Tag: America

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 285

anoth­er fair­ly brief roundup

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.

Fun fact: 285 is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares (1+4+9+16…+81).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Will Get to Herd Immu­ni­ty in 2021…One Way or Anoth­er (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “By July it will all be over. The only ques­tion is how many peo­ple have to die between now and then? Youyang Gu, whose pro­jec­tions have been among the most accu­rate, projects that the Unit­ed States will have reached herd immu­ni­ty by July, with about half of the immu­ni­ty com­ing from vac­ci­na­tions and half from infec­tions. Long before we reach herd immu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, the infec­tion and death rates will fall. Gu is pro­ject­ing that by March infec­tions will be half what they are now and by May about one-tenth the cur­rent rate. The drop will catch peo­ple by sur­prise just like the increase. We are not good at expo­nen­tials.” I hope this is right!
    • Relat­ed: Unit­ed King­dom vs Unit­ed States Vac­cine Fight (Poli­math, Sub­stack): “The Unit­ed States has vac­ci­nat­ed more indi­vid­u­als by far than any oth­er coun­try in the world. One in four of all COVID vac­ci­na­tions in the world have tak­en place in the Unit­ed States. The three coun­tries that are doing the best per-capi­ta (Israel, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, and Bahrain) are all incred­i­bly small and dense.” This is short and encour­ag­ing.
  2. Failed Trump Prophe­cies Offer a Les­son in Humil­i­ty (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “The failed prophe­cies of Don­ald Trump’s reelec­tion may have dam­aged the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the US inde­pen­dent Charis­mat­ic wing of evan­gel­i­cal­ism more than any event since the tel­e­van­ge­list scan­dals of the 1980s. They have led some out­siders to crit­i­cize Chris­tian­i­ty itself and right­ly call us to introspection.“Keener is one of my favorite NT schol­ars.
  3. Two Worlds: So Much Pros­per­i­ty, So Much Skep­ti­cism (Mor­gan Housel, Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “I want to tell you two of the biggest eco­nom­ic sto­ries that aren’t get­ting enough atten­tion. One is that house­hold finances might be in the best shape they’ve ever been in. Ever. That might sound crazy, and it’s easy to over­look because of the sec­ond sto­ry: Covid has dumped kerosene on wealth inequal­i­ty in ways we’ve yet to ful­ly grasp.”
  4. The Case For Wood­en Pews (Yuval Levin, Deseret Mag­a­zine): “It is not exact­ly a cri­sis of belief in the teach­ings of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion [that under­mines faith], but rather a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in the insti­tu­tions that claim to embody them. In oth­er words, Amer­i­cans aren’t los­ing their faith in God. Eighty-sev­en per­cent of the pub­lic expressed belief in God last year in Gallup’s fig­ures, which is rough­ly the lev­el poll­sters have found for many decades. What Amer­i­cans do have trou­ble believ­ing, how­ev­er, is that our insti­tu­tions — our church­es, sem­i­nar­ies, reli­gious schools and char­i­ties — remain capa­ble of form­ing trust­wor­thy peo­ple who actu­al­ly exhib­it the integri­ty they preach.” Sol­id, although the title is mis­lead­ing.
  5. Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign.
  6. What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine.
  7. Rise of the zom­bie ants: why hype is creep­ing into sci­en­tif­ic papers. (Gem­ma Con­roy, Nature Index): “The review found that near­ly half of these stud­ies uncov­ered incon­sis­ten­cies between abstracts and their full text, with 19% cit­ing major dis­crep­an­cies. Two stud­ies cit­ed exam­ples where non-sig­nif­i­cant results were framed in over­ly opti­mistic terms in the abstracts.”

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 Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books I find use­ful]. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.”  First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 284

a small col­lec­tion because it’s too over­whelm­ing oth­er­wise

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

I made an extra effort to keep this to sev­en entries today, oth­er­wise it would have been thir­ty (no joke — that’s what I began culling from).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Only the Church Can Tru­ly Defeat a Chris­t­ian Insur­rec­tion (David French, The Dis­patch): “I would bet that most of my read­ers would instant­ly label the exact same event Islam­ic ter­ror­ism if Islam­ic sym­bols filled the crowd, if Islam­ic music played in the loud­speak­ers, and if mem­bers of the crowd shout­ed ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they charged the Capi­tol.”
  2. The Roman Road from Insur­rec­tion (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “If the world rejects us because of Christ and him cru­ci­fied, so much the worse for the world. If the world rejects us because they think Christ is just a mas­cot for what we would already be sup­port­ing or doing even if Jesus were still dead, then God have mer­cy on us.”
    • The author is pres­i­dent of the Ethics & Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion. A few years ago I remem­ber telling one of our inter­na­tion­al stu­dents that if he want­ed a healthy Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, Rus­sell Moore need­ed to be one of his go-to reads.
  3. Every­thing Is Bro­ken (Alana New­house, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Being on a ship near­ly 4 mil­lion square miles in area along with 330 mil­lion oth­er peo­ple and real­iz­ing the entire hull is pock­marked with holes is ter­ri­fy­ing.” Wide-rang­ing.
  4. The Great Unrav­el­ing (Bari Weiss, Sub­Stack): “I don’t know the answer. But I know that you have to be sort of strange to stand apart and refuse to join Team Red or Team Blue. These strange ones are the ones who think that polit­i­cal vio­lence is wrong, that mob jus­tice is nev­er just and the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence is always right. These are the ones who are skep­ti­cal of state and cor­po­rate pow­er, even when it is clamp­ing down on peo­ple they despise.”
  5. We Need a New Media Sys­tem (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The flaw in the sys­tem is that even the biggest news com­pa­nies now oper­ate under the assump­tion that at least half their poten­tial audi­ence isn’t lis­ten­ing. This leads to all sorts of prob­lems, and the fact that the eas­i­est way to keep your own demo­graph­ic is to feed it neg­a­tive sto­ries about oth­ers is only the most obvi­ous. On all sides, we now lean into inflam­ma­to­ry car­i­ca­tures, because the finan­cial incen­tives encour­age it.”
  6. ‘Our souls are dead’: how I sur­vived a Chi­nese ‘re-edu­ca­tion’ camp for Uighurs (Gul­ba­har Haiti­wa­ji with Rozenn Mor­gat, The Guardian): “Women like me, who emerged from the camps, are no longer who we once were. We are shad­ows; our souls are dead. I was made to believe that my loved ones, my hus­band and my daugh­ter, were ter­ror­ists. I was so far away, so alone, so exhaust­ed and alien­at­ed, that I almost end­ed up believ­ing it. My hus­band, Ker­im, my daugh­ters Gul­hu­mar and Gul­ni­gar – I denounced your ‘crimes’ I begged for­give­ness from the Com­mu­nist par­ty for atroc­i­ties that nei­ther you nor I com­mit­ted.”
    • I think this ranks among the great evils of his­to­ry and it is hap­pen­ing right now. I am shocked I don’t see high­er lev­els of out­rage and pub­lic respons­es to it on the inter­na­tion­al stage.
  7. Why Has Israel Suc­ceed­ed At COVID Vac­ci­na­tion? (Elad Gil, per­son­al blog): “Many coun­tries and states have been too focused on ‘fair­ness’ and ‘equi­ty’ so have frozen their vac­ci­na­tion efforts in place, or put in place large fines for ‘mis­used virus’. Remem­ber — every­one will even­tu­al­ly get vac­ci­nat­ed. The more shots in arms, the bet­ter, with an empha­sis on the old and comor­bid. And also remem­ber, we are in the mid­dle of a ‘once in a cen­tu­ry pan­dem­ic’- it is more impor­tant to move fast to save lives than to cre­ate and enforce com­plex rules.”
    • The author is a Sil­i­con Val­ley entre­pre­neur and is, far as I can tell, com­plete­ly cor­rect. The fail­ure of the states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment on this issue is astound­ing. The entire pan­dem­ic has been a demon­stra­tion of our bipar­ti­san polit­i­cal incom­pe­tence.

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 Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 283

per­spec­tives on a day stu­dents will cov­er in their US His­to­ry class­es

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. WHAT HAPPENED

    • Mad­ness on Capi­tol Hill (Andrew McCormick, The Nation): “For all the vio­lence in the air, the mood was less coup and more col­lege foot­ball tail­gate. Pop songs blared from speak­ers. Some­where, snare drums went rat-a-tat-tat. And the chants were so loud they rum­bled in your chest.” This is the most vivid arti­cle I have come upon so far.

