Tag: pandemic

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 262

Hon­est­ly, this week’s col­lec­tion of arti­cles has some of the best I’ve seen in some time.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. 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.
  2. The Church Forests of Ethiopia (YouTube): nine min­utes. This com­men­tary by Rod Dreher was what brought the video to my atten­tion. Watch the video before you read the com­men­tary. These forests are a beau­ti­ful pic­ture of the way the Church bless­es the world around it, and what the Church must do to thrive in the envi­ron­ment we find our­selves in.
  3. Lis­ten to Thomas Sow­ell (Cole­man Hugh­es, City Jour­nal): “…peo­ple pre­dictably line up on oppo­site sides of polit­i­cal issues that seem­ing­ly have noth­ing in com­mon. For instance, know­ing someone’s posi­tion on cli­mate change some­how allows you to pre­dict their views on tax­ing the rich, gun con­trol, and abor­tion. It’s tempt­ing to dis­miss this as mere polit­i­cal trib­al­ism. But Sow­ell con­tends that more is at work: that there are two fun­da­men­tal ways of think­ing about the social world, two sets of basic assump­tions about human nature, and two con­flict­ing ‘visions,’ from which most polit­i­cal dis­agree­ments fol­low.” Sow­ell is a senior fel­low at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  4. Some reflec­tions on the media:
    • The Truth Is Pay­walled But The Lies Are Free (Nathan J. Robin­son, Cur­rent Affairs): “You want ‘Port­land Pro­test­ers Burn Bibles, Amer­i­can Flags In The Streets,’ ‘The Moral Case Against Mask Man­dates And Oth­er COVID Restric­tions,’ or an arti­cle sug­gest­ing the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health has admit­ted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infil­trat­ing Ger­man insti­tu­tions, the rea­sons con­tact trac­ing is fail­ing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s under­cut­ting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the web­site a bit you’ll run straight into the pay­wall.”
      • This is a good arti­cle. For the record, I agree with his assess­ment of the New York Times: it often con­tains the facts, but some­times incor­rect­ly framed with fool­ish infer­ences built upon them. That burn­ing Bibles and flags thing Robin­son knocks, though? That real­ly hap­pened: Did Port­land Pro­test­ers Burn Bibles and Amer­i­can Flags? (Snopes)
    • How the Media Could Get the Elec­tion Sto­ry Wrong (Ben Smith, New York Times): “The coro­n­avirus cri­sis means that states like Penn­syl­va­nia may be count­ing mail-in bal­lots for weeks, while Pres­i­dent Trump tweets false alle­ga­tions about fraud. And the last bar­ri­ers between Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy and a deep polit­i­cal cri­sis may be tele­vi­sion news and some ver­sion of that mad­den­ing nee­dle on The New York Times web­site.”
      • This is ter­ri­fy­ing and is 100% worth using up one of your pay­wall arti­cles for.
    • How the Media Led the Great Racial Awak­en­ing (Zach Gold­berg, Tablet): “Dur­ing this same peri­od, while exot­ic new phras­es were enter­ing the dis­course, uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­niz­able words like ‘racism’ were being rad­i­cal­ly rede­fined. Along with the new lan­guage came ideas and beliefs ani­mat­ing a new moral-polit­i­cal frame­work to apply to pub­lic life and Amer­i­can soci­ety.”
  5. On the divi­sions in Amer­i­ca:
    • To unite the coun­try, we need hon­esty and courage (Robert George and Cor­nell West, Boston Globe): “Hon­esty and courage alone can save our wound­ed, dis­unit­ed coun­try now. We need the hon­esty and courage to speak the truth — includ­ing painful truths that unset­tle not only our foes but also our friends and, most espe­cial­ly, our­selves.” The authors (both Chris­t­ian) are pro­fes­sors at Prince­ton and Har­vard, respec­tive­ly. 
    • Remem­ber­ing John Lewis, and the Polit­i­cal The­ol­o­gy that Changed a Nation (David French, The Dis­patch): “What looks inevitable in hind­sight was any­thing but cer­tain. In fact, if you were plac­ing con­tem­po­rary bets on a polit­i­cal out­come, would you guess that some ver­sion of a three-cen­tu­ry sta­tus quo would pre­vail, or that the civ­il rights move­ment would achieve a legal rev­o­lu­tion near­ly on par with eman­ci­pa­tion itself? At the same time, can we even recall a mod­ern Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal move­ment so con­sis­tent with the upside-down log­ic of bib­li­cal Chris­tian­i­ty?”
    • This is Not The Amer­i­can Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Amer­i­cans are extreme­ly fond of exag­ger­at­ing the threat their polit­i­cal ene­mies pose. Histri­on­ics about Don­ald Trump end­ing Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy are every­where to be found; read­ers will no doubt remem­ber the pro­tes­tors who claimed that Dick Cheney was the sec­ond com­ing of Hitler, or that Barack Oba­ma was a stealth author­i­tar­i­an social­ist.” This is a reas­sur­ing essay.
    • Sec­u­lar­ism Can­not Sus­tain Lib­er­ty, a Response to Greg Forster (Al Mohler, Law & Lib­er­ty): “I believe that the project of civ­i­liza­tion in the West, and in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world in par­tic­u­lar, has brought the great­est flow­er­ing of lib­er­ties and the great­est oppor­tu­ni­ties for human flour­ish­ing in human his­to­ry. I also believe that this civ­i­liza­tion­al project has arrived at this moment of max­i­mum dan­ger after decades of both neglect and mount­ing oppo­si­tion. The most fun­da­men­tal prob­lem is the loss of the intel­lec­tu­al and moral pre­con­di­tions that make the project of ordered lib­er­ty pos­si­ble.”
    • Could Amer­i­ca split up? (Damon Link­er, The Week): “I often catch myself pon­der­ing exact­ly what it is that keeps our coun­try togeth­er. What do we hold in com­mon? What do we share?” 
  6. Church­es and the pan­dem­ic:
    • How Two Cal­i­for­nia Megachurch­es Kept Wor­ship­ing (Kate Shell­nutt and Nicole Shanks, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Two Cal­i­for­nia church­es were so eager to meet last week­end that when their ser­vices began, wor­shipers erupt­ed in applause. In Sun Val­ley, con­gre­gants fill­ing Grace Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s 3,500-seat sanc­tu­ary rose and cheered, some doc­u­ment­ing the moment with their iPhones, when pas­tor John MacArthur opened the sec­ond week in a row of in-per­son ser­vices…. An hour away in River­side, Cal­i­for­nia, wor­ship­pers at Har­vest Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship were greet­ed with cheeky pink and pur­ple signs that said, ‘Smile with your eyes (and wear a mask)’ and ‘Just leave room for your Bible—and anoth­er 5½ feet.’ It was the third Sun­day that Har­vest met in a white tent half the size of a foot­ball field to com­ply with state orders restrict­ing indoor wor­ship.”
    • Should Church­es in Cal­i­for­nia Defy Gov­ern­ment Restric­tions? A Response to John MacArthur (Gavin Ortlund, per­son­al blog): “To my mind, there are at least four bib­li­cal val­ues that should inform our deci­sion-mak­ing in this sit­u­a­tion: 1. the impor­tance of wor­ship (Hebrews 10:25), 2. love for neigh­bor (Mark 12:31), 3. obe­di­ence to gov­ern­ment (Romans 13:1–7), and 4. main­tain­ing a good wit­ness (Colos­sians 4:5–6). What con­cerns me about defy­ing the state order right now is that it seems to pri­or­i­tize 1 at the expense of 2–4.”
    • Mask­ing and Masks: A Hypo­thet­i­cal Inter­view (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “A free peo­ple should be jeal­ous of their lib­er­ty. And one of the best ways to be jeal­ous of your lib­er­ty is to require the gov­ern­ment, when­ev­er it exer­cis­es its author­i­ty coer­cive­ly, to be able to give a very spe­cif­ic rea­son. A gen­er­al rea­son is not good enough. The law should pro­hib­it steal­ing, for exam­ple, and when the cops arrest a thief, they should be able to say that they arrest­ed him because he was ‘steal­ing.’ Neg­a­tive pro­hi­bi­tions are the foun­da­tion of civic lib­er­ty, and broad, gen­er­al feel-good direc­tives are the foun­da­tion of tyran­ny.“ I am not opposed to manda­to­ry masks, but this is a good defense of the oppo­si­tion. 
  7. Con­cern­ing Chi­na:
    • The Tik­Tok War (Ben Thomp­son, Strat­e­ch­ery): “TikTok’s algo­rithm, unmoored from the con­straints of your social net­work or pro­fes­sion­al con­tent cre­ators, is free to pro­mote what­ev­er videos it likes, with­out any­one know­ing the dif­fer­ence. Tik­Tok could pro­mote a par­tic­u­lar can­di­date or a par­tic­u­lar issue in a par­tic­u­lar geog­ra­phy, with­out any­one — except per­haps the can­di­date, now indebt­ed to a Chi­nese com­pa­ny — know­ing. You may be skep­ti­cal this might hap­pen, but again, Chi­na has already demon­strat­ed a will­ing­ness to cen­sor speech on a plat­form banned in Chi­na; how much of a leap is it to think that a Par­ty com­mit­ted to ide­o­log­i­cal dom­i­nance will for­ev­er leave a route direct­ly into the hearts and minds of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans untouched?”
    • Books pulled from the library shelves, songs banned…it’s the new nor­mal in Hong Kong (Louisa Lim, The Guardian): “Put sim­ply, with­in a sin­gle month, Bei­jing has dis­man­tled a par­tial­ly free soci­ety and is try­ing to use its new law to enforce glob­al cen­sor­ship on speech regard­ing Hong Kong.”
    • Chris­tians Wor­ry Hong Kong’s New Law Will Ham­per Mis­sions (D. Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…Chris­tians liv­ing out­side of Chi­na now won­der: Is it still safe for them to com­mu­ni­cate open­ly with friends and col­leagues in Hong Kong? For years, the ter­ri­to­ry has served as a stag­ing ground for min­istry orga­ni­za­tions oper­at­ing across the region. But now, will they face pres­sure or per­se­cu­tion, as those in the main­land do? If they are crit­i­cal of Bei­jing on social media or in an arti­cle such as this, will they be denied entry to Hong Kong—or worse, detained and pos­si­bly impris­oned upon land­ing in Hong Kong?”
    • ‘Clean Up This Mess’: The Chi­nese Thinkers Behind Xi’s Hard Line (Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “While China’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty has long nur­tured legions of aca­d­e­mics to defend its agen­da, these author­i­tar­i­an thinkers stand out for their unabashed, often flashily eru­dite advo­ca­cy of one-par­ty rule and assertive sov­er­eign­ty, and their turn against the lib­er­al ideas that many of them once embraced.”
    • Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Penal­izes Chi­nese Offi­cials for Hong Kong Crack­down (Pran­shu Ver­ma and Edward Wong, New York Times): “The action is anoth­er in a series of mea­sures the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has tak­en in recent months to ratch­et up pres­sure on Bei­jing. Last month, the admin­is­tra­tion imposed sanc­tions on the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, includ­ing a senior mem­ber of the Com­mu­nist Par­ty, over human rights abus­es against the large­ly Mus­lim Uighur minor­i­ty.”

