Tag: politics

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 323

Arti­cles about every­thing from Jill Biden’s faith to Yale Law School’s fail­ings to an analy­sis of Amer­i­can divorce to a com­mon-sense argu­ment against pornog­ra­phy. Enjoy!

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.

323 is 17 · 19, which are two of my favorite num­bers. I par­tic­u­lar­ly delight in using them on the microwave.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Evan­gel­i­cal Elites, Fight­ing Each Oth­er (David French, The Dis­patch): “…the old­er cul­ture war cat­e­gories are being sup­ple­ment­ed and some­times sup­plant­ed by a new con­fronta­tion between lib­er­al­ism and illib­er­al­ism. While illib­er­al right and illib­er­al left snarl at any­one not in their tribes, the lib­er­al right and the lib­er­al left are form­ing new rela­tion­ships and new alliances.” An excel­lent piece, and the first com­ment is also worth read­ing (it’s by French him­self about some­thing he  meant to include in the arti­cle).
  2. Jill Biden paid a sur­prise vis­it to the woman who helped her regain faith in God (Jada Yuan, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For five years after the death of her son, Jill Biden says, she lost her faith in God. She ‘felt betrayed, bro­ken’ when Beau died of brain can­cer at 46, and she had stopped going to church or even pray­ing, she told the con­gre­gants of Brook­land Bap­tist Church late Sun­day after­noon. But she found her way back, and over the week­end trav­eled near­ly 500 miles to sur­prise the woman who’d helped her get there.” I was deeply moved by this sto­ry.
  3. A Wor­ri­some Peek Inside Yale Law’s Diver­si­ty Bureau­cra­cy (Conor Frieder­s­forf, The Atlantic): “[Odd­ly,] the diver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors spent many hours on this low-stakes dra­ma among high-IQ adults, afford­ing out­siders an unusu­al peek at their meth­ods and a relat­ed series of cru­cial mis­takes, most stem­ming from an inabil­i­ty or unwill­ing­ness to see how the inter­ests of stu­dents diverge from the inter­ests and incen­tives of their office.”
  4. Two arti­cles dis­cussing the research sug­gest­ing con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er than lib­er­als:
    • From the left: Con­ser­v­a­tives Are Hap­pi­er Than Lib­er­als. Dis­cuss. (Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times): “Ulti­mate­ly, though, this line of inquiry rais­es an even broad­er ques­tion: whether lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives func­tion on fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent moral planes.”
    • From the right: Friends and Ex-Friends (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I admit to being skep­ti­cal of any attempt to quan­ti­fy hap­pi­ness, which is a sub­jec­tive judg­ment. Nev­er­the­less, if it is true that con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er on bal­ance than lib­er­als, I think it has to do with two basic things. First, con­ser­v­a­tives tend to accept that the world will nev­er be per­fect, and find it eas­i­er to live with imper­fec­tions.… Sec­ond, con­ser­v­a­tives tend to care less about polit­i­cal cru­sad­ing.… I don’t know any ordi­nary con­ser­v­a­tives who would cut off a friend over their lib­er­al pol­i­tics.”
  5. The Naked Truth: Porn is Bad For You (Kather­ine Dee, The Amer­i­can Mind): “Com­mon sense is vital­ly use­ful, espe­cial­ly in per­son­al deci­sion-mak­ing. So, here’s what I know. I know that immer­sion in, or even just reg­u­lar usage of, any­thing has an impact on a person’s psy­chol­o­gy.”
  6. The Evo­lu­tion of Divorce (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Nation­al Affairs): “In the case of divorce, as in so many oth­ers, the worst con­se­quences of the social rev­o­lu­tion of the 1960s and ’70s are now felt dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly by the poor and less edu­cat­ed, while the wealthy elites who set off these trans­for­ma­tions in the first place have man­aged to reclaim some­what health­i­er and more sta­ble habits of mar­ried life. This imbal­ance leaves our cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal elites less well attuned to the mag­ni­tude of social dys­func­tion in much of Amer­i­can soci­ety, and leaves the most vul­ner­a­ble Amer­i­cans — espe­cial­ly chil­dren liv­ing in poor and work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties — even worse off than they would oth­er­wise be.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  7. Is Col­lege Worth It? A Com­pre­hen­sive Return on Invest­ment Analy­sis (Pre­ston Coop­er, FreeOpp): “The analy­sis reveals that a student’s choice of pro­gram is per­haps the most impor­tant finan­cial deci­sion he or she will ever make. Most bachelor’s degree pro­grams in engi­neer­ing, com­put­er sci­ence, eco­nom­ics, and nurs­ing increase life­time earn­ings by $500,000 or more, even after sub­tract­ing the costs of col­lege. But most pro­grams in fields such as art, music, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, and psy­chol­o­gy leave stu­dents finan­cial­ly worse off than if they had nev­er gone to col­lege at all.” Search the table at We Cal­cu­lat­ed Return On Invest­ment For 30,000 Bachelor’s Degrees. Find Yours. (Pre­ston Coop­er, FreeOpp)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 320

deli­cious news nuggets of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to thought­ful Chris­tians and peo­ple con­nect­ed to Stan­ford

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

This is vol­ume 320, which is 28 + 26.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Mis­takes We Can­not Make Again (David French, The Dis­patch): “…if peo­ple of faith are to be con­cerned about jus­tice (and they are!), then jus­tice is rarely more imme­di­ate and impor­tant than when con­fronting both the scourge of crime and the tragedy of excess enforce­ment and mass incar­cer­a­tion.”
  2. A Cog in the Col­lege Admis­sions Scan­dal Speaks Out (Bil­ly Witz, New York Times): “Van­de­mo­er, unlike the oth­ers accused in the plot, did not per­son­al­ly gain in the trans­ac­tions. He hand­ed checks total­ing $770,000 from Singer to Stan­ford devel­op­ment offi­cers, who planned to use the mon­ey for new boats.… So as he told his sto­ry to Stanford’s inves­ti­ga­tors, he won­dered why no one had ever come to him when the indict­ments came down, not­ing that even fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors had acknowl­edged he did not enrich him­self from the scheme. It rein­forced the notion that he was sim­ply an asset — a name­less, expend­able cog in a cor­po­ra­tion with a $29 bil­lion endow­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Stan­ford does not come off look­ing good at all.
  3. Stan­ford stu­dents are more like­ly to wear masks on bicy­cles than hel­mets (Maxwell Mey­er, Stan­ford Review): “In April of this year, I wit­nessed some­thing on the Stan­ford cam­pus that will be seared into my mem­o­ry for­ev­er: a stu­dent on a bicy­cle, wear­ing flip-flops, Air­Pods in ear, going the wrong way through a round­about in an active con­struc­tion zone, with no hel­met. But like any good fol­low­er of sci­ence, the stu­dent was wear­ing a dis­pos­able blue face mask — for safe­ty, I guess.” Should he desire to, Mey­er will become a well-known nation­al com­men­ta­tor some­day. He’s quite good.
  4. Why I Am a Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rist (Hans Boers­ma, First Things): “When rulers man­date vac­cine pass­ports and estab­lish elab­o­rate elec­tron­ic sys­tems to police com­pli­ance, it doesn’t take a great deal of imag­i­na­tion to see how the same sys­tem might be used—and in the eyes of many should be used—to reg­u­late car­bon emis­sions, expen­di­tures, and even opin­ions. After all, it’s not just the coro­n­avirus that is dan­ger­ous. So are cli­mate change, social inequal­i­ty, and cer­tain moral and reli­gious con­vic­tions. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, trav­el­ing from vac­cine pass­ports to a social cred­it system—the kind that Chi­na already has in place—takes no time at all.… This is not an argu­ment against vac­ci­na­tion per se. It is an argu­ment to take con­spir­a­cy theorists—David fore­most among them—seriously.” The author is an Angli­can the­olo­gian.
  5. The Pub­lic Con­tin­ues to Under­es­ti­mate COVID’s Age Dis­crim­i­na­tion (David Wal­lace-Wells, NY Mag­a­zine): “After 18 months of pub­lic-health guid­ance pro­mot­ing uni­ver­sal vig­i­lance, I think hard­ly any Amer­i­can has a clear view of just how dra­mat­ic these dif­fer­en­tials are. All else being equal, an unvac­ci­nat­ed 66-year old is about 30 times more like­ly to die, giv­en a con­firmed case, than an unvac­ci­nat­ed 36-year-old, and some­one over 85 is over 10,000 times more at risk of dying than a child under 10.… a vac­ci­nat­ed 80-year-old has about the same mor­tal­i­ty risk as an unvac­ci­nat­ed 50-year-old, and an unvac­ci­nat­ed 30-year-old has a low­er risk than a vac­ci­nat­ed 45-year-old.”
  6. Inside the Church That Preach­es ‘Wives Need to Be Led with a Firm Hand’ (Sarah Stanko­rb, Vice): “Moth­er Kirk can be a joy­ous, faith­ful com­mu­ni­ty. But the con­ser­v­a­tive con­gre­ga­tion also is at odds with Moscow’s more lib­er­al pop­u­la­tion (sur­round­ing Latah coun­ty vot­ed for Pres­i­dent Biden in 2020). Depend­ing upon whom you ask, the town either hosts a Calvin­ist utopia or a patri­ar­chal cult in which women must sub­mit or face dis­ci­pline at home and at church. At the cen­ter of it all is noto­ri­ous­ly con­tro­ver­sial Dou­glas Wil­son, the fire­brand pas­tor who has been pre­sid­ing over his Moth­er Kirk fief­dom for more than 40 years.” Many of the details in this sto­ry are very bad.
    • A Taste of Novem­ber in the Air (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Inci­den­tal­ly, in case you are curi­ous, I haven’t read the Vice piece because I did read the ques­tions that the writer sent to Nan­cy and to me while ‘research­ing,’ and the said ques­tions were all more loaded than the entrees at Tater’s, Home of the Grand Stuffed Pota­to Buf­fet. Way too many bacon bits.… If you read any­thing that unset­tles you, and you would like par­tic­u­lar answers to spe­cif­ic ques­tions, we have made them read­i­ly avail­able. On the top of this page, over to the right, we have a box called Crit­i­cal Ques­tions.” Wilson’s response to the Vice piece. 
  7. Unpop­ulism (David Leon­hardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick, New York Times): “In elite cir­cles, includ­ing Capi­tol Hill, peo­ple often mis­un­der­stand Amer­i­can pub­lic opin­ion in a spe­cif­ic way. They imag­ine that the medi­an vot­er resem­bles a type of polit­i­cal mod­er­ate who is quite com­mon in those elite cir­cles — some­body who is social­ly lib­er­al and fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive.… In the rest of the coun­try, how­ev­er, this ide­o­log­i­cal com­bi­na­tion is not so com­mon, polls show. If any­thing, more Amer­i­cans can accu­rate­ly be described as the oppo­site — social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and eco­nom­i­cal­ly lib­er­al. That’s true across racial groups, includ­ing among Black and His­pan­ic vot­ers.” Not pay­walled.

