become one of the field hospital’s most ded­i­cat­ed vol­un­teers and cham­pi­ons.”
  4. Is the World Ignor­ing a Chris­t­ian Geno­cide in Nige­ria? (Lela Gilbert, Prov­i­dence): “Those of us who track reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions and Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion agree with those who increas­ing­ly speak of anoth­er geno­cide. Mur­der­ous inci­dents are act­ed out with accel­er­at­ing fre­quen­cy, per­pe­trat­ed pri­mar­i­ly by two ter­ror groups—Boko Haram and Fulani jihadis. Tens of thou­sands of Nige­ri­ans have been slaugh­tered in the last decade. But their sto­ries rarely appear in main­stream West­ern news reports.”
  5. Four arti­cles more par­ti­san than those I often share:
    • On the right: End the Glob­al­iza­tion Gravy Train (J.D Vance, The Amer­i­can Mind): “West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion was, in fact, built by figures—one in par­tic­u­lar whose res­ur­rec­tion we just celebrated—who rec­og­nized that mate­r­i­al con­sump­tion, while nec­es­sary and impor­tant, was hard­ly the only good worth pur­su­ing.” 
    • On the left: Study­ing Fas­cist Pro­pa­gan­da by Day, Watch­ing Trump’s Coro­n­avirus Updates by Night (Andrew Marantz, The New York­er): “[Yale pro­fes­sor Jason] Stan­ley isn’t, or isn’t main­ly, a schol­ar of pub­lic pol­i­cy; he is a philoso­pher of lan­guage. When he insin­u­ates that Trump is a fascist—and you don’t have to be a philoso­pher of lan­guage to catch the insinuation—he means that Trump talks like a fas­cist, not nec­es­sar­i­ly that he gov­erns like one.” Sent my way by a con­cerned alum­nus.
    • On the right: Evan­gel­i­cals Need More Prag­ma­tism and Less Moral­ism (Daniel Strand, Prov­i­dence): “Many evan­gel­i­cals have expressed their dis­il­lu­sion at both polit­i­cal par­ties because nei­ther seems to line up with their beliefs. Democ­rats seem antag­o­nis­tic to Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions, and Repub­li­cans ral­ly to defend and sup­port a pres­i­dent whose char­ac­ter would not exact­ly line up with Chris­t­ian stan­dards, let alone those of used car salesman—my apolo­gies to used car sales­men. To all this, I say good.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of ethics at the USAF Air War Col­lege.
    • On the left: We Are Liv­ing In A Failed State (George Pack­er, The Atlantic): “When the virus came here, it found a coun­try with seri­ous under­ly­ing con­di­tions, and it exploit­ed them ruth­less­ly. Chron­ic ills—a cor­rupt polit­i­cal class, a scle­rot­ic bureau­cra­cy, a heart­less econ­o­my, a divid­ed and dis­tract­ed public—had gone untreat­ed for years. We had learned to live, uncom­fort­ably, with the symp­toms. It took the scale and inti­ma­cy of a pan­dem­ic to expose their severity—to shock Amer­i­cans with the recog­ni­tion that we are in the high-risk cat­e­go­ry.”
  6. The Decline of the Jury (Peter Hitchens, First Things): “For with­out a jury, any tri­al is sim­ply a process by which the state reas­sures itself that it has got the right man. A group of state employ­ees, none of them espe­cial­ly dis­tin­guished, are asked to con­firm the views of oth­er state employ­ees. With a jury, the gov­ern­ment can­not know the out­come and must prove its case. And so the faint, phan­tas­mal ide­al of the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence takes on actu­al flesh and bones and stands in the path of pow­er.”

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 For an eye-open­ing (and dis­may­ing) expe­ri­ence, read What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic). (first shared back in vol­ume 5): “one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 246

