Tag: how the church is perceived

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 228

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 Tale of Two Church­es (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, NY Review of Books): “To many reli­gious peo­ple, there’s no such thing as coin­ci­dence: Pas­tor Jay and Pas­tor Der­rick felt acute­ly the prophet­ic nature of their union tak­ing place just the day before the shoot­ing. It felt as though, in the midst of the chaos and the con­fu­sion, God was using them to write a bet­ter sto­ry. The Lord had guid­ed them to their merg­er at exact­ly the right time to redi­rect the anger and pain in the com­mu­ni­ty to a high­er, holy pur­pose.”
    • This my must-read link of the week. SO GOOD. I almost cried.
    • Kind of relat­ed but only mar­gin­al­ly: Pray­ing for Hong Kong Can Be Polit­i­cal­ly Disruptive—Even in Amer­i­ca  (D Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dif­fer­ent ori­gins among eth­nic Chi­nese immi­grants can fos­ter dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views, with more Chris­tians from Chi­na sup­port­ing the poli­cies of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, and those from else­where often more crit­i­cal of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
  2. ‘Absolute­ly No Mer­cy’: Leaked Files Expose How Chi­na Orga­nized Mass Deten­tions of Mus­lims (Austin Ramzy and Chris Buck­ley, NY Times): “…one of the most sig­nif­i­cant leaks of gov­ern­ment papers from inside China’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty in decades. They pro­vide an unprece­dent­ed inside view of the con­tin­u­ing clam­p­down in Xin­jiang, in which the author­i­ties have cor­ralled as many as a mil­lion eth­nic Uighurs, Kaza­khs and oth­ers into intern­ment camps and pris­ons over the past three years.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. More Preg­nan­cy, Less Crime (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “More gen­er­al­ly, how­ev­er, there are pol­i­cy impli­ca­tion if we think beyond the imme­di­ate results. First, these results show that crime isn’t sim­ply a prod­uct of fam­i­ly back­ground, pover­ty and neglect. Crime is a choice.”
    • The orig­i­nal study: Fam­i­ly For­ma­tion and Crime (Max­im Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose, job mar­ket paper, pdf link): “Our event-study analy­sis indi­cates that preg­nan­cy trig­gers sharp declines in crime rival­ing any known inter­ven­tion.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Dat­ing Mar­ket (Tyro Part­ners, pdf link): “With the advent of online dat­ing, women in prime repro­duc­tive age are in the dom­i­nant posi­tion in the dat­ing mar­ket for the first time in human history.This comes with huge social ram­i­fi­ca­tions.” The authors are hedge fund guys. Inter­est­ing through­out and at times quite amus­ing. I espe­cial­ly com­mend to you the chart at the bot­tom of the page 5 con­trast­ed with the chart at the top of page 6.
  4. Thread on the protests in Iran (Shay Khatiri, Twit­ter): “Dur­ing its first 24 hours, it’s already been the most vio­lent protests in decades, if not ever. 1979 rev­o­lu­tion did not reach this lev­el of vio­lence.”
    • Amnesty Says At Least 106 Killed In Iran Protests (John Gam­brell, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Days of protests in Iran over ris­ing fuel prices and a sub­se­quent gov­ern­ment crack­down have killed at least 106 peo­ple across the Islam­ic Repub­lic, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al said Tues­day, cit­ing ‘cred­i­ble reports.’”
  5. Why Some Peo­ple Are Impos­si­bly Tal­ent­ed (David Rob­son, BBC): “…influ­en­tial sci­en­tists are much more like­ly to have diverse inter­ests out­side their pri­ma­ry area of research than the aver­age sci­en­tist, for instance. Stud­ies have found that Nobel Prize-win­ning sci­en­tists are about 25 times more like­ly to sing, dance or act than the aver­age sci­en­tist. They are also 17 times more like­ly to cre­ate visu­al art, 12 times more like­ly to write poet­ry and four times more like­ly to be a musi­cian.”
  6. 2019 Reli­gious Free­dom Index (Beck­et Law): “If Amer­i­ca is becom­ing less reli­gious, as some polls indi­cate, does that nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it is also becom­ing less sup­port­ive of reli­gious lib­er­ty pro­tec­tions? Are we, in fact, divid­ed on ques­tions of reli­gious free­dom?… With a cur­rent score of 67, the 2019 Index indi­cates strong sup­port for reli­gious free­dom pro­tec­tions. ”
  7. Why Did the Wall Fall, 30 Years Ago? (George Weigel, First Things): “Get­ting this his­to­ry straight is impor­tant, not just as a mat­ter of intel­lec­tu­al hygiene but for the future. Pub­lic offi­cials who do not grasp the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to the col­lapse of Euro­pean com­mu­nism and the emer­gence of new democ­ra­cies in cen­tral and east­ern Europe are unlike­ly to appre­ci­ate the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to free and vir­tu­ous 21st-cen­tu­ry soci­eties and to 21st-cen­tu­ry democ­ra­cy.”

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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 223

