Tag: politics

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 216

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. No, real­ly. I mean them and they mat­ter. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cops Who Abused Pho­to­shop (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): this is out­ra­geous. Dif­fi­cult to excerpt, but well worth read­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. How Pornog­ra­phy Makes Us Less Human and Less Humane (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Beneath pornog­ra­phy is the sup­po­si­tion that the mere fact of our desire for a woman makes us wor­thy of her. And so, not being bound by any kind of norm, desire must pro­ceed end­less­ly. It is no sur­prise that the indus­tri­al­ized, cheap-and-easy sex of pornog­ra­phy has answered and evoked an almost unre­strained sex­u­al greed, which allows us to be gods and god­dess­es with­in the safe­ty of our own fan­tasies. It is for deep and impor­tant rea­sons that the Ten Com­mand­ments use the eco­nom­ic lan­guage of ‘cov­et­ing’ to describe the bad­ness of errant sex­u­al desires.” Many insights in this essay.
    1. Relat­ed: In the Face of Sex­u­al Temp­ta­tion, Repres­sion Is a Sure-Fire Fail­ure (Rachel Gilson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Repres­sion and avoid­ance are ulti­mate­ly human-cen­tered respons­es. They stuff desire, suf­fo­cate it, ban­ish it, and yet rarely suc­ceed at engen­der­ing true puri­ty. By con­trast, Chris­t­ian asceti­cism reminds us that we are not stronger than desire and then invites us to cast our gaze toward the One who is. It asks the Chris­t­ian to fol­low the sight line of desire—like look­ing down the bar­rel of a gun—and train it on what all desire is ulti­mate­ly sat­is­fied by: the glo­ry of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6).”
    2. Relat­ed What Genet­ics Is Teach­ing Us About Sex­u­al­i­ty (Steven M. Phelps and Robbee Wedow, New York Times): “…genet­ic dif­fer­ences account for rough­ly one-third of the vari­a­tion in same-sex behav­ior.” The authors are pro­fes­sors (one of biol­o­gy at UT Austin and the oth­er of soci­ol­o­gy at Har­vard). They are also both gay men. They are reflect­ing on research pub­lished in the jour­nal Sci­ence: Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genet­ic archi­tec­ture of same-sex sex­u­al behav­ior (which Wedow coau­thored).
  3. What Major­i­ty-World Mis­sions Real­ly Looks Like (Dor­cas Cheng-Tozun, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2015, 9 of the top 20 send­ing countries—including Brazil, the Philip­pines, Chi­na, India, Nige­ria, and South Africa—were in the major­i­ty world (also referred to as the devel­op­ing world), with a total of 101,000 inter­na­tion­al mis­sion­ar­ies.” For con­text, the com­bined total is close to the num­ber sent from the USA.
  4. Why do Chi­nese peo­ple like their gov­ern­ment? (Kaiser Kuo, SupChi­na): “It’s the rare per­son who can tru­ly sep­a­rate, at both an intel­lec­tu­al and an emo­tion­al lev­el, crit­i­cism of his or her coun­try from crit­i­cism of his or her country’s gov­ern­ment — espe­cial­ly if that gov­ern­ment is not, at present, ter­ri­bly embat­tled and is deliv­er­ing basic pub­lic goods in a rea­son­ably com­pe­tent man­ner.”
    1. Relat­ed: 9 ques­tions about the Hong Kong protests you were too embar­rassed to ask (Jen Kir­by, Vox): “”What began as a tar­get­ed protest against a con­tro­ver­sial extra­di­tion bill in June has trans­formed into what feels like a bat­tle for the future of Hong Kong. Pro­test­ers are not just fight­ing their local gov­ern­ment. They’re chal­leng­ing one of the most pow­er­ful coun­tries on earth: Chi­na.
