Tag: famous Christians

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 346

strong arti­cles this week — more rec­om­mend­ed than nor­mal

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 343

a briefer col­lec­tion than nor­mal

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

This is vol­ume 343, which has an unusu­al rela­tion­ship with the num­ber 18. Name­ly 343 = 180 + 181 + 182.

I don’t have much access to my com­put­er this week, so this is a briefer col­lec­tion than the norm. And there may not be an update next week at all — we’ll see.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Read­ers Around the World Are Pray­ing for Ukraine (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “…prayer is indeed pow­er­ful, often in ways we can’t account for. War, what­ev­er else it is, is spir­i­tu­al­ly dark, even demon­ic. From the first days of the Russ­ian inva­sion, reli­gious peo­ple and insti­tu­tions around the world have respond­ed by pray­ing. Writ­ten prayers and Psalms can be a life­line, help­ing us pray when our own words — and even our own faith — fail.”
    • The last prayer is amaz­ing con­tent for the New York Times and I post it here in full since some of you don’t have access through the NYT pay­wall:
    • “Father-God, may the attack­ers’ fin­gers freeze; may they drop things; may they not see clear­ly; may their equip­ment mal­func­tion; may they expe­ri­ence
    • over­whelm­ing hope­less­ness, enor­mous fatigue and a com­plete loss of any desire to fight; may their com­mu­ni­ca­tion be bro­ken; may there be con­fu­sion. Lead them to sur­ren­der. Stretch the kilo­me­ters before them into end­less kilo­me­ters of non­ad­vance­ment. Remove their lead­er­ship and replace them with peo­ple who make deci­sions that reflect a fear of you.
      Oh, God, infuse defend­ers with incred­i­ble surges of renewed alert­ness, strength, hope, courage. Inspire those who want to help. Show them spe­cif­ic, effec­tive ideas. Move them swift­ly and safe­ly.
      The worst is yet to come, Lord, if you do not stop it. But please, no peace where there is no peace. We ask for peace unit­ed with right­eous­ness and truth.God of all com­fort, be phys­i­cal­ly present with all the moth­ers, fathers, grand­par­ents and chil­dren who are hid­ing, hear­ing, smelling, endur­ing. Warm them; fill them with food; give them water, toi­lets, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their loved ones, the Gospel, hope in you.
      We repent of mak­ing idols of polit­i­cal lead­ers and news out­lets. For­give us for want­i­ng them to be our gods and sav­iors. For­give us for being unrea­son­able, for not want­i­ng to admit both the good and bad in all of our lead­ers. It is this spir­it that leads us to dic­ta­tors because we aban­don respon­si­bil­i­ty and rea­son. We con­fess the seeds of war that live in our own hearts.
      We hum­ble our hearts, our bod­ies. We ask you for mer­cy. Thank you that you love mer­cy and have all pow­er.”
  2. How Reli­gious Faith Can Shape Suc­cess in School (Ilana M. Hor­witz, New York Times): “I found that what reli­gion offers teenagers varies by social class. Those raised by pro­fes­sion­al-class par­ents, for exam­ple, do not expe­ri­ence much in the way of an edu­ca­tion­al advan­tage from being reli­gious. In some ways, reli­gion even con­strains teenagers’ edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties (espe­cial­ly girls’) by shap­ing their aca­d­e­m­ic ambi­tions after grad­u­a­tion; they are less like­ly to con­sid­er a selec­tive col­lege as they pri­or­i­tize life goals such as par­ent­hood, altru­ism and ser­vice to God rather than a pres­ti­gious career. How­ev­er, teenage boys from work­ing-class fam­i­lies, regard­less of race, who were reg­u­lar­ly involved in their church and strong­ly believed in God were twice as like­ly to earn bachelor’s degrees as mod­er­ate­ly reli­gious or non­re­li­gious boys.”
    • I find the ten­sion between faith and wealth inter­est­ing. They emerge as rivals in all sorts of sit­u­a­tions. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Tulane.
  3. This 47-year-old left a $800,000 salary to coach bas­ket­ball – now his small school is head­ed to NCAA March Mad­ness (Tom Hud­dle­ston, Jr): “In 2016, Aldrich was in the midst of a lucra­tive career. After being a part­ner at one of the world’s top law firms, he’d become the chief finan­cial offi­cer of a pri­vate equi­ty firm, with a salary of $800,000 per year, he told The Wash­ing­ton Post last week. But then, his best friend and for­mer col­lege bas­ket­ball team­mate Ryan Odom land­ed the job as head bas­ket­ball coach at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land, Bal­ti­more Coun­ty. Odom offered Aldrich a posi­tion as direc­tor of recruit­ing, a job that paid only $32,000 per year. But it got Aldrich clos­er to ful­fill­ing a life­long dream: a career coach­ing col­lege bas­ket­ball. He accept­ed.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I did some dig­ging and turns out the coach is a devout Chris­t­ian.
  4. The Semi­con­duc­tor Ecosys­tem – Explained (Steve Blank, blog): “Con­trol­ling advanced chip man­u­fac­tur­ing in the 21st cen­tu­ry may well prove to be like con­trol­lin g the oil sup­ply in the 20th. The coun­try that con­trols this man­u­fac­tur­ing can throt­tle the mil­i­tary and eco­nom­ic pow­er of oth­ers.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. SF is now boy­cotting most of the Unit­ed States (Joe Eskenazi,Mission Local):  “It will come as lit­tle sur­prise to any­one famil­iar with the M.O. of San Fran­cis­co gov­ern­ment that we have no tests nor audits nor analy­sis nor method­ol­o­gy to deter­mine if our trav­el bans or boy­cotts are mak­ing any dif­fer­ence for the good.… You could argue that, in 2016, San Fran­cis­co put itself in the van­guard of a move­ment. But, in the ensu­ing six years, nobody else has joined up. ‘No city has reached out to say they want to mir­ror our rules,’ con­firms Chu.” 
  6. The Real Rea­son That Pornog­ra­phy Can Lead to Male Sex­u­al Dis­sat­is­fac­tion (Ross Pomeroy, Real Clear Sci­ence): “…the unre­al­is­tic depic­tions of sex, female part­ners, and rela­tion­ships com­mon­ly seen in pornog­ra­phy can warp men’s expec­ta­tions of real-life sex. When het­ero­sex­u­al men expect sex with their part­ners to be just like the staged fan­tasies they see on the Inter­net, this can lead to dis­sat­is­fac­tion and even low­er their well-being.”
    • Sci­ence, catch­ing up to youth pas­tors since 2022.
    • Catch­ing up to bad youth pas­tors, actu­al­ly. The advice at the end is pret­ty ter­ri­ble by almost any­one’s stan­dards.
  7. The Chris­tians Who Think the Ukraine Inva­sion Means Jesus Is Return­ing to Earth (Alex Mor­ris, Rolling Stone): “For mil­len­nia, end times Chris­tians have tried to shoe­horn cur­rent events into proof of Jesus’ immi­nent return, tak­ing cryp­tic lan­guage from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Matthew, and Rev­e­la­tion to come up with var­i­ous the­o­ries as to how the world will end. In most of these the­o­ries — embraced by con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal or fun­da­men­tal­ist branch­es of the faith — an enti­ty referred to as Gog and Magog descends from the ‘far north’ upon a peace­ful, recon­sti­tut­ed Israel, whose peo­ple had been ‘brought out from the nations, and all now dwell secure­ly,’ as it is described in Ezekiel. The result­ing war that fol­lows allows a Mes­si­ah to swoop in and come to Israel’s res­cue. It also ush­ers in the end of the world as we know it and the estab­lish­ment of a new and bet­ter king­dom of God on earth.”
    • The author most­ly did his home­work, but did mis­spell “pen­ta­costal” lat­er in the essay and def­i­nite­ly gets some of the men­tal­i­ty wrong.