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 319

a brief roundup

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

This is vol­ume 319, which feels like it ought to be a prime num­ber but real­ly 319 = 11 · 29.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A giant space rock demol­ished an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city and every­one in it – pos­si­bly inspir­ing the Bib­li­cal sto­ry of Sodom (Christo­pher R. Moore, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “As the inhab­i­tants of an ancient Mid­dle East­ern city now called Tall el-Ham­mam went about their dai­ly busi­ness one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speed­ing toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph). Flash­ing through the atmos­phere, the rock explod­ed in a mas­sive fire­ball about 2.5 miles (4 kilo­me­ters) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more pow­er­ful than the Hiroshi­ma atom­ic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blind­ed instant­ly. Air tem­per­a­tures rapid­ly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahren­heit (2,000 degrees Cel­sius). Cloth­ing and wood imme­di­ate­ly burst into flames.”
    • No, it did­n’t “inspire” the Bible sto­ry. The Bible sto­ry is inspired, though. Astound­ing regard­less.
    • A bit of cold water: Sodom Destroyed by Mete­or, Sci­en­tists Say. Bib­li­cal Archae­ol­o­gists Not Con­vinced. (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Archae­ol­o­gists Steve Ortiz, direc­tor of Lip­scomb University’s Lanier Cen­ter of Archae­ol­o­gy, agreed that while Tall el-Ham­mam is an impor­tant site, its destruc­tion date is too late to fit the Sodom sce­nario. He dis­missed the fire­ball hoopla to CT. ‘[Their] destruc­tion does not look any dif­fer­ent than any oth­er destruc­tion,’ he said. ‘We have Assyr­i­an and Egypt­ian destruc­tions at Gez­er that looks just as dra­mat­ic.’ ”
  2. Why Covid reg­u­la­tions may be around longer than you think (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “The US and most Euro­pean coun­tries had aban­doned pass­ports by the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. In many South Amer­i­can nations, free­dom to trav­el with­out a pass­port was a con­sti­tu­tion­al right. So how did the pass­port come roar­ing back? The answer was the first world war.… Lloyd writes: ‘At the end of the war in 1918, the move­ment to abol­ish pass­ports re-ener­gised itself but it was now fight­ing against gov­ern­ments who had dis­cov­ered how close­ly a pop­u­la­tion could be con­trolled and how eas­i­ly this could be jus­ti­fied.’ ”
    1. The Extreme­ly Weird Pol­i­tics of Covid (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In less than two years, we’ve gone from a world where it was nor­mal for a left-lean­ing pub­li­ca­tion to run an essay gen­tly cel­e­brat­ing the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a bru­tal out­break of the plague, to a world where the defi­ance of pub­lic health rules dur­ing a less lethal pan­dem­ic is cod­ed as incred­i­bly right wing. I don’t know exact­ly why or exact­ly what it means. I just want peo­ple to acknowl­edge that it has hap­pened and it’s real­ly, real­ly weird.” Accu­rate.
  3. My Con­fes­sions (Joshua Katz, First Things): “Though my faith in acad­e­mia, which had been wan­ing for years, is now large­ly gone, my faith in the pow­er of God’s mys­te­ri­ous ways is ascen­dant. Because reli­gion is still new to me, and because I grew up with the New York Times, which in the guise of news now instructs those apt­ly dubbed by John McWhort­er ‘The Elect’ to despise reli­gion, I find it remarkable—though I shouldn’t—that many of the peo­ple who have worked so hard to keep me going are reli­gious.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of clas­sics at Prince­ton.
  4. The 1619 Project and Liv­ing in Truth (Sean Wilentz, Opera His­tor­i­ca): “If it were a high school his­to­ry paper, that dis­cus­sion alone would have been grounds for fail­ure. It’s rare, after all, to read a stu­dent get every sin­gle stat­ed fact per­fect­ly wrong, in sup­port of a propo­si­tion for which there is no oth­er evi­dence cit­ed, on two of the most impor­tant top­ics in all of U.S. his­to­ry, indeed, all of mod­ern his­to­ry, the caus­es of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and the ori­gins of anti­slav­ery. But this wasn’t a high school paper, it was the New York Times Mag­a­zine, and the author was, accord­ing to her contributor’s biog­ra­phy, a high­ly acclaimed jour­nal­ist.” The author is a his­to­ri­an at Prince­ton. The arti­cle itself is a PDF, direct link here.
  5. The Sci­en­tist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Con­trol Killing Machine (Ronen Bergman and Far­naz Fas­si­hi, New York Times): “The straight-out-of-sci­ence-fic­tion sto­ry of what real­ly hap­pened that after­noon and the events lead­ing up to it, pub­lished here for the first time, is based on inter­views with Amer­i­can, Israeli and Iran­ian offi­cials, includ­ing two intel­li­gence offi­cials famil­iar with the details of the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of the oper­a­tion, and state­ments Mr. Fakhrizadeh’s fam­i­ly made to the Iran­ian news media.”
  6. Every­body Hates the Jews (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In an era in which the past is mined by offense-archae­ol­o­gists for the most minor of microag­gres­sions, the very real macroag­gres­sions tak­ing place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on Hasidic Jews on the streets of Brook­lyn, which have become a reg­u­lar fea­ture of life there, are over­looked or, some­times, jus­ti­fied by the very activists who go to the mat over the ‘cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion’ of a taco.” A bit long, but sober­ing.
  7. Whith­er Tar­taria? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “So I think there’s a gen­uine mys­tery to be explained here: if peo­ple pre­fer tra­di­tion­al archi­tec­ture by a large mar­gin, how come we’ve stopped pro­duc­ing it?” Much bet­ter than the excerpt indi­cates.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 316

an unusu­al den­si­ty of thought­ful arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex

