Tag: gender

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 177

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Two Dif­fer­ent Temp­ta­tions Fac­ing Young Evan­gel­i­cals (David French, Nation­al Review): “So, young Chris­tians, hold your faith tight­ly and your pol­i­tics loose­ly. You will not find a home here. As Peter says, you are a ‘for­eign­er and exile.’ It’s best to get used to it ear­ly on. Trust me, it can be a gut-wrench­ing dis­cov­ery to make when you’re old.”
  2. STEP Bible Data (Tyn­dale House, Github)This is the under­ly­ing data set for STEP Bible (Scrip­ture Tools for Every Per­son). If you’re a coder look­ing for a neat project, play around with this! Read the announce­ment here.
  3. Sev­er­al inter­est­ing LGBT-relat­ed pieces came across my path this week:
    • Is Sex Bina­ry?(Alex Byrne, Arc Dig­i­tal): “As Simone de Beau­voir puts it in The Sec­ond Sex (the found­ing text of mod­ern fem­i­nism), the sex­es ‘are basi­cal­ly defined by the gametes they pro­duce.’ Specif­i­cal­ly, females pro­duce large gametes (repro­duc­tive cells), and males pro­duce small ones. (Since there are no species with a third inter­me­di­ate gamete size, there are only two sex­es.) A glance at the huge vari­ety of females and males across the ani­mal and veg­etable king­doms will con­firm that there is noth­ing else the sex­es can be.” The author is a pro-trans pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at MIT.
    • Queer­ing Sci­ence (Mark Reg­nerus, First Things): “Any study that comes to con­clu­sions or even rais­es evi­dence con­trary to the taboos that have formed in recent years is tak­en hostage—first by pseu­do­ny­mous strangers at key­boards; then by the oppor­tunis­tic fac­ul­ty who jump on the band­wag­on dis­play­ing a method­olog­i­cal purism hereto­fore unknown in sex­u­al sci­ence; and then by the uni­ver­si­ties them­selves, whose inter­est has shift­ed from the pur­suit of truth to the pur­suit of virtue (sig­nal­ing).” I shared some arti­cles about the Littman brouha­ha at Brown short­ly after it hap­pened, and I’ve also shared Mark Regnerus’s research before. He is a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at UT Austin.
    • Bartle­by The Big­ot (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “This young Chris­t­ian, Isabel­la Chow, is now thought to be so dan­ger­ous that stu­dents (and oth­ers?) at Berke­ley believe she should be dri­ven from pub­lic life, and can­not be allowed to say what she believes on the pages of the cam­pus news­pa­per.” This is no doubt eas­i­er for many of you to imag­ine than think­ing about some­one bak­ing a cake for a gay wed­ding.
  4. Reli­gion and Depres­sion in Ado­les­cence (Frue­hwirth, Iyer, and Zhang, Jour­nal of Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my): “Many stud­ies show a cor­re­la­tion between reli­gios­i­ty and men­tal health, yet the ques­tion remains whether the rela­tion­ship is causal…. Explo­ration of mech­a­nisms sug­gests that reli­gios­i­ty buffers against stres­sors in ways that school activ­i­ties and friend­ships do not.” If you can’t access the ver­sion accept­ed for pub­li­ca­tion you can see an ear­li­er ver­sion at SSRN. Found via Tyler Cowen — see his com­men­tary.
  5. Why Do Women Earn Less Than Men? Evi­dence from Bus and Train Oper­a­tors (Emanuel Bolot­nyy, job mar­ket paper from Har­vard): “Even in a union­ized envi­ron­ment, where work tasks are sim­i­lar, hourly wages are iden­ti­cal, and tenure dic­tates pro­mo­tions, female work­ers earn $0.89 on the male-work­er dol­lar (week­ly earn­ings). We use con­fi­den­tial admin­is­tra­tive data on bus and train oper­a­tors from the Mass­a­chu­setts Bay Trans­porta­tion Author­i­ty (MBTA) to show that the week­ly earn­ings gap can be explained entire­ly by the work­place choic­es that women and men make. Women val­ue time and flex­i­bil­i­ty more than men.”

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 156

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.