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 one I have fond­ness in my heart for: Man­ly wed­ding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Out­line): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a cam­ou­flage ring, part­ly to sig­nal my deep com­mit­ment to irony and part­ly to get bet­ter ser­vice at the auto parts store.” I real­ly enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wed­ding bands in the not-too-distant future. First shared in vol­ume 210.

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 338

more eclec­tic than nor­mal

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

This is the 338th install­ment. 338, I am told, is the small­est num­ber for which both the num­ber of divi­sors and the sum of its prime fac­tors is a per­fect num­ber. An odd hon­or, but one I am pleased to acknowl­edge.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Romance:
    • Reverse friend zone: many roman­tic rela­tion­ships start off just as friends. In fact, most peo­ple pre­fer it this way (Tibi Puiu, ZME Sci­ence): “When par­tic­i­pants were asked about their orig­i­nal inten­tions for ini­ti­at­ing the friend­ship that went on to evolve roman­ti­cal­ly, only 30% said they were sex­u­al­ly attract­ed to the part­ner from the very begin­ning. In 70% of cas­es, nei­ther of the two par­ties in the rela­tion­ship orig­i­nal­ly had feel­ings, with attrac­tion blos­som­ing at a lat­er time.”
    • Too Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not if You Avoid Cohab­it­ing First (Brad Wilcox and Lyman Stone, Wall Street Jour­nal): “In ana­lyz­ing reports of mar­riage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government’s Nation­al Sur­vey of Fam­i­ly Growth (NFSG), we found that there is a group of women for whom mar­riage before 30 is not risky: women who mar­ried direct­ly, with­out ever cohab­it­ing pri­or to mar­riage. In fact, women who mar­ried between 22 and 30, with­out first liv­ing togeth­er, had some of the low­est rates of divorce in the NSFG.”#justsaying
  2. Stephen Col­bert Explains The Rela­tion­ship Between His Com­e­dy and His Faith (Twit­ter): I think I would real­ly like Stephen Col­bert if I met him in per­son.
  3. Stan­ford relat­ed:
    • Are semes­ters or quar­ters bet­ter? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In fact I think the quar­ter sys­tem doesn’t go far enough. I think we should have many more one- and two-week class­es, or five-week class­es, as well. Under­stand­ably that is more dif­fi­cult to man­age oper­a­tional­ly, but I don’t see any rea­son why it should be impos­si­ble. Com­pa­nies solve more com­plex sched­ul­ing prob­lems than that all the time. If I think of GMU, either the under­grad­u­ate majors, or the grad­u­ate stu­dents, should in my opin­ion have had some class­room time with almost every sin­gle instruc­tor. So much of life and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is about match­ing!”
    • I went to every library on cam­pus so you don’t have to (Annie Reller, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Below is my rank­ing of the libraries on cam­pus. Please keep in mind that I have spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria when going to libraries: com­fy chairs, ambiance and light­ing. I am a human­i­ties major, so desks are less nec­es­sary as I do most of my work on my lap­top.”
  4. Why Isn’t There a Repli­ca­tion Cri­sis in Math? (Jay Daigle, blog): “Many papers have errors, yes—but our major results gen­er­al­ly hold up, even when the inter­me­di­ate steps are wrong! Our errors can usu­al­ly be fixed with­out real­ly chang­ing our con­clu­sions.… But isn’t it…weird…that our results hold up when our meth­ods don’t? How does that even work? We get away with it becuase we can be right for the wrong rea­sons—we most­ly only try to prove things that are basi­cal­ly true.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. The author is a math pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. Hack­ers:
    • North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Inter­net (Andy Green­berg, Wired): “But respon­si­bil­i­ty for North Kore­a’s ongo­ing inter­net out­ages does­n’t lie with US Cyber Com­mand or any oth­er state-spon­sored hack­ing agency. In fact, it was the work of one Amer­i­can man in a T‑shirt, paja­ma pants, and slip­pers, sit­ting in his liv­ing room night after night, watch­ing Alien movies and eat­ing spicy corn snacks—and peri­od­i­cal­ly walk­ing over to his home office to check on the progress of the pro­grams he was run­ning to dis­rupt the inter­net of an entire coun­try.” What an absolute leg­end.
    • How A Lone Hack­er Shred­ded the Myth of Crowd­sourc­ing (Mark Har­ris, Medi­um): “Myself and oth­ers in the social sci­ences com­mu­ni­ty tend to think of such mas­sive acts of sab­o­tage as anom­alies, but are they?” won­dered Cebri­an. To set­tle the ques­tion, Cebri­an ana­lyzed his (and oth­er) crowd­sourc­ing con­tests with the help of Vic­tor Nar­o­dit­skiy, a game the­o­ry expert at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Southamp­ton. The results shocked him. “The expect­ed out­come is for every­one to attack, regard­less of how dif­fi­cult an attack is,” says Cebri­an. “It is actu­al­ly ratio­nal for the crowd to be mali­cious, espe­cial­ly in a com­pe­ti­tion envi­ron­ment. And I can’t think of any engi­neer­ing or game the­o­ret­ic or eco­nom­ic incen­tive to stop it.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Ukraine Gave Up a Giant Nuclear Arse­nal 30 Years Ago. Today There Are Regrets. (William J. Broad, New York Times): “We gave away the capa­bil­i­ty for noth­ing,” said Andriy Zahorod­niuk, a for­mer defense min­is­ter of Ukraine. Refer­ring to the secu­ri­ty assur­ances Ukraine won in exchange for its nuclear arms, he added: “Now, every time some­body offers us to sign a strip of paper, the response is, ‘Thank you very much. We already had one of those some time ago.’”
    • If Rus­sia does invade Ukraine, I think the biggest glob­al con­se­quence might be that nuclear pow­ers become even more com­mit­ted to main­tain­ing their arse­nals and non-nuclear pow­ers strive even hard­er to join the club.
  7. The Cana­di­an truck­ers:
    • Sym­pa­thet­ic: What the Truck­ers Want (Rupa Sub­ra­manya, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “It was iron­ic, she said that she could serve but couldn’t dine at the restau­rant where she worked.”
    • Con­cerned: Dis­patch from the Ottawa Front: Sloly is telling you all he’s in trou­ble. Who’s lis­ten­ing? (Matt Gur­ney, Sub­stack): “This is a com­pli­cat­ed protest and a com­pli­cat­ed event. It has lay­ers. Are there good, frus­trat­ed peo­ple just try­ing to be heard in the crowd? Yes. Are there bad peo­ple in the crowd, includ­ing some who’ve waved hate sym­bols and harassed or attacked oth­ers? Yes. Are there peo­ple tak­ing care­ful care of the roads, sweep­ing up trash and shov­el­ling ice and snow off the side­walk? Yes. Are there hard men milling about, keep­ing a wary eye on any­one who seems out of place? Yes. Is it a place where some peo­ple are hav­ing good-natured fun? Yes. Is it a place some oth­er peo­ple would right­ly be afraid to go? Yes. And so on. But it’s even more com­pli­cat­ed than it looks.”

