Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 282

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 280

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 279

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Blows to vol­ley­ball star Hay­ley Hod­son’s head changed her life (Patrick Hru­by, LA Times): “The fam­i­ly did not trust Stan­ford. School doc­tors, Hod­son says, had diag­nosed her foot pain as inflam­ma­tion and told her that she wasn’t risk­ing fur­ther injury by play­ing. Med­ical records show that an inde­pen­dent doc­tor sub­se­quent­ly reviewed MRI scans tak­en by Stan­ford and deter­mined she had a stress frac­ture.” Hay­ley was a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  2. My White Priv­i­lege Did­n’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quil­lette): “Not long after, I walked into a sub­ur­ban Bap­tist church, full of strange, unfash­ion­ably dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. I was a Marx­ist, a fem­i­nist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smok­er, and des­per­ate. The love I received in that place is the rea­son that I will defend the rights of fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to my dying breath.” This is amaz­ing. If you only read one thing this week, make it this one. Reminder: titles are rarely cho­sen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an arti­cle.
  3. A pastor’s life depends on a coro­n­avirus vac­cine. Now he faces skep­tics in his church. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Before the pan­dem­ic, the 45-year-old min­is­ter, who nor­mal­ly leads near­ly 2,000 peo­ple, would stand by the entrance to shake hands and offer hugs. Now, before ser­vices, he stays seclud­ed in a room off­stage until it is time to preach while an armed church mem­ber who works for Home­land Secu­ri­ty watch­es the door.”
  4. Amer­i­cans’ Men­tal Health Rat­ings Sink to New Low (Megan Bre­nan, Gallup): “Although the major­i­ty of U.S. adults con­tin­ue to rate their men­tal health as excel­lent (34%) or good (42%), and far few­er say it is only fair (18%) or poor (5%), the lat­est excel­lent rat­ings are eight points low­er than Gallup has mea­sured in any pri­or year.” 
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent because of one very inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic: the only group that showed an increase in men­tal health was week­ly church­go­ers (the week­ly part mat­ters — month­ly church­go­ers expe­ri­enced a decline). I looked at the more detailed PDF and it was unclear to me how they asked about church atten­dance, and of course it is impos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy cau­sa­tion from a sur­vey like this.
    • I found this com­ment by an econ­o­mist on Twit­ter fun­ny: “This is absolute­ly the least sur­pris­ing thing ever. Church folks are like, “The pan­dem­ic sucks, but my church did these 57 things and I’m over­whelmed with peo­ple try­ing to find ways to sup­port dur­ing these times.” Every­body else is like, ‘I’M SO ALONE’” 
  5. The Rise and Fall of Carl Lentz, the Celebri­ty Pas­tor of Hill­song Church (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Soon the church’s cul­tur­al cachet grew out­side Chris­t­ian cir­cles. ‘I knew peo­ple who came to church not because they were Chris­tians but because they thought Carl was hot,’ said Heather McClana­han, who worked for the church in 2014 and 2015.”
    • The Cri­sis of Chris­t­ian Celebri­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “The way I’ve put it in speech­es to young Chris­tians is sim­ply this, ‘Make the easy choice so you don’t have to make the hard choice.’ Say­ing no to the extra drink is much eas­i­er than halt­ing a drunk­en flir­ta­tion.”
  6. Promi­nent evan­gel­i­cals are direct­ing Trump’s sink­ing ship. That feeds doubts about reli­gion. (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When promi­nent Chris­tians affirm absurd polit­i­cal lies with reli­gious fer­vor, non­be­liev­ers have every rea­son to think: ‘Maybe Chris­tians are prone to swal­low­ing absurd reli­gious lies as well. Maybe they are sim­ply cred­u­lous about every­thing.’ If we should encounter some­one who believes — hon­est­ly and adamant­ly believes — in both the exis­tence of the East­er Bun­ny and in the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ, it would nat­u­ral­ly raise ques­tions about the qual­i­ty of his or her believ­ing fac­ul­ties.”
  7. The com­ing war on the hid­den algo­rithms that trap peo­ple in pover­ty (Karen Hao, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): Not until they were stand­ing in the court­room in the mid­dle of a hear­ing did the wit­ness rep­re­sent­ing the state reveal that the gov­ern­ment had just adopt­ed a new algo­rithm. The wit­ness, a nurse, couldn’t explain any­thing about it. “Of course not—they bought it off the shelf,” Gilman says. “She’s a nurse, not a com­put­er sci­en­tist. She couldn’t answer what fac­tors go into it. How is it weight­ed? What are the out­comes that you’re look­ing for? So there I am with my stu­dent attor­ney, who’s in my clin­ic with me, and it’s like, ‘Oh, am I going to cross-exam­ine an algo­rithm?’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

QI’s Gift-Wrap­ping Life Hack! (QI, YouTube): mind blown in less than three min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To university-educated media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low-paying man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon asso­ciate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 212, with a fol­low-up shared the next week: How (and Why) to KISSASS (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “…if you’re not a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion­al class, the key to get­ting your per­son­al essays pub­lished in promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions is KISSASS—Keep It Short, Sad, And Sim­ple, Stu­pid.”

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 275

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Elec­tion stuff is at the bot­tom. I’d say read at your per­il, but there’s some gen­uine­ly fas­ci­nat­ing stuff in there. There will be a TON of analy­sis pieces next week, so please for­ward me any that you find insight­ful.

