Tag: politics

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 210

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.

It’s good to be back after last week’s hia­tus.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Trained on Old Sci­en­tif­ic Papers Makes Dis­cov­er­ies Humans Missed (Madeleine Gre­go­ry, Moth­er­board): “In a study pub­lished in Nature on July 3, researchers from the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry used an algo­rithm called Word2Vec sift through sci­en­tif­ic papers for con­nec­tions humans had missed. Their algo­rithm then spit out pre­dic­tions for pos­si­ble ther­mo­elec­tric mate­ri­als, which con­vert heat to ener­gy and are used in many heat­ing and cool­ing appli­ca­tions.”
  2. Can Chris­t­ian Com­pas­sion Influ­ence How We Treat Migrants? (Alan Cross, The Bul­wark): “Com­pas­sion is not inher­it­ed, either in indi­vid­u­als nor in nations. It must be cul­ti­vat­ed and that cul­ti­va­tion often hap­pens in tri­al when we are test­ed. Amer­i­ca is being test­ed right now. How will we respond to the migrants com­ing to us des­per­ate for help and refuge? How will we respond to the sight of Oscar and Vale­ria drown­ing and being found face down on the banks of Rio Grande in each other’s arms?”
    • Relat­ed: In the ‘bat­tle at the bor­der,’ evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers jos­tle for Trump-era media rel­e­van­cy (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Unless you’ve been under a rock recent­ly, you know much of the coun­try is fix­at­ed on the mess at our bor­der. What’s not as vis­i­ble is how evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are fight­ing among them­selves over all of this.”
    • And yet: Repub­li­cans turn more neg­a­tive toward refugees as num­ber admit­ted to U.S. plum­mets (Han­nah Har­tig, Pew Research): “By more than two-to-one (68% to 25%), white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants say the U.S. does not have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees. Oth­er reli­gious groups are more like­ly to say the U.S. does have this respon­si­bil­i­ty. And opin­ions among reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults are near­ly the reverse of those of white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants: 65% say the U.S. has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees into the coun­try, while just 31% say it does not.”
  3. Man­ly wed­ding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Out­line): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a cam­ou­flage ring, part­ly to sig­nal my deep com­mit­ment to irony and part­ly to get bet­ter ser­vice at the auto parts store.” I real­ly enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wed­ding bands in the not-too-dis­tant future.
  4. Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians Face A Deep­en­ing Cri­sis (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Cop­pock men­tioned to me the pow­er­ful exam­ple of St. Ambrose, the bish­op of Milan, who was will­ing to rebuke the Roman Emper­or Theo­do­sius for the latter’s role in mas­sacring civil­ians as pun­ish­ment for the mur­der of one of his gen­er­als. Ambrose refused to allow the Church to become a polit­i­cal prop, despite con­cerns that doing so might endan­ger him. Ambrose spoke truth to pow­er. (Theo­do­sius end­ed up seek­ing penance, and Ambrose went on to teach, con­vert, and bap­tize St. Augus­tine.) Prox­im­i­ty to pow­er is fine for Chris­tians, Cop­pock told me, but only so long as it does not cor­rupt their moral sense, only so long as they don’t allow their faith to become polit­i­cal­ly weaponized. Yet that is pre­cise­ly what’s hap­pen­ing today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I wish that the Amer­i­can church was more vis­i­bly dis­mayed at some of Trump’s obvi­ous sins. I remind peo­ple of all polit­i­cal incli­na­tions that you can sup­port someone’s over­all agen­da and still rebuke them for acts of wicked­ness. In fact, being will­ing to do so makes your sup­port more mean­ing­ful. So vote for who­ev­er you want, and hold the lead­ers you sup­port to a high stan­dard.
  5. Taiwan’s Sta­tus is a Geopo­lit­i­cal Absur­di­ty (Chris Hor­ton, The Atlantic): “’Taiwan’s gov­ern­ment is demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elected—we have a pres­i­dent, we have a par­lia­ment,’ For­eign Min­is­ter Joseph Wu said plain­tive­ly at a brief­ing for for­eign media ear­li­er this year. At the time, his gov­ern­ment was try­ing to be includ­ed in the World Health Assem­bly. (It was ulti­mate­ly blocked by Chi­na.) ‘We issue visas, we issue pass­ports,’ he said, prac­ti­cal­ly plead­ing. ‘We have a mil­i­tary and a cur­ren­cy … Tai­wan exists by itself; Tai­wan is not a part of any oth­er coun­try.’”
  6. Robespierre’s Amer­i­ca (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The data con­firm what one hears and expe­ri­ences anec­do­tal­ly all the time: In the prover­bial land of the free, peo­ple live in mor­tal fear of a moral faux pas. Opin­ions that were con­sid­ered rea­son­able and nor­mal a few years ago are increas­ing­ly deliv­ered in whis­pers. Pro­fes­sors fear their stu­dents. Pub­lish­ers drop books at the slight­est whiff of social-media con­tro­ver­sy.”
  7. Gay Rites Are Civ­il Rites (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “‘Civ­il reli­gion’ is a sur­pris­ing place for social jus­tice to end up. Gay pride start­ed at Stonewall as a giant ****-you to civ­il soci­ety. Home­less peo­ple, addicts, and sex work­ers told the police where they could shove their respectable val­ues. But there was anoth­er major world reli­gion that start­ed with beg­gars, lep­ers, and pros­ti­tutes, wasn’t there? One that told the Phar­isees where to shove their respectable val­ues.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

