Tag: guns

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 520: the honesty tax and other counterproductive things

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Hon­esty Tax (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “We set high — stu­pid­ly, coun­ter­pro­duc­tive­ly high — stan­dards and then min­i­mal­ly enforce them because full enforce­ment would be a dis­as­ter. So, almost every­one just lies. Then, the peo­ple you pun­ish are the peo­ple who are unwill­ing to lie, or who don’t know the rules about what kinds of lies are ‘nor­mal’ and what kinds are seri­ous­ly out of bounds. Those less like­ly to know these infor­mal rules are not a ran­dom­ly select­ed group of peo­ple — the more con­nec­tions you have in D.C., the more you know what ‘not to men­tion.’ But lying is bad! Select­ing for liars is bad! This may end up look­ing sort of sim­i­lar to the result you’d get if you just had a rea­son­able pol­i­cy in the first place, but it’s actu­al­ly a lot worse — you screened out every­one who wasn’t will­ing to be dis­hon­est.”
  2. What Is Man, That Thou Art Mind­ful Of Him? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): bril­liant and dif­fi­cult to excerpt. Dwarkesh Patel hosts a pod­cast with God debat­ing Iblis over whether humans are tru­ly intel­li­gent and whether bio­log­i­cal intel­li­gence is even pos­si­ble. Don’t assume it is Chris­t­ian based on the title — it is def­i­nite­ly not.
  3. What Hap­pens If No One Reads (Spencer Kla­van, The Free Press): “If Chat­G­PT could tell you what a meal tastes like, would you not feel the need to eat it? …I asked Grok about The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov and it told me, ‘We’re all a mess of con­tra­dic­tions.’ And so we are. Why didn’t Dos­toyevsky just say that?”
  4. The Mil­lion­aire Who Left Wall Street to Become a Para­medic (Christo­pher Maag, New York Times): “Jonathan Kleis­ner didn’t know what he want­ed to be when he grew up, except a suc­cess. After attend­ing Ford­ham Prep, a Jesuit high school in the Bronx, he went to Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, drop­ping out a semes­ter before grad­u­a­tion to take a job at a small trad­ing firm on Wall Street for $40,000 a year. It was 1991, it looked as if the reces­sion was over and the mood on the street was buoy­ant.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. If for no oth­er rea­son, read to see the sto­ry of 985 pound guy. Absolute­ly wild.
  5. Giv­ing peo­ple mon­ey helped less than I thought it would (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “Mul­ti­ple large, high-qual­i­ty ran­dom­ized stud­ies are find­ing that guar­an­teed income trans­fers do not appear to pro­duce sus­tained improve­ments in men­tal health, stress lev­els, phys­i­cal health, child devel­op­ment out­comes or employ­ment.”
    • Inspired by the above arti­cle but going in some dif­fer­ent direc­tions: Why I Am Not a Lib­er­al (David Brooks, New York Times): “Piper’s essay kicked up a bit of an inter­net storm. You might have thought the pro­gres­sive reac­tion would have been: We need to keep giv­ing poor peo­ple mon­ey, but we also need to focus on the human and behav­ioral fac­tors that will enable them to build com­fort­able, inde­pen­dent lives. But that wasn’t the reac­tion. The pro­gres­sives I saw dou­bled down on the the­sis: Poor peo­ple just need mon­ey.”
  6. Sick Peo­ple Are Sick (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “It will nev­er stop amaz­ing and depress­ing me, real­ly, when the pub­lic reacts with shock when peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness behave like peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness… In our elite culture’s eager­ness to des­tig­ma­tize, we’ve made men­tal ill­ness unse­ri­ous. We’ve reduced it to Tik­Tok dances and ther­a­peu­tic hash­tags. ‘It’s OK to not be OK,’ says the cheer­ful let­ter­ing, but there’s always the implied caveat: it’s OK so long as ‘not being OK’ looks like cry­ing in an endear­ing way, jour­nal­ing, eat­ing ice cream straight from the car­ton, and then bounc­ing back with resilience. The real tex­ture of seri­ous men­tal ill­ness — the para­noia, the rages, the break­downs, the cata­to­nia — doesn’t fit into that frame­work, so when it arrives peo­ple don’t know how to metab­o­lize it.”
    • This is com­mon at Stan­ford. Peo­ple love the rhetoric of sup­port­ing peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness up until it’s actu­al­ly hard and dis­tress­ing.
  7. Your Rivals Aren’t Respon­si­ble for Mass Shoot­ings (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…while the ten­den­cy to extreme and apoc­a­lyp­tic rhetoric is a con­sis­tent fea­ture of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics (even a demo­c­ra­t­ic birthright), most of the killers shoot­ing up schools and church­es or tar­get­ing politi­cians for assas­si­na­tions are not real­ly par­tic­i­pants in this polar­iza­tion. They aren’t tak­ing wok­e­ness or pop­ulism too lit­er­al­ly or too far; they’re fol­low­ing oth­er direc­tives and act­ing on oth­er pur­pos­es entire­ly.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Tay­lor Swift Engage­ment Over­turned As Ref­er­ee Deter­mines Travis Kel­ce’s Knee Did­n’t Touch The Ground (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Bing (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Ven­mo (Texts from Super­heroes)
  • Wave­func­tion Col­lapse (xkcd)
  • How Ani­me Took Over Amer­i­ca (Joshua Hunt, New York Times): “A recent sur­vey of over 4,000 Amer­i­can adults showed that 42 per­cent of all Gen Z respon­dents watched ani­me every week, far high­er than the 25 per­cent of Gen Z respon­dents who fol­lowed the N.F.L.” — a visu­al­ly stun­ning arti­cle
  • Do Not Dis­turb (Pearls Before Swine)
  • The top col­lege cam­pus­es to find celebri­ties — and their kids (Christo­pher Cameron, New York Post): “Con­grat­u­la­tions, the high school class of 2025 (rah-rah-rah!) is ready to matric­u­late! Your fresh­ly sprout­ed schol­ar spent the last four years grow­ing their GPA, acing their APs and crush­ing their SATs in prepa­ra­tion for brain-bend­ing cur­ricu­lum. But are they ready for the most advan­ta­geous aspect of life at a top col­lege: social­iz­ing with star­dom?  It’s Math­e­mat­ics 101. Half of Hol­ly­wood canoodling x 20 years = a crop of celebri­ty scions who are now rul­ing the cam­pus­es of New England’s old­est insti­tu­tions, as well as the increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive so-called ‘new Ivies’ (schools like Notre Dame, New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, Emory, Rice, Van­der­bilt, North­west­ern and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty).”

