Tag: how the church is perceived

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 389

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

This is vol­ume 389, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty Can Still Come Back (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “There was no such thing as monasticism—through which pagan North­ern Europe was turned Christian—until there was. There was no Ref­or­ma­tion until there was. There was no revival that turned Methodists and Bap­tists into cul­tur­al­ly dom­i­nant forces in the mid­west­ern and south­east­ern Unit­ed States—until there was. There was no East African Revival, led pri­mar­i­ly by African peo­ple, that helped turn Africa from a 9 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent in 1900 into a 50 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent today—until there was. Chris­tian­i­ty, like its founder, does not go from strength to strength but from death to res­ur­rec­tion.”
  2. Is the Pub­lic Domain Just?: Bib­li­cal Stew­ard­ship and Legal Pro­tec­tion For Tra­di­tion­al Knowl­edge Assets (Ruth L. Okedi­ji, The Colum­bia Jour­nal of Law and the Arts): “The Arti­cle pro­pos­es a the­o­log­i­cal frame­work of ‘bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship’ root­ed in ima­go Dei—the foun­da­tion­al con­cept inform­ing Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings of human nature and social interaction—to address the socio-moral dimen­sions that are con­sti­tu­tive of TK [tra­di­tion­al knowl­edge] sys­tems and the insti­tu­tion­al con­text in which they unfold. The bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship frame­work focus­es on the coop­er­a­tive and kin­ship arrange­ments that enable and sus­tain pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty for TK.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law and a sol­id Chris­t­ian. I just heard her speak and the per­son intro­duc­ing her men­tioned this arti­cle as an exam­ple of how bold she is in inte­grat­ing her faith into her schol­ar­ship.
  3. Some COVID per­spec­tives
    • Sure­ly Right (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the only sen­si­ble posi­tion is to advo­cate for ear­ly and wide­spread vac­cine access, be high­ly crit­i­cal of all the pol­i­tick­ing about vac­cine tim­ing around the elec­tion, and to avoid man­dates unless you intend to enforce them at gun­point.… Because we live in a world where the default is not to vac­ci­nate, pol­i­tics poi­sons every­thing it touch­es, and the child­hood man­dates are his­tor­i­cal acci­dents that could very well fall to con­cert­ed polit­i­cal action.”
      • A brief, fas­ci­nat­ing read.
    • Why the Odds Are Stacked Against a Promis­ing New Covid Drug (Ben­jamin Mueller, The New York Times): “By for­ti­fy­ing the body’s own mech­a­nisms for quash­ing an invad­ing virus, they can poten­tial­ly help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and oth­er virus­es with the poten­tial to kin­dle future pan­demics.… For all of its promise, though, the drug — called pegy­lat­ed inter­fer­on lamb­da — faces an uncer­tain road [due to the FDA].”
    • Not pay­walled. Infu­ri­at­ing. Out­ra­geous. Ridicu­lous.
    • Bureau­crats: “COVID is so bad we need to change every aspect of soci­ety to deal with it. But don’t change our bureau­cra­cy. It’s not THAT bad.”
  4. Boston Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vides update on CTE study, dis­cov­ers brain dis­ease in 92 per­cent of ex-NFL play­ers ana­lyzed (Vic­to­ria Her­nan­dez, USA Today): “The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty CTE Cen­ter stud­ied the brains of 376 deceased for­mer NFL play­ers and diag­nosed 345 of them with chron­ic trau­mat­ic encephalopa­thy. This is 91.7 per­cent of those stud­ied.”
    • I’ve been say­ing this for about two stu­dent gen­er­a­tions now, but foot­bal­l’s days are num­bered in Amer­i­ca. It’s hard to imag­ine the sport sur­viv­ing the sorts of reforms that would be nec­es­sary.
  5. I Thought I Was Sav­ing Trans Kids. Now I’m Blow­ing the Whis­tle. (Jamie Reed, The Free Press): “I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and polit­i­cal­ly to the left of Bernie Sanders.… I’m now mar­ried to a trans man, and togeth­er we are rais­ing my two bio­log­i­cal chil­dren from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage and three fos­ter chil­dren we hope to adopt.… Giv­en the secre­cy and lack of rig­or­ous stan­dards that char­ac­ter­ize youth gen­der tran­si­tion across the coun­try, I believe that to ensure the safe­ty of Amer­i­can chil­dren, we need a mora­to­ri­um on the hor­mon­al and sur­gi­cal treat­ment of young peo­ple with gen­der dys­pho­ria.”
    • Not sur­pris­ing if you’ve been fol­low­ing this top­ic, but depress­ing and with new anec­dotes.
  6. Chat­G­PT Is a Blur­ry JPEG of the Web (Ted Chi­ang, The New York­er): “Think of Chat­G­PT as a blur­ry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the infor­ma­tion on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the infor­ma­tion of a high­er-res­o­lu­tion image, but, if you’re look­ing for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approx­i­ma­tion. But, because the approx­i­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed in the form of gram­mat­i­cal text, which Chat­G­PT excels at cre­at­ing, it’s usu­al­ly accept­able. You’re still look­ing at a blur­ry JPEG, but the blur­ri­ness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the pic­ture as a whole look less sharp.”
    • This is a good anal­o­gy.
  7. A Black Pro­fes­sor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell (Vin­cent Lloyd, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Each stu­dent read from a pre­pared state­ment about how the sem­i­nar per­pet­u­at­ed anti-black vio­lence in its con­tent and form, how the black stu­dents had been harmed, how I was guilty of count­less microag­gres­sions, includ­ing through my body lan­guage, and how stu­dents didn’t feel safe because I didn’t imme­di­ate­ly cor­rect views that failed to treat anti-black­ness as the cause of all the world’s ills.… I am a black pro­fes­sor, I direct­ed my university’s black-stud­ies pro­gram, I lead anti-racism and trans­for­ma­tive-jus­tice work­shops, and I have pub­lished books on anti-black racism and prison abo­li­tion. I live in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly black neigh­bor­hood of Philadel­phia, my daugh­ter went to an Afro­cen­tric school, and I am on the board of our local black cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Vil­lano­va (which is not, to be clear, the loca­tion of this deba­cle).

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 Uncon­scious Learn­ing Under­lies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in Peo­ple Who Can Uncon­scious­ly Pre­dict Com­plex Pat­terns (Sci Tech Dai­ly): “Indi­vid­u­als who can uncon­scious­ly pre­dict com­plex pat­terns, an abil­i­ty called implic­it pat­tern learn­ing, are like­ly to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who cre­ates pat­terns of events in the uni­verse, accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.” Shock­er: peo­ple who see real­i­ty clear­ly are more like­ly to per­ceive God’s hand at work in real­i­ty. From vol­ume 267.

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 381

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.