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

This is vol­ume 316, which is cool because leg­endary Stan­ford CS pro­fes­sor Don Knuth wrote a book called 3:16 Bible Texts Illu­mi­nat­ed in which he ana­lyzes every chap­ter 3 verse 16 in the Bible as a means of bring­ing his aca­d­e­m­ic exper­tise to bear upon his faith.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Curse of Ham: Get­ting It Hor­ri­bly Wrong (Stephen Le Feu­vre, The Gospel Coali­tion Africa): “In bib­li­cal Hebrew, the name ‘Cush’ seems to mean ‘Ethiopi­an’ or ‘black­ness’. Black African nations seem­ing­ly devel­oped from the off­spring of Cush. But that is exact­ly where the so-called curse of Ham is mis­ap­plied. The curse nev­er fell on Ham or on Cush. For what­ev­er rea­son, not tru­ly giv­en in the text, it fell on Canaan. In Gen­e­sis 9:25 Noah pours out his anger, ‘Cursed be Canaan!’ There is no record of a bib­li­cal curse put on the descen­dants of Cush or the nations of Africa.”
    1. A slight­ly old­er arti­cle that I’m shar­ing this week for obvi­ous rea­sons. If you’ve recent­ly heard the phrase “Curse of Canaan” or “Curse of Ham” this arti­cle will help you sort out what it means.
  2. Why the UN’s Dire Cli­mate Change Report Is Ded­i­cat­ed to an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Houghton, who died of com­pli­ca­tions relat­ed to COVID-19 in 2020 at the age of 88, was the chief edi­tor of the first three IPCC reports and an ear­ly, influ­en­tial leader call­ing for action on cli­mate change. His con­cerns about green­house gas­es, ris­ing tem­per­a­ture aver­ages, dying coral reefs, blis­ter­ing heat waves, and increas­ing­ly extreme weath­er were informed by his train­ing at as atmos­pher­ic physi­cist and his com­mit­ment to sci­ence. They also come out of his evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of God, the bib­li­cal accounts of humanity’s rela­tion­ship to cre­ation, and what it means for a Chris­t­ian to fol­low Christ.”
  3. A clus­ter of arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex:
    • Can Chris­t­ian Sin­gles Thrive? (Anna Broad­way, Plough): “The glob­al church has at least eighty-five mil­lion more women than men among adults thir­ty or old­er; the US church has twen­ty-five mil­lion more women. Even if some of those women have or find spous­es out­side the faith, that leaves mil­lions who can’t ever mar­ry – a real­i­ty the church has yet to face. Instead, most Chris­tians I met around the world treat­ed het­ero­sex­u­al mar­riage as the pri­ma­ry nar­ra­tive axis in life.”
    • Is Noth­ing Sacred? Reli­gion and Sex (Dou­glas T. Ken­rick, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “High­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple often wait many years past puber­ty to set­tle down, as they delay start­ing a fam­i­ly for up to a decade while attend­ing col­lege and grad­u­ate school. Those indi­vid­u­als do not want strong pro­hi­bi­tions against pre­mar­i­tal sex­u­al­i­ty and birth con­trol because it would mean they’d need to remain celi­bate for many years, and com­plete­ly sup­press their post-puber­tal sex­u­al urges until they get their Ph.D., M.D., or law degree, and then wait a lit­tle longer until they find a part­ner with whom to set­tle down. Wee­den has sug­gest­ed that the links between reli­gion and repro­duc­tive strat­e­gy account for many of the heat­ed moral con­flicts between the reli­gious right and the irre­li­gious aca­d­e­m­ic elit­ists on the left.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of social psy­chol­o­gy at Ari­zona State and I think this is very insight­ful.
    • The Prob­lem With Being Cool About Sex (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “Yet here is the conun­drum fac­ing fem­i­nist writ­ers: Our enlight­ened values—less stig­ma regard­ing unwed moth­ers, the accep­tance of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, greater eco­nom­ic free­dom for women, the avail­abil­i­ty of con­tra­cep­tion, and the embrace of con­sent culture—haven’t trans­lat­ed into any­thing like a par­adise of guilt-free fun.” A very non-Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive that unex­pect­ed­ly aligns with impor­tant Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions at a few points.
  4. Why Poet­ry Is So Cru­cial Right Now (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Both poet­ry and prayer remind us that there is more to say about real­i­ty than can be said in words though, in both, we use words to try to glimpse what is beyond words. And they both make space to name our deep­est long­ings, lamen­ta­tions, and loves.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a NYT colum­nist. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  5. When Migrants Come Knock­ing (Edmund Wald­stein, Plough): “The nation-state com­bines the worst fea­tures of polit­i­cal and impe­r­i­al com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the advan­tages of a small com­mu­ni­ty found­ed in friend­ship and mutu­al trust among cit­i­zens actu­al­ly liv­ing a com­mon life, but pre­serves the com­mu­nal ego­ism and hatred of out­siders typ­i­cal of such small com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the capa­cious­ness and abil­i­ty to unite many nations typ­i­cal of ancient empires, but has all of their mil­i­tarism and libido dom­i­nan­di.” A wide-rang­ing Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on refugees; rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Why I Vot­ed For the Athe­ist Pres­i­dent of Harvard’s Chap­lain Group (Pete Williamson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Har­vard has no ‘chief chap­lain,’ and the pres­i­dent of the Har­vard Chap­lains does not direct spir­i­tu­al life on cam­pus. We are a decen­tral­ized, non­hier­ar­chi­cal com­mu­ni­ty of inde­pen­dent chap­lain­cies, with about 40 chap­lains span­ning rough­ly 25 denom­i­na­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, tra­di­tions, and reli­gions.… Chap­lain pres­i­dents are cho­sen not to reflect whose tra­di­tion is ascen­dant, nor as a reward to the most influ­en­tial chap­lain. They are not an indi­ca­tor of a bold new vision for the Har­vard Chap­lains.”
  7. A Third Par­ty Won’t Save Us (Alexan­der H. Cohen, Per­sua­sion): “It’s true that some third par­ties have his­tor­i­cal­ly bro­ken the mold, notably in the pre-Civ­il War era. The Repub­li­can Par­ty itself began as an insur­gent, anti-slav­ery third par­ty. But the rules have changed. The Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties have been in pow­er so long that they have con­scious­ly designed a sys­tem that pro­tects their dom­i­nance and dis­cour­ages the orga­ni­za­tion of new third par­ties.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Clark­son Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (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 309

in which I pro­vide my views on ser­mon orig­i­nal­i­ty

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.

