Tag: devotional

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 404

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

This is vol­ume 404, which makes me hap­py that I’ve final­ly found it. If you know, you know.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two arti­cles for spir­i­tu­al growth, both rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Roast What You Kill: Becom­ing a Man Who Fol­lows Through (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “What a strange pic­ture. The man woke up ear­ly. He pre­pared his tools. He lay in wait. He act­ed delib­er­ate­ly, force­ful­ly. He took the prize, brought home the meat — but nev­er cooked it. Per­haps he decid­ed he had worked hard enough for one day. Per­haps he real­ized just how tired he felt. His enthu­si­asm died before the meal was pre­pared. He labored promis­ing­ly, for a time. He remained focused, for a while. His was hard but unfin­ished work. In the end, his plate is just as emp­ty as that of the oth­er slug­gard, wak­ing at his return.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who notes: “The author focus­es on men, but I think a lot of his points apply to women too.”
    • 3 Rea­sons We Avoid Evan­ge­lism (Matt Smethurst, Gospel Coali­tion): “In a post-Chris­t­ian age, we can’t pre­sume any basic assump­tions in those we’re try­ing to reach with the gospel. So we must take care to lean in and lis­ten well, to climb into our neighbor’s way of see­ing and inhab­it­ing the world. Oth­er­wise, we’ll be speak­ing about terms—even bib­li­cal ones—that’ll be sim­ply mis­un­der­stood or reject­ed out­right. ‘God loves you’ is great news, but mean­ing­less if you don’t under­stand the nature of God (or for that mat­ter, love).”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by the very same stu­dent
  2. Why this Jew is binge-watch­ing The Cho­sen (and maybe you should too) (Fay­dra Shapiro. The Times of Israel): “I wish that Jews could under­stand that the New Tes­ta­ment is thor­ough­ly Jew­ish – replete with Jew­ish cat­e­gories and Jew­ish prac­tices, Jew­ish con­tro­ver­sies, Jew­ish scrip­ture, and brim­ming with Jews – I think we could reclaim some of our own his­to­ry. Because let’s face it, if we want to under­stand some­thing about the Judaism of our ances­tors in this spe­cif­ic peri­od, the New Tes­ta­ment has some real val­ue. And if Jews could feel more com­fort­able with the New Tes­ta­ment as com­pris­ing an impor­tant piece of Jew­ish cul­tur­al lit­er­a­ture, we might be able to engage more deeply togeth­er as Jews and Chris­tians.”
    • I’ve met Fay­dra twice and will prob­a­bly meet her again this sum­mer on the Pas­sages trip.
  3. What Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism Has Done to My State and My Faith Is a Sin (Susan Stub­son, New York Times): “I am adrift in this unnamed sea, unteth­ered from both my faith com­mu­ni­ty and my polit­i­cal par­ty as I try to rec­on­cile evan­gel­i­cals’ repeat­ed endorse­ments of can­di­dates who thumb their noses at the least of us. Chris­tians are called to serve God, not a polit­i­cal par­ty, to put our faith in a high­er pow­er, not in human beings. We’re taught not to bow to false idols. Yet idol­a­try is increas­ing­ly promi­nent and our foun­da­tion­al prin­ci­ples — humil­i­ty, kind­ness and com­pas­sion — in short sup­ply.”
    • A good read. Unlocked.
  4. When the Ther­a­peu­tic God Isn’t Suf­fi­cient (John Car­pen­ter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “God’s peo­ple have to endure the cat­a­stro­phes of the world. We can protest ‘it’s not fair, why should we taste the worm­wood and the gall when we didn’t do what brought about the judg­ment?’ But it hap­pens. Peo­ple live mate­ri­al­is­ti­cal­ly, tak­ing loans they can’t pay, get­ting hous­es too expen­sive for them. It’s greed; it’s mate­ri­al­ism. Then the econ­o­my crash­es, like it did in 2008. Is it only the greedy and mate­ri­al­is­tic who suf­fer? No. Many are swept along into unem­ploy­ment and bank­rupt­cy. Ethiopia made some hor­ri­ble eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal choic­es in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. One result was that our daugh­ter died and there was blood every­where.”
    • This is quite good.
  5. The Price of Pot (Aaron Renn, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Accord­ing to a new study from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty researchers, recre­ation­al pot use in teens is asso­ci­at­ed with increased depres­sion and increased sui­ci­dal thoughts. It’s also asso­ci­at­ed with high­er lev­els of tru­an­cy and fight­ing, as well as low­er grade point aver­ages. It’s impor­tant to note that this study zeroed in on non-abu­sive recre­ation­al use, exclud­ing peo­ple that researchers iden­ti­fied as hav­ing a drug prob­lem.”
  6. I taught in San Fran­cis­co. Chil­dren are trained to be offend­ed (James Vescovi, Newsweek): “The city’s trou­bles are in large part due to a mind­set that seems to per­vade life and that I encoun­tered in schools, where I was a high school teacher. In a nut­shell, adults are afraid to offend, while chil­dren seem trained to be offend­ed.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. A dif­fer­ent stu­dent, for those keep­ing track at home.
  7. Yet more praise for Tim Keller
    • 5 ways Tim Keller was the anti-celebri­ty celebri­ty pas­tor (Kate­lyn Beaty, Sub­stack): “This might sound insult­ing, but I mean it in the best way: Tim Keller didn’t lead with his looks. His appear­ance and dress were pleas­ant, and pleas­ant­ly unre­mark­able. I loved this anec­dote from Tyler Huck­abee, that Keller declined doing a pho­to­shoot for a mag­a­zine pro­file. (Free makeover and glossy images? Sign me up!) Huck­abee said Keller just didn’t seem inter­est­ed. Anoth­er way of say­ing this: Keller val­ued sub­stance over style. He didn’t need to be dressed in lux­u­ry cloth­ing for New York­ers to find his mes­sage com­pelling.”
    • A Tale of Two New York City Pas­tors (Kara Bet­tis Car­val­ho, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[In col­lege I attend­ed both Redeemer and Hill­song and] it was hard to miss the stark dif­fer­ences between both church­es and their lead­ers: One formed me. The oth­er enter­tained me.… The nefar­i­ous truth is that we, too, are often respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing celebri­ty pas­tors. In col­lege, was I hun­gry for Scrip­ture and gospel-cen­tered com­mu­ni­ty? Yes. Was I also will­ing to be emo­tion­al­ly tit­il­lat­ed, spir­i­tu­al­ly dis­tract­ed and even enter­tained, and look­ing for a place to belong? Also, yes.”
    • The Far-See­ing Faith of Tim Keller (Michael Luo, New York­er): “His lim­it­ed preach­ing expe­ri­ence, in a small-town church in the Bible Belt, made him an unlike­ly fit for New York City. With­in three years of its found­ing, how­ev­er, Redeemer had swelled from fifty peo­ple to a thou­sand. By the mid-aughts, it had become a bea­con, around the world, for pas­tors inter­est­ed in min­is­ter­ing to cos­mopoli­tan audi­ences. Unlike many sub­ur­ban megachurch­es, with their soft-rock praise bands and user-friend­ly ser­mons, Redeemer’s ser­vices were almost defi­ant­ly staid, fea­tur­ing tra­di­tion­al hymns and litur­gy. But the ser­mons were wry and eru­dite, filled with lit­er­ary allu­sions and philo­soph­i­cal ref­er­ences, and Keller was shrewd about urg­ing his con­gre­gants to exam­ine their ‘coun­ter­feit gods’—their pur­suit of totems like pow­er, sta­tus, and wealth, which the city encour­aged.”
    • Tim Keller Lives (Mar­vin Olasky, Reli­gion and Lib­er­ty Online): “I had one-to-one talks with Keller only three times, so I hope you’ll read else­where about his influ­ence via friend­ships. My wife and I did lis­ten in per­son to his ser­mons from 2008 to 2011, and at first we did so anx­ious­ly. Lis­ten­ing to how he han­dled dif­fi­cult Bible pas­sages was like watch­ing a short­stop rang­ing far to his right on a hard-hit ball: Will he be able to reach it? He has. He’s on the out­field grass: How can he pos­si­bly throw out the run­ner at first? He just did.”
      • As a preach­er, I want to high­light this. Keller’s preach­ing was extra­or­di­nary. Lis­ten­ing to him preach was like watch­ing a gold medal­ist com­pete. No. That’s not right, because lis­ten­ing to preach­ing isn’t pas­sive. Lis­ten­ing to him preach was like being in the ring with a cham­pi­on — when you weren’t busy get­ting pum­meled you were in awe of his skill.
    • What Has Trump Cost Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty? (Ross Douhat, New York Times): “When reli­gious con­ser­vatism made its peace with Don­ald Trump in 2016, the fun­da­men­tal cal­cu­la­tion was that the ben­e­fits of polit­i­cal pow­er — or, alter­na­tive­ly, of keep­ing cul­tur­al lib­er­al­ism out of full polit­i­cal pow­er — out­weighed the costs to Chris­t­ian cred­i­bil­i­ty inher­ent in accept­ing a hea­then fig­ure as a polit­i­cal cham­pi­on and leader. The con­trary cal­cu­la­tion, made by the Chris­t­ian wing of Nev­er Trump, was that accept­ing Trump required moral com­pro­mis­es that Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty would ulti­mate­ly suf­fer for, what­ev­er Supreme Court seats or pol­i­cy vic­to­ries reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives might gain.”
      • Does not go where you expect — this is actu­al­ly an inter­est­ing reflec­tion on Tim Keller. Rec­om­mend­ed.

