Tag: how the church is perceived

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 279

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. Blows to vol­ley­ball star Hay­ley Hod­son’s head changed her life (Patrick Hru­by, LA Times): “The fam­i­ly did not trust Stan­ford. School doc­tors, Hod­son says, had diag­nosed her foot pain as inflam­ma­tion and told her that she wasn’t risk­ing fur­ther injury by play­ing. Med­ical records show that an inde­pen­dent doc­tor sub­se­quent­ly reviewed MRI scans tak­en by Stan­ford and deter­mined she had a stress frac­ture.” Hay­ley was a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  2. My White Priv­i­lege Did­n’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quil­lette): “Not long after, I walked into a sub­ur­ban Bap­tist church, full of strange, unfash­ion­ably dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. I was a Marx­ist, a fem­i­nist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smok­er, and des­per­ate. The love I received in that place is the rea­son that I will defend the rights of fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to my dying breath.” This is amaz­ing. If you only read one thing this week, make it this one. Reminder: titles are rarely cho­sen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an arti­cle.
  3. A pastor’s life depends on a coro­n­avirus vac­cine. Now he faces skep­tics in his church. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Before the pan­dem­ic, the 45-year-old min­is­ter, who nor­mal­ly leads near­ly 2,000 peo­ple, would stand by the entrance to shake hands and offer hugs. Now, before ser­vices, he stays seclud­ed in a room off­stage until it is time to preach while an armed church mem­ber who works for Home­land Secu­ri­ty watch­es the door.”
  4. Amer­i­cans’ Men­tal Health Rat­ings Sink to New Low (Megan Bre­nan, Gallup): “Although the major­i­ty of U.S. adults con­tin­ue to rate their men­tal health as excel­lent (34%) or good (42%), and far few­er say it is only fair (18%) or poor (5%), the lat­est excel­lent rat­ings are eight points low­er than Gallup has mea­sured in any pri­or year.” 
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent because of one very inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic: the only group that showed an increase in men­tal health was week­ly church­go­ers (the week­ly part mat­ters — month­ly church­go­ers expe­ri­enced a decline). I looked at the more detailed PDF and it was unclear to me how they asked about church atten­dance, and of course it is impos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy cau­sa­tion from a sur­vey like this.
    • I found this com­ment by an econ­o­mist on Twit­ter fun­ny: “This is absolute­ly the least sur­pris­ing thing ever. Church folks are like, “The pan­dem­ic sucks, but my church did these 57 things and I’m over­whelmed with peo­ple try­ing to find ways to sup­port dur­ing these times.” Every­body else is like, ‘I’M SO ALONE’” 
  5. The Rise and Fall of Carl Lentz, the Celebri­ty Pas­tor of Hill­song Church (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Soon the church’s cul­tur­al cachet grew out­side Chris­t­ian cir­cles. ‘I knew peo­ple who came to church not because they were Chris­tians but because they thought Carl was hot,’ said Heather McClana­han, who worked for the church in 2014 and 2015.”
    • The Cri­sis of Chris­t­ian Celebri­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “The way I’ve put it in speech­es to young Chris­tians is sim­ply this, ‘Make the easy choice so you don’t have to make the hard choice.’ Say­ing no to the extra drink is much eas­i­er than halt­ing a drunk­en flir­ta­tion.”
  6. Promi­nent evan­gel­i­cals are direct­ing Trump’s sink­ing ship. That feeds doubts about reli­gion. (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When promi­nent Chris­tians affirm absurd polit­i­cal lies with reli­gious fer­vor, non­be­liev­ers have every rea­son to think: ‘Maybe Chris­tians are prone to swal­low­ing absurd reli­gious lies as well. Maybe they are sim­ply cred­u­lous about every­thing.’ If we should encounter some­one who believes — hon­est­ly and adamant­ly believes — in both the exis­tence of the East­er Bun­ny and in the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ, it would nat­u­ral­ly raise ques­tions about the qual­i­ty of his or her believ­ing fac­ul­ties.”
  7. The com­ing war on the hid­den algo­rithms that trap peo­ple in pover­ty (Karen Hao, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): Not until they were stand­ing in the court­room in the mid­dle of a hear­ing did the wit­ness rep­re­sent­ing the state reveal that the gov­ern­ment had just adopt­ed a new algo­rithm. The wit­ness, a nurse, couldn’t explain any­thing about it. “Of course not—they bought it off the shelf,” Gilman says. “She’s a nurse, not a com­put­er sci­en­tist. She couldn’t answer what fac­tors go into it. How is it weight­ed? What are the out­comes that you’re look­ing for? So there I am with my stu­dent attor­ney, who’s in my clin­ic with me, and it’s like, ‘Oh, am I going to cross-exam­ine an algo­rithm?’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

QI’s Gift-Wrap­ping Life Hack! (QI, YouTube): mind blown in less than three min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To university-educated media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low-paying man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon asso­ciate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 212, with a fol­low-up shared the next week: 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.”

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 277

After assem­bling them, I real­ized the first link is about the friend zone and the final link is about man­ly wed­ding rings.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How To Get Out Of The Friend Zone (Aaron Renn, The Mas­culin­ist): “Friend­ships between men and women have the char­ac­ter­is­tic that they often evolve into asym­me­try of intent, which is exploita­tive if it per­sists…. remem­ber, just as no woman is under any oblig­a­tion to go out on a date with a man such as you, you are under no oblig­a­tion to be a friend to women.”
    • Every once in a while I like to toss out some­thing sure to rile peo­ple up, just to make sure you’re all pay­ing atten­tion. 
  2. God Mode Acti­vat­ed: Meet the Gamers Bring­ing Jesus to Twitch (Christo­pher Hut­ton, Medi­um): “Dustin Phillips is a blond-haired, beard­ed children’s pas­tor in Texas who also serves as GMA’s CEO. On Twitch, he goes by the han­dle Pas­tor­Doost­yn and is known as the “demon-slay­ing pas­tor.” He preach­es the gospel to his 1,400 fol­low­ers while stream­ing games like Doom and Poke­mon.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who was no doubt pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on finals. 
  3. Boy Scouts Face At Least 82,000 Sex Abuse Claims (Min­istry Watch): “Today is the dead­line set by a bank­rupt­cy court for fil­ing a sex-abuse claim against the Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca (BSA). The num­ber of claims so far filed now exceed 82,000, far more than the 9,000 claims filed in Catholic Church cas­es.”
    • Some of you have heard me say this before: the sex­u­al abuse scan­dal in the church is hor­rif­ic, yet it will be dwarfed by what we uncov­er about sex­u­al abuse in pub­lic schools and in youth orga­ni­za­tions. The church­es deserve rebuke for their han­dling of the wicked­ness in their ranks; sad­ly, I doubt that you will hear near­ly as much about the far more mas­sive scan­dals lurk­ing in non­re­li­gious insti­tu­tions.
  4. Andy Stan­ley on Evan­gel­i­cals After Trump (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “In the Gospels, Jesus calls on his fol­low­ers to go out, teach his mes­sage, and bap­tize peo­ple. Stan­ley has orga­nized his life around this imper­a­tive, called ‘the Great Com­mis­sion.’ The ques­tion for evan­gel­i­cals, now, is whether the unde­ni­able asso­ci­a­tion between Trump and their ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty will make that work hard­er. ‘Has this group of peo­ple who have some­how become “evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers”’ aligned with Trump ‘hurt the Church’s abil­i­ty to reach peo­ple out­side the Church? Absolute­ly,’ Stan­ley said. But he’s not over­ly wor­ried: A year or two from now, he said, ‘all that goes away.’ New lead­ers will rise up. The Trump era of evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ry will fade. Stan­ley chuck­led. ‘And this will just be, for a lot of peo­ple, a bad dream.’”
    • Relat­ed: The Cul­tur­al Con­se­quences of Very, Very Repub­li­can Chris­tian­i­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “What’s the cul­tur­al effect of a very, very Repub­li­can Chris­tian­i­ty? It’s way too sim­ple to say that it impairs the abil­i­ty of Chris­tians to reach their friends and neigh­bors. In some places it enhances the church’s appeal and inte­grates Chris­tians with­in their com­mu­ni­ty. In oth­er places it cre­ates a host of chal­lenges and need­less­ly alien­ates Chris­tians from their fel­low cit­i­zens.” Insight­ful.
  5. Vic­tim­hood or Devel­op­ment? (Glenn Loury, John McWhort­er, Shel­by Steele and Eli Steele, Quil­lette): “Again, the biggest mis­take we made is to buy into the idea that our vic­tim­iza­tion by racism was our source of pow­er rather than our self, our skills, our tal­ents, our devel­op­ment. As vic­tims, we had won a great civ­il rights move­ment. The down­side is it seduced us.” A fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion to eaves­drop on. You can also watch it on video.
  6. Madi­son Cawthorn, the GOP’s young star, arrives in Wash­ing­ton (Matthew Kas­sel, Jew­ish Insid­er): “He… seemed to believe that evan­ge­lism was a call­ing on par with pub­lic ser­vice. ‘If all you are is friends with oth­er Chris­tians, then how are you ever going to lead some­body to Christ?’ Cawthorn mused. ‘If you’re not want­i­ng to lead some­body to Christ, then you’re prob­a­bly not real­ly a Chris­t­ian.’”
    • I share that arti­cle to pro­vide con­text for this arti­cle: New­ly Elect­ed GOP Con­gress­man Madi­son Cawthorn Has Tried to Con­vert Jews to Chris­tian­i­ty (Pilar Melen­dez, The Dai­ly Beast): “Madi­son Cawthorn, the North Car­oli­na Repub­li­can who will become the youngest mem­ber of Con­gress in his­to­ry, has admit­ted he tried to con­vert Jews and Mus­lims to Chris­tian­i­ty.” The jour­nal­ist seems gen­uine­ly shocked.
    • Con­trast that with Con­vert Me If You Can (David Harsyani, Nation­al Review): “To be hon­est, I’m often sur­prised at how shy Chris­tians are at [evan­ge­lism]. As a hea­then, though, I am flat­tered by the atten­tion. And as a per­son in pos­ses­sion of free will, I am also uncon­cerned.” 
  7. Pas­tor John MacArthur and Cal­i­for­nia church clos­ings: Why isn’t this a nation­al sto­ry? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Indoor wor­ship ser­vices are banned in Cal­i­for­nia, a state of megachurch­es. You don’t have to be a reli­gion expert to know that restric­tion wasn’t going to fly, espe­cial­ly when stores and oth­er busi­ness­es had no sim­i­lar restric­tions…. Again, reli­gious folks see a chasm between how they’re treat­ed and how oth­er pro­tes­tors are treat­ed. And in-per­son nude danc­ing is a form of pro­tect­ed cul­tur­al expres­sion, as opposed to pub­lic wor­ship?”

