Tag: how the church is perceived

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 306

some real­ly out­stand­ing arti­cles this 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 306, which is an inter­est­ing num­ber because 306 = 71 + 73 + 79 + 83 and is there­fore the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­can Passover (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “June­teenth is a good thing for all Amer­i­cans, not just black Amer­i­cans, to cel­e­brate.… I’m at a loss to under­stand why cel­e­brat­ing the end of slav­ery is any­thing but good. In par­tic­u­lar, I’m at a loss to under­stand why see­ing white Amer­i­cans cel­e­brate the end of slav­ery is any­thing but good.”
  2. What We Learned Doing Fast Grants (Patrick Col­li­son, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Hsu, Future): “In our sur­vey of the sci­en­tists who received Fast Grants, 78% said that they would change their research pro­gram ‘a lot’ if their exist­ing fund­ing could be spent in an uncon­strained fash­ion. We find this num­ber to be far too high: the cur­rent grant fund­ing appa­ra­tus does not allow some of the best sci­en­tists in the world to pur­sue the research agen­das that they them­selves think are best. Sci­en­tists are in the para­dox­i­cal posi­tion of being deemed the very best peo­ple to fund in order to make impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies but not so trust­wor­thy that they should be able to decide what work would actu­al­ly make the most sense!” EXTREMELY worth read­ing.
  3. Why Has “Iver­mectin” Become a Dirty Word? (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “A Catch-22 seemed to be ensnar­ing sci­ence. With the world des­per­ate for news about an unprece­dent­ed dis­as­ter, Sil­i­con Val­ley had essen­tial­ly decid­ed to dis­al­low dis­cus­sion of a poten­tial solu­tion — dis­al­low calls for more research and more study — because not enough research and study had been done.”
    • This is ridicu­lous. Dig into it your­self — it’s crazy­town. The pre­scient Lewis nailed it years ago: “Of all tyran­nies, a tyran­ny sin­cere­ly exer­cised for the good of its vic­tims may be the most oppres­sive. It would be bet­ter to live under rob­ber barons than under omnipo­tent moral busy­bod­ies. The rob­ber baron’s cru­el­ty may some­times sleep, his cupid­i­ty may at some point be sati­at­ed; but those who tor­ment us for our own good will tor­ment us with­out end for they do so with the approval of their own con­science.” (from the under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed God in the Dock: Essays on The­ol­o­gy and Ethics)
  4. Chris­tians, Beware the Blame Game (Carl True­man, First Things): “By all means, call out the moral fail­ings of Chris­tians, con­gre­ga­tions and denom­i­na­tions, left and right; but be spe­cif­ic, do so with­out slan­der and vit­ri­ol, and make a clear dis­tinc­tion between the church and the spe­cif­ic fail­ings to which you allude in order to pro­mote clear think­ing. And remember—if your cri­tique of Chris­tians is not bal­anced by a Pauline empha­sis on the church, the body of Christ, as the answer to the world’s prob­lems, you ulti­mate­ly offer no true Chris­t­ian com­men­tary on the con­tem­po­rary scene. For as soon as you see the church her­self as part of the prob­lem, you have lost the gospel and deprived your­self and your audi­ence of hope.”
  5. Some reli­gious free­dom news and com­men­tary:
    • Four Things You Need to Know After a Huge Day at SCOTUS (David French, The Dis­patch): “Very few com­ments about the Ful­ton case have empha­sized a crit­i­cal part of its ruling—that Philadel­phia has very lim­it­ed abil­i­ty to force city con­trac­tors to con­tract away their First Amend­ment rights.… When the gov­ern­ment expands—and gov­ern­ment con­tracts and gov­ern­ment funds touch more Amer­i­can lives and institutions—opposing par­ti­sans fre­quent­ly demand that those funds come with ide­o­log­i­cal strings attached.” Sad­ly pay­walled, but the best com­men­tary on the rul­ing I’ve read. If you’re an avid news con­sumer, The Dis­patch is well worth a sub­scrip­tion.
    • From the court, a vin­di­ca­tion of faith-based ser­vice. From Ali­to, a blue­print for the future. (Andrea Pic­ciot­ti-Bay­er, SCO­TUS­blog): “At the end of the day, Ful­ton is an impor­tant rebuke to overzeal­ous gov­ern­ment offi­cials who weaponize anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion laws against tra­di­tion­al reli­gious belief. Brace your­self for the response of dis­grun­tled pro­gres­sives.”
    • Supreme Court Backs Catholic Agency in Case on Gay Rights and Fos­ter Care (Adam Lip­tak, New York Times): “The deci­sion, in the lat­est clash between antidis­crim­i­na­tion prin­ci­ples and claims of con­science, was a set­back for gay rights and fur­ther evi­dence that reli­gious groups almost always pre­vail in the cur­rent court.”
    • Jus­tice Depart­ment says it can defend reli­gious schools’ exemp­tion from anti-LGBTQ dis­crim­i­na­tion laws (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “To oth­ers, includ­ing sup­port­ers of Pres­i­dent Biden, the admin­is­tra­tion had no oth­er option, since fed­er­al civ­il rights law regard­ing edu­ca­tion — called Title IX — exempts reli­gion. They not­ed the pur­pose of the department’s fil­ing, which was to block con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gious groups from becom­ing par­ties to the law­suit, argu­ing the agency can defend the exemp­tion on its own.”
    • A frank analy­sis of the dynam­ics: No, the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion Isn’t Betray­ing Its Sup­port for LGBTQ Rights (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate): “The best way to pre­vent the fed­er­al judi­cia­ry from adopt­ing CCCU’s extreme stance is to stop the orga­ni­za­tion from mak­ing it before a court in the first place. That is pre­sum­ably one rea­son why the Jus­tice Depart­ment strong­ly opposed the group’s request to inter­vene, insist­ing on Tues­day that the admin­is­tra­tion can defend the Title IX exemp­tion just fine by itself. The DOJ’s lat­est fil­ing does not imply that the agency is exceed­ing­ly enthu­si­as­tic about the exemp­tion, but rather that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion can be trust­ed to sup­port the law’s legal­i­ty in court.”
  6. The Per­il of Politi­ciz­ing Sci­ence (Anna I. Krylov, The Jour­nal of Phys­i­cal Chem­istry Let­ters): “The Cold War is a dis­tant mem­o­ry and the coun­try shown on my birth cer­tifi­cate and school and uni­ver­si­ty diplo­mas, the USSR, is no longer on the map. But I find myself expe­ri­enc­ing its lega­cy some thou­sands of miles to the west, as if I am liv­ing in an Orwellian twi­light zone. I wit­ness ever-increas­ing attempts to sub­ject sci­ence and edu­ca­tion to ide­o­log­i­cal con­trol and cen­sor­ship. Just as in Sovi­et times, the cen­sor­ship is being jus­ti­fied by the greater good.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of chem­istry at USC.
  7. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Stan­ford ther­a­pists allege ‘hos­tile cli­mate’ for Jews in the work­place (Gabe Stut­man, Jew­ish News of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia): “Two Jew­ish men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als at Stanford’s on-cam­pus coun­sel­ing clin­ic have filed work­place dis­crim­i­na­tion com­plaints after what they call ‘severe and per­sis­tent’ anti-Jew­ish harass­ment from col­leagues. Dr. Ronald Albuch­er, a psy­chi­a­trist and asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in the med­ical school, and Sheila Levin, a ther­a­pist spe­cial­iz­ing in eat­ing dis­or­ders, describe being pressed into join­ing a ‘white­ness’ affin­i­ty group by staffers with the Diver­si­ty, Equi­ty and Inclu­sion pro­gram, being told they were ‘priv­i­leged,’ and see­ing anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents down­played.”
    • When the medal­ists aren’t the mon­ey-mak­ers (Jas­mine Ker­ber, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “If ath­let­ic direc­tors were reward­ed for Olympic sports every bit as much as for foot­ball and men’s bas­ket­ball, you would see dif­fer­ent behav­ior,” Hogshead-Makar said.

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 some thoughts about slav­ery and the Bible – Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

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 305

more sub­lists 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.

