Tag: Israel

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 427

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.

427 feels kin­da prime-ish, but it’s not. 427 = 61*7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘Gen­der-Affirm­ing Care Is Dan­ger­ous. I Know Because I Helped Pio­neer It.’ (Riit­tak­ert­tu Kaltiala, The Free Press): “Soon after our hos­pi­tal began offer­ing hor­mon­al inter­ven­tions for these patients, we began to see that the mir­a­cle we had been promised was not hap­pen­ing. What we were see­ing was just the oppo­site. The young peo­ple we were treat­ing were not thriv­ing. Instead, their lives were dete­ri­o­rat­ing. We thought, what is this? Because there wasn’t a hint in stud­ies that this could hap­pen.”
  2. More Israel/Gaza per­spec­tives:
    • The Decol­o­niza­tion Nar­ra­tive Is Dan­ger­ous and False (Simon Sebag Mon­te­fiore, The Atlantic): “The decol­o­niza­tion nar­ra­tive… holds that Israel is an ‘impe­ri­al­ist-colo­nial­ist’ force, that Israelis are ‘set­tler-colo­nial­ists,’ and that Pales­tini­ans have a right to elim­i­nate their oppres­sors. (On Octo­ber 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as ‘white’ or ‘white-adja­cent’ and Pales­tini­ans as ‘peo­ple of col­or.’ This ide­ol­o­gy, pow­er­ful in the acad­e­my but long over­due for seri­ous chal­lenge, is a tox­ic, his­tor­i­cal­ly non­sen­si­cal mix of Marx­ist the­o­ry, Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da, and tra­di­tion­al anti-Semi­tism from the Mid­dle Ages and the 19th cen­tu­ry. But its cur­rent engine is the new iden­ti­ty analy­sis, which sees his­to­ry through a con­cept of race that derives from the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.”
      • Long but good. The author, who is Jew­ish, is well-known for his his­to­ry books (per­haps the best way to describe him is as a non-aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­an).
    • Whose Geno­cide Is It Any­way? (Zachary R. Gold­smith, Quil­lette): “Since the year 2000, the pop­u­la­tion of Gaza has near­ly dou­bled; it boasts the 39th high­est birthrate among the world’s coun­tries, and the aver­age life expectan­cy is near­ly 76 years of age (the aver­age life expectan­cy in the US is just over 77 years of age). If Israel is intent on com­mit­ting geno­cide in Gaza, it is doing a very poor job.… Since the Mid­dle Ages, Jews have been accused of mur­der­ing chil­dren and using their blood for rit­u­al pur­pos­es. This blood libel lives on today in a new form, as the Jews of the state of Israel are accused of pur­pose­ful­ly killing chil­dren in a cam­paign of geno­cide.”
    • Hamas’ Bid for Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Legit­i­ma­cy (Damir Maru­sic, Sub­stack): “…for rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, vio­lence is a polit­i­cal act. Like any num­ber of rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, Hamas knew exact­ly what it was doing. But in my ini­tial read of its cyn­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion, I didn’t give them their due. They weren’t mere­ly try­ing to tor­pe­do a deal that could be their undo­ing. They were mak­ing a bid for full polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy among Pales­tini­ans.”
      • The author is an edi­tor at the Wash­ing­ton Post.
    • Stop help­ing Hamas win its dis­in­for­ma­tion war (Sam Wineb­urg, Times of Israel): “Along with my col­leagues at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, I have spent the last sev­en years study­ing how peo­ple learn to make bet­ter deci­sions about what to believe online.… Here are four guide­lines for see­ing through the fog and stay­ing sane in the midst of this cur­rent infor­ma­tion war.”
      • The author is an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of edu­ca­tion at Stan­ford.
    • What Hap­pens When There Aren’t Enough Jews to Lynch? (Avi­tal Chizhik-Gold­schmidt, The Free Press): “…a flight from Tel Aviv was land­ing on Sun­day evening at the air­port in the city of Makhachkala. Hun­dreds of peo­ple stormed the air­port to greet that flight—of 45 pas­sen­gers, 15 were Israeli, many of them chil­dren. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men wav­ing Pales­tin­ian flags. On the tar­mac, they attack an air­port employ­ee, who des­per­ate­ly explains: ‘There are no pas­sen­gers here any­more,’ and then exclaims, ‘I am Mus­lim!’ Some of the riot­ers demand­ed to exam­ine the pass­ports of arriv­ing pas­sen­gers, seem­ing­ly try­ing to iden­ti­fy those who were Israeli, and oth­ers searched cars as they were leav­ing. Anoth­er video emerged of two young boys at the air­port, proud­ly declar­ing that they came to ‘kill Jews’ with knives.”
      • Anti­semitism is surg­ing glob­al­ly and it is ter­ri­fy­ing to watch.
    • The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape West­ern Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “These [decades-old Amer­i­can] group­ings still exist — evan­gel­i­cals are still very pro-Israel, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent is a Zion­ist lib­er­al, the pro­gres­sive move­ment is pro-Pales­tin­ian — but in the cur­rent cri­sis you can see a more com­plex align­ment tak­ing shape, with impli­ca­tions that extend beyond the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian ques­tion alone.”
  3. Just the Facts on ‘Geofenc­ing’ (Mag­gie Mac­Far­land Phillips, Real Clear Pol­i­cy): “Data bro­kers, includ­ing Safe­Graph, insist that their infor­ma­tion is anonymized. But it is pre­cise­ly the lack of speci­fici­ty that wor­ries crit­ics. ‘There’s no par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual who the gov­ern­ment is sus­pi­cious of,’ Adam Schwartz of the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, told Real­Clear­In­ves­ti­ga­tions. ‘It’s a drag­net.’ More­over, there is no guar­an­tee that the data col­lect­ed through geofenc­ing stays anony­mous. ‘It is often very easy to take sup­pos­ed­ly de-iden­ti­fied data and re-iden­ti­fy a per­son,’ said Schwartz, ‘And it’s very, very easy to do that with loca­tion data.’”
  4. Movies, Moral Revul­sion, and a Post-Chris­t­ian Age (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It seems to me that the idea that you can elic­it moral revul­sion mere­ly by depict­ing evil assumes two things. First, it assumes that the realm of the visu­al can be manip­u­lat­ed to bypass tit­il­la­tion and pro­ceed straight to con­dem­na­tion. Sec­ond, it assumes an audi­ence who pos­sess a moral imag­i­na­tion that would both moti­vate and equip them to do this. The first assump­tion could be false. The sec­ond assump­tion absolute­ly is. Sec­u­lar soci­ety, aid­ed by the litur­gi­cal effect of the Inter­net and the porno­graph­ic nature of the Web, has long been feed­ing itself on images of the moral­ly out­ra­geous.”
    • Chris­tians were famous­ly hos­tile towards mass enter­tain­ment a few decades ago. The next gen­er­a­tion of evan­gel­i­cals rebelled against that and too often became uncrit­i­cal­ly accept­ing of all forms of enter­tain­ment. We need to get to place of reject­ing what needs to be reject­ed and allow­ing free­dom oth­er­wise. There are shows you should not watch and songs you should not jam out to. And you should be will­ing to tell peo­ple why, “Yeah, I did­n’t watch Game of Thrones once I real­ized how porno­graph­ic it was.” Or in a paper about a film you had to watch for a class, “The direc­tor made a mis­take includ­ing [what­ev­er it is]: it does­n’t advance the plot or enhance the theme. It actu­al­ly under­mines the pur­pose of the work and seems to have been includ­ed most­ly to appeal to a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al demo­graph­ic, there­by mak­ing the film’s mes­sage need­less­ly inac­ces­si­ble to those not already pre­dis­posed to agree with it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have

