Tag: elite colleges

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 323

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 321

I always try to trim these to sev­en items. Cut­ting the 8th was bru­tal this week — so many good options!

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 321, which is not only a num­ber but also a count­down.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Top Trans Doc­tors Blow the Whis­tle on ‘Slop­py’ Care (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “[The] new ortho­doxy has gone too far, accord­ing to two of the most promi­nent providers in the field of trans­gen­der med­i­cine: Dr. Mar­ci Bow­ers, a world-renowned vagino­plas­ty spe­cial­ist who oper­at­ed on real­i­ty-tele­vi­sion star Jazz Jen­nings; and Eri­ca Ander­son, a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia San Francisco’s Child and Ado­les­cent Gen­der Clin­ic. In the course of their careers, both have seen thou­sands of patients. Both are board mem­bers of the World Pro­fes­sion­al Asso­ci­a­tion for Trans­gen­der Health (WPATH), the orga­ni­za­tion that sets the stan­dards world­wide for trans­gen­der med­ical care. And both are trans­gen­der women. Ear­li­er this month, Ander­son told me she sub­mit­ted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warn­ing that many trans­gen­der health­care providers were treat­ing kids reck­less­ly. The Times passed, explain­ing it was ‘out­side our cov­er­age pri­or­i­ties right now.’ ”
    • A sober­ing arti­cle, and also a trag­ic but unsur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion about the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al team.
  2. High­lights From The Com­ments On Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I might be the only per­son in the world who likes McMan­sions. They just look like nice, pleas­ant build­ings made by peo­ple who want to vague­ly enjoy the place where they live. Prob­a­bly the least offen­sive thing peo­ple are mak­ing these days.”
    • Judg­ing from the com­ments he real­ly struck a chord with the “Whith­er Tar­taria?” piece I linked two weeks ago. Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. What Amer­i­can Chris­tians Hear at Church (Casey Cep, New York­er): “Homiletics—the prop­er name for the art of preaching—is still taught in sem­i­nar­ies and divin­i­ty schools, but it is not often stud­ied out­side of those insti­tu­tions. This is regret­table, since many more Amer­i­cans attend church than sub­scribe to a news­pa­per.… Tak­ing advan­tage of the tech­nolo­gies that have allowed church­es to stream ser­vices and post them online, Pew has stud­ied the length, lan­guage, and con­tent of tens of thou­sands of ser­mons, by denom­i­na­tion and tra­di­tion, most recent­ly for the nine Sun­days before and the Sun­day after last fall’s Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.” Quite inter­est­ing.
  4. Slav­ery vs. White Suprema­cy (Van Gosse & Sean Wilentz, New York Review of Books): “Anti­slav­ery and anti-racist pol­i­tics appeared only in the 1760s—and only in the Amer­i­can colonies. Those pol­i­tics, hailed by lat­er abo­li­tion­ists as of world-his­tor­i­cal impor­tance, engaged blacks and whites, enslaved and free. Inspired by the Revolution’s egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, anti­slav­ery advo­cates over­came pow­er­ful oppo­si­tion and enact­ed the first eman­ci­pa­tions of their kind in his­to­ry, in sev­en of the thir­teen orig­i­nal states.… The Unit­ed States, in short, was found­ed not on slav­ery and white suprema­cy but amid an unprece­dent­ed strug­gle over slav­ery and white suprema­cy, which the Con­sti­tu­tion left open.” Illu­mi­nat­ing let­ters between two his­to­ry pro­fes­sors.
  5. ‘Some are just psy­chopaths’: Chi­nese detec­tive in exile reveals extent of tor­ture against Uyghurs (Rebec­ca Wright, Ivan Wat­son, Zahid Mah­mood and Tom Booth, CNN): “ ‘Kick them, beat them (until they’re) bruised and swollen,’ Jiang said, recall­ing how he and his col­leagues used to inter­ro­gate detainees in police deten­tion cen­ters. ‘Until they kneel on the floor cry­ing.’ Dur­ing his time in Xin­jiang, Jiang said every new detainee was beat­en dur­ing the inter­ro­ga­tion process — includ­ing men, women and chil­dren as young as 14.” The details in this sto­ry are dark. I’ve seen oth­er sto­ries with tes­ti­monies from for­mer pris­on­ers, this one fea­tures one of the guards speak­ing up in addi­tion to sto­ries from pris­on­ers.
  6. Train­ings (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Uni­ver­si­ties don’t usu­al­ly cre­ate their own train­ing mod­ules — they buy prod­ucts from com­pa­nies that spe­cial­ize in that kind of thing. And those com­pa­nies want to save mon­ey by reusing their old code. So they extract the con­tent of their Title IX cours­es and sim­ply stuff new con­tent into the exist­ing frame­works. Easy-peasy. And the upper-lev­el admin­is­tra­tors of the uni­ver­si­ty, who don’t want to spend any more mon­ey on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged mon­ster they’ve been hand­ed. But that cre­ates a big prob­lem: the kind of struc­ture need­ed to com­mu­ni­cate to peo­ple the con­tours of a law and the expec­ta­tions gen­er­at­ed by that law is not the kind of struc­ture need­ed to explore the moral devel­op­ment of a com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. Yale and the Edu­ca­tion of Gov­ern­ing Elites (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “A pro­gram con­ceived to teach future elites how to wise­ly use state pow­er has mor­phed into a pro­gram teach­ing them how to wise­ly oppose it. This trans­for­ma­tion is one more illus­tra­tion of Dashan’s the­sis. At Yale we see the Amer­i­can predica­ment made con­crete: an entrenched gov­ern­ing class that enjoys the priv­i­leges of elite sta­tus but refus­es to pre­pare for the respon­si­bil­i­ties of elite sta­tion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 311

