Tag: politics

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 233

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

I had hoped to include some stuff on Iran but that did­n’t hap­pen. Too much oth­er inter­est­ing stuff came up.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The His­to­ri­an as Moral­ist (Yuval Levin, Nation­al Review): “Prop­er­ly under­stood, the moral­ist calls soci­ety to its high­est self, per­haps espe­cial­ly by help­ing a soci­ety under­stand the ways in which what it thinks are its strengths are actu­al­ly its weak­ness­es. And an effec­tive moral­ist would do this in an engag­ing and com­pelling way. The ablest moral­ist is thus almost inevitably a kind of intel­lec­tu­al.” This was much bet­ter than I expect­ed.
  2. Scam Lures Speak­ers to Fake UK Church Con­fer­ences (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This email scheme has become the “Niger­ian prince” offer of the Chris­t­ian speak­ing cir­cuit, with hun­dreds of US Chris­t­ian lead­ers invit­ed to events at UK church­es by scam­mers who hope to col­lect hun­dreds of dol­lars in visa fees ahead of the pur­port­ed con­fer­ences.” What a niche scam! I won­der if this exists for oth­er pro­fes­sions.
  3. Chi­na: State­ment from Ear­ly Rain Covenant Church regard­ing Pas­tor Wang Yi’s severe sen­tence (Adam Ford, Dis­rn): “In Christ, we issue the fol­low­ing exhor­ta­tion and protest against Pas­tor Wang Yi’s severe sen­tence. Do you gov­ern­ment offi­cials not know that this is a sin against God? Do you not know that this is an abuse of your author­i­ty (Rom. 13:3)? Even so, we do not hate you. On the con­trary, our mer­ci­ful and right­eous God wants us to love you and to pray for you.”
  4. Hav­ing Kids (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “I remem­ber per­fect­ly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the abil­i­ty to take off for some oth­er coun­try at a momen­t’s notice. That was so great. Why did I nev­er do that? See what I did there? The fact is, most of the free­dom I had before kids, I nev­er used. I paid for it in lone­li­ness, but I nev­er used it.” 
  5. The Big Farmer Bailout Was Nev­er Debat­ed (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “This is a telling exam­ple of how pol­i­tics works–the process rather than the fun­da­men­tal ques­tion deter­mines much of the out­come.” Fas­ci­nat­ing. 
  6. Too much trans­paren­cy makes the world more opaque. (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The demand for trans­paren­cy seems so innocu­ous. Who could be against greater trans­paren­cy? But trans­paren­cy is inim­i­cal to pri­va­cy. And we care about pri­va­cy in part, because we can be more hon­est and truth­ful in pri­vate than in pub­lic.”
  7. 1776 Hon­ors America’s Diver­si­ty in a Way 1619 Does Not (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “My own judg­ment diverges some­what from the main rival fac­tions in this debate. Like many crit­ics, I hope the Times Mag­a­zine’s work suc­ceeds in caus­ing more Amer­i­cans to rec­og­nize the remark­able faith that African Amer­i­cans showed in our country’s promise even in eras when Amer­i­ca least deserved it. Yet the core refram­ing that the 1619 Project advo­cates would unwit­ting­ly set back, rather than advance, the caus­es of equi­ty and racial inclu­sion.”

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 No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 232