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 337

Some wild sto­ries about Stan­ford 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.

This is vol­ume 337, a prime num­ber. In fact, the dig­its are prime even when rearranged (the oth­er per­mu­ta­tions of these dig­its being 373 and 733).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I do not expect a civ­il war in Amer­i­ca (and what does wor­ry me) (Chris Blattman, blog): “Most ene­mies pre­fer to loathe one anoth­er in peace. War is real­ly cost­ly. It kills, destroys economies, and weak­ens your coun­try to ene­mies. As a result, all sides have huge incen­tives to avoid vio­lence. That’s why most rivals don’t fight. For every thou­sand eth­nic groups, gangs, reli­gious sects, polit­i­cal fac­tions or nations who hate one anoth­er, maybe one in a thou­sand end up in pro­longed vio­lence. Because it just doesn’t make sense.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist and polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at U Chica­go. I like this arti­cle in part because he spends time talk­ing about the absurd “democ­ra­cy rat­ings” polit­i­cal sci­en­tists have been down­grad­ing Amer­i­ca in over the last few years.
  2. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed news:
    • PDF: A Lit­er­a­ture Review and Meta-Analy­sis of the Effects of Lock­downs on COVID-19 Mor­tal­i­ty (Jonas Her­by, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Han­ke, Stud­ies in Applied Eco­nom­ics): “[The stud­ies] were sep­a­rat­ed into three groups: lock­down strin­gency index stud­ies, shel­ter-in-place­order (SIPO) stud­ies, and spe­cif­ic NPI stud­ies. An analy­sis of each of these three groups sup­port the con­clu­sion that lock­downs have had lit­tle to no effect on COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty. More specif­i­cal­ly, strin­gency index stud­ies find that lock­downs in Europe and the Unit­ed States only reduced COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty by 0.2% on aver­age. SIPOs were also inef­fec­tive, only reduc­ing COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty by 2.9% on aver­age. Spe­cif­ic NPI stud­ies also find no broad-based evi­dence of notice­able effects on COVID-19 mor­tal­i­ty. While this meta-analy­sis con­cludes that lock­downs have had lit­tle to no pub­lic health effects, they have imposed enor­mous eco­nom­ic and social costs where they have been adopt­ed. In con­se­quence, lock­down poli­cies are ill-found­ed and should be reject­ed as a pan­dem­ic pol­i­cy instru­ment.”
      • Lock­downs only achieved a .2% reduc­tion in deaths? That’s one in five hun­dred. Wow. Some of the oth­er stuff our soci­ety did was jus­ti­fied, but clear­ly lock­downs aren’t a tool we should use in the future.
    • Race-Based Rationing Is Real—And Dan­ger­ous (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “The rationing rules in New York and else­where are not the prod­uct of any­thing resem­bling con­ven­tion­al polit­i­cal per­sua­sion. No par­ty would support—certainly not openly—the essen­tial­iza­tion and instru­men­tal­iza­tion of race in med­i­cine. Few are will­ing to defend poli­cies such as these on the mer­its, because what exact­ly would they say? Telling­ly, these con­tro­ver­sies have received lim­it­ed cov­er­age from main­stream out­lets.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • COVID Affects Your Mem­o­ry (Alex Gutentag, Tablet): “After spend­ing four years check­ing every per­ceived author­i­tar­i­an impulse from Don­ald Trump, the media sud­den­ly called for strict enforce­ment of gov­ern­ment decrees, denounced the non­com­pli­ant, pun­ished dis­senters, and advo­cat­ed for Big Tech clam­p­downs on speech.… With the 2022 midterms in sight, the nar­ra­tive is sim­ply shift­ing with­out apol­o­gy, and many of the argu­ments once made by ‘covid­iots’ are now being backed by Antho­ny Fau­ci, CDC Direc­tor Rochelle Walen­sky, and the famil­iar cast of jour­nal­ists and experts.”
  3. Two reveal­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • “Racist, Trig­ger­ing, Dis­re­spect­ful” — Stan­ford RA slams unmasked white stu­dents (Stan­ford Review): “Late Sun­day night, a Stan­ford stu­dent RA in the EVGR dor­mi­to­ry emailed the building’s 2,400 res­i­dents to warn against a ‘gross inequity’ that risked stu­dents ‘being killed or maimed for a life­time.’ The dan­ger in ques­tion? Mask­less stu­dents— espe­cial­ly white ones.”
    • The teach­ers of White Plaza (Valerie Trapp, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “He tried to respond and was cut off. ‘You’re a white guy,’ Wait­es said. ‘I can inter­rupt you.’ ‘And you’re a white woman.’ ‘Well, you’re cop­ping out of the fact I’m say­ing that you’re racist, and you’re not say­ing you’re not a racist.’ ”
    • This isn’t all of cam­pus life, but it’s not none of cam­pus life.
  4. Some insights into acad­e­mia:
    • How the job mar­ket works at top schools (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “At least pre-Covid, most of the fac­ul­ty would get togeth­er and rate the grad­u­ate stu­dents (I am not sure how it has oper­at­ed for the last two years, though I sus­pect the same, only over Zoom). Some but not all of the stu­dents would be des­ig­nat­ed as ‘should work at a top school.’ If you were not so rat­ed, your chance of being hired at a top school was slim. Oth­er schools, of course, would know not to pur­sue the top can­di­dates, and would shoot low­er, though some fool­hardy places might try to lure them any­way. But basi­cal­ly if you were hir­ing at a high lev­el, you would call the place­ment offi­cer at a top school, and they would tier the can­di­dates, based on where you were call­ing from, and rec­om­mend accord­ing­ly.”