wide-rang­ing links with a focus on the pan­dem­ic

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues (although I skipped last week because I was on vaca­tion and it was glo­ri­ous). 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 311th install­ment. 311 is some­thing called a per­mutable prime (aka absolute prime), which means that it is prime no mat­ter how you reorder the dig­its. In oth­er words because 311, 113, and 131 are all primes they are per­mutable primes. Nifty!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The New Moral Code of America’s Elite (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “…it’s decent, if you have a prob­lem with some­one, to take it up with them before run­ning it up the near­est flag­pole. But this is some­thing peo­ple with the right views and the best degrees, it seems, sim­ply do not do; just as the dis­tinc­tion between tat­tling and whistleblowing—resting, as it does, on a sober eval­u­a­tion of one’s own motives and the stakes at hand—is one they often fail to make.” THIS IS WILD and 100% worth using up a pay­wall view on.
  2. The Ger­man Exper­i­ment That Placed Fos­ter Chil­dren with Pedophiles (Rachel Aviv, New York­er): “Per­haps the politi­cians were recep­tive because the project seemed to be the oppo­site of the Nazis’ repro­duc­tive exper­i­ments, with their rigid empha­sis on prop­a­gat­ing cer­tain kinds of fam­i­lies, or per­haps they were uncon­cerned because, in their opin­ion, the boys were already lost.” Actu­al­ly insane.
  3. “These Bas­tards Will Nev­er See Our Tears”: How Yulia Naval­naya Became Russia’s Real First Lady (Julia Ioffe, Van­i­ty Fair): “She said, ‘I think there is no chance that they will let him out. He will be in jail for a long time,’ ” Grozev recalls. “You must under­stand how shock­ing this con­ver­sa­tion was. She’s this wide-eyed, earnest, hon­est per­son. She says these things like they’re the most obvi­ous things on earth, but she’s say­ing very nonob­vi­ous things. You have to process what she says before you real­ize that it’s obvi­ous only in a cer­tain uni­verse.” That uni­verse was the imag­ined future in which Rus­sia is free and hap­py.
    • What an absolute­ly astound­ing lady. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Call it Racism, Not ‘White Suprema­cy’ (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “ ‘White­ness is a sys­tem, not white skin’ is a per­fect­ly plau­si­ble real­i­ty, but it has the laws of ordi­nary lan­guage work­ing against it, and that’s not going to change any­time soon. My sense is that you can have the lan­guage of white­ness or you can have an audi­ence that under­stands what you’re say­ing, but you can’t have both.”
  5. A whole pas­sel of pan­dem­ic-relat­ed arti­cles, all of which are extreme­ly worth­while.
    • The Noble Lies of COVID-19 (Ker­ring­ton Pow­ell & Vinay Prasad, Slate): “Pub­lic health mes­sag­ing is pred­i­cat­ed on trust, which over­comes the enor­mous com­plex­i­ty of the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture, cre­at­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­mu­ni­cate ini­tia­tives effec­tive­ly. Still, vio­la­tion of this trust ren­ders the com­mu­ni­ca­tion unre­li­able. When trust is shat­tered, mes­sag­ing is no longer clear and straight­for­ward, and instead results in the audi­ence try­ing to reverse-engi­neer the state­ment based on their view of the speaker’s intent.”
    • The Myth of Pan­ic (Tan­ner Greer, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “This is the great les­son of the 2020 coro­n­avirus: We should have been allowed to fear. Alas, our lead­ers feared our fear more than they feared our deaths. ” The lat­ter half (about the moti­va­tions of the rul­ing class) is par­tic­u­lar­ly insight­ful. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • ‘I’m sor­ry, but it’s too late’ Alaba­ma doc­tor on treat­ing unvac­ci­nat­ed, dying COVID patients (Den­nis Pil­lion, AL.com): “You kind of go into it think­ing, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this per­son, because they make their own choice,’” Cobia said. “But then you actu­al­ly see them, you see them face to face, and it real­ly changes your whole per­spec­tive, because they’re still just a per­son that thinks that they made the best deci­sion that they could with the infor­ma­tion that they have, and all the mis­in­for­ma­tion that’s out there. And now all you real­ly see is their fear and their regret. And even though I may walk into the room think­ing, ‘Okay, this is your fault, you did this to your­self,’ when I leave the room, I just see a per­son that’s real­ly suf­fer­ing, and that is so regret­ful for the choice that they made.” Sober­ing.
    • Let’s get more peo­ple vac­ci­nat­ed (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Now if I went around tweet­ing all day ‘don’t take the vac­cines unless you’re high­ly vul­ner­a­ble, they’re exper­i­men­tal treat­ments the FDA hasn’t approved because they say they don’t have enough safe­ty data yet’ peo­ple would (right­ly) get very mad at me. Spread­ing that mes­sage would (right­ly) be con­sid­ered an anti-social and chaot­ic thing to be doing. But the mes­sage is true, and a good way to cut down on its spread would be to make it not be true, rather than try­ing to infor­mal­ly stig­ma­tize say­ing it.”
    • The New COVID Pan­ic (Susan Matthews, Slate): “The most impor­tant thing to real­ize is that break­through cas­es are going to con­tin­ue to sur­face in our lives. ‘The goal was nev­er to erad­i­cate COVID from being annoying—it was to erad­i­cate it from being a killer,’ said Dara Kass, an emer­gency med­i­cine physi­cian in New York. (She empha­sized, again, that the vac­cines are very good at doing the lat­ter.) And so even while you have like­ly heard that break­through cas­es are ‘rare,’ that’s a sub­jec­tive assess­ment that is prob­a­bly worth adjust­ing upward.”
    • Are COVID Restric­tions the New TSA? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “It’s like God was design­ing the eas­i­est moral and util­i­tar­i­an ques­tion pos­si­ble. Here we have a sit­u­a­tion where a dis­ease 1) Spares chil­dren 2) Spares those who behave respon­si­bly; and 3) There­fore has a bur­den that falls almost exclu­sive­ly on those who behave irre­spon­si­bly.” This is an uneven essay but on the whole quite strong.
    • Good morn­ing. Covid is more mys­te­ri­ous than we often admit. (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Social dis­tanc­ing and espe­cial­ly vac­ci­na­tion can save lives. But much of the ebb and flow of a pan­dem­ic can­not be explained by changes in human behav­ior. That was true with influen­za a cen­tu­ry ago, and it is true with Covid now. An out­break often fiz­zles mys­te­ri­ous­ly, like a for­est fire that fails to jump from one patch of trees to anoth­er.” Super inter­est­ing!
  6. Inside a KKK mur­der plot: Grab him up, take him to the riv­er (Jason Dearen, AP News): “A con­fi­den­tial infor­mant had infil­trat­ed the group, and his record­ings pro­vide a rare, detailed look at the inner work­ings of a mod­ern klan cell and a domes­tic ter­ror­ism probe. That inves­ti­ga­tion would unearth anoth­er secret: An unknown num­ber of klans­men were work­ing inside the Flori­da Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions, with sig­nif­i­cant pow­er over inmates, Black and white.” Odd cap­i­tal­iza­tion deci­sions aside, a worth­while sto­ry.
  7. The Illu­sion of Porn “Lit­er­a­cy” (Samuel D. James, First Things): “Edu­ca­tion is about dis­cern­ment, yes, but it is also moral for­ma­tion. No teacher or admin­is­tra­tor inter­est­ed in keep­ing her career would advo­cate a cur­ricu­lum that treat­ed racism the way porn lit­er­a­cy treats smut, as a sub­stance with which to become bet­ter acquaint­ed and a more informed con­sumer. Like­wise, any teacher who invit­ed a CEO of Big Tobac­co to give a lec­ture on why his career is sat­is­fy­ing would be sharply rebuked. What we as a soci­ety deem harm­ful and unjust is taught as such.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Aliens and Pro­nouns (Dil­bert): I am gen­uine­ly curi­ous what the pop­u­lar reac­tion to this strip will be. I wish I had access to his ana­lyt­ics! He’s going to learn some inter­est­ing things about our cul­ture. Peo­ple on Twit­ter will lose their minds… but Adams must be gam­bling that most peo­ple will find it fun­ny.
  • Shark Fish­ing (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine min­utes.
  • Strange Ways Air­lines Cut Costs (QI, YouTube): four min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Let­ter To My Younger Self (Ryan Leaf, The Player’s Tri­bune): “Con­grat­u­la­tions. You offi­cial­ly have it all — mon­ey, pow­er and pres­tige. All the things that are impor­tant, right?… That’s you, young Ryan Leaf, at his absolute finest: arro­gant, boor­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic. You think you’re on top of the world and that you’ve got all the answers. Well I’m sor­ry to have to tell you this, but the truth is….” Such a grip­ping let­ter. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. (first shared in vol­ume 99)