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

I’ve missed send­ing this email due to hol­i­day trav­els for a while, and I’ve got noth­ing on Iran yet. Too much is hap­pen­ing and I’m in a remote place with lim­it­ed inter­net access. Any­thing you find great please send my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Prob­lem Isn’t the ‘Mer­it,’ It’s the ‘Ocra­cy’ (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was built on the assump­tion that the most salient polit­i­cal divides would reflect geog­ra­phy, not ide­ol­o­gy or class. The sen­a­tor from Mass­a­chu­setts would share bonds in com­mon with the lay cit­i­zen­ry of Boston that he did not share with a sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na. On the nation­al sphere this would allow him to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of his con­stituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry than oth­ers; yet because of the way Amer­i­can politi­cians are elect­ed, this sense of rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of a geo­graph­i­cal­ly bound­ed group of peo­ple is more true in the polit­i­cal are­na than in most oth­ers.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Decade in review: Mar­i­tal norms erode (Ryan T. Ander­son and Robert P. George, USA Today): “Law shapes cul­ture; cul­ture shapes beliefs; beliefs shape action. The law now effec­tive­ly teach­es that moth­ers and fathers are replace­able, that mar­riage is sim­ply about con­sent­ing adult rela­tion­ships, of what­ev­er for­ma­tion the par­ties hap­pen to pre­fer. This under­mines the truth that chil­dren deserve a moth­er and a father — one of each.”
    • Fol­low-up by Rod Dreher: Fam­i­ly, Mem­o­ry, Pow­er (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “If you’re one of those peo­ple with a habit of say­ing, nobody has ever explained how all this is going to hurt het­ero­sex­u­al me, this is a good basic place to start. Moral­i­ty is an ecol­o­gy. This is the equiv­a­lent of inject­ing some­thing into the ground­wa­ter. It may be a good thing, or it may be a bad thing, but it does affect every­body. Peo­ple who say it doesn’t are lying — per­haps to them­selves.”
    • That fol­low-up inspired Pro­fes­sor George to reply: The Shame Of The Con­formists (this is on Dreher’s blog): “Some­one might say, ‘this is no time for recrim­i­na­tions.’ Well, I don’t agree. This is pre­cise­ly the time for recrim­i­na­tions. Indeed, there was nev­er a bet­ter time. Stand­ing bold­ly for what is true and good and right and just is everybody’s job. It’s not just ‘oth­er people’s’ job. Espe­cial­ly to my fel­low Chris­tians I say, it is OUR job. It comes with the Gospel ter­ri­to­ry. You say ‘it’s hard’? Of course, it’s hard. But who ever told you that Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship was not going to be hard? Or risky? Or cost­ly? Not Jesus, that’s for sure. He told us–in the most explic­it terms–that it was going to be hard–very hard–and risky, and cost­ly. “
  3. Yes, Jesus Was a Refugee. He Still Is. (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “When most peo­ple talk about Jesus being a refugee, they’re not talk­ing about Beth­le­hem but the family’s flight to Egypt. Some time after his birth, Herod got pan­icky about rumors of a new king and sent sol­diers to kill all the new­borns in Beth­le­hem. An angel warned Joseph and Mary to high­tail it to Egypt where they could safe­ly lay low. Egypt made for an ide­al hid­ing place, con­nect­ed to Judea via a well-trav­eled and rel­a­tive­ly safe trade route known as the Via Maris. The argu­ment for Mary and Joseph’s refugee sta­tus here is about as strong as it could be under the cir­cum­stances.”
  4. Bib­li­cal Archaeology’s Top 10 Dis­cov­er­ies of 2019 (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…many of the main­stream media sto­ries announc­ing these dis­cov­er­ies acknowl­edged that the Bible was right all along or right after all in these instances. Archae­ol­o­gist Nel­son Glueck’s dec­la­ra­tion that ‘no archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery has ever con­tro­vert­ed a Bib­li­cal ref­er­ence’ still stands.”
  5. Some fol­low-ups to the Chris­tian­i­ty Today arti­cle I shared last time call­ing for Trump’s removal from office:
    • The Flag in the Whirl­wind: An Update from CT’s Pres­i­dent (Tim Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a polit­i­cal land­scape dom­i­nat­ed by polar­iza­tion, hos­til­i­ty, and mis­un­der­stand­ing, we believe it’s crit­i­cal for Chris­tians to mod­el how to have a firm opin­ion and host free dis­cus­sion at the same time. Evan­gel­i­cals of dif­fer­ent stripes can­not con­tin­ue to shout one anoth­er down, bul­ly those who dis­agree, or exclude one anoth­er and refuse to lis­ten. We hold fast to our view that the whole­heart­ed evan­gel­i­cal embrace of Trump has been enor­mous­ly costly—but we are com­mit­ted to irenic con­ver­sa­tion with men and women of good faith who believe oth­er­wise.”
      • Side note: the author was a gym­nast at Stan­ford who was active­ly involved in cam­pus min­istry while here (his time pre­ced­ed my tenure at Chi Alpha, to my knowl­edge we have nev­er met or even been in the same ZIP code). There’s an arti­cle about his sto­ry back in vol­ume 191. 
    • What It Would Take for Evan­gel­i­cals to Turn on Pres­i­dent Trump (Michael Luo, New York­er): “…though greater reli­gios­i­ty is cor­re­lat­ed with Chris­t­ian-nation­al­ist beliefs, once those beliefs are account­ed for, Amer­i­cans who engaged in more fre­quent reli­gious practice—church atten­dance, prayer, and bible reading—were less like­ly than their less obser­vant peers to sub­scribe to polit­i­cal views nor­mal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, such as believ­ing that refugees from the Mid­dle East pose a ter­ror­ist threat to the Unit­ed States, or that ille­gal immi­grants from Mex­i­co are most­ly dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals. In oth­er words, White­head and Per­ry find that the threat to demo­c­ra­t­ic plu­ral­ism is not evan­gel­i­cal­ism itself but the cul­ture around evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
    • Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.”
    • Trump Should Not Be Removed from Office: A Response to Mark Gal­li and Chris­tian­i­ty Today (Wayne Gru­dem, Town­hall): “If evan­gel­i­cals fail to sup­port Don­ald Trump after he has deliv­ered on so many issues impor­tant to Chris­t­ian val­ues, many peo­ple will con­clude that we real­ly do not care about con­ser­v­a­tive judges, the pro­tec­tion of the unborn, the pro­tec­tion of gen­der dis­tinc­tions, reli­gious free­dom, con­science pro­tec­tions for Chris­tians in the work­place, a strong enough mil­i­tary to pro­tect us against threats from Chi­na, North Korea, Rus­sia, and Iran, jobs,wages, eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties for minori­ties, a secure bor­der, Israel, afford­able ener­gy (espe­cial­ly for the poor), ener­gy inde­pen­dence, the pro­tec­tion of prop­er­ty rights, expand­ing parental choice for schools, revi­tal­iz­ing NATO, pro­tect­ing free­dom of speech on cam­pus­es, and many oth­er things. Gal­li dis­miss­es these con­cerns with the label ‘polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy,’ but all of these issues affect people’s ordi­nary lives. These issues real­ly do mat­ter. On issue after issue, Pres­i­dent Trump is chang­ing the direc­tion of the coun­try for the bet­ter. When I weigh these results against his some­times impre­cise and coarse speech, there is no com­par­i­son.”
    • Where Cain Got His Wife, and Oth­er Issues Relat­ed to the 2020 Elec­tion (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “As men­tioned above, I did not vote for the pres­i­dent in 2016. I did not vote for him because char­ac­ter mat­ters, and because I did not trust him to do what he was promis­ing to do…. And with that said, I have to acknowl­edge I was wrong… If any­thing, the great mass of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers have demon­strat­ed that they actu­al­ly have a bet­ter set of polit­i­cal instincts than their lead­ers, me includ­ed.”
  6. My Semes­ter With the Snowflakes (James Hatch, Medi­um): “In May of 2019, I was accept­ed to the Eli Whit­ney stu­dent pro­gram at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. At 52, I am the old­est fresh­man in the class of 2023. Before I was accept­ed, I didn’t real­ly know what to expect. I had seen the infa­mous YouTube video of stu­dents scream­ing at a fac­ul­ty mem­ber. I had seen the news sto­ries regard­ing the admis­sions scan­dal and that Yale was includ­ed in that unfor­tu­nate busi­ness. I had also heard the stu­dents at Yale referred to as ‘snowflakes’ in var­i­ous social media dump­sters and occa­sion­al­ly I’d seen ref­er­ences to Ivy League stu­dents as snowflakes in a few news sources.” (there’s an inter­est­ing fol­low-up inter­view with him on NPR)
  7. Two aca­d­e­m­ic things I found inter­est­ing:
    • Com­par­ing meta-analy­ses and pre­reg­is­tered mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tion projects (Aman­da Kvar­ven, Eirik Strøm­land & Mag­nus Johan­nes­son, Nature Human Behav­ior): “We com­pare the results of meta-analy­ses to large-scale pre­reg­is­tered repli­ca­tions in psy­chol­o­gy car­ried out at mul­ti­ple lab­o­ra­to­ries. The mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions pro­vide pre­cise­ly esti­mat­ed effect sizes that do not suf­fer from pub­li­ca­tion bias or selec­tive report­ing. We searched the lit­er­a­ture and iden­ti­fied 15 meta-analy­ses on the same top­ics as mul­ti­ple-lab­o­ra­to­ry repli­ca­tions. We find that meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from repli­ca­tion effect sizes for 12 out of the 15 meta-repli­ca­tion pairs. These dif­fer­ences are sys­tem­at­ic and, on aver­age, meta-ana­lyt­ic effect sizes are almost three times as large as repli­ca­tion effect sizes.” uh-oh. 
    • The Many Faces of Sci­en­tif­ic Fraud (Nico­las Chevas­sus-au-Louis, Quil­lette): “Is every sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle a fraud? This ques­tion may seem puz­zling to those out­side the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. After all, any­one who took a phi­los­o­phy course in col­lege is like­ly to think of lab­o­ra­to­ry work as emi­nent­ly ratio­nal. The assump­tion is that a researcher faced with an enig­ma posed by nature for­mu­lates a hypoth­e­sis, then con­ceives an exper­i­ment to test its valid­i­ty…. How­ev­er, as every researcher knows, it is pure false­hood. In real­i­ty, noth­ing takes place the way it is described in a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle. The exper­i­ments were car­ried out in a far more dis­or­dered man­ner, in stages far less log­i­cal than those relat­ed in the arti­cle. If you look at it that way, a sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle is a kind of trick.” The author has a Ph.D. in biol­o­gy and this is an excerpt from a book he is pub­lish­ing with Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 231

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

A Christ­mas reminder: Chi Alpha is a donor-fund­ed min­istry. This week­ly roundup of links is one small part of what we do to equip stu­dents to live for Christ in a con­fused cul­ture. If you’d like to make a spe­cial year-end gift to help us reach future lead­ers, vis­it https://glenandpaula.com/giving. Every pen­ny counts — thanks!

