Tag: how the church is perceived

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 363

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 num­ber 363, which can be rep­re­sent­ed as 31 + 32 + 33 + 34 + 35

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why aren’t smart peo­ple hap­pi­er? (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “My grand­ma does not know how to use the ‘input’ but­ton on her TV’s remote con­trol, but she does know how to raise a fam­i­ly full of good peo­ple who love each oth­er, how to car­ry on through a tragedy, and how to make the per­fect pump­kin pie.… Exclud­ing this kind of intel­li­gence from our def­i­n­i­tions doesn’t just hurt our grandmas—it hurts us too. If you don’t val­ue the abil­i­ty to solve poor­ly defined prob­lems, you’ll nev­er get more of it. You won’t seek out peo­ple who have that abil­i­ty and try to learn from them, nor will you lis­ten to them when they have some­thing impor­tant to say. You’ll spend your whole life try­ing to solve prob­lems with clev­er­ness when what you real­ly need is wis­dom.”
  2. New York City’s Largest Evan­gel­i­cal Church Plans Bil­lion-Dol­lar Devel­op­ment (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “On 10.5 acres of church land, the pro­posed vil­lage would include thou­sands of units of afford­able hous­ing, a trade school, a super­mar­ket, a per­form­ing arts cen­ter, 24/7 child­care for night-shift work­ers, senior liv­ing facil­i­ties, and oth­er ameni­ties designed to revi­tal­ize the East New York neigh­bor­hood.”
    • But I thought church­es were leech­es on soci­ety exploit­ing their tax-exempt sta­tus with­out help­ing their com­mu­ni­ties! I’m sure some­one told me that once. 
  3. When mix­ing faith with fur­ries, things can get hairy (Riley Far­rell, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “…Chris­tians in the fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty are cau­tious about who knows about both their fur­ry and faith­ful selves. Chris­t­ian fur­ries inter­viewed for this sto­ry, includ­ing lead­ers of the group that calls itself the Chris­t­ian Fur­ry Fel­low­ship, asked to be anony­mous, fear­ing ‘doxxing’ from with­in the large­ly sec­u­lar fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty for their Chris­t­ian iden­ti­ty and ostra­ciza­tion from their pro­fes­sion­al lives for their fur­ry hob­by.”
    • This was by far the most unex­pect­ed arti­cle I read this week. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing here. I draw your atten­tion to my dis­claimers.
  4. Fact-Check­ing Ran­dall Balmer’s Urban Leg­end on the Real Ori­gin of the Reli­gious Right (Jonathan White­head, The Gospel Coali­tion): “By the ear­ly 1970s, Evan­gel­i­cals, Catholics, and oth­er reli­gious vot­ers had dis­cov­ered that pol­i­tics would not leave them alone. Then their con­cerns about abor­tion, gov­ern­ment over­reach in schools, sec­u­lar human­ism at the FCC, and an unre­spon­sive ‘born again’ Pres­i­dent all merged into a sin­gle out­let, cre­at­ing a tor­rent of Repub­li­can vot­ers in 1978 and beyond.”
    • I post­ed a debunk­ing of this claim a while ago, but this one is quite good. And the claim gets repeat­ed enough in cer­tain cir­cles that debunk­ings should be repeat­ed as well.
  5. There Is a Sec­u­lar Case for Life (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amidst a squadron of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers, there was a sin­gle athe­ist pro­gres­sive. He was beard­ed, disheveled, and qui­et, but when he spoke every­one fell silent. Every­one leaned for­ward to hear what he had to say. His name was Nat Hentoff. He was a writer for the Vil­lage Voice; he’d pub­lished in Play­boy. He was a pro­gres­sive civ­il lib­er­tar­i­an. He was also one of the most per­sua­sive pro-life voic­es in the land.”
  6. Yearn­ing for a Banana Repub­lic (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “When seri­ous peo­ple talk seri­ous­ly about chang­ing a regime, they’re talk­ing about chang­ing the sys­tem of gov­ern­ment. Regime change in Iraq meant get­ting rid of a total­i­tar­i­an, ter­ror­is­tic dic­ta­tor­ship, not sim­ply replac­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein with a more pli­able and coop­er­a­tive tyrant. America’s regime isn’t on any bal­lot. Sym­bol­i­cal­ly, it is the bal­lot. More prop­er­ly, it is the con­sti­tu­tion­al sys­tem that requires our lead­ers to be elect­ed.”
    • This is straight fire. Not espe­cial­ly par­ti­san but def­i­nite­ly polit­i­cal. Gold­berg is a tremen­dous word­smith.
  7. 1st syn­thet­ic mouse embryos — com­plete with beat­ing hearts and brains — cre­at­ed with no sperm, eggs or womb (Nico­let­ta Lanese, Live Sci­ence): “To achieve this feat, the researchers used only stem cells and a spin­ning device filled with shiny glass vials.”
    • The title is, I think, poor­ly word­ed. These are not embryos assem­bled from raw mate­ri­als; rather, the researchers suc­cess­ful­ly mor­phed a stem cell into an embryo. Which is also amaz­ing!

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  Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.” First shared in vol­ume 232. (sad­ly, this is pay­walled)

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 361

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 361, which is also the num­ber of inter­sec­tions on a Go board.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Actu­al­ly Good AI-Gen­er­at­ed Bible Art with DALL·E 2 (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “The GPT‑3 prompts I used evolved over time, but this one is emblem­at­ic: Sug­gest 5 unique con­cept ideas for a work of visu­al art inspired by Luke 14:7–11 (do not pick the place of hon­or) in the Bible. Include art direc­tion and a spe­cif­ic medi­um and artist to emu­late. Include artists from a vari­ety of eras, styles, and media. Try for an unusu­al per­spec­tive. Title, year, medi­um. Descrip­tion.”
    • Some of these are stun­ning. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Reli­gion Is Dying? Don’t Believe It (Byron R. John­son & Jeff Levin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Data from five recent U.S. pop­u­la­tion sur­veys point to the vibran­cy, ubiq­ui­ty and growth of reli­gion in the U.S. Amer­i­cans are becom­ing more reli­gious, and reli­gious insti­tu­tions are thriv­ing. Con­sis­tent with some pre­vi­ous stud­ies but con­trary to wide­ly held assump­tions, many peo­ple who report no reli­gious affiliation—and even many self-iden­ti­fied athe­ists and agnostics—exhibit sub­stan­tial lev­els of reli­gious prac­tice and belief.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors of social sci­ence and epi­demi­ol­o­gy, respec­tive­ly. I one hun­dred per­cent believe this report. The so-called “rise of the nones” is most­ly the result of con­fir­ma­tion bias by sec­u­lar aca­d­e­mics and jour­nal­ists who find reli­gious­ly com­mit­ted peo­ple annoy­ing.
    • This WSJ arti­cle (which I think is pay­walled) is based on the freely avail­able schol­ar­ly arti­cle: Are Reli­gious “Nones” Real­ly Not Reli­gious?: Revis­it­ing Glenn, Three Decades Lat­er (Levin et al, Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Jour­nal of Research on Reli­gion): “The use of words and phras­es such as none, no reli­gion, and not reli­gious to describe this group of unaf­fil­i­at­ed indi­vid­u­als is thus inap­pro­pri­ate, inac­cu­rate, and mis­lead­ing.”
  3. Which Sins Are Feed­ing Your Sin of Lust? (David Powli­son, Cross­way): “Tom con­cen­trat­ed all his atten­tion on one mar­quee sin that sur­faced spo­rad­i­cal­ly, defin­ing and ener­giz­ing all his guilty feel­ings. But that nar­row­ing of atten­tion served to mask far more seri­ous, per­va­sive sins. As a pas­tor, friend, or oth­er coun­selor, you don’t want to con­cen­trate all your ener­gies in the same place Tom did. There were oth­er, deep­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for grace and truth to rewrite the script of this man’s life.”
  4. A Media-Fueled Social Pan­ic Over Unmarked Graves (Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “It’s now been 14 months since the orig­i­nal announce­ment was made about pre­sumed graves in Kam­loops, and no phys­i­cal evi­dence has been unearthed. No graves. No corpses. No human remains.… I’ve been in jour­nal­ism for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry, and have wit­nessed plen­ty of bizarre con­tro­ver­sies with­in my trade. But I’ve nev­er wit­nessed any­thing sim­i­lar to this phe­nom­e­non. It’s like one of those case-stud­ies in mass hys­te­ria and pop­u­lar delu­sion that you read about in his­to­ry books.”
    • This is not a claim that bad things did­n’t hap­pen. It’s more of a claim that the spe­cif­ic bad things that are alleged did­n’t hap­pen or that they did­n’t hap­pen on the scale wide­ly report­ed.
  5. Chi­na relat­ed:
  6. NHS will SHUT its con­tro­ver­sial Tavi­s­tock trans­gen­der clin­ic for chil­dren after damn­ing report warned it was ‘not safe’ (John Ely and Lau­rence Dol­limore, The Dai­ly Mail): “It fol­lows an announce­ment last month that every child treat­ed for gen­der dys­pho­ria in the last decade will have their med­ical records scru­ti­nised to see if NHS care is caus­ing them more harm than good.”
  7. Hot Takes Don’t Belong in Church (Chris Nye, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “So long as we are cre­at­ing a palat­able state­ment for social media or Sunday’s ser­mon, we are not pray­ing, wor­ship­ing, or orga­niz­ing our­selves for mean­ing­ful action. But in today’s cul­ture, the appear­ance of moral­i­ty is more impor­tant than moral actions, and speak­ing is more high­ly val­ued than pray­ing.”
    • This is full of good points. Chris is an acquain­tance of mine.

