Author: Glen

I just fin­ished read­ing The Black Swan: The Impact of the High­ly Improb­a­ble by Nas­sim Taleb

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down­load prophe­cy the movie . It’s a fun read, and I think some of the things I learned from it will help me to illus­trate Eccle­si­astes when we start preach­ing through it in a few weeks.

Any­way, here are some snip­pets I thought were worth hold­ing on to. Hope they are as use­ful to you as I think they will be to me.

The writer Umber­to Eco belongs to that small class of schol­ars who are ency­clo­pe­dic, insight­ful, and non­dull. He is the own­er of a large per­son­al library (con­tain­ing thir­ty thou­sand books), and sep­a­rates vis­i­tors into two cat­e­gories: those who react with “Wow! Sig­nore pro­fes­sore dot­tore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the oth­ers – a very small minor­i­ty – who get the point that a pri­vate library is not an ego-boost­ing appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valu­able than unread ones. The library should con­tain as much of what you do not know as your finan­cial means, mort­gage rates, and the cur­rent­ly tight real-estate mar­ket allow you to put there. Page 1

Now if only I could con­vince Paula that this is the right way to think about book acqui­si­tions…

It was a few years after the begin­ning of the Lebanese war, as I was attend­ing the Whar­ton School, at the age of twen­ty-two, that I was hit with the idea of effi­cient mar­kets – and idea that holds that there is no way to derive prof­its from trad­ed secu­ri­ties since these instru­ments have auto­mat­i­cal­ly incor­po­rat­ed all the avail­able infor­ma­tion. Pub­lic infor­ma­tion can there­fore be use­less, par­tic­u­lar­ly to a busi­ness­man, since prices can already “include” all such infor­ma­tion, and news shared with mil­lions gives you no real advan­tage. Odds are that one or more of the hun­dreds of mil­lions of oth­er read­ers of such infor­ma­tion will already have bought the secu­ri­ty, thus push­ing up the price. I then com­plete­ly gave up read­ing news­pa­pers and watch­ing tele­vi­sion, which freed up a con­sid­er­able amount of time (say one hour or more per day, enough time to read more than a hun­dred addi­tion­al books per years, which, after a cou­ple of decades, starts mount­ing). Page 17

I’ve been struck late­ly by the num­ber of peo­ple I respect who advise us against read­ing the news­pa­per on the grounds that it makes you more stu­pid about things that mat­ter. I even stum­bled across a com­pi­la­tion of quotes against news today.

In the arts – say the cin­e­ma – things are far more vicious. What we call “talent” gen­er­al­ly comes from suc­cess, rather than its oppo­site. A great deal of empiri­cism has been done on the sub­ject, most notably by Art De Vany, an insight­ful and orig­i­nal thinker who sin­gle­mind­ed­ly stud­ied wild uncer­tain­ty in the movies. He showed that, sad­ly, much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attri­bu­tion. The movie makes the actor, he claims – and a large dose of non­lin­ear luck makes the movie. Page 31 (he foot­notes Arthur De Vany Hol­ly­wood Eco­nom­ics: Chaos in the Music Indus­try 2002)

I sus­pect the same thing is true of megachurch­es. Don’t mis­un­der­stand me — there is a high lev­el of skill involved in build­ing an orga­ni­za­tion like that. But look­ing around at min­is­ters I know, many more peo­ple seem to have the skills than have the megachurch to go with it. In oth­er words, there are peo­ple out there as skilled as Ed Young

that the world will nev­er know. I don’t think I’m one of them, mind, but I know that they’re out there. I’ve met them.

Indeed, it is not a well-known fact that the most com­plete expo­si­tion of the ideas of skep­ti­cism, until recent­ly, remains the work of a pow­er­ful Catholic bish­op who was an august mem­ber of the French Acad­e­my. Pierre-Daniel Huet wrote his Philo­soph­i­cal Trea­tise on the Weak­ness of the Human Mind in 1690, a remark­ably book that tears through dog­mas and ques­tions human per­cep­tion. Huet presents argu­ments against causal­i­ty that are quite potent – he states, for instance, that any event can have an infin­i­ty of pos­si­ble caus­es. Page 49

Inter­est­ing. You can read more about Huet on Wikipedia

.

In a famous argu­ment, the logi­cian W. V. Quine showed that there exist fam­i­lies of log­i­cal­ly con­sis­tent inter­pre­ta­tions and the­o­ries that can match a giv­en series of facts. Page 72

You can learn more about Quine on Wikipedia.

