Tag: justice

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 222

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

This has been a crazy week for me, so a short­er list than nor­mal. Enjoy!

  1. More on Both­am Jean, Amber Guyger, and for­give­ness:
    • Both­am Jean’s Brother’s Offer of For­give­ness Went Viral. His Mother’s Calls for Jus­tice Should Too. (Dore­na Williamson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When a black per­son extends rad­i­cal for­give­ness, we see the grace of the gospel. But when we ignore a black person’s call for jus­tice, we cheap­en that grace. Both are act­ing like the God we serve; we need to lis­ten to them both.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Pas­tor Delonte Gholston’s Face­book post. “I agreed with so much of what this broth­er said and did because what he did is deeply root­ed in the truth of the gospel. What I despise is the ways that the pow­ers love to use sto­ries like these to tell peo­ple who are being active­ly oppressed, ‘why don’t you just for­give like them?’” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Amber Guyger’s Judge Gave Her a Bible and a Hug. Did That Cross a Line? (Sarah Mer­vosh and Nicholas Bogel-Bur­roughs, New York Times): Deb­o­rah Rhode, an expert in legal ethics and the direc­tor of the Cen­ter on the Legal Pro­fes­sion at Stan­ford Law School, said she believed that Judge Kemp’s behav­ior stayed with­in eth­i­cal bounds, espe­cial­ly because it came after the sen­tenc­ing had end­ed. ‘All the judge did is express some bonds of com­mon human­i­ty, and I don’t think we should be pun­ish­ing judges for that,’ she said. ‘If any­thing, our legal sys­tem has suf­fered from an absence of ade­quate com­pas­sion.’”
    • Why a Judge Says She Gave Amber Guyger a Bible, a Hug and Hope of Redemp­tion (Sarah Mer­vosh, New York Times): ““‘She asked me if I thought her life could have pur­pose,’ Judge Kemp recalled. “I said, “I know that it can.” She said, “I don’t know where to start, I don’t have a Bible.”’ Judge Kemp said she thought of the Bible in her cham­bers. “I said, “Well, hold on, I’ll get you a Bible.”’”
    • Don’t Mis­un­der­stand the ‘White Chris­t­ian’ Reac­tion to Brandt Jean’s Act of For­give­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “The moment went so viral not because for­give­ness was expect­ed or white inno­cence was pre­sumed. The moment went viral because the guilt was so obvi­ous, and rage was so under­stand­able. The moment went so viral because it was shock­ing. Brandt Jean demon­strat­ed a lev­el of grace that most Chris­tians (white or oth­er­wise) sim­ply couldn’t com­pre­hend, and they couldn’t com­pre­hend it because the hor­ror inflict­ed on his broth­er was so obvi­ous and so thor­ough­ly unjus­ti­fi­able.”
    • Both­am Jean’s neigh­bor, a key wit­ness in Amber Guyger tri­al, shot to death in Dal­las (Dal­las News): “A key wit­ness in Amber Guyger’s mur­der tri­al was shot and killed Fri­day evening at an apart­ment com­plex near Dal­las’ Med­ical Dis­trict, author­i­ties said.” 👀 Real­i­ty is entire­ly too much like a movie script late­ly.
  2. And some thoughts on Chi­na, Hong Kong, and free­dom.
    • The Chi­na Cul­tur­al Clash (Ben Thomp­son, Strat­e­ch­ery): “The prob­lem from a West­ern per­spec­tive is that the links Clin­ton was so sure would push in only one direc­tion — towards polit­i­cal free­dom — turned out to be two-way streets: Chi­na is not sim­ply resist­ing West­ern ideals of free­dom, but seek­ing to impose their own.”
    • I Can See Clear­ly Now (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “I thought this day was com­ing, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Bei­jing expect­ed it to come so soon either: the Chi­nese author­i­ties were play­ing a long game, bid­ing their time and build­ing their pow­er, and I do not think they were rel­ish­ing an imme­di­ate con­fronta­tion with West­ern cap­i­tal­ism. But the Hong Kong protests forced their hand. Bei­jing clear­ly per­ceives these protests as an exis­ten­tial threat, and have decid­ed that the moment has come to go all-in. They have pushed all their chips into the cen­ter of the table … and the cap­i­tal­ists imme­di­ate­ly fold­ed like a Chi­nese-made lawn chair.”
    • In relat­ed news: US announces visa restric­tions on Chi­na for Xin­jiang abus­es (Jen­nifer Hansler, CNN): “The move comes as the State Depart­ment has increased its pub­lic con­dem­na­tion of Chi­na’s arbi­trary deten­tion of up to two mil­lion Uyghurs in ‘in intern­ment camps designed to erase reli­gious and eth­nic iden­ti­ties.’”
  3. Upcom­ing book leaves sci­en­tif­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty for exis­tence of ‘Adam and Eve’ (USA Today): “…a lead­ing pub­lic schol­ar — Joshua Swami­dass, a physi­cian and genome sci­en­tist at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis, Mis­souri — is mak­ing a bold new attempt to rec­on­cile the bib­li­cal sto­ry of Adam and Eve with what we know about the genet­ic ances­try of the human race…. [He] makes an auda­cious claim: A de novo-cre­at­ed Adam and Eve could very well be uni­ver­sal human ances­tors who lived in the Mid­dle East in the last 6,000–10,000 years. This is not the first attempt to rec­on­cile the Gar­den of Eden sto­ry with sci­ence, but rarely does some­one with Swami­dass’ cre­den­tials do what most sci­en­tists would deem unthink­able: Take the sto­ry seri­ous­ly. How­ev­er, some athe­ist sci­en­tists are tak­ing Swami­dass seri­ous­ly.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York.

