Tag: china

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 350

Few­er main top­ics than nor­mal, but a bunch of arti­cles in the top­ics

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 350, and 350 is a very respectable num­ber. I’m impressed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Pol­i­tics Poi­soned the Evan­gel­i­cal Church (Tim Alber­ta, The Atlantic): “Hav­ing grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pas­tor at anoth­er church in town, I’ve spent my life watch­ing evan­gel­i­cal­ism morph from a spir­i­tu­al dis­po­si­tion into a polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty. It’s heart­break­ing. So many peo­ple who love the Lord, who give their time and mon­ey to the poor and the mourn­ing and the per­se­cut­ed, have been reduced to a car­i­ca­ture. But I under­stand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became com­pul­sive­ly polit­i­cal, allow­ing spe­cif­ic eth­i­cal argu­ments to snow­ball into full-blown par­ti­san advo­ca­cy, often in ways that dis­tract­ed from their mis­sion of evan­ge­liz­ing for Christ.”
  2. Being a Polit­i­cal Jour­nal­ist Made Me a Bet­ter Chris­t­ian (Jon Ward, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But Chris­tians can­not be the con­science of the state if we are not first the con­science of whichev­er polit­i­cal par­ty we belong to. We have the dif­fi­cult task of belong­ing to polit­i­cal par­ties and work­ing for the good of the coun­try through those insti­tu­tions, while also stand­ing apart from those par­ties to crit­i­cize them at times for their weak­ness­es, errors, and cor­rup­tions.” The entire essay is delight­ful.
  3. A con­tro­ver­sy about how Chris­tians should engage in the pub­lic square:
    • How I Evolved on Tim Keller (James R. Wood, First Things): “If we assume that win­some­ness will gain a favor­able hear­ing, when Chris­tians con­sis­tent­ly receive heat­ed push­back, we will be tempt­ed to think our con­vic­tions are the prob­lem. If win­some­ness is met with hos­til­i­ty, it is easy to won­der, ‘Are we in the wrong?’ Thus the slide toward sec­u­lar culture’s rea­son­ing is greased. A ‘sec­u­lar-friend­ly’ pol­i­tics has prob­lems sim­i­lar to ‘seek­er-friend­ly’ wor­ship. An exces­sive con­cern to appeal to the unchurched is plagued by the accom­mo­da­tion­ist temp­ta­tion.”
    • A Cri­tique of Tim Keller Reveals the Moral Devo­lu­tion of the New Chris­t­ian Right (The Dis­patch, David French): “Yet even if the des­per­ate times nar­ra­tive were true, the des­per­ate mea­sures ratio­nal­iza­tion suf­fers from pro­found moral defects. The bib­li­cal call to Chris­tians to love your ene­mies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhib­it the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kind­ness, good­ness, faith­ful­ness, gen­tle­ness, and self-control—does not rep­re­sent a set of tac­tics to be aban­doned when times are tough but rather a set of eter­nal moral prin­ci­ples to be applied even in the face of extreme adver­si­ty…
    • Is it Time to Move Past Tim Keller? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The ques­tion is not whether love of neigh­bor doesn’t work and should be for­got­ten, the ques­tion is what love of neigh­bor demands from us, and whether such love might look dif­fer­ent when the pre­sent­ing moral and spir­i­tu­al needs of our neigh­bors might not be what they were a gen­er­a­tion ago.”
    • some thoughts on Tim Keller (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Like Dio­genes with his lantern, I’m look­ing for one crit­ic of Tim Keller who shows some aware­ness that Chris­tians are com­mand­ed by their Lord to act in cer­tain ways and to refrain from act­ing in oth­ers. To think only in terms of what is effec­tive or strate­gic is to fight on the Devil’s home ground.”
    • This Arti­cle is Not About Tim Keller (James Wood, Amer­i­can Reformer): “How do we know what the future holds for the public’s per­cep­tion of Chris­tians and their attempts to love their neigh­bors through polit­i­cal action? We might be sur­prised what the judg­ments of his­to­ry have in store. Not only do I ques­tion the cer­tain­ty we can have in these assess­ments about how our polit­i­cal actions will impact our long-term gospel wit­ness, but I also think this is a cat­e­go­ry error. Pol­i­tics is not about min­i­miz­ing offense in order to max­i­mize open­ness to the evan­ge­lis­tic mes­sage. Pol­i­tics is, rather, focused on the pur­suit of jus­tice and the just order­ing of soci­ety.”
  4. Against longter­mism (Phil Tor­res, Aeon): “…longter­mism might be one of the most influ­en­tial ide­olo­gies that few peo­ple out­side of elite uni­ver­si­ties and Sil­i­con Val­ley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a for­mer longter­mist who pub­lished an entire book four years ago in defence of the gen­er­al idea, I have come to see this world­view as quite pos­si­bly the most dan­ger­ous sec­u­lar belief sys­tem in the world today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who thinks this is espe­cial­ly impor­tant for Sil­i­con Val­ley peo­ple to hear. From Oct 2021.
  5. More on the Supreme Court and abor­tion
    • How Roe Warped the Repub­lic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And the way Roe was decid­ed made this polar­iza­tion worse. From the per­spec­tive of geog­ra­phy and class, a group of robed lawyers in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., demand­ing that the coun­try sim­ply accept their set­tle­ment on one of the gravest moral ques­tions imag­in­able is the per­fect primer for a pop­ulist revolt. What has hap­pened in sim­i­lar ways with oth­er issues — immi­gra­tion, most notably — hap­pened with abor­tion first: The elite set­tle­ment failed to set­tle the issue, and the back­lash encom­passed not just the issue itself but elite legit­i­ma­cy writ large.”
    • Protest sup­port­ing Roe v. Wade takes over cam­pus (Bryan Steven Mon­ge Ser­ra­no, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “About 250 stu­dents, fac­ul­ty and staff came togeth­er to chant and march.” ]
      • “Takes over cam­pus” is an exag­ger­a­tion. 250 peo­ple? There are class­es larg­er than that. Hav­ing said that, the bulk of the stu­dent body at Stan­ford is unde­ni­ably on the pro-Roe side. I won­der if the small ral­ly indi­cates a lev­el of apa­thy or sim­ply a desire to wait for the actu­al ver­dict to be released.
