Tag: LGBTQ

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 301

per­spec­tives on Israel, Bit­coin, and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 296

the first two links are among the best I’ve shared in some time

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 296, which is the num­ber of par­ti­tions con­tained in the num­ber 30.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Woke Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Blake Smith, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The con­tem­po­rary ide­al, increas­ing­ly, is no longer some­one so charm­ing­ly per­son­able that oth­ers for­get he is in fact a ruth­less com­peti­tor, but a per­son who so con­vinc­ing­ly nar­rates her hav­ing over­come some kind of social injus­tice that oth­ers for­get she is in fact a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of sys­tems of priv­i­lege.” The author is a his­to­ry prof at U Chica­go. This essay is straight fire, and I believe he took an x‑ray of some of your souls before he wrote it.
  2. Some Prin­ci­ples & Obser­va­tions About Social Jus­tice Pol­i­tics (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Once you have made the pre­ven­tion of emo­tion­al harm the cen­tral focus of your pol­i­tics, you will find your­self run­ning up against the fact that emo­tion­al harm is a ubiq­ui­tous and inerad­i­ca­ble part of the human expe­ri­ence, far beyond the abil­i­ty of any polit­i­cal move­ment to pre­vent.” deBoer, one of my two favorite athe­ist social­ists to read (the oth­er being Steven Brust), brings it with excel­lence in this one. It was hard to find the best excerpt — there are so many.
  3. Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coro­n­avirus (Gina Kola­ta, New York Times): “For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on mes­sen­ger RNA, or mRNA — the genet­ic script that car­ries DNA instruc­tions to each cell’s pro­tein-mak­ing machin­ery. She was con­vinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own med­i­cines, includ­ing vac­cines. But for many years her career at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia was frag­ile. She migrat­ed from lab to lab, rely­ing on one senior sci­en­tist after anoth­er to take her in. She nev­er made more than $60,000 a year.” This is a heart­warm­ing sto­ry that should also make you very sad — it illus­trates how bro­ken the aca­d­e­m­ic sys­tem is and how we came very close to los­ing a life­sav­ing break­through.
  4. This should not hap­pen more than once (Alexan­dra Petri, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The moments when peo­ple make up their secret minds about what is nor­mal and what is accept­able are nev­er big. They are always in pri­vate, when no one can see that you have failed the test, when all you were doing was try­ing to avoid any dis­com­fort, be cool, play along. But there is a price. The price is that the Matt Gaet­zes out there will leave the inter­ac­tion think­ing they have under­stood the world cor­rect­ly. That what they are doing is work­ing. That this is how the world is. But it is the accu­mu­la­tion of these lit­tle assents that make the world this way.” Well-writ­ten and true. Also, don’t take nude pho­tos of your­self nor allow oth­ers to do so. It is unlike­ly you will be hap­py with the out­come.
  5. A Hea­then’s East­er (Steve Randy Wald­man, Inter­flu­id­i­ty): “My the­o­log­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion is about can­dy-wrap­per lev­el. But for what­ev­er it’s worth, I con­sid­er this aspect of Christianity’s found­ing myth or event remark­able, and under­em­pha­sized. ‘For­give them, Father, they know not what they do,’ rep­re­sents a pro­found plea from the lips of a man being painful­ly mur­dered. That a par­ent, one with fire and brim­stone read­i­ly at hand and a noto­ri­ous his­to­ry of smit­ing, would for­give is per­haps even more aston­ish­ing, even more won­der­ful.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  6. The effects of Black Lives Mat­ter protests (Jerusalem Dem­sas, Vox): “[The researcher’s] main find­ing is a 15 to 20 per­cent reduc­tion in lethal use of force by police offi­cers — rough­ly 300 few­er police homi­cides — in cen­sus places that saw BLM protests. Campbell’s research also indi­cates that these protests cor­re­late with a 10 per­cent increase in mur­ders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were some­where between 1,000 and 6,000 more homi­cides than would have been expect­ed if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.”
