Tag: LGBTQ

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 252

There was an abun­dance of sad news this week, which match­es this month, which match­es this year.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Bible tells us to weep with those who weep, and this is a good week for that. I’ve had to share arti­cles about sim­i­lar wicked­ness too many times, begin­ning all the way back in vol­ume 4.
    • I think this 8 minute Face­book video by my friend Jamil Stell is good. He filmed it a few hours before George Floyd’s death, which is why he doesn’t ref­er­ence it. Jamil, who spoke at our fall retreat four years ago, is the Chi Alpha direc­tor at Cal State Stanis­laus.
    • I Specif­i­cal­ly Request­ed The Oppo­site of This (Imgur) — if a pic­ture is worth 1,000 words, a pic­ture with a great cap­tion is an entire trea­tise.
    • The Sor­rows of Min­neapo­lis: A Prayer for Our City (John Piper, Desir­ing God): dif­fi­cult to excerpt, quite good.
    • When the Law Does­n’t Con­tain All the Answers (Bob Driscoll, The Dis­patch): “The law, even applied cor­rect­ly, doesn’t rem­e­dy what we know is wrong. We can hope that the George Floyd killing can pro­vide some insight into the feel­ing of frus­tra­tion in many minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties sur­round­ing polic­ing issues, because we can see, or at least sense, the depth of the prob­lem. Assum­ing the sys­tem prop­er­ly tries and con­victs the kneel­ing offi­cer of some seri­ous offense, will you feel any bet­ter about George Floyd’s death? I won’t.”
    • George Floyd Left a Gospel Lega­cy in Hous­ton (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The rest of the coun­try knows George Floyd from sev­er­al min­utes of cell phone footage cap­tured dur­ing his final hours. But in Houston’s Third Ward, they know Floyd for how he lived for decades—a men­tor to a gen­er­a­tion of young men and a ‘per­son of peace’ ush­er­ing min­istries into the area.”
    • Did George Floyd and Then-Offi­cer Derek Chau­vin Work Togeth­er in Min­neapo­lis? (Snopes): “So while it’s true that Floyd and Chau­vin worked at the club at the same time, it’s unknown, and unlike­ly, accord­ing to the for­mer own­er of the build­ing where the club was locat­ed, that the two men knew each oth­er.”
    • Cooped up: A shame­ful Cen­tral Park encounter demands all New York­ers be bet­ter peo­ple (Robert A. George, NY Dai­ly News) : “In the lat­est episode of the every­day-fresh-hell that is New York City under quar­an­tine, one white female, Amy Coop­er, was caught on video call­ing the cops on one black male, Chris­t­ian Coop­er. Sor­ry, folks, I’d encour­age every­one to push back on the reflex­ive instinct to make this into a sto­ry about racism as it’s more a mod­ern para­ble of bad behav­ior between two indi­vid­u­als.” Super-inter­est­ing.
    • White Peo­ple Behav­ing Bad­ly (Zaid Jilani, Arc Dig­i­tal): “The truth is, mea­sured explic­it and implic­it racial bias has rapid­ly declined, inter­ra­cial crimes are rare, and whites are actu­al­ly under­rep­re­sent­ed com­pared to their share of the pop­u­la­tion in the FBI’s index of hate crimes. No racial group has a monop­oly on hate, what­ev­er anec­dotes ele­vat­ed to news cov­er­age may lead us to believe.”
    • Anger Is Jus­ti­fied, Riots Nev­er Are (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “Riots are bad. Riots are nev­er a coher­ent or moral response to injus­tice, they just mul­ti­ply injus­tices and the riot­ers them­selves often suf­fer more in the long run…. Riots dis­suade indi­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies, and busi­ness­es from stay­ing in or join­ing a com­mu­ni­ty. Who wants to raise their kids in the neigh­bor­hood where the police sta­tion had to be evac­u­at­ed before it was set ablaze?” Some research on the effects of riots The Eco­nom­ic After­math of the 1960s Riots in Amer­i­can Cities: Evi­dence from Prop­er­ty Val­ues (Collins & Mar­go, Jour­nal of Eco­nom­ic His­to­ry on JSTOR) and this Twit­ter thread by a Prince­ton pro­fes­sor.
    • A dif­fer­ing per­spec­tive: What the news does­n’t show about protests in Min­neapo­lis and Louisville (Jason John­son, Vox): “Night­time cov­er­age will sel­dom show a full city map demon­strat­ing that, two blocks over from a street that looks like a ‘city engulfed in flames,’ there’s a CVS still open for busi­ness. The press flock­ing to dra­mat­ic images as a protest metaphor is not a new phe­nom­e­non.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and jour­nal­ism at Mor­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • George Floyd protests: Pho­tos show upris­ings across Amer­i­ca (Jen Kir­by and Kainaz Amaria, Vox): strik­ing images.
  2. About Chi­na:
    • The Infi­nite Heart­break of Lov­ing Hong Kong (Wil­fred Chan, The Nation): “Some­thing pro­found has been lost. It is not democ­ra­cy, because Hong Kong was nev­er demo­c­ra­t­ic. It is not auton­o­my, because Hong Kong nev­er enjoyed self-deter­mi­na­tion. It is cer­tain­ly not the will to resist; as I write this, activists are already plan­ning a full cal­en­dar of mass protests, deter­mined to fight until the bit­ter end. What is lost is the feel­ing that Hong Kong’s future could be an open ques­tion.”
    • Pom­peo declares Hong Kong no longer autonomous from Chi­na (Car­ol Morel­lo, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘Hong Kong and its dynam­ic, enter­pris­ing, and free peo­ple have flour­ished for decades as a bas­tion of lib­er­ty, and this deci­sion gives me no plea­sure,’ [Pom­peo] added. ‘But sound pol­i­cy­mak­ing requires a recog­ni­tion of real­i­ty. While the Unit­ed States once hoped that free and pros­per­ous Hong Kong would pro­vide a mod­el for author­i­tar­i­an Chi­na, it is now clear that Chi­na is mod­el­ing Hong Kong after itself.’”
