Tag: how the church is perceived

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 205

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. #MeToo Comes For Mar­tin Luther King (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I wish none of this were true, and per­haps we will learn when the record­ings are even­tu­al­ly released that these claims are not true, but I very much doubt it. David Garrow’s rep­u­ta­tion as a civ­il rights move­ment his­to­ri­an is beyond reproach, and as a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist, Gar­row can­not be said to have polit­i­cal motives for try­ing to dis­cred­it King. “ This is very sad. I knew King was adul­ter­ous, but these alle­ga­tions go far beyond that.
  2. Christo­pher Hitchens and his Chris­t­ian friends (Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridge­head): “Christo­pher Hitchens is remem­bered by the god­less as a man who tru­ly hat­ed Chris­tians and want­ed to utter­ly destroy Chris­tian­i­ty. In pub­lic, in front of his admir­ers, he main­tained that posi­tion even as the grave yawned at him. But as was always the case with Christo­pher Hitchens, there was quite a bit more to the sto­ry.”
  3. These two sto­ries are very dif­fer­ent and yet very sim­i­lar.
    • Los­ing Reli­gion and Find­ing Ecsta­sy in Hous­ton (Jia Tolenti­no, The New York­er): “I won­der if I would have stayed reli­gious if I had grown up in a place oth­er than Hous­ton and a time oth­er than now. I won­der how dif­fer­ent I would be if I had been able to find the feel­ing of devot­ed self-destruc­tion only through God. Instead, I have con­fused reli­gion with drugs, drugs with music, music with reli­gion. I can’t tell whether my incli­na­tion toward ecsta­sy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecsta­t­ic ten­den­cy that I ever believed at all.”
      • Tolenti­no has a way with words and her arti­cle, though sad, is enter­tain­ing­ly writ­ten. Over at GetRe­li­gion, Dou­glas LeBlanc offers the obser­va­tion: “Tolentino’s child­hood expe­ri­ences appar­ent­ly left her think­ing that the main point of Chris­tian­i­ty is to live in an unbreak­able bub­ble of bliss. If that’s the case, Ecsta­sy makes per­fect sense as the most tempt­ing sub­sti­tute for God.”
    • Come­di­an Pete Holmes was a good Chris­t­ian guy. Then his wife left him, and things got weird. (Daniel Burke, CNN): “…I thought that the lines were to God were closed, but they aren’t. We were taught that God spoke direct­ly to his prophets and the authors of the New Tes­ta­ment, and then Paul, and then it was over. And then I took mush­rooms, and I was like, ‘It ain’t over!’”
  4. Can We Believe? (Andrew Kla­van, City Jour­nal): “In any case, sci­en­tists used to accuse reli­gious peo­ple of invent­ing a ‘God of the Gaps’—that is, using reli­gion to explain away what sci­ence had not yet uncov­ered. But mul­ti­vers­es and sim­u­la­tions seem very much like a Sci­ence of the Gaps, jer­ry-rigged noth­ings designed to cir­cum­vent the sim­plest expla­na­tion for the real­i­ty we know.”
    • This is the same Andrew Kla­van who spoke on cam­pus recent­ly. I was unable to attend his talk (being busy preach­ing at the same time), but every­one I know who went found it quite com­pelling despite the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing it.
  5. See the World Like a Title IX Bureau­crat (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “[The Prince­ton stu­dents’ pro­pos­als] illus­trate an under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed ten­sion in the approach of today’s stu­dent activists, who simul­ta­ne­ous­ly express out­rage at the bad behav­ior of admin­is­tra­tive bureau­cra­cies and fight to expand their size and pow­er… Prince­ton bureau­crats have been focused on cam­pus sex­u­al assault for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry now. And in the telling of the stu­dent activists, they’ve yet to meet even min­i­mal eth­i­cal and pro­ce­dur­al stan­dards. So why pour mil­lions more into the same hier­ar­chies, expand­ing the might, mea­sured in total staff, of their lead­ers?”
  6. Five Insights Chris­tian­i­ty Brings to Pol­i­tics (Michael Math­e­son Miller, Law & Lib­er­ty): “It is impor­tant to note that a Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is not sim­ply a sec­u­lar vision of gov­ern­ment with reli­gion sprin­kled on top. Sec­u­lar­ism is not neu­tral. A Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is ground­ed in key the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal ideas about the nature of God and real­i­ty, the impor­tance of jus­tice, the val­ue of free­dom, the role of the fam­i­ly, and a rich under­stand­ing of the human per­son as cre­at­ed in the image of God, made for flour­ish­ing, and called to an eter­nal des­tiny.” This arti­cle is a par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholic way of think­ing about this sub­ject (one of sev­er­al Catholic approach­es, I should add).
    • On a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal note: The man who pre­dict­ed Trump’s vic­to­ry says Democ­rats may have to impeach him to have a chance in 2020 (Chris Cil­liz­za, CNN): “Licht­man, a pro­fes­sor at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Wash­ing­ton, DC, was the most promi­nent voice pre­dict­ing Don­ald Trump’s vic­to­ry in the run-up to the 2016 elec­tion. When Trump won, it marked the 9th(!) straight pres­i­den­tial elec­tion where Licht­man had cor­rect­ly pre­dict­ed the Elec­toral Col­lege win­ner. (That’s all the way back to 1984, for you math wiz­ards.)”
      • Caveat lec­tor. There are a lot of pun­dits, and at least one of them being right about the last 9 elec­tions by chance isn’t that improb­a­ble (unless I’m miss­ing some­thing there are only 512 dif­fer­ent out­comes if you are only con­sid­er­ing the two major par­ties). Inter­est­ing nonethe­less.
  7. Self-cen­sor­ship on Cam­pus Is Bad for Sci­ence (Lau­na Mar­jo­la, The Atlantic): “Sad­ly, stu­dents do not seem to real­ize that their good inten­tions may lead them to resist learn­ing sci­en­tif­ic facts, and can even harm their own goal of help­ing women and eth­nic minori­ties.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Williams Col­lege.