    • ‘Is This Real­ly Hap­pen­ing?’: The Siege of Con­gress, Seen From the Inside (var­i­ous, Politi­co): “One mem­ber at one point, a Demo­c­rat, Steve Cohen, yelled over towards the Repub­li­can side of the room and said, ‘Call Trump and tell him to call this off.’ And then a lit­tle bit lat­er on, a law­mak­er sit­ting on the Repub­li­can side shot back and said some­thing along the lines of, ‘I bet you lib­er­als are glad now you didn’t defund the police.’”This is amaz­ing. And read­ing this I have a much more pos­i­tive view of the front­line police response than I had gleaned from pre­vi­ous report­ing. The issue was high­er in the com­mand struc­ture.

    • Let me tell you about my expe­ri­ence at yes­ter­day’s Trump Ral­ly. (Not The Bee): “Again, pic­tures nev­er do a crowd jus­tice, but I went to a Big 10 col­lege foot­ball school, I know what tens of thou­sands of peo­ple looks like, and this was that at least.”

    •  ‘What else could I do?’ NJ Rep. Kim helps clean up Capi­tol (Mike Catal­i­ni, AP News): “‘When you see some­thing you love that’s bro­ken you want to fix it. I love the Capi­tol. I‘m hon­ored to be there,’ he said. ‘This build­ing is extra­or­di­nary and the rotun­da in par­tic­u­lar is just awe-inspir­ing. How many count­less gen­er­a­tions have been inspired in that room? It real­ly broke my heart and I just felt com­pelled to do some­thing. … What else could I do?’” A pro­file of the man behind a pho­to you’ve no doubt seen.

  2. WHAT HAPPENED IN CONTEXT

    • America’s His­to­ry of Polit­i­cal Vio­lence (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “Ear­ly reac­tions to the incur­sion tend­ed toward the cat­a­stroph­ic, and more than one jour­nal­ist spoke of a ‘coup,’ the death of the Repub­lic, and ‘civ­il war.’ By evening calmer heads and cool­er emo­tions began to emerge as the riot­ers were arrest­ed and dis­persed, reveal­ing less a Bol­she­vik storm­ing of the Win­ter Palace than a LARP­ing event by QAnon para­noids.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.

    •  The Five Crises of the Amer­i­can Regime (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “In the past eight months, two Capi­tol Hills have fall­en. Two shock­ing events sym­bol­ize the abdi­ca­tion of author­i­ty by America’s rul­ing class, an abdi­ca­tion that has led to what can be described, not with­out exag­ger­a­tion, as the slow-motion dis­in­te­gra­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca in its present form.… What is the mean­ing of these dystopi­an scenes? Many Democ­rats claim that Repub­li­cans are destroy­ing the repub­lic. Many Repub­li­cans claim the reverse. They are both cor­rect.” The author is a pro­fes­sor in the UT Austin school of pub­lic affairs. This is the most com­pre­hen­sive (and to my mind, large­ly cor­rect) analy­sis I’ve come across.

    • Vio­lence in the Capi­tol, Dan­gers in the After­math (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “One need not dis­miss the lam­en­ta­ble actions of yes­ter­day to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly reject efforts to apply terms that are plain­ly inap­plic­a­ble: attempt­ed coup, insur­rec­tion, sedi­tion.… That the only per­son shot was a pro­test­er killed by an armed agent of the state by itself makes clear how irre­spon­si­ble these terms are.” 

  3. THEOLOGICAL/RELIGIOUS COMMENTARY

    • Chris­t­ian Lead­ers Pray for Peace and Safe­ty Amid Capi­tol Mob (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Pas­tor Rick War­ren called the attack ‘domes­tic ter­ror­ism,’ while South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion (SBC) Ethics & Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion pres­i­dent Rus­sell Moore con­demned their actions as ‘immoral, unjust, dan­ger­ous, and inex­cus­able’ and called on the pres­i­dent to direct his sup­port­ers to ‘stop this dan­ger­ous and anti-con­sti­tu­tion­al anar­chy.’ ”There’s a wide roundup of voic­es here.

    • Like A Fire Shut Up In My Bones (Paul Shult, Luther­ans For Racial Jus­tice): “My thoughts I share with you are shaped by my call­ing as a pas­tor. I am not a polit­i­cal sci­ence major, a lawyer, a pub­lic pol­i­cy expert, or a busi­ness own­er. I don’t want to argue pol­i­tics, which is very dif­fi­cult because so much in our nation and in Chris­tian­i­ty has become politi­cized. So, here are my thoughts around just a few things I think are impor­tant to con­sid­er — per­haps they can be help­ful to some.” The author pas­tors a church near cam­pus that sev­er­al of our stu­dents have attend­ed (one of them brought this arti­cle to my atten­tion).

    • The Gospel in a Democ­ra­cy Under Assault (Rus­sell Moore, Gospel Coali­tion): “Coun­tries can fall. I hope this one doesn’t. But, either way, let’s not fall with it.”

    • Ille­git­i­mate Times (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “So it is look­ing as though one way or anoth­er we are going to have to learn how to live under a gov­ern­ment we believe to be at bot­tom ille­git­i­mate. And that looks to be the case no mat­ter what hap­pens today, actu­al­ly, which hap­pens to be Jan­u­ary 6, the day when Con­gress rat­i­fies the votes of the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden is con­firmed, which seems like­ly, a very large num­ber of Amer­i­cans will believe he got there by fraud­u­lent means. And if Trump is confirmed—by some sort of extra­or­di­nary long shot—that irreg­u­lar process, what­ev­er it was, will be con­sid­ered by a very large num­ber of Amer­i­cans to have been fraud­u­lent in a very dif­fer­ent way. And even though a larg­er num­ber of Chris­tians will be in the first group, our num­bers in both groups will not be insignif­i­cant.” Please note, this is from before the events in ques­tion! I share it because it con­tains some very unusu­al insights.