Also, 156 is three sets of 52, which means I’ve been doing this for a lit­tle over three years now (I some­times take a week or two off). Yay!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mr. Rogers Had a Sim­ple Set of Rules for Talk­ing to Chil­dren (Maxwell King, The Atlantic): “1. ‘State the idea you wish to express as clear­ly as pos­si­ble, and in terms preschool­ers can under­stand.’ Exam­ple: It is dan­ger­ous to play in the street. 2. “Rephrase in a pos­i­tive man­ner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe. 3. “Rephrase the idea, bear­ing in mind that preschool­ers can­not yet make sub­tle dis­tinc­tions and need to be redi­rect­ed to author­i­ties they trust.” As in, Ask your par­ents where it is safe to play.” There are sev­er­al more rules, most equal­ly good for talk­ing to adults.
  2. The Lifes­pan of a Lie (Ben Blum, Medi­um): “The appeal of the Stan­ford prison exper­i­ment seems to go deep­er than its sci­en­tif­ic valid­i­ty, per­haps because it tells us a sto­ry about our­selves that we des­per­ate­ly want to believe: that we, as indi­vid­u­als, can­not real­ly be held account­able for the some­times rep­re­hen­si­ble things we do.” The arti­cle claims, con­vinc­ing­ly, that the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment did not hap­pen at all the way we have been taught. Wow.
  3. When Diver­si­ty Means Uni­for­mi­ty (Lionel Shriv­er, The Spec­ta­tor): “Will Nor­man, London’s ‘walk­ing and cycling com­mis­sion­er’, bemoaned the fact that too many cyclists in the city are white, male and mid­dle-class. ‘The real chal­lenge for Lon­don cycling,’ he declared, ‘is diver­si­ty.’ As opposed to build­ing more cycle lanes for every­body, or fix­ing pot­holes lethal to everybody’s wheel rims, Nor­man regards his prin­ci­pal func­tion as increas­ing black and minor­i­ty eth­nic rid­er­ship.” This anec­dote is not the focus of the arti­cle.
  4. Of Boys and Toys (Leonard Sax, Insti­tute For Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…they found that lit­tle children—boys especially—had bare­ly a clue which gen­der they belonged to, even when the psy­chol­o­gists used the sim­plest non­ver­bal prompts. Kids under two years of age score only slight­ly above chance in assign­ing them­selves or oth­er kids to the cor­rect gen­der. Nev­er­the­less, Serbin’s group found that children’s toy pref­er­ences are firm­ly in place by this age, espe­cial­ly among boys. When the exper­i­menters offered boys a truck or a doll, most boys chose the truck. In fact, boys pre­ferred trucks over dolls more strong­ly than girls pre­ferred dolls over trucks. That ought to be sur­pris­ing if you buy into gen­der schema the­o­ry because 18-month-old girls were more like­ly than boys to be able to clas­si­fy them­selves and oth­er chil­dren by gen­der. If gen­der schema the­o­ry is cor­rect, the girls should show a stronger pref­er­ence for gen­der-typ­i­cal toys because girls this age are more like­ly to know that they are, in fact, girls. But the real­i­ty is just the oppo­site.”
  5. Har­vard Rat­ed Asian-Amer­i­can Appli­cants Low­er on Per­son­al­i­ty Traits, Law­suit Says (Hadley Green, New York Times): “They com­pare Harvard’s treat­ment of Asian-Amer­i­cans with its well-doc­u­ment­ed cam­paign to reduce the grow­ing num­ber of Jews being admit­ted to Har­vard in the 1920s. Until then, appli­cants had been admit­ted on aca­d­e­m­ic mer­it. To avoid adopt­ing a bla­tant quo­ta sys­tem, Har­vard intro­duced sub­jec­tive cri­te­ria like char­ac­ter, per­son­al­i­ty and promise. The plain­tiffs call this the ‘orig­i­nal sin of holis­tic admis­sions.’” What are the odds they are the only high­ly-selec­tive uni­ver­si­ty to do this?
  6. Con­ser­v­a­tive Reli­gious Lead­ers Are Denounc­ing Trump Immi­gra­tion Poli­cies (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times): “A coali­tion of evan­gel­i­cal groups, includ­ing the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals and the Coun­cil for Chris­t­ian Col­leges and Uni­ver­si­ties, sent a let­ter to Pres­i­dent Trump on June 1 plead­ing with him to pro­tect the uni­ty of fam­i­lies and not to close off all avenues to asy­lum for immi­grants and refugees flee­ing dan­ger.”
    • Relat­ed: World Refugee Day 2018: ‘Wel­com­ing the Stranger’ Meets ‘Zero Tol­er­ance’ (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Chris­tians, the issue of fam­i­ly uni­ty for immi­grants shows signs of tran­scend­ing par­ti­san lines. Franklin Gra­ham, an evan­gel­i­cal advis­er to Pres­i­dent Trump, recent­ly spoke against fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion on CBN News, encour­ag­ing leg­isla­tive reform to rem­e­dy the new guide­lines for migrants at the bor­der.”
    • Relat­ed: She says fed­er­al offi­cials took her daugh­ter while she breast­fed the child in a deten­tion cen­ter (Ed Lavan­dera, Jason Mor­ris and Dar­ran Simon, CNN): “The undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grant from Hon­duras sobbed as she told an attor­ney Tues­day how fed­er­al author­i­ties took her daugh­ter while she breast­fed the child in a deten­tion cen­ter, where she was await­ing pros­e­cu­tion for enter­ing the coun­try ille­gal­ly. When the woman resist­ed, she was hand­cuffed…” Bear in the mind that this is an alle­ga­tion, not a sub­stan­ti­at­ed event. I find it plau­si­ble.
  7. A com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.”

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 On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

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 154

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We’re a long way from any final judg­ment on God’s pur­pos­es in the Trump era. But so far the Trump pres­i­den­cy has clear­ly been a kind of apoc­a­lypse — not (yet) in the ‘world-his­tor­i­cal calami­ty’ sense of the word, but in the orig­i­nal Greek mean­ing: an unveil­ing, an uncov­er­ing, an expo­sure of truths that had hereto­fore been hid­den.”
    • Relat­ed: On Gen­der, Pow­er, and Sin: The Evan­gel­i­cal #MeToo Moment (Richard Beck, per­son­al blog): “A the­o­log­i­cal and bib­li­cal way to say all this is that men’s dom­i­nance over women is a part of the Fal­l’s curse upon human­i­ty. The wound of sin upon gen­der rela­tions is clear in Gen­e­sis 3: ‘He will rule over you.’ So if that’s a part of the curse, why do evan­gel­i­cals think that build­ing the curse into the system–gender subordination–is going to pro­duce any­thing oth­er than cursed out­comes?” I wish the author spent more time build­ing the Bib­li­cal case for his per­spec­tive.
  2. 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.
  3. What I’ve Learned in Twen­ty Years of Mar­riage (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “My grand­moth­er wise­ly asked one night when I was final­ly going to ask ‘that girl from Ocean Springs’ to mar­ry me. I answered, ‘When I can afford it.’ She laughed. ‘Hon­ey, I mar­ried your grand­pa in the mid­dle of a Great Depres­sion,’ she said. ‘We made it work. Nobody can afford to get mar­ried. You just mar­ry, and make it work.’ Apart from the gospel, those were, and remain, the most lib­er­at­ing words I ever heard. I bought a ring that wouldn’t impress any­one, then or now, but we were head­ed for the altar. My only regret is that we aren’t today cel­e­brat­ing our twen­ty-first anniver­sary instead of our twen­ti­eth.” This is from a few years back and is full of wis­dom.
  4. Title IX Is Too Easy To Abuse (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Is it pos­si­ble for two peo­ple to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sex­u­al­ly assault each oth­er? This is the question—rife with legal, anatom­i­cal, and emo­tion­al improbabilities—to which the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati now address­es itself, and with some urgency, as the insti­tu­tion and three of its employ­ees are cur­rent­ly being sued over an encounter that was sex­u­al for a brief moment, but that just as quick­ly entered the realm of eter­nal return. ”
  5. What­ev­er Hap­pened to Gifts of Lan­guage, Prophe­cy, and Heal­ing? (Andrew Wil­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “tak­ing a longer view by trac­ing our roots back to the ear­ly church fathers leads to some sur­pris­es. We dis­cov­er that some things, though rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al in recent times, are actu­al­ly very nor­mal across the broad­er sweep of human his­to­ry. Angels and demons would be an obvi­ous exam­ple. Or, more sur­pris­ing­ly, mirac­u­lous gifts.”
  6. I was Jor­dan Peterson’s strongest sup­port­er. Now I think he’s dan­ger­ous (Bernard Schiff, The Star): “When he was ren­o­vat­ing his house I invit­ed his fam­i­ly to live with mine. For five months, they occu­pied the third floor of our large house. We had meals togeth­er in the evening and long, colour­ful con­ver­sa­tions. There, away from cam­pus, I saw a man who was devot­ed to his wife and his chil­dren, who were love­ly and gen­tle and for whom I still feel affec­tion. He was atten­tive and thought­ful, stern and kind, play­ful and warm. His wife, Tam­my, appeared to be the keel, the bal­last and the rud­der, and Jor­dan ran the ship.” This is a long pro­file, by turns infor­ma­tive and puz­zling.
  7. The Evan­gel­i­cal Fight to Win Back Cal­i­for­nia (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Though the state has one of the high­est per­cent­ages of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults, the fast grow­ing reli­gious group in the coun­try, that large­ly blue sea is dot­ted with evan­gel­i­cal islands that are large­ly red. One in five adults in the state are evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, accord­ing to the Pew Research Cen­ter, and there are more megachurch­es in Cal­i­for­nia than in any oth­er state.” This arti­cle is most­ly about pol­i­tics, but is inter­est­ing nonethe­less.