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 353

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 353, the 71st prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I saw this gem on Twit­ter: “I don’t wish to sound apoc­a­lyp­tic about this, but one has the sense that at present our soci­ety is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly char­ac­ter­ized by wild­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate account­abil­i­ty for triv­ial trans­gres­sions and zero account­abil­i­ty for pro­found insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure.” (David Polan­sky, co-founder of LinkedIn)
  2. The Rob­ber Baroness of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia (Maia Sil­ber, New York­er): “The university’s most vital pur­pose, Stan­ford explained in an address to its Board of Trustees a few years after her husband’s death, was the devel­op­ment of the student’s ‘soul germ.’ She urged the trustees to eschew class­rooms in favor of shops and work­shops that would ‘dig­ni­fy labor’ by teach­ing future work­ers to ‘use their hands deft­ly and use­ful­ly.’ Stan­ford believed that, in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing voca­tion­al train­ing, the uni­ver­si­ty should incul­cate the val­ues of faith, thrift, and absti­nence of var­i­ous kinds. She and her hus­band banned alco­hol from the dor­mi­to­ries and capped the num­ber of women under­grad­u­ates at five hun­dred.”
  3. 78 Min­utes (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “I know it’s a sta­tis­ti­cal anom­aly. I know it almost nev­er hap­pens. I know there are a mil­lion things I wor­ry less about that hap­pen with greater reg­u­lar­i­ty and worse effects; but those things are unfor­tu­nate, and this is evil. Mis­for­tune is awful, but this was some­thing worse. This was tor­ture. This was cru­el. This was inten­tion­al. The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters.”
  4. How did the IR com­mu­ni­ty get Russia/Ukraine so wrong? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The IR com­mu­ni­ty is risk-averse, and pre­serv­ing of its aca­d­e­m­ic rep­u­ta­tions, and thus its mem­bers are less will­ing to make bold pre­dic­tions than say pun­dits are. You might even think that is good, all things con­sid­ered, but it will help explain the missed pre­dic­tions here.” Many inter­est­ing con­sid­er­a­tions, fol­low-up at Data on IR schol­ars and their views on Russia/Ukraine.
  5. Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Polit­i­cal Iden­ti­ty (Eric Kauf­mann, CSPI): “The youth­ful surge is main­ly about LGBT iden­ti­ty, with con­sid­er­ably less change in sex­u­al behav­ior. The rise is great­est for bisex­u­al­i­ty, espe­cial­ly among females, with less change for gays and les­bians. The growth in LGBT iden­ti­fi­ca­tion shows no signs of slow­ing down among the young, but there is com­pelling evi­dence that gen­der non­con­for­mi­ty peaked around 2020 and declined in 2021. It appears less preva­lent among teenagers than those in their ear­ly twen­ties.” Plus a fas­ci­nat­ing Twit­ter thread by the author high­light­ing key details — so much data in this piece to con­tem­plate. Spicy through­out.
  6. The Pope’s Secret Back Chan­nel to Hitler (David Kertzer, The Atlantic): “As the head of a large inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion, his over­rid­ing aim in nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler’s emis­sary was pro­tect­ing the insti­tu­tion­al resources and pre­rog­a­tives of the Roman Catholic Church in the Third Reich. If the only goal was to pro­tect the wel­fare of the insti­tu­tion­al Church, his efforts could well be judged a suc­cess. But for those who see the papa­cy as a posi­tion of great moral lead­er­ship, the rev­e­la­tions of Pius XII’s secret nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler must come as a sharp dis­ap­point­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. We Need to Com­pli­cate the Neg­a­tive World (Trevin Wax, Gospel Coali­tion): “…tak­ing a stand for true Chris­tian­i­ty has always been cost­ly. Chris­t­ian min­is­ters lost their jobs in the 1960s for doing noth­ing more than allow­ing African Amer­i­cans to attend wor­ship! In some way or anoth­er, we’ve been in the neg­a­tive world since the time of the New Tes­ta­ment, but the form of that hos­til­i­ty toward the faith changes depend­ing on the place and the era. And the opportunities—where soci­ety smiles on aspects of Christianity—change too. We live in pos­i­tive, neu­tral, and neg­a­tive worlds simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, depend­ing on the issue.“This is quite good.

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 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, and I fea­tured anoth­er arti­cle by him short­ly before this one. First shared back in 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 352