TIL that the num­ber 309 is is the small­est num­ber whose 5th pow­er con­tains every dig­it at least once. 3095=2,817,036,000,549. I’m real­ly stunned that some­one fig­ured that out.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘Ser­mon­gate’ Prompts a Quandary: Should Pas­tors Bor­row Words From One Anoth­er? (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Ben­jamin Franklin wrote of his admi­ra­tion of a young Pres­by­ter­ian preach­er much respect­ed for his preach­ing, which was appar­ent­ly deliv­ered extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly. When a doc­tri­nal dis­pute erupt­ed in the con­gre­ga­tion, how­ev­er, an adver­sary rec­og­nized that a pas­sage deliv­ered by the preach­er had been lift­ed from an uncred­it­ed source. Franklin stuck by the pla­gia­rist. ‘I rather approved his giv­ing us good ser­mons com­posed by oth­ers,’ he wrote, ‘than bad ones of his own man­u­fac­ture.’ ”
    • The appro­pri­ate prin­ci­ples seem so obvi­ous to me:
    • Nev­er present some­one else’s per­son­al sto­ries as though they hap­pened to you. It’s hard to call that any­thing oth­er than lying.
    • If you gain an insight from some­one else, why would you deprive your hear­ers of that good insight? USE IT. Cred­it it in the way that seems most appro­pri­ate, but a ser­mon is not a writ­ten resource peo­ple are going to cite nor one that peo­ple are going to track down your ref­er­ences on. I don’t even think pla­gia­rism is the right term in this con­ver­sa­tion: there’s no stan­dard way to cite oth­er ser­mons nor should there be. Peo­ple who get a bee in their bon­net about this seem so odd to me.
    • In fact, you should always assume that the mes­sages I deliv­er have been enriched by insights from oth­ers. I love God’s Word and I love my stu­dents too much to just give them my own lim­it­ed obser­va­tions. My own prac­tice: I copy and paste the text into a Word doc­u­ment. Then I begin typ­ing my insights and con­struct­ing a rough out­line. Then I con­sult schol­ar­ly and ser­mon­ic resources and revise my outline/notes when I real­ize I’ve mis­un­der­stood some­thing or that I missed an impor­tant point. Typ­i­cal­ly that means I read two or three com­men­taries and will some­times skim one or two ser­mons from preach­ers I respect. If some­one’s phras­ing is so good I adopt it, I usu­al­ly add, “I heard a pas­tor say” or “an aca­d­e­m­ic com­men­tary real­ly helped me out on this point” and some­times will even give the pre­cise source. But not always. Some­times cit­ing some­thing ver­bal­ly breaks up the flow too much. Some­times after an espe­cial­ly fact-laden mes­sage I will send out an email roundup of the most impor­tant sources (that tends to hap­pen after apolo­getic ser­mons when I’m appeal­ing to extrascrip­tur­al facts).
    • It gets com­pli­cat­ed with insights I gleaned years ago and have preached mul­ti­ple times since. Some­times I don’t even remem­ber that it was­n’t orig­i­nal to me (whether clever phras­ing or an entire ser­mon out­line). That’s how learn­ing works! I’m not try­ing to deceive any­one, but I am 100% con­fi­dent that I word some things a cer­tain way because some­one else word­ed it that way to me and I thought, “that’s per­fect” and now that I’ve said it 70 times I just know that’s how I think about the sub­ject.
    • If you ever want to know if some­thing I said is orig­i­nal to me, just ask. If I quot­ed some­one else (and remem­ber that I have), I’ll be thrilled to point you to a resource that helped me!
  2. What Makes a Cult a Cult? (Zoë Heller, New York­er): “The good news is that ratio­nal objec­tions to flaws in cult doc­trine or to hypocrisies on the part of a cult leader do have a pow­er­ful impact if and when they occur to the cult mem­bers them­selves. The ana­lyt­i­cal mind may be qui­etened by cult-think, but it is rarely dead­ened alto­geth­er. Espe­cial­ly if cult life is prov­ing unpleas­ant, the capac­i­ty for crit­i­cal thought can reassert itself.” The focus here is on way-out-there cults. Inter­est­ing nonethe­less, even giv­en the author’s blind spots (I think it would have been a stronger arti­cle if she had men­tioned a few sec­u­lar beliefs as par­al­lels).
  3. Our Unequal Polyg­a­mous Past (Conn Car­roll, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “This brief his­to­ry of human sex­u­al rela­tions shows us three things: 1) we are hard­wired to form monog­a­mous pair bonds; 2) the priv­i­leged among us will always try to monop­o­lize more mates; and 3) we can check the priv­i­lege of the pow­er­ful by enforc­ing monog­a­mous cul­tur­al norms.”
  4. Wok­e­ness:
    • As a Gay Child in a Chris­t­ian Cult, I Was Taught to Hate Myself. Then I Joined the Church of Social Justice—and Noth­ing Changed (Ben Appel, Quil­lette): “For years, I feared homo­pho­bic right-wing evan­gel­i­cals. But these days, I’m equal­ly wary of the pro­gres­sive activists who push a dis­tinct­ly homo­pho­bic agen­da that denies the bio­log­i­cal real­i­ty of sex—and who claim that what we are attract­ed to isn’t male or female bod­ies per se, but rather male or female gen­der iden­ti­ties. This out­look effec­tive­ly imag­ines away the exis­tence of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, which, in the real world, is of course root­ed in phys­i­cal attrac­tion based on bio­log­i­cal attrib­ut­es.”
    • If you hate the cul­ture wars, blame lib­er­als (Kevin Drum, per­son­al blog): “It is not con­ser­v­a­tives who have turned Amer­i­can pol­i­tics into a cul­ture war bat­tle. It is lib­er­als. And this should­n’t come as a sur­prise since pro­gres­sives have been brag­ging pub­licly about push­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty left­ward since at least 2004. Now, I’m per­son­al­ly hap­py about most of this. But that does­n’t blind me to the fact that “per­son­al­ly hap­py” means noth­ing in pol­i­tics. What mat­ters is what the medi­an vot­er feels, and Democ­rats have been mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther away from the medi­an vot­er for years:” Inter­est­ing and very dif­fer­ent from the mes­sage I usu­al­ly hear, which blames polar­iza­tion on con­ser­v­a­tives who are said to have moved much more to the right than lib­er­als have moved to the left.
    • Cul­ture Wars are Long Wars (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Cul­tur­al insur­gents win few con­verts in their own cohort. They can, how­ev­er, build up a sys­tem of ideas and insti­tu­tions which will pre­serve and refine the ideals they hope their com­mu­ni­ty will adopt in the future. The real tar­get of these ideas are not their con­tem­po­raries, but their con­tem­po­raries’ chil­dren and grand­chil­dren. Cul­ture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn. Future gen­er­a­tions will be open to val­ues the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion rejects out­right. This will not be appar­ent at first. Beneath the offi­cial com­ings and goings of the cohorts above, a new con­sen­sus forms in in the cohorts below. Ideas will fes­ter among the young, but their impact will be hid­den by the inabil­i­ty and inex­pe­ri­ence of youth. But the youth do not stay young. Even­tu­al­ly a tran­si­tion point arrives.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • What Hap­pened To You? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “[We have wit­nessed a] sud­den, rapid, stun­ning shift in the belief sys­tem of the Amer­i­can elites. It has sent the whole soci­ety into a pro­found cul­tur­al dis­lo­ca­tion. It is, in essence, an ongo­ing moral pan­ic against the specter of ‘white suprema­cy,’ which is now bizarrely regard­ed as an accu­rate descrip­tion of the largest, freest, most suc­cess­ful mul­tira­cial democ­ra­cy in human his­to­ry.”
    • The West’s cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion is over (Ed West, UnHerd): “Life of Bri­an couldn’t be made 20 years ear­li­er, and nei­ther could it be made now; its satire of Jesus, a prophet of Islam, would risk upset­ting Mus­lim sen­si­bil­i­ties, which it’s fair to say peo­ple have become slight­ly wary of doing. At the very least it would need to cut out the scene point­ing fun at a man who, absurd­ly to the film­mak­ers and audi­ences, iden­ti­fies as a woman; absurd in 1979, as it had been in 1879 and 1779 and in every year before that, but a sacred idea in 2021. It’s sacred in the sense that its believ­ers have cap­tured the moral citadel where the most pow­er­ful ideas are pro­tect­ed by taboo, achieved either by emo­tion­al argu­ment or intim­i­da­tion (and both can be effec­tive). This is not some dark new age of can­cel cul­ture, how­ev­er, it’s just a return to nor­mal­i­ty.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed
    • Why Did­n’t COVID-19 Kill the Con­sti­tu­tion? (Jacob Sul­lum. Rea­son): “COVID-19 did not kill the Con­sti­tu­tion. But the cri­sis made it vivid­ly clear that we can­not count on politi­cians or bureau­crats to wor­ry about lim­its on their author­i­ty, espe­cial­ly when they believe they are doing what is nec­es­sary to pro­tect the pub­lic from a dead­ly dan­ger. The task of enforc­ing those lim­its falls to judges who are will­ing to stick their necks out.”
    • What Are the Lim­its to Gov­ern­men­tal Author­i­ty over the Church? (Ben Edwards, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “Christians/churches must sub­mit to every gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion unless it would mean dis­obey­ing God (i.e., cause them to sin) or the gov­ern­ment is seek­ing to reg­u­late some­thing out­side its sphere of author­i­ty.”
  6. On Chi­na
    • Chi­na Won’t Bury Us, Either (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Gar­ry Kas­parov has a pithy way of sum­ming up the past 18 months of tribu­la­tion. ‘Chi­na gave us the virus,’ the chess and human-rights cham­pi­on told me over a recent break­fast. ‘And the free world gave us the vac­cines.’ ”
    • Why a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan would be a cat­a­stro­phe for Chi­na and the world (Jon Stokes, per­son­al blog): “The world’s largest, most valu­able tech com­pa­nies are depen­dent either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly on the steady out­put of TSMC’s fabs. If those fabs went offline or became unavail­able in the west because they were con­trolled by PRC, it would imme­di­ate­ly dev­as­tate the glob­al econ­o­my. An unknow­able num­ber of large com­pa­nies just wouldn’t be able to refill their inven­to­ries for an inde­ter­mi­nate­ly long time.” This is about com­put­er chips and how a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan will be dis­as­trous for that mar­ket (which touch­es on so many oth­ers) no mat­ter how the inva­sion plays out. Very thought­ful.
  7. Scripps Spelling Bee 2021: Zaila Avant-garde Wins (Mag­gie Astor and Maria Cramer, New York Times): “Zaila, who just fin­ished eighth grade in her home­town, Har­vey, La., showed a prowess for spelling at 10, when her father, who had been watch­ing finals of the Scripps Nation­al Spelling Bee on ESPN, asked her how to spell the win­ning word: maro­cain. Zaila spelled it per­fect­ly. Then he asked her to spell the win­ning words going back to 1999. She spelled near­ly all of them cor­rect­ly and was able to tell him the books where she had seen them.” Read the whole thing — this kid is amaz­ing at more than spelling! The inter­face is weird — you’ll have to click “Read more” just before the time­line.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” First shared in vol­ume 150.