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 296

the first two links are among the best I’ve shared in some time

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 296, which is the num­ber of par­ti­tions con­tained in the num­ber 30.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Woke Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Blake Smith, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The con­tem­po­rary ide­al, increas­ing­ly, is no longer some­one so charm­ing­ly per­son­able that oth­ers for­get he is in fact a ruth­less com­peti­tor, but a per­son who so con­vinc­ing­ly nar­rates her hav­ing over­come some kind of social injus­tice that oth­ers for­get she is in fact a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of sys­tems of priv­i­lege.” The author is a his­to­ry prof at U Chica­go. This essay is straight fire, and I believe he took an x‑ray of some of your souls before he wrote it.
  2. Some Prin­ci­ples & Obser­va­tions About Social Jus­tice Pol­i­tics (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Once you have made the pre­ven­tion of emo­tion­al harm the cen­tral focus of your pol­i­tics, you will find your­self run­ning up against the fact that emo­tion­al harm is a ubiq­ui­tous and inerad­i­ca­ble part of the human expe­ri­ence, far beyond the abil­i­ty of any polit­i­cal move­ment to pre­vent.” deBoer, one of my two favorite athe­ist social­ists to read (the oth­er being Steven Brust), brings it with excel­lence in this one. It was hard to find the best excerpt — there are so many.
  3. Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coro­n­avirus (Gina Kola­ta, New York Times): “For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on mes­sen­ger RNA, or mRNA — the genet­ic script that car­ries DNA instruc­tions to each cell’s pro­tein-mak­ing machin­ery. She was con­vinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own med­i­cines, includ­ing vac­cines. But for many years her career at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia was frag­ile. She migrat­ed from lab to lab, rely­ing on one senior sci­en­tist after anoth­er to take her in. She nev­er made more than $60,000 a year.” This is a heart­warm­ing sto­ry that should also make you very sad — it illus­trates how bro­ken the aca­d­e­m­ic sys­tem is and how we came very close to los­ing a life­sav­ing break­through.
  4. This should not hap­pen more than once (Alexan­dra Petri, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The moments when peo­ple make up their secret minds about what is nor­mal and what is accept­able are nev­er big. They are always in pri­vate, when no one can see that you have failed the test, when all you were doing was try­ing to avoid any dis­com­fort, be cool, play along. But there is a price. The price is that the Matt Gaet­zes out there will leave the inter­ac­tion think­ing they have under­stood the world cor­rect­ly. That what they are doing is work­ing. That this is how the world is. But it is the accu­mu­la­tion of these lit­tle assents that make the world this way.” Well-writ­ten and true. Also, don’t take nude pho­tos of your­self nor allow oth­ers to do so. It is unlike­ly you will be hap­py with the out­come.
  5. A Hea­then’s East­er (Steve Randy Wald­man, Inter­flu­id­i­ty): “My the­o­log­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion is about can­dy-wrap­per lev­el. But for what­ev­er it’s worth, I con­sid­er this aspect of Christianity’s found­ing myth or event remark­able, and under­em­pha­sized. ‘For­give them, Father, they know not what they do,’ rep­re­sents a pro­found plea from the lips of a man being painful­ly mur­dered. That a par­ent, one with fire and brim­stone read­i­ly at hand and a noto­ri­ous his­to­ry of smit­ing, would for­give is per­haps even more aston­ish­ing, even more won­der­ful.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  6. The effects of Black Lives Mat­ter protests (Jerusalem Dem­sas, Vox): “[The researcher’s] main find­ing is a 15 to 20 per­cent reduc­tion in lethal use of force by police offi­cers — rough­ly 300 few­er police homi­cides — in cen­sus places that saw BLM protests. Campbell’s research also indi­cates that these protests cor­re­late with a 10 per­cent increase in mur­ders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were some­where between 1,000 and 6,000 more homi­cides than would have been expect­ed if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.”
  7. A whole pas­sel of trans-relat­ed arti­cles:
    • A Truce Pro­pos­al In The Trans Wars (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “In our cur­rent cul­ture, [my] some­what com­pli­cat­ed stance is anath­e­ma.… The pro­por­tion of peo­ple in this debate who seem psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly unsta­ble, emo­tion­al­ly volatile and per­son­al­ly vicious seems larg­er than usu­al.”
    • How Super-Straight Start­ed a Cul­ture War on Tik­Tok (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Most have dat­ing pref­er­ences that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly imply a neg­a­tive view of peo­ple who fall out­side them––I’d be averse to dat­ing an 18-year-old or a 60-year-old, yet I nei­ther hate nor fear either age cohort––and that they might not be able to change even if they want­ed to. Claims that only big­ots would decline to date a trans per­son strike some com­men­ta­tors as a form of coer­cion.”
    • Keira Bell: My Sto­ry (Keira Bell, Per­sua­sion): “Five years after begin­ning my med­ical tran­si­tion to becom­ing male, I began the process of detran­si­tion­ing. A lot of trans men talk about how you can’t cry with a high dose of testos­terone in your body, and this affect­ed me too: I couldn’t release my emo­tions. One of the first signs that I was becom­ing Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about.” This is very sober­ing.
    • A Guide to Neo­pro­nouns (Ezra Mar­cus, New York Times): “Many peo­ple who use neo­pro­nouns don’t just use one set. They select a hand­ful, and show off their col­lec­tions on web­sites like Pronouny.xyz, a site that pro­vides usage exam­ples for neo­pro­nouns. Users make their own Pro­nouny pages, like this one, which includes xe/xem/xyr, moon/moonself, star/starself, bee/beeself, and bun/bunself. ‘Sor­ry if I have too many pro­nouns,’ the page’s cre­ator wrote. ‘You can use just one set or just they/them if they’re too many!!’ ”
    • From a few weeks back: There Is No Epi­dem­ic Of Trans Mur­ders (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “So, of the eleven US mur­ders of trans or gen­der-non­con­form­ing peo­ple this year, only two — the ones in Puer­to Rico — appear to have been prob­a­bly moti­vat­ed by anti-trans hatred. They are still hor­ri­ble — no one deserves to be mur­dered — but the killings do not have the mean­ing that are being attrib­uted to them.”
    • Also slight­ly old­er: ‘A Hot­ly Con­test­ed Issue’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “The stu­dent alleged­ly threat­ened to sue Shawnee State, which in turn pres­sured Meri­wether fur­ther to address the stu­dent in her pre­ferred man­ner. Meri­wether agreed — on the con­di­tion that he could put a dis­claimer in his syl­labus about how he was fol­low­ing the university’s pro­noun pol­i­cy under com­pul­sion, and stat­ing his views about bio­log­i­cal sex and gen­der being one and the same and immutable. Meriwether’s dean reject­ed this as incom­pat­i­ble with the university’s gen­der iden­ti­ty pol­i­cy.… [the Sixth Cir­cuit Court sided with the pro­fes­sor] writ­ing that if pro­fes­sors ‘lacked free-speech pro­tec­tions when teach­ing, a uni­ver­si­ty would wield alarm­ing pow­er to com­pel ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty.’ A uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent could ‘require a paci­fist to declare that war is just, a civ­il rights icon to con­demn the Free­dom Rid­ers, a believ­er to deny the exis­tence of God, or a Sovi­et émi­gré to address his stu­dents as ‘com­rades,’ ’ he wrote. ‘That can­not be.’ ”
    • A very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the same case: A Vic­to­ry For Real­i­ty (Carl True­man, First Things): “The court’s rul­ing is worth read­ing in full. The evi­dent incom­pe­tence and mal­ice of the admin­is­tra­tion is impres­sive, as it ini­tial­ly flip-flops on whether an accept­able com­pro­mise is pos­si­ble and then descends into open hos­til­i­ty toward Meri­wether, includ­ing (but, as lawyers say, not lim­it­ed to) open mock­ery, deri­sion of his faith, and an inves­ti­ga­tion for which he was not asked to pro­vide any wit­ness­es. The court also iden­ti­fies the university’s flip-flop­ping and hos­til­i­ty to Meriwether’s reli­gious views as evi­dence that the mat­ter was not about apply­ing an estab­lished pol­i­cy in a neu­tral way but rather about tar­get­ing the pro­fes­sor for his Chris­t­ian beliefs.”

