Tag: immigration

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 382

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.

382 is the small­est num­ber such that σ(n) =σ(n+3). σ(n) is the divi­sor func­tion, found by adding up n’s pos­i­tive divi­sors. In oth­er words, σ(382) equals 576 because it is the sum of its four divi­sors 1 + 2 + 191 + 382 which also equals 1 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 35 + 55 + 77 + 385 which are the eight divi­sors of 385, hence σ(385)=σ(382).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. O Come All Ye Faith­ful, Except When Christ­mas Falls on a Sun­day (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Christ­mas is con­sid­ered by most Chris­tians to be the sec­ond-most sig­nif­i­cant reli­gious hol­i­day of the year, behind East­er. But most Protes­tants do not attend church ser­vices on Christ­mas Day when it falls on a week­day. If every­one from the pews to the pul­pit would rather stay home, what is a prac­ti­cal house of wor­ship to do? This year, some Protes­tant church­es are decid­ing to skip Sun­day ser­vices com­plete­ly.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent a while ago.
    • My take? Skip­ping church because it’s Christ­mas makes as much sense as skip­ping cake because it’s your birth­day.
  2. The Dan­gers of Elite Pro­jec­tion (Jar­rett Walk­er, per­son­al blog): “Elite pro­jec­tion is the belief, among rel­a­tive­ly for­tu­nate and influ­en­tial peo­ple, that what those peo­ple find con­ve­nient or attrac­tive is good for the soci­ety as a whole. Once you learn to rec­og­nize this sim­ple mis­take, you see it every­where.… [The prob­lem is] elites are always a minor­i­ty, and that plan­ning a city or trans­port net­work around the pref­er­ences of a minor­i­ty rou­tine­ly yields an out­come that doesn’t work for the major­i­ty. Even the elite minor­i­ty won’t like the result in the end.”
    • Rel­e­vant to many cul­tur­al con­tro­ver­sies about mar­riage and gen­der, btw.
  3. A Sign That Tuition Is Too High: Some Col­leges Are Slash­ing It in Half (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York Times): “Col­by-Sawyer has joined a grow­ing num­ber of small, pri­vate col­leges in what’s called the tuition reset, which over­hauls prices to reflect what most stu­dents actu­al­ly pay after dis­count­ing through need-based and mer­it finan­cial aid. The reset is part mar­ket­ing move and part real­i­ty check. It is frank recog­ni­tion among some less­er-known col­leges that their prices are some­thing of a feint.”
  4. Mar­tyrs in Mosul: A Con­ver­sa­tion on Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion with Father Bene­dict Kiely (Anni­ka Nordquist, Madis­on’s Notes Pod­cast): a pod­cast by one of our alum­ni. I haven’t had a chance to lis­ten to this episode yet (and may not for a while because of being around fam­i­ly 24/7 dur­ing the hol­i­days), but she asked me post it and I trust her judge­ment that it is of gen­er­al inter­est.
  5. Girl Scout mom kicked out of Radio City and barred from see­ing Rock­ettes after facial recog­ni­tion tech iden­ti­fied her (Julianne McShane, NBC News): “Kel­ly Con­lon, a senior asso­ciate with the New Jer­sey per­son­al injury firm Davis, Saper­stein and Salomon — which is rep­re­sent­ing a client suing a restau­rant owned by the par­ent com­pa­ny, MSG Enter­tain­ment — told NBC New York that secu­ri­ty guards approached her and asked for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion as soon as she arrived on the week­end after Thanks­giv­ing. The guards ulti­mate­ly turned her away from the show even though she is not involved in her fir­m’s lit­i­ga­tion against the com­pa­ny. Conlon’s daugh­ter and the rest of the Girl Scouts were able to attend the per­for­mance, she told the sta­tion.”
    • When­ev­er we say we’re afraid of tech­nol­o­gy we’re usu­al­ly say­ing we’re afraid of how peo­ple will use tech­nol­o­gy. And our fears are often well-found­ed.
  6. USCIS Has Added 500 Pages to Its Immi­gra­tion Forms Since 2003 (David J. Bier, Cato Insti­tute): “It is worth empha­siz­ing that no sig­nif­i­cant immi­gra­tion reform has become law dur­ing the last two decades. The agency is uni­lat­er­al­ly impos­ing dra­mat­ic increas­es in the bureau­crat­ic obsta­cles to immi­gra­tion ben­e­fits with­out input from Con­gress. But the hun­dreds of new pages of infor­ma­tion is also mak­ing the agency less effi­cient at its job, delay­ing appli­ca­tions and caus­ing back­logs to grow to unimag­in­able lengths.”
  7. The FBI and Twit­ter (Arnold Kling, Sub­stack): “Today, the main­stream reac­tion to the Twit­ter Files sto­ry is to chant ‘noth­ing­burg­er.’ These peo­ple cat­er­waul about the threats to ‘our democ­ra­cy,’ and here is a threat to democ­ra­cy in plain sight, and now it’s ‘noth­ing to see here, move along.’ For me, the big con­cern is lack of account­abil­i­ty with­in the gov­ern­ment intel­li­gence agen­cies.”

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 What the Tent­mak­ing Busi­ness Was Real­ly Like for the Apos­tle Paul (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “[It] cost the Apos­tle Paul to write his let­ters, includ­ing the secur­ing of mate­ri­als and the hir­ing of a sec­re­tary to make a copy for him­self. After exten­sive research and cal­cu­la­tion, he deter­mined that on the low side it would have cost him at least $2,000 in today’s cur­ren­cy to write 1 Corinthi­ans. (And that doesn’t include the cost of send­ing some­one like Titus on a long jour­ney to deliv­er it.)” Short and fas­ci­nat­ing. From vol­ume 256.

