Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 324

some pre-Hal­loween 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 324, which is 182.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Emp­ty Pews Are an Amer­i­can Pub­lic Health Cri­sis (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele and Bren­dan Case, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious par­tic­i­pa­tion strong­ly pro­motes health and well­ness. This means that Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing dis­af­fec­tion with orga­nized reli­gion isn’t just bad news for church­es; it also rep­re­sents a pub­lic health cri­sis, one that has been large­ly ignored but the effects of which are like­ly to increase in com­ing years.”
    • The authors are part of the Human Flour­ish­ing Pro­gram at Har­vard. I have quot­ed Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research sev­er­al times in the past.
  2. Some per­spec­tives on the Amer­i­can church:
    • J.D. Vance and the Great Chal­lenge of Chris­t­ian Mal­ice (David French, The Dis­patch): “The real cri­sis [in Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal engage­ment] is instead a cri­sis of the heart. Our ortho­doxy is under­mined by our actions, and our actions spring forth from the deep­est parts of our being. At a time of ris­ing antipa­thy, a Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty should blaze forth with a radi­ant coun­ter­cul­tur­al embrace of kind­ness and grace. Instead, all too many of us have for­got­ten a fun­da­men­tal truth. There are no ‘right peo­ple’ to hate.”
    • Why ‘Evan­gel­i­cal’ Is Becom­ing Anoth­er Word for ‘Repub­li­can’ (Ryan Burge, New York Times): “For instance, in 2008, just 16 per­cent of all self-iden­ti­fied evan­gel­i­cals report­ed their church atten­dance as nev­er or sel­dom. But in 2020, that num­ber jumped to 27 per­cent. In 2008, about a third of evan­gel­i­cals who nev­er attend­ed church said they were polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. By 2019, that had risen to about 50 per­cent.… [also] more peo­ple are embrac­ing the label who have no attach­ment to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. For exam­ple, the share of Catholics who also iden­ti­fied as evan­gel­i­cals (or born again) rose to 15 per­cent in 2018 from 9 per­cent in 2008. That same pat­tern appears with Mus­lims. In fact, there’s evi­dence that the share of mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, Ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty and Hin­duism who iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cal is larg­er today than it was just a decade ago.”
    • The Evan­gel­i­cal Church Is Break­ing Apart (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Scott Dud­ley, the senior pas­tor at Belle­vue Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton, refers to this as ‘our idol­a­try of pol­i­tics.’ He’s heard of many con­gre­gants leav­ing their church because it didn’t match their pol­i­tics, he told me, but has nev­er once heard of some­one chang­ing their pol­i­tics because it didn’t match their church’s teach­ing. He often tells his con­gre­ga­tion that if the Bible doesn’t chal­lenge your pol­i­tics at least occa­sion­al­ly, you’re not real­ly pay­ing atten­tion to the Hebrew scrip­tures or the New Tes­ta­ment.”
    • Church Mem­ber­ship Is Not a One-Way Street (Alex Duke, Cross­way): “Think of your church as a light­bulb hooked up to a dim­mer switch in a dark room. Every­thing we do makes our wit­ness brighter or dark­er. Prac­tic­ing mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is one of the surest ways to turn that dim­mer switch up; ignor­ing it is one of the surest ways to turn it down. Mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is more impor­tant than you think.”
  3. The Prob­lem With Dave Chap­pelle (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Chap­pelle is not a hap­less vic­tim of a crush­ing ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da; he’s not Bar­ronelle Stutz­man or James Eich. Chap­pelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robe­spierre of the very rev­o­lu­tion that’s after him now. His for­tune was made inside the same pro­gres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ty that threat­ens him, and it is pre­cise­ly Chappelle’s (and many oth­er come­di­ans) skill with which he dis­missed any notion of the sacred that has tak­en root in the peo­ple who are walk­ing out on his un-PC act.” Real­ly sol­id insights here.