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 Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

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 268

This install­ment can be titled “Amer­i­ca In Decline, but the Bible Look­ing Pret­ty Sol­id. Also Aus­tralia.”

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.

After large­ly fin­ish­ing this email I learned that Supreme Court Jus­tice Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg died. I expect a TON of ink to be spilled on this and on what­ev­er devel­ops polit­i­cal­ly next week. Keep an eye out for thought­ful com­men­tary and send it my way. Please do pray for her fam­i­ly and for our nation — an already tense elec­tion sea­son just became even more fraught.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Does the Bible Pass the Bechdel Test? A Data-Dri­ven Look at Women in the Sto­ry of Scrip­ture (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “So does the Bible pass the Bechdel test? This short answer is: yes, there are scenes where two named women have a con­ver­sa­tion not about a man. The longer answer is more com­plex, but also, I think, rich­er.” This is REALLY well done.
  2. Sev­en Dead­ly Sins, One Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The sev­en dead­ly sins—wrath, sloth, pride, envy, greed, glut­tony, and lust—as we now list them came to us in the West­ern church through Thomas Aquinas in the 13th cen­tu­ry, Pope Gre­go­ry the Great sev­en cen­turies pri­or, and a mys­tic named Eva­grius two cen­turies before that…. The 2020 elec­tion gives occa­sion to deal with them all.”
  3. Eco­log­i­cal insights ignored:
    • They Know How to Pre­vent Megafires. Why Won’t Any­body Lis­ten? (Eliz­a­beth Weil, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Aca­d­e­mics believe that between 4.4 mil­lion and 11.8 mil­lion acres burned each year in pre­his­toric Cal­i­for­nia…. We live with a death­ly back­log. In Feb­ru­ary 2020, Nature Sus­tain­abil­i­ty pub­lished this ter­ri­fy­ing con­clu­sion: Cal­i­for­nia would need to burn 20 mil­lion acres — an area about the size of Maine — to resta­bi­lize in terms of fire.”
    • Is Plas­tic Recy­cling A Lie? Oil Com­pa­nies Tout­ed Recy­cling To Sell More Plas­tic (Lau­ra Sul­li­van, NPR): “All of these prob­lems [with recy­cling] have exist­ed for decades, no mat­ter what new recy­cling tech­nol­o­gy or expen­sive machin­ery has been devel­oped. In all that time, less than 10 per­cent of plas­tic has ever been recy­cled. But the pub­lic has known lit­tle about these dif­fi­cul­ties.”
    • Nei­ther arti­cle is giv­ing us much new infor­ma­tion — I have heard knowl­edge­able peo­ple say sim­i­lar things for quite some time now. The fact that we have not changed is dis­ap­point­ing but not sur­pris­ing: politi­cians (like most peo­ple) “lis­ten to sci­ence” when the find­ings of sci­en­tists align with their self-inter­est. The con­tin­ued exis­tence of these and oth­er glar­ing prob­lems in Amer­i­can life make me sad.
  4. EXCLUSIVE: Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment opens inves­ti­ga­tion into Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty after pres­i­dent deems racism ’embed­ded’ in the school (Tiana Lowe, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “The Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion has informed Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty that it is under inves­ti­ga­tion fol­low­ing the school pres­i­den­t’s dec­la­ra­tion that racism was ‘embed­ded’ in the insti­tu­tion.”
  5. Sta­tis­tics, lies and the virus: five lessons from a pan­dem­ic (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “You can appre­ci­ate, I hope, my obses­sion with these two con­trast­ing accounts of sta­tis­tics: one as a trick, one as a tool.… Scep­ti­cism has its place, but eas­i­ly cur­dles into cyn­i­cism and can be weaponised into some­thing even more poi­so­nous than that. “ Very good insights from a British econ­o­mist.
  6. Racism Is Real. But Is “Sys­temic Racism”? That Time I Was Pub­lished by Newsweek—For Two Hours (Matthew Franck, Pub­lic Dis­course): “If every­one in gen­er­al but no one in par­tic­u­lar is to blame, the few remain­ing actu­al racists among us are let off the hook. They’re no worse than the rest of us. Of course, unlike all of us who are invit­ed to affirm our col­lec­tive guilt for the ‘sys­tem,’ the tru­ly guilty won’t feel guilty.”
    • The author is the Asso­ciate Direc­tor of the James Madi­son Pro­gram at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. This one is includ­ed most­ly for the dra­ma of it being pub­lished and then unpub­lished by Newsweek. There is an unhealthy intel­lec­tu­al cli­mate at many of our major pub­li­ca­tions.
  7. When you browse Insta­gram and find for­mer Aus­tralian Prime Min­is­ter Tony Abbot­t’s pass­port num­ber (Alex Hope, per­son­al web­site): “The point of this sto­ry isn’t to say ‘wow Tony Abbott got hacked, what a dum­my’. The point is that if some­one famous can unknow­ing­ly post their board­ing pass, any­one can.” Sur­pris­ing­ly enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