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 Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

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 148

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This col­lege pro­fes­sor gives her stu­dents extra cred­it for going on dates (Lisa Bonos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “She sees con­ver­sa­tions about dat­ing as part of the big ques­tions her class­es tack­le, such as: How should I live my life? What kinds of rela­tion­ships help me to become the kind of per­son I want to be? If stu­dents don’t learn how to date while they’re in col­lege, while sur­round­ed by thou­sands of peers all in a sim­i­lar stage in life, Cronin says, it only gets hard­er to build those skills after grad­u­a­tion.” The pro­fes­sor in ques­tion, Ker­ry Cronin, is a philoso­pher at Boston Col­lege.
    • She has these rules for a first date: “The stu­dent has to ask in per­son (“tex­ting is the dev­il; stop it,” she says in one of her YouTube videos), and the recip­i­ent has to know it’s a date. And if they say they’re busy and to check back with them lat­er, don’t. Just move on. ‘That’s a great skill to build, so that you can have a thick­er skin,’ Cronin says. She believes that the per­son who asks, pays. And the first date shouldn’t cost more than $10, include drugs or alco­hol, or last longer than 90 min­utes…”
    • Those are good guide­lines. Read them again.
  2. I think the fol­low­ing two arti­cles will prove to be among the most con­tro­ver­sial I’ve ever shared. I also think they both con­tain much prac­ti­cal wis­dom that will prove rel­e­vant as the weath­er warms:
    • For the gents: Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.”
    • For the ladies: Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.”
    • I am aware that these two arti­cles only deal with things from a male per­spec­tive. Sad­ly, I haven’t come across any insight­ful arti­cles that help ladies deal with their own lust or give gen­tle­men advice on how to be help­ful to them. Ladies, if you’ve read some­thing you found tru­ly help­ful, let me know.
  3. Jesus, Take the Con­trol Wheel: South­west Pilot Saw Fly­ing as Min­istry (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Tam­mie Jo Shults—the pilot who guid­ed Flight 1380 to the ground April 17 after a mid­flight engine fail­ure shot debris through a win­dow, killing one passenger—is a rec­og­niz­able fig­ure at the Texas Hill Coun­try church, which aver­ages 900 in wor­ship…. Mul­ti­ple media reports have cit­ed a blog post in which Shults stat­ed being a pilot gave her ‘the oppor­tu­ni­ty to wit­ness for Christ on almost every flight.’” You can glo­ri­fy God in almost any pro­fes­sion — make it your ambi­tion.
  4. Five Great Books on African Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cal His­to­ry (Thomas Kidd, The Gospel Coali­tion): “If I had to pick one African Amer­i­can church leader I wish more Chris­tians knew about, it would prob­a­bly be [Lemuel] Haynes. A Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War sol­dier, Haynes went on to become a pas­tor of a large­ly white church in New Eng­land, a crit­ic of Amer­i­can slav­ery, and an advo­cate of the New Divin­i­ty the­ol­o­gy of Jonathan Edwards’s suc­ces­sors.”
  5. Don­ald Trump, Trag­ic Hero (Vic­tor Davis Han­son, Nation­al Review): “Trag­ic heroes, as they have been por­trayed from Sopho­cles’ plays (e.g., Ajax, Antigone, Oedi­pus Rex, Philoctetes) to the mod­ern west­ern film, are not intrin­si­cal­ly noble. Much less are they like­able. Cer­tain­ly, they can often be obnox­ious and pet­ty, if not dan­ger­ous, espe­cial­ly to those around them.” Han­son is a fel­low at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  6. The Face­book Tri­als: It’s Not “Our” Data (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…I have hun­dreds of friends on Face­book, most of whom I don’t know well and have nev­er met. But my Face­book friends are friends. We share com­mon inter­ests and, most of the time, I’m hap­py to see what they are think­ing and doing and I’m pleased when they show inter­est in what I’m up to. If, before Face­book exist­ed, I had been asked to list ‘my friends,’ I would have had a hard time nam­ing ten friends, let alone hun­dreds. My Face­book friends didn’t exist before Face­book. My Face­book friend­ships are not sim­ply my data—they are a unique co-cre­ation of myself, my friends, and, yes, Face­book.”
  7. Google Will Now Answer Your The­o­log­i­cal Ques­tions (OpenBible.info): “Google just announced an AI-pow­ered exper­i­ment called Talk to Books, which lets you enter a query and find pas­sages in books that are seman­ti­cal­ly sim­i­lar to your query, not mere­ly pas­sages that hap­pen to match the key­words you chose. For the­ol­o­gy- and Bible-relat­ed ques­tions, it often presents an evan­gel­i­cal per­spec­tive, per­haps because U.S. evan­gel­i­cal pub­lish­ers have been eager for Google to index their books.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • A Divid­ed Coun­try (Pearls Before Swine): this one actu­al­ly made me laugh and not mere­ly chor­tle sen­si­bly.
  • Christ Chel­la (John Crist, Face­book): this is amaz­ing­ly detailed and the more you know the evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture the fun­nier it is

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selec­tive pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools. The reli­gion in ques­tion is not Method­ism or Catholi­cism but an extreme ver­sion of the belief sys­tem of the lib­er­al elite: the lib­er­al pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, and cre­ative class­es, which pro­vide a large major­i­ty of stu­dents enrolled at such places and an even larg­er major­i­ty of fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tors who work at them. To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 138