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 368

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 368, which is appar­ent­ly how many ways there are to tile a 4×15 rec­tan­gle with the pen­tomi­noes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Grad­u­al­ly, then Sud­den­ly (Lawrence Freed­man, Sub­stack): “It would of course be pre­ma­ture to pro­nounce a com­plete Ukrain­ian vic­to­ry in the war because of one suc­cess­ful and unex­pect­ed break­through. But what has hap­pened over the past few days is of his­toric impor­tance. This offen­sive has over­turned much of what was con­fi­dent­ly assumed about the course of the war.… Rus­sia is los­ing but it has not yet lost. It still occu­pies a large chunk of Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry and still has sub­stan­tial mil­i­tary assets in the coun­try.”
    • Good news from Ukraine. The author is pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of war stud­ies at King’s Col­lege in Lon­don. He’s not some ran­do pop­ping off.
  2. An Icon, Not An Idol (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The Crown rep­re­sents some­thing from the ancient past, a log­i­cal­ly inde­fen­si­ble but emo­tion­al­ly salient sym­bol of some­thing called a nation, some­thing that gives its mem­bers mean­ing and hap­pi­ness. How­ev­er shit­ty the econ­o­my, or awful the prime min­is­ter, or ugly the dis­course, the monarch is able to rep­re­sent the nation all the time. In a liv­ing, breath­ing, mor­tal per­son. The impor­tance of this in a deeply polar­ized and ide­o­log­i­cal world, where fel­low cit­i­zens have come to despise their oppo­nents as ene­mies, is hard to mea­sure. But it mat­ters that divi­sive fig­ures such as Boris John­son or Mar­garet Thatch­er were nev­er required or expect­ed to rep­re­sent the entire nation. It mat­ters that in times of pro­found acri­mo­ny, some­thing unites.”
  3. No Longer Strug­gling To Believe (John W. Kennedy, AG News): “The first week on cam­pus in Con­way, Schiefer went to a Chi Alpha gath­er­ing — on acci­dent. She saw a fly­er adver­tis­ing an event with a band. She appre­ci­at­ed the music, but no so much the lyrics. Jesus kept pop­ping up in the words of the cho­rus­es. ‘It’s not that I hat­ed Chris­tians,’ says the straight­for­ward Schiefer. ‘I just thought they were stu­pid.’ Still, Schiefer left the ini­tial meet­ing with a nag­ging sen­sa­tion that she had a void in her life. That first semes­ter, sev­er­al of her dor­m­mates who treat­ed her with respect reg­u­lar­ly went to Chi Alpha gath­er­ings and they invit­ed her along. Soon she began attend­ing every Mon­day night. ‘I found friend­ship before faith,’ Schiefer says. ‘My class­mates weren’t intim­i­dat­ed by my lack of faith or my ask­ing ques­tions.’ ”
  4. Ex-Alien Judge Speaks Out in Favor of Using the Statu­to­ry Term “Alien” Rather Than “Nonci­t­i­zen” (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “Defend­ers of ‘nonci­t­i­zen’ some­times claim that this word is inter­change­able with alien because every­one is a cit­i­zen of some­where, sans the unusu­al case of the indi­vid­ual who has some­how been ren­dered state­less. This con­tention is not an accu­rate excuse. For one, monar­chies exist. A Span­ish born per­son is a ‘sub­ject’ of the King­dom of Spain, albeit he may have demo­c­ra­t­ic rights. One born in Sau­di Ara­bia is sim­i­lar­ly a ‘sub­ject’ of the House of Saud. Even more, a per­son born in Amer­i­can Samoa or Swains Island is a U.S. nation­al, but not a cit­i­zen; he or she can­not vote in fed­er­al elec­tions nor hold fed­er­al office. These dis­tinc­tions mat­ter. Words mat­ter. Our fed­er­al immi­gra­tion statutes con­cern them­selves with aliens. This word is not a pejo­ra­tive nor an insult. I cer­tain­ly did not con­sid­er it an insult to be referred to as an alien in my depor­ta­tion pro­ceed­ings.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  5. The Debate Over Mus­lim Col­lege Stu­dents Get­ting Secret Mar­riages (Emma Green, The New York­er): “Moha­jir tries to be direct in her book. She writes that ‘there appears to be a pro­found rise in the preva­lence of secret mar­riages among Mus­lim Amer­i­cans, espe­cial­ly polyg­y­nous secret mar­riages,’ in which men take more than one wife. ‘I per­son­al­ly have a major, vis­cer­al reac­tion to polygamy,’ Quraishi-Lan­des, the Wis­con­sin schol­ar, who also edit­ed the book, said. ‘I was, like, ‘I don’t want to nor­mal­ize secret polygamy. I don’t like that.’ Moha­jir replied, ‘Look, the whole book is about real-life rela­tion­ships. And if peo­ple are real­ly in a real-life polyg­a­mous rela­tion­ship, here’s how we can help them make it healthy and not abu­sive.’ ”
    • I had heard of secret mar­riages, but I had­n’t con­sid­ered that secret mar­riages among young Mus­lim men would almost cer­tain­ly be polyg­a­mous.
  6. How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham (Jesse Sin­gal, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “For mil­lions of peo­ple watch­ing this sto­ry unfold, this was yet anoth­er exam­ple of the inerad­i­ca­ble stain of Amer­i­can racism, of just how lit­tle progress we’ve real­ly made. Except it didn’t hap­pen.… All the jour­nal­ists who cred­u­lous­ly report­ed on this event were wrong—and it was an embar­rass­ing kind of wrong, because the red flags were large, numer­ous, and flap­ping loud­ly. Richard­son and her fam­i­ly mem­bers report­ed that racial slurs had been hurled with aban­don, loud­ly and repeat­ed­ly, in a crowd­ed gym filled with more than 5,000 peo­ple. But the jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing this inci­dent nev­er stopped to notice how odd it was that none of these vile slurs were cap­tured by any of the thou­sands of lit­tle hand­held cam­eras in the gym at the time, nor on the big­ger cam­eras record­ing the match. Nor did they find it strange that in the days fol­low­ing the inci­dent, not a sin­gle oth­er eye­wit­ness came forward—none of Richardson’s black team­mates, and none of the play­ers for either team.”
    • I’ve been fol­low­ing this sto­ry, wait­ing for a thor­ough well-put togeth­er piece. This is it. It illu­mi­nates some­thing very sad about con­tem­po­rary media.
  7. Blunt Viet­nam Marine Tells You Exact­ly What Hap­pened To Him (Bill Ehrhart, YouTube): six­teen min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent — extreme­ly inter­est­ing. In the com­ments the film­mak­er rec­om­mends watch­ing Mag­nif­i­cent Viet­nam Green Beret Tells What Hap­pened To Him (David Chris­t­ian, YouTube, one hour long!) to hear an equal­ly artic­u­late but dif­fer­ing per­spec­tive. I have watched excerpts from it and can con­firm he’s a good sto­ry­teller and dis­agrees with the first gent quite strong­ly. Both rec­om­mend­ed if you have the time and are inter­est­ed in war/foreign pol­i­cy.

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 Weath­er­ing the Storm: How Faith Affects Well-Being (Byron John­son & Chris­tos Makridis, Pub­lic Dis­course): “First, and con­sis­tent with pri­or stud­ies, active Chris­tians exhib­it 6 per­cent greater cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and are 6 per­cent­age points more like­ly to report that they are thriving—a mea­sure from Gallup that com­bines respon­dent infor­ma­tion on both cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and expect­ed future life sat­is­fac­tion over the next five years. Sec­ond, and at least as impor­tant, we found that SWB is either acycli­cal or slight­ly coun­ter­cycli­cal for active Chris­tians, where­as it is strong­ly pro­cycli­cal for (inac­tive) Chris­tians and the­ists.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. The study which this arti­cle sum­ma­rizes is on SSRN: Does Reli­gious Affil­i­a­tion Pro­tect People’s Well-being? Evi­dence from the Great Reces­sion After Cor­rect­ing for Selec­tion Effects.  From vol­ume 235.

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 316

an unusu­al den­si­ty of thought­ful arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex

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 316, which is cool because leg­endary Stan­ford CS pro­fes­sor Don Knuth wrote a book called 3:16 Bible Texts Illu­mi­nat­ed in which he ana­lyzes every chap­ter 3 verse 16 in the Bible as a means of bring­ing his aca­d­e­m­ic exper­tise to bear upon his faith.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Curse of Ham: Get­ting It Hor­ri­bly Wrong (Stephen Le Feu­vre, The Gospel Coali­tion Africa): “In bib­li­cal Hebrew, the name ‘Cush’ seems to mean ‘Ethiopi­an’ or ‘black­ness’. Black African nations seem­ing­ly devel­oped from the off­spring of Cush. But that is exact­ly where the so-called curse of Ham is mis­ap­plied. The curse nev­er fell on Ham or on Cush. For what­ev­er rea­son, not tru­ly giv­en in the text, it fell on Canaan. In Gen­e­sis 9:25 Noah pours out his anger, ‘Cursed be Canaan!’ There is no record of a bib­li­cal curse put on the descen­dants of Cush or the nations of Africa.”
    1. A slight­ly old­er arti­cle that I’m shar­ing this week for obvi­ous rea­sons. If you’ve recent­ly heard the phrase “Curse of Canaan” or “Curse of Ham” this arti­cle will help you sort out what it means.
  2. Why the UN’s Dire Cli­mate Change Report Is Ded­i­cat­ed to an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Houghton, who died of com­pli­ca­tions relat­ed to COVID-19 in 2020 at the age of 88, was the chief edi­tor of the first three IPCC reports and an ear­ly, influ­en­tial leader call­ing for action on cli­mate change. His con­cerns about green­house gas­es, ris­ing tem­per­a­ture aver­ages, dying coral reefs, blis­ter­ing heat waves, and increas­ing­ly extreme weath­er were informed by his train­ing at as atmos­pher­ic physi­cist and his com­mit­ment to sci­ence. They also come out of his evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of God, the bib­li­cal accounts of humanity’s rela­tion­ship to cre­ation, and what it means for a Chris­t­ian to fol­low Christ.”
  3. A clus­ter of arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex:
    • Can Chris­t­ian Sin­gles Thrive? (Anna Broad­way, Plough): “The glob­al church has at least eighty-five mil­lion more women than men among adults thir­ty or old­er; the US church has twen­ty-five mil­lion more women. Even if some of those women have or find spous­es out­side the faith, that leaves mil­lions who can’t ever mar­ry – a real­i­ty the church has yet to face. Instead, most Chris­tians I met around the world treat­ed het­ero­sex­u­al mar­riage as the pri­ma­ry nar­ra­tive axis in life.”
    • Is Noth­ing Sacred? Reli­gion and Sex (Dou­glas T. Ken­rick, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “High­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple often wait many years past puber­ty to set­tle down, as they delay start­ing a fam­i­ly for up to a decade while attend­ing col­lege and grad­u­ate school. Those indi­vid­u­als do not want strong pro­hi­bi­tions against pre­mar­i­tal sex­u­al­i­ty and birth con­trol because it would mean they’d need to remain celi­bate for many years, and com­plete­ly sup­press their post-puber­tal sex­u­al urges until they get their Ph.D., M.D., or law degree, and then wait a lit­tle longer until they find a part­ner with whom to set­tle down. Wee­den has sug­gest­ed that the links between reli­gion and repro­duc­tive strat­e­gy account for many of the heat­ed moral con­flicts between the reli­gious right and the irre­li­gious aca­d­e­m­ic elit­ists on the left.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of social psy­chol­o­gy at Ari­zona State and I think this is very insight­ful.
    • The Prob­lem With Being Cool About Sex (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “Yet here is the conun­drum fac­ing fem­i­nist writ­ers: Our enlight­ened values—less stig­ma regard­ing unwed moth­ers, the accep­tance of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, greater eco­nom­ic free­dom for women, the avail­abil­i­ty of con­tra­cep­tion, and the embrace of con­sent culture—haven’t trans­lat­ed into any­thing like a par­adise of guilt-free fun.” A very non-Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive that unex­pect­ed­ly aligns with impor­tant Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions at a few points.
  4. Why Poet­ry Is So Cru­cial Right Now (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Both poet­ry and prayer remind us that there is more to say about real­i­ty than can be said in words though, in both, we use words to try to glimpse what is beyond words. And they both make space to name our deep­est long­ings, lamen­ta­tions, and loves.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a NYT colum­nist. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  5. When Migrants Come Knock­ing (Edmund Wald­stein, Plough): “The nation-state com­bines the worst fea­tures of polit­i­cal and impe­r­i­al com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the advan­tages of a small com­mu­ni­ty found­ed in friend­ship and mutu­al trust among cit­i­zens actu­al­ly liv­ing a com­mon life, but pre­serves the com­mu­nal ego­ism and hatred of out­siders typ­i­cal of such small com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the capa­cious­ness and abil­i­ty to unite many nations typ­i­cal of ancient empires, but has all of their mil­i­tarism and libido dom­i­nan­di.” A wide-rang­ing Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on refugees; rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Why I Vot­ed For the Athe­ist Pres­i­dent of Harvard’s Chap­lain Group (Pete Williamson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Har­vard has no ‘chief chap­lain,’ and the pres­i­dent of the Har­vard Chap­lains does not direct spir­i­tu­al life on cam­pus. We are a decen­tral­ized, non­hier­ar­chi­cal com­mu­ni­ty of inde­pen­dent chap­lain­cies, with about 40 chap­lains span­ning rough­ly 25 denom­i­na­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, tra­di­tions, and reli­gions.… Chap­lain pres­i­dents are cho­sen not to reflect whose tra­di­tion is ascen­dant, nor as a reward to the most influ­en­tial chap­lain. They are not an indi­ca­tor of a bold new vision for the Har­vard Chap­lains.”
  7. A Third Par­ty Won’t Save Us (Alexan­der H. Cohen, Per­sua­sion): “It’s true that some third par­ties have his­tor­i­cal­ly bro­ken the mold, notably in the pre-Civ­il War era. The Repub­li­can Par­ty itself began as an insur­gent, anti-slav­ery third par­ty. But the rules have changed. The Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties have been in pow­er so long that they have con­scious­ly designed a sys­tem that pro­tects their dom­i­nance and dis­cour­ages the orga­ni­za­tion of new third par­ties.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Clark­son Uni­ver­si­ty.

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 Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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 234

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. Reflec­tions on Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “I don’t know what pro­por­tion of stu­dents at elite schools are part of the inter­sec­tion­al sub­cul­ture. But it is com­mon enough that I nev­er go more than a few days with­out encoun­ter­ing it. As a crude point of com­par­i­son, I’m more like­ly to meet a com­mit­ted inter­sec­tion­al­ist on any giv­en day at Colum­bia than I am to meet a com­mit­ted veg­e­tar­i­an, and much more like­ly than I am to meet a com­mit­ted Chris­t­ian.”
  2. The Unit­ed States is Starved for Tal­ent (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­all, get­ting (approx­i­mate­ly) one extra high-skilled [H1‑B] work­er caus­es a 23% increase in the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a suc­cess­ful IPO with­in five years (a 1.5 per­cent­age point increase in the base­line prob­a­bil­i­ty of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect. Remem­ber, these star­tups have access to a labor pool of 160 mil­lion work­ers.”
  3. Why Bad Things Must Hap­pen to Good Peo­ple (Nathaniel Givens, Pub­lic Square): “It’s also fair to say that when we know in advance the bound­aries of the bad that can hap­pen, we can hedge our bets and selec­tive­ly choose our course through life to opti­mize risk and reward. The prob­lem isn’t that we will make dif­fer­ent deci­sions under con­di­tions like these. The prob­lem is that we will make them for dif­fer­ent rea­sons.” A Mor­mon take on theod­i­cy, quite inter­est­ing and not con­tin­gent on Mor­mon dis­tinc­tives.
  4. Aus­tralian rap­tors start fires to flush out prey (John Pick­rell, Cos­mos): “Black kites (Mil­vus migrans), whistling kites (Halias­tur sphenu­rus) and brown fal­cons (Fal­co berig­o­ra) all reg­u­lar­ly con­gre­gate near the edges of bush­fires, tak­ing advan­tage of an exo­dus of small lizards, mam­mals, birds and insects – but it appears that some may have learnt not only to use fire to their advan­tage, but also to con­trol it.”
  5. Big Data+Small Bias « Small Data+Zero Bias (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Sup­pose you want to esti­mate who will win the 2016 US Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. You ask 2.3 mil­lion poten­tial vot­ers whether they are like­ly to vote for Trump or not. The sam­ple is in all ways demo­graph­i­cal­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the US vot­ing pop­u­la­tion but poten­tial Trump vot­ers are a tiny bit less like­ly to answer the ques­tion, just .001 less like­ly to answer (note they don’t lie, they just don’t answer).” I was stunned.
  6. Coach O. Vs. The Acela Grad­grind (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “You’d think that the media elites would by now have learned the cost to their own cred­i­bil­i­ty of not under­stand­ing this coun­try. But they keep being sur­prised. Nobody expects a New York Times edi­to­r­i­al writer to agree with the deci­sion to can­cel col­lege class­es because of a foot­ball game. But one would like to think that a man of the world such as him­self would have enough sense to think about why this deci­sion might have been made, and what it says about cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence. I sus­pect if the LSU Board of Super­vi­sors had can­celled class­es for Trans­gen­der Day Of Remem­brance, the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al board would have wet its col­lec­tive pants with delight.”
    • Relat­ed: Where Ivy Mat­ters: The Edu­ca­tion­al Back­grounds of U.S. Cul­tur­al Elites (Brint et al, Soci­ol­o­gy of Edu­ca­tion): “We find that the lead­ing U.S. edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions are sub­stan­tial­ly more impor­tant for prepar­ing future mem­bers of the cul­tur­al elite than they are for prepar­ing future mem­bers of the busi­ness or polit­i­cal elite. In addi­tion, mem­bers of the cul­tur­al elite who are rec­og­nized for out­stand­ing achieve­ments by peers and experts are much more like­ly to have obtained degrees from the lead­ing edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions than are those who achieve acclaim from pop­u­lar audi­ences.”
  7. See­ing Both Sides (Andrew Bunt, Think The­ol­o­gy): “One of the things I find most dif­fi­cult about being a celi­bate gay/same-sex attract­ed Chris­t­ian is when I feel a strong attrac­tion to a spe­cif­ic guy.”