    • What to Make of Sec­re­tary Pom­peo Decer­ti­fy­ing Hong Kong Auton­o­my (Julian Ku, Law­fare): “Although Pompeo’s dra­mat­ic announce­ment drew head­lines around the world, his deci­sion should not have sur­prised observers, giv­en the new require­ments on any such cer­ti­fi­ca­tion imposed by Con­gress in Novem­ber 2019.”
    • ‘All-out com­bat’ feared as India, Chi­na engage in bor­der stand­off (Saif Khalid, Al Jazeera): “A video shot by an Indi­an sol­dier and shared on social media showed sol­diers from both nations engaged in fist­fights and stone-pelt­ing at the de fac­to bor­der, known as Line of Actu­al Con­trol (LAC). The inci­dent, which con­tin­ued until the next day, result­ed in 11 sol­diers being injured on both sides.” The head­line seems a bit over-the-top. I talked with a friend who has some rel­e­vant exper­tise and he is not that con­cerned. Still worth keep­ing an eye on. 
    • Chi­na-India bor­der: Clash­es raise fears of broad­er con­fronta­tion as Bei­jing pur­sues sov­er­eign­ty claims on all fronts (Anna Fifield and Joan­na Slater, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The rela­tion­ship between the two coun­tries remains tense, exac­er­bat­ed by efforts from both cap­i­tals to stoke nation­al­ist sen­ti­ment. The obvi­ous place for this to erupt is at the point where the two coun­tries bump up against each oth­er.” 
  3. ‘AKA Jane Roe’ and the humil­i­a­tion of the pro-life move­ment (Karen Swal­lows Pri­or, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Even before the film aired, head­line after head­line heaped humil­i­a­tion on pro-lif­ers. The Los Ange­les Times report­ed that McCor­vey had been paid to change her mind. This was mis­lead­ing: McCor­vey wasn’t paid to change her mind — she was paid to speak at pro-life events after she claimed she had changed her posi­tion.”
    • Relat­ed: FX doc­u­men­tary on Nor­ma McCor­vey omits key Catholic sources who knew her best (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Also, the doc­u­men­tary is coy about one impor­tant thing. To get access to McCor­vey, sure­ly they had to pay up too? We call that ‘check­book jour­nal­ism’ and eth­i­cal news orga­ni­za­tions don’t offer mon­ey to their inter­vie­wees. When pressed by the Wash­ing­ton Post, the film’s pro­duc­er admit­ted he paid her a ‘mod­est licens­ing fee’ for use of fam­i­ly pho­tos and doc­u­men­tary footage.” 
  4. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives:
    • Con­ser­v­a­tives who refuse to wear masks under­cut a cen­tral claim of their beliefs (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Refus­ing to wear masks] also under­cuts a more cen­tral claim of con­ser­vatism: that big, coer­cive gov­ern­ment pro­grams are unnec­es­sary because pri­vate insti­tu­tions could pro­vide many ben­e­fits that we think of as ‘pub­lic goods.’ For that to be true, the civic cul­ture would have to be such that indi­vid­u­als are will­ing to make seri­ous sac­ri­fices for the com­mon good, and espe­cial­ly to pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble among us.”
    • Reopen­ing church­es safe­ly: What pas­tors in Utah, Geor­gia have learned (Kelsey Dal­las, Deseret News): “The Rev. Leroy Davis wants his church to feel as safe as Cost­co. The ser­vice will hope­ful­ly be a lit­tle more per­son­al, he said, but the envi­ron­ment should seem just as clean.“
    • The Reg­u­la­to­ry State Is Fail­ing Us (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “It is impor­tant not to make this a par­ti­san con­flict. I do not view the admin­is­tra­tive state as extra-con­sti­tu­tion­al. That said, it has become far too inflex­i­ble, and not suf­fi­cient­ly focused on out­comes. It is time we woke up and real­ized that we have a sys­tem that sim­ply is not work­ing.”
    • COVID-19 Has Exposed Crit­i­cal Weak­ness­es in Glob­al High­er Edu­ca­tion (Chris­tos Makridis and Soula Paras­sidis): “While pub­licly avail­able data does not seem to exist to iden­ti­fy the source of the increas­ing pro­lif­er­a­tion of degree pro­grams, many stu­dents have been fun­neled into degree pro­grams with­out an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what they are going to learn and their post-grad­u­a­tion labor mar­ket prospects.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
  5. Have Pen­te­costals Out­grown Their Name? (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Names can be tricky. What do you call a Pen­te­costal who isn’t called a Pen­te­costal? The ques­tion sounds like a rid­dle, but it’s a real chal­lenge for schol­ars. They have strug­gled for years to set­tle on the best term for the broad and diverse move­ment of Chris­tians who empha­size the indi­vid­ual believer’s rela­tion­ship to the Holy Spir­it and talk about being Spir­it-filled, Spir­it-bap­tized, or Spir­it-empow­ered.”
  6. Conn. trans­gen­der pol­i­cy found to vio­late Title IX (ESPN): “Con­necti­cut’s pol­i­cy allow­ing trans­gen­der girls to com­pete as girls in high school sports vio­lates the civ­il rights of ath­letes who have always iden­ti­fied as female, the U.S. Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment has deter­mined in a deci­sion that could force the state to change course to keep fed­er­al fund­ing and influ­ence oth­ers to do the same.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Indi­vid­u­als have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” The author just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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 251