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 Philoso­pher Redefin­ing Equal­i­ty (Nathan Heller, New York­er): “When she was three, her moth­er asked, ‘Why do you allow your broth­er to talk for you?’—why didn’t she speak for her­self? ‘Until now, it sim­ply was not nec­es­sary,’ Eliz­a­beth said. It was the first full sen­tence that she had ever uttered.” I think that’s the best first sen­tence I’ve ever heard of. A tad long, but rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 189.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 216

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 179

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. ‘God, I don’t want to die,’ U.S. mis­sion­ary wrote before he was killed by tribe on Indi­an island (Joan­na Slater and Annie Gowen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “An Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary try­ing to meet and con­vert one of the most iso­lat­ed hunter-and-gath­er­er tribes in the world offered them fish and oth­er small gifts before the tribes­men killed him and buried his body on the beach, jour­nals and emails show.”
    • Relat­ed: US Mis­sion­ary Killed by ‘World’s Most Iso­lat­ed’ Tribe (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Some have declared Chau a mar­tyr and com­pared him to Jim Elliot, who was famous­ly killed at age 28 while attempt­ing to evan­ge­lize an iso­lat­ed indige­nous group in Ecuador.”
    • Relat­ed: Death Of A Mis­sion­ary (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If Chau had been a mis­sion­ary try­ing to sneak into North Korea, I would have thought him insane­ly brave. But the law against vis­it­ing that island was there for a very good rea­son: this tribe has had no expo­sure to out­siders, and is enor­mous­ly vul­ner­a­ble to com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­eases. There are only a small num­ber of them in exis­tence, and they could be wiped out quick­ly by com­mon ill­ness­es for which they have no immu­ni­ty…. It is one thing to be will­ing to lay down your life for these trib­al peo­ple. It is cru­el to expect them to lay down their lives so you can prove your love for God.”
  2. How do con­ser­v­a­tives respond to archae­ol­o­gists’ skep­ti­cism about Bible his­to­ry? (Richard Ostling, Patheos): “There’s vast unex­plored ter­rain in Israel, where only 50 of an esti­mat­ed 6,000 sites have under­gone thor­ough exam­i­na­tion, with lim­it­ed work at anoth­er 300. Sur­viv­ing evi­dence from ancient times is nec­es­sar­i­ly spot­ty and inter­pre­ta­tions can be sub­jec­tive. Schol­ars usu­al­ly end up with cir­cum­stan­tial plau­si­bil­i­ty, not absolute proof or dis­proof.”
  3. Ex-Detainee Describes Tor­ture In Chi­na’s Xin­jiang Re-Edu­ca­tion Camp (Rob Schmitz, NPR): “Samarkand says he was trans­ferred to a re-edu­ca­tion camp, where peo­ple were sep­a­rat­ed into three groups: those who were reli­gious, those who were sus­pect­ed of being crim­i­nals, and those, like him, who had trav­eled abroad. All of them, says Samarkand, had one thing in com­mon, though: They had grown up in Mus­lim fam­i­lies and com­mu­ni­ties.”
  4. Info­graph­ic: You Have More Time for Bible Read­ing than You Think (Cross­way): “In just 12 min­utes per day, you could read the whole Bible in a year. Does that still feel a bit ambi­tious? In just 6 min­utes per day, you could read the entire New Tes­ta­ment over the course of 6 months.”
  5. Elisha and the She-bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): a very insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge.
  6. Sir Roger Scru­ton Is a Friend to Mus­lims and Jews (Jibran Khan, Nation­al Review): “There can be no real dia­logue with some­one who doesn’t believe in any­thing, and yet this has been the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of lib­er­al ‘inter­faith’ dis­cus­sion, to so water down the dis­course that no one gets to encounter, let alone tol­er­ate and appre­ci­ate, dif­fer­ence.” I did not think I would find this arti­cle inter­est­ing.
  7. It’s time we bal­ance the scales of jus­tice in our schools (Bet­sy DeVos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A fair process treats each par­ty with dig­ni­ty and ensures the integri­ty of final deci­sions. Hav­ing out­comes over­turned and relit­i­gat­ed because of process con­cerns — which has hap­pened dozens of times in recent years — can be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to sur­vivors.”
    • Relat­ed: The ACLU Declines to Defend Civ­il Rights (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “the ACLU issued a pub­lic state­ment that con­sti­tut­ed a stark, short­sight­ed betray­al of the organization’s his­toric mis­sion: It vehe­ment­ly opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.”
    • Relat­ed: One Crim­i­nal-Defense Attorney’s Lament (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “In cer­tain ways, social con­dem­na­tion has become some­thing even worse, the mere accu­sa­tion being all that’s required for a mob of undu­ly pas­sion­ate peo­ple to crush a career. There’s no oppor­tu­ni­ty to defend and no means to chal­lenge an accu­sa­tion. While the ‘pun­ish­ment’ isn’t levied by gov­ern­ment, and is there­fore beyond any required involve­ment of such niceties as due process, the net result can be as destruc­tive giv­en the cur­rent tide of blind accep­tance and capit­u­la­tion.”

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 provoca­tive In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

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 169

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

This one is com­ing to you from Seoul. I’ve been super busy on this mis­sion trip, so these are select­ed from a less wide range than nor­mal.

