Tag: education

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 448

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 448, an untouch­able num­ber. Which is an absolute­ly cool des­ig­na­tion for a num­ber to have.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Gos­sip is good, Stan­ford sci­en­tist sug­gests (Sarayu Pai, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Although gos­sip­ing is typ­i­cal­ly cast in a neg­a­tive light, a study con­duct­ed by researchers from Stan­ford and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land found that gos­sip­ing may be a ben­e­fi­cial prac­tice, as long as infor­ma­tion remains ‘reli­able.’ Study co-author Michele Gelfand, who is a pro­fes­sor at the Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, esti­mates that peo­ple gos­sip an hour a day on aver­age — defined as the ‘exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent, who said “these peo­ple need a dose of the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week : gos­sip is cor­ro­sive!” [Glen’s note — the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week is a thing we do in our Chi Alpha, and “gos­sip is cor­ro­sive” is one of them]
    • Indeed they do, and this is use­ful launch­ing point for a brief dis­course on gos­sip. In this study, gos­sip is defined as “exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.” But that’s not what we’re con­demn­ing when we con­demn gos­sip! If some­one tells you, “wow — that Caleb guy is super charm­ing and hand­some” and you reply, “You know he’s mar­ried, right?” then you’ve done noth­ing wrong — that’s not the sin of gos­sip. But if you spread a false neg­a­tive rumor about Caleb “you know he does drugs, right?”, that is the sin of gos­sip. This study con­flates those two very dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions.
    • The sin of gos­sip can be described as bear­ing bad news behind some­one’s back with a bad heart. The bad news can be bad in the sense of being untrue or it can be bad in the sense of unnec­es­sary and unhelp­ful. For more on this help­ful fram­ing, check out What Is Gos­sip? Expos­ing a Com­mon and Dan­ger­ous Sin (Matt Mitchell, Desir­ing God).
    • This is a recur­ring pat­tern, by the way: some researcher wants to study some­thing inter­est­ing but needs to oper­a­tional­ize a vari­able in some unortho­dox way to make the research fea­si­ble. Then they do their research and find some­thing that would be coun­ter­in­tu­itive rel­a­tive to the orig­i­nal mean­ing of the word they’re using (although maybe not that sur­pris­ing giv­en their oper­a­tional­iza­tion of the vari­able), and then the media repeats it as a com­men­tary on the actu­al thing — a thing which the sci­en­tists nev­er stud­ied. In this case, the study did­n’t actu­al­ly ana­lyze the sin of gos­sip, but nonethe­less near the end of the arti­cle we learn that “some stu­dents with pre­vi­ous­ly neg­a­tive views of gos­sip report see­ing it dif­fer­ent­ly in light of this study.”
  2. Why We Fast (Ross Byrd, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Fast­ing is no mag­ic fix. In fact, it’s almost the exact oppo­site of a mag­ic fix. It takes time, patience, and discipline—dare I say, suffering—to see its fruit. But the fruit is no less than the abil­i­ty to see more of God. Here are three ways to under­stand Chris­t­ian fast­ing: 1. Fast­ing makes space for God. 2. Fast­ing inter­rupts and reori­ents our uncon­scious pat­terns. 3. Fast­ing gives us eyes to see the unseen.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. Lots of good insights in this one.
  3. ‘Lit­tle Women’ and the Art of Break­ing Gram­mat­i­cal Rules (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “Curzan notes, for exam­ple, that the use of ‘lit­er­al­ly’ to exag­ger­ate is no recent anom­aly but rather goes back to, for exam­ple, our ‘Lit­tle Women,’ in which Louisa May Alcott has it that at a gath­er­ing ‘the land lit­er­al­ly flowed with milk and hon­ey.’ The March girls, also, would have said ‘sneaked’ where, since just the 1970s, as Curzan charts, we have been increas­ing­ly like­ly to say ‘snuck.’ Are you a lit­tle irked by the youngs say­ing ‘based off of’ rather than ‘based on’? That one threw me when I start­ed hear­ing my stu­dents say­ing it about 15 years ago; Curzan calms us down and demon­strates how ordi­nary and even log­i­cal it is. Curzan is also good on the use of ‘hope­ful­ly’ to mean ‘it is hoped.’ This became a punch­ing bag only in the 1960s — until then, not even gram­mar scolds cared, too busy com­plain­ing that, for exam­ple, the ‘prop­er’ mean­ing of obnox­ious is ‘sub­ject to harm.’” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Some more Israel/Hamas com­men­tary
    • Frac­tured Are the Peace­mak­ers (Sophia Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I spent a week in Israel and the West Bank meet­ing Pales­tin­ian Chris­tians and Mes­sian­ic Jews who are pas­tors, youth lead­ers, YMCA lead­ers, tour guides, lawyers, and stu­dents. Many of them aren’t pro­fes­sion­al peace activists, but all of them, from what I could tell, take seri­ous­ly Jesus’ Ser­mon on the Mount and strive to embody his procla­ma­tion that ‘blessed are the peace­mak­ers, for they will be called chil­dren of God’ (Matt. 5:9). The prob­lem is, I spoke to about two dozen indi­vid­u­als about what peace­mak­ing means and got almost two dozen dif­fer­ent answers.” Unlocked.
    • Israel Has Cre­at­ed a New Stan­dard for Urban War­fare. Why Will No One Admit It? (John Spencer, Newsweek): “In my long career study­ing and advis­ing on urban war­fare for the U.S. mil­i­tary, I’ve nev­er known an army to take such mea­sures to attend to the ene­my’s civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, espe­cial­ly while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly com­bat­ing the ene­my in the very same build­ings. In fact, by my analy­sis, Israel has imple­ment­ed more pre­cau­tions to pre­vent civil­ian harm than any mil­i­tary in history—above and beyond what inter­na­tion­al law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
      • The author is the chair of urban war stud­ies at the Mod­ern War Insti­tute at West Point. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid: Amer­i­can Lib­er­ty and the Jews (Mike Cosper, Acton Insti­tute): “His­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, the emer­gence of anti-Semi­tism is always a sign of some­thing poi­so­nous tak­ing root in a soci­ety. It doesn’t just spell dan­ger for Jews; it spells dan­ger for every­one. As Bari Weiss has put it, ‘What starts with the Jews nev­er ends with the Jews.’ The rise of anti-Semi­tism in Nazi Ger­many, Sovi­et Rus­sia, and half a dozen Mid­dle East­ern states was quick­ly fol­lowed by oth­er forms of vio­lence, tyran­ny, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” This is a long and sol­id arti­cle that cov­ers much more than anti-Semi­tism (although that is at its heart).
  5. Schools are using research to try to improve children’s learn­ing – but it’s not work­ing (Sal­ly Rior­dan, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “A series of ran­domised con­trolled tri­als, includ­ing one look­ing at how to improve lit­er­a­cy through evi­dence, have sug­gest­ed that schools that use meth­ods based on research are not per­form­ing bet­ter than schools that do not.”
    • British con­text, hence the spelling.
  6. The Anti-Frag­ile Bren­dan Eich (Andrew Beck, First Things): “I am not here to com­plain about can­cel cul­ture. Bren­dan Eich does not. He is too busy. He refus­es to be defined by the evil done to him, or by the pur­port­ed het­ero­doxy of his beliefs, but by the work he does and by his char­ac­ter, as known by those clos­est to him. Rather than tak­ing to the air­waves and lean­ing into the role of mar­tyr, as have so many oth­ers who have endured sim­i­lar abuse, Eich nev­er speaks pub­licly about the wrong done to him—not once even in pri­vate to me. Instead, he dili­gent­ly pur­sues his voca­tion.”
  7. The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Move­ment (David French, New York Times): “The old­er I get, the more I’m con­vinced that we sim­ply don’t know who we are — or what we tru­ly believe — until our val­ues car­ry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Repub­li­can Par­ty has made the case that life begins at con­cep­tion. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Repub­li­can Par­ty can’t live with its own phi­los­o­phy. There is no tru­ly pro-life par­ty in the Unit­ed States.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 411