  1. On What Athe­ists Say There Is (M. Antho­ny Mills, Soci­ety of Catholic Sci­en­tists): “Accord­ing to the athe­ist, the theist’s error is believ­ing in one too many things. Yet, for the the­ist, the dis­agree­ment is not about the exis­tence of one par­tic­u­lar thing, but ‘about every­thing,’ as Mac­In­tyre puts it.” The begin­ning and end are excel­lent. The mid­dle mud­dles unless you have very pre­cise philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests. The author has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. 
  2. Atten­tion Sean Feucht and evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers: Hatred of the press is hurt­ing your cause (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Get­ting rebuffed when­ev­er I tried to inter­view him got rather tir­ing when I noticed how he was tweet­ing his vex­a­tion with media cov­er­age while plan­ning a huge Chris­t­ian con­cert on the Mall that day. Note to pub­lic fig­ures: When you con­tin­u­al­ly refuse to give reporters access, don’t be sur­prised when their cov­er­age isn’t what you’d like.”
  3. Future of Chris­t­ian Mar­riage: Mark Reg­nerus in New Book Stud­ies It & Advis­es (Rachel Lu, Nation­al Review): “This is the book to read if you’ve won­dered whether young Chris­tians around the world are more success­ful than their sec­u­lar coun­ter­parts at find­ing love.”
    • Relat­ed but not direct­ly: A Case for Lat­er Mar­riage (Elise Ehrhard, First Things): “The lat­er mar­ry­ing age in the Unit­ed States is here to stay, and there is no rea­son for peo­ple of faith to fear it. In fact, we should embrace it as a good thing.”
  4. Supreme Court Recon­sid­ers Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Rule in Fos­ter Care Case (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The city is reach­ing out and telling a pri­vate reli­gious ministry—which has been doing this work for two centuries—how to run its inter­nal affairs. And try­ing to coerce it to make state­ments that are con­trary to its reli­gious beliefs as a con­di­tion of con­tin­u­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the reli­gious exer­cise that they have car­ried out in Philadel­phia for two cen­turies.” Hon­est­ly, this case could be far more impor­tant than the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. I am cau­tious­ly hope­ful. 
  5. Gre­ta Thun­berg Hears Your Excus­es. She Is Not Impressed. (David March­ese, New York Times): “It some­times gets awk­ward: In Swe­den we have this phe­nom­e­non called Jan­te­la­gen. It’s when some­one is famous, and the peo­ple around use up all their ener­gy to ignore the fact that the per­son is famous.” This is a fun inter­view. I sus­pect I would like Gre­ta but I doubt she would like me. 
  6. Some elec­tion stuff:
    • Why Evan­gel­i­cals Aren’t What They Used to Be (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “There has recent­ly been talk of aban­don­ing the label ‘evan­gel­i­cal’ among those who answer to the descrip­tor, large­ly because of its trans­for­ma­tion into a main­ly polit­i­cal term.” Bru­enig is a Roman Catholic and a con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing writer. 
    • Why Evan­gel­i­cals Dis­agree on the Pres­i­dent (Tim Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tiantiy Today): “Our inabil­i­ty to under­stand the ratio­nal­i­ty of an oppos­ing view­point is more often a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion on our part than a fail­ure of ratio­nal­i­ty on theirs. The dif­fer­ence between the camps can­not be that one side is tru­ly Chris­t­ian while the oth­er is not, or that either side pos­sess­es a monop­oly on good ideas and good inten­tions.” Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tor. I think the author cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fies the two camps in evan­gel­i­cal­ism, but is wrong in his assess­ment of their cause. The author is, inci­den­tal­ly, a Stan­ford grad.
    • In Search Of Heal­ing (Gene Wein­garten, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate has riv­en fam­i­lies, destroyed ancient friend­ships, test­ed mar­riages. The stakes are so ele­vat­ed, the alter­na­tives so stark, the con­se­quences so poten­tial­ly dire, that the prin­ci­pal emo­tion gen­er­at­ed — inflamed by high­ly par­ti­san media, and social media, on the left and the right — is some­thing that very much resem­bles hatred.” This might hon­est­ly be my favorite read of the week. The end is amaz­ing.
    • ‘You are no longer my moth­er’: A divid­ed Amer­i­ca will strug­gle to heal after Trump era (Tim Reid, Gabriel­la Borter, & Michael Mar­ti­na, Reuters): “She is not sure those rifts with friends and fam­i­ly will ever mend, because each believes the oth­er to have a total­ly alien val­ue sys­tem.”
    • What the Vot­ers Are Try­ing to Tell Us (David Brooks, New York Times): “…elec­tions are edu­ca­tion­al events. Vot­ers are not always wise, but they are usu­al­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble. They know more about their own lives than we in our infor­ma­tion bub­bles do, and they almost always tell us some­thing impor­tant.”
    • Tak­ing new seats and retain­ing old ones, a string of con­gres­sion­al vic­to­ries for Stan­ford alums (Sari­na Deb and Yash Dalmia, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Ten Stan­ford alum­ni were re-elect­ed to their posi­tions in Con­gress in Tuesday’s elec­tions — sev­en in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and three in the Sen­ate.”
    • Three per­spec­tives on race and the elec­tion:
      1. Lati­no Evan­gel­i­cals Boost Trump in Flori­da and Texas (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, Amer­i­cans saw the con­trast between Lati­no vot­ers from dif­fer­ent back­grounds play out in two major metro areas in US swing states—Maricopa Coun­ty in Ari­zona and Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ty in Flori­da.”
      2. Trump’s gains with His­pan­ic vot­ers should prompt some pro­gres­sive rethink­ing (Matthew Ygle­sias, Vox): “What if many US His­pan­ics sim­ply don’t see the racial pol­i­tics of the Trump era the way intel­lec­tu­als — whose think­ing and writ­ing on struc­tur­al racism and white suprema­cy have gained broad influ­ence in recent years — think they should?”
      3. The Trump vote is ris­ing among Blacks and His­pan­ics, despite the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom (Musa al-Ghar­bi, NBC News): “Per­cep­tions of Trump as racist seem to be a core dri­ving force push­ing whites toward the Democ­rats. Why would the oppo­site pat­tern be hold­ing among minor­i­ty vot­ers — i.e. the very peo­ple the pres­i­dent is pur­port­ed­ly being racist against?” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia and wrote this before the elec­tion. 