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 261

Links to some encour­ag­ing sto­ries, some hor­ri­fy­ing sto­ries, and some con­fus­ing sto­ries. Because it be like that some­times.

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 I Redis­cov­ered Faith (Mal­colm Glad­well, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I have always believed in God. I have grasped the log­ic of Chris­t­ian faith. What I have had a hard time see­ing is God’s pow­er. I put that sen­tence in the past tense because some­thing hap­pened to me…” Shared with me by a stu­dent.
  2. Swe­den, Which Nev­er Had Lock­down, Sees COVID-19 Cas­es Plum­met as Rest of Europe Suf­fers Spike (Soo Kim, Newsweek): “Amid fears over a poten­tial sec­ond wave of the nov­el coro­n­avirus across Europe, new infec­tions in Swe­den, where full lock­down mea­sures were not imple­ment­ed, have most­ly declined since late June…. Mean­while, oth­er parts of Europe have report­ed large spikes in new cas­es over the same peri­od, includ­ing Spain, France, Ger­many, Bel­gium and The Nether­lands, which have seen increas­es between 40 and 200 per­cent over the last month, accord­ing to the lat­est WHO report Wednes­day.” Huh. Real­i­ty is com­pli­cat­ed and that’s why they make get­ting a PhD so ardu­ous. 
  3. John Roberts: Inside his sur­pris­ing streak of lib­er­al wins (Joan Biskupic, CNN): “…CNN offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes at how jus­tices on the Roberts court assert­ed their inter­ests, forged coali­tions and nav­i­gat­ed polit­i­cal pres­sure and the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. The jus­tices’ opin­ions are pub­lic, but their delib­er­a­tions are pri­vate and usu­al­ly remain secret.”
  4. Har­vard Cre­ates Man­agers Instead of Elites (Saf­fron Huang, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “At Har­vard, the implic­it sig­nal we receive every day is that every­thing requires a man­ag­er. Our extracur­ric­u­lars, despite vary­ing club names, most­ly revolve around admin­is­tra­tive work and send­ing emails. Emails solic­it­ing dona­tions, emails invit­ing speak­ers to a con­fer­ence, emails pub­li­ciz­ing your mag­a­zine launch with ‘FREE DONUTS’ dom­i­nat­ing the sub­ject line. Grant­ed, exe­cu­tion of mun­dane tasks is nec­es­sary for real work to be done. The skills of sub­tly bump­ing an unre­spon­sive team­mate, deft­ly achiev­ing a friend­ly-but-pro­fes­sion­al tone, and cre­at­ing Excel files wor­thy of a UI/UX design­er will serve you well in cor­po­rate life…. Very few clubs cre­ate a gen­er­a­tive and imag­i­na­tive vision for your future self at work, or for what you should be work­ing on. Although this is the stat­ed pur­pose of a Har­vard lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion, cam­pus cul­ture has ele­vat­ed man­age­ri­al­ism above cre­ation…. The result is a class that excels at being judged and excels at man­ag­ing and exe­cut­ing defined tasks.” Quite inter­est­ing and very rel­e­vant to Stan­ford.
  5. The Supreme Court’s sur­pris­ing deci­sion on church­es and the pan­dem­ic, explained (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Unlike his fel­low Repub­li­can jus­tices, in oth­er words, Roberts appears to believe that courts have a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong duty to defer to demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly account­able offi­cials dur­ing an his­toric pub­lic health cri­sis.” I found this analy­sis of Robert’s vote quite inter­est­ing. 
    • Obey­ing God Rather than Men? A Con­sti­tu­tion­al Schol­ar on What’s Real­ly a Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Issue (Ed Stet­zer inter­view­ing John Inazu, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Be peo­ple of hope who are known for putting the inter­ests of oth­ers above your own. Lament the costs of this virus to human life, men­tal health, and mate­r­i­al well-being. Lament our inabil­i­ty to gath­er for wor­ship. Pray for the end of this virus. But in the mean­time, love your neigh­bors and seek the peace of the city, even if it feels cost­ly.”
    • We Can’t Roll the Dice on Reli­gious Lib­er­ty: Neva­da, the Supreme Court, and Church­es (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Neva­da won the injunc­tion bat­tle, but church­es need to help the state back up and make the right choice. This is the line that every main­stream evan­gel­i­cal group said they would draw, and it has now been crossed.”
    • Christ, not Cae­sar, Is Head of the Church (John MacArthur, Grace To You): “His­to­ry is full of painful reminders that gov­ern­ment pow­er is eas­i­ly and fre­quent­ly abused for evil pur­pos­es. Politi­cians may manip­u­late sta­tis­tics and the media can cov­er up or cam­ou­flage incon­ve­nient truths. So a dis­cern­ing church can­not pas­sive­ly or auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­ply if the gov­ern­ment orders a shut­down of con­gre­ga­tion­al meetings—even if the rea­son giv­en is a con­cern for pub­lic health and safe­ty.”
    • A Time for Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence? A Response to Grace Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s Elders (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “We under­stand that we are not ancient Israel. And though in one sense all space is sacred for a Chris­t­ian because all space is under Christ’s lord­ship, in anoth­er sense no space is sacred, at least in a Tem­ple-like way; and the government’s author­i­ty also extends every­where inside its bor­ders.”
    • Fur­ther Reflec­tions on Recent Con­ver­sa­tions about Chris­t­ian Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “…my arti­cle and our pod­cast tried to do one sim­ple thing: remind fel­low believers—as we all ven­ture for­ward on our polit­i­cal­ly tumul­tuous landscape—of the cru­cial role of Chris­t­ian free­dom when we take these kinds of stances. On this and so many oth­er issues, believ­ers will come to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about the best path to take. And for the sake of main­tain­ing uni­ty, the unique author­i­ty of Scrip­ture, and the gospel, we need to keep train­ing our instincts to have a quick grasp for what belongs in the realm of free­dom and what does not.”
    • Our Gal­va­niz­ing Grand­fa­ther (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Suf­fice it to say that the civ­il gov­ern­ment does have legit­i­mate author­i­ty around sacred things (cir­ca sacra), but no author­i­ty what­ev­er in sacred things (in sac­ris). And when the gov­ern­ment abus­es this basic dis­tinc­tion willy nil­ly, as our gov­ern­ments have been doing in their overt and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry treat­ment of the church, it is time for the lead­er­ship of the church to take a stand. So with all of that run­ning in the back­ground, my pur­pose here this morn­ing is sim­ply to hon­or John MacArthur for his lead­er­ship in this.”
  6. Inter­view: Jour­nal­ist Michael Tracey on Riots & Protests (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “…the diver­gence in opin­ion — between local black and minor­i­ty pop­u­la­tions about the eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of the riots, and the activists/journalists who claim to speak on their behalf — is strik­ing.”
  7. Are Chris­tians For­bid­den to Eat Blood? (David Clos­son, Gospel Coali­tion): “We can learn at least two things from the Jerusalem Coun­cil. First, on mat­ters per­tain­ing to the gospel, there is no room for com­pro­mise. The apos­tles and elders were firm and swift in their denun­ci­a­tion of those who sought to add works to the gospel. Sal­va­tion is by faith alone through grace alone; human effort is exclud­ed. Sec­ond, grace should be extend­ed for dif­fer­ences that aren’t cen­tral to the gospel.” Peo­ple dunked on this arti­cle, but it’s good and deals with an impor­tant ques­tion that will occur to any Bible read­er. 

