Tag: LGBTQ

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 342

the long collections of links are at the end — punchy stuff up top

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

This is volume 342, which is 666 in base 7. Do with that information as you see fit.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead. (Emma Camp, New York Times): “…my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights protests and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.”
    • This is a strong column. And the anecdote about her first amendment sign is amusing.
  2. We’re All Sinners, and Accepting That Is Actually a Good Thing (Tish Harrison Warren, New York Times): “My favorite definition of sin comes from the English author Francis Spufford. He says that most of us in the West think of sin as a word that ‘basically means “indulgence” or “enjoyable naughtiness.“ ‘ Instead, he calls sin ‘the human propensity to mess things up’ — only he doesn’t use the word ‘mess,’ and his word is probably closer to the truth of things.”
    • This sentence from later on was quite good: “The Lutheran theologian Martin Marty wrote that we live in a culture where ‘everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven.’ ”
  3. Women who self-objectify are less aware of the cold during nights out, study finds (Beth Elwood, PsyPost): “Self-objectification is when a person is overly concerned with how others perceive their appearance. When people self-objectify, they view themselves as objects of attraction. Interestingly, a greater tendency to self-objectify has been associated with reduced attention to one’s bodily processes, for example, difficulty identifying feelings of hunger.”
    • “Self-objectify.” I love when we come up with new words that we don’t need. Vain will do fine, thank you. And I doubt this is as gendered as the headline suggests — I see frat bros in their muscle shirts even when it is chilly out. Vain people are apparently not lying when they say they don’t feel the cold.
  4. A feud between mail carriers, wild turkeys comes to a deadly climax near Sacramento (Christian Martinez, LA Times): “For months, mail carriers in the Sacramento County enclave of Arden-Arcade have been terrorized by wild turkeys, at times disrupting deliveries. This week, tensions between the fowl and one U.S. Postal Service worker reached a violent climax when the carrier killed a turkey while on duty, officials said, prompting an investigation by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.”
    • If a crime was committed then California laws need reform. If self-defense is a legitimate excuse in human death how much more when an animal is killed? I stan the letter carrier.
  5. On Ukraine:
    • Why Forecasting War Is Hard (Richard Hanania, Substack): “If North Korea can maintain a formidable army, I suspect that Russia can too no matter how bad sanctions get.… I keep trying to play the scenario out in my head as to what a Russian loss looks like and it’s hard to see it.”
    • Ukraine is around the same size as Texas. (My Life Elsewhere)
    • The U.S. Is Not at War, But Its Civil Society Is Mobilizing Against Russia (Benjamin Parker, The Bulwark): “While no state of war exists between the government of the United States and the government of Russia, a sort of opt-in, cultural-economic quasi-war exists between American civil society and the Russian government. The same goes for many if not all of the other countries arrayed against Russia. This raises lots of interesting and difficult questions…”
    • Related: Putin Dons President Xi Mask So Companies Will Stop Boycotting Them (Babylon Bee): ouch
    • Go Ahead. Pray for Putin’s Demise. (Tish Harrison Warren, Christianity Today): “Very often in the imprecatory psalms, we are asking that people’s evil actions would ricochet back on themselves. We are not praying that violence begets more violence or that evil starts a cycle of vengeance or retaliation. But we are praying that people would be destroyed by their own schemes and, as my professor prayed, that bombs would explode in bombers’ faces.”
    • They Predicted the Ukraine War. But Did They Still Get It Wrong? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s a curious feature of Western debate since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that a school of thought that predicted some version of this conflict has been depicted as discredited by the partial fulfillment of its prophecies.”
    • Ukraine’s Believers and the ‘Christian’ Putin (Mindy Belz, Wall Street Journal): “Pro-Russian fighters in Donbas seized churches and Christian universities, some violently. Militiamen abducted, tortured and killed four Pentecostal deacons. Their bodies were found in a mass grave along with two dozen others. One watchdog group, the European Evangelical Alliance, called Donbas ‘the area of Europe where the church suffers the most.’ ” Recommended by an alumnus.
    • Facebook allows war posts urging violence against Russian invaders (Munsif Vengattil & Elizabeth Culliford, Reuters): “The calls for the leaders’ deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method, one email said, in a recent change to the company’s rules on violence and incitement.”
      • It’s like a modern-day version of the religious gymnastics Jesus condemned in Mark 7:9–13. Facebook is opposed to calls for violence except when they are not.
    • Why white evangelical Christians are Putin’s biggest American fan base (Anthea Butler, MSNBC): “…more pro-Putin American evangelicals are coming into sharp focus. Televangelist Pat Robertson proclaimed that Putin is ‘being compelled by God’ to invade Ukraine — his take on Putin’s motivations is questionable at best, but his support for Putin as part of a divine plan is notable.”
      • Ummm… not a Pat Robertson fanboy here, but I feel the need to point out to the author that Judas was part of a divine plan. Being part of a divine plan is not automatically commendable. The article is interesting regardless.
    • The Real Russia ‘Reset’: Reassessing US Sanctions Policy Against Russia (Daniel P. Ahn, Russia Matters):  “…the pecuniary cost of sanctions to Russia has been larger than previously estimated, but these sanctions have had an effect on domestic politics that is not necessarily favorable to U.S. interests. Namely, the Russian government’s attempts to protect economic sectors it considers strategic have made the country’s powerful elites even more dependent on the Kremlin, while the bottom-line costs are borne by ordinary people.”
      • This is recent yet from before the current sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine (and thus less caught up in the moment). Recommended by a student.
  6. On the pandemic:
    • Tolerating COVID Misinformation Is Better Than the Alternative (Conor Friedersdor, The Atlantic): “On December 30, 2019, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital in Hubei, China, began to warn friends and colleagues about the outbreak of a novel respiratory illness. Four days later, he was summoned to appear before local authorities, who reprimanded him for ‘making false comments’ that ‘severely disturbed the social order.’ In hindsight, Li was the first person accused of disseminating medical misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, despite the fact that he was telling the truth.”
    • Secondary Attack Rates for Omicron and Delta Variants of SARS-CoV‑2 in Norwegian Households (Jørgensen, Nygård & Kacelnik, JAMA): “Secondary attack rate [chance of transmitting to someone else in your household] was 25.1% (95% CI, 24.4%-25.9%) when the variant of the index case was Omicron, 19.4% (95% CI, 19.0%-19.8%) when it was Delta, and 17.9% (95% CI, 17.5%-18.4%) when it was nonclassified.”
      • This is straight-up surprising to me. If you got COVID there was only a 1/5 to 1/4 chance of spreading it to the people who live with you. This is based on national-level Norwegian data and I don’t know enough about Norway’s architecture, culture, or COVID restrictions compared to the USA to know how well this maps to us, but it’s really interesting. For context, when I got COVID so did most (but not all) of my family.
    • An Anti-Vax Judge Is Preventing the Navy From Deploying a Warship (Mark Joseph Stern, Slate): “The Navy and the federal judiciary are therefore in a standoff. The Navy will not deploy Doe’s warship until he is stripped of command [because of his response to COVID]. Merryday will not allow it to do so. As a result, Merryday has effectively taken a 10,000 ton, $1.8 billion guided-missile destroyer out of commission.”
      • This is more of an op-ed than an article and is very hostile to the officer and the judge. Nonetheless interesting.
    • Destroyer can’t deploy because CO won’t get COVID vaccine, Navy says (Geoff Ziezulewicz, Navy Times): “But according to Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel, a religious freedom non-profit representing the plaintiffs, the government is ‘putting in these histrionic kinds of statements into the record that are completely contrary to the evidence.’ While Navy leaders have professed lost confidence in the CO, they still sent him and his ship out to sea for two weeks of training, Staver told Navy Times on Monday. ‘When this was filed in court saying the ship is not deployable because they lost confidence in the Commander, the Commander was on board the ship out to sea for two weeks of testing and training for military readiness,’ Staver said.”
      • A more comprehensive accounting. The legal context about the requirements of RFRA at the end are clarifying.
  7. Florida’s education bill:
    • For the bill: Why are they really wanting to talk to 1st graders about sexuality? (Peter Heck, Substack): “What am I missing? Why are there people so invested in talking to kindergartners about sex that they are railing against this law and rallying Hollywood, media, and their entire progressive pop culture apparatus into misrepresenting and reversing it?”
    • For the bill: “Don’t Say Gay” is a lie (Allie Beth Stuckey, World): “..what is the well-meaning, reasonable opposition to this bill? I am hard-pressed to think of one valid reason, even as I have attempted a good faith effort of putting myself in a progressive’s shoes. The most charitable explanation I can give is that most people angrily protesting and reporting on the bill have not read it.”
    • Against the bill: Bills like ‘Don’t Say Gay’ hurt LGBTQ youth already at high risk of suicide (Amit Paley, USA Today): “LGBTQ youth are already placed at significantly increased risk for suicide because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized. The Trevor Project’s  2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, capturing the experiences of nearly 35,000 LGBTQ youth across the United States, found that 42% of respondents seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of trans and nonbinary youth.”
    • The above claim in academic context: Suicide by Clinic-Referred Transgender Adolescents in the United Kingdom (Michael Biggs, Archives of Sexual Behavior): “From 2010 to 2020, four patients were known or suspected to have died by suicide, out of about 15,000 patients (including those on the waiting list). To calculate the annual suicide rate, the total number of years spent by patients under the clinic’s care is estimated at about 30,000. This yields an annual suicide rate of 13 per 100,000 (95% confidence interval: 4–34). Compared to the United Kingdom population of similar age and sexual composition, the suicide rate for patients at the GIDS was 5.5 times higher.”
      • Summary: this study suggests that UK youth who consider themselves trans are more likely to attempt suicide than their peers but at a much lower rate than the fifty percent which is often thrown around. The suicide rate among this population is actually thousands of times smaller than that, slightly above one hundredth of one percent. Each of those deaths is a tragedy, and having an accurate understanding of the problem is essential to planning effective societal responses.
      • Incidentally, this far lower number is actually compatible with the 50% claim in the preceding article when the phrase “seriously considered attempting suicide” is rightly understood. The academic paper delves into some relevant considerations and I commend it to you.

