Tag: media

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 388

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

This is vol­ume 388, which has 97 as one of its prime fac­tors. I just think that’s cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Be Open to Spir­i­tu­al Expe­ri­ence. Also, Be Real­ly Care­ful. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But pre­cise­ly because an atti­tude of spir­i­tu­al exper­i­men­ta­tion is rea­son­able, it’s also impor­tant to empha­size some­thing taught by almost every hor­ror movie but nonethe­less skat­ed over in a lot of Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: the impor­tance of being real­ly care­ful in your open­ness, and not just tak­ing the benef­i­cence of the meta­phys­i­cal realm for grant­ed. If the mate­r­i­al uni­verse as we find it is beau­ti­ful but also nat­u­ral­ly per­ilous, and shot through with sin and evil wher­ev­er human agency is at work, there is no rea­son to expect that any spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion would be dif­fer­ent — no rea­son to think that being a ‘psy­cho­naut’ is any less per­ilous than being an astro­naut, even if the dan­ger takes a dif­fer­ent form.””
    • Douthat speak­ing a rare type of truth at the New York Times.
    • Dreher responds to Douthat’s col­umn and goes much deep­er: Psy­cho­nauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganiz­ing Pop Cul­ture (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Douthat is emphat­i­cal­ly cor­rect that one should be extreme­ly care­ful about this stuff. There is no rea­son at all to believe that the spir­i­tu­al realm is benign.”
  2. Lay­offs Broke Big Tech’s Elite Col­lege Hir­ing Pipeline (Anna Kramer, Wired): “…the fact that lay­offs haven’t exclud­ed the grad­u­ates of the top schools clean­ly illus­trates an argu­ment that labor experts, com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sors, and unions have been try­ing to make for years: The skills required for most of the jobs that pow­er these larg­er insti­tu­tions do not actu­al­ly require degrees from the world’s pre­mier com­put­er sci­ence pro­grams. If they did, Meta would hard­ly have choked off the intern­ship pipeline it had spent years build­ing, risk­ing los­ing the trust of a gen­er­a­tion of elite col­lege grad­u­ates.”
  3. On Sci­en­tif­ic Trans­paren­cy, Researcher Degrees Of Free­dom, And That NEJM Study On Youth Gen­der Med­i­cine (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “If you com­pare that to the pro­to­col doc­u­ment, you’ll notice that of the eight key vari­ables the researchers were most inter­est­ed in — ‘gen­der dys­pho­ria, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, trau­ma symp­toms, self-injury, sui­ci­dal­i­ty, body esteem, and qual­i­ty of life’ — the ones I bold­ed are not report­ed in the NEJM paper. That’s six out of eight, or 75% of the vari­ables cov­ered by the researchers’ hypoth­e­sis in their pro­to­col doc­u­ment (includ­ing the ‘offi­cial­ly’ pre­reg­is­tered short­er ver­sion).”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. This is thor­ough. Sin­gal is real­ly, real­ly good at this. I hate to say that I am instinc­tive­ly skep­ti­cal of aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies when they touch on human sex­u­al­i­ty, but I am. It’s stuff like this over and over again.
  4. Pen­te­costal­ism from soup to nuts: A (near) com­plete his­to­ry of this move­ment in Amer­i­ca (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “With­out a doubt, the por­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty known as Pen­te­costal­ism was — by far — the fastest-grow­ing move­ment of the 20th cen­tu­ry, going from zero mem­bers on Jan. 1, 1901 to 644 mil­lion adher­ents world­wide now. It is the pri­ma­ry expres­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty in the Glob­al South. It is the one form of Chris­tian­i­ty to mount a seri­ous chal­lenge to the growth of Islam, main­ly because of its appeal to the very poor and its reliance on the mirac­u­lous.”
  5. Why Not Mars (Maciej CegÅ‚owski, per­son­al web­site): “When the great moment final­ly came, and the astro­nauts had tak­en their first Mar­t­ian self­ie, strict mis­sion rules meant to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and min­i­mize risk would leave the crew depen­dent on the same robots they’d been sent at enor­mous cost to replace. Only the microbes that lived in the space­craft, unin­formed of the mis­sion rules, would be free to go wan­der out­side. They would become the real explor­ers of Mars, and if their luck held, its first colonists.”
    • This is real­ly well-writ­ten!
  6. Mis­in­for­ma­tion on Mis­in­for­ma­tion: Con­cep­tu­al and Method­olog­i­cal Chal­lenges (Sacha Altay, Manon Berriche, & Alber­to Acer­bi, Social Media + Soci­ety): “…the inter­net is not rife with mis­in­for­ma­tion or news, but with memes and enter­tain­ing con­tent.… peo­ple do not believe every­thing they see on the inter­net: the sheer vol­ume of engage­ment should not be con­flat­ed with belief.”
    • From the abstract. The authors are at Oxford, Fon­da­tion Nationale des Sci­ences Poli­tiques, and Brunel.
  7. As Refugees Flood Into U.S., Chi­nese Chris­tians Told To Wait (Susan Crab­tree, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “The Unit­ed States could grant the church mem­bers imme­di­ate emer­gency asy­lum, as it has done for tens of thou­sands of Ukraini­ans flee­ing their war-rav­aged coun­try and the first group of Afghans air­lift­ed into the Unit­ed States amid the chaot­ic U.S. evac­u­a­tion in August 2021. Just this month, Pres­i­dent Biden announced plans to allow Venezue­lans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans flee­ing per­se­cu­tion pri­or­i­ty asy­lum sta­tus as long as they arrived by plane and had pri­vate spon­sors ready to help them reset­tle. When it comes to Chi­nese Chris­tians trapped in lim­bo, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is balk­ing, while offer­ing no expla­na­tion for the dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent treat­ment of these groups of for­eign nation­als seek­ing asy­lum. Human rights advo­cates believe they already have the answer: The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is wary of fur­ther rock­ing the boat with Chi­na amid efforts to repair basic lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

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 par­ti­cle col­lec­tion that fan­cied itself a physi­cist (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Democritus’s point is that if the atom­ist says both that atoms are all that exist and that col­or, sweet­ness, etc. and the oth­er qual­i­ties of con­scious expe­ri­ence are not to be found in the atoms, then we have a para­dox.” From vol­ume 264.

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 386

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.

