Tag: china

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 333

ways in which many uni­ver­si­ties are mis­guid­ed

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

This is vol­ume 333, which makes me won­der what I’ll do when I get to vol­ume 666. Halfway to a dis­turb­ing mile­stone!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. COVID per­spec­tives, many crit­i­cal of uni­ver­si­ty poli­cies.
    • Uni­ver­si­ties’ Covid Poli­cies Defy Sci­ence and Rea­son (Mar­ty Makary, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Accord­ing to the CDC, the risk of a ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed adult end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal for Covid was 1 in 26,000 for the week end­ing in Novem­ber 27. Who was that one per­son? Not a col­lege stu­dent.” The author is a sur­geon at Johns Hop­kins.
    • Uni­ver­si­ty COVID Poli­cies Are Bad for Stu­dents (Emi­ly Oster, The Atlantic): “I don’t know if uni­ver­si­ties were right to go large­ly or ful­ly remote in 2020. The world before vac­cines was a dif­fer­ent one, and the choic­es were dif­fi­cult. I am cer­tain, though, that mov­ing to remote instruc­tion is the wrong choice now.” The author is an econ­o­mist at Brown.
    • Are Prince­ton and Yale impris­on­ing their stu­dents? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I doubt these poli­cies will sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it the spread of Covid. But my objec­tion is more fun­da­men­tal: They put uni­ver­si­ties in the unten­able posi­tion of both pan­ick­ing about Covid and treat­ing Covid as triv­ial. Giv­en the pur­pose of a uni­ver­si­ty as an edu­ca­tion­al leader, a uni­ver­si­ty that is hyp­o­crit­i­cal and rhetor­i­cal­ly cor­rupt is fail­ing out­right.” The author is an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty. The link is to a non-pay­walled excerpt of a pay­walled arti­cle.
    • Covid 1/6/22: The Blip (Zvi Mow­showitz, Less Wrong): “If you don’t want your stu­dents infect­ed in Jan­u­ary, you have zero options. You do have the option to ensure they are not infect­ed on cam­pus by not open­ing the cam­pus, in which case the infec­tions will not be your fault, but the infec­tions will still hap­pen.” Long and infor­ma­tive about many things.
    • There is good news (Kate­lyn Jetelina, Sub­stack): “Vac­cines are work­ing. And not just work­ing okay, they are work­ing incred­i­bly well. I know this is hard to believe when every­one around us is test­ing pos­i­tive. But vac­cines are doing their pri­ma­ry job: keep­ing peo­ple out of the hos­pi­tal.” The author is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas sys­tem.
    • I Saw First­hand What It Takes to Keep COVID Out of Hong Kong. It Felt Like a Dif­fer­ent Plan­et. (Car­o­line Chen, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Hong Kong’s quar­an­tine pro­ce­dures are among the strictest in the world. The city is com­mit­ted to a ‘zero-COVID’ pol­i­cy, which means it will take every pos­si­ble mea­sure to pre­vent a sin­gle case. Its poli­cies for trav­el­ers have become pro­gres­sive­ly strin­gent.”
    • The C.D.C. Is Hop­ing You’ll Fig­ure Covid Out on Your Own (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “The gov­ern­ment can help us pull out of this fog, but it should always be based on being hon­est with the pub­lic. We aren’t expect­ing offi­cials to have crys­tal balls about every­thing, but we want them to empow­er and inform us while prepar­ing for even­tu­al­i­ties — good or bad. Two years is too long to still be hop­ing for luck to get through all this.”
  2. Jesus Coor­di­na­tor (Ray­mond Partsch III, The Dai­ly Iber­ian): “For years now, the Ragin’ Cajuns have stayed the night before a home game at the Hilton Gar­den Inn across the street from Cajun Field. The hotel’s swim­ming pool has served for dozens of bap­tisms per­formed by Treuil. ‘The Hilton may have more bap­tisms than the local church­es,’ Wingert­er joked. ‘But in all seri­ous­ness, it is such an incred­i­ble thing to wit­ness. To watch them find their path and Eric help them with that is spe­cial.’ ” This was my cam­pus pas­tor. Real­ly good arti­cle about him.
  3. Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists See Prof­it in Prayer (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…while prayer, Bible read­ing, and Scrip­ture med­i­ta­tion will always be free, the smart­phone apps that help peo­ple do those things in 2022 offer the promise of great poten­tial prof­it.” I have com­plex feel­ings about this.
  4. What It Means To See Jesus (Casey Cep, The New York­er): “What Hud­son calls appear­ances are com­mu­nal visions, with more than one per­son see­ing the same image of Jesus at the same time; appari­tions are when Jesus seems to be present in the phys­i­cal world, as though any­one can see him, yet only the vision­ary actu­al­ly does so; with visions, the vision­ary alone can see Jesus, and is ful­ly aware that no one else can.“This is way more inter­est­ing than I expect­ed.
  5. Chi­na har­vests mass­es of data on West­ern tar­gets, doc­u­ments show (Cate Cadell, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The exact scope of China’s gov­ern­ment pub­lic opin­ion mon­i­tor­ing indus­try is unclear, but there have been some indi­ca­tions about its size in Chi­nese state media. In 2014, the state-backed news­pa­per Chi­na Dai­ly said more than 2 mil­lion peo­ple were work­ing as pub­lic opin­ion ana­lysts. In 2018, the People’s Dai­ly, anoth­er offi­cial organ, said the government’s online opin­ion analy­sis indus­try was worth ‘tens of bil­lions of yuan,’ equiv­a­lent to bil­lions of dol­lars, and was grow­ing at a rate of 50 per­cent a year.”
  6. Trans pris­on­ers ‘switch gen­der again’ once freed from women’s units (Mar­cel­lo Mega and John Booth­man, The Times): “The dis­clo­sure — in a study pub­lished in the British Jour­nal of Crim­i­nol­o­gy — has raised fresh con­cerns about self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of gen­der pos­ing a risk to women’s safe­ty as first min­is­ter Nico­la Stur­geon pre­pares to press ahead with gen­der recog­ni­tion leg­is­la­tion this year.”
  7. Top-Down Let­down (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “You know what vot­er sup­pres­sion, vot­er fraud, and les­bian vam­pires all have in com­mon? They all played the same role in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, with equal effect.” Gold­berg is a delight­ful word­smith.

