Tag: europe

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 298

sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle from the news this week — just ran­dom­ly inter­est­ing things

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 298, which is a fair­ly unin­ter­est­ing num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. New Rule: Give It to Me Straight, Doc (Bill Maher, YouTube): eight min­utes. This is a very good clip about COVID mis­in­for­ma­tion, although the lan­guage is not fam­i­ly-friend­ly. It goes in a direc­tion I did not expect towards the end.
    • Relat­ed: Why do so many vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple remain irra­tional­ly fear­ful? Lis­ten to the professor’s sto­ry. (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “To take just one exam­ple, major media out­lets trum­pet­ed new gov­ern­ment data last week show­ing that 5,800 ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed Amer­i­cans had con­tract­ed Covid. That may sound like a big num­ber, but it indi­cates that a vac­ci­nat­ed person’s chances of get­ting Covid are about one in 11,000.… A car trip is a big­ger threat, to you and oth­ers. About 100 Amer­i­cans are like­ly to die in car crash­es today. The new fed­er­al data sug­gests that either zero or one vac­ci­nat­ed per­son will die today from Covid.”
  2. On Good Par­ties (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Break­ing Ground): “A Good Par­ty is a place where bonds of friend­ship, fos­tered in a spir­it of both char­i­ty and joy, serve as the build­ing blocks for com­mu­nal life over­all. The wed­ding feast, that abun­dant ban­quet of Chris­t­ian life, is always pre­fig­ured in the con­vivial sym­po­sium of friend­ship. The king­dom of heav­en, when it comes, will be a very Good Par­ty. Good Par­ties don’t mere­ly offer us the oppor­tu­ni­ty to gath­er with those we love. Rather, more impor­tant­ly, they teach us how to love.” This is real­ly quite some­thing. I like it a lot.
  3. The Ques­tion That Dic­tates How Chris­tians Approach Cul­ture and Pol­i­tics (David French, The Dis­patch): “It’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly obvi­ous that one expla­na­tion for pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent Chris­t­ian approach­es to pol­i­tics and cul­ture rests with dif­fer­ent answers to the fol­low­ing ques­tion: Does the pri­ma­ry threat to the church come from with­in the church or with­out? Put dif­fer­ent­ly, does the church stum­ble and fall pri­mar­i­ly because of the sins of the church or because of the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal head­winds direct­ed against the church?”
    • In Here, Out There: On Assess­ing Spir­i­tu­al Threats (Dan Dar­ling, Sub­stack): “At times when we are com­bat­ing cul­tur­al ideas, we are not argu­ing with the world, but try­ing to equip the next gen­er­a­tion of Chris­tians whose faith will be chal­lenged by ideas that run con­trary to Scrip­ture. Our peo­ple are inun­dat­ed on every side by mes­sages that are at odds with Jesus’ teach­ings. Pop cul­ture, social media, friends, etc form a pow­er­ful influ­ence on this cohort of young peo­ple.” Not a rebut­tal, but a com­ple­ment.
  4. It’s Time for Social Con­ser­v­a­tives to Stop Fawn­ing Over Hun­gary (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “What made Hungary’s fam­i­ly pol­i­cy work wasn’t the pop­ulism, but the bor­ing tech­noc­ra­cy of it. Flashy pop­ulist pro­grams failed, while just push­ing cash out the door to fam­i­lies (as is the norm in coun­tries like Swe­den, Den­mark, or Nor­way, all of which have high­er birth rates than Hun­gary) worked. Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives should learn from this: if you want a high­er birth rate, you’re going to have to pay for it.” This was way more inter­est­ing than I antic­i­pat­ed.
  5. Why is Every­thing Lib­er­al? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “In a democ­ra­cy, every vote is sup­posed to be equal. If about half the coun­try sup­ports one side and half the coun­try sup­ports anoth­er, you may expect major insti­tu­tions to either be equal­ly divid­ed, or to try to stay polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral. This is not what we find.” This is basi­cal­ly one real­ly good obser­va­tion expound­ed in detail. The author, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, is a research fel­low at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty.
  6. Repa­ra­tions: A Crit­i­cal The­o­log­i­cal Review (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “With tax col­lec­tors and sol­diers through­out the Gospels, there is no talk of resti­tu­tion for impe­r­i­al suprema­cy or extrac­tive sys­tems, nor any sum­mons to dis­man­tle the struc­tures they inhab­it­ed, just the straight­for­ward com­mand to live a god­ly life, be gen­er­ous to oth­ers, and repay what you have stolen.” Well done book reviews are amaz­ing. This is as good as the best reviews by Scott Alexan­der.
  7. The Great Unset­tling (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “We in the West invent­ed this thing called ‘moder­ni­ty’, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world want­ed it or not. Once we called this process ‘the white man’s bur­den’ and export­ed it with dread­noughts. Now we call it ‘devel­op­ment’ and export it via the World Bank.” Wide-rang­ing.

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 This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 276