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. The Small World Net­work of Col­lege Class­es: Impli­ca­tions for Epi­dem­ic Spread on a Uni­ver­si­ty Cam­pus (Wee­den & Corn­well, pre­pub): “If one chose a giv­en stu­dent at ran­dom, that stu­dent is like­ly to attend class with a stu­dent who, in turn, attends class with any oth­er ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dent. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, although it is unlike­ly that any two ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dents would be enrolled in the same course, it is high­ly like­ly that they would be enrolled in dif­fer­ent cours­es that both include the same third par­ty.“
    • The authors, pro­fes­sors at Cor­nell, were curi­ous about the poten­tial for dis­ease spread among under­grads at their school. Tak­ing this in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion: the aver­age stu­dent at Stan­ford is like­ly only one or two steps away from Chi Alpha. WOW! Invite your friends!
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus:
    • A Com­ic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pan­dem­ic Mod­el­ing (Zach Wein­er­smith, Mag­gie Koerth, Lau­ra Bron­ner and Jas­mine Mithani, FiveThir­tyEight): dif­fi­cult to excerpt. It’s a com­ic strip.
    • Why can’t you go fish­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic? (Matthew Wal­ter, The Week): “Com­mon sense is exact­ly what has been lack­ing through­out this pan­dem­ic. This has been true of near­ly every­one in a posi­tion of author­i­ty. Telling peo­ple that they can­not engage in ordi­nary, whole­some, total­ly risk-free activ­i­ties is not, as Whit­mer recent­ly put it, ‘the best sci­ence.’ It is not any kind of sci­ence.”
    • When Coro­n­avirus Lock­downs Go Too Far (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…offi­cials micro­manag­ing out­door time and exer­cise — chivvy­ing peo­ple out of parks if they’re doing the wrong thing (read­ing qui­et­ly instead of exer­cis­ing, say) or clos­ing an entire state’s worth of parks, as New Jersey’s gov­er­nor chose to do last week — are crack­ing down on exact­ly the kind of cre­ative and adap­tive behav­iors that a social­ly dis­tanced soci­ety ought to be encour­ag­ing.”
    • When Will The Riots Begin? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “From the point of view of the non-elites, the elites with their mod­els and data and pro­jec­tions have shut the econ­o­my down. The news is full of pleas for New York, which always seemed like a sus­pi­cious den of urban inequity, but their home­town is doing fine. The church is closed, the bar is closed, the local plant is closed. Mon­ey is tight. Mean­while the elites are laugh­ing about bing­ing Tiger King on Net­flix.”
    • What does this econ­o­mist think of epi­demi­ol­o­gists? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…I have a few rude ques­tions that nobody else seems will­ing to ask, and I gen­uine­ly do not know the answers to these: As a class of sci­en­tists, how much are epi­demi­ol­o­gists paid? Is good or bad news bet­ter for their salaries? How smart are they? What are their aver­age GRE scores? Are they hired into thick, liq­uid aca­d­e­m­ic and insti­tu­tion­al mar­kets? And how mer­i­to­crat­ic are those mar­kets? What is their over­all track record on pre­dic­tions, whether before or dur­ing this cri­sis?”
      1. A response: From my email, a note about epi­demi­ol­o­gy (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The quan­ti­ta­tive mod­el­ers are gen­er­al­ly much smarter than the peo­ple per­form­ing con­tact trac­ing or qual­i­ta­tive epi­demi­ol­o­gy stud­ies. How­ev­er, if I’m being com­plete­ly hon­est, their intel­li­gence is prob­a­bly low­er than the aver­age engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor – and cer­tain­ly below that of math­e­mati­cians and sta­tis­ti­cians.”
      2. A response: A reply to Tyler Cown’s ques­tions on Epi­demi­ol­o­gy: (an anony­mous pro­fes­sor named Joseph, per­son­al blog): “Epi­demi­ol­o­gists are typ­i­cal­ly paid above aver­age for aca­d­e­mics, because of their links to med­ical schools. Those in depart­ments of pub­lic health are shame­ful­ly under­paid. Since peo­ple want good news from them, there is some pres­sure to pro­duce good news and most of our scan­dals come from over-opti­mistic fore­casts.” 
    • Sus­pend­ing WHO Fund­ing Should Be Just the Begin­ning (Lyman Stone, The Dis­patch): “…the WHO is sim­ply not the orga­ni­za­tion of doc­tors many peo­ple envi­sion. Of the 80 job list­ings cur­rent­ly on the WHO’s web­site, no more than four that I could iden­ti­fy apply to doc­tors at all. Even per­ma­nent career posi­tions on the inter­na­tion­al pro­fes­sion­al payscale usu­al­ly do not require more than a master’s degree in a health-relat­ed field. The WHO is cur­rent­ly hir­ing almost as many media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion staffers as it is epi­demi­o­log­i­cal staffers.”
    • Car­ta’s covid-19 lay­off (Hen­ry Ward, Medi­um): “It is impor­tant that all of you know I per­son­al­ly reviewed every list and every per­son. If you are one of those affect­ed it is because I decid­ed it. Your man­ag­er did not. For the major­i­ty of you it was quite the con­trary. Your man­ag­er fought to keep you and I over­rode them. They are blame­less. If today is your last day, there is only one per­son to blame and it is me.” This is super-classy.
    • The Black Plague (Keean­ga-Yamaht­ta Tay­lor, New York­er): “The old African-Amer­i­can apho­rism “When white Amer­i­ca catch­es a cold, black Amer­i­ca gets pneu­mo­nia” has a new, mor­bid twist: when white Amer­i­ca catch­es the nov­el coro­n­avirus, black Amer­i­cans die.”
    • A dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive: Do COVID-19 Racial Dis­par­i­ties Mat­ter? (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “In fact, blacks are more like­ly than whites to die of many diseases—not just this one. In oth­er cas­es, the reverse is true. Accord­ing to CDC mor­tal­i­ty data, whites are more like­ly than blacks to die of chron­ic low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­ease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, liv­er dis­ease, and eight dif­fer­ent types of can­cer. The same think­ing that attrib­ut­es the racial dis­par­i­ty in COVID-19 deaths to sys­temic racism against blacks could be applied equal­ly to argue the exis­tence of sys­temic racism against whites.”
    • Wast­ed time: how San Fran­cis­co failed its home­less pop­u­la­tion amid coro­n­avirus (Vivian Ho, The Guardian): “…many not-for-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions that offered ser­vices to the unhoused were forced to close. Shel­ters that used to allow peo­ple to con­gre­gate dur­ing the day closed their doors. So did gyms with show­ers, busi­ness­es with pub­lic restrooms and even the pub­lic library, where the unhoused can stay dry from the rain.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Chris­tian­i­ty & Coro­n­avirus
    • The Coro­n­avirus and the Will of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Because we are not Jesus, it is a very bad idea to walk around telling strangers how their suf­fer­ing might dis­play the works of God. But as friends, we can par­tic­i­pate in oth­ers’ dis­cern­ment and pat­tern-seek­ing, and we can try to dis­cern pur­pos­es in our own life — suf­fer­ing as pun­ish­ment, suf­fer­ing as refine­ment, suf­fer­ing as a judg­ment on a nation or soci­ety, suf­fer­ing as an oppor­tu­ni­ty, suf­fer­ing as part of a sto­ry not our own.”
    • Min­istry Lead­ers to ICE: Release Immi­grants and Let Church­es Help (Bekah McNeel, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This week, evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers from nine major orga­ni­za­tions wrote the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to urge offi­cials to release detained immi­grants dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who are elder­ly or at high­er risk for con­tract­ing COVID-19.”
    • A Q&A for church­es on gov­ern­ment restric­tions with a reli­gious lib­er­ty attor­ney: Nav­i­gat­ing the ten­sion between church and state dur­ing a pan­dem­ic (Jeff Pick­er­ing, The Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “Ulti­mate­ly, church­es should approach reli­gious free­dom con­flicts the same way they approach COVID-19: not with fear of suf­fer­ing but with calm con­fi­dence in the good­ness of God. Nei­ther a glob­al pan­dem­ic nor a local bureau­crat can silence the gospel.”
    • Jus­tice Depart­ment takes church’s side in 1st Amend­ment suit (Colleen Long, Michael Bal­samo And Emi­ly Wag­ster Pet­tus, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “The Jus­tice Depart­ment took the rare step on Tues­day of weigh­ing in on the side of a Mis­sis­sip­pi Chris­t­ian church where local offi­cials had tried to stop Holy Week ser­vices broad­cast to con­gre­gants sit­ting in their cars in the park­ing lot.…. Attor­ney Ryan Tuck­er of the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, which rep­re­sents the church, says there’s a Son­ic Dri­ve-In restau­rant about 200 yards (180 meters) from the church where patrons are still allowed to roll down their win­dows and talk.”
    • Promi­nent Vir­ginia pas­tor who said ‘God is larg­er than this dread­ed virus’ dies of covid-19 (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Ear­li­er in the ser­mon, he said: ‘If I had to deliv­er my own eulo­gy, I’d say, ‘God is greater than any chal­lenge you and I face.’ That would be my epi­taph.’”
  4. Athe­ists are the Most Polit­i­cal­ly Active Group in the Unit­ed States (Ryan P Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “At every lev­el on the edu­ca­tion spec­trum, athe­ists and agnos­tics are more polit­i­cal­ly active than Protes­tants or Catholics. More edu­ca­tion leads to high­er lev­els of polit­i­cal activ­i­ty among all reli­gious groups, but the rela­tion­ship is even stronger for athe­ists than oth­er groups. An athe­ist with a grad­u­ate degree par­tic­i­pat­ed in 2.1 polit­i­cal activ­i­ties in the last year. It was 1.8 activ­i­ties for agnos­tics. For Catholics and Protes­tants it’s between 1.3 and 1.4 activ­i­ties. That’s not a small dif­fer­ence.”
  5. The Trump cam­paign wants to win the votes of evan­gel­i­cals of col­or (Julie Zauzmer and Michelle Boorstein , Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Black and Lati­no evan­gel­i­cals] have con­ser­v­a­tive beliefs on social issues such as same-sex mar­riage, which they oppose at rates just slight­ly low­er than white evan­gel­i­cals, and to some extent abor­tion, which would put them in the Repub­li­can camp. But they also tend to favor more legal­ized immi­gra­tion, gov­ern­ment sen­si­tiv­i­ty toward racial jus­tice, and help for the poor, gen­er­al­ly push­ing them toward Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates.”
  6. The bloody decade: think Amer­i­ca’s divid­ed now? Try the 1970s (William Rose­nau, Spec­ta­tor): “In 1974 alone, there were 2,044 bomb­ings in Amer­i­ca, with 24 peo­ple killed. Vio­lent extrem­ist groups dot­ted the polit­i­cal land­scape in a way they sim­ply do not today.”
  7. Bloomberg News Killed Inves­ti­ga­tion, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife (David Folken­flik. NPR): “Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an inves­ti­ga­tion into the wealth of Com­mu­nist Par­ty elites in Chi­na, fear­ful of reper­cus­sions by the Chi­nese government.The com­pa­ny suc­cess­ful­ly silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters qui­et, too.”

