Tag: academia

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 291

fas­ci­nat­ing links from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

This is vol­ume 291, which is not a very inter­est­ing num­ber. It’s 3 · 97, which I guess is some­thing.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State (Ben Mauk, New York­er): “On his sec­ond day of deten­tion, a mem­ber of the camp admin­is­tra­tion came to see him. Kok­teubai asked when he would learn what he was accused of doing. He was sur­prised to learn that he wouldn’t be ques­tioned at all. ‘If you hadn’t com­mit­ted a crime, you wouldn’t have end­ed up here,’ the admin­is­tra­tor told him. ‘So there is some­thing you are here for.’ ” The graph­ics inter­fere with the read­ing expe­ri­ence, but it’s worth­while.
  2. On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good.
  3. David Shor on Why Trump Was Good for the GOP and How Dems Can Win in 2022 (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “But when I look at the 2020 elec­tion, I see that we ran against the most unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can ever to run for pres­i­dent — and we ran lit­er­al­ly the most pop­u­lar fig­ure in our par­ty whose last name is not Oba­ma — and we only nar­row­ly won the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden had done 0.3 per­cent worse, then Don­ald Trump would have won reelec­tion…” This is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly fas­ci­nat­ing in a very non­par­ti­san way (although the inter­vie­wee is extreme­ly par­ti­san).
  4. In pan­dem­ic news:
    • 5 Pan­dem­ic Mis­takes We Keep Repeat­ing (Zeynep Tufek­ci, The Atlantic): “One of the most impor­tant prob­lems under­min­ing the pan­dem­ic response has been the mis­trust and pater­nal­ism that some pub­lic-health agen­cies and experts have exhib­it­ed toward the pub­lic.… And yet, from the begin­ning, a good chunk of the pub­lic-fac­ing mes­sag­ing and news arti­cles implied or claimed that vac­cines won’t pro­tect you against infect­ing oth­er peo­ple or that we didn’t know if they would, when both were false.” Watch­ing peo­ple reject accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the pan­dem­ic because high-sta­tus peo­ple rail against it has been like watch­ing my skep­ti­cal friends reject the gospel because of peer pres­sure. IT’S GOOD NEWS — BELIEVE IT! The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UNC.
    • Pan­dem­ic Approach­es: The Dif­fer­ences Between Flori­da, Cal­i­for­nia (Noel King, Greg Allen, & Eric West­er­velt, NPR): “In Decem­ber, Cal­i­for­nia had a spike, and Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som reim­posed a stay-at-home order and a busi­ness lock­down order that was recent­ly lift­ed. At the same time, cas­es were spik­ing in Flori­da. But every­thing stayed open, includ­ing schools. So which approach works?” Spoil­er: Flori­da is look­ing pret­ty good.
    • Stop Say­ing We Can’t Go Back to Nor­mal After Vac­cines (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Rea­son): “Nor­mal­cy is the whole point of vac­ci­na­tion, and these vac­cines can get us there. So when pub­lic health advice says “no” to nor­mal­cy even after vac­ci­na­tion, it mis­leads the pub­lic and wild­ly under­sells the vac­cines. A year into this, that’s cru­el and dispir­it­ing.… there must be a firm end date to those pub­lic mea­sures for every­one. I can’t say exact­ly when it should be, nor do I think a sin­gle nation­al date would make sense. I’m envi­sion­ing some­thing like six weeks after vac­cines have become avail­able (as in, you can eas­i­ly get an appoint­ment) to all who want them in a giv­en city, coun­ty, or state.”
    • Not Gath­er­ing with the Church Hurts You Spir­i­tu­al­ly (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Jesus designed Chris­tian­i­ty and the progress of our dis­ci­ple­ship to cen­ter around gath­er­ings. The math is there­fore sim­ple: Gath­er­ing with the church is spir­i­tu­al­ly good for you. Not phys­i­cal­ly gath­er­ing with the church spir­i­tu­al­ly hurts you.”
    • The Secret Life of a Coro­n­avirus (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With sci­en­tists adrift in an ocean of def­i­n­i­tions, philoso­phers have rowed out to offer life­lines.” What a glo­ri­ous sen­tence. Also, I began the arti­cle sym­pa­thet­ic to the idea that virus­es are alive and we draw our bound­aries too tight­ly, which is what the author wants me to believe. But his argu­ments were so weak that I’ve flipped to: “not alive, mere­ly inter­ac­tive.”
    • The rise of the nox­ious con­tract (David B. Grusky et al, Stan­ford Cen­ter On Pover­ty and Inequal­i­ty): “We observed that many peo­ple ‘com­pare down­ward’ by empha­siz­ing their priv­i­lege rel­a­tive to those less for­tu­nate, that oth­ers ‘look out­ward’ in recog­ni­tion that times of cri­sis require band­ing togeth­er, and that yet oth­ers ‘look inward’ as they cope with unusu­al­ly stress­ful chal­lenges. Although many ways of cop­ing are there­fore in play, none of them entail invid­i­ous com­par­isons that then lead to resent­ment or con­flict.” An analy­sis of whether peo­ple who have to work in-per­son are resent­ful of those who telecom­mute. Spoil­er: not so much. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. On Ryan Ander­son­’s book being dropped by Ama­zon:
    • Ryan T. Ander­son Was Made For This Moment (Rod Dreher inter­view­ing Ryan T. Ander­son, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…most every­one agrees that a hos­pi­tal shouldn’t refuse to treat some­one for Covid because they iden­ti­fy as LGBT. But, thank God, that doesn’t seem to have actu­al­ly ever hap­pened. Still when peo­ple hear about a law that bans LGBT dis­crim­i­na­tion, that’s what they have in mind. They don’t real­ize what it means for sex-reas­sign­ment pro­ce­dures in gen­er­al, let alone what it means for chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria in par­tic­u­lar. So activists pull on people’s heart­strings by say­ing we need a law ban­ning tru­ly unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion (which is vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent) and then that law isn’t nuanced and mea­sured, but a rad­i­cal bill impos­ing a rad­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. A law that is sold as a shield pro­tect­ing vul­ner­a­ble minori­ties ends up being a sword to per­se­cute peo­ple who don’t embrace a new sex­u­al ortho­doxy.”
    • Book Ban­ning in an Age of Ama­zon (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “Remem­ber where you were in Feb­ru­ary of 2021. Con­gress fought over a sec­ond impeach­ment of an ex-pres­i­dent. The states debat­ed whether forced tru­an­cy would make life eas­i­er for America’s teach­ers. And earth’s largest bookseller—(Internal mot­to: ‘Work Hard. Have Fun. Make his­to­ry.’)—began qui­et­ly delet­ing books.”
  6. Killing The SAT Means Hurt­ing Minori­ties (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “There’s a rea­son why white Hol­ly­wood celebs cheat the sys­tem. It’s the only way their less gift­ed kids can win out over the dis­ad­van­taged. Want to max­i­mize priv­i­lege? Make admis­sions depen­dent sole­ly on teacher rec­om­men­da­tions, school grades, and per­son­al essays. Want to min­i­mize it? Abol­ish lega­cy admis­sions, and use the SAT.” I gen­uine­ly do not under­stand how this is con­tro­ver­sial. The data is clear and over­whelm­ing.
  7. Ele­vat­ing the Role of Faith-Inspired Impact in the Social Sec­tor (Jeri Eck­hart Queenan, Peter Grunert, and Devin Mur­phy, The Bridges­pan Group): “Giv­ing to reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tions (which includes dona­tions to con­gre­ga­tions) rep­re­sents near­ly one-third of all giv­ing in the Unit­ed States. Rough­ly a third of the 50 largest non­prof­its in the coun­try have a faith ori­en­ta­tion. And, 40 per­cent of inter­na­tion­al non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions are faith-inspired.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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). 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 290

links con­tain­ing both good and bad news for evan­gel­i­cals

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.

