Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 256

FYI, I offer some of my own thoughts on police towards the end.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Rebel Physi­cist Try­ing to Fix Quan­tum Mechan­ics (Bob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Bassi is a prac­tic­ing Catholic and a believ­er in God, some­thing he says is ‘unusu­al’ but ‘not rare” among his col­leagues at the uni­ver­si­ty. Ein­stein called his own belief that real­i­ty could be under­stood ‘reli­gion,’ and I won­dered if there’s a con­nec­tion between Bassi’s reli­gious faith and that in what has become essen­tial­ly a far-right posi­tion in physics.” I have no opin­ion on the under­ly­ing sci­en­tif­ic con­tro­ver­sy, but Bassi sounds like a fas­ci­nat­ing per­son.
  2. What the Tent­mak­ing Busi­ness Was Real­ly Like for the Apos­tle Paul (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “[It] cost the Apos­tle Paul to write his let­ters, includ­ing the secur­ing of mate­ri­als and the hir­ing of a sec­re­tary to make a copy for him­self. After exten­sive research and cal­cu­la­tion, he deter­mined that on the low side it would have cost him at least $2,000 in today’s cur­ren­cy to write 1 Corinthi­ans. (And that doesn’t include the cost of send­ing some­one like Titus on a long jour­ney to deliv­er it.)” Short and fas­ci­nat­ing.
  3. The Tempt­ing of Neil Gor­such (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We may offi­cial­ly have three branch­es of gov­ern­ment, but Amer­i­cans seem to accept that it’s more like 2.25: A pres­i­den­cy that acts uni­lat­er­al­ly when­ev­er pos­si­ble, a high court that checks the White House and set­tles cul­ture wars, and a Con­gress that occa­sion­al­ly bestirs itself to pass a bud­get.”
  4. Reli­gious Amer­i­cans Have Less Pos­i­tive Atti­tudes Toward Sci­ence, But This Does Not Extend to Oth­er Cul­tures (Jonathon McPhetres, Jonathan Jong & Miron Zuck­er­man, Social Psy­cho­log­i­cal and Per­son­al­i­ty Sci­ence): “It is com­mon­ly claimed that sci­ence and reli­gion are log­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly at odds with one anoth­er. How­ev­er, pre­vi­ous stud­ies have main­ly exam­ined Amer­i­can sam­ples…” Raw data at https://osf.io/t7w6x/ DOI 10.1177/1948550620923239. The authors are pro­fes­sors at MIT, Oxford, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.
  5. “He’s the Cho­sen One to Run Amer­i­ca”: Inside the Cult of Trump, His Ral­lies Are Church and He Is the Gospel (Jeff Sharlet, Van­i­ty Fair): “Non­be­liev­ers roll their eyes over what they see as the gob­s­mack­ing hypocrisy of Trump as a tri­bune of fam­i­ly val­ues, the dopi­ness of the rubes who con­sid­er him a moral man. Non­be­liev­ers, in oth­er words, miss the point. They lack gno­sis. Very few believ­ers deny Trump’s sor­did past. Some turn to the old Chris­t­ian ready-made of redemp­tion: Their man was lost, but now he’s found. Oth­ers love him pre­cise­ly because he is a sinner—if a man of such vast, crass, and open appetites can embody the nation (and real­ly, who is more American—vast, crass, and open—than Trump), then you too, stu­dent of porn, mon­ster truck lover, ulti­mate fight­er in your dreams and games, can claim an anoint­ing.” The title filled me with low expec­ta­tions, but the arti­cle has some inter­est­ing reflec­tions on Gnos­ti­cism in mod­ern Amer­i­ca. 
  6. On reli­gious lib­er­ty:
    • The True Extent of Reli­gious Lib­er­ty in Amer­i­ca, Explained (David French, The Dis­patch): “Yes, it is true that in some respects reli­gious lib­er­ty is ‘under siege.’ There are activists and law­mak­ers who want to push back at mul­ti­ple doc­trines and some rad­i­cals even dream of revok­ing tax exemp­tions from reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions that main­tain tra­di­tion­al teach­ings on sex and gen­der. But if the siege is real, then so is the citadel. Peo­ple of faith in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca enjoy more lib­er­ty and more real polit­i­cal pow­er than any faith com­mu­ni­ty in the devel­oped world.” This is real­ly good.
    • No Longer a Lux­u­ry – Reli­gious Lib­er­ty is a Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Pri­or­i­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, Prov­i­dence): “…increas­es in reli­gious lib­er­ty are asso­ci­at­ed with robust increas­es in human flour­ish­ing even after con­trol­ling for dif­fer­ences in gross domes­tic prod­uct, the labor force, and mea­sures of eco­nom­ic free­dom. For exam­ple, mov­ing a coun­try that ranks in reli­gious lib­er­ty along the lines of Rus­sia to one that ranks clos­er to the Unit­ed States amounts to an 11 per­cent increase in the share of indi­vid­u­als who say that they are thriv­ing.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
    • Torah Is the Air We Breathe (Gil Stu­dent, First Things): “But our spir­i­tu­al­ly impov­er­ished soci­ety views reli­gious prac­tices as mere­ly cul­tur­al expres­sions. It views reli­gious ser­vices as equiv­a­lent to yoga class­es and book club meet­ings. It does not see reli­gion as essen­tial, and there­fore can­not under­stand that Jews don’t serve God as part of our lives; rather, we live to serve God.”
  7. On race, police, and protests
    • Above the Law: The Data Are In on Police, Killing, and Race (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “…police killings have made up about one out of every twelve vio­lent deaths of Amer­i­cans between 2010 and 2018. That’s includ­ing Amer­i­can mil­i­tary deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and else­where dur­ing that win­dow. Indeed, more Amer­i­cans died at the hands of police offi­cers dur­ing that peri­od (about 14,400) than died while on active mil­i­tary duty (about 9,400). Police vio­lence in Amer­i­ca is extra­or­di­nary in its inten­si­ty. It is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the actu­al threats fac­ing police offi­cers, and it has risen sig­nif­i­cant­ly in recent years with­out appar­ent jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.”
    • Jew­ish busi­ness­es in Los Ange­les ran­sacked in riots, but only Israeli and Jew­ish media care (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “The Ore­gon­ian called riot-plagued Port­land ‘a city of ply­wood.’ Since then, images have emerged of a dark­er nar­ra­tive, with riot­ers tar­get­ing Jew­ish busi­ness­es. Israeli news­pa­pers ran with this angle this past Sat­ur­day, but by the end of the day, there was noth­ing about the Jew­ish van­dal­ism to be found on the New York Times web­site. Usu­al­ly the Times is pret­ty up on anti-Semi­tism, but it was eas­i­er to find a piece about Anna Win­tour than any men­tions of van­dal­ized Jews.”