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 245

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. Some East­er thoughts:
    • God­for­sak­en For Us (Fred Sanders, The Scrip­to­ri­um Dai­ly): “The words of Jesus here make promi­nent the name God (Eli, Eli). Jesus cries the name of God human­ly from a human place. One rea­son he does [not call God Father], I think, is that what is being enact­ed here on the cross is the Divine-Human encounter over sin. The one who has tak­en the place of the sin­ner is being pun­ished by exile, pre­cise­ly as a human, pre­cise­ly by God. To put this in the back­ground and reach out instead for Father-Son lan­guage in the para­phrased telling of this sto­ry is to tac­it­ly accept the propo­si­tion that what is hap­pen­ing on the cross reveals more about the Trin­i­ty (God in him­self) than about the incar­na­tion (God meet­ing man) or the atone­ment (sin meet­ing jus­tice).”
    • Christ Suf­fered for Our Sins, but He Did­n’t Go to Hell for Them (Brad East inter­view­ing Matthew Emer­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The biggest [mis­con­cep­tion about what hap­pened when Jesus died] is prob­a­bly the idea that Christ, dur­ing his descent, went to hell and was tor­ment­ed there.”
  2. Chris­tian­i­ty and Coro­n­avirus:
    • Uncer­tain­ty and the Chris­t­ian (Ephraim Rad­ner, First Things): “Uncer­tain­ty is at the cen­ter of the Chris­t­ian voca­tion. Uncer­tain­ty may not com­pre­hen­sive­ly describe that voca­tion, but it defines it in an essen­tial way. Many Chris­tians will and do reject this claim, I real­ize. ‘We know with cer­tain­ty all that is impor­tant to know!’ they will say. God is in con­trol; God is good; God rewards the faith­ful; Jesus is Lord, and in him death and sin are defeat­ed; the gates of Hell will not pre­vail against the church, and heav­en awaits us. These are indeed Big Pic­ture cer­tain­ties. But the Big Pic­ture isn’t all there is to God’s real­i­ty or to the Christian’s life. Small pic­tures are the bits that make up the Big Picture’s mosa­ic.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of his­tor­i­cal the­ol­o­gy at Wycliffe Col­lege in Cana­da.
    • Coro­n­avirus Search­es Lead Mil­lions to Hear About Jesus (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mil­lions of wor­ried peo­ple who have turned to Google with their anx­i­ety over COVID-19 have end­ed up con­nect­ing with Chris­t­ian evan­ge­lists in their search results—leading to a spike in online con­ver­sions in March.”
    • The Men and Women Who Run Toward the Dying (Bari Weiss, New York Times): “Before the plague hit, the pri­ma­ry job of hos­pi­tal chap­lains was tend­ing to patients and their fam­i­lies. Now the empha­sis has shift­ed to car­ing for their own col­leagues.”
    • Charis­mat­ic Chris­tians who believe in the pow­er of faith heal­ings are try­ing them over the phone  (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘I pray for peo­ple on the phone, and there is no dif­fer­ence in the spir­it realm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re touch­ing or not. It’s not about me, it’s about God and releas­ing his spir­it to take con­trol over the ele­ments of the body and speak life into them and to the dis­ease.’”
    • Dur­ing the Coro­n­avirus Out­break, I Miss Singing at Church (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “We must embrace social dis­tanc­ing, for as long is as need­ed, to pro­tect our health care sys­tem and the very real, fleshy bod­ies of mil­lions of people.But we also need to col­lec­tive­ly notice that some­thing pro­found is lost by hav­ing to inter­act with the world and our neigh­bors in most­ly dis­em­bod­ied, dig­i­tal ways. This is some­thing to lament and to grieve. And like all grief, it expos­es the val­ue and glo­ry of the thing that was lost.”
  3. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus:
    • What Every­one’s Get­ting Wrong About the Toi­let Paper Short­age (Will Ore­mus, Medi­um): “In short, the toi­let paper indus­try is split into two, large­ly sep­a­rate mar­kets: com­mer­cial and con­sumer. The pan­dem­ic has shift­ed the lion’s share of demand to the lat­ter. Peo­ple actu­al­ly do need to buy sig­nif­i­cant­ly more toi­let paper dur­ing the pan­dem­ic — not because they’re mak­ing more trips to the bath­room, but because they’re mak­ing more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion under stay-at-home orders, Amer­i­cans are no longer using the restrooms at their work­place, in schools, at restau­rants, at hotels, or in air­ports.”
    • Even Now, Crim­i­nal Defen­dants Have Rights (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Con­sid­er a poor per­son arrest­ed on sus­pi­cion of drunk dri­ving. Nor­mal­ly he would be arraigned and receive a pub­lic defend­er with­in 48 hours of arrest. Now he could sit in jail for a week with­out an attor­ney before get­ting the oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell his side of things to a judge.”
    • Apple and Google will make track­ing tech­nol­o­gy to fight coro­n­avirus (Adam Clark Estes and Shirin Ghaf­fary, Vox): “Apple and Google plan to build con­tact-trac­ing func­tion­al­i­ty into the oper­at­ing sys­tems of the phones them­selves, which might sound a lit­tle tricky for folks who wor­ry about being tracked with­out their con­sent. As the New York Times points out, by build­ing the tool direct­ly into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, Apple and Google effec­tive­ly ensure that the con­tact-trac­ing sys­tem can run 24 hours a day, rather than only when a par­tic­u­lar app is open.”
    • In the Fog of Coro­n­avirus, There Are No Experts (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[In the movie ‘Con­ta­gion’] only insti­tu­tions can be trust­ed; out­sider ‘knowl­edge’ leads only to the grave. That’s the movie; the real­i­ty has been oth­er­wise. In our actu­al pan­dem­ic, most of the insti­tu­tions that we asso­ciate with pub­lic health exper­tise and trust­ed med­ical author­i­ty have failed more cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly than Trump has.”
    • I’m Con­cerned About “US”: A Black Doc­tor’s Plea for Racial COVID19 Data (Rebekah Fen­ton, Medi­um): “I noticed a trend among the obit­u­ar­ies I read. They fea­ture high num­bers of Black peo­ple. They look like me, like my family’s friend. A fam­i­ly in Chica­go has lost two sis­ters, Patri­cia and Wan­da Frieson, to coro­n­avirus at 61 and 63. Arnold Obey, an avid marathon run­ner and retired prin­ci­pal in New York, died at 73. But the ages of Black and brown vic­tims were also low­er than I expect­ed. Dez-Ann Romain at 36. Dave Edwards at 48. Kious Kel­ly, an assis­tant nurse man­ag­er, at 48.” Rebekah is an alum­na of Chi Alpha.
    • Flat­ten The Curve (Ohio Depart­ment of Health, YouTube): thir­ty well-done sec­onds
  4. S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay.
  5. The Sit­u­a­tion With Vik­tor Orban (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I count myself an admir­er of many of the things Vik­tor Orban has done, espe­cial­ly his moves to pro­tect Hun­gar­i­an sov­er­eign­ty, the par­tic­u­lar­i­ty of its cul­ture, and to resist migra­tion being forced upon Hun­gary. This does not mean I sup­port every­thing he does — I hon­est­ly don’t fol­low Orban close­ly enough to have an informed opin­ion — but I think on bal­ance, he has been good for Hun­gary, and for Europe. I would have a lot more con­fi­dence for the future were I liv­ing in a coun­try gov­erned by Vik­tor Orban than by Angela Merkel.” I don’t know why I find this sub­ject so fas­ci­nat­ing. Maybe it’s just because Dreher does and I love read­ing his writ­ing.

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 Let­ter To My Younger Self (Ryan Leaf, The Player’s Tri­bune): “Con­grat­u­la­tions. You offi­cial­ly have it all — mon­ey, pow­er and pres­tige. All the things that are impor­tant, right?… That’s you, young Ryan Leaf, at his absolute finest: arro­gant, boor­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic. You think you’re on top of the world and that you’ve got all the answers. Well I’m sor­ry to have to tell you this, but the truth is….” Such a grip­ping let­ter. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. (first shared in vol­ume 99)

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 244

The­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tives on the pan­dem­ic, some inter­est­ing news tid­bits, the state of Stan­ford ath­let­ic fan­dom, and a good reminder that Mor­monism is not a Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tion.

