Tag: police

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 458



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

This is vol­ume 458, a num­ber with very few fac­tors. 458 = 229 · 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. America’s Top Export May Be Anx­i­ety (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “We’re see­ing the inter­na­tion­al trans­mis­sion of a nov­el West­ern the­o­ry of men­tal health. It’s the glob­al­iza­tion of Western—and, just maybe, Amer­i­can—despair.… Accord­ing to the pod­cast search engine Lis­ten Notes, more than 5,500 pod­casts have the word trau­ma in their title. In celebri­ty media, men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als are so com­mon that they’ve spawned a sub­genre of sum­maries of celebri­ty men­tal-health tes­ti­mo­ni­als, includ­ing ’39 Celebri­ties Who Have Opened Up About Men­tal Health,’ ‘What 22 Celebri­ties Have Said About Hav­ing Depres­sion,’ and ’12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Men­tal Health.’ ”
    • Poly­math Tyler Cowen called this “one of the best and most impor­tant pieces of the year.” Unlocked.
  2. How to get 7th graders to smoke (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the week­end, but most peo­ple think they know how to save the chil­dren, fix the schools, reform the pris­ons, over­haul health­care, repair pol­i­tics, restore civil­i­ty, and bring about world peace. Per­haps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those oth­er things.”
    • This is a hum­bling essay.
  3. Chat­G­PT is bull­shit (Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, Ethics and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy): “The machines are not try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing they believe or per­ceive. Their inac­cu­ra­cy is not due to mis­per­cep­tion or hal­lu­ci­na­tion. As we have point­ed out, they are not try­ing to con­vey infor­ma­tion at all. They are bull­shit­ting.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow. Apolo­gies for the lan­guage, but the lan­guage is at the heart of the point the authors are mak­ing.
  4. No Longer Pitiable (Jared Hay­den, Mere Ortho­doxy): “For Paul, what makes sin­gle­ness ‘bet­ter’ is not the absence of sex as such, for nei­ther sex nor mar­riage is a sin, as he is at pains to show. Rather, sin­gle­ness is the ‘hap­pi­er’ state because it pro­vides believ­ers the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be ‘anx­ious about the things of the Lord’ rather than ‘world­ly things’ because the ‘appoint­ed time has grown very short.’ For Paul, all sin­gles should live devot­ed to the Lord… one either lever­ages sin­gle­ness for the Lord, like Paul; or one lever­ages it for world­ly or sin­ful pur­pos­es, like idle wid­ows (1 Tim 5:13).”
    • A the­o­log­i­cal­ly rich essay about sin­gle­ness.
  5. Evo­lu­tion May Be Pur­pose­ful And It’s Freak­ing Sci­en­tists Out (Andrea Mor­ris, Forbes): “Noble is neu­tral on reli­gious mat­ters. Yet he sees com­pelling evi­dence that pur­pose may be fun­da­men­tal to life. He’s deter­mined to debunk the cur­rent sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digm and replace the ele­vat­ed impor­tance of genes with some­thing much more con­tro­ver­sial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained sup­port from the next gen­er­a­tion of ori­gins-of-life researchers work­ing to top­ple the reign of gene-cen­trism.”
  6. Some arti­cles about the war in Gaza:
    • Israelis Are Not Watch­ing the Same War You Are (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of secu­ri­ty and casu­al­ties. And all of a sud­den, peo­ple under­stand that this was not fea­si­ble for the long run. That is to say that we will prob­a­bly have to see more sol­diers fight­ing in the north and in the south for the com­ing years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a per­ma­nent war but maybe a per­ma­nent state of ongo­ing oper­a­tions.”
      • A fas­ci­nat­ing (albeit a tad long) inter­view with an Israeli intel­lec­tu­al.
    • Get­ting Aid Into Gaza (Ger­man Lopez, New York Times): “Israel has enforced opaque rules that turn back trucks meant for Gaza, cit­ing secu­ri­ty con­cerns. Egypt has blocked aid to protest Israel’s mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. Hamas has stolen, or tried to steal, aid ship­ments for its own use.”
      • A rea­son­ably fair-mind­ed arti­cle. Exam­ines mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives.
  7. Abused by the badge (Jes­si­ca Con­tr­era, Jenn Abel­son, John D. Hard­en, Hay­den God­frey & Nate Jones, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A Wash­ing­ton Post inves­ti­ga­tion has found that over the past two decades, hun­dreds of law enforce­ment offi­cers in the Unit­ed States have sex­u­al­ly abused chil­dren while offi­cials at every lev­el of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem have failed to pro­tect kids, pun­ish abusers and pre­vent addi­tion­al crimes… The Post iden­ti­fied at least 1,800 state and local law enforce­ment offi­cers who were charged with crimes involv­ing child sex­u­al abuse from 2005 through 2022.”
    • I have long said that the peo­ple throw­ing stones at the Roman Catholic Church for their sex­u­al abuse cri­sis would be stunned with the far worse num­bers on child sex­u­al abuse in the pub­lic school sys­tem (and I stand by that). But I did not fore­see this one and I should have. There is author­i­ty, there­fore there is abuse of author­i­ty.
    • Unlocked.

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 355

Two pieces crit­i­cal of Stan­ford plus lots more.

