Tag: global christianity

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 436

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 436, which isn’t an espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing num­ber. It is, appar­ent­ly, non­to­tient, but even after read­ing about totients I remain unin­ter­est­ed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. From Vex­ing Uncer­tain­ty to Intel­lec­tu­al Humil­i­ty (Michael Dick­son, Schiz­o­phre­nia Bul­letin):  “I am a 55-year-old hus­band, father, friend, and pro­fes­sion­al philoso­pher. In 1992, as a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, a porter found me amongst the cows in the mead­ows of King’s Col­lege, after being there for 2 or 3 days. I was in bad phys­i­cal shape, hav­ing eat­en noth­ing, and appar­ent­ly get­ting water from the riv­er. He asked what I was doing. I replied: ‘I’m solv­ing a prob­lem about sto­chas­tic cal­cu­lus.’ This state­ment was true, but did not answer his ques­tion. He took me to the hos­pi­tal, where I remained for some weeks. It wasn’t the first time that I was psy­chot­ic, but it was, maybe, the first time that any­body noticed, the first time that I was unable to hide it from oth­ers, and there­fore from myself.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na. A remark­able (and fair­ly brief) arti­cle. 
  2. Gov­Docs to the Res­cue! Debunk­ing an Immi­gra­tion Myth (Rose­mary Meszaros and Kather­ine Pen­navaria, Pol­i­cy Com­mons): “No one’s fam­i­ly name was changed, altered, short­ened, butchered, or ‘writ­ten down wrong’ at Ellis Island or any Amer­i­can port. That idea is an urban leg­end. Many names did get changed as immi­grants set­tled into their new Amer­i­can lives, but those changes were made sev­er­al years after arrival and were done by choice of some­one in the fam­i­ly.”
  3. A Peace­ful Solu­tion on Tai­wan Is Slip­ping Away (Michael Beck­ley, New York Times): “…Tai­wan pro­vokes Chi­na sim­ply by being what it is: A pros­per­ous and free soci­ety. Taiwan’s bloom­ing nation­al iden­ti­ty threat­ens Chi­na with the prospect of per­ma­nent ter­ri­to­r­i­al dis­mem­ber­ment; and Taiwan’s elec­tions, rule of law and free press make a mock­ery of Beijing’s claim that Chi­nese cul­ture is incom­pat­i­ble with democ­ra­cy. America’s words can’t change any of that. Chi­nese law explic­it­ly states that Bei­jing may use force if pos­si­bil­i­ties for peace­ful uni­fi­ca­tion are ‘com­plete­ly exhaust­ed.’ Because of pol­i­tics in Tai­wan and the Unit­ed States, those pos­si­bil­i­ties are dwin­dling.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Tufts.
    • Relat­ed: Tai­wan’s Chi­na-skep­tic rul­ing-par­ty can­di­date wins pres­i­den­tial elec­tion (Emi­ly Feng, NPR): “For secu­ri­ty rea­sons, Tai­wan does not allow absen­tee vot­ing, man­dat­ing that all vot­ers cast their bal­lots in-per­son, on paper only. The phys­i­cal bal­lots are then count­ed by hand at every polling sta­tion, a process that is com­plete­ly open to the pub­lic.” The impli­ca­tion being that they are so wor­ried about Chi­nese med­dling that they engage in rad­i­cal trans­paren­cy. Wow.
  4. Xi Jin­ping Is Not Try­ing to Make Chris­tian­i­ty More Chi­nese (Feng­gang Yang, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Through­out Decem­ber, the author­i­ties once again tried hard to con­tain and curb Christ­mas cel­e­bra­tions inside and out­side church­es, pro­hib­it­ed stu­dents and oth­ers from par­tic­i­pat­ing in Christ­mas activ­i­ties, and detained some house church lead­ers to pre­vent them from orga­niz­ing con­gre­ga­tion­al gath­er­ings. Yet most church­es, both the offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned church­es and unreg­is­tered house church­es, held Christ­mas Eve and Christ­mas Day wor­ship ser­vices. The online evan­ge­lis­tic galas by Bei­jing Zion Church and oth­er house church­es on Zoom and oth­er plat­forms are of high artis­tic qual­i­ty. Chris­tians shared dis­creet­ly on social media that church lead­ers bap­tized a num­ber of new believ­ers despite the cur­rent ‘bit­ter win­ter’ for church­es in Chi­na.”
    • I found this bit fas­ci­nat­ing: “Many peo­ple in the West may not know that in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist polit­i­cal sys­tem, the party’s pol­i­cy is supe­ri­or to state laws and trumps the con­sti­tu­tion. The Chi­nafi­ca­tion pol­i­cy has led to the pro­mul­ga­tion of a series of admin­is­tra­tive reg­u­la­tions and mea­sures, includ­ing the vast­ly expand­ed Reg­u­la­tions of Reli­gious Affairs that took effect in 2018.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Pur­due.
  5. You Need To Be Cringe­maxxing (Mary Har­ring­ton, Sub­stack): “There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is try­ing. Here’s the thing though: data con­sis­tent­ly show that the hap­pi­est peo­ple — those who feel that their lives are most filled with pur­pose and ful­fil­ment — are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those with kids — it’s those who go to church. Those, in oth­er words, who are not just to be indif­fer­ent to cool, but active­ly anti-cool. The first step to a hap­py and ful­filled life, it appears, is cringe­maxxing.”
    • Some oth­er vague­ly-relat­ed life advice: Risk-Aver­sion Is Killing Romance (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Some­times it seems to me we’ve become so sus­pi­cious of each other’s inten­tions that we pathol­o­gise romance and com­mit­ment, and end up psy­cho­analysing to death behav­iour that’s actu­al­ly decent. Now we take every­thing that comes with real love—being affect­ed by some­one else’s emo­tions, putting your partner’s needs first, depend­ing on them—and call it dam­age or anx­ious attach­ment or trau­ma. No! It’s called deep con­nec­tion! And God, yes, wouldn’t it be much eas­i­er if it was a pathol­o­gy, a dis­ease, one we could diag­nose and solve because it’s scary and it comes with­out guar­an­tees. But it isn’t.”
  6. “How Do I Find the Main Point of a Psalm?” (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “So, the point is to look at the pieces very care­ful­ly, to fit them togeth­er in mid­size units, to jot down the main points of the mid­size units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to orga­nize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all togeth­er until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, sev­en, eight, nine points of the mid­size units are in a flow that make one big over­ar­ch­ing point. You will be sur­prised, if you take up pen­cil and paper and do this, what you will see.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
  7. Death by a Thou­sand Paper Cuts (David Brooks, The New York Times): “…[some­times I] find a prob­lem so mas­sive that I can’t believe I’ve ever writ­ten about any­thing else. This lat­ter expe­ri­ence hap­pened as I looked into the grow­ing bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of Amer­i­can life. It’s not only that grow­ing bureau­cra­cies cost a lot of mon­ey; they also ener­vate Amer­i­can soci­ety. They redis­trib­ute pow­er from work­ers to rule mak­ers, and in so doing sap ini­tia­tive, dis­cre­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty and dri­ve. Once you start pok­ing around, the sta­tis­tics are stag­ger­ing.”
    • Relat­ed: No joke: Feds are ban­ning humor­ous elec­tron­ic mes­sages on high­ways (AP News): “Among those that will be dis­ap­pear­ing are mes­sages such as ‘Use Yah Blinkah’ in Mass­a­chu­setts; ‘Vis­it­ing in-laws? Slow down, get there late,’ from Ohio; ‘Don’t dri­ve Star Span­gled Ham­mered,’ from Penn­syl­va­nia; ‘Hocus pocus, dri­ve with focus’ from New Jer­sey; and ‘Hands on the wheel, not your meal’ from Ari­zona.”
      • You think Stan­ford hates fun? Try the fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy!

