Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 192

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 187

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. Emo­tions Make Ter­ri­ble Gods (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “We live in an emo­ji world where self-expres­sion and ‘being the true you’ hold high­est pri­or­i­ty — no one can tell us how to feel…. In all, the assump­tion stands: you are your emo­tions — for bet­ter or worse. To repress them is to repress your­self.”
  2. ‘I Was a TSA Agent, and You Fed Me’ (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But church­es, as they join in prayer for a leg­isla­tive solu­tion, have also stepped up to sup­port com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers affect­ed by the bud­get­ing stale­mate. Here are 10 places where Chris­tians are reach­ing out to love their fur­loughed and unpaid neigh­bors…” This is an inspir­ing list. I am struck by both the geo­graph­ic and the denom­i­na­tion­al diver­si­ty. The extent to which church­es bless their com­mu­ni­ties is dif­fi­cult to over­state.
  3. Is Big Tech Merg­ing With Big Broth­er? Kin­da Looks Like It (David Samuels, Wired): “A nation­al or glob­al sur­veil­lance net­work that uses benef­i­cent algo­rithms to reshape human thoughts and actions in ways that elites believe to be just or ben­e­fi­cial to all mankind is hard­ly the road to a new Eden. It’s the road to a prison camp.”
  4. Death on demand: has euthana­sia gone too far? (Christo­pher de Bel­laigue, Guardian): “Alto­geth­er, well over a quar­ter of all deaths in 2017 in the Nether­lands were induced.… sui­cide leaves scars on friends and fam­i­ly that may nev­er heal. But sui­cide is an indi­vid­ual act, self-moti­vat­ed and self-admin­is­tered, and its force field is con­tained. Euthana­sia, by con­trast, is the prod­uct of soci­ety. When it goes wrong, it goes wrong for every­one.” In case you’re read­ing quick­ly, read that first sen­tence again. Over 25%!
  5. The Gay Church (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “A church that, since 2005, bans priests with ‘deep-seat­ed homo­sex­u­al ten­den­cies’ and offi­cial­ly teach­es that gay men are ‘objec­tive­ly dis­or­dered’ and inher­ent­ly dis­posed toward ‘intrin­sic moral evil’ is actu­al­ly com­posed, in ways very few oth­er insti­tu­tions are, of gay men.” I find his lack of engage­ment with Scrip­ture and focus on church his­to­ry strik­ing and very Catholic.
  6. A lot of arti­cles about the dust­up at the March for Life. I find polar­iz­ing sit­u­a­tions like this fas­ci­nat­ing and fre­quent­ly reveal­ing.
    • The Media Botched the Cov­ing­ton Catholic Sto­ry (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Among oth­er things, jour­nal­is­tic ethics held that if you didn’t have the report­ing to sup­port a sto­ry, and if that sto­ry had the poten­tial to hurt its sub­jects, and if those sub­jects were pri­vate cit­i­zens, and if they were more­over minors, you didn’t run the sto­ry. You kept report­ing it; you let your­self get scooped; and you accept­ed that speed is not the high­est val­ue. Oth­er­wise, you were the trash press.” This piece is bru­tal. If you only read one of the arti­cles in this sec­tion, make it this one.
    • For an exam­ple of a harsh­er per­spec­tive: Why do the Cov­ing­ton Catholic kids get the ben­e­fit of the doubt? (Lau­ra Turn­er, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “There’s no virtue in rush­ing to get in a hot take! But nei­ther is there in ignor­ing clear evi­dence of racism and cru­el­ty. As new accounts and new videos of the inci­dent emerged, more stayed the same than changed: Sandmann’s sim­per­ing expres­sion remained, as did his immov­able oppo­si­tion to Phillips. (In his ‘Today’ show inter­view, Sand­mann says he now wish­es he ‘could’ve walked away and avoid­ed the whole thing.’ The use of ‘could’ve’ is doing a lot of work there — he always could have cho­sen to walk away. He chose not to.)”
    • The Cov­ing­ton Scis­sor (Ross Douthat, NY Times): “To under­stand what makes this inci­dent so bril­liant in its divi­sive­ness, you need to see the tapes­try in full, how each con­stituent ele­ment (abor­tion, race, MAGA, white boys, Catholi­cism, Native Amer­i­can rit­u­al) auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­firms pri­ors on both sides of our divide. And you also need to see how the video itself, far from being a means to achiev­ing con­sen­sus, is an amaz­ing accel­er­ant of con­tro­ver­sy…” Douthat’s op-ed is inspired by the short sto­ry Sort By Con­tro­ver­sial (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex). It’s an easy read and I rec­om­mend it.
    • Anoth­er per­spec­tive less sym­pa­thet­ic to the boys: The real pol­i­tics behind the Cov­ing­ton Catholic con­tro­ver­sy, explained (Zack Beauchamp, Vox): “The argu­ment here is not that it’s wrong to care about the Cov­ing­ton stu­dents per se. Rather, it’s a kind of dis­gust at the hypocrisy on dis­play: Con­ser­v­a­tives and the main­stream media don’t, in the left-lib­er­al view, ever dis­play the same lev­els of con­cern for minor­i­ty kids accused of actu­al crimes. All the sym­pa­thy being extend­ed to these kids, all the ben­e­fit of the doubt, reflects the abil­i­ty of the priv­i­leged to com­mand a lev­el of sym­pa­thy that the less priv­i­leged lack.”
    • Cov­ing­ton isn’t about facts, but about iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics. Nick Sand­mann com­mit­ted ‘face­crime’ (Tuck­er Carl­son, Fox News): “People’s views evolve over time. Polit­i­cal divi­sions can heal and often do. But fights over iden­ti­ty do not; they are dif­fer­ent. Iden­ti­ty does not change. It can’t be mod­er­at­ed or con­trolled. It’s inher­ent. We’re born that way. When we go to war over who we are, it’s a per­ma­nent bat­tle. It is a dis­as­ter that lasts for gen­er­a­tions. Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics will destroy this coun­try faster than a for­eign inva­sion.”
    • The Abyss of Hate Ver­sus Hate (Andrew Sul­li­van, NY Mag­a­zine): “To put it blunt­ly: They were 16-year-olds sub­ject­ed to ver­bal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being big­ots. It just beg­gars belief that the same lib­er­als who fret about ‘micro-aggres­sions’ for 20-some­things were able to see 16-year-olds absorb­ing the worst racist garbage from reli­gious big­ots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face…. this is what will inevitably hap­pen once you’ve rede­fined racism or sex­ism to mean prej­u­dice plus pow­er. ”
  7. US mis­sion­ary who engaged with reclu­sive Brazil­ian tribe could be charged with geno­cide (Phoebe Loomes, NZ Her­ald): “Camp­bell has claimed that he made the expe­di­tion to the remote region at the request of the Jama­ma­di peo­ple, who he is in con­tact with, as they want­ed to learn to use GPS nav­i­ga­tors. Dur­ing this expe­di­tion he encoun­tered the iso­lat­ed Hi-Mer­imã tribe. For this, Brazil­ian offi­cials say Camp­bell could be charged with a slew of offences, includ­ing geno­cide.“
    • Geno­cide seems much too strong a term for a sit­u­a­tion in which no one is known to have died or even so much as sneezed. Maybe the word trans­lat­ed as geno­cide is broad­er in Por­tuguese?
    • Help­ful con­text: Brazil Inves­ti­gates If US Mis­sion­ary Encroached on Iso­lat­ed Ama­zon Tribe (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Ribeiro shared con­cerns about indige­nous peo­ple receiv­ing assis­tance from groups appoint­ed by the gov­ern­ment, since they rarely stay in a com­mu­ni­ty long enough to build rela­tion­ships and learn the lan­guage. Mean­while, she says field mis­sion­ar­ies often bring high lev­els of tech­ni­cal training—from anthro­pol­o­gy to nursing—while com­mit­ting to serve for an extend­ed amount of time.”