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 Man­ly wed­ding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Out­line): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a cam­ou­flage ring, part­ly to sig­nal my deep com­mit­ment to irony and part­ly to get bet­ter ser­vice at the auto parts store.” I real­ly enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wed­ding bands in the not-too-distant future. First shared in vol­ume 210.

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 263

this one is short­er than nor­mal

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. Pan­demics Aren’t New—Just Look at Plagues in the Bible (Karen Engle, Logos): “With coro­n­avirus on everyone’s mind, ques­tions abound of whether the word ‘pan­dem­ic’ appears in the Bible, too. The short answer is no—’pandemic’ is not in the Bible. How­ev­er, the words “plague” and ‘pesti­lence’ are (no less than 122 times) and often ref­er­ence indi­vid­u­als or nations afflict­ed with a ter­ri­ble ill­ness.”
  2. ‘Chris­tian­i­ty Will Have Pow­er’ (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “‘Trump’s an out­sider, like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is. Is he a man of integri­ty? Absolute­ly not,’ he went on. ‘Does he stand up for some of our moral Chris­t­ian val­ues? Yes.’ The guys agreed. ‘I’m not going to say he’s a Chris­t­ian, but he just doesn’t attack us,’ his friend Jason Mul­der said.” Need­less­ly snarky at times, but one of the rare mus­ings on evan­gel­i­cal Trump sup­port in a promi­nent media source that gets a lot of things right.
    • An inter­est­ing counter-per­spec­tive: Chris­tians want pow­er? Sioux Cen­ter push­es back on New York Times sto­ry (Lee Pitts, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Our church small group [in Sioux Cen­ter] is more diverse than my small groups in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. We enjoy the com­pa­ny of three peo­ple from Mex­i­co, a gen­tle­man from Paraguay, a woman from Japan, an engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor from Ghana and a cou­ple orig­i­nal­ly from that exot­ic place called South Car­oli­na (that’s me). In fact, out of our 12-mem­ber small group, only two orig­i­nal­ly hail from North­west Iowa. Mean­while my D.C. small groups fea­tured all upper mid­dle-class White peo­ple most­ly sport­ing advanced degrees and flashy jobs inside the Belt­way. But the stereo­type would reverse that. My Sioux Cen­ter small group should be all White and my D.C. one would sure­ly be full of diver­si­ty, right? Wrong.” This arti­cle doesn’t real­ly rebut many of the reli­gious claims of the NY Times arti­cle, but it does under­cut some of the cul­tur­al ones.
  3. Wok­e­ness: old reli­gion in a new bot­tle (Sean Collins, Spiked): “What we’re see­ing now is an ampli­fi­ca­tion of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that has no out­let. There’s no way to see peo­ple kneel­ing, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or sway­ing while they hold up can­dles, and avoid acknowl­edg­ing that it’s dri­ven by a spir­i­tu­al desire. I per­ceived this when I wrote about Occu­py Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that is man­i­fest­ing itself more vio­lent­ly. Because to the post-Protes­tants, the world is an out­rage and we are all sin­ners.”
  4. How Megachurch­es Spent Coro­n­avirus Relief Funds (Luke Scorziell, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Accord­ing to Vaughn’s account­ing, the church spent 93 per­cent of the mon­ey on pay­roll. The addi­tion­al 7 per­cent went to rent and util­i­ties. The PPP rules say loans will be con­vert­ed to grants if 75 per­cent of the funds are used for pay­roll and the rest for spec­i­fied needs, includ­ing rent and util­i­ties. The mon­ey helped with more than just pay­ing the bills, how­ev­er. Because Palm Valley’s staff didn’t have to wor­ry about their job secu­ri­ty, they were able to focus ful­ly on car­ing for the church in the pan­dem­ic, Vaughn said.”
  5. Abol­ish the Police? Those Who Sur­vived the Chaos in Seat­tle Aren’t So Sure (Nel­lie Bowles, New York Times): “Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own may­or that the protests in his home­town were peace­ful, with ‘a block par­ty atmos­phere.’ But that was not what he saw through the win­dows of his Seat­tle cof­fee shop.”
    • Relat­ed: replac­ing police with social work­ers (Jes­si­ca Crispin, per­son­al blog): “If we do not have police, an armed squadron of men and women asked to inter­vene in sit­u­a­tions we our­selves can­not man­age, whether that be crime, acute men­tal ill­ness, or vio­lence, then who will we turn to in those sit­u­a­tions? One such pro­pos­al is to replace police with social work­ers. But as my friend R. said to me as we dis­cussed these ideas, ‘I don’t think these peo­ple have inter­act­ed with social work­ers.’ ” This is a per­spec­tive I had not heard before.
  6. Injus­tice, Out­rage, and the Prob­lem of Atheod­i­cy (Pub­lic Square): “In a world with­out God, there is no ulti­mate pur­pose in the injus­tice. And there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty of any ulti­mate prov­i­den­tial redemp­tion. It is just raw, rank, irra­tional injus­tice. And so what is the appro­pri­ate reac­tion? Out­rage! (And per­haps also despair.)” The author is a law prof at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego. Also, bear in mind that Pub­lic Square is the Mor­mon equiv­a­lent of First Things.
  7. Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Com­plete­ly Garbage’ (Steven Levy, Wired): “The major­i­ty of all US tests are com­plete­ly garbage, wast­ed. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reim­burse at the same lev­el, of course they’re going to take every cus­tomer. Because they are mak­ing ridicu­lous mon­ey, and it’s most­ly rich peo­ple that are get­ting access to that. You have to have the reim­burse­ment sys­tem pay a lit­tle bit extra for 24 hours, pay the nor­mal fee for 48 hours, and pay noth­ing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.”