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 Great Unrav­el­ing (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “I don’t know the answer. But I know that you have to be sort of strange to stand apart and refuse to join Team Red or Team Blue. These strange ones are the ones who think that polit­i­cal vio­lence is wrong, that mob jus­tice is nev­er just and the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence is always right. These are the ones who are skep­ti­cal of state and cor­po­rate pow­er, even when it is clamp­ing down on peo­ple they despise.” From vol­ume 284.

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 403

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

This is vol­ume 403, which is one of those num­bers that feels like it might be prime but is not — it is 13 · 31. I think it’s cool that its prime fac­tors are reversed ver­sions of each oth­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Hap­pened to His­to­ri­an Mol­ly Worthen? (Collin Hansen, Gospel Coali­tion Pod­cast). This 90 minute pod­cast episode was rec­om­mend­ed to me more than once, and I final­ly gave it a lis­ten. I high­ly rec­om­mend it. A well-known his­to­ri­an and jour­nal­ist con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty and tells her sto­ry here. JD Greear and Tim Keller play key roles in the sto­ry.
  2. What the Church Should Do… (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “Sev­er­al times a week, every week, some­body will come up to me and say, “You know what our church should do?” … I’ll smile and say, ‘That’s a great idea. Get back to me when you’ve got it worked out.’ Most peo­ple are very annoyed by my answer. I don’t know why. God had giv­en them that bur­den, not me. I learned a long time ago, I can only do so much. I’ve also learned every fol­low­er of Christ is unique­ly gift­ed and called to serve the Kingdom’s redemp­tive mis­sion in the world.”
  3. Died: Tim Keller, New York City Pas­tor Who Mod­eled Win­some Wit­ness (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Tim Keller, a New York City pas­tor who min­is­tered to young urban pro­fes­sion­als and in the process became a lead­ing exam­ple for how a win­some Chris­t­ian wit­ness could win a hear­ing for the gospel even in unlike­ly places, died on Fri­day at age 72—three years after being diag­nosed with pan­cre­at­ic can­cer.”
    • Tim Keller Prac­ticed the Grace He Preached (Col­in Hansen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “His steadi­ness under this grow­ing hos­til­i­ty gave courage and com­fort to younger lead­ers who became dis­il­lu­sioned by the fall of so many of our for­mer heroes. Even I wor­ried about uncov­er­ing unflat­ter­ing secrets when I began writ­ing his biog­ra­phy. Instead, talk­ing to dozens of Keller’s close friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers who knew him from child­hood only con­firmed my per­son­al expe­ri­ence of him.”
    • He Made Me Want to Be More Like Jesus (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “You see, the point about Tim Keller is that he was gra­cious toward peo­ple who couldn’t repay him, because he knew that Jesus had been gra­cious to him first. Tim real­ly, gen­uine­ly, total­ly believed that he was more sin­ful than he could ever have imag­ined, and more loved by God than he could have ever hoped. He believed this. And this belief spilled out in how he inter­act­ed with oth­ers.”
    • Tim Keller Prac­ticed the Grace He Preached (Col­in Hansen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “His steadi­ness under this grow­ing hos­til­i­ty gave courage and com­fort to younger lead­ers who became dis­il­lu­sioned by the fall of so many of our for­mer heroes. Even I wor­ried about uncov­er­ing unflat­ter­ing secrets when I began writ­ing his biog­ra­phy. Instead, talk­ing to dozens of Keller’s close friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers who knew him from child­hood only con­firmed my per­son­al expe­ri­ence of him.”
    • We nev­er met, but Keller was extreme­ly influ­en­tial on me and I mourn his pass­ing.
  4. How I became a ‘Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist’ (Ken­neth L. Wood­ward, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with find­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists is that no one can agree on what the term means.”
  5. Why Is The Aca­d­e­m­ic Job Mar­ket So Weird? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten):  “Col­leges want two things from their pro­fes­sors. First, they need them to teach class­es. Sec­ond, they need them to do good research, raise the college’s rep­u­ta­tion, and look pres­ti­gious. Col­leges want to pre­tend to stu­dents that the same peo­ple are doing both these jobs, because stu­dents like the idea of being taught by pres­ti­gious thought lead­ers. But they don’t want to actu­al­ly have the same peo­ple do both jobs, because the most valu­able use of pres­ti­gious thought lead­ers’ time is doing research or pro­mot­ing their ideas. Every hour Ein­stein spends in the class­room is an hour he’s not spend­ing in the lab mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies that will rain down hon­ors upon him­self and his insti­tu­tion. And there’s no guar­an­tee Ein­stein is even a good teacher. Solu­tion: hire for two dif­fer­ent posi­tions, but give them the same job title to make things max­i­mal­ly con­fus­ing for stu­dents. Have them occa­sion­al­ly do each oth­ers’ jobs, so stu­dents get even more con­fused. You very con­spic­u­ous­ly hire Ein­stein, and hold out the car­rot of being taught by Ein­stein. But Ein­stein actu­al­ly only teach­es one 400-lev­el sem­i­nar a year, and every oth­er class is taught by the cheap­est per­son able to teach at all.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. Rec­om­mend­ed espe­cial­ly to any­one who aspires to acad­e­mia.
  6. Legal­iz­ing Mar­i­jua­na Is a Big Mis­take (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Of all the ways to win a cul­ture war, the smoothest is to just make the oth­er side seem hope­less­ly uncool. So it’s been with the march of mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion: There have been moral argu­ments about the excess­es of the drug war and med­ical argu­ments about the poten­tial ben­e­fits of pot, but the vibe of the whole debate has pit­ted the chill against the uptight, the cool against the square, the relaxed future against the Prin­ci­pal Skin­ners of the past.”
    • Unlocked and worth your time.
  7. He Told Fol­low­ers to Starve to Meet Jesus. Why Did So Many Do It? (Andrew Hig­gins, New York Times): “As of this past week, 179 bod­ies have been exhumed and moved to a hos­pi­tal mor­tu­ary in the coastal town of Malin­di, around 100 miles east of Shaka­ho­la, for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and autop­sy. The government’s chief pathol­o­gists report­ed last week that while star­va­tion caused many deaths, some of the bod­ies showed signs of death by asphyx­i­a­tion, stran­gu­la­tion or blud­geon­ing. Some had had organs removed, a police affi­davit said.”
    • I shared a news arti­cle about this before,  but this one has more detail. Wild. Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Every­thing Is Bro­ken (Alana New­house, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Being on a ship near­ly 4 mil­lion square miles in area along with 330 mil­lion oth­er peo­ple and real­iz­ing the entire hull is pock­marked with holes is ter­ri­fy­ing.” Wide-rang­ing. From vol­ume 284.