    • How Jesus became white — and why it’s time to can­cel that (Emi­ly McFar­lan Miller, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Ander­son said that it has been com­mon for peo­ple to depict Jesus as a mem­ber of their cul­ture or their eth­nic group. ‘If a per­son thinks that’s the only pos­si­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jesus, then that’s where the prob­lem starts,’ he said.” It’s almost like por­tray­ing God visu­al­ly leads to trou­ble. I wish God had thought to warn against that.
    • Reflec­tions from a Chris­t­ian schol­ar on Social Jus­tice, Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry, Marx­ism, and Bib­li­cal Ethics (Kel­ly Ham­ren, Face­book): “I have two Eng­lish degrees (B.A. and M.A.) from a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty and a Ph.D. in lit­er­a­ture and crit­i­cism from a state uni­ver­si­ty. In my field, Marx­ism is one of the most com­mon­ly stud­ied and most influ­en­tial per­spec­tives, and Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry is also a sig­nif­i­cant force and gain­ing momen­tum.… my stud­ies have con­vinced me that the suf­fer­ings and deaths of mil­lions are not only cor­re­lat­ed with but large­ly caused by the Marx­ist-Lenin­ist agen­da, and I am there­fore deeply opposed to Marx­ism as a frame­work. I hope that, know­ing this, those patient enough to read these notes will acquit me of being a clos­et Marx­ist cov­er­ing a sec­u­lar agen­da with a veneer of Bible vers­es.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Law pro­fes­sor’s response to stu­dent offend­ed by their shirt (Patri­cia Leary, Imgur): “Premise: You are not pay­ing for my opin­ion. Cri­tique: You are not pay­ing me to pre­tend I don’t have one.” Two com­ments: first, this is a few years old. Sec­ond, ini­tial­ly looks made-up but checks out. The author is a pro­fes­sor at Whit­ti­er Law School: Law pro­fes­sor responds to stu­dents who com­plained about her Black Lives Mat­ter shirt (Scott Jaschik, Inside High­er Ed) 
    • The New Truth (Jacob Siegel, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What we are wit­ness­ing, in the rapid­ly trans­form­ing norms around race, sex, and gen­der, is not an argu­ment at all but a rev­o­lu­tion in moral sen­ti­ment. In all rev­o­lu­tions, the new thing strug­gling to be born makes use of the old sys­tem in order to over­throw it. At present, insti­tu­tions like the uni­ver­si­ty, the press, and the med­ical pro­fes­sion pre­serve the appear­ance of rea­son, empiri­cism, and argu­ment while alter­ing, through edict and coer­cion, the mean­ing of essen­tial terms in the moral lex­i­con, like fair­ness, equal­i­ty, friend­ship, and love.”
    • His­to­ry Shows Free Speech Is The Los­er In Mob Action (Jonathan Tur­ley, per­son­al blog): “What will be left when objec­tion­able pub­lic art and aca­d­e­mics are scrubbed from view? The silence that fol­lows may be com­fort­ing to those who want to remove images or ideas that cause unease. His­to­ry has shown, how­ev­er, that ortho­doxy is nev­er sat­is­fied with silence. It demands speech. Once all the offend­ing stat­ues are down, and all the offend­ing pro­fes­sors are culled, the appetite for col­lec­tive sup­pres­sion will become a demand for col­lec­tive expres­sion.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Of Stat­ues and Sym­bol­ic Mur­der (Wil­fred M. McClay, First Things): “…a great many of the foot sol­diers in this move­ment are young, white, sub­ur­ban, mid­dle-class and col­lege-edu­cat­ed; and that they are work­ing out their sal­va­tion with fear and trem­bling and a dead­ly earnest­ness. The ‘white priv­i­lege’ of which these young peo­ple com­plain is a pro­jec­tion onto oth­ers of the very con­di­tion that they sus­pect and fear in them­selves. Hence the con­vul­sive rage, com­plete with copi­ous gut­ter pro­fan­i­ty, which we have all seen in videos of them. Peo­ple in the grip of such pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal forces will go a long way to expi­ate for their exis­ten­tial sins and rid them­selves of their demons. They are eas­i­ly mobi­lized by oth­ers. Accord­ing to Pew esti­mates, only one out of six Black Lives Mat­ter activists is actu­al­ly black.”
      1. Relat­ed to the last sen­tence: George Floyd Pro­test­er Demo­graph­ics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities (Mobile­Wal­la report) has bar charts based on sur­veilling the cell phones of peo­ple at the protests and infer­ring their demo­graph­ics the way mar­keters do. 
    • A Min­neapo­lis Neigh­bor­hood Vowed to Check Its Priv­i­lege. It’s Already Being Test­ed. (Caitlin Dick­er­son, New York Times): “The impulse many white Pow­der­horn Park res­i­dents have to seek help from com­mu­ni­ty groups rather than from the police is being felt in neigh­bor­hoods across the coun­try. But some are find­ing the com­mit­ment hard to stand by when faced with the com­plex real­i­ties of life. While friends, neigh­bors and even fam­i­ly mem­bers in Pow­der­horn Park agree to avoid call­ing the police at all costs, it has been hard­er to estab­lish where to draw the line.” Read through to the insane final sto­ry. 
    • I don’t often insert my own com­men­tary in these emails, but in this case I’d like to high­light a Bib­li­cal per­spec­tive.
      1. The Bible teach­es that one of the rea­sons that God gives gov­ern­ments author­i­ty is for them to use vio­lence in the pur­suit of jus­tice. Romans 13:4 is key: “the one in author­i­ty is God’s ser­vant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no rea­son. They are God’s ser­vants, agents of wrath to bring pun­ish­ment on the wrong­do­er.”
      2. We have free­dom in how we choose to do that as a soci­ety — the Bible does not require that we use police or that we build pris­ons. Hav­ing said that, if we abol­ish domes­tic law enforce­ment then the only alter­na­tives I see are the mil­i­tary, pri­vate busi­ness­es that offer pro­tec­tion for a fee, sanc­tioned vig­i­lan­tism, or mob jus­tice. These are not appeal­ing options. Some com­bi­na­tion of unbundling police work, reduc­ing crim­i­nal laws while rethink­ing the sanc­tions for vio­lat­ing them, and increas­ing police pay while impos­ing high­er stan­dards for police con­duct seems like a bet­ter path for­ward.