Con­cern­ing the ben­e­fits of reli­gion, the virtue of intel­lec­tu­al humil­i­ty, per­spec­tives on the pan­dem­ic, the glob­al strat­e­gy of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and an unset­tling account of gov­ern­men­tal sur­veil­lance.

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. Reli­gious ser­vices may low­er risk of ‘deaths of despair’ (Chris Sweeney, Har­vard Gazette): “After adjust­ing for numer­ous vari­ables, the study showed that women who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 68 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair com­pared to those nev­er attend­ing ser­vices. Men who attend­ed ser­vices at least once per week had a 33 per­cent low­er risk of death from despair.” Those are HUGE reduc­tions!
  2. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • Amid the Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis, a Reg­i­men for Reën­try (Atul Gawande, The New York­er): “But, in the face of enor­mous risks, Amer­i­can hos­pi­tals have learned how to avoid becom­ing sites of spread. When the time is right to light­en up on the lock­down and bring peo­ple back to work, there are wider lessons to be learned from places that nev­er locked down in the first place.” This was quite good.
    • What African Nations Are Teach­ing the West About Fight­ing the Coro­n­avirus (Jina Moore, The New York­er): “Much of what Ger­ca­ma encoun­tered at the air­port had been designed to pre­vent Ebo­la. Since 2018, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of the Con­go, South Sudan’s neigh­bor to the south­west, has been strug­gling with the dis­ease. But local pub­lic-health offi­cials’ quick repur­pos­ing of Ebo­la pro­to­cols and infra­struc­ture impressed Ger­ca­ma, as did the work of rapid-response teams, whom she twice wit­nessed respond to sus­pect­ed coro­n­avirus cas­es dur­ing the week she spent in the coun­try.”
    • A Spec­tac­u­lar­ly Bad Wash­ing­ton Post Sto­ry on Apple and Google’s Expo­sure Noti­fi­ca­tion Project (John Gru­ber, blog): “A Wash­ing­ton Post sto­ry today on Apple and Google’s joint effort on COVID-19 expo­sure noti­fi­ca­tion project, from reporters Reed Alber­got­ti and Drew Har­well, is the worst sto­ry I’ve seen in the Post in mem­o­ry. It’s so atro­cious­ly bad — fac­tu­al­ly wrong and one-sided in opin­ion — that it should be retract­ed.” Ouch. Gru­ber backs it up. 
    • Coro­n­avirus Cri­sis: Ron DeSan­tis Got Flori­da’s COVID-19 Strat­e­gy Right (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “A cou­ple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decid­ed that Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis was a pub­lic men­ace who was going to get Florid­i­ans killed with his lax response to the coro­n­avirus cri­sis…. The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom has begun to change about Flori­da, as the dis­as­ter so wide­ly pre­dict­ed hasn’t mate­ri­al­ized.”
    • As more states reopen, Geor­gia defies pre­dic­tions of coro­n­avirus resur­gence. What’s the les­son for the rest of the coun­try? (Andrew Romano, Yahoo News): “That’s the bal­ance reopen­ing needs to strike if it’s going to work: few­er offi­cial restric­tions in exchange for more indi­vid­ual and com­mu­ni­ty respon­si­bil­i­ty.”
    • A con­trary per­spec­tive: It Sure Seems Like Flori­da And Geor­gia Lied About Their Infec­tion Rates (Luis Pra­da, Cracked): “Flori­da and Geor­gia are petu­lant, enti­tled quar­an­tine pro­test­ers embod­ied as states. Since this all start­ed, both states have been fran­ti­cal­ly search­ing for an excuse to end their quar­an­tines as fast as pos­si­ble and get back to life as usu­al despite a ram­pag­ing virus that’s killing peo­ple.”
    • Mis­sis­sip­pi church destroyed by arson was suing city over safer-at-home order (Ari­an­na Poindex­ter, WLBT TV): “A Mis­sis­sip­pi church at the cen­ter of an arson inves­ti­ga­tion is the same church cur­rent­ly in a bat­tle with city lead­ers over a COVID-19 safer-at-home order. First Pen­te­costal Church in Hol­ly Springs was destroyed by what inves­ti­ga­tors believe is an arson­ist. Inves­ti­ga­tors found graf­fi­ti on pave­ment in the church park­ing lot that reads, ‘Bet you stay home now you hypokrits (sic).’” 
    • Meet the ‘Gang Pas­tor’ Behind Cape Town’s Viral Coro­n­avirus Coop­er­a­tion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We reg­u­lar­ly stop while we are work­ing to invite peo­ple to fol­low Jesus. I’ve lost track, but maybe 5,000 to 10,000 have told us they’ve repent­ed and are turn­ing to fol­low Jesus. But I don’t call this suc­cess, it is just a small piece in the over­all cause of what we Chris­tians are called to do.”
    • Don­ald Trump Does­n’t Want Author­i­ty (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Great men and bad men alike seek atten­tion as a means of get­ting pow­er, but our pres­i­dent is inter­est­ed in pow­er only as a means of get­ting atten­tion.”
  3. Uncer­tain­ty (Howard Marks, Oak­tree Cap­i­tal): “The peo­ple who are always sure are no more help­ful than the peo­ple who are nev­er sure. The real expert’s con­fi­dence is rea­son-based and pro­por­tion­al to the weight of the evi­dence.” Shared by an alum­nus’ father.
  4. China’s Plans to Win Con­trol of the Glob­al Order (Tan­ner Greer, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “As Bei­jing sees it, China’s suc­cess depends on dis­cred­it­ing the tenets of lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ism so that notions like indi­vid­ual free­dom and con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy come to be seen as the relics of an obso­lete sys­tem.” I found this piece to be very insight­ful.
    • Relat­ed: In China’s Cri­sis, Xi Sees a Cru­cible to Strength­en His Rule (Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “Mr. Xi, shaped by his years of adver­si­ty as a young man, has seized on the pan­dem­ic as an oppor­tu­ni­ty in dis­guise — a chance to redeem the par­ty after ear­ly mis­takes let infec­tions slip out of con­trol, and to ral­ly nation­al pride in the face of inter­na­tion­al ire over those mis­takes. And the state pro­pa­gan­da machine is aggres­sive­ly back­ing him up, tout­ing his lead­er­ship in fight­ing the pan­dem­ic.”
    • Relat­ed: Xi’s Regime Recasts Chi­na as the Good Samar­i­tan dur­ing Pan­dem­ic (Alan Dowd, Prov­i­dence): “Add it all up—the PR spin, the pro­pa­gan­da push, the pal­lets of aid, the preening—and in a very real sense, Xi Jinping’s regime is offer­ing a new, twist­ed ver­sion of the Para­ble of the Good Samar­i­tan. In Xi’s retelling, the road­side rob­bers who assault the trav­el­er lat­er return to res­cue him—and some­how expect to be hailed as heroes.”
    • An explo­sive sum­mer of dis­con­tent is brew­ing in Hong Kong (Shibani Mah­tani, Wash­ing­ton Post): “On Tues­day, Hong Kong author­i­ties extend­ed pan­dem­ic-relat­ed rules lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings to effec­tive­ly ban, for the first time, a June 4 vig­il mark­ing the anniver­sary of Chi­na’s mas­sacre of stu­dent demon­stra­tors in Tianan­men Square in 1989.”
    • Chi­na Push­es for New Hong Kong Secu­ri­ty Law (Kei­th Brad­sh­er and Austin Ramzy, New York Times): “The leg­isla­tive push in Bei­jing marks the most aggres­sive step by the par­ty to exert its influ­ence over the for­mer British colony since it was reclaimed by Chi­na in 1997.”
    • Seri­ous­ly — pray for Hong Kong.
  5. A Mis­sis­sip­pi pas­tor with eight kids and no pro­fes­sion­al music back­ground won ‘The Voice’ — and made show his­to­ry (Emi­ly Yahr, Wash­ing­ton Post): ““‘I’ve lit­er­al­ly nev­er per­formed. I just sing at church,’ Tilgh­man explained, intro­duc­ing him­self as a pas­tor. This sparked an attempt to prove who was the biggest church fan; Leg­end revealed his grand­fa­ther was a pas­tor, and Jonas one-upped him by boast­ing his father was a pas­tor.”
  6. Under the Rain­bow Ban­ner (Darel Paul, First Things): “In June 1999, Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton declared the first nation­al Pride Month. Twen­ty years lat­er, June is as teem­ing with rain­bows as Decem­ber is with rein­deer. The Pride flag flies above embassies, state capi­tols, and sta­di­ums. Rain­bow stripes adorn city cross­walks.”
    • In response: Queer Times (Carl True­man, First Things): “The debate over LGBTQ issues is not a debate about sex­u­al behav­ior. I sus­pect it is not real­ly at this point a debate with the L, the G, or the B. It is the T and the Q that are car­ry­ing the day, and we need to under­stand that the debate is about the rad­i­cal abo­li­tion of meta­physics and meta­nar­ra­tives and any notion of cul­tur­al sta­bil­i­ty that might rest there­upon.”
  7. Since I Met Edward Snow­den, I’ve Nev­er Stopped Watch­ing My Back (Bar­ton Gell­man, The Atlantic): “Some­one had tak­en con­trol of my iPad, blast­ing through Apple’s secu­ri­ty restric­tions and acquir­ing the pow­er to rewrite any­thing that the oper­at­ing sys­tem could touch. I dropped the tablet on the seat next to me as if it were con­ta­giou” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Grip­ping and dis­turb­ing.

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 Ian McE­wan ‘dubi­ous’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 240