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 411, which is the num­ber you used to dial to get direc­to­ry assis­tance from the phone com­pa­ny. It’s now slang for infor­ma­tion, so an emi­nent­ly appro­pri­ate num­ber for today’s com­pi­la­tion.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This roundup has more spir­i­tu­al­ly enrich­ing con­tent than usu­al.
    • The Shep­herd Boy Who Wasn’t (Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If we stick only to the ‘God can use any­one’ read­ing of David’s ori­gin sto­ry, we cel­e­brate God’s ele­va­tion of the over­looked and risk miss­ing God’s clear warn­ing to the ele­vat­ed: It can hap­pen to you. But if we see David for who he real­ly was, we real­ize that every great man or woman who ris­es to pow­er in the church is only one rooftop stroll away from a David-sized crash.”
      • I have unlocked this arti­cle. It’s longer than it needs to be, but good. The author is a pro­fes­sor of Old Tes­ta­ment at Hunt­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Fear­ing God as Sons, Not Slaves (Ben Edwards, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “This dis­tinc­tion is per­haps most clear­ly seen in Exo­dus 20: ‘And all the peo­ple were watch­ing and hear­ing the thun­der and the light­ning flash­es, and the sound of the trum­pet, and the moun­tain smok­ing; and when the peo­ple saw it all, they trem­bled and stood at a dis­tance. 19 Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us your­self and we will lis­ten; but do not have God speak to us, or we will die!’ How­ev­er, Moses said to the peo­ple, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you will not sin.’’ Moses tells Israel: ‘Don’t be afraid, but fear.’ The Israelites were tempt­ed to cow­er in ter­ror as they beheld God’s majesty. But the fear they tru­ly need­ed was one that would lead them to avoid sin.”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal
    • Why I Gave Up Drink­ing (Sarah Bessey, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I think that con­vic­tion has got­ten a bit of a bad rap in the Church over the past lit­tle while. It’s under­stand­able. We have an over­cor­rec­tion to a lot of the legal­ism and bound­ary-mark­er Chris­tian­i­ty that dam­aged so many, the behav­iour mod­i­fi­ca­tion and rule-mak­ing and impo­si­tion of oth­er people’s con­vic­tions onto our own souls. But in our steer­ing away from legal­ism, I won­der if we left the road to holi­ness or began to for­get that God also cares about what we do and how we do it and why.”
      • From last year, but was just rec­om­mend­ed to me by a friend. It’s good.
    • Why Do We Go to Church? (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “Why do so many of us who claim to be Chris­tians nev­er attend church? I know every­one has their rea­sons, but here’s the hard truth: Jesus loves the church. He gave His life for the church. Jesus con­sid­ers the church to be His bride. I don’t care how close you are to Jesus, you can’t tell Him His wife is ugly. If we love Jesus, then we love His church. If you don’t love the church, then there’s rea­son to ques­tion if you love Jesus.”
    • Rap­ture (Pre­cept Austin): “In our day, the Rap­ture has come under attack by many. Some think it rep­re­sents the nov­el teach­ings of ‘defeatist Chris­tians.’ Oth­ers think it is pure fan­ta­sy. Still oth­ers seem to savor the idea of the Church going through the events of the Tribu­la­tion in order to ‘prove her met­al’ or refine her. We find it dif­fi­cult to under­stand why there is such oppo­si­tion by Chris­tians to the idea that the bride­groom would come for His bride pri­or to pour­ing forth His wrath (John 14:1–3)?”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent and I quite liked this one. I’m pret­ty famil­iar with the argu­ments in favor of a pret­ribu­la­tion­al rap­ture (a posi­tion I myself hold), but there was stuff in here that was new to me.
  2. Why Match School And Stu­dent Rank? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…elite col­leges are machines for laun­der­ing priv­i­lege. That is: Har­vard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented peo­ple, and 25% rich/powerful peo­ple. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart peo­ple get to net­work with elites, which is the first step to becom­ing elite them­selves. And the rich peo­ple get mixed in so thor­ough­ly with a pool of smart/talented peo­ple that every­one assumes they must be smart/talented them­selves. After all, they have a degree from Har­vard!”
  3. A Church’s Quest for Enchant­ment (Mag­gie Phllips, Tablet): “[Pen­te­costal­ism] began in the 19th cen­tu­ry, with the par­al­lel devel­op­ment through­out the Anglos­phere of a grass­roots spir­i­tu­al enthu­si­asm ground­ed in per­son­al expe­ri­ence. Its the­ol­o­gy is root­ed in his­to­ry both ancient and more con­tem­po­rary: a key event in the Chris­t­ian Bible’s Book of the Acts of the Apos­tles, as well as the the­ol­o­gy of John Wes­ley, who is rec­og­nized as the father of Method­ism. In the U.S., its cat­a­lyst is usu­al­ly iden­ti­fied as a reli­gious revival move­ment that began in Los Ange­les in 1906; over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, it still enjoys a wide­spread pres­ence in the U.S., and is a rapid­ly grow­ing glob­al phe­nom­e­non.”
    • This is actu­al­ly a pret­ty good overview of Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty for a sec­u­lar audi­ence. She gets a few details wrong, but over­all this is sol­id.
  4. The Church in a Time of Gen­der War (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “What I am say­ing is that I now believe most evan­gel­i­cal church­es should look at their sin­gle mem­bers with both eyes open: an appre­ci­a­tion for the won­der­ful poten­tial of their sea­son of life, but also a desire and strat­e­gy, as the Lord per­mits, to find ways to get these peo­ple Chris­t­ian spous­es. In oth­er words, I don’t think we should fear admit­ting that mar­riage is, in the major­i­ty of sit­u­a­tions we will come across, prefer­able to sin­gle­ness.”
    • Some peo­ple think I empha­size romance too much. I actu­al­ly won­der if I empha­size it too lit­tle.
    • Also, not reflect­ed in the excerpt but very much at the heart of the piece is the author’s con­cern that men and women in our cul­ture are col­lec­tive­ly believ­ing the worst of each oth­er and assum­ing the answer is for the oth­er gen­der to become more like them. He’s get­ting at some­thing real here. I think Chi Alpha has a health­i­er dat­ing cul­ture than oth­er places at Stan­ford, and I still see the ten­den­cies James cri­tiques in this piece in mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty.
    • Men are awe­some. Women are awe­some. You should prob­a­bly want to get mar­ried. Which means you should prob­a­bly go on dates.
  5. Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilder­ness. (Chris­tine Emba, Wash­ing­ton Post): “To the extent that any vision of ‘non­tox­ic’ mas­culin­i­ty is pro­posed, it ends up sound­ing more like stereo­typ­i­cal fem­i­nin­i­ty than any­thing else: Guys should learn to be more sen­si­tive, qui­et and social­ly apt, seem­ing­ly overnight.… I’m con­vinced that men are in a cri­sis. And I strong­ly sus­pect that end­ing it will require a pos­i­tive vision of what mas­culin­i­ty entails that is par­tic­u­lar — that is, nei­ther neu­tral nor inter­change­able with fem­i­nin­i­ty. Still, I find myself reluc­tant to ful­ly artic­u­late one. There’s a rea­son a lot of the writ­ing on the cri­sis in mas­culin­i­ty ends at the diag­no­sis stage.”
    • Unlocked. Sol­id over­all but amus­ing­ly clue­less at a few points. 
    • Relat­ed, although the author dis­claims it: Fight­ing (Marc Andreesen, Sub­stack): “At a pri­vate con­fer­ence this week, I was asked what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Mixed Mar­tial Arts (MMA) train­ing, Elon Musk’s chal­lenge to a cage fight, and pub­lic reports that a Zuckerberg/Musk MMA fight may well hap­pen lat­er this year, per­haps in the actu­al Roman Colos­se­um. I said, ‘I think that’s all great.’ And in this post I explain why.… I was also asked whether I con­sid­er Mark and Elon to be role mod­els to chil­dren in their embrace of fight­ing, and I said, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, yes. And I fur­ther rec­om­mend­ed to the audi­ence that they have their chil­dren trained in MMA, as my wife and I are.”
  6. The Tri­umph of the Good Samar­i­tan (Ash Mil­ton, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The activist defend­ers of the tent cities had seized on a moral lan­guage deeply ingrained in West­ern soci­eties. The notion of duty to neigh­bors, espe­cial­ly those who are poor and vul­ner­a­ble, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong inher­i­tance from Chris­tian­i­ty. But they were using con­cepts they did not care to under­stand. For the activists, the home­less weren’t neigh­bors in any rec­i­p­ro­cal sense, just a bat­ter­ing ram to use in their own con­flicts with soci­ety. By rhetor­i­cal­ly re-premis­ing neigh­bor­ly duties as a one-way rela­tion­ship of trib­ute and def­er­ence paid to the wretched by soci­ety, they ren­dered the very moral con­cepts they invoked use­less. They demand­ed neigh­bor­ly duties from strangers but pro­vid­ed no pos­si­bil­i­ty of those involved ever becom­ing any­thing like real neigh­bors to each oth­er.”
    • A bit longer than nec­es­sary, but quite good.
  7. Who’s Afraid of Moms for Lib­er­ty? (Robert Pondis­cio, The Free Press): “Moms for Lib­er­ty is the beat­ing heart of this country’s move­ment of angry parents—and Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion has nev­er seen any­thing quite like it.… The basic thrust of Moms for Liberty’s advocacy—that par­ents, not the gov­ern­ment, should have the ulti­mate say in what chil­dren are taught in pub­lic schools—has legs. Not one sub­group in McLaughlin’s crosstabs—Trump or Biden vot­ers; pro-life or pro-choice; black, white, or His­pan­ic; urban, rur­al, or suburban—disagrees.”

