Tag: marriage

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 276

I real­ly like the sto­ries of the shame­less­ly sketchy judge near the end

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Azerbaijan’s drones owned the bat­tle­field in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of war­fare (Robyn Dixon, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a mat­ter of months, how­ev­er, Nagorno-Karabakh has become per­haps the most pow­er­ful exam­ple of how small and rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive attack drones can change the dimen­sions of con­flicts once dom­i­nat­ed by ground bat­tles and tra­di­tion­al air pow­er.”
  2. The U.S. Divorce Rate Has Hit a 50-Year Low (Wendy Wang, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Divorce in Amer­i­ca has been falling fast in recent years, and it just hit a record low in 2019. For every 1,000 mar­riages in the last year, only 14.9 end­ed in divorce, accord­ing to the new­ly released Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey data from the Cen­sus Bureau. This is the low­est rate we have seen in 50 years. It is even slight­ly low­er than 1970, when 15 mar­riages end­ed in divorce per 1,000 mar­riages.”
  3. Gen­der Activists Are Try­ing to Can­cel My Book. Why is Sil­i­con Val­ley Help­ing Them? (Abi­gail Shri­er, Quil­lette): “This is what cen­sor­ship looks like in 21st-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. It isn’t the gov­ern­ment send­ing police to your home. It’s Sil­i­con Val­ley oli­gop­o­lists imple­ment­ing black­outs and appeas­ing social-jus­tice mobs, while send­ing dis­fa­vored ideas down mem­o­ry holes. And the forces of cen­sor­ship are win­ning. Not only because their efforts to cen­sor leave almost no trace. They are win­ning because, thus far, most Amer­i­cans have been con­tent to sur­ren­der vir­tu­al­ly every lib­er­ty in exchange for the lux­u­ry of hav­ing prod­ucts deliv­ered to their door.”
    • Relat­ed: How cor­po­ra­tions can delete your exis­tence (Gavin Haynes, Unherd): “In the bank­ing system’s capac­i­ty to dis­able the indi­vid­ual with­out pro-active­ly doing them harm, there’s an echo of the ele­gance of the Chi­nese government’s social cred­it.”
  4. On the valid­i­ty of the elec­tion:
    • Who’s cov­er­ing this? Are charis­mat­ics and Pen­te­costals behind Trump’s refusal to con­cede? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…these folks are a sub­set — a move­ment among charismatics/pentecostals — of a Chris­t­ian sub­set and not well known to the gen­er­al pub­lic. How­ev­er, when you have flocks of Repub­li­cans call­ing foul on the elec­tion and the president’s most high-pro­file pas­tor is hav­ing night­ly prayer meet­ings because she is cer­tain that prophets have decreed four more years for Trump, it’s time more reporters give a lis­ten.”
    • How we can be con­fi­dent that Trump’s vot­er fraud claims are baloney (Hen­ry Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mass vot­er fraud should be rel­a­tive­ly easy to detect, even if it might be dif­fi­cult to prove. Since we elect pres­i­dents through the elec­toral col­lege, polit­i­cal oper­a­tives try­ing to nefar­i­ous­ly pro­duce a vic­to­ry would focus on states crit­i­cal to an elec­toral col­lege major­i­ty…. None of these ear­ly warn­ing signs of fraud appear in the results.”
    • The Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion Was Legit­i­mate. Con­spir­a­cies Are Not. (David French, The Dis­patch): “The count­ing must con­tin­ue and all legal chal­lenges must be heard, but as of this moment there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that should cause Amer­i­cans to believe that this elec­tion was ille­git­i­mate, and it is shame­ful and dan­ger­ous for any­one to sug­gest or allege oth­er­wise.”
    • A Primer in Basic Elec­toral Skep­ti­cism (Dou­glas Wil­son, blog): “We have reports that every­thing is fine and nor­mal. We have reports of vot­er fraud. We do not know which reports are true. But we do know which reports are cen­sored. And if that doesn’t tell you some­thing, then you are not pay­ing atten­tion.”
    • Means, motive, and oppor­tu­ni­ty (Ed Fes­er, blog): “…some main­stream his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, includ­ing lib­er­al ones, think that these states were indeed stolen from Nixon [in 1960]. For exam­ple, Kennedy biog­ra­ph­er Sey­mour Hersh judges that the elec­tion was stolen. His­to­ri­an Robert Dallek thinks that at least Illi­nois was stolen, via Daley’s polit­i­cal machine. His­to­ri­an William Rorabaugh thinks that Nixon may have been cheat­ed out of as many as 100,000 to 200,000 votes in Johnson’s cor­rupt Texas.” Wild stuff that I did not know. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Pasade­na City Col­lege. 
    • My own view: the elec­tion was valid and of course there was cheat­ing. Peo­ple cheat at cards, peo­ple cheat on their tax­es. Why in the world would­n’t peo­ple try to cheat in an elec­tion? But it seems unlike­ly to me that despite all the eyes on the process any cheat­ing was sig­nif­i­cant enough to change the out­come of the elec­tion. Hav­ing said that, it is inevitable that peo­ple are skep­ti­cal. The media and the tech firms have made them­selves so par­ti­san that they have for­feit­ed the trust which would be very handy for them to have right now.