    • Why I wel­come the prospect of Roe v. Wade being over­turned (Avi Shafran, NBC News): “Roe was a sledge­ham­mer, and wrong­ly wield­ed. In the wake of its rever­sal, cit­i­zens in each state would be charged with using a scalpel to instead craft laws that treat nascent life with respect while accom­mo­dat­ing the pro­tec­tion of women’s well-being.”
      • Inter­est­ing thoughts from a Rab­bi. He comes down in a dif­fer­ent place than most peo­ple you have heard from.
    • How Dare They! (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “What strikes me most in these takes is the under­ly­ing con­tempt for and sus­pi­cion of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process — from many of the same peo­ple who insist they want to save it. How dare vot­ers have a say on abor­tion rights! The issue — which divides the coun­try today as much as it has for decades — is one that appar­ent­ly can­not ever be put up for a vote. On this ques­tion, Democ­rats real­ly do seem to believe that sev­en men alone should make that deci­sion — once, in 1973. Women today, includ­ing one on SCOTUS? Not so much.”
    • Pro-Life Min­istries Have Been Car­ing For Women And Babies For Gen­er­a­tions (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “More than 2500 pro-life Preg­nan­cy Resource Cen­ters (PRCs) are a com­pas­sion­ate army of staff, donors, and vol­un­teers that num­ber in the hun­dreds of thou­sands. They are com­mit­ted to help­ing women make life-giv­ing choic­es, and they often sup­port these women for years after their babies are born. The total amount of mon­ey these orga­ni­za­tions spend in sup­port of women and babies is not known, but it like­ly exceeds $1 bil­lion annu­al­ly. We should also note that the vast major­i­ty of adop­tions in this coun­try are done by Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies and through Chris­t­ian adop­tion agen­cies.”
    • The Supreme Court Leak Was an Unplanned Com­pli­ca­tion for Preg­nan­cy Cen­ters (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I try to shield my team from it here,” she said, telling them not to get online and try to defend them­selves. “I saw a post on Insta­gram: ‘I’ve nev­er met a pro-life per­son who is address­ing access to health care, acces­si­ble child­care, col­lege edu­ca­tion.’ Hun­dreds of peo­ple are com­ment­ing, ‘Yeah I’ve nev­er met one of those.’ I’m think­ing I’m going to lose my mind. We’re here! We’re get­ting women into hous­ing same day, we’re get­ting them out of domes­tic vio­lence same day, we’re get­ting them fur­ni­ture the same day,” Marten con­tin­ued. “For my team to go home every day and turn on the news and social media and get gaslit, say­ing, ‘If you real­ly cared …’ It’s an emo­tion­al toll.”
  6. On Chi­na
    • China’s Bizarre Author­i­tar­i­an-Lib­er­tar­i­an COVID Strat­e­gy (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “On the one hand, Chi­na has con­fined mil­lions of peo­ple to their homes, even to the extent of out­law­ing walk­ing out­side or hav­ing food deliv­ered. Many thou­sands of oth­er peo­ple have been tak­en from their homes and put into quar­an­tine cen­ters. On the oth­er hand, vac­ci­na­tion is not manda­to­ry! I can under­stand author­i­tar­i­an­ism. I can under­stand lib­er­tar­i­an­ism. I have dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing how jail­ing peo­ple, poten­tial­ly with­out food, is ok but requir­ing vac­ci­na­tions is not.”
    • Dra­mat­ic sto­ry of Kyr­gyz Chris­t­ian swept up in Chi­na’s Uyghur repres­sion gets very lit­tle ink (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “While unimag­in­able hor­rors per­sist­ed in the camp, Joseph tes­ti­fied about how God worked in the hearts of the inmates around them. They had no pri­va­cy in any part of the com­plex, with cam­eras in their rooms and micro­phones for mon­i­tor­ing. Thus, 50 to 60 inmates filled the show­er room every day and it was the only place where Joseph could share his faith. The water from the show­er heads made enough noise to mask their con­ver­sa­tions.  In the first few months, there was hard­ly any­one who would talk to him about God. Then the ques­tion began. ‘How could God let us be here in this place?’ they would ask. ‘How could God allow our chil­dren to be aban­doned?’ ” Crazy details, espe­cial­ly if you fol­low the links in the arti­cle.
    • Tik­Tok May Be More Dan­ger­ous Than It Looks (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Tik­Tok is owned by ByteDance, a Chi­nese com­pa­ny. And Chi­nese com­pa­nies are vul­ner­a­ble to the whims and the will of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.… TikTok’s real pow­er isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and cre­ate. It’s over the opaque algo­rithm that gov­erns what gets seen and what doesn’t. Tik­Tok has been thick with videos back­ing the Russ­ian nar­ra­tive on the war in Ukraine. Media Mat­ters, for instance, tracked an appar­ent­ly coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign dri­ven by 186 Russ­ian Tik­Tok influ­encers who nor­mal­ly post beau­ty tips, prank videos and fluff. And we know that Chi­na has been ampli­fy­ing Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da world­wide. How com­fort­able are we with not know­ing whether the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty decid­ed to weigh in on how the algo­rithm treats these videos?”
    • Why Chi­nese Cul­ture Has Not Con­quered Us All (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Out­side of its own bor­ders, post-Deng Chi­na has a poor record sell­ing the intan­gi­ble. Chi­nese cul­tur­al influ­ence is not com­men­su­rate with China’s eco­nom­ic pow­er or geopo­lit­i­cal heft. For the last two decades observers of Chi­na have pon­dered this mys­tery. Why has China’s grow­ing glob­al promi­nence, pros­per­ous com­mer­cial­ized econ­o­my, and huge glob­al dias­po­ra not led to cul­tur­al influ­ence? Why have both China’s intel­lec­tu­al high cul­ture and its expan­sive pop cul­ture offer­ings failed to take root out­side of the Sinos­phere?” Very thought­ful, as I have come to expect from Greer.