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. I often bury my per­spec­tive, but here is my two ¢ on the Coro­n­avirus: Amer­i­ca is respond­ing to this dis­ease so bad­ly that I find it hard to believe. Giv­en the amaz­ing­ly com­pe­tent peo­ple who pop­u­late this coun­try, our col­lec­tive inep­ti­tude is stag­ger­ing.
    • Deal­ing With a Once-In-A-Cen­tu­ry Pathogen (Claire Lehmann, Quil­lette): “In ear­ly Octo­ber 1918, when the Span­ish flu hit the east coast of the Unit­ed States, the health com­mis­sion­er of St Louis, Max Starkloff, ordered the clo­sure of schools, movie the­aters, saloons, sport­ing events and oth­er pub­lic gath­er­ing spots. While the mea­sures were protest­ed by some cit­i­zens, the quar­an­tine went ahead. A month lat­er, as the pan­dem­ic raged on, he ordered the clo­sure of all busi­ness, with a few excep­tions, such as banks. While dras­tic quar­an­tine mea­sures were being imple­ment­ed in St Louis, the health com­mis­sion­er of Philadel­phia, Wilmer Krusen, gave per­mis­sion for a parade for the war effort to go ahead in his city. It is report­ed that with­in 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hos­pi­tals was filled, and in the week end­ing Octo­ber 5th, 1918, 2,600 peo­ple in Philadel­phia had died, with the fig­ure almost dou­bling a week lat­er. At the end of the out­break, St Louis had the low­est record­ed death rate in the US, while in Philadel­phia mor­tu­ar­ies over­flowed and ‘bod­ies [were] piled up on side­walks.’”
    • Coro­n­avirus: Links, Spec­u­la­tion, Open Thread (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “If we hadn’t let our cul­ture reach the point where gov­ern­ments ban things by default and review at leisure, and where indi­vid­ual ini­tia­tive is frowned upon in favor of wait­ing for offi­cial per­mis­sion to do the right thing, we could have recov­ered from all of these mis­takes. Hos­pi­tals would have used their exist­ing tests which they already have more than enough of, doc­tors would have had per­mis­sion to test sus­pi­cious cas­es at their dis­cre­tion, and we would have had a chance to catch infec­tions ear­ly before they could spread. If the gov­ern­ment didn’t already reg­u­late adren­a­line, bus­pirone, insulin, and genet­ic test­ing to the point of near-unavail­abil­i­ty, maybe peo­ple would have thought it was weird­er, or raised more of a fuss, when they start­ed doing it for coro­n­avirus tests.”
    • Exclu­sive: The Strongest Evi­dence Yet That Amer­i­ca Is Botch­ing Coro­n­avirus Test­ing (Robin­son Mey­er & Alex­is C. Madri­gal, The Atlantic): “Test­ing is the first and most impor­tant tool in under­stand­ing the epi­demi­ol­o­gy of a dis­ease out­break. In the Unit­ed States, a series of fail­ures has com­bined with the decen­tral­ized nature of our health-care sys­tem to hand­i­cap the nation’s abil­i­ty to see the sever­i­ty of the out­break in hard num­bers.”
    • Before and after: coro­n­avirus emp­ties world’s busiest spaces  (Agence France-Presse, The Guardian): “Emp­ty pub­lic squares, a high­way with no cars on it and desert­ed holy sites – a series of strik­ing satel­lite images have revealed the impact of the coro­n­avirus epi­dem­ic on some of the world’s busiest spaces.”
    • Prepar­ing Your Church For Coro­n­avirus (Lyman Stone, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Thus, Chris­tians have two cru­cial duties. First, not to use plague, and the fear of the death of the body, as an excuse to aban­don our God-giv­en duties. We must care for the sick, both the sick in soul and in body. Where dis­ease kills par­ents, we must care for the chil­dren. Where dis­ease kills chil­dren, we must tend to the wounds of the fam­i­ly. Where dis­ease spreads fear, we must be bold in faith. But we should not be idiots. We have a moral oblig­a­tion to pro­tect oth­ers by lim­it­ing the spread of dis­ease. To ignore that duty mur­ders our neigh­bors.” A bit long but excel­lent. 
  2. Men Too Eas­i­ly For­got­ten (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “Real men do not bul­ly. Real men do not watch porn. Real men do not abuse women. Real men do not live at home after col­lege play­ing video games in their parent’s base­ment. Amen to what real men are not, but what, then, is a real man? Can we not say more than just a male who doesn’t do bad? We need men who not only avoid evil but embody what is good. There is a pro­found dif­fer­ence. One sees man­hood as an incur­able ill­ness of soci­ety to be man­aged; the oth­er, a pil­lar to build civ­i­liza­tion upon.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Low-Income Col­lege Stu­dents Are Being Taxed Like Trust-Fund Babies (Eri­ca L. Green, New York Times): “In the past, a stu­dent from a house­hold with a joint income of $50,000 who was award­ed a schol­ar­ship that cov­ered $11,500 in room and board would be taxed at their par­ents’ rate of 12 per­cent. Under the new law, that mon­ey would be taxed up to 35 per­cent.” This is a few months old, shared with me by a stu­dent. For the record, this is insane.
  4. The oth­er way to lose a war (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Some crit­ics like to chalk up pro­longed Amer­i­can engage­ment in places like Afghanistan and Iraq to war­mon­ger­ing or realpoli­tik or some oth­er sin­is­ter moti­va­tion. In my opin­ion, that is the reverse of the truth. The fault of those who advo­cate such engage­ment isn’t world­ly cyn­i­cism, but oth­er­world­ly ide­al­ism.” Thought­ful and thought-pro­vok­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed. 
  5. My Same-Sex Attrac­tion Has an Answer (Rachel Gilson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For peo­ple like me who expe­ri­ence same-sex attrac­tion, the world begs us to believe that our authen­tic selves are only found in giv­ing in. It promis­es hero sta­tus if we sub­mit to our attrac­tions. Our desires whis­per, like a ser­pent in a gar­den, that there is no death in going against God’s Word.”
  6. The lure of ‘cool’ brain research is sti­fling psy­chother­a­py  (Allen Frances, Aeon): “…I can affirm con­fi­dent­ly that there are no neat answers in psy­chi­a­try. The best we can do is embrace an ecu­meni­cal four-dimen­sion­al mod­el that includes all pos­si­ble con­trib­u­tors to human func­tion­ing: the bio­log­i­cal, the psy­cho­log­i­cal, the social, and the spir­i­tu­al. Reduc­ing peo­ple to just one ele­ment – their brain func­tion­ing, or their psy­cho­log­i­cal ten­den­cies, or their social con­text, or their strug­gle for mean­ing – results in a flat, dis­tort­ed image that leaves out more than it can cap­ture.” The author was chair of the psy­chi­a­try depart­ment at Duke. 
  7. Let’s Decon­struct a Decon­ver­sion Sto­ry: The Case of Rhett and Link (Alisa Childers, Gospel Coali­tion): “Our cul­tur­al moment is a caul­dron of infor­ma­tion and celebri­ty wor­ship in which the cult of per­son­al­i­ty can fer­ment and grow. With every hit of the ‘like’ but­ton, the per­son­al­i­ties we’ve sub­scribed to have become our author­i­ties for truth.”
    • Red Flags in the Spir­i­tu­al Decon­struc­tion of My Old Friends Rhett and Link (Shel­by Abbot, per­son­al blog): “After they left staff with Cru, I kept in touch with the guys for a few years. But time and life hap­pened, and my com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them fad­ed. Every now and then I’d send a mes­sage, but both Rhett and Link stopped rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing. I fig­ured they prob­a­bly changed their num­bers and email address­es, or had too many DM’s from fans to find my ran­dom mes­sages say­ing hel­lo. [After hear­ing their] per­son­al spir­i­tu­al decon­struc­tion sto­ries. It sud­den­ly made a lot sense to me why I nev­er heard back from them.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selec­tive pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools. The reli­gion in ques­tion is not Method­ism or Catholi­cism but an extreme ver­sion of the belief sys­tem of the lib­er­al elite: the lib­er­al pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, and cre­ative class­es, which pro­vide a large major­i­ty of stu­dents enrolled at such places and an even larg­er major­i­ty of fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tors who work at them. 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 239