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

This is vol­ume 355, which is 5 times 71. It’s also appar­ent­ly the num­ber of labeled topolo­gies with 4 ele­ments, but I think know­ing that it is 5 · 71 is cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • Stanford’s War on Social Life (Ginevra Davis, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The Uni­ver­si­ty sent a clear mes­sage with its treat­ment of the Band. Spon­ta­neous orga­ni­za­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they could become chaot­ic, con­tro­ver­sial, or oth­er­wise a space for break­ing rules, were now some­thing to be con­trolled. Rather than treat­ing free­dom and spon­tane­ity as strengths, the dynam­ic became one where stu­dents had to jus­ti­fy their projects and ideas while under sus­pi­cion from admin­is­tra­tors. Stu­dent life was becom­ing dom­i­nat­ed by restric­tive bureau­cra­cy.” I believe this is sub­stan­tial­ly cor­rect.
    • How I Almost Did­n’t Grad­u­ate From Stan­ford (Maxwell Mey­er, Sub­stack): “Appar­ent­ly, in order to grad­u­ate from Stan­ford while not offi­cial­ly enrolled, I need­ed to be placed in a spe­cial 0‑unit ‘course’ that exists only on paper. And because Stan­ford requires boost­er vac­cines in order to enroll in cours­es, the degree progress office was lit­er­al­ly unable to place me in the fake course.”
  2. The Google engi­neer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As he talked to LaM­DA about reli­gion, Lemoine, who stud­ied cog­ni­tive and com­put­er sci­ence in col­lege, noticed the chat­bot talk­ing about its rights and per­son­hood, and decid­ed to press fur­ther. In anoth­er exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robot­ics.” Spec­u­la­tive and dis­put­ed.
  3. This traf­fic stop between a Black man and a White state troop­er began with fear. It end­ed with a sur­pris­ing act of kind­ness (John Blake, CNN): “Doty closed his tick­et book and opened his car door. He walked back over to Wilk­er­son­’s car and turned to Ged­dis. ‘Sir, do you mind if I ask what kind of can­cer you have?’ ‘No, I don’t mind. I have colon can­cer.’ Doty took a deep breath and looked at Ged­dis. ‘Can I pray for you?’ Doty said.” Heart­warm­ing.
  4. In the world of med­i­cine:
    • A turn­ing point in can­cer (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “The con­ver­gence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor direct­ly or the blood (known as liq­uid biopsy)—matched with the appro­pri­ate ther­a­py is lead­ing to out­comes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncol­o­gists.”
    • The Bat­tle Over Gen­der Ther­a­py (Emi­ly Bazelon, New York Times): “ ‘Being trans comes with goals — this is what to do,’ Butzen says. ‘It comes with a sup­port net­work and a cause to fight for.’ Online, where the stakes start rel­a­tive­ly low, teenagers in pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ties can trade in a cis­gen­der, het­ero­sex­u­al, white iden­ti­ty — the epit­o­me of priv­i­lege and oppres­sion — to join a com­mu­ni­ty with a clear claim to being mar­gin­al­ized and deserv­ing of pro­tec­tion.”
      • It is sig­nif­i­cant that this report­ing is in New York Times. This is a long arti­cle and it was dif­fi­cult to find a pas­sage to excerpt. I am con­fi­dent the jour­nal­ist would not con­sid­er this a rep­re­sen­ta­tive excerpt nor the one she con­sid­ers most impor­tant.
  5. Pro­fes­sors Need the Pow­er to Fire Diver­si­ty Bureau­crats (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “At present, sanc­tions in high­er edu­ca­tion flow in one direc­tion: Diver­si­ty bureau­crats exert con­trol over fac­ul­ty mem­bers whose speech alleged­ly under­mines inclu­sion. I pro­pose giv­ing fac­ul­ty the pow­er to inves­ti­gate, sanc­tion, and fire diver­si­ty offi­cials if they under­mine free speech. Admin­is­tra­tive abus­es will con­tin­ue as long as bureau­crats can pun­ish speech, even in fla­grant vio­la­tion of uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­cy, with­out any con­se­quences.” I like this. I don’t think it’s struc­tural­ly pos­si­ble at most uni­ver­si­ties, but I like this.
  6. Inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive:
    • Five Blunt Truths About the War in Ukraine (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The Rus­sians are run­ning out of pre­ci­sion-guid­ed weapons. The Ukraini­ans are run­ning out of Sovi­et-era muni­tions. The world is run­ning out of patience for the war. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is run­ning out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chi­nese are watch­ing.… an army that can­not wage a high-tech war, rel­a­tive­ly low on col­lat­er­al dam­age, will wage a low-tech war, appalling­ly high on such dam­age. Ukraine, by its own esti­mates, is suf­fer­ing 20,000 casu­al­ties a month. By con­trast, the U.S. suf­fered about 36,000 casu­al­ties in Iraq over sev­en years of war. For all its brav­ery and resolve, Kyiv can hold off — but not defeat — a neigh­bor more than three times its size in a war of attri­tion.”
    • China’s mil­i­tary expan­sion is reach­ing a dan­ger­ous tip­ping point (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Chi­na is build­ing the capa­bil­i­ty to use nuclear black­mail to deter a U.S. inter­ven­tion if it invades Tai­wan, fol­low­ing Russia’s mod­el. China’s region­al mil­i­tary pres­ence is expand­ing, includ­ing a secret naval base in Cam­bo­dia and a secret mil­i­tary coop­er­a­tion agree­ment with the Solomon Islands. Chi­na has devel­oped new tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing hyper­son­ic mis­siles and anti­satel­lite lasers, to keep the U.S. mil­i­tary at bay in a Tai­wan sce­nario. And now, Chi­na no longer rec­og­nizes the Tai­wan Strait as inter­na­tion­al waters.”
  7. Ele­phant in the Zoom (Ryan Grim, The Inter­cept): “…Planned Par­ent­hood, NARAL Pro-Choice Amer­i­ca, and oth­er repro­duc­tive health orga­ni­za­tions had sim­i­lar­ly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between com­pet­ing fac­tions of their orga­ni­za­tions, most often break­ing down along staff-ver­sus-man­age­ment lines. It’s also true of the pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy space across the board, which has, more or less, effec­tive­ly ceased to func­tion. The Sier­ra Club, Demos, the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union, Col­or of Change, the Move­ment for Black Lives, Human Rights Cam­paign, Time’s Up, the Sun­rise Move­ment, and many oth­er orga­ni­za­tions have seen wrench­ing and debil­i­tat­ing tur­moil in the past cou­ple years.”

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 Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stu­pid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. First shared in vol­ume 221.

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 313

a dis­turbing­ly high num­ber of pan­dem­ic-relat­ed arti­cles

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.

313 is the 65th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic relat­ed