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 261

Links to some encour­ag­ing sto­ries, some hor­ri­fy­ing sto­ries, and some con­fus­ing sto­ries. Because it be like that some­times.

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. How I Redis­cov­ered Faith (Mal­colm Glad­well, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I have always believed in God. I have grasped the log­ic of Chris­t­ian faith. What I have had a hard time see­ing is God’s pow­er. I put that sen­tence in the past tense because some­thing hap­pened to me…” Shared with me by a stu­dent.
  2. Swe­den, Which Nev­er Had Lock­down, Sees COVID-19 Cas­es Plum­met as Rest of Europe Suf­fers Spike (Soo Kim, Newsweek): “Amid fears over a poten­tial sec­ond wave of the nov­el coro­n­avirus across Europe, new infec­tions in Swe­den, where full lock­down mea­sures were not imple­ment­ed, have most­ly declined since late June…. Mean­while, oth­er parts of Europe have report­ed large spikes in new cas­es over the same peri­od, includ­ing Spain, France, Ger­many, Bel­gium and The Nether­lands, which have seen increas­es between 40 and 200 per­cent over the last month, accord­ing to the lat­est WHO report Wednes­day.” Huh. Real­i­ty is com­pli­cat­ed and that’s why they make get­ting a PhD so ardu­ous. 
  3. John Roberts: Inside his sur­pris­ing streak of lib­er­al wins (Joan Biskupic, CNN): “…CNN offers a rare glimpse behind the scenes at how jus­tices on the Roberts court assert­ed their inter­ests, forged coali­tions and nav­i­gat­ed polit­i­cal pres­sure and the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. The jus­tices’ opin­ions are pub­lic, but their delib­er­a­tions are pri­vate and usu­al­ly remain secret.”
  4. Har­vard Cre­ates Man­agers Instead of Elites (Saf­fron Huang, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “At Har­vard, the implic­it sig­nal we receive every day is that every­thing requires a man­ag­er. Our extracur­ric­u­lars, despite vary­ing club names, most­ly revolve around admin­is­tra­tive work and send­ing emails. Emails solic­it­ing dona­tions, emails invit­ing speak­ers to a con­fer­ence, emails pub­li­ciz­ing your mag­a­zine launch with ‘FREE DONUTS’ dom­i­nat­ing the sub­ject line. Grant­ed, exe­cu­tion of mun­dane tasks is nec­es­sary for real work to be done. The skills of sub­tly bump­ing an unre­spon­sive team­mate, deft­ly achiev­ing a friend­ly-but-pro­fes­sion­al tone, and cre­at­ing Excel files wor­thy of a UI/UX design­er will serve you well in cor­po­rate life…. Very few clubs cre­ate a gen­er­a­tive and imag­i­na­tive vision for your future self at work, or for what you should be work­ing on. Although this is the stat­ed pur­pose of a Har­vard lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion, cam­pus cul­ture has ele­vat­ed man­age­ri­al­ism above cre­ation…. The result is a class that excels at being judged and excels at man­ag­ing and exe­cut­ing defined tasks.” Quite inter­est­ing and very rel­e­vant to Stan­ford.
  5. The Supreme Court’s sur­pris­ing deci­sion on church­es and the pan­dem­ic, explained (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Unlike his fel­low Repub­li­can jus­tices, in oth­er words, Roberts appears to believe that courts have a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong duty to defer to demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly account­able offi­cials dur­ing an his­toric pub­lic health cri­sis.” I found this analy­sis of Robert’s vote quite inter­est­ing. 
    • Obey­ing God Rather than Men? A Con­sti­tu­tion­al Schol­ar on What’s Real­ly a Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Issue (Ed Stet­zer inter­view­ing John Inazu, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Be peo­ple of hope who are known for putting the inter­ests of oth­ers above your own. Lament the costs of this virus to human life, men­tal health, and mate­r­i­al well-being. Lament our inabil­i­ty to gath­er for wor­ship. Pray for the end of this virus. But in the mean­time, love your neigh­bors and seek the peace of the city, even if it feels cost­ly.”
    • We Can’t Roll the Dice on Reli­gious Lib­er­ty: Neva­da, the Supreme Court, and Church­es (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Neva­da won the injunc­tion bat­tle, but church­es need to help the state back up and make the right choice. This is the line that every main­stream evan­gel­i­cal group said they would draw, and it has now been crossed.”
    • Christ, not Cae­sar, Is Head of the Church (John MacArthur, Grace To You): “His­to­ry is full of painful reminders that gov­ern­ment pow­er is eas­i­ly and fre­quent­ly abused for evil pur­pos­es. Politi­cians may manip­u­late sta­tis­tics and the media can cov­er up or cam­ou­flage incon­ve­nient truths. So a dis­cern­ing church can­not pas­sive­ly or auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­ply if the gov­ern­ment orders a shut­down of con­gre­ga­tion­al meetings—even if the rea­son giv­en is a con­cern for pub­lic health and safe­ty.”
    • A Time for Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence? A Response to Grace Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s Elders (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “We under­stand that we are not ancient Israel. And though in one sense all space is sacred for a Chris­t­ian because all space is under Christ’s lord­ship, in anoth­er sense no space is sacred, at least in a Tem­ple-like way; and the government’s author­i­ty also extends every­where inside its bor­ders.”
    • Fur­ther Reflec­tions on Recent Con­ver­sa­tions about Chris­t­ian Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “…my arti­cle and our pod­cast tried to do one sim­ple thing: remind fel­low believers—as we all ven­ture for­ward on our polit­i­cal­ly tumul­tuous landscape—of the cru­cial role of Chris­t­ian free­dom when we take these kinds of stances. On this and so many oth­er issues, believ­ers will come to dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about the best path to take. And for the sake of main­tain­ing uni­ty, the unique author­i­ty of Scrip­ture, and the gospel, we need to keep train­ing our instincts to have a quick grasp for what belongs in the realm of free­dom and what does not.”
    • Our Gal­va­niz­ing Grand­fa­ther (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Suf­fice it to say that the civ­il gov­ern­ment does have legit­i­mate author­i­ty around sacred things (cir­ca sacra), but no author­i­ty what­ev­er in sacred things (in sac­ris). And when the gov­ern­ment abus­es this basic dis­tinc­tion willy nil­ly, as our gov­ern­ments have been doing in their overt and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry treat­ment of the church, it is time for the lead­er­ship of the church to take a stand. So with all of that run­ning in the back­ground, my pur­pose here this morn­ing is sim­ply to hon­or John MacArthur for his lead­er­ship in this.”
  6. Inter­view: Jour­nal­ist Michael Tracey on Riots & Protests (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “…the diver­gence in opin­ion — between local black and minor­i­ty pop­u­la­tions about the eth­i­cal impli­ca­tions of the riots, and the activists/journalists who claim to speak on their behalf — is strik­ing.”
  7. Are Chris­tians For­bid­den to Eat Blood? (David Clos­son, Gospel Coali­tion): “We can learn at least two things from the Jerusalem Coun­cil. First, on mat­ters per­tain­ing to the gospel, there is no room for com­pro­mise. The apos­tles and elders were firm and swift in their denun­ci­a­tion of those who sought to add works to the gospel. Sal­va­tion is by faith alone through grace alone; human effort is exclud­ed. Sec­ond, grace should be extend­ed for dif­fer­ences that aren’t cen­tral to the gospel.” Peo­ple dunked on this arti­cle, but it’s good and deals with an impor­tant ques­tion that will occur to any Bible read­er. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 260