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 Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 348

A reminder not to be cool plus oth­er provo­ca­tions.

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.

348 is the sum of four con­sec­u­tive primes: 79 + 83 + 89 + 97 = 348.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. “Extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evi­dence”… And oth­er stu­pid state­ments (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “ ‘Extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evi­dence.’ While this may seem like sound rea­son­ing at first glance, it fails in sig­nif­i­cant ways. Try using this phrase and switch out the mod­i­fi­er. What if I said, ‘phys­i­cal claims require phys­i­cal evi­dence.’ Or what about this: ‘mirac­u­lous claims require mirac­u­lous evi­dence’? How about ‘canine claims require canine evi­dence’? Of course, you would see the fal­la­cy right away. The equiv­o­ca­tion cre­ates an appar­ent pro­fun­di­ty that mis­di­rects our sens­es. In every case claims just need evi­dence.”
  2. In Praise of the Bor­ing, Uncool Church (Brett McCrack­en, Gospel Coali­tion): “It seems almost every ‘leader of Chris­t­ian cool’—whether a tat­tooed celebri­ty pas­tor or a buzzy night­club church—flames out and los­es its foot­ing fair­ly quick­ly. Which is not at all sur­pris­ing. By their very nature, things that are cool are ephemer­al. What’s fash­ion­able is, by the neces­si­ty of the rules of fash­ion, quick­ly obso­lete. This is one of many rea­sons why chas­ing cool is a fool’s errand for church­es and pas­tors…”
  3. Unex­pect­ed neg­a­tive impacts of COVID:
    • Report: 26 Mil­lion Amer­i­cans Stopped Read­ing the Bible Reg­u­lar­ly Dur­ing COVID-19 (Adam MacIn­nis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Plake thinks the dra­mat­ic change shows how close­ly Bible reading—even inde­pen­dent Bible reading—is con­nect­ed to church atten­dance. When reg­u­lar ser­vices were inter­rupt­ed by the pan­dem­ic and relat­ed health man­dates, it impact­ed not just the cor­po­rate bod­ies of believ­ers but also indi­vid­u­als at home.”
    • Researchers: COVID-19, Israel-Gaza war fueled anti­semitism (Lau­rie Kell­man, AP News): “The study com­piled data from 22 coun­tries. French author­i­ties, for instance, report­ed a 36% jump in anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents involv­ing phys­i­cal vio­lence, from 44 to 60. The Unit­ed King­dom saw a 78% jump in inci­dents of assault, from 97 to 173. The num­ber of anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents in Cana­da rose 54%, from 173 to 266, the report said.… [In Amer­i­ca] The Anti-Defama­tion League count­ed 2,717 anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents of assault, harass­ment and van­dal­ism in 2021, a 34% increase over the pre­vi­ous year. It was the high­est num­ber since the New York City-based group began track­ing such inci­dents in 1979.”
  4. Red Flags for Faith-Based Lib­er­ty in Hong Kong (Susan Crab­tree, Real Clear Pol­i­tics): “Under Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping, all reli­gions have faced per­se­cu­tion.… For sev­er­al years, the Chris­t­ian church in Hong Kong was large­ly spared. But recent actions tak­en against Hong Kong’s Chris­t­ian church­es are chip­ping away at the reli­gious free­dom the city has enjoyed since the British estab­lished it as a colony in the ear­ly 1840s.”
  5. Tips From the Top: Do the Best Per­form­ers Real­ly Give the Best Advice? (David E. Levari, Daniel T. Gilbert & Tim­o­thy D. Wil­son, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence): “Although advice from the best-per­form­ing advi­sors was no more ben­e­fi­cial than advice from oth­er advi­sors, par­tic­i­pants believed that it had been—and they believed this despite the fact that they were told noth­ing about their advi­sors’ per­for­mance. Why? The best per­form­ers did not give bet­ter advice, but they did give more of it, and par­tic­i­pants appar­ent­ly mis­took quan­ti­ty for qual­i­ty.” The researchers are at Har­vard and UVA. I did not read the arti­cle itself because I found the abstract instant­ly plau­si­ble.