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 329

a short­er than usu­al roundup

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

This is the 329th install­ment. 329 is, appar­ent­ly, the num­ber of forests (a type of graph) with 10 ver­tices.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Lov­ing Lies (Bill Adair, Air Mail): “Inter­view­ing Glass can be frus­trat­ing, because he frets so much about get­ting every detail right. He’ll stop mid­sen­tence to pon­der the month or day that some­thing hap­pened. Was that lunch in late 2014 or ear­ly 2015? He’ll check. He knows he has a rep­u­ta­tion as a liar and that he has already blown a life­time of cred­i­bil­i­ty.”
    • Quite a sto­ry. You will need to pro­vide your email address to unlock it and it is 100% worth it.
  2. Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, Man on Fire (Mau­reen Dowd, New York Times): “The ene­my is the inner me,” he said. “The Bible says in the last days — I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know — but it says we’ll be lovers of our­selves. The No. 1 pho­to­graph today is a self­ie, ‘Oh, me at the protest.’ ‘Me with the fire.’ ‘Fol­low me.’ ‘Lis­ten to me.’ We’re liv­ing in a time where peo­ple are will­ing to do any­thing to get fol­lowed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much infor­ma­tion? It’s going fast and it can be manip­u­lat­ed obvi­ous­ly in a myr­i­ad of ways. And peo­ple are led like sheep to slaugh­ter.”
  3. What I told the stu­dents of Prince­ton (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “…I want you to think for a moment about a young woman here at Prince­ton. She’s a mag­nif­i­cent ath­lete named Ellie Mar­quardt, an all-Amer­i­can swim­mer who set an Ivy League record in the 500-meter freestyle event as a fresh­man. Just before Thanks­giv­ing, Ellie was defeat­ed in the 500-meter, the event she held the record in, by almost 14 sec­onds by a 22 year old bio­log­i­cal male at Penn who was com­pet­ing on the men’s team as recent­ly as Novem­ber of 2019. That male ath­lete now holds mul­ti­ple U.S. records in women’s swim­ming, eras­ing the hard work of so many of our best female ath­letes, and mak­ing a mock­ery of the rights women fought for gen­er­a­tions to achieve.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  4. Even on U.S. Cam­pus­es, Chi­na Cracks Down on Stu­dents Who Speak Out (Sebas­t­ian Rotel­la, ProP­ub­li­ca): “As the regime of Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping reach­es across bor­ders to con­trol its cit­i­zens wher­ev­er they are, its assaults on aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom have inten­si­fied, accord­ing to U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials, aca­d­e­mics, dis­si­dents and oth­er experts. Chi­nese intel­li­gence offi­cers are mon­i­tor­ing cam­pus­es across the Unit­ed States with online sur­veil­lance and an array of infor­mants moti­vat­ed by mon­ey, ambi­tion, fear or authen­tic patri­o­tism. A com­ment in class about Tai­wan or a speech at a ral­ly about Tibet can result in retal­i­a­tion against stu­dents and their rel­a­tives back home.”
  5. Polit­i­cal arti­cles which caught my atten­tion:
    • I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grate­ful for His Supreme Court Picks (Eri­ka Bachiochi, New York Times): “Mr. Trump’s eco­nom­ic pop­ulism (at least in rhetoric) blast­ed through the lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that has tend­ed to dom­i­nate the G.O.P., a lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that has made the party’s alliance with pro-lif­ers one of strange bed­fel­lows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any rel­e­vance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those sin­gle-issue vot­ers will be free to look else­where — it will have to offer the coun­try the matrix of eth­nic diver­si­ty and eco­nom­ic sol­i­dar­i­ty that Mr. Trump stum­bled upon, but with­out the divi­sive­ness of the man him­self.”
    • Democ­rats fall flat with ‘Lat­inx’ lan­guage (Marc Caputo & Sab­ri­na Rodriguez, Politi­co): “The num­bers sug­gest that using Lat­inx is a vio­la­tion of the polit­i­cal Hip­po­crat­ic Oath, which is to first do no elec­toral harm,” said Aman­di, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s suc­cess­ful His­pan­ic out­reach nation­wide in his two pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns. “Why are we using a word that is pre­ferred by only 2 per­cent, but offends as many as 40 per­cent of those vot­ers we want to win?” Shared with me by a stu­dent well-suit­ed to assess this con­tro­ver­sy. 
    • [Stan­ford] Sen­ate again denies Mike Pence event fund­ing at meet­ing revot­ing on grants (Itzel Luna, Stan­ford Dai­ly):  “Five sen­a­tors vot­ed in favor of SCR’s $6,000 fund­ing request to bring for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to cam­pus in the win­ter quar­ter. Eight sen­a­tors abstained and no one vot­ed against the fund­ing which, accord­ing to the sen­a­tors, con­sti­tut­ed a fail­ure to receive major­i­ty approval.” This reads like a par­o­dy of stu­dent gov­ern­ment.
    • Young Dems more like­ly to despise the oth­er par­ty (Neal Roth­schild, Axios): “[Among col­lege stu­dents,] 5% of Repub­li­cans said they would­n’t be friends with some­one from the oppo­site par­ty, com­pared to 37% of Democ­rats. 71% of Democ­rats would­n’t go on a date with some­one with oppos­ing views, ver­sus 31% of Republicans.30% of Democ­rats — and 7% of Repub­li­cans — would­n’t work for some­one who vot­ed dif­fer­ent­ly from them.”