    2. Relat­ed: Hong Kong Democ­ra­cy Activists Arrest­ed Ahead Of Planned March (Emi­ly Feng & Scott Neu­man, NPR): “Joshua Wong, Hong Kong’s most famous pro-democ­ra­cy leader, was arrest­ed on Fri­day along with fel­low activists and politi­cians in what appeared to be a coor­di­nat­ed sweep by the city’s police ahead of a mass anti-gov­ern­ment march that had been planned for the week­end.”
    3. Relat­ed: The One Unit­ed Strug­gle For Free­dom (David Brooks, New York Times): “Many sus­pect Amer­i­ca will nev­er step in to help. The Amer­i­can right no longer believes in spread­ing democ­ra­cy to for­eign­ers. The Amer­i­can left embraces a nation­al nar­ra­tive that empha­sizes slav­ery and oppres­sion, not that Amer­i­ca is a bea­con or an exam­ple. Nei­ther par­ty any longer sees Amer­i­ca as a van­guard nation whose very mis­sion is to advance uni­ver­sal democ­ra­cy and human dig­ni­ty.”
    4. Relat­ed: China’s Spies Are On The Offen­sive (Mike Giglio, The Atlantic): “Espi­onage and coun­teres­pi­onage have been essen­tial tools of state­craft for cen­turies, of course, and U.S. and Chi­nese intel­li­gence agen­cies have been bat­tling one anoth­er for decades. But what these recent cas­es sug­gest is that the intel­li­gence war is escalating—that Chi­na has increased both the scope and the sophis­ti­ca­tion of its efforts to steal secrets from the U.S.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Why Every­thing They Say About The Ama­zon, Includ­ing That It’s The ‘Lungs Of The World,’ Is Wrong (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Forbes): “‘What is hap­pen­ing in the Ama­zon is not excep­tion­al,’ said Coutin­ho. ‘Take a look at Google web search­es search for ‘Ama­zon’ and ‘Ama­zon For­est’ over time. Glob­al pub­lic opin­ion was not as inter­est­ed in the ‘Ama­zon tragedy’ when the sit­u­a­tion was unde­ni­ably worse. The present moment does not jus­ti­fy glob­al hys­te­ria.’ And while fires in Brazil have increased, there is no evi­dence that Ama­zon for­est fires have.” I found this arti­cle quite infor­ma­tive.
  6. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Sides With Nurs­es Who Object to Abor­tion (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Beyond its out­come, this case is a sig­nal of the Trump administration’s pri­or­i­ties: It sees reli­gious free­dom and con­science pro­tec­tions as cen­tral parts of Amer­i­can civ­il rights, and offi­cials plan to enforce those laws.”
    1. Relat­ed: By their tweets you will know them: The Democ­rats’ con­tin­u­ing God gap (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “While the Nones have grown dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the last 20 years, it’s still impor­tant to real­ize that more than six in ten Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy as a Chris­t­ian, accord­ing to the 2018 Coop­er­a­tive Con­gres­sion­al Elec­tion Study. If Democ­rats want to win back the White House, it would behoove them to reach out to those Chris­t­ian vot­ers. How­ev­er, at least on social media, Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates fail to do so.”
    2. Relat­ed: Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty embraces non­re­li­gious vot­ers, crit­i­cizes ‘reli­gious lib­er­ty’ in new res­o­lu­tion (Caleb Parke, Fox News): “The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee (DNC) passed a res­o­lu­tion Sat­ur­day prais­ing the val­ues of ‘reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed’ Amer­i­cans as the ‘largest reli­gious group with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.’ The res­o­lu­tion, which was unan­i­mous­ly passed at the DNC’s sum­mer meet­ing on Aug. 24 in San Fran­cis­co, Calif., was cham­pi­oned by the Sec­u­lar Coali­tion of Amer­i­ca, an orga­ni­za­tion that lob­bies on behalf of athe­ists, agnos­tics, and human­ists on pub­lic pol­i­cy.”