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 Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 258

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 257

a short­er col­lec­tion of links than those I’ve shared recent­ly

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. Stop Fir­ing the Inno­cent (Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic): “Caf­fer­ty was pun­ished for an offense he insists he did not com­mit. Shor was pun­ished for doing some­thing that most wouldn’t even con­sid­er objec­tion­able. Wadi was pun­ished for the sins of his daugh­ter. What all of these rather dif­fer­ent cas­es have in com­mon is that none of the peo­ple who were deprived of a liveli­hood in the name of fight­ing racism appear to have been guilty of actu­al­ly per­pet­u­at­ing racism.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins. 
    • This is an essen­tial fol­low-up: pun­ish­ing the inno­cent (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “…for those who want to effect social change by expo­sure and sham­ing, pun­ish­ing the inno­cent is a fea­ture of their sys­tem, not a bug. It increas­es fear, which increas­es dis­ci­pline, not only of one­self but of oth­ers. And every employ­er who fires an employ­ee because they’re afraid of a social-media mob draws us clos­er to a ful­ly Panop­tic soci­ety, a social tyran­ny with an effi­cien­cy beyond the dreams of total­i­tar­i­an soci­eties of the past.” This reminds me of the clas­sic post Plan­et of Cops by Fred­dy deBoer.
  2. The Min­neapo­lis street cor­ner where George Floyd was killed has become a Chris­t­ian revival­ist site. (Ruth Gra­ham, Slate): “‘I would describe this as revival and awak­en­ing,’ said Joshua Giles, a local pas­tor who has been com­ing to the site to pray and preach for sev­er­al weeks. Giles, who is Black, said he has tak­en part in con­ver­sions and spon­ta­neous bap­tisms there, and that at least one woman had been mirac­u­lous­ly healed of per­sis­tent pain in her arm.”
    • I found the way Gra­ham framed one min­is­ter’s crit­i­cism of the Black Lives Mat­ter orga­ni­za­tion inter­est­ing. I don’t think it’s an unusu­al per­spec­tive — it was pre­sent­ed on Tues­day by sports anchor (and Colum­bia grad) Mar­cel­lus Wiley: https://twitter.com/SFY/status/1278064470435090438 (three minute video)
    • It’s also inter­est­ing to com­pare Wor­ship­pers Con­tin­ue ‘Uni­ty Revival’ at George Floyd Memo­r­i­al Despite Push­back (Tay­lor Berglund, Charis­ma News). The reports large­ly align, I’m just fas­ci­nat­ed by how reporters’ inter­ests and con­texts shape the ques­tions they ask and the answers they empha­size. I am pret­ty sure both reporters are Chris­t­ian, although I sus­pect they grav­i­tate to dif­fer­ent church­es.
  3. Is Tim Scott the Most Influ­en­tial Leg­is­la­tor in Con­gress? (Declan Gar­vey, The Dis­patch): “To Scott, his black­ness and his par­ti­san affil­i­a­tion makes per­fect sense: He’s lived the Amer­i­can dream, ris­ing from pover­ty to build a series of suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es. He’s a devout Chris­t­ian com­mit­ted to the preser­va­tion of reli­gious lib­er­ty. But to inter­lop­ers pro­ject­ing their own expe­ri­ences and beliefs onto him, two of his three core iden­ti­ties are in direct con­tra­dic­tion with one anoth­er. Lean­ing too hard into one elic­its accu­sa­tions of being trai­tor­ous to the oth­er.’” Utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. How a Great Pow­er Falls Apart (Charles King, For­eign Affairs): “Faced with a series of exter­nal shocks and inter­nal crises, and pur­sued by more dynam­ic and adapt­able com­peti­tors abroad, his coun­try had far less life in it than any­one at the time could see. All coun­tries end. Every soci­ety has its own rock bot­tom, obscured by dark­ness until impact is immi­nent. Already in the sixth cen­tu­ry, Amal­rik wrote, goats were graz­ing in the Roman Forum.” The author is an inter­na­tion­al rela­tions Pro­fes­sor at George­town. Rel­e­vant for both Amer­i­ca and Chi­na.
  5. Pas­tors on Social Media (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “… you are wrestling against prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers, and those pow­ers have keen eyes for your desire for a big­ger audi­ence and your church mem­bers’ affin­i­ty for oth­er forms of social rein­force­ment. They want you to believe that oth­er forms of wis­dom are more reli­able than God’s Word, oth­er audi­ences more impor­tant than your hum­ble con­gre­ga­tion, oth­er plat­forms more pow­er­ful for speak­ing, oth­er kinds of impact you can make more last­ing and sig­nif­i­cant. The sec­ond you begin to believe these things you have begun to com­pro­mise your call­ing as a pas­tor.” This is a fire hydrant of wis­dom, and most of it is rel­e­vant to every­one.
  6. On Behalf Of Envi­ron­men­tal­ists, I Apol­o­gize For The Cli­mate Scare (Mike Shel­len­berg­er, Quil­lette): “Cli­mate change is hap­pen­ing. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem. I may seem like a strange per­son to be say­ing all of this. I have been a cli­mate activist for 20 years and an envi­ron­men­tal­ist for 30.”
    • The author’s book is cur­rent­ly the #1 best sell­er in envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence on Ama­zon. This arti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Forbes (where he is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor) but they took it down in the ensu­ing con­tro­ver­sy. Unde­ni­ably inter­est­ing. I don’t have exper­tise in this area, so if he’s wrong please point me to any bet­ter pieces you know of.
  7. The Ghost of Woodrow Wil­son (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…unless the endgame of New Haven’s removal of Colum­bus is the expro­pri­a­tion of white prop­er­ty (Yale’s prop­er­ty, I sup­pose, espe­cial­ly) and its redis­tri­b­u­tion to the Pequots and Mohe­gans, then a con­sis­tent rejec­tion of Columbus’s lega­cy isn’t what my city is embrac­ing. Instead, it’s just doing the same thing as Prince­ton: keep­ing the inher­i­tance, but repu­di­at­ing the bene­fac­tor. Keep­ing the gains, but mak­ing a big show of pro­nounc­ing them ill got­ten.”

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 Are Satanists of the MS-13 gang an under-covered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS-13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 158.

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 249

The vin­di­ca­tion of a vil­i­fied mis­sion­ary, thoughts about the mur­der of Ahmaud Arbery, and pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives.