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 401

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

This is vol­ume 401, the 79th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Oth­er Half of Dis­ci­ple­ship (Mike Glenn, Scot McK­night’s Sub­stack): “The test of every great recipe is, does the dish taste good when it’s pre­pared? The test of truth for every dis­ci­ple is, did the teach­ing of Jesus prove true when it was lived out? Paul was con­fi­dent of Jesus’ faith­ful­ness because he had lived out the teach­ings of Jesus in the most try­ing of cir­cum­stances. That’s why he was able to write, ‘I know in whom I have believed.’ Most of us lack this kind of true life con­fi­dence in God’s Word because we’ve nev­er tried to live out what we know. A mem­o­rized dis­ci­ple­ship is only half known.”
  2. Home­less in the City Where He Was Once May­or (Mike Bak­er, New York Times): “The words jolt­ed Mr. Mar­tin with a mix of recog­ni­tion and dis­be­lief. He had known Craig Coyn­er for more than 50 years, watch­ing with admi­ra­tion as the man from one of the most promi­nent fam­i­lies in Bend, Ore., rose through an acclaimed career — as a pros­e­cu­tor, a defense lawyer and then a may­or who helped turn the town into one of the nation’s fastest-grow­ing cities. Now, at age 75, Mr. Coyn­er was occu­py­ing a bed at the shel­ter on Sec­ond Street, his house lost to fore­clo­sure, his toes gnarled by frost­bite, his belong­ings lim­it­ed to a tub of tat­tered cloth­ing and books on the floor next to his bed.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent, this is a wild and heart­break­ing sto­ry. I have unlocked the pay­wall.
  3. The Long Road to Con­fronting China’s War on Reli­gion: Part I (Carl M. Can­non & Susan Crab­tree, Real Clear Pol­i­tics): “The impulse [to restrict reli­gion is root­ed in the truth] that the major faiths observed in Chi­na are not indige­nous to the world’s old­est civ­i­liza­tion. Bud­dhism was import­ed from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in over­land trad­ing routes and human migra­tion from the Mid­dle East, while Chris­tian­i­ty, anoth­er Abra­ham­ic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and Amer­i­ca. To Com­mu­nist lead­ers, and many Han Chi­nese civil­ians, these tra­di­tions rep­re­sent poten­tial­ly desta­bi­liz­ing for­eign influ­ence.  The para­dox, of course, is that Marx­ism was also a for­eign import, one imposed on Chi­nese soci­ety – in Mao Zedong’s own words – from ‘the bar­rel of a gun.’ It not only desta­bi­lized China’s exist­ing social struc­tures and spir­i­tu­al tra­di­tions, but as Marx­ist-Lenin­ism mor­phed into Mao­ism, also became a kind of nation­al reli­gion itself – with Mao Zedong in the role of sav­ior.”
  4. There is No Chris­t­ian Argu­ment for Pro­tect­ing Pornog­ra­phy (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “This chart reveals that at the exact same time there’s been a sig­nif­i­cant decline in over­all sex­u­al activ­i­ty, there’s been a sig­nif­i­cant increase in young adults who’ve had a same-sex encounter. Now let’s ask a ques­tion: What could be true of a gen­er­a­tion that would cause it both to 1) have a lot few­er sex­u­al encoun­ters than gen­er­a­tions before it, but also 2) be much more will­ing than pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions to exper­i­ment? I think I have one plau­si­ble answer.… Could it be that a sex reces­sion and a blur­ring of the lines between male and female are con­sis­tent con­se­quences of young peo­ple who have expe­ri­enced a porno­graph­ic stag­ing of the human body since before puber­ty? Giv­en all this porn, why have sex, and why not have it with whomev­er?”
  5. From the Com­ments (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Pro­fes­sion­al med­ical ethics are bogus. There is no con­sis­ten­cy and the entire pro­fes­sion serves to pan­der to the prej­u­dices of the edu­cat­ed.”
    • Brief but bru­tal per­spec­tive on the med­ical resis­tance to human chal­lenge tri­als.
  6. Raise Your Thresh­old For Accus­ing Peo­ple Of Fak­ing Bisex­u­al­i­ty (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Sup­pose some­one (let’s say a woman) has exact­ly equal sex­u­al attrac­tion to both men and women. Their male dat­ing pool is all het­ero­sex­u­al and bisex­u­al men (95%+ of men), and their female dat­ing pool is all les­bian and bisex­u­al women (about 5–10% of women). So their poten­tial dat­ing pool is about 90% male. So this ‘per­fect­ly’ bisex­u­al woman could be expect­ed to date about 10x as many men as women, just by num­bers alone. The aver­age per­son dates about sev­en peo­ple before mar­riage (yes, this seems low to me too). So if our bisex­u­al woman sam­ples exact­ly even­ly from her male vs. female dat­ing pool, we would expect about a 50–50 chance (0.90^7 = 0.478) that all sev­en of her rela­tion­ships would be with men.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing break­down of some things I had rarely con­sid­ered.
  7. The Cost Dis­ease of the Pop­ulist Sec­tor (Daniel W. Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “The com­min­gling of the rich and the pow­er­ful is a sto­ry as old as civ­i­liza­tion, but in the cur­rent era of cap­i­tal­ism the dynam­ic has become even more prob­lem­at­ic. David Brooks warned about ‘sta­tus-income dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um’ in Bobos in Par­adise: those who pos­sess sta­tus but not wealth live first-class lives dur­ing the day but mid­dle-class lives in the evening. Over time, these folks start to resent the mid­dle-class aspects of their exis­tence.”
    • This is a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion scan­dals than I had con­sid­ered before.

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 My White Priv­i­lege Didn’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quil­lette): “Not long after, I walked into a sub­ur­ban Bap­tist church, full of strange, unfash­ion­ably dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. I was a Marx­ist, a fem­i­nist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smok­er, and des­per­ate. The love I received in that place is the rea­son that I will defend the rights of fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to my dying breath.”

This is amaz­ing. Reminder: titles are rarely cho­sen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an arti­cle. From vol­ume 279.

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 380

I found a remark­ably strong list of arti­cles to choose from this week — what float­ed to the top is worth pon­der­ing

