Tag: academia

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 192

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 Bible Says Jesus Was Real. What Oth­er Proof Exists? (Christo­pher Klein, History.com): “With­in a few decades of his life­time, Jesus was men­tioned by Jew­ish and Roman his­to­ri­ans in pas­sages that cor­rob­o­rate por­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment that describe the life and death of Jesus.”
  2. Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ram­age, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fash­ioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Sto­ries like this are cat­nip for me. The author is gay, a fact which weighs heav­i­ly in his report­ing. A friend passed this my way, and I remind you that I always wel­come such sug­ges­tions.
  3. Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians Just Retook the Unit­ed Methodist Church (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “In the final hours of the con­fer­ence on Tues­day, the debate turned acri­mo­nious: One del­e­gate alleged, with­out clear evi­dence, that peo­ple at the con­fer­ence were brib­ing oth­ers for votes. Anoth­er speaker’s mic was silenced when he threat­ened to fil­i­buster any vote before the end of the day. And the debate came to an abrupt halt: Del­e­gates had to clear out of the con­fer­ence hall so that it could be turned over for a mon­ster-truck ral­ly.”
    • That final sen­tence, while fac­tu­al, feels like a metaphor for some­thing.
    • I pre­dict the vic­to­ri­ous tra­di­tion­al­ists in the UMC will be far more mag­nan­i­mous toward church­es that wish to leave than the revi­sion­ists in oth­er denom­i­na­tions have been to their van­quished (I’m look­ing at you, Epis­co­pal Church).
  4. The Trau­ma Floor (Casey New­ton, The Verge): “One [Face­book con­tent mod­er­a­tor] walks the floor pro­mot­ing the idea that the Earth is flat. A for­mer employ­ee told me he has begun to ques­tion cer­tain aspects of the Holo­caust. Anoth­er for­mer employ­ee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: ‘I no longer believe 9/11 was a ter­ror­ist attack.’”
  5. Black men are less reli­gious than black women, but more reli­gious than white women and men (Kiana Cox and Jeff Dia­mant, Pew Research Cen­ter): “About sev­en-in-ten (69%) black men say reli­gion is very impor­tant to them, com­pared with 80% of black women. But black men place more impor­tance on reli­gion than white women (55%) and His­pan­ic women (65%), accord­ing to the 2014 Reli­gious Land­scape Study.”
    • I doubt many antire­li­gious peo­ple think of them­selves as racist, so they should real­ize that their attempts to erase reli­gion from the pub­lic square dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly harm black peo­ple.
  6. ‘Every day was about sur­vival’ : Inside the grad­u­ate stu­dent afford­abil­i­ty cri­sis (Char­lie Curnin, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “…when Shalev Marom wakes up with only $18 in her bank account, she finds it hard to be excit­ed about her finan­cial sit­u­a­tion. Shalev Marom, who relies on pick­ing pro­duce from cam­pus trees to sus­tain her­self, eats just one full meal a day…. At Stan­ford, Shalev Marom lives in the cheap­est hous­ing option open to her — and as an inter­na­tion­al stu­dent on a J‑1 visa, she is sub­ject to strict fed­er­al laws that reg­u­late any addi­tion­al income she could receive from fur­ther employ­ment. In each pay peri­od — rough­ly two-weeks long — she says she cur­rent­ly receives around $200 to $300 from her research assist­ant­ship, after the deduc­tion of hous­ing costs and Uni­ver­si­ty fees.”
    • This is heart­break­ing. If you know a Stan­ford stu­dent who can’t afford to eat, let me know. We can help.
  7. Main­stream Media Blacks Out The Democ­rats’ Infan­ti­cide Vote (David Harsyani, The Fed­er­al­ist): “So I was going to have a lit­tle fun at the expense of CNN this morn­ing, con­trast­ing the news site’s head­line for the Democ­rats’ gun restric­tion bill—’House to vote on guns back­ground check bill with bipar­ti­san support’—which has gar­nered exact­ly four Repub­li­can co-spon­sors, with its head­line for the Sen. Ben Sasse’s anti-infan­ti­cide bill, which I was cer­tain would be sole­ly about the “GOP” despite hav­ing four Demo­c­rat sen­a­tors vot­ing to move the bill for­ward. Turns out, it was even bet­ter. There was noth­ing to con­trast because, as far as I can tell, CNN doesn’t fea­ture a sin­gle sto­ry on their web­site regard­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty block­ing of Sasse’s Born-Alive Abor­tion Sur­vivors Pro­tec­tion Act, which would have saved new­born babies who sur­vive abor­tion attempts from neg­li­gent homi­cide.”
    • A sur­vey of the results of a Google News search con­firms that this bill received almost no report­ing cov­er­age — almost all of the hits are opin­ion pieces.
    • Relat­ed: Ben Sasse Height­ens the Con­tra­dic­tions (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The days in which “safe, legal, and rare,” could appeal to a wide swathe of Amer­i­cans are over. For pro-lif­ers, abor­tion is the tak­ing of inno­cent life, a thing which sim­ply should not be legal or should only be legal in the most extreme cas­es. For ‘repro­duc­tive jus­tice’ advo­cates, the right to legal abor­tion is about pro­tect­ing the auton­o­my of human per­sons, of pre­serv­ing the unen­cum­bered choice of women whose choice would oth­er­wise be nat­u­ral­ly encum­bered in ways that a man’s is not sim­ply because of their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren.”
    • Relat­ed: The Abor­tion Debate Needs Moral Lament (Michael Wear, The Atlantic): “After decades of earnest attempts to find some com­mon ground on this most ten­der and per­son­al issue—think of Sen­a­tors Ted Kennedy and Sam Brownback’s work on a Down Syn­drome reg­istry, bipar­ti­san sup­port for the Hyde Amend­ment, and Pres­i­dent Obama’s first-term appeal for efforts to reduce the num­ber of women seek­ing abortions—that impulse has been vir­tu­al­ly erad­i­cat­ed among elect­ed offi­cials.”

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 How Can I Learn To Receive – And Give – Crit­i­cism In Light Of The Cross? (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “A believ­er is one who iden­ti­fies with all that God affirms and con­demns in Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion. In oth­er words, in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s judg­ment of me; and in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of me. Both have a rad­i­cal impact on how we take and give crit­i­cism.” This is based on a longer arti­cle (4 page PDF). (first shared in vol­ume 63)