305 is appar­ent­ly the 5th ‘hexag­o­nal prism num­ber’, which total­ly sounds made up and I am slight­ly skep­ti­cal of. This is because 305 = (n + 1)(3n2 + 3n + 1) where n=4 (pre­sum­ably the first hexag­o­nal prism num­ber is 1, when n=0).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Fad­ing of For­give­ness (Tim Keller, Car­dus): “In oth­er words, we no longer ground our val­ues in the sacred. We sim­ply treat the val­ues them­selves as sacred.… When the moral norms are detached from faith in a just God, it detach­es them also from faith in a mer­ci­ful and for­giv­ing God. In such a ‘sec­u­lar reli­gion,’ devi­a­tion from norms is sim­ply unfor­give­able.” Full of insights.
  2. Lov­ing the Foreigners—Even When They Have a Dead­ly Dis­ease (Hwee Hwee Tan, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While migrant work­ers had long lived chal­leng­ing lives in Sin­ga­pore, it was their unique vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty dur­ing the cir­cuit-break­er peri­od that real­ly woke up local Chris­tians to the need to help them—in both the short and long term.”
  3. A cri­sis inside Amer­i­ca’s largest evan­gel­i­cal denom­i­na­tion:
    • Rus­sell Moore’s Warn­ings Should Bring a Reck­on­ing (David French, The Dis­patch): “Chris­tians, let me ask you a ques­tion. When the #MeToo move­ment launched… did you think, ‘Stop obsess­ing over scan­dal. Most mem­bers of the media and most folks in Hol­ly­wood are good peo­ple’? Or did you think that mul­ti­ple pow­er­ful Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions were beset with deep cul­tur­al and spir­i­tu­al prob­lems? .… #MeToo did reveal moral rot. But let’s flip it all around. When you heard about cor­rup­tion and sex­u­al mis­con­duct at America’s largest Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty, what did you think? What did you think when you read about the sex­u­al scan­dal at Hill­song or when you learned about Ravi Zacharias’ record of abuse and his ministry’s ter­ri­ble mis­treat­ment of whistle­blow­ers? Did you pause to con­sid­er the larg­er impli­ca­tions of a decade of sex­u­al pre­da­tion at one of America’s largest Chris­t­ian camps or the camp’s efforts to intim­i­date and coerce vic­tims into silence?” I don’t often tip my hand, but FYI Moore and French are two of my favorite evan­gel­i­cal cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tors. If they ever agree on some­thing, you can be pret­ty sure that is my posi­tion as well.
    • The Scan­dal Rock­ing the Evan­gel­i­cal World (Pete Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “And the rot that has been so pow­er­ful­ly and so painful­ly exposed by Rus­sell Moore is not an indict­ment of Jesus any more than the fail­ures of the reli­gious author­i­ties in first-cen­tu­ry Pales­tine were. A the­olo­gian recent­ly remind­ed me that the Church is not the hope of the world; its pur­pose is to be a wit­ness to the hope of the world, even if that wit­ness is often imper­fect. But those of us of the Chris­t­ian faith do seem to be over­do­ing the imper­fect part.”
    • Where Did All the Evan­gel­i­cal Prophets Go? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The god­less­ness of the left maps very clean­ly onto the evan­gel­i­cal church’s radar because its insti­tu­tions and lead­ers are watch­ing for it all the time, but the god­less­ness of the right is obvi­ous­ly not yet some­thing some­one can talk about con­fi­dent­ly, expect­ing their denom­i­na­tion or eccle­si­as­ti­cal sup­port sys­tem to back them on.” Some good insights here.
  4. The future of Amer­i­ca:
    • A calm per­spec­tive: Are We Des­tined for a Trump Coup in 2024? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Then keep in mind, too, that in the event of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024, Biden, not Trump, will enjoy the presidency’s pow­ers; Kamala Har­ris, not Mike Pence, will pre­side over the elec­toral count; and Trump will be four years old­er, unlike­ly to run a fourth time, and there­fore some­what less intim­i­dat­ing in defeat.”
    • Alarmed from the left: 9/11 and 1/6 (Tim­o­thy Sny­der, Sub­stack): “The sce­nario then goes like this. The Repub­li­cans win back the House and Sen­ate in 2022, in part thanks to vot­er sup­pres­sion. The Repub­li­can can­di­date in 2024 los­es the pop­u­lar vote by sev­er­al mil­lion and the elec­toral vote by the mar­gin of a few states. State leg­is­la­tures, claim­ing fraud, alter the elec­toral count vote. The House and Sen­ate accept that altered count. The los­ing can­di­date becomes the pres­i­dent. We no longer have ‘demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment.’ And peo­ple are angry. No one is seek­ing to hide that this is the plan.”  The author is a his­to­ri­an at Yale.
    • Alarmed from the right: Our Increas­ing­ly Unrec­og­niz­able Civ­i­liza­tion (Mark Steyn, Imprim­is): “…one notices that Amer­i­ca is far­ther down this road than any oth­er coun­try in the West­ern world. In oth­er words, at this moment of cri­sis for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, or for what we used to call Chris­ten­dom, the lead­ing coun­try of the free world is pulling the wrong way.” Sent my way by a friend of the min­istry.
  5. A few thoughts on depres­sion (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “For some rea­son, human com­pa­ny helps. In fact, it is the sin­gle thing that helps the most. But not the kind of com­pa­ny a sad per­son needs. What a depressed per­son needs is sim­ply to talk to peo­ple, not about their prob­lems or their neg­a­tive thoughts or their depres­sion, but about any­thing else — music, ani­mals, sci­ence. The most help­ful top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion, I’ve found, is absur­di­ty — just talk­ing about utter­ly ridicu­lous things, gross things, vul­gar offen­sive things, bizarre things. Shared activ­i­ties, like going on a hike or play­ing sports, are OK, but talk­ing is much, much more impor­tant.”
  6. Once a Bas­tion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Iden­ti­ty Cri­sis (Michael Pow­ell, New York Times): “I got the sense it was more impor­tant for A.C.L.U. staff to iden­ti­fy with clients and pro­gres­sive caus­es than to stand on prin­ci­ple,” he said in a recent inter­view. “Lib­er­als are leav­ing the First Amend­ment behind.”
  7. Some snap­shots of acad­e­mia:
    • The Native Schol­ar Who Wasn’t (Sarah Viren, New York Times): “Of the 1,500 uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tors list­ed as Native Amer­i­can at the time, said Bill Cross, who helped found the Amer­i­can Indian/Alaska Native Pro­fes­sors Asso­ci­a­tion, “we’re look­ing real­is­ti­cal­ly at one-third of those being Indi­ans.”
    • Gripped by ‘Din­ner Par­ty-gate,’ Yale Law Con­fronts a Ven­omous Divide (Sarah Lyell and Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “At the law school, the episode has exposed bit­ter divi­sions in a top-ranked insti­tu­tion strug­gling to adapt at a moment of roil­ing social change. Stu­dents reg­u­lar­ly attack their pro­fes­sors, and one anoth­er, for their schol­ar­ship, pro­fes­sion­al choic­es and per­ceived polit­i­cal views. In a place awash in rumor and anony­mous accu­sa­tions, almost no one would speak on the record.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 297

slight­ly weird­er arti­cles than the usu­al (and more fun videos)

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 297, which is known as a Kaprekar Num­ber. It’s such a weird thing I can bare­ly believe it has a name. To sim­pli­fy a bit, if you square the num­ber and split the dig­its in half and they add back up to the orig­i­nal num­ber, it’s a Kaprekar num­ber. Since 2972 = 88,209 and 297 = 88 + 209, that means 297 is one of these odd numer­i­cal enti­ties.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. About police shoot­ings: I’m real­ly sad and I also don’t have any arti­cles because I haven’t read any­thing inter­est­ing about them in rela­tion to the most recent episodes. If you find some­thing — espe­cial­ly some­thing writ­ten from a thought­ful Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive — please do let me know.
  2. Can the Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Find God? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “To be dropped into [a world like this] and not be per­sis­tent­ly open to reli­gious pos­si­bil­i­ties seems much more like prej­u­dice than ratio­nal­i­ty.”
    • Relat­ed: Anoth­er Obsta­cle to Elite Reli­gion (Audrey Poll­now, Sub­stack): “One friend—a very admirable per­son who has devot­ed their life to learn­ing and ser­vice rather than to acquir­ing mon­ey or prestige—told me that they could nev­er become a Chris­t­ian because the inabil­i­ty to be ‘good enough’ in the achieve­ment depart­ment would make them depressed.”
    • Relat­ed: Why the Church Is Los­ing the Next Gen­er­a­tion (Rus­sell Moore, newslet­ter): “If peo­ple reject the church because they reject Jesus and the gospel, we should be sad­dened but not sur­prised.  But what hap­pens when peo­ple reject the church because they think we reject Jesus and the gospel?”
    • Relat­ed: Can Amer­i­ca’s ‘Civ­il Reli­gion’ Still Unite The Coun­try? (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “Amer­i­cans are expect­ed to hold their hands over their hearts when they recite the Pledge of Alle­giance or stand for the nation­al anthem. Young peo­ple are taught to regard the coun­try’s founders almost as saints. The ‘self-evi­dent’ truths list­ed in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the key pro­vi­sions of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and the Bill of Rights have acquired the sta­tus of scrip­ture in the U.S. con­scious­ness.” The scare quotes around ‘self-evi­dent’ are weird.
  3. On Lov­ing Mor­tals (Cur­tis Yarvin, Athwart): “Here’s a catch-22, or a Meno’s Para­dox of sorts: why should these young men live well with­out a fam­i­ly for whom to do it, and why should young women tol­er­ate (much less love) men who don’t live well? Lov­ing a mor­tal saved me, and count­less oth­er men I know, from the Achil­lean fate, but in most cas­es it seems some­thing like a mir­a­cle.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent, who called it enthralling.
  4. Stan­ford activists ‘Dis­turbed the War’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Lenny Siegel, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “After watch­ing the play, ‘Alice in ROTC-Land,’ thou­sands of demon­stra­tors poured out of Frost Amphithe­ater to con­front police. Inci­den­tal­ly, that per­for­mance launched the act­ing career of Sigour­ney Weaver, who played the title role.” Inter­est­ing and also very weird. The author seems to want Stan­ford to be a democ­ra­cy as though it were a gov­ern­ment. Full of fas­ci­nat­ing anec­dotes.
  5. The Splin­ter­ing of the Evan­gel­i­cal Soul (Tim­o­thy Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This [col­lapse of media integri­ty] presents an extra­or­di­nary chal­lenge for Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship. Media con­sump­tion has been climb­ing for years, and it soared amid the pan­dem­ic. Mem­bers of our con­gre­ga­tions may spend a few hours a week in the Word of God (which should always be the Christian’s most impor­tant source of infor­ma­tion and author­i­ty) but 40 hours or more main­lin­ing the ani­mosi­ties of the day.” The author is a Stan­ford grad.
  6. A The­ol­o­gy of Free Speech (Brad Lit­tle­john, Gospel Coali­tion): “Thus, as Chris­tians, we must clear­ly affirm that free­dom of speech can be a great good. But it is an instru­men­tal good, a means to the end of pro­claim­ing truth and encour­ag­ing right­eous­ness. It is not an end in itself, as if the mere free­dom to open our mouths were sacro­sanct. We have a moral right to speak truth in due sea­son. We have no moral right to slan­der, deceive, curse, or insult. In order to secure our moral right to speak truth, how­ev­er, we gen­er­al­ly need to defend a legal right that includes a right to speak false­hood.” This is quite good.
  7. Whith­er the Reli­gious Left? (Matthew Sit­man, The New Repub­lic): “Unlike the bland con­for­mi­ty of civic reli­gion, the prophet­ic calls of par­tic­u­lar­is­tic faiths rarely line up with the needs of polit­i­cal par­ties. This cuts both ways: The reli­gious left, in all its diver­si­ty, will nev­er be a reli­able ally of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, nor will the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty always be a com­fort­able home for the reli­gious left.… That means the reli­gious left faces sim­i­lar dilem­mas as the social­ist left: dis­cern­ing how far and how fast to push, how to relate high ideals to the real­i­ties of main­stream par­ties.”