The num­ber 381 , which is a Kaprekar con­stant in base 2 (101111101). Kaprekar con­stants are weird things and you’ll need to google them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The rise and fall of peer review (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “If you look at what sci­en­tists actu­al­ly do, it’s clear they don’t think peer review real­ly mat­ters. First: if sci­en­tists cared a lot about peer review, when their papers got reviewed and reject­ed, they would lis­ten to the feed­back, do more exper­i­ments, rewrite the paper, etc. Instead, they usu­al­ly just sub­mit the same paper to anoth­er jour­nal.”
    • I absolute­ly loved this arti­cle. The author is a post­doc in social psy­chol­o­gy at Colum­bia Busi­ness School.
    • He also has an aca­d­e­m­ic paper mak­ing the same point in a remark­able way at https://psyarxiv.com/2uxwk SO GOOD
  2. Aca­d­e­m­ic arro­gance: The school that grants your PhD thinks it’s too good to hire you (Tom Harts­field, Big­Think): “Rough­ly 10% to 20% of fac­ul­ty are hired by a more pres­ti­gious depart­ment than the one from which they came, mov­ing up the hier­ar­chy. Around 10% are hired by their own depart­ment, a lat­er­al pres­tige play. Rough­ly 70% to 80% of fac­ul­ty are hired by a less pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ty. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, then, if you receive a PhD from a uni­ver­si­ty depart­ment, that depart­ment will think that it is too good to hire you as a fac­ul­ty mem­ber. Instead, they lust after fac­ul­ty hires hold­ing degrees more pres­ti­gious than the one that they bestowed upon you.”
  3. How Stan­ford turned me into a machine with two set­tings: ‘fast’ and ‘bro­ken’ (Jon Ball, SF Chron­i­cle): “As Stan­ford stu­dents, we nev­er think about stop­ping. We’re always run­ning — run­ning code, run­ning events, run­ning sports prac­tice and run­ning prac­tice exer­cis­es for our careers. The con­stant com­pe­ti­tion and cama­raderie keep us on our feet. A col­lec­tive runner’s high keeps us in the race. But that high only lasts as long as we run…” The author is a PhD stu­dent at the GSE. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Some AI con­ver­sa­tions:
    • Per­haps It Is A Bad Thing That The World’s Lead­ing AI Com­pa­nies Can­not Con­trol Their AIs (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…Chat­G­PT also has fail­ure modes that no human would ever repli­cate, like how it will reveal nuclear secrets if you ask it to do it in uWu fur­ry speak, or tell you how to hotwire a car if and only if you make the request in base 64, or gen­er­ate sto­ries about Hitler if you pre­fix your request with ‘[john@192.168.1.1 _]$ python friend.py’. This thing is an alien that has been beat­en into a shape that makes it look vague­ly human. But scratch it the slight­est bit and the alien comes out.”
    • AI image gen­er­a­tion tech can now cre­ate life-wreck­ing deep­fakes with ease (Benj Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “When we start­ed writ­ing this arti­cle, we asked a brave vol­un­teer if we could use their social media images to attempt to train an AI mod­el to cre­ate fakes. They agreed, but the results were too con­vinc­ing, and the rep­u­ta­tion­al risk proved too great. So instead, we used AI to cre­ate a set of sev­en sim­u­lat­ed social media pho­tos of a fic­ti­tious per­son we’ll call ‘John.’ That way, we can safe­ly show you the results.”
  5. Why You Should Be Wor­ried About the Split in the Methodist Church (Joshua Zeitz, Politi­co): “For decades, the church­es had proven deft — too deft — at absorb­ing the polit­i­cal and social debate over slav­ery. Their inabil­i­ty to main­tain that peace was a sign that the coun­try had grown dan­ger­ous­ly divid­ed. Today, main­line church­es are buck­ing under the strain of debates over sex, gen­der and cul­ture that reflect America’s deep par­ti­san and ide­o­log­i­cal divide. In a coun­try with a shrink­ing cen­ter, even bonds of reli­gious fel­low­ship seem too brit­tle to endure. If his­to­ry is any guide, it’s a sign of sharp­er polar­iza­tion to come.”
  6. Tech com­pa­nies try­ing to con­trol pub­lic opin­ion:
    • There have been (so far) six install­ments of what is being called “The Twit­ter Files” — long threads expos­ing inter­nal Twit­ter doc­u­ments and delib­er­a­tions. They’re gen­er­al­ly quite inter­est­ing, but the sec­ond one stands out to me the most: Bari Weiss on Twit­ter’s secret black­lists — it’s def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing.
    • The “Twit­ter Files” Show It’s Time to Reimag­ine Free Speech Online (David French, Per­sua­sion): “Back in my lit­i­ga­tion days, I led legal teams that fol­lowed a few sim­ple rules. First, pub­lic insti­tu­tions must com­ply with the First Amend­ment, and they should be sued if they don’t. Sec­ond, pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties have the free­dom to craft their own rules, but if they promise free speech, they should deliv­er, and there is no bet­ter mod­el for deliv­er­ing free speech than the First Amend­ment. The same mes­sage should apply to social media.”
    • What the Hell Hap­pened to Pay­Pal? (Rupa Sub­ra­manya, The Free Press): “One by one, they go to start their busi­ness day only to find a baf­fling mes­sage from their pay­ments app inform­ing them: ‘You can no longer do busi­ness with Pay­Pal.’ There is lit­tle or no expla­na­tion. They have some­how offend­ed the sen­si­bil­i­ties of some­one some­where deep inside the bureau­cra­cy.… These are entre­pre­neurs, writ­ers, aca­d­e­mics, activists—the very same peo­ple Pay­Pal, whose mis­sion is ‘democ­ra­tiz­ing finan­cial ser­vices,’ was meant to empow­er.”
  7. The Hijack­ing of Pedi­atric Med­i­cine (Aaron Sibar­i­um, The Free Press): “For Vinay Prasad, a pro­fes­sor of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and bio­sta­tis­tics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San Fran­cis­co, it’s hard to blame [skep­ti­cal par­ents]. ‘The rea­son to trust mod­ern doc­tors over ancient heal­ers is that more of what we tell you to do is jus­ti­fied by well-done stud­ies,’ Prasad said. ‘But how do we hold that perch when we just make stuff up?’”

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 Cul­tures That Build (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “In the 21st cen­tu­ry, the main ques­tion in Amer­i­can social life is not ‘how do we make that hap­pen?’ but ‘how do we get man­age­ment to take our side?’ This is a learned response, and a cul­ture which has inter­nal­ized it will not be a cul­ture that ‘builds.’”

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 377

things which grabbed my atten­tion

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

This is vol­ume 377, the 14th Fibonac­ci num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. sprawl­ing along the way: a polemic and an exhor­ta­tion (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “When­ev­er Chris­tians decide that they need a strat­e­gy, they’re writ­ing a recipe for dis­obe­di­ence to the Lord Jesus. As Stan­ley Hauer­was has always said in response to peo­ple who say that the Church needs a social strat­e­gy, ‘the Church is a social strat­e­gy.…’ The Church’s job is to be the Church, and the Christian’s task is to be like Christ, and strate­gies invari­ably get in the way of both.”
    • This is insight­ful.
  2. How Should Chris­tians Speak in Pub­lic? (Tim Keller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The fruit of the Spir­it includes love, joy and peace, patience and kind­ness, and humil­i­ty. These must be evi­dent as we speak about the gospel pub­licly. Right now, the most pop­u­lar pub­lic fig­ures show con­fi­dence and fear­less­ness but not love and humil­i­ty. We can­not fol­low in that train.”
    • Dif­fi­cult to excerpt fair­ly.
  3. Does edu­ca­tion ‘cure’ peo­ple of faith? The data says no (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion News): “Those who are the most like­ly to be reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed are those with the low­est lev­els of for­mal edu­ca­tion. The group that is the most like­ly to align with a faith tra­di­tion? Those who have earned a col­lege degree or more.”
    • This is one of those true things that peo­ple have a hard time believ­ing.
  4. Iran and Chi­na Use Pri­vate Detec­tives to Spy on Dis­si­dents in Amer­i­ca (Ben­jamin Weis­er and & William K. Rash­baum, New York Times): “Across Amer­i­ca, inves­ti­ga­tors are increas­ing­ly being hired by a new kind of client — author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments like Iran and Chi­na attempt­ing to sur­veil, harass, threat­en and even repa­tri­ate dis­si­dents liv­ing law­ful­ly in the Unit­ed States, law enforce­ment offi­cials said.”
  5. Ael­la & The Futil­i­ty Of ‘Con­sent’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I’ve heard that ‘but ani­mals can’t con­sent!’ argu­ment from peo­ple before, as a defense against nor­mal­iz­ing bes­tial­i­ty, and it has nev­er made sense. You think ani­mals can con­sent to being eat­en?”
    • I remem­ber when I first talked with a stu­dent who seri­ous­ly claimed that con­sent was the only moral rule applic­a­ble to sex. I was so stunned I don’t think I had the where­with­al to laugh. It’s such an absurd claim.
  6. Lep­rosy: Ancient dis­ease able to regen­er­ate organs (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Ani­mal exper­i­ments have uncov­ered the bac­te­ri­a’s remark­able abil­i­ty to almost dou­ble the size of liv­ers by stim­u­lat­ing healthy growth. It is a sneak­i­ly self­ish act that gives the bac­te­ria more tis­sue to infect. But work­ing out how they do it could lead to new age-defy­ing ther­a­pies, the sci­en­tists say.”
    • This is super cool! I hope it pans out.
  7. The top 10 most-regret­ted col­lege majors — and the degrees grad­u­ates wish they had pur­sued instead (Jes­si­ca Dick­ler, CNBC): “Com­put­er sci­ence majors, with an aver­age annu­al start­ing salary of almost $100,000, were the hap­pi­est over­all, accord­ing to ZipRecruiter. Stu­dents who majored in crim­i­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, nurs­ing, busi­ness and finance also felt very good about their choic­es.”