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 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.” From vol­ume 280.

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 322

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

This is the 322nd install­ment, and today I learned that 322 is the 12th Lucas num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of Evan­gel­i­cal Lead­er­ship (Mark Gal­li, Sub­stack): “This ten­den­cy has only got­ten worse, as now the mark of a suc­cess­ful evan­gel­i­cal writer is to get pub­lished reg­u­lar­ly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s inter­est­ing about such pieces is that (a) such writ­ers make a point that affirms the view of the sec­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion (on top­ics like envi­ron­men­tal care, racial injus­tice, sex­u­al abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evan­gel­i­cals should take the same point of view. How­ev­er, their writ­ing doesn’t reach the mass­es of evan­gel­i­cals who take a con­trary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writ­ers are real­ly inter­est­ed in get­ting those evan­gel­i­cals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the main­stream press. Bet­ter to try to get such a col­umn pub­lished in the most pop­u­lar Pen­te­costal out­let, Charis­ma. Ah, but that would do noth­ing to enhance the pres­tige of evan­gel­i­cals among the culture’s elite.”
    1. This is a SUPER inter­est­ing arti­cle that makes good points… but the author some­how avoid­ed look­ing in a mir­ror while writ­ing it. He was the edi­tor-in-chief of Chris­tian­i­ty Today!
    • Fol­low-up: Falling from Grace into Mer­cy— or Elite Evan­gel­i­cal­ism, Part 2 (Mark Gal­li, Sub­stack): “But one thing about retire­ment is the time one has to reflect on one’s career, and I see more clear­ly how much I was will­ing to go along to get along, and how much I was part of the sys­tem.… I don’t think there is much hope in reform­ing many things that course through the veins of elite evan­gel­i­cals.”
  2. Two of the most dis­tress­ing news items I’ve seen in some time.
  3. Hunt­ing the Satanists (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the world­view of QAnon and Yale’s diver­si­ty office are sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar. Both see a world in which Satan, lit­er­al or metaphor­i­cal, is an active force in the world cor­rupt­ing indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions. Satan is pow­er­ful but hid­den. He only reveals his influ­ence when the cor­rupt­ed slip-up and by the incor­rect use of a word, phrase, or ges­ture reveal their true natures. Since Satan is pow­er­ful and hid­den the good peo­ple must con­stant­ly mon­i­tor every­one.” An astute­ly observed par­al­lel.
  4. It’s Time for a Bet­ter and Smarter Alliance Against Porn (David French, The Dis­patch): “One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing devel­op­ments of mod­ern times has been the way in which Amer­i­can ideas and Amer­i­can con­duct fre­quent­ly con­tra­dict each oth­er. The world of ideas most­ly (though not exclu­sive­ly) has moved left, quick­ly. Ideas move from pro­gres­sive fringe to main­stream with stun­ning speed.… But in the world of con­duct, some­thing else is hap­pen­ing. Social con­ser­v­a­tive lifestyles are mak­ing a come­back. Divorce rates are down. Teen preg­nan­cy is down. Abor­tion rates (abor­tions per 1,000 women) and ratios (abor­tions per 1,000 preg­nan­cies) are way down. Sin­gle par­ent­ing has sta­bi­lized, and the per­cent­age of chil­dren liv­ing with both par­ents is inch­ing up.”
  5. Please Don’t Give Up On Hav­ing Kids Because Of Cli­mate Change (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “If you think priv­i­leged mod­ern Amer­i­cans shouldn’t have chil­dren now because of qual­i­ty-of-life issues [relat­ed to cli­mate change], you implic­it­ly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had chil­dren.”
  6. Two tid­bits from Chi­na:
    • Ter­ror & tourism: Xin­jiang eas­es its grip, but fear remains (Dake Kang, AP News): “Any­time I tried to chat with some­one, the min­ders would draw in close, strain­ing to hear every word. It’s hard to know why Chi­nese author­i­ties have shift­ed to sub­tler meth­ods of con­trol­ling the region. It may be that sear­ing crit­i­cism from the West, along with pun­ish­ing polit­i­cal and com­mer­cial sanc­tions, have pushed author­i­ties to light­en up. Or it may sim­ply be that Chi­na judges it has come far enough in its goal of sub­du­ing the Uyghurs and oth­er most­ly Mus­lim minori­ties to relax its grip.”
    • The Tri­umph and Ter­ror of Wang Hun­ing (N.S. Lyons, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Wang record­ed his obser­va­tions in a mem­oir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book Amer­i­ca Against Amer­i­ca. In it, he mar­vels at home­less encamp­ments in the streets of Wash­ing­ton DC, out-of-con­trol drug crime in poor black neigh­bor­hoods in New York and San Fran­cis­co, and cor­po­ra­tions that seemed to have fused them­selves to and tak­en over respon­si­bil­i­ties of gov­ern­ment.… Amer­i­cans can, he says, per­ceive that they are faced with ‘intri­cate social and cul­tur­al prob­lems,’ they ‘tend to think of them as sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems’ to be solved sep­a­rate­ly. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their prob­lems are in fact all inex­tri­ca­bly inter­linked and have the same root cause: a rad­i­cal, nihilis­tic indi­vid­u­al­ism at the heart of mod­ern Amer­i­can lib­er­al­ism.”
      • Sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. One of Chi­na’s key lead­ers has accu­rate­ly diag­nosed cer­tain chal­lenges their nation is fac­ing but his solu­tions are lack­ing (and evil). And he seems to have come to many of his con­vic­tions by vis­it­ing Amer­i­ca and wit­ness­ing our cul­tur­al fol­ly.
  7. Don’t Let Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Claims Mask Bad Faith Argu­ments (Daniel Ben­nett, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious lib­er­ty is too impor­tant to let it get mis­used. It’s not a waiv­er to avoid all incon­ve­niences in life or, worse, a tool to make polit­i­cal state­ments. For reli­gious lib­er­ty to sur­vive polit­i­cal and legal scruti­ny in the future, we must safe­guard exemp­tions against abuse.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at John Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 321