  7. A whole pas­sel of trans-relat­ed arti­cles:
    • A Truce Pro­pos­al In The Trans Wars (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “In our cur­rent cul­ture, [my] some­what com­pli­cat­ed stance is anath­e­ma.… The pro­por­tion of peo­ple in this debate who seem psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly unsta­ble, emo­tion­al­ly volatile and per­son­al­ly vicious seems larg­er than usu­al.”
    • How Super-Straight Start­ed a Cul­ture War on Tik­Tok (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Most have dat­ing pref­er­ences that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly imply a neg­a­tive view of peo­ple who fall out­side them––I’d be averse to dat­ing an 18-year-old or a 60-year-old, yet I nei­ther hate nor fear either age cohort––and that they might not be able to change even if they want­ed to. Claims that only big­ots would decline to date a trans per­son strike some com­men­ta­tors as a form of coer­cion.”
    • Keira Bell: My Sto­ry (Keira Bell, Per­sua­sion): “Five years after begin­ning my med­ical tran­si­tion to becom­ing male, I began the process of detran­si­tion­ing. A lot of trans men talk about how you can’t cry with a high dose of testos­terone in your body, and this affect­ed me too: I couldn’t release my emo­tions. One of the first signs that I was becom­ing Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about.” This is very sober­ing.
    • A Guide to Neo­pro­nouns (Ezra Mar­cus, New York Times): “Many peo­ple who use neo­pro­nouns don’t just use one set. They select a hand­ful, and show off their col­lec­tions on web­sites like Pronouny.xyz, a site that pro­vides usage exam­ples for neo­pro­nouns. Users make their own Pro­nouny pages, like this one, which includes xe/xem/xyr, moon/moonself, star/starself, bee/beeself, and bun/bunself. ‘Sor­ry if I have too many pro­nouns,’ the page’s cre­ator wrote. ‘You can use just one set or just they/them if they’re too many!!’ ”
    • From a few weeks back: There Is No Epi­dem­ic Of Trans Mur­ders (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “So, of the eleven US mur­ders of trans or gen­der-non­con­form­ing peo­ple this year, only two — the ones in Puer­to Rico — appear to have been prob­a­bly moti­vat­ed by anti-trans hatred. They are still hor­ri­ble — no one deserves to be mur­dered — but the killings do not have the mean­ing that are being attrib­uted to them.”
    • Also slight­ly old­er: ‘A Hot­ly Con­test­ed Issue’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “The stu­dent alleged­ly threat­ened to sue Shawnee State, which in turn pres­sured Meri­wether fur­ther to address the stu­dent in her pre­ferred man­ner. Meri­wether agreed — on the con­di­tion that he could put a dis­claimer in his syl­labus about how he was fol­low­ing the university’s pro­noun pol­i­cy under com­pul­sion, and stat­ing his views about bio­log­i­cal sex and gen­der being one and the same and immutable. Meriwether’s dean reject­ed this as incom­pat­i­ble with the university’s gen­der iden­ti­ty pol­i­cy.… [the Sixth Cir­cuit Court sided with the pro­fes­sor] writ­ing that if pro­fes­sors ‘lacked free-speech pro­tec­tions when teach­ing, a uni­ver­si­ty would wield alarm­ing pow­er to com­pel ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty.’ A uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent could ‘require a paci­fist to declare that war is just, a civ­il rights icon to con­demn the Free­dom Rid­ers, a believ­er to deny the exis­tence of God, or a Sovi­et émi­gré to address his stu­dents as ‘com­rades,’ ’ he wrote. ‘That can­not be.’ ”
    • A very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the same case: A Vic­to­ry For Real­i­ty (Carl True­man, First Things): “The court’s rul­ing is worth read­ing in full. The evi­dent incom­pe­tence and mal­ice of the admin­is­tra­tion is impres­sive, as it ini­tial­ly flip-flops on whether an accept­able com­pro­mise is pos­si­ble and then descends into open hos­til­i­ty toward Meri­wether, includ­ing (but, as lawyers say, not lim­it­ed to) open mock­ery, deri­sion of his faith, and an inves­ti­ga­tion for which he was not asked to pro­vide any wit­ness­es. The court also iden­ti­fies the university’s flip-flop­ping and hos­til­i­ty to Meriwether’s reli­gious views as evi­dence that the mat­ter was not about apply­ing an estab­lished pol­i­cy in a neu­tral way but rather about tar­get­ing the pro­fes­sor for his Chris­t­ian beliefs.”