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 182

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. If They Weren’t Tak­ing Notes, How Did the Dis­ci­ples Remem­ber Jesus’s Exact Teach­ing? The 3‑Step Process for For­mu­lat­ing the 4 Gospels (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “I might not be able to tell you what I did last week, but I could give you a three-hour lec­ture about Jesus and the Jew­ish roots of the Last Sup­per with zero prepa­ra­tion because I have been talk­ing about it all the time for the last ten years. That’s one key dif­fer­ence between rehearsed mem­o­ries and inci­den­tal mem­o­ries.”
  2. What Straight‑A Stu­dents Get Wrong (Adam Grant, New York Times): “The evi­dence is clear: Aca­d­e­m­ic excel­lence is not a strong pre­dic­tor of career excel­lence. Across indus­tries, research shows that the cor­re­la­tion between grades and job per­for­mance is mod­est in the first year after col­lege and triv­ial with­in a hand­ful of years. For exam­ple, at Google, once employ­ees are two or three years out of col­lege, their grades have no bear­ing on their per­for­mance.” The author is an orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist at Penn’s Whar­ton School.
    • This arti­cle was sent to me by an alum­na who said, “I some­times skipped Chi Alpha or oth­er mean­ing­ful activ­i­ties with friends for that one extra hour of study­ing, which I now regret.”
  3. Hun­dreds of sex abuse alle­ga­tions found in fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es across U.S. (Sarah Smith, Star-Telegram): “One hun­dred and six­ty-eight church lead­ers were accused or con­vict­ed of com­mit­ting sex­u­al crimes against chil­dren, the inves­ti­ga­tion found. At least 45 of the alleged abusers con­tin­ued in min­istry after accu­sa­tions came to the atten­tion of church author­i­ties or law enforce­ment.… Inde­pen­dent fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es preach sep­a­ra­tion: Stay sep­a­rate from the world, sep­a­rate from non-believ­ers and sep­a­rate from Chris­tians who do not believe as they do. That includes South­ern Bap­tists, who are deemed by the strict sect as too lib­er­al.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing stuff.
  4. Chi­na cracks down on Chris­tians — a new era of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion has arrived (Nina Shea and Bob Fu, Fox News): “The government’s repres­sion against the church­es is being done in the name of Pres­i­dent Xi Jinping’s ‘sini­ciza­tion’ cam­paign, osten­si­bly to strength­en Chi­nese cul­ture. How­ev­er, it increas­ing­ly appears aimed at remov­ing the Bible and its teach­ings from Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty.” (relat­ed cov­er­age at the New York Times)
    • My Dec­la­ra­tion of Faith­ful Dis­obe­di­ence (Wang Yi, Chris­t­ian Dai­ly Reporter): “As a pas­tor, my dis­obe­di­ence is one part of the gospel com­mis­sion. Christ’s great com­mis­sion requires of us great dis­obe­di­ence. The goal of dis­obe­di­ence is not to change the world but to tes­ti­fy about anoth­er world.” A now-impris­oned pas­tor wrote this let­ter with instruc­tions that it be pub­lished if he was detained for more than 48 hours. STRAIGHT FIRE.
  5. Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop and how “reli­gious lib­er­ty” became so tox­ic (Andrew Kop­pel­man, Vox): “Deep dis­agree­ment about moral fun­da­men­tals is noth­ing new; it is what reli­gious diver­si­ty con­sists of. That ought to include dis­agree­ment about such fraught mat­ters as sex­u­al­i­ty. Moral dis­agree­ment about things that mat­ter a lot is an inevitable con­se­quence of a free soci­ety. The best we can hope for is to live peace­ful­ly togeth­er in mutu­al con­tempt.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Fair­ness For All’: Smart Pol­i­tics, Or A Sell­out? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…there real­ly is a ques­tion of jus­tice with­in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have to face. We may sin­cere­ly believe that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is moral­ly wrong, but at what point does the com­mon good require that we agree that gay peo­ple have a right to be wrong? Espe­cial­ly because we are ask­ing them to agree that we have a right to be wrong (in their eyes) too.”
    • Response to the above: Mis­guid­ed Pro­pos­al From Chris­t­ian Lead­ers and LGBT Activists Is Any­thing but ‘Fair­ness for All’ (Ryan T. Ander­son, The Dai­ly Sig­nal): “Estab­lish­ing bad pub­lic pol­i­cy for every­one and then exempt­ing select reli­gious insti­tu­tions is not act­ing for the com­mon good—and is cer­tain­ly not fair for all. And there are bet­ter ways for­ward for those who seek com­pro­mise.”
    • Kin­da dif­fer­ent, but kin­da relat­ed: The Cul­ture Wars Are Ancient His­to­ry (Peter Lei­thart, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The real fight isn’t between reli­gion and sec­u­lar­ism, but between two kinds of reli­gion. His book makes the case that today’s cul­ture war shares much in com­mon with the cul­ture war that rocked ancient Rome.” Insight­ful.
  6. The Case Against Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…mer­i­to­crats are often edu­cat­ed to be bad lead­ers, and bad peo­ple, in a very spe­cif­ic way — a way of arro­gant intel­li­gence unmoored from his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence, ambi­tion untem­pered by self-sac­ri­fice. The way of the ‘best and the bright­est’ at the dawn of the tech­no­crat­ic era and the ‘smartest guys in the room’ decades lat­er, the way of the arson­ists of late-2000s Wall Street and the ‘move fast and break things’ cul­ture of Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Is Sex Social­ly Con­struct­ed? (Alex Byrne, Arc Dig­i­tal): “Clear­ly many ani­mals have belonged to the cat­e­go­ry female (or male) with­out exist­ing with­in a soci­ety of any kind. Indeed, there would have been females and males even if life on Earth had been destroyed by an aster­oid half a bil­lion years ago and humans had nev­er evolved. Female and male are there­fore not social­ly con­struct­ed cat­e­gories; that is, sex is not social­ly con­struct­ed.” Byrne is the head of MIT’s depart­ment of lin­guis­tics and phi­los­o­phy. I shared a relat­ed arti­cle of his back in issue 177.

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 On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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 173

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. Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Chris­t­ian Doc­tor Who Heals Rape Vic­tims (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[Dr. Denis] Muk­wege is the son of a Pen­te­costal min­is­ter and was inspired to pur­sue med­i­cine after trav­el­ing with his father to pray for the sick. Panzi Hos­pi­tal, which he found­ed in 1999, is man­aged by the Pen­te­costal Church­es in Cen­tral Africa (CEPAC).”
  2. Turk­ish court orders release of U.S. pas­tor Andrew Brun­son (Erin Cun­ning­ham, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In his final state­ment to the court just before the ver­dict was issued, Brun­son said: ‘I’m an inno­cent man. I love Jesus. I love this coun­try,’ and broke down in tears.”
  3. So many peo­ple have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put oth­er peo­ple’s pri­va­cy in jeop­ardy (Deb­o­rah Net­burn, Los Ange­les Times): “…once 3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have uploaded their genomes to pub­lic geneal­o­gy web­sites, near­ly every­one in the U.S. would be iden­ti­fi­able by their DNA alone and just a few addi­tion­al clues. More than 1 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have already pub­lished their genet­ic infor­ma­tion, and dozens more do so every day.” The under­ly­ing research: Iden­ti­ty infer­ence of genom­ic data using long-range famil­ial search­es (Erlich, Shor, Pe’er, and Car­mi, Sci­ence)
  4. Pol­i­tics as the New Reli­gion for Pro­gres­sive Democ­rats (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­ers, who may or may not be asso­ci­at­ed with oth­er civic insti­tu­tions, seem most excit­ed about sup­port­ing or donat­ing to caus­es, going to ral­lies, and express­ing opin­ions online, among oth­er activ­i­ties. Polit­i­cal engage­ment may be pro­vid­ing these Amer­i­cans with a new form of iden­ti­ty.”
  5. I Left Same-Sex Romance for Love (Rachel Gilson, Gospel Coali­tion): “If giv­ing free rein to my desires was the key to life, why had it only some­times brought me hap­pi­ness? Just as often, I reaped medi­oc­rity or pain. Con­trary to what I believed, pur­su­ing my nat­ur­al desires did not cre­ate ful­fill­ment, nor were my desires ful­ly trust­wor­thy just because they were, and are, ‘real.’ An itch can be very real, yelling out to be scratched. But for some ail­ments, scratch­ing just deep­ens the wound. A dif­fer­ent cure must be found.” The author is a cam­pus min­is­ter and a Yale grad. If you find this arti­cle intrigu­ing, she also has a per­son­al web­site: https://rachelgilson.com/
  6. Amer­i­cans Strong­ly Dis­like PC Cul­ture (Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic): “Among the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, a full 80 per­cent believe that “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is a prob­lem in our coun­try.” Even young peo­ple are uncom­fort­able with it, includ­ing 74 per­cent ages 24 to 29, and 79 per­cent under age 24. On this par­tic­u­lar issue, the woke are in a clear minor­i­ty across all ages. Youth isn’t a good proxy for sup­port of polit­i­cal correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either. Whites are ever so slight­ly less like­ly than aver­age to believe that polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is a prob­lem in the coun­try: 79 per­cent of them share this sen­ti­ment. Instead, it is Asians (82 per­cent), His­pan­ics (87 per­cent), and Amer­i­can Indi­ans (88 per­cent) who are most like­ly to oppose polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness…. Three quar­ters of African Amer­i­cans oppose polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness.” The author is a lec­tur­er on gov­ern­ment at Har­vard.
  7. Mak­ing What Har­vard Is About Trans­par­ent (Raz­ib Khan, per­son­al blog): “…a few years ago the pres­i­dent of Har­vard declared that the insti­tu­tion was all about inclu­sion. On the face of it that is just a bald-faced lie, and every­one knows it. Har­vard is about exclu­sion, selec­tion, and cura­tion. ‘Inclu­sion’ actu­al­ly meant that there are cer­tain views and back­grounds that Har­vard is going to curate and encour­age. Which is fine. But an insti­tu­tion which excludes >95% of those who apply for admis­sion is by def­i­n­i­tion not inclu­sive and open.” The essay is about Har­vard but also applies to schools like it (look­ing at you, Stan­ford). You won’t agree with every­thing, but a lot will ring true.