From naked pro­tes­tors in Port­land to slav­ery in Chi­na to the­o­log­i­cal reflec­tions on con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

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. Chi­na’s Xin­jiang Province a Moral Quandary for the West (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “The attempt to place mod­ern slaves in the sup­ply chain of West­ern lux­u­ry goods is an attempt to impli­cate and moral­ly geld West­ern nations who would crit­i­cize or pun­ish the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty for its crimes.”
  2. USS Uni­ver­si­ty (Scott Gal­loway, per­son­al blog): “There is a dan­ger­ous con­fla­tion of the dis­cus­sion about K‑12 and uni­ver­si­ty reopen­ings. The two are stark­ly dif­fer­ent. There are strong rea­sons to reopen K‑12, and there are stronger rea­sons to keep uni­ver­si­ties shut­tered.“ The author is a busi­ness prof at NYU. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Relat­ed: Col­leges Are Get­ting Ready to Blame Their Stu­dents (Julia Mar­cus and Jes­si­ca Gold, The Atlantic): “Stu­dents will get infect­ed, and uni­ver­si­ties will rebuke them for it; cam­pus­es will close, and stu­dents will be blamed for it. Rely­ing on the self-con­trol of young adults, rather than deploy­ing the pub­lic-health infra­struc­ture need­ed to con­trol a dis­ease that spreads eas­i­ly among peo­ple who live, eat, study, and social­ize togeth­er, is not a safe reopen­ing strategy—and yelling at stu­dents for their dan­ger­ous behav­ior won’t help either.” The authors are pro­fes­sors at Har­vard and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly. 
    • Vague­ly relat­ed: Your State’s COVID Num­bers In Con­text (Poli­Math, Sub­stack): “Head­lines are aller­gic to con­text and the high-pop­u­la­tion states get all the atten­tion because they show big num­bers (because they are big states). When a small­er state gets any report­ing, it is entire­ly out­side any con­text. In Wash­ing­ton, it was report­ed that we had 754 new cas­es and 7 new deaths. Is that a lot? How does that com­pare to oth­er states?” Very detailed and insight­ful. 
  3. Coro­n­avirus, Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ries, and the Ninth Com­mand­ment (David French, The Dis­patch): “Chris­t­ian teach­ing about our lives in our work­places is not pri­mar­i­ly about how to obtain a pro­mo­tion, how to invest our mon­ey, or how to start a busi­ness. In oth­er words, it’s not about the objec­tives of eco­nom­ic engage­ment, though those objec­tives are impor­tant. Instead, the focus is on min­is­ter­ing to col­leagues, cul­ti­vat­ing faith in adver­si­ty, and gen­er­al­ly learn­ing how to be salt and light even in some­times hos­tile or intim­i­dat­ing envi­ron­ments. [But we don’t do this with pol­i­tics.]” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus, this one was real­ly good.
  4. 8 facts about reli­gion and gov­ern­ment in the Unit­ed States (Dalia Fah­my, Pew Research Cen­ter): “While the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion does not men­tion God, every state con­sti­tu­tion ref­er­ences either God or the divine. God also appears in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, the Pledge of Alle­giance and on U.S. cur­ren­cy.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Where is the nation­al news cov­er­age of cur­rent surge of van­dal­ism at Catholic church­es? (Clemente Lisi, GetRe­li­gion): “Who’s respon­si­ble for this anti-Catholic vio­lence? Is it Mus­lim ter­ror­ists? Neo-Nazis? Left-wing rad­i­cals? Are these iso­lat­ed inci­dents or part of a coor­di­nat­ed attack? We don’t know because the elite news­rooms with the tal­ent and resources to han­dle this kind of inves­ti­ga­tion are miss­ing in action, in this case.… One has to won­der how these inci­dents would have been cov­ered had they been mosques? What about pub­lic schools? Or say Planned Par­ent­hood facil­i­ties?”
    • Relat­ed: Roman Catholics: The Orig­i­nal Abo­li­tion­ists (Paul Ken­gor, Cri­sis Mag­a­zine): “Last week­end, one of Serra’s mis­sion church­es in Cal­i­for­nia went up in flames, with the cause of the fire not yet known. In the last few days, a stat­ue of Mary was set on fire in Boston and anoth­er was van­dal­ized in Brook­lyn (among oth­ers). As to what Mary has to do with the mod­ern anti-stat­ue-racism move­ment is anyone’s guess. Nonethe­less, if the issue is (right­ly so) a just con­dem­na­tion of slav­ery and racism, and if one is gen­uine­ly seek­ing accu­rate his­to­ry, then today’s activists ought to look back in admi­ra­tion at the impres­sive track record of the Roman Catholic Church.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Grove City Col­lege. The his­to­ry of the Catholic Church on the issue of slav­ery is bet­ter than the Protes­tant church.
  6. What You Need To Know About The Bat­tle of Port­land (Robert Evans, Belling­cat): “I report­ed on the fight­ing in Mosul back in 2017, and what hap­pened that night in the streets of Port­land was, of course, not near­ly as bru­tal or dan­ger­ous as actu­al com­bat. Yet it was about as close as you can get with­out using live ammu­ni­tion.“ A sig­nif­i­cant qual­i­fi­er at the end of that sen­tence, inter­est­ing nonethe­less.
    • Portland’s protests were sup­posed to be about black lives. Now, they’re white spec­ta­cle. (E.D. Mondainé, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We wel­come our white broth­ers and sis­ters in this strug­gle. In fact, we need them. But I must ask them to remain humbly attuned to the oppor­tu­ni­ty of this moment — and to reflect on whether any actions they take will tru­ly help estab­lish jus­tice, or whether they are sim­ply for show.” The author is pres­i­dent of the Port­land branch of the NAACP.
    • Out of Port­land tear gas, an appari­tion emerges, cap­tur­ing the imag­i­na­tion of pro­test­ers (Los Ange­les Times): “She emerged as an appari­tion from clouds of tear gas as fed­er­al agents fired pep­per balls at angry pro­test­ers in the ear­ly Sat­ur­day dark­ness. A woman wear­ing noth­ing but a black face mask and a stock­ing cap strode toward a dozen heav­i­ly armed agents attired in cam­ou­flage fatigues, lined up across a down­town Port­land street.” Port­land gonna port.
    • Tan­gen­tial­ly Relat­ed: Amer­i­can Crime and the Bal­ti­more Mod­el (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Ide­al­ists may hope these changes will elim­i­nate police bru­tal­i­ty as com­mu­ni­ties find bet­ter ways to pre­vent crime than deter­rence and force. But on the hunch that human nature hasn’t changed, that isn’t going to hap­pen. Crim­i­nals, fear­ing less, will con­tin­ue to prey on oth­ers. Police, fear­ing more, will hold back from doing their jobs. Those with means to leave their neigh­bor­hoods, will. Those with­out the means will suf­fer.”
  7. A new intel­li­gentsia is push­ing back against wok­e­ness (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, For­ward): “The anti-woke Black intel­li­gentsia is lead­ing a counter-cul­ture to a woke hege­mo­ny and the online cul­ture that pop­u­lar­ized it. But their views hew more close­ly to those of most Black Amer­i­cans than the new antiracism. Polling has long indi­cat­ed that white lib­er­als express rad­i­cal­ly more lib­er­al views on racial and social issues than their Black and Lati­no neigh­bors.” Very inter­est­ing inter­views.
    • Relat­ed: The Left is Now the Right (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “Things we once despised about the right have been ampli­fied a thou­sand-fold on the flip. Con­ser­v­a­tives once tried to leg­is­late what went on in your bed­room; now it’s the left that obsess­es over sex­u­al cod­i­cils, not just for the bed­room but every­where. Right-wingers from time to time made head­lines cam­paign­ing against every­thing from The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ to ‘Fuck the Police,’ though we laughed at the idea that Ice Cube made cops lit­er­al­ly unsafe… today Matt Ygle­sias sign­ing a group let­ter with Noam Chom­sky is con­sid­ered threat­en­ing.”
    • Relat­ed: When Wokes and Racists Actu­al­ly Agree on Every­thing (Ryan Long Com­e­dy, YouTube) : two min­utes of bril­liance