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 Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

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 291

fas­ci­nat­ing links from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives

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 291, which is not a very inter­est­ing num­ber. It’s 3 · 97, which I guess is some­thing.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State (Ben Mauk, New York­er): “On his sec­ond day of deten­tion, a mem­ber of the camp admin­is­tra­tion came to see him. Kok­teubai asked when he would learn what he was accused of doing. He was sur­prised to learn that he wouldn’t be ques­tioned at all. ‘If you hadn’t com­mit­ted a crime, you wouldn’t have end­ed up here,’ the admin­is­tra­tor told him. ‘So there is some­thing you are here for.’ ” The graph­ics inter­fere with the read­ing expe­ri­ence, but it’s worth­while.
  2. On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good.
  3. David Shor on Why Trump Was Good for the GOP and How Dems Can Win in 2022 (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “But when I look at the 2020 elec­tion, I see that we ran against the most unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can ever to run for pres­i­dent — and we ran lit­er­al­ly the most pop­u­lar fig­ure in our par­ty whose last name is not Oba­ma — and we only nar­row­ly won the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden had done 0.3 per­cent worse, then Don­ald Trump would have won reelec­tion…” This is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly fas­ci­nat­ing in a very non­par­ti­san way (although the inter­vie­wee is extreme­ly par­ti­san).
  4. In pan­dem­ic news:
    • 5 Pan­dem­ic Mis­takes We Keep Repeat­ing (Zeynep Tufek­ci, The Atlantic): “One of the most impor­tant prob­lems under­min­ing the pan­dem­ic response has been the mis­trust and pater­nal­ism that some pub­lic-health agen­cies and experts have exhib­it­ed toward the pub­lic.… And yet, from the begin­ning, a good chunk of the pub­lic-fac­ing mes­sag­ing and news arti­cles implied or claimed that vac­cines won’t pro­tect you against infect­ing oth­er peo­ple or that we didn’t know if they would, when both were false.” Watch­ing peo­ple reject accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the pan­dem­ic because high-sta­tus peo­ple rail against it has been like watch­ing my skep­ti­cal friends reject the gospel because of peer pres­sure. IT’S GOOD NEWS — BELIEVE IT! The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UNC.
    • Pan­dem­ic Approach­es: The Dif­fer­ences Between Flori­da, Cal­i­for­nia (Noel King, Greg Allen, & Eric West­er­velt, NPR): “In Decem­ber, Cal­i­for­nia had a spike, and Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som reim­posed a stay-at-home order and a busi­ness lock­down order that was recent­ly lift­ed. At the same time, cas­es were spik­ing in Flori­da. But every­thing stayed open, includ­ing schools. So which approach works?” Spoil­er: Flori­da is look­ing pret­ty good.
    • Stop Say­ing We Can’t Go Back to Nor­mal After Vac­cines (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Rea­son): “Nor­mal­cy is the whole point of vac­ci­na­tion, and these vac­cines can get us there. So when pub­lic health advice says “no” to nor­mal­cy even after vac­ci­na­tion, it mis­leads the pub­lic and wild­ly under­sells the vac­cines. A year into this, that’s cru­el and dispir­it­ing.… there must be a firm end date to those pub­lic mea­sures for every­one. I can’t say exact­ly when it should be, nor do I think a sin­gle nation­al date would make sense. I’m envi­sion­ing some­thing like six weeks after vac­cines have become avail­able (as in, you can eas­i­ly get an appoint­ment) to all who want them in a giv­en city, coun­ty, or state.”
    • Not Gath­er­ing with the Church Hurts You Spir­i­tu­al­ly (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Jesus designed Chris­tian­i­ty and the progress of our dis­ci­ple­ship to cen­ter around gath­er­ings. The math is there­fore sim­ple: Gath­er­ing with the church is spir­i­tu­al­ly good for you. Not phys­i­cal­ly gath­er­ing with the church spir­i­tu­al­ly hurts you.”
    • The Secret Life of a Coro­n­avirus (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With sci­en­tists adrift in an ocean of def­i­n­i­tions, philoso­phers have rowed out to offer life­lines.” What a glo­ri­ous sen­tence. Also, I began the arti­cle sym­pa­thet­ic to the idea that virus­es are alive and we draw our bound­aries too tight­ly, which is what the author wants me to believe. But his argu­ments were so weak that I’ve flipped to: “not alive, mere­ly inter­ac­tive.”
    • The rise of the nox­ious con­tract (David B. Grusky et al, Stan­ford Cen­ter On Pover­ty and Inequal­i­ty): “We observed that many peo­ple ‘com­pare down­ward’ by empha­siz­ing their priv­i­lege rel­a­tive to those less for­tu­nate, that oth­ers ‘look out­ward’ in recog­ni­tion that times of cri­sis require band­ing togeth­er, and that yet oth­ers ‘look inward’ as they cope with unusu­al­ly stress­ful chal­lenges. Although many ways of cop­ing are there­fore in play, none of them entail invid­i­ous com­par­isons that then lead to resent­ment or con­flict.” An analy­sis of whether peo­ple who have to work in-per­son are resent­ful of those who telecom­mute. Spoil­er: not so much. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. On Ryan Ander­son­’s book being dropped by Ama­zon:
    • Ryan T. Ander­son Was Made For This Moment (Rod Dreher inter­view­ing Ryan T. Ander­son, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…most every­one agrees that a hos­pi­tal shouldn’t refuse to treat some­one for Covid because they iden­ti­fy as LGBT. But, thank God, that doesn’t seem to have actu­al­ly ever hap­pened. Still when peo­ple hear about a law that bans LGBT dis­crim­i­na­tion, that’s what they have in mind. They don’t real­ize what it means for sex-reas­sign­ment pro­ce­dures in gen­er­al, let alone what it means for chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria in par­tic­u­lar. So activists pull on people’s heart­strings by say­ing we need a law ban­ning tru­ly unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion (which is vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent) and then that law isn’t nuanced and mea­sured, but a rad­i­cal bill impos­ing a rad­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. A law that is sold as a shield pro­tect­ing vul­ner­a­ble minori­ties ends up being a sword to per­se­cute peo­ple who don’t embrace a new sex­u­al ortho­doxy.”
    • Book Ban­ning in an Age of Ama­zon (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “Remem­ber where you were in Feb­ru­ary of 2021. Con­gress fought over a sec­ond impeach­ment of an ex-pres­i­dent. The states debat­ed whether forced tru­an­cy would make life eas­i­er for America’s teach­ers. And earth’s largest bookseller—(Internal mot­to: ‘Work Hard. Have Fun. Make his­to­ry.’)—began qui­et­ly delet­ing books.”
  6. Killing The SAT Means Hurt­ing Minori­ties (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “There’s a rea­son why white Hol­ly­wood celebs cheat the sys­tem. It’s the only way their less gift­ed kids can win out over the dis­ad­van­taged. Want to max­i­mize priv­i­lege? Make admis­sions depen­dent sole­ly on teacher rec­om­men­da­tions, school grades, and per­son­al essays. Want to min­i­mize it? Abol­ish lega­cy admis­sions, and use the SAT.” I gen­uine­ly do not under­stand how this is con­tro­ver­sial. The data is clear and over­whelm­ing.
  7. Ele­vat­ing the Role of Faith-Inspired Impact in the Social Sec­tor (Jeri Eck­hart Queenan, Peter Grunert, and Devin Mur­phy, The Bridges­pan Group): “Giv­ing to reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tions (which includes dona­tions to con­gre­ga­tions) rep­re­sents near­ly one-third of all giv­ing in the Unit­ed States. Rough­ly a third of the 50 largest non­prof­its in the coun­try have a faith ori­en­ta­tion. And, 40 per­cent of inter­na­tion­al non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions are faith-inspired.” 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 The Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 287

