Tag: journalism

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 275

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Elec­tion stuff is at the bot­tom. I’d say read at your per­il, but there’s some gen­uine­ly fas­ci­nat­ing stuff in there. There will be a TON of analy­sis pieces next week, so please for­ward me any that you find insight­ful.

  1. On What Athe­ists Say There Is (M. Antho­ny Mills, Soci­ety of Catholic Sci­en­tists): “Accord­ing to the athe­ist, the theist’s error is believ­ing in one too many things. Yet, for the the­ist, the dis­agree­ment is not about the exis­tence of one par­tic­u­lar thing, but ‘about every­thing,’ as Mac­In­tyre puts it.” The begin­ning and end are excel­lent. The mid­dle mud­dles unless you have very pre­cise philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests. The author has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. 
  2. Atten­tion Sean Feucht and evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers: Hatred of the press is hurt­ing your cause (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Get­ting rebuffed when­ev­er I tried to inter­view him got rather tir­ing when I noticed how he was tweet­ing his vex­a­tion with media cov­er­age while plan­ning a huge Chris­t­ian con­cert on the Mall that day. Note to pub­lic fig­ures: When you con­tin­u­al­ly refuse to give reporters access, don’t be sur­prised when their cov­er­age isn’t what you’d like.”
  3. Future of Chris­t­ian Mar­riage: Mark Reg­nerus in New Book Stud­ies It & Advis­es (Rachel Lu, Nation­al Review): “This is the book to read if you’ve won­dered whether young Chris­tians around the world are more success­ful than their sec­u­lar coun­ter­parts at find­ing love.”
    • Relat­ed but not direct­ly: A Case for Lat­er Mar­riage (Elise Ehrhard, First Things): “The lat­er mar­ry­ing age in the Unit­ed States is here to stay, and there is no rea­son for peo­ple of faith to fear it. In fact, we should embrace it as a good thing.”
  4. Supreme Court Recon­sid­ers Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Rule in Fos­ter Care Case (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The city is reach­ing out and telling a pri­vate reli­gious ministry—which has been doing this work for two centuries—how to run its inter­nal affairs. And try­ing to coerce it to make state­ments that are con­trary to its reli­gious beliefs as a con­di­tion of con­tin­u­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the reli­gious exer­cise that they have car­ried out in Philadel­phia for two cen­turies.” Hon­est­ly, this case could be far more impor­tant than the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. I am cau­tious­ly hope­ful. 
  5. Gre­ta Thun­berg Hears Your Excus­es. She Is Not Impressed. (David March­ese, New York Times): “It some­times gets awk­ward: In Swe­den we have this phe­nom­e­non called Jan­te­la­gen. It’s when some­one is famous, and the peo­ple around use up all their ener­gy to ignore the fact that the per­son is famous.” This is a fun inter­view. I sus­pect I would like Gre­ta but I doubt she would like me. 
  6. Some elec­tion stuff:
    • Why Evan­gel­i­cals Aren’t What They Used to Be (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “There has recent­ly been talk of aban­don­ing the label ‘evan­gel­i­cal’ among those who answer to the descrip­tor, large­ly because of its trans­for­ma­tion into a main­ly polit­i­cal term.” Bru­enig is a Roman Catholic and a con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing writer. 
    • Why Evan­gel­i­cals Dis­agree on the Pres­i­dent (Tim Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tiantiy Today): “Our inabil­i­ty to under­stand the ratio­nal­i­ty of an oppos­ing view­point is more often a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion on our part than a fail­ure of ratio­nal­i­ty on theirs. The dif­fer­ence between the camps can­not be that one side is tru­ly Chris­t­ian while the oth­er is not, or that either side pos­sess­es a monop­oly on good ideas and good inten­tions.” Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tor. I think the author cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fies the two camps in evan­gel­i­cal­ism, but is wrong in his assess­ment of their cause. The author is, inci­den­tal­ly, a Stan­ford grad.
    • In Search Of Heal­ing (Gene Wein­garten, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate has riv­en fam­i­lies, destroyed ancient friend­ships, test­ed mar­riages. The stakes are so ele­vat­ed, the alter­na­tives so stark, the con­se­quences so poten­tial­ly dire, that the prin­ci­pal emo­tion gen­er­at­ed — inflamed by high­ly par­ti­san media, and social media, on the left and the right — is some­thing that very much resem­bles hatred.” This might hon­est­ly be my favorite read of the week. The end is amaz­ing.
    • ‘You are no longer my moth­er’: A divid­ed Amer­i­ca will strug­gle to heal after Trump era (Tim Reid, Gabriel­la Borter, & Michael Mar­ti­na, Reuters): “She is not sure those rifts with friends and fam­i­ly will ever mend, because each believes the oth­er to have a total­ly alien val­ue sys­tem.”
    • What the Vot­ers Are Try­ing to Tell Us (David Brooks, New York Times): “…elec­tions are edu­ca­tion­al events. Vot­ers are not always wise, but they are usu­al­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble. They know more about their own lives than we in our infor­ma­tion bub­bles do, and they almost always tell us some­thing impor­tant.”
    • Tak­ing new seats and retain­ing old ones, a string of con­gres­sion­al vic­to­ries for Stan­ford alums (Sari­na Deb and Yash Dalmia, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Ten Stan­ford alum­ni were re-elect­ed to their posi­tions in Con­gress in Tuesday’s elec­tions — sev­en in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and three in the Sen­ate.”
    • Three per­spec­tives on race and the elec­tion:
      1. Lati­no Evan­gel­i­cals Boost Trump in Flori­da and Texas (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, Amer­i­cans saw the con­trast between Lati­no vot­ers from dif­fer­ent back­grounds play out in two major metro areas in US swing states—Maricopa Coun­ty in Ari­zona and Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ty in Flori­da.”
      2. Trump’s gains with His­pan­ic vot­ers should prompt some pro­gres­sive rethink­ing (Matthew Ygle­sias, Vox): “What if many US His­pan­ics sim­ply don’t see the racial pol­i­tics of the Trump era the way intel­lec­tu­als — whose think­ing and writ­ing on struc­tur­al racism and white suprema­cy have gained broad influ­ence in recent years — think they should?”
      3. The Trump vote is ris­ing among Blacks and His­pan­ics, despite the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom (Musa al-Ghar­bi, NBC News): “Per­cep­tions of Trump as racist seem to be a core dri­ving force push­ing whites toward the Democ­rats. Why would the oppo­site pat­tern be hold­ing among minor­i­ty vot­ers — i.e. the very peo­ple the pres­i­dent is pur­port­ed­ly being racist against?” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia and wrote this before the elec­tion. 

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 APA Meet­ing: A Photo-Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the oth­er.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing. First shared in vol­ume 204.