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

This is vol­ume 380, which one web­site claims is the num­ber of 13-bead neck­lace pat­terns you can cre­ate if you have only two col­ors of beads. That seems real­ly low to me so I must not under­stand the way they define pat­terns and I don’t want to do the math, so that’s my num­ber fac­toid for the week.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Euthana­sia Has Done to Cana­da (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The idea that human rights encom­pass a right to self-destruc­tion, the con­ceit that peo­ple in a state of ter­ri­ble suf­fer­ing and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty are real­ly ‘free’ to make a choice that ends all choic­es, the idea that a heal­ing pro­fes­sion should include death in its bat­tery of treat­ments — these are inher­ent­ly destruc­tive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cru­el brave new world, a dehu­man­iz­ing final chap­ter for the lib­er­al sto­ry.”
    • Woman fea­tured in pro-euthana­sia com­mer­cial want­ed to live, say friends (Tristin Hop­per, Nation­al Post): “In sev­er­al more egre­gious cas­es, Cana­di­ans have even been offered MAID in lieu of prop­er med­ical treat­ment. Last month, a House of Com­mons com­mit­tee heard about five sep­a­rate inci­dents of Cana­di­an Armed Forces vet­er­ans being offered MAID after seek­ing assis­tance with issues rang­ing from depres­sion to PTSD. Most recent­ly, for­mer par­a­lympian Chris­tine Gau­thi­er went pub­lic with her sto­ry of being offered MAID by a Vet­er­ans Affairs case­work­er after she com­plained about delays in installing an in-home chair­lift.”
  2. What Too Lit­tle For­give­ness Does to Us (Tim Keller, New York Times): “…there must be the recog­ni­tion that for­give­ness does not con­tra­dict the pur­suit of jus­tice. Rather, it is its pre­con­di­tion. For­giv­ing is not excus­ing. To for­give some­thing, you must name it as the evil it is.… [But] if you don’t for­give inter­nal­ly, you won’t con­front the wrong­do­ers for justice’s sake or for future vic­tims’ sake or for God’s sake. You will be doing it for your sake, and the project will go awry. ”
  3. Anato­my of a Can­cel­la­tion (Scott Yenor, First Things): “The Title IX charges marked an esca­la­tion and, strange­ly, a path to qua­si-vic­to­ry.… I had been prepar­ing for it for years, know­ing that some­one who treads on con­tro­ver­sial top­ics such as the fam­i­ly and fem­i­nism would even­tu­al­ly face the ire of the university’s civ­il rights regime. All my lec­tures for the past five years are record­ed and stored. All stu­dent com­mu­ni­ca­tions and grades are saved. I had kept detailed records on whom I called on dur­ing each class.”
    • Remark­able. Will prob­a­bly enter my ros­ter of clas­sics I repost at the bot­tom of these emails.
  4. Remem­ber­ing What Repen­tance Looks Like (David French, The Dis­patch): “Any per­son can live a life of great mean­ing and hon­or far removed from the spot­light. And not one of us is capa­ble of peer­ing into a man’s heart to know when he’s changed. But let me sug­gest a clear warn­ing sign that repen­tance isn’t real—when a pow­er­ful per­son doesn’t just ask for for­give­ness but also seeks restora­tion to the life they lived before. No one is enti­tled to be a pas­tor or a politi­cian, and there are times when the con­tin­ued quest for those posi­tions is itself a sign that a per­son sim­ply doesn’t under­stand the price they should pay when they’ve com­mit­ted a seri­ous wrong.”
  5. When Gay Rights Clash With Reli­gious Free­dom (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Ms. Smith serves gay cus­tomers. She would not refuse to build a web­site for some­one sim­ply because the per­son is gay. She specif­i­cal­ly does not want her ser­vices to be used as part of a cel­e­bra­tion of a same-sex wed­ding. We make sim­i­lar allowances for oth­er ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences. A pro-choice artist should not be com­pelled to make a logo for a pro-life ral­ly. A pro­gres­sive par­ty plan­ner should not be required to take on a Trump PAC as a client. A gay web design­er ought not be forced to cre­ate a site pro­mot­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive church.”
    • Relat­ed: The Respect for Mar­riage Act Is Also a Vic­to­ry for Same-Sex-Mar­riage Oppo­nents (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “When this bill is signed into law, there will be a fed­er­al statute that makes a res­o­lu­tion of con­flict between reli­gious free­dom and gay-rights claims explic­it in a way that it arguably was not before, clear­ly favor­ing a reli­gious group over a gay couple—even though the con­flict involves open ques­tions on the rela­tion­ship between the First Amend­ment and antidis­crim­i­na­tion laws.”
    • Gersen is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law.
  6. More about Chat­G­PT and AI gen­er­al­ly
    • Does Chat­G­PT Mean Robots Are Com­ing For the Skilled Jobs? (Paul Krug­man, New York Times): “OK, I didn’t write the para­graph you just read; Chat­G­PT did, in response to the ques­tion ‘How will A.I. affect the demand for knowl­edge work­ers?’ The give­away, to me at least, is that I still refuse to use ‘impact’ as a verb. And it didn’t explic­it­ly lay out exact­ly why we should, over­all, expect no impact on aggre­gate employ­ment. But it was arguably bet­ter than what many humans, includ­ing some peo­ple who imag­ine them­selves smart, would have writ­ten.” Nobel lau­re­ate Paul Krug­man opin­ing on the poten­tial impact of tech­nol­o­gy like Chat­G­PT.
    • The Mechan­i­cal Pro­fes­sor (Ethan Mol­lick, Sub­stack): “But, rather than be scared of AI, we should think about how these sys­tems pro­vide us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help extend our own capa­bil­i­ties. Think of it like hav­ing an intern, but one who just hap­pens to work instan­teous­ly, can write both code and sol­id descrip­tive writ­ing, and has a large chunk of the world’s knowl­edge in their brain.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of man­age­ment at the Whar­ton School.
    • Before the flood (Samuel Ham­mond, Sub­stack): “In par­tic­u­lar, I sus­pect near-term AI will break a lot of things, start­ing with our lega­cy insti­tu­tions. The firmware of the US gov­ern­ment is 70+ years old. We val­i­date people’s iden­ti­ty with a nine dig­it num­ber­ing sys­tem cre­at­ed in 1936. The Admin­is­tra­tive Pro­ce­dure Act, which gov­erns all reg­u­la­to­ry process, came only ten years lat­er. The IRS Mas­ter File runs on assem­bly from the 1960s. Our labor laws are from the assem­bly line era. Unem­ploy­ment Insur­ance — the safe­ty-net for help­ing peo­ple adjust to employ­ment shocks from AI or oth­er­wise — is so bro­ken that Con­gress found it eas­i­er to give every­one an extra $600 a week and live with $150 bil­lion worth of fraud than to recruit the retired Cobol engi­neers nec­es­sary to sim­ply update the code. There is a great deal of ruin in this nation.” The author is the direc­to­ry of social pol­i­cy for the Niska­nen Cen­ter.
    • How come GPT can seem so bril­liant one minute and so breath­tak­ing­ly dumb the next? (Gary Mar­cus, Sub­stack): “GPT doesn’t talk ran­dom­ly, because it’s pas­tich­ing things actu­al peo­ple said. (Or, more often, syn­onyms and para­phras­es of those things.) When GPT gets things right, it is often com­bin­ing bits that don’t belong togeth­er, but not quite in ran­dom ways, but rather in ways where there is some over­lap in some aspect or anoth­er.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • What are the pol­i­tics of Chat­G­PT? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Most of all, I see Chat­G­PT as ‘pro-West­ern’ in its per­spec­tive, while grant­i­ng there are dif­fer­ent visions of what this means. I also see Chat­G­PT as ‘con­tro­ver­sy min­i­miz­ing,’ for both com­mer­cial rea­sons but also for sim­ply wish­ing to get on with the sub­stan­tive work with a min­i­mum of exter­nal fuss. I would not myself have built it so dif­fer­ent­ly, and note that the bias may lie in the train­ing data rather than any bias­es of the cre­ators.”
  7. Air­plane Mode to Become Obso­lete in the EU (Nik­ki Main, Giz­mo­do): “It’s been said that the rea­son for ban­ning cell phone use on air­planes is because it could inter­fere with the pilot’s nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems. How­ev­er, Busi­ness Insid­er report­ed in 2017 that the FCC instat­ed the air­plane cell phone ban to ‘pro­tect against radio inter­fer­ence to cell phone net­works on the ground.’ If all air­lines allowed cell phone access at 40,000 feet in the air, mul­ti­ple cell tow­ers on the ground could pick up on ser­vice from active cell phones which could crowd the ground net­works, dis­rupt­ing ser­vice, accord­ing to the out­let.”
    • This one intrigues me because it calls into ques­tion a sit­u­a­tion so many of us take for grant­ed. I, for one, would not like there to be phone calls on air­planes (hard to read or watch a movie with that going on next to you). But stay­ing touch via text would be nice.

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 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.” From vol­ume 254.