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 Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imag­ine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”  First shared in vol­ume 159.

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 259

This week con­tains some of the most fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles I ever have passed along. Def­i­nite­ly worth skim­ming!

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. 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).
  2. The Coro­n­avirus and the Right’s Sci­en­tif­ic Coun­ter­rev­o­lu­tion (Ari Schul­man, The New Repub­lic): “That so many views tut-tut­ted as the irra­tional defi­ance of expert con­sen­sus actu­al­ly became the expert con­sen­sus in the span of just a few weeks vivid­ly sug­gests that we need to reex­am­ine just how our cul­ture talks about exper­tise. The prob­lem is not main­ly that the experts were wrong—that is to be expect­ed. It is, rather, that our lead insti­tu­tions and pub­lic infor­ma­tion out­lets con­tin­u­al­ly treat­ed the assur­ances of experts as neu­tral inter­pre­ta­tions of set­tled sci­ence when they plain­ly were not.” Inter­est­ing through­out. This will like­ly enter my rota­tion of clas­sics that I repost from time to time. 
    • Relat­ed: An Open Let­ter To My Fel­low Chris­tians (David Carreon, per­son­al blog): “Large gath­er­ings are dan­ger­ous with a spread­ing virus regard­less of the rea­son for the assem­bly. Some resist the straight­for­ward response to this out of idol­a­try of church atten­dance and the church build­ing. Any good thing can become an idol. Gold is good but can be shaped into a gold­en calf (Exo 32:4). Sex is good but can we can also per­vert it through for­ni­ca­tion (1 Cor 6:9). A church build­ing or even phys­i­cal atten­dance at church can be mis­tak­en for the Church itself. This, too, is idol­a­try.” David is a Stan­ford psy­chi­a­trist (and a friend of mine)
    • Relat­ed: Andy Stan­ley Explains Why His Megachurch Won’t Gath­er on Sun­days Until 2021 (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Here is where I think the church needs to think about this: As a local church, we have lim­it­ed time, lim­it­ed staff, and lim­it­ed resources; it makes no sense to focus our staff time and resources on cre­at­ing a sub­par envi­ron­ment on Sun­day morn­ing for a nine and 11 o’clock ser­vice that only 20% of the peo­ple may attend. We decid­ed to focus on the 100% of all of our church folks and their friends and the rest of the world that may show up lat­er.“
  3. David Shor’s Uni­fied The­o­ry of the 2020 Elec­tion (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “Cam­paigns do want to win. But the peo­ple who work in cam­paigns tend to be high­ly ide­o­log­i­cal­ly moti­vat­ed and thus, super-prone to con­vinc­ing them­selves to do things that are strate­gi­cal­ly dumb.” Super inter­est­ing — well worth read­ing.
  4. Dis­turb­ing video shows hun­dreds of blind­fold­ed pris­on­ers in Xin­jiang (Matt Rivers, Max Fos­ter and James Grif­fiths, CNN): “The video — which was post­ed online anony­mous­ly last week — shows hun­dreds of men, most of whom are dressed in pur­ple and orange vests with the words ‘Kash­gar Deten­tion Cen­ter’ print­ed on them, seat­ed in rows on the ground of what appears to be a large court­yard out­side a train sta­tion. Their heads are shaved and their hands bound behind their backs. All of the men are wear­ing black blind­folds over their eyes and they are being watched over by dozens of police offi­cers in SWAT uni­forms.”’
    • Relat­ed: Chi­na cuts Uighur births with IUDs, abor­tion, ster­il­iza­tion (Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “While indi­vid­ual women have spo­ken out before about forced birth con­trol, the prac­tice is far more wide­spread and sys­tem­at­ic than pre­vi­ous­ly known, accord­ing to an AP inves­ti­ga­tion based on gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics, state doc­u­ments and inter­views with 30 ex-detainees, fam­i­ly mem­bers and a for­mer deten­tion camp instruc­tor. The cam­paign over the past four years in the far west region of Xin­jiang is lead­ing to what some experts are call­ing a form of ‘demo­graph­ic geno­cide.’”
  5. Sit With Neg­a­tive Emo­tions, Don’t Push Them Away (Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic): “In sum, if we want a life full of deep mean­ing, true love, and emo­tion­al strength, it’s going to involve the risk (and often the real­i­ty) of dis­com­fort, con­flict, and loss. This means there will be sad­ness, fear, anger, and dis­gust. If we elim­i­nate neg­a­tive emo­tions and expe­ri­ences from our lives, we will be poor­er and weak­er for hav­ing done so.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard, rec­om­mend­ed by a friend.
  6. 10 The­ses About Can­cel Cul­ture (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The point of can­cel­la­tion is ulti­mate­ly to estab­lish norms for the major­i­ty, not to bring the stars back down to earth…. The goal isn’t to pun­ish every­one, or even very many some­ones; it’s to shame or scare just enough peo­ple to make the rest con­form.”
    • The Will­ful Blind­ness of Reac­tionary Lib­er­al­ism (Osi­ta Nwane­vu, The New Repub­lic): “The ten­sions we’ve seen late­ly have been inter­nal to lib­er­al­ism for ages: between those who take the asso­cia­tive nature of lib­er­al soci­ety seri­ous­ly and those who are deter­mined not to. It is the for­mer group, the defend­ers of pro­gres­sive iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, who in fact are protecting—indeed expanding—the bounds of lib­er­al­ism. And it is the lat­ter group, the reac­tionar­ies, who are most guilty of the illib­er­al­ism they claim has over­tak­en the Amer­i­can Left.” Writ­ten before the let­ter I shared last week, this is one of the best defens­es of can­cel cul­ture.
    • The World That Twit­ter Made (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “I sus­pect an entire class of pun­dits has inter­nal­ized the idea that [Twit­ter debate] is what pub­lic dis­cus­sion is. Of course they don’t believe in free expres­sion, civ­il debate, the spir­it of lib­er­al­ism, and all of that jazz. To this gen­er­a­tion those things are just words. The pub­lic sphere they have known has always been a bare-knuck­le brawl.”
    • Res­ig­na­tion Let­ter (Bari Weiss, per­son­al web­site): “What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selec­tiv­i­ty. If a person’s ide­ol­o­gy is in keep­ing with the new ortho­doxy, they and their work remain unscru­ti­nized. Every­one else lives in fear of the dig­i­tal thun­der­dome.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • See You Next Fri­day (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “What has hap­pened, I think, is rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple: A crit­i­cal mass of the staff and man­age­ment at New York Mag­a­zine and Vox Media no longer want to asso­ciate with me, and, in a time of ever tight­en­ing bud­gets, I’m a lux­u­ry item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entire­ly their pre­rog­a­tive.”
    • Illu­sion and Agree­ment in the Debate over Intol­er­ance (Justin Wein­berg, Dai­ly Nous): “In short, I don’t think soci­ety has got­ten more intol­er­ant, but tech­nol­o­gy has facil­i­tat­ed, among oth­er things, the expres­sion of intol­er­ance.”
    • A More Spe­cif­ic Let­ter on Jus­tice and Open Debate (many authors, The Objec­tive): “In truth, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ peo­ple — par­tic­u­lar­ly Black and trans peo­ple — can now cri­tique elites pub­licly and hold them account­able social­ly; this seems to be the letter’s great­est con­cern. What’s per­haps even more grat­ing to many of the sig­na­to­ries is that a cri­tique of their long held views is per­sua­sive.”
    • Liked tweets near­ly cost me my uni­ver­si­ty job (Mike McCul­loch, Unherd): “To think that I could have lost my career to a sin­gle com­plaint about my liked tweets shows just how hys­ter­i­cal the present social mood is. Now more than ever, it is vital that we — and in par­tic­u­lar the uni­ver­si­ties — stand up for enlight­en­ment prin­ci­ples and replace fear with rea­son and fact.” The author is a math lec­tur­er (sim­i­lar to an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the US) at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ply­mouth. 
    • A Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence by a Prince­ton Pro­fes­sor (Joshua T. Katz, Quil­lette): “I am friends with many peo­ple who signed the Prince­ton let­ter, which requests and in some places demands a dizzy­ing array of changes, and I sup­port their right to speak as they see fit. But I am embar­rassed for them.” 
    • Attempt­ed Putsch At Prince­ton (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I am a Prince­ton pro­fes­sor who signed the let­ter that you wrote about today. I am also a devout Chris­t­ian and a dai­ly read­er of your blog.” Con­tains a let­ter from a Prince­ton prof with a dif­fer­ent view than the one above, worth con­trast­ing.
  7. My Time in Prison (George Car­di­nal Pell, First Things): “There is a lot of good­ness in pris­ons. At times, I am sure, pris­ons may be hell on earth. I was for­tu­nate to be kept safe and treat­ed well. I was impressed by the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of the warders, the faith of the pris­on­ers, and the exis­tence of a moral sense even in the dark­est places.”

