Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 308

there are a few arti­cles touch­ing on faith in unex­pect­ed ways this week

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

This is the 308th instal­la­tion of this series, and the num­ber 308 is a hep­tag­o­nal pyra­mi­dal num­ber. Pyra­mi­dal num­bers describe the num­ber of objects required to form a pyra­mid of a cer­tain height with a giv­en num­ber of sides (in this case, a sev­en lay­er pyra­mid with a hep­tag­o­nal base).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Acad­e­mia and faith:
    • Dr. Karin Öberg: Plan­e­tary For­ma­tion, Faith-Shap­ing Books, and the Beau­ty of an Intel­li­gi­ble Uni­verse (Raquel Sequeira, BioL­o­gos): “I feel like there are so many sto­ries of Chris­tians that have had a great strug­gle in acad­e­mia and for whom liv­ing out their faith has been prob­lem­at­ic in dif­fer­ent ways. While these peo­ple do exist and those strug­gles are real, I want peo­ple to know that this is not always the case. I have had a smooth and joy­ful jour­ney being very open about my faith at the very sec­u­lar place that Har­vard is.”
    • The turn­ing tide of intel­lec­tu­al athe­ism (Jonathon Van Maren, Mer­ca­tor­Net): “Not so long ago, the athe­ists who retreat­ed to their Dar­win­ian tow­ers and bricked them­selves up to fire arrows at the faith­ful want­ed to be there. Their intel­lec­tu­al silos were a refuge from faith because they didn’t want Chris­tian­i­ty to be true. They hat­ed it and thought we’d be bet­ter off with­out it.… [but v]iewing West­ern civil­i­sa­tion with its Chris­t­ian soul cut out, many are now will­ing to say: ‘We need Christ.’ What they are unable, thus far, to say, is: ‘I need Christ.’ But the polit­i­cal must become per­son­al. Peter­son appears to under­stand that—and is awestruck by the real­i­ty of it.“ 
  2. When the Aliens Come, Will Their Arrival Destroy Our Faith? (David French, The Dis­patch): “…a sur­pris­ing num­ber of the­olo­gians and Chris­t­ian thinkers have open­ly con­sid­ered the pos­si­bil­i­ty of alien intel­li­gence, includ­ing in book­s and essays. The good folks at Biol­o­gos have pon­dered the ques­tion. And sur­vey­ing the lit­er­a­ture, there is an inter­est­ing amount of con­sen­sus about both the key Chris­t­ian ques­tions and the Chris­t­ian con­clu­sions about alien life.” David French agrees with me, which is always a hap­py out­come.
  3. Where Did the Coro­n­avirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Trou­bling. (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “Near­ly every SARS case since the orig­i­nal epi­dem­ic has been due to lab leaks — six inci­dents in three coun­tries, includ­ing twice in a sin­gle month from a lab in Bei­jing.” This arti­cle is unlocked — you won’t use up your NYT arti­cles read­ing it.
  4. What Bari Weiss Won’t Tell You About Human Rights and Chi­na (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Per­haps there could be greater trade bar­ri­ers between the Unit­ed States and Chi­na — but there’s a real risk that doing so could cause major dam­age to the inter­na­tion­al econ­o­my. And that’s pre­cise­ly the prob­lem, right? When the fight to treat­ing peo­ple with respect and dig­ni­ty by extend­ing them basic free­doms is such a chal­lenge to the world eco­nom­ic sys­tem, you have to acknowl­edge that there’s some­thing wrong with what that sys­tem defines as valu­able.”
  5. My Con­ver­sa­tion With Win­ston Mar­shall (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “One of the things that I have noticed is that an inor­di­nate num­ber of peo­ple who have been will­ing to tell the truth and stand up to the new illib­er­al­ism, are reli­gious. And I won­dered if you could just tell us a lit­tle bit more about how your faith guid­ed you through this deci­sion or maybe to put it anoth­er way, maybe it’s that your faith anchors you in val­ues that are so much big­ger and more eter­nal than the idiot winds that feel like they’re sweep­ing through our pol­i­tics every day.”
  6. A Schol­ar­ly Screw-Up of Bib­li­cal Pro­por­tions (Ariel Sabar, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “What should a jour­nal do after pub­lish­ing a block­buster paper marred by fraud­u­lent evi­dence, failed peer review, and undis­closed con­flicts of inter­est? If you’re Har­vard The­o­log­i­cal Review, the answer appears to be noth­ing.”
  7. Book Announce­ment: We Have Nev­er Been Woke (Musa al-Ghar­bi, per­son­al web­site): “…the Amer­i­cans who are the pri­ma­ry pro­duc­ers and con­sumers of con­tent on antiracism, social­ism, fem­i­nism, etc. also hap­pen to be among the pri­ma­ry ben­e­fi­cia­ries of gen­dered, racial­ized and oth­er forms of inequal­i­ty – and not pas­sive ben­e­fi­cia­ries. We are active par­tic­i­pants in exploit­ing and repro­duc­ing inequal­i­ties. And yet, it is dif­fi­cult for us to ‘see’ how we con­tribute to the prob­lem — pre­cise­ly because of our deeply felt com­mit­ments to social jus­tice. So we expro­pri­ate blame to oth­er­s… often peo­ple who ben­e­fit far less from the sys­tem than we do, and exert far less influ­ence over it.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia, and this book looks like it will be straight fire.