I real­ly like the sto­ries of the shame­less­ly sketchy judge near the end

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Azerbaijan’s drones owned the bat­tle­field in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of war­fare (Robyn Dixon, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a mat­ter of months, how­ev­er, Nagorno-Karabakh has become per­haps the most pow­er­ful exam­ple of how small and rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive attack drones can change the dimen­sions of con­flicts once dom­i­nat­ed by ground bat­tles and tra­di­tion­al air pow­er.”
  2. The U.S. Divorce Rate Has Hit a 50-Year Low (Wendy Wang, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Divorce in Amer­i­ca has been falling fast in recent years, and it just hit a record low in 2019. For every 1,000 mar­riages in the last year, only 14.9 end­ed in divorce, accord­ing to the new­ly released Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey data from the Cen­sus Bureau. This is the low­est rate we have seen in 50 years. It is even slight­ly low­er than 1970, when 15 mar­riages end­ed in divorce per 1,000 mar­riages.”
  3. Gen­der Activists Are Try­ing to Can­cel My Book. Why is Sil­i­con Val­ley Help­ing Them? (Abi­gail Shri­er, Quil­lette): “This is what cen­sor­ship looks like in 21st-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. It isn’t the gov­ern­ment send­ing police to your home. It’s Sil­i­con Val­ley oli­gop­o­lists imple­ment­ing black­outs and appeas­ing social-jus­tice mobs, while send­ing dis­fa­vored ideas down mem­o­ry holes. And the forces of cen­sor­ship are win­ning. Not only because their efforts to cen­sor leave almost no trace. They are win­ning because, thus far, most Amer­i­cans have been con­tent to sur­ren­der vir­tu­al­ly every lib­er­ty in exchange for the lux­u­ry of hav­ing prod­ucts deliv­ered to their door.”
    • Relat­ed: How cor­po­ra­tions can delete your exis­tence (Gavin Haynes, Unherd): “In the bank­ing system’s capac­i­ty to dis­able the indi­vid­ual with­out pro-active­ly doing them harm, there’s an echo of the ele­gance of the Chi­nese government’s social cred­it.”
  4. On the valid­i­ty of the elec­tion:
    • Who’s cov­er­ing this? Are charis­mat­ics and Pen­te­costals behind Trump’s refusal to con­cede? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…these folks are a sub­set — a move­ment among charismatics/pentecostals — of a Chris­t­ian sub­set and not well known to the gen­er­al pub­lic. How­ev­er, when you have flocks of Repub­li­cans call­ing foul on the elec­tion and the president’s most high-pro­file pas­tor is hav­ing night­ly prayer meet­ings because she is cer­tain that prophets have decreed four more years for Trump, it’s time more reporters give a lis­ten.”
    • How we can be con­fi­dent that Trump’s vot­er fraud claims are baloney (Hen­ry Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mass vot­er fraud should be rel­a­tive­ly easy to detect, even if it might be dif­fi­cult to prove. Since we elect pres­i­dents through the elec­toral col­lege, polit­i­cal oper­a­tives try­ing to nefar­i­ous­ly pro­duce a vic­to­ry would focus on states crit­i­cal to an elec­toral col­lege major­i­ty…. None of these ear­ly warn­ing signs of fraud appear in the results.”
    • The Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion Was Legit­i­mate. Con­spir­a­cies Are Not. (David French, The Dis­patch): “The count­ing must con­tin­ue and all legal chal­lenges must be heard, but as of this moment there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that should cause Amer­i­cans to believe that this elec­tion was ille­git­i­mate, and it is shame­ful and dan­ger­ous for any­one to sug­gest or allege oth­er­wise.”
    • A Primer in Basic Elec­toral Skep­ti­cism (Dou­glas Wil­son, blog): “We have reports that every­thing is fine and nor­mal. We have reports of vot­er fraud. We do not know which reports are true. But we do know which reports are cen­sored. And if that doesn’t tell you some­thing, then you are not pay­ing atten­tion.”
    • Means, motive, and oppor­tu­ni­ty (Ed Fes­er, blog): “…some main­stream his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, includ­ing lib­er­al ones, think that these states were indeed stolen from Nixon [in 1960]. For exam­ple, Kennedy biog­ra­ph­er Sey­mour Hersh judges that the elec­tion was stolen. His­to­ri­an Robert Dallek thinks that at least Illi­nois was stolen, via Daley’s polit­i­cal machine. His­to­ri­an William Rorabaugh thinks that Nixon may have been cheat­ed out of as many as 100,000 to 200,000 votes in Johnson’s cor­rupt Texas.” Wild stuff that I did not know. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Pasade­na City Col­lege. 
    • My own view: the elec­tion was valid and of course there was cheat­ing. Peo­ple cheat at cards, peo­ple cheat on their tax­es. Why in the world would­n’t peo­ple try to cheat in an elec­tion? But it seems unlike­ly to me that despite all the eyes on the process any cheat­ing was sig­nif­i­cant enough to change the out­come of the elec­tion. Hav­ing said that, it is inevitable that peo­ple are skep­ti­cal. The media and the tech firms have made them­selves so par­ti­san that they have for­feit­ed the trust which would be very handy for them to have right now.