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 305

more sub­lists than nor­mal

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

305 is appar­ent­ly the 5th ‘hexag­o­nal prism num­ber’, which total­ly sounds made up and I am slight­ly skep­ti­cal of. This is because 305 = (n + 1)(3n2 + 3n + 1) where n=4 (pre­sum­ably the first hexag­o­nal prism num­ber is 1, when n=0).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Fad­ing of For­give­ness (Tim Keller, Car­dus): “In oth­er words, we no longer ground our val­ues in the sacred. We sim­ply treat the val­ues them­selves as sacred.… When the moral norms are detached from faith in a just God, it detach­es them also from faith in a mer­ci­ful and for­giv­ing God. In such a ‘sec­u­lar reli­gion,’ devi­a­tion from norms is sim­ply unfor­give­able.” Full of insights.
  2. Lov­ing the Foreigners—Even When They Have a Dead­ly Dis­ease (Hwee Hwee Tan, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While migrant work­ers had long lived chal­leng­ing lives in Sin­ga­pore, it was their unique vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty dur­ing the cir­cuit-break­er peri­od that real­ly woke up local Chris­tians to the need to help them—in both the short and long term.”
  3. A cri­sis inside Amer­i­ca’s largest evan­gel­i­cal denom­i­na­tion:
    • Rus­sell Moore’s Warn­ings Should Bring a Reck­on­ing (David French, The Dis­patch): “Chris­tians, let me ask you a ques­tion. When the #MeToo move­ment launched… did you think, ‘Stop obsess­ing over scan­dal. Most mem­bers of the media and most folks in Hol­ly­wood are good peo­ple’? Or did you think that mul­ti­ple pow­er­ful Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions were beset with deep cul­tur­al and spir­i­tu­al prob­lems? .… #MeToo did reveal moral rot. But let’s flip it all around. When you heard about cor­rup­tion and sex­u­al mis­con­duct at America’s largest Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty, what did you think? What did you think when you read about the sex­u­al scan­dal at Hill­song or when you learned about Ravi Zacharias’ record of abuse and his ministry’s ter­ri­ble mis­treat­ment of whistle­blow­ers? Did you pause to con­sid­er the larg­er impli­ca­tions of a decade of sex­u­al pre­da­tion at one of America’s largest Chris­t­ian camps or the camp’s efforts to intim­i­date and coerce vic­tims into silence?” I don’t often tip my hand, but FYI Moore and French are two of my favorite evan­gel­i­cal cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tors. If they ever agree on some­thing, you can be pret­ty sure that is my posi­tion as well.
    • The Scan­dal Rock­ing the Evan­gel­i­cal World (Pete Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “And the rot that has been so pow­er­ful­ly and so painful­ly exposed by Rus­sell Moore is not an indict­ment of Jesus any more than the fail­ures of the reli­gious author­i­ties in first-cen­tu­ry Pales­tine were. A the­olo­gian recent­ly remind­ed me that the Church is not the hope of the world; its pur­pose is to be a wit­ness to the hope of the world, even if that wit­ness is often imper­fect. But those of us of the Chris­t­ian faith do seem to be over­do­ing the imper­fect part.”
    • Where Did All the Evan­gel­i­cal Prophets Go? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The god­less­ness of the left maps very clean­ly onto the evan­gel­i­cal church’s radar because its insti­tu­tions and lead­ers are watch­ing for it all the time, but the god­less­ness of the right is obvi­ous­ly not yet some­thing some­one can talk about con­fi­dent­ly, expect­ing their denom­i­na­tion or eccle­si­as­ti­cal sup­port sys­tem to back them on.” Some good insights here.
  4. The future of Amer­i­ca:
    • A calm per­spec­tive: Are We Des­tined for a Trump Coup in 2024? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Then keep in mind, too, that in the event of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024, Biden, not Trump, will enjoy the presidency’s pow­ers; Kamala Har­ris, not Mike Pence, will pre­side over the elec­toral count; and Trump will be four years old­er, unlike­ly to run a fourth time, and there­fore some­what less intim­i­dat­ing in defeat.”
    • Alarmed from the left: 9/11 and 1/6 (Tim­o­thy Sny­der, Sub­stack): “The sce­nario then goes like this. The Repub­li­cans win back the House and Sen­ate in 2022, in part thanks to vot­er sup­pres­sion. The Repub­li­can can­di­date in 2024 los­es the pop­u­lar vote by sev­er­al mil­lion and the elec­toral vote by the mar­gin of a few states. State leg­is­la­tures, claim­ing fraud, alter the elec­toral count vote. The House and Sen­ate accept that altered count. The los­ing can­di­date becomes the pres­i­dent. We no longer have ‘demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment.’ And peo­ple are angry. No one is seek­ing to hide that this is the plan.”  The author is a his­to­ri­an at Yale.
    • Alarmed from the right: Our Increas­ing­ly Unrec­og­niz­able Civ­i­liza­tion (Mark Steyn, Imprim­is): “…one notices that Amer­i­ca is far­ther down this road than any oth­er coun­try in the West­ern world. In oth­er words, at this moment of cri­sis for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, or for what we used to call Chris­ten­dom, the lead­ing coun­try of the free world is pulling the wrong way.” Sent my way by a friend of the min­istry.
  5. A few thoughts on depres­sion (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “For some rea­son, human com­pa­ny helps. In fact, it is the sin­gle thing that helps the most. But not the kind of com­pa­ny a sad per­son needs. What a depressed per­son needs is sim­ply to talk to peo­ple, not about their prob­lems or their neg­a­tive thoughts or their depres­sion, but about any­thing else — music, ani­mals, sci­ence. The most help­ful top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion, I’ve found, is absur­di­ty — just talk­ing about utter­ly ridicu­lous things, gross things, vul­gar offen­sive things, bizarre things. Shared activ­i­ties, like going on a hike or play­ing sports, are OK, but talk­ing is much, much more impor­tant.”
  6. Once a Bas­tion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Iden­ti­ty Cri­sis (Michael Pow­ell, New York Times): “I got the sense it was more impor­tant for A.C.L.U. staff to iden­ti­fy with clients and pro­gres­sive caus­es than to stand on prin­ci­ple,” he said in a recent inter­view. “Lib­er­als are leav­ing the First Amend­ment behind.”
  7. Some snap­shots of acad­e­mia:
    • The Native Schol­ar Who Wasn’t (Sarah Viren, New York Times): “Of the 1,500 uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tors list­ed as Native Amer­i­can at the time, said Bill Cross, who helped found the Amer­i­can Indian/Alaska Native Pro­fes­sors Asso­ci­a­tion, “we’re look­ing real­is­ti­cal­ly at one-third of those being Indi­ans.”
    • Gripped by ‘Din­ner Par­ty-gate,’ Yale Law Con­fronts a Ven­omous Divide (Sarah Lyell and Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “At the law school, the episode has exposed bit­ter divi­sions in a top-ranked insti­tu­tion strug­gling to adapt at a moment of roil­ing social change. Stu­dents reg­u­lar­ly attack their pro­fes­sors, and one anoth­er, for their schol­ar­ship, pro­fes­sion­al choic­es and per­ceived polit­i­cal views. In a place awash in rumor and anony­mous accu­sa­tions, almost no one would speak on the record.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67)