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 Cul­tur­al Moment (pod­cast): I lis­tened to this pod­cast about fol­low­ing Jesus in the post-Chris­t­ian world upon the rec­om­men­da­tion of some alum­ni and a stu­dent. It’s quite good. Def­i­nite­ly start with episode 1. First shared in vol­ume 231.

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 359

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.

359 is the 72nd prime num­ber, and is also what is known as a Sophie Ger­main prime because if you dou­ble it and add 1 the result (719) is also prime.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Faith The Ene­my of Sci­ence? (Glen Scriven­er, Twit­ter): a good 90 sec­ond video
  2. I Don’t Want to See a High School Foot­ball Coach Pray­ing at the 50-Yard Line (Anne Lam­ott, New York Times): “How do peo­ple like me who believe entire­ly in sci­ence and rea­son also believe that prayer can heal and restore? Well, I’ve seen it hap­pen a thou­sand times in my own incon­se­quen­tial life. God seems like a total showoff to me, if per­haps unnec­es­sar­i­ly cryp­tic.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing op-ed.
  3. On mas­culin­i­ty:
    • Against the Extrem­ism of the Amer­i­can Mas­culin­i­ty Debate (David French, The Dis­patch): “While there are many mil­lions of men and boys who do quite well in our coun­try, the vast major­i­ty of our nation’s young men are falling behind their female peers. I quot­ed this sta­tis­tic in my last newslet­ter, but it’s worth quot­ing again: Men account for 70 per­cent of the decline in enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.”
    • So Jor­dan Peter­son post­ed a video mes­sage to the Church. Mes­sage to the Chris­t­ian Church­es (Jor­dan Peter­son, YouTube: eleven min­utes. It’s gen­er­at­ed thoughts:
    • Church: Where Are The Men? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Peter­son means it lit­er­al­ly when he com­plains here that most church­es offer noth­ing for young men. Men feel unwant­ed in these fem­i­nized precincts, and there is often noth­ing much to attract or hold them to con­gre­ga­tion­al life.” This post is LONG and ven­tures deep­er into church his­to­ry than I expect­ed it to.
    • Jor­dan Peterson’s “Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es” Is Non­sense (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “He’s found an audi­ence and that’s fine, but when Peter­son steers out­side of his lane, you can tell. And on Wednes­day, Peter­son veered well out­side of his lane with this ‘Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es.’ It is ridicu­lous.”
    • Cross­ing the Jor­dan (Matthew Hosier, Think­The­ol­o­gy): “There is much about this mes­sage that I find salu­tary and invig­o­rat­ing. As I say, it made me laugh and cry and cheer. Although, with­out clar­i­ty about the aton­ing work of Christ on the cross, with­out a prop­er notion of grace, Peterson’s appeal rep­re­sents only a robust Pela­gian­ism and is there­fore insuf­fi­cient to deal with our most fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. Pela­gian­ism does not offer a solu­tion to the prob­lem of orig­i­nal sin; at best it can ame­lio­rate the symp­toms, not cure the dis­ease.”
  4. Book Review: The Man From The Future (Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexan­der): “…after a life­time of cul­tur­al­ly-Jew­ish athe­ism, he wished to be bap­tized. His daugh­ter attrib­uted her father’s ‘change of heart’ to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small prob­a­bil­i­ty of gain­ing a bet­ter after­life is worth the rel­a­tive­ly triv­ial cost of a deathbed con­ver­sion. Even as his pow­ers desert­ed him, John von Neu­mann remained a game the­o­rist to the end.” Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
  5. Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl that led to Indi­ana abor­tion draw­ing inter­na­tion­al atten­tion (Bethany Bruner, Mon­roe Trombly, Tony Cook, The Colum­bus Dis­patch): “A Colum­bus man has been charged with impreg­nat­ing a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose trav­el to Indi­ana to seek an abor­tion led to inter­na­tion­al atten­tion fol­low­ing the Supreme Court’s deci­sion to over­turn Roe v Wade and acti­va­tion of Ohio’s abor­tion law.”
  6. Whose breath are you breath­ing? (Farah Han­cock, Radio New Zealand): “At 5737ppm, the equiv­a­lent of one in every sev­en breaths I took on the bus was air oth­er peo­ple had breathed out. I texted a friend: ‘OMG, the read­ings are so high I may as well let the oth­er pas­sen­gers lick my face!’ I was being a lit­tle gross, because even accord­ing to a sci­en­tist, it is a lit­tle gross. ‘You can think of it as spit par­ti­cles, tiny spit par­ti­cles are what you are breath­ing in,’ says Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land aerosol chemist Dr Joel Rinde­laub. ‘It’s breath back­wash that gets peo­ple infect­ed.’ ”
    • First, “breath back­wash” is a mag­nif­i­cent term. Kudos. Sec­ond, I’m pret­ty sure the math is more com­pli­cat­ed than the arti­cle makes it seem. I would nonethe­less love see­ing CO2 meters in pub­lic places.
  7. How Uni­ver­si­ties Weaponize Fresh­man Ori­en­ta­tion (Abi­gail Antho­ny, Nation­al Review): “Ide­al­ly, fresh­man ori­en­ta­tion should be a pro­ce­dur­al, social assim­i­la­tion to famil­iar­ize stu­dents with the resources the uni­ver­si­ty offers and how to access them. How­ev­er, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty under­took a mis­sion to present incom­ing stu­dents with sex­u­al, moral, and polit­i­cal guid­ance, whol­ly omit­ting wide­ly held per­spec­tives and effec­tive­ly insu­lat­ing pro­gres­sive views from intel­lec­tu­al tri­al. More­over, atten­dance at these events was com­pul­so­ry, thus con­sti­tut­ing an ide­o­log­i­cal haz­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The lines in this checker­board pat­tern are straight (Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s work on some ran­dom blog)
  • Turn­about (The Far Side)
  • Down Mem­o­ry Lame (Load­ing Artist) — relat­able
  • Humans Will Believe Any­thing They Hear (Bengt Wash­burn, YouTube): six min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. It sound­ed famil­iar so I searched the archives and saw I shared it back in vol­ume 310. It was def­i­nite­ly worth watch­ing again!
  • “Eat the Rich” ice cream truck sells $10 pop­si­cles shaped like Bezos, Musk, oth­ers (Khristo­pher J. Brooks, CBS News): “An artists’ col­lec­tive in Brook­lyn is sell­ing pop­si­cles shaped like bil­lion­aires includ­ing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with the tagline ‘Eat the Rich.’ But the $10 price tag on the frozen treats has some peo­ple point­ing out the irony of crit­i­ciz­ing the world’s wealth­i­est while engag­ing in ‘peak cap­i­tal­ism.’ ” Warn­ing: auto­plays unre­lat­ed videos.
  • BMW starts sell­ing heat­ed seat sub­scrip­tions for $18 a month (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “Car­mak­ers have always charged cus­tomers more mon­ey for high-end fea­tures, of course, but the dynam­ic is very dif­fer­ent when soft­ware, rather than hard­ware, is the lim­it­ing fac­tor. Charg­ing more for high-end fea­tures feels dif­fer­ent when you already own them In the case of heat­ed seats, for exam­ple, BMW own­ers already have all the nec­es­sary com­po­nents, but BMW has sim­ply placed a soft­ware block on their func­tion­al­i­ty that buy­ers then have to pay to remove.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. This actu­al­ly prob­a­bly belongs up in the seri­ous cat­e­go­ry because it’s an omen of the future.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Church, inten­sive kin­ship, and glob­al psy­cho­log­i­cal vari­a­tion (Schulz et al, Sci­ence): “…we pro­pose that the West­ern Church (i.e., the branch of Chris­tian­i­ty that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) trans­formed Euro­pean kin­ship struc­tures dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages and that this trans­for­ma­tion was a key fac­tor behind a shift towards a WEIRD­er psy­chol­o­gy.” At the time I first shared it I said, “This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.” I did a quick lit­er­a­ture church and the result seems to be hold­ing. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 356

from the week abor­tion fell

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 356, which is a hap­py num­ber (some­thing I learned about only today). A hap­py num­ber is a num­ber whose dig­its when squared sum to 1 if the process is repeat­ed long enough. 356 takes six iter­a­tions.

  1. 356 ==> 32+52+62 = 9+25+36 = 70.
  2. 70 ==> 72+02 = 49.
  3. 49 ==> 42+92 = 16+81 = 97.
  4. 97 ==> 92+72 = 81+49 = 130
  5. 130 ==> 12+32+02 = 1+9+0 = 10
  6. 10 ==> 12 + 02 = 1