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 How the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 165. 

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 258

Is 650 a lot? it depends. Pen­nies? No. Mur­ders? Yes. Coro­n­avirus cas­es? Depends on where they spread.

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. Church­es Emerge as Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cas­es (Kate Con­ger, Jack Healy and Lucy Tomp­kins, New York Times): “More than 650 coro­n­avirus cas­es have been linked to near­ly 40 church­es and reli­gious events across the Unit­ed States since the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, with many of them erupt­ing over the last month as Amer­i­cans resumed their pre-pan­dem­ic activ­i­ties, accord­ing to a New York Times data­base.” 
    • Are Church­es “A Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cas­es?” (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “If I have $3,000,000 in the bank and you give me anoth­er $650, you’d hard­ly be in the posi­tion to claim that you had made a major con­tri­bu­tion to my wealth. Sim­i­lar­ly, adding 650 cas­es to America’s total case­load of 3 mil­lion is no more than a blip that leaves 99.98% attrib­ut­able to oth­er caus­es.”
    • Church­es, Coro­n­avirus, and the New York Times (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It is strange (at best) to use words like ‘major’ and ‘erupt­ed’ when describ­ing 650 cas­es. On that point, the head­line is mis­lead­ing. Hav­ing 650 cas­es in my coun­ty might be news, but 650 nation­al­ly out of three mil­lion cas­es is a head­line look­ing for a sto­ry. The real sto­ry is this: church­es are gath­er­ing and remark­ably few infec­tions are tak­ing place.”
  2. Amer­i­ca’s Racial Progress (David French, Nation­al Review): “There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that Amer­i­ca has a long his­to­ry of bru­tal and shame­ful mis­treat­ment of racial minori­ties — with black Amer­i­cans its chief vic­tims. And sec­ond, that Amer­i­ca is a great nation, and that Amer­i­can cit­i­zens (and cit­i­zens of the world) should be grate­ful for its found­ing. Per­haps no nation has done more good for more peo­ple than the Unit­ed States. It was and is a bea­con of lib­er­ty and pros­per­i­ty in a world long awash in tyran­ny and pover­ty.”
  3. A Let­ter on Jus­tice and Open Debate (many sig­na­to­ries, Harpers): “The restric­tion of debate, whether by a repres­sive gov­ern­ment or an intol­er­ant soci­ety, invari­ably hurts those who lack pow­er and makes every­one less capa­ble of demo­c­ra­t­ic par­tic­i­pa­tion. The way to defeat bad ideas is by expo­sure, argu­ment, and per­sua­sion, not by try­ing to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between jus­tice and free­dom, which can­not exist with­out each oth­er.”
    • Promi­nent Artists and Writ­ers Warn of an ‘Intol­er­ant Cli­mate’ (Jen­nifer Schuessler and Eliz­a­beth A. Har­ris, New York Times): “‘We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sit­ting around writ­ing this let­ter,’ Mr. Williams, who is African-Amer­i­can, said. ‘It includes plen­ty of Black thinkers, Mus­lim thinkers, Jew­ish thinkers, peo­ple who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.’”
    • end­ing the cha­rade (Fred­die deBoer, per­son­al blog): “Please, think for a minute and con­sid­er: what does it say when a com­plete­ly gener­ic endorse­ment of free speech and open debate is in and of itself imme­di­ate­ly diag­nosed as anti-pro­gres­sive, as anti-left?”(empha­sis in orig­i­nal)
  4. Lazarus Chak­w­era: Malaw­i’s pres­i­dent who ‘argued with God’ (BBC): “In the unmis­tak­able cadence of a preach­er, Malaw­i’s new Pres­i­dent, Lazarus Chak­w­era, appealed for uni­ty in his coun­try short­ly after he was sworn in on Sun­day. The day of the week seemed fit­ting as the for­mer head of the Malawi Assem­blies of God, one of the largest Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions in the coun­try, treat­ed the stage like a pul­pit to inspire fer­vour with his words.”
  5. Slate Star Codex and Sil­i­con Valley’s War Against the Media (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “The divi­sion between the Grey and Blue tribes is often ren­dered in the sim­plis­tic terms of a demo­graph­ic encounter between white, nerdi­ly enti­tled men in hood­ies on one side and diverse, effete, artis­tic snobs on the oth­er.” Inter­est­ing through­out. 
  6. Chris­tian­i­ty’s Covert Suc­cess (Mark Too­ley, Prov­i­dence) “I quote an Indi­an pro­fes­sor who says that Chris­tian­i­ty pro­ceeds in two ways, through conversion—which is obvi­ous, that’s how peo­ple tend to think Chris­tian­i­ty precedes—but he then says, through sec­u­lar­iza­tion. And I think he’s absolute­ly right. And I think that the assump­tion of peo­ple in the West that the sec­u­lar is some­how neu­tral, that if you’re sec­u­lar, you’ve some­how escaped the bounds of cul­tur­al con­tin­gency, couldn’t be more wrong.”
  7. On Reli­gion, the Supreme Court Pro­tects the Right to Be Dif­fer­ent (Michael McConnell, New York Times): “The court may be polit­i­cal, but its pol­i­tics is of the mid­dle, and of a par­tic­u­lar kind of mid­dle, one that is com­mit­ted to plu­ral­ism and dif­fer­ence rather than to the advance­ment of par­tic­u­lar moral stances.” The author is a Stan­ford law prof.