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 Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

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 216

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. No, real­ly. I mean them and they mat­ter. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cops Who Abused Pho­to­shop (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): this is out­ra­geous. Dif­fi­cult to excerpt, but well worth read­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. 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.” Many insights in this essay.
    1. Relat­ed: In the Face of Sex­u­al Temp­ta­tion, Repres­sion Is a Sure-Fire Fail­ure (Rachel Gilson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Repres­sion and avoid­ance are ulti­mate­ly human-cen­tered respons­es. They stuff desire, suf­fo­cate it, ban­ish it, and yet rarely suc­ceed at engen­der­ing true puri­ty. By con­trast, Chris­t­ian asceti­cism reminds us that we are not stronger than desire and then invites us to cast our gaze toward the One who is. It asks the Chris­t­ian to fol­low the sight line of desire—like look­ing down the bar­rel of a gun—and train it on what all desire is ulti­mate­ly sat­is­fied by: the glo­ry of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6).”
    2. Relat­ed What Genet­ics Is Teach­ing Us About Sex­u­al­i­ty (Steven M. Phelps and Robbee Wedow, New York Times): “…genet­ic dif­fer­ences account for rough­ly one-third of the vari­a­tion in same-sex behav­ior.” The authors are pro­fes­sors (one of biol­o­gy at UT Austin and the oth­er of soci­ol­o­gy at Har­vard). They are also both gay men. They are reflect­ing on research pub­lished in the jour­nal Sci­ence: Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genet­ic archi­tec­ture of same-sex sex­u­al behav­ior (which Wedow coau­thored).
  3. What Major­i­ty-World Mis­sions Real­ly Looks Like (Dor­cas Cheng-Tozun, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2015, 9 of the top 20 send­ing countries—including Brazil, the Philip­pines, Chi­na, India, Nige­ria, and South Africa—were in the major­i­ty world (also referred to as the devel­op­ing world), with a total of 101,000 inter­na­tion­al mis­sion­ar­ies.” For con­text, the com­bined total is close to the num­ber sent from the USA.
  4. Why do Chi­nese peo­ple like their gov­ern­ment? (Kaiser Kuo, SupChi­na): “It’s the rare per­son who can tru­ly sep­a­rate, at both an intel­lec­tu­al and an emo­tion­al lev­el, crit­i­cism of his or her coun­try from crit­i­cism of his or her country’s gov­ern­ment — espe­cial­ly if that gov­ern­ment is not, at present, ter­ri­bly embat­tled and is deliv­er­ing basic pub­lic goods in a rea­son­ably com­pe­tent man­ner.”
    1. Relat­ed: 9 ques­tions about the Hong Kong protests you were too embar­rassed to ask (Jen Kir­by, Vox): “”What began as a tar­get­ed protest against a con­tro­ver­sial extra­di­tion bill in June has trans­formed into what feels like a bat­tle for the future of Hong Kong. Pro­test­ers are not just fight­ing their local gov­ern­ment. They’re chal­leng­ing one of the most pow­er­ful coun­tries on earth: Chi­na.
    2. Relat­ed: Hong Kong Democ­ra­cy Activists Arrest­ed Ahead Of Planned March (Emi­ly Feng & Scott Neu­man, NPR): “Joshua Wong, Hong Kong’s most famous pro-democ­ra­cy leader, was arrest­ed on Fri­day along with fel­low activists and politi­cians in what appeared to be a coor­di­nat­ed sweep by the city’s police ahead of a mass anti-gov­ern­ment march that had been planned for the week­end.”
    3. Relat­ed: The One Unit­ed Strug­gle For Free­dom (David Brooks, New York Times): “Many sus­pect Amer­i­ca will nev­er step in to help. The Amer­i­can right no longer believes in spread­ing democ­ra­cy to for­eign­ers. The Amer­i­can left embraces a nation­al nar­ra­tive that empha­sizes slav­ery and oppres­sion, not that Amer­i­ca is a bea­con or an exam­ple. Nei­ther par­ty any longer sees Amer­i­ca as a van­guard nation whose very mis­sion is to advance uni­ver­sal democ­ra­cy and human dig­ni­ty.”
    4. Relat­ed: China’s Spies Are On The Offen­sive (Mike Giglio, The Atlantic): “Espi­onage and coun­teres­pi­onage have been essen­tial tools of state­craft for cen­turies, of course, and U.S. and Chi­nese intel­li­gence agen­cies have been bat­tling one anoth­er for decades. But what these recent cas­es sug­gest is that the intel­li­gence war is escalating—that Chi­na has increased both the scope and the sophis­ti­ca­tion of its efforts to steal secrets from the U.S.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Why Every­thing They Say About The Ama­zon, Includ­ing That It’s The ‘Lungs Of The World,’ Is Wrong (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Forbes): “‘What is hap­pen­ing in the Ama­zon is not excep­tion­al,’ said Coutin­ho. ‘Take a look at Google web search­es search for ‘Ama­zon’ and ‘Ama­zon For­est’ over time. Glob­al pub­lic opin­ion was not as inter­est­ed in the ‘Ama­zon tragedy’ when the sit­u­a­tion was unde­ni­ably worse. The present moment does not jus­ti­fy glob­al hys­te­ria.’ And while fires in Brazil have increased, there is no evi­dence that Ama­zon for­est fires have.” I found this arti­cle quite infor­ma­tive.
  6. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Sides With Nurs­es Who Object to Abor­tion (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Beyond its out­come, this case is a sig­nal of the Trump administration’s pri­or­i­ties: It sees reli­gious free­dom and con­science pro­tec­tions as cen­tral parts of Amer­i­can civ­il rights, and offi­cials plan to enforce those laws.”
    1. Relat­ed: By their tweets you will know them: The Democ­rats’ con­tin­u­ing God gap (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “While the Nones have grown dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the last 20 years, it’s still impor­tant to real­ize that more than six in ten Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy as a Chris­t­ian, accord­ing to the 2018 Coop­er­a­tive Con­gres­sion­al Elec­tion Study. If Democ­rats want to win back the White House, it would behoove them to reach out to those Chris­t­ian vot­ers. How­ev­er, at least on social media, Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates fail to do so.”
    2. Relat­ed: Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty embraces non­re­li­gious vot­ers, crit­i­cizes ‘reli­gious lib­er­ty’ in new res­o­lu­tion (Caleb Parke, Fox News): “The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee (DNC) passed a res­o­lu­tion Sat­ur­day prais­ing the val­ues of ‘reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed’ Amer­i­cans as the ‘largest reli­gious group with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.’ The res­o­lu­tion, which was unan­i­mous­ly passed at the DNC’s sum­mer meet­ing on Aug. 24 in San Fran­cis­co, Calif., was cham­pi­oned by the Sec­u­lar Coali­tion of Amer­i­ca, an orga­ni­za­tion that lob­bies on behalf of athe­ists, agnos­tics, and human­ists on pub­lic pol­i­cy.”
    3. Relat­ed: Michael Wear’s com­men­tary on Twit­ter: “I just want to be clear. This is both polit­i­cal­ly stu­pid, but also, just stu­pid on a fun­da­men­tal lev­el that tran­scends elec­toral pol­i­tics.” (Wear was an Oba­ma staffer)
  7. Let’s have open bor­ders for peo­ple and closed bor­ders for cap­i­tal (Jeff Spross, The Week): “…human beings aren’t the only things that cross bor­ders: goods, ser­vices, and finan­cial cap­i­tal do it all the time as well. A bet­ter response to Trump might not be to debate whether bor­ders should be enforced, but rather enforced against what? Specif­i­cal­ly, the left-pro­gres­sive posi­tion on bor­ders should be some­thing like: max­i­mum enforce­ment against the move­ment of finan­cial cap­i­tal, mod­er­ate enforce­ment against goods and ser­vices, and min­i­mal enforce­ment against peo­ple.”
    1. Relat­ed: Chris­tian­i­ty and Cap­i­tal­ism Recon­sid­ered (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “[the claim] that cap­i­tal­ism makes us wealth­i­er, lets us live longer, and improves our ethics — could be right and even so Chris­tian­i­ty and cap­i­tal­ism might not be com­pat­i­ble. Maybe God doesn’t want us to be rich­er and longer-lived, and maybe there are cer­tain mat­ters of faith­ful­ness that tran­scend what most peo­ple call ‘ethics.’”

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 Eat, Pray, Code: Rule of St. Bene­dict Becomes Tech Developer’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “SQLite—a data­base man­age­ment engine used in most major browsers, smart phones, Adobe prod­ucts, and Skype—adopted a code of ethics pulled direct­ly from the bib­li­cal pre­cepts set by the ven­er­at­ed sixth-century monk.” This arti­cle blew my mind. First shared in vol­ume 175.

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 210

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.