  1. The Ide­o­log­i­cal Blind­ness at the Heart of Media Bias (David French, Nation­al Review): “It is con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing to me that main­stream media out­lets have some­how con­vinced them­selves of two con­tra­dic­to­ry things at once: 1) They can­not fair­ly cov­er Amer­i­ca with­out a news­room that more or less looks like Amer­i­ca, but 2) they can cov­er Amer­i­can with­out a news­room that thinks like Amer­i­ca.”
  2. God Doesn’t Turn A Blind Eye To Abuse, Nei­ther Should The Church (Rus­sell Moore, Gospel Coali­tion): “Many through­out the cen­turies have sought to pro­tect the rep­u­ta­tion of God by down­play­ing his wrath. To some degree, the impulse here is good, because many have a false view of God as an angry, sullen, puni­tive deity, not as the God of over­flow­ing love Jesus revealed to us. God’s wrath isn’t a tem­per tantrum. On the oth­er hand, those who point us away from the wrath of God do so at the per­il of eclips­ing God’s own rev­e­la­tion of him­self as holy and just, the One who ‘does not leave the guilty unpun­ished’ (Ex. 34:7). At the cross, the apos­tle Paul wrote, God ‘con­demned sin in the flesh’ (Rom. 8:3). This is impor­tant for us to know, espe­cial­ly those who have sur­vived awful things…. At the cross, God’s wrath and God’s love come togeth­er. They don’t can­cel one anoth­er out.”
  3. Remem­ber those arti­cles I shared about the hor­rif­ic Chi­na crack­down on Mus­lims? Now they are turn­ing their atten­tion to Chris­tians (although much less intense­ly — the sit­u­a­tion with the Mus­lims has echoes of con­cen­tra­tion camps).
    • Chi­na Bans Zion, Beijing’s Biggest House Church (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bei­jing author­i­ties threat­ened to close Zion Church last month after the 1,500-member con­gre­ga­tion, one of the Chi­nese capital’s largest house church­es, refused to install sur­veil­lance cam­eras in its sanc­tu­ary. After ser­vices on Sun­day, offi­cials deliv­ered on their threat to the unof­fi­cial Protes­tant con­gre­ga­tion, which meets in a ren­o­vat­ed hall in north­ern Bei­jing. Zion is now banned and its mate­ri­als con­fis­cat­ed.…”
    • Group: Offi­cials destroy­ing cross­es, burn­ing bibles in Chi­na (AP News): “China’s gov­ern­ment is ratch­et­ing up a crack­down on Chris­t­ian con­gre­ga­tions in Bei­jing and sev­er­al provinces, destroy­ing cross­es, burn­ing bibles, shut­ting church­es and order­ing fol­low­ers to sign papers renounc­ing their faith, accord­ing to pas­tors and a group that mon­i­tors reli­gion in Chi­na.”
    • Church raid­ed amid esca­lat­ing crack­down (Chi­naAid): “All across Chi­na, church­es are fac­ing pres­sures unprece­dent­ed since the reign of dic­ta­tor Mao Zedong. In Henan, where a con­cen­trat­ed crack­down is occur­ring, sev­en min­is­ters were arrest­ed and then lat­er released that evening…. Addi­tion­al­ly, local offi­cials in Wen­zhou, Zhe­jiang dis­trib­uted a form col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on the reli­gious beliefs of mid­dle school stu­dents and their par­ents. This could have dan­ger­ous reper­cus­sions, as Chi­nese reg­u­la­tions for­bid par­ents from teach­ing reli­gion to their chil­dren.”
    • Chi­na Mulls Major Restric­tions on Online Min­istries (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chi­nese Chris­tians have one month to tell their gov­ern­ment what they think of pro­posed new rules that ban the shar­ing of prayer, Bible read­ing, bap­tism, com­mu­nion, and oth­er forms of reli­gious activ­i­ty online.“
  4. Vice And Fire (Peter Hitchens, First Things): “As far as I can find out, ­Mar­tin is a lapsed Roman Catholic and has quite banal views about how reli­gion caus­es wars and God is a ‘giant invis­i­ble guy in the sky.’ I do not think he has set out to make an attack on Chris­tian­i­ty. I do not think he espe­cial­ly likes it, but I sus­pect he has dis­card­ed it, and so he has writ­ten an account of a world in which it sim­ply does not exist. His fan­ta­sy great­ly dis­turbs me, because it helps to nor­mal­ize the indif­fer­ence to Chris­tian­i­ty which is a far greater threat to it than active athe­ism.” This is an excel­lent cri­tique of the huge­ly over­rat­ed Game Of Thrones.
  5. After Both­am Jean’s shoot­ing death, his Dal­las church intent on seek­ing jus­tice (Bob­by Ross, Jr., The Chris­t­ian Chron­i­cle): “By all accounts, Both­am Jean was a devot­ed man of faith with a ‘beau­ti­ful’ and ‘pow­er­ful’ singing voice. He was bap­tized at age 10 in his native St. Lucia and moved to the U.S. at age 19 to attend Hard­ing Uni­ver­si­ty in Searcy, Ark., where he often led wor­ship in chapel and served as a min­istry intern with the Col­lege Church of Christ.”
    • Relat­ed: The Worst Police Shoot­ing Yet (David French, Nation­al Review): “We ask police offi­cers to be brave. We ask offi­cers to face a much high­er degree of dan­ger than civil­ians. We ask them to show restraint even in the face of provo­ca­tions and tense con­fronta­tions. There are count­less among them who do all we ask, and more. But we also ask some­thing else: that police offi­cers be sub­ject to the very laws they’re sworn to enforce.”
    • Relat­ed: End Qual­i­fied Immu­ni­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “A police offi­cer killed a com­plete­ly inno­cent man because of the officer’s inex­cus­able mis­take. He escaped crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion. And then he even escaped civ­il lia­bil­i­ty — because of a lit­tle-known, judge-made legal doc­trine called qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty.” Note that French is writ­ing about a dif­fer­ent case in this arti­cle.
    • Relat­ed: Should Cops Be Immune From Law­suits? (Matt Ford, The New Repub­lic): “The prob­lems with qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty mir­ror a deep­er and more dis­turb­ing trend in the law. Courts, which are sup­posed to be the great vin­di­ca­tors of Amer­i­cans’ rights and lib­er­ties, are increas­ing­ly closed off to them.”
  6. Cal­i­for­nia leg­is­la­tor shelves bill to ban paid ‘gay con­ver­sion ther­a­py’ for adults (Melanie Mason, LA TImes): “The news of Low’s deci­sion was laud­ed by oppo­nents to the mea­sure. Jonathan Keller, pres­i­dent of the social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion Cal­i­for­nia Fam­i­ly Coun­cil, said his group was ‘inex­press­ibly grate­ful’ to Low for lis­ten­ing to reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties.”
  7. Does Our Cul­tur­al Obses­sion With Safe­ty Spell the Down­fall of Democ­ra­cy? (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, New York Times): These are “‘the three Great Untruths’ of the cur­rent moment: ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you weak­er’; ‘always trust your feel­ings’; ‘life is a bat­tle between good peo­ple and evil peo­ple.’” This is a review of two books and is quite insight­ful.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 165

