Tag: global christianity

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.

To that end, on Fri­days I’ve been shar­ing articles/resources I have found help­ful recent­ly in think­ing about broad­er cul­tur­al and soci­etal issues (be sure to see the dis­claimer at the bot­tom). May these give you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar. Past emails are archived at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links

With­out fur­ther ado, I give you the inter­est­ing things:

1. I heard a mov­ing Radi­o­lab episode: Gray’s Dona­tion. If you’ve nev­er lis­tened to Radi­o­lab before, I high­ly rec­om­mend the episodes Col­ors and Oops. If you’re into pod­casts, check out a list of thought­ful Chris­t­ian pod­casts I com­piled a while back.
2. ’A Tour of Burned Church­es’ Explores Race, Resilience, and Reli­gion in Amer­i­ca (Huff­in­g­ton Post, Christo­pher Math­ias): an inter­view with a pod­cast­er about a series he did on the burn­ing of black church­es in Amer­i­ca. I have not lis­tened to the series, but the inter­view was good.
3. Data about Adults Who Do Not Believe In God (Pew Forum) — one of the charts makes me think of a fun­ny clip about athe­ism as white priv­i­lege [the whole thing is worth watch­ing, but you can jump to the sound bite at 5:45]. There is a good sum­ma­ry of some of the take­aways at GetRe­li­gion. On a relat­ed note, there is a study in Cur­rent Biol­o­gy: The Neg­a­tive Asso­ci­a­tion Between Reli­gious­ness and Children’s Altru­ism Across The World. The com­ments on red­dit are inter­est­ing (more inter­est­ing to me than the study itself).
4. A some­what con­trar­i­an piece: Lib­er­als Are Los­ing The Cul­ture War (Mol­ly Ball, The Atlantic). A semi-response piece: This Isn’t A Cul­ture War, It’s A War On Cul­ture (The Fed­er­al­ist, David Harsanyi).
5. File under sad: The State Depart­ment Turns Its Back on Syr­i­an Chris­tians and Oth­er Non-Mus­lim Refugees (Nation­al Review, Nina Shea)
6. The sto­ry I allud­ed to in my ser­mon: How Prop 47 Helped One Man Keep His Job (KQED,  Sara Hos­sai­ni). This is an illus­tra­tion of what jus­ti­fi­ca­tion involves — a legal decree that exempts you from penal­ties the law would oth­er­wise apply (when I quote stuff in my ser­mon I try to remem­ber to share it here).
7. Quick Links:
   • A Com­ic About Heav­en (the same com­ic has a vague­ly relat­ed strip here)
   • Darth Jar Jar: this would be awe­some.
   • Why a neg­a­tive times a neg­a­tive is a pos­i­tive.  Some ran­do red­di­tor illus­trates this very suc­cinct­ly.
   • The War Between The Bar­bates: Facial Hair of the Com­man­ders of the Unit­ed States Civ­il War.

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.