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 408

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 408, the 8th Pell Num­ber, a sequence use­ful in approx­i­mat­ing the square root of 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Com­pe­ti­tion for Believ­ers in Africa Is Trans­form­ing Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Nicholas Bariyo & Gben­ga Aking­bule, Wall Street Jour­nal): “On a recent Sun­day morn­ing in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, mem­bers of the faith­ful clutched their hymn books and chant­ed God’s prais­es as they danced to the beat of tam­bourines. A preach­er led the con­gre­ga­tion in pray­ing for the health of their chil­dren and suc­cess at work. The ser­vice resem­bled Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty, a move­ment that orig­i­nat­ed in the U.S. and has swept Africa in the last few decades. But the par­tic­i­pants weren’t Chris­tians. They were Mus­lims, prac­tic­ing an ecsta­t­ic style of wor­ship that has devel­oped in response to the chal­lenge posed by Pen­te­costal­ism. Across sub-Saha­ran Africa, reli­gion today is in fer­ment as dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam vie for believers—a con­test that is trans­form­ing both faiths and dis­rupt­ing long-estab­lished terms of coex­is­tence.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. I believe I have unlocked the pay­wall on this one.
  2. Cal­i­for­nia restau­rant used fake priest to get work­ers to con­fess “sins,” feds say (Aimee Pic­chi, CBS News): “In court doc­u­ments, a serv­er at the restau­rant, Maria Par­ra, tes­ti­fied that she found her con­ver­sa­tion with the alleged priest ‘unlike nor­mal con­fes­sions,’ where she would talk about what she want­ed to con­fess, accord­ing to a court doc­u­ment reviewed by CBS Mon­ey­Watch. Instead, the priest told her that he would ask ques­tions ‘to get the sins out of me.’ ”
  3. Slav­ery in the Bible | Dr. Esau Mccaul­ley (Jude 3 Project, YouTube): sev­en min­utes.
  4. Sports Writ­ers Out, Zoomer Tik­Tok­ers In (Ethan Strauss, Sub­stack): “There’s a real malev­o­lent genius to con­coct­ing a cuck­ish char­ac­ter who pals around with the high-sta­tus Cavin­ders, but only as the butt of their jokes. He’s lit­er­al­ly mod­el­ing los­ing mon­ey towards the Betr cof­fers, while hang­ing out with mod­els. Some­one actu­al­ly came up with a means for habit­u­at­ing young men into an attrac­tive form of fail­ing as part of an ‘organic’-looking humil­i­a­tion fan­ta­sy.”
  5. Data Fal­si­fi­ca­da (Part 1): “Clus­ter­fake” (Uri Simon­sohn, Leif Nel­son & Joe Sim­mons, Data Cola­da): “That’s right: Two dif­fer­ent peo­ple inde­pen­dent­ly faked data for two dif­fer­ent stud­ies in a paper about dis­hon­esty.”
    • There was empha­sis in orig­i­nal which I removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. U.S.-Funded Sci­en­tist Among Three Chi­nese Researchers Who Fell Ill Amid Ear­ly Covid-19 Out­break (Michael R. Gor­don, Wall Street Jour­nal): “A promi­nent sci­en­tist who worked on coro­n­avirus projects fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment is one of three Chi­nese researchers who became sick with an unspec­i­fied ill­ness dur­ing the ini­tial out­break of Covid-19, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer U.S. offi­cials.”
    • A less san­i­tized pre­sen­ta­tion of the same facts: First Peo­ple Sick­ened By COVID-19 Were Chi­nese Sci­en­tists At Wuhan Insti­tute Of Virol­o­gy, Say US Gov­ern­ment Sources (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Matt Taib­bi & Alex Gutentag, Sub­stack): “Sources with­in the US gov­ern­ment say that three of the ear­li­est peo­ple to become infect­ed with SARS-CoV­‑2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were mem­bers of the Wuhan lab sus­pect­ed to have leaked the pan­dem­ic virus. As such, not only do we know there were WIV sci­en­tists who had devel­oped COVID-19-like ill­ness­es in Novem­ber 2019, but also that they were work­ing with the clos­est rel­a­tives of SARS-CoV­‑2, and insert­ing gain-of-func­tion fea­tures unique to it.”
  7. REVIEW EXCLUSIVE—Catch Him if You Can: Meet Will Cur­ry (Josi­ah Jon­er, Stan­ford Review): “Will Curry’s sto­ry is long and complex—but most of all, enthralling. He is a liv­ing sto­ry of some­one who lived the adven­tur­ous life that so many desire yet nev­er actu­al­ly live, includ­ing many at Stan­ford trapped in a cul­ture of monot­o­ny. Is all of the sto­ry he told me true? Maybe, or maybe not. Will is, after all, a com­pet­i­tive pok­er play­er who has pulled off bluffs in the past. But regard­less, Will’s sto­ry is far from over. In fact, I think it’s real­ly only begun.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs. From vol­ume 286.

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 396

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.

396 is appar­ent­ly the num­ber of 3x3 slid­ing puz­zle posi­tions that require exact­ly 11 moves to solve start­ing with a hole in the cen­ter. I have not ver­i­fied that claim.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Glob­al Trans­for­ma­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty Is Here (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, The New York Times): “Mul­ti­ple schol­ars point to West­ern Europe as an exam­ple of what’s to come in the Unit­ed States. Today, the three largest Protes­tant church­es in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evan­gel­i­cal megachurch­es of a charis­mat­ic or Pen­te­costal bent. A study last year exam­ined Chi­nese church­es in Britain that were expe­ri­enc­ing expo­nen­tial growth, some­times dou­bling or tripling in size in a few years. Last April, the Ital­ian Chi­nese The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary opened in Rome to train Man­darin- and Can­tonese-speak­ing pas­tors. Some of the largest megachurch­es in metro Lon­don are led by Africans, includ­ing Kingsway Inter­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian Cen­ter, which is led by a Niger­ian, Matthew Ashimolowo, and is most like­ly the largest church in Europe.”
    • I have unlocked this one.
  2. The school shoot­ing in Nashville was the defin­ing news event of the week. This sto­ry is a tragedy fea­tur­ing three hot-but­ton top­ics: trans issues, Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, and guns. A lot more is going to come out about this and peo­ple on the left and the right are going to lose their minds try­ing to spin it. If you see some­thing that thought­ful­ly explores one or more of these ele­ments let me know. Here are some reflec­tions on it that I have found inter­est­ing so far.
    • Pres­by­ter­ian School Mourns 6 Dead in Nashville Shoot­ing (Daniel Sil­li­man and Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At Wood­mont Bap­tist, not long after they heard the sirens whir by, pas­tors and staff read reports of a shoot­ing at Covenant. When they saw on Twit­ter that their church was named as the reuni­fi­ca­tion site, they didn’t ques­tion it—they just put on their nametags, met police in the park­ing lot, and pre­pared to open their doors to bus­es of sur­viv­ing chil­dren and par­ents des­per­ate to see their kids safe and sound, senior pas­tor Nathan Park­er told CT. The chil­dren gath­ered in the fel­low­ship hall, where the stu­dent min­is­ter hand­ed out col­or­ing sheets and began pro­cess­ing the shoot­ing with them.”
    • Heav­i­ly Armed Assailant Kills Six at Chris­t­ian School (Emi­ly Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Lev­en­son and Jesus Jiménez, New York Times): “Chief Drake said that the assailant was ‘at one point a stu­dent’ at the school.… There was con­fu­sion about the gen­der iden­ti­ty of the assailant in the imme­di­ate after­math of the attack. Chief Drake said the shoot­er iden­ti­fied as trans­gen­der. Offi­cials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shoot­er, but, accord­ing to a social media post and a LinkedIn pro­file, the shoot­er appeared to iden­ti­fy as male in recent months.… Chief Drake said it was too ear­ly to dis­cuss a pos­si­ble motive for the shoot­ing, though he con­firmed that the attack was tar­get­ed.”