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 If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 202

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 First Rule of Social-Media Cen­sor­ship Is That There Are No Rules (David French, Nation­al Review): “The great val­ue of view­point neu­tral­i­ty is that it com­ports with our sense of fun­da­men­tal fair­ness. It hear­kens back to the image of the blind­fold­ed Lady Jus­tice, hold­ing her scales, indif­fer­ent to the pow­er or priv­i­lege of her peti­tion­ers. Twit­ter and Face­book have removed the blind­fold, thrown away the scales, and cho­sen to wield only the sword.”
    • Relat­ed but less aggres­sive: Facebook’s Unin­tend­ed Con­se­quence (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The deep­er prob­lem is the over­whelm­ing con­cen­tra­tion of tech­ni­cal, finan­cial and moral pow­er in the hands of peo­ple who lack the train­ing, expe­ri­ence, wis­dom, trust­wor­thi­ness, humil­i­ty and incen­tives to exer­cise that pow­er respon­si­bly.”
    • Relat­ed but with a dif­fer­ent empha­sis: The Big Tech Threat (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “My the­sis is that the evi­dence strong­ly sug­gests there is some­thing deeply trou­bling, maybe even deeply wrong, with the entire social media econ­o­my. My the­sis is that it does not rep­re­sent a source of strength for America’s tomor­row, but is rather a source of per­il.” A tran­script of a speech giv­en by a US Sen­a­tor who is a Stan­ford grad and who was speak­ing at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  2. We Are Tak­ing Reli­gious Free­dom Too Far (Mar­garet Ren­kl, New York Times): “Reli­gious faith is a pri­vate mat­ter between a believ­er and God. But how a believ­er lives in com­mu­ni­ty with oth­er peo­ple is some­thing dif­fer­ent alto­geth­er. It’s time to stop giv­ing believ­ers a pass just because their beliefs hap­pen to run counter to the laws of the nation they live in.”
    • In response: A New York Times Op-Ed Is Very Wrong About Reli­gious Lib­er­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “She for­mu­lates reli­gious lib­er­ty like this: ‘In this coun­try, cit­ing reli­gious or spir­i­tu­al con­vic­tions is often a sure­fire way to get out of doing some­thing you’re required by law to do.’ This is a com­mon fram­ing on the left. Essen­tial­ly, it’s an argu­ment that reli­gious free­dom is an intru­sion into the law and that reli­gious peo­ple are engaged in a form of spe­cial plead­ing — seek­ing rights and exemp­tions unavail­able to oth­er Amer­i­cans. In real­i­ty, the First Amend­ment is supreme, and when states seek to intrude on reli­gious lib­er­ty, they’re try­ing to get out of some­thing they’re required by law to do. Respect­ing the First Amend­ment is the default oblig­a­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and every state and local gov­ern­ment in the Unit­ed States.”
    • Relat­ed but on a dif­fer­ent top­ic: Health and Human Ser­vices and the Reli­gious-Lib­er­ty War (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The con­flict between reli­gious lib­er­ty, LGBTQ rights, and abor­tion access is about to inten­si­fy. In the com­ing weeks or months, HHS is expect­ed to issue a revised ver­sion of Rule 1557 of the Afford­able Care Act, which extend­ed nondis­crim­i­na­tion pro­tec­tions to trans­gen­der peo­ple and women who have ter­mi­nat­ed preg­nan­cies. The Supreme Court is also slat­ed to con­sid­er civ­il-rights pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ indi­vid­u­als in sev­er­al high-pro­file upcom­ing cas­es; while those cas­es most­ly involve pro­tec­tions pro­vid­ed under employ­ment law, they sim­i­lar­ly pit reli­gious lib­er­ty against LGBTQ rights.”
  3. Agapáo and Philéo by the Sea of Tiberias (Ron Bel­gau, Spir­i­tu­al Friend­ship): “After break­fast, Peter and Jesus had a con­ver­sa­tion which rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion about how to under­stand the verbs for love—agapáo and philéo—used in the orig­i­nal Greek…. The pas­sage is dif­fi­cult to trans­late because although Eng­lish has always had sep­a­rate nouns for ‘love’ and ‘friend­ship,’ no Eng­lish speak­er pri­or to Mark Zucker­berg used ‘friend’ as a verb. Trans­la­tors, there­fore, must either trans­late both words as ‘love,’ which los­es a poten­tial nuance in the orig­i­nal, or else must try to some­how make the dif­fer­ence appar­ent in Eng­lish.” This is the most sat­is­fy­ing expla­na­tion of this pas­sage I have heard.
  4. Amer­i­can church­es must reject lit­er­al­ism and admit we got it wrong on gay peo­ple (Oliv­er Thomas, USA Today): “Church­es will con­tin­ue hem­or­rhag­ing mem­bers and mon­ey at an alarm­ing rate until we muster the courage to face the truth: We got it wrong on gays and les­bians. This shouldn’t alarm or sur­prise us. We have learned some things that the ancients — includ­ing Moses and Paul — sim­ply did not know. Not even Jesus…”
    • The author is a retired Amer­i­can Bap­tist min­is­ter.
    • In response: Oliv­er Thomas @USATODAY Says the Amer­i­can Church Got it Wrong on Gay People—And He’s Right (Michael Kruger, per­son­al blog): “In this way, Thomas is right. The church is killing itself, if by the ‘church’ one means the main­line denom­i­na­tions who have aban­doned bib­li­cal author­i­ty. Indeed, sta­tis­tics have shown, plain­ly and incon­tro­vert­ibly, that the main­line denom­i­na­tions are dying and the bible-believ­ing ones are grow­ing.”
    • In response: No, Chris­tian­i­ty Doesn’t Need To Endorse Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty To Grow (Glenn Stan­ton, The Fed­er­al­ist): “When same-sex-attract­ed Chris­tians go to church, they are not choos­ing the pews of church­es Thomas is call­ing us to become. Again, it’s just the oppo­site. Research con­duct­ed joint­ly at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Los Ange­les by schol­ars who are not shy about sup­port­ing gay pol­i­tics found that gay- and les­bian-iden­ti­fied peo­ple are 2.5 times more like­ly to attend church­es that took a more con­ser­v­a­tive view on Chris­tian­i­ty (includ­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty) than the so-called ‘wel­com­ing and affirm­ing’ con­gre­ga­tions that cel­e­brate it.”
  5. What’s wrong with Amer­i­ca? I debate Ben Shapiro.(Sean Illing, Vox): “There are basi­cal­ly two visions of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. One is that Amer­i­ca was found­ed on great moral prin­ci­ples that we failed to live up to his­tor­i­cal­ly and we’ve been striv­ing to ful­fill. The oth­er is that Amer­i­ca is root­ed in racism, big­otry, sex­ism, and homo­pho­bia, and that these great moral prin­ci­ples were the founders mere­ly flat­ter­ing them­selves.”
    • This is a very good exchange. Whichev­er side you’re sym­pa­thet­ic to, you’ll enjoy read­ing this inter­view.
  6. Why God Is a He (Den­nis Prager, YouTube): five min­utes. It’s an inter­est­ing way to approach the issue. As a Chris­t­ian I would make a dif­fer­ent argu­ment con­nect­ed to the incar­na­tion and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus as a male, but Prager is an obser­vant Jew and so that line of think­ing is unavail­able to him.
  7. Are All Repub­li­cans Bib­li­cal Lit­er­al­ists? Are All Democ­rats Heretics?(Ryan Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “With the release of the 2018 wave of the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey data, I think that it’s time to take stock of how a person’s view of the Bible is relat­ed to their polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. Are there bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists who are Democ­rats? How many Repub­li­cans don’t put much stock in the Bible? And, how has the view of the Bible changed over time?”
    • tl;dr — Rough­ly ¼ of Democ­rats and â…“ of Repub­li­cans believe the Bible is the lit­er­al word of God. Rough­ly half of each par­ty think the Bible is inspired but not always to be tak­en lit­er­al­ly. The remain­der in each par­ty believe that the Bible is just ancient fables.