386 is inter­est­ing because it feels like it ought to have lots of divi­sors, but it’s just 2 · 193. Of course you can dou­ble any prime, but it still sur­pris­es me when I run across it. Primes dou­bled are, by def­i­n­i­tion, exact­ly as rare as primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I am a Chris­t­ian (James Choi, Yale Fac­ul­ty Web­site): “There are things about Chris­tian­i­ty that are con­fus­ing or hard to accept as true. But in math, if we start with axioms that are sol­id, then we can prove easy the­o­rems based on those axioms, and then use those easy the­o­rems to prove coun­ter­in­tu­itive, seem­ing­ly false the­o­rems. We can believe the hard the­o­rems because we have con­fi­dence in the axioms and the easy the­o­rems. To me, the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ is the fun­da­men­tal the­o­rem of Chris­tian­i­ty. If we can gain con­fi­dence in this, then this pro­vides a foun­da­tion for us to have faith in the rest of the claims of Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of finance at Yale. He’s had a ver­sion of this page on his offi­cial web­site ever since he was a sopho­more at Har­vard. He kept it up while apply­ing to grad school and while going on the job mar­ket. Respect.
  2. Why the Media is Hon­est and Good (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “My advice is to read the main­stream media, and trust the facts they present, while ques­tion­ing the nar­ra­tives. Under­stand where the bias­es are and cor­rect for them. Read some of their crit­ics too, but under­stand that those crit­ics are almost more biased and less intel­li­gent and hon­est than those that they attack. The few media crit­ics who are bet­ter than the press are rare and deserve your sup­port. The excep­tion here is any­thing hav­ing to do with race, gen­der, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, where you should under­stand that estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ists are try­ing their best but can’t be trust­ed because they’ve lost their minds, or are scared of those that have, and you’d be bet­ter off lis­ten­ing to peo­ple with can­ce­lable views.”
  3. The bat­tle of the stan­dards: why the US and UK can’t stop fight­ing the met­ric sys­tem (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “It all went back to Nim­rod, he was say­ing. Nim­rod, great-grand­son of Noah and the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord,’ who had attempt­ed to unite the world’s pop­u­la­tion by build­ing the Tow­er of Babel so that human­i­ty might climb up to Heav­en itself. ‘And God inter­vened, stop­ping him from build­ing the tow­er,’ said Tony. God then spread human­i­ty across the globe, divid­ing us up into dif­fer­ent nations with their own lan­guages and tra­di­tions. As Tony under­stood the mes­sage of the Tow­er of Babel, it was that ‘Peo­ple should live in dis­tinct nations because it pro­vides a uni­fy­ing force in their lives. It gives them a sense of pur­pose.’”
  4. What if Diver­si­ty Train­ings Are Doing More Harm Than Good? (Jesse Sin­gal, New York Times): “Over the years, social sci­en­tists who have con­duct­ed care­ful reviews of the evi­dence base for diver­si­ty train­ings have fre­quent­ly come to dis­cour­ag­ing con­clu­sions. Though diver­si­ty train­ings have been around in one form or anoth­er since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever sub­ject­ed to rig­or­ous eval­u­a­tion, and those that are most­ly appear to have lit­tle or no pos­i­tive long-term effects… Some diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives might actu­al­ly wors­en the D.E.I. cli­mates of the orga­ni­za­tions that pay for them.”
  5. If Affir­ma­tive Action Ends, Col­lege Admis­sions May Be Changed For­ev­er (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Col­leges are plan­ning behind the scenes for the court rul­ing, though they are reluc­tant to release plans, wor­ried about poten­tial­ly open­ing them­selves up to legal action. ‘“‘We don’t want to get ahead of the court, and we don’t want to give the court any ideas,’”’ Dr. Pérez said.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Who is includ­ed by “inclu­sive” lan­guage? (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “…one thing you’d learn in a fan­cy Amer­i­can school is why you shouldn’t talk about the eco­nom­ic under­de­vel­op­ment of Africa like this. You’d learn bet­ter eti­quette. Or at least dif­fer­ent eti­quette — eti­quette that will dif­fer­en­ti­ate you from less sophis­ti­cat­ed peo­ple who might run around say­ing offen­sive things about pover­ty in the Glob­al South. For instance, a per­son with­out a prop­er edu­ca­tion might refer to the coun­tries in ques­tion as ‘the third world’ with­out hav­ing read Marc Silver’s Jan­u­ary 2021 NPR piece about why this is offen­sive. But to Bright’s point, speak­ing dif­fer­ent­ly doesn’t actu­al­ly change any­thing.  And that, per­haps, is a big part of the appeal.”
  7. NHL play­er refus­es to wear Pride Night jer­sey dur­ing warm-ups, cit­ing reli­gious beliefs (Jared Gans, The Hill): “I respect every­body, and I respect everybody’s choic­es. My choice is to stay true to myself and my reli­gion,” he said while tak­ing ques­tions in the Fly­ers’ lock­er room after the team’s 5–2 vic­to­ry over the Ana­heim Ducks. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
    • Sim­ple faith­ful­ness is a beau­ti­ful thing.

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 Bib­li­cal Cri­tique of Sec­u­lar Jus­tice and Crit­i­cal The­o­ry (Tim Keller, Gospel In Life): “In the Bible Chris­tians have an ancient, rich, strong, com­pre­hen­sive, com­plex, and attrac­tive under­stand­ing of jus­tice. Bib­li­cal jus­tice dif­fers in sig­nif­i­cant ways from all the sec­u­lar alter­na­tives, with­out ignor­ing the con­cerns of any of them. Yet Chris­tians know lit­tle about bib­li­cal jus­tice, despite its promi­nence in the Scrip­tures.” The read of the week. From vol­ume 262

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 383

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I offi­ci­ate a wed­ding on Fri­day — con­grats Alex & Andrea!) 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.

Hap­py New Year! Most of my read­ers know this, but this bun­dle of links is an over­flow from a min­istry called Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. Today is Decem­ber 31st, which is the biggest giv­ing day of the year. If you are inclined toward gen­eros­i­ty on New Year’s Eve, con­sid­er mak­ing a year-end dona­tion to sup­port the min­istry.

This is vol­ume 383, which is both a prime num­ber and a palin­drome. Not too shab­by, 383. Hold your head up high among the num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rea­sons to believe, Christ­mas edi­tion:
    • How Would You Prove That God Per­formed a Mir­a­cle? (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “Josh Brown directs the pro­gram in neu­ro­science at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Bloom­ing­ton. He has pub­lished dozens of arti­cles on top­ics like the neur­al basis of deci­sion mak­ing in the brain. He has wire-rimmed glass­es and a calm, method­i­cal way of speak­ing. And after almost two decades of keep­ing rel­a­tive­ly qui­et, he is now speak­ing open­ly about his most sur­pris­ing research find­ing: He believes that God mirac­u­lous­ly healed him of a brain tumor.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is a his­to­ri­an at UNC.
    • When Mary Met the Angel (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘Sci­ence is the descrip­tion of how God choos­es to work most of the time,’ writes Rus­sell Cow­burn, a pro­fes­sor of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. ‘We know dead bod­ies don’t come back to life accord­ing to sci­ence. And yet Chris­tian­i­ty is built on the obser­va­tion that Jesus came back to life. I am very hap­py to say that at that spe­cial moment, God was act­ing dif­fer­ent­ly.’ Like many oth­er world-class sci­en­tists I’ve interviewed—including Fran­cis Collins, for­mer direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health—Prof. Cow­burn came to faith in Jesus as an adult. He is not just try­ing to make sci­en­tif­ic sense of a child­hood faith that he can­not shed.”
      • Dis­claimer: I know the author and am thrilled she was invit­ed to write about faith for the WSJ.
    • A Christ­mas Con­ver­sa­tion About Christ (Nico­las Kristof inter­view­ing Rus­sell Moore, New York Times): “The most impor­tant blind spot is per­haps miss­ing why so many of us are drawn to faith in the first place. We real­ly do believe the Gospel is Good News that answers the deep­est long­ings of the human heart. I would just rec­om­mend that peo­ple read one of the Gospels with an open mind. Jesus loves New York Times read­ers, too.”
  2. A Dark­ness Revealed (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…the great chal­lenge here, as ever, is to strive to see our ances­tors and our con­tem­po­raries with moral clar­i­ty, not white­wash­ing their sins and fail­ings with poet­ic mem­o­ry, while also rec­og­niz­ing their virtues — and in all cas­es, nev­er, ever allow­ing their full human­i­ty, the good and the bad alike, to be assim­i­lat­ed into the realm of ideas.”
    • I found this grip­ping. A man wres­tles with the not-entire­ly-sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion that his father was in the KKK.
  3. Urbana Mis­sions Con­fer­ence That Once Drew 20,000 Expect­ed to Fall Far Short (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry Watch): “Jao said that lin­ger­ing con­cerns over COVID-19 and the country’s eco­nom­ic woes are help­ing to dri­ve pro­ject­ed atten­dance down for the con­fer­ence, usu­al­ly held every three years, but delayed until this year by the pan­dem­ic. Like many church­es, he said, Inter­Var­si­ty and oth­er cam­pus min­istries are still rebuild­ing their atten­dance.”
  4. Our First Close­up Image of Mars Was a Paint-By-Num­bers Pas­tel Draw­ing (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al blog): “On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew with­in 6,118 miles of the sur­face of Mars, cap­tur­ing images as it passed over the plan­et. The image data was trans­mit­ted back to sci­en­tists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quick­ly ren­der a pho­to­graph from it. They deter­mined that the fastest way to see what Mariner 4 had seen was to print out the imag­ing data as a series of num­bers, paste them into a grid, buy a set of pas­tels from a near­by art store, and do a paint-by-num­bers job with the pas­tels on the data grid.”
    • This is actu­al­ly beau­ti­ful.
  5. Amer­i­cans Have Found Their Hap­py Place (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “Two econ­o­mists, David G. Blanch­flower of Dart­mouth and Alex Bryson of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, have come up with a new and more intu­itive way to mea­sure well-being. The results are strik­ing. If you con­sid­er US states as com­pa­ra­ble to coun­tries, 16 of the top 20 polit­i­cal units in the world for well-being are in the US — includ­ing the top sev­en.”
  6. The Media Very Rarely Lies (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “The point is: the media rarely lies explic­it­ly and direct­ly. Reporters rarely say spe­cif­ic things they know to be false. When the media mis­in­forms peo­ple, it does so by mis­in­ter­pret­ing things, exclud­ing con­text, or sig­nal-boost­ing some events while ignor­ing oth­ers, not by par­tic­i­pat­ing in some bright-line cat­e­go­ry called ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion’.”
    • Fol­low-up: Sor­ry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I find it real­ly inter­est­ing that so many com­menters were so resis­tant to the idea that the worst and dumb­est con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries of our time don’t involve out­right lies. I think all of us — not just cen­sors — want to main­tain the com­fort­ing illu­sion that the bad peo­ple are doing some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than the good peo­ple, some­thing that marks them as Obvi­ous­ly Bad in bright neon paint.”
  7. Is the right win­ning the com­e­dy wars? (Con­stance Grady, Vox): “It’s as though there’s some sort of fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect between right and left on the issue of com­e­dy. On a very basic lev­el, the two sides seem to dis­agree on the ques­tion of what a joke should look like, what it’s okay to joke about, and what is so under threat that to joke about it would be unthink­able. No one seems sure how to talk about the dif­fer­ence, exact­ly. They just know that they want to be the fun­ny ones.”