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 Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and the Com­mon Good (Nation­al Affairs, William Haun): “Many of today’s pro­gres­sives, con­ser­v­a­tives, and lib­er­tar­i­ans [can­not] explain why reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar and reli­gious exer­cise in par­tic­u­lar should shape the com­mon good, even when they go against the grain of sec­u­lar visions adopt­ed in law.” Not light read­ing but worth­while. The author is a lawyer for the Beck­et Fund. From vol­ume 248

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 376

My favorite line from this week: “Men bond by insult­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it; women bond by com­pli­ment­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it.”

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, vol­ume 376, is an auto­mor­phic num­ber because when raised to a pow­er it ends in itself. 3762 = 141376. It con­tin­ues: 3763 = 53157376 and so on. 37615 = 424441337012461701988020381601157349376 and so on.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Male-War­rior Hypoth­e­sis (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “…young human males often address each oth­er with abu­sive insults. The rit­u­al tests the strength of the friend­ship. If light­heart­ed ver­bal quips do not dam­age the rela­tion­ship, then the bonds are like­ly rel­a­tive­ly strong. In con­trast, women and girls sel­dom insult their friends, and often work extra hard to praise them to avoid any signs of hos­til­i­ty. Men bond by insult­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it; women bond by com­pli­ment­ing each oth­er and not real­ly mean­ing it.”
    • This arti­cle is engross­ing even if you already know the gist.
  2. The Fever Is Break­ing (David Brooks, New York Times): “The sin­gle most impor­tant result of this elec­tion was the tri­umph of the normies. Estab­lish­men­tar­i­an, prac­ti­cal lead­ers who are not always scream­ing angri­ly at you did phe­nom­e­nal­ly well, on right and left: Mike DeWine in Ohio, Josh Shapiro in Penn­syl­va­nia. Work­man­like incum­bents from John Thune in South Dako­ta to Ron Wyden in Ore­gon had suc­cess­ful nights. Gov. Tony Evers of Wis­con­sin had the quo­ta­tion that sum­ma­rized the elec­tion: ‘Bor­ing wins.’ ”
    • Relat­ed (in that it is about pol­i­tics): 3 Prin­ci­ples for Set­tling Polit­i­cal Spats in the Church (Daniel K. Williams, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Any attempt to make soci­ety more moral through leg­is­la­tion will inevitably be selec­tive and incom­plete and may offer mixed results. Which major polit­i­cal par­ty in the Unit­ed States is com­mit­ted to address­ing the prob­lems of divorce, gam­bling addic­tions, mar­i­tal infi­deli­ty, and alco­hol abuse? Which par­ty will do the most to pro­tect the poor from being exploit­ed through pay­day loans? Which par­ty will fight against the pornog­ra­phy indus­try? If you haven’t seen any polit­i­cal ads this elec­tion sea­son that address any of these issues, per­haps that’s a sign of the moral selec­tiv­i­ty in our cur­rent par­ti­san pol­i­tics.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West Geor­gia. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  3. A Tra­di­tion of Anti-Tra­di­tion­al­ists (Mark Bauer­lein, First Things): “All the talk in the human­i­ties back then turned on ‘open­ing up the canon’ and break­ing up the dom­i­nance of Dead White Males—less John Dry­den and more Aphra Behn, more diver­si­ty and few­er idols—but in the the­o­ry area, these fig­ures were as canon­i­cal as the saints.… What this bias has pro­duced is two gen­er­a­tions of col­lege teach­ers who don’t real­ize their bias. They got a nar­row edu­ca­tion that they trust­ed was the broad­est one. They gen­uine­ly don’t know that anoth­er crit­i­cal tra­di­tion besides the progressive/transgressive one exists.” This essay is a bulls­eye.
    • Relat­ed: An Exis­ten­tial Threat to Doing Good Sci­ence (Lua­na Maro­ja, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “The restric­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research. Let’s start with teach­ing. I need to empha­size that this is not hypo­thet­i­cal. The cen­so­ri­ous, fear­ful cli­mate is already affect­ing the con­tent of what we teach.”
    • There’s a Stan­ford con­nec­tion in this sec­ond arti­cle, btw. The arti­cle is an adap­ta­tion of a speech giv­en at a pri­vate con­fer­ence at Stan­ford quite recent­ly.
  4. Con­tra Res­i­dent Con­trar­i­an On Unfal­si­fi­able Inter­nal States (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “But in the sto­ries these peo­ple told me, it was more about — they found that this effort was pro­duc­ing some­thing unex­pect­ed, and devel­op­ing new per­son­al­i­ty aspects that they need­ed, so they kept going. If you take one step towards Darth Vad­er, he will take two steps toward you (sor­ry if I am sound­ing like a Sith youth pas­tor).”
    • This is absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing and the excerpt does not do it any jus­tice. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. New Endorse­ments for Col­lege Ath­letes Resur­face an Old Con­cern: Sex Sells (Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Haley Jones, an All-Amer­i­ca guard at Stan­ford and a can­di­date for the Play­er of the Year Award, said she didn’t want to play up sex appeal. Her endorse­ment income is dri­ven by a social media image that por­trays her as a light­heart­ed stu­dent-ath­lete with­out an overt­ly provoca­tive tone.”
    • Inter­est­ing in its own right, also a stronger Stan­ford angle than I expect­ed.
  6. It’s Always a ‘Neg­a­tive World’ for Chris­tian­i­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “One of [the] core con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian cri­tiques of Amer­i­can cul­ture is that Amer­i­ca is grow­ing ever-more hos­tile to the authen­tic Chris­t­ian faith. We’ve left a friend­ly and hos­pitable past, and now we’re con­fronting a hos­tile future.… But this analy­sis is fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong. It’s dan­ger­ous­ly wrong. It’s wrong not because the present moment is par­tic­u­lar­ly hos­pitable to the Chris­t­ian faith, but because it fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stands both Amer­i­can his­to­ry and Amer­i­can Chris­ten­dom, and it fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stands the per­ma­nent coun­ter­cul­tur­al real­i­ty of authen­tic Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  7. Pay­walls or Con­stant Intru­sive Ads: Pick One (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “And I also want to say, if you’re annoyed that you can’t get past a pay­wall — tough. Because an era of ris­ing pay­walls is absolute­ly nec­es­sary if you want writ­ing to sur­vive as a pro­fes­sion, and if you want good jour­nal­ism and analy­sis to endure.”

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 Small World Net­work of Col­lege Class­es: Impli­ca­tions for Epi­dem­ic Spread on a Uni­ver­si­ty Cam­pus (Wee­den & Corn­well, Soci­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence): “If one chose a giv­en stu­dent at ran­dom, that stu­dent is like­ly to attend class with a stu­dent who, in turn, attends class with any oth­er ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dent. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, although it is unlike­ly that any two ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dents would be enrolled in the same course, it is high­ly like­ly that they would be enrolled in dif­fer­ent cours­es that both include the same third par­ty.“

The authors, pro­fes­sors at Cor­nell, were curi­ous about the poten­tial for dis­ease spread among under­grads at their school. Tak­ing this in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion: the aver­age stu­dent at Stan­ford is like­ly only one or two steps away from Chi Alpha. WOW! Invite your friends! From vol­ume 246