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 307

my favorite arti­cle this week is about a guy who could quench flames by singing at them

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

This is the 307th instal­la­tion, which I like because 307 is a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Endur­ing Les­son of the Galileo Myth (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “While I first heard the sto­ry of Galileo in ele­men­tary school, it wasn’t until about a decade after I had grad­u­at­ed from col­lege that I final­ly learned the truth. No doubt some peo­ple are just now hear­ing about it for the first time. How is that pos­si­ble?”
    • Unless you have done some read­ing on Galileo, you almost cer­tain­ly believe untrue things about what hap­pened.
  2. Social Media, Iden­ti­ty, and the Church (Tim Keller, Life In The Gospel): “While extrem­ists can only gain sta­tus and belong­ing on-line, mod­er­ates (right­ly) fear say­ing some­thing that will anger oth­ers and jeop­ar­dize their career or rela­tion­ships. And so, while extrem­ist­s’ frag­ile iden­ti­ties get a great deal of cov­er on the inter­net, mod­er­ates’ iden­ti­ties are threat­ened by it.”
  3. The Man Who Put Out Fires with Music (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “This exper­i­ment excit­ed such skep­ti­cism that Kel­logg was enlist­ed to repeat it for a team of Berke­ley sci­en­tists. The result­ing pub­lic test on Sep­tem­ber 6, broad­cast live over KGO, is one of the most remark­able events in the his­to­ry of radio.”
    • I’ve actu­al­ly heard (and used) the clos­ing sto­ry before in a ser­mon, but there were details I did­n’t know. It’s nice to have the full sto­ry. Com­ing once again to a ser­mon near you.
  4. Some arti­cles about self-cen­sor­ship and can­cel­la­tion:
    • Why I’m Leav­ing Mum­ford & Sons (Win­ston Mar­shall, Medi­um): “The truth is that report­ing on extrem­ism at the great risk of endan­ger­ing one­self is unques­tion­ably brave. I also feel that my pre­vi­ous apol­o­gy in a small way par­tic­i­pates in the lie that such extrem­ism does not exist, or worse, is a force for good.” Courage and class.
    • Meet the Cen­sored: Bret Wein­stein (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “This is a sig­nif­i­cant moment in the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can media. If a show with the audi­ence that Wein­stein and Hey­ing have can be put out of busi­ness this eas­i­ly, it means that inde­pen­dent media going for­ward will either have to oper­ate out­side the major Inter­net plat­forms, or give up its tra­di­tion­al role as a chal­lenger of main­stream nar­ra­tives.”
    • The Ene­mies of the Open Soci­ety (Mar­tin Gur­ri, Dis­course Mag­a­zine): “In oth­er words, this was a cul­tur­al rather than a polit­i­cal event. It con­cerned our ideals, not our rights: and the ideals of a great many impor­tant Amer­i­cans appear at this time to be drift­ing away from the open soci­ety.”
    • The Books Are Already Burn­ing (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “But why do so few oppose the pres­sure, lies, and the cor­rupt­ing force of these bul­ly­ing cam­paigns? The silent sup­port­ers have each per­formed the same risk-ben­e­fit cal­cu­la­tion and arrived at the same con­clu­sion: Speak­ing up isn’t worth it.”
    • A Con­ver­sa­tion with Daniel Elder, the Choral Music Com­pos­er Who Was Can­celled for Oppos­ing Arson (Quil­lette): “The media prefers to focus on how hor­ri­ble this expe­ri­ence was for me, but an impor­tant facet eas­i­ly lost in this nar­ra­tive is how free I’ve felt since I made the choice.… I say this as an encour­age­ment to the silent major­i­ty all around us: If you’re will­ing to endure the painful tri­al of self, you will be bet­ter for it in the end. And, with enough of us, the world will be bet­ter, too.”
  5. Some arti­cles on sex­u­al­i­ty and sex­u­al ethics.
    • A Pecu­liar Dis­ap­proval of Gay Pride (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “When a per­son becomes a Chris­t­ian, he under­goes a trans­for­ma­tion not just of what he dis­ap­proves, but of how he dis­ap­proves. There is noth­ing pecu­liar­ly Chris­t­ian about the mere dis­ap­proval of any human behav­ior. There­fore, dis­ap­proval of sin­ful behav­iors is no evi­dence of sav­ing grace. Becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is far more pro­found than chang­ing what we dis­ap­prove of.”
    • How Should I Respond to a Colleague’s Same-Sex Wed­ding? (Char­lie Self, The Gospel Coali­tion): “But even with a hum­ble and lov­ing spir­it, pru­dent speech, and gen­uine love for the co-work­ers, there’s a risk of los­ing pro­mo­tions and even employ­ment. This is where faith must con­quer fear, and holy love tri­umph over com­pro­mise. As these deci­sions are dis­cerned, may they be bathed in bless­ing our co-work­ers with tear­ful inter­ces­sion.” Char­lie is a friend who has spo­ken at Chi Alpha before.
    • How Should I Address My Trans­gen­der Col­league? (Char­lie Self, The Gospel Coali­tion): “As Chris­tians, we want to tell the truth, and using the wrong pro­nouns isn’t truth-telling. On the oth­er hand, insist­ing on using cor­rect pro­nouns for a per­son who has asked you not to can come across as dis­re­spect­ful and antag­o­nis­tic.”
    • Homo­phobes don’t care about same-sex love. They object to the sex. (Bri­an Broome, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Love isn’t the prob­lem. I don’t believe that homo­phobes object to whether same-sex cou­ples love each oth­er. No, it’s not the love. It’s the sex.”
  6. The Great Awok­en­ing (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “This brings us ulti­mate­ly back to reli­gion. You can­not fight some­thing with noth­ing. You can­not fight a reli­gious war just by being against that reli­gion. You must fight it with a com­pet­ing reli­gion. And there is one that has deep roots here in Amer­i­ca. Evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tantism, in its var­i­ous iter­a­tions, is what found­ed the coun­try. The woke will even admit it (when it is use­ful to accuse the Chris­tians who built Amer­i­ca of geno­cide). It formed the reli­gious core of Amer­i­ca ages ago and if wok­e­ness will ever be com­bat­ed it will again.”
  7. This is an old­er (1992) arti­cle shared with me by a stu­dent: Research Sup­ports Bible’s Account of Red Sea Part­ing : Weath­er: Gulf of Suez’s geog­ra­phy would make it pos­si­ble, mete­o­rol­o­gist and oceanog­ra­ph­er say. (Thomas H. Maugh II, LA Times): “Because of the pecu­liar geog­ra­phy of the north­ern end of the Red Sea, researchers report Sun­day in the Bul­letin of the Amer­i­can Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Soci­ety, a mod­er­ate wind blow­ing con­stant­ly for about 10 hours could have caused the sea to recede about a mile and the water lev­el to drop 10 feet, leav­ing dry land in the area where many bib­li­cal schol­ars believe the cross­ing occurred.” I have not looked into the under­ly­ing research, but quite inter­est­ing.