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 208

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 Pray for Refugees Because I Was One. And God Was Faith­ful. (Sun­day Htoo, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When I was in the jun­gle and run­ning for my life, I felt that I would be safe. I felt that some­one I did not know was pray­ing for me. Some­one is run­ning for their life right now in Bur­ma, or anoth­er coun­try torn by war. Please pray for him, for her, for the chil­dren, for the elder­ly, and for a woman who may be preg­nant. Your prayer is full of mean­ing.” If you ignore every oth­er arti­cle to which I link this week, read this.
    • Rel­e­vant: Migrant chil­dren describe neglect at Texas bor­der facil­i­ty (Cedar Attana­sio, Garance Burke and Martha Men­doza, AP News): “‘In my 22 years of doing vis­its with chil­dren in deten­tion I have nev­er heard of this lev­el of inhu­man­i­ty,’ said Hol­ly Coop­er, who co-directs Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis’ Immi­gra­tion Law Clin­ic and rep­re­sents detained youth…. the Bor­der Patrol is hold­ing 15,000 peo­ple, and the agency con­sid­ers 4,000 to be at capac­i­ty.”
    • Also: Is it Chris­t­ian or ille­gal to aid migrants? A hung Tuc­son jury, a fork in the road of faith (Bri­an McLaren, USA Today): “reli­gious lib­er­ty means the free­dom to save refugees in the desert.” I met McLaren once and had a nice con­ver­sa­tion with him. There is zero chance he remem­bers me. There are parts of this op-ed with which I stren­u­ous­ly dis­agree, rec­om­mend­ed nonethe­less.
  2. The Illib­er­al Right Throws a Tantrum (Adam Ser­w­er, The Atlantic): “The Amer­i­can creed has no more devot­ed adher­ents than those who have been his­tor­i­cal­ly denied its promis­es, and no more fair-weath­er friends than those who have tak­en them for grant­ed.”
    • In response: Is The Reli­gious Right Priv­i­leged? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Polit­i­cal­ly, lib­er­al­ism has imposed via the judi­cia­ry, the least demo­c­ra­t­ic branch, a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion, a form of lethal vio­lence that the church oppos­es for the same rea­sons it oppos­es infan­ti­cide — and after 50 years of small‑d demo­c­ra­t­ic activism by pro-lif­ers, the pro-choice side seems to be hard­en­ing into a view that such activism is as un-Amer­i­can as racism. Legal­ly, elite lib­er­al­ism is increas­ing­ly embrac­ing argu­ments that would make it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for the church to oper­ate hos­pi­tals and adop­tion agen­cies today, and per­haps col­leges and gram­mar schools tomor­row. And in its inter­nal life, beneath the post-Protes­tant ten­den­cy I’ve just described, pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics is also nur­tur­ing a fash­ion­able occultism, whose rit­u­als may be prac­ticed some­what iron­i­cal­ly or per­for­ma­tive­ly but whose anti-Catholi­cism seems quite sin­cere.”
    • Relat­ed: Two Painful Truths of America’s Reli­gious Cul­ture War (David French, Nation­al Review): “Here are two painful truths: Sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment is break­ing its promise of lib­er­ty, and the Amer­i­can church is break­ing its promise of virtue.”
  3. What Real­ly Hap­pened to Malaysia’s Miss­ing Air­plane (William Langewi­esche, The Atlantic): “The idea that a sophis­ti­cat­ed machine, with its mod­ern instru­ments and redun­dant com­mu­ni­ca­tions, could sim­ply van­ish seems beyond the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty. It is hard to per­ma­nent­ly delete an email, and liv­ing off the grid is near­ly unachiev­able even when the attempt is delib­er­ate. A Boe­ing 777 is meant to be elec­tron­i­cal­ly acces­si­ble at all times…. All sorts of the­o­rists have made claims, ampli­fied by social media, that ignore the satel­lite data, and in some cas­es also the radar tracks, the air­craft sys­tems, the air-traf­fic-con­trol record, the physics of flight, and the basic con­tours of plan­e­tary geog­ra­phy. ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent (and, it seems, half the inter­net — this is wide­ly con­sid­ered a must-read arti­cle). The author is a pro­fes­sion­al pilot and a vet­er­an jour­nal­ist
  4. ‘Sing Hal­lelu­jah to the Lord’ has become the unof­fi­cial anthem of the anti-extra­di­tion protest move­ment (Ken­neth Tan, Shang­hai­ist): “Alarmed by reports of police bru­tal­i­ty, many church groups gal­va­nized to par­tic­i­pate in peace protests, call­ing on the author­i­ties to stop the vio­lence. Their pres­ence on the front lines of the protests were help­ful in mak­ing the demon­stra­tions look more like an out­door wor­ship ser­vice rather than the ‘orga­nized riots’ the gov­ern­ment said it had to crack down on to bring back law and order.”
    • Relat­ed: A new kind of Hong Kong activism emerges as pro­test­ers mobi­lize with­out any lead­ers (Alice Su, LA Times): “This time around, pro­test­ers are delib­er­ate­ly lead­er­less, Leung said. ‘It looks quite orga­nized and well-dis­ci­plined. But I’m quite sure you can­not find any­one man­ag­ing the whole thing,’ Leung said, adding that the pro­test­ers’ logis­ti­cal prac­tices — bring­ing sup­plies, set­ting up med­ical sta­tions, rapid mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion — were ‘in-built’ from the last few years of prac­tice. ‘It’s just like a machine or a self-learn­ing AI that can run by them­selves,’ he said.”
    • Relat­ed: check out this drone footage of the protests (3 min­utes, YouTube).
  5. Repa­ra­tions came up in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on June­teenth. Here are two tes­ti­monies that caught a lot of atten­tion:
    • Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Tes­ti­mo­ny on Repa­ra­tions (Olivia Paschal & Madeleine Carlisle, The Atlantic): “The typ­i­cal black fam­i­ly in this coun­try has one-tenth the wealth of the typ­i­cal white fam­i­ly. Black women die in child­birth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boast­ing the largest prison pop­u­la­tion on the plan­et, of which the descen­dants of the enslaved make up the largest share. The mat­ter of repa­ra­tions is one of mak­ing amends and direct redress, but it is also a ques­tion of cit­i­zen­ship.” (or watch the five minute video on YouTube)
    • My Tes­ti­mo­ny On Repa­ra­tions (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “But the peo­ple who were owed for slav­ery are no longer here, and we’re not enti­tled to col­lect on their debts. Repa­ra­tions, by def­i­n­i­tion, are only giv­en to vic­tims. So the moment you give me repa­ra­tions, you’ve made me into a vic­tim with­out my con­sent. Not just that: you’ve made one-third of black Americans—who con­sis­tent­ly poll against reparations—into vic­tims with­out their con­sent, and black Amer­i­cans have fought too long for the right to define them­selves to be spo­ken for in such a con­de­scend­ing man­ner.” (or watch the six minute video on YouTube)
    • Some­what, kin­da relat­ed: ‘Affir­ma­tive Action Is Not About Equal­i­ty. It’s About Cov­er­ing Ass.’ (Evan Goldstein,Chronicle Review): “What hap­pened is that I went through a trau­ma. I was accused of assault­ing a woman with whom I was hav­ing an extra­mar­i­tal affair. I was pub­licly humil­i­at­ed. I had to with­draw an appoint­ment as under­sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion in the last years of Reagan’s sec­ond term. I was a crack-cocaine addict; it almost killed me. My wife at the time, God bless her, stayed with me, and we sub­se­quent­ly had two fine sons. But at the time, I was dying. I found Jesus. I got my life togeth­er. They stuck with me at the Kennedy School, but I just couldn’t bear the feel­ing of con­de­scen­sion.” This is an inter­view with Glenn Loury, who was the first black tenured econ pro­fes­sor at Har­vard. He is now an econ­o­mist at Brown.
  6. Ide­ol­o­gy and Facts Col­lide at Ober­lin Col­lege (Daniel McGraw, Quil­lette): “It slow­ly became evi­dent that this case was not about free expres­sion and assem­bly or racial injus­tice and civ­il rights. It was about some­thing more banal. A cow­ard­ly col­lege admin­is­tra­tion picked on a small and vul­ner­a­ble busi­ness in an attempt to fend off accu­sa­tions of racism it was fac­ing from its own stu­dents.”
    • Hon­est­ly, this Twit­ter thread about it is even bet­ter. Jaw-drop­ping details. Read it first and then the above arti­cle if you want a more well-round­ed nar­ra­tive.
  7. How Should Chris­tians Have Sex? (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “I long for more robust cat­e­gories of right and wrong besides con­sent — a base­line, but only that — and more than a gen­er­al reminder not to be a jerk. I can get that from Dan Sav­age, but I also want to know what Jesus thinks.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 207

