Tag: culture

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Alienation, Death, and Selfishness

It’s like we’re all watch­ing the same for­eign-lan­guage movie with sub­ti­tles for dif­fer­ent films. We’re see­ing the same things and can’t under­stand why we dis­agree about the plot.

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

My sum­ma­ry of this week’s read­ing is a bit of a rant. Buck­le up.

I was caught off-guard by this tweet yes­ter­day from ABC News: “Pro­test­ers in Cal­i­for­nia set fire to a cour­t­house, dam­aged a police sta­tion and assault­ed offi­cers after a peace­ful demon­stra­tion inten­si­fied.”

It was those last few words that caught my eye: “a peace­ful demon­stra­tion inten­si­fied.” I would have thought the inten­si­fi­ca­tion of peace was some­thing akin to heav­en, but appar­ent­ly inten­si­fy­ing peace leads to a place full of flames.

I sup­pose it is pos­si­ble that the per­son who wrote the tweet sim­ply meant that the peace­ful protest changed into some­thing vio­lent, but it’s so in line with oth­er lan­guage that’s float­ing around that I sus­pect it reflects the author’s per­spec­tive: peace­ful demon­stra­tions are some­times accom­pa­nied by fire and vio­lence.

Per­haps the tweet was noth­ing more than poor­ly-word­ed. Even if so, it illus­trates the schism in our cul­ture. Go read the com­ments on the tweet. It’s like we’re all watch­ing the same for­eign-lan­guage movie with sub­ti­tles for dif­fer­ent films. We’re see­ing the same things and can’t under­stand why we dis­agree about the plot.

Exam­ples abound. Is the 1619 Project is a nec­es­sary cor­rec­tion of the stan­dard Amer­i­can nar­ra­tive or is it a mali­cious dis­tor­tion of our his­to­ry? Is can­cel cul­ture even a thing? Is free speech a real val­ue to cel­e­brate in all areas of life, a nec­es­sary legal stan­dard which we should con­strue as nar­row­ly as pos­si­ble, or a hyp­o­crit­i­cal tool used to mar­gin­al­ize peo­ple? How do you feel about Black Lives Mat­ter? Does it mat­ter whether we are talk­ing about Black Lives Mat­ter as an orga­ni­za­tion, as a slo­gan, or as a grass­roots upris­ing? Is reli­gious lib­er­ty the cor­ner­stone of human rights or does it deserve scare quotes because “reli­gious lib­er­ty” is real­ly a pre­text for priv­i­lege? Who should be pres­i­dent? How many gen­ders are there? Is the envi­ron­ment on the brink of col­lapse? Is social­ism one of the most ruinous mis­takes in his­to­ry or a hope­ful inevitabil­i­ty we should embrace? Can a well-informed and decent per­son be a con­ser­v­a­tive? Can a well-informed and decent per­son be a lib­er­al?

Peo­ple strong­ly (and even vio­lent­ly) dif­fer about each of these ques­tions. With that on my mind, two pas­sages from the read­ing stood out to me. The first is a reminder that the bro­ken­ness we see out there is an aggre­gate of the bro­ken­ness that is in each of us.

The prob­lem is not in our sys­tems but in our selves. This is the rea­son all soci­eties col­lapse, why the dams of good­ness nev­er hold out long against the floods of evil, why the bad peo­ple always some­how seem to come to the top. Soci­ety is only us. There is no “them”. If there were no such thing as Orig­i­nal Sin, why else couldn’t we ever attain the good­ness and jus­tice and joy and peace that the major­i­ty of sane peo­ple always want and have always want­ed? Orig­i­nal Sin is the only key that opens the mys­tery of his­to­ry.

Kreeft com­ment­ing on Pensee 211 (page 155)

And then, as a cau­tion­ary note, this one:

Stag­ger­ing­ly enor­mous mis­eries have been the fruit of modernity’s five great rev­o­lu­tions: the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, the French Rev­o­lu­tion, the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion, the Nation­al Social­ist Rev­o­lu­tion and the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion. These five rev­o­lu­tions are one rev­o­lu­tion: five vis­i­ble out-crop­pings of the same invis­i­ble under­sea con­ti­nent. Each stems from the same root: the idol­a­trous search for a new absolute, the diviniza­tion of pow­er or free­dom or equal­i­ty or pride or plea­sure, respec­tive­ly.

Kreeft com­ment­ing on Pensee 199 (page 135)

I have opin­ions about all of the ques­tions I rat­tled off ear­li­er, and I hold this opin­ion as strong­ly as any of them: words are bet­ter than weapons and bal­lots are bet­ter than bul­lets. Our dis­agree­ments must not dri­ve us to destroy one anoth­er or to tear down the soci­ety we live in. Peo­ple suf­fer when a soci­ety col­laps­es, and those who are already vul­ner­a­ble suf­fer even more.

I don’t think Amer­i­ca is on the cusp of a vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion, but why keep walk­ing down this road? Opt out. As fol­low­ers of Christ let us instead become what I’ve heard called “a cre­ative coun­ter­cul­ture for the com­mon good.” As our Mas­ter said, “Love your ene­mies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mis­treat you”(Luke 6:27–28).

Let your peace inten­si­fy. Here endeth the rant.

Some oth­er quotes from the read­ing that stood out to me:

Pas­cal, Pensee 165: The last act is bloody, how­ev­er fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is fin­ished for ever. 

Kreeft com­ment­ing: A sto­ry, like a syl­lo­gism, gets its uni­ty and point from its con­clu­sion, its end. Life seems wretched and vain because its end, and hence its point, seems to be death, and death seems to be noth­ing­ness. There­fore the ques­tion of immor­tal­i­ty is exis­ten­tial­ly cru­cial.

Pas­cal, Pensee 165 (page 144)

This may seem abstract to you while you’re in col­lege, but Pas­cal makes an excel­lent point else­where:

Any­one with only a week to live will not find it in his inter­est to believe that all this is just a mat­ter of chance. Now, if we were not bound by our pas­sions, a week and a hun­dred years would come to the same thing. 

Pas­cal, Pensee 326 (page 141)

Relat­ed:

Is not our span of life equal­ly infin­i­tes­i­mal in eter­ni­ty, even if it is extend­ed by ten years?

Pas­cal, Pensee 199 (page 125)

On a dif­fer­ent note:

Sec­u­lar moral­i­ty is a plan for the ful­fill­ment of self­ish­ness, Chris­tian­i­ty is a plan for its destruc­tion. It cuts to the heart. In fact, it is heart surgery. Clear­ly, this is going to appear opti­mistic only to one who knows he has heart dis­ease. No one who thinks he is healthy is going to be hap­py to be offered a free heart trans­plant.

Kreeft intro­duc­ing chap­ter 12 (page 148)

And a use­ful reminder that peo­ple are the same wher­ev­er you go, whether 17th cen­tu­ry France, con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca, or ancient Israel (see Eccle­si­astes 7:21–22):

No one talks about us in our pres­ence as he would in our absence. Human rela­tions are only based on this mutu­al decep­tion; and few friend­ships would sur­vive if every­one knew what his friend said about him behind his back, even though he spoke sin­cere­ly and dis­pas­sion­ate­ly.

Pas­cal, from Pensee 978 (page 151)

In my expe­ri­ence this next obser­va­tion is spot-on:

The great­est liar in the world is still out­raged by being lied to. No one is a moral rel­a­tivist, sub­jec­tivist or min­i­mal­ist when it comes to oth­ers’ behav­ior to him, only his to oth­ers.

Kreet com­ment­ing on Pensee 978 (page 153)

And I am always amused when some­one pulls the move Kreeft describes here:

In Pas­cal, as in the Mid­dle Ages, the vast size of the uni­verse is used to show forth the vast­ness of God’s pow­er. The very same fact is com­mon­ly used by the mod­ern mind (which igno­rant­ly thinks it is the first to dis­cov­er the fact) as evi­dence for athe­ism! “How could you believe in a God when Man is but a lost speck in an infi­nite abyss?” Why the size of the uni­verse should count against the­ism is nev­er argued for, only assumed. For the argu­ment is worth­less or nonex­is­tent, but the feel­ing is strong. That’s where the change takes place: in feel­ing, in sen­si­bil­i­ty.

Kreeft com­ment­ing on Pensee 199 (page 128)

Sim­i­lar­ly:

Sci­ence no more proves that nature is not a moth­er but only mat­ter than an X‑ray proves that a woman is not a moth­er but only a bag of bones.

Kreeft, intro­duc­tion to chap­ter 10 (page 120)

And this last one seems to me to be most­ly true. It’s true enough to think about.