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 APA Meet­ing: A Photo-Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the oth­er.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing. First shared in vol­ume 204.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 269

I share a few per­son­al thoughts about crim­i­nal jus­tice reform in this one. Just a few.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some thoughts fol­low­ing the Bre­on­na Tay­lor ver­dict:
    • Cor­rect­ing the mis­in­for­ma­tion about Bre­on­na Tay­lor (Radley Balko, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We could pre­vent the next Bre­on­na Tay­lor. We could ban forced entry raids to serve drug war­rants. We could hold judges account­able for sign­ing war­rants that don’t pass con­sti­tu­tion­al muster. We could demand that police offi­cers wear body cam­eras dur­ing these raids to hold them account­able, and that they be ade­quate­ly pun­ished when they fail to acti­vate them. We could do a lot to make sure there are no more Bre­on­na Tay­lors. The ques­tion is whether we want to.”
    • From a month ago, but time­ly now: Supreme Court Prece­dent Killed Bre­on­na Tay­lor (David French, The Dis­patch): “Some­thing (or some things) have to give, and those ‘things’ are no-knock raids and qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty. Indi­vid­ual lib­er­ties should not be sac­ri­ficed on the altar of police drug raids, and vic­tims of civ­il rights abus­es should be enti­tled to receive com­pen­sa­tion for their loss­es, includ­ing their injuries and wounds.”
    • My 2 cents: Amer­i­ca’s jus­tice sys­tem would be great­ly improved if no-knock raids and qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty were either elim­i­nat­ed or great­ly con­strained. And if we get rid of civ­il asset for­fei­ture at the same time — wow.
  2. Review: ‘Domin­ion: How the Chris­t­ian Rev­o­lu­tion Remade the World’ by Tom Hol­land (Tim Keller, Gospel Coali­tion): “…the shame-and-hon­or cul­tures of old, pagan Europe—of the Anglo-Sax­ons, the Franks, and the Germans—thought that the Chris­t­ian eth­ic of for­giv­ing one’s ene­mies and of hon­or­ing the poor and weak to be com­plete­ly unwork­able as a basis for soci­ety. These ideas would’ve nev­er occurred to any­one unless they held to a uni­verse with a sin­gle, per­son­al God who cre­at­ed all beings in his image, and with a Sav­ior who came and died in sac­ri­fi­cial love. The ideas only could’ve grown from such a worldview—they don’t make sense in a dif­fer­ent one. If, instead, we believe we’re here by acci­dent through a process of sur­vival of the fittest, then there can be no moral absolutes, and life must be, if any­thing, about pow­er and the mas­tery of oth­ers, not about love. That, declared Niet­zsche, is the only way to live once you are tru­ly will­ing to admit that the Chris­t­ian God does not exist.”
  3. We Are All Algo­rithms Now (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­Stack): “In the past, we might have turned to more reli­able media for con­text and per­spec­tive. But the jour­nal­ists and reporters and edi­tors who are sup­posed to per­form this func­tion are human as well. And they are per­haps the ones most trapped in the social media hellscape…. The press could have been the anti­dote to the social media trap. Instead they chose to become the prof­itable push­er of the poi­son.“ This was writ­ten before news of RBG’s death and is even more time­ly now.
  4. Con­cern­ing the Supreme Court:
    • Lead­ing Repub­li­can politi­cians have flip-flopped What Sen­ate Repub­li­cans have said about fill­ing a Supreme Court vacan­cy (one minute video, YouTube)
    • Lead­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians have flip-flopped What lead­ing Democ­rats have said about fill­ing a Supreme Court vacan­cy (two minute video, Twit­ter) 
    • A thought from the left: Down With Judi­cial Suprema­cy! (Jamelle Bouie, New York Times): “The Supreme Court has the pow­er to inter­pret the Con­sti­tu­tion and estab­lish its mean­ing for fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ment alike. But this pow­er wasn’t enu­mer­at­ed in the Con­sti­tu­tion and isn’t inher­ent in the court as an insti­tu­tion. Instead, the court’s pow­er to inter­pret and bind oth­ers to that inter­pre­ta­tion was con­struct­ed over time by polit­i­cal and legal actors through­out the sys­tem, from pres­i­dents and law­mak­ers to the judges and jus­tices them­selves.”
    • A thought from the right: How the G.O.P. Might Get to Yes on Replac­ing Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Since I became opposed to abor­tion, some­time in my lat­er teens, I have nev­er regard­ed the Supreme Court with warmth, admi­ra­tion or patri­ot­ic trust. What my lib­er­al friends felt after Bush v. Gore or after Brett Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion or in imag­in­ing some future rul­ing by Amy Coney Bar­rett, I have felt for my entire adult life.”