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 Fer­til­i­ty rate: ‘Jaw-drop­ping’ glob­al crash in chil­dren being born (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Chi­na, cur­rent­ly the most pop­u­lous nation in the world, is expect­ed to peak at 1.4 bil­lion in four years’ time before near­ly halv­ing to 732 mil­lion by 2100. India will take its place.” From a long-term per­spec­tive, this is pos­si­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant news you will read this year. Some of you will still be alive when China’s pop­u­la­tion is half what it is now. And it’s not just Chi­na — many nations are on the same path (with only a few siz­able ones head­ed in the oppo­site direc­tion). From vol­ume 259

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 367

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

This is the 367th install­ment, notable because 367 is a prime num­ber and also the largest num­ber whose square is com­posed of strict­ly increas­ing dig­its: 3672 = 134689.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Social­ism, Nation­al­ism, and Tolkien (Alec Dent, The Dis­patch): “In our time of unprece­dent­ed wealth and safe­ty, the once-defeat­ed foe of illib­er­al­ism has made a reap­pearence.… due large­ly to a lack of appre­ci­a­tion for how good we have things right now, a lack of under­stand­ing of how we got here, and a lack of under­stand­ing of how a rad­i­cal over­haul of soci­ety would alter the world as we know it.”
  2. The Despo­tism of Isa­ias Afew­er­ki (Alex de Waal, The Baf­fler): “…fight­ers protest­ed the deci­sion that they should con­tin­ue to serve with­out pay for two more years. A group of dis­abled vet­er­ans marched—there’s no verb that con­veys the deter­mined col­lec­tive motion of their wheel­chairs, arti­fi­cial limbs, and sticks—towards the cap­i­tal to demand their pen­sions. They were shot at with live ammu­ni­tion. Some were killed, oth­ers were arrest­ed and dis­ap­peared.”
    • I’d heard before that Eritrea was worse than North Korea in some ways, but this arti­cle real­ly drove it home. Wow.
  3. Why Peo­ple Are Los­ing Faith In Pub­lic Insti­tu­tions (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…if you relied on the Post to tell you about the world you actu­al­ly live in, it would not have occurred to you that there is any oth­er side to the library sto­ry than the vir­tu­ous pink-haired queer librar­i­an and her allies ver­sus the mob of big­ots. If you are on the Left, isn’t it in your inter­est to under­stand why peo­ple are so upset, even if you don’t agree with them? Isn’t it in your inter­est to at least think about why the peo­ple of a town would rather defund their library rather than see it used in this way?”
    • This one is wild and Dreher, as they say, has the receipts.
  4. Can an Athe­ist Be a Moral Real­ist? (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “…I can’t see how you can be an athe­ist and a moral real­ist at the same time. It is like eat­ing a cake and still hav­ing it. If nat­u­ral­ism is true, then aren’t we just meat bags full of water with no dig­ni­ty? My friend says I am car­i­ca­tur­ing his posi­tion. Am I miss­ing some­thing, or is he?”
    • This is well argued. The author is a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment and phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas.
  5. Trump should fill Chris­tians with rage. How come he doesn’t? (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I know that peo­ple inspired by [Jesus] have done great things in the past — build­ing hos­pi­tals for the poor, improv­ing the rights of women and chil­dren, mil­i­tat­ing against slav­ery, car­ing for the men­tal­ly dis­abled, work­ing for a mer­ci­ful wel­fare state, fight­ing prej­u­dice, improv­ing glob­al health. But pre­cise­ly because these things have hap­pened, it is dif­fi­cult for me to com­pre­hend why so many Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals have reject­ed the splen­dor and romance of their call­ing and set­tled for the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal resent­ments of the hard right.”
    • Long and a bit ram­bly, nonethe­less inter­est­ing.
  6. Pub­lish­ing needs JK Rowl­ing to be a mon­ster (Vic­to­ria Smith, The Crit­ic Mag­a­zine): “The trou­ble with JK Rowl­ing is that she has done noth­ing wrong. Back in 2020, she wrote a care­ful­ly word­ed, com­pas­sion­ate piece about sex and gen­der.… This is a sit­u­a­tion in which the pun­ish­ment has cre­at­ed the crime and it’s one that is need­ed by mem­bers of the pub­lish­ing indus­try who have spent years embrac­ing the argu­ments of the most extreme trans activists while ignor­ing those of fem­i­nists. They need Rowl­ing to be a mon­ster. Oth­er­wise they might have to respond, not just to what Rowl­ing has writ­ten, but to the real­i­ties of the move­ment to which they have pledged alle­giance.”
  7. Died: Queen Eliz­a­beth II, British Monarch Who Put Her Trust in God (Dud­ley Delffs, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Queen’s love of the Bible and its gospel mes­sage led to her par­tic­i­pa­tion in the pub­li­ca­tion of a spe­cial book to com­mem­o­rate her 90th birth­day. Titled The Ser­vant Queen and the King She Serves.… Her Majesty per­son­al­ly wrote the fore­word, thank­ing read­ers for their prayers and good wish­es. ‘I have been—and remain—very grate­ful to … God for His stead­fast love. I have indeed seen His faith­ful­ness,’ she wrote. The book was dis­trib­uted to thou­sands of church­es across the UK and through­out many Com­mon­wealth coun­tries pri­or to the Queen’s birth­day in 2016. The book proved so pop­u­lar that the Bible Soci­ety had to print anoth­er 150,000 copies to meet demand.”

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 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. From vol­ume 234.

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 360

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.