Indeed, peo­ple tend to fool them­selves with their self-nar­ra­tive of “national identity,” which, in a break­through paper in Sci­ence by six­ty-five authors, was shown to be a total fic­tion. (“National trait­s” might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Pla­ton­ic notions that car­ry no empir­i­cal validity—yet, for exam­ple, both the Eng­lish and the non-Eng­lish erro­neous­ly believe in an Eng­lish “national temperament.”) Empir­i­cal­ly, sex, social class, and pro­fes­sion seem to be bet­ter pre­dic­tors of someone’s behav­ior than nation­al­i­ty (a male from Swe­den resem­bles a male from Togo more than a female from Swe­den; a philoso­pher from Peru resem­bles a philoso­pher from Scot­land more than a jan­i­tor from Peru; and so on). Page 74–75

And yet the French remain… 🙂 Seri­ous­ly, this reminds me of bone I have to pick with per­son­al­i­ty test­ing, name­ly that it is com­plete and utter bunk. Dif­fer­ent peo­ple have dif­fer­ent ranges of tem­pera­ment, sure, but the tools we use to mea­sure those vari­ances are ridicu­lous.

[Giv­en that the nar­ra­tive fal­la­cy is so mis­lead­ing, we should remem­ber that] Only a dia­mond can cut a dia­mond; we can use our abil­i­ty to con­vince with a sto­ry that con­veys the right message—what sto­ry­tellers seem to do. Page 84

Good reminder for ser­mons — there are times that all the data in the world will lack the impact of a sin­gle com­pelling sto­ry.

The researcher Thomas Aste­bro has shown that returns on inde­pen­dent inven­tions (you take the ceme­tery into account) are far low­er than those on ven­ture cap­i­tal. Some blind­ness to the odd­s… is nec­es­sary for entre­pre­neurs to func­tion. The ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist is the one who gets the shekels. The econ­o­mist William Bau­mol calls this “a touch of madness.” This may indeed apply to all con­cen­trat­ed busi­ness­es: when you look at the empir­i­cal record, you not only see that ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists do bet­ter than entre­pre­neurs, but pub­lish­ers do bet­ter than writ­ers, deal­ers do bet­ter than artists, and sci­ence does bet­ter than sci­en­tists (about 50 per­cent of sci­en­tif­ic and schol­ar­ly papers, cost­ing months, some­times years of effort, are nev­er tru­ly read). Page 90

And gov­ern­ments do bet­ter than tax­pay­ers. 🙂

Pre­dic­tion, not nar­ra­tion, is the real test of our under­stand­ing of the world. Page 133

True dat.

For many peo­ple, knowl­edge has the remark­able pow­er of pro­duc­ing con­fi­dence instead of mea­sur­able apti­tude. Page 135

Trag­i­cal­ly true dat.

Show two groups of peo­ple a blur­ry image of a fire hydrant, blur­ry enough for them not to rec­og­nize what it is. For one group, increase the res­o­lu­tion slow­ly, in ten steps. For the sec­ond, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point were both groups have pre­sent­ed an iden­ti­cal image and ask each of them to iden­ti­fy what they see. The mem­bers of the group that saw few­er inter­me­di­ate steps are like­ly to rec­og­nize the hydrant much quick­er. Moral? The more infor­ma­tion you give some­one, the more hypothe­ses they will for­mu­late along the way, and the worse-off they will be. They see more ran­dom noise and mis­take it for infor­ma­tion. Page 144

Com­bine that with this next one…

…in anoth­er telling exper­i­ment, the psy­chol­o­gist Paul Slovic asked book­mak­ers to select from eighty-eight vari­ables in past horse races those that they found use­ful in com­put­ing the odds. These vari­ables includ­ed all man­ner of sta­tis­ti­cal infor­ma­tion about past per­for­mances. The book­mark­ers were giv­en the ten most use­ful vari­ables, then asked to pre­dict the out­comes of races. Then they were giv­en ten more and asked to pre­dict again. The increase in the infor­ma­tion set did not lead to an increase in their accu­ra­cy; their con­fi­dence in their choic­es, on the oth­er hand, went up marked­ly. Infor­ma­tion proved to be tox­ic. Page 145

So if you’re addict­ed to sta­tis­tics, lay off! Espe­cial­ly if you’re track­ing every nuance of your week­ly atten­dance or the hour-by-hour views of your most recent Face­book ad.

Eco­nom­ics is the most insu­lar of fields; it is the one that quotes least from out­side itself! Page 155

I did­n’t see a foot­note for this claim, but it amus­es me to believe that it’s true.

Researchers have test­ed how stu­dents esti­mate the time need­ed to com­plete their projects. In one rep­re­sen­ta­tive test, they broke a group into two vari­eties, opti­mistic and pes­simistic. Opti­mistic stu­dents promised twen­ty-six days; the pes­simistic ones forty-sev­en days. The aver­age actu­al time to com­ple­tion turned out to be fifty-six days. Page 157

Read it and weep, stu­dents. Read it and weep.