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. Chris­t­ian Coro­n­avirus Per­spec­tives
    • Chris­tian­i­ty Offers No Answers About the Coro­n­avirus (N.T. Wright, Time): “Sup­pos­ing real human wis­dom doesn’t mean being able to string togeth­er some dodgy spec­u­la­tions and say, ‘So that’s all right then?’ What if, after all, there are moments such as T. S. Eliot rec­og­nized in the ear­ly 1940s, when the only advice is to wait with­out hope, because we’d be hop­ing for the wrong thing? Ratio­nal­ists (includ­ing Chris­t­ian ratio­nal­ists) want expla­na­tions; Roman­tics (includ­ing Chris­t­ian roman­tics) want to be giv­en a sigh of relief. But per­haps what we need more than either is to recov­er the bib­li­cal tra­di­tion of lament.”
      • Please remem­ber that authors do not usu­al­ly pick the head­lines for their arti­cles. In this case espe­cial­ly the lev­el of mis­match between the title and the arti­cle is strik­ing.
    • Sur­prised by Hope­less­ness: A Response to NT Wright (Andy Davis, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Despite what T. S. Eliot says, Chris­tians know exact­ly what to hope for. We’ve been clear­ly instruct­ed by God’s prophet­ic Word, and there­fore, we should be radi­ant with hope—an unshak­able con­vic­tion that the future is inde­scrib­ably bright. The world is ‘with­out hope and with­out God’ (Eph. 2:14); so when Chris­tians radi­ate hope, the world notices and is moved to ask us to give a rea­son for the hope with­in us (1 Pet. 3:15).”
    • Like the Mer­chants of Baby­lon (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “The Bible tells us that God’s deal­ings with mankind are often mys­te­ri­ous, and so we should nev­er rush to glib expla­na­tions. But His works are not absolute­ly inscrutable. When Jesus rebuked the peo­ple for mis­read­ing the col­lapse of the tow­er of Siloam, and for the inci­dent where Pilate killed the men of Galilee (Luke 13:1–5), He rebuked them, not for read­ing mean­ing into the sto­ry, but for hav­ing read the wrong mean­ing into the sto­ry.”
    • How An Evil Virus Points to the Crush­ing Weight of the Fall (David French, The Dis­patch): “Last night, my wife and I were walk­ing through our neigh­bor­hood and saw a pas­tor friend in his back­yard. We stopped him and had a love­ly con­ver­sa­tion while main­tain­ing prop­er social dis­tanc­ing from the side­walk. As we shared our own bur­dens and stress­es, he made an impor­tant obser­va­tion – this moment demon­strates so clear­ly our need for a sav­ior. By that, he meant far, far more than the idea that we need some of that ‘old-time reli­gion’ before we meet our mak­er. No, he meant that a bro­ken world eager­ly awaits the redemp­tion declared in Rev­e­la­tions 21, when the Lord declares, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”
    • The Book of Com­mon Prayer: Prayers for Plagues and Times of Great Sick­ness (Richard Beck, per­son­al blog): “Have pity upon us mis­er­able sin­ners, who now are vis­it­ed with great sick­ness and mor­tal­i­ty; that like as thou didst then accept of an atone­ment, and didst com­mand the destroy­ing Angel to cease from pun­ish­ing, so it may now please thee to with­draw from us this plague and griev­ous sick­ness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
    • The Apoc­a­lypse as an ‘Unveil­ing’: What Reli­gion Teach­es Us About the End Times (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “For peo­ple of many faiths, and even none at all, it can feel late­ly like the end of the world is near. Not only is there a plague, but hun­dreds of bil­lions of locusts are swarm­ing East Africa. Wild­fires have rav­aged Aus­tralia, killing an untold num­ber of ani­mals. A recent earth­quake in Utah even shook the Salt Lake Tem­ple to the top of its icon­ic spire, caus­ing the gold­en trum­pet to fall from the angel Moroni’s right hand.”
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus Com­men­tary
    • Tips from some­one with 50 years of social dis­tanc­ing expe­ri­ence (Rae Ellen Bichell, Min­neso­ta Pub­lic Radio): “Keep track of some­thing…. In the era of COVID-19, he sug­gests track­ing what you can — or can’t — find at the gro­cery store. Or, bet­ter yet, par­tic­i­pat­ing in some cit­i­zen sci­ence, like a project called CoCo­RaHS that tracks rain­fall across the coun­try.”
    • It’s Time to Face Facts, Amer­i­ca: Masks Work (Fer­ris Jabr, Wired): “The col­lec­tive evi­dence makes a strong case for uni­ver­sal mask wear­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. Masks are not a sub­sti­tute for oth­er inter­ven­tions; they must always be used in com­bi­na­tion with social dis­tanc­ing and hand hygiene.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. 
    • The Coro­n­avirus and the Con­ser­v­a­tive Mind (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the sup­posed con­ser­v­a­tive mind is more attuned to exter­nal threat and inter­nal con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, more inclined to sup­port author­i­ty and hier­ar­chy, and fear sub­ver­sion and dis­sent. And so the polit­i­cal respons­es to the pan­dem­ic have put these psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries to a very inter­est­ing test.” This is an angle that nev­er would have occurred to me but which is obvi­ous­ly worth explor­ing. 
    • Coro­n­avirus maps and charts show COVID-19 symp­toms, spread, death rate (Busi­ness Insid­er): “These 22 charts and graph­ics lay out what you need to know as the out­break con­tin­ues to progress.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. This is only mar­gin­al­ly about the coro­n­avirus: An inside look at the hos­pi­tal going up in Cen­tral Park (Tony Carnes, A Jour­ney Through NYC Reli­gions): “The heart of Cen­tral Park is Bethes­da Foun­tain, which was built to com­mem­o­rate the heal­ing pow­er of Jesus at the Pool of Bethes­da in Israel. Fred­er­ic Law Olm­st­ed, the park’s design­er, hoped that the park would pro­vide spir­i­tu­al refresh­ment to urban mass­es from their tra­vails. Now, a Chris­t­ian min­istry is real­iz­ing the sym­bol­ism in the 21st Cen­tu­ry by erect­ing a crit­i­cal care hos­pi­tal at the park’s 97th Street Trans­verse and Fifth Avenue…. Samaritan’s Purse med­ical per­son­nel use the twen­ty sec­onds while they wash their hands to pray for each of their patients by name. It is fit­ting that they do that at their present loca­tion.”
    • What a heart­warm­ing sto­ry. Who could be opposed?
    • Oh, wait. De Bla­sio “Very Con­cerned” About Anti-Gay Evan­gel­i­cal Group Run­ning Cen­tral Park Coro­n­avirus Hos­pi­tal (Jake Offen­hartz, The Gothamist): “May­or Bill de Bla­sio said the city will keep a close eye on the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist group oper­at­ing a field hos­pi­tal in Cen­tral Park, amid grow­ing fears that some New York­ers could face dis­crim­i­na­tion and sub­stan­dard care from the reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • And New York­ers Are Right to Be Skep­ti­cal of Evan­gel­i­cal-Run Coro­n­avirus Ward in Cen­tral Park (Jonathan Mer­rit, The Dai­ly Beast): “The vast major­i­ty of New York­ers are not Chris­t­ian, and if they find them­selves wheez­ing for air due to COVID-19, they don’t want to be pros­e­ly­tized while receiv­ing treat­ment. They too have rea­son to be skep­ti­cal of the organization’s makeshift hos­pi­tal.” 
    • Some amus­ing com­ments I saw in response, “I think they’re actu­al­ly afraid that the vol­un­teers will give away Chick-Fil‑A sand­wich­es” and “If the may­or had been as con­cerned about the coro­n­avirus as he is about the Chris­tians then New York would look very dif­fer­ent today.” Ouch.
  4. Dona­tions: From Bribery to Benev­o­lence (Jas­mine Ker­ber, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “A spec­trum exists between bribery and benev­o­lence, and dona­tions fall in var­i­ous places along that con­tin­u­um. Oper­a­tion Var­si­ty Blues high­light­ed the most cor­rupt ‘dona­tions’; for­mer Stan­ford sail­ing coach John Van­de­mo­er plead­ed guilty to accept­ing a bribe, not an altru­is­tic con­tri­bu­tion to ath­let­ics.” Jas­mine is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
    • I shared an arti­cle that dis­cussed phil­an­thropy from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive back in vol­ume 213.
  5. At least the seats are red: Why is Stan­ford Sta­di­um often emp­ty? (Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As nation­al Heis­man vot­ers did not vote for Chris­t­ian McCaf­frey ’18 because they could not both­er to watch his games, Stan­ford stu­dents would not bike over to Stan­ford Sta­di­um for [his] games. ‘I will nev­er for­get this,’ McCaf­frey told The Ath­let­ic. ‘My sopho­more year against UCLA, I had a heck of a game. I biked back to my dorm, I’m kind of on a high horse. I walk in, and six or sev­en peo­ple asked where I was! I think I had some­thing like 243 yards rush­ing, four touch­downs. And they didn’t know where I was!’”
  6. 3 Types of Skep­tics (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “1. Those who need answers…. 2. Those who don’t like the answers…. 3. Those who need heal­ing.”
  7. Are Mor­mons Chris­tians?: A Review of “The Saints of Zion: An Intro­duc­tion to Mor­mon The­ol­o­gy” (Tim Miller, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “He makes clear that Mor­mons are not Chris­tians, but does so by point­ing out that this has been the claim of the Mor­mon church itself through­out his­to­ry (despite recent attempts to argue dif­fer­ent­ly).”

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 Book Review: See­ing Like A State (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Peas­ants didn’t like per­ma­nent sur­names. Their own sys­tem was quite rea­son­able for them: John the bak­er was John Bak­er, John the black­smith was John Smith, John who lived under the hill was John Under­hill, John who was real­ly short was John Short. The same per­son might be John Smith and John Under­hill in dif­fer­ent con­texts, where his sta­tus as a black­smith or place of ori­gin was more impor­tant. But the gov­ern­ment insist­ed on giv­ing every­one a sin­gle per­ma­nent name, unique for the vil­lage, and track­ing who was in the same fam­i­ly as whom. Resis­tance was intense.” This is long and amaz­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 95)