    • How the Pan­dem­ic Now Ends (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): “Here, then, is the cur­rent pan­dem­ic dilem­ma: Vac­cines remain the best way for indi­vid­u­als to pro­tect them­selves, but soci­eties can­not treat vac­cines as their only defense.”
      • First, this is a free arti­cle that won’t use up a pay­wall click. Sec­ond, this is dis­cour­ag­ing to read and makes me think Stan­ford is going to be way more restric­tive than I was hop­ing come fall.
    • What We Lose When We Livestream Church (Collin Hansen, New York Times): “The very word we trans­late from Greek as ‘church’ in the New Tes­ta­ment sug­gests we must assem­ble in per­son. The church wasn’t just a bridge of 2,000 years until human­i­ty reached Peak Zoom. It’s essen­tial for the reli­gion where God took on flesh and dwelt among us. It’s essen­tial in a faith that believes Jesus phys­i­cal­ly rose from the dead and then sat down to enjoy a meal with his stunned friends.”
    • Covid incom­pe­tence (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amaz­ing­ly the US pol­i­cy response is even more irres­olute than the first time around. Our gov­ern­ment is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sug­ar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wan­ders off fol­low­ing a pup­py.”
      • The author is a senior fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • “What Do Full Hos­pi­tals Real­ly Tell Us About COVID?” (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “The pub­lic argu­ment for spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals is more exper­tise and low­er costs because of effi­cien­cy. The real mod­el was no emer­gency room, and thus no way for un- and under-insured peo­ple to get into the hos­pi­tal. All of the finan­cial ben­e­fits of being a hos­pi­tal with­out any of the respon­si­bil­i­ties. So we get wom­en’s hos­pi­tals, ortho­pe­dic hos­pi­tals, etc., suck­ing the prof­itable work from com­mu­ni­ty hos­pi­tals, with­out tak­ing any of the bur­den of com­mu­ni­ty care for the indi­gent.… The hos­pi­tals in Louisiana which take indi­gent patients and patients though the ER—pretty much all COVID patients—are slammed. The spe­cial­ty hos­pi­tals have lots of staff and lots of beds and don’t have much in the way of COVID patients, if there are any at all.”
      • I did not know any of that. Real­ly inter­est­ing. Writ­ten a law prof at Louisiana State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Porn­dem­ic? A Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Study of Pornog­ra­phy Use Before and Dur­ing the COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic in a Nation­al­ly Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sam­ple of Amer­i­cans (Grubbs et al, Archives of Sex­u­al Behav­ior): “In gen­er­al, pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward over the pan­dem­ic, for both men and women. Prob­lem­at­ic pornog­ra­phy use trend­ed down­ward for men and remained low and unchanged in women.”
      • The excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a lit­tle sur­pris­ing but also I think peo­ple are less like­ly to watch porn with their fam­i­lies around, which hap­pened a lot dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. I do won­der how their find­ings cross-check with traf­fic stats from porn web­sites. It seems like an obvi­ous way to do a sim­ple check on their find­ings.
  2. The Gap Between Law and Moral­i­ty (Helen Dale, Law & Lib­er­ty): “The planet’s two great legal sys­tems devel­oped in two Euro­pean civil­i­sa­tions, Rome and Eng­land. Their wide prove­nance is not only due to both peo­ples con­quer­ing great empires. It’s also because they worked: they did things no oth­er legal regime did before them, and those oth­ers are still inca­pable of doing now.… Incred­i­bly, these devel­oped inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er. The Eng­lish com­mon law did not bor­row from Rome: when it first emerged, Roman law was lost.”
    • This is sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. In the words of an alum­nus, “This one was a sleep­er hit. Start­ed slow, blew me away by the end.”
  3. Why a Mas­cu­line Min­istry Rose and Fell (David French, The Dis­patch): “When coun­ter­ing a cul­ture that often attacks tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent vice, the answer isn’t to indulge tra­di­tion­al mas­cu­line incli­na­tions as inher­ent virtue.… Driscoll, in all his tough­ness and swag­ger, tried to make men out of Chris­tians. The church, how­ev­er, should make Chris­tians out of men.”
  4. Cor­nel West on Why the Left Needs Jesus (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “When I was in Char­lottesville, look­ing at these sick white broth­ers in neo-Nazi par­ties and the Klan spit­ting and cussing and car­ry­ing on, I could see the hounds of hell rag­ing on the bat­tle­field of their souls. But I also know that there’s greed in me. There’s hatred in me. Peo­ple say, ‘Oh, you’re so qual­i­ta­tive­ly dif­fer­ent than those gang­sters.’ I say, ‘No, I’ve got gang­ster in me. I was a gang­ster before I met Jesus. Now I’m a redeemed sin­ner with gang­ster pro­cliv­i­ties.’ It is a very dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at things than many of my sec­u­lar com­rades.”
  5. Crim­i­nal-Jus­tice Reform­ers Chose the Wrong Slo­gan (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Before the pub­lic sours on crim­i­nal-jus­tice reform more broadly—as it may amid ris­ing fears about crime and dis­or­der in cities—a new focus and ral­ly­ing cry are need­ed. And giv­en the spike in homi­cides that has afflict­ed the Unit­ed States dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly killing Black peo­ple, there’s an espe­cial­ly strong case for this over­due slo­gan: Solve All Mur­ders. Pre­cise­ly because Black lives mat­ter, peo­ple who take Black lives shouldn’t get away with it.”
  6. Assem­blies of God Grow­ing with Pen­te­costal Per­sis­tence (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s dif­fi­cult to pin­point exact­ly why the Assem­blies of God has con­tin­ued to increase over the past 15 years. Research shows that mem­ber­ship of the Assem­blies of God has become more polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and more reli­gious­ly active today than just a decade ago, but its own num­bers indi­cate that it has achieved incred­i­ble racial diversity—44 per­cent of mem­bers in the Unit­ed States are eth­nic minori­ties.”
    • Since the Assem­blies of God is the group with which I am ordained and is the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of Chi Alpha, file under “arti­cles that make me hap­py.”
  7. We Need to Build Our Way Out of This Mess (Eli Doura­do, New York Times): “How did the most dynam­ic coun­try on the plan­et become so scle­rot­ic? We did it to our­selves. We enact­ed laws that priv­i­lege the sta­tus quo at the expense of change and progress. We lib­er­al­ly passed out veto rights to any­one with the mon­ey and where­with­al to hire a lawyer. If we want to reverse the dam­age and cre­ate a more pros­per­ous future, we must make it easy to build.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist at Utah State Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). 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 296