  4. APOLOGETICALLY INTERESTING
    • Why Reli­gious Cou­ples Thrive in a Pan­dem­ic (Liz HoChing & Spencer James, Real Clear Reli­gion): “It is no sur­prise there­fore that home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to be high­ly sat­is­fied with their sex­u­al rela­tion­ship, com­pared with cou­ples in a shared sec­u­lar rela­tion­ship. Women in shared home-wor­ship­ping rela­tion­ships were found to be twice as like­ly to be sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fied from the inter­na­tion­al data, and three-times as like­ly to be sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fied from data gath­ered in the Unit­ed States. These are num­bers that can­not be ignored.”
      • There are many inter­est­ing quotes I could have cho­sen. I pick this one because it is some­thing I com­mon­ly see come up in research and yet so con­trary to the pre­vail­ing nar­ra­tive in our cul­ture. And also because most of you are yet to pick your spouse — this is a reminder to pick some­one who shares your vibrant faith in the Lord.
    • Stand­ing By: The Spa­tial Orga­ni­za­tion of Coer­cive Insti­tu­tions in Chi­na (Adam Y. Liu and Charles Chang, Social Sci­ence Research): “We find that police sta­tions are more like­ly to be locat­ed with­in walk­ing dis­tance of for­eign reli­gious sites (church­es) than oth­er sites (tem­ples), even after con­trol­ling for the esti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion with­in 1km of each site and a set of key site attrib­ut­es.” The authors are schol­ars at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore and at Yale, respec­tive­ly.
    • Inter­est­ing tid­bits from the arti­cle itself (the above is from the abstract):
      • “…among all major reli­gions in Chi­na, Chris­tian­i­ty has since the late 19th cen­tu­ry been per­sis­tent­ly viewed by the Chi­nese state—the incum­bent athe­is­tic par­ty state in particular—as the most threat­en­ing to social order and state pow­er.”
      • “…one of the most con­sis­tent and sur­pris­ing social sci­en­tif­ic find­ings is the extent of the involve­ment of reli­gious groups in large scale social and polit­i­cal move­ments.”
      • “Schol­ars find that the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry and civic atti­tudes embed­ded in Chris­tian­i­ty make its believ­ers more like­ly to engage in col­lec­tive con­tention.”
      • “In a sharp con­trast, the par­ty state sees oth­er reli­gions, such as Bud­dhism, as not only non-threat­en­ing, but also con­ducive to strength­en­ing its grip on pow­er. In some instances, local offi­cials have even sup­port­ed the con­struc­tion of non-West­ern reli­gious sites as an explic­it way to counter the grow­ing influ­ence of Chris­tian­i­ty in their juris­dic­tions.”
    • Let me be clear: I lack the exper­tise to eval­u­ate their find­ings. What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is the mat­ter-of-fact way these schol­ars refer to a con­sen­sus in their field about Chris­tian­i­ty. It is inter­est­ing to read this in con­junc­tion with the news about this week.
  5. UNRELATED THINGS
    • Rev. William Bar­ber on Greed, Pover­ty and Evan­gel­i­cal Pol­i­tics (David March­ese, New York Times): “Very few reli­gious lead­ers are able to inspire polit­i­cal action on the part of large num­bers of peo­ple who don’t share their church, their denom­i­na­tion or their faith. Yet the Rev. Dr. William Bar­ber, senior pas­tor of Green­leaf Chris­t­ian Church in Golds­boro, N.C., has done just that.” This is an inter­est­ing (and at times per­plex­ing) inter­view.
    • some prob­lems don’t have solu­tions, or the demand game (Fred­die DeBoer, per­son­al blog): “Here’s the real­i­ty with pornog­ra­phy: it may very well be very bad, and there is prob­a­bly noth­ing that we can do about it. Tech­nol­o­gy changed the world and made some­thing for which their is huge demand effort­less­ly easy to trans­mit and receive. And that’s that; that’s the sto­ry of pornog­ra­phy. Some prob­lems don’t have solu­tions.” The author, an athe­ist social­ist, inad­ver­tent­ly comes close to agree­ing with Jesus that “the poor you will have with you always.”
    • Inside RZIM, Staff Push Lead­ers to Take Respon­si­bil­i­ty for Scan­dal (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At an online all-staff meet­ing in mid-Octo­ber, how­ev­er, RZIM speak­er Sam All­ber­ry, who offi­ci­at­ed at Zacharias’s grave­side ser­vice, asked why ‘min­istry team­mates’ had been includ­ed in the offi­cial denial. They had not been con­sult­ed before lead­er­ship craft­ed the unsigned state­ment deny­ing the claims. ‘Why are you putting words in my mouth?’ said All­ber­ry, accord­ing to peo­ple who attend­ed the meet­ing. ‘Frankly, I believe these women and find their alle­ga­tions to be cred­i­ble.’”
      • This makes me very sad. Also, there’s a per­son­al cau­tion in here. One of the details is that Zacharias lied about small­er things. If you ever see me lying or exag­ger­at­ing (except for obvi­ous humor), please call me on it. I’d rather be embar­rassed social­ly in the moment than lay the foun­da­tion for ruin lat­er.
    • The Awok­en­ing Will Not Bring an End to the Night­mare (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Inter­faith Youth Core) : “…the whites who seem most eager to con­demn ‘ide­o­log­i­cal racism’ (i.e. peo­ple say­ing, think­ing or feel­ing the ‘wrong’ things about minori­ties), and who are most osten­ta­tious in demon­strat­ing their own ‘wok­e­ness,’ also tend to be the peo­ple who ben­e­fit the most from what soci­ol­o­gists describe as ‘insti­tu­tion­al’ or ‘sys­temic’ racism. Con­se­quent­ly, the places in Amer­i­ca with the high­est con­cen­tra­tions of whites who are ‘with it’ also hap­pen to be the most unequal places in the coun­try.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia.
    • Mak­ing pol­i­cy for a low-trust world (Matthew Ygle­sias, sub­stack): “The cor­rect way to respond to a low-trust envi­ron­ment is not to dou­ble down on pro­ce­du­ral­ism, but to com­mit your­self to the ‘it does exact­ly what it says on the tin’ prin­ci­ple and imple­ment poli­cies that have the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics: It’s easy for every­one, whether they agree with you or dis­agree with you, to under­stand what it is you say you are doing. It’s easy for every­one to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do. It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.”
    • Like Preach­er-Politi­cians Before Him, Sen­a­tor Raphael Warnock Will Keep His Pul­pit (Adelle Banks, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “ ‘It’s unusu­al for a pas­tor to get involved in some­thing as messy as pol­i­tics, but I see this as a con­tin­u­a­tion of a life of ser­vice: first as an agi­ta­tor, then an advo­cate, and hope­ful­ly next as a leg­is­la­tor’” Warnock said as he was clos­ing in on the top spot of a wide-open pri­ma­ry. ‘I say I’m step­ping up to my next call­ing to serve, not step­ping down from the pul­pit.’ ” I did not know this his­to­ry, and after read­ing it I am pleased to inform you that if I am elect­ed to the US Sen­ate I will con­tin­ue to min­is­ter with Chi Alpha at Stan­ford.
    • The Real Prob­lem with 4‑Letter Words (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, Gospel Coali­tion): “Curs­ing falls into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. Strict­ly speak­ing, pro­fan­i­ties are words that desacral­ize what is holy. Words mis­us­ing the names of God and his judg­ments are pro­fane; the worst of these are blasphemy.While pro­fan­i­ties are relat­ed to the divine, obscen­i­ties are relat­ed to the human. This cat­e­go­ry of words serves to coarsen bod­i­ly func­tions (whether sex­u­al or excre­to­ry).… Anoth­er cat­e­go­ry of curse words con­sists of those the cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist Steven Pinker calls ‘abu­sive.’ ”
    • California’s Donor-Dis­clo­sure Law Threat­ens Reli­gious Char­i­ties (John Bursch, Real Clear Reli­gion): “Not once has the attor­ney gen­er­al giv­en a con­vinc­ing rea­son for col­lect­ing donors’ names and address­es en masse. His office has effec­tive­ly reg­u­lat­ed char­i­ties for decades with­out that infor­ma­tion. In 10 years, the attor­ney gen­er­al only used donor lists in five out of 540 inves­ti­ga­tions. And even in those five, he could have obtained the same infor­ma­tion through tar­get­ed sub­poe­nas or audits, all with­out risk­ing the mas­sive dis­clo­sure of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion from all reg­is­tered char­i­ties.”
    • The New Strain: How Bad Is It? (Bren­dan Foht and Ari Schul­man, The New Atlantis): “The steps that most need to be tak­en in response to the new strain are the same ones that should have been tak­en for the last year any­way, but that our gov­ern­ment has proved large­ly unable or unwill­ing to take. An effec­tive regime of test­ing, trac­ing, and iso­lat­ing, for exam­ple, has been need­ed through­out the pan­dem­ic, but nev­er real­ly imple­ment­ed.” One of the authors post­ed on Twit­ter: “In the course of work­ing on this piece, my con­cern about the new Covid strain went from about a 4 to an 8.5, with the remain­ing 1.5 com­posed most­ly of gen­er­al­ized skep­ti­cism and moti­vat­ed dis­be­lief.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How Pornog­ra­phy Makes Us Less Human and Less Humane (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Beneath pornog­ra­phy is the sup­po­si­tion that the mere fact of our desire for a woman makes us wor­thy of her. And so, not being bound by any kind of norm, desire must pro­ceed end­less­ly. It is no sur­prise that the indus­tri­al­ized, cheap-and-easy sex of pornog­ra­phy has answered and evoked an almost unre­strained sex­u­al greed, which allows us to be gods and god­dess­es with­in the safe­ty of our own fan­tasies. It is for deep and impor­tant rea­sons that the Ten Com­mand­ments use the eco­nom­ic lan­guage of ‘cov­et­ing’ to describe the bad­ness of errant sex­u­al desires.” First shared in vol­ume 216.

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 280

I think this is the first time two of the arti­cles are by alum­ni. Maybe some­day it will be all sev­en!

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.