I got way more into that than I expect­ed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The huge news today is that abor­tion is no longer a con­sti­tu­tion­al right in Amer­i­ca. I expect deep­er analy­ses to appear by next week — most colum­nists appear to be sav­ing their big pieces for the Sun­day papers. Send rec­om­men­da­tions my way!
    • What changed from Jus­tice Alito’s draft opin­ion to final rul­ing on Roe (Kel­ly Hoop­er, Politi­co): “…Ali­to did add to his orig­i­nal opin­ion, with a fierce rebut­tal of the court’s lib­er­al dis­senters, plus a direct shot at Chief Jus­tice John Roberts in the final text. Roberts was the only con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tice on the court to side with its three lib­er­als, mak­ing the final vote 5–4 in the deci­sion to strike down Roe and give states the green light to ban abor­tion.”
    • Supreme Court over­turns con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog): “Stare deci­sis, Ali­to stressed, ‘is not a strait­jack­et’ when a rul­ing is griev­ous­ly incor­rect.… Notably, the dis­senters fin­ished by not­ing only that they dis­sent­ed, omit­ting the word ‘respect­ful­ly’ that com­mon­ly accom­pa­nies the dis­sent.”
      • A good sum­ma­ry of the opin­ion. The author used to teach at Stan­ford Law School. That last sen­tence is impor­tant.
    • From the right: The Land is Bright (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Some desire to down­play this vic­to­ry or even to lament the man­ner of it. We should not. Fed­er­al law in Amer­i­ca once rec­og­nized a right to kill unborn chil­dren. Now it does not. Our feel­ings should be unam­bigu­ous: it is a great good that over half the states in our union are soon like­ly to have laws grant­i­ng sweep­ing pro­tec­tions to the unborn. And we can just say that it is good.”
    • From the left: Which rights are next on the Supreme Court’s chop­ping block? (Ian Mill­houser, Vox): “In any event, the future of rights oth­er than abor­tion will like­ly need to be lit­i­gat­ed. There is no doubt that Thomas would hap­pi­ly light many exist­ing rights on fire. And there is lit­tle doubt that Ali­to, based on his Oberge­fell dis­sent, would also hap­pi­ly tear down same-sex mar­riage. But it takes five votes to strip away an exist­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al right, and it remains to be seen whether Jus­tices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Bar­rett — con­ser­v­a­tives who some­times break with Alito’s most aggres­sive attempts to dri­ve the law to the right — will sup­port mass roll­backs of exist­ing rights.”
      • Mill­houser is often hyper­bol­ic and fails to read ideas he dis­agrees with fair­ly, but this is a pret­ty good sum­ma­ry.
    • From the right: The Supreme Court strikes down Roe and Casey (Albert Mohler, World): “…pro-life Amer­i­cans have learned not to assume any­thing and to wait to see any deci­sion in the black and white of plain text. Well, we have the plain text. It is explo­sive. It is earth­shak­ing.… It is an answer to prayer.”
      • The author is a sem­i­nary pres­i­dent and also the pres­i­dent of the Evan­gel­i­cal The­o­log­i­cal Soci­ety.
    • From the left: Get­ting Real About the Post-‘Roe’ World (Scott Lemieux, The Amer­i­can Prospect): “The the­o­ry went that Repub­li­can elites didn’t real­ly want to over­rule Roe, but were mere­ly pre­tend­ing to for the sake of pan­der­ing to their base. This nar­ra­tive was always false; the sur­vival of Roe was always a high­ly con­tin­gent fluke, the prod­uct of sev­er­al mis­takes by Repub­li­can pres­i­dents.”
    • From the right: The Long Bat­tle to Over­turn Roe (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “There are at least two large rea­sons that the long bat­tle to over­turn Roe has suc­ceed­ed. First, pro-lif­ers did not heed Casey’s com­mand that they give up on work­ing to defend the lives of unborn human beings, and they remained a pow­er­ful polit­i­cal force in the Repub­li­can par­ty, all the more so as near­ly all Democ­rats had aban­doned the pro-life cause. Sec­ond, the con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment grew and flour­ished, thanks in large part to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and to Jus­tice Scalia and Jus­tice Thomas.”
    • From the left: Repub­li­cans Are Will­ing to Pay a Polit­i­cal Price to Ban Abor­tion. It’s Up to Democ­rats to Make Them Pay It. (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “After the draft deci­sion leaked, Democ­rats brought a wish-list bill to the floor of both cham­bers that even pro-choice Repub­li­cans — even Sen. Susan Collins — were able to com­fort­ably vote against on the grounds that it was too extreme, more expan­sive than Casey. Democ­rats need to break the agen­da into pieces.… Unlike a catch-all bill, there are many indi­vid­ual ideas about pro­tect­ing abor­tion rights that are very broad­ly pop­u­lar — bring­ing them to the floor puts Repub­li­cans in the posi­tion of either vot­ing for poli­cies to pro­tect abor­tion rights, or going home to defend votes that are actu­al­ly hard to defend in elec­tion cam­paigns.”
      • Both par­ties should do this on a whole host of issues. Pol­i­tics would change quick­ly if our lead­ers gov­erned this way. Bar­ro is right about the shrewd strat­e­gy, but I think it unlike­ly that his par­ty will heed him.
  2. Made in Amer­i­ca: Goods Exports by State (Raul Amoros, Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist): “Texas has been the top export­ing state in the U.S. for an incred­i­ble 20 years in a row. Last year, Texas export­ed $375 bil­lion worth of goods, which is more than Cal­i­for­nia ($175 bil­lion), New York ($85 bil­lion), and Louisiana ($77 bil­lion) com­bined. The state’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ing export cat­e­go­ry is petro­le­um and coal prod­ucts, but it’s also impor­tant to men­tion that Texas led the nation in tech exports for the ninth straight year. Cal­i­for­nia was the sec­ond high­est exporter of goods in 2021 with a total val­ue of $175 bil­lion, an increase of 12% from the pre­vi­ous year.”
    • Sur­pris­es here, rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal.
  3. Mike Pence and the Chris­t­ian Con­flict on Jan­u­ary 6 (David French, The Dis­patch): “A healthy nation­al cul­ture both con­demns cow­ardice and hon­ors val­or, even when val­or is sim­ply part of the job. And we should do both with an immense mea­sure of humil­i­ty. How many of us have proven our own courage under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances? Pence faced threats to his fam­i­ly, threats to him­self, threats to his pow­er, and threats to the rest of his career. How many of us have pre­vailed in the face of such pres­sure?  To scorn courage in such cir­cum­stances fur­ther incen­tivizes cow­ardice. At least the cow­ard­ly retain their polit­i­cal pow­er and their polit­i­cal home.”
  4. In Defense of Polit­i­cal Esca­la­tion (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “If our ulti­mate goal is return­ing to a nor­mal­cy in which gov­ern­ment agen­cies and cor­po­ra­tions treat all Amer­i­cans fair­ly regard­less of view­point, how are we to achieve this? At a min­i­mum, we must acknowl­edge that these insti­tu­tions are already weaponized and their artillery points only in one direc­tion: against the oppo­nents of the left.”
    • To my knowl­edge Shri­er is not reli­gious and is in no way con­ser­v­a­tive, but she is artic­u­lat­ing an argu­ment that I see fre­quent­ly on the right (most famous­ly in the French/Ahmari dust­up). It ani­mates Trump­ism and is one of the rea­sons DeSan­tis is so pop­u­lar on the right and that Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives have such a fas­ci­na­tion with Orban in Hun­gary.
  5. Pen­te­costals’ Polit­i­cal War­fare (Miguel Pet­rosky, The Reveal­er): “Issues like abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage, and even fears of creep­ing ‘Marx­ism,’ have long been of con­cern to some fac­tions of Amer­i­can con­ser­vatism. But in parts of the Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic world, these issues con­tain cos­mic impli­ca­tions for the country’s rela­tion­ship with God. In the Hebrew Scrip­tures, each of Israel’s kings either ‘did what was right’ or ‘did what was evil’ in the eyes of God—with either bless­ings or curs­es for the king­dom. Since Pen­te­costals view them­selves as being a con­tin­u­a­tion of the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, they are cer­tain God will judge Amer­i­ca by the issues they view as stray­ing from the Bible.”
  6. Leaked Audio From 80 Inter­nal Tik­Tok Meet­ings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeat­ed­ly Accessed From Chi­na (Emi­ly Bak­er-White, Buz­zFeed News): “Law­mak­ers’ fear that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment will be able to get its hands on Amer­i­can data through ByteDance is root­ed in the real­i­ty that Chi­nese com­pa­nies are sub­ject to the whims of the author­i­tar­i­an Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, which has been crack­ing down on its home­grown tech giants over the last year. The risk is that the gov­ern­ment could force ByteDance to col­lect and turn over infor­ma­tion as a form of ‘data espi­onage.’ There is, how­ev­er, anoth­er con­cern: that the soft pow­er of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment could impact how ByteDance exec­u­tives direct their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts to adjust the levers of TikTok’s pow­er­ful ‘For You’ algo­rithm, which rec­om­mends videos to its more than 1 bil­lion users. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, has called Tik­Tok ‘a Tro­jan horse the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty can use to influ­ence what Amer­i­cans see, hear, and ulti­mate­ly think.’ ”
  7. Quest to Con­quer a Dis­ease (Amy Lynn Smith, AG News): “Gib­son met Hong as he ate lunch with anoth­er intern in the stu­dent union. Hong asked to join them, and after­ward Gib­son and Hong began meet­ing for tea or cof­fee every week. Gib­son learned that Hong, the night before he intro­duced him­self, had a dream in which a man encour­aged Hong to meet peo­ple on cam­pus. Hong lat­er came to rec­og­nize the man in the dream as Jesus. A friend­ship devel­oped between Hong and Gib­son.”
    • This is about two of our alum­ni: Dan Gib­son, who did his min­istry train­ing with Chi Alpha Stan­ford sev­er­al years ago, and Guosong “Frank” Hong who did his PhD here and is now a pro­fes­sor.

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 To Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super-short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing. First shared in vol­ume 224.