you would­n’t believe how many awe­some links I cut this 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 287, a num­ber which is the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes thrice over (287 = 89 + 97 + 101 = 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 = 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Sci­ence of Rea­son­ing With Unrea­son­able Peo­ple (Adam Grant, New York Times): “Social sci­en­tists have found that ask­ing peo­ple how their pre­ferred polit­i­cal poli­cies might work in prac­tice, rather than ask­ing why they favor those approach­es, was more effec­tive in open­ing their minds. As peo­ple strug­gled to explain their ide­al tax leg­is­la­tion or health care plan, they grasped the com­plex­i­ty of the prob­lem and rec­og­nized gaps in their knowl­edge.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Pen­n’s Whar­ton School.
  2. Pelo­ton makes ton­ing your glutes feel spir­i­tu­al. But should Jesus be part of the expe­ri­ence? (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): ‘Nick Stok­er, 41, a Lon­don busi­ness­man, trig­gered hun­dreds of com­ments on the Pelo­ton Red­dit page in April when he post­ed that he took a “Sun­days with Love” ride and thought he was get­ting pan­dem­ic-era “spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tion and uplift­ing music,” but actu­al­ly got some­thing more about God and Chris­tian­i­ty. The ride should have been labeled as Chris­t­ian, he argued. “I don’t want my chil­dren lis­ten­ing to these sort of mes­sages.”’
  3. Thoughts about Chris­tian­i­ty and Amer­i­ca
    • Dis­cern­ing the Dif­fer­ence Between Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and Chris­t­ian Patri­o­tism (David French, The Dis­patch): “I love this coun­try, but I love it with eyes wide open. The aspi­ra­tions of our found­ing have long been tem­pered by the bru­tal real­i­ties of our fall­en nature. The same nation that stormed Normandy’s beach­es to destroy a fas­cist empire simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sus­tained a seg­re­ga­tion­ist regime with­in its own bor­ders. Our virtues do not negate our vices, and our vices do not negate our virtues. Amer­i­ca isn’t 1619 or 1776. It’s 1619 and 1776.”
    • Betray­ing Your Church—And Your Par­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “On Jan­u­ary 6, as an armed mob invad­ed the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Kinzinger said he could feel a dark­ness descend over the Capi­tol. One of his friends in Con­gress, the Okla­homa Repub­li­can Mark­wayne Mullin, heard the same thing from mem­bers of the Capi­tol Police. Kinzinger doesn’t doubt that the dev­il is at work in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. He just sus­pects that the ene­my might be lurk­ing in his own house.”
    • It’s Time to Talk About Vio­lent Chris­t­ian Extrem­ism (Zack Stan­ton inter­view­ing Eliz­a­beth Neu­mann, Politi­co): “Here’s the thing, and I will do my best to explain it from a sec­u­lar per­spec­tive: There’s text in the New Tes­ta­ment where the Apos­tle Paul is admon­ish­ing a church he helped estab­lish: ‘You should be mature adults now in your faith, but I’m still hav­ing to feed you with milk.’ He’s basi­cal­ly say­ing, you should be 18, but you’re still nurs­ing, and we need you to get it togeth­er.… One of my ques­tions is: Are we see­ing in the last four years one of the con­se­quences of that fail­ure? They didn’t mature [in their faith], and they’re very eas­i­ly led astray by what scrip­ture calls ‘false teach­ers.’ My the­sis here is that if we had a more scrip­tural­ly based set of believ­ers in this coun­try — if every­body who calls them­selves a ‘Chris­t­ian’ had actu­al­ly read through, I don’t know, 80 per­cent of the Bible — they would not have been so eas­i­ly deceived.” The inter­vie­wee is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who has served as a Deputy Chief of Staff in the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing.
  4. The chal­lenge of Chi­na:
    • Biden’s Night­mare May Be Chi­na (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Deal­ing with Mitch McConnell will be a piece of cake for Pres­i­dent Biden com­pared with deal­ing with Xi. Biden’s chal­lenge will be to con­strain a Chi­nese leader who has been oppres­sive in Hong Kong, geno­ci­dal in the Xin­jiang region, obdu­rate on trade, ruth­less on human rights and insin­cere on every­thing, while still coop­er­at­ing with Chi­na on issues like cli­mate change, fen­tanyl and North Korea (which many experts expect to resume mis­sile launch­es this year).”
    • ‘Their goal is to destroy every­one’: Uighur camp detainees allege sys­tem­at­ic rape (Matthew Hill, David Cam­panale and Joel Gunter, BBC): “It was unlike­ly that Xi or oth­er top par­ty offi­cials would have direct­ed or autho­rised rape or tor­ture,” Par­ton said, but they would “cer­tain­ly be aware of it. I think they pre­fer at the top just to turn a blind eye. The line has gone out to imple­ment this pol­i­cy with great stern­ness, and that is what is hap­pen­ing.” That left “no real con­straints”, he said. “I just don’t see what the per­pe­tra­tors of these acts would have to hold them back.” I don’t know how this isn’t front page news almost every day. We want to say every­one is as evil as Hitler EXCEPT THE PEOPLE RUNNING ACTUAL CONCENTRATION CAMPS.
    • And thoughts on Tai­wan, which is not Chi­na
      • Under­stand­ing Tai­wanese Nation­al­ism: A His­tor­i­cal Primer in Bul­let Points (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “As some­one who has lived years in both Tai­wan and in Chi­na I can also give a more anec­do­tal assess­ment: the dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries and their respec­tive cul­tures (to say noth­ing of their polit­i­cal sys­tems) is clear. They are sim­ply not the same peo­ple.”
      • Chi­na and the Ques­tion of Tai­wan (Aaron Sarin, Quil­lette): “His­to­ri­an James A. Mill­ward points out that many in his dis­ci­pline have implic­it­ly accept­ed the Par­ty line on Tai­wanese his­to­ry. They will refer, for exam­ple, to the Qing dynasty’s ‘recap­ture of Tai­wan in 1683,’ even though, as Mill­ward explains, ‘no Chi­na-based state—not even an impe­r­i­al dynasty—ha[d] ever ruled the island before.’ Here we see the suc­cess of the CCP’s pro­pa­gan­da, even out­side Chi­na. The truth is that Tai­wan was a Qing acqui­si­tion, and that is the sole basis for Beijing’s claims today.”
      • Fork The Gov­ern­ment (Plan­et Mon­ey, NPR): “As coun­tries around the world strug­gle to han­dle the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, Tai­wan stands out as a rel­a­tive suc­cess sto­ry… so far. Since April, only one local­ly trans­mit­ted case has been report­ed. There have been only sev­en deaths — in the entire coun­try. There are a lot of rea­sons why Tai­wan has been able to keep its infec­tion and death rates so low. For one, it’s an island. Also, it’s dealt with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus epi­dem­ic before. But Tai­wan has also been tak­ing a rel­a­tive­ly exper­i­men­tal approach to the pan­dem­ic with tech­nol­o­gy. Like work­ing with civic hack­ers to code its way out of the pan­dem­ic.” This is a pod­cast episode.
  5. Things relat­ed to the cred­i­bil­i­ty cri­sis in our cul­ture:
    • Nation­al­ism, prej­u­dice, and FDA reg­u­la­tion (Scott Sum­n­er, Econ­Lib): “You say peo­ple shouldn’t be allowed to take a vac­cine unless experts find it to be safe and effec­tive? OK, the UK experts did just that. You say that only the opin­ion of US experts counts because our experts are clear­ly the best? Real­ly, where is the sci­en­tif­ic study that shows that our experts are the best? I thought you said we need­ed to ‘trust the sci­en­tists’? Now you are say­ing we must trust the nation­al­ists?” The author is an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Web­MD, And The Tragedy Of Leg­i­ble Exper­tise (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said some­thing (or been silent about some­thing in a sug­ges­tive way), and then some blog­ger I trust­ed said the oppo­site, and the blog­ger turned out to be right. I real­ize this kind of thing is vul­ner­a­ble to selec­tion bias, but it’s been the same cou­ple of blog­gers through­out, peo­ple who I already trust­ed and already sus­pect­ed might be bet­ter than the experts in a lot of ways.”
    • Where Have All the Great Works Gone? (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “It was obvi­ous to even those who dis­liked Niet­zche that he was a sem­i­nal fig­ure in West­ern thought; it was obvi­ous even to those who dis­agreed with Ibsen that he claimed a sim­i­lar place in West­ern lit­er­a­ture, and so forth. Their ideas might be argued against, but their genius and their influ­ence was unde­ni­able.  Is there any­one who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for?  How about for the last two decades?  The last three?  Or is there any­one at all who is still liv­ing today that might be described this way? In the realm of sci­ence, per­haps. But in the world of social, his­tor­i­cal, eth­i­cal, and polit­i­cal thought, no one comes to mind.”
    • Social Jus­tice, Aus­ter­i­ty, and the Human­i­ties Death Spi­ral (Geoff Shul­len­berg­er, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “How are human­i­ties dis­ci­plines push­ing back against the exis­ten­tial threats they face? Obvi­ous­ly, one can find a vari­ety of argu­ments against cut­backs and the deval­u­a­tion of human­is­tic study. On the oth­er hand, fac­ul­ty mem­bers with­in these fields some­times make what looks like a case against their own val­ue. For exam­ple, the Chica­go announce­ment states that ‘Eng­lish as a dis­ci­pline has a long his­to­ry of pro­vid­ing aes­thet­ic ratio­nal­iza­tions for col­o­niza­tion, exploita­tion, extrac­tion, and anti-Black­ness.’ Those who make fund­ing deci­sions might well ask why such a dis­ci­pline deserves to con­tin­ue exist­ing.” The author teach­es Eng­lish at NYU. It was dif­fi­cult choos­ing which bit to excerpt — def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing if you aspire to acad­e­mia.
    • The Gen­er­al­iz­abil­i­ty Cri­sis (Tal Yarkoni, PsyArx­iv): “Most the­o­ries and hypothe­ses in psy­chol­o­gy are ver­bal in nature, yet their eval­u­a­tion over­whelm­ing­ly relies on infer­en­tial sta­tis­ti­cal pro­ce­dures. The valid­i­ty of the move from qual­i­ta­tive to quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis depends on the ver­bal and sta­tis­ti­cal expres­sions of a hypoth­e­sis being close­ly aligned—that is, that the two must refer to rough­ly the same set of hypo­thet­i­cal obser­va­tions. Here I argue that many appli­ca­tions of sta­tis­ti­cal infer­ence in psy­chol­o­gy fail to meet this basic con­di­tion.” The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at UT Austin. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I lack the exper­tise to eval­u­ate it but find it intu­tive­ly plau­si­ble.
  6. Rise of the Barstool con­ser­v­a­tives (Matthew Walther, The Week): “What Trump rec­og­nized was that there are mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who do not oppose or even care about abor­tion or same-sex mar­riage, much less stem-cell research or any of the oth­er caus­es that had ani­mat­ed tra­di­tion­al social con­ser­v­a­tives. Instead he cor­rect­ly intu­it­ed that the new cul­ture war would be fought over very dif­fer­ent (and more neb­u­lous) issues: vague con­cerns about polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and ‘SJWs,’ oppo­si­tion to the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of so-called crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty about the Amer­i­can flag and the mil­i­tary, the rights of male under­grad­u­ates to engage in for­ni­ca­tion while intox­i­cat­ed with­out fear of the Title IX mafia.” I think there’s some truth here, but I think he under­plays the impor­tance of abor­tion in Trump’s appeal. He nonethe­less puts his fin­ger on an impor­tant part of the way Trump’s coali­tion was forged and the shape of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics mov­ing for­ward.
  7. On GameStop:
    • In the GameStop Fren­zy, What If We’re All the 1 Per­cent? (Michael J. Rhodes, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…we shouldn’t con­fuse fight­ing for a bet­ter seat at the black­jack table with con­fronting an econ­o­my addict­ed to gam­bling.… Jesus doesn’t tell his flock to beat the rich fool at his own game. He invites them to live an eco­nom­ic life free from greed or fear, stor­ing up trea­sure in heav­en by giv­ing gen­er­ous­ly to the poor (Luke 12:33).” The author is an Old Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Carey Bap­tist Col­lege. Worth­while arti­cle.
    • The Insid­ers’ Game (David Sacks, Per­sua­sion): “If there is a Big Lie in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics right now, it is the idea that cen­sor­ship of social media is nec­es­sary to save democ­ra­cy.… What the insid­ers fear is not the end of democ­ra­cy, but the end of their con­trol over it, and the loss of the ben­e­fits they extract from it. Ulti­mate­ly, the bat­tle over speech is just one aspect of a broad­er war for pow­er amid a grow­ing polit­i­cal realign­ment that is not Left ver­sus Right, but rather insid­er ver­sus out­sider.” The author was on the found­ing team at Pay­Pal.
    • Call­ing Wall Street’s Bluff (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “Now the experts tell us that the true price on the mar­ket changes every day, because the fun­da­men­tals are always chang­ing, even though they’re fun­da­men­tal.… Nat­u­ral­ly, peo­ple are some­what sus­pi­cious of this whole sys­tem. Every so often it seems to crash the entire econ­o­my. But even when it’s sup­pos­ed­ly work­ing, some­thing seems off.” Stan­ford alum­nus Josh Haw­ley is, of course, the con­tro­ver­sial Sen­a­tor from Mis­souri.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Too Much Dark Mon­ey in Almonds (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every­one always talks about how much mon­ey there is in pol­i­tics. This is the wrong fram­ing. The right fram­ing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so lit­tle mon­ey in pol­i­tics? But Ansolabehere focus­es on elec­tions, and the mys­tery is wider than that. Sure, dur­ing the 2018 elec­tion, can­di­dates, par­ties, PACs, and out­siders com­bined spent about $5 bil­lion – $2.5 bil­lion on Democ­rats, $2 bil­lion on Repub­li­cans, and $0.5 bil­lion on third par­ties. And although that sounds like a lot of mon­ey to you or me, on the nation­al scale, it’s puny. The US almond indus­try earns $12 bil­lion per year. Amer­i­cans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on can­di­dates last year.” It builds to a sur­pris­ing twist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 219.