  5. On faith and pol­i­tics:
    • How Faith Shapes My Pol­i­tics (David Brooks, New York Times): “In a soci­ety that is grow­ing rad­i­cal­ly more sec­u­lar every day, I’d say we have more to fear from polit­i­cal dog­ma­tism than reli­gious dog­ma­tism.” 
    • Relat­ed: This just in! Evan­gel­i­cals are actu­al­ly Amer­i­ca’s least politi­cized group of church­es (Richard Ostling, GetRe­li­gion): “…the emerg­ing sce­nario appears to indi­cate a rel­a­tive­ly small and unrep­re­sen­ta­tive band of evan­gel­i­cal par­ti­sans at the nation­al lev­el has — aid­ed by mas­sive amounts of news cov­er­age — dis­tort­ed the pub­lic image of grass-roots white evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
    • What are your Expec­ta­tions of Jesus’ Local Church? (Adam Sin­nett, church web­site): “Over the last six months the elders of DCC have received numer­ous ques­tions, rec­om­men­da­tions, and crit­i­cisms in rela­tion to what we should be doing as a church in regards to: our pan­dem­ic response, the rela­tion­ship between church and state, tim­ing and con­tent of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, grow­ing unem­ploy­ment, the home­less­ness cri­sis, polit­i­cal par­ti­san­ship, sys­temic injus­tice, police bru­tal­i­ty, social protests, and more.”
    • Fol­low-up: Who Does What in the Life of the Church? (Adam Sin­net, church web­site): “If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as ‘the lead­ers’ we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the life of the church on the pas­tors. If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as ‘the peo­ple’, we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty on the indi­vid­u­als. If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as an ‘insti­tu­tion’, we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty on the orga­ni­za­tion, its struc­tures, and process­es. Who then is respon­si­ble for ful­fill­ing God’s pur­pose for his church? Is it the lead­ers, or the peo­ple, or the insti­tu­tion? Put sim­ply, every­one is respon­si­ble, though in dif­fer­ent ways.”
    • Mark Dev­er’s Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist Sues to Not For­sake the Assem­bly (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…the DC congregation’s legal fight is unique­ly tied to its the­o­log­i­cal beliefs around how a church should gath­er. Dev­er has long resist­ed mul­ti-site, mul­ti-ser­vice mod­els of church, though they are very pop­u­lar among fel­low South­ern Bap­tists. The DC Bap­tist church does not stream ser­vices online, and hasn’t made an excep­tion to that rule dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.”
    • Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist, a large evan­gel­i­cal church, sues DC May­or Muriel Bows­er over coro­n­avirus restric­tions (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The vote Sun­day at a mem­bers meet­ing to pur­sue lit­i­ga­tion was 402 in favor, 35 against, mem­bers said, though church lead­ers would not con­firm spe­cif­ic num­bers.”
  6. Two ran­dom arti­cles touch­ing on race:
    • This Is How Biden Should Approach the Lati­no Vote (Ian Haney López and Tory Gav­i­to, New York Times): “Pro­gres­sives com­mon­ly cat­e­go­rize Lati­nos as peo­ple of col­or, no doubt part­ly because pro­gres­sive Lati­nos see the group that way and encour­age oth­ers to do so as well. Cer­tain­ly, we both once took that per­spec­tive for grant­ed. Yet in our sur­vey, only one in four His­pan­ics saw the group as peo­ple of col­or.”
      • I am unin­ter­est­ed in the par­ti­san angle of this op-ed, but the sta­tis­tic I excerpt­ed stood out to me. I won­der what per­cent­age of Stan­ford stu­dents would have pre­dict­ed it? I sus­pect the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Stan­ford stu­dents would have bet on the oppo­site.
    • The Pre­tense That Prince­ton Is Racist (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “I object to the entire witch hunt of an inves­ti­ga­tion, which Repub­li­cans would rec­og­nize as a fla­grant abuse of fed­er­al pow­er were it aimed at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty. No rea­son­able per­son could con­clude that an oner­ous probe of Prince­ton for anti-Black racism is the best use, or even a good use, of scarce resources to safe­guard civ­il rights. The deci­sion to grap­ple with racism should not trig­ger a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion, whether or not that grap­pling is total­ly hon­est.”
  7. Tea Time: The Chris­t­ian Mis­sion to Pre­serve Cul­ture (Lyman Stone, The Plough): “As strange as it may seem for a white Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary to be teach­ing an eight-year-old Chi­nese girl from the tea cap­i­tal of the world how to pour tea, such I under­stood to be my Chris­t­ian duty.”