    • Intel­lec­tu­al Free­dom in Medieval Uni­ver­si­ties (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “One rea­son [medieval uni­ver­si­ties flour­ished] is the lack of pro­fes­sion­al admin­is­tra­tors, a fea­ture of uni­ver­si­ties that last­ed into mod­ern times. (Har­vard University—O the bliss of it!—as late as 1850 had only a sin­gle full-time admin­is­tra­tor, the pres­i­dent, helped by a jan­i­tor, a cook, and two ush­ers.) It is a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple of suc­cess­ful insti­tu­tions that the peo­ple who run them are the ones most com­mit­ted to their mis­sions and most respon­si­ble for their suc­cess. A pro­fes­sion­al admin­is­tra­tive class, by con­trast, spends much of its time evad­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for fail­ure and tak­ing cred­it for oth­er people’s achieve­ments.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Going South: Life at the World’s Most Pro­gres­sive Uni­ver­si­ty (David Benatar, Quil­lette): “Many uni­ver­si­ties have a problem—on this point there seems to be wide­spread agree­ment. The nature of that prob­lem, how­ev­er, remains bit­ter­ly con­test­ed. Lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives wor­ry that high­er edu­ca­tion has suc­cumbed to regres­sive rad­i­cal­ism on mat­ters relat­ed to race and gen­der. Those who self-iden­ti­fy as pro­gres­sives and social jus­tice activists, on the oth­er hand, com­plain that uni­ver­si­ties are still gov­erned by embed­ded struc­tures of oppres­sion, and that lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives have suc­cumbed to a moral pan­ic in response to rea­son­able calls for reform.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town.
  5. Men in the church:
    • Part one: Is Chris­tian­i­ty doing more harm than good to Amer­i­can men? (Antho­ny Bradley, Acton): “It’s often thought that con­trol of women, and espe­cial­ly women’s bod­ies, has been the obses­sion of Chris­t­ian cler­gy down through the ages, but actu­al­ly it has been the con­trol of men and their bod­ies that has just as often char­ac­ter­ized Christianity’s ori­en­ta­tion. How­ev­er, because that con­trol has his­tor­i­cal­ly been mis­man­aged, rang­ing from fem­i­niza­tion, to priests using the con­fes­sion­al to con­trol hus­bands, to cler­gy falling prey to mar­ry­ing church and pol­i­tics, to cler­gy sex-abuse scan­dals, to recent sto­ries of evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors abus­ing their pow­er, men have become increas­ing­ly alien­at­ed from the very insti­tu­tion cre­at­ed to form them to be of ben­e­fit to oth­ers.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Reli­gious Stud­ies at The King’s Col­lege in NYC. 
    • Part two: Sav­ing men requires the lead­er­ship of lay­men (Antho­ny Bradley, The Acton Insti­tute): “Amer­i­can boys are often taught that mar­riage or work will be a cure for their lone­li­ness and alien­ation, but many men find out the hard way that one can be mar­ried, gain­ful­ly employed, and still incred­i­bly lone­ly. Men need local, lay-led con­fra­ter­ni­ties that res­onate with their deep­est long­ings and their desire for com­mu­nion with their fel­lows, formed by local com­mon inter­ests.”
  6. How Hous­es of Wor­ship Became Hotbeds of Graft (Avi­tal Chizhik-Gold­schmidt, The New Repub­lic): “In extreme cas­es, finan­cial opac­i­ty in hous­es of wor­ship can even become a secu­ri­ty risk: It was that exact lack of trans­paren­cy that may have cost human life at Goldstein’s syn­a­gogue in Poway. Though the syn­a­gogue had received $150,000 from the gov­ern­ment because it “believed that it was at risk of an anti-Semit­ic attack on its con­gre­gants,” accord­ing to one of the con­gre­gants’ sub­se­quent suits—court doc­u­ments show that on the day of the attack, the building’s doors were unlocked and no guards, gates, or oth­er secu­ri­ty mea­sures were in place. Instead of pro­vid­ing a nec­es­sary guard at the front of the syn­a­gogue, funds had alleged­ly been divert­ed else­where; the plain­tiffs argue that this mis­take may have cost the life of Lori Gilbert-Kaye, who was killed in the shoot­ing.”
  7. Con­cern­ing Fran­cis Collins:
    • How The Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Used Evan­gel­i­cal Lead­ers To Spread COVID Pro­pa­gan­da To Church­es (Megan Basham, The Dai­ly Wire): “Oth­er than his procla­ma­tions that he is, him­self, a believ­er, the NIH direc­tor espous­es near­ly no pub­lic posi­tions that would mark him out as any dif­fer­ent from any extreme Left-wing bureau­crat. He has not only defend­ed exper­i­men­ta­tion on fetus­es obtained by abor­tion, he has also direct­ed record-lev­el spend­ing toward it. Among the pri­or­i­ties the NIH has fund­ed under Collins — a Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh exper­i­ment that involved graft­ing infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the har­vest­ed organs of abort­ed, full-term babies. Some doc­tors have even charged Collins with giv­ing mon­ey to research that required extract­ing kid­neys, ureters, and blad­ders from liv­ing infants.”
    • Evan­gel­i­cals: Who Are The Good & The Bad? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “What sticks in my craw is the seem­ing­ly unex­am­ined assump­tion that if you don’t land where edu­cat­ed mid­dle class elites do on any or all of these ques­tions, that you must in some sense be a threat to the integri­ty of the Church. Per­haps edu­cat­ed mid­dle class elite opin­ion is the real threat, you know?” A long arti­cle sum­ma­riz­ing and inter­act­ing with two oth­er arti­cles.
    • I’m going to regret writ­ing this (Erick Erik­son, Sub­stack): “..the NIH exec­u­tive tells me it is impor­tant to under­stand that Collins does not approve and sanc­tion all research and fund­ing and of the fund­ing Collins has direct­ly over­seen and approved, only a lit­tle would be con­tro­ver­sial. The NIH is com­plex and while Collins guides the whole, he does not over­see or approve the entire­ty of the budget.“A sane take (and one I pri­vate­ly expressed ear­li­er today with­out hav­ing seen this arti­cle).
    • Dis­claimer: I loose­ly know Fran­cis Collins and respect him. I do wish he had done a few things dif­fer­ent­ly, but I am sure that if I had his job he would wish I had done a LOT of things dif­fer­ent­ly and he would be right.