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. A Mis­sion­ary on Tri­al (Ariel Levy, The New York­er): “Accord­ing to a study pub­lished in 2017 in The Amer­i­can Jour­nal for Clin­i­cal Nutri­tion, four­teen per cent of chil­dren treat­ed for severe acute mal­nu­tri­tion at Mula­go Hospital—Uganda’s best facility—died. The study notes that the over-all mor­tal­i­ty rate in Africa for chil­dren with S.A.M. is between twen­ty and twen­ty-five per cent. Dur­ing the years when Serv­ing His Chil­dren func­tioned as an in-patient facil­i­ty, its rate was eleven per cent.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed. If you want to dig deep­er, last Octo­ber a Ugan­dan tele­vi­sion sta­tion did a twen­ty-minute sto­ry on this case which also dis­cred­it­ed the missionary’s accusers. Proverbs 18:17 wins again.
    • I see a sim­i­lar dynam­ic in some stu­dents who are feel­ing angst over their faith. Upon con­ver­sa­tion, I often learn that they have been told untrue or mis­lead­ing things about mis­sions, the his­to­ry of the church, and the present sta­tus of the church in the world. Always remem­ber that crit­ics might have motives beyond sim­ply estab­lish­ing the truth. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lis­ten to them, but it does mean that you don’t treat their com­plaints as axioms. When this reporter flew to Ugan­da and talked to peo­ple on the ground she quick­ly learned that the inter­na­tion­al­ly-accept­ed nar­ra­tive was not right.
  2. Why We Opened a Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty in Iraq Amid ISIS’ Geno­cide (Jayson Cas­par, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There was an unwrit­ten under­stand­ing that the Chris­tians would not overt­ly pros­e­ly­tize and share the gospel, but be indi­rect and not offend sharia law. But after ISIS and the lack of any real response from the Mus­lim world, Arch­bish­op War­da says that this agree­ment is now fin­ished. That as we go for­ward, we will no longer be shy. We are going to pro­claim the gospel, pro­claim the teach­ings of Christ, and who­ev­er comes to us will come…. There may not be many Chris­tians in Iraq. But as an old priest said once to me, ‘Well, remem­ber Christ only had 12, and every­one want­ed to kill them, too.’”
  3. Exquis­ite Scan­dal (Nan­cy Lemann, Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly): “The famil­iar the­o­ry at the tri­al was that the peo­ple of Louisiana would rather be enter­tained than served with ethics. Some would call this a Gal­lic atti­tude, to be blind­ed by charm at the expense of integri­ty, and indeed the cul­ture of Louisiana is his­tor­i­cal­ly French Catholic. And as the Catholics might say, the fall from grace is inevitable, a mys­tery to be endured rather than a prob­lem to be solved. And some in Louisiana would pre­fer a smart crook to an unin­tel­li­gent oppor­tunist masked as a cru­sad­er whose ambi­tion blinds him to his own stu­pid­i­ty. Such a one could be just as dan­ger­ous, if not more so, than a crook.” As some­one born in Louisiana, I very much enjoyed this arti­cle. 
  4. Gre­go­ry and Travis McMichael face mur­der charges in con­nec­tion with Ahmaud Arbery case (Steve Almasy and Angela Bara­jas, CNN): “Two men involved in the fatal shoot­ing of Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, Geor­gia, have been arrest­ed and face mur­der and aggra­vat­ed assault charges, accord­ing to the Geor­gia Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion.”
    • It is amaz­ing to me that it was not the video evi­dence that led to their arrest, but the pub­lic out­cry in response to the video evi­dence. 
    • A Vig­i­lante Killing in Geor­gia (David French, The Dis­patch): “When white men grab guns and mount up to pur­sue and seize an unarmed black man in the street, they stand in the shoes of lynch mobs past.”
    • Think­ing Chris­tian­ly About the Ahmaud Arbery Lynch­ing (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “If we are to be peo­ple who act just­ly and pro­mote jus­tice, which is that each per­son receives their right­ful dues, then we must right­ly dis­cern what has hap­pened in the case of Arbery. This was a lynch­ing. It was an act that God hates. And so we must rec­og­nize that and we must call it by its name and speak out against it and against all such acts of injus­tice.”
    • Relat­ed in the abstract: How to Pun­ish Vot­ers (Josie Duffy Rice, New York Times): “It’s well known that vot­er sup­pres­sion has tak­en the form of the clos­ing of polling places, new restric­tive vot­er ID laws, vot­er roll purges of thou­sands of eli­gi­ble vot­ers and nine-hour lines at the polls. But Ms. Pearson’s case is a reminder that it can also take the form of the aggres­sive pros­e­cu­tion of indi­vid­ual black vot­ers for polling-place offens­es — which in many cas­es appears moti­vat­ed less by a sin­cere desire to address fraud than by a desire to intim­i­date.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • The Covid-19 Rid­dle: Why Does the Virus Wal­lop Some Places and Spare Oth­ers? (Han­nah Beech, Alis­sa J. Rubin, Ana­toly Kur­manaev and Ruth Maclean, New York Times): “The coro­n­avirus has killed so many peo­ple in Iran that the coun­try has resort­ed to mass buri­als, but in neigh­bor­ing Iraq, the body count is few­er than 100. The Domini­can Repub­lic has report­ed near­ly 7,600 cas­es of the virus. Just across the bor­der, Haiti has record­ed about 85.”
    • Coro­n­avirus Could Dis­rupt Weath­er Fore­cast­ing (Hen­ry Foun­tain, New York Times): “…data on tem­per­a­ture, wind and humid­i­ty from air­plane flights, col­lect­ed by sen­sors on the planes and trans­mit­ted in real time to fore­cast­ing orga­ni­za­tions around the world, has been cut by near­ly 90 per­cent in some regions.” I must con­fess I did not see that com­ing. At all. 
    • Google App Cen­sor­ing Covid-19 Cours­es (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Google is a pri­vate enti­ty. It has the right to con­trol what goes out on its app plat­form. Whether Google is moral­ly cor­rect to exer­cise that right to sup­press any unof­fi­cial pan­dem­ic infor­ma­tion is a dif­fer­ent ques­tion — and a very impor­tant one. Google owns YouTube — how long will they allow these cours­es to remain on YouTube?” These are cours­es by aca­d­e­mics speak­ing with­in their areas of exper­tise.
    • Relat­ed: Who is Judy Mikovits in ‘Plan­dem­ic,’ the coro­n­avirus con­spir­a­cy video just banned from social media? (Katie Shep­herd, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The film is so ques­tion­able that social media plat­forms includ­ing Face­book, YouTube and Vimeo on Thurs­day scrubbed it from their sites. A Vimeo spokesper­son, for exam­ple, said that the com­pa­ny ‘stands firm in keep­ing our plat­form safe from con­tent that spreads harm­ful and mis­lead­ing health infor­ma­tion. The video in ques­tion has been removed … for vio­lat­ing these very poli­cies.’” A friend sent me a link to her video but it was pulled down. I have no opin­ion about the video because I haven’t seen it. But I do have an opin­ion about it being pulled down. I dis­like that intense­ly. I fear the risks of mis­in­for­ma­tion far less than I fear the risks of con­trol­ling infor­ma­tion. 
    • A pas­tor in the Bronx thought he knew hard­ship. Then his church saw 13 coro­n­avirus deaths. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Promised Land, in the poor­est con­gres­sion­al dis­trict in the nation, sees about 250 most­ly African Amer­i­can and Lati­no wor­shipers on a nor­mal week­end. Pub­lic hous­ing units line the streets near the church in the Mott Haven neigh­bor­hood, where city offi­cials esti­mate the pover­ty rate is about 44 per­cent.”
    • In Inner-City Black Church­es: More Grief, Few­er Resources, Stronger Faith (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Despite bear­ing the dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact of the out­break, black believ­ers have demon­strat­ed par­tic­u­lar spir­i­tu­al endurance. In a Pew sur­vey released last week, mem­bers of his­tor­i­cal­ly black church­es were more like­ly than any oth­er reli­gious tra­di­tion to say their faith has been strength­ened through the out­break. More than half (56%) say their faith has become stronger, com­pared to 35 per­cent of all Chris­tians and 24 per­cent of adults over­all.”
    • Clin­i­cal Study Con­sid­ers The Pow­er Of Prayer To Com­bat COVID-19 (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “Half of the patients, ran­dom­ly cho­sen, will receive a ‘uni­ver­sal’ prayer offered in five denom­i­na­tion­al forms, via Chris­tian­i­ty, Hin­duism, Islam, Judaism, and Bud­dhism. The oth­er 500 patients will con­sti­tute the con­trol group.” This study looks like a mess. How do they expect to keep the 500 in the con­trol group from being prayed for? I am pret­ty sure that if you are hos­pi­tal­ized with Covid-19 some­one is pray­ing for you. And my the­ol­o­gy leads me to believe those organ­ic, heart­felt prayers offered by peo­ple who actu­al­ly know the patients are going to be more sig­nif­i­cant than the “uni­ver­sal prayers” offered by the research par­tic­i­pants. I expect this study will lead inter­net athe­ists to claim that all prayer has been debunked when at most it will show that script­ed mul­ti­faith prayers offered on behalf of strangers do not move the heart of God. 
    • Food Banks Can’t Go On Like This (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Nor­mal­ly, ‘res­cued’ food—items that would oth­er­wise be thrown out as their sell-by date approaches—accounts for 97 per­cent of Feed­ing San Diego’s dis­tri­b­u­tions. Until the pan­dem­ic, the group was receiv­ing unpur­chased food from 204 Star­bucks loca­tions every night of the year. Most of those stores are now closed. The orga­ni­za­tion nor­mal­ly gets excess food from 260 gro­cery stores too, but con­sumers have been stock­ing up enough late­ly that many shelves are picked clean.”
  6. The UK Bless­ing — Church­es sing ‘The Bless­ing’ over the UK (YouTube): sev­en mov­ing min­utes. Shared with me by a student’s father.

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 Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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 247