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 Plan­et of Cops (Fred­die de Boer, per­son­al blog): “The woke world is a world of snitch­es, infor­mants, rats. Go to any space con­cerned with social jus­tice and what will you find? End­less sur­veil­lance. Every­body is to be judged. Every­one is under sus­pi­cion. Every­thing you say is to be scoured, picked over, ana­lyzed for any pos­si­ble offense. Everyone’s a detec­tive in the Divi­sion of Prob­lem­at­ics, and they walk the beat 24/7…. I don’t know how peo­ple can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly talk about prison abo­li­tion and restor­ing the idea of for­give­ness to lit­er­al crim­i­nal jus­tice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kan­ga­roo court sys­tem.” First shared in vol­ume 161.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 254

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 253

Spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions for police reform, var­i­ous explain­ers and opin­ion pieces, and some weird news about Tik­Tok and Chris­tian­i­ty.

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. On the racial divi­sion in Amer­i­ca:
    • How to Make this Moment the Turn­ing Point for Real Change (Barack Oba­ma, Medi­um): “Final­ly, the more spe­cif­ic we can make demands for crim­i­nal jus­tice and police reform, the hard­er it will be for elect­ed offi­cials to just offer lip ser­vice to the cause and then fall back into busi­ness as usu­al once protests have gone away. The con­tent of that reform agen­da will be dif­fer­ent for var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Some spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: “For those who are inter­est­ed in research-based solu­tions to stop police vio­lence, here’s what you need to know — based on the facts and data. A thread. (1/x)” (Samuel Sinyang­we, Twit­ter)
    • More spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: How to Actu­al­ly Fix Amer­i­ca’s Police (Seth W. Stoughton, Jef­frey J. Noble & Geof­frey P. Alpert, The Atlantic): “‘Over­crim­i­nal­iza­tion’ has been broad­ly dis­cussed; there are so many laws that vio­la­tions are ubiq­ui­tous. If every­one is a crim­i­nal, offi­cers have almost unfet­tered dis­cre­tion to pick and choose which laws to enforce and whom to stop, frisk, search, or arrest.” The authors have an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of exper­tise (a law prof, a crim­i­nol­o­gy prof, and a for­mer offi­cer).
    • I Must Object: A Rebut­tal to Brown Univ.’s Let­ter Decry­ing Per­va­sive Racism in US (Glenn C. Loury, City Jour­nal): “I deeply resent­ed the let­ter. First of all, what makes an admin­is­tra­tor (even a high­ly paid one, with an exalt­ed title) a ‘leader’ of this uni­ver­si­ty? We, the fac­ul­ty, are the only ‘lead­ers’ wor­thy of men­tion when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-push­ing appa­ratchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unset­tling. Why must this university’s senior admin­is­tra­tion declare, on behalf of the insti­tu­tion as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any sub­tle dif­fer­ences of empha­sis or nuance—interpret con­tentious cur­rent events through a sin­gle lens?” Loury, who is black, is an econ pro­fes­sor at Brown. He did not come to play.
    • Efrem Smith: White Evan­gel­i­cals Need to Hum­ble Them­selves (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve been encour­aged, espe­cial­ly in the evan­gel­i­cal wing of the church, to see more pas­tors speak­ing out, being bro­ken­heart­ed, call­ing for change. But then there’s also a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of evan­gel­i­cal­ism that is either silent or late to the par­ty when it comes to the church call­ing for jus­tice.”
    • A Nation on Fire Needs the Flames of the Spir­it (Esau McCaul­ley, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There is no oth­er world in which to talk about Jesus than a world in which black men can have their necks stepped on for nine min­utes.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a pro­fes­sor of New Tes­ta­ment at Wheaton. 
    • Don’t under­stand the protests? What you’re see­ing is peo­ple pushed to the edge (Kareem Abdul-Jab­bar, LA Times): “…even though we do all the con­ven­tion­al things to raise pub­lic and polit­i­cal aware­ness — write artic­u­late and insight­ful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the con­tin­ued dev­as­ta­tion on CNN, sup­port can­di­dates who promise change — the nee­dle hard­ly budges.”
    • On Days of Dis­or­der (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Notice that this schema is val­ue neu­tral: it describes both the foot­ball hooli­gan and the race riot­er, 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian pogroms and 21st cen­tu­ry Hong Kong street bat­tles. In all of these a cer­tain per­cent­age of the par­tic­i­pants plays the game for fair­ly mun­dane rea­sons: to rev­el in excite­ment or ter­ror, lose them­selves in a rare sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty, belong­ing, or pow­er, or to sim­ply gain the mon­e­tary rewards that come with theft and loot­ing. The pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion will­ing to join a riot to attain these things like­ly reflects the pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion oth­er­wise cut off from them in nor­mal times. Few riot­ers are mar­ried men who must be at work at 8:00 AM the next morn­ing.” This was quite good. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Sim­plic­i­ty Is The Ene­my & Bad Apples (Jonathan Last, The Bul­wark): “What’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now is large and com­pli­cat­ed. We have a series of prob­lems, some of which over­lap, some of which do not. And attempts to solve them have, his­tor­i­cal­ly, been stymied by con­flat­ing them and believ­ing that they are sim­ple and con­nect­ed.”
  2. On the pan­dem­ic:
    • The Trea­son of Epi­demi­ol­o­gists (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “The sim­ple fact is that what­ev­er leg­is­la­tion we’re going to get, we’d still get if the protests stopped this morn­ing. In fact, a rea­son­able per­son would con­clude we’d be more like­ly to get it if they stopped now, because the more these things go on, the more oppo­si­tion and resent­ment will grow.” 
    • Relat­ed: “A thread about how protest­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic was described when con­ser­v­a­tives were doing it” (Matt Walsh, Twit­ter)
    • Sur­gi­sphere: gov­ern­ments and WHO changed Covid-19 pol­i­cy based on sus­pect data from tiny US com­pa­ny (Melis­sa Dav­ey, Stephanie Kirch­gaess­ner & Sarah Bose­ley, The Guardian): “The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion and a num­ber of nation­al gov­ern­ments have changed their Covid-19 poli­cies and treat­ments on the basis of flawed data from a lit­tle-known US health­care ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny, also call­ing into ques­tion the integri­ty of key stud­ies pub­lished in some of the world’s most pres­ti­gious med­ical jour­nals. A Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion can reveal the US-based com­pa­ny Sur­gi­sphere, whose hand­ful of employ­ees appear to include a sci­ence fic­tion writer and an adult-con­tent mod­el, has pro­vid­ed data for mul­ti­ple stud­ies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief exec­u­tive, but has so far failed to ade­quate­ly explain its data or method­ol­o­gy.” This is actu­al­ly nuts.