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 Asymmetric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t easily justify. If someone were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win easily. We would respond by cutting that person out of our life, and continuing to do the thing.” This entire series of articles (this is the fourth, the others are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth reading. It’s a very interesting way to think about the limits of reason and the wisdom hidden in tradition. First shared in volume 206.

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 340

Lots of Ukraine/Russia links, plus more entertaining links than normal as a compensation.

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

This is volume 340, which is cool because it’s a multiple of 17 and I really like the number 17.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. On Ukraine and Russia: a lot of links here, just open the interesting titles in new tabs.
    • To Stay and Serve: Why We Didn’t Flee Ukraine (Vasyl Ostryi, Gospel Coalition): “How should the church respond when there is a growing threat of war? When there is constant fear in society? I’m convinced that if the church is not relevant at a time of crisis, then it is not relevant in a time of peace.… while the church may not fight like the nation, we still believe we have a role to play in this struggle. We will shelter the weak, serve the suffering, and mend the broken. And as we do, we offer the unshakable hope of Christ and his gospel.” Respect.
    • We lack the ability to ideate and innovate on foreign policy (Melissa Wear, Substack): “Why is it that the media and experts marveled so much at the unprecedented sharing of intelligence on President Putin’s next moves? Because it was something new. And it’s no surprise it comes from the intelligence community. They and those in the military and defense are not as often cultivated under the banner of progress and peace and the End of History in typical IR and political sciences courses, narratives, and hallways of power.”
    • We’re All Ukrainians Now (David French, The Dispatch): “No one claims that Ukraine is a perfect country. Like many former Soviet republics, it has struggled to find its footing. It’s endured authoritarianism, and it battles corruption. But, in Lewis’s words, it is ‘not in the least aggressive.’ It ‘asks only to be let alone.’ As a nation that has endured its own aggressive attacks, how can we not empathize? How can we not do what we reasonably can to deter Russian aggression and help Ukrainians defend themselves?” 
    • Thoughts On Shitpost Diplomacy (Tanner Greer, personal blog): “The American diplomat who posted this meme should have known this. He or she was almost certainly a Foreign Service Officer in the Public Diplomacy cone; a public diplomat’s first charge is learning how to communicate persuasively to the people of the region stationed in. It is not that this officer lacked the raw intelligence to fulfill this role: four out of every five applicants fail the Foreign Service’s selective entrance tests. It is what this diplomat did after receiving his or her post that mattered. This diplomat did not study. Memes like these are the product of a culture that retweets more than it reads.”
    • On Ukraine (George Weigel, First Things): “For months now, the world press has described Russian troop deployments along Ukraine’s borders as spearheads of a possible invasion. The truth, however, is that Russia invaded Ukraine seven years ago, when it annexed Crimea and Russian ‘little green men’ ignited a war in eastern Ukraine that has taken over 14,000 lives and displaced over a million people. Whatever the current military developments, a Russian invasion of Ukraine has not been ‘imminent’; the invasion is ongoing.”
    • Amid War and Rumors of War, Ukraine Pastors Preach and Prepare (Jayson Casper, Christianity Today): “Preaching on the Sermon on the Mount’s injunction toward peacemaking, Kulakevych continued his laser-sharp focus on the possible Russian invasion. Five weeks ago, as the separatist conflict in the eastern Donbas region began to escalate, he surveyed the Bible for its teaching on ‘wars and rumors of war.’ He followed that with an application of ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled’ and, on the next Sunday, a treatise on worry.”
    • Russia Keeps Punishing Evangelicals in Crimea (Kate Shellnutt and Forum 18, Christianity Today): “Since Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014—one of the central points of conflict in the current clash between the two countries—Protestant Christians in the territory have faced greater government penalties for practicing their faith.”
    • Russia’s space agency warns US sanctions could ‘destroy’ cooperation on the International Space Station (Kristin Fisher, CNN): “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the International Space Station (ISS) from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or…Europe?” Rogozin said. “There is also the possibility of a 500-ton structure falling on India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, therefore all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?” Recommended by an alumnus.
    • Putin as a man of ideas (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “If you write books, whether good or bad ones, and wonder whether your work matters, I suggest the answer lies before you on your TV screen each evening. Russia is a nation of ideas, led by people who are obsessed with ideas. The rest of the world, most of all Europe, will need better ideas in turn.”
    • Putin’s spiritual destiny (Giles Fraser,  UnHerd): “Last year, on the anniversary of the baptism of the Rus, [Patriarch] Kirill preached to his people, urging them to stay true to Vladimir’s conversion and the blood of the orthodox martyrs. He told them to love ‘our homeland, our people, our rulers and our army’. The Western secular imagination doesn’t get this. It looks at Putin’s speech the other evening, and it describes him as mad — which is another way of saying we do not understand what is going on. And we show how little we understand by thinking that a bunch of sanctions is going to make a blind bit of difference. They won’t.”
    • Putin’s Attack on Ukraine Is a Religious War (John Schindler, Substack): “Every secular geostrategic challenge cited as a reason for Putin’s aggression – NATO expansion, Western military moves, oil and gas politics – existed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to limit his attacks on Ukraine to Crimea and the Southeast. What’s changed since then that makes his effort to subdue all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the Kremlin? The creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, with official American backing, is the difference, and Moscow believes this was all a nefarious U.S. plot to divide world Orthodoxy at Russia’s expense. Clearly Putin has decided that reclaiming Ukraine and its capital, ‘the mother of Russian cities,’ for Russian Orthodoxy is worth a major war. Make no mistake, this is a religious war, even if almost nobody in the West realizes it.“This is in the mix. I don’t know what percentage of the mix it is, but it’s definitely in the mix.
    • War and dating apps (swipe left) (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “Ukrainian women in second city Kharkiv — just 20 miles from tyrannical Vladimir Putin’s vast invasion force — have been stunned by a salvo of admirers in uniform. Hunky Russian troops called Andrei, Alexander, Gregory, Michail and a bearded Chechen fighter nicknamed ‘Black’ were among dozens whose profiles popped up.” This is a link to a summary of an article from the Sun. The summary is enough, but if you click through you’ll see actual Tinder photos.
  2. I spent six months in a cult. They’re still here on campus. (Camille Williams, The Daily Northwestern): “So, you are probably wondering: how did I get out? …Some may call it a gut instinct; I call it the Holy Spirit within me squirming in revolt. After that conversation, I ran out of my bedroom and yelled to my mother, ‘I accidentally joined a cult.’ After she went from confused laughter to vowing to throw hands with these people, I finally started to feel this burden release.”
    • This is an article by a student in Chi Alpha at Northwestern. She was in Chi Alpha, got sucked into a cult, and then got out and returned to Chi Alpha.
  3. Gangsters want to be good people too (Chris Blattman, blog): “I remember meeting one gang leader on the streets of Chicago. We were standing in line at a nacho and ice cream truck (yes that exists) chatting. I was trying to understand how one of the violence reduction programs I was working on affected his operations. After all, we were trying to recruit away his best young men—his star dealers and shooters. We wanted to get them into other kinds of jobs. Surely he was frustrated. On the contrary. He was delighted. ‘I only do this for the boys,’ he said. ‘They need something to do. Your program is even better. I’m happy they’re going.’ In his mind, the violent drug-dealing was a public employment program, and he the administrator.”
  4. Some Canadian Convoy Aftermath:
    • Convoy Crackdown (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “Family members having trouble living their lives is being treated not as a bug but as a feature. The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children, it seems. This extends as noted above to those who provide financial assistance to those engaging in disapproved activities, and that such retaliation will continue to happen after the activities in question cease, so not only is one without one’s money and other assets, and without the ability to spend what one does have, others may reasonably fear that helping you not end up on the street might land them in the same situation.” Emphasis in original.
    • Trudeau ends use of Emergencies Act, says ‘situation is no longer an emergency’ (Nick Boisvert, CBC): “The Senate was in the midst of debating the act on Wednesday but withdrew the motion shortly after Trudeau made his announcement.” I am glad the emergency measures have been lifted, but what should concern us all is that this is now on the table as an option for otherwise rights-based governments.
    • What Led to Canada’s Crisis (Nathan Pinkoski,First Things): “The crisis had its origins in material conditions unique to Canada. A combination of elite overproduction and Canada’s position in the shadow of the United States has produced an ideologically supercharged managerial class that has accelerated the adoption of a new kind of emergency politics.“The author is at the nearby Zephyr Institute.
  5. By Any Other Name (Helena, Substack): “UK NHS referral data shows a 4000% increase in pediatric gender service referrals (not a typo). So-called ‘gender dysphoria’, which was once a very rare diagnosis that described mostly prepubescent boys and adult men, is now most commonly diagnosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explosive numbers are a result of increased societal acceptance, and that at long last trans people are coming out of hiding and living as their authentic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see comparable rates of transgender identity across all age groups and between both sexes, but its disproportionately adolescent females feeling that warm and fuzzy inclusive acceptance.” A very personal narrative. Long, recommended.
  6. The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects (Apoorva Mandavilli, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” My level of confidence in our public health agencies cannot go much lower. And sadly, in an attempt to prevent people believing disapproved thoughts the CDC has inflamed conspiracy theorists. Outrageous.