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 Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fashioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.” First shared in vol­ume 192

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 267

some apolo­get­i­cal­ly-inter­est­ing links near the top — rec­om­mend­ed!

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues.

We have some new mem­bers on our mail­ing list — wel­come! I’d like to direct you to the dis­claimers at the end of this email — they real­ly do mat­ter and I real­ly do mean them.

I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Uncon­scious Learn­ing Under­lies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in Peo­ple Who Can Uncon­scious­ly Pre­dict Com­plex Pat­terns (Sci Tech Dai­ly): “Indi­vid­u­als who can uncon­scious­ly pre­dict com­plex pat­terns, an abil­i­ty called implic­it pat­tern learn­ing, are like­ly to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who cre­ates pat­terns of events in the uni­verse, accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.” Shock­er: peo­ple who see real­i­ty clear­ly are more like­ly to per­ceive God’s hand at work in real­i­ty. 
  2. Redeem­ing Con­dos, Pres­by­te­ri­ans Buy NYC Build­ing for $30 Mil­lion (Kathryn Wat­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a study of 22 US cites—including Grand Rapids, Detroit, Min­neapo­lis, San Fran­cis­co, and Seattle—Hartson and Williams looked at mail­ing list data to iden­ti­fy address­es that were labeled as church­es in 2003 but not in 2018. They iden­ti­fied approx­i­mate­ly 200 church build­ings that had been flipped for com­mer­cial or res­i­den­tial use. In the same cities, in the same 15 years, they found about 2,000 com­mer­cial spaces that had been turned into hous­es of wor­ship. While there are many sacred spaces becom­ing sec­u­lar, it seems more are con­vert­ing the oth­er way.” 👀 — I did not know this and am very encour­aged by it. 
  3. On pol­i­tics:
    • No Longer Human (George Yancey, Patheos): “In one way it real­ly does not mat­ter if Trump or Biden wins the pres­i­den­cy. Either way you will have a sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of indi­vid­u­als who will feel dis­placed. They will be tempt­ed to cre­ate an us ver­sus them men­tal­i­ty in which they can envi­sion the elec­tion vic­tors as ene­mies of the state who must be defeat­ed at all costs. ” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bay­lor. 
    • Relat­ed — two arti­cles high­light­ing how the right is afraid of the left in Amer­i­ca:
      1. Ide­ol­o­gy Binds And Blinds (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As I see it, the ‘major threat of the far left’ to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in pow­er, they will go ped­al to the medal on a soft total­i­tar­i­an ‘social jus­tice’ regime that would pun­ish dis­senters by cost­ing them their liveli­hoods, and ruin­ing their church­es and oth­er insti­tu­tions.”
      2. On Not Accept­ing Stolen Elec­tions (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Don’t take your eye off the ball. Who is going to be riot­ing in late Novem­ber after the elec­tion? Well, who’s riot­ing now? This is not a trick ques­tion.”
    • And it’s not just one-sided. Here are two arti­cles high­light­ing how the left is afraid of the right in Amer­i­ca:
      1. The Left Secret­ly Preps for MAGA Vio­lence After Elec­tion Day (Sam Stein, The Dai­ly Beast): “‘I don’t know what the strat­e­gy is when armed right-wing mili­tia dudes show up in polling places,’ the same source said. ‘This [Kyle] Rit­ten­house guy is being lion­ized on the right, right now. If it is being unleashed that you can shoot peo­ple and be a hero, I don’t know what prepa­ra­tion we can pos­si­bly do for that.’”
      2. We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Hard­er. Amer­i­ca is Dying. (umair haque, Medi­um): “There is a cru­cial les­son there. Amer­i­ca already has an ISIS, a Tal­iban, an SS wait­ing to be born.A group of young men will­ing to do vio­lence at the drop of a hat, because they’ve been brain­washed into hat­ing. The dem­a­gogue has blamed hat­ed minori­ties and advo­cates of democ­ra­cy and peace for those young men’s stunt­ed life chances, and they believe him. That’s exact­ly what an ISIS is, what a Tal­iban is, what an SS is. The only thing left to do by an author­i­tar­i­an is to for­mal­ize it.”
  4. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Change Still Works (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “…look at the moun­tain of evi­dence that change through the civic process is not only pos­si­ble, but a recur­ring real­i­ty, and that it began long before Floyd’s death.” I believe much of our cur­rent cul­tur­al con­flict can be under­stood in terms of the Toc­queville Para­dox, which I have also heard referred to as “The Para­dox of Ris­ing Expec­ta­tions.”
  5. On racism:
    • Prince­ton’s Pres­i­dent Is Wrong. The Uni­ver­si­ty Is Not Sys­tem­i­cal­ly Racist (Sergiu Klain­er­man, Newsweek): “Unable to iden­ti­fy spe­cif­ic cas­es of racism, these war­riors for social injus­tice are advanc­ing their agen­da by claim­ing instead that all Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Prince­ton, are struc­tural­ly and sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist (‘SSR’). That is to say, that they are racist even as they man­i­fest­ly do every­thing imag­in­able to pro­mote under-rep­re­sent­ed groups. Prince­ton, for exam­ple, has had for years an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly large num­ber of admin­is­tra­tors (by some counts, over 65) ded­i­cat­ed to pro­mot­ing diver­si­ty and inclu­sion.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics at Prince­ton.
    • Scholas­tics con­tra racism (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “The fal­si­ty and evil of racism, and thus of those insti­tu­tions, clear­ly fol­lows from stan­dard Scholas­tic [the­o­log­i­cal] think­ing about human nature and nat­ur­al law.”
    • Book Review: How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Ken­di(Bill Mel­one, Mere Ortho­doxy): “But recent crit­i­cism of social jus­tice advo­ca­cy and the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment has failed to crit­i­cize the best of antiracist think­ing, and is much the less­er for it. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when that crit­i­cism does not engage seri­ous­ly with the work of Ibram X. Ken­di.”
    • No, racism isn’t a ‘cre­ation of white peo­ple’ (David Abu­lafia, The Spec­ta­tor): “It is there­fore a sad and hor­ri­ble truth that every con­ti­nent has expe­ri­enced racist per­se­cu­tions before as well as after the age of the Euro­pean empires. Quite pos­si­bly the first Homo Sapi­ens played a big role in the dis­ap­pear­ance of the Nean­derthals.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Cam­bridge.
  6. Chris­t­ian musi­cian Sean Feucht held defi­ant Seat­tle wor­ship protest after con­cert was banned (Julia Duin, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Sean Feucht, 37, the ral­ly orga­niz­er, laughed about the con­flict with city offi­cials while wel­com­ing the crowd of 800 to 900 peo­ple. ‘Wel­come to Seattle’s largest wor­ship protest,’ he said at the begin­ning of a two-hour set. ‘Turn to each oth­er and say, “Wel­come to the protest.” In this city, that makes it a legal gath­er­ing.’”
  7. Chris­tians, Gun Rights, and the Amer­i­can Social Com­pact (David French, The Dis­patch): “The dis­tinc­tive Chris­t­ian pres­ence has to include mod­el­ing the respon­si­ble, vir­tu­ous exer­cise of the rights its polit­i­cal move­ments seek to secure. It has to include using its voice and pow­er to advo­cate for that respon­si­bil­i­ty and to oppose reck­less­ness. Sim­ply put, the repub­lic was not designed to thrive if those who are reli­gious are not also moral.” 

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 Philoso­pher Redefin­ing Equal­i­ty (Nathan Heller, New York­er): “When she was three, her moth­er asked, ‘Why do you allow your broth­er to talk for you?’—why didn’t she speak for her­self? ‘Until now, it sim­ply was not nec­es­sary,’ Eliz­a­beth said. It was the first full sen­tence that she had ever uttered.” I think that’s the best first sen­tence I’ve ever heard of. The arti­cle is a tad long, but rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 189.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 264

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a stu­dent brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm (sad­ly irrel­e­vant for that pur­pose at the moment). First shared in vol­ume 181.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Vanity of Human Reason, of Dogmatism, and of the Philosophers

why Chris­tian­i­ty has such a coun­ter­cul­tur­al per­spec­tive on sex

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

This week we’re talk­ing about chap­ters 7–9, the van­i­ty of human rea­son, of dog­ma­tism, and of the philoso­phers.

The thing that stood out most to me is the skep­ti­cism that Pas­cal applies to rea­son. Recall that he is one of the great­est sci­en­tists in his­to­ry and that his pio­neer­ing work laid the foun­da­tion for many fields of study. He knows well what rea­son can achieve, and as a result he also real­izes its lim­i­ta­tions.