This is vol­ume 290, which is an inter­est­ing num­ber because it is both the prod­uct of three primes (= 2 â‹… 5 â‹… 29) as well as the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes (= 67 + 71+ 73 +79).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Evan­gel­i­cals in Amer­i­ca: The Stats May Sur­prise You (Ryan Burge, Gospel Coali­tion): “…after look­ing at the data for the last 10 years as a quan­ti­ta­tive social sci­en­tist, I can say with cer­tain­ty that although there are clear rea­sons for con­cern, evan­gel­i­cal pres­ence in the Unit­ed States is stronger than ever before.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and also a pas­tor in a non-evan­gel­i­cal denom­i­na­tion.
  2. Reli­gious Com­mu­ni­ty and Human Flour­ish­ing (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In some cas­es, our results close­ly repli­cat­ed past work. For exam­ple, we found that, even after con­trol­ling for the fac­tors above, indi­vid­u­als who attend­ed reli­gious ser­vices week­ly or more were 16% less like­ly to become depressed, and saw a 29% reduc­tion in smok­ing and 34% reduc­tion in heavy drink­ing. These results match rea­son­ably close­ly results from sev­er­al pri­or stud­ies, includ­ing the pri­or meta-analy­ses men­tioned above. Some­what strik­ing­ly, but again in line with pri­or analy­sis, week­ly ser­vice atten­dees were 26% less like­ly to die dur­ing the fol­low-up peri­od.” Van­der­Weele , him­self a Chris­t­ian, is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard and I have shared some of his work before.
  3. When Ama­zon Erased My Book (Ryan T. Ander­son, First Things): “Ama­zon nev­er informed me or my pub­lish­er that it was remov­ing my book. And Amazon’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives haven’t respond­ed to our inquiries about it. Per­haps they’re cit­ing a reli­gious objec­tion to sell­ing my book? Or maybe they only sell books with which they agree? (If so, they have a lot of explain­ing to do about why they car­ry Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.) If there’s a reli­gious or speech objec­tion, let’s hear it.” His book is quite good and is still avail­able at Barnes & Noble. Ama­zon, how­ev­er, sells 5/6 of the books in Amer­i­ca. Being delist­ed by them seri­ous­ly affects the mar­ket­place of ideas.
    • Damna­tio memo­ri­ae (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “But to me, the most inter­est­ing point for reflec­tion is this: The cen­sors at Ama­zon clear­ly believe there is only one rea­son to read a book. You read a book because you agree with it and want it to con­firm what you already believe. Imag­ine, for instance, a trans­gen­der activist who wants to under­stand the posi­tion held by Ryan Ander­son and peo­ple like him in order bet­ter to refute it. That per­son can’t get a copy of the book through Ama­zon any more than a sym­pa­thet­ic read­er like me can.”  The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Bay­lor whose writ­ing I have fea­tured before.
  4. Not all ‘anti-racist’ ideas are good ones. The left isn’t being hon­est about this. (Matthew Ygle­sias, Wash­ing­ton Post): “More broad­ly, iden­ti­fy­ing a racial gap and declar­ing it to be racist is often insuf­fi­cient. Such an approach impedes actu­al­ly think­ing about prob­lems — par­tic­u­lar­ly in media, aca­d­e­m­ic and non­prof­it cir­cles, where the accu­sa­tion of racism can car­ry severe con­se­quences. And so to avoid con­tro­ver­sy, peo­ple avoid impor­tant debates rather than risk­ing offense.”
  5. The Covid Emer­gency Must End (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “A major set­back is always pos­si­ble, but right now, the con­di­tions for the end of the emer­gency seem like­ly to arrive some­time in the sum­mer, not at Christ­mas­time.”
    • School Clo­sures Have Failed America’s Chil­dren (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Yes, it’s hard to open schools dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. But pri­vate schools most­ly man­aged to, and that’s true not only of rich board­ing schools but also of strapped Catholic schools. As a nation, we fought to keep restau­rants and malls open — but we didn’t make schools a sim­i­lar pri­or­i­ty, so needy chil­dren were left behind”
  6. 1 in 6 Gen Z adults are LGBT. And this num­ber could con­tin­ue to grow. (Saman­tha Schmidt, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Research from the Williams Insti­tute at the UCLA School of Law has sim­i­lar­ly found that a key dri­ver of the growth in the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty has been a surge in bisex­u­al women and girls. Bisex­u­al women make up the largest group of LGBT adults — about 35 per­cent, accord­ing to a Williams Insti­tute analy­sis of data from three pop­u­la­tion-based sur­veys. More than one in 10 U.S. high school youth iden­ti­fies as les­bian, gay or bisex­u­al. And among them, 75 per­cent are female and 77 per­cent iden­ti­fy as bisex­u­al.” The cheer­lead­ing aside, it’s a very inter­est­ing arti­cle — espe­cial­ly if you think about oth­er ways to frame it.
    • Anoth­er per­spec­tive on the same data: Two Sex­es. Infi­nite Gen­ders. (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “It turns out that in 2020, only 1.4 per­cent of US adults are gay men, and only 0.7 per­cent are les­bians. So all the gays and les­bians amount to a lit­tle over 2 per­cent of the country’s adults. And that seems about right to me. The sur­prise, how­ev­er, is that there are now almost as many peo­ple iden­ti­fy­ing as ‘trans’ as ‘les­bian’.… Bisex­u­als, at 54.6 per­cent of all ‘LGBT’ iden­ti­fiers, are now a major­i­ty, and in Gen Z, clock in at 72 per­cent! The qual­i­fi­ca­tion to this is that only 3.7 per­cent of bisex­u­als live with some­one of the same sex while over 30 per­cent live with some­one of the oppo­site sex.”
  7. Inside a Bat­tle Over Race, Class and Pow­er at Smith Col­lege (Michael Pow­ell, New York Times): “The sto­ry high­lights the ten­sions between a student’s deeply felt sense of per­son­al truth and facts that are at odds with it.” What is super-weird to me is that I’ve seen peo­ple on social media say, “See? It’s more com­pli­cat­ed than crit­ics are mak­ing it out to be.” But… it’s not. Read­ing the details mere­ly fills in the out­line of the sto­ry I had picked up from oth­er sources.

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 two arti­cles from back in the 90’s, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote them back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism, and if you nev­er have before I encour­age you to read them both. Espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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 288

I keep think­ing one week there won’t be enough con­tent… this isn’t that week

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.

This is vol­ume 288. The num­ber 288 is inter­est­ing in that it can also be writ­ten 4! â‹… 3! â‹… 2! â‹… 1!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Long Can COVID Cas­es Keep Plum­met­ing? (David Wal­lace-Wells, NY Mag­a­zine): “It’s insane. It’s total­ly crazy. And so, you’re absolute­ly right, we have cho­sen that the best way for­ward is to live in a state of uncer­tain­ty rather than giv­ing peo­ple all the tools and infor­ma­tion, even if it isn’t per­fect. It turns out that in many cas­es we’d rather not engage with that knowl­edge at all than have any sources of error in what­ev­er it is we’re doing.“An inter­view with a Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, although be warned that it will frus­trate you with how rea­son­able and yet under­im­ple­ment­ed his sug­ges­tions are. The title is poor­ly cho­sen.
    • The Vac­cine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired. (Dan Bar­ry, New York Times): “The Texas doc­tor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vac­cine had been opened on this late Decem­ber night, he had to find 10 eli­gi­ble peo­ple for its remain­ing dos­es before the pre­cious med­i­cine expired. In six hours. [He did and for] his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his gov­ern­ment job and then charged with steal­ing 10 vac­cine dos­es worth a total of $135 — a shun-wor­thy mis­de­meanor that sent his name and mug shot rock­et­ing around the globe.” The doc­tor comes across as a hero and the pros­e­cu­tor as a vil­lain. Not even a real vil­lain — car­toon vil­lain. I am actu­al­ly a lit­tle worked up about this.
  2. 10 Lessons of an MIT Edu­ca­tion (Gian-Car­lo Rota, Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty): “At cer­tain lib­er­al arts col­leges, sports appear to be more impor­tant than class­room sub­jects, and with good rea­son. A sport may be the only train­ing in ‘know­ing how’-in demon­strat­ing cer­ti­fi­able pro­fi­cien­cy-that a stu­dent under­takes at those col­leges. At MIT, sports are a hob­by (how­ev­er pas­sion­ate­ly pur­sued) rather than a cen­tral focus because we offer a wide range of absorb­ing ‘know­ing how’ activ­i­ties.” Appar­ent­ly one of an MIT pro­fes­sor’s advisees archived his fac­ul­ty web­site after his death.
    • Relat­ed: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (Gian-Car­lo Rota, Notices Of The AMS): “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite prob­lems con­stant­ly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dor­mant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve prob­lems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and peo­ple will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’ ” This link is a PDF.
  3. With a Star Sci­ence Reporter’s Purg­ing, Mob Cul­ture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase (Quil­lette edi­to­r­i­al): “So what we’re left with is the spec­ta­cle of an acclaimed reporter being purged not for malev­o­lent actions, nor even malev­o­lent intent, but rather for mak­ing a cer­tain kind of sound. This is an impor­tant depar­ture from ordi­nary mob­bings because, even in their most dog­mat­ic form, the­o­ries of social jus­tice gen­er­al­ly are at least nom­i­nal­ly con­cerned with the improve­ment of human moral­i­ty, which, cru­cial­ly, is insep­a­ra­ble from the ques­tion of intent. McNeil, on the oth­er hand, is being judged accord­ing to a the­o­ry of wrong­do­ing that presents cer­tain words or phras­es as evil by their mere utter­ance, as with a Har­ry Pot­ter spell.” This is very clev­er­ly writ­ten. Also, extreme­ly cor­rect.
  4. All In One (John Tasioulas, Aeon): “If, for exam­ple, human rights are demands that are gen­er­al­ly high-pri­or­i­ty in nature, such that it’s sel­dom if ever jus­ti­fied to over­ride them, then we lose our grip on that impor­tant idea if we start includ­ing under the head­ing of ‘human rights’ valu­able objec­tives – for exam­ple, access to a high-qual­i­ty inter­net con­nec­tion – that don’t plau­si­bly enjoy that kind of pri­or­i­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The author is a philoso­pher at Oxford.
  5. Ravi Zacharias Hid Hun­dreds of Pic­tures of Women, Abuse Dur­ing Mas­sages, and a Rape Alle­ga­tion (Daniel Sil­li­man and Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “A 12-page report released Thurs­day by Ravi Zacharias Inter­na­tion­al Min­istries (RZIM) con­firms abuse by Zacharias at day spas he owned in Atlanta and uncov­ers five addi­tion­al vic­tims in the US, as well as evi­dence of sex­u­al abuse in Thai­land, India, and Malaysia.” The full report is here (pdf).
  6. We Need Bal­ance When It Comes To Gen­der Dys­phor­ic Kids. I Would Know (Scott New­gent, Newsweek): “So if we are now wak­ing up to the fact that gen­der dys­pho­ria is over-sim­plis­ti­cal­ly con­flat­ed with trans­gen­derism, med­ical treat­ments have under­stud­ied long-term con­se­quences, some are get­ting rich off trans­gen­der med­i­cine and de-tran­si­tion­ers are speak­ing up in sky­rock­et­ing num­bers, why are we only mak­ing it eas­i­er for chil­dren to unques­tion­ing­ly tran­si­tion? We now have the oblig­a­tion to work togeth­er to slow trans med­ical­iza­tion of minors until they are adults and have the capac­i­ty to tru­ly under­stand the life­long con­se­quences of tran­si­tion­ing. As a for­mer les­bian and cur­rent trans man, I main­tain this is not trans­pho­bic.”
  7. How To Be Pro-Life in Joe Biden’s Amer­i­ca (David French, The Dis­patch): “There remains no bar­ri­er for pro-life Amer­i­cans to love their neigh­bor and direct­ly sup­port moth­ers and chil­dren who face dire need. There is even an oppor­tu­ni­ty to enact leg­is­la­tion that can fur­ther ease the fears of young moth­ers and increase their con­fi­dence that they can raise and sup­port a child… Pol­i­tics do mat­ter, cer­tain­ly, but there’s a deep­er truth. Chris­tians don’t need to win Sen­ate races to love their neigh­bors.”