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 Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selective pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools.… To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

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 304

fas­ci­nat­ing links — enjoy

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

This is the 304th install­ment, an inter­est­ing num­ber because it is the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes. 304 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sin­ning in the Rain: Weath­er Shocks, Church Atten­dance and Crime (Jonathan Moreno-Med­i­na, The Review of Eco­nom­ics and Sta­tis­tics): “Based on a pan­el between 1980 and 2016, I find that one more Sun­day with pre­cip­i­ta­tion at the time of church increas­es year­ly drug-relat­ed, alco­hol-relat­ed and white-col­lar crimes.” Fas­ci­nat­ing. The author is a Ph.D. can­di­date in econ at Duke.
  2. Amer­i­ca Los­es Reli­gion, Some­what (Lyman Stone, Nation­al Review): “Amer­i­cans today are more like­ly to be part of a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty than they were in 1800; the change over time can be char­ac­ter­ized nei­ther by a grad­ual decline from a reli­gious­ly pris­tine past nor by the onward march of ratio­nal think­ing.”
  3. Some thoughts on race in Amer­i­ca:
    • When Our Fore­fa­thers Fail (David French, The Dis­patch): “Human­i­ty has not trans­formed its fun­da­men­tal nature in the last 100 years. A nation full of peo­ple no bet­ter than us can do great good. A nation full of peo­ple no worse than us can com­mit great evil. Remem­ber­ing our nation’s virtues helps give us hope. Remem­ber­ing our sin gives us humil­i­ty. Remem­ber­ing both gives us the moti­va­tion and the inspi­ra­tion nec­es­sary to repair our land.”
    • T. D. Jakes on How White Evan­gel­i­cals Lost Their Way (Emma Green, The Atlantic): ‘Where I’ve tried to focus is on the white pas­tors who spoke out and tried to say some­thing pos­i­tive that was mis­un­der­stood. And I lit­er­al­ly got on the phone with some of them and encour­aged them to keep talk­ing. Their imme­di­ate reac­tion was “I got it wrong; I’m not going to broach that sub­ject again. I’m going to stay away from it. I’m just not going to talk about it.” And if we do that, we’ll nev­er get bet­ter. We have to keep talk­ing.’ The title is pret­ty mis­lead­ing — that’s def­i­nite­ly not the vibe you pick up from the arti­cle itself.
    • What Hap­pens When Doc­tors Can’t Speak Freely? (Katie Her­zog, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “’Whole research areas are off-lim­its,’ he said, adding that some of what is being pub­lished in the nation’s top jour­nals is ‘shod­dy as hell.‘  Here, he was refer­ring in part to a study pub­lished last year in the Pro­ceed­ings Of The Nation­al Acad­e­my Of Sci­ences. The study was cov­ered all over the news, with head­lines like ‘Black New­borns More Like­ly to Die When Looked After by White Doc­tors’ (CNN), ‘The Lack of Black Doc­tors is Killing Black Babies’ (For­tune), and ‘Black Babies More Like­ly to Sur­vive when Cared for by Black Doc­tors’ (The Guardian). Despite these breath­less head­lines, the study was so method­olog­i­cal­ly flawed that, accord­ing to sev­er­al of the doc­tors I spoke with, it’s impos­si­ble to extrap­o­late any con­clu­sions about how the race of the treat­ing doc­tor impacts patient out­comes at all. And yet very few peo­ple were will­ing to pub­licly crit­i­cize it.”
    • Those Who Did­n’t Make the List (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I absolute­ly believe that we can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly build admis­sions sys­tems that increase diver­si­ty and inclu­sion, includ­ing specif­i­cal­ly for Black and His­pan­ic appli­cants, with­out per­pet­u­at­ing oth­er kinds of injus­tice. I just have zero faith our actu­al­ly-exist­ing uni­ver­si­ties and employ­ers will put them togeth­er. Why do good when it’s so much eas­i­er to appear to be good?”
  4. COVID per­spec­tives:
    • Why the Lab Leak The­o­ry Mat­ters (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “First, to the extent that the Unit­ed States is engaged in a con­flict of pro­pa­gan­da and soft pow­er with the regime in Bei­jing, there’s a pret­ty big dif­fer­ence between a world where the Chi­nese regime can say, We weren’t respon­si­ble for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re deca­dent, and a world where this was basi­cal­ly their Cher­nobyl except their incom­pe­tence and cov­er-up sick­ened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.”
    • Media Group­think and the Lab-Leak The­o­ry (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “If the lab-leak the­o­ry is final­ly get­ting the respect­ful atten­tion it always deserved, it’s main­ly because Joe Biden autho­rized an inquiry and Antho­ny Fau­ci admit­ted to doubts about the nat­ur­al-ori­gin claim. In oth­er words, the right pres­i­dent and the right pub­lic-health expert have blessed a cer­tain line of inquiry. Yet the lab-leak the­o­ry, whether or not it turns out to be right, was always cred­i­ble. Even if Tom Cot­ton believed it.”
    • The Lab-Leak The­o­ry: Inside the Fight to Uncov­er COVID-19’s Ori­gins (Kather­ine Eban, Van­i­ty Fair): “A months long Van­i­ty Fair inves­ti­ga­tion, inter­views with more than 40 peo­ple, and a review of hun­dreds of pages of U.S. gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, includ­ing inter­nal mem­os, meet­ing min­utes, and email cor­re­spon­dence, found that con­flicts of inter­est, stem­ming in part from large gov­ern­ment grants sup­port­ing con­tro­ver­sial virol­o­gy research, ham­pered the U.S. inves­ti­ga­tion into COVID-19’s ori­gin at every step. In one State Depart­ment meet­ing, offi­cials seek­ing to demand trans­paren­cy from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment say they were explic­it­ly told by col­leagues not to explore the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s gain-of-func­tion research, because it would bring unwel­come atten­tion to U.S. gov­ern­ment fund­ing of it.” Long, detailed.
  5. A Dan­ger­ous State of Affairs (Kevin Williamson, Nation­al Review): “In Dal­las, a recent class for those seek­ing a license to car­ry was well attend­ed in spite of the fact that Texas is about to imple­ment ‘con­sti­tu­tion­al car­ry,’ under which no license would be required to car­ry a firearm that the car­ri­er is legal­ly eli­gi­ble to own. Mid­dle-aged African Amer­i­cans made up almost exact­ly one half of that class. Black buy­ers account for about one in five of the guns sold nation­wide in recent years, and His­pan­ic buy­ers a sim­i­lar share. And about one in five buy­ers last year were first-time buy­ers.”
  6. Woke Insti­tu­tions is Just Civ­il Rights Law (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The US seems to elect some of the most con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians in the West­ern world, but has per­haps the wok­est insti­tu­tions. Civ­il rights law makes all major insti­tu­tions sub­ject to the will of left-wing bureau­crats, activists, and judges at the expense of nor­mal cit­i­zens.”
  7. I read two sur­pris­ing­ly com­ple­men­tary arti­cles about abor­tion this week:
    • Abor­tion as an Instru­ment of Eugen­ics (Michael Stokes Paulsen, Har­vard Law Review): “If the intu­ition of the wrong­ness of trait-selec­tion abor­tion has moral salience — the intu­ition that it is sim­ply wrong to kill a fetus for rea­sons of race, sex, or dis­abil­i­ty — it is because of the implic­it recog­ni­tion of the human­i­ty of the fetus. If killing a fetus because she is female (or Black, or dis­abled) is thought hor­ri­ble, it can only be because the human fetus is thought to pos­sess moral sta­tus as human — because ‘it’ is a baby girl or a baby boy, a mem­ber of the human fam­i­ly.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas. The arti­cle itself is very long. Unless you are in law school, read­ing the intro­duc­tion, sec­tion IV, and the con­clu­sion is prob­a­bly enough.
    • Dawkins is wrong – gross­ly wrong – about Down’s syn­drome (Simon Barnes, Tor­toise): “[Dawkins] is in the posi­tion of the bril­liant philoso­pher telling us that the table at which we are sit­ting does not exist.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 299

