Tag: college

TGFI, Volume 547: canine cancer cure and paying college athletes

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tech boss uses AI and Chat­G­PT to cre­ate can­cer vac­cine for his dying dog (Natasha Bita, The Aus­tralian): “Heart­bro­ken when his fur-baby was diag­nosed with a dead­ly mast cell can­cer in 2024, Mr Conyn­g­ham threw thou­sands of dol­lars at vet­eri­nary chemother­a­py and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treat­ment with a cus­tom mRNA can­cer vac­cine over the Christ­mas break, the ten­nis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recov­ery that has astound­ed researchers at the cut­ting-edge of human can­cer treat­ments.… [A sci­en­tist said,] ‘Usu­al­ly we don’t sup­port direct-to-con­sumer type DNA sequenc­ing because while gen­er­at­ing data for genomics is rel­a­tive­ly easy for us, inter­ro­gat­ing that data is real­ly hard and chal­leng­ing,’ he said. But Paul said, ‘No wor­ries, I’m a data ana­lyst and I’ll fig­ure this out with the help of Chat­G­PT’.”
    • Note that he did not cure the can­cer, just treat­ed it. Stun­ning nonethe­less.
  2. The Dan­ger of AI Isn’t Mis­in­for­ma­tion. It’s Mis-For­ma­tion. (Jonathan Sams, The Gospel Coali­tion): “In each of these exam­ples, it’s pos­si­ble AI could churn out a bib­li­cal­ly accu­rate answer. But the dan­ger isn’t pure­ly a mat­ter of mis­in­for­ma­tion; it’s a mat­ter of for­ma­tion. The real issue is what habit­u­al AI use does to us. It turns into mus­cle mem­o­ry that, over time, will reshape basic Chris­t­ian habits like what we pay atten­tion to, what we expect, and where we look for coun­sel.”
  3. Pay­ing Col­lege Ath­letes Has Cre­at­ed a Mess. It Was Still the Right Thing to Do. (Joe Nocera, The Free Press): “What is a prob­lem, I acknowl­edge, is the trans­fer por­tal. In the bad old days, ath­letes couldn’t trans­fer with­out los­ing a year of eligibility—even if the coach who had recruit­ed them left for green­er pas­tures. But when play­ers switch two or three times in the course of their col­lege career, that cre­ates a whole oth­er set of prob­lems. Small­er schools, in par­tic­u­lar, have a dif­fi­cult time hold­ing on to their best play­ers because the major sports schools pick them off with NIL offers. (Pre­dic­tion: There will be few­er upsets in this year’s tour­na­ment than there used to be.) Col­lege ath­letes have become free agents rather than col­lege stu­dents. One astound­ing sta­tis­tic: In the South­east­ern Con­fer­ence, only one bas­ket­ball play­er spent four years at the same school. One!”
  4. Sex is not a sym­bol (Kris­ten Sanders, Sub­stack): “But there are a few threads in some of the con­ver­sa­tions swirling about fer­til­i­ty that I think we might pull on. For one, mar­riage, and not sex, is the metaphor for union between God and humans. This mat­ters quite a bit! .…What I object to, most strong­ly, is a view of God and his work­ings in the world that relies on a ‘hid­den’ order or struc­ture that it is our job to dis­cov­er. God is present in the world with­out hid­ing behind every tree or bush. In say­ing that sex is a gift, we are say­ing all that we need to say about it. Mak­ing it sacred, for me, actu­al­ly impedes the kind of divi­sions being made in Leviti­cus between the holy and the pro­fane. The pro­fane is sim­ply that which is good, but not good for use in the order of revealed knowl­edge of God. It is good for its own sake. For it, we can return thanks, joy­ful­ly, rel­ish­ing its gifts- of com­mu­nion and hos­pi­tal­i­ty, of sex­u­al­i­ty and its nour­ish­ments, of chil­dren if they are grant­ed to us. None of these need to be made holy to be good. That is how we receive the world as gift.”
  5. The mys­te­ri­ous Red­di­tor who’s chang­ing the way we do laun­dry (Alex Abad-San­tos, Vox): “He has sin­gle­hand­ed­ly changed the way peo­ple do laun­dry. He is the rea­son the word ‘lipase’ has become a top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion across elder mil­len­ni­al group chats. He can move the mar­ket. His adher­ents clam­or for their face­less cham­pi­on to give them advice. They praise him for a 12-hour process called ‘spa day’ and post their dis­gust­ing but sat­is­fy­ing results for the world to see.… Most of the world uses pow­dered laun­dry deter­gent, which allows for more enzyme flex­i­bil­i­ty; Amer­i­cans gen­er­al­ly pre­fer liq­uid, which doesn’t always con­tain these pre­cious enzymes.”
  6. Scrip­ture, Cre­ation, and Accom­mo­da­tion (Michael Hor­ton, Sub­stack): “[I]n 1896 Andrew Dick­son White intro­duced the fic­tion that, through its pro­mo­tion by Bertrand Rus­sell and many oth­er promi­nent thinkers, has proved influ­en­tial. White says, ‘Calvin took the lead (against Coper­ni­can­ism) in his Com­men­tary on Gen­e­sis, by con­demn­ing all who assert­ed that the earth is not at the cen­tre of the uni­verse. He clinched the mat­ter by the usu­al ref­er­ence to the first verse of the nine­ty-third psalm, and asked, ‘Who will ven­ture to place the author­i­ty of Coper­ni­cus above that of the Holy Spir­it?’’ How­ev­er, Calvin nev­er men­tions Coper­ni­cus, here or any­where else, and he does not con­demn helio­cen­trists. As [Mar­garet] Osler notes, ‘Few astronomers adopt­ed Coper­ni­can astron­o­my dur­ing the first fifty years fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of De rev­o­lu­tion­ibus.’ This includ­ed Bacon, of course, so it would not be sur­pris­ing if Calvin was not even aware of Coper­ni­cus. More egre­gious is White’s spu­ri­ous quo­ta­tion, put into cir­cu­la­tion by F. W. Far­rar a decade ear­li­er and, through White, passed on by Bertrand Rus­sell and many oth­ers. Instead, what Calvin says is that scrip­ture is accom­mo­dat­ed dis­course. Regard­ing Gen­e­sis 1 he cau­tioned, ‘The Holy Spir­it had no inten­tion to teach astron­o­my.’ ”
    • I con­sid­er myself well-informed in this area, and Hor­ton has got some good info here I don’t recall run­ning across before.
  7. Amer­i­can Din­er Goth­ic (Robert Mar­i­ani, The New Atlantis): “You’re in a small town in Wis­con­sin, the heart of Nor­mal Amer­i­ca. The trans­gen­der assis­tant man­ag­er at CVS has a sep­tum pierc­ing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads ‘Finn.’ A block away, the 4channer con­struc­tion work­er in the Sam Hyde shoot­er shirt lis­tens to Bladee and plots his impend­ing viral­i­ty. At Tar­get, the ani­me sec­tion has metas­ta­sized from one shelf to an entire aisle. These aren’t ran­dom weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aes­thet­ic bleed­ing through the cubi­cles: ani­me stick­ers on lap­tops, Dis­cord run­ning on sec­ond mon­i­tors. They’re a new Amer­i­can type, young but trans-gen­er­a­tional, as dis­tinc­tive as the orga­ni­za­tion man or the val­ley girl once were. I call them din­er­goths: what you get when eco­nom­ic mobil­i­ty dies, sub­urbs become psy­chic deserts, and Dis­cord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 341

a lot about Rus­si­a’s inva­sion of Ukraine, but don’t sleep on the rest — there’s good stuff!

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 341, which when ren­dered in base 2 (34110=1010101012) is appar­ent­ly the small­est pseudo­prime in that base.