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. Ethiopia’s Evan­gel­i­cal Prime Min­is­ter Wins Nobel Peace Prize (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The son of a Mus­lim father and Ortho­dox moth­er, Ahmed is a Protes­tant Pen­te­costal, or ‘Pen­tay,’ like many Ethiopi­an politi­cians. His faith is seen as a dri­ving fac­tor in his push for peace.”
  2. Alge­ria Forces Chris­tians Out of the Country’s Largest Church­es (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At least 15 Protes­tant churches—out of only about 46 in the country—have been shut­tered since Jan­u­ary 2018, accord­ing to the Chris­t­ian advo­ca­cy group Mid­dle East Con­cern. The coun­try, home to just 125,000 Chris­tians, few­er than 1 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, ranks 22nd on Open Doors’ World Watch List. Chris­t­ian con­gre­ga­tions strug­gle to reg­is­ter with the gov­ern­ment agency tasked with reg­u­lat­ing non-Mus­lim wor­ship, per a 2006 law. It nev­er con­venes and has not issued a sin­gle approval.”
  3. The Per­ilous Pow­er of the Preacher’s Wife (Kate Bowler, New York TImes): “Ordained pro­gres­sive women secure a mea­sure of insti­tu­tion­al sway, but they lack the cul­tur­al cap­i­tal of their con­ser­v­a­tive coun­ter­parts. My research shows that con­ser­v­a­tive women gain con­sid­er­able influ­ence with­out insti­tu­tion­al pow­er, and lib­er­al women gain insti­tu­tion­al pow­er with­out con­sid­er­able influ­ence.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Duke Divin­i­ty School and I have spot­light­ed arti­cles by her three times pre­vi­ous­ly, in vol­ume 37, vol­ume 116, and vol­ume 143.
  4. The delud­ed cult of social jus­tice (John Gray, UnHerd): “Sel­dom have the demands of jus­tice been so man­i­fest­ly fad­dish. Increas­ing­ly, jus­tice is seen as not an attribute of legal sys­tems but of entire soci­eties. At the same time it is believed to be owed to groups more than indi­vid­u­als. In these cir­cum­stances, every­thing depends on whether the group to which peo­ple are deemed to be belong is in vogue.” The author is a retired pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy (Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics) and a well-known athe­ist. 
  5. How to Con­vince an Athe­ist that God Exists (John Ellis, per­son­al blog): “I didn’t become an athe­ist because that’s what I want­ed; I became an athe­ist because I believed it was the truth. So, stand­ing on that side­walk while try­ing not to think about my mom pray­ing for me, I cursed a God I didn’t even believe exist­ed.”
  6. Some thoughts about China’s gov­ern­ment:
    • What are the Options Part III: The Big­ger Pic­ture (Christo­pher Bald­ing, per­son­al blog): “The Unit­ed States must be pre­pared to lay­out a vision for the val­ue it wants to pro­mote, to make the biggest sac­ri­fices to real­ize those val­ues, share the ben­e­fits with aligned coun­tries, and deny ben­e­fits to adver­sary or non­aligned coun­tries.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I linked to anoth­er of Balding’s posts about Chi­na back in vol­ume 162. 
    • Here’s a grow­ing list of com­pa­nies bow­ing to Chi­na cen­sor­ship pres­sure (Natasha Pinon, Mash­able): “Major glob­al com­pa­nies have been bow­ing to both direct and indi­rect pres­sure from Chi­na’s polit­i­cal lead­ers to con­trol how the eco­nom­ic pow­er­house of a coun­try is por­trayed for some time.”
    • Chi­na’s Vision of Vic­to­ry? (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “So-called influ­ence oper­a­tions are aimed at the ene­mies China’s lead­ers fear most: the ones who pose an ide­o­log­i­cal, not a geopo­lit­i­cal, threat to the Com­mu­nist Par­ty. These are the hos­tile forces that threat­en the sta­bil­i­ty of the Com­mu­nist regime, and many of them—from Chris­tians and Uighurs flee­ing reli­gious per­se­cu­tion to Tai­wanese, Hong Kongers, and oth­ers of Chi­nese descent who dare imag­ine dif­fer­ent futures for their people—live in Amer­i­ca. As long as these groups can safe­ly assem­ble and freely speak with­in the Unit­ed States, Amer­i­ca will be seen as a threat to the Chi­nese par­ty-state. Sim­i­lar fears have already led Bei­jing to demand ide­o­log­i­cal feal­ty from its for­eign debtors. China’s lead­ers do not ask clients to change their sys­tem of gov­ern­ment but to squelch crit­i­cism of Chi­nese com­mu­nism inside their bor­ders.” Greer has appeared once before in vol­ume 217.
    • China’s Loom­ing Class Strug­gle (Joel Kotkin, Quil­lette): “Ini­tial­ly, China’s progress lift­ed up all class­es, rais­ing as many as 850 mil­lion peo­ple out of extreme pover­ty in 40 years, one of the great­est eco­nom­ic accom­plish­ments in his­to­ry. Yet the boom has been less suc­cess­ful in cre­at­ing a West­ern-style mass mid­dle class which ana­lyst Nan Chen esti­mates at rough­ly 12 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. ‘Rather than repli­cat­ing the mid­dle-class growth of post-World War II Amer­i­ca,’ she observes, ‘Chi­na appears to have skipped that stage alto­geth­er and head­ed straight for a mod­el of extra­or­di­nary pro­duc­tiv­i­ty but dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dis­trib­uted wealth.’” Kotkin is a pro­fes­sor of urban stud­ies at Chap­man Uni­ver­si­ty.
  7. Attor­ney Gen­er­al William P. Barr Deliv­ers Remarks to the Law School and the de Nico­la Cen­ter for Ethics and Cul­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame (William Barr, Depart­ment of Jus­tice): “From the Found­ing Era onward, there was strong con­sen­sus about the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious lib­er­ty in the Unit­ed States. The imper­a­tive of pro­tect­ing reli­gious free­dom was not just a nod in the direc­tion of piety. It reflects the Framers’ belief that reli­gion was indis­pens­able to sus­tain­ing our free sys­tem of gov­ern­ment.” (you can watch a video of the speech instead)
    • What Barr Got Right — And What He Might Add (Howard Husock, Nation­al Review): “Barr stands accused of endors­ing some sort of Chris­t­ian theoc­ra­cy. Barr, of course, hard­ly endorsed the idea the church–state divide should be erased in the Unit­ed States. Nor did he insist that only the reli­gious could live a healthy and pro­duc­tive life. Rather, he sin­gled out for crit­i­cism those who believe that, in effect, gov­ern­ment social pro­grams could replace the virtues instilled by reli­gion. It’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion.”
    • William Barr Is Neck-Deep in Extrem­ist Catholic Insti­tu­tions (Joan Walsh, The Nation): “In a histri­on­ic speech at Notre Dame Law School on Fri­day, he blamed ‘sec­u­lar­ists’ and ‘so-called pro­gres­sives’ for destroy­ing soci­ety and pre­cip­i­tat­ing the crises of fam­i­ly dis­so­lu­tion, crime, and drugs, while talk­ing of a war between reli­gious and non­re­li­gious Amer­i­cans.”
    • Bill Barr: Reli­gious Lib­er­ty War­rior (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It’s a stan­dard defense of religion’s role in Amer­i­can life. It would have been unre­mark­able for any US Attor­ney Gen­er­al, Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat, pri­or to 2008 to have giv­en. But now, many on the Left have become so hate­ful of reli­gion that Barr’s speech strikes the ears of peo­ple like Nobel Prize-win­ning econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man as the hand­i­work of a Cos­sack pro­pa­gan­dist…” I prob­a­bly include more arti­cles from Dreher than any­one else because he is so amaz­ing­ly pro­lif­ic and often writes about top­ics I am inter­est­ed in.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