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 353

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 353, the 71st prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I saw this gem on Twit­ter: “I don’t wish to sound apoc­a­lyp­tic about this, but one has the sense that at present our soci­ety is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly char­ac­ter­ized by wild­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate account­abil­i­ty for triv­ial trans­gres­sions and zero account­abil­i­ty for pro­found insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure.” (David Polan­sky, co-founder of LinkedIn)
  2. The Rob­ber Baroness of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia (Maia Sil­ber, New York­er): “The university’s most vital pur­pose, Stan­ford explained in an address to its Board of Trustees a few years after her husband’s death, was the devel­op­ment of the student’s ‘soul germ.’ She urged the trustees to eschew class­rooms in favor of shops and work­shops that would ‘dig­ni­fy labor’ by teach­ing future work­ers to ‘use their hands deft­ly and use­ful­ly.’ Stan­ford believed that, in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing voca­tion­al train­ing, the uni­ver­si­ty should incul­cate the val­ues of faith, thrift, and absti­nence of var­i­ous kinds. She and her hus­band banned alco­hol from the dor­mi­to­ries and capped the num­ber of women under­grad­u­ates at five hun­dred.”
  3. 78 Min­utes (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “I know it’s a sta­tis­ti­cal anom­aly. I know it almost nev­er hap­pens. I know there are a mil­lion things I wor­ry less about that hap­pen with greater reg­u­lar­i­ty and worse effects; but those things are unfor­tu­nate, and this is evil. Mis­for­tune is awful, but this was some­thing worse. This was tor­ture. This was cru­el. This was inten­tion­al. The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters.”
  4. How did the IR com­mu­ni­ty get Russia/Ukraine so wrong? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The IR com­mu­ni­ty is risk-averse, and pre­serv­ing of its aca­d­e­m­ic rep­u­ta­tions, and thus its mem­bers are less will­ing to make bold pre­dic­tions than say pun­dits are. You might even think that is good, all things con­sid­ered, but it will help explain the missed pre­dic­tions here.” Many inter­est­ing con­sid­er­a­tions, fol­low-up at Data on IR schol­ars and their views on Russia/Ukraine.
  5. Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Polit­i­cal Iden­ti­ty (Eric Kauf­mann, CSPI): “The youth­ful surge is main­ly about LGBT iden­ti­ty, with con­sid­er­ably less change in sex­u­al behav­ior. The rise is great­est for bisex­u­al­i­ty, espe­cial­ly among females, with less change for gays and les­bians. The growth in LGBT iden­ti­fi­ca­tion shows no signs of slow­ing down among the young, but there is com­pelling evi­dence that gen­der non­con­for­mi­ty peaked around 2020 and declined in 2021. It appears less preva­lent among teenagers than those in their ear­ly twen­ties.” Plus a fas­ci­nat­ing Twit­ter thread by the author high­light­ing key details — so much data in this piece to con­tem­plate. Spicy through­out.
  6. The Pope’s Secret Back Chan­nel to Hitler (David Kertzer, The Atlantic): “As the head of a large inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion, his over­rid­ing aim in nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler’s emis­sary was pro­tect­ing the insti­tu­tion­al resources and pre­rog­a­tives of the Roman Catholic Church in the Third Reich. If the only goal was to pro­tect the wel­fare of the insti­tu­tion­al Church, his efforts could well be judged a suc­cess. But for those who see the papa­cy as a posi­tion of great moral lead­er­ship, the rev­e­la­tions of Pius XII’s secret nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler must come as a sharp dis­ap­point­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. We Need to Com­pli­cate the Neg­a­tive World (Trevin Wax, Gospel Coali­tion): “…tak­ing a stand for true Chris­tian­i­ty has always been cost­ly. Chris­t­ian min­is­ters lost their jobs in the 1960s for doing noth­ing more than allow­ing African Amer­i­cans to attend wor­ship! In some way or anoth­er, we’ve been in the neg­a­tive world since the time of the New Tes­ta­ment, but the form of that hos­til­i­ty toward the faith changes depend­ing on the place and the era. And the opportunities—where soci­ety smiles on aspects of Christianity—change too. We live in pos­i­tive, neu­tral, and neg­a­tive worlds simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, depend­ing on the issue.“This is quite good.

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 New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs, and I fea­tured anoth­er arti­cle by him short­ly before this one. First shared back in vol­ume 286.

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 352

a heart­break­ing week

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 352, which is (I am informed) the num­ber of ways to place 9 queens on a 9×9 chess­board so that they can­not attack each oth­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The South­ern Bap­tist abuse cri­sis:
    • South­ern Bap­tists Refused to Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pas­tors (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Guide­post Solu­tions, the third-par­ty inves­tiga­tive firm, wants the 13-mil­lion-mem­ber denom­i­na­tion to cre­ate an online data­base of abusers, offer com­pen­sa­tion for sur­vivors, sharply lim­it non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments, and estab­lish a new enti­ty ded­i­cat­ed to respond­ing to abuse. The direc­tives in the 288-page report will sound famil­iar for sur­vivors and advo­cates, who have been call­ing for those mea­sures all along.”
    • This Is the South­ern Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Indeed, the very ones who rebuked me and oth­ers for using the word cri­sis in ref­er­ence to South­ern Bap­tist sex­u­al abuse not only knew that there was such a cri­sis but were qui­et­ly doc­u­ment­ing it, even as they told those fight­ing for reform that such crimes rarely hap­pened among “peo­ple like us.” When I read the back-and-forth between some of these pres­i­dents, high-rank­ing staff, and their lawyers, I can­not help but won­der what else this can be called but a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy.”
    • No Athe­ist Has Done This Much Dam­age to the Chris­t­ian Faith (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “It’s near­ly impos­si­ble to over­state how much dam­age these new revelations—these nec­es­sary and long-over­due revelations—are doing to the Chris­t­ian wit­ness. No athe­ist, no sec­u­lar­ists or mate­ri­al­ists, could inflict near­ly as much dam­age to the Chris­t­ian faith as these lead­ers with­in the Chris­t­ian Church have done.“This is a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple: skep­tics rarely hurt the Church. Chris­tians, though, hurt the Church all the time.
    • Avoid­ing Finan­cial And Gov­er­nance Dis­as­ters (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “…in some very impor­tant ways, sex­u­al abuse and sex­u­al harass­ment in the church are effects. They are con­se­quences. They are fruits, not the root, of the problem.So what’s the cause? It’s pret­ty un-glam­orous. It doesn’t gen­er­ate as many head­lines, and when it does gen­er­ate a head­line, that head­line tends to be ignored, or quick­ly for­got­ten. And that cause is mon­ey. More specif­i­cal­ly, the love of mon­ey.… So, at a min­i­mum, I think we evan­gel­i­cals should be spend­ing as much time under­stand­ing and uncov­er­ing finan­cial fraud as we spend on sex­u­al abuse and tox­ic lead­er­ship.”
    • How the ‘Apoc­a­lyp­tic’ South­ern Bap­tist Report Almost Didn’t Hap­pen (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry­Watch): “In oth­er words, the Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee would be put in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing itself. Then-Pres­i­dent J.D. Greear was ready to move on when Benkert stood up at a micro­phone with a motion of his own, based on anoth­er sec­tion of bylaw 29. ‘I would like the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a motion to over­rule the Com­mit­tee on Order of Busi­ness at the appro­pri­ate time,’ he said. Benkert’s motion was met with applause. Then a sec­ond, and then almost all of the 15,000 local church del­e­gates, known as mes­sen­gers, raised their yel­low vot­ing cards in the air—far more than the two-thirds major­i­ty need­ed to over­rule the com­mit­tee.”