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 172

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 did­n’t think I’d be able to send the email this week because I’m preach­ing in rur­al Alas­ka with­out reli­able WiFi, but I was able to grab a bit this morn­ing. As a result, this edi­tion feels a bit big­ger than nor­mal to me — com­pil­ing the list is quick because when­ev­er I read a good arti­cle I throw it on the pile, but edit­ing it down takes time I don’t have today. So here you go. Enjoy!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. First, a bit about Supreme Court nom­i­nee Brett Kavanaugh. I’ve had less time than nor­mal for read­ing this week, so I am cer­tain there are inter­est­ing and insight­ful arti­cles I nev­er stum­bled upon. Send me things you think I missed! Of one thing I am con­vinced: the lev­el of fury on both sides over this nom­i­na­tion is off-the-charts, and both sides seem to under­es­ti­mate just how out­raged the oth­er side is.
    • Only the Truth Can Save Us Now (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “even more than before the hear­ings, my feel­ing after over eight hours in pur­ga­to­ry is that I still real­ly want to know the truth. And sur­pris­ing­ly, I left the long day of tes­ti­mo­ny con­vinced that for all the years that have passed since the sum­mer of 1982, the truth might actu­al­ly be acces­si­ble, and there are obvi­ous ques­tions and avenues of inquiry, unpur­sued by both par­ties, that could bring us clos­er to under­stand­ing which of the two wit­ness­es were telling the real truth.”
    • I Know Brett Kavanaugh, but I Wouldn’t Con­firm Him (Ben­jamin Wittes, The Atlantic): “Faced with cred­i­ble alle­ga­tions of seri­ous mis­con­duct against him, Kavanaugh behaved in a fash­ion unac­cept­able in a jus­tice, it seems pre­pon­der­ant­ly like­ly he was not can­did with the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee on impor­tant mat­ters, and the risk of Ford’s alle­ga­tions being clos­er to the truth than his denial of them is sim­ply too high to place him on the Supreme Court…. As much as I admire Kavanaugh, my con­science would not per­mit me to vote for him.” This makes the most thought­ful case against Kavanaugh. See last week’s edi­tion for a sim­i­lar piece that comes to the oppo­site con­clu­sion.
    • The Rachel Mitchell Memo -“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to prove. But this case is even weak­er than that. Dr. Ford iden­ti­fied oth­er wit­ness­es to the event, and those wit­ness­es either refut­ed her alle­ga­tions or failed to cor­rob­o­rate them….I do not think that a rea­son­able pros­e­cu­tor would bring this case based on the evi­dence before the Com­mit­tee. Nor do I believe that this evi­dence is suf­fi­cient to sat­is­fy the pre­pon­der­ance-of-the-evi­dence stan­dard.” This is the report writ­ten by the sex-crimes pros­e­cu­tor who inter­viewed Dr. Ford on the Repub­li­cans’ behalf in the Sen­ate hear­ing.
    • A Non-scan­dalous, Non-ide­o­log­i­cal Case Against Brett Kavanaugh (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “I do wor­ry about a Supreme Court where lit­er­al­ly all nine mem­bers received their respec­tive legal edu­ca­tion at either Har­vard or Yale Law.”
    • Con­ser­v­a­tive Women Are Angry About Kavanaugh—And They Think Oth­er Vot­ers Are, Too (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “These women are infu­ri­at­ed with the way the sex­u­al-assault alle­ga­tions against the Supreme Court nom­i­nee Brett Kavanaugh have been han­dled. They are not con­vinced by Ford or any oth­er woman who has come for­ward. They resent the impli­ca­tion that all women should sup­port the accusers. And they believe that this scan­dal will ulti­mate­ly hurt the cause of women who have been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed. Above all, these women, and the women they know, are ready to lash out against Democ­rats in the upcom­ing midterm elec­tions.”
    • The Per­ni­cious Dou­ble Stan­dards Around Brett Kavanaugh’s Drink­ing (Megan Gar­ber, The Atlantic): “There’s been a lot of talk about dou­ble stan­dards of late—rightfully so—and here is one more: the assump­tion that alco­hol is one thing for men and anoth­er for women.” This one comes rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. For the record, you should not get drunk regard­less of your gen­der. Eph­esians 5:18, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauch­ery. Instead, be filled with the Spir­it.”
    • Poll: Amid Kavanaugh Con­fir­ma­tion Bat­tle, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Enthu­si­asm Edge Evap­o­rates (Domeni­co Mon­ta­naro, NPR): “While Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans are now equal­ly enthu­si­as­tic about the midterms, the sto­ry is very dif­fer­ent for key Demo­c­ra­t­ic base groups and inde­pen­dents. While 82 per­cent of Democ­rats say the midterms are very impor­tant, that’s true of just 60 per­cent of peo­ple under 30, 61 per­cent of Lati­nos and 65 per­cent of inde­pen­dents.”
  2. On the broad­er impli­ca­tions of the Ford/Kavanaugh dra­ma.
    • Six Broad­er Insights From the Kavanaugh Saga So Far (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “Most men are not abusers, yet very large num­bers of women have been abused. So if a man is an abuser, there is a good chance he has abused a fair num­ber of women. That means many well-mean­ing men expe­ri­ence sex­u­al abuse as a rel­a­tive­ly rare phe­nom­e­non. They haven’t done it, and most of their male friends haven’t either. At the same time, most women have abuse, rape or #MeToo sto­ries, and they expe­ri­ence these phe­nom­e­na as rel­a­tive­ly com­mon and often life-alter­ing. Prob­a­bly they also have heard mul­ti­ple such sto­ries from their female friends. This struc­tur­al asym­me­try of per­spec­tives is cru­cial to under­stand­ing the dis­course and the often fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences in opin­ion.”
    • An Age Divid­ed By Sex (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “the cul­ture war as we’ve known it since has not been a sim­ple clash of con­ser­v­a­tives who want to repress and lib­er­als who want to eman­ci­pate. Rather it’s been an ongo­ing argu­ment between two forces — fem­i­nists and reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives — that both want to remor­al­ize Amer­i­can soci­ety, albeit in very dif­fer­ent ways.”
    • The Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Against Itself (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “the whole mer­i­to­crat­ic game… depends on a repro­duc­tion of priv­i­lege that pre­tends to be some­thing else, some­thing fair and open and all about hard work and just deserts. In this game the peo­ple whose priv­i­lege is par­tic­u­lar­ly obvi­ous, the board­ing school­ers and New York toffs and Bethes­da coun­try club­bers, play a cru­cial­ly impor­tant role. It’s not just that their par­ents pay full freight and keep the eco­nom­ics of tuition viable for every­one. It’s that the eliter-than-elite kids them­selves help cre­ate a pro­vi­sion­al inside-the-Ivy hier­ar­chy that lets all the oth­er priv­i­leged kids, the ones who are mere­ly upper-upper mid­dle class, feel the spur of resent­ment and ambi­tion that keeps us run­ning, keeps us com­pet­ing, keeps us sharp and awful in all the ways that mer­i­toc­ra­cy requires.” This is not real­ly about Kavanaugh, but it is cer­tain­ly about the world most of you inhab­it at Stan­ford.
    • See this insight­ful response: Brett Kavanaugh and the Lim­its of Social-Class Priv­i­lege for Con­ser­v­a­tives (David French, Nation­al Review): “The social bat­tles of the elite col­lege rep­re­sent the squab­bling of men and women at the tip of the priv­i­lege spear in the most pow­er­ful nation in the his­to­ry of the plan­et. But as real as these pet­ty resent­ments were and are, they pale in com­par­i­son to the most impor­tant thing. They miss the real roots of Ivy rage. Brett Kavanaugh’s true sin isn’t his con­nec­tions, his pop­u­lar­i­ty, or his prep school. His true sin is that he’s a con­ser­v­a­tive. And now he’s a par­tic­u­lar kind of con­ser­v­a­tive — a con­ser­v­a­tive who mat­ters, a con­ser­v­a­tive who will have the pow­er (and might actu­al­ly have the con­vic­tions) to threat­en one or more of the most sacred ele­ments of pro­gres­sive jurispru­dence. He can poten­tial­ly affect the law and the cul­ture in a pro­found way. So what we’re watch­ing is the sys­tem­at­ic revo­ca­tion of his elite priv­i­lege.”