so many enter­tain­ing tid­bits at the end — way more than nor­mal

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

This is the 299th install­ment of these emails. 299 is, I am told, the most pieces into which a sim­ple object (like a cube or a sphere — some­thing with­out a weird struc­ture) can be split using 12 straight cuts.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why You’re Chris­t­ian (David Per­rell, per­son­al blog): “…I’m a tepid non-believ­er myself.… [How­ev­er] I real­ized that society’s most pas­sion­ate crit­ics, most of whom claim to be sec­u­lar, usu­al­ly have the most Chris­t­ian val­ues of all. They’ve stud­ied in elite uni­ver­si­ties, they live in major cities, and they’re proud mem­bers of the intel­li­gentsia. Human rights, a cen­ter­piece of their moral out­look, is incon­sis­tent with the rest of their world­view. Though they pride them­selves on evi­dence-based think­ing, they’re intel­lec­tu­al­ly bank­rupt on the top­ic of human rights.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): What Became of Athe­ism, Part One: Wear­ing the Uni­form (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…if God exists then that is the sin­gle most impor­tant fact in the his­to­ry of cre­ation and noth­ing else can take its crown, ever. If a being exists, of what­ev­er nature, who cre­at­ed real­i­ty, exists with­in all of real­i­ty, set reality’s phys­i­cal and moral rules, watch­es over all of real­i­ty, judges all of us on how devout and moral we are, and deter­mines reward and pun­ish­ment based on that judge­ment, that clear­ly is the truth that trumps all oth­er truths. Strange to let it slip out of the debate qui­et­ly in the night. But then I sup­pose that’s cul­ture war; soon­er or lat­er the only ques­tion that remains is who is on what side of the line, and all the rest dis­solves.”
  2. Jus­tice-relat­ed thoughts:
    • ‘The Voice of Your Broth­er’s Blood Is Cry­ing to Me From the Ground’ (David French, The Dis­patch): “…we can artic­u­late three truths of sim­ple, indi­vid­ual jus­tice. First, a grave wrong cre­ates a moral and spir­i­tu­al cry for redress. Sec­ond, it is the role of gov­ern­ment to pro­vide that redress. And third, the gov­ern­ment must be impar­tial, treat­ing ‘great and small’ alike. All too many Amer­i­cans are com­plete­ly unaware of the extent to which the present struc­tures and habits of Amer­i­can law fail to meet those basic oblig­a­tions, espe­cial­ly when injus­tice is vis­it­ed upon the cit­i­zen by the state.”
    • Chau­vin Was Con­vict­ed. Some­thing Is Still Very Wrong. (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “For­give­ness doesn’t feel par­tic­u­lar­ly tri­umphant. It’s a gift no one wants to be in the posi­tion to give; it releas­es a wrong­do­er from moral debt — for their own good and the com­mon good, not for the sake of the wronged.… But I want to live in a world where it is pos­si­ble to for­give and to be for­giv­en. In fact, I think it’s nec­es­sary.”
    • The Real Rea­son to End the Death Penal­ty (Paul Gra­ham, Sub­stack): “But in prac­tice the debate about the death penal­ty is not about whether it’s ok to kill mur­der­ers. It’s about whether it’s ok to kill inno­cent peo­ple, because at least 4% of peo­ple on death row are inno­cent.” I find this a real­ly inter­est­ing line of argu­ment. Clear­ly we want to have a 100% accu­ra­cy rate in all crim­i­nal con­vic­tions. But is 96% accu­ra­cy out­ra­geous­ly intol­er­a­ble? To the extent that it becomes a per­sua­sive argu­ment against the death penal­ty isn’t that then also an argu­ment against impris­on­ment? Or vir­tu­al­ly any pun­ish­ment?
    • Unjust Sec­u­lar Jus­tice (Matthew Schmitz,First Things): “While in the colo­nial era most cas­es went to tri­al (and most tri­als last­ed a stun­ning­ly short thir­ty min­utes), more and more are now resolved by a plea bar­gain. Nowhere is our aban­don­ment of colo­nial ideas of crim­i­nal jus­tice more appar­ent than in no-con­test pleas that allow defen­dants to receive lighter sen­tences with­out any admis­sion of guilt.” This is an old­er book review (2013) but is quite good.