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 From Midwest Drug Dealer to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspiring Story (Yasmin Samrai, Stanford Review): “To justify his criminal behaviour, he told himself that though selling pot was illegal, it wasn’t immoral. This theory came crashing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres discovered that the burglars had nearly mistaken his house for his neighbor’s, he realized that selling drugs put other people’s safety in jeopardy. ‘I was shocked and sickened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black market and my actions had unintended consequences.’” What a wild story. 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 335

spicier content than normal — you have been warned

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

This is volume 335. The number 335 is pretty cool because it is divisible by the number of primes below it (335 = 67 · 5, and there are 67 primes less than 335).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No, Religious Freedom Doesn’t Send People to Hell (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “Religious freedom is a restriction on the power of the state to set itself up as a mediator between God and humanity. It is not an affirmation of idolatry, just as saying, ‘The government shouldn’t take your baby away and raise your children’ is not an affirmation of bad parenting. Saying parents should raise their children, instead of the government, does not mean everyone’s parenting is good.”
  2. About identity issues
    • No, the Revolution Isn’t Over (N.S. Lyons, Substack): “In what is rapidly becoming one of my preferred explanations for the Revolution, the evolutionary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has identified ‘elite overproduction’ as having been one of the top drivers of revolution and civil conflict throughout history. He points to the tendency for decadent societies to produce far more overeducated elites than there are elite-level jobs, leading to large numbers of underemployed, resentful elite-class intellectuals of the type who tend pine after the position and status they ‘deserve’ and eventually start spending their free time starting revolutionary cells.”
      • This is long and full of insight. And very, very spicy. I have no idea who the author is — N.S. Lyons is a pen name for a DC area analyst with expertise in the Chinese Communist Party. I assume he finds the pen name necessary to protect his professional reputation when he writes about American culture. Did I mention it was spicy?
    • The Trans Movement Is Not About Rights Anymore (Andrew Sullivan, Substack): “This week, the writer Colin Wright posed on Twitter the following question: ‘What rights do trans people currently not have but want that don’t involve replacing biological sex with one’s subjective ‘gender identity’?’ And the response was, of course, crickets. The truth is: the 6–3 Bostock decision places trans people in every state under the protection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the sturdy prohibition on sex discrimination. A Trump nominee wrote the ruling. What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution.”
    • Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto (Jordan Peterson, National Post): “My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?”
    • Being Jewish in an Unraveling America (Bari Weiss, Substack): “The bad guy was killed. The good guys were saved. It doesn’t often turn out that way. All the Jews I know—even the atheists—are thanking God.  But why, despite my gratitude, do I feel so much rage? Why does it feel like there is so little comfort to be found? What has changed? I did not feel this way in the horrific aftermath of the Tree of Life massacre—the most lethal in all of American Jewish history.… What I now see is this: In America captured by tribalism and dehumanization, in an America swept up by ideologies that pit us against one another in a zero-sum game, in an America enthralled with the poisonous idea that some groups matter more than others, not all Jews—and not all Jewish victims—are treated equally. What seems to matter most to media pundits and politicians is not the Jews themselves, but the identities of their attackers. And it scares me.”
  3. The Pro-Life Movement’s Moral Doublespeak (Aaron Renn, Substack): “But the modern Christian church has put forth a fake reality in which women are almost always the victim except in rare, extreme cases. They seem incapable of admitting that women who abort their babies know what they are doing. They can’t bring themselves to even acknowledge that women initiate about 70% of all divorces. When pastors write entire books about marriage and never once mention the basic and well known fact that women file for the vast majority of divorces – and that’s every Christian marriage book I’ve ever read – they aren’t serious people. They justify and excuse almost any female behavior, and even twist reality to somehow blame men for it.” There are several uncomfortable insights in this essay.
  4. China’s Births Hit Historic Low, a Political Problem for Beijing (Steven Lee Myers and Alexandra Stevenson, New York Times): “The number of births fell to 10.6 million in 2021, compared with 12 million the year before, according to figures reported on Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics. That was fewer even than the number in 1961, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s economic policy, resulted in widespread famine and death.”
  5. Buy Things, Not Experiences (Harold Lee, personal blog):  “…the focus on minimalism sounds like a new form of conspicuous consumption. Now that even the poor can afford material goods, let’s denigrate goods while highlighting the remaining luxuries that only the affluent can enjoy and show off to their friends.”
    • This is a short, well-argued contrarian take. Stuff like this is catnip to me.
  6. About the pandemic:
    • Hong Kongers Rebel Against Order to Hand Over Hamsters (Rob Quinn, Newser): “After a woman and 11 hamsters in the pet shop she worked in tested positive for COVID, authorities said Tuesday that anybody who bought a hamster on or after Dec. 22 should hand it in to be euthanized. But while the territory generally has a high level of compliance with COVID orders, the hamster order was widely seen as a step too far…”
    • To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doctors (Aaron E. Carroll, New York Times): “Caring for an individual and protecting a population require different priorities, practices and ways of thinking. While it may sound counterintuitive, to heal the country and put our Covid-19 response on the right track, we need to think less like doctors.” The author is both a physician and also the chief health officer at Indiana University.
    • Omicron optimist, pessimist or fatalist – which are you? (Tim Harford, personal blog): “Is this the point at which we should shrug our shoulders and give up? Omicron has prompted three kinds of reaction: optimism, pessimism and fatalism.… What’s confusing is that all three views may be right. Omicron is quite plausibly mild, catastrophic and inevitable all at once.” The author is a British economist. 
    • Lying About Covid For ‘International Harmony’ (Rod Dreher, The American Conservative): “Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases and their work with similar viruses in Wuhan’s laboratories: they were subject to fierce edicts from a ruthless, totalitarian regime. It is more shocking to discover in emails released this week that some western scientists were also saying different things in public from what they thought in private.” Contains excerpts from a paywalled article.
    • School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Haven’t Reckoned With It. (Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine): “It is always easier to diagnose these pathologies when they are taking place on the other side. You’ve probably seen the raft of papers showing how vaccine uptake correlates with Democratic voting and COVID deaths correlate with Republican voting. Perhaps you have marveled at the spectacle of Republican elites actively harming their own audience. But the same thing Fox News hosts were doing to their elderly supporters, progressive activists were doing to their side’s young ones.” It may not be obvious, but this article dovetails very nicely with the Dreher article about elites not being truthful and not reckoning with mistakes.
  7. The long-term effects of protestant activities in China (Yuyu Chen, Hui Wang, Se Yan, Journal of Comparative Economics): “Our findings imply that late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Protestant missionaries pioneered that modernization movement by disseminating, along with Christianity, Western science and technology to even the most remote regions of China. Such efforts accelerated the pace of modernization, contributed to the accumulation of human capital, and reshaped the social values of local people. Although these historical legacies of missionaries’ undertakings were suppressed during the Cultural Revolution, they rapidly resurged and began to contribute to socioeconomic developments when China began to open up and reform.” The authors appear to be scholars at Peking 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 Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks‐Ramage, Medium): “How, in famously liberal Hollywood and among statistically progressive millennials, had good old‐fashioned evangelism [sic] gained popularity? In this context, a church like Reality L.A. seemed like something that could never work. But that evening, as I reflected on the troubled actress and the psychic brutalities inflicted by the entertainment industry, it occurred to me that I had underestimated Hollywood’s biggest product: lost souls.” First shared in volume 192 