the first two links are among the best I’ve shared 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.

This is vol­ume 296, which is the num­ber of par­ti­tions con­tained in the num­ber 30.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Woke Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Blake Smith, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The con­tem­po­rary ide­al, increas­ing­ly, is no longer some­one so charm­ing­ly per­son­able that oth­ers for­get he is in fact a ruth­less com­peti­tor, but a per­son who so con­vinc­ing­ly nar­rates her hav­ing over­come some kind of social injus­tice that oth­ers for­get she is in fact a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of sys­tems of priv­i­lege.” The author is a his­to­ry prof at U Chica­go. This essay is straight fire, and I believe he took an x‑ray of some of your souls before he wrote it.
  2. Some Prin­ci­ples & Obser­va­tions About Social Jus­tice Pol­i­tics (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Once you have made the pre­ven­tion of emo­tion­al harm the cen­tral focus of your pol­i­tics, you will find your­self run­ning up against the fact that emo­tion­al harm is a ubiq­ui­tous and inerad­i­ca­ble part of the human expe­ri­ence, far beyond the abil­i­ty of any polit­i­cal move­ment to pre­vent.” deBoer, one of my two favorite athe­ist social­ists to read (the oth­er being Steven Brust), brings it with excel­lence in this one. It was hard to find the best excerpt — there are so many.
  3. Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coro­n­avirus (Gina Kola­ta, New York Times): “For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on mes­sen­ger RNA, or mRNA — the genet­ic script that car­ries DNA instruc­tions to each cell’s pro­tein-mak­ing machin­ery. She was con­vinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own med­i­cines, includ­ing vac­cines. But for many years her career at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia was frag­ile. She migrat­ed from lab to lab, rely­ing on one senior sci­en­tist after anoth­er to take her in. She nev­er made more than $60,000 a year.” This is a heart­warm­ing sto­ry that should also make you very sad — it illus­trates how bro­ken the aca­d­e­m­ic sys­tem is and how we came very close to los­ing a life­sav­ing break­through.
  4. This should not hap­pen more than once (Alexan­dra Petri, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The moments when peo­ple make up their secret minds about what is nor­mal and what is accept­able are nev­er big. They are always in pri­vate, when no one can see that you have failed the test, when all you were doing was try­ing to avoid any dis­com­fort, be cool, play along. But there is a price. The price is that the Matt Gaet­zes out there will leave the inter­ac­tion think­ing they have under­stood the world cor­rect­ly. That what they are doing is work­ing. That this is how the world is. But it is the accu­mu­la­tion of these lit­tle assents that make the world this way.” Well-writ­ten and true. Also, don’t take nude pho­tos of your­self nor allow oth­ers to do so. It is unlike­ly you will be hap­py with the out­come.
  5. A Hea­then’s East­er (Steve Randy Wald­man, Inter­flu­id­i­ty): “My the­o­log­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion is about can­dy-wrap­per lev­el. But for what­ev­er it’s worth, I con­sid­er this aspect of Christianity’s found­ing myth or event remark­able, and under­em­pha­sized. ‘For­give them, Father, they know not what they do,’ rep­re­sents a pro­found plea from the lips of a man being painful­ly mur­dered. That a par­ent, one with fire and brim­stone read­i­ly at hand and a noto­ri­ous his­to­ry of smit­ing, would for­give is per­haps even more aston­ish­ing, even more won­der­ful.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  6. The effects of Black Lives Mat­ter protests (Jerusalem Dem­sas, Vox): “[The researcher’s] main find­ing is a 15 to 20 per­cent reduc­tion in lethal use of force by police offi­cers — rough­ly 300 few­er police homi­cides — in cen­sus places that saw BLM protests. Campbell’s research also indi­cates that these protests cor­re­late with a 10 per­cent increase in mur­ders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were some­where between 1,000 and 6,000 more homi­cides than would have been expect­ed if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.”
  7. A whole pas­sel of trans-relat­ed arti­cles:
    • A Truce Pro­pos­al In The Trans Wars (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “In our cur­rent cul­ture, [my] some­what com­pli­cat­ed stance is anath­e­ma.… The pro­por­tion of peo­ple in this debate who seem psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly unsta­ble, emo­tion­al­ly volatile and per­son­al­ly vicious seems larg­er than usu­al.”
    • How Super-Straight Start­ed a Cul­ture War on Tik­Tok (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Most have dat­ing pref­er­ences that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly imply a neg­a­tive view of peo­ple who fall out­side them––I’d be averse to dat­ing an 18-year-old or a 60-year-old, yet I nei­ther hate nor fear either age cohort––and that they might not be able to change even if they want­ed to. Claims that only big­ots would decline to date a trans per­son strike some com­men­ta­tors as a form of coer­cion.”
    • Keira Bell: My Sto­ry (Keira Bell, Per­sua­sion): “Five years after begin­ning my med­ical tran­si­tion to becom­ing male, I began the process of detran­si­tion­ing. A lot of trans men talk about how you can’t cry with a high dose of testos­terone in your body, and this affect­ed me too: I couldn’t release my emo­tions. One of the first signs that I was becom­ing Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about.” This is very sober­ing.
    • A Guide to Neo­pro­nouns (Ezra Mar­cus, New York Times): “Many peo­ple who use neo­pro­nouns don’t just use one set. They select a hand­ful, and show off their col­lec­tions on web­sites like Pronouny.xyz, a site that pro­vides usage exam­ples for neo­pro­nouns. Users make their own Pro­nouny pages, like this one, which includes xe/xem/xyr, moon/moonself, star/starself, bee/beeself, and bun/bunself. ‘Sor­ry if I have too many pro­nouns,’ the page’s cre­ator wrote. ‘You can use just one set or just they/them if they’re too many!!’ ”
    • From a few weeks back: There Is No Epi­dem­ic Of Trans Mur­ders (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “So, of the eleven US mur­ders of trans or gen­der-non­con­form­ing peo­ple this year, only two — the ones in Puer­to Rico — appear to have been prob­a­bly moti­vat­ed by anti-trans hatred. They are still hor­ri­ble — no one deserves to be mur­dered — but the killings do not have the mean­ing that are being attrib­uted to them.”
    • Also slight­ly old­er: ‘A Hot­ly Con­test­ed Issue’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “The stu­dent alleged­ly threat­ened to sue Shawnee State, which in turn pres­sured Meri­wether fur­ther to address the stu­dent in her pre­ferred man­ner. Meri­wether agreed — on the con­di­tion that he could put a dis­claimer in his syl­labus about how he was fol­low­ing the university’s pro­noun pol­i­cy under com­pul­sion, and stat­ing his views about bio­log­i­cal sex and gen­der being one and the same and immutable. Meriwether’s dean reject­ed this as incom­pat­i­ble with the university’s gen­der iden­ti­ty pol­i­cy.… [the Sixth Cir­cuit Court sided with the pro­fes­sor] writ­ing that if pro­fes­sors ‘lacked free-speech pro­tec­tions when teach­ing, a uni­ver­si­ty would wield alarm­ing pow­er to com­pel ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty.’ A uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent could ‘require a paci­fist to declare that war is just, a civ­il rights icon to con­demn the Free­dom Rid­ers, a believ­er to deny the exis­tence of God, or a Sovi­et émi­gré to address his stu­dents as ‘com­rades,’ ’ he wrote. ‘That can­not be.’ ”
    • A very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the same case: A Vic­to­ry For Real­i­ty (Carl True­man, First Things): “The court’s rul­ing is worth read­ing in full. The evi­dent incom­pe­tence and mal­ice of the admin­is­tra­tion is impres­sive, as it ini­tial­ly flip-flops on whether an accept­able com­pro­mise is pos­si­ble and then descends into open hos­til­i­ty toward Meri­wether, includ­ing (but, as lawyers say, not lim­it­ed to) open mock­ery, deri­sion of his faith, and an inves­ti­ga­tion for which he was not asked to pro­vide any wit­ness­es. The court also iden­ti­fies the university’s flip-flop­ping and hos­til­i­ty to Meriwether’s reli­gious views as evi­dence that the mat­ter was not about apply­ing an estab­lished pol­i­cy in a neu­tral way but rather about tar­get­ing the pro­fes­sor for his Chris­t­ian beliefs.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 269