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 Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

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 291

fas­ci­nat­ing links from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives

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 291, which is not a very inter­est­ing num­ber. It’s 3 · 97, which I guess is some­thing.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State (Ben Mauk, New York­er): “On his sec­ond day of deten­tion, a mem­ber of the camp admin­is­tra­tion came to see him. Kok­teubai asked when he would learn what he was accused of doing. He was sur­prised to learn that he wouldn’t be ques­tioned at all. ‘If you hadn’t com­mit­ted a crime, you wouldn’t have end­ed up here,’ the admin­is­tra­tor told him. ‘So there is some­thing you are here for.’ ” The graph­ics inter­fere with the read­ing expe­ri­ence, but it’s worth­while.
  2. On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good.
  3. David Shor on Why Trump Was Good for the GOP and How Dems Can Win in 2022 (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “But when I look at the 2020 elec­tion, I see that we ran against the most unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can ever to run for pres­i­dent — and we ran lit­er­al­ly the most pop­u­lar fig­ure in our par­ty whose last name is not Oba­ma — and we only nar­row­ly won the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden had done 0.3 per­cent worse, then Don­ald Trump would have won reelec­tion…” This is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly fas­ci­nat­ing in a very non­par­ti­san way (although the inter­vie­wee is extreme­ly par­ti­san).
  4. In pan­dem­ic news:
    • 5 Pan­dem­ic Mis­takes We Keep Repeat­ing (Zeynep Tufek­ci, The Atlantic): “One of the most impor­tant prob­lems under­min­ing the pan­dem­ic response has been the mis­trust and pater­nal­ism that some pub­lic-health agen­cies and experts have exhib­it­ed toward the pub­lic.… And yet, from the begin­ning, a good chunk of the pub­lic-fac­ing mes­sag­ing and news arti­cles implied or claimed that vac­cines won’t pro­tect you against infect­ing oth­er peo­ple or that we didn’t know if they would, when both were false.” Watch­ing peo­ple reject accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the pan­dem­ic because high-sta­tus peo­ple rail against it has been like watch­ing my skep­ti­cal friends reject the gospel because of peer pres­sure. IT’S GOOD NEWS — BELIEVE IT! The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UNC.
    • Pan­dem­ic Approach­es: The Dif­fer­ences Between Flori­da, Cal­i­for­nia (Noel King, Greg Allen, & Eric West­er­velt, NPR): “In Decem­ber, Cal­i­for­nia had a spike, and Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som reim­posed a stay-at-home order and a busi­ness lock­down order that was recent­ly lift­ed. At the same time, cas­es were spik­ing in Flori­da. But every­thing stayed open, includ­ing schools. So which approach works?” Spoil­er: Flori­da is look­ing pret­ty good.
    • Stop Say­ing We Can’t Go Back to Nor­mal After Vac­cines (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Rea­son): “Nor­mal­cy is the whole point of vac­ci­na­tion, and these vac­cines can get us there. So when pub­lic health advice says “no” to nor­mal­cy even after vac­ci­na­tion, it mis­leads the pub­lic and wild­ly under­sells the vac­cines. A year into this, that’s cru­el and dispir­it­ing.… there must be a firm end date to those pub­lic mea­sures for every­one. I can’t say exact­ly when it should be, nor do I think a sin­gle nation­al date would make sense. I’m envi­sion­ing some­thing like six weeks after vac­cines have become avail­able (as in, you can eas­i­ly get an appoint­ment) to all who want them in a giv­en city, coun­ty, or state.”
    • Not Gath­er­ing with the Church Hurts You Spir­i­tu­al­ly (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Jesus designed Chris­tian­i­ty and the progress of our dis­ci­ple­ship to cen­ter around gath­er­ings. The math is there­fore sim­ple: Gath­er­ing with the church is spir­i­tu­al­ly good for you. Not phys­i­cal­ly gath­er­ing with the church spir­i­tu­al­ly hurts you.”
    • The Secret Life of a Coro­n­avirus (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With sci­en­tists adrift in an ocean of def­i­n­i­tions, philoso­phers have rowed out to offer life­lines.” What a glo­ri­ous sen­tence. Also, I began the arti­cle sym­pa­thet­ic to the idea that virus­es are alive and we draw our bound­aries too tight­ly, which is what the author wants me to believe. But his argu­ments were so weak that I’ve flipped to: “not alive, mere­ly inter­ac­tive.”
    • The rise of the nox­ious con­tract (David B. Grusky et al, Stan­ford Cen­ter On Pover­ty and Inequal­i­ty): “We observed that many peo­ple ‘com­pare down­ward’ by empha­siz­ing their priv­i­lege rel­a­tive to those less for­tu­nate, that oth­ers ‘look out­ward’ in recog­ni­tion that times of cri­sis require band­ing togeth­er, and that yet oth­ers ‘look inward’ as they cope with unusu­al­ly stress­ful chal­lenges. Although many ways of cop­ing are there­fore in play, none of them entail invid­i­ous com­par­isons that then lead to resent­ment or con­flict.” An analy­sis of whether peo­ple who have to work in-per­son are resent­ful of those who telecom­mute. Spoil­er: not so much. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. On Ryan Ander­son­’s book being dropped by Ama­zon:
    • Ryan T. Ander­son Was Made For This Moment (Rod Dreher inter­view­ing Ryan T. Ander­son, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…most every­one agrees that a hos­pi­tal shouldn’t refuse to treat some­one for Covid because they iden­ti­fy as LGBT. But, thank God, that doesn’t seem to have actu­al­ly ever hap­pened. Still when peo­ple hear about a law that bans LGBT dis­crim­i­na­tion, that’s what they have in mind. They don’t real­ize what it means for sex-reas­sign­ment pro­ce­dures in gen­er­al, let alone what it means for chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria in par­tic­u­lar. So activists pull on people’s heart­strings by say­ing we need a law ban­ning tru­ly unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion (which is vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent) and then that law isn’t nuanced and mea­sured, but a rad­i­cal bill impos­ing a rad­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. A law that is sold as a shield pro­tect­ing vul­ner­a­ble minori­ties ends up being a sword to per­se­cute peo­ple who don’t embrace a new sex­u­al ortho­doxy.”
    • Book Ban­ning in an Age of Ama­zon (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “Remem­ber where you were in Feb­ru­ary of 2021. Con­gress fought over a sec­ond impeach­ment of an ex-pres­i­dent. The states debat­ed whether forced tru­an­cy would make life eas­i­er for America’s teach­ers. And earth’s largest bookseller—(Internal mot­to: ‘Work Hard. Have Fun. Make his­to­ry.’)—began qui­et­ly delet­ing books.”
  6. Killing The SAT Means Hurt­ing Minori­ties (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “There’s a rea­son why white Hol­ly­wood celebs cheat the sys­tem. It’s the only way their less gift­ed kids can win out over the dis­ad­van­taged. Want to max­i­mize priv­i­lege? Make admis­sions depen­dent sole­ly on teacher rec­om­men­da­tions, school grades, and per­son­al essays. Want to min­i­mize it? Abol­ish lega­cy admis­sions, and use the SAT.” I gen­uine­ly do not under­stand how this is con­tro­ver­sial. The data is clear and over­whelm­ing.
  7. Ele­vat­ing the Role of Faith-Inspired Impact in the Social Sec­tor (Jeri Eck­hart Queenan, Peter Grunert, and Devin Mur­phy, The Bridges­pan Group): “Giv­ing to reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tions (which includes dona­tions to con­gre­ga­tions) rep­re­sents near­ly one-third of all giv­ing in the Unit­ed States. Rough­ly a third of the 50 largest non­prof­its in the coun­try have a faith ori­en­ta­tion. And, 40 per­cent of inter­na­tion­al non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions are faith-inspired.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