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 285

anoth­er fair­ly brief roundup

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.

Fun fact: 285 is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares (1+4+9+16…+81).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Will Get to Herd Immu­ni­ty in 2021…One Way or Anoth­er (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “By July it will all be over. The only ques­tion is how many peo­ple have to die between now and then? Youyang Gu, whose pro­jec­tions have been among the most accu­rate, projects that the Unit­ed States will have reached herd immu­ni­ty by July, with about half of the immu­ni­ty com­ing from vac­ci­na­tions and half from infec­tions. Long before we reach herd immu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, the infec­tion and death rates will fall. Gu is pro­ject­ing that by March infec­tions will be half what they are now and by May about one-tenth the cur­rent rate. The drop will catch peo­ple by sur­prise just like the increase. We are not good at expo­nen­tials.” I hope this is right!
    • Relat­ed: Unit­ed King­dom vs Unit­ed States Vac­cine Fight (Poli­math, Sub­stack): “The Unit­ed States has vac­ci­nat­ed more indi­vid­u­als by far than any oth­er coun­try in the world. One in four of all COVID vac­ci­na­tions in the world have tak­en place in the Unit­ed States. The three coun­tries that are doing the best per-capi­ta (Israel, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, and Bahrain) are all incred­i­bly small and dense.” This is short and encour­ag­ing.
  2. Failed Trump Prophe­cies Offer a Les­son in Humil­i­ty (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “The failed prophe­cies of Don­ald Trump’s reelec­tion may have dam­aged the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the US inde­pen­dent Charis­mat­ic wing of evan­gel­i­cal­ism more than any event since the tel­e­van­ge­list scan­dals of the 1980s. They have led some out­siders to crit­i­cize Chris­tian­i­ty itself and right­ly call us to introspection.“Keener is one of my favorite NT schol­ars.
  3. Two Worlds: So Much Pros­per­i­ty, So Much Skep­ti­cism (Mor­gan Housel, Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “I want to tell you two of the biggest eco­nom­ic sto­ries that aren’t get­ting enough atten­tion. One is that house­hold finances might be in the best shape they’ve ever been in. Ever. That might sound crazy, and it’s easy to over­look because of the sec­ond sto­ry: Covid has dumped kerosene on wealth inequal­i­ty in ways we’ve yet to ful­ly grasp.”
  4. The Case For Wood­en Pews (Yuval Levin, Deseret Mag­a­zine): “It is not exact­ly a cri­sis of belief in the teach­ings of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion [that under­mines faith], but rather a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in the insti­tu­tions that claim to embody them. In oth­er words, Amer­i­cans aren’t los­ing their faith in God. Eighty-sev­en per­cent of the pub­lic expressed belief in God last year in Gallup’s fig­ures, which is rough­ly the lev­el poll­sters have found for many decades. What Amer­i­cans do have trou­ble believ­ing, how­ev­er, is that our insti­tu­tions — our church­es, sem­i­nar­ies, reli­gious schools and char­i­ties — remain capa­ble of form­ing trust­wor­thy peo­ple who actu­al­ly exhib­it the integri­ty they preach.” Sol­id, although the title is mis­lead­ing.
  5. Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign.
  6. What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine.
  7. Rise of the zom­bie ants: why hype is creep­ing into sci­en­tif­ic papers. (Gem­ma Con­roy, Nature Index): “The review found that near­ly half of these stud­ies uncov­ered incon­sis­ten­cies between abstracts and their full text, with 19% cit­ing major dis­crep­an­cies. Two stud­ies cit­ed exam­ples where non-sig­nif­i­cant results were framed in over­ly opti­mistic terms in the abstracts.”

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 Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books I find use­ful]. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.”  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 284

a small col­lec­tion because it’s too over­whelm­ing oth­er­wise

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.

I made an extra effort to keep this to sev­en entries today, oth­er­wise it would have been thir­ty (no joke — that’s what I began culling from).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Only the Church Can Tru­ly Defeat a Chris­t­ian Insur­rec­tion (David French, The Dis­patch): “I would bet that most of my read­ers would instant­ly label the exact same event Islam­ic ter­ror­ism if Islam­ic sym­bols filled the crowd, if Islam­ic music played in the loud­speak­ers, and if mem­bers of the crowd shout­ed ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they charged the Capi­tol.”
  2. The Roman Road from Insur­rec­tion (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “If the world rejects us because of Christ and him cru­ci­fied, so much the worse for the world. If the world rejects us because they think Christ is just a mas­cot for what we would already be sup­port­ing or doing even if Jesus were still dead, then God have mer­cy on us.”
    • The author is pres­i­dent of the Ethics & Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion. A few years ago I remem­ber telling one of our inter­na­tion­al stu­dents that if he want­ed a healthy Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, Rus­sell Moore need­ed to be one of his go-to reads.
  3. Every­thing Is Bro­ken (Alana New­house, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Being on a ship near­ly 4 mil­lion square miles in area along with 330 mil­lion oth­er peo­ple and real­iz­ing the entire hull is pock­marked with holes is ter­ri­fy­ing.” Wide-rang­ing.
  4. The Great Unrav­el­ing (Bari Weiss, Sub­Stack): “I don’t know the answer. But I know that you have to be sort of strange to stand apart and refuse to join Team Red or Team Blue. These strange ones are the ones who think that polit­i­cal vio­lence is wrong, that mob jus­tice is nev­er just and the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence is always right. These are the ones who are skep­ti­cal of state and cor­po­rate pow­er, even when it is clamp­ing down on peo­ple they despise.”
  5. We Need a New Media Sys­tem (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The flaw in the sys­tem is that even the biggest news com­pa­nies now oper­ate under the assump­tion that at least half their poten­tial audi­ence isn’t lis­ten­ing. This leads to all sorts of prob­lems, and the fact that the eas­i­est way to keep your own demo­graph­ic is to feed it neg­a­tive sto­ries about oth­ers is only the most obvi­ous. On all sides, we now lean into inflam­ma­to­ry car­i­ca­tures, because the finan­cial incen­tives encour­age it.”
  6. ‘Our souls are dead’: how I sur­vived a Chi­nese ‘re-edu­ca­tion’ camp for Uighurs (Gul­ba­har Haiti­wa­ji with Rozenn Mor­gat, The Guardian): “Women like me, who emerged from the camps, are no longer who we once were. We are shad­ows; our souls are dead. I was made to believe that my loved ones, my hus­band and my daugh­ter, were ter­ror­ists. I was so far away, so alone, so exhaust­ed and alien­at­ed, that I almost end­ed up believ­ing it. My hus­band, Ker­im, my daugh­ters Gul­hu­mar and Gul­ni­gar – I denounced your ‘crimes’ I begged for­give­ness from the Com­mu­nist par­ty for atroc­i­ties that nei­ther you nor I com­mit­ted.”
    • I think this ranks among the great evils of his­to­ry and it is hap­pen­ing right now. I am shocked I don’t see high­er lev­els of out­rage and pub­lic respons­es to it on the inter­na­tion­al stage.
  7. Why Has Israel Suc­ceed­ed At COVID Vac­ci­na­tion? (Elad Gil, per­son­al blog): “Many coun­tries and states have been too focused on ‘fair­ness’ and ‘equi­ty’ so have frozen their vac­ci­na­tion efforts in place, or put in place large fines for ‘mis­used virus’. Remem­ber — every­one will even­tu­al­ly get vac­ci­nat­ed. The more shots in arms, the bet­ter, with an empha­sis on the old and comor­bid. And also remem­ber, we are in the mid­dle of a ‘once in a cen­tu­ry pan­dem­ic’- it is more impor­tant to move fast to save lives than to cre­ate and enforce com­plex rules.”
    • The author is a Sil­i­con Val­ley entre­pre­neur and is, far as I can tell, com­plete­ly cor­rect. The fail­ure of the states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment on this issue is astound­ing. The entire pan­dem­ic has been a demon­stra­tion of our bipar­ti­san polit­i­cal incom­pe­tence.

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 283

per­spec­tives on a day stu­dents will cov­er in their US His­to­ry class­es

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. WHAT HAPPENED

    • Mad­ness on Capi­tol Hill (Andrew McCormick, The Nation): “For all the vio­lence in the air, the mood was less coup and more col­lege foot­ball tail­gate. Pop songs blared from speak­ers. Some­where, snare drums went rat-a-tat-tat. And the chants were so loud they rum­bled in your chest.” This is the most vivid arti­cle I have come upon so far.