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 265

lots about race and racial ten­sion

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. Here are the things about race and racial ten­sion that stood out to me.
    • Why Did the Police Shoot Jacob Blake? (Trevor Noah, The Dai­ly Show): “I could tell you this sto­ry with my eyes closed by now. If I want­ed to I could pre­re­cord five of these seg­ments and go on vaca­tion and you would nev­er know.” Ten worth­while min­utes.
    • The Kenosha shoot­ing did­n’t hap­pen in a vac­u­um (Denise Lock­wood, CNN): “I am remind­ed of what Rod­ney Prunty, the for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Unit­ed Way of Racine Coun­ty, said to me dur­ing an inter­view: ‘If you have a pond full of fish and a few of them die, you ask what’s wrong with the fish. But when the pond full of fish dies, we ask what’s wrong with the pond.’ In Wis­con­sin, it’s time we talked about what’s wrong with the pond.”
    • Riots in John Piper’s Neigh­bor­hood (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Piper’s peo­ple moved in with­out a mas­ter plan, which was both con­fus­ing (‘What should we do?’) and exact­ly what When Help­ing Hurts authors would lat­er advise (start with build­ing rela­tion­ships, watch­ing, and learn­ing). Every­one end­ed up doing some­thing dif­fer­ent. But for decades, they’ve kept at it, work­ing through dis­ap­point­ments and chal­lenges, loot­ing and riots, bro­ken glass and home­less tent cities in the parks. They’re still doing it.” This is an out­stand­ing sto­ry.
    • Feel Good or Do Good (George Yancey, Patheos): “To gain the sup­port of real con­vic­tion we need the type of con­ver­sa­tions where we lis­ten to oth­ers as much as dis­cuss our point of view with them. We con­nect with oth­ers and get at the core of why they dis­agree with us. We under­stand their argu­ments and con­sid­er how to deal with the issues they bring up. We admit the valid­i­ty of those issues even if we dis­agree with them. Does this sound like any­thing that is hap­pen­ing with antiracism?” The author, who is black, is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bay­lor whom I have ref­er­enced sev­er­al times. 
    • Rule of Law Imper­iled (R. R. Reno, First Things): “The destruc­tion of prop­er­ty is not just an attack on another’s pos­ses­sions. It is a vio­la­tion of jus­tice. This is why riot­ing and loot­ing affects far more than those whose stores are burned. Cit­i­zens begin to wor­ry that they do not live in a soci­ety com­mit­ted to jus­tice. As we know from blacks who resent mis­treat­ment by the police, which is also unjust, this wor­ry can become explo­sive, even among those not per­son­al­ly affect­ed.”
    • Kyle Rit­ten­house, Pop­ulist Hero (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If I were a polling firm, I would run a nation­al poll ask­ing peo­ple who have heard of Kyle Rit­ten­house whether they think he’s a vil­lain, a hero, or don’t know. That would tell us a lot about the mood of the coun­try.”
  2. Unbe­com­ing Amer­i­can (Johann N. Neem, Hedge­hog Review): “A shared cul­ture is not a total­iz­ing one; indeed, it makes real plu­ral­ism pos­si­ble by giv­ing us some­thing larg­er to share regard­less of our many dif­fer­ences. Or so I believed. But when that shared world was rede­fined as white—and when white peo­ple, threat­ened by its loss, reclaimed it—I found myself an exile. A per­son los­ing his coun­try. I felt myself unbe­com­ing in more than one sense. On col­lege cam­pus­es, includ­ing the one where I now teach, the left impos­es new bound­aries on thought and speech in its effort to chal­lenge his­tor­i­cal bound­aries, while, in pol­i­tics, the right embraces bound­aries that we had hoped nev­er to see again.” The author, a man of Indi­an descent, is a his­to­ri­an at West­ern Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. I real­ly liked this arti­cle.
    • Fol­low-up inter­view: An Immi­grant’s Plea: “Don’t Con­vert to White­ness” (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “My biggest fear, actu­al­ly, is vio­lence. We for­get that social order is frag­ile. You don’t have to look far to see how preva­lent eth­nic or reli­gious vio­lence is around the world. If we form tribes, we will respond in hate­ful ways to each oth­er. Right­ly or wrong­ly, peo­ple will feel belea­guered. We will get angri­er and angri­er. There will be less empa­thy.” I share his con­cern. 
  3. Advice For Stu­dents In a Time of Strife (a whole pas­sel of Prince­ton pro­fes­sors, First Things): “Remem­ber, as an Amer­i­can col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent you are one of the luckiest—most privileged—people on plan­et earth. Do not fall into the trap of think­ing of your­self as a vic­tim or build­ing an iden­ti­ty for your­self around that idea. You can avoid the trap while strong­ly stand­ing up for your right to fair and equal treat­ment and bold­ly work­ing for reform where there are dou­ble stan­dards need­ing to be rec­ti­fied.” Tech­ni­cal­ly not a whole pas­sel, which con­notes a large but uncer­tain num­ber. I count 16 sig­na­to­ries!
  4. Chi­na Secret­ly Built A Vast New Infra­struc­ture To Imprison Mus­lims (Megha Rajagopalan, Ali­son Killing, and Chris­to Buschek, Buz­zfeed): “Down­load­ing What­sApp, which is banned in Chi­na, main­tain­ing ties with fam­i­ly abroad, engag­ing in prayer, and vis­it­ing a for­eign web­site are all offens­es for which Mus­lims have been sent to camps, accord­ing to pre­vi­ous­ly leaked doc­u­ments and inter­views with for­mer detainees. Because the gov­ern­ment does not con­sid­er intern­ment camps to be part of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and none of these behav­iors are crimes under Chi­nese law, no detainees have been for­mal­ly arrest­ed or charged with a crime, let alone seen a day in court.” I’ve shared sim­i­lar news this before. This arti­cle is fresh and espe­cial­ly damn­ing.
    • Part 2: What They Saw: Ex-Pris­on­ers Detail The Hor­rors Of Chi­na’s Deten­tion Camps (Buz­zfeed): “More than a dozen for­mer detainees con­firmed to Buz­zFeed News that pris­on­ers were divid­ed into three cat­e­gories, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed by uni­form col­ors. Those in blue, like Pari­da and the major­i­ty of the peo­ple inter­viewed for this arti­cle, were con­sid­ered the least threat­en­ing. Often, they were accused of minor trans­gres­sions, like down­load­ing banned apps to their phones or hav­ing trav­eled abroad. Imams, reli­gious peo­ple, and oth­ers con­sid­ered sub­ver­sive to the state were placed in the strictest group — and were usu­al­ly shack­led even inside the camp.”
    • Part 3: Blanked-Out Spots On Chi­na’s Maps Helped Us Uncov­er Xin­jiang’s Camps (Buz­zfeed): “Our break­through came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satel­lite imagery tiles load­ing in the vicin­i­ty of one of the known camps while using the Chi­nese map­ping plat­form Baidu Maps. The satel­lite imagery was old, but oth­er­wise fine when zoomed out — but at a cer­tain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp loca­tion…. We ana­lyzed the masked loca­tions by com­par­ing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the Euro­pean Space Agency’s Sen­tinel Hub, and Plan­et Labs.” This one will be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing to CS peo­ple. 