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to read books effi­cient­ly in grad school (Thomas Kidd, per­son­al newslet­ter): “Here’s the method I rec­om­mend for read­ing a book effi­cient­ly: read every word of the intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion of a book. Then read the intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion of each chap­ter word-for-word. With­in each chap­ter, read the first and last sen­tence of each body para­graph. Slow down when it gets inter­est­ing, or when the author hits on your par­tic­u­lar research inter­est.” Kidd is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty. There is a length­i­er arti­cle with relat­ed thoughts titled Effi­cient Read­ing by Karin Wulf, a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at William and Mary.
  2. The Anti-Chris­t­ian Alt-Right (Matthew Rose, First Things): “Almost every­thing writ­ten about the ‘alter­na­tive right’ in main­stream out­lets is wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stu­pid. It is deep. Its ideas are not ridicu­lous. They are seri­ous. To appre­ci­ate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its pres­ence on social media, where its obnox­ious use of insult, obscen­i­ty, and racism has earned it a rep­u­ta­tion for moral idio­cy. The rep­u­ta­tion is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and per­son­al attacks are argu­ments of gen­uine pow­er and expand­ing appeal…. The alt-right is anti-Chris­t­ian. Not by impli­ca­tion or insin­u­a­tion, but by con­fes­sion. Its lead­ing thinkers flaunt their rejec­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty and their desire to con­vert believ­ers away from it.”
  3. News To A For­eign Coun­try (David War­ren, per­son­al blog): “The State has its reli­gion, we have ours. So long as we remain meek and obe­di­ent, to any­thing we are required to sign, the Antichrist him­self wouldn’t care what we think. The trou­ble aris­es only when we fail to sign, salute, or check the right box­es. That is, from the Antichrist’s point of view, a form of defi­ance that requires pun­ish­ment — a pun­ish­ment that we have brought upon our­selves, as will be con­de­scend­ing­ly explained.” This is a tran­scribed speech by a Cana­di­an jour­nal­ist, and it is extreme­ly fiery and very Catholic.
  4. Trans­gen­der Ide­ol­o­gy Is Rid­dled With Con­tra­dic­tions. Here Are the Big Ones. (Ryan T Ander­son, Her­itage): “If gen­der is a social con­struct, how can gen­der iden­ti­ty be innate and immutable? How can one’s iden­ti­ty with respect to a social con­struct be deter­mined by biol­o­gy in the womb? How can one’s iden­ti­ty be unchange­able (immutable) with respect to an ever-chang­ing social con­struct? And if gen­der iden­ti­ty is innate, how can it be ‘flu­id’?”
  5. Mas­sacre in Myan­mar (Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo, Simon Lewis and Antoni Slod­kows­ki, Reuters):  “Reuters has pieced togeth­er what hap­pened in Inn Din in the days lead­ing up to the killing of the 10 Rohingya – eight men and two high school stu­dents in their late teens. Until now, accounts of the vio­lence against the Rohingya in Rakhine state have been pro­vid­ed only by its vic­tims. The Reuters recon­struc­tion draws for the first time on inter­views with Bud­dhist vil­lagers who con­fessed to torch­ing Rohingya homes, bury­ing bod­ies and killing Mus­lims. This account also marks the first time sol­diers and para­mil­i­tary police have been impli­cat­ed by tes­ti­mo­ny from secu­ri­ty per­son­nel them­selves.”
  6. Should We Say “Of Course” To Fem­i­nism? (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “…I would chal­lenge all crit­i­cal­ly-think­ing fem­i­nists to ask the same ques­tion I asked my friend: if this move­ment does­n’t wel­come me, my opin­ions, or my solu­tions, why would I want to be part of it?” Yes, this is our Anni­ka.
  7. Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sex­u­al Assault on Cam­pus?  (Jia Tol­lenti­no, The New York­er):  “In col­lege, every­thing is Janus-faced: what you inter­pret as refuge can lead to dan­ger, and vice ver­sa. One of the most high­ly val­orized social activ­i­ties, black­ing out and hook­ing up, holds the poten­tial for trau­ma with­in it like a seed.”
  8. What Teenagers Are Learn­ing From Online Porn (Mag­gie Jones, New York Times): “But you don’t have to believe that porn leads to sex­u­al assault or that it’s cre­at­ing a gen­er­a­tion of bru­tal men to won­der how it helps shape how teenagers talk and think about sex and, by exten­sion, their ideas about mas­culin­i­ty, fem­i­nin­i­ty, inti­ma­cy and pow­er.” This arti­cle uses graph­ic imagery.
  9. How Chi­nese over­seas stu­dents are learn­ing harsh life lessons (Eric Fish, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post):   “Inter­views with Chi­nese stu­dents study­ing abroad and aca­d­e­mics who research their atti­tudes present a com­plex pic­ture – one in which stu­dents enter and leave with diverse views and iden­ti­ties that often defy clear loy­al­ties or ide­o­log­i­cal labels. But nev­er­the­less, many feel caught in the geopo­lit­i­cal cross­fire – forced to choose a side or keep their heads down.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but it’s insight­ful (first shared in vol­ume 32).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 137