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 221

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, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Black Church After Chris­ten­dom (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I don’t know about you, but I can­not recall the last time I wit­nessed more pow­er­ful pub­lic expres­sions of what it means to be a Chris­t­ian than what Brandt Jean and Judge Tam­my Kemp did in that court­room. Guyger — again, a white woman — is going to prison to do time for her crime — but both Mr. Jean and Judge Kemp want­ed her to know that there is hope for her, and redemp­tion.”
    • There are lots of news sources that fea­ture the video clip of Brandt Jean. I chose Dreher’s piece because he also focus­es on the judge. Both of their actions inspire me.
    • I first saw video clips of Brandt Jean’s mov­ing words surg­ing on social media, and I almost imme­di­ate­ly after­wards saw a back­lash which I found per­plex­ing. Some com­menters even sug­gest­ed that there is some­thing racist about lik­ing this video. I think the truth is much more whole­some — Chris­tians love see­ing cost­ly acts of obe­di­ence to Christ. Wit­ness the sim­i­lar reac­tions Chris­tians had to the gospel-fueled tes­ti­mo­ny of Rachael Den­hol­lan­der against Lar­ry Nas­sar and to the Amish community’s for­give­ness of a school shoot­er years ago. There were dif­fer­ent racial dynam­ics but sim­i­lar respons­es from Chris­tians.
  2. The Inter­net Is Over­run With Images of Child Sex­u­al Abuse. What Went Wrong? (Michael Keller and Gabriel Dance, The New York Times): “Pic­tures of child sex­u­al abuse have long been pro­duced and shared to sat­is­fy twist­ed adult obses­sions. But it has nev­er been like this: Tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies report­ed a record 45 mil­lion online pho­tos and videos of the abuse last year…. the prob­lem of child sex­u­al abuse imagery faces a par­tic­u­lar hur­dle: It gets scant atten­tion because few peo­ple want to con­front the enor­mi­ty and hor­ror of the con­tent, or they wrong­ly dis­miss it as pri­mar­i­ly teenagers send­ing inap­pro­pri­ate self­ies.” WARNING — this is very dis­turb­ing. The reporters non-gra­tu­itous­ly describe some of the con­tent. If you sus­pect that the scene pre­ced­ing “The pre­dom­i­nant sound is the child scream­ing and cry­ing” will both­er you, it will.
    • I know some of our alum­ni who work in tech and in pol­i­cy still receive my Fri­day emails. If that is you, you need to read the pre­ced­ing arti­cle.
    • Relat­ed: Porn Cul­ture and Polit­i­cal Courage (Ter­ry Schelling, First Things): “The uncom­fort­able truth is that the rapid growth in child pornog­ra­phy is con­nect­ed to the cul­tur­al nor­mal­iza­tion of online pornog­ra­phy as a whole.”
  3. I Spent Years Search­ing for Magic—I Found God Instead (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Cat­a­pult): “I want­ed mag­ic. I didn’t think too much about mean­ing. Or at least, as long as every­thing meant some­thing, the specifics didn’t seem to mat­ter. Basil could mean love. Thurs­days could mean pow­er. The full moon puri­ty. Why not? The alter­na­tive was that noth­ing meant any­thing at all.” This is won­der­ful­ly writ­ten. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. How Do Chris­tians Fit Into the Two-Par­ty Sys­tem? They Don’t (Tim Keller, New York Times): “I know of a man from Mis­sis­sip­pi who was a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can and a tra­di­tion­al Pres­by­ter­ian. He vis­it­ed the Scot­tish High­lands and found the church­es there as strict and as ortho­dox as he had hoped. No one so much as turned on a tele­vi­sion on a Sun­day. Every­one mem­o­rized cat­e­chisms and Scrip­ture. But one day he dis­cov­ered that the Scot­tish Chris­t­ian friends he admired were (in his view) social­ists. Their under­stand­ing of gov­ern­ment eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy and the state’s respon­si­bil­i­ties was by his lights very left-wing, yet also ground­ed in their Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions. He returned to the Unit­ed States not more polit­i­cal­ly lib­er­al but, in his words, ‘hum­bled and chas­tened.’ He real­ized that thought­ful Chris­tians, all try­ing to obey God’s call, could rea­son­ably appear at dif­fer­ent places on the polit­i­cal spec­trum, with loy­al­ties to dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal strate­gies.”
    • Relat­ed: A Basic Primer on Rights and Oblig­a­tions (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “…the Bible doesn’t say much about rights. It does, how­ev­er, fre­quent­ly address oblig­a­tions, so the key to for­mu­lat­ing a bib­li­cal doc­trine of rights is to flip the doc­trine of oblig­a­tion.”
  5. How Stan­ford Hides Con­flicts of Inter­est (Daniel “Bob” Fer­reira, Stan­ford Sphere): “We start­ed by going through all 127 full-time, non-cour­tesy pro­fes­sors in Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Bio­engi­neer­ing, and Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, and we checked what Bloomberg, Crunch­base, and the SEC had on them. Then, we went on to ver­i­fy whether this infor­ma­tion was current—through com­pa­ny web­sites, men­tions on their own pub­lic CVs, or media cov­er­age. Final­ly, we removed fac­ul­ty whose links to busi­ness­es had noth­ing to do with biotech.”
  6. Hong Kong: First Line of Defence against a Ris­ing Fas­cist Pow­er (Aaron Sarin, Quil­lette): “China’s gov­ern­ment has only retained the name ‘Com­mu­nist Par­ty’ because to do oth­er­wise would be a first step towards admit­ting the atroc­i­ties of the past. The sev­er­ing of the link between Xi and Mao would make it pos­si­ble to acknowl­edge that Mao was one of history’s worst vil­lains. This would set a prece­dent for crit­i­cis­ing author­i­ty that would inevitably lead to Xi’s own down­fall. So the name stays, but in truth there is noth­ing ‘com­mu­nist’ about this Com­mu­nist Par­ty (save its author­i­tar­i­an­ism). In fact, Marx­ist stu­dents, activists, and social work­ers have been arrest­ed and tor­tured since Xi took pow­er, and uni­ver­si­ties have shut down Marx­ist soci­eties.”
    • The Prophet­ic Voice of Hong Kong’s Pro­test­ers (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Many Hong Kong Chris­tians, while com­pris­ing less than 12 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, have played a promi­nent role in the protests—marching, singing hymns, hold­ing prayer cir­cles, and pro­vid­ing food and shel­ter to oth­er demon­stra­tors. (The Jesus Peo­ple song ‘Sing Hal­lelu­jah to the Lord’ became an unex­pect­ed anthem of the protests, as par­tic­i­pants sang the tune to calm con­fronta­tions with police.) For Chris­tians there, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty may be the great­est exis­ten­tial threat to the Hong Kong church.”
  7. The Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stu­pid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. This essay is about a decade old but I only recent­ly stum­bled upon it.

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 Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