  5. Lessons from the elec­tion
    • When Polit­i­cal Prophe­cies Don’t Come to Pass (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, many Chris­tians have lis­tened to lead­ers proph­esy that Trump would again win the elec­tion. Some, such as Jere­mi­ah John­son, have con­tin­ued to affirm that their prophe­cy will turn out to be true in the end. Oth­ers, such as Kris Val­lot­ton, have pub­licly apol­o­gized. For now, many will decide that the prophe­cy was con­tin­gent, mist­imed or, more like­ly, mis­tak­en.” This is out­stand­ing.
    • Why Cal­i­for­nia Reject­ed Racial Pref­er­ences Again (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “As I under­stand the state’s his­to­ry, the country’s his­to­ry, and the world’s his­to­ry, gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not be trust­ed to fac­tor race into deci­sion mak­ing with­out treat­ing peo­ple unjust­ly, and inter­group stig­mas and resent­ments tend to increase when any group is giv­en pref­er­en­tial treat­ment.”
    • May God Bless Pres­i­dent Biden (David French, The Dis­patch): “So here’s my sim­ple prayer for Pres­i­dent Biden: May God bless him and grant him the wis­dom to know what’s just, the courage to do what’s just, and the sta­mi­na to with­stand the rig­ors of the most dif­fi­cult job in the world. May his vir­tu­ous plans pre­vail and may his unright­eous efforts fail. And may God pro­tect him from all harm.” Amen.
    • A Moment Of Per­il (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “But the broad real­i­ty remains that in order to obtain and wield polit­i­cal pow­er, Democ­rats need to embrace can­di­dates who are less reflec­tive of the pro­gres­sive world­view of young col­lege grad­u­ates, and they need to run them in states that are less right-wing than Alaba­ma or Mon­tana.”
    • How 2020 Killed Off Democ­rats’ Demo­graph­ic Hopes (Zack Stan­ton, Politi­co): “For years, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty has oper­at­ed under one immutable assump­tion: Long-term demo­graph­ic trends would give the par­ty some­thing like a per­ma­nent major­i­ty as the coun­try as a whole grows less white and more urban. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s reliance on the pol­i­tics of racial resent­ment would only quick­en the process, solid­i­fy­ing sup­port for Democ­rats among peo­ple of col­or. Then came Novem­ber 3, 2020. And all those assump­tions now seem like total non­sense.” An inter­view with David Shor. 
    • Lat­inX-plain­ing the elec­tion (Anto­nio Gar­cia-Mar­tinez, The Pull Request): “The prob­lem with bas­ing a polit­i­cal plat­form on white guilt is that, at some point, you run out of either whites or guilt. Which is what hap­pens in a tru­ly major­i­ty-minor­i­ty nation when non-whites (at least as cur­rent­ly defined) assume their equal place in the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal fir­ma­ment.” The author nor­mal­ly writes about tech­nol­o­gy issues (hence the title of the newslet­ter).
  6. Sec­u­lar­iza­tion and the Tribu­la­tions of the Amer­i­can Work­ing-Class (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I praise the schol­ar­ship and courage of Bri­an N. Wheaton.”
    • Relat­ed: Get­ting Past the Gate­keep­ers (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Your gate­keep­ers want you to write a book more like the one they would have writ­ten. If you do make revi­sions, make them in such a way that the book becomes not less your own, but even more your own. That’s not pride. If God con­de­scends to allow cer­tain insights to the his­to­ri­ans on your board, how won­der­ful! Let them write about them! Read and learn from them! But if He con­de­scends to allow cer­tain oth­er insights to you, you should write about yours, not theirs.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin. 
  7. COVID-relat­ed
    • Super-spread­er wed­ding par­ty shows COVID hol­i­day dan­gers (Karen Kaplan, LA Times): “Only 55 peo­ple attend­ed the Aug. 7 recep­tion at the Big Moose Inn in Millinock­et. But one of those guests arrived with a coro­n­avirus infec­tion. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 oth­er peo­ple. Sev­en of them died. None of the vic­tims who lost their lives had attend­ed the par­ty.”
    • COVID-19 Mobil­i­ty Net­work Mod­el­ing (Stan­ford): “Our mod­el pre­dicts that a small minor­i­ty of ‘super­spread­er’ POIs [points of inter­est] account for a large major­i­ty of infec­tions and that restrict­ing max­i­mum occu­pan­cy at each POI is more effec­tive than uni­form­ly reduc­ing mobil­i­ty.” Click on “Sim­u­la­tion” and play around with the Reli­gious Orga­ni­za­tions tog­gle. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry, who drew my atten­tion espe­cial­ly to fig­ures 2d and 3c in the appen­dix of the paper.