    • Out­rage Over­load (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “Mod­ern policing—or even polic­ing qua policing—owes far less to slave patrolling than NASA owes to Hitler’s rock­et pro­gram. And yet no one talks about the trou­bling Nazi roots of mod­ern space explo­ration, or asks Elon Musk if he’s exor­cised the ghost of Wern­er Von Braun from SpaceX. I have seen this slave patrol thing brought up count­less times in inter­views, and not once have I seen an inter­view­er say, ‘Real­ly?’ nev­er mind, ‘What the hell are you talk­ing about?’ It’s as bat­ty as any con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, and it’s a delib­er­ate attempt to heap innu­en­do on polic­ing in lieu of mak­ing an intel­li­gent argu­ment. And that’s what frus­trates me to no end. It’s the job of jour­nal­ists to call out B.S. when it’s being thrown in their faces.”
  3. Where Two or Three Are Gath­ered (William J. Haun & Daniel L. Chen, Law & Lib­er­ty): “Over 40 ami­cus briefs lam­bast­ed this embrace of open-end­ed gov­ern­ment surveillance—reflecting an ide­o­log­i­cal agree­ment so wide that NARAL Pro-Choice North Car­oli­na and Wis­con­sin Right to Life joined the same brief. On the sur­face, wide­spread con­sen­sus in favor of asso­ci­a­tion­al pri­va­cy is sure­ly wel­come. But this agree­ment masks equal­ly wide­spread, decades-long con­fu­sion over how and why the Con­sti­tu­tion pro­tects free asso­ci­a­tion.” Quite good, a bit dry. The authors are lawyers with the Beck­et Fund.
  4. “Wokeness is a prob­lem and we all know it” (Sean Illing inter­view­ing James Carville, Vox): “We won the White House against a world-his­tor­i­cal buf­foon. And we came with­in 42,000 votes of los­ing. We lost con­gres­sion­al seats. We didn’t pick up state leg­is­la­tures. So let’s not have an argu­ment about whether or not we’re off-key in our mes­sag­ing. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jar­gon and there’s too much eso­ter­i­ca and it turns peo­ple off.” Carville is a leg­endary Demo­c­ra­t­ic polit­i­cal strate­gist and he is in full-on old man rant mode here.
  5. ‘This Is a Catastrophe.’ In India, Ill­ness Is Every­where. (Jef­frey Get­tle­man, New York Times): “New Del­hi, India’s sprawl­ing cap­i­tal of 20 mil­lion, is suf­fer­ing a calami­tous surge. A few days ago, the pos­i­tiv­i­ty rate hit a stag­ger­ing 36 per­cent — mean­ing more than one out of three peo­ple test­ed were infect­ed. A month ago, it was less than 3 per­cent.”
    1. Relat­ed: ‘Death Is the Only Truth.’ Watch­ing India’s Funer­al Pyres Burn. (Aman Sethi, New York Times): “The Indi­an gov­ern­ment has ordered Twit­ter, Face­book and Insta­gram to take down dozens of posts crit­i­ciz­ing its han­dling of the pan­dem­ic. But the graph­ic images of mass cre­ma­tions have cut through this wall of noise, mis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da, cap­tur­ing what epi­demi­ol­o­gists call ‘excess mor­tal­i­ty’ in grue­some detail.”
  6. Colum­bia Stone (T.A. Kras­ni­can, Sub­stack): “This pub­lic for­get­ful­ness is the same indif­fer­ence that in 1938 inspired Adolf Hitler, after issu­ing orders for his Nazi ‘death-head for­ma­tions’ to ‘send to death mer­ci­less­ly and with­out com­pas­sion, men, women, and chil­dren of Pol­ish deriva­tion and lan­guage,’ to write the famous phrase, ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the anni­hi­la­tion of the Arme­ni­ans?’ Pub­lic ambiva­lence about human tragedy embold­ened him.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Indi­vid­u­al­ism is asso­ci­at­ed with hap­py coun­tries, but not peo­ple (Zaid Jilani, Sub­stack): “In a recent­ly released study, team of researchers stud­ied young adults across four coun­tries — Chi­na, the Unit­ed States, Rus­sia, and Italy — start­ing with the hypoth­e­sis that lev­els of life sat­is­fac­tion would be high­er among indi­vid­u­als who have indi­vid­u­al­is­tic val­ues. At the coun­try lev­el, this is indeed what they found. Coun­tries with a high­er index of indi­vid­u­al­is­tic val­ues had more life sat­is­fac­tion — that put Amer­i­ca on top, fol­lowed by Italy, Rus­sia, and then Chi­na. But an entire­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture emerged when they looked at the indi­vid­ual lev­el. There, they found that indi­vid­u­al­ism had no impact on life sat­is­fac­tion. Instead, life sat­is­fac­tion was pos­i­tive­ly cor­re­lat­ed with col­lec­tivism, regard­less of the wider cul­ture of the coun­try.” My take: Amer­i­cans are on aver­age hap­pi­er than the Chi­nese because of the free­doms which emerge from our indi­vid­u­al­ism, but the hap­pi­est indi­vid­u­als in each coun­try are those that freely choose to embrace fam­i­ly and com­mu­ni­ty.