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 220

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. My hope is that every­one will find at least one link intrigu­ing enough to click through for more. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Does a Reli­gious Upbring­ing Pro­mote Gen­eros­i­ty or Not? (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In 2015, a paper by Jean Dece­ty and co-authors report­ed that chil­dren who were brought up reli­gious­ly were less gen­er­ous. The paper received a great deal of atten­tion, and was cov­ered by over 80 media out­lets includ­ing The Econ­o­mist, the Boston Globe, the Los Ange­les Times, and Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. As it turned out, how­ev­er, the paper by Dece­ty was wrong.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus who not­ed, “it seemed up your alley.” A sto­ry which touch­es on reli­gion, fea­tures a sta­tis­ti­cal screwup, and high­lights media bias? Indeed it is! The author is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard whose writ­ing I have high­light­ed before. 
  2. Is Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty on Its Last Legs? The Data Say Oth­er­wise. (Bradley Wright, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty is doing rather well for itself. Where it is not increas­ing, it is hold­ing steady. As Stan­ton writes, ‘Church­es that are faith­ful­ly preach­ing, teach­ing, and prac­tic­ing Bib­li­cal truths and con­ser­v­a­tive the­ol­o­gy are hold­ing sta­ble over­all. In some areas, they are see­ing growth.’ In con­trast, the for­tunes of main­line Protes­tantism in Amer­i­ca are falling fast. Its long decline has been doc­u­ment­ed before, and Stan­ton updates our under­stand­ing of it. As he puts it, ‘peo­ple are leav­ing those church­es like the build­ings are on fire.’” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at U Conn whose writ­ing I have high­light­ed before.
  3. Look­ing back at the Snow­den rev­e­la­tions (Matthew Green, per­son­al blog): “One of the most impor­tant lessons we learned from the Snow­den leaks was that the NSA very much pri­or­i­tizes its sur­veil­lance mis­sion, to the point where it is will­ing to active­ly insert vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties into encryp­tion prod­ucts and stan­dards used on U.S. net­works…. This kind of sab­o­tage is, need­less to say, some­thing that not even the most para­noid secu­ri­ty researchers would have pre­dict­ed from our own intel­li­gence agen­cies. Agen­cies that, osten­si­bly have a mis­sion to pro­tect U.S. net­works.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins.
  4. Harvard’s Lega­cies Are Noth­ing to Be Proud Of (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “If you are won­der­ing why Amer­i­cans do not trust the cur­rent estab­lish­ment, or why Amer­i­cans are not so con­vinced that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty actu­al­ly will reverse income inequal­i­ty, look no fur­ther than the Har­vard admis­sions case.”
  5. Inside Stanford’s Last Fall­out Shel­ter: a time cap­sule to Cold War pol­i­tics and protests (Patrick Mon­re­al, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “At the height of the Cold War, Stan­ford and the Office of Civ­il Defense, a fed­er­al agency estab­lished by Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, des­ig­nat­ed as many as 56 fall­out shel­ters on cam­pus. The Uni­ver­si­ty man­aged these shel­ters, which col­lec­tive­ly had a max­i­mum occu­pan­cy of 49,269 peo­ple, as a part of emer­gency plans in the event of a nuclear strike or nat­ur­al dis­as­ter.”
  6. Some diverse per­spec­tives on max­i­miz­ing your time at Stan­ford.
    • Class­es for the Col­lege Con­trar­i­an: The Com­pre­hen­sive Guide to Get­ting More out of Stan­ford (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “Although Stanford’s dom­i­nance in STEM fields is uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged, it can be hard­er to find stel­lar human­i­ties and social sci­ences class­es, which don’t have the same struc­tured cur­ricu­lums and are more like­ly to suf­fer from severe grade infla­tion. This is not even to men­tion the dif­fi­cul­ty of find­ing class­es which rep­re­sent oppos­ing view­points and teach crit­i­cal thought rather than aca­d­e­m­ic ortho­doxy.” Anni­ka is involved in Chi Alpha. 
    • Eleven Must-Take Class­es This Fall (Stan­ford Sphere edi­to­r­i­al board): “In our old­est recur­ring fea­ture, we present below an alpha­bet­ized list of the most inter­est­ing class­es of the fall.”
    • I pro­pose a new rule at Stan­ford — all stu­dents shall be auto­mat­i­cal­ly enrolled in any cours­es which are rec­om­mend­ed by both the Sphere and the Review 
    • How to Major in Uni­corn (Max Read & Andrew Grana­to, New York Mag­a­zine): “Google was found­ed by two Stan­ford grad­u­ate stu­dents, Insta­gram by two Stan­ford alum­ni, Snapchat by a Stan­ford dropout. What­sApp, Net­flix, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard were all found­ed by one­time Stan­ford stu­dents; the ear­li­est investors in Face­book and Ama­zon were Stan­ford grad­u­ates. Even Eliz­a­beth Holmes, sym­bol of Sil­i­con Val­ley self-delu­sion and fraud, was a stu­dent at Stan­ford when she dropped out to found Ther­a­nos. About the only two famous tech founders with no imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent Stan­ford con­nec­tion are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates — though is it a coin­ci­dence that each had a daugh­ter attend the school?”
    • If Not Snapchat, What? A Guide to Stanford’s Non-Tech Fief­doms (Andrew Grana­to, New York Mag­a­zine): “An anec­dote about the uni­ver­si­ty that is posi­tion­ing itself to take charge of the 21st cen­tu­ry: Jack­son Beard ’17, the for­mer stu­dent body pres­i­dent, told me a sto­ry about how a cab­i­net mem­ber of hers tried to sched­ule a meet­ing with the head of the stu­dent health cen­ter to dis­cuss school pol­i­cy on invol­un­tary psy­chi­atric holds of stu­dents. After many delays, a meet­ing occurred where the admin­is­tra­tor ‘just asked, straight up, “When do you two grad­u­ate?” He said, “I want to know when you’ll stop car­ing about this issue.”’” A remark­ably brief sum­ma­ry of a very real Stan­ford dynam­ic.
    • An Optimist’s Guide to Find­ing Mean­ing at Stan­ford (Ibrahim Bhar­mal and Ali­na Utra­ta, Medi­um) “The best advice I ever got about pick­ing a major was: plan out all the class­es you want to take, and then see what major lets you take those class­es. YOU HAVE TONS OF TIME! Spend fresh­man and sopho­more year tak­ing all the class­es you’re inter­est­ed in and expand­ing your hori­zons — even class­es that don’t seem ‘use­ful’ to you.”
  7. The Dan­ger of Reusing Nat­ur­al Exper­i­ments (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “A cor­re­spon­dent writes to ask whether I was aware that Reg­u­la­tion SHO has been used by more than fifty oth­er stud­ies to test a vari­ety of hypothe­ses. I was not! The prob­lem is obvi­ous. If the same exper­i­ment is used mul­ti­ple times we should be impos­ing mul­ti­ple hypoth­e­sis stan­dards to avoid the green jel­ly bean prob­lem, oth­er­wise known as the false pos­i­tive prob­lem.” 

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 Facts Are Not Self‐Interpreting (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 184.

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 219

New stu­dents: if this is your first email from the Chi Alpha list, wel­come! Every Fri­day I email out a com­pi­la­tion of arti­cles about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. My hope is that every­one will find at least one link intrigu­ing enough to click through for more.

Most of the list’s con­tent isn’t remote­ly like this, so even if this isn’t your cup of tea be sure to stick around (although I’ve heard rumors that some peo­ple stay on our list just for this Fri­day email). Also pay atten­tion to the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom — I real­ly mean them. And I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Lega­cy and Ath­lete Pref­er­ences at Har­vard (Peter Arcidi­a­cono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ran­som, link is a PDF of a work­ing paper): “The law­suit Stu­dents For Fair Admis­sions v. Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vid­ed an unprece­dent­ed look at how an elite school makes admis­sions deci­sions. Using pub­licly-released reports, we exam­ine the pref­er­ences Har­vard gives for recruit­ed ath­letes, lega­cies, those on the dean’s inter­est list, and chil­dren of fac­ul­ty and staff (ALD­Cs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African Amer­i­can, Asian Amer­i­can, and His­pan­ic, the share is less than 16% each. Our mod­el of admis­sions shows that rough­ly three quar­ters of white ALDC admits would have been reject­ed if they had been treat­ed as white non-ALD­Cs. Remov­ing pref­er­ences for ath­letes and lega­cies would sig­nif­i­cant­ly alter the racial dis­tri­b­u­tion of admit­ted stu­dents, with the share of white admits falling and all oth­er groups ris­ing or remain­ing unchanged.” The lead author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Duke.
  2. Too Much Dark Mon­ey in Almonds (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every­one always talks about how much mon­ey there is in pol­i­tics. This is the wrong fram­ing. The right fram­ing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so lit­tle mon­ey in pol­i­tics? But Ansolabehere focus­es on elec­tions, and the mys­tery is wider than that. Sure, dur­ing the 2018 elec­tion, can­di­dates, par­ties, PACs, and out­siders com­bined spent about $5 bil­lion – $2.5 bil­lion on Democ­rats, $2 bil­lion on Repub­li­cans, and $0.5 bil­lion on third par­ties. And although that sounds like a lot of mon­ey to you or me, on the nation­al scale, it’s puny. The US almond indus­try earns $12 bil­lion per year. Amer­i­cans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on can­di­dates last year.” It builds to a sur­pris­ing twist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. I nor­mal­ly avoid two links from one author, but every once in a while some­one is on fire. Against Against Pseudoad­dic­tion (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Let me con­fess: I think pseudoad­dic­tion is real. In fact, I think it’s obvi­ous­ly real. I think every­one should real­ize it’s real as soon as it’s explained prop­er­ly to them. I think we should be ter­ri­fied that any of our insti­tu­tions – media, acad­e­mia, what­ev­er – think they could pos­si­bly get away with claim­ing pseudoad­dic­tion isn’t real. I think peo­ple should be tak­ing to the streets try­ing to over­throw a med­ical sys­tem that has the slight­est doubt about whether pseudoad­dic­tion is real. If you can think of more hyper­bol­ic state­ments about pseudoad­dic­tion, I prob­a­bly believe those too.” I am ful­ly per­suad­ed by this arti­cle. 
  4. ‘I Basi­cal­ly Just Made It Up’: Con­fes­sions of a Social Con­struc­tion­ist (Christo­pher Dum­mitt, Quil­lette): “In my defence, I wasn’t alone. Every­one was (and is) mak­ing it up. That’s how the gen­der-stud­ies field works. But it’s not much of a defence. I should have known bet­ter. If I were to retroac­tive­ly psy­cho­an­a­lyze myself, I would say that, real­ly, I did know bet­ter. And that’s why I was so angry and assertive about what I thought I knew. It was to hide the fact that, at a very basic lev­el, I didn’t have proof for part of what I was say­ing. So I stuck to the argu­ments with fer­vor, and denounced alter­na­tive points of view.” The author is a his­to­ri­an at Trent Uni­ver­si­ty (in Cana­da). 
  5. The Chris­t­ian Right Is Help­ing Dri­ve Lib­er­als Away From Reli­gion (Amelia Thom­son-DeVeaux and Daniel Cox, FiveThir­tyEight): “Researchers haven’t found a com­pre­hen­sive expla­na­tion for why the num­ber of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans has increased over the past few years — the shift is too large and too com­plex. But a recent swell of social sci­ence research sug­gests that even if pol­i­tics wasn’t the sole cul­prit, it was an impor­tant con­trib­u­tor.”
    • Relat­ed: Not every­body wants thoughts and prayers after a dis­as­ter, accord­ing to a study of hur­ri­cane sur­vivors (Allen Kim, CNN): “Think­ing of send­ing your ‘thoughts and prayers’ to those affect­ed by tragedy or a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter? Well, not every­one wants them. While Chris­tians val­ue these ges­tures from reli­gious peo­ple, some athe­ists and agnos­tics would pay mon­ey to avoid them, accord­ing to a study pub­lished Mon­day in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.” I am shocked at how aller­gic some peo­ple are to reli­gion. The aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle upon which this news sto­ry was based is The val­ue of thoughts and prayers (Lin­da Thun­ström and Shiri Noy, PNAS).
  6. World Vision Flips the Script on Child Spon­sor­ship (Jere­my Weber, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Almost 1,000 chil­dren in rur­al Guatemala gained spon­sors this month from a megachurch in south­ern Indi­ana. But in this case, it was the indige­nous chil­dren in need who pon­dered pho­tos of smil­ing faces and chose one they felt a con­nec­tion with. And it was the adult donors in the Unit­ed States who ner­vous­ly wait­ed, won­der­ing who would pick them.”
  7. The grand­mas­ter diet: How to lose weight while bare­ly mov­ing (Aish­warya Kumar, ESPN): “Robert Sapol­sky, who stud­ies stress in pri­mates at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, says a chess play­er can burn up to 6,000 calo­ries a day while play­ing in a tour­na­ment, three times what an aver­age per­son con­sumes in a day. Based on breath­ing rates (which triple dur­ing com­pe­ti­tion), blood pres­sure (which ele­vates) and mus­cle con­trac­tions before, dur­ing and after major tour­na­ments, Sapol­sky sug­gests that grand­mas­ters’ stress respons­es to chess are on par with what elite ath­letes expe­ri­ence.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a stu­dent brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 181.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 217