  5. Lessons from the elec­tion
    • When Polit­i­cal Prophe­cies Don’t Come to Pass (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, many Chris­tians have lis­tened to lead­ers proph­esy that Trump would again win the elec­tion. Some, such as Jere­mi­ah John­son, have con­tin­ued to affirm that their prophe­cy will turn out to be true in the end. Oth­ers, such as Kris Val­lot­ton, have pub­licly apol­o­gized. For now, many will decide that the prophe­cy was con­tin­gent, mist­imed or, more like­ly, mis­tak­en.” This is out­stand­ing.
    • Why Cal­i­for­nia Reject­ed Racial Pref­er­ences Again (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “As I under­stand the state’s his­to­ry, the country’s his­to­ry, and the world’s his­to­ry, gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not be trust­ed to fac­tor race into deci­sion mak­ing with­out treat­ing peo­ple unjust­ly, and inter­group stig­mas and resent­ments tend to increase when any group is giv­en pref­er­en­tial treat­ment.”
    • May God Bless Pres­i­dent Biden (David French, The Dis­patch): “So here’s my sim­ple prayer for Pres­i­dent Biden: May God bless him and grant him the wis­dom to know what’s just, the courage to do what’s just, and the sta­mi­na to with­stand the rig­ors of the most dif­fi­cult job in the world. May his vir­tu­ous plans pre­vail and may his unright­eous efforts fail. And may God pro­tect him from all harm.” Amen.
    • A Moment Of Per­il (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “But the broad real­i­ty remains that in order to obtain and wield polit­i­cal pow­er, Democ­rats need to embrace can­di­dates who are less reflec­tive of the pro­gres­sive world­view of young col­lege grad­u­ates, and they need to run them in states that are less right-wing than Alaba­ma or Mon­tana.”
    • How 2020 Killed Off Democ­rats’ Demo­graph­ic Hopes (Zack Stan­ton, Politi­co): “For years, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty has oper­at­ed under one immutable assump­tion: Long-term demo­graph­ic trends would give the par­ty some­thing like a per­ma­nent major­i­ty as the coun­try as a whole grows less white and more urban. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s reliance on the pol­i­tics of racial resent­ment would only quick­en the process, solid­i­fy­ing sup­port for Democ­rats among peo­ple of col­or. Then came Novem­ber 3, 2020. And all those assump­tions now seem like total non­sense.” An inter­view with David Shor. 
    • Lat­inX-plain­ing the elec­tion (Anto­nio Gar­cia-Mar­tinez, The Pull Request): “The prob­lem with bas­ing a polit­i­cal plat­form on white guilt is that, at some point, you run out of either whites or guilt. Which is what hap­pens in a tru­ly major­i­ty-minor­i­ty nation when non-whites (at least as cur­rent­ly defined) assume their equal place in the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal fir­ma­ment.” The author nor­mal­ly writes about tech­nol­o­gy issues (hence the title of the newslet­ter).
  6. Sec­u­lar­iza­tion and the Tribu­la­tions of the Amer­i­can Work­ing-Class (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I praise the schol­ar­ship and courage of Bri­an N. Wheaton.”
    • Relat­ed: Get­ting Past the Gate­keep­ers (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Your gate­keep­ers want you to write a book more like the one they would have writ­ten. If you do make revi­sions, make them in such a way that the book becomes not less your own, but even more your own. That’s not pride. If God con­de­scends to allow cer­tain insights to the his­to­ri­ans on your board, how won­der­ful! Let them write about them! Read and learn from them! But if He con­de­scends to allow cer­tain oth­er insights to you, you should write about yours, not theirs.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin. 
  7. COVID-relat­ed
    • Super-spread­er wed­ding par­ty shows COVID hol­i­day dan­gers (Karen Kaplan, LA Times): “Only 55 peo­ple attend­ed the Aug. 7 recep­tion at the Big Moose Inn in Millinock­et. But one of those guests arrived with a coro­n­avirus infec­tion. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 oth­er peo­ple. Sev­en of them died. None of the vic­tims who lost their lives had attend­ed the par­ty.”
    • COVID-19 Mobil­i­ty Net­work Mod­el­ing (Stan­ford): “Our mod­el pre­dicts that a small minor­i­ty of ‘super­spread­er’ POIs [points of inter­est] account for a large major­i­ty of infec­tions and that restrict­ing max­i­mum occu­pan­cy at each POI is more effec­tive than uni­form­ly reduc­ing mobil­i­ty.” Click on “Sim­u­la­tion” and play around with the Reli­gious Orga­ni­za­tions tog­gle. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry, who drew my atten­tion espe­cial­ly to fig­ures 2d and 3c in the appen­dix of the paper.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 275