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 243

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. Recov­er­ing Friend­ship (Devo­rah Gold­man, Pub­lic Dis­course): “And then you go at it, ham­mer and tongs, far into the night, night after night; or walk­ing through fine coun­try that nei­ther gives a glance to, each learn­ing the weight of the other’s punch­es, and often more like mutu­al­ly respect­ful ene­mies than friends. Actu­al­ly (though it nev­er seems so at the time) you mod­i­fy one another’s thought; out of this per­pet­u­al dog­fight a com­mu­ni­ty of mind and a deep affec­tion emerge.”
  2. In God We Divide (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “The more reli­gious­ly engaged a white vot­er is, the more like­ly he or she will be a Repub­li­can; the less reli­gious the vot­er, the more like­ly to be a Demo­c­rat. But, as we shall see it’s not that sim­ple: The deep­er you go, the more com­plex it gets.”
    • Note the adjec­tive “white” in the first sen­tence — almost all dis­cus­sion about the pol­i­tics of reli­gious peo­ple focus­es on white vot­ers. The piece lat­er acknowl­edges vot­ers of col­or but doesn’t explore how their faith influ­ences their votes. Instead non-white evan­gel­i­cals are usu­al­ly treat­ed as though faith is irrel­e­vant to their polit­i­cal views, which is absurd. All that to say: the arti­cle has inter­est­ing insights but bear in mind its crip­pling lim­i­ta­tion.
  3. Is Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal in Israel Myth? Or Real­i­ty? (Ralph Hawkins, Logos): “When I was work­ing on my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion about the Ebal site, I spent a week with Zer­tal. One morn­ing while we were dri­ving to the site, he told me his crit­ics had accused him of try­ing to prove the Bible. They said he imposed a cul­tic inter­pre­ta­tion onto the stone struc­ture he had found. He explained, though, that he had been born and raised in Ein She­mer, Israeli kib­butz that was affil­i­at­ed with a sec­u­lar move­ment. He said he had grown up believ­ing that the Bible was full of myths. When he did his grad­u­ate work in archae­ol­o­gy, he did it at Tel Aviv, the most lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, where those views were rein­forced. He insist­ed he had not embarked on his exca­va­tion at Mount Ebal in order to prove the Bible. What he found there, how­ev­er, had a pro­found effect on him. He said, ‘I became a believ­er at Mount Ebal.’”
    • I love sto­ries like this. Archae­ol­o­gy and the Bible is fas­ci­nat­ing to me.
  4. Chris­tian­i­ty & Coro­n­avirus
    • When Coro­na Makes Us More Like The New Tes­ta­ment (Andrew Wil­son, Think The­ol­o­gy): “In a num­ber of curi­ous ways, the Coro­n­avirus out­break is mak­ing us more like the New Tes­ta­ment church.” See also Sam Allberry’s Twit­ter thread about God’s Pur­pos­es In Pan­dem­ic. It reminds me of Num­bers 11:18–20.
    • Coro­n­avirus, Courage, and the Sec­ond Temp­ta­tion of Christ (David French, The Dis­patch): “Shun per­for­ma­tive reck­less­ness. Do not pre­sume that our faith makes us immune to the laws of biol­o­gy and viral trans­mis­sion. At the same time, believ­ers should not shrink from pur­pose­ful and sac­ri­fi­cial per­son­al risk. There may come a time when you must care for those who are sick. Do so with­out reser­va­tion, but do so pru­dent­ly with the knowl­edge that you should not impute your risks to oth­ers.”
    • Can­celed Mis­sion Trips Expect­ed to Have Long-Term Fall­out (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Approx­i­mate­ly 20 per­cent of all US-based inter­na­tion­al mis­sion work each year is done by short-term vol­un­teers, accord­ing to an analy­sis by soci­ol­o­gist of reli­gion Robert Wuth­now. That trans­lates to 1.6 mil­lion US church mem­bers annu­al­ly going on inter­na­tion­al mis­sion trips and doing work val­ued at $1.1 bil­lion (not count­ing prepa­ra­tion time and trav­el days).”
    • Church as a Non-Essen­tial Ser­vice (Matthew Schmitz, First Things): “Judg­ing by the response of many reli­gious lead­ers, church is a non-essen­tial ser­vice. We are capa­ble of tak­ing pru­dent mea­sures to keep our super­mar­kets open, but not our sanc­tu­ar­ies. Coro­n­avirus has shown what we val­ue. In Penn­syl­va­nia, beer dis­trib­u­tors are deemed essen­tial. In San Fran­cis­co and New York, cannabis dis­pen­saries are.” This is actu­al­ly a con­tri­bu­tion to an online dust­up but I find it more inter­est­ing than the dis­pute itself.
    • Dig­i­tal Com­mu­nion: His­to­ry, The­ol­o­gy, and Prac­tices (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “A few weeks ago, I post­ed a graph­ic that attempts to show that the ele­ments of a ser­vice that are trans­ac­tion­al or broad­cast ori­ent­ed are usu­al­ly the eas­i­est to move online, but the rela­tion­al parts of church are often the most challenging—and most overlooked—elements of dig­i­tal church.”
    • In Leviti­cus, an unex­pect­ed les­son in sur­viv­ing quar­an­tine (Rachel Sha­ran­sky Danziger, For­ward): “Before, I could nev­er under­stand why we should learn in so much detail about every lit­tle rit­u­al in the Taber­na­cle, and who does what, and when. Now, as I work hard to make our new­ly claus­tro­pho­bic home into a place of calm and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, I under­stand the book’s insis­tence on such details.” A Jew­ish per­spec­tive.
  5. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus Com­men­tary
    • That Dis­com­fort You’re Feel­ing Is Grief (Scott Beri­na­to, Har­vard Busi­ness Review): “There is some­thing pow­er­ful about nam­ing this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my cowork­ers I’m hav­ing a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emo­tions need motion. It’s impor­tant we acknowl­edge what we go through.”
      • Pas­toral aside: this is (some of) you. Paula and I have both talked to peo­ple who have been mourn­ing with­out real­iz­ing what they were doing. You are griev­ing. A few days ago I uploaded a two-minute video reflect­ing on Psalm 137:1 which touch­es on this.
    • Leisure in a Time of Coro­n­avirus (Nathan Schlueter, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Schools are closed. Sports and music lessons are can­celled. Every­one is at home. What are you going to do? Instead of allow­ing coro­n­avirus con­trol your life, why not plan for leisure? Use this time to do the things you are always wish­ing you had the time to do—or do bet­ter. Now you have that time, so do those things.”
    • Face Masks: Much More Than You Want­ed To Know (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Some peo­ple with swine flu trav­elled on a plane from New York to Chi­na, and many fel­low pas­sen­gers got infect­ed. Some researchers looked at whether pas­sen­gers who wore masks through­out the flight stayed health­i­er. The answer was very much yes. They were able to track down 9 peo­ple who got sick on the flight and 32 who didn’t. 0% of the sick pas­sen­gers wore masks, com­pared to 47% of the healthy pas­sen­gers. Anoth­er way to look at that is that 0% of mask-wear­ers got sick, but 35% of non-wear­ers did. This was a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence, and of obvi­ous applic­a­bil­i­ty to the cur­rent ques­tion.”
    • The Fog of Pan­dem­ic (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “The U.S. is fight­ing a war with extreme uncer­tain­ties. It may be weeks before we know whether we are flat­ten­ing the coro­n­avirus curve, and months before we know what kind of econ­o­my we’ll have in the sec­ond half of this year.”
    • When can we let up? Explor­ing how to relax coro­n­avirus lock­downs (Stat News): “The approach get­ting the most sup­port is one that experts have long doubt­ed could work with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus: aggres­sive case find­ing, con­tact trac­ing, com­mu­ni­ty sur­veil­lance, iso­la­tion of cas­es, and quar­an­ti­ning of con­tacts. Both Sin­ga­pore and South Korea used that, allow­ing them to make tac­ti­cal deci­sions about schools (most­ly open in both coun­tries) and pub­lic move­ment, spar­ing them from shut­ting down to the extent that the U.S. and many coun­tries in Europe have.”
    • Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic: We Need the Skep­tics (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “When a bad thing hap­pens to a good per­son, we are tempt­ed to rage at God. When innu­mer­able bad things hap­pen to half of every­one we know, we rage at each oth­er.”
    • On Coro­n­avirus, Rea­son To Hope (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): This week we saw FDA approval of new test­ing sys­tems from Roche and from Abbott labs that run tests ten times faster than cur­rent meth­ods. To give you an idea of what this means, Roche brags that their Cobas 8800 machine can process over 3000 tests per day. Until today, Louisiana hadn’t had a total of 3000 peo­ple test­ed. Roche is now mak­ing and ship­ping 400,000 test kits per week in the US, while Abbott is mak­ing a mil­lion of their test kits each week. Those sys­tems will be com­ing online this com­ing week…. And there are more com­pa­nies in the process of get­ting approval. In two weeks, we should be able to test 150,000 – 200,000 Amer­i­cans dai­ly, and that means that we don’t all need to stay home any­more.”
      • You can see the num­ber of tests admin­is­tered so far at The COVID Track­ing Project — this is one of the best indi­ca­tors to keep an eye on because it deter­mines the reli­a­bil­i­ty of every oth­er sta­tis­tic.
    • The World After Coro­n­avirus (Yuval Noah Harari, Finan­cial Times): “But tem­po­rary mea­sures have a nasty habit of out­last­ing emer­gen­cies, espe­cial­ly as there is always a new emer­gency lurk­ing on the hori­zon. My home coun­try of Israel, for exam­ple, declared a state of emer­gency dur­ing its 1948 War of Inde­pen­dence, which jus­ti­fied a range of tem­po­rary mea­sures from press cen­sor­ship and land con­fis­ca­tion to spe­cial reg­u­la­tions for mak­ing pud­ding (I kid you not). The War of Inde­pen­dence has long been won, but Israel nev­er declared the emer­gency over, and has failed to abol­ish many of the ‘tem­po­rary’ mea­sures of 1948 (the emer­gency pud­ding decree was mer­ci­ful­ly abol­ished in 2011).”
    • Safe­ty Pro­to­cols and Zones of Quar­an­tine (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In oth­er words, this part of the virus response should tran­si­tion to a health and safe­ty reg­u­la­to­ry con­cern that is impor­tant, but han­dled like most of the oth­ers. For exam­ple, poor food hygiene can also kill you, but gov­ern­ments gen­er­al­ly don’t respond by decid­ing which cuisines are essen­tial and which are not. Rather, any­one will­ing to fol­low the safe­ty rules can put up any menu they want. So it should be for eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties of all kinds.”

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 The Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” First shared in vol­ume 150. 

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 242

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.