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. Our Hope Is Com­ing (Steven Lon­go­ria, Deni­son Forum): “The world we live in would tell us that hope is close­ly tied to doubt. To say ‘I hope it doesn’t rain tomor­row’ car­ries with it a fear that it will like­ly rain…. Bib­li­cal hope is some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent. It con­veys a state of con­fi­dence, secu­ri­ty, and lack of wor­ry.” Steven is an alum­nus of our min­istry who is cur­rent­ly study­ing at Dal­las The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. Go, Steven!
  2. 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.” Rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. #Church­Too
    • What Would Jesus Do? Clean House In The Catholic Church. (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Con­gre­gants] do not expect the church to be per­fect; even St. Peter, after all, denied Christ three times. But they do expect to find the reflec­tion of Christ there. Accord­ing to news reports, the church hier­ar­chy in Penn­syl­va­nia and beyond has already denied Christ’s gospel three times: once when it shel­tered preda­tors in silence; once when it failed to remove every­one who was involved in cov­er­ing up any crime; and again when two of the six dio­ce­ses involved tried to shut down the grand jury inves­ti­ga­tion that pro­duced the report. Now they face the same choice Peter did.” Straight fire.
    • Why Men Like Me Should Not Be Priests (Daniel Matt­son, First Things): “Most of the hor­rif­ic abuse detailed in the Penn­syl­va­nia Grand Jury report involved ado­les­cent boys and young men. This isn’t pedophil­ia…. If the Church wants to avoid sex scan­dals, it must stop ordain­ing the sorts of men who have the hard­est time remain­ing chaste.” This arti­cle is full of details I did not know. Fas­ci­nat­ing and no doubt a light­ning rod for con­tro­very.
    • How the Wil­low Creek Church Scan­dal Has Stunned the Evan­gel­i­cal World (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times): “The sud­den res­ig­na­tion of Wil­low Creek Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s top lead­ers fol­low­ing sex­u­al harass­ment alle­ga­tions against Rev. Bill Hybels, their found­ing pas­tor, has shak­en evan­gel­i­cals far from the church’s base in the Chica­go sub­urbs. There are few big­ger names in the evan­gel­i­cal world than Mr. Hybels, and few church­es more influ­en­tial than Wil­low Creek. Chris­tians world­wide looked to it as a mod­el of smart lead­er­ship.”
    • These two scan­dals are espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing when jux­ta­posed. The Roman Catholic Church is the most hier­ar­chi­cal of denom­i­na­tions with author­i­ty flow­ing down from the Pope. Wil­low Creek is a non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al con­gre­ga­tion and is com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent of exter­nal author­i­ty. They rep­re­sent two extremes of church gov­er­nance and the rev­e­la­tion of their moral fail­ures demon­strate that the prob­lem of sin is not solved by rules. See Colos­sians 2:20–23.
    • Relat­ed: Evan­gel­i­cal Puri­ty Cul­ture Taught Me to Ratio­nal­ize My Sex­u­al Assault (Bec­ca Andrews, Moth­er Jones): “I under­stood my role: I was a sex­u­al gate­keep­er. Men, we were taught, are bur­dened by God with insa­tiable lust. Women, of course, are not, so it makes sense that we are expect­ed to cre­ate the bound­aries. We are respon­si­ble for what we wear, but more broad­ly, we are tasked with defin­ing con­sent, as thorny as that may seem…. The stakes are high in puri­ty cul­ture. Every slipup is a strike against any hope of a suc­cess­ful mar­riage.” Although inter­est­ing, the arti­cle doesn’t quite make the case that the title implies.
    • For the record: nev­er keep a crim­i­nal mat­ter pri­vate because you fear your report will hurt the pub­lic per­cep­tion of a reli­gious body, polit­i­cal enti­ty, or any oth­er insti­tu­tion. Souls are eter­nal, orga­ni­za­tions are not. Indi­vid­u­als are more impor­tant than insti­tu­tions. This is true even of denom­i­na­tions and indi­vid­ual con­gre­ga­tions — Jesus died for the Church and not for a brand. 1 Corinthi­ans 6:1–7 tells us to for­bear in civ­il mat­ters, but when it comes to crim­i­nal mat­ters Romans 13:1–7 is the rel­e­vant pas­sage.
  4. Social Injus­tice and the Gospel (John MacArthur, Grace To You): “I am con­vinced the only long-term solu­tion to every brand of eth­nic ani­mus is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ alone are the bar­ri­ers and divid­ing walls between peo­ple groups bro­ken down, the enmi­ty abol­ished, and dif­fer­ing cul­tures and eth­nic groups bound togeth­er in one new peo­ple (Eph­esians 2:14–15). The black lead­ers with whom I min­is­tered dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment shared that con­vic­tion. The evan­gel­i­cals who are say­ing the most and talk­ing the loud­est these days about what’s referred to as ‘social jus­tice’ seem to have a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive.” This is appar­ent­ly the first in a series.
  5. “Let The Whore­house Burn!” (Christo­pher Cald­well, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “‘As of this evening,’ said Pierre Moscovi­ci in Lux­em­bourg in June, ‘the Greek cri­sis is over.’ Moscovi­ci, a French Social­ist politi­cian who serves as the eco­nom­ics com­mis­sion­er of the Euro­pean Union, was mak­ing quite a claim…. Today, despite what Pierre Moscovi­ci and his col­leagues said in Lux­em­bourg, Greek debt, at 179 per­cent, is high­er still. The lat­est E.U. deal requires Greece to run large bud­get sur­plus­es until the year 2060 to repay the debts brought on by the E.U.’s own mis­man­age­ment. The coun­try is in some respects worse off than it was when Greek pro­test­ers mobbed the par­lia­ment in May 2010, howl­ing, ‘Let the whore­house burn!’”
  6. Norway’s hid­den scan­dal (Tim Whewell, BBC): “His con­vic­tion puts the spot­light back on a sys­tem which has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cised by some par­ents – and by lead­ing Nor­we­gian pro­fes­sion­als in the child­care field – for being too quick to put chil­dren into care, split­ting fam­i­lies unnec­es­sar­i­ly. The dis­graced psy­chi­a­trist has had his pro­fes­sion­al licence revoked, mean­ing he can­not work in the same field again. But par­ents who’ve lost cus­tody of chil­dren in cas­es he was involved in believe all his pre­vi­ous deci­sions should be reviewed.” This is out­ra­geous.
  7. Col­orado Defies the Supreme Court, Renews Per­se­cu­tion of a Chris­t­ian Bak­er (David French, Nation­al Review): “On the very day that Phillips won his case at the Supreme Court, a per­son emailed with yet anoth­er delib­er­ate­ly offen­sive design request: “I’m think­ing a three-tiered white cake. Cheese­cake frost­ing. And the top­per should be a large fig­ure of Satan, lick­ing a 9″ black Dil­do. I would like the dil­do to be an actu­al work­ing mod­el, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake. I can pro­vide it for you if you don’t have the means to pro­cure one your­self.” And final­ly, two days lat­er, a per­son iden­ti­fy­ing as ‘Autumn Marie’ vis­it­ed Phillips’s shop and request­ed a cake fea­tur­ing a pen­ta­gram. Accord­ing to ADF, ‘Phillips believes that per­son was Autumn Scar­di­na.’ Rather than rec­og­niz­ing Scardina’s con­duct as noth­ing more than a bad-faith cam­paign of harass­ment, Aubrey Ele­nis, the direc­tor of the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Divi­sion, found on June 28 ‘prob­a­ble cause’ to believe that Phillips vio­lat­ed Scardina’s civ­il rights….”
    • Relat­ed: When oppo­si­tion to reli­gious lib­er­ty becomes sil­ly, pet­ty, and vin­dic­tive (Andrew T. Walk­er. Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “When our cre­ative direc­tor walked into my office to noti­fy me [that our min­istry was being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against by a com­pa­ny], my first response was to smile. Why? Because the ERLC had been the vic­tim of dis­crim­i­na­tion, and I knew an oppor­tu­ni­ty like this meant the ERLC could pur­sue the moral high ground. What pro­gres­sivism does to dis­senters, we would not do to them…. No law­suit was nec­es­sary. No media storm was called for. We have zero desire to force the dis­crim­i­nat­ing com­pa­ny to agree with us or com­ply with our demands. No one was hold­ing the oth­er hostage to their ide­o­log­i­cal expec­ta­tions. The pow­er of choice and the free­dom of view­point diver­si­ty allowed two actors to pur­sue a path­way of plu­ral­ism.”