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 300

some of the arti­cles have high­er-qual­i­ty argu­ments than the norm

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

This is vol­ume 300, which is how many Spar­tans it takes to fend off a Per­sian army.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Men Behave Bad­ly — A Review (Rob Hen­der­son, Quil­lette): “Intrigu­ing­ly, men and women con­verge in their answers when asked what per­cent­age of men would be will­ing to com­mit rape. Women esti­mate that about one-third of men would com­mit rape if there were no con­se­quences, and about one-third of men report that they would com­mit rape if they believed they could get away with it.” The author is a PhD can­di­date at Cam­bridge review­ing a book by a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing through­out. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Proof That Polit­i­cal Priv­i­lege Is Harm­ful for Chris­tian­i­ty (Nilay Saiya, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a peer-reviewed study pub­lished this month in the jour­nal Soci­ol­o­gy of Reli­gion, my coau­thor and I chal­lenge the per­ceived wis­dom that edu­ca­tion and afflu­ence spell Christianity’s demise. In our sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of a glob­al sam­ple of 166 coun­tries from 2010 to 2020, we find that the most impor­tant deter­mi­nant of Chris­t­ian vital­i­ty is the extent to which gov­ern­ments give offi­cial sup­port to Chris­tian­i­ty through their laws and poli­cies. How­ev­er, it is not in the way devout believ­ers might expect.”
  3. The Redemp­tion of Justin Bieber (Zach Baron, GQ): “And then there is God. If you ask Chance the Rap­per why he and his friend seem so hap­py in an indus­try that tends to grind peo­ple to dust, he will answer with­out hes­i­ta­tion. ‘Both of us, our secret sauce is Jesus,’ Chance says. ‘Justin doesn’t fake the funk. He goes to Jesus with his prob­lems, he goes to Jesus with his suc­cess­es. He calls me just to talk about Jesus.’ ”
  4. In Decid­ing Ful­ton v. Philadel­phia, the Supreme Court Should Remem­ber That Fos­ter Care Is for the Chil­dren (James Dwyer, Nation­al Review): “But fos­ter care is not a pub­lic accom­mo­da­tion nor a ser­vice to ‘the pub­lic.’ Chil­dren are not gener­ic goods for sale (like donuts or cups of cof­fee), to which every­one has an equal right. Instead, when the gov­ern­ment is mak­ing deci­sions on behalf of fos­ter chil­dren, it is oblig­at­ed to act only in that child’s best inter­est.” The author is a law prof at William and Mary and this arti­cle is real­ly good.
  5. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed:
    • COVID-19 Rewired Our Brains (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “At some point, the pan­dem­ic — the pro­vi­sion­al and prac­ti­cal judg­ments in favor of cau­tion that can jus­ti­fy restric­tive behav­iors — became an unshake­able moral pur­pose. Actu­al weigh­ing of risks went out the win­dow: There’s a dead­ly dis­ease out there; my actions can con­tribute to the end of the dis­ease or to its spread­ing in per­pe­tu­ity. ” This artic­u­lates some­thing I’ve dim­ly felt. Very good.
    • The Lib­er­als Who Can’t Quit Lock­down (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “But per­son­al deci­sions dur­ing the coro­n­avirus cri­sis are fraught because they seem sym­bol­ic of people’s broad­er val­ue sys­tems. When vac­ci­nat­ed adults refuse to see friends indoors, they’re work­ing through the trau­ma of the past year, in which the bro­ken­ness of America’s med­ical sys­tem was so evi­dent. When they keep their kids out of play­grounds and urge friends to stay dis­tanced at small out­door pic­nics, they are con­tin­u­ing the spir­it of the past year, when civic duty has been expressed through lone­ly asceti­cism. For many peo­ple, this kind of behav­ior is a form of good cit­i­zen­ship. That’s a hard idea to give up.”
    • Believe Sci­ence: Get Vac­ci­nat­ed. Then Relax. (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, once we are stuck inside it is very hard to unstick our­selves. I’m try­ing to remind myself of this truth when I find myself want­i­ng to berate friends who, ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, look at me with crazy eyes when I sug­gest com­ing over for din­ner. PTSD might be too strong a descrip­tor, but it’s not so far off either.”
    • Data Shows White Evan­gel­i­cals And Catholics More Like­ly to Get Vac­cine Than ‘Nones’ and Gen­er­al Pub­lic (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion Unplugged): “…when the sam­ple is bro­ken down into the three of the largest reli­gious groups: White evan­gel­i­cals, White Catholics and the reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed, some dis­par­i­ties begin to emerge. It’s note­wor­thy that White Chris­tians were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to get the vac­cine than the gen­er­al pub­lic between Jan­u­ary and April. In the lat­est wave of the sur­vey, near­ly 60% of White Catholics had been vac­ci­nat­ed and just about half of White evan­gel­i­cals said the same. It was the reli­gious “nones” that were lag­ging far behind, with only 31% indi­cat­ing that they had received one dose.” That is def­i­nite­ly not the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from the media, but it is the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from my friends. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Patents are Not the Prob­lem! (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Patents are not the prob­lem. All of the vac­cine man­u­fac­tur­ers are try­ing to increase sup­ply as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. Bil­lions of dos­es are being produced–more than ever before in the his­to­ry of the world. Licens­es are wide­ly avail­able.… Plas­tic bags are a big­ger bot­tle­neck than patents. The US embar­go on vac­cine sup­plies to India was pre­cise­ly that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion used the DPA to pri­or­i­tize things like biore­ac­tor bags and fil­ters to US sup­pli­ers and that meant that India’s Serum Insti­tute was hav­ing trou­ble get­ting its pro­duc­tion lines ready for Novavax. Cure­Vac, anoth­er poten­tial mRNA vac­cine, is also find­ing it dif­fi­cult to find sup­plies due to US restric­tions (which means sup­plies are short every­where).” Loose­ly relat­ed, but such a glo­ri­ous rant I had to share it.
    • The ori­gin of COVID: Did peo­ple or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? (Nicholas Wade, Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists): “Sci­ence is sup­pos­ed­ly a self-cor­rect­ing com­mu­ni­ty of experts who con­stant­ly check each other’s work. So why didn’t oth­er virol­o­gists point out that the Ander­sen group’s argu­ment was full of absurd­ly large holes? Per­haps because in today’s uni­ver­si­ties speech can be very cost­ly. Careers can be destroyed for step­ping out of line. Any virol­o­gist who chal­lenges the community’s declared view risks hav­ing his next grant appli­ca­tion turned down by the pan­el of fel­low virol­o­gists that advis­es the gov­ern­ment grant dis­tri­b­u­tion agency.” Very thor­ough, very read­able, very per­sua­sive. There is a real chance humans are respon­si­ble for COVID and we need to inves­ti­gate it.
  6. How the Pen­ta­gon Start­ed Tak­ing U.F.O.s Seri­ous­ly (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “Despite the fact that most adults car­ry around excep­tion­al­ly good cam­era tech­nol­o­gy in their pock­ets, most U.F.O. pho­tos and videos remain mad­den­ing­ly indis­tinct, but the for­mer Pen­ta­gon offi­cial implied that the gov­ern­ment pos­sess­es stark visu­al doc­u­men­ta­tion; Eli­zon­do and Mel­lon have said the same thing.”
  7. I Became a Moth­er at 25, and I’m Not Sor­ry I Didn’t Wait (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “But what of hav­ing chil­dren — or get­ting mar­ried, for that mat­ter — before estab­lish­ing one­self? That is: What to say to the young per­son who might con­sid­er those kinds of com­mit­ments if not for the final­i­ty of it all, the sense that she may be mak­ing some­body else before know­ing who she her­self real­ly is?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

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 298

sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle from the news this week — just ran­dom­ly inter­est­ing things

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

This is vol­ume 298, which is a fair­ly unin­ter­est­ing num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. New Rule: Give It to Me Straight, Doc (Bill Maher, YouTube): eight min­utes. This is a very good clip about COVID mis­in­for­ma­tion, although the lan­guage is not fam­i­ly-friend­ly. It goes in a direc­tion I did not expect towards the end.
    • Relat­ed: Why do so many vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple remain irra­tional­ly fear­ful? Lis­ten to the professor’s sto­ry. (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “To take just one exam­ple, major media out­lets trum­pet­ed new gov­ern­ment data last week show­ing that 5,800 ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed Amer­i­cans had con­tract­ed Covid. That may sound like a big num­ber, but it indi­cates that a vac­ci­nat­ed person’s chances of get­ting Covid are about one in 11,000.… A car trip is a big­ger threat, to you and oth­ers. About 100 Amer­i­cans are like­ly to die in car crash­es today. The new fed­er­al data sug­gests that either zero or one vac­ci­nat­ed per­son will die today from Covid.”
  2. On Good Par­ties (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Break­ing Ground): “A Good Par­ty is a place where bonds of friend­ship, fos­tered in a spir­it of both char­i­ty and joy, serve as the build­ing blocks for com­mu­nal life over­all. The wed­ding feast, that abun­dant ban­quet of Chris­t­ian life, is always pre­fig­ured in the con­vivial sym­po­sium of friend­ship. The king­dom of heav­en, when it comes, will be a very Good Par­ty. Good Par­ties don’t mere­ly offer us the oppor­tu­ni­ty to gath­er with those we love. Rather, more impor­tant­ly, they teach us how to love.” This is real­ly quite some­thing. I like it a lot.
  3. The Ques­tion That Dic­tates How Chris­tians Approach Cul­ture and Pol­i­tics (David French, The Dis­patch): “It’s becom­ing increas­ing­ly obvi­ous that one expla­na­tion for pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent Chris­t­ian approach­es to pol­i­tics and cul­ture rests with dif­fer­ent answers to the fol­low­ing ques­tion: Does the pri­ma­ry threat to the church come from with­in the church or with­out? Put dif­fer­ent­ly, does the church stum­ble and fall pri­mar­i­ly because of the sins of the church or because of the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal head­winds direct­ed against the church?”
    • In Here, Out There: On Assess­ing Spir­i­tu­al Threats (Dan Dar­ling, Sub­stack): “At times when we are com­bat­ing cul­tur­al ideas, we are not argu­ing with the world, but try­ing to equip the next gen­er­a­tion of Chris­tians whose faith will be chal­lenged by ideas that run con­trary to Scrip­ture. Our peo­ple are inun­dat­ed on every side by mes­sages that are at odds with Jesus’ teach­ings. Pop cul­ture, social media, friends, etc form a pow­er­ful influ­ence on this cohort of young peo­ple.” Not a rebut­tal, but a com­ple­ment.
  4. It’s Time for Social Con­ser­v­a­tives to Stop Fawn­ing Over Hun­gary (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “What made Hungary’s fam­i­ly pol­i­cy work wasn’t the pop­ulism, but the bor­ing tech­noc­ra­cy of it. Flashy pop­ulist pro­grams failed, while just push­ing cash out the door to fam­i­lies (as is the norm in coun­tries like Swe­den, Den­mark, or Nor­way, all of which have high­er birth rates than Hun­gary) worked. Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives should learn from this: if you want a high­er birth rate, you’re going to have to pay for it.” This was way more inter­est­ing than I antic­i­pat­ed.
  5. Why is Every­thing Lib­er­al? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “In a democ­ra­cy, every vote is sup­posed to be equal. If about half the coun­try sup­ports one side and half the coun­try sup­ports anoth­er, you may expect major insti­tu­tions to either be equal­ly divid­ed, or to try to stay polit­i­cal­ly neu­tral. This is not what we find.” This is basi­cal­ly one real­ly good obser­va­tion expound­ed in detail. The author, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, is a research fel­low at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty.
  6. Repa­ra­tions: A Crit­i­cal The­o­log­i­cal Review (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “With tax col­lec­tors and sol­diers through­out the Gospels, there is no talk of resti­tu­tion for impe­r­i­al suprema­cy or extrac­tive sys­tems, nor any sum­mons to dis­man­tle the struc­tures they inhab­it­ed, just the straight­for­ward com­mand to live a god­ly life, be gen­er­ous to oth­ers, and repay what you have stolen.” Well done book reviews are amaz­ing. This is as good as the best reviews by Scott Alexan­der.
  7. The Great Unset­tling (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “We in the West invent­ed this thing called ‘moder­ni­ty’, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world want­ed it or not. Once we called this process ‘the white man’s bur­den’ and export­ed it with dread­noughts. Now we call it ‘devel­op­ment’ and export it via the World Bank.” Wide-rang­ing.