I always try to trim these to sev­en items. Cut­ting the 8th was bru­tal this week — so many good options!

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

This is vol­ume 321, which is not only a num­ber but also a count­down.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Top Trans Doc­tors Blow the Whis­tle on ‘Slop­py’ Care (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “[The] new ortho­doxy has gone too far, accord­ing to two of the most promi­nent providers in the field of trans­gen­der med­i­cine: Dr. Mar­ci Bow­ers, a world-renowned vagino­plas­ty spe­cial­ist who oper­at­ed on real­i­ty-tele­vi­sion star Jazz Jen­nings; and Eri­ca Ander­son, a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia San Francisco’s Child and Ado­les­cent Gen­der Clin­ic. In the course of their careers, both have seen thou­sands of patients. Both are board mem­bers of the World Pro­fes­sion­al Asso­ci­a­tion for Trans­gen­der Health (WPATH), the orga­ni­za­tion that sets the stan­dards world­wide for trans­gen­der med­ical care. And both are trans­gen­der women. Ear­li­er this month, Ander­son told me she sub­mit­ted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warn­ing that many trans­gen­der health­care providers were treat­ing kids reck­less­ly. The Times passed, explain­ing it was ‘out­side our cov­er­age pri­or­i­ties right now.’ ”
    • A sober­ing arti­cle, and also a trag­ic but unsur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion about the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al team.
  2. High­lights From The Com­ments On Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I might be the only per­son in the world who likes McMan­sions. They just look like nice, pleas­ant build­ings made by peo­ple who want to vague­ly enjoy the place where they live. Prob­a­bly the least offen­sive thing peo­ple are mak­ing these days.”
    • Judg­ing from the com­ments he real­ly struck a chord with the “Whith­er Tar­taria?” piece I linked two weeks ago. Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. What Amer­i­can Chris­tians Hear at Church (Casey Cep, New York­er): “Homiletics—the prop­er name for the art of preaching—is still taught in sem­i­nar­ies and divin­i­ty schools, but it is not often stud­ied out­side of those insti­tu­tions. This is regret­table, since many more Amer­i­cans attend church than sub­scribe to a news­pa­per.… Tak­ing advan­tage of the tech­nolo­gies that have allowed church­es to stream ser­vices and post them online, Pew has stud­ied the length, lan­guage, and con­tent of tens of thou­sands of ser­mons, by denom­i­na­tion and tra­di­tion, most recent­ly for the nine Sun­days before and the Sun­day after last fall’s Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.” Quite inter­est­ing.
  4. Slav­ery vs. White Suprema­cy (Van Gosse & Sean Wilentz, New York Review of Books): “Anti­slav­ery and anti-racist pol­i­tics appeared only in the 1760s—and only in the Amer­i­can colonies. Those pol­i­tics, hailed by lat­er abo­li­tion­ists as of world-his­tor­i­cal impor­tance, engaged blacks and whites, enslaved and free. Inspired by the Revolution’s egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, anti­slav­ery advo­cates over­came pow­er­ful oppo­si­tion and enact­ed the first eman­ci­pa­tions of their kind in his­to­ry, in sev­en of the thir­teen orig­i­nal states.… The Unit­ed States, in short, was found­ed not on slav­ery and white suprema­cy but amid an unprece­dent­ed strug­gle over slav­ery and white suprema­cy, which the Con­sti­tu­tion left open.” Illu­mi­nat­ing let­ters between two his­to­ry pro­fes­sors.
  5. ‘Some are just psy­chopaths’: Chi­nese detec­tive in exile reveals extent of tor­ture against Uyghurs (Rebec­ca Wright, Ivan Wat­son, Zahid Mah­mood and Tom Booth, CNN): “ ‘Kick them, beat them (until they’re) bruised and swollen,’ Jiang said, recall­ing how he and his col­leagues used to inter­ro­gate detainees in police deten­tion cen­ters. ‘Until they kneel on the floor cry­ing.’ Dur­ing his time in Xin­jiang, Jiang said every new detainee was beat­en dur­ing the inter­ro­ga­tion process — includ­ing men, women and chil­dren as young as 14.” The details in this sto­ry are dark. I’ve seen oth­er sto­ries with tes­ti­monies from for­mer pris­on­ers, this one fea­tures one of the guards speak­ing up in addi­tion to sto­ries from pris­on­ers.
  6. Train­ings (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Uni­ver­si­ties don’t usu­al­ly cre­ate their own train­ing mod­ules — they buy prod­ucts from com­pa­nies that spe­cial­ize in that kind of thing. And those com­pa­nies want to save mon­ey by reusing their old code. So they extract the con­tent of their Title IX cours­es and sim­ply stuff new con­tent into the exist­ing frame­works. Easy-peasy. And the upper-lev­el admin­is­tra­tors of the uni­ver­si­ty, who don’t want to spend any more mon­ey on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged mon­ster they’ve been hand­ed. But that cre­ates a big prob­lem: the kind of struc­ture need­ed to com­mu­ni­cate to peo­ple the con­tours of a law and the expec­ta­tions gen­er­at­ed by that law is not the kind of struc­ture need­ed to explore the moral devel­op­ment of a com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. Yale and the Edu­ca­tion of Gov­ern­ing Elites (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “A pro­gram con­ceived to teach future elites how to wise­ly use state pow­er has mor­phed into a pro­gram teach­ing them how to wise­ly oppose it. This trans­for­ma­tion is one more illus­tra­tion of Dashan’s the­sis. At Yale we see the Amer­i­can predica­ment made con­crete: an entrenched gov­ern­ing class that enjoys the priv­i­leges of elite sta­tus but refus­es to pre­pare for the respon­si­bil­i­ties of elite sta­tion.”