  4. The par­ent­ing prob­lem the gov­ern­ment can’t fix (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, The Week): “There is a cul­tur­al weight dan­gling from the yoke of mod­ern Amer­i­can par­ent­hood — one that is prob­a­bly beyond the gov­ern­ment to alle­vi­ate.… Chil­dren are a per­son­al choice and there­fore a per­son­al prob­lem, many peo­ple seem to believe. Have as many as you want — just make sure they don’t both­er the rest of us. The prob­lem is that this cre­do is total­ly out of step with real­i­ty.… par­ent­ing is an inher­ent­ly social occu­pa­tion. Try­ing to cram it into an indi­vid­u­al­ist frame­work, where the costs and con­se­quences of chil­dren fall on par­ents and no one else, dis­torts the whole endeav­or.”
    • I have long thought that dis­lik­ing chil­dren is pro­found­ly hyp­o­crit­i­cal. You were once a child who craved affec­tion and under­stand­ing, how rude to reject chil­dren now that you have learned to nav­i­gate the world more effec­tive­ly.
  5. Sci­en­tists Built an AI to Give Eth­i­cal Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist (Tony Tran, Futur­ism): “And as is often the case, part of the rea­son Delphi’s answers can get ques­tion­able can like­ly be linked back to how it was cre­at­ed. The folks behind the project drew on some eye­brow-rais­ing sources to help train the AI, includ­ing the ‘Am I the Ass­hole?’ sub­red­dit, the ‘Con­fes­sions’ sub­red­dit, and the ‘Dear Abby’ advice col­umn, accord­ing to the paper the team behind Del­phi pub­lished about the exper­i­ment. It should be not­ed, though, that just the sit­u­a­tions were culled from those sources — not the actu­al replies and answers them­selves.… the team behind Del­phi used Amazon’s crowd­sourc­ing ser­vice Mechan­i­cal­Turk to find respon­dents to actu­al­ly train the AI.”
  6. About Israel and Jew­ish peo­ple:
    • When Your Body Is Some­one Else’s Haunt­ed House (Dara Horn, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Those girls were not stu­pid, and prob­a­bly not even big­ot­ed. But in their entire­ly typ­i­cal and well-inten­tioned edu­ca­tion, they had learned about Jews main­ly because peo­ple had killed Jews. Like most peo­ple in the world, they had only encoun­tered dead Jews: peo­ple whose sole attribute was that they had been mur­dered, and whose mur­ders served a clear pur­pose, which was to teach us some­thing. Jews were peo­ple who, for moral and edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es, were sup­posed to be dead.”
    • Whose Promised Land? A Jour­ney Into a Divid­ed Israel (Patrick Kings­ley & Laeti­tia Van­con, New York Times): “‘I believe in the coun­try as long as it doesn’t fight reli­gion, as long as it doesn’t fight me,’ he said. In his view, the new gov­ern­ment has under­mined Israel’s Jew­ish­ness, under­cut­ting the state’s legit­i­ma­cy. ‘If it’s not a Jew­ish state, then we have no right to exist here,’ he said. ‘Our right to exist here is based on the fact that God gave us the land.’”
    • Pales­tine Isn’t Fer­gu­son (Susie Lin­field, The Atlantic): “Any use­ful analy­sis of the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict requires engag­ing with an unre­solved, frus­trat­ing­ly com­plex, griev­ous­ly resilient strug­gle between two nation­al move­ments, each with a jus­ti­fied claim to the land. Once that effort is aban­doned, a vac­u­um ensues. It is filled by the trans­for­ma­tion of a coun­try into a metaphor; by the rewrit­ing (or ignor­ing) of his­to­ry; by Manichean think­ing; and by the con­ver­sion of lan­guage into a means of per­for­mance rather than a descrip­tion of real­i­ty.”
  7. Learn­ing From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vul­cans (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…both of these rel­a­tive non-enti­ties were pulled aside from their reg­u­lar posi­tions and hand­ed an addi­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ty— coor­di­na­tor of the Amer­i­can effort in Afghanistan.Read that again: they were both giv­en the same job at the same time. Yet the prob­lem was worse than just dupli­ca­tion of effort and con­fused lines of author­i­ty. The two men were not even aware the oth­er man was work­ing the same port­fo­lio!”