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. Eleven arrests, dou­ble the tear gas fired dur­ing Occu­py move­ment and 81 injured: police chief paints dis­turb­ing pic­ture of Hong Kong extra­di­tion bill protests (Ng Kang-chung & Christy Leung, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “In a post­mortem on Thurs­day of the clash­es between offi­cers and pro­test­ers who had sur­round­ed the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil build­ing and admin­is­tra­tive head­quar­ters the day before, Com­mis­sion­er of Police Stephen Lo Wai-chung said more than 150 rounds of tear gas had been fired – almost dou­ble that on the first day of the Occu­py demon­stra­tions – and about 20 bean­bag rounds, as well as ‘sev­er­al’ rounds of rub­ber bul­lets.” See also these relat­ed pho­tos from AP.
    • What Hong Kong’s Free­dom Means to the World (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Cir­ca 2019, Hong Kong is a study in the creep­ing pow­er and increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of autoc­ra­cy. While it is pos­si­ble there could be a Tianan­men-like mas­sacre in the streets of Hong Kong, it is more like­ly that its main­land over­lords will opt for more sub­tle ways of chok­ing off Hong Kong’s remain­ing auton­o­my and free­doms.”
    • Hong Kong and the Future of Free­dom (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “When Ronald Rea­gan called the Sovi­et Union ‘the focus of evil in the mod­ern world,’ one promi­nent lib­er­al writer denounced him as ‘prim­i­tive.’ But it was such rhetoric that gave courage to dis­si­dents and dream­ers on the oth­er side of the wall. What’s real­ly prim­i­tive is to look upon the oppres­sion of oth­ers and, whether out of defi­cient sym­pa­thy or exces­sive sophis­ti­ca­tion, remain silent.”
  2. The Pol­i­tics of Dystopia (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Lib­er­al­ism has nev­er done as well as it thinks at resolv­ing its own crises. America’s gravest moral evil, chat­tel slav­ery, was defeat­ed by an author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­dent in a reli­gious civ­il war, not by pro­ce­du­ral­ism or con­sti­tu­tion­al debate. The cri­sis of the 1930s end­ed hap­pi­ly for lib­er­al­ism because a reac­tionary impe­ri­al­ist with­stood Adolf Hitler and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary Bol­she­vik crushed him. The lib­er­al peace that fol­lowed may depend on fear of the atom­ic bomb.”
    • Relat­ed: A High-School Porn Star’s Cry for Help (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The prob­lem is that there are some very old human impuls­es that must now con­tend with porn. One of them is the ten­den­cy of deeply trou­bled teenage girls to act out sex­u­al­ly as a kind of dis­tress sig­nal, an attempt to get the atten­tion of adults who may not be get­ting the mes­sage that they’re in a cri­sis.”
    • Relat­ed? JON STEWART Goes OFF On Con­gress (YouTube): a remark­able nine-minute clip. The next day the bill was passed in com­mit­tee and now awaits a full vote.
  3. The restau­rant own­er who asked for 1‑star Yelp reviews (Zachary Crock­ett, The Hus­tle): “In 2014, chef Davide Cer­re­ti­ni adver­tised a spe­cial that would for­ev­er change his fate: Any­one who left his restau­rant a 1‑star review on Yelp would get 25% off a piz­za.” This is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Her Evan­gel­i­cal Megachurch Was Her World. Then Her Daugh­ter Said She Was Molest­ed by a Min­is­ter. (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Ms. Bragg said that all she want­ed was a church home that would care for her fam­i­ly. Evan­gel­i­cals in Dal­las are enam­ored with the Vil­lage, with Mr. Chan­dler and with all the church rep­re­sents, she said recent­ly. She start­ed to cry.”
  5. A Soci­ol­o­gist of Reli­gion on Protes­tants, Porn, and the “Puri­ty Indus­tri­al Com­plex” (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “What I found is that, what­ev­er we think pornog­ra­phy is doing, those effects tend to be ampli­fied when we’re talk­ing about con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants. It seems to be unique­ly harm­ful to con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants’ men­tal health, their sense of self, their own identities—certainly their inti­mate relationships—in ways that don’t tend to be as harm­ful for peo­ple who don’t have that kind of moral prob­lem with it.” Chotin­er is inter­view­ing Samuel Per­ry, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa.
  6. The Rise Of Pro­gres­sive Occultism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “For an increas­ing num­ber of left-lean­ing millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any orga­nized religion—occult spir­i­tu­al­i­ty isn’t just a form of per­son­al prac­tice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a meta­phys­i­cal can­vas for the Amer­i­can cul­ture wars in the post-Trump era: pit­ting the self-iden­ti­fied Davids of seem­ing­ly sec­u­lar pro­gres­sivism against the Goliath of nation­al­ist evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The arti­cle ends with an amaz­ing quote: “Back in 1992, Chris­t­ian broad­cast­er Pat Robert­son warned of the dan­gers of fem­i­nism, pre­dict­ing that it would induce ‘women to leave their husbands.…practice witch­craft, destroy cap­i­tal­ism and become les­bians.’ Many of today’s witch­es would hap­pi­ly agree.” 👀
  7. Is Chris­tian­i­ty los­ing to Islam? (Paul Seabright, Asia Times): “On a world scale – what­ev­er pop­ulists may say – Chris­tian­i­ty is not strug­gling; it is in more vig­or­ous shape than it has ever been. And the mar­ket­place is where most of the reli­gious action is going to take place in this cen­tu­ry. As in many oth­er mar­ket­places, there are large returns to economies of scale for those who can work out how to exploit them. That is why cor­po­rate reli­gion is here to stay – and why we should expect it to con­sol­i­date its dom­i­nance.” The author is an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor in France.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 206

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. 30 Years After Tianan­men, a Chi­nese Mil­i­tary Insid­er Warns: Nev­er For­get (Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “…Ms. Jiang’s deci­sion to chal­lenge the silence car­ries an extra polit­i­cal charge because she is not only an army vet­er­an but also the daugh­ter of the mil­i­tary elite. Her father was a gen­er­al, and she was born and raised in mil­i­tary com­pounds. She proud­ly enlist­ed in the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army about 50 years ago, and in pho­tos from her time as a mil­i­tary jour­nal­ist, she stands beam­ing in her green army uni­form, a note­book in hand and cam­era hang­ing from her neck.”
  2. Clarence Thomas’s Dan­ger­ous Idea (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And in any oth­er area of pol­i­cy Thomas’s point about how legal abor­tion appears, in the aggre­gate, to act in racist and eugenic ways would be tak­en as an indi­ca­tor that some­thing more than just eman­ci­pa­tion is at work. ”
  3. If you have not been fol­low­ing it, a remark­able argu­ment has devel­oped in the world of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive intel­li­gentsia. The quick­ness with which oth­ers have jumped into shows that there’s a real divi­sion here.
    • Against David French-ism (Sohrab Ahmari, First Things): “Pro­gres­sives under­stand that cul­ture war means dis­cred­it­ing their oppo­nents and weak­en­ing or destroy­ing their insti­tu­tions. Con­ser­v­a­tives should approach the cul­ture war with a sim­i­lar real­ism. Civil­i­ty and decen­cy are sec­ondary val­ues. They reg­u­late com­pli­ance with an estab­lished order and ortho­doxy. We should seek to use these val­ues to enforce our order and our ortho­doxy, not pre­tend that they could ever be neu­tral. To rec­og­nize that enmi­ty is real is its own kind of moral duty.”
    • What Sohrab Ahmari Gets Wrong (David French, Nation­al Review): “I firm­ly believe that the defense of these polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al val­ues must be con­duct­ed in accor­dance with scrip­tur­al admo­ni­tions to love your ene­mies, to bless those who per­se­cute you, with full knowl­edge that the ‘Lord’s ser­vant’ must be ‘kind to every­one, able to teach, and patient­ly endure evil.’”
    • What A Clash Between Con­ser­v­a­tives Reveals (Alan Jacobs, The Atlantic): “It’s impor­tant to note that Ahmari sees the dif­fer­ences between him and French as root­ed, ulti­mate­ly, in their dif­fer­ent Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions: Catholi­cism for Ahmari—who recent­ly pub­lished a mem­oir of his conversion—and evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tantism. But whether this is indeed the heart of the mat­ter, the dis­pute so far hasn’t fall­en out that way. Some Catholics are with French, some Protes­tants with Ahmari.”
      • A fol­low-up piece Jacobs pub­lished on his own blog, well worth read­ing on its own. Fair Play To You (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Con­science exemp­tions ain’t what they used to be — about that there is sure­ly no dis­agree­ment. The dis­pute is sim­ply whether that’s good or bad.” This post con­tains a beau­ti­ful imag­i­nary dia­log which I high­ly com­mend to you — read that if you read noth­ing else.
    • The Ahmari/French debate: A read­ing list (Joe Carter, Acton Insti­tute): the lev­el of debate this has kicked off is amaz­ing. Click here to see all the ins and outs.
  4. These Men Say the Boy Scouts’ Sex Abuse Prob­lem Is Worse Than Any­one Knew (Eliana Dock­ter­man, Time): “‘They were reporting…that they were a whole­some orga­ni­za­tion,’ says Tim Kos­noff, one of the attor­neys, ‘when they were kick­ing out child moles­ters at the rate of one every two days for 100 years.’”
  5. Deep­fake Pro­pa­gan­da Is Not A Real Prob­lem (Rus­sell Bran­dom, The Verge): “In any of these cas­es, attack­ers had the motive and the resources to pro­duce a deep­fake video. The tech­nol­o­gy is cheap, eas­i­ly avail­able, and tech­ni­cal­ly straight­for­ward. But giv­en the option of fab­ri­cat­ing video evi­dence, each group seems to have decid­ed it wasn’t worth the trou­ble. Instead we saw news arti­cles made up from whole cloth, or videos edit­ed to take on a sin­is­ter mean­ing.”
  6. There was a con­tro­ver­sy recent­ly when Trump showed up at a church and the pas­tor prayed for him.
    • On Pray­ing for the Pres­i­dent (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “What’s remark­able about this prayer is not that it hap­pened, but that it shows how thor­ough­ly the Trump era has opened the way for cyn­i­cism and out­rage over even mun­dane, pre­dictable Chris­t­ian behav­ior.”
    • David Platt Asks God to Grant Trump ‘All the Grace He Needs to Gov­ern’ (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Platt is in an inter­est­ing posi­tion. For years, he’s preached against the Amer­i­can focus on “self-advance­ment, self-esteem, and self-suf­fi­cien­cy” and “indi­vid­u­al­ism, mate­ri­al­ism, and uni­ver­sal­ism.” And now he’s the pas­tor of a sub­ur­ban Wash­ing­ton con­gre­ga­tion full of Chris­tians who work on the Hill, a place once deemed ‘a holy des­ti­na­tion for GOP sen­a­tors and Bush aides.’”
    • Prayer For The Pres­i­dent (David Platt): this is Platt’s let­ter to the con­gre­ga­tion explain­ing his actions. “At the end of my ser­mon at the 1:00 wor­ship gath­er­ing, I stepped to the side for what I thought would be a cou­ple of moments in qui­et reflec­tion as we pre­pared to take the Lord’s Sup­per. But I was imme­di­ate­ly called back­stage and told that the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States was on his way to the church, would be there in a mat­ter of min­utes, and would like for us to pray for him.”
    • In case you’re won­der­ing, I would 100% have done what Platt did. And I would have done it for Oba­ma, Clin­ton, Bush, or who­ev­er. I would have done it for Nero. I can­not under­stand how this is con­tro­ver­sial or is being per­ceived as par­ti­san.
  7. Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 205