    • Heed­ing the Nashville shooter’s own voice: Do jour­nal­ists want the ‘man­i­festo’ released? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, jour­nal­ists would be doing every­thing that they can to answer the ‘why’ ques­tion in this case, includ­ing call­ing for the release of Hale’s man­i­festo text and oth­er mate­ri­als linked to the attack. But these are not nor­mal cir­cum­stances.… Unless I have missed some­thing, the AP cov­er­age — the news mate­r­i­al that will appear in most local news­pa­pers — have made zero ref­er­ences to the shooter’s own social-media mate­ri­als. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, these online sources are one of the first places that reporters raised in the Inter­net era go for insights into this kind of sto­ry.”
    • At a loss for words (Joshua Katz, The New Cri­te­ri­on): “I am sor­ry, there­fore, that TheNew York Times, in its above-the-fold front-page sto­ry yes­ter­day, names the shoot­er before the vic­tims.… Until we know more about the killer, it would be unwise to speak of her motives, though it is obvi­ous­ly note­wor­thy that a stan­dard data­base of mass shoot­ings in the Unit­ed States since 1966 does not record a sin­gle female shoot­er at a K–12 school. (Bizarrely, the main arti­cle in the Times ignores this fact, instead stat­ing that the shoot­ing was ‘unusu­al’ because Covenant is a pri­vate ele­men­tary school rather than a pub­lic high school.)”
      • Author sound famil­iar? Katz was a pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton and is now a fel­low at AEI and he’s been men­tioned in these week­ly roundups before.
    • In the Face of Tragedy, Peti­tion­ing God Is an Act of Faith (David French, New York Times): “It is a ter­ri­ble sign of our polar­ized times that the very con­cept of prayer in the midst of tragedy has itself become con­tentious. ‘Spare us your prayers,’ some will say. ‘We demand action.’ But what if peo­ple need prayer? What if griev­ing neigh­bors are des­per­ate for prayer?… For the faith­ful believ­er, prayer isn’t a sub­sti­tute for action, it’s a pre­req­ui­site for action. It grounds us before we move to serve oth­ers. It grounds us before we speak in the pub­lic square.”
      • I’ve unlocked the pay­wall on this one. Well worth your time.
    • Nashville’s Satan­ic Theo­phany (Rod Dreher, Sub­stack): “Lis­ten to me: this has been the strat­e­gy of LGBT advo­cates for more than twen­ty years now: con­vince the normies that if they don’t give the activists what they want, that they will have blood on their hands. At the turn of the cen­tu­ry, activists con­vinced schools that in order to com­bat bul­ly­ing — a wor­thy endeav­or — they had to teach gay ide­ol­o­gy. You might have thought, ‘Real­ly? Why isn’t it enough to teach that bul­ly­ing is wrong, and to pun­ish bul­lies?’ The ques­tion itself reveals the real moti­va­tion behind the cam­paign.”
      • Dreher recent­ly moved entire­ly to Sub­stack.
    • Not about the shoot­ing at all, but rel­e­vant to think­ing about issues sur­round­ing trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy. Under­stand­ing the Sex Bina­ry (Col­in Wright, City Jour­nal): “When biol­o­gists claim that ‘sex is bina­ry,’ they mean some­thing straight­for­ward: there are only two sex­es. This state­ment is true because an individual’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) their pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs (i.e., gonads) are orga­nized, through devel­op­ment, to pro­duce. Males have pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs orga­nized around the pro­duc­tion of sperm; females, ova. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sex­es that a per­son can be. Sex is there­fore bina­ry.”
    • Also not about this shoot­ing but con­cern­ing guns in gen­er­al, the most infor­ma­tive thing I’ve seen is this debate between two pas­tors on guns that I shared back in vol­ume 48 (you have to click through to see it since it’s mul­ti­ple links). Many more relat­ed arti­cles I’ve shared through the years can be found at https://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/tag/guns
  3. The age of aver­age (Alex Mur­rell, per­son­al blog): “The inte­ri­ors of our homes, cof­fee shops and restau­rants all look the same. The build­ings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we dri­ve, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, iden­ti­ties and taglines all look the same. But it doesn’t end there. In the age of aver­age, homo­gene­ity can be found in an almost indef­i­nite num­ber of domains. The Insta­gram pic­tures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the sky­lines we see, the web­sites we vis­it and the illus­tra­tions which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The accom­pa­ny­ing pho­tos are strik­ing.
  4. How Chris­t­ian Is Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Kele­fa San­neh, The New York­er): “If Amer­i­ca was once bet­ter than it is now, why did our Chris­t­ian fore­bears allow it to get worse? In answer­ing this ques­tion, Wolfe some­times sounds more like a crit­ic of the faith than a defend­er of it.… Wolfe thinks that there is some­thing ‘weird’ about the way in which the U.S. and oth­er West­ern nations reject eth­nic chauvinism—officially, anyway—in favor of an ‘ide­ol­o­gy of uni­ver­sal­i­ty.’ But this weird uni­ver­sal­i­ty is part of what sets Chris­tian­i­ty apart from most oth­er creeds.”
    • An insight­ful arti­cle in the New York­er. The author is the son of a famous the­olo­gian.
  5. Hollywood’s Great Awak­en­ing (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “Made by Chris­t­ian pro­duc­tion house King­dom Sto­ry Com­pa­ny and backed by mega dis­trib­u­tor Lion­s­gate, [Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion] earned back its $15 mil­lion bud­get the week­end it opened, when crit­ics pre­dict­ed it would gross clos­er to $6 or $7 mil­lion. That’s a tri­umphant per­for­mance com­pared to the week­end debuts of recent block­busters, like 65, a sci-fi flick with a $91 mil­lion bud­get that made just $12.3 mil­lion, and M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Knock at the Cab­in, which brought in $14.1 mil­lion. Since its release on Feb­ru­ary 24, Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion has grossed $49 mil­lion in tick­et sales—besting many of this year’s Oscar nom­i­nees com­bined at U.S. box offices.”
  6. Some AI-relat­ed per­spec­tives
    • Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I am remind­ed of the advent of the print­ing press, after Guten­berg. Of course the press brought an immense amount of good, enabling the sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions, among many oth­er ben­e­fits. But it also cre­at­ed writ­ings by Lenin, Hitler, and Mao’s Red Book. It is a moot point whether you can ‘blame’ those on the print­ing press, nonethe­less the press brought (in com­bi­na­tion with some oth­er inno­va­tions) a remark­able amount of true, mov­ing his­to­ry. How about the Wars of Reli­gion and the bloody 17th cen­tu­ry to boot? Still, if you were redo­ing world his­to­ry you would take the print­ing press in a heart­beat. Who needs pover­ty, squalor, and recur­rences of Ghenghis Khan-like fig­ures?”
    • Response to Tyler Cowen’s Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “If you cre­ate some­thing with supe­ri­or intel­li­gence, that oper­ates at faster speed, that can make copies of itself, what hap­pens by default? That new source of intel­li­gence will rapid­ly gain con­trol of the future. It is very, very dif­fi­cult to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing even under ide­al cir­cum­stances.”
      • A rebut­tal to the Cowen piece.
    • Cowen defends his views (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): he is defend­ing his views against a Scott Alexan­der piece which I did­n’t find as inter­est­ing as the Mow­showitz piece I linked above. The rejoin­der is broad enough to be use­ful on its own.
    • It is inter­est­ing to think about AI risk as a Chris­t­ian who believes in demons which seem to be smarter than humans and who are described sev­er­al times in the Bible as run­ning sig­nif­i­cant parts of this world.
  7. Free Will Is Real (Stu­art T. Doyle, Skep­tic): “Here I will try to con­vince you that free will is real and not an illu­sion. I’ll argue that far from being exem­plars of ratio­nal­i­ty and skep­ti­cism, the main argu­ments against free will make unjus­ti­fi­able log­i­cal leaps and are naïve in the light of cut­ting-edge sci­en­tif­ic findings.Throughout the philo­soph­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, resolv­ing the ques­tion of whether or not we have free will has often revolved around two cri­te­ria for free will: (1) We must be the true sources of our own actions. (2) We must have the abil­i­ty to do oth­er­wise. I argue that humans meet both cri­te­ria through two con­cepts: scale and unde­cid­abil­i­ty.”