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 329

a short­er than usu­al roundup

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

This is the 329th install­ment. 329 is, appar­ent­ly, the num­ber of forests (a type of graph) with 10 ver­tices.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Lov­ing Lies (Bill Adair, Air Mail): “Inter­view­ing Glass can be frus­trat­ing, because he frets so much about get­ting every detail right. He’ll stop mid­sen­tence to pon­der the month or day that some­thing hap­pened. Was that lunch in late 2014 or ear­ly 2015? He’ll check. He knows he has a rep­u­ta­tion as a liar and that he has already blown a life­time of cred­i­bil­i­ty.”
    • Quite a sto­ry. You will need to pro­vide your email address to unlock it and it is 100% worth it.
  2. Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, Man on Fire (Mau­reen Dowd, New York Times): “The ene­my is the inner me,” he said. “The Bible says in the last days — I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know — but it says we’ll be lovers of our­selves. The No. 1 pho­to­graph today is a self­ie, ‘Oh, me at the protest.’ ‘Me with the fire.’ ‘Fol­low me.’ ‘Lis­ten to me.’ We’re liv­ing in a time where peo­ple are will­ing to do any­thing to get fol­lowed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much infor­ma­tion? It’s going fast and it can be manip­u­lat­ed obvi­ous­ly in a myr­i­ad of ways. And peo­ple are led like sheep to slaugh­ter.”
  3. What I told the stu­dents of Prince­ton (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “…I want you to think for a moment about a young woman here at Prince­ton. She’s a mag­nif­i­cent ath­lete named Ellie Mar­quardt, an all-Amer­i­can swim­mer who set an Ivy League record in the 500-meter freestyle event as a fresh­man. Just before Thanks­giv­ing, Ellie was defeat­ed in the 500-meter, the event she held the record in, by almost 14 sec­onds by a 22 year old bio­log­i­cal male at Penn who was com­pet­ing on the men’s team as recent­ly as Novem­ber of 2019. That male ath­lete now holds mul­ti­ple U.S. records in women’s swim­ming, eras­ing the hard work of so many of our best female ath­letes, and mak­ing a mock­ery of the rights women fought for gen­er­a­tions to achieve.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  4. Even on U.S. Cam­pus­es, Chi­na Cracks Down on Stu­dents Who Speak Out (Sebas­t­ian Rotel­la, ProP­ub­li­ca): “As the regime of Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping reach­es across bor­ders to con­trol its cit­i­zens wher­ev­er they are, its assaults on aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom have inten­si­fied, accord­ing to U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials, aca­d­e­mics, dis­si­dents and oth­er experts. Chi­nese intel­li­gence offi­cers are mon­i­tor­ing cam­pus­es across the Unit­ed States with online sur­veil­lance and an array of infor­mants moti­vat­ed by mon­ey, ambi­tion, fear or authen­tic patri­o­tism. A com­ment in class about Tai­wan or a speech at a ral­ly about Tibet can result in retal­i­a­tion against stu­dents and their rel­a­tives back home.”
  5. Polit­i­cal arti­cles which caught my atten­tion:
    • I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grate­ful for His Supreme Court Picks (Eri­ka Bachiochi, New York Times): “Mr. Trump’s eco­nom­ic pop­ulism (at least in rhetoric) blast­ed through the lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that has tend­ed to dom­i­nate the G.O.P., a lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that has made the party’s alliance with pro-lif­ers one of strange bed­fel­lows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any rel­e­vance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those sin­gle-issue vot­ers will be free to look else­where — it will have to offer the coun­try the matrix of eth­nic diver­si­ty and eco­nom­ic sol­i­dar­i­ty that Mr. Trump stum­bled upon, but with­out the divi­sive­ness of the man him­self.”
    • Democ­rats fall flat with ‘Lat­inx’ lan­guage (Marc Caputo & Sab­ri­na Rodriguez, Politi­co): “The num­bers sug­gest that using Lat­inx is a vio­la­tion of the polit­i­cal Hip­po­crat­ic Oath, which is to first do no elec­toral harm,” said Aman­di, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s suc­cess­ful His­pan­ic out­reach nation­wide in his two pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns. “Why are we using a word that is pre­ferred by only 2 per­cent, but offends as many as 40 per­cent of those vot­ers we want to win?” Shared with me by a stu­dent well-suit­ed to assess this con­tro­ver­sy. 
    • [Stan­ford] Sen­ate again denies Mike Pence event fund­ing at meet­ing revot­ing on grants (Itzel Luna, Stan­ford Dai­ly):  “Five sen­a­tors vot­ed in favor of SCR’s $6,000 fund­ing request to bring for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to cam­pus in the win­ter quar­ter. Eight sen­a­tors abstained and no one vot­ed against the fund­ing which, accord­ing to the sen­a­tors, con­sti­tut­ed a fail­ure to receive major­i­ty approval.” This reads like a par­o­dy of stu­dent gov­ern­ment.
    • Young Dems more like­ly to despise the oth­er par­ty (Neal Roth­schild, Axios): “[Among col­lege stu­dents,] 5% of Repub­li­cans said they would­n’t be friends with some­one from the oppo­site par­ty, com­pared to 37% of Democ­rats. 71% of Democ­rats would­n’t go on a date with some­one with oppos­ing views, ver­sus 31% of Republicans.30% of Democ­rats — and 7% of Repub­li­cans — would­n’t work for some­one who vot­ed dif­fer­ent­ly from 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 Is Christ­mas a Pagan Rip-off? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “…what­ev­er the Christ­mas hol­i­day has become today, it start­ed as a copy­cat of well-estab­lished pagan hol­i­days. If you like Christ­mas, you have Sat­ur­na­lia and Sol Invic­tus to thank. That’s the sto­ry, and every­one from lib­er­al Chris­tians to con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians to non-Chris­tians seem to agree that it’s true. Except that it isn’t.” From vol­ume 280.

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 327

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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 318

First, a word to new stu­dents: wel­come! This might be your first email from Chi Alpha and if so you might be a lit­tle con­fused.

For the last sev­er­al years, I have been shar­ing articles/resources every Fri­day about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues.

I was inspired by the tribe of Issachar from the time of King David. They 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.

Be sure to see the dis­claimers at the bot­tom. Also, I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

All that hav­ing been said, here is 318th roundup of things I have found inter­est­ing (318, I am told, is the num­ber of unla­beled par­tial­ly ordered sets of 6 ele­ments).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Amer­i­can Cri­sis of Selec­tive Empa­thy (David French, The Dis­patch): “…Amer­i­ca is expe­ri­enc­ing an empa­thy cri­sis. But it’s not quite the cri­sis you might think. Our empa­thy can over­flow for the peo­ple we love, for the peo­ple with­in our tribe—even when they make grave errors. But what about our empa­thy for ‘them,’ the peo­ple we dis­trust? Then empa­thy is in short sup­ply. Indeed, in some cas­es, the very con­cept of empa­thy is under fire.”
    • Relat­ed: The Lim­its of My Empa­thy for Covid Deniers (Tressie McMil­lan Cot­tom, New York Times): “Because I val­ue being a think­ing per­son, I hon­or emo­tions like empa­thy, fear, joy and trust to guide me around the pit­falls of my ego. Ego makes for real­ly slop­py analy­sis and writ­ing. I am at a point where head­lines about ill and dying Covid deniers do not pull at my empa­thy strings the way I want them to.”
  2. Norm Macdonald’s Spir­i­tu­al Jour­ney (Nic Rowan, First Things): “Mac­don­ald may have only been dab­bling in Chris­tian­i­ty, but his crit­i­cisms of the post-Chris­t­ian world were often inci­sive. He had no tol­er­ance for sci­en­tism and laughed at athe­ists. He fre­quent­ly lam­pooned the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Maher. And he wasn’t afraid to make dark pre­dic­tions about a future dom­i­nat­ed by their suc­ces­sors.”
  3. Fired After Get­ting Vaccinated—And Encour­ag­ing Oth­ers to Do So (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “I was try­ing to use my plat­form to share the truth. You’re right that Chris­tians should be peo­ple of the truth—not just that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, but also the truth about what is real. The ques­tion is: How do you get the truth to peo­ple? We live in a time where infor­ma­tion is com­ing at us from all over. It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly that peo­ple don’t want to believe the truth.” This is a sol­id inter­view. Dar­ling comes off very well.
  4. Effect size is sig­nif­i­cant­ly more impor­tant than sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance. (Ben Recht, per­son­al blog): “In either case we are talk­ing about a dif­fer­ence of 15 cas­es between the treat­ment and con­trol vil­lages in a pop­u­la­tion of 32,000 indi­vid­u­als.… If the effect size is so small that we need sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­tics, maybe that means the effect isn’t real. Using sophis­ti­cat­ed sta­tis­ti­cal scaf­fold­ing clouds our judge­ment. We end up using sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods as a crutch, not to dig sig­nals out of noise, but to con­vince our­selves of sig­nals when there are none.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of machine learn­ing and data analy­sis at Berke­ley.
  5. Why Amer­i­ca needs the Black church for its own sur­vival (Char­lie Date, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The dif­fer­ence between the Black church and any oth­er Chris­t­ian insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­ca is that rather than aban­don­ing Scrip­ture as a tool of our oppres­sion, we apply Scrip­ture as God’s rule for our lib­er­ty and liv­ing. The dif­fer­ence is in how our social eth­ic is root­ed in both right­eous­ness and jus­tice, not either right­eous­ness or jus­tice. The dif­fer­ence is that we’ve come to see Jesus and his pow­er to sus­tain and flour­ish us from the mar­gins with­out the ben­e­fit of large donors, polit­i­cal cap­i­tal or own­er­ship of media out­lets.” The author is pas­tor of a promi­nent Black church in Chica­go as well as a sem­i­nary pro­fes­sor.
  6. Roe Will Go (Robert P. George, First Things): “Let me offer a pre­dic­tion, free of any face-sav­ing hedge: Next year, the Supreme Court will hold that there is no con­sti­tu­tion­al right to elec­tive abor­tions. In Dobbs v. Jack­son Women’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion, a case pend­ing before the court, it will return the issue to the states for the first time in forty-nine years. It will do so explic­it­ly, call­ing out by name, and revers­ing in full, the two major cas­es that con­fect­ed and then entrenched a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to elec­tive abor­tion: Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Par­ent­hood v. Casey (1992). And the vote will be six to three.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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 313

a dis­turbing­ly high num­ber of pan­dem­ic-relat­ed arti­cles

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.