    • ‘Is This Real­ly Hap­pen­ing?’: The Siege of Con­gress, Seen From the Inside (var­i­ous, Politi­co): “One mem­ber at one point, a Demo­c­rat, Steve Cohen, yelled over towards the Repub­li­can side of the room and said, ‘Call Trump and tell him to call this off.’ And then a lit­tle bit lat­er on, a law­mak­er sit­ting on the Repub­li­can side shot back and said some­thing along the lines of, ‘I bet you lib­er­als are glad now you didn’t defund the police.’”This is amaz­ing. And read­ing this I have a much more pos­i­tive view of the front­line police response than I had gleaned from pre­vi­ous report­ing. The issue was high­er in the com­mand struc­ture.

    • Let me tell you about my expe­ri­ence at yes­ter­day’s Trump Ral­ly. (Not The Bee): “Again, pic­tures nev­er do a crowd jus­tice, but I went to a Big 10 col­lege foot­ball school, I know what tens of thou­sands of peo­ple looks like, and this was that at least.”

    •  ‘What else could I do?’ NJ Rep. Kim helps clean up Capi­tol (Mike Catal­i­ni, AP News): “‘When you see some­thing you love that’s bro­ken you want to fix it. I love the Capi­tol. I‘m hon­ored to be there,’ he said. ‘This build­ing is extra­or­di­nary and the rotun­da in par­tic­u­lar is just awe-inspir­ing. How many count­less gen­er­a­tions have been inspired in that room? It real­ly broke my heart and I just felt com­pelled to do some­thing. … What else could I do?’” A pro­file of the man behind a pho­to you’ve no doubt seen.

  2. WHAT HAPPENED IN CONTEXT

    • America’s His­to­ry of Polit­i­cal Vio­lence (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “Ear­ly reac­tions to the incur­sion tend­ed toward the cat­a­stroph­ic, and more than one jour­nal­ist spoke of a ‘coup,’ the death of the Repub­lic, and ‘civ­il war.’ By evening calmer heads and cool­er emo­tions began to emerge as the riot­ers were arrest­ed and dis­persed, reveal­ing less a Bol­she­vik storm­ing of the Win­ter Palace than a LARP­ing event by QAnon para­noids.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.

    •  The Five Crises of the Amer­i­can Regime (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “In the past eight months, two Capi­tol Hills have fall­en. Two shock­ing events sym­bol­ize the abdi­ca­tion of author­i­ty by America’s rul­ing class, an abdi­ca­tion that has led to what can be described, not with­out exag­ger­a­tion, as the slow-motion dis­in­te­gra­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca in its present form.… What is the mean­ing of these dystopi­an scenes? Many Democ­rats claim that Repub­li­cans are destroy­ing the repub­lic. Many Repub­li­cans claim the reverse. They are both cor­rect.” The author is a pro­fes­sor in the UT Austin school of pub­lic affairs. This is the most com­pre­hen­sive (and to my mind, large­ly cor­rect) analy­sis I’ve come across.

    • Vio­lence in the Capi­tol, Dan­gers in the After­math (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “One need not dis­miss the lam­en­ta­ble actions of yes­ter­day to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly reject efforts to apply terms that are plain­ly inap­plic­a­ble: attempt­ed coup, insur­rec­tion, sedi­tion.… That the only per­son shot was a pro­test­er killed by an armed agent of the state by itself makes clear how irre­spon­si­ble these terms are.” 

  3. THEOLOGICAL/RELIGIOUS COMMENTARY

    • Chris­t­ian Lead­ers Pray for Peace and Safe­ty Amid Capi­tol Mob (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Pas­tor Rick War­ren called the attack ‘domes­tic ter­ror­ism,’ while South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion (SBC) Ethics & Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion pres­i­dent Rus­sell Moore con­demned their actions as ‘immoral, unjust, dan­ger­ous, and inex­cus­able’ and called on the pres­i­dent to direct his sup­port­ers to ‘stop this dan­ger­ous and anti-con­sti­tu­tion­al anar­chy.’ ”There’s a wide roundup of voic­es here.

    • Like A Fire Shut Up In My Bones (Paul Shult, Luther­ans For Racial Jus­tice): “My thoughts I share with you are shaped by my call­ing as a pas­tor. I am not a polit­i­cal sci­ence major, a lawyer, a pub­lic pol­i­cy expert, or a busi­ness own­er. I don’t want to argue pol­i­tics, which is very dif­fi­cult because so much in our nation and in Chris­tian­i­ty has become politi­cized. So, here are my thoughts around just a few things I think are impor­tant to con­sid­er — per­haps they can be help­ful to some.” The author pas­tors a church near cam­pus that sev­er­al of our stu­dents have attend­ed (one of them brought this arti­cle to my atten­tion).

    • The Gospel in a Democ­ra­cy Under Assault (Rus­sell Moore, Gospel Coali­tion): “Coun­tries can fall. I hope this one doesn’t. But, either way, let’s not fall with it.”

    • Ille­git­i­mate Times (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “So it is look­ing as though one way or anoth­er we are going to have to learn how to live under a gov­ern­ment we believe to be at bot­tom ille­git­i­mate. And that looks to be the case no mat­ter what hap­pens today, actu­al­ly, which hap­pens to be Jan­u­ary 6, the day when Con­gress rat­i­fies the votes of the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden is con­firmed, which seems like­ly, a very large num­ber of Amer­i­cans will believe he got there by fraud­u­lent means. And if Trump is confirmed—by some sort of extra­or­di­nary long shot—that irreg­u­lar process, what­ev­er it was, will be con­sid­ered by a very large num­ber of Amer­i­cans to have been fraud­u­lent in a very dif­fer­ent way. And even though a larg­er num­ber of Chris­tians will be in the first group, our num­bers in both groups will not be insignif­i­cant.” Please note, this is from before the events in ques­tion! I share it because it con­tains some very unusu­al insights.

  4. APOLOGETICALLY INTERESTING
    • Why Reli­gious Cou­ples Thrive in a Pan­dem­ic (Liz HoChing & Spencer James, Real Clear Reli­gion): “It is no sur­prise there­fore that home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to be high­ly sat­is­fied with their sex­u­al rela­tion­ship, com­pared with cou­ples in a shared sec­u­lar rela­tion­ship. Women in shared home-wor­ship­ping rela­tion­ships were found to be twice as like­ly to be sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fied from the inter­na­tion­al data, and three-times as like­ly to be sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fied from data gath­ered in the Unit­ed States. These are num­bers that can­not be ignored.”
      • There are many inter­est­ing quotes I could have cho­sen. I pick this one because it is some­thing I com­mon­ly see come up in research and yet so con­trary to the pre­vail­ing nar­ra­tive in our cul­ture. And also because most of you are yet to pick your spouse — this is a reminder to pick some­one who shares your vibrant faith in the Lord.
    • Stand­ing By: The Spa­tial Orga­ni­za­tion of Coer­cive Insti­tu­tions in Chi­na (Adam Y. Liu and Charles Chang, Social Sci­ence Research): “We find that police sta­tions are more like­ly to be locat­ed with­in walk­ing dis­tance of for­eign reli­gious sites (church­es) than oth­er sites (tem­ples), even after con­trol­ling for the esti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion with­in 1km of each site and a set of key site attrib­ut­es.” The authors are schol­ars at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore and at Yale, respec­tive­ly.
    • Inter­est­ing tid­bits from the arti­cle itself (the above is from the abstract):
      • “…among all major reli­gions in Chi­na, Chris­tian­i­ty has since the late 19th cen­tu­ry been per­sis­tent­ly viewed by the Chi­nese state—the incum­bent athe­is­tic par­ty state in particular—as the most threat­en­ing to social order and state pow­er.”
      • “…one of the most con­sis­tent and sur­pris­ing social sci­en­tif­ic find­ings is the extent of the involve­ment of reli­gious groups in large scale social and polit­i­cal move­ments.”
      • “Schol­ars find that the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry and civic atti­tudes embed­ded in Chris­tian­i­ty make its believ­ers more like­ly to engage in col­lec­tive con­tention.”
      • “In a sharp con­trast, the par­ty state sees oth­er reli­gions, such as Bud­dhism, as not only non-threat­en­ing, but also con­ducive to strength­en­ing its grip on pow­er. In some instances, local offi­cials have even sup­port­ed the con­struc­tion of non-West­ern reli­gious sites as an explic­it way to counter the grow­ing influ­ence of Chris­tian­i­ty in their juris­dic­tions.”
    • Let me be clear: I lack the exper­tise to eval­u­ate their find­ings. What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is the mat­ter-of-fact way these schol­ars refer to a con­sen­sus in their field about Chris­tian­i­ty. It is inter­est­ing to read this in con­junc­tion with the news about this week.
  5. UNRELATED THINGS
    • Rev. William Bar­ber on Greed, Pover­ty and Evan­gel­i­cal Pol­i­tics (David March­ese, New York Times): “Very few reli­gious lead­ers are able to inspire polit­i­cal action on the part of large num­bers of peo­ple who don’t share their church, their denom­i­na­tion or their faith. Yet the Rev. Dr. William Bar­ber, senior pas­tor of Green­leaf Chris­t­ian Church in Golds­boro, N.C., has done just that.” This is an inter­est­ing (and at times per­plex­ing) inter­view.
    • some prob­lems don’t have solu­tions, or the demand game (Fred­die DeBoer, per­son­al blog): “Here’s the real­i­ty with pornog­ra­phy: it may very well be very bad, and there is prob­a­bly noth­ing that we can do about it. Tech­nol­o­gy changed the world and made some­thing for which their is huge demand effort­less­ly easy to trans­mit and receive. And that’s that; that’s the sto­ry of pornog­ra­phy. Some prob­lems don’t have solu­tions.” The author, an athe­ist social­ist, inad­ver­tent­ly comes close to agree­ing with Jesus that “the poor you will have with you always.”
    • Inside RZIM, Staff Push Lead­ers to Take Respon­si­bil­i­ty for Scan­dal (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At an online all-staff meet­ing in mid-Octo­ber, how­ev­er, RZIM speak­er Sam All­ber­ry, who offi­ci­at­ed at Zacharias’s grave­side ser­vice, asked why ‘min­istry team­mates’ had been includ­ed in the offi­cial denial. They had not been con­sult­ed before lead­er­ship craft­ed the unsigned state­ment deny­ing the claims. ‘Why are you putting words in my mouth?’ said All­ber­ry, accord­ing to peo­ple who attend­ed the meet­ing. ‘Frankly, I believe these women and find their alle­ga­tions to be cred­i­ble.’”
      • This makes me very sad. Also, there’s a per­son­al cau­tion in here. One of the details is that Zacharias lied about small­er things. If you ever see me lying or exag­ger­at­ing (except for obvi­ous humor), please call me on it. I’d rather be embar­rassed social­ly in the moment than lay the foun­da­tion for ruin lat­er.
    • The Awok­en­ing Will Not Bring an End to the Night­mare (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Inter­faith Youth Core) : “…the whites who seem most eager to con­demn ‘ide­o­log­i­cal racism’ (i.e. peo­ple say­ing, think­ing or feel­ing the ‘wrong’ things about minori­ties), and who are most osten­ta­tious in demon­strat­ing their own ‘wok­e­ness,’ also tend to be the peo­ple who ben­e­fit the most from what soci­ol­o­gists describe as ‘insti­tu­tion­al’ or ‘sys­temic’ racism. Con­se­quent­ly, the places in Amer­i­ca with the high­est con­cen­tra­tions of whites who are ‘with it’ also hap­pen to be the most unequal places in the coun­try.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia.
    • Mak­ing pol­i­cy for a low-trust world (Matthew Ygle­sias, sub­stack): “The cor­rect way to respond to a low-trust envi­ron­ment is not to dou­ble down on pro­ce­du­ral­ism, but to com­mit your­self to the ‘it does exact­ly what it says on the tin’ prin­ci­ple and imple­ment poli­cies that have the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics: It’s easy for every­one, whether they agree with you or dis­agree with you, to under­stand what it is you say you are doing. It’s easy for every­one to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do. It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.”
    • Like Preach­er-Politi­cians Before Him, Sen­a­tor Raphael Warnock Will Keep His Pul­pit (Adelle Banks, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “ ‘It’s unusu­al for a pas­tor to get involved in some­thing as messy as pol­i­tics, but I see this as a con­tin­u­a­tion of a life of ser­vice: first as an agi­ta­tor, then an advo­cate, and hope­ful­ly next as a leg­is­la­tor’” Warnock said as he was clos­ing in on the top spot of a wide-open pri­ma­ry. ‘I say I’m step­ping up to my next call­ing to serve, not step­ping down from the pul­pit.’ ” I did not know this his­to­ry, and after read­ing it I am pleased to inform you that if I am elect­ed to the US Sen­ate I will con­tin­ue to min­is­ter with Chi Alpha at Stan­ford.
    • The Real Prob­lem with 4‑Letter Words (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, Gospel Coali­tion): “Curs­ing falls into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. Strict­ly speak­ing, pro­fan­i­ties are words that desacral­ize what is holy. Words mis­us­ing the names of God and his judg­ments are pro­fane; the worst of these are blasphemy.While pro­fan­i­ties are relat­ed to the divine, obscen­i­ties are relat­ed to the human. This cat­e­go­ry of words serves to coarsen bod­i­ly func­tions (whether sex­u­al or excre­to­ry).… Anoth­er cat­e­go­ry of curse words con­sists of those the cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist Steven Pinker calls ‘abu­sive.’ ”
    • California’s Donor-Dis­clo­sure Law Threat­ens Reli­gious Char­i­ties (John Bursch, Real Clear Reli­gion): “Not once has the attor­ney gen­er­al giv­en a con­vinc­ing rea­son for col­lect­ing donors’ names and address­es en masse. His office has effec­tive­ly reg­u­lat­ed char­i­ties for decades with­out that infor­ma­tion. In 10 years, the attor­ney gen­er­al only used donor lists in five out of 540 inves­ti­ga­tions. And even in those five, he could have obtained the same infor­ma­tion through tar­get­ed sub­poe­nas or audits, all with­out risk­ing the mas­sive dis­clo­sure of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion from all reg­is­tered char­i­ties.”
    • The New Strain: How Bad Is It? (Bren­dan Foht and Ari Schul­man, The New Atlantis): “The steps that most need to be tak­en in response to the new strain are the same ones that should have been tak­en for the last year any­way, but that our gov­ern­ment has proved large­ly unable or unwill­ing to take. An effec­tive regime of test­ing, trac­ing, and iso­lat­ing, for exam­ple, has been need­ed through­out the pan­dem­ic, but nev­er real­ly imple­ment­ed.” One of the authors post­ed on Twit­ter: “In the course of work­ing on this piece, my con­cern about the new Covid strain went from about a 4 to an 8.5, with the remain­ing 1.5 com­posed most­ly of gen­er­al­ized skep­ti­cism and moti­vat­ed dis­be­lief.”