On to the things Glen found inter­est­ing:

  1. Trump Should Be Removed from Office (Mark Gal­li, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Sen­ate or by pop­u­lar vote next election—that is a mat­ter of pru­den­tial judg­ment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a mat­ter of par­ti­san loy­al­ties but loy­al­ty to the Cre­ator of the Ten Com­mand­ments.”
    • Emma Green nabbed an inter­view with Gal­li about the edi­to­r­i­al: How Trump Lost an Evan­gel­i­cal Stal­wart (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “So I am a great believ­er in the prov­i­dence of God, and that he will, in his grace, mer­cy, and mys­te­ri­ous judg­ment, help us through this peri­od. It’s not my respon­si­bil­i­ty to heal the breach among evan­gel­i­cals. It’s not my respon­si­bil­i­ty to bring peace to the world. My respon­si­bil­i­ty, giv­en the posi­tion I have, what­ev­er it might be, is to speak the truth. If it makes a dif­fer­ence, I am thank­ful to God. And if it doesn’t make a dif­fer­ence, that’s kind of up to him.”
    • When the CT Edi­tor’s Feel­ings Trump Facts (Jim Gar­low, Charis­ma News): “Numer­ous high-vis­i­bil­i­ty evan­gel­i­cals have had oppor­tu­ni­ty to be with the pres­i­dent, to coun­sel him and to pray with him. Some have spo­ken truth to lead­er­ship. Wise­ly, they do not dis­cuss the con­tent of those meet­ings pub­licly. Nor should they. They are con­sid­er­ably more aware of the ‘heart’ of the pres­i­dent than is Mr. Gal­li. If he knew what they know about Mr. Trump, Gal­li would not have writ­ten such an arti­cle.”
    • I sus­pect Charisma’s op-ed is clos­er to the per­spec­tive of most evan­gel­i­cal Trump sup­port­ers than Chris­tian­i­ty Today’s is. For con­text, Chris­tian­i­ty Today post­ed sim­i­lar op-eds dur­ing each of the two pre­vi­ous impeach­ments.
    • Speak­ing of the pre­vi­ous impeach­ments, did you real­ize that from Nixon until now â…“ of U.S. pres­i­dents have been impeached? Props to Ross Douthat for notic­ing that. 
  2. A Sci­ence-Based Case for End­ing the Porn Epi­dem­ic (Pas­cal-Emmanuel Gob­ry, Amer­i­can Great­ness): “Since it seems some­how rel­e­vant, let me state at the out­set that I am French. Every fiber of my Latin, Catholic body recoils at puri­tanism of any sort, espe­cial­ly the bizarre, Anglo-Puri­tan kind so preva­lent in Amer­i­ca. I believe eroti­cism is one of God’s great­est gifts to humankind, prud­ish­ness a bizarre aber­ra­tion, and not so long ago, hyper­bol­ic warn­ings about the per­ils of pornog­ra­phy, whether from my Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian or pro­gres­sive fem­i­nist friends, had me rolling my eyes…. The evi­dence is in: porn is as addic­tive as smok­ing, or more, except that what smok­ing does to your lungs, porn does to your brain.”
    • Relat­ed: Let’s Fix the Pornog­ra­phy Prob­lem (Jim Banks, First Things): “The preva­lence of pornog­ra­phy in our soci­ety has con­se­quences, espe­cial­ly for our chil­dren. It’s time to start talk­ing about it, and it’s time for the gov­ern­ment to get involved.” The author is a Repub­li­can mem­ber of con­gress.
  3. The New Tes­ta­ment Doesn’t Say What Most Peo­ple Think It Does About Heav­en (N.T. Wright, Time): “The book of Rev­e­la­tion ends, not with souls going up to heav­en, but with the New Jerusalem com­ing down to earth, so that ‘the dwelling of God is with humans.’ The whole cre­ation, declares St. Paul, will be set free from its slav­ery to cor­rup­tion, to enjoy God’s intend­ed free­dom.”
  4. Los­ing Faith in the Human­i­ties (Simon Dur­ing, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Faith has been lost across two dif­fer­ent zones: first, reli­gion; then, high cul­ture…. Cul­tur­al sec­u­lar­iza­tion resem­bles ear­li­er reli­gious sec­u­lar­iza­tion. What hap­pened to Chris­t­ian rev­e­la­tion and the Bible is now hap­pen­ing to the idea of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion and ‘the best that has been thought and said,’ in Arnold’s famous phrase.”
  5. This Cul­tur­al Moment (pod­cast): I’ve been lis­ten­ing to this pod­cast about fol­low­ing Jesus in the post-Chris­t­ian world upon the rec­om­men­da­tion of some alum­ni and a stu­dent. It’s quite good. Def­i­nite­ly start with episode 1.
  6. What Would Jesus Do About Inequal­i­ty? (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “In today’s evan­gel­i­cal­ism, this is where the the­o­log­i­cal action is: the faith and work move­ment, the inter­sec­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty with the demands of the work­place and the broad­er econ­o­my — in a soci­ety that is one of the world’s wealth­i­est, yet per­sis­tent­ly inhu­mane.”
  7. The Dig­i­tal Pul­pit: A Nation­wide Analy­sis of Online Ser­mons (Pew Research): “For instance, ser­mons from evan­gel­i­cal church­es were three times more like­ly than those from oth­er tra­di­tions to include the phrase ‘eter­nal hell’ (or vari­a­tions such as ‘eter­ni­ty in hell’). How­ev­er, a con­gre­gant who attend­ed every ser­vice at a giv­en evan­gel­i­cal church in the dataset had a rough­ly one-in-ten chance of hear­ing one of those terms at least once dur­ing the study peri­od. By com­par­i­son, that same con­gre­gant had a 99% chance of hear­ing the word ‘love.’”
    • Relat­ed with some good inter­views: How long is the ser­mon? Study ranks Chris­t­ian church­es (David Crary, AP News): “Accord­ing to Pew, the medi­an length of the ser­mons was 37 min­utes. Catholic ser­mons were the short­est, at a medi­an of just 14 min­utes, com­pared with 25 min­utes for ser­mons in main­line Protes­tant con­gre­ga­tions and 39 min­utes in evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant con­gre­ga­tions. His­tor­i­cal­ly black Protes­tant church­es had by far the longest ser­mons, at a medi­an of 54 min­utes. Pew said ser­mons at the black church­es last­ed longer than main­line Protes­tant ser­mons even though, on aver­age, they had rough­ly the same num­ber of words.”

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 Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32).