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 Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imag­ine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”  First shared in vol­ume 159.

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 319

a brief roundup

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

This is vol­ume 319, which feels like it ought to be a prime num­ber but real­ly 319 = 11 · 29.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A giant space rock demol­ished an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city and every­one in it – pos­si­bly inspir­ing the Bib­li­cal sto­ry of Sodom (Christo­pher R. Moore, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “As the inhab­i­tants of an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city now called Tall el-Ham­mam went about their dai­ly busi­ness one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speed­ing toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph). Flash­ing through the atmos­phere, the rock explod­ed in a mas­sive fire­ball about 2.5 miles (4 kilo­me­ters) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more pow­er­ful than the Hiroshi­ma atom­ic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blind­ed instant­ly. Air tem­per­a­tures rapid­ly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahren­heit (2,000 degrees Cel­sius). Cloth­ing and wood imme­di­ate­ly burst into flames.”
    • No, it did­n’t “inspire” the Bible sto­ry. The Bible sto­ry is inspired, though. Astound­ing regard­less.
    • A bit of cold water: Sodom Destroyed by Mete­or, Sci­en­tists Say. Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­o­gists Not Con­vinced. (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Archae­ol­o­gists Steve Ortiz, direc­tor of Lip­scomb University’s Lanier Cen­ter of Archae­ol­o­gy, agreed that while Tall el-Ham­mam is an impor­tant site, its destruc­tion date is too late to fit the Sodom sce­nario. He dis­missed the fire­ball hoopla to CT. ‘[Their] destruc­tion does not look any dif­fer­ent than any oth­er destruc­tion,’ he said. ‘We have Assyr­i­an and Egypt­ian destruc­tions at Gez­er that looks just as dra­mat­ic.’ ”
  2. Why Covid reg­u­la­tions may be around longer than you think (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “The US and most Euro­pean coun­tries had aban­doned pass­ports by the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. In many South Amer­i­can nations, free­dom to trav­el with­out a pass­port was a con­sti­tu­tion­al right. So how did the pass­port come roar­ing back? The answer was the first world war.… Lloyd writes: ‘At the end of the war in 1918, the move­ment to abol­ish pass­ports re-ener­gised itself but it was now fight­ing against gov­ern­ments who had dis­cov­ered how close­ly a pop­u­la­tion could be con­trolled and how eas­i­ly this could be jus­ti­fied.’ ”
    1. The Extreme­ly Weird Pol­i­tics of Covid (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In less than two years, we’ve gone from a world where it was nor­mal for a left-lean­ing pub­li­ca­tion to run an essay gen­tly cel­e­brat­ing the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a bru­tal out­break of the plague, to a world where the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a less lethal pan­dem­ic is cod­ed as incred­i­bly right wing. I don’t know exact­ly why or exact­ly what it means. I just want peo­ple to acknowl­edge that it has hap­pened and it’s real­ly, real­ly weird.” Accu­rate.
  3. My Con­fes­sions (Joshua Katz, First Things): “Though my faith in acad­e­mia, which had been wan­ing for years, is now large­ly gone, my faith in the pow­er of God’s mys­te­ri­ous ways is ascen­dant. Because reli­gion is still new to me, and because I grew up with the New York Times, which in the guise of news now instructs those apt­ly dubbed by John McWhort­er ‘The Elect’ to despise reli­gion, I find it remarkable—though I shouldn’t—that many of the peo­ple who have worked so hard to keep me going are reli­gious.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of clas­sics at Prince­ton.