    • In ref­er­ence to the imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing arti­cle: know­ing how the sys­tem works is real­ly impor­tant. I’ve seen shady stuff hap­pen at some meet­ings but was­n’t quick enough to get to the floor or was­n’t sure enough of the rules to inter­vene. In a busi­ness meet­ing knowl­edge tru­ly is pow­er.
    • In ref­er­ence to the larg­er sto­ry, there are so many things hap­pen­ing here:
    • This is an occa­sion for lamen­ta­tion. I have long said that the Protes­tant sex­u­al abuse cri­sis will dwarf the Catholic Church’s (because we tend to have less control/screening of min­is­ters) and that both will be dwarfed by the pub­lic school cri­sis (which is yet to ful­ly reveal itself but I believe will be far worse).
    • The South­ern Bap­tist exec­u­tives gen­uine­ly had less con­trol over the situation(s) than some of their crit­ics allege, but they had far more con­trol than they pre­tend­ed and when they did act it was often to con­ceal wicked things.
    • The fact that the SBC com­mis­sioned this report and made it pub­lic is very much to their cred­it and over time will loom larg­er in the remem­brance of this.
    • The scope of the abuse, while broad, appears to be less than I feared.
    •  The SBC legal team and the for­mer exec­u­tives come off look­ing like evil reli­gious lead­ers writ­ten by a lazy hack writer. It’s stag­ger­ing­ly bad.
    • This entire deba­cle is ger­mane to the Tim Keller/winsomeness debate: do we oper­ate accord­ing to the stan­dards of our cul­ture or the stan­dards of the King­dom? Christ demands anoth­er way, and if that opens us up to neg­a­tive cul­tur­al con­se­quences (whether elec­toral defeats or ruinous law­suits) then so be it.
  2. The school shoot­ing:
    • A fourth-grad­er who sur­vived the shoot­ing says she smeared friend’s blood on her­self to appear dead (Nora Neus, CNN): “Miah said she was scared the gun­man would come back to kill her and a few oth­er sur­viv­ing friends. So, she put her hands in her friend’s blood, who laid next to her— and already looked dead—and then smeared it all over her­self to appear dead.… She says after­wards, she over­heard talk of police wait­ing out­side the school. Recount­ing this dur­ing the inter­view, she start­ed cry­ing, say­ing she just didn’t under­stand why they didn’t come inside and get them.” Heart­break­ing. Details are still com­ing out, and none of them are good.
    • Texas school shoot­er Sal­vador Ramos once cut up his face with knives ‘just for fun,’ friends say (Yaron Stein­buch, New York Post): “The gun­man who slaugh­tered 19 kids and two teach­ers at a Texas ele­men­tary school report­ed­ly exhib­it­ed increas­ing­ly bizarre behav­ior lead­ing up to the ram­page – includ­ing cut­ting up his face with knives just ‘for fun,’ friends said.”
    • Pass and Enforce Red Flag Laws. Now. (David French, The Dis­patch): “Mass killings are their own thing. Mass shoot­ers are fre­quent­ly law-abid­ing, right up until the moment when they com­mit mass mur­der. Mass shoot­ings are often metic­u­lous­ly planned, which means that they can cir­cum­vent com­mon gun con­trol laws. For exam­ple, the Buf­fa­lo shoot­er legal­ly pur­chased the weapon he used and then ille­gal­ly mod­i­fied it to make it more lethal. So when we talk about com­mon gun con­trol pro­pos­als after mass shootings—whether we’re refer­ring to expand­ed back­ground checks, assault weapons bans, or lim­its on mag­a­zine capacity—the gen­er­al rule is that none of those mea­sures, even if imple­ment­ed, would have actu­al­ly pre­vent­ed any recent mass shoot­ing.” This is a thought­ful piece with a spe­cif­ic and con­struc­tive pol­i­cy sug­ges­tion.
    • The Chil­dren Who Kill Chil­dren (Samuel D. James, First Things): “There are some who sneer at peo­ple, like me, who offer prayers in times like these. Prayer, they say, is non-action: an inef­fec­tive, mean­ing­less piety meant to main­tain the sta­tus quo on gun con­trol. Yet it’s these same scoffers who instinc­tive­ly piv­ot to the top­ic of gun con­trol when­ev­er a child takes the lives of oth­er chil­dren, and their polit­i­cal rage is no less a reli­gious recita­tion sim­ply because they con­fuse Con­gress for God. An inabil­i­ty to talk about any­thing oth­er than gun con­trol threat­ens to dead­en our lament and neu­tral­ize a vital con­ver­sa­tion about why so many of our country’s most lost, most hate­ful peo­ple are boys with their whole lives ahead of them.” This is a strong arti­cle.
    • ‘The Onion’ has repub­lished a grim head­line about mass shoot­ings 21 times since 2014 (Rachel Treis­man, NPR): “There are a cou­ple of inevitable respons­es to a mass shoot­ing in Amer­i­ca: funer­als and fundrais­ers, prayers from politi­cians and the resur­fac­ing of one par­tic­u­lar arti­cle from satir­i­cal site The Onion. ‘No Way To Pre­vent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Reg­u­lar­ly Hap­pens’ has been repub­lished 21 times in almost exact­ly eight years.” The rep­e­ti­tion of this head­line has prob­a­bly shift­ed more hearts than any oth­er argu­ment I am aware of.
  3. Covid was liberalism’s endgame (Matthew B. Craw­ford, Unherd): “The inno­va­tion achieved here is in the way gov­ern­ment con­ceives its sub­jects: not as cit­i­zens whose con­sid­ered con­sent must be secured, but as par­ti­cles to be steered through a sci­ence of behav­iour man­age­ment that relies on our pre-reflec­tive cog­ni­tive bias­es.”
  4. A Com­mit­ment to Kind­ness Does Not Mean Sur­ren­der­ing Your Con­vic­tions (David French, The Dis­patch): “Time and again I read about how bad things are now, how vile the left has become, and how a com­mit­ment to ‘win­some­ness’ or kind­ness is sim­ply inad­e­quate to the moment. Even worse, it’s some­times seen as evi­dence of weak­ness or fear—an effort cur­ry favor with peo­ple who hate you.  But the con­ver­sa­tion con­sis­tent­ly mis­con­strues what com­mit­ments to civil­i­ty and decen­cy do and don’t mean—that civil­i­ty is some­how a short­hand for sur­ren­der on mat­ters of deep con­vic­tion. It is not. Or that a com­mit­ment to civil­i­ty implies an aver­sion to con­flict and a timid­i­ty in the face of oppo­si­tion. It does not.”
  5. The LGBT­sQew­ing of Amer­i­ca (Alexan­der Zuba­tov, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “We have strong­ly sug­ges­tive evi­dence, more­over, that social cues can play causal roles in sway­ing impres­sion­able teens to adopt new sex­u­al iden­ti­ties.… The sim­ple mes­sage such research con­veys is some­thing that those of us who have not lost touch with our child­hood and our awk­ward teen years will find unsur­pris­ing, and indeed, even obvi­ous: Most kids and teens are works in progress and unde­cid­ed and con­fused about many key aspects of their lives.”
  6. In Par­tial, Grudg­ing Defense Of The Hear­ing Voic­es Move­ment (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I still remem­ber a patient who asked me if I could cure his anx­i­ety with­in a week. I told him absolute­ly not — med­ica­tions take a few weeks to even kick in, and man­ag­ing anx­i­ety can be a life­long process — and why did he need a cure in a week any­way? He said he was an inspi­ra­tional speak­er on the top­ic ‘How I Over­came My Anx­i­ety’, and he had a speech sched­uled next week, but was too anx­ious to work on it. I think about this per­son often.” Inter­est­ing through­out and the anec­dote I excerpt­ed is actu­al­ly tan­gen­tial to the main point.
  7. Why This Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Says All Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Should “Die in a Fire” (Nathan Robin­son inter­view­ing Nicholas Weaver, Cur­rent Affairs): “Is it accu­rate to sum­ma­rize what you were say­ing before as, essen­tial­ly: There is no prob­lem that cryp­tocur­ren­cy solves, and to the extent that it is func­tion­al, it does things worse than we can already do them with exist­ing elec­tron­ic pay­ment sys­tems. To the extent it has advan­tages, the advan­tage is doing crimes. And every oth­er claim made for the supe­ri­or­i­ty of cryp­tocur­ren­cy as cur­ren­cy falls apart if you scru­ti­nize it.” This spicy meat­ball comes rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  8. Glob­al reli­gious per­se­cu­tion:
    • The faces from China’s Uyghur deten­tion camps (John Sud­worth, BBC): “The doc­u­ments pro­vide some of the strongest evi­dence to date for a pol­i­cy tar­get­ing almost any expres­sion of Uyghur iden­ti­ty, cul­ture or Islam­ic faith — and of a chain of com­mand run­ning all the way up to the Chi­nese leader, Xi Jin­ping.”
    • Niger­ian Chris­tians Protest Deborah’s Death (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Two weeks ago, in Nigeria’s north­west­ern-most state of Soko­to, Deb­o­rah Samuel was beat­en to death and set on fire by fel­low stu­dents at She­hu Sha­gari Col­lege of Edu­ca­tion. Offi­cials and police inter­vened in vain.”