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 Book Review: The Cult Of Smart (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “DeBoer recalls hear­ing an immi­grant moth­er proud­ly describe her old­er kid’s achieve­ments in math, sci­ence, etc, “and then her younger son ran by, and she said, off­hand, ‘This one, he is maybe not so smart.’ ” DeBoer was orig­i­nal­ly shocked to hear some­one describe her own son that way, then real­ized that he wouldn’t have thought twice if she’d dis­missed him as unath­let­ic, or bad at music. Intel­li­gence is con­sid­ered such a basic mea­sure of human worth that to dis­miss some­one as unin­tel­li­gent seems like con­sign­ing them into the out­er dark­ness.” Nor­mal­ly the best thing about Alexander’s blog is his book reviews. This one was just okay (smart and well-writ­ten but not astound­ing) and then all of a sud­den he turned his rant up to 11. Hang in until you reach the phrase “child prison.” If you’re not sold at that point, stop read­ing. From vol­ume 289.

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 395

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 395, which feels like it ought to have a lot of fac­tors but only has 79 and 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What if Kids Are Sad and Stressed Because Their Par­ents Are? (David French, New York Times): “The same year that 44 per­cent of teenagers report­ed suf­fer­ing from seri­ous sad­ness, accord­ing to the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion, 41.5 per­cent of adults report­ed ‘recent symp­toms of an anx­i­ety or depres­sive dis­or­der,’ an increase from an already high base­line of 36.4 per­cent just months before. More­over, while sui­cide rates have gone up in the youngest cohort of Amer­i­cans, they still mate­ri­al­ly lag sui­cide rates among their par­ents and grand­par­ents.… Teens do not exist on an island. The con­nec­tion between parental emo­tion­al health and the emo­tion­al health of their kids is well estab­lished. More­over, the way par­ents raise their kids can, of course, direct­ly affect emo­tion­al health.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall on this one.
  2. Com­pa­ny that Trade­marked ‘Wor­ship Leader’ Makes Oth­ers Drop the Term (Kelsey Kramer McGin­nis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Since 2016, Authen­tic Media has owned the rights to the phrase ‘wor­ship leader’ when applied to peri­od­i­cals, online pub­li­ca­tions, and web­sites with resources around wor­ship. Pri­or to that, the trade­mark had been owned by Maranatha Music, Wor­ship Leader’s pre­vi­ous own­er, since 1993. The com­pa­ny also holds trade­marks for ‘wor­ship leader work­shop’ and ‘song dis­cov­ery.’ ”
  3. Is It Time to Quit ‘Qui­et Time’? (Dru John­son and Celi­na Dur­gin, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If today’s com­mon rit­u­als of Bible engage­ment are not work­ing, then we must dis­rupt them in favor of deep learn­ing prac­tices. These new habits could con­sist of com­mu­nal lis­ten­ing, deep div­ing, repeat­ed read­ing of whole books of the Bible, or some oth­er strat­e­gy. But the assump­tion that dai­ly devo­tions alone will yield scrip­tur­al lit­er­a­cy and flu­en­cy no longer appears ten­able, because it nev­er was.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent, who says, “The title is very click­baitish, but the arti­cle itself has good points. It’s cri­tiquing the prac­tice of only super­fi­cial­ly and pas­sive­ly read­ing short pas­sages of Scrip­ture iso­lat­ed from their con­text in the rest of the Bible and iso­lat­ed from oth­er believ­ers.”
  4. Edu­ca­tion Com­men­tary is Dom­i­nat­ed by Opti­mism Bias (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “The opti­mism bias in edu­ca­tion cir­cles has sev­er­al ortho­dox­ies. 1. Every stu­dent is capa­ble of aca­d­e­m­ic flour­ish­ing, and every time a stu­dent does not flour­ish, it must be the result of some sort of error or injus­tice.… 5. Any­one who dis­agrees with this doc­trine hates chil­dren, sup­ports inequal­i­ty, and doesn’t care about poor peo­ple.”
  5. How to Learn and Teach Eco­nom­ics with Large Lan­guage Mod­els, Includ­ing GPT (Tyler Cowen & Alexan­der T. Tabar­rok, SSRN): “One gen­er­al rule is that you should keep on ask­ing GPT fol­low-up ques­tions to get more out of it. It is more like squeez­ing a lemon than throw­ing a dart at a tar­get.… Don’t be pas­sive, as with GPTs you always need to ask, and it rewards you when you are being demand­ing.”
    • A lot of very good advice about using GPT and oth­er LLMs in here in here.
  6. How to Under­stand the Well-Being Gap between Lib­er­als and Con­ser­v­a­tives (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Amer­i­can Affairs Jour­nal): “The well-being gap between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives [show­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er and bet­ter-adjust­ed than lib­er­als] is one of the most robust pat­terns in social sci­ence research. It is not a prod­uct of things that hap­pened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the avail­able data reach. The dif­fer­ences man­i­fest across age, gen­der, race, reli­gion, and oth­er dimen­sions. They are not mere­ly present in the Unit­ed States, but in most oth­er stud­ied coun­tries as well.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colom­bia.
  7. A lot of Stan­ford-relat­ed sto­ries, most­ly neg­a­tive:
    • The Mar­vel­lous Boys of Palo Alto (David Leav­itt, The New York­er): “To grow up in Stan­ford is to be a son of Stan­ford in a way that no mere grad­u­ate can ever know. Bankman-Fried is a son of Stan­ford if there ever was one, as am I. And what are sons of Stan­ford taught? That if we should get into trou­ble, even real bad trou­ble, we can rest assured that our par­ents will bail us out, which is tan­ta­mount to rest­ing assured that Stan­ford will bail us out, since Stan­ford has tak­en our par­ents to its heart and feeds mon­ey reg­u­lar­ly into their bank accounts and owns the land on which they live. This faith in the cer­ti­tude of pro­tec­tion, if not unique to the Stan­ford nation-state, is, I am con­vinced, one of its most essen­tial aspects.”
      • The author grew up in the house in which Sam Bankman-Fried is now under house arrest.
    • Stanford’s War Against Its Own Stu­dents (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “Any place that sets a bar so high that you have to be lit­er­al­ly per­fect to get there; and when you get here, if you don’t stay per­fect, [Stan­ford] will pun­ish you with every admin­is­tra­tive resource they have for embar­rass­ing them,” Paul­meier added. “To me, that just sounds like an abu­sive par­ent, not like an edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion you should mod­el your kid’s life around.”
    • Stan­ford’s Dark Hand in Twit­ter Cen­sor­ship (Thomas Adamo & Josi­ah Jon­er, The Stan­ford Review): “Emails revealed that the Stan­ford Inter­net Obser­va­to­ry (SIO) active­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed with Twit­ter to sup­press infor­ma­tion they knew was fac­tu­al­ly true. Taibbi’s inves­ti­ga­tion revealed that Stanford’s Viral­i­ty Project ‘rec­om­mends that mul­ti­ple plat­forms take action even against ‘sto­ries of true vac­cine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hes­i­tan­cy.’”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Next Steps on Protests and Free Speech (Dean Jen­ny S. Mar­tinez, let­ter to the Stan­ford Law School): “I want to set expec­ta­tions clear­ly going for­ward: our com­mit­ment to diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion is not going to take the form of hav­ing the school admin­is­tra­tion announce insti­tu­tion­al posi­tions on a wide range of cur­rent social and polit­i­cal issues, make fre­quent insti­tu­tion­al state­ments about cur­rent news events, or exclude or con­demn speak­ers who hold views on social and polit­i­cal issues with whom some or even many in our com­mu­ni­ty dis­agree. I believe that focus on these types of actions as the hall­mark of an ‘inclu­sive’ envi­ron­ment can lead to cre­at­ing and enforc­ing an insti­tu­tion­al ortho­doxy that is not only at odds with our core com­mit­ment to aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, but also that would cre­ate an echo cham­ber that ill pre­pares stu­dents to go out into and act as effec­tive advo­cates in a soci­ety that dis­agrees about many impor­tant issues.”
      • The dean is spit­ting straight fire in this let­ter.