Also, there’s a lot hap­pen­ing this week and I feel under­in­formed. These are the things that stood out to me from the less-than-I-would-have-liked that I did read.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rus­si­a’s Inva­sion of Ukraine:
    • Just war the­o­ry and the Rus­so-Ukrain­ian war (Ed Fes­er, blog): “One of the strik­ing fea­tures of the cat­a­stro­phe in Ukraine is how unam­bigu­ous­ly the prin­ci­ples of just war doc­trine seem to apply. On the one hand, Russia’s inva­sion can­not be jus­ti­fied giv­en the cri­te­ria of just war the­o­ry. On the oth­er hand, NATO mil­i­tary action against Rus­sia can­not be jus­ti­fied either.” The author, a Chris­t­ian, is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Pasade­na City Col­lege.
    • We Are All Real­ists Now (Ryan Feda­siuk, George­town Secu­ri­ty Stud­ies Review): “After a sleep­less night spent read­ing takes about every mod­ern geopo­lit­i­cal issue under the sun I found, hon­est­ly, that I could not care less about any of them. Can peo­ple get to safe­ty? Where are the med­ical facil­i­ties? How many refugees can the Unit­ed States admit? — These are the ques­tions that mat­ter. War may be an object of aca­d­e­m­ic study, but it is first and fore­most a human cat­a­stro­phe.” The author is pur­su­ing his mas­ter’s at George­town. This is brief and quite good. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Paus­ing at the Precipice (Tan­ner Greer, Schol­ar’s Stage): “This is a pow­er­ful frame­work for under­stand­ing for­eign pol­i­cy crises. Cat­a­stroph­ic mis­judg­ment rests on the con­ver­gence of two ele­ments: an emer­gent sense that there is a moral imper­a­tive to act paired with a break­down in the for­mal deci­sion-mak­ing process­es designed to force pol­i­cy mak­ers to care­ful­ly weigh the poten­tial con­se­quences of their deci­sions.”
    • The Absence Of A Trag­ic Sense (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…we have just entered into an extreme­ly dan­ger­ous peri­od of life on this plan­et. Peo­ple who are thrilled over the moral clar­i­ty of the moment must have for­got­ten that the Cold War, with the ter­ror of nuclear war hang­ing over our heads con­stant­ly, was a time of moral clar­i­ty too.”
    • We Have Nev­er Been Here Before (Thomas L. Fried­man, New York Times): “…today’s world is rest­ing on two simul­ta­ne­ous extremes: Nev­er have the lead­ers of two of the three most pow­er­ful nuclear nations — Putin and Xi — had more unchecked pow­er and nev­er have more peo­ple from one end of the world to the oth­er been wired togeth­er with few­er and few­er buffers. So, what those two lead­ers decide to do with their unchecked pow­er will touch vir­tu­al­ly all of us direct­ly or indi­rect­ly. Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine is our first real taste of how crazy and unsta­ble this kind of wired world can get. It will not be our last.”
    • Ukraine war: ‘My city’s being shelled, but mum won’t believe me’ (Maria Korenyuk and Jack Good­man, BBC): “My par­ents under­stand that some mil­i­tary action is hap­pen­ing here. But they say: ‘Rus­sians came to lib­er­ate you. They won’t ruin any­thing, they won’t touch you. They’re only tar­get­ing mil­i­tary bases’.”
    • Russ­ian Degra­da­tion and Ukrain­ian Hope: The Exam­ple of Chris­t­ian High­er Edu­ca­tion (Per­ry Glanz­er, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Russ­ian polit­i­cal lead­ers con­tin­u­al­ly exalt cor­rup­tion, dys­func­tion, and the pur­suit of pow­er. This leads them to under­mine bur­geon­ing efforts to rebuild civ­il soci­ety, improve reli­gious lib­er­ty, or expand reli­gious edu­ca­tion. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the dom­i­nant Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church makes things worse. For­mer com­mu­nists large­ly con­trol the Russ­ian Ortho­dox Church, and they use this pow­er to sup­port a Russ­ian ver­sion of Chris­t­ian nationalism—making the church an instru­ment of the state. In Ukraine I have found hope and courage among edu­ca­tors and Chris­tians try­ing to build civ­il soci­ety in the con­text of reli­gious free­dom in ways that some polit­i­cal lead­ers sup­port­ed.” This was unex­pect­ed­ly inter­est­ing. The author is an edu­ca­tion prof at Bay­lor.
    • How Putin Wants Rus­sians to See the War in Ukraine (Masha Gessen, The New York­er): “While news chan­nels around the world broad­cast spe­cial reports from Ukrain­ian cities that are being bom­bard­ed by the Russ­ian mil­i­tary, Russ­ian news­casts on state-con­trolled chan­nels, which have a monop­oly on broad­cast tele­vi­sion, are short and unevent­ful.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • The West’s Green Delu­sions Empow­ered Putin (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Green cam­paigns have suc­ceed­ed in destroy­ing Ger­man ener­gy independence—they call it Energiewende, or ‘ener­gy turnaround’—by suc­cess­ful­ly sell­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers on a pecu­liar ver­sion of envi­ron­men­tal­ism. It calls cli­mate change a near-term apoc­a­lyp­tic threat to human sur­vival while turn­ing up its nose at the tech­nolo­gies that can help address cli­mate change most and soon­est: nuclear and nat­ur­al gas.… Ger­many has trapped itself. It could burn more coal and under­mine its com­mit­ment to reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions. Or it could use more nat­ur­al gas, which gen­er­ates half the car­bon emis­sions of coal, but at the cost of depen­dence on import­ed Russ­ian gas. Berlin was faced with a choice between unleash­ing the wrath of Putin on neigh­bor­ing coun­tries or invit­ing the wrath of Gre­ta Thun­berg. They chose Putin.” Those last two sen­tences…
    • When the Man Meets the Moment (David French, The Dis­patch): “The future is opaque. The fog of war has descend­ed over the bat­tle­field. Much is unknown, but this much is clear: An ordi­nary man has answered the call of an extra­or­di­nary time, and he has sparked hope in his own peo­ple and in a cyn­i­cal and weary west.”
    • A Tale of Two Mas­culin­i­ties (Andrew T. Walk­er, World): “…com­pare the rival mas­culin­i­ties of Zelen­skyy and Vladimir Putin. Zelenskyy’s com­mon grace demon­stra­tion of healthy mas­culin­i­ty exudes lead­er­ship, courage, resolve, and sac­ri­fice. He does not tell you of his courage; he sim­ply shows it. And then there is the so-called ‘man­li­ness’ of Putin, who boasts of a mas­culin­i­ty with ridicu­lous pho­tos of him­self rid­ing hors­es while shirt­less.”
    • ‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes (Mau­ra Reynolds, Politi­co): “Putin is increas­ing­ly oper­at­ing emo­tion­al­ly and like­ly to use all the weapons at his dis­pos­al, includ­ing nuclear ones. It’s impor­tant not to have any illu­sions — but equal­ly impor­tant not to lose hope.” Not the main point of the piece, but my favorite part is when she says sanc­tions won’t be enough and then sug­gests stronger sanc­tions. Over­all a mixed arti­cle but worth read­ing if you’re inter­est­ed in the sub­ject.
    • Ukrain­ian sailor in Major­ca tried to sink yacht of Russ­ian boss (BBC): “He told a judge that he regret­ted noth­ing and would do it again.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • For­mer Miss Grand Ukraine joins fight against Russ­ian inva­sion (Patrick Reil­ly, New York Post): “[Anas­ta­sia Lenna] had pre­vi­ous­ly worked as a mod­el and a pub­lic rela­tions man­ag­er in Turkey, accord­ing to her Miss Grand Inter­na­tion­al pro­file, a whole world away from the vio­lence of the bat­tle­field. She also speaks five lan­guages and has worked as a trans­la­tor.”
  2. Supreme Court:
    • Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son Thanks God for Supreme Court Nom­i­na­tion (Jack Jenk­ins, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Jack­son did not men­tion a spe­cif­ic faith tra­di­tion in her remarks, so it was not imme­di­ate­ly clear whether she would alter the reli­gious make­up of the Supreme Court, which cur­rent­ly con­sists pri­mar­i­ly of Catholic and Jew­ish jus­tices (Jus­tice Neil Gor­such was raised Catholic but attend­ed an Epis­co­pal Church in Col­orado).… Mis­souri Repub­li­can Sen. Josh Haw­ley not­ed Jack­son had served on the board of Mon­trose Chris­t­ian School. The Mary­land school, which has since been closed, oper­at­ed under a state­ment of faith that declared ‘we should speak on behalf of the unborn and con­tend for the sanc­ti­ty of all human life from con­cep­tion to nat­ur­al death’ and out­lined a belief that mar­riage exists only between a man and a woman. In respond­ing to Haw­ley, who said he agreed with the state­ments, Jack­son dis­tanced her­self from the school’s beliefs. She said she did not ‘nec­es­sar­i­ly agree with all of the state­ments,’ and was not pre­vi­ous­ly aware of their exis­tence.”
    • The Long Cru­sade of Clarence and Gin­ni Thomas (Dan­ny Hakim and Jo Beck­er, New York Times): “Gin­ni Lamp, as she was known then, was on a cheer squad for taller girls known as the Squires, bran­dish­ing a sword and a shield before foot­ball games. ‘She would march in front with that; she loved doing that,’ said Sue Nor­by, a class­mate. ‘My oth­er friends were on the pom­pom squad because they were so short, but Gin­ni was on a dif­fer­ent squad because she was tall, with oth­er tall girls. She was the war­rior woman.’”
      • I have men­tioned this before, but I am a suck­er for sto­ries about the Jus­tices. They are all such fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple. Even ide­o­log­i­cal pieces like this reveal their idio­syn­crat­ic won­der­ful­ness. Warn­ing: this is very long.
  3. Covid Arith­metic for Anx­ious Par­ents (Bryan Caplan, blog): “The most ‘adult’ thing for par­ents and teach­ers to do on this March 1 [when Vir­ginia lifts its school mask man­date] is walk kids through the Covid math. Even third-graders should be able to fol­low it. And if you real­ly want to show your matu­ri­ty, you should con­fess that for the last two years, most adults have been act­ing like chil­dren. Life gave us a math project, yet we act­ed like it was a poet­ry assign­ment.”
  4. Walk­ing in the Pur­pose of God (Chris­tos Makridis, XA Alum­ni): “Put sim­ply, I nev­er would have guessed what I’m doing now three years ago. While my engage­ment in the cryp­tocur­ren­cy and NFT sphere ‘might’ have been pos­si­ble on paper, it wouldn’t have been near­ly this rich and diver­si­fied absent my say­ing ‘yes’ to the Lord one step at a time and sim­ply walk­ing in obe­di­ence.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of XA at Stan­ford.
  5. Study Exam­ines Link Between Account­abil­i­ty to God and Psy­cho­log­i­cal Well-Being (Neu­ro­science News): “Reli­gious believ­ers who embrace account­abil­i­ty to God (or anoth­er tran­scen­dent guide for life) expe­ri­ence high­er lev­els of three of the four vari­ables of psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being – mat­ter­ing to oth­ers, dig­ni­ty and mean­ing in their lives, though not hap­pi­ness – accord­ing to a study from researchers with Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty, West­mont Col­lege and Hope Col­lege.”
  6. Against alco­hol, #6437 (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…a sud­den and unex­pect­ed nation-wide alco­hol sales ban in South Africa… causal­ly reduced injury-induced mor­tal­i­ty in the coun­try by at least 14% dur­ing the five weeks of the ban.” Links to a brief sum­ma­ry of some research with links to the orig­i­nal arti­cle.
  7. There’s No Cri­sis of Faith on Cam­pus (Ryan Burge, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Looked at in its entire­ty, the col­lege expe­ri­ence may actu­al­ly make stu­dents more sure of their reli­gious beliefs after they grad­u­ate. This is the idea known to psy­chol­o­gists as the ‘inoc­u­la­tion effect’: When some­one is con­front­ed with weak attacks on their beliefs, they become more pre­pared to defend those beliefs when they come under seri­ous attacks. This is essen­tial­ly how a vac­cine works: It gives an indi­vid­ual a weak­ened ver­sion of the virus, so that when the immune sys­tem encoun­ters the real thing, it can eas­i­ly fight off the vil­lain. Sim­i­lar­ly, chal­leng­ing a young per­son to defend their beliefs in a sup­port­ive, open envi­ron­ment like col­lege may leave them bet­ter pre­pared to hold firm to their con­vic­tions lat­er in life.“The author, whom I have cit­ed before, is a pas­tor and pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Wash­ing­ton 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 The APA Meet­ing: A Photo-Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the oth­er.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing. First shared in vol­ume 204