360 is, of course, the num­ber of degrees in a cir­cle. It’s also due north on a com­pass.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The God Gap Helps Explain a ‘Seis­mic Shift’ in Amer­i­can Pol­i­tics (David French, Sub­stack): “Count­less polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al issues don’t have a clear ‘Chris­t­ian’ pol­i­cy solu­tion, yet when a party’s mem­bers per­ceive it to be the par­ty of Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty, then the plat­form is wrong­ly infused with reli­gious fer­vor, even on issues (like tax rates, gun pol­i­cy, envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy, for­eign pol­i­cy, and count­less oth­ers) where the cor­rect reli­gious answer is far from clear.”
    • The excerpt is not the main point, which is also good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. I’m a Scam Pre­ven­tion Expert, and I Got Scammed (Natasha Lupinia, per­son­al web­site): “This scam went against every­thing I thought I knew about social engi­neer­ing attacks. The caller was pro­fes­sion­al, knowl­edge­able, patient, and easy to under­stand (con­nec­tion issues notwith­stand­ing). He had so much infor­ma­tion about me already that, even know­ing how easy it is to find sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion about peo­ple, I was inclined to take him at face val­ue…”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. A clus­ter of links which touch on com­mon col­lege sce­nar­ios:
    • Bomb­shell alco­hol study fund­ed by Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion finds only risks, zero ben­e­fits for young adults (Chloe Tay­lor, For­tune): “Researchers said that for peo­ple aged between 15 and 39, the rec­om­mend­ed amount of alco­hol that could be con­sumed before risk­ing their health was ‘a lit­tle more than one-tenth of a stan­dard drink.’ They defined a stan­dard drink as 3.4 flu­id ounces of red wine or 12 flu­id ounces of beer.”
    • When We Con­sent, We Shouldn’t Feel Ter­ri­ble After, Right? (Emma Camp, New York Times): “Con­sent edu­ca­tion takes already anx­ious, inex­pe­ri­enced young peo­ple, and gives them a sim­plis­tic, bina­ry way of under­stand­ing sex. It’s no sur­prise then that many of us have absorbed the mes­sage that sex is a straight­for­ward trans­ac­tion with lit­tle room for com­pli­cat­ed feel­ings — and that we’re con­fused when we expe­ri­ence the inevitable com­pli­ca­tions that sex­u­al inti­ma­cy brings.”
      • A cri­tique of uni­ver­si­ty mes­sag­ing around sex. It does­n’t say all I would like, but it accu­rate­ly iden­ti­fies prob­lems with the cur­rent sys­tem.
    • First base is hook­ing up, sec­ond base is talk­ing, third base is going on a date and fourth base is dat­ing (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “In terms of attrac­tive­ness, the bot­tom 80% of men are com­pet­ing for the bot­tom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are com­pet­ing for the top 20% of men.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
    • Pro­nouns: Progressivism’s Pre­pos­ter­ous Plight (Farhana K, Tra­vers­ing Tra­di­tion): “With­out the abil­i­ty to define a woman as female, for exam­ple, encroach­ment into women’s only spaces will become com­mon­place. There is no way for the state to pro­tect the needs and wants of women, because noth­ing is essen­tial to being a woman and no defin­i­tive fea­ture of women that require such pro­tec­tions, because a woman is any­one who defines them­selves as one. Yet for the Mus­lim woman who abides by the shar’i com­mands to veil from unre­lat­ed men and min­i­mize phys­i­cal con­tact, increas­ing­ly decon­struc­tive atti­tudes to gen­der will pose a clash that few pol­i­cy­mak­ers and mem­bers of the pub­lic have had the strength to accom­mo­date.”
      • Inter­est­ing to see a Mus­lim per­spec­tive.
  4. The Great Fic­tion of AI (Josh Dzieza, The Verge): “…it might not be such a bad thing to have to apply a Tur­ing test to every­thing I read, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the more com­mer­cial­ized mar­ket­ing-dri­ven cor­ners of the inter­net where AI text is most often deployed. The ques­tions it made me ask were the sorts of ques­tions I should be ask­ing any­way: is this sup­port­ed by facts, inter­nal­ly con­sis­tent, and orig­i­nal, or is it coast­ing on pleas­ant-sound­ing lan­guage and rehash­ing con­ven­tion­al wis­dom?; how much human writ­ing meets that stan­dard?; how often am I read­ing with enough atten­tion to notice? If this is the epis­temic cri­sis AI-gen­er­at­ed text is going to bring, maybe it’s a healthy one.”
    • I found this one super inter­est­ing and some­what amaz­ing.
  5. The Hypocrisy of Elites (Erik Toren­berg, Sub­stack): “…we see this every­where: elites pro­mote body pos­i­tiv­i­ty — the idea that being over­weight is healthy — while being most obsessed with main­tain­ing per­fect health. Elites pro­mote sex­u­al inde­pen­dence and polyamory, yet them­selves are most like­ly to be monog­a­mous in sta­ble long-term rela­tion­ships. Elites com­plain about over­pop­u­la­tion and car­bon foot­print, but they’re the ones hav­ing the most kids and inflict­ing the largest car­bon foot­print.”
  6. The Fall of His­to­ry as a Major–and as a Part of the Human­i­ties (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Amer­i­can cul­ture has lost faith in his­to­ry as a vehi­cle for under­stand­ing the human expe­ri­ence. Our high cul­ture ques­tions the very con­cept of shared human expe­ri­ence. It is hard for history—or any of the humanities—to flour­ish in a world that does not put much stock in the human. By adopt­ing inter­sec­tion­al ide­ol­o­gy as their own, the pro­fes­sion­al human­ists have con­firmed that they do not believe in the promise of their own dis­ci­pline. And if they do not believe in it…. why should any 18 year old stu­dent?” This is an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly insight­ful essay.
  7. 33 Prob­lems With Media in One Chart (Nick Rout­ley, Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist): rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I now know what astro­turf­ing is.

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 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.” First shared in vol­ume 227. I know I shared this recent­ly in light of the Dobbs deci­sion, and it is def­i­nite­ly worth shar­ing again.

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 327

Two weeks of con­tent dis­tilled into one. It’s like juice con­cen­trate!

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

This is vol­ume 327, and 327 is the largest num­ber such that it togeth­er with its dou­ble and triple con­tain every dig­it 1–9 once: 327 dou­bled is 654 and tripled it is 981. Odd but cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Teacher Who Nev­er Spoke (Mau­reeen Swinger, Plough): “The sum­mer my broth­er Duane turned twen­ty, a for­mi­da­ble young man stayed with us on a break from the Ivy League. He had nev­er, to anyone’s knowl­edge, lost an argu­ment. Sev­er­al weeks into his vis­it, my moth­er walked into the din­ing room where my broth­er and his friend were, in the­o­ry, eat­ing lunch. In real­i­ty, both men were sit­ting at the table with locked jaws. One didn’t have to say, ‘I need you to eat.’ The oth­er didn’t need to say, ‘Hell, no.’ They both knew exact­ly what was going on: the Ivy Lea­guer was los­ing an argu­ment to my broth­er, who had nev­er learned to speak.”
    • This is from a while ago (2017), but I must have missed it. Sim­ply astound­ing. I wept while read­ing it. Any­one tak­ing a class where Peter Singer’s phi­los­o­phy is high­ly regard­ed should read this ASAP.
  2. She was sold to a stranger so her fam­i­ly could eat as Afghanistan crum­bles (Anna Coren, Jessie Yeung and Abdul Basir Bina, CNN): “Mag­ul, a 10-year-old girl in neigh­bor­ing Ghor province, cries every day as she pre­pares to be sold to a 70-year-old man to set­tle her fam­i­ly’s debts. Her par­ents had bor­rowed 200,000 Afgha­nis ($2,200) from a neigh­bor in their vil­lage — but with­out a job or sav­ings, they have no way of return­ing the mon­ey.”
    • This is one of the most depress­ing things I have read in some time.
  3. What hap­pens when peo­ple in Texas can’t get abor­tions: ‘Dia­pers save a lot more babies than ultra­sounds’ (Casey Parks, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I always tell peo­ple, ‘Dia­pers save a lot more babies than ultra­sounds.’ ” Har­ing said. “I don’t want an ultra­sound machine. I want tons of dia­pers. Buy me $20,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of dia­pers because if you have a woman who comes in with four kids — yeah, look­ing at the baby, she real­izes it’s a human being. But if you tell her, ‘I’m going to give you dia­pers for all four kids,’ believe me, the dia­pers for all four kids is going to save that baby a lot quick­er than a lit­tle pen­nant on the screen.”
    • It’s rare to read a sym­pa­thet­ic sto­ry about a pro-life cen­ter in a major Amer­i­can news­pa­per.
  4. Philip Yancey’s Mes­sage of Grace (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Yancey told the par­ents in the audi­ence that, bib­li­cal­ly, God grieves as much as they do; that God loves their chil­dren as much as they do; and that God is deeply pained by the state of this bro­ken world. To his sur­prise, he found his faith affirmed rather than shat­tered. He wit­nessed in per­son some­thing the the­olo­gian Miroslav Volf wrote on the day after the New­town shoot­ings: ‘Those who observe suf­fer­ing are tempt­ed to reject God; those who expe­ri­ence it often can­not give up on God, their solace and their agony.’ ”
    • This is one of the most gospel-cen­tric arti­cles I have read in a major pub­li­ca­tion in quite some time.
  5. When All The Media Nar­ra­tives Col­lapse (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major sto­ries, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Don­ald Trump accused the MSM of being ‘fake news’ the more assid­u­ous­ly they tried to prove him right.”
  6. His Rea­sons for Oppos­ing Trump Were Bib­li­cal. Now a Top Chris­t­ian Edi­tor Is Out. (Ben Smith, New York Times): “As the long­time edi­tor of World, a Chris­t­ian news orga­ni­za­tion that has a web­site, a biweek­ly mag­a­zine and a set of pod­casts, Mr. Olasky has deliv­ered a mix of hard news and watch­dog arti­cles about the evan­gel­i­cal realm under a jour­nal­is­tic phi­los­o­phy he calls ‘bib­li­cal objec­tiv­i­ty.’ It involves tak­ing strong stands where the Bible is clear, which has led World to oppose abor­tion rights and sup­port refugees, he says, and to fol­low reportable facts where the Bible doesn’t pro­vide clear guid­ance.”
  7. Some pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives:
    • The Covid pan­dem­ic is not tak­ing the very best of turns (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “While the fog of war is thick right now, the ear­ly data on Nu sug­gests that it may be a big deal. Even if it’s not, how­ev­er, it has been obvi­ous since we got the vac­cines that vac­cine escape is a con­cern. You can debate whether the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a vac­cine escap­ing vari­ant is 20% or 80%, but in any case we need effec­tive con­tin­gency plans in place. If we fail to respond effec­tive­ly to Nu, that will be a con­sid­er­ably greater insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure than any­thing that hap­pened at the out­set of the pan­dem­ic. We’ve had almost two years since the first COVID case and one year from the vac­cine approvals to pre­pare. So I ask: what is the plan for the vac­cine-escap­ing vari­ant?”
    • The Weird­ness of Gov­ern­ment Vari­a­tion in COVID-19 Respons­es (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “But imag­ine at the start of the pan­dem­ic, some­one had said to you ‘Every­one will face the exis­tence of the same dis­ease, and have access to the exact same tools to fight it. But in some EU coun­tries or US states, peo­ple won’t be allowed to leave their house and have to cov­er their faces in pub­lic. In oth­er places, gov­ern­ment will just leave peo­ple alone. Vast dif­fer­ences of this sort will exist across juris­dic­tions that are sim­i­lar on objec­tive met­rics of how bad the pan­dem­ic is at any par­tic­u­lar moment.’ I would’ve found this to be a very unlike­ly out­come! You could’ve con­vinced me EU states would do very lit­tle on COVID-19, or that they would do lock­downs every­where. I would not have believed that you could have two neigh­bor­ing coun­tries that have sim­i­lar num­bers, but one of them forces every­one to stay home, while the oth­er doesn’t. This is the kind of extreme vari­a­tion in pol­i­cy we don’t see in oth­er areas.”
    • The Vac­cine Moment, part one (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “Covid is a rev­e­la­tion. It has lain bare splits in the social fab­ric that were always there but could be ignored in bet­ter times. It has revealed the com­pli­ance of the lega­cy media and the pow­er of Sil­i­con Val­ley to curate and con­trol the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion. It has con­firmed the sly dis­hon­esty of polit­i­cal lead­ers, and their ulti­mate obei­sance to cor­po­rate pow­er. It has shown up ‘The Sci­ence’ for the com­pro­mised ide­ol­o­gy it is. Most of all, it has revealed the author­i­tar­i­an streak that lies beneath so many peo­ple, and which always emerges in fear­ful times.”
    • A tweet that made me laugh: “The WHO chose Omi­cron over Nu for the vari­ant of con­cern, prob­a­bly because it sounds too much like ‘new.’ But the next let­ter is not Omi­cron but Xi. Was that a lit­tle too on the nose?” (Jared Wal­czak, Twit­ter)