Arti­cles rang­ing from how to share your faith dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to Amish health­care poli­cies to the lim­i­ta­tions of lock­downs. 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.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Amish Health Care Sys­tem (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by how many of today’s biggest eco­nom­ic prob­lems just mys­te­ri­ous­ly failed to exist in the past. Our grand­par­ents eas­i­ly paid for col­lege with sum­mer jobs, raised three or four kids on a sin­gle income, and bought hous­es in their 20s or 30s and nev­er wor­ried about rent or evic­tion again. And yes, they got med­ical care with­out health insur­ance, and avoid­ed the kind of med­ical bank­rupt­cies we see too fre­quent­ly today. How did this work so well? Are there ways to make it work today?”
    • I would say unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing except near­ly every­thing on Slate Star Codex is fas­ci­nat­ing; in fact, the more eso­teric the top­ic the bet­ter.
    • Fol­low-up: Employ­er Pro­vid­ed Health Insur­ance Delen­da Est (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Most of my patients have insur­ance; most of them are well-off; most of them are intel­li­gent enough that they should be able to nav­i­gate the bureau­cra­cy. Lis­ten to the usu­al debate around insur­ance, and you would expect them to be the win­ners of our sys­tem; the rich peo­ple who can turn their finan­cial advan­tage into bet­ter care. And yet bare­ly a day goes by with­out a reminder that it doesn’t work this way.”
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus News and Com­men­tary 
    • Amid Pan­dem­ic, Hong Kong Arrests Major Pro-Democ­ra­cy Fig­ures (Elaine Yu and Austin Ramzy, NY Times): “The virus has halt­ed protests around the world, forc­ing peo­ple to stay home and giv­ing the author­i­ties new laws for lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings and detain­ing peo­ple with less fear of pub­lic blow­back while many res­i­dents remained under lock­downs or observ­ing lim­its on their move­ment. But the arrests on Sat­ur­day in Hong Kong, along with a renewed push for nation­al secu­ri­ty leg­is­la­tion in the city, could anger pro­test­ers and rein­vig­o­rate mass demon­stra­tions that had tapered off.”
    • Lock­downs Don’t Work (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Lock­downs don’t work. These oth­er policies—travel restric­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its, cen­tral­ized quar­an­tine, mask require­ments, and school cancellations—do work. Because COVID is an extreme­ly severe dis­ease that, if left unchecked, will kill hun­dreds of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans, it is vital­ly impor­tant that pol­i­cy­mak­ers focus their efforts on poli­cies that do work (masks, cen­tral quar­an­tines, trav­el restric­tions, school can­cel­la­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its), and avoid imple­ment­ing dra­con­ian, unpop­u­lar poli­cies that don’t work (lock­downs).”
    • Lock­down Social­ism will col­lapse (Arnold Kling, per­son­al blog): “you can stay in your res­i­dence, but pay­ing rent or pay­ing your mort­gage is option­al…. you can obtain gro­ceries and shop on line, but hav­ing a job is option­al…. if you own a small busi­ness, you don’t need rev­enue, because the gov­ern­ment will keep send­ing checks.”
    • We Can’t Go on Like This Much Longer (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “…protests against our total shut­down, while puny now, will doubt­less grow. The psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age — not count­ing the phys­i­cal toll — caused by this deeply unnat­ur­al way of life is going to inten­si­fy. We remain human beings, a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly social mam­mal, and we ori­ent our­selves in time, look­ing for­ward to the future. When that future has been sus­pend­ed, humans come undone.”
    • How not to say the wrong thing to health-care work­ers (Dorothy R. Novick, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…a per­son in any giv­en cir­cle should send love and com­pas­sion inward, to those in small­er cir­cles, and process per­son­al grief out­ward, to those in larg­er cir­cles…. Com­fort in, grief out.”
    • It’s Time To Build (Marc Andreesen, blog): “The things we build in huge quan­ti­ties, like com­put­ers and TVs, drop rapid­ly in price. The things we don’t, like hous­ing, schools, and hos­pi­tals, sky­rock­et in price. What’s the Amer­i­can dream? The oppor­tu­ni­ty to have a home of your own, and a fam­i­ly you can pro­vide for. We need to break the rapid­ly esca­lat­ing price curves for hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, and health­care, to make sure that every Amer­i­can can real­ize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.”
    • In response: Why We Can’t Build (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The insti­tu­tions through which Amer­i­cans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Fran­cis Fukuyama’s term, ‘vetoc­ra­cies,’ in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. It’s true in state and local gov­ern­ments. It’s even true in the pri­vate sec­tor.”
    • How to Pro­tect Civ­il Lib­er­ties in a Pan­dem­ic (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “In emer­gen­cies, [the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the ACLU] reflect­ed in an inter­view ear­li­er this month, gov­ern­ment offi­cials jus­ti­fy new pow­ers by point­ing to the extra­or­di­nary chal­lenges of the moment. Yet long after the emer­gency pass­es, they tend to assert those very same pow­ers as if they are the new nor­mal…. ‘We are still lit­i­gat­ing pow­ers in 2020 that were adopt­ed in 2001.’”
  3. Chris­t­ian Coro­n­avirus News & Com­men­tary
    • COVID-19 Is Not God’s Judg­ment (Jim Deni­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…bib­li­cal judg­ments through dis­ease are super­nat­ur­al in ori­gin. When God sent ‘boils’ on Egypt, they broke out instant­ly ‘on man and beast’ through­out the land. The ‘pesti­lence’ of Rev­e­la­tion will come by one of the ‘four horse­men of the apoc­a­lypse,’ not a wet mar­ket in Wuhan. Every­thing sci­en­tists can tell us about COVID-19 is that the virus evolved from oth­er virus­es. It is nat­ur­al, not super­nat­ur­al.” 
    • If Liquor Stores Are Essen­tial, Why Isn’t Church? (Michael McConnel & Max Raskin, NY Times): “It is not for gov­ern­ment offi­cials to decide whether reli­gious wor­ship is essen­tial; the First Amend­ment already decid­ed that. The ques­tion is whether, and how, it may be con­duct­ed with­out undue risk to pub­lic health.” McConnell is a Stan­ford law prof.
    • Pan­dem­ic Evan­ge­lism: Spread­ing the Gospel, not the Virus (Peter Cush­man, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “Step 1: Fer­vent­ly Pray for the Lost… Step 2: Tell the Lost You’re Pray­ing for Them… Step 3a: Tell the Lost about Christ: Rec­og­niz­ing Oppor­tu­ni­ties.” This is a series of blog posts which is not yet fin­ished. The indi­vid­ual posts so far → step one, step two, step 3a.
    • Covid-19 has killed mul­ti­ple bish­ops and pas­tors with­in the nation’s largest black Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Church of God in Christ, the country’s biggest African Amer­i­can Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion, has tak­en a deep and painful lead­er­ship hit with reports of at least a dozen to up to 30 bish­ops and promi­nent cler­gy dying of covid-19…”
    • Under fire from many, Samaritan’s Purse finds an unlike­ly cham­pi­on (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “In the course of the past four weeks, Tilson, who is not reli­gious and had nev­er heard of Franklin Gra­ham, the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian leader of Samaritan’s Purse, has become one of the field hospital’s most ded­i­cat­ed vol­un­teers and cham­pi­ons.”
  4. Is the World Ignor­ing a Chris­t­ian Geno­cide in Nige­ria? (Lela Gilbert, Prov­i­dence): “Those of us who track reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions and Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion agree with those who increas­ing­ly speak of anoth­er geno­cide. Mur­der­ous inci­dents are act­ed out with accel­er­at­ing fre­quen­cy, per­pe­trat­ed pri­mar­i­ly by two ter­ror groups—Boko Haram and Fulani jihadis. Tens of thou­sands of Nige­ri­ans have been slaugh­tered in the last decade. But their sto­ries rarely appear in main­stream West­ern news reports.”
  5. Four arti­cles more par­ti­san than those I often share:
    • On the right: End the Glob­al­iza­tion Gravy Train (J.D Vance, The Amer­i­can Mind): “West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion was, in fact, built by figures—one in par­tic­u­lar whose res­ur­rec­tion we just celebrated—who rec­og­nized that mate­r­i­al con­sump­tion, while nec­es­sary and impor­tant, was hard­ly the only good worth pur­su­ing.” 
    • On the left: Study­ing Fas­cist Pro­pa­gan­da by Day, Watch­ing Trump’s Coro­n­avirus Updates by Night (Andrew Marantz, The New York­er): “[Yale pro­fes­sor Jason] Stan­ley isn’t, or isn’t main­ly, a schol­ar of pub­lic pol­i­cy; he is a philoso­pher of lan­guage. When he insin­u­ates that Trump is a fascist—and you don’t have to be a philoso­pher of lan­guage to catch the insinuation—he means that Trump talks like a fas­cist, not nec­es­sar­i­ly that he gov­erns like one.” Sent my way by a con­cerned alum­nus.
    • On the right: Evan­gel­i­cals Need More Prag­ma­tism and Less Moral­ism (Daniel Strand, Prov­i­dence): “Many evan­gel­i­cals have expressed their dis­il­lu­sion at both polit­i­cal par­ties because nei­ther seems to line up with their beliefs. Democ­rats seem antag­o­nis­tic to Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions, and Repub­li­cans ral­ly to defend and sup­port a pres­i­dent whose char­ac­ter would not exact­ly line up with Chris­t­ian stan­dards, let alone those of used car salesman—my apolo­gies to used car sales­men. To all this, I say good.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of ethics at the USAF Air War Col­lege.
    • On the left: We Are Liv­ing In A Failed State (George Pack­er, The Atlantic): “When the virus came here, it found a coun­try with seri­ous under­ly­ing con­di­tions, and it exploit­ed them ruth­less­ly. Chron­ic ills—a cor­rupt polit­i­cal class, a scle­rot­ic bureau­cra­cy, a heart­less econ­o­my, a divid­ed and dis­tract­ed public—had gone untreat­ed for years. We had learned to live, uncom­fort­ably, with the symp­toms. It took the scale and inti­ma­cy of a pan­dem­ic to expose their severity—to shock Amer­i­cans with the recog­ni­tion that we are in the high-risk cat­e­go­ry.”
  6. The Decline of the Jury (Peter Hitchens, First Things): “For with­out a jury, any tri­al is sim­ply a process by which the state reas­sures itself that it has got the right man. A group of state employ­ees, none of them espe­cial­ly dis­tin­guished, are asked to con­firm the views of oth­er state employ­ees. With a jury, the gov­ern­ment can­not know the out­come and must prove its case. And so the faint, phan­tas­mal ide­al of the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence takes on actu­al flesh and bones and stands in the path of pow­er.”

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 For an eye-open­ing (and dis­may­ing) expe­ri­ence, read What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic). (first shared back in vol­ume 5): “one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.”