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Lar­ry Nas­sar Tes­ti­mo­ny Went Viral. But There’s More to the Gospel Than For­give­ness. (Mor­gan Lee inter­view­ing Rachael Den­hol­lan­der, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “One of the areas where Chris­tians don’t do well is in acknowl­edg­ing the dev­as­ta­tion of the wound. We can tend to gloss over the dev­as­ta­tion of any kind of suf­fer­ing but espe­cial­ly sex­u­al assault, with Chris­t­ian plat­i­tudes like God works all things togeth­er for good or God is sov­er­eign. Those are very good and glo­ri­ous bib­li­cal truths, but when they are mis­ap­plied in a way to damp­en the hor­ror of evil, they ulti­mate­ly damp­en the good­ness of God. Good­ness and dark­ness exist as oppo­sites. If we pre­tend that the dark­ness isn’t dark, it damp­ens the beau­ty of the light.”
  2. Want to see a spat between two bril­liant the­olo­gians?
    • The New Tes­ta­ment in the strange words of David Bent­ley Hart (N.T. Wright, The Chris­t­ian Cen­tu­ry): “When a the­olo­gian of the stature of David Bent­ley Hart offers a ‘piti­less­ly lit­er­al trans­la­tion’ of the New Tes­ta­ment that is ‘not shaped by lat­er the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal his­to­ry’ and aims to make ‘the famil­iar strange, nov­el, and per­haps new­ly com­pelling,’ we are eager to see the result. He promis­es to bring out the ‘wild­ly indis­crim­i­nate polypho­ny’ of the writ­ers’ styles and emphases, con­verg­ing on their ‘vibrant cer­tain­ty that his­to­ry has been invad­ed by God in Christ in such a way that noth­ing can stay as it was.’ But his two main claims (to be ‘lit­er­al’ and ‘undog­mat­ic’) are not borne out, and the promise of dis­play­ing the strange­ness of ear­ly Chris­t­ian life dis­ap­pears behind dif­fer­ent kinds of strange­ness.”
    • A Reply To N.T. Wright (David Bent­ley Hart, Eclec­tic Ortho­doxy): “[A rebut­tal] where­in, at long last, our author unbur­dens him­self of a great num­ber of com­plaints he has long wished to make against that pious man’s earnest but prob­lem­at­ic approach to the New Tes­ta­ment, embell­ished with a few moments of sly mock­ery, but ulti­mate­ly intend­ed as a good-natured—albeit inflexible—expression of deep dis­agree­ment.”
    • Trans­lat­ing the N. T. Wright and David Bent­ley Hart Tus­sle  (Caleb Lind­gren, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While the ver­bal spar­ring is both sharp and enter­tain­ing (and per­haps off-putting to cer­tain sen­si­bil­i­ties), there is a valu­able point at the heart of this debate—one that is worth not­ing as these two Bible schol­ar­ship heavy-hit­ters take swings at each other’s work.”
  3. Fake porn is the new fake news, and the inter­net isn’t ready (Nicole Lee, Engad­get): “Moth­er­board recent­ly uncov­ered a dis­turb­ing new trend on Red­dit, in which users cre­ate AI-gen­er­at­ed porno­graph­ic clips by swap­ping oth­er peo­ple’s faces onto porn stars…. Need­less to say, this has fright­en­ing con­se­quences. Not only does this open the door for a hor­ri­fy­ing new kind of revenge porn, where a venge­ful ex could slap your face on an X‑rated video, it also opens a Pan­do­ra’s box of fears where noth­ing on the inter­net can ever be trust­ed.” The embed­ded (non-sketchy) gif is alarm­ing­ly real­is­tic. The tech­nol­o­gy is already good enough that we’re at a tip­ping point, and it will only get more effec­tive in the future.
  4. A Work­out-Track­ing App Acci­den­tal­ly Revealed The Loca­tion Of A Bunch Of Secret Mil­i­tary Bases And Sol­diers’ Names (Digg): “Stra­va, a GPS-enabled mobile app that allows users to track their run­ning, bik­ing and swim­ming work­outs, is attract­ing con­tro­ver­sy after observers noticed that its glob­al work­out heatmap appar­ent­ly revealed the loca­tion of secret mil­i­tary bases and the exer­cise habits of indi­vid­ual troops on those bases.” Oops. Tech­nol­o­gy has con­se­quences. Remem­ber that, you star­tup­py types.
  5. The Abor­tion Memo (David Brooks, New York Times): “I’m ask­ing us to rethink our pri­or­i­ties. What does Amer­i­ca need most right now? One of our talk­ing points is that late-term abor­tions are extreme­ly rare. If they are extreme­ly rare, why are we giv­ing them pri­or­i­ty over all of our oth­er issues com­bined?”
  6. The female price of male plea­sure (Lili Loof­bourow, The Week): “Because if you’re going to wax poet­ic about male plea­sure, you had bet­ter be ready to talk about its secret, unpleas­ant, ubiq­ui­tous cousin: female pain. Research shows that 30 per­cent of women report pain dur­ing vagi­nal sex, 72 per­cent report pain dur­ing anal sex, and ‘large pro­por­tions’ don’t tell their part­ners when sex hurts.” First, fas­ci­nat­ing because I had no idea. Sec­ond, because the author is so cocooned in assump­tions stem­ming from the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion that she doesn’t seem to have con­sid­ered whether this is a symp­tom of the whole thing being unhealthy and mis­tak­en on key points.
  7. Show­ing Off To the Uni­verse: Bea­cons For The After­life of Our Civ­i­liza­tion (Steven Wol­fram, per­son­al blog): “There’s a thought exper­i­ment I’ve long found use­ful. Imag­ine a very advanced civ­i­liza­tion, that’s able to move things like stars and plan­ets around at will. What arrange­ment would they put them in? Maybe they’d want to make a ‘bea­con of pur­pose’. And maybe—like Kant—one could think that would be achiev­able by set­ting up some ‘rec­og­niz­able’ geo­met­ric pat­tern. Like how about an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle? But no, that won’t do. Because for exam­ple the Tro­jan aster­oids actu­al­ly form an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle with Jupiter and the Sun already, just as a result of physics. And pret­ty soon one real­izes that there’s actu­al­ly noth­ing the aliens could do to ‘prove their pur­pose’. The con­fig­u­ra­tion of stars in the sky may look kind of ran­dom to us (except, of course, that we still see con­stel­la­tions in it). But there’s noth­ing to say that looked at in the right way it doesn’t actu­al­ly rep­re­sent some grand pur­pose.” A long but fas­ci­nat­ing essay about how dif­fi­cult it is to encode a mes­sage that unam­bigu­ous­ly com­mu­ni­cates intel­li­gence. Rel­e­vance to nat­ur­al the­ol­o­gy should be obvi­ous (although Wol­fram, being an athe­ist, goes in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion).
  8. Some of our stu­dents and alum­ni have pub­lished things recent­ly:
    • The One Les­son We Do Not Learn at Stan­ford (Hugh Zhang, The Stan­ford Review): “If we fail to devel­op the type of char­ac­ter need­ed to resist temp­ta­tion when the stakes are so low, how can we be trust­ed to resist them when they are high­er? What we do at Stan­ford is less harm­ful than the fail­ings of the pow­er­ful. But it is only less harm­ful because our pow­er is yet lim­it­ed. When those in promi­nent posi­tions act as we do, we right­ly fear for society’s well being…. If we tru­ly believe that the duty of a uni­ver­si­ty is to pre­pare us for our respon­si­bil­i­ties in the world beyond these idyl­lic palm trees, then the most impor­tant les­son we can learn here at Stan­ford is the age old les­son of integri­ty: the abil­i­ty to do what is right even when no one is look­ing.”
    • Can I Help You? (Ryan Eber­hardt, per­son­al blog): “My friend Arjun com­mit­ted sui­cide last Sep­tem­ber. I’m ‘over it’ in as much of a func­tion­al sense as pos­si­ble, but I still think about him all the time. I miss him so much. He was among my best friends in high school…. I wish I could tell him about all the things I’m up to these days, brain­storm things for me to pur­sue after grad­u­a­tion, and ask for his advice. That will nev­er hap­pen again. But here’s the fun­ny thing: I don’t know if I would be so eager to talk to him if he weren’t dead. Death has an inter­est­ing way of doing that.”
    • Revers­ing the Curse: A Spir­i­tu­al Guide to Decod­ing Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (Femi Olu­tade, Medi­um): “For those of you who are root­ed in a faith tra­di­tion but can’t under­stand how a pop­u­lar, ‘sec­u­lar’ rap album can be a faith­ful wit­ness to Jesus’s life and mis­sion, Kendrick — and Jesus for that mat­ter — may sur­prise you. For any­one who is still search­ing for how truth and jus­tice emerge from the shad­ow of racism and oppres­sion, I present to you the sto­ries of hip hop and Judeo-Chris­t­ian scrip­tures in the hope that you can find in them the kind of trans­for­ma­tion that I have expe­ri­enced.” Femi releas­ing this free online book bit by bit. Seth, who writes the for­ward is also one of our alum­ni.
    • Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice (Rebekah Fen­ton, Kev­in­MD): “Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice dur­ing the class­room phase. Why do we only show rash­es on Cau­casian patients? Why do we only learn to rec­og­nize how men present with MIs? Why do we not address how obe­si­ty impacts exam find­ings? Med­ical edu­ca­tion favors the white, thin, male patient. I’ve seen his chest X‑ray, I’ve exam­ined his abdomen, I know his symp­toms, and I’ve seen his rash­es.”