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 265

lots about race and racial ten­sion

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. Here are the things about race and racial ten­sion that stood out to me.
    • Why Did the Police Shoot Jacob Blake? (Trevor Noah, The Dai­ly Show): “I could tell you this sto­ry with my eyes closed by now. If I want­ed to I could pre­re­cord five of these seg­ments and go on vaca­tion and you would nev­er know.” Ten worth­while min­utes.
    • The Kenosha shoot­ing did­n’t hap­pen in a vac­u­um (Denise Lock­wood, CNN): “I am remind­ed of what Rod­ney Prunty, the for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Unit­ed Way of Racine Coun­ty, said to me dur­ing an inter­view: ‘If you have a pond full of fish and a few of them die, you ask what’s wrong with the fish. But when the pond full of fish dies, we ask what’s wrong with the pond.’ In Wis­con­sin, it’s time we talked about what’s wrong with the pond.”
    • Riots in John Piper’s Neigh­bor­hood (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Piper’s peo­ple moved in with­out a mas­ter plan, which was both con­fus­ing (‘What should we do?’) and exact­ly what When Help­ing Hurts authors would lat­er advise (start with build­ing rela­tion­ships, watch­ing, and learn­ing). Every­one end­ed up doing some­thing dif­fer­ent. But for decades, they’ve kept at it, work­ing through dis­ap­point­ments and chal­lenges, loot­ing and riots, bro­ken glass and home­less tent cities in the parks. They’re still doing it.” This is an out­stand­ing sto­ry.
    • Feel Good or Do Good (George Yancey, Patheos): “To gain the sup­port of real con­vic­tion we need the type of con­ver­sa­tions where we lis­ten to oth­ers as much as dis­cuss our point of view with them. We con­nect with oth­ers and get at the core of why they dis­agree with us. We under­stand their argu­ments and con­sid­er how to deal with the issues they bring up. We admit the valid­i­ty of those issues even if we dis­agree with them. Does this sound like any­thing that is hap­pen­ing with antiracism?” The author, who is black, is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bay­lor whom I have ref­er­enced sev­er­al times. 
    • Rule of Law Imper­iled (R. R. Reno, First Things): “The destruc­tion of prop­er­ty is not just an attack on another’s pos­ses­sions. It is a vio­la­tion of jus­tice. This is why riot­ing and loot­ing affects far more than those whose stores are burned. Cit­i­zens begin to wor­ry that they do not live in a soci­ety com­mit­ted to jus­tice. As we know from blacks who resent mis­treat­ment by the police, which is also unjust, this wor­ry can become explo­sive, even among those not per­son­al­ly affect­ed.”
    • Kyle Rit­ten­house, Pop­ulist Hero (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If I were a polling firm, I would run a nation­al poll ask­ing peo­ple who have heard of Kyle Rit­ten­house whether they think he’s a vil­lain, a hero, or don’t know. That would tell us a lot about the mood of the coun­try.”
  2. Unbe­com­ing Amer­i­can (Johann N. Neem, Hedge­hog Review): “A shared cul­ture is not a total­iz­ing one; indeed, it makes real plu­ral­ism pos­si­ble by giv­ing us some­thing larg­er to share regard­less of our many dif­fer­ences. Or so I believed. But when that shared world was rede­fined as white—and when white peo­ple, threat­ened by its loss, reclaimed it—I found myself an exile. A per­son los­ing his coun­try. I felt myself unbe­com­ing in more than one sense. On col­lege cam­pus­es, includ­ing the one where I now teach, the left impos­es new bound­aries on thought and speech in its effort to chal­lenge his­tor­i­cal bound­aries, while, in pol­i­tics, the right embraces bound­aries that we had hoped nev­er to see again.” The author, a man of Indi­an descent, is a his­to­ri­an at West­ern Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. I real­ly liked this arti­cle.
    • Fol­low-up inter­view: An Immi­grant’s Plea: “Don’t Con­vert to White­ness” (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “My biggest fear, actu­al­ly, is vio­lence. We for­get that social order is frag­ile. You don’t have to look far to see how preva­lent eth­nic or reli­gious vio­lence is around the world. If we form tribes, we will respond in hate­ful ways to each oth­er. Right­ly or wrong­ly, peo­ple will feel belea­guered. We will get angri­er and angri­er. There will be less empa­thy.” I share his con­cern. 
  3. Advice For Stu­dents In a Time of Strife (a whole pas­sel of Prince­ton pro­fes­sors, First Things): “Remem­ber, as an Amer­i­can col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent you are one of the luckiest—most privileged—people on plan­et earth. Do not fall into the trap of think­ing of your­self as a vic­tim or build­ing an iden­ti­ty for your­self around that idea. You can avoid the trap while strong­ly stand­ing up for your right to fair and equal treat­ment and bold­ly work­ing for reform where there are dou­ble stan­dards need­ing to be rec­ti­fied.” Tech­ni­cal­ly not a whole pas­sel, which con­notes a large but uncer­tain num­ber. I count 16 sig­na­to­ries!
  4. Chi­na Secret­ly Built A Vast New Infra­struc­ture To Imprison Mus­lims (Megha Rajagopalan, Ali­son Killing, and Chris­to Buschek, Buz­zfeed): “Down­load­ing What­sApp, which is banned in Chi­na, main­tain­ing ties with fam­i­ly abroad, engag­ing in prayer, and vis­it­ing a for­eign web­site are all offens­es for which Mus­lims have been sent to camps, accord­ing to pre­vi­ous­ly leaked doc­u­ments and inter­views with for­mer detainees. Because the gov­ern­ment does not con­sid­er intern­ment camps to be part of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and none of these behav­iors are crimes under Chi­nese law, no detainees have been for­mal­ly arrest­ed or charged with a crime, let alone seen a day in court.” I’ve shared sim­i­lar news this before. This arti­cle is fresh and espe­cial­ly damn­ing.
    • Part 2: What They Saw: Ex-Pris­on­ers Detail The Hor­rors Of Chi­na’s Deten­tion Camps (Buz­zfeed): “More than a dozen for­mer detainees con­firmed to Buz­zFeed News that pris­on­ers were divid­ed into three cat­e­gories, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed by uni­form col­ors. Those in blue, like Pari­da and the major­i­ty of the peo­ple inter­viewed for this arti­cle, were con­sid­ered the least threat­en­ing. Often, they were accused of minor trans­gres­sions, like down­load­ing banned apps to their phones or hav­ing trav­eled abroad. Imams, reli­gious peo­ple, and oth­ers con­sid­ered sub­ver­sive to the state were placed in the strictest group — and were usu­al­ly shack­led even inside the camp.”
    • Part 3: Blanked-Out Spots On Chi­na’s Maps Helped Us Uncov­er Xin­jiang’s Camps (Buz­zfeed): “Our break­through came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satel­lite imagery tiles load­ing in the vicin­i­ty of one of the known camps while using the Chi­nese map­ping plat­form Baidu Maps. The satel­lite imagery was old, but oth­er­wise fine when zoomed out — but at a cer­tain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp loca­tion…. We ana­lyzed the masked loca­tions by com­par­ing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the Euro­pean Space Agency’s Sen­tinel Hub, and Plan­et Labs.” This one will be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to CS peo­ple. 
  5. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez talks about trust­ing the news (Twit­ter): “…when you see a FACT that is report­ed, cit­ed, and ver­i­fied by sev­er­al rep­utable out­lets, 99.999% it’s going to be true. HOWEVER! There is a big dif­fer­ence between a fact and the STORY. And the STORY (often the head­line) that’s sur­round­ing the fact is fre­quent­ly stretched, mis­char­ac­ter­ized, or dra­ma­tized to get you to click.” She and I have a remark­ably sim­i­lar per­spec­tive on the media.
    • Relat­ed: Giv­en my time again, I would­n’t choose jour­nal­ism (Sarah Ditum, Unherd): “Being mad was impor­tant because the eco­nom­ics of this kind of con­tent required fast out­put (since time­li­ness is crit­i­cal) and high engage­ment (since this is how edi­tors, and writ­ers, mea­sure suc­cess). I write quick­ly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so peo­ple are more like­ly to share and react. Not every­thing I wrote when this was my main form of jour­nal­ism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dis­hon­esty that made me feel ashamed…” 