[Unlike bio­log­i­cal vari­ables such as age, human ven­tures exhib­it a total­ly dif­fer­ent sched­ule] Let’s say a project is expect­ed to ter­mi­nate in 79 days…. On the 79th day, if the project is not fin­ished, it will be expect­ed to take anoth­er 25 days to com­plete. But on the 90th day, if the project is still not com­plet­ed, it should have about 58 days to go. On the 100th, it will have 89 days to go. On the 119th, it should have an extra 149 days. On day 600, if the project is not done, you will be expect­ed to need an extra 1,590 days. As you see, the longer you wait, the longer you will be expect­ed to wait. Page 159

Eep. Based on this log­ic, my office will be final­ly and ful­ly cleaned some­time around 3,000 A.D.

At New York’s JFK air­port you can find gigan­tic news­stands with walls full of mag­a­zines. They are usu­al­ly manned by a very polite fam­i­ly from the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent (just the par­ents; the chil­dren are in med­ical school). These walls present you with the entire cor­pus of what an “informed” per­son needs in order “to know what is going on.” I won­der how long it would take to read every sin­gle one of these mag­a­zines, exclud­ing the fish­ing and motor­cy­cle peri­od­i­cals (but includ­ing the gos­sip magazines—you might as well have some fun). Half a life­time? An entire life­time?
Sad­ly, all this knowl­edge would not help the read­er to fore­cast what is to hap­pen tomor­row. Actu­al­ly, it might decrease his abil­i­ty to fore­cast. Page 163–164

He not only knocks news­pa­pers, he knocks mag­a­zines as well. What’s next, blogs? 🙂

In 1965 two radio astronomers at Bell Labs in New Jer­sey who were mount­ing a large anten­na were both­ered by a back­ground noise, a hiss, like the sta­t­ic that you hear when you have bad recep­tion. The noise could not be eradicated—even after they cleaned the bird excre­ment out of the dish, since they were con­vinced that bird poop was behind the noise. It took a while for them to fig­ure out that what they were hear­ing was the trace of the birth of the uni­verse, the cos­mic back­ground microwave radi­a­tion. Page 168

They made an impor­tant dis­cov­ery about the very nature of the uni­verse while look­ing for bird poop! Don’t wait for the great moment. The event (con­ver­sa­tion, ser­mon, insight) that changes your min­istry for­ev­er will like­ly come at the most unex­pect­ed moment, and it prob­a­bly won’t hap­pen in the lime­light. Get out there and clean some bird poop, and be atten­tive to your sur­round­ings while you do it.

[How hard can long-range pre­dic­tion be?] I use the exam­ple as com­put­ed by the math­e­mati­cian Michael Berry. If you know a set of basic para­me­ters con­cern­ing [a bil­liard] ball at rest, can com­pute the resis­tance of the table (quite ele­men­tary), and can gauge the strength of the impact, then it is rather easy to pre­dict what would hap­pen at the first hit. The sec­ond impact becomes more com­pli­cat­ed, but pos­si­ble; you need to be more care­ful about your knowl­edge of the ini­tial states, and more pre­ci­sion is called for. The prob­lem is that to cor­rect­ly com­pute the ninth impact, you need to take into account the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull of some­one stand­ing next to the table (mod­est­ly, Berry’s com­pu­ta­tions use a weight of less than 150 pounds). And to com­pute the fifty-sixth impact, every sin­gle ele­men­tary par­ti­cle in the uni­verse needs to be present in your assump­tions! An elec­tron at the edge of the uni­verse, sep­a­rat­ed from us by 10 bil­lion light-years, must fig­ure in the cal­cu­la­tions, since it exerts a mean­ing­ful effect on the out­come…. Note that this bil­liard-ball sto­ry assumes a plain and sim­ple world; it does not even take into account these crazy social mat­ters pos­si­bly endowed with free will. Page 178

Wow. Wow back­wards.

We are made to fol­low lead­ers who can gath­er peo­ple togeth­er because the advan­tages of being in groups trump the dis­ad­van­tages of being alone. It has been more prof­itable for us to bind togeth­er in the wrong direc­tion than to be alone in the right one. Those who have fol­lowed the assertive idiot rather than the intro­spec­tive wise per­son have passed us some of their genes. Page 192

And this is why char­ac­ter and doc­trine are always more impor­tant when screen­ing min­istry can­di­dates than lead­er­ship apti­tude. Assertive idiots lead peo­ple into spir­i­tu­al dis­as­ter.