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 290

links con­tain­ing both good and bad news for evan­gel­i­cals

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 290, which is an inter­est­ing num­ber because it is both the prod­uct of three primes (= 2 â‹… 5 â‹… 29) as well as the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes (= 67 + 71+ 73 +79).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Evan­gel­i­cals in Amer­i­ca: The Stats May Sur­prise You (Ryan Burge, Gospel Coali­tion): “…after look­ing at the data for the last 10 years as a quan­ti­ta­tive social sci­en­tist, I can say with cer­tain­ty that although there are clear rea­sons for con­cern, evan­gel­i­cal pres­ence in the Unit­ed States is stronger than ever before.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and also a pas­tor in a non-evan­gel­i­cal denom­i­na­tion.
  2. Reli­gious Com­mu­ni­ty and Human Flour­ish­ing (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In some cas­es, our results close­ly repli­cat­ed past work. For exam­ple, we found that, even after con­trol­ling for the fac­tors above, indi­vid­u­als who attend­ed reli­gious ser­vices week­ly or more were 16% less like­ly to become depressed, and saw a 29% reduc­tion in smok­ing and 34% reduc­tion in heavy drink­ing. These results match rea­son­ably close­ly results from sev­er­al pri­or stud­ies, includ­ing the pri­or meta-analy­ses men­tioned above. Some­what strik­ing­ly, but again in line with pri­or analy­sis, week­ly ser­vice atten­dees were 26% less like­ly to die dur­ing the fol­low-up peri­od.” Van­der­Weele , him­self a Chris­t­ian, is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard and I have shared some of his work before.
  3. When Ama­zon Erased My Book (Ryan T. Ander­son, First Things): “Ama­zon nev­er informed me or my pub­lish­er that it was remov­ing my book. And Amazon’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives haven’t respond­ed to our inquiries about it. Per­haps they’re cit­ing a reli­gious objec­tion to sell­ing my book? Or maybe they only sell books with which they agree? (If so, they have a lot of explain­ing to do about why they car­ry Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.) If there’s a reli­gious or speech objec­tion, let’s hear it.” His book is quite good and is still avail­able at Barnes & Noble. Ama­zon, how­ev­er, sells 5/6 of the books in Amer­i­ca. Being delist­ed by them seri­ous­ly affects the mar­ket­place of ideas.
    • Damna­tio memo­ri­ae (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “But to me, the most inter­est­ing point for reflec­tion is this: The cen­sors at Ama­zon clear­ly believe there is only one rea­son to read a book. You read a book because you agree with it and want it to con­firm what you already believe. Imag­ine, for instance, a trans­gen­der activist who wants to under­stand the posi­tion held by Ryan Ander­son and peo­ple like him in order bet­ter to refute it. That per­son can’t get a copy of the book through Ama­zon any more than a sym­pa­thet­ic read­er like me can.”  The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Bay­lor whose writ­ing I have fea­tured before.
  4. Not all ‘anti-racist’ ideas are good ones. The left isn’t being hon­est about this. (Matthew Ygle­sias, Wash­ing­ton Post): “More broad­ly, iden­ti­fy­ing a racial gap and declar­ing it to be racist is often insuf­fi­cient. Such an approach impedes actu­al­ly think­ing about prob­lems — par­tic­u­lar­ly in media, aca­d­e­m­ic and non­prof­it cir­cles, where the accu­sa­tion of racism can car­ry severe con­se­quences. And so to avoid con­tro­ver­sy, peo­ple avoid impor­tant debates rather than risk­ing offense.”
  5. The Covid Emer­gency Must End (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “A major set­back is always pos­si­ble, but right now, the con­di­tions for the end of the emer­gency seem like­ly to arrive some­time in the sum­mer, not at Christ­mas­time.”
    • School Clo­sures Have Failed America’s Chil­dren (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Yes, it’s hard to open schools dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. But pri­vate schools most­ly man­aged to, and that’s true not only of rich board­ing schools but also of strapped Catholic schools. As a nation, we fought to keep restau­rants and malls open — but we didn’t make schools a sim­i­lar pri­or­i­ty, so needy chil­dren were left behind”
  6. 1 in 6 Gen Z adults are LGBT. And this num­ber could con­tin­ue to grow. (Saman­tha Schmidt, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Research from the Williams Insti­tute at the UCLA School of Law has sim­i­lar­ly found that a key dri­ver of the growth in the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty has been a surge in bisex­u­al women and girls. Bisex­u­al women make up the largest group of LGBT adults — about 35 per­cent, accord­ing to a Williams Insti­tute analy­sis of data from three pop­u­la­tion-based sur­veys. More than one in 10 U.S. high school youth iden­ti­fies as les­bian, gay or bisex­u­al. And among them, 75 per­cent are female and 77 per­cent iden­ti­fy as bisex­u­al.” The cheer­lead­ing aside, it’s a very inter­est­ing arti­cle — espe­cial­ly if you think about oth­er ways to frame it.
    • Anoth­er per­spec­tive on the same data: Two Sex­es. Infi­nite Gen­ders. (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “It turns out that in 2020, only 1.4 per­cent of US adults are gay men, and only 0.7 per­cent are les­bians. So all the gays and les­bians amount to a lit­tle over 2 per­cent of the country’s adults. And that seems about right to me. The sur­prise, how­ev­er, is that there are now almost as many peo­ple iden­ti­fy­ing as ‘trans’ as ‘les­bian’.… Bisex­u­als, at 54.6 per­cent of all ‘LGBT’ iden­ti­fiers, are now a major­i­ty, and in Gen Z, clock in at 72 per­cent! The qual­i­fi­ca­tion to this is that only 3.7 per­cent of bisex­u­als live with some­one of the same sex while over 30 per­cent live with some­one of the oppo­site sex.”
  7. Inside a Bat­tle Over Race, Class and Pow­er at Smith Col­lege (Michael Pow­ell, New York Times): “The sto­ry high­lights the ten­sions between a student’s deeply felt sense of per­son­al truth and facts that are at odds with it.” What is super-weird to me is that I’ve seen peo­ple on social media say, “See? It’s more com­pli­cat­ed than crit­ics are mak­ing it out to be.” But… it’s not. Read­ing the details mere­ly fills in the out­line of the sto­ry I had picked up from oth­er sources.