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 Con­ser­v­a­tives Clash on the Goal of Gov­ern­ment (Jonathan Lee­man, Prov­i­dence): “There is no neu­tral­i­ty. The pub­lic square is a bat­tle­ground of gods. Our cul­ture wars are wars of reli­gion. For the time being, lib­er­al­ism keeps us from pick­ing up sixteenth-century swords for those wars, which is no small achieve­ment. But don’t assume it won’t con­trol us with the sub­tler tools of a twenty-first cen­tu­ry legal total­i­tar­i­an­ism.” Insight­ful reflec­tions on how Chris­tians should form their polit­i­cal posi­tions. First shared in vol­ume 218.

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 350

Few­er main top­ics than nor­mal, but a bunch of arti­cles in the top­ics

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 350, and 350 is a very respectable num­ber. I’m impressed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Pol­i­tics Poi­soned the Evan­gel­i­cal Church (Tim Alber­ta, The Atlantic): “Hav­ing grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pas­tor at anoth­er church in town, I’ve spent my life watch­ing evan­gel­i­cal­ism morph from a spir­i­tu­al dis­po­si­tion into a polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty. It’s heart­break­ing. So many peo­ple who love the Lord, who give their time and mon­ey to the poor and the mourn­ing and the per­se­cut­ed, have been reduced to a car­i­ca­ture. But I under­stand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became com­pul­sive­ly polit­i­cal, allow­ing spe­cif­ic eth­i­cal argu­ments to snow­ball into full-blown par­ti­san advo­ca­cy, often in ways that dis­tract­ed from their mis­sion of evan­ge­liz­ing for Christ.”
  2. Being a Polit­i­cal Jour­nal­ist Made Me a Bet­ter Chris­t­ian (Jon Ward, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But Chris­tians can­not be the con­science of the state if we are not first the con­science of whichev­er polit­i­cal par­ty we belong to. We have the dif­fi­cult task of belong­ing to polit­i­cal par­ties and work­ing for the good of the coun­try through those insti­tu­tions, while also stand­ing apart from those par­ties to crit­i­cize them at times for their weak­ness­es, errors, and cor­rup­tions.” The entire essay is delight­ful.
  3. A con­tro­ver­sy about how Chris­tians should engage in the pub­lic square:
    • How I Evolved on Tim Keller (James R. Wood, First Things): “If we assume that win­some­ness will gain a favor­able hear­ing, when Chris­tians con­sis­tent­ly receive heat­ed push­back, we will be tempt­ed to think our con­vic­tions are the prob­lem. If win­some­ness is met with hos­til­i­ty, it is easy to won­der, ‘Are we in the wrong?’ Thus the slide toward sec­u­lar culture’s rea­son­ing is greased. A ‘sec­u­lar-friend­ly’ pol­i­tics has prob­lems sim­i­lar to ‘seek­er-friend­ly’ wor­ship. An exces­sive con­cern to appeal to the unchurched is plagued by the accom­mo­da­tion­ist temp­ta­tion.”
    • A Cri­tique of Tim Keller Reveals the Moral Devo­lu­tion of the New Chris­t­ian Right (The Dis­patch, David French): “Yet even if the des­per­ate times nar­ra­tive were true, the des­per­ate mea­sures ratio­nal­iza­tion suf­fers from pro­found moral defects. The bib­li­cal call to Chris­tians to love your ene­mies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhib­it the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kind­ness, good­ness, faith­ful­ness, gen­tle­ness, and self-control—does not rep­re­sent a set of tac­tics to be aban­doned when times are tough but rather a set of eter­nal moral prin­ci­ples to be applied even in the face of extreme adver­si­ty…
    • Is it Time to Move Past Tim Keller? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The ques­tion is not whether love of neigh­bor doesn’t work and should be for­got­ten, the ques­tion is what love of neigh­bor demands from us, and whether such love might look dif­fer­ent when the pre­sent­ing moral and spir­i­tu­al needs of our neigh­bors might not be what they were a gen­er­a­tion ago.”
    • some thoughts on Tim Keller (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Like Dio­genes with his lantern, I’m look­ing for one crit­ic of Tim Keller who shows some aware­ness that Chris­tians are com­mand­ed by their Lord to act in cer­tain ways and to refrain from act­ing in oth­ers. To think only in terms of what is effec­tive or strate­gic is to fight on the Devil’s home ground.”
    • This Arti­cle is Not About Tim Keller (James Wood, Amer­i­can Reformer): “How do we know what the future holds for the public’s per­cep­tion of Chris­tians and their attempts to love their neigh­bors through polit­i­cal action? We might be sur­prised what the judg­ments of his­to­ry have in store. Not only do I ques­tion the cer­tain­ty we can have in these assess­ments about how our polit­i­cal actions will impact our long-term gospel wit­ness, but I also think this is a cat­e­go­ry error. Pol­i­tics is not about min­i­miz­ing offense in order to max­i­mize open­ness to the evan­ge­lis­tic mes­sage. Pol­i­tics is, rather, focused on the pur­suit of jus­tice and the just order­ing of soci­ety.”
  4. Against longter­mism (Phil Tor­res, Aeon): “…longter­mism might be one of the most influ­en­tial ide­olo­gies that few peo­ple out­side of elite uni­ver­si­ties and Sil­i­con Val­ley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a for­mer longter­mist who pub­lished an entire book four years ago in defence of the gen­er­al idea, I have come to see this world­view as quite pos­si­bly the most dan­ger­ous sec­u­lar belief sys­tem in the world today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who thinks this is espe­cial­ly impor­tant for Sil­i­con Val­ley peo­ple to hear. From Oct 2021.
  5. More on the Supreme Court and abor­tion
    • How Roe Warped the Repub­lic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And the way Roe was decid­ed made this polar­iza­tion worse. From the per­spec­tive of geog­ra­phy and class, a group of robed lawyers in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., demand­ing that the coun­try sim­ply accept their set­tle­ment on one of the gravest moral ques­tions imag­in­able is the per­fect primer for a pop­ulist revolt. What has hap­pened in sim­i­lar ways with oth­er issues — immi­gra­tion, most notably — hap­pened with abor­tion first: The elite set­tle­ment failed to set­tle the issue, and the back­lash encom­passed not just the issue itself but elite legit­i­ma­cy writ large.”
    • Protest sup­port­ing Roe v. Wade takes over cam­pus (Bryan Steven Mon­ge Ser­ra­no, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “About 250 stu­dents, fac­ul­ty and staff came togeth­er to chant and march.” ]
      • “Takes over cam­pus” is an exag­ger­a­tion. 250 peo­ple? There are class­es larg­er than that. Hav­ing said that, the bulk of the stu­dent body at Stan­ford is unde­ni­ably on the pro-Roe side. I won­der if the small ral­ly indi­cates a lev­el of apa­thy or sim­ply a desire to wait for the actu­al ver­dict to be released.
    • Why I wel­come the prospect of Roe v. Wade being over­turned (Avi Shafran, NBC News): “Roe was a sledge­ham­mer, and wrong­ly wield­ed. In the wake of its rever­sal, cit­i­zens in each state would be charged with using a scalpel to instead craft laws that treat nascent life with respect while accom­mo­dat­ing the pro­tec­tion of women’s well-being.”
      • Inter­est­ing thoughts from a Rab­bi. He comes down in a dif­fer­ent place than most peo­ple you have heard from.
    • How Dare They! (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “What strikes me most in these takes is the under­ly­ing con­tempt for and sus­pi­cion of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process — from many of the same peo­ple who insist they want to save it. How dare vot­ers have a say on abor­tion rights! The issue — which divides the coun­try today as much as it has for decades — is one that appar­ent­ly can­not ever be put up for a vote. On this ques­tion, Democ­rats real­ly do seem to believe that sev­en men alone should make that deci­sion — once, in 1973. Women today, includ­ing one on SCOTUS? Not so much.”
    • Pro-Life Min­istries Have Been Car­ing For Women And Babies For Gen­er­a­tions (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “More than 2500 pro-life Preg­nan­cy Resource Cen­ters (PRCs) are a com­pas­sion­ate army of staff, donors, and vol­un­teers that num­ber in the hun­dreds of thou­sands. They are com­mit­ted to help­ing women make life-giv­ing choic­es, and they often sup­port these women for years after their babies are born. The total amount of mon­ey these orga­ni­za­tions spend in sup­port of women and babies is not known, but it like­ly exceeds $1 bil­lion annu­al­ly. We should also note that the vast major­i­ty of adop­tions in this coun­try are done by Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies and through Chris­t­ian adop­tion agen­cies.”
    • The Supreme Court Leak Was an Unplanned Com­pli­ca­tion for Preg­nan­cy Cen­ters (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I try to shield my team from it here,” she said, telling them not to get online and try to defend them­selves. “I saw a post on Insta­gram: ‘I’ve nev­er met a pro-life per­son who is address­ing access to health care, acces­si­ble child­care, col­lege edu­ca­tion.’ Hun­dreds of peo­ple are com­ment­ing, ‘Yeah I’ve nev­er met one of those.’ I’m think­ing I’m going to lose my mind. We’re here! We’re get­ting women into hous­ing same day, we’re get­ting them out of domes­tic vio­lence same day, we’re get­ting them fur­ni­ture the same day,” Marten con­tin­ued. “For my team to go home every day and turn on the news and social media and get gaslit, say­ing, ‘If you real­ly cared …’ It’s an emo­tion­al toll.”
  6. On Chi­na
    • China’s Bizarre Author­i­tar­i­an-Lib­er­tar­i­an COVID Strat­e­gy (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “On the one hand, Chi­na has con­fined mil­lions of peo­ple to their homes, even to the extent of out­law­ing walk­ing out­side or hav­ing food deliv­ered. Many thou­sands of oth­er peo­ple have been tak­en from their homes and put into quar­an­tine cen­ters. On the oth­er hand, vac­ci­na­tion is not manda­to­ry! I can under­stand author­i­tar­i­an­ism. I can under­stand lib­er­tar­i­an­ism. I have dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing how jail­ing peo­ple, poten­tial­ly with­out food, is ok but requir­ing vac­ci­na­tions is not.”
    • Dra­mat­ic sto­ry of Kyr­gyz Chris­t­ian swept up in Chi­na’s Uyghur repres­sion gets very lit­tle ink (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “While unimag­in­able hor­rors per­sist­ed in the camp, Joseph tes­ti­fied about how God worked in the hearts of the inmates around them. They had no pri­va­cy in any part of the com­plex, with cam­eras in their rooms and micro­phones for mon­i­tor­ing. Thus, 50 to 60 inmates filled the show­er room every day and it was the only place where Joseph could share his faith. The water from the show­er heads made enough noise to mask their con­ver­sa­tions.  In the first few months, there was hard­ly any­one who would talk to him about God. Then the ques­tion began. ‘How could God let us be here in this place?’ they would ask. ‘How could God allow our chil­dren to be aban­doned?’ ” Crazy details, espe­cial­ly if you fol­low the links in the arti­cle.
    • Tik­Tok May Be More Dan­ger­ous Than It Looks (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Tik­Tok is owned by ByteDance, a Chi­nese com­pa­ny. And Chi­nese com­pa­nies are vul­ner­a­ble to the whims and the will of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.… TikTok’s real pow­er isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and cre­ate. It’s over the opaque algo­rithm that gov­erns what gets seen and what doesn’t. Tik­Tok has been thick with videos back­ing the Russ­ian nar­ra­tive on the war in Ukraine. Media Mat­ters, for instance, tracked an appar­ent­ly coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign dri­ven by 186 Russ­ian Tik­Tok influ­encers who nor­mal­ly post beau­ty tips, prank videos and fluff. And we know that Chi­na has been ampli­fy­ing Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da world­wide. How com­fort­able are we with not know­ing whether the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty decid­ed to weigh in on how the algo­rithm treats these videos?”
    • Why Chi­nese Cul­ture Has Not Con­quered Us All (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Out­side of its own bor­ders, post-Deng Chi­na has a poor record sell­ing the intan­gi­ble. Chi­nese cul­tur­al influ­ence is not com­men­su­rate with China’s eco­nom­ic pow­er or geopo­lit­i­cal heft. For the last two decades observers of Chi­na have pon­dered this mys­tery. Why has China’s grow­ing glob­al promi­nence, pros­per­ous com­mer­cial­ized econ­o­my, and huge glob­al dias­po­ra not led to cul­tur­al influ­ence? Why have both China’s intel­lec­tu­al high cul­ture and its expan­sive pop cul­ture offer­ings failed to take root out­side of the Sinos­phere?” Very thought­ful, as I have come to expect from Greer.