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 Are Satanists of the MS-13 gang an under-covered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS-13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 158.

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 309

in which I pro­vide my views on ser­mon orig­i­nal­i­ty

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.

TIL that the num­ber 309 is is the small­est num­ber whose 5th pow­er con­tains every dig­it at least once. 3095=2,817,036,000,549. I’m real­ly stunned that some­one fig­ured that out.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘Ser­mon­gate’ Prompts a Quandary: Should Pas­tors Bor­row Words From One Anoth­er? (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Ben­jamin Franklin wrote of his admi­ra­tion of a young Pres­by­ter­ian preach­er much respect­ed for his preach­ing, which was appar­ent­ly deliv­ered extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly. When a doc­tri­nal dis­pute erupt­ed in the con­gre­ga­tion, how­ev­er, an adver­sary rec­og­nized that a pas­sage deliv­ered by the preach­er had been lift­ed from an uncred­it­ed source. Franklin stuck by the pla­gia­rist. ‘I rather approved his giv­ing us good ser­mons com­posed by oth­ers,’ he wrote, ‘than bad ones of his own man­u­fac­ture.’ ”
    • The appro­pri­ate prin­ci­ples seem so obvi­ous to me:
    • Nev­er present some­one else’s per­son­al sto­ries as though they hap­pened to you. It’s hard to call that any­thing oth­er than lying.
    • If you gain an insight from some­one else, why would you deprive your hear­ers of that good insight? USE IT. Cred­it it in the way that seems most appro­pri­ate, but a ser­mon is not a writ­ten resource peo­ple are going to cite nor one that peo­ple are going to track down your ref­er­ences on. I don’t even think pla­gia­rism is the right term in this con­ver­sa­tion: there’s no stan­dard way to cite oth­er ser­mons nor should there be. Peo­ple who get a bee in their bon­net about this seem so odd to me.
    • In fact, you should always assume that the mes­sages I deliv­er have been enriched by insights from oth­ers. I love God’s Word and I love my stu­dents too much to just give them my own lim­it­ed obser­va­tions. My own prac­tice: I copy and paste the text into a Word doc­u­ment. Then I begin typ­ing my insights and con­struct­ing a rough out­line. Then I con­sult schol­ar­ly and ser­mon­ic resources and revise my outline/notes when I real­ize I’ve mis­un­der­stood some­thing or that I missed an impor­tant point. Typ­i­cal­ly that means I read two or three com­men­taries and will some­times skim one or two ser­mons from preach­ers I respect. If some­one’s phras­ing is so good I adopt it, I usu­al­ly add, “I heard a pas­tor say” or “an aca­d­e­m­ic com­men­tary real­ly helped me out on this point” and some­times will even give the pre­cise source. But not always. Some­times cit­ing some­thing ver­bal­ly breaks up the flow too much. Some­times after an espe­cial­ly fact-laden mes­sage I will send out an email roundup of the most impor­tant sources (that tends to hap­pen after apolo­getic ser­mons when I’m appeal­ing to extrascrip­tur­al facts).
    • It gets com­pli­cat­ed with insights I gleaned years ago and have preached mul­ti­ple times since. Some­times I don’t even remem­ber that it was­n’t orig­i­nal to me (whether clever phras­ing or an entire ser­mon out­line). That’s how learn­ing works! I’m not try­ing to deceive any­one, but I am 100% con­fi­dent that I word some things a cer­tain way because some­one else word­ed it that way to me and I thought, “that’s per­fect” and now that I’ve said it 70 times I just know that’s how I think about the sub­ject.
    • If you ever want to know if some­thing I said is orig­i­nal to me, just ask. If I quot­ed some­one else (and remem­ber that I have), I’ll be thrilled to point you to a resource that helped me!
  2. What Makes a Cult a Cult? (Zoë Heller, New York­er): “The good news is that ratio­nal objec­tions to flaws in cult doc­trine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a pow­er­ful impact if and when they occur to the cult mem­bers them­selves. The ana­lyt­i­cal mind may be qui­etened by cult-think, but it is rarely dead­ened alto­geth­er. Espe­cial­ly if cult life is prov­ing unpleas­ant, the capac­i­ty for crit­i­cal thought can reassert itself.” The focus here is on way-out-there cults. Inter­est­ing nonethe­less, even giv­en the author’s blind spots (I think it would have been a stronger arti­cle if she had men­tioned a few sec­u­lar beliefs as par­al­lels).
  3. Our Unequal Polyg­a­mous Past (Conn Car­roll, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “This brief his­to­ry of human sex­u­al rela­tions shows us three things: 1) we are hard­wired to form monog­a­mous pair bonds; 2) the priv­i­leged among us will always try to monop­o­lize more mates; and 3) we can check the priv­i­lege of the pow­er­ful by enforc­ing monog­a­mous cul­tur­al norms.”
  4. Wok­e­ness:
    • As a Gay Child in a Chris­t­ian Cult, I Was Taught to Hate Myself. Then I Joined the Church of Social Justice—and Noth­ing Changed (Ben Appel, Quil­lette): “For years, I feared homo­pho­bic right-wing evan­gel­i­cals. But these days, I’m equal­ly wary of the pro­gres­sive activists who push a dis­tinct­ly homo­pho­bic agen­da that denies the bio­log­i­cal real­i­ty of sex—and who claim that what we are attract­ed to isn’t male or female bod­ies per se, but rather male or female gen­der iden­ti­ties. This out­look effec­tive­ly imag­ines away the exis­tence of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, which, in the real world, is of course root­ed in phys­i­cal attrac­tion based on bio­log­i­cal attrib­ut­es.”