  6. John Adams’ Fear Has Come to Pass (David French, The Dis­patch): “…the most polar­ized Amer­i­cans are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and col­lege-edu­cat­ed on the left and dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and retired on the right. The peo­ple dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dri­ving polar­iza­tion in the Unit­ed States are not oppressed minori­ties, but rather some of the most pow­er­ful, most priv­i­leged, wealth­i­est peo­ple who’ve ever lived. They enjoy more free­dom and oppor­tu­ni­ty than vir­tu­al­ly any pri­or gen­er­a­tion of humans, all while liv­ing under the pro­tec­tive umbrel­la of the most pow­er­ful mil­i­tary in the his­to­ry of the plan­et.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. A Polit­i­cal Sci­en­tist on Ukraine (Mike Mazarr, Twit­ter): “Very struck by recent analy­sis + report­ing that high­lights a risk–highly uncer­tain but not so far wide­ly discussed–of a sig­nif­i­cant esca­la­tion of the Ukraine war in com­ing weeks. What it means, and what it implies for US pol­i­cy, are not at all clear.”

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 347

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 347, a Fried­man num­ber. That means it can be writ­ten as an equa­tion com­prised of its own dig­its (3+4=7).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What John Updike and Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins knew about the pow­er of East­er (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “If Jesus wasn’t actu­al­ly res­ur­rect­ed, then East­er is less real than the bud­ding buzz of spring, less real than a dying breath, less real than my own hands, feet and skin. I have no inter­est in a Chris­tian­i­ty that isn’t deeply, pro­found­ly, irre­ducibly mate­r­i­al.”
  2. Frag­men­ta­tion Is Not What’s Killing Us (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[The break­down at Babel] does indeed sound like now. But the lessons we learn will be wrong if we don’t see the pri­ma­ry point of the Babel sto­ry: The prob­lem wasn’t the frag­men­ta­tion. The prob­lem was the uni­ty.”
  3. Chi­na Covid #2 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “I want to empha­size that it is very dif­fi­cult to know what is going on inside Chi­na and my sources for this are not the best. I find the Ukraine war a rel­a­tive epis­temic cake­walk com­pared to this. So please under­stand that the alarmist claims from var­i­ous threads are to be tak­en with large heap­ings of salt.”
  4. Solve for the wartime pre­sen­ta­tion equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The country’s IT Army, a vol­un­teer force of hack­ers and activists that takes its direc­tion from the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment, says it has used [facial recog­ni­tion search­es] to inform the fam­i­lies of the deaths of 582 Rus­sians, includ­ing by send­ing them pho­tos of the aban­doned corpses. The Ukraini­ans cham­pi­on the use of face-scan­ning soft­ware from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a bru­tal but effec­tive way to stir up dis­sent inside Rus­sia, dis­cour­age oth­er fight­ers and has­ten an end to a dev­as­tat­ing war.” Tech­nolo­gies always have unex­pect­ed appli­ca­tions.
  5. Help­ing the Poor: The Great Dis­trac­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Gov­ern­ments around the world impose numer­ous poli­cies that active­ly hurt the poor. The whole debate about ‘help­ing the poor’ cre­ates the illu­sion that the sole rea­son for their suf­fer­ing is mere neglect, even though out­right abuse is ram­pant.… They don’t need us to help them; they need us to stop hurt­ing them.”
  6. There is No Pink Tax (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Pref­er­ences dif­fer sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly across gen­ders lead­ing to sub­tly dif­fer­ent prod­ucts even in cat­e­gories which appear sim­i­lar on the sur­face.… Women and men could save mon­ey by buy­ing prod­ucts pri­mar­i­ly mar­ket­ed to the oppo­site gender–like 2‑in‑1 shampoo+conditioner–but only by buy­ing prod­ucts that they pre­fer less than the prod­ucts they choose to buy.”
  7. Study explores aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess among Jew­ish girls (Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty, Phys.org): “Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents are 23 per­cent­age points more like­ly to grad­u­ate col­lege than girls with a non-Jew­ish upbring­ing, even after account­ing for their par­ents’ socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus. Girls raised by Jew­ish par­ents also grad­u­ate from more selec­tive col­leges, accord­ing to a new­ly pub­lished study by Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Ilana Hor­witz.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. One of our PhD can­di­dates is coau­thor on the paper — con­grat­u­la­tions!