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 Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From.(Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qual­i­ties.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). This serendip­i­tous­ly hap­pened to be next in the sequence of old­er links. It fits very well with the above arti­cle about evan­gel­i­cal puri­ty cul­ture. (first shared in vol­ume 62)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 140

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 gun debate has flared up again in the wake of a school shoot­ing.
  2. Lying to Inves­ti­ga­tors Should­n’t Be a Crime (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “Pros­e­cu­tors want to catch you in a lie because, when they can’t prove an under­ly­ing crime, it’s often easy to prove that you lied to them. That’s where the prob­lem aris­es. I’ve been telling my aston­ished law stu­dents for decades that except in cer­tain well-defined cir­cum­stances, lying to inves­ti­ga­tors shouldn’t be a crime.” Carter is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale. I strong­ly endorse this view.
  3. Let’s Fix Peer Review (Ray Tru­ant, per­son­al blog): “When we apply for a grant or want to pub­lish our sci­ence, we secret­ly get the work reviewed by our peers, some of which are com­pet­ing with us for pre­cious fund­ing, or a bizarre ver­sion of fame. Under the veil of anonymi­ty, a review­er can write any­thing, includ­ed false state­ments, or incor­rect state­ments to jus­ti­fy a deci­sion. The deci­sion is most often, ‘do not fund’ or ‘reject’, even if the review is based off of inac­cu­ra­cies, lack of exper­tise, or even bla­tant slan­der. There are no rules, there are no reper­cus­sions.” Tru­ant is a bio­chemist at McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty in Cana­da.
  4. Jane Stanford’s Speech (Jane Stan­ford, stanford.edu): A stu­dent had to read this for a class a while back, and was struck by how selec­tive­ly it is quot­ed by the uni­ver­si­ty. The orig­i­nal doc­u­ment is thor­ough­ly reli­gious. “An impres­sion has gone forth that we were indif­fer­ent to reli­gious influ­ences and instruc­tions being taught here. I am quite sure that if all could be made to under­stand that this project was born from a great sor­row, the great­est that par­ents can endure, that the Cre­ator has led us through the deep waters out into the sun­shine of faith and and belief in a future life; that we have whol­ly and entire­ly as far as pos­si­ble giv­en our lives to Him; and only ask that He will guide us to do His will; that every stone that has been laid into the build­ings of this Uni­ver­si­ty but num­bers the prayers that have been offered up to our Heav­en­ly Father for strength, guid­ance, and help. That we should for­get His love and mer­cy and be indif­fer­ent as to the Chris­t­ian influ­ence to be used among the stu­dents, it would be an impos­si­bil­i­ty.”
  5. [Har­vard] Places HCFA On ‘Pro­ba­tion’ After Group Barred Stu­dent in Same-Sex Rela­tion­ship from Lead­er­ship (Car­o­line Engel­may­er & Michael Xie, Har­vard Crim­son): “The Office of Stu­dent Life has placed reli­gious group Har­vard Col­lege Faith and Action on ‘admin­is­tra­tive pro­ba­tion’ for a year after the orga­ni­za­tion pres­sured a female mem­ber of its stu­dent lead­er­ship to resign in Sep­tem­ber fol­low­ing her deci­sion to date a woman.… Col­lege admin­is­tra­tors told them HCFA is the first-ever cam­pus group to be placed on admin­is­tra­tive pro­ba­tion.”
  6. Mean­while on the Farm, Lone­ly Men and Women of Faith: The Expe­ri­ence of Reli­gious Stu­dents at Stan­ford (Ben Simon, Stan­ford Review): “It may be unrea­son­able to expect a sec­u­lar insti­tu­tion like Stan­ford to ful­ly accom­mo­date each student’s reli­gious needs. With that said, Stan­ford goes far beyond the let­ter of the law when it comes to eth­nic or racial diver­si­ty, but it does lit­tle to go out of its way to help reli­gious stu­dents.”