    • One of the Best Speech­es You Will Ever Hear from the Sen­ate Floor (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “I believe that we have a wide­spread lega­cy of sex­u­al assault in this coun­try. I believe we don’t have much of a shared sex­u­al eth­ic right now—and we haven’t for quite some time—and I think hor­ri­ble stuff has hap­pened, and con­tin­ues to hap­pen. I’ve wept with the vic­tims of sex­u­al assault, and I believe the advo­ca­cy groups’ data that between one-fifth and one-third of Amer­i­can women have been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed at some point in their lives. And giv­en that most women have many oth­er impor­tant women in their lives—a mom, and a daugh­ter, sis­ters, and a cou­ple of close friends—it means that the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Amer­i­can women have been deeply affect­ed, deeply hurt, by the tragedy of sex­u­al vio­lence.” The speech is by Ben Sasse, a for­mer sem­i­nary pres­i­dent now serv­ing as a sen­a­tor from Nebras­ka.
    • Rage Pol­i­tics On The Left (R. R. Reno, First Things): “Of the utopi­an dreams of the 1960s, only the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion has attained cul­tur­al dom­i­nance. To a great degree, we as a soci­ety believe in the promis­es of that rev­o­lu­tion: that sex can be safe; that men and women can enjoy sex­u­al free­dom to the same degree and in the same way; that sex need have noth­ing to do with chil­dren; that sex is pure­ly pri­vate. These promis­es are back­stopped by abor­tion, the con­sti­tu­tion­al sta­tus of which fuels the urgency sur­round­ing the Kavanaugh appoint­ment.”
      • In a sim­i­lar vein: Believ­abil­i­ty Is The Road To Nation­al Ruin (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “When pol­i­tics becomes sole­ly a mat­ter of ‘I believe’ ver­sus ‘I believe,’ it descends into a raw con­test for pow­er. His­tor­i­cal­ly, it’s been fas­cists, not lib­er­als, who tend to win such con­tests.”
    • I was sex­u­al­ly assault­ed and thought it was my fault. It’s past time for a 1980s reck­on­ing. (Kirsten Pow­ers, USA Today): “There is a prob­lem, though, and it’s this: The cul­ture failed to give us the lan­guage to describe such vio­la­tions, and made us feel that talk­ing about what hap­pened to an author­i­ty fig­ure would only make things worse for us. For­tu­nate­ly for women, what hap­pened in the 1980s isn’t stay­ing in the 1980s. It’s a reck­on­ing that is well over­due.”
  3. Steel­man­ning the NIM­BYs (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “San Fran­cis­co is easy to hate. Even a lot of the peo­ple who already live there hate it. They hate the streets piled with dis­card­ed nee­dles and human waste. They hate the traf­fic (fifth worst in the world) and the crime (third most prop­er­ty crime in the US). They hate liv­ing five peo­ple to a three-bed­room apart­ment. They hate hav­ing aggres­sive peo­ple scream incom­pre­hen­si­ble things at them on the side­walk. They hate the var­i­ous mutu­al­ly hos­tile tran­sit sys­tems that inter­lock in a sys­tem I would call byzan­tine except that at least you could get around medieval Con­stan­tino­ple with­out check­ing whether the Muni and Cal­Train were mys­te­ri­ous­ly fail­ing to con­nect to each oth­er today. They hate that every­one else in the city hates them, from vis­i­ble KILL ALL TECHIES graf­fi­ti on their com­mute to work, to a sub­tle mood of seething resent­ment from every­one they meet. They hate the omnipresent bill­boards expect­ing them to have strong opin­ions on apps. I’m not say­ing every­one in San Fran­cis­co hates it. There are peo­ple who like all sorts of things. Some peo­ple like being tied up, whipped, and elec­tro­cut­ed by strangers. And a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of these peo­ple live in San Fran­cis­co. I am just say­ing this isn’t a coin­ci­dence.”
    • Steel­man­ning refers to the oppo­site of attack­ing a straw man argu­ment. Instead of mak­ing your opponent’s argu­ment weak­er, you strength­en it as much as you can.
    • Coun­ter­point: YIMBY! (Scott Sum­n­er, Econ­Lib): “Think of it this way. Lots of par­ents don’t let their kids play out­side by them­selves, because oth­er par­ents don’t let their kids play out­side. If you choose to be the excep­tion, then (unlike dur­ing the 1960s) your kid is the only one avail­able for pedophiles to prey upon. Lots of the anti-NIM­BY feel­ing comes from a false per­cep­tion of what the real estate mar­ket would look like if com­plete lais­sez-faire were adopt­ed, based on the cur­rent dis­tort­ed mar­ket.”
  4. The Dis­ap­pear­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive Pro­fes­sor (Jon A. Shields, Nation­al Affairs): “Pro­fes­sors are even less tol­er­ant of evan­gel­i­cals, whom they asso­ciate with social con­ser­vatism. Near­ly 60% of anthro­pol­o­gists, 50% of lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors, 39% of polit­i­cal sci­en­tists and soci­ol­o­gists, 34% of phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors, and 29% of his­to­ri­ans say they would be less inclined to hire evan­gel­i­cals. Yancey fur­ther found that female pro­fes­sors expressed more anti-con­ser­v­a­tive bias than men, per­haps in part because female pro­fes­sors tend to be more pro­gres­sive than their male peers.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment at Clare­mont McKen­na.
  5. The Big Hack: How Chi­na Used a Tiny Chip to Infil­trate U.S. Com­pa­nies (Jor­dan Robert­son and Michael Rieey, Bloomberg): “Nest­ed on the servers’ moth­er­boards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much big­ger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ orig­i­nal design. Ama­zon report­ed the dis­cov­ery to U.S. author­i­ties, send­ing a shud­der through the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. Elemental’s servers could be found in Depart­ment of Defense data cen­ters, the CIA’s drone oper­a­tions, and the onboard net­works of Navy war­ships. And Ele­men­tal was just one of hun­dreds of Super­mi­cro cus­tomers. Dur­ing the ensu­ing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years lat­er, inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined that the chips allowed the attack­ers to cre­ate a stealth door­way into any net­work that includ­ed the altered machines. Mul­ti­ple peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter say inves­ti­ga­tors found that the chips had been insert­ed at fac­to­ries run by man­u­fac­tur­ing sub­con­trac­tors in Chi­na.”
    • This bit made me chuck­le: “Two of Elemental’s biggest ear­ly clients were the Mor­mon church, which used the tech­nol­o­gy to beam ser­mons to con­gre­ga­tions around the world, and the adult film indus­try, which did not.”
  6. How Do Chris­tians Fit Into the Two-Par­ty Sys­tem? They Don’t (Tim Keller, New York Times): “Chris­tians are pushed toward two main options. One is to with­draw and try to be apo­lit­i­cal. The sec­ond is to assim­i­late and ful­ly adopt one party’s whole pack­age in order to have your place at the table. Nei­ther of these options is valid.”
  7. Are You a Young Evan­gel­i­cal? We Want to Hear From You Ahead of the Midterm Elec­tions (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “If you are an evan­gel­i­cal born after 1980, I’d love to hear about the rela­tion­ship between your faith and pol­i­tics today. And if you grew up evan­gel­i­cal and your views are shift­ing, feel free to share that, too. We may pub­lish a selec­tion of the respons­es.” Take a few min­utes and respond to this — you might get print­ed in the New York Times.