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 Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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 335

spici­er con­tent than nor­mal — you have been warned

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 335. The num­ber 335 is pret­ty cool because it is divis­i­ble by the num­ber of primes below it (335 = 67 · 5, and there are 67 primes less than 335).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No, Reli­gious Free­dom Doesn’t Send Peo­ple to Hell (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious free­dom is a restric­tion on the pow­er of the state to set itself up as a medi­a­tor between God and human­i­ty. It is not an affir­ma­tion of idol­a­try, just as say­ing, ‘The gov­ern­ment shouldn’t take your baby away and raise your chil­dren’ is not an affir­ma­tion of bad par­ent­ing. Say­ing par­ents should raise their chil­dren, instead of the gov­ern­ment, does not mean everyone’s par­ent­ing is good.”
  2. About iden­ti­ty issues
    • No, the Rev­o­lu­tion Isn’t Over (N.S. Lyons, Sub­stack): “In what is rapid­ly becom­ing one of my pre­ferred expla­na­tions for the Rev­o­lu­tion, the evo­lu­tion­ary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has iden­ti­fied ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion’ as hav­ing been one of the top dri­vers of rev­o­lu­tion and civ­il con­flict through­out his­to­ry. He points to the ten­den­cy for deca­dent soci­eties to pro­duce far more overe­d­u­cat­ed elites than there are elite-lev­el jobs, lead­ing to large num­bers of under­em­ployed, resent­ful elite-class intel­lec­tu­als of the type who tend pine after the posi­tion and sta­tus they ‘deserve’ and even­tu­al­ly start spend­ing their free time start­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary cells.”
      • This is long and full of insight. And very, very spicy. I have no idea who the author is — N.S. Lyons is a pen name for a DC area ana­lyst with exper­tise in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty. I assume he finds the pen name nec­es­sary to pro­tect his pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tion when he writes about Amer­i­can cul­ture. Did I men­tion it was spicy?
    • The Trans Move­ment Is Not About Rights Any­more (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “This week, the writer Col­in Wright posed on Twit­ter the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘What rights do trans peo­ple cur­rent­ly not have but want that don’t involve replac­ing bio­log­i­cal sex with one’s sub­jec­tive ‘gen­der iden­ti­ty’?’ And the response was, of course, crick­ets. The truth is: the 6–3 Bostock deci­sion places trans peo­ple in every state under the pro­tec­tion of the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the stur­dy pro­hi­bi­tion on sex dis­crim­i­na­tion. A Trump nom­i­nee wrote the rul­ing. What the trans move­ment is now doing, after this com­pre­hen­sive vic­to­ry, is not about rights at all. It is about cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion.”
    • Why I am no longer a tenured pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to (Jor­dan Peter­son, Nation­al Post): “My stu­dents are also part­ly unac­cept­able pre­cise­ly because they are my stu­dents. I am aca­d­e­m­ic per­sona non gra­ta, because of my unac­cept­able philo­soph­i­cal posi­tions. And this isn’t just some incon­ve­nience. These facts ren­dered my job moral­ly unten­able. How can I accept prospec­tive researchers and train them in good con­science know­ing their employ­ment prospects to be min­i­mal?”
    • Being Jew­ish in an Unrav­el­ing Amer­i­ca (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “The bad guy was killed. The good guys were saved. It doesn’t often turn out that way. All the Jews I know—even the atheists—are thank­ing God.  But why, despite my grat­i­tude, do I feel so much rage? Why does it feel like there is so lit­tle com­fort to be found? What has changed? I did not feel this way in the hor­rif­ic after­math of the Tree of Life massacre—the most lethal in all of Amer­i­can Jew­ish his­to­ry.… What I now see is this: In Amer­i­ca cap­tured by trib­al­ism and dehu­man­iza­tion, in an Amer­i­ca swept up by ide­olo­gies that pit us against one anoth­er in a zero-sum game, in an Amer­i­ca enthralled with the poi­so­nous idea that some groups mat­ter more than oth­ers, not all Jews—and not all Jew­ish victims—are treat­ed equal­ly. What seems to mat­ter most to media pun­dits and politi­cians is not the Jews them­selves, but the iden­ti­ties of their attack­ers. And it scares me.”
  3. The Pro-Life Move­men­t’s Moral Dou­ble­s­peak (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “But the mod­ern Chris­t­ian church has put forth a fake real­i­ty in which women are almost always the vic­tim except in rare, extreme cas­es. They seem inca­pable of admit­ting that women who abort their babies know what they are doing. They can’t bring them­selves to even acknowl­edge that women ini­ti­ate about 70% of all divorces. When pas­tors write entire books about mar­riage and nev­er once men­tion the basic and well known fact that women file for the vast major­i­ty of divorces – and that’s every Chris­t­ian mar­riage book I’ve ever read – they aren’t seri­ous peo­ple. They jus­ti­fy and excuse almost any female behav­ior, and even twist real­i­ty to some­how blame men for it.” There are sev­er­al uncom­fort­able insights in this essay.