  7. As more jour­nal­ists report on Ice­land’s cir­cum­ci­sion saga, the coun­try gets a rab­bi (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “As Robert George of Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty – for­mer chair­man of the U.S. Com­mis­sion on Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom – not­ed in a series of tweets recent­ly, a coun­try ban­ning cir­cum­ci­sion effec­tive­ly bans Jews from liv­ing there. Dit­to for Mus­lims…. [How­ev­er] Gun­nars­dót­tir told the news­pa­per she ‘didn’t think it was nec­es­sary to con­sult’ with the island’s small Jew­ish and Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion before propos­ing the anti-cir­cum­ci­sion bill, adding ‘I didn’t see it as a reli­gious mat­ter.’” That last detail is telling. Reli­gious illit­er­a­cy caus­es real harms.
  8. Read My Lips: No New Admin­is­tra­tors (Berber Jin, Stan­ford Review): “Though admin­is­tra­tive offices are obvi­ous­ly nec­es­sary for the university’s oper­a­tion, their self-serv­ing incen­tives should make us wary of their expan­sion. Unlike fac­ul­ty, who gain pres­tige through qual­i­ty teach­ing and inno­v­a­tive research, admin­is­tra­tors move up the career lad­der by expand­ing bureau­cra­cy.” The Review has been on fire late­ly.

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 debate between two pas­tors on guns I shared back in vol­ume 48 – both are very thought­ful and are skill­ful debaters.  Here is the con­ver­sa­tion so far. All the posts are pret­ty short.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 108

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. Should Tyler Cowen Believe In God? (Ross Douthat, NYT): this is delight­ful. “There: I’ve prob­a­bly blas­phemed, weak­ened my Catholic cre­den­tials, endan­gered my soul, insult­ed my reli­gious brethren, picked point­less fights with Mus­lims and Calvin­ists, and betrayed a juve­nile under­stand­ing of sta­tis­tics.”
  2. Des­per­a­tion and Ser­vice in the Bail Indus­try (Joshua Page, Con­texts): “…indus­try advo­cates con­fi­dent­ly assert that bail com­pa­nies and agents are ser­vice providers help­ing needy peo­ple. As my research shows, this claim is based in real­i­ty. But it is a con­struct­ed real­i­ty. Polit­i­cal and legal deci­sions make the ser­vices nec­es­sary in the first place.”
  3. “High” Achiev­ers? Cannabis Access and Aca­d­e­m­ic Per­for­mance (Olivi­er Marie & Ulf Zölitz, The Review of Eco­nom­ic Stud­ies): The authors stud­ied “an excep­tion­al pol­i­cy intro­duced in the city of Maas­tricht in the Nether­lands that dis­crim­i­nat­ed access via licensed cannabis shops based on an individual’s nation­al­i­ty…. We find that the aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance of stu­dents who are no longer legal­ly per­mit­ted to buy cannabis sub­stan­tial­ly increas­es.” In oth­er news, water is wet. You can find a PDF of the full paper at SSRN)
  4. The Case Against Car­di­nal Pell (Julia Yost, First Things): this is fas­ci­nat­ing and dis­tress­ing and full of all sorts of indi­rect­ly-relat­ed asides, such as “the McMartin Preschool case gen­er­at­ed 321 charges from forty-one chil­dren. We now know that every charge was a lie and every child was a liar. Yet today, with the chil­dren now well into their thir­ties, many of them still insist that their charges were true.”
  5. Stranger In A Strange Land (Fran­cis J. Beck­with, Inside High­er Ed): “A lit­tle over four years ago, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado at Boul­der began a three-year pilot pro­gram that I believe has no prece­dent in Amer­i­can high­er edu­ca­tion. With the help of pri­vate donors and the sup­port of the university’s board, pres­i­dent and chan­cel­lor, the school cre­at­ed the posi­tion of Vis­it­ing Schol­ar of Con­ser­v­a­tive Thought and Pol­i­cy.”
  6. I Am Not a ‘Paki,’ Not a Ter­ror­ist. I Am Nobody but Myself. (Omar Aziz, NY Times): rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. “Here is the basic conun­drum the child of immi­grants faces as he goes through school. Until now, he has safe­ly assumed the iden­ti­ty pro­vid­ed to him by his fam­i­ly, but as he encoun­ters inno­cent white faces, he is con­front­ed with an inter­ro­ga­tion about who he real­ly is.”
  7. Would Your Dog Eat You if You Died? Get the Facts. (Eri­ka Engel­haupt, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “There’s no way to guar­an­tee that your pet won’t eat you if you die, apart from not hav­ing any pets. Even ham­sters and birds have been known to scav­enge on occa­sion.” Ham­sters? Real­ly? Who has ham­sters roam­ing freely through their house?