a heart­break­ing week

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 352, which is (I am informed) the num­ber of ways to place 9 queens on a 9×9 chess­board so that they can­not attack each oth­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The South­ern Bap­tist abuse cri­sis:
    • South­ern Bap­tists Refused to Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pas­tors (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Guide­post Solu­tions, the third-par­ty inves­tiga­tive firm, wants the 13-mil­lion-mem­ber denom­i­na­tion to cre­ate an online data­base of abusers, offer com­pen­sa­tion for sur­vivors, sharply lim­it non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments, and estab­lish a new enti­ty ded­i­cat­ed to respond­ing to abuse. The direc­tives in the 288-page report will sound famil­iar for sur­vivors and advo­cates, who have been call­ing for those mea­sures all along.”
    • This Is the South­ern Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Indeed, the very ones who rebuked me and oth­ers for using the word cri­sis in ref­er­ence to South­ern Bap­tist sex­u­al abuse not only knew that there was such a cri­sis but were qui­et­ly doc­u­ment­ing it, even as they told those fight­ing for reform that such crimes rarely hap­pened among “peo­ple like us.” When I read the back-and-forth between some of these pres­i­dents, high-rank­ing staff, and their lawyers, I can­not help but won­der what else this can be called but a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy.”
    • No Athe­ist Has Done This Much Dam­age to the Chris­t­ian Faith (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “It’s near­ly impos­si­ble to over­state how much dam­age these new revelations—these nec­es­sary and long-over­due revelations—are doing to the Chris­t­ian wit­ness. No athe­ist, no sec­u­lar­ists or mate­ri­al­ists, could inflict near­ly as much dam­age to the Chris­t­ian faith as these lead­ers with­in the Chris­t­ian Church have done.“This is a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple: skep­tics rarely hurt the Church. Chris­tians, though, hurt the Church all the time.
    • Avoid­ing Finan­cial And Gov­er­nance Dis­as­ters (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “…in some very impor­tant ways, sex­u­al abuse and sex­u­al harass­ment in the church are effects. They are con­se­quences. They are fruits, not the root, of the problem.So what’s the cause? It’s pret­ty un-glam­orous. It doesn’t gen­er­ate as many head­lines, and when it does gen­er­ate a head­line, that head­line tends to be ignored, or quick­ly for­got­ten. And that cause is mon­ey. More specif­i­cal­ly, the love of mon­ey.… So, at a min­i­mum, I think we evan­gel­i­cals should be spend­ing as much time under­stand­ing and uncov­er­ing finan­cial fraud as we spend on sex­u­al abuse and tox­ic lead­er­ship.”
    • How the ‘Apoc­a­lyp­tic’ South­ern Bap­tist Report Almost Didn’t Hap­pen (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry­Watch): “In oth­er words, the Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee would be put in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing itself. Then-Pres­i­dent J.D. Greear was ready to move on when Benkert stood up at a micro­phone with a motion of his own, based on anoth­er sec­tion of bylaw 29. ‘I would like the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a motion to over­rule the Com­mit­tee on Order of Busi­ness at the appro­pri­ate time,’ he said. Benkert’s motion was met with applause. Then a sec­ond, and then almost all of the 15,000 local church del­e­gates, known as mes­sen­gers, raised their yel­low vot­ing cards in the air—far more than the two-thirds major­i­ty need­ed to over­rule the com­mit­tee.”
    • In ref­er­ence to the imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing arti­cle: know­ing how the sys­tem works is real­ly impor­tant. I’ve seen shady stuff hap­pen at some meet­ings but was­n’t quick enough to get to the floor or was­n’t sure enough of the rules to inter­vene. In a busi­ness meet­ing knowl­edge tru­ly is pow­er.
    • In ref­er­ence to the larg­er sto­ry, there are so many things hap­pen­ing here:
    • This is an occa­sion for lamen­ta­tion. I have long said that the Protes­tant sex­u­al abuse cri­sis will dwarf the Catholic Church’s (because we tend to have less control/screening of min­is­ters) and that both will be dwarfed by the pub­lic school cri­sis (which is yet to ful­ly reveal itself but I believe will be far worse).
    • The South­ern Bap­tist exec­u­tives gen­uine­ly had less con­trol over the situation(s) than some of their crit­ics allege, but they had far more con­trol than they pre­tend­ed and when they did act it was often to con­ceal wicked things.
    • The fact that the SBC com­mis­sioned this report and made it pub­lic is very much to their cred­it and over time will loom larg­er in the remem­brance of this.
    • The scope of the abuse, while broad, appears to be less than I feared.
    •  The SBC legal team and the for­mer exec­u­tives come off look­ing like evil reli­gious lead­ers writ­ten by a lazy hack writer. It’s stag­ger­ing­ly bad.
    • This entire deba­cle is ger­mane to the Tim Keller/winsomeness debate: do we oper­ate accord­ing to the stan­dards of our cul­ture or the stan­dards of the King­dom? Christ demands anoth­er way, and if that opens us up to neg­a­tive cul­tur­al con­se­quences (whether elec­toral defeats or ruinous law­suits) then so be it.
  2. The school shoot­ing:
    • A fourth-grad­er who sur­vived the shoot­ing says she smeared friend’s blood on her­self to appear dead (Nora Neus, CNN): “Miah said she was scared the gun­man would come back to kill her and a few oth­er sur­viv­ing friends. So, she put her hands in her friend’s blood, who laid next to her— and already looked dead—and then smeared it all over her­self to appear dead.… She says after­wards, she over­heard talk of police wait­ing out­side the school. Recount­ing this dur­ing the inter­view, she start­ed cry­ing, say­ing she just didn’t under­stand why they didn’t come inside and get them.” Heart­break­ing. Details are still com­ing out, and none of them are good.
    • Texas school shoot­er Sal­vador Ramos once cut up his face with knives ‘just for fun,’ friends say (Yaron Stein­buch, New York Post): “The gun­man who slaugh­tered 19 kids and two teach­ers at a Texas ele­men­tary school report­ed­ly exhib­it­ed increas­ing­ly bizarre behav­ior lead­ing up to the ram­page – includ­ing cut­ting up his face with knives just ‘for fun,’ friends said.”
    • Pass and Enforce Red Flag Laws. Now. (David French, The Dis­patch): “Mass killings are their own thing. Mass shoot­ers are fre­quent­ly law-abid­ing, right up until the moment when they com­mit mass mur­der. Mass shoot­ings are often metic­u­lous­ly planned, which means that they can cir­cum­vent com­mon gun con­trol laws. For exam­ple, the Buf­fa­lo shoot­er legal­ly pur­chased the weapon he used and then ille­gal­ly mod­i­fied it to make it more lethal. So when we talk about com­mon gun con­trol pro­pos­als after mass shootings—whether we’re refer­ring to expand­ed back­ground checks, assault weapons bans, or lim­its on mag­a­zine capacity—the gen­er­al rule is that none of those mea­sures, even if imple­ment­ed, would have actu­al­ly pre­vent­ed any recent mass shoot­ing.” This is a thought­ful piece with a spe­cif­ic and con­struc­tive pol­i­cy sug­ges­tion.
    • The Chil­dren Who Kill Chil­dren (Samuel D. James, First Things): “There are some who sneer at peo­ple, like me, who offer prayers in times like these. Prayer, they say, is non-action: an inef­fec­tive, mean­ing­less piety meant to main­tain the sta­tus quo on gun con­trol. Yet it’s these same scoffers who instinc­tive­ly piv­ot to the top­ic of gun con­trol when­ev­er a child takes the lives of oth­er chil­dren, and their polit­i­cal rage is no less a reli­gious recita­tion sim­ply because they con­fuse Con­gress for God. An inabil­i­ty to talk about any­thing oth­er than gun con­trol threat­ens to dead­en our lament and neu­tral­ize a vital con­ver­sa­tion about why so many of our country’s most lost, most hate­ful peo­ple are boys with their whole lives ahead of them.” This is a strong arti­cle.
    • ‘The Onion’ has repub­lished a grim head­line about mass shoot­ings 21 times since 2014 (Rachel Treis­man, NPR): “There are a cou­ple of inevitable respons­es to a mass shoot­ing in Amer­i­ca: funer­als and fundrais­ers, prayers from politi­cians and the resur­fac­ing of one par­tic­u­lar arti­cle from satir­i­cal site The Onion. ‘No Way To Pre­vent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Reg­u­lar­ly Hap­pens’ has been repub­lished 21 times in almost exact­ly eight years.” The rep­e­ti­tion of this head­line has prob­a­bly shift­ed more hearts than any oth­er argu­ment I am aware of.
  3. Covid was liberalism’s endgame (Matthew B. Craw­ford, Unherd): “The inno­va­tion achieved here is in the way gov­ern­ment con­ceives its sub­jects: not as cit­i­zens whose con­sid­ered con­sent must be secured, but as par­ti­cles to be steered through a sci­ence of behav­iour man­age­ment that relies on our pre-reflec­tive cog­ni­tive bias­es.”
  4. A Com­mit­ment to Kind­ness Does Not Mean Sur­ren­der­ing Your Con­vic­tions (David French, The Dis­patch): “Time and again I read about how bad things are now, how vile the left has become, and how a com­mit­ment to ‘win­some­ness’ or kind­ness is sim­ply inad­e­quate to the moment. Even worse, it’s some­times seen as evi­dence of weak­ness or fear—an effort cur­ry favor with peo­ple who hate you.  But the con­ver­sa­tion con­sis­tent­ly mis­con­strues what com­mit­ments to civil­i­ty and decen­cy do and don’t mean—that civil­i­ty is some­how a short­hand for sur­ren­der on mat­ters of deep con­vic­tion. It is not. Or that a com­mit­ment to civil­i­ty implies an aver­sion to con­flict and a timid­i­ty in the face of oppo­si­tion. It does not.”
  5. The LGBT­sQew­ing of Amer­i­ca (Alexan­der Zuba­tov, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “We have strong­ly sug­ges­tive evi­dence, more­over, that social cues can play causal roles in sway­ing impres­sion­able teens to adopt new sex­u­al iden­ti­ties.… The sim­ple mes­sage such research con­veys is some­thing that those of us who have not lost touch with our child­hood and our awk­ward teen years will find unsur­pris­ing, and indeed, even obvi­ous: Most kids and teens are works in progress and unde­cid­ed and con­fused about many key aspects of their lives.”
  6. In Par­tial, Grudg­ing Defense Of The Hear­ing Voic­es Move­ment (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I still remem­ber a patient who asked me if I could cure his anx­i­ety with­in a week. I told him absolute­ly not — med­ica­tions take a few weeks to even kick in, and man­ag­ing anx­i­ety can be a life­long process — and why did he need a cure in a week any­way? He said he was an inspi­ra­tional speak­er on the top­ic ‘How I Over­came My Anx­i­ety’, and he had a speech sched­uled next week, but was too anx­ious to work on it. I think about this per­son often.” Inter­est­ing through­out and the anec­dote I excerpt­ed is actu­al­ly tan­gen­tial to the main point.
  7. Why This Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Says All Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Should “Die in a Fire” (Nathan Robin­son inter­view­ing Nicholas Weaver, Cur­rent Affairs): “Is it accu­rate to sum­ma­rize what you were say­ing before as, essen­tial­ly: There is no prob­lem that cryp­tocur­ren­cy solves, and to the extent that it is func­tion­al, it does things worse than we can already do them with exist­ing elec­tron­ic pay­ment sys­tems. To the extent it has advan­tages, the advan­tage is doing crimes. And every oth­er claim made for the supe­ri­or­i­ty of cryp­tocur­ren­cy as cur­ren­cy falls apart if you scru­ti­nize it.” This spicy meat­ball comes rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  8. Glob­al reli­gious per­se­cu­tion:
    • The faces from China’s Uyghur deten­tion camps (John Sud­worth, BBC): “The doc­u­ments pro­vide some of the strongest evi­dence to date for a pol­i­cy tar­get­ing almost any expres­sion of Uyghur iden­ti­ty, cul­ture or Islam­ic faith — and of a chain of com­mand run­ning all the way up to the Chi­nese leader, Xi Jin­ping.”
    • Niger­ian Chris­tians Protest Deborah’s Death (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Two weeks ago, in Nigeria’s north­west­ern-most state of Soko­to, Deb­o­rah Samuel was beat­en to death and set on fire by fel­low stu­dents at She­hu Sha­gari Col­lege of Edu­ca­tion. Offi­cials and police inter­vened in vain.”

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 Con­ser­v­a­tives Clash on the Goal of Gov­ern­ment (Jonathan Lee­man, Prov­i­dence): “There is no neu­tral­i­ty. The pub­lic square is a bat­tle­ground of gods. Our cul­ture wars are wars of reli­gion. For the time being, lib­er­al­ism keeps us from pick­ing up sixteenth-century swords for those wars, which is no small achieve­ment. But don’t assume it won’t con­trol us with the sub­tler tools of a twenty-first cen­tu­ry legal total­i­tar­i­an­ism.” Insight­ful reflec­tions on how Chris­tians should form their polit­i­cal posi­tions. First shared in vol­ume 218.