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 This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 295

A lot about Jesus and a lit­tle bit about the news cycle.

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 vol­ume 295, which is not a ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing num­ber. Accord­ing to one web­site it is a “struc­tured del­toidal hexa­con­ta­he­dral num­ber” but that sounds sil­ly and is even less inter­est­ing to me than the sim­ple fact that 295 = 59 â‹… 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Ten­nant on Aquinas’s Sec­ond Way (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “…I don’t mean to be too hard on Ten­nant, specif­i­cal­ly. There is noth­ing unique about his objec­tions. On the con­trary, vari­a­tions on them are con­stant­ly raised against Aquinas by main­stream aca­d­e­m­ic philoso­phers and by main­stream aca­d­e­mics and intel­lec­tu­als from oth­er fields (not to men­tion count­less ama­teurs). And yet they are all demon­stra­bly based on egre­gious errors and mis­un­der­stand­ings. Which, while it tells you noth­ing about Aquinas, says much about what you should think of main­stream aca­d­e­m­ic and intel­lec­tu­al opin­ion.” 
  2. From the Emp­ty Tomb to Today’s Abuse: Believe Women (Amy Orr-Ewing, Gospel Coali­tion): “If we don’t believe women, then we have to dis­miss the eye­wit­ness­es to the Incar­na­tion, Atone­ment, and Res­ur­rec­tion. If we won’t lis­ten, we don’t have access to the evi­dence for the cen­tral truths of the Chris­t­ian faith.”
  3. Is Chris­tian­i­ty a White Man’s Reli­gion? (Claude Atcho, Gospel Coali­tion): “[This] exam­ple and exhor­ta­tion show how to dis­en­tan­gle rather than decon­struct. Through care­ful dis­en­tan­gling and patient recov­ery, we find that Chris­tian­i­ty unique­ly speaks to the con­cerns of Black peo­ple with expe­ri­en­tial and his­tor­i­cal foun­da­tions that have empow­ered our peo­ple for cen­turies.”
  4. He’s a Famous Evan­gel­i­cal Preach­er, but His Kids Wish He’d Pipe Down (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “I told Rick Joyn­er that I thought his strug­gles with his chil­dren reflect­ed a larg­er gen­er­a­tion gap and dwin­dling of influ­ence of the reli­gious right. To my sur­prise, he agreed. ‘The church in Amer­i­ca has been tremen­dous­ly weak­ened,’ he acknowl­edged. If the Joyn­ers are a micro­cosm of a nation divid­ed, per­haps they also offer a ray of hope in their abil­i­ty to bridge dif­fer­ences. They remain close and get togeth­er for hol­i­days, even if gath­er­ings are tense.” Real­ly inter­est­ing.
  5. How America’s sur­veil­lance net­works helped the FBI catch the Capi­tol mob (Drew Har­well & Craig Tim­berg, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When­ev­er you see this tech­nol­o­gy used on some­one you don’t like, remem­ber it’s also being used on a social move­ment you sup­port,” said Evan Greer, direc­tor of the dig­i­tal rights advo­ca­cy group Fight for the Future. “Once in a while, this tech­nol­o­gy gets used on real­ly bad peo­ple doing real­ly bad stuff. But the rest of the time it’s being used on all of us, in ways that are pro­found­ly chill­ing for free­dom of expres­sion.”
  6. Wel­come to the Decade of Con­cern (Tan­ner Greer, Schol­ar’s Stage): “The 2020s will see both the growth of Chi­nese mil­i­tary pow­er to new heights and a tem­po­rary nadir in Amer­i­can capac­i­ty to inter­vene in any con­flict in China’s near abroad. The ‘tem­po­rary’ part of that equa­tion is impor­tant. His­to­ri­ans of the First World War and the Pacif­ic War trace the ori­gins of those con­flicts to pes­simistic assess­ments of the chang­ing bal­ance of pow­er. The bel­ligeren­cy of impe­r­i­al Japan and Wil­helmine Ger­many rest­ed on a belief that their posi­tion vis a vis their ene­mies could only decline with time. Any states­man who believes that a tem­po­rary mil­i­tary advan­tage over an ene­my will soon erode will have a strong incen­tive to fight it out before ero­sion has begun.”
    • Chi­na-relat­ed: The cost of speak­ing up against Chi­na (Joel Gunter, BBC): “Some of those who spoke to the BBC — from the US, UK, Aus­tralia, Nor­way, the Nether­lands, Fin­land, Ger­many, and Turkey — pro­vid­ed screen­shots of threat­en­ing What­sApp, WeChat and Face­book mes­sages; oth­ers described in detail what had been said in phone and video calls. Every­one described some form of deten­tion or harass­ment of their fam­i­ly mem­bers in Xin­jiang by local police or state secu­ri­ty offi­cials.”
  7. On the Geor­gia vot­ing law:
    • Pos­i­tive: Why State Elec­tion Reform Bills Don’t Sig­nal a New Jim Crow Era (Wal­ter Olson, The Dis­patch): “The law, wide­ly por­trayed as a hor­ren­dous ven­ture into so-called vot­er sup­pres­sion, actu­al­ly con­tains many pro­vi­sions that lib­er­al­ize access to bal­lot meth­ods that came in handy dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, such as ear­ly vot­ing, as well as address­ing the gen­uine prob­lem of long lines at polling places.”
    • Neg­a­tive: What Georgia’s Vot­ing Law Real­ly Does (Nick Corasan­i­ti and Reid J. Epstein, New York Times): “Go page by page through Georgia’s new vot­ing law, and one take­away stands above all oth­ers: The Repub­li­can leg­is­la­ture and gov­er­nor have made a breath­tak­ing asser­tion of par­ti­san pow­er in elec­tions, mak­ing absen­tee vot­ing hard­er and cre­at­ing restric­tions and com­pli­ca­tions in the wake of nar­row loss­es to Democ­rats.”
    • Pos­i­tive: No, Georgia’s new vot­ing law is not a return to Jim Crow (Hen­ry Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “No bill is per­fect, and rea­son­able peo­ple can dis­agree about the bal­ance between vot­er access and elec­tion integri­ty. But Demo­c­ra­t­ic claims that this law amounts to racist vot­er sup­pres­sion should be seen for what they are: over­wrought par­ti­san rhetoric that unnec­es­sar­i­ly increas­es racial and polit­i­cal ten­sions.” The author is a senior fel­low at the Ethics and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Cen­ter
    • Out­raged: Vot­er Sup­pres­sion Is Vio­lence (Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone): “This neo-Jim Crow mea­sure builds upon the may­hem that has already cost lives, not just at the Capi­tol, but also thanks to the malev­o­lent gov­er­nance of Repub­li­cans nation­wide. After decades of work­ing to erode the promise of the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment, or per­haps to sim­ply reserve it for them­selves, it appears that Repub­li­cans want to fin­ish the job this year. This is why S.B. 202, and the laws sure­ly to be mod­eled after it, are designed to ensure that white men with regres­sive pol­i­tics will con­tin­ue to hold pow­er.”
    • Neg­a­tive-ish: Fact check: What the new Geor­gia elec­tions law actu­al­ly does (Daniel Dale and Dianne Gal­lagher, CNN): “As crit­ics have cor­rect­ly said, the law impos­es sig­nif­i­cant new obsta­cles to vot­ing. It also gives the Repub­li­can-con­trolled state gov­ern­ment new pow­er to assert con­trol over the con­duct of elec­tions in Demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­ties. The law does, how­ev­er, con­tain some pro­vi­sions that can be rea­son­ably be described as pro-vot­ing, and crit­ics have not always described all of the text accu­rate­ly.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Life­guard Earn­ings Here May Have You Prac­tic­ing Your Strokes (Arden Dier, News­er): “Accord­ing to Forbes, sev­en life­guards made more than $300,000 in 2019, which was the most recent year for which data was avail­able, while 82 life­guards made more than $200,000. Thir­ty-one life­guards made more than $50,000 in over­time pay, while three col­lect­ed more than $100,000, per Forbes.”
  • John Mor­ton (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): the trick is about nine min­utes, although the video is longer due to ads at the end.
  • Chick-Fil‑A Drug Deal­er (John Crist, YouTube): five min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have From the hap­py news depart­ment: Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 293