…demon­stra­tion is not the only instru­ment for con­vinc­ing us. How few things can be demon­strat­ed! Proofs only con­vince the mind; habit pro­vides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed…. We must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain our­selves in that belief…, for it is too much trou­ble to have the proofs always present before us…. When we believe only by the strength of our con­vic­tion and the automa­ton is inclined to believe the oppo­site, that is not enough. We must there­fore make both parts of us believe: the mind by rea­sons, which need to be seen only once in a life­time, and the automa­ton by habit.

Pas­cal, Pensee 821 (pages 99–100)

This is bril­liant, although the trans­la­tion feels clum­sy to me. Kreeft’s com­men­tary on this is help­ful:

…once rea­son has con­vinced us to believe, we require the aid of good habits to over­come bad habit­u­al ten­den­cies in the oppo­site direc­tion. There­fore we must act as if we believed, go to church and so forth, thus habit­u­at­ing the automa­ton to obey what rea­son has dis­cov­ered to be true. Habit is not an hon­est sub­sti­tute for rea­son, but it is an hon­est and need­ed ser­vant to rea­son. If we try to fight against irra­tional­i­ty with rea­son alone, we will lose. We need crud­er weapons too.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 821, page 100

This is one rea­son that Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty is often so instru­men­tal in some­one’s con­ver­sion. Rea­son, like a map, can guide peo­ple to Christ but only if they actu­al­ly fol­low the direc­tions. Oth­er parts of their self must be engaged for the jour­ney to take place, and these parts are most com­mon­ly called forth through rela­tion­ships.

It also occurs to me that this may be a good way to explain why Chris­tian­i­ty has such a coun­ter­cul­tur­al per­spec­tive on sex. Sex engages the whole per­son and can either do so in a way that rein­forces the gospel mes­sage or in a way that under­mines it (see Eph­esians 5:31–32 and 1 Cor 6:12–20). Paul lays this out in Romans 1:18–27

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heav­en against all the god­less­ness and wicked­ness of peo­ple, who sup­press the truth by their wicked­ness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the cre­ation of the world God’s invis­i­ble qualities—his eter­nal pow­er and divine nature—have been clear­ly seen, being under­stood from what has been made, so that peo­ple are with­out excuse.

21For although they knew God, they nei­ther glo­ri­fied him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their think­ing became futile and their fool­ish hearts were dark­ened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glo­ry of the immor­tal God for images made to look like a mor­tal human being and birds and ani­mals and rep­tiles.

24There­fore God gave them over in the sin­ful desires of their hearts to sex­u­al impu­ri­ty for the degrad­ing of their bod­ies with one anoth­er. 25They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and wor­shiped and served cre­at­ed things rather than the Creator—who is for­ev­er praised. Amen.

26Because of this, God gave them over to shame­ful lusts. Even their women exchanged nat­ur­al sex­u­al rela­tions for unnat­ur­al ones. 27In the same way the men also aban­doned nat­ur­al rela­tions with women and were inflamed with lust for one anoth­er. Men com­mit­ted shame­ful acts with oth­er men, and received in them­selves the due penal­ty for their error.

Romans 1:18–27 (NIV)

When peo­ple reject the knowl­edge of God, they must build lives to rein­force that rejec­tion of God. Paul says they do it using idols and sex, and he adds that they suf­fer for it. Of course they do. They are liv­ing based on a false con­cep­tion of human nature, which makes it inevitable that there will be need­less pain. Paula recent­ly had a plate shat­ter in the microwave. We had both assumed it was microwave-safe, but because we were wrong the shat­ter­ing was inevitable. The cause of the dam­age was the inter­ac­tion of invis­i­ble things (the microwaves and the mol­e­c­u­lar struc­ture of the plate), but the result­ing dam­age was eas­i­ly observed. Sad­ly, our cul­ture (and many lives with­in it) are shat­ter­ing and the rea­sons are invis­i­ble to many peo­ple.

Oth­er thoughts from these chap­ters that stood out to me:

To rea­son is to rely on rea­son, and to rely on rea­son is an act of faith, not of rea­son. There­fore rea­son pre­sup­pos­es faith… Indeed, how could rea­son itself be val­i­dat­ed? There are only three pos­si­bil­i­ties: (1) by some­thing sub­ra­tional, like ani­mal instinct (which is obvi­ous­ly absurd: How can the infe­ri­or val­i­date the supe­ri­or?); or (2) by some­thing ratio­nal, by a piece of rea­son­ing (which is also absurd: How can the part jus­ti­fy the whole? All rea­son is on tri­al; how dare the one piece of rea­son­ing you use to jus­ti­fy all rea­son­ing be exempt from tri­al?); or (3) by some­thing super­ra­tional, by faith in God (which is the only pos­si­bil­i­ty left).

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 131, pages 110–111

FWIW, I think Kreeft’s inclu­sion of God in the third point is valid but it’s real­ly some­thing he should argue for. I think many skep­tics would counter that some­thing like the pla­ton­ic laws of log­ic could stand in for God in option 3, which is true but does­n’t get them as far away from God as they think. Hav­ing read oth­er things by Kreeft, I believe he has had this argu­ment before and is mere­ly announc­ing check­mate when it is still not obvi­ous to his oppo­nent that the game is over.