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 When Chil­dren Say They’re Trans (Jesse Sin­gal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a con­nec­tion between social influ­ences and gender-identity explo­ration among ado­les­cents would require ignor­ing a lot of what we know about the devel­op­ing teenage brain—which is more sus­cep­ti­ble to peer influ­ence, more impul­sive, and less adept at weigh­ing long-term out­comes and con­se­quences than ful­ly devel­oped adult brains—as well as indi­vid­ual sto­ries like Delta’s.” This is a long and bal­anced piece which has gar­nered out­rage in some online cir­cles. First shared in vol­ume 157.

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.

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Order & Method

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through an anno­tat­ed trans­la­tion of Pas­cal’s Pensees called Chris­tian­i­ty For Mod­ern Pagans, I’ll post the thoughts I’m email­ing the stu­dents here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2020. The read­ing sched­ule is online.

The theme that seems most impor­tant to me from this first week’s read­ings (the pref­ace and the chap­ters Order & Method) is the need to under­stand the heart behind some­one’s skep­ti­cism. We must gen­uine­ly love our skep­ti­cal friends if we are to per­suade them.

Their intel­lec­tu­al ques­tions are real and have to be answered hon­est­ly, but the cries of the heart (Chris­tian­i­ty is intol­er­ant, faith is for igno­rant peo­ple, becom­ing a Chris­t­ian would make me into some­one I would­n’t like, fol­low­ing Jesus would mean aban­don­ing fun) are far more impor­tant.

I find when I speak with unbe­liev­ers on cam­pus their first ques­tions to me are often tests: they want to see how I respond to pure­ly intel­lec­tu­al inquiries before they begin rais­ing the issues that real­ly keep them from faith. And some­times they don’t even know the real rea­sons they won’t con­sid­er Chris­tian­i­ty. A reply I’ve found help­ful is, “I’ll answer your ques­tion as best I can, but I’m curi­ous: if I answer it to your sat­is­fac­tion will you seri­ous­ly con­sid­er becom­ing a Chris­t­ian? If not, what would still hold you back?”

What do you think Stan­ford stu­dents’ biggest heart objec­tions are to Chris­tian­i­ty? I’m curi­ous what you notice as you speak with your friends.

And now a few excerpts from the read­ing I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed:

In the past, the dif­fi­cul­ty in accept­ing Chris­tian­i­ty was its sec­ond point, sal­va­tion. Every­one in pre­mod­ern soci­eties knew sin was real, but many doubt­ed sal­va­tion. Today it is the exact oppo­site: every­body is saved, but there is no sin to be saved from. Thus what orig­i­nal­ly came into the world as “good news” strikes the mod­ern mind as bad news, as guilt-rid­den, moral­is­tic and “judg­men­tal”. (page 26, Kreeft’s com­men­tary on pensee 6)

Page 26 (from Kreeft’s com­men­tary on pensee 6)

If he exalts him­self, I hum­ble him.
If he hum­bles him­self, I exalt him.
And I go on con­tra­dict­ing him
Until he under­stands
That he is a mon­ster that pass­es all under­stand­ing.

Page 37 (Pas­cal speak­ing, pensee 130)

When we want to cor­rect some­one use­ful­ly and show him he is wrong, we must see from what point of view he is approach­ing the mat­ter, for it is usu­al­ly right from that point of view, and we must admit this, but show him the point of view from which it is wrong. This will please him, because he will see that he was not wrong but mere­ly failed to see every aspect of the ques­tion.

Page 39 (Pas­cal speak­ing, pensee 701)

Our reli­gion is wise and fool­ish: wise, because it is the most learned and most strong­ly based on mir­a­cles, prophe­cies, etc., fool­ish, because it is not all this which makes peo­ple belong to it. . . . What makes them believe is the Cross. . . . And so St. Paul, who came with wis­dom and signs, said that he came with nei­ther wis­dom nor signs, for he came to con­vert, but those who come only to con­vince may say they come with wis­dom and signs.

Page 42 (Pas­cal speak­ing, pensee 842)

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 254

The less time­ly stuff is up top this time and there are a lot of mag­ic videos at the bot­tom.