313 is the 65th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • How the Pan­dem­ic Now Ends (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): “Here, then, is the cur­rent pan­dem­ic dilem­ma: Vac­cines remain the best way for indi­vid­u­als to pro­tect them­selves, but soci­eties can­not treat vac­cines as their only defense.”
      • First, this is a free arti­cle that won’t use up a pay­wall click. Sec­ond, this is dis­cour­ag­ing to read and makes me think Stan­ford is going to be way more restric­tive than I was hop­ing come fall.
    • What We Lose When We Livestream Church (Collin Hansen, New York Times): “The very word we trans­late from Greek as ‘church’ in the New Tes­ta­ment sug­gests we must assem­ble in per­son. The church wasn’t just a bridge of 2,000 years until human­i­ty reached Peak Zoom. It’s essen­tial for the reli­gion where God took on flesh and dwelt among us. It’s essen­tial in a faith that believes Jesus phys­i­cal­ly rose from the dead and then sat down to enjoy a meal with his stunned friends.”
    • Covid incom­pe­tence (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amaz­ing­ly the US pol­i­cy response is even more irres­olute than the first time around. Our gov­ern­ment is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sug­ar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wan­ders off fol­low­ing a pup­py.”
      • The author is a senior fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • “What Do Full Hos­pi­tals Real­ly Tell Us About COVID?” (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “The pub­lic argu­ment for spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals is more exper­tise and low­er costs because of effi­cien­cy. The real mod­el was no emer­gency room, and thus no way for un- and under-insured peo­ple to get into the hos­pi­tal. All of the finan­cial ben­e­fits of being a hos­pi­tal with­out any of the respon­si­bil­i­ties. So we get wom­en’s hos­pi­tals, ortho­pe­dic hos­pi­tals, etc., suck­ing the prof­itable work from com­mu­ni­ty hos­pi­tals, with­out tak­ing any of the bur­den of com­mu­ni­ty care for the indi­gent.… The hos­pi­tals in Louisiana which take indi­gent patients and patients though the ER—pretty much all COVID patients—are slammed. The spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals have lots of staff and lots of beds and don’t have much in the way of COVID patients, if there are any at all.”
      • I did not know any of that. Real­ly inter­est­ing. Writ­ten a law prof at Louisiana State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Porn­dem­ic? A Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Study of Pornog­ra­phy Use Before and Dur­ing the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic in a Nation­al­ly Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sam­ple of Amer­i­cans (Grubbs et al, Archives of Sex­u­al Behav­ior): “In gen­er­al, pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward over the pan­dem­ic, for both men and women. Prob­lem­at­ic pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward for men and remained low and unchanged in women.”
      • The excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing but also I think peo­ple are less like­ly to watch porn with their fam­i­lies around, which hap­pened a lot dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. I do won­der how their find­ings cross-check with traf­fic stats from porn web­sites. It seems like an obvi­ous way to do a sim­ple check on their find­ings.
  2. The Gap Between Law and Moral­i­ty (Helen Dale, Law & Lib­er­ty): “The planet’s two great legal sys­tems devel­oped in two Euro­pean civil­i­sa­tions, Rome and Eng­land. Their wide prove­nance is not only due to both peo­ples con­quer­ing great empires. It’s also because they worked: they did things no oth­er legal regime did before them, and those oth­ers are still inca­pable of doing now.… Incred­i­bly, these devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er. The Eng­lish com­mon law did not bor­row from Rome: when it first emerged, Roman law was lost.”
    • This is sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. In the words of an alum­nus, “This one was a sleep­er hit. Start­ed slow, blew me away by the end.”
  3. Why a Mas­cu­line Min­istry Rose and Fell (David French, The Dis­patch): “When coun­ter­ing a cul­ture that often attacks tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent vice, the answer isn’t to indulge tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent virtue.… Driscoll, in all his tough­ness and swag­ger, tried to make men out of Chris­tians. The church, how­ev­er, should make Chris­tians out of men.”
  4. Cor­nel West on Why the Left Needs Jesus (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “When I was in Char­lottesville, look­ing at these sick white broth­ers in neo-Nazi par­ties and the Klan spit­ting and cussing and car­ry­ing on, I could see the hounds of hell rag­ing on the bat­tle­field of their souls. But I also know that there’s greed in me. There’s hatred in me. Peo­ple say, ‘Oh, you’re so qual­i­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent than those gang­sters.’ I say, ‘No, I’ve got gang­ster in me. I was a gang­ster before I met Jesus. Now I’m a redeemed sin­ner with gang­ster pro­cliv­i­ties.’ It is a very dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at things than many of my sec­u­lar com­rades.”
  5. Crim­i­nal-Jus­tice Reform­ers Chose the Wrong Slo­gan (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Before the pub­lic sours on crim­i­nal-jus­tice reform more broadly—as it may amid ris­ing fears about crime and dis­or­der in cities—a new focus and ral­ly­ing cry are need­ed. And giv­en the spike in homi­cides that has afflict­ed the Unit­ed States dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly killing Black peo­ple, there’s an espe­cial­ly strong case for this over­due slo­gan: Solve All Mur­ders. Pre­cise­ly because Black lives mat­ter, peo­ple who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.”
  6. Assem­blies of God Grow­ing with Pen­te­costal Per­sis­tence (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s dif­fi­cult to pin­point exact­ly why the Assem­blies of God has con­tin­ued to increase over the past 15 years. Research shows that mem­ber­ship of the Assem­blies of God has become more polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and more reli­gious­ly active today than just a decade ago, but its own num­bers indi­cate that it has achieved incred­i­ble racial diversity—44 per­cent of mem­bers in the Unit­ed States are eth­nic minori­ties.”
    • Since the Assem­blies of God is the group with which I am ordained and is the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Chi Alpha, file under “arti­cles that make me hap­py.”
  7. We Need to Build Our Way Out of This Mess (Eli Doura­do, New York Times): “How did the most dynam­ic coun­try on the plan­et become so scle­rot­ic? We did it to our­selves. We enact­ed laws that priv­i­lege the sta­tus quo at the expense of change and progress. We lib­er­al­ly passed out veto rights to any­one with the mon­ey and where­with­al to hire a lawyer. If we want to reverse the dam­age and cre­ate a more pros­per­ous future, we must make it easy to build.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist at Utah 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 a provoca­tive read, In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 303