You can think skep­ti­cism, but you can’t live it.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 131, page 111

Philoso­phers and the­olo­gians do not prac­tice what they preach any bet­ter than the rest of us–less, if they preach bet­ter than the rest of us.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 142, page 117

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 258

Is 650 a lot? it depends. Pen­nies? No. Mur­ders? Yes. Coro­n­avirus cas­es? Depends on where they spread.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Church­es Emerge as Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cas­es (Kate Con­ger, Jack Healy and Lucy Tomp­kins, New York Times): “More than 650 coro­n­avirus cas­es have been linked to near­ly 40 church­es and reli­gious events across the Unit­ed States since the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, with many of them erupt­ing over the last month as Amer­i­cans resumed their pre-pan­dem­ic activ­i­ties, accord­ing to a New York Times data­base.” 
    • Are Church­es “A Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cas­es?” (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “If I have $3,000,000 in the bank and you give me anoth­er $650, you’d hard­ly be in the posi­tion to claim that you had made a major con­tri­bu­tion to my wealth. Sim­i­lar­ly, adding 650 cas­es to America’s total case­load of 3 mil­lion is no more than a blip that leaves 99.98% attrib­ut­able to oth­er caus­es.”
    • Church­es, Coro­n­avirus, and the New York Times (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It is strange (at best) to use words like ‘major’ and ‘erupt­ed’ when describ­ing 650 cas­es. On that point, the head­line is mis­lead­ing. Hav­ing 650 cas­es in my coun­ty might be news, but 650 nation­al­ly out of three mil­lion cas­es is a head­line look­ing for a sto­ry. The real sto­ry is this: church­es are gath­er­ing and remark­ably few infec­tions are tak­ing place.”
  2. Amer­i­ca’s Racial Progress (David French, Nation­al Review): “There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that Amer­i­ca has a long his­to­ry of bru­tal and shame­ful mis­treat­ment of racial minori­ties — with black Amer­i­cans its chief vic­tims. And sec­ond, that Amer­i­ca is a great nation, and that Amer­i­can cit­i­zens (and cit­i­zens of the world) should be grate­ful for its found­ing. Per­haps no nation has done more good for more peo­ple than the Unit­ed States. It was and is a bea­con of lib­er­ty and pros­per­i­ty in a world long awash in tyran­ny and pover­ty.”
  3. A Let­ter on Jus­tice and Open Debate (many sig­na­to­ries, Harpers): “The restric­tion of debate, whether by a repres­sive gov­ern­ment or an intol­er­ant soci­ety, invari­ably hurts those who lack pow­er and makes every­one less capa­ble of demo­c­ra­t­ic par­tic­i­pa­tion. The way to defeat bad ideas is by expo­sure, argu­ment, and per­sua­sion, not by try­ing to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between jus­tice and free­dom, which can­not exist with­out each oth­er.”
    • Promi­nent Artists and Writ­ers Warn of an ‘Intol­er­ant Cli­mate’ (Jen­nifer Schuessler and Eliz­a­beth A. Har­ris, New York Times): “‘We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sit­ting around writ­ing this let­ter,’ Mr. Williams, who is African-Amer­i­can, said. ‘It includes plen­ty of Black thinkers, Mus­lim thinkers, Jew­ish thinkers, peo­ple who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.’”
    • end­ing the cha­rade (Fred­die deBoer, per­son­al blog): “Please, think for a minute and con­sid­er: what does it say when a com­plete­ly gener­ic endorse­ment of free speech and open debate is in and of itself imme­di­ate­ly diag­nosed as anti-pro­gres­sive, as anti-left?”(empha­sis in orig­i­nal)
  4. Lazarus Chak­w­era: Malaw­i’s pres­i­dent who ‘argued with God’ (BBC): “In the unmis­tak­able cadence of a preach­er, Malaw­i’s new Pres­i­dent, Lazarus Chak­w­era, appealed for uni­ty in his coun­try short­ly after he was sworn in on Sun­day. The day of the week seemed fit­ting as the for­mer head of the Malawi Assem­blies of God, one of the largest Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions in the coun­try, treat­ed the stage like a pul­pit to inspire fer­vour with his words.”
  5. Slate Star Codex and Sil­i­con Valley’s War Against the Media (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “The divi­sion between the Grey and Blue tribes is often ren­dered in the sim­plis­tic terms of a demo­graph­ic encounter between white, nerdi­ly enti­tled men in hood­ies on one side and diverse, effete, artis­tic snobs on the oth­er.” Inter­est­ing through­out. 
  6. Chris­tian­i­ty’s Covert Suc­cess (Mark Too­ley, Prov­i­dence) “I quote an Indi­an pro­fes­sor who says that Chris­tian­i­ty pro­ceeds in two ways, through conversion—which is obvi­ous, that’s how peo­ple tend to think Chris­tian­i­ty precedes—but he then says, through sec­u­lar­iza­tion. And I think he’s absolute­ly right. And I think that the assump­tion of peo­ple in the West that the sec­u­lar is some­how neu­tral, that if you’re sec­u­lar, you’ve some­how escaped the bounds of cul­tur­al con­tin­gency, couldn’t be more wrong.”
  7. On Reli­gion, the Supreme Court Pro­tects the Right to Be Dif­fer­ent (Michael McConnell, New York Times): “The court may be polit­i­cal, but its pol­i­tics is of the mid­dle, and of a par­tic­u­lar kind of mid­dle, one that is com­mit­ted to plu­ral­ism and dif­fer­ence rather than to the advance­ment of par­tic­u­lar moral stances.” The author is a Stan­ford law prof.

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 Plan­et of Cops (Fred­die de Boer, per­son­al blog): “The woke world is a world of snitch­es, infor­mants, rats. Go to any space con­cerned with social jus­tice and what will you find? End­less sur­veil­lance. Every­body is to be judged. Every­one is under sus­pi­cion. Every­thing you say is to be scoured, picked over, ana­lyzed for any pos­si­ble offense. Everyone’s a detec­tive in the Divi­sion of Prob­lem­at­ics, and they walk the beat 24/7…. I don’t know how peo­ple can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly talk about prison abo­li­tion and restor­ing the idea of for­give­ness to lit­er­al crim­i­nal jus­tice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kan­ga­roo court sys­tem.” First shared in vol­ume 161.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Vanity and the Vanity of Human Justice

Pas­cal diag­nosed our mod­ern dys­func­tions 350 years ago.

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

One rea­son I appre­ci­ate read­ing writ­ers from the dis­tant past is that when they make an obser­va­tion rel­e­vant to mod­ern times it is usu­al­ly more pow­er­ful than if it was uttered by one of our con­tem­po­raries.