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 Unites Most Grad­u­ates of Selec­tive Col­leges? An Intact Fam­i­ly (Nicholas Zill & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “… even after con­trol­ling for par­ent edu­ca­tion, fam­i­ly income, and stu­dent race and eth­nic­i­ty, being raised by one’s mar­ried birth par­ents pro­vides an addi­tion­al boost to one’s chances of get­ting through Prince­ton.”
  2. What Chris­tians Must Remem­ber about Nuclear Weapons and Arms Con­trol (Peter Feaver & William Inbo­den & Michael Singh, Prov­i­dence): “Before embrac­ing calls for the abo­li­tion of nuclear weapons, thought­ful Chris­tians must con­front two uncom­fort­able facts. First, we live in a fall­en world in which the threats we face are chang­ing, and arguably grow­ing. Sec­ond, the enve­lope of peace and secu­ri­ty in which free soci­eties have thrived for the past eight decades is not self-sustaining—one need only view the recent decline of democ­ra­cies and rise of author­i­tar­i­an threats from Rus­sia and Chi­na. One can detest nuclear weapons and still see their strate­gic val­ue.” The authors are, respec­tive­ly, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Duke, a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at UT Austin, and a senior fel­low at a think­tank.
  3. Peer Review (Rod­ney Brooks, per­son­al blog): “I came to real­ize that the editor’s job was real, and it required me to deeply under­stand the top­ic of the paper, and the bias­es of the review­ers, and not to treat the ref­er­ees as hav­ing the right to deter­mine the fate of the paper them­selves. As an edi­tor I had to add judge­ment to the process at many steps along the way, and to strive for the process to improve the papers, but also to let in ideas that were new.” The author is a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of robot­ics at MIT.
  4. JK Rowl­ing Writes about Her Rea­sons for Speak­ing out on Sex and Gen­der Issues (JK Rowl­ing, per­son­al blog): “…I refuse to bow down to a move­ment that I believe is doing demon­stra­ble harm in seek­ing to erode ‘woman’ as a polit­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal class and offer­ing cov­er to preda­tors like few before it.”
  5. More on the NY Times tan­gle last week and what it reveals about our soci­ety
    • Amer­i­ca is chang­ing, and so is the media (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The news media likes to pre­tend that it sim­ply holds up a mir­ror to Amer­i­ca as it is. We don’t want to be seen as actors craft­ing the polit­i­cal debate, agents who make deci­sions that shape the bound­aries of the nation­al dis­course. We are, of course. We always have been.”
    • The Still-Vital Case for Lib­er­al­ism in a Rad­i­cal Age (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “…it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing author­i­tar­i­an racism is far more impor­tant to the con­clu­sion that left-wing illib­er­al­ism is com­plete­ly unim­por­tant. One can oppose dif­fer­ent evils, even those evils aligned against each oth­er, with­out assign­ing them equal weight.”
    • Why every­one hates the main­stream media (Andrew Pot­ter, Pol­i­cy for Pan­demics): “It’s not a coin­ci­dence that lawyers, jour­nal­ists, and politi­cians are rou­tine­ly ranked as the most dis­liked pro­fes­sions in the world. It’s because the law is not about jus­tice, pol­i­tics is not about democ­ra­cy, and the news is not about infor­ma­tion. But in each case, that is what emerges, by har­ness­ing the sta­tus-con­scious com­pet­i­tive natures of the par­tic­i­pants.” The author is a for­mer jour­nal­ist and edi­tor.
  6. Thoughts on race and racism:
    • George Floyd and Me (Shai Linn, Gospel Coali­tion): “Though I’m deeply griev­ed, I am not with­out hope. Per­son­al­ly, I have lit­tle con­fi­dence in our gov­ern­ment or pol­i­cy­mak­ers to change the sys­temic fac­tors that con­tributed to the George Floyd sit­u­a­tion. But my hope isn’t in the gov­ern­ment. My hope is in the Lord.”
    • Amer­i­can Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go (David French, The Dis­patch): “If polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect pro­gres­sives are often guilty of over-racial­iz­ing Amer­i­can pub­lic dis­course, and they are, polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect con­ser­v­a­tives com­mit the oppo­site sin—and they fil­ter out or angri­ly reject all the infor­ma­tion that con­tra­dicts their the­sis.”
    • This moment cries out for us to con­front race in Amer­i­ca (Con­doleez­za Rice, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Still, we sim­ply must acknowl­edge that soci­ety is not col­or-blind and prob­a­bly nev­er will be. Progress comes when peo­ple treat one anoth­er with respect, as if we were col­or-blind. Unless and until we are hon­est that race is still an anchor around our country’s neck, that shad­ow will nev­er be lift­ed. Our coun­try has a birth defect: Africans and Euro­peans came to this coun­try togeth­er — but one group was in chains.” She is, of course, a fel­low believ­er and also a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who will soon be the direc­tor of the Hoover Insti­tu­tion. 
    • Our Present Moment: Why Is It So Hard? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I’m think­ing more broad­ly about why race in this coun­try is so dif­fi­cult, and in par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cult even between peo­ple of good will, between peo­ple in your church of a dif­fer­ent col­or. I’m think­ing about peo­ple who agree on so many oth­er things. And you sing the same songs and you real­ly love Jesus togeth­er. And you read the same Bible, and you real­ly are togeth­er for the gospel. So why is it so divi­sive?” Some real­ly good thoughts in here.
  7. On the protests