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 304

fas­ci­nat­ing links — enjoy

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

This is the 304th install­ment, an inter­est­ing num­ber because it is the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes. 304 = 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sin­ning in the Rain: Weath­er Shocks, Church Atten­dance and Crime (Jonathan Moreno-Med­i­na, The Review of Eco­nom­ics and Sta­tis­tics): “Based on a pan­el between 1980 and 2016, I find that one more Sun­day with pre­cip­i­ta­tion at the time of church increas­es year­ly drug-relat­ed, alco­hol-relat­ed and white-col­lar crimes.” Fas­ci­nat­ing. The author is a Ph.D. can­di­date in econ at Duke.
  2. Amer­i­ca Los­es Reli­gion, Some­what (Lyman Stone, Nation­al Review): “Amer­i­cans today are more like­ly to be part of a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty than they were in 1800; the change over time can be char­ac­ter­ized nei­ther by a grad­ual decline from a reli­gious­ly pris­tine past nor by the onward march of ratio­nal think­ing.”
  3. Some thoughts on race in Amer­i­ca:
    • When Our Fore­fa­thers Fail (David French, The Dis­patch): “Human­i­ty has not trans­formed its fun­da­men­tal nature in the last 100 years. A nation full of peo­ple no bet­ter than us can do great good. A nation full of peo­ple no worse than us can com­mit great evil. Remem­ber­ing our nation’s virtues helps give us hope. Remem­ber­ing our sin gives us humil­i­ty. Remem­ber­ing both gives us the moti­va­tion and the inspi­ra­tion nec­es­sary to repair our land.”
    • T. D. Jakes on How White Evan­gel­i­cals Lost Their Way (Emma Green, The Atlantic): ‘Where I’ve tried to focus is on the white pas­tors who spoke out and tried to say some­thing pos­i­tive that was mis­un­der­stood. And I lit­er­al­ly got on the phone with some of them and encour­aged them to keep talk­ing. Their imme­di­ate reac­tion was “I got it wrong; I’m not going to broach that sub­ject again. I’m going to stay away from it. I’m just not going to talk about it.” And if we do that, we’ll nev­er get bet­ter. We have to keep talk­ing.’ The title is pret­ty mis­lead­ing — that’s def­i­nite­ly not the vibe you pick up from the arti­cle itself.
    • What Hap­pens When Doc­tors Can’t Speak Freely? (Katie Her­zog, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “‘Whole research areas are off-lim­its,’ he said, adding that some of what is being pub­lished in the nation’s top jour­nals is ‘shod­dy as hell.’  Here, he was refer­ring in part to a study pub­lished last year in the Pro­ceed­ings Of The Nation­al Acad­e­my Of Sci­ences. The study was cov­ered all over the news, with head­lines like ‘Black New­borns More Like­ly to Die When Looked After by White Doc­tors’ (CNN), ‘The Lack of Black Doc­tors is Killing Black Babies’ (For­tune), and ‘Black Babies More Like­ly to Sur­vive when Cared for by Black Doc­tors’ (The Guardian). Despite these breath­less head­lines, the study was so method­olog­i­cal­ly flawed that, accord­ing to sev­er­al of the doc­tors I spoke with, it’s impos­si­ble to extrap­o­late any con­clu­sions about how the race of the treat­ing doc­tor impacts patient out­comes at all. And yet very few peo­ple were will­ing to pub­licly crit­i­cize it.”
    • Those Who Did­n’t Make the List (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I absolute­ly believe that we can the­o­ret­i­cal­ly build admis­sions sys­tems that increase diver­si­ty and inclu­sion, includ­ing specif­i­cal­ly for Black and His­pan­ic appli­cants, with­out per­pet­u­at­ing oth­er kinds of injus­tice. I just have zero faith our actu­al­ly-exist­ing uni­ver­si­ties and employ­ers will put them togeth­er. Why do good when it’s so much eas­i­er to appear to be good?”
  4. COVID per­spec­tives:
    • Why the Lab Leak The­o­ry Mat­ters (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “First, to the extent that the Unit­ed States is engaged in a con­flict of pro­pa­gan­da and soft pow­er with the regime in Bei­jing, there’s a pret­ty big dif­fer­ence between a world where the Chi­nese regime can say, We weren’t respon­si­ble for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re deca­dent, and a world where this was basi­cal­ly their Cher­nobyl except their incom­pe­tence and cov­er-up sick­ened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.”
    • Media Group­think and the Lab-Leak The­o­ry (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “If the lab-leak the­o­ry is final­ly get­ting the respect­ful atten­tion it always deserved, it’s main­ly because Joe Biden autho­rized an inquiry and Antho­ny Fau­ci admit­ted to doubts about the nat­ur­al-ori­gin claim. In oth­er words, the right pres­i­dent and the right pub­lic-health expert have blessed a cer­tain line of inquiry. Yet the lab-leak the­o­ry, whether or not it turns out to be right, was always cred­i­ble. Even if Tom Cot­ton believed it.”
    • The Lab-Leak The­o­ry: Inside the Fight to Uncov­er COVID-19’s Ori­gins (Kather­ine Eban, Van­i­ty Fair): “A months long Van­i­ty Fair inves­ti­ga­tion, inter­views with more than 40 peo­ple, and a review of hun­dreds of pages of U.S. gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, includ­ing inter­nal mem­os, meet­ing min­utes, and email cor­re­spon­dence, found that con­flicts of inter­est, stem­ming in part from large gov­ern­ment grants sup­port­ing con­tro­ver­sial virol­o­gy research, ham­pered the U.S. inves­ti­ga­tion into COVID-19’s ori­gin at every step. In one State Depart­ment meet­ing, offi­cials seek­ing to demand trans­paren­cy from the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment say they were explic­it­ly told by col­leagues not to explore the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s gain-of-func­tion research, because it would bring unwel­come atten­tion to U.S. gov­ern­ment fund­ing of it.” Long, detailed.
  5. A Dan­ger­ous State of Affairs (Kevin Williamson, Nation­al Review): “In Dal­las, a recent class for those seek­ing a license to car­ry was well attend­ed in spite of the fact that Texas is about to imple­ment ‘con­sti­tu­tion­al car­ry,’ under which no license would be required to car­ry a firearm that the car­ri­er is legal­ly eli­gi­ble to own. Mid­dle-aged African Amer­i­cans made up almost exact­ly one half of that class. Black buy­ers account for about one in five of the guns sold nation­wide in recent years, and His­pan­ic buy­ers a sim­i­lar share. And about one in five buy­ers last year were first-time buy­ers.”
  6. Woke Insti­tu­tions is Just Civ­il Rights Law (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The US seems to elect some of the most con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians in the West­ern world, but has per­haps the wok­est insti­tu­tions. Civ­il rights law makes all major insti­tu­tions sub­ject to the will of left-wing bureau­crats, activists, and judges at the expense of nor­mal cit­i­zens.”
  7. I read two sur­pris­ing­ly com­ple­men­tary arti­cles about abor­tion this week:
    • Abor­tion as an Instru­ment of Eugen­ics (Michael Stokes Paulsen, Har­vard Law Review): “If the intu­ition of the wrong­ness of trait-selec­tion abor­tion has moral salience — the intu­ition that it is sim­ply wrong to kill a fetus for rea­sons of race, sex, or dis­abil­i­ty — it is because of the implic­it recog­ni­tion of the human­i­ty of the fetus. If killing a fetus because she is female (or Black, or dis­abled) is thought hor­ri­ble, it can only be because the human fetus is thought to pos­sess moral sta­tus as human — because ‘it’ is a baby girl or a baby boy, a mem­ber of the human fam­i­ly.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Thomas. The arti­cle itself is very long. Unless you are in law school, read­ing the intro­duc­tion, sec­tion IV, and the con­clu­sion is prob­a­bly enough.
    • Dawkins is wrong – gross­ly wrong – about Down’s syn­drome (Simon Barnes, Tor­toise): “[Dawkins] is in the posi­tion of the bril­liant philoso­pher telling us that the table at which we are sit­ting does not exist.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 267

some apolo­get­i­cal­ly-inter­est­ing links near the top — rec­om­mend­ed!

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues.

We have some new mem­bers on our mail­ing list — wel­come! I’d like to direct you to the dis­claimers at the end of this email — they real­ly do mat­ter and I real­ly do mean them.