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 426

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 426, and I am absurd­ly pleased that 4+2=6. In some regards I am very easy to amuse.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Keep­ing the Faith at Stan­ford (Isabel­la Griepp, The Stan­ford Review): “Stay­ing true to your faith is a seri­ous under­tak­ing at a place like Stan­ford, but it can also be the most reward­ing part of your time on cam­pus. It is vital that you use your first quar­ter in col­lege to get plugged into Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • The author is in Chi Alpha.
  2. How Rich Donors and Loose Rules Are Trans­form­ing Col­lege Sports (David A. Fahren­thold and Bil­ly Witz, New York Times): “One play­er at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty now makes $750,000 a year, accord­ing to the group that pays him. At Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, some play­ers not only get a pay­check — they get a free car lease to boot, cour­tesy of a donor col­lec­tive.… The New York Times iden­ti­fied more than 120 col­lec­tives, includ­ing at least one for every school in each of the five major col­lege foot­ball con­fer­ences. The aver­age starter at a big-time foot­ball pro­gram now takes in about $103,000 a year, accord­ing to Open­dorse, a com­pa­ny that process­es pay­ments to the play­ers for the col­lec­tives.”
  3. 15 Rea­sons Why Mass Media Employ­ees Act Like Pro­pa­gan­dists (Caitlin John­ston, per­son­al blog): “Just because a lot of the mass media’s pro­pa­gan­dis­tic behav­ior can be explained with­out secret con­spir­a­cies doesn’t mean secret con­spir­a­cies aren’t hap­pen­ing. In 1977 Carl Bern­stein pub­lished an arti­cle titled ‘The CIA and the Media’ report­ing that the CIA had covert­ly infil­trat­ed America’s most influ­en­tial news out­lets and had over 400 reporters who it con­sid­ered assets in a pro­gram known as Oper­a­tion Mock­ing­bird. We are told that this sort of covert infil­tra­tion doesn’t hap­pen any­more today, but that’s absurd.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus in response my com­men­tary last week on how to think about jour­nal­ism. Most of the 15 rea­sons seem to revolve around this insight: jour­nal­ists respond to incen­tives and the sys­tem pro­vides rewards that ben­e­fit them but not their readers/viewers. We should remain mind­ful of this.
  4. Two arti­cles about man­hood:
    • Under­stand­ing the Young Male Syn­drome (Rob K Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “In his cross-cul­tur­al research, the psy­chol­o­gist Mar­tin J. Sea­ger has found 3 con­sis­tent require­ments to achieve the sta­tus of man­hood in var­i­ous soci­eties around the world. First, the indi­vid­ual must be a fight­er and a win­ner. Sec­ond, he must be a provider and pro­tec­tor. And third, he must main­tain mas­tery and con­trol of him­self at all times. Across cul­tures, there seems to be an implic­it under­stand­ing of what being a man is… Indeed, mas­culin­i­ty is wide­ly con­sid­ered to be an arti­fi­cial­ly induced sta­tus, achiev­able only through test­ing and care­ful instruc­tion. Real men do not sim­ply emerge like but­ter­flies from their boy­ish cocoons. Rather, they must be care­ful­ly shaped, nur­tured, coun­seled, and prod­ded into man­hood.”
      • This is long and worth read­ing for any­one who has an inter­est in gen­der dynam­ics.
    • News Men Can Use (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “I also do these prac­ti­cal posts because it’s impor­tant for those of us Chris­t­ian lay peo­ple who have skills and knowl­edge to step up and share them. The truth is, pas­tors aren’t life coach­es and often don’t know what they are talk­ing about in areas out­side of their core com­pe­ten­cy in preach­ing the Bible and the­ol­o­gy. So it’s unfair and even dan­ger­ous to rely on them to be gen­er­al pur­pose guides to life. That means lay peo­ple have to be will­ing to step up in the areas where they have real insight and expe­ri­ence.”
      • I can­not endorse the point Renn makes in this excerpt strong­ly enough. There’s a lot pas­tors don’t know. I get ner­vous when I hear a min­is­ter opin­ing pub­licly on a top­ic I know the Bible says very lit­tle about.
      • When you look for pas­tors, look for those with enough humil­i­ty to know that they are not an expert in things like busi­ness, law, pol­i­tics, lead­er­ship, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, con­sult­ing, biol­o­gy, astro­physics, invest­ment bank­ing, immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy, etc. There may be spe­cif­ic state­ments in some of those fields that pas­tors can make with God’s author­i­ty, but they are sure­ly lim­it­ed.
      • You want a pas­tor who speaks con­fi­dent­ly where the Bible speaks clear­ly and speaks cau­tious­ly where the Bible is silent. But as a Chris­t­ian layper­son, you should feel empow­ered to speak con­fi­dent­ly when you have rel­e­vant knowl­edge in your field of exper­tise.
  5. Two Chris­tians — one on the left and one on the right.
    • On the left: Shawn Fain’s Old-Time Reli­gion (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “ ‘One of the first things I do every day when I get up is I crack open my devo­tion­al for a dai­ly read­ing, and I pray. Ear­li­er this week, I was struck by the dai­ly read­ing, which seemed to speak direct­ly to the moment we find our­selves in,’ Fain explained in his speech. The com­men­tary Fain read observed that great acts of faith are rarely born of care­ful cal­cu­la­tion, and most often include an ele­ment of fear. ‘When I made the deci­sion to run for pres­i­dent of our union, it was a test of my faith, because I sure as hell had doubts,’ Fain said. ‘So I told myself: Either you believe it’s pos­si­ble to stand up and make a dif­fer­ence, or you don’t. And if you don’t believe, then shut up and stay on the side­line.’ ”
    • On the right: Evan­gel­i­cal Mike John­son ‘Raised Up’ as House Speak­er (Jack Jenk­ins, a Reli­gion News Ser­vice wire sto­ry reprint­ed in Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “John­son has been tied to mul­ti­ple Bap­tist church­es over the years and cur­rent­ly attends Cypress Bap­tist Church in Ben­ton, Louisiana, accord­ing to the Louisiana Bap­tist Mes­sage. He is also a for­mer lawyer and com­mu­ni­ca­tions staffer with the Alliance Defense Fund, which lat­er became known as Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian legal firm.”
  6. What “Lati­no” Miss­es (Luis Par­rales, Per­sua­sion): “Lati­nos are proud of their ances­try, espe­cial­ly when it’s relat­ed to nation­al ori­gin. But most don’t accept the sig­nif­i­cance or the weight of eth­no­ra­cial iden­ti­ty that our dis­course projects onto them. It’s an atti­tude that’s not exact­ly col­or-blind or post-racial; it sim­ply rec­og­nizes how race, eth­nic­i­ty, nation­al ori­gin (or what­ev­er label we use to cat­e­go­rize peo­ple) often blend togeth­er.”
  7. More com­men­tary on the Israel/Gaza war:
    • I Don’t See a Bet­ter Way Out (Ned Lazarus, The Atlantic): “I have ded­i­cat­ed much of my pro­fes­sion­al life to seek­ing peace­ful change in this con­flict, try­ing to lis­ten to and under­stand Israelis and Pales­tini­ans and find ways to work toward peace or jus­tice or coex­is­tence or mutu­al under­stand­ing or any­thing bet­ter than what there is now.… I see no way out of the night­mare so long as Hamas con­tin­ues to rule the Gaza Strip, and no viable way to remove it from pow­er with­out an Israeli ground offen­sive.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al affairs at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • The Prob­lem of West Bank Set­tle­ments (Tomas Pueyo, Sub­stack): “You can’t under­stand the Pales­tin­ian per­spec­tive with­out under­stand­ing the issue of set­tle­ments in the West Bank. It’s their biggest source of irri­ta­tion, it makes many Pales­tini­ans’ lives insuf­fer­able, and it’s prob­a­bly Israel’s most con­tentious pol­i­cy. So let’s under­stand why Israel is there in the first place, why it’s build­ing set­tle­ments there, and what will hap­pen to them.”
      • Look­ing over his Sub­stack, the author has writ­ten sev­er­al arti­cles about Israel and Pales­tine late­ly and they seem to be well-researched and are also try­ing to present the strongest, fairest argu­ments from both sides. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Debunk­ing Myths About Israel & Pales­tine (Gur­winder, Sub­stack): “Israel must curb its fanat­i­cal ele­ments — its bombs are hit­ting too many civil­ians, its set­tle­ment-build­ing is out of con­trol, its Supreme Court is under attack by its own gov­ern­ment, and its ultra-ortho­dox cit­i­zens are rapid­ly out­breed­ing its sec­u­lar ones. But Israel’s excess­es are Hamas’s norms. Fur­ther, it’s the only lib­er­al democ­ra­cy in a sea of autoc­ra­cies, and unlike all of them it’s will­ing to open­ly crit­i­cize itself and set high human­i­tar­i­an stan­dards even if it can’t always meet them.”
    • Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Day (Antonin Scalia, C‑SPAN): eleven min­utes of now-deceased Supreme Court Jus­tice Antonin Scalia speak­ing about the Holo­caust and the high­ly-edu­cat­ed and refined soci­ety that pro­duced it.
    • For Israel, There Are No Good Options Now (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “I wish I had some sane idea of what hap­pens now. We can only grieve for all those inno­cents trapped in this hell. All I can say is that if Israel con­tin­ues to wage war in Gaza with this lev­el of civil­ian casu­al­ties, and con­tin­ues to expand its foot­print on the West Bank this aggres­sive­ly at the same time, and responds to West­ern requests to take a pause and think things through with anger and defi­ance, it will be hard to sus­tain West­ern sup­port indef­i­nite­ly.”
    • A War Against the Jews (Michael Oren, Sub­stack): “…dead Jews buy us only so much sym­pa­thy. In fact, there is prob­a­bly a for­mu­la. Six mil­lion dead in the Holo­caust pro­cured us rough­ly 25 years of grace before the Euro­peans refused to refu­el the U.S. planes bring­ing life­sav­ing muni­tions to Israel dur­ing the Yom Kip­pur War in 1973. Four­teen hun­dred butchered Jews bought us a lit­tle less than two weeks’ worth of pos­i­tive cov­er­age.”
      • The author is a for­mer Israeli politi­cian and served as Israel’s ambas­sador to the US.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Wrong Psalm (Tim Hawkins, YouTube): four amus­ing min­utes
  • AI Humor (SMBC): the mouseover text on this one is actu­al­ly wise
  • Self-Esteem (SMBC)
  • The Flori­da Man Games: includ­ing such gems as “EVADING ARREST OBSTACLE COURSE: Jump over fences, through back yards, and away from actu­al police offi­cers to earn your free­dom!” and “A CATALYTIC CONVERTER, 2 BIKES, AND A HANDFUL OF COPPER PIPES: RACE AGAINST TIME: Com­pete head to head in a race that lets you live a day in the life of a Flori­da man head­line” 
  • A store let cus­tomers steal shoes — if they could out­run a pro sprint­er (Kyle Mel­nick, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Some cus­tomers thought­the man­agers were jok­ing, but they still took the chance. Most did not rec­og­nize Zeze — who has run the 100-meter dash in 9.99 sec­onds and the 200-meter dash in 19.97 sec­onds — or know he was a pro­fes­sion­al sprint­er. Zeze wore a black polo and a band on his left arm that said ‘SECURITY.’ Zeze eas­i­ly caught the first run­ner, who grabbed a pair ofblack shoes around 11:30 a.m. and ran away on a busy side­walk. Zeze said he sprint­ed at about 35 per­cent of his max­i­mum speed to catch most cus­tomers.”

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 425

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 425, the sum of 3 con­sec­u­tive primes. 425 = 137 + 139 + 149