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.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 164

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. Two con­trast­ing per­spec­tives on who is real­ly win­ning in Amer­i­ca, both inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished by smart peo­ple in the same high-pro­file mag­a­zine:
    • Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jor­dan Peter­son (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “There are many legit­i­mate rea­sons to dis­agree with him on a num­ber of sub­jects, and many peo­ple of good will do. But there is no coher­ent rea­son for the left’s oblit­er­at­ing and irra­tional hatred of Jor­dan Peter­son. What, then, accounts for it? It is because the left, while it cur­rent­ly seems ascen­dant in our hous­es of cul­ture and art, has in fact entered its deca­dent late phase, and it is deeply vul­ner­a­ble.”
    • Con­ser­v­a­tives Are Scared, Even Under Trump (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “While lib­er­al activist groups paint Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Wash­ing­ton as an unmit­i­gat­ed for­ward march of con­ser­v­a­tive vic­to­ries, con­ser­v­a­tive activist groups—including Weber’s—don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly per­ceive things the same way. Rather, some of these groups see the next few years under Trump as a brief win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate defens­es against a cul­ture that is mov­ing away from them. In parts of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, the long-game strat­e­gy is to defend their posi­tion by devolv­ing pow­er away from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the Supreme Court, using the momen­tum of the Trump years to bat­ten down the hatch­es against the inevitable cul­tur­al storms ahead.”
  2. Final text of Jew­ish nation-state law, approved by the Knes­set ear­ly on July 19 (Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel): “The law for the first time enshrines Israel as ‘the nation­al home of the Jew­ish peo­ple.’ The law becomes one of the so-called Basic Laws, which, like a con­sti­tu­tion, guide Israel’s legal sys­tem and are usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult to repeal than reg­u­lar laws.” Unlike most arti­cles, this includes the full (trans­lat­ed) text of the law, and it is worth read­ing if you’ve only seen it excerpt­ed. It’s not long.
    • I believe this is the Israeli law that infu­ri­at­ed Stan­ford stu­dent Hamzeh Daoud (see last week’s install­ment for details).
    • Israel’s New Law: A Tale of Two Nation-States (Robert Nichol­son, Prov­i­dence): “The Pales­tine Basic Law (2003) defines Pales­tine as part of the Arab world and Arab uni­ty as a sin­gu­lar goal of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. The law also defines Ara­bic as Palestine’s offi­cial lan­guage, Jerusalem as its offi­cial cap­i­tal, and Islam as its offi­cial reli­gion. This basic law serves as a tem­po­rary con­sti­tu­tion for the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty until a sov­er­eign State of Pales­tine is estab­lished. In the mean­time, the law gov­erns dai­ly life inside the West Bank and to some extent Gaza. On July 19 the Israeli Knes­set passed a sim­i­lar basic law.” This was incred­i­bly help­ful con­text to me.
    • Under the Law: Israeli Chris­tians Wor­ry About Sec­ondary Sta­tus in Jew­ish Nation-State (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘This law out­lines that Israel’s demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues are sec­ondary for non-Jews,’ said Sha­dia Qubti, a Pales­tin­ian evan­gel­i­cal liv­ing in Nazareth. ‘It sends a clear mes­sage that my lan­guage is not wel­come and con­se­quent­ly, nei­ther is my cul­tur­al and eth­nic iden­ti­ty.’”
  3. A Bet­ter Way to Ban Alex Jones (David French, New York Times): “The good news is that tech com­pa­nies don’t have to rely on vague, mal­leable and hot­ly con­test­ed def­i­n­i­tions of hate speech to deal with con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists like Mr. Jones. The far bet­ter option would be to pro­hib­it libel or slan­der on their plat­forms…. Pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions can ban who­ev­er they like. But if com­pa­nies like Face­book are eager to nav­i­gate speech con­tro­ver­sies in good faith, they would do well to learn from the cen­turies of legal devel­op­ments in Amer­i­can law. When cre­at­ing a true mar­ket­place of ideas, why not let the First Amend­ment be your guide?”
    • His fol­low-up: A First Amend­ment Peace Plan for the Twit­ter Wars (David French, Nation­al Review): “As I dug down into objec­tions to my pro­posed First Amend­ment frame­work, I often found that the objec­tions were ulti­mate­ly based on a desire to dis­crim­i­nate on the basis of view­point, on a desire to use the pow­er of the plat­form to priv­i­lege some voic­es and sup­press oth­ers.”
  4. A Kind of Home­less­ness: Evan­gel­i­cals of Col­or in the Trump Era (Melani McAl­is­ter, Reli­gion & Pol­i­tics): “Yet the head­lines about ‘evan­gel­i­cal’ sup­port for the pres­i­dent and his agen­da mean that evan­gel­i­cals of col­or can seem to be an invis­i­ble community—rarely acknowl­edged by jour­nal­ists even when they go to the same church­es or claim a sim­i­lar the­ol­o­gy. White evan­gel­i­cals are numer­i­cal­ly dominant—although declining—but their opin­ions dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dom­i­nate U.S. media report­ing on how the­o­log­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants think, vote, and believe. At one lev­el, the racial dif­fer­ence is emi­nent­ly pre­dictable. Sure­ly the white­ness of white evan­gel­i­cals is cru­cial to under­stand­ing their polit­i­cal beliefs and their vot­ing pat­terns. As Janelle Wong shows in her new book, Immi­grants, Evan­gel­i­cals, and Pol­i­tics in an Era of Demo­graph­ic Change, although evan­gel­i­cals of any giv­en race are more con­ser­v­a­tive than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion of that race, evan­gel­i­cals of col­or over­all are far less con­ser­v­a­tive than white evan­gel­i­cals. Indeed, they are less con­ser­v­a­tive than white peo­ple over­all.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Amer­i­can Stud­ies and Inter­na­tion­al Affairs at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. How Trump Rad­i­cal­ized ICE (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic): “By the begin­ning of Barack Obama’s sec­ond term, immi­gra­tion had become one of the high­est pri­or­i­ties of fed­er­al law enforce­ment: Half of all fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tions were for immi­gra­tion-relat­ed crimes. In 2012, Con­gress appro­pri­at­ed $18 bil­lion for immi­gra­tion enforce­ment. It spent $14 bil­lion for all the oth­er major crim­i­nal law-enforce­ment agen­cies com­bined: the FBI; the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion; the Secret Ser­vice; the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms, and Explo­sives; and the U.S. Mar­shals Ser­vice.” ICE is much, much big­ger than I real­ized. This is a real­ly impor­tant arti­cle.
  6. Oh, The Human­i­ties! (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the years since the Great Reces­sion have been ‘bru­tal for almost every major in the human­i­ties.’ They’ve also been bad for ‘social sci­ence fields that most close­ly resem­ble human­is­tic ones — soci­ol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions and polit­i­cal sci­ence.’ Mean­while the sci­ences and engi­neer­ing have gained at the expense of human­ism…”
  7. Bethel Church Sur­vives Red­ding Carr Fire, But Still Faces Heat (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Bethel’s part, staff said the church could not act as an evac­u­a­tion zone because of its prox­im­i­ty to the blaze and because there is a sin­gle entry and exit point to the cam­pus, which is itself sur­round­ed by brush. The Red Cross said Bethel offered to be an evac­u­a­tion site, but was turned down because of the campus’s near­ness to the fire…. The church has, how­ev­er, flexed its con­sid­er­able min­istry mus­cle and finan­cial resources, encour­ag­ing dona­tions to aid relief efforts. Bethel is also part­ner­ing with the Red Cross and the Sal­va­tion Army in response to the Carr fire, Far­rel­ly said.”
    • Relat­ed: Osteen’s church was sim­i­lar­ly crit­i­cized after Hur­ri­cane Har­vey, also with what seem to me to be scant fac­tu­al grounds. Dis­cussed back in vol­ume 116.
    • Also (ten­u­ous­ly) relat­ed: Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Dev­as­tat­ing Fires Are Man-Caused — But Not In The Way They Tell Us (Chuck DeVore, Forbes): “ In the 1850s and 1860s, the typ­i­cal Sier­ra land­scape was of open fields of grass punc­tu­at­ed by iso­lat­ed pine stands and a few scat­tered oak trees. The first branch­es on the pine trees start­ed about 20 feet up—lower branch­es hav­ing been burned off by low-inten­si­ty grass­fires. California’s Native Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion had for years shaped this land­scape with fire to encour­age the grass­lands and boost the game ani­mal pop­u­la­tion. As the Gold Rush remade mod­ern Cal­i­for­nia, tim­ber was har­vest­ed and replant­ed. Fires were sup­pressed because they threat­ened homes as well as burned up a valu­able resource. The land­scape filled in with trees, but the trees were har­vest­ed every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, how­ev­er, that cycle began to be dis­rupt­ed with increas­ing­ly bur­den­some reg­u­la­tions. The tim­ber har­vest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped com­plete­ly, espe­cial­ly on the almost 60% of Cal­i­for­nia for­est land owned by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.”

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 Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘per­fect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

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).