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 200

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 big news this week is the hor­rif­ic attacks in Sri Lan­ka on East­er Sun­day. Here are some of the respons­es that caught my inter­est:
    • Sri Lankan Sun­day School Was ‘Will­ing to Die for Christ’ on East­er. Half Did. (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dur­ing Sun­day School, [Prab­ha] had talked to the chil­dren about the impor­tance of repen­tance and receiv­ing Jesus as Lord. Because a recent vehi­cle acci­dent had claimed the lives of six Zion Church mem­bers, he had referred to that event and chal­lenged the chil­dren, ask­ing them if they would be will­ing to even die for Jesus. All the chil­dren had respond­ed by putting their hands up and sig­nalled their fresh ded­i­ca­tion to Jesus by light­ing a sym­bol­ic can­dle. For so many of those chil­dren it would be their final act of wor­ship (2 Tim­o­thy 6:6–8).” WOW
    • Are Chris­tians Priv­i­leged or Per­se­cut­ed? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But if the equa­tion of tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty with priv­i­lege has some rel­e­vance to the actu­al Euro-Amer­i­can sit­u­a­tion, when applied glob­al­ly it’s a gross cat­e­go­ry error…. One of the basic facts of con­tem­po­rary reli­gious his­to­ry is that Chris­tians around the world are per­se­cut­ed on an extra­or­di­nary scale — by mobs and pogroms in India, jihadists and Unit­ed States-allied gov­ern­ments in the Mus­lim world, sec­u­lar total­i­tar­i­ans in Chi­na and North Korea. Yet as an era-defin­ing real­i­ty rather than an episod­ic phe­nom­e­non this real­i­ty is bare­ly vis­i­ble in the West­ern media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by West­ern gov­ern­ments and human­i­tar­i­an insti­tu­tions. (‘Islam­o­pho­bia’ looms large; talk of ‘Christo­pho­bia’ is almost nonex­is­tent.)”
    • When Chris­tians Are Under Attack, Mus­lims and the Left Need to Defend Them (Meh­di Hasan): “I am a Mus­lim, and I con­sid­er myself to be on the left, but I’m embar­rassed to admit that in both Mus­lim and left cir­cles, the issue of Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion has been down­played and even ignored for far too long.”
    • Why Con­ser­v­a­tives Are So Angry About Obama’s Ref­er­ence to “East­er Wor­ship­pers” (Ruth Gra­ham, Slate): “I would argue that it takes a true savant of exquis­ite­ly attuned griev­ance col­lec­tion to read an indi­vid­ual ref­er­ence to ‘East­er wor­ship­pers’ as an attempt to avoid acknowl­edg­ing Chris­tian­i­ty. East­er is the most impor­tant hol­i­day in the Chris­t­ian cal­en­dar. ‘East­er’ has no oth­er mean­ing.”
    • Sri Lan­ka attacks: St Antho­ny’s ‘church of mir­a­cles’ a sym­bol of hope (Ayeshea Per­ara, BBC): “Among those gath­ered out­side the church is Pra­bath Bud­dhi­ka. Although Mr Bud­dhi­ka is Bud­dhist by reli­gion, like many oth­ers, he is a strong believ­er in the pow­er of St Antho­ny. ‘My house is right here,’ he said, adding that he’d been attend­ing the church since he was a child and gone along with his fam­i­ly many times.”
    • Why Sri Lan­ka Was Prob­a­bly Not Retal­i­a­tion for Christchurch (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic): “The bomb­ings in Sri Lan­ka were among the more spec­tac­u­lar in the his­to­ry of ter­ror­ism, and they almost cer­tain­ly took more plan­ning than would have been pos­si­ble in the past five weeks. (It may seem easy to get sev­er­al guys to push det­o­na­tor but­tons all at once, in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent loca­tions. But ter­ror­ists are often bum­blers, and the more com­pli­cat­ed the plan, the greater the chance of dis­rup­tion.)”
  2. What About Cap­i­tal­iz­ing Pro­nouns Refer­ring to God? (Randy Alcorn, Eter­nal Per­spec­tives Min­istries): “I have had to fight to get Heav­en cap­i­tal­ized in my books, argu­ing that it is a prop­er noun, and just as real a place as Sat­urn or France. I argue the same for cap­i­tal­iz­ing the New Earth—if we cap­i­tal­ize New Eng­land, why not the redeemed cre­ation that Scrip­ture calls the ‘New Earth’?”
    • This is a very thought­ful per­spec­tive on hon­or­ing God with your writ­ten words.
  3. Is Prison Nec­es­sary? Ruth Wil­son Gilmore Might Change Your Mind (Rachel Kush­n­er, New York Times): “If prison, in its philo­soph­i­cal ori­gin, was meant as a humane alter­na­tive to beat­ings or tor­ture or death, it has trans­formed into a fixed fea­ture of mod­ern life, one that is not known, even by its sup­port­ers and admin­is­tra­tors, for its human­i­ty.”
  4. On East­er Sun­day, Louisiana church looks to rebuild from fires (Ash­ley Cusick, Wash­ing­ton Post via SF Gate): “We got $1,000 from an athe­ist,” Tou­s­saint said with a laugh. ‘He said he did­n’t believe in God, but he don’t believe in burn­ing build­ings down, either.’”
  5. How angry pilots got the Navy to stop dis­miss­ing UFO sight­ings (Dean­na Paul, Wash­ing­ton Post via SF Gate): “A recent uptick in sight­ings of uniden­ti­fied fly­ing objects — or as the mil­i­tary calls them, ‘unex­plained aer­i­al phe­nom­e­na’ — prompt­ed the Navy to draft for­mal pro­ce­dures for pilots to doc­u­ment encoun­ters, a cor­rec­tive mea­sure that for­mer offi­cials say is long over­due.”
    • This being 2019, this is some­how not the most inter­est­ing sto­ry in the news.
  6. And now for some stuff about the major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal par­ties, with par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to reli­gious dynam­ics:
    • Franklin Gra­ham and the High Cost of the Lost Evan­gel­i­cal Wit­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “The prop­er Evan­gel­i­cal posi­tion toward any pres­i­dent is not hard to artic­u­late, though it is exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to hold to, espe­cial­ly in polar­ized times when one par­ty seems set on lim­it­ing reli­gious lib­er­ty and zeal­ous­ly defend­ing abor­tion: We should pray for pres­i­dents, cri­tique them when they’re wrong, praise them when they’re right, and nev­er, ever impose par­ti­san dou­ble stan­dards.”
    • The Reli­gious Com­po­si­tion of the Two Major Par­ties (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “…nei­ther of the two major par­ties in the Unit­ed States are dom­i­nat­ed by one spe­cif­ic reli­gious group. I know that tons of arti­cles are writ­ten the link between evan­gel­i­cals and Repub­li­cans, but the data indi­cates that over two thirds of Repub­li­cans today are not evan­gel­i­cals. The same is essen­tial­ly true for Democ­rats as well. The largest group for them (the nones) make up just three in ten Democ­rats today.”
    • Relat­ed: The Devout And The Nones (Mark Movs­esian, First Things): “Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans who report that their reli­gious affil­i­a­tion is ‘Strong.’ This per­cent­age has fluc­tu­at­ed a bit over the decades, but the most recent sur­vey puts it at 34 per­cent, a num­ber that has remained basi­cal­ly unchanged since 1975, when 35 per­cent of Amer­i­cans report­ed a strong reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. Appar­ent­ly, the rise of the Nones is not attrib­ut­able to a decline in reli­gious enthu­si­asm among the most strong­ly com­mit­ted.”
    • Meet Stanford’s Con­gres­sion­al Fresh­men (Jean Yung, Dave Sloane, & Tim­o­thy Weath­er­head, Stan­ford Mag­a­zine): inter­est­ing brief pro­files of the five Stan­ford alum­ni who were recent­ly elect­ed to the nation­al leg­is­la­ture. Two Demo­c­ra­t­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tives, two Repub­li­can rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and one Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor.
    • Why Won’t Twit­ter Treat White Suprema­cy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Ban­ning Some Repub­li­can Politi­cians Too. (Joseph Cox and Jason Koe­bler, Moth­er­board): “When a plat­form aggres­sive­ly enforces against ISIS con­tent, for instance, it can also flag inno­cent accounts as well, such as Ara­bic lan­guage broad­cast­ers. Soci­ety, in gen­er­al, accepts the ben­e­fit of ban­ning ISIS for incon­ve­nienc­ing some oth­ers, he said.”
      • I get the impres­sion the authors think this is evi­dence that Repub­li­cans real­ly are white suprema­cists and that the algo­rithms see clear­ly with­out the social pres­sure that holds back truth-tellers. I sus­pect they have the exact oppo­site approach to machine learn­ing when it deliv­ers racist results. I’m spit­balling here, but maybe the bet­ter response is dis­trust algo­rithms a lit­tle more when­ev­er they con­firm your bias­es. Just a thought.
  7. Half of Amer­i­cans Say Evan­gel­i­cals Are Dis­crim­i­nat­ed Against (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Amer­i­cans’ per­cep­tions of dis­crim­i­na­tion tend to be par­ti­san. For instance, 7 in 10 Amer­i­cans on the polit­i­cal right say evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are sub­ject to dis­crim­i­na­tion, while less than half as many (32%) left-lean­ing Amer­i­cans agree.”