    • The C.D.C. Wait­ed ‘Its Entire Exis­tence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong? (Eric Lip­ton, Abby Good­nough, Michael D. Shear, Megan Twohey, Apoor­va Mandavilli,Sheri Fink & Mark Walk­er, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. is risk-averse, per­fec­tion­ist and ill suit­ed to impro­vis­ing in a quick­ly evolv­ing cri­sis — par­tic­u­lar­ly one that shuts down the coun­try and par­a­lyzes the econ­o­my.”
  3. The Muse­um of the Bible is win­ning over some of its biggest crit­ics: Jew­ish schol­ars (Men­achem Weck­er, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mintz believes Jew­ish schol­ars who denounced evan­gel­i­cal tones in the muse­um may have done so because they don’t see eye-to-eye with its polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive own­ers. But, she notes, the muse­um itself caters to Jews. She cites a time when it arranged kosher food for an event in which her hus­band, an Ortho­dox rab­bi, par­tic­i­pat­ed. ‘They were just nice about it,’ she says.”
  4. Chris­t­ian Tik­Tok videos are cen­sored and delet­ed in the US, cre­ators say (Liza Van­den­boom, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Chris­t­ian con­tent is often cen­sored and removed from Tik­Tok, accord­ing to sev­er­al cre­ators on the plat­form. The Chi­na-based social media app hosts short, snip­py videos rang­ing from inspi­ra­tional mini-speech­es to musi­cal and dance per­for­mances and is pop­u­lar with teenagers and young adults. The plat­form reports over 800 mil­lion active users, with 30 mil­lion active users in the U.S. Researchers have grown con­cerned over the app’s reach and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of it bring­ing Chi­nese-style cen­sor­ship to main­stream U.S. audi­ences.” 
  5. Tech­noc­ra­cy Is Impos­si­ble (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Lead­ers should pay atten­tion to sci­en­tists, dra­mat­i­cal­ly more than the cur­rent Pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion does, but an immu­nol­o­gist will say one thing, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent, an econ­o­mist some­thing alto­geth­er oth­er. The var­i­ous sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines will not speak with a sin­gle voice, indeed will not speak at all: indi­vid­ual schol­ars will speak, and what they say will arise from a com­bi­na­tion of their schol­ar­ly exper­tise and their beliefs (derived from non-sci­en­tif­ic sources) about what mat­ters most in life, and a good polit­i­cal leader will have the gen­er­al intel­li­gence and moral dis­cern­ment to sift the var­i­ous mes­sages he or she receives and make a deci­sion based on all the rel­e­vant input.”
  6. There was a fight at the New York Times this week. I’m not actu­al­ly that inter­est­ed in the op-ed that pro­voked it, but I am quite inter­est­ed in how the fight is play­ing out. The New York Times occu­pies a spe­cial place in the Amer­i­can media ecosys­tem and fights like this illu­mi­nate some of what is hap­pen­ing beneath the sur­face.
    • New York Times Jour­nal­ists Scared To Have an Op-Ed Page (Matt Welch, Rea­son): “This pub­lish­ing flap, which in com­par­a­tive impor­tance is a sput­ter­ing match next to the hell-infer­no of spring 2020, is nonethe­less sym­bol­ic of a shift bear­ing more tec­ton­ic heft. Our lib­er­al insti­tu­tions, not unlike our con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als, are nois­i­ly aban­don­ing lib­er­al­ism.”
    • The Inside Sto­ry of the Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “This process, with back and forth over phone, email, and text, extend­ed through the morn­ing and after­noon on Wednes­day. Cot­ton and his team then signed off on the final ver­sion around 2:30 p.m. It was post­ed short­ly after. Then, all hell broke loose.”
    • A Twit­ter thread from NY Times opin­ion colum­nist Bari Weiss: “The civ­il war inside The New York Times between the (most­ly young) wokes the (most­ly 40+) lib­er­als is the same one rag­ing inside oth­er pub­li­ca­tions and com­pa­nies across the coun­try. The dynam­ic is always the same. (Thread.)”
    • ‘New York Times’ Staffers Grill Lead­er­ship Over Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed Dur­ing All-Hands (Lau­ra Wag­n­er, Vice): “…the most infor­ma­tive parts of the meet­ing came from the lengthy ques­tion-and-answer por­tion. Staffers asked for an autop­sy of the piece and how it was pub­lished; if com­pa­ny lead­ers were plan­ning to address James Bennet’s lead­er­ship of the opin­ion sec­tion, which has had ‘sev­er­al mis­fires’; whether Opin­ion staff edi­tor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘open­ly bad mouth[ing] younger news col­leagues on a plat­form where they, because of strict com­pa­ny pol­i­cy, could not defend them­selves’; whether the opin­ion sec­tion had sug­gest­ed the top­ic of the op-ed to Cot­ton; and what the Times would do to help retain and sup­port Black employ­ees.”
    • After staff uproar, New York Times says Sen. Tom Cot­ton op-ed urg­ing mil­i­tary incur­sion into U.S. cities ‘did not meet our stan­dards’ (Ela­he Iza­di, Paul Farhi and Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Because of its promi­nence, the Times’s op-ed page and colum­nists often gen­er­ate con­tro­ver­sy, though rarely from with­in the news­pa­per itself. There was wide­spread crit­i­cism in Feb­ru­ary, for exam­ple, when the Times pub­lished an op-ed from a mem­ber of Afghanistan’s Tal­iban, par­tic­u­lar­ly because the paper failed to iden­ti­fy the author’s his­to­ry of involve­ment in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties. There was lit­tle inter­nal oppo­si­tion to the col­umn, how­ev­er, at least none that spilled into pub­lic view.”
    • New York Times has stopped defend­ing its Tom Cot­ton op-ed (Erik Wem­ple, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As Jack Shafer has not­ed, the Times opin­ion page exists to pro­voke. It has run op-eds by Moam­mar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin and oth­ers. In a Decem­ber 2017 staff meet­ing, Ben­net addressed the dif­fi­cul­ties of judg­ing when a piece goes too far: ‘We’ve pub­lished Vladimir Putin,’ Ben­net said in the meet­ing. ‘Should we not allow Vladimir Putin into our pages? It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say that that would be doing a ser­vice to our read­ers. But as you can see, I mean, I strug­gle to artic­u­late what those bound­aries are.’”

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 One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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 252

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 251

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Ian McE­wan ‘dubi­ous’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 250

Prob­a­bly my favorite arti­cle in this bunch is the epi­demi­o­log­i­cal analy­sis of the sev­en dead­ly sins. What a genius idea.

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.