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 Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stu­pid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. First shared in vol­ume 221.

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 287

you would­n’t believe how many awe­some links I cut this week

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.

This is vol­ume 287, a num­ber which is the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes thrice over (287 = 89 + 97 + 101 = 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 = 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Sci­ence of Rea­son­ing With Unrea­son­able Peo­ple (Adam Grant, New York Times): “Social sci­en­tists have found that ask­ing peo­ple how their pre­ferred polit­i­cal poli­cies might work in prac­tice, rather than ask­ing why they favor those approach­es, was more effec­tive in open­ing their minds. As peo­ple strug­gled to explain their ide­al tax leg­is­la­tion or health care plan, they grasped the com­plex­i­ty of the prob­lem and rec­og­nized gaps in their knowl­edge.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Pen­n’s Whar­ton School.
  2. Pelo­ton makes ton­ing your glutes feel spir­i­tu­al. But should Jesus be part of the expe­ri­ence? (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): ‘Nick Stok­er, 41, a Lon­don busi­ness­man, trig­gered hun­dreds of com­ments on the Pelo­ton Red­dit page in April when he post­ed that he took a “Sun­days with Love” ride and thought he was get­ting pan­dem­ic-era “spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tion and uplift­ing music,” but actu­al­ly got some­thing more about God and Chris­tian­i­ty. The ride should have been labeled as Chris­t­ian, he argued. “I don’t want my chil­dren lis­ten­ing to these sort of mes­sages.”’
  3. Thoughts about Chris­tian­i­ty and Amer­i­ca
    • Dis­cern­ing the Dif­fer­ence Between Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and Chris­t­ian Patri­o­tism (David French, The Dis­patch): “I love this coun­try, but I love it with eyes wide open. The aspi­ra­tions of our found­ing have long been tem­pered by the bru­tal real­i­ties of our fall­en nature. The same nation that stormed Normandy’s beach­es to destroy a fas­cist empire simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sus­tained a seg­re­ga­tion­ist regime with­in its own bor­ders. Our virtues do not negate our vices, and our vices do not negate our virtues. Amer­i­ca isn’t 1619 or 1776. It’s 1619 and 1776.”
    • Betray­ing Your Church—And Your Par­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “On Jan­u­ary 6, as an armed mob invad­ed the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Kinzinger said he could feel a dark­ness descend over the Capi­tol. One of his friends in Con­gress, the Okla­homa Repub­li­can Mark­wayne Mullin, heard the same thing from mem­bers of the Capi­tol Police. Kinzinger doesn’t doubt that the dev­il is at work in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. He just sus­pects that the ene­my might be lurk­ing in his own house.”
    • It’s Time to Talk About Vio­lent Chris­t­ian Extrem­ism (Zack Stan­ton inter­view­ing Eliz­a­beth Neu­mann, Politi­co): “Here’s the thing, and I will do my best to explain it from a sec­u­lar per­spec­tive: There’s text in the New Tes­ta­ment where the Apos­tle Paul is admon­ish­ing a church he helped estab­lish: ‘You should be mature adults now in your faith, but I’m still hav­ing to feed you with milk.’ He’s basi­cal­ly say­ing, you should be 18, but you’re still nurs­ing, and we need you to get it togeth­er.… One of my ques­tions is: Are we see­ing in the last four years one of the con­se­quences of that fail­ure? They didn’t mature [in their faith], and they’re very eas­i­ly led astray by what scrip­ture calls ‘false teach­ers.’ My the­sis here is that if we had a more scrip­tural­ly based set of believ­ers in this coun­try — if every­body who calls them­selves a ‘Chris­t­ian’ had actu­al­ly read through, I don’t know, 80 per­cent of the Bible — they would not have been so eas­i­ly deceived.” The inter­vie­wee is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who has served as a Deputy Chief of Staff in the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing.
  4. The chal­lenge of Chi­na:
    • Biden’s Night­mare May Be Chi­na (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Deal­ing with Mitch McConnell will be a piece of cake for Pres­i­dent Biden com­pared with deal­ing with Xi. Biden’s chal­lenge will be to con­strain a Chi­nese leader who has been oppres­sive in Hong Kong, geno­ci­dal in the Xin­jiang region, obdu­rate on trade, ruth­less on human rights and insin­cere on every­thing, while still coop­er­at­ing with Chi­na on issues like cli­mate change, fen­tanyl and North Korea (which many experts expect to resume mis­sile launch­es this year).”
    • ‘Their goal is to destroy every­one’: Uighur camp detainees allege sys­tem­at­ic rape (Matthew Hill, David Cam­panale and Joel Gunter, BBC): “It was unlike­ly that Xi or oth­er top par­ty offi­cials would have direct­ed or autho­rised rape or tor­ture,” Par­ton said, but they would “cer­tain­ly be aware of it. I think they pre­fer at the top just to turn a blind eye. The line has gone out to imple­ment this pol­i­cy with great stern­ness, and that is what is hap­pen­ing.” That left “no real con­straints”, he said. “I just don’t see what the per­pe­tra­tors of these acts would have to hold them back.” I don’t know how this isn’t front page news almost every day. We want to say every­one is as evil as Hitler EXCEPT THE PEOPLE RUNNING ACTUAL CONCENTRATION CAMPS.
    • And thoughts on Tai­wan, which is not Chi­na
      • Under­stand­ing Tai­wanese Nation­al­ism: A His­tor­i­cal Primer in Bul­let Points (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “As some­one who has lived years in both Tai­wan and in Chi­na I can also give a more anec­do­tal assess­ment: the dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries and their respec­tive cul­tures (to say noth­ing of their polit­i­cal sys­tems) is clear. They are sim­ply not the same peo­ple.”
      • Chi­na and the Ques­tion of Tai­wan (Aaron Sarin, Quil­lette): “His­to­ri­an James A. Mill­ward points out that many in his dis­ci­pline have implic­it­ly accept­ed the Par­ty line on Tai­wanese his­to­ry. They will refer, for exam­ple, to the Qing dynasty’s ‘recap­ture of Tai­wan in 1683,’ even though, as Mill­ward explains, ‘no Chi­na-based state—not even an impe­r­i­al dynasty—ha[d] ever ruled the island before.’ Here we see the suc­cess of the CCP’s pro­pa­gan­da, even out­side Chi­na. The truth is that Tai­wan was a Qing acqui­si­tion, and that is the sole basis for Beijing’s claims today.”
      • Fork The Gov­ern­ment (Plan­et Mon­ey, NPR): “As coun­tries around the world strug­gle to han­dle the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, Tai­wan stands out as a rel­a­tive suc­cess sto­ry… so far. Since April, only one local­ly trans­mit­ted case has been report­ed. There have been only sev­en deaths — in the entire coun­try. There are a lot of rea­sons why Tai­wan has been able to keep its infec­tion and death rates so low. For one, it’s an island. Also, it’s dealt with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus epi­dem­ic before. But Tai­wan has also been tak­ing a rel­a­tive­ly exper­i­men­tal approach to the pan­dem­ic with tech­nol­o­gy. Like work­ing with civic hack­ers to code its way out of the pan­dem­ic.” This is a pod­cast episode.
  5. Things relat­ed to the cred­i­bil­i­ty cri­sis in our cul­ture:
    • Nation­al­ism, prej­u­dice, and FDA reg­u­la­tion (Scott Sum­n­er, Econ­Lib): “You say peo­ple shouldn’t be allowed to take a vac­cine unless experts find it to be safe and effec­tive? OK, the UK experts did just that. You say that only the opin­ion of US experts counts because our experts are clear­ly the best? Real­ly, where is the sci­en­tif­ic study that shows that our experts are the best? I thought you said we need­ed to ‘trust the sci­en­tists’? Now you are say­ing we must trust the nation­al­ists?” The author is an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Web­MD, And The Tragedy Of Leg­i­ble Exper­tise (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said some­thing (or been silent about some­thing in a sug­ges­tive way), and then some blog­ger I trust­ed said the oppo­site, and the blog­ger turned out to be right. I real­ize this kind of thing is vul­ner­a­ble to selec­tion bias, but it’s been the same cou­ple of blog­gers through­out, peo­ple who I already trust­ed and already sus­pect­ed might be bet­ter than the experts in a lot of ways.”
    • Where Have All the Great Works Gone? (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “It was obvi­ous to even those who dis­liked Niet­zche that he was a sem­i­nal fig­ure in West­ern thought; it was obvi­ous even to those who dis­agreed with Ibsen that he claimed a sim­i­lar place in West­ern lit­er­a­ture, and so forth. Their ideas might be argued against, but their genius and their influ­ence was unde­ni­able.  Is there any­one who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for?  How about for the last two decades?  The last three?  Or is there any­one at all who is still liv­ing today that might be described this way? In the realm of sci­ence, per­haps. But in the world of social, his­tor­i­cal, eth­i­cal, and polit­i­cal thought, no one comes to mind.”
    • Social Jus­tice, Aus­ter­i­ty, and the Human­i­ties Death Spi­ral (Geoff Shul­len­berg­er, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “How are human­i­ties dis­ci­plines push­ing back against the exis­ten­tial threats they face? Obvi­ous­ly, one can find a vari­ety of argu­ments against cut­backs and the deval­u­a­tion of human­is­tic study. On the oth­er hand, fac­ul­ty mem­bers with­in these fields some­times make what looks like a case against their own val­ue. For exam­ple, the Chica­go announce­ment states that ‘Eng­lish as a dis­ci­pline has a long his­to­ry of pro­vid­ing aes­thet­ic ratio­nal­iza­tions for col­o­niza­tion, exploita­tion, extrac­tion, and anti-Black­ness.’ Those who make fund­ing deci­sions might well ask why such a dis­ci­pline deserves to con­tin­ue exist­ing.” The author teach­es Eng­lish at NYU. It was dif­fi­cult choos­ing which bit to excerpt — def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing if you aspire to acad­e­mia.
    • The Gen­er­al­iz­abil­i­ty Cri­sis (Tal Yarkoni, PsyArx­iv): “Most the­o­ries and hypothe­ses in psy­chol­o­gy are ver­bal in nature, yet their eval­u­a­tion over­whelm­ing­ly relies on infer­en­tial sta­tis­ti­cal pro­ce­dures. The valid­i­ty of the move from qual­i­ta­tive to quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis depends on the ver­bal and sta­tis­ti­cal expres­sions of a hypoth­e­sis being close­ly aligned—that is, that the two must refer to rough­ly the same set of hypo­thet­i­cal obser­va­tions. Here I argue that many appli­ca­tions of sta­tis­ti­cal infer­ence in psy­chol­o­gy fail to meet this basic con­di­tion.” The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at UT Austin. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I lack the exper­tise to eval­u­ate it but find it intu­tive­ly plau­si­ble.
  6. Rise of the Barstool con­ser­v­a­tives (Matthew Walther, The Week): “What Trump rec­og­nized was that there are mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who do not oppose or even care about abor­tion or same-sex mar­riage, much less stem-cell research or any of the oth­er caus­es that had ani­mat­ed tra­di­tion­al social con­ser­v­a­tives. Instead he cor­rect­ly intu­it­ed that the new cul­ture war would be fought over very dif­fer­ent (and more neb­u­lous) issues: vague con­cerns about polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and ‘SJWs,’ oppo­si­tion to the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of so-called crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty about the Amer­i­can flag and the mil­i­tary, the rights of male under­grad­u­ates to engage in for­ni­ca­tion while intox­i­cat­ed with­out fear of the Title IX mafia.” I think there’s some truth here, but I think he under­plays the impor­tance of abor­tion in Trump’s appeal. He nonethe­less puts his fin­ger on an impor­tant part of the way Trump’s coali­tion was forged and the shape of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics mov­ing for­ward.
  7. On GameStop:
    • In the GameStop Fren­zy, What If We’re All the 1 Per­cent? (Michael J. Rhodes, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…we shouldn’t con­fuse fight­ing for a bet­ter seat at the black­jack table with con­fronting an econ­o­my addict­ed to gam­bling.… Jesus doesn’t tell his flock to beat the rich fool at his own game. He invites them to live an eco­nom­ic life free from greed or fear, stor­ing up trea­sure in heav­en by giv­ing gen­er­ous­ly to the poor (Luke 12:33).” The author is an Old Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Carey Bap­tist Col­lege. Worth­while arti­cle.
    • The Insid­ers’ Game (David Sacks, Per­sua­sion): “If there is a Big Lie in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics right now, it is the idea that cen­sor­ship of social media is nec­es­sary to save democ­ra­cy.… What the insid­ers fear is not the end of democ­ra­cy, but the end of their con­trol over it, and the loss of the ben­e­fits they extract from it. Ulti­mate­ly, the bat­tle over speech is just one aspect of a broad­er war for pow­er amid a grow­ing polit­i­cal realign­ment that is not Left ver­sus Right, but rather insid­er ver­sus out­sider.” The author was on the found­ing team at Pay­Pal.
    • Call­ing Wall Street’s Bluff (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “Now the experts tell us that the true price on the mar­ket changes every day, because the fun­da­men­tals are always chang­ing, even though they’re fun­da­men­tal.… Nat­u­ral­ly, peo­ple are some­what sus­pi­cious of this whole sys­tem. Every so often it seems to crash the entire econ­o­my. But even when it’s sup­pos­ed­ly work­ing, some­thing seems off.” Stan­ford alum­nus Josh Haw­ley is, of course, the con­tro­ver­sial Sen­a­tor from Mis­souri.