Peo­ple are often ashamed of loss­es, so they engage in strate­gies that pro­duce very lit­tle volatil­i­ty but con­tain the risk of a large loss—like col­lect­ing nick­els in front of steam­rollers. Page 204

I can total­ly see myself being talk­ing into doing that. What a vivid image.

Many peo­ple do not real­ize that they are get­ting a lucky break in life when they get it. If a big pub­lish­er (or a big art deal­er or a movie exec­u­tive or a hot­shot banker or a big thinker) sug­gests an appoint­ment, can­cel any­thing you have planned: you may nev­er see such a win­dow open up again. I am some­times shocked at how lit­tle peo­ple real­ize that these oppor­tu­ni­ties do not grow on trees. Col­lect as many free non­lot­tery tick­ets (those with open-end­ed pay­offs) as you can, and, once they start pay­ing off, do not dis­card them. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chas­ing such oppor­tu­ni­ties and max­i­miz­ing expo­sure to them. This makes liv­ing in big cities invalu­able because you increase the odds of serendip­i­tous encounters—you gain expo­sure to the enve­lope of serendip­i­ty. The idea of set­tling in a rur­al area on grounds that one has good com­mu­ni­ca­tions “in the age of the Inter­net” tun­nels out of such sources of pos­i­tive uncer­tain­ty. Diplo­mats under­stand that very well: casu­al chance dis­cus­sions at cock­tail par­ties usu­al­ly lead to big breakthroughs—not dry cor­re­spon­dence or tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions. Go to par­ties! If you’re a sci­en­tist, you will chance upon a remark that might spark new research. Page 209

Of such things are des­tinies made.

We can have a clear idea of the con­se­quences of an event, even if we do not know how like­ly it is to occur. I don’t know the odds of an earth­quake, but I can imag­ine how San Fran­cis­co might be affect­ed by one. This idea that in order to make a deci­sion you need to focus on the con­se­quences (which you can know) rather than the prob­a­bil­i­ty (which you can’t know) is the cen­tral idea of uncer­tain­ty. Much of my life is based on it.

You can build an over­all the­o­ry of deci­sion-mak­ing on this idea. All you have to do is mit­i­gate the con­se­quences. As I said, if my port­fo­lio is exposed to a mar­ket crash, the odds of which I can’t com­pute, all I have to do is buy insur­ance, or get out and invest the amounts I am not will­ing to ever lose in less risky secu­ri­ties. Page 211

The results of an earth­quake in San Fran­cis­co — bad. Prob­a­bil­i­ty — unac­cept­ably high. Tick, tick, tick…

I said ear­li­er that ran­dom­ness is bad, but it is not always so. Luck is far more egal­i­tar­i­an than even intel­li­gence. If peo­ple were reward­ed strict­ly accord­ing to their abil­i­ties, things would still be unfair—people don’t choose their abil­i­ties. Ran­dom­ness has the ben­e­fi­cial effect of reshuf­fling society’s cards, knock­ing down the big guy. Page 232

The race is not always to the swift, and this is by design.

Now why am I call­ing this busi­ness Madel­brot­ian, or frac­tal, ran­dom­ness? Every sin­gle bit and piece of this puz­zle has been pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned by some­one else, such as Pare­to, Yule, and Zipf, but it was Man­del­brot who a) con­nect­ed the dots, b) linked ran­dom­ness to geom­e­try (and a spe­cial brand at that), and c) took the sub­ject to its nat­ur­al con­clu­sion. Indeed many math­e­mati­cians are famous today part­ly because he dug out their works to back up his claims—the strat­e­gy I am fol­low­ing here in this book. “I had to invent my pre­de­ces­sors, so peo­ple take me seriously,” [Man­del­brot] once told me, and he used the cred­i­bil­i­ty of big guns as a rhetor­i­cal device. One can almost always fer­ret out pre­de­ces­sors for any thought. You can always find some­one who worked on a part of your argu­ment and use his con­tri­bu­tion as your back­up. Page 256

Ph.D. can­di­dates take note. There are worse peo­ple to emu­late than Man­del­brot.

The degen­er­a­tion of philo­soph­i­cal schools in its turn is the con­se­quence of the mis­tak­en belief that one can phi­los­o­phize with­out hav­ing been com­pelled to phi­los­o­phize by prob­lems out­side phi­los­o­phy…. Gen­uine philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems are always root­ed out­side phi­los­o­phy and they die if these roots decay…. These roots are eas­i­ly for­got­ten by philoso­phers who “study” phi­los­o­phy instead of being forced into phi­los­o­phy by the pres­sure of non­philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems.
He foot­notes Karl Pop­per, Con­jec­tures and Refu­ta­tions, pages 95–97.