How nat­ur­al and nor­mal is our unnat­ur­al injus­tice! Of course we are annoyed at crit­i­cism, even true crit­i­cism. Espe­cial­ly true crit­i­cism. A man will for­give you for unjust crit­i­cism but not for just crit­i­cism. A bul­ly will for­give you if you call him a cow­ard but not if you call him a bul­ly. A cow­ard will for­give you if you call him a bul­ly but not if you call him a cow­ard.

Kreeft com­ment­ing on Pensee 978 (page 153)

It reminds me of the say­ing, “when you throw a stone into a pack of dogs, the dog that yelps is the one that got hit.” What makes you yelp? It’s worth pon­der­ing.

For this week we’re read­ing chap­ters 13 (Diver­sion) & 14 (Indif­fer­ence). I think you’ll be shocked at how con­tem­po­rary they seem.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 259

This week con­tains some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles I ever have passed along. Def­i­nite­ly worth skim­ming!

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. Fer­til­i­ty rate: ‘Jaw-drop­ping’ glob­al crash in chil­dren being born (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Chi­na, cur­rent­ly the most pop­u­lous nation in the world, is expect­ed to peak at 1.4 bil­lion in four years’ time before near­ly halv­ing to 732 mil­lion by 2100. India will take its place.” From a long-term per­spec­tive, this is pos­si­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant news you will read this year. Some of you will still be alive when China’s pop­u­la­tion is half what it is now. And it’s not just Chi­na — many nations are on the same path (with only a few siz­able ones head­ed in the oppo­site direc­tion).
  2. The Coro­n­avirus and the Right’s Sci­en­tif­ic Coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion (Ari Schul­man, The New Repub­lic): “That so many views tut-tut­ted as the irra­tional defi­ance of expert con­sen­sus actu­al­ly became the expert con­sen­sus in the span of just a few weeks vivid­ly sug­gests that we need to reex­am­ine just how our cul­ture talks about exper­tise. The prob­lem is not main­ly that the experts were wrong—that is to be expect­ed. It is, rather, that our lead insti­tu­tions and pub­lic infor­ma­tion out­lets con­tin­u­al­ly treat­ed the assur­ances of experts as neu­tral inter­pre­ta­tions of set­tled sci­ence when they plain­ly were not.” Inter­est­ing through­out. This will like­ly enter my rota­tion of clas­sics that I repost from time to time. 
    • Relat­ed: An Open Let­ter To My Fel­low Chris­tians (David Carreon, per­son­al blog): “Large gath­er­ings are dan­ger­ous with a spread­ing virus regard­less of the rea­son for the assem­bly. Some resist the straight­for­ward response to this out of idol­a­try of church atten­dance and the church build­ing. Any good thing can become an idol. Gold is good but can be shaped into a gold­en calf (Exo 32:4). Sex is good but can we can also per­vert it through for­ni­ca­tion (1 Cor 6:9). A church build­ing or even phys­i­cal atten­dance at church can be mis­tak­en for the Church itself. This, too, is idol­a­try.” David is a Stan­ford psy­chi­a­trist (and a friend of mine)
    • Relat­ed: Andy Stan­ley Explains Why His Megachurch Won’t Gath­er on Sun­days Until 2021 (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Here is where I think the church needs to think about this: As a local church, we have lim­it­ed time, lim­it­ed staff, and lim­it­ed resources; it makes no sense to focus our staff time and resources on cre­at­ing a sub­par envi­ron­ment on Sun­day morn­ing for a nine and 11 o’clock ser­vice that only 20% of the peo­ple may attend. We decid­ed to focus on the 100% of all of our church folks and their friends and the rest of the world that may show up lat­er.“
  3. David Shor’s Uni­fied The­o­ry of the 2020 Elec­tion (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “Cam­paigns do want to win. But the peo­ple who work in cam­paigns tend to be high­ly ide­o­log­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed and thus, super-prone to con­vinc­ing them­selves to do things that are strate­gi­cal­ly dumb.” Super inter­est­ing — well worth read­ing.
  4. Dis­turb­ing video shows hun­dreds of blind­fold­ed pris­on­ers in Xin­jiang (Matt Rivers, Max Fos­ter and James Grif­fiths, CNN): “The video — which was post­ed online anony­mous­ly last week — shows hun­dreds of men, most of whom are dressed in pur­ple and orange vests with the words ‘Kash­gar Deten­tion Cen­ter’ print­ed on them, seat­ed in rows on the ground of what appears to be a large court­yard out­side a train sta­tion. Their heads are shaved and their hands bound behind their backs. All of the men are wear­ing black blind­folds over their eyes and they are being watched over by dozens of police offi­cers in SWAT uni­forms.”’
    • Relat­ed: Chi­na cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abor­tion, ster­il­iza­tion (Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “While indi­vid­ual women have spo­ken out before about forced birth con­trol, the prac­tice is far more wide­spread and sys­tem­at­ic than pre­vi­ous­ly known, accord­ing to an AP inves­ti­ga­tion based on gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics, state doc­u­ments and inter­views with 30 ex-detainees, fam­i­ly mem­bers and a for­mer deten­tion camp instruc­tor. The cam­paign over the past four years in the far west region of Xin­jiang is lead­ing to what some experts are call­ing a form of ‘demo­graph­ic geno­cide.’”
  5. Sit With Neg­a­tive Emo­tions, Don’t Push Them Away (Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic): “In sum, if we want a life full of deep mean­ing, true love, and emo­tion­al strength, it’s going to involve the risk (and often the real­i­ty) of dis­com­fort, con­flict, and loss. This means there will be sad­ness, fear, anger, and dis­gust. If we elim­i­nate neg­a­tive emo­tions and expe­ri­ences from our lives, we will be poor­er and weak­er for hav­ing done so.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard, rec­om­mend­ed by a friend.
  6. 10 The­ses About Can­cel Cul­ture (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The point of can­cel­la­tion is ulti­mate­ly to estab­lish norms for the major­i­ty, not to bring the stars back down to earth…. The goal isn’t to pun­ish every­one, or even very many some­ones; it’s to shame or scare just enough peo­ple to make the rest con­form.”
    • The Will­ful Blind­ness of Reac­tionary Lib­er­al­ism (Osi­ta Nwane­vu, The New Repub­lic): “The ten­sions we’ve seen late­ly have been inter­nal to lib­er­al­ism for ages: between those who take the asso­cia­tive nature of lib­er­al soci­ety seri­ous­ly and those who are deter­mined not to. It is the for­mer group, the defend­ers of pro­gres­sive iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, who in fact are protecting—indeed expanding—the bounds of lib­er­al­ism. And it is the lat­ter group, the reac­tionar­ies, who are most guilty of the illib­er­al­ism they claim has over­tak­en the Amer­i­can Left.” Writ­ten before the let­ter I shared last week, this is one of the best defens­es of can­cel cul­ture.
    • The World That Twit­ter Made (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “I sus­pect an entire class of pun­dits has inter­nal­ized the idea that [Twit­ter debate] is what pub­lic dis­cus­sion is. Of course they don’t believe in free expres­sion, civ­il debate, the spir­it of lib­er­al­ism, and all of that jazz. To this gen­er­a­tion those things are just words. The pub­lic sphere they have known has always been a bare-knuck­le brawl.”
    • Res­ig­na­tion Let­ter (Bari Weiss, per­son­al web­site): “What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selec­tiv­i­ty. If a person’s ide­ol­o­gy is in keep­ing with the new ortho­doxy, they and their work remain unscru­ti­nized. Every­one else lives in fear of the dig­i­tal thun­der­dome.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • See You Next Fri­day (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “What has hap­pened, I think, is rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple: A crit­i­cal mass of the staff and man­age­ment at New York Mag­a­zine and Vox Media no longer want to asso­ciate with me, and, in a time of ever tight­en­ing bud­gets, I’m a lux­u­ry item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entire­ly their pre­rog­a­tive.”
    • Illu­sion and Agree­ment in the Debate over Intol­er­ance (Justin Wein­berg, Dai­ly Nous): “In short, I don’t think soci­ety has got­ten more intol­er­ant, but tech­nol­o­gy has facil­i­tat­ed, among oth­er things, the expres­sion of intol­er­ance.”
    • A More Spe­cif­ic Let­ter on Jus­tice and Open Debate (many authors, The Objec­tive): “In truth, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ peo­ple — par­tic­u­lar­ly Black and trans peo­ple — can now cri­tique elites pub­licly and hold them account­able social­ly; this seems to be the letter’s great­est con­cern. What’s per­haps even more grat­ing to many of the sig­na­to­ries is that a cri­tique of their long held views is per­sua­sive.”
    • Liked tweets near­ly cost me my uni­ver­si­ty job (Mike McCul­loch, Unherd): “To think that I could have lost my career to a sin­gle com­plaint about my liked tweets shows just how hys­ter­i­cal the present social mood is. Now more than ever, it is vital that we — and in par­tic­u­lar the uni­ver­si­ties — stand up for enlight­en­ment prin­ci­ples and replace fear with rea­son and fact.” The author is a math lec­tur­er (sim­i­lar to an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the US) at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ply­mouth. 
    • A Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence by a Prince­ton Pro­fes­sor (Joshua T. Katz, Quil­lette): “I am friends with many peo­ple who signed the Prince­ton let­ter, which requests and in some places demands a dizzy­ing array of changes, and I sup­port their right to speak as they see fit. But I am embar­rassed for them.” 
    • Attempt­ed Putsch At Prince­ton (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I am a Prince­ton pro­fes­sor who signed the let­ter that you wrote about today. I am also a devout Chris­t­ian and a dai­ly read­er of your blog.” Con­tains a let­ter from a Prince­ton prof with a dif­fer­ent view than the one above, worth con­trast­ing.
  7. My Time in Prison (George Car­di­nal Pell, First Things): “There is a lot of good­ness in pris­ons. At times, I am sure, pris­ons may be hell on earth. I was for­tu­nate to be kept safe and treat­ed well. I was impressed by the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of the warders, the faith of the pris­on­ers, and the exis­tence of a moral sense even in the dark­est places.”