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 This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 182

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 181

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. America’s New Reli­gions (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “The need for mean­ing hasn’t gone away, but with­out Chris­tian­i­ty, this yearn­ing looks to pol­i­tics for sat­is­fac­tion. And reli­gious impuls­es, once anchored in and tamed by Chris­tian­i­ty, find expres­sion in var­i­ous polit­i­cal cults. These polit­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions of reli­gion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been expe­ri­enced and refined and mod­eled by mil­len­nia of prac­tice and thought. They are evolv­ing in real time. And like almost all new cultish impuls­es, they demand a total and imme­di­ate com­mit­ment to save the world.”
  2. Is the Protes­tant Work Eth­ic Real? (Stephen J. Dub­n­er, Freako­nom­ics): “The ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­al of a mis­sion­ary project in the Philip­pines found that very poor peo­ple earned more mon­ey as a result of receiv­ing reli­gious instruc­tion. Why? The researchers sus­pect there were two pri­ma­ry dri­vers: opti­mism and grit.”
    • The researchers in ques­tion wrote up their research in Ran­dom­iz­ing Reli­gion: The Impact of Protes­tant Evan­ge­lism on Eco­nom­ic Out­comes (Gharad T. Bryan, James J. Choi, Dean Kar­lan, NBER): “To study the causal impact of reli­gios­i­ty, we part­nered with Inter­na­tion­al Care Min­istries (ICM), an evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant anti-pover­ty orga­ni­za­tion that oper­ates in the Philip­pines, to con­duct an eval­u­a­tion that ran­dom­ly assigned invi­ta­tions to attend Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy and val­ues train­ing.” The authors are affil­i­at­ed with the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics, Yale, and North­west­ern. The sec­ond author, Choi, is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian.
  3. Dutch Asy­lum Ser­vice Nears 1,000 Hours, With Evan­gel­i­cals’ Sup­port (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “A marathon wor­ship ser­vice held by a church in the Nether­lands to shield a fam­i­ly of asy­lum seek­ers has gar­nered world­wide atten­tion. The feat has proved impres­sive for its longevi­ty alone—now going on six weeks—but also rep­re­sents a unique ecu­meni­cal moment among Chris­tians in the tiny Euro­pean nation.”
  4. For­mer Stan­ford post­doc crit­i­cized for cre­at­ing the world’s first gene-edit­ed babies (Ele­na Shao, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “On Nov. 28, He Jianku — a post­doc­tor­al fel­low at Stan­ford from 2011–2012 — announced to hun­dreds of sci­en­tists, col­leagues and jour­nal­ists that he had cre­at­ed the world’s first genet­i­cal­ly edit­ed babies: twin girls with the pseu­do­nyms Lulu and Nana whose DNA he claims to have altered to make them HIV-resis­tant.” FYI Bill Hurl­burt, one of the Stan­ford bioethics experts inter­viewed in this arti­cle, is a sol­id believ­er.
  5. God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a frosh brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. I read two inter­est­ing pro­files of famous Chris­tians from the past this week:
    • Phillis Wheat­ley: An Evan­gel­i­cal and the First Pub­lished African Amer­i­can Female Poet (Thomas Kidd, Gospel Coali­tion): “Phillis Wheat­ley, the first pub­lished African Amer­i­can female poet and a devout Chris­t­ian, died on Decem­ber 5, 1784. We can’t be sure of her birth­date, because she was born in West Africa and sold into slav­ery by 1761.”
    • Evan­gel­i­cal retail­er John Wana­mak­er built for­tune by blend­ing faith with busi­ness (Mark Kell­ner, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Wana­mak­er, who also served four years as post­mas­ter gen­er­al of the Unit­ed States, was fore­most an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who meld­ed faith and works, specif­i­cal­ly the work­ing of his retail empire. While build­ing the first depart­ment store in Philadel­phia, he also fund­ed the growth of the city’s first megachurch, which fea­tured a range of social ser­vices under­gird­ed by a strong evan­ge­lis­tic out­reach. He offered young male employ­ees of his store guid­ance through a YMCA-like pro­gram aimed at pro­mot­ing spir­i­tu­al dis­ci­pline. All employ­ees could spend a sum­mer vaca­tion at a church-run resort, albeit with strict behav­ioral codes.”
  7. Have U.S. Protes­tants gone soft on alco­hol? (Richard Ostling, Patheos): “…from 2007 to 2017 U.S. deaths attrib­uted to alco­hol increased 35 per­cent, and 67 per­cent among women (while teen deaths declined 16 per­cent). These fatal­i­ties well out­num­ber those from opi­oid over­dos­es that have roused such pub­lic con­cern…. Only 2 per­cent of evan­gel­i­cals admit­ted they some­times over-indulge.”