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 346

strong arti­cles this week — more rec­om­mend­ed than nor­mal

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

This, vol­ume 346, is the 5th Franel num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Spir­i­tu­al­ly uplift­ing:
    • Fire Upon The Earth (Charles Cha­put, First Things): “Too many peo­ple who claim to be Chris­t­ian sim­ply don’t know Jesus Christ. They don’t real­ly believe in the gospel. They feel embar­rassed by their reli­gion and out of step with the times. They may keep their reli­gion for its com­fort val­ue, or adjust it to fit their doubts. It doesn’t reshape their lives, because it isn’t real. And because it isn’t real, it has no trans­form­ing effect on their behav­ior, no social force, and few pub­lic con­se­quences. Their faith, what­ev­er it once was, is now dead.” THIS IS STRAIGHT FIRE. The excerpt does not do it jus­tice.
    • The Man On The Mid­dle Cross (Alis­tair Begg, YouTube): one and a half min­utes.
    • It’s Fri­day… But Sun­day’s a Com­ing! (YouTube): three and a half min­utes
  2. Recalled Expe­ri­ences Sur­round­ing Death: More Than Hal­lu­ci­na­tions? (Neu­ro­science News): “The recalled expe­ri­ences sur­round­ing death are not con­sis­tent with hal­lu­ci­na­tions, illu­sions or psy­che­del­ic drug induced expe­ri­ences, accord­ing to sev­er­al pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished stud­ies. Instead, they fol­low a spe­cif­ic nar­ra­tive arc involv­ing a per­cep­tion of: (a) sep­a­ra­tion from the body with a height­ened, vast sense of con­scious­ness and recog­ni­tion of death; (b) trav­el to a des­ti­na­tion; © a mean­ing­ful and pur­pose­ful review of life, involv­ing a crit­i­cal analy­sis of all actions, inten­tions and thoughts towards oth­ers; a per­cep­tion of (d) being in a place that feels like “home”, and (e) a return back to life.” The orig­i­nal research: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.14740
  3. Why the Past 10 Years of Amer­i­can Life Have Been Unique­ly Stu­pid (Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic): “The sto­ry of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what hap­pened to Amer­i­ca in the 2010s, and for the frac­tured coun­try we now inhab­it. Some­thing went ter­ri­bly wrong, very sud­den­ly. We are dis­ori­ent­ed, unable to speak the same lan­guage or rec­og­nize the same truth. We are cut off from one anoth­er and from the past.” This is quite good. Haidt is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU and is some­one who seems to be faith-adja­cent: he’s near Chris­tian­i­ty but not there yet.
  4. LGBTQ relat­ed
    • What I wish I’d known when I was 19 and had sex reas­sign­ment surgery (Corin­na Cohn, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Surgery unshack­led me from my body’s urges, but the destruc­tion of my gonads intro­duced a dif­fer­ent type of bondage. From the day of my surgery, I became a med­ical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life.” I am impressed that the Wash­ing­ton Post pub­lished this op-ed.
    • How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Cul­ture War (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If con­ser­v­a­tives had pre­dict­ed just before Oberge­fell v. Hodges that soon a fifth of young adults would iden­ti­fy as L.G.B.T.Q., promi­nent voic­es would deploy terms like ‘preg­nant per­son’ and ‘men­stru­a­tor’ in place of ‘woman,’ and natal males would be win­ning women’s track and swim­ming com­pe­ti­tions, they would have been treat­ed as hys­ter­ics.” This is a strong essay. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed and worth using up one of your pay­wall access­es.
    • Vic­to­ry: Shawnee State agrees pro­fes­sors can’t be forced to speak con­trary to their beliefs (Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom): “As part of the set­tle­ment, the uni­ver­si­ty has agreed that Meri­wether has the right to choose when to use, or avoid using, titles or pro­nouns when refer­ring to or address­ing stu­dents. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the uni­ver­si­ty agreed Meri­wether will nev­er be man­dat­ed to use pro­nouns, includ­ing if a stu­dent requests pro­nouns that con­flict with his or her bio­log­i­cal sex.” In addi­tion, “the uni­ver­si­ty agreed to pay $400,000 in dam­ages and Meriwether’s attor­neys’ fees.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • The Accu­ra­cy of Author­i­ties (Robin Han­son, blog): “The best esti­mates of a max­i­mal­ly accu­rate source would be very fre­quent­ly updat­ed and fol­low a ran­dom walk, which implies a large amount of back­track­ing. And author­i­ta­tive sources like WHO are often said to be our most accu­rate sources. Even so, such sources do not tend to act this way. They instead update their esti­mates rarely, and are espe­cial­ly reluc­tant to issue esti­mates that seem to back­track. Why?” There is sol­id wis­dom in this post.
    • Faith, Sci­ence, and Fran­cis Collins (Dhruv Khullar, New York­er): “In May, 2021, after help­ing to lead the fed­er­al pan­dem­ic response for more than a year, dur­ing which he woke up most morn­ings at four-thir­ty, Collins escaped for a week­end to a rent­ed barn in Loudoun Coun­ty, Vir­ginia. He brought his gui­tar and a Bible that he has had for decades; hors­es and goats kept him com­pa­ny. Collins gazed out at the blue sky and rolling hills. He wrote, prayed, and ulti­mate­ly decid­ed to leave his post as the direc­tor of the N.I.H. Collins told me that he prays not to ask God to change his cir­cum­stances, but to ask God what he him­self should do.”
    • A Warn­ing From Shang­hai (Jay Bat­tacharya, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Yet the soul search­ing [of the attack on me and oth­er researchers] should have caused among pub­lic health offi­cials has large­ly failed to occur. Instead, the les­son seems to be: Dis­sent at your own risk. I do not prac­tice medicine—I am a pro­fes­sor spe­cial­iz­ing in epi­demi­ol­o­gy and health pol­i­cy at Stan­ford Med­ical School. But many friends who do prac­tice have told me how they have cen­sored their thoughts about Covid lock­downs, vac­cines, and rec­om­mend­ed treat­ment to avoid the mob.”
  6. The Law that Banned Every­thing (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If every­thing is poten­tial­ly ille­gal, and gov­ern­ment does not have the resources to go after every­thing, then the gov­ern­ment basi­cal­ly has arbi­trary pow­er to do what­ev­er it wants under civ­il rights law.” This was an absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view. The inter­vie­wee is a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego.
  7. A primer on the Stan­ford bud­get (Tim Macken­zie, Stan­ford Dai­ly) “… this year’s oper­at­ing bud­get says ‘the buffers serve as a finan­cial reserve in the event of an earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter.’ In oth­er words, Stan­ford has near­ly $4 bil­lion in a rainy-day fund. In the 2019–2020 bud­get, the last pre-COVID bud­get, Tier I and Tier II Buffers stood at $1.4 bil­lion and $1.0 bil­lion, respec­tive­ly. The buffers actu­al­ly grew by more than a bil­lion dol­lars dur­ing the ongo­ing pan­dem­ic. Mean­while, hun­dreds of work­ers were laid off and sub­con­tract­ed work­ers went months with­out promised pay. Appar­ent­ly, a glob­al pan­dem­ic does not reach the thresh­old of ‘earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter’ required to uti­lize finan­cial reserves to resist changes in uni­ver­si­ty oper­a­tions when chal­lenged with mar­ket uncer­tain­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 285

anoth­er fair­ly brief roundup

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

Fun fact: 285 is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares (1+4+9+16…+81).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Will Get to Herd Immu­ni­ty in 2021…One Way or Anoth­er (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “By July it will all be over. The only ques­tion is how many peo­ple have to die between now and then? Youyang Gu, whose pro­jec­tions have been among the most accu­rate, projects that the Unit­ed States will have reached herd immu­ni­ty by July, with about half of the immu­ni­ty com­ing from vac­ci­na­tions and half from infec­tions. Long before we reach herd immu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, the infec­tion and death rates will fall. Gu is pro­ject­ing that by March infec­tions will be half what they are now and by May about one-tenth the cur­rent rate. The drop will catch peo­ple by sur­prise just like the increase. We are not good at expo­nen­tials.” I hope this is right!
    • Relat­ed: Unit­ed King­dom vs Unit­ed States Vac­cine Fight (Poli­math, Sub­stack): “The Unit­ed States has vac­ci­nat­ed more indi­vid­u­als by far than any oth­er coun­try in the world. One in four of all COVID vac­ci­na­tions in the world have tak­en place in the Unit­ed States. The three coun­tries that are doing the best per-capi­ta (Israel, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, and Bahrain) are all incred­i­bly small and dense.” This is short and encour­ag­ing.
  2. Failed Trump Prophe­cies Offer a Les­son in Humil­i­ty (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “The failed prophe­cies of Don­ald Trump’s reelec­tion may have dam­aged the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the US inde­pen­dent Charis­mat­ic wing of evan­gel­i­cal­ism more than any event since the tel­e­van­ge­list scan­dals of the 1980s. They have led some out­siders to crit­i­cize Chris­tian­i­ty itself and right­ly call us to introspection.“Keener is one of my favorite NT schol­ars.
  3. Two Worlds: So Much Pros­per­i­ty, So Much Skep­ti­cism (Mor­gan Housel, Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “I want to tell you two of the biggest eco­nom­ic sto­ries that aren’t get­ting enough atten­tion. One is that house­hold finances might be in the best shape they’ve ever been in. Ever. That might sound crazy, and it’s easy to over­look because of the sec­ond sto­ry: Covid has dumped kerosene on wealth inequal­i­ty in ways we’ve yet to ful­ly grasp.”
  4. The Case For Wood­en Pews (Yuval Levin, Deseret Mag­a­zine): “It is not exact­ly a cri­sis of belief in the teach­ings of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion [that under­mines faith], but rather a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in the insti­tu­tions that claim to embody them. In oth­er words, Amer­i­cans aren’t los­ing their faith in God. Eighty-sev­en per­cent of the pub­lic expressed belief in God last year in Gallup’s fig­ures, which is rough­ly the lev­el poll­sters have found for many decades. What Amer­i­cans do have trou­ble believ­ing, how­ev­er, is that our insti­tu­tions — our church­es, sem­i­nar­ies, reli­gious schools and char­i­ties — remain capa­ble of form­ing trust­wor­thy peo­ple who actu­al­ly exhib­it the integri­ty they preach.” Sol­id, although the title is mis­lead­ing.
  5. Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign.
  6. What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine.
  7. Rise of the zom­bie ants: why hype is creep­ing into sci­en­tif­ic papers. (Gem­ma Con­roy, Nature Index): “The review found that near­ly half of these stud­ies uncov­ered incon­sis­ten­cies between abstracts and their full text, with 19% cit­ing major dis­crep­an­cies. Two stud­ies cit­ed exam­ples where non-sig­nif­i­cant results were framed in over­ly opti­mistic terms in the abstracts.”

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 Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books I find 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.”  First shared in vol­ume 217.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 203