Things Glen Found Amusing

Something Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light a link I shared before which is still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have  The Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire): this essay teas­es out the impli­ca­tions of this insight: “Think­ing can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” Warn­ing: the for­mat­ting is hor­rid. It is worth read­ing any­way. Either use the Read­abil­i­ty book­marklet, an app like Pock­et, or just cut and paste it into a text doc­u­ment on your com­put­er. (first shared in vol­ume 2)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 57

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues, with a pref­er­ence for con­tent from aca­d­e­mics and influ­en­tial voic­es. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Articles I Found Interesting

This has been a depress­ing week. Shoot­ings by police, shoot­ings of police, the ISIS bomb­ing in Bagh­dad, reli­gious-lib­er­ty infringe­ments, dis­grace­ful polit­i­cal behav­ior and more. If you’re feel­ing down, the first few links will be espe­cial­ly help­ful to you.

  1. How To Pray In Our Time Of Nation­al Cri­sis (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “Many of us are anx­ious and hurt­ing. All of us are con­fused. When faced with this type of nation­al crisis we may find it dif­fi­cult to turn to our Com­forter in prayer. We are used to going to God with our requests, but this time seems dif­fer­ent. We are mired in sor­row and pain…”
  2. Lamen­ta­tions: A Bot­tle For The Tears Of the World (Christo­pher Wright, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “So much of our wor­ship is cov­er-up: pre­tend­ing to have emo­tions we don’t real­ly feel, or smoth­er­ing the emo­tions we do. That is not praise. It sim­ply leaves us to pick up our suf­fer­ing again on the way out—without bring­ing it into God’s pres­ence or hurl­ing it at him in ques­tion­ing (but trust­ing) protest. Spend­ing time in Lamen­ta­tions helps us learn how to plumb the depths of lament as well as scale the heights of rejoic­ing.”
  3. What Shoot­ings And Racial Jus­tice Mean For The Body of Christ (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “If we believe that every per­son will stand before a Judg­ment Seat, we can­not then stand silent­ly when we see injus­tice. But many—including evan­gel­i­cals of all ethnicities—wonder what we can real­ly do? Some are reluc­tant to speak because they do not wish to reduce these issues to a hash-tag and they don’t know what to do.”
  4. End Need­less Inter­ac­tion With Cops Dur­ing Traf­fic Stops (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): a shrewd, easy-to-imple­ment sug­ges­tion.
  5. My Four Months As A Pri­vate Prison Guard (Shane Bauer, Moth­er Jones): a very long but very engag­ing essay. “I start­ed apply­ing for jobs in pri­vate pris­ons because I want­ed to see the inner work­ings of an indus­try that holds 131,000 of the nation’s 1.6 mil­lion pris­on­ers. As a jour­nal­ist, it’s near­ly impos­si­ble to get an uncon­strained look inside our penal sys­tem. When pris­ons do let reporters in, it’s usu­al­ly for care­ful­ly man­aged tours and mon­i­tored inter­views with inmates. Pri­vate pris­ons are espe­cial­ly secre­tive.” See also Wounds From Incar­cer­a­tion That Nev­er Heal (Tony Brown & Eve­lyn Pat­ter­son, The New Repub­lic)
  6. Two sto­ries on the reli­gious-lib­er­ty front:
  7. A group of our sum­mer Chi Alphans had a con­ver­sa­tion about how the books of the Bible got select­ed. If you’re curi­ous, here are two resources by Michael Kruger, a schol­ar in the field, that should prove help­ful: Ten Basic Facts About the NT Canon That Every Chris­t­ian Should Mem­o­rize and 10 Mis­con­cep­tions About the NT Canon

A Quote To Ponder

Think before you act; think twice before you speak; think thrice before you post to social media.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

If you have a non-Stan­ford friend who might be inter­est­ed in these emails, they can sign up at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/subscribe, and if you want to view the archives they are at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 55

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues, with a pref­er­ence for con­tent from aca­d­e­mics and influ­en­tial voic­es. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Articles I Found Interesting

