Tag: healing

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 issue 413, which I have been told is a struc­tured hexag­o­nal dia­mond num­ber. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds very impres­sive. I also know that 413 = 7 · 59, which I find both cool and under­stand­able.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. I’m a Con­tin­u­a­tion­ist with Can­cer. I Still Believe in Heal­ings. (Tim Shorey, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I live my life and face my can­cer some­where between seem­ing­ly sin­cere ‘namers and claimers’ who expect heal­ing every time and seem­ing­ly sur­ren­dered ‘if-the-Lord-willers’ whose prayers affirm God’s heal­ing pow­er but whose caveats and qual­i­fiers make it sound like he’s not like­ly to use it. God alone knows the heart. But the tone of the for­mer par­ty can sound like pre­sump­tion mas­querad­ing as faith, while the tone of the lat­ter can sound like doubt mas­querad­ing as humil­i­ty.”
   • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who appro­pri­ate­ly asks, “if you read this, please also pray for the author, Tim Shorey.”
2. Date to mar­ry, not to have fun (Bethany Man­del, The Spec­ta­tor): “A lot of things are impor­tant in a mar­riage: love, respect, trust, laugh­ter. But per­haps most impor­tant is to remem­ber that it’s a part­ner­ship for life; and as such, dat­ing should not be con­sid­ered fun, but instead like a job inter­view for the most impor­tant role you’ll ever have, that of a spouse. If you were inter­view­ing for a job, would you allow the process to drag on, long after you know it’s the right fit (or not)?”
   • Broad­ly agree, with the pro­vi­sion that this is advice about dat­ing rela­tion­ship and not just about going on dates. In oth­er words, go on dates to have fun and then care­ful­ly dis­cern who is a good match for pro­gress­ing into a seri­ous dat­ing rela­tion­ship. Too many Chris­tians want to know they want to mar­ry some­one before they go out for cof­fee with them, and that’s a lot of pres­sure to put on a lat­te.
   • Relat­ed: Swip­ing and Dat­ing Pref­er­ences (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Here’s a sketch of what might be hap­pen­ing: Men high on the Dark Tri­ad (psy­chopa­thy, nar­cis­sism, Machi­avel­lian­ism) use dat­ing apps. They might make up 10–20% of users. They go on a ram­page, sleep­ing with lots of women, play­ing games with them, lead­ing them on, ghost­ing them, lying to them, etc. Dark Tri­ad men are excel­lent impos­tors; they are good at mim­ic­k­ing desir­able roman­tic qual­i­ties, and are thus able to pro­cure lots of sex part­ners. The women they sleep with become dis­il­lu­sioned. These women begin to behave in psy­cho­path­ic and nar­cis­sis­tic ways to pro­tect them­selves from emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and pain, and per­haps as a way to even the score with ‘men’ as a cat­e­go­ry. They learn to avoid Dark Tri­ad men and exploit nor­mal men. These men become con­fused and upset, and begin to treat oth­er women the same way to ‘get even.’ In short, Dark Tri­ad men mis­treat women, who then mis­treat ordi­nary men, who then mis­treat ordi­nary women. Bad behav­ior dri­ves out the good. A sys­tem tai­lor-made for psy­cho­path­ic males (dat­ing apps facil­i­tate anonymi­ty, super­fi­cial­i­ty, and decep­tion) pre­dictably gives rise to a defect-defect equi­lib­ri­um.”
   • Full of inter­est­ing data.
3. Study of Elite Col­lege Admis­sions Data Sug­gests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qual­i­fi­ca­tion (Aatish Bha­tia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz, New York Times): “Elite col­leges have long been filled with the chil­dren of the rich­est fam­i­lies: At Ivy League schools, one in six stu­dents has par­ents in the top 1 per­cent.… For appli­cants with the same SAT or ACT score, chil­dren from fam­i­lies in the top 1 per­cent were 34 per­cent more like­ly to be admit­ted than the aver­age appli­cant, and those from the top 0.1 per­cent were more than twice as like­ly to get in.”
   • The aca­d­e­m­ic study Raj Chetty, David J. Deming and John N. Friedman, "Diversifying Society's Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges"
   • One of the authors wrote about their find­ings on his Sub­stack: Ivy-Plus col­leges are a gate­way to the elite (David Dem­ing, Sub­stack): “Wait­list admits are 60% more like­ly than wait­list rejects to have earn­ings in the top 1% for their age, are near­ly twice as like­ly to attend a top 10 grad­u­ate school and are three times as like­ly to work in a pres­ti­gious firm (think high­ly ranked research hos­pi­tals, top law and con­sult­ing firms, nation­al news­pa­pers, etc.).”
4. Why won’t Indi­ana Jones con­vert to some­thing after all he has seen in his life? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, On Reli­gion): “What we want to know is why he is always back to square one at the start of every adven­ture – a skep­tic, or even a scoffer. I mean, think about it: He has seen the Ark of the Covenant opened and the destroy­ing angels pour out God’s vengeance on his ene­mies. He has seen the sacred Hin­du stones come to life. …He has seen the true cup of Christ heal his own father from a fatal gun­shot wound – on screen, with no ambi­gu­i­ty.”
   • It’s reveal­ing about mod­ern assump­tions that almost no one thinks to ask this ques­tion.