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 What Athe­ists Say There Is (M. Antho­ny Mills, Soci­ety of Catholic Sci­en­tists): “Accord­ing to the athe­ist, the theist’s error is believ­ing in one too many things. Yet, for the the­ist, the dis­agree­ment is not about the exis­tence of one par­tic­u­lar thing, but ‘about every­thing,’ as Mac­In­tyre puts it.” The begin­ning and end are excel­lent. The mid­dle mud­dles unless you have very pre­cise philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests. The author has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. From vol­ume 275.

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 340

Lots of Ukraine/Russia links, plus more enter­tain­ing links than nor­mal as a com­pen­sa­tion.

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 340, which is cool because it’s a mul­ti­ple of 17 and I real­ly like the num­ber 17.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. On Ukraine and Rus­sia: a lot of links here, just open the inter­est­ing titles in new tabs.
    • To Stay and Serve: Why We Didn’t Flee Ukraine (Vasyl Ostryi, Gospel Coali­tion): “How should the church respond when there is a grow­ing threat of war? When there is con­stant fear in soci­ety? I’m con­vinced that if the church is not rel­e­vant at a time of cri­sis, then it is not rel­e­vant in a time of peace.… while the church may not fight like the nation, we still believe we have a role to play in this strug­gle. We will shel­ter the weak, serve the suf­fer­ing, and mend the bro­ken. And as we do, we offer the unshak­able hope of Christ and his gospel.” Respect.
    • We lack the abil­i­ty to ideate and inno­vate on for­eign pol­i­cy (Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “Why is it that the media and experts mar­veled so much at the unprece­dent­ed shar­ing of intel­li­gence on Pres­i­dent Putin’s next moves? Because it was some­thing new. And it’s no sur­prise it comes from the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. They and those in the mil­i­tary and defense are not as often cul­ti­vat­ed under the ban­ner of progress and peace and the End of His­to­ry in typ­i­cal IR and polit­i­cal sci­ences cours­es, nar­ra­tives, and hall­ways of pow­er.”
    • We’re All Ukraini­ans Now (David French, The Dis­patch): “No one claims that Ukraine is a per­fect coun­try. Like many for­mer Sovi­et republics, it has strug­gled to find its foot­ing. It’s endured author­i­tar­i­an­ism, and it bat­tles cor­rup­tion. But, in Lewis’s words, it is ‘not in the least aggres­sive.’ It ‘asks only to be let alone.’ As a nation that has endured its own aggres­sive attacks, how can we not empathize? How can we not do what we rea­son­ably can to deter Russ­ian aggres­sion and help Ukraini­ans defend them­selves?” 
    • Thoughts On Shit­post Diplo­ma­cy (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can diplo­mat who post­ed this meme should have known this. He or she was almost cer­tain­ly a For­eign Ser­vice Offi­cer in the Pub­lic Diplo­ma­cy cone; a pub­lic diplomat’s first charge is learn­ing how to com­mu­ni­cate per­sua­sive­ly to the peo­ple of the region sta­tioned in. It is not that this offi­cer lacked the raw intel­li­gence to ful­fill this role: four out of every five appli­cants fail the For­eign Service’s selec­tive entrance tests. It is what this diplo­mat did after receiv­ing his or her post that mat­tered. This diplo­mat did not study. Memes like these are the prod­uct of a cul­ture that retweets more than it reads.”
    • On Ukraine (George Weigel, First Things): “For months now, the world press has described Russ­ian troop deploy­ments along Ukraine’s bor­ders as spear­heads of a pos­si­ble inva­sion. The truth, how­ev­er, is that Rus­sia invad­ed Ukraine sev­en years ago, when it annexed Crimea and Russ­ian ‘lit­tle green men’ ignit­ed a war in east­ern Ukraine that has tak­en over 14,000 lives and dis­placed over a mil­lion peo­ple. What­ev­er the cur­rent mil­i­tary devel­op­ments, a Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine has not been ‘immi­nent’; the inva­sion is ongo­ing.”
    • Amid War and Rumors of War, Ukraine Pas­tors Preach and Pre­pare (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Preach­ing on the Ser­mon on the Mount’s injunc­tion toward peace­mak­ing, Kulakevych con­tin­ued his laser-sharp focus on the pos­si­ble Russ­ian inva­sion. Five weeks ago, as the sep­a­ratist con­flict in the east­ern Don­bas region began to esca­late, he sur­veyed the Bible for its teach­ing on ‘wars and rumors of war.’ He fol­lowed that with an appli­ca­tion of ‘Do not let your hearts be trou­bled’ and, on the next Sun­day, a trea­tise on wor­ry.”
    • Rus­sia Keeps Pun­ish­ing Evan­gel­i­cals in Crimea (Kate Shell­nutt and Forum 18, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Since Rus­sia annexed the Crimean Penin­su­la from Ukraine in 2014—one of the cen­tral points of con­flict in the cur­rent clash between the two countries—Protestant Chris­tians in the ter­ri­to­ry have faced greater gov­ern­ment penal­ties for prac­tic­ing their faith.”
    • Rus­si­a’s space agency warns US sanc­tions could ‘destroy’ coop­er­a­tion on the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (Kristin Fish­er, CNN): “If you block coop­er­a­tion with us, who will save the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (ISS) from an uncon­trolled deor­bit and fall into the Unit­ed States or…Europe?” Rogozin said. “There is also the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a 500-ton struc­ture falling on India and Chi­na. Do you want to threat­en them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Rus­sia, there­fore all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Putin as a man of ideas (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “If you write books, whether good or bad ones, and won­der whether your work mat­ters, I sug­gest the answer lies before you on your TV screen each evening. Rus­sia is a nation of ideas, led by peo­ple who are obsessed with ideas. The rest of the world, most of all Europe, will need bet­ter ideas in turn.”
    • Putin’s spir­i­tu­al des­tiny (Giles Fras­er,  UnHerd): “Last year, on the anniver­sary of the bap­tism of the Rus, [Patri­arch] Kir­ill preached to his peo­ple, urg­ing them to stay true to Vladimir’s con­ver­sion and the blood of the ortho­dox mar­tyrs. He told them to love ‘our home­land, our peo­ple, our rulers and our army’. The West­ern sec­u­lar imag­i­na­tion doesn’t get this. It looks at Putin’s speech the oth­er evening, and it describes him as mad — which is anoth­er way of say­ing we do not under­stand what is going on. And we show how lit­tle we under­stand by think­ing that a bunch of sanc­tions is going to make a blind bit of dif­fer­ence. They won’t.”
    • Putin’s Attack on Ukraine Is a Reli­gious War (John Schindler, Sub­stack): “Every sec­u­lar geostrate­gic chal­lenge cit­ed as a rea­son for Putin’s aggres­sion – NATO expan­sion, West­ern mil­i­tary moves, oil and gas pol­i­tics – exist­ed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to lim­it his attacks on Ukraine to Crimea and the South­east. What’s changed since then that makes his effort to sub­due all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the Krem­lin? The cre­ation of an auto­cephalous Ortho­dox Church of Ukraine in 2019, with offi­cial Amer­i­can back­ing, is the dif­fer­ence, and Moscow believes this was all a nefar­i­ous U.S. plot to divide world Ortho­doxy at Russia’s expense. Clear­ly Putin has decid­ed that reclaim­ing Ukraine and its cap­i­tal, ‘the moth­er of Russ­ian cities,’ for Russ­ian Ortho­doxy is worth a major war. Make no mis­take, this is a reli­gious war, even if almost nobody in the West real­izes it.“This is in the mix. I don’t know what per­cent­age of the mix it is, but it’s def­i­nite­ly in the mix.
    • War and dat­ing apps (swipe left) (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Ukrain­ian women in sec­ond city Kharkiv — just 20 miles from tyran­ni­cal Vladimir Putin’s vast inva­sion force — have been stunned by a sal­vo of admir­ers in uni­form. Hunky Russ­ian troops called Andrei, Alexan­der, Gre­go­ry, Michail and a beard­ed Chechen fight­er nick­named ‘Black’ were among dozens whose pro­files popped up.” This is a link to a sum­ma­ry of an arti­cle from the Sun. The sum­ma­ry is enough, but if you click through you’ll see actu­al Tin­der pho­tos.
  2. I spent six months in a cult. They’re still here on cam­pus. (Camille Williams, The Dai­ly North­west­ern): “So, you are prob­a­bly won­der­ing: how did I get out? …Some may call it a gut instinct; I call it the Holy Spir­it with­in me squirm­ing in revolt. After that con­ver­sa­tion, I ran out of my bed­room and yelled to my moth­er, ‘I acci­den­tal­ly joined a cult.’ After she went from con­fused laugh­ter to vow­ing to throw hands with these peo­ple, I final­ly start­ed to feel this bur­den release.”
    • This is an arti­cle by a stu­dent in Chi Alpha at North­west­ern. She was in Chi Alpha, got sucked into a cult, and then got out and returned to Chi Alpha.
  3. Gang­sters want to be good peo­ple too (Chris Blattman, blog): “I remem­ber meet­ing one gang leader on the streets of Chica­go. We were stand­ing in line at a nacho and ice cream truck (yes that exists) chat­ting. I was try­ing to under­stand how one of the vio­lence reduc­tion pro­grams I was work­ing on affect­ed his oper­a­tions. After all, we were try­ing to recruit away his best young men—his star deal­ers and shoot­ers. We want­ed to get them into oth­er kinds of jobs. Sure­ly he was frus­trat­ed. On the con­trary. He was delight­ed. ‘I only do this for the boys,’ he said. ‘They need some­thing to do. Your pro­gram is even bet­ter. I’m hap­py they’re going.’ In his mind, the vio­lent drug-deal­ing was a pub­lic employ­ment pro­gram, and he the admin­is­tra­tor.”
  4. Some Cana­di­an Con­voy After­math:
    • Con­voy Crack­down (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “Fam­i­ly mem­bers hav­ing trou­ble liv­ing their lives is being treat­ed not as a bug but as a fea­ture. The sins of the father are to be laid upon the chil­dren, it seems. This extends as not­ed above to those who pro­vide finan­cial assis­tance to those engag­ing in dis­ap­proved activ­i­ties, and that such retal­i­a­tion will con­tin­ue to hap­pen after the activ­i­ties in ques­tion cease, so not only is one with­out one’s mon­ey and oth­er assets, and with­out the abil­i­ty to spend what one does have, oth­ers may rea­son­ably fear that help­ing you not end up on the street might land them in the same sit­u­a­tion.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Trudeau ends use of Emer­gen­cies Act, says ‘sit­u­a­tion is no longer an emer­gency’ (Nick Boisvert, CBC): “The Sen­ate was in the midst of debat­ing the act on Wednes­day but with­drew the motion short­ly after Trudeau made his announce­ment.” I am glad the emer­gency mea­sures have been lift­ed, but what should con­cern us all is that this is now on the table as an option for oth­er­wise rights-based gov­ern­ments.
    • What Led to Canada’s Cri­sis (Nathan Pinkoski,First Things): “The cri­sis had its ori­gins in mate­r­i­al con­di­tions unique to Cana­da. A com­bi­na­tion of elite over­pro­duc­tion and Canada’s posi­tion in the shad­ow of the Unit­ed States has pro­duced an ide­o­log­i­cal­ly super­charged man­age­r­i­al class that has accel­er­at­ed the adop­tion of a new kind of emer­gency politics.“The author is at the near­by Zephyr Insti­tute.
  5. By Any Oth­er Name (Hele­na, Sub­stack): “UK NHS refer­ral data shows a 4000% increase in pedi­atric gen­der ser­vice refer­rals (not a typo). So-called ‘gen­der dys­pho­ria’, which was once a very rare diag­no­sis that described most­ly pre­pu­bes­cent boys and adult men, is now most com­mon­ly diag­nosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explo­sive num­bers are a result of increased soci­etal accep­tance, and that at long last trans peo­ple are com­ing out of hid­ing and liv­ing as their authen­tic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see com­pa­ra­ble rates of trans­gen­der iden­ti­ty across all age groups and between both sex­es, but its dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly ado­les­cent females feel­ing that warm and fuzzy inclu­sive accep­tance.” A very per­son­al nar­ra­tive. Long, rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. The C.D.C. Isn’t Pub­lish­ing Large Por­tions of the Covid Data It Col­lects (Apoor­va Man­davil­li, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. has been rou­tine­ly col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion since the Covid vac­cines were first rolled out last year, accord­ing to a fed­er­al offi­cial famil­iar with the effort. The agency has been reluc­tant to make those fig­ures pub­lic, the offi­cial said, because they might be mis­in­ter­pret­ed as the vac­cines being inef­fec­tive.” My lev­el of con­fi­dence in our pub­lic health agen­cies can­not go much low­er. And sad­ly, in an attempt to pre­vent peo­ple believ­ing dis­ap­proved thoughts the CDC has inflamed con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists. Out­ra­geous.