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m going to start today’s roundup off with an expla­na­tion of why this email is the way it is. First read this brief arti­cle by Nate Sil­ver: It’s easy to screw up on break­ing news. But you have to admit when you do. (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “This morn­ing, Gallup pub­lished its annu­al poll on trust in the media. Over­all, only 32 per­cent of Amer­i­cans say they trust the mass media ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ to ‘report the news ful­ly, accu­rate­ly and fair­ly’ — tied with 2016 for a record low. ”
    • Sil­ver’s arti­cle made me reflect on how I think about mod­ern jour­nal­ism and then made me want to explain it. First, I do believe jour­nal­ists try to get things right. Places like the NYT and the Wash­ing­ton Post rarely pub­lish false infor­ma­tion and gen­er­al­ly cor­rect false­hoods when they become aware of them. The more spe­cif­ic a claim is the more like­ly it is to be true.
    • Jour­nal­ists do, how­ev­er, fre­quent­ly fail to report true infor­ma­tion they are not inter­est­ed in or excit­ed about. This is rarely a con­scious choice — it’s just a byprod­uct of the way they think about real­i­ty. This comes up espe­cial­ly on so-called “cul­ture war” issues. Many top-notch reporters are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly unaware of and strange­ly incu­ri­ous about many of the facts and sto­ries around trans­gen­derism, mar­riage, reli­gious lib­er­ty, and so on.
    • In fact, news­rooms are so ide­o­log­i­cal­ly mono­cul­tur­al that there are often mas­sive holes in what is report­ed. Not only are reporters blind to incon­ve­nient facts, they are often blind to entire sto­ries and trends. An excel­lent his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of this is when­ev­er the 60s and 70s are remem­bered. Amer­i­ca legit expe­ri­enced a Great Awak­en­ing (the Jesus Peo­ple move­ment) that hap­pened in par­al­lel with the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion. We only ever talk about the sec­ond not because reporters/commentators are sup­press­ing knowl­edge of the Jesus Peo­ple but because they gen­uine­ly are not even aware that they exist­ed or that what hap­pened then is still shap­ing our cul­ture today.
    • And so when I want a fact, I turn to some­place like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Reuters or to a cred­i­ble expert who writes direct­ly to the pub­lic (Ryan Burge is a good exam­ple of this). But when I want an analy­sis, I look for cred­i­ble, sane voic­es both with­in and with­out the con­fines of the media estab­lish­ment. I fre­quent­ly look to places like Sub­stack or niche web­sites like Mere Ortho­doxy or to main­stream media com­men­ta­tors like Ross Douthat or David French or Megan McAr­dle who have a track record of syn­the­siz­ing infor­ma­tion accu­rate­ly and form­ing opin­ions wise­ly.
    • And when I’m read­ing some­thing, I often ask, “Does this per­spec­tive seem plau­si­ble in light of my expe­ri­ence?” Espe­cial­ly when it is a claim about evan­gel­i­cal­ism or charismatic/Pentecostal Chris­tian­i­ty — I like­ly know more about that world than 98% of the staff of the New York Times (and after read­ing some arti­cles I think I know more about it than all their staff put togeth­er). Some­times they take an odd­ball church or reli­gious leader and put their sto­ry for­ward as rep­re­sen­ta­tive when it is not at all.
    • Any­way, there is prob­a­bly a lot more to say about mod­ern media, but what I just said is pret­ty much why this week­ly update fea­tures the mix of con­tent that it does: main­stream media sources for facts and a diverse array of experts for analy­sis, all fil­tered through evan­gel­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties.
    • A relat­ed thought on news con­sump­tion: peri­od­ic­i­ty (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “The more unsta­ble a sit­u­a­tion is, the more rapid­ly it changes, the less valu­able minute-by-minute report­ing is. I don’t know what hap­pened to the hos­pi­tal in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Econ­o­mist shows up I will be bet­ter informed about it than peo­ple who have been rage-refresh­ing their brows­er win­dows for the past sev­er­al days, and I will have suf­fered con­sid­er­ably less emo­tion­al stress.… If you’re read­ing the news sev­er­al times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stim­u­lat­ed.”
  2. Mov­ing on, here are some arti­cles that give con­text for the Israel war on Hamas:
    • Pales­tin­ian right of return mat­ters (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Because it seems to me that what­ev­er you per­son­al­ly think about [the Pales­tin­ian right of return], it is absolute­ly cen­tral to how the Arab world and dias­po­ra Jews and sec­u­lar Israelis all view the con­flict. Which in turn means that it’s cen­tral to the col­lapse of the Two-State Solu­tion as a polit­i­cal con­struct and to the col­lapse of the peace camp in Israeli pol­i­tics that might have been inclined make a deal that was favor­able to Pales­tin­ian inter­ests. There is, in fact, a whole school of thought asso­ci­at­ed with Bill Clin­ton and Amer­i­can nego­tia­tor Den­nis Ross that holds the right of return almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly respon­si­ble for scut­tling the Camp David talks and pre­vent­ing the emer­gence of an inde­pen­dent Pales­tine. Of course, many oth­er well-informed peo­ple deny that’s the case or believe it’s an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. But even if you think it is fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect to say the res­o­lu­tion of this con­flict hinges on the right of return, its cen­tral­i­ty to so many of the nar­ra­tives around this issue makes it an impor­tant con­cept to under­stand.”
    • The For­got­ten His­to­ry of the Term “Pales­tine” (Dou­glas J. Fei­th, Mosa­ic): “The term ‘Pales­tine’ was used for mil­len­nia with­out a pre­cise geo­graph­ic def­i­n­i­tion. That’s not uncommon—think of ‘Tran­scau­ca­sus’ or ‘Mid­west.’ No pre­cise def­i­n­i­tion exist­ed for Pales­tine because none was required. Since the Roman era, the name lacked polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. No nation ever had that name.”
      • This is from back in 2021. Super inter­est­ing stuff.
    • Hamas does not yet under­stand the depth of Israeli resolve (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, Times of Israel): “That ene­my is not the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, of course, even though sup­port for ter­ror attacks is wide­spread among Pales­tini­ans. The ene­my is not exact­ly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The ene­my is the Pales­tin­ian the­o­ry of Israelis that makes the vio­lence seen on Octo­ber 7 seem to many of them a ratio­nal step on the road to lib­er­a­tion rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet anoth­er in a long string of self-inflict­ed dis­as­ters for the Pales­tin­ian cause.… A tragedy is about to unfold in Gaza made worse by the long learn­ing curve it will take for Hamas to grasp the depth of Israeli resolve. It has robbed Israel of any oth­er inter­est but its destruc­tion. In the Israeli mind, any bru­tal­i­ty Hamas can com­mit it will com­mit. And so it can­not be allowed to ever com­mit any act ever again.”
  3. Some Chris­t­ian per­spec­tives
    • Anti­se­mit­ic Vio­lence and Its Shame­ful Defense (Mike Cosper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To be hor­ri­fied by the slaugh­ter of Israeli inno­cents doesn’t require deny­ing the suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. And car­ing for Pales­tin­ian inno­cents doesn’t require being cold or numb to the hor­rors of anti­semitism and Hamas. We can con­demn Hamas while demand­ing account­abil­i­ty from Israeli lead­ers who have foment­ed vio­lence, ele­vat­ed right-wing extrem­ists, and excused vio­la­tions of inter­na­tion­al law. Indeed, Chris­tians should be marked by our will­ing­ness to oppose all injus­tice and to care for Israeli and Pales­tin­ian vic­tims alike. And while that includes under­stand­ing that Pales­tini­ans have suf­fered great injus­tices from the gov­ern­ment of Israel—as well as neigh­bor­ing states of Egypt, Jor­dan, Iran, Lebanon, Syr­ia, and Sau­di Ara­bia, as well as Hamas and the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty itself—it must also include active rejec­tion of anti­semitism.”
    • With­er the Poi­so­nous Plant of Hamas (Tamir Khouri, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In this envi­ron­ment of hatred, racism, and vio­lence, Hamas has exploit­ed young peo­ple with false promis­es. With no hori­zon of hope, Hamas’s adher­ents in Pales­tine sank into dark­ness and helped Hamas vic­tim­ize Israelis too. But it does not have to be this way. As Chris­tians, we believe in the pow­er of redemp­tion. With real hope for the future of this land, these hate­ful move­ments will with­er. For a last­ing peace, we must respect the image of God in Israelis and Pales­tini­ans alike. Is it too much to ask that we don’t see this as a zero-sum game? Shouldn’t both Israelis and Pales­tini­ans live in the dig­ni­ty God intend­ed for us?”
      • The pseu­do­ny­mous author is a Pales­tin­ian Chris­t­ian who is an Israeli cit­i­zen.
  4. Some arti­cles about mod­ern acad­e­mia:
    • Why Big Mon­ey Can’t Eas­i­ly Change Cam­pus Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…donors should find ways to give mon­ey to the actu­al stu­dents — through the Hil­lel or oth­er Jew­ish or Israeli stu­dent groups if you’re espe­cial­ly con­cerned with the Jew­ish place on cam­pus, but more gen­er­al­ly through polit­i­cal or reli­gious groups that promise to work against the school’s dom­i­nant assump­tions, or through stu­dent asso­ci­a­tions that seem to fos­ter free debate, or through cam­pus-adja­cent insti­tu­tions that serve stu­dents but are inde­pen­dent of the schools. But not with the goal of using such stu­dent groups as a means of con­flict with the admin­is­tra­tion or the fac­ul­ty. Rather, with the goal that such groups can become micro­cosms of the uni­ver­si­ty you loved once and fear no longer exists, cells in a body yet to be restored, whose health and flour­ish­ing with­in the large world of Penn or Har­vard or wher­ev­er is an end unto itself.”
      • Ross Douthat speaks noth­ing but truth through­out this essay. If you know any gazil­lion­aires who want to influ­ence the tra­jec­to­ries of elite uni­ver­si­ties have them read this essay and then tell them about Chi Alpha. Men­tion we’d like a build­ing near cam­pus.
    • The War Comes to Stan­ford (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Alma Andi­no, a Jew­ish senior at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, spent the day of Hamas’s attacks against Israel cry­ing and dis­traught. Like many Jews around the coun­try, much of the week­end passed on the phone with fam­i­ly mem­bers, fear­ing for the safe­ty of friends and extend­ed fam­i­ly in Israel. Andino’s fel­low stu­dents in Colum­bae, the social jus­tice and anti­war res­i­den­tial house where she is a res­i­den­tial assis­tant, held her through her pan­ic attacks. ‘I felt so pow­er­less,’ she recalled when we spoke this week. On Mon­day, a friend asked if she’d seen the ban­ner some of her house­mates were prepar­ing to hang on the front of Colum­bae, the house she con­sid­ered to be her com­mu­ni­ty and her home. The sheet bore the slo­gan ‘Zion­ism is geno­cide’ in red let­ters, styled to look as if they were drip­ping with blood.… For Alma Andi­no, events on cam­pus have already reached a break­ing point. After beg­ging her house­mates not to hang the ban­ner, she said the group debat­ed for hours, with the impli­ca­tion they would desist only if a suit­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Israel’s exis­tence could be giv­en. They told her they felt that as stu­dent activists, they need­ed to dis­play a mes­sage that would put them on the right side of his­to­ry. We should be advo­cat­ing for mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, they said. ‘Except for Jews?’ Alma replied. The group scoffed.”
    • What Con­ser­v­a­tives Mis­un­der­stand About Rad­i­cal­ism at Uni­ver­si­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “The ten­sion burst­ing into view right now—between a major­i­ty of schol­ars, for whom ‘decol­o­niza­tion’ means putting few­er white Euro­peans on their syl­labi, and a small minor­i­ty who believe it entails any­thing-goes vio­lent revolution—is the unwel­come and unsur­pris­ing result of uni­ver­si­ties want­i­ng to cos­play rebel­lion while still churn­ing out Wall Street–executive alum­ni who will one day pad endow­ments that are larg­er than Israel’s annu­al defense bud­get.”
      • The title makes this sound more par­ti­san than it is. 100% worth a read and pon­der.
    • Stu­dents for Pogroms in Israel (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Look­ing back on the Man­son killings, Joan Did­ion wrote, ‘Many peo­ple I know in Los Ange­les believe that the Six­ties end­ed abrupt­ly on August 9, 1969, end­ed at the exact moment when word of the mur­ders on Cielo Dri­ve trav­eled like brush­fire through the com­mu­ni­ty, and in a sense this is true. The ten­sion broke that day. The para­noia was ful­filled.’ A few peo­ple I know believe last Saturday’s attack on Israel and the respons­es from left­ist stu­dent groups mark the end of the ‘Great Awok­en­ing.’ Although it is too ear­ly to eval­u­ate the accu­ra­cy of that hypoth­e­sis, cam­pus pol­i­tics have cer­tain­ly trans­formed in recent days. Now we are left won­der­ing whether what comes next is bet­ter or worse than what pre­ced­ed it.”
      • He makes spe­cif­ic men­tion of Stan­ford at one point, although it is hard­ly his focus.
    • Moral con­tro­ver­sies and aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lic health: Notes on nav­i­gat­ing and sur­viv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom chal­lenges (Tyler Van­der­Weele, Glob­al Epi­demi­ol­o­gy): “I think that there needs to be more open dis­cus­sion in acad­e­mia, and in soci­ety, about these mat­ters. Most peo­ple, even those who are deeply con­cerned, seem very uneasy dis­cussing these issues, for fear of being attacked for sim­ply rais­ing them. Col­leagues at Har­vard, rang­ing from an expert in child devel­op­ment to a clin­i­cian pro­vid­ing men­tal health care for teenage girls, have told me that they are uncom­fort­able shar­ing their con­cerns on these mat­ters in many or most set­tings at Har­vard. An evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard like­wise recent­ly came under attack because she explic­it­ly stat­ed that sex was bio­log­i­cal and bina­ry, even though she also not­ed that we can nev­er­the­less respect a per­son­’s gen­der iden­ti­ty. The attack was suf­fi­cient­ly severe, and the admin­is­tra­tion’s response suf­fi­cient­ly weak, that she even­tu­al­ly felt she had no choice but to resign. Rather than open dis­cus­sion, it seems we are often now rely­ing on anony­mous arti­cles, or brave, and sub­se­quent­ly vil­i­fied, authors and whis­tle-blow­ers to raise alter­na­tive view­points. One may strong­ly dis­agree with their posi­tions, but it is not unrea­son­able to raise the ques­tions.”
      • I removed hyper­linked foot­notes from this excerpt for read­abil­i­ty. This is worth read­ing as a mod­el of mature­ly and wise­ly respond­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic intol­er­ance. Not many schol­ars have com­port­ed them­selves with as much class as Van­der­Weele when their views came under attack. Also, I learned in this arti­cle that Van­der­Weele is Catholic. I had assumed he was an evan­gel­i­cal based on some­thing I heard else­where.
  5. Think­ing about the moral dimen­sions of the war
    • The Moral Ques­tions at the Heart of the Gaza War (David French, New York Times): “This is the prob­lem Israeli sol­diers and com­man­ders face. They must pro­tect their cit­i­zens from sav­agery. They must com­ply with the laws of war. And they must make a series of moral choic­es, under extreme duress, that can define them and their nation — all while they face a ter­ror­ist ene­my that appears to pos­sess no con­science at all.”
      • Worth read­ing. As I men­tioned when I shared French’s pre­vi­ous arti­cle, he is more qual­i­fied than any oth­er colum­nist I know to weigh in on this.
    • This Way for the Geno­cide, Ladies and Gen­tle­men (Chris Hedges, Scheer­Post): “I spent sev­en years report­ing on the con­flict, four of them as the Mid­dle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bod­ies of Israeli vic­tims of bus bomb­ings in Jerusalem by Pales­tin­ian sui­cide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, includ­ing chil­dren, in the cor­ri­dors in Dar Al-Shi­fa Hos­pi­tal in Gaza City. I watched Israeli sol­diers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then cal­lous­ly shot in the Khan You­nis refugee camp. I shel­tered from bombs dropped by Israeli war­planes. I climbed over the rub­ble of demol­ished Pales­tin­ian homes and apart­ment blocks along the bor­der with Egypt. I inter­viewed the blood­ied and dazed sur­vivors. I heard the soul crush­ing wails of moth­ers keen­ing over the corpses of their chil­dren.… it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the com­plic­i­ty of an inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that licens­es Israel’s geno­ci­dal slaugh­ter and accel­er­ates a cycle of vio­lence it may not be able to con­trol.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Smart­phones Have Tur­bocharged the Dan­ger of Porn (Mary Har­ring­ton, Wall Street Jour­nal): “It should come as no sur­prise that the per­son­al­ized, tac­tile, portable smart­phone would be the dig­i­tal por­tal of choice for some­thing as inti­mate as porn con­sump­tion. But of the new com­pul­sive behav­iors enabled by smart­phones, few have as intense and imme­di­ate a reward cycle as porn—or as many far-reach­ing con­se­quences.”
  7. Is It Wrong to Cure Blind­ness? (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “The Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, the $40 bil­lion-endowed fund­ing arm of the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, recent­ly took a stand against ableism by propos­ing a change to its mis­sion state­ment, which promis­es to ‘enhance health, length­en life, and reduce ill­ness and dis­abil­i­ty.’ An advi­so­ry com­mit­tee with­in the NIH took issue with the phrase ‘reduce… dis­abil­i­ty,’ writ­ing in a 66-page report pub­lished last Decem­ber that it ‘could be inter­pret­ed as per­pet­u­at­ing ableist beliefs that dis­abled peo­ple are flawed and need to be ‘fixed.’ ”
    • There are legit insane per­spec­tives being nor­mal­ized in the world right now. Cur­ing blind­ness is an unequiv­o­cal good.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic): “…one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.” This is an old arti­cle I share peri­od­i­cal­ly, I think I first shared it way back in my fifth Fri­day email. Help­ful in pars­ing media cov­er­age in the cur­rent war.