And the­ol­o­gy that is divorced from dai­ly min­istry gets wonky. All the great­est the­olo­gians in the his­to­ry of the church have been involved in reg­u­lar min­istry to nor­mal peo­ple.

I am most often irri­tat­ed by those who attack the bish­op but some­one fall for the secu­ri­ties analyst—those who exer­cise their skep­ti­cism against reli­gion but not against econ­o­mists, social sci­en­tists, and pho­ny sta­tis­ti­cians. Using the con­fir­ma­tion bias, peo­ple will tell you that reli­gion was hor­ri­ble for mankind by count­ing deaths from the Inqui­si­tion and var­i­ous reli­gious wars. But they will not show you how many peo­ple were killed by nation­al­ism, social sci­ence, and polit­i­cal the­o­ry under Stal­in­ism or dur­ing the Viet­nam War. Even priests don’t go to bish­ops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor’s. But we stop by the offices of many pseu­do-sci­en­tists and “experts” with­out alter­na­tive. We no longer believe in papal infal­li­bil­i­ty; we seem to believe in the infal­li­bil­i­ty of the Nobel…. Page 291

Rare to read such clear think­ing about this in a book not devot­ed to apolo­get­ics. Of course, Taleb has it in for the Nobel.

Imag­ine a speck of dust next to a plan­et a bil­lion times the size of earth. The speck of dust rep­re­sents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge plan­et would be the odds against it. So stop sweat­ing the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a cas­tle as a present and wor­ried about the mildew in the bath­room. Page 298

Indeed. I like a book that clos­es with a call to grat­i­tude, even if it’s unclear to whom your grat­i­tude should be direct­ed.

A fun read. Rec­om­mend­ed.

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A short book­let (28 pages), Jesus of Nazareth: How His­to­ri­ans Can Know Him and Why It Mat­ters was released for free this morn­ing by the Christ on Cam­pus Ini­tia­tive. It’s writ­ten by Craig Blomberg death at a funer­al online

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how to lose friends alien­ate peo­ple online the christ­mas wish online

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, a well-respect­ed schol­ar.

One thing I real­ly appre­ci­ate about this piece is that Blomberg foot­notes his sources well and pro­vides an anno­tat­ed bib­li­og­ra­phy at the end. So if he makes a claim some­one finds sketchy they are wel­come to inves­ti­gate it more thor­ough­ly. Chris­t­ian out­reach pieces are rarely con­sid­er­ate in this way, and I applaud the deci­sion.

High­ly rec­om­mend­ed if you (or your friends) have ques­tions about what we can pos­si­bly know about a man who lived 2,000 years ago.

found via JT

I read D. Michael Lind­say’s Faith in the Halls of Pow­er: How Evan­gel­i­cals Joined the Amer­i­can Elite a while ago and have been mean­ing to post some excerpts from it for a while now. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing soci­o­log­i­cal study of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers (not just the lead­ers of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism but also lead­ers in soci­ety who are evan­gel­i­cals). In addi­tion to exist­ing research, Lind­say based his con­clu­sions on inter­views with 360 lead­ers drawn from four cat­e­gories: polit­i­cal lead­ers, intel­lec­tu­al lead­ers, busi­ness lead­ers, and min­istry lead­ers.

Here are some para­graphs that caught my atten­tion.

Page 33:

I found the fol­low­ing quote from Ger­man the­olo­gian Mar­tin Luther on one polit­i­cal leader’s desk: “The very ablest youth should be reserved and edu­cat­ed not for the office of preach­ing, but for gov­ern­ment, because in preach­ing the Holy Spir­it does it all, where­as in gov­ern­ment one must exer­cise rea­son in the shad­owy realms where ambi­gu­i­ty and uncer­tain­ty are the order of the day.”

And this is why we count it a suc­cess when our grad­u­ates go into the work­force, gov­ern­men­tal ser­vice, or acad­e­mia. We do want some grad­u­ates to fol­low us into voca­tion­al min­istry but not most.

Page 77:

At the same time, evan­gel­i­cals were estab­lish­ing cam­pus out­reach groups. Some, such as the Prince­ton Evan­gel­i­cal Fel­low­ship, had been present on elite cam­pus­es for a cou­ple of decades. The Cru­sad­er Club—later renamed the Ambassadors—began as a group of evan­gel­i­cal stu­dents from Princeton’s Class of 1912. Their influ­ence is remark­able. One of its founders, for exam­ple, was Samuel Shoe­mak­er, who lat­er helped estab­lish Alco­holics Anony­mous. Shoemaker’s twelve-step pro­gram for over­com­ing addic­tion was for­mu­lat­ed in this cam­pus group.