  1. Britain vot­ed to leave the Euro­pean Union.
  2. Relat­ed To Orlan­do:
    • Omar Mateen’s Mul­ti­ple Motives (Kirsten Pow­ers, USA Today): “Almost as quick­ly as the mas­sacre of inno­cents in Orlan­do unfold­ed, Amer­i­cans retreat­ed to their ide­o­log­i­cal cor­ners to inter­pret the moti­va­tions of the mass mur­der­er, Omar Mateen.”
    • FBI Inves­ti­ga­tors say they have found no evi­dence that Orlan­do shoot­er had gay lovers (Mol­ly Hen­nessy-Fiske, LA Times): huh. This is still a devel­op­ing sto­ry, do not assume this is the final word.
    • The Gun Con­trol We Deserve (Patrick Blanch­field, n+1): “As many crit­ics have observed, we would be naïve to think that heavy-hand­ed gun con­trol mea­sures would not involve the same dis­pro­por­tion­ate racial tar­get­ing and police vio­lence we right­ly con­demn in the War on Drugs and in every­day encoun­ters in places from Bal­ti­more to Fer­gu­son to Cleve­land to Oak­land.” A very thought­ful piece.
  3. Elon Musk Is Wrong. We Aren’t Liv­ing In A Sim­u­la­tion (Ric­car­do Man­zot­ti and Andrew Smart, Vice): “The world we live in is made of real stuff. Sim­u­la­tions are things made of the same stuff. Musk’s argu­ment does not show that we are get­ting any clos­er to pro­duc­ing an alter­na­tive real­i­ty. Rather it shows that we are get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter at shap­ing the phys­i­cal world.” The authors take unwar­rant­ed pot shots at dual­ism, but make very good points over­all. Relat­ed: SMBC “Heap Prob­lem.”
  4. The Sotomay­or and Kagan Dis­sents in Utah vs Stri­eff (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “If out­stand­ing war­rants were few and far between and dis­trib­uted more or less ran­dom­ly the case would have been wrong­ly decid­ed but of lit­tle prac­ti­cal impor­tance. Out­stand­ing war­rants, how­ev­er, are com­mon and much more com­mon in some com­mu­ni­ties than oth­ers. As I wrote in 2014, in Fer­gu­son, MO a major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion had out­stand­ing war­rants and not because of high crime:”
  5. Ban the Box or Require the Box? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Sad­ly, a pol­i­cy that was intend­ed to raise the employ­ment prospects of black men ends up hav­ing the biggest pos­i­tive effect on white men with a crim­i­nal record…. Poli­cies like ban the box try to get peo­ple to do the ‘right thing’ by blind­ing peo­ple to cer­tain types of infor­ma­tion. But blind­ed peo­ple tend to use oth­er cues to achieve their inter­ests and when those oth­er cues are less infor­ma­tive that often makes things worse.”
  6. I’m A Sin­gle-Issue Vot­er On Mul­ti­ple Issues And So Are You (Den­ny Burk, per­son­al blog): “Sin­gle-issue vot­ing is not the idea that being right on any sin­gle issue qual­i­fies a can­di­date for office. Sin­gle-issue vot­ing is the idea that being wrong on a sin­gle issue may dis­qual­i­fy a can­di­date from office.”
  7. My Holy Land Vaca­tion (Tom Bis­sell, Harpers): “I excuse myself and stroll out­side. I notice that some­one else has also walked out ear­ly: Pas­tor Mar­ty. He tells me that he was trou­bled by the vio­lence of the Israeli Redneck’s speech. I tell Pas­tor Mar­ty that I don’t fault a man who’s fought in four wars for sound­ing like a lunatic. What both­ers me is the way peo­ple were applaud­ing him.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.

A Quote To Ponder

“Stan­ford stu­dents are good at being good at things. Your Chris­tian­i­ty can’t just be one more thing you’re good at. To be good miss­es the point. The point is not what you do but what Jesus has done.” Seth Vil­le­gas

Something Amusing To End On

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 50

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

  1. What are the most-cit­ed pub­li­ca­tions in the social sci­ences (accord­ing to Google Schol­ar)? (Elliot Green, Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics Impact Blog): I am famil­iar with many of them, but some I have nev­er even heard of. Appar­ent­ly I am less well-read than I thought.
  2. The False Promise of DNA Test­ing (Matthew Shaer, The Atlantic): DNA test­ing exon­er­ates some but false­ly impli­cates oth­ers.
  3. Good Cit­i­zen­ship as Barack Oba­ma and Clarence Thomas See It (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “There are real diver­gences in the ways that Oba­ma and Thomas view cit­i­zen­ship, but their approach­es are more com­ple­men­tary than con­tra­dic­to­ry. Tak­en togeth­er, their advice encom­pass­es the per­son­al and the polit­i­cal, afford­ing a bet­ter por­trait of the whole cit­i­zen than either offers in iso­la­tion.”
  4. The cul­ture wars play out in the most fas­ci­nat­ing ways:
    • Media Want To Make Sure You Nev­er Hear About The Lit­tle Sis­ters of the Poor (Mol­lie Hem­ing­way, The Fed­er­al­ist): “A case of “Lit­tle Sis­ters of the Poor” vs. “Pow­er­ful Men in Gov­ern­ment” is a gift from the edi­to­r­i­al gods…. If any Repub­li­can pres­i­dent went to war against a group called Lit­tle Sis­ters of the Poor, that edi­to­r­i­al gift would be unwrapped on every front page of every news­pa­per in the land.” (addi­tion­al com­men­tary at GetRe­li­gion)
    • Relat­ed: Pro­fes­sor Michael McConnell on Zubik v. Bur­well (Michael McConnell, Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “the deci­sion was basi­cal­ly a qui­et, face-sav­ing, non-prece­dent-set­ting defeat for the gov­ern­ment.”
    • How The Fight Over Trans­gen­der Kids Got A Lead­ing Sex Researcher Fired (Jesse Sin­gal, NY Mag): this is a very long piece which I found utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. It shows that for some peo­ple 90% agree­ment is not enough: “And if you look close­ly at what real­ly hap­pened — if you read the review (which CAMH has now pulled off of its web­site), speak with the activists who effec­tive­ly wrote large swaths of it, exam­ine the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence, and talk to for­mer GIC clin­i­cians and the par­ents of patients they worked with, it’s hard not to come to an uncom­fort­able, polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect con­clu­sion: Zucker’s defend­ers are right. This was a show tri­al.”
    • Yes, my sex­u­al­i­ty is a choice: Why I reject the “born this way” nar­ra­tive (Mar­cie Bian­co, Salon):  “The pro­gres­sive move away from iden­ti­ty cat­e­gories negates the need for the nor­ma­tive, ‘born this way’ nar­ra­tive that has been used to social­ly val­i­date them…. if sex­u­al­i­ty is social­ly con­struct­ed and expressed through cul­ture, then there is no norm, nor is there deviance.”
    • State-Man­dat­ed Mourn­ing for Abort­ed Fetus­es (Emma Green, The Atlantic): I am some­what baf­fled that this sto­ry doesn’t men­tion the Cen­ter for Med­ical Progress videos from last year. There is clear­ly a rela­tion­ship.
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Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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