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. #MeToo Comes For Mar­tin Luther King (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I wish none of this were true, and per­haps we will learn when the record­ings are even­tu­al­ly released that these claims are not true, but I very much doubt it. David Garrow’s rep­u­ta­tion as a civ­il rights move­ment his­to­ri­an is beyond reproach, and as a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist, Gar­row can­not be said to have polit­i­cal motives for try­ing to dis­cred­it King. “ This is very sad. I knew King was adul­ter­ous, but these alle­ga­tions go far beyond that.
  2. Christo­pher Hitchens and his Chris­t­ian friends (Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridge­head): “Christo­pher Hitchens is remem­bered by the god­less as a man who tru­ly hat­ed Chris­tians and want­ed to utter­ly destroy Chris­tian­i­ty. In pub­lic, in front of his admir­ers, he main­tained that posi­tion even as the grave yawned at him. But as was always the case with Christo­pher Hitchens, there was quite a bit more to the sto­ry.”
  3. These two sto­ries are very dif­fer­ent and yet very sim­i­lar.
    • Los­ing Reli­gion and Find­ing Ecsta­sy in Hous­ton (Jia Tolenti­no, The New York­er): “I won­der if I would have stayed reli­gious if I had grown up in a place oth­er than Hous­ton and a time oth­er than now. I won­der how dif­fer­ent I would be if I had been able to find the feel­ing of devot­ed self-destruc­tion only through God. Instead, I have con­fused reli­gion with drugs, drugs with music, music with reli­gion. I can’t tell whether my incli­na­tion toward ecsta­sy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecsta­t­ic ten­den­cy that I ever believed at all.”
      • Tolenti­no has a way with words and her arti­cle, though sad, is enter­tain­ing­ly writ­ten. Over at GetRe­li­gion, Dou­glas LeBlanc offers the obser­va­tion: “Tolentino’s child­hood expe­ri­ences appar­ent­ly left her think­ing that the main point of Chris­tian­i­ty is to live in an unbreak­able bub­ble of bliss. If that’s the case, Ecsta­sy makes per­fect sense as the most tempt­ing sub­sti­tute for God.”
    • Come­di­an Pete Holmes was a good Chris­t­ian guy. Then his wife left him, and things got weird. (Daniel Burke, CNN): “…I thought that the lines were to God were closed, but they aren’t. We were taught that God spoke direct­ly to his prophets and the authors of the New Tes­ta­ment, and then Paul, and then it was over. And then I took mush­rooms, and I was like, ‘It ain’t over!’”
  4. Can We Believe? (Andrew Kla­van, City Jour­nal): “In any case, sci­en­tists used to accuse reli­gious peo­ple of invent­ing a ‘God of the Gaps’—that is, using reli­gion to explain away what sci­ence had not yet uncov­ered. But mul­ti­vers­es and sim­u­la­tions seem very much like a Sci­ence of the Gaps, jer­ry-rigged noth­ings designed to cir­cum­vent the sim­plest expla­na­tion for the real­i­ty we know.”
    • This is the same Andrew Kla­van who spoke on cam­pus recent­ly. I was unable to attend his talk (being busy preach­ing at the same time), but every­one I know who went found it quite com­pelling despite the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing it.
  5. See the World Like a Title IX Bureau­crat (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “[The Prince­ton stu­dents’ pro­pos­als] illus­trate an under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed ten­sion in the approach of today’s stu­dent activists, who simul­ta­ne­ous­ly express out­rage at the bad behav­ior of admin­is­tra­tive bureau­cra­cies and fight to expand their size and pow­er… Prince­ton bureau­crats have been focused on cam­pus sex­u­al assault for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry now. And in the telling of the stu­dent activists, they’ve yet to meet even min­i­mal eth­i­cal and pro­ce­dur­al stan­dards. So why pour mil­lions more into the same hier­ar­chies, expand­ing the might, mea­sured in total staff, of their lead­ers?”
  6. Five Insights Chris­tian­i­ty Brings to Pol­i­tics (Michael Math­e­son Miller, Law & Lib­er­ty): “It is impor­tant to note that a Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is not sim­ply a sec­u­lar vision of gov­ern­ment with reli­gion sprin­kled on top. Sec­u­lar­ism is not neu­tral. A Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is ground­ed in key the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal ideas about the nature of God and real­i­ty, the impor­tance of jus­tice, the val­ue of free­dom, the role of the fam­i­ly, and a rich under­stand­ing of the human per­son as cre­at­ed in the image of God, made for flour­ish­ing, and called to an eter­nal des­tiny.” This arti­cle is a par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholic way of think­ing about this sub­ject (one of sev­er­al Catholic approach­es, I should add).
    • On a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal note: The man who pre­dict­ed Trump’s vic­to­ry says Democ­rats may have to impeach him to have a chance in 2020 (Chris Cil­liz­za, CNN): “Licht­man, a pro­fes­sor at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Wash­ing­ton, DC, was the most promi­nent voice pre­dict­ing Don­ald Trump’s vic­to­ry in the run-up to the 2016 elec­tion. When Trump won, it marked the 9th(!) straight pres­i­den­tial elec­tion where Licht­man had cor­rect­ly pre­dict­ed the Elec­toral Col­lege win­ner. (That’s all the way back to 1984, for you math wiz­ards.)”
      • Caveat lec­tor. There are a lot of pun­dits, and at least one of them being right about the last 9 elec­tions by chance isn’t that improb­a­ble (unless I’m miss­ing some­thing there are only 512 dif­fer­ent out­comes if you are only con­sid­er­ing the two major par­ties). Inter­est­ing nonethe­less.
  7. Self-cen­sor­ship on Cam­pus Is Bad for Sci­ence (Lau­na Mar­jo­la, The Atlantic): “Sad­ly, stu­dents do not seem to real­ize that their good inten­tions may lead them to resist learn­ing sci­en­tif­ic facts, and can even harm their own goal of help­ing women and eth­nic minori­ties.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Williams Col­lege.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 202