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Heart of the Evan­gel­i­cal Cri­sis (Mark Gal­li, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “My next thought was, ‘Well, if I call myself a Chris­t­ian, I should have greater love and desire to know God more deeply. Per­haps I should pray for that.’ And that’s when some­thing occurred to me with great force: I wasn’t sure I want­ed that. I rec­og­nize that was an odd admis­sion for a per­son who claimed to be a good Chris­t­ian. But there it was. I didn’t think I real­ly want­ed to love God more. The rea­sons for that are com­plex and will be touched on lat­er, but the bot­tom line was: I real­ly didn’t want to love God.” First essay in a series.
  2. Abor­tion in Amer­i­ca, explained in 10 facts (Anna North, Vox): “Even though the abor­tion rate has declined, the pro­ce­dure remains com­mon­place. Accord­ing to a 2017 analy­sis by the Guttmach­er Insti­tute, 23.7 per­cent of women in the Unit­ed States will have an abor­tion by the age of 45. Nine­teen per­cent will have one by age 30, and 4.6 per­cent will have one by age 20.”
    • Debunk­ing 9 Myths Sur­round­ing Alabama’s Abor­tion Law (Car­ole Noviel­li, Live Action): “This bill, HB314, was spon­sored by a female law­mak­er, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ter­ri Collins, and was signed into law by female Gov­er­nor Kay Ivey. Pro-life orga­ni­za­tions are led by women. The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court deci­sion, on the oth­er hand, was imposed by all men.”
    • Alaba­ma and Geor­gia Are Throw­ing Down the Gaunt­let against Roe. Good. (David French, Nation­al Review): dif­fi­cult to excerpt. A good sum­ma­ry of the legal strat­e­gy the south­ern states are pur­su­ing.
    • I’m an anti-abor­tion Chris­t­ian. But Alabama’s ban will do more harm than good. (Kather­ine Kelaidis, Vox): “Dra­con­ian bans on abor­tion — and frankly any­thing oth­er than lib­er­al access to abor­tions along with com­pre­hen­sive sex edu­ca­tion and access to con­tra­cep­tion — fail to pro­tect human life, both in the womb and out­side of it. This, in itself, should be intol­er­a­ble to any Chris­t­ian, par­tic­u­lar­ly one who views abor­tion as moral­ly sus­pect.”
    • Why some anti-abor­tion con­ser­v­a­tives think Alabama’s abor­tion law goes too far (Jane Coas­ton, Vox): “A 2018 Gallup poll found that just 29 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe abor­tion should be legal in all cir­cum­stances, but that out­weighs the 18 per­cent of Amer­i­cans who believe abor­tion should be ille­gal in all cir­cum­stances. The vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans think abor­tion should be legal, with restric­tions of some kind (abor­tions being per­mit­ted only with­in the first three months of preg­nan­cy, for exam­ple).”
    • That lat­est Pat Robert­son juridi­cal quote: Jour­nal­ists may want to note these inter­est­ing facts (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Robert­son is (a) mak­ing a com­ment about legal ques­tions linked to this Alaba­ma law and, (b) also about the polit­i­cal real­i­ties sur­round­ing it. Thus, I am ask­ing: Should jour­nal­ists con­sid­er adding one or two sen­tences to their reports not­ing that Robert­son is (a) a grad­u­ate of Yale Law School and (b) some­one who grew up in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., as the son of a U.S. Sen­a­tor? How many read­ers know these two facts about this famous reli­gious leader?” Wait. What? I had no idea.
    • Most Abor­tion-Mind­ed Women Aren’t Cal­cu­lat­ing Killers. They’re Afraid (Maria Baer, Gospel Coali­tion): the whole thing is worth read­ing — this bit caught my atten­tion but isn’t real­ly close to her main point: “Evil often begets more evil. While many who sup­port so-called abor­tion rights believe they’re serv­ing needy women, they’re over­look­ing one crit­i­cal real­i­ty: Women are often brought—reluctantly—to the abor­tion doc­tor. These women are com­pelled toward abor­tion not by their own empow­er­ing, my-body-is-my-own sense of auton­o­my, but by anoth­er per­son seek­ing con­trol. Angry boyfriends, angry hus­bands, angry moth­ers, angry employers—these are so often the wind at the back of an abor­tion-mind­ed woman.”
  3. Too many men: Chi­na and India bat­tle with the con­se­quences of gen­der imbal­ance (Simon Deny­er & Annie Gowen,South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): this arti­cle is a year old, it’s long but good. “Noth­ing like this has hap­pened in human his­to­ry. A com­bi­na­tion of cul­tur­al pref­er­ences, gov­ern­ment decree and mod­ern med­ical tech­nol­o­gy in the world’s two largest coun­tries has cre­at­ed a gen­der imbal­ance on a con­ti­nen­tal scale. Men out­num­ber women by 70 mil­lion in Chi­na and India…. In any giv­en age group, a pro­por­tion of men will fail to find brides, but they will stay in the mar­riage mar­ket, com­pet­ing with younger men to mar­ry younger women. The dis­pro­por­tion keeps grow­ing. By 2050, French demog­ra­ph­er Christophe Guil­mo­to esti­mates, there could be between 150 to 190 men for every 100 women in China’s mar­riage mar­ket.”
  4. A few brief obser­va­tions about think­ing clear­ly:
    • Account­ing Iden­ti­ties and the Implic­it The­o­ry of Iner­tia (Nick Rowe, Worth­while Cana­di­an Ini­tia­tive): “Ani­mals can be divid­ed into Car­ni­vores and Non-Car­ni­vores: A = C + NC. There­fore, if we add some wolves to an island of sheep, the num­ber of ani­mals on that island will increase. It’s easy to see why that argu­ment might not be right. Wolves kill sheep. But if you did­n’t know that fact about wolves and sheep, the argu­ment looks very appeal­ing. But the equa­tion A = C + NC tells us absolute­ly noth­ing about the world; it’s an account­ing iden­ti­ty that is true by def­i­n­i­tion. The only thing it tells you is how I have cho­sen to divide up the world into parts. And I can choose an infi­nite num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways to divide the world up into parts.” This is an impor­tant insight.
    • Why Do Exper­i­ments Make Peo­ple Uneasy? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “One fac­tor which comes out of respon­dent com­ments is that the exper­i­ment forces peo­ple to reck­on with the idea that even experts don’t know what the right thing to do is and that con­fes­sion of igno­rance both­ers peo­ple. (This is also one rea­son why peo­ple may pre­fer pun­dits who always ‘know’ the right thing to do even when they man­i­fest­ly do not).”
    • Our first instinct is far too often wrong (Tim Har­ford, Finan­cial Times): “In a mul­ti­ple-choice test, you some­times write down an answer and then have sec­ond thoughts. Is it wise to stay with your first instincts, or bet­ter to switch? Most peo­ple would advise that the ini­tial answer is usu­al­ly bet­ter than the doubt-plagued sec­ond guess…. Researchers have been study­ing this ques­tion since the 1920s. They have over­whelm­ing­ly con­clud­ed both that indi­vid­ual answer changes are more like­ly to be from wrong to right, and that stu­dents who change their answers tend to improve their scores.”
    • The Big Sto­ry You Don’t Read About (David Brooks, New York Times): “How did we in our busi­ness get in the spot where we spend 90 per­cent of our cov­er­age on the 10 per­cent of our lives influ­enced by pol­i­tics and 10 per­cent of our cov­er­age on the 90 per­cent of our lives influ­enced by rela­tion­ship, com­mu­ni­ty and the places we live in every day?”
  5. When Male Run­ners Lose to Women (Ley­land Cec­co, The Wal­rus): “Stud­ies are start­ing to show that male and female bod­ies respond dif­fer­ent­ly to fatigue: dur­ing long peri­ods of exer­cise, the brain mon­i­tors and triages the body’s out­put, reg­u­lat­ing feel­ings of exhaus­tion to ensure the run­ner doesn’t overex­tend them­selves. If the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem sens­es the activ­i­ty is becom­ing too intense, it reduces the muscle’s out­put…. ‘It turns out women have a slight­ly, it seems, bet­ter resis­tance to that kind of fatigue.’”
  6. The Incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of Crit­i­cal The­o­ry and Chris­tian­i­ty (Neil Shen­vi & Pat Sawyer, Gospel Coali­tion): “Chris­tian­i­ty pro­vides us with an over­ar­ch­ing meta­nar­ra­tive that runs from cre­ation to redemp­tion: We are crea­tures made in God’s image, who have sinned against him, who need to be res­cued through the aton­ing work of Jesus, and who are called to love both God and neigh­bor. In con­trast, crit­i­cal the­o­ry is asso­ci­at­ed with a meta­nar­ra­tive that runs from oppres­sion to lib­er­a­tion: We are mem­bers either of a dom­i­nant group or of a mar­gin­al­ized group with respect to a giv­en iden­ti­ty mark­er. As such, we either need to divest our­selves of pow­er and seek to lib­er­ate oth­ers, or we need to acquire pow­er and lib­er­ate our­selves by dis­man­tling all struc­tures and insti­tu­tions that sub­ju­gate and oppress. In crit­i­cal the­o­ry, the great­est sin is oppres­sion, and the great­est virtue is the pur­suit of lib­er­a­tion.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): Chris­tians Can­not Be Mis­treat­ed (George Yancey, Patheos): “I believe that some indi­vid­u­als are unable to see anti-Chris­t­ian dis­crim­i­na­tion no mat­ter what evi­dence is pre­sent­ed to them. For them the cul­tur­al nar­ra­tive that Chris­tians are the dom­i­nant group is sim­ply too pow­er­ful for them to con­sid­er alter­na­tive infor­ma­tion.” The author, whose work I have fea­tured before, is a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Texas.
  7. The ‘3.5% Rule’: How A Small Minor­i­ty Can Change The World (David Rob­son, BBC): “Look­ing at hun­dreds of cam­paigns over the last cen­tu­ry, Chenoweth found that non­vi­o­lent cam­paigns are twice as like­ly to achieve their goals as vio­lent cam­paigns. And although the exact dynam­ics will depend on many fac­tors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the pop­u­la­tion active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in the protests to ensure seri­ous polit­i­cal change.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 202