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 What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-written. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian. First shared in vol­ume 178.

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 317

lots of pan­dem­ic and vac­ci­na­tion stuff

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

This is vol­ume 317 — a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Too Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Did you believe that? I mean, that’s also a pret­ty cool sto­ry, isn’t it? Right-wing news out­lets accuse the so-called ‘lib­er­al media’ of bias, then get hoist on their own petard? Seems a bit too cute. Have you clicked through to any of the links yet? No? Not even after I admit­ted I’m prob­a­bly biased here?”
  2. On vac­ci­na­tions
    • It’s Time to Stop Ratio­nal­iz­ing and Enabling Evan­gel­i­cal Vac­cine Rejec­tion (David French, The Dis­patch): “For the Chris­t­ian believ­er, the pur­suit of free­dom is insep­a­ra­ble from the pur­suit of virtue. We do not seek lib­er­ty sim­ply to sat­is­fy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pur­sue the free­dom to make our neigh­bors sick, we vio­late the social com­pact and under­mine our moral stand­ing in pol­i­tics, law, and cul­ture. Chris­t­ian lib­er­tin­ism becomes a long-term threat to reli­gious lib­er­ty itself.”
      • Although I am vac­ci­nat­ed myself, I am more sym­pa­thet­ic to vac­cine reluc­tants than French is. I def­i­nite­ly do not think it is a reli­gious lib­er­ty issue, though. It seems to me that this is more a mat­ter of per­son­al auton­o­my and the reluc­tance is large­ly dri­ven by self-inflict­ed dam­age from the author­i­ties. The CDC (for exam­ple) has repeat­ed­ly said and done extra­or­di­nar­i­ly stu­pid things in this pan­dem­ic. Very often you would have been bet­ter off doing the oppo­site of what they advo­cat­ed for. Peo­ple noticed. And so now that the offi­cial advice is to receive the vac­cine, peo­ple who are resis­tant are apply­ing an under­stand­able heuris­tic.
    • I’m a For­mer Pas­tor, and I Don’t Believe in ‘Reli­gious Exemp­tions’ to Vac­cine Man­dates (Cur­tis Chang, New York Times): “Chris­tians who request reli­gious exemp­tions rarely even try to offer sub­stan­tive bib­li­cal and the­o­log­i­cal rea­son­ing. Rather, the dri­vers for evan­gel­i­cal resis­tance are non­re­li­gious and are root­ed in deep-seat­ed sus­pi­cion of gov­ern­ment and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to mis­in­for­ma­tion.… The biggest threat to any legit­i­mate right is the ille­git­i­mate abuse of that right.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Cur­tis Chang used to pas­tor near here and although we’ve nev­er met I emailed with him once about a book he had writ­ten.
    • NRB spokesman Dan Dar­ling fired after pro-vac­cine state­ments on ‘Morn­ing Joe’ (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Daniel Dar­ling, senior vice pres­i­dent of com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the Nation­al Reli­gious Broad­cast­ers, was fired Fri­day (Aug. 27) after refus­ing to recant his pro-vac­cine state­ments, accord­ing to a source autho­rized to speak for Dar­ling.”
    • The ACLU, Pri­or to COVID, Denounced Man­dates and Coer­cive Mea­sures to Fight Pan­demics (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “What makes the ACLU’s posi­tion so remark­able — besides the inher­ent shock of a civ­il lib­er­ties orga­ni­za­tion cham­pi­oning state man­dates over­rid­ing indi­vid­ual choice — is that, very recent­ly, the same group warned of the grave dan­gers of the very mind­set it is now push­ing. In 2008, the ACLU pub­lished a com­pre­hen­sive report on pan­demics which had one pri­ma­ry pur­pose: to denounce as dan­ger­ous and unnec­es­sary attempts by the state to man­date, coerce, and con­trol in the name of pro­tect­ing the pub­lic from pan­demics.”
  3. The pan­dem­ic more gen­er­al­ly
    1. One in 5,000 (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Here’s one way to think about a one-in-10,000 dai­ly chance: It would take more than three months for the com­bined risk to reach just 1 per­cent… I will con­fess to one bit of hes­i­ta­tion about walk­ing you through the data on break­through infec­tions: It’s not clear how much we should be wor­ry­ing about them. For the vac­ci­nat­ed, Covid resem­bles the flu and usu­al­ly a mild one. Soci­ety does not grind to a halt over the flu.”
    2. New Details Emerge About Coro­n­avirus Research at Chi­nese Lab (Sharon Lern­er & Mara Hvis­ten­dahl, The Inter­cept): “The doc­u­ments con­tain sev­er­al crit­i­cal details about the research in Wuhan, includ­ing the fact that key exper­i­men­tal work with human­ized mice was con­duct­ed at a biosafe­ty lev­el 3 lab at Wuhan Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­ter for Ani­mal Exper­i­ment — and not at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy, as was pre­vi­ous­ly assumed.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
    3. New Stud­ies Find Evi­dence Of ‘Super­hu­man’ Immu­ni­ty To COVID-19 In Some Indi­vid­u­als (Michaleen Doucleff, NPR): “In fact, these anti­bod­ies were even able to deac­ti­vate a virus engi­neered, on pur­pose, to be high­ly resis­tant to neu­tral­iza­tion. This virus con­tained 20 muta­tions that are known to pre­vent SARS-CoV­‑2 anti­bod­ies from bind­ing to it. Anti­bod­ies from peo­ple who were only vac­ci­nat­ed or who only had pri­or coro­n­avirus infec­tions were essen­tial­ly use­less against this mutant virus. But anti­bod­ies in peo­ple with the ‘hybrid immu­ni­ty’ could neu­tral­ize it.”
  4. Steven Pinker Thinks Your Sense of Immi­nent Doom Is Wrong (David March­ese, New York Times): “Giv­en that vir­tu­al­ly every cli­mate sci­en­tist believes that human activ­i­ty is warm­ing the plan­et, how could any­one deny it? The answer is, peo­ple don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly believe what sci­en­tists say because they cor­rect­ly sense that with­in acad­e­mia a per­son can get pun­ished for unortho­dox beliefs.”
    • Includ­ing entire­ly for that excerpt. What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is that the jour­nal­ist is dis­mis­sive of this idea, which is not only clear­ly true but at the root of much soci­etal dys­func­tion. We have a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in our cul­ture because our experts seem deter­mined to demon­strate their untrust­wor­thi­ness again and again. Jour­nal­ists are even more to blame than aca­d­e­mics, which is why I think it is so hard for this jour­nal­ist to accept Pinker’s claim.
  5. Per­spec­tive: The moral util­i­ty of his­to­ry (Jon Meacham, Deseret News): “As a mat­ter of observ­able fact, the Unit­ed States, through its spo­radic adher­ence to its finest aspi­ra­tions, is the most durable exper­i­ment in plu­ral­is­tic repub­li­can­ism the world has known. Oth­er nation­al rev­o­lu­tions have descend­ed into dic­ta­tor­ship and per­se­cu­tion; ours has pro­duced envi­able, if frag­ile, demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. In the main, the Amer­i­ca of the 21st cen­tu­ry is, for all its short­com­ings, freer and more accept­ing than it has ever been.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. On the Texas abor­tion law
    1. Texas’ Abor­tion Law Should Force Amer­i­ca to Change Its Ways (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, New York Times): “In Amer­i­ca, of all the preg­nan­cies that don’t end in mis­car­riage, near­ly one in five is abort­ed; this is a soci­ety in which things are wild­ly off track. A world like this, spun by forces that lead to that many lives being undone, doesn’t hap­pen by chance. It takes all of us. It takes a vil­lage to make abor­tion seem like the best choice. We can change our ways, though.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at South­east­ern Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary.
    2. The Pro-Life Move­ment Must Tran­scend Pol­i­tics (David French, The Dis­patch): “To be pro-life does not mean sup­port­ing every pos­si­ble strat­e­gy, even if only tem­porar­i­ly suc­cess­ful (a Texas state court has already issued a broad injunc­tion against the law), designed to ban or lim­it abor­tion. Strate­gies designed to ban abor­tion do not nec­es­sar­i­ly help end abor­tion, and end­ing abor­tion is the ulti­mate aim of the pro-life move­ment.”
    3. How a for­mer SLS pro­fes­sor and Hoover fel­low helped shape the Texas abor­tion ban (Sari­na Deb and Geor­gia Rosen­berg, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Jonathan Mitchell was a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford Law School and for­mer fel­low at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion when he the­o­rized the legal mech­a­nism which laid the ground­work for the con­tro­ver­sial Texas abor­tion ban that went into effect last week. If states want­ed to cir­cum­vent judi­cial review, Mitchell wrote in a 2018 law review arti­cle, they could del­e­gate the pow­er of enforce­ment to pri­vate cit­i­zens. That is exact­ly what S.B. 8 does.”
  7. Strate­gic Cit­ing (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “[Schol­ars are more like­ly to cite oth­er schol­ars who can help them out]… The find­ing is robust to con­trol­ling for self-cita­tions, own-jour­nal cita­tions, and a vari­ety of oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties. The authors also show that deceased authors get few­er cita­tions than matched liv­ing authors. For exam­ple, liv­ing Nobel prize win­ners get more cita­tions than dead ones even when they were award­ed the prize joint­ly.”