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 375

a week full of wild arti­cles

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

This is vol­ume 375, which can also be writ­ten at 3·53. I like the threes on either side of the five.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Truth Cops: Leaked Doc­u­ments Out­line DHS’s Plans to Police Dis­in­for­ma­tion (Ken Klip­pen­stein & Lee Fang, The Inter­cept): “DHS’s mis­sion to fight dis­in­for­ma­tion, stem­ming from con­cerns around Russ­ian influ­ence in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, began tak­ing shape dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion and over efforts to shape dis­cus­sions around vac­cine pol­i­cy dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.”
    • This is the arti­cle of the week and it’s not close. Wow. Some more excerpts:
    • “U.S. offi­cials have rou­tine­ly lied about an array of issues, from the caus­es of its wars in Viet­nam and Iraq to their more recent obfus­ca­tion around the role of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health in fund­ing the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s coro­n­avirus research. That track record has not pre­vent­ed the U.S. gov­ern­ment from seek­ing to become arbiters of what con­sti­tutes false or dan­ger­ous infor­ma­tion on inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal top­ics.”
    • This bit was wild: “Dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion, the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty, in an email to an offi­cial at Twit­ter, for­ward­ed infor­ma­tion about a poten­tial threat to crit­i­cal U.S. infra­struc­ture, cit­ing FBI warn­ings, in this case about an account that could imper­il elec­tion sys­tem integri­ty. The Twit­ter user in ques­tion had 56 fol­low­ers, along with a bio that read ‘dm us your weed store loca­tions (hoes be mad, but this is a par­o­dy account),’ under a ban­ner image of Blu­cifer, the 32-foot-tall demon­ic horse sculp­ture fea­tured at the entrance of the Den­ver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port.”
  2. Neg­a­tive World Arrives in Aus­tralia (Simon Kennedy, Mere Ortho­doxy): “This was a water­shed cul­tur­al moment for Aus­tralia, and pos­si­bly for the West. A man with out­stand­ing cre­den­tials was told that, because of some ser­mons preached by some­one else from almost a decade ago, he need­ed to recon­sid­er his fit for the role he had just been appoint­ed to. For all we know, Thor­burn may dis­agree with these ser­mons. He may nev­er have been aware of them or lis­tened to them. The bot­tom line here was guilt-by-asso­ci­a­tion.”
  3. Black, Chris­t­ian and Tran­scend­ing the Polit­i­cal Bina­ry (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “The con­ser­v­a­tive and pro­gres­sive approach­es are not the only way to approach pol­i­tics. Every­thing that doesn’t fit isn’t ille­git­i­mate. Once we real­ize those aren’t the only two approach­es, then we open up space for peo­ple of col­or, peo­ple of faith and oth­ers who are polit­i­cal­ly home­less to real­ly have a voice and help heal some­thing that’s been bro­ken and won’t be fixed by either of those two sides.”
  4. Racial Dis­crim­i­na­tion Is Not the Path to Racial Jus­tice (David French, The Dis­patch): “If schools tru­ly want to pri­or­i­tize diver­si­ty, they should focus on class. Fos­ter­ing greater class-based diver­si­ty can help achieve greater diver­si­ty across the board: More racial diver­si­ty, more eco­nom­ic diver­si­ty, more ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty, and more diver­si­ty on the basis of reli­gion. Empha­siz­ing diver­si­ty of class doesn’t just cre­ate a stu­dent body that looks like Amer­i­ca. It cre­ates a stu­dent body that is like Amer­i­ca.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Racial Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics: A Warn­ing From Sara­je­vo (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “White racial con­scious­ness is taboo for a good his­tor­i­cal rea­son, but any­one with a lick of com­mon sense has to see that you can­not keep attack­ing white peo­ple as moral­ly bad because of the col­or of their skin, and pun­ish them in pub­lic and pri­vate life because they are white, with­out invit­ing push­back.”
    • We are play­ing with fire when it comes to race in Amer­i­ca and pray we open our eyes before the flames rage out of con­trol.
  5. Stan­ford knew about the cam­pus imposter for a year. He kept com­ing back. (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic safe­ty depart­ment have been aware since at least Decem­ber 2021 that William Cur­ry, the Alaba­ma native who was removed from cam­pus Thurs­day, had pre­tend­ed to be a Stan­ford stu­dent and lived in mul­ti­ple Uni­ver­si­ty dorms, accord­ing to com­mu­ni­ca­tions obtained by The Dai­ly.” Very detailed. A well-report­ed sto­ry.
    • Imposter recounts his time on cam­pus (Theo Bak­er, The Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Cur­ry said he lied to peo­ple in high school about attend­ing Stan­ford and claimed his par­ents believed he was enrolled in the Uni­ver­si­ty. He con­firmed many ele­ments of the Daily’s report­ing and even mes­saged a Dai­ly reporter after the inter­view, say­ing ‘always my duty to help my fel­low stu­dents.’ ” — empha­sis added. Less inter­est­ing than the main sto­ry, but still intrigu­ing.
    • In oth­er Stan­ford news, Stan­ford Tree gets the axe, sus­pend­ed until Jan­u­ary (Car­o­line Chen & Yana Kim, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In the fall of 2020, the Band tran­si­tioned from a Vol­un­tary Stu­dent Orga­ni­za­tion (VSO) to being under the Depart­ment of Ath­let­ics (DAPER). At the same time, its Con­sti­tu­tion, which allowed stu­dent self-expres­sion such as kneel­ing dur­ing the nation­al anthem and tap­ing ‘Abol­ish ICE’ on the back of their jack­ets, was dis­solved, accord­ing to Band social chair and recruiter Noah Bartlett ’23, who described there being a sig­nif­i­cant ‘cul­ture shift’ since he joined the Band in 2019.” HOW DARE YOU SAY WE DON’T LIKE FUN! NO FUN FOR YOU!
  6. NYC judge rules polyamorous unions enti­tled to same legal pro­tec­tions as 2‑person rela­tion­ships (Julia Mus­to, NY Post): “In the case at hand, Bac­dayan notes how changes since 1989 play a role, includ­ing changes to the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘fam­i­ly.’ She notes the law has rapid­ly pro­ceed­ed in rec­og­niz­ing that it is pos­si­ble for a child to have more than two legal par­ents. ‘Why then, except for the very real pos­si­bil­i­ty of implic­it majori­tar­i­an ani­mus, is the lim­i­ta­tion of two per­sons insert­ed into the def­i­n­i­tion of a fam­i­ly-like rela­tion­ship for the pur­pos­es of receiv­ing the same pro­tec­tions from evic­tion accord­ed to legal­ly for­mal­ized or blood rela­tion­ships?’ asked Bac­dayan.”
    • “Two per­son rela­tion­ships”
    • This is from ear­ly last month
  7. Mod­er­a­tion Is Dif­fer­ent From Cen­sor­ship (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “A min­i­mum viable prod­uct for mod­er­a­tion with­out cen­sor­ship is for a plat­form to do exact­ly the same thing they’re doing now — remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts — but have an opt-in set­ting, ‘see banned posts’. If you per­son­al­ly choose to see harass­ing and offen­sive con­tent, you can tog­gle that set­ting, and every­thing bad will reap­pear.” The meme near the top made me chuck­le.

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 S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay. From vol­ume 245.