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 Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion. First shared in vol­ume 206.

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 273

Hon­est­ly, there are too many polit­i­cal arti­cles in this one.

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 does Google’s monop­oly hurt you? Try these search­es. (Geof­frey Fowler, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Googling didn’t used to require so much … scrolling. On some search­es, it’s like Where’s Wal­do but for infor­ma­tion. With­out us even real­iz­ing it, the Internet’s most-used web­site has been get­ting worse. On too many queries, Google is more inter­est­ed in mak­ing search lucra­tive than a bet­ter prod­uct for us.”
  2. A shad­owy AI ser­vice has trans­formed thou­sands of women’s pho­tos into fake nudes: ‘Make fan­ta­sy a real­i­ty’ (Drew Har­well, Wash­ing­ton Post): “An arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence ser­vice freely avail­able on the Web has been used to trans­form more than 100,000 women’s images into nude pho­tos with­out the women’s knowl­edge or con­sent, trig­ger­ing fears of a new wave of dam­ag­ing ‘deep­fakes’ that could be used for harass­ment or black­mail. Users of the auto­mat­ed ser­vice can anony­mous­ly sub­mit a pho­to of a clothed woman and receive an altered ver­sion with the cloth­ing removed.” Well, that’s not ter­ri­fy­ing at all. 
  3. Of Course We’re Not a Democ­ra­cy (Mike Lee, First Things): “Our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment is best described as a con­sti­tu­tion­al repub­lic. Pow­er is not found in mere majori­ties, but in care­ful­ly bal­anced pow­er.” The author is a US Sen­a­tor (R — Utah).
  4. Should the Pro­fes­sion­al Be Polit­i­cal? (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “The Coin­base deci­sion cap­tured the atten­tion of CEOs, tech work­ers, and mem­bers of the media who are ask­ing them­selves a time­ly ques­tion: What role, if any, should polit­i­cal activism play in the work­place? If Coinbase’s approach doesn’t lead to a staff exo­dus or legal set­backs or some oth­er unfore­seen harm, it is like­ly to be adopt­ed at oth­er companies––probably for the better––because it is well suit­ed to help­ing work­places stay diverse and inclu­sive in a polar­ized moment.”
  5. Elec­tion-relat­ed arti­cles
    • My favorite polit­i­cal ad of 2020 (Twit­ter): 30 sec­onds, and I am quite seri­ous. 
    • The Spir­i­tu­al Bless­ing of Polit­i­cal Home­less­ness (David French, The Dis­patch): “More and more, thought­ful (main­ly young) Chris­tians say to me, ‘I’m pro-life, I believe in reli­gious free­dom and free speech, I think we should wel­come immi­grants and refugees, and I des­per­ate­ly want racial rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Where do I fit in?’ The answer is clear. Nowhere. And that truth is a bless­ing, if you embrace it.”
    • Poli­cies, Per­sons, and Paths to Ruin (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “Actu­al­ly, this is a long-over­due arti­cle attempt­ing to explain why I remain baf­fled that so many Chris­tians con­sid­er the sins of unre­pen­tant sex­u­al immoral­i­ty (porneia), unre­pen­tant boast­ful­ness (ala­zoneia), unre­pen­tant vul­gar­i­ty (ais­chrolo­gia), unre­pen­tant fac­tious­ness (dichostasi­ai), and the like, to be only tox­ic for our nation, while poli­cies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switch­ing, free­dom-lim­it­ing, and social­is­tic over­reach are viewed as dead­ly.” 
    • Could Trump Be A Christ-Fig­ure: A Response to John Piper About Trump (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “I don’t know if Trump is who the media says he is, I can only go off what I hear him say and see him do. Take away the accu­sa­tions of xeno­pho­bia, racism, and misog­y­ny and what do you have? An alleged sor­did past with women (me too) and a present of enact­ing the poli­cies I agree with.” The title is so provoca­tive and I almost didn’t read it, but I found it gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing. The title is over-the-top, though.
    • Why Most Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are Polit­i­cal Con­ser­v­a­tives (JP More­land, per­son­al blog): “Suf­fice it to say that, when care­ful­ly exam­ined, the texts show that the state is not to be in the busi­ness of show­ing com­pas­sion or pro­vid­ing pos­i­tive rights for its cit­i­zens through its use of coer­cive pow­er (e.g. tax­a­tion). These are mat­ters of indi­vid­ual moral respon­si­bil­i­ty and oblig­a­tion for the peo­ple of God (and var­i­ous char­i­ties). Rather, the state is the pro­tec­tor of neg­a­tive rights.” The link is to a short blog entry that con­tains a link to a 20 page PDF. The excerpt is from the PDF. The author is a philoso­pher at Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty and brought up some points about the Old Tes­ta­ment I had nev­er con­sid­ered before. 
    • 2020 Polls: Vot­ers Have Nev­er Been More Divid­ed by Gen­der (Eric Levitz, NY Mag­a­zine): “And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprece­dent­ed­ly sin­gle; they also appear to be unprece­dent­ed­ly unin­ter­est­ed in het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty: Accord­ing to pri­vate polling shared with Intel­li­gencer by Demo­c­ra­t­ic data sci­en­tist David Shor, rough­ly 30 per­cent of Amer­i­can women under 25 iden­ti­fy as LGBT; for women over 60, that fig­ure is less than 5 per­cent.” 👀👀👀