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

I was sick last week and did­n’t have a chance to post. It was refresh­ing to take a break from the infor­ma­tion del­uge that is the mod­ern age!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Coro­n­avirus Is More Than a Dis­ease. It’s a Test. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “So already, the virus has exposed a clear weak spot in what you might call the lib­er­al-glob­al­ist imag­i­na­tion: an overzeal­ous ‘remain calm’ spir­it in the face of the real risks of a hyper-con­nect­ed world.”. 
    • The Pan­dem­ic Is Com­ing (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): Dreher has been post­ing lots of great infor­ma­tion on this. Worth fol­low­ing on this top­ic gen­er­al­ly.
    • China’s Book­stores Band Togeth­er To Sur­vive the Epi­dem­ic (Ken­rick Davis, Sixth Tone): unex­pect­ed­ly inter­est­ing with strik­ing pic­tures.
    • How Fast Can a Virus Destroy a Sup­ply Chain? (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Glob­al sup­ply chains have yet to come apart most­ly because trade and pros­per­i­ty gen­er­al­ly have been ris­ing. But now, for the first time since World War II, the glob­al econ­o­my faces the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a true decou­pling of many trade con­nec­tions. It is not suf­fi­cient­ly well under­stood how rapid that process could be. A com­plex inter­na­tion­al sup­ply chain is frag­ile pre­cise­ly for the same rea­sons it is valu­able — name­ly, it is hard to con­struct and main­tain because it involves so many inter­de­pen­den­cies.”
  2. The boss who put every­one on 70K (Stephanie Hegar­ty, BBC): ‘“Before the $70,000 min­i­mum wage, we were hav­ing between zero and two babies born per year amongst the team,’ he says. ‘And since the announce­ment — and it’s been only about four-and-a-half years — we’ve had more than 40 babies.’”
  3. China’s ‘War on Ter­ror’ uproots fam­i­lies, leaked data shows (Dake Kang, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Rea­sons list­ed for intern­ment include ‘minor reli­gious infec­tion,’ ‘dis­turbs oth­er per­sons by vis­it­ing them with­out rea­sons,’ ‘rel­a­tives abroad,’ ‘think­ing is hard to grasp’ and ‘untrust­wor­thy per­son born in a cer­tain decade.’ The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 per­cent of peo­ple con­sid­ered ‘untrust­wor­thy’ were in the age brack­et of 25 to 29 years, accord­ing to an analy­sis of the data by Zenz.”
  4. Are We Liv­ing Out Romans 1? (Rosario But­ter­field, Desir­ing God): “Romans 1:26 tells us that peo­ple give them­selves over to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty because they wor­ship and serve the cre­ation. There­fore, from God’s point of view, homo­sex­u­al prac­tice is the sex­u­al dis­play of false wor­ship. Well-heeled Gay Pride march­es, with big-mon­ey cor­po­rate spon­sors smil­ing in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the LGBTQ machine, give us a mod­ern-day pic­ture of what wor­ship­ing the crea­ture looks like.”
  5. Chesa Boudin: San Francisco’s Law­less Rev­o­lu­tion­ary (Maxwell Mey­er, The Stan­ford Review) “In Com­rade Gringo’s new San Fran­cis­co, a naked pros­ti­tute on hero­in can defe­cate in a gro­cery store aisle, take up to $950 of goods, walk back to their tent on a city side­walk, steal a hand­gun and drop some nee­dles along the way, and then solic­it sex or drugs‚ or both, to pedes­tri­ans out­side a local busi­ness, with just a cita­tion (if that). But God for­bid that pros­ti­tute should offer those pedes­tri­ans a plas­tic straw, for hell hath no fury like San Fran­cis­co offi­cials when ‘The Plan­et’ is threat­ened.”
    • This rant in a stu­dent paper reads like pro­fes­sion­al pun­dit­ry in a nation­al-lev­el pub­li­ca­tion. I wish to acknowl­edge the author’s excel­lent writ­ing skills.
  6. The Rise and Tri­umph of the Mod­ern Self (Carl True­man, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Every age has its mal­adies, and I for one have no wish to have lived my life in an era when chil­dren worked as chim­ney sweeps or, like my father, grew up in the shad­ow of the Luft­waffe. We do not choose our time, and we must not waste ener­gy lament­ing our time. We need first and fore­most to under­stand our time and then to respond to it with informed wis­dom.”
  7. The Val­ue of Study Abroad Expe­ri­ence in the Labor Mar­ket: Find­ings from a Resume Audit Exper­i­ment (Cheng & Florick, SSRN): “Com­pared to resumes that list no study abroad expe­ri­ence, resumes that list study abroad expe­ri­ence in Asia regard­less of length are about 20 per­cent more like­ly to receive a call­back for an inter­view if the resume stud­ied. The dif­fer­ences in rates increas­es to 25 per­cent when com­par­ing resumes with­out study abroad expe­ri­ence to those that list two-week pro­grams in Asia. Resumes that list study abroad expe­ri­ence in Europe for one year are 20 per­cent less like­ly to receive any call­back and 35 per­cent less like­ly to receiv­ing [sic] a call back for an inter­view, rel­a­tive to resumes that do not list study abroad expe­ri­ence.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 234

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. Reflec­tions on Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “I don’t know what pro­por­tion of stu­dents at elite schools are part of the inter­sec­tion­al sub­cul­ture. But it is com­mon enough that I nev­er go more than a few days with­out encoun­ter­ing it. As a crude point of com­par­i­son, I’m more like­ly to meet a com­mit­ted inter­sec­tion­al­ist on any giv­en day at Colum­bia than I am to meet a com­mit­ted veg­e­tar­i­an, and much more like­ly than I am to meet a com­mit­ted Chris­t­ian.”
  2. The Unit­ed States is Starved for Tal­ent (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­all, get­ting (approx­i­mate­ly) one extra high-skilled [H1‑B] work­er caus­es a 23% increase in the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a suc­cess­ful IPO with­in five years (a 1.5 per­cent­age point increase in the base­line prob­a­bil­i­ty of 6.6%). That’s a huge effect. Remem­ber, these star­tups have access to a labor pool of 160 mil­lion work­ers.”
  3. Why Bad Things Must Hap­pen to Good Peo­ple (Nathaniel Givens, Pub­lic Square): “It’s also fair to say that when we know in advance the bound­aries of the bad that can hap­pen, we can hedge our bets and selec­tive­ly choose our course through life to opti­mize risk and reward. The prob­lem isn’t that we will make dif­fer­ent deci­sions under con­di­tions like these. The prob­lem is that we will make them for dif­fer­ent rea­sons.” A Mor­mon take on theod­i­cy, quite inter­est­ing and not con­tin­gent on Mor­mon dis­tinc­tives.
  4. Aus­tralian rap­tors start fires to flush out prey (John Pick­rell, Cos­mos): “Black kites (Mil­vus migrans), whistling kites (Halias­tur sphenu­rus) and brown fal­cons (Fal­co berig­o­ra) all reg­u­lar­ly con­gre­gate near the edges of bush­fires, tak­ing advan­tage of an exo­dus of small lizards, mam­mals, birds and insects – but it appears that some may have learnt not only to use fire to their advan­tage, but also to con­trol it.”
  5. Big Data+Small Bias « Small Data+Zero Bias (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Sup­pose you want to esti­mate who will win the 2016 US Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. You ask 2.3 mil­lion poten­tial vot­ers whether they are like­ly to vote for Trump or not. The sam­ple is in all ways demo­graph­i­cal­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the US vot­ing pop­u­la­tion but poten­tial Trump vot­ers are a tiny bit less like­ly to answer the ques­tion, just .001 less like­ly to answer (note they don’t lie, they just don’t answer).” I was stunned.
  6. Coach O. Vs. The Acela Grad­grind (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “You’d think that the media elites would by now have learned the cost to their own cred­i­bil­i­ty of not under­stand­ing this coun­try. But they keep being sur­prised. Nobody expects a New York Times edi­to­r­i­al writer to agree with the deci­sion to can­cel col­lege class­es because of a foot­ball game. But one would like to think that a man of the world such as him­self would have enough sense to think about why this deci­sion might have been made, and what it says about cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence. I sus­pect if the LSU Board of Super­vi­sors had can­celled class­es for Trans­gen­der Day Of Remem­brance, the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al board would have wet its col­lec­tive pants with delight.”
    • Relat­ed: Where Ivy Mat­ters: The Edu­ca­tion­al Back­grounds of U.S. Cul­tur­al Elites (Brint et al, Soci­ol­o­gy of Edu­ca­tion): “We find that the lead­ing U.S. edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions are sub­stan­tial­ly more impor­tant for prepar­ing future mem­bers of the cul­tur­al elite than they are for prepar­ing future mem­bers of the busi­ness or polit­i­cal elite. In addi­tion, mem­bers of the cul­tur­al elite who are rec­og­nized for out­stand­ing achieve­ments by peers and experts are much more like­ly to have obtained degrees from the lead­ing edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions than are those who achieve acclaim from pop­u­lar audi­ences.”
  7. See­ing Both Sides (Andrew Bunt, Think The­ol­o­gy): “One of the things I find most dif­fi­cult about being a celi­bate gay/same-sex attract­ed Chris­t­ian is when I feel a strong attrac­tion to a spe­cif­ic guy.”