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 234

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. Reflec­tions on Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “I don’t know what pro­por­tion of stu­dents at elite schools are part of the inter­sec­tion­al sub­cul­ture. But it is com­mon enough that I nev­er go more than a few days with­out encoun­ter­ing it. As a crude point of com­par­i­son, I’m more like­ly to meet a com­mit­ted inter­sec­tion­al­ist on any giv­en day at Colum­bia than I am to meet a com­mit­ted veg­e­tar­i­an, and much more like­ly than I am to meet a com­mit­ted Chris­t­ian.”
  2. The Unit­ed States is Starved for Tal­ent (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­all, get­ting (approx­i­mate­ly) one extra high-skilled [H1‑B] work­er caus­es a 23% increase in the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a suc­cess­ful IPO with­in five years (a 1.5 per­cent­age point increase in the base­line prob­a­bil­i­ty of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect. Remem­ber, these star­tups have access to a labor pool of 160 mil­lion work­ers.”
  3. Why Bad Things Must Hap­pen to Good Peo­ple (Nathaniel Givens, Pub­lic Square): “It’s also fair to say that when we know in advance the bound­aries of the bad that can hap­pen, we can hedge our bets and selec­tive­ly choose our course through life to opti­mize risk and reward. The prob­lem isn’t that we will make dif­fer­ent deci­sions under con­di­tions like these. The prob­lem is that we will make them for dif­fer­ent rea­sons.” A Mor­mon take on theod­i­cy, quite inter­est­ing and not con­tin­gent on Mor­mon dis­tinc­tives.
  4. Aus­tralian rap­tors start fires to flush out prey (John Pick­rell, Cos­mos): “Black kites (Mil­vus migrans), whistling kites (Halias­tur sphenu­rus) and brown fal­cons (Fal­co berig­o­ra) all reg­u­lar­ly con­gre­gate near the edges of bush­fires, tak­ing advan­tage of an exo­dus of small lizards, mam­mals, birds and insects – but it appears that some may have learnt not only to use fire to their advan­tage, but also to con­trol it.”
  5. Big Data+Small Bias « Small Data+Zero Bias (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Sup­pose you want to esti­mate who will win the 2016 US Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. You ask 2.3 mil­lion poten­tial vot­ers whether they are like­ly to vote for Trump or not. The sam­ple is in all ways demo­graph­i­cal­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the US vot­ing pop­u­la­tion but poten­tial Trump vot­ers are a tiny bit less like­ly to answer the ques­tion, just .001 less like­ly to answer (note they don’t lie, they just don’t answer).” I was stunned.
  6. Coach O. Vs. The Acela Grad­grind (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “You’d think that the media elites would by now have learned the cost to their own cred­i­bil­i­ty of not under­stand­ing this coun­try. But they keep being sur­prised. Nobody expects a New York Times edi­to­r­i­al writer to agree with the deci­sion to can­cel col­lege class­es because of a foot­ball game. But one would like to think that a man of the world such as him­self would have enough sense to think about why this deci­sion might have been made, and what it says about cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence. I sus­pect if the LSU Board of Super­vi­sors had can­celled class­es for Trans­gen­der Day Of Remem­brance, the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al board would have wet its col­lec­tive pants with delight.”
    • Relat­ed: Where Ivy Mat­ters: The Edu­ca­tion­al Back­grounds of U.S. Cul­tur­al Elites (Brint et al, Soci­ol­o­gy of Edu­ca­tion): “We find that the lead­ing U.S. edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions are sub­stan­tial­ly more impor­tant for prepar­ing future mem­bers of the cul­tur­al elite than they are for prepar­ing future mem­bers of the busi­ness or polit­i­cal elite. In addi­tion, mem­bers of the cul­tur­al elite who are rec­og­nized for out­stand­ing achieve­ments by peers and experts are much more like­ly to have obtained degrees from the lead­ing edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions than are those who achieve acclaim from pop­u­lar audi­ences.”
  7. See­ing Both Sides (Andrew Bunt, Think The­ol­o­gy): “One of the things I find most dif­fi­cult about being a celi­bate gay/same-sex attract­ed Chris­t­ian is when I feel a strong attrac­tion to a spe­cif­ic guy.”