  4. China’s Births Hit His­toric Low, a Polit­i­cal Prob­lem for Bei­jing (Steven Lee Myers and Alexan­dra Steven­son, New York Times): “The num­ber of births fell to 10.6 mil­lion in 2021, com­pared with 12 mil­lion the year before, accord­ing to fig­ures report­ed on Mon­day by the Nation­al Bureau of Sta­tis­tics. That was few­er even than the num­ber in 1961, when the Great Leap For­ward, Mao Zedong’s eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, result­ed in wide­spread famine and death.”
  5. Buy Things, Not Expe­ri­ences (Harold Lee, per­son­al blog):  “…the focus on min­i­mal­ism sounds like a new form of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Now that even the poor can afford mate­r­i­al goods, let’s den­i­grate goods while high­light­ing the remain­ing lux­u­ries that only the afflu­ent can enjoy and show off to their friends.”
    • This is a short, well-argued con­trar­i­an take. Stuff like this is cat­nip to me.
  6. About the pan­dem­ic:
    • Hong Kongers Rebel Against Order to Hand Over Ham­sters (Rob Quinn, News­er): “After a woman and 11 ham­sters in the pet shop she worked in test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID, author­i­ties said Tues­day that any­body who bought a ham­ster on or after Dec. 22 should hand it in to be euth­a­nized. But while the ter­ri­to­ry gen­er­al­ly has a high lev­el of com­pli­ance with COVID orders, the ham­ster order was wide­ly seen as a step too far…”
    • To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doc­tors (Aaron E. Car­roll, New York Times): “Car­ing for an indi­vid­ual and pro­tect­ing a pop­u­la­tion require dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties, prac­tices and ways of think­ing. While it may sound coun­ter­in­tu­itive, to heal the coun­try and put our Covid-19 response on the right track, we need to think less like doc­tors.” The author is both a physi­cian and also the chief health offi­cer at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Omi­cron opti­mist, pes­simist or fatal­ist – which are you? (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “Is this the point at which we should shrug our shoul­ders and give up? Omi­cron has prompt­ed three kinds of reac­tion: opti­mism, pes­simism and fatal­ism.… What’s con­fus­ing is that all three views may be right. Omi­cron is quite plau­si­bly mild, cat­a­stroph­ic and inevitable all at once.” The author is a British econ­o­mist. 
    • Lying About Covid For ‘Inter­na­tion­al Har­mo­ny’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pan­dem­ic start­ed. It is just about under­stand­able, if not for­giv­able, that Chi­nese sci­en­tists have obfus­cat­ed vital infor­ma­tion about ear­ly cas­es and their work with sim­i­lar virus­es in Wuhan’s lab­o­ra­to­ries: they were sub­ject to fierce edicts from a ruth­less, total­i­tar­i­an regime. It is more shock­ing to dis­cov­er in emails released this week that some west­ern sci­en­tists were also say­ing dif­fer­ent things in pub­lic from what they thought in pri­vate.” Con­tains excerpts from a pay­walled arti­cle.
    • School Clo­sures Were a Cat­a­stroph­ic Error. Pro­gres­sives Still Haven’t Reck­oned With It. (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “It is always eas­i­er to diag­nose these patholo­gies when they are tak­ing place on the oth­er side. You’ve prob­a­bly seen the raft of papers show­ing how vac­cine uptake cor­re­lates with Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ing and COVID deaths cor­re­late with Repub­li­can vot­ing. Per­haps you have mar­veled at the spec­ta­cle of Repub­li­can elites active­ly harm­ing their own audi­ence. But the same thing Fox News hosts were doing to their elder­ly sup­port­ers, pro­gres­sive activists were doing to their side’s young ones.” It may not be obvi­ous, but this arti­cle dove­tails very nice­ly with the Dreher arti­cle about elites not being truth­ful and not reck­on­ing with mis­takes.
  7. The long-term effects of protes­tant activ­i­ties in Chi­na (Yuyu Chen, Hui Wang, Se Yan, Jour­nal of Com­par­a­tive Eco­nom­ics): “Our find­ings imply that late-nine­teenth- and ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Protes­tant mis­sion­ar­ies pio­neered that mod­ern­iza­tion move­ment by dis­sem­i­nat­ing, along with Chris­tian­i­ty, West­ern sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to even the most remote regions of Chi­na. Such efforts accel­er­at­ed the pace of mod­ern­iza­tion, con­tributed to the accu­mu­la­tion of human cap­i­tal, and reshaped the social val­ues of local peo­ple. Although these his­tor­i­cal lega­cies of mis­sion­ar­ies’ under­tak­ings were sup­pressed dur­ing the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, they rapid­ly resurged and began to con­tribute to socioe­co­nom­ic devel­op­ments when Chi­na began to open up and reform.” The authors appear to be schol­ars at Peking 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 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 334