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 haveLet­ter To My Younger Self (Ryan Leaf, The Player’s Tri­bune): “Con­grat­u­la­tions. You offi­cial­ly have it all — mon­ey, pow­er and pres­tige. All the things that are impor­tant, right?… That’s you, young Ryan Leaf, at his absolute finest: arro­gant, boor­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic. You think you’re on top of the world and that you’ve got all the answers. Well I’m sor­ry to have to tell you this, but the truth is….” Such a grip­ping let­ter. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. (first shared in vol­ume 99)

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 198

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. Chi­nese city offers US$1,500 reward to help snare for­eign reli­gious lead­ers (Mimi Lau, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “Under the new reward scheme in Guangzhou, the cap­i­tal of Guang­dong province, infor­mants can earn between 5,000 and 10,000 yuan for tips lead­ing to the arrest of a non-Chi­nese reli­gious leader, accord­ing to a state­ment on the department’s web­site. Oth­er pay­ments include 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for infor­ma­tion lead­ing to the clo­sure of a for­eign reli­gious group, and between 100 and 3,000 yuan for tips about local­ly organ­ised gath­er­ings and their lead­ers.”
    • Relat­ed: Hong Kong Pas­tor Fac­ing Prison Preach­es the Ser­mon of His Life (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For decades, I have preached numer­ous ser­mons. Lit­tle could I antic­i­pate that the one mes­sage which prepa­ra­tion took me the longest time and the most heart­felt prayer, and which prob­a­bly would reach the largest audi­ence, is pre­cise­ly this one deliv­ered from the defendant’s dock.”
  2. Pas­tor­ing A Pur­ple Church: ‘I Absolute­ly Bite My Tongue Some­times’ (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “The pro­mo­tion of dis­course over dis­cord may strength­en civic cul­ture in an era of polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion, but for Edmon­ston, the mis­sion is more a reflec­tion of Pres­by­ter­ian the­ol­o­gy than it is a com­mit­ment to demo­c­ra­t­ic process.”
    • There is a lot to like in this arti­cle, but I feel com­pelled to add that what binds a church togeth­er is a com­mit­ment to Christ. It is okay to be divid­ed over polit­i­cal issues. It is much less okay to be divid­ed over sub­stan­tive Scrip­tur­al issues. This sto­ry con­fus­es the two.
  3. The Brand Is Belief (Kier­an Dahl, Top­ic Mag­a­zine): “C3’s the­ol­o­gy would appear to be at odds with how the church presents and mar­kets itself. Isn’t humil­i­ty one of Jesus’s biggest lessons for human­i­ty? Isn’t social media inher­ent­ly nar­cis­sis­tic?.… C3 feels like an algo­rith­mi­cal­ly curat­ed brand that hap­pens to love Jesus—the Airbnb of reli­gion.”
    • I love arti­cles show­ing how out­siders view church­es. Some of what the author stum­bles over I find puz­zling — like think­ing that the name of the church’s dis­ci­ple­ship class ‘Growth Track’ is a capit­u­la­tion to cul­ture. Inter­est­ing through­out.
  4. The Hap­pi­ness Reces­sion (Brad Wilcox & Lyman Stone, The Atlantic): “In 2018, hap­pi­ness among young adults in Amer­i­ca fell to a record low. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 report­ing that they were ‘very hap­py’ in life fell to 25 percent—the low­est lev­el that the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey, a key barom­e­ter of Amer­i­can social life, has ever record­ed for that pop­u­la­tion. Hap­pi­ness fell most among young men—with only 22 per­cent of young men (and 28 per­cent of young women) report­ing that they were ‘very hap­py’ in 2018.”
    • React­ing to this arti­cle, David French offers this obser­va­tion, “For gen­er­a­tions, key ele­ments of our cul­tur­al and aca­d­e­m­ic elite have been argu­ing essen­tial­ly the oppo­site — that lib­er­a­tion from reli­gion and lib­er­a­tion from mar­riage were pre­req­ui­sites to true human flour­ish­ing. If you asked an ear­ly era sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion­ary for his pre­dic­tion for a cul­ture with pro­found­ly less reli­gious prac­tice, less mar­riage, and many few­er moral restraints on sex­u­al prac­tice, I sin­cere­ly doubt that he’d respond that he believed that cul­ture would be less hap­py, with peo­ple hav­ing less sex.” It Turns Out That Sex­u­al Lib­er­a­tion Isn’t All That Lib­er­at­ing (David French, Nation­al Review).
  5. Case Report of gas­tro­pare­sis heal­ing: 16 years of a chron­ic syn­drome resolved after prox­i­mal inter­ces­so­ry prayer (Romez, Zaritzky & Brown, Com­ple­men­tary Ther­a­pies In Med­i­cine): a mirac­u­lous heal­ing account as report­ed in a jour­nal. I found this bit amus­ing: “A note­wor­thy obser­va­tion is that stud­ies show­ing pos­i­tive effects of prayer have typ­i­cal­ly involved inter­ces­sors who either pro­fessed either 1) being ‘born again’ Chris­tians (with a com­mit­ment to dai­ly devo­tion­al prayer and active fel­low­ship with their local church) or 2) faith in heal­ing.”
  6. Democ­rats Have to Decide Whether Faith Is an Asset for 2020 (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The real evi­dence of Democ­rats’ approach to faith will come in cam­paign dol­lars and infra­struc­ture, which will like­ly be devel­oped slight­ly lat­er in the elec­tion cycle; on their han­dling of con­test­ed issues like abor­tion, which is cru­cial­ly impor­tant to many reli­gious vot­ers; and their abil­i­ty to tap reli­gious net­works for vol­un­teers.”
  7. Don­ald Trump Changed The New York Times. Is It For­ev­er? (Peter Boy­er, Esquire): “A Mon­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty poll tak­en last year found that 77 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe that tra­di­tion­al news out­lets report ‘fake news’—a sig­nif­i­cant leap from the year before.” This is an inter­est­ing and dis­heart­en­ing arti­cle.