  6. Do Pro-Lif­ers Who Reject Trump Have ‘Blood on their Hands’? (David French, The DIs­patch): “Decades of data and decades of legal, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al devel­op­ments have com­bined to teach us a few, sim­ple real­i­ties about abor­tion in the Unit­ed States: 1. Pres­i­dents have been irrel­e­vant to the abor­tion rate; 2. Judges have been forces of sta­bil­i­ty, not change, in abor­tion law; 3. State leg­is­la­tures have had more influ­ence on abor­tion than Con­gress; 4. Even if Roe is over­turned, abor­tion will be most­ly unchanged in the U.S.; and 5. The pro-life move­ment has an enor­mous cul­tur­al advan­tage.“ Chock-full of insights. Despite the title, it is less about par­ti­san pol­i­tics and more about abor­tion in Amer­i­ca.

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 Facts Are Not Self‐Interpreting (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 184.

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 255

Again, the stand­alone stuff is up top and the cur­rent news items are towards the end.

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. Why Ditch­ing Insta­gram Earned me the Podi­um (Madi­son Fis­ch­er, per­son­al blog): “I cared so much about what every­one thought of me that it became out­sourced con­fi­dence…. Pride in my accom­plish­ments made me con­tent, and con­tent­ed­ness is poi­son to a young ath­lete who has to stay hun­gry if she wants to stay com­pet­i­tive.”
  2. The Finan­cial Fin­ish Line (Christi­na Dar­nell, Min­istry Watch): “Giv­ing has always been anoth­er bedrock prin­ci­ple for the Barn­harts. The com­pa­ny com­mit­ted to giv­ing half of their prof­its to min­istry. The oth­er half goes to grow­ing the busi­ness. The first year, they gave away $50,000. The next year, it was $150,000. It grew to $1 mil­lion a year—then $1 mil­lion a month.” An inspir­ing sto­ry.
  3. On Cul­tures That Build (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “In the 21st cen­tu­ry, the main ques­tion in Amer­i­can social life is not ‘how do we make that hap­pen?’ but ‘how do we get man­age­ment to take our side?’ This is a learned response, and a cul­ture which has inter­nal­ized it will not be a cul­ture that ‘builds.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Amer­i­ca’s Insti­tu­tions Are Fail­ing (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “What­ev­er the true cause for our fail­ure, when I look at the twin cat­a­stro­phes of this annus hor­ri­bilis, the plague and the police protests, what strikes me is that America’s safe­keep­ing insti­tu­tions have for­got­ten how to prop­er­ly see the threats of the 21st cen­tu­ry and move quick­ly to respond to them. Those who deny his­to­ry may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed.”
  4. Is There a Reli­gious Left? (Casey Cep, New York­er): “The daugh­ter of a Bap­tist preach­er who was once the dean of the Howard Uni­ver­si­ty School of Divin­i­ty, New­some came by her faith and her preach­ing hon­est­ly, yet almost all of the pub­lic­i­ty that fol­lowed her act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence [tak­ing down the Con­fed­er­ate flag] stripped her protest of its the­o­log­i­cal tenor. Such is the fate of much of the activism of the so-called reli­gious left: if it is suc­cess­ful, it is sub­sumed by broad­er caus­es and coali­tions; if it fails, it is for­got­ten.” 
  5. Race in Amer­i­ca
    • Most US Pas­tors Speak Out in Response to George Floy­d’s Death (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Near­ly all US pas­tors (94%) agree that ‘the church has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to denounce racism,’ and most (62%) say their church has made a state­ment on the unrest stem­ming from the May 25 death of George Floyd, accord­ing to a Bar­na Church Pulse Poll released today. The poll, con­duct­ed over the past week, also found that 76 per­cent of pas­tors say the church should sup­port peace­ful protests occur­ring in response to Floyd’s killing.”
    • What the Bible Has to Say About Black Anger (Esau McCauley, New York Times): “Jesus expe­ri­enced the real­i­ty of state-spon­sored ter­ror. That is why the black Chris­t­ian has always felt a par­tic­u­lar kin­ship with this cru­ci­fied king from an oppressed eth­nic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynch­ing tree.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton. 
    • On the Unjust Death of George Floyd and Racism in Amer­i­ca (Mar­co Rubio, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Like before, the lat­est unrest has giv­en rise to voic­es argu­ing that the foun­da­tions of our repub­lic are built on sys­temic racism and must there­fore be brought down. The only dif­fer­ence is that this time claims like these don’t just come from the fringes of our pol­i­tics. Like before, we also have voic­es who say that today race is a fac­tor only in indi­vid­ual cas­es, dis­tinct from our soci­ety at large. Both of these views are wrong.” This was a speech giv­en on the floor of the Sen­ate.
    • Racist Police Vio­lence Recon­sid­ered (John McWhort­er, Quil­lette): “…these fig­ures are not nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dence of police racism. Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post‘s data­base, over 95 per­cent of the peo­ple fatal­ly shot by police offi­cers in 2019 were male, and no seri­ous-mind­ed per­son argues that this is evi­dence of sys­temic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the dis­pro­por­tion­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of black men among those killed by cops?” McWhort­er is a pro­fes­sor of lin­guis­tics at Colum­bia. 
    • Sto­ries and Data (Cole­man Hugh­es, City Jour­nal): “…the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it.” The author is a fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute.
    • A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Polic­ing (Felipe Goncalves & Steven Mel­lo, SSRN): “Using a bunch­ing esti­ma­tion design and data from the Flori­da High­way Patrol, we show that minori­ties are less like­ly to receive a dis­count on their speed­ing tick­ets than white dri­vers. Dis­ag­gre­gat­ing this dif­fer­ence to the indi­vid­ual police offi­cer, we find that 40% of offi­cers explain all of the aggre­gate dis­crim­i­na­tion.” 40% is HUGE!
    • Why I Stopped Talk­ing About Racial Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and Start­ed Talk­ing About White Suprema­cy (Erna Kim Hack­ett, Inher­i­tance Mag­a­zine): “The term white suprema­cy labels the prob­lem more accu­rate­ly. It locates the prob­lem on white­ness and its sys­tems. It focus­es on out­comes, not inten­tions. It is col­lec­tive, not indi­vid­ual. It makes white­ness uncom­fort­able and respon­si­ble. And that is impor­tant.” Shared with me by a stu­dent.
  6. On Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism:
    • The Amer­i­can Sovi­et Men­tal­i­ty (Izabel­la Tabarovsky, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The mobs that per­form the unan­i­mous con­dem­na­tion rit­u­als of today do not fol­low orders from above. But that does not dimin­ish their pow­er to exert pres­sure on those under their influ­ence. Those of us who came out of the col­lec­tivist Sovi­et cul­ture under­stand these dynam­ics instinc­tive­ly.” The author is a schol­ar with the Wil­son Cen­ter.
    • Is There Still Room for Debate? (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “Lib­er­al­ism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spir­it to it. A spir­it that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ide­ol­o­gy — friend­ship, art, love, sex, schol­ar­ship, fam­i­ly. A spir­it that seeks not to impose ortho­doxy but to open up the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the human mind and soul.”
    • The Amer­i­can Press Is Destroy­ing Itself (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “It isn’t the whole sto­ry, but it’s demon­stra­bly true that vio­lence, arson, and riot­ing are occur­ring. How­ev­er, because it is polit­i­cal­ly unten­able to dis­cuss this in ways that do not sug­gest sup­port, reporters have been twist­ing them­selves into knots. We are see­ing head­lines pre­vi­ous­ly imag­in­able only in The Onion, e.g., ‘27 police offi­cers injured dur­ing large­ly peace­ful anti-racism protests in Lon­don.’”
    • The woke rev­o­lu­tion in Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism has begun (Damon Link­er, The Week): “In place of dif­fi­cul­ty, com­plex­i­ty, and com­pli­ca­tion, today’s jour­nal­is­tic rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies crave tidy moral lessons with clear vil­lains and heroes. They cham­pi­on sim­plic­i­ty, embrace moral uplift, and seek out evil­do­ers to demo­nize.” See also his ear­li­er col­umn Don’t will­ful­ly ignore the com­plex­i­ty of what’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 254