Next Fri­day is Christ­mas and a week lat­er is New Year’s Day, so I’ll prob­a­bly either skip the next two weeks or send some­thing out on Thursday/Saturday.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Christ­mas a Pagan Rip-off? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “…what­ev­er the Christ­mas hol­i­day has become today, it start­ed as a copy­cat of well-estab­lished pagan hol­i­days. If you like Christ­mas, you have Sat­ur­na­lia and Sol Invic­tus to thank. That’s the sto­ry, and every­one from lib­er­al Chris­tians to con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians to non-Chris­tians seem to agree that it’s true. Except that it isn’t.”
  2. What I Saw At The Jeri­cho March (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Let me repeat this: a black Evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor denounced witch­es and Marx­ists and blew a sho­far to defend Don­ald Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. If you had gone back in his­to­ry a decade and told the world that this would hap­pen one day on the Nation­al Mall, they would have put you in an asy­lum. Now you would be for­giv­en for think­ing that our coun­try has become an asy­lum.” This is long and engross­ing.
    • The Dan­ger­ous Idol­a­try of Chris­t­ian Trump­ism (David French, The Dis­patch): “A sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of the Chris­t­ian pub­lic has fall­en for con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, has mixed nation­al­ism with the Chris­t­ian gospel, has sub­sti­tut­ed a bizarre mys­ti­cism for rea­son and evi­dence, and rages in fear and anger against their polit­i­cal opponents—all in the name of pre­serv­ing Don­ald Trump’s pow­er.” 
    • The Cult of Chris­t­ian Trump­ism (Michael Hor­ton, Gospel Coali­tion): “My pub­lic call­ing is not to bind Chris­t­ian con­sciences to my own polit­i­cal posi­tions. Rather, as a min­is­ter of the Word, I am join­ing oth­ers in sound­ing the alarm that a line has been crossed into rank spir­i­tu­al adul­tery.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of the­ol­o­gy.
    • A Defense Of Jeri­cho March Crit­i­cism (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “The kind of crazy talk at the Jeri­cho March ral­ly is going to get us all tar­get­ed by the state, and by woke­sters in insti­tu­tions, but will not advance our cause one bit. Besides, as a con­ser­v­a­tive and a Chris­t­ian whose writ­ing in recent years has been dom­i­nat­ed by anger and anx­i­ety over the loss of reli­gious and civ­il lib­er­ties in the face of wok­e­ness, I can say with­out a doubt that I would not want to live in a coun­try gov­erned by the rad­i­cal nation­al­ism and emo­tivist Chris­tian­i­ty of the Jeri­cho Marchers.” A fol­low-up to the long and engross­ing piece atop this sec­tion.
  3. Why the coro­n­avirus vac­cine may not be acces­si­ble for the peo­ple who need it most (Rebekah Fen­ton, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Gov­ern­ment author­i­ties should keep this in mind. The most respect­ed mem­bers of a com­mu­ni­ty may not be those with the most edu­ca­tion or the fan­ci­est titles. Church­es, com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions and health-out­reach pro­grams often know the needs of the peo­ple they serve, have long records of meet­ing them, and have estab­lished strong bonds of trust….. Pub­lic health offi­cials should respect these lead­ers’ com­mit­ment to ser­vice and involve them at the plan­ning stages, instead of just rely­ing on them to spread the word after deci­sions are made.” Rebekah, a doc­tor in Chica­go, is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
    • The Elder­ly vs. Essen­tial Work­ers: Who Should Get the Coro­n­avirus Vac­cine First? (Abby Good­nough and Jan Hoff­man, New York Times): “Ulti­mate­ly, the choice comes down to whether pre­vent­ing death or curb­ing the spread of the virus and return­ing to some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy is the high­est pri­or­i­ty. ‘If your goal is to max­i­mize the preser­va­tion of human life, then you would bias the vac­cine toward old­er Amer­i­cans,’ Dr. Scott Got­tlieb, the for­mer Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion com­mis­sion­er, said recent­ly. ‘If your goal is to reduce the rate of infec­tion, then you would pri­or­i­tize essen­tial work­ers’…. The trade-off between the two is mud­died by the fact that the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘essen­tial work­ers’ used by the C.D.C. com­pris­es near­ly 70 per­cent of the Amer­i­can work force.”
    • A crit­i­cal Twit­ter thread about vac­cine roll­out plans (David Algo­nquin, Twit­ter)
  4. Does Reli­gious Affil­i­a­tion Pro­tect Peo­ple’s Well-Being? Evi­dence from the Great Reces­sion after Cor­rect­ing for Selec­tion Effects (Chris­tos Makridis, Byron John­son and Harold G. Koenig, Jour­nal for the Sci­en­tif­ic Study of Reli­gion): “Using Gallup’s U.S. Dai­ly Poll between 2008 and 2017, we find that those who are engaged in their local church and view their faith as impor­tant to their lives have not only high­er lev­els of sub­jec­tive well-being, but also acycli­cal lev­els. We show that the acycli­cal­i­ty of sub­jec­tive well-being among Chris­tians is not dri­ven by selec­tion effects or the pres­ence of greater social cap­i­tal, but rather a sense of pur­pose over the busi­ness cycle inde­pen­dent of finan­cial cir­cum­stances.” You should have access to the full text using your Stan­ford login. Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry and is an econ­o­mist in Wash­ing­ton, DC. 
  5. Like It Or Not, Keira Bell Has Opened Up a Real Con­ver­sa­tion About Gen­der Dys­pho­ria (Quil­lette): “In the debate about tran­si­tion­ing chil­dren who expe­ri­ence gen­der dys­pho­ria, Ms. Bell’s case rep­re­sents an impor­tant turn­ing point. Ms. Bell, now 23, was 16 years old when she pre­sent­ed to the Tavi­s­tock Cen­tre in Lon­don, which runs Britain’s Gen­der Iden­ti­ty Devel­op­ment Ser­vice. In a land­mark rul­ing deliv­ered ear­li­er this month, a British court upheld her claim that she’d been rushed through gen­der reas­sign­ment with­out prop­er safe­guards.” The author is unlist­ed, although this is per­haps sim­ply a web­site error.
  6. Nuclear weapons agency breached amid mas­sive cyber onslaught (Natasha Bertrand and Eric Wolff, Politi­co): “They found sus­pi­cious activ­i­ty in net­works belong­ing to the Fed­er­al Ener­gy Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion (FERC), San­dia and Los Alam­os nation­al lab­o­ra­to­ries in New Mex­i­co and Wash­ing­ton, the Office of Secure Trans­porta­tion at NNSA, and the Rich­land Field Office of the DOE. The hack­ers have been able to do more dam­age at FERC than the oth­er agen­cies, and offi­cials there have evi­dence of high­ly mali­cious activ­i­ty, the offi­cials said, but did not elab­o­rate.”
    • Why the US gov­ern­ment hack is lit­er­al­ly keep­ing secu­ri­ty experts awake at night (Bri­an Fung, CNN): “I woke up in the mid­dle of the night last night just sick to my stom­ach,” said There­sa Pay­ton, who served as White House Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m at a 9 — and it’s not because of what I know; it’s because of what we still don’t know.”
    • I Was the Home­land Secu­ri­ty Advis­er to Trump. We’re Being Hacked.(Thomas Bossart, New York Times): “The log­i­cal con­clu­sion is that we must act as if the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment has con­trol of all the net­works it has pen­e­trat­ed. But it is unclear what the Rus­sians intend to do next. The access the Rus­sians now enjoy could be used for far more than sim­ply spy­ing.… Domes­tic and geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions could esca­late quite eas­i­ly if they use their access for malign influ­ence and mis­in­for­ma­tion — both hall­marks of Russ­ian behav­ior.”
  7. Porn­hub Removes Major­i­ty of Videos in a Vic­to­ry for Exo­dus Cry (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “An announce­ment on Porn­hub claims it has bet­ter poli­cies than oth­er plat­forms and blames Exo­dus Cry and the Nation­al Cen­ter on Sex­u­al Exploita­tion for tar­get­ing the site. ’These are orga­ni­za­tions ded­i­cat­ed to abol­ish­ing pornog­ra­phy, ban­ning mate­r­i­al they claim is obscene, and shut­ting down com­mer­cial sex work.’” Shared with me by an alum­nus.

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 Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a follow-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 213.

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 274

I’d be hap­py that this is the last week I’ll share “how to think about vot­ing” arti­cles, except next week I’ll have to share elec­tion think­pieces.