    • The protests start­ed out look­ing like 1968. They turned into 1964. (Omar Wasow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al move­ment try­ing to draw atten­tion to the long his­to­ry of racist and bru­tal polic­ing, non­vi­o­lence in the face of police repres­sion is an exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult strat­e­gy to sus­tain. Evi­dence from the 1960s, how­ev­er — and per­haps this month, too — sug­gests using such tac­tics to gen­er­ate media cov­er­age of a press­ing social prob­lem can be a pow­er­ful tool for build­ing a coali­tion for social change.”
    • We often accuse the right of dis­tort­ing sci­ence. But the left changed the coro­n­avirus nar­ra­tive overnight (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, The Guardian): “Two weeks ago we shamed peo­ple for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.”
    • Trib­al­ism Comes for Pan­dem­ic Sci­ence (Yuval Levin, The New Atlantis): “These pub­lic health pro­fes­sion­als are sim­ply admit­ting that their views on the health risks of large gath­er­ings depend on the polit­i­cal valence of those gath­er­ings. Rather than com­part­men­tal­ize their pro­fes­sion­al judg­ment from their polit­i­cal pri­or­i­ties — explain­ing the risks of large protests regard­less of their polit­i­cal con­tent and then sep­a­rate­ly and in a dif­fer­ent con­text express­ing what­ev­er views they might have about that con­tent — they open­ly deny not only the pos­si­bil­i­ty but even the desir­abil­i­ty of detached pro­fes­sion­al advice. This kind of atti­tude inevitably makes it much hard­er for the pub­lic to assess sci­en­tif­ic claims about the pan­dem­ic through any­thing oth­er than a polit­i­cal lens.”
    • The Grow­ing CHAZm in Seat­tle (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It took activists less than 24 hours to dis­cov­er that even their make-believe Duchy of Grand Fen­woke relies on the basic build­ing blocks of any poli­ty. If Seattle’s supine and sausage-spined polit­i­cal lead­er­ship allows this exper­i­ment to con­tin­ue, pret­ty soon you can expect the emer­gence of cur­ren­cy, tax­es, even some kind of char­ter or con­sti­tu­tion. It wouldn’t shock me if they end­ed up cre­at­ing rudi­men­ta­ry courts or even a jail.” Gold­berg is an expert at the mean­der­ing rant. 
    • Anar­chy In Seat­tle (Christo­pher Rufo, City Jour­nal): “The Capi­tol Hill Autonomous Zone has set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent: armed left-wing activists have assert­ed their dom­i­nance of the streets and estab­lished an alter­na­tive polit­i­cal author­i­ty over a large sec­tion of a neigh­bor­hood. They have claimed de fac­to police pow­er over thou­sands of res­i­dents and dozens of businesses—completely out­side of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process. In a mat­ter of days, Antifa-affil­i­at­ed para­mil­i­taries have cre­at­ed a hard­ened bor­der, estab­lished a rudi­men­ta­ry form of gov­ern­ment based on prin­ci­ples of inter­sec­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and forcibly removed unfriend­ly media from the ter­ri­to­ry.”
    • A Dark Cloud For Democ­ra­cy (Carl True­man, First Things): “…this does not entire­ly explain why Min­neapo­lis and not Hong Kong has grabbed the imag­i­na­tion of British youth. After all, Hong Kong is a much more recent part of the British nar­ra­tive; one can watch the dis­man­tling of Hong Kong’s con­sti­tu­tion online and on the tele­vi­sion; and an extreme­ly good case can be made that the British gov­ern­ment is more respon­si­ble for that mess and its poten­tial ame­lio­ra­tion than for the chaos in the Min­neapo­lis police depart­ment. After all, the British can actu­al­ly do some­thing about it—as Boris Johnson’s pledge on immi­gra­tion to the U.K. from Hong Kong indi­cates. So why Min­neapo­lis, not Hong Kong?”
    • If we want bet­ter polic­ing, we’re going to have to spend more, not less (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Reform is thus more like­ly to stick if we co-opt the unions rather than try­ing to break them. Instead of ‘defund the police,’ what if we offloaded the non­ju­di­cial parts of their work, like deal­ing with the home­less and the men­tal­ly ill, to social work­ers, and then ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’ to reform the polic­ing part? We could offer a sig­nif­i­cant salary boost in exchange for accept­ing stricter stan­dards and over­sight, which wouldn’t just ease the polit­i­cal obsta­cles, but pos­si­bly attract high­er-qual­i­ty can­di­dates to the police force.”
    • Most Amer­i­cans Want Police Reform But Don’t Back ‘Defund The Police’ (Ariel Edwards-Levy and Kevin Robil­lard, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “A near-uni­ver­sal major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans sup­port at least some changes to polic­ing in the Unit­ed States fol­low­ing the death of George Floyd in the cus­tody of Min­neapo­lis police, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. There is major­i­ty sup­port for pro­pos­als cir­cu­lat­ing in Con­gress to ban choke­holds and make it eas­i­er to track and charge offi­cers accused of mis­con­duct. But the idea of ‘defund­ing the police’ has lit­tle sup­port from the pub­lic.”
    • Police Bru­tal­i­ty: The Fer­gu­son Effect (Robert Ver­bruggen, Nation­al Review): “There’s a temp­ta­tion in some quar­ters to think this issue is like gay mar­riage or mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion, where there’s a turn­ing point in pub­lic opin­ion and a rapid shift in pol­i­cy and then every­one won­ders what the big deal ever was. See, for exam­ple, Tim Alberta’s piece in Politi­co today, which bizarrely claims we may be see­ing the ‘last stand’ of law-and-order Repub­li­cans and draws those two par­al­lels explic­it­ly. But crime isn’t like that. When the streets become unsafe, pub­lic opin­ion shifts back in favor of the folks who stand between the inno­cents and the bad guys.”