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 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 228

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Tale of Two Church­es (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, NY Review of Books): “To many reli­gious peo­ple, there’s no such thing as coin­ci­dence: Pas­tor Jay and Pas­tor Der­rick felt acute­ly the prophet­ic nature of their union tak­ing place just the day before the shoot­ing. It felt as though, in the midst of the chaos and the con­fu­sion, God was using them to write a bet­ter sto­ry. The Lord had guid­ed them to their merg­er at exact­ly the right time to redi­rect the anger and pain in the com­mu­ni­ty to a high­er, holy pur­pose.”
    • This my must-read link of the week. SO GOOD. I almost cried.
    • Kind of relat­ed but only mar­gin­al­ly: Pray­ing for Hong Kong Can Be Polit­i­cal­ly Disruptive—Even in Amer­i­ca  (D Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dif­fer­ent ori­gins among eth­nic Chi­nese immi­grants can fos­ter dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views, with more Chris­tians from Chi­na sup­port­ing the poli­cies of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, and those from else­where often more crit­i­cal of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
  2. ‘Absolute­ly No Mer­cy’: Leaked Files Expose How Chi­na Orga­nized Mass Deten­tions of Mus­lims (Austin Ramzy and Chris Buck­ley, NY Times): “…one of the most sig­nif­i­cant leaks of gov­ern­ment papers from inside China’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty in decades. They pro­vide an unprece­dent­ed inside view of the con­tin­u­ing clam­p­down in Xin­jiang, in which the author­i­ties have cor­ralled as many as a mil­lion eth­nic Uighurs, Kaza­khs and oth­ers into intern­ment camps and pris­ons over the past three years.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. More Preg­nan­cy, Less Crime (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “More gen­er­al­ly, how­ev­er, there are pol­i­cy impli­ca­tion if we think beyond the imme­di­ate results. First, these results show that crime isn’t sim­ply a prod­uct of fam­i­ly back­ground, pover­ty and neglect. Crime is a choice.”
    • The orig­i­nal study: Fam­i­ly For­ma­tion and Crime (Max­im Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose, job mar­ket paper, pdf link): “Our event-study analy­sis indi­cates that preg­nan­cy trig­gers sharp declines in crime rival­ing any known inter­ven­tion.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Dat­ing Mar­ket (Tyro Part­ners, pdf link): “With the advent of online dat­ing, women in prime repro­duc­tive age are in the dom­i­nant posi­tion in the dat­ing mar­ket for the first time in human history.This comes with huge social ram­i­fi­ca­tions.” The authors are hedge fund guys. Inter­est­ing through­out and at times quite amus­ing. I espe­cial­ly com­mend to you the chart at the bot­tom of the page 5 con­trast­ed with the chart at the top of page 6.
  4. Thread on the protests in Iran (Shay Khatiri, Twit­ter): “Dur­ing its first 24 hours, it’s already been the most vio­lent protests in decades, if not ever. 1979 rev­o­lu­tion did not reach this lev­el of vio­lence.”
    • Amnesty Says At Least 106 Killed In Iran Protests (John Gam­brell, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Days of protests in Iran over ris­ing fuel prices and a sub­se­quent gov­ern­ment crack­down have killed at least 106 peo­ple across the Islam­ic Repub­lic, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al said Tues­day, cit­ing ‘cred­i­ble reports.’”
  5. Why Some Peo­ple Are Impos­si­bly Tal­ent­ed (David Rob­son, BBC): “…influ­en­tial sci­en­tists are much more like­ly to have diverse inter­ests out­side their pri­ma­ry area of research than the aver­age sci­en­tist, for instance. Stud­ies have found that Nobel Prize-win­ning sci­en­tists are about 25 times more like­ly to sing, dance or act than the aver­age sci­en­tist. They are also 17 times more like­ly to cre­ate visu­al art, 12 times more like­ly to write poet­ry and four times more like­ly to be a musi­cian.”
  6. 2019 Reli­gious Free­dom Index (Beck­et Law): “If Amer­i­ca is becom­ing less reli­gious, as some polls indi­cate, does that nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it is also becom­ing less sup­port­ive of reli­gious lib­er­ty pro­tec­tions? Are we, in fact, divid­ed on ques­tions of reli­gious free­dom?… With a cur­rent score of 67, the 2019 Index indi­cates strong sup­port for reli­gious free­dom pro­tec­tions. ”
  7. Why Did the Wall Fall, 30 Years Ago? (George Weigel, First Things): “Get­ting this his­to­ry straight is impor­tant, not just as a mat­ter of intel­lec­tu­al hygiene but for the future. Pub­lic offi­cials who do not grasp the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to the col­lapse of Euro­pean com­mu­nism and the emer­gence of new democ­ra­cies in cen­tral and east­ern Europe are unlike­ly to appre­ci­ate the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to free and vir­tu­ous 21st-cen­tu­ry soci­eties and to 21st-cen­tu­ry democ­ra­cy.”