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 Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 344

344 is the 8th octa­he­dral num­ber

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 344, and 344 is the 8th octa­he­dral num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No, Chris­tian­i­ty Is Not as Bad as You Think (Josh How­er­ton, The Gospel Coali­tion): “In addi­tion to hav­ing flaws and sins, church­es also have an Ene­my whose pri­ma­ry weapon is lies.… Satan tries to decon­struct the church Jesus is con­struct­ing (Matt. 16:18) by lever­ag­ing her faults to slan­der her with plau­si­ble false nar­ra­tives. And that is exact­ly what we find: a wide and grow­ing gap between cul­tur­al nar­ra­tives about Chris­tian­i­ty and the real­i­ty of Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  2. The truth about nuclear deter­rence (Hebert Lin, Insti­tute of Art and Ideas): “… it pre­sumes all nuclear pow­ers rec­og­nize their ulti­mate self-inter­est in avoid­ing nuclear war, since nuclear war would lead to dev­as­ta­tion for both sides. But this neat pic­ture becomes very messy very quick­ly when one real­izes that nations have oth­er goals in addi­tion to that of avoid­ing nuclear war.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. Gov­ern­ment Is Flail­ing, in Part Because Lib­er­als Hob­bled It (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “..one generation’s solu­tions have become the next generation’s prob­lems. Process­es meant to pro­mote cit­i­zen involve­ment have them­selves been cap­tured by cor­po­rate inter­ests and rich NIM­BYs. Laws meant to ensure that gov­ern­ment con­sid­ers the con­se­quences of its actions have made it too dif­fi­cult for gov­ern­ment to act con­se­quen­tial­ly.” This is quite good. This is not an angry par­ti­san piece — Klein is him­self a lib­er­al engag­ing in pub­lic reflec­tion.
  4. Some arti­cles about trans­gen­derism:
  5. What Oper­a­tion Warp Speed Did, Didn’t and Can’t Do (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “First, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that OWS did not cre­ate any sci­en­tif­ic inno­va­tions or dis­cov­er­ies. The inno­v­a­tive mRNA vac­cines are right­ly laud­ed but all of the key sci­en­tif­ic ideas behind mRNA as a deliv­ery mech­a­nism long pre­date Oper­a­tion Warp Speed. The sci­en­tif­ic advances were the result of many decades of work, some of it sup­port­ed by uni­ver­si­ty and gov­ern­ment fund­ing and also a sig­nif­i­cant frac­tion by large pri­vate invest­ments in firms such as Mod­er­na and BioN­Tech. It was BioN­Tech recall that hired Katal­in Karikó (and many oth­er mRNA researchers) when she couldn’t get uni­ver­si­ty or gov­ern­ment fund­ing. Since OWS cre­at­ed no new sci­en­tif­ic break­throughs there isn’t much to learn from OWS about the effi­ca­cy of large scale pro­grams for that pur­pose.” Inter­est­ing through­out.
  6. Thread about can­cel cul­ture (Greg Lukianoff, Twit­ter): “We tracked 563 attempts to get schol­ars can­celed since 2015 — includ­ing 283 just since 2020. Near­ly 2/3 were suc­cess­ful, result­ing in sanc­tion, & 1‑in‑5 result­ed in ter­mi­na­tion (that includes 30 tenured pro­fes­sors!).”
  7. We are rein­stat­ing our SAT/ACT require­ment for future admis­sions cycles (Stu Schmill, MIT Admis­sions): “…stan­dard­ized tests also help us iden­ti­fy aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly pre­pared, socioe­co­nom­i­cal­ly dis­ad­van­taged stu­dents who could not oth­er­wise demon­strate readi­ness⁠ because they do not attend schools that offer advanced course­work, can­not afford expen­sive enrich­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, can­not expect lengthy let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion from their over­bur­dened teach­ers, or are oth­er­wise ham­pered by edu­ca­tion­al inequal­i­ties.⁠” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.

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 An Epi­dem­ic of Dis­be­lief (Bar­bara Bradley Hager­ty, The Atlantic): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, inves­ti­ga­tors had assumed that some­one who assaults a stranger by the rail­road tracks is noth­ing like the man who assaults his co-worker or his girl­friend. But it turns out that the space between acquain­tance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleve­land inves­ti­ga­tors uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were sur­prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force iden­ti­fied dozens of mys­tery rapists this way.” Infu­ri­at­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 211.

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 343

a briefer col­lec­tion than nor­mal

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

This is vol­ume 343, which has an unusu­al rela­tion­ship with the num­ber 18. Name­ly 343 = 180 + 181 + 182.

I don’t have much access to my com­put­er this week, so this is a briefer col­lec­tion than the norm. And there may not be an update next week at all — we’ll see.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Read­ers Around the World Are Pray­ing for Ukraine (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “…prayer is indeed pow­er­ful, often in ways we can’t account for. War, what­ev­er else it is, is spir­i­tu­al­ly dark, even demon­ic. From the first days of the Russ­ian inva­sion, reli­gious peo­ple and insti­tu­tions around the world have respond­ed by pray­ing. Writ­ten prayers and Psalms can be a life­line, help­ing us pray when our own words — and even our own faith — fail.”
    • The last prayer is amaz­ing con­tent for the New York Times and I post it here in full since some of you don’t have access through the NYT pay­wall:
    • “Father-God, may the attack­ers’ fin­gers freeze; may they drop things; may they not see clear­ly; may their equip­ment mal­func­tion; may they expe­ri­ence
    • over­whelm­ing hope­less­ness, enor­mous fatigue and a com­plete loss of any desire to fight; may their com­mu­ni­ca­tion be bro­ken; may there be con­fu­sion. Lead them to sur­ren­der. Stretch the kilo­me­ters before them into end­less kilo­me­ters of non­ad­vance­ment. Remove their lead­er­ship and replace them with peo­ple who make deci­sions that reflect a fear of you.
      Oh, God, infuse defend­ers with incred­i­ble surges of renewed alert­ness, strength, hope, courage. Inspire those who want to help. Show them spe­cif­ic, effec­tive ideas. Move them swift­ly and safe­ly.
      The worst is yet to come, Lord, if you do not stop it. But please, no peace where there is no peace. We ask for peace unit­ed with right­eous­ness and truth.God of all com­fort, be phys­i­cal­ly present with all the moth­ers, fathers, grand­par­ents and chil­dren who are hid­ing, hear­ing, smelling, endur­ing. Warm them; fill them with food; give them water, toi­lets, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their loved ones, the Gospel, hope in you.
      We repent of mak­ing idols of polit­i­cal lead­ers and news out­lets. For­give us for want­i­ng them to be our gods and sav­iors. For­give us for being unrea­son­able, for not want­i­ng to admit both the good and bad in all of our lead­ers. It is this spir­it that leads us to dic­ta­tors because we aban­don respon­si­bil­i­ty and rea­son. We con­fess the seeds of war that live in our own hearts.
      We hum­ble our hearts, our bod­ies. We ask you for mer­cy. Thank you that you love mer­cy and have all pow­er.”
  2. How Reli­gious Faith Can Shape Suc­cess in School (Ilana M. Hor­witz, New York Times): “I found that what reli­gion offers teenagers varies by social class. Those raised by pro­fes­sion­al-class par­ents, for exam­ple, do not expe­ri­ence much in the way of an edu­ca­tion­al advan­tage from being reli­gious. In some ways, reli­gion even con­strains teenagers’ edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties (espe­cial­ly girls’) by shap­ing their aca­d­e­m­ic ambi­tions after grad­u­a­tion; they are less like­ly to con­sid­er a selec­tive col­lege as they pri­or­i­tize life goals such as par­ent­hood, altru­ism and ser­vice to God rather than a pres­ti­gious career. How­ev­er, teenage boys from work­ing-class fam­i­lies, regard­less of race, who were reg­u­lar­ly involved in their church and strong­ly believed in God were twice as like­ly to earn bachelor’s degrees as mod­er­ate­ly reli­gious or non­re­li­gious boys.”
    • I find the ten­sion between faith and wealth inter­est­ing. They emerge as rivals in all sorts of sit­u­a­tions. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Tulane.
  3. This 47-year-old left a $800,000 salary to coach bas­ket­ball – now his small school is head­ed to NCAA March Mad­ness (Tom Hud­dle­ston, Jr): “In 2016, Aldrich was in the midst of a lucra­tive career. After being a part­ner at one of the world’s top law firms, he’d become the chief finan­cial offi­cer of a pri­vate equi­ty firm, with a salary of $800,000 per year, he told The Wash­ing­ton Post last week. But then, his best friend and for­mer col­lege bas­ket­ball team­mate Ryan Odom land­ed the job as head bas­ket­ball coach at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land, Bal­ti­more Coun­ty. Odom offered Aldrich a posi­tion as direc­tor of recruit­ing, a job that paid only $32,000 per year. But it got Aldrich clos­er to ful­fill­ing a life­long dream: a career coach­ing col­lege bas­ket­ball. He accept­ed.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I did some dig­ging and turns out the coach is a devout Chris­t­ian.
  4. The Semi­con­duc­tor Ecosys­tem – Explained (Steve Blank, blog): “Con­trol­ling advanced chip man­u­fac­tur­ing in the 21st cen­tu­ry may well prove to be like con­trol­lin g the oil sup­ply in the 20th. The coun­try that con­trols this man­u­fac­tur­ing can throt­tle the mil­i­tary and eco­nom­ic pow­er of oth­ers.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. SF is now boy­cotting most of the Unit­ed States (Joe Eskenazi,Mission Local):  “It will come as lit­tle sur­prise to any­one famil­iar with the M.O. of San Fran­cis­co gov­ern­ment that we have no tests nor audits nor analy­sis nor method­ol­o­gy to deter­mine if our trav­el bans or boy­cotts are mak­ing any dif­fer­ence for the good.… You could argue that, in 2016, San Fran­cis­co put itself in the van­guard of a move­ment. But, in the ensu­ing six years, nobody else has joined up. ‘No city has reached out to say they want to mir­ror our rules,’ con­firms Chu.” 
  6. The Real Rea­son That Pornog­ra­phy Can Lead to Male Sex­u­al Dis­sat­is­fac­tion (Ross Pomeroy, Real Clear Sci­ence): “…the unre­al­is­tic depic­tions of sex, female part­ners, and rela­tion­ships com­mon­ly seen in pornog­ra­phy can warp men’s expec­ta­tions of real-life sex. When het­ero­sex­u­al men expect sex with their part­ners to be just like the staged fan­tasies they see on the Inter­net, this can lead to dis­sat­is­fac­tion and even low­er their well-being.”
    • Sci­ence, catch­ing up to youth pas­tors since 2022.
    • Catch­ing up to bad youth pas­tors, actu­al­ly. The advice at the end is pret­ty ter­ri­ble by almost any­one’s stan­dards.
  7. The Chris­tians Who Think the Ukraine Inva­sion Means Jesus Is Return­ing to Earth (Alex Mor­ris, Rolling Stone): “For mil­len­nia, end times Chris­tians have tried to shoe­horn cur­rent events into proof of Jesus’ immi­nent return, tak­ing cryp­tic lan­guage from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Matthew, and Rev­e­la­tion to come up with var­i­ous the­o­ries as to how the world will end. In most of these the­o­ries — embraced by con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal or fun­da­men­tal­ist branch­es of the faith — an enti­ty referred to as Gog and Magog descends from the ‘far north’ upon a peace­ful, recon­sti­tut­ed Israel, whose peo­ple had been ‘brought out from the nations, and all now dwell secure­ly,’ as it is described in Ezekiel. The result­ing war that fol­lows allows a Mes­si­ah to swoop in and come to Israel’s res­cue. It also ush­ers in the end of the world as we know it and the estab­lish­ment of a new and bet­ter king­dom of God on earth.”
    • The author most­ly did his home­work, but did mis­spell “pen­ta­costal” lat­er in the essay and def­i­nite­ly gets some of the men­tal­i­ty wrong.