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 Prob­lem with Dull Knives: What’s the Defense Depart­ment got to do with Code for Amer­i­ca? (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Medi­um): “I have a dis­tinct mem­o­ry of being a kid in the kitchen with my mom, awk­ward­ly and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous­ly wield­ing a knife, try­ing to cut some tough veg­etable, and defend­ing my actions by say­ing the knife was dull any­way. My mom stopped me and said firm­ly, ‘Jen­ny, a dull knife is much more dan­ger­ous than a sharp knife. You’re strug­gling and using much more force than you should, and that knife is going to end up God Knows Where.’ She was right, of course…. But hav­ing poor tools [for the mil­i­tary] doesn’t make us fight less; it makes us fight bad­ly.” (some empha­sis in the orig­i­nal removed). High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 155.

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 251

Con­cern­ing the ben­e­fits of reli­gion, the virtue of intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty, per­spec­tives on the pan­dem­ic, the glob­al strat­e­gy of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and an unset­tling account of gov­ern­men­tal sur­veil­lance.

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. Reli­gious ser­vices may low­er risk of ‘deaths of despair’ (Chris Sweeney, Har­vard Gazette): “After adjust­ing for numer­ous vari­ables, the study showed that women who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 68 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair com­pared to those nev­er attend­ing ser­vices. Men who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 33 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair.” Those are HUGE reduc­tions!
  2. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • Amid the Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis, a Reg­i­men for Reën­try (Atul Gawande, The New York­er): “But, in the face of enor­mous risks, Amer­i­can hos­pi­tals have learned how to avoid becom­ing sites of spread. When the time is right to light­en up on the lock­down and bring peo­ple back to work, there are wider lessons to be learned from places that nev­er locked down in the first place.” This was quite good.
    • What African Nations Are Teach­ing the West About Fight­ing the Coro­n­avirus (Jina Moore, The New York­er): “Much of what Ger­ca­ma encoun­tered at the air­port had been designed to pre­vent Ebo­la. Since 2018, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of the Con­go, South Sudan’s neigh­bor to the south­west, has been strug­gling with the dis­ease. But local pub­lic-health offi­cials’ quick repur­pos­ing of Ebo­la pro­to­cols and infra­struc­ture impressed Ger­ca­ma, as did the work of rapid-response teams, whom she twice wit­nessed respond to sus­pect­ed coro­n­avirus cas­es dur­ing the week she spent in the coun­try.”
    • A Spec­tac­u­lar­ly Bad Wash­ing­ton Post Sto­ry on Apple and Google’s Expo­sure Noti­fi­ca­tion Project (John Gru­ber, blog): “A Wash­ing­ton Post sto­ry today on Apple and Google’s joint effort on COVID-19 expo­sure noti­fi­ca­tion project, from reporters Reed Alber­got­ti and Drew Har­well, is the worst sto­ry I’ve seen in the Post in mem­o­ry. It’s so atro­cious­ly bad — fac­tu­al­ly wrong and one-sided in opin­ion — that it should be retract­ed.” Ouch. Gru­ber backs it up. 
    • Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis: Ron DeSan­tis Got Flori­da’s COVID-19 Strat­e­gy Right (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “A cou­ple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decid­ed that Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis was a pub­lic men­ace who was going to get Florid­i­ans killed with his lax response to the coro­n­avirus cri­sis…. The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom has begun to change about Flori­da, as the dis­as­ter so wide­ly pre­dict­ed hasn’t mate­ri­al­ized.”
    • As more states reopen, Geor­gia defies pre­dic­tions of coro­n­avirus resur­gence. What’s the les­son for the rest of the coun­try? (Andrew Romano, Yahoo News): “That’s the bal­ance reopen­ing needs to strike if it’s going to work: few­er offi­cial restric­tions in exchange for more indi­vid­ual and com­mu­ni­ty respon­si­bil­i­ty.”
    • A con­trary per­spec­tive: It Sure Seems Like Flori­da And Geor­gia Lied About Their Infec­tion Rates (Luis Pra­da, Cracked): “Flori­da and Geor­gia are petu­lant, enti­tled quar­an­tine pro­test­ers embod­ied as states. Since this all start­ed, both states have been fran­ti­cal­ly search­ing for an excuse to end their quar­an­tines as fast as pos­si­ble and get back to life as usu­al despite a ram­pag­ing virus that’s killing peo­ple.”
    • Mis­sis­sip­pi church destroyed by arson was suing city over safer-at-home order (Ari­an­na Poindex­ter, WLBT TV): “A Mis­sis­sip­pi church at the cen­ter of an arson inves­ti­ga­tion is the same church cur­rent­ly in a bat­tle with city lead­ers over a COVID-19 safer-at-home order. First Pen­te­costal Church in Hol­ly Springs was destroyed by what inves­ti­ga­tors believe is an arson­ist. Inves­ti­ga­tors found graf­fi­ti on pave­ment in the church park­ing lot that reads, ‘Bet you stay home now you hypokrits (sic).’” 
    • Meet the ‘Gang Pas­tor’ Behind Cape Town’s Viral Coro­n­avirus Coop­er­a­tion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We reg­u­lar­ly stop while we are work­ing to invite peo­ple to fol­low Jesus. I’ve lost track, but maybe 5,000 to 10,000 have told us they’ve repent­ed and are turn­ing to fol­low Jesus. But I don’t call this suc­cess, it is just a small piece in the over­all cause of what we Chris­tians are called to do.”
    • Don­ald Trump Does­n’t Want Author­i­ty (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Great men and bad men alike seek atten­tion as a means of get­ting pow­er, but our pres­i­dent is inter­est­ed in pow­er only as a means of get­ting atten­tion.”
  3. Uncer­tain­ty (Howard Marks, Oak­tree Cap­i­tal): “The peo­ple who are always sure are no more help­ful than the peo­ple who are nev­er sure. The real expert’s con­fi­dence is rea­son-based and pro­por­tion­al to the weight of the evi­dence.” Shared by an alum­nus’ father.
  4. China’s Plans to Win Con­trol of the Glob­al Order (Tan­ner Greer, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “As Bei­jing sees it, China’s suc­cess depends on dis­cred­it­ing the tenets of lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism so that notions like indi­vid­ual free­dom and con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy come to be seen as the relics of an obso­lete sys­tem.” I found this piece to be very insight­ful.
    • Relat­ed: In China’s Cri­sis, Xi Sees a Cru­cible to Strength­en His Rule (Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “Mr. Xi, shaped by his years of adver­si­ty as a young man, has seized on the pan­dem­ic as an oppor­tu­ni­ty in dis­guise — a chance to redeem the par­ty after ear­ly mis­takes let infec­tions slip out of con­trol, and to ral­ly nation­al pride in the face of inter­na­tion­al ire over those mis­takes. And the state pro­pa­gan­da machine is aggres­sive­ly back­ing him up, tout­ing his lead­er­ship in fight­ing the pan­dem­ic.”
    • Relat­ed: Xi’s Regime Recasts Chi­na as the Good Samar­i­tan dur­ing Pan­dem­ic (Alan Dowd, Prov­i­dence): “Add it all up—the PR spin, the pro­pa­gan­da push, the pal­lets of aid, the preening—and in a very real sense, Xi Jinping’s regime is offer­ing a new, twist­ed ver­sion of the Para­ble of the Good Samar­i­tan. In Xi’s retelling, the road­side rob­bers who assault the trav­el­er lat­er return to res­cue him—and some­how expect to be hailed as heroes.”
    • An explo­sive sum­mer of dis­con­tent is brew­ing in Hong Kong (Shibani Mah­tani, Wash­ing­ton Post): “On Tues­day, Hong Kong author­i­ties extend­ed pan­dem­ic-relat­ed rules lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings to effec­tive­ly ban, for the first time, a June 4 vig­il mark­ing the anniver­sary of Chi­na’s mas­sacre of stu­dent demon­stra­tors in Tianan­men Square in 1989.”
    • Chi­na Push­es for New Hong Kong Secu­ri­ty Law (Kei­th Brad­sh­er and Austin Ramzy, New York Times): “The leg­isla­tive push in Bei­jing marks the most aggres­sive step by the par­ty to exert its influ­ence over the for­mer British colony since it was reclaimed by Chi­na in 1997.”
    • Seri­ous­ly — pray for Hong Kong.
  5. A Mis­sis­sip­pi pas­tor with eight kids and no pro­fes­sion­al music back­ground won ‘The Voice’ — and made show his­to­ry (Emi­ly Yahr, Wash­ing­ton Post): ““‘I’ve lit­er­al­ly nev­er per­formed. I just sing at church,’ Tilgh­man explained, intro­duc­ing him­self as a pas­tor. This sparked an attempt to prove who was the biggest church fan; Leg­end revealed his grand­fa­ther was a pas­tor, and Jonas one-upped him by boast­ing his father was a pas­tor.”
  6. Under the Rain­bow Ban­ner (Darel Paul, First Things): “In June 1999, Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton declared the first nation­al Pride Month. Twen­ty years lat­er, June is as teem­ing with rain­bows as Decem­ber is with rein­deer. The Pride flag flies above embassies, state capi­tols, and sta­di­ums. Rain­bow stripes adorn city cross­walks.”
    • In response: Queer Times (Carl True­man, First Things): “The debate over LGBTQ issues is not a debate about sex­u­al behav­ior. I sus­pect it is not real­ly at this point a debate with the L, the G, or the B. It is the T and the Q that are car­ry­ing the day, and we need to under­stand that the debate is about the rad­i­cal abo­li­tion of meta­physics and meta­nar­ra­tives and any notion of cul­tur­al sta­bil­i­ty that might rest there­upon.”
  7. Since I Met Edward Snow­den, I’ve Nev­er Stopped Watch­ing My Back (Bar­ton Gell­man, The Atlantic): “Some­one had tak­en con­trol of my iPad, blast­ing through Apple’s secu­ri­ty restric­tions and acquir­ing the pow­er to rewrite any­thing that the oper­at­ing sys­tem could touch. I dropped the tablet on the seat next to me as if it were con­ta­giou” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Grip­ping and dis­turb­ing.

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 Ian McE­wan ‘dubi­ous’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 250

Prob­a­bly my favorite arti­cle in this bunch is the epi­demi­o­log­i­cal analy­sis of the sev­en dead­ly sins. What a genius idea.