Cam­pus min­istry has a dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on cul­ture — I’ll have to add this to my list of anec­dotes. It’s going to go right up there with the long-term impact of the Holy Club at Oxford watch what we do is secret online .

Page 79:

Anoth­er impor­tant fac­tor is that evan­gel­i­cal young adults tend to become evan­gel­i­cal adults: They are much less like­ly than oth­ers to aban­don their faith. Hence, evan­gel­i­cal chil­dren attend­ing selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties become alum­ni and donors. This devel­op­ment may be at the crux of the evan­gel­i­cal intel­lec­tu­al renais­sance.

He foot­notes Hout, Gree­ley, and Wilde “The Demo­graph­ic Imper­a­tive in Reli­gious Change in the Unit­ed States”, Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Soci­ol­o­gy 107:468–500 (2001) for this data. I’m encour­aged by this obser­va­tion — I’ve intu­itive­ly known for a while that if stu­dents make it through col­lege with a fer­vent faith in Christ they’re like­ly to main­tain it for a life­time. It’s nice to see that research agrees with me. 😉

Page 85:

Evan­gel­i­cal­s’ sup­port is geared not only to the Ivy League but also to a vari­ety of selec­tive, non­sec­tar­i­an insti­tu­tions. For exam­ple, one of the CEOs I spoke to gives schol­ar­ship mon­ey to his under­grad­u­ate insti­tu­tion, Amherst Col­lege. The funds are pri­mar­i­ly award­ed to active stu­dent vol­un­teers in such a way that ‘the schol­ar­ships have [typ­i­cal­ly] been giv­en to Christians.’ Sev­er­al peo­ple told that they pre­fer not to give mon­ey to what they call the ‘crappy school­s’ that pop­u­late the evan­gel­i­cal sub­cul­ture but instead pre­fer to con­tribute funds to ‘serious’ places like Har­vard and Yale, while tar­get­ing par­tic­u­lar schol­ars or pro­grams that wel­come and engage evan­gel­i­cals.

Very inter­est­ing. Very inter­est­ing indeed. If any­one wants to estab­lish a Cen­ter for Evan­gel­i­cal (or even Pen­te­costal) Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty at Stan­ford, give me a call. I have some ideas…

Page 90:

This kind of intel­lec­tu­al explo­ration of Chris­tian­i­ty is not uncom­mon among the lead­ers I inter­viewed, espe­cial­ly those who attend­ed sec­u­lar uni­ver­si­ties. Typ­i­cal­ly, these explo­rations begin with pri­vate reflec­tion and indi­vid­ual read­ing, often books by evan­gel­i­cal authors seek­ing to offer a defense of Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions. The most pop­u­lar of these writ­ers is C. S. Lewis, who was an Oxford tutor and Cam­bridge pro­fes­sor of medieval lit­er­a­ture. Lewis, who died in 1963, wrote dozens of schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar books, but per­haps his most famous is Mere Chris­tian­i­ty, a slim vol­ume pub­lished in 1952. The book is based on a series of fif­teen-minute radio talks he deliv­ered on the BBC in the 1940s. Near­ly one in four of the peo­ple I inter­viewed men­tioned Lewis’ influ­ence on their own spir­i­tu­al jour­ney, and many have read his works mul­ti­ple times. One CEO told me, “I’ve read Mere Chris­tian­i­ty six times… I almost have it memorized.”

While these inves­ti­ga­tions usu­al­ly begin in pri­vate, most of the peo­ple I spoke to said a cam­pus group helped solid­i­fy their faith. These groups are the back­bone of evan­gel­i­cal net­works.

It’s good to know that Chi Alpha is a ver­te­brae in the back­bone of the major evan­gel­i­cal net­works in Amer­i­ca, because some­times we feel like ves­ti­gial organs. I need to get the last sen­tence of that quote into the hands of every Assem­blies of God pas­tor in my dis­trict. 😉

Also, it’s worth not­ing that most con­verts read lit­er­a­ture before con­vert­ing (at least, those who go on to posi­tions of influ­ence do). I should give away more books…

Page 91:

Col­lec­tive­ly, they [the evan­gel­i­cal cam­pus min­istries] reached a siz­able num­ber of under­grad­u­ates. At Prince­ton alone, for exam­ple, I found approx­i­mate­ly four hun­dred under­grad­u­ate students—close to 10 per­cent of the stu­dent body—regularly involved in one or more evan­gel­i­cal groups on cam­pus. And the num­ber of stu­dents involved with the Har­vard chap­ter of Cam­pus Cru­sade has increased five­fold over the last two decades. These find­ings mir­ror wider trends with­in the Ivy League. They still do not reach large seg­ments of the stu­dent body (except per­haps at Prince­ton), but these and oth­er evan­gel­i­cal groups like Inter­Var­si­ty Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship and cam­pus min­istries for par­tic­u­lar eth­nic groups have seen sim­i­lar groups. Tak­en togeth­er, these point to a sig­nif­i­cant shift on the cam­pus­es of America’s top uni­ver­si­ties.