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 Every­thing That’s Wrong Of Rac­coons (Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg, The Toast): “Once when my dog died a pas­sel of rac­coons showed up in the back­yard as if to say ‘Now that he’s gone, we own the night,’ and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it dis­re­spect­ful to 1) me per­son­al­ly and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t dis­re­spect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.” (first shared in vol­ume 97)

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 193

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 Gen­e­sis of the Tech Indus­try, and Vice Ver­sa (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “In the Book of Gen­e­sis, the under­ly­ing mod­el of eco­nom­ics is a pret­ty opti­mistic one, and that is anoth­er way in which West­ern his­to­ry draws upon its Judeo-Chris­t­ian roots.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  2. Marc Edwards Is a Sad Vic­tim of Our Mod­ern Polit­i­cal Era (Kevin Drum, Moth­er Jones): “…just as he had hon­est­ly exposed Flint’s prob­lems in the first place, he also con­tin­ued to hon­est­ly report the results of the inter­ven­tion. When the water was once again safe, he said so—and that turned him from a hero into a pari­ah.” How have I not heard this? I was talk­ing with a friend last week about how shock­ing it is that the water in Flint is still unsafe.
  3. Why Did Evan­gel­i­cals Flock to Trump? Exis­ten­tial Fear. (AJ Nolte, The Bul­wark): “Don­ald Trump appeared at a time dur­ing which many evan­gel­i­cals’ ris­ing expec­ta­tions had turned, rather rapid­ly, into exis­ten­tial fear. Trump was unique­ly posi­tioned to exploit that moment and win over evan­gel­i­cals. Yet while that sup­port is very real, I also think it is shal­low­er and more con­di­tion­al than it appears.” Dr. Nolte is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Regent Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Very much relat­ed: The Inde­cent-Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Remind me again why Chris­tians vote for Trump, despite his per­son­al cor­rup­tion? You think it might have some­thing to do with the fact that we know what the Democ­rats have planned for us?”
    • Relat­ed to the above, but not so much to the ini­tial link: When being a Chris­t­ian isn’t “decent” any­more (Den­ny Burk, per­son­al blog): “…it appears as a mat­ter of course that it is open sea­son on Chris­tians who dare to affirm what the Bible teach­es about sex­u­al ethics. This is the new real­i­ty for Chris­tians who hold the line on bib­li­cal sex­u­al ethics, and I don’t see any signs of things let­ting up. On the con­trary, this kind of open ani­mus only seems to be spread­ing.”
  4. “Gay” vs “Same-Sex Attrac­tion”: A Dia­logue (Greg Coles & Rachel Gilson, The Cen­ter For Faith, Sex­u­al­i­ty, and Gen­der): “Both Greg and Rachel believe in a his­tor­i­cal­ly Chris­t­ian view of mar­riage and sex­u­al rela­tion­ships. Rachel does not iden­ti­fy as gay or les­bian, even though she expe­ri­ences same-sex attrac­tion. Greg does iden­ti­fy as gay, pre­fer­ring the term over ‘same-sex attract­ed.’” This is an intro­duc­to­ry arti­cle that links to a sev­en-part series. It is short­er than it sounds (the sec­ond-to-last arti­cle is fair­ly long, how­ev­er). Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Relat­ed: The Chris­t­ian Debate Over Sex­u­al Iden­ti­ty (Sam All­ber­ry, Desir­ing God): “As a Chris­t­ian, one of the key things for me is real­iz­ing that iden­ti­ty as Chris­tians is not some­thing that we dis­cov­er in our­selves, nor is it some­thing we cre­ate. It’s some­thing we receive and are giv­en by the only per­son who can know our actu­al iden­ti­ty, which is the God who made us. So my iden­ti­ty as a Chris­t­ian comes from the fact that I’ve been cre­at­ed by God and redeemed by him through the sav­ing work of Jesus.” This is a bit old­er.
  5. I’m a Jour­nal­ist. Appar­ent­ly, I’m Also One of America’s “Top Doc­tors.” (Mar­shall Allen, ProP­ub­li­ca): “I don’t have a med­ical degree, and I’m not a physi­cian. But I am an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist who spe­cial­izes in health care. So I leaned for­ward in my seat with some antic­i­pa­tion when I returned the call last year. I spoke to a cheer­ful sales­woman named Anne at a com­pa­ny on New York’s Long Island that hands out the Top Doc­tor Awards. For some rea­son, she believed I was a physi­cian and, even bet­ter, wor­thy of one of their awards. Puz­zled and amused, I took notes.”
  6. Trans Men Erase Women (Char­lotte Allen, First Things): “Male-to-female trans­gen­der ath­letes are van­ish­ing­ly few in num­ber (like male-to-female trans peo­ple in gen­er­al), but as the above exam­ples indi­cate, when they com­pete, they pose a crush­ing exis­ten­tial threat to women’s sports. That is because the very exis­tence of women’s sports is pred­i­cat­ed, as Mar­ti­na Navratilo­va rec­og­nized, on the now-high­ly polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect obser­va­tion that the two sex­es are rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal­ly.”
  7. The Pell Affair: Aus­tralia Is Now On Tri­al (George Weigel, First Things): “If it is not reversed on appeal, that false ver­dict will con­sti­tute a new indict­ment: the indict­ment of a legal sys­tem that could not bring itself to ren­der jus­tice in the face of pub­lic hys­te­ria, polit­i­cal vendet­ta, and media aggres­sion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not 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 192