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.

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

why Chris­tian­i­ty has such a coun­ter­cul­tur­al per­spec­tive on sex

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

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

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

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

Pas­cal, Pensee 821 (pages 99–100)

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

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

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 821, page 100

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

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

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

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

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

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

Romans 1:18–27 (NIV)

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

Oth­er thoughts from these chap­ters that stood out to me:

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

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

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

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

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 131, page 111

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

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 142, page 117

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 257

a short­er col­lec­tion of links than those I’ve shared recent­ly

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. Stop Fir­ing the Inno­cent (Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic): “Caf­fer­ty was pun­ished for an offense he insists he did not com­mit. Shor was pun­ished for doing some­thing that most wouldn’t even con­sid­er objec­tion­able. Wadi was pun­ished for the sins of his daugh­ter. What all of these rather dif­fer­ent cas­es have in com­mon is that none of the peo­ple who were deprived of a liveli­hood in the name of fight­ing racism appear to have been guilty of actu­al­ly per­pet­u­at­ing racism.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins. 
    • This is an essen­tial fol­low-up: pun­ish­ing the inno­cent (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “…for those who want to effect social change by expo­sure and sham­ing, pun­ish­ing the inno­cent is a fea­ture of their sys­tem, not a bug. It increas­es fear, which increas­es dis­ci­pline, not only of one­self but of oth­ers. And every employ­er who fires an employ­ee because they’re afraid of a social-media mob draws us clos­er to a ful­ly Panop­tic soci­ety, a social tyran­ny with an effi­cien­cy beyond the dreams of total­i­tar­i­an soci­eties of the past.” This reminds me of the clas­sic post Plan­et of Cops by Fred­dy deBoer.
  2. The Min­neapo­lis street cor­ner where George Floyd was killed has become a Chris­t­ian revival­ist site. (Ruth Gra­ham, Slate): “‘I would describe this as revival and awak­en­ing,’ said Joshua Giles, a local pas­tor who has been com­ing to the site to pray and preach for sev­er­al weeks. Giles, who is Black, said he has tak­en part in con­ver­sions and spon­ta­neous bap­tisms there, and that at least one woman had been mirac­u­lous­ly healed of per­sis­tent pain in her arm.”
    • I found the way Gra­ham framed one min­is­ter’s crit­i­cism of the Black Lives Mat­ter orga­ni­za­tion inter­est­ing. I don’t think it’s an unusu­al per­spec­tive — it was pre­sent­ed on Tues­day by sports anchor (and Colum­bia grad) Mar­cel­lus Wiley: https://twitter.com/SFY/status/1278064470435090438 (three minute video)
    • It’s also inter­est­ing to com­pare Wor­ship­pers Con­tin­ue ‘Uni­ty Revival’ at George Floyd Memo­r­i­al Despite Push­back (Tay­lor Berglund, Charis­ma News). The reports large­ly align, I’m just fas­ci­nat­ed by how reporters’ inter­ests and con­texts shape the ques­tions they ask and the answers they empha­size. I am pret­ty sure both reporters are Chris­t­ian, although I sus­pect they grav­i­tate to dif­fer­ent church­es.
  3. Is Tim Scott the Most Influ­en­tial Leg­is­la­tor in Con­gress? (Declan Gar­vey, The Dis­patch): “To Scott, his black­ness and his par­ti­san affil­i­a­tion makes per­fect sense: He’s lived the Amer­i­can dream, ris­ing from pover­ty to build a series of suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es. He’s a devout Chris­t­ian com­mit­ted to the preser­va­tion of reli­gious lib­er­ty. But to inter­lop­ers pro­ject­ing their own expe­ri­ences and beliefs onto him, two of his three core iden­ti­ties are in direct con­tra­dic­tion with one anoth­er. Lean­ing too hard into one elic­its accu­sa­tions of being trai­tor­ous to the oth­er.’” Utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. How a Great Pow­er Falls Apart (Charles King, For­eign Affairs): “Faced with a series of exter­nal shocks and inter­nal crises, and pur­sued by more dynam­ic and adapt­able com­peti­tors abroad, his coun­try had far less life in it than any­one at the time could see. All coun­tries end. Every soci­ety has its own rock bot­tom, obscured by dark­ness until impact is immi­nent. Already in the sixth cen­tu­ry, Amal­rik wrote, goats were graz­ing in the Roman Forum.” The author is an inter­na­tion­al rela­tions Pro­fes­sor at George­town. Rel­e­vant for both Amer­i­ca and Chi­na.
  5. Pas­tors on Social Media (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “… you are wrestling against prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers, and those pow­ers have keen eyes for your desire for a big­ger audi­ence and your church mem­bers’ affin­i­ty for oth­er forms of social rein­force­ment. They want you to believe that oth­er forms of wis­dom are more reli­able than God’s Word, oth­er audi­ences more impor­tant than your hum­ble con­gre­ga­tion, oth­er plat­forms more pow­er­ful for speak­ing, oth­er kinds of impact you can make more last­ing and sig­nif­i­cant. The sec­ond you begin to believe these things you have begun to com­pro­mise your call­ing as a pas­tor.” This is a fire hydrant of wis­dom, and most of it is rel­e­vant to every­one.
  6. On Behalf Of Envi­ron­men­tal­ists, I Apol­o­gize For The Cli­mate Scare (Mike Shel­len­berg­er, Quil­lette): “Cli­mate change is hap­pen­ing. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem. I may seem like a strange per­son to be say­ing all of this. I have been a cli­mate activist for 20 years and an envi­ron­men­tal­ist for 30.”
    • The author’s book is cur­rent­ly the #1 best sell­er in envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence on Ama­zon. This arti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Forbes (where he is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor) but they took it down in the ensu­ing con­tro­ver­sy. Unde­ni­ably inter­est­ing. I don’t have exper­tise in this area, so if he’s wrong please point me to any bet­ter pieces you know of.
  7. The Ghost of Woodrow Wil­son (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…unless the endgame of New Haven’s removal of Colum­bus is the expro­pri­a­tion of white prop­er­ty (Yale’s prop­er­ty, I sup­pose, espe­cial­ly) and its redis­tri­b­u­tion to the Pequots and Mohe­gans, then a con­sis­tent rejec­tion of Columbus’s lega­cy isn’t what my city is embrac­ing. Instead, it’s just doing the same thing as Prince­ton: keep­ing the inher­i­tance, but repu­di­at­ing the bene­fac­tor. Keep­ing the gains, but mak­ing a big show of pro­nounc­ing them ill got­ten.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 255