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.” At the time of writ­ing, the author had 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 284

a small col­lec­tion because it’s too over­whelm­ing oth­er­wise

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 made an extra effort to keep this to sev­en entries today, oth­er­wise it would have been thir­ty (no joke — that’s what I began culling from).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Only the Church Can Tru­ly Defeat a Chris­t­ian Insur­rec­tion (David French, The Dis­patch): “I would bet that most of my read­ers would instant­ly label the exact same event Islam­ic ter­ror­ism if Islam­ic sym­bols filled the crowd, if Islam­ic music played in the loud­speak­ers, and if mem­bers of the crowd shout­ed ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they charged the Capi­tol.”
  2. The Roman Road from Insur­rec­tion (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “If the world rejects us because of Christ and him cru­ci­fied, so much the worse for the world. If the world rejects us because they think Christ is just a mas­cot for what we would already be sup­port­ing or doing even if Jesus were still dead, then God have mer­cy on us.”
    • The author is pres­i­dent of the Ethics & Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion. A few years ago I remem­ber telling one of our inter­na­tion­al stu­dents that if he want­ed a healthy Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, Rus­sell Moore need­ed to be one of his go-to reads.
  3. Every­thing Is Bro­ken (Alana New­house, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Being on a ship near­ly 4 mil­lion square miles in area along with 330 mil­lion oth­er peo­ple and real­iz­ing the entire hull is pock­marked with holes is ter­ri­fy­ing.” Wide-rang­ing.
  4. The Great Unrav­el­ing (Bari Weiss, Sub­Stack): “I don’t know the answer. But I know that you have to be sort of strange to stand apart and refuse to join Team Red or Team Blue. These strange ones are the ones who think that polit­i­cal vio­lence is wrong, that mob jus­tice is nev­er just and the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence is always right. These are the ones who are skep­ti­cal of state and cor­po­rate pow­er, even when it is clamp­ing down on peo­ple they despise.”
  5. We Need a New Media Sys­tem (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The flaw in the sys­tem is that even the biggest news com­pa­nies now oper­ate under the assump­tion that at least half their poten­tial audi­ence isn’t lis­ten­ing. This leads to all sorts of prob­lems, and the fact that the eas­i­est way to keep your own demo­graph­ic is to feed it neg­a­tive sto­ries about oth­ers is only the most obvi­ous. On all sides, we now lean into inflam­ma­to­ry car­i­ca­tures, because the finan­cial incen­tives encour­age it.”
  6. ‘Our souls are dead’: how I sur­vived a Chi­nese ‘re-edu­ca­tion’ camp for Uighurs (Gul­ba­har Haiti­wa­ji with Rozenn Mor­gat, The Guardian): “Women like me, who emerged from the camps, are no longer who we once were. We are shad­ows; our souls are dead. I was made to believe that my loved ones, my hus­band and my daugh­ter, were ter­ror­ists. I was so far away, so alone, so exhaust­ed and alien­at­ed, that I almost end­ed up believ­ing it. My hus­band, Ker­im, my daugh­ters Gul­hu­mar and Gul­ni­gar – I denounced your ‘crimes’ I begged for­give­ness from the Com­mu­nist par­ty for atroc­i­ties that nei­ther you nor I com­mit­ted.”
    • I think this ranks among the great evils of his­to­ry and it is hap­pen­ing right now. I am shocked I don’t see high­er lev­els of out­rage and pub­lic respons­es to it on the inter­na­tion­al stage.
  7. Why Has Israel Suc­ceed­ed At COVID Vac­ci­na­tion? (Elad Gil, per­son­al blog): “Many coun­tries and states have been too focused on ‘fair­ness’ and ‘equi­ty’ so have frozen their vac­ci­na­tion efforts in place, or put in place large fines for ‘mis­used virus’. Remem­ber — every­one will even­tu­al­ly get vac­ci­nat­ed. The more shots in arms, the bet­ter, with an empha­sis on the old and comor­bid. And also remem­ber, we are in the mid­dle of a ‘once in a cen­tu­ry pan­dem­ic’- it is more impor­tant to move fast to save lives than to cre­ate and enforce com­plex rules.”
    • The author is a Sil­i­con Val­ley entre­pre­neur and is, far as I can tell, com­plete­ly cor­rect. The fail­ure of the states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment on this issue is astound­ing. The entire pan­dem­ic has been a demon­stra­tion of our bipar­ti­san polit­i­cal incom­pe­tence.