A lot of links this week. Can you tell I’m on lock­down in the Bay Area? Since some of you are, too, you’ll have time to read them! 😂

Kid­ding aside, I nev­er assume any­one reads all of these. Skim the links and open the ones that inter­est you in new tabs, but be sure to open all the amus­ing stuff at the end — you need it.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic Visu­al­iz­ers:
  2. Chris­t­ian Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives:
    • The Emo­tion­al Impact Of Cam­pus Clo­sures (Michele Phoenix, per­son­al blog): “There are few things in life as pre­dictable as one’s col­lege tra­jec­to­ry. From the dread­ed fresh­man-fif­teen to changes in aca­d­e­m­ic majors or find­ing out last minute that you’re two cred­its short… It all plays out accord­ing to an estab­lished time­line. Then comes a virus that upends every­thing and predictability—one of the pri­ma­ry sta­bi­liz­ing fac­tors of our lives—suddenly morphs into a whirl­wind of shift­ing unknowns.”
      • Relat­ed: Unfin­ished nar­ra­tives (Jes­si­ca de la Paz, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Every­day there’s anoth­er email, and with every email anoth­er string of hope we wear hang­ing around our necks is yanked off, and we’re left with a red impres­sion of where it once was. My immi­grant par­ents who fought tooth and nail for me and my broth­ers won’t get to see me walk across the stage to get my diplo­ma. There will be no pho­tos or laugh­ter-filled recep­tion.” Jes­si­ca is a Chi Alpha stu­dent. She is also quot­ed in this Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle: To Fight Coro­n­avirus, Col­leges Sent Stu­dents Home. Now Will They Refund Tuition?
    • In Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic, Chris­tian­i­ty Has Ancient Lessons (Lyman Stone, For­eign Pol­i­cy): “The mod­ern world has sud­den­ly become reac­quaint­ed with the old­est trav­el­ing com­pan­ion of human his­to­ry: exis­ten­tial dread and the fear of unavoid­able, inscrutable death. No vac­cine or antibi­ot­ic will save us for the time being. Because this expe­ri­ence has become for­eign to mod­ern peo­ple, we are, by and large, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly under­equipped for the cur­rent coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.” Side note: I have very much enjoyed the author on Twit­ter.
    • Respond­ing to Pan­demics: 4 Lessons from Church His­to­ry (Glen Scriven­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “Plagues inten­si­fy the nat­ur­al course of life. They inten­si­fy our own sense of mor­tal­i­ty and frailty. They also inten­si­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties to dis­play coun­ter­cul­tur­al, coun­ter­con­di­tion­al love. The church rose to the chal­lenge in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry, win­ning both admir­ers and also con­verts.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. A longer ver­sion is avail­able as a 45 minute YouTube video (which, full con­fes­sion, I have not watched). 
    • The­o­log­i­cal Reflec­tions on the Pan­dem­ic (Bri­an Tabb, Gospel Coali­tion): “All people—rich and poor, young and old, reli­gious and non-religious—are sus­cep­ti­ble to sick­ness and are cer­tain to die one day. Yet for fol­low­ers of Jesus, sick­ness tests our faith, reveals our hope, and moves us to be zeal­ous for good works.”
    • Plague and Prov­i­dence: What Huldrych Zwingli Taught Me About Trust­ing God (Stephen Ecch­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “I first came across Huldrych Zwingli’s ‘Plague Song’ while study­ing the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews: ‘Help, Lord God, help in this trou­ble! I think death is at the door. Stand before me, Christ, for you have over­come him.’”
    • Does Reli­gion Impact What Peo­ple Are Afraid Of? (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “Among Protes­tants who nev­er attend church, their total num­ber of fears is no dif­fer­ent than Catholics at just about six­teen. How­ev­er, as a Protes­tant increas­es their fre­quen­cy of wor­ship atten­dance their total num­ber of fears begins to decline. Among Protes­tants who attend more than once a week, the mod­el pre­dicts just 11.5 fears – which is sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant from both low attend­ing Protes­tants and all Catholics.”
    • This is not the end of the world, accord­ing to Chris­tians who study the end of the world (Julie Zauzmer and Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Could this be a sign of the apoc­a­lypse? It sure might feel apoc­a­lyp­tic. But not if you ask Chris­t­ian writ­ers and pas­tors who have spent years focus­ing their mes­sage on the Book of Rev­e­la­tion — the New Testament’s final book.”
  3. Gen­er­al Pan­dem­ic Think­pieces:
    • Buzz Aldrin has some advice for Amer­i­cans in quar­an­tine (Eric Berg­er, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “Buzz Aldrin knows a thing or two about quar­an­tines. After return­ing from the Moon in 1969, Aldrin, Neil Arm­strong, and Michael Collins spent 21 days in quar­an­tine to pre­vent the spread of any con­ta­gions they might have brought back from the lunar sur­face.” Very short. Mild­ly amus­ing.
    • NIH Direc­tor: ‘We’re on an Expo­nen­tial Curve’ (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “When I asked him how he sees faith now, in his late 60s, com­pared with how he saw things in his late 20s, he told me, ‘I think I’ve also arrived at a place where my faith has become a real­ly strong sup­port for deal­ing with life’s strug­gles. It took me awhile, I think—that sense that God is suf­fi­cient and that I don’t have to be strong in every cir­cum­stance.’” Fran­cis Collins is a sol­id believ­er who we co-host­ed to speak at Stan­ford around a decade ago. Good inter­view. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • A fias­co in the mak­ing? As the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic takes hold, we are mak­ing deci­sions with­out reli­able data (John Ioan­ni­dis, Stat News): “The most valu­able piece of infor­ma­tion for answer­ing those ques­tions would be to know the cur­rent preva­lence of the infec­tion in a ran­dom sam­ple of a pop­u­la­tion and to repeat this exer­cise at reg­u­lar time inter­vals to esti­mate the inci­dence of new infec­tions. Sad­ly, that’s infor­ma­tion we don’t have.” The author is a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine, of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and pop­u­la­tion health, of bio­med­ical data sci­ence, and of sta­tis­tics.
    • Chi­na Is Avoid­ing Blame by Trolling the World (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “A gov­ern­ment is not a race. It’s a regime—and eas­i­ly one of the worst and most bru­tal in our life­time. Crit­i­ciz­ing author­i­tar­i­an regimes for what they do out­side their own bor­ders and to their own peo­ple is sim­ply call­ing things as they are. To do oth­er­wise is to for­go analy­sis and accu­ra­cy in the name of assuag­ing a regime that deserves no such con­sid­er­a­tion.”
      • Relat­ed: Don’t blame ‘Chi­na’ for the coro­n­avirus — blame the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Let’s stop say­ing ‘Chi­nese virus’ — not because every­one who uses it is racist, but because it need­less­ly plays into the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s attempts to divide us and deflect our atten­tion from their bad actions. Let’s just call it the ‘CCP virus.’ That’s more accu­rate and offends only those who deserve it.”