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

Also, this is the 250th of these week­ly roundups I have pub­lished. Even though last week was num­ber 249, I was still sur­prised to type in 250 this week. Some­day I’ll remem­ber a spe­cial num­ber is com­ing up and do some­thing dif­fer­ent for it. But not this day.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Are the Wages of Sin Real­ly Death?: Moral and Epi­demi­o­log­ic Obser­va­tions (David Lyle Jef­frey and Jeff Levin, Chris­t­ian Scholar’s Review): “So, are the wages of sin real­ly death? As far as pop­u­la­tion-health research sug­gests, the answer is a guard­ed yes.” The authors are pro­fes­sors at Bay­lor, one of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and the oth­er of lit­er­a­ture. 
  2. Kids’ TV has a porn prob­lem (Brazy­Day, Medi­um): “In a very real way, the ‘hyper­sex­u­al and tox­ic’ cul­ture that has sprung up around children’s TV car­toons is of com­pa­nies’ own mak­ing. They active­ly allow it to hap­pen sim­ply by doing noth­ing — cre­at­ing a law­less vac­u­um where any­thing goes and porn coex­ists with harm­less fan cre­ations.” This arti­cle was much bet­ter than I expect­ed it to be. 
  3. How We Got the Bible (Dirk Jongkind,Desiring God): “…by under­stand­ing what God had done over the ages, we will see that it is rea­son­able and jus­ti­fied to trust that the Bible in our hands is a trans­la­tion of the trust­wor­thy words of Scrip­ture.” The author is a research fel­low in New Tes­ta­ment text and lan­guage at Tyn­dale House, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. 
  4. The real Lord of the Flies: what hap­pened when six boys were ship­wrecked for 15 months (The Guardian): “The kids agreed to work in teams of two, draw­ing up a strict ros­ter for gar­den, kitchen and guard duty. Some­times they quar­relled, but when­ev­er that hap­pened they solved it by impos­ing a time-out. Their days began and end­ed with song and prayer. Kolo fash­ioned a makeshift gui­tar from a piece of drift­wood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires sal­vaged from their wrecked boat – an instru­ment Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spir­its.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing Twit­ter thread in response by Tan­ner Greer: “Lord of the Flies is one of those nov­els that peo­ple remem­ber wrong. Peo­ple remem­ber its cen­tral theme as ‘take away civ­i­liza­tion, and we all turn into Hobbe­sian lit­tle mon­sters.’ But if you read the book as an adult, instead of an 8th grad­er speed­ing through, you find a dif­fer­ent mean­ing.”
  5. Should Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives Aspire to Noto­ri­ety? (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You don’t go look­ing for pow­er and pres­tige. You aspire to be faith­ful. If pres­tige finds you, then you allow your­self to be extrud­ed into it and pray that God pro­tect you from the spir­i­tu­al dan­gers.” This is essay is part of a swarm of inter­net arti­cles about the tra­jec­to­ry of the mag­a­zine First Things, but you don’t have to read any­thing else about that (or even care much about that) to find this essay worth­while. 
  6. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • “Our reg­u­la­to­ry state is fail­ing us” Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “When the CDC pooh-poohed masks ear­ly on, or botched their test­ing kit there­by delay­ing U.S. test­ing by weeks or maybe months, did the per­ma­nent staff of the CDC rise up and rebel and leak howl­ing protests to the media, real­iz­ing that thou­sands of lives were at stake? That is sure­ly what would hap­pen if say the cur­rent FDA announced it was going to approve thalido­mide.” This is a link to a search result on his blog, keep scrolling after you fin­ish the main arti­cle to see sev­er­al exam­ples of what he is describ­ing. 
    • Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic: A Plea for Gen­eros­i­ty (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “There is a good rea­son to hes­i­tate to judge, name­ly our igno­rance. Plagues are a time for scape­goats and blame-shift­ing pre­cise­ly because they deal out suf­fer­ing such a seem­ing­ly unjust and ran­dom fash­ion. Our lead­ers say they will fol­low the sci­ence, but they can’t, real­ly. With a hereto­fore-unseen virus such as this one, the sci­ence is more like inher­it­ed wis­dom and intu­ition from pre­vi­ous, sim­i­lar mal­adies, at least at the start. What fol­lows is a con­fused rush to catch up through tri­al and error.“
    • The Risks — Know Them — Avoid Them (Erin Bro­mage, per­son­al blog): “I reg­u­lar­ly hear peo­ple wor­ry­ing about gro­cery stores, bike rides, incon­sid­er­ate run­ners who are not wear­ing masks.… are these places of con­cern? Well, not real­ly. Let me explain.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at U Mass who teach­es cours­es on immunol­o­gy and infec­tious dis­ease. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. 
    • No, the super­spread­er choir in Wash­ing­ton does­n’t prove church is dan­ger­ous (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “It’s hard to blame the choir for not tak­ing more pre­cau­tions, as this was March 10, before stuff real­ly hit the fan (and when our gov­ern­ment was still telling peo­ple NOT to wear masks).”
      • This op-ed is based on a CDC inves­ti­ga­tion: “The March 10 choir rehearsal last­ed from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. Sev­er­al mem­bers arrived ear­ly to set up chairs in a large mul­ti­pur­pose room. Chairs were arranged in six rows of 20 chairs each, spaced 6–10 inch­es apart with a cen­ter aisle divid­ing left and right stages.”
    • Lock­down is over. Some­one tell the gov­ern­ment (Dominic Green, Spec­ta­tor USA): “Every soci­ety has react­ed to COVID-19 accord­ing to its prin­ci­ples or, if no prin­ci­ples were to hand, its habits. It has been America’s mis­for­tune that its prin­ci­ples and habits are ill-suit­ed to man­ag­ing an epi­dem­ic.”
    • Take the Shut­down Skep­tics Seri­ous­ly (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “The gen­er­al point is that min­i­miz­ing the num­ber of COVID-19 deaths today or a month from now or six months from now may or may not min­i­mize the human costs of the pan­dem­ic when the full spec­trum of human con­se­quences is con­sid­ered. The last glob­al depres­sion cre­at­ed con­di­tions for a cat­a­stroph­ic world war that killed rough­ly 75 to 80 mil­lion peo­ple. Is that a pos­si­bil­i­ty? The down­side risks and costs of every approach are real, fright­en­ing, and depress­ing, no mat­ter how lit­tle one thinks of reopen­ing now.”
    • Coro­n­avirus and The Myopia of Amer­i­can Excep­tion­al­ism (Brad Lit­tle­john, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Rather than prov­ing our­selves excep­tion­al, we sim­ply assume that we are. The ordi­nary rules do not apply to us, because we are Amer­i­ca. We make things bet­ter here, we run things more effi­cient­ly here, we live more hap­pi­ly here, because we are Amer­i­ca. There is no need to look at OECD rank­ings, because we already know that they are wrong if they show us any­where but #1…. this way of think­ing, far from mak­ing Amer­i­ca great, is almost cer­tain to make her the oppo­site. After all, the only way to improve is to learn, and the chief way we learn as human beings is from the exam­ples of oth­ers.”
    • The Mir­a­cle of the Inter­net (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The surge in traf­fic, on the inter­net as a whole and on AT&T’s part of the net­work, is extra­or­di­nary in a way that the phrase 20 per­cent increase doesn’t quite cap­ture. AT&T’s net­work is car­ry­ing an extra 71 petabytes of data every day. How much is 71 petabytes? One com­par­i­son: Back at the end of 2014, AT&T’s total net­work traf­fic was 56 petabytes a day; in just a few weeks, AT&T has accom­mo­dat­ed more new traf­fic every day than its total dai­ly traf­fic six years ago. (Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the AT&T net­work has been car­ry­ing about 426 petabytes a day—one petabyte is 1 mil­lion giga­bytes.)”
    • Stan­ford’s $27.7 bil­lion not enough to house stu­dents in need amid pan­dem­ic (Sheikh Sri­jon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Har­vard is allow­ing those on cam­pus with demon­strat­ed need to stay for the whole sum­mer for only $200. MIT is offer­ing free hous­ing and meals. Duke is offer­ing free hous­ing and par­tial com­pen­sa­tion for lost sum­mer earn­ings to those with sub­stan­tial finan­cial aid.… Com­pare Stanford’s pol­i­cy to these insti­tu­tions’ poli­cies. Though it has a $27.7 bil­lion dol­lar endow­ment (as of Octo­ber 2019), it is charg­ing stu­dents near­ly $6,000 for sum­mer hous­ing and meals in times of such finan­cial uncer­tain­ty.”
  7. The New York Times Sur­ren­dered to an Out­rage Mob. Jour­nal­ism Will Suf­fer For It. (Pamela Paresky, Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen And Steven Pinker, Politi­co): “…for the Times to ‘dis­ap­pear’ pas­sages of a pub­lished arti­cle into an inac­ces­si­ble mem­o­ry hole is an Orwellian act that, thanks to the newspaper’s actions, might now be seen as accept­able jour­nal­is­tic prac­tice. It is all the worse when the edi­tors’ pub­lished account of what they delet­ed is itself inac­cu­rate. This does a dis­ser­vice to read­ers, his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, who are left unable to deter­mine for them­selves what the con­tro­ver­sy was about, and to Stephens, who is left unable to defend him­self against read­ers’ worst sus­pi­cions.”