    3. Relat­ed: Michael Wear’s com­men­tary on Twit­ter: “I just want to be clear. This is both polit­i­cal­ly stu­pid, but also, just stu­pid on a fun­da­men­tal lev­el that tran­scends elec­toral pol­i­tics.” (Wear was an Oba­ma staffer)
  7. Let’s have open bor­ders for peo­ple and closed bor­ders for cap­i­tal (Jeff Spross, The Week): “…human beings aren’t the only things that cross bor­ders: goods, ser­vices, and finan­cial cap­i­tal do it all the time as well. A bet­ter response to Trump might not be to debate whether bor­ders should be enforced, but rather enforced against what? Specif­i­cal­ly, the left-pro­gres­sive posi­tion on bor­ders should be some­thing like: max­i­mum enforce­ment against the move­ment of finan­cial cap­i­tal, mod­er­ate enforce­ment against goods and ser­vices, and min­i­mal enforce­ment against peo­ple.”
    1. Relat­ed: Chris­tian­i­ty and Cap­i­tal­ism Recon­sid­ered (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “[the claim] that cap­i­tal­ism makes us wealth­i­er, lets us live longer, and improves our ethics — could be right and even so Chris­tian­i­ty and cap­i­tal­ism might not be com­pat­i­ble. Maybe God doesn’t want us to be rich­er and longer-lived, and maybe there are cer­tain mat­ters of faith­ful­ness that tran­scend what most peo­ple call ‘ethics.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 213

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. Sev­er­al arti­cles relat­ed to the mass shoot­ings:
  2. Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have a porn prob­lem, stud­ies show, but not the one you think (Jana Riess, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Draw­ing on numer­ous stud­ies, Per­ry finds that, despite the sta­tis­ti­cal find­ing that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians are less like­ly to use porn, the per­cep­tion with­in evan­gel­i­cal church­es is that this has become an enor­mous prob­lem for the faith­ful.”
  3. What Ails the Right Isn’t (Just) Racism (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Put anoth­er way, the right is cor­rect that cry­ing wolf mat­ters. And the left is cor­rect that The Boy Who Cried Wolf ends with a wolf feast­ing on folks who con­clud­ed that they shouldn’t wor­ry about wolves because one kid fibbed.” I found this far more inter­est­ing than the title led me to antic­i­pate.
  4. Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a fol­low-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. How (and Why) to KISSASS (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “…if you’re not a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion­al class, the key to get­ting your per­son­al essays pub­lished in promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions is KISSASS—Keep It Short, Sad, And Sim­ple, Stu­pid.” This is a fol­low-up to an arti­cle I shared pre­vi­ous­ly and I found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Car­ol Swain Worked to Hold Politi­cians Account­able. Then She Felt God Call Her to Run. (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Swain, change has been a recur­ring theme in her life. She went from low-income sin­gle moth­er to Ivy League aca­d­e­m­ic, from Demo­c­rat to Repub­li­can media com­men­ta­tor, and from Jehovah’s Wit­ness turned non-church­go­er to com­mit­ted fol­low­er of Christ.” What a fas­ci­nat­ing lady.
  7. Why I’m Not A Lib­er­al (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “Because lib­er­al­ism is based on indi­vid­ual rights, it nat­u­ral­ly favors the indi­vid­ual assert­ing his rights against tra­di­tion­al social sub­jects, whether they be the com­mu­ni­ty, the fam­i­ly, or even his own mar­riage. If a clas­si­cal­ly lib­er­al sys­tem has no effect on the val­ues of soci­ety, it is an aston­ish­ing coin­ci­dence that wher­ev­er lib­er­al polit­i­cal arrange­ments emerge, a new lib­er­al under­stand­ing of mar­riage even­tu­al­ly replaces the pre­vi­ous Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings as the legal and social real­i­ty.” This essay cov­ers a lot of ground.

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 212

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. Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To uni­ver­si­ty-edu­cat­ed media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low-pay­ing man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon asso­ciate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle.