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 Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 126

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. For elites, pol­i­tics is dri­ven by ide­ol­o­gy. For vot­ers, it’s not.  (Ezra Klein, Vox): “In the­o­ry, ide­ol­o­gy comes first and par­ty comes sec­ond. We decide whether we’re for sin­gle-pay­er health care, or same-sex mar­riage, or abor­tion restric­tion, and then we choose the par­ty that most close­ly fits our ideas. You’re a lib­er­al and so you become a Demo­c­rat; you’re a con­ser­v­a­tive and so you become a Repub­li­can. The truth, it seems, is clos­er to the reverse.…”
    • I found the above inter­est­ing to read in con­junc­tion with this arti­cle — it’s on the long side:  The Pri­mal Scream of Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics (Mary Eber­stadt, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “Isn’t it sug­ges­tive that the ear­li­est col­lec­tive artic­u­la­tion of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics came from the com­mu­ni­ty that was first to suf­fer from the accel­er­at­ed fray­ing of fam­i­ly ties, a har­bin­ger of what came next for all? Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics can­not be under­stood apart from the pre­ced­ing and con­comi­tant social fact of fam­i­ly implo­sion.”
    • Also rel­e­vant: Con­ser­v­a­tives, Don’t Dis­miss the Sex­u­al Mis­con­duct Claims Against Roy Moore (David French, Nation­al Review): “Each day seems to bring a new sto­ry of yet anoth­er pow­er­ful per­son fac­ing a string of accu­sa­tions. While there is a dan­ger of a witch hunt, the pres­ence of mul­ti­ple claims of mis­con­duct from mul­ti­ple sources should always make us pause — regard­less of whether the alleged abuser comes from the Left or the Right. It’s a moral imper­a­tive that we not deter­mine the verac­i­ty of the alle­ga­tions by the ide­ol­o­gy of the accused.” Roy Moore has been pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned in vol­umes 121 and 31.
  2. Fires Aren’t the Only Threat to the Cal­i­for­nia Dream (Enri­co Moret­ti, NY Times): “Over the past two years, San Fran­cis­co Coun­ty added 38,000 jobs, reach­ing its high­est employ­ment lev­el ever. Yet only 4,500 new hous­ing units were per­mit­ted. For all those new fam­i­lies knock­ing on San Fran­cis­co doors, new units are avail­able for less than 12 per­cent of them. The num­bers for Sil­i­con Val­ley are even worse. This is why the rents sky­rock­et. The prob­lem is large­ly self-inflict­ed: the region has some of the country’s slow­est, most polit­i­cal and cum­ber­some hous­ing approval process­es and most strin­gent land-use restric­tions.” The author is an eco­nom­ics prof at UC Berke­ley.
  3. Sculpt­ed By Evo­lu­tion (David Schmitt, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “…empir­i­cal evi­dence shows that most sex dif­fer­ences are con­spic­u­ous­ly larg­er in cul­tures with more egal­i­tar­i­an gen­der roles—as in Scan­di­navia…. Extremes of sex­u­al free­dom beget larg­er psy­cho­log­i­cal sex dif­fer­ences. Or as explained by Israeli psy­chol­o­gists Shalom Schwartz and Tam­my Rubel-Lif­shitz, it may be that hav­ing few­er gen­dered restric­tions in a cul­ture allows ‘both sex­es to pur­sue more freely the val­ues they inher­ent­ly care about more.’” The author was men­tioned back in vol­ume 113 in con­nec­tion with the Google gen­der memo.
  4. Lib­er­al Tra­di­tion, Yes; Lib­er­al Ide­ol­o­gy, No (R.R. Reno, First Things): this is long, very Catholic, and veers into occa­sion­al bril­liance. Rec­om­mend­ed if that descrip­tion appeals to you. “Lib­er­al­ism, prop­er­ly under­stood, is not a creed; it is a tra­di­tion, a set of insti­tu­tions, and a habit of mind.”
  5. Some­thing Is Wrong On The Inter­net (James Bri­dle, Medi­um): “…I don’t even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down. Some­one or some­thing or some com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple and things is using YouTube to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly fright­en, trau­ma­tise, and abuse chil­dren, auto­mat­i­cal­ly and at scale, and it forces me to ques­tion my own beliefs about the inter­net, at every lev­el.” This is real­ly inter­est­ing.
  6. John Wal­ton and Israel’s Con­quest of Canaan: Did God Real­ly Com­mand Geno­cide? (Spoil­er Alert: No, he didn’t..and the Israelites didn’t claim he did to jus­ti­fy mass killing either) (Joel Ander­son, per­son­al blog):  “if you object to what is being described in the book of Joshua, that’s like object­ing to the Allies ban­ning Nazism and Nazi sym­bols in Ger­many, or to the Unit­ed States try­ing to get rid of the Tal­iban who had inflict­ed hor­ren­dous atroc­i­ties on the inno­cent Afghani peo­ple. But who in their right mind would do that?”
  7. Are Chris­tians Sup­posed To Be Com­mu­nists? (David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “There were no polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies in the ancient world, no abstract pro­grams for the recon­sti­tu­tion of soci­ety. But if not a polit­i­cal move­ment, the church was a kind of poli­ty, and the form of life it assumed was not mere­ly a prac­ti­cal strat­e­gy for sur­vival, but rather the embod­i­ment of its high­est spir­i­tu­al ideals. Its ‘com­mu­nism’ was hard­ly inci­den­tal to the faith.” This is ulti­mate­ly a med­i­ta­tion on the Greek word koinon­ia. Hart leaves out some impor­tant parts of the New Tes­ta­ment wit­ness (such as 1 Tim 6:17–18 and Acts 5:4) and there­by veers from the truth a lit­tle. Still, any­time some­one gets a the­o­log­i­cal op-ed pub­lished in the NYT I’m impressed.

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selec­tive pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools. The reli­gion in ques­tion is not Method­ism or Catholi­cism but an extreme ver­sion of the belief sys­tem of the lib­er­al elite: the lib­er­al pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, and cre­ative class­es, which pro­vide a large major­i­ty of stu­dents enrolled at such places and an even larg­er major­i­ty of fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tors who work at them. To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 115