  4. The 1619 Project and Liv­ing in Truth (Sean Wilentz, Opera His­tor­i­ca): “If it were a high school his­to­ry paper, that dis­cus­sion alone would have been grounds for fail­ure. It’s rare, after all, to read a stu­dent get every sin­gle stat­ed fact per­fect­ly wrong, in sup­port of a propo­si­tion for which there is no oth­er evi­dence cit­ed, on two of the most impor­tant top­ics in all of U.S. his­to­ry, indeed, all of mod­ern his­to­ry, the caus­es of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and the ori­gins of anti­slav­ery. But this wasn’t a high school paper, it was the New York Times Mag­a­zine, and the author was, accord­ing to her contributor’s biog­ra­phy, a high­ly acclaimed jour­nal­ist.” The author is a his­to­ri­an at Prince­ton. The arti­cle itself is a PDF, direct link here.
  5. The Sci­en­tist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Con­trol Killing Machine (Ronen Bergman and Far­naz Fas­si­hi, New York Times): “The straight-out-of-sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry of what real­ly hap­pened that after­noon and the events lead­ing up to it, pub­lished here for the first time, is based on inter­views with Amer­i­can, Israeli and Iran­ian offi­cials, includ­ing two intel­li­gence offi­cials famil­iar with the details of the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of the oper­a­tion, and state­ments Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s fam­i­ly made to the Iran­ian news media.”
  6. Every­body Hates the Jews (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In an era in which the past is mined by offense-archae­ol­o­gists for the most minor of microag­gres­sions, the very real macroag­gres­sions tak­ing place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on Hasidic Jews on the streets of Brook­lyn, which have become a reg­u­lar fea­ture of life there, are over­looked or, some­times, jus­ti­fied by the very activists who go to the mat over the ‘cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion’ of a taco.” A bit long, but sober­ing.
  7. Whith­er Tar­taria? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “So I think there’s a gen­uine mys­tery to be explained here: if peo­ple pre­fer tra­di­tion­al archi­tec­ture by a large mar­gin, how come we’ve stopped pro­duc­ing it?” Much bet­ter than the excerpt indi­cates.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 314

Afghanistan links at the bot­tom.

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

314 is rough­ly Ï€ times 100, and that makes me hap­py.

Afghanistan links are at the bot­tom and are well worth read­ing, but oth­er stuff is up top in case you’re over­whelmed already.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Guide to Find­ing Faith (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the world in 2021, no less than the world in 1521 or 321, presents con­sid­er­able evi­dence of an orig­i­nat­ing intel­li­gence pre­sid­ing over a law-bound world well made for our minds to under­stand, and at the same time a panoply of spir­i­tu­al forces that seem to inter­vene unpre­dictably in our exis­tence.” This is a won­der­ful thing to have print­ed in the New York Times.
  2. The Real Col­lege Scan­dal (Agnes Callard, The Point Mag­a­zine): “If I had to mea­sure the worth of my class­es in my stu­dents’ sub­se­quent civic virtue or life sat­is­fac­tion, I couldn’t afford to lose touch with most of them after grad­u­a­tion. I am some­times sad­dened when I lose touch with them, but it nev­er caus­es me to won­der whether their edu­ca­tion was worth­while.” Enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. Ope­nAI Codex Live Demo (Ope­nAI, YouTube): thir­ty astound­ing min­utes. This tech­nol­o­gy is going to change SO MUCH. I’m hon­est­ly blown away. Sign up for beta access at https://openai.com/join
  4. Unmar­ried Sex Is Worse Than You Think (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra & Collin Hansen, Gospel Coali­tion): “Amer­i­cans talk a lot about sex. Any­one would think they’re hav­ing a lot of it.… Instead, the oppo­site has hap­pened. Young peo­ple are hav­ing less sex—and are less happy—than the mar­ried, church­go­ing gen­er­a­tion before them.”