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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 204

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

This one is com­ing out extra-ear­ly today because my sched­ule has been and will con­tin­ue to be absurd­ly busy for the next bit. Prayers appre­ci­at­ed!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How lawyers are dis­tort­ing reli­gious free­dom (Asma Uddin, Deseret News): “Last sum­mer, the court decid­ed Trump v. Hawaii (the trav­el ban case) only three weeks after it decid­ed Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop v. Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion, which involved a Chris­t­ian bak­er who refused on reli­gious grounds to bake a wed­ding cake for a gay cou­ple…. The stark con­trast in the court’s approach to anti-reli­gious hos­til­i­ty raised the ques­tion: Does reli­gious free­dom apply equal­ly to Mus­lims and Chris­tians? But in all the pan­ic and pun­dit­ry that ensued, Amer­i­cans over­looked a crit­i­cal fac­tor: The lawyers chal­leng­ing the ban left out legal argu­ments under the Free Exer­cise Clause that, if not omit­ted, might have changed the out­come.” This is a very good (and some­what dis­cour­ag­ing) op-ed.
  2. Lit­er­a­ture as Flat­tery (James McEl­roy, Amer­i­can Affairs Jour­nal): “Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture is cre­ative­ly exhaust­ed because free indi­rect style places the read­er above the char­ac­ters…. Char­ac­ters have to be blind to the obvi­ous for the sto­ry to work. We are told this style is all about engen­der­ing empa­thy, but in actu­al­i­ty it func­tions by cre­at­ing stunt­ed char­ac­ters. The read­er is trained to look down at oth­ers, and the writer becomes obse­quious to the oh-so-intel­li­gent read­ers’ egos, always telling them, ‘Look how smart you are.’”
  3. The APA Meet­ing: A Pho­to-Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the oth­er.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing.
  4. Two Stan­ford sto­ries:
    • What I Learned When I Called Out an Anti-Semit­ic Car­toon­ist at Stan­ford Ear­li­er This Month (Ari Hoff­man, Mosa­ic): “Per­haps my most sur­pris­ing real­iza­tion was how few are those will­ing to speak pub­licly, under their own name. After my op-ed appeared, some indi­vid­u­als approached me to say they agreed with me but didn’t have the nec­es­sary elo­quence to speak out. To them I would reply: what mat­ters is not poet­ics but prin­ci­ples.” What I found fas­ci­nat­ing about this arti­cle is how uni­ver­sal the prin­ci­ples he artic­u­lates are. If you are a Chris­t­ian debat­ing whether and how to speak out about an issue that grieves you, you will find help­ful advice here.
    • From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.’” What a wild sto­ry.
  5. The Impos­si­ble Future of Chris­tians in the Mid­dle East (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The num­bers in Iraq are espe­cial­ly stark: Before the Amer­i­can inva­sion, as many as 1.4 mil­lion Chris­tians lived in the coun­try. Today, few­er than 250,000 remain—an 80 per­cent drop in less than two decades.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Reli­gious Men Can Be Devot­ed Dads, Too (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Jason S. Car­roll & Lau­rie DeRose, New York Times): “It turns out that fem­i­nism and faith both have high expec­ta­tions of hus­bands and fathers, if for very dif­fer­ent ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, and that both result in high­er-qual­i­ty mar­riages for women.”
    • The title is fun­ny and was prob­a­bly not cho­sen by the authors (that’s usu­al­ly the case in news­pa­pers). This op-ed is a sum­ma­ry of some find­ings from their larg­er report The Ties That Bind: Is Faith a Glob­al Force for Good or Ill in the Fam­i­ly? , where they dis­cov­er, among oth­er things, that “When it comes to rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty in het­ero­sex­u­al rela­tion­ships, high­ly reli­gious cou­ples enjoy high­er-qual­i­ty rela­tion­ships and more sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, com­pared to less/mixed reli­gious cou­ples and sec­u­lar cou­ples. For instance, women in high­ly reli­gious rela­tion­ships are about 50% more like­ly to report that they are strong­ly sat­is­fied with their sex­u­al rela­tion­ship than their sec­u­lar and less reli­gious coun­ter­parts.”
  7. Why Chris­tian­i­ty Quit Grow­ing in Korea (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, The Gospel Coali­tion): “By 1970, 18 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion was Chris­t­ian; by 2000, it was 31 per­cent. (Those counts include Protes­tants and Catholics.) By 2006, South Korea was send­ing out more mis­sion­ar­ies than any oth­er coun­try except the much-larg­er Unit­ed States. By 2015, Seoul was behind only Hous­ton and Dal­las in num­ber of megachurches—and Seoul’s were much larg­er…. And then, things stalled. Growth slowed way down, and church atten­dance began to shrink.” A long and very inter­est­ing arti­cle.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have the provoca­tive “In Defense of Flog­ging” (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was first shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