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 No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

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 295

A lot about Jesus and a lit­tle bit about the news cycle.

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

This vol­ume 295, which is not a ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing num­ber. Accord­ing to one web­site it is a “struc­tured del­toidal hexa­con­ta­he­dral num­ber” but that sounds sil­ly and is even less inter­est­ing to me than the sim­ple fact that 295 = 59 â‹… 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Ten­nant on Aquinas’s Sec­ond Way (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “…I don’t mean to be too hard on Ten­nant, specifically. There is noth­ing unique about his objections. On the con­trary, vari­a­tions on them are con­stant­ly raised against Aquinas by main­stream aca­d­e­m­ic philoso­phers and by main­stream aca­d­e­mics and intel­lec­tu­als from oth­er fields (not to men­tion count­less amateurs). And yet they are all demon­stra­bly based on egre­gious errors and misunderstandings. Which, while it tells you noth­ing about Aquinas, says much about what you should think of main­stream aca­d­e­m­ic and intel­lec­tu­al opinion.“ 
  2. From the Emp­ty Tomb to Today’s Abuse: Believe Women (Amy Orr-Ewing, Gospel Coali­tion): “If we don’t believe women, then we have to dis­miss the eye­wit­ness­es to the Incar­na­tion, Atone­ment, and Res­ur­rec­tion. If we won’t lis­ten, we don’t have access to the evi­dence for the cen­tral truths of the Chris­t­ian faith.”
  3. Is Chris­tian­i­ty a White Man’s Reli­gion? (Claude Atcho, Gospel Coali­tion): “[This] exam­ple and exhor­ta­tion show how to dis­en­tan­gle rather than decon­struct. Through care­ful dis­en­tan­gling and patient recov­ery, we find that Chris­tian­i­ty unique­ly speaks to the con­cerns of Black peo­ple with expe­ri­en­tial and his­tor­i­cal foun­da­tions that have empow­ered our peo­ple for cen­turies.”
  4. He’s a Famous Evan­gel­i­cal Preach­er, but His Kids Wish He’d Pipe Down (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “I told Rick Joyn­er that I thought his strug­gles with his chil­dren reflect­ed a larg­er gen­er­a­tion gap and dwin­dling of influ­ence of the reli­gious right. To my sur­prise, he agreed. ‘The church in Amer­i­ca has been tremen­dous­ly weak­ened,’ he acknowl­edged. If the Joyn­ers are a micro­cosm of a nation divid­ed, per­haps they also offer a ray of hope in their abil­i­ty to bridge dif­fer­ences. They remain close and get togeth­er for hol­i­days, even if gath­er­ings are tense.” Real­ly inter­est­ing.
  5. How America’s sur­veil­lance net­works helped the FBI catch the Capi­tol mob (Drew Har­well & Craig Tim­berg, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Whenever you see this tech­nol­o­gy used on some­one you don’t like, remem­ber it’s also being used on a social move­ment you support,” said Evan Greer, direc­tor of the dig­i­tal rights advo­ca­cy group Fight for the Future. “Once in a while, this tech­nol­o­gy gets used on real­ly bad peo­ple doing real­ly bad stuff. But the rest of the time it’s being used on all of us, in ways that are pro­found­ly chill­ing for free­dom of expression.”
  6. Wel­come to the Decade of Con­cern (Tan­ner Greer, Schol­ar’s Stage): “The 2020s will see both the growth of Chi­nese mil­i­tary pow­er to new heights and a tem­po­rary nadir in Amer­i­can capac­i­ty to inter­vene in any con­flict in China’s near abroad. The ‘tem­po­rary’ part of that equa­tion is impor­tant. His­to­ri­ans of the First World War and the Pacif­ic War trace the ori­gins of those con­flicts to pes­simistic assess­ments of the chang­ing bal­ance of pow­er. The bel­ligeren­cy of impe­r­i­al Japan and Wil­helmine Ger­many rest­ed on a belief that their posi­tion vis a vis their ene­mies could only decline with time. Any states­man who believes that a tem­po­rary mil­i­tary advan­tage over an ene­my will soon erode will have a strong incen­tive to fight it out before ero­sion has begun.”
    • Chi­na-relat­ed: The cost of speak­ing up against Chi­na (Joel Gunter, BBC): “Some of those who spoke to the BBC — from the US, UK, Aus­tralia, Nor­way, the Nether­lands, Fin­land, Ger­many, and Turkey — pro­vid­ed screen­shots of threat­en­ing What­sApp, WeChat and Face­book mes­sages; oth­ers described in detail what had been said in phone and video calls. Every­one described some form of deten­tion or harass­ment of their fam­i­ly mem­bers in Xin­jiang by local police or state secu­ri­ty offi­cials.”
  7. On the Geor­gia vot­ing law:
    • Pos­i­tive: Why State Elec­tion Reform Bills Don’t Sig­nal a New Jim Crow Era (Wal­ter Olson, The Dis­patch): “The law, wide­ly por­trayed as a hor­ren­dous ven­ture into so-called vot­er sup­pres­sion, actu­al­ly con­tains many pro­vi­sions that lib­er­al­ize access to bal­lot meth­ods that came in handy dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, such as ear­ly vot­ing, as well as address­ing the gen­uine prob­lem of long lines at polling places.”
    • Neg­a­tive: What Georgia’s Vot­ing Law Real­ly Does (Nick Corasan­i­ti and Reid J. Epstein, New York Times): “Go page by page through Georgia’s new vot­ing law, and one take­away stands above all oth­ers: The Repub­li­can leg­is­la­ture and gov­er­nor have made a breath­tak­ing asser­tion of par­ti­san pow­er in elec­tions, mak­ing absen­tee vot­ing hard­er and cre­at­ing restric­tions and com­pli­ca­tions in the wake of nar­row loss­es to Democ­rats.”
    • Pos­i­tive: No, Georgia’s new vot­ing law is not a return to Jim Crow (Hen­ry Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “No bill is per­fect, and rea­son­able peo­ple can dis­agree about the bal­ance between vot­er access and elec­tion integri­ty. But Demo­c­ra­t­ic claims that this law amounts to racist vot­er sup­pres­sion should be seen for what they are: over­wrought par­ti­san rhetoric that unnec­es­sar­i­ly increas­es racial and polit­i­cal ten­sions.” The author is a senior fel­low at the Ethics and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Cen­ter
    • Out­raged: Vot­er Sup­pres­sion Is Vio­lence (Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone): “This neo-Jim Crow mea­sure builds upon the may­hem that has already cost lives, not just at the Capi­tol, but also thanks to the malev­o­lent gov­er­nance of Repub­li­cans nation­wide. After decades of work­ing to erode the promise of the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment, or per­haps to sim­ply reserve it for them­selves, it appears that Repub­li­cans want to fin­ish the job this year. This is why S.B. 202, and the laws sure­ly to be mod­eled after it, are designed to ensure that white men with regres­sive pol­i­tics will con­tin­ue to hold pow­er.”
    • Neg­a­tive-ish: Fact check: What the new Geor­gia elec­tions law actu­al­ly does (Daniel Dale and Dianne Gal­lagher, CNN): “As crit­ics have cor­rect­ly said, the law impos­es sig­nif­i­cant new obsta­cles to vot­ing. It also gives the Repub­li­can-con­trolled state gov­ern­ment new pow­er to assert con­trol over the con­duct of elec­tions in Demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­ties. The law does, how­ev­er, con­tain some pro­vi­sions that can be rea­son­ably be described as pro-vot­ing, and crit­ics have not always described all of the text accu­rate­ly.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Life­guard Earn­ings Here May Have You Prac­tic­ing Your Strokes (Arden Dier, News­er): “Accord­ing to Forbes, sev­en life­guards made more than $300,000 in 2019, which was the most recent year for which data was avail­able, while 82 life­guards made more than $200,000. Thir­ty-one life­guards made more than $50,000 in over­time pay, while three col­lect­ed more than $100,000, per Forbes.”
  • John Mor­ton (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): the trick is about nine min­utes, although the video is longer due to ads at the end.
  • Chick-Fil‑A Drug Deal­er (John Crist, YouTube): five min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have From the hap­py news depart­ment: Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