a whole lot­ta mag­ic tricks at the end of this one

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. A Nation of Chris­tians Is Not Nec­es­sar­i­ly a Chris­t­ian Nation (David French, The Dis­patch): “There are influ­en­tial peo­ple and insti­tu­tions in this coun­try who’ve tak­en the posi­tion that ortho­dox expres­sions of Chris­t­ian sex­u­al moral­i­ty rep­re­sent noth­ing more than big­otry and hatred.  But as much hos­til­i­ty as I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from some sec­u­lar left­ists in response to the pub­lic expres­sion of my Chris­t­ian val­ues, noth­ing com­pares to hos­til­i­ty I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians when I root­ed my oppo­si­tion to Don­ald Trump in the same Chris­t­ian val­ues that some­times earned me scorn in the Ivy League.”
    • Con­tra French on Chris­tian­i­ty’s Decline (Ross Douthat, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, in the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion to Mar­tin Luther King Jr. you see two things hap­pen­ing togeth­er: the pri­vate prac­tice of faith becomes pret­ty steadi­ly more robust, and the gov­ern­ment becomes more com­mit­ted to what most of us, reli­gious and not, now con­sid­er basic ele­ments of jus­tice and mer­cy. Over this mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional process, you could rea­son­ably say that Amer­i­ca remained man­i­fest­ly imper­fect but came clos­er, how­ev­er lurch­ing­ly, to the com­bi­na­tion of wide­spread per­son­al faith and greater polit­i­cal jus­tice that French argues char­ac­ter­izes the Chris­t­ian soci­ety. That this hap­pened, quite often, through con­flict between Protes­tants (both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, etc.) is unde­ni­able but not, it seems to me, a par­tic­u­lar­ly telling cri­tique: In a heav­i­ly Protes­tant soci­ety how else would change come?” A very impres­sive response.
    • America’s Chris­t­ian His­to­ry Is Broad­er Than Its White Protes­tant Past (David French, The Dis­patch): “Because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can progress has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action. But also because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can oppres­sion has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action as well. And a move­ment that’s dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and Chris­t­ian needs to remem­ber that sober­ing fact.” A sol­id sur­re­join­der, but I think I award the match point to Douthat even though I usu­al­ly agree with French more.
  2. Pan­dem­ic stuff:
    • One More Time: What Do You Want Us to Do About Covid that We Aren’t Doing Already? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I will not live in fear. And I sus­pect that this is at the heart of all of it — for com­plex soci­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, [our] elites are made up of peo­ple who suf­fer from anx­i­ety and inse­cu­ri­ty at vast­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate rates, and they go through life need­ing their own feel­ings to be val­i­dat­ed by every­one else. This is very scary for them, and if it’s not scary for some of the rest of us, they expe­ri­ence that as implied judg­ment.” This is very, very good once you get past the Syr­ia stuff up top (which is help­ful as a fram­ing device, but goes on a lit­tle too long).
    • Why UCSF COVID expert Bob Wachter will soon be ‘over’ the pan­dem­ic (Eric Ting, SF Gate): “I believe it’s like­li­est that it peaks soon and comes down in Feb­ru­ary, and we’ll find our­selves in a world where the risk to ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed indi­vid­u­als is quite low, and it gets low for a few rea­sons. For one, every­one should have some immu­ni­ty because with the unvac­ci­nat­ed, most if not all will have been infect­ed by the time this wave ends. This vari­ant of the virus, which is now dom­i­nant, is more mild on aver­age. And the risk is low­er for immuno­com­pro­mised and high-risk indi­vid­u­als because of the increas­ing avail­abil­i­ty of med­ica­tions that decrease the chance they’ll get super sick.” The inter­vie­wee is chair of the Depart­ment of Med­i­cine at UCSF.