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 326

I had to cut this down from 20 can­di­date links to 7. It was gru­el­ing. Only gold remains.

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 326, which makes me a lit­tle hap­py because last week I observed that 3 +2 = 5 and this week we can see a sim­i­lar coin­ci­dence with mul­ti­pli­ca­tion: 3 â‹… 2 = 6.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. U.S. mis­sion­ar­ies have long tried to con­vert the ‘unreached’ in the Ama­zon. Now Indige­nous groups are fight­ing back. (Ter­rence McCoy, Wash­ing­ton Post): “But the bib­li­cal com­mis­sion that fol­low­ers of Jesus ‘make dis­ci­ples of all nations’ is increas­ing­ly col­lid­ing with the laws of man in Brazil, where the right to vol­un­tary iso­la­tion is enshrined in the con­sti­tu­tion and where it’s ille­gal to con­tact iso­lat­ed Indige­nous groups with­out gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion.”
    • The details in the sto­ry show that things are more com­plex than the head­line leads you to believe. The indige­nous peo­ple are divid­ed — some want the mis­sion­ar­ies and some do not. The ones who do not are rep­re­sent­ed by a lawyer and he is the focus of this sto­ry. Sure­ly the rights of those who wish to hear new ideas should also be respect­ed? The peo­ple who applaud this devel­op­ment are almost cer­tain­ly glad that they don’t believe what their ances­tors believed, but they appar­ent­ly hope these peo­ple are not exposed to mul­ti­ple reli­gious per­spec­tives.
    • There is prob­a­bly close to a 100% inverse cor­re­la­tion between those who believe the indige­nous peo­ple should be able to keep out­siders away and those who believe Amer­i­ca should build a wall. It’s an inter­est­ing ide­o­log­i­cal con­sis­ten­cy test. And this would be more than a wall with con­trolled access — this would be a force field.
  2. How I Became Extreme­ly Open-Mind­ed (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “When I set out to write about the entire chron­ic-ill­ness expe­ri­ence, I hes­i­tat­ed over whether to tell this kind of sto­ry. After all, if you’re try­ing to con­vince skep­ti­cal read­ers to take chron­ic sick­ness seri­ous­ly, and to make the case for the med­ical-out­sider view of how to treat Lyme dis­ease, report­ing that you’ve been dab­bling in pseu­do­science and that it works is a good way to con­firm every stereo­type about chron­ic ail­ments and their treat­ment…” Engross­ing.
  3. Truth, jus­tice and the tor­tur­ing of tol­er­ance (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Too many in the church have tol­er­at­ed too much for too long. To be sure, sit­u­a­tions can be com­pli­cat­ed. Motives and actions can be mixed. Facts can be dis­put­ed. Per­spec­tives can dif­fer. Pic­tures can be incom­plete. Nev­er­the­less, some things are clear­ly and sim­ply wrong. It takes wis­dom to dis­cern what should be tol­er­at­ed and what should not.” The sto­ry starts in one place and winds up some­where com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. Some pan­dem­ic and pan­dem­ic-adja­cent news:
    • Vac­cines for Chil­dren (5–11 years old) (Matt Shapiro, Sub­stack): “There seemed to be a resilient faith among the doc­tors in this dis­cus­sion that the only appro­pri­ate way to move for­ward would be to make the vac­cine avail­able and then trust par­ents and care­givers to take into con­sid­er­a­tion all the risks and make the right deci­sions giv­en the evi­dence that is avail­able. Hear­ing them say this is so strange to me because that is exact­ly my posi­tion.” This is good, sane com­men­tary.
    • How SARS-CoV­‑2 in Amer­i­can deer could alter the course of the glob­al pan­dem­ic (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “Now vet­eri­nar­i­ans at Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty have found active SARS-CoV­‑2 infec­tions in at least 30% of deer test­ed across Iowa dur­ing 2020. Their study, pub­lished online last week, sug­gests that white-tailed deer could become what’s known as a reser­voir for SARS-CoV­‑2. That is, the ani­mals could car­ry the virus indef­i­nite­ly and spread it back to humans peri­od­i­cal­ly. If that’s the case, it would essen­tial­ly dash any hopes of elim­i­nat­ing or erad­i­cat­ing the virus in the U.S. — and there­fore from the world — says vet­eri­nary virol­o­gist Suresh Kuchipu­di at Penn State, who co-led the study.”
      • Have they tried mask­ing the deer?
    • Good morn­ing. Is it time to start mov­ing back to nor­mal­cy? (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “The bot­tom line is that Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple that we unthink­ing­ly accept in oth­er parts of life. And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to head­lines pro­claim­ing that Covid is defeat­ed. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived. All of which rais­es the ques­tion of which pre­cau­tions should end — now or soon — and which should become per­ma­nent.”
      • Gonna tip my hand here: we should accept that COVID is not going away, lament those we have lost, rejoice that we have vac­cines and are even start­ing to see effec­tive treat­ments emerge, and get on with life. Unvac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple have made their choice and I’m hap­py to respect it, dou­bly so now that deer seem to be repos­i­to­ries for COVID (wide­spread ani­mal infec­tions under­mine the only strong argu­ment I know for vac­cine man­dates — name­ly that the unvac­ci­nat­ed allow the virus to cir­cu­late and per­haps mutate).
    • God’s Mer­cy in a New Malar­ia Vac­cine (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra inter­views Kel­ly Chibale, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Sci­ence is a gift from God, out of his mer­cy for us. As a sci­en­tist, I am doing God’s work, attempt­ing to alle­vi­ate human suf­fer­ing in part­ner­ship with God. And oth­er Chris­tians can­not say that we don’t need the sci­en­tif­ic part of the body of Christ. The fin­ger can­not say it doesn’t need the nose (1 Cor. 12:12–27).” The inter­vie­wee is a pro­fes­sor of Organ­ic Chem­istry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town.
  5. Meta-analy­sis sug­gests that emo­tion­al intel­li­gence is declin­ing among col­lege stu­dents (Beth Ell­wood, Psy Post): “West­ern cul­ture has under­gone remark­able change in the past 20 years. For one, a rise in eco­nom­ic lib­er­al­ism and free-mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism has encour­aged an envi­ron­ment of com­pet­i­tive indi­vid­u­al­ism. Sec­ond­ly, social media emerged and has grown rapid­ly, along with smart­phone tech­nol­o­gy. Stud­ies sug­gest these changes may have led to gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in per­son­al­i­ty, reveal­ing gen­er­a­tional ris­es in nar­cis­sism, self-esteem, self-focus, and mate­ri­al­ism.”
    • This feels relat­ed: A “pro­lif­er­a­tion of admin­is­tra­tors”: fac­ul­ty reflect on two decades of rapid expan­sion (Philip Mousav­izadeh, Yale Dai­ly News): “Lau­ren Noble, the founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the William F. Buck­ley Jr. pro­gram at Yale, point­ed to the fact that the num­ber of Yale’s admin­is­tra­tors today exceeds the num­ber of fac­ul­ty — 5,066 com­pared to 4,937 — which ‘rais­es impor­tant ques­tions about the university’s allo­ca­tion of resources,’ she said. ‘It’s unclear how such a sig­nif­i­cant increase advances Yale’s mis­sion.’ ”
    • For con­text, there are only 4,664 under­grads at Yale: more than one admin­is­tra­tor per stu­dent! Not all admin­is­tra­tors deal with stu­dents (some work with fac­ul­ty, for exam­ple), but that is still a stun­ning com­par­i­son.
  6. Some thoughts about crit­i­cal race the­o­ry in schools:
    • The Woke Meet Their Match: Par­ents (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “And when the Democ­rats and the main­stream media insist that CRT is not being taught in high schools, they’re being way too cute. Of course K‑12 kids in Virginia’s pub­lic schools are not explic­it­ly read­ing the col­lect­ed works of Der­rick Bell or Richard Del­ga­do — no more than Catholic school kids in third grade are study­ing cri­tiques of Aquinas. But they are being taught in a school sys­tem now thor­ough­ly com­mit­ted to the ide­ol­o­gy and world­view of CRT, by teach­ers who have been mar­i­nat­ed in it, and whose unions have cham­pi­oned it.… To use a term the woke might under­stand, it is, in fact, struc­tur­al.”
    • “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” and actu­al edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy, part one (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Stan­dard­ized test­ing has become a weird dis­course flash­point, but I think every­one agrees that you can, in prin­ci­ple, assess someone’s com­pe­tence in a giv­en sub­ject area with a test. And if you want to com­pare dif­fer­ent peo­ple, you need to give them the same test. It’s only by mak­ing com­par­isons across class­rooms and across time that we are able to per­sua­sive­ly demon­strate that par­tic­u­lates are bad for school per­for­mance, healthy meals are good for school per­for­mance, and air con­di­tion­ing improves school per­for­mance in the sum­mer.”
    • “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” and actu­al edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy, part two (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “That said, my view on [teach­ing his­to­ry] as a K‑12 edu­ca­tion issue has always had two parts:
      • Pub­lic schools are pub­lic, and to some extent, they inevitably have to reflect mass opin­ion. You can try to buck that trend and lose the school board elec­tion, hand­ing all con­trol over to right-wingers who don’t even think pub­lic schools should exist, or you can acknowl­edge that in a patri­ot­ic coun­try you basi­cal­ly have to come up with a way to craft a patri­ot­ic nar­ra­tive that’s also inclu­sive.
      • This is not actu­al­ly very sig­nif­i­cant. The kids who are good at school will go on to attend selec­tive col­leges where they will absolute­ly be exposed to left-wing intel­lec­tu­als’ thoughts on patri­o­tism and Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. The kids who are not good at school, mean­while, are not pay­ing close atten­tion to the con­tent of his­to­ry class­es.”
  7. How NFTs Cre­ate Val­ue (Steve Kaczyn­s­ki and Scott Duke Komin­ers, Har­vard Busi­ness Review): “But NFTs don’t just pro­vide a kind of dig­i­tal ‘deed.’ Because blockchains are pro­gram­ma­ble, it’s pos­si­ble to endow NFTs with fea­tures that enable them to expand their pur­pose over time, or even to pro­vide direct util­i­ty to their hold­ers. In oth­er words, NFTs can do things — or let their own­ers do things — in both dig­i­tal spaces and the phys­i­cal world. In this sense, NFTs can func­tion like mem­ber­ship cards or tick­ets, pro­vid­ing access to events, exclu­sive mer­chan­dise, and spe­cial dis­counts — as well as serv­ing as dig­i­tal keys to online spaces where hold­ers can engage with each oth­er. More­over, because the blockchain is pub­lic, it’s even pos­si­ble to send addi­tion­al prod­ucts direct­ly to any­one who owns a giv­en token. All of this gives NFT hold­ers val­ue over and above sim­ple own­er­ship — and pro­vides cre­ators with a vec­tor to build a high­ly engaged com­mu­ni­ty around their brands.” This is the first expla­na­tion of NFTs I’ve read that makes them sound use­ful.