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 372

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

This is vol­ume 372, a num­ber I think is cool because it can be expressed as the sum of suc­ces­sive primes: 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 = 372.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Con­ve­nient, That Kanye West­’s Behav­ior Could Not Pos­si­bly Be Influ­enced by His Men­tal Ill­ness (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Two things I real­ly hate: morals of con­ve­nience and false friends. The types of peo­ple who say ‘men­tal ill­ness doesn’t do that’ are the types to pro­fess sup­port for those with psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders, but only when it’s easy, when the men­tal­ly ill are doing the social­ly approved things like talk­ing to them­selves on the sub­way. Which of course means that they are no friend to the men­tal­ly ill at all; sup­port only means some­thing when it comes at a cost.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: How Kanye West’s Break­down Makes Sense of Our Social Cri­sis (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Insta­bil­i­ty from this artist is hard­ly sur­pris­ing. Sev­er­al years ago, I not­ed that I was wor­ried for the rapper—not because of his men­tal health chal­lenges but because of what Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals often do to celebri­ties who pro­fess faith. Too often we claim them as, at best, mas­cots for ‘our side’ and, at worst, as tro­phies from the cul­ture wars. Over and over, the church has expect­ed things from these fig­ures that they do not have the matu­ri­ty, wis­dom, or even sta­bil­i­ty to han­dle.”
  2. Review: When Nar­cis­sism Comes to Church (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “But this book makes a mon­u­men­tal deci­sion: a deci­sion to put the Bible’s moral lan­guage to the side, to call a dis­or­der what the Bible calls sin, to call self-actu­al­iza­tion what the Bible calls repen­tance. This book’s aver­sion to bib­li­cal cat­e­gories does not empow­er read­ers to con­front spir­i­tu­al­ly abu­sive sys­tems. It instead makes those sys­tems hard­er to dis­rupt.”
    • This is an out­stand­ing book review that puts its fin­ger on a prob­lem I fre­quent­ly notice — when we dis­re­gard Bib­li­cal analy­sis we make it need­less­ly hard to bring Bib­li­cal solu­tions to bear.
  3. The Woman Who Gave the World a Thou­sand Names for God (Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Has there been a sin­gle trans­la­tor in church his­to­ry with Barnwell’s sway? We could talk about Jerome and his Latin Vul­gate, used by the Roman Catholic Church as its prin­ci­pal trans­la­tion for over 1,500 years. There was Luther and his Ger­man-lan­guage Bible. There was England’s King James I, if you cred­it him for com­mis­sion­ing his KJV—or William Tyn­dale if you feel like the KJV was most­ly cribbed from his work.” The claim feels like hyper­bole until you read the arti­cle. Wowsers. What a lega­cy!
  4. How California’s Bul­let Train Went Off the Rails (Ralph Vartabe­di­an, New York Times): “ ‘There were so many things that went wrong,’ Mr. McNa­ma­ra said. ‘[The rail com­pa­ny] was very angry. They told the state they were leav­ing for North Africa, which was less polit­i­cal­ly dys­func­tion­al. They went to Moroc­co and helped them build a rail sys­tem.’ Morocco’s bul­let train start­ed ser­vice in 2018.”
  5. 10 Affir­ma­tions and Denials on Eth­nic Har­mo­ny, Jus­tice, and the Church (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “We sim­ply can­not allow pol­i­tics or sec­u­lar cul­ture to define our terms or deter­mine our beliefs. Jesus puts his fin­ger on eth­nic har­mo­ny and says, ‘Mine.’ There­fore, the aim of these affir­ma­tions and denials is to right­ly rep­re­sent the voice of Jesus Christ. The One who designed eth­nic diver­si­ty has unpar­al­leled author­i­ty and has the final word on the whole issue.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Place­bo Of Affir­ma­tive Action (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “A recent David Shor analy­sis found that, among Demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­cies, affir­ma­tive action was among the most unpop­u­lar — with even less sup­port than ‘defund the police.’ More tan­gi­bly: on the nine occa­sions the pol­i­cy has been put to the elec­toral test since 1996, it has lost eight times, most recent­ly in super-lib­er­al Cal­i­for­nia in 2020.”
  6. Three Para­dox­es of Athe­ism (Neil Shen­vi, per­son­al web­site): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, one of the most attrac­tive fea­tures of athe­ism has been its claim to stark real­ism. No mat­ter how unap­peal­ing a god­less uni­verse may turn out to be, athe­ists claim to be com­mit­ted to adher­ing to the truth at all costs. How­ev­er, in this essay I would like to show that at the very heart of athe­ism are sev­er­al extreme­ly unex­pect­ed para­dox­es, areas in which athe­ism is shown to be in ten­sion with a com­mit­ment to real­ism and a life con­sis­tent with truth.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Spread of Catholic hos­pi­tals lim­its repro­duc­tive care across the U.S. (Frances Stead Sell­ers and Meena Venkatara­manan, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Catholic sys­tems now con­trol about 1 in 7 U.S. hos­pi­tal beds, requir­ing reli­gious doc­trine to guide treat­ment, often to the sur­prise of patients.”
    • The above arti­cle annoyed me and I was pleased to see this response: As Wash­ing­ton Post tar­gets Catholic hos­pi­tals, every reli­gious insti­tu­tion needs to build defens­es (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er):  “These jour­nal­ists write as if the base­line is total accep­tance of abor­tion, gay mar­riage, and trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy and that the scary new thing is the reli­gious hos­pi­tals or teach­ings that have been around for cen­turies or mil­len­nia. ‘Spread of Catholic hos­pi­tals’ is a fun­ny head­line because Catholics were the ones who invent­ed hos­pi­tals. If you want­ed to write a trend piece, you should real­ly write about the spread of laws and law­suits threat­en­ing Catholic hos­pi­tals, which are actu­al­ly new.”

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 Is Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal in Israel Myth? Or Real­i­ty? (Ralph Hawkins, Logos): “When I was work­ing on my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion about the Ebal site, I spent a week with Zer­tal. One morn­ing while we were dri­ving to the site, he told me his crit­ics had accused him of try­ing to prove the Bible. They said he imposed a cul­tic inter­pre­ta­tion onto the stone struc­ture he had found. He explained, though, that he had been born and raised in Ein She­mer, Israeli kib­butz that was affil­i­at­ed with a sec­u­lar move­ment. He said he had grown up believ­ing that the Bible was full of myths. When he did his grad­u­ate work in archae­ol­o­gy, he did it at Tel Aviv, the most lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, where those views were rein­forced. He insist­ed he had not embarked on his exca­va­tion at Mount Ebal in order to prove the Bible. What he found there, how­ev­er, had a pro­found effect on him. He said, ‘I became a believ­er at Mount Ebal.’” I love sto­ries like this. Archae­ol­o­gy and the Bible is fas­ci­nat­ing to me. From vol­ume 243.

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 370

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

This is vol­ume 370, a nar­cis­sis­tic num­ber (some­times also called an Arm­strong num­ber). It has three dig­its, and when you raise each dig­it to the third pow­er they sum to the orig­i­nal num­ber: 370 = 33 + 73 + 03. There are only 88 nar­cis­sis­tic num­bers in base 10, and only 4 of those have three dig­its (153, 370, 371, and 407).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (or More) Unskip­pable Ads in a Row (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “This, my friends, is the web we asked for. We want­ed every­thing for free—but what we real­ly got was a swamp where all the costs are still there, just hid­den. And the expe­ri­ence we have gained from oth­er indus­tries where prices are most­ly hid­den from view—healthcare is the most obvi­ous exam­ple, but of course there are others—is that this usu­al­ly turns out to be the most expen­sive trans­ac­tion of them all.”
    • This is real­ly good!
  2. For Sub­ur­ban Texas Men, a Work­out Craze With a Side of Faith (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “This is F3 — that’s fit­ness, fel­low­ship and faith — a fast-grow­ing net­work of men’s work­outs that com­bine exer­cise with spir­i­tu­al­ly inflect­ed cama­raderie.… I first heard about F3 through a few acquain­tances in Texas, men who spoke about their local groups with the zeal of evan­ge­lists. It remind­ed me of how urban women used to talk with me about Soul­Cy­cle, only these guys were sub­ur­ban fathers.”
    • A Short Sto­ry of Men (David French, The Dis­patch): “What is the short sto­ry of mod­ern men? Life has changed for­ev­er. Ide­o­logues pull men and boys into destruc­tive and unsus­tain­able extremes. Yet vir­tu­ous pur­pose can still be found in the fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks of the good life. Only a man can be a hus­band, only a man can be a father, and men need male friends. If a man can fill those roles with integri­ty and courage, then doubts about his mas­culin­i­ty should not ever dark­en his heart.”
    • This is a response piece inspired by the above sto­ry about F3.
  3. The Chero­kee Nation is again call­ing on Con­gress to deliv­er on a 200-year-old promise (Harmeet Kaur, CNN): “The Chero­kee Nation is renew­ing its cam­paign for rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Con­gress, call­ing on fed­er­al leg­is­la­tors to hon­or a treaty that the US gov­ern­ment made near­ly 200 years ago. In a video released last week, the trib­al nation reassert­ed its demand that Con­gress seat its del­e­gate in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives – a right stip­u­lat­ed by the 1835 Treaty of New Echo­ta.”
    • From what I can tell this is a legit claim: the treaty was approved by the US Sen­ate even though shady things hap­pened on the the Chero­kee side (the treaty was entered into by Chero­kees not autho­rized to nego­ti­ate on behalf of their tribe). I don’t know why this is con­tro­ver­sial: Amer­i­ca took the land, we need to hon­or all the terms of the deal.
  4. ‘Out of con­trol’ STD sit­u­a­tion prompts call for changes (Mike Sto­bbe, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “New syphilis infec­tions plum­met­ed in the U.S. start­ing in the 1940s when antibi­otics became wide­ly avail­able. They fell to their low­est ever by 1998, when few­er than 7,000 new cas­es were report­ed nation­wide. The CDC was so encour­aged by the progress it launched a plan to elim­i­nate syphilis in the U.S. But by 2002 cas­es began ris­ing again, large­ly among gay and bisex­u­al men, and they kept going. In late 2013, CDC end­ed its elim­i­na­tion cam­paign in the face of lim­it­ed fund­ing and esca­lat­ing cas­es, which that year sur­passed 17,000. By 2020 cas­es had reached near­ly 41,700 and they spiked even fur­ther last year, to more than 52,000.”
    • That’s a 26% jump just last year!
    • As STD rates explode, are we still sure God’s way isn’t bet­ter? (Peter Heck, Not The Bee): “There’s more to the Chris­t­ian sex­u­al eth­ic than a despot­ic list of don’ts. There’s a holis­tic and healthy ide­al that includes rec­og­niz­ing the per­son you are dat­ing is some­one’s future spouse and should be treat­ed with the same dig­ni­ty that we would want anoth­er treat­ing our future spouse. There’s an endur­ing com­men­da­tion of the for­ma­tion of life­long, lov­ing rela­tion­ships built not upon tawdry lusts but self-sac­ri­fi­cial com­mit­ment; the recog­ni­tion that love is not some­thing we feel, but some­thing we do. There’s a self-con­trol that pro­tects human­i­ty and lib­er­ates it from sick­ness and suf­fer­ing. It’s God’s way…”
    • I often think upon this fact: if the Chris­t­ian sex­u­al eth­ic were uni­ver­sal­ly observed for one gen­er­a­tion STDs would be essen­tial­ly elim­i­nat­ed.
  5. Illib­er­al­ism Is For (Cul­tur­al) Losers (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “Illib­er­al­ism, the deep desire to deny to oth­ers their rights of con­science and belief and prop­er­ty that we our­selves enjoy and to force them into con­for­mi­ty to our vision of the com­mon good by way of coer­cive State pow­er is the last resort of losers. Cul­tur­al losers. Abi­gail Adams would judge that such peo­ple are unfit for lib­er­ty; or at least they are peo­ple who can’t accom­plish any­thing fruit­ful with it. I have a bet­ter idea. Reform our weak insti­tu­tions, and where we can­not, we build bet­ter ones and be cul­tur­al win­ners.”
  6. An ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ men­tal­i­ty on cam­pus­es turns poten­tial friends into allies — or ene­mies (Pamela Paresky and Samuel J. Abrams, Boston Globe): “Accord­ing to an NBC poll released in August, only 20 per­cent of col­lege sopho­mores sur­veyed said they can def­i­nite­ly see them­selves room­ing with some­one who vot­ed dif­fer­ent­ly than they did in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. And more than half said they prob­a­bly or def­i­nite­ly couldn’t see them­selves dat­ing such a stu­dent. Cam­pus cul­ture seems to fur­ther social dis­con­nec­tion rather than fos­ter friend­ship across the polit­i­cal divide.”
    • The authors are schol­ars of psy­chol­o­gy and pol­i­tics, respec­tive­ly. I read this one most­ly because the thumb­nail pre­view is of Stan­ford.
  7. The ‘Liz­zo Play­ing James Madis­on’s Flute’ Con­tro­ver­sy: A Blogger’s Analy­sis (Nick Catog­gio, The Dis­patch): “H ad you heard of Madison’s flute before Liz­zo played it? I hadn’t. I’d heard of her but not it. It was she who lent celebri­ty to the instru­ment, not vice ver­sa. You may find that dispir­it­ing, although I’m not sure why any of us should have base­line knowl­edge about a ran­dom gift giv­en to James Madi­son that played no mean­ing­ful role in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Me, I’m thrilled to have learned about it via this episode. A crys­tal flute! Made for the father of the Con­sti­tu­tion! Played for the first time in 200 years by a celebrity—totally ran­dom­ly! It wouldn’t sur­prise me if it turns out to have mag­i­cal pow­ers and Liz­zo has now been pos­sessed by Madison’s ghost. Which, if so, would make her next con­cert a must-see. But I digress. The last rea­son this sto­ry is instant blog fod­der is because, per the fore­go­ing, it’s quirky as all hell.”