Again, the stand­alone stuff is up top and the cur­rent news items are towards the end.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Ditch­ing Insta­gram Earned me the Podi­um (Madi­son Fis­ch­er, per­son­al blog): “I cared so much about what every­one thought of me that it became out­sourced con­fi­dence…. Pride in my accom­plish­ments made me con­tent, and con­tent­ed­ness is poi­son to a young ath­lete who has to stay hun­gry if she wants to stay com­pet­i­tive.”
  2. The Finan­cial Fin­ish Line (Christi­na Dar­nell, Min­istry Watch): “Giv­ing has always been anoth­er bedrock prin­ci­ple for the Barn­harts. The com­pa­ny com­mit­ted to giv­ing half of their prof­its to min­istry. The oth­er half goes to grow­ing the busi­ness. The first year, they gave away $50,000. The next year, it was $150,000. It grew to $1 mil­lion a year—then $1 mil­lion a month.” An inspir­ing sto­ry.
  3. On Cul­tures That Build (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “In the 21st cen­tu­ry, the main ques­tion in Amer­i­can social life is not ‘how do we make that hap­pen?’ but ‘how do we get man­age­ment to take our side?’ This is a learned response, and a cul­ture which has inter­nal­ized it will not be a cul­ture that ‘builds.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Amer­i­ca’s Insti­tu­tions Are Fail­ing (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “What­ev­er the true cause for our fail­ure, when I look at the twin cat­a­stro­phes of this annus hor­ri­bilis, the plague and the police protests, what strikes me is that America’s safe­keep­ing insti­tu­tions have for­got­ten how to prop­er­ly see the threats of the 21st cen­tu­ry and move quick­ly to respond to them. Those who deny his­to­ry may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed.”
  4. Is There a Reli­gious Left? (Casey Cep, New York­er): “The daugh­ter of a Bap­tist preach­er who was once the dean of the Howard Uni­ver­si­ty School of Divin­i­ty, New­some came by her faith and her preach­ing hon­est­ly, yet almost all of the pub­lic­i­ty that fol­lowed her act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence [tak­ing down the Con­fed­er­ate flag] stripped her protest of its the­o­log­i­cal tenor. Such is the fate of much of the activism of the so-called reli­gious left: if it is suc­cess­ful, it is sub­sumed by broad­er caus­es and coali­tions; if it fails, it is for­got­ten.” 
  5. Race in Amer­i­ca
    • Most US Pas­tors Speak Out in Response to George Floy­d’s Death (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Near­ly all US pas­tors (94%) agree that ‘the church has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to denounce racism,’ and most (62%) say their church has made a state­ment on the unrest stem­ming from the May 25 death of George Floyd, accord­ing to a Bar­na Church Pulse Poll released today. The poll, con­duct­ed over the past week, also found that 76 per­cent of pas­tors say the church should sup­port peace­ful protests occur­ring in response to Floyd’s killing.”
    • What the Bible Has to Say About Black Anger (Esau McCauley, New York Times): “Jesus expe­ri­enced the real­i­ty of state-spon­sored ter­ror. That is why the black Chris­t­ian has always felt a par­tic­u­lar kin­ship with this cru­ci­fied king from an oppressed eth­nic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynch­ing tree.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton. 
    • On the Unjust Death of George Floyd and Racism in Amer­i­ca (Mar­co Rubio, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Like before, the lat­est unrest has giv­en rise to voic­es argu­ing that the foun­da­tions of our repub­lic are built on sys­temic racism and must there­fore be brought down. The only dif­fer­ence is that this time claims like these don’t just come from the fringes of our pol­i­tics. Like before, we also have voic­es who say that today race is a fac­tor only in indi­vid­ual cas­es, dis­tinct from our soci­ety at large. Both of these views are wrong.” This was a speech giv­en on the floor of the Sen­ate.
    • Racist Police Vio­lence Recon­sid­ered (John McWhort­er, Quil­lette): “…these fig­ures are not nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dence of police racism. Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post‘s data­base, over 95 per­cent of the peo­ple fatal­ly shot by police offi­cers in 2019 were male, and no seri­ous-mind­ed per­son argues that this is evi­dence of sys­temic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the dis­pro­por­tion­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of black men among those killed by cops?” McWhort­er is a pro­fes­sor of lin­guis­tics at Colum­bia. 
    • Sto­ries and Data (Cole­man Hugh­es, City Jour­nal): “…the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it.” The author is a fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute.
    • A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Polic­ing (Felipe Goncalves & Steven Mel­lo, SSRN): “Using a bunch­ing esti­ma­tion design and data from the Flori­da High­way Patrol, we show that minori­ties are less like­ly to receive a dis­count on their speed­ing tick­ets than white dri­vers. Dis­ag­gre­gat­ing this dif­fer­ence to the indi­vid­ual police offi­cer, we find that 40% of offi­cers explain all of the aggre­gate dis­crim­i­na­tion.” 40% is HUGE!
    • Why I Stopped Talk­ing About Racial Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and Start­ed Talk­ing About White Suprema­cy (Erna Kim Hack­ett, Inher­i­tance Mag­a­zine): “The term white suprema­cy labels the prob­lem more accu­rate­ly. It locates the prob­lem on white­ness and its sys­tems. It focus­es on out­comes, not inten­tions. It is col­lec­tive, not indi­vid­ual. It makes white­ness uncom­fort­able and respon­si­ble. And that is impor­tant.” Shared with me by a stu­dent.
  6. On Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism:
    • The Amer­i­can Sovi­et Men­tal­i­ty (Izabel­la Tabarovsky, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The mobs that per­form the unan­i­mous con­dem­na­tion rit­u­als of today do not fol­low orders from above. But that does not dimin­ish their pow­er to exert pres­sure on those under their influ­ence. Those of us who came out of the col­lec­tivist Sovi­et cul­ture under­stand these dynam­ics instinc­tive­ly.” The author is a schol­ar with the Wil­son Cen­ter.
    • Is There Still Room for Debate? (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “Lib­er­al­ism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spir­it to it. A spir­it that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ide­ol­o­gy — friend­ship, art, love, sex, schol­ar­ship, fam­i­ly. A spir­it that seeks not to impose ortho­doxy but to open up the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the human mind and soul.”
    • The Amer­i­can Press Is Destroy­ing Itself (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “It isn’t the whole sto­ry, but it’s demon­stra­bly true that vio­lence, arson, and riot­ing are occur­ring. How­ev­er, because it is polit­i­cal­ly unten­able to dis­cuss this in ways that do not sug­gest sup­port, reporters have been twist­ing them­selves into knots. We are see­ing head­lines pre­vi­ous­ly imag­in­able only in The Onion, e.g., ‘27 police offi­cers injured dur­ing large­ly peace­ful anti-racism protests in Lon­don.’”
    • The woke rev­o­lu­tion in Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism has begun (Damon Link­er, The Week): “In place of dif­fi­cul­ty, com­plex­i­ty, and com­pli­ca­tion, today’s jour­nal­is­tic rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies crave tidy moral lessons with clear vil­lains and heroes. They cham­pi­on sim­plic­i­ty, embrace moral uplift, and seek out evil­do­ers to demo­nize.” See also his ear­li­er col­umn Don’t will­ful­ly ignore the com­plex­i­ty of what’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” First shared in vol­ume 156.