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 Bible Says Jesus Was Real. What Oth­er Proof Exists? (Christo­pher Klein, History.com): “With­in a few decades of his life­time, Jesus was men­tioned by Jew­ish and Roman his­to­ri­ans in pas­sages that cor­rob­o­rate por­tions of the New Tes­ta­ment that describe the life and death of Jesus.”
  2. Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ram­age, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fash­ioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Sto­ries like this are cat­nip for me. The author is gay, a fact which weighs heav­i­ly in his report­ing. A friend passed this my way, and I remind you that I always wel­come such sug­ges­tions.
  3. Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians Just Retook the Unit­ed Methodist Church (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “In the final hours of the con­fer­ence on Tues­day, the debate turned acri­mo­nious: One del­e­gate alleged, with­out clear evi­dence, that peo­ple at the con­fer­ence were brib­ing oth­ers for votes. Anoth­er speaker’s mic was silenced when he threat­ened to fil­i­buster any vote before the end of the day. And the debate came to an abrupt halt: Del­e­gates had to clear out of the con­fer­ence hall so that it could be turned over for a mon­ster-truck ral­ly.”
    • That final sen­tence, while fac­tu­al, feels like a metaphor for some­thing.
    • I pre­dict the vic­to­ri­ous tra­di­tion­al­ists in the UMC will be far more mag­nan­i­mous toward church­es that wish to leave than the revi­sion­ists in oth­er denom­i­na­tions have been to their van­quished (I’m look­ing at you, Epis­co­pal Church).
  4. The Trau­ma Floor (Casey New­ton, The Verge): “One [Face­book con­tent mod­er­a­tor] walks the floor pro­mot­ing the idea that the Earth is flat. A for­mer employ­ee told me he has begun to ques­tion cer­tain aspects of the Holo­caust. Anoth­er for­mer employ­ee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: ‘I no longer believe 9/11 was a ter­ror­ist attack.’”
  5. Black men are less reli­gious than black women, but more reli­gious than white women and men (Kiana Cox and Jeff Dia­mant, Pew Research Cen­ter): “About sev­en-in-ten (69%) black men say reli­gion is very impor­tant to them, com­pared with 80% of black women. But black men place more impor­tance on reli­gion than white women (55%) and His­pan­ic women (65%), accord­ing to the 2014 Reli­gious Land­scape Study.”
    • I doubt many antire­li­gious peo­ple think of them­selves as racist, so they should real­ize that their attempts to erase reli­gion from the pub­lic square dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly harm black peo­ple.
  6. ‘Every day was about sur­vival’ : Inside the grad­u­ate stu­dent afford­abil­i­ty cri­sis (Char­lie Curnin, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “…when Shalev Marom wakes up with only $18 in her bank account, she finds it hard to be excit­ed about her finan­cial sit­u­a­tion. Shalev Marom, who relies on pick­ing pro­duce from cam­pus trees to sus­tain her­self, eats just one full meal a day…. At Stan­ford, Shalev Marom lives in the cheap­est hous­ing option open to her — and as an inter­na­tion­al stu­dent on a J‑1 visa, she is sub­ject to strict fed­er­al laws that reg­u­late any addi­tion­al income she could receive from fur­ther employ­ment. In each pay peri­od — rough­ly two-weeks long — she says she cur­rent­ly receives around $200 to $300 from her research assist­ant­ship, after the deduc­tion of hous­ing costs and Uni­ver­si­ty fees.”
    • This is heart­break­ing. If you know a Stan­ford stu­dent who can’t afford to eat, let me know. We can help.
  7. Main­stream Media Blacks Out The Democ­rats’ Infan­ti­cide Vote (David Harsyani, The Fed­er­al­ist): “So I was going to have a lit­tle fun at the expense of CNN this morn­ing, con­trast­ing the news site’s head­line for the Democ­rats’ gun restric­tion bill—’House to vote on guns back­ground check bill with bipar­ti­san support’—which has gar­nered exact­ly four Repub­li­can co-spon­sors, with its head­line for the Sen. Ben Sasse’s anti-infan­ti­cide bill, which I was cer­tain would be sole­ly about the “GOP” despite hav­ing four Demo­c­rat sen­a­tors vot­ing to move the bill for­ward. Turns out, it was even bet­ter. There was noth­ing to con­trast because, as far as I can tell, CNN doesn’t fea­ture a sin­gle sto­ry on their web­site regard­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty block­ing of Sasse’s Born-Alive Abor­tion Sur­vivors Pro­tec­tion Act, which would have saved new­born babies who sur­vive abor­tion attempts from neg­li­gent homi­cide.”
    • A sur­vey of the results of a Google News search con­firms that this bill received almost no report­ing cov­er­age — almost all of the hits are opin­ion pieces.
    • Relat­ed: Ben Sasse Height­ens the Con­tra­dic­tions (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The days in which “safe, legal, and rare,” could appeal to a wide swathe of Amer­i­cans are over. For pro-lif­ers, abor­tion is the tak­ing of inno­cent life, a thing which sim­ply should not be legal or should only be legal in the most extreme cas­es. For ‘repro­duc­tive jus­tice’ advo­cates, the right to legal abor­tion is about pro­tect­ing the auton­o­my of human per­sons, of pre­serv­ing the unen­cum­bered choice of women whose choice would oth­er­wise be nat­u­ral­ly encum­bered in ways that a man’s is not sim­ply because of their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren.”
    • Relat­ed: The Abor­tion Debate Needs Moral Lament (Michael Wear, The Atlantic): “After decades of earnest attempts to find some com­mon ground on this most ten­der and per­son­al issue—think of Sen­a­tors Ted Kennedy and Sam Brownback’s work on a Down Syn­drome reg­istry, bipar­ti­san sup­port for the Hyde Amend­ment, and Pres­i­dent Obama’s first-term appeal for efforts to reduce the num­ber of women seek­ing abortions—that impulse has been vir­tu­al­ly erad­i­cat­ed among elect­ed offi­cials.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How Can I Learn To Receive – And Give – Crit­i­cism In Light Of The Cross? (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “A believ­er is one who iden­ti­fies with all that God affirms and con­demns in Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion. In oth­er words, in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s judg­ment of me; and in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of me. Both have a rad­i­cal impact on how we take and give crit­i­cism.” This is based on a longer arti­cle (4 page PDF). (first shared in vol­ume 63)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 187