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 424

lots of arti­cles from an emo­tion­al­ly drain­ing 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 424, which is sym­met­ri­cal and also the sum of 10 con­sec­u­tive primes. 424 = 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Today’s roundup was dif­fi­cult to assem­ble. First, there are the obvi­ous emo­tion­al chal­lenges of read­ing too much about the hor­rif­ic raid by Hamas. If you are won­der­ing whether you should dive deeply into orig­i­nal sources (Insta­gram sto­ries from on the field, etc), no you should not. It will harm your soul. Sec­ond, there is a whole sea of infor­ma­tion and opin­ions and I have a very small buck­et. Third, it was a busy week (and today in par­tic­u­lar was quite hec­tic for me). All that hav­ing been said, if you find oth­er inter­est­ing sto­ries about the unfold­ing sit­u­a­tion in Israel, please send them my way.

  1. The best/most inter­est­ing sto­ries I’ve seen about the Hamas attack on Israel.
    • ‘We’re Going to Die Here’ (Yair Rosen­berg, The Atlantic): “First I’m hear­ing this gun­fire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road, then I hear it from the neigh­bor­hood, and then I hear it out­side my win­dow. I’m in the room with my wife, and I hear the gun­fire direct­ly out­side my win­dow, as well as shout­ing. I under­stand Ara­bic. I under­stood exact­ly what was hap­pen­ing: that Hamas has infil­trat­ed our kib­butz, that there are ter­ror­ists out­side my win­dow, and that I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls, and I don’t know if any­one is going to come to save us.”
      • This is an amaz­ing sto­ry. 100% worth read­ing.
    • The attacks on Israel, and the response. (Isaac Saul, Tan­gle): “Am I pro-Israel or pro-Pales­tine? I have no idea. I’m pro-not-killing-civil­ians. I’m pro-not-trap­ping-mil­lions-of-peo­ple-in-open-air-pris­ons. I’m pro-not-shoot­ing-grand­mas-in-the-back-of-the-head. I’m pro-not-flat­ten­ing-apart­ment-com­plex­es. I’m pro-not-rap­ing-women-and-tak­ing-hostages. I’m pro-not-unjust­ly-impris­on­ing-peo­ple-with­out-due-process. I’m pro-free­dom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we nev­er see in this con­flict any­more. What­ev­er this is, I want none of it.”
      • This is a well-done roundup fea­tur­ing diverse view­points.
    • Dark­ness Vis­i­ble (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The more I’ve thought and read about Israel, the more it seems that its found­ing was both a moral neces­si­ty and a prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty. The moral neces­si­ty is proven by last week­end. If Jews can be sub­ject to a medieval pogrom in their own coun­try in 2023, what hope could they ever have with­out a coun­try at all? The prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty lies in the sim­ple fact that the state of Israel was cre­at­ed on land laden with deep reli­gious sym­bol­ism, where much of the exist­ing pop­u­la­tion did not give con­sent, and despite the ear­ly promise, no coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans was ever con­struct­ed along­side it.”
      • A more com­pre­hen­sive essay than many I’ve read so far.
    • What It Would Mean to Treat Hamas Like ISIS (David French, New York Times): “…Israel’s goal is not to pun­ish Hamas but to defeat it — to remove it from pow­er in Gaza the way the Iraqi mil­i­tary, the Unit­ed States and their allies removed ISIS from Mosul, Fal­lu­ja, Rama­di and every oth­er city ISIS con­trolled in Iraq. That can’t be accom­plished by air pow­er alone. If remov­ing Hamas from pow­er is the goal, then that almost cer­tain­ly means sol­diers and tanks fight­ing in Gazan cities, block by block, house to house in an area of rough­ly two mil­lion peo­ple. The pur­pose of this newslet­ter is to give you a primer on both the mil­i­tary dif­fi­cul­ty of the task and the human­i­tar­i­an con­straints on it, along with the lim­i­ta­tions that are unique to Israel.”
      • Unlocked — a thor­ough arti­cle from an author with high­ly rel­e­vant exper­tise.
    • Hamas prac­ticed in plain sight, post­ing video of mock attack weeks before bor­der breach (Michael Beiseck­er &  Sarah El Deeb, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “A slick­ly pro­duced two-minute pro­pa­gan­da video post­ed to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12 shows fight­ers using explo­sives to blast through a repli­ca of the bor­der gate, sweep in on pick­up trucks and then move build­ing by build­ing through a full-scale recon­struc­tion of an Israeli town, fir­ing auto­mat­ic weapons at human-sil­hou­et­ted paper tar­gets. The Islam­ic mil­i­tant group’s live-fire exer­cise dubbed oper­a­tion ‘Strong Pil­lar’ also had mil­i­tants in body armor and com­bat fatigues car­ry­ing out oper­a­tions that includ­ed the destruc­tion of mock-ups of the wall’s con­crete tow­ers and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions anten­na, just as they would do for real in the dead­ly attack last Sat­ur­day.”
    • As Deaths Soar in Gaza From Israeli Strikes, Egypt Offers Aid, but No Exit (Declan Walsh, New York Times): “Egypt has long insist­ed that Israel must solve the Pales­tin­ian issue with­in its bor­ders, to keep alive aspi­ra­tions for a future Pales­tin­ian state. Allow­ing large num­bers of Gazans to cross over, even as refugees, would ‘revive the idea that Sinai is the alter­na­tive coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans,’ said Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty. A relat­ed sce­nario that wor­ries Egypt is that it could end up as the de fac­to admin­is­tra­tor of Gaza.”
      • Egypt, of course, is the only nation besides Israel that shares a bor­der with the Gaza Strip. It is often over­looked by Amer­i­cans because we don’t know our geog­ra­phy very well, but Egypt is equal­ly involved in pre­vent­ing the migra­tion of the Pales­tini­ans in Gaza.
    • How Hamas breached Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’ (Samuel Grana­dos, Ruby Mellen, Lau­ren Tier­ney, Artur Galocha, Cate Brown and Aaron Steck­el­berg, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The fence was breached at 29 points, accord­ing to the Israel Defense Forces. Though there wereIs­raeli guard tow­ers posi­tioned every 500 feet along the perime­ter of the wall at some points, the fight­ers appeared to encounter lit­tle resis­tance. The bor­der was min­i­mal­ly staffed, it soon became apparent,with much of Israel’s mil­i­tary divert­ed to focus on unrest in the West Bank.”
      • Detailed and quite inter­est­ing. Also not very long to read.
    • The Pro­gres­sives Who Flunked the Hamas Test (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “In the fevered world of social media, pro­gres­sive activists have often sought to dis­cred­it hate­ful state­ments and unjust poli­cies by describ­ing them as ‘vio­lence,’ even ‘geno­cide.’ This ten­den­cy seems grotesque if the same activists are not pre­pared to crit­i­cize Hamas, a group whose found­ing char­ter is explic­it­ly geno­ci­dal… Fit­ting Israel into the inter­sec­tion­al frame­work has always been dif­fi­cult, because its Jew­ish cit­i­zens are both his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed—the sur­vivors of an attempt to wipe them out entire­ly—and cur­rent­ly in a dom­i­nant posi­tion over the Pales­tini­ans, as demon­strat­ed by the Netanyahu government’s deci­sion to restrict pow­er and water sup­plies to Gaza. The sim­plis­tic log­ic of pop inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty can­not rec­on­cile this, and the sub­ject caused schisms with­in the left long before Saturday’s attacks.”
      • This one is espe­cial­ly worth read­ing for uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents. It high­lights weak­ness­es in a per­spec­tive you are often taught from.
    • A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer one (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, The Times of Israel): “Hamas seemed to do every­thing pos­si­ble to shift Israeli psy­chol­o­gy from a com­fort­able faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. And it will soon learn the scale of that mis­cal­cu­la­tion. A strong Israel may tol­er­ate a bel­liger­ent Hamas on its bor­der; a weak­er one can­not. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources wor­ry­ing about the human­i­tar­i­an fall­out from a Gaza ground war; a more vul­ner­a­ble Israel can­not. A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer Israel. Hamas was once a tol­er­a­ble threat. It just made itself an intol­er­a­ble one, all while con­vinc­ing Israelis they are too vul­ner­a­ble and weak to respond with the old restraint.”
  2. Some theological/Christian per­spec­tives:
    • The Way Out is Through: Peace Must Start with the End of Hamas (Marc LiVec­che, Prov­i­dence): “Israel must do every­thing pos­si­ble to min­i­mize the toil on the inno­cent, and to mul­ti­ply hell on the mon­sters.”
      • The author is a research fel­low at the Naval War Col­lege and is writ­ing about just war the­o­ry as it applies to the con­flict between Israel and Hamas.
    • Amid Israel-Hamas War, Local Chris­tians Seek Right­eous Anger and Gospel Hope (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Noth­ing about this sit­u­a­tion is right or good,” said Lisa Loden, a Mes­sian­ic Jew­ish mem­ber of the Beth­le­hem Insti­tute of Peace and Jus­tice. “But there is a strong desire to see the Lord use these events to draw peo­ple to him­self.”
    • Israel’s 9/11: The Need for Moral Clar­i­ty (Bernard N. Howard and Ivan Mesa, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Moral clar­i­ty also allows for suit­ably one-sided prayer. It’s right to pray for the swift defeat of Hamas. The mur­der­ous oper­a­tions room of Hamas will nev­er pro­vide good lead­er­ship for the Pales­tini­ans liv­ing in Gaza. We should by all means pray for both-sided things too: the sal­va­tion of peo­ple on both sides; the pro­tec­tion, heal­ing, and com­fort of peo­ple on both sides; and the growth of the church that lives inside the bor­ders of both nations. Even as we pray for these both-sided things, let us bold­ly call on our God to thwart, frus­trate, and defeat the one side that is hell-bent on ter­ror­ism.”
    • Amer­i­can Chris­tians Should Stand with Israel under Attack (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Some­times, espe­cial­ly in the ear­ly moments of any war, we may be uncer­tain about who is right and who is wrong. There is no such moral con­fu­sion here. Hamas—and its state sponsors—attacked inno­cent peo­ple, as they have done repeat­ed­ly in the past, this time employ­ing a force and bru­tal­i­ty pre­vi­ous­ly unseen.… As Chris­tians, we should pay spe­cial atten­tion to vio­lence direct­ed toward Israel—just as we would pay spe­cial atten­tion to a vio­lent attack on a mem­ber of our extend­ed fam­i­ly. After all, we are graft­ed on to the promise made to Abra­ham (Rom. 11:17). Our Lord Jesus was and is a Jew­ish man from Galilee.”
  3. Some Stan­ford-con­nect­ed arti­cles:
    • This Was Nev­er Sup­posed to Hap­pen (Amichai Magen, Per­sua­sion): “Ana­lysts keen to con­vey the mag­ni­tude of Octo­ber 7th to Amer­i­can audi­ences have already tagged it Israel’s Pearl Har­bor or 9/11. Nei­ther label ade­quate­ly cap­tures the day’s true sig­nif­i­cance. A more accu­rate name might be some­thing like ‘Israel’s civic Yom Kip­pur.’ Why? Because the very exis­tence of the State of Israel was sup­posed to guar­an­tee that a day like this would nev­er hap­pen. In the Yom Kip­pur War of Octo­ber 1973—when Egypt and Syr­ia launched a sur­prise assault—Israel lost some 2,700 sol­diers, but it man­aged to effec­tive­ly pro­tect its civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. No Israeli towns or vil­lages were ever breached. The social con­tract was hon­ored, albeit at a ter­ri­ble price. On Octo­ber 7, 2023, it was pri­mar­i­ly civil­ians who were killed, maimed, and kid­napped. This was the day when the IDF wasn’t there to defend the peo­ple it was cre­at­ed to pro­tect.”
      • The author, him­self Israeli, is a Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor and Fel­low in Israel Stud­ies at the Free­man-Spogli Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • The impact of Hamas’ dev­as­tat­ing attack (Matthew Wigler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Like most Jews, I seek the peace and secu­ri­ty of Israel as a Jew­ish state in the indige­nous home­land of the Jew­ish peo­ple, a safe haven after mil­len­nia of per­se­cu­tion where Jews can final­ly claim con­trol over their own des­tiny. Like­wise, like most Jews, I also dream of a future of dig­ni­ty and free­dom for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, who, by the very same prin­ci­ples of self-deter­mi­na­tion, deserve a state of their own in a land that they too have called home for many cen­turies. How­ev­er, Hamas’ ide­ol­o­gy of hate and meth­ods of ter­ror­ism are con­trary to that vision.”
  4. Oth­er inter­est­ing stuff not relat­ed to the war:
    • 5 Rea­sons Gen Z Is Primed for Spir­i­tu­al Renew­al (Kyle Richter & Patrick Miller, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Our last meet­ing of the year was big­ger than the first. We start­ed with 300 stu­dents and end­ed with 400. That nev­er hap­pens. Then in the fall of this year, it hap­pened again: 500 stu­dents attend­ed our first meet­ing; 600 showed up the next week. This doesn’t hap­pen.But it did. And it’s not unique to us. As we talk to cam­pus min­is­ters and pas­tors from San Fran­cis­co to Jack­sonville, Billings to Atlanta, DC to Dal­las, we know we aren’t alone. Some will urge cau­tion before draw­ing con­clu­sions. Isn’t this the era of dechurch­ing, decon­struc­tion, and ris­ing “nones”? But data lags behind real­i­ty and we don’t want the church to miss what may be hap­pen­ing.”
    • The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics (Jai, Sub­stack): “The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics says that when you observe or inter­act with a prob­lem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the prob­lem worse, even if you make it slight­ly bet­ter, the eth­i­cal bur­den of the prob­lem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In par­tic­u­lar, if you inter­act with a prob­lem and ben­e­fit from it, you are a com­plete mon­ster. I don’t sub­scribe to this school of thought, but it seems pret­ty pop­u­lar.”
      • A few years old, but real­ly good.
    • Repro­ducibil­i­ty tri­al: 246 biol­o­gists get dif­fer­ent results from same data sets (Anil Oza, Nature): “In a mas­sive exer­cise to exam­ine repro­ducibil­i­ty, more than 200 biol­o­gists analysed the same sets of eco­log­i­cal data — and got wide­ly diver­gent results. The first sweep­ing study1 of its kind in ecol­o­gy demon­strates how much results in the field can vary, not because of dif­fer­ences in the envi­ron­ment, but because of sci­en­tists’ ana­lyt­i­cal choic­es.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 324