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 Eat, Pray, Code: Rule of St. Bene­dict Becomes Tech Developer’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “SQLite—a data­base man­age­ment engine used in most major browsers, smart phones, Adobe prod­ucts, and Skype—adopted a code of ethics pulled direct­ly from the bib­li­cal pre­cepts set by the ven­er­at­ed sixth-century monk.” This arti­cle blew my mind. First shared in vol­ume 175.

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 325

Vol­ume 325. Since 3+2=5, I con­sid­er that aus­pi­cious.

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 325, which I think is kind of cool since 3 + 2 = 5 (I am, as they say, eas­i­ly amused).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some faith & pol­i­tics con­tent. The last two are a bit par­ti­san.
    • A Chris­t­ian Defense of Amer­i­can Clas­si­cal Lib­er­al­ism (David French, The Dis­patch): “There is no per­fect form of gov­ern­ment on this side of the new heav­ens and the new earth. But the alter­na­tives to clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism suf­fer by com­par­i­son to the imper­fect sys­tem we pos­sess. When post-lib­er­als mag­ni­fy the pow­er of the state, they risk degrad­ing the dig­ni­ty of the indi­vid­ual. When they trust the wis­dom of rulers, they neglect their own fall­en nature. Peo­ple are of incal­cu­la­ble worth, and we are stained with sin. Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism rec­og­nizes both real­i­ties. We dis­re­gard its pro­tec­tions at our pro­found per­il.”
    • The “Chop” and Lib­er­al­is­m’s Cri­sis of Mean­ing (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “With­out a coher­ent moral frame­work, con­tem­po­rary pro­gres­sivism has to con­stant­ly man­u­fac­ture norms and enforce them not through shared com­mu­ni­ty stig­mas but by author­i­ty struc­tures. The new norms, though, are not infused with mean­ing. Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty is Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy with rig­or mor­tis: the cold, clam­my remains of long dead Protes­tant social eth­ic.” That final sen­tence… wow.
    • The Cau­tion­ary Tale of Fran­cis Collins (Justin Lee, First Things): “[Collins] showed that it was pos­si­ble for an evan­gel­i­cal from a work­ing-class back­ground to rise to the heights of sci­en­tif­ic and bureau­crat­ic accom­plish­ment. His pres­ence in the halls of med­ical pow­er was also a tes­ta­ment to the har­mo­ny of faith and rea­son. Collins has cham­pi­oned the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of sci­ence and reli­gion and encour­aged Chris­tians to accept the­is­tic evo­lu­tion through his best­selling 2006 book The Lan­guage of God and a spin-off orga­ni­za­tion, BioL­o­gos. His wit­ness is sin­gu­lar, and sin­gu­lar­ly powerful—if we don’t look too close­ly.” I have con­flict­ed feel­ings about this arti­cle (I think it is undu­ly harsh on Dr. Collins), but it is a per­spec­tive I have encoun­tered sev­er­al times. I’m also not sure it belongs under the pol­i­tics bul­let point, but it’s at least adja­cent.
    • Faith trumps Trump in Vir­ginia (Tony Carnes, A Jour­ney Through NYC Reli­gions): “Youngkin goes to an evan­gel­i­cal Epis­co­pal church Holy Trin­i­ty Church and pro­vides a retreat cen­ter for FOCUS (Fel­low­ship of Chris­tians in Uni­ver­si­ties & Schools), an evan­gel­i­cal out­reach to prep school stu­dents. In UK Youngkin served on the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee of Holy Trin­i­ty Bromp­ton (the home church of the Alpha course). The GOP Lt Gov­er­nor-elect Win­some Sears is an African Amer­i­can who head­ed a home­less min­istry for the Sal­va­tion Army (as well as being vice pres­i­dent of the Board of Edu­ca­tion for Vir­ginia, an elect­ed offi­cial, and a Marine). Attor­ney Gen­er­al-elect Jason Miyares is a Lati­no Chris­t­ian, a mem­ber of Galilee Epis­co­pal Church, an evan­gel­i­cal lean­ing Epis­co­pal church.” Brief but super inter­est­ing.
    • Pence says James Madi­son and the Bible helped him cer­ti­fy elec­tion results against Trump’s wish­es (Tim­o­thy Bel­la, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The for­mer vice pres­i­dent, whose answer was met with applause from the Iowa City audi­ence, denied that he was advised it would hurt his chances of run­ning for pres­i­dent if he fol­lowed Trump’s plan. ‘Every­thing you’ve recit­ed rel­a­tive to me is false,’ he said to the audi­ence mem­ber. Pence, refer­ring to the oath he took to uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion, also cit­ed a Bible verse he said he leaned on: ‘Psalm 15 says he who keeps his oath even when it hurts.’ ”
  2. Pan­dem­ic restric­tions were a blow to reli­gious lib­er­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, NY Post): “Of all the unequal impacts of the pan­dem­ic, the costs of state and local restric­tions that fell square­ly on reli­gious house­holds seem under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed. Although every­one felt the effects of nation­al and state quar­an­tines, and Amer­i­cans strug­gled with men­tal health more broad­ly, my paper shows that reli­gious adher­ents, espe­cial­ly Catholics or oth­er Chris­tians, expe­ri­enced unique harm. Even more trou­bling is that the costs of shut­downs for places of wor­ship were not lim­it­ed to the con­gre­gants. Evi­dence from a Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty study led up by Byron John­son shows that faith-based orga­ni­za­tions shoul­der the bulk of the home­less­ness bur­den in cities, car­ing for the least for­tu­nate. In this sense, cut­ting off in-per­son wor­ship simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cuts off one of the pri­ma­ry ways that hous­es of wor­ship serve their broad­er com­mu­ni­ties.”
  3. Bil­lion­aire Seeks to Build Large­ly Win­dow­less Dorm In ‘Social and Psy­cho­log­i­cal Exper­i­ment’ (Aaron Gor­don, Vice): “Accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent, 94 per­cent of dorm rooms in Munger Hall [at UCSB] will be tiny, win­dow­less pods that open onto a cen­tral com­mon area. And it will stuff so many stu­dents [4,500] into such a small space that Den­nis McFad­den, the archi­tect who resigned from the university’s review com­mit­tee, said in his res­ig­na­tion let­ter it ‘would qual­i­fy as the eighth dens­est neigh­bor­hood on the plan­et, falling just short of Dha­ka, Bangladesh.’ McFad­den said the uni­ver­si­ty had pro­vid­ed no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for ignor­ing estab­lished research that nat­ur­al light and views of the out­doors are vital to healthy liv­ing, except to say they were bound to Munger’s vision.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    1. Munger rebuts: Munger on con­tro­ver­sial UCSB dorm: Fake win­dows are bet­ter than real win­dows (CNN). He is total­ly and awe­some­ly intran­si­gent.
  4. What Hap­pened to Matt Taib­bi? (Ross Barkan, New York Mag­a­zine): “ ‘One of the moments that solid­i­fied in my mind the dif­fi­cult path I’d have going for­ward in main­stream media, and that pushed me toward the deci­sion to do Sub­stack full-time, came when I did a cam­paign piece on Biden for Rolling Stone,’ Taib­bi said. ‘I was notic­ing what every­one else saw, that the man was hav­ing trou­ble remem­ber­ing things, among oth­er issues. I called back some of the med­ical sources who were glad to vio­late the ‘Gold­wa­ter rule’ against diag­nos­ing peo­ple from afar to talk to me about Trump being crazy, just to ask for their assess­ment of Biden. None respond­ed, and one lit­er­al­ly hung up on me. Even off the record they wouldn’t talk about it. It hit me in that moment that Trump had so fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the busi­ness that even sources were behav­ing dif­fer­ent­ly, and I’d have to adapt one way or the oth­er.’ ”