top­ics range from the pan­dem­ic to a Bib­li­cal view of UFOs

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

This is the 303rd edi­tion, which is fun because 303 is a lucky num­ber, a cat­e­go­ry of num­bers that gives us insight into prime num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Dr. Fran­cis Collins Dis­cuss­es The Com­plex­i­ties Of Herd Immu­ni­ty (Col­bert Report, YouTube): sev­en min­utes. Dr. Collins is a fel­low believ­er and emi­nent sci­en­tist. He flat-out shares his tes­ti­mo­ny! Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  2. Why I Did­n’t “Just Bake the Cake” (Jack Phillips, First Things): “My com­mit­ment to God and to the truth of a book I believe to be his holy Word is the defin­ing premise of my life, the focus of my faith, and the guid­ing direc­tive for my actions. If you ask me to sep­a­rate all of that from my work, from my deci­sions, from my art … I sim­ply can’t do that. Not just won’t—can’t. It’s like ask­ing a con­trac­tor to build a great build­ing, but first remove the foun­da­tion.”
  3. It’s Time to Devel­op a Bib­li­cal Ufol­o­gy (Kyle Beshears, The­ol­o­gy in the Mid­dle): “What is the rela­tion­ship, if any, between UAP phe­nom­e­na and Chris­t­ian angelolo­gies and demonolo­gies? How does the doc­trine of the ima­go Dei fit in? Can our the­ol­o­gy of the fall address extrater­res­tri­als? What if they arrive deny­ing the lord­ship of Christ (Gal 1:8; 1 John 2:22)? What if they arrive pro­claim­ing the lord­ship of Christ (Rom 10:9)?”
  4. The Myth of the Val­ue-Neu­tral Mar­ket (Mark Movs­esyian, First Things): “The neu­tral mar­ket does not cre­ate tol­er­ance for diverse views; rather, it’s the oth­er way around. Tol­er­ance for diverse views cre­ates the neu­tral mar­ket; when tol­er­ance dis­ap­pears, the mar­ket becomes as polar­ized as every­thing else.”
  5. The future of war is bizarre and ter­ri­fy­ing (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “The world may yet explode into anoth­er WW2-style con­fla­gra­tion, or the kind of nuclear holo­caust we feared dur­ing the Cold War. If so, then my bet is that drones will dom­i­nate that bat­tle­field. But most of the mod­ern mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies led them­selves to a very dif­fer­ent kind of great-pow­er war — a war of con­stant snip­ing and harass­ment. Assas­sin drones, cyber­at­tacks, info ops, and bioweapons raise the pos­si­bil­i­ty of nev­er-end­ing low-grade attacks that are below the thresh­old of mas­sive retal­i­a­tion.”
  6. For Cos­mopoli­tan Chris­tians, Sec­u­lar Approval Is a Com­mon Temp­ta­tion (Justin E. Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We need Chris­tians who aren’t smit­ten with the cul­ture or mere­ly pro­fi­cient at regur­gi­tat­ing its litur­gy. We need believ­ers who can wres­tle with sec­u­lar thought, affirm­ing the mer­its and oppos­ing the lies. Chris­tians must be con­fi­dent and dis­tinct­ly Chris­t­ian in our fields—boldly speak­ing up when the emper­or is strid­ing around with no clothes. When change is nec­es­sary, we must cor­rect the mis­takes of our elders by mov­ing clos­er to the Bible, not fur­ther from it.”
  7. Some thoughts about Wuhan:
    • The medi­a’s lab leak fias­co (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “If some­thing is a 70–30 issue but the 30 are keep­ing their heads down, it can look like a 98–2 issue.… There is just more dis­agree­ment and dis­sen­sion than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to peo­ple and speak to them in a more relaxed way. My strong sus­pi­cion is that this is true across domains of exper­tise, and is cre­at­ing a lot of bub­bles of fake con­sen­sus that can become very mis­lead­ing.”
    • Check­ing Facts Even If One Can’t (Zeynep Tufek­ci, Sub­stack): “If any­thing, all this over­reach and hur­ry to declare every­thing a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry or ‘not fol­low­ing the sci­ence’ just helps erode what trust author­i­ties or fact-check­ers may have had in their pro­nounce­ments. Imag­ine that in a few years, we do get some evi­dence that real­ly helps resolve the ques­tion one way or the oth­er, and the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty were indeed able achieve a con­sen­sus of sorts. Who’d believe it after this?”
    • The Con­sid­er­able, If Cir­cum­stan­tial, Evi­dence of a Wuhan Lab Leak (Jim Ger­aghty, Nation­al Review): “Per­haps the least plau­si­ble argu­ment in oppo­si­tion to the lab-leak the­o­ry is that the staff of the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy or oth­er Chi­nese facil­i­ties are just too dili­gent to ever make a con­se­quen­tial mis­take. The orig­i­nal SARS virus had acci­den­tal­ly leaked from the Chi­nese Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy in Bei­jing, part of China’s Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol. Twice.” The com­pi­la­tion of the evi­dence is com­pelling. To use a legal image, if I was a on a jury I’d vote to con­vict unless the oppos­ing coun­sel had some slam dunk argu­ments — and in this sit­u­a­tion the oppos­ing coun­sel is fran­ti­cal­ly try­ing to get the case dis­missed before it comes to court.

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 Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From. (Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qual­i­ties.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). (first shared in vol­ume 62)

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 301

per­spec­tives on Israel, Bit­coin, and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty