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 Sins That Cry Out to Heav­en (Eduar­do Andi­no, First Things): “The Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion speaks of four pec­ca­ta cla­man­tia, or sins that cry out to heav­en for vengeance: mur­der, sodomy, oppres­sion of the poor, and defraud­ing work­ers of their wages…. This is not an arbi­trary col­lec­tion of sins.” From vol­ume 274

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 326

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 322

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

This is the 322nd install­ment, and today I learned that 322 is the 12th Lucas num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of Evan­gel­i­cal Lead­er­ship (Mark Gal­li, Sub­stack): “This ten­den­cy has only got­ten worse, as now the mark of a suc­cess­ful evan­gel­i­cal writer is to get pub­lished reg­u­lar­ly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s inter­est­ing about such pieces is that (a) such writ­ers make a point that affirms the view of the sec­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion (on top­ics like envi­ron­men­tal care, racial injus­tice, sex­u­al abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evan­gel­i­cals should take the same point of view. How­ev­er, their writ­ing doesn’t reach the mass­es of evan­gel­i­cals who take a con­trary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writ­ers are real­ly inter­est­ed in get­ting those evan­gel­i­cals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the main­stream press. Bet­ter to try to get such a col­umn pub­lished in the most pop­u­lar Pen­te­costal out­let, Charis­ma. Ah, but that would do noth­ing to enhance the pres­tige of evan­gel­i­cals among the culture’s elite.”
    1. This is a SUPER inter­est­ing arti­cle that makes good points… but the author some­how avoid­ed look­ing in a mir­ror while writ­ing it. He was the edi­tor-in-chief of Chris­tian­i­ty Today!
    • Fol­low-up: Falling from Grace into Mer­cy— or Elite Evan­gel­i­cal­ism, Part 2 (Mark Gal­li, Sub­stack): “But one thing about retire­ment is the time one has to reflect on one’s career, and I see more clear­ly how much I was will­ing to go along to get along, and how much I was part of the sys­tem.… I don’t think there is much hope in reform­ing many things that course through the veins of elite evan­gel­i­cals.”
  2. Two of the most dis­tress­ing news items I’ve seen in some time.
  3. Hunt­ing the Satanists (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the world­view of QAnon and Yale’s diver­si­ty office are sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar. Both see a world in which Satan, lit­er­al or metaphor­i­cal, is an active force in the world cor­rupt­ing indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions. Satan is pow­er­ful but hid­den. He only reveals his influ­ence when the cor­rupt­ed slip-up and by the incor­rect use of a word, phrase, or ges­ture reveal their true natures. Since Satan is pow­er­ful and hid­den the good peo­ple must con­stant­ly mon­i­tor every­one.” An astute­ly observed par­al­lel.
  4. It’s Time for a Bet­ter and Smarter Alliance Against Porn (David French, The Dis­patch): “One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing devel­op­ments of mod­ern times has been the way in which Amer­i­can ideas and Amer­i­can con­duct fre­quent­ly con­tra­dict each oth­er. The world of ideas most­ly (though not exclu­sive­ly) has moved left, quick­ly. Ideas move from pro­gres­sive fringe to main­stream with stun­ning speed.… But in the world of con­duct, some­thing else is hap­pen­ing. Social con­ser­v­a­tive lifestyles are mak­ing a come­back. Divorce rates are down. Teen preg­nan­cy is down. Abor­tion rates (abor­tions per 1,000 women) and ratios (abor­tions per 1,000 preg­nan­cies) are way down. Sin­gle par­ent­ing has sta­bi­lized, and the per­cent­age of chil­dren liv­ing with both par­ents is inch­ing up.”
  5. Please Don’t Give Up On Hav­ing Kids Because Of Cli­mate Change (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “If you think priv­i­leged mod­ern Amer­i­cans shouldn’t have chil­dren now because of qual­i­ty-of-life issues [relat­ed to cli­mate change], you implic­it­ly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had chil­dren.”
  6. Two tid­bits from Chi­na:
    • Ter­ror & tourism: Xin­jiang eas­es its grip, but fear remains (Dake Kang, AP News): “Any­time I tried to chat with some­one, the min­ders would draw in close, strain­ing to hear every word. It’s hard to know why Chi­nese author­i­ties have shift­ed to sub­tler meth­ods of con­trol­ling the region. It may be that sear­ing crit­i­cism from the West, along with pun­ish­ing polit­i­cal and com­mer­cial sanc­tions, have pushed author­i­ties to light­en up. Or it may sim­ply be that Chi­na judges it has come far enough in its goal of sub­du­ing the Uyghurs and oth­er most­ly Mus­lim minori­ties to relax its grip.”
    • The Tri­umph and Ter­ror of Wang Hun­ing (N.S. Lyons, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Wang record­ed his obser­va­tions in a mem­oir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book Amer­i­ca Against Amer­i­ca. In it, he mar­vels at home­less encamp­ments in the streets of Wash­ing­ton DC, out-of-con­trol drug crime in poor black neigh­bor­hoods in New York and San Fran­cis­co, and cor­po­ra­tions that seemed to have fused them­selves to and tak­en over respon­si­bil­i­ties of gov­ern­ment.… Amer­i­cans can, he says, per­ceive that they are faced with ‘intri­cate social and cul­tur­al prob­lems,’ they ‘tend to think of them as sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems’ to be solved sep­a­rate­ly. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their prob­lems are in fact all inex­tri­ca­bly inter­linked and have the same root cause: a rad­i­cal, nihilis­tic indi­vid­u­al­ism at the heart of mod­ern Amer­i­can lib­er­al­ism.”
      • Sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. One of Chi­na’s key lead­ers has accu­rate­ly diag­nosed cer­tain chal­lenges their nation is fac­ing but his solu­tions are lack­ing (and evil). And he seems to have come to many of his con­vic­tions by vis­it­ing Amer­i­ca and wit­ness­ing our cul­tur­al fol­ly.
  7. Don’t Let Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Claims Mask Bad Faith Argu­ments (Daniel Ben­nett, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious lib­er­ty is too impor­tant to let it get mis­used. It’s not a waiv­er to avoid all incon­ve­niences in life or, worse, a tool to make polit­i­cal state­ments. For reli­gious lib­er­ty to sur­vive polit­i­cal and legal scruti­ny in the future, we must safe­guard exemp­tions against abuse.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at John Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have When Chil­dren Say They’re Trans (Jesse Sin­gal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a con­nec­tion between social influ­ences and gender-identity explo­ration among ado­les­cents would require ignor­ing a lot of what we know about the devel­op­ing teenage brain—which is more sus­cep­ti­ble to peer influ­ence, more impul­sive, and less adept at weigh­ing long-term out­comes and con­se­quences than ful­ly devel­oped adult brains—as well as indi­vid­ual sto­ries like Delta’s.” This is a long and bal­anced piece which has gar­nered out­rage in some online cir­cles. First shared in vol­ume 157.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 302

this was a busy week for me — I’m amazed I read enough mate­r­i­al to pop­u­late this list!