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 243

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. Recov­er­ing Friend­ship (Devo­rah Gold­man, Pub­lic Dis­course): “And then you go at it, ham­mer and tongs, far into the night, night after night; or walk­ing through fine coun­try that nei­ther gives a glance to, each learn­ing the weight of the other’s punch­es, and often more like mutu­al­ly respect­ful ene­mies than friends. Actu­al­ly (though it nev­er seems so at the time) you mod­i­fy one another’s thought; out of this per­pet­u­al dog­fight a com­mu­ni­ty of mind and a deep affec­tion emerge.”
  2. In God We Divide (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “The more reli­gious­ly engaged a white vot­er is, the more like­ly he or she will be a Repub­li­can; the less reli­gious the vot­er, the more like­ly to be a Demo­c­rat. But, as we shall see it’s not that sim­ple: The deep­er you go, the more com­plex it gets.”
    • Note the adjec­tive “white” in the first sen­tence — almost all dis­cus­sion about the pol­i­tics of reli­gious peo­ple focus­es on white vot­ers. The piece lat­er acknowl­edges vot­ers of col­or but doesn’t explore how their faith influ­ences their votes. Instead non-white evan­gel­i­cals are usu­al­ly treat­ed as though faith is irrel­e­vant to their polit­i­cal views, which is absurd. All that to say: the arti­cle has inter­est­ing insights but bear in mind its crip­pling lim­i­ta­tion.
  3. Is Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal in Israel Myth? Or Real­i­ty? (Ralph Hawkins, Logos): “When I was work­ing on my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion about the Ebal site, I spent a week with Zer­tal. One morn­ing while we were dri­ving to the site, he told me his crit­ics had accused him of try­ing to prove the Bible. They said he imposed a cul­tic inter­pre­ta­tion onto the stone struc­ture he had found. He explained, though, that he had been born and raised in Ein She­mer, Israeli kib­butz that was affil­i­at­ed with a sec­u­lar move­ment. He said he had grown up believ­ing that the Bible was full of myths. When he did his grad­u­ate work in archae­ol­o­gy, he did it at Tel Aviv, the most lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, where those views were rein­forced. He insist­ed he had not embarked on his exca­va­tion at Mount Ebal in order to prove the Bible. What he found there, how­ev­er, had a pro­found effect on him. He said, ‘I became a believ­er at Mount Ebal.’”
    • I love sto­ries like this. Archae­ol­o­gy and the Bible is fas­ci­nat­ing to me.
  4. Chris­tian­i­ty & Coro­n­avirus
    • When Coro­na Makes Us More Like The New Tes­ta­ment (Andrew Wil­son, Think The­ol­o­gy): “In a num­ber of curi­ous ways, the Coro­n­avirus out­break is mak­ing us more like the New Tes­ta­ment church.” See also Sam Allberry’s Twit­ter thread about God’s Pur­pos­es In Pan­dem­ic. It reminds me of Num­bers 11:18–20.
    • Coro­n­avirus, Courage, and the Sec­ond Temp­ta­tion of Christ (David French, The Dis­patch): “Shun per­for­ma­tive reck­less­ness. Do not pre­sume that our faith makes us immune to the laws of biol­o­gy and viral trans­mis­sion. At the same time, believ­ers should not shrink from pur­pose­ful and sac­ri­fi­cial per­son­al risk. There may come a time when you must care for those who are sick. Do so with­out reser­va­tion, but do so pru­dent­ly with the knowl­edge that you should not impute your risks to oth­ers.”
    • Can­celed Mis­sion Trips Expect­ed to Have Long-Term Fall­out (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Approx­i­mate­ly 20 per­cent of all US-based inter­na­tion­al mis­sion work each year is done by short-term vol­un­teers, accord­ing to an analy­sis by soci­ol­o­gist of reli­gion Robert Wuth­now. That trans­lates to 1.6 mil­lion US church mem­bers annu­al­ly going on inter­na­tion­al mis­sion trips and doing work val­ued at $1.1 bil­lion (not count­ing prepa­ra­tion time and trav­el days).”
    • Church as a Non-Essen­tial Ser­vice (Matthew Schmitz, First Things): “Judg­ing by the response of many reli­gious lead­ers, church is a non-essen­tial ser­vice. We are capa­ble of tak­ing pru­dent mea­sures to keep our super­mar­kets open, but not our sanc­tu­ar­ies. Coro­n­avirus has shown what we val­ue. In Penn­syl­va­nia, beer dis­trib­u­tors are deemed essen­tial. In San Fran­cis­co and New York, cannabis dis­pen­saries are.” This is actu­al­ly a con­tri­bu­tion to an online dust­up but I find it more inter­est­ing than the dis­pute itself.
    • Dig­i­tal Com­mu­nion: His­to­ry, The­ol­o­gy, and Prac­tices (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “A few weeks ago, I post­ed a graph­ic that attempts to show that the ele­ments of a ser­vice that are trans­ac­tion­al or broad­cast ori­ent­ed are usu­al­ly the eas­i­est to move online, but the rela­tion­al parts of church are often the most challenging—and most overlooked—elements of dig­i­tal church.”
    • In Leviti­cus, an unex­pect­ed les­son in sur­viv­ing quar­an­tine (Rachel Sha­ran­sky Danziger, For­ward): “Before, I could nev­er under­stand why we should learn in so much detail about every lit­tle rit­u­al in the Taber­na­cle, and who does what, and when. Now, as I work hard to make our new­ly claus­tro­pho­bic home into a place of calm and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, I under­stand the book’s insis­tence on such details.” A Jew­ish per­spec­tive.
  5. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus Com­men­tary
    • That Dis­com­fort You’re Feel­ing Is Grief (Scott Beri­na­to, Har­vard Busi­ness Review): “There is some­thing pow­er­ful about nam­ing this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my cowork­ers I’m hav­ing a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emo­tions need motion. It’s impor­tant we acknowl­edge what we go through.”
      • Pas­toral aside: this is (some of) you. Paula and I have both talked to peo­ple who have been mourn­ing with­out real­iz­ing what they were doing. You are griev­ing. A few days ago I uploaded a two-minute video reflect­ing on Psalm 137:1 which touch­es on this.
    • Leisure in a Time of Coro­n­avirus (Nathan Schlueter, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Schools are closed. Sports and music lessons are can­celled. Every­one is at home. What are you going to do? Instead of allow­ing coro­n­avirus con­trol your life, why not plan for leisure? Use this time to do the things you are always wish­ing you had the time to do—or do bet­ter. Now you have that time, so do those things.”
    • Face Masks: Much More Than You Want­ed To Know (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Some peo­ple with swine flu trav­elled on a plane from New York to Chi­na, and many fel­low pas­sen­gers got infect­ed. Some researchers looked at whether pas­sen­gers who wore masks through­out the flight stayed health­i­er. The answer was very much yes. They were able to track down 9 peo­ple who got sick on the flight and 32 who didn’t. 0% of the sick pas­sen­gers wore masks, com­pared to 47% of the healthy pas­sen­gers. Anoth­er way to look at that is that 0% of mask-wear­ers got sick, but 35% of non-wear­ers did. This was a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence, and of obvi­ous applic­a­bil­i­ty to the cur­rent ques­tion.”
    • The Fog of Pan­dem­ic (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “The U.S. is fight­ing a war with extreme uncer­tain­ties. It may be weeks before we know whether we are flat­ten­ing the coro­n­avirus curve, and months before we know what kind of econ­o­my we’ll have in the sec­ond half of this year.”
    • When can we let up? Explor­ing how to relax coro­n­avirus lock­downs (Stat News): “The approach get­ting the most sup­port is one that experts have long doubt­ed could work with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus: aggres­sive case find­ing, con­tact trac­ing, com­mu­ni­ty sur­veil­lance, iso­la­tion of cas­es, and quar­an­ti­ning of con­tacts. Both Sin­ga­pore and South Korea used that, allow­ing them to make tac­ti­cal deci­sions about schools (most­ly open in both coun­tries) and pub­lic move­ment, spar­ing them from shut­ting down to the extent that the U.S. and many coun­tries in Europe have.”
    • Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic: We Need the Skep­tics (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “When a bad thing hap­pens to a good per­son, we are tempt­ed to rage at God. When innu­mer­able bad things hap­pen to half of every­one we know, we rage at each oth­er.”
    • On Coro­n­avirus, Rea­son To Hope (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): This week we saw FDA approval of new test­ing sys­tems from Roche and from Abbott labs that run tests ten times faster than cur­rent meth­ods. To give you an idea of what this means, Roche brags that their Cobas 8800 machine can process over 3000 tests per day. Until today, Louisiana hadn’t had a total of 3000 peo­ple test­ed. Roche is now mak­ing and ship­ping 400,000 test kits per week in the US, while Abbott is mak­ing a mil­lion of their test kits each week. Those sys­tems will be com­ing online this com­ing week…. And there are more com­pa­nies in the process of get­ting approval. In two weeks, we should be able to test 150,000 – 200,000 Amer­i­cans dai­ly, and that means that we don’t all need to stay home any­more.”
      • You can see the num­ber of tests admin­is­tered so far at The COVID Track­ing Project — this is one of the best indi­ca­tors to keep an eye on because it deter­mines the reli­a­bil­i­ty of every oth­er sta­tis­tic.
    • The World After Coro­n­avirus (Yuval Noah Harari, Finan­cial Times): “But tem­po­rary mea­sures have a nasty habit of out­last­ing emer­gen­cies, espe­cial­ly as there is always a new emer­gency lurk­ing on the hori­zon. My home coun­try of Israel, for exam­ple, declared a state of emer­gency dur­ing its 1948 War of Inde­pen­dence, which jus­ti­fied a range of tem­po­rary mea­sures from press cen­sor­ship and land con­fis­ca­tion to spe­cial reg­u­la­tions for mak­ing pud­ding (I kid you not). The War of Inde­pen­dence has long been won, but Israel nev­er declared the emer­gency over, and has failed to abol­ish many of the ‘tem­po­rary’ mea­sures of 1948 (the emer­gency pud­ding decree was mer­ci­ful­ly abol­ished in 2011).”
    • Safe­ty Pro­to­cols and Zones of Quar­an­tine (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In oth­er words, this part of the virus response should tran­si­tion to a health and safe­ty reg­u­la­to­ry con­cern that is impor­tant, but han­dled like most of the oth­ers. For exam­ple, poor food hygiene can also kill you, but gov­ern­ments gen­er­al­ly don’t respond by decid­ing which cuisines are essen­tial and which are not. Rather, any­one will­ing to fol­low the safe­ty rules can put up any menu they want. So it should be for eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties of all kinds.”