It’s good to be back after last week’s hia­tus.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Trained on Old Sci­en­tif­ic Papers Makes Dis­cov­er­ies Humans Missed (Madeleine Gre­go­ry, Moth­er­board): “In a study pub­lished in Nature on July 3, researchers from the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry used an algo­rithm called Word2Vec sift through sci­en­tif­ic papers for con­nec­tions humans had missed. Their algo­rithm then spit out pre­dic­tions for pos­si­ble ther­mo­elec­tric mate­ri­als, which con­vert heat to ener­gy and are used in many heat­ing and cool­ing appli­ca­tions.”
  2. Can Chris­t­ian Com­pas­sion Influ­ence How We Treat Migrants? (Alan Cross, The Bul­wark): “Com­pas­sion is not inher­it­ed, either in indi­vid­u­als nor in nations. It must be cul­ti­vat­ed and that cul­ti­va­tion often hap­pens in tri­al when we are test­ed. Amer­i­ca is being test­ed right now. How will we respond to the migrants com­ing to us des­per­ate for help and refuge? How will we respond to the sight of Oscar and Vale­ria drown­ing and being found face down on the banks of Rio Grande in each other’s arms?”
    • Relat­ed: In the ‘bat­tle at the bor­der,’ evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers jos­tle for Trump-era media rel­e­van­cy (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Unless you’ve been under a rock recent­ly, you know much of the coun­try is fix­at­ed on the mess at our bor­der. What’s not as vis­i­ble is how evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are fight­ing among them­selves over all of this.”
    • And yet: Repub­li­cans turn more neg­a­tive toward refugees as num­ber admit­ted to U.S. plum­mets (Han­nah Har­tig, Pew Research): “By more than two-to-one (68% to 25%), white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants say the U.S. does not have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees. Oth­er reli­gious groups are more like­ly to say the U.S. does have this respon­si­bil­i­ty. And opin­ions among reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults are near­ly the reverse of those of white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants: 65% say the U.S. has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees into the coun­try, while just 31% say it does not.”
  3. Man­ly wed­ding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Out­line): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a cam­ou­flage ring, part­ly to sig­nal my deep com­mit­ment to irony and part­ly to get bet­ter ser­vice at the auto parts store.” I real­ly enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wed­ding bands in the not-too-dis­tant future.
  4. Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians Face A Deep­en­ing Cri­sis (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Cop­pock men­tioned to me the pow­er­ful exam­ple of St. Ambrose, the bish­op of Milan, who was will­ing to rebuke the Roman Emper­or Theo­do­sius for the latter’s role in mas­sacring civil­ians as pun­ish­ment for the mur­der of one of his gen­er­als. Ambrose refused to allow the Church to become a polit­i­cal prop, despite con­cerns that doing so might endan­ger him. Ambrose spoke truth to pow­er. (Theo­do­sius end­ed up seek­ing penance, and Ambrose went on to teach, con­vert, and bap­tize St. Augus­tine.) Prox­im­i­ty to pow­er is fine for Chris­tians, Cop­pock told me, but only so long as it does not cor­rupt their moral sense, only so long as they don’t allow their faith to become polit­i­cal­ly weaponized. Yet that is pre­cise­ly what’s hap­pen­ing today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I wish that the Amer­i­can church was more vis­i­bly dis­mayed at some of Trump’s obvi­ous sins. I remind peo­ple of all polit­i­cal incli­na­tions that you can sup­port someone’s over­all agen­da and still rebuke them for acts of wicked­ness. In fact, being will­ing to do so makes your sup­port more mean­ing­ful. So vote for who­ev­er you want, and hold the lead­ers you sup­port to a high stan­dard.
  5. Taiwan’s Sta­tus is a Geopo­lit­i­cal Absur­di­ty (Chris Hor­ton, The Atlantic): “’Taiwan’s gov­ern­ment is demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elected—we have a pres­i­dent, we have a par­lia­ment,’ For­eign Min­is­ter Joseph Wu said plain­tive­ly at a brief­ing for for­eign media ear­li­er this year. At the time, his gov­ern­ment was try­ing to be includ­ed in the World Health Assem­bly. (It was ulti­mate­ly blocked by Chi­na.) ‘We issue visas, we issue pass­ports,’ he said, prac­ti­cal­ly plead­ing. ‘We have a mil­i­tary and a cur­ren­cy … Tai­wan exists by itself; Tai­wan is not a part of any oth­er coun­try.’”
  6. Robespierre’s Amer­i­ca (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The data con­firm what one hears and expe­ri­ences anec­do­tal­ly all the time: In the prover­bial land of the free, peo­ple live in mor­tal fear of a moral faux pas. Opin­ions that were con­sid­ered rea­son­able and nor­mal a few years ago are increas­ing­ly deliv­ered in whis­pers. Pro­fes­sors fear their stu­dents. Pub­lish­ers drop books at the slight­est whiff of social-media con­tro­ver­sy.”
  7. Gay Rites Are Civ­il Rites (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “‘Civ­il reli­gion’ is a sur­pris­ing place for social jus­tice to end up. Gay pride start­ed at Stonewall as a giant ****-you to civ­il soci­ety. Home­less peo­ple, addicts, and sex work­ers told the police where they could shove their respectable val­ues. But there was anoth­er major world reli­gion that start­ed with beg­gars, lep­ers, and pros­ti­tutes, wasn’t there? One that told the Phar­isees where to shove their respectable val­ues.”

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 com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” First shared in vol­ume 156.

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 209

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.