    • “Dishonesty…Is Always an Indi­ca­tor of Weak­ness”: Tuck­er Carl­son on How He Brought His Coro­n­avirus Mes­sage to Mar-a-Lago (Joe Hagan, Van­i­ty Fair): “I felt I had a moral oblig­a­tion to be use­ful in what­ev­er small way I could, and, you know, I don’t have any actu­al author­i­ty. I’m just a talk show host. But I felt—and my wife strong­ly felt—that I had a moral oblig­a­tion to try and be help­ful in what­ev­er way pos­si­ble. I’m not an advis­er to the per­son or any­one else oth­er than my chil­dren. And I mean that. And you can ask any­body in the White House or out how many times have I gone to the White House to give my opin­ion on things. Because I don’t do that. And in gen­er­al I real­ly dis­ap­prove of peo­ple stray­ing too far out­side their lanes and act­ing like just because they have sol­id rat­ings, they have a right to con­trol pub­lic pol­i­cy. I don’t believe that. I think it’s wrong.” Unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Coro­nalinks 3/19/20 (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m usu­al­ly pret­ty harsh on Bay Area gov­ern­ments here. So I want to give cred­it where cred­it is due: they’ve react­ed to the coro­n­avirus epi­dem­ic with a lev­el of swift­ness and feroc­i­ty they usu­al­ly reserve for attempts to build new hous­ing.” I am includ­ing the link entire­ly for that glo­ri­ous line. The rest is worth­while, but that line is majes­tic.
    • Coro­n­avirus: The Ham­mer and the Dance (Tom­sa Pueyo, Medi­um): “This is prob­a­bly the sin­gle biggest, most impor­tant mis­take peo­ple make when think­ing about this stage: they think it will keep them home for months. This is not the case at all. In fact, it is like­ly that our lives will go back to close to nor­mal.”
      • The author is quite crit­i­cal of the USA. Maybe it’s because I live in Sil­i­con Val­ley and am cur­rent­ly on lock­down, but I think we’re respond­ing pret­ty aggres­sive­ly. Hon­est­ly, I think we’re doing bet­ter than most coun­tries around the world (def­i­nite­ly not Sin­ga­pore, though — respect to that island tech­noc­ra­cy). Also, Amer­i­ca often takes a while to mobi­lize in response to great chal­lenges but once we do the strength of our response is stag­ger­ing. We engage in relent­less and pub­lic self-crit­i­cism that leads us to over­com­pen­sate; for exam­ple, the news keep empha­siz­ing that we are piti­ful­ly behind on test kits. It is true that we were inex­cus­ably behind. How­ev­er, our capac­i­ty for test­ing is explod­ing — pre­cise­ly because every­one believes we are piti­ful­ly behind. There remain oth­er areas in which we are still falling flat, and they are hav­ing bright spot­lights trained upon them. So I’m cau­tious­ly opti­mistic. Things will be bad but not near­ly as bad as they could have been. For all of her faults, Amer­i­ca is still pret­ty amaz­ing.
      • Also, the author inex­plic­a­bly trusts China’s reports about their cur­rent lev­els of infec­tion. Giv­en extreme­ly recent his­to­ry, that is per­plex­ing.
    • Why Telling Peo­ple They Don’t Need Masks Back­fired (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “It used to be said that back in the Sovi­et Union, if there was a line, you first got in line and then fig­ured out what the line was for — peo­ple knew that there were going to be short­ages and that the author­i­ties often lied, so they hoard­ed.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at UNC. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • We’re not going back to nor­mal (Gideon Lich­field, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “…one can imag­ine a world in which, to get on a flight, per­haps you’ll have to be signed up to a ser­vice that tracks your move­ments via your phone. The air­line wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infect­ed peo­ple or dis­ease hot spots. There’d be sim­i­lar require­ments at the entrance to large venues, gov­ern­ment build­ings, or pub­lic trans­port hubs. There would be tem­per­a­ture scan­ners every­where, and your work­place might demand you wear a mon­i­tor that tracks your tem­per­a­ture or oth­er vital signs.” Shared by a con­cerned stu­dent.
  4. Non-pan­dem­ic (YES!!!!):
    • Book Review: Hoover (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Her­bert Hoover is the first stu­dent at Stan­ford. Not just a mem­ber of the first grad­u­at­ing class. Lit­er­al­ly the first stu­dent. He arrives at the dorms two months ear­ly to get a head start on var­i­ous mon­ey-mak­ing schemes, includ­ing dis­trib­ut­ing news­pa­pers, deliv­er­ing laun­dry, tend­ing live­stock, and help­ing oth­er stu­dents reg­is­ter. He would lat­er sell some of these busi­ness­es to oth­er stu­dents and start more, oper­at­ing a con­stant churn of enter­pris­es through­out his col­lege career. His aca­d­e­mics remain mediocre, and he con­tin­ues to have few friends – until he tries out for the foot­ball team in sopho­more year. He has zero ath­let­ic tal­ent and fails mis­er­ably, but the coach (whose eye for tal­ent appar­ent­ly tran­scends ath­let­ics) spots poten­tial in Hoover and asks him to come on as team man­ag­er. In this role, Hoover is an unqual­i­fied suc­cess. He turns the team’s debt into a sur­plus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berke­ley vs. Stan­ford foot­ball match played on Thanks­giv­ing which remains a beloved Stan­ford foot­ball tra­di­tion.” Long but good (if you are inter­est­ed in Stan­ford, pres­i­den­tial his­to­ry, or clever thoughts).
      • Relat­ed: Scott Alexan­der on Her­bert Hoover (Scott Sum­n­er, The Library of Eco­nom­ics and Lib­er­ty): “Hoover was not the most tal­ent­ed per­son to ever become Pres­i­dent, but he was prob­a­bly the most com­pe­tent. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his areas of com­pe­tence did not dove­tail with the prob­lems fac­ing the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s. Hoover was very good at orga­niz­ing large endeav­ors, but the prob­lems faced by the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s were macro­eco­nom­ic in nature. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, being a good admin­is­tra­tor doesn’t have much cor­re­la­tion with under­stand­ing macro­eco­nom­ics.”
    • ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ at the Muse­um of the Bible are all forg­eries (Michael Greshko, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “Loll insist­ed on inde­pen­dence. Not only would the Muse­um of the Bible have no say on the team’s find­ings, her report would be final—and would have to be released to the pub­lic. The Muse­um of the Bible agreed to the terms. ‘Hon­est­ly, I’ve nev­er worked with a muse­um that was so up-front,’ Loll says.”
      • The Muse­um of the Bible comes off look­ing pret­ty good in this arti­cle. I feel bad for them.
    • Porn Restric­tion for Real­ists (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…a world where the tube-sites are gone and peo­ple must go back to pay­ing for their porn is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over the world we live in now. This world is pos­si­ble: it exist­ed two decades ago. Tech­no­log­i­cal change is part of what hap­pened, but only part. Just as impor­tant in the cre­ation of the new, porn-flushed world we live are legal pro­tec­tions giv­en to web­sites like Porn­Hub and X Ham­ster which allow them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for the theft their busi­ness mod­el is based on. It also allows them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for much worse sins.”
    • Learn­ing From His­to­ry: How Con­gress Can Pro­tect Both Rights and Beliefs (Don Bonker, Real­Clear­Reli­gion): “Back in 1984, I received an unex­pect­ed call from Sen­a­tor Mark Hat­field (R‑OR), a high­ly regard­ed Repub­li­can who chaired the pow­er­ful Sen­ate Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee. I won­dered, why would he call a young Demo­c­rat who had no sig­nif­i­cant posi­tion and lit­tle influ­ence in the halls of Con­gress?”