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Most Short­sight­ed Attack on Free Speech in Mod­ern U.S. His­to­ry (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Under a legal regime where hate speech was not con­sid­ered free speech, Trump and Ses­sions could like­ly pun­ish words used by mem­bers of Antifa and Black Lives Mat­ter. Do you think he’d police their speech more or less vig­or­ous­ly than white suprema­cists?”
  2. Everyone’s Sus­pi­cious of Athe­ists — Even Oth­er Athe­ists (Thomas MacMil­lan, NY Mag): “Accord­ing to a new study pub­lished last week in Nature, peo­ple all over the world con­nect immoral­i­ty with athe­ism. In fact, the moral prej­u­dice against athe­ists is so strong that it holds even in coun­tries like the Nether­lands, where most peo­ple aren’t reli­gious. Even athe­ists them­selves, accord­ing to the study, are inclined to see non­be­liev­ers as more wicked than the faith­ful.” The Nature paper is Glob­al evi­dence of extreme intu­itive moral prej­u­dice against athe­ists.
  3. I Won’t Make Jesus Bow Down to Xi Jin­ping (Derek Lam, New York Times): “Of Hong Kong’s six major reli­gions, five are already firm­ly under the con­trol of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty. Judg­ing by recent events, the par­ty is very close to com­plet­ing its mis­sion of bring­ing Chris­tian­i­ty under its thumb.”
  4. The Dri­ve For Per­fect Chil­dren Gets A Lit­tle Scary (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg View): “If you could direct­ly alter your kids’ genet­ic pro­file, what would you want? It’s hard to know how the social debate would turn out after years of back and forth, but I was dis­mayed to read one recent research paper by psy­chol­o­gists Rachel M. Lath­am and Sophie von Stumm. The descrip­tive title of that work, based on sur­vey evi­dence, is ‘Moth­ers want extra­ver­sion over con­sci­en­tious­ness or intel­li­gence for their chil­dren.’ Upon reflec­tion, maybe that isn’t so sur­pris­ing, because par­ents pre­sum­ably want chil­dren who are fun to spend time with.”
  5. Math­e­mat­i­cal mys­tery of ancient Baby­lon­ian clay tablet solved (Phys.org): “Plimp­ton 322 pre­dates Hip­parchus by more than 1000 years,” says Dr Wild­berg­er. “It opens up new pos­si­bil­i­ties not just for mod­ern math­e­mat­ics research, but also for math­e­mat­ics edu­ca­tion. With Plimp­ton 322 we see a sim­pler, more accu­rate trigonom­e­try that has clear advan­tages over our own.” The aca­d­e­m­ic paper is Plimp­ton 322 is Baby­lon­ian exact sex­a­ges­i­mal trigonom­e­try (His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca). Anoth­er reminder that our ances­tors were pret­ty clever.
  6. Robert E. Lee opposed Con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ments (Lisa Des­jardins, PBS New­sHour):  “But while he was alive, Lee stressed his belief that the coun­try should move past the war. He swore alle­giance to the Union and pub­licly decried south­ern sep­a­ratism, whether mil­i­tant or sym­bol­ic.”
  7. This Is How Sex­ism Works in Sil­i­con Val­ley  My law­suit failed. Oth­ers won’t. (Ellan Pao, The Cut): “Before suing, I’d con­sult­ed oth­er women who had sued big, pow­er­ful com­pa­nies over harass­ment and dis­crim­i­na­tion, and they all gave me pret­ty much the same advice: ‘Don’t do it.’ One woman told me, ‘It’s a com­plete mis­match of resources. They don’t fight fair. Even if you win, it will destroy your rep­u­ta­tion.’”
  8. James Kennedy Min­istries Sues SPLC over Hate Map (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): see also Politico’s June arti­cle Has a Civ­il Rights Stal­wart Lost Its Way? (short answer: yes, yes it has)

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 113

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Don’t Under­stand Chris­tians Watch­ing Game of Thrones (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “Does any­one real­ly think that when Jesus warned against look­ing at a woman lust­ful­ly (Matt. 5:27), or when Paul told us to avoid every hint of sex­u­al immoral­i­ty and not even to speak of the things the world does in secret (Eph. 4:3–12), that some­how this meant, go ahead and watch naked men and women have (or pre­tend to have) sex?” I don’t always agree with every­thing I share here, but for the record I am 100% in agree­ment with the author. Soft­core porn doesn’t cease to be soft­core porn just because it has grip­ping dia­log and cool spe­cial effects. For anoth­er (unper­sua­sive to me) per­spec­tive, read Seri­ous­ly, ‘Game of Thrones’ made me a bet­ter Bible read­er (Caryn Rivadeneira, Wash­ing­ton Post).
  2. News­wor­thy Deaths (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): just a reminder that the view we have of  what’s hap­pen­ing in the world is always a dis­tort­ed one.
  3. You’ve no doubt heard about the Google memo sug­gest­ing new ways to pur­sue gen­der diver­si­ty in tech which got the author fired. There has been a TON of fas­ci­nat­ing com­men­tary. Here are a few pieces that stood out to me.
    • Here’s the memo itself: Google’s Ide­o­log­i­cal Echo Cham­ber (James Damore). It’s short and easy to read. Def­i­nite­ly skim it if you’ve only heard oth­er peo­ple describe it.
    • Google’s War Over The Sex­es (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “I strong­ly sus­pect that more than a few Sil­i­con Val­ley high­er-ups agreed with the broad themes of Damore’s memo. But just as tech titans accept some cen­sor­ship and oppres­sion as the price of doing busi­ness in Chi­na, they accept per­for­ma­tive pro­gres­sivism as the price of hav­ing nice cam­pus­es in the most lib­er­al state in the union and recruit­ing their employ­ees from its most elite and lib­er­al schools.” If you only read one thing this week, read this one. The last six or so para­graphs in par­tic­u­lar are quite good.
    • I’m a woman in com­put­er sci­ence. Let me ladys­plain the Google memo to you. (Cyn­thia Lee, Vox): “At the out­set, it must be con­ced­ed that, despite what some of the com­men­tary has implied, the man­i­festo is not an unhinged rant. Its qua­si-pro­fes­sion­al tone is a big part of what makes it so beguil­ing (to some) and also so dan­ger­ous.” The author is a CS lec­tur­er at Stan­ford.
    • As a Woman in Tech, I Real­ized: These Are Not My Peo­ple (Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “James Damore, an engi­neer at Google, wrote a memo sug­gest­ing that maybe there weren’t so many women at Google because women are less inter­est­ed in sit­ting around and star­ing at code all day. The inter­net erupt­ed. James Damore is no longer work­ing at Google. As a woman work­ing in the bro­tas­tic atmos­phere of IT, I ulti­mate­ly came to a con­clu­sion sim­i­lar to his.”
    • What the Google Engineer’s Man­i­festo Missed About Dis­crim­i­na­tion at Work (Paula Eng­land, Insti­tute For Fam­i­ly Stud­ies blog): “Damore’s memo missed one huge thing: Abun­dant and rig­or­ous sci­en­tif­ic studies—by soci­ol­o­gists, psy­chol­o­gists, and economists—have demon­strat­ed that gen­der and race bias­es adverse­ly affect women and peo­ple of col­or in the work­place.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at NYU.
    • The Google Memo: Four Sci­en­tists Respond (Quil­lette Mag­a­zine): four schol­ars with rel­e­vant exper­tise large­ly back up the memo author’s claims about gen­der dif­fer­ences.
      1. Lee Jus­sim, pro­fes­sor of social psy­chol­o­gy at Rut­gers: “The author of the Google essay on issues relat­ed to diver­si­ty gets near­ly all of the sci­ence and its impli­ca­tions exact­ly right.”
      2. David Schmitt, who has a Ph.D. in per­son­al­i­ty psy­chol­o­gy: “In the case of per­son­al­i­ty traits, evi­dence that men and women may have dif­fer­ent aver­age lev­els of cer­tain traits is rather strong.… But it is not clear to me how such sex dif­fer­ences are rel­e­vant to the Google work­place.”
      3. Geof­frey Miller, pro­fes­sor of evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of New Mex­i­co: “Grad­ed fair­ly, his memo would get at least an A- in any mas­ters’ lev­el psy­chol­o­gy course.”
      4. Debra W Soh, who has a Ph.D. in sex­u­al neu­ro­science: “With­in the field of neu­ro­science, sex dif­fer­ences between women and men—when it comes to brain struc­ture and func­tion and asso­ci­at­ed dif­fer­ences in per­son­al­i­ty and occu­pa­tion­al preferences—are under­stood to be true, because the evi­dence for them (thou­sands of stud­ies) is strong.”
    • The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gen­der Dif­fer­ences? (Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): A sum­ma­ry of meta-analy­ses on the sub­ject of gen­der dif­fer­ences. “Gen­der dif­fer­ences in math/science abil­i­ty, achieve­ment, and per­for­mance are small or nil.… Gen­der dif­fer­ences in inter­est and enjoy­ment of math, cod­ing, and high­ly ‘sys­tem­iz­ing’ activ­i­ties are large.”
    • Googling Moral Puri­ty (R.R. Reno, First Things):  “Our rul­ing class relies on ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion’ to legit­i­mate its super­em­i­nence. This makes the atten­dant ide­ol­o­gy sacro­sanct. Any pub­lic dis­sent becomes explo­sive, because it threat­ens the legit­i­ma­cy of our cur­rent social sys­tem, which is char­ac­ter­ized by an increas­ing con­cen­tra­tion of wealth and pow­er among just a few at the tip­py-top.”
    • Quote of the week goes to Rod Dreher: “Gen­der non-essen­tial­ists are the young earth cre­ation­ists of the Left.” (source)
  4. Relat­ed in a weird way: The Tox­ic Dra­ma on YA Twit­ter (Kat Rosen­field, Vul­ture): “One author and for­mer diver­si­ty advo­cate described why she no longer takes part: ‘I have nev­er seen social inter­ac­tion this [messed] up,’ she wrote in an email. ‘And I’ve been in prison.’”
  5. Why Are There No New Major Reli­gions? (Joe Emont, The Atlantic): “State per­se­cu­tion, aid­ed by reli­gious author­i­ties, is in fact a major rea­son why new faiths fail in parts of the world where gov­ern­ment polices reli­gious doc­trine.” The author fails to acknowl­edge the potent new reli­gion in North Amer­i­ca that is a brew of envi­ron­men­tal­ism and sex­u­al auton­o­my with New Age super­sti­tion thrown in. Also, he doesn’t real­ly con­sid­er that maybe some reli­gions are legit­imized by miracles/divine sanc­tion. Inter­est­ing stuff nonethe­less.
  6. Hype­priests: The Grail-Wear­ing Pas­tors Who Dress Like Justin Bieber (Sam Schube, GQ): “I wish Justin Bieber the best. ‘Love Your­self’ is among the finest pop songs of this short cen­tu­ry, and I find his Insta­gram account deeply charm­ing in its utter lack of guile. But even if he weren’t Justin Bieber, he’d deserve the guid­ance, spir­i­tu­al or oth­er­wise, he’s seek­ing. We all deserve that. All I mean to say is this: It is rather remark­able that the men Justin Bieber has entrust­ed to deliv­er that guid­ance have decid­ed to dress like Justin Bieber.”