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 Too Much Dark Mon­ey in Almonds (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every­one always talks about how much mon­ey there is in pol­i­tics. This is the wrong fram­ing. The right fram­ing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so lit­tle mon­ey in pol­i­tics? But Ansolabehere focus­es on elec­tions, and the mys­tery is wider than that. Sure, dur­ing the 2018 elec­tion, can­di­dates, par­ties, PACs, and out­siders com­bined spent about $5 bil­lion – $2.5 bil­lion on Democ­rats, $2 bil­lion on Repub­li­cans, and $0.5 bil­lion on third par­ties. And although that sounds like a lot of mon­ey to you or me, on the nation­al scale, it’s puny. The US almond indus­try earns $12 bil­lion per year. Amer­i­cans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on can­di­dates last year.” It builds to a sur­pris­ing twist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 219.

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 282

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­day this week) 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. How Per­fec­tion­ism Has Made the Pan­dem­ic Worse (Miles Kim­ball, per­son­al blog): “I’ve noticed one reg­u­lar­i­ty in how the US (and many oth­er coun­tries) have han­dled the pan­dem­ic: per­fec­tion­ism has been get­ting in the way of a quick and pow­er­ful response. Every lit­tle bit would have helped reduce the repro­duc­tion ratio of the coro­n­avirus, but only things that were big bits were allowed.” The author is an econ­o­mist at UC Boul­der.
    • Pub­lic health bod­ies may be talk­ing at us, but they’re actu­al­ly talk­ing to each oth­er (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…when a large group acts as though a com­pli­cat­ed prob­lem is a no-brain­er, that doesn’t mean the solu­tion is obvi­ous; it means some­thing has gone bad­ly wrong.”
    • My vac­cine crack­pot­tery: a con­fes­sion (Scott Aaron­son, per­son­al blog): “I think [our fail­ure] will be clear to future gen­er­a­tions, who’ll write PhD the­ses explor­ing how it was pos­si­ble that we invent­ed mul­ti­ple effec­tive covid vac­cines in mere days or weeks, but then sim­ply sat on those vac­cines for a year, tick­ing off box­es called ‘Phase I,’ ‘Phase II,’ etc. while civ­i­liza­tion hung in the bal­ance.” The author is a CS prof at UT Austin.
    • Small Num­ber of Covid Patients Devel­op Severe Psy­chot­ic Symp­toms (Pam Bel­luck, New York Times): “[she] had become infect­ed with the coro­n­avirus in the spring. She had expe­ri­enced only mild phys­i­cal symp­toms from the virus, but, months lat­er, she heard a voice that first told her to kill her­self and then told her to kill her chil­dren.” Shared with me by a stu­dent who not­ed it is both inter­est­ing and freaky. This real­ly high­lights what a bul­let we dodged with this pan­dem­ic — can you imag­ine a plague whose main effect was to make peo­ple vio­lent­ly psy­chot­ic? Soci­ety would end. Full-on zom­bie apoc­a­lypse.
  2. Rick War­ren On The Year We Had (Cameron Strang, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “We have led over 16,000 peo­ple to Christ since March. We’re in revival. We’re aver­ag­ing about 80 peo­ple a day com­ing to Christ—80 peo­ple a day.… Of those 16,000 peo­ple who have come to Christ, over 12,000 of them have come through per­son­al, one-on-one wit­ness­ing by my mem­bers. Not led to Christ by my ser­mons. By one on one evan­ge­liz­ing.”
  3. East Africa fears sec­ond wave — of locust swarms (Navin Singh Khad­ka, BBC): “New swarms of desert locusts are threat­en­ing the liveli­hoods of mil­lions of peo­ple in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of con­trol efforts, the Unit­ed Nations has warned.” This is the lat­est news con­cern­ing an arti­cle from August an alum­nus recent­ly shared with me: The Bib­li­cal locust plagues of 2020 (David Nja­gi, BBC): “In 2020, locusts have swarmed in large num­bers in dozens of coun­tries, includ­ing Kenya, Ethiopia, Ugan­da, Soma­lia, Eritrea, India, Pak­istan, Iran, Yemen, Oman and Sau­di Ara­bia. When swarms affect sev­er­al coun­tries at once in very large num­bers, it is known as a plague.”
  4. Why You Can’t Meet God Over Zoom (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “The very inad­e­qua­cy of church ser­vices, Zoom and oth­er­wise, is a reminder we do not come into church­es to encounter a life les­son on how to raise our chil­dren or to learn to be good Amer­i­cans, what­ev­er that means. Our aim is much more auda­cious. We are attempt­ing to encounter God and, in so doing, find our­selves, pos­si­bly for the first time.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton Col­lege.
    • This isn’t real­ly a knock on McCaul­ley so much as an obser­va­tion and a hope: many Chris­tians who write for pub­li­ca­tions like the NYT lead with the neg­a­tives and slow­ly build to their point that “church isn’t so bad real­ly and maybe some­day you should check it out.” I won­der if that is a byprod­uct of the edi­to­r­i­al process or if it is sim­ply a selec­tion effect in the sort of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­al who wants to (and is per­mit­ted to) write an op-ed for a cul­tur­al­ly influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tion.
    • Think­ing about this puts me in mind of Eri­ca Camp­bel­l’s song I Luh God (YouTube, three min­utes). It swept through our min­istry a few years ago, I think because it scratched an itch in our stu­dents. Our stu­dents had dance par­ties to it after our wor­ship ser­vices. She sang with con­fi­dent joy: “I luh God, you don’t luh God? What’s wrong with chu?”
    • When we dis­cuss the faith as though it were a series of syl­lo­gisms we’re being fool­ish. Peo­ple’s ques­tions need answers, cer­tain­ly. But all the answers in the world will do no good if, at some lev­el, peo­ple don’t hope Chris­tian­i­ty is true. We must kin­dle hope before we go to the trou­ble of over­com­ing objec­tions to hope.
    • I say all that to say this: if you ever write an op-ed for the New York Times, do apolo­get­ics with­out being apolo­getic. Bring as much joy to it as you can and let your writ­ing be filled with win­some con­fi­dence. We need a whole flock of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­als with the swag­ger of a G.K. Chester­ton.
  5. High­er Edu­ca­tion Risks No Longer Being Worth It – Here’s How to Change Course (Chris­tos Makridis, Quil­lette): “For all the talk about racial equi­ty in col­leges, you would think that fac­ul­ty would be work­ing with local small busi­ness own­ers, espe­cial­ly minori­ties, to men­tor and equip them to dri­ve greater prof­itabil­i­ty and impact. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that rarely hap­pens.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  6. The Church Needs Prophets, But It Wants Lawyers (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian cul­ture is rife with con­gre­gants look­ing for lawyers, not prophets and not pas­tors. The church-shop­ping phe­nom­e­non puts us in church­es that make us feel quite com­fort­able, and the sheer num­ber of avail­able con­gre­ga­tions (espe­cial­ly in the South and parts of the Mid­west) makes us quite mobile.”
    • I almost did­n’t share this one because I thought it was more use­ful for min­istry lead­ers, but after I had men­tal­ly deep-sixed it a stu­dent emailed me and said: “I think it could be use­ful for Chris­tians who find them­selves frus­trat­ed by and unable to sup­port blan­ket crit­i­cism of the church and of orga­nized reli­gion from the left, but also dis­sat­is­fied by respons­es from the right that frame any crit­i­cism as part of a cul­ture war and triv­i­al­ize issues with­in the church as just a few bad exam­ples. I think for me it also was help­ful in think­ing of how I might respond to non-Chris­tians when these kinds of crit­i­cisms come up in con­ver­sa­tion and how I can be both defend Chris­tian­i­ty and the good parts of the church while acknowl­edg­ing con­tin­ued bro­ken­ness and need for improve­ment. It also hap­pened to tie in nice­ly with a ser­mon I heard on Sun­day about how Chris­tians have no prob­lem rec­og­niz­ing sin as the cause of bro­ken­ness in the world but often point to the sins of oth­ers, whether of peers, lead­ers, or past gen­er­a­tions, instead of their own sin as the cause of that bro­ken­ness. In that sense I think it both helped me think about how to process the fail­ings of promi­nent Chris­tians and talk about them with non-believ­ers as well as be remind­ed by these fail­ings to remem­ber that beyond defend­ing the church, my response as an indi­vid­ual should also be to iden­ti­fy and root out sin in my own life even when the dam­age is not as obvi­ous to my com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. WHAT HAPPENS ON JANUARY 6th (Ben Sasse, Face­book): “There is some vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle – and the media flat­ly declar­ing from on high that ‘there is no fraud!’ has made things worse. It has height­ened pub­lic dis­trust, because there are, in fact, doc­u­ment­ed cas­es of vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle. But the cru­cial ques­tions are: (A) What evi­dence do we have of fraud? and (B) Does that evi­dence sup­port the belief in fraud on a scale so sig­nif­i­cant that it could have changed the out­come? We have lit­tle evi­dence of fraud, and what evi­dence we do have does not come any­where close to adding up to a dif­fer­ent win­ner of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.”
    • Sasse is one of the Nebras­ka sen­a­tors and is also a for­mer sem­i­nary pres­i­dent. Mis­souri sen­a­tor Josh Haw­ley, who this seems to be aimed at, is also an out­spo­ken believ­er on Capi­tol Hill. Haw­ley, inci­den­tal­ly, did his under­grad at Stan­ford. He grad­u­at­ed the year we were launch­ing Chi Alpha, so our paths have nev­er crossed.
    • Haw­ley does­n’t have a state­ment as com­pre­hen­sive as Sasse’s, but here is an excerpt from his press release: “I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy the elec­toral col­lege results on Jan­u­ary 6 with­out rais­ing the fact that some states, par­tic­u­lar­ly Penn­syl­va­nia, failed to fol­low their own state elec­tion laws. And I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy with­out point­ing out the unprece­dent­ed effort of mega cor­po­ra­tions, includ­ing Face­book and Twit­ter, to inter­fere in this elec­tion, in sup­port of Joe Biden.”
    • I gen­er­al­ly avoid polit­i­cal posts like this because I find the minu­tia of pol­i­tics unin­ter­est­ing. In this case, the fact that two evan­gel­i­cals who are nor­mal­ly polit­i­cal allies are hav­ing a sub­stan­tive and pub­lic dis­agree­ment intrigues me.