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 Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.” I just found this blog and am lov­ing it.
  2. When Faith Comes Up, Stu­dents Avert Their Eyes (Michael Roth, The Atlantic): “As a non­be­liev­er myself, I am not try­ing to con­vert any stu­dent to any reli­gion. Yet how to dis­cuss reli­gious faith in class pos­es a major chal­lenge for non­re­li­gious col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. How can such an insti­tu­tion claim to edu­cate stu­dents about ideas, cul­ture, and ways of life if stu­dents, pro­fes­sors, or both are uncom­fort­able when talk­ing about some­thing that’s been cen­tral to human­i­ty through­out record­ed his­to­ry?” Roth is a his­to­ri­an and the pres­i­dent of Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. The Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Very enter­tain­ing.
  4. Elite Fail­ure Has Brought Amer­i­cans to the Edge of an Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “What Amer­i­cans young and old are aban­don­ing is not so much the promise of fam­i­ly, faith, and nation­al pride as the trust that America’s exist­ing insti­tu­tions can be relied on to pro­vide for them.”
    • Use­ful­ly read along­side The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad (James Fal­lows, The Atlantic): “Gov­ern­men­tal ‘fail­ure’ comes down to an inabil­i­ty to match a society’s resources to its biggest oppor­tu­ni­ties and needs. This is the clear­est stan­dard by which cur­rent U.S. nation­al gov­er­nance fails. In prin­ci­ple, almost noth­ing is beyond America’s capac­i­ties. In prac­tice, almost every big task seems too hard. Yet for our own era’s coun­ter­parts to duchies and monasteries—for state and local gov­ern­ments, and for cer­tain large pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing uni­ver­si­ties and some companies—the coun­try is still main­ly func­tion­al, in exact­ly the areas where nation­al gov­er­nance has failed.”
    • Relat­ed: How Uni­ver­si­ties Have Been Part of the Prob­lem (And Can Be Part of the Solu­tion) for America’s Civic Crises (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): “Stu­dents are taught to real­ly hone their crit­i­cal capac­i­ties at uni­ver­si­ty – but what of their affir­ma­tive ones? Put anoth­er way, there is a big focus on iden­ti­fy­ing prob­lems, crit­i­ciz­ing, prob­lema­tiz­ing, decon­struct­ing, high­light­ing dif­fer­ences, etc. – but much less on com­ing up with prac­ti­cal solu­tions, or explain­ing what works, what is good (and why), or acknowl­edg­ing what the peo­ple we engage are right about, or build­ing con­sen­sus through the things we share in com­mon. These are not skills that are pri­or­i­tized in high­er edu­ca­tion today.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Also see his com­pan­ion piece Aca­d­e­m­ic and Polit­i­cal Elit­ism at Inside High­er Ed.
  5. Can Jesus Close the Wage Gap? Inside Hill­song’s Insta­gram-Fueled Wom­en’s Move­ment (Hay­ley Phe­lan, Elle): “This year’s theme, ‘Be Found in the New,’ is tak­en from the Book of Rev­e­la­tion. But if you didn’t know that, the pam­phlet could be an Urban Out­fit­ters cat­a­log or an Ever­lane lookbook—a sign of both Hillsong’s cul­tur­al flu­en­cy and mar­keters’ aware­ness of con­sumer fatigue. A new sofa or cute leg­gings are just the win­dow dress­ing in a life of purpose—a way to tran­scend exhaus­tion, lone­li­ness, and low self-esteem, and step into a world of our own mak­ing. Which, when you get right down to it, sounds a lot like reli­gion.”
  6. Five Things They Don’t Tell You About Slav­ery (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “None of the oth­er soci­eties taint­ed by slav­ery pro­duced the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, a Wash­ing­ton, Jef­fer­son, and Hamil­ton, the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, or a tra­di­tion of lib­er­ty that inspired peo­ple around the world for cen­turies. If we don’t keep that in mind, as well as the broad­er con­text of slav­ery, we aren’t giv­ing this coun­try — or his­to­ry — its due.” The title is not great but the arti­cle is quite inter­est­ing. 
  7. Home­less­ness and the high cost of liv­ing (Chris­tos Makridis, The Hill): “…econ­o­mists have reached a con­sen­sus that the pri­ma­ry dri­ver behind increas­ing hous­ing prices and rental rates is the pres­ence of, and increase in, land use restric­tions. Put sim­ply, land use restric­tions, or hous­ing mar­ket reg­u­la­tions more gen­er­al­ly, place restric­tions on the types of struc­tures that can be built — that either implic­it­ly or explic­it­ly raise the cost for devel­op­ers.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.

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 What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-written. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian. First shared in vol­ume 178.