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 106

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. One Amer­i­can fam­i­ly’s mis­sion to res­cue civil­ians in Mosul (Mar­co Wer­man, PRI’s The World): I heard this sto­ry on NPR this week and was floored. Lis­ten to the thir­teen-minute inter­view (don’t just read the sur­round­ing text ‑the siz­zle is in the audio ver­sion). Amaz­ing. For more about David Eubank’s min­istry, read Jun­gle Cow­boys (Sophia Lee, World Mag­a­zine).
  2. The Legal Mean­ing of the Cos­by Mis­tri­al (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “The extra­or­di­nar­i­ly high pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al bur­den of proof in any crim­i­nal tri­al is inten­tion­al­ly designed to heav­i­ly favor defen­dants, because we long ago embraced as a soci­ety Blackstone’s prin­ci­ple. For­mu­lat­ed in the sev­en­teen-six­ties by the Eng­lish jurist William Black­stone, the pre­sump­tion is that it is bet­ter to have ten guilty peo­ple go free than that one inno­cent per­son suf­fer. Hard as it is to stom­ach today, embrac­ing that cal­cu­lus means that we should even want ten rapists (not to men­tion ter­ror­ists and mur­der­ers) to go free in order to pro­tect the one false­ly accused.” Gersen, a Har­vard Law prof, also has anoth­er sol­id arti­cle this week: Why Racial­ly Offen­sive Trade­marks Are Now Legal­ly Pro­tect­ed.
  3. Phi­lan­do Castile After­math (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Still, I can’t grasp why Castile’s killer got away scot-free, and why there hasn’t been much of an out­cry. If a police offi­cer can shoot to death a motorist who was obey­ing all his com­mands, and walk away a free man from that shoot­ing, how safe are any of us?” On Slate, Leon Ney­fakh writes Phi­lan­do Castile Should Be the NRA’s Per­fect Cause Célèbre. There’s Just One Prob­lem. See also David French’s The Unwrit­ten Law That Helps Bad Cops Go Free.
  4. Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democ­rats, Trans­gen­derism, and Islamist Ter­ror (Jonathan V. Last, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “Although I describe myself as trans­gen­der (I was don­ning flam­boy­ant male cos­tumes from ear­ly child­hood on), I am high­ly skep­ti­cal about the cur­rent trans­gen­der wave, which I think has been pro­duced by far more com­pli­cat­ed psy­cho­log­i­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal fac­tors than cur­rent gen­der dis­course allows. Fur­ther­more, I con­demn the esca­lat­ing pre­scrip­tion of puber­ty block­ers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for chil­dren. I regard this prac­tice as a crim­i­nal vio­la­tion of human rights.”
  5. Mis-Edu­cat­ing The Young (David Brooks, NY Times): “Child­hood is more struc­tured than it has ever been. But then the great engine of the mer­i­toc­ra­cy spits peo­ple out into a young adult­hood that is less struc­tured than it has ever been.”
  6. The most impor­tant truth about hard work, and also read­ing, that you can find (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Giv­en two peo­ple of approx­i­mate­ly the same abil­i­ty and one per­son who works ten per­cent more than the oth­er, the lat­ter will more than twice out­pro­duce the for­mer. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the oppor­tu­ni­ty – it is very much like com­pound inter­est.”
  7. Two minds: The cog­ni­tive dif­fer­ences between men and women (Bruce Gold­man, Stan­ford Med­i­cine): “In a study of 34 rhe­sus mon­keys, for exam­ple, males strong­ly pre­ferred toys with wheels over plush toys, where­as females found plush toys lik­able. It would be tough to argue that the mon­keys’ par­ents bought them sex-typed toys or that simi­an soci­ety encour­ages its male off­spring to play more with trucks.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Things Glen Found Entertaining

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.