some pre-Hal­loween links

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 324, which is 182.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Emp­ty Pews Are an Amer­i­can Pub­lic Health Cri­sis (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele and Bren­dan Case, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious par­tic­i­pa­tion strong­ly pro­motes health and well­ness. This means that Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing dis­af­fec­tion with orga­nized reli­gion isn’t just bad news for church­es; it also rep­re­sents a pub­lic health cri­sis, one that has been large­ly ignored but the effects of which are like­ly to increase in com­ing years.”
    • The authors are part of the Human Flour­ish­ing Pro­gram at Har­vard. I have quot­ed Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research sev­er­al times in the past.
  2. Some per­spec­tives on the Amer­i­can church:
    • J.D. Vance and the Great Chal­lenge of Chris­t­ian Mal­ice (David French, The Dis­patch): “The real cri­sis [in Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal engage­ment] is instead a cri­sis of the heart. Our ortho­doxy is under­mined by our actions, and our actions spring forth from the deep­est parts of our being. At a time of ris­ing antipa­thy, a Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty should blaze forth with a radi­ant coun­ter­cul­tur­al embrace of kind­ness and grace. Instead, all too many of us have for­got­ten a fun­da­men­tal truth. There are no ‘right peo­ple’ to hate.”
    • Why ‘Evan­gel­i­cal’ Is Becom­ing Anoth­er Word for ‘Repub­li­can’ (Ryan Burge, New York Times): “For instance, in 2008, just 16 per­cent of all self-iden­ti­fied evan­gel­i­cals report­ed their church atten­dance as nev­er or sel­dom. But in 2020, that num­ber jumped to 27 per­cent. In 2008, about a third of evan­gel­i­cals who nev­er attend­ed church said they were polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. By 2019, that had risen to about 50 per­cent.… [also] more peo­ple are embrac­ing the label who have no attach­ment to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. For exam­ple, the share of Catholics who also iden­ti­fied as evan­gel­i­cals (or born again) rose to 15 per­cent in 2018 from 9 per­cent in 2008. That same pat­tern appears with Mus­lims. In fact, there’s evi­dence that the share of mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, Ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty and Hin­duism who iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cal is larg­er today than it was just a decade ago.”
    • The Evan­gel­i­cal Church Is Break­ing Apart (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Scott Dud­ley, the senior pas­tor at Belle­vue Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton, refers to this as ‘our idol­a­try of pol­i­tics.’ He’s heard of many con­gre­gants leav­ing their church because it didn’t match their pol­i­tics, he told me, but has nev­er once heard of some­one chang­ing their pol­i­tics because it didn’t match their church’s teach­ing. He often tells his con­gre­ga­tion that if the Bible doesn’t chal­lenge your pol­i­tics at least occa­sion­al­ly, you’re not real­ly pay­ing atten­tion to the Hebrew scrip­tures or the New Tes­ta­ment.”
    • Church Mem­ber­ship Is Not a One-Way Street (Alex Duke, Cross­way): “Think of your church as a light­bulb hooked up to a dim­mer switch in a dark room. Every­thing we do makes our wit­ness brighter or dark­er. Prac­tic­ing mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is one of the surest ways to turn that dim­mer switch up; ignor­ing it is one of the surest ways to turn it down. Mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is more impor­tant than you think.”
  3. The Prob­lem With Dave Chap­pelle (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Chap­pelle is not a hap­less vic­tim of a crush­ing ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da; he’s not Bar­ronelle Stutz­man or James Eich. Chap­pelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robe­spierre of the very rev­o­lu­tion that’s after him now. His for­tune was made inside the same pro­gres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ty that threat­ens him, and it is pre­cise­ly Chappelle’s (and many oth­er come­di­ans) skill with which he dis­missed any notion of the sacred that has tak­en root in the peo­ple who are walk­ing out on his un-PC act.” Real­ly sol­id insights here.
  4. The par­ent­ing prob­lem the gov­ern­ment can’t fix (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, The Week): “There is a cul­tur­al weight dan­gling from the yoke of mod­ern Amer­i­can par­ent­hood — one that is prob­a­bly beyond the gov­ern­ment to alle­vi­ate.… Chil­dren are a per­son­al choice and there­fore a per­son­al prob­lem, many peo­ple seem to believe. Have as many as you want — just make sure they don’t both­er the rest of us. The prob­lem is that this cre­do is total­ly out of step with real­i­ty.… par­ent­ing is an inher­ent­ly social occu­pa­tion. Try­ing to cram it into an indi­vid­u­al­ist frame­work, where the costs and con­se­quences of chil­dren fall on par­ents and no one else, dis­torts the whole endeav­or.”
    • I have long thought that dis­lik­ing chil­dren is pro­found­ly hyp­o­crit­i­cal. You were once a child who craved affec­tion and under­stand­ing, how rude to reject chil­dren now that you have learned to nav­i­gate the world more effec­tive­ly.
  5. Sci­en­tists Built an AI to Give Eth­i­cal Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist (Tony Tran, Futur­ism): “And as is often the case, part of the rea­son Delphi’s answers can get ques­tion­able can like­ly be linked back to how it was cre­at­ed. The folks behind the project drew on some eye­brow-rais­ing sources to help train the AI, includ­ing the ‘Am I the Ass­hole?’ sub­red­dit, the ‘Con­fes­sions’ sub­red­dit, and the ‘Dear Abby’ advice col­umn, accord­ing to the paper the team behind Del­phi pub­lished about the exper­i­ment. It should be not­ed, though, that just the sit­u­a­tions were culled from those sources — not the actu­al replies and answers them­selves.… the team behind Del­phi used Amazon’s crowd­sourc­ing ser­vice Mechan­i­cal­Turk to find respon­dents to actu­al­ly train the AI.”
  6. About Israel and Jew­ish peo­ple:
    • When Your Body Is Some­one Else’s Haunt­ed House (Dara Horn, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Those girls were not stu­pid, and prob­a­bly not even big­ot­ed. But in their entire­ly typ­i­cal and well-inten­tioned edu­ca­tion, they had learned about Jews main­ly because peo­ple had killed Jews. Like most peo­ple in the world, they had only encoun­tered dead Jews: peo­ple whose sole attribute was that they had been mur­dered, and whose mur­ders served a clear pur­pose, which was to teach us some­thing. Jews were peo­ple who, for moral and edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es, were sup­posed to be dead.”
    • Whose Promised Land? A Jour­ney Into a Divid­ed Israel (Patrick Kings­ley & Laeti­tia Van­con, New York Times): “‘I believe in the coun­try as long as it doesn’t fight reli­gion, as long as it doesn’t fight me,’ he said. In his view, the new gov­ern­ment has under­mined Israel’s Jew­ish­ness, under­cut­ting the state’s legit­i­ma­cy. ‘If it’s not a Jew­ish state, then we have no right to exist here,’ he said. ‘Our right to exist here is based on the fact that God gave us the land.’”
    • Pales­tine Isn’t Fer­gu­son (Susie Lin­field, The Atlantic): “Any use­ful analy­sis of the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict requires engag­ing with an unre­solved, frus­trat­ing­ly com­plex, griev­ous­ly resilient strug­gle between two nation­al move­ments, each with a jus­ti­fied claim to the land. Once that effort is aban­doned, a vac­u­um ensues. It is filled by the trans­for­ma­tion of a coun­try into a metaphor; by the rewrit­ing (or ignor­ing) of his­to­ry; by Manichean think­ing; and by the con­ver­sion of lan­guage into a means of per­for­mance rather than a descrip­tion of real­i­ty.”
  7. Learn­ing From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vul­cans (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…both of these rel­a­tive non-enti­ties were pulled aside from their reg­u­lar posi­tions and hand­ed an addi­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ty— coor­di­na­tor of the Amer­i­can effort in Afghanistan.Read that again: they were both giv­en the same job at the same time. Yet the prob­lem was worse than just dupli­ca­tion of effort and con­fused lines of author­i­ty. The two men were not even aware the oth­er man was work­ing the same port­fo­lio!”

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 Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imag­ine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”  First shared in vol­ume 159.

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 302

this was a busy week for me — I’m amazed I read enough mate­r­i­al to pop­u­late this list!

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

This vol­ume is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares: 92 + 102 + 112 = 302.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. You Aren’t Actu­al­ly Mad at the SATs (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Try­ing to fight edu­ca­tion­al inequal­i­ty by get­ting rid of the SAT is like try­ing to fight cli­mate change by get­ting rid of ther­mome­ters.”
  2. Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remem­ber You Will Die (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “In Octo­ber 2018, on her 455th day with the skull on her desk, she wrote, ‘Every­one dies, their bod­ies rot, and every face becomes a skull (unless you are incor­rupt).’ ”
  3. Adver­sary Drones Are Spy­ing On The U.S. And The Pen­ta­gon Acts Like They’re UFOs (Tyler Rogoway, The Dri­ve): “Yes, I real­ize that the idea that an adver­sary is pen­e­trat­ing U.S. mil­i­tary train­ing areas unmo­lest­ed, and has been for years, using low­ly drone tech­nol­o­gy and bal­loons, is a big pill to swal­low, but as one of the peo­ple who have repeat­ed­ly warned about the threat posed by low­er-end drones for a decade—warnings that large­ly were dis­missed by the Pen­ta­gon until drones made or altered in ram­shackle ISIS work­shops in a war zone were lit­er­al­ly rain­ing down bomblets on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq—it isn’t real­ly sur­pris­ing at all.” I saw this when it first came out and did­n’t share it for some rea­son, but it popped up again because of the upcom­ing Sen­ate UFO thing and I want­ed to let y’all see it.
  4. Is the ‘DEFCON 3 cul­ture war’ over reli­gious free­dom bills com­ing to an end? (Kelsey Dal­las, Deseret News): “Six years ago, Indi­ana law­mak­ers’ efforts to pass a new reli­gious free­dom law spawned protests, trav­el bans and boy­cott threats from nation­al ath­let­ic orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the NCAA, NFL and NBA. This year, when Mon­tana and South Dako­ta passed sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion, the back­lash was so mut­ed by com­par­i­son that even some reli­gious free­dom experts didn’t hear about the bills until the Deseret News sent an inter­view request.”
  5. Who Makes More: Teach­ers or Cops? (Red­dit) — a coun­ter­in­tu­itive pre­sen­ta­tion of the state-by-state data
  6. The incom­ing Stan­ford stu­dent liv­ing under siege in Gaza (Cameron Ehsan, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Yousef AbuHashem ’25 has kept a small back­pack close to him since Israeli airstrikes tar­get­ing Gaza began 11 days ago. The bag is large enough to fit only the bare essen­tials: his birth cer­tifi­cate, pass­port, sec­ondary school diplo­ma, cloth­ing and cash.”
  7. The New Furies of the Old­est Hatred (Peter Savod­nik, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “All gov­ern­ments should be scru­ti­nized. But crit­i­cism of Israeli pol­i­cy is often just crit­i­cism of Israel’s exis­tence. We know this because the crit­i­cized poli­cies almost always involve Israel being able to defend itself against hos­tile neigh­bors (being able to exist); and because there is an obses­sion with Israel that dis­tin­guish­es it from any oth­er coun­try or for­eign-pol­i­cy issue. Count­less Mus­lims have suf­fered at the hands of the Chi­nese, Indi­ans and Rus­sians — to say noth­ing of the Assad regime hav­ing incin­er­at­ed as many as 600,000 Syr­i­ans, the near­ly 500,000 Pales­tini­ans con­fined to refugee camps in Lebanon, or the inden­tured ser­vants, includ­ing many Pales­tini­ans, in the near­by Gulf. This is not whataboutism. It is per­spec­tive.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cor­po­rate Pol­i­tics (Dil­bert)
  • Gross But Fun­ny (At Ran­dom Comics)
  • Sleuthing Cap­tain America’s Shield (Alan Katz, The Smith­so­ni­an’s blog): “SD-600 requires that the Smith­son­ian estab­lish legal title to any item to be acquired for the col­lec­tions with accom­pa­ny­ing evi­dence, such as prove­nance infor­ma­tion, per­mits, export/import licens­es, and intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty trans­fer agree­ments where applic­a­ble. Such evi­dence would prove con­clu­sive­ly that an item wasn’t, for exam­ple, already owned by anoth­er depart­ment of the US gov­ern­ment (i.e. S.W.O.R.D. in the case of Fal­con and the Win­ter Sol­dier) and sub­ject to repos­ses­sion by that enti­ty.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)