The less time­ly stuff is up top this time and there are a lot of mag­ic videos at the bot­tom.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Unites Most Grad­u­ates of Selec­tive Col­leges? An Intact Fam­i­ly (Nicholas Zill & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “… even after con­trol­ling for par­ent edu­ca­tion, fam­i­ly income, and stu­dent race and eth­nic­i­ty, being raised by one’s mar­ried birth par­ents pro­vides an addi­tion­al boost to one’s chances of get­ting through Prince­ton.”
  2. What Chris­tians Must Remem­ber about Nuclear Weapons and Arms Con­trol (Peter Feaver & William Inbo­den & Michael Singh, Prov­i­dence): “Before embrac­ing calls for the abo­li­tion of nuclear weapons, thought­ful Chris­tians must con­front two uncom­fort­able facts. First, we live in a fall­en world in which the threats we face are chang­ing, and arguably grow­ing. Sec­ond, the enve­lope of peace and secu­ri­ty in which free soci­eties have thrived for the past eight decades is not self-sustaining—one need only view the recent decline of democ­ra­cies and rise of author­i­tar­i­an threats from Rus­sia and Chi­na. One can detest nuclear weapons and still see their strate­gic val­ue.” The authors are, respec­tive­ly, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Duke, a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at UT Austin, and a senior fel­low at a think­tank.
  3. Peer Review (Rod­ney Brooks, per­son­al blog): “I came to real­ize that the editor’s job was real, and it required me to deeply under­stand the top­ic of the paper, and the bias­es of the review­ers, and not to treat the ref­er­ees as hav­ing the right to deter­mine the fate of the paper them­selves. As an edi­tor I had to add judge­ment to the process at many steps along the way, and to strive for the process to improve the papers, but also to let in ideas that were new.” The author is a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of robot­ics at MIT.
  4. JK Rowl­ing Writes about Her Rea­sons for Speak­ing out on Sex and Gen­der Issues (JK Rowl­ing, per­son­al blog): “…I refuse to bow down to a move­ment that I believe is doing demon­stra­ble harm in seek­ing to erode ‘woman’ as a polit­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal class and offer­ing cov­er to preda­tors like few before it.”
  5. More on the NY Times tan­gle last week and what it reveals about our soci­ety
    • Amer­i­ca is chang­ing, and so is the media (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The news media likes to pre­tend that it sim­ply holds up a mir­ror to Amer­i­ca as it is. We don’t want to be seen as actors craft­ing the polit­i­cal debate, agents who make deci­sions that shape the bound­aries of the nation­al dis­course. We are, of course. We always have been.”
    • The Still-Vital Case for Lib­er­al­ism in a Rad­i­cal Age (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “…it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing author­i­tar­i­an racism is far more impor­tant to the con­clu­sion that left-wing illib­er­al­ism is com­plete­ly unim­por­tant. One can oppose dif­fer­ent evils, even those evils aligned against each oth­er, with­out assign­ing them equal weight.”
    • Why every­one hates the main­stream media (Andrew Pot­ter, Pol­i­cy for Pan­demics): “It’s not a coin­ci­dence that lawyers, jour­nal­ists, and politi­cians are rou­tine­ly ranked as the most dis­liked pro­fes­sions in the world. It’s because the law is not about jus­tice, pol­i­tics is not about democ­ra­cy, and the news is not about infor­ma­tion. But in each case, that is what emerges, by har­ness­ing the sta­tus-con­scious com­pet­i­tive natures of the par­tic­i­pants.” The author is a for­mer jour­nal­ist and edi­tor.
  6. Thoughts on race and racism:
    • George Floyd and Me (Shai Linn, Gospel Coali­tion): “Though I’m deeply griev­ed, I am not with­out hope. Per­son­al­ly, I have lit­tle con­fi­dence in our gov­ern­ment or pol­i­cy­mak­ers to change the sys­temic fac­tors that con­tributed to the George Floyd sit­u­a­tion. But my hope isn’t in the gov­ern­ment. My hope is in the Lord.”
    • Amer­i­can Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go (David French, The Dis­patch): “If polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect pro­gres­sives are often guilty of over-racial­iz­ing Amer­i­can pub­lic dis­course, and they are, polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect con­ser­v­a­tives com­mit the oppo­site sin—and they fil­ter out or angri­ly reject all the infor­ma­tion that con­tra­dicts their the­sis.”
    • This moment cries out for us to con­front race in Amer­i­ca (Con­doleez­za Rice, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Still, we sim­ply must acknowl­edge that soci­ety is not col­or-blind and prob­a­bly nev­er will be. Progress comes when peo­ple treat one anoth­er with respect, as if we were col­or-blind. Unless and until we are hon­est that race is still an anchor around our country’s neck, that shad­ow will nev­er be lift­ed. Our coun­try has a birth defect: Africans and Euro­peans came to this coun­try togeth­er — but one group was in chains.” She is, of course, a fel­low believ­er and also a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who will soon be the direc­tor of the Hoover Insti­tu­tion. 
    • Our Present Moment: Why Is It So Hard? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I’m think­ing more broad­ly about why race in this coun­try is so dif­fi­cult, and in par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cult even between peo­ple of good will, between peo­ple in your church of a dif­fer­ent col­or. I’m think­ing about peo­ple who agree on so many oth­er things. And you sing the same songs and you real­ly love Jesus togeth­er. And you read the same Bible, and you real­ly are togeth­er for the gospel. So why is it so divi­sive?” Some real­ly good thoughts in here.
  7. On the protests
    • The protests start­ed out look­ing like 1968. They turned into 1964. (Omar Wasow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al move­ment try­ing to draw atten­tion to the long his­to­ry of racist and bru­tal polic­ing, non­vi­o­lence in the face of police repres­sion is an exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult strat­e­gy to sus­tain. Evi­dence from the 1960s, how­ev­er — and per­haps this month, too — sug­gests using such tac­tics to gen­er­ate media cov­er­age of a press­ing social prob­lem can be a pow­er­ful tool for build­ing a coali­tion for social change.”
    • We often accuse the right of dis­tort­ing sci­ence. But the left changed the coro­n­avirus nar­ra­tive overnight (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, The Guardian): “Two weeks ago we shamed peo­ple for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.”
    • Trib­al­ism Comes for Pan­dem­ic Sci­ence (Yuval Levin, The New Atlantis): “These pub­lic health pro­fes­sion­als are sim­ply admit­ting that their views on the health risks of large gath­er­ings depend on the polit­i­cal valence of those gath­er­ings. Rather than com­part­men­tal­ize their pro­fes­sion­al judg­ment from their polit­i­cal pri­or­i­ties — explain­ing the risks of large protests regard­less of their polit­i­cal con­tent and then sep­a­rate­ly and in a dif­fer­ent con­text express­ing what­ev­er views they might have about that con­tent — they open­ly deny not only the pos­si­bil­i­ty but even the desir­abil­i­ty of detached pro­fes­sion­al advice. This kind of atti­tude inevitably makes it much hard­er for the pub­lic to assess sci­en­tif­ic claims about the pan­dem­ic through any­thing oth­er than a polit­i­cal lens.”
    • The Grow­ing CHAZm in Seat­tle (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It took activists less than 24 hours to dis­cov­er that even their make-believe Duchy of Grand Fen­woke relies on the basic build­ing blocks of any poli­ty. If Seattle’s supine and sausage-spined polit­i­cal lead­er­ship allows this exper­i­ment to con­tin­ue, pret­ty soon you can expect the emer­gence of cur­ren­cy, tax­es, even some kind of char­ter or con­sti­tu­tion. It wouldn’t shock me if they end­ed up cre­at­ing rudi­men­ta­ry courts or even a jail.” Gold­berg is an expert at the mean­der­ing rant. 
    • Anar­chy In Seat­tle (Christo­pher Rufo, City Jour­nal): “The Capi­tol Hill Autonomous Zone has set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent: armed left-wing activists have assert­ed their dom­i­nance of the streets and estab­lished an alter­na­tive polit­i­cal author­i­ty over a large sec­tion of a neigh­bor­hood. They have claimed de fac­to police pow­er over thou­sands of res­i­dents and dozens of businesses—completely out­side of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process. In a mat­ter of days, Antifa-affil­i­at­ed para­mil­i­taries have cre­at­ed a hard­ened bor­der, estab­lished a rudi­men­ta­ry form of gov­ern­ment based on prin­ci­ples of inter­sec­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and forcibly removed unfriend­ly media from the ter­ri­to­ry.”
    • A Dark Cloud For Democ­ra­cy (Carl True­man, First Things): “…this does not entire­ly explain why Min­neapo­lis and not Hong Kong has grabbed the imag­i­na­tion of British youth. After all, Hong Kong is a much more recent part of the British nar­ra­tive; one can watch the dis­man­tling of Hong Kong’s con­sti­tu­tion online and on the tele­vi­sion; and an extreme­ly good case can be made that the British gov­ern­ment is more respon­si­ble for that mess and its poten­tial ame­lio­ra­tion than for the chaos in the Min­neapo­lis police depart­ment. After all, the British can actu­al­ly do some­thing about it—as Boris Johnson’s pledge on immi­gra­tion to the U.K. from Hong Kong indi­cates. So why Min­neapo­lis, not Hong Kong?”
    • If we want bet­ter polic­ing, we’re going to have to spend more, not less (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Reform is thus more like­ly to stick if we co-opt the unions rather than try­ing to break them. Instead of ‘defund the police,’ what if we offloaded the non­ju­di­cial parts of their work, like deal­ing with the home­less and the men­tal­ly ill, to social work­ers, and then ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’ to reform the polic­ing part? We could offer a sig­nif­i­cant salary boost in exchange for accept­ing stricter stan­dards and over­sight, which wouldn’t just ease the polit­i­cal obsta­cles, but pos­si­bly attract high­er-qual­i­ty can­di­dates to the police force.”
    • Most Amer­i­cans Want Police Reform But Don’t Back ‘Defund The Police’ (Ariel Edwards-Levy and Kevin Robil­lard, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “A near-uni­ver­sal major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans sup­port at least some changes to polic­ing in the Unit­ed States fol­low­ing the death of George Floyd in the cus­tody of Min­neapo­lis police, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. There is major­i­ty sup­port for pro­pos­als cir­cu­lat­ing in Con­gress to ban choke­holds and make it eas­i­er to track and charge offi­cers accused of mis­con­duct. But the idea of ‘defund­ing the police’ has lit­tle sup­port from the pub­lic.”
    • Police Bru­tal­i­ty: The Fer­gu­son Effect (Robert Ver­bruggen, Nation­al Review): “There’s a temp­ta­tion in some quar­ters to think this issue is like gay mar­riage or mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion, where there’s a turn­ing point in pub­lic opin­ion and a rapid shift in pol­i­cy and then every­one won­ders what the big deal ever was. See, for exam­ple, Tim Alberta’s piece in Politi­co today, which bizarrely claims we may be see­ing the ‘last stand’ of law-and-order Repub­li­cans and draws those two par­al­lels explic­it­ly. But crime isn’t like that. When the streets become unsafe, pub­lic opin­ion shifts back in favor of the folks who stand between the inno­cents and the bad guys.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Prob­lem with Dull Knives: What’s the Defense Depart­ment got to do with Code for Amer­i­ca? (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Medi­um): “I have a dis­tinct mem­o­ry of being a kid in the kitchen with my mom, awk­ward­ly and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous­ly wield­ing a knife, try­ing to cut some tough veg­etable, and defend­ing my actions by say­ing the knife was dull any­way. My mom stopped me and said firm­ly, ‘Jen­ny, a dull knife is much more dan­ger­ous than a sharp knife. You’re strug­gling and using much more force than you should, and that knife is going to end up God Knows Where.’ She was right, of course…. But hav­ing poor tools [for the mil­i­tary] doesn’t make us fight less; it makes us fight bad­ly.” (some empha­sis in the orig­i­nal removed). High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 155.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 253

Spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions for police reform, var­i­ous explain­ers and opin­ion pieces, and some weird news about Tik­Tok and Chris­tian­i­ty.

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. On the racial divi­sion in Amer­i­ca:
    • How to Make this Moment the Turn­ing Point for Real Change (Barack Oba­ma, Medi­um): “Final­ly, the more spe­cif­ic we can make demands for crim­i­nal jus­tice and police reform, the hard­er it will be for elect­ed offi­cials to just offer lip ser­vice to the cause and then fall back into busi­ness as usu­al once protests have gone away. The con­tent of that reform agen­da will be dif­fer­ent for var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Some spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: “For those who are inter­est­ed in research-based solu­tions to stop police vio­lence, here’s what you need to know — based on the facts and data. A thread. (1/x)” (Samuel Sinyang­we, Twit­ter)
    • More spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: How to Actu­al­ly Fix Amer­i­ca’s Police (Seth W. Stoughton, Jef­frey J. Noble & Geof­frey P. Alpert, The Atlantic): “‘Over­crim­i­nal­iza­tion’ has been broad­ly dis­cussed; there are so many laws that vio­la­tions are ubiq­ui­tous. If every­one is a crim­i­nal, offi­cers have almost unfet­tered dis­cre­tion to pick and choose which laws to enforce and whom to stop, frisk, search, or arrest.” The authors have an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of exper­tise (a law prof, a crim­i­nol­o­gy prof, and a for­mer offi­cer).
    • I Must Object: A Rebut­tal to Brown Univ.’s Let­ter Decry­ing Per­va­sive Racism in US (Glenn C. Loury, City Jour­nal): “I deeply resent­ed the let­ter. First of all, what makes an admin­is­tra­tor (even a high­ly paid one, with an exalt­ed title) a ‘leader’ of this uni­ver­si­ty? We, the fac­ul­ty, are the only ‘lead­ers’ wor­thy of men­tion when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-push­ing appa­ratchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unset­tling. Why must this university’s senior admin­is­tra­tion declare, on behalf of the insti­tu­tion as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any sub­tle dif­fer­ences of empha­sis or nuance—interpret con­tentious cur­rent events through a sin­gle lens?” Loury, who is black, is an econ pro­fes­sor at Brown. He did not come to play.
    • Efrem Smith: White Evan­gel­i­cals Need to Hum­ble Them­selves (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve been encour­aged, espe­cial­ly in the evan­gel­i­cal wing of the church, to see more pas­tors speak­ing out, being bro­ken­heart­ed, call­ing for change. But then there’s also a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of evan­gel­i­cal­ism that is either silent or late to the par­ty when it comes to the church call­ing for jus­tice.”
    • A Nation on Fire Needs the Flames of the Spir­it (Esau McCaul­ley, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There is no oth­er world in which to talk about Jesus than a world in which black men can have their necks stepped on for nine min­utes.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a pro­fes­sor of New Tes­ta­ment at Wheaton. 
    • Don’t under­stand the protests? What you’re see­ing is peo­ple pushed to the edge (Kareem Abdul-Jab­bar, LA Times): “…even though we do all the con­ven­tion­al things to raise pub­lic and polit­i­cal aware­ness — write artic­u­late and insight­ful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the con­tin­ued dev­as­ta­tion on CNN, sup­port can­di­dates who promise change — the nee­dle hard­ly budges.”
    • On Days of Dis­or­der (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Notice that this schema is val­ue neu­tral: it describes both the foot­ball hooli­gan and the race riot­er, 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian pogroms and 21st cen­tu­ry Hong Kong street bat­tles. In all of these a cer­tain per­cent­age of the par­tic­i­pants plays the game for fair­ly mun­dane rea­sons: to rev­el in excite­ment or ter­ror, lose them­selves in a rare sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty, belong­ing, or pow­er, or to sim­ply gain the mon­e­tary rewards that come with theft and loot­ing. The pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion will­ing to join a riot to attain these things like­ly reflects the pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion oth­er­wise cut off from them in nor­mal times. Few riot­ers are mar­ried men who must be at work at 8:00 AM the next morn­ing.” This was quite good. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Sim­plic­i­ty Is The Ene­my & Bad Apples (Jonathan Last, The Bul­wark): “What’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now is large and com­pli­cat­ed. We have a series of prob­lems, some of which over­lap, some of which do not. And attempts to solve them have, his­tor­i­cal­ly, been stymied by con­flat­ing them and believ­ing that they are sim­ple and con­nect­ed.”
  2. On the pan­dem­ic:
    • The Trea­son of Epi­demi­ol­o­gists (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “The sim­ple fact is that what­ev­er leg­is­la­tion we’re going to get, we’d still get if the protests stopped this morn­ing. In fact, a rea­son­able per­son would con­clude we’d be more like­ly to get it if they stopped now, because the more these things go on, the more oppo­si­tion and resent­ment will grow.” 
    • Relat­ed: “A thread about how protest­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic was described when con­ser­v­a­tives were doing it” (Matt Walsh, Twit­ter)
    • Sur­gi­sphere: gov­ern­ments and WHO changed Covid-19 pol­i­cy based on sus­pect data from tiny US com­pa­ny (Melis­sa Dav­ey, Stephanie Kirch­gaess­ner & Sarah Bose­ley, The Guardian): “The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion and a num­ber of nation­al gov­ern­ments have changed their Covid-19 poli­cies and treat­ments on the basis of flawed data from a lit­tle-known US health­care ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny, also call­ing into ques­tion the integri­ty of key stud­ies pub­lished in some of the world’s most pres­ti­gious med­ical jour­nals. A Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion can reveal the US-based com­pa­ny Sur­gi­sphere, whose hand­ful of employ­ees appear to include a sci­ence fic­tion writer and an adult-con­tent mod­el, has pro­vid­ed data for mul­ti­ple stud­ies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief exec­u­tive, but has so far failed to ade­quate­ly explain its data or method­ol­o­gy.” This is actu­al­ly nuts.
    • The C.D.C. Wait­ed ‘Its Entire Exis­tence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong? (Eric Lip­ton, Abby Good­nough, Michael D. Shear, Megan Twohey, Apoor­va Mandavilli,Sheri Fink & Mark Walk­er, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. is risk-averse, per­fec­tion­ist and ill suit­ed to impro­vis­ing in a quick­ly evolv­ing cri­sis — par­tic­u­lar­ly one that shuts down the coun­try and par­a­lyzes the econ­o­my.”
  3. The Muse­um of the Bible is win­ning over some of its biggest crit­ics: Jew­ish schol­ars (Men­achem Weck­er, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mintz believes Jew­ish schol­ars who denounced evan­gel­i­cal tones in the muse­um may have done so because they don’t see eye-to-eye with its polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive own­ers. But, she notes, the muse­um itself caters to Jews. She cites a time when it arranged kosher food for an event in which her hus­band, an Ortho­dox rab­bi, par­tic­i­pat­ed. ‘They were just nice about it,’ she says.”
  4. Chris­t­ian Tik­Tok videos are cen­sored and delet­ed in the US, cre­ators say (Liza Van­den­boom, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Chris­t­ian con­tent is often cen­sored and removed from Tik­Tok, accord­ing to sev­er­al cre­ators on the plat­form. The Chi­na-based social media app hosts short, snip­py videos rang­ing from inspi­ra­tional mini-speech­es to musi­cal and dance per­for­mances and is pop­u­lar with teenagers and young adults. The plat­form reports over 800 mil­lion active users, with 30 mil­lion active users in the U.S. Researchers have grown con­cerned over the app’s reach and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of it bring­ing Chi­nese-style cen­sor­ship to main­stream U.S. audi­ences.” 
  5. Tech­noc­ra­cy Is Impos­si­ble (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Lead­ers should pay atten­tion to sci­en­tists, dra­mat­i­cal­ly more than the cur­rent Pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion does, but an immu­nol­o­gist will say one thing, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent, an econ­o­mist some­thing alto­geth­er oth­er. The var­i­ous sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines will not speak with a sin­gle voice, indeed will not speak at all: indi­vid­ual schol­ars will speak, and what they say will arise from a com­bi­na­tion of their schol­ar­ly exper­tise and their beliefs (derived from non-sci­en­tif­ic sources) about what mat­ters most in life, and a good polit­i­cal leader will have the gen­er­al intel­li­gence and moral dis­cern­ment to sift the var­i­ous mes­sages he or she receives and make a deci­sion based on all the rel­e­vant input.”
  6. There was a fight at the New York Times this week. I’m not actu­al­ly that inter­est­ed in the op-ed that pro­voked it, but I am quite inter­est­ed in how the fight is play­ing out. The New York Times occu­pies a spe­cial place in the Amer­i­can media ecosys­tem and fights like this illu­mi­nate some of what is hap­pen­ing beneath the sur­face.
    • New York Times Jour­nal­ists Scared To Have an Op-Ed Page (Matt Welch, Rea­son): “This pub­lish­ing flap, which in com­par­a­tive impor­tance is a sput­ter­ing match next to the hell-infer­no of spring 2020, is nonethe­less sym­bol­ic of a shift bear­ing more tec­ton­ic heft. Our lib­er­al insti­tu­tions, not unlike our con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als, are nois­i­ly aban­don­ing lib­er­al­ism.”
    • The Inside Sto­ry of the Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “This process, with back and forth over phone, email, and text, extend­ed through the morn­ing and after­noon on Wednes­day. Cot­ton and his team then signed off on the final ver­sion around 2:30 p.m. It was post­ed short­ly after. Then, all hell broke loose.”
    • A Twit­ter thread from NY Times opin­ion colum­nist Bari Weiss: “The civ­il war inside The New York Times between the (most­ly young) wokes the (most­ly 40+) lib­er­als is the same one rag­ing inside oth­er pub­li­ca­tions and com­pa­nies across the coun­try. The dynam­ic is always the same. (Thread.)”
    • ‘New York Times’ Staffers Grill Lead­er­ship Over Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed Dur­ing All-Hands (Lau­ra Wag­n­er, Vice): “…the most infor­ma­tive parts of the meet­ing came from the lengthy ques­tion-and-answer por­tion. Staffers asked for an autop­sy of the piece and how it was pub­lished; if com­pa­ny lead­ers were plan­ning to address James Bennet’s lead­er­ship of the opin­ion sec­tion, which has had ‘sev­er­al mis­fires’; whether Opin­ion staff edi­tor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘open­ly bad mouth[ing] younger news col­leagues on a plat­form where they, because of strict com­pa­ny pol­i­cy, could not defend them­selves’; whether the opin­ion sec­tion had sug­gest­ed the top­ic of the op-ed to Cot­ton; and what the Times would do to help retain and sup­port Black employ­ees.”
    • After staff uproar, New York Times says Sen. Tom Cot­ton op-ed urg­ing mil­i­tary incur­sion into U.S. cities ‘did not meet our stan­dards’ (Ela­he Iza­di, Paul Farhi and Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Because of its promi­nence, the Times’s op-ed page and colum­nists often gen­er­ate con­tro­ver­sy, though rarely from with­in the news­pa­per itself. There was wide­spread crit­i­cism in Feb­ru­ary, for exam­ple, when the Times pub­lished an op-ed from a mem­ber of Afghanistan’s Tal­iban, par­tic­u­lar­ly because the paper failed to iden­ti­fy the author’s his­to­ry of involve­ment in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties. There was lit­tle inter­nal oppo­si­tion to the col­umn, how­ev­er, at least none that spilled into pub­lic view.”
    • New York Times has stopped defend­ing its Tom Cot­ton op-ed (Erik Wem­ple, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As Jack Shafer has not­ed, the Times opin­ion page exists to pro­voke. It has run op-eds by Moam­mar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin and oth­ers. In a Decem­ber 2017 staff meet­ing, Ben­net addressed the dif­fi­cul­ties of judg­ing when a piece goes too far: ‘We’ve pub­lished Vladimir Putin,’ Ben­net said in the meet­ing. ‘Should we not allow Vladimir Putin into our pages? It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say that that would be doing a ser­vice to our read­ers. But as you can see, I mean, I strug­gle to artic­u­late what those bound­aries are.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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 250

Prob­a­bly my favorite arti­cle in this bunch is the epi­demi­o­log­i­cal analy­sis of the sev­en dead­ly sins. What a genius idea.

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.