UPDATE: I mis­tak­en­ly attrib­uted the sto­ry about Jason Spyres to the Stan­ford Dai­ly. It was actu­al­ly in the Stan­ford Review. I’ve cor­rect­ed the offend­ing para­graph.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 183

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. You Are Doing It Wrong: Read­ing Entire Books Of The Bible (Tim Miller, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “Imag­ine being in Rome when the book of Romans was first deliv­ered. Now imag­ine the read­er only read­ing for three min­utes (cor­re­spond­ing to the end of chap­ter one) and say­ing, ‘well, that is enough for today, we will read some more tomor­row.’ The crowd would be out­raged and would demand the man con­tin­ue read­ing.”
  2. Shame Storm (Helen Andrews, First Things): “The more online shame cycles you observe, the more obvi­ous the pat­tern becomes: Every­one comes up with a prin­ci­pled-sound­ing pre­text that serves as a bar­ri­er against admit­ting to them­selves that, in fact, all they have real­ly done is joined a mob. Once that bar­ri­er is erect­ed, all rules of decen­cy go out the win­dow, but the pre­text is almost always a lie.” I found this essay engross­ing.
  3. China’s Deten­tion Camps for Mus­lims Turn to Forced Labor (Chris Buck­ley and Austin Ramzy, New York Times): “The evo­lu­tion of the Xin­jiang camps echoes China’s ‘re-edu­ca­tion through labor’ sys­tem, where cit­i­zens once were sent with­out tri­al to toil for years. Chi­na abol­ished ‘re-edu­ca­tion through labor’ five years ago, but Xin­jiang appears to be cre­at­ing a new ver­sion.”
  4. Inter­net Church Isn’t Real­ly Church (Lau­ra Turn­er, New York Times): “The inten­tion behind live-stream­ing ser­vices — to make church, and its atten­dant ben­e­fits of com­mu­ni­ty, prayer and wor­ship, avail­able to every­one with a smart­phone — is a good one. But it pre­sumes that God is pri­mar­i­ly present to us one on one, as indi­vid­u­als, rather than as a com­mu­ni­ty of believ­ers.” Kind of a fol­low-up to last week’s John Crist video.
  5. A mother’s leap of faith at an African air­port, and a 15-year mys­tery (Petu­la Dvo­rak, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The sto­ry of Tom and Maya and Zainab is about trust, about lis­ten­ing to your heart over your mind, and about that gut feel­ing you have when you meet a good per­son. And it’s a sto­ry that could’ve gone hor­ri­bly wrong.” Heart­warm­ing.
  6. Is There Such a Thing as an Author­i­tar­i­an Vot­er? (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “In one of the ironies of his­to­ry, as the social sci­en­tif­ic por­trait of human­i­ty grows more psy­cho­log­i­cal and irra­tional, it comes clos­er and clos­er to approx­i­mat­ing the old Adam of tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty: a fall­en, depraved crea­ture, unable to see him­self clear­ly except with the aid of a high­er pow­er.”
  7. Men and Mar­riage: Debunk­ing The Ball and Chain Myth (Brad Wilcox & Nicholas Wolfin­ger, Nation­al Mar­riage Project): “…the ben­e­fits of mar­riage for men are sub­stan­tial by every con­ceiv­able mea­sure, includ­ing more mon­ey, a bet­ter sex life, and sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter phys­i­cal and men­tal health. Yet many men remain igno­rant of these ben­e­fits, a view seem­ing­ly pro­mot­ed by pop­u­lar cul­ture.” This is a PDF of a brochure from the Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies. The two authors are soci­ol­o­gists whom I have linked to in pre­vi­ous issues.

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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 175