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 is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares: 92 + 102 + 112 = 302.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. You Aren’t Actu­al­ly Mad at the SATs (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Try­ing to fight edu­ca­tion­al inequal­i­ty by get­ting rid of the SAT is like try­ing to fight cli­mate change by get­ting rid of ther­mome­ters.”
  2. Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remem­ber You Will Die (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “In Octo­ber 2018, on her 455th day with the skull on her desk, she wrote, ‘Every­one dies, their bod­ies rot, and every face becomes a skull (unless you are incor­rupt).’ ”
  3. Adver­sary Drones Are Spy­ing On The U.S. And The Pen­ta­gon Acts Like They’re UFOs (Tyler Rogoway, The Dri­ve): “Yes, I real­ize that the idea that an adver­sary is pen­e­trat­ing U.S. mil­i­tary train­ing areas unmo­lest­ed, and has been for years, using low­ly drone tech­nol­o­gy and bal­loons, is a big pill to swal­low, but as one of the peo­ple who have repeat­ed­ly warned about the threat posed by low­er-end drones for a decade—warnings that large­ly were dis­missed by the Pen­ta­gon until drones made or altered in ram­shackle ISIS work­shops in a war zone were lit­er­al­ly rain­ing down bomblets on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq—it isn’t real­ly sur­pris­ing at all.” I saw this when it first came out and did­n’t share it for some rea­son, but it popped up again because of the upcom­ing Sen­ate UFO thing and I want­ed to let y’all see it.
  4. Is the ‘DEFCON 3 cul­ture war’ over reli­gious free­dom bills com­ing to an end? (Kelsey Dal­las, Deseret News): “Six years ago, Indi­ana law­mak­ers’ efforts to pass a new reli­gious free­dom law spawned protests, trav­el bans and boy­cott threats from nation­al ath­let­ic orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the NCAA, NFL and NBA. This year, when Mon­tana and South Dako­ta passed sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion, the back­lash was so mut­ed by com­par­i­son that even some reli­gious free­dom experts didn’t hear about the bills until the Deseret News sent an inter­view request.”
  5. Who Makes More: Teach­ers or Cops? (Red­dit) — a coun­ter­in­tu­itive pre­sen­ta­tion of the state-by-state data
  6. The incom­ing Stan­ford stu­dent liv­ing under siege in Gaza (Cameron Ehsan, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Yousef AbuHashem ’25 has kept a small back­pack close to him since Israeli airstrikes tar­get­ing Gaza began 11 days ago. The bag is large enough to fit only the bare essen­tials: his birth cer­tifi­cate, pass­port, sec­ondary school diplo­ma, cloth­ing and cash.”
  7. The New Furies of the Old­est Hatred (Peter Savod­nik, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “All gov­ern­ments should be scru­ti­nized. But crit­i­cism of Israeli pol­i­cy is often just crit­i­cism of Israel’s exis­tence. We know this because the crit­i­cized poli­cies almost always involve Israel being able to defend itself against hos­tile neigh­bors (being able to exist); and because there is an obses­sion with Israel that dis­tin­guish­es it from any oth­er coun­try or for­eign-pol­i­cy issue. Count­less Mus­lims have suf­fered at the hands of the Chi­nese, Indi­ans and Rus­sians — to say noth­ing of the Assad regime hav­ing incin­er­at­ed as many as 600,000 Syr­i­ans, the near­ly 500,000 Pales­tini­ans con­fined to refugee camps in Lebanon, or the inden­tured ser­vants, includ­ing many Pales­tini­ans, in the near­by Gulf. This is not whataboutism. It is per­spec­tive.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cor­po­rate Pol­i­tics (Dil­bert)
  • Gross But Fun­ny (At Ran­dom Comics)
  • Sleuthing Cap­tain America’s Shield (Alan Katz, The Smith­so­ni­an’s blog): “SD-600 requires that the Smith­son­ian estab­lish legal title to any item to be acquired for the col­lec­tions with accom­pa­ny­ing evi­dence, such as prove­nance infor­ma­tion, per­mits, export/import licens­es, and intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty trans­fer agree­ments where applic­a­ble. Such evi­dence would prove con­clu­sive­ly that an item wasn’t, for exam­ple, already owned by anoth­er depart­ment of the US gov­ern­ment (i.e. S.W.O.R.D. in the case of Fal­con and the Win­ter Sol­dier) and sub­ject to repos­ses­sion by that enti­ty.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘per­fect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

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 292

there is an absurd­ly long list of enter­tain­ing YouTube videos at the end

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

This is vol­ume 292, which is the num­ber of ways you can break a dol­lar into two or more coins.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Grow­ing My Faith in the Face of Death (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “Most par­tic­u­lar­ly for me as a Chris­t­ian, Jesus’s cost­ly love, death, and res­ur­rec­tion had become not just some­thing I believed and filed away, but a hope that sus­tained me all day. I pray this prayer dai­ly. Occa­sion­al­ly it elec­tri­fies, but ulti­mate­ly it always calms: And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morn­ing only by your grace, keep me in the joy­ful, live­ly remem­brance that what­ev­er hap­pens, I will some­day know my final ris­ing, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.”
  2. The Emp­ty Reli­gions of Insta­gram (Leigh Stein, New York Times): “I have hard­ly prayed to God since I was a teenag­er, but the pan­dem­ic has cracked open inside me a pro­found yearn­ing for rev­er­ence, humil­i­ty and awe. I have an over­draft on my out­rage account. I want moral author­i­ty from some­one who isn’t shilling a mem­oir or call­ing out her ene­mies on social media for clout.”
  3. Do Lib­er­als Care if Books Dis­ap­pear? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In the last stages of the same-sex mar­riage debate, I nev­er encoun­tered a flick­er of pri­vate doubt from lib­er­al friends. But in the gen­der-iden­ti­ty debate, there are per­va­sive lib­er­al doubts about the cur­rent activist posi­tion. Yet with­out lib­er­al objec­tion, that posi­tion appears to set rules for what Ama­zon will sell.”
  4. The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of America’s Elites (Bari Weiss, City Jour­nal): “So chil­dren learn how the new rules of woke work. The idea of lying in order to please a teacher seems like a phe­nom­e­non from the Sovi­et Union. But the high school­ers I spoke with said that they do ver­sions of this, includ­ing par­rot­ing views they don’t believe in assign­ments so that their grades don’t suf­fer.… One Eng­lish teacher in Los Ange­les tac­it­ly acknowl­edges the prob­lem: she has the class turn off their videos on Zoom and asks each stu­dent to make their name anony­mous so that they can have unin­hib­it­ed dis­cus­sions.”
    • Relat­ed: Pri­vate Schools Have Become Tru­ly Obscene (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Pri­vate schools reg­u­lar­ly make deci­sions that par­ents don’t under­stand. Like ancient peo­ples, the par­ents try to make sense of the clues. They decide that col­lege admis­sions must be the god of pri­vate school—wrong—or that the god must be AP scores, or sports, or insti­tu­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. The god of pri­vate school is money.“A lit­tle uneven but a vis­cer­al­ly fun read.
  5. Can­cel­ing Is Pow­er­less (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Pol­i­tics is about pow­er. Can­cel mobs don’t have it, and they nev­er will. You want­ed repa­ra­tions; you got Dr. Seuss. Maybe time to take a hard look at why.” His fol­low-up Per­haps We Can­not Do Both is also worth­while.
  6. Why Reformed Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Has Splin­tered: Four Approach­es to Race, Pol­i­tics, and Gen­der (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “By virtue of our upbring­ing, our expe­ri­ences, our hurts, our per­son­al­i­ties, our gifts, and our fears, we grav­i­tate toward cer­tain expla­na­tions and often think in famil­iar pat­terns when it comes to the most com­pli­cat­ed and con­tro­ver­sial issues. Why is it that by know­ing what some­one thinks about, say, mask wear­ing that you prob­a­bly have a pret­ty good idea what they think about Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and sys­temic racism?” His break­down of approach­es is help­ful even out­side the Reformed tribe. You can see all four respons­es with­in Chi Alpha. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed if you want a frame­work for under­stand­ing why fel­low believ­ers dis­agree with you.
  7. Two arti­cles about Chi­na:

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 289

A col­lec­tion of links rang­ing from the future of Amer­i­ca to the impacts of hypocrisy.

