Tag: how the church is perceived

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 182

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. If They Weren’t Tak­ing Notes, How Did the Dis­ci­ples Remem­ber Jesus’s Exact Teach­ing? The 3‑Step Process for For­mu­lat­ing the 4 Gospels (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “I might not be able to tell you what I did last week, but I could give you a three-hour lec­ture about Jesus and the Jew­ish roots of the Last Sup­per with zero prepa­ra­tion because I have been talk­ing about it all the time for the last ten years. That’s one key dif­fer­ence between rehearsed mem­o­ries and inci­den­tal mem­o­ries.”
  2. What Straight‑A Stu­dents Get Wrong (Adam Grant, New York Times): “The evi­dence is clear: Aca­d­e­m­ic excel­lence is not a strong pre­dic­tor of career excel­lence. Across indus­tries, research shows that the cor­re­la­tion between grades and job per­for­mance is mod­est in the first year after col­lege and triv­ial with­in a hand­ful of years. For exam­ple, at Google, once employ­ees are two or three years out of col­lege, their grades have no bear­ing on their per­for­mance.” The author is an orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist at Penn’s Whar­ton School.
    • This arti­cle was sent to me by an alum­na who said, “I some­times skipped Chi Alpha or oth­er mean­ing­ful activ­i­ties with friends for that one extra hour of study­ing, which I now regret.”
  3. Hun­dreds of sex abuse alle­ga­tions found in fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es across U.S. (Sarah Smith, Star-Telegram): “One hun­dred and six­ty-eight church lead­ers were accused or con­vict­ed of com­mit­ting sex­u­al crimes against chil­dren, the inves­ti­ga­tion found. At least 45 of the alleged abusers con­tin­ued in min­istry after accu­sa­tions came to the atten­tion of church author­i­ties or law enforce­ment.… Inde­pen­dent fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es preach sep­a­ra­tion: Stay sep­a­rate from the world, sep­a­rate from non-believ­ers and sep­a­rate from Chris­tians who do not believe as they do. That includes South­ern Bap­tists, who are deemed by the strict sect as too lib­er­al.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing stuff.
  4. Chi­na cracks down on Chris­tians — a new era of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion has arrived (Nina Shea and Bob Fu, Fox News): “The government’s repres­sion against the church­es is being done in the name of Pres­i­dent Xi Jinping’s ‘sini­ciza­tion’ cam­paign, osten­si­bly to strength­en Chi­nese cul­ture. How­ev­er, it increas­ing­ly appears aimed at remov­ing the Bible and its teach­ings from Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty.” (relat­ed cov­er­age at the New York Times)
    • My Dec­la­ra­tion of Faith­ful Dis­obe­di­ence (Wang Yi, Chris­t­ian Dai­ly Reporter): “As a pas­tor, my dis­obe­di­ence is one part of the gospel com­mis­sion. Christ’s great com­mis­sion requires of us great dis­obe­di­ence. The goal of dis­obe­di­ence is not to change the world but to tes­ti­fy about anoth­er world.” A now-impris­oned pas­tor wrote this let­ter with instruc­tions that it be pub­lished if he was detained for more than 48 hours. STRAIGHT FIRE.