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 254

The less time­ly stuff is up top this time and there are a lot of mag­ic videos at the bot­tom.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Unites Most Grad­u­ates of Selec­tive Col­leges? An Intact Fam­i­ly (Nicholas Zill & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “… even after con­trol­ling for par­ent edu­ca­tion, fam­i­ly income, and stu­dent race and eth­nic­i­ty, being raised by one’s mar­ried birth par­ents pro­vides an addi­tion­al boost to one’s chances of get­ting through Prince­ton.”
  2. What Chris­tians Must Remem­ber about Nuclear Weapons and Arms Con­trol (Peter Feaver & William Inbo­den & Michael Singh, Prov­i­dence): “Before embrac­ing calls for the abo­li­tion of nuclear weapons, thought­ful Chris­tians must con­front two uncom­fort­able facts. First, we live in a fall­en world in which the threats we face are chang­ing, and arguably grow­ing. Sec­ond, the enve­lope of peace and secu­ri­ty in which free soci­eties have thrived for the past eight decades is not self-sustaining—one need only view the recent decline of democ­ra­cies and rise of author­i­tar­i­an threats from Rus­sia and Chi­na. One can detest nuclear weapons and still see their strate­gic val­ue.” The authors are, respec­tive­ly, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Duke, a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at UT Austin, and a senior fel­low at a think­tank.
  3. Peer Review (Rod­ney Brooks, per­son­al blog): “I came to real­ize that the editor’s job was real, and it required me to deeply under­stand the top­ic of the paper, and the bias­es of the review­ers, and not to treat the ref­er­ees as hav­ing the right to deter­mine the fate of the paper them­selves. As an edi­tor I had to add judge­ment to the process at many steps along the way, and to strive for the process to improve the papers, but also to let in ideas that were new.” The author is a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of robot­ics at MIT.
  4. JK Rowl­ing Writes about Her Rea­sons for Speak­ing out on Sex and Gen­der Issues (JK Rowl­ing, per­son­al blog): “…I refuse to bow down to a move­ment that I believe is doing demon­stra­ble harm in seek­ing to erode ‘woman’ as a polit­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal class and offer­ing cov­er to preda­tors like few before it.”
  5. More on the NY Times tan­gle last week and what it reveals about our soci­ety
    • Amer­i­ca is chang­ing, and so is the media (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The news media likes to pre­tend that it sim­ply holds up a mir­ror to Amer­i­ca as it is. We don’t want to be seen as actors craft­ing the polit­i­cal debate, agents who make deci­sions that shape the bound­aries of the nation­al dis­course. We are, of course. We always have been.”
    • The Still-Vital Case for Lib­er­al­ism in a Rad­i­cal Age (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “…it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing author­i­tar­i­an racism is far more impor­tant to the con­clu­sion that left-wing illib­er­al­ism is com­plete­ly unim­por­tant. One can oppose dif­fer­ent evils, even those evils aligned against each oth­er, with­out assign­ing them equal weight.”
    • Why every­one hates the main­stream media (Andrew Pot­ter, Pol­i­cy for Pan­demics): “It’s not a coin­ci­dence that lawyers, jour­nal­ists, and politi­cians are rou­tine­ly ranked as the most dis­liked pro­fes­sions in the world. It’s because the law is not about jus­tice, pol­i­tics is not about democ­ra­cy, and the news is not about infor­ma­tion. But in each case, that is what emerges, by har­ness­ing the sta­tus-con­scious com­pet­i­tive natures of the par­tic­i­pants.” The author is a for­mer jour­nal­ist and edi­tor.
  6. Thoughts on race and racism:
    • George Floyd and Me (Shai Linn, Gospel Coali­tion): “Though I’m deeply griev­ed, I am not with­out hope. Per­son­al­ly, I have lit­tle con­fi­dence in our gov­ern­ment or pol­i­cy­mak­ers to change the sys­temic fac­tors that con­tributed to the George Floyd sit­u­a­tion. But my hope isn’t in the gov­ern­ment. My hope is in the Lord.”
    • Amer­i­can Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go (David French, The Dis­patch): “If polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect pro­gres­sives are often guilty of over-racial­iz­ing Amer­i­can pub­lic dis­course, and they are, polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect con­ser­v­a­tives com­mit the oppo­site sin—and they fil­ter out or angri­ly reject all the infor­ma­tion that con­tra­dicts their the­sis.”
    • This moment cries out for us to con­front race in Amer­i­ca (Con­doleez­za Rice, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Still, we sim­ply must acknowl­edge that soci­ety is not col­or-blind and prob­a­bly nev­er will be. Progress comes when peo­ple treat one anoth­er with respect, as if we were col­or-blind. Unless and until we are hon­est that race is still an anchor around our country’s neck, that shad­ow will nev­er be lift­ed. Our coun­try has a birth defect: Africans and Euro­peans came to this coun­try togeth­er — but one group was in chains.” She is, of course, a fel­low believ­er and also a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who will soon be the direc­tor of the Hoover Insti­tu­tion. 
    • Our Present Moment: Why Is It So Hard? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I’m think­ing more broad­ly about why race in this coun­try is so dif­fi­cult, and in par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cult even between peo­ple of good will, between peo­ple in your church of a dif­fer­ent col­or. I’m think­ing about peo­ple who agree on so many oth­er things. And you sing the same songs and you real­ly love Jesus togeth­er. And you read the same Bible, and you real­ly are togeth­er for the gospel. So why is it so divi­sive?” Some real­ly good thoughts in here.
  7. On the protests
    • The protests start­ed out look­ing like 1968. They turned into 1964. (Omar Wasow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al move­ment try­ing to draw atten­tion to the long his­to­ry of racist and bru­tal polic­ing, non­vi­o­lence in the face of police repres­sion is an exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult strat­e­gy to sus­tain. Evi­dence from the 1960s, how­ev­er — and per­haps this month, too — sug­gests using such tac­tics to gen­er­ate media cov­er­age of a press­ing social prob­lem can be a pow­er­ful tool for build­ing a coali­tion for social change.”
    • We often accuse the right of dis­tort­ing sci­ence. But the left changed the coro­n­avirus nar­ra­tive overnight (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, The Guardian): “Two weeks ago we shamed peo­ple for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.”
    • Trib­al­ism Comes for Pan­dem­ic Sci­ence (Yuval Levin, The New Atlantis): “These pub­lic health pro­fes­sion­als are sim­ply admit­ting that their views on the health risks of large gath­er­ings depend on the polit­i­cal valence of those gath­er­ings. Rather than com­part­men­tal­ize their pro­fes­sion­al judg­ment from their polit­i­cal pri­or­i­ties — explain­ing the risks of large protests regard­less of their polit­i­cal con­tent and then sep­a­rate­ly and in a dif­fer­ent con­text express­ing what­ev­er views they might have about that con­tent — they open­ly deny not only the pos­si­bil­i­ty but even the desir­abil­i­ty of detached pro­fes­sion­al advice. This kind of atti­tude inevitably makes it much hard­er for the pub­lic to assess sci­en­tif­ic claims about the pan­dem­ic through any­thing oth­er than a polit­i­cal lens.”
    • The Grow­ing CHAZm in Seat­tle (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It took activists less than 24 hours to dis­cov­er that even their make-believe Duchy of Grand Fen­woke relies on the basic build­ing blocks of any poli­ty. If Seattle’s supine and sausage-spined polit­i­cal lead­er­ship allows this exper­i­ment to con­tin­ue, pret­ty soon you can expect the emer­gence of cur­ren­cy, tax­es, even some kind of char­ter or con­sti­tu­tion. It wouldn’t shock me if they end­ed up cre­at­ing rudi­men­ta­ry courts or even a jail.” Gold­berg is an expert at the mean­der­ing rant. 
    • Anar­chy In Seat­tle (Christo­pher Rufo, City Jour­nal): “The Capi­tol Hill Autonomous Zone has set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent: armed left-wing activists have assert­ed their dom­i­nance of the streets and estab­lished an alter­na­tive polit­i­cal author­i­ty over a large sec­tion of a neigh­bor­hood. They have claimed de fac­to police pow­er over thou­sands of res­i­dents and dozens of businesses—completely out­side of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process. In a mat­ter of days, Antifa-affil­i­at­ed para­mil­i­taries have cre­at­ed a hard­ened bor­der, estab­lished a rudi­men­ta­ry form of gov­ern­ment based on prin­ci­ples of inter­sec­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and forcibly removed unfriend­ly media from the ter­ri­to­ry.”
    • A Dark Cloud For Democ­ra­cy (Carl True­man, First Things): “…this does not entire­ly explain why Min­neapo­lis and not Hong Kong has grabbed the imag­i­na­tion of British youth. After all, Hong Kong is a much more recent part of the British nar­ra­tive; one can watch the dis­man­tling of Hong Kong’s con­sti­tu­tion online and on the tele­vi­sion; and an extreme­ly good case can be made that the British gov­ern­ment is more respon­si­ble for that mess and its poten­tial ame­lio­ra­tion than for the chaos in the Min­neapo­lis police depart­ment. After all, the British can actu­al­ly do some­thing about it—as Boris Johnson’s pledge on immi­gra­tion to the U.K. from Hong Kong indi­cates. So why Min­neapo­lis, not Hong Kong?”
    • If we want bet­ter polic­ing, we’re going to have to spend more, not less (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Reform is thus more like­ly to stick if we co-opt the unions rather than try­ing to break them. Instead of ‘defund the police,’ what if we offloaded the non­ju­di­cial parts of their work, like deal­ing with the home­less and the men­tal­ly ill, to social work­ers, and then ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’ to reform the polic­ing part? We could offer a sig­nif­i­cant salary boost in exchange for accept­ing stricter stan­dards and over­sight, which wouldn’t just ease the polit­i­cal obsta­cles, but pos­si­bly attract high­er-qual­i­ty can­di­dates to the police force.”
    • Most Amer­i­cans Want Police Reform But Don’t Back ‘Defund The Police’ (Ariel Edwards-Levy and Kevin Robil­lard, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “A near-uni­ver­sal major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans sup­port at least some changes to polic­ing in the Unit­ed States fol­low­ing the death of George Floyd in the cus­tody of Min­neapo­lis police, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. There is major­i­ty sup­port for pro­pos­als cir­cu­lat­ing in Con­gress to ban choke­holds and make it eas­i­er to track and charge offi­cers accused of mis­con­duct. But the idea of ‘defund­ing the police’ has lit­tle sup­port from the pub­lic.”
    • Police Bru­tal­i­ty: The Fer­gu­son Effect (Robert Ver­bruggen, Nation­al Review): “There’s a temp­ta­tion in some quar­ters to think this issue is like gay mar­riage or mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion, where there’s a turn­ing point in pub­lic opin­ion and a rapid shift in pol­i­cy and then every­one won­ders what the big deal ever was. See, for exam­ple, Tim Alberta’s piece in Politi­co today, which bizarrely claims we may be see­ing the ‘last stand’ of law-and-order Repub­li­cans and draws those two par­al­lels explic­it­ly. But crime isn’t like that. When the streets become unsafe, pub­lic opin­ion shifts back in favor of the folks who stand between the inno­cents and the bad guys.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 232