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 294

more on Atlanta, puri­ty cul­ture, and oth­er inter­est­ing links

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

This is vol­ume 294, which is neat because 111152 ‑ 2942 = 123,456,789. Num­bers are fun!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. On anti-Asian vio­lence:
    • The Racism Virus: Anti-Asian Attacks Surge (NBC News, YouTube): fifty-two min­utes, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. From before the Atlanta shoot­ings.
    • Race and False Hate Crime Nar­ra­tives (Heather Mac Don­ald, Quil­lette): “Per­haps a rev­e­la­tion of anti-Asian ani­mus will emerge, but for now, Long appears to have tar­get­ed pre­sumed sex work­ers who hap­pened, giv­en the demo­graph­ics of the mas­sage trade in Atlanta, to be Asian. Long intend­ed to tar­get a busi­ness in Flori­da next that made pornog­ra­phy, he told police. The employ­ees there were unlike­ly to be Asian.” The author is a Stan­ford Law School grad.
    • I am sur­prised at how divi­sive the ques­tion of motive has been. Regard­less of motive in this spe­cif­ic case, I think it is clear that the Atlanta attacks were wicked and also that many Asian-Amer­i­cans encounter prej­u­dice that too often esca­lates into vio­lence.
  2. On Chris­t­ian sex­u­al teach­ings:
    • Atlanta Suspect’s Fix­a­tion on Sex Is Famil­iar Thorn for Evan­gel­i­cals (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture he was raised in, he said, ‘teach­es women to hate their bod­ies, as the source of temp­ta­tion, and it teach­es men to hate their minds, which lead them into lust and sex­u­al immoral­i­ty.’ ”
    • Why the Atlanta Mas­sacre Trig­gered a Con­ver­sa­tion About Puri­ty Cul­ture (David French, The Dis­patch): “Plac­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for male puri­ty on women harms women. It cre­ates an impos­si­ble bur­den. You can­not oppress women enough to pro­tect men from them­selves. You can ban porn, ban explic­it TV and movies of all types, put women in long dress­es, pro­hib­it make­up, and require courtship con­tracts, and you stil­l will not solve the prob­lem of sin.”
    • Nev­er The Demons (Samuel D. James, Let­ter & Litur­gy): “I’m all for inter­ro­gat­ing the harm­ful effects of some church cul­tures, but I’m not sure why we don’t even linger over the news of a young man’s mur­der­ing eight peo­ple to ‘elim­i­nate temp­ta­tion’ long enough to see the demon­ic forces that Jesus clear­ly saw every­where he went. And when that sto­ry is quick­ly fol­lowed by anoth­er mass mur­der in Col­orado? The news cycle just resets, and the blood is on the hands of the GOP, or all Mus­lims, or puri­ty cul­ture, or can­cel culture…name your ide­o­log­i­cal ene­my, and you can find some­one promi­nent lay­ing hor­ror at their feet. Nev­er the demons.”
    • On puri­ty cul­ture and vio­lence, briefly (Samuel D. James, Let­ter & Litur­gy): “I think sto­ries [like the NYT arti­cle] are frus­trat­ing because they offer gen­uine insight mixed with a jour­nal­is­tic fram­ing that is deeply untrust­wor­thy. Brad Onishi, Jeff Chu, and Samuel Perry—the three voic­es brought in to crit­i­cize evan­gel­i­cal puri­ty culture—are all exam­ples of LGBT-affirm­ing post-evan­gel­i­cal­ism. Because of this fram­ing, the sub­text of the arti­cle is that there are real­ly only two choic­es for evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians: dou­ble down on hat­ing women and empow­er­ing shoot­ers like Robert Long, or aban­don core evan­gel­i­cal doc­trines. This is exact­ly the pos­ture that defines near­ly all anti-puri­ty cul­ture writ­ing I see, which is why I get so frus­trat­ed by it, even when it makes gen­uine­ly help­ful points…”
    • Ques­tions for David French on the Con­nec­tions between the Atlanta Killer and Puri­ty Cul­ture (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “What is the con­nec­tion between the killer and tox­ic puri­ty the­ol­o­gy and cul­ture? The piece assumes a con­nec­tion but nev­er gets around to demon­strat­ing one. And that leads to the weird expe­ri­ence of read­ing some­thing where I agree with vir­tu­al­ly every sin­gle word and yet find that the actu­al argu­ment doesn’t hold togeth­er.”
    • How church­es talk about sex­u­al­i­ty can mean life or death. We saw that in Robert Long. (Rachel Den­hol­lan­der, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Sex­u­al­i­ty divorced from per­son­hood is the foun­da­tion of objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and vio­lence. The evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty has yet to grap­ple with its own ver­sion of this same mind-set and the deep dam­age it has, and will con­tin­ue, to do.”
  3. Chris­t­ian Bak­er Sued Again for Refus­ing to Bake a Cake (Colleen Slevin, Asso­ci­at­ed Press @ Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Autumn Scar­di­na attempt­ed to order the birth­day cake on the same day in 2017 that the high court announced it would hear bak­er Jack Phillips’s appeal in the wed­ding cake case. Scar­di­na, an attor­ney, request­ed a cake that was blue on the out­side and pink on the inside in hon­or of her gen­der tran­si­tion.”