  2. Six­teen and Evan­gel­i­cal (Lau­ra Turn­er, Slate): “A world with­out God wouldn’t make sense to me. But it now makes sense to many of my friends. I final­ly under­stand that we nev­er had a shared faith struc­ture. We went to the same church, some of us for years. We heard the same ser­mons, slept in the same cab­ins at camp, read the same books of the Bible, lis­tened to the same music. But we went home to dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies.” The author is John & Nan­cy Ortberg’s daugh­ter.
  3. Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Report­ed­ly Bans All Mar­tial Arts Groups With­out Warn­ing Over Email (Jin Hyun, NextShark): “Accord­ing to Choi, the university’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion behind the shut­down can be sum­ma­rized in four points: ‘the groups like to unof­fi­cial­ly prac­tice dur­ing dead week, they recruit pro­fes­sion­al, inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned coach­es to run their prac­tices, they com­pete and reg­u­lar­ly win nation­al cham­pi­onships with­out Uni­ver­si­ty help, they par­tic­i­pate heav­i­ly in the local com­mu­ni­ty by teach­ing stu­dents, alum­ni, and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers.’”
    • Stan­ford often seems con­flict­ed about whether its under­grads are future lead­ers to be empow­ered or lia­bil­i­ties to be micro­man­aged.
  4. As admin­is­tra­tors walk back ‘insuf­fi­cient’ response, police reveal noose may have been on cam­pus since March (Ele­na Shao and Daniel Mar­tinez-Krams, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The new infor­ma­tion comes amid crit­i­cism of Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors’ response to the inci­dent, and one day after they held a sol­i­dar­i­ty ral­ly and town hall. A self-care event is sched­uled to take place Fri­day after­noon.” There have been a lot of arti­cles about this — but this once grabbed me with the tid­bit in the head­line. SINCE MARCH?
  5. On Court Prophets and Wilder­ness Prophets  (Tim­o­thy Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Whether you view Trump as a David or an Antipas, whether you serve at the court of the resplen­dent king or stand over against the court from the wilder­ness, one thing Nathan and John the Bap­tist held in com­mon was that both were will­ing to con­demn unright­eous­ness in their rulers—even if it cost them every­thing.”
    • Also polit­i­cal: The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty Is Actu­al­ly Three Par­ties (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “What the data demon­strates is that the group con­tain­ing the largest pro­por­tion of minor­i­ty vot­ers is the most skep­ti­cal of some of the most pro­gres­sive poli­cies embraced by Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates like Eliz­a­beth War­ren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Har­ris.” Per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of this op-ed is when he talks about the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of favor­ing small donors over large donors.
  6. In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons (Paul Mozur, New York Times): “The police offi­cers wres­tled with Col­in Che­ung in an unmarked car. They need­ed his face. They grabbed his jaw to force his head in front of his iPhone. They slapped his face. They shout­ed, ‘Wake up!’ They pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr. Che­ung had dis­abled his phone’s facial-recog­ni­tion login with a quick but­ton mash as soon as they grabbed him.”
  7. Canada’s bizarre trans-wax­ing con­tro­ver­sy (Bren­dan O’Neill, Spiked): “Yaniv says if the case is lost then a dan­ger­ous prece­dent will be set for trans peo­ple. In truth, the real dan­ger is if Yaniv wins the case, because that would set a prece­dent where­by the law could require that women must touch penis­es or risk los­ing their jobs. It would be pro­found­ly misog­y­nis­tic.” The lan­guage in this piece is vul­gar at times but in my esti­ma­tion not reck­less­ly so. Rod Dreher sums things up pith­ily with the head­line: From ‘Bake My Cake’ to ‘Wax My Tes­ti­cles’ (The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive)
    • Relat­ed: Lib­er­als’ aston­ish­ing­ly rad­i­cal shift on gen­der (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Slaves every­where pre­sum­ably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legit­i­ma­cy of the sys­tem and the mas­ter that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we could­n’t even begin to per­ceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a bur­den so oner­ous that it pro­duces a demand for the over­turn­ing of well-set­tled rules and assump­tions, some of which (‘the gen­der bina­ry’) go all the way back to the ear­li­est ori­gins of human civ­i­liza­tion?”