Also, this is the 250th of these week­ly roundups I have pub­lished. Even though last week was num­ber 249, I was still sur­prised to type in 250 this week. Some­day I’ll remem­ber a spe­cial num­ber is com­ing up and do some­thing dif­fer­ent for it. But not this day.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Are the Wages of Sin Real­ly Death?: Moral and Epi­demi­o­log­ic Obser­va­tions (David Lyle Jef­frey and Jeff Levin, Chris­t­ian Scholar’s Review): “So, are the wages of sin real­ly death? As far as pop­u­la­tion-health research sug­gests, the answer is a guard­ed yes.” The authors are pro­fes­sors at Bay­lor, one of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and the oth­er of lit­er­a­ture. 
  2. Kids’ TV has a porn prob­lem (Brazy­Day, Medi­um): “In a very real way, the ‘hyper­sex­u­al and tox­ic’ cul­ture that has sprung up around children’s TV car­toons is of com­pa­nies’ own mak­ing. They active­ly allow it to hap­pen sim­ply by doing noth­ing — cre­at­ing a law­less vac­u­um where any­thing goes and porn coex­ists with harm­less fan cre­ations.” This arti­cle was much bet­ter than I expect­ed it to be. 
  3. How We Got the Bible (Dirk Jongkind,Desiring God): “…by under­stand­ing what God had done over the ages, we will see that it is rea­son­able and jus­ti­fied to trust that the Bible in our hands is a trans­la­tion of the trust­wor­thy words of Scrip­ture.” The author is a research fel­low in New Tes­ta­ment text and lan­guage at Tyn­dale House, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. 
  4. The real Lord of the Flies: what hap­pened when six boys were ship­wrecked for 15 months (The Guardian): “The kids agreed to work in teams of two, draw­ing up a strict ros­ter for gar­den, kitchen and guard duty. Some­times they quar­relled, but when­ev­er that hap­pened they solved it by impos­ing a time-out. Their days began and end­ed with song and prayer. Kolo fash­ioned a makeshift gui­tar from a piece of drift­wood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires sal­vaged from their wrecked boat – an instru­ment Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spir­its.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing Twit­ter thread in response by Tan­ner Greer: “Lord of the Flies is one of those nov­els that peo­ple remem­ber wrong. Peo­ple remem­ber its cen­tral theme as ‘take away civ­i­liza­tion, and we all turn into Hobbe­sian lit­tle mon­sters.’ But if you read the book as an adult, instead of an 8th grad­er speed­ing through, you find a dif­fer­ent mean­ing.”
  5. Should Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives Aspire to Noto­ri­ety? (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You don’t go look­ing for pow­er and pres­tige. You aspire to be faith­ful. If pres­tige finds you, then you allow your­self to be extrud­ed into it and pray that God pro­tect you from the spir­i­tu­al dan­gers.” This is essay is part of a swarm of inter­net arti­cles about the tra­jec­to­ry of the mag­a­zine First Things, but you don’t have to read any­thing else about that (or even care much about that) to find this essay worth­while. 
  6. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • “Our reg­u­la­to­ry state is fail­ing us” Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “When the CDC pooh-poohed masks ear­ly on, or botched their test­ing kit there­by delay­ing U.S. test­ing by weeks or maybe months, did the per­ma­nent staff of the CDC rise up and rebel and leak howl­ing protests to the media, real­iz­ing that thou­sands of lives were at stake? That is sure­ly what would hap­pen if say the cur­rent FDA announced it was going to approve thalido­mide.” This is a link to a search result on his blog, keep scrolling after you fin­ish the main arti­cle to see sev­er­al exam­ples of what he is describ­ing. 
    • Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic: A Plea for Gen­eros­i­ty (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “There is a good rea­son to hes­i­tate to judge, name­ly our igno­rance. Plagues are a time for scape­goats and blame-shift­ing pre­cise­ly because they deal out suf­fer­ing such a seem­ing­ly unjust and ran­dom fash­ion. Our lead­ers say they will fol­low the sci­ence, but they can’t, real­ly. With a hereto­fore-unseen virus such as this one, the sci­ence is more like inher­it­ed wis­dom and intu­ition from pre­vi­ous, sim­i­lar mal­adies, at least at the start. What fol­lows is a con­fused rush to catch up through tri­al and error.“
    • The Risks — Know Them — Avoid Them (Erin Bro­mage, per­son­al blog): “I reg­u­lar­ly hear peo­ple wor­ry­ing about gro­cery stores, bike rides, incon­sid­er­ate run­ners who are not wear­ing masks.… are these places of con­cern? Well, not real­ly. Let me explain.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at U Mass who teach­es cours­es on immunol­o­gy and infec­tious dis­ease. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. 
    • No, the super­spread­er choir in Wash­ing­ton does­n’t prove church is dan­ger­ous (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “It’s hard to blame the choir for not tak­ing more pre­cau­tions, as this was March 10, before stuff real­ly hit the fan (and when our gov­ern­ment was still telling peo­ple NOT to wear masks).”
      • This op-ed is based on a CDC inves­ti­ga­tion: “The March 10 choir rehearsal last­ed from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. Sev­er­al mem­bers arrived ear­ly to set up chairs in a large mul­ti­pur­pose room. Chairs were arranged in six rows of 20 chairs each, spaced 6–10 inch­es apart with a cen­ter aisle divid­ing left and right stages.”
    • Lock­down is over. Some­one tell the gov­ern­ment (Dominic Green, Spec­ta­tor USA): “Every soci­ety has react­ed to COVID-19 accord­ing to its prin­ci­ples or, if no prin­ci­ples were to hand, its habits. It has been America’s mis­for­tune that its prin­ci­ples and habits are ill-suit­ed to man­ag­ing an epi­dem­ic.”
    • Take the Shut­down Skep­tics Seri­ous­ly (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “The gen­er­al point is that min­i­miz­ing the num­ber of COVID-19 deaths today or a month from now or six months from now may or may not min­i­mize the human costs of the pan­dem­ic when the full spec­trum of human con­se­quences is con­sid­ered. The last glob­al depres­sion cre­at­ed con­di­tions for a cat­a­stroph­ic world war that killed rough­ly 75 to 80 mil­lion peo­ple. Is that a pos­si­bil­i­ty? The down­side risks and costs of every approach are real, fright­en­ing, and depress­ing, no mat­ter how lit­tle one thinks of reopen­ing now.”
    • Coro­n­avirus and The Myopia of Amer­i­can Excep­tion­al­ism (Brad Lit­tle­john, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Rather than prov­ing our­selves excep­tion­al, we sim­ply assume that we are. The ordi­nary rules do not apply to us, because we are Amer­i­ca. We make things bet­ter here, we run things more effi­cient­ly here, we live more hap­pi­ly here, because we are Amer­i­ca. There is no need to look at OECD rank­ings, because we already know that they are wrong if they show us any­where but #1…. this way of think­ing, far from mak­ing Amer­i­ca great, is almost cer­tain to make her the oppo­site. After all, the only way to improve is to learn, and the chief way we learn as human beings is from the exam­ples of oth­ers.”
    • The Mir­a­cle of the Inter­net (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The surge in traf­fic, on the inter­net as a whole and on AT&T’s part of the net­work, is extra­or­di­nary in a way that the phrase 20 per­cent increase doesn’t quite cap­ture. AT&T’s net­work is car­ry­ing an extra 71 petabytes of data every day. How much is 71 petabytes? One com­par­i­son: Back at the end of 2014, AT&T’s total net­work traf­fic was 56 petabytes a day; in just a few weeks, AT&T has accom­mo­dat­ed more new traf­fic every day than its total dai­ly traf­fic six years ago. (Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the AT&T net­work has been car­ry­ing about 426 petabytes a day—one petabyte is 1 mil­lion giga­bytes.)”
    • Stan­ford’s $27.7 bil­lion not enough to house stu­dents in need amid pan­dem­ic (Sheikh Sri­jon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Har­vard is allow­ing those on cam­pus with demon­strat­ed need to stay for the whole sum­mer for only $200. MIT is offer­ing free hous­ing and meals. Duke is offer­ing free hous­ing and par­tial com­pen­sa­tion for lost sum­mer earn­ings to those with sub­stan­tial finan­cial aid.… Com­pare Stanford’s pol­i­cy to these insti­tu­tions’ poli­cies. Though it has a $27.7 bil­lion dol­lar endow­ment (as of Octo­ber 2019), it is charg­ing stu­dents near­ly $6,000 for sum­mer hous­ing and meals in times of such finan­cial uncer­tain­ty.”
  7. The New York Times Sur­ren­dered to an Out­rage Mob. Jour­nal­ism Will Suf­fer For It. (Pamela Paresky, Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen And Steven Pinker, Politi­co): “…for the Times to ‘dis­ap­pear’ pas­sages of a pub­lished arti­cle into an inac­ces­si­ble mem­o­ry hole is an Orwellian act that, thanks to the newspaper’s actions, might now be seen as accept­able jour­nal­is­tic prac­tice. It is all the worse when the edi­tors’ pub­lished account of what they delet­ed is itself inac­cu­rate. This does a dis­ser­vice to read­ers, his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, who are left unable to deter­mine for them­selves what the con­tro­ver­sy was about, and to Stephens, who is left unable to defend him­self against read­ers’ worst sus­pi­cions.”

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 If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 227

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.

In case you were won­der­ing, so far I have found the impeach­ment hear­ings and the com­men­tary on them unin­ter­est­ing. Let me know if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing about them, though.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Dis­hon­esty of the Abor­tion Debate (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The argu­ment for abor­tion, if made hon­est­ly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire con­se­quences to women of mak­ing a very sim­ple med­ical pro­ce­dure ille­gal. The argu­ment against it doesn’t take even a sin­gle word. The argu­ment against it is a pic­ture…. The truth is that the best argu­ment on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowl­edge that fact, you aren’t speak­ing or even think­ing hon­est­ly about the issue. You cer­tain­ly aren’t going to con­vince any­body. Only the truth has the pow­er to move.”
    • This arti­cle has received praise from across the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum. There is an inter­est­ing Twit­ter response thread by Char­lie Camosy, a pro­fes­sor of ethics at Ford­ham. 
  2. India is try­ing to build the world’s biggest facial recog­ni­tion sys­tem (Julie Zaugg, CNN): “‘We were able to match 10,561 miss­ing chil­dren with those liv­ing in insti­tu­tions,’ he told CNN. ‘They are cur­rent­ly in the process of being reunit­ed with their fam­i­lies.’ Most of them were vic­tims of traf­fick­ing, forced to work in the fields, in gar­ment fac­to­ries or in broth­els, accord­ing to Rib­hu. This momen­tous under­tak­ing was made pos­si­ble by facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­vid­ed by New Del­hi’s police. ‘There are over 300,000 miss­ing chil­dren in India and over 100,000 liv­ing in insti­tu­tions,’ he explained. ‘We could­n’t pos­si­bly have matched them all man­u­al­ly.’”
    • That’s a real­ly won­der­ful use of the tech­nol­o­gy and it makes me very afraid, because the obvi­ous pos­i­tive uses are like­ly to pre­vent us from build­ing in ade­quate legal safe­guards against the out­landish tyran­ni­cal pow­er this tech­nol­o­gy makes pos­si­ble.
  3. Men­tal Health, Bul­ly­ing, Career Uncer­tain­ty (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “More than a third of Ph.D. stu­dents have sought help for anx­i­ety or depres­sion caused by Ph.D. study, accord­ing to results of a glob­al sur­vey of 6,300 stu­dents from Nature. Thir­ty-six per­cent is a very large share, con­sid­er­ing that many stu­dents who suf­fer don’t reach out for help. Still, the fig­ure par­al­lels those found by oth­er stud­ies on the top­ic. A 2018 study of most­ly Ph.D. stu­dents, for instance, found that 39 per­cent of respon­dents scored in the mod­er­ate-to-severe depres­sion range. That’s com­pared to 6 per­cent of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion mea­sured with the same scale.”
  4. Pete Buttigieg wants to build a bridge to the reli­gious right. But ten­sion with­in his in-laws’ fam­i­ly high­lights how dif­fi­cult that may be. (Amy B. Wang, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Three days after Christ­mas 2017, Rhyan Glez­man got a text from his youngest broth­er, Chas­ten, say­ing he was engaged to his boyfriend of 2½ years — Pete Buttigieg, may­or of South Bend, Ind. Rhyan, an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian pas­tor, texted back: ‘I love you and is the only rea­son I’m going to share this one ques­tion to you. Are you will­ing to sur­ren­der to God ‘the one who cre­at­ed you and I’ to what­ev­er he says? I love you beyond what you will ever think or know. I think the world of you and Pete, you need to know that. Have a great day broth­er!!!’”
  5. Why my col­lege pals went to Yale while my high school friends went to jail (Rob Hen­der­son, NY Post): “It is fas­ci­nat­ing to hear afflu­ent peo­ple dis­cuss the rea­sons for upward mobil­i­ty. They sug­gest solu­tions like ‘oppor­tu­ni­ty’ and ‘edu­ca­tion.’ Sel­dom do they men­tion ‘par­ents’ or ‘fam­i­ly.’ This is why: Afflu­ent peo­ple take their fam­i­lies for grant­ed. They’re so used to hav­ing sta­ble fam­i­lies, it doesn’t occur to them what it would be like to go with­out. It’s like ask­ing a fish about the impor­tance of water.”
    • This is some­thing I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed by for years — Stan­ford stu­dents are far more like­ly to come from intact fam­i­lies than are the stu­dents I meet while doing retreats for oth­er Chi Alphas. The author is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in psy­chol­o­gy at Cam­bridge.
  6. State­ment from Medill Dean Charles Whitak­er (North­west­ern University):”…I patent­ly reject the notion that our stu­dents have no right to report on com­mu­ni­ties oth­er than those from which they hail, and I will nev­er affirm that stu­dents who do not come from mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties can­not under­stand or accu­rate­ly con­vey the strug­gles of those pop­u­la­tions. And, unlike our young charges at The Dai­ly, who in a heart­felt, though not well-con­sid­ered edi­to­r­i­al, apol­o­gized for their work on the Ses­sions sto­ry, I absolute­ly will not apol­o­gize for encour­ag­ing our stu­dents to take on the much-need­ed and very dif­fi­cult task of report­ing on our life and times at North­west­ern and beyond.” This is straight fire. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • The back­sto­ry: Jeff Ses­sions (for­mer US Attor­ney Gen­er­al) spoke at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty. The cam­pus paper cov­ered the event and the pro­tes­tors, and received sharp crit­i­cism from activists for so doing. The edi­to­r­i­al board of the Dai­ly North­west­ern issued an apol­o­gy via op-ed. A lot of peo­ple (includ­ing high-pro­file pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists) expressed strong opin­ions about the cov­er­age of the event and the apol­o­gy, and this is the dean’s response.
  7. The Place of Chris­t­ian Reli­gion in the Amer­i­can Found­ing (Thomas Taco­ma, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Take the notion that ‘almost all’ of the Amer­i­can founders were deists. Ethan Allen was the lone con­firmed Amer­i­can deist of any influ­ence in the found­ing peri­od. Thomas Paine, who spent rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle time in the Unit­ed States—and became deeply unpop­u­lar in Amer­i­ca after writ­ing The Age of Rea­son—was the era’s oth­er famous deist. Jef­fer­son, Adams, and Franklin were much qui­eter about their het­ero­dox beliefs, and even they were not dyed-in-the-wool deists. Franklin, for exam­ple, often spoke of Prov­i­dence, and of a God who did in fact inter­vene in the affairs of men.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Blue Moun­tain Col­lege and is review­ing a book by Mark Hall, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at George Fox Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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 215