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 334

a whole lot­ta mag­ic tricks at the end of this one

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Nation of Chris­tians Is Not Nec­es­sar­i­ly a Chris­t­ian Nation (David French, The Dis­patch): “There are influ­en­tial peo­ple and insti­tu­tions in this coun­try who’ve tak­en the posi­tion that ortho­dox expres­sions of Chris­t­ian sex­u­al moral­i­ty rep­re­sent noth­ing more than big­otry and hatred.  But as much hos­til­i­ty as I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from some sec­u­lar left­ists in response to the pub­lic expres­sion of my Chris­t­ian val­ues, noth­ing com­pares to hos­til­i­ty I’ve seen and expe­ri­enced from self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians when I root­ed my oppo­si­tion to Don­ald Trump in the same Chris­t­ian val­ues that some­times earned me scorn in the Ivy League.”
    • Con­tra French on Chris­tian­i­ty’s Decline (Ross Douthat, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, in the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion to Mar­tin Luther King Jr. you see two things hap­pen­ing togeth­er: the pri­vate prac­tice of faith becomes pret­ty steadi­ly more robust, and the gov­ern­ment becomes more com­mit­ted to what most of us, reli­gious and not, now con­sid­er basic ele­ments of jus­tice and mer­cy. Over this mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional process, you could rea­son­ably say that Amer­i­ca remained man­i­fest­ly imper­fect but came clos­er, how­ev­er lurch­ing­ly, to the com­bi­na­tion of wide­spread per­son­al faith and greater polit­i­cal jus­tice that French argues char­ac­ter­izes the Chris­t­ian soci­ety. That this hap­pened, quite often, through con­flict between Protes­tants (both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, etc.) is unde­ni­able but not, it seems to me, a par­tic­u­lar­ly telling cri­tique: In a heav­i­ly Protes­tant soci­ety how else would change come?” A very impres­sive response.
    • America’s Chris­t­ian His­to­ry Is Broad­er Than Its White Protes­tant Past (David French, The Dis­patch): “Because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can progress has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action. But also because Amer­i­ca is a major­i­ty Chris­t­ian nation, Amer­i­can oppres­sion has depend­ed on Chris­t­ian action as well. And a move­ment that’s dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and Chris­t­ian needs to remem­ber that sober­ing fact.” A sol­id sur­re­join­der, but I think I award the match point to Douthat even though I usu­al­ly agree with French more.
  2. Pan­dem­ic stuff:
    • One More Time: What Do You Want Us to Do About Covid that We Aren’t Doing Already? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I will not live in fear. And I sus­pect that this is at the heart of all of it — for com­plex soci­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, [our] elites are made up of peo­ple who suf­fer from anx­i­ety and inse­cu­ri­ty at vast­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate rates, and they go through life need­ing their own feel­ings to be val­i­dat­ed by every­one else. This is very scary for them, and if it’s not scary for some of the rest of us, they expe­ri­ence that as implied judg­ment.” This is very, very good once you get past the Syr­ia stuff up top (which is help­ful as a fram­ing device, but goes on a lit­tle too long).
    • Why UCSF COVID expert Bob Wachter will soon be ‘over’ the pan­dem­ic (Eric Ting, SF Gate): “I believe it’s like­li­est that it peaks soon and comes down in Feb­ru­ary, and we’ll find our­selves in a world where the risk to ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed indi­vid­u­als is quite low, and it gets low for a few rea­sons. For one, every­one should have some immu­ni­ty because with the unvac­ci­nat­ed, most if not all will have been infect­ed by the time this wave ends. This vari­ant of the virus, which is now dom­i­nant, is more mild on aver­age. And the risk is low­er for immuno­com­pro­mised and high-risk indi­vid­u­als because of the increas­ing avail­abil­i­ty of med­ica­tions that decrease the chance they’ll get super sick.” The inter­vie­wee is chair of the Depart­ment of Med­i­cine at UCSF.
    • Dear Stan­ford: don’t force boost­ers on stu­dents (Monte Fis­ch­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When Paul Offit — direc­tor of the Vac­cine Edu­ca­tion Cen­ter at the Children’s Hos­pi­tal of Philadel­phia, mem­ber of the FDA’s vac­cine advi­so­ry com­mit­tee, decades-long ene­my of the anti-vax move­ment and co-inven­tor of a rotavirus vac­cine — tells his own twen­ty-some­thing son not to get boost­ed, you might start to ask some ques­tions about the wis­dom of Stanford’s lat­est man­date.” The author is a PhD can­di­date in MS&E.
  3. Is the West Becom­ing Pagan Again? (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “Ms. Delsol’s inge­nious approach is to exam­ine the civ­i­liza­tion­al change under­way in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Chris­tians brought what she calls a ‘nor­ma­tive inver­sion’ to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in con­tempt and con­demned much that the Romans prized, par­tic­u­lar­ly in mat­ters relat­ed to sex and fam­i­ly. Today the Chris­t­ian over­lay on West­ern cul­tur­al life is being removed, reveal­ing a lot of pagan urges that it cov­ered up. To state Ms. Delsol’s argu­ment crude­ly, what is hap­pen­ing today is an undo­ing, but it is also a redo­ing. We are invert­ing the nor­ma­tive inver­sion. We are repa­ganiz­ing.”
  4. New Math Research Group Reflects a Schism in the Field (Rachel Crow­ell, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “A new orga­ni­za­tion called the Asso­ci­a­tion for Math­e­mat­i­cal Research (AMR) has ignit­ed fierce debates in the math research and edu­ca­tion com­mu­ni­ties since it was launched last Octo­ber.… The AMR claims to have no posi­tion on social jus­tice issues, and crit­ics see its silence on those top­ics as part of a back­lash against inclu­siv­i­ty efforts.… The con­tro­ver­sy reflects a grow­ing divi­sion between researchers who want to keep sci­en­tif­ic and math­e­mat­i­cal pur­suits sep­a­rate from social issues that they see as irrel­e­vant to research and those who say even pure math­e­mat­ics can­not be con­sid­ered sep­a­rate­ly from the racism and sex­ism in its cul­ture.”
  5. We need to be able to talk about trans ath­letes and women’s sports (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Male puber­ty makes you taller, con­fers greater mus­cle and bone mass, larg­er heart and lung capac­i­ty rel­a­tive to your size, and more hemo­glo­bin. For cis­gen­der men, this trans­lates to rough­ly a 6 to 10 per­cent advan­tage over bio­log­i­cal women in sports such as run­ning and swim­ming, though the gap can be larg­er in oth­er domains, and in a few sports female biol­o­gy actu­al­ly con­veys some advan­tage. That 6 to 10 per­cent might sound mod­est, but at the elite lev­el, where 1 per­cent to 2 per­cent dif­fer­ences can eas­i­ly make the mar­gin of vic­to­ry, it’s over­whelm­ing. Jamaica’s Elaine Thomp­son-Her­ah, the fastest woman in the world, would lose to America’s best high school boys, and the fastest pitch ever record­ed by a woman would be unim­pres­sive for many high school base­ball teams.”
  6. The Bad Guys Are Win­ning (Anne Apple­baum, The Atlantic): “As Vladimir Putin fig­ured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnec­es­sary if you can jail, tor­ture, or pos­si­bly mur­der just a few key peo­ple. The rest will be fright­ened into stay­ing home. Even­tu­al­ly they will become apa­thet­ic, because they believe noth­ing can change.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­na.
  7. Why the Catholic Church is Los­ing Latin Amer­i­ca (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Luciana Mag­a­l­haes & Saman­tha Pear­son, The Wall Street Jour­nal): “The rise of lib­er­a­tion the­ol­o­gy in the 1960s and  ’70s, a time when the Catholic Church in Latin Amer­i­ca increas­ing­ly stressed its mis­sion as one of social jus­tice, in some cas­es draw­ing on Marx­ist ideas, failed to counter the appeal of Protes­tant faiths. Or, in the words of a now-leg­endary quip, var­i­ous­ly attrib­uted to Catholic and Protes­tant sources: ‘The Catholic Church opt­ed for the poor and the poor opt­ed for the Pen­te­costals.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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