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 160

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. Democ­rats Are Wrong About Repub­li­cans. Repub­li­cans Are Wrong About Democ­rats. (Per­ry Bacon Jr., FiveThir­tyEight): “Blacks made up about a quar­ter of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, but Repub­li­cans esti­mat­ed the share at 46 per­cent. Repub­li­cans thought 38 per­cent of Democ­rats were gay, les­bian or bisex­u­al, while the actu­al num­ber was about 6 per­cent. Democ­rats esti­mat­ed that 44 per­cent of Repub­li­cans make more than $250,000 a year. The actu­al share was 2 per­cent. Peo­ple also over­stat­ed the num­bers of these stereo­typ­i­cal groups with­in their own par­ty — Democ­rats thought 29 per­cent of their fel­low Democ­rats were gay, les­bian or bisex­u­al — but they weren’t off by as much as mem­bers of the oth­er par­ty.”
  2. The Social­ist Net­work (Gilad Edel­man, Wash­ing­ton Month­ly): “At the heart of the split between lib­er­als and social­ists, at least in the­o­ry, is the ques­tion of what to do about cap­i­tal­ism. Lib­er­als tend to see it as some­thing that needs to be fixed. Social­ists see it as some­thing to be defeat­ed. They say they do, any­way. As we’ve seen, the Mil­len­ni­al social­ist intel­lec­tu­als aren’t real­ly call­ing for gov­ern­ment takeover of indus­try.”
  3. Affirm­ing Dis­ad­van­tage (John McWhort­er, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “Do I oppose affir­ma­tive action? Not at all. But I sug­gest that what we now ‘affirm’ is dis­ad­van­tage suf­fered by all kinds of peo­ple.” The author is a lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia. He earned his Ph.D. at Stan­ford, btw.
  4. Cul­ture War As Class War: How Gay Rights Rein­force Elite Pow­er (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “Priv­i­leg­ing the nor­mal­iza­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty rather than, say, racial inte­gra­tion allows elites to have their diver­si­ty cake and eat it, too.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.
  5. If You Care About NATO You Should Care About Ger­man Mil­i­tary Readi­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “…Germany’s mil­i­tary made head­lines when it used broom­sticks instead of machine guns dur­ing a NATO exer­cise because of a short­age of equip­ment. The lack of real weapons in the Euro­pean Union’s most pop­u­lous nation was seen as symp­to­matic of how under­fund­ed its mil­i­tary has long been.” This is scary.
  6. Learn­ing From ‘The Final Pagan Gen­er­a­tion’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): this is a long and illu­mi­nat­ing post. “Under­stand that we, like the final pagan gen­er­a­tion [in ancient Rome], might think we are fight­ing for tol­er­ance, but our oppo­nents are fight­ing for vic­to­ry. We have to change our tac­tics.” (empha­sis removed)
  7. Pres­i­dent Trump has nom­i­nat­ed Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court Jus­tice. I’ve got a lot of links here — just pick one or two.
    • It Took a Vil­lage to Raise Kavanaugh (David Brooks, New York Times): “Kavanaugh is the prod­uct of a com­mu­ni­ty. He is the prod­uct of a con­ser­v­a­tive legal infra­struc­ture that devel­ops ideas, recruits tal­ent, links ris­ing stars, nur­tures genius, molds and launch­es judi­cial nom­i­nees…. If you empha­size pro­fes­sion­al excel­lence first, if you gain a foothold in society’s main­stream insti­tu­tions, if you build a cohe­sive band of broth­ers and sis­ters, you can trans­form the land­scape of your field.”
    • As Trump picks Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, evan­gel­i­cals rejoice: ‘I will vote for him again’ (Julie Zauzmer, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Many evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors and activists said they would have been pleased with any of the names report­ed to be on Trump’s short­list for the nom­i­na­tion. After all, that was the gam­bit that won Trump so many evan­gel­i­cal votes in 2016: He made the unusu­al move of releas­ing, before he was even pres­i­dent, a list of judges he would con­sid­er for the Supreme Court if elect­ed. And evan­gel­i­cals liked what they saw.”
    • Brett Kavanaugh, Don­ald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, explained (Dylan Matthews, Vox): “Kavanaugh con­tin­ued to com­pile a legal record that would lead to Durbin’s descrip­tion of him as ‘the Zelig or For­rest Gump of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics. You show up at every scene of the crime … whether it is Elián González or the Starr Report, you are there.’”
    • Will Brett Kavanaugh Pass the Reli­gious Right’s New Lit­mus Test? (Sarah Pos­ner, The Nation): “Even with­out the Trump-appoint­ed Kennedy suc­ces­sor, the Court had already expand­ed ‘reli­gious free­dom’ to include pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­ined reli­gious rights.” This is an extreme­ly mis­lead­ing arti­cle, but inter­est­ing in the mis­un­der­stand­ings it reveals.
    • You’ll Hate This Post On Brett Kavanaugh And Free Speech (Ken White, Pope­hat): “Kavanaugh has been an appel­late judge for 12 years and has writ­ten many opin­ions on free speech issues. They trend very pro­tec­tive of free speech, both in sub­stance and in rhetoric.”
    • Judge Kavanaugh and the Sec­ond Amend­ment (David Kopel, Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “Judge Kavanaugh­’s text, his­to­ry, and tra­di­tion method­ol­o­gy for Sec­ond Amend­ment cas­es will not please peo­ple who believe that all gun con­trol is imper­mis­si­ble, nor will it please advo­cates who want to make the Sec­ond Amend­ment a sec­ond-class right.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

I thought the Baby­lon Bee was excep­tion­al­ly fun­ny this week. Maybe I was just feel­ing gig­gly.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

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).

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 156

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.

Also, 156 is three sets of 52, which means I’ve been doing this for a lit­tle over three years now (I some­times take a week or two off). Yay!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mr. Rogers Had a Sim­ple Set of Rules for Talk­ing to Chil­dren (Maxwell King, The Atlantic): “1. ‘State the idea you wish to express as clear­ly as pos­si­ble, and in terms preschool­ers can under­stand.’ Exam­ple: It is dan­ger­ous to play in the street. 2. “Rephrase in a pos­i­tive man­ner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe. 3. “Rephrase the idea, bear­ing in mind that preschool­ers can­not yet make sub­tle dis­tinc­tions and need to be redi­rect­ed to author­i­ties they trust.” As in, Ask your par­ents where it is safe to play.” There are sev­er­al more rules, most equal­ly good for talk­ing to adults.
  2. The Lifes­pan of a Lie (Ben Blum, Medi­um): “The appeal of the Stan­ford prison exper­i­ment seems to go deep­er than its sci­en­tif­ic valid­i­ty, per­haps because it tells us a sto­ry about our­selves that we des­per­ate­ly want to believe: that we, as indi­vid­u­als, can­not real­ly be held account­able for the some­times rep­re­hen­si­ble things we do.” The arti­cle claims, con­vinc­ing­ly, that the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment did not hap­pen at all the way we have been taught. Wow.
  3. When Diver­si­ty Means Uni­for­mi­ty (Lionel Shriv­er, The Spec­ta­tor): “Will Nor­man, London’s ‘walk­ing and cycling com­mis­sion­er’, bemoaned the fact that too many cyclists in the city are white, male and mid­dle-class. ‘The real chal­lenge for Lon­don cycling,’ he declared, ‘is diver­si­ty.’ As opposed to build­ing more cycle lanes for every­body, or fix­ing pot­holes lethal to everybody’s wheel rims, Nor­man regards his prin­ci­pal func­tion as increas­ing black and minor­i­ty eth­nic rid­er­ship.” This anec­dote is not the focus of the arti­cle.
  4. Of Boys and Toys (Leonard Sax, Insti­tute For Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…they found that lit­tle children—boys especially—had bare­ly a clue which gen­der they belonged to, even when the psy­chol­o­gists used the sim­plest non­ver­bal prompts. Kids under two years of age score only slight­ly above chance in assign­ing them­selves or oth­er kids to the cor­rect gen­der. Nev­er­the­less, Serbin’s group found that children’s toy pref­er­ences are firm­ly in place by this age, espe­cial­ly among boys. When the exper­i­menters offered boys a truck or a doll, most boys chose the truck. In fact, boys pre­ferred trucks over dolls more strong­ly than girls pre­ferred dolls over trucks. That ought to be sur­pris­ing if you buy into gen­der schema the­o­ry because 18-month-old girls were more like­ly than boys to be able to clas­si­fy them­selves and oth­er chil­dren by gen­der. If gen­der schema the­o­ry is cor­rect, the girls should show a stronger pref­er­ence for gen­der-typ­i­cal toys because girls this age are more like­ly to know that they are, in fact, girls. But the real­i­ty is just the oppo­site.”
  5. Har­vard Rat­ed Asian-Amer­i­can Appli­cants Low­er on Per­son­al­i­ty Traits, Law­suit Says (Hadley Green, New York Times): “They com­pare Harvard’s treat­ment of Asian-Amer­i­cans with its well-doc­u­ment­ed cam­paign to reduce the grow­ing num­ber of Jews being admit­ted to Har­vard in the 1920s. Until then, appli­cants had been admit­ted on aca­d­e­m­ic mer­it. To avoid adopt­ing a bla­tant quo­ta sys­tem, Har­vard intro­duced sub­jec­tive cri­te­ria like char­ac­ter, per­son­al­i­ty and promise. The plain­tiffs call this the ‘orig­i­nal sin of holis­tic admis­sions.’” What are the odds they are the only high­ly-selec­tive uni­ver­si­ty to do this?
  6. Con­ser­v­a­tive Reli­gious Lead­ers Are Denounc­ing Trump Immi­gra­tion Poli­cies (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times): “A coali­tion of evan­gel­i­cal groups, includ­ing the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals and the Coun­cil for Chris­t­ian Col­leges and Uni­ver­si­ties, sent a let­ter to Pres­i­dent Trump on June 1 plead­ing with him to pro­tect the uni­ty of fam­i­lies and not to close off all avenues to asy­lum for immi­grants and refugees flee­ing dan­ger.”
    • Relat­ed: World Refugee Day 2018: ‘Wel­com­ing the Stranger’ Meets ‘Zero Tol­er­ance’ (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Chris­tians, the issue of fam­i­ly uni­ty for immi­grants shows signs of tran­scend­ing par­ti­san lines. Franklin Gra­ham, an evan­gel­i­cal advis­er to Pres­i­dent Trump, recent­ly spoke against fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion on CBN News, encour­ag­ing leg­isla­tive reform to rem­e­dy the new guide­lines for migrants at the bor­der.”
    • Relat­ed: She says fed­er­al offi­cials took her daugh­ter while she breast­fed the child in a deten­tion cen­ter (Ed Lavan­dera, Jason Mor­ris and Dar­ran Simon, CNN): “The undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grant from Hon­duras sobbed as she told an attor­ney Tues­day how fed­er­al author­i­ties took her daugh­ter while she breast­fed the child in a deten­tion cen­ter, where she was await­ing pros­e­cu­tion for enter­ing the coun­try ille­gal­ly. When the woman resist­ed, she was hand­cuffed…” Bear in the mind that this is an alle­ga­tion, not a sub­stan­ti­at­ed event. I find it plau­si­ble.
  7. A com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.”