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. Emo­tions Make Ter­ri­ble Gods (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “We live in an emo­ji world where self-expres­sion and ‘being the true you’ hold high­est pri­or­i­ty — no one can tell us how to feel…. In all, the assump­tion stands: you are your emo­tions — for bet­ter or worse. To repress them is to repress your­self.”
  2. ‘I Was a TSA Agent, and You Fed Me’ (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But church­es, as they join in prayer for a leg­isla­tive solu­tion, have also stepped up to sup­port com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers affect­ed by the bud­get­ing stale­mate. Here are 10 places where Chris­tians are reach­ing out to love their fur­loughed and unpaid neigh­bors…” This is an inspir­ing list. I am struck by both the geo­graph­ic and the denom­i­na­tion­al diver­si­ty. The extent to which church­es bless their com­mu­ni­ties is dif­fi­cult to over­state.
  3. Is Big Tech Merg­ing With Big Broth­er? Kin­da Looks Like It (David Samuels, Wired): “A nation­al or glob­al sur­veil­lance net­work that uses benef­i­cent algo­rithms to reshape human thoughts and actions in ways that elites believe to be just or ben­e­fi­cial to all mankind is hard­ly the road to a new Eden. It’s the road to a prison camp.”
  4. Death on demand: has euthana­sia gone too far? (Christo­pher de Bel­laigue, Guardian): “Alto­geth­er, well over a quar­ter of all deaths in 2017 in the Nether­lands were induced.… sui­cide leaves scars on friends and fam­i­ly that may nev­er heal. But sui­cide is an indi­vid­ual act, self-moti­vat­ed and self-admin­is­tered, and its force field is con­tained. Euthana­sia, by con­trast, is the prod­uct of soci­ety. When it goes wrong, it goes wrong for every­one.” In case you’re read­ing quick­ly, read that first sen­tence again. Over 25%!
  5. The Gay Church (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “A church that, since 2005, bans priests with ‘deep-seat­ed homo­sex­u­al ten­den­cies’ and offi­cial­ly teach­es that gay men are ‘objec­tive­ly dis­or­dered’ and inher­ent­ly dis­posed toward ‘intrin­sic moral evil’ is actu­al­ly com­posed, in ways very few oth­er insti­tu­tions are, of gay men.” I find his lack of engage­ment with Scrip­ture and focus on church his­to­ry strik­ing and very Catholic.
  6. A lot of arti­cles about the dust­up at the March for Life. I find polar­iz­ing sit­u­a­tions like this fas­ci­nat­ing and fre­quent­ly reveal­ing.
    • The Media Botched the Cov­ing­ton Catholic Sto­ry (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Among oth­er things, jour­nal­is­tic ethics held that if you didn’t have the report­ing to sup­port a sto­ry, and if that sto­ry had the poten­tial to hurt its sub­jects, and if those sub­jects were pri­vate cit­i­zens, and if they were more­over minors, you didn’t run the sto­ry. You kept report­ing it; you let your­self get scooped; and you accept­ed that speed is not the high­est val­ue. Oth­er­wise, you were the trash press.” This piece is bru­tal. If you only read one of the arti­cles in this sec­tion, make it this one.
    • For an exam­ple of a harsh­er per­spec­tive: Why do the Cov­ing­ton Catholic kids get the ben­e­fit of the doubt? (Lau­ra Turn­er, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “There’s no virtue in rush­ing to get in a hot take! But nei­ther is there in ignor­ing clear evi­dence of racism and cru­el­ty. As new accounts and new videos of the inci­dent emerged, more stayed the same than changed: Sandmann’s sim­per­ing expres­sion remained, as did his immov­able oppo­si­tion to Phillips. (In his ‘Today’ show inter­view, Sand­mann says he now wish­es he ‘could’ve walked away and avoid­ed the whole thing.’ The use of ‘could’ve’ is doing a lot of work there — he always could have cho­sen to walk away. He chose not to.)”
    • The Cov­ing­ton Scis­sor (Ross Douthat, NY Times): “To under­stand what makes this inci­dent so bril­liant in its divi­sive­ness, you need to see the tapes­try in full, how each con­stituent ele­ment (abor­tion, race, MAGA, white boys, Catholi­cism, Native Amer­i­can rit­u­al) auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­firms pri­ors on both sides of our divide. And you also need to see how the video itself, far from being a means to achiev­ing con­sen­sus, is an amaz­ing accel­er­ant of con­tro­ver­sy…” Douthat’s op-ed is inspired by the short sto­ry Sort By Con­tro­ver­sial (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex). It’s an easy read and I rec­om­mend it.
    • Anoth­er per­spec­tive less sym­pa­thet­ic to the boys: The real pol­i­tics behind the Cov­ing­ton Catholic con­tro­ver­sy, explained (Zack Beauchamp, Vox): “The argu­ment here is not that it’s wrong to care about the Cov­ing­ton stu­dents per se. Rather, it’s a kind of dis­gust at the hypocrisy on dis­play: Con­ser­v­a­tives and the main­stream media don’t, in the left-lib­er­al view, ever dis­play the same lev­els of con­cern for minor­i­ty kids accused of actu­al crimes. All the sym­pa­thy being extend­ed to these kids, all the ben­e­fit of the doubt, reflects the abil­i­ty of the priv­i­leged to com­mand a lev­el of sym­pa­thy that the less priv­i­leged lack.”
    • Cov­ing­ton isn’t about facts, but about iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics. Nick Sand­mann com­mit­ted ‘face­crime’ (Tuck­er Carl­son, Fox News): “People’s views evolve over time. Polit­i­cal divi­sions can heal and often do. But fights over iden­ti­ty do not; they are dif­fer­ent. Iden­ti­ty does not change. It can’t be mod­er­at­ed or con­trolled. It’s inher­ent. We’re born that way. When we go to war over who we are, it’s a per­ma­nent bat­tle. It is a dis­as­ter that lasts for gen­er­a­tions. Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics will destroy this coun­try faster than a for­eign inva­sion.”
    • The Abyss of Hate Ver­sus Hate (Andrew Sul­li­van, NY Mag­a­zine): “To put it blunt­ly: They were 16-year-olds sub­ject­ed to ver­bal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being big­ots. It just beg­gars belief that the same lib­er­als who fret about ‘micro-aggres­sions’ for 20-some­things were able to see 16-year-olds absorb­ing the worst racist garbage from reli­gious big­ots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face…. this is what will inevitably hap­pen once you’ve rede­fined racism or sex­ism to mean prej­u­dice plus pow­er. ”
  7. US mis­sion­ary who engaged with reclu­sive Brazil­ian tribe could be charged with geno­cide (Phoebe Loomes, NZ Her­ald): “Camp­bell has claimed that he made the expe­di­tion to the remote region at the request of the Jama­ma­di peo­ple, who he is in con­tact with, as they want­ed to learn to use GPS nav­i­ga­tors. Dur­ing this expe­di­tion he encoun­tered the iso­lat­ed Hi-Mer­imã tribe. For this, Brazil­ian offi­cials say Camp­bell could be charged with a slew of offences, includ­ing geno­cide.“
    • Geno­cide seems much too strong a term for a sit­u­a­tion in which no one is known to have died or even so much as sneezed. Maybe the word trans­lat­ed as geno­cide is broad­er in Por­tuguese?
    • Help­ful con­text: Brazil Inves­ti­gates If US Mis­sion­ary Encroached on Iso­lat­ed Ama­zon Tribe (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Ribeiro shared con­cerns about indige­nous peo­ple receiv­ing assis­tance from groups appoint­ed by the gov­ern­ment, since they rarely stay in a com­mu­ni­ty long enough to build rela­tion­ships and learn the lan­guage. Mean­while, she says field mis­sion­ar­ies often bring high lev­els of tech­ni­cal training—from anthro­pol­o­gy to nursing—while com­mit­ting to serve for an extend­ed amount of time.”