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 Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 274

I’d be hap­py that this is the last week I’ll share “how to think about vot­ing” arti­cles, except next week I’ll have to share elec­tion think­pieces.

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. White Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca built a faith-based safe­ty net. What hap­pens when it’s gone? (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “‘The aver­age Amer­i­can doesn’t real­ize all the things that church­es do to make soci­ety less awful,’ [pro­fes­sor Burge] said. Church­es and oth­er reli­gious groups tutor kids, feed hun­gry peo­ple, shel­ter the home­less and do a great deal of good, often under the radar, he said. As reli­gious groups shrink, those ser­vices could be lost. Burge fears younger Amer­i­cans, in par­tic­u­lar, don’t see orga­nized reli­gion as use­ful. But ‘it’s one of those things where you don’t know what you had till it is gone.’”
  2. The Sins That Cry Out to Heav­en (Eduar­do Andi­no, First Things): “The Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion speaks of four pec­ca­ta cla­man­tia, or sins that cry out to heav­en for vengeance: mur­der, sodomy, oppres­sion of the poor, and defraud­ing work­ers of their wages…. This is not an arbi­trary col­lec­tion of sins.”
  3. Vot­ing & Faith
    • Meet the Evan­gel­i­cals Who Won’t Vote for Trump, Biden, or Any­body at All (Megan Fowler, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Like many Chris­t­ian non­vot­ers before her, she saw the act of cast­ing a bal­lot as a sign of approval for a polit­i­cal pow­er struc­ture that in many ways opposed the way of Christ. She couldn’t do it. If Jesus brought about his king­dom by lay­ing down his rights and spurn­ing polit­i­cal pow­er, Kennedy want­ed to fol­low his exam­ple.”
    • Of Course Evan­gel­i­cals Should Vote for Trump (Paula White-Cain, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve seen [Don­ald Trump] first­hand as a father, a hus­band, a leader, a busi­ness­man and now the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca. I also rec­og­nize most peo­ple have sec­ond­hand infor­ma­tion that mis­char­ac­ter­izes the man I know.”
    • The Chris­t­ian Case for Joe Biden (Josh Dick­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As the Nation­al Faith Engage­ment Direc­tor for the Biden Cam­paign, I spend my days talk­ing to peo­ple of faith about why I believe Joe is the clear moral choice in this elec­tion. But I haven’t always been a Demo­c­rat. Like many Chris­tians, I grew up Repub­li­can.”
    • A Tale of Two Evan­gel­i­calisms (Joel Hall­dorf, Break­ing Ground): “In the sto­ry of Swedish moder­ni­ty, the demo­c­ra­t­ic wel­fare state trans­formed an unjust and elit­ist soci­ety into a more just one. But the found­ing myth of Unit­ed States is not a sto­ry about free­dom through the state, but free­dom from the state.”
  4. On the media:
    • What Do For­eign Cor­re­spon­dents Think of the U.S.? (The New York­er, YouTube): thir­teen min­utes. I found the first half more inter­est­ing than the last half. It picked back up in the last two min­utes.
    • What I Wish My Chris­t­ian Friends Knew About the News Media (Rob Vaughn, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Are my friends wrong to see the main­stream media as rot­ten and rid­den with ‘fake news’? Yes. At least in sig­nif­i­cant ways, they have that wrong. Sure, we make mis­takes. We have blind spots and faulty assump­tions. But many of the crit­i­cisms are off the mark: they mis­un­der­stand what jour­nal­ism is about; they feed a grow­ing sense that there is no agreed upon real­i­ty and set of facts to which we can all refer; and, as a Chris­t­ian I fear they reflect poor­ly on peo­ple who say they love the truth.”
    • My Res­ig­na­tion From The Inter­cept (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “Today I sent my inten­tion to resign from The Inter­cept, the news out­let I co-found­ed in 2013 with Jere­my Scahill and Lau­ra Poitras, as well as from its par­ent com­pa­ny First Look Media. The final, pre­cip­i­tat­ing cause is that The Intercept’s edi­tors, in vio­la­tion of my con­trac­tu­al right of edi­to­r­i­al free­dom, cen­sored an arti­cle I wrote this week, refus­ing to pub­lish it unless I remove all sec­tions crit­i­cal of Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Joe Biden, the can­di­date vehe­ment­ly sup­port­ed by all New-York-based Inter­cept edi­tors involved in this effort at sup­pres­sion.” This is sad. 
    • How The Inter­cept Aban­doned Its Truth-Seek­ing Mission—And Lost Its Best Jour­nal­ist (Zaid Jilani, Quil­lette): “Green­wald is a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure, but my sense of him is that he’s extreme­ly prin­ci­pled. Although he’s unabashed­ly a man of the liberal-Left—having spent years advo­cat­ing for left-wing caus­es from ani­mal rights to anti-war activism—he has devel­oped an impres­sive (some would call it inflex­i­ble) com­mit­ment to what he sees as basic fair­ness. He doesn’t care about the let­ter next to a politician’s name: Green­wald believes every­one in pow­er should be held account­able at all times.”
    • Two Reli­gion Reporters Cov­er Where Faith and Pol­i­tics Meet (Will Dud­ding, New York Times): “I think [reli­gion and pol­i­tics] seem insep­a­ra­ble part­ly because it’s elec­tion sea­son, and as jour­nal­ists we tend to view things through that lens our­selves. For ordi­nary believ­ers, the con­nec­tion is not always so clear. Some peo­ple clear­ly draw a con­nec­tion between their faith and their views on nation­al pol­i­tics; oth­ers def­i­nite­ly don’t. I try to keep that in mind as a reporter and not force every sto­ry into a polit­i­cal frame.”
  5. Lots of Overnight Tragedies, No Overnight Mir­a­cles (Mor­gan Housel, The Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “An impor­tant thing that explains a lot of things is that good news takes time but bad news hap­pens instant­ly.” Rec­om­mend­ed by the par­ent of an alum­nus.
  6. Amer­i­cans Have Lost Sight of What ‘Fas­cism’ Means (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “Words mat­ter because they help order our under­stand­ing of pol­i­tics both at home and abroad. If Cot­ton is a fas­cist, then we don’t know what fas­cism is. And if we don’t know what fas­cism is, then we will strug­gle to iden­ti­fy it when it threat­ens mil­lions of lives—which is pre­cise­ly what is hap­pen­ing today in areas under Beijing’s con­trol.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. The man who wants to help you out of debt – at any cost (J Oliv­er Con­roy, The Guardian): “Ram­sey has made clear that he regards peo­ple like me as over-edu­cat­ed, pen­cil-necked idiots. From a finan­cial point of view, I am in some ways his worst night­mare. I have more than $80,000 in stu­dent debt, most of it from a master’s degree in jour­nal­ism. I work at a famous­ly lib­er­al news­pa­per whose colum­nists like to advo­cate for all the sorts of bleed­ing-heart eco­nom­ic poli­cies he hates.” I’m always fas­ci­nat­ed by news­pa­per arti­cles about high-pro­file Chris­tians. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.’” What a wild sto­ry. First shared in vol­ume 204.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 269

I share a few per­son­al thoughts about crim­i­nal jus­tice reform in this one. Just a few.