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’ve missed send­ing this email due to hol­i­day trav­els for a while, and I’ve got noth­ing on Iran yet. Too much is hap­pen­ing and I’m in a remote place with lim­it­ed inter­net access. Any­thing you find great please send my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Prob­lem Isn’t the ‘Mer­it,’ It’s the ‘Ocra­cy’ (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was built on the assump­tion that the most salient polit­i­cal divides would reflect geog­ra­phy, not ide­ol­o­gy or class. The sen­a­tor from Mass­a­chu­setts would share bonds in com­mon with the lay cit­i­zen­ry of Boston that he did not share with a sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na. On the nation­al sphere this would allow him to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of his con­stituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry than oth­ers; yet because of the way Amer­i­can politi­cians are elect­ed, this sense of rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of a geo­graph­i­cal­ly bound­ed group of peo­ple is more true in the polit­i­cal are­na than in most oth­ers.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Decade in review: Mar­i­tal norms erode (Ryan T. Ander­son and Robert P. George, USA Today): “Law shapes cul­ture; cul­ture shapes beliefs; beliefs shape action. The law now effec­tive­ly teach­es that moth­ers and fathers are replace­able, that mar­riage is sim­ply about con­sent­ing adult rela­tion­ships, of what­ev­er for­ma­tion the par­ties hap­pen to pre­fer. This under­mines the truth that chil­dren deserve a moth­er and a father — one of each.”
    • Fol­low-up by Rod Dreher: Fam­i­ly, Mem­o­ry, Pow­er (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If you’re one of those peo­ple with a habit of say­ing, nobody has ever explained how all this is going to hurt het­ero­sex­u­al me, this is a good basic place to start. Moral­i­ty is an ecol­o­gy. This is the equiv­a­lent of inject­ing some­thing into the ground­wa­ter. It may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing, but it does affect every­body. Peo­ple who say it doesn’t are lying — per­haps to them­selves.”
    • That fol­low-up inspired Pro­fes­sor George to reply: The Shame Of The Con­formists (this is on Dreher’s blog): “Some­one might say, ‘this is no time for recrim­i­na­tions.’ Well, I don’t agree. This is pre­cise­ly the time for recrim­i­na­tions. Indeed, there was nev­er a bet­ter time. Stand­ing bold­ly for what is true and good and right and just is everybody’s job. It’s not just ‘oth­er people’s’ job. Espe­cial­ly to my fel­low Chris­tians I say, it is OUR job. It comes with the Gospel ter­ri­to­ry. You say ‘it’s hard’? Of course, it’s hard. But who ever told you that Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship was not going to be hard? Or risky? Or cost­ly? Not Jesus, that’s for sure. He told us–in the most explic­it terms–that it was going to be hard–very hard–and risky, and cost­ly. “
  3. Yes, Jesus Was a Refugee. He Still Is. (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “When most peo­ple talk about Jesus being a refugee, they’re not talk­ing about Beth­le­hem but the family’s flight to Egypt. Some time after his birth, Herod got pan­icky about rumors of a new king and sent sol­diers to kill all the new­borns in Beth­le­hem. An angel warned Joseph and Mary to high­tail it to Egypt where they could safe­ly lay low. Egypt made for an ide­al hid­ing place, con­nect­ed to Judea via a well-trav­eled and rel­a­tive­ly safe trade route known as the Via Maris. The argu­ment for Mary and Joseph’s refugee sta­tus here is about as strong as it could be under the cir­cum­stances.”
  4. Bib­li­cal Archaeology’s Top 10 Dis­cov­er­ies of 2019 (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…many of the main­stream media sto­ries announc­ing these dis­cov­er­ies acknowl­edged that the Bible was right all along or right after all in these instances. Archae­ol­o­gist Nel­son Glueck’s dec­la­ra­tion that ‘no archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery has ever con­tro­vert­ed a Bib­li­cal ref­er­ence’ still stands.”
  5. Some fol­low-ups to the Chris­tian­i­ty Today arti­cle I shared last time call­ing for Trump’s removal from office:
    • The Flag in the Whirl­wind: An Update from CT’s Pres­i­dent (Tim Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a polit­i­cal land­scape dom­i­nat­ed by polar­iza­tion, hos­til­i­ty, and mis­un­der­stand­ing, we believe it’s crit­i­cal for Chris­tians to mod­el how to have a firm opin­ion and host free dis­cus­sion at the same time. Evan­gel­i­cals of dif­fer­ent stripes can­not con­tin­ue to shout one anoth­er down, bul­ly those who dis­agree, or exclude one anoth­er and refuse to lis­ten. We hold fast to our view that the whole­heart­ed evan­gel­i­cal embrace of Trump has been enor­mous­ly costly—but we are com­mit­ted to irenic con­ver­sa­tion with men and women of good faith who believe oth­er­wise.”
      • Side note: the author was a gym­nast at Stan­ford who was active­ly involved in cam­pus min­istry while here (his time pre­ced­ed my tenure at Chi Alpha, to my knowl­edge we have nev­er met or even been in the same ZIP code). There’s an arti­cle about his sto­ry back in vol­ume 191. 
    • What It Would Take for Evan­gel­i­cals to Turn on Pres­i­dent Trump (Michael Luo, New York­er): “…though greater reli­gios­i­ty is cor­re­lat­ed with Chris­t­ian-nation­al­ist beliefs, once those beliefs are account­ed for, Amer­i­cans who engaged in more fre­quent reli­gious practice—church atten­dance, prayer, and bible reading—were less like­ly than their less obser­vant peers to sub­scribe to polit­i­cal views nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, such as believ­ing that refugees from the Mid­dle East pose a ter­ror­ist threat to the Unit­ed States, or that ille­gal immi­grants from Mex­i­co are most­ly dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals. In oth­er words, White­head and Per­ry find that the threat to demo­c­ra­t­ic plu­ral­ism is not evan­gel­i­cal­ism itself but the cul­ture around evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
    • Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.”
    • Trump Should Not Be Removed from Office: A Response to Mark Gal­li and Chris­tian­i­ty Today (Wayne Gru­dem, Town­hall): “If evan­gel­i­cals fail to sup­port Don­ald Trump after he has deliv­ered on so many issues impor­tant to Chris­t­ian val­ues, many peo­ple will con­clude that we real­ly do not care about con­ser­v­a­tive judges, the pro­tec­tion of the unborn, the pro­tec­tion of gen­der dis­tinc­tions, reli­gious free­dom, con­science pro­tec­tions for Chris­tians in the work­place, a strong enough mil­i­tary to pro­tect us against threats from Chi­na, North Korea, Rus­sia, and Iran, jobs,wages, eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties for minori­ties, a secure bor­der, Israel, afford­able ener­gy (espe­cial­ly for the poor), ener­gy inde­pen­dence, the pro­tec­tion of prop­er­ty rights, expand­ing parental choice for schools, revi­tal­iz­ing NATO, pro­tect­ing free­dom of speech on cam­pus­es, and many oth­er things. Gal­li dis­miss­es these con­cerns with the label ‘polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy,’ but all of these issues affect people’s ordi­nary lives. These issues real­ly do mat­ter. On issue after issue, Pres­i­dent Trump is chang­ing the direc­tion of the coun­try for the bet­ter. When I weigh these results against his some­times impre­cise and coarse speech, there is no com­par­i­son.”
    • Where Cain Got His Wife, and Oth­er Issues Relat­ed to the 2020 Elec­tion (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “As men­tioned above, I did not vote for the pres­i­dent in 2016. I did not vote for him because char­ac­ter mat­ters, and because I did not trust him to do what he was promis­ing to do…. And with that said, I have to acknowl­edge I was wrong… If any­thing, the great mass of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers have demon­strat­ed that they actu­al­ly have a bet­ter set of polit­i­cal instincts than their lead­ers, me includ­ed.”
  6. My Semes­ter With the Snowflakes (James Hatch, Medi­um): “In May of 2019, I was accept­ed to the Eli Whit­ney stu­dent pro­gram at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. At 52, I am the old­est fresh­man in the class of 2023. Before I was accept­ed, I didn’t real­ly know what to expect. I had seen the infa­mous YouTube video of stu­dents scream­ing at a fac­ul­ty mem­ber. I had seen the news sto­ries regard­ing the admis­sions scan­dal and that Yale was includ­ed in that unfor­tu­nate busi­ness. I had also heard the stu­dents at Yale referred to as ‘snowflakes’ in var­i­ous social media dump­sters and occa­sion­al­ly I’d seen ref­er­ences to Ivy League stu­dents as snowflakes in a few news sources.” (there’s an inter­est­ing fol­low-up inter­view with him on NPR)
  7. Two aca­d­e­m­ic things I found inter­est­ing:
    • Com­par­ing meta-analy­ses and pre­reg­is­tered mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tion projects (Aman­da Kvar­ven, Eirik Strøm­land & Mag­nus Johan­nes­son, Nature Human Behav­ior): “We com­pare the results of meta-analy­ses to large-scale pre­reg­is­tered repli­ca­tions in psy­chol­o­gy car­ried out at mul­ti­ple lab­o­ra­to­ries. The mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions pro­vide pre­cise­ly esti­mat­ed effect sizes that do not suf­fer from pub­li­ca­tion bias or selec­tive report­ing. We searched the lit­er­a­ture and iden­ti­fied 15 meta-analy­ses on the same top­ics as mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions. We find that meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from repli­ca­tion effect sizes for 12 out of the 15 meta-repli­ca­tion pairs. These dif­fer­ences are sys­tem­at­ic and, on aver­age, meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are almost three times as large as repli­ca­tion effect sizes.” uh-oh. 
    • The Many Faces of Sci­en­tif­ic Fraud (Nico­las Chevas­sus-au-Louis, Quil­lette): “Is every sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle a fraud? This ques­tion may seem puz­zling to those out­side the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. After all, any­one who took a phi­los­o­phy course in col­lege is like­ly to think of lab­o­ra­to­ry work as emi­nent­ly ratio­nal. The assump­tion is that a researcher faced with an enig­ma posed by nature for­mu­lates a hypoth­e­sis, then con­ceives an exper­i­ment to test its valid­i­ty…. How­ev­er, as every researcher knows, it is pure false­hood. In real­i­ty, noth­ing takes place the way it is described in a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle. The exper­i­ments were car­ried out in a far more dis­or­dered man­ner, in stages far less log­i­cal than those relat­ed in the arti­cle. If you look at it that way, a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle is a kind of trick.” The author has a Ph.D. in biol­o­gy and this is an excerpt from a book he is pub­lish­ing with Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