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 Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

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 232

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’ve missed send­ing this email due to hol­i­day trav­els for a while, and I’ve got noth­ing on Iran yet. Too much is hap­pen­ing and I’m in a remote place with lim­it­ed inter­net access. Any­thing you find great please send my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Prob­lem Isn’t the ‘Mer­it,’ It’s the ‘Ocra­cy’ (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was built on the assump­tion that the most salient polit­i­cal divides would reflect geog­ra­phy, not ide­ol­o­gy or class. The sen­a­tor from Mass­a­chu­setts would share bonds in com­mon with the lay cit­i­zen­ry of Boston that he did not share with a sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na. On the nation­al sphere this would allow him to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of his con­stituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry than oth­ers; yet because of the way Amer­i­can politi­cians are elect­ed, this sense of rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of a geo­graph­i­cal­ly bound­ed group of peo­ple is more true in the polit­i­cal are­na than in most oth­ers.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Decade in review: Mar­i­tal norms erode (Ryan T. Ander­son and Robert P. George, USA Today): “Law shapes cul­ture; cul­ture shapes beliefs; beliefs shape action. The law now effec­tive­ly teach­es that moth­ers and fathers are replace­able, that mar­riage is sim­ply about con­sent­ing adult rela­tion­ships, of what­ev­er for­ma­tion the par­ties hap­pen to pre­fer. This under­mines the truth that chil­dren deserve a moth­er and a father — one of each.”
    • Fol­low-up by Rod Dreher: Fam­i­ly, Mem­o­ry, Pow­er (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If you’re one of those peo­ple with a habit of say­ing, nobody has ever explained how all this is going to hurt het­ero­sex­u­al me, this is a good basic place to start. Moral­i­ty is an ecol­o­gy. This is the equiv­a­lent of inject­ing some­thing into the ground­wa­ter. It may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing, but it does affect every­body. Peo­ple who say it doesn’t are lying — per­haps to them­selves.”
    • That fol­low-up inspired Pro­fes­sor George to reply: The Shame Of The Con­formists (this is on Dreher’s blog): “Some­one might say, ‘this is no time for recrim­i­na­tions.’ Well, I don’t agree. This is pre­cise­ly the time for recrim­i­na­tions. Indeed, there was nev­er a bet­ter time. Stand­ing bold­ly for what is true and good and right and just is everybody’s job. It’s not just ‘oth­er people’s’ job. Espe­cial­ly to my fel­low Chris­tians I say, it is OUR job. It comes with the Gospel ter­ri­to­ry. You say ‘it’s hard’? Of course, it’s hard. But who ever told you that Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship was not going to be hard? Or risky? Or cost­ly? Not Jesus, that’s for sure. He told us–in the most explic­it terms–that it was going to be hard–very hard–and risky, and cost­ly. “
  3. Yes, Jesus Was a Refugee. He Still Is. (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “When most peo­ple talk about Jesus being a refugee, they’re not talk­ing about Beth­le­hem but the family’s flight to Egypt. Some time after his birth, Herod got pan­icky about rumors of a new king and sent sol­diers to kill all the new­borns in Beth­le­hem. An angel warned Joseph and Mary to high­tail it to Egypt where they could safe­ly lay low. Egypt made for an ide­al hid­ing place, con­nect­ed to Judea via a well-trav­eled and rel­a­tive­ly safe trade route known as the Via Maris. The argu­ment for Mary and Joseph’s refugee sta­tus here is about as strong as it could be under the cir­cum­stances.”
  4. Bib­li­cal Archaeology’s Top 10 Dis­cov­er­ies of 2019 (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…many of the main­stream media sto­ries announc­ing these dis­cov­er­ies acknowl­edged that the Bible was right all along or right after all in these instances. Archae­ol­o­gist Nel­son Glueck’s dec­la­ra­tion that ‘no archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery has ever con­tro­vert­ed a Bib­li­cal ref­er­ence’ still stands.”
  5. Some fol­low-ups to the Chris­tian­i­ty Today arti­cle I shared last time call­ing for Trump’s removal from office:
    • The Flag in the Whirl­wind: An Update from CT’s Pres­i­dent (Tim Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a polit­i­cal land­scape dom­i­nat­ed by polar­iza­tion, hos­til­i­ty, and mis­un­der­stand­ing, we believe it’s crit­i­cal for Chris­tians to mod­el how to have a firm opin­ion and host free dis­cus­sion at the same time. Evan­gel­i­cals of dif­fer­ent stripes can­not con­tin­ue to shout one anoth­er down, bul­ly those who dis­agree, or exclude one anoth­er and refuse to lis­ten. We hold fast to our view that the whole­heart­ed evan­gel­i­cal embrace of Trump has been enor­mous­ly costly—but we are com­mit­ted to irenic con­ver­sa­tion with men and women of good faith who believe oth­er­wise.”
      • Side note: the author was a gym­nast at Stan­ford who was active­ly involved in cam­pus min­istry while here (his time pre­ced­ed my tenure at Chi Alpha, to my knowl­edge we have nev­er met or even been in the same ZIP code). There’s an arti­cle about his sto­ry back in vol­ume 191. 