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 Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire), an essay  built on this insight: “Think­ing can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” (first shared in vol­ume 2)

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 179

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. ‘God, I don’t want to die,’ U.S. mis­sion­ary wrote before he was killed by tribe on Indi­an island (Joan­na Slater and Annie Gowen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “An Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary try­ing to meet and con­vert one of the most iso­lat­ed hunter-and-gath­er­er tribes in the world offered them fish and oth­er small gifts before the tribes­men killed him and buried his body on the beach, jour­nals and emails show.”
    • Relat­ed: US Mis­sion­ary Killed by ‘World’s Most Iso­lat­ed’ Tribe (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Some have declared Chau a mar­tyr and com­pared him to Jim Elliot, who was famous­ly killed at age 28 while attempt­ing to evan­ge­lize an iso­lat­ed indige­nous group in Ecuador.”
    • Relat­ed: Death Of A Mis­sion­ary (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If Chau had been a mis­sion­ary try­ing to sneak into North Korea, I would have thought him insane­ly brave. But the law against vis­it­ing that island was there for a very good rea­son: this tribe has had no expo­sure to out­siders, and is enor­mous­ly vul­ner­a­ble to com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases. There are only a small num­ber of them in exis­tence, and they could be wiped out quick­ly by com­mon ill­ness­es for which they have no immu­ni­ty…. It is one thing to be will­ing to lay down your life for these trib­al peo­ple. It is cru­el to expect them to lay down their lives so you can prove your love for God.”
  2. How do con­ser­v­a­tives respond to archae­ol­o­gists’ skep­ti­cism about Bible his­to­ry? (Richard Ostling, Patheos): “There’s vast unex­plored ter­rain in Israel, where only 50 of an esti­mat­ed 6,000 sites have under­gone thor­ough exam­i­na­tion, with lim­it­ed work at anoth­er 300. Sur­viv­ing evi­dence from ancient times is nec­es­sar­i­ly spot­ty and inter­pre­ta­tions can be sub­jec­tive. Schol­ars usu­al­ly end up with cir­cum­stan­tial plau­si­bil­i­ty, not absolute proof or dis­proof.”
  3. Ex-Detainee Describes Tor­ture In Chi­na’s Xin­jiang Re-Edu­ca­tion Camp (Rob Schmitz, NPR): “Samarkand says he was trans­ferred to a re-edu­ca­tion camp, where peo­ple were sep­a­rat­ed into three groups: those who were reli­gious, those who were sus­pect­ed of being crim­i­nals, and those, like him, who had trav­eled abroad. All of them, says Samarkand, had one thing in com­mon, though: They had grown up in Mus­lim fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties.”
  4. Info­graph­ic: You Have More Time for Bible Read­ing than You Think (Cross­way): “In just 12 min­utes per day, you could read the whole Bible in a year. Does that still feel a bit ambi­tious? In just 6 min­utes per day, you could read the entire New Tes­ta­ment over the course of 6 months.”
  5. Elisha and the She-bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): a very insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge.
  6. Sir Roger Scru­ton Is a Friend to Mus­lims and Jews (Jibran Khan, Nation­al Review): “There can be no real dia­logue with some­one who doesn’t believe in any­thing, and yet this has been the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of lib­er­al ‘inter­faith’ dis­cus­sion, to so water down the dis­course that no one gets to encounter, let alone tol­er­ate and appre­ci­ate, dif­fer­ence.” I did not think I would find this arti­cle inter­est­ing.
  7. It’s time we bal­ance the scales of jus­tice in our schools (Bet­sy DeVos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A fair process treats each par­ty with dig­ni­ty and ensures the integri­ty of final deci­sions. Hav­ing out­comes over­turned and relit­i­gat­ed because of process con­cerns — which has hap­pened dozens of times in recent years — can be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to sur­vivors.”
    • Relat­ed: The ACLU Declines to Defend Civ­il Rights (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “the ACLU issued a pub­lic state­ment that con­sti­tut­ed a stark, short­sight­ed betray­al of the organization’s his­toric mis­sion: It vehe­ment­ly opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.”
    • Relat­ed: One Crim­i­nal-Defense Attorney’s Lament (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “In cer­tain ways, social con­dem­na­tion has become some­thing even worse, the mere accu­sa­tion being all that’s required for a mob of undu­ly pas­sion­ate peo­ple to crush a career. There’s no oppor­tu­ni­ty to defend and no means to chal­lenge an accu­sa­tion. While the ‘pun­ish­ment’ isn’t levied by gov­ern­ment, and is there­fore beyond any required involve­ment of such niceties as due process, the net result can be as destruc­tive giv­en the cur­rent tide of blind accep­tance and capit­u­la­tion.”