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 301, which is what is known as a Hap­py Num­ber. So there.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cross and the Machine (Paul Kingsnorth, First Things): “It kept hap­pen­ing, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerv­ing. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being … hunt­ed? I want­ed it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no inter­est in Chris­tian­i­ty. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sound­ed pret­ty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.” A won­der­ful­ly-told con­ver­sion sto­ry.
  2. Why We Should Read What We Cite (Because It Mat­ters) (Joseph Lath­am & Gilly Koritzky, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): “Con­sid­er an aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle that came out at the height of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and argues that doc­tors’ racist bias­es are a main rea­son for the high­er COVID-19-relat­ed hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and mor­tal­i­ty rates among African Amer­i­cans. It says that ‘there is evi­dence of med­ical bias in the test­ing and treat­ment of African-Amer­i­cans with COVID-19’ and cites this report as the source. The prob­lem? The report con­tains no such evi­dence.” The excerpt does not do it jus­tice. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The authors are psy­chol­o­gists.
  3. How We Got to the Equal­i­ty Act (Matthew Lee Ander­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The sto­ry that evan­gel­i­cals are (mere­ly) vic­tims of pro­gres­sive aggres­sors not only fails to account for the ways in which the LGBT move­ment was shaped by pop­ulist evan­gel­i­cal rhetoric and tac­tics. It also for­gets that the gay lib­er­a­tion move­ment was a direct response to the sys­temic and per­va­sive exclu­sion of les­bian and gay indi­vid­u­als from the struc­tures of our pub­lic life—including from Amer­i­ca itself. Per­fec­tion­ism in pol­i­tics breeds rad­i­cal­ism in response.”
  4. When a Famous Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Unrav­eled Sil­i­con Valley’s Most Sen­sa­tion­al Mur­der Case (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine a vio­lent mur­der at the epi­cen­ter of ear­ly San­ta Clara Valley—soon to be renamed Sil­i­con Val­ley in the pop­u­lar imagination—and an inno­cent man sent to Death Row at San Quentin. But a famous lit­er­ary crit­ic emerges as the super sleuth who gets him freed, amid dark evo­ca­tions of scan­dal involv­ing cor­rupt politi­cians and murky under­world fig­ures. You don’t need to imag­ine it, because it real­ly hap­pened.” A engross­ing Stan­ford sto­ry.
  5. About the cur­rent con­flict in Israel:
    • This was writ­ten before the cur­rent vio­lence: Eight Tips for Read­ing About Israel (Mat­ti Fried­man, Sapir): “If you’re crit­i­cal of open-fire orders on the Gaza fence, you should know how that works on the India-Pak­istan bor­der, or the Turkey-Syr­ia bor­der, or on the perime­ters of U.S. mil­i­tary bases in Afghanistan. Same goes for refugee absorp­tion, press free­dom, minor­i­ty rights, or any­thing. Israel doesn’t always come out look­ing great. But you’ll find that most crit­i­cism of Israel doesn’t com­pare it with any­thing. That’s a sign the dis­cus­sion isn’t about a real coun­try.”
    • Against Israel: A bad part­ner is worse than rain (Fred­die de Boer, Sub­stack): “If every word that they have said about the per­fidy and self-destruc­tion of the Pales­tini­ans was cor­rect, it would make no dif­fer­ence. The moral oblig­a­tion falls on the dom­i­nant par­ty, and Israel is beyond dom­i­nant. The myth­mak­ing about all of the oppor­tu­ni­ties they squan­dered does not make a lick of moral dif­fer­ence.”
    • For Israel: For the Sake of Peace, Israel Must Rout Hamas (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Israel made plen­ty of mis­takes in the run-up to the cur­rent fight­ing, includ­ing heavy-hand­ed polic­ing in Jerusalem at Ramadan and inad­e­quate polic­ing in Arab-Israeli towns that have been hit by mob vio­lence. But there is a vast dif­fer­ence in moral weight between Israel’s mis­cal­cu­la­tions and Hamas’s cal­cu­la­tions, between blun­ders and crimes. That’s some­thing to bear in mind when Pales­tin­ian rock­ets hit Israeli civil­ians by design and Israeli mis­siles hit Pales­tin­ian civil­ians inad­ver­tent­ly.”
    • Against Israel: A Night­mare of Ter­ror Across the Land­scape of Pales­tine (Yousef Munayy­er, The Nation): “In towns through­out Israel, Pales­tini­ans have been beat­en and ter­ror­ized by ram­pag­ing mobs; one man was dragged from his car and bru­tal­ized in what many are describ­ing as a lynch­ing. In the West Bank, Pales­tini­ans have been shot and killed in raids by the Israeli mil­i­tary. In Jerusalem, Pales­tin­ian fam­i­lies, fac­ing the ongo­ing threat of expul­sion, have been harassed by set­tlers and mil­i­tary alike. And across Gaza, Israeli war planes have dropped bomb after bomb, destroy­ing entire apart­ment build­ings. Many have died, many more have been injured. If they man­age to sur­vive, they will wit­ness their soci­ety shat­tered when the smoke clears.”
    • For Israel: The Two Wrongs of the Gaza Nar­ra­tive (David French, The Dis­patch): “Any dis­cus­sion of the law of war often sounds cold and clin­i­cal, even though we’re dis­cussing mat­ters of life and death, includ­ing the inevitable and trag­ic deaths of civil­ians who always suf­fer when wars rage in city centers—especially when jihadists wear civil­ian clothes and embed them­selves in civil­ian struc­tures. When Hamas does so, it vio­lates the law of war by inhibit­ing the dis­tinc­tion between civil­ian and mil­i­tary tar­gets. The legal and moral respon­si­bil­i­ty for result­ing civil­ian deaths rests with Hamas, not Israel.”
    • Against Israel: The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apol­o­gist for the Netanyahu Gov­ern­ment (Bernie Sanders, New York Times): “No one is argu­ing that Israel, or any gov­ern­ment, does not have the right to self-defense or to pro­tect its peo­ple. So why are these words repeat­ed year after year, war after war? And why is the ques­tion almost nev­er asked: ‘What are the rights of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple?’ And why do we seem to take notice of the vio­lence in Israel and Pales­tine only when rock­ets are falling on Israel?”
    • For Israel: The Bad Optics of Fight­ing for Your Life (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “The goal here is the erad­i­ca­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple. That is the bone-chill­ing truth. That is the core obsta­cle to peace. Any­one who insists that the ongo­ing rock­et bar­rage is about a par­tic­u­lar Israeli gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy must be made to answer for this.”
  6. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and Eco­nom­ic Free­dom (Chris­tos Makridis, City Jour­nal): “Using data on more than 146 coun­tries since 1996, my research finds that increas­es in reli­gious free­dom pre­cede, and help explain, increas­es in eco­nom­ic free­dom. The log­ic is sim­ple: since reli­gious free­dom fun­da­men­tal­ly involves grant­i­ng indi­vid­u­als the auton­o­my to think and wor­ship in what­ev­er form they wish, it is arguably the most basic of all free­doms. Prop­er­ty rights are of lit­tle use if those who retain them do not have the free­dom to think what they wish and prac­tice what they believe.” Chris­tos, an econ­o­mist at Ari­zona State, is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  7. Rival thoughts on Bit­coin:
    • Bit­coin Is Civ­i­liza­tion (Bal­a­ji S. Srini­vasan, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Bit­coin might seem like a curios­i­ty in a democ­ra­cy with a sta­ble cur­ren­cy. But in coun­tries with deeply unsta­ble economies and author­i­tar­i­an pol­i­tics, it is a life­line. As Alex Glad­stein recent­ly explained in Rea­son Mag­a­zine, Bit­coin has been used by dis­si­dents and activists in places like Cuba, Nige­ria, and Belarus. In Rus­sia, the country’s most promi­nent oppo­si­tion politi­cian and Putin crit­ic, Alex­ei Navaly, has raised mil­lions in Bit­coin. As Glad­stein wrote: ‘Putin can do a lot of things, but he can’t freeze a bit­coin account.’ If you want to under­stand what cryp­to is real­ly about, ask Venezue­lans if they’d rather own bolí­var or Bit­coin.”
    • The Case Against Bit­coin (Michael W. Green, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “In the last week of April, min­ing pools based in Chi­na account­ed for rough­ly 90% of the pro­cess­ing pow­er (‘hash rate’) in the Bit­coin net­work. Rough­ly three weeks ago, a pow­er out­age in the Xin­jiang region of Chi­na result­ed in a plunge in glob­al Bit­coin pro­cess­ing. Bit­coin min­ing — the process of record keep­ing for the ‘immutable’ chain of record on which the Bit­coin net­work depends — is dom­i­nat­ed by enti­ties in coun­tries with the stat­ed objec­tive to harm the inter­ests of the Unit­ed States. Bit­coin pro­po­nents con­tin­u­ous­ly assure us that this is ‘just about to change,’ but the data has not shift­ed in a mean­ing­ful man­ner in the last five years. This is not a decen­tral­ized sys­tem. It is cen­tral­ized in the coun­tries that seek our destruc­tion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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.