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 From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.’” What a wild sto­ry. First shared in vol­ume 204 

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 332

Final 2021 install­ment, includ­ing some good news about a bad dis­ease.

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. Learn­ing in dou­ble time: The effect of lec­ture video speed on imme­di­ate and delayed com­pre­hen­sion (Mur­phy et al, Applied Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­o­gy): “We pre­sent­ed par­tic­i­pants with lec­ture videos at dif­fer­ent speeds and test­ed imme­di­ate and delayed (1 week) com­pre­hen­sion. Results revealed min­i­mal costs incurred by increas­ing video speed from 1x to 1.5x, or 2x speed, but per­for­mance declined beyond 2x speed. We also com­pared learn­ing out­comes after watch­ing videos once at 1x or twice at 2x speed. There was not an advan­tage to watch­ing twice at 2x speed but if par­tic­i­pants watched the video again at 2x speed imme­di­ate­ly before the test, com­pared with watch­ing once at 1x a week before the test, com­pre­hen­sion improved. Thus, increas­ing the speed of videos (up to 2x) may be an effi­cient strat­e­gy, espe­cial­ly if stu­dents use the time saved for addi­tion­al study­ing or rewatch­ing the videos, but learn­ers should do this addi­tion­al study­ing short­ly before an exam.” The authors are researchers at UCLA.
  2. The pan­dem­ic:
    • Our play­book to fight covid-19 is out­dat­ed. Here are 10 updates for 2022. (Joseph G. Allen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Pub­lic health’s cred­i­bil­i­ty is on the line now. The pub­lic and busi­ness­es see that pub­lic health guid­ance isn’t keep­ing up with the times, and they’re right.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal health at Har­vard.
    • Pan-coro­n­avirus “super” vac­cine (Kate­lyn Jetelina, Sub­stack): “This clin­i­cal tri­al has tak­en longer than expect­ed because peo­ple can only par­tic­i­pate if they have not been pre­vi­ous­ly vac­ci­nat­ed or infect­ed with COVID. As you can imag­ine, the pool of eli­gi­ble and will­ing par­tic­i­pants is get­ting small­er and small­er.” The author is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas Health Cen­ter.
    • Covid 12/30: Infin­i­ty War (Zvi Mow­showitz, Less Wrong): “For five weeks, we’ve seen Omi­cron dou­ble and dou­ble again. That which can’t go on for­ev­er, won’t. There aren’t many dou­blings left. This is it. The CDC’s revised guide­lines made it even more clear that we’re going to col­lec­tive­ly make the right deci­sion, let it hap­pen, and hope for the best. It’s not like we have any choice in the mat­ter.” Long and full of time­ly infor­ma­tion.
  3. The Miss­ing Data in the Infla­tion Debate (Aus­tan Gools­bee, New York Times): “…the pain of infla­tion may not be shared equal­ly.… In Novem­ber, online prices fell 0.2 per­cent as the C.P.I. rose 0.8 per­cent. In oth­er words: The more some­one shops online rather than in stores, the less infla­tion the indi­vid­ual has faced. Notably, shop­ping online is far more com­mon among high-income peo­ple. And dur­ing the pan­dem­ic the prac­tice has grown more preva­lent.” The author is an econ prof at U Chica­go.
  4. Evan­gel­i­cals a Ris­ing Force Inside Argentina’s Pris­ons (Ger­man de los San­tos & Rodri­go Abd, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Many here began ped­dling drugs as teenagers and got stuck in a spi­ral of vio­lence that led some to their graves and oth­ers to over­crowd­ed pris­ons divid­ed between two forces: drug lords and preach­ers. Over the past 20 years, Argen­tine prison author­i­ties have encour­aged, to one extent or anoth­er, the cre­ation of units effec­tive­ly run by evan­gel­i­cal inmates—sometimes grant­i­ng them a few extra spe­cial priv­i­leges, such as more time in fresh air.” An Asso­ci­at­ed Press sto­ry.
  5. The secret truth of the stu­dent debt cri­sis (Ryan Coop­er, The Week): “The truth is the ques­tion of whether stu­dent debt should be can­celed is large­ly irrel­e­vant. Most stu­dent debt will be can­celed soon­er or lat­er, because an ever-grow­ing share of bor­row­ers can­not pos­si­bly repay their loans. Ever.”
  6. Build­ing Trust Across the Polit­i­cal Divide (April Law­son, Com­ment): “The Blue-inflect­ed tra­di­tion­al empa­thy-build­ing forms of bridge-build­ing have a great deal to rec­om­mend them. But there is a flaw: the implic­it belief under­ly­ing this style of bridg­ing is that we can learn to love each oth­er by see­ing that we are all deeply the same. While true in some sens­es, this miss­es a fun­da­men­tal insight about rela­tion­ship that most of us know from expe­ri­ence: We have the capac­i­ty to build rela­tion­ship through con­flict.” Hon­est­ly describes very real dynam­ics. Almost a year old but I’m just see­ing it now.
  7. Musko­gee stu­dent hon­ored for sav­ing 2 lives (Cathy Spauld­ing, Enid News & Eagle): “Davy­on, who attends the 6th and 7th Grade Acad­e­my, used an abdom­i­nal thrust on a school mate who was chok­ing on a bot­tle cap. Lat­er that day, Davy­on res­cued a woman from a burn­ing house.”
    • First, this 6th grad­er deserves huge props. Sec­ond, the sto­ries are actu­al­ly a lit­tle com­i­cal when you read the details. So much so that “saved” might be gen­er­ous on the burn­ing house. Still, boss.

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 God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a stu­dent brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm. Worth watch­ing as you pre­pare to return to cam­pus. First shared in vol­ume 181.