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). 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 301

per­spec­tives on Israel, Bit­coin, and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty

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 301, which is what is known as a Hap­py Num­ber. So there.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cross and the Machine (Paul Kingsnorth, First Things): “It kept hap­pen­ing, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerv­ing. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being … hunt­ed? I want­ed it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no inter­est in Chris­tian­i­ty. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sound­ed pret­ty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.” A won­der­ful­ly-told con­ver­sion sto­ry.
  2. Why We Should Read What We Cite (Because It Mat­ters) (Joseph Lath­am & Gilly Koritzky, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): “Con­sid­er an aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle that came out at the height of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and argues that doc­tors’ racist bias­es are a main rea­son for the high­er COVID-19-relat­ed hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and mor­tal­i­ty rates among African Amer­i­cans. It says that ‘there is evi­dence of med­ical bias in the test­ing and treat­ment of African-Amer­i­cans with COVID-19’ and cites this report as the source. The prob­lem? The report con­tains no such evi­dence.” The excerpt does not do it jus­tice. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The authors are psy­chol­o­gists.
  3. How We Got to the Equal­i­ty Act (Matthew Lee Ander­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The sto­ry that evan­gel­i­cals are (mere­ly) vic­tims of pro­gres­sive aggres­sors not only fails to account for the ways in which the LGBT move­ment was shaped by pop­ulist evan­gel­i­cal rhetoric and tac­tics. It also for­gets that the gay lib­er­a­tion move­ment was a direct response to the sys­temic and per­va­sive exclu­sion of les­bian and gay indi­vid­u­als from the struc­tures of our pub­lic life—including from Amer­i­ca itself. Per­fec­tion­ism in pol­i­tics breeds rad­i­cal­ism in response.”
  4. When a Famous Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Unrav­eled Sil­i­con Valley’s Most Sen­sa­tion­al Mur­der Case (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine a vio­lent mur­der at the epi­cen­ter of ear­ly San­ta Clara Valley—soon to be renamed Sil­i­con Val­ley in the pop­u­lar imagination—and an inno­cent man sent to Death Row at San Quentin. But a famous lit­er­ary crit­ic emerges as the super sleuth who gets him freed, amid dark evo­ca­tions of scan­dal involv­ing cor­rupt politi­cians and murky under­world fig­ures. You don’t need to imag­ine it, because it real­ly hap­pened.” A engross­ing Stan­ford sto­ry.
  5. About the cur­rent con­flict in Israel:
    • This was writ­ten before the cur­rent vio­lence: Eight Tips for Read­ing About Israel (Mat­ti Fried­man, Sapir): “If you’re crit­i­cal of open-fire orders on the Gaza fence, you should know how that works on the India-Pak­istan bor­der, or the Turkey-Syr­ia bor­der, or on the perime­ters of U.S. mil­i­tary bases in Afghanistan. Same goes for refugee absorp­tion, press free­dom, minor­i­ty rights, or any­thing. Israel doesn’t always come out look­ing great. But you’ll find that most crit­i­cism of Israel doesn’t com­pare it with any­thing. That’s a sign the dis­cus­sion isn’t about a real coun­try.”
    • Against Israel: A bad part­ner is worse than rain (Fred­die de Boer, Sub­stack): “If every word that they have said about the per­fidy and self-destruc­tion of the Pales­tini­ans was cor­rect, it would make no dif­fer­ence. The moral oblig­a­tion falls on the dom­i­nant par­ty, and Israel is beyond dom­i­nant. The myth­mak­ing about all of the oppor­tu­ni­ties they squan­dered does not make a lick of moral dif­fer­ence.”
    • For Israel: For the Sake of Peace, Israel Must Rout Hamas (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Israel made plen­ty of mis­takes in the run-up to the cur­rent fight­ing, includ­ing heavy-hand­ed polic­ing in Jerusalem at Ramadan and inad­e­quate polic­ing in Arab-Israeli towns that have been hit by mob vio­lence. But there is a vast dif­fer­ence in moral weight between Israel’s mis­cal­cu­la­tions and Hamas’s cal­cu­la­tions, between blun­ders and crimes. That’s some­thing to bear in mind when Pales­tin­ian rock­ets hit Israeli civil­ians by design and Israeli mis­siles hit Pales­tin­ian civil­ians inad­ver­tent­ly.”
    • Against Israel: A Night­mare of Ter­ror Across the Land­scape of Pales­tine (Yousef Munayy­er, The Nation): “In towns through­out Israel, Pales­tini­ans have been beat­en and ter­ror­ized by ram­pag­ing mobs; one man was dragged from his car and bru­tal­ized in what many are describ­ing as a lynch­ing. In the West Bank, Pales­tini­ans have been shot and killed in raids by the Israeli mil­i­tary. In Jerusalem, Pales­tin­ian fam­i­lies, fac­ing the ongo­ing threat of expul­sion, have been harassed by set­tlers and mil­i­tary alike. And across Gaza, Israeli war planes have dropped bomb after bomb, destroy­ing entire apart­ment build­ings. Many have died, many more have been injured. If they man­age to sur­vive, they will wit­ness their soci­ety shat­tered when the smoke clears.”
    • For Israel: The Two Wrongs of the Gaza Nar­ra­tive (David French, The Dis­patch): “Any dis­cus­sion of the law of war often sounds cold and clin­i­cal, even though we’re dis­cussing mat­ters of life and death, includ­ing the inevitable and trag­ic deaths of civil­ians who always suf­fer when wars rage in city centers—especially when jihadists wear civil­ian clothes and embed them­selves in civil­ian struc­tures. When Hamas does so, it vio­lates the law of war by inhibit­ing the dis­tinc­tion between civil­ian and mil­i­tary tar­gets. The legal and moral respon­si­bil­i­ty for result­ing civil­ian deaths rests with Hamas, not Israel.”
    • Against Israel: The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apol­o­gist for the Netanyahu Gov­ern­ment (Bernie Sanders, New York Times): “No one is argu­ing that Israel, or any gov­ern­ment, does not have the right to self-defense or to pro­tect its peo­ple. So why are these words repeat­ed year after year, war after war? And why is the ques­tion almost nev­er asked: ‘What are the rights of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple?’ And why do we seem to take notice of the vio­lence in Israel and Pales­tine only when rock­ets are falling on Israel?”
    • For Israel: The Bad Optics of Fight­ing for Your Life (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “The goal here is the erad­i­ca­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple. That is the bone-chill­ing truth. That is the core obsta­cle to peace. Any­one who insists that the ongo­ing rock­et bar­rage is about a par­tic­u­lar Israeli gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy must be made to answer for this.”
  6. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and Eco­nom­ic Free­dom (Chris­tos Makridis, City Jour­nal): “Using data on more than 146 coun­tries since 1996, my research finds that increas­es in reli­gious free­dom pre­cede, and help explain, increas­es in eco­nom­ic free­dom. The log­ic is sim­ple: since reli­gious free­dom fun­da­men­tal­ly involves grant­i­ng indi­vid­u­als the auton­o­my to think and wor­ship in what­ev­er form they wish, it is arguably the most basic of all free­doms. Prop­er­ty rights are of lit­tle use if those who retain them do not have the free­dom to think what they wish and prac­tice what they believe.” Chris­tos, an econ­o­mist at Ari­zona State, is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  7. Rival thoughts on Bit­coin:
    • Bit­coin Is Civ­i­liza­tion (Bal­a­ji S. Srini­vasan, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Bit­coin might seem like a curios­i­ty in a democ­ra­cy with a sta­ble cur­ren­cy. But in coun­tries with deeply unsta­ble economies and author­i­tar­i­an pol­i­tics, it is a life­line. As Alex Glad­stein recent­ly explained in Rea­son Mag­a­zine, Bit­coin has been used by dis­si­dents and activists in places like Cuba, Nige­ria, and Belarus. In Rus­sia, the country’s most promi­nent oppo­si­tion politi­cian and Putin crit­ic, Alex­ei Navaly, has raised mil­lions in Bit­coin. As Glad­stein wrote: ‘Putin can do a lot of things, but he can’t freeze a bit­coin account.’ If you want to under­stand what cryp­to is real­ly about, ask Venezue­lans if they’d rather own bolí­var or Bit­coin.”
    • The Case Against Bit­coin (Michael W. Green, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “In the last week of April, min­ing pools based in Chi­na account­ed for rough­ly 90% of the pro­cess­ing pow­er (‘hash rate’) in the Bit­coin net­work. Rough­ly three weeks ago, a pow­er out­age in the Xin­jiang region of Chi­na result­ed in a plunge in glob­al Bit­coin pro­cess­ing. Bit­coin min­ing — the process of record keep­ing for the ‘immutable’ chain of record on which the Bit­coin net­work depends — is dom­i­nat­ed by enti­ties in coun­tries with the stat­ed objec­tive to harm the inter­ests of the Unit­ed States. Bit­coin pro­po­nents con­tin­u­ous­ly assure us that this is ‘just about to change,’ but the data has not shift­ed in a mean­ing­ful man­ner in the last five years. This is not a decen­tral­ized sys­tem. It is cen­tral­ized in the coun­tries that seek our destruc­tion.”