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 provoca­tive In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

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 178

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. No — real­ly. I mean them. Also, I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Cul­tur­al win­some­ness will not be enough for Chris­tians (Andrew T Walk­er, Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “Chow is the very def­i­n­i­tion of class, dig­ni­ty and civil­i­ty. She’s a mod­el for what faith­ful Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship looks like in the pub­lic square. There is no foam­ing-at-the-mouth hatred for any­one. She loves every­one; she just did not want to vio­late her con­science. What’s the les­son here? There are many. But to focus on just one, this sto­ry is a reminder that no amount of cul­tur­al sophis­ti­ca­tion or intel­li­gence will absolve the Chris­t­ian from being seen as a back­ward-think­ing big­ot.” This is cor­rect.
    • Relat­ed: An inter­view with Isabel­la Chow (Allie Stuck­ey, Twit­ter) — this is a 4 minute video.
    • Kind of relat­ed: The State of Hate (David Mont­gomery, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In think­ing about my inter­view, I was struck by just how lit­tle he had dis­put­ed the SPLC’s claims about the frankly dis­qui­et­ing posi­tions he has tak­en. To some extent, it was sim­i­lar to my expe­ri­ence at the FRC and ADF. They sim­ply saw those posi­tions as admirable, or at the very least defen­si­ble, expres­sions of truth — where­as, to the SPLC, they were expres­sions of hate.”
    • Vague­ly relat­ed: David French on the price of pub­lic engage­ment (Twit­ter)
  2. What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-writ­ten. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian.
  3. Ask and You Shall Evan­ge­lize (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “‘Mod­ern selves are so inter­nal,’ Keller said. ‘In the old days if you were con­vinced of the truth, you changed your­self. Now we adopt the truth as acces­sories that fit in with who we want to be.’” A good arti­cle on the nature of effec­tive wit­ness in con­tem­po­rary West­ern soci­ety.
  4. Why Are Young Peo­ple Hav­ing So Lit­tle Sex? (Kate Julian, The Atlantic): “I men­tioned to sev­er­al of the peo­ple I inter­viewed for this piece that I’d met my hus­band in an ele­va­tor, in 2001. (We worked on dif­fer­ent floors of the same insti­tu­tion, and over the months that fol­lowed struck up many more conversations—in the ele­va­tor, in the break room, on the walk to the sub­way.) I was fas­ci­nat­ed by the extent to which this prompt­ed oth­er women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet some­one that way. And yet quite a few of them sug­gest­ed that if a ran­dom guy start­ed talk­ing to them in an ele­va­tor, they would be weird­ed out. ‘Creep­er! Get away from me,’ one woman imag­ined think­ing.” The arti­cle is vul­gar in places and premised on flawed assump­tions… and still man­ages to be fas­ci­nat­ing and insight­ful.
    • Relat­ed: How the GOP Gave Up on Porn (Tim Alber­ta, Politi­co): “We know that the ubiq­ui­ty of porn is a prob­lem: Even as experts debate the sci­ence of addic­tion and the link between con­sump­tion and destruc­tive behav­ior, there is sure­fire soci­o­log­i­cal evi­dence of its exac­er­bat­ing influ­ence on those most susceptible—people pre­dis­posed to vio­lence, for instance, or misog­y­ny or child abuse. There is also con­sen­sus that it has, in plen­ty of cas­es, con­tributed to abu­sive rela­tion­ships and the frac­tur­ing of fam­i­lies. And that’s just where adults are con­cerned.”
  5. The Best Way To Save Peo­ple From Sui­cide (Jason Cherkis, Huff­in­g­ton Post High­line): “Mot­to didn’t take long to write the first let­ter a patient would receive. He knew what he want­ed to say, hit­ting upon two sentences—37 words—that felt just right: ‘It has been some time since you were here at the hos­pi­tal, and we hope things are going well for you. If you wish to drop us a note we would be glad to hear from you.’” This is an engross­ing arti­cle. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. Over­com­ing Bar­ri­ers to Women’s Advance­ment in Polit­i­cal Sci­ence (Amy Catalinac, PDF host­ed at Har­vard): “Of the polit­i­cal sci­en­tists of my gen­er­a­tion I know well, suc­cess­ful ones do all of these things auto­mat­i­cal­ly, and those who have been less suc­cess­ful do many few­er of them.” Very straight talk on how to get a tenure-track job. From my out­side van­tage point, this seems like excel­lent advice for social sci­en­tists of either gen­der.
  7. The dra­mat­ic implo­sion of ‘I Kissed Dat­ing Good­bye’ is a les­son — and a warn­ing (Chris­tine Emba, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The next time we’re tempt­ed toward too-for­mu­la­ic think­ing, we’ll know to take it with a grain of salt. After all, life is rarely so pure.”