  5. Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop and how “reli­gious lib­er­ty” became so tox­ic (Andrew Kop­pel­man, Vox): “Deep dis­agree­ment about moral fun­da­men­tals is noth­ing new; it is what reli­gious diver­si­ty con­sists of. That ought to include dis­agree­ment about such fraught mat­ters as sex­u­al­i­ty. Moral dis­agree­ment about things that mat­ter a lot is an inevitable con­se­quence of a free soci­ety. The best we can hope for is to live peace­ful­ly togeth­er in mutu­al con­tempt.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Fair­ness For All’: Smart Pol­i­tics, Or A Sell­out? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…there real­ly is a ques­tion of jus­tice with­in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have to face. We may sin­cere­ly believe that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is moral­ly wrong, but at what point does the com­mon good require that we agree that gay peo­ple have a right to be wrong? Espe­cial­ly because we are ask­ing them to agree that we have a right to be wrong (in their eyes) too.”
    • Response to the above: Mis­guid­ed Pro­pos­al From Chris­t­ian Lead­ers and LGBT Activists Is Any­thing but ‘Fair­ness for All’ (Ryan T. Ander­son, The Dai­ly Sig­nal): “Estab­lish­ing bad pub­lic pol­i­cy for every­one and then exempt­ing select reli­gious insti­tu­tions is not act­ing for the com­mon good—and is cer­tain­ly not fair for all. And there are bet­ter ways for­ward for those who seek com­pro­mise.”
    • Kin­da dif­fer­ent, but kin­da relat­ed: The Cul­ture Wars Are Ancient His­to­ry (Peter Lei­thart, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The real fight isn’t between reli­gion and sec­u­lar­ism, but between two kinds of reli­gion. His book makes the case that today’s cul­ture war shares much in com­mon with the cul­ture war that rocked ancient Rome.” Insight­ful.
  6. The Case Against Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…mer­i­to­crats are often edu­cat­ed to be bad lead­ers, and bad peo­ple, in a very spe­cif­ic way — a way of arro­gant intel­li­gence unmoored from his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence, ambi­tion untem­pered by self-sac­ri­fice. The way of the ‘best and the bright­est’ at the dawn of the tech­no­crat­ic era and the ‘smartest guys in the room’ decades lat­er, the way of the arson­ists of late-2000s Wall Street and the ‘move fast and break things’ cul­ture of Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Is Sex Social­ly Con­struct­ed? (Alex Byrne, Arc Dig­i­tal): “Clear­ly many ani­mals have belonged to the cat­e­go­ry female (or male) with­out exist­ing with­in a soci­ety of any kind. Indeed, there would have been females and males even if life on Earth had been destroyed by an aster­oid half a bil­lion years ago and humans had nev­er evolved. Female and male are there­fore not social­ly con­struct­ed cat­e­gories; that is, sex is not social­ly con­struct­ed.” Byrne is the head of MIT’s depart­ment of lin­guis­tics and phi­los­o­phy. I shared a relat­ed arti­cle of his back in issue 177.