FYI: there’s an excel­lent chance I won’t be send­ing my Fri­day roundup next week.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Christ in the Camps (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “I humbly reach out to the only fac­tion of Amer­i­cans I know of who have the ear of the admin­is­tra­tion and who care about chil­dren: my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ who attend evan­gel­i­cal church­es. It seems clear that we are in the midst of a pro­found human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis and that chil­dren are being forced to suf­fer in ter­ri­ble ways. Maybe it was nev­er sup­posed to be this way; maybe the sys­tem just got over­whelmed. But this is a dis­as­ter.” Sear­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. 
    • The hor­ri­fy­ing con­di­tions fac­ing kids in bor­der deten­tion, explained (Dara Lind, Vox): “It is appar­ent that even an admin­is­tra­tion act­ing with the best inter­ests of chil­dren in mind at every turn would be scram­bling right now. But pol­i­cy­mak­ers are split on how much of the cur­rent cri­sis is sim­ply a resource prob­lem — one Con­gress could help by send­ing more resources — and how much is delib­er­ate mis­treat­ment or neglect from an admin­is­tra­tion that doesn’t deserve any more mon­ey or trust.
    • Why a Gov­ern­ment Lawyer Argued Against Giv­ing Immi­grant Kids Tooth­brush­es (Ken White, The Atlantic): “This admin­is­tra­tion is mere­ly the lat­est one to sub­ject immi­grant chil­dren to abu­sive con­di­tions. It’s been 35 years since Jen­ny Flo­res was strip-searched in an adult facil­i­ty. Before Sarah Fabi­an defend­ed con­crete floors and bright lights for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, she defend­ed putting kids in soli­tary con­fine­ment for Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma. The fault lies not with any one admin­is­tra­tion or politi­cian, but with the cul­ture: the ICE and CBP cul­ture that encour­ages the abuse, the cul­ture of the legal apol­o­gists who defend it, and our culture—a large­ly indif­fer­ent Amer­i­ca that hasn’t done a damn thing about it.”
    • Indi­rect­ly relat­ed: I’m a Jour­nal­ist but I Didn’t Ful­ly Real­ize the Ter­ri­ble Pow­er of U.S. Bor­der Offi­cials Until They Vio­lat­ed My Rights and Pri­va­cy (Seth Harp, The Inter­cept): “As I was walk­ing out, I said to Mon­civias and Vil­lar­real, ‘It’s fun­ny, of all the coun­tries I’ve been to, the bor­der guards have nev­er treat­ed me worse than here, in the one coun­try I’m a cit­i­zen of, in the town where I was born.’” This is unset­tling. 
  2. Peo­ple Who Pay Peo­ple to Kill Peo­ple (Rene Chun, The Atlantic): “The authors deter­mined that 2 per­cent of all mur­ders in Aus­tralia were con­tract killings and that con­tracts were, in some cas­es, sur­pris­ing­ly afford­able. One unful­filled con­tract was for 500 Aus­tralian dol­lars; anoth­er job was com­plet­ed for just $2,000.” This is wild to me because those are close to the amounts that a min­is­ter might get paid for preach­ing at a retreat or offi­ci­at­ing a wed­ding. Who knew assas­sins and min­is­ters had sim­i­lar pay scales? Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Some LGBT links (large­ly occa­sioned by Pride Month).
    • A Match Made In Heav­en (Nathaniel Frank, Wash­ing­ton Post): “What may seem like a straight­for­ward chance to cel­e­brate progress actu­al­ly masks a fault line that has divid­ed our move­ment since its start: whether our goal is equal­i­ty or lib­er­a­tion, a fight for the right to be treat­ed like every­one else or the free­dom to be authen­ti­cal­ly our­selves. Do we seek belong­ing in the world as it is (includ­ing the mil­i­tary, mar­riage and par­ent­ing) or the chance to trans­form the world, by throw­ing off repres­sive norms, into a place where all of us — queer and non-queer alike — can be more free?”
    • Response: Stonewall’s ‘Gift’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To an old-school Cas­san­dra like me — one of the Cas­san­dras who was mocked in the 2000s as a para­noid — this entire col­umn reads like an I told you so, and a vin­di­ca­tion of the Law of Mer­it­ed Impos­si­bil­i­ty (‘It will nev­er hap­pen, and when it does, you big­ots will deserve it’). Not that it does a bit of good now.”
    • Rug­by Australia’s “Own Goal” (Peter Singer, Project Syn­di­cate): “Rug­by Aus­tralia would have a stronger basis for its deci­sion if Folau’s post had expressed hatred toward homo­sex­u­als and could have been inter­pret­ed as an incite­ment to vio­lence against them. But the post no more express­es hatred toward homo­sex­u­als than cig­a­rette warn­ings express hatred toward smok­ers.” Yes, this is the famous philoso­pher Peter Singer. I rarely agree with him, but in this case I strong­ly do.
    • The Reli­gious Roots of Pride (Brett Krutzsch, The Advo­cate): “What most Amer­i­cans do not know when they gaze on the parade’s near­ly-naked dancers, ‘dykes on bikes,’ and trans­gen­der teenagers is that Pride parades exist because of a devout Pen­te­costal min­is­ter.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of reli­gion at Haver­ford Col­lege. One quib­ble: describ­ing Troy Per­ry as a “devout Pen­te­costal” is not accu­rate. He said, “
I knew that I was not start­ing anoth­er Pen­te­costal church. I was start­ing a church that would be tru­ly ecu­meni­cal.” (source: the his­to­ry of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Com­mu­ni­ty Church­es). It would be fair to say “ex-Pen­te­costal min­is­ter Troy Per­ry”, though. His back­ground was news to me.
  4. The Chris­t­ian Case for Mar­i­jua­na (Jonathan Mer­ritt, New York Times): “Amer­i­ca is sick, and the Chris­t­ian call to com­pas­sion oblig­ates the faith­ful to act. Chron­ic pain and ill­ness now affect tens of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, and in many cas­es the cause eludes the bright­est med­ical minds. To fight these ail­ments, Amer­i­cans have been pre­scribed mind-alter­ing anti-depres­sants, high­ly addic­tive pain reliev­ers and opi­oids, and all man­ner of legal sub­stances with a list of side effects so long that drug com­mer­cials feel like ‘Sat­ur­day Night Live’ shorts.”
  5. The Per­cep­tion Gap: How False Impres­sions are Pulling Amer­i­cans Apart (Sean Stevens, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans sig­nif­i­cant­ly over­es­ti­mate how many peo­ple on the ‘oth­er side’ hold extreme views. Typ­i­cal­ly, their esti­mates are rough­ly dou­ble the actu­al num­bers for a giv­en issue…. Edu­ca­tion seems to increase, rather than mit­i­gate, the Per­cep­tion Gap (just as increased edu­ca­tion has found to track with increased ide­o­log­i­cal prej­u­dice). Col­lege edu­ca­tion results in an espe­cial­ly dis­tort­ed view of Repub­li­cans among lib­er­als in par­tic­u­lar.” The orig­i­nal research is at https://perceptiongap.us/ (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 Prob­lem with Dull Knives: What’s the Defense Depart­ment got to do with Code for Amer­i­ca? (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Medi­um): “I have a dis­tinct mem­o­ry of being a kid in the kitchen with my mom, awk­ward­ly and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous­ly wield­ing a knife, try­ing to cut some tough veg­etable, and defend­ing my actions by say­ing the knife was dull any­way. My mom stopped me and said firm­ly, ‘Jen­ny, a dull knife is much more dan­ger­ous than a sharp knife. You’re strug­gling and using much more force than you should, and that knife is going to end up God Knows Where.’ She was right, of course…. But hav­ing poor tools [for the mil­i­tary] doesn’t make us fight less; it makes us fight bad­ly.” (some empha­sis in the orig­i­nal removed). High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 155.

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 194

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. Relat­ed to the mosque attack in New Zealand:
    • Mass mur­der­ers crave pub­lic­i­ty. Maybe giv­ing them less would be help­ful. (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Many com­men­ta­tors, won­der­ing why mass shoot­ings became so com­mon in the late 20th cen­tu­ry, have point­ed to var­i­ous cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ments. They might bet­ter have point­ed to cable news, which ensured that dis­af­fect­ed losers with hyper­tro­phied egos and shriv­eled souls became the non­stop talk of the nation — in every nation, and most of the world’s 6,500 lan­guages. The wall-to-wall cov­er­age teach­es men who may not be able to get a job or a girl­friend that, nonethe­less, in some­thing under an hour, they can become Genghis Khan.”
    • The New Zealand Attack and the Glob­al Chal­lenge of Far-Right Extrem­ism (Seth Jones, Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies): “Based on the glob­al­iza­tion of far-right extrem­ism, the Christchurch attack—and the attacker—needs to be under­stood as part of a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al trend that requires more atten­tion and greater invest­ment from gov­ern­ments and the pri­vate sec­tor.”
    • White Nationalism’s Deep Amer­i­can Roots (Adam Ser­w­er, The Atlantic): “A pop­u­lar myth of Amer­i­can his­to­ry is that racism is the exclu­sive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist ener­gy in the U.S. came from old-mon­ey elites in the North­east, and was also fueled by labor strug­gles in the Pacif­ic North­west, which had stirred a wave of big­otry that led to the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act of 1882.” (this is not direct­ly relat­ed to the shoot­ing but is time­ly)
  2. An MIT Pro­fes­sor Meets the Author of All Knowl­edge (Ros­alind Picard, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arro­gant fool who snubbed the great­est Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, art, and every­thing else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, hav­ing received the most unde­served grace. I walk with joy, along­side the most amaz­ing Com­pan­ion any­one could ask for, filled with desire to keep learn­ing and explor­ing.”
  3. The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of Shame (Sal­va­tore Sci­bona, New York Times): “We are under­go­ing an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion in shame. New tech­nolo­gies have rad­i­cal­ly expand­ed our abil­i­ty to make and dis­trib­ute a prod­uct. The prod­uct is our judg­ment of one anoth­er. As in past indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions, the mass man­u­fac­ture and use of a prod­uct pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able to just a few or in small amounts has giv­en us the pow­er to do harm at a pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able scale.”
  4. The Supreme Court Is Qui­et­ly Chang­ing the Sta­tus of Reli­gion in Amer­i­can Life (Jef­frey Toobin, New York­er): “What the con­ser­v­a­tives are doing, in effect, is read­ing the estab­lish­ment clause out of the Con­sti­tu­tion, and turn­ing almost every issue into a free-exer­cise case. In this read­ing, any denial of gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits to a church can be seen as dis­crim­i­na­tion which amounts to a denial of free exercise—and the con­ser­v­a­tives are mak­ing the same move with respect to indi­vid­u­als.”
    • Relat­ed: The Court and the Cross (Lin­da Green­house, New York Times): “The appetite of the two newest jus­tices, Mr. Kavanaugh and Mr. Gor­such, for cas­es that would enlarge the con­sti­tu­tion­al play­ing field for reli­gion appears near­ly bound­less.”
  5. If Lib­er­als Won’t Enforce Bor­ders, Fas­cists Will (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Dem­a­gogues don’t rise by talk­ing about irrel­e­vant issues. Dem­a­gogues rise by talk­ing about issues that mat­ter to peo­ple, and that more con­ven­tion­al lead­ers appear unwill­ing or unable to address: unem­ploy­ment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immi­gra­tion now. Vot­ers get to decide what the country’s prob­lems are. Polit­i­cal elites have to devise solu­tions to those prob­lems. If dif­fi­cult issues go unad­dressed by respon­si­ble lead­ers, they will be exploit­ed by irre­spon­si­ble ones.” I high­light­ed a piece by Frum with a sim­i­lar theme back in issue 175. This is a very thought­ful arti­cle.
  6. The Scan­dalous Acad­e­my: Social Sci­ence in Ser­vice of Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics (Scott Yenor, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Let us not ignore the most dis­turb­ing find­ing: that men who have sex with men are expect­ed to live twelve years less than those who do not. This mir­rors oth­er stud­ies con­duct­ed in British Colum­bia (which see an eight- to twen­ty-year dif­fer­ence) and Den­mark (which sees a small­er dif­fer­ence of four to twelve years). M. Ryan Baker’s ‘Gay and Les­bian Health Dis­par­i­ties: Evi­dence and Rec­om­men­da­tions’ in a 2008 issue of the Jour­nal of Health Dis­par­i­ties Research and Prac­tice yield­ed sim­i­lar results. To put that in per­spec­tive, smok­ing decreas­es life expectan­cy only ten years.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Boise State and the arti­cle is focused on bias­es and blind spots in the social sci­ences more than on the spe­cif­ic issue high­light­ed in the excerpt.
  7. No Hate Left Behind (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “Just over 42 per­cent of the peo­ple in each par­ty view the oppo­si­tion as ‘down­right evil.’ In real num­bers, this sug­gests that 48.8 mil­lion vot­ers out of the 136.7 mil­lion who cast bal­lots in 2016 believe that mem­bers of oppo­si­tion par­ty are in league with the dev­il.”
    • Relat­ed: Par­ti­san Hate Is Becom­ing a Nation­al Cri­sis (David French, Nation­al Review): “I won­der where [par­ti­san hatred] would be if our nation hadn’t been extra­or­di­nar­i­ly lucky in the last two years. Yes, lucky. Imag­ine our nation­al cul­ture if the con­gres­sion­al base­ball shoot­er hadn’t been imme­di­ate­ly con­front­ed by two brave Capi­tol Police offi­cers. Imag­ine a nation where the Char­lottesville ter­ror­ist kept plow­ing through the ranks of pro­test­ers, or where the Trump super­fan bomber actu­al­ly suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing func­tion­ing explo­sives.”