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 229

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. Should Lebanon’s Chris­tians Join Protests? Viral Ser­mons Argue Yes and No. (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “”For the past month, Lebanese evan­gel­i­cals have debat­ed Scrip­ture, shar­ing ser­mons online. One viral effort urges believ­ers to stay away from wide­spread demon­stra­tions in sub­mis­sion to author­i­ty. Anoth­er licens­es par­tic­i­pa­tion in the pop­u­lar push for jus­tice.”
    • I like this arti­cle because it helps us look at a con­tentious Bib­li­cal issue in a set­ting where most of us don’t have a strong bias one way or the oth­er. Decide whose argu­ments you find most com­pelling, and then think about how they apply in your own set­ting.
  2. Most peo­ple are bad at argu­ing. These 2 tech­niques will make you bet­ter. (Bri­an Resnick, Vox): “1) If the argu­ment you find con­vinc­ing doesn’t res­onate with some­one else, find out what does…. 2) Lis­ten. Your ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents want to feel like they’ve been heard.”
  3. See­ing Like A Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. LGBT Rights-Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Bill Pro­posed in Con­gress (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Con­gress­man Chris Stew­art doesn’t expect his bill to pass. But he is propos­ing the Fair­ness for All Act any­way. It’s a step of faith for Stew­art, a Repub­li­can who rep­re­sents Utah’s sec­ond dis­trict, and a mark­er on the bet that it’s pos­si­ble to find a com­pro­mise that pro­tects both reli­gious lib­er­ty and LGBT rights.”
  5. How the Trump Cabinet’s Bible Teacher Became a Shad­ow Diplo­mat (Mat­tathias Schwartz, New York Times): “Sev­en years ago, Drollinger pub­lished a short book called ‘Rebuild­ing Amer­i­ca: The Bib­li­cal Blue­print,’ which lays out his ambi­tion to ‘to reach all the cap­i­tals of the world for Christ.’ Drollinger, like many evan­gel­i­cals, refers to this God-giv­en glob­al remit as the Great Com­mis­sion, a phrase pop­u­lar­ized by the 19th-cen­tu­ry mis­sion­ary James Hud­son Tay­lor; Drollinger traces its man­date to Jesus’ charge, as relat­ed by Matthew, to ‘make dis­ci­ples of all the nations.’ A chart in ‘Rebuild­ing Amer­i­ca’ dia­grams the ‘influ­ence path’ of a pub­lic ser­vant as a base­ball dia­mond, run­ning through local gov­ern­ment (first base), state gov­ern­ment (sec­ond base) and nation­al gov­ern­ment (third base) and cul­mi­nat­ing in ‘inter­na­tion­al influ­ence’ (home plate).” I shared anoth­er arti­cle about Drollinger back in vol­ume 147.
  6. China’s Sov­er­eign­ty Trip­wire in Hong Kong (David P. Gold­man, First Things): “Chi­na is a poly­glot, mul­ti­eth­nic empire, not a nation-state. Infringe­ment of its con­trol over any part of its ter­ri­to­ry threat­ens the whole. For­eign inter­ven­tion and region­al divi­sions is the stuff of China’s his­tor­i­cal night­mares. Any loss of sov­er­eign­ty, in China’s expe­ri­ence, begins a slip­pery slope toward impe­r­i­al crack­up. For­eign inva­sion is still a liv­ing mem­o­ry in Chi­na, and Bei­jing reads the worst into Amer­i­can inter­ven­tion over Hong Kong.”
  7. The Sal­va­tion Army’s Actions Speak Loud­er Than Its The­ol­o­gy (Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg): “Vol­un­teers are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly than non-vol­un­teers to be reli­gious; and the reli­gious are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly than the non-reli­gious to vol­un­teer. As reli­gion declines, so does vol­un­teer­ing. If we put the reli­gious vol­un­teers out of busi­ness, a lot of peo­ple will sud­den­ly be unhelped. We need all the vol­un­teers we can get. And we can­not rea­son­ably expect to replace them with paid labor. Accord­ing to the Urban Insti­tute, the 8.7 bil­lion hours vol­un­teered in the U.S. in 2016 were worth about $187.4 bil­lion.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale.

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 Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

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 226

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. I’m a Cli­mate Sci­en­tist Who Believes in God. Hear Me Out. (Katharine Hay­hoe, New York Times): “…I believe that evan­gel­i­cals who take the Bible seri­ous­ly already care about cli­mate change (although they might not real­ize it). Cli­mate change will strike hard against the very peo­ple we’re told to care for and love, ampli­fy­ing hunger and pover­ty, and increas­ing risks of resource scarci­ty that can exac­er­bate polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty, and even cre­ate or wors­en refugee crises.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Texas Tech and, as it hap­pens, spoke at Stan­ford last night.
  2. Split the Cedars of Lebanon: Evan­gel­i­cals Bal­ance Prayer, Protest, and Pol­i­tics in Ongo­ing Upris­ing (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There can be no uni­ty with pro­test­ers curs­ing and hurl­ing hatred at the polit­i­cal class, he said, urg­ing Chris­t­ian sep­a­ra­tion from such behav­ior. If cit­i­zens are unsat­is­fied, they should vote their offi­cials out. And as for the eco­nom­ic trou­bles, he believes a great God will take care of their needs. Oth­er pas­tors have endorsed demon­stra­tions as a vehi­cle for change. Some have called for prayer and fast­ing. Either way, many of the pre­vi­ous­ly apo­lit­i­cal have become engaged.”
  3. The New Par­ty of the Rich (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “The rich­est 15 per­cent of House dis­tricts are now rep­re­sent­ed by 56 Democ­rats and just 10 Repub­li­cans. In 2018, vot­ers in America’s wealth­i­est coun­ties, cities, and neigh­bor­hoods made a deci­sive turn toward the Democ­rats, and now America’s tra­di­tion­al par­ty of the left—whether it admits it or not—is the par­ty of the rich.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.
  4. How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal.
  5. The Church, inten­sive kin­ship, and glob­al psy­cho­log­i­cal vari­a­tion (Schulz et al, Sci­ence): “…we pro­pose that the West­ern Church (i.e., the branch of Chris­tian­i­ty that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) trans­formed Euro­pean kin­ship struc­tures dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages and that this trans­for­ma­tion was a key fac­tor behind a shift towards a WEIRD­er psy­chol­o­gy.” This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.
  6. It’s Offi­cial: Pres­i­dent Trump Has Tweet­ed More Words Than James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Chris Wil­son, Time): “In the 1,020 days since he took office, Pres­i­dent Trump’s Twit­ter account has post­ed 266,055 words. Ulysses, which runs about 780 pages, has 264,564. That’s using the same mea­sure of count­ing words with the freely avail­able dig­i­tal ver­sion of the tome on Project Guten­berg. (How one counts words is slight­ly fun­gi­ble depend­ing on, for exam­ple, on how one con­sid­ers hyphens and con­trac­tions, but my fig­ure is very close to var­i­ous oth­er tal­lies).” Wow. That’s a lot of words.
  7. The Dan­gers of Flu­ent Lec­tures (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “The study, involv­ing Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty under­grad­u­ates in large, intro­duc­to­ry physics class­es, com­pared stu­dents’ self reports about what they’d learned with what they’d actu­al­ly learned, as deter­mined by a mul­ti­ple choice tests. Stu­dents were taught using exact­ly the same course mate­ri­als — a key con­trol that many oth­er stud­ies com­par­ing active ver­sus pas­sive learn­ing have failed to estab­lish. But one group learned via active instruc­tion meth­ods for a week at the end of the semes­ter and the oth­er learned via lec­tures from expe­ri­enced and well-regard­ed instruc­tors.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. See a relat­ed link back in vol­ume 218.