    • If you hate the cul­ture wars, blame lib­er­als (Kevin Drum, per­son­al blog): “It is not con­ser­v­a­tives who have turned Amer­i­can pol­i­tics into a cul­ture war bat­tle. It is lib­er­als. And this should­n’t come as a sur­prise since pro­gres­sives have been brag­ging pub­licly about push­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty left­ward since at least 2004. Now, I’m per­son­al­ly hap­py about most of this. But that does­n’t blind me to the fact that “per­son­al­ly hap­py” means noth­ing in pol­i­tics. What mat­ters is what the medi­an vot­er feels, and Democ­rats have been mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther away from the medi­an vot­er for years:” Inter­est­ing and very dif­fer­ent from the mes­sage I usu­al­ly hear, which blames polar­iza­tion on con­ser­v­a­tives who are said to have moved much more to the right than lib­er­als have moved to the left.
    • Cul­ture Wars are Long Wars (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Cul­tur­al insur­gents win few con­verts in their own cohort. They can, how­ev­er, build up a sys­tem of ideas and insti­tu­tions which will pre­serve and refine the ideals they hope their com­mu­ni­ty will adopt in the future. The real tar­get of these ideas are not their con­tem­po­raries, but their con­tem­po­raries’ chil­dren and grand­chil­dren. Cul­ture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn. Future gen­er­a­tions will be open to val­ues the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion rejects out­right. This will not be appar­ent at first. Beneath the offi­cial com­ings and goings of the cohorts above, a new con­sen­sus forms in in the cohorts below. Ideas will fes­ter among the young, but their impact will be hid­den by the inabil­i­ty and inex­pe­ri­ence of youth. But the youth do not stay young. Even­tu­al­ly a tran­si­tion point arrives.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • What Hap­pened To You? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “[We have wit­nessed a] sud­den, rapid, stun­ning shift in the belief sys­tem of the Amer­i­can elites. It has sent the whole soci­ety into a pro­found cul­tur­al dis­lo­ca­tion. It is, in essence, an ongo­ing moral pan­ic against the specter of ‘white suprema­cy,’ which is now bizarrely regard­ed as an accu­rate descrip­tion of the largest, freest, most suc­cess­ful mul­tira­cial democ­ra­cy in human his­to­ry.”
    • The West’s cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion is over (Ed West, UnHerd): “Life of Bri­an couldn’t be made 20 years ear­li­er, and nei­ther could it be made now; its satire of Jesus, a prophet of Islam, would risk upset­ting Mus­lim sen­si­bil­i­ties, which it’s fair to say peo­ple have become slight­ly wary of doing. At the very least it would need to cut out the scene point­ing fun at a man who, absurd­ly to the film­mak­ers and audi­ences, iden­ti­fies as a woman; absurd in 1979, as it had been in 1879 and 1779 and in every year before that, but a sacred idea in 2021. It’s sacred in the sense that its believ­ers have cap­tured the moral citadel where the most pow­er­ful ideas are pro­tect­ed by taboo, achieved either by emo­tion­al argu­ment or intim­i­da­tion (and both can be effec­tive). This is not some dark new age of can­cel cul­ture, how­ev­er, it’s just a return to nor­mal­i­ty.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed
    • Why Did­n’t COVID-19 Kill the Con­sti­tu­tion? (Jacob Sul­lum. Rea­son): “COVID-19 did not kill the Con­sti­tu­tion. But the cri­sis made it vivid­ly clear that we can­not count on politi­cians or bureau­crats to wor­ry about lim­its on their author­i­ty, espe­cial­ly when they believe they are doing what is nec­es­sary to pro­tect the pub­lic from a dead­ly dan­ger. The task of enforc­ing those lim­its falls to judges who are will­ing to stick their necks out.”
    • What Are the Lim­its to Gov­ern­men­tal Author­i­ty over the Church? (Ben Edwards, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “Christians/churches must sub­mit to every gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion unless it would mean dis­obey­ing God (i.e., cause them to sin) or the gov­ern­ment is seek­ing to reg­u­late some­thing out­side its sphere of author­i­ty.”
  6. On Chi­na
    • Chi­na Won’t Bury Us, Either (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Gar­ry Kas­parov has a pithy way of sum­ming up the past 18 months of tribu­la­tion. ‘Chi­na gave us the virus,’ the chess and human-rights cham­pi­on told me over a recent break­fast. ‘And the free world gave us the vac­cines.’ ”
    • Why a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan would be a cat­a­stro­phe for Chi­na and the world (Jon Stokes, per­son­al blog): “The world’s largest, most valu­able tech com­pa­nies are depen­dent either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly on the steady out­put of TSMC’s fabs. If those fabs went offline or became unavail­able in the west because they were con­trolled by PRC, it would imme­di­ate­ly dev­as­tate the glob­al econ­o­my. An unknow­able num­ber of large com­pa­nies just wouldn’t be able to refill their inven­to­ries for an inde­ter­mi­nate­ly long time.” This is about com­put­er chips and how a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan will be dis­as­trous for that mar­ket (which touch­es on so many oth­ers) no mat­ter how the inva­sion plays out. Very thought­ful.
  7. Scripps Spelling Bee 2021: Zaila Avant-garde Wins (Mag­gie Astor and Maria Cramer, New York Times): “Zaila, who just fin­ished eighth grade in her home­town, Har­vey, La., showed a prowess for spelling at 10, when her father, who had been watch­ing finals of the Scripps Nation­al Spelling Bee on ESPN, asked her how to spell the win­ning word: maro­cain. Zaila spelled it per­fect­ly. Then he asked her to spell the win­ning words going back to 1999. She spelled near­ly all of them cor­rect­ly and was able to tell him the books where she had seen them.” Read the whole thing — this kid is amaz­ing at more than spelling! The inter­face is weird — you’ll have to click “Read more” just before the time­line.