Woot!

Pages 140–141

“Being There,” an essay by poet and jour­nal­ist Steve Turn­er, has become a man­i­festo for expand­ing the evan­gel­i­cal pres­ence in main­stream cul­ture. Turn­er urges evan­gel­i­cals to cre­ate pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al com­mu­ni­ties in cul­tur­al cen­ters so that they can reach gen­er­al audi­ences. This is some­times referred to as a “ministry of presence.” Increas­ing­ly evan­gel­i­cals have rec­og­nized the val­ue of “being pre­sen­t” in cen­ters of elite cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion…. Across the evan­gel­i­cal land­scape a “theology of the city” has emerged. Sev­er­al peo­ple I spoke to said they were inspired by a pas­sage in Jere­mi­ah 29 where the prophet admon­ished the exiled Jews to seek the peace and pros­per­i­ty of their cities, even though they were in areas pop­u­lat­ed, and ruled, by Baby­lon­ian pagans. I was struck by the num­ber of people—all of whom were work­ing places of elite cul­tur­al production—who referred to this pas­sage. Evan­gel­i­cals liv­ing and work­ing in these cos­mopoli­tan cen­ters iden­ti­fy with the exiled Jews, for any of them feel a great deal of ten­sion between the worlds of their faith and their pro­fes­sion. They referred to urban cen­ters as “flashpoints” on the “battle lines” between peo­ple of faith and their sec­u­lar oppo­nents and point­ed to mis­sion­ary activ­i­ties of the ear­ly church that cen­tered along trade routes. These are jus­ti­fi­ca­tions evan­gel­i­cals offer for their involvement—not nec­es­sar­i­ly expla­na­tions that they give to out­siders, but ways they legit­i­mate their involve­ment to fel­low believ­ers.

The essay he ref­er­ences is Steve Turn­er “Being There: A Vision For Chris­tian­i­ty and the Art­s” Trin­i­ty Sem­i­nary Review 21 (1999): 25–33 – I can’t find it online, oth­er­wise I would link to it.

Page 165:

As anoth­er busi­ness leader told me [explain­ing why he wasn’t a pas­tor], “There are plen­ty of Chris­tians work­ing on Sun­day morn­ing…. There is no more Chris­t­ian hour in the coun­try than from eleven to noon on Sun­day morn­ings. But Tues­day after­noon seemed open.”

Page 177–178:

Evan­gel­i­cal busi­ness lead­ers also say faith influ­ences adver­tis­ing and cor­po­rate spon­sor­ships. I inter­viewed Jockey’s CEO, Debra Waller, in the company’s Man­hat­tan show­room, which was lined with larg­er-than-life pho­tos of mod­els in Jock­ey under­wear. I told Waller that I had nev­er con­duct­ed an inter­view sur­round­ed by so much human flesh. She replied, “Well, we have inten­tion­al­ly decid­ed to stay away from the more provoca­tive, sexy type of advertising.” When pressed about the extent to which her evan­gel­i­cal faith shapes adver­tis­ing deci­sions, Waller, who remains per­son­al­ly involved in approv­ing all of the firm’s adver­tis­ing, point­ed out that all Jock­ey mod­els wear wed­ding rings in pho­to shoots involv­ing both men and women, imply­ing that the cou­ple in the ads is mar­ried. She also stip­u­lates, “a man and a woman can’t look like a pret­zel…. Peo­ple hug­ging each oth­er in this sit­u­a­tion would be very believable,” but the ad must not demon­strate any­thing more “intimate” than that.

Heh. It’s that sto­ry that made me want to read the book after I stum­bled across it in Andy Crouch’s review

jack and the beanstalk the real sto­ry online down­load

afro samu­rai res­ur­rec­tion dvd of Lind­say’s work.