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 289, which is a Fried­man num­ber because 289 = (8 + 9)2

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why will the impor­tant thinkers of the future be reli­gious ones? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Fourth, if you live amongst the intel­li­gentsia, being reli­gious is one active form of rebel­lion. Rebel­lious­ness is gross­ly cor­re­lat­ed with intel­lec­tu­al inno­va­tion, again even if the vari­ance of qual­i­ty increas­es.” Cowen is not reli­gious him­self.
  2. Book Review: The Cult Of Smart (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “DeBoer recalls hear­ing an immi­grant moth­er proud­ly describe her old­er kid’s achieve­ments in math, sci­ence, etc, “and then her younger son ran by, and she said, off­hand, ‘This one, he is maybe not so smart.’ ” DeBoer was orig­i­nal­ly shocked to hear some­one describe her own son that way, then real­ized that he would­n’t have thought twice if she’d dis­missed him as unath­let­ic, or bad at music. Intel­li­gence is con­sid­ered such a basic mea­sure of human worth that to dis­miss some­one as unin­tel­li­gent seems like con­sign­ing them into the out­er dark­ness.”
    • Nor­mal­ly the best thing about Alexan­der’s blog is his book reviews. This one was just okay (smart and well-writ­ten but not astound­ing) and then all of a sud­den he turned his rant up to 11. Hang in until you reach the phrase “child prison.” If you’re not sold at that point, stop read­ing.
  3. The “Major­i­ty-Minor­i­ty” Myth (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Most demo­graph­ic esti­mates of the ‘white’ pop­u­la­tion are based on the Cen­sus def­i­n­i­tion: ‘non-His­pan­ic white.’ But what of ‘His­pan­ic whites’ — those whose lin­eage may come from South or Latin Amer­i­ca in eth­nic­i­ty but who also iden­ti­fy racial­ly and social­ly as white? If you include them in this cat­e­go­ry, Amer­i­ca remains two-thirds ‘white’ all the way through 2060 and beyond.” A fas­ci­nat­ing read.
  4. ‘Hor­ri­ble’: Wit­ness­es recall mas­sacre in Ethiopi­an holy city (Cara Anna, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Bod­ies with gun­shot wounds lay in the streets for days in Ethiopia’s holi­est city. At night, res­i­dents lis­tened in hor­ror as hye­nas fed on the corpses of peo­ple they knew. But they were for­bid­den from bury­ing their dead by the invad­ing Eritre­an sol­diers.… some 800 peo­ple were killed that week­end at the church and around the city.”
  5. The Dou­ble­thinkers (Natan Sha­ran­sky with Gil Troy, Tablet Mag­a­zine):  “Step by lib­er­at­ing step, I was run­ning toward free­dom. By the time I was impris­oned in 1977, I had been free for at least four years. As thrilling as it was to be released from prison after nine long years in 1986, leav­ing the prison of dou­ble­think years ear­li­er made me even more euphor­ic.” The author has had quite the life — begin­ning as a sci­en­tist in Sovi­et Rus­sia, becom­ing a dis­si­dent, and then even­tu­al­ly reach­ing Israel and becom­ing a politi­cian.
    • Relat­ed: Fir­ing Actors for Being Con­ser­v­a­tive Is Anoth­er Hol­ly­wood Black­list (Jonathan Chait, New York Mag­a­zine): “What’s most strik­ing about the news cov­er­age of Carano’s defen­es­tra­tion is the utter absence of any scruti­ny of her employ­er or her (now-for­mer) agency. The tone of the report­ing sim­ply con­veys her posts as though they were a series of pet­ty crimes, the pun­ish­ment of which is inevitable and self-evi­dent­ly jus­ti­fied. The prin­ci­ple that an actor ought to be fired for express­ing unsound polit­i­cal views has sim­ply fad­ed into the back­ground.”
    • Also relat­ed: Gina Cara­no and Crowd-Sourced McCarthy­ism (Bari Weiss, newslet­ter): “Things have got­ten so ridicu­lous so quick­ly — Bon Appetit is cur­rent­ly going back and edit­ing insuf­fi­cient­ly sen­si­tive recipes in what they call (I kid you not) an ‘archive repair effort’ — that my base­line assump­tion is that 99 per­cent of can­cel­la­tions are unwar­rant­ed. In oth­er words, peo­ple are los­ing their jobs and their rep­u­ta­tions not for vio­lat­ing gen­uine taboos but for sim­ple mis­takes, minor sins or absolute non­sense.”
    • And a dif­fer­ent relat­ed sto­ry:  Whistle­blow­er at Smith Col­lege Resigns Over Racism (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “Under the guise of racial progress, Smith Col­lege has cre­at­ed a racial­ly hos­tile envi­ron­ment in which indi­vid­ual acts of dis­crim­i­na­tion and hos­til­i­ty flour­ish. In this envi­ron­ment, people’s worth as human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty and respect, is deter­mined by the col­or of their skin.”  
  6. ‘You Are One Step Away from Com­plete and Total Insan­i­ty’ (David French, The Dis­patch): “This has been a dif­fi­cult newslet­ter to write. I’ve had to con­front my own neg­li­gence. I’m a Chris­t­ian writer and jour­nal­ist, and I paid insuf­fi­cient atten­tion to Thompson’s ini­tial claims. I was only vague­ly aware of her alle­ga­tions at the time, and had I dug down into the sto­ry, it would have been obvi­ous that Zacharias’s account had seri­ous prob­lems. It is no excuse to say that I can’t cov­er every­thing. I should have cov­ered this. I’m ter­ri­bly sor­ry I did not.”
    • Relat­ed: The Wreck­age of Ravi Zacharias (Rusell Moore, newslet­ter): “Your sal­va­tion and dis­ci­ple­ship are not depen­dent on whether the preach­er from whom you heard the gospel is gen­uine, but rather on whether the gospel itself is gen­uine. It is. Preda­tors often move for­ward by hid­ing behind mim­ic­ked truth. Preda­to­ry film­mak­ers pro­ceed by learn­ing how to make good films. Preda­to­ry politi­cians go for­ward by hon­ing polit­i­cal skills. Fraud­u­lent reli­gious lead­ers often ped­dle false doc­trine, but some of them also traf­fic in true doc­trines by which they have not per­son­al­ly been trans­formed. Yes, wolves often come with false doc­trine. But that does not mean that wolves are lim­it­ed to the flocks that tol­er­ate false doc­trine. In infil­trat­ing a sheep pen, a wolf will come in the skin of a sheep, not that of a goat.”
    • Also relat­ed: Ravi Zacharias, Rich Mullins, and a Raga­muf­fin Lega­cy (Esther O’Reil­ly, Patheos): “As I was reflect­ing on all this recent­ly, my mind went back to anoth­er fig­ure who was a ‘celebri­ty Chris­t­ian’ in his own way, yet attained this sta­tus reluc­tant­ly, almost by acci­dent. This fig­ure also had a mag­net­ic appeal, also had a lucra­tive and pop­u­lar min­istry, and also used his plat­form to address the chal­lenges of the Chris­t­ian walk. He also spoke often about sin, grace, moral puri­ty and spir­i­tu­al integri­ty, while wrestling with pri­vate sin. I’m speak­ing about Chris­t­ian singer-song­writer Rich Mullins…” Rich Mullins is actu­al­ly one of my heroes.
  7. Essen­tial­ly Fer­tile: Notes Toward a Land Eth­ic (Jacque­lyn Lee, First Things): “What­ev­er one’s opin­ion about cli­mate change—true, false, man-made, nat­ur­al course of events, the most acute prob­lem human­i­ty faces, left­ist uni­corn, etc.—it’s unde­ni­able that the aver­age Amer­i­can is estranged from the land. That the earth is humanity’s sole source of food and water is as inescapable as ‘male and female he cre­at­ed them.’ And just as con­ser­v­a­tives insist that with­out a right­ly ordered sex­u­al eth­ic soci­ety will be in dis­ar­ray, so should we insist that with­out a right­ly ordered ‘land eth­ic’ soci­ety is unsus­tain­able.” I was not sure what to expect as I began read­ing this arti­cle and was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How To Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super-short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing. First shared in vol­ume 224.