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 an eye-open­ing (and dis­may­ing) read: What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic). (first shared back in vol­ume 5): “one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.”

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 177

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 Two Dif­fer­ent Temp­ta­tions Fac­ing Young Evan­gel­i­cals (David French, Nation­al Review): “So, young Chris­tians, hold your faith tight­ly and your pol­i­tics loose­ly. You will not find a home here. As Peter says, you are a ‘for­eign­er and exile.’ It’s best to get used to it ear­ly on. Trust me, it can be a gut-wrench­ing dis­cov­ery to make when you’re old.”
  2. STEP Bible Data (Tyn­dale House, Github)This is the under­ly­ing data set for STEP Bible (Scrip­ture Tools for Every Per­son). If you’re a coder look­ing for a neat project, play around with this! Read the announce­ment here.
  3. Sev­er­al inter­est­ing LGBT-relat­ed pieces came across my path this week:
    • Is Sex Bina­ry?(Alex Byrne, Arc Dig­i­tal): “As Simone de Beau­voir puts it in The Sec­ond Sex (the found­ing text of mod­ern fem­i­nism), the sex­es ‘are basi­cal­ly defined by the gametes they pro­duce.’ Specif­i­cal­ly, females pro­duce large gametes (repro­duc­tive cells), and males pro­duce small ones. (Since there are no species with a third inter­me­di­ate gamete size, there are only two sex­es.) A glance at the huge vari­ety of females and males across the ani­mal and veg­etable king­doms will con­firm that there is noth­ing else the sex­es can be.” The author is a pro-trans pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at MIT.
    • Queer­ing Sci­ence (Mark Reg­nerus, First Things): “Any study that comes to con­clu­sions or even rais­es evi­dence con­trary to the taboos that have formed in recent years is tak­en hostage—first by pseu­do­ny­mous strangers at key­boards; then by the oppor­tunis­tic fac­ul­ty who jump on the band­wag­on dis­play­ing a method­olog­i­cal purism hereto­fore unknown in sex­u­al sci­ence; and then by the uni­ver­si­ties them­selves, whose inter­est has shift­ed from the pur­suit of truth to the pur­suit of virtue (sig­nal­ing).” I shared some arti­cles about the Littman brouha­ha at Brown short­ly after it hap­pened, and I’ve also shared Mark Regnerus’s research before. He is a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at UT Austin.
    • Bartle­by The Big­ot (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “This young Chris­t­ian, Isabel­la Chow, is now thought to be so dan­ger­ous that stu­dents (and oth­ers?) at Berke­ley believe she should be dri­ven from pub­lic life, and can­not be allowed to say what she believes on the pages of the cam­pus news­pa­per.” This is no doubt eas­i­er for many of you to imag­ine than think­ing about some­one bak­ing a cake for a gay wed­ding.
  4. Reli­gion and Depres­sion in Ado­les­cence (Frue­hwirth, Iyer, and Zhang, Jour­nal of Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my): “Many stud­ies show a cor­re­la­tion between reli­gios­i­ty and men­tal health, yet the ques­tion remains whether the rela­tion­ship is causal…. Explo­ration of mech­a­nisms sug­gests that reli­gios­i­ty buffers against stres­sors in ways that school activ­i­ties and friend­ships do not.” If you can’t access the ver­sion accept­ed for pub­li­ca­tion you can see an ear­li­er ver­sion at SSRN. Found via Tyler Cowen — see his com­men­tary.
  5. Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evi­dence from Bus and Train Oper­a­tors (Emanuel Bolot­nyy, job mar­ket paper from Har­vard): “Even in a union­ized envi­ron­ment, where work tasks are sim­i­lar, hourly wages are iden­ti­cal, and tenure dic­tates pro­mo­tions, female work­ers earn $0.89 on the male-work­er dol­lar (week­ly earn­ings). We use con­fi­den­tial admin­is­tra­tive data on bus and train oper­a­tors from the Mass­a­chu­setts Bay Trans­porta­tion Author­i­ty (MBTA) to show that the week­ly earn­ings gap can be explained entire­ly by the work­place choic­es that women and men make. Women val­ue time and flex­i­bil­i­ty more than men.”