I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Uncon­scious Learn­ing Under­lies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in Peo­ple Who Can Uncon­scious­ly Pre­dict Com­plex Pat­terns (Sci Tech Dai­ly): “Indi­vid­u­als who can uncon­scious­ly pre­dict com­plex pat­terns, an abil­i­ty called implic­it pat­tern learn­ing, are like­ly to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who cre­ates pat­terns of events in the uni­verse, accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.” Shock­er: peo­ple who see real­i­ty clear­ly are more like­ly to per­ceive God’s hand at work in real­i­ty. 
  2. Redeem­ing Con­dos, Pres­by­te­ri­ans Buy NYC Build­ing for $30 Mil­lion (Kathryn Wat­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a study of 22 US cites—including Grand Rapids, Detroit, Min­neapo­lis, San Fran­cis­co, and Seattle—Hartson and Williams looked at mail­ing list data to iden­ti­fy address­es that were labeled as church­es in 2003 but not in 2018. They iden­ti­fied approx­i­mate­ly 200 church build­ings that had been flipped for com­mer­cial or res­i­den­tial use. In the same cities, in the same 15 years, they found about 2,000 com­mer­cial spaces that had been turned into hous­es of wor­ship. While there are many sacred spaces becom­ing sec­u­lar, it seems more are con­vert­ing the oth­er way.” 👀 — I did not know this and am very encour­aged by it. 
  3. On pol­i­tics:
    • No Longer Human (George Yancey, Patheos): “In one way it real­ly does not mat­ter if Trump or Biden wins the pres­i­den­cy. Either way you will have a sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of indi­vid­u­als who will feel dis­placed. They will be tempt­ed to cre­ate an us ver­sus them men­tal­i­ty in which they can envi­sion the elec­tion vic­tors as ene­mies of the state who must be defeat­ed at all costs. ” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bay­lor. 
    • Relat­ed — two arti­cles high­light­ing how the right is afraid of the left in Amer­i­ca:
      1. Ide­ol­o­gy Binds And Blinds (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As I see it, the ‘major threat of the far left’ to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in pow­er, they will go ped­al to the medal on a soft total­i­tar­i­an ‘social jus­tice’ regime that would pun­ish dis­senters by cost­ing them their liveli­hoods, and ruin­ing their church­es and oth­er insti­tu­tions.”
      2. On Not Accept­ing Stolen Elec­tions (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Don’t take your eye off the ball. Who is going to be riot­ing in late Novem­ber after the elec­tion? Well, who’s riot­ing now? This is not a trick ques­tion.”
    • And it’s not just one-sided. Here are two arti­cles high­light­ing how the left is afraid of the right in Amer­i­ca:
      1. The Left Secret­ly Preps for MAGA Vio­lence After Elec­tion Day (Sam Stein, The Dai­ly Beast): “‘I don’t know what the strat­e­gy is when armed right-wing mili­tia dudes show up in polling places,’ the same source said. ‘This [Kyle] Rit­ten­house guy is being lion­ized on the right, right now. If it is being unleashed that you can shoot peo­ple and be a hero, I don’t know what prepa­ra­tion we can pos­si­bly do for that.’”
      2. We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Hard­er. Amer­i­ca is Dying. (umair haque, Medi­um): “There is a cru­cial les­son there. Amer­i­ca already has an ISIS, a Tal­iban, an SS wait­ing to be born.A group of young men will­ing to do vio­lence at the drop of a hat, because they’ve been brain­washed into hat­ing. The dem­a­gogue has blamed hat­ed minori­ties and advo­cates of democ­ra­cy and peace for those young men’s stunt­ed life chances, and they believe him. That’s exact­ly what an ISIS is, what a Tal­iban is, what an SS is. The only thing left to do by an author­i­tar­i­an is to for­mal­ize it.”
  4. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Change Still Works (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “…look at the moun­tain of evi­dence that change through the civic process is not only pos­si­ble, but a recur­ring real­i­ty, and that it began long before Floyd’s death.” I believe much of our cur­rent cul­tur­al con­flict can be under­stood in terms of the Toc­queville Para­dox, which I have also heard referred to as “The Para­dox of Ris­ing Expec­ta­tions.”
  5. On racism:
    • Prince­ton’s Pres­i­dent Is Wrong. The Uni­ver­si­ty Is Not Sys­tem­i­cal­ly Racist (Sergiu Klain­er­man, Newsweek): “Unable to iden­ti­fy spe­cif­ic cas­es of racism, these war­riors for social injus­tice are advanc­ing their agen­da by claim­ing instead that all Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Prince­ton, are struc­tural­ly and sys­tem­i­cal­ly racist (‘SSR’). That is to say, that they are racist even as they man­i­fest­ly do every­thing imag­in­able to pro­mote under-rep­re­sent­ed groups. Prince­ton, for exam­ple, has had for years an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly large num­ber of admin­is­tra­tors (by some counts, over 65) ded­i­cat­ed to pro­mot­ing diver­si­ty and inclu­sion.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics at Prince­ton.
    • Scholas­tics con­tra racism (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “The fal­si­ty and evil of racism, and thus of those insti­tu­tions, clear­ly fol­lows from stan­dard Scholas­tic [the­o­log­i­cal] think­ing about human nature and nat­ur­al law.”
    • Book Review: How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Ken­di(Bill Mel­one, Mere Ortho­doxy): “But recent crit­i­cism of social jus­tice advo­ca­cy and the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment has failed to crit­i­cize the best of antiracist think­ing, and is much the less­er for it. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true when that crit­i­cism does not engage seri­ous­ly with the work of Ibram X. Ken­di.”
    • No, racism isn’t a ‘cre­ation of white peo­ple’ (David Abu­lafia, The Spec­ta­tor): “It is there­fore a sad and hor­ri­ble truth that every con­ti­nent has expe­ri­enced racist per­se­cu­tions before as well as after the age of the Euro­pean empires. Quite pos­si­bly the first Homo Sapi­ens played a big role in the dis­ap­pear­ance of the Nean­derthals.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Cam­bridge.
  6. Chris­t­ian musi­cian Sean Feucht held defi­ant Seat­tle wor­ship protest after con­cert was banned (Julia Duin, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Sean Feucht, 37, the ral­ly orga­niz­er, laughed about the con­flict with city offi­cials while wel­com­ing the crowd of 800 to 900 peo­ple. ‘Wel­come to Seattle’s largest wor­ship protest,’ he said at the begin­ning of a two-hour set. ‘Turn to each oth­er and say, “Wel­come to the protest.” In this city, that makes it a legal gath­er­ing.’”
  7. Chris­tians, Gun Rights, and the Amer­i­can Social Com­pact (David French, The Dis­patch): “The dis­tinc­tive Chris­t­ian pres­ence has to include mod­el­ing the respon­si­ble, vir­tu­ous exer­cise of the rights its polit­i­cal move­ments seek to secure. It has to include using its voice and pow­er to advo­cate for that respon­si­bil­i­ty and to oppose reck­less­ness. Sim­ply put, the repub­lic was not designed to thrive if those who are reli­gious are not also moral.” 

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 Philoso­pher Redefin­ing Equal­i­ty (Nathan Heller, New York­er): “When she was three, her moth­er asked, ‘Why do you allow your broth­er to talk for you?’—why didn’t she speak for her­self? ‘Until now, it sim­ply was not nec­es­sary,’ Eliz­a­beth said. It was the first full sen­tence that she had ever uttered.” I think that’s the best first sen­tence I’ve ever heard of. The arti­cle is a tad long, but rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 189.

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 213

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. Sev­er­al arti­cles relat­ed to the mass shoot­ings:
  2. Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have a porn prob­lem, stud­ies show, but not the one you think (Jana Riess, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Draw­ing on numer­ous stud­ies, Per­ry finds that, despite the sta­tis­ti­cal find­ing that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians are less like­ly to use porn, the per­cep­tion with­in evan­gel­i­cal church­es is that this has become an enor­mous prob­lem for the faith­ful.”
  3. What Ails the Right Isn’t (Just) Racism (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Put anoth­er way, the right is cor­rect that cry­ing wolf mat­ters. And the left is cor­rect that The Boy Who Cried Wolf ends with a wolf feast­ing on folks who con­clud­ed that they shouldn’t wor­ry about wolves because one kid fibbed.” I found this far more inter­est­ing than the title led me to antic­i­pate.
  4. Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a fol­low-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. How (and Why) to KISSASS (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “…if you’re not a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion­al class, the key to get­ting your per­son­al essays pub­lished in promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions is KISSASS—Keep It Short, Sad, And Sim­ple, Stu­pid.” This is a fol­low-up to an arti­cle I shared pre­vi­ous­ly and I found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Car­ol Swain Worked to Hold Politi­cians Account­able. Then She Felt God Call Her to Run. (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Swain, change has been a recur­ring theme in her life. She went from low-income sin­gle moth­er to Ivy League aca­d­e­m­ic, from Demo­c­rat to Repub­li­can media com­men­ta­tor, and from Jehovah’s Wit­ness turned non-church­go­er to com­mit­ted fol­low­er of Christ.” What a fas­ci­nat­ing lady.
  7. Why I’m Not A Lib­er­al (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “Because lib­er­al­ism is based on indi­vid­ual rights, it nat­u­ral­ly favors the indi­vid­ual assert­ing his rights against tra­di­tion­al social sub­jects, whether they be the com­mu­ni­ty, the fam­i­ly, or even his own mar­riage. If a clas­si­cal­ly lib­er­al sys­tem has no effect on the val­ues of soci­ety, it is an aston­ish­ing coin­ci­dence that wher­ev­er lib­er­al polit­i­cal arrange­ments emerge, a new lib­er­al under­stand­ing of mar­riage even­tu­al­ly replaces the pre­vi­ous Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings as the legal and social real­i­ty.” This essay cov­ers a lot of ground.