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 Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot. First shared in vol­ume 215.

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 281

inter­est­ing things from Christ­mas week 2020

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.

As fore­told, slight­ly delayed this week and will like­ly be a day off next week as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Apply­ing Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples in the work­place (Vann Ky, per­son­al blog): “These prin­ci­ples have helped me devel­op work ethics and make an impact, not just at my cur­rent com­pa­ny but also when I was a col­lege stu­dent.” Vann is an alum­na.
  2. When You Can’t Just ‘Trust the Sci­ence’ (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Last month [the CDC’s] Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee on Immu­niza­tion Prac­tices pro­duced a work­ing doc­u­ment that’s a mas­ter­piece of para-sci­en­tif­ic effort, in which ques­tions that are legit­i­mate­ly med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic (who will the vac­cine help the most), ques­tions that are more logis­ti­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal (which pat­tern of dis­tri­b­u­tion will be eas­i­er to put in place) and moral ques­tions about who deserves a vac­cine are all jum­bled up, assessed with a form of pseu­do-rig­or that resem­bles some­one bluff­ing the way through a McK­in­sey job inter­view and then used to jus­ti­fy the con­clu­sion that we should vac­ci­nate essen­tial work­ers before seniors … because seniors are more like­ly to be priv­i­leged and white.”
    • Why Did So Many Doc­tors Become Nazis? (Ash­ley K. Fer­nades, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “It is wor­thy of empha­sis that although many pro­fes­sions (includ­ing law) were ‘tak­en in’ by Nazi phi­los­o­phy, doc­tors and nurs­es had a pecu­liar­ly strong attrac­tion to it. Robert N. Proc­tor (1988) notes that physi­cians joined the Nazi par­ty in droves (near­ly 50% by 1945), much high­er than any oth­er pro­fes­sion. Physi­cians were sev­en times more like­ly to join the SS than oth­er employed Ger­man males.” The author is a physi­cian and a bioethi­cist at The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty. 
    • Ore­gon Hos­pi­tals Did­n’t Have Short­ages. So Why Were Dis­abled Peo­ple Denied Care? (Joseph Shapiro, NPR): “There’s no rea­son that these exam­ples would occur more fre­quent­ly in Ore­gon than in oth­er states. But the fight for that anony­mous woman with an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty peeled back the cur­tain on health care deci­sion-mak­ing in Ore­gon in a way that did not hap­pen in oth­er states. That activism led to change in Ore­gon — includ­ing anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion leg­is­la­tion and new statewide poli­cies.”
    • How Much Herd Immu­ni­ty Is Enough? (Don­ald G. McNeil, New York Times): “In a tele­phone inter­view the next day, Dr. Fau­ci acknowl­edged that he had slow­ly but delib­er­ate­ly been mov­ing the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, part­ly based on new sci­ence, and part­ly on his gut feel­ing that the coun­try is final­ly ready to hear what he real­ly thinks.”
  3. The Death and Life of an Admis­sions Algo­rithm (Lilah Burke, Insid­er High­er Edu­ca­tion): “For exam­ple, let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion con­tain­ing the words ‘best,’ ‘award,’ ‘research’ or ‘Ph.D.’ are pre­dic­tive of admis­sion — and can lead to a high­er score — while let­ters con­tain­ing the words ‘good,’ ‘lass,’ ‘pro­gram­ming’ or ‘tech­nol­o­gy’ are pre­dic­tive of rejec­tion. A high­er grade point aver­age means an appli­cant is more like­ly to be accept­ed, as does the name of an elite col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty on the résumé. With­in the sys­tem, insti­tu­tions were encod­ed into the cat­e­gories ‘elite,’ ‘good’ and ‘oth­er,’ based on a sur­vey of UT com­put­er sci­ence fac­ul­ty.”
    • Inter­est­ing­ly, the crit­i­cisms peo­ple made of the algo­rithm are not actu­al­ly crit­i­cisms of the algo­rithm. They are crit­i­cisms of the admis­sions com­mit­tee itself.
  4. An Advent Lament in the Pan­dem­ic (Michael Luo, The New York­er): “The pan­dem­ic in 2020 has held a mir­ror to Chris­tian­i­ty, just as the epi­demics of antiq­ui­ty did, but today’s reflec­tion car­ries the poten­tial to repulse rather than attract.”
    • Curi­ous­ly, the spe­cif­ic exam­ples he cites are most­ly pos­i­tive but he allows the neg­a­tive exam­ple to col­or the entire piece. This is what I have seen as well — vir­tu­al­ly all church­es are act­ing respon­si­bly but the pub­lic focus is on the ones that aren’t.
  5. Why Does It Mat­ter that Jesus Was Born of a Vir­gin? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “Even if pro­fess­ing Chris­tians accept the vir­gin birth, many would have a hard time artic­u­lat­ing why the doc­trine real­ly mat­ters.”
  6. A Game Design­er’s Analy­sis of QAnon (Reed Berkowitz, Medi­um): “When I saw QAnon, I knew exact­ly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays peo­ple.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. 117 Wit­ness­es Detail North Korea’s Per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Drawn from expe­ri­ences stretch­ing from 1990 to 2019, KFI’s report lists scores of vio­la­tions. These include 36 instances of pun­ish­ment met­ed out to fam­i­ly mem­bers, 36 instances of tor­ture, and 20 exe­cu­tions. Women and girls rep­re­sent 60 per­cent of the vic­tims.… Chris­tians total near­ly 80 per­cent: 215 cas­es.” The 98 page report which inspired this arti­cle is Per­se­cut­ing Faith:Documenting reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions in North Korea

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 Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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 276