    • A response: No Fam­i­lies, No Chil­dren, No Future (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “There is noth­ing remote­ly nor­mal about that num­ber. It is a sign of a deeply deca­dent cul­ture — that is, a cul­ture that lacks the where­with­al to sur­vive. The most impor­tant thing that a gen­er­a­tion can do is pro­duce the next gen­er­a­tion. No fam­i­lies, no chil­dren, no future.”
    • How fas­cist is Pres­i­dent Trump? There’s still a for­mu­la for that. (John McNeill, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a fed­er­al, decen­tral­ized state with con­sti­tu­tion­al checks and bal­ances, it’s hard­er to gov­ern as a fas­cist than to run as one. Trump’s polit­i­cal out­look and behav­ior bear many sim­i­lar­i­ties to those of fas­cist lead­ers, but he has not ruled like an authen­tic fas­cist.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at George­town. 
    • ICE Detainees in Geor­gia Say They Had Unneed­ed Surg­eries (Caitlin Dick­er­son, Seth Freed Wessler and Miri­am Jor­dan, New York Times): “Immi­grants detained at an ICE-con­tract­ed cen­ter in Geor­gia said they had inva­sive gyne­col­o­gy pro­ce­dures that they lat­er learned might have been unnec­es­sary.” About a month old, rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • In a year of polit­i­cal anger, unde­cid­ed vot­ers inspire a spe­cial kind of scorn (Mau­ra Jud­kis, Wash­ing­ton Post): “With so much on the line, the Unde­cid­eds have become more mys­ti­fy­ing — and frus­trat­ing — than ever. Nobody believes they are real. Oh, and every­one hates them.”
  6. The Real Caus­es of Human Sex Dif­fer­ences (David C. Geary>, Quil­lette): “Peo­ple have many stereo­types about boys and men and girls and women and most of them are accu­rate and, if any­thing, under­es­ti­mate the mag­ni­tude of actu­al sex differences.The key ques­tion is whether these stereo­typed beliefs cre­ate a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy or are large­ly a descrip­tion of sex dif­fer­ences that chil­dren and adults have observed in their day-to-day life.” The author is an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri 
  7. Glob­al things to remem­ber in prayer:
    • Niger­ian forces killed 12 peace­ful pro­test­ers, Amnesty says (Sam Olukoya And Lekan Oyekan­mi, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “At least 56 peo­ple have died dur­ing two weeks of wide­spread demon­stra­tions against police vio­lence, includ­ing 38 on Tues­day, the group said…. cit­ing eye­wit­ness­es, video footage and hos­pi­tal reports.”
    • Nige­ria Is Mur­der­ing Its Cit­i­zens (Chi­ma­man­da Ngozi Adichie, New York Times): “The Niger­ian state has turned on its peo­ple. The only rea­son to shoot into a crowd of peace­ful cit­i­zens is to ter­ror­ize: to kill some and make the oth­ers back down. It is a colos­sal and unfor­giv­able crime.”
    • Turks and Arme­ni­ans Rec­on­cile in Christ. Can Azeris Join Them? (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bey­tel became a Chris­t­ian in 2000. But it was not until 2009 when he met Jacob Purs­ley, an Amer­i­can min­is­ter to Turkey, that he began to wres­tle with his share in the nation­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. The spir­i­tu­al growth of the church is hin­dered by the uncon­fessed sin of geno­cide, Purs­ley implored the believ­ers. He urged Turk­ish Chris­tians to seek rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with Arme­ni­ans, on behalf of the nation.”
    • Azer­bai­jan Evan­gel­i­cals: Con­flict with Arme­ni­ans Is Not a Reli­gious War (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):“Originally a ‘Mus­lim athe­ist’ from a well-edu­cat­ed fam­i­ly, he was saved in 1991 after fol­low­ing a beau­ti­ful girl and her mys­te­ri­ous leather-bound book to a Bible study. With­in a year, he was assis­tant pas­tor, and in 1997 he was ordained a min­is­ter in the Greater Grace Chris­t­ian move­ment.” Includ­ing entire­ly for that lumi­nous excerpt. 
    • Biden and Big Tech have Poland and Hun­gary in their crosshairs (Glad­den Pap­pin, Newsweek): “The real rea­son that Poland and Hun­gary have been demo­nized in the Unit­ed States is that they rep­re­sent a suc­cess­ful alter­na­tive to the failed Amer­i­can com­bi­na­tion of indus­tri­al and fam­i­ly col­lapse.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Dal­las. I don’t have strong opin­ions about Euro­pean pol­i­tics, but I am struck by how pas­sion­ate some Amer­i­cans are about them.

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 Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Mag­i­cal Think­ing (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Build­ing a com­put­er is pre­cise­ly anal­o­gous to putting togeth­er a bit of mag­i­cal sleight of hand. It is a clever exer­cise in sim­u­la­tion, noth­ing more. And the con­vinc­ing­ness of the sim­u­la­tion is as com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant in the one case as it is in the oth­er. Say­ing ‘Gee, AI pro­grams can do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is intel­li­gence!’ is like say­ing ‘Gee, Penn and Teller do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is mag­ic!’” Fes­er is one of my favorite philoso­phers. First shared in vol­ume 197, and I recall a CS major telling me how much he dis­agreed with it.