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. White Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca built a faith-based safe­ty net. What hap­pens when it’s gone? (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “‘The aver­age Amer­i­can doesn’t real­ize all the things that church­es do to make soci­ety less awful,’ [pro­fes­sor Burge] said. Church­es and oth­er reli­gious groups tutor kids, feed hun­gry peo­ple, shel­ter the home­less and do a great deal of good, often under the radar, he said. As reli­gious groups shrink, those ser­vices could be lost. Burge fears younger Amer­i­cans, in par­tic­u­lar, don’t see orga­nized reli­gion as use­ful. But ‘it’s one of those things where you don’t know what you had till it is gone.’”
  2. The Sins That Cry Out to Heav­en (Eduar­do Andi­no, First Things): “The Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion speaks of four pec­ca­ta cla­man­tia, or sins that cry out to heav­en for vengeance: mur­der, sodomy, oppres­sion of the poor, and defraud­ing work­ers of their wages…. This is not an arbi­trary col­lec­tion of sins.”
  3. Vot­ing & Faith
    • Meet the Evan­gel­i­cals Who Won’t Vote for Trump, Biden, or Any­body at All (Megan Fowler, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Like many Chris­t­ian non­vot­ers before her, she saw the act of cast­ing a bal­lot as a sign of approval for a polit­i­cal pow­er struc­ture that in many ways opposed the way of Christ. She couldn’t do it. If Jesus brought about his king­dom by lay­ing down his rights and spurn­ing polit­i­cal pow­er, Kennedy want­ed to fol­low his exam­ple.”
    • Of Course Evan­gel­i­cals Should Vote for Trump (Paula White-Cain, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve seen [Don­ald Trump] first­hand as a father, a hus­band, a leader, a busi­ness­man and now the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca. I also rec­og­nize most peo­ple have sec­ond­hand infor­ma­tion that mis­char­ac­ter­izes the man I know.”
    • The Chris­t­ian Case for Joe Biden (Josh Dick­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As the Nation­al Faith Engage­ment Direc­tor for the Biden Cam­paign, I spend my days talk­ing to peo­ple of faith about why I believe Joe is the clear moral choice in this elec­tion. But I haven’t always been a Demo­c­rat. Like many Chris­tians, I grew up Repub­li­can.”
    • A Tale of Two Evan­gel­i­calisms (Joel Hall­dorf, Break­ing Ground): “In the sto­ry of Swedish moder­ni­ty, the demo­c­ra­t­ic wel­fare state trans­formed an unjust and elit­ist soci­ety into a more just one. But the found­ing myth of Unit­ed States is not a sto­ry about free­dom through the state, but free­dom from the state.”
  4. On the media:
    • What Do For­eign Cor­re­spon­dents Think of the U.S.? (The New York­er, YouTube): thir­teen min­utes. I found the first half more inter­est­ing than the last half. It picked back up in the last two min­utes.
    • What I Wish My Chris­t­ian Friends Knew About the News Media (Rob Vaughn, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Are my friends wrong to see the main­stream media as rot­ten and rid­den with ‘fake news’? Yes. At least in sig­nif­i­cant ways, they have that wrong. Sure, we make mis­takes. We have blind spots and faulty assump­tions. But many of the crit­i­cisms are off the mark: they mis­un­der­stand what jour­nal­ism is about; they feed a grow­ing sense that there is no agreed upon real­i­ty and set of facts to which we can all refer; and, as a Chris­t­ian I fear they reflect poor­ly on peo­ple who say they love the truth.”
    • My Res­ig­na­tion From The Inter­cept (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “Today I sent my inten­tion to resign from The Inter­cept, the news out­let I co-found­ed in 2013 with Jere­my Scahill and Lau­ra Poitras, as well as from its par­ent com­pa­ny First Look Media. The final, pre­cip­i­tat­ing cause is that The Intercept’s edi­tors, in vio­la­tion of my con­trac­tu­al right of edi­to­r­i­al free­dom, cen­sored an arti­cle I wrote this week, refus­ing to pub­lish it unless I remove all sec­tions crit­i­cal of Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Joe Biden, the can­di­date vehe­ment­ly sup­port­ed by all New-York-based Inter­cept edi­tors involved in this effort at sup­pres­sion.” This is sad. 
    • How The Inter­cept Aban­doned Its Truth-Seek­ing Mission—And Lost Its Best Jour­nal­ist (Zaid Jilani, Quil­lette): “Green­wald is a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure, but my sense of him is that he’s extreme­ly prin­ci­pled. Although he’s unabashed­ly a man of the liberal-Left—having spent years advo­cat­ing for left-wing caus­es from ani­mal rights to anti-war activism—he has devel­oped an impres­sive (some would call it inflex­i­ble) com­mit­ment to what he sees as basic fair­ness. He doesn’t care about the let­ter next to a politician’s name: Green­wald believes every­one in pow­er should be held account­able at all times.”
    • Two Reli­gion Reporters Cov­er Where Faith and Pol­i­tics Meet (Will Dud­ding, New York Times): “I think [reli­gion and pol­i­tics] seem insep­a­ra­ble part­ly because it’s elec­tion sea­son, and as jour­nal­ists we tend to view things through that lens our­selves. For ordi­nary believ­ers, the con­nec­tion is not always so clear. Some peo­ple clear­ly draw a con­nec­tion between their faith and their views on nation­al pol­i­tics; oth­ers def­i­nite­ly don’t. I try to keep that in mind as a reporter and not force every sto­ry into a polit­i­cal frame.”
  5. Lots of Overnight Tragedies, No Overnight Mir­a­cles (Mor­gan Housel, The Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “An impor­tant thing that explains a lot of things is that good news takes time but bad news hap­pens instant­ly.” Rec­om­mend­ed by the par­ent of an alum­nus.
  6. Amer­i­cans Have Lost Sight of What ‘Fas­cism’ Means (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “Words mat­ter because they help order our under­stand­ing of pol­i­tics both at home and abroad. If Cot­ton is a fas­cist, then we don’t know what fas­cism is. And if we don’t know what fas­cism is, then we will strug­gle to iden­ti­fy it when it threat­ens mil­lions of lives—which is pre­cise­ly what is hap­pen­ing today in areas under Beijing’s con­trol.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. The man who wants to help you out of debt – at any cost (J Oliv­er Con­roy, The Guardian): “Ram­sey has made clear that he regards peo­ple like me as over-edu­cat­ed, pen­cil-necked idiots. From a finan­cial point of view, I am in some ways his worst night­mare. I have more than $80,000 in stu­dent debt, most of it from a master’s degree in jour­nal­ism. I work at a famous­ly lib­er­al news­pa­per whose colum­nists like to advo­cate for all the sorts of bleed­ing-heart eco­nom­ic poli­cies he hates.” I’m always fas­ci­nat­ed by news­pa­per arti­cles about high-pro­file Chris­tians. 

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 From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.’” What a wild sto­ry. First shared in vol­ume 204.

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 273

Hon­est­ly, there are too many polit­i­cal arti­cles in this one.