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 271

I’m just glad there’s a mag­ic video at the end

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Lan­guage of Priv­i­lege (Nicholas Clair­mont, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So, in the end, the ques­tion raised by wok­e­ness is a sim­ple one: Doesn’t it actu­al­ly just favor rich peo­ple?”
  2. The Stu­dents Left Behind by Remote Learn­ing (Alec MacGillis, ProP­ub­li­ca): “But it was not hard to see how par­ents could have got the impres­sion that chil­dren were at great risk. Towns and cities had closed play­grounds, wrap­ping police tape around them. Peo­ple in heav­i­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic areas were wear­ing masks even on emp­ty streets. There may have been an implic­it­ly polit­i­cal dynam­ic at work: the greater the threat posed by COVID-19, the greater Trump’s fail­ure in not con­tain­ing it.”
    • This is a very long but absolute­ly engross­ing arti­cle. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed that you at least skim it.
  3. Lib­er­al­ism and Its Dis­con­tents (Fran­cis Fukuya­ma, Amer­i­can Pur­pose): “Democ­ra­cy itself is being chal­lenged by author­i­tar­i­an states like Rus­sia and Chi­na that manip­u­late or dis­pense with free and fair elec­tions. But the more insid­i­ous threat aris­es from pop­ulists with­in exist­ing lib­er­al democ­ra­cies who are using the legit­i­ma­cy they gain through their elec­toral man­dates to chal­lenge or under­mine lib­er­al insti­tu­tions.” The author directs the Cen­ter on Democ­ra­cy, Devel­op­ment and the Rule of Law at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. This is from the inau­gur­al issue of a promis­ing new mag­a­zine.
    • Relat­ed: Sui­cide of the Lib­er­als (Gary Saul Mor­son, First Things): “One some­times hears that ‘the pen­du­lum is bound to swing back.’ But how does one know there is a pen­du­lum at all, rather than—let us say—a snow­ball accel­er­at­ing down­hill? It is unwise to com­fort one­self with metaphors. When a par­ty is will­ing to push its pow­er as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets suf­fi­cient oppo­si­tion.” The author is a human­i­ties prof at North­west­ern.
  4. Diver­si­ty At the Oscars (Fil­ip Mazur­czak, First Things): “At a time of declin­ing read­er­ship world­wide, and because of the mag­i­cal con­nec­tion hun­dreds of mil­lions have to the movies, film is per­haps the most effec­tive medi­um with which to edu­cate peo­ple about his­to­ry. Cer­tain top­ics, such as the Armen­ian Geno­cide or com­mu­nist crimes, deserve a defin­i­tive epic on the scale of Schindler’s List or Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan. But iron­i­cal­ly, the Academy’s new diver­si­ty rules will make it even less like­ly for such top­ics to receive the sil­ver screen treat­ment they deserve.” The author is a Ph.D. can­di­date in his­to­ry.
  5. Arme­nia is under attack by Azer­bai­jan. Hear­ing that is as dis­tress­ing as hear­ing that a Ger­man politi­cian is mak­ing loud com­plaints against the Jews.
    • Arme­ni­ans Fight to Hold Ancient Home­land With­in Azer­bai­jan (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Fierce fight­ing has bro­ken out in the Cau­ca­sus Moun­tains between the Caspi­an and Black Seas, pit­ting Chris­t­ian Arme­ni­ans ver­sus Mus­lim Azeris. But is it right to employ their reli­gious labels?”
    • Defend­ing Chris­t­ian Arme­nia (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Most Amer­i­cans have no idea that in the 20th cen­tu­ry, the Turks waged a true geno­cide against the Armen­ian Chris­t­ian peo­ple. The book to read is 2019’s The Thir­ty-Year Geno­cide: Turkey’s Destruc­tion of Its Chris­t­ian Minori­ties, 1894–1924, by the Israeli his­to­ri­ans Ben­ny Mor­ris and Dror Ze’evi. I had to put it down — a lot — because its record of the atroc­i­ties the Turks wrought on inno­cent Arme­ni­ans in the eth­nic and reli­gious cleans­ing of Turkey was too much to bear.”
    • Turkey is Nor­mal­iz­ing Mil­i­tant Jihadism (Armen V. Sahakyan, Prov­i­dence): “Ankara’s desta­bi­liz­er-in-chief Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan has now extend­ed his men­ac­ing mil­i­tary involve­ment to the South Cau­ca­sus, where Turk­ish army per­son­nel are assist­ing Ankara’s satel­lite state Azer­bai­jan in a mas­sive inva­sion against Art­sakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Arme­nia. But what grabbed inter­na­tion­al head­lines are the appalling reports of Turkey’s delib­er­ate mis­use of the ‘reli­gious card’ in the Art­sakh-Azer­bai­jan con­flict and its trans­port of 4,000 jihadist ter­ror­ists in Syr­ia to fight against Chris­t­ian Arme­ni­ans.”
  6. I’m going to link to some polit­i­cal arti­cles which inter­est­ed me, some of which are extreme­ly par­ti­san. If you only have time to read one, please read one whose slant you dis­agree with. Giv­en that I could not pos­si­bly agree with all of these arti­cles, I hope it is clear that the stan­dard dis­claimers apply even more than usu­al.
    • What Makes A Vote Moral or Immoral? The Ethics of Vot­ing (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “…I think I would be pas­toral­ly over­step­ping were I to tell you how I think you pos­i­tive­ly should vote, assum­ing there is more than one per­mis­si­ble option (which includes not vot­ing, vot­ing for a third par­ty, writ­ing in a can­di­date, or even civ­il dis­obe­di­ence if you live in a coun­try with com­pul­so­ry vot­ing). At most, I think a pas­tor can, from time to time, warn you against paths you should not take. Sel­dom if ever should he tell you which path you should take, assum­ing that doing so clos­es down oth­er moral­ly per­mis­si­ble paths.”
    • 7 Rea­sons Why It Is Pos­si­ble for Chris­tians to Vote for Trump in 2020 With­out Get­ting a Defiled Con­science and/or Los­ing Their Soul (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “So the pro­pos­al that fol­lows is intend­ed to enable you to go and vote for Trump, ide­al­ly with­out a mask, and not give way after­ward to any temp­ta­tion to flush red or laugh a lit­tle furtive heh heh if asked about it. You are not a crim­i­nal. You are not insane. You are not a fas­cist. You are not a haz­ard to the repub­lic. You are not try­ing to ring in The Handmaid’s Tale. You have good rea­sons, oh ye eas­i­ly gaslit evan­gel­i­cals.”
    • Chris­t­ian Wit­ness Demands That We Defend Truth—and Reject Don­ald Trump (O. Alan Noble, Pub­lic Dis­course): “By its very nature, false­hood breeds chaos. To sup­port Trump would require me to sup­port four more years of epis­te­mo­log­i­cal chaos. I fear that if I were to sup­port his reelec­tion, even grudg­ing­ly, even­tu­al­ly I would find myself apol­o­giz­ing for his lies, and then excus­ing his lies, and then defend­ing his lies, and final­ly believ­ing his lies. Bet­ter men and women than I have grown con­fused in just this way since 2016.”
    • Vot­ing for Life (Ramesh Pon­nu­ru & Robert P. George, Nation­al Review): “Nei­ther of us has endorsed Don­ald Trump. Both of us have been intense­ly crit­i­cal of him on issues of per­son­al char­ac­ter and, in some cas­es, pub­lic pol­i­cy. We do not claim, as some have claimed, that Catholics and oth­er pro-life cit­i­zens have an oblig­a­tion to cast their bal­lot for him. The premis­es of the argu­ment against abor­tion do not by them­selves com­pel such a stance. Peo­ple who share the view that the abor­tion license is a pro­found injus­tice on a mas­sive scale that must be res­olute­ly opposed can reach dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about whether Trump deserves their vote. If, how­ev­er, the con­sid­er­a­tions we have adduced in this essay are sound, they prac­ti­cal­ly pre­clude a vote for Biden.”
    • A new group of evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers forms in sup­port of Biden (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The group favor­ing Biden, set up by long­time evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers Ron Sider and Rich Mouw, includes sev­er­al lead­ers who have since retired from major evan­gel­i­cal insti­tu­tions. Among them is John Huff­man, who was board chair of Chris­tian­i­ty Today mag­a­zine, a life­long Repub­li­can and for­mer pas­tor to Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon. He is plan­ning to vote for a Demo­c­rat for the first time.”
    • “You’re hired” Mul­li­gan review (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “For in much of the rhetoric about ‘sci­ence,’ and ‘experts,’ we are exhort­ed to ignore every day truths and the scat­tered infor­ma­tion of actu­al peo­ple, and sur­ren­der to unac­count­able tech­nocrats, who chat and social climb with each oth­er, but who have been wrong about so much late­ly.” The author is a senior fel­low at Hoover. I learned more from this book review than I do from many books.
  7. Scar­let fever mak­ing a come­back thanks to a tox­ic virus, researchers say (Hol­ly Richard­son, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “Pro­fes­sor Walk­er said while one might expect that a virus infect­ing a bac­te­ria was bad for the bac­te­ria, this was not always so. ‘In this case, the bac­te­r­i­al virus is car­ry­ing three new tox­ins and because it’s car­ry­ing those tox­ins when it infects the bac­te­ria, it gives the bac­te­ria this extra vir­u­lence poten­tial.’” 👀 This is like two supervil­lains team­ing up.