  5. Does Cana­da have a reli­gion prob­lem? (Ray Pen­nings, Sub­stack): “In part­ner­ship with the Angus-Reid Insti­tute, Car­dus has been mea­sur­ing Cana­di­an spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. We asked about sev­en prac­tices — belief in God’s exis­tence, prayer, read­ing a scrip­ture, par­tic­i­pat­ing in wor­ship, believ­ing in an after­life, hav­ing reli­gious expe­ri­ences, teach­ing your kids about faith. We termed the 16 per­cent who do at least six of these ‘reli­gious­ly com­mit­ted’ and the 19 per­cent who do zero or one ‘non-believ­ers.’ That leaves the 64 per cent of Cana­di­ans in the mid­dle — nei­ther devout­ly reli­gious, nor reli­gious­ly indif­fer­ent. They’re a big chunk of the 86 per cent of Cana­di­ans who pray at least month­ly.  But many reli­gious Cana­di­ans, of var­i­ous faiths, don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly feel it’s safe to be pub­lic about their beliefs.” The author is the co-founder of Car­dus, a Cana­di­an think tank. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  6. Who Tells Them Things They Don’t Want to Hear? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…I don’t think and have nev­er sug­gest­ed that crowd­fund­ed media can replace the basic news­gath­er­ing func­tion of news­pa­pers and that the NYT in par­tic­u­lar still serves a vital func­tion in its fun­da­men­tal repor­to­r­i­al duties. This is, in fact, pre­cise­ly why I am so dis­turbed by the paper’s takeover by a fringe ide­ol­o­gy embraced by a tiny sliv­er of the Amer­i­can pub­lic and by behind-the-scenes high school bull­shit.”
    • These two lines at the end grabbed me, “It’s only integri­ty when it hurts, guys. Some­thing you write is only brave when it piss­es off all your friends and col­leagues.
  7. Con­cern­ing Afghanistan, the work­ing out of which has made me more ashamed of my coun­try than I can put into words.
    • What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan (Mike Jason, The Atlantic): “We didn’t send the right peo­ple, pre­pare them well, or reward them after­ward. We rotat­ed strangers on tours of up to a year and expect­ed them to build rela­tion­ships, then replaced them. We were over­ly opti­mistic and large­ly made things up as we went along. We didn’t like over­sight or tough ques­tions from Wash­ing­ton, and no one real­ly both­ered to hold us account­able any­way.… We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 inco­her­ent wars, one year at a time, with­out a sense of direc­tion.” The author is an Army vet who served in Afghanistan. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Bru­tal.
    • I Was Deeply Involved in War in Afghanistan for More Than a Decade. Here’s What We Must Learn (James Stavridis, Time): “The on-the-ground lead­ers in Afghanistan, most­ly Army and Marine Corps, were over­whelm­ing­ly brave, thought­ful, and com­pe­tent. But as we learned over the long years, we sim­ply rotat­ed them too fre­quent­ly. If we had fought World War II by lim­it­ing Gen­er­al Eisen­how­er or Admi­ral Nimitz to one year tours of duty, the out­come would have been dif­fer­ent, to say the least. We made the same mis­take in Viet­nam, where every­one was on a one year tour, and the out­come was a dis­as­ter. This was reflect­ed up-and-down the chain of com­mand, and the lack of con­ti­nu­ity and sense of ‘I’ve just got to make it to my depar­ture date’ hin­dered strate­gic coheren­cy bad­ly.” The author is a for­mer com­man­der of NATO. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Nation­al Humil­i­a­tions (Mark Too­ley, Prov­i­dence): “And Amer­i­ca like all great nations will endure and hope­ful­ly learn from its humil­i­a­tions, whether 1941 or 1950 or 1975 or 2001 or today. All nations ulti­mate­ly decide their own des­tinies medi­at­ed by divine judg­ment and mer­cy. Maybe Afghanistan’s col­lapse is a divine judg­ment on it and us. But there is mer­cy always avail­able, accom­pa­nied by wis­dom.”
      • The sur­vey of his­to­ry at the begin­ning is what caught my atten­tion. Some of those dis­as­ters are bare­ly on my his­tor­i­cal radar.