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 two arti­cles from back in the 90’s, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote them back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism, and if you nev­er have before I encour­age you to read them both. Espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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 288

I keep think­ing one week there won’t be enough con­tent… this isn’t that week

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

This is vol­ume 288. The num­ber 288 is inter­est­ing in that it can also be writ­ten 4! â‹… 3! â‹… 2! â‹… 1!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Long Can COVID Cas­es Keep Plum­met­ing? (David Wal­lace-Wells, NY Mag­a­zine): “It’s insane. It’s total­ly crazy. And so, you’re absolute­ly right, we have cho­sen that the best way for­ward is to live in a state of uncer­tain­ty rather than giv­ing peo­ple all the tools and infor­ma­tion, even if it isn’t per­fect. It turns out that in many cas­es we’d rather not engage with that knowl­edge at all than have any sources of error in what­ev­er it is we’re doing.“An inter­view with a Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, although be warned that it will frus­trate you with how rea­son­able and yet under­im­ple­ment­ed his sug­ges­tions are. The title is poor­ly cho­sen.
    • The Vac­cine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired. (Dan Bar­ry, New York Times): “The Texas doc­tor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vac­cine had been opened on this late Decem­ber night, he had to find 10 eli­gi­ble peo­ple for its remain­ing dos­es before the pre­cious med­i­cine expired. In six hours. [He did and for] his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his gov­ern­ment job and then charged with steal­ing 10 vac­cine dos­es worth a total of $135 — a shun-wor­thy mis­de­meanor that sent his name and mug shot rock­et­ing around the globe.” The doc­tor comes across as a hero and the pros­e­cu­tor as a vil­lain. Not even a real vil­lain — car­toon vil­lain. I am actu­al­ly a lit­tle worked up about this.
  2. 10 Lessons of an MIT Edu­ca­tion (Gian-Car­lo Rota, Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty): “At cer­tain lib­er­al arts col­leges, sports appear to be more impor­tant than class­room sub­jects, and with good rea­son. A sport may be the only train­ing in ‘know­ing how’-in demon­strat­ing cer­ti­fi­able pro­fi­cien­cy-that a stu­dent under­takes at those col­leges. At MIT, sports are a hob­by (how­ev­er pas­sion­ate­ly pur­sued) rather than a cen­tral focus because we offer a wide range of absorb­ing ‘know­ing how’ activ­i­ties.” Appar­ent­ly one of an MIT pro­fes­sor’s advisees archived his fac­ul­ty web­site after his death.
    • Relat­ed: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (Gian-Car­lo Rota, Notices Of The AMS): “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite prob­lems con­stant­ly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dor­mant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve prob­lems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and peo­ple will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’ ” This link is a PDF.
  3. With a Star Sci­ence Reporter’s Purg­ing, Mob Cul­ture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase (Quil­lette edi­to­r­i­al): “So what we’re left with is the spec­ta­cle of an acclaimed reporter being purged not for malev­o­lent actions, nor even malev­o­lent intent, but rather for mak­ing a cer­tain kind of sound. This is an impor­tant depar­ture from ordi­nary mob­bings because, even in their most dog­mat­ic form, the­o­ries of social jus­tice gen­er­al­ly are at least nom­i­nal­ly con­cerned with the improve­ment of human moral­i­ty, which, cru­cial­ly, is insep­a­ra­ble from the ques­tion of intent. McNeil, on the oth­er hand, is being judged accord­ing to a the­o­ry of wrong­do­ing that presents cer­tain words or phras­es as evil by their mere utter­ance, as with a Har­ry Pot­ter spell.” This is very clev­er­ly writ­ten. Also, extreme­ly cor­rect.
  4. All In One (John Tasioulas, Aeon): “If, for exam­ple, human rights are demands that are gen­er­al­ly high-pri­or­i­ty in nature, such that it’s sel­dom if ever jus­ti­fied to over­ride them, then we lose our grip on that impor­tant idea if we start includ­ing under the head­ing of ‘human rights’ valu­able objec­tives – for exam­ple, access to a high-qual­i­ty inter­net con­nec­tion – that don’t plau­si­bly enjoy that kind of pri­or­i­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The author is a philoso­pher at Oxford.
  5. Ravi Zacharias Hid Hun­dreds of Pic­tures of Women, Abuse Dur­ing Mas­sages, and a Rape Alle­ga­tion (Daniel Sil­li­man and Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “A 12-page report released Thurs­day by Ravi Zacharias Inter­na­tion­al Min­istries (RZIM) con­firms abuse by Zacharias at day spas he owned in Atlanta and uncov­ers five addi­tion­al vic­tims in the US, as well as evi­dence of sex­u­al abuse in Thai­land, India, and Malaysia.” The full report is here (pdf).
  6. We Need Bal­ance When It Comes To Gen­der Dys­phor­ic Kids. I Would Know (Scott New­gent, Newsweek): “So if we are now wak­ing up to the fact that gen­der dys­pho­ria is over-sim­plis­ti­cal­ly con­flat­ed with trans­gen­derism, med­ical treat­ments have under­stud­ied long-term con­se­quences, some are get­ting rich off trans­gen­der med­i­cine and de-tran­si­tion­ers are speak­ing up in sky­rock­et­ing num­bers, why are we only mak­ing it eas­i­er for chil­dren to unques­tion­ing­ly tran­si­tion? We now have the oblig­a­tion to work togeth­er to slow trans med­ical­iza­tion of minors until they are adults and have the capac­i­ty to tru­ly under­stand the life­long con­se­quences of tran­si­tion­ing. As a for­mer les­bian and cur­rent trans man, I main­tain this is not trans­pho­bic.”
  7. How To Be Pro-Life in Joe Biden’s Amer­i­ca (David French, The Dis­patch): “There remains no bar­ri­er for pro-life Amer­i­cans to love their neigh­bor and direct­ly sup­port moth­ers and chil­dren who face dire need. There is even an oppor­tu­ni­ty to enact leg­is­la­tion that can fur­ther ease the fears of young moth­ers and increase their con­fi­dence that they can raise and sup­port a child… Pol­i­tics do mat­ter, cer­tain­ly, but there’s a deep­er truth. Chris­tians don’t need to win Sen­ate races to love their neigh­bors.”

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 Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stu­pid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. First shared in vol­ume 221.

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 280

I think this is the first time two of the arti­cles are by alum­ni. Maybe some­day it will be all sev­en!

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.