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. How does Google’s monop­oly hurt you? Try these search­es. (Geof­frey Fowler, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Googling didn’t used to require so much … scrolling. On some search­es, it’s like Where’s Wal­do but for infor­ma­tion. With­out us even real­iz­ing it, the Internet’s most-used web­site has been get­ting worse. On too many queries, Google is more inter­est­ed in mak­ing search lucra­tive than a bet­ter prod­uct for us.”
  2. A shad­owy AI ser­vice has trans­formed thou­sands of women’s pho­tos into fake nudes: ‘Make fan­ta­sy a real­i­ty’ (Drew Har­well, Wash­ing­ton Post): “An arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence ser­vice freely avail­able on the Web has been used to trans­form more than 100,000 women’s images into nude pho­tos with­out the women’s knowl­edge or con­sent, trig­ger­ing fears of a new wave of dam­ag­ing ‘deep­fakes’ that could be used for harass­ment or black­mail. Users of the auto­mat­ed ser­vice can anony­mous­ly sub­mit a pho­to of a clothed woman and receive an altered ver­sion with the cloth­ing removed.” Well, that’s not ter­ri­fy­ing at all. 
  3. Of Course We’re Not a Democ­ra­cy (Mike Lee, First Things): “Our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment is best described as a con­sti­tu­tion­al repub­lic. Pow­er is not found in mere majori­ties, but in care­ful­ly bal­anced pow­er.” The author is a US Sen­a­tor (R — Utah).
  4. Should the Pro­fes­sion­al Be Polit­i­cal? (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “The Coin­base deci­sion cap­tured the atten­tion of CEOs, tech work­ers, and mem­bers of the media who are ask­ing them­selves a time­ly ques­tion: What role, if any, should polit­i­cal activism play in the work­place? If Coinbase’s approach doesn’t lead to a staff exo­dus or legal set­backs or some oth­er unfore­seen harm, it is like­ly to be adopt­ed at oth­er companies––probably for the better––because it is well suit­ed to help­ing work­places stay diverse and inclu­sive in a polar­ized moment.”
  5. Elec­tion-relat­ed arti­cles
    • My favorite polit­i­cal ad of 2020 (Twit­ter): 30 sec­onds, and I am quite seri­ous. 
    • The Spir­i­tu­al Bless­ing of Polit­i­cal Home­less­ness (David French, The Dis­patch): “More and more, thought­ful (main­ly young) Chris­tians say to me, ‘I’m pro-life, I believe in reli­gious free­dom and free speech, I think we should wel­come immi­grants and refugees, and I des­per­ate­ly want racial rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Where do I fit in?’ The answer is clear. Nowhere. And that truth is a bless­ing, if you embrace it.”
    • Poli­cies, Per­sons, and Paths to Ruin (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “Actu­al­ly, this is a long-over­due arti­cle attempt­ing to explain why I remain baf­fled that so many Chris­tians con­sid­er the sins of unre­pen­tant sex­u­al immoral­i­ty (porneia), unre­pen­tant boast­ful­ness (ala­zoneia), unre­pen­tant vul­gar­i­ty (ais­chrolo­gia), unre­pen­tant fac­tious­ness (dichostasi­ai), and the like, to be only tox­ic for our nation, while poli­cies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switch­ing, free­dom-lim­it­ing, and social­is­tic over­reach are viewed as dead­ly.” 
    • Could Trump Be A Christ-Fig­ure: A Response to John Piper About Trump (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “I don’t know if Trump is who the media says he is, I can only go off what I hear him say and see him do. Take away the accu­sa­tions of xeno­pho­bia, racism, and misog­y­ny and what do you have? An alleged sor­did past with women (me too) and a present of enact­ing the poli­cies I agree with.” The title is so provoca­tive and I almost didn’t read it, but I found it gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing. The title is over-the-top, though.
    • Why Most Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are Polit­i­cal Con­ser­v­a­tives (JP More­land, per­son­al blog): “Suf­fice it to say that, when care­ful­ly exam­ined, the texts show that the state is not to be in the busi­ness of show­ing com­pas­sion or pro­vid­ing pos­i­tive rights for its cit­i­zens through its use of coer­cive pow­er (e.g. tax­a­tion). These are mat­ters of indi­vid­ual moral respon­si­bil­i­ty and oblig­a­tion for the peo­ple of God (and var­i­ous char­i­ties). Rather, the state is the pro­tec­tor of neg­a­tive rights.” The link is to a short blog entry that con­tains a link to a 20 page PDF. The excerpt is from the PDF. The author is a philoso­pher at Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty and brought up some points about the Old Tes­ta­ment I had nev­er con­sid­ered before. 
    • 2020 Polls: Vot­ers Have Nev­er Been More Divid­ed by Gen­der (Eric Levitz, NY Mag­a­zine): “And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprece­dent­ed­ly sin­gle; they also appear to be unprece­dent­ed­ly unin­ter­est­ed in het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty: Accord­ing to pri­vate polling shared with Intel­li­gencer by Demo­c­ra­t­ic data sci­en­tist David Shor, rough­ly 30 per­cent of Amer­i­can women under 25 iden­ti­fy as LGBT; for women over 60, that fig­ure is less than 5 per­cent.” 👀👀👀
    • A response: No Fam­i­lies, No Chil­dren, No Future (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “There is noth­ing remote­ly nor­mal about that num­ber. It is a sign of a deeply deca­dent cul­ture — that is, a cul­ture that lacks the where­with­al to sur­vive. The most impor­tant thing that a gen­er­a­tion can do is pro­duce the next gen­er­a­tion. No fam­i­lies, no chil­dren, no future.”
    • How fas­cist is Pres­i­dent Trump? There’s still a for­mu­la for that. (John McNeill, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a fed­er­al, decen­tral­ized state with con­sti­tu­tion­al checks and bal­ances, it’s hard­er to gov­ern as a fas­cist than to run as one. Trump’s polit­i­cal out­look and behav­ior bear many sim­i­lar­i­ties to those of fas­cist lead­ers, but he has not ruled like an authen­tic fas­cist.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at George­town. 
    • ICE Detainees in Geor­gia Say They Had Unneed­ed Surg­eries (Caitlin Dick­er­son, Seth Freed Wessler and Miri­am Jor­dan, New York Times): “Immi­grants detained at an ICE-con­tract­ed cen­ter in Geor­gia said they had inva­sive gyne­col­o­gy pro­ce­dures that they lat­er learned might have been unnec­es­sary.” About a month old, rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • In a year of polit­i­cal anger, unde­cid­ed vot­ers inspire a spe­cial kind of scorn (Mau­ra Jud­kis, Wash­ing­ton Post): “With so much on the line, the Unde­cid­eds have become more mys­ti­fy­ing — and frus­trat­ing — than ever. Nobody believes they are real. Oh, and every­one hates them.”
  6. The Real Caus­es of Human Sex Dif­fer­ences (David C. Geary>, Quil­lette): “Peo­ple have many stereo­types about boys and men and girls and women and most of them are accu­rate and, if any­thing, under­es­ti­mate the mag­ni­tude of actu­al sex differences.The key ques­tion is whether these stereo­typed beliefs cre­ate a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy or are large­ly a descrip­tion of sex dif­fer­ences that chil­dren and adults have observed in their day-to-day life.” The author is an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri 
  7. Glob­al things to remem­ber in prayer:
    • Niger­ian forces killed 12 peace­ful pro­test­ers, Amnesty says (Sam Olukoya And Lekan Oyekan­mi, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “At least 56 peo­ple have died dur­ing two weeks of wide­spread demon­stra­tions against police vio­lence, includ­ing 38 on Tues­day, the group said…. cit­ing eye­wit­ness­es, video footage and hos­pi­tal reports.”
    • Nige­ria Is Mur­der­ing Its Cit­i­zens (Chi­ma­man­da Ngozi Adichie, New York Times): “The Niger­ian state has turned on its peo­ple. The only rea­son to shoot into a crowd of peace­ful cit­i­zens is to ter­ror­ize: to kill some and make the oth­ers back down. It is a colos­sal and unfor­giv­able crime.”
    • Turks and Arme­ni­ans Rec­on­cile in Christ. Can Azeris Join Them? (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bey­tel became a Chris­t­ian in 2000. But it was not until 2009 when he met Jacob Purs­ley, an Amer­i­can min­is­ter to Turkey, that he began to wres­tle with his share in the nation­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. The spir­i­tu­al growth of the church is hin­dered by the uncon­fessed sin of geno­cide, Purs­ley implored the believ­ers. He urged Turk­ish Chris­tians to seek rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with Arme­ni­ans, on behalf of the nation.”
    • Azer­bai­jan Evan­gel­i­cals: Con­flict with Arme­ni­ans Is Not a Reli­gious War (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):“Originally a ‘Mus­lim athe­ist’ from a well-edu­cat­ed fam­i­ly, he was saved in 1991 after fol­low­ing a beau­ti­ful girl and her mys­te­ri­ous leather-bound book to a Bible study. With­in a year, he was assis­tant pas­tor, and in 1997 he was ordained a min­is­ter in the Greater Grace Chris­t­ian move­ment.” Includ­ing entire­ly for that lumi­nous excerpt. 
    • Biden and Big Tech have Poland and Hun­gary in their crosshairs (Glad­den Pap­pin, Newsweek): “The real rea­son that Poland and Hun­gary have been demo­nized in the Unit­ed States is that they rep­re­sent a suc­cess­ful alter­na­tive to the failed Amer­i­can com­bi­na­tion of indus­tri­al and fam­i­ly col­lapse.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Dal­las. I don’t have strong opin­ions about Euro­pean pol­i­tics, but I am struck by how pas­sion­ate some Amer­i­cans are about them.

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 Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Mag­i­cal Think­ing (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Build­ing a com­put­er is pre­cise­ly anal­o­gous to putting togeth­er a bit of mag­i­cal sleight of hand. It is a clever exer­cise in sim­u­la­tion, noth­ing more. And the con­vinc­ing­ness of the sim­u­la­tion is as com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant in the one case as it is in the oth­er. Say­ing ‘Gee, AI pro­grams can do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is intel­li­gence!’ is like say­ing ‘Gee, Penn and Teller do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is mag­ic!’” Fes­er is one of my favorite philoso­phers. First shared in vol­ume 197, and I recall a CS major telling me how much he dis­agreed with it.