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 272

I cheat­ed when num­ber­ing a few of these

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A DC Church Shows How to Fight for Reli­gious Free­dom (David French, The Dis­patch): “Late Fri­day night a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., hand­ed down a reli­gious lib­er­ty rul­ing that I hope will echo through­out the nation…. It demon­strates how thought­ful Chris­tians can engage in the pub­lic square and defend their lib­er­ty with con­vic­tion while also car­ing for their com­mu­ni­ties and demon­strat­ing extra­or­di­nary patience with pub­lic offi­cials. In oth­er words, in one court case we’re watch­ing what it’s like when Chris­t­ian legal ends are pur­sued through Chris­t­ian moral means.” Excel­lent news with typ­i­cal­ly insight­ful com­men­tary by David French.
  2. Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“
    • Out­stand­ing. There are SO MANY quotable bits in this essay. 
    • Why Is Wok­e­ness Win­ning? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Crit­i­cal the­o­ry was once an eso­teric aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit. Now it has become the core, under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the major­i­ty of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, media, cor­po­ra­tions, lib­er­al church­es, NGOs, phil­an­thropies, and, of course, main­stream jour­nal­ism.”
    • The Fun­da­men­tal­ist War on Wok­e­ness is a War on Chris­t­ian Love (Michael Bird, Patheos): “The whole anti-woke and anti-crit­i­cal race the­o­ry trope strike me as not so much inter­est­ed in oppos­ing pro­gres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism and its divi­sive racial pol­i­tics, as much as it serves to deny eth­nic minori­ties have any griev­ances and white church­es have any respon­si­bil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.” Bird is a respect­ed evan­gel­i­cal the­olo­gian. 
  3. Some Stan­ford-relat­ed arti­cles I saw:
    • The Pre­science of Shel­by Steele (Samuel Kro­nen, Quil­lette): “Shel­by was the only sib­ling to reject the tenets of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism, and although he and his [twin] broth­er work on the same cam­pus and occa­sion­al­ly pass each oth­er (Shel­by is at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion), the two are not on speak­ing terms.” Not the most reveal­ing excerpt, but prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing to this audi­ence.
    • An open let­ter from a Stan­ford wrestling par­ent to the Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent (Sarah Traxler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When address­ing the rea­sons that the 11 sports in par­tic­u­lar are being dis­con­tin­ued, wrestling was cit­ed only in the cat­e­go­ry of com­pet­ing ‘with­out a full com­ple­ment of schol­ar­ships.’ One over-looked rea­son for this is that wrestlers often come from low­er income groups. As such, wrestling stu­dent-ath­letes often qual­i­fy for need-based finan­cial aid, reduc­ing the demand for the full com­ple­ment of ath­let­ic-based schol­ar­ships.”
    • My Brief Spell as an Activist (Lucy Kross Wal­lace, Quil­lette): “This was my first intox­i­cat­ing taste of empow­er­ment born from vic­tim­hood. I was vin­di­cat­ed; exu­ber­ant. None of it had been my fault. All my doubts and self-hatred and guilt could be laid to rest. I had been the vic­tim not only of cir­cum­stance and mis­for­tune, but of oppres­sion. The prob­lem was sim­ple, the solu­tion equal­ly so. I didn’t have to change—society did.” The author is a sopho­more at Stan­ford.
  4. A reminder that there are some hor­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing in this world:
    • How Turkey’s Mil­i­tary Adven­tures Decrease Free­dom at Home (Garo Pay­lan, New York Times): “After a decades-long fit­ful truce, the con­flict over the sta­tus of Nagorno-Karabakh — a break­away Armen­ian enclave in Azer­bai­jan — between Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia resumed last month, lead­ing to a large mil­i­tary deploy­ment, destruc­tion of civil­ian cen­ters and thou­sands of casu­al­ties. In this war, Turkey strong­ly sup­ports Azer­bai­jan, with which it shares eth­nic bonds, and Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan dis­missed glob­al calls for a cease-fire.” The author is a mem­ber of the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Azer­bai­jan’s assault against Arme­nia threat­ens democ­ra­cy every­where (Chris­tos Makridis & Alex Gal­it­sky, The Hill): “While Azer­bai­jan has attempt­ed to shield itself from inter­na­tion­al scruti­ny by rid­ing on the pres­ence of tense domes­tic pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States and a glob­al pan­dem­ic, we can­not ignore it any longer. The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must rec­og­nize that fail­ure to stand up for reli­gious minori­ties any­where is a threat to them every­where. Inac­tion cre­ates prece­dent and embold­ens dic­ta­tors.” One of the authors, Chris­tos, is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
    • Chi­na ambas­sador makes veiled threat to Hong Kong-based Cana­di­ans (Helen David­son, The Guardian): “Cana­da is among sev­er­al coun­tries that sus­pend­ed extra­di­tion agree­ments with Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s impo­si­tion of a sweep­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty law in June. Dozens of MPs recent­ly called for Cana­da to offer ‘safe har­bour’ to pro-democ­ra­cy pro­test­ers flee­ing Hong Kong, prompt­ing the warn­ing from Cong.”
    • Relat­ed from a few weeks ago: ‘You will be put into deten­tion’: For­mer ABC bureau chief tells sto­ry of flee­ing Chi­na for first time (Matthew Car­ney, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “We were instruct­ed to report to a facil­i­ty in north Bei­jing and told to bring my daugh­ter Yas­mine, who was 14 at the time, as she was now part of the inves­ti­ga­tion. This felt like a line in the sand for me. I could not accept that they would involve my chil­dren. At the same time I was fright­ened. It felt like part of the Chi­nese play­book: to go after fam­i­ly mem­bers as a way to exact pun­ish­ment and revenge.”
  5. ‘Hand­maid’ real­i­ty: Deeply reli­gious mar­riages have more spousal equal­i­ty (New York Post): “Reli­gious, home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples also report greater rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, and they are three times more like­ly than less-reli­gious peers to report a sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship. The women don’t appear to be repressed; in fact, they’re gen­er­al­ly more like­ly to say they’re hap­py and that their life has mean­ing and pur­pose.” And yet again research con­firms Bib­li­cal pre­cepts. Allow me to take his oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer a friend­ly pas­toral reminder to mar­ry anoth­er Chris­t­ian, should you mar­ry. 
    • Why Only Amy Coney Bar­rett Gets to Have It All (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “…to set the record straight, on hand­maids and beyond, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians must do their part to imag­ine a broad­er and more human­iz­ing vision for women’s place in the pub­lic square. Chris­tian­i­ty has always con­tained a lib­er­a­to­ry seed: one that tells women that the human desire to work, cre­ate and shape insti­tu­tions is as impor­tant, even as holy, as their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren. If Chris­tians don’t like the hand­maid stereo­types, now is the time to be clear on all that Chris­t­ian women can do and be.”
  6. How Chris­tians Should Think About Vot­ing (Michael & Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “When you vote in an elec­tion, with the excep­tion of a write-in bal­lot, you are not vot­ing for your dream can­di­date. Your vote is not an unmedi­at­ed expres­sion of your iden­ti­ty, your vote is a choice between options you did not choose your­self. If you view your vote as an unmedi­at­ed, pure expres­sion of your will, it can be debil­i­tat­ing.” The author is a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer. The arti­cle itself is very non­par­ti­san. 
    • Lati­no, Evan­gel­i­cal and Polit­i­cal­ly Home­less (Jen­nifer Med­i­na, New York Times): “When Pas­tor Rivera looks at his con­gre­ga­tion of 200 fam­i­lies he sees a micro­cosm of the Lati­no vote in the Unit­ed States: how com­plex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solid­i­fy cru­cial sup­port can fall short. There are not clear ide­o­log­i­cal lines here between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives. Peo­ple care about immi­gra­tion, but are equal­ly con­cerned about reli­gious lib­er­ty and abor­tion.”
    • Putting this one here is kind of cheat­ing, but I like hav­ing only 7 major top­ics. This is polit­i­cal enough that I’m jus­ti­fy­ing it to myself. The 1619 Chron­i­cles (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Jour­nal­ists are, most often, in the busi­ness of writ­ing the first rough draft of his­to­ry, not try­ing to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a low­er­case t, fol­low­ing evi­dence in direc­tions unseen, not the capital‑T truth of a pre-estab­lished nar­ra­tive in which incon­ve­nient facts get dis­card­ed.”
    • How the 1619 Project took over 2020 (Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Han­nah-Jones has fierce­ly defend­ed the 1619 Project. But today, she acknowl­edges that for all the experts she con­sult­ed, she should have sat down with addi­tion­al schol­ars with par­tic­u­lar focus on colo­nial his­to­ry, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and the Civ­il War, to bet­ter reflect the con­tention in the field.”
  7. For­get What Gen­der Activists Tell You. Here’s What Med­ical Tran­si­tion Looks Like (Scott New­gent, Quil­lette): “I write all this as a 47-year-old trans­gen­der man who tran­si­tioned five years ago. I’m also a par­ent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good inten­tions of par­ents who seek to sup­port their chil­dren, I have seri­ous con­cerns about reck­less acqui­es­cence to a child’s Inter­net-medi­at­ed self-diag­no­sis. Many old­er trans­gen­der folks share these con­cerns, too.”