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 Every­thing That’s Wrong Of Rac­coons (Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg, The Toast): “Once when my dog died a pas­sel of rac­coons showed up in the back­yard as if to say ‘Now that he’s gone, we own the night,’ and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it dis­re­spect­ful to 1) me per­son­al­ly and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t dis­re­spect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.” (first shared in vol­ume 97)

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 241

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. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus and Chris­tian­i­ty:
    • Love in the Time of Coro­n­avirus — Andy Crouch (Andy Crouch, The Prax­is Jour­nal): “…while gov­ern­ment at all lev­els can enforce a cer­tain amount of behav­ior change, for exam­ple through quar­an­tines and “lock­downs,” it is almost impos­si­ble for coer­cive author­i­ty to increase people’s capac­i­ty for love and ser­vice to oth­ers. This is the role of faith and above all, we believe, the Chris­t­ian faith. Equip­ping Chris­tians for moments like this is the role of Chris­t­ian lead­ers.” THIS. READ THIS.
    • What Mar­tin Luther Teach­es Us About Coro­n­avirus (Emmy Yang, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a cli­mate of fear sur­round­ing the out­break, I come back to Luther’s let­ter for guid­ance. As a med­ical stu­dent and a future physi­cian, I have a clear voca­tion­al com­mit­ment to car­ing for the sick—whether they have coro­n­avirus, tuber­cu­lo­sis, or influen­za. Pre­cau­tions I will take, yes. But I am remind­ed by Luther that they are indi­vid­u­als deserv­ing of care all the same.”
    • Here is an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Luther’s orig­i­nal let­ter: Whether One May Flee From A Dead­ly Plague: “Since it is gen­er­al­ly true of Chris­tians that few are strong and many are weak, one sim­ply can­not place the same bur­den upon every­one. A per­son who has a strong faith can drink poi­son and suf­fer no harm, Mark 16[:18], while one who has a weak faith would there­by drink to his death.”
    • Wuhan Pas­tor: Pray with Us (anony­mous, Chi­na­Source): “Thus, my broth­ers and sis­ters, I encour­age you to be strong in Christ’s love. If we more deeply expe­ri­ence death in this pesti­lence, under­stand­ing the gospel, we may more deeply expe­ri­ence Christ’s love, and grow ever near­er to God.”
    • How DC Church­es Respond­ed When the Gov­ern­ment Banned Pub­lic Gath­er­ings Dur­ing the Span­ish Flu of 1918 (Caleb Morell, 9 Marks): “Dur­ing one of the worst epi­demics to ever hit our coun­try, church­es respect­ed the direc­tives of the gov­ern­ment for a lim­it­ed time out of neigh­bor­ly love and in order to pro­tect pub­lic health. Even when church­es began to dis­agree with the Com­mis­sion­ers’ per­spec­tive, they con­tin­ued to abide by their orders.”
    • Should Your Church Stop Meet­ing to Slow COVID-19? How 3 Seat­tle Church­es Decid­ed. (Daniel Chin, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “After work­ing for WHO and then the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion in Chi­na, my wife and I moved to Seat­tle in 2015 to lead the foundation’s work to con­trol tuber­cu­lo­sis in sev­er­al coun­tries. For a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry, I’ve answered a call­ing as a fol­low­er of Christ to stop the spread of dis­eases and work to elim­i­nate them, and now I heed that call­ing to speak to my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ to take this epi­dem­ic seri­ous­ly and respond.” The author is an evan­gel­i­cal and a physi­cian who spe­cial­izes in infec­tious dis­eases.
  2. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus More Gen­er­al­ly:
    • How Much Worse the Coro­n­avirus Could Get, in Charts (Nicholas Kristof and Stu­art A. Thomp­son, NY Times): “What’s at stake in this coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic? How many Amer­i­cans can become infect­ed? How many might die? The answers depend on the actions we take — and, cru­cial­ly, on when we take them. Work­ing with infec­tious dis­ease epi­demi­ol­o­gists, we devel­oped this inter­ac­tive tool that lets you see what may lie ahead in the Unit­ed States and how much of a dif­fer­ence it could make if offi­cials act quick­ly.” Note that this is not pay­walled. Many promi­nent news orga­ni­za­tions have kind­ly made their pan­dem­ic news freely avail­able.
    • Why it’s so hard to pin down the risk of dying from coro­n­avirus (Marc Lip­sitch, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Sev­er­al esti­mates have sug­gest­ed that the risk of dying, for those infect­ed with covid-19 and show­ing its flu-like symp­toms, is around 1 or 2 per­cent. Elder­ly adults have a con­sid­er­ably high­er risk of both becom­ing infect­ed and dying, as do peo­ple with com­pro­mised immune sys­tems. The esti­mates might change as new data arrive, but the range of 1 to 2 per­cent for fatal­i­ties among the symp­to­matic seems to be the con­sen­sus for now. The over­all fatal­i­ty rate for peo­ple infect­ed with covid-19 will be low­er — pos­si­bly much low­er — when we know how many peo­ple are infect­ed but asymp­to­matic.” The author is a Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gist. 
    • COVID-19 Event Risk Assess­ment Plan­ner (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Now here is the most impor­tant point. It’s the size of the group, not the num­ber of car­ri­ers that most dri­ves the result. For exam­ple, sup­pose our esti­mate of the num­ber of car­ri­ers if off by a fac­tor of 10–that is instead of 20,000 there are just 2000 car­ri­ers in the Unit­ed States. In this case, the prob­a­bil­i­ty of at least one car­ri­er at a big event of 100,000 drops not by a fac­tor of ten but just to 45%. In oth­er words, large events are a bad idea even in sce­nar­ios with just a small num­ber of car­ri­ers.” (source code for the embed­ded graph is at https://github.com/jsweitz/covid-19-event-risk-planner) The code and the graph come from a biol­o­gist at Geor­gia Tech and the expla­na­tion comes from an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Track­Coro­na — COVID-19 Track­er and Live Map — one of the peo­ple run­ning the web­site is a Stan­ford under­grad. 
    • Coro­n­avirus: Why You Must Act Now (Tomas Pueyo, Medi­um): “Coun­tries that act fast can reduce the num­ber of deaths by a fac­tor of ten. And that’s just count­ing the fatal­i­ty rate. Act­ing fast also dras­ti­cal­ly reduces the cas­es, mak­ing this even more of a no-brain­er.”
    • How Chi­na’s “Bat Woman” Hunt­ed Down Virus­es from SARS to the New Coro­n­avirus (Jane Qiu, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Shi—a virol­o­gist who is often called China’s ‘bat woman’ by her col­leagues because of her virus-hunt­ing expe­di­tions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the con­fer­ence she was attend­ing in Shang­hai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle.
    • $1 mil­lion plus in Emer­gent Ven­tures Prizes for coro­n­avirus work (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I believe that we should be using prizes to help inno­vate and com­bat the coro­n­avirus. When are prizes bet­ter than grants? The case for prizes is stronger when you don’t know who is like­ly to make the break­through, you val­ue the final out­put more than the process, there is an urgency to solu­tions (tal­ent devel­op­ment is too slow), suc­cess is rel­a­tive­ly easy to define, and efforts and invest­ments are like­ly to be under­com­pen­sat­ed. All of these apply to the threat from the coro­n­avirus.”
    • COVID-19 reduces eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty, which reduces pol­lu­tion, which saves lives. (Mar­shall Burke, G‑Feed): “…dis­rup­tion is only like­ly to increase in com­ing days in regions where the epi­dem­ic is just begin­ning. Strange­ly, this dis­rup­tion could also have unex­pect­ed health ben­e­fits — and these ben­e­fits could be quite large in cer­tain parts of the world.” Real­i­ty is com­pli­cat­ed.
    • How social dis­tanc­ing for coro­n­avirus could cause a lone­li­ness epi­dem­ic (Ezra Klein, Vox): “Make no mis­take: The rapid imple­men­ta­tion of social dis­tanc­ing is nec­es­sary to flat­ten the coro­n­avirus curve and pre­vent the cur­rent pan­dem­ic from wors­en­ing. But just as the coro­n­avirus fall­out threat­ens to cause an eco­nom­ic reces­sion, it’s also going to cause what we might call a “social reces­sion”: a col­lapse in social con­tact that is par­tic­u­lar­ly hard on the pop­u­la­tions most vul­ner­a­ble to iso­la­tion and lone­li­ness — old­er adults and peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties or pre­ex­ist­ing health con­di­tions.”
    • The effect of trav­el restric­tions on the spread of the 2019 nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) out­break (Chi­nazzi et al, Sci­ence): “The trav­el quar­an­tine around Wuhan has only mod­est­ly delayed the epi­dem­ic spread to oth­er areas of Main­land Chi­na…. The mod­el indi­cates that while the Wuhan trav­el ban was ini­tial­ly effec­tive at reduc­ing inter­na­tion­al case impor­ta­tions, the num­ber of cas­es observed out­side Main­land Chi­na will resume its growth after 2–3 weeks from cas­es that orig­i­nat­ed else­where.”
  3. Keep It Sim­ple (Ed Fes­er, First Things): “Math­e­mat­ics appears to describe a realm of enti­ties with qua­si-­di­vine attrib­ut­es. The series of nat­ur­al num­bers is infi­nite. That one and one equal two and two and two equal four could not have been oth­er­wise. Such math­e­mat­i­cal truths nev­er begin being true or cease being true; they hold eter­nal­ly and immutably. The lines, planes, and fig­ures stud­ied by the geome­ter have a kind of per­fec­tion that the objects of our ­expe­ri­ence lack. Math­e­mat­i­cal objects seem ­imma­te­r­i­al and known by pure rea­son rather than through the sens­es.” This is a very inter­est­ing review of a book by William Lane Craig.
  4. Con­cern­ing Woody Allen:
    • Woody Allen: Issues and Prin­ci­ples (Steven Brust, per­son­al blog): “Pre­sump­tion of inno­cence in the courts is the legal reflec­tion of the prin­ci­ple that we need to be cer­tain some­one is guilty before inflict­ing pun­ish­ment, that, ‘it is bet­ter 10 guilty men go free than one inno­cent man be pun­ished.’ The prin­ci­ple pre-dates its legal reflec­tion, which, in West­ern soci­ety, we can find in sixth Cen­tu­ry Rome, as well as both Tal­mu­dic and Islam­ic law. The prin­ci­ple has always been fought for by the oppressed, and for good rea­son: it is the oppressed who are most vul­ner­a­ble, and most like­ly to be abused both by the legal sys­tem and bour­geois pub­lic opin­ion. Those who want to chuck the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence, whether in law or in the pub­lic are­na, are doing the work of the oppres­sors.” The author is a social­ist, which I men­tion because the next author is very con­ser­v­a­tive. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion. 
    • The Woody Allen Witch Hunt (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But we are not sup­posed to live in a soci­ety in which some­one who has mere­ly been accused of a hor­ri­ble thing finds him­self unable to pub­lish a book telling his side of the sto­ry, or silenced because the cul­tur­al winds have shift­ed. Thir­ty years ago, or less, chil­dren who made accu­sa­tions against pow­er­ful men were not believed. Women too. It is not progress to go from dis­be­liev­ing women and chil­dren as a mat­ter of course to believ­ing them reflex­ive­ly. We think we are advanc­ing jus­tice, but real­ly we are just rear­rang­ing our prej­u­dices.” The author is a very con­ser­v­a­tive, which I men­tion because the pre­vi­ous author is a social­ist. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion.
  5. How Many Nones Are There? Maybe More than We Thought (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “When you com­pare those who say they have “no reli­gion” in the GSS, to those who say they are either athe­ist, agnos­tic, or noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar in the CCES, a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence emerges…. The upshot is this: the share of Amer­i­cans who have no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion is near­ly a third of the Unit­ed States, not the 23.1% fig­ure which comes from the GSS.”

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 Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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.