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 MIT Pro­fes­sor Meets the Author of All Knowl­edge (Ros­alind Picard, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arro­gant fool who snubbed the great­est Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, art, and every­thing else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, hav­ing received the most unde­served grace. I walk with joy, along­side the most amaz­ing Com­pan­ion any­one could ask for, filled with desire to keep learn­ing and explor­ing.” First shared in vol­ume 194.

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 162

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. How to Wit­ness to a Dis­tract­ed World (O. Alan Noble, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Let me give you a sce­nario. I believe it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble today to sit down with a non-believ­ing friend and have a pas­sion­ate, lengthy con­ver­sa­tion about the gospel and nev­er plant a seed deeply. Because as soon as you both rise from the table, he pulls out his phone and checks Face­book or responds to a text from his wife…. It was all a kind of rhetor­i­cal dance or game that we play. And the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of the dance is not to win over the oth­er per­son but to define your iden­ti­ty. The game is called expres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism. And most of us play it.”
  2. A Glob­al Guide To State-Spon­sored Trolling (Michael Riley, Lau­ren Etter, and Bib­hu­dat­ta Prad­han, Bloomberg): “‘Peo­ple some­times wor­ry that Azer­bai­jan will shut down Face­book,’ said Katy Pearce, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton who has stud­ied the plat­for­m’s use in that coun­try. ‘Why would it? Face­book is the most effec­tive tool of con­trol the gov­ern­ment has.’”
  3. Hous­ing Costs Reduce The Returns To Edu­ca­tion (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The return to edu­ca­tion, for exam­ple, has increased in the Unit­ed States but it’s less well appre­ci­at­ed that in order to earn high wages col­lege edu­cat­ed work­ers must increas­ing­ly live in expen­sive cities. One con­se­quence is that the net col­lege wage pre­mi­um is not as large as it appears and inequal­i­ty has been over-esti­mat­ed.”
  4. The many deaths of lib­er­al­ism (Daniel Cole and Aure­lian Craiu­tu, Aeon): “The prob­lem for any­one declar­ing the death of lib­er­al­ism is that it has not one but sev­er­al pil­lars and dimen­sions: legal, polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and moral (or reli­gious). The weak­en­ing or dis­ap­pear­ance of one or two lib­er­al pil­lars or tenets would not be enough to declare lib­er­al­ism as a whole dead.”
  5. Epis­toc­ra­cy: a polit­i­cal theorist’s case for let­ting only the informed vote (Sean Illing inter­view­ing Jason Bren­nan, Vox): “I like to say I’m a fan of democ­ra­cy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maid­en, but I think Iron Maid­en has quite a few albums that are ter­ri­ble — and I think democ­ra­cy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best sys­tem we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.” The title is inac­cu­rate — Bren­nan goes so far as to favor extend­ing the right to vote to chil­dren.
  6. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Con­venes the ‘Super Bowl’ of Reli­gious Free­dom (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “This min­is­te­r­i­al, which is real­ly just a fan­cy word for ‘big meet­ing,’ could be inter­pret­ed as the unveil­ing of an ele­ment of the Trump administration’s for­eign-pol­i­cy strat­e­gy. For the last three days, del­e­ga­tions from around the world have gath­ered to hear vic­tims of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion share their sto­ries. Amer­i­can offi­cials have declared in no uncer­tain terms that they believe the Unit­ed States should evan­ge­lize reli­gious lib­er­ty around the world, and that democ­ra­cy is built on a foun­da­tion of free­dom in faith.”
    • Relat­ed: Pence and Pom­peo Make Big Reli­gious Free­dom Pledges (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Vice Pres­i­dent called out coun­tries across the globe, start­ing with Nicaragua where he accused the Orte­ga admin­is­tra­tion of ‘vir­tu­al­ly wag­ing war on the Catholic Church.’ He con­demned China’s per­se­cu­tion of its Tibetan Bud­dhists, Uyghur Mus­lims, and Chris­tians, as well as the actions of its author­i­tar­i­an neigh­bor: North Korea…. Pence also called out Iran. While acknowl­edg­ing that its Chris­tians, Jews, and Baha’i are all per­se­cut­ed by its Shia gov­ern­ment, he specif­i­cal­ly sin­gled out its Sun­ni Kurd pop­u­la­tion…. Russia’s Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es, who have been sub­ject to intense per­se­cu­tion in recent years, were also rec­og­nized by Pence…. The Vice Pres­i­dent also called for an end to anti-Semit­ic attacks in West­ern Europe.”
    • Relat­ed: Turkey Lets Andrew Brun­son Leave Prison (Chris­tian­i­ty Today)
    • Relat­ed: The World’s Next Reli­gious Free­dom Suc­cess Sto­ry: Uzbek­istan? (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘That [pan­el was] dif­fer­ent than any­thing you’ve ever heard from almost any place in the for­mer Sovi­et Union,’ said Chris Seiple, pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of the Insti­tute for Glob­al Engage­ment, who orga­nized the pan­el and will lead a del­e­ga­tion to Uzbek­istan this fall. ‘… They’re insti­tu­tion­al­iz­ing the process of change. That’s the key. The process is the goal.’”
  7. Is There Recourse When Fact Check­ers Get It Wrong? (Kalev Lee­taru, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “In short, through the busi­ness deci­sion of a sin­gle Sil­i­con Val­ley cor­po­ra­tion, fact check­ers have been ele­vat­ed from help­ful ref­er­ence librar­i­ans into a posi­tion of ulti­mate arbi­tra­tor of truth in our online world, with­out the atten­dant checks and bal­ances to mit­i­gate abuse.”

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 No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

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).

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

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