    • What It Would Take for Evan­gel­i­cals to Turn on Pres­i­dent Trump (Michael Luo, New York­er): “…though greater reli­gios­i­ty is cor­re­lat­ed with Chris­t­ian-nation­al­ist beliefs, once those beliefs are account­ed for, Amer­i­cans who engaged in more fre­quent reli­gious practice—church atten­dance, prayer, and bible reading—were less like­ly than their less obser­vant peers to sub­scribe to polit­i­cal views nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, such as believ­ing that refugees from the Mid­dle East pose a ter­ror­ist threat to the Unit­ed States, or that ille­gal immi­grants from Mex­i­co are most­ly dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals. In oth­er words, White­head and Per­ry find that the threat to demo­c­ra­t­ic plu­ral­ism is not evan­gel­i­cal­ism itself but the cul­ture around evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
    • Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.”
    • Trump Should Not Be Removed from Office: A Response to Mark Gal­li and Chris­tian­i­ty Today (Wayne Gru­dem, Town­hall): “If evan­gel­i­cals fail to sup­port Don­ald Trump after he has deliv­ered on so many issues impor­tant to Chris­t­ian val­ues, many peo­ple will con­clude that we real­ly do not care about con­ser­v­a­tive judges, the pro­tec­tion of the unborn, the pro­tec­tion of gen­der dis­tinc­tions, reli­gious free­dom, con­science pro­tec­tions for Chris­tians in the work­place, a strong enough mil­i­tary to pro­tect us against threats from Chi­na, North Korea, Rus­sia, and Iran, jobs,wages, eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties for minori­ties, a secure bor­der, Israel, afford­able ener­gy (espe­cial­ly for the poor), ener­gy inde­pen­dence, the pro­tec­tion of prop­er­ty rights, expand­ing parental choice for schools, revi­tal­iz­ing NATO, pro­tect­ing free­dom of speech on cam­pus­es, and many oth­er things. Gal­li dis­miss­es these con­cerns with the label ‘polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy,’ but all of these issues affect people’s ordi­nary lives. These issues real­ly do mat­ter. On issue after issue, Pres­i­dent Trump is chang­ing the direc­tion of the coun­try for the bet­ter. When I weigh these results against his some­times impre­cise and coarse speech, there is no com­par­i­son.”
    • Where Cain Got His Wife, and Oth­er Issues Relat­ed to the 2020 Elec­tion (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “As men­tioned above, I did not vote for the pres­i­dent in 2016. I did not vote for him because char­ac­ter mat­ters, and because I did not trust him to do what he was promis­ing to do…. And with that said, I have to acknowl­edge I was wrong… If any­thing, the great mass of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers have demon­strat­ed that they actu­al­ly have a bet­ter set of polit­i­cal instincts than their lead­ers, me includ­ed.”
  6. My Semes­ter With the Snowflakes (James Hatch, Medi­um): “In May of 2019, I was accept­ed to the Eli Whit­ney stu­dent pro­gram at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. At 52, I am the old­est fresh­man in the class of 2023. Before I was accept­ed, I didn’t real­ly know what to expect. I had seen the infa­mous YouTube video of stu­dents scream­ing at a fac­ul­ty mem­ber. I had seen the news sto­ries regard­ing the admis­sions scan­dal and that Yale was includ­ed in that unfor­tu­nate busi­ness. I had also heard the stu­dents at Yale referred to as ‘snowflakes’ in var­i­ous social media dump­sters and occa­sion­al­ly I’d seen ref­er­ences to Ivy League stu­dents as snowflakes in a few news sources.” (there’s an inter­est­ing fol­low-up inter­view with him on NPR)
  7. Two aca­d­e­m­ic things I found inter­est­ing:
    • Com­par­ing meta-analy­ses and pre­reg­is­tered mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tion projects (Aman­da Kvar­ven, Eirik Strøm­land & Mag­nus Johan­nes­son, Nature Human Behav­ior): “We com­pare the results of meta-analy­ses to large-scale pre­reg­is­tered repli­ca­tions in psy­chol­o­gy car­ried out at mul­ti­ple lab­o­ra­to­ries. The mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions pro­vide pre­cise­ly esti­mat­ed effect sizes that do not suf­fer from pub­li­ca­tion bias or selec­tive report­ing. We searched the lit­er­a­ture and iden­ti­fied 15 meta-analy­ses on the same top­ics as mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions. We find that meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from repli­ca­tion effect sizes for 12 out of the 15 meta-repli­ca­tion pairs. These dif­fer­ences are sys­tem­at­ic and, on aver­age, meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are almost three times as large as repli­ca­tion effect sizes.” uh-oh. 
    • The Many Faces of Sci­en­tif­ic Fraud (Nico­las Chevas­sus-au-Louis, Quil­lette): “Is every sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle a fraud? This ques­tion may seem puz­zling to those out­side the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. After all, any­one who took a phi­los­o­phy course in col­lege is like­ly to think of lab­o­ra­to­ry work as emi­nent­ly ratio­nal. The assump­tion is that a researcher faced with an enig­ma posed by nature for­mu­lates a hypoth­e­sis, then con­ceives an exper­i­ment to test its valid­i­ty…. How­ev­er, as every researcher knows, it is pure false­hood. In real­i­ty, noth­ing takes place the way it is described in a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle. The exper­i­ments were car­ried out in a far more dis­or­dered man­ner, in stages far less log­i­cal than those relat­ed in the arti­cle. If you look at it that way, a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle is a kind of trick.” The author has a Ph.D. in biol­o­gy and this is an excerpt from a book he is pub­lish­ing with Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