    • Dear Stan­ford: don’t force boost­ers on stu­dents (Monte Fis­ch­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When Paul Offit — direc­tor of the Vac­cine Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter at the Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia, mem­ber of the FDA’s vac­cine advi­so­ry com­mit­tee, decades-long ene­my of the anti-vax move­ment and co-inven­tor of a rotavirus vac­cine — tells his own twen­ty-some­thing son not to get boost­ed, you might start to ask some ques­tions about the wis­dom of Stanford’s lat­est man­date.” The author is a PhD can­di­date in MS&E.
  3. Is the West Becom­ing Pagan Again? (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “Ms. Delsol’s inge­nious approach is to exam­ine the civ­i­liza­tion­al change under­way in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Chris­tians brought what she calls a ‘nor­ma­tive inver­sion’ to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in con­tempt and con­demned much that the Romans prized, par­tic­u­lar­ly in mat­ters relat­ed to sex and fam­i­ly. Today the Chris­t­ian over­lay on West­ern cul­tur­al life is being removed, reveal­ing a lot of pagan urges that it cov­ered up. To state Ms. Delsol’s argu­ment crude­ly, what is hap­pen­ing today is an undo­ing, but it is also a redo­ing. We are invert­ing the nor­ma­tive inver­sion. We are repa­ganiz­ing.”
  4. New Math Research Group Reflects a Schism in the Field (Rachel Crow­ell, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “A new orga­ni­za­tion called the Asso­ci­a­tion for Math­e­mat­i­cal Research (AMR) has ignit­ed fierce debates in the math research and edu­ca­tion com­mu­ni­ties since it was launched last Octo­ber.… The AMR claims to have no posi­tion on social jus­tice issues, and crit­ics see its silence on those top­ics as part of a back­lash against inclu­siv­i­ty efforts.… The con­tro­ver­sy reflects a grow­ing divi­sion between researchers who want to keep sci­en­tif­ic and math­e­mat­i­cal pur­suits sep­a­rate from social issues that they see as irrel­e­vant to research and those who say even pure math­e­mat­ics can­not be con­sid­ered sep­a­rate­ly from the racism and sex­ism in its cul­ture.”
  5. We need to be able to talk about trans ath­letes and women’s sports (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Male puber­ty makes you taller, con­fers greater mus­cle and bone mass, larg­er heart and lung capac­i­ty rel­a­tive to your size, and more hemo­glo­bin. For cis­gen­der men, this trans­lates to rough­ly a 6 to 10 per­cent advan­tage over bio­log­i­cal women in sports such as run­ning and swim­ming, though the gap can be larg­er in oth­er domains, and in a few sports female biol­o­gy actu­al­ly con­veys some advan­tage. That 6 to 10 per­cent might sound mod­est, but at the elite lev­el, where 1 per­cent to 2 per­cent dif­fer­ences can eas­i­ly make the mar­gin of vic­to­ry, it’s over­whelm­ing. Jamaica’s Elaine Thomp­son-Her­ah, the fastest woman in the world, would lose to America’s best high school boys, and the fastest pitch ever record­ed by a woman would be unim­pres­sive for many high school base­ball teams.”
  6. The Bad Guys Are Win­ning (Anne Apple­baum, The Atlantic): “As Vladimir Putin fig­ured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnec­es­sary if you can jail, tor­ture, or pos­si­bly mur­der just a few key peo­ple. The rest will be fright­ened into stay­ing home. Even­tu­al­ly they will become apa­thet­ic, because they believe noth­ing can change.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­na.
  7. Why the Catholic Church is Los­ing Latin Amer­i­ca (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Luciana Mag­a­l­haes & Saman­tha Pear­son, The Wall Street Jour­nal): “The rise of lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy in the 1960s and  ’70s, a time when the Catholic Church in Latin Amer­i­ca increas­ing­ly stressed its mis­sion as one of social jus­tice, in some cas­es draw­ing on Marx­ist ideas, failed to counter the appeal of Protes­tant faiths. Or, in the words of a now-leg­endary quip, var­i­ous­ly attrib­uted to Catholic and Protes­tant sources: ‘The Catholic Church opt­ed for the poor and the poor opt­ed for the Pen­te­costals.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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 A (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

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 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.