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 Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” First shared in vol­ume 150. 

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 235

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. Weath­er­ing the Storm: How Faith Affects Well-Being (Byron John­son & Chris­tos Makridis, Pub­lic Dis­course): “First, and con­sis­tent with pri­or stud­ies, active Chris­tians exhib­it 6 per­cent greater cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and are 6 per­cent­age points more like­ly to report that they are thriving—a mea­sure from Gallup that com­bines respon­dent infor­ma­tion on both cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and expect­ed future life sat­is­fac­tion over the next five years. Sec­ond, and at least as impor­tant, we found that SWB is either acycli­cal or slight­ly coun­ter­cycli­cal for active Chris­tians, where­as it is strong­ly pro­cycli­cal for (inac­tive) Chris­tians and the­ists.”
  2. More Non-Evan­gel­i­cals Are Call­ing Them­selves Born Again (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Just over 36 per­cent of the entire sam­ple said that they were born again in 1988, the first year the ques­tion was asked. The ques­tion appeared spo­rad­i­cal­ly on the GSS until 2004, when it became a part of every bi-annu­al sur­vey as the num­ber of affir­ma­tive respons­es began to rise. In the last 14 years, the share of born-again Amer­i­cans has risen to 41 per­cent, and much high­er (54%) among peo­ple of col­or. Since 2010, at least half of peo­ple of col­or say that they have had a ‘turn­ing point in their life’ when they com­mit­ted them­selves to Christ.”
  3. Sex dif­fer­ences in chim­panzees’ use of sticks as play objects resem­ble those of chil­dren (Sonya M. Kahlen­berg & Richard W. Wrang­ham, Cur­rent Biol­o­gy): “…when pre­sent­ed with sex-stereo­typed human toys, cap­tive female mon­keys play more with typ­i­cal­ly fem­i­nine toys, where­as male mon­keys play more with mas­cu­line toys. In human and non­hu­man pri­mates, juve­nile females demon­strate a greater inter­est in infants, and males in rough-and-tum­ble play. This sex dif­fer­ence in activ­i­ty pref­er­ences par­al­lels adult behav­ior and may con­tribute to dif­fer­ences in toy play. Here, we present the first evi­dence of sex dif­fer­ences in use of play objects in a wild pri­mate, in chim­panzees (Pan troglodytes). We find that juve­niles tend to car­ry sticks in a man­ner sug­ges­tive of rudi­men­ta­ry doll play and, as in chil­dren and cap­tive mon­keys, this behav­ior is more com­mon in females than in males.” https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.024
  4. When a sex offend­er calls, she’s there to lis­ten (Ser­e­na Solomon, Vox): “On the desk in her liv­ing room, a [Women Against Reg­istry] sign sum­ma­rizes her pitch: ‘Destroy­ing Fam­i­lies Does Not Pro­tect Chil­dren.’ It’s a mes­sage geared toward women. WAR argues that the reg­istry can pre­vent reg­is­trants from liv­ing with sup­port­ing rel­a­tives; it can bank­rupt fam­i­lies and invites vig­i­lante attacks.” A fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle. Rec­om­mend­ed by a Chi Alphan.
  5. Detroit man set­tles race dis­crim­i­na­tion law­suit, then bank won’t cash his check (Tre­sa Bal­das, Detroit Free Press): “Thomas closed his [exist­ing bank] account that day and left the premis­es. With­in an hour, he deposit­ed the checks into a new account at a Chase bank in Detroit. They cleared with­in 12 hours. Thomas, who had no car and walked to work, used the mon­ey to buy a 2004 Dodge Duran­go.” This sto­ry bog­gles the mind.
  6. Adven­tures in the Old Athe­ism, Part IV: Marx (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Indeed, oppo­si­tion to Marx­ism is in my view a pre­req­ui­site to being a seri­ous crit­ic of cap­i­tal­ism, for Marx­ism con­tains none of the good that is in cap­i­tal­ism, much of the bad that is in it, and adds grave evils of its own to boot.” That’s not the main thrust of this essay, but I loved that quote. The whole thing is worth read­ing.
  7. Peo­ple crit­i­cize pro-lif­ers for focus­ing so much on abor­tion. But there’s a rea­son we do. (Matthew Lee Ander­son, Vox): “But for the pro-lif­er, that ‘clump of cells’ is as won­drous, as potent, as mys­te­ri­ous as, well, the cos­mos. The recog­ni­tion of the ‘baby’ induces a hushed rev­er­ence. The uni­verse once appeared out of noth­ing, a fact that rea­son­ably seems to induce the strange ver­ti­go of awe, but the for­ma­tion of a new human being is not so dif­fer­ent from this. The embryo con­tains a whole world of pos­si­bil­i­ties and adven­tures.”
    • Relat­ed: Abor­tion Regret Isn’t a Myth, Despite New Study (Maria Baer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…researcher Michael J. New not­ed that women who vol­un­teer to respond to ques­tions fol­low­ing an abor­tion are more like­ly to be the ones who feel pos­i­tive­ly about it, and there­fore the find­ings do not rep­re­sent the full spec­trum of women who have had abor­tions. New—a pro­fes­sor at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca and a schol­ar with the pro-life Char­lotte Lozi­er Institute—noted that of all the women asked to par­tic­i­pate, less than 40 per­cent agreed, and rough­ly 30 per­cent of the 667 who par­tic­i­pat­ed had stopped respond­ing by the end of the five-year study.”
    • Relat­ed: Trump March­es For Life (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “So, I am gen­uine­ly sur­prised that Don­ald Trump has been so good on pro­life issues, and that he came to the March For Life today. And if peo­ple wor­ry that the march is becom­ing too asso­ci­at­ed with Repub­li­can pol­i­tics, then they should not fault Trump for it, but should redou­ble efforts to get more Democ­rats to get involved.”

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 Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘per­fect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