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 212

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. 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.
  2. Six­teen and Evan­gel­i­cal (Lau­ra Turn­er, Slate): “A world with­out God wouldn’t make sense to me. But it now makes sense to many of my friends. I final­ly under­stand that we nev­er had a shared faith struc­ture. We went to the same church, some of us for years. We heard the same ser­mons, slept in the same cab­ins at camp, read the same books of the Bible, lis­tened to the same music. But we went home to dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies.” The author is John & Nan­cy Ortberg’s daugh­ter.
  3. Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Report­ed­ly Bans All Mar­tial Arts Groups With­out Warn­ing Over Email (Jin Hyun, NextShark): “Accord­ing to Choi, the university’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion behind the shut­down can be sum­ma­rized in four points: ‘the groups like to unof­fi­cial­ly prac­tice dur­ing dead week, they recruit pro­fes­sion­al, inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned coach­es to run their prac­tices, they com­pete and reg­u­lar­ly win nation­al cham­pi­onships with­out Uni­ver­si­ty help, they par­tic­i­pate heav­i­ly in the local com­mu­ni­ty by teach­ing stu­dents, alum­ni, and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers.’”
    • Stan­ford often seems con­flict­ed about whether its under­grads are future lead­ers to be empow­ered or lia­bil­i­ties to be micro­man­aged.
  4. As admin­is­tra­tors walk back ‘insuf­fi­cient’ response, police reveal noose may have been on cam­pus since March (Ele­na Shao and Daniel Mar­tinez-Krams, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The new infor­ma­tion comes amid crit­i­cism of Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors’ response to the inci­dent, and one day after they held a sol­i­dar­i­ty ral­ly and town hall. A self-care event is sched­uled to take place Fri­day after­noon.” There have been a lot of arti­cles about this — but this once grabbed me with the tid­bit in the head­line. SINCE MARCH?
  5. On Court Prophets and Wilder­ness Prophets  (Tim­o­thy Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Whether you view Trump as a David or an Antipas, whether you serve at the court of the resplen­dent king or stand over against the court from the wilder­ness, one thing Nathan and John the Bap­tist held in com­mon was that both were will­ing to con­demn unright­eous­ness in their rulers—even if it cost them every­thing.”
    • Also polit­i­cal: The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty Is Actu­al­ly Three Par­ties (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “What the data demon­strates is that the group con­tain­ing the largest pro­por­tion of minor­i­ty vot­ers is the most skep­ti­cal of some of the most pro­gres­sive poli­cies embraced by Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates like Eliz­a­beth War­ren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Har­ris.” Per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of this op-ed is when he talks about the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of favor­ing small donors over large donors.
  6. In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons (Paul Mozur, New York Times): “The police offi­cers wres­tled with Col­in Che­ung in an unmarked car. They need­ed his face. They grabbed his jaw to force his head in front of his iPhone. They slapped his face. They shout­ed, ‘Wake up!’ They pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr. Che­ung had dis­abled his phone’s facial-recog­ni­tion login with a quick but­ton mash as soon as they grabbed him.”
  7. Canada’s bizarre trans-wax­ing con­tro­ver­sy (Bren­dan O’Neill, Spiked): “Yaniv says if the case is lost then a dan­ger­ous prece­dent will be set for trans peo­ple. In truth, the real dan­ger is if Yaniv wins the case, because that would set a prece­dent where­by the law could require that women must touch penis­es or risk los­ing their jobs. It would be pro­found­ly misog­y­nis­tic.” The lan­guage in this piece is vul­gar at times but in my esti­ma­tion not reck­less­ly so. Rod Dreher sums things up pith­ily with the head­line: From ‘Bake My Cake’ to ‘Wax My Tes­ti­cles’ (The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive)
    • Relat­ed: Lib­er­als’ aston­ish­ing­ly rad­i­cal shift on gen­der (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Slaves every­where pre­sum­ably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legit­i­ma­cy of the sys­tem and the mas­ter that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we could­n’t even begin to per­ceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a bur­den so oner­ous that it pro­duces a demand for the over­turn­ing of well-set­tled rules and assump­tions, some of which (‘the gen­der bina­ry’) go all the way back to the ear­li­est ori­gins of human civ­i­liza­tion?”

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 210

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.

It’s good to be back after last week’s hia­tus.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Trained on Old Sci­en­tif­ic Papers Makes Dis­cov­er­ies Humans Missed (Madeleine Gre­go­ry, Moth­er­board): “In a study pub­lished in Nature on July 3, researchers from the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry used an algo­rithm called Word2Vec sift through sci­en­tif­ic papers for con­nec­tions humans had missed. Their algo­rithm then spit out pre­dic­tions for pos­si­ble ther­mo­elec­tric mate­ri­als, which con­vert heat to ener­gy and are used in many heat­ing and cool­ing appli­ca­tions.”
  2. Can Chris­t­ian Com­pas­sion Influ­ence How We Treat Migrants? (Alan Cross, The Bul­wark): “Com­pas­sion is not inher­it­ed, either in indi­vid­u­als nor in nations. It must be cul­ti­vat­ed and that cul­ti­va­tion often hap­pens in tri­al when we are test­ed. Amer­i­ca is being test­ed right now. How will we respond to the migrants com­ing to us des­per­ate for help and refuge? How will we respond to the sight of Oscar and Vale­ria drown­ing and being found face down on the banks of Rio Grande in each other’s arms?”
    • Relat­ed: In the ‘bat­tle at the bor­der,’ evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers jos­tle for Trump-era media rel­e­van­cy (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Unless you’ve been under a rock recent­ly, you know much of the coun­try is fix­at­ed on the mess at our bor­der. What’s not as vis­i­ble is how evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are fight­ing among them­selves over all of this.”
    • And yet: Repub­li­cans turn more neg­a­tive toward refugees as num­ber admit­ted to U.S. plum­mets (Han­nah Har­tig, Pew Research): “By more than two-to-one (68% to 25%), white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants say the U.S. does not have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees. Oth­er reli­gious groups are more like­ly to say the U.S. does have this respon­si­bil­i­ty. And opin­ions among reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults are near­ly the reverse of those of white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants: 65% say the U.S. has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees into the coun­try, while just 31% say it does not.”
  3. 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.
  4. Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians Face A Deep­en­ing Cri­sis (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Cop­pock men­tioned to me the pow­er­ful exam­ple of St. Ambrose, the bish­op of Milan, who was will­ing to rebuke the Roman Emper­or Theo­do­sius for the latter’s role in mas­sacring civil­ians as pun­ish­ment for the mur­der of one of his gen­er­als. Ambrose refused to allow the Church to become a polit­i­cal prop, despite con­cerns that doing so might endan­ger him. Ambrose spoke truth to pow­er. (Theo­do­sius end­ed up seek­ing penance, and Ambrose went on to teach, con­vert, and bap­tize St. Augus­tine.) Prox­im­i­ty to pow­er is fine for Chris­tians, Cop­pock told me, but only so long as it does not cor­rupt their moral sense, only so long as they don’t allow their faith to become polit­i­cal­ly weaponized. Yet that is pre­cise­ly what’s hap­pen­ing today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I wish that the Amer­i­can church was more vis­i­bly dis­mayed at some of Trump’s obvi­ous sins. I remind peo­ple of all polit­i­cal incli­na­tions that you can sup­port someone’s over­all agen­da and still rebuke them for acts of wicked­ness. In fact, being will­ing to do so makes your sup­port more mean­ing­ful. So vote for who­ev­er you want, and hold the lead­ers you sup­port to a high stan­dard.
  5. Taiwan’s Sta­tus is a Geopo­lit­i­cal Absur­di­ty (Chris Hor­ton, The Atlantic): “’Taiwan’s gov­ern­ment is demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elected—we have a pres­i­dent, we have a par­lia­ment,’ For­eign Min­is­ter Joseph Wu said plain­tive­ly at a brief­ing for for­eign media ear­li­er this year. At the time, his gov­ern­ment was try­ing to be includ­ed in the World Health Assem­bly. (It was ulti­mate­ly blocked by Chi­na.) ‘We issue visas, we issue pass­ports,’ he said, prac­ti­cal­ly plead­ing. ‘We have a mil­i­tary and a cur­ren­cy … Tai­wan exists by itself; Tai­wan is not a part of any oth­er coun­try.’”
  6. Robespierre’s Amer­i­ca (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The data con­firm what one hears and expe­ri­ences anec­do­tal­ly all the time: In the prover­bial land of the free, peo­ple live in mor­tal fear of a moral faux pas. Opin­ions that were con­sid­ered rea­son­able and nor­mal a few years ago are increas­ing­ly deliv­ered in whis­pers. Pro­fes­sors fear their stu­dents. Pub­lish­ers drop books at the slight­est whiff of social-media con­tro­ver­sy.”
  7. Gay Rites Are Civ­il Rites (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “‘Civ­il reli­gion’ is a sur­pris­ing place for social jus­tice to end up. Gay pride start­ed at Stonewall as a giant ****-you to civ­il soci­ety. Home­less peo­ple, addicts, and sex work­ers told the police where they could shove their respectable val­ues. But there was anoth­er major world reli­gion that start­ed with beg­gars, lep­ers, and pros­ti­tutes, wasn’t there? One that told the Phar­isees where to shove their respectable val­ues.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” First shared in vol­ume 156.