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The First Rule of Social-Media Cen­sor­ship Is That There Are No Rules (David French, Nation­al Review): “The great val­ue of view­point neu­tral­i­ty is that it com­ports with our sense of fun­da­men­tal fair­ness. It hear­kens back to the image of the blind­fold­ed Lady Jus­tice, hold­ing her scales, indif­fer­ent to the pow­er or priv­i­lege of her peti­tion­ers. Twit­ter and Face­book have removed the blind­fold, thrown away the scales, and cho­sen to wield only the sword.”
    • Relat­ed but less aggres­sive: Facebook’s Unin­tend­ed Con­se­quence (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The deep­er prob­lem is the over­whelm­ing con­cen­tra­tion of tech­ni­cal, finan­cial and moral pow­er in the hands of peo­ple who lack the train­ing, expe­ri­ence, wis­dom, trust­wor­thi­ness, humil­i­ty and incen­tives to exer­cise that pow­er respon­si­bly.”
    • Relat­ed but with a dif­fer­ent empha­sis: The Big Tech Threat (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “My the­sis is that the evi­dence strong­ly sug­gests there is some­thing deeply trou­bling, maybe even deeply wrong, with the entire social media econ­o­my. My the­sis is that it does not rep­re­sent a source of strength for America’s tomor­row, but is rather a source of per­il.” A tran­script of a speech giv­en by a US Sen­a­tor who is a Stan­ford grad and who was speak­ing at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  2. We Are Tak­ing Reli­gious Free­dom Too Far (Mar­garet Ren­kl, New York Times): “Reli­gious faith is a pri­vate mat­ter between a believ­er and God. But how a believ­er lives in com­mu­ni­ty with oth­er peo­ple is some­thing dif­fer­ent alto­geth­er. It’s time to stop giv­ing believ­ers a pass just because their beliefs hap­pen to run counter to the laws of the nation they live in.”
    • In response: A New York Times Op-Ed Is Very Wrong About Reli­gious Lib­er­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “She for­mu­lates reli­gious lib­er­ty like this: ‘In this coun­try, cit­ing reli­gious or spir­i­tu­al con­vic­tions is often a sure­fire way to get out of doing some­thing you’re required by law to do.’ This is a com­mon fram­ing on the left. Essen­tial­ly, it’s an argu­ment that reli­gious free­dom is an intru­sion into the law and that reli­gious peo­ple are engaged in a form of spe­cial plead­ing — seek­ing rights and exemp­tions unavail­able to oth­er Amer­i­cans. In real­i­ty, the First Amend­ment is supreme, and when states seek to intrude on reli­gious lib­er­ty, they’re try­ing to get out of some­thing they’re required by law to do. Respect­ing the First Amend­ment is the default oblig­a­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and every state and local gov­ern­ment in the Unit­ed States.”
    • Relat­ed but on a dif­fer­ent top­ic: Health and Human Ser­vices and the Reli­gious-Lib­er­ty War (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The con­flict between reli­gious lib­er­ty, LGBTQ rights, and abor­tion access is about to inten­si­fy. In the com­ing weeks or months, HHS is expect­ed to issue a revised ver­sion of Rule 1557 of the Afford­able Care Act, which extend­ed nondis­crim­i­na­tion pro­tec­tions to trans­gen­der peo­ple and women who have ter­mi­nat­ed preg­nan­cies. The Supreme Court is also slat­ed to con­sid­er civ­il-rights pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ indi­vid­u­als in sev­er­al high-pro­file upcom­ing cas­es; while those cas­es most­ly involve pro­tec­tions pro­vid­ed under employ­ment law, they sim­i­lar­ly pit reli­gious lib­er­ty against LGBTQ rights.”
  3. Agapáo and Philéo by the Sea of Tiberias (Ron Bel­gau, Spir­i­tu­al Friend­ship): “After break­fast, Peter and Jesus had a con­ver­sa­tion which rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion about how to under­stand the verbs for love—agapáo and philéo—used in the orig­i­nal Greek…. The pas­sage is dif­fi­cult to trans­late because although Eng­lish has always had sep­a­rate nouns for ‘love’ and ‘friend­ship,’ no Eng­lish speak­er pri­or to Mark Zucker­berg used ‘friend’ as a verb. Trans­la­tors, there­fore, must either trans­late both words as ‘love,’ which los­es a poten­tial nuance in the orig­i­nal, or else must try to some­how make the dif­fer­ence appar­ent in Eng­lish.” This is the most sat­is­fy­ing expla­na­tion of this pas­sage I have heard.
  4. Amer­i­can church­es must reject lit­er­al­ism and admit we got it wrong on gay peo­ple (Oliv­er Thomas, USA Today): “Church­es will con­tin­ue hem­or­rhag­ing mem­bers and mon­ey at an alarm­ing rate until we muster the courage to face the truth: We got it wrong on gays and les­bians. This shouldn’t alarm or sur­prise us. We have learned some things that the ancients — includ­ing Moses and Paul — sim­ply did not know. Not even Jesus…”
    • The author is a retired Amer­i­can Bap­tist min­is­ter.
    • In response: Oliv­er Thomas @USATODAY Says the Amer­i­can Church Got it Wrong on Gay People—And He’s Right (Michael Kruger, per­son­al blog): “In this way, Thomas is right. The church is killing itself, if by the ‘church’ one means the main­line denom­i­na­tions who have aban­doned bib­li­cal author­i­ty. Indeed, sta­tis­tics have shown, plain­ly and incon­tro­vert­ibly, that the main­line denom­i­na­tions are dying and the bible-believ­ing ones are grow­ing.”
    • In response: No, Chris­tian­i­ty Doesn’t Need To Endorse Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty To Grow (Glenn Stan­ton, The Fed­er­al­ist): “When same-sex-attract­ed Chris­tians go to church, they are not choos­ing the pews of church­es Thomas is call­ing us to become. Again, it’s just the oppo­site. Research con­duct­ed joint­ly at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Los Ange­les by schol­ars who are not shy about sup­port­ing gay pol­i­tics found that gay- and les­bian-iden­ti­fied peo­ple are 2.5 times more like­ly to attend church­es that took a more con­ser­v­a­tive view on Chris­tian­i­ty (includ­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty) than the so-called ‘wel­com­ing and affirm­ing’ con­gre­ga­tions that cel­e­brate it.”
  5. What’s wrong with Amer­i­ca? I debate Ben Shapiro.(Sean Illing, Vox): “There are basi­cal­ly two visions of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. One is that Amer­i­ca was found­ed on great moral prin­ci­ples that we failed to live up to his­tor­i­cal­ly and we’ve been striv­ing to ful­fill. The oth­er is that Amer­i­ca is root­ed in racism, big­otry, sex­ism, and homo­pho­bia, and that these great moral prin­ci­ples were the founders mere­ly flat­ter­ing them­selves.”
    • This is a very good exchange. Whichev­er side you’re sym­pa­thet­ic to, you’ll enjoy read­ing this inter­view.
  6. Why God Is a He (Den­nis Prager, YouTube): five min­utes. It’s an inter­est­ing way to approach the issue. As a Chris­t­ian I would make a dif­fer­ent argu­ment con­nect­ed to the incar­na­tion and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus as a male, but Prager is an obser­vant Jew and so that line of think­ing is unavail­able to him.
  7. Are All Repub­li­cans Bib­li­cal Lit­er­al­ists? Are All Democ­rats Heretics?(Ryan Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “With the release of the 2018 wave of the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey data, I think that it’s time to take stock of how a person’s view of the Bible is relat­ed to their polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. Are there bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists who are Democ­rats? How many Repub­li­cans don’t put much stock in the Bible? And, how has the view of the Bible changed over time?”
    • tl;dr — Rough­ly ¼ of Democ­rats and â…“ of Repub­li­cans believe the Bible is the lit­er­al word of God. Rough­ly half of each par­ty think the Bible is inspired but not always to be tak­en lit­er­al­ly. The remain­der in each par­ty believe that the Bible is just ancient fables.