    • The Nev­er-End­ing Per­se­cu­tion of Jack Phillips (David Harsyani, Nation­al Review): “You may not be sur­prised to learn that Scar­di­na hadn’t asked the most famous Chris­t­ian bak­er in the nation to cre­ate a ‘tran­si­tion’ cake by hap­pen­stance. Phillips’s lawyers sus­pec­t Scar­di­na called — the name appeared on the caller ID — to request ‘an image of Satan smok­ing mar­i­jua­na.’ Lat­er, an email was sent to the shop request­ing ‘a three-tiered white cake’ with a ‘large fig­ure of Satan, lick­ing a nine inch black Dil­do … that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.’ ”
    • Col­orado Bak­er Faces Long Line Of Peo­ple Out­side Wait­ing To Be Oppressed By Him (Baby­lon Bee): “Phillips had anoth­er busy day, but in the end, all his cus­tomers were sat­is­fied, those who want­ed cakes receiv­ing beau­ti­ful cakes and those who want­ed to get dis­crim­i­nat­ed against get­ting dis­crim­i­nat­ed against. Philips is now con­sid­er­ing open­ing anoth­er branch just to not make peo­ple cakes, as he is appar­ent­ly the only cakeshop in the coun­try that does that, and it’s in high demand.” Nor­mal­ly I’d put a Baby­lon Bee arti­cle in the amus­ing sec­tion, but this one belongs here.
  4. Stan­ford’s silence does­n’t sur­prise wrestling champ: ‘Prob­a­bly more mad at me’ (Ann Kil­lion, SF Chron­i­cle): “Stan­ford ath­let­ics did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment on Griffith’s nation­al title. On Sat­ur­day the ath­let­ic depart­ment Twit­ter account @GoStanford tweet­ed, ‘Shane Grif­fith is a nation­al cham­pi­on. The red­shirt sopho­more com­plet­ed his run at the NCAA cham­pi­onships atop the podi­um, Sat­ur­day, at the Enter­prise Cen­ter.’ The dry mes­sage was notably miss­ing the excla­ma­tion points and emo­jis that accom­pa­ny almost every oth­er post.”
  5. What It Takes To Go From Slav­ery To Free­dom (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “ ‘When you are a slave, you don’t have to think,’ Yeon­mi told me. ‘In North Korea you can’t say I. You can just say we. We love the col­or red. Or we love kim­chi. You know every answer. In North Korea, every­thing is deter­mined for you before you are born, based on your family’s stand­ing in the par­ty. You don’t think: What do I study? Where do I live? Who do I mar­ry? They decide.  I remem­ber after I pub­lished my book one of my first inter­views was with NPR and they asked me about free­dom. I said free­dom was painful and con­fus­ing. I think they were expect­ing me to say free­dom was awe­some.’ But the truth was more com­pli­cat­ed. ‘It was so painful to be free. I some­times thought in the begin­ning if there was a guar­an­tee to go back to North Korea and not get exe­cut­ed and just live on frozen pota­toes I might go back.’ ” WOW. What an inter­view. Com­ing some­day to a ser­mon near you.
  6. The Bur­den of Proof (Jim­my Akin, per­son­al blog): “When­ev­er two peo­ple dis­agree and one wants the oth­er to change his view, then the per­son advo­cat­ing the change always has to shoul­der the bur­den of proof.” The cen­tral nugget is in the excerpt, but there’s more there (includ­ing an inter­est­ing Catholic per­spec­tive on Sola Scrip­tura).
  7. Why Are Few­er Young Adults Hav­ing Casu­al Sex? (Scott J. South & Lei Lei, Socius): “Among young women, the decline in the fre­quen­cy of drink­ing alco­hol explains about one quar­ter of the drop in the propen­si­ty to have casu­al sex. Among young men, declines in drink­ing fre­quen­cy, an increase in com­put­er gam­ing, and the grow­ing per­cent­age who core­side with their par­ents all con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the decline in casu­al sex.” See also the “a while ago” link below.

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Consent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25) 

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 290

links con­tain­ing both good and bad news for evan­gel­i­cals

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 287

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 283

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. WHAT HAPPENED

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

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

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

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

  2. WHAT HAPPENED IN CONTEXT

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

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

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

  3. THEOLOGICAL/RELIGIOUS COMMENTARY

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

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

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

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

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 282

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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