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The First Rule of Social-Media Cen­sor­ship Is That There Are No Rules (David French, Nation­al Review): “The great val­ue of view­point neu­tral­i­ty is that it com­ports with our sense of fun­da­men­tal fair­ness. It hear­kens back to the image of the blind­fold­ed Lady Jus­tice, hold­ing her scales, indif­fer­ent to the pow­er or priv­i­lege of her peti­tion­ers. Twit­ter and Face­book have removed the blind­fold, thrown away the scales, and cho­sen to wield only the sword.”
    • Relat­ed but less aggres­sive: Facebook’s Unin­tend­ed Con­se­quence (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The deep­er prob­lem is the over­whelm­ing con­cen­tra­tion of tech­ni­cal, finan­cial and moral pow­er in the hands of peo­ple who lack the train­ing, expe­ri­ence, wis­dom, trust­wor­thi­ness, humil­i­ty and incen­tives to exer­cise that pow­er respon­si­bly.”
    • Relat­ed but with a dif­fer­ent empha­sis: The Big Tech Threat (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “My the­sis is that the evi­dence strong­ly sug­gests there is some­thing deeply trou­bling, maybe even deeply wrong, with the entire social media econ­o­my. My the­sis is that it does not rep­re­sent a source of strength for America’s tomor­row, but is rather a source of per­il.” A tran­script of a speech giv­en by a US Sen­a­tor who is a Stan­ford grad and who was speak­ing at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  2. We Are Tak­ing Reli­gious Free­dom Too Far (Mar­garet Ren­kl, New York Times): “Reli­gious faith is a pri­vate mat­ter between a believ­er and God. But how a believ­er lives in com­mu­ni­ty with oth­er peo­ple is some­thing dif­fer­ent alto­geth­er. It’s time to stop giv­ing believ­ers a pass just because their beliefs hap­pen to run counter to the laws of the nation they live in.”
    • In response: A New York Times Op-Ed Is Very Wrong About Reli­gious Lib­er­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “She for­mu­lates reli­gious lib­er­ty like this: ‘In this coun­try, cit­ing reli­gious or spir­i­tu­al con­vic­tions is often a sure­fire way to get out of doing some­thing you’re required by law to do.’ This is a com­mon fram­ing on the left. Essen­tial­ly, it’s an argu­ment that reli­gious free­dom is an intru­sion into the law and that reli­gious peo­ple are engaged in a form of spe­cial plead­ing — seek­ing rights and exemp­tions unavail­able to oth­er Amer­i­cans. In real­i­ty, the First Amend­ment is supreme, and when states seek to intrude on reli­gious lib­er­ty, they’re try­ing to get out of some­thing they’re required by law to do. Respect­ing the First Amend­ment is the default oblig­a­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and every state and local gov­ern­ment in the Unit­ed States.”
    • Relat­ed but on a dif­fer­ent top­ic: Health and Human Ser­vices and the Reli­gious-Lib­er­ty War (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The con­flict between reli­gious lib­er­ty, LGBTQ rights, and abor­tion access is about to inten­si­fy. In the com­ing weeks or months, HHS is expect­ed to issue a revised ver­sion of Rule 1557 of the Afford­able Care Act, which extend­ed nondis­crim­i­na­tion pro­tec­tions to trans­gen­der peo­ple and women who have ter­mi­nat­ed preg­nan­cies. The Supreme Court is also slat­ed to con­sid­er civ­il-rights pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ indi­vid­u­als in sev­er­al high-pro­file upcom­ing cas­es; while those cas­es most­ly involve pro­tec­tions pro­vid­ed under employ­ment law, they sim­i­lar­ly pit reli­gious lib­er­ty against LGBTQ rights.”
  3. Agapáo and Philéo by the Sea of Tiberias (Ron Bel­gau, Spir­i­tu­al Friend­ship): “After break­fast, Peter and Jesus had a con­ver­sa­tion which rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion about how to under­stand the verbs for love—agapáo and philéo—used in the orig­i­nal Greek…. The pas­sage is dif­fi­cult to trans­late because although Eng­lish has always had sep­a­rate nouns for ‘love’ and ‘friend­ship,’ no Eng­lish speak­er pri­or to Mark Zucker­berg used ‘friend’ as a verb. Trans­la­tors, there­fore, must either trans­late both words as ‘love,’ which los­es a poten­tial nuance in the orig­i­nal, or else must try to some­how make the dif­fer­ence appar­ent in Eng­lish.” This is the most sat­is­fy­ing expla­na­tion of this pas­sage I have heard.
  4. Amer­i­can church­es must reject lit­er­al­ism and admit we got it wrong on gay peo­ple (Oliv­er Thomas, USA Today): “Church­es will con­tin­ue hem­or­rhag­ing mem­bers and mon­ey at an alarm­ing rate until we muster the courage to face the truth: We got it wrong on gays and les­bians. This shouldn’t alarm or sur­prise us. We have learned some things that the ancients — includ­ing Moses and Paul — sim­ply did not know. Not even Jesus…”
    • The author is a retired Amer­i­can Bap­tist min­is­ter.
    • In response: Oliv­er Thomas @USATODAY Says the Amer­i­can Church Got it Wrong on Gay People—And He’s Right (Michael Kruger, per­son­al blog): “In this way, Thomas is right. The church is killing itself, if by the ‘church’ one means the main­line denom­i­na­tions who have aban­doned bib­li­cal author­i­ty. Indeed, sta­tis­tics have shown, plain­ly and incon­tro­vert­ibly, that the main­line denom­i­na­tions are dying and the bible-believ­ing ones are grow­ing.”
    • In response: No, Chris­tian­i­ty Doesn’t Need To Endorse Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty To Grow (Glenn Stan­ton, The Fed­er­al­ist): “When same-sex-attract­ed Chris­tians go to church, they are not choos­ing the pews of church­es Thomas is call­ing us to become. Again, it’s just the oppo­site. Research con­duct­ed joint­ly at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Los Ange­les by schol­ars who are not shy about sup­port­ing gay pol­i­tics found that gay- and les­bian-iden­ti­fied peo­ple are 2.5 times more like­ly to attend church­es that took a more con­ser­v­a­tive view on Chris­tian­i­ty (includ­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty) than the so-called ‘wel­com­ing and affirm­ing’ con­gre­ga­tions that cel­e­brate it.”
  5. What’s wrong with Amer­i­ca? I debate Ben Shapiro.(Sean Illing, Vox): “There are basi­cal­ly two visions of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. One is that Amer­i­ca was found­ed on great moral prin­ci­ples that we failed to live up to his­tor­i­cal­ly and we’ve been striv­ing to ful­fill. The oth­er is that Amer­i­ca is root­ed in racism, big­otry, sex­ism, and homo­pho­bia, and that these great moral prin­ci­ples were the founders mere­ly flat­ter­ing them­selves.”
    • This is a very good exchange. Whichev­er side you’re sym­pa­thet­ic to, you’ll enjoy read­ing this inter­view.
  6. Why God Is a He (Den­nis Prager, YouTube): five min­utes. It’s an inter­est­ing way to approach the issue. As a Chris­t­ian I would make a dif­fer­ent argu­ment con­nect­ed to the incar­na­tion and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus as a male, but Prager is an obser­vant Jew and so that line of think­ing is unavail­able to him.
  7. Are All Repub­li­cans Bib­li­cal Lit­er­al­ists? Are All Democ­rats Heretics?(Ryan Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “With the release of the 2018 wave of the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey data, I think that it’s time to take stock of how a person’s view of the Bible is relat­ed to their polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. Are there bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists who are Democ­rats? How many Repub­li­cans don’t put much stock in the Bible? And, how has the view of the Bible changed over time?”
    • tl;dr — Rough­ly ¼ of Democ­rats and â…“ of Repub­li­cans believe the Bible is the lit­er­al word of God. Rough­ly half of each par­ty think the Bible is inspired but not always to be tak­en lit­er­al­ly. The remain­der in each par­ty believe that the Bible is just ancient fables.