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 200

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The big news this week is the hor­rif­ic attacks in Sri Lan­ka on East­er Sun­day. Here are some of the respons­es that caught my inter­est:
    • Sri Lankan Sun­day School Was ‘Will­ing to Die for Christ’ on East­er. Half Did. (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dur­ing Sun­day School, [Prab­ha] had talked to the chil­dren about the impor­tance of repen­tance and receiv­ing Jesus as Lord. Because a recent vehi­cle acci­dent had claimed the lives of six Zion Church mem­bers, he had referred to that event and chal­lenged the chil­dren, ask­ing them if they would be will­ing to even die for Jesus. All the chil­dren had respond­ed by putting their hands up and sig­nalled their fresh ded­i­ca­tion to Jesus by light­ing a sym­bol­ic can­dle. For so many of those chil­dren it would be their final act of wor­ship (2 Tim­o­thy 6:6–8).” WOW
    • Are Chris­tians Priv­i­leged or Per­se­cut­ed? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But if the equa­tion of tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty with priv­i­lege has some rel­e­vance to the actu­al Euro-Amer­i­can sit­u­a­tion, when applied glob­al­ly it’s a gross cat­e­go­ry error…. One of the basic facts of con­tem­po­rary reli­gious his­to­ry is that Chris­tians around the world are per­se­cut­ed on an extra­or­di­nary scale — by mobs and pogroms in India, jihadists and Unit­ed States-allied gov­ern­ments in the Mus­lim world, sec­u­lar total­i­tar­i­ans in Chi­na and North Korea. Yet as an era-defin­ing real­i­ty rather than an episod­ic phe­nom­e­non this real­i­ty is bare­ly vis­i­ble in the West­ern media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by West­ern gov­ern­ments and human­i­tar­i­an insti­tu­tions. (‘Islam­o­pho­bia’ looms large; talk of ‘Christo­pho­bia’ is almost nonex­is­tent.)”
    • When Chris­tians Are Under Attack, Mus­lims and the Left Need to Defend Them (Meh­di Hasan): “I am a Mus­lim, and I con­sid­er myself to be on the left, but I’m embar­rassed to admit that in both Mus­lim and left cir­cles, the issue of Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion has been down­played and even ignored for far too long.”
    • Why Con­ser­v­a­tives Are So Angry About Obama’s Ref­er­ence to “East­er Wor­ship­pers” (Ruth Gra­ham, Slate): “I would argue that it takes a true savant of exquis­ite­ly attuned griev­ance col­lec­tion to read an indi­vid­ual ref­er­ence to ‘East­er wor­ship­pers’ as an attempt to avoid acknowl­edg­ing Chris­tian­i­ty. East­er is the most impor­tant hol­i­day in the Chris­t­ian cal­en­dar. ‘East­er’ has no oth­er mean­ing.”
    • Sri Lan­ka attacks: St Antho­ny’s ‘church of mir­a­cles’ a sym­bol of hope (Ayeshea Per­ara, BBC): “Among those gath­ered out­side the church is Pra­bath Bud­dhi­ka. Although Mr Bud­dhi­ka is Bud­dhist by reli­gion, like many oth­ers, he is a strong believ­er in the pow­er of St Antho­ny. ‘My house is right here,’ he said, adding that he’d been attend­ing the church since he was a child and gone along with his fam­i­ly many times.”
    • Why Sri Lan­ka Was Prob­a­bly Not Retal­i­a­tion for Christchurch (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic): “The bomb­ings in Sri Lan­ka were among the more spec­tac­u­lar in the his­to­ry of ter­ror­ism, and they almost cer­tain­ly took more plan­ning than would have been pos­si­ble in the past five weeks. (It may seem easy to get sev­er­al guys to push det­o­na­tor but­tons all at once, in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent loca­tions. But ter­ror­ists are often bum­blers, and the more com­pli­cat­ed the plan, the greater the chance of dis­rup­tion.)”
  2. What About Cap­i­tal­iz­ing Pro­nouns Refer­ring to God? (Randy Alcorn, Eter­nal Per­spec­tives Min­istries): “I have had to fight to get Heav­en cap­i­tal­ized in my books, argu­ing that it is a prop­er noun, and just as real a place as Sat­urn or France. I argue the same for cap­i­tal­iz­ing the New Earth—if we cap­i­tal­ize New Eng­land, why not the redeemed cre­ation that Scrip­ture calls the ‘New Earth’?”
    • This is a very thought­ful per­spec­tive on hon­or­ing God with your writ­ten words.
  3. Is Prison Nec­es­sary? Ruth Wil­son Gilmore Might Change Your Mind (Rachel Kush­n­er, New York Times): “If prison, in its philo­soph­i­cal ori­gin, was meant as a humane alter­na­tive to beat­ings or tor­ture or death, it has trans­formed into a fixed fea­ture of mod­ern life, one that is not known, even by its sup­port­ers and admin­is­tra­tors, for its human­i­ty.”
  4. On East­er Sun­day, Louisiana church looks to rebuild from fires (Ash­ley Cusick, Wash­ing­ton Post via SF Gate): “We got $1,000 from an athe­ist,” Tou­s­saint said with a laugh. ‘He said he did­n’t believe in God, but he don’t believe in burn­ing build­ings down, either.’”
  5. How angry pilots got the Navy to stop dis­miss­ing UFO sight­ings (Dean­na Paul, Wash­ing­ton Post via SF Gate): “A recent uptick in sight­ings of uniden­ti­fied fly­ing objects — or as the mil­i­tary calls them, ‘unex­plained aer­i­al phe­nom­e­na’ — prompt­ed the Navy to draft for­mal pro­ce­dures for pilots to doc­u­ment encoun­ters, a cor­rec­tive mea­sure that for­mer offi­cials say is long over­due.”
    • This being 2019, this is some­how not the most inter­est­ing sto­ry in the news.
  6. And now for some stuff about the major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal par­ties, with par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to reli­gious dynam­ics:
    • Franklin Gra­ham and the High Cost of the Lost Evan­gel­i­cal Wit­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “The prop­er Evan­gel­i­cal posi­tion toward any pres­i­dent is not hard to artic­u­late, though it is exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to hold to, espe­cial­ly in polar­ized times when one par­ty seems set on lim­it­ing reli­gious lib­er­ty and zeal­ous­ly defend­ing abor­tion: We should pray for pres­i­dents, cri­tique them when they’re wrong, praise them when they’re right, and nev­er, ever impose par­ti­san dou­ble stan­dards.”
    • The Reli­gious Com­po­si­tion of the Two Major Par­ties (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “…nei­ther of the two major par­ties in the Unit­ed States are dom­i­nat­ed by one spe­cif­ic reli­gious group. I know that tons of arti­cles are writ­ten the link between evan­gel­i­cals and Repub­li­cans, but the data indi­cates that over two thirds of Repub­li­cans today are not evan­gel­i­cals. The same is essen­tial­ly true for Democ­rats as well. The largest group for them (the nones) make up just three in ten Democ­rats today.”
    • Relat­ed: The Devout And The Nones (Mark Movs­esian, First Things): “Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans who report that their reli­gious affil­i­a­tion is ‘Strong.’ This per­cent­age has fluc­tu­at­ed a bit over the decades, but the most recent sur­vey puts it at 34 per­cent, a num­ber that has remained basi­cal­ly unchanged since 1975, when 35 per­cent of Amer­i­cans report­ed a strong reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. Appar­ent­ly, the rise of the Nones is not attrib­ut­able to a decline in reli­gious enthu­si­asm among the most strong­ly com­mit­ted.”
    • Meet Stanford’s Con­gres­sion­al Fresh­men (Jean Yung, Dave Sloane, & Tim­o­thy Weath­er­head, Stan­ford Mag­a­zine): inter­est­ing brief pro­files of the five Stan­ford alum­ni who were recent­ly elect­ed to the nation­al leg­is­la­ture. Two Demo­c­ra­t­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tives, two Repub­li­can rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and one Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor.
    • Why Won’t Twit­ter Treat White Suprema­cy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Ban­ning Some Repub­li­can Politi­cians Too. (Joseph Cox and Jason Koe­bler, Moth­er­board): “When a plat­form aggres­sive­ly enforces against ISIS con­tent, for instance, it can also flag inno­cent accounts as well, such as Ara­bic lan­guage broad­cast­ers. Soci­ety, in gen­er­al, accepts the ben­e­fit of ban­ning ISIS for incon­ve­nienc­ing some oth­ers, he said.”
      • I get the impres­sion the authors think this is evi­dence that Repub­li­cans real­ly are white suprema­cists and that the algo­rithms see clear­ly with­out the social pres­sure that holds back truth-tellers. I sus­pect they have the exact oppo­site approach to machine learn­ing when it deliv­ers racist results. I’m spit­balling here, but maybe the bet­ter response is dis­trust algo­rithms a lit­tle more when­ev­er they con­firm your bias­es. Just a thought.
  7. Half of Amer­i­cans Say Evan­gel­i­cals Are Dis­crim­i­nat­ed Against (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Amer­i­cans’ per­cep­tions of dis­crim­i­na­tion tend to be par­ti­san. For instance, 7 in 10 Amer­i­cans on the polit­i­cal right say evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are sub­ject to dis­crim­i­na­tion, while less than half as many (32%) left-lean­ing Amer­i­cans agree.”

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 haveLet­ter To My Younger Self (Ryan Leaf, The Player’s Tri­bune): “Con­grat­u­la­tions. You offi­cial­ly have it all — mon­ey, pow­er and pres­tige. All the things that are impor­tant, right?… That’s you, young Ryan Leaf, at his absolute finest: arro­gant, boor­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic. You think you’re on top of the world and that you’ve got all the answers. Well I’m sor­ry to have to tell you this, but the truth is….” Such a grip­ping let­ter. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. (first shared in vol­ume 99)

