Tag: nobel

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.

To that end, on Fri­days I’ve been shar­ing articles/resources I have found help­ful recent­ly in think­ing about broad­er cul­tur­al and soci­etal issues (be sure to see the dis­claimer at the bot­tom). May these give you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar. Past emails are archived at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links

With­out fur­ther ado, I give you the inter­est­ing things:

1. There was a shoot­ing at a col­lege in Ore­gon yes­ter­day. There’s a reli­gious angle to this sto­ry, but the details are still not clear.
   • Before read­ing the news arti­cles, read this great arti­cle from The New Repub­lic about pro­cess­ing break­ing news called A Skeptic’s Guide To Media Cov­er­age of Mass Shoot­ings.
   • Joe Carter at The Gospel Coali­tion has a help­ful sum­ma­ry of some of the reli­gious angles to the sto­ry: FactCheck­er: The Umpqua Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege Shoot­ing
   • NY Post: Ore­gon Gun­man Sin­gled Out Chris­tians Dur­ing Ram­page
   • Wash­ing­ton Post: Ore. Shoot­er Left Behind Online Por­trait Of A Lone­ly Youth WIth A Grudge Against Reli­gion
   • Accord­ing to one eye­wit­ness quot­ed in the LA Times, “If they said they were Chris­tians, they were shot again”: Ore­gon col­lege shoot­ing updates: Gun­man Chris Harp­er-Mer­cer killed 9, had 13 guns
   • Ore­gon Live: Gun­man in Ore­gon col­lege shoot­ing exe­cut­ed class­mates, say­ing ‘I’ll see you soon’ accord­ing to an eye­wit­ness in this sto­ry he did ask stu­dents about their faith before killing them, but did not specif­i­cal­ly tar­get Chris­tians.
   • By con­trast, the NY Times arti­cle Ore­gon Shoot­ing At Umpqua Col­lege Kills 10, Sher­iff Says does not even men­tion the word Chris­t­ian or God, nor does Inside High­er Ed’s Tragedy at Umpqua.
2. For com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent news, read Googling For God (NY Times, Seth Stephens-Davi­d­owitz): file under “interesting but not that sur­pris­ing” (although I am sur­prised at the rel­a­tive posi­tions of ques­tions 1 and 2  — I assumed they were swapped)
3. Pope Fran­cis and the Not-Quite-Sec­u­lar West (NY Times, Ross Douthat): Secularism’s grip on Amer­i­ca is weak­er than it appears.
4. Stop The Robot Apoc­a­lypse (Amia Srini­vasan, Lon­don Review of Books): the title is mis­lead­ing — this is an insight­ful cri­tique of the effec­tive altru­ism move­ment from the left.
5. Huh. The Cor­re­la­tions Between Arts and Crafts and a Nobel Prize (Rosie Cima, Priceo­nom­ics).

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.