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 300

some of the arti­cles have high­er-qual­i­ty argu­ments than the norm

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 300, which is how many Spar­tans it takes to fend off a Per­sian army.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Men Behave Bad­ly — A Review (Rob Hen­der­son, Quil­lette): “Intrigu­ing­ly, men and women con­verge in their answers when asked what per­cent­age of men would be will­ing to com­mit rape. Women esti­mate that about one-third of men would com­mit rape if there were no con­se­quences, and about one-third of men report that they would com­mit rape if they believed they could get away with it.” The author is a PhD can­di­date at Cam­bridge review­ing a book by a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing through­out. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Proof That Polit­i­cal Priv­i­lege Is Harm­ful for Chris­tian­i­ty (Nilay Saiya, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a peer-reviewed study pub­lished this month in the jour­nal Soci­ol­o­gy of Reli­gion, my coau­thor and I chal­lenge the per­ceived wis­dom that edu­ca­tion and afflu­ence spell Christianity’s demise. In our sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of a glob­al sam­ple of 166 coun­tries from 2010 to 2020, we find that the most impor­tant deter­mi­nant of Chris­t­ian vital­i­ty is the extent to which gov­ern­ments give offi­cial sup­port to Chris­tian­i­ty through their laws and poli­cies. How­ev­er, it is not in the way devout believ­ers might expect.”
  3. The Redemp­tion of Justin Bieber (Zach Baron, GQ): “And then there is God. If you ask Chance the Rap­per why he and his friend seem so hap­py in an indus­try that tends to grind peo­ple to dust, he will answer with­out hes­i­ta­tion. ‘Both of us, our secret sauce is Jesus,’ Chance says. ‘Justin doesn’t fake the funk. He goes to Jesus with his prob­lems, he goes to Jesus with his suc­cess­es. He calls me just to talk about Jesus.’ ”
  4. In Decid­ing Ful­ton v. Philadel­phia, the Supreme Court Should Remem­ber That Fos­ter Care Is for the Chil­dren (James Dwyer, Nation­al Review): “But fos­ter care is not a pub­lic accom­mo­da­tion nor a ser­vice to ‘the pub­lic.’ Chil­dren are not gener­ic goods for sale (like donuts or cups of cof­fee), to which every­one has an equal right. Instead, when the gov­ern­ment is mak­ing deci­sions on behalf of fos­ter chil­dren, it is oblig­at­ed to act only in that child’s best inter­est.” The author is a law prof at William and Mary and this arti­cle is real­ly good.
  5. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed:
    • COVID-19 Rewired Our Brains (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “At some point, the pan­dem­ic — the pro­vi­sion­al and prac­ti­cal judg­ments in favor of cau­tion that can jus­ti­fy restric­tive behav­iors — became an unshake­able moral pur­pose. Actu­al weigh­ing of risks went out the win­dow: There’s a dead­ly dis­ease out there; my actions can con­tribute to the end of the dis­ease or to its spread­ing in per­pe­tu­ity. ” This artic­u­lates some­thing I’ve dim­ly felt. Very good.
    • The Lib­er­als Who Can’t Quit Lock­down (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “But per­son­al deci­sions dur­ing the coro­n­avirus cri­sis are fraught because they seem sym­bol­ic of people’s broad­er val­ue sys­tems. When vac­ci­nat­ed adults refuse to see friends indoors, they’re work­ing through the trau­ma of the past year, in which the bro­ken­ness of America’s med­ical sys­tem was so evi­dent. When they keep their kids out of play­grounds and urge friends to stay dis­tanced at small out­door pic­nics, they are con­tin­u­ing the spir­it of the past year, when civic duty has been expressed through lone­ly asceti­cism. For many peo­ple, this kind of behav­ior is a form of good cit­i­zen­ship. That’s a hard idea to give up.”
    • Believe Sci­ence: Get Vac­ci­nat­ed. Then Relax. (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, once we are stuck inside it is very hard to unstick our­selves. I’m try­ing to remind myself of this truth when I find myself want­i­ng to berate friends who, ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, look at me with crazy eyes when I sug­gest com­ing over for din­ner. PTSD might be too strong a descrip­tor, but it’s not so far off either.”
    • Data Shows White Evan­gel­i­cals And Catholics More Like­ly to Get Vac­cine Than ‘Nones’ and Gen­er­al Pub­lic (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion Unplugged): “…when the sam­ple is bro­ken down into the three of the largest reli­gious groups: White evan­gel­i­cals, White Catholics and the reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed, some dis­par­i­ties begin to emerge. It’s note­wor­thy that White Chris­tians were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to get the vac­cine than the gen­er­al pub­lic between Jan­u­ary and April. In the lat­est wave of the sur­vey, near­ly 60% of White Catholics had been vac­ci­nat­ed and just about half of White evan­gel­i­cals said the same. It was the reli­gious “nones” that were lag­ging far behind, with only 31% indi­cat­ing that they had received one dose.” That is def­i­nite­ly not the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from the media, but it is the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from my friends. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Patents are Not the Prob­lem! (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Patents are not the prob­lem. All of the vac­cine man­u­fac­tur­ers are try­ing to increase sup­ply as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. Bil­lions of dos­es are being produced–more than ever before in the his­to­ry of the world. Licens­es are wide­ly avail­able.… Plas­tic bags are a big­ger bot­tle­neck than patents. The US embar­go on vac­cine sup­plies to India was pre­cise­ly that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion used the DPA to pri­or­i­tize things like biore­ac­tor bags and fil­ters to US sup­pli­ers and that meant that India’s Serum Insti­tute was hav­ing trou­ble get­ting its pro­duc­tion lines ready for Novavax. Cure­Vac, anoth­er poten­tial mRNA vac­cine, is also find­ing it dif­fi­cult to find sup­plies due to US restric­tions (which means sup­plies are short every­where).” Loose­ly relat­ed, but such a glo­ri­ous rant I had to share it.
    • The ori­gin of COVID: Did peo­ple or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? (Nicholas Wade, Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists): “Sci­ence is sup­pos­ed­ly a self-cor­rect­ing com­mu­ni­ty of experts who con­stant­ly check each other’s work. So why didn’t oth­er virol­o­gists point out that the Ander­sen group’s argu­ment was full of absurd­ly large holes? Per­haps because in today’s uni­ver­si­ties speech can be very cost­ly. Careers can be destroyed for step­ping out of line. Any virol­o­gist who chal­lenges the community’s declared view risks hav­ing his next grant appli­ca­tion turned down by the pan­el of fel­low virol­o­gists that advis­es the gov­ern­ment grant dis­tri­b­u­tion agency.” Very thor­ough, very read­able, very per­sua­sive. There is a real chance humans are respon­si­ble for COVID and we need to inves­ti­gate it.
  6. How the Pen­ta­gon Start­ed Tak­ing U.F.O.s Seri­ous­ly (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “Despite the fact that most adults car­ry around excep­tion­al­ly good cam­era tech­nol­o­gy in their pock­ets, most U.F.O. pho­tos and videos remain mad­den­ing­ly indis­tinct, but the for­mer Pen­ta­gon offi­cial implied that the gov­ern­ment pos­sess­es stark visu­al doc­u­men­ta­tion; Eli­zon­do and Mel­lon have said the same thing.”
  7. I Became a Moth­er at 25, and I’m Not Sor­ry I Didn’t Wait (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “But what of hav­ing chil­dren — or get­ting mar­ried, for that mat­ter — before estab­lish­ing one­self? That is: What to say to the young per­son who might con­sid­er those kinds of com­mit­ments if not for the final­i­ty of it all, the sense that she may be mak­ing some­body else before know­ing who she her­self real­ly is?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 281

inter­est­ing things from Christ­mas week 2020

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.

As fore­told, slight­ly delayed this week and will like­ly be a day off next week as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Apply­ing Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples in the work­place (Vann Ky, per­son­al blog): “These prin­ci­ples have helped me devel­op work ethics and make an impact, not just at my cur­rent com­pa­ny but also when I was a col­lege stu­dent.” Vann is an alum­na.
  2. When You Can’t Just ‘Trust the Sci­ence’ (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Last month [the CDC’s] Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee on Immu­niza­tion Prac­tices pro­duced a work­ing doc­u­ment that’s a mas­ter­piece of para-sci­en­tif­ic effort, in which ques­tions that are legit­i­mate­ly med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic (who will the vac­cine help the most), ques­tions that are more logis­ti­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal (which pat­tern of dis­tri­b­u­tion will be eas­i­er to put in place) and moral ques­tions about who deserves a vac­cine are all jum­bled up, assessed with a form of pseu­do-rig­or that resem­bles some­one bluff­ing the way through a McK­in­sey job inter­view and then used to jus­ti­fy the con­clu­sion that we should vac­ci­nate essen­tial work­ers before seniors … because seniors are more like­ly to be priv­i­leged and white.”
    • Why Did So Many Doc­tors Become Nazis? (Ash­ley K. Fer­nades, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “It is wor­thy of empha­sis that although many pro­fes­sions (includ­ing law) were ‘tak­en in’ by Nazi phi­los­o­phy, doc­tors and nurs­es had a pecu­liar­ly strong attrac­tion to it. Robert N. Proc­tor (1988) notes that physi­cians joined the Nazi par­ty in droves (near­ly 50% by 1945), much high­er than any oth­er pro­fes­sion. Physi­cians were sev­en times more like­ly to join the SS than oth­er employed Ger­man males.” The author is a physi­cian and a bioethi­cist at The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty. 
    • Ore­gon Hos­pi­tals Did­n’t Have Short­ages. So Why Were Dis­abled Peo­ple Denied Care? (Joseph Shapiro, NPR): “There’s no rea­son that these exam­ples would occur more fre­quent­ly in Ore­gon than in oth­er states. But the fight for that anony­mous woman with an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty peeled back the cur­tain on health care deci­sion-mak­ing in Ore­gon in a way that did not hap­pen in oth­er states. That activism led to change in Ore­gon — includ­ing anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion leg­is­la­tion and new statewide poli­cies.”
    • How Much Herd Immu­ni­ty Is Enough? (Don­ald G. McNeil, New York Times): “In a tele­phone inter­view the next day, Dr. Fau­ci acknowl­edged that he had slow­ly but delib­er­ate­ly been mov­ing the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, part­ly based on new sci­ence, and part­ly on his gut feel­ing that the coun­try is final­ly ready to hear what he real­ly thinks.”
  3. The Death and Life of an Admis­sions Algo­rithm (Lilah Burke, Insid­er High­er Edu­ca­tion): “For exam­ple, let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion con­tain­ing the words ‘best,’ ‘award,’ ‘research’ or ‘Ph.D.’ are pre­dic­tive of admis­sion — and can lead to a high­er score — while let­ters con­tain­ing the words ‘good,’ ‘lass,’ ‘pro­gram­ming’ or ‘tech­nol­o­gy’ are pre­dic­tive of rejec­tion. A high­er grade point aver­age means an appli­cant is more like­ly to be accept­ed, as does the name of an elite col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty on the résumé. With­in the sys­tem, insti­tu­tions were encod­ed into the cat­e­gories ‘elite,’ ‘good’ and ‘oth­er,’ based on a sur­vey of UT com­put­er sci­ence fac­ul­ty.”
    • Inter­est­ing­ly, the crit­i­cisms peo­ple made of the algo­rithm are not actu­al­ly crit­i­cisms of the algo­rithm. They are crit­i­cisms of the admis­sions com­mit­tee itself.
  4. An Advent Lament in the Pan­dem­ic (Michael Luo, The New York­er): “The pan­dem­ic in 2020 has held a mir­ror to Chris­tian­i­ty, just as the epi­demics of antiq­ui­ty did, but today’s reflec­tion car­ries the poten­tial to repulse rather than attract.”
    • Curi­ous­ly, the spe­cif­ic exam­ples he cites are most­ly pos­i­tive but he allows the neg­a­tive exam­ple to col­or the entire piece. This is what I have seen as well — vir­tu­al­ly all church­es are act­ing respon­si­bly but the pub­lic focus is on the ones that aren’t.
  5. Why Does It Mat­ter that Jesus Was Born of a Vir­gin? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “Even if pro­fess­ing Chris­tians accept the vir­gin birth, many would have a hard time artic­u­lat­ing why the doc­trine real­ly mat­ters.”
  6. A Game Design­er’s Analy­sis of QAnon (Reed Berkowitz, Medi­um): “When I saw QAnon, I knew exact­ly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays peo­ple.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. 117 Wit­ness­es Detail North Korea’s Per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Drawn from expe­ri­ences stretch­ing from 1990 to 2019, KFI’s report lists scores of vio­la­tions. These include 36 instances of pun­ish­ment met­ed out to fam­i­ly mem­bers, 36 instances of tor­ture, and 20 exe­cu­tions. Women and girls rep­re­sent 60 per­cent of the vic­tims.… Chris­tians total near­ly 80 per­cent: 215 cas­es.” The 98 page report which inspired this arti­cle is Per­se­cut­ing Faith:Documenting reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions in North Korea