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. Few­er Sex Part­ners Means a Hap­pi­er Mar­riage (Olga Khaz­an, The Atlantic): “Nicholas Wolfin­ger, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah, has found that Amer­i­cans who have only ever slept with their spous­es are most like­ly to report being in a ‘very hap­py’ mar­riage. Mean­while, the low­est odds of mar­i­tal happiness—about 13 per­cent­age points low­er than the one-part­ner women—belong to women who have had six to 10 sex­u­al part­ners in their lives.”
    • This arti­cle was inspired by the longer and even more fas­ci­nat­ing Does Sex­u­al His­to­ry Affect Mar­i­tal Hap­pi­ness? (Nicholas Wolfin­ger, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “For a com­bined sam­ple of men and women, spous­es report­ing only one life­time sex­u­al part­ner are 7% more like­ly to be hap­py than are those with oth­er part­ners in their past. This is larg­er than the five-per­cent­age-point dif­fer­ence asso­ci­at­ed with a four-year col­lege degree, larg­er than the six-point dif­fer­ence that comes with attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices sev­er­al times a month or more, and larg­er than the boost that comes with hav­ing an income above the nation­al medi­an.”
  2. 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.
  3. Find­ing ‘Com­mon Good’ Among Evan­gel­i­cals In The Polit­i­cal Sea­son (Sarah McCam­mon, NPR): “On a recent evening in Hous­ton, under the heavy branch­es of live oak trees, Doug Pagitt stood before a cou­ple dozen peo­ple gath­ered on blue fold­ing chairs on the Rice Uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus. ‘You’ve heard it said that to be a true Chris­t­ian, you must vote like a Repub­li­can,’ he said. ‘But we are here to be remind­ed that just ain’t so.’”
    • Relat­ed: Cory Book­er could be a can­di­date for the ‘reli­gious left’ (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Ques­tions about reli­gion can par­a­lyze some politi­cians, but not [Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor] Cory Book­er. If any­thing, the top­ic seems to relax him. Sit­ting in his spa­cious but spar­tan office on Capi­tol Hill in ear­ly Octo­ber, the sen­a­tor propped his sneak­ered feet up on his desk and waxed poet­ic about spir­i­tu­al mat­ters, bounc­ing between dis­cus­sions of Jesus’ dis­ci­ples, hous­ing pol­i­cy and his own reli­gious prac­tices.”
  4. The White House Says Social­ism Is a Threat. It’s Right. (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Who would have thought that an attack on social­ism would be so con­tro­ver­sial? But these days it is. The White House’s Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers issued a report called ‘The Oppor­tu­ni­ty Costs of Social­ism’ to a scathing recep­tion on social media: ‘dreck,’ said the econ­o­mist Justin Wolfers, while Paul Krug­man referred to it as ‘amaz­ing­ly dis­hon­est.’ I’m here to tell you that I have read the entire report, and many of the sources it cites, and most of it is cor­rect.” FYI: one of our alum­ni helped to write the report in ques­tion.
  5. The Car­a­van Is a Chal­lenge to the Integri­ty of U.S. Bor­ders (David Frum, The Atlantic): “If lib­er­als insist that only fas­cists will defend bor­ders, then vot­ers will hire fas­cists to do the job lib­er­als will not do.” That sen­tence is one of the most hon­est things I’ve heard in the recent immi­gra­tion debate. When decid­ing what immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy you deem best, rec­og­nize that you have to fac­tor in how pas­sion­ate­ly oth­er­wise apo­lit­i­cal peo­ple feel about this.
  6. A Chris­t­ian Man Receives Jus­tice (David French, Nation­al Review): “gov­ern­ment offi­cials demon­strat­ed sub­stan­tial intol­er­ance in the name of ‘inclu­sion’ and rather than seek­ing solu­tions that allowed each mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty to exer­cise their lib­er­ty (to enjoy rights to cakes and con­science, for exam­ple), they took sides against Chris­tians, using their pow­er to send a clear mes­sage: Tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty is incom­pat­i­ble with the pro­gres­sive state. That is not a deci­sion the Con­sti­tu­tion empow­ers them to make.”
  7. The midterms are already hacked. You just don’t know it yet. (Ben­jamin Wof­ford, Vox): “The secu­ri­ty expert at a big tech cor­po­ra­tion, who spoke on back­ground in order to speak frankly about elec­tion vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, put it this way: ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the Pentagon’s [secu­ri­ty mea­sures], elec­tions have prob­a­bly moved from a 2 to a 3.’” Very alarm­ing.