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 1619 Project (many authors, New York Times Mag­a­zine): “…[many believe] that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, how­ev­er, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unan­i­mous­ly cel­e­brat­ed every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defin­ing con­tra­dic­tions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to his­to­ry (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), that was when a ship arrived at Point Com­fort in the British colony of Vir­ginia, bear­ing a car­go of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inau­gu­rat­ed a bar­bar­ic sys­tem of chat­tel slav­ery that would last for the next 250 years. This is some­times referred to as the country’s orig­i­nal sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very ori­gin.” The link is to a PDF of the entire issue.
    • A pos­i­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: A Brief His­to­ry of the His­to­ry Wars (Rebec­ca Onion, Slate): “For the sake of our col­lec­tive car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, we would do bet­ter to rec­og­nize these skir­mish­es over Amer­i­can history—in which con­ser­v­a­tives demand that a pos­i­tive vision of our nation’s past, stud­ded with suc­cess­es, inven­tions, and ‘great men,’ take pride of place in our pub­lic culture—as recur­rent episodes in a par­tic­u­lar decades-old front of the cul­ture wars. That way, we could stop wast­ing our good faith on old, dead-end con­ver­sa­tions.”
    • A neg­a­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: The New York Times sur­ren­ders to the left on race (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Through­out the issue of the NYTM, head­lines make, with just slight vari­a­tions, the same rhetor­i­cal move over and over again: ‘Here is some­thing unpleas­ant, unjust, or even down­right evil about life in the present-day Unit­ed States. Bet you did­n’t real­ize that slav­ery is ulti­mate­ly to blame.’ Lack of uni­ver­sal access to health care? High rates of sug­ar con­sump­tion? Cal­lous treat­ment of incar­cer­at­ed pris­on­ers? White record­ing artists ‘steal­ing’ black music? Harsh labor prac­tices? That’s right — all of it, and far more, fol­lows from slav­ery.”
    • A com­pli­cat­ed con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How slav­ery doomed lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment in Amer­i­ca (Philip Klein, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “A num­ber of con­ser­v­a­tives react­ed to the project by brand­ing it as anti-Amer­i­can. But I don’t think that’s fair, at least based on the lead essay I read from Nikole Han­nah-Jones. In fact, her piece is quite the oppo­site. Sure, it chron­i­cles the bru­tal­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery and the cen­tu­ry of oppres­sion, insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­crim­i­na­tion, and racist ter­ror­ism that fol­lowed. Yet the piece is ulti­mate­ly about how she rec­on­ciles that his­to­ry with her patri­o­tism and comes to under­stand her own father’s love of a coun­try that treat­ed him so poor­ly.”
    • A neg­a­tive con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How To Dele­git­imize A Nation (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But who we imag­ine our­selves to be today shapes who we will become tomor­row. If The 1619 Project were mere­ly about expand­ing our com­mon under­stand­ing of the Amer­i­can ori­gins, who could object? It arrives, though, in the midst of an epic cul­ture war over who we are, and who we are going to be.”
    • Relat­ed: Black Amer­i­can His­to­ry Should Give Evan­gel­i­cals a Sense of Per­spec­tive — and Hope (David French, Nation­al Review): “If men and women have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak and pos­sess the courage to tell the truth, they have hope that they can trans­form a nation. What was true for black Amer­i­cans (includ­ing the black Amer­i­can church) in the most dire of cir­cum­stances is still true for con­tem­po­rary Chris­tians in far less try­ing times”
    • In response: In Defense Of Evan­gel­i­cal Cul­tur­al Pes­simism (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “This, I think, is a dis­tinc­tion that makes a big dif­fer­ence re: French’s argu­ment. You can’t cease to be black; you can cease to be Chris­t­ian, or at least mean­ing­ful­ly Chris­t­ian.” This piece is way too long but makes some good points.
  2. Don’t Use These Free-Speech Argu­ments Ever Again (Ken White, The Atlantic): “If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in Amer­i­ca, or lis­tened to talk­ing heads on the news, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly encoun­tered emp­ty, mis­lead­ing, or sim­ply false tropes about the First Amend­ment. Those tired tropes are bar­ri­ers to seri­ous dis­cus­sions about free speech. Any use­ful dis­cus­sion of what the law should be must be informed by an accu­rate view of what the law is.” White is best known under his inter­net alias Pope­hat. Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent.
  3. The Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Lux­u­ry beliefs’ are the lat­est sta­tus sym­bol for rich Amer­i­cans (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Post): “…as trendy clothes and oth­er prod­ucts become more acces­si­ble and afford­able, there is increas­ing­ly less sta­tus attached to lux­u­ry goods. The upper class­es have found a clever solu­tion to this prob­lem: lux­u­ry beliefs. These are ideas and opin­ions that con­fer sta­tus on the rich at very lit­tle cost, while tak­ing a toll on the low­er class.”
  4. How Life Became an End­less, Ter­ri­ble Com­pe­ti­tion (Daniel Markovits, The Atlantic): “Escap­ing the mer­i­toc­ra­cy trap will not be easy. Elites nat­u­ral­ly resist poli­cies that threat­en to under­mine their advan­tages. But it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble to get rich off your own human cap­i­tal with­out exploit­ing your­self and impov­er­ish­ing your inner life, and mer­i­to­crats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive them­selves.” The author is a Yale law pro­fes­sor. I found his diag­no­sis more per­sua­sive than his prog­no­sis.
  5. The Com­ing Migra­tion out of Sub-Saha­ran Africa (Christo­pher Cald­well, Nation­al Review): “The pop­u­la­tion pres­sures ema­nat­ing from the Mid­dle East in recent decades, already suf­fi­cient to dri­ve the Euro­pean polit­i­cal sys­tem into con­vul­sions, are going to pale beside those from sub-Saha­ran Africa in decades to come.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Why Nice­ness Weak­ens Our Wit­ness (Sharon Hodde Miller, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We exist in a world that swings between sweet­ness and out­rage, two behav­iors that seem to be at odds with one anoth­er. In real­i­ty, they are two sides of the same coin: a lack of spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion. When our civil­i­ty isn’t root­ed in some­thing stur­dy and deep, when our good behav­ior isn’t spring­ing from the core of who we are but is instead mere­ly a mask we put on, it is only a mat­ter of time before the façade crum­bles away and our true state is revealed: an entire gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who are real­ly good at look­ing good.” I agree with the sub­stance of this arti­cle, but the title both­ers me. 
  7. Fact-Check­ing Satire — Is Snopes Seri­ous? (Bill Zeis­er, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “the Bee’s founder and minor­i­ty own­er, Adam Ford, took par­tic­u­lar excep­tion to the tone of the Snopes assess­ment. In a lengthy Twit­ter thread, he called Snopes’ han­dling of the piece on Thomas ‘par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious’ and ‘dis­turb­ing.’ He point­ed to a sub­ti­tle that cas­ti­gat­ed the Bee for ‘fan­ning the flames of con­tro­ver­sy’ and ‘mud­dy­ing the details of a news sto­ry’ to the point that it was unclear if the piece qual­i­fied as satire. Ford com­plained that through­out the Snopes sto­ry, sup­pos­ed­ly an ‘objec­tive fact check,’ the assess­ment ‘veered towards pro­nounc­ing a moral judg­ment,’ seem­ing­ly accus­ing the satir­i­cal site of will­ful decep­tion. It is cer­tain­ly under­stand­able how Ford could feel this way: Snopes referred to the Bee’s ‘ruse’ and offered that ‘the Baby­lon Bee has man­aged to fool read­ers with its brand of satire in the past.’”

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 the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 165. 