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 Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire), an essay built on this insight: “Think­ing can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” (first shared in vol­ume 2)

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 224

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Mil­lion Peo­ple Are Jailed at Chi­na’s Gulags. I Man­aged to Escape. Here’s What Real­ly Goes on Inside (David Stavrou, Ha Aretz): “Tor­ture – met­al nails, fin­ger­nails pulled out, elec­tric shocks – takes place in the ‘black room.’ Pun­ish­ment is a con­stant. The pris­on­ers are forced to take pills and get injec­tions. It’s for dis­ease pre­ven­tion, the staff tell them, but in real­i­ty they are the human sub­jects of med­ical exper­i­ments. Many of the inmates suf­fer from cog­ni­tive decline. Some of the men become ster­ile. Women are rou­tine­ly raped.” This is one of the worst things hap­pen­ing in the world right now, and that is say­ing some­thing since ‘glob­al hor­rors’ is a fright­en­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive cat­e­go­ry.
  2. Stan­ford fails its Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty (Sarah Myers, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “This year, class­es were held on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kip­pur. These hol­i­days are the High Holy Days of Judaism, so-called because they are the holi­est days of the year for Judaism. Rosh Hashanah lasts two days and Yom Kip­pur one. Many Jews attend ser­vices for most of the day on these hol­i­days. Fast­ing is con­sid­ered a key part of observ­ing Yom Kip­pur. Yet, Stan­ford decid­ed that class­es would be held, and pro­fes­sors would be free to cre­ate assign­ments with no regard for stu­dents observ­ing these days.”
  3. Black Bap­tist church shaped Cum­mings’ com­mit­ment (Jeff Karoub, AP News): “To many black cler­gy, Mary­land Rep. Eli­jah E. Cum­mings was more than a for­mi­da­ble ora­tor, civ­il rights cham­pi­on and pas­sion­ate pub­lic ser­vant, he was also one of them — in prac­tice, if not pro­fes­sion.”
  4. How To Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super-short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing.
  5. The Codev­il­la Tapes (David Samuels, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Samuels: ‘Please remove me from temp­ta­tion, said no one, ever.’ “Codev­il­la: ‘Well as a mat­ter of fact, Chris­tians do “lead us not into temp­ta­tion” all the time.’ Samuels: ‘You do say “lead us not into temp­ta­tion,” but I am not aware of the Chris­t­ian prayer that says “please take away the choco­late cake while I’m in the mid­dle of eat­ing it.”’ Codev­il­la: ‘Well, St. Augus­tine said exact­ly that, you know, “Lord make me pure, but not yet.”’ This is a super-long, wide-rang­ing inter­view. It is full of fas­ci­nat­ing tid­bits and will reward skim­ming.
  6. On Mex­i­can State Col­lapse (El Anti-Pozolero, a per­son­al blog): “It’s an absolute­ly extra­or­di­nary episode even by the grim and bizarre annals of what we mis­tak­en­ly call the post-2006 Mex­i­can Drug War. The Bat­tle of Culi­acán stands on a lev­el above, say, the Ayotz­i­na­pa mas­sacre, or the Zetas’ expul­sion of the entire pop­u­la­tion of Ciu­dad Mier. Killing scores of inno­cents and bru­tal­iz­ing small towns is one thing: seiz­ing region­al cap­i­tal cities and crush­ing the nation­al armed forces in open fight­ing in broad day­light is some­thing else.”
    • Mex­i­co’s bid to detain El Chapo son ‘a fail­ure of every­thing’ (Will Grant, BBC News): “It was a huge embar­rass­ment for the gov­ern­ment. They had cap­tured one of the most want­ed men in Mex­i­co and, out­gunned and over­whelmed by the car­tel, they sim­ply turned him back over to his men.”
    • How Mex­i­co became a failed state (Manuel Suárez-Mier, Asia Times): “When we think about what’s impres­sive here, it is the sheer amount of dev­as­ta­tion of a large coun­try (14th in GDP; 135 mil­lion peo­ple) that a dog­mat­ic, self-cen­tered, nar­cis­sis­tic and igno­rant leader can inflict in such short time.”
  7. What Teach­ing Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridg­ing America’s Par­ti­san Divide (Evan Man­dery, Politi­co): “We teach peo­ple that it’s impo­lite to dis­cuss reli­gion and pol­i­tics in pub­lic. It’s wrong. We need to teach peo­ple how to dis­cuss reli­gion and pol­i­tics.”