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 Are Satanists of the MS-13 gang an under-covered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS-13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 158.

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 211

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. Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists have duty to report on tragedies in coun­tries like Sudan. (Isa­ha Sesay, USA Today): “If the suf­fer­ing of these girls and their par­ents is not enough to make us pay atten­tion to what has hap­pened in Chi­bok, there is some­thing else to con­sid­er: the threat to glob­al secu­ri­ty. The fate of these girls is in many ways a reflec­tion of the Niger­ian fed­er­al government’s long­stand­ing inabil­i­ty to main­tain peace and sta­bil­i­ty in the north­east of the coun­try. Amer­i­cans should see the dis­ap­pear­ance of the Chi­bok girls as a flare, illu­mi­nat­ing the exis­tence of an ‘ungoverned space’ that is fer­tile ground for a pow­er­ful ter­ror­ist group.”
  2. Face­book and Google track what porn you’re watch­ing, even when you’re in incog­ni­to (Iso­bel Ash­er Hamil­ton, Busi­ness Insid­er): “Researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mel­lon, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia ana­lyzed 22,484 pornog­ra­phy sites using a site called webXray to iden­ti­fy track­ing tools feed­ing data back to third par­ties. ‘Our results indi­cate track­ing is endem­ic on pornog­ra­phy web­sites: 93% of pages leak user data to a third-par­ty,’ the study con­cludes.”
    • Num­bers 32:23 comes to mind: “be sure that your sin will find you out.”
    • An unex­pect­ed con­se­quence of porn: Stream­ing online pornog­ra­phy pro­duces as much CO2 as Bel­gium (Michael Le Page, New­Sci­en­tist): “The trans­mis­sion and view­ing of online videos gen­er­ates 300 mil­lion tonnes of car­bon diox­ide a year, or near­ly 1 per cent of glob­al emis­sions. On-demand video ser­vices such as Net­flix account for a third of this, with online porno­graph­ic videos gen­er­at­ing anoth­er third.”
  3. An Epi­dem­ic of Dis­be­lief (Bar­bara Bradley Hager­ty, The Atlantic): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, inves­ti­ga­tors had assumed that some­one who assaults a stranger by the rail­road tracks is noth­ing like the man who assaults his co-work­er or his girl­friend. But it turns out that the space between acquain­tance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleve­land inves­ti­ga­tors uploaded the DNA from the acquain­tance-rape kits, they were sur­prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force iden­ti­fied dozens of mys­tery rapists this way.” Infu­ri­at­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. 
  4. Oil-patch evan­gel­i­cals: How Chris­tian­i­ty and crude fueled the rise of the Amer­i­can right (Dar­ren Dochuk, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the face of the Rock­e­fellers’ pro­gres­sive way, Tex­an oil­ers cham­pi­oned a the­ol­o­gy of per­son­al encounter with scrip­ture and an active High­er Being. They her­ald­ed church auton­o­my and gospel teach­ings about pros­per­i­ty and end times, a mes­sage that antic­i­pat­ed the vio­lent dis­rup­tions of the oil age and the need to save souls and reap God’s — and the earth’s — rich­es before the world’s end.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Notre Dame and describes an aspect of mod­ern evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ry I had not heard before.
    • An inter­view with the above author: Anoint­ed with Oil: Evan­gel­i­cals and the Petro­le­um Indus­try (Thomas Kidd, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Oil his­to­ri­ans may be sur­prised to hear it, but in some instances oil’s cor­po­rate struc­tures evolved direct­ly out of the the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments of its lead­ers.” The first piece felt a lit­tle hos­tile to me, where­as this one did not at all. 