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 149

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 137

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. My Lar­ry Nas­sar Tes­ti­mo­ny Went Viral. But There’s More to the Gospel Than For­give­ness. (Mor­gan Lee inter­view­ing Rachael Den­hol­lan­der, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “One of the areas where Chris­tians don’t do well is in acknowl­edg­ing the dev­as­ta­tion of the wound. We can tend to gloss over the dev­as­ta­tion of any kind of suf­fer­ing but espe­cial­ly sex­u­al assault, with Chris­t­ian plat­i­tudes like God works all things togeth­er for good or God is sov­er­eign. Those are very good and glo­ri­ous bib­li­cal truths, but when they are mis­ap­plied in a way to damp­en the hor­ror of evil, they ulti­mate­ly damp­en the good­ness of God. Good­ness and dark­ness exist as oppo­sites. If we pre­tend that the dark­ness isn’t dark, it damp­ens the beau­ty of the light.”
  2. Want to see a spat between two bril­liant the­olo­gians?
    • The New Tes­ta­ment in the strange words of David Bent­ley Hart (N.T. Wright, The Chris­t­ian Cen­tu­ry): “When a the­olo­gian of the stature of David Bent­ley Hart offers a ‘piti­less­ly lit­er­al trans­la­tion’ of the New Tes­ta­ment that is ‘not shaped by lat­er the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal his­to­ry’ and aims to make ‘the famil­iar strange, nov­el, and per­haps new­ly com­pelling,’ we are eager to see the result. He promis­es to bring out the ‘wild­ly indis­crim­i­nate polypho­ny’ of the writ­ers’ styles and emphases, con­verg­ing on their ‘vibrant cer­tain­ty that his­to­ry has been invad­ed by God in Christ in such a way that noth­ing can stay as it was.’ But his two main claims (to be ‘lit­er­al’ and ‘undog­mat­ic’) are not borne out, and the promise of dis­play­ing the strange­ness of ear­ly Chris­t­ian life dis­ap­pears behind dif­fer­ent kinds of strange­ness.”
    • A Reply To N.T. Wright (David Bent­ley Hart, Eclec­tic Ortho­doxy): “[A rebut­tal] where­in, at long last, our author unbur­dens him­self of a great num­ber of com­plaints he has long wished to make against that pious man’s earnest but prob­lem­at­ic approach to the New Tes­ta­ment, embell­ished with a few moments of sly mock­ery, but ulti­mate­ly intend­ed as a good-natured—albeit inflexible—expression of deep dis­agree­ment.”
    • Trans­lat­ing the N. T. Wright and David Bent­ley Hart Tus­sle  (Caleb Lind­gren, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While the ver­bal spar­ring is both sharp and enter­tain­ing (and per­haps off-putting to cer­tain sen­si­bil­i­ties), there is a valu­able point at the heart of this debate—one that is worth not­ing as these two Bible schol­ar­ship heavy-hit­ters take swings at each other’s work.”
  3. Fake porn is the new fake news, and the inter­net isn’t ready (Nicole Lee, Engad­get): “Moth­er­board recent­ly uncov­ered a dis­turb­ing new trend on Red­dit, in which users cre­ate AI-gen­er­at­ed porno­graph­ic clips by swap­ping oth­er peo­ple’s faces onto porn stars…. Need­less to say, this has fright­en­ing con­se­quences. Not only does this open the door for a hor­ri­fy­ing new kind of revenge porn, where a venge­ful ex could slap your face on an X‑rated video, it also opens a Pan­do­ra’s box of fears where noth­ing on the inter­net can ever be trust­ed.” The embed­ded (non-sketchy) gif is alarm­ing­ly real­is­tic. The tech­nol­o­gy is already good enough that we’re at a tip­ping point, and it will only get more effec­tive in the future.
  4. A Work­out-Track­ing App Acci­den­tal­ly Revealed The Loca­tion Of A Bunch Of Secret Mil­i­tary Bases And Sol­diers’ Names (Digg): “Stra­va, a GPS-enabled mobile app that allows users to track their run­ning, bik­ing and swim­ming work­outs, is attract­ing con­tro­ver­sy after observers noticed that its glob­al work­out heatmap appar­ent­ly revealed the loca­tion of secret mil­i­tary bases and the exer­cise habits of indi­vid­ual troops on those bases.” Oops. Tech­nol­o­gy has con­se­quences. Remem­ber that, you star­tup­py types.
  5. The Abor­tion Memo (David Brooks, New York Times): “I’m ask­ing us to rethink our pri­or­i­ties. What does Amer­i­ca need most right now? One of our talk­ing points is that late-term abor­tions are extreme­ly rare. If they are extreme­ly rare, why are we giv­ing them pri­or­i­ty over all of our oth­er issues com­bined?”