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 On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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).

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 154

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 Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We’re a long way from any final judg­ment on God’s pur­pos­es in the Trump era. But so far the Trump pres­i­den­cy has clear­ly been a kind of apoc­a­lypse — not (yet) in the ‘world-his­tor­i­cal calami­ty’ sense of the word, but in the orig­i­nal Greek mean­ing: an unveil­ing, an uncov­er­ing, an expo­sure of truths that had hereto­fore been hid­den.”
    • Relat­ed: On Gen­der, Pow­er, and Sin: The Evan­gel­i­cal #MeToo Moment (Richard Beck, per­son­al blog): “A the­o­log­i­cal and bib­li­cal way to say all this is that men’s dom­i­nance over women is a part of the Fal­l’s curse upon human­i­ty. The wound of sin upon gen­der rela­tions is clear in Gen­e­sis 3: ‘He will rule over you.’ So if that’s a part of the curse, why do evan­gel­i­cals think that build­ing the curse into the system–gender subordination–is going to pro­duce any­thing oth­er than cursed out­comes?” I wish the author spent more time build­ing the Bib­li­cal case for his per­spec­tive.
  2. A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note.
    • The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-writ­ten and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its.
  3. What I’ve Learned in Twen­ty Years of Mar­riage (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “My grand­moth­er wise­ly asked one night when I was final­ly going to ask ‘that girl from Ocean Springs’ to mar­ry me. I answered, ‘When I can afford it.’ She laughed. ‘Hon­ey, I mar­ried your grand­pa in the mid­dle of a Great Depres­sion,’ she said. ‘We made it work. Nobody can afford to get mar­ried. You just mar­ry, and make it work.’ Apart from the gospel, those were, and remain, the most lib­er­at­ing words I ever heard. I bought a ring that wouldn’t impress any­one, then or now, but we were head­ed for the altar. My only regret is that we aren’t today cel­e­brat­ing our twen­ty-first anniver­sary instead of our twen­ti­eth.” This is from a few years back and is full of wis­dom.
  4. Title IX Is Too Easy To Abuse (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Is it pos­si­ble for two peo­ple to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sex­u­al­ly assault each oth­er? This is the question—rife with legal, anatom­i­cal, and emo­tion­al improbabilities—to which the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati now address­es itself, and with some urgency, as the insti­tu­tion and three of its employ­ees are cur­rent­ly being sued over an encounter that was sex­u­al for a brief moment, but that just as quick­ly entered the realm of eter­nal return. ”
  5. What­ev­er Hap­pened to Gifts of Lan­guage, Prophe­cy, and Heal­ing? (Andrew Wil­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “tak­ing a longer view by trac­ing our roots back to the ear­ly church fathers leads to some sur­pris­es. We dis­cov­er that some things, though rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al in recent times, are actu­al­ly very nor­mal across the broad­er sweep of human his­to­ry. Angels and demons would be an obvi­ous exam­ple. Or, more sur­pris­ing­ly, mirac­u­lous gifts.”
  6. I was Jor­dan Peterson’s strongest sup­port­er. Now I think he’s dan­ger­ous (Bernard Schiff, The Star): “When he was ren­o­vat­ing his house I invit­ed his fam­i­ly to live with mine. For five months, they occu­pied the third floor of our large house. We had meals togeth­er in the evening and long, colour­ful con­ver­sa­tions. There, away from cam­pus, I saw a man who was devot­ed to his wife and his chil­dren, who were love­ly and gen­tle and for whom I still feel affec­tion. He was atten­tive and thought­ful, stern and kind, play­ful and warm. His wife, Tam­my, appeared to be the keel, the bal­last and the rud­der, and Jor­dan ran the ship.” This is a long pro­file, by turns infor­ma­tive and puz­zling.
  7. The Evan­gel­i­cal Fight to Win Back Cal­i­for­nia (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Though the state has one of the high­est per­cent­ages of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults, the fast grow­ing reli­gious group in the coun­try, that large­ly blue sea is dot­ted with evan­gel­i­cal islands that are large­ly red. One in five adults in the state are evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, accord­ing to the Pew Research Cen­ter, and there are more megachurch­es in Cal­i­for­nia than in any oth­er state.” This arti­cle is most­ly about pol­i­tics, but is inter­est­ing nonethe­less.

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 Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

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).

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 149

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 Ugly Cod­ed Cri­tique of Chick-Fil-A’s Chris­tian­i­ty (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “A few years ago, a well-known pro­gres­sive com­men­ta­tor mused to his large Twit­ter fol­low­ing that some­times he wish­es all the Chris­tians would just dis­ap­pear. I would like to believe he was sim­ply too unin­formed to real­ize that he was wish­ing for a whiter world.” This arti­cle makes an impor­tant point that you may find use­ful in cam­pus dis­cus­sions. It is in response to the very odd Chick-Fil‑A’s Creepy Infil­tra­tion Of New York City (Dan Piepen­bring, New York­er). Rec­om­mend­ed to me by an alum­nus.
  2. Church Of The Don­ald (Ruth Gra­ham, Politi­co): “Trump per­son­al­ly has appeared 11 times on CBN since his cam­paign began; in 2017 alone, he gave more inter­views to CBN than to CNN, ABC or CBS…. Chris­t­ian broad­cast­ers offer an unmedi­at­ed chan­nel to the liv­ing rooms of a remark­ably wide swath of Amer­i­can believ­ers, an audi­ence more polit­i­cal­ly and racial­ly diverse than you might expect. TBN alone has more local sta­tions to its name than Fox or the three major net­works.” Insight­ful and rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. When the Rohingya Came, This Chris­t­ian Hos­pi­tal Was Ready (Sarah Eekhof Zyl­stra, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): this is a grip­ping sto­ry and dif­fi­cult to excerpt. Wow.
  4. Alfie Evans and Our Moral Cross­roads (Charles Camosy, First Things): “Alfie Evans’s death is being aimed by the very peo­ple whose voca­tion it is to help and pro­tect him. The dif­fer­ence in Alfie’s case is that, because he has con­tin­ued to breathe, the pre­tense of ‘removal of bur­den­some treat­ment’ is patent­ly absurd. In a sit­u­a­tion that was no doubt dis­tress­ing to those who hoped he would die, Alfie’s con­tin­u­ing to breathe has clar­i­fied the true object of the act of remov­ing his ven­ti­la­tor.” The more I read about this case the angri­er I become.
  5. Alan Jacobs: a Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­al for the inter­net age (David J. Michael, Amer­i­ca): “…he was pub­lish­ing schol­ar­ly work with­in his field but was increas­ing­ly devot­ing time to writ­ing essays and the­o­log­i­cal pieces for Chris­t­ian mag­a­zines and jour­nals. Switch­ing back and forth could be dis­ori­ent­ing, and he spent sev­er­al years debat­ing and pray­ing about which audi­ence he should focus on. ‘At one point, I just had an epiphany: You don’t get to choose.You’re gonna have to write for your schol­ar­ly peers, and you’re gonna have to write for your fel­low Chris­tians because you have things to say to both audi­ences. So, that means, you got­ta learn to code switch.’” I am a big fan of Alan Jacobs’ writ­ing.
  6. Dear Human­i­ties Profs: We Are The Prob­lem (Eric Ben­nett, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Three gen­er­a­tions ago, lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors exchanged a rig­or­ous­ly defined sphere of exper­tise, to which they could speak with author­i­ty, for a much wider field to which they could speak with vir­tu­al­ly no pow­er at all…. Lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors have affect­ed Amer­i­ca more by sleep­ing in its down­town hotels and eat­ing in its fast-food restau­rants than by telling one anoth­er where real prospects for free­dom lay. ” Oof. That’s a sol­id blow, right there. The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Prov­i­dence Col­lege.
  7. Uncan­ny Vul­vas (Diana Fleis­chman, Jaco­bite Mag­a­zine): “Video games and social media already under­mine the native psy­cho­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms that make us work towards sta­tus — they sup­ply more imme­di­ate rewards and take far less effort than any­thing we work towards out in the real world. Sex robots are only going to make that worse, espe­cial­ly for young men.” Def­i­nite­ly not a Chris­t­ian arti­cle. From a some­what relat­ed Chris­t­ian stand­point: The Eco­nom­ics of Sex­u­al Puri­ty (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog).