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. Some thoughts fol­low­ing the Bre­on­na Tay­lor ver­dict:
    • Cor­rect­ing the mis­in­for­ma­tion about Bre­on­na Tay­lor (Radley Balko, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We could pre­vent the next Bre­on­na Tay­lor. We could ban forced entry raids to serve drug war­rants. We could hold judges account­able for sign­ing war­rants that don’t pass con­sti­tu­tion­al muster. We could demand that police offi­cers wear body cam­eras dur­ing these raids to hold them account­able, and that they be ade­quate­ly pun­ished when they fail to acti­vate them. We could do a lot to make sure there are no more Bre­on­na Tay­lors. The ques­tion is whether we want to.”
    • From a month ago, but time­ly now: Supreme Court Prece­dent Killed Bre­on­na Tay­lor (David French, The Dis­patch): “Some­thing (or some things) have to give, and those ‘things’ are no-knock raids and qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty. Indi­vid­ual lib­er­ties should not be sac­ri­ficed on the altar of police drug raids, and vic­tims of civ­il rights abus­es should be enti­tled to receive com­pen­sa­tion for their loss­es, includ­ing their injuries and wounds.”
    • My 2 cents: Amer­i­ca’s jus­tice sys­tem would be great­ly improved if no-knock raids and qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty were either elim­i­nat­ed or great­ly con­strained. And if we get rid of civ­il asset for­fei­ture at the same time — wow.
  2. Review: ‘Domin­ion: How the Chris­t­ian Rev­o­lu­tion Remade the World’ by Tom Hol­land (Tim Keller, Gospel Coali­tion): “…the shame-and-hon­or cul­tures of old, pagan Europe—of the Anglo-Sax­ons, the Franks, and the Germans—thought that the Chris­t­ian eth­ic of for­giv­ing one’s ene­mies and of hon­or­ing the poor and weak to be com­plete­ly unwork­able as a basis for soci­ety. These ideas would’ve nev­er occurred to any­one unless they held to a uni­verse with a sin­gle, per­son­al God who cre­at­ed all beings in his image, and with a Sav­ior who came and died in sac­ri­fi­cial love. The ideas only could’ve grown from such a worldview—they don’t make sense in a dif­fer­ent one. If, instead, we believe we’re here by acci­dent through a process of sur­vival of the fittest, then there can be no moral absolutes, and life must be, if any­thing, about pow­er and the mas­tery of oth­ers, not about love. That, declared Niet­zsche, is the only way to live once you are tru­ly will­ing to admit that the Chris­t­ian God does not exist.”
  3. We Are All Algo­rithms Now (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­Stack): “In the past, we might have turned to more reli­able media for con­text and per­spec­tive. But the jour­nal­ists and reporters and edi­tors who are sup­posed to per­form this func­tion are human as well. And they are per­haps the ones most trapped in the social media hellscape…. The press could have been the anti­dote to the social media trap. Instead they chose to become the prof­itable push­er of the poi­son.“ This was writ­ten before news of RBG’s death and is even more time­ly now.
  4. Con­cern­ing the Supreme Court:
    • Lead­ing Repub­li­can politi­cians have flip-flopped What Sen­ate Repub­li­cans have said about fill­ing a Supreme Court vacan­cy (one minute video, YouTube)
    • Lead­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians have flip-flopped What lead­ing Democ­rats have said about fill­ing a Supreme Court vacan­cy (two minute video, Twit­ter) 
    • A thought from the left: Down With Judi­cial Suprema­cy! (Jamelle Bouie, New York Times): “The Supreme Court has the pow­er to inter­pret the Con­sti­tu­tion and estab­lish its mean­ing for fed­er­al, state and local gov­ern­ment alike. But this pow­er wasn’t enu­mer­at­ed in the Con­sti­tu­tion and isn’t inher­ent in the court as an insti­tu­tion. Instead, the court’s pow­er to inter­pret and bind oth­ers to that inter­pre­ta­tion was con­struct­ed over time by polit­i­cal and legal actors through­out the sys­tem, from pres­i­dents and law­mak­ers to the judges and jus­tices them­selves.”
    • A thought from the right: How the G.O.P. Might Get to Yes on Replac­ing Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Since I became opposed to abor­tion, some­time in my lat­er teens, I have nev­er regard­ed the Supreme Court with warmth, admi­ra­tion or patri­ot­ic trust. What my lib­er­al friends felt after Bush v. Gore or after Brett Kavanaugh’s con­fir­ma­tion or in imag­in­ing some future rul­ing by Amy Coney Bar­rett, I have felt for my entire adult life.”
  5. On faith and pol­i­tics:
    • How Faith Shapes My Pol­i­tics (David Brooks, New York Times): “In a soci­ety that is grow­ing rad­i­cal­ly more sec­u­lar every day, I’d say we have more to fear from polit­i­cal dog­ma­tism than reli­gious dog­ma­tism.” 
    • Relat­ed: This just in! Evan­gel­i­cals are actu­al­ly Amer­i­ca’s least politi­cized group of church­es (Richard Ostling, GetRe­li­gion): “…the emerg­ing sce­nario appears to indi­cate a rel­a­tive­ly small and unrep­re­sen­ta­tive band of evan­gel­i­cal par­ti­sans at the nation­al lev­el has — aid­ed by mas­sive amounts of news cov­er­age — dis­tort­ed the pub­lic image of grass-roots white evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
    • What are your Expec­ta­tions of Jesus’ Local Church? (Adam Sin­nett, church web­site): “Over the last six months the elders of DCC have received numer­ous ques­tions, rec­om­men­da­tions, and crit­i­cisms in rela­tion to what we should be doing as a church in regards to: our pan­dem­ic response, the rela­tion­ship between church and state, tim­ing and con­tent of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, grow­ing unem­ploy­ment, the home­less­ness cri­sis, polit­i­cal par­ti­san­ship, sys­temic injus­tice, police bru­tal­i­ty, social protests, and more.”
    • Fol­low-up: Who Does What in the Life of the Church? (Adam Sin­net, church web­site): “If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as ‘the lead­ers’ we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty for the life of the church on the pas­tors. If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as ‘the peo­ple’, we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty on the indi­vid­u­als. If we think of the church pri­mar­i­ly as an ‘insti­tu­tion’, we’ll place the bur­den of respon­si­bil­i­ty on the orga­ni­za­tion, its struc­tures, and process­es. Who then is respon­si­ble for ful­fill­ing God’s pur­pose for his church? Is it the lead­ers, or the peo­ple, or the insti­tu­tion? Put sim­ply, every­one is respon­si­ble, though in dif­fer­ent ways.”
    • Mark Dev­er’s Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist Sues to Not For­sake the Assem­bly (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…the DC congregation’s legal fight is unique­ly tied to its the­o­log­i­cal beliefs around how a church should gath­er. Dev­er has long resist­ed mul­ti-site, mul­ti-ser­vice mod­els of church, though they are very pop­u­lar among fel­low South­ern Bap­tists. The DC Bap­tist church does not stream ser­vices online, and hasn’t made an excep­tion to that rule dur­ing the pan­dem­ic.”
    • Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist, a large evan­gel­i­cal church, sues DC May­or Muriel Bows­er over coro­n­avirus restric­tions (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The vote Sun­day at a mem­bers meet­ing to pur­sue lit­i­ga­tion was 402 in favor, 35 against, mem­bers said, though church lead­ers would not con­firm spe­cif­ic num­bers.”
  6. Two ran­dom arti­cles touch­ing on race:
    • This Is How Biden Should Approach the Lati­no Vote (Ian Haney López and Tory Gav­i­to, New York Times): “Pro­gres­sives com­mon­ly cat­e­go­rize Lati­nos as peo­ple of col­or, no doubt part­ly because pro­gres­sive Lati­nos see the group that way and encour­age oth­ers to do so as well. Cer­tain­ly, we both once took that per­spec­tive for grant­ed. Yet in our sur­vey, only one in four His­pan­ics saw the group as peo­ple of col­or.”
      • I am unin­ter­est­ed in the par­ti­san angle of this op-ed, but the sta­tis­tic I excerpt­ed stood out to me. I won­der what per­cent­age of Stan­ford stu­dents would have pre­dict­ed it? I sus­pect the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Stan­ford stu­dents would have bet on the oppo­site.
    • The Pre­tense That Prince­ton Is Racist (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “I object to the entire witch hunt of an inves­ti­ga­tion, which Repub­li­cans would rec­og­nize as a fla­grant abuse of fed­er­al pow­er were it aimed at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty. No rea­son­able per­son could con­clude that an oner­ous probe of Prince­ton for anti-Black racism is the best use, or even a good use, of scarce resources to safe­guard civ­il rights. The deci­sion to grap­ple with racism should not trig­ger a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion, whether or not that grap­pling is total­ly hon­est.”
  7. Tea Time: The Chris­t­ian Mis­sion to Pre­serve Cul­ture (Lyman Stone, The Plough): “As strange as it may seem for a white Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary to be teach­ing an eight-year-old Chi­nese girl from the tea cap­i­tal of the world how to pour tea, such I under­stood to be my Chris­t­ian duty.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fashioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.” First shared in vol­ume 192

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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