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 212

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. Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To uni­ver­si­ty-edu­cat­ed media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low-pay­ing man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon asso­ciate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle.
  2. Six­teen and Evan­gel­i­cal (Lau­ra Turn­er, Slate): “A world with­out God wouldn’t make sense to me. But it now makes sense to many of my friends. I final­ly under­stand that we nev­er had a shared faith struc­ture. We went to the same church, some of us for years. We heard the same ser­mons, slept in the same cab­ins at camp, read the same books of the Bible, lis­tened to the same music. But we went home to dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies.” The author is John & Nan­cy Ortberg’s daugh­ter.
  3. Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Report­ed­ly Bans All Mar­tial Arts Groups With­out Warn­ing Over Email (Jin Hyun, NextShark): “Accord­ing to Choi, the university’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion behind the shut­down can be sum­ma­rized in four points: ‘the groups like to unof­fi­cial­ly prac­tice dur­ing dead week, they recruit pro­fes­sion­al, inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned coach­es to run their prac­tices, they com­pete and reg­u­lar­ly win nation­al cham­pi­onships with­out Uni­ver­si­ty help, they par­tic­i­pate heav­i­ly in the local com­mu­ni­ty by teach­ing stu­dents, alum­ni, and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers.’”
    • Stan­ford often seems con­flict­ed about whether its under­grads are future lead­ers to be empow­ered or lia­bil­i­ties to be micro­man­aged.
  4. As admin­is­tra­tors walk back ‘insuf­fi­cient’ response, police reveal noose may have been on cam­pus since March (Ele­na Shao and Daniel Mar­tinez-Krams, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The new infor­ma­tion comes amid crit­i­cism of Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors’ response to the inci­dent, and one day after they held a sol­i­dar­i­ty ral­ly and town hall. A self-care event is sched­uled to take place Fri­day after­noon.” There have been a lot of arti­cles about this — but this once grabbed me with the tid­bit in the head­line. SINCE MARCH?
  5. On Court Prophets and Wilder­ness Prophets  (Tim­o­thy Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Whether you view Trump as a David or an Antipas, whether you serve at the court of the resplen­dent king or stand over against the court from the wilder­ness, one thing Nathan and John the Bap­tist held in com­mon was that both were will­ing to con­demn unright­eous­ness in their rulers—even if it cost them every­thing.”
    • Also polit­i­cal: The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty Is Actu­al­ly Three Par­ties (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “What the data demon­strates is that the group con­tain­ing the largest pro­por­tion of minor­i­ty vot­ers is the most skep­ti­cal of some of the most pro­gres­sive poli­cies embraced by Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates like Eliz­a­beth War­ren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Har­ris.” Per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of this op-ed is when he talks about the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of favor­ing small donors over large donors.
  6. In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons (Paul Mozur, New York Times): “The police offi­cers wres­tled with Col­in Che­ung in an unmarked car. They need­ed his face. They grabbed his jaw to force his head in front of his iPhone. They slapped his face. They shout­ed, ‘Wake up!’ They pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr. Che­ung had dis­abled his phone’s facial-recog­ni­tion login with a quick but­ton mash as soon as they grabbed him.”
  7. Canada’s bizarre trans-wax­ing con­tro­ver­sy (Bren­dan O’Neill, Spiked): “Yaniv says if the case is lost then a dan­ger­ous prece­dent will be set for trans peo­ple. In truth, the real dan­ger is if Yaniv wins the case, because that would set a prece­dent where­by the law could require that women must touch penis­es or risk los­ing their jobs. It would be pro­found­ly misog­y­nis­tic.” The lan­guage in this piece is vul­gar at times but in my esti­ma­tion not reck­less­ly so. Rod Dreher sums things up pith­ily with the head­line: From ‘Bake My Cake’ to ‘Wax My Tes­ti­cles’ (The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive)
    • Relat­ed: Lib­er­als’ aston­ish­ing­ly rad­i­cal shift on gen­der (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Slaves every­where pre­sum­ably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legit­i­ma­cy of the sys­tem and the mas­ter that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we could­n’t even begin to per­ceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a bur­den so oner­ous that it pro­duces a demand for the over­turn­ing of well-set­tled rules and assump­tions, some of which (‘the gen­der bina­ry’) go all the way back to the ear­li­est ori­gins of human civ­i­liza­tion?”

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 Are Satanists of the MS-13 gang an under-covered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS-13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 158.

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 198

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. Chi­nese city offers US$1,500 reward to help snare for­eign reli­gious lead­ers (Mimi Lau, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “Under the new reward scheme in Guangzhou, the cap­i­tal of Guang­dong province, infor­mants can earn between 5,000 and 10,000 yuan for tips lead­ing to the arrest of a non-Chi­nese reli­gious leader, accord­ing to a state­ment on the department’s web­site. Oth­er pay­ments include 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for infor­ma­tion lead­ing to the clo­sure of a for­eign reli­gious group, and between 100 and 3,000 yuan for tips about local­ly organ­ised gath­er­ings and their lead­ers.”
    • Relat­ed: Hong Kong Pas­tor Fac­ing Prison Preach­es the Ser­mon of His Life (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For decades, I have preached numer­ous ser­mons. Lit­tle could I antic­i­pate that the one mes­sage which prepa­ra­tion took me the longest time and the most heart­felt prayer, and which prob­a­bly would reach the largest audi­ence, is pre­cise­ly this one deliv­ered from the defendant’s dock.”
  2. Pas­tor­ing A Pur­ple Church: ‘I Absolute­ly Bite My Tongue Some­times’ (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “The pro­mo­tion of dis­course over dis­cord may strength­en civic cul­ture in an era of polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion, but for Edmon­ston, the mis­sion is more a reflec­tion of Pres­by­ter­ian the­ol­o­gy than it is a com­mit­ment to demo­c­ra­t­ic process.”
    • There is a lot to like in this arti­cle, but I feel com­pelled to add that what binds a church togeth­er is a com­mit­ment to Christ. It is okay to be divid­ed over polit­i­cal issues. It is much less okay to be divid­ed over sub­stan­tive Scrip­tur­al issues. This sto­ry con­fus­es the two.
  3. The Brand Is Belief (Kier­an Dahl, Top­ic Mag­a­zine): “C3’s the­ol­o­gy would appear to be at odds with how the church presents and mar­kets itself. Isn’t humil­i­ty one of Jesus’s biggest lessons for human­i­ty? Isn’t social media inher­ent­ly nar­cis­sis­tic?.… C3 feels like an algo­rith­mi­cal­ly curat­ed brand that hap­pens to love Jesus—the Airbnb of reli­gion.”
    • I love arti­cles show­ing how out­siders view church­es. Some of what the author stum­bles over I find puz­zling — like think­ing that the name of the church’s dis­ci­ple­ship class ‘Growth Track’ is a capit­u­la­tion to cul­ture. Inter­est­ing through­out.
  4. The Hap­pi­ness Reces­sion (Brad Wilcox & Lyman Stone, The Atlantic): “In 2018, hap­pi­ness among young adults in Amer­i­ca fell to a record low. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 report­ing that they were ‘very hap­py’ in life fell to 25 percent—the low­est lev­el that the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey, a key barom­e­ter of Amer­i­can social life, has ever record­ed for that pop­u­la­tion. Hap­pi­ness fell most among young men—with only 22 per­cent of young men (and 28 per­cent of young women) report­ing that they were ‘very hap­py’ in 2018.”
    • React­ing to this arti­cle, David French offers this obser­va­tion, “For gen­er­a­tions, key ele­ments of our cul­tur­al and aca­d­e­m­ic elite have been argu­ing essen­tial­ly the oppo­site — that lib­er­a­tion from reli­gion and lib­er­a­tion from mar­riage were pre­req­ui­sites to true human flour­ish­ing. If you asked an ear­ly era sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion­ary for his pre­dic­tion for a cul­ture with pro­found­ly less reli­gious prac­tice, less mar­riage, and many few­er moral restraints on sex­u­al prac­tice, I sin­cere­ly doubt that he’d respond that he believed that cul­ture would be less hap­py, with peo­ple hav­ing less sex.” It Turns Out That Sex­u­al Lib­er­a­tion Isn’t All That Lib­er­at­ing (David French, Nation­al Review).
  5. Case Report of gas­tro­pare­sis heal­ing: 16 years of a chron­ic syn­drome resolved after prox­i­mal inter­ces­so­ry prayer (Romez, Zaritzky & Brown, Com­ple­men­tary Ther­a­pies In Med­i­cine): a mirac­u­lous heal­ing account as report­ed in a jour­nal. I found this bit amus­ing: “A note­wor­thy obser­va­tion is that stud­ies show­ing pos­i­tive effects of prayer have typ­i­cal­ly involved inter­ces­sors who either pro­fessed either 1) being ‘born again’ Chris­tians (with a com­mit­ment to dai­ly devo­tion­al prayer and active fel­low­ship with their local church) or 2) faith in heal­ing.”
  6. Democ­rats Have to Decide Whether Faith Is an Asset for 2020 (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The real evi­dence of Democ­rats’ approach to faith will come in cam­paign dol­lars and infra­struc­ture, which will like­ly be devel­oped slight­ly lat­er in the elec­tion cycle; on their han­dling of con­test­ed issues like abor­tion, which is cru­cial­ly impor­tant to many reli­gious vot­ers; and their abil­i­ty to tap reli­gious net­works for vol­un­teers.”
  7. Don­ald Trump Changed The New York Times. Is It For­ev­er? (Peter Boy­er, Esquire): “A Mon­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty poll tak­en last year found that 77 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe that tra­di­tion­al news out­lets report ‘fake news’—a sig­nif­i­cant leap from the year before.” This is an inter­est­ing and dis­heart­en­ing arti­cle.

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 Every­thing That’s Wrong Of Rac­coons (Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg, The Toast): “Once when my dog died a pas­sel of rac­coons showed up in the back­yard as if to say ‘Now that he’s gone, we own the night,’ and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it dis­re­spect­ful to 1) me per­son­al­ly and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t dis­re­spect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.” (first shared in vol­ume 97)

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.