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 333

ways in which many universities are misguided

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

This is volume 333, which makes me wonder what I’ll do when I get to volume 666. Halfway to a disturbing milestone!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. COVID perspectives, many critical of university policies.
    • Universities’ Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason (Marty Makary, Bari Weiss’s Substack): “According to the CDC, the risk of a fully vaccinated adult ending up in the hospital for Covid was 1 in 26,000 for the week ending in November 27. Who was that one person? Not a college student.” The author is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins.
    • University COVID Policies Are Bad for Students (Emily Oster, The Atlantic): “I don’t know if universities were right to go largely or fully remote in 2020. The world before vaccines was a different one, and the choices were difficult. I am certain, though, that moving to remote instruction is the wrong choice now.” The author is an economist at Brown.
    • Are Princeton and Yale imprisoning their students? (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “I doubt these policies will significantly limit the spread of Covid. But my objection is more fundamental: They put universities in the untenable position of both panicking about Covid and treating Covid as trivial. Given the purpose of a university as an educational leader, a university that is hypocritical and rhetorically corrupt is failing outright.” The author is an economist at George Mason University. The link is to a non-paywalled excerpt of a paywalled article.
    • Covid 1/6/22: The Blip (Zvi Mowshowitz, Less Wrong): “If you don’t want your students infected in January, you have zero options. You do have the option to ensure they are not infected on campus by not opening the campus, in which case the infections will not be your fault, but the infections will still happen.” Long and informative about many things.
    • There is good news (Katelyn Jetelina, Substack): “Vaccines are working. And not just working okay, they are working incredibly well. I know this is hard to believe when everyone around us is testing positive. But vaccines are doing their primary job: keeping people out of the hospital.” The author is an epidemiologist in the University of Texas system.
    • I Saw Firsthand What It Takes to Keep COVID Out of Hong Kong. It Felt Like a Different Planet. (Caroline Chen, ProPublica): “Hong Kong’s quarantine procedures are among the strictest in the world. The city is committed to a ‘zero-COVID’ policy, which means it will take every possible measure to prevent a single case. Its policies for travelers have become progressively stringent.”
    • The C.D.C. Is Hoping You’ll Figure Covid Out on Your Own (Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times): “The government can help us pull out of this fog, but it should always be based on being honest with the public. We aren’t expecting officials to have crystal balls about everything, but we want them to empower and inform us while preparing for eventualities — good or bad. Two years is too long to still be hoping for luck to get through all this.”
  2. Jesus Coordinator (Raymond Partsch III, The Daily Iberian): “For years now, the Ragin’ Cajuns have stayed the night before a home game at the Hilton Garden Inn across the street from Cajun Field. The hotel’s swimming pool has served for dozens of baptisms performed by Treuil. ‘The Hilton may have more baptisms than the local churches,’ Wingerter joked. ‘But in all seriousness, it is such an incredible thing to witness. To watch them find their path and Eric help them with that is special.’ ” This was my campus pastor. Really good article about him.
  3. Venture Capitalists See Profit in Prayer (Daniel Silliman, Christianity Today): “…while prayer, Bible reading, and Scripture meditation will always be free, the smartphone apps that help people do those things in 2022 offer the promise of great potential profit.” I have complex feelings about this.
  4. What It Means To See Jesus (Casey Cep, The New Yorker): “What Hudson calls appearances are communal visions, with more than one person seeing the same image of Jesus at the same time; apparitions are when Jesus seems to be present in the physical world, as though anyone can see him, yet only the visionary actually does so; with visions, the visionary alone can see Jesus, and is fully aware that no one else can.“This is way more interesting than I expected.
  5. China harvests masses of data on Western targets, documents show (Cate Cadell, Washington Post): “The exact scope of China’s government public opinion monitoring industry is unclear, but there have been some indications about its size in Chinese state media. In 2014, the state-backed newspaper China Daily said more than 2 million people were working as public opinion analysts. In 2018, the People’s Daily, another official organ, said the government’s online opinion analysis industry was worth ‘tens of billions of yuan,’ equivalent to billions of dollars, and was growing at a rate of 50 percent a year.”
  6. Trans prisoners ‘switch gender again’ once freed from women’s units (Marcello Mega and John Boothman, The Times): “The disclosure — in a study published in the British Journal of Criminology — has raised fresh concerns about self-identification of gender posing a risk to women’s safety as first minister Nicola Sturgeon prepares to press ahead with gender recognition legislation this year.”
  7. Top-Down Letdown (Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch): “You know what voter suppression, voter fraud, and lesbian vampires all have in common? They all played the same role in the 2020 presidential election, with equal effect.” Goldberg is a delightful wordsmith.