It reminds me of an excerpt from C. S. Lewis’ intro­duc­tion to a trans­la­tion of Athana­sius’ On The Incar­na­tion of the Word of God:

Every age has its own out­look. It is spe­cial­ly good at see­ing cer­tain truths and spe­cial­ly liable to make cer­tain mis­takes. We all, there­fore, need the books that will cor­rect the char­ac­ter­is­tic mis­takes of our own peri­od. And that means the old books. All con­tem­po­rary writ­ers share to some extent the con­tem­po­rary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Noth­ing strikes me more when I read the con­tro­ver­sies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usu­al­ly assum­ing with­out ques­tion a good deal which we should now absolute­ly deny. They thought that they were as com­plete­ly opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secret­ly united—united with each oth­er and against ear­li­er and lat­er ages—by a great mass of com­mon assump­tions. We may be sure that the char­ac­ter­is­tic blind­ness of the twen­ti­eth century—the blind­ness about which pos­ter­i­ty will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have nev­er sus­pect­ed it, and con­cerns some­thing about which there is untrou­bled agree­ment between Hitler and Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can ful­ly escape this blind­ness, but we shall cer­tain­ly increase it, and weak­en our guard against it, if we read only mod­ern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggra­vate the error with which we are already dan­ger­ous­ly ill. The only pal­lia­tive is to keep the clean sea breeze of the cen­turies blow­ing through our minds, and this can be done only by read­ing old books. Not, of course, that there is any mag­ic about the past. Peo­ple were no clev­er­er then than they are now; they made as many mis­takes as we. But not the same mis­takes. They will not flat­ter us in the errors we are already com­mit­ting; and their own errors, being now open and pal­pa­ble, will not endan­ger us. Two heads are bet­ter than one, not because either is infal­li­ble, but because they are unlike­ly to go wrong in the same direc­tion. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a cor­rec­tive as the books of the past, but unfor­tu­nate­ly we can­not get at them.

C. S. Lewis

With that in mind, two of Pas­cal’s obser­va­tions struck me as espe­cial­ly pre­scient:

The mind nat­u­ral­ly believes and the will nat­u­ral­ly loves, so that when there are no true objects for them they nec­es­sar­i­ly become attached to false ones.  

Pas­cal, Pen­sée 661 (page 77)

Hun­dreds of years ago, Pas­cal accu­rate­ly diag­nosed the mod­ern Amer­i­can. Our decep­tive­ly sec­u­lar age is full of reli­gion, and for many peo­ple pol­i­tics is their pre­ferred form of wor­ship. Look back over my Fri­day “Issachar” emails and you will see many exam­ples of the reli­gious dynam­ics in our cul­tur­al debates; in fact, the very first arti­cle I ever shared was Joseph Bot­tum’s The Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas and this week I’m like­ly to share David French’s Amer­i­ca Is in the Grips of a Fun­da­men­tal­ist Revival.

As your pas­tor I urge you: don’t par­tic­i­pate in the crazy of what­ev­er group you tend to vote with. You already have a reli­gion, so you are free to treat pol­i­tics as sig­nif­i­cant but not ulti­mate. Back in the 90’s, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. Read them both, espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. You won’t res­onate with every cri­tique in either arti­cle, but you will find much to think about.

Mov­ing on, I also appre­ci­at­ed one of Pas­cal’s com­ments which is rel­e­vant to social media:

We are not sat­is­fied with the life we have in our­selves and our own being. We want to lead an imag­i­nary life in the eyes of oth­ers, and so we try to make an impres­sion. We strive con­stant­ly to embell­ish and pre­serve our imag­i­nary being, and neglect the real one.

Pas­cal, Pen­sée 806 (page 79)

Read­ing this Pen­sée brought to mind Madi­son Fis­cher’s asser­tion that ditch­ing social media was key to her win­ning a medal as a com­pet­i­tive climber.

“I cared so much about what every­one thought of me that it became out­sourced con­fi­dence…. I couldn’t step out of the rep­u­ta­tion I forged online so I lived in a world of enti­tle­ment. Pride in my accom­plish­ments made me con­tent, and con­tent­ed­ness is poi­son to a young ath­lete who has to stay hun­gry if she wants to stay com­pet­i­tive.”

Madi­son Fis­ch­er

She real­ized that she faced a choice: actu­al­ly become a more com­pet­i­tive climber or spend her time try­ing to look like what peo­ple thought a com­pet­i­tive climber should be.

In a sim­i­lar man­ner, we can actu­al­ly strive to be like Jesus or we can instead try to become what oth­er peo­ple think a fol­low­er of Jesus should be. In oth­er words, we can either fol­low Jesus or we can fol­low oth­er peo­ple. We can fol­low Christ or a crowd.

This is about more than social media, but it’s def­i­nite­ly about social media as well. You prob­a­bly know that I am on Face­book and Twit­ter, so clear­ly I’m not about to tell you to delete your accounts. But I do urge you to be aware of the temp­ta­tions they cre­ate. Med­i­tate on Matthew 6:1, “Be care­ful not to prac­tice your right­eous­ness in front of oth­ers to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heav­en.”

Oth­er tid­bits I appre­ci­at­ed:

The athe­ist argues: “If there were a God, how could there be injus­tice?” To which Pas­cal replies: “If there is injus­tice, there must be true jus­tice for it to be rel­a­tive to and a defect of; and this true jus­tice is not found on Earth or in man, there­fore it must exist in Heav­en and God.” Either there or nowhere; and if nowhere, then “every­thing is per­mis­si­ble”. But not every­thing is per­mis­si­ble. There­fore there must be a God.

Kreeft com­ment­ing on Pen­sée 697, page 94

And I par­tic­u­lar­ly like this one. It’s true of babies, and it’s true of adults. Dif­fer­ent tri­fles, same psy­chol­o­gy.

A tri­fle con­soles us because a tri­fle upsets us.

Pas­cal, Pen­sée 43 (page 75)