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 Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

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 230

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 Les­son To Unlearn (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “The most dam­ag­ing thing you learned in school was­n’t some­thing you learned in any spe­cif­ic class. It was learn­ing to get good grades.” Stan­ford stu­dents: if you feel attacked, you are. He is aim­ing at you. Worth pon­der­ing.
  2. The Chris­tians I Know (Eboo Patel, Inside High­er Ed): “Too often when I talk about the impor­tance of pos­i­tive­ly engag­ing reli­gious iden­ti­ty in a pro­gres­sive high­er ed space, the first ques­tion that gets asked is this: ‘Chris­tians hate gays and refugees and poor peo­ple, so why should I cre­ate a space for their iden­ti­ties?’ That’s the same view of Chris­tians that big­ots have of Mus­lims: know­ing only the bad stuff. My hope is that peo­ple will remem­ber that Chris­tians often start and run the pro­grams that pro­vide direct ser­vice to those very peo­ple when they are suf­fer­ing the most.”
  3. British Evan­gel­i­cals Brace for Brex­it (Ken Chit­wood, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The gen­er­al­ly pro-remain stance of British evan­gel­i­cals might be sur­pris­ing to some. How­ev­er, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Andrea Hatch­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South in Sewa­nee, Ten­nessee, found British evan­gel­i­cals are ‘less bound­aried’ and gen­er­al­ly ‘more inter­na­tion­al­ist in out­look’ than either their Angli­can and Pen­te­costal peers or US evan­gel­i­cals. They are also more will­ing to work across polit­i­cal divides.” I find this inter­est­ing for sev­er­al rea­sons, one of which is the way the author sep­a­rates Pen­te­costals from evan­gel­i­cals. Is that a UK thing? In the USA Pen­te­costals are gen­er­al­ly seen as a sub­set of evan­gel­i­cals.
    • Relat­ed: The Begin­ning of the End of the Unit­ed King­dom (First Things): “It may seem hys­ter­i­cal to pro­claim the end to a coun­try that has basi­cal­ly exist­ed in its present form—minus the Repub­lic of Ire­land, of course—since 1707. But the evi­dence is build­ing by the day. In thir­ty years, it is far more like­ly than not that the Unit­ed King­dom will not exist. What will exist is an Eng­land that will be poor­er, frac­tured between the Lon­don elite and the rest of the coun­try, and pos­si­bly sub­ject to demo­graph­ic fac­tion­al­ism.”
    • Relat­ed: The Blun­der­ing Bril­liance of Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “It is this aspect of Boris’s pol­i­tics that some of his close allies insist has been mis­un­der­stood. He has done what no oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive leader in the West has done: He has co-opt­ed and there­by neutered the far right. The reac­tionary Brex­it Par­ty has all but col­lapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immi­gra­tion fer­vor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the eco­nom­ic and social cen­ter under Johnson’s lead­er­ship. And there is a strat­e­gy to this. What Cum­mings and John­son believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for lib­er­al progress, has, through its over­reach and hubris, actu­al­ly become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Con­ti­nent. By forc­ing many very dif­fer­ent coun­tries into one increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful Euro­crat­ic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nation­al­ist reac­tion.” This one is long but real­ly good. If you enjoy it, I super high­ly rec­om­mend a very amus­ing arti­cle about Boris John­son I shared back in vol­ume 208 (scroll down to the fun­ny sec­tion).
  4. Reli­gion, Reten­tion, and Why We Stay or Go (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “What to make of all this? First, evan­gel­i­cals are doing a good job of keep­ing peo­ple inside the tent…. The oth­er thing worth pon­der­ing is that almost no one is mov­ing toward Catholi­cism or main­line Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. Instead, the move­ment is all at the edges of the spec­trum — evan­gel­i­cals on one end, and the nones on the oth­er.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and is him­self an ex-evan­gel­i­cal. 
  5. A guide to hav­ing an actu­al­ly hap­py Christ­mas (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “Mr Mutz found that Chris­tians felt hap­pi­er at Christ­mas, while oth­ers felt less hap­py. Sim­i­lar­ly Messrs Kass­er and Shel­don found that peo­ple who spent more time with their fam­i­lies or engag­ing in reli­gious prac­tices tend­ed to have a bet­ter time of things. Con­sumerism fared less well, accord­ing to Messrs Kass­er and Shel­don; for all the mon­ey and effort buy­ing and wrap­ping gifts, the activ­i­ty ‘appar­ent­ly con­tributes lit­tle to hol­i­day joy’.”
  6. 200 Researchers, 5 Hypothe­ses, No Con­sis­tent Answers (Christie Aschwan­den, Wired): “When var­i­ous research teams designed their own means of test­ing the very same set of research ques­tions, they came up with diver­gent, and in some cas­es oppos­ing, results. The crowd­sourced study is a dra­mat­ic demon­stra­tion of an idea that’s been wide­ly dis­cussed in light of the repro­ducibil­i­ty crisis—the notion that sub­jec­tive deci­sions researchers make while design­ing their stud­ies can have an enor­mous impact on their observed results. Whether through p‑hacking or via the choic­es they make as they wan­der the gar­den of fork­ing paths, researchers may inten­tion­al­ly or inad­ver­tent­ly nudge their results toward a par­tic­u­lar con­clu­sion.” I don’t think this is sur­pris­ing to any­one who knows many sci­en­tists, but it’s def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing.
  7. Are We in the Midst of a Trans­gen­der Mur­der Epi­dem­ic? (Will­fred Reil­ly, Quil­lette): “The Human Rights Cam­paign main­tains a year-by-year data­base con­tain­ing every known case of a trans­gen­der indi­vid­ual being killed by vio­lent means, and gives this num­ber as 29 in 2017, 26 in 2018, and 22 in 2019. Not only do these fig­ures not reflect a year-by-year increase in attacks on trans persons—they are remark­ably con­sis­tent, and may be trend­ing slight­ly downwards—they also indi­cate that the trans mur­der rate is sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er than the mur­der rate for Amer­i­cans over­all.” Any num­ber of mur­ders is too many. Still, I found this inter­est­ing because I hear the con­trary so often. In light of the pre­vi­ous arti­cle, if you know oppos­ing research I’d like to see it. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Ken­tucky State 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 Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