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 time­ly What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Atlantic): “…one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.” (first shared back in vol­ume 5, note that the first Israel arti­cle in today’s roundup is by the same author).

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 196

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 one is com­ing out ear­ly in the morn­ing because I’m dri­ving back from a mis­sion trip and will be on the road the entire day. When I’m on a mis­sion trip I usu­al­ly do very brief video blogs (under a minute each) — you can see the ones for this trip here.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Chi­na Shuts Down Anoth­er Big Bei­jing Church (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Through­out its 26-year his­to­ry, Shouwang mem­bers have refused to come under Com­mu­nist author­i­ty and per­se­vered despite per­se­cu­tion, with their ‘under­ground’ ser­vices forced out­side when evict­ed from their build­ings in 2009 and with their found­ing pas­tor Jin Tian­ming under house arrest since 2011.”
    • Relat­ed: Chi­na’s Mus­lim gulag is tough to cov­er, but a few reporters aren’t giv­ing up (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “One of the mosques in Kash­gar, it added, has been trans­formed into a hookah lounge. A city that was once a world cen­ter for tra­di­tion­al Islam­ic and Cen­tral Asian archi­tec­ture is now Dis­ney­land meets Aladdin, (a fairy­tale that orig­i­nal­ly was set in Chi­na, by the way). It’s tough cov­er­ing Chi­na and the jour­nal­ists who try to do it well inevitably end up expelled.” This is a good sum­ma­ry of report­ing on one of the most wicked gov­ern­ment pro­grams in the world right now. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. A Case for the Elec­toral Col­lege (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Is there a case for a sys­tem that some­times pro­duces unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic out­comes? I think so, on two grounds. First, it cre­ates incen­tives for polit­i­cal par­ties and can­di­dates to seek super­ma­jori­ties rather than just play­ing for 50.1 per­cent, because the lat­ter play is a los­ing one more often than in a pop­u­lar-vote pres­i­den­tial sys­tem. Sec­ond, it cre­ates incen­tives for polit­i­cal par­ties to try to break region­al blocs con­trolled by the oppo­si­tion, rather than just max­i­miz­ing turnout in their own areas, because you win the pres­i­den­cy con­sis­tent­ly only as a par­ty of mul­ti­ple regions and you can crack a rival party’s nar­row major­i­ty by flip­ping a few states.”
  3. An Inter­view With Lisa Littman, Who Coined the Term ‘Rapid Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria’ (Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “Although there have been spec­u­la­tions about my affil­i­a­tions, I am not a reli­gious or polit­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tive and I am not a rad­i­cal fem­i­nist. No orga­ni­za­tions fund­ed my study. That means that I pay out-of-pock­et for research-relat­ed costs like print­ing, trav­el­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ences, pub­li­ca­tion fees, etc. And because I do not earn my liveli­hood pro­vid­ing tran­si­tion ser­vices or refer­rals for tran­si­tion, and I have not per­son­al­ly (nor has my spouse or chil­dren) expe­ri­enced gen­der dys­pho­ria or tran­si­tion, I have far few­er con­flicts of inter­est than many of the cur­rent researchers in this field.” Fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view.
  4. How the West Changed The World For the Bet­ter (Ben Shapiro, Nation­al Review): “Thanks to the West, bil­lions of human beings no longer suf­fer in abject pover­ty; thanks to the West, democ­ra­cy is seen as both the moral and the prac­ti­cal default posi­tion for aspir­ing gov­ern­ments; thanks to the West, indi­vid­u­al­ism has been able to gain ground against the nat­ur­al trib­al­ism endem­ic to human beings. The his­to­ry of the West isn’t a his­to­ry of unal­loyed great­ness: It is replete with suf­fer­ing and tyran­ny and slav­ery and mis­ery. But all of those evils are present in every civ­i­liza­tion his­tor­i­cal­ly. The ques­tion is why the West changed the world.”
    • A most­ly-neg­a­tive review of a relat­ed book Shapiro just pub­lished: The Right Side of History—A Review (Jared Mar­cel Pollen, Quil­lette): “…Shapiro’s attempt to demon­strate that sec­u­lar civ­i­liza­tion needs to rekin­dle the Judeo-Chris­t­ian teach­ings upon which it is based, inad­ver­tent­ly shows us why we were right to leave them behind in the first place.” I have not read Shapiro’s book, but many of the spe­cif­ic crit­i­cisms Pollen makes are not very per­sua­sive. For exam­ple, it is a con­ven­tion­al enough posi­tion among experts that mod­ern sci­ence arose due to Chris­tian­i­ty that I have had stu­dents tell me that they were taught it in his­to­ry cours­es at Stan­ford.
  5. The Real Rea­sons Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals Sup­port Israel (David French, Nation­al Review): “The [com­mon media] expla­na­tion goes some­thing like this — Evan­gel­i­cals believe that the rebirth of Israel is has­ten­ing not just the sec­ond com­ing of Christ, but a par­tic­u­lar kind of sec­ond com­ing, one that includes fire, fury, and war that will con­sume the Jew­ish peo­ple.… But the true nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian sup­port for Israel is sub­stan­tial­ly dif­fer­ent. The intel­lec­tu­al and the­o­log­i­cal roots of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism do not rest in end-times proph­e­sies but rather in Old Tes­ta­ment promis­es.”
    • One exam­ple of a much broad­er phe­nom­e­non. I very rarely rec­og­nize myself or my peers in media expla­na­tions of “why evan­gel­i­cals believe ______ about _______.” Or even just “evan­gel­i­cals believe ______”. I find this puz­zling because it’s not as though we don’t have reg­u­lar gath­er­ings where we explain what we believe to any­one who will lis­ten.
  6. Open­ly Gay, Open­ly Chris­t­ian Buttigieg Chal­lenges the Reli­gious Right (Ed Kil­go­re, New York Mag­a­zine): “As Barack Oba­ma once con­vinc­ing­ly argued, doubt about what God wants peo­ple to do polit­i­cal­ly is an impor­tant part of an atti­tude of humil­i­ty which used to be called ‘the fear of God.’” It is inter­est­ing how many of the Democ­rats seek­ing nom­i­na­tion are out­spo­ken about their faith.
  7. Black and Evan­gel­i­cal: Why I Keep The Label (Bran­don Wash­ing­ton, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I too have been wound­ed by evangelicalism’s pos­ture toward social ethics. But I have con­clud­ed that an exo­dus of eth­nic minori­ties amounts to seg­re­ga­tion of the move­ment and only con­tributes to the prob­lem. So I remain.”

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 Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.” (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 168

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Most Momen­tous Place? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The old city of Jerusalem is aston­ish­ing­ly small for a city with so many momen­tous places. One can walk from Christianity’s holi­est site to the holi­est site of Judaism, paus­ing to look at one of the holi­est sites of Islam, in less time than it takes to walk from my office on the cam­pus of George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty to the cam­pus Star­bucks.” Short and provoca­tive.
  2. Aus­trali­a’s new Pen­te­costal prime min­is­ter: Try to guess how the press is receiv­ing him (Ira Rifkin, GetRe­li­gion): “…the new prime min­is­ter, Scott Mor­ri­son, is an out­spo­ken, polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Pen­te­costal Chris­t­ian. This mix­ing of reli­gion and pol­i­tics may be old-hat at this point for Amer­i­cans. But it’s an entire­ly new expe­ri­ence for Aus­tralians.”
  3. My nephew tried to school me on cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion. It did­n’t end well.(Jack Van­No­ord, Chica­go Tri­bune): fic­tion­al, amus­ing, and makes a seri­ous point about glob­al cul­tur­al exchange. “Most weeks, his less-woke friends go out for Taco Tues­days, but not Kyle. No more hum­mus. No more bagels. No mo’ pho. Poor Kyle. Liv­ing the unap­pro­pri­at­ed life is tough busi­ness. When­ev­er it rains, Kyle gets soaked. No more umbrel­las for him. Chi­nese. Kyle has stopped binge watch­ing ‘The Walk­ing Dead’ once I men­tioned the word for, and the con­cept of, zom­bies were appro­pri­at­ed from West Africa. Kyle was tak­ing a sum­mer math course at the com­mu­ni­ty col­lege. But he dropped out. It was just too hard. His home­work was tak­ing all evening. He was doing all his assign­ments using Roman numer­als since Ara­bic numer­als are … well, Ara­bic.”
  4. The Reli­gious Typol­o­gy (Pew Research Cen­ter): “ a new Pew Research Cen­ter analy­sis looks at beliefs and behav­iors that cut across many denom­i­na­tions – impor­tant traits that unite peo­ple of dif­fer­ent faiths, or that divide peo­ple who have the same reli­gious affil­i­a­tion – pro­duc­ing a new and reveal­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion, or typol­o­gy, of reli­gion in Amer­i­ca.”
  5. A Prison That’s Also a Loony Bin (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “A trans­gen­der pris­on­er has admit­ted sex­u­al­ly assault­ing inmates at a women’s jail. Karen White, 51, who was born male but now iden­ti­fies as a woman, has plead­ed guilty to two counts of sex­u­al touch­ing at New Hall Prison, Wake­field.” The sto­ry is astound­ing.
  6. Bet­ter Dead Than Dis­abled? (Charles Camosy, Com­mon­weal): “pro­lif­ers are not imag­in­ing things: argu­ments in favor of the autonomous moral and legal choice to com­mit infan­ti­cide are easy to find…. [for exam­ple, a] 2012 arti­cle by moral philoso­phers Alber­to Giu­bili­ni and Francesca Min­er­va, which appeared in the respect­ed Jour­nal of Med­ical Ethics, was provoca­tive­ly titled ‘After-Birth Abor­tion: Why Should the Baby Live?’”
  7. Diary of a Con­cus­sion: What I Learned About Head Injuries By Hav­ing One (Eliz­a­beth Lopat­to, The Verge): “To have your per­son­al­i­ty altered by brain trau­ma seems to upset peo­ple more than hav­ing it altered by, for instance, emo­tion­al trau­ma. I don’t know why this is! …. If I thought I was my brain, prob­a­bly I would have found the injury more upset­ting. But I didn’t and don’t believe that; my self is an inter­ac­tion between my body and my brain.” This is a year old but I just stum­bled upon it. Super inter­est­ing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How To Pray A Psalm (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): prayer life need a boost? Give this a try. (first shared in vol­ume 69)

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.