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. The article is 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 329

a shorter than usual roundup

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

This is the 329th installment. 329 is, apparently, the number of forests (a type of graph) with 10 vertices.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Loving Lies (Bill Adair, Air Mail): “Interviewing Glass can be frustrating, because he frets so much about getting every detail right. He’ll stop midsentence to ponder the month or day that something happened. Was that lunch in late 2014 or early 2015? He’ll check. He knows he has a reputation as a liar and that he has already blown a lifetime of credibility.”
    • Quite a story. You will need to provide your email address to unlock it and it is 100% worth it.
  2. Denzel Washington, Man on Fire (Maureen Dowd, New York Times): “The enemy is the inner me,” he said. “The Bible says in the last days — I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know — but it says we’ll be lovers of ourselves. The No. 1 photograph today is a selfie, ‘Oh, me at the protest.’ ‘Me with the fire.’ ‘Follow me.’ ‘Listen to me.’ We’re living in a time where people are willing to do anything to get followed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much information? It’s going fast and it can be manipulated obviously in a myriad of ways. And people are led like sheep to slaughter.”
  3. What I told the students of Princeton (Abigail Shrier, Substack): “…I want you to think for a moment about a young woman here at Princeton. She’s a magnificent athlete named Ellie Marquardt, an all-American swimmer who set an Ivy League record in the 500-meter freestyle event as a freshman. Just before Thanksgiving, Ellie was defeated in the 500-meter, the event she held the record in, by almost 14 seconds by a 22 year old biological male at Penn who was competing on the men’s team as recently as November of 2019. That male athlete now holds multiple U.S. records in women’s swimming, erasing the hard work of so many of our best female athletes, and making a mockery of the rights women fought for generations to achieve.” Emphasis in original.
  4. Even on U.S. Campuses, China Cracks Down on Students Who Speak Out (Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica): “As the regime of Chinese President Xi Jinping reaches across borders to control its citizens wherever they are, its assaults on academic freedom have intensified, according to U.S. national security officials, academics, dissidents and other experts. Chinese intelligence officers are monitoring campuses across the United States with online surveillance and an array of informants motivated by money, ambition, fear or authentic patriotism. A comment in class about Taiwan or a speech at a rally about Tibet can result in retaliation against students and their relatives back home.”
  5. Political articles which caught my attention:
    • I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grateful for His Supreme Court Picks (Erika Bachiochi, New York Times): “Mr. Trump’s economic populism (at least in rhetoric) blasted through the libertarianism that has tended to dominate the G.O.P., a libertarianism that has made the party’s alliance with pro-lifers one of strange bedfellows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any relevance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those single-issue voters will be free to look elsewhere — it will have to offer the country the matrix of ethnic diversity and economic solidarity that Mr. Trump stumbled upon, but without the divisiveness of the man himself.”
    • Democrats fall flat with ‘Latinx’ language (Marc Caputo & Sabrina Rodriguez, Politico): “The numbers suggest that using Latinx is a violation of the political Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no electoral harm,” said Amandi, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s successful Hispanic outreach nationwide in his two presidential campaigns. “Why are we using a word that is preferred by only 2 percent, but offends as many as 40 percent of those voters we want to win?” Shared with me by a student well-suited to assess this controversy. 
    • [Stanford] Senate again denies Mike Pence event funding at meeting revoting on grants (Itzel Luna, Stanford Daily):  “Five senators voted in favor of SCR’s $6,000 funding request to bring former Vice President Mike Pence to campus in the winter quarter. Eight senators abstained and no one voted against the funding which, according to the senators, constituted a failure to receive majority approval.” This reads like a parody of student government.
    • Young Dems more likely to despise the other party (Neal Rothschild, Axios): “[Among college students,] 5% of Republicans said they wouldn’t be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats. 71% of Democrats wouldn’t go on a date with someone with opposing views, versus 31% of Republicans.30% of Democrats — and 7% of Republicans — wouldn’t work for someone who voted differently from them.”

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 Is Christmas a Pagan Rip-off? (Kevin DeYoung, Gospel Coalition): “…whatever the Christmas holiday has become today, it started as a copycat of well-established pagan holidays. If you like Christmas, you have Saturnalia and Sol Invictus to thank. That’s the story, and everyone from liberal Christians to conservative Christians to non-Christians seem to agree that it’s true. Except that it isn’t.” From volume 280.

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 322

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

This is the 322nd installment, and today I learned that 322 is the 12th Lucas number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of Evangelical Leadership (Mark Galli, Substack): “This tendency has only gotten worse, as now the mark of a successful evangelical writer is to get published regularly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s interesting about such pieces is that (a) such writers make a point that affirms the view of the secular publication (on topics like environmental care, racial injustice, sexual abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evangelicals should take the same point of view. However, their writing doesn’t reach the masses of evangelicals who take a contrary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writers are really interested in getting those evangelicals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the mainstream press. Better to try to get such a column published in the most popular Pentecostal outlet, Charisma. Ah, but that would do nothing to enhance the prestige of evangelicals among the culture’s elite.”
    1. This is a SUPER interesting article that makes good points… but the author somehow avoided looking in a mirror while writing it. He was the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today!
    • Follow-up: Falling from Grace into Mercy— or Elite Evangelicalism, Part 2 (Mark Galli, Substack): “But one thing about retirement is the time one has to reflect on one’s career, and I see more clearly how much I was willing to go along to get along, and how much I was part of the system.… I don’t think there is much hope in reforming many things that course through the veins of elite evangelicals.”
  2. Two of the most distressing news items I’ve seen in some time.
  3. Hunting the Satanists (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “…the worldview of QAnon and Yale’s diversity office are surprisingly similar. Both see a world in which Satan, literal or metaphorical, is an active force in the world corrupting individuals and institutions. Satan is powerful but hidden. He only reveals his influence when the corrupted slip-up and by the incorrect use of a word, phrase, or gesture reveal their true natures. Since Satan is powerful and hidden the good people must constantly monitor everyone.” An astutely observed parallel.
  4. It’s Time for a Better and Smarter Alliance Against Porn (David French, The Dispatch): “One of the most fascinating developments of modern times has been the way in which American ideas and American conduct frequently contradict each other. The world of ideas mostly (though not exclusively) has moved left, quickly. Ideas move from progressive fringe to mainstream with stunning speed.… But in the world of conduct, something else is happening. Social conservative lifestyles are making a comeback. Divorce rates are down. Teen pregnancy is down. Abortion rates (abortions per 1,000 women) and ratios (abortions per 1,000 pregnancies) are way down. Single parenting has stabilized, and the percentage of children living with both parents is inching up.”
  5. Please Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “If you think privileged modern Americans shouldn’t have children now because of quality-of-life issues [related to climate change], you implicitly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had children.”
  6. Two tidbits from China:
    • Terror & tourism: Xinjiang eases its grip, but fear remains (Dake Kang, AP News): “Anytime I tried to chat with someone, the minders would draw in close, straining to hear every word. It’s hard to know why Chinese authorities have shifted to subtler methods of controlling the region. It may be that searing criticism from the West, along with punishing political and commercial sanctions, have pushed authorities to lighten up. Or it may simply be that China judges it has come far enough in its goal of subduing the Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities to relax its grip.”
    • The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning (N.S. Lyons, Palladium Magazine): “Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government.… Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with ‘intricate social and cultural problems,’ they ‘tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems’ to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.”
      • Surprisingly engrossing. One of China’s key leaders has accurately diagnosed certain challenges their nation is facing but his solutions are lacking (and evil). And he seems to have come to many of his convictions by visiting America and witnessing our cultural folly.
  7. Don’t Let Religious Liberty Claims Mask Bad Faith Arguments (Daniel Bennett, Christianity Today): “Religious liberty is too important to let it get misused. It’s not a waiver to avoid all inconveniences in life or, worse, a tool to make political statements. For religious liberty to survive political and legal scrutiny in the future, we must safeguard exemptions against abuse.” The author is a political science professor at John Brown 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 When Children Say They’re Trans (Jesse Singal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the possibility of a connection between social influences and gender‐identity exploration among adolescents would require ignoring a lot of what we know about the developing teenage brain—which is more susceptible to peer influence, more impulsive, and less adept at weighing long‐term outcomes and consequences than fully developed adult brains—as well as individual stories like Delta’s.” This is a long and balanced piece which has garnered outrage in some online circles. First shared in volume 157.