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 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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 184

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 Moral Hor­ror of America’s Pris­ons (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “…if you think America’s cur­rent penal sys­tem is the very best we can do, that is about the most pes­simistic ver­dict on this coun­try I have ever heard. Has any­one ever sug­gest­ed that the Amer­i­can prison sys­tem is the world’s best? The can-do atti­tude is one of my favorite fea­tures of Amer­i­can life. We just need to apply it a lit­tle more broad­ly.”
  2. The Num­ber 1 Rea­son For The Decline In Church Atten­dance… (Thom Ranier, Facts & Trends): “Stat­ed sim­ply, the num­ber one rea­son for the decline in church atten­dance is that mem­bers attend with less fre­quen­cy than they did just a few years ago. Allow me to explain. If the fre­quen­cy of atten­dance changes, then atten­dance will respond accord­ing­ly. For exam­ple, if 200 mem­bers attend every week the aver­age atten­dance is, obvi­ous­ly, 200. But if one-half of those mem­bers miss only one out of four weeks, the atten­dance drops to 175. Did you catch that? No mem­bers left the church. Every­one is still rel­a­tive­ly active in the church. But atten­dance declined over 12 per­cent because half the mem­bers changed their atten­dance behav­ior slight­ly.”
  3. Bib­li­cal Archaeology’s Top 10 Dis­cov­er­ies of 2018 (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “These dis­cov­er­ies, rel­a­tive­ly insignif­i­cant indi­vid­u­al­ly, join with many oth­er dis­cov­er­ies over the decades to give us a great deal of con­fi­dence in the his­tor­i­cal details con­tained in the Bible.” Note: these are pre­cise­ly the sort of mun­dane, ongo­ing dis­cov­er­ies we would expect from a book describ­ing real peo­ple doing real things in real places. I encour­age you to con­trast it with the texts of oth­er reli­gions.
  4. Facts Are Not Self-Inter­pret­ing (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. Evan­gel­i­cal Mega-donors Are Rethink­ing Mon­ey in Pol­i­tics (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “‘What Chris­t­ian phil­an­thropists see now, maybe more than in past gen­er­a­tions, is the full land­scape of how they can deploy their [mon­ey] toward the entire­ty of what God cares about,’ said Josh Kwan, who was recent­ly appoint­ed the head of the Gathering—the organization’s first new leader in its three-decade run.”
  6. Two Roads for the New French Right (Mark Lil­la, New York Review of Books): “Con­ti­nen­tal con­ser­vatism going back to the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry has always rest­ed on an organ­ic con­cep­tion of soci­ety. It sees Europe as a sin­gle Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion com­posed of dif­fer­ent nations with dis­tinct lan­guages and cus­toms. These nations are com­posed of fam­i­lies, which are organ­isms, too, with dif­fer­ing but com­ple­men­tary roles and duties for moth­ers, fathers, and chil­dren. On this view, the fun­da­men­tal task of soci­ety is to trans­mit knowl­edge, moral­i­ty, and cul­ture to future gen­er­a­tions, per­pet­u­at­ing the life of the civ­i­liza­tion­al organ­ism. It is not to serve an agglom­er­a­tion of autonomous indi­vid­u­als bear­ing rights.”
    • This arti­cle pro­voked let­ters to the edi­tor to which Lil­la respond­ed: How to Write About the Right: An Exchange. Lil­la ends his rebut­tal with this, “For those con­cerned about the antilib­er­al forces gain­ing strength in world pol­i­tics, the most impor­tant thing is to main­tain one’s sangfroid. Before we judge we must be sure of what exact­ly we are judg­ing. We need to take ideas seri­ous­ly, make dis­tinc­tions, and nev­er pre­sume that the present is just the past in dis­guise. Greil Mar­cus falls into that last trap, I’m afraid, by shift­ing from dis­cussing the affini­ties among coun­tries to imag­in­ing a Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al with poles in the US and Rus­sia. What­ev­er we are fac­ing, it is not twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry fas­cism. Hell keeps on dis­gorg­ing new demons to beset us. And as sea­soned exor­cists know, each must be called by its prop­er name before it can be cast out.”
    • There is some­thing help­ful about read­ing about pol­i­tics in anoth­er cul­ture. If you are inclined to skip this because you’re not French, I encour­age you to at least skim 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  Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

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.