  5. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez talks about trust­ing the news (Twit­ter): “…when you see a FACT that is report­ed, cit­ed, and ver­i­fied by sev­er­al rep­utable out­lets, 99.999% it’s going to be true. HOWEVER! There is a big dif­fer­ence between a fact and the STORY. And the STORY (often the head­line) that’s sur­round­ing the fact is fre­quent­ly stretched, mis­char­ac­ter­ized, or dra­ma­tized to get you to click.” She and I have a remark­ably sim­i­lar per­spec­tive on the media.
    • Relat­ed: Giv­en my time again, I would­n’t choose jour­nal­ism (Sarah Ditum, Unherd): “Being mad was impor­tant because the eco­nom­ics of this kind of con­tent required fast out­put (since time­li­ness is crit­i­cal) and high engage­ment (since this is how edi­tors, and writ­ers, mea­sure suc­cess). I write quick­ly when I’m angry, and anger begets more anger, so peo­ple are more like­ly to share and react. Not every­thing I wrote when this was my main form of jour­nal­ism was bad, but only some of it was good, and the worst of it had a dis­hon­esty that made me feel ashamed…” 
  6. Do Pro-Lif­ers Who Reject Trump Have ‘Blood on their Hands’? (David French, The DIs­patch): “Decades of data and decades of legal, polit­i­cal, and cul­tur­al devel­op­ments have com­bined to teach us a few, sim­ple real­i­ties about abor­tion in the Unit­ed States: 1. Pres­i­dents have been irrel­e­vant to the abor­tion rate; 2. Judges have been forces of sta­bil­i­ty, not change, in abor­tion law; 3. State leg­is­la­tures have had more influ­ence on abor­tion than Con­gress; 4. Even if Roe is over­turned, abor­tion will be most­ly unchanged in the U.S.; and 5. The pro-life move­ment has an enor­mous cul­tur­al advan­tage.“ Chock-full of insights. Despite the title, it is less about par­ti­san pol­i­tics and more about abor­tion in Amer­i­ca.

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 Facts Are Not Self‐Interpreting (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 184.

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 263

this one is short­er than nor­mal

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. Pan­demics Aren’t New—Just Look at Plagues in the Bible (Karen Engle, Logos): “With coro­n­avirus on everyone’s mind, ques­tions abound of whether the word ‘pan­dem­ic’ appears in the Bible, too. The short answer is no—’pandemic’ is not in the Bible. How­ev­er, the words “plague” and ‘pesti­lence’ are (no less than 122 times) and often ref­er­ence indi­vid­u­als or nations afflict­ed with a ter­ri­ble ill­ness.”
  2. ‘Chris­tian­i­ty Will Have Pow­er’ (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “‘Trump’s an out­sider, like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is. Is he a man of integri­ty? Absolute­ly not,’ he went on. ‘Does he stand up for some of our moral Chris­t­ian val­ues? Yes.’ The guys agreed. ‘I’m not going to say he’s a Chris­t­ian, but he just doesn’t attack us,’ his friend Jason Mul­der said.” Need­less­ly snarky at times, but one of the rare mus­ings on evan­gel­i­cal Trump sup­port in a promi­nent media source that gets a lot of things right.
    • An inter­est­ing counter-per­spec­tive: Chris­tians want pow­er? Sioux Cen­ter push­es back on New York Times sto­ry (Lee Pitts, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Our church small group [in Sioux Cen­ter] is more diverse than my small groups in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. We enjoy the com­pa­ny of three peo­ple from Mex­i­co, a gen­tle­man from Paraguay, a woman from Japan, an engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor from Ghana and a cou­ple orig­i­nal­ly from that exot­ic place called South Car­oli­na (that’s me). In fact, out of our 12-mem­ber small group, only two orig­i­nal­ly hail from North­west Iowa. Mean­while my D.C. small groups fea­tured all upper mid­dle-class White peo­ple most­ly sport­ing advanced degrees and flashy jobs inside the Belt­way. But the stereo­type would reverse that. My Sioux Cen­ter small group should be all White and my D.C. one would sure­ly be full of diver­si­ty, right? Wrong.” This arti­cle doesn’t real­ly rebut many of the reli­gious claims of the NY Times arti­cle, but it does under­cut some of the cul­tur­al ones.
  3. Wok­e­ness: old reli­gion in a new bot­tle (Sean Collins, Spiked): “What we’re see­ing now is an ampli­fi­ca­tion of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that has no out­let. There’s no way to see peo­ple kneel­ing, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or sway­ing while they hold up can­dles, and avoid acknowl­edg­ing that it’s dri­ven by a spir­i­tu­al desire. I per­ceived this when I wrote about Occu­py Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that is man­i­fest­ing itself more vio­lent­ly. Because to the post-Protes­tants, the world is an out­rage and we are all sin­ners.”
  4. How Megachurch­es Spent Coro­n­avirus Relief Funds (Luke Scorziell, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Accord­ing to Vaughn’s account­ing, the church spent 93 per­cent of the mon­ey on pay­roll. The addi­tion­al 7 per­cent went to rent and util­i­ties. The PPP rules say loans will be con­vert­ed to grants if 75 per­cent of the funds are used for pay­roll and the rest for spec­i­fied needs, includ­ing rent and util­i­ties. The mon­ey helped with more than just pay­ing the bills, how­ev­er. Because Palm Valley’s staff didn’t have to wor­ry about their job secu­ri­ty, they were able to focus ful­ly on car­ing for the church in the pan­dem­ic, Vaughn said.”
  5. Abol­ish the Police? Those Who Sur­vived the Chaos in Seat­tle Aren’t So Sure (Nel­lie Bowles, New York Times): “Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own may­or that the protests in his home­town were peace­ful, with ‘a block par­ty atmos­phere.’ But that was not what he saw through the win­dows of his Seat­tle cof­fee shop.”
    • Relat­ed: replac­ing police with social work­ers (Jes­si­ca Crispin, per­son­al blog): “If we do not have police, an armed squadron of men and women asked to inter­vene in sit­u­a­tions we our­selves can­not man­age, whether that be crime, acute men­tal ill­ness, or vio­lence, then who will we turn to in those sit­u­a­tions? One such pro­pos­al is to replace police with social work­ers. But as my friend R. said to me as we dis­cussed these ideas, ‘I don’t think these peo­ple have inter­act­ed with social work­ers.’ ” This is a per­spec­tive I had not heard before.
  6. Injus­tice, Out­rage, and the Prob­lem of Atheod­i­cy (Pub­lic Square): “In a world with­out God, there is no ulti­mate pur­pose in the injus­tice. And there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty of any ulti­mate prov­i­den­tial redemp­tion. It is just raw, rank, irra­tional injus­tice. And so what is the appro­pri­ate reac­tion? Out­rage! (And per­haps also despair.)” The author is a law prof at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego. Also, bear in mind that Pub­lic Square is the Mor­mon equiv­a­lent of First Things.
  7. Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Com­plete­ly Garbage’ (Steven Levy, Wired): “The major­i­ty of all US tests are com­plete­ly garbage, wast­ed. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reim­burse at the same lev­el, of course they’re going to take every cus­tomer. Because they are mak­ing ridicu­lous mon­ey, and it’s most­ly rich peo­ple that are get­ting access to that. You have to have the reim­burse­ment sys­tem pay a lit­tle bit extra for 24 hours, pay the nor­mal fee for 48 hours, and pay noth­ing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.”