  5. Katharine Bir­bals­ingh is right: chil­dren do have orig­i­nal sin (Theo Hob­son, The Spec­ta­tor): “When my son was about six he heard some­thing at school about slav­ery but was not quite clear what it was all about. So I spelled it out. I told him that a slave was some­one that some­one else owned and ordered around and prob­a­bly mis­treat­ed. I wait­ed for the prop­er response of moral hor­ror to show on his inno­cent fea­tures. Instead he said, ‘Cool, I want one!’” What a phe­nom­e­nal open­ing anec­dote.
  6. Lib­er­als Read, Con­ser­v­a­tives Watch TV (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “Con­ser­v­a­tive media per­fect­ing the ‘info­tain­ment’ genre of news com­men­tary brought peo­ple into pol­i­tics that a gen­er­a­tion ear­li­er would’ve paid more atten­tion to pro­fes­sion­al wrestling or mon­ster truck ral­lies instead. Lib­er­al­ism has cap­tured a com­bi­na­tion of an overe­d­u­cat­ed class with more desire for sta­tus than intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty along with men­tal­ly ill indi­vid­u­als who in the 1990s might have joined some apo­lit­i­cal sub­cul­ture instead of becom­ing pas­sion­ate about race and gen­der issues.” Very long and insight­ful arti­cle (9,000ish words)
  7. Sur­vey: One-third of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents have expe­ri­enced anti­semitism (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News): “…the most com­mon form of anti­semitism was offen­sive com­ments online. Only 1% of stu­dents were vic­tims of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence, and only 1% were threat­ened with vio­lence. In all, the sur­vey found 43% of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents had expe­ri­enced and/or wit­nessed anti­se­mit­ic activ­i­ty in the past year. Among those who wit­nessed it, the most com­mon expe­ri­ence was see­ing swastikas around cam­pus or van­dal­ism to Jew­ish fra­ter­ni­ties, soror­i­ties and cul­tur­al build­ings.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 165.

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 323

Arti­cles about every­thing from Jill Biden’s faith to Yale Law School’s fail­ings to an analy­sis of Amer­i­can divorce to a com­mon-sense argu­ment against pornog­ra­phy. Enjoy!

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

323 is 17 · 19, which are two of my favorite num­bers. I par­tic­u­lar­ly delight in using them on the microwave.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Evan­gel­i­cal Elites, Fight­ing Each Oth­er (David French, The Dis­patch): “…the old­er cul­ture war cat­e­gories are being sup­ple­ment­ed and some­times sup­plant­ed by a new con­fronta­tion between lib­er­al­ism and illib­er­al­ism. While illib­er­al right and illib­er­al left snarl at any­one not in their tribes, the lib­er­al right and the lib­er­al left are form­ing new rela­tion­ships and new alliances.” An excel­lent piece, and the first com­ment is also worth read­ing (it’s by French him­self about some­thing he  meant to include in the arti­cle).
  2. Jill Biden paid a sur­prise vis­it to the woman who helped her regain faith in God (Jada Yuan, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For five years after the death of her son, Jill Biden says, she lost her faith in God. She ‘felt betrayed, bro­ken’ when Beau died of brain can­cer at 46, and she had stopped going to church or even pray­ing, she told the con­gre­gants of Brook­land Bap­tist Church late Sun­day after­noon. But she found her way back, and over the week­end trav­eled near­ly 500 miles to sur­prise the woman who’d helped her get there.” I was deeply moved by this sto­ry.
  3. A Wor­ri­some Peek Inside Yale Law’s Diver­si­ty Bureau­cra­cy (Conor Frieder­s­forf, The Atlantic): “[Odd­ly,] the diver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors spent many hours on this low-stakes dra­ma among high-IQ adults, afford­ing out­siders an unusu­al peek at their meth­ods and a relat­ed series of cru­cial mis­takes, most stem­ming from an inabil­i­ty or unwill­ing­ness to see how the inter­ests of stu­dents diverge from the inter­ests and incen­tives of their office.”
  4. Two arti­cles dis­cussing the research sug­gest­ing con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er than lib­er­als:
    • From the left: Con­ser­v­a­tives Are Hap­pi­er Than Lib­er­als. Dis­cuss. (Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times): “Ulti­mate­ly, though, this line of inquiry rais­es an even broad­er ques­tion: whether lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives func­tion on fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent moral planes.”
    • From the right: Friends and Ex-Friends (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I admit to being skep­ti­cal of any attempt to quan­ti­fy hap­pi­ness, which is a sub­jec­tive judg­ment. Nev­er­the­less, if it is true that con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er on bal­ance than lib­er­als, I think it has to do with two basic things. First, con­ser­v­a­tives tend to accept that the world will nev­er be per­fect, and find it eas­i­er to live with imper­fec­tions.… Sec­ond, con­ser­v­a­tives tend to care less about polit­i­cal cru­sad­ing.… I don’t know any ordi­nary con­ser­v­a­tives who would cut off a friend over their lib­er­al pol­i­tics.”
  5. The Naked Truth: Porn is Bad For You (Kather­ine Dee, The Amer­i­can Mind): “Com­mon sense is vital­ly use­ful, espe­cial­ly in per­son­al deci­sion-mak­ing. So, here’s what I know. I know that immer­sion in, or even just reg­u­lar usage of, any­thing has an impact on a person’s psy­chol­o­gy.”
  6. The Evo­lu­tion of Divorce (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Nation­al Affairs): “In the case of divorce, as in so many oth­ers, the worst con­se­quences of the social rev­o­lu­tion of the 1960s and ’70s are now felt dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly by the poor and less edu­cat­ed, while the wealthy elites who set off these trans­for­ma­tions in the first place have man­aged to reclaim some­what health­i­er and more sta­ble habits of mar­ried life. This imbal­ance leaves our cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal elites less well attuned to the mag­ni­tude of social dys­func­tion in much of Amer­i­can soci­ety, and leaves the most vul­ner­a­ble Amer­i­cans — espe­cial­ly chil­dren liv­ing in poor and work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties — even worse off than they would oth­er­wise be.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  7. Is Col­lege Worth It? A Com­pre­hen­sive Return on Invest­ment Analy­sis (Pre­ston Coop­er, FreeOpp): “The analy­sis reveals that a student’s choice of pro­gram is per­haps the most impor­tant finan­cial deci­sion he or she will ever make. Most bachelor’s degree pro­grams in engi­neer­ing, com­put­er sci­ence, eco­nom­ics, and nurs­ing increase life­time earn­ings by $500,000 or more, even after sub­tract­ing the costs of col­lege. But most pro­grams in fields such as art, music, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, and psy­chol­o­gy leave stu­dents finan­cial­ly worse off than if they had nev­er gone to col­lege at all.” Search the table at We Cal­cu­lat­ed Return On Invest­ment For 30,000 Bachelor’s Degrees. Find Yours. (Pre­ston Coop­er, FreeOpp)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 186