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 272

I cheat­ed when num­ber­ing a few of these

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A DC Church Shows How to Fight for Reli­gious Free­dom (David French, The Dis­patch): “Late Fri­day night a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., hand­ed down a reli­gious lib­er­ty rul­ing that I hope will echo through­out the nation…. It demon­strates how thought­ful Chris­tians can engage in the pub­lic square and defend their lib­er­ty with con­vic­tion while also car­ing for their com­mu­ni­ties and demon­strat­ing extra­or­di­nary patience with pub­lic offi­cials. In oth­er words, in one court case we’re watch­ing what it’s like when Chris­t­ian legal ends are pur­sued through Chris­t­ian moral means.” Excel­lent news with typ­i­cal­ly insight­ful com­men­tary by David French.
  2. Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“
    • Out­stand­ing. There are SO MANY quotable bits in this essay. 
    • Why Is Wok­e­ness Win­ning? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Crit­i­cal the­o­ry was once an eso­teric aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit. Now it has become the core, under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the major­i­ty of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, media, cor­po­ra­tions, lib­er­al church­es, NGOs, phil­an­thropies, and, of course, main­stream jour­nal­ism.”
    • The Fun­da­men­tal­ist War on Wok­e­ness is a War on Chris­t­ian Love (Michael Bird, Patheos): “The whole anti-woke and anti-crit­i­cal race the­o­ry trope strike me as not so much inter­est­ed in oppos­ing pro­gres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism and its divi­sive racial pol­i­tics, as much as it serves to deny eth­nic minori­ties have any griev­ances and white church­es have any respon­si­bil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.” Bird is a respect­ed evan­gel­i­cal the­olo­gian. 
  3. Some Stan­ford-relat­ed arti­cles I saw:
    • The Pre­science of Shel­by Steele (Samuel Kro­nen, Quil­lette): “Shel­by was the only sib­ling to reject the tenets of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism, and although he and his [twin] broth­er work on the same cam­pus and occa­sion­al­ly pass each oth­er (Shel­by is at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion), the two are not on speak­ing terms.” Not the most reveal­ing excerpt, but prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing to this audi­ence.
    • An open let­ter from a Stan­ford wrestling par­ent to the Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent (Sarah Traxler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When address­ing the rea­sons that the 11 sports in par­tic­u­lar are being dis­con­tin­ued, wrestling was cit­ed only in the cat­e­go­ry of com­pet­ing ‘with­out a full com­ple­ment of schol­ar­ships.’ One over-looked rea­son for this is that wrestlers often come from low­er income groups. As such, wrestling stu­dent-ath­letes often qual­i­fy for need-based finan­cial aid, reduc­ing the demand for the full com­ple­ment of ath­let­ic-based schol­ar­ships.”
    • My Brief Spell as an Activist (Lucy Kross Wal­lace, Quil­lette): “This was my first intox­i­cat­ing taste of empow­er­ment born from vic­tim­hood. I was vin­di­cat­ed; exu­ber­ant. None of it had been my fault. All my doubts and self-hatred and guilt could be laid to rest. I had been the vic­tim not only of cir­cum­stance and mis­for­tune, but of oppres­sion. The prob­lem was sim­ple, the solu­tion equal­ly so. I didn’t have to change—society did.” The author is a sopho­more at Stan­ford.
  4. A reminder that there are some hor­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing in this world:
    • How Turkey’s Mil­i­tary Adven­tures Decrease Free­dom at Home (Garo Pay­lan, New York Times): “After a decades-long fit­ful truce, the con­flict over the sta­tus of Nagorno-Karabakh — a break­away Armen­ian enclave in Azer­bai­jan — between Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia resumed last month, lead­ing to a large mil­i­tary deploy­ment, destruc­tion of civil­ian cen­ters and thou­sands of casu­al­ties. In this war, Turkey strong­ly sup­ports Azer­bai­jan, with which it shares eth­nic bonds, and Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan dis­missed glob­al calls for a cease-fire.” The author is a mem­ber of the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Azer­bai­jan’s assault against Arme­nia threat­ens democ­ra­cy every­where (Chris­tos Makridis & Alex Gal­it­sky, The Hill): “While Azer­bai­jan has attempt­ed to shield itself from inter­na­tion­al scruti­ny by rid­ing on the pres­ence of tense domes­tic pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States and a glob­al pan­dem­ic, we can­not ignore it any longer. The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must rec­og­nize that fail­ure to stand up for reli­gious minori­ties any­where is a threat to them every­where. Inac­tion cre­ates prece­dent and embold­ens dic­ta­tors.” One of the authors, Chris­tos, is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
    • Chi­na ambas­sador makes veiled threat to Hong Kong-based Cana­di­ans (Helen David­son, The Guardian): “Cana­da is among sev­er­al coun­tries that sus­pend­ed extra­di­tion agree­ments with Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s impo­si­tion of a sweep­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty law in June. Dozens of MPs recent­ly called for Cana­da to offer ‘safe har­bour’ to pro-democ­ra­cy pro­test­ers flee­ing Hong Kong, prompt­ing the warn­ing from Cong.”
    • Relat­ed from a few weeks ago: ‘You will be put into deten­tion’: For­mer ABC bureau chief tells sto­ry of flee­ing Chi­na for first time (Matthew Car­ney, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “We were instruct­ed to report to a facil­i­ty in north Bei­jing and told to bring my daugh­ter Yas­mine, who was 14 at the time, as she was now part of the inves­ti­ga­tion. This felt like a line in the sand for me. I could not accept that they would involve my chil­dren. At the same time I was fright­ened. It felt like part of the Chi­nese play­book: to go after fam­i­ly mem­bers as a way to exact pun­ish­ment and revenge.”
  5. ‘Hand­maid’ real­i­ty: Deeply reli­gious mar­riages have more spousal equal­i­ty (New York Post): “Reli­gious, home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples also report greater rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, and they are three times more like­ly than less-reli­gious peers to report a sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship. The women don’t appear to be repressed; in fact, they’re gen­er­al­ly more like­ly to say they’re hap­py and that their life has mean­ing and pur­pose.” And yet again research con­firms Bib­li­cal pre­cepts. Allow me to take his oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer a friend­ly pas­toral reminder to mar­ry anoth­er Chris­t­ian, should you mar­ry. 
    • Why Only Amy Coney Bar­rett Gets to Have It All (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “…to set the record straight, on hand­maids and beyond, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians must do their part to imag­ine a broad­er and more human­iz­ing vision for women’s place in the pub­lic square. Chris­tian­i­ty has always con­tained a lib­er­a­to­ry seed: one that tells women that the human desire to work, cre­ate and shape insti­tu­tions is as impor­tant, even as holy, as their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren. If Chris­tians don’t like the hand­maid stereo­types, now is the time to be clear on all that Chris­t­ian women can do and be.”
  6. How Chris­tians Should Think About Vot­ing (Michael & Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “When you vote in an elec­tion, with the excep­tion of a write-in bal­lot, you are not vot­ing for your dream can­di­date. Your vote is not an unmedi­at­ed expres­sion of your iden­ti­ty, your vote is a choice between options you did not choose your­self. If you view your vote as an unmedi­at­ed, pure expres­sion of your will, it can be debil­i­tat­ing.” The author is a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer. The arti­cle itself is very non­par­ti­san. 
    • Lati­no, Evan­gel­i­cal and Polit­i­cal­ly Home­less (Jen­nifer Med­i­na, New York Times): “When Pas­tor Rivera looks at his con­gre­ga­tion of 200 fam­i­lies he sees a micro­cosm of the Lati­no vote in the Unit­ed States: how com­plex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solid­i­fy cru­cial sup­port can fall short. There are not clear ide­o­log­i­cal lines here between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives. Peo­ple care about immi­gra­tion, but are equal­ly con­cerned about reli­gious lib­er­ty and abor­tion.”
    • Putting this one here is kind of cheat­ing, but I like hav­ing only 7 major top­ics. This is polit­i­cal enough that I’m jus­ti­fy­ing it to myself. The 1619 Chron­i­cles (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Jour­nal­ists are, most often, in the busi­ness of writ­ing the first rough draft of his­to­ry, not try­ing to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a low­er­case t, fol­low­ing evi­dence in direc­tions unseen, not the capital‑T truth of a pre-estab­lished nar­ra­tive in which incon­ve­nient facts get dis­card­ed.”
    • How the 1619 Project took over 2020 (Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Han­nah-Jones has fierce­ly defend­ed the 1619 Project. But today, she acknowl­edges that for all the experts she con­sult­ed, she should have sat down with addi­tion­al schol­ars with par­tic­u­lar focus on colo­nial his­to­ry, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and the Civ­il War, to bet­ter reflect the con­tention in the field.”
  7. For­get What Gen­der Activists Tell You. Here’s What Med­ical Tran­si­tion Looks Like (Scott New­gent, Quil­lette): “I write all this as a 47-year-old trans­gen­der man who tran­si­tioned five years ago. I’m also a par­ent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good inten­tions of par­ents who seek to sup­port their chil­dren, I have seri­ous con­cerns about reck­less acqui­es­cence to a child’s Inter­net-medi­at­ed self-diag­no­sis. Many old­er trans­gen­der folks share these con­cerns, too.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Religion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65. First shared in vol­ume 195.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 264

sub­stan­tive pieces this week, plus reli­gious argu­ments for and against both Biden and Trump