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 If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 249

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 244

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 242

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 241

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 235

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. Weath­er­ing the Storm: How Faith Affects Well-Being (Byron John­son & Chris­tos Makridis, Pub­lic Dis­course): “First, and con­sis­tent with pri­or stud­ies, active Chris­tians exhib­it 6 per­cent greater cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and are 6 per­cent­age points more like­ly to report that they are thriving—a mea­sure from Gallup that com­bines respon­dent infor­ma­tion on both cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and expect­ed future life sat­is­fac­tion over the next five years. Sec­ond, and at least as impor­tant, we found that SWB is either acycli­cal or slight­ly coun­ter­cycli­cal for active Chris­tians, where­as it is strong­ly pro­cycli­cal for (inac­tive) Chris­tians and the­ists.”
  2. More Non-Evan­gel­i­cals Are Call­ing Them­selves Born Again (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Just over 36 per­cent of the entire sam­ple said that they were born again in 1988, the first year the ques­tion was asked. The ques­tion appeared spo­rad­i­cal­ly on the GSS until 2004, when it became a part of every bi-annu­al sur­vey as the num­ber of affir­ma­tive respons­es began to rise. In the last 14 years, the share of born-again Amer­i­cans has risen to 41 per­cent, and much high­er (54%) among peo­ple of col­or. Since 2010, at least half of peo­ple of col­or say that they have had a ‘turn­ing point in their life’ when they com­mit­ted them­selves to Christ.”
  3. Sex dif­fer­ences in chim­panzees’ use of sticks as play objects resem­ble those of chil­dren (Sonya M. Kahlen­berg & Richard W. Wrang­ham, Cur­rent Biol­o­gy): “…when pre­sent­ed with sex-stereo­typed human toys, cap­tive female mon­keys play more with typ­i­cal­ly fem­i­nine toys, where­as male mon­keys play more with mas­cu­line toys. In human and non­hu­man pri­mates, juve­nile females demon­strate a greater inter­est in infants, and males in rough-and-tum­ble play. This sex dif­fer­ence in activ­i­ty pref­er­ences par­al­lels adult behav­ior and may con­tribute to dif­fer­ences in toy play. Here, we present the first evi­dence of sex dif­fer­ences in use of play objects in a wild pri­mate, in chim­panzees (Pan troglodytes). We find that juve­niles tend to car­ry sticks in a man­ner sug­ges­tive of rudi­men­ta­ry doll play and, as in chil­dren and cap­tive mon­keys, this behav­ior is more com­mon in females than in males.” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.024
  4. When a sex offend­er calls, she’s there to lis­ten (Ser­e­na Solomon, Vox): “On the desk in her liv­ing room, a [Women Against Reg­istry] sign sum­ma­rizes her pitch: ‘Destroy­ing Fam­i­lies Does Not Pro­tect Chil­dren.’ It’s a mes­sage geared toward women. WAR argues that the reg­istry can pre­vent reg­is­trants from liv­ing with sup­port­ing rel­a­tives; it can bank­rupt fam­i­lies and invites vig­i­lante attacks.” A fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle. Rec­om­mend­ed by a Chi Alphan.
  5. Detroit man set­tles race dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suit, then bank won’t cash his check (Tre­sa Bal­das, Detroit Free Press): “Thomas closed his [exist­ing bank] account that day and left the premis­es. With­in an hour, he deposit­ed the checks into a new account at a Chase bank in Detroit. They cleared with­in 12 hours. Thomas, who had no car and walked to work, used the mon­ey to buy a 2004 Dodge Duran­go.” This sto­ry bog­gles the mind.
  6. Adven­tures in the Old Athe­ism, Part IV: Marx (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Indeed, oppo­si­tion to Marx­ism is in my view a pre­req­ui­site to being a seri­ous crit­ic of cap­i­tal­ism, for Marx­ism con­tains none of the good that is in cap­i­tal­ism, much of the bad that is in it, and adds grave evils of its own to boot.” That’s not the main thrust of this essay, but I loved that quote. The whole thing is worth read­ing.
  7. Peo­ple crit­i­cize pro-lif­ers for focus­ing so much on abor­tion. But there’s a rea­son we do. (Matthew Lee Ander­son, Vox): “But for the pro-lif­er, that ‘clump of cells’ is as won­drous, as potent, as mys­te­ri­ous as, well, the cos­mos. The recog­ni­tion of the ‘baby’ induces a hushed rev­er­ence. The uni­verse once appeared out of noth­ing, a fact that rea­son­ably seems to induce the strange ver­ti­go of awe, but the for­ma­tion of a new human being is not so dif­fer­ent from this. The embryo con­tains a whole world of pos­si­bil­i­ties and adven­tures.”
    • Relat­ed: Abor­tion Regret Isn’t a Myth, Despite New Study (Maria Baer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…researcher Michael J. New not­ed that women who vol­un­teer to respond to ques­tions fol­low­ing an abor­tion are more like­ly to be the ones who feel pos­i­tive­ly about it, and there­fore the find­ings do not rep­re­sent the full spec­trum of women who have had abor­tions. New—a pro­fes­sor at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca and a schol­ar with the pro-life Char­lotte Lozi­er Institute—noted that of all the women asked to par­tic­i­pate, less than 40 per­cent agreed, and rough­ly 30 per­cent of the 667 who par­tic­i­pat­ed had stopped respond­ing by the end of the five-year study.”
    • Relat­ed: Trump March­es For Life (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “So, I am gen­uine­ly sur­prised that Don­ald Trump has been so good on pro­life issues, and that he came to the March For Life today. And if peo­ple wor­ry that the march is becom­ing too asso­ci­at­ed with Repub­li­can pol­i­tics, then they should not fault Trump for it, but should redou­ble efforts to get more Democ­rats to get involved.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). 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.