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 208

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. I Pray for Refugees Because I Was One. And God Was Faith­ful. (Sun­day Htoo, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When I was in the jun­gle and run­ning for my life, I felt that I would be safe. I felt that some­one I did not know was pray­ing for me. Some­one is run­ning for their life right now in Bur­ma, or anoth­er coun­try torn by war. Please pray for him, for her, for the chil­dren, for the elder­ly, and for a woman who may be preg­nant. Your prayer is full of mean­ing.” If you ignore every oth­er arti­cle to which I link this week, read this.
    • Rel­e­vant: Migrant chil­dren describe neglect at Texas bor­der facil­i­ty (Cedar Attana­sio, Garance Burke and Martha Men­doza, AP News): “‘In my 22 years of doing vis­its with chil­dren in deten­tion I have nev­er heard of this lev­el of inhu­man­i­ty,’ said Hol­ly Coop­er, who co-directs Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis’ Immi­gra­tion Law Clin­ic and rep­re­sents detained youth…. the Bor­der Patrol is hold­ing 15,000 peo­ple, and the agency con­sid­ers 4,000 to be at capac­i­ty.”
    • Also: Is it Chris­t­ian or ille­gal to aid migrants? A hung Tuc­son jury, a fork in the road of faith (Bri­an McLaren, USA Today): “reli­gious lib­er­ty means the free­dom to save refugees in the desert.” I met McLaren once and had a nice con­ver­sa­tion with him. There is zero chance he remem­bers me. There are parts of this op-ed with which I stren­u­ous­ly dis­agree, rec­om­mend­ed nonethe­less.
  2. The Illib­er­al Right Throws a Tantrum (Adam Ser­w­er, The Atlantic): “The Amer­i­can creed has no more devot­ed adher­ents than those who have been his­tor­i­cal­ly denied its promis­es, and no more fair-weath­er friends than those who have tak­en them for grant­ed.”
    • In response: Is The Reli­gious Right Priv­i­leged? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Polit­i­cal­ly, lib­er­al­ism has imposed via the judi­cia­ry, the least demo­c­ra­t­ic branch, a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion, a form of lethal vio­lence that the church oppos­es for the same rea­sons it oppos­es infan­ti­cide — and after 50 years of small‑d demo­c­ra­t­ic activism by pro-lif­ers, the pro-choice side seems to be hard­en­ing into a view that such activism is as un-Amer­i­can as racism. Legal­ly, elite lib­er­al­ism is increas­ing­ly embrac­ing argu­ments that would make it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for the church to oper­ate hos­pi­tals and adop­tion agen­cies today, and per­haps col­leges and gram­mar schools tomor­row. And in its inter­nal life, beneath the post-Protes­tant ten­den­cy I’ve just described, pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics is also nur­tur­ing a fash­ion­able occultism, whose rit­u­als may be prac­ticed some­what iron­i­cal­ly or per­for­ma­tive­ly but whose anti-Catholi­cism seems quite sin­cere.”
    • Relat­ed: Two Painful Truths of America’s Reli­gious Cul­ture War (David French, Nation­al Review): “Here are two painful truths: Sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment is break­ing its promise of lib­er­ty, and the Amer­i­can church is break­ing its promise of virtue.”
  3. What Real­ly Hap­pened to Malaysia’s Miss­ing Air­plane (William Langewi­esche, The Atlantic): “The idea that a sophis­ti­cat­ed machine, with its mod­ern instru­ments and redun­dant com­mu­ni­ca­tions, could sim­ply van­ish seems beyond the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty. It is hard to per­ma­nent­ly delete an email, and liv­ing off the grid is near­ly unachiev­able even when the attempt is delib­er­ate. A Boe­ing 777 is meant to be elec­tron­i­cal­ly acces­si­ble at all times…. All sorts of the­o­rists have made claims, ampli­fied by social media, that ignore the satel­lite data, and in some cas­es also the radar tracks, the air­craft sys­tems, the air-traf­fic-con­trol record, the physics of flight, and the basic con­tours of plan­e­tary geog­ra­phy. ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent (and, it seems, half the inter­net — this is wide­ly con­sid­ered a must-read arti­cle). The author is a pro­fes­sion­al pilot and a vet­er­an jour­nal­ist
  4. ‘Sing Hal­lelu­jah to the Lord’ has become the unof­fi­cial anthem of the anti-extra­di­tion protest move­ment (Ken­neth Tan, Shang­hai­ist): “Alarmed by reports of police bru­tal­i­ty, many church groups gal­va­nized to par­tic­i­pate in peace protests, call­ing on the author­i­ties to stop the vio­lence. Their pres­ence on the front lines of the protests were help­ful in mak­ing the demon­stra­tions look more like an out­door wor­ship ser­vice rather than the ‘orga­nized riots’ the gov­ern­ment said it had to crack down on to bring back law and order.”
    • Relat­ed: A new kind of Hong Kong activism emerges as pro­test­ers mobi­lize with­out any lead­ers (Alice Su, LA Times): “This time around, pro­test­ers are delib­er­ate­ly lead­er­less, Leung said. ‘It looks quite orga­nized and well-dis­ci­plined. But I’m quite sure you can­not find any­one man­ag­ing the whole thing,’ Leung said, adding that the pro­test­ers’ logis­ti­cal prac­tices — bring­ing sup­plies, set­ting up med­ical sta­tions, rapid mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion — were ‘in-built’ from the last few years of prac­tice. ‘It’s just like a machine or a self-learn­ing AI that can run by them­selves,’ he said.”
    • Relat­ed: check out this drone footage of the protests (3 min­utes, YouTube).
  5. Repa­ra­tions came up in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on June­teenth. Here are two tes­ti­monies that caught a lot of atten­tion:
    • Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Tes­ti­mo­ny on Repa­ra­tions (Olivia Paschal & Madeleine Carlisle, The Atlantic): “The typ­i­cal black fam­i­ly in this coun­try has one-tenth the wealth of the typ­i­cal white fam­i­ly. Black women die in child­birth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boast­ing the largest prison pop­u­la­tion on the plan­et, of which the descen­dants of the enslaved make up the largest share. The mat­ter of repa­ra­tions is one of mak­ing amends and direct redress, but it is also a ques­tion of cit­i­zen­ship.” (or watch the five minute video on YouTube)
    • My Tes­ti­mo­ny On Repa­ra­tions (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “But the peo­ple who were owed for slav­ery are no longer here, and we’re not enti­tled to col­lect on their debts. Repa­ra­tions, by def­i­n­i­tion, are only giv­en to vic­tims. So the moment you give me repa­ra­tions, you’ve made me into a vic­tim with­out my con­sent. Not just that: you’ve made one-third of black Americans—who con­sis­tent­ly poll against reparations—into vic­tims with­out their con­sent, and black Amer­i­cans have fought too long for the right to define them­selves to be spo­ken for in such a con­de­scend­ing man­ner.” (or watch the six minute video on YouTube)
    • Some­what, kin­da relat­ed: ‘Affir­ma­tive Action Is Not About Equal­i­ty. It’s About Cov­er­ing Ass.’ (Evan Goldstein,Chronicle Review): “What hap­pened is that I went through a trau­ma. I was accused of assault­ing a woman with whom I was hav­ing an extra­mar­i­tal affair. I was pub­licly humil­i­at­ed. I had to with­draw an appoint­ment as under­sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion in the last years of Reagan’s sec­ond term. I was a crack-cocaine addict; it almost killed me. My wife at the time, God bless her, stayed with me, and we sub­se­quent­ly had two fine sons. But at the time, I was dying. I found Jesus. I got my life togeth­er. They stuck with me at the Kennedy School, but I just couldn’t bear the feel­ing of con­de­scen­sion.” This is an inter­view with Glenn Loury, who was the first black tenured econ pro­fes­sor at Har­vard. He is now an econ­o­mist at Brown.
  6. Ide­ol­o­gy and Facts Col­lide at Ober­lin Col­lege (Daniel McGraw, Quil­lette): “It slow­ly became evi­dent that this case was not about free expres­sion and assem­bly or racial injus­tice and civ­il rights. It was about some­thing more banal. A cow­ard­ly col­lege admin­is­tra­tion picked on a small and vul­ner­a­ble busi­ness in an attempt to fend off accu­sa­tions of racism it was fac­ing from its own stu­dents.”
    • Hon­est­ly, this Twit­ter thread about it is even bet­ter. Jaw-drop­ping details. Read it first and then the above arti­cle if you want a more well-round­ed nar­ra­tive.
  7. How Should Chris­tians Have Sex? (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “I long for more robust cat­e­gories of right and wrong besides con­sent — a base­line, but only that — and more than a gen­er­al reminder not to be a jerk. I can get that from Dan Sav­age, but I also want to know what Jesus thinks.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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 207