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 321

I always try to trim these to seven items. Cutting the 8th was brutal this week — so many good options!

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

This is volume 321, which is not only a number but also a countdown.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care (Abigail Shrier, Bari Weiss’s Substack): “[The] new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic. In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women. Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Times passed, explaining it was ‘outside our coverage priorities right now.’ ”
    • A sobering article, and also a tragic but unsurprising revelation about the New York Times editorial team.
  2. Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “I might be the only person in the world who likes McMansions. They just look like nice, pleasant buildings made by people who want to vaguely enjoy the place where they live. Probably the least offensive thing people are making these days.”
    • Judging from the comments he really struck a chord with the “Whither Tartaria?” piece I linked two weeks ago. Fascinating stuff, highly recommended.
  3. What American Christians Hear at Church (Casey Cep, New Yorker): “Homiletics—the proper name for the art of preaching—is still taught in seminaries and divinity schools, but it is not often studied outside of those institutions. This is regrettable, since many more Americans attend church than subscribe to a newspaper.… Taking advantage of the technologies that have allowed churches to stream services and post them online, Pew has studied the length, language, and content of tens of thousands of sermons, by denomination and tradition, most recently for the nine Sundays before and the Sunday after last fall’s Presidential election.” Quite interesting.
  4. Slavery vs. White Supremacy (Van Gosse & Sean Wilentz, New York Review of Books): “Antislavery and anti-racist politics appeared only in the 1760s—and only in the American colonies. Those politics, hailed by later abolitionists as of world-historical importance, engaged blacks and whites, enslaved and free. Inspired by the Revolution’s egalitarianism, antislavery advocates overcame powerful opposition and enacted the first emancipations of their kind in history, in seven of the thirteen original states.… The United States, in short, was founded not on slavery and white supremacy but amid an unprecedented struggle over slavery and white supremacy, which the Constitution left open.” Illuminating letters between two history professors.
  5. ‘Some are just psychopaths’: Chinese detective in exile reveals extent of torture against Uyghurs (Rebecca Wright, Ivan Watson, Zahid Mahmood and Tom Booth, CNN): “ ‘Kick them, beat them (until they’re) bruised and swollen,’ Jiang said, recalling how he and his colleagues used to interrogate detainees in police detention centers. ‘Until they kneel on the floor crying.’ During his time in Xinjiang, Jiang said every new detainee was beaten during the interrogation process — including men, women and children as young as 14.” The details in this story are dark. I’ve seen other stories with testimonies from former prisoners, this one features one of the guards speaking up in addition to stories from prisoners.
  6. Trainings (Alan Jacobs, personal blog): “Universities don’t usually create their own training modules — they buy products from companies that specialize in that kind of thing. And those companies want to save money by reusing their old code. So they extract the content of their Title IX courses and simply stuff new content into the existing frameworks. Easy-peasy. And the upper-level administrators of the university, who don’t want to spend any more money on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged monster they’ve been handed. But that creates a big problem: the kind of structure needed to communicate to people the contours of a law and the expectations generated by that law is not the kind of structure needed to explore the moral development of a community.”
  7. Yale and the Education of Governing Elites (Tanner Greer, personal blog): “A program conceived to teach future elites how to wisely use state power has morphed into a program teaching them how to wisely oppose it. This transformation is one more illustration of Dashan’s thesis. At Yale we see the American predicament made concrete: an entrenched governing class that enjoys the privileges of elite status but refuses to prepare for the responsibilities of elite station.”

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 311

wide-ranging links with a focus on the pandemic

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues (although I skipped last week because I was on vacation and it was glorious). Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

This is the 311th installment. 311 is something called a permutable prime (aka absolute prime), which means that it is prime no matter how you reorder the digits. In other words because 311, 113, and 131 are all primes they are permutable primes. Nifty!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The New Moral Code of America’s Elite (Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic): “…it’s decent, if you have a problem with someone, to take it up with them before running it up the nearest flagpole. But this is something people with the right views and the best degrees, it seems, simply do not do; just as the distinction between tattling and whistleblowing—resting, as it does, on a sober evaluation of one’s own motives and the stakes at hand—is one they often fail to make.” THIS IS WILD and 100% worth using up a paywall view on.
  2. The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles (Rachel Aviv, New Yorker): “Perhaps the politicians were receptive because the project seemed to be the opposite of the Nazis’ reproductive experiments, with their rigid emphasis on propagating certain kinds of families, or perhaps they were unconcerned because, in their opinion, the boys were already lost.” Actually insane.
  3. “These Bastards Will Never See Our Tears”: How Yulia Navalnaya Became Russia’s Real First Lady (Julia Ioffe, Vanity Fair): “She said, ‘I think there is no chance that they will let him out. He will be in jail for a long time,’ ” Grozev recalls. “You must understand how shocking this conversation was. She’s this wide-eyed, earnest, honest person. She says these things like they’re the most obvious things on earth, but she’s saying very nonobvious things. You have to process what she says before you realize that it’s obvious only in a certain universe.” That universe was the imagined future in which Russia is free and happy.
    • What an absolutely astounding lady. Recommended by a student.
  4. Call it Racism, Not ‘White Supremacy’ (Samuel D. James, Substack): “ ‘Whiteness is a system, not white skin’ is a perfectly plausible reality, but it has the laws of ordinary language working against it, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. My sense is that you can have the language of whiteness or you can have an audience that understands what you’re saying, but you can’t have both.”
  5. A whole passel of pandemic-related articles, all of which are extremely worthwhile.
    • The Noble Lies of COVID-19 (Kerrington Powell & Vinay Prasad, Slate): “Public health messaging is predicated on trust, which overcomes the enormous complexity of the scientific literature, creating an opportunity to communicate initiatives effectively. Still, violation of this trust renders the communication unreliable. When trust is shattered, messaging is no longer clear and straightforward, and instead results in the audience trying to reverse-engineer the statement based on their view of the speaker’s intent.”
    • The Myth of Panic (Tanner Greer, Palladium Magazine): “This is the great lesson of the 2020 coronavirus: We should have been allowed to fear. Alas, our leaders feared our fear more than they feared our deaths. ” The latter half (about the motivations of the ruling class) is particularly insightful. Recommended by an alumnus.
    • ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’ Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients (Dennis Pillion, AL.com): “You kind of go into it thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this person, because they make their own choice,’” Cobia said. “But then you actually see them, you see them face to face, and it really changes your whole perspective, because they’re still just a person that thinks that they made the best decision that they could with the information that they have, and all the misinformation that’s out there. And now all you really see is their fear and their regret. And even though I may walk into the room thinking, ‘Okay, this is your fault, you did this to yourself,’ when I leave the room, I just see a person that’s really suffering, and that is so regretful for the choice that they made.” Sobering.
    • Let’s get more people vaccinated (Matt Yglesias, Substack): “Now if I went around tweeting all day ‘don’t take the vaccines unless you’re highly vulnerable, they’re experimental treatments the FDA hasn’t approved because they say they don’t have enough safety data yet’ people would (rightly) get very mad at me. Spreading that message would (rightly) be considered an anti-social and chaotic thing to be doing. But the message is true, and a good way to cut down on its spread would be to make it not be true, rather than trying to informally stigmatize saying it.”
    • The New COVID Panic (Susan Matthews, Slate): “The most important thing to realize is that breakthrough cases are going to continue to surface in our lives. ‘The goal was never to eradicate COVID from being annoying—it was to eradicate it from being a killer,’ said Dara Kass, an emergency medicine physician in New York. (She emphasized, again, that the vaccines are very good at doing the latter.) And so even while you have likely heard that breakthrough cases are ‘rare,’ that’s a subjective assessment that is probably worth adjusting upward.”
    • Are COVID Restrictions the New TSA? (Richard Hanania, Substack): “It’s like God was designing the easiest moral and utilitarian question possible. Here we have a situation where a disease 1) Spares children 2) Spares those who behave responsibly; and 3) Therefore has a burden that falls almost exclusively on those who behave irresponsibly.” This is an uneven essay but on the whole quite strong.
    • Good morning. Covid is more mysterious than we often admit. (David Leonhardt, New York Times): “Social distancing and especially vaccination can save lives. But much of the ebb and flow of a pandemic cannot be explained by changes in human behavior. That was true with influenza a century ago, and it is true with Covid now. An outbreak often fizzles mysteriously, like a forest fire that fails to jump from one patch of trees to another.” Super interesting!
  6. Inside a KKK murder plot: Grab him up, take him to the river (Jason Dearen, AP News): “A confidential informant had infiltrated the group, and his recordings provide a rare, detailed look at the inner workings of a modern klan cell and a domestic terrorism probe. That investigation would unearth another secret: An unknown number of klansmen were working inside the Florida Department of Corrections, with significant power over inmates, Black and white.” Odd capitalization decisions aside, a worthwhile story.
  7. The Illusion of Porn “Literacy” (Samuel D. James, First Things): “Education is about discernment, yes, but it is also moral formation. No teacher or administrator interested in keeping her career would advocate a curriculum that treated racism the way porn literacy treats smut, as a substance with which to become better acquainted and a more informed consumer. Likewise, any teacher who invited a CEO of Big Tobacco to give a lecture on why his career is satisfying would be sharply rebuked. What we as a society deem harmful and unjust is taught as such.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Aliens and Pronouns (Dilbert): I am genuinely curious what the popular reaction to this strip will be. I wish I had access to his analytics! He’s going to learn some interesting things about our culture. People on Twitter will lose their minds… but Adams must be gambling that most people will find it funny.
  • Shark Fishing (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine minutes.
  • Strange Ways Airlines Cut Costs (QI, YouTube): four minutes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 309