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 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 175

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. Few­er Sex Part­ners Means a Hap­pi­er Mar­riage (Olga Khaz­an, The Atlantic): “Nicholas Wolfin­ger, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah, has found that Amer­i­cans who have only ever slept with their spous­es are most like­ly to report being in a ‘very hap­py’ mar­riage. Mean­while, the low­est odds of mar­i­tal happiness—about 13 per­cent­age points low­er than the one-part­ner women—belong to women who have had six to 10 sex­u­al part­ners in their lives.”
    • This arti­cle was inspired by the longer and even more fas­ci­nat­ing Does Sex­u­al His­to­ry Affect Mar­i­tal Hap­pi­ness? (Nicholas Wolfin­ger, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “For a com­bined sam­ple of men and women, spous­es report­ing only one life­time sex­u­al part­ner are 7% more like­ly to be hap­py than are those with oth­er part­ners in their past. This is larg­er than the five-per­cent­age-point dif­fer­ence asso­ci­at­ed with a four-year col­lege degree, larg­er than the six-point dif­fer­ence that comes with attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices sev­er­al times a month or more, and larg­er than the boost that comes with hav­ing an income above the nation­al medi­an.”
  2. Eat, Pray, Code: Rule of St. Bene­dict Becomes Tech Developer’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “SQLite—a data­base man­age­ment engine used in most major browsers, smart phones, Adobe prod­ucts, and Skype—adopted a code of ethics pulled direct­ly from the bib­li­cal pre­cepts set by the ven­er­at­ed sixth-cen­tu­ry monk.” This arti­cle blew my mind.
  3. Find­ing ‘Com­mon Good’ Among Evan­gel­i­cals In The Polit­i­cal Sea­son (Sarah McCam­mon, NPR): “On a recent evening in Hous­ton, under the heavy branch­es of live oak trees, Doug Pagitt stood before a cou­ple dozen peo­ple gath­ered on blue fold­ing chairs on the Rice Uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus. ‘You’ve heard it said that to be a true Chris­t­ian, you must vote like a Repub­li­can,’ he said. ‘But we are here to be remind­ed that just ain’t so.’”
    • Relat­ed: Cory Book­er could be a can­di­date for the ‘reli­gious left’ (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Ques­tions about reli­gion can par­a­lyze some politi­cians, but not [Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor] Cory Book­er. If any­thing, the top­ic seems to relax him. Sit­ting in his spa­cious but spar­tan office on Capi­tol Hill in ear­ly Octo­ber, the sen­a­tor propped his sneak­ered feet up on his desk and waxed poet­ic about spir­i­tu­al mat­ters, bounc­ing between dis­cus­sions of Jesus’ dis­ci­ples, hous­ing pol­i­cy and his own reli­gious prac­tices.”
  4. The White House Says Social­ism Is a Threat. It’s Right. (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Who would have thought that an attack on social­ism would be so con­tro­ver­sial? But these days it is. The White House’s Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers issued a report called ‘The Oppor­tu­ni­ty Costs of Social­ism’ to a scathing recep­tion on social media: ‘dreck,’ said the econ­o­mist Justin Wolfers, while Paul Krug­man referred to it as ‘amaz­ing­ly dis­hon­est.’ I’m here to tell you that I have read the entire report, and many of the sources it cites, and most of it is cor­rect.” FYI: one of our alum­ni helped to write the report in ques­tion.
  5. The Car­a­van Is a Chal­lenge to the Integri­ty of U.S. Bor­ders (David Frum, The Atlantic): “If lib­er­als insist that only fas­cists will defend bor­ders, then vot­ers will hire fas­cists to do the job lib­er­als will not do.” That sen­tence is one of the most hon­est things I’ve heard in the recent immi­gra­tion debate. When decid­ing what immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy you deem best, rec­og­nize that you have to fac­tor in how pas­sion­ate­ly oth­er­wise apo­lit­i­cal peo­ple feel about this.
  6. A Chris­t­ian Man Receives Jus­tice (David French, Nation­al Review): “gov­ern­ment offi­cials demon­strat­ed sub­stan­tial intol­er­ance in the name of ‘inclu­sion’ and rather than seek­ing solu­tions that allowed each mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty to exer­cise their lib­er­ty (to enjoy rights to cakes and con­science, for exam­ple), they took sides against Chris­tians, using their pow­er to send a clear mes­sage: Tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty is incom­pat­i­ble with the pro­gres­sive state. That is not a deci­sion the Con­sti­tu­tion empow­ers them to make.”
  7. The midterms are already hacked. You just don’t know it yet. (Ben­jamin Wof­ford, Vox): “The secu­ri­ty expert at a big tech cor­po­ra­tion, who spoke on back­ground in order to speak frankly about elec­tion vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, put it this way: ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the Pentagon’s [secu­ri­ty mea­sures], elec­tions have prob­a­bly moved from a 2 to a 3.’” Very alarm­ing.