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. Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter)
  2. Engi­neers of the Soul: Ide­ol­o­gy in Xi Jin­ping’s Chi­na (John Gar­naut, Sinocism): “In clas­si­cal Chi­nese state­craft there are two tools for gain­ing and main­tain­ing con­trol over “the moun­tains and the rivers”: The first is wu (weapons, vio­lence — æ­¦) and the sec­ond is wen (lan­guage, cul­ture — æ–‡). Chi­nese lead­ers have always believed that pow­er derives from con­trol­ling both the phys­i­cal bat­tle­field and the cul­tur­al domain. You can’t sus­tain phys­i­cal pow­er with­out dis­cur­sive pow­er. Wu and wen go hand-in-hand.”
  3. A Strange Argu­ment for the Com­mon­place (Cato Unbound, Agnes Callard): “We should not equal­ize the rich and poor, but rather endeav­or to make the poor of tomor­row wealth­i­er than the rich of today.” I’m includ­ing this link most­ly because of that quote. Also because it has some com­men­tary on Peter Singer which dove­tails with a con­ver­sa­tion I had ear­li­er this week.
  4. Most Teenagers Drop Out of Church as Young Adults (Aaron Earls, Life­way Research ): “Almost half (47 per­cent) of those who dropped out and attend­ed col­lege say mov­ing to col­lege played a role in their no longer attend­ing church for at least a year…. Among all those who dropped out, 29 per­cent say they planned on tak­ing a break from church once they grad­u­at­ed high school. Sev­en in 10 (71 per­cent) say their leav­ing wasn’t an inten­tion­al deci­sion.”
    • The title is a bit mis­lead­ing. Yes, a major­i­ty of young adults who pre­vi­ous­ly attend­ed church do stop attend­ing church for at least one year between the ages of 18–22, but if you look at their under­ly­ing research about 70% even­tu­al­ly start attend­ing again. Also, it doesn’t seem to ask whether any of these peo­ple were involved in an activ­i­ty that they might not char­ac­ter­ize as church (like Chi Alpha or Inter­var­si­ty). I know some of my Chi Alpha stu­dents are not cur­rent­ly wor­ship­ing with a Sun­day morn­ing con­gre­ga­tion, but it would be wrong to infer that their faith has been put on pause.
  5. Have Aliens Found Us? A Har­vard Astronomer on the Mys­te­ri­ous Inter­stel­lar Object ‘Oumua­mua (Isaac Chotin­er, New York­er): “Last year, I wrote a paper about cos­mol­o­gy where there was an unusu­al result, which showed that per­haps the gas in the uni­verse was much cold­er than we expect­ed. And so we pos­tu­lat­ed that maybe dark mat­ter has some prop­er­ty that makes the gas cool­er. And nobody cares, nobody is wor­ried about it, no one says it is not sci­ence. Every­one says that is mainstream—to con­sid­er dark mat­ter, a sub­stance we have nev­er seen. That’s com­plete­ly fine. It doesn’t both­er any­one. But when you men­tion the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there could be equip­ment out there that is com­ing from anoth­er civilization—which, to my mind, is much less spec­u­la­tive, because we have already sent things into space—then that is regard­ed as unsci­en­tif­ic.”
    • I am skep­ti­cal, but I find the con­ver­sa­tion fas­ci­nat­ing. Relat­ed: an arti­cle on the Fer­mi para­dox I shared back in vol­ume 159 and an arti­cle on gov­ern­ment inves­ti­ga­tion of UFO reports from vol­ume 132.
  6. The mar­vel of the human dad (Anna Machin, Aeon): “But cru­cial­ly, dad has not evolved to be the mir­ror to mum, a male moth­er, so to speak. Evo­lu­tion hates redun­dan­cy and will not select for roles that dupli­cate each oth­er if one type of indi­vid­ual can ful­fil the role alone. Rather, dad’s role has evolved to com­ple­ment mum’s.” Dr. Machin is a pro­fes­sor of evo­lu­tion­ary anthro­pol­o­gy at Oxford.
  7. The Virtue Sig­nalers Won’t Change the World (John McWhort­er, The Atlantic): “Just as the first and sec­ond waves of both fem­i­nism and antiracism trans­formed social struc­tures, third-wave antiracism may seem par­al­lel to third-wave fem­i­nism in mov­ing on to a dif­fer­ent form of abuse, psy­cho­log­i­cal rather than insti­tu­tion­al. But this focus on the psy­cho­log­i­cal has mor­phed, of late, from a prag­mat­ic mis­sion to change minds into a witch hunt dri­ven by the per­son­al ben­e­fits of virtue sig­nal­ing, obsessed with uncon­scious and sub­con­scious bias. As noble as this cul­ture of sham­ing gen­uine­ly seems to many, it’s a dead end.”
    • A use­ful, detailed fol­low-up: The Per­ils of a Psy­cho­log­i­cal Approach to Anti-racism (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “If the phe­nom­e­non McWhort­er described is real, we should be able to find left­ists who intend to fight bias by call­ing out psy­cho­log­i­cal harms, only to fall into ‘hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ty, over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, and even a degree of per­for­mance’ as par­tic­i­pants sig­nal virtue in ways that help no one.”

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 Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

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 178

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. No — real­ly. I mean them. Also, I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Cul­tur­al win­some­ness will not be enough for Chris­tians (Andrew T Walk­er, Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “Chow is the very def­i­n­i­tion of class, dig­ni­ty and civil­i­ty. She’s a mod­el for what faith­ful Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship looks like in the pub­lic square. There is no foam­ing-at-the-mouth hatred for any­one. She loves every­one; she just did not want to vio­late her con­science. What’s the les­son here? There are many. But to focus on just one, this sto­ry is a reminder that no amount of cul­tur­al sophis­ti­ca­tion or intel­li­gence will absolve the Chris­t­ian from being seen as a back­ward-think­ing big­ot.” This is cor­rect.
    • Relat­ed: An inter­view with Isabel­la Chow (Allie Stuck­ey, Twit­ter) — this is a 4 minute video.
    • Kind of relat­ed: The State of Hate (David Mont­gomery, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In think­ing about my inter­view, I was struck by just how lit­tle he had dis­put­ed the SPLC’s claims about the frankly dis­qui­et­ing posi­tions he has tak­en. To some extent, it was sim­i­lar to my expe­ri­ence at the FRC and ADF. They sim­ply saw those posi­tions as admirable, or at the very least defen­si­ble, expres­sions of truth — where­as, to the SPLC, they were expres­sions of hate.”
    • Vague­ly relat­ed: David French on the price of pub­lic engage­ment (Twit­ter)
  2. What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-writ­ten. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian.
  3. Ask and You Shall Evan­ge­lize (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “‘Mod­ern selves are so inter­nal,’ Keller said. ‘In the old days if you were con­vinced of the truth, you changed your­self. Now we adopt the truth as acces­sories that fit in with who we want to be.’” A good arti­cle on the nature of effec­tive wit­ness in con­tem­po­rary West­ern soci­ety.
  4. Why Are Young Peo­ple Hav­ing So Lit­tle Sex? (Kate Julian, The Atlantic): “I men­tioned to sev­er­al of the peo­ple I inter­viewed for this piece that I’d met my hus­band in an ele­va­tor, in 2001. (We worked on dif­fer­ent floors of the same insti­tu­tion, and over the months that fol­lowed struck up many more conversations—in the ele­va­tor, in the break room, on the walk to the sub­way.) I was fas­ci­nat­ed by the extent to which this prompt­ed oth­er women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet some­one that way. And yet quite a few of them sug­gest­ed that if a ran­dom guy start­ed talk­ing to them in an ele­va­tor, they would be weird­ed out. ‘Creep­er! Get away from me,’ one woman imag­ined think­ing.” The arti­cle is vul­gar in places and premised on flawed assump­tions… and still man­ages to be fas­ci­nat­ing and insight­ful.
    • Relat­ed: How the GOP Gave Up on Porn (Tim Alber­ta, Politi­co): “We know that the ubiq­ui­ty of porn is a prob­lem: Even as experts debate the sci­ence of addic­tion and the link between con­sump­tion and destruc­tive behav­ior, there is sure­fire soci­o­log­i­cal evi­dence of its exac­er­bat­ing influ­ence on those most susceptible—people pre­dis­posed to vio­lence, for instance, or misog­y­ny or child abuse. There is also con­sen­sus that it has, in plen­ty of cas­es, con­tributed to abu­sive rela­tion­ships and the frac­tur­ing of fam­i­lies. And that’s just where adults are con­cerned.”
  5. The Best Way To Save Peo­ple From Sui­cide (Jason Cherkis, Huff­in­g­ton Post High­line): “Mot­to didn’t take long to write the first let­ter a patient would receive. He knew what he want­ed to say, hit­ting upon two sentences—37 words—that felt just right: ‘It has been some time since you were here at the hos­pi­tal, and we hope things are going well for you. If you wish to drop us a note we would be glad to hear from you.’” This is an engross­ing arti­cle. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. Over­com­ing Bar­ri­ers to Women’s Advance­ment in Polit­i­cal Sci­ence (Amy Catalinac, PDF host­ed at Har­vard): “Of the polit­i­cal sci­en­tists of my gen­er­a­tion I know well, suc­cess­ful ones do all of these things auto­mat­i­cal­ly, and those who have been less suc­cess­ful do many few­er of them.” Very straight talk on how to get a tenure-track job. From my out­side van­tage point, this seems like excel­lent advice for social sci­en­tists of either gen­der.
  7. The dra­mat­ic implo­sion of ‘I Kissed Dat­ing Good­bye’ is a les­son — and a warn­ing (Chris­tine Emba, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The next time we’re tempt­ed toward too-for­mu­la­ic think­ing, we’ll know to take it with a grain of salt. After all, life is rarely so pure.”