in which I provide my views on sermon originality

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.

TIL that the number 309 is is the smallest number whose 5th power contains every digit at least once. 3095=2,817,036,000,549. I’m really stunned that someone figured that out.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘Sermongate’ Prompts a Quandary: Should Pastors Borrow Words From One Another? (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin wrote of his admiration of a young Presbyterian preacher much respected for his preaching, which was apparently delivered extemporaneously. When a doctrinal dispute erupted in the congregation, however, an adversary recognized that a passage delivered by the preacher had been lifted from an uncredited source. Franklin stuck by the plagiarist. ‘I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others,’ he wrote, ‘than bad ones of his own manufacture.’ ”
    • The appropriate principles seem so obvious to me:
    • Never present someone else’s personal stories as though they happened to you. It’s hard to call that anything other than lying.
    • If you gain an insight from someone else, why would you deprive your hearers of that good insight? USE IT. Credit it in the way that seems most appropriate, but a sermon is not a written resource people are going to cite nor one that people are going to track down your references on. I don’t even think plagiarism is the right term in this conversation: there’s no standard way to cite other sermons nor should there be. People who get a bee in their bonnet about this seem so odd to me.
    • In fact, you should always assume that the messages I deliver have been enriched by insights from others. I love God’s Word and I love my students too much to just give them my own limited observations. My own practice: I copy and paste the text into a Word document. Then I begin typing my insights and constructing a rough outline. Then I consult scholarly and sermonic resources and revise my outline/notes when I realize I’ve misunderstood something or that I missed an important point. Typically that means I read two or three commentaries and will sometimes skim one or two sermons from preachers I respect. If someone’s phrasing is so good I adopt it, I usually add, “I heard a pastor say” or “an academic commentary really helped me out on this point” and sometimes will even give the precise source. But not always. Sometimes citing something verbally breaks up the flow too much. Sometimes after an especially fact-laden message I will send out an email roundup of the most important sources (that tends to happen after apologetic sermons when I’m appealing to extrascriptural facts).
    • It gets complicated with insights I gleaned years ago and have preached multiple times since. Sometimes I don’t even remember that it wasn’t original to me (whether clever phrasing or an entire sermon outline). That’s how learning works! I’m not trying to deceive anyone, but I am 100% confident that I word some things a certain way because someone else worded it that way to me and I thought, “that’s perfect” and now that I’ve said it 70 times I just know that’s how I think about the subject.
    • If you ever want to know if something I said is original to me, just ask. If I quoted someone else (and remember that I have), I’ll be thrilled to point you to a resource that helped me!
  2. What Makes a Cult a Cult? (Zoë Heller, New Yorker): “The good news is that rational objections to flaws in cult doctrine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a powerful impact if and when they occur to the cult members themselves. The analytical mind may be quietened by cult-think, but it is rarely deadened altogether. Especially if cult life is proving unpleasant, the capacity for critical thought can reassert itself.” The focus here is on way-out-there cults. Interesting nonetheless, even given the author’s blind spots (I think it would have been a stronger article if she had mentioned a few secular beliefs as parallels).
  3. Our Unequal Polygamous Past (Conn Carroll, Institute for Family Studies): “This brief history of human sexual relations shows us three things: 1) we are hardwired to form monogamous pair bonds; 2) the privileged among us will always try to monopolize more mates; and 3) we can check the privilege of the powerful by enforcing monogamous cultural norms.”
  4. Wokeness:
    • As a Gay Child in a Christian Cult, I Was Taught to Hate Myself. Then I Joined the Church of Social Justice—and Nothing Changed (Ben Appel, Quillette): “For years, I feared homophobic right-wing evangelicals. But these days, I’m equally wary of the progressive activists who push a distinctly homophobic agenda that denies the biological reality of sex—and who claim that what we are attracted to isn’t male or female bodies per se, but rather male or female gender identities. This outlook effectively imagines away the existence of homosexuality, which, in the real world, is of course rooted in physical attraction based on biological attributes.”
    • If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals (Kevin Drum, personal blog): “It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise since progressives have been bragging publicly about pushing the Democratic Party leftward since at least 2004. Now, I’m personally happy about most of this. But that doesn’t blind me to the fact that “personally happy” means nothing in politics. What matters is what the median voter feels, and Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years:” Interesting and very different from the message I usually hear, which blames polarization on conservatives who are said to have moved much more to the right than liberals have moved to the left.
    • Culture Wars are Long Wars (Tanner Greer, personal blog): “Cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort. They can, however, build up a system of ideas and institutions which will preserve and refine the ideals they hope their community will adopt in the future. The real target of these ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren. Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn. Future generations will be open to values the current generation rejects outright. This will not be apparent at first. Beneath the official comings and goings of the cohorts above, a new consensus forms in in the cohorts below. Ideas will fester among the young, but their impact will be hidden by the inability and inexperience of youth. But the youth do not stay young. Eventually a transition point arrives.” Emphasis in original.
    • What Happened To You? (Andrew Sullivan, Substack): “[We have witnessed a] sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of ‘white supremacy,’ which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.”
    • The West’s cultural revolution is over (Ed West, UnHerd): “Life of Brian couldn’t be made 20 years earlier, and neither could it be made now; its satire of Jesus, a prophet of Islam, would risk upsetting Muslim sensibilities, which it’s fair to say people have become slightly wary of doing. At the very least it would need to cut out the scene pointing fun at a man who, absurdly to the filmmakers and audiences, identifies as a woman; absurd in 1979, as it had been in 1879 and 1779 and in every year before that, but a sacred idea in 2021. It’s sacred in the sense that its believers have captured the moral citadel where the most powerful ideas are protected by taboo, achieved either by emotional argument or intimidation (and both can be effective). This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality.”
  5. Pandemic-related
    • Why Didn’t COVID-19 Kill the Constitution? (Jacob Sullum. Reason): “COVID-19 did not kill the Constitution. But the crisis made it vividly clear that we cannot count on politicians or bureaucrats to worry about limits on their authority, especially when they believe they are doing what is necessary to protect the public from a deadly danger. The task of enforcing those limits falls to judges who are willing to stick their necks out.”
    • What Are the Limits to Governmental Authority over the Church? (Ben Edwards, Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary): “Christians/churches must submit to every government regulation unless it would mean disobeying God (i.e., cause them to sin) or the government is seeking to regulate something outside its sphere of authority.”
  6. On China
    • China Won’t Bury Us, Either (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Garry Kasparov has a pithy way of summing up the past 18 months of tribulation. ‘China gave us the virus,’ the chess and human-rights champion told me over a recent breakfast. ‘And the free world gave us the vaccines.’ ”
    • Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a catastrophe for China and the world (Jon Stokes, personal blog): “The world’s largest, most valuable tech companies are dependent either directly or indirectly on the steady output of TSMC’s fabs. If those fabs went offline or became unavailable in the west because they were controlled by PRC, it would immediately devastate the global economy. An unknowable number of large companies just wouldn’t be able to refill their inventories for an indeterminately long time.” This is about computer chips and how a Chinese invasion of Taiwan will be disastrous for that market (which touches on so many others) no matter how the invasion plays out. Very thoughtful.
  7. Scripps Spelling Bee 2021: Zaila Avant-garde Wins (Maggie Astor and Maria Cramer, New York Times): “Zaila, who just finished eighth grade in her hometown, Harvey, La., showed a prowess for spelling at 10, when her father, who had been watching finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee on ESPN, asked her how to spell the winning word: marocain. Zaila spelled it perfectly. Then he asked her to spell the winning words going back to 1999. She spelled nearly all of them correctly and was able to tell him the books where she had seen them.” Read the whole thing — this kid is amazing at more than spelling! The interface is weird — you’ll have to click “Read more” just before the timeline.