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 Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” First shared in vol­ume 150.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 308

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 303

top­ics range from the pan­dem­ic to a Bib­li­cal view of UFOs

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

This is the 303rd edi­tion, which is fun because 303 is a lucky num­ber, a cat­e­go­ry of num­bers that gives us insight into prime num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Dr. Fran­cis Collins Dis­cuss­es The Com­plex­i­ties Of Herd Immu­ni­ty (Col­bert Report, YouTube): sev­en min­utes. Dr. Collins is a fel­low believ­er and emi­nent sci­en­tist. He flat-out shares his tes­ti­mo­ny! Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  2. Why I Did­n’t “Just Bake the Cake” (Jack Phillips, First Things): “My com­mit­ment to God and to the truth of a book I believe to be his holy Word is the defin­ing premise of my life, the focus of my faith, and the guid­ing direc­tive for my actions. If you ask me to sep­a­rate all of that from my work, from my deci­sions, from my art … I sim­ply can’t do that. Not just won’t—can’t. It’s like ask­ing a con­trac­tor to build a great build­ing, but first remove the foun­da­tion.”
  3. It’s Time to Devel­op a Bib­li­cal Ufol­o­gy (Kyle Beshears, The­ol­o­gy in the Mid­dle): “What is the rela­tion­ship, if any, between UAP phe­nom­e­na and Chris­t­ian angelolo­gies and demonolo­gies? How does the doc­trine of the ima­go Dei fit in? Can our the­ol­o­gy of the fall address extrater­res­tri­als? What if they arrive deny­ing the lord­ship of Christ (Gal 1:8; 1 John 2:22)? What if they arrive pro­claim­ing the lord­ship of Christ (Rom 10:9)?”
  4. The Myth of the Val­ue-Neu­tral Mar­ket (Mark Movs­esyian, First Things): “The neu­tral mar­ket does not cre­ate tol­er­ance for diverse views; rather, it’s the oth­er way around. Tol­er­ance for diverse views cre­ates the neu­tral mar­ket; when tol­er­ance dis­ap­pears, the mar­ket becomes as polar­ized as every­thing else.”
  5. The future of war is bizarre and ter­ri­fy­ing (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “The world may yet explode into anoth­er WW2-style con­fla­gra­tion, or the kind of nuclear holo­caust we feared dur­ing the Cold War. If so, then my bet is that drones will dom­i­nate that bat­tle­field. But most of the mod­ern mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies led them­selves to a very dif­fer­ent kind of great-pow­er war — a war of con­stant snip­ing and harass­ment. Assas­sin drones, cyber­at­tacks, info ops, and bioweapons raise the pos­si­bil­i­ty of nev­er-end­ing low-grade attacks that are below the thresh­old of mas­sive retal­i­a­tion.”
  6. For Cos­mopoli­tan Chris­tians, Sec­u­lar Approval Is a Com­mon Temp­ta­tion (Justin E. Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We need Chris­tians who aren’t smit­ten with the cul­ture or mere­ly pro­fi­cient at regur­gi­tat­ing its litur­gy. We need believ­ers who can wres­tle with sec­u­lar thought, affirm­ing the mer­its and oppos­ing the lies. Chris­tians must be con­fi­dent and dis­tinct­ly Chris­t­ian in our fields—boldly speak­ing up when the emper­or is strid­ing around with no clothes. When change is nec­es­sary, we must cor­rect the mis­takes of our elders by mov­ing clos­er to the Bible, not fur­ther from it.”
  7. Some thoughts about Wuhan:
    • The medi­a’s lab leak fias­co (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “If some­thing is a 70–30 issue but the 30 are keep­ing their heads down, it can look like a 98–2 issue.… There is just more dis­agree­ment and dis­sen­sion than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to peo­ple and speak to them in a more relaxed way. My strong sus­pi­cion is that this is true across domains of exper­tise, and is cre­at­ing a lot of bub­bles of fake con­sen­sus that can become very mis­lead­ing.”
    • Check­ing Facts Even If One Can’t (Zeynep Tufek­ci, Sub­stack): “If any­thing, all this over­reach and hur­ry to declare every­thing a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry or ‘not fol­low­ing the sci­ence’ just helps erode what trust author­i­ties or fact-check­ers may have had in their pro­nounce­ments. Imag­ine that in a few years, we do get some evi­dence that real­ly helps resolve the ques­tion one way or the oth­er, and the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty were indeed able achieve a con­sen­sus of sorts. Who’d believe it after this?”
    • The Con­sid­er­able, If Cir­cum­stan­tial, Evi­dence of a Wuhan Lab Leak (Jim Ger­aghty, Nation­al Review): “Per­haps the least plau­si­ble argu­ment in oppo­si­tion to the lab-leak the­o­ry is that the staff of the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy or oth­er Chi­nese facil­i­ties are just too dili­gent to ever make a con­se­quen­tial mis­take. The orig­i­nal SARS virus had acci­den­tal­ly leaked from the Chi­nese Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy in Bei­jing, part of China’s Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol. Twice.” The com­pi­la­tion of the evi­dence is com­pelling. To use a legal image, if I was a on a jury I’d vote to con­vict unless the oppos­ing coun­sel had some slam dunk argu­ments — and in this sit­u­a­tion the oppos­ing coun­sel is fran­ti­cal­ly try­ing to get the case dis­missed before it comes to court.