    • Afghan Trav­es­ty (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “God knows how to hum­ble great mil­i­tary pow­ers. He has done it numer­ous times, and that is what you are see­ing right now. What are we to make of that great patri­ot­ic vaunt, ‘these col­ors don’t run’? The reply is that they will run any and every time God deter­mines that they will.” The­o­log­i­cal­ly brac­ing.
    • Dis­as­ter in Afghanistan Will Fol­low Us Home (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “But didn’t we have to leave Afghanistan some­time? So goes a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment. Yes, though we’ve been in Korea for 71 years, at far high­er cost, and the world is bet­ter off for it.”
    • Did Amer­i­ca just lose Afghanistan because of What­sApp? (Pre­ston Byrne, per­son­al blog): “The Unit­ed States thought it was fight­ing an army. I sus­pect the rea­son we lost is because we were fight­ing a meme.”
    • The above dove­tails nice­ly with a Tan­ner Greer essay: Fight­ing Like Tal­iban (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pick­up bas­ket­ball, a con­test among friends, a tour­na­ment where you nev­er knew which team you’d be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomor­row. On Tues­day, you might be part of a fear­some Tal­iban reg­i­ment, run­ning into a mine­field. And on Wednes­day you might be man­ning a check­point for some gang of the North­ern Alliance.”
    • Dis­hon­or in Afghanistan (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “You can believe that get­ting out of Afghanistan is the right policy––again, I have friends whom I respect who believe that––while also under­stand­ing that this was a ter­ri­ble way to get out of Afghanistan. We can all agree that it’s time to leave a par­ty; that doesn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly mean you should jump out the near­est win­dow to make your exit.”
    • The Fall of Impe­r­i­al Amer­i­ca (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As a friend of mine put it this morn­ing, how many meet­ings to plan an order­ly evac­u­a­tion of Afghanistan did our mil­i­tary brass miss so they could attend diver­si­ty train­ing? Again, we are an unse­ri­ous coun­try, and the world knows it. A friend of mine whose son is head­ed to West Point told me that in the boy’s pack­et of infor­ma­tion that just came in there is a rain­bow-flag diver­si­ty stick­er. Amer­i­ca might not know how to win actu­al wars, but it sure is going to equip its troops to win the cul­ture war against tra­di­tion­al moral­i­ty and old-fash­ioned Amer­i­can val­ues.” Feisty.
    • What We Can Learn From Europe’s Refugee Crises (John Gus­tavs­son, The Dis­patch): “As a Euro­pean with expe­ri­ence of work­ing with eco­nom­ic and migra­tion pol­i­cy, and who wit­nessed what hap­pened in my home coun­try of Swe­den, I have seen what works—and espe­cial­ly what doesn’t.”
      • Full of real talk. I am in favor of reset­tling vir­tu­al­ly any­one who can get out (or who we can get out) of Afghanistan and putting them onto a path to cit­i­zen­ship (like­wise for Hong Kong). I am also in favor of being thought­ful in the ways described in this arti­cle.
    • Today’s Tal­iban uses sophis­ti­cat­ed social media prac­tices that rarely vio­late the rules (Craig Tim­berg and Cris­tiano Lima, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…U.S. con­ser­v­a­tives have been demand­ing to know why for­mer pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has been banned from Twit­ter while var­i­ous Tal­iban fig­ures have not. The answer, ana­lysts said, may sim­ply be that Trump’s posts for years chal­lenged plat­form rules against hate speech and incit­ing vio­lence. Today’s Tal­iban, by and large, does not.”
      • This illus­trates a weak­ness in the West. We pun­ish pro­ce­dur­al vio­la­tions more than we pun­ish actu­al vice, in part because so many of our elites don’t have a moral com­pass that they view as true and bind­ing. It’s OK if the Tal­iban uses social media to achieve actu­al evil as long as they don’t make us think about what they’re doing. Kind of like it’s okay for Chi­na to bru­tal­ize their own pop­u­la­tion as long as they don’t tweet about it and lie about doing it. Tech com­pa­nies will boy­cott Geor­gia but not Chi­na; they will dis­man­tle Par­ler but not Tik­Tok.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 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.