5. Are We Liv­ing Through ‘End Times’? (Bari Weiss inter­view­ing Peter Turchin, The Free Press): “Elite over­pro­duc­tion turns out to be the best pre­dic­tor of a cri­sis to come. It is essen­tial­ly ubiq­ui­tous in the pre-cri­sis peri­ods of all soci­eties. I used the game of musi­cal chairs to illus­trate it, except in the usu­al game, you start with 11 play­ers and ten chairs, and one per­son los­es. Here, instead of remov­ing chairs, you keep chairs con­stant, and we add more play­ers. You can imag­ine the amount of chaos that is going to hap­pen. Now let’s con­nect this to the over­pro­duc­tion of wealthy peo­ple in the Unit­ed States. As more and more of them become play­ers in pol­i­tics, they dri­ve up the price of get­ting into office. And more impor­tant­ly, the more peo­ple are vying for these posi­tions, the more peo­ple are going to be frus­trat­ed. They’re going to be losers. But humans don’t have to fol­low rules. This is the dark side of com­pe­ti­tion: if it’s too extreme, it cre­ates con­di­tions for peo­ple to start to break rules.”
   • Turchin is a social sci­en­tist at U Conn. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
   • The author explains the rela­tion­ship between what he does and the sci­ence fic­tion we see in the Foun­da­tion series: Psy­chohis­to­ry and Clio­dy­nam­ics (Peter Turchin, per­son­al blog): “Pre­dic­tion is over­rat­ed. What we real­ly should be striv­ing for, with our social sci­ence, is abil­i­ty to bring about desir­able out­comes and to avoid unwant­ed out­comes. What’s the point of pre­dict­ing future, if it’s very bleak and we are not able to change it? We would be like the per­son con­demned to hang before sun­rise – per­fect knowl­edge of the future, zero abil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.”
6. Bad Def­i­n­i­tions Of “Democ­ra­cy” And “Account­abil­i­ty” Shade Into Total­i­tar­i­an­ism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “You could, in the­o­ry, define ‘demo­c­ra­t­ic’ this way, so that the more areas of life are sub­ject­ed to the con­trol of a (demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed) gov­ern­ment, the more demo­c­ra­t­ic your soci­ety is. But in that case, the most demo­c­ra­t­ic pos­si­ble soci­ety is total­i­tar­i­an­ism — a soci­ety where the gov­ern­ment con­trols every facet of life, includ­ing what reli­gion you prac­tice, who you mar­ry, and what job you work at. In this soci­ety there would be no room for human free­dom.”
7. The Impor­tance Of Say­ing “Yes” To The “But” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “One of the endur­ing frus­tra­tions of liv­ing in a polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized coun­try is the evap­o­ra­tion of nuance. As the mus­cles of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy atro­phy, and as cul­tur­al trib­al­ism infects everyone’s con­scious­ness, it becomes more and more dif­fi­cult to say, ‘Yes, but …’ Every­one hates the but. It com­pli­cates; it mud­dles; it can dis­able a slo­gan; and punc­ture a polit­i­cal­ly use­ful myth.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Fight­ing Against Satanism (Tik­Tok via Red­dit): This is hilar­i­ous and worth the two and half min­utes to watch. The sto­ry is fab­u­lous on its own. The Jamaican accent expo­nen­tial­ly increas­es the pay­off. I showed this to a Jamaican stu­dent who said, “It’s the way we exag­ger­ate every sin­gle detail. That’s why I always go home for the hol­i­day sea­son, every­one has a new sto­ry to dra­ma­tize. You always have to be pre­pared to cry in laugh­ter at Jamaican par­ties.”
• ‘Bet You Wish You Had Lis­tened To The Safe­ty Pre­sen­ta­tion Now, Eh?’ Says Smug Stew­ardess As Plane Plum­mets Toward The Ground (Baby­lon Bee)
• Jen­ny (SMBC)
• Democ­ra­cy Man (Pearls Before Swine)
• Can a Lego Car Roll Down­hill For­ev­er? (Brick Tech­nol­o­gy, YouTube): nine min­utes of clever engi­neer­ing. I think he starts to cheat at around the 50° incline but it’s still super inter­est­ing.
• Twit­ter Jus­tice (Pearls Before Swine)
• How Do You Know If You’ve Got Chem­istry? (Julie Kim, YouTube): six min­utes.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Reli­gious Com­mu­ni­ty and Human Flour­ish­ing (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In some cas­es, our results close­ly repli­cat­ed past work. For exam­ple, we found that, even after con­trol­ling for the fac­tors above, indi­vid­u­als who attend­ed reli­gious ser­vices week­ly or more were 16% less like­ly to become depressed, and saw a 29% reduc­tion in smok­ing and 34% reduc­tion in heavy drink­ing. These results match rea­son­ably close­ly results from sev­er­al pri­or stud­ies, includ­ing the pri­or meta-analy­ses men­tioned above. Some­what strik­ing­ly, but again in line with pri­or analy­sis, week­ly ser­vice atten­dees were 26% less like­ly to die dur­ing the fol­low-up peri­od.” Van­der­Weele, him­self a Chris­t­ian, is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard and I have shared some of his work before. From vol­ume 290.

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.