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 230

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Les­son To Unlearn (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “The most dam­ag­ing thing you learned in school was­n’t some­thing you learned in any spe­cif­ic class. It was learn­ing to get good grades.” Stan­ford stu­dents: if you feel attacked, you are. He is aim­ing at you. Worth pon­der­ing.
  2. The Chris­tians I Know (Eboo Patel, Inside High­er Ed): “Too often when I talk about the impor­tance of pos­i­tive­ly engag­ing reli­gious iden­ti­ty in a pro­gres­sive high­er ed space, the first ques­tion that gets asked is this: ‘Chris­tians hate gays and refugees and poor peo­ple, so why should I cre­ate a space for their iden­ti­ties?’ That’s the same view of Chris­tians that big­ots have of Mus­lims: know­ing only the bad stuff. My hope is that peo­ple will remem­ber that Chris­tians often start and run the pro­grams that pro­vide direct ser­vice to those very peo­ple when they are suf­fer­ing the most.”
  3. British Evan­gel­i­cals Brace for Brex­it (Ken Chit­wood, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The gen­er­al­ly pro-remain stance of British evan­gel­i­cals might be sur­pris­ing to some. How­ev­er, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Andrea Hatch­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South in Sewa­nee, Ten­nessee, found British evan­gel­i­cals are ‘less bound­aried’ and gen­er­al­ly ‘more inter­na­tion­al­ist in out­look’ than either their Angli­can and Pen­te­costal peers or US evan­gel­i­cals. They are also more will­ing to work across polit­i­cal divides.” I find this inter­est­ing for sev­er­al rea­sons, one of which is the way the author sep­a­rates Pen­te­costals from evan­gel­i­cals. Is that a UK thing? In the USA Pen­te­costals are gen­er­al­ly seen as a sub­set of evan­gel­i­cals.
    • Relat­ed: The Begin­ning of the End of the Unit­ed King­dom (First Things): “It may seem hys­ter­i­cal to pro­claim the end to a coun­try that has basi­cal­ly exist­ed in its present form—minus the Repub­lic of Ire­land, of course—since 1707. But the evi­dence is build­ing by the day. In thir­ty years, it is far more like­ly than not that the Unit­ed King­dom will not exist. What will exist is an Eng­land that will be poor­er, frac­tured between the Lon­don elite and the rest of the coun­try, and pos­si­bly sub­ject to demo­graph­ic fac­tion­al­ism.”
    • Relat­ed: The Blun­der­ing Bril­liance of Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “It is this aspect of Boris’s pol­i­tics that some of his close allies insist has been mis­un­der­stood. He has done what no oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive leader in the West has done: He has co-opt­ed and there­by neutered the far right. The reac­tionary Brex­it Par­ty has all but col­lapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immi­gra­tion fer­vor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the eco­nom­ic and social cen­ter under Johnson’s lead­er­ship. And there is a strat­e­gy to this. What Cum­mings and John­son believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for lib­er­al progress, has, through its over­reach and hubris, actu­al­ly become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Con­ti­nent. By forc­ing many very dif­fer­ent coun­tries into one increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful Euro­crat­ic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nation­al­ist reac­tion.” This one is long but real­ly good. If you enjoy it, I super high­ly rec­om­mend a very amus­ing arti­cle about Boris John­son I shared back in vol­ume 208 (scroll down to the fun­ny sec­tion).
  4. Reli­gion, Reten­tion, and Why We Stay or Go (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “What to make of all this? First, evan­gel­i­cals are doing a good job of keep­ing peo­ple inside the tent…. The oth­er thing worth pon­der­ing is that almost no one is mov­ing toward Catholi­cism or main­line Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. Instead, the move­ment is all at the edges of the spec­trum — evan­gel­i­cals on one end, and the nones on the oth­er.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and is him­self an ex-evan­gel­i­cal. 
  5. A guide to hav­ing an actu­al­ly hap­py Christ­mas (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “Mr Mutz found that Chris­tians felt hap­pi­er at Christ­mas, while oth­ers felt less hap­py. Sim­i­lar­ly Messrs Kass­er and Shel­don found that peo­ple who spent more time with their fam­i­lies or engag­ing in reli­gious prac­tices tend­ed to have a bet­ter time of things. Con­sumerism fared less well, accord­ing to Messrs Kass­er and Shel­don; for all the mon­ey and effort buy­ing and wrap­ping gifts, the activ­i­ty ‘appar­ent­ly con­tributes lit­tle to hol­i­day joy’.”
  6. 200 Researchers, 5 Hypothe­ses, No Con­sis­tent Answers (Christie Aschwan­den, Wired): “When var­i­ous research teams designed their own means of test­ing the very same set of research ques­tions, they came up with diver­gent, and in some cas­es oppos­ing, results. The crowd­sourced study is a dra­mat­ic demon­stra­tion of an idea that’s been wide­ly dis­cussed in light of the repro­ducibil­i­ty crisis—the notion that sub­jec­tive deci­sions researchers make while design­ing their stud­ies can have an enor­mous impact on their observed results. Whether through p‑hacking or via the choic­es they make as they wan­der the gar­den of fork­ing paths, researchers may inten­tion­al­ly or inad­ver­tent­ly nudge their results toward a par­tic­u­lar con­clu­sion.” I don’t think this is sur­pris­ing to any­one who knows many sci­en­tists, but it’s def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing.
  7. Are We in the Midst of a Trans­gen­der Mur­der Epi­dem­ic? (Will­fred Reil­ly, Quil­lette): “The Human Rights Cam­paign main­tains a year-by-year data­base con­tain­ing every known case of a trans­gen­der indi­vid­ual being killed by vio­lent means, and gives this num­ber as 29 in 2017, 26 in 2018, and 22 in 2019. Not only do these fig­ures not reflect a year-by-year increase in attacks on trans persons—they are remark­ably con­sis­tent, and may be trend­ing slight­ly downwards—they also indi­cate that the trans mur­der rate is sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er than the mur­der rate for Amer­i­cans over­all.” Any num­ber of mur­ders is too many. Still, I found this inter­est­ing because I hear the con­trary so often. In light of the pre­vi­ous arti­cle, if you know oppos­ing research I’d like to see it. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Ken­tucky State Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have 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 229

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Should Lebanon’s Chris­tians Join Protests? Viral Ser­mons Argue Yes and No. (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “”For the past month, Lebanese evan­gel­i­cals have debat­ed Scrip­ture, shar­ing ser­mons online. One viral effort urges believ­ers to stay away from wide­spread demon­stra­tions in sub­mis­sion to author­i­ty. Anoth­er licens­es par­tic­i­pa­tion in the pop­u­lar push for jus­tice.”
    • I like this arti­cle because it helps us look at a con­tentious Bib­li­cal issue in a set­ting where most of us don’t have a strong bias one way or the oth­er. Decide whose argu­ments you find most com­pelling, and then think about how they apply in your own set­ting.
  2. Most peo­ple are bad at argu­ing. These 2 tech­niques will make you bet­ter. (Bri­an Resnick, Vox): “1) If the argu­ment you find con­vinc­ing doesn’t res­onate with some­one else, find out what does…. 2) Lis­ten. Your ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents want to feel like they’ve been heard.”
  3. See­ing Like A Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. LGBT Rights-Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Bill Pro­posed in Con­gress (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Con­gress­man Chris Stew­art doesn’t expect his bill to pass. But he is propos­ing the Fair­ness for All Act any­way. It’s a step of faith for Stew­art, a Repub­li­can who rep­re­sents Utah’s sec­ond dis­trict, and a mark­er on the bet that it’s pos­si­ble to find a com­pro­mise that pro­tects both reli­gious lib­er­ty and LGBT rights.”
  5. How the Trump Cabinet’s Bible Teacher Became a Shad­ow Diplo­mat (Mat­tathias Schwartz, New York Times): “Sev­en years ago, Drollinger pub­lished a short book called ‘Rebuild­ing Amer­i­ca: The Bib­li­cal Blue­print,’ which lays out his ambi­tion to ‘to reach all the cap­i­tals of the world for Christ.’ Drollinger, like many evan­gel­i­cals, refers to this God-giv­en glob­al remit as the Great Com­mis­sion, a phrase pop­u­lar­ized by the 19th-cen­tu­ry mis­sion­ary James Hud­son Tay­lor; Drollinger traces its man­date to Jesus’ charge, as relat­ed by Matthew, to ‘make dis­ci­ples of all the nations.’ A chart in ‘Rebuild­ing Amer­i­ca’ dia­grams the ‘influ­ence path’ of a pub­lic ser­vant as a base­ball dia­mond, run­ning through local gov­ern­ment (first base), state gov­ern­ment (sec­ond base) and nation­al gov­ern­ment (third base) and cul­mi­nat­ing in ‘inter­na­tion­al influ­ence’ (home plate).” I shared anoth­er arti­cle about Drollinger back in vol­ume 147.
  6. China’s Sov­er­eign­ty Trip­wire in Hong Kong (David P. Gold­man, First Things): “Chi­na is a poly­glot, mul­ti­eth­nic empire, not a nation-state. Infringe­ment of its con­trol over any part of its ter­ri­to­ry threat­ens the whole. For­eign inter­ven­tion and region­al divi­sions is the stuff of China’s his­tor­i­cal night­mares. Any loss of sov­er­eign­ty, in China’s expe­ri­ence, begins a slip­pery slope toward impe­r­i­al crack­up. For­eign inva­sion is still a liv­ing mem­o­ry in Chi­na, and Bei­jing reads the worst into Amer­i­can inter­ven­tion over Hong Kong.”
  7. The Sal­va­tion Army’s Actions Speak Loud­er Than Its The­ol­o­gy (Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg): “Vol­un­teers are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly than non-vol­un­teers to be reli­gious; and the reli­gious are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly than the non-reli­gious to vol­un­teer. As reli­gion declines, so does vol­un­teer­ing. If we put the reli­gious vol­un­teers out of busi­ness, a lot of peo­ple will sud­den­ly be unhelped. We need all the vol­un­teers we can get. And we can­not rea­son­ably expect to replace them with paid labor. Accord­ing to the Urban Insti­tute, the 8.7 bil­lion hours vol­un­teered in the U.S. in 2016 were worth about $187.4 bil­lion.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale.

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 Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 227

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 216

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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