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 Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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 278

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. Why Oba­ma Fears for Our Democ­ra­cy (Jef­frey Gold­berg inter­view­ing Barack Oba­ma, The Atlantic) “You men­tioned ear­li­er that I’m in some ways a nev­er-Trump con­ser­v­a­tive. That’s not quite right, but what is true is that tem­pera­men­tal­ly I am sym­pa­thet­ic to a cer­tain strain of con­ser­vatism in the sense that I’m not just a mate­ri­al­ist. I’m not an eco­nom­ic deter­min­ist. I think it’s impor­tant, but I think there are things oth­er than stuff and mon­ey and income—the reli­gious cri­tique of mod­ern soci­ety, that we’ve lost that sense of com­mu­ni­ty.” There is an absurd­ly lengthy intro­duc­tion. Skip down to “Our con­ver­sa­tion has been edit­ed for clar­i­ty and con­ci­sion” about a fifth of the way down the page.
  2. The Chil­dren of Porn­hub (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “The world has often been obliv­i­ous to child sex­u­al abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we pros­e­cute indi­vid­u­als like Jef­frey Epstein or R. Kel­ly. But we should also stand up to cor­po­ra­tions that sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly exploit chil­dren. With Porn­hub, we have Jef­frey Epstein times 1,000.” Kristof goes out of his way to make it clear that he is not con­demn­ing pornog­ra­phy itself, just abuse. I’ll go far­ther: pornog­ra­phy is vile and I think it is a nation­al shame. If you watch porn, know that for­give­ness and free­dom are avail­able in Christ and I a hap­py to talk with you about it.
  3. The Mass Mur­der of Niger­ian Chris­tians (Rab­bi Abra­ham Coop­er and Rev. John­nie Moore, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Offi­cials’ ini­tial refusal to attribute the attack in Kaduna to Islamists—in any form—reflects a black hole of denial that is pro­nounced in Niger­ian pol­i­tics. This endem­ic self-cen­sor­ship has now been absorbed by many pro­fes­sion­als in the for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment who have adopt­ed a pol­i­cy of not men­tion­ing the reli­gious com­po­nents of these out­rages at any cost, in order to pre­vent being accused of politi­ciz­ing reli­gion. This denial serves as an accel­er­ant of reli­gion-fueled conflict—until the facts and blood on the ground can no longer be denied.”
  4. Big Gov­ern­men­t’s Over­looked Amer­i­cans (Nicholas Eber­stadt, Nation­al Review): “How could Amer­i­can health author­i­ties com­plete­ly miss a domes­tic epi­dem­ic of such sever­i­ty and dura­tion? Even dur­ing the Cold War, remem­ber, U.S. researchers were quick­er to spot the advent of the health cri­sis for the work­ing-age pop­u­la­tion of the Sovi­et Union: and this dur­ing the hey­day of Sovi­et dis­in­for­ma­tion and strate­gic decep­tion, long before glas­nost. What­ev­er else may be said about this sig­nal U.S. fail­ure in dis­ease pre­ven­tion and con­trol, it occa­sioned remark­ably lit­tle reflec­tion, self-crit­i­cism, and course cor­rec­tion on the part of America’s pub­lic-health appa­ra­tus.” 
  5. The Supreme Court Was Right to Block Cuomo’s Reli­gious Restric­tions (Michael W. McConnell and Max Raskin, New York Times): “In the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, no one knew what worked and what didn’t. Courts were under­stand­ably reluc­tant to sec­ond-guess. But we are now 10 months into the pan­dem­ic. Why are gov­ern­ments still pick­ing and choos­ing among con­sti­tu­tion­al rights with­out explain­ing their rea­son­ing?” McConnell is a Stan­ford law prof, Raskin a law prof at New York Uni­ver­si­ty.
  6. Den­i­grat­ing Hoover (Vic­tor Davis Han­son, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “[Some Stan­ford stu­dents and fac­ul­ty com­plain about Hoover, yet] Hoover schol­ars as a gen­er­al rule do not fix­ate on Stan­ford, whether the Uni­ver­si­ty, its stu­dents or its pro­fes­sors, for their per­ceived laps­es in judge­ment or con­tro­ver­sies that often can arise at large cam­pus­es — such as the recent sen­sa­tion­al alle­ga­tions con­cern­ing admis­sions fraud; a recent Stan­ford affil­i­at­ed vis­it­ing researcher arrest­ed for alleged­ly hid­ing ties with the Chi­nese mil­i­tary; Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion alle­ga­tions that Stan­ford had not prop­er­ly and ful­ly dis­closed, as required, siz­able gifts from Chi­nese gov­ern­ment-relat­ed sources; sex scan­dal alle­ga­tions at the busi­ness school; efforts to dis­rupt a cam­pus speak­er while spread­ing a grotesque anti-Semit­ic fly­er; and gen­er­al con­cern on the cam­pus con­cern­ing a wave of anti-Semit­ic inci­dents.”
  7. Mis­aligned incen­tives and the scale of incar­cer­a­tion in the Unit­ed States (Aurélie Ouss, Jour­nal of Pub­lic Eco­nom­ics): “Typ­i­cal­ly, prison is paid for at the state lev­el, but coun­ty employ­ees (such as judges, pros­e­cu­tors or pro­ba­tion offi­cers) deter­mine time spent in cus­tody. I exploit a nat­ur­al exper­i­ment that shift­ed the cost bur­den of juve­nile incar­cer­a­tion from state to coun­ties, keep­ing over­all costs and respon­si­bil­i­ties unchanged. This result­ed in a stark drop in incar­cer­a­tion, and no increase in arrests, sug­gest­ing an over-use of prison when costs are not inter­nal­ized. The large mag­ni­tude of the change sug­gests that mis­aligned incen­tives in crim­i­nal jus­tice may be a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to the cur­rent lev­els of incar­cer­a­tion in the Unit­ed States.” The author is a crim­i­nol­o­gist at U Penn. Found via Tyler Cowen.

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 Epi­dem­ic of Dis­be­lief (Bar­bara Bradley Hager­ty, The Atlantic): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, inves­ti­ga­tors had assumed that some­one who assaults a stranger by the rail­road tracks is noth­ing like the man who assaults his co-worker or his girl­friend. But it turns out that the space between acquain­tance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleve­land inves­ti­ga­tors uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were sur­prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force iden­ti­fied dozens of mys­tery rapists this way.” Infu­ri­at­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 211.

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 258

Is 650 a lot? it depends. Pen­nies? No. Mur­ders? Yes. Coro­n­avirus cas­es? Depends on where they spread.