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 Nuclear Fam­i­ly Was a Mis­take (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you want to sum­ma­rize the changes in fam­i­ly struc­ture over the past cen­tu­ry, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for indi­vid­u­als and more unsta­ble for fam­i­lies. We’ve made life bet­ter for adults but worse for chil­dren. We’ve moved from big, inter­con­nect­ed, and extend­ed fam­i­lies, which helped pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple in soci­ety from the shocks of life, to small­er, detached nuclear fam­i­lies (a mar­ried cou­ple and their chil­dren), which give the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in soci­ety room to max­i­mize their tal­ents and expand their options. The shift from big­ger and inter­con­nect­ed extend­ed fam­i­lies to small­er and detached nuclear fam­i­lies ulti­mate­ly led to a famil­ial sys­tem that lib­er­ates the rich and rav­ages the work­ing-class and the poor.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. From vol­ume 238.

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 369

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

This is post 369, which I like sim­ply because 3+6=9.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Sug­ar Babies of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty (Nico­la Buskirk, Sub­stack): “But decades after the unwind­ing of America’s tra­di­tion­al sex­u­al mores, no new moral­i­ty has clear­ly emerged, and young peo­ple increas­ing­ly find them­selves nav­i­gat­ing a cul­ture of sex­u­al anar­chy, in which — pro­vid­ed an act is con­sen­su­al — there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Such think­ing has brought us inevitably to the rise of Only­Fans, the nor­mal­iza­tion of sex work, and the curi­ous sto­ry of Stan­ford University’s sug­ar babies.”
    • A curi­ous sto­ry indeed!
  2. Wikipedia Is Mak­ing Us More Polit­i­cal (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “There is sim­ply no par­al­lel to this with any oth­er peri­od of media his­to­ry; the dig­i­tal age is the very first to say that we should have access to a repos­i­to­ry of a person’s most con­tro­ver­sial sen­tences, per­ma­nent­ly acces­si­ble through their bio­graph­i­cal data.… All of these exam­ples ampli­fy the role of pol­i­tics in cul­ture, by mak­ing par­ti­san opin­ions a vital part of a person’s bio­graph­i­cal data. There is no dis­tinc­tion any more between the per­son who, through their voca­tion­al or per­son­al choic­es, decides to become a polit­i­cal fig­ure, and the per­son who is per­ceived as polit­i­cal. What we know about the one is pret­ty much what we know about the oth­er. Thus, hyper-politi­ciza­tion of every­thing feels much more nor­mal.”
  3. So you haven’t caught COVID yet. Does that mean you’re a super­dodger? (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “Your immune response and these T cells fire up much more quick­ly [than in a per­son with­out the HLA muta­tion],” Hol­len­bach says. “So for lack of a bet­ter term, you basi­cal­ly nuke the infec­tion before you even start to have symp­toms.… It’s def­i­nite­ly luck,” she says. “But, you know, this muta­tion is quite com­mon. We esti­mate that maybe 1 in 10 peo­ple have it. And in peo­ple who are asymp­to­matic, that ris­es to 1 in 5.”
    • Relat­ed: The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic feels over but is not actu­al­ly over. (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “For the time being I will still mask at air­ports and on air­planes and occa­sion­al­ly in very large indoor gath­er­ings. Oth­er than that, I’m done. I am vac­ci­nat­ed, boost­ed and had COVID-19 ear­li­er this year, so the prospect of con­tract­ing it again seems both less like­ly and less scary. The thing is, I con­fess to being unsure whether I have made the right prob­a­bil­i­ty cal­cu­la­tions.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al pol­i­tics at Tufts.
  4. Why Is The Cen­tral Val­ley So Bad? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “A short dri­ve through [the Cen­tral Val­ley] is enough to notice pover­ty, decay, and home­less camps worse even than the rest of Cal­i­for­nia. But I didn’t real­ize how bad it was until read­ing this piece on the San Joaquin Riv­er. It claims that if the Cen­tral Val­ley were its own state, it would be the poor­est in Amer­i­ca, even worse than Mis­sis­sip­pi. This was kind of shock­ing. I always think of Mis­sis­sip­pi as bad because of a his­to­ry of racial vio­lence, racial seg­re­ga­tion, and get­ting burned down dur­ing the Civ­il War. But the Cen­tral Val­ley has none of those things, plus it has extreme­ly fer­tile farm­land, plus it’s in one of the rich­est states of the coun­try and should at least get good sub­si­dies and infra­struc­ture. How did it get so bad?”
  5. Cov­er­age of church­es:
    • Doug Wil­son in Ida­ho:
      1. Pas­tor Seeks To Make Moscow, Ida­ho A ‘Chris­t­ian Town’  (NBC News, YouTube): twelve min­utes.
      2. What NBC Did­n’t Show You (Dou­glas Wil­son, YouTube): Wilson’s response video, four and a half min­utes.
      3. NBC News Lends a Hand (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “As I have said else­where, I am grate­ful that it was not a hit piece—they let both sides talk, in oth­er words. It was even-hand­ed in that way. At the same time, it was clear that what we were say­ing must have sound­ed some­thing like Mid­dle Klin­gon to them, and this of course affects the edit­ing process.”
    • Gra­ce­point at Berke­ley:
      1. The Ungod­ly Sur­veil­lance of Anti-Porn ‘Shame­ware’ Apps (Dhruv Mehro­tra, Wired): “At its most basic lev­el, the idea is pret­ty straight­for­ward: Why would any­one watch porn if they are going to have to talk to their par­ents or pas­tor about it?… The trou­ble is, accord­ing to Hao-Wei Lin, pro­vid­ing his church leader with a ledger of every­thing he did online meant his pas­tor could always find some­thing to ask him about, and the way Covenant Eyes flagged con­tent didn’t help. For exam­ple, in Covenant Eyes reports that Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED, his online psy­chi­a­try text­book was rat­ed ‘High­ly Mature,’ the most severe cat­e­go­ry of con­tent reserved for ‘anonymiz­ers, nudi­ty, erot­i­ca, and pornog­ra­phy.’ ”
      2. At Gra­ce­point Min­istries, ‘Whole-Life Dis­ci­ple­ship’ Took Its Toll (Cur­tis Yee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Thir­ty-two for­mer Gra­ce­point mem­bers who spoke with Chris­tian­i­ty Today for this sto­ry described a cul­ture that was ‘con­trol­ling’ and ‘coer­cive’ for the sake of min­istry effi­cien­cy. Mem­bers said they were manip­u­lat­ed into con­fess­ing sins, screamed at by lead­ers, and over­loaded with oblig­a­tions to the point of ill­ness. To keep mem­bers focused on mis­sion work, Gra­ce­point effec­tive­ly restrict­ed dat­ing, media con­sump­tion, and pet own­er­ship. Lead­ers direct­ed staff on how to arrange their homes, where to shop for clothes, and what cars to dri­ve.”
  6. Rich Mullins: Raga­muf­fin, Celebri­ty, Dis­ci­ple (Bethel McGrew, Plough): “You might have called him a frus­trat­ed strug­gling artist: a suc­cess­ful artist who nev­er want­ed to suc­ceed. When Myrrh records first called to say Amy Grant want­ed to record his song ‘Sing Your Praise to the Lord,’ he near­ly hung up. But it would be a hit, the first of many. He wrote nat­u­ral­ly to the peo­ple, com­ple­ment­ing his poet­ic lyri­cism with a good pop writer’s ear for how to con­vey pro­found ideas sim­ply. His arrange­ments were an eclec­tic fusion of pop and folk, most famous­ly intro­duc­ing radio to his sig­na­ture instru­ment, the ham­mered dul­cimer. This was the secret sauce that made hit sin­gles out of songs like the atmos­pher­ic West­ern nature poem ‘Call­ing Out Your Name’ – a tune which, by all the rules of hit sin­gles, should nev­er even have been on the air. As one fan put it, Mullins was weird, but he was also so good that radio had to play him.”
    • Mullins was unique and bril­liant and I am still sad he is dead. He was before your time, so I doubt you will believe me when I say that he by him­self out­weighed the entire Chris­t­ian music indus­try that you have been exposed to. But he was that good. It was more than his music. It was his life.