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 221

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, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Black Church After Chris­ten­dom (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I don’t know about you, but I can­not recall the last time I wit­nessed more pow­er­ful pub­lic expres­sions of what it means to be a Chris­t­ian than what Brandt Jean and Judge Tam­my Kemp did in that court­room. Guyger — again, a white woman — is going to prison to do time for her crime — but both Mr. Jean and Judge Kemp want­ed her to know that there is hope for her, and redemp­tion.”
    • There are lots of news sources that fea­ture the video clip of Brandt Jean. I chose Dreher’s piece because he also focus­es on the judge. Both of their actions inspire me.
    • I first saw video clips of Brandt Jean’s mov­ing words surg­ing on social media, and I almost imme­di­ate­ly after­wards saw a back­lash which I found per­plex­ing. Some com­menters even sug­gest­ed that there is some­thing racist about lik­ing this video. I think the truth is much more whole­some — Chris­tians love see­ing cost­ly acts of obe­di­ence to Christ. Wit­ness the sim­i­lar reac­tions Chris­tians had to the gospel-fueled tes­ti­mo­ny of Rachael Den­hol­lan­der against Lar­ry Nas­sar and to the Amish community’s for­give­ness of a school shoot­er years ago. There were dif­fer­ent racial dynam­ics but sim­i­lar respons­es from Chris­tians.
  2. The Inter­net Is Over­run With Images of Child Sex­u­al Abuse. What Went Wrong? (Michael Keller and Gabriel Dance, The New York Times): “Pic­tures of child sex­u­al abuse have long been pro­duced and shared to sat­is­fy twist­ed adult obses­sions. But it has nev­er been like this: Tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies report­ed a record 45 mil­lion online pho­tos and videos of the abuse last year…. the prob­lem of child sex­u­al abuse imagery faces a par­tic­u­lar hur­dle: It gets scant atten­tion because few peo­ple want to con­front the enor­mi­ty and hor­ror of the con­tent, or they wrong­ly dis­miss it as pri­mar­i­ly teenagers send­ing inap­pro­pri­ate self­ies.” WARNING — this is very dis­turb­ing. The reporters non-gra­tu­itous­ly describe some of the con­tent. If you sus­pect that the scene pre­ced­ing “The pre­dom­i­nant sound is the child scream­ing and cry­ing” will both­er you, it will.
    • I know some of our alum­ni who work in tech and in pol­i­cy still receive my Fri­day emails. If that is you, you need to read the pre­ced­ing arti­cle.
    • Relat­ed: Porn Cul­ture and Polit­i­cal Courage (Ter­ry Schelling, First Things): “The uncom­fort­able truth is that the rapid growth in child pornog­ra­phy is con­nect­ed to the cul­tur­al nor­mal­iza­tion of online pornog­ra­phy as a whole.”
  3. I Spent Years Search­ing for Magic—I Found God Instead (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Cat­a­pult): “I want­ed mag­ic. I didn’t think too much about mean­ing. Or at least, as long as every­thing meant some­thing, the specifics didn’t seem to mat­ter. Basil could mean love. Thurs­days could mean pow­er. The full moon puri­ty. Why not? The alter­na­tive was that noth­ing meant any­thing at all.” This is won­der­ful­ly writ­ten. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. How Do Chris­tians Fit Into the Two-Par­ty Sys­tem? They Don’t (Tim Keller, New York Times): “I know of a man from Mis­sis­sip­pi who was a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can and a tra­di­tion­al Pres­by­ter­ian. He vis­it­ed the Scot­tish High­lands and found the church­es there as strict and as ortho­dox as he had hoped. No one so much as turned on a tele­vi­sion on a Sun­day. Every­one mem­o­rized cat­e­chisms and Scrip­ture. But one day he dis­cov­ered that the Scot­tish Chris­t­ian friends he admired were (in his view) social­ists. Their under­stand­ing of gov­ern­ment eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy and the state’s respon­si­bil­i­ties was by his lights very left-wing, yet also ground­ed in their Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions. He returned to the Unit­ed States not more polit­i­cal­ly lib­er­al but, in his words, ‘hum­bled and chas­tened.’ He real­ized that thought­ful Chris­tians, all try­ing to obey God’s call, could rea­son­ably appear at dif­fer­ent places on the polit­i­cal spec­trum, with loy­al­ties to dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal strate­gies.”
    • Relat­ed: A Basic Primer on Rights and Oblig­a­tions (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “…the Bible doesn’t say much about rights. It does, how­ev­er, fre­quent­ly address oblig­a­tions, so the key to for­mu­lat­ing a bib­li­cal doc­trine of rights is to flip the doc­trine of oblig­a­tion.”
  5. How Stan­ford Hides Con­flicts of Inter­est (Daniel “Bob” Fer­reira, Stan­ford Sphere): “We start­ed by going through all 127 full-time, non-cour­tesy pro­fes­sors in Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Bio­engi­neer­ing, and Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, and we checked what Bloomberg, Crunch­base, and the SEC had on them. Then, we went on to ver­i­fy whether this infor­ma­tion was current—through com­pa­ny web­sites, men­tions on their own pub­lic CVs, or media cov­er­age. Final­ly, we removed fac­ul­ty whose links to busi­ness­es had noth­ing to do with biotech.”
  6. Hong Kong: First Line of Defence against a Ris­ing Fas­cist Pow­er (Aaron Sarin, Quil­lette): “China’s gov­ern­ment has only retained the name ‘Com­mu­nist Par­ty’ because to do oth­er­wise would be a first step towards admit­ting the atroc­i­ties of the past. The sev­er­ing of the link between Xi and Mao would make it pos­si­ble to acknowl­edge that Mao was one of history’s worst vil­lains. This would set a prece­dent for crit­i­cis­ing author­i­ty that would inevitably lead to Xi’s own down­fall. So the name stays, but in truth there is noth­ing ‘com­mu­nist’ about this Com­mu­nist Par­ty (save its author­i­tar­i­an­ism). In fact, Marx­ist stu­dents, activists, and social work­ers have been arrest­ed and tor­tured since Xi took pow­er, and uni­ver­si­ties have shut down Marx­ist soci­eties.”
    • The Prophet­ic Voice of Hong Kong’s Pro­test­ers (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Many Hong Kong Chris­tians, while com­pris­ing less than 12 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, have played a promi­nent role in the protests—marching, singing hymns, hold­ing prayer cir­cles, and pro­vid­ing food and shel­ter to oth­er demon­stra­tors. (The Jesus Peo­ple song ‘Sing Hal­lelu­jah to the Lord’ became an unex­pect­ed anthem of the protests, as par­tic­i­pants sang the tune to calm con­fronta­tions with police.) For Chris­tians there, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty may be the great­est exis­ten­tial threat to the Hong Kong church.”
  7. 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. This essay is about a decade old but I only recent­ly stum­bled upon it.

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 Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate cap­i­tal­ism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