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 an eye-open­ing (and dis­may­ing) read: What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic). (first shared back in vol­ume 5): “one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.”

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 174

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. Your Real Bio­log­i­cal Clock Is You’re Going to Die (Tom Scoc­ca, Hmm Dai­ly): “If you intend to have chil­dren, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not bank­ing extra years as a per­son who is still too young to have chil­dren. You are sub­tract­ing years from the time you will share the world with your chil­dren.” Straight talk young peo­ple need to hear. Make the choic­es you want, but be sure you under­stand their con­se­quences. Read it and then think about it.
  2. Half of Pas­tors Approve of Trump’s Job Per­for­mance (Aaron Earls, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Despite 52 per­cent of Protes­tant pas­tors iden­ti­fy­ing as a Repub­li­can and only 18 per­cent call­ing them­selves a Demo­c­rat in a Life­Way Research sur­vey pri­or to the Novem­ber 2016 elec­tion, only 32 per­cent said they planned to vote for Trump. A full 40 per­cent said they were unde­cid­ed, with 19 per­cent plan­ning to vote for Hillary Clin­ton…. [Now after the elec­tion] there is no lack of data on Pres­i­dent Trump, but many were still hes­i­tant to give an opin­ion.” From an alum­nus who was quite dis­turbed by these num­bers.
    • Relat­ed: Why Evan­gel­i­cals Vot­ed Trump: Debunk­ing the 81% (Ed Stet­zer & Andrew McDon­ald, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The data tells us that most Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals are not look­ing to their pas­tors for polit­i­cal guid­ance, and most pas­tors are not will­ing to touch the sub­ject lest they get burned. Only 4 in 10 respon­dents told us they want­ed advice from their pas­tor on polit­i­cal issues. And only 4 in 10 told us their pas­tor uses Scrip­ture to address polit­i­cal top­ics at least once a month or more. Put anoth­er way, many evan­gel­i­cals are like­ly turn­ing to culture—and often the most out­raged voices—rather than the church for polit­i­cal dis­ci­ple­ship.”
  3. I sup­port affir­ma­tive action. But Har­vard real­ly is hurt­ing Asian Amer­i­cans. (Michael Li, Vox): “As the Har­vard case per­co­lat­ed through the courts this sum­mer, I spoke to a num­ber of Asian-Amer­i­can adults, includ­ing some who are on the fac­ul­ties of elite uni­ver­si­ties. These con­ver­sa­tions took place in hushed tones — one per­son lit­er­al­ly looked over his shoul­der to make sure no one could hear. Invari­ably, peo­ple thought affir­ma­tive action was essen­tial. Just as invari­ably, peo­ple thought maybe, just maybe, Har­vard and oth­er elite schools are long over­due for a hard look in the mir­ror.” The author is senior coun­sel at NYU’s Bren­nan Cen­ter for Jus­tice.
  4. A Reac­tionary Renam­ing: Stan­ford and Eng­lish Lan­guage Pol­i­tics (Hol­lis Rob­bins, LA Review of Books): “Span­ish sol­diers preyed on Native women and Ser­ra endeav­ored — but reg­u­lar­ly failed — to pro­tect them. But on the Atlantic coast, what found­ing Amer­i­can fig­ure isn’t equal­ly impli­cat­ed in the destruc­tion of native cul­ture even if most lived and wrote long after native pop­u­la­tions on the Atlantic coast were dec­i­mat­ed, destroyed, and dri­ven west?” An inter­est­ing cri­tique of Stanford’s deci­sion to move away from Serra’s name. The author is a human­i­ties schol­ar at Sono­ma State Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. Jim Jones & Har­vey Milk: The Secret His­to­ry (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Milk and Jones were friends and allies.” If you know about either of these men and how they are gen­er­al­ly per­ceived, pre­pare to be sur­prised.
  6. More on Kavanaugh because more has been writ­ten (and I’ve run across some good stuff I missed pre­vi­ous­ly)
    • Does Any­one Still Take Both Sex­u­al Assault and Due Process Seri­ous­ly? (Emi­ly Yoffe, The Atlantic): “Sex­u­al vio­lence is a seri­ous nation­al prob­lem. But in the wake of the Kavanaugh hear­ing, it has joined the list of explo­sive­ly par­ti­san issues. Republicans—adopting the rhetor­i­cal style of the president—dismiss accusers. Democ­rats mock the idea that fair­ness and due process are nec­es­sary for the accused. These atti­tudes will be detri­men­tal to the coun­try and are per­ilous for each par­ty.”
    • The media mis­han­dled Kavanaugh — and made Trump a win­ner (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Some argue that all jour­nal­ism involves bias, either hid­den or revealed. But it is one thing to say that objec­tiv­i­ty and fair­ness are ulti­mate­ly unreach­able. It is anoth­er to cease grasp­ing for them. That would be a world of pure­ly pri­vate truths, in which the bold­est liars and dem­a­gogues would thrive.” Ger­son is an evan­gel­i­cal who was a speech­writer in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.
    • Every­one Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hear­ings (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “When pub­lic life means the ran­sack­ing of people’s pri­vate lives even when they were in high school, we are cir­cling a deeply illib­er­al drain. A civ­i­lized soci­ety observes a dis­tinc­tion between pub­lic and pri­vate, and this dis­tinc­tion is inte­gral to indi­vid­ual free­dom. Such a dis­tinc­tion was anath­e­ma in old-school monar­chies when the king could arbi­trar­i­ly arrest, jail, or exe­cute you at will, for pri­vate behav­ior or thoughts. These lines are also blurred in author­i­tar­i­an regimes, where the pow­er of the gov­ern­ment knows few lim­its in mon­i­tor­ing a person’s home or pri­vate affairs or cor­re­spon­dence or tax returns or texts. These bound­aries def­i­n­i­tion­al­ly can’t exist in theoc­ra­cies, where the state is inter­est­ed as much in pun­ish­ing and expos­ing sin, as in pre­vent­ing crime. The Iran­ian and Sau­di gov­ern­ments — like the ear­ly mod­ern monar­chies — seek not only to con­trol your body, but also to look into your soul. They know that every­one has a dark side, and this dark side can be exposed in order to destroy peo­ple. All you need is an accu­sa­tion.” This piece is a few weeks old but I missed it. Sul­li­van, if you don’t rec­og­nize the name, is the intel­lec­tu­al father of gay mar­riage. He’s an inter­est­ing chap — he self-iden­ti­fies as a con­ser­v­a­tive and yet sup­port­ed Barack Oba­ma, and he calls him­self a faith­ful Roman Catholic yet had a wed­ding cer­e­mo­ny with his male part­ner. He’s one of the most idio­syn­crat­ic intel­lec­tu­als out there.
    • Why Women Can (and Should) Sup­port Brett Kavanaugh (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a stu­dent at Stan­ford, where Dr. Blasey Ford stud­ied and taught, as a grad­u­ate of Holton-Arms, the high school she attend­ed at the time of the alleged assault, and, rar­er still, as a vocal female con­ser­v­a­tive on cam­pus, I too have been think­ing with about this episode and what it means for women, for men, and for our soci­ety as a whole.” This is our Anni­ka.
  7. The Audac­i­ty of Gen­der-Reveal Par­ties: Anoth­er Step Towards Cul­tur­al Insan­i­ty (Al Mohler, per­son­al blog): “Chris­tians think­ing about this moral con­fu­sion must first stop at the vocab­u­lary used in this article—particularly the word, ‘cis­gen­der.’ Using that term plays into the entire gen­der rev­o­lu­tion. The term indi­cates that some­one born a male is quite com­fort­able with being male. Even adopt­ing the vocab­u­lary, there­fore, becomes an enor­mous prob­lem because the vocab­u­lary assumes that you accept the ide­ol­o­gy of the trans­gen­der revolutionaries—that gen­der flu­id­i­ty exists and that the gen­der assigned at one’s birth may or may not be fac­tu­al.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