Next Fri­day is Christ­mas and a week lat­er is New Year’s Day, so I’ll prob­a­bly either skip the next two weeks or send some­thing out on Thursday/Saturday.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. 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.”
  2. What I Saw At The Jeri­cho March (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Let me repeat this: a black Evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor denounced witch­es and Marx­ists and blew a sho­far to defend Don­ald Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. If you had gone back in his­to­ry a decade and told the world that this would hap­pen one day on the Nation­al Mall, they would have put you in an asy­lum. Now you would be for­giv­en for think­ing that our coun­try has become an asy­lum.” This is long and engross­ing.
    • The Dan­ger­ous Idol­a­try of Chris­t­ian Trump­ism (David French, The Dis­patch): “A sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of the Chris­t­ian pub­lic has fall­en for con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, has mixed nation­al­ism with the Chris­t­ian gospel, has sub­sti­tut­ed a bizarre mys­ti­cism for rea­son and evi­dence, and rages in fear and anger against their polit­i­cal opponents—all in the name of pre­serv­ing Don­ald Trump’s pow­er.” 
    • The Cult of Chris­t­ian Trump­ism (Michael Hor­ton, Gospel Coali­tion): “My pub­lic call­ing is not to bind Chris­t­ian con­sciences to my own polit­i­cal posi­tions. Rather, as a min­is­ter of the Word, I am join­ing oth­ers in sound­ing the alarm that a line has been crossed into rank spir­i­tu­al adul­tery.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of the­ol­o­gy.
    • A Defense Of Jeri­cho March Crit­i­cism (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “The kind of crazy talk at the Jeri­cho March ral­ly is going to get us all tar­get­ed by the state, and by woke­sters in insti­tu­tions, but will not advance our cause one bit. Besides, as a con­ser­v­a­tive and a Chris­t­ian whose writ­ing in recent years has been dom­i­nat­ed by anger and anx­i­ety over the loss of reli­gious and civ­il lib­er­ties in the face of wok­e­ness, I can say with­out a doubt that I would not want to live in a coun­try gov­erned by the rad­i­cal nation­al­ism and emo­tivist Chris­tian­i­ty of the Jeri­cho Marchers.” A fol­low-up to the long and engross­ing piece atop this sec­tion.
  3. Why the coro­n­avirus vac­cine may not be acces­si­ble for the peo­ple who need it most (Rebekah Fen­ton, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Gov­ern­ment author­i­ties should keep this in mind. The most respect­ed mem­bers of a com­mu­ni­ty may not be those with the most edu­ca­tion or the fan­ci­est titles. Church­es, com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions and health-out­reach pro­grams often know the needs of the peo­ple they serve, have long records of meet­ing them, and have estab­lished strong bonds of trust….. Pub­lic health offi­cials should respect these lead­ers’ com­mit­ment to ser­vice and involve them at the plan­ning stages, instead of just rely­ing on them to spread the word after deci­sions are made.” Rebekah, a doc­tor in Chica­go, is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
    • The Elder­ly vs. Essen­tial Work­ers: Who Should Get the Coro­n­avirus Vac­cine First? (Abby Good­nough and Jan Hoff­man, New York Times): “Ulti­mate­ly, the choice comes down to whether pre­vent­ing death or curb­ing the spread of the virus and return­ing to some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy is the high­est pri­or­i­ty. ‘If your goal is to max­i­mize the preser­va­tion of human life, then you would bias the vac­cine toward old­er Amer­i­cans,’ Dr. Scott Got­tlieb, the for­mer Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion com­mis­sion­er, said recent­ly. ‘If your goal is to reduce the rate of infec­tion, then you would pri­or­i­tize essen­tial work­ers’…. The trade-off between the two is mud­died by the fact that the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘essen­tial work­ers’ used by the C.D.C. com­pris­es near­ly 70 per­cent of the Amer­i­can work force.”
    • A crit­i­cal Twit­ter thread about vac­cine roll­out plans (David Algo­nquin, Twit­ter)
  4. Does Reli­gious Affil­i­a­tion Pro­tect Peo­ple’s Well-Being? Evi­dence from the Great Reces­sion after Cor­rect­ing for Selec­tion Effects (Chris­tos Makridis, Byron John­son and Harold G. Koenig, Jour­nal for the Sci­en­tif­ic Study of Reli­gion): “Using Gallup’s U.S. Dai­ly Poll between 2008 and 2017, we find that those who are engaged in their local church and view their faith as impor­tant to their lives have not only high­er lev­els of sub­jec­tive well-being, but also acycli­cal lev­els. We show that the acycli­cal­i­ty of sub­jec­tive well-being among Chris­tians is not dri­ven by selec­tion effects or the pres­ence of greater social cap­i­tal, but rather a sense of pur­pose over the busi­ness cycle inde­pen­dent of finan­cial cir­cum­stances.” You should have access to the full text using your Stan­ford login. Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry and is an econ­o­mist in Wash­ing­ton, DC. 
  5. Like It Or Not, Keira Bell Has Opened Up a Real Con­ver­sa­tion About Gen­der Dys­pho­ria (Quil­lette): “In the debate about tran­si­tion­ing chil­dren who expe­ri­ence gen­der dys­pho­ria, Ms. Bell’s case rep­re­sents an impor­tant turn­ing point. Ms. Bell, now 23, was 16 years old when she pre­sent­ed to the Tavi­s­tock Cen­tre in Lon­don, which runs Britain’s Gen­der Iden­ti­ty Devel­op­ment Ser­vice. In a land­mark rul­ing deliv­ered ear­li­er this month, a British court upheld her claim that she’d been rushed through gen­der reas­sign­ment with­out prop­er safe­guards.” The author is unlist­ed, although this is per­haps sim­ply a web­site error.
  6. Nuclear weapons agency breached amid mas­sive cyber onslaught (Natasha Bertrand and Eric Wolff, Politi­co): “They found sus­pi­cious activ­i­ty in net­works belong­ing to the Fed­er­al Ener­gy Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion (FERC), San­dia and Los Alam­os nation­al lab­o­ra­to­ries in New Mex­i­co and Wash­ing­ton, the Office of Secure Trans­porta­tion at NNSA, and the Rich­land Field Office of the DOE. The hack­ers have been able to do more dam­age at FERC than the oth­er agen­cies, and offi­cials there have evi­dence of high­ly mali­cious activ­i­ty, the offi­cials said, but did not elab­o­rate.”
    • Why the US gov­ern­ment hack is lit­er­al­ly keep­ing secu­ri­ty experts awake at night (Bri­an Fung, CNN): “I woke up in the mid­dle of the night last night just sick to my stom­ach,” said There­sa Pay­ton, who served as White House Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m at a 9 — and it’s not because of what I know; it’s because of what we still don’t know.”
    • I Was the Home­land Secu­ri­ty Advis­er to Trump. We’re Being Hacked.(Thomas Bossart, New York Times): “The log­i­cal con­clu­sion is that we must act as if the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment has con­trol of all the net­works it has pen­e­trat­ed. But it is unclear what the Rus­sians intend to do next. The access the Rus­sians now enjoy could be used for far more than sim­ply spy­ing.… Domes­tic and geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions could esca­late quite eas­i­ly if they use their access for malign influ­ence and mis­in­for­ma­tion — both hall­marks of Russ­ian behav­ior.”
  7. Porn­hub Removes Major­i­ty of Videos in a Vic­to­ry for Exo­dus Cry (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “An announce­ment on Porn­hub claims it has bet­ter poli­cies than oth­er plat­forms and blames Exo­dus Cry and the Nation­al Cen­ter on Sex­u­al Exploita­tion for tar­get­ing the site. ’These are orga­ni­za­tions ded­i­cat­ed to abol­ish­ing pornog­ra­phy, ban­ning mate­r­i­al they claim is obscene, and shut­ting down com­mer­cial sex work.’” Shared with me by an alum­nus.