  6. The female price of male plea­sure (Lili Loof­bourow, The Week): “Because if you’re going to wax poet­ic about male plea­sure, you had bet­ter be ready to talk about its secret, unpleas­ant, ubiq­ui­tous cousin: female pain. Research shows that 30 per­cent of women report pain dur­ing vagi­nal sex, 72 per­cent report pain dur­ing anal sex, and ‘large pro­por­tions’ don’t tell their part­ners when sex hurts.” First, fas­ci­nat­ing because I had no idea. Sec­ond, because the author is so cocooned in assump­tions stem­ming from the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion that she doesn’t seem to have con­sid­ered whether this is a symp­tom of the whole thing being unhealthy and mis­tak­en on key points.
  7. Show­ing Off To the Uni­verse: Bea­cons For The After­life of Our Civ­i­liza­tion (Steven Wol­fram, per­son­al blog): “There’s a thought exper­i­ment I’ve long found use­ful. Imag­ine a very advanced civ­i­liza­tion, that’s able to move things like stars and plan­ets around at will. What arrange­ment would they put them in? Maybe they’d want to make a ‘bea­con of pur­pose’. And maybe—like Kant—one could think that would be achiev­able by set­ting up some ‘rec­og­niz­able’ geo­met­ric pat­tern. Like how about an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle? But no, that won’t do. Because for exam­ple the Tro­jan aster­oids actu­al­ly form an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle with Jupiter and the Sun already, just as a result of physics. And pret­ty soon one real­izes that there’s actu­al­ly noth­ing the aliens could do to ‘prove their pur­pose’. The con­fig­u­ra­tion of stars in the sky may look kind of ran­dom to us (except, of course, that we still see con­stel­la­tions in it). But there’s noth­ing to say that looked at in the right way it doesn’t actu­al­ly rep­re­sent some grand pur­pose.” A long but fas­ci­nat­ing essay about how dif­fi­cult it is to encode a mes­sage that unam­bigu­ous­ly com­mu­ni­cates intel­li­gence. Rel­e­vance to nat­ur­al the­ol­o­gy should be obvi­ous (although Wol­fram, being an athe­ist, goes in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion).
  8. Some of our stu­dents and alum­ni have pub­lished things recent­ly:
    • The One Les­son We Do Not Learn at Stan­ford (Hugh Zhang, The Stan­ford Review): “If we fail to devel­op the type of char­ac­ter need­ed to resist temp­ta­tion when the stakes are so low, how can we be trust­ed to resist them when they are high­er? What we do at Stan­ford is less harm­ful than the fail­ings of the pow­er­ful. But it is only less harm­ful because our pow­er is yet lim­it­ed. When those in promi­nent posi­tions act as we do, we right­ly fear for society’s well being…. If we tru­ly believe that the duty of a uni­ver­si­ty is to pre­pare us for our respon­si­bil­i­ties in the world beyond these idyl­lic palm trees, then the most impor­tant les­son we can learn here at Stan­ford is the age old les­son of integri­ty: the abil­i­ty to do what is right even when no one is look­ing.”
    • Can I Help You? (Ryan Eber­hardt, per­son­al blog): “My friend Arjun com­mit­ted sui­cide last Sep­tem­ber. I’m ‘over it’ in as much of a func­tion­al sense as pos­si­ble, but I still think about him all the time. I miss him so much. He was among my best friends in high school…. I wish I could tell him about all the things I’m up to these days, brain­storm things for me to pur­sue after grad­u­a­tion, and ask for his advice. That will nev­er hap­pen again. But here’s the fun­ny thing: I don’t know if I would be so eager to talk to him if he weren’t dead. Death has an inter­est­ing way of doing that.”
    • Revers­ing the Curse: A Spir­i­tu­al Guide to Decod­ing Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (Femi Olu­tade, Medi­um): “For those of you who are root­ed in a faith tra­di­tion but can’t under­stand how a pop­u­lar, ‘sec­u­lar’ rap album can be a faith­ful wit­ness to Jesus’s life and mis­sion, Kendrick — and Jesus for that mat­ter — may sur­prise you. For any­one who is still search­ing for how truth and jus­tice emerge from the shad­ow of racism and oppres­sion, I present to you the sto­ries of hip hop and Judeo-Chris­t­ian scrip­tures in the hope that you can find in them the kind of trans­for­ma­tion that I have expe­ri­enced.” Femi releas­ing this free online book bit by bit. Seth, who writes the for­ward is also one of our alum­ni.
    • Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice (Rebekah Fen­ton, Kev­in­MD): “Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice dur­ing the class­room phase. Why do we only show rash­es on Cau­casian patients? Why do we only learn to rec­og­nize how men present with MIs? Why do we not address how obe­si­ty impacts exam find­ings? Med­ical edu­ca­tion favors the white, thin, male patient. I’ve seen his chest X‑ray, I’ve exam­ined his abdomen, I know his symp­toms, and I’ve seen his rash­es.”