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 198

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. Chi­nese city offers US$1,500 reward to help snare for­eign reli­gious lead­ers (Mimi Lau, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “Under the new reward scheme in Guangzhou, the cap­i­tal of Guang­dong province, infor­mants can earn between 5,000 and 10,000 yuan for tips lead­ing to the arrest of a non-Chi­nese reli­gious leader, accord­ing to a state­ment on the department’s web­site. Oth­er pay­ments include 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for infor­ma­tion lead­ing to the clo­sure of a for­eign reli­gious group, and between 100 and 3,000 yuan for tips about local­ly organ­ised gath­er­ings and their lead­ers.”
    • Relat­ed: Hong Kong Pas­tor Fac­ing Prison Preach­es the Ser­mon of His Life (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For decades, I have preached numer­ous ser­mons. Lit­tle could I antic­i­pate that the one mes­sage which prepa­ra­tion took me the longest time and the most heart­felt prayer, and which prob­a­bly would reach the largest audi­ence, is pre­cise­ly this one deliv­ered from the defendant’s dock.”
  2. Pas­tor­ing A Pur­ple Church: ‘I Absolute­ly Bite My Tongue Some­times’ (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “The pro­mo­tion of dis­course over dis­cord may strength­en civic cul­ture in an era of polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion, but for Edmon­ston, the mis­sion is more a reflec­tion of Pres­by­ter­ian the­ol­o­gy than it is a com­mit­ment to demo­c­ra­t­ic process.”
    • There is a lot to like in this arti­cle, but I feel com­pelled to add that what binds a church togeth­er is a com­mit­ment to Christ. It is okay to be divid­ed over polit­i­cal issues. It is much less okay to be divid­ed over sub­stan­tive Scrip­tur­al issues. This sto­ry con­fus­es the two.
  3. The Brand Is Belief (Kier­an Dahl, Top­ic Mag­a­zine): “C3’s the­ol­o­gy would appear to be at odds with how the church presents and mar­kets itself. Isn’t humil­i­ty one of Jesus’s biggest lessons for human­i­ty? Isn’t social media inher­ent­ly nar­cis­sis­tic?.… C3 feels like an algo­rith­mi­cal­ly curat­ed brand that hap­pens to love Jesus—the Airbnb of reli­gion.”
    • I love arti­cles show­ing how out­siders view church­es. Some of what the author stum­bles over I find puz­zling — like think­ing that the name of the church’s dis­ci­ple­ship class ‘Growth Track’ is a capit­u­la­tion to cul­ture. Inter­est­ing through­out.
  4. The Hap­pi­ness Reces­sion (Brad Wilcox & Lyman Stone, The Atlantic): “In 2018, hap­pi­ness among young adults in Amer­i­ca fell to a record low. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 report­ing that they were ‘very hap­py’ in life fell to 25 percent—the low­est lev­el that the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey, a key barom­e­ter of Amer­i­can social life, has ever record­ed for that pop­u­la­tion. Hap­pi­ness fell most among young men—with only 22 per­cent of young men (and 28 per­cent of young women) report­ing that they were ‘very hap­py’ in 2018.”
    • React­ing to this arti­cle, David French offers this obser­va­tion, “For gen­er­a­tions, key ele­ments of our cul­tur­al and aca­d­e­m­ic elite have been argu­ing essen­tial­ly the oppo­site — that lib­er­a­tion from reli­gion and lib­er­a­tion from mar­riage were pre­req­ui­sites to true human flour­ish­ing. If you asked an ear­ly era sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion­ary for his pre­dic­tion for a cul­ture with pro­found­ly less reli­gious prac­tice, less mar­riage, and many few­er moral restraints on sex­u­al prac­tice, I sin­cere­ly doubt that he’d respond that he believed that cul­ture would be less hap­py, with peo­ple hav­ing less sex.” It Turns Out That Sex­u­al Lib­er­a­tion Isn’t All That Lib­er­at­ing (David French, Nation­al Review).
  5. Case Report of gas­tro­pare­sis heal­ing: 16 years of a chron­ic syn­drome resolved after prox­i­mal inter­ces­so­ry prayer (Romez, Zaritzky & Brown, Com­ple­men­tary Ther­a­pies In Med­i­cine): a mirac­u­lous heal­ing account as report­ed in a jour­nal. I found this bit amus­ing: “A note­wor­thy obser­va­tion is that stud­ies show­ing pos­i­tive effects of prayer have typ­i­cal­ly involved inter­ces­sors who either pro­fessed either 1) being ‘born again’ Chris­tians (with a com­mit­ment to dai­ly devo­tion­al prayer and active fel­low­ship with their local church) or 2) faith in heal­ing.”
  6. Democ­rats Have to Decide Whether Faith Is an Asset for 2020 (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The real evi­dence of Democ­rats’ approach to faith will come in cam­paign dol­lars and infra­struc­ture, which will like­ly be devel­oped slight­ly lat­er in the elec­tion cycle; on their han­dling of con­test­ed issues like abor­tion, which is cru­cial­ly impor­tant to many reli­gious vot­ers; and their abil­i­ty to tap reli­gious net­works for vol­un­teers.”
  7. Don­ald Trump Changed The New York Times. Is It For­ev­er? (Peter Boy­er, Esquire): “A Mon­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty poll tak­en last year found that 77 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe that tra­di­tion­al news out­lets report ‘fake news’—a sig­nif­i­cant leap from the year before.” This is an inter­est­ing and dis­heart­en­ing arti­cle.

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 Every­thing That’s Wrong Of Rac­coons (Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg, The Toast): “Once when my dog died a pas­sel of rac­coons showed up in the back­yard as if to say ‘Now that he’s gone, we own the night,’ and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it dis­re­spect­ful to 1) me per­son­al­ly and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t dis­re­spect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.” (first shared in vol­ume 97)

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 196

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

This one is com­ing out ear­ly in the morn­ing because I’m dri­ving back from a mis­sion trip and will be on the road the entire day. When I’m on a mis­sion trip I usu­al­ly do very brief video blogs (under a minute each) — you can see the ones for this trip here.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Chi­na Shuts Down Anoth­er Big Bei­jing Church (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Through­out its 26-year his­to­ry, Shouwang mem­bers have refused to come under Com­mu­nist author­i­ty and per­se­vered despite per­se­cu­tion, with their ‘under­ground’ ser­vices forced out­side when evict­ed from their build­ings in 2009 and with their found­ing pas­tor Jin Tian­ming under house arrest since 2011.”
    • Relat­ed: Chi­na’s Mus­lim gulag is tough to cov­er, but a few reporters aren’t giv­ing up (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “One of the mosques in Kash­gar, it added, has been trans­formed into a hookah lounge. A city that was once a world cen­ter for tra­di­tion­al Islam­ic and Cen­tral Asian archi­tec­ture is now Dis­ney­land meets Aladdin, (a fairy­tale that orig­i­nal­ly was set in Chi­na, by the way). It’s tough cov­er­ing Chi­na and the jour­nal­ists who try to do it well inevitably end up expelled.” This is a good sum­ma­ry of report­ing on one of the most wicked gov­ern­ment pro­grams in the world right now. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. A Case for the Elec­toral Col­lege (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Is there a case for a sys­tem that some­times pro­duces unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic out­comes? I think so, on two grounds. First, it cre­ates incen­tives for polit­i­cal par­ties and can­di­dates to seek super­ma­jori­ties rather than just play­ing for 50.1 per­cent, because the lat­ter play is a los­ing one more often than in a pop­u­lar-vote pres­i­den­tial sys­tem. Sec­ond, it cre­ates incen­tives for polit­i­cal par­ties to try to break region­al blocs con­trolled by the oppo­si­tion, rather than just max­i­miz­ing turnout in their own areas, because you win the pres­i­den­cy con­sis­tent­ly only as a par­ty of mul­ti­ple regions and you can crack a rival party’s nar­row major­i­ty by flip­ping a few states.”
  3. An Inter­view With Lisa Littman, Who Coined the Term ‘Rapid Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria’ (Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “Although there have been spec­u­la­tions about my affil­i­a­tions, I am not a reli­gious or polit­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tive and I am not a rad­i­cal fem­i­nist. No orga­ni­za­tions fund­ed my study. That means that I pay out-of-pock­et for research-relat­ed costs like print­ing, trav­el­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ences, pub­li­ca­tion fees, etc. And because I do not earn my liveli­hood pro­vid­ing tran­si­tion ser­vices or refer­rals for tran­si­tion, and I have not per­son­al­ly (nor has my spouse or chil­dren) expe­ri­enced gen­der dys­pho­ria or tran­si­tion, I have far few­er con­flicts of inter­est than many of the cur­rent researchers in this field.” Fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view.
  4. How the West Changed The World For the Bet­ter (Ben Shapiro, Nation­al Review): “Thanks to the West, bil­lions of human beings no longer suf­fer in abject pover­ty; thanks to the West, democ­ra­cy is seen as both the moral and the prac­ti­cal default posi­tion for aspir­ing gov­ern­ments; thanks to the West, indi­vid­u­al­ism has been able to gain ground against the nat­ur­al trib­al­ism endem­ic to human beings. The his­to­ry of the West isn’t a his­to­ry of unal­loyed great­ness: It is replete with suf­fer­ing and tyran­ny and slav­ery and mis­ery. But all of those evils are present in every civ­i­liza­tion his­tor­i­cal­ly. The ques­tion is why the West changed the world.”
    • A most­ly-neg­a­tive review of a relat­ed book Shapiro just pub­lished: The Right Side of History—A Review (Jared Mar­cel Pollen, Quil­lette): “…Shapiro’s attempt to demon­strate that sec­u­lar civ­i­liza­tion needs to rekin­dle the Judeo-Chris­t­ian teach­ings upon which it is based, inad­ver­tent­ly shows us why we were right to leave them behind in the first place.” I have not read Shapiro’s book, but many of the spe­cif­ic crit­i­cisms Pollen makes are not very per­sua­sive. For exam­ple, it is a con­ven­tion­al enough posi­tion among experts that mod­ern sci­ence arose due to Chris­tian­i­ty that I have had stu­dents tell me that they were taught it in his­to­ry cours­es at Stan­ford.
  5. The Real Rea­sons Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals Sup­port Israel (David French, Nation­al Review): “The [com­mon media] expla­na­tion goes some­thing like this — Evan­gel­i­cals believe that the rebirth of Israel is has­ten­ing not just the sec­ond com­ing of Christ, but a par­tic­u­lar kind of sec­ond com­ing, one that includes fire, fury, and war that will con­sume the Jew­ish peo­ple.… But the true nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian sup­port for Israel is sub­stan­tial­ly dif­fer­ent. The intel­lec­tu­al and the­o­log­i­cal roots of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism do not rest in end-times proph­e­sies but rather in Old Tes­ta­ment promis­es.”
    • One exam­ple of a much broad­er phe­nom­e­non. I very rarely rec­og­nize myself or my peers in media expla­na­tions of “why evan­gel­i­cals believe ______ about _______.” Or even just “evan­gel­i­cals believe ______”. I find this puz­zling because it’s not as though we don’t have reg­u­lar gath­er­ings where we explain what we believe to any­one who will lis­ten.
  6. Open­ly Gay, Open­ly Chris­t­ian Buttigieg Chal­lenges the Reli­gious Right (Ed Kil­go­re, New York Mag­a­zine): “As Barack Oba­ma once con­vinc­ing­ly argued, doubt about what God wants peo­ple to do polit­i­cal­ly is an impor­tant part of an atti­tude of humil­i­ty which used to be called ‘the fear of God.’” It is inter­est­ing how many of the Democ­rats seek­ing nom­i­na­tion are out­spo­ken about their faith.
  7. Black and Evan­gel­i­cal: Why I Keep The Label (Bran­don Wash­ing­ton, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I too have been wound­ed by evangelicalism’s pos­ture toward social ethics. But I have con­clud­ed that an exo­dus of eth­nic minori­ties amounts to seg­re­ga­tion of the move­ment and only con­tributes to the prob­lem. So I remain.”