I real­ly like the sto­ries of the shame­less­ly sketchy judge near the end

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. Azerbaijan’s drones owned the bat­tle­field in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of war­fare (Robyn Dixon, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a mat­ter of months, how­ev­er, Nagorno-Karabakh has become per­haps the most pow­er­ful exam­ple of how small and rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive attack drones can change the dimen­sions of con­flicts once dom­i­nat­ed by ground bat­tles and tra­di­tion­al air pow­er.”
  2. The U.S. Divorce Rate Has Hit a 50-Year Low (Wendy Wang, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Divorce in Amer­i­ca has been falling fast in recent years, and it just hit a record low in 2019. For every 1,000 mar­riages in the last year, only 14.9 end­ed in divorce, accord­ing to the new­ly released Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey data from the Cen­sus Bureau. This is the low­est rate we have seen in 50 years. It is even slight­ly low­er than 1970, when 15 mar­riages end­ed in divorce per 1,000 mar­riages.”
  3. Gen­der Activists Are Try­ing to Can­cel My Book. Why is Sil­i­con Val­ley Help­ing Them? (Abi­gail Shri­er, Quil­lette): “This is what cen­sor­ship looks like in 21st-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. It isn’t the gov­ern­ment send­ing police to your home. It’s Sil­i­con Val­ley oli­gop­o­lists imple­ment­ing black­outs and appeas­ing social-jus­tice mobs, while send­ing dis­fa­vored ideas down mem­o­ry holes. And the forces of cen­sor­ship are win­ning. Not only because their efforts to cen­sor leave almost no trace. They are win­ning because, thus far, most Amer­i­cans have been con­tent to sur­ren­der vir­tu­al­ly every lib­er­ty in exchange for the lux­u­ry of hav­ing prod­ucts deliv­ered to their door.”
    • Relat­ed: How cor­po­ra­tions can delete your exis­tence (Gavin Haynes, Unherd): “In the bank­ing system’s capac­i­ty to dis­able the indi­vid­ual with­out pro-active­ly doing them harm, there’s an echo of the ele­gance of the Chi­nese government’s social cred­it.”
  4. On the valid­i­ty of the elec­tion:
    • Who’s cov­er­ing this? Are charis­mat­ics and Pen­te­costals behind Trump’s refusal to con­cede? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…these folks are a sub­set — a move­ment among charismatics/pentecostals — of a Chris­t­ian sub­set and not well known to the gen­er­al pub­lic. How­ev­er, when you have flocks of Repub­li­cans call­ing foul on the elec­tion and the president’s most high-pro­file pas­tor is hav­ing night­ly prayer meet­ings because she is cer­tain that prophets have decreed four more years for Trump, it’s time more reporters give a lis­ten.”
    • How we can be con­fi­dent that Trump’s vot­er fraud claims are baloney (Hen­ry Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mass vot­er fraud should be rel­a­tive­ly easy to detect, even if it might be dif­fi­cult to prove. Since we elect pres­i­dents through the elec­toral col­lege, polit­i­cal oper­a­tives try­ing to nefar­i­ous­ly pro­duce a vic­to­ry would focus on states crit­i­cal to an elec­toral col­lege major­i­ty…. None of these ear­ly warn­ing signs of fraud appear in the results.”
    • The Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion Was Legit­i­mate. Con­spir­a­cies Are Not. (David French, The Dis­patch): “The count­ing must con­tin­ue and all legal chal­lenges must be heard, but as of this moment there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that should cause Amer­i­cans to believe that this elec­tion was ille­git­i­mate, and it is shame­ful and dan­ger­ous for any­one to sug­gest or allege oth­er­wise.”
    • A Primer in Basic Elec­toral Skep­ti­cism (Dou­glas Wil­son, blog): “We have reports that every­thing is fine and nor­mal. We have reports of vot­er fraud. We do not know which reports are true. But we do know which reports are cen­sored. And if that doesn’t tell you some­thing, then you are not pay­ing atten­tion.”
    • Means, motive, and oppor­tu­ni­ty (Ed Fes­er, blog): “…some main­stream his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, includ­ing lib­er­al ones, think that these states were indeed stolen from Nixon [in 1960]. For exam­ple, Kennedy biog­ra­ph­er Sey­mour Hersh judges that the elec­tion was stolen. His­to­ri­an Robert Dallek thinks that at least Illi­nois was stolen, via Daley’s polit­i­cal machine. His­to­ri­an William Rorabaugh thinks that Nixon may have been cheat­ed out of as many as 100,000 to 200,000 votes in Johnson’s cor­rupt Texas.” Wild stuff that I did not know. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Pasade­na City Col­lege. 
    • My own view: the elec­tion was valid and of course there was cheat­ing. Peo­ple cheat at cards, peo­ple cheat on their tax­es. Why in the world would­n’t peo­ple try to cheat in an elec­tion? But it seems unlike­ly to me that despite all the eyes on the process any cheat­ing was sig­nif­i­cant enough to change the out­come of the elec­tion. Hav­ing said that, it is inevitable that peo­ple are skep­ti­cal. The media and the tech firms have made them­selves so par­ti­san that they have for­feit­ed the trust which would be very handy for them to have right now.
  5. Lessons from the elec­tion
    • When Polit­i­cal Prophe­cies Don’t Come to Pass (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, many Chris­tians have lis­tened to lead­ers proph­esy that Trump would again win the elec­tion. Some, such as Jere­mi­ah John­son, have con­tin­ued to affirm that their prophe­cy will turn out to be true in the end. Oth­ers, such as Kris Val­lot­ton, have pub­licly apol­o­gized. For now, many will decide that the prophe­cy was con­tin­gent, mist­imed or, more like­ly, mis­tak­en.” This is out­stand­ing.
    • Why Cal­i­for­nia Reject­ed Racial Pref­er­ences Again (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “As I under­stand the state’s his­to­ry, the country’s his­to­ry, and the world’s his­to­ry, gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not be trust­ed to fac­tor race into deci­sion mak­ing with­out treat­ing peo­ple unjust­ly, and inter­group stig­mas and resent­ments tend to increase when any group is giv­en pref­er­en­tial treat­ment.”
    • May God Bless Pres­i­dent Biden (David French, The Dis­patch): “So here’s my sim­ple prayer for Pres­i­dent Biden: May God bless him and grant him the wis­dom to know what’s just, the courage to do what’s just, and the sta­mi­na to with­stand the rig­ors of the most dif­fi­cult job in the world. May his vir­tu­ous plans pre­vail and may his unright­eous efforts fail. And may God pro­tect him from all harm.” Amen.
    • A Moment Of Per­il (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “But the broad real­i­ty remains that in order to obtain and wield polit­i­cal pow­er, Democ­rats need to embrace can­di­dates who are less reflec­tive of the pro­gres­sive world­view of young col­lege grad­u­ates, and they need to run them in states that are less right-wing than Alaba­ma or Mon­tana.”
    • How 2020 Killed Off Democ­rats’ Demo­graph­ic Hopes (Zack Stan­ton, Politi­co): “For years, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty has oper­at­ed under one immutable assump­tion: Long-term demo­graph­ic trends would give the par­ty some­thing like a per­ma­nent major­i­ty as the coun­try as a whole grows less white and more urban. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s reliance on the pol­i­tics of racial resent­ment would only quick­en the process, solid­i­fy­ing sup­port for Democ­rats among peo­ple of col­or. Then came Novem­ber 3, 2020. And all those assump­tions now seem like total non­sense.” An inter­view with David Shor. 
    • Lat­inX-plain­ing the elec­tion (Anto­nio Gar­cia-Mar­tinez, The Pull Request): “The prob­lem with bas­ing a polit­i­cal plat­form on white guilt is that, at some point, you run out of either whites or guilt. Which is what hap­pens in a tru­ly major­i­ty-minor­i­ty nation when non-whites (at least as cur­rent­ly defined) assume their equal place in the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal fir­ma­ment.” The author nor­mal­ly writes about tech­nol­o­gy issues (hence the title of the newslet­ter).
  6. Sec­u­lar­iza­tion and the Tribu­la­tions of the Amer­i­can Work­ing-Class (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I praise the schol­ar­ship and courage of Bri­an N. Wheaton.”
    • Relat­ed: Get­ting Past the Gate­keep­ers (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Your gate­keep­ers want you to write a book more like the one they would have writ­ten. If you do make revi­sions, make them in such a way that the book becomes not less your own, but even more your own. That’s not pride. If God con­de­scends to allow cer­tain insights to the his­to­ri­ans on your board, how won­der­ful! Let them write about them! Read and learn from them! But if He con­de­scends to allow cer­tain oth­er insights to you, you should write about yours, not theirs.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin. 
  7. COVID-relat­ed
    • Super-spread­er wed­ding par­ty shows COVID hol­i­day dan­gers (Karen Kaplan, LA Times): “Only 55 peo­ple attend­ed the Aug. 7 recep­tion at the Big Moose Inn in Millinock­et. But one of those guests arrived with a coro­n­avirus infec­tion. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 oth­er peo­ple. Sev­en of them died. None of the vic­tims who lost their lives had attend­ed the par­ty.”
    • COVID-19 Mobil­i­ty Net­work Mod­el­ing (Stan­ford): “Our mod­el pre­dicts that a small minor­i­ty of ‘super­spread­er’ POIs [points of inter­est] account for a large major­i­ty of infec­tions and that restrict­ing max­i­mum occu­pan­cy at each POI is more effec­tive than uni­form­ly reduc­ing mobil­i­ty.” Click on “Sim­u­la­tion” and play around with the Reli­gious Orga­ni­za­tions tog­gle. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry, who drew my atten­tion espe­cial­ly to fig­ures 2d and 3c in the appen­dix of the paper.

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 Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion. First shared in vol­ume 206.

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 268

This install­ment can be titled “Amer­i­ca In Decline, but the Bible Look­ing Pret­ty Sol­id. Also Aus­tralia.”

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.