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 154

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 Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We’re a long way from any final judg­ment on God’s pur­pos­es in the Trump era. But so far the Trump pres­i­den­cy has clear­ly been a kind of apoc­a­lypse — not (yet) in the ‘world-his­tor­i­cal calami­ty’ sense of the word, but in the orig­i­nal Greek mean­ing: an unveil­ing, an uncov­er­ing, an expo­sure of truths that had hereto­fore been hid­den.”
    • Relat­ed: On Gen­der, Pow­er, and Sin: The Evan­gel­i­cal #MeToo Moment (Richard Beck, per­son­al blog): “A the­o­log­i­cal and bib­li­cal way to say all this is that men’s dom­i­nance over women is a part of the Fal­l’s curse upon human­i­ty. The wound of sin upon gen­der rela­tions is clear in Gen­e­sis 3: ‘He will rule over you.’ So if that’s a part of the curse, why do evan­gel­i­cals think that build­ing the curse into the system–gender subordination–is going to pro­duce any­thing oth­er than cursed out­comes?” I wish the author spent more time build­ing the Bib­li­cal case for his per­spec­tive.
  2. A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note.
    • The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-writ­ten and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its.
  3. What I’ve Learned in Twen­ty Years of Mar­riage (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “My grand­moth­er wise­ly asked one night when I was final­ly going to ask ‘that girl from Ocean Springs’ to mar­ry me. I answered, ‘When I can afford it.’ She laughed. ‘Hon­ey, I mar­ried your grand­pa in the mid­dle of a Great Depres­sion,’ she said. ‘We made it work. Nobody can afford to get mar­ried. You just mar­ry, and make it work.’ Apart from the gospel, those were, and remain, the most lib­er­at­ing words I ever heard. I bought a ring that wouldn’t impress any­one, then or now, but we were head­ed for the altar. My only regret is that we aren’t today cel­e­brat­ing our twen­ty-first anniver­sary instead of our twen­ti­eth.” This is from a few years back and is full of wis­dom.
  4. Title IX Is Too Easy To Abuse (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Is it pos­si­ble for two peo­ple to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sex­u­al­ly assault each oth­er? This is the question—rife with legal, anatom­i­cal, and emo­tion­al improbabilities—to which the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati now address­es itself, and with some urgency, as the insti­tu­tion and three of its employ­ees are cur­rent­ly being sued over an encounter that was sex­u­al for a brief moment, but that just as quick­ly entered the realm of eter­nal return. ”
  5. What­ev­er Hap­pened to Gifts of Lan­guage, Prophe­cy, and Heal­ing? (Andrew Wil­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “tak­ing a longer view by trac­ing our roots back to the ear­ly church fathers leads to some sur­pris­es. We dis­cov­er that some things, though rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al in recent times, are actu­al­ly very nor­mal across the broad­er sweep of human his­to­ry. Angels and demons would be an obvi­ous exam­ple. Or, more sur­pris­ing­ly, mirac­u­lous gifts.”
  6. I was Jor­dan Peterson’s strongest sup­port­er. Now I think he’s dan­ger­ous (Bernard Schiff, The Star): “When he was ren­o­vat­ing his house I invit­ed his fam­i­ly to live with mine. For five months, they occu­pied the third floor of our large house. We had meals togeth­er in the evening and long, colour­ful con­ver­sa­tions. There, away from cam­pus, I saw a man who was devot­ed to his wife and his chil­dren, who were love­ly and gen­tle and for whom I still feel affec­tion. He was atten­tive and thought­ful, stern and kind, play­ful and warm. His wife, Tam­my, appeared to be the keel, the bal­last and the rud­der, and Jor­dan ran the ship.” This is a long pro­file, by turns infor­ma­tive and puz­zling.
  7. The Evan­gel­i­cal Fight to Win Back Cal­i­for­nia (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Though the state has one of the high­est per­cent­ages of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults, the fast grow­ing reli­gious group in the coun­try, that large­ly blue sea is dot­ted with evan­gel­i­cal islands that are large­ly red. One in five adults in the state are evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, accord­ing to the Pew Research Cen­ter, and there are more megachurch­es in Cal­i­for­nia than in any oth­er state.” This arti­cle is most­ly about pol­i­tics, but is inter­est­ing nonethe­less.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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 153

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. Fed­er­al Agen­cies Lost Track of Near­ly 1,500 Migrant Chil­dren Placed With Spon­sors (Ron Nixon, New York Times): “…the agency had lost track of near­ly 1,500 migrant chil­dren it placed with spon­sors in the Unit­ed States, rais­ing con­cerns they could end up in the hands of human traf­fick­ers or be used as labor­ers by peo­ple pos­ing as rel­a­tives.” This is an arti­cle from April about kids who arrive alone at the bor­der, but I can’t help but think of it when I hear sto­ries about new poli­cies sep­a­rat­ing kids from their fam­i­lies at the bor­der. If I am read­ing this cor­rect­ly, they lost track of 20% of the minors they placed. Out­ra­geous­ly unac­cept­able. 
  2. The Wrath of God Poured Out — The Humil­i­a­tion of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion (Albert Mohler, per­son­al blog): this is pure fire. I pray lead­ers in the Assem­blies of God will act with sim­i­lar courage should it become nec­es­sary.  
  3. What Our Iden­ti­ty Search­es Real­ly Reveal (Eric Park­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “the most sig­nif­i­cant ques­tion in under­stand­ing per­son­al iden­ti­ty is not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘Whose am I?’… This one turn of phrase might be the most sig­nif­i­cant turn of thought we could ever make. But since many of us haven’t made that turn of thought, we inhab­it con­struct­ed iden­ti­ties rather than received iden­ti­ties.”
  4. Chi­na’s social cred­it sys­tem has blocked peo­ple from tak­ing 11 mil­lion flights and 4 mil­lion train trips (Tara Fran­cis Chan, Busi­ness Insid­er): “a for­mer offi­cial, Hou Yunchun, is quot­ed as say­ing the sys­tem needs to be improved so ‘dis­cred­it­ed peo­ple become bank­rupt.’”
  5. 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.
  6. Mar­riage name game: What kind of guy would take his wife’s last name? (Phys.org): “[The study] found that among men with less than a high school degree, 10.3 per­cent report­ed chang­ing their sur­name. Among men with a high school degree but no col­lege, it was 3.6 per­cent, and among men with any col­lege, only 2 per­cent. None of the men sur­veyed who had an advanced degree changed their name.”
  7. The Racism Tread­mill (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “In an econ­o­my increas­ing­ly based on cog­ni­tive labor, it’s hard to imag­ine a cul­tur­al fea­ture more harm­ful than a social­ly-enforced taboo on aca­d­e­m­ic striv­ing. But wor­ries about the harm caused by the ‘act­ing white’ epi­thet have been met with skep­ti­cism by pro­gres­sives.” The author is an under­grad at Colum­bia 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 a provoca­tive read, In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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 145

