Tag: disability

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 327

Two weeks of con­tent dis­tilled into one. It’s like juice con­cen­trate!

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 327, and 327 is the largest num­ber such that it togeth­er with its dou­ble and triple con­tain every dig­it 1–9 once: 327 dou­bled is 654 and tripled it is 981. Odd but cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Teacher Who Nev­er Spoke (Mau­reeen Swinger, Plough): “The sum­mer my broth­er Duane turned twen­ty, a for­mi­da­ble young man stayed with us on a break from the Ivy League. He had nev­er, to anyone’s knowl­edge, lost an argu­ment. Sev­er­al weeks into his vis­it, my moth­er walked into the din­ing room where my broth­er and his friend were, in the­o­ry, eat­ing lunch. In real­i­ty, both men were sit­ting at the table with locked jaws. One didn’t have to say, ‘I need you to eat.’ The oth­er didn’t need to say, ‘Hell, no.’ They both knew exact­ly what was going on: the Ivy Lea­guer was los­ing an argu­ment to my broth­er, who had nev­er learned to speak.”
    • This is from a while ago (2017), but I must have missed it. Sim­ply astound­ing. I wept while read­ing it. Any­one tak­ing a class where Peter Singer’s phi­los­o­phy is high­ly regard­ed should read this ASAP.
  2. She was sold to a stranger so her fam­i­ly could eat as Afghanistan crum­bles (Anna Coren, Jessie Yeung and Abdul Basir Bina, CNN): “Mag­ul, a 10-year-old girl in neigh­bor­ing Ghor province, cries every day as she pre­pares to be sold to a 70-year-old man to set­tle her fam­i­ly’s debts. Her par­ents had bor­rowed 200,000 Afgha­nis ($2,200) from a neigh­bor in their vil­lage — but with­out a job or sav­ings, they have no way of return­ing the mon­ey.”
    • This is one of the most depress­ing things I have read in some time.
  3. What hap­pens when peo­ple in Texas can’t get abor­tions: ‘Dia­pers save a lot more babies than ultra­sounds’ (Casey Parks, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I always tell peo­ple, ‘Dia­pers save a lot more babies than ultra­sounds.’ ” Har­ing said. “I don’t want an ultra­sound machine. I want tons of dia­pers. Buy me $20,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of dia­pers because if you have a woman who comes in with four kids — yeah, look­ing at the baby, she real­izes it’s a human being. But if you tell her, ‘I’m going to give you dia­pers for all four kids,’ believe me, the dia­pers for all four kids is going to save that baby a lot quick­er than a lit­tle pen­nant on the screen.”
    • It’s rare to read a sym­pa­thet­ic sto­ry about a pro-life cen­ter in a major Amer­i­can news­pa­per.
  4. Philip Yancey’s Mes­sage of Grace (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Yancey told the par­ents in the audi­ence that, bib­li­cal­ly, God grieves as much as they do; that God loves their chil­dren as much as they do; and that God is deeply pained by the state of this bro­ken world. To his sur­prise, he found his faith affirmed rather than shat­tered. He wit­nessed in per­son some­thing the the­olo­gian Miroslav Volf wrote on the day after the New­town shoot­ings: ‘Those who observe suf­fer­ing are tempt­ed to reject God; those who expe­ri­ence it often can­not give up on God, their solace and their agony.’ ”
    • This is one of the most gospel-cen­tric arti­cles I have read in a major pub­li­ca­tion in quite some time.
  5. When All The Media Nar­ra­tives Col­lapse (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major sto­ries, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Don­ald Trump accused the MSM of being ‘fake news’ the more assid­u­ous­ly they tried to prove him right.”
  6. His Rea­sons for Oppos­ing Trump Were Bib­li­cal. Now a Top Chris­t­ian Edi­tor Is Out. (Ben Smith, New York Times): “As the long­time edi­tor of World, a Chris­t­ian news orga­ni­za­tion that has a web­site, a biweek­ly mag­a­zine and a set of pod­casts, Mr. Olasky has deliv­ered a mix of hard news and watch­dog arti­cles about the evan­gel­i­cal realm under a jour­nal­is­tic phi­los­o­phy he calls ‘bib­li­cal objec­tiv­i­ty.’ It involves tak­ing strong stands where the Bible is clear, which has led World to oppose abor­tion rights and sup­port refugees, he says, and to fol­low reportable facts where the Bible doesn’t pro­vide clear guid­ance.”
  7. Some pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives:
    • The Covid pan­dem­ic is not tak­ing the very best of turns (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “While the fog of war is thick right now, the ear­ly data on Nu sug­gests that it may be a big deal. Even if it’s not, how­ev­er, it has been obvi­ous since we got the vac­cines that vac­cine escape is a con­cern. You can debate whether the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a vac­cine escap­ing vari­ant is 20% or 80%, but in any case we need effec­tive con­tin­gency plans in place. If we fail to respond effec­tive­ly to Nu, that will be a con­sid­er­ably greater insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure than any­thing that hap­pened at the out­set of the pan­dem­ic. We’ve had almost two years since the first COVID case and one year from the vac­cine approvals to pre­pare. So I ask: what is the plan for the vac­cine-escap­ing vari­ant?”
    • The Weird­ness of Gov­ern­ment Vari­a­tion in COVID-19 Respons­es (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “But imag­ine at the start of the pan­dem­ic, some­one had said to you ‘Every­one will face the exis­tence of the same dis­ease, and have access to the exact same tools to fight it. But in some EU coun­tries or US states, peo­ple won’t be allowed to leave their house and have to cov­er their faces in pub­lic. In oth­er places, gov­ern­ment will just leave peo­ple alone. Vast dif­fer­ences of this sort will exist across juris­dic­tions that are sim­i­lar on objec­tive met­rics of how bad the pan­dem­ic is at any par­tic­u­lar moment.’ I would’ve found this to be a very unlike­ly out­come! You could’ve con­vinced me EU states would do very lit­tle on COVID-19, or that they would do lock­downs every­where. I would not have believed that you could have two neigh­bor­ing coun­tries that have sim­i­lar num­bers, but one of them forces every­one to stay home, while the oth­er doesn’t. This is the kind of extreme vari­a­tion in pol­i­cy we don’t see in oth­er areas.”
    • The Vac­cine Moment, part one (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “Covid is a rev­e­la­tion. It has lain bare splits in the social fab­ric that were always there but could be ignored in bet­ter times. It has revealed the com­pli­ance of the lega­cy media and the pow­er of Sil­i­con Val­ley to curate and con­trol the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion. It has con­firmed the sly dis­hon­esty of polit­i­cal lead­ers, and their ulti­mate obei­sance to cor­po­rate pow­er. It has shown up ‘The Sci­ence’ for the com­pro­mised ide­ol­o­gy it is. Most of all, it has revealed the author­i­tar­i­an streak that lies beneath so many peo­ple, and which always emerges in fear­ful times.”
    • A tweet that made me laugh: “The WHO chose Omi­cron over Nu for the vari­ant of con­cern, prob­a­bly because it sounds too much like ‘new.’ But the next let­ter is not Omi­cron but Xi. Was that a lit­tle too on the nose?” (Jared Wal­czak, Twit­ter)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-written. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian. First shared in vol­ume 178.

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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.