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 Killing Human Mon­sters (Mark LiVec­chi, Prov­i­dence): “‘The inter­nal con­di­tion of God’s exter­nal expres­sion of wrath,’ writes the the­olo­gian and rab­bi Abra­ham Joshua Hes­chel, ‘is grief.’ To the best I can deduce, there­in is com­mu­ni­cat­ed the com­plex dis­po­si­tion of the just war­rior.… I do not rejoice that I wor­ship a God who kills. I only rejoice that I wor­ship a God who is will­ing to.” From vol­ume 236.

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 366

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

This is the 366th of these mis­sives, which is not only the num­ber of days in a leap year but also  82 + 92 + 102+ 112.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No Promis­es (Eve Tush­net, Plough): “In con­fes­sion you do not seek pri­mar­i­ly moral improve­ment but rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with God. The con­fes­sion­al is less a class­room and more a tryst­ing place. In my own life, my best cur­rent under­stand­ing of what I’m doing is not that I’ve turned away from drunk­en­ness and to absti­nence; absti­nence is an absence. It’s slight­ly more true to say that I am turn­ing from drunk­en­ness to sobri­ety: a path of peace. But it is most true to say that I hope to turn from drunk­en­ness to Christ. And this in all things: not from vice to virtue but from vice to God.”
  2. Humans Are All More Close­ly Relat­ed Than We Com­mon­ly Think (Scott Her­sh­berg­er, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “…our most recent com­mon ances­tor prob­a­bly lived no ear­li­er than 1400 B.C.and pos­si­bly as recent­ly as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefer­ti­ti, some­one from whom we are all descend­ed was like­ly alive some­where in the world. Go back a bit fur­ther, and you reach a date when our fam­i­ly trees share not just one ances­tor in com­mon but every ances­tor in com­mon.… some­where between 5300 and 2200 B.C.,according to Rohde’s cal­cu­la­tions.”
    • If only there was an ancient and holy book which attest­ed some­thing sim­i­lar…
  3. Why Are We in Ukraine? (Christo­pher Cald­well, Clare­mont Review of Books): “The attempt to iso­late Rus­sia from the Amer­i­can world sys­tem has had a strik­ing unin­tend­ed consequence—the pos­si­ble found­ing of an alter­na­tive world sys­tem that would draw pow­er away from the exist­ing one. Twen­ty years ago, under George W. Bush, the Unit­ed States removed the Iraqi deter­rent from Iran’s neigh­bor­hood, trans­form­ing Iran overnight into a region­al pow­er. This year, under Joe Biden, the Unit­ed States has made Chi­na a gift of Russia’s exportable food and min­er­al resources. We are dis­play­ing an out­right genius for iden­ti­fy­ing our most dan­ger­ous mil­i­tary adver­sary and solv­ing its most press­ing strate­gic chal­lenge.”
    • In relat­ed news, these two arti­cles by Rod Dreher are the clear­est things I’ve seen high­light­ing the prob­lems Europe is fac­ing as a result of the Ukrain­ian war. Scary times.
    • Neron­ian Rul­ing Class Fid­dles While West Burns (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As rich as the West is, it can’t keep its peo­ple warm in the win­ter by burn­ing cash. And so, Euro­pean house­holds are now being forced to ask if freez­ing in the dark for Ukraine is some­thing they real­ly want to do. This is not going to hap­pen to Amer­i­cans — but you should think about how you would react if this were you, and your elder­ly par­ents, and your kids. Yes, Putin is an SOB, but this is the real world.”
    • Can You Heat Europe With Von Der Leyen’s Hot Air? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To be clear: Putin was wicked to invade Ukraine, and I wish Rus­sia would lose that war. But Rus­sia is not los­ing that war; the West is. It is unspeak­ably arro­gant for Ursu­la von der Leyen to say Putin is not being crick­et to use eco­nom­ics as a weapon of war, when she and the group of nations she leads have spent the last six months doing exact­ly the same thing to Rus­sia, only with­out much effect. Rus­sia, obvi­ous­ly, has the bet­ter hand — and it’s play­ing it. Again: we are ruled by fools who pre­fer sun­ny ide­o­log­i­cal dreams to cold real­i­ty … of the sort that’s going to hit Euro­pean homes and busi­ness­es very hard by Jan­u­ary.”
  4. Sub­ma­rine Cables and Con­tain­er Ship­ments: Two Imme­di­ate Risks to the US Econ­o­my if Chi­na Invades Tai­wan (Chris­tine McDaniel and Weifeng Zhong, Mer­ca­tus): “The poten­tial effects of a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan on the US econ­o­my are far greater than those of the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine. Con­tain­er ship­ments to and from major ports in the region, as well as dig­i­tal flows, would be at direct risk. Chi­na and Tai­wan are also major sup­pli­ers and con­sumers for US major trad­ing part­ners around the globe from Japan and Ger­many to Sau­di Ara­bia. The effects of a cri­sis or block­ade would be felt by every major econ­o­my, which, in turn, would pro­duce addi­tion­al neg­a­tive effects for the US econ­o­my.”
  5. Octo­pus­es Don’t Have Back­bones — or Rights (New York Times): “…male blue-ringed octo­pus­es could use touch to rec­og­nize females they’d already mat­ed with. After bump­ing into a for­mer mate, the males fled, per­haps to avoid being eat­en. Such research sug­gests that octo­pus­es and oth­er cephalopods are smart and sen­si­tive.”
    • That’s a fun­ny excerpt. More seri­ous­ly, I thought this point was quite inter­est­ing: “Dr. Nie­mi said crit­ics have point­ed out that ani­mal care com­mit­tees have rarely denied approval to researchers. But in his expe­ri­ence, this is because com­mit­tees go back and forth with a sci­en­tist to revise the plan until it is accept­able.”
  6. Death in Navy SEAL Train­ing Expos­es a Cul­ture of Bru­tal­i­ty, Cheat­ing and Drugs (Dave Philipps, New York Times): “Sailors who enter the pro­gram bol­stered by steroids and hor­mones can push hard­er, recov­er faster and prob­a­bly beat out the sailors who are try­ing to become SEALs while clean, said one senior SEAL leader with mul­ti­ple com­bat deploy­ments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up select­ing only the very best cheaters, and steadi­ly fill the SEAL teams with war fight­ers who view rules as option­al. ‘What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?’ said the leader. ‘A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an eth­i­cal deci­sion?’ ” 
    • This sto­ry has INSANE details.
  7. New sto­ries on New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, Sean Feucht keep assum­ing a right-wing takeover (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…he doesn’t claim to be a pas­tor who’s expect­ed to take a qua­si-vow of prop­er­ty; he’s a rock musi­cian who does what oth­er enter­tain­ers do: Haul in the cash. He just hap­pens to have put a Chris­t­ian veneer on it all, and he’s doing for con­ser­v­a­tives what lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood elites have done for the Left for years.  If you look at Feucht in that light — as an astute enter­tain­er who wise­ly grasped peo­ples’ anger at church shut-downs in 2020 and exploit­ed it in a series of con­certs — his wealth doesn’t seem as unusu­al.”
    • I found this piece very inter­est­ing. At its best, GetRe­li­gion high­lights how news sto­ries in major pub­li­ca­tions get basic facts wrong about reli­gion (espe­cial­ly tra­di­tion­al reli­gions) and miss impor­tant insights as a result. This is one of their bet­ter pieces in a while.