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 always, just skim and open the links that seem inter­est­ing to you in new tabs.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chal­lenge of Marx­ism (Yoram Hazony, Quil­lette): “Not very long ago, most of us liv­ing in free soci­eties knew that Marx­ism was not com­pat­i­ble with democ­ra­cy…. Indeed, the entire pur­pose of demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment, with its plu­ral­i­ty of legit­i­mate par­ties, is to avoid the vio­lent recon­sti­tu­tion of soci­ety that Marx­ist polit­i­cal the­o­ry regards as the only rea­son­able aim of pol­i­tics.”
  2. The par­ti­cle col­lec­tion that fan­cied itself a physi­cist (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Democritus’s point is that if the atom­ist says both that atoms are all that exist and that col­or, sweet­ness, etc. and the oth­er qual­i­ties of con­scious expe­ri­ence are not to be found in the atoms, then we have a para­dox.” Fes­er, as I’ve men­tioned before, is one of my favorite philoso­phers.
  3. Anti-racist Argu­ments Are Tear­ing Peo­ple Apart (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “I made a series of rapid assump­tions about what I was watch­ing. I sur­mised that Broshi was a col­lege-edu­cat­ed, upper-mid­dle-class pro­gres­sive who sits on some sort of edu­ca­tion coun­cil in the pub­lic-school sys­tem and owns copies of White Fragili­ty and How to Be an Antiracist. I sur­mised that she was call­ing some­one out. And I sur­mised that her white, male tar­get was off­screen rolling his eyes. All of which turned out to be cor­rect.” This is amaz­ing.
    • Relat­ed: Why we can­not ignore Insti­tu­tion­al Racism (George Yancey, Patheos): “Pre­tend that we are going to have a mile race a year from now. I tell a third of the class about the race and hire a train­er for them. For anoth­er third of the class I tell them about the race six months lat­er but do not hire them a train­er. But I do advise them that they may want to work on their own to get ready for the race. The last third of the class I call them the morn­ing of the race and tell them that it is time to run. Assum­ing that the class is ran­dom­ly divid­ed into thirds, we know what will hap­pen in the race do we not?”
    • Relat­ed: Black and White evan­gel­i­cals once talked about ‘racial rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.’ Then Trump came along. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…despite shared Chris­t­ian beliefs and com­mit­ment to reli­gious obser­vance, White evan­gel­i­cals are among the most strong­ly Repub­li­can con­stituen­cies, while Black Protes­tants tend to vote Demo­c­ra­t­ic. And that divide appears to have grown hard­er to bridge since Trump took office.”
    • Col­leges aren’t report­ing anti-Semi­tism as a crime (Aiden Pink, For­ward): “A For­ward analy­sis com­par­ing news reports of cam­pus anti­semitism between 2016 and 2018 to the fil­ings for those years found that few­er than half of the inci­dents that could have been report­ed as hate crimes actu­al­ly were. Out of a total of 158 inci­dents at 64 schools, 93 — includ­ing anti­se­mit­ic van­dal­ism at brand-name schools known for vibrant Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties like Har­vard, Prince­ton, MIT, UCLA and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land — were left out of the fed­er­al fil­ings.” Stan­ford comes off look­ing pret­ty good in this arti­cle. 
  4. The Amer­i­can Mis­un­der­stand­ing of Nat­ur­al Rights (Cameron Hilditch, Nation­al Review): “Our inher­i­tance of human rights was built to reflect the fact that we are all liv­ing images of a par­tic­u­lar cru­ci­fied crim­i­nal from Galilee, who pro­claimed that we are each and all more than what Cae­sar would make of us. If we care to enjoy the rights bequeathed to us by this tra­di­tion through­out the com­ing years, decades, and cen­turies, then we can no longer avoid pub­licly dis­cussing the inex­tri­ca­ble nature of reli­gious and polit­i­cal ideas.” 
    • Relat­ed: Is Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian Jurispru­dence a Thing? (Steven D. Smith, Law & Lib­er­ty): “Tak­en togeth­er, these assump­tions gen­er­ate an over­all atti­tude toward the project of law that resists oppos­ing extremes: on the one hand, an exces­sive or decon­struc­tive cynicism—one that would reduce the law to sim­ply a man­i­fes­ta­tion of pow­er based on class, race, or gender—and on the oth­er hand a dan­ger­ous utopi­anism that would use law to achieve per­fect jus­tice but end up destroy­ing human free­dom.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego. 
    • Relat­ed. Ish. The end of sec­u­lar­ism is nigh (Tom Hol­land, UnHerd): “That there exist­ed things called ‘reli­gions’ — ‘Hin­duism’, ‘Islam’, ‘Judaism’ ­— and that these func­tioned in a dimen­sion dis­tinct from entire spheres of human activ­i­ty — spheres called ‘sec­u­lar’ in Eng­lish — was not a con­vic­tion native to any­where except for West­ern Europe.”
  5. Chi­na’s Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance State Goes Glob­al (Ross Ander­sen, The Atlantic): “In the ear­ly aughts, the Chi­nese tele­com titan ZTE sold Ethiopia a wire­less net­work with built-in back­door access for the gov­ern­ment. In a lat­er crack­down, dis­si­dents were round­ed up for bru­tal inter­ro­ga­tions, dur­ing which they were played audio from recent phone calls they’d made. Today, Kenya, Ugan­da, and Mau­ri­tius are out­fit­ting major cities with Chi­nese-made sur­veil­lance net­works.” I think hor­ri­fy­ing might be the best word for this arti­cle. 
  6. On pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics and Chris­tian­i­ty:
    • From the right: Let­ter to an Anti-Trump Chris­t­ian Friend (Wayne Gru­dem, Town­Hall): “In every col­umn that I’ve pub­lished in sup­port of Trump, I have explic­it­ly reg­is­tered my dis­ap­proval of his char­ac­ter flaws and pre­vi­ous immoral behav­ior. I sup­port him because of the poli­cies he has enact­ed and will enact, and in spite of his char­ac­ter flaws (which I don’t think rise to a lev­el that would dis­qual­i­fy him from being pres­i­dent; more on this below).” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Phoenix Sem­i­nary.
    •  From the left: The Joe Biden that I know is a man of faith (Chris Coons, Fox News): “For Democ­rats like Joe and me, tak­ing care of the plan­et isn’t just about ris­ing sea lev­els and extreme weath­er, it’s also about pro­tect­ing and hon­or­ing God’s cre­ation. For Democ­rats like Joe and me, fight­ing for civ­il rights and equal­i­ty isn’t just about polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, it’s about lov­ing our neigh­bor and rec­og­niz­ing that all of us are cre­at­ed equal in the eyes of God.” The author is a US Sen­a­tor.
    • A crit­i­cism of the right: Why Evan­gel­i­cals Sup­port Trump—and Why They Shouldn’t (George Yancey, The Bul­wark): “Many evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians see Trump as some­one who will save them from Chris­tianopho­bia. And while I under­stand and respect the nature of these Chris­tians’ fears—in fact, I share them—I believe that Trump is not only not a solu­tion to these issues but in the long run he will make things worse.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Bay­lor.
    • A crit­i­cism of the left: Devout Catholics and Sec­u­lar Pro­gres­sives (Robert George, First Things): this one is dif­fi­cult to excerpt. Very well done. The author is a pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton. 

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 God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a stu­dent brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm (sad­ly irrel­e­vant for that pur­pose at the moment). First shared in vol­ume 181.

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.