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 164

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. Two con­trast­ing per­spec­tives on who is real­ly win­ning in Amer­i­ca, both inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished by smart peo­ple in the same high-pro­file mag­a­zine:
    • Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jor­dan Peter­son (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “There are many legit­i­mate rea­sons to dis­agree with him on a num­ber of sub­jects, and many peo­ple of good will do. But there is no coher­ent rea­son for the left’s oblit­er­at­ing and irra­tional hatred of Jor­dan Peter­son. What, then, accounts for it? It is because the left, while it cur­rent­ly seems ascen­dant in our hous­es of cul­ture and art, has in fact entered its deca­dent late phase, and it is deeply vul­ner­a­ble.”
    • Con­ser­v­a­tives Are Scared, Even Under Trump (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “While lib­er­al activist groups paint Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Wash­ing­ton as an unmit­i­gat­ed for­ward march of con­ser­v­a­tive vic­to­ries, con­ser­v­a­tive activist groups—including Weber’s—don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly per­ceive things the same way. Rather, some of these groups see the next few years under Trump as a brief win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate defens­es against a cul­ture that is mov­ing away from them. In parts of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, the long-game strat­e­gy is to defend their posi­tion by devolv­ing pow­er away from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the Supreme Court, using the momen­tum of the Trump years to bat­ten down the hatch­es against the inevitable cul­tur­al storms ahead.”
  2. Final text of Jew­ish nation-state law, approved by the Knes­set ear­ly on July 19 (Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel): “The law for the first time enshrines Israel as ‘the nation­al home of the Jew­ish peo­ple.’ The law becomes one of the so-called Basic Laws, which, like a con­sti­tu­tion, guide Israel’s legal sys­tem and are usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult to repeal than reg­u­lar laws.” Unlike most arti­cles, this includes the full (trans­lat­ed) text of the law, and it is worth read­ing if you’ve only seen it excerpt­ed. It’s not long.
    • I believe this is the Israeli law that infu­ri­at­ed Stan­ford stu­dent Hamzeh Daoud (see last week’s install­ment for details).
    • Israel’s New Law: A Tale of Two Nation-States (Robert Nichol­son, Prov­i­dence): “The Pales­tine Basic Law (2003) defines Pales­tine as part of the Arab world and Arab uni­ty as a sin­gu­lar goal of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. The law also defines Ara­bic as Palestine’s offi­cial lan­guage, Jerusalem as its offi­cial cap­i­tal, and Islam as its offi­cial reli­gion. This basic law serves as a tem­po­rary con­sti­tu­tion for the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty until a sov­er­eign State of Pales­tine is estab­lished. In the mean­time, the law gov­erns dai­ly life inside the West Bank and to some extent Gaza. On July 19 the Israeli Knes­set passed a sim­i­lar basic law.” This was incred­i­bly help­ful con­text to me.
    • Under the Law: Israeli Chris­tians Wor­ry About Sec­ondary Sta­tus in Jew­ish Nation-State (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘This law out­lines that Israel’s demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues are sec­ondary for non-Jews,’ said Sha­dia Qubti, a Pales­tin­ian evan­gel­i­cal liv­ing in Nazareth. ‘It sends a clear mes­sage that my lan­guage is not wel­come and con­se­quent­ly, nei­ther is my cul­tur­al and eth­nic iden­ti­ty.’”
  3. A Bet­ter Way to Ban Alex Jones (David French, New York Times): “The good news is that tech com­pa­nies don’t have to rely on vague, mal­leable and hot­ly con­test­ed def­i­n­i­tions of hate speech to deal with con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists like Mr. Jones. The far bet­ter option would be to pro­hib­it libel or slan­der on their plat­forms…. Pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions can ban who­ev­er they like. But if com­pa­nies like Face­book are eager to nav­i­gate speech con­tro­ver­sies in good faith, they would do well to learn from the cen­turies of legal devel­op­ments in Amer­i­can law. When cre­at­ing a true mar­ket­place of ideas, why not let the First Amend­ment be your guide?”
    • His fol­low-up: A First Amend­ment Peace Plan for the Twit­ter Wars (David French, Nation­al Review): “As I dug down into objec­tions to my pro­posed First Amend­ment frame­work, I often found that the objec­tions were ulti­mate­ly based on a desire to dis­crim­i­nate on the basis of view­point, on a desire to use the pow­er of the plat­form to priv­i­lege some voic­es and sup­press oth­ers.”
  4. A Kind of Home­less­ness: Evan­gel­i­cals of Col­or in the Trump Era (Melani McAl­is­ter, Reli­gion & Pol­i­tics): “Yet the head­lines about ‘evan­gel­i­cal’ sup­port for the pres­i­dent and his agen­da mean that evan­gel­i­cals of col­or can seem to be an invis­i­ble community—rarely acknowl­edged by jour­nal­ists even when they go to the same church­es or claim a sim­i­lar the­ol­o­gy. White evan­gel­i­cals are numer­i­cal­ly dominant—although declining—but their opin­ions dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dom­i­nate U.S. media report­ing on how the­o­log­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants think, vote, and believe. At one lev­el, the racial dif­fer­ence is emi­nent­ly pre­dictable. Sure­ly the white­ness of white evan­gel­i­cals is cru­cial to under­stand­ing their polit­i­cal beliefs and their vot­ing pat­terns. As Janelle Wong shows in her new book, Immi­grants, Evan­gel­i­cals, and Pol­i­tics in an Era of Demo­graph­ic Change, although evan­gel­i­cals of any giv­en race are more con­ser­v­a­tive than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion of that race, evan­gel­i­cals of col­or over­all are far less con­ser­v­a­tive than white evan­gel­i­cals. Indeed, they are less con­ser­v­a­tive than white peo­ple over­all.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Amer­i­can Stud­ies and Inter­na­tion­al Affairs at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. How Trump Rad­i­cal­ized ICE (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic): “By the begin­ning of Barack Obama’s sec­ond term, immi­gra­tion had become one of the high­est pri­or­i­ties of fed­er­al law enforce­ment: Half of all fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tions were for immi­gra­tion-relat­ed crimes. In 2012, Con­gress appro­pri­at­ed $18 bil­lion for immi­gra­tion enforce­ment. It spent $14 bil­lion for all the oth­er major crim­i­nal law-enforce­ment agen­cies com­bined: the FBI; the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion; the Secret Ser­vice; the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms, and Explo­sives; and the U.S. Mar­shals Ser­vice.” ICE is much, much big­ger than I real­ized. This is a real­ly impor­tant arti­cle.
  6. Oh, The Human­i­ties! (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the years since the Great Reces­sion have been ‘bru­tal for almost every major in the human­i­ties.’ They’ve also been bad for ‘social sci­ence fields that most close­ly resem­ble human­is­tic ones — soci­ol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions and polit­i­cal sci­ence.’ Mean­while the sci­ences and engi­neer­ing have gained at the expense of human­ism…”
  7. Bethel Church Sur­vives Red­ding Carr Fire, But Still Faces Heat (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Bethel’s part, staff said the church could not act as an evac­u­a­tion zone because of its prox­im­i­ty to the blaze and because there is a sin­gle entry and exit point to the cam­pus, which is itself sur­round­ed by brush. The Red Cross said Bethel offered to be an evac­u­a­tion site, but was turned down because of the campus’s near­ness to the fire…. The church has, how­ev­er, flexed its con­sid­er­able min­istry mus­cle and finan­cial resources, encour­ag­ing dona­tions to aid relief efforts. Bethel is also part­ner­ing with the Red Cross and the Sal­va­tion Army in response to the Carr fire, Far­rel­ly said.”
    • Relat­ed: Osteen’s church was sim­i­lar­ly crit­i­cized after Hur­ri­cane Har­vey, also with what seem to me to be scant fac­tu­al grounds. Dis­cussed back in vol­ume 116.
    • Also (ten­u­ous­ly) relat­ed: Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Dev­as­tat­ing Fires Are Man-Caused — But Not In The Way They Tell Us (Chuck DeVore, Forbes): “ In the 1850s and 1860s, the typ­i­cal Sier­ra land­scape was of open fields of grass punc­tu­at­ed by iso­lat­ed pine stands and a few scat­tered oak trees. The first branch­es on the pine trees start­ed about 20 feet up—lower branch­es hav­ing been burned off by low-inten­si­ty grass­fires. California’s Native Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion had for years shaped this land­scape with fire to encour­age the grass­lands and boost the game ani­mal pop­u­la­tion. As the Gold Rush remade mod­ern Cal­i­for­nia, tim­ber was har­vest­ed and replant­ed. Fires were sup­pressed because they threat­ened homes as well as burned up a valu­able resource. The land­scape filled in with trees, but the trees were har­vest­ed every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, how­ev­er, that cycle began to be dis­rupt­ed with increas­ing­ly bur­den­some reg­u­la­tions. The tim­ber har­vest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped com­plete­ly, espe­cial­ly on the almost 60% of Cal­i­for­nia for­est land owned by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.”

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 Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘per­fect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

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).

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.