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 217

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.” I just found this blog and am lov­ing it.
  2. When Faith Comes Up, Stu­dents Avert Their Eyes (Michael Roth, The Atlantic): “As a non­be­liev­er myself, I am not try­ing to con­vert any stu­dent to any reli­gion. Yet how to dis­cuss reli­gious faith in class pos­es a major chal­lenge for non­re­li­gious col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. How can such an insti­tu­tion claim to edu­cate stu­dents about ideas, cul­ture, and ways of life if stu­dents, pro­fes­sors, or both are uncom­fort­able when talk­ing about some­thing that’s been cen­tral to human­i­ty through­out record­ed his­to­ry?” Roth is a his­to­ri­an and the pres­i­dent of Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. The Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Very enter­tain­ing.
  4. Elite Fail­ure Has Brought Amer­i­cans to the Edge of an Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “What Amer­i­cans young and old are aban­don­ing is not so much the promise of fam­i­ly, faith, and nation­al pride as the trust that America’s exist­ing insti­tu­tions can be relied on to pro­vide for them.”
    • Use­ful­ly read along­side The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad (James Fal­lows, The Atlantic): “Gov­ern­men­tal ‘fail­ure’ comes down to an inabil­i­ty to match a society’s resources to its biggest oppor­tu­ni­ties and needs. This is the clear­est stan­dard by which cur­rent U.S. nation­al gov­er­nance fails. In prin­ci­ple, almost noth­ing is beyond America’s capac­i­ties. In prac­tice, almost every big task seems too hard. Yet for our own era’s coun­ter­parts to duchies and monasteries—for state and local gov­ern­ments, and for cer­tain large pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing uni­ver­si­ties and some companies—the coun­try is still main­ly func­tion­al, in exact­ly the areas where nation­al gov­er­nance has failed.”
    • Relat­ed: How Uni­ver­si­ties Have Been Part of the Prob­lem (And Can Be Part of the Solu­tion) for America’s Civic Crises (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): “Stu­dents are taught to real­ly hone their crit­i­cal capac­i­ties at uni­ver­si­ty – but what of their affir­ma­tive ones? Put anoth­er way, there is a big focus on iden­ti­fy­ing prob­lems, crit­i­ciz­ing, prob­lema­tiz­ing, decon­struct­ing, high­light­ing dif­fer­ences, etc. – but much less on com­ing up with prac­ti­cal solu­tions, or explain­ing what works, what is good (and why), or acknowl­edg­ing what the peo­ple we engage are right about, or build­ing con­sen­sus through the things we share in com­mon. These are not skills that are pri­or­i­tized in high­er edu­ca­tion today.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Also see his com­pan­ion piece Aca­d­e­m­ic and Polit­i­cal Elit­ism at Inside High­er Ed.
  5. Can Jesus Close the Wage Gap? Inside Hill­song’s Insta­gram-Fueled Wom­en’s Move­ment (Hay­ley Phe­lan, Elle): “This year’s theme, ‘Be Found in the New,’ is tak­en from the Book of Rev­e­la­tion. But if you didn’t know that, the pam­phlet could be an Urban Out­fit­ters cat­a­log or an Ever­lane lookbook—a sign of both Hillsong’s cul­tur­al flu­en­cy and mar­keters’ aware­ness of con­sumer fatigue. A new sofa or cute leg­gings are just the win­dow dress­ing in a life of purpose—a way to tran­scend exhaus­tion, lone­li­ness, and low self-esteem, and step into a world of our own mak­ing. Which, when you get right down to it, sounds a lot like reli­gion.”
  6. Five Things They Don’t Tell You About Slav­ery (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “None of the oth­er soci­eties taint­ed by slav­ery pro­duced the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, a Wash­ing­ton, Jef­fer­son, and Hamil­ton, the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, or a tra­di­tion of lib­er­ty that inspired peo­ple around the world for cen­turies. If we don’t keep that in mind, as well as the broad­er con­text of slav­ery, we aren’t giv­ing this coun­try — or his­to­ry — its due.” The title is not great but the arti­cle is quite inter­est­ing. 
  7. Home­less­ness and the high cost of liv­ing (Chris­tos Makridis, The Hill): “…econ­o­mists have reached a con­sen­sus that the pri­ma­ry dri­ver behind increas­ing hous­ing prices and rental rates is the pres­ence of, and increase in, land use restric­tions. Put sim­ply, land use restric­tions, or hous­ing mar­ket reg­u­la­tions more gen­er­al­ly, place restric­tions on the types of struc­tures that can be built — that either implic­it­ly or explic­it­ly raise the cost for devel­op­ers.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.

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 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. First shared in vol­ume 178.