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 Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a follow-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 213.

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 272

I cheat­ed when num­ber­ing a few of these

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A DC Church Shows How to Fight for Reli­gious Free­dom (David French, The Dis­patch): “Late Fri­day night a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., hand­ed down a reli­gious lib­er­ty rul­ing that I hope will echo through­out the nation…. It demon­strates how thought­ful Chris­tians can engage in the pub­lic square and defend their lib­er­ty with con­vic­tion while also car­ing for their com­mu­ni­ties and demon­strat­ing extra­or­di­nary patience with pub­lic offi­cials. In oth­er words, in one court case we’re watch­ing what it’s like when Chris­t­ian legal ends are pur­sued through Chris­t­ian moral means.” Excel­lent news with typ­i­cal­ly insight­ful com­men­tary by David French.
  2. Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“
    • Out­stand­ing. There are SO MANY quotable bits in this essay. 
    • Why Is Wok­e­ness Win­ning? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Crit­i­cal the­o­ry was once an eso­teric aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit. Now it has become the core, under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the major­i­ty of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, media, cor­po­ra­tions, lib­er­al church­es, NGOs, phil­an­thropies, and, of course, main­stream jour­nal­ism.”
    • The Fun­da­men­tal­ist War on Wok­e­ness is a War on Chris­t­ian Love (Michael Bird, Patheos): “The whole anti-woke and anti-crit­i­cal race the­o­ry trope strike me as not so much inter­est­ed in oppos­ing pro­gres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism and its divi­sive racial pol­i­tics, as much as it serves to deny eth­nic minori­ties have any griev­ances and white church­es have any respon­si­bil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.” Bird is a respect­ed evan­gel­i­cal the­olo­gian. 
  3. Some Stan­ford-relat­ed arti­cles I saw:
    • The Pre­science of Shel­by Steele (Samuel Kro­nen, Quil­lette): “Shel­by was the only sib­ling to reject the tenets of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism, and although he and his [twin] broth­er work on the same cam­pus and occa­sion­al­ly pass each oth­er (Shel­by is at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion), the two are not on speak­ing terms.” Not the most reveal­ing excerpt, but prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing to this audi­ence.
    • An open let­ter from a Stan­ford wrestling par­ent to the Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent (Sarah Traxler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When address­ing the rea­sons that the 11 sports in par­tic­u­lar are being dis­con­tin­ued, wrestling was cit­ed only in the cat­e­go­ry of com­pet­ing ‘with­out a full com­ple­ment of schol­ar­ships.’ One over-looked rea­son for this is that wrestlers often come from low­er income groups. As such, wrestling stu­dent-ath­letes often qual­i­fy for need-based finan­cial aid, reduc­ing the demand for the full com­ple­ment of ath­let­ic-based schol­ar­ships.”
    • My Brief Spell as an Activist (Lucy Kross Wal­lace, Quil­lette): “This was my first intox­i­cat­ing taste of empow­er­ment born from vic­tim­hood. I was vin­di­cat­ed; exu­ber­ant. None of it had been my fault. All my doubts and self-hatred and guilt could be laid to rest. I had been the vic­tim not only of cir­cum­stance and mis­for­tune, but of oppres­sion. The prob­lem was sim­ple, the solu­tion equal­ly so. I didn’t have to change—society did.” The author is a sopho­more at Stan­ford.
  4. A reminder that there are some hor­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing in this world:
    • How Turkey’s Mil­i­tary Adven­tures Decrease Free­dom at Home (Garo Pay­lan, New York Times): “After a decades-long fit­ful truce, the con­flict over the sta­tus of Nagorno-Karabakh — a break­away Armen­ian enclave in Azer­bai­jan — between Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia resumed last month, lead­ing to a large mil­i­tary deploy­ment, destruc­tion of civil­ian cen­ters and thou­sands of casu­al­ties. In this war, Turkey strong­ly sup­ports Azer­bai­jan, with which it shares eth­nic bonds, and Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan dis­missed glob­al calls for a cease-fire.” The author is a mem­ber of the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Azer­bai­jan’s assault against Arme­nia threat­ens democ­ra­cy every­where (Chris­tos Makridis & Alex Gal­it­sky, The Hill): “While Azer­bai­jan has attempt­ed to shield itself from inter­na­tion­al scruti­ny by rid­ing on the pres­ence of tense domes­tic pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States and a glob­al pan­dem­ic, we can­not ignore it any longer. The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must rec­og­nize that fail­ure to stand up for reli­gious minori­ties any­where is a threat to them every­where. Inac­tion cre­ates prece­dent and embold­ens dic­ta­tors.” One of the authors, Chris­tos, is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