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 181

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. America’s New Reli­gions (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “The need for mean­ing hasn’t gone away, but with­out Chris­tian­i­ty, this yearn­ing looks to pol­i­tics for sat­is­fac­tion. And reli­gious impuls­es, once anchored in and tamed by Chris­tian­i­ty, find expres­sion in var­i­ous polit­i­cal cults. These polit­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions of reli­gion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven’t been expe­ri­enced and refined and mod­eled by mil­len­nia of prac­tice and thought. They are evolv­ing in real time. And like almost all new cultish impuls­es, they demand a total and imme­di­ate com­mit­ment to save the world.”
  2. Is the Protes­tant Work Eth­ic Real? (Stephen J. Dub­n­er, Freako­nom­ics): “The ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­al of a mis­sion­ary project in the Philip­pines found that very poor peo­ple earned more mon­ey as a result of receiv­ing reli­gious instruc­tion. Why? The researchers sus­pect there were two pri­ma­ry dri­vers: opti­mism and grit.”
    • The researchers in ques­tion wrote up their research in Ran­dom­iz­ing Reli­gion: The Impact of Protes­tant Evan­ge­lism on Eco­nom­ic Out­comes (Gharad T. Bryan, James J. Choi, Dean Kar­lan, NBER): “To study the causal impact of reli­gios­i­ty, we part­nered with Inter­na­tion­al Care Min­istries (ICM), an evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant anti-pover­ty orga­ni­za­tion that oper­ates in the Philip­pines, to con­duct an eval­u­a­tion that ran­dom­ly assigned invi­ta­tions to attend Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy and val­ues train­ing.” The authors are affil­i­at­ed with the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics, Yale, and North­west­ern. The sec­ond author, Choi, is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian.
  3. Dutch Asy­lum Ser­vice Nears 1,000 Hours, With Evan­gel­i­cals’ Sup­port (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “A marathon wor­ship ser­vice held by a church in the Nether­lands to shield a fam­i­ly of asy­lum seek­ers has gar­nered world­wide atten­tion. The feat has proved impres­sive for its longevi­ty alone—now going on six weeks—but also rep­re­sents a unique ecu­meni­cal moment among Chris­tians in the tiny Euro­pean nation.”
  4. For­mer Stan­ford post­doc crit­i­cized for cre­at­ing the world’s first gene-edit­ed babies (Ele­na Shao, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “On Nov. 28, He Jianku — a post­doc­tor­al fel­low at Stan­ford from 2011–2012 — announced to hun­dreds of sci­en­tists, col­leagues and jour­nal­ists that he had cre­at­ed the world’s first genet­i­cal­ly edit­ed babies: twin girls with the pseu­do­nyms Lulu and Nana whose DNA he claims to have altered to make them HIV-resis­tant.” FYI Bill Hurl­burt, one of the Stan­ford bioethics experts inter­viewed in this arti­cle, is a sol­id believ­er.
  5. God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a frosh brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. I read two inter­est­ing pro­files of famous Chris­tians from the past this week:
    • Phillis Wheat­ley: An Evan­gel­i­cal and the First Pub­lished African Amer­i­can Female Poet (Thomas Kidd, Gospel Coali­tion): “Phillis Wheat­ley, the first pub­lished African Amer­i­can female poet and a devout Chris­t­ian, died on Decem­ber 5, 1784. We can’t be sure of her birth­date, because she was born in West Africa and sold into slav­ery by 1761.”
    • Evan­gel­i­cal retail­er John Wana­mak­er built for­tune by blend­ing faith with busi­ness (Mark Kell­ner, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Wana­mak­er, who also served four years as post­mas­ter gen­er­al of the Unit­ed States, was fore­most an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who meld­ed faith and works, specif­i­cal­ly the work­ing of his retail empire. While build­ing the first depart­ment store in Philadel­phia, he also fund­ed the growth of the city’s first megachurch, which fea­tured a range of social ser­vices under­gird­ed by a strong evan­ge­lis­tic out­reach. He offered young male employ­ees of his store guid­ance through a YMCA-like pro­gram aimed at pro­mot­ing spir­i­tu­al dis­ci­pline. All employ­ees could spend a sum­mer vaca­tion at a church-run resort, albeit with strict behav­ioral codes.”
  7. Have U.S. Protes­tants gone soft on alco­hol? (Richard Ostling, Patheos): “…from 2007 to 2017 U.S. deaths attrib­uted to alco­hol increased 35 per­cent, and 67 per­cent among women (while teen deaths declined 16 per­cent). These fatal­i­ties well out­num­ber those from opi­oid over­dos­es that have roused such pub­lic con­cern…. Only 2 per­cent of evan­gel­i­cals admit­ted they some­times over-indulge.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 179

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. ‘God, I don’t want to die,’ U.S. mis­sion­ary wrote before he was killed by tribe on Indi­an island (Joan­na Slater and Annie Gowen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “An Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary try­ing to meet and con­vert one of the most iso­lat­ed hunter-and-gath­er­er tribes in the world offered them fish and oth­er small gifts before the tribes­men killed him and buried his body on the beach, jour­nals and emails show.”
    • Relat­ed: US Mis­sion­ary Killed by ‘World’s Most Iso­lat­ed’ Tribe (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Some have declared Chau a mar­tyr and com­pared him to Jim Elliot, who was famous­ly killed at age 28 while attempt­ing to evan­ge­lize an iso­lat­ed indige­nous group in Ecuador.”
    • Relat­ed: Death Of A Mis­sion­ary (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If Chau had been a mis­sion­ary try­ing to sneak into North Korea, I would have thought him insane­ly brave. But the law against vis­it­ing that island was there for a very good rea­son: this tribe has had no expo­sure to out­siders, and is enor­mous­ly vul­ner­a­ble to com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases. There are only a small num­ber of them in exis­tence, and they could be wiped out quick­ly by com­mon ill­ness­es for which they have no immu­ni­ty…. It is one thing to be will­ing to lay down your life for these trib­al peo­ple. It is cru­el to expect them to lay down their lives so you can prove your love for God.”
  2. How do con­ser­v­a­tives respond to archae­ol­o­gists’ skep­ti­cism about Bible his­to­ry? (Richard Ostling, Patheos): “There’s vast unex­plored ter­rain in Israel, where only 50 of an esti­mat­ed 6,000 sites have under­gone thor­ough exam­i­na­tion, with lim­it­ed work at anoth­er 300. Sur­viv­ing evi­dence from ancient times is nec­es­sar­i­ly spot­ty and inter­pre­ta­tions can be sub­jec­tive. Schol­ars usu­al­ly end up with cir­cum­stan­tial plau­si­bil­i­ty, not absolute proof or dis­proof.”
  3. Ex-Detainee Describes Tor­ture In Chi­na’s Xin­jiang Re-Edu­ca­tion Camp (Rob Schmitz, NPR): “Samarkand says he was trans­ferred to a re-edu­ca­tion camp, where peo­ple were sep­a­rat­ed into three groups: those who were reli­gious, those who were sus­pect­ed of being crim­i­nals, and those, like him, who had trav­eled abroad. All of them, says Samarkand, had one thing in com­mon, though: They had grown up in Mus­lim fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties.”
  4. Info­graph­ic: You Have More Time for Bible Read­ing than You Think (Cross­way): “In just 12 min­utes per day, you could read the whole Bible in a year. Does that still feel a bit ambi­tious? In just 6 min­utes per day, you could read the entire New Tes­ta­ment over the course of 6 months.”
  5. Elisha and the She-bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): a very insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge.
  6. Sir Roger Scru­ton Is a Friend to Mus­lims and Jews (Jibran Khan, Nation­al Review): “There can be no real dia­logue with some­one who doesn’t believe in any­thing, and yet this has been the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of lib­er­al ‘inter­faith’ dis­cus­sion, to so water down the dis­course that no one gets to encounter, let alone tol­er­ate and appre­ci­ate, dif­fer­ence.” I did not think I would find this arti­cle inter­est­ing.
  7. It’s time we bal­ance the scales of jus­tice in our schools (Bet­sy DeVos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A fair process treats each par­ty with dig­ni­ty and ensures the integri­ty of final deci­sions. Hav­ing out­comes over­turned and relit­i­gat­ed because of process con­cerns — which has hap­pened dozens of times in recent years — can be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to sur­vivors.”
    • Relat­ed: The ACLU Declines to Defend Civ­il Rights (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “the ACLU issued a pub­lic state­ment that con­sti­tut­ed a stark, short­sight­ed betray­al of the organization’s his­toric mis­sion: It vehe­ment­ly opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.”
    • Relat­ed: One Crim­i­nal-Defense Attorney’s Lament (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “In cer­tain ways, social con­dem­na­tion has become some­thing even worse, the mere accu­sa­tion being all that’s required for a mob of undu­ly pas­sion­ate peo­ple to crush a career. There’s no oppor­tu­ni­ty to defend and no means to chal­lenge an accu­sa­tion. While the ‘pun­ish­ment’ isn’t levied by gov­ern­ment, and is there­fore beyond any required involve­ment of such niceties as due process, the net result can be as destruc­tive giv­en the cur­rent tide of blind accep­tance and capit­u­la­tion.”

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 provoca­tive In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

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.