After large­ly fin­ish­ing this email I learned that Supreme Court Jus­tice Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg died. I expect a TON of ink to be spilled on this and on what­ev­er devel­ops polit­i­cal­ly next week. Keep an eye out for thought­ful com­men­tary and send it my way. Please do pray for her fam­i­ly and for our nation — an already tense elec­tion sea­son just became even more fraught.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Does the Bible Pass the Bechdel Test? A Data-Dri­ven Look at Women in the Sto­ry of Scrip­ture (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “So does the Bible pass the Bechdel test? This short answer is: yes, there are scenes where two named women have a con­ver­sa­tion not about a man. The longer answer is more com­plex, but also, I think, rich­er.” This is REALLY well done.
  2. Sev­en Dead­ly Sins, One Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The sev­en dead­ly sins—wrath, sloth, pride, envy, greed, glut­tony, and lust—as we now list them came to us in the West­ern church through Thomas Aquinas in the 13th cen­tu­ry, Pope Gre­go­ry the Great sev­en cen­turies pri­or, and a mys­tic named Eva­grius two cen­turies before that…. The 2020 elec­tion gives occa­sion to deal with them all.”
  3. Eco­log­i­cal insights ignored:
    • They Know How to Pre­vent Megafires. Why Won’t Any­body Lis­ten? (Eliz­a­beth Weil, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Aca­d­e­mics believe that between 4.4 mil­lion and 11.8 mil­lion acres burned each year in pre­his­toric Cal­i­for­nia…. We live with a death­ly back­log. In Feb­ru­ary 2020, Nature Sus­tain­abil­i­ty pub­lished this ter­ri­fy­ing con­clu­sion: Cal­i­for­nia would need to burn 20 mil­lion acres — an area about the size of Maine — to resta­bi­lize in terms of fire.”
    • Is Plas­tic Recy­cling A Lie? Oil Com­pa­nies Tout­ed Recy­cling To Sell More Plas­tic (Lau­ra Sul­li­van, NPR): “All of these prob­lems [with recy­cling] have exist­ed for decades, no mat­ter what new recy­cling tech­nol­o­gy or expen­sive machin­ery has been devel­oped. In all that time, less than 10 per­cent of plas­tic has ever been recy­cled. But the pub­lic has known lit­tle about these dif­fi­cul­ties.”
    • Nei­ther arti­cle is giv­ing us much new infor­ma­tion — I have heard knowl­edge­able peo­ple say sim­i­lar things for quite some time now. The fact that we have not changed is dis­ap­point­ing but not sur­pris­ing: politi­cians (like most peo­ple) “lis­ten to sci­ence” when the find­ings of sci­en­tists align with their self-inter­est. The con­tin­ued exis­tence of these and oth­er glar­ing prob­lems in Amer­i­can life make me sad.
  4. EXCLUSIVE: Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment opens inves­ti­ga­tion into Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty after pres­i­dent deems racism ’embed­ded’ in the school (Tiana Lowe, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “The Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion has informed Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty that it is under inves­ti­ga­tion fol­low­ing the school pres­i­den­t’s dec­la­ra­tion that racism was ‘embed­ded’ in the insti­tu­tion.”
  5. Sta­tis­tics, lies and the virus: five lessons from a pan­dem­ic (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “You can appre­ci­ate, I hope, my obses­sion with these two con­trast­ing accounts of sta­tis­tics: one as a trick, one as a tool.… Scep­ti­cism has its place, but eas­i­ly cur­dles into cyn­i­cism and can be weaponised into some­thing even more poi­so­nous than that. “ Very good insights from a British econ­o­mist.
  6. Racism Is Real. But Is “Sys­temic Racism”? That Time I Was Pub­lished by Newsweek—For Two Hours (Matthew Franck, Pub­lic Dis­course): “If every­one in gen­er­al but no one in par­tic­u­lar is to blame, the few remain­ing actu­al racists among us are let off the hook. They’re no worse than the rest of us. Of course, unlike all of us who are invit­ed to affirm our col­lec­tive guilt for the ‘sys­tem,’ the tru­ly guilty won’t feel guilty.”
    • The author is the Asso­ciate Direc­tor of the James Madi­son Pro­gram at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. This one is includ­ed most­ly for the dra­ma of it being pub­lished and then unpub­lished by Newsweek. There is an unhealthy intel­lec­tu­al cli­mate at many of our major pub­li­ca­tions.
  7. When you browse Insta­gram and find for­mer Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter Tony Abbot­t’s pass­port num­ber (Alex Hope, per­son­al web­site): “The point of this sto­ry isn’t to say ‘wow Tony Abbott got hacked, what a dum­my’. The point is that if some­one famous can unknow­ing­ly post their board­ing pass, any­one can.” Sur­pris­ing­ly enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive.

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 A (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

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 266

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. Do You ‘Believe in Science’…or Not? (Jacob Hess, Pub­lic Square): “…what if we’re wit­ness­ing the true nature of sci­ence in its full glo­ry? Not as an ora­cle that speaks in some mono­lith­ic voice. But as an argument—between oth­er­wise thought­ful and good-heart­ed peo­ple all seek­ing truth, but read­ing the data dif­fer­ent­ly, defin­ing terms dif­fer­ent­ly, empha­siz­ing dif­fer­ent indi­ca­tors in deter­min­ing what is true and trust­wor­thy, etc. If so, rather than wait­ing for Sci­ence to declare the truth of a matter—maybe we need to start doing some­thing else: Think­ing for our­selves.” This was a much bet­ter arti­cle than I expect­ed.
  2. Aca­d­e­mics Are Real­ly, Real­ly Wor­ried About Their Free­dom (John McWhort­er, The Atlantic): “One pro­fes­sor notes, ‘Even with tenure and author­i­ty, I wor­ry that stu­dents could file spu­ri­ous Title IX com­plaints … or that stu­dents could boy­cott me or remove me as Chair.’ I have no rea­son to sup­pose that he is being dra­mat­ic, because exact­ly this, he says, hap­pened to his pre­de­ces­sor.” The author is a lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia.
    • Relat­ed: The Denial of Can­cel Cul­ture (Eric Kauf­mann, Quil­lette): “Aca­d­e­mics don’t dis­crim­i­nate more than oth­er edu­cat­ed pro­fes­sion­als, and the Right dis­crim­i­nates as much as the Left, but the fact the Left out­num­bers the Right 6:1 (9:1 among cur­rent [social sci­ences and human­i­ties] staff) means that con­ser­v­a­tives and Leavers expe­ri­ence a far high­er dis­crim­i­na­to­ry effect than the left-lib­er­al major­i­ty. On a four-per­son hir­ing pan­el, a Leaver faces an 80 per­cent chance of dis­crim­i­na­tion.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics at Birk­beck Col­lege in the UK.
  3. Arti­cles Relat­ed To Race, Racism and Relat­ed Top­ics
    • Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty’s White-Suprema­cy Prob­lem (David Luo, New York­er): “…Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism is not the same as per­son­al reli­gios­i­ty. In fact, reli­gious commitment—as mea­sured by church atten­dance, prayer, and Scrip­ture reading—tends to improve atti­tudes on race, serv­ing as a pro­gres­sive influ­ence. This sug­gests the root of the white church’s prob­lem may not be ‘Chris­tian­i­ty prop­er,’ as Dou­glass put it, so much as the cul­ture around white Chris­tian­i­ty, which nar­rows and dimin­ish­es the Amer­i­can project.” This arti­cle cov­ers a lot of ground and not all of it with equal insight (or per­haps fair­ness is the word I’m look­ing for), but as a whole well-done.
    • Black Chris­tians Play a Cru­cial Role in Ath­lete Activism (Paul Putz , Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While some black Chris­t­ian ath­letes have abstained from the recent wave of activism in sta­di­ums and arenas—Orlando Mag­ic for­ward Jonathan Isaac, for exam­ple, cit­ed his under­stand­ing of the gospel when declin­ing to ful­ly par­tic­i­pate in a pre-game racial jus­tice ceremony—far more have played a lead­ing role.”
    • I was the woman sur­round­ed by BLM pro­test­ers at a D.C. restau­rant. Here’s why I didn’t raise my fist. (Lau­ren Vic­tor, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Last week, I went out to din­ner in D.C. with a friend. As we sat out­side at a neigh­bor­hood restau­rant, a group of pro­test­ers sur­round­ed our table and demand­ed that I raise my fist in sup­port of the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment. I had marched repeat­ed­ly in the past sev­er­al months in sup­port of their cause, but I refused their demands. That inter­ac­tion wound up in a viral video that with­in 48 hours had been viewed more than 12 mil­lion times.” This is fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • ‘You’re Not Allowed To Film’: The Fight for Con­trol Over Who Reports From Port­land (Nan­cy Rom­mel­mann, Rea­son): “I can­not say who came up with these anti-cam­era bat­tle cries. But it’s easy to under­stand why pro­test­ers use them: to shape the nar­ra­tive the coun­try sees about the protests. And that nar­ra­tive, in my esti­ma­tion after many weeks cov­er­ing street clash­es in a city where I lived for 15 years, is 90 per­cent [men­da­cious non­sense].”
    • Don’t take your guns to town, son (Tim Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “In life, there are hor­ri­ble sit­u­a­tions in which there are no good deci­sions or where it is extreme­ly easy to make the wrong deci­sion. So when we can avoid these hor­ri­ble sit­u­a­tions, we ought to.”
      • This is an insight with wide-rang­ing appli­ca­tion. It’s why you shouldn’t bring guns to a protest and also why there are some par­ties on cam­pus you shouldn’t go to.
    • Police reforms inspired by George Floyd face defeat in CA (Edi­to­r­i­al Board, Sacra­men­to Bee): “The leg­is­la­tors who authored these cru­cial reforms deserve sup­port and recog­ni­tion for walk­ing the walk. But Cal­i­for­ni­ans must also remem­ber the names of any leg­is­la­tors who took a knee to hon­or Black Lives Mat­ter in front of the cam­eras and then, behind the scenes, bowed down to police groups to kill much-need­ed reforms.”
  4. The Social Fab­ric of the US Is Fray­ing Severe­ly, if Not Unrav­el­ling (Glenn Green­wald, The Inter­cept): “Why is vir­tu­al­ly every met­ric of men­tal and spir­i­tu­al dis­ease — sui­cide, depres­sion, anx­i­ety dis­or­ders, addic­tion, and alco­holism — increas­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly, rapid­ly, in the rich­est coun­try on earth, one filled with advanced tech­nolo­gies and at least the pre­tense of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy?”
  5. Boy­cotts Can’t Be a Test of Moral Puri­ty (Zephyr Tea­chout, The Atlantic): “We don’t ask peo­ple to boy­cott libraries in order to change library rules; we don’t ask peo­ple to boy­cott high­ways to ask for them to be safer; we don’t demand that you buy only bot­tled water while protest­ing water-util­i­ty gov­er­nance.” The delight­ful­ly-named author is a law prof at Ford­ham. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. On pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics:
    • What You Should Know About the 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty Plat­form (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “Why should Chris­tians care about a doc­u­ment that few non-politi­cians will ever read? Because of the influ­ence the two major par­ty plat­forms have on pub­lic pol­i­cy. While the plat­form is not bind­ing on the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee or any oth­er politi­cians, polit­i­cal sci­en­tists have found that over the past 30 years law­mak­ers in Con­gress tend to vote in line with their party’s plat­form: 89 per­cent of the time for Repub­li­cans, and 79 per­cent of the time for Democ­rats.“
    • What You Should Know About the 2020 Repub­li­can Par­ty Plat­form (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “This arti­cle will pro­vide, with­out com­men­tary, an out­line of the Repub­li­can plat­form as it relates to sev­er­al social issues. Every state­ment is either a direct quote or a sum­ma­ry of the platform’s posi­tion.”