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 Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

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 256

FYI, I offer some of my own thoughts on police towards the end.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Rebel Physi­cist Try­ing to Fix Quan­tum Mechan­ics (Bob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Bassi is a prac­tic­ing Catholic and a believ­er in God, some­thing he says is ‘unusu­al’ but ‘not rare” among his col­leagues at the uni­ver­si­ty. Ein­stein called his own belief that real­i­ty could be under­stood ‘reli­gion,’ and I won­dered if there’s a con­nec­tion between Bassi’s reli­gious faith and that in what has become essen­tial­ly a far-right posi­tion in physics.” I have no opin­ion on the under­ly­ing sci­en­tif­ic con­tro­ver­sy, but Bassi sounds like a fas­ci­nat­ing per­son.
  2. What the Tent­mak­ing Busi­ness Was Real­ly Like for the Apos­tle Paul (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “[It] cost the Apos­tle Paul to write his let­ters, includ­ing the secur­ing of mate­ri­als and the hir­ing of a sec­re­tary to make a copy for him­self. After exten­sive research and cal­cu­la­tion, he deter­mined that on the low side it would have cost him at least $2,000 in today’s cur­ren­cy to write 1 Corinthi­ans. (And that doesn’t include the cost of send­ing some­one like Titus on a long jour­ney to deliv­er it.)” Short and fas­ci­nat­ing.
  3. The Tempt­ing of Neil Gor­such (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We may offi­cial­ly have three branch­es of gov­ern­ment, but Amer­i­cans seem to accept that it’s more like 2.25: A pres­i­den­cy that acts uni­lat­er­al­ly when­ev­er pos­si­ble, a high court that checks the White House and set­tles cul­ture wars, and a Con­gress that occa­sion­al­ly bestirs itself to pass a bud­get.”
  4. Reli­gious Amer­i­cans Have Less Pos­i­tive Atti­tudes Toward Sci­ence, But This Does Not Extend to Oth­er Cul­tures (Jonathon McPhetres, Jonathan Jong & Miron Zuck­er­man, Social Psy­cho­log­i­cal and Per­son­al­i­ty Sci­ence): “It is com­mon­ly claimed that sci­ence and reli­gion are log­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly at odds with one anoth­er. How­ev­er, pre­vi­ous stud­ies have main­ly exam­ined Amer­i­can sam­ples…” Raw data at https://osf.io/t7w6x/ DOI 10.1177/1948550620923239. The authors are pro­fes­sors at MIT, Oxford, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.
  5. “He’s the Cho­sen One to Run Amer­i­ca”: Inside the Cult of Trump, His Ral­lies Are Church and He Is the Gospel (Jeff Sharlet, Van­i­ty Fair): “Non­be­liev­ers roll their eyes over what they see as the gob­s­mack­ing hypocrisy of Trump as a tri­bune of fam­i­ly val­ues, the dopi­ness of the rubes who con­sid­er him a moral man. Non­be­liev­ers, in oth­er words, miss the point. They lack gno­sis. Very few believ­ers deny Trump’s sor­did past. Some turn to the old Chris­t­ian ready-made of redemp­tion: Their man was lost, but now he’s found. Oth­ers love him pre­cise­ly because he is a sinner—if a man of such vast, crass, and open appetites can embody the nation (and real­ly, who is more American—vast, crass, and open—than Trump), then you too, stu­dent of porn, mon­ster truck lover, ulti­mate fight­er in your dreams and games, can claim an anoint­ing.” The title filled me with low expec­ta­tions, but the arti­cle has some inter­est­ing reflec­tions on Gnos­ti­cism in mod­ern Amer­i­ca. 
  6. On reli­gious lib­er­ty:
    • The True Extent of Reli­gious Lib­er­ty in Amer­i­ca, Explained (David French, The Dis­patch): “Yes, it is true that in some respects reli­gious lib­er­ty is ‘under siege.’ There are activists and law­mak­ers who want to push back at mul­ti­ple doc­trines and some rad­i­cals even dream of revok­ing tax exemp­tions from reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions that main­tain tra­di­tion­al teach­ings on sex and gen­der. But if the siege is real, then so is the citadel. Peo­ple of faith in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca enjoy more lib­er­ty and more real polit­i­cal pow­er than any faith com­mu­ni­ty in the devel­oped world.” This is real­ly good.
    • No Longer a Lux­u­ry – Reli­gious Lib­er­ty is a Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Pri­or­i­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, Prov­i­dence): “…increas­es in reli­gious lib­er­ty are asso­ci­at­ed with robust increas­es in human flour­ish­ing even after con­trol­ling for dif­fer­ences in gross domes­tic prod­uct, the labor force, and mea­sures of eco­nom­ic free­dom. For exam­ple, mov­ing a coun­try that ranks in reli­gious lib­er­ty along the lines of Rus­sia to one that ranks clos­er to the Unit­ed States amounts to an 11 per­cent increase in the share of indi­vid­u­als who say that they are thriv­ing.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
    • Torah Is the Air We Breathe (Gil Stu­dent, First Things): “But our spir­i­tu­al­ly impov­er­ished soci­ety views reli­gious prac­tices as mere­ly cul­tur­al expres­sions. It views reli­gious ser­vices as equiv­a­lent to yoga class­es and book club meet­ings. It does not see reli­gion as essen­tial, and there­fore can­not under­stand that Jews don’t serve God as part of our lives; rather, we live to serve God.”
  7. On race, police, and protests
    • Above the Law: The Data Are In on Police, Killing, and Race (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “…police killings have made up about one out of every twelve vio­lent deaths of Amer­i­cans between 2010 and 2018. That’s includ­ing Amer­i­can mil­i­tary deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and else­where dur­ing that win­dow. Indeed, more Amer­i­cans died at the hands of police offi­cers dur­ing that peri­od (about 14,400) than died while on active mil­i­tary duty (about 9,400). Police vio­lence in Amer­i­ca is extra­or­di­nary in its inten­si­ty. It is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the actu­al threats fac­ing police offi­cers, and it has risen sig­nif­i­cant­ly in recent years with­out appar­ent jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.”
    • Jew­ish busi­ness­es in Los Ange­les ran­sacked in riots, but only Israeli and Jew­ish media care (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “The Ore­gon­ian called riot-plagued Port­land ‘a city of ply­wood.’ Since then, images have emerged of a dark­er nar­ra­tive, with riot­ers tar­get­ing Jew­ish busi­ness­es. Israeli news­pa­pers ran with this angle this past Sat­ur­day, but by the end of the day, there was noth­ing about the Jew­ish van­dal­ism to be found on the New York Times web­site. Usu­al­ly the Times is pret­ty up on anti-Semi­tism, but it was eas­i­er to find a piece about Anna Win­tour than any men­tions of van­dal­ized Jews.”
    • How Jesus became white — and why it’s time to can­cel that (Emi­ly McFar­lan Miller, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Ander­son said that it has been com­mon for peo­ple to depict Jesus as a mem­ber of their cul­ture or their eth­nic group. ‘If a per­son thinks that’s the only pos­si­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jesus, then that’s where the prob­lem starts,’ he said.” It’s almost like por­tray­ing God visu­al­ly leads to trou­ble. I wish God had thought to warn against that.
    • Reflec­tions from a Chris­t­ian schol­ar on Social Jus­tice, Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry, Marx­ism, and Bib­li­cal Ethics (Kel­ly Ham­ren, Face­book): “I have two Eng­lish degrees (B.A. and M.A.) from a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty and a Ph.D. in lit­er­a­ture and crit­i­cism from a state uni­ver­si­ty. In my field, Marx­ism is one of the most com­mon­ly stud­ied and most influ­en­tial per­spec­tives, and Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry is also a sig­nif­i­cant force and gain­ing momen­tum.… my stud­ies have con­vinced me that the suf­fer­ings and deaths of mil­lions are not only cor­re­lat­ed with but large­ly caused by the Marx­ist-Lenin­ist agen­da, and I am there­fore deeply opposed to Marx­ism as a frame­work. I hope that, know­ing this, those patient enough to read these notes will acquit me of being a clos­et Marx­ist cov­er­ing a sec­u­lar agen­da with a veneer of Bible vers­es.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Law pro­fes­sor’s response to stu­dent offend­ed by their shirt (Patri­cia Leary, Imgur): “Premise: You are not pay­ing for my opin­ion. Cri­tique: You are not pay­ing me to pre­tend I don’t have one.” Two com­ments: first, this is a few years old. Sec­ond, ini­tial­ly looks made-up but checks out. The author is a pro­fes­sor at Whit­ti­er Law School: Law pro­fes­sor responds to stu­dents who com­plained about her Black Lives Mat­ter shirt (Scott Jaschik, Inside High­er Ed) 
    • The New Truth (Jacob Siegel, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What we are wit­ness­ing, in the rapid­ly trans­form­ing norms around race, sex, and gen­der, is not an argu­ment at all but a rev­o­lu­tion in moral sen­ti­ment. In all rev­o­lu­tions, the new thing strug­gling to be born makes use of the old sys­tem in order to over­throw it. At present, insti­tu­tions like the uni­ver­si­ty, the press, and the med­ical pro­fes­sion pre­serve the appear­ance of rea­son, empiri­cism, and argu­ment while alter­ing, through edict and coer­cion, the mean­ing of essen­tial terms in the moral lex­i­con, like fair­ness, equal­i­ty, friend­ship, and love.”
    • His­to­ry Shows Free Speech Is The Los­er In Mob Action (Jonathan Tur­ley, per­son­al blog): “What will be left when objec­tion­able pub­lic art and aca­d­e­mics are scrubbed from view? The silence that fol­lows may be com­fort­ing to those who want to remove images or ideas that cause unease. His­to­ry has shown, how­ev­er, that ortho­doxy is nev­er sat­is­fied with silence. It demands speech. Once all the offend­ing stat­ues are down, and all the offend­ing pro­fes­sors are culled, the appetite for col­lec­tive sup­pres­sion will become a demand for col­lec­tive expres­sion.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Of Stat­ues and Sym­bol­ic Mur­der (Wil­fred M. McClay, First Things): “…a great many of the foot sol­diers in this move­ment are young, white, sub­ur­ban, mid­dle-class and col­lege-edu­cat­ed; and that they are work­ing out their sal­va­tion with fear and trem­bling and a dead­ly earnest­ness. The ‘white priv­i­lege’ of which these young peo­ple com­plain is a pro­jec­tion onto oth­ers of the very con­di­tion that they sus­pect and fear in them­selves. Hence the con­vul­sive rage, com­plete with copi­ous gut­ter pro­fan­i­ty, which we have all seen in videos of them. Peo­ple in the grip of such pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal forces will go a long way to expi­ate for their exis­ten­tial sins and rid them­selves of their demons. They are eas­i­ly mobi­lized by oth­ers. Accord­ing to Pew esti­mates, only one out of six Black Lives Mat­ter activists is actu­al­ly black.”
      1. Relat­ed to the last sen­tence: George Floyd Pro­test­er Demo­graph­ics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities (Mobile­Wal­la report) has bar charts based on sur­veilling the cell phones of peo­ple at the protests and infer­ring their demo­graph­ics the way mar­keters do. 
    • A Min­neapo­lis Neigh­bor­hood Vowed to Check Its Priv­i­lege. It’s Already Being Test­ed. (Caitlin Dick­er­son, New York Times): “The impulse many white Pow­der­horn Park res­i­dents have to seek help from com­mu­ni­ty groups rather than from the police is being felt in neigh­bor­hoods across the coun­try. But some are find­ing the com­mit­ment hard to stand by when faced with the com­plex real­i­ties of life. While friends, neigh­bors and even fam­i­ly mem­bers in Pow­der­horn Park agree to avoid call­ing the police at all costs, it has been hard­er to estab­lish where to draw the line.” Read through to the insane final sto­ry. 
    • I don’t often insert my own com­men­tary in these emails, but in this case I’d like to high­light a Bib­li­cal per­spec­tive.
      1. The Bible teach­es that one of the rea­sons that God gives gov­ern­ments author­i­ty is for them to use vio­lence in the pur­suit of jus­tice. Romans 13:4 is key: “the one in author­i­ty is God’s ser­vant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no rea­son. They are God’s ser­vants, agents of wrath to bring pun­ish­ment on the wrong­do­er.”
      2. We have free­dom in how we choose to do that as a soci­ety — the Bible does not require that we use police or that we build pris­ons. Hav­ing said that, if we abol­ish domes­tic law enforce­ment then the only alter­na­tives I see are the mil­i­tary, pri­vate busi­ness­es that offer pro­tec­tion for a fee, sanc­tioned vig­i­lan­tism, or mob jus­tice. These are not appeal­ing options. Some com­bi­na­tion of unbundling police work, reduc­ing crim­i­nal laws while rethink­ing the sanc­tions for vio­lat­ing them, and increas­ing police pay while impos­ing high­er stan­dards for police con­duct seems like a bet­ter path for­ward.