I feel as though the last few issues have had a drought of amus­ing things. I think this week makes up for it.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 173

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. Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Chris­t­ian Doc­tor Who Heals Rape Vic­tims (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[Dr. Denis] Muk­wege is the son of a Pen­te­costal min­is­ter and was inspired to pur­sue med­i­cine after trav­el­ing with his father to pray for the sick. Panzi Hos­pi­tal, which he found­ed in 1999, is man­aged by the Pen­te­costal Church­es in Cen­tral Africa (CEPAC).”
  2. Turk­ish court orders release of U.S. pas­tor Andrew Brun­son (Erin Cun­ning­ham, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In his final state­ment to the court just before the ver­dict was issued, Brun­son said: ‘I’m an inno­cent man. I love Jesus. I love this coun­try,’ and broke down in tears.”
  3. So many peo­ple have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put oth­er peo­ple’s pri­va­cy in jeop­ardy (Deb­o­rah Net­burn, Los Ange­les Times): “…once 3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have uploaded their genomes to pub­lic geneal­o­gy web­sites, near­ly every­one in the U.S. would be iden­ti­fi­able by their DNA alone and just a few addi­tion­al clues. More than 1 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have already pub­lished their genet­ic infor­ma­tion, and dozens more do so every day.” The under­ly­ing research: Iden­ti­ty infer­ence of genom­ic data using long-range famil­ial search­es (Erlich, Shor, Pe’er, and Car­mi, Sci­ence)
  4. Pol­i­tics as the New Reli­gion for Pro­gres­sive Democ­rats (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­ers, who may or may not be asso­ci­at­ed with oth­er civic insti­tu­tions, seem most excit­ed about sup­port­ing or donat­ing to caus­es, going to ral­lies, and express­ing opin­ions online, among oth­er activ­i­ties. Polit­i­cal engage­ment may be pro­vid­ing these Amer­i­cans with a new form of iden­ti­ty.”
  5. I Left Same-Sex Romance for Love (Rachel Gilson, Gospel Coali­tion): “If giv­ing free rein to my desires was the key to life, why had it only some­times brought me hap­pi­ness? Just as often, I reaped medi­oc­rity or pain. Con­trary to what I believed, pur­su­ing my nat­ur­al desires did not cre­ate ful­fill­ment, nor were my desires ful­ly trust­wor­thy just because they were, and are, ‘real.’ An itch can be very real, yelling out to be scratched. But for some ail­ments, scratch­ing just deep­ens the wound. A dif­fer­ent cure must be found.” The author is a cam­pus min­is­ter and a Yale grad. If you find this arti­cle intrigu­ing, she also has a per­son­al web­site: https://rachelgilson.com/
  6. Amer­i­cans Strong­ly Dis­like PC Cul­ture (Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic): “Among the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, a full 80 per­cent believe that “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is a prob­lem in our coun­try.” Even young peo­ple are uncom­fort­able with it, includ­ing 74 per­cent ages 24 to 29, and 79 per­cent under age 24. On this par­tic­u­lar issue, the woke are in a clear minor­i­ty across all ages. Youth isn’t a good proxy for sup­port of polit­i­cal correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either. Whites are ever so slight­ly less like­ly than aver­age to believe that polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is a prob­lem in the coun­try: 79 per­cent of them share this sen­ti­ment. Instead, it is Asians (82 per­cent), His­pan­ics (87 per­cent), and Amer­i­can Indi­ans (88 per­cent) who are most like­ly to oppose polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness…. Three quar­ters of African Amer­i­cans oppose polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness.” The author is a lec­tur­er on gov­ern­ment at Har­vard.
  7. Mak­ing What Har­vard Is About Trans­par­ent (Raz­ib Khan, per­son­al blog): “…a few years ago the pres­i­dent of Har­vard declared that the insti­tu­tion was all about inclu­sion. On the face of it that is just a bald-faced lie, and every­one knows it. Har­vard is about exclu­sion, selec­tion, and cura­tion. ‘Inclu­sion’ actu­al­ly meant that there are cer­tain views and back­grounds that Har­vard is going to curate and encour­age. Which is fine. But an insti­tu­tion which excludes >95% of those who apply for admis­sion is by def­i­n­i­tion not inclu­sive and open.” The essay is about Har­vard but also applies to schools like it (look­ing at you, Stan­ford). You won’t agree with every­thing, but a lot will ring true.

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 Every­thing That’s Wrong Of Rac­coons (Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg, The Toast): “Once when my dog died a pas­sel of rac­coons showed up in the back­yard as if to say ‘Now that he’s gone, we own the night,’ and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it dis­re­spect­ful to 1) me per­son­al­ly and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t dis­re­spect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.” (first shared in vol­ume 97)

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 168

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. The Most Momen­tous Place? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The old city of Jerusalem is aston­ish­ing­ly small for a city with so many momen­tous places. One can walk from Christianity’s holi­est site to the holi­est site of Judaism, paus­ing to look at one of the holi­est sites of Islam, in less time than it takes to walk from my office on the cam­pus of George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty to the cam­pus Star­bucks.” Short and provoca­tive.
  2. Aus­trali­a’s new Pen­te­costal prime min­is­ter: Try to guess how the press is receiv­ing him (Ira Rifkin, GetRe­li­gion): “…the new prime min­is­ter, Scott Mor­ri­son, is an out­spo­ken, polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Pen­te­costal Chris­t­ian. This mix­ing of reli­gion and pol­i­tics may be old-hat at this point for Amer­i­cans. But it’s an entire­ly new expe­ri­ence for Aus­tralians.”
  3. My nephew tried to school me on cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion. It did­n’t end well.(Jack Van­No­ord, Chica­go Tri­bune): fic­tion­al, amus­ing, and makes a seri­ous point about glob­al cul­tur­al exchange. “Most weeks, his less-woke friends go out for Taco Tues­days, but not Kyle. No more hum­mus. No more bagels. No mo’ pho. Poor Kyle. Liv­ing the unap­pro­pri­at­ed life is tough busi­ness. When­ev­er it rains, Kyle gets soaked. No more umbrel­las for him. Chi­nese. Kyle has stopped binge watch­ing ‘The Walk­ing Dead’ once I men­tioned the word for, and the con­cept of, zom­bies were appro­pri­at­ed from West Africa. Kyle was tak­ing a sum­mer math course at the com­mu­ni­ty col­lege. But he dropped out. It was just too hard. His home­work was tak­ing all evening. He was doing all his assign­ments using Roman numer­als since Ara­bic numer­als are … well, Ara­bic.”
  4. The Reli­gious Typol­o­gy (Pew Research Cen­ter): “ a new Pew Research Cen­ter analy­sis looks at beliefs and behav­iors that cut across many denom­i­na­tions – impor­tant traits that unite peo­ple of dif­fer­ent faiths, or that divide peo­ple who have the same reli­gious affil­i­a­tion – pro­duc­ing a new and reveal­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion, or typol­o­gy, of reli­gion in Amer­i­ca.”
  5. A Prison That’s Also a Loony Bin (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “A trans­gen­der pris­on­er has admit­ted sex­u­al­ly assault­ing inmates at a women’s jail. Karen White, 51, who was born male but now iden­ti­fies as a woman, has plead­ed guilty to two counts of sex­u­al touch­ing at New Hall Prison, Wake­field.” The sto­ry is astound­ing.
  6. Bet­ter Dead Than Dis­abled? (Charles Camosy, Com­mon­weal): “pro­lif­ers are not imag­in­ing things: argu­ments in favor of the autonomous moral and legal choice to com­mit infan­ti­cide are easy to find…. [for exam­ple, a] 2012 arti­cle by moral philoso­phers Alber­to Giu­bili­ni and Francesca Min­er­va, which appeared in the respect­ed Jour­nal of Med­ical Ethics, was provoca­tive­ly titled ‘After-Birth Abor­tion: Why Should the Baby Live?’”
  7. Diary of a Con­cus­sion: What I Learned About Head Injuries By Hav­ing One (Eliz­a­beth Lopat­to, The Verge): “To have your per­son­al­i­ty altered by brain trau­ma seems to upset peo­ple more than hav­ing it altered by, for instance, emo­tion­al trau­ma. I don’t know why this is! …. If I thought I was my brain, prob­a­bly I would have found the injury more upset­ting. But I didn’t and don’t believe that; my self is an inter­ac­tion between my body and my brain.” This is a year old but I just stum­bled upon it. Super inter­est­ing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How To Pray A Psalm (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): prayer life need a boost? Give this a try. (first shared in vol­ume 69)

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.

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