Pages 10 and 220:

Sur­pris­ing­ly, more than half of all lead­ers talked about embrac­ing the evan­gel­i­cal approach to faith—“deciding to fol­low Jesus,” in evan­gel­i­cal parlance—after high school. Evangelicalism’s most pro­lif­ic poll­ster, George Bar­na, has found that “if peo­ple do not embrace Jesus Christ as their sav­ior before they reach their teenage years, the chance of their doing so at all is slim.” This sug­gests that Amer­i­can lead­er­s’ spir­i­tu­al jour­neys are notice­ably dif­fer­ent from those of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion. Faith is impor­tant to them, but they gen­er­al­ly embrace it lat­er in life.… a major­i­ty of those [evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers] I inter­viewed (56 per­cent) embraced evan­gel­i­cal­ism after age sev­en­teen, and over one-quar­ter were not raised in church­go­ing fam­i­lies.

This find­ing is extreme­ly sig­nif­i­cant for explain­ing the strate­gic impor­tance of col­lege min­istry. While most Chris­tians get saved at a young age, those Chris­tians who wind up exert­ing the most influ­ence on soci­ety dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly come from those saved in cam­pus min­istry (espe­cial­ly at elite uni­ver­si­ties) or lat­er. The num­ber I hear tossed around is usu­al­ly 80% — “80% of every­one who gets saved gets saved in chil­dren’s or youth min­istry.” If that is accu­rate (and I don’t know what the real sta­tis­tic is), then some­one who con­verts in col­lege is 5 times as like­ly to become a sig­nif­i­cant leader in our cul­ture as some­one who con­verts as a child.

Page 224

…sociologist Sal­ly Gal­lagher has shown that though evan­gel­i­cals pay lip ser­vice to male head­ship in the fam­i­ly, few fam­i­lies actu­al­ly behave that way. Evan­gel­i­cal women join the Amer­i­can work­force at the same rate as women in the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion. And con­trary to claims that evan­gel­i­cal belief con­tributes to domes­tic vio­lence, church­go­ing evan­gel­i­cals have the low­est rates of domes­tic vio­lence of any reli­gious group in the coun­try. Evan­gel­i­cal fathers are more active and expres­sive with their chil­dren and more emo­tion­al­ly engaged with their wives. This has led soci­ol­o­gist Brad Wilcox to con­clude that if evan­gel­i­cals main­tain a patri­archy, “theirs is a very soft patri­archy.”

That needs to be said more often. Evan­gel­i­cals get a bum rap that we don’t deserve. He foot­notes Sal­ly Gal­lagher Evan­gel­i­cal Iden­ti­ty and Gen­dered Fam­i­ly Life 2003 and Brad Wilcox Soft Patri­archs, New Men: How Chris­tian­i­ty Shapes Fathers and Hus­bands 2004

Page 289:

The Protes­tant and Catholic tra­di­tions have long rec­og­nized the legit­i­ma­cy of two forms of reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion: modal­i­ties and sodal­i­ties. Anchored by geo­graph­i­cal func­tion, a modal­i­ty is a per­ma­nent, local­ized reli­gious struc­ture that serves a range of con­stituents. The tra­di­tion­al church parish exem­pli­fies a reli­gious modal­i­ty, serv­ing young and old alike. By con­trast, a sodal­i­ty focus­es on par­tic­u­lar reli­gious func­tions and is not teth­ered to geog­ra­phy in the same way. Exam­ples include medieval Catholic orders and Protes­tant mis­sion­ary agen­cies. Sodal­i­ties serve more spe­cial­ized func­tions than modal­i­ties. Dur­ing the Ref­or­ma­tion, Luther tried to erad­i­cate sodal­i­ties from the church, but by the time of William Carey in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, Protes­tants had redis­cov­ered the tac­ti­cal ben­e­fits of sodal­i­ties, find­ing them help­ful in accom­plish­ing goals that were larg­er than could be under­tak­en by a sin­gle con­gre­ga­tion.

Hey, I’m part of a sodal­i­ty

divx leg­end of zor­ro the

. Who knew? It seems that there’s prob­a­bly a lot of lit­er­a­ture on this that I’ve been com­plete­ly unaware of that would be ger­mane to the con­tem­po­rary debate about para­church orga­ni­za­tions.

Pages 297 & 300:

Dye’s exam­i­na­tion (2002) of the struc­ture of insti­tu­tion­al pow­er in the Unit­ed States reveals that 54 per­cent of the nation’s cor­po­rate lead­ers and 42 per­cent of gov­ern­ment lead­ers today grad­u­at­ed from one of twelve high­ly selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties…. The eight Ivy League cam­pus­es (Brown, Colum­bia, Cor­nell, Dart­mouth, Har­vard, Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, Prince­ton, and Yale), the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.

He foot­notes Thomas R. Dye Who Is Run­ning Amer­i­ca? The Bush Restora­tion. 7th ed. (2002).

Two thoughts:
1) Stan­ford made the list!
2) Chi Alpha still isn’t touch­ing most of those cam­pus­es. Sad.hit­man dvd