fea­tur­ing sev­er­al per­spec­tives about the mur­ders in Atlanta

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

This is vol­ume 293 — a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Arti­cle relat­ed to vio­lence against Asian-Amer­i­cans:
    • Reli­gion, Race, and the Atlanta Mur­ders (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There are so many threads to this knot that need to be slow­ly untan­gled. There are ele­ments relat­ed to pornog­ra­phy, sex traf­fick­ing, reli­gion, evan­gel­i­cal­ism, South­ern Bap­tists, and many oth­ers just out­side our periph­ery. But nei­ther the com­plex­i­ty of this event nor the trib­al­ism of our cul­tur­al dis­course must not allow us to avoid self-reflec­tion and scruti­ny. We must con­front the real­i­ty that some­thing is hor­ri­bly wrong in our midst when a per­son kills to ‘elim­i­nate’ temp­ta­tion.”
    • We Need to Put a Name to This Vio­lence (Jay Caspi­an Kang, New York Times): “There is no shared his­to­ry between, say, Thai immi­grants who saw images of one of their own attacked in San Fran­cis­co, and the Chi­nese-Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion of Oak­land alarmed by the assault in Chinatown.Asian-American iden­ti­ty is frac­tured and often inco­her­ent because it assumes kin­ship between peo­ple who do not speak the same lan­guage, and, in many cas­es, dis­like one anoth­er.” This was writ­ten before the Atlanta mur­ders and is dis­cussing the trend wave of vio­lence more gen­er­al­ly.
    • The Mud­dled His­to­ry of Anti-Asian Vio­lence (Hua Hsu, New York­er): “Some have won­dered if these hor­rif­ic, viral videos con­sti­tute a wave, or if they were just ran­dom inci­dents. When your con­cerns have gone unrec­og­nized for decades, it’s under­stand­able why some with­in the Asian-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty remain so invest­ed in using these high­ly vis­i­ble moments as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to call atten­tion to hate, even if the inci­dents seem more var­ied than that. The wave in ques­tion isn’t just two or three inci­dents.” Also writ­ten before the Atlanta shoot­ings.
    • Racial­iz­ing The Atlanta Mas­sage Par­lor Killings (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It is strik­ing to see how quick­ly our media has racial­ized the nar­ra­tive of the hor­rif­ic mur­ders at the Geor­gia mas­sage par­lors. From what we know so far, the alleged mur­der­er was a young man tor­ment­ed by his com­pul­sive sex­u­al desires. He vis­it­ed mas­sage par­lors in the past, and went to this one to kill the women he once depend­ed on to grat­i­fy his desires. From all the avail­able evi­dence, these killings were the misog­y­nis­tic act of a sex­u­al­ly depraved man.” As is often the case with Dreher, some of the best mate­r­i­al is in the updates at the end (usu­al­ly a com­ment from a read­er that Dreher thought sig­nif­i­cant).
    • When The Nar­ra­tive Replaces The News (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Mass killers, if they are moti­vat­ed by big­otry or hate, tend to let the world know… This mass mur­der­er in Atlanta actu­al­ly denied any such motive, and, to repeat myself, there is no evi­dence for it — and that has been true from the very start.”
    • The Media Got It Wrong: Police Cap­tain Did­n’t Say the Atlanta Spa Killer Was Hav­ing a ‘Bad Day’ (Rob­by Soave, Rea­son): “A police offi­cer excus­ing Long’s actions as mere­ly the result of him hav­ing a ‘bad day’ would indeed be con­temptible. But that’s not what Bak­er did. In fact, many of the peo­ple so infu­ri­at­ed about the quote were mis­led by Rupar’s edit of the video. The full video (the rel­e­vant sec­tion starts at about 13:50) makes clear that Bak­er was not pro­vid­ing his own com­men­tary, but rather sum­ma­riz­ing what Long had told the inves­ti­ga­tors.”
  2. Third Places and the Hori­zons of Male Friend­ships (Ryan McCormick, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, typ­i­cal male friend­ship is dif­fer­ent from typ­i­cal, con­tem­po­rary female friend­ship. A fail­ure to rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ent ways that men and women form inti­mate bonds in friend­ship is what breeds so much con­fu­sion and leads to the mis­di­ag­no­sis of ‘tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty.’” I will add one extra lay­er of diag­no­sis that the author did­n’t address: many in our cul­ture have a hor­ror of male-only spaces. How are we sur­prised to dis­cov­er a dearth of male friend­ships when we view the very exis­tence of mas­cu­line com­mu­ni­ties as evi­dence of some­thing amiss?
  3. The False and Exag­ger­at­ed Claims Still Being Spread About the Capi­tol Riot (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “Despite this alleged bru­tal mur­der tak­ing place in one of the most sur­veilled build­ings on the plan­et, filled that day with hun­dreds of cell­phones tap­ing the events, nobody saw video of it. No pho­tographs depict­ed it. To this day, no autop­sy report has been released. No details from any offi­cial source have been pro­vid­ed.”
    • Fol­low-up: As the Insur­rec­tion Nar­ra­tive Crum­bles, Democ­rats Cling to it More Des­per­ate­ly Than Ever (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “As I detailed sev­er­al weeks ago, so many of the most har­row­ing and wide­spread media claims about the Jan­u­ary 6 riot proved to be total fab­ri­ca­tions. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Bri­an Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extin­guish­er. No pro­test­er brought zip-ties with them as some pre­med­i­tat­ed plot to kid­nap mem­bers of Con­gress (two riot­ers found them on a table inside). There’s no evi­dence any­one intend­ed to assas­si­nate Mike Pence, Mitt Rom­ney or any­one else.”
    • Relat­ed: Two are charged in the assault of a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died after the Jan. 6 riot. (Katie Ben­ner and Adam Gold­man, New York Times): “The Jus­tice Depart­ment has charged two men in the assault on Bri­an D. Sick­nick, a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died the day after he fought riot­ers storm­ing the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment offi­cial briefed on the case and court doc­u­ments.… It is not clear whether Offi­cer Sick­nick died because of his expo­sure to the spray.”
  4. Covid’s Par­ti­san Errors (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “ ‘Repub­li­cans con­sis­tent­ly under­es­ti­mate risks, while Democ­rats con­sis­tent­ly over­es­ti­mate them.’  …The rea­sons for these ide­o­log­i­cal bias­es aren’t com­plete­ly clear, but they are not shock­ing. Con­ser­v­a­tives tend to be more hos­tile to behav­ior restric­tions and to sci­en­tif­ic research. And lib­er­als some­times over­re­act to social prob­lems.”
  5. Tim­ing the SARS-CoV­‑2 index case in Hubei province (Sci­ence, Jonathan Pekar et al):  “Empir­i­cal obser­va­tion through­out the SARS-CoV­‑2 pan­dem­ic has shown the out­sized role of super­spread­ing events in the prop­a­ga­tion of SARS-CoV­‑2, where­in the aver­age infect­ed per­son does not trans­mit the virus. Our results sug­gest the same dynam­ics like­ly influ­enced the ini­tial estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2 in humans, as only 29.7% of sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics from the pri­ma­ry analy­sis went on to estab­lish self-sus­tain­ing epi­demics. The remain­ing 70.3% of epi­demics went extinct.… Fur­ther­more, the large and high­ly con­nect­ed con­tact net­works char­ac­ter­iz­ing urban areas seem crit­i­cal to the estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2. When we sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics where the num­ber of con­nec­tions was reduced by 50% or 75% (with­out rescal­ing per-con­tact trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty), to reflect emer­gence in a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty, the epi­demics went extinct 94.5% or 99.6% of the time, respec­tive­ly.”
    • This is real­ly inter­est­ing. The researchers are large­ly at UCSD. One impli­ca­tion is that there are a LOT more ani­mal-to-human COVID-like infec­tions that sim­ply nev­er make the leap to becom­ing wide­spread. Kind of like music: there are a ton of great musi­cians who just nev­er catch their big break. With­out super­spread­ers, this kind of pan­dem­ic appears unlike­ly. I hope researchers can find a way to address what­ev­er caus­es some­one to be a super­spread­er.
  6. Rais­ing Beef Cat­tle (Tom Blan­ton, Quil­lette): “It is by cher­ry-pick­ing images of the times of con­fine­ment from around the world that the grue­some image of ‘fac­to­ry farms’ is cre­at­ed. Often the images are tak­en from coun­tries that don’t have the human­i­tar­i­an reg­u­la­tions that most West­ern nations have.… If those gen­uine­ly con­cerned for the suf­fer­ing of ani­mals could find it with­in them­selves to rec­og­nize that it is not immoral to slaugh­ter ani­mals humane­ly for food, they would find many allies for the cause of reduc­ing ani­mal suf­fer­ing amongst the peo­ple who raise and work with these ani­mals on a dai­ly basis.”
  7. Could It Be… Genes? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “This is an arti­cle about how fam­i­ly influ­ences chil­dren with­out a con­sid­er­a­tion of the most direct and pow­er­ful way. The words ‘gene’ and ‘genes’ and ‘genet­ic’ do not appear in this paper. Nei­ther do ‘her­i­ta­ble’ or ‘hered­i­ty’ or ‘hered­i­tary.’ The con­cept of the trans­fer of genet­ic infor­ma­tion from par­ent to off­spring sim­ply does not exist in this men­tal space… in a paper about how fam­i­lies influ­ence the char­ac­ter­is­tics of their chil­dren. I would call this odd, but it’s par for the course in social sci­ence research.”

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 On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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.