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 Religion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65. First shared in vol­ume 195.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 271

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 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 245

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. Some East­er thoughts:
    • God­for­sak­en For Us (Fred Sanders, The Scrip­to­ri­um Dai­ly): “The words of Jesus here make promi­nent the name God (Eli, Eli). Jesus cries the name of God human­ly from a human place. One rea­son he does [not call God Father], I think, is that what is being enact­ed here on the cross is the Divine-Human encounter over sin. The one who has tak­en the place of the sin­ner is being pun­ished by exile, pre­cise­ly as a human, pre­cise­ly by God. To put this in the back­ground and reach out instead for Father-Son lan­guage in the para­phrased telling of this sto­ry is to tac­it­ly accept the propo­si­tion that what is hap­pen­ing on the cross reveals more about the Trin­i­ty (God in him­self) than about the incar­na­tion (God meet­ing man) or the atone­ment (sin meet­ing jus­tice).”
    • Christ Suf­fered for Our Sins, but He Did­n’t Go to Hell for Them (Brad East inter­view­ing Matthew Emer­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The biggest [mis­con­cep­tion about what hap­pened when Jesus died] is prob­a­bly the idea that Christ, dur­ing his descent, went to hell and was tor­ment­ed there.”
  2. Chris­tian­i­ty and Coro­n­avirus:
    • Uncer­tain­ty and the Chris­t­ian (Ephraim Rad­ner, First Things): “Uncer­tain­ty is at the cen­ter of the Chris­t­ian voca­tion. Uncer­tain­ty may not com­pre­hen­sive­ly describe that voca­tion, but it defines it in an essen­tial way. Many Chris­tians will and do reject this claim, I real­ize. ‘We know with cer­tain­ty all that is impor­tant to know!’ they will say. God is in con­trol; God is good; God rewards the faith­ful; Jesus is Lord, and in him death and sin are defeat­ed; the gates of Hell will not pre­vail against the church, and heav­en awaits us. These are indeed Big Pic­ture cer­tain­ties. But the Big Pic­ture isn’t all there is to God’s real­i­ty or to the Christian’s life. Small pic­tures are the bits that make up the Big Picture’s mosa­ic.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of his­tor­i­cal the­ol­o­gy at Wycliffe Col­lege in Cana­da.
    • Coro­n­avirus Search­es Lead Mil­lions to Hear About Jesus (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mil­lions of wor­ried peo­ple who have turned to Google with their anx­i­ety over COVID-19 have end­ed up con­nect­ing with Chris­t­ian evan­ge­lists in their search results—leading to a spike in online con­ver­sions in March.”
    • The Men and Women Who Run Toward the Dying (Bari Weiss, New York Times): “Before the plague hit, the pri­ma­ry job of hos­pi­tal chap­lains was tend­ing to patients and their fam­i­lies. Now the empha­sis has shift­ed to car­ing for their own col­leagues.”
    • Charis­mat­ic Chris­tians who believe in the pow­er of faith heal­ings are try­ing them over the phone  (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘I pray for peo­ple on the phone, and there is no dif­fer­ence in the spir­it realm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re touch­ing or not. It’s not about me, it’s about God and releas­ing his spir­it to take con­trol over the ele­ments of the body and speak life into them and to the dis­ease.’”
    • Dur­ing the Coro­n­avirus Out­break, I Miss Singing at Church (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “We must embrace social dis­tanc­ing, for as long is as need­ed, to pro­tect our health care sys­tem and the very real, fleshy bod­ies of mil­lions of people.But we also need to col­lec­tive­ly notice that some­thing pro­found is lost by hav­ing to inter­act with the world and our neigh­bors in most­ly dis­em­bod­ied, dig­i­tal ways. This is some­thing to lament and to grieve. And like all grief, it expos­es the val­ue and glo­ry of the thing that was lost.”
  3. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus:
    • What Every­one’s Get­ting Wrong About the Toi­let Paper Short­age (Will Ore­mus, Medi­um): “In short, the toi­let paper indus­try is split into two, large­ly sep­a­rate mar­kets: com­mer­cial and con­sumer. The pan­dem­ic has shift­ed the lion’s share of demand to the lat­ter. Peo­ple actu­al­ly do need to buy sig­nif­i­cant­ly more toi­let paper dur­ing the pan­dem­ic — not because they’re mak­ing more trips to the bath­room, but because they’re mak­ing more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion under stay-at-home orders, Amer­i­cans are no longer using the restrooms at their work­place, in schools, at restau­rants, at hotels, or in air­ports.”
    • Even Now, Crim­i­nal Defen­dants Have Rights (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Con­sid­er a poor per­son arrest­ed on sus­pi­cion of drunk dri­ving. Nor­mal­ly he would be arraigned and receive a pub­lic defend­er with­in 48 hours of arrest. Now he could sit in jail for a week with­out an attor­ney before get­ting the oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell his side of things to a judge.”
    • Apple and Google will make track­ing tech­nol­o­gy to fight coro­n­avirus (Adam Clark Estes and Shirin Ghaf­fary, Vox): “Apple and Google plan to build con­tact-trac­ing func­tion­al­i­ty into the oper­at­ing sys­tems of the phones them­selves, which might sound a lit­tle tricky for folks who wor­ry about being tracked with­out their con­sent. As the New York Times points out, by build­ing the tool direct­ly into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, Apple and Google effec­tive­ly ensure that the con­tact-trac­ing sys­tem can run 24 hours a day, rather than only when a par­tic­u­lar app is open.”
    • In the Fog of Coro­n­avirus, There Are No Experts (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[In the movie ‘Con­ta­gion’] only insti­tu­tions can be trust­ed; out­sider ‘knowl­edge’ leads only to the grave. That’s the movie; the real­i­ty has been oth­er­wise. In our actu­al pan­dem­ic, most of the insti­tu­tions that we asso­ciate with pub­lic health exper­tise and trust­ed med­ical author­i­ty have failed more cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly than Trump has.”
    • I’m Con­cerned About “US”: A Black Doc­tor’s Plea for Racial COVID19 Data (Rebekah Fen­ton, Medi­um): “I noticed a trend among the obit­u­ar­ies I read. They fea­ture high num­bers of Black peo­ple. They look like me, like my family’s friend. A fam­i­ly in Chica­go has lost two sis­ters, Patri­cia and Wan­da Frieson, to coro­n­avirus at 61 and 63. Arnold Obey, an avid marathon run­ner and retired prin­ci­pal in New York, died at 73. But the ages of Black and brown vic­tims were also low­er than I expect­ed. Dez-Ann Romain at 36. Dave Edwards at 48. Kious Kel­ly, an assis­tant nurse man­ag­er, at 48.” Rebekah is an alum­na of Chi Alpha.
    • Flat­ten The Curve (Ohio Depart­ment of Health, YouTube): thir­ty well-done sec­onds
  4. S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay.
  5. The Sit­u­a­tion With Vik­tor Orban (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I count myself an admir­er of many of the things Vik­tor Orban has done, espe­cial­ly his moves to pro­tect Hun­gar­i­an sov­er­eign­ty, the par­tic­u­lar­i­ty of its cul­ture, and to resist migra­tion being forced upon Hun­gary. This does not mean I sup­port every­thing he does — I hon­est­ly don’t fol­low Orban close­ly enough to have an informed opin­ion — but I think on bal­ance, he has been good for Hun­gary, and for Europe. I would have a lot more con­fi­dence for the future were I liv­ing in a coun­try gov­erned by Vik­tor Orban than by Angela Merkel.” I don’t know why I find this sub­ject so fas­ci­nat­ing. Maybe it’s just because Dreher does and I love read­ing his writ­ing.

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 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 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 228