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  Film Experts: Why Chris­t­ian Movies Are a Joke (Dou­glas Wil­son): “Ste­fan Malar­ney (Hot Tub Time Machine) made the obser­va­tion that Chris­t­ian film mak­ers sim­ply refuse to pick mate­r­i­al that is true to life. Andre Caproni (Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies) agreed, adding that unless we address the human con­di­tion with integri­ty, we are deny­ing some­thing essen­tial­ly spir­i­tu­al about our­selves.” For the record, this is satire. From vol­ume 233.

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 365

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

This is vol­ume 365, which is the num­ber of days in most years. In oth­er words, I’ve done the equiv­a­lent of work­ing on this email dai­ly for a year. In real­i­ty I just add a lit­tle bit every day as I’m read­ing things, but it’s still a big sta­tis­tic.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good. And, above all, lis­ten to your moth­er.”
    • Warn­ing: the head­er pic­ture is risque but the arti­cle is worth it. The author is not a Chris­t­ian and unsur­pris­ing­ly comes to some non-Chris­t­ian con­clu­sions — still fas­ci­nat­ing to see a force­ful sec­u­lar rejec­tion of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion.
  2. Racism-relat­ed:
    • Black cou­ple sues after they say home val­u­a­tion ris­es near­ly $300,000 when shown by White col­league (Justin Gam­ble and Vir­ginia Lang­maid, CNN): “Con­nol­ly and Mott lat­er re-applied with anoth­er lender, and ‘white­washed’ their home, accord­ing to the law­suit. This includ­ed remov­ing pho­tos of their Black fam­i­ly from the home, and hav­ing a White col­league present the prop­er­ty to the apprais­er. The suit claims this val­u­a­tion came back at $750,000, more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars high­er than 20/20 Val­u­a­tions’ appraisal of $472,000.”
    • In California’s largest race bias cas­es, Lati­no work­ers are accused of abus­ing Black col­leagues (Mar­got Roo­sevelt, Los Ange­les Times): “Though the agency tracks the race and eth­nic­i­ty of vic­tims, it does not com­pile offi­cial sta­tis­tics on offend­ers. Nor are there data­bas­es of pri­vate cas­es cat­e­go­rized by per­pe­tra­tors’ race. This makes it hard to gauge the extent of anti-Black hos­til­i­ty from Lati­no work­ers. But court fil­ings, vic­tims’ alle­ga­tions and employ­er records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Ange­les and San Fran­cis­co offices involved dis­crim­i­na­tion by Lati­nos, about a third involved white offend­ers and a third were unspe­cif­ic.”
  3. Chris­t­ian Polit­i­cal Ethics Are Upside Down (David French, The Dis­patch): “…both the Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties are utter­ly depen­dent upon their most devout mem­bers for their elec­toral suc­cess. As I’ve not­ed before, non­white Democ­rats (and espe­cial­ly black Democ­rats) are among the most God-fear­ing, church­go­ing mem­bers of Amer­i­can soci­ety. At the same time, the Repub­li­can Par­ty would be irrel­e­vant with­out its own white Evan­gel­i­cal base. The bot­tom line is that Chris­tians in both par­ties have absolute veto pow­er over (at the very least) the party’s nation­al can­di­dates.”
  4. Silent cri­sis of soar­ing excess deaths grip­ping Britain is only tip of the ice­berg (Sarah Knap­ton, The Tele­graph via Yahoo News): “For 14 of the past 15 weeks, Eng­land and Wales have aver­aged around 1,000 extra deaths each week, none of which are due to Covid. If the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry con­tin­ues, the num­ber of non-Covid excess deaths will soon out­strip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more dead­ly than the omi­cron wave. So what is going on? Experts believe deci­sions tak­en by the Gov­ern­ment in the ear­li­est stages of the pan­dem­ic may now be com­ing back to bite. Poli­cies that kept peo­ple indoors, scared them away from hos­pi­tals and deprived them of treat­ment and pri­ma­ry care are final­ly tak­ing their toll.”
  5. The Rise of the Work­er Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Score (Jodi Kan­tor and Arya Sun­daram, New York Times): “…two years ago, her employ­er start­ed requir­ing chap­lains to accrue more of what it called ‘pro­duc­tiv­i­ty points.’ A vis­it to the dying: as lit­tle as one point. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in a funer­al: one and three-quar­ters points. A phone call to griev­ing rel­a­tives: one-quar­ter point.”
  6. Good con­ver­sa­tions have lots of door­knobs (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Con­ver­sa­tion­al affor­dances are things like digres­sions and con­fes­sions and bold claims that beg for a rejoin­der. Talk­ing to anoth­er per­son is like rock climb­ing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist our­selves sky­ward. Maybe that’s why a real­ly good con­ver­sa­tion feels a lit­tle bit like float­ing. What mat­ters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affor­dances.” The author has a PhD in psy­chol­o­gy from Har­vard and is doing a post­doc at Colum­bia study­ing con­ver­sa­tions.
    • Relat­ed: Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “…most of us are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mis­tak­en about how much we will enjoy a social encounter. Com­muters expect­ed to have less pleas­ant rides if they tried to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger. But their actu­al expe­ri­ence was pre­cise­ly the oppo­site. Peo­ple ran­dom­ly assigned to talk with a stranger enjoyed their trips con­sis­tent­ly more than those instruct­ed to keep to them­selves. Intro­verts some­times go into these sit­u­a­tions with par­tic­u­lar­ly low expec­ta­tions, but both intro­verts and extro­verts tend­ed to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions more than rid­ing solo.”
  7. Put Down the Woke Man’s Bur­den (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “The Har­vard being whipped along by the admin­is­tra­tive caste, by con­trast, resem­bles the Children’s Cru­sade of the Mid­dle Ages: wrong cause, wrong army. And it ends up attack­ing the wrong ene­mies.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Relat­ed: Harvard’s Sta­tus as Wealth­i­est School Faces Oil-Rich Con­tender in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas (Janet Lorin & Ser­gio Cha­pa, Bloomberg): “Oil reached a high of $120 a bar­rel ear­li­er this year as a result of a war-induced ener­gy crunch. The rev­enue is expect­ed to help nar­row the gap between the Texas system’s $42.9 bil­lion endow­ment and Harvard’s $53.2 bil­lion as of June 2021. ‘The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas has a cash wind­fall when every­one is look­ing at a poten­tial cash crunch,’ said William Goet­z­mann, a pro­fes­sor of finance and man­age­ment stud­ies at Yale University’s School of Man­age­ment. ‘Adjust­ing your port­fo­lio for social con­cerns is not cost­less.’ ”

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 Too much trans­paren­cy makes the world more opaque. (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The demand for trans­paren­cy seems so innocu­ous. Who could be against greater trans­paren­cy? But trans­paren­cy is inim­i­cal to pri­va­cy. And we care about pri­va­cy in part, because we can be more hon­est and truth­ful in pri­vate than in public.”First shared in vol­ume 233.

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.