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 232

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’ve missed send­ing this email due to hol­i­day trav­els for a while, and I’ve got noth­ing on Iran yet. Too much is hap­pen­ing and I’m in a remote place with lim­it­ed inter­net access. Any­thing you find great please send my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Prob­lem Isn’t the ‘Mer­it,’ It’s the ‘Ocra­cy’ (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was built on the assump­tion that the most salient polit­i­cal divides would reflect geog­ra­phy, not ide­ol­o­gy or class. The sen­a­tor from Mass­a­chu­setts would share bonds in com­mon with the lay cit­i­zen­ry of Boston that he did not share with a sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na. On the nation­al sphere this would allow him to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of his con­stituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry than oth­ers; yet because of the way Amer­i­can politi­cians are elect­ed, this sense of rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of a geo­graph­i­cal­ly bound­ed group of peo­ple is more true in the polit­i­cal are­na than in most oth­ers.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Decade in review: Mar­i­tal norms erode (Ryan T. Ander­son and Robert P. George, USA Today): “Law shapes cul­ture; cul­ture shapes beliefs; beliefs shape action. The law now effec­tive­ly teach­es that moth­ers and fathers are replace­able, that mar­riage is sim­ply about con­sent­ing adult rela­tion­ships, of what­ev­er for­ma­tion the par­ties hap­pen to pre­fer. This under­mines the truth that chil­dren deserve a moth­er and a father — one of each.”
    • Fol­low-up by Rod Dreher: Fam­i­ly, Mem­o­ry, Pow­er (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If you’re one of those peo­ple with a habit of say­ing, nobody has ever explained how all this is going to hurt het­ero­sex­u­al me, this is a good basic place to start. Moral­i­ty is an ecol­o­gy. This is the equiv­a­lent of inject­ing some­thing into the ground­wa­ter. It may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing, but it does affect every­body. Peo­ple who say it doesn’t are lying — per­haps to them­selves.”
    • That fol­low-up inspired Pro­fes­sor George to reply: The Shame Of The Con­formists (this is on Dreher’s blog): “Some­one might say, ‘this is no time for recrim­i­na­tions.’ Well, I don’t agree. This is pre­cise­ly the time for recrim­i­na­tions. Indeed, there was nev­er a bet­ter time. Stand­ing bold­ly for what is true and good and right and just is everybody’s job. It’s not just ‘oth­er people’s’ job. Espe­cial­ly to my fel­low Chris­tians I say, it is OUR job. It comes with the Gospel ter­ri­to­ry. You say ‘it’s hard’? Of course, it’s hard. But who ever told you that Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship was not going to be hard? Or risky? Or cost­ly? Not Jesus, that’s for sure. He told us–in the most explic­it terms–that it was going to be hard–very hard–and risky, and cost­ly. “
  3. Yes, Jesus Was a Refugee. He Still Is. (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “When most peo­ple talk about Jesus being a refugee, they’re not talk­ing about Beth­le­hem but the family’s flight to Egypt. Some time after his birth, Herod got pan­icky about rumors of a new king and sent sol­diers to kill all the new­borns in Beth­le­hem. An angel warned Joseph and Mary to high­tail it to Egypt where they could safe­ly lay low. Egypt made for an ide­al hid­ing place, con­nect­ed to Judea via a well-trav­eled and rel­a­tive­ly safe trade route known as the Via Maris. The argu­ment for Mary and Joseph’s refugee sta­tus here is about as strong as it could be under the cir­cum­stances.”
  4. Bib­li­cal Archaeology’s Top 10 Dis­cov­er­ies of 2019 (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…many of the main­stream media sto­ries announc­ing these dis­cov­er­ies acknowl­edged that the Bible was right all along or right after all in these instances. Archae­ol­o­gist Nel­son Glueck’s dec­la­ra­tion that ‘no archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery has ever con­tro­vert­ed a Bib­li­cal ref­er­ence’ still stands.”
  5. Some fol­low-ups to the Chris­tian­i­ty Today arti­cle I shared last time call­ing for Trump’s removal from office:
    • The Flag in the Whirl­wind: An Update from CT’s Pres­i­dent (Tim Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a polit­i­cal land­scape dom­i­nat­ed by polar­iza­tion, hos­til­i­ty, and mis­un­der­stand­ing, we believe it’s crit­i­cal for Chris­tians to mod­el how to have a firm opin­ion and host free dis­cus­sion at the same time. Evan­gel­i­cals of dif­fer­ent stripes can­not con­tin­ue to shout one anoth­er down, bul­ly those who dis­agree, or exclude one anoth­er and refuse to lis­ten. We hold fast to our view that the whole­heart­ed evan­gel­i­cal embrace of Trump has been enor­mous­ly costly—but we are com­mit­ted to irenic con­ver­sa­tion with men and women of good faith who believe oth­er­wise.”
      • Side note: the author was a gym­nast at Stan­ford who was active­ly involved in cam­pus min­istry while here (his time pre­ced­ed my tenure at Chi Alpha, to my knowl­edge we have nev­er met or even been in the same ZIP code). There’s an arti­cle about his sto­ry back in vol­ume 191. 
    • What It Would Take for Evan­gel­i­cals to Turn on Pres­i­dent Trump (Michael Luo, New York­er): “…though greater reli­gios­i­ty is cor­re­lat­ed with Chris­t­ian-nation­al­ist beliefs, once those beliefs are account­ed for, Amer­i­cans who engaged in more fre­quent reli­gious practice—church atten­dance, prayer, and bible reading—were less like­ly than their less obser­vant peers to sub­scribe to polit­i­cal views nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, such as believ­ing that refugees from the Mid­dle East pose a ter­ror­ist threat to the Unit­ed States, or that ille­gal immi­grants from Mex­i­co are most­ly dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals. In oth­er words, White­head and Per­ry find that the threat to demo­c­ra­t­ic plu­ral­ism is not evan­gel­i­cal­ism itself but the cul­ture around evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
    • Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.”
    • Trump Should Not Be Removed from Office: A Response to Mark Gal­li and Chris­tian­i­ty Today (Wayne Gru­dem, Town­hall): “If evan­gel­i­cals fail to sup­port Don­ald Trump after he has deliv­ered on so many issues impor­tant to Chris­t­ian val­ues, many peo­ple will con­clude that we real­ly do not care about con­ser­v­a­tive judges, the pro­tec­tion of the unborn, the pro­tec­tion of gen­der dis­tinc­tions, reli­gious free­dom, con­science pro­tec­tions for Chris­tians in the work­place, a strong enough mil­i­tary to pro­tect us against threats from Chi­na, North Korea, Rus­sia, and Iran, jobs,wages, eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties for minori­ties, a secure bor­der, Israel, afford­able ener­gy (espe­cial­ly for the poor), ener­gy inde­pen­dence, the pro­tec­tion of prop­er­ty rights, expand­ing parental choice for schools, revi­tal­iz­ing NATO, pro­tect­ing free­dom of speech on cam­pus­es, and many oth­er things. Gal­li dis­miss­es these con­cerns with the label ‘polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy,’ but all of these issues affect people’s ordi­nary lives. These issues real­ly do mat­ter. On issue after issue, Pres­i­dent Trump is chang­ing the direc­tion of the coun­try for the bet­ter. When I weigh these results against his some­times impre­cise and coarse speech, there is no com­par­i­son.”
    • Where Cain Got His Wife, and Oth­er Issues Relat­ed to the 2020 Elec­tion (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “As men­tioned above, I did not vote for the pres­i­dent in 2016. I did not vote for him because char­ac­ter mat­ters, and because I did not trust him to do what he was promis­ing to do…. And with that said, I have to acknowl­edge I was wrong… If any­thing, the great mass of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers have demon­strat­ed that they actu­al­ly have a bet­ter set of polit­i­cal instincts than their lead­ers, me includ­ed.”
  6. My Semes­ter With the Snowflakes (James Hatch, Medi­um): “In May of 2019, I was accept­ed to the Eli Whit­ney stu­dent pro­gram at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. At 52, I am the old­est fresh­man in the class of 2023. Before I was accept­ed, I didn’t real­ly know what to expect. I had seen the infa­mous YouTube video of stu­dents scream­ing at a fac­ul­ty mem­ber. I had seen the news sto­ries regard­ing the admis­sions scan­dal and that Yale was includ­ed in that unfor­tu­nate busi­ness. I had also heard the stu­dents at Yale referred to as ‘snowflakes’ in var­i­ous social media dump­sters and occa­sion­al­ly I’d seen ref­er­ences to Ivy League stu­dents as snowflakes in a few news sources.” (there’s an inter­est­ing fol­low-up inter­view with him on NPR)
  7. Two aca­d­e­m­ic things I found inter­est­ing:
    • Com­par­ing meta-analy­ses and pre­reg­is­tered mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tion projects (Aman­da Kvar­ven, Eirik Strøm­land & Mag­nus Johan­nes­son, Nature Human Behav­ior): “We com­pare the results of meta-analy­ses to large-scale pre­reg­is­tered repli­ca­tions in psy­chol­o­gy car­ried out at mul­ti­ple lab­o­ra­to­ries. The mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions pro­vide pre­cise­ly esti­mat­ed effect sizes that do not suf­fer from pub­li­ca­tion bias or selec­tive report­ing. We searched the lit­er­a­ture and iden­ti­fied 15 meta-analy­ses on the same top­ics as mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions. We find that meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from repli­ca­tion effect sizes for 12 out of the 15 meta-repli­ca­tion pairs. These dif­fer­ences are sys­tem­at­ic and, on aver­age, meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are almost three times as large as repli­ca­tion effect sizes.” uh-oh. 
    • The Many Faces of Sci­en­tif­ic Fraud (Nico­las Chevas­sus-au-Louis, Quil­lette): “Is every sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle a fraud? This ques­tion may seem puz­zling to those out­side the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. After all, any­one who took a phi­los­o­phy course in col­lege is like­ly to think of lab­o­ra­to­ry work as emi­nent­ly ratio­nal. The assump­tion is that a researcher faced with an enig­ma posed by nature for­mu­lates a hypoth­e­sis, then con­ceives an exper­i­ment to test its valid­i­ty…. How­ev­er, as every researcher knows, it is pure false­hood. In real­i­ty, noth­ing takes place the way it is described in a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle. The exper­i­ments were car­ried out in a far more dis­or­dered man­ner, in stages far less log­i­cal than those relat­ed in the arti­cle. If you look at it that way, a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle is a kind of trick.” The author has a Ph.D. in biol­o­gy and this is an excerpt from a book he is pub­lish­ing with Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

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.