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 On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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 180

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

This week was espe­cial­ly hard for me to put togeth­er. I stum­bled upon so much insight­ful writ­ing this week! I had to ruth­less­ly elim­i­nate some that I real­ly liked, so I hope you enjoy these gems that sur­vived my ruth­less win­now­ing process.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Slain mis­sion­ary John Chau pre­pared much more than we thought, but are mis­sion­ar­ies still fools? (Ed Stet­zer, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…Mary Ho, who leads All Nations (the agency that sent Chau on mis­sions), indi­cat­ed that he was heav­i­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and even quar­an­tined before going on the mis­sion. The Wash­ing­ton Post report­ed Tues­day night that Chau also under­took lin­guis­tic and med­ical train­ing to pre­pare for the out­reach. These new reports at a min­i­mum chal­lenge the sim­plis­tic image of an adven­ture-seek­ing zealot will­ing to reck­less­ly risk the lives of a remote group of islanders.” By far the best arti­cle I’ve read on this sub­ject.
  2. Lib­er­al Par­ents, Rad­i­cal Chil­dren (David Brooks, New York Times): “In the age of social media, virtue is not defined by how com­pas­sion­ate­ly you act. Virtue is defined by how vehe­ment­ly you react to that which you find offen­sive. Virtue involves the self-dis­play of a cer­tain indig­nant sen­si­bil­i­ty, and any­body who doesn’t dis­play that sen­si­bil­i­ty is moral­ly sus­pect.” An insight­ful col­umn — this excerpt does not do it jus­tice.
    • Relat­ed but not obvi­ous­ly: The Ques­tion With­out A Solu­tion (Alan Jacobs, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “You read all this with a feel­ing of ris­ing hor­ror, and not just because of the phys­i­cal and men­tal and spir­i­tu­al suf­fer­ing. You feel that hor­ror also because it becomes increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult, as the sto­ry pro­gress­es, to imag­ine how the even the worst of the pain could have been avoid­ed. Not one man, or woman, knew a pru­dent rem­e­dy.” Haunt­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
    • More clear­ly relat­ed: Debate ends when we label views we sim­ply dis­agree with as ‘hatred’ (Kenan Malik, The Guardian): “‘It is bet­ter to debate a ques­tion with­out set­tling it,’ observed the 18th-cen­tu­ry French writer Joseph Jou­bert, ‘than to set­tle a ques­tion with­out debat­ing it.’ How naive that sounds today.”
  3. My New Vagi­na Won’t Make Me Hap­py (Andrea Long Chu, New York Times): “Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagi­na as a wound;as a result, it will require reg­u­lar, painful atten­tion to main­tain. This is what I want, but there is no guar­an­tee it will make me hap­pi­er. In fact, I don’t expect it to.”
    • See also this response piece: The New York Times Reveals Painful Truths about Trans­gen­der Lives (Ryan T. Ander­son, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Why should a doc­tor per­form surgery when it won’t make the patient hap­py, it won’t accom­plish its intend­ed goal, it won’t improve the under­ly­ing con­di­tion, it might make the under­ly­ing con­di­tion worse, and it might increase the like­li­hood of sui­cide?” Ander­son was men­tioned in Chu’s op-ed.
  4. Amer­i­can Exor­cism (Mike Mar­i­ani, The Atlantic): “If nei­ther the men­tal-health eval­u­a­tion nor a sub­se­quent phys­i­cal exam turns up a stan­dard expla­na­tion for the person’s afflic­tion, the priest starts to take the case more seri­ous­ly. At this point he may begin look­ing for what the Church con­sid­ers the clas­sic signs of demon­ic pos­ses­sion: facil­i­ty in a lan­guage the per­son has nev­er learned; phys­i­cal strength beyond his or her age or con­di­tion; access to secret knowl­edge; and a vehe­ment aver­sion to God and sacred objects, includ­ing cru­ci­fix­es and holy water.”
  5. What If The Place­bo Effect Isn’t A Trick? (Gary Green­berg, New York Times Mag­a­zine): “The find­ings of the I.B.S. study were in keep­ing with a hypoth­e­sis Kaptchuk had formed over the years: that the place­bo effect is a bio­log­i­cal response to an act of car­ing; that some­how the encounter itself calls forth heal­ing and that the more intense and focused it is, the more heal­ing it evokes.”
  6. For Cal­i­for­ni­ans liv­ing in their cars, a church park­ing lot can briefly be home (Kim­ber­ly Win­ston, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As they often do in hard times, hous­es of wor­ship stepped in. In Chico, a hub for Par­adise refugees, church­es have opened their build­ings and park­ing lots as tem­po­rary shel­ters. But while those church­es have been laud­ed, con­gre­ga­tions in oth­er areas that open their park­ing lots to those they some­times refer to as ‘vehi­cle res­i­dents’ face hur­dles and hos­til­i­ty. Many Bay Area munic­i­pal­i­ties, includ­ing the tech cen­ters of San Fran­cis­co and San Jose, have out­lawed sleep­ing in a car parked on the street overnight, while neigh­bors speak out against hav­ing the home­less next door.”
  7. A Time To Fast (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over one hun­dred years ago researchers demon­strat­ed that calo­rie restric­tion in rats increased lifes­pan, some­times by as much as 50%. Since that time, the find­ing has been repli­cat­ed and extend­ed to pri­mates. A few humans have tak­en up the diet but for most of us easy access to deli­cious food trumps willpow­er. A new paper in Sci­ence reviews the lit­er­a­ture on calo­rie restric­tion and also offers some evi­dence that less restric­tive regimes such as inter­mit­tent fast­ing may have sim­i­lar effects.” A sec­u­lar per­spec­tive on the ben­e­fits of cer­tain types of fast­ing (this is a sum­ma­ry of an arti­cle in the jour­nal Sci­ence).

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 Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

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.