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 195

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. Elite Col­leges Con­stant­ly Tell Low-Income Stu­dents That They Do Not Belong (Clint Smith, The Atlantic): “The priv­i­leged poor are stu­dents who come from low-income back­grounds but attend­ed wealthy pri­vate high schools, giv­ing them a lev­el of famil­iar­i­ty with and access to the social and cul­tur­al cap­i­tal that tend to make peo­ple suc­cess­ful at elite uni­ver­si­ties. The dou­bly dis­ad­van­taged are stu­dents who arrive at these top insti­tu­tions from neigh­bor­hood pub­lic schools, many of which are over­crowd­ed and under­fund­ed. They are schools where these stu­dents have excelled, but that are ill-equipped to give them the socio­cul­tur­al tools nec­es­sary to under­stand the nuances of how these elite col­leges oper­ate.”
    • Relat­ed: The Scan­dals of Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The ‘more mer­i­toc­ra­cy’ argu­ment against both lega­cies and racial quo­tas implic­it­ly assumes that apti­tude — some elixir of I.Q. and work eth­ic — is what our elite pri­mar­i­ly lacks. But is that real­ly our upper class’s prob­lem?”
  2. Evan­gel­i­cals Show No Decline, Despite Trump and Nones (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The fact that evan­gel­i­cals’ share of the pop­u­la­tion remains rel­a­tive­ly sta­ble over the last decade is strik­ing giv­en the con­tin­ued rise of the nones. Evan­gel­i­cals have been able to replace loss­es as fast as they are occur­ring, at least for now.”
  3. Reli­gion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65.
  4. Why The Bible Ain’t Woke (Toby Sumpter, per­son­al blog): “…it is sim­ply not enough to note that Jonathan Edwards, the puri­tans, or the founders of South­ern Sem­i­nary owned slaves. Far more work must be done to demon­strate that these men sinned in their treat­ment of their slaves. And fur­ther­more, even where sin can be clear­ly demon­strat­ed, there must be a bright and shin­ing light of demar­ca­tion between dis­qual­i­fy­ing sin and the endem­ic sins of the human race.” He has unde­ni­ably inter­est­ing things to say, but read his arti­cle in con­junc­tion with the con­tent from Peter Williams and Glenn Miller I shared back in vol­ume 76.
  5. The Reck­on­ing of Mor­ris Dees and the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter (Bob Moser, New York­er): “For those of us who’ve worked in the Pover­ty Palace, putting it all into per­spec­tive isn’t easy, even to our­selves. We were work­ing with a group of ded­i­cat­ed and tal­ent­ed peo­ple, fight­ing all kinds of good fights, mak­ing life mis­er­able for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shad­ows hung over every­thing: the racial and gen­der dis­par­i­ties, the whis­pers about sex­u­al harass­ment, the abus­es that stemmed from the top-down man­age­ment, and the guilt you couldn’t help feel­ing about the legions of donors who believed that their mon­ey was being used, faith­ful­ly and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dix­ie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.”
  6. The need for intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty in psy­cho­log­i­cal sci­ence: Our own stud­ies of active­ly open-mind­ed think­ing as a case study (Stanovich and Toplak, Cog­ni­tion): “it is impor­tant that psy­chol­o­gy main­tain its cred­i­bil­i­ty as a neu­tral arbiter—a cred­i­bil­i­ty that has been vast­ly erod­ed in recent years by empir­i­cal evi­dence of the ide­o­log­i­cal bias in our sci­ence (Ceci and Williams, 2018, Craw­ford and Jus­sim, 2018, Duarte et al., 2015). There is a need for greater intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty in all areas of psy­chol­o­gy, but par­tic­u­lar­ly in those that inter­face with pol­i­tics and socio­cul­tur­al beliefs. Greater intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty in our own lab years ago might have pre­vent­ed us from con­tin­u­ing to use items in our AOT scale that inflat­ed neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tions with reli­gios­i­ty.”
    • tl;dr — researchers real­ized that a well-known psy­cho­log­i­cal tool they devel­oped years ago was biased against reli­gious believ­ers, and they con­clud­ed this prob­a­bly hap­pened because their lab was “over­whelm­ing­ly sec­u­lar.” They humbly repent­ed and wrote a paper about their mis­take. Kudos to them.
  7. Athe­ism Is Incon­sis­tent with the Sci­en­tif­ic Method, Prizewin­ning Physi­cist Says (Lee Billings, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “I hon­est­ly think athe­ism is incon­sis­tent with the sci­en­tif­ic method. What I mean by that is, what is athe­ism? It’s a state­ment, a cat­e­gor­i­cal state­ment that express­es belief in non­be­lief.” This is from an inter­view with Marce­lo Gleis­er, Dart­mouth physics prof. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Sad­ly, I got noth­ing this week. In lieu of awe­some links, here’s a mediocre joke: “What’s the best thing to put in a cook­ie? Your teeth!”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selec­tive pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools. The reli­gion in ques­tion is not Method­ism or Catholi­cism but an extreme ver­sion of the belief sys­tem of the lib­er­al elite: the lib­er­al pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, and cre­ative class­es, which pro­vide a large major­i­ty of stu­dents enrolled at such places and an even larg­er major­i­ty of fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tors who work at them. To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 182

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. If They Weren’t Tak­ing Notes, How Did the Dis­ci­ples Remem­ber Jesus’s Exact Teach­ing? The 3‑Step Process for For­mu­lat­ing the 4 Gospels (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “I might not be able to tell you what I did last week, but I could give you a three-hour lec­ture about Jesus and the Jew­ish roots of the Last Sup­per with zero prepa­ra­tion because I have been talk­ing about it all the time for the last ten years. That’s one key dif­fer­ence between rehearsed mem­o­ries and inci­den­tal mem­o­ries.”
  2. What Straight‑A Stu­dents Get Wrong (Adam Grant, New York Times): “The evi­dence is clear: Aca­d­e­m­ic excel­lence is not a strong pre­dic­tor of career excel­lence. Across indus­tries, research shows that the cor­re­la­tion between grades and job per­for­mance is mod­est in the first year after col­lege and triv­ial with­in a hand­ful of years. For exam­ple, at Google, once employ­ees are two or three years out of col­lege, their grades have no bear­ing on their per­for­mance.” The author is an orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist at Penn’s Whar­ton School.
    • This arti­cle was sent to me by an alum­na who said, “I some­times skipped Chi Alpha or oth­er mean­ing­ful activ­i­ties with friends for that one extra hour of study­ing, which I now regret.”
  3. Hun­dreds of sex abuse alle­ga­tions found in fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es across U.S. (Sarah Smith, Star-Telegram): “One hun­dred and six­ty-eight church lead­ers were accused or con­vict­ed of com­mit­ting sex­u­al crimes against chil­dren, the inves­ti­ga­tion found. At least 45 of the alleged abusers con­tin­ued in min­istry after accu­sa­tions came to the atten­tion of church author­i­ties or law enforce­ment.… Inde­pen­dent fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es preach sep­a­ra­tion: Stay sep­a­rate from the world, sep­a­rate from non-believ­ers and sep­a­rate from Chris­tians who do not believe as they do. That includes South­ern Bap­tists, who are deemed by the strict sect as too lib­er­al.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing stuff.
  4. Chi­na cracks down on Chris­tians — a new era of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion has arrived (Nina Shea and Bob Fu, Fox News): “The government’s repres­sion against the church­es is being done in the name of Pres­i­dent Xi Jinping’s ‘sini­ciza­tion’ cam­paign, osten­si­bly to strength­en Chi­nese cul­ture. How­ev­er, it increas­ing­ly appears aimed at remov­ing the Bible and its teach­ings from Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty.” (relat­ed cov­er­age at the New York Times)
    • My Dec­la­ra­tion of Faith­ful Dis­obe­di­ence (Wang Yi, Chris­t­ian Dai­ly Reporter): “As a pas­tor, my dis­obe­di­ence is one part of the gospel com­mis­sion. Christ’s great com­mis­sion requires of us great dis­obe­di­ence. The goal of dis­obe­di­ence is not to change the world but to tes­ti­fy about anoth­er world.” A now-impris­oned pas­tor wrote this let­ter with instruc­tions that it be pub­lished if he was detained for more than 48 hours. STRAIGHT FIRE.
  5. Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop and how “reli­gious lib­er­ty” became so tox­ic (Andrew Kop­pel­man, Vox): “Deep dis­agree­ment about moral fun­da­men­tals is noth­ing new; it is what reli­gious diver­si­ty con­sists of. That ought to include dis­agree­ment about such fraught mat­ters as sex­u­al­i­ty. Moral dis­agree­ment about things that mat­ter a lot is an inevitable con­se­quence of a free soci­ety. The best we can hope for is to live peace­ful­ly togeth­er in mutu­al con­tempt.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Fair­ness For All’: Smart Pol­i­tics, Or A Sell­out? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…there real­ly is a ques­tion of jus­tice with­in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have to face. We may sin­cere­ly believe that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is moral­ly wrong, but at what point does the com­mon good require that we agree that gay peo­ple have a right to be wrong? Espe­cial­ly because we are ask­ing them to agree that we have a right to be wrong (in their eyes) too.”
    • Response to the above: Mis­guid­ed Pro­pos­al From Chris­t­ian Lead­ers and LGBT Activists Is Any­thing but ‘Fair­ness for All’ (Ryan T. Ander­son, The Dai­ly Sig­nal): “Estab­lish­ing bad pub­lic pol­i­cy for every­one and then exempt­ing select reli­gious insti­tu­tions is not act­ing for the com­mon good—and is cer­tain­ly not fair for all. And there are bet­ter ways for­ward for those who seek com­pro­mise.”
    • Kin­da dif­fer­ent, but kin­da relat­ed: The Cul­ture Wars Are Ancient His­to­ry (Peter Lei­thart, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The real fight isn’t between reli­gion and sec­u­lar­ism, but between two kinds of reli­gion. His book makes the case that today’s cul­ture war shares much in com­mon with the cul­ture war that rocked ancient Rome.” Insight­ful.
  6. The Case Against Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…mer­i­to­crats are often edu­cat­ed to be bad lead­ers, and bad peo­ple, in a very spe­cif­ic way — a way of arro­gant intel­li­gence unmoored from his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence, ambi­tion untem­pered by self-sac­ri­fice. The way of the ‘best and the bright­est’ at the dawn of the tech­no­crat­ic era and the ‘smartest guys in the room’ decades lat­er, the way of the arson­ists of late-2000s Wall Street and the ‘move fast and break things’ cul­ture of Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Is Sex Social­ly Con­struct­ed? (Alex Byrne, Arc Dig­i­tal): “Clear­ly many ani­mals have belonged to the cat­e­go­ry female (or male) with­out exist­ing with­in a soci­ety of any kind. Indeed, there would have been females and males even if life on Earth had been destroyed by an aster­oid half a bil­lion years ago and humans had nev­er evolved. Female and male are there­fore not social­ly con­struct­ed cat­e­gories; that is, sex is not social­ly con­struct­ed.” Byrne is the head of MIT’s depart­ment of lin­guis­tics and phi­los­o­phy. I shared a relat­ed arti­cle of his back in issue 177.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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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