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Tale of Two Church­es (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, NY Review of Books): “To many reli­gious peo­ple, there’s no such thing as coin­ci­dence: Pas­tor Jay and Pas­tor Der­rick felt acute­ly the prophet­ic nature of their union tak­ing place just the day before the shoot­ing. It felt as though, in the midst of the chaos and the con­fu­sion, God was using them to write a bet­ter sto­ry. The Lord had guid­ed them to their merg­er at exact­ly the right time to redi­rect the anger and pain in the com­mu­ni­ty to a high­er, holy pur­pose.”
    • This my must-read link of the week. SO GOOD. I almost cried.
    • Kind of relat­ed but only mar­gin­al­ly: Pray­ing for Hong Kong Can Be Polit­i­cal­ly Disruptive—Even in Amer­i­ca  (D Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dif­fer­ent ori­gins among eth­nic Chi­nese immi­grants can fos­ter dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views, with more Chris­tians from Chi­na sup­port­ing the poli­cies of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, and those from else­where often more crit­i­cal of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
  2. ‘Absolute­ly No Mer­cy’: Leaked Files Expose How Chi­na Orga­nized Mass Deten­tions of Mus­lims (Austin Ramzy and Chris Buck­ley, NY Times): “…one of the most sig­nif­i­cant leaks of gov­ern­ment papers from inside China’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty in decades. They pro­vide an unprece­dent­ed inside view of the con­tin­u­ing clam­p­down in Xin­jiang, in which the author­i­ties have cor­ralled as many as a mil­lion eth­nic Uighurs, Kaza­khs and oth­ers into intern­ment camps and pris­ons over the past three years.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. More Preg­nan­cy, Less Crime (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “More gen­er­al­ly, how­ev­er, there are pol­i­cy impli­ca­tion if we think beyond the imme­di­ate results. First, these results show that crime isn’t sim­ply a prod­uct of fam­i­ly back­ground, pover­ty and neglect. Crime is a choice.”
    • The orig­i­nal study: Fam­i­ly For­ma­tion and Crime (Max­im Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose, job mar­ket paper, pdf link): “Our event-study analy­sis indi­cates that preg­nan­cy trig­gers sharp declines in crime rival­ing any known inter­ven­tion.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Dat­ing Mar­ket (Tyro Part­ners, pdf link): “With the advent of online dat­ing, women in prime repro­duc­tive age are in the dom­i­nant posi­tion in the dat­ing mar­ket for the first time in human history.This comes with huge social ram­i­fi­ca­tions.” The authors are hedge fund guys. Inter­est­ing through­out and at times quite amus­ing. I espe­cial­ly com­mend to you the chart at the bot­tom of the page 5 con­trast­ed with the chart at the top of page 6.
  4. Thread on the protests in Iran (Shay Khatiri, Twit­ter): “Dur­ing its first 24 hours, it’s already been the most vio­lent protests in decades, if not ever. 1979 rev­o­lu­tion did not reach this lev­el of vio­lence.”
    • Amnesty Says At Least 106 Killed In Iran Protests (John Gam­brell, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Days of protests in Iran over ris­ing fuel prices and a sub­se­quent gov­ern­ment crack­down have killed at least 106 peo­ple across the Islam­ic Repub­lic, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al said Tues­day, cit­ing ‘cred­i­ble reports.’”
  5. Why Some Peo­ple Are Impos­si­bly Tal­ent­ed (David Rob­son, BBC): “…influ­en­tial sci­en­tists are much more like­ly to have diverse inter­ests out­side their pri­ma­ry area of research than the aver­age sci­en­tist, for instance. Stud­ies have found that Nobel Prize-win­ning sci­en­tists are about 25 times more like­ly to sing, dance or act than the aver­age sci­en­tist. They are also 17 times more like­ly to cre­ate visu­al art, 12 times more like­ly to write poet­ry and four times more like­ly to be a musi­cian.”
  6. 2019 Reli­gious Free­dom Index (Beck­et Law): “If Amer­i­ca is becom­ing less reli­gious, as some polls indi­cate, does that nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it is also becom­ing less sup­port­ive of reli­gious lib­er­ty pro­tec­tions? Are we, in fact, divid­ed on ques­tions of reli­gious free­dom?… With a cur­rent score of 67, the 2019 Index indi­cates strong sup­port for reli­gious free­dom pro­tec­tions. ”
  7. Why Did the Wall Fall, 30 Years Ago? (George Weigel, First Things): “Get­ting this his­to­ry straight is impor­tant, not just as a mat­ter of intel­lec­tu­al hygiene but for the future. Pub­lic offi­cials who do not grasp the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to the col­lapse of Euro­pean com­mu­nism and the emer­gence of new democ­ra­cies in cen­tral and east­ern Europe are unlike­ly to appre­ci­ate the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to free and vir­tu­ous 21st-cen­tu­ry soci­eties and to 21st-cen­tu­ry democ­ra­cy.”

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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 218

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. “We May Have To Shoot Down This Air­craft” (Gar­rett Graff, Politi­co): “We can’t see the air­craft. We don’t know where it is because we don’t have any radars point­ing into the U.S. Any­thing in the Unit­ed States was con­sid­ered friend­ly by def­i­n­i­tion.” A grip­ping account of the Flight 93 sto­ry.
  2. Active Learn­ing Works But Stu­dents Don’t Like It (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “A care­ful­ly done study that held stu­dents and teach­ers con­stant shows that stu­dents learn more in active learn­ing class­es but they dis­like this style of class and think they learn less. It’s no big surprise–active learn­ing is hard and makes the stu­dents feel stu­pid. It’s much eas­i­er to sit back and be enter­tained by a great lec­tur­er who makes every­thing seem sim­ple.”
  3. How Evan­gel­i­cals Invent­ed Lib­er­als’ Favorite Legal Doc­trine (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Fed­er­al­ist): “…with­in the many ironies of his­to­ry, the social and polit­i­cal instru­ments a per­fec­tion­ist move­ment deploys may be eas­i­ly co-opt­ed for ends and pur­pos­es nev­er imag­ined in their devel­op­ment. That is, if late-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry evan­gel­i­cal activists sowed the wind, today’s activists have reaped the whirl­wind.” I love arti­cles that present a top­ic I think I know some­thing about and pro­ceed to show me some­thing I had nev­er known before.
  4. A Famous Argu­ment Against Free Will Has Been Debunked (Bahar Gholipour, The Atlantic): “It would be quite an achieve­ment for a brain sig­nal 100 times small­er than major brain waves to solve the prob­lem of free will. But the sto­ry of the Bere­itschaftspo­ten­tial has one more twist: It might be some­thing else entire­ly.”
  5. Vik­tor Orban Among The Chris­tians (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Orban is what Trump’s biggest fans wish he was (but isn’t), and what Trump’s ene­mies think him to be (but isn’t). If Don­ald Trump had the smarts and skills of Vik­tor Orban, the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in the US would be much, much dif­fer­ent — for bet­ter or for worse, depend­ing on your point of view.” I don’t have much inter­est in Hun­gar­i­an pol­i­tics, but this fas­ci­nat­ed me. 
  6. When the Cul­ture War Comes for the Kids (George Pack­er, The Atlantic): “I asked myself if I was mov­ing to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new pro­gres­sivism didn’t just car­ry my own pol­i­tics fur­ther than I liked. It was actu­al­ly hos­tile to prin­ci­ples with­out which I don’t believe democ­ra­cy can sur­vive.” This arti­cle came high­ly rec­om­mend­ed, but it only got inter­est­ing to me about halfway through — and then wow.
  7. Con­ser­v­a­tives Clash on the Goal of Gov­ern­ment (Jonathan Lee­man, Prov­i­dence): “There is no neu­tral­i­ty. The pub­lic square is a bat­tle­ground of gods. Our cul­ture wars are wars of reli­gion. For the time being, lib­er­al­ism keeps us from pick­ing up six­teenth-cen­tu­ry swords for those wars, which is no small achieve­ment. But don’t assume it won’t con­trol us with the sub­tler tools of a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry legal total­i­tar­i­an­ism.” Insight­ful reflec­tions on how Chris­tians should form their polit­i­cal posi­tions.

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 Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

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.