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 215

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 1619 Project (many authors, New York Times Mag­a­zine): “…[many believe] that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, how­ev­er, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unan­i­mous­ly cel­e­brat­ed every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defin­ing con­tra­dic­tions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to his­to­ry (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), that was when a ship arrived at Point Com­fort in the British colony of Vir­ginia, bear­ing a car­go of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inau­gu­rat­ed a bar­bar­ic sys­tem of chat­tel slav­ery that would last for the next 250 years. This is some­times referred to as the country’s orig­i­nal sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very ori­gin.” The link is to a PDF of the entire issue.
    • A pos­i­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: A Brief His­to­ry of the His­to­ry Wars (Rebec­ca Onion, Slate): “For the sake of our col­lec­tive car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, we would do bet­ter to rec­og­nize these skir­mish­es over Amer­i­can history—in which con­ser­v­a­tives demand that a pos­i­tive vision of our nation’s past, stud­ded with suc­cess­es, inven­tions, and ‘great men,’ take pride of place in our pub­lic culture—as recur­rent episodes in a par­tic­u­lar decades-old front of the cul­ture wars. That way, we could stop wast­ing our good faith on old, dead-end con­ver­sa­tions.”
    • A neg­a­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: The New York Times sur­ren­ders to the left on race (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Through­out the issue of the NYTM, head­lines make, with just slight vari­a­tions, the same rhetor­i­cal move over and over again: ‘Here is some­thing unpleas­ant, unjust, or even down­right evil about life in the present-day Unit­ed States. Bet you did­n’t real­ize that slav­ery is ulti­mate­ly to blame.’ Lack of uni­ver­sal access to health care? High rates of sug­ar con­sump­tion? Cal­lous treat­ment of incar­cer­at­ed pris­on­ers? White record­ing artists ‘steal­ing’ black music? Harsh labor prac­tices? That’s right — all of it, and far more, fol­lows from slav­ery.”
    • A com­pli­cat­ed con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How slav­ery doomed lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment in Amer­i­ca (Philip Klein, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “A num­ber of con­ser­v­a­tives react­ed to the project by brand­ing it as anti-Amer­i­can. But I don’t think that’s fair, at least based on the lead essay I read from Nikole Han­nah-Jones. In fact, her piece is quite the oppo­site. Sure, it chron­i­cles the bru­tal­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery and the cen­tu­ry of oppres­sion, insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­crim­i­na­tion, and racist ter­ror­ism that fol­lowed. Yet the piece is ulti­mate­ly about how she rec­on­ciles that his­to­ry with her patri­o­tism and comes to under­stand her own father’s love of a coun­try that treat­ed him so poor­ly.”
    • A neg­a­tive con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How To Dele­git­imize A Nation (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But who we imag­ine our­selves to be today shapes who we will become tomor­row. If The 1619 Project were mere­ly about expand­ing our com­mon under­stand­ing of the Amer­i­can ori­gins, who could object? It arrives, though, in the midst of an epic cul­ture war over who we are, and who we are going to be.”
    • Relat­ed: Black Amer­i­can His­to­ry Should Give Evan­gel­i­cals a Sense of Per­spec­tive — and Hope (David French, Nation­al Review): “If men and women have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak and pos­sess the courage to tell the truth, they have hope that they can trans­form a nation. What was true for black Amer­i­cans (includ­ing the black Amer­i­can church) in the most dire of cir­cum­stances is still true for con­tem­po­rary Chris­tians in far less try­ing times”
    • In response: In Defense Of Evan­gel­i­cal Cul­tur­al Pes­simism (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “This, I think, is a dis­tinc­tion that makes a big dif­fer­ence re: French’s argu­ment. You can’t cease to be black; you can cease to be Chris­t­ian, or at least mean­ing­ful­ly Chris­t­ian.” This piece is way too long but makes some good points.
  2. Don’t Use These Free-Speech Argu­ments Ever Again (Ken White, The Atlantic): “If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in Amer­i­ca, or lis­tened to talk­ing heads on the news, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly encoun­tered emp­ty, mis­lead­ing, or sim­ply false tropes about the First Amend­ment. Those tired tropes are bar­ri­ers to seri­ous dis­cus­sions about free speech. Any use­ful dis­cus­sion of what the law should be must be informed by an accu­rate view of what the law is.” White is best known under his inter­net alias Pope­hat. Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent.
  3. The Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Lux­u­ry beliefs’ are the lat­est sta­tus sym­bol for rich Amer­i­cans (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Post): “…as trendy clothes and oth­er prod­ucts become more acces­si­ble and afford­able, there is increas­ing­ly less sta­tus attached to lux­u­ry goods. The upper class­es have found a clever solu­tion to this prob­lem: lux­u­ry beliefs. These are ideas and opin­ions that con­fer sta­tus on the rich at very lit­tle cost, while tak­ing a toll on the low­er class.”
  4. How Life Became an End­less, Ter­ri­ble Com­pe­ti­tion (Daniel Markovits, The Atlantic): “Escap­ing the mer­i­toc­ra­cy trap will not be easy. Elites nat­u­ral­ly resist poli­cies that threat­en to under­mine their advan­tages. But it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble to get rich off your own human cap­i­tal with­out exploit­ing your­self and impov­er­ish­ing your inner life, and mer­i­to­crats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive them­selves.” The author is a Yale law pro­fes­sor. I found his diag­no­sis more per­sua­sive than his prog­no­sis.
  5. The Com­ing Migra­tion out of Sub-Saha­ran Africa (Christo­pher Cald­well, Nation­al Review): “The pop­u­la­tion pres­sures ema­nat­ing from the Mid­dle East in recent decades, already suf­fi­cient to dri­ve the Euro­pean polit­i­cal sys­tem into con­vul­sions, are going to pale beside those from sub-Saha­ran Africa in decades to come.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Why Nice­ness Weak­ens Our Wit­ness (Sharon Hodde Miller, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We exist in a world that swings between sweet­ness and out­rage, two behav­iors that seem to be at odds with one anoth­er. In real­i­ty, they are two sides of the same coin: a lack of spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion. When our civil­i­ty isn’t root­ed in some­thing stur­dy and deep, when our good behav­ior isn’t spring­ing from the core of who we are but is instead mere­ly a mask we put on, it is only a mat­ter of time before the façade crum­bles away and our true state is revealed: an entire gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who are real­ly good at look­ing good.” I agree with the sub­stance of this arti­cle, but the title both­ers me. 
  7. Fact-Check­ing Satire — Is Snopes Seri­ous? (Bill Zeis­er, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “the Bee’s founder and minor­i­ty own­er, Adam Ford, took par­tic­u­lar excep­tion to the tone of the Snopes assess­ment. In a lengthy Twit­ter thread, he called Snopes’ han­dling of the piece on Thomas ‘par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious’ and ‘dis­turb­ing.’ He point­ed to a sub­ti­tle that cas­ti­gat­ed the Bee for ‘fan­ning the flames of con­tro­ver­sy’ and ‘mud­dy­ing the details of a news sto­ry’ to the point that it was unclear if the piece qual­i­fied as satire. Ford com­plained that through­out the Snopes sto­ry, sup­pos­ed­ly an ‘objec­tive fact check,’ the assess­ment ‘veered towards pro­nounc­ing a moral judg­ment,’ seem­ing­ly accus­ing the satir­i­cal site of will­ful decep­tion. It is cer­tain­ly under­stand­able how Ford could feel this way: Snopes referred to the Bee’s ‘ruse’ and offered that ‘the Baby­lon Bee has man­aged to fool read­ers with its brand of satire in the past.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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