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 Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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 194

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. Relat­ed to the mosque attack in New Zealand:
    • Mass mur­der­ers crave pub­lic­i­ty. Maybe giv­ing them less would be help­ful. (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Many com­men­ta­tors, won­der­ing why mass shoot­ings became so com­mon in the late 20th cen­tu­ry, have point­ed to var­i­ous cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic devel­op­ments. They might bet­ter have point­ed to cable news, which ensured that dis­af­fect­ed losers with hyper­tro­phied egos and shriv­eled souls became the non­stop talk of the nation — in every nation, and most of the world’s 6,500 lan­guages. The wall-to-wall cov­er­age teach­es men who may not be able to get a job or a girl­friend that, nonethe­less, in some­thing under an hour, they can become Genghis Khan.”
    • The New Zealand Attack and the Glob­al Chal­lenge of Far-Right Extrem­ism (Seth Jones, Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies): “Based on the glob­al­iza­tion of far-right extrem­ism, the Christchurch attack—and the attacker—needs to be under­stood as part of a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al trend that requires more atten­tion and greater invest­ment from gov­ern­ments and the pri­vate sec­tor.”
    • White Nationalism’s Deep Amer­i­can Roots (Adam Ser­w­er, The Atlantic): “A pop­u­lar myth of Amer­i­can his­to­ry is that racism is the exclu­sive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist ener­gy in the U.S. came from old-mon­ey elites in the North­east, and was also fueled by labor strug­gles in the Pacif­ic North­west, which had stirred a wave of big­otry that led to the Chi­nese Exclu­sion Act of 1882.” (this is not direct­ly relat­ed to the shoot­ing but is time­ly)
  2. An MIT Pro­fes­sor Meets the Author of All Knowl­edge (Ros­alind Picard, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arro­gant fool who snubbed the great­est Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, art, and every­thing else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, hav­ing received the most unde­served grace. I walk with joy, along­side the most amaz­ing Com­pan­ion any­one could ask for, filled with desire to keep learn­ing and explor­ing.”
  3. The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion of Shame (Sal­va­tore Sci­bona, New York Times): “We are under­go­ing an indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion in shame. New tech­nolo­gies have rad­i­cal­ly expand­ed our abil­i­ty to make and dis­trib­ute a prod­uct. The prod­uct is our judg­ment of one anoth­er. As in past indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions, the mass man­u­fac­ture and use of a prod­uct pre­vi­ous­ly avail­able to just a few or in small amounts has giv­en us the pow­er to do harm at a pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able scale.”
  4. The Supreme Court Is Qui­et­ly Chang­ing the Sta­tus of Reli­gion in Amer­i­can Life (Jef­frey Toobin, New York­er): “What the con­ser­v­a­tives are doing, in effect, is read­ing the estab­lish­ment clause out of the Con­sti­tu­tion, and turn­ing almost every issue into a free-exer­cise case. In this read­ing, any denial of gov­ern­ment ben­e­fits to a church can be seen as dis­crim­i­na­tion which amounts to a denial of free exercise—and the con­ser­v­a­tives are mak­ing the same move with respect to indi­vid­u­als.”
    • Relat­ed: The Court and the Cross (Lin­da Green­house, New York Times): “The appetite of the two newest jus­tices, Mr. Kavanaugh and Mr. Gor­such, for cas­es that would enlarge the con­sti­tu­tion­al play­ing field for reli­gion appears near­ly bound­less.”
  5. If Lib­er­als Won’t Enforce Bor­ders, Fas­cists Will (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Dem­a­gogues don’t rise by talk­ing about irrel­e­vant issues. Dem­a­gogues rise by talk­ing about issues that mat­ter to peo­ple, and that more con­ven­tion­al lead­ers appear unwill­ing or unable to address: unem­ploy­ment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immi­gra­tion now. Vot­ers get to decide what the country’s prob­lems are. Polit­i­cal elites have to devise solu­tions to those prob­lems. If dif­fi­cult issues go unad­dressed by respon­si­ble lead­ers, they will be exploit­ed by irre­spon­si­ble ones.” I high­light­ed a piece by Frum with a sim­i­lar theme back in issue 175. This is a very thought­ful arti­cle.
  6. The Scan­dalous Acad­e­my: Social Sci­ence in Ser­vice of Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics (Scott Yenor, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Let us not ignore the most dis­turb­ing find­ing: that men who have sex with men are expect­ed to live twelve years less than those who do not. This mir­rors oth­er stud­ies con­duct­ed in British Colum­bia (which see an eight- to twen­ty-year dif­fer­ence) and Den­mark (which sees a small­er dif­fer­ence of four to twelve years). M. Ryan Baker’s ‘Gay and Les­bian Health Dis­par­i­ties: Evi­dence and Rec­om­men­da­tions’ in a 2008 issue of the Jour­nal of Health Dis­par­i­ties Research and Prac­tice yield­ed sim­i­lar results. To put that in per­spec­tive, smok­ing decreas­es life expectan­cy only ten years.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Boise State and the arti­cle is focused on bias­es and blind spots in the social sci­ences more than on the spe­cif­ic issue high­light­ed in the excerpt.
  7. No Hate Left Behind (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “Just over 42 per­cent of the peo­ple in each par­ty view the oppo­si­tion as ‘down­right evil.’ In real num­bers, this sug­gests that 48.8 mil­lion vot­ers out of the 136.7 mil­lion who cast bal­lots in 2016 believe that mem­bers of oppo­si­tion par­ty are in league with the dev­il.”
    • Relat­ed: Par­ti­san Hate Is Becom­ing a Nation­al Cri­sis (David French, Nation­al Review): “I won­der where [par­ti­san hatred] would be if our nation hadn’t been extra­or­di­nar­i­ly lucky in the last two years. Yes, lucky. Imag­ine our nation­al cul­ture if the con­gres­sion­al base­ball shoot­er hadn’t been imme­di­ate­ly con­front­ed by two brave Capi­tol Police offi­cers. Imag­ine a nation where the Char­lottesville ter­ror­ist kept plow­ing through the ranks of pro­test­ers, or where the Trump super­fan bomber actu­al­ly suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing func­tion­ing explo­sives.”

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 Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

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.