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 220

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. My hope is that every­one will find at least one link intrigu­ing enough to click through for more. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Does a Reli­gious Upbring­ing Pro­mote Gen­eros­i­ty or Not? (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In 2015, a paper by Jean Dece­ty and co-authors report­ed that chil­dren who were brought up reli­gious­ly were less gen­er­ous. The paper received a great deal of atten­tion, and was cov­ered by over 80 media out­lets includ­ing The Econ­o­mist, the Boston Globe, the Los Ange­les Times, and Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. As it turned out, how­ev­er, the paper by Dece­ty was wrong.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus who not­ed, “it seemed up your alley.” A sto­ry which touch­es on reli­gion, fea­tures a sta­tis­ti­cal screwup, and high­lights media bias? Indeed it is! The author is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard whose writ­ing I have high­light­ed before. 
  2. Is Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty on Its Last Legs? The Data Say Oth­er­wise. (Bradley Wright, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty is doing rather well for itself. Where it is not increas­ing, it is hold­ing steady. As Stan­ton writes, ‘Church­es that are faith­ful­ly preach­ing, teach­ing, and prac­tic­ing Bib­li­cal truths and con­ser­v­a­tive the­ol­o­gy are hold­ing sta­ble over­all. In some areas, they are see­ing growth.’ In con­trast, the for­tunes of main­line Protes­tantism in Amer­i­ca are falling fast. Its long decline has been doc­u­ment­ed before, and Stan­ton updates our under­stand­ing of it. As he puts it, ‘peo­ple are leav­ing those church­es like the build­ings are on fire.’” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at U Conn whose writ­ing I have high­light­ed before.
  3. Look­ing back at the Snow­den rev­e­la­tions (Matthew Green, per­son­al blog): “One of the most impor­tant lessons we learned from the Snow­den leaks was that the NSA very much pri­or­i­tizes its sur­veil­lance mis­sion, to the point where it is will­ing to active­ly insert vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties into encryp­tion prod­ucts and stan­dards used on U.S. net­works…. This kind of sab­o­tage is, need­less to say, some­thing that not even the most para­noid secu­ri­ty researchers would have pre­dict­ed from our own intel­li­gence agen­cies. Agen­cies that, osten­si­bly have a mis­sion to pro­tect U.S. net­works.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins.
  4. Harvard’s Lega­cies Are Noth­ing to Be Proud Of (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “If you are won­der­ing why Amer­i­cans do not trust the cur­rent estab­lish­ment, or why Amer­i­cans are not so con­vinced that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty actu­al­ly will reverse income inequal­i­ty, look no fur­ther than the Har­vard admis­sions case.”
  5. Inside Stanford’s Last Fall­out Shel­ter: a time cap­sule to Cold War pol­i­tics and protests (Patrick Mon­re­al, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “At the height of the Cold War, Stan­ford and the Office of Civ­il Defense, a fed­er­al agency estab­lished by Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, des­ig­nat­ed as many as 56 fall­out shel­ters on cam­pus. The Uni­ver­si­ty man­aged these shel­ters, which col­lec­tive­ly had a max­i­mum occu­pan­cy of 49,269 peo­ple, as a part of emer­gency plans in the event of a nuclear strike or nat­ur­al dis­as­ter.”
  6. Some diverse per­spec­tives on max­i­miz­ing your time at Stan­ford.
    • Class­es for the Col­lege Con­trar­i­an: The Com­pre­hen­sive Guide to Get­ting More out of Stan­ford (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “Although Stanford’s dom­i­nance in STEM fields is uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged, it can be hard­er to find stel­lar human­i­ties and social sci­ences class­es, which don’t have the same struc­tured cur­ricu­lums and are more like­ly to suf­fer from severe grade infla­tion. This is not even to men­tion the dif­fi­cul­ty of find­ing class­es which rep­re­sent oppos­ing view­points and teach crit­i­cal thought rather than aca­d­e­m­ic ortho­doxy.” Anni­ka is involved in Chi Alpha. 
    • Eleven Must-Take Class­es This Fall (Stan­ford Sphere edi­to­r­i­al board): “In our old­est recur­ring fea­ture, we present below an alpha­bet­ized list of the most inter­est­ing class­es of the fall.”
    • I pro­pose a new rule at Stan­ford — all stu­dents shall be auto­mat­i­cal­ly enrolled in any cours­es which are rec­om­mend­ed by both the Sphere and the Review 
    • How to Major in Uni­corn (Max Read & Andrew Grana­to, New York Mag­a­zine): “Google was found­ed by two Stan­ford grad­u­ate stu­dents, Insta­gram by two Stan­ford alum­ni, Snapchat by a Stan­ford dropout. What­sApp, Net­flix, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard were all found­ed by one­time Stan­ford stu­dents; the ear­li­est investors in Face­book and Ama­zon were Stan­ford grad­u­ates. Even Eliz­a­beth Holmes, sym­bol of Sil­i­con Val­ley self-delu­sion and fraud, was a stu­dent at Stan­ford when she dropped out to found Ther­a­nos. About the only two famous tech founders with no imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent Stan­ford con­nec­tion are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates — though is it a coin­ci­dence that each had a daugh­ter attend the school?”
    • If Not Snapchat, What? A Guide to Stanford’s Non-Tech Fief­doms (Andrew Grana­to, New York Mag­a­zine): “An anec­dote about the uni­ver­si­ty that is posi­tion­ing itself to take charge of the 21st cen­tu­ry: Jack­son Beard ’17, the for­mer stu­dent body pres­i­dent, told me a sto­ry about how a cab­i­net mem­ber of hers tried to sched­ule a meet­ing with the head of the stu­dent health cen­ter to dis­cuss school pol­i­cy on invol­un­tary psy­chi­atric holds of stu­dents. After many delays, a meet­ing occurred where the admin­is­tra­tor ‘just asked, straight up, “When do you two grad­u­ate?” He said, “I want to know when you’ll stop car­ing about this issue.”’” A remark­ably brief sum­ma­ry of a very real Stan­ford dynam­ic.
    • An Optimist’s Guide to Find­ing Mean­ing at Stan­ford (Ibrahim Bhar­mal and Ali­na Utra­ta, Medi­um) “The best advice I ever got about pick­ing a major was: plan out all the class­es you want to take, and then see what major lets you take those class­es. YOU HAVE TONS OF TIME! Spend fresh­man and sopho­more year tak­ing all the class­es you’re inter­est­ed in and expand­ing your hori­zons — even class­es that don’t seem ‘use­ful’ to you.”
  7. The Dan­ger of Reusing Nat­ur­al Exper­i­ments (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “A cor­re­spon­dent writes to ask whether I was aware that Reg­u­la­tion SHO has been used by more than fifty oth­er stud­ies to test a vari­ety of hypothe­ses. I was not! The prob­lem is obvi­ous. If the same exper­i­ment is used mul­ti­ple times we should be impos­ing mul­ti­ple hypoth­e­sis stan­dards to avoid the green jel­ly bean prob­lem, oth­er­wise known as the false pos­i­tive prob­lem.” 

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 219

New stu­dents: if this is your first email from the Chi Alpha list, wel­come! Every Fri­day I email out a com­pi­la­tion of arti­cles about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. My hope is that every­one will find at least one link intrigu­ing enough to click through for more.