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 Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From. (Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qual­i­ties.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). (first shared in vol­ume 62)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 299

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 295

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 292

there is an absurd­ly long list of enter­tain­ing YouTube videos at the end

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

This is vol­ume 292, which is the num­ber of ways you can break a dol­lar into two or more coins.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Grow­ing My Faith in the Face of Death (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “Most par­tic­u­lar­ly for me as a Chris­t­ian, Jesus’s cost­ly love, death, and res­ur­rec­tion had become not just some­thing I believed and filed away, but a hope that sus­tained me all day. I pray this prayer dai­ly. Occa­sion­al­ly it elec­tri­fies, but ulti­mate­ly it always calms: And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morn­ing only by your grace, keep me in the joy­ful, live­ly remem­brance that what­ev­er hap­pens, I will some­day know my final ris­ing, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.”
  2. The Emp­ty Reli­gions of Insta­gram (Leigh Stein, New York Times): “I have hard­ly prayed to God since I was a teenag­er, but the pan­dem­ic has cracked open inside me a pro­found yearn­ing for rev­er­ence, humil­i­ty and awe. I have an over­draft on my out­rage account. I want moral author­i­ty from some­one who isn’t shilling a mem­oir or call­ing out her ene­mies on social media for clout.”
  3. Do Lib­er­als Care if Books Dis­ap­pear? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In the last stages of the same-sex mar­riage debate, I nev­er encoun­tered a flick­er of pri­vate doubt from lib­er­al friends. But in the gen­der-iden­ti­ty debate, there are per­va­sive lib­er­al doubts about the cur­rent activist posi­tion. Yet with­out lib­er­al objec­tion, that posi­tion appears to set rules for what Ama­zon will sell.”
  4. The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of America’s Elites (Bari Weiss, City Jour­nal): “So chil­dren learn how the new rules of woke work. The idea of lying in order to please a teacher seems like a phe­nom­e­non from the Sovi­et Union. But the high school­ers I spoke with said that they do ver­sions of this, includ­ing par­rot­ing views they don’t believe in assign­ments so that their grades don’t suf­fer.… One Eng­lish teacher in Los Ange­les tac­it­ly acknowl­edges the prob­lem: she has the class turn off their videos on Zoom and asks each stu­dent to make their name anony­mous so that they can have unin­hib­it­ed dis­cus­sions.”
    • Relat­ed: Pri­vate Schools Have Become Tru­ly Obscene (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Pri­vate schools reg­u­lar­ly make deci­sions that par­ents don’t under­stand. Like ancient peo­ples, the par­ents try to make sense of the clues. They decide that col­lege admis­sions must be the god of pri­vate school—wrong—or that the god must be AP scores, or sports, or insti­tu­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. The god of pri­vate school is money.“A lit­tle uneven but a vis­cer­al­ly fun read.
  5. Can­cel­ing Is Pow­er­less (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Pol­i­tics is about pow­er. Can­cel mobs don’t have it, and they nev­er will. You want­ed repa­ra­tions; you got Dr. Seuss. Maybe time to take a hard look at why.” His fol­low-up Per­haps We Can­not Do Both is also worth­while.
  6. Why Reformed Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Has Splin­tered: Four Approach­es to Race, Pol­i­tics, and Gen­der (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “By virtue of our upbring­ing, our expe­ri­ences, our hurts, our per­son­al­i­ties, our gifts, and our fears, we grav­i­tate toward cer­tain expla­na­tions and often think in famil­iar pat­terns when it comes to the most com­pli­cat­ed and con­tro­ver­sial issues. Why is it that by know­ing what some­one thinks about, say, mask wear­ing that you prob­a­bly have a pret­ty good idea what they think about Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and sys­temic racism?” His break­down of approach­es is help­ful even out­side the Reformed tribe. You can see all four respons­es with­in Chi Alpha. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed if you want a frame­work for under­stand­ing why fel­low believ­ers dis­agree with you.
  7. Two arti­cles about Chi­na:

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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