    • Chi­na ambas­sador makes veiled threat to Hong Kong-based Cana­di­ans (Helen David­son, The Guardian): “Cana­da is among sev­er­al coun­tries that sus­pend­ed extra­di­tion agree­ments with Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s impo­si­tion of a sweep­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty law in June. Dozens of MPs recent­ly called for Cana­da to offer ‘safe har­bour’ to pro-democ­ra­cy pro­test­ers flee­ing Hong Kong, prompt­ing the warn­ing from Cong.”
    • Relat­ed from a few weeks ago: ‘You will be put into deten­tion’: For­mer ABC bureau chief tells sto­ry of flee­ing Chi­na for first time (Matthew Car­ney, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “We were instruct­ed to report to a facil­i­ty in north Bei­jing and told to bring my daugh­ter Yas­mine, who was 14 at the time, as she was now part of the inves­ti­ga­tion. This felt like a line in the sand for me. I could not accept that they would involve my chil­dren. At the same time I was fright­ened. It felt like part of the Chi­nese play­book: to go after fam­i­ly mem­bers as a way to exact pun­ish­ment and revenge.”
  5. ‘Hand­maid’ real­i­ty: Deeply reli­gious mar­riages have more spousal equal­i­ty (New York Post): “Reli­gious, home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples also report greater rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, and they are three times more like­ly than less-reli­gious peers to report a sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship. The women don’t appear to be repressed; in fact, they’re gen­er­al­ly more like­ly to say they’re hap­py and that their life has mean­ing and pur­pose.” And yet again research con­firms Bib­li­cal pre­cepts. Allow me to take his oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer a friend­ly pas­toral reminder to mar­ry anoth­er Chris­t­ian, should you mar­ry. 
    • Why Only Amy Coney Bar­rett Gets to Have It All (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “…to set the record straight, on hand­maids and beyond, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians must do their part to imag­ine a broad­er and more human­iz­ing vision for women’s place in the pub­lic square. Chris­tian­i­ty has always con­tained a lib­er­a­to­ry seed: one that tells women that the human desire to work, cre­ate and shape insti­tu­tions is as impor­tant, even as holy, as their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren. If Chris­tians don’t like the hand­maid stereo­types, now is the time to be clear on all that Chris­t­ian women can do and be.”
  6. How Chris­tians Should Think About Vot­ing (Michael & Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “When you vote in an elec­tion, with the excep­tion of a write-in bal­lot, you are not vot­ing for your dream can­di­date. Your vote is not an unmedi­at­ed expres­sion of your iden­ti­ty, your vote is a choice between options you did not choose your­self. If you view your vote as an unmedi­at­ed, pure expres­sion of your will, it can be debil­i­tat­ing.” The author is a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer. The arti­cle itself is very non­par­ti­san. 
    • Lati­no, Evan­gel­i­cal and Polit­i­cal­ly Home­less (Jen­nifer Med­i­na, New York Times): “When Pas­tor Rivera looks at his con­gre­ga­tion of 200 fam­i­lies he sees a micro­cosm of the Lati­no vote in the Unit­ed States: how com­plex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solid­i­fy cru­cial sup­port can fall short. There are not clear ide­o­log­i­cal lines here between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives. Peo­ple care about immi­gra­tion, but are equal­ly con­cerned about reli­gious lib­er­ty and abor­tion.”
    • Putting this one here is kind of cheat­ing, but I like hav­ing only 7 major top­ics. This is polit­i­cal enough that I’m jus­ti­fy­ing it to myself. The 1619 Chron­i­cles (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Jour­nal­ists are, most often, in the busi­ness of writ­ing the first rough draft of his­to­ry, not try­ing to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a low­er­case t, fol­low­ing evi­dence in direc­tions unseen, not the capital‑T truth of a pre-estab­lished nar­ra­tive in which incon­ve­nient facts get dis­card­ed.”
    • How the 1619 Project took over 2020 (Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Han­nah-Jones has fierce­ly defend­ed the 1619 Project. But today, she acknowl­edges that for all the experts she con­sult­ed, she should have sat down with addi­tion­al schol­ars with par­tic­u­lar focus on colo­nial his­to­ry, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and the Civ­il War, to bet­ter reflect the con­tention in the field.”
  7. For­get What Gen­der Activists Tell You. Here’s What Med­ical Tran­si­tion Looks Like (Scott New­gent, Quil­lette): “I write all this as a 47-year-old trans­gen­der man who tran­si­tioned five years ago. I’m also a par­ent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good inten­tions of par­ents who seek to sup­port their chil­dren, I have seri­ous con­cerns about reck­less acqui­es­cence to a child’s Inter­net-medi­at­ed self-diag­no­sis. Many old­er trans­gen­der folks share these con­cerns, too.”

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 Religion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65. First shared in vol­ume 195.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 254

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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