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 Pornog­ra­phy Makes Us Less Human and Less Humane (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Beneath pornog­ra­phy is the sup­po­si­tion that the mere fact of our desire for a woman makes us wor­thy of her. And so, not being bound by any kind of norm, desire must pro­ceed end­less­ly. It is no sur­prise that the indus­tri­al­ized, cheap-and-easy sex of pornog­ra­phy has answered and evoked an almost unre­strained sex­u­al greed, which allows us to be gods and god­dess­es with­in the safe­ty of our own fan­tasies. It is for deep and impor­tant rea­sons that the Ten Com­mand­ments use the eco­nom­ic lan­guage of ‘cov­et­ing’ to describe the bad­ness of errant sex­u­al desires.” First shared in vol­ume 216.

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 282

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­day this week) 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. How Per­fec­tion­ism Has Made the Pan­dem­ic Worse (Miles Kim­ball, per­son­al blog): “I’ve noticed one reg­u­lar­i­ty in how the US (and many oth­er coun­tries) have han­dled the pan­dem­ic: per­fec­tion­ism has been get­ting in the way of a quick and pow­er­ful response. Every lit­tle bit would have helped reduce the repro­duc­tion ratio of the coro­n­avirus, but only things that were big bits were allowed.” The author is an econ­o­mist at UC Boul­der.
    • Pub­lic health bod­ies may be talk­ing at us, but they’re actu­al­ly talk­ing to each oth­er (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…when a large group acts as though a com­pli­cat­ed prob­lem is a no-brain­er, that doesn’t mean the solu­tion is obvi­ous; it means some­thing has gone bad­ly wrong.”
    • My vac­cine crack­pot­tery: a con­fes­sion (Scott Aaron­son, per­son­al blog): “I think [our fail­ure] will be clear to future gen­er­a­tions, who’ll write PhD the­ses explor­ing how it was pos­si­ble that we invent­ed mul­ti­ple effec­tive covid vac­cines in mere days or weeks, but then sim­ply sat on those vac­cines for a year, tick­ing off box­es called ‘Phase I,’ ‘Phase II,’ etc. while civ­i­liza­tion hung in the bal­ance.” The author is a CS prof at UT Austin.
    • Small Num­ber of Covid Patients Devel­op Severe Psy­chot­ic Symp­toms (Pam Bel­luck, New York Times): “[she] had become infect­ed with the coro­n­avirus in the spring. She had expe­ri­enced only mild phys­i­cal symp­toms from the virus, but, months lat­er, she heard a voice that first told her to kill her­self and then told her to kill her chil­dren.” Shared with me by a stu­dent who not­ed it is both inter­est­ing and freaky. This real­ly high­lights what a bul­let we dodged with this pan­dem­ic — can you imag­ine a plague whose main effect was to make peo­ple vio­lent­ly psy­chot­ic? Soci­ety would end. Full-on zom­bie apoc­a­lypse.
  2. Rick War­ren On The Year We Had (Cameron Strang, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “We have led over 16,000 peo­ple to Christ since March. We’re in revival. We’re aver­ag­ing about 80 peo­ple a day com­ing to Christ—80 peo­ple a day.… Of those 16,000 peo­ple who have come to Christ, over 12,000 of them have come through per­son­al, one-on-one wit­ness­ing by my mem­bers. Not led to Christ by my ser­mons. By one on one evan­ge­liz­ing.”
  3. East Africa fears sec­ond wave — of locust swarms (Navin Singh Khad­ka, BBC): “New swarms of desert locusts are threat­en­ing the liveli­hoods of mil­lions of peo­ple in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of con­trol efforts, the Unit­ed Nations has warned.” This is the lat­est news con­cern­ing an arti­cle from August an alum­nus recent­ly shared with me: The Bib­li­cal locust plagues of 2020 (David Nja­gi, BBC): “In 2020, locusts have swarmed in large num­bers in dozens of coun­tries, includ­ing Kenya, Ethiopia, Ugan­da, Soma­lia, Eritrea, India, Pak­istan, Iran, Yemen, Oman and Sau­di Ara­bia. When swarms affect sev­er­al coun­tries at once in very large num­bers, it is known as a plague.”
  4. Why You Can’t Meet God Over Zoom (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “The very inad­e­qua­cy of church ser­vices, Zoom and oth­er­wise, is a reminder we do not come into church­es to encounter a life les­son on how to raise our chil­dren or to learn to be good Amer­i­cans, what­ev­er that means. Our aim is much more auda­cious. We are attempt­ing to encounter God and, in so doing, find our­selves, pos­si­bly for the first time.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton Col­lege.
    • This isn’t real­ly a knock on McCaul­ley so much as an obser­va­tion and a hope: many Chris­tians who write for pub­li­ca­tions like the NYT lead with the neg­a­tives and slow­ly build to their point that “church isn’t so bad real­ly and maybe some­day you should check it out.” I won­der if that is a byprod­uct of the edi­to­r­i­al process or if it is sim­ply a selec­tion effect in the sort of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­al who wants to (and is per­mit­ted to) write an op-ed for a cul­tur­al­ly influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tion.
    • Think­ing about this puts me in mind of Eri­ca Camp­bel­l’s song I Luh God (YouTube, three min­utes). It swept through our min­istry a few years ago, I think because it scratched an itch in our stu­dents. Our stu­dents had dance par­ties to it after our wor­ship ser­vices. She sang with con­fi­dent joy: “I luh God, you don’t luh God? What’s wrong with chu?”
    • When we dis­cuss the faith as though it were a series of syl­lo­gisms we’re being fool­ish. Peo­ple’s ques­tions need answers, cer­tain­ly. But all the answers in the world will do no good if, at some lev­el, peo­ple don’t hope Chris­tian­i­ty is true. We must kin­dle hope before we go to the trou­ble of over­com­ing objec­tions to hope.
    • I say all that to say this: if you ever write an op-ed for the New York Times, do apolo­get­ics with­out being apolo­getic. Bring as much joy to it as you can and let your writ­ing be filled with win­some con­fi­dence. We need a whole flock of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­als with the swag­ger of a G.K. Chester­ton.
  5. High­er Edu­ca­tion Risks No Longer Being Worth It – Here’s How to Change Course (Chris­tos Makridis, Quil­lette): “For all the talk about racial equi­ty in col­leges, you would think that fac­ul­ty would be work­ing with local small busi­ness own­ers, espe­cial­ly minori­ties, to men­tor and equip them to dri­ve greater prof­itabil­i­ty and impact. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that rarely hap­pens.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  6. The Church Needs Prophets, But It Wants Lawyers (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian cul­ture is rife with con­gre­gants look­ing for lawyers, not prophets and not pas­tors. The church-shop­ping phe­nom­e­non puts us in church­es that make us feel quite com­fort­able, and the sheer num­ber of avail­able con­gre­ga­tions (espe­cial­ly in the South and parts of the Mid­west) makes us quite mobile.”
    • I almost did­n’t share this one because I thought it was more use­ful for min­istry lead­ers, but after I had men­tal­ly deep-sixed it a stu­dent emailed me and said: “I think it could be use­ful for Chris­tians who find them­selves frus­trat­ed by and unable to sup­port blan­ket crit­i­cism of the church and of orga­nized reli­gion from the left, but also dis­sat­is­fied by respons­es from the right that frame any crit­i­cism as part of a cul­ture war and triv­i­al­ize issues with­in the church as just a few bad exam­ples. I think for me it also was help­ful in think­ing of how I might respond to non-Chris­tians when these kinds of crit­i­cisms come up in con­ver­sa­tion and how I can be both defend Chris­tian­i­ty and the good parts of the church while acknowl­edg­ing con­tin­ued bro­ken­ness and need for improve­ment. It also hap­pened to tie in nice­ly with a ser­mon I heard on Sun­day about how Chris­tians have no prob­lem rec­og­niz­ing sin as the cause of bro­ken­ness in the world but often point to the sins of oth­ers, whether of peers, lead­ers, or past gen­er­a­tions, instead of their own sin as the cause of that bro­ken­ness. In that sense I think it both helped me think about how to process the fail­ings of promi­nent Chris­tians and talk about them with non-believ­ers as well as be remind­ed by these fail­ings to remem­ber that beyond defend­ing the church, my response as an indi­vid­ual should also be to iden­ti­fy and root out sin in my own life even when the dam­age is not as obvi­ous to my com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. WHAT HAPPENS ON JANUARY 6th (Ben Sasse, Face­book): “There is some vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle – and the media flat­ly declar­ing from on high that ‘there is no fraud!’ has made things worse. It has height­ened pub­lic dis­trust, because there are, in fact, doc­u­ment­ed cas­es of vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle. But the cru­cial ques­tions are: (A) What evi­dence do we have of fraud? and (B) Does that evi­dence sup­port the belief in fraud on a scale so sig­nif­i­cant that it could have changed the out­come? We have lit­tle evi­dence of fraud, and what evi­dence we do have does not come any­where close to adding up to a dif­fer­ent win­ner of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.”
    • Sasse is one of the Nebras­ka sen­a­tors and is also a for­mer sem­i­nary pres­i­dent. Mis­souri sen­a­tor Josh Haw­ley, who this seems to be aimed at, is also an out­spo­ken believ­er on Capi­tol Hill. Haw­ley, inci­den­tal­ly, did his under­grad at Stan­ford. He grad­u­at­ed the year we were launch­ing Chi Alpha, so our paths have nev­er crossed.
    • Haw­ley does­n’t have a state­ment as com­pre­hen­sive as Sasse’s, but here is an excerpt from his press release: “I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy the elec­toral col­lege results on Jan­u­ary 6 with­out rais­ing the fact that some states, par­tic­u­lar­ly Penn­syl­va­nia, failed to fol­low their own state elec­tion laws. And I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy with­out point­ing out the unprece­dent­ed effort of mega cor­po­ra­tions, includ­ing Face­book and Twit­ter, to inter­fere in this elec­tion, in sup­port of Joe Biden.”
    • I gen­er­al­ly avoid polit­i­cal posts like this because I find the minu­tia of pol­i­tics unin­ter­est­ing. In this case, the fact that two evan­gel­i­cals who are nor­mal­ly polit­i­cal allies are hav­ing a sub­stan­tive and pub­lic dis­agree­ment intrigues me.