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 Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imag­ine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”  First shared in vol­ume 159.

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 194

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. Relat­ed to the mosque attack in New Zealand:
    • Mass mur­der­ers crave pub­lic­i­ty. Maybe giv­ing them less would be help­ful. (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Many com­men­ta­tors, won­der­ing why mass shoot­ings became so com­mon in the late 20th cen­tu­ry, have point­ed to var­i­ous cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ments. They might bet­ter have point­ed to cable news, which ensured that dis­af­fect­ed losers with hyper­tro­phied egos and shriv­eled souls became the non­stop talk of the nation — in every nation, and most of the world’s 6,500 lan­guages. The wall-to-wall cov­er­age teach­es men who may not be able to get a job or a girl­friend that, nonethe­less, in some­thing under an hour, they can become Genghis Khan.”
    • The New Zealand Attack and the Glob­al Chal­lenge of Far-Right Extrem­ism (Seth Jones, Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies): “Based on the glob­al­iza­tion of far-right extrem­ism, the Christchurch attack—and the attacker—needs to be under­stood as part of a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al trend that requires more atten­tion and greater invest­ment from gov­ern­ments and the pri­vate sec­tor.”
    • White Nationalism’s Deep Amer­i­can Roots (Adam Ser­w­er, The Atlantic): “A pop­u­lar myth of Amer­i­can his­to­ry is that racism is the exclu­sive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist ener­gy in the U.S. came from old-mon­ey elites in the North­east, and was also fueled by labor strug­gles in the Pacif­ic North­west, which had stirred a wave of big­otry that led to the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act of 1882.” (this is not direct­ly relat­ed to the shoot­ing but is time­ly)
  2. An MIT Pro­fes­sor Meets the Author of All Knowl­edge (Ros­alind Picard, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arro­gant fool who snubbed the great­est Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, art, and every­thing else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, hav­ing received the most unde­served grace. I walk with joy, along­side the most amaz­ing Com­pan­ion any­one could ask for, filled with desire to keep learn­ing and explor­ing.”
  3. The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of Shame (Sal­va­tore Sci­bona, New York Times): “We are under­go­ing an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion in shame. New tech­nolo­gies have rad­i­cal­ly expand­ed our abil­i­ty to make and dis­trib­ute a prod­uct. The prod­uct is our judg­ment of one anoth­er. As in past indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions, the mass man­u­fac­ture and use of a prod­uct pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able to just a few or in small amounts has giv­en us the pow­er to do harm at a pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able scale.”
  4. The Supreme Court Is Qui­et­ly Chang­ing the Sta­tus of Reli­gion in Amer­i­can Life (Jef­frey Toobin, New York­er): “What the con­ser­v­a­tives are doing, in effect, is read­ing the estab­lish­ment clause out of the Con­sti­tu­tion, and turn­ing almost every issue into a free-exer­cise case. In this read­ing, any denial of gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits to a church can be seen as dis­crim­i­na­tion which amounts to a denial of free exercise—and the con­ser­v­a­tives are mak­ing the same move with respect to indi­vid­u­als.”
    • Relat­ed: The Court and the Cross (Lin­da Green­house, New York Times): “The appetite of the two newest jus­tices, Mr. Kavanaugh and Mr. Gor­such, for cas­es that would enlarge the con­sti­tu­tion­al play­ing field for reli­gion appears near­ly bound­less.”
  5. If Lib­er­als Won’t Enforce Bor­ders, Fas­cists Will (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Dem­a­gogues don’t rise by talk­ing about irrel­e­vant issues. Dem­a­gogues rise by talk­ing about issues that mat­ter to peo­ple, and that more con­ven­tion­al lead­ers appear unwill­ing or unable to address: unem­ploy­ment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immi­gra­tion now. Vot­ers get to decide what the country’s prob­lems are. Polit­i­cal elites have to devise solu­tions to those prob­lems. If dif­fi­cult issues go unad­dressed by respon­si­ble lead­ers, they will be exploit­ed by irre­spon­si­ble ones.” I high­light­ed a piece by Frum with a sim­i­lar theme back in issue 175. This is a very thought­ful arti­cle.
  6. The Scan­dalous Acad­e­my: Social Sci­ence in Ser­vice of Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics (Scott Yenor, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Let us not ignore the most dis­turb­ing find­ing: that men who have sex with men are expect­ed to live twelve years less than those who do not. This mir­rors oth­er stud­ies con­duct­ed in British Colum­bia (which see an eight- to twen­ty-year dif­fer­ence) and Den­mark (which sees a small­er dif­fer­ence of four to twelve years). M. Ryan Baker’s ‘Gay and Les­bian Health Dis­par­i­ties: Evi­dence and Rec­om­men­da­tions’ in a 2008 issue of the Jour­nal of Health Dis­par­i­ties Research and Prac­tice yield­ed sim­i­lar results. To put that in per­spec­tive, smok­ing decreas­es life expectan­cy only ten years.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Boise State and the arti­cle is focused on bias­es and blind spots in the social sci­ences more than on the spe­cif­ic issue high­light­ed in the excerpt.
  7. No Hate Left Behind (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “Just over 42 per­cent of the peo­ple in each par­ty view the oppo­si­tion as ‘down­right evil.’ In real num­bers, this sug­gests that 48.8 mil­lion vot­ers out of the 136.7 mil­lion who cast bal­lots in 2016 believe that mem­bers of oppo­si­tion par­ty are in league with the dev­il.”
    • Relat­ed: Par­ti­san Hate Is Becom­ing a Nation­al Cri­sis (David French, Nation­al Review): “I won­der where [par­ti­san hatred] would be if our nation hadn’t been extra­or­di­nar­i­ly lucky in the last two years. Yes, lucky. Imag­ine our nation­al cul­ture if the con­gres­sion­al base­ball shoot­er hadn’t been imme­di­ate­ly con­front­ed by two brave Capi­tol Police offi­cers. Imag­ine a nation where the Char­lottesville ter­ror­ist kept plow­ing through the ranks of pro­test­ers, or where the Trump super­fan bomber actu­al­ly suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing func­tion­ing explo­sives.”