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. Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

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 265

lots about race and racial ten­sion

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. Here are the things about race and racial ten­sion that stood out to me.
    • Why Did the Police Shoot Jacob Blake? (Trevor Noah, The Dai­ly Show): “I could tell you this sto­ry with my eyes closed by now. If I want­ed to I could pre­re­cord five of these seg­ments and go on vaca­tion and you would nev­er know.” Ten worth­while min­utes.
    • The Kenosha shoot­ing did­n’t hap­pen in a vac­u­um (Denise Lock­wood, CNN): “I am remind­ed of what Rod­ney Prunty, the for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Unit­ed Way of Racine Coun­ty, said to me dur­ing an inter­view: ‘If you have a pond full of fish and a few of them die, you ask what’s wrong with the fish. But when the pond full of fish dies, we ask what’s wrong with the pond.’ In Wis­con­sin, it’s time we talked about what’s wrong with the pond.”
    • Riots in John Piper’s Neigh­bor­hood (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Piper’s peo­ple moved in with­out a mas­ter plan, which was both con­fus­ing (‘What should we do?’) and exact­ly what When Help­ing Hurts authors would lat­er advise (start with build­ing rela­tion­ships, watch­ing, and learn­ing). Every­one end­ed up doing some­thing dif­fer­ent. But for decades, they’ve kept at it, work­ing through dis­ap­point­ments and chal­lenges, loot­ing and riots, bro­ken glass and home­less tent cities in the parks. They’re still doing it.” This is an out­stand­ing sto­ry.
    • Feel Good or Do Good (George Yancey, Patheos): “To gain the sup­port of real con­vic­tion we need the type of con­ver­sa­tions where we lis­ten to oth­ers as much as dis­cuss our point of view with them. We con­nect with oth­ers and get at the core of why they dis­agree with us. We under­stand their argu­ments and con­sid­er how to deal with the issues they bring up. We admit the valid­i­ty of those issues even if we dis­agree with them. Does this sound like any­thing that is hap­pen­ing with antiracism?” The author, who is black, is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bay­lor whom I have ref­er­enced sev­er­al times. 
    • Rule of Law Imper­iled (R. R. Reno, First Things): “The destruc­tion of prop­er­ty is not just an attack on another’s pos­ses­sions. It is a vio­la­tion of jus­tice. This is why riot­ing and loot­ing affects far more than those whose stores are burned. Cit­i­zens begin to wor­ry that they do not live in a soci­ety com­mit­ted to jus­tice. As we know from blacks who resent mis­treat­ment by the police, which is also unjust, this wor­ry can become explo­sive, even among those not per­son­al­ly affect­ed.”
    • Kyle Rit­ten­house, Pop­ulist Hero (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If I were a polling firm, I would run a nation­al poll ask­ing peo­ple who have heard of Kyle Rit­ten­house whether they think he’s a vil­lain, a hero, or don’t know. That would tell us a lot about the mood of the coun­try.”
  2. Unbe­com­ing Amer­i­can (Johann N. Neem, Hedge­hog Review): “A shared cul­ture is not a total­iz­ing one; indeed, it makes real plu­ral­ism pos­si­ble by giv­ing us some­thing larg­er to share regard­less of our many dif­fer­ences. Or so I believed. But when that shared world was rede­fined as white—and when white peo­ple, threat­ened by its loss, reclaimed it—I found myself an exile. A per­son los­ing his coun­try. I felt myself unbe­com­ing in more than one sense. On col­lege cam­pus­es, includ­ing the one where I now teach, the left impos­es new bound­aries on thought and speech in its effort to chal­lenge his­tor­i­cal bound­aries, while, in pol­i­tics, the right embraces bound­aries that we had hoped nev­er to see again.” The author, a man of Indi­an descent, is a his­to­ri­an at West­ern Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. I real­ly liked this arti­cle.
    • Fol­low-up inter­view: An Immi­grant’s Plea: “Don’t Con­vert to White­ness” (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “My biggest fear, actu­al­ly, is vio­lence. We for­get that social order is frag­ile. You don’t have to look far to see how preva­lent eth­nic or reli­gious vio­lence is around the world. If we form tribes, we will respond in hate­ful ways to each oth­er. Right­ly or wrong­ly, peo­ple will feel belea­guered. We will get angri­er and angri­er. There will be less empa­thy.” I share his con­cern. 
  3. Advice For Stu­dents In a Time of Strife (a whole pas­sel of Prince­ton pro­fes­sors, First Things): “Remem­ber, as an Amer­i­can col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent you are one of the luckiest—most privileged—people on plan­et earth. Do not fall into the trap of think­ing of your­self as a vic­tim or build­ing an iden­ti­ty for your­self around that idea. You can avoid the trap while strong­ly stand­ing up for your right to fair and equal treat­ment and bold­ly work­ing for reform where there are dou­ble stan­dards need­ing to be rec­ti­fied.” Tech­ni­cal­ly not a whole pas­sel, which con­notes a large but uncer­tain num­ber. I count 16 sig­na­to­ries!
  4. Chi­na Secret­ly Built A Vast New Infra­struc­ture To Imprison Mus­lims (Megha Rajagopalan, Ali­son Killing, and Chris­to Buschek, Buz­zfeed): “Down­load­ing What­sApp, which is banned in Chi­na, main­tain­ing ties with fam­i­ly abroad, engag­ing in prayer, and vis­it­ing a for­eign web­site are all offens­es for which Mus­lims have been sent to camps, accord­ing to pre­vi­ous­ly leaked doc­u­ments and inter­views with for­mer detainees. Because the gov­ern­ment does not con­sid­er intern­ment camps to be part of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and none of these behav­iors are crimes under Chi­nese law, no detainees have been for­mal­ly arrest­ed or charged with a crime, let alone seen a day in court.” I’ve shared sim­i­lar news this before. This arti­cle is fresh and espe­cial­ly damn­ing.
    • Part 2: What They Saw: Ex-Pris­on­ers Detail The Hor­rors Of Chi­na’s Deten­tion Camps (Buz­zfeed): “More than a dozen for­mer detainees con­firmed to Buz­zFeed News that pris­on­ers were divid­ed into three cat­e­gories, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed by uni­form col­ors. Those in blue, like Pari­da and the major­i­ty of the peo­ple inter­viewed for this arti­cle, were con­sid­ered the least threat­en­ing. Often, they were accused of minor trans­gres­sions, like down­load­ing banned apps to their phones or hav­ing trav­eled abroad. Imams, reli­gious peo­ple, and oth­ers con­sid­ered sub­ver­sive to the state were placed in the strictest group — and were usu­al­ly shack­led even inside the camp.”
    • Part 3: Blanked-Out Spots On Chi­na’s Maps Helped Us Uncov­er Xin­jiang’s Camps (Buz­zfeed): “Our break­through came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satel­lite imagery tiles load­ing in the vicin­i­ty of one of the known camps while using the Chi­nese map­ping plat­form Baidu Maps. The satel­lite imagery was old, but oth­er­wise fine when zoomed out — but at a cer­tain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp loca­tion…. We ana­lyzed the masked loca­tions by com­par­ing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the Euro­pean Space Agency’s Sen­tinel Hub, and Plan­et Labs.” This one will be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to CS peo­ple. 
  5. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez talks about trust­ing the news (Twit­ter): “…when you see a FACT that is report­ed, cit­ed, and ver­i­fied by sev­er­al rep­utable out­lets, 99.999% it’s going to be true. HOWEVER! There is a big dif­fer­ence between a fact and the STORY. And the STORY (often the head­line) that’s sur­round­ing the fact is fre­quent­ly stretched, mis­char­ac­ter­ized, or dra­ma­tized to get you to click.” She and I have a remark­ably sim­i­lar per­spec­tive on the media.
    • Relat­ed: Giv­en my time again, I would­n’t choose jour­nal­ism (Sarah Ditum, Unherd): “Being mad was impor­tant because the eco­nom­ics of this kind of con­tent required fast out­put (since time­li­ness is crit­i­cal) and high engage­ment (since this is how edi­tors, and writ­ers, mea­sure suc­cess). I write quick­ly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so peo­ple are more like­ly to share and react. Not every­thing I wrote when this was my main form of jour­nal­ism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dis­hon­esty that made me feel ashamed…” 
  6. Do Pro-Lif­ers Who Reject Trump Have ‘Blood on their Hands’? (David French, The DIs­patch): “Decades of data and decades of legal, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al devel­op­ments have com­bined to teach us a few, sim­ple real­i­ties about abor­tion in the Unit­ed States: 1. Pres­i­dents have been irrel­e­vant to the abor­tion rate; 2. Judges have been forces of sta­bil­i­ty, not change, in abor­tion law; 3. State leg­is­la­tures have had more influ­ence on abor­tion than Con­gress; 4. Even if Roe is over­turned, abor­tion will be most­ly unchanged in the U.S.; and 5. The pro-life move­ment has an enor­mous cul­tur­al advan­tage.“ Chock-full of insights. Despite the title, it is less about par­ti­san pol­i­tics and more about abor­tion in Amer­i­ca.

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 Facts Are Not Self‐Interpreting (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 184.

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.