Most of the list’s con­tent isn’t remote­ly like this, so even if this isn’t your cup of tea be sure to stick around (although I’ve heard rumors that some peo­ple stay on our list just for this Fri­day email). Also pay atten­tion to the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom — I real­ly mean them. And I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Lega­cy and Ath­lete Pref­er­ences at Har­vard (Peter Arcidi­a­cono, Josh Kinsler and Tyler Ran­som, link is a PDF of a work­ing paper): “The law­suit Stu­dents For Fair Admis­sions v. Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vid­ed an unprece­dent­ed look at how an elite school makes admis­sions deci­sions. Using pub­licly-released reports, we exam­ine the pref­er­ences Har­vard gives for recruit­ed ath­letes, lega­cies, those on the dean’s inter­est list, and chil­dren of fac­ul­ty and staff (ALD­Cs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African Amer­i­can, Asian Amer­i­can, and His­pan­ic, the share is less than 16% each. Our mod­el of admis­sions shows that rough­ly three quar­ters of white ALDC admits would have been reject­ed if they had been treat­ed as white non-ALD­Cs. Remov­ing pref­er­ences for ath­letes and lega­cies would sig­nif­i­cant­ly alter the racial dis­tri­b­u­tion of admit­ted stu­dents, with the share of white admits falling and all oth­er groups ris­ing or remain­ing unchanged.” The lead author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Duke.
  2. Too Much Dark Mon­ey in Almonds (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every­one always talks about how much mon­ey there is in pol­i­tics. This is the wrong fram­ing. The right fram­ing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so lit­tle mon­ey in pol­i­tics? But Ansolabehere focus­es on elec­tions, and the mys­tery is wider than that. Sure, dur­ing the 2018 elec­tion, can­di­dates, par­ties, PACs, and out­siders com­bined spent about $5 bil­lion – $2.5 bil­lion on Democ­rats, $2 bil­lion on Repub­li­cans, and $0.5 bil­lion on third par­ties. And although that sounds like a lot of mon­ey to you or me, on the nation­al scale, it’s puny. The US almond indus­try earns $12 bil­lion per year. Amer­i­cans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on can­di­dates last year.” It builds to a sur­pris­ing twist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. I nor­mal­ly avoid two links from one author, but every once in a while some­one is on fire. Against Against Pseudoad­dic­tion (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Let me con­fess: I think pseudoad­dic­tion is real. In fact, I think it’s obvi­ous­ly real. I think every­one should real­ize it’s real as soon as it’s explained prop­er­ly to them. I think we should be ter­ri­fied that any of our insti­tu­tions – media, acad­e­mia, what­ev­er – think they could pos­si­bly get away with claim­ing pseudoad­dic­tion isn’t real. I think peo­ple should be tak­ing to the streets try­ing to over­throw a med­ical sys­tem that has the slight­est doubt about whether pseudoad­dic­tion is real. If you can think of more hyper­bol­ic state­ments about pseudoad­dic­tion, I prob­a­bly believe those too.” I am ful­ly per­suad­ed by this arti­cle. 
  4. ‘I Basi­cal­ly Just Made It Up’: Con­fes­sions of a Social Con­struc­tion­ist (Christo­pher Dum­mitt, Quil­lette): “In my defence, I wasn’t alone. Every­one was (and is) mak­ing it up. That’s how the gen­der-stud­ies field works. But it’s not much of a defence. I should have known bet­ter. If I were to retroac­tive­ly psy­cho­an­a­lyze myself, I would say that, real­ly, I did know bet­ter. And that’s why I was so angry and assertive about what I thought I knew. It was to hide the fact that, at a very basic lev­el, I didn’t have proof for part of what I was say­ing. So I stuck to the argu­ments with fer­vor, and denounced alter­na­tive points of view.” The author is a his­to­ri­an at Trent Uni­ver­si­ty (in Cana­da). 
  5. The Chris­t­ian Right Is Help­ing Dri­ve Lib­er­als Away From Reli­gion (Amelia Thom­son-DeVeaux and Daniel Cox, FiveThir­tyEight): “Researchers haven’t found a com­pre­hen­sive expla­na­tion for why the num­ber of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans has increased over the past few years — the shift is too large and too com­plex. But a recent swell of social sci­ence research sug­gests that even if pol­i­tics wasn’t the sole cul­prit, it was an impor­tant con­trib­u­tor.”
    • Relat­ed: Not every­body wants thoughts and prayers after a dis­as­ter, accord­ing to a study of hur­ri­cane sur­vivors (Allen Kim, CNN): “Think­ing of send­ing your ‘thoughts and prayers’ to those affect­ed by tragedy or a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter? Well, not every­one wants them. While Chris­tians val­ue these ges­tures from reli­gious peo­ple, some athe­ists and agnos­tics would pay mon­ey to avoid them, accord­ing to a study pub­lished Mon­day in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.” I am shocked at how aller­gic some peo­ple are to reli­gion. The aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle upon which this news sto­ry was based is The val­ue of thoughts and prayers (Lin­da Thun­ström and Shiri Noy, PNAS).
  6. World Vision Flips the Script on Child Spon­sor­ship (Jere­my Weber, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Almost 1,000 chil­dren in rur­al Guatemala gained spon­sors this month from a megachurch in south­ern Indi­ana. But in this case, it was the indige­nous chil­dren in need who pon­dered pho­tos of smil­ing faces and chose one they felt a con­nec­tion with. And it was the adult donors in the Unit­ed States who ner­vous­ly wait­ed, won­der­ing who would pick them.”
  7. The grand­mas­ter diet: How to lose weight while bare­ly mov­ing (Aish­warya Kumar, ESPN): “Robert Sapol­sky, who stud­ies stress in pri­mates at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, says a chess play­er can burn up to 6,000 calo­ries a day while play­ing in a tour­na­ment, three times what an aver­age per­son con­sumes in a day. Based on breath­ing rates (which triple dur­ing com­pe­ti­tion), blood pres­sure (which ele­vates) and mus­cle con­trac­tions before, dur­ing and after major tour­na­ments, Sapol­sky sug­gests that grand­mas­ters’ stress respons­es to chess are on par with what elite ath­letes expe­ri­ence.”

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 God­speed: The Pace Of Being Known (Vimeo): a stu­dent brought this 30 minute video to my atten­tion and said it made her think about how she should be liv­ing in her dorm. Rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 181.

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 218

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. “We May Have To Shoot Down This Air­craft” (Gar­rett Graff, Politi­co): “We can’t see the air­craft. We don’t know where it is because we don’t have any radars point­ing into the U.S. Any­thing in the Unit­ed States was con­sid­ered friend­ly by def­i­n­i­tion.” A grip­ping account of the Flight 93 sto­ry.
  2. Active Learn­ing Works But Stu­dents Don’t Like It (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “A care­ful­ly done study that held stu­dents and teach­ers con­stant shows that stu­dents learn more in active learn­ing class­es but they dis­like this style of class and think they learn less. It’s no big surprise–active learn­ing is hard and makes the stu­dents feel stu­pid. It’s much eas­i­er to sit back and be enter­tained by a great lec­tur­er who makes every­thing seem sim­ple.”
  3. How Evan­gel­i­cals Invent­ed Lib­er­als’ Favorite Legal Doc­trine (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Fed­er­al­ist): “…with­in the many ironies of his­to­ry, the social and polit­i­cal instru­ments a per­fec­tion­ist move­ment deploys may be eas­i­ly co-opt­ed for ends and pur­pos­es nev­er imag­ined in their devel­op­ment. That is, if late-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry evan­gel­i­cal activists sowed the wind, today’s activists have reaped the whirl­wind.” I love arti­cles that present a top­ic I think I know some­thing about and pro­ceed to show me some­thing I had nev­er known before.
  4. A Famous Argu­ment Against Free Will Has Been Debunked (Bahar Gholipour, The Atlantic): “It would be quite an achieve­ment for a brain sig­nal 100 times small­er than major brain waves to solve the prob­lem of free will. But the sto­ry of the Bere­itschaftspo­ten­tial has one more twist: It might be some­thing else entire­ly.”
  5. Vik­tor Orban Among The Chris­tians (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Orban is what Trump’s biggest fans wish he was (but isn’t), and what Trump’s ene­mies think him to be (but isn’t). If Don­ald Trump had the smarts and skills of Vik­tor Orban, the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in the US would be much, much dif­fer­ent — for bet­ter or for worse, depend­ing on your point of view.” I don’t have much inter­est in Hun­gar­i­an pol­i­tics, but this fas­ci­nat­ed me. 
  6. When the Cul­ture War Comes for the Kids (George Pack­er, The Atlantic): “I asked myself if I was mov­ing to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new pro­gres­sivism didn’t just car­ry my own pol­i­tics fur­ther than I liked. It was actu­al­ly hos­tile to prin­ci­ples with­out which I don’t believe democ­ra­cy can sur­vive.” This arti­cle came high­ly rec­om­mend­ed, but it only got inter­est­ing to me about halfway through — and then wow.
  7. Con­ser­v­a­tives Clash on the Goal of Gov­ern­ment (Jonathan Lee­man, Prov­i­dence): “There is no neu­tral­i­ty. The pub­lic square is a bat­tle­ground of gods. Our cul­ture wars are wars of reli­gion. For the time being, lib­er­al­ism keeps us from pick­ing up six­teenth-cen­tu­ry swords for those wars, which is no small achieve­ment. But don’t assume it won’t con­trol us with the sub­tler tools of a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry legal total­i­tar­i­an­ism.” Insight­ful reflec­tions on how Chris­tians should form their polit­i­cal posi­tions.

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.