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 Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

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 167

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Catholic Church is fac­ing a tremen­dous cri­sis, one poten­tial­ly far big­ger than any I have seen in my life­time. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about it. Here are some pieces I found illu­mi­nat­ing.
    • Protes­tants Should Care Deeply about the Catholic Cat­a­stro­phe (David French, Nation­al Review): “The Church is like a navy, a col­lec­tion of ships unit­ed in pur­pose and in des­ti­na­tion. Each denom­i­na­tion is like a dif­fer­ent ship in that navy, and while each crew is pri­mar­i­ly tasked with the health and well-being of its own ves­sel, it’s also deeply invest­ed in the strength of the fleet. Each ves­sel is more vul­ner­a­ble as the fleet weak­ens. Each ves­sel is stronger sur­round­ed by its pro­tec­tive arma­da. If the anal­o­gy holds, then one of the might­i­est bat­tle­ships in the fleet, the Catholic Church, is tak­ing tor­pe­does left and right.”
    • A Catholic Civ­il War? (Matthew Schmitz, New York Times): “…the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civ­il war. On one side are the tra­di­tion­al­ists, who insist that abuse can be pre­vent­ed only by tighter adher­ence to church doc­trine. On the oth­er side are the lib­er­als, who demand that the church cease con­demn­ing homo­sex­u­al acts and allow gay priests to step out of the clos­et.” This may sound like hyper­bole, but I believe it is accu­rate.
    • Catholics Face A Painful Ques­tion: Is It True? (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In his state­ments on Viganò’s tes­ti­mo­ny last Sun­day, Fran­cis invit­ed jour­nal­ists to use their skills and capac­i­ties to draw con­clu­sions about the mat­ter. And so, on Mon­day morn­ing, I began to try.” This is sad. It seems the only per­son doing actu­al jour­nal­ism on this for a major news­pa­per is… an opin­ion colum­nist. It stinks to high heav­en that the major papers aren’t fero­cious­ly pur­su­ing this.
    • What Did Pope Fran­cis Know? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “this doesn’t mean that the pope should resign — not even if Viganò is ful­ly vin­di­cat­ed. One papal res­ig­na­tion per mil­len­ni­um is more than enough. That cop-out should not be eas­i­ly avail­able to pon­tif­fs con­front­ed with scan­dals, includ­ing scan­dals of their own mak­ing, any more than it should be avail­able to fathers.”
    • Answer­ing Vigano’s Crit­ics (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Again: if the alle­ga­tions are false, you say, ‘They’re false.’ But that’s not what the Pope said. At all. If the Pope thinks he can ignore Vigano as he has ignored the dubia car­di­nals, he is grave­ly mis­tak­en.”
    • Sto­ry of bomb­shell charges against Pope more sur­re­al by the minute (John L. Allen, Jr., Crux): “If there’s one thing any­one who’s cov­ered the Vat­i­can for a long time ought to have learned by now, it’s nev­er to say a par­tic­u­lar sto­ry just can’t get any­more sur­re­al, because trust me — it always can.”
  2. The School Shoot­ings That Weren’t (Anya Kamenetz, Alex­is Arnold, and Emi­ly Car­di­nali, NPR): Dif­fi­cult to excerpt the key data, so here’s the sum­ma­ry: schools report­ed 240 shoot­ings in the 2015–2016 school year, but NPR fol­lowed up and was only able to ver­i­fy 11. How did this hap­pen? “the law of real­ly, real­ly big num­bers. Temkin notes that ‘240 schools is less than half of 1 per­cent,’ of the schools in the sur­vey. ‘It’s in the mar­gin of error.’ ”
  3. There was a reveal­ing ker­fluffle at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria in ado­les­cents and young adults: A study of parental reports (Lisa Littman, PLOS ONE): “The ele­vat­ed num­ber of friends per friend­ship group who became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, the pat­tern of clus­ter out­breaks of trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in these friend­ship groups, the sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of friend­ship groups where the major­i­ty of the mem­bers became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, and the peer group dynam­ics observed all serve to sup­port the plau­si­bil­i­ty of social and peer con­ta­gion for ROGD [Rapid Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria]. The wors­en­ing of men­tal well-being and par­ent-child rela­tion­ships and behav­iors that iso­late teens from their par­ents, fam­i­lies, non-trans­gen­der friends and main­stream sources of infor­ma­tion are par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cern­ing. More research is need­ed to bet­ter under­stand rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria, its impli­ca­tions, and scope.” The research paper in ques­tion.
    • Jour­nal Look­ing Into Study on ‘Rapid-Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “Brown Uni­ver­si­ty and PLOS ONE have dis­tanced them­selves from a con­tro­ver­sial, peer-reviewed pub­lished study on ‘rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria,’ or gen­der iden­ti­ty issues that present not ear­ly and over a life­time but quick­ly, in teenagers and young adults.” This is the neu­tral take.
    • New paper ignites storm over whether teens expe­ri­ence ‘rapid onset’ of trans­gen­der iden­ti­ty (Mered­ith Wad­man, Sci­ence): “The actions by the jour­nal and the uni­ver­si­ty have infu­ri­at­ed some researchers who say the moves tram­ple aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, although the paper remains freely avail­able. ‘This is a sad day for @BrownUniversity, and an indict­ment of the integri­ty of their aca­d­e­m­ic and admin­is­tra­tive lead­er­ship,’ Jef­frey Fli­er, a for­mer dean of Har­vard Med­ical School in Boston and a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine there, tweet­ed on Mon­day.” This is a slight­ly more feisty take.
    • Ryan T. Ander­son on Twit­ter: “If this is the sort of cen­sor­ship that takes place out in the open, just image what’s tak­ing place behind closed doors. All because this research reached polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect con­clu­sion. But when lives are at stake, it’s more impor­tant to be cor­rect than polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect.” A feisty and I sus­pect very accu­rate take.
  4. The French, Com­ing Apart (Christo­pher Cald­well, City Jour­nal): “Since Toc­queville, we have under­stood that our demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties are emu­la­tive. Nobody wants to be thought a big­ot if the mem­ber­ship board of the coun­try club takes pride in its mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. But as the prospect of ris­ing in the world is ham­pered or extin­guished, the induce­ments to ide­o­log­i­cal con­formism weak­en. Dis­sent appears. Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness grows more dra­con­ian. Final­ly the rul­ing class reach­es a dan­ger­ous stage, in which it begins to lose not only its legit­i­ma­cy but also a sense of what its legit­i­ma­cy rest­ed on in the first place.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that’s sort of about France, sort of about Amer­i­ca, and most­ly about West­ern moder­ni­ty.
  5. Chi­na Is Treat­ing Islam Like A Men­tal Ill­ness (Sigal Samuel, The Atlantic): “The med­ical anal­o­gy is one way the gov­ern­ment tries to jus­ti­fy its pol­i­cy of large-scale intern­ment: After all, attempt­ing to inoc­u­late a whole pop­u­la­tion against, say, the flu, requires giv­ing flu shots not just to the already-afflict­ed few, but to a crit­i­cal mass of peo­ple. In fact, using this rhetoric, Chi­na has tried to defend a sys­tem of arrest quo­tas for Uighurs. Police offi­cers con­firmed to Radio Free Asia that they are under orders to meet spe­cif­ic pop­u­la­tion tar­gets when round­ing up peo­ple for intern­ment. In one town­ship, police offi­cials said they were being ordered to send 40 per­cent of the local pop­u­la­tion to the camps.” I’ve men­tioned this before, but it tru­ly is one of the scan­dals of the mod­ern world.
  6. With Flow­ers In Their Hair (Andrew Fer­gu­son, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “The seeds of the destruc­tion of the Haight exper­i­ment could be found in its own antin­o­mi­an­ism, in its orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion. Maybe the whole­sale rejec­tion of time-hon­ored and time-test­ed val­ues — monogamy, mod­er­a­tion, good man­ners, self-denial, self-con­trol, the sanc­ti­ty of pri­vate prop­er­ty, per­son­al account­abil­i­ty to high­er author­i­ties, both mate­r­i­al and spir­i­tu­al — leads to squalor and mis­ery. Maybe the project they’re cel­e­brat­ing in San Fran­cis­co this sum­mer was doomed from the start.” Long and good.
  7. Amer­i­ca Soured on My Mul­tira­cial Fam­i­ly (David French, The Atlantic): “There are three fun­da­men­tal, com­pli­cat­ing truths about adop­tion. First, every sin­gle adop­tion begins with pro­found loss. Through death, aban­don­ment, or even lov­ing sur­ren­der, a child suf­fers the loss of his or her moth­er and father. Sec­ond, the demo­graph­ics of those in need of lov­ing homes do not pre­cise­ly match the demo­graph­ics of those seek­ing a new child. Adop­tive par­ents are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white. Adopt­ed chil­dren are not. Thus, mul­tira­cial fam­i­lies are a nat­ur­al and inevitable con­se­quence of the adop­tion process. Third, Amer­i­can cul­ture has long been obsessed with ques­tions of race and iden­ti­ty.”