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 been trav­el­ing a lot this week, so I haven’t done as much online read­ing as nor­mal. A few of these links are actu­al­ly left­overs from pre­vi­ous weeks that did­n’t quite make the orig­i­nal cut. Let me know if I over­looked some­thing you think I’d find inter­est­ing!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I’m Hap­py My Son Mar­ried at 20 (Rebec­ca Brew­ster Steven­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The preva­lent mes­sage in our cul­ture is that young adult­hood is the time to build a foun­da­tion for a healthy life. Those in their ear­ly 20s are encour­aged to pur­sue edu­ca­tion, trav­el, and gain life expe­ri­ence, all unhin­dered by wed­lock. Mar­riage is viewed by many as some­thing that comes only after ade­quate time to devel­op per­son­al iden­ti­ty and estab­lish a strong finan­cial foot­ing. But inher­ent in this delay is a real­i­ty we as par­ents are very cog­nizant of: Young adults, like all of us, are sex­u­al beings. When mar­riage is delayed, so is the oppor­tu­ni­ty to expe­ri­ence sex­u­al inti­ma­cy with­in God’s para­me­ters of a mar­riage covenant.”
  2. Stan­ford’s Pro­posed Renam­ing Prin­ci­ples: when I read the prin­ci­ples, my ini­tial thought was that Serra’s name was secure on cam­pus. But at least one stu­dent strong­ly dis­agrees.  
  3. The Per­ils of Paid Con­tent (Andrew Pot­ter, In Due Course): “When I was a stu­dent jour­nal­ist, it was axiomat­ic that adver­tis­ing was the biggest threat to inde­pen­dent media. Putting your liveli­hood in the hands of cap­i­tal­ists meant, ipso fac­to, doing their bid­ding. Expe­ri­ence is a great teacher though, and when I start­ed work­ing as an edi­tor at a news­pa­per, I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to dis­cov­er that you didn’t wake up every day to a swarm of calls from out­raged adver­tis­ers threat­en­ing to pull their cam­paigns if we didn’t smarten up….  But you know who does com­plain a lot? Sub­scribers do, end­less­ly.”
  4. Last Fall This Schol­ar Defend­ed Colo­nial­ism. Now He’s Defend­ing Him­self. (Vimal Patel, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “There are two sep­a­rate issues. One is the sub­stan­tive issue of colo­nial­ism. I think the acad­e­my remains high­ly illib­er­al and intol­er­ant of my view­point. It remains the case that most of the peo­ple who sup­port­ed me didn’t sup­port me because they agreed with my argu­ment. I think my sup­port­ers came in two types: those who agreed with my argu­ment, and oth­ers who said that even bad argu­ments that have gone through the process of being pub­lished should be respond­ed to, not silenced.”
  5. Empire State Of Mind (Doug Mack, Slate): “If you can find Iowa on the map and rat­tle off a few facts about the state (corn, cau­cus­es, Field of Dreams, a real­ly big state fair), you should be able to do the same for Puer­to Rico, which has a larg­er pop­u­la­tion. That’s espe­cial­ly impor­tant for lead­ers in Wash­ing­ton, giv­en that the ter­ri­to­ries have no full-fledged con­gres­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of their own, and giv­en that a cer­tain base­line lev­el of knowl­edge is a pre­req­ui­site for sound pol­i­cy­mak­ing.”
  6. The Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca Scan­dal, in 3 Para­graphs (Robin­son Mey­er, The Atlantic): “About 270,000 peo­ple installed Kogan’s app on their Face­book account. But as with any Face­book devel­op­er at the time, Kogan could access data about those users or their friends. And when Kogan’s app asked for that data, it saved that infor­ma­tion into a pri­vate data­base instead of imme­di­ate­ly delet­ing it. Kogan pro­vid­ed that pri­vate data­base, con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion about 50 mil­lion Face­book users, to the vot­er-pro­fil­ing com­pa­ny Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca. Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca used it to make 30 mil­lion ‘psy­cho­graph­ic’ pro­files about vot­ers.
  7. John Bolton Is Right About the U.N. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The U.N. is a nev­er-end­ing scan­dal dis­guised as an ever­last­ing hope. The hope is that dia­logue can over­come dis­trust and col­lec­tive secu­ri­ty can be made to work in the inter­ests of human­i­ty. Real­i­ty says oth­er­wise. Trust is estab­lished by deeds, not words. Col­lec­tive secu­ri­ty is a recipe for inter­na­tion­al paral­y­sis or worse. Just ask the peo­ple of Alep­po.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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