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 Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot. First shared in vol­ume 215.

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 281

inter­est­ing things from Christ­mas week 2020

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.

As fore­told, slight­ly delayed this week and will like­ly be a day off next week as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Apply­ing Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples in the work­place (Vann Ky, per­son­al blog): “These prin­ci­ples have helped me devel­op work ethics and make an impact, not just at my cur­rent com­pa­ny but also when I was a col­lege stu­dent.” Vann is an alum­na.
  2. When You Can’t Just ‘Trust the Sci­ence’ (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Last month [the CDC’s] Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee on Immu­niza­tion Prac­tices pro­duced a work­ing doc­u­ment that’s a mas­ter­piece of para-sci­en­tif­ic effort, in which ques­tions that are legit­i­mate­ly med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic (who will the vac­cine help the most), ques­tions that are more logis­ti­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal (which pat­tern of dis­tri­b­u­tion will be eas­i­er to put in place) and moral ques­tions about who deserves a vac­cine are all jum­bled up, assessed with a form of pseu­do-rig­or that resem­bles some­one bluff­ing the way through a McK­in­sey job inter­view and then used to jus­ti­fy the con­clu­sion that we should vac­ci­nate essen­tial work­ers before seniors … because seniors are more like­ly to be priv­i­leged and white.”
    • Why Did So Many Doc­tors Become Nazis? (Ash­ley K. Fer­nades, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “It is wor­thy of empha­sis that although many pro­fes­sions (includ­ing law) were ‘tak­en in’ by Nazi phi­los­o­phy, doc­tors and nurs­es had a pecu­liar­ly strong attrac­tion to it. Robert N. Proc­tor (1988) notes that physi­cians joined the Nazi par­ty in droves (near­ly 50% by 1945), much high­er than any oth­er pro­fes­sion. Physi­cians were sev­en times more like­ly to join the SS than oth­er employed Ger­man males.” The author is a physi­cian and a bioethi­cist at The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty. 
    • Ore­gon Hos­pi­tals Did­n’t Have Short­ages. So Why Were Dis­abled Peo­ple Denied Care? (Joseph Shapiro, NPR): “There’s no rea­son that these exam­ples would occur more fre­quent­ly in Ore­gon than in oth­er states. But the fight for that anony­mous woman with an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty peeled back the cur­tain on health care deci­sion-mak­ing in Ore­gon in a way that did not hap­pen in oth­er states. That activism led to change in Ore­gon — includ­ing anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion leg­is­la­tion and new statewide poli­cies.”
    • How Much Herd Immu­ni­ty Is Enough? (Don­ald G. McNeil, New York Times): “In a tele­phone inter­view the next day, Dr. Fau­ci acknowl­edged that he had slow­ly but delib­er­ate­ly been mov­ing the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, part­ly based on new sci­ence, and part­ly on his gut feel­ing that the coun­try is final­ly ready to hear what he real­ly thinks.”
  3. The Death and Life of an Admis­sions Algo­rithm (Lilah Burke, Insid­er High­er Edu­ca­tion): “For exam­ple, let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion con­tain­ing the words ‘best,’ ‘award,’ ‘research’ or ‘Ph.D.’ are pre­dic­tive of admis­sion — and can lead to a high­er score — while let­ters con­tain­ing the words ‘good,’ ‘lass,’ ‘pro­gram­ming’ or ‘tech­nol­o­gy’ are pre­dic­tive of rejec­tion. A high­er grade point aver­age means an appli­cant is more like­ly to be accept­ed, as does the name of an elite col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty on the résumé. With­in the sys­tem, insti­tu­tions were encod­ed into the cat­e­gories ‘elite,’ ‘good’ and ‘oth­er,’ based on a sur­vey of UT com­put­er sci­ence fac­ul­ty.”
    • Inter­est­ing­ly, the crit­i­cisms peo­ple made of the algo­rithm are not actu­al­ly crit­i­cisms of the algo­rithm. They are crit­i­cisms of the admis­sions com­mit­tee itself.
  4. An Advent Lament in the Pan­dem­ic (Michael Luo, The New York­er): “The pan­dem­ic in 2020 has held a mir­ror to Chris­tian­i­ty, just as the epi­demics of antiq­ui­ty did, but today’s reflec­tion car­ries the poten­tial to repulse rather than attract.”
    • Curi­ous­ly, the spe­cif­ic exam­ples he cites are most­ly pos­i­tive but he allows the neg­a­tive exam­ple to col­or the entire piece. This is what I have seen as well — vir­tu­al­ly all church­es are act­ing respon­si­bly but the pub­lic focus is on the ones that aren’t.
  5. Why Does It Mat­ter that Jesus Was Born of a Vir­gin? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “Even if pro­fess­ing Chris­tians accept the vir­gin birth, many would have a hard time artic­u­lat­ing why the doc­trine real­ly mat­ters.”
  6. A Game Design­er’s Analy­sis of QAnon (Reed Berkowitz, Medi­um): “When I saw QAnon, I knew exact­ly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays peo­ple.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. 117 Wit­ness­es Detail North Korea’s Per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Drawn from expe­ri­ences stretch­ing from 1990 to 2019, KFI’s report lists scores of vio­la­tions. These include 36 instances of pun­ish­ment met­ed out to fam­i­ly mem­bers, 36 instances of tor­ture, and 20 exe­cu­tions. Women and girls rep­re­sent 60 per­cent of the vic­tims.… Chris­tians total near­ly 80 per­cent: 215 cas­es.” The 98 page report which inspired this arti­cle is Per­se­cut­ing Faith:Documenting reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions in North Korea

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 Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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.