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 world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67)

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 those of any orga­ni­za­tion I work for or 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 140

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The gun debate has flared up again in the wake of a school shoot­ing.
  2. Lying to Inves­ti­ga­tors Should­n’t Be a Crime (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “Pros­e­cu­tors want to catch you in a lie because, when they can’t prove an under­ly­ing crime, it’s often easy to prove that you lied to them. That’s where the prob­lem aris­es. I’ve been telling my aston­ished law stu­dents for decades that except in cer­tain well-defined cir­cum­stances, lying to inves­ti­ga­tors shouldn’t be a crime.” Carter is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale. I strong­ly endorse this view.
  3. Let’s Fix Peer Review (Ray Tru­ant, per­son­al blog): “When we apply for a grant or want to pub­lish our sci­ence, we secret­ly get the work reviewed by our peers, some of which are com­pet­ing with us for pre­cious fund­ing, or a bizarre ver­sion of fame. Under the veil of anonymi­ty, a review­er can write any­thing, includ­ed false state­ments, or incor­rect state­ments to jus­ti­fy a deci­sion. The deci­sion is most often, ‘do not fund’ or ‘reject’, even if the review is based off of inac­cu­ra­cies, lack of exper­tise, or even bla­tant slan­der. There are no rules, there are no reper­cus­sions.” Tru­ant is a bio­chemist at McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty in Cana­da.
  4. Jane Stanford’s Speech (Jane Stan­ford, stanford.edu): A stu­dent had to read this for a class a while back, and was struck by how selec­tive­ly it is quot­ed by the uni­ver­si­ty. The orig­i­nal doc­u­ment is thor­ough­ly reli­gious. “An impres­sion has gone forth that we were indif­fer­ent to reli­gious influ­ences and instruc­tions being taught here. I am quite sure that if all could be made to under­stand that this project was born from a great sor­row, the great­est that par­ents can endure, that the Cre­ator has led us through the deep waters out into the sun­shine of faith and and belief in a future life; that we have whol­ly and entire­ly as far as pos­si­ble giv­en our lives to Him; and only ask that He will guide us to do His will; that every stone that has been laid into the build­ings of this Uni­ver­si­ty but num­bers the prayers that have been offered up to our Heav­en­ly Father for strength, guid­ance, and help. That we should for­get His love and mer­cy and be indif­fer­ent as to the Chris­t­ian influ­ence to be used among the stu­dents, it would be an impos­si­bil­i­ty.”
  5. [Har­vard] Places HCFA On ‘Pro­ba­tion’ After Group Barred Stu­dent in Same-Sex Rela­tion­ship from Lead­er­ship (Car­o­line Engel­may­er & Michael Xie, Har­vard Crim­son): “The Office of Stu­dent Life has placed reli­gious group Har­vard Col­lege Faith and Action on ‘admin­is­tra­tive pro­ba­tion’ for a year after the orga­ni­za­tion pres­sured a female mem­ber of its stu­dent lead­er­ship to resign in Sep­tem­ber fol­low­ing her deci­sion to date a woman.… Col­lege admin­is­tra­tors told them HCFA is the first-ever cam­pus group to be placed on admin­is­tra­tive pro­ba­tion.”
  6. Mean­while on the Farm, Lone­ly Men and Women of Faith: The Expe­ri­ence of Reli­gious Stu­dents at Stan­ford (Ben Simon, Stan­ford Review): “It may be unrea­son­able to expect a sec­u­lar insti­tu­tion like Stan­ford to ful­ly accom­mo­date each student’s reli­gious needs. With that said, Stan­ford goes far beyond the let­ter of the law when it comes to eth­nic or racial diver­si­ty, but it does lit­tle to go out of its way to help reli­gious stu­dents.”
  7. As more jour­nal­ists report on Ice­land’s cir­cum­ci­sion saga, the coun­try gets a rab­bi (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “As Robert George of Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty – for­mer chair­man of the U.S. Com­mis­sion on Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom – not­ed in a series of tweets recent­ly, a coun­try ban­ning cir­cum­ci­sion effec­tive­ly bans Jews from liv­ing there. Dit­to for Mus­lims…. [How­ev­er] Gun­nars­dót­tir told the news­pa­per she ‘didn’t think it was nec­es­sary to con­sult’ with the island’s small Jew­ish and Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion before propos­ing the anti-cir­cum­ci­sion bill, adding ‘I didn’t see it as a reli­gious mat­ter.’” That last detail is telling. Reli­gious illit­er­a­cy caus­es real harms.
  8. Read My Lips: No New Admin­is­tra­tors (Berber Jin, Stan­ford Review): “Though admin­is­tra­tive offices are obvi­ous­ly nec­es­sary for the university’s oper­a­tion, their self-serv­ing incen­tives should make us wary of their expan­sion. Unlike fac­ul­ty, who gain pres­tige through qual­i­ty teach­ing and inno­v­a­tive research, admin­is­tra­tors move up the career lad­der by expand­ing bureau­cra­cy.” The Review has been on fire late­ly.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a debate between two pas­tors on guns I shared back in vol­ume 48 – both are very thought­ful and are skill­ful debaters.  Here is the con­ver­sa­tion so far. All the posts are pret­ty short.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 121

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Exchanged Life (J. Hus­don Tay­lor, a let­ter to his sis­ter): “It lit­tle mat­ters to my ser­vant whether I send him to buy a few cash worth of things, or the most expen­sive arti­cles. In either case he looks to me for the mon­ey, and brings me his pur­chas­es. So, if God place me in great per­plex­i­ty, must He not give me much guid­ance; in posi­tions of great dif­fi­cul­ty, much grace; in cir­cum­stances of great pres­sure and tri­al, much strength? No fear that His resources will be unequal to the emer­gency!” (brought to my atten­tion by a stu­dent, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed)
  2. The news from Las Vegas is so heart­break­ing. Here are a few pieces about it and also about the issue of guns more gen­er­al­ly.
  3. A Brief His­to­ry of Ces­sa­tion­ism (Thomas Kidd, Gospel Coali­tion): “In the 1700s and 1800s, sus­pi­cion of claimed mir­a­cles was con­nect­ed to anti-Catholi­cism. Protes­tant crit­ics saw the Catholic tra­di­tion as rid­dled with fake claims of mir­a­cles. Ridi­cul­ing the fake mir­a­cle claims of Catholics (such as icons bleed­ing a liq­uid that turned out to be cher­ry juice) became a sta­ple of Reformed polemics against the Catholic Church. So when seem­ing­ly mirac­u­lous events hap­pened in Protes­tant church­es, even sym­pa­thet­ic observers warned against the threat of bogus mir­a­cles.”
  4. The Lim­its of “Diver­si­ty” (Kele­fa San­neh, The New York­er): “It is pos­si­ble that ‘diver­si­ty’ will ulti­mate­ly prove too weak a term to do all that is asked of it. Con­tem­po­rary advo­cates some­times empha­size, instead, “inclu­sion,” a less neu­tral con­cept, and one that ges­tures at the polit­i­cal agen­das that inevitably shape these debates.”
  5. ‘Pan­icked’ Lon­don train com­muters force open doors, flee onto tracks when man reads the Bible aloud (Dou­glas Per­ry, Ore­gon Live). I’ve said it before — our cul­ture has replaced the fear of God with the fear of reli­gion. It’s a poor trade.
  6. Why the rule of law suf­fers when we have too many laws (Ilya Somin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Because of the vast scope of cur­rent law, in mod­ern Amer­i­ca the author­i­ties can pin a crime on the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of peo­ple, if they real­ly want to. Whether you get hauled into court or not depends more on the dis­cre­tionary deci­sions of  law enforce­ment offi­cials than on any legal rule…. the rule of law has large­ly been sup­plant­ed by the rule of chance and the rule of exec­u­tive dis­cre­tion. Inevitably, polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy and par­ti­san­ship have a major impact on the lat­ter. For exam­ple, fed­er­al law enforce­ment pri­or­i­ties are very dif­fer­ent under Trump than they were under Oba­ma.”
  7. Roy Moore is a fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ure with a com­pelling sto­ry. He’s the guy you might know as “that Ten Com­mand­ments judge from the South.” He is run­ning for a seat in the US Sen­ate and he just won the pri­ma­ry elec­tion and seems on track to win the gen­er­al elec­tion. There are inter­est­ing times ahead as a result.

Things Glen Found Amusing

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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