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 When Chil­dren Say They’re Trans (Jesse Sin­gal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a con­nec­tion between social influ­ences and gender-identity explo­ration among ado­les­cents would require ignor­ing a lot of what we know about the devel­op­ing teenage brain—which is more sus­cep­ti­ble to peer influ­ence, more impul­sive, and less adept at weigh­ing long-term out­comes and con­se­quences than ful­ly devel­oped adult brains—as well as indi­vid­ual sto­ries like Delta’s.” This is a long and bal­anced piece which has gar­nered out­rage in some online cir­cles. First shared in vol­ume 157.

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 255

Again, the stand­alone stuff is up top and the cur­rent news items are towards the end.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Ditch­ing Insta­gram Earned me the Podi­um (Madi­son Fis­ch­er, per­son­al blog): “I cared so much about what every­one thought of me that it became out­sourced con­fi­dence…. Pride in my accom­plish­ments made me con­tent, and con­tent­ed­ness is poi­son to a young ath­lete who has to stay hun­gry if she wants to stay com­pet­i­tive.”
  2. The Finan­cial Fin­ish Line (Christi­na Dar­nell, Min­istry Watch): “Giv­ing has always been anoth­er bedrock prin­ci­ple for the Barn­harts. The com­pa­ny com­mit­ted to giv­ing half of their prof­its to min­istry. The oth­er half goes to grow­ing the busi­ness. The first year, they gave away $50,000. The next year, it was $150,000. It grew to $1 mil­lion a year—then $1 mil­lion a month.” An inspir­ing sto­ry.
  3. On Cul­tures That Build (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “In the 21st cen­tu­ry, the main ques­tion in Amer­i­can social life is not ‘how do we make that hap­pen?’ but ‘how do we get man­age­ment to take our side?’ This is a learned response, and a cul­ture which has inter­nal­ized it will not be a cul­ture that ‘builds.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Amer­i­ca’s Insti­tu­tions Are Fail­ing (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “What­ev­er the true cause for our fail­ure, when I look at the twin cat­a­stro­phes of this annus hor­ri­bilis, the plague and the police protests, what strikes me is that America’s safe­keep­ing insti­tu­tions have for­got­ten how to prop­er­ly see the threats of the 21st cen­tu­ry and move quick­ly to respond to them. Those who deny his­to­ry may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed.”
  4. Is There a Reli­gious Left? (Casey Cep, New York­er): “The daugh­ter of a Bap­tist preach­er who was once the dean of the Howard Uni­ver­si­ty School of Divin­i­ty, New­some came by her faith and her preach­ing hon­est­ly, yet almost all of the pub­lic­i­ty that fol­lowed her act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence [tak­ing down the Con­fed­er­ate flag] stripped her protest of its the­o­log­i­cal tenor. Such is the fate of much of the activism of the so-called reli­gious left: if it is suc­cess­ful, it is sub­sumed by broad­er caus­es and coali­tions; if it fails, it is for­got­ten.” 
  5. Race in Amer­i­ca
    • Most US Pas­tors Speak Out in Response to George Floy­d’s Death (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Near­ly all US pas­tors (94%) agree that ‘the church has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to denounce racism,’ and most (62%) say their church has made a state­ment on the unrest stem­ming from the May 25 death of George Floyd, accord­ing to a Bar­na Church Pulse Poll released today. The poll, con­duct­ed over the past week, also found that 76 per­cent of pas­tors say the church should sup­port peace­ful protests occur­ring in response to Floyd’s killing.”
    • What the Bible Has to Say About Black Anger (Esau McCauley, New York Times): “Jesus expe­ri­enced the real­i­ty of state-spon­sored ter­ror. That is why the black Chris­t­ian has always felt a par­tic­u­lar kin­ship with this cru­ci­fied king from an oppressed eth­nic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynch­ing tree.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton. 
    • On the Unjust Death of George Floyd and Racism in Amer­i­ca (Mar­co Rubio, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Like before, the lat­est unrest has giv­en rise to voic­es argu­ing that the foun­da­tions of our repub­lic are built on sys­temic racism and must there­fore be brought down. The only dif­fer­ence is that this time claims like these don’t just come from the fringes of our pol­i­tics. Like before, we also have voic­es who say that today race is a fac­tor only in indi­vid­ual cas­es, dis­tinct from our soci­ety at large. Both of these views are wrong.” This was a speech giv­en on the floor of the Sen­ate.
    • Racist Police Vio­lence Recon­sid­ered (John McWhort­er, Quil­lette): “…these fig­ures are not nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dence of police racism. Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post‘s data­base, over 95 per­cent of the peo­ple fatal­ly shot by police offi­cers in 2019 were male, and no seri­ous-mind­ed per­son argues that this is evi­dence of sys­temic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the dis­pro­por­tion­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of black men among those killed by cops?” McWhort­er is a pro­fes­sor of lin­guis­tics at Colum­bia. 
    • Sto­ries and Data (Cole­man Hugh­es, City Jour­nal): “…the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it.” The author is a fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute.
    • A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Polic­ing (Felipe Goncalves & Steven Mel­lo, SSRN): “Using a bunch­ing esti­ma­tion design and data from the Flori­da High­way Patrol, we show that minori­ties are less like­ly to receive a dis­count on their speed­ing tick­ets than white dri­vers. Dis­ag­gre­gat­ing this dif­fer­ence to the indi­vid­ual police offi­cer, we find that 40% of offi­cers explain all of the aggre­gate dis­crim­i­na­tion.” 40% is HUGE!
    • Why I Stopped Talk­ing About Racial Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and Start­ed Talk­ing About White Suprema­cy (Erna Kim Hack­ett, Inher­i­tance Mag­a­zine): “The term white suprema­cy labels the prob­lem more accu­rate­ly. It locates the prob­lem on white­ness and its sys­tems. It focus­es on out­comes, not inten­tions. It is col­lec­tive, not indi­vid­ual. It makes white­ness uncom­fort­able and respon­si­ble. And that is impor­tant.” Shared with me by a stu­dent.
  6. On Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism:
    • The Amer­i­can Sovi­et Men­tal­i­ty (Izabel­la Tabarovsky, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The mobs that per­form the unan­i­mous con­dem­na­tion rit­u­als of today do not fol­low orders from above. But that does not dimin­ish their pow­er to exert pres­sure on those under their influ­ence. Those of us who came out of the col­lec­tivist Sovi­et cul­ture under­stand these dynam­ics instinc­tive­ly.” The author is a schol­ar with the Wil­son Cen­ter.
    • Is There Still Room for Debate? (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “Lib­er­al­ism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spir­it to it. A spir­it that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ide­ol­o­gy — friend­ship, art, love, sex, schol­ar­ship, fam­i­ly. A spir­it that seeks not to impose ortho­doxy but to open up the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the human mind and soul.”
    • The Amer­i­can Press Is Destroy­ing Itself (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “It isn’t the whole sto­ry, but it’s demon­stra­bly true that vio­lence, arson, and riot­ing are occur­ring. How­ev­er, because it is polit­i­cal­ly unten­able to dis­cuss this in ways that do not sug­gest sup­port, reporters have been twist­ing them­selves into knots. We are see­ing head­lines pre­vi­ous­ly imag­in­able only in The Onion, e.g., ‘27 police offi­cers injured dur­ing large­ly peace­ful anti-racism protests in Lon­don.’”
    • The woke rev­o­lu­tion in Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism has begun (Damon Link­er, The Week): “In place of dif­fi­cul­ty, com­plex­i­ty, and com­pli­ca­tion, today’s jour­nal­is­tic rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies crave tidy moral lessons with clear vil­lains and heroes. They cham­pi­on sim­plic­i­ty, embrace moral uplift, and seek out evil­do­ers to demo­nize.” See also his ear­li­er col­umn Don’t will­ful­ly ignore the com­plex­i­ty of what’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now

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 com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” First shared in vol­ume 156.

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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.