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. Eleven arrests, dou­ble the tear gas fired dur­ing Occu­py move­ment and 81 injured: police chief paints dis­turb­ing pic­ture of Hong Kong extra­di­tion bill protests (Ng Kang-chung & Christy Leung, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “In a post­mortem on Thurs­day of the clash­es between offi­cers and pro­test­ers who had sur­round­ed the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil build­ing and admin­is­tra­tive head­quar­ters the day before, Com­mis­sion­er of Police Stephen Lo Wai-chung said more than 150 rounds of tear gas had been fired – almost dou­ble that on the first day of the Occu­py demon­stra­tions – and about 20 bean­bag rounds, as well as ‘sev­er­al’ rounds of rub­ber bul­lets.” See also these relat­ed pho­tos from AP.
    • What Hong Kong’s Free­dom Means to the World (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Cir­ca 2019, Hong Kong is a study in the creep­ing pow­er and increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of autoc­ra­cy. While it is pos­si­ble there could be a Tianan­men-like mas­sacre in the streets of Hong Kong, it is more like­ly that its main­land over­lords will opt for more sub­tle ways of chok­ing off Hong Kong’s remain­ing auton­o­my and free­doms.”
    • Hong Kong and the Future of Free­dom (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “When Ronald Rea­gan called the Sovi­et Union ‘the focus of evil in the mod­ern world,’ one promi­nent lib­er­al writer denounced him as ‘prim­i­tive.’ But it was such rhetoric that gave courage to dis­si­dents and dream­ers on the oth­er side of the wall. What’s real­ly prim­i­tive is to look upon the oppres­sion of oth­ers and, whether out of defi­cient sym­pa­thy or exces­sive sophis­ti­ca­tion, remain silent.”
  2. The Pol­i­tics of Dystopia (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Lib­er­al­ism has nev­er done as well as it thinks at resolv­ing its own crises. America’s gravest moral evil, chat­tel slav­ery, was defeat­ed by an author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­dent in a reli­gious civ­il war, not by pro­ce­du­ral­ism or con­sti­tu­tion­al debate. The cri­sis of the 1930s end­ed hap­pi­ly for lib­er­al­ism because a reac­tionary impe­ri­al­ist with­stood Adolf Hitler and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary Bol­she­vik crushed him. The lib­er­al peace that fol­lowed may depend on fear of the atom­ic bomb.”
    • Relat­ed: A High-School Porn Star’s Cry for Help (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The prob­lem is that there are some very old human impuls­es that must now con­tend with porn. One of them is the ten­den­cy of deeply trou­bled teenage girls to act out sex­u­al­ly as a kind of dis­tress sig­nal, an attempt to get the atten­tion of adults who may not be get­ting the mes­sage that they’re in a cri­sis.”
    • Relat­ed? JON STEWART Goes OFF On Con­gress (YouTube): a remark­able nine-minute clip. The next day the bill was passed in com­mit­tee and now awaits a full vote.
  3. The restau­rant own­er who asked for 1‑star Yelp reviews (Zachary Crock­ett, The Hus­tle): “In 2014, chef Davide Cer­re­ti­ni adver­tised a spe­cial that would for­ev­er change his fate: Any­one who left his restau­rant a 1‑star review on Yelp would get 25% off a piz­za.” This is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Her Evan­gel­i­cal Megachurch Was Her World. Then Her Daugh­ter Said She Was Molest­ed by a Min­is­ter. (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Ms. Bragg said that all she want­ed was a church home that would care for her fam­i­ly. Evan­gel­i­cals in Dal­las are enam­ored with the Vil­lage, with Mr. Chan­dler and with all the church rep­re­sents, she said recent­ly. She start­ed to cry.”
  5. A Soci­ol­o­gist of Reli­gion on Protes­tants, Porn, and the “Puri­ty Indus­tri­al Com­plex” (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “What I found is that, what­ev­er we think pornog­ra­phy is doing, those effects tend to be ampli­fied when we’re talk­ing about con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants. It seems to be unique­ly harm­ful to con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants’ men­tal health, their sense of self, their own identities—certainly their inti­mate relationships—in ways that don’t tend to be as harm­ful for peo­ple who don’t have that kind of moral prob­lem with it.” Chotin­er is inter­view­ing Samuel Per­ry, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa.
  6. The Rise Of Pro­gres­sive Occultism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “For an increas­ing num­ber of left-lean­ing millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any orga­nized religion—occult spir­i­tu­al­i­ty isn’t just a form of per­son­al prac­tice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a meta­phys­i­cal can­vas for the Amer­i­can cul­ture wars in the post-Trump era: pit­ting the self-iden­ti­fied Davids of seem­ing­ly sec­u­lar pro­gres­sivism against the Goliath of nation­al­ist evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The arti­cle ends with an amaz­ing quote: “Back in 1992, Chris­t­ian broad­cast­er Pat Robert­son warned of the dan­gers of fem­i­nism, pre­dict­ing that it would induce ‘women to leave their husbands.…practice witch­craft, destroy cap­i­tal­ism and become les­bians.’ Many of today’s witch­es would hap­pi­ly agree.” 👀
  7. Is Chris­tian­i­ty los­ing to Islam? (Paul Seabright, Asia Times): “On a world scale – what­ev­er pop­ulists may say – Chris­tian­i­ty is not strug­gling; it is in more vig­or­ous shape than it has ever been. And the mar­ket­place is where most of the reli­gious action is going to take place in this cen­tu­ry. As in many oth­er mar­ket­places, there are large returns to economies of scale for those who can work out how to exploit them. That is why cor­po­rate reli­gion is here to stay – and why we should expect it to con­sol­i­date its dom­i­nance.” The author is an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor in France.

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 Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Indi­vid­u­als have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” The author just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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.