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).

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 146

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. Every­one Got The Pulse Mas­sacre Sto­ry Com­plete­ly Wrong (Melis­sa Jelt­sen, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “…in acquit­ting Salman, 31, on Fri­day, a jury also deliv­ered a ver­dict on the sto­ry we’d told our­selves about the killings: We’d got­ten it wrong. In the wake of the shoot­ing, the media and pub­lic focused on cer­tain details, many of which were lat­er deter­mined to be unfound­ed, and dis­count­ed oth­ers, like Mateen’s own expla­na­tion for his actions.” This is a must-read. It’s amaz­ing how wrong the cul­tur­al con­sen­sus is. 
  2. Altered Brain Devel­op­men­tal Tra­jec­to­ries in Ado­les­cents After Ini­ti­at­ing Drink­ing (Adolf Pfef­fer­baum, et al, Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Psy­chi­a­try): “Ini­ti­a­tion of drink­ing dur­ing ado­les­cence, with or with­out mar­i­jua­na co-use, dis­or­dered nor­mal brain growth tra­jec­to­ries.” Ado­les­cence is defined as up to 21 in this study, which means most col­lege stu­dents should be far more leery of alco­hol than they are. 
  3. “Engag­ing the Cul­ture” Doesn’t Work Because Chris­t­ian Beliefs Are a Mark of Low Sta­tus (Dean Abbot, Patheos): “Evan­gel­i­cals sought to engage the cul­ture by being rel­e­vant, by cre­at­ing works of art, by offer­ing good argu­ments for their posi­tions. None of these addressed the real prob­lem: that Chris­t­ian belief sim­ply isn’t cool, and that very few peo­ple want to low­er their social sta­tus by iden­ti­fy­ing pub­licly with it.”
    • See also his fol­low-up Tra­di­tion­al Chris­t­ian Belief and Low Social Sta­tus: Four Respons­es: “The cul­tur­al shift that dis­lodged tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty from its place as the foun­da­tion of Amer­i­can cul­ture has pro­voked a num­ber of respons­es among believ­ers. Though these respons­es may seem infi­nite­ly var­ied on the sur­face, the bulk of them can actu­al­ly be cat­e­go­rized under four head­ings: accom­mo­da­tion, appease­ment, accep­tance and aggres­sion.”
    • And the sequel to that, The Low Social Sta­tus of Chris­t­ian Belief Is Part of a Larg­er Prob­lem: “In Christianity’s place, a new default reli­gion stands. In this sys­tem, the human prob­lem is lack of lib­er­ty, specif­i­cal­ly the lack of lib­er­ty for each indi­vid­ual to deter­mine his own val­ues, pur­pose and morals. The solu­tion is to lib­er­ate oth­ers by advo­cat­ing, even in an abstract and risk-free way, for ‘social jus­tice.’”
  4. Plumbers and Priests (Tony Wood­lief, per­son­al blog): “I don’t know how I got to the point where I’m inclined to dis­be­lieve any­thing an aca­d­e­m­ic claims. I’m not anti-intel­lec­tu­al. I read stuff. I even hold a PhD, and a Mas­ter of Fine Arts on top of that. I can show you math­e­mat­i­cal­ly why a sin­gle-mem­ber plu­ral­i­ty vot­ing sys­tem tends to yield two major par­ties, and for the chas­er I can hit you with an expli­ca­tion of the roots of lit­er­ary mod­ernism.… [and yet] the fact is I don’t have any con­fi­dence in those N.C. State find­ings.” The author has a Ph.D. in polit­i­cal sci­ence. I almost didn’t include this one, but I can’t stop think­ing about it.
  5. ‘I Know I Will Be Crit­i­cized’: The Lati­no Evan­gel­i­cal Who Advis­es Trump on Immi­gra­tion (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times):  “Mr. Rodriguez rep­re­sents a grow­ing seg­ment of the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment, and one that is often over­looked in all the atten­tion paid to the white evan­gel­i­cals serv­ing as Mr. Trump’s cheer­lead­ers. One in four evan­gel­i­cals in the Unit­ed States is now an immi­grant or the child of one. In the younger gen­er­a­tion of evan­gel­i­cals, there are now more His­pan­ic peo­ple than non-His­pan­ic whites.” Dis­clo­sure: I have met Sam­my but don’t know him. We’re in the same denom­i­na­tion.
  6. Some news from the glob­al church:
      • Mis­sion­ar­ies at bor­der spread Chris­tian­i­ty to North Korea (Hyung-jin Kim And Ger­ry Shih, AP News): “Among the mis­sion­ar­ies and pas­tors killed under mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances in recent years is the Rev. Han Chung-rye­ol, a Chi­nese pas­tor of Kore­an descent who head­ed a front-line church in the Chi­nese bor­der town of Chang­bai before he was found dead of mul­ti­ple stab wounds and a punc­tured skull in April 2016, rais­ing sus­pi­cions that North Korea was involved.”
      • Chi­na Bans Bibles from Online Sell­ers Like Ama­zon (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “Two days before the Bibles were banned from online pur­chase, the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment released a doc­u­ment out­lin­ing how it intends to pro­mote ‘Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty’ over the next five years. Accord­ing to the doc­u­ment, one of the government’s key objec­tives is to rein­ter­pret and retrans­late the Bible in order to enhance ‘Chi­nese-style Chris­tian­i­ty and the­ol­o­gy.’”
      • Meet the First Female Evan­gel­i­cal Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date of Colom­bia (Deann Alford, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “My pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion fol­lows a bib­li­cal mod­el. The Bible teach­es that we must be wit­ness­es of the Lord when­ev­er we are. In the last cen­tu­ry, US mis­sion­ar­ies taught that pol­i­tics was of the dev­il, and the church here was apa­thet­ic. For­tu­nate­ly, we’re wak­ing up. But we must wake up prop­er­ly, mind­ful to not con­fuse the church with a polit­i­cal par­ty.”
      • Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Singer Los­es Cos­ta Rica Pres­i­den­tial Race (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The evan­gel­i­cal can­di­date had emerged from obscu­ri­ty to take a plu­ral­i­ty of the vote in the first round of the pres­i­den­tial race…. Despite his loss, Alvara­do Muñoz’s suc­cess is ‘a cul­tur­al game chang­er,’ says Dou­glass Sul­li­van-González, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­sis­sip­pi Hon­ors Col­lege dean who has done reli­gious research in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca. ‘[Evangéli­cos] are now going to be seen a polit­i­cal chal­lenge thanks to the suc­cess of Fabri­cio Alvara­do, said Sul­li­van-González.”
  7. Two relat­ed arti­cles by the Chair­man of the US Com­mis­sion on Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom (he is also a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Vil­lano­va).
    • Reli­gious Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, Sec­u­lar Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, and Oth­er Threats to Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom (Daniel Mark, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Serv­ing on USCIRF, which mon­i­tors and reports on the worst reli­gious free­dom sit­u­a­tions in the world, I am acute­ly aware of how our chal­lenges at home pale in com­par­i­son to what goes on abroad. But the les­son from this is not what you think. It’s not that we should feel so good as to become com­pla­cent about our own present cir­cum­stances. On the con­trary, the painful inter­na­tion­al scene should be an ever-present reminder to us of how rare, how pre­cious, and how vul­ner­a­ble reli­gious free­dom is—and how vig­i­lant we must be in defend­ing it.” 
    • Domes­tic Chal­lenges to Reli­gious Lib­er­ty From Left and Right (Daniel Mark, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “One cen­tral con­se­quence of this denial of human nature is that it leads ineluctably to a denial of human rights. With­out a firm view of human nature, we can­not con­struct a coher­ent account of human rights. I am aware, of course, that the peo­ple I have in mind here claim all sorts of things in the name of human rights. But the new menu of human rights is selec­tive, sub­jec­tive, and, final­ly, inde­fen­si­ble.”  

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 How To Pray A Psalm (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): prayer life need a boost? Give this a try. (first shared in vol­ume 69)

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).

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.