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 134

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. ‘Walk­ing a line’: The shrewd tac­tics of the White House’s evan­gel­i­cal gate­keep­er (Michelle Boorstein & Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, The Wash­ing­ton Post):  “The Sen­ate race in Alaba­ma and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist Roy Moore? ‘I’m not involved.’ Trump’s pen­chant for lying? ‘I don’t want to get into it. Because I don’t focus on those things.’ The GOP tax law that bit­ter­ly divid­ed reli­gious lead­ers? ‘I don’t think there’s an answer.’ ‘For me, that’s all noise,’ he said. ‘It’s not that it isn’t impor­tant, but I don’t have time for all that… If I did dig into it, I might have stronger opin­ions, and that would be a dis­trac­tion for me.’”
  2. The Top 50 Coun­tries Where It’s Most Dan­ger­ous to Fol­low Jesus (Sarah Zyl­stra, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For decades, North Korea has clear­ly been the world’s worst per­se­cu­tor of Chris­tians. But now, anoth­er nation near­ly match­es it.” Spoil­er alert: Afghanistan.
  3. Clas­si­cal Lib­er­al­ism Strikes Out (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Thus, the irony: indi­vid­u­al­ism and sta­tism are not oppo­sites, but grow togeth­er in tan­dem. In our dai­ly par­ti­san pol­i­tics, we have tend­ed to pit indi­vid­u­al­ism against sta­tism – Ayn Rand against Karl Marx – with con­ser­v­a­tives claim­ing to be indi­vid­u­al­ists and pro­gres­sives claim­ing to sup­port an expan­sive state. But what we have wit­nessed is the simul­ta­ne­ous growth of both the state and the rise of indi­vid­u­al­ism, not as oppo­sites, but as nec­es­sary part­ners. The world has nev­er seen a more indi­vid­u­al­is­tic soci­ety nor a more encom­pass­ing state. The state has empow­ered itself by claim­ing to empow­er the indi­vid­ual.” This is a very stim­u­lat­ing inter­view with Notre Dame pro­fes­sor Patrick Deneen. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. High­er Edu­ca­tion Is Drown­ing In BS (Chris­t­ian Smith, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Ideas and their accom­pa­ny­ing prac­tices have con­se­quences. What is formed in col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties over decades shows up for bet­ter or worse in the char­ac­ter and qual­i­ty of our pub­lic ser­vants, polit­i­cal cam­paigns, pub­lic-pol­i­cy debates, cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion, social cap­i­tal, media pro­gram­ming, low­er school edu­ca­tion, con­sumer pref­er­ences, busi­ness ethics, enter­tain­ments, and much more. And the long-term cor­ro­sive effects on pol­i­tics and cul­ture can also be repaired only over the long term, if ever. There are no quick fix­es here.” Side note: I’ve met Dr. Smith, who is a soci­ol­o­gist at Notre Dame, before. He’s a smart cook­ie. 
  5. Oprah: Prophet, Priest­ess … Queen? (Ross Douthat, New York Times):  “Amer­i­can cul­ture is divid­ed between three broad approach­es to reli­gious ques­tions: one tra­di­tion­al, one spir­i­tu­al and one sec­u­lar. The tra­di­tion­al approach takes var­i­ous forms (Catholic and Protes­tant, Mus­lim and Ortho­dox Jew­ish) but its instincts are creedal, con­fes­sion­al, dog­mat­ic; it believes in a spe­cif­ic rev­e­la­tion, a spe­cif­ic author­i­ty and a spe­cif­ic holy book, and seeks to con­form itself to teach­ings hand­ed down from the reli­gious past. The sec­u­lar approach is post-reli­gious, sci­en­tis­tic, con­vinced that the lab­o­ra­to­ry and the micro­scope will ulti­mate­ly account for every­thing that mat­ters, while hope­ful­ly jus­ti­fy­ing a lib­er­al society’s still-some­what-Chris­t­ian moral com­mit­ments along the way. But in between sec­u­lar­ism and tra­di­tion­al­ism lies the most Amer­i­can approach to mat­ters of faith….”
  6. Can We Teach Our­selves to Believe? (Agnes Callard, New York Times): “Pas­cal seems to con­cede that try­ing to believe is a mat­ter of wish­ful think­ing, self-decep­tion or self-manip­u­la­tion. He thinks we should do it any­way. But I think our hope of becom­ing bet­ter peo­ple — whether in respect of reli­gion, friend­ship or jus­tice, or in any num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways — rests on the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there is a more straight­for­ward and less self-abas­ing way to try to believe.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. 
  7. The Legion Lone­ly (Steven Thomas, Hazlitt): “Friend­ship in adult­hood is a chal­lenge for a lot of peo­ple. On aver­age, both men and women start to lose friends around age 25, and con­tin­ue to lose friends steadi­ly for the rest of our lives.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.