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 Preacher And Politics: Seven Thoughts (Kevin DeYoung, Gospel Coalition): “I have plenty of opinions and convictions. But that’s not what I want my ministry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t comment on abortion or gay marriage or racism or other issues about the which the Bible speaks clearly. And yet, I’m always mindful that I can’t separate Blogger Kevin or Twitter Kevin or Professor Kevin from Pastor Kevin. As such, my comments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more political convictions to myself than I otherwise would.” First shared in volume 150.

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 307

my favorite article this week is about a guy who could quench flames by singing at them

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

This is the 307th installation, which I like because 307 is a prime number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Enduring Lesson of the Galileo Myth (Joe Carter, Gospel Coalition): “While I first heard the story of Galileo in elementary school, it wasn’t until about a decade after I had graduated from college that I finally learned the truth. No doubt some people are just now hearing about it for the first time. How is that possible?”
    • Unless you have done some reading on Galileo, you almost certainly believe untrue things about what happened.
  2. Social Media, Identity, and the Church (Tim Keller, Life In The Gospel): “While extremists can only gain status and belonging on-line, moderates (rightly) fear saying something that will anger others and jeopardize their career or relationships. And so, while extremists’ fragile identities get a great deal of cover on the internet, moderates’ identities are threatened by it.”
  3. The Man Who Put Out Fires with Music (Ted Gioia, Substack): “This experiment excited such skepticism that Kellogg was enlisted to repeat it for a team of Berkeley scientists. The resulting public test on September 6, broadcast live over KGO, is one of the most remarkable events in the history of radio.”
    • I’ve actually heard (and used) the closing story before in a sermon, but there were details I didn’t know. It’s nice to have the full story. Coming once again to a sermon near you.
  4. Some articles about self-censorship and cancellation:
    • Why I’m Leaving Mumford & Sons (Winston Marshall, Medium): “The truth is that reporting on extremism at the great risk of endangering oneself is unquestionably brave. I also feel that my previous apology in a small way participates in the lie that such extremism does not exist, or worse, is a force for good.” Courage and class.
    • Meet the Censored: Bret Weinstein (Matt Taibbi, Substack): “This is a significant moment in the history of American media. If a show with the audience that Weinstein and Heying have can be put out of business this easily, it means that independent media going forward will either have to operate outside the major Internet platforms, or give up its traditional role as a challenger of mainstream narratives.”
    • The Enemies of the Open Society (Martin Gurri, Discourse Magazine): “In other words, this was a cultural rather than a political event. It concerned our ideals, not our rights: and the ideals of a great many important Americans appear at this time to be drifting away from the open society.”
    • The Books Are Already Burning (Abigail Shrier, Bari Weiss’s Substack): “But why do so few oppose the pressure, lies, and the corrupting force of these bullying campaigns? The silent supporters have each performed the same risk-benefit calculation and arrived at the same conclusion: Speaking up isn’t worth it.”
    • A Conversation with Daniel Elder, the Choral Music Composer Who Was Cancelled for Opposing Arson (Quillette): “The media prefers to focus on how horrible this experience was for me, but an important facet easily lost in this narrative is how free I’ve felt since I made the choice.… I say this as an encouragement to the silent majority all around us: If you’re willing to endure the painful trial of self, you will be better for it in the end. And, with enough of us, the world will be better, too.”
  5. Some articles on sexuality and sexual ethics.
    • A Peculiar Disapproval of Gay Pride (John Piper, Desiring God): “When a person becomes a Christian, he undergoes a transformation not just of what he disapproves, but of how he disapproves. There is nothing peculiarly Christian about the mere disapproval of any human behavior. Therefore, disapproval of sinful behaviors is no evidence of saving grace. Becoming a Christian is far more profound than changing what we disapprove of.”
    • How Should I Respond to a Colleague’s Same-Sex Wedding? (Charlie Self, The Gospel Coalition): “But even with a humble and loving spirit, prudent speech, and genuine love for the co-workers, there’s a risk of losing promotions and even employment. This is where faith must conquer fear, and holy love triumph over compromise. As these decisions are discerned, may they be bathed in blessing our co-workers with tearful intercession.” Charlie is a friend who has spoken at Chi Alpha before.
    • How Should I Address My Transgender Colleague? (Charlie Self, The Gospel Coalition): “As Christians, we want to tell the truth, and using the wrong pronouns isn’t truth-telling. On the other hand, insisting on using correct pronouns for a person who has asked you not to can come across as disrespectful and antagonistic.”
    • Homophobes don’t care about same-sex love. They object to the sex. (Brian Broome, Washington Post): “Love isn’t the problem. I don’t believe that homophobes object to whether same-sex couples love each other. No, it’s not the love. It’s the sex.”
  6. The Great Awokening (anonymous, Substack): “This brings us ultimately back to religion. You cannot fight something with nothing. You cannot fight a religious war just by being against that religion. You must fight it with a competing religion. And there is one that has deep roots here in America. Evangelical Protestantism, in its various iterations, is what founded the country. The woke will even admit it (when it is useful to accuse the Christians who built America of genocide). It formed the religious core of America ages ago and if wokeness will ever be combated it will again.”
  7. This is an older (1992) article shared with me by a student: Research Supports Bible’s Account of Red Sea Parting : Weather: Gulf of Suez’s geography would make it possible, meteorologist and oceanographer say. (Thomas H. Maugh II, LA Times): “Because of the peculiar geography of the northern end of the Red Sea, researchers report Sunday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, a moderate wind blowing constantly for about 10 hours could have caused the sea to recede about a mile and the water level to drop 10 feet, leaving dry land in the area where many biblical scholars believe the crossing occurred.” I have not looked into the underlying research, but quite interesting.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have On Political Correctness (William Deresiewicz, The American Scholar): a long and thoughtful article. “Selective private colleges have become religious schools.… To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion…. I say this, by the way, as an atheist, a democratic socialist, a native northeasterner, a person who believes that colleges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvious by now, a card-carrying member of the liberal elite.” (first shared in volume 92)

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.