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. Church­es Emerge as Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cas­es (Kate Con­ger, Jack Healy and Lucy Tomp­kins, New York Times): “More than 650 coro­n­avirus cas­es have been linked to near­ly 40 church­es and reli­gious events across the Unit­ed States since the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, with many of them erupt­ing over the last month as Amer­i­cans resumed their pre-pan­dem­ic activ­i­ties, accord­ing to a New York Times data­base.” 
    • Are Church­es “A Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cas­es?” (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “If I have $3,000,000 in the bank and you give me anoth­er $650, you’d hard­ly be in the posi­tion to claim that you had made a major con­tri­bu­tion to my wealth. Sim­i­lar­ly, adding 650 cas­es to America’s total case­load of 3 mil­lion is no more than a blip that leaves 99.98% attrib­ut­able to oth­er caus­es.”
    • Church­es, Coro­n­avirus, and the New York Times (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It is strange (at best) to use words like ‘major’ and ‘erupt­ed’ when describ­ing 650 cas­es. On that point, the head­line is mis­lead­ing. Hav­ing 650 cas­es in my coun­ty might be news, but 650 nation­al­ly out of three mil­lion cas­es is a head­line look­ing for a sto­ry. The real sto­ry is this: church­es are gath­er­ing and remark­ably few infec­tions are tak­ing place.”
  2. Amer­i­ca’s Racial Progress (David French, Nation­al Review): “There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that Amer­i­ca has a long his­to­ry of bru­tal and shame­ful mis­treat­ment of racial minori­ties — with black Amer­i­cans its chief vic­tims. And sec­ond, that Amer­i­ca is a great nation, and that Amer­i­can cit­i­zens (and cit­i­zens of the world) should be grate­ful for its found­ing. Per­haps no nation has done more good for more peo­ple than the Unit­ed States. It was and is a bea­con of lib­er­ty and pros­per­i­ty in a world long awash in tyran­ny and pover­ty.”
  3. A Let­ter on Jus­tice and Open Debate (many sig­na­to­ries, Harpers): “The restric­tion of debate, whether by a repres­sive gov­ern­ment or an intol­er­ant soci­ety, invari­ably hurts those who lack pow­er and makes every­one less capa­ble of demo­c­ra­t­ic par­tic­i­pa­tion. The way to defeat bad ideas is by expo­sure, argu­ment, and per­sua­sion, not by try­ing to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between jus­tice and free­dom, which can­not exist with­out each oth­er.”
    • Promi­nent Artists and Writ­ers Warn of an ‘Intol­er­ant Cli­mate’ (Jen­nifer Schuessler and Eliz­a­beth A. Har­ris, New York Times): “‘We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sit­ting around writ­ing this let­ter,’ Mr. Williams, who is African-Amer­i­can, said. ‘It includes plen­ty of Black thinkers, Mus­lim thinkers, Jew­ish thinkers, peo­ple who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.’”
    • end­ing the cha­rade (Fred­die deBoer, per­son­al blog): “Please, think for a minute and con­sid­er: what does it say when a com­plete­ly gener­ic endorse­ment of free speech and open debate is in and of itself imme­di­ate­ly diag­nosed as anti-pro­gres­sive, as anti-left?”(empha­sis in orig­i­nal)
  4. Lazarus Chak­w­era: Malaw­i’s pres­i­dent who ‘argued with God’ (BBC): “In the unmis­tak­able cadence of a preach­er, Malaw­i’s new Pres­i­dent, Lazarus Chak­w­era, appealed for uni­ty in his coun­try short­ly after he was sworn in on Sun­day. The day of the week seemed fit­ting as the for­mer head of the Malawi Assem­blies of God, one of the largest Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions in the coun­try, treat­ed the stage like a pul­pit to inspire fer­vour with his words.”
  5. Slate Star Codex and Sil­i­con Valley’s War Against the Media (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “The divi­sion between the Grey and Blue tribes is often ren­dered in the sim­plis­tic terms of a demo­graph­ic encounter between white, nerdi­ly enti­tled men in hood­ies on one side and diverse, effete, artis­tic snobs on the oth­er.” Inter­est­ing through­out. 
  6. Chris­tian­i­ty’s Covert Suc­cess (Mark Too­ley, Prov­i­dence) “I quote an Indi­an pro­fes­sor who says that Chris­tian­i­ty pro­ceeds in two ways, through conversion—which is obvi­ous, that’s how peo­ple tend to think Chris­tian­i­ty precedes—but he then says, through sec­u­lar­iza­tion. And I think he’s absolute­ly right. And I think that the assump­tion of peo­ple in the West that the sec­u­lar is some­how neu­tral, that if you’re sec­u­lar, you’ve some­how escaped the bounds of cul­tur­al con­tin­gency, couldn’t be more wrong.”
  7. On Reli­gion, the Supreme Court Pro­tects the Right to Be Dif­fer­ent (Michael McConnell, New York Times): “The court may be polit­i­cal, but its pol­i­tics is of the mid­dle, and of a par­tic­u­lar kind of mid­dle, one that is com­mit­ted to plu­ral­ism and dif­fer­ence rather than to the advance­ment of par­tic­u­lar moral stances.” The author is a Stan­ford law prof.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 237

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 Gang Is Jesus” (Alex Cuadros, Harpers Mag­a­zine): “A year ago, I flew to Rio and fol­lowed Mar­tins around for a few weeks as he preached. I hoped to rec­on­cile two com­pet­ing nar­ra­tives of the evan­gel­i­cal church’s role in the fave­las. For the country’s poor, all but neglect­ed by the state, church­es serve not only as a source of spir­i­tu­al sal­va­tion but as a haven of last resort—a place to find com­mu­ni­ty, job tips, and coun­sel­ing, or sim­ply to gath­er and sing with­out fear of vio­lence. Yet sto­ries of crooked pas­tors abound in the new Brazil; in recent years, sev­er­al have been caught trans­port­ing weapons for the drug trade. While many gang mem­bers find in Jesus the courage to quit this life, oth­ers seem to have inter­nal­ized a skewed set of bib­li­cal lessons, even com­mit­ting acts of vio­lence in Jesus’ name.”
  2. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty: Not Just for Social Con­ser­v­a­tives (David French, The Dis­patch): “The beau­ty of civ­il lib­er­ties case law is that each law­ful exer­cise of lib­er­ty rein­forces anoth­er. So it is with this case. Pro­gres­sives will like­ly cheer that these four activists will escape pun­ish­ment for sav­ing immi­grant lives. And which cas­es helped them win? One of them was Hob­by Lob­by—an asser­tion of reli­gious free­dom by Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives against the Oba­ma administration’s con­tra­cep­tion man­date, a cause that many pro­gres­sives despised.”
  3. Lov­ing to Know (N.T. Wright, First Things): “The sci­en­tist may be fas­ci­nat­ed by the way a can­cer cell grows, but that fas­ci­na­tion will increase his deter­mi­na­tion to stop it in its tracks. The his­to­ri­an may be intrigued by the caus­es of the First World War, but she may well hope that her inves­ti­ga­tion of the com­plex tan­gle of moti­va­tions will help us spot future warn­ing signs. And the par­ent who enjoys watch­ing the child climb­ing a tree will, as a mat­ter of love, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly affirm the child’s free­dom and seek to mit­i­gate any clear dan­ger. Love is always on the look­out.” This arti­cle is a lit­tle uneven but very insight­ful at places.
  4. Edu­cat­ed Fools (Thomas Geoghe­gan, The New Repub­lic): “Mer­i­toc­ra­cy has its own deep state—with secrets unknown even to those of us who are part of it. And the worst thing is the way it can taunt the work­ing class with the ideals of the Enlight­en­ment, when it is we mer­i­to­crat­ic lib­er­als who have the great­est inter­est in lim­it­ing its spread. We think we’re act­ing in such good faith in push­ing for col­lege and even com­mu­ni­ty col­lege edu­ca­tion. But real sal­va­tion can be offered only to a few, on a retail, not a whole­sale, basis: Instead of rais­ing peo­ple up col­lec­tive­ly, we’re being care­ful to do it one diplo­ma at a time.
”
    • The author’s blind­ness to the con­tin­ued exis­tence of church­es stood out to me. “There is no foothold left in big cities, or any­place else where the glob­al win­ners live, for high school grad­u­ates to exer­cise even a tiny bit of pow­er. There’s no church to slot into as a dea­con…” (empha­sis added) Fact check: church­es are flour­ish­ing in big cities.
  5. Nige­ria is a killing field of defense­less Chris­tians (Reli­gion Unplugged): “The list of Niger­ian Chris­tians slaugh­tered, shot dead, hacked to death, stran­gled and tor­tured to death, grows by the day. From vil­lages in the arid North­ern Nige­ria to ham­lets in the lush Savan­nah South, wail­ing, mourn­ing, and curs­es pierce the air, while tears fall from tired eyes.”
    • Relat­ed: All Across Nige­ria, Chris­tians Marched Sun­day to Protest Per­se­cu­tion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Ade­boye and his con­gre­ga­tion, one of the largest in the world, answered the call issued by the Chris­t­ian Asso­ci­a­tion of Nige­ria (CAN) for a three-day fast this past week­end, con­clud­ing in a prayer walk. Based on reports from its state chap­ters and local media, CAN esti­mates 5 mil­lion peo­ple marched in 28 of Nigeria’s 36 states on Sun­day.”
  6. The Ene­mies of Writ­ing (George Pack­er, The Atlantic): “Fear breeds self-cen­sor­ship, and self-cen­sor­ship is more insid­i­ous than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a sur­er way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfet­tered mind. A writer can still write while hid­ing from the thought police. But a writer who car­ries the thought police around in his head, who always feels com­pelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my ter­mi­nol­o­gy cor­rect? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my ene­mies? Could it get me ratioed on Twit­ter?—that writer’s words will soon become life­less.”
  7. 11 Rea­sons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”) (Tim Fer­riss, per­son­al blog): “In that short span of time, my month­ly blog audi­ence had explod­ed from a small group of friends (20–30?) to the cur­rent size of Prov­i­dence, Rhode Island (180,–200,000 peo­ple). Well, let’s dig into that. What do we know of Prov­i­dence? Here’s one snip­pet from Wikipedia, and bold­ing is mine: ‘Com­pared to the nation­al aver­age, Prov­i­dence has an aver­age rate of vio­lent crime and a high­er rate of prop­er­ty crime per 100,000 inhab­i­tants. In 2010, there were 15 mur­ders, down from 24 in 2009. In 2010, Prov­i­dence fared bet­ter regard­ing vio­lent crime than most of its peer cities. Spring­field, Mass­a­chu­setts, has approx­i­mate­ly 20,000 few­er res­i­dents than Prov­i­dence but report­ed 15 mur­ders in 2009, the same num­ber of homi­cides as Prov­i­dence but a slight­ly high­er rate per capi­ta.’ The point is this: you don’t need to do any­thing wrong to get death threats, rape threats, etc. You just need a big enough audi­ence. Think of your­self as the leader of a tribe or the may­or of a city. The aver­ages will dic­tate that you get a cer­tain num­ber of cra­zies, con artists, extor­tion­ists, pos­si­ble (or actu­al) mur­der­ers, and so on.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How Can I Learn To Receive – And Give – Crit­i­cism In Light Of The Cross? (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “A believ­er is one who iden­ti­fies with all that God affirms and con­demns in Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion. In oth­er words, in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s judg­ment of me; and in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of me. Both have a rad­i­cal impact on how we take and give crit­i­cism.” This is based on a longer arti­cle (4 page PDF). (first shared in vol­ume 63)

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.