  5. Stan­ford oppos­es bill that would let col­lege ath­letes in Cal­i­for­nia prof­it from endorse­ments (Ian Park, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The NCAA earns more than $1 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enue from broad­cast­ing rights and cham­pi­onships. In return, stu­dent-ath­letes receive lit­tle to no com­pen­sa­tion, oth­er than schol­ar­ships. Accord­ing to a study by Drex­el Uni­ver­si­ty and the Nation­al Col­lege Play­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, schol­ar­ships aren’t enough for many stu­dent-ath­letes, as sur­veyed ath­letes had to pay col­leges schol­ar­ship short­falls of as much as $17,000.”
    • In oth­er and com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed local news: SF does not have the high­est rents in the Bay Area (Adam Brin­klow, Curbed): “Men­lo Park, home of Face­book, has the high­est rents in the region, aver­ag­ing $4,638 per month. Palo Alto also beat out SF with a star­tling $3,857 per month price tag.” 
    • Else­where in the arti­cle we learn that Red­wood City rents aver­age $1,956. I love Men­lo Park, but there’s no way it is twice as nice as Red­wood City. Sheesh!
  6. Trump vs. Dems: ‘Racist,’ ‘social­ist’ lines drawn for 2020 (Lisa Mas­caro, AP News): “With tweets and a vote, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and House Democ­rats estab­lished the sharp and emo­tion­al­ly raw con­tours of the 2020 elec­tion cam­paigns. In the process, they have cre­at­ed a fraught polit­i­cal frame: ‘racists’ vs. ‘social­ists.’”
    • What Pelosi Ver­sus the Squad Real­ly Means (David Brooks, New York Times): “Lib­er­al­ism arose out of the fact that polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tions, while excit­ing at the out­set, usu­al­ly end up in bru­tal­i­ty, dic­ta­tor­ship and blood. Work­ing with­in the sys­tem is best. Peo­ple who came of age in the past few decades did not grow up in an atmos­phere of assumed lib­er­al­ism. They often grew up in an atmos­phere that cri­tiques it.”
    • ‘It Makes Us Want to Sup­port Him More’ (Peter Nicholas, The Atlantic): “A few con­ced­ed that Trump occa­sion­al­ly fires off an inap­pro­pri­ate tweet, but said his accom­plish­ments in office over­shad­ow any offense. If any­thing, they said, his lan­guage springs from an authen­tic­i­ty they find refresh­ing. None of the peo­ple I spoke with con­sid­ered his com­ments about the con­gress­women racist.”
    • Peo­ple Who Have Screamed ‘Racism’ For Decades Won­der Why No One Is Lis­ten­ing To Them About Trump (Baby­lon Bee): this would nor­mal­ly go down in the amus­ing sec­tion because the head­line is from a satire site, but this is one of those times where the Bee’s insight is rel­e­vant: “‘I mean, we com­pared John McCain to George Wal­lace,’ stat­ed Demo­c­rat Mag­gie Wilkins, ‘and I’m not sure who to com­pare Trump to in order to show he’s an even more wors­er racist.’ Activists are con­sid­er­ing com­ing up with oth­er words to express that Trump is a worse kind of racist. They con­sid­ered ‘white suprema­cist,’ but they’ve been using that a lot late­ly, so it would only mean to most peo­ple that Trump is as bad as the Bet­sy Ross flag. So they tried to invent a new term — dou­ble plus racist — to express how extra racist Trump is, but then remem­bered they already used that on Mitt Rom­ney.”
  7. 5 Rea­sons to Dis­en­tan­gle Sex­u­al­i­ty and Race (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Chris­t­ian sex­u­al ethics were as shock­ing to their orig­i­nal first-cen­tu­ry Gre­co-Roman con­text as they are today. If Chris­tians are to learn from his­to­ry, the les­son must be this: hold fast to Scripture’s rad­i­cal demands, whether the cul­tur­al tide is com­ing in or out. You won’t know which side of his­to­ry you’re on until the last day.” Dis­claimer: I know the author and have col­lab­o­rat­ed with her on events at Stan­ford.

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.

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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.