Also, this is the 250th of these week­ly roundups I have pub­lished. Even though last week was num­ber 249, I was still sur­prised to type in 250 this week. Some­day I’ll remem­ber a spe­cial num­ber is com­ing up and do some­thing dif­fer­ent for it. But not this day.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Are the Wages of Sin Real­ly Death?: Moral and Epi­demi­o­log­ic Obser­va­tions (David Lyle Jef­frey and Jeff Levin, Chris­t­ian Scholar’s Review): “So, are the wages of sin real­ly death? As far as pop­u­la­tion-health research sug­gests, the answer is a guard­ed yes.” The authors are pro­fes­sors at Bay­lor, one of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and the oth­er of lit­er­a­ture. 
  2. Kids’ TV has a porn prob­lem (Brazy­Day, Medi­um): “In a very real way, the ‘hyper­sex­u­al and tox­ic’ cul­ture that has sprung up around children’s TV car­toons is of com­pa­nies’ own mak­ing. They active­ly allow it to hap­pen sim­ply by doing noth­ing — cre­at­ing a law­less vac­u­um where any­thing goes and porn coex­ists with harm­less fan cre­ations.” This arti­cle was much bet­ter than I expect­ed it to be. 
  3. How We Got the Bible (Dirk Jongkind,Desiring God): “…by under­stand­ing what God had done over the ages, we will see that it is rea­son­able and jus­ti­fied to trust that the Bible in our hands is a trans­la­tion of the trust­wor­thy words of Scrip­ture.” The author is a research fel­low in New Tes­ta­ment text and lan­guage at Tyn­dale House, Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. 
  4. The real Lord of the Flies: what hap­pened when six boys were ship­wrecked for 15 months (The Guardian): “The kids agreed to work in teams of two, draw­ing up a strict ros­ter for gar­den, kitchen and guard duty. Some­times they quar­relled, but when­ev­er that hap­pened they solved it by impos­ing a time-out. Their days began and end­ed with song and prayer. Kolo fash­ioned a makeshift gui­tar from a piece of drift­wood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires sal­vaged from their wrecked boat – an instru­ment Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spir­its.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing Twit­ter thread in response by Tan­ner Greer: “Lord of the Flies is one of those nov­els that peo­ple remem­ber wrong. Peo­ple remem­ber its cen­tral theme as ‘take away civ­i­liza­tion, and we all turn into Hobbe­sian lit­tle mon­sters.’ But if you read the book as an adult, instead of an 8th grad­er speed­ing through, you find a dif­fer­ent mean­ing.”
  5. Should Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives Aspire to Noto­ri­ety? (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You don’t go look­ing for pow­er and pres­tige. You aspire to be faith­ful. If pres­tige finds you, then you allow your­self to be extrud­ed into it and pray that God pro­tect you from the spir­i­tu­al dan­gers.” This is essay is part of a swarm of inter­net arti­cles about the tra­jec­to­ry of the mag­a­zine First Things, but you don’t have to read any­thing else about that (or even care much about that) to find this essay worth­while. 
  6. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • “Our reg­u­la­to­ry state is fail­ing us” Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “When the CDC pooh-poohed masks ear­ly on, or botched their test­ing kit there­by delay­ing U.S. test­ing by weeks or maybe months, did the per­ma­nent staff of the CDC rise up and rebel and leak howl­ing protests to the media, real­iz­ing that thou­sands of lives were at stake? That is sure­ly what would hap­pen if say the cur­rent FDA announced it was going to approve thalido­mide.” This is a link to a search result on his blog, keep scrolling after you fin­ish the main arti­cle to see sev­er­al exam­ples of what he is describ­ing. 
    • Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic: A Plea for Gen­eros­i­ty (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “There is a good rea­son to hes­i­tate to judge, name­ly our igno­rance. Plagues are a time for scape­goats and blame-shift­ing pre­cise­ly because they deal out suf­fer­ing such a seem­ing­ly unjust and ran­dom fash­ion. Our lead­ers say they will fol­low the sci­ence, but they can’t, real­ly. With a hereto­fore-unseen virus such as this one, the sci­ence is more like inher­it­ed wis­dom and intu­ition from pre­vi­ous, sim­i­lar mal­adies, at least at the start. What fol­lows is a con­fused rush to catch up through tri­al and error.“
    • The Risks — Know Them — Avoid Them (Erin Bro­mage, per­son­al blog): “I reg­u­lar­ly hear peo­ple wor­ry­ing about gro­cery stores, bike rides, incon­sid­er­ate run­ners who are not wear­ing masks.… are these places of con­cern? Well, not real­ly. Let me explain.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at U Mass who teach­es cours­es on immunol­o­gy and infec­tious dis­ease. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. 
    • No, the super­spread­er choir in Wash­ing­ton does­n’t prove church is dan­ger­ous (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “It’s hard to blame the choir for not tak­ing more pre­cau­tions, as this was March 10, before stuff real­ly hit the fan (and when our gov­ern­ment was still telling peo­ple NOT to wear masks).”
      • This op-ed is based on a CDC inves­ti­ga­tion: “The March 10 choir rehearsal last­ed from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. Sev­er­al mem­bers arrived ear­ly to set up chairs in a large mul­ti­pur­pose room. Chairs were arranged in six rows of 20 chairs each, spaced 6–10 inch­es apart with a cen­ter aisle divid­ing left and right stages.”
    • Lock­down is over. Some­one tell the gov­ern­ment (Dominic Green, Spec­ta­tor USA): “Every soci­ety has react­ed to COVID-19 accord­ing to its prin­ci­ples or, if no prin­ci­ples were to hand, its habits. It has been America’s mis­for­tune that its prin­ci­ples and habits are ill-suit­ed to man­ag­ing an epi­dem­ic.”
    • Take the Shut­down Skep­tics Seri­ous­ly (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “The gen­er­al point is that min­i­miz­ing the num­ber of COVID-19 deaths today or a month from now or six months from now may or may not min­i­mize the human costs of the pan­dem­ic when the full spec­trum of human con­se­quences is con­sid­ered. The last glob­al depres­sion cre­at­ed con­di­tions for a cat­a­stroph­ic world war that killed rough­ly 75 to 80 mil­lion peo­ple. Is that a pos­si­bil­i­ty? The down­side risks and costs of every approach are real, fright­en­ing, and depress­ing, no mat­ter how lit­tle one thinks of reopen­ing now.”
    • Coro­n­avirus and The Myopia of Amer­i­can Excep­tion­al­ism (Brad Lit­tle­john, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Rather than prov­ing our­selves excep­tion­al, we sim­ply assume that we are. The ordi­nary rules do not apply to us, because we are Amer­i­ca. We make things bet­ter here, we run things more effi­cient­ly here, we live more hap­pi­ly here, because we are Amer­i­ca. There is no need to look at OECD rank­ings, because we already know that they are wrong if they show us any­where but #1…. this way of think­ing, far from mak­ing Amer­i­ca great, is almost cer­tain to make her the oppo­site. After all, the only way to improve is to learn, and the chief way we learn as human beings is from the exam­ples of oth­ers.”
    • The Mir­a­cle of the Inter­net (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The surge in traf­fic, on the inter­net as a whole and on AT&T’s part of the net­work, is extra­or­di­nary in a way that the phrase 20 per­cent increase doesn’t quite cap­ture. AT&T’s net­work is car­ry­ing an extra 71 petabytes of data every day. How much is 71 petabytes? One com­par­i­son: Back at the end of 2014, AT&T’s total net­work traf­fic was 56 petabytes a day; in just a few weeks, AT&T has accom­mo­dat­ed more new traf­fic every day than its total dai­ly traf­fic six years ago. (Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the AT&T net­work has been car­ry­ing about 426 petabytes a day—one petabyte is 1 mil­lion giga­bytes.)”
    • Stan­ford’s $27.7 bil­lion not enough to house stu­dents in need amid pan­dem­ic (Sheikh Sri­jon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Har­vard is allow­ing those on cam­pus with demon­strat­ed need to stay for the whole sum­mer for only $200. MIT is offer­ing free hous­ing and meals. Duke is offer­ing free hous­ing and par­tial com­pen­sa­tion for lost sum­mer earn­ings to those with sub­stan­tial finan­cial aid.… Com­pare Stanford’s pol­i­cy to these insti­tu­tions’ poli­cies. Though it has a $27.7 bil­lion dol­lar endow­ment (as of Octo­ber 2019), it is charg­ing stu­dents near­ly $6,000 for sum­mer hous­ing and meals in times of such finan­cial uncer­tain­ty.”
  7. The New York Times Sur­ren­dered to an Out­rage Mob. Jour­nal­ism Will Suf­fer For It. (Pamela Paresky, Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen And Steven Pinker, Politi­co): “…for the Times to ‘dis­ap­pear’ pas­sages of a pub­lished arti­cle into an inac­ces­si­ble mem­o­ry hole is an Orwellian act that, thanks to the newspaper’s actions, might now be seen as accept­able jour­nal­is­tic prac­tice. It is all the worse when the edi­tors’ pub­lished account of what they delet­ed is itself inac­cu­rate. This does a dis­ser­vice to read­ers, his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, who are left unable to deter­mine for them­selves what the con­tro­ver­sy was about, and to Stephens, who is left unable to defend him­self against read­ers’ worst sus­pi­cions.”

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 If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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