Tag: politics

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 291

fas­ci­nat­ing links from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives

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 291, which is not a very inter­est­ing num­ber. It’s 3 · 97, which I guess is some­thing.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State (Ben Mauk, New York­er): “On his sec­ond day of deten­tion, a mem­ber of the camp admin­is­tra­tion came to see him. Kok­teubai asked when he would learn what he was accused of doing. He was sur­prised to learn that he wouldn’t be ques­tioned at all. ‘If you hadn’t com­mit­ted a crime, you wouldn’t have end­ed up here,’ the admin­is­tra­tor told him. ‘So there is some­thing you are here for.’ ” The graph­ics inter­fere with the read­ing expe­ri­ence, but it’s worth­while.
  2. On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good.
  3. David Shor on Why Trump Was Good for the GOP and How Dems Can Win in 2022 (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “But when I look at the 2020 elec­tion, I see that we ran against the most unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can ever to run for pres­i­dent — and we ran lit­er­al­ly the most pop­u­lar fig­ure in our par­ty whose last name is not Oba­ma — and we only nar­row­ly won the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden had done 0.3 per­cent worse, then Don­ald Trump would have won reelec­tion…” This is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly fas­ci­nat­ing in a very non­par­ti­san way (although the inter­vie­wee is extreme­ly par­ti­san).
  4. In pan­dem­ic news:
    • 5 Pan­dem­ic Mis­takes We Keep Repeat­ing (Zeynep Tufek­ci, The Atlantic): “One of the most impor­tant prob­lems under­min­ing the pan­dem­ic response has been the mis­trust and pater­nal­ism that some pub­lic-health agen­cies and experts have exhib­it­ed toward the pub­lic.… And yet, from the begin­ning, a good chunk of the pub­lic-fac­ing mes­sag­ing and news arti­cles implied or claimed that vac­cines won’t pro­tect you against infect­ing oth­er peo­ple or that we didn’t know if they would, when both were false.” Watch­ing peo­ple reject accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the pan­dem­ic because high-sta­tus peo­ple rail against it has been like watch­ing my skep­ti­cal friends reject the gospel because of peer pres­sure. IT’S GOOD NEWS — BELIEVE IT! The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UNC.
    • Pan­dem­ic Approach­es: The Dif­fer­ences Between Flori­da, Cal­i­for­nia (Noel King, Greg Allen, & Eric West­er­velt, NPR): “In Decem­ber, Cal­i­for­nia had a spike, and Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som reim­posed a stay-at-home order and a busi­ness lock­down order that was recent­ly lift­ed. At the same time, cas­es were spik­ing in Flori­da. But every­thing stayed open, includ­ing schools. So which approach works?” Spoil­er: Flori­da is look­ing pret­ty good.
    • Stop Say­ing We Can’t Go Back to Nor­mal After Vac­cines (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Rea­son): “Nor­mal­cy is the whole point of vac­ci­na­tion, and these vac­cines can get us there. So when pub­lic health advice says “no” to nor­mal­cy even after vac­ci­na­tion, it mis­leads the pub­lic and wild­ly under­sells the vac­cines. A year into this, that’s cru­el and dispir­it­ing.… there must be a firm end date to those pub­lic mea­sures for every­one. I can’t say exact­ly when it should be, nor do I think a sin­gle nation­al date would make sense. I’m envi­sion­ing some­thing like six weeks after vac­cines have become avail­able (as in, you can eas­i­ly get an appoint­ment) to all who want them in a giv­en city, coun­ty, or state.”
    • Not Gath­er­ing with the Church Hurts You Spir­i­tu­al­ly (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Jesus designed Chris­tian­i­ty and the progress of our dis­ci­ple­ship to cen­ter around gath­er­ings. The math is there­fore sim­ple: Gath­er­ing with the church is spir­i­tu­al­ly good for you. Not phys­i­cal­ly gath­er­ing with the church spir­i­tu­al­ly hurts you.”
    • The Secret Life of a Coro­n­avirus (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With sci­en­tists adrift in an ocean of def­i­n­i­tions, philoso­phers have rowed out to offer life­lines.” What a glo­ri­ous sen­tence. Also, I began the arti­cle sym­pa­thet­ic to the idea that virus­es are alive and we draw our bound­aries too tight­ly, which is what the author wants me to believe. But his argu­ments were so weak that I’ve flipped to: “not alive, mere­ly inter­ac­tive.”
    • The rise of the nox­ious con­tract (David B. Grusky et al, Stan­ford Cen­ter On Pover­ty and Inequal­i­ty): “We observed that many peo­ple ‘com­pare down­ward’ by empha­siz­ing their priv­i­lege rel­a­tive to those less for­tu­nate, that oth­ers ‘look out­ward’ in recog­ni­tion that times of cri­sis require band­ing togeth­er, and that yet oth­ers ‘look inward’ as they cope with unusu­al­ly stress­ful chal­lenges. Although many ways of cop­ing are there­fore in play, none of them entail invid­i­ous com­par­isons that then lead to resent­ment or con­flict.” An analy­sis of whether peo­ple who have to work in-per­son are resent­ful of those who telecom­mute. Spoil­er: not so much. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. On Ryan Ander­son­’s book being dropped by Ama­zon:
    • Ryan T. Ander­son Was Made For This Moment (Rod Dreher inter­view­ing Ryan T. Ander­son, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…most every­one agrees that a hos­pi­tal shouldn’t refuse to treat some­one for Covid because they iden­ti­fy as LGBT. But, thank God, that doesn’t seem to have actu­al­ly ever hap­pened. Still when peo­ple hear about a law that bans LGBT dis­crim­i­na­tion, that’s what they have in mind. They don’t real­ize what it means for sex-reas­sign­ment pro­ce­dures in gen­er­al, let alone what it means for chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria in par­tic­u­lar. So activists pull on people’s heart­strings by say­ing we need a law ban­ning tru­ly unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion (which is vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent) and then that law isn’t nuanced and mea­sured, but a rad­i­cal bill impos­ing a rad­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. A law that is sold as a shield pro­tect­ing vul­ner­a­ble minori­ties ends up being a sword to per­se­cute peo­ple who don’t embrace a new sex­u­al ortho­doxy.”
    • Book Ban­ning in an Age of Ama­zon (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “Remem­ber where you were in Feb­ru­ary of 2021. Con­gress fought over a sec­ond impeach­ment of an ex-pres­i­dent. The states debat­ed whether forced tru­an­cy would make life eas­i­er for America’s teach­ers. And earth’s largest bookseller—(Internal mot­to: ‘Work Hard. Have Fun. Make his­to­ry.’)—began qui­et­ly delet­ing books.”
  6. Killing The SAT Means Hurt­ing Minori­ties (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “There’s a rea­son why white Hol­ly­wood celebs cheat the sys­tem. It’s the only way their less gift­ed kids can win out over the dis­ad­van­taged. Want to max­i­mize priv­i­lege? Make admis­sions depen­dent sole­ly on teacher rec­om­men­da­tions, school grades, and per­son­al essays. Want to min­i­mize it? Abol­ish lega­cy admis­sions, and use the SAT.” I gen­uine­ly do not under­stand how this is con­tro­ver­sial. The data is clear and over­whelm­ing.
  7. Ele­vat­ing the Role of Faith-Inspired Impact in the Social Sec­tor (Jeri Eck­hart Queenan, Peter Grunert, and Devin Mur­phy, The Bridges­pan Group): “Giv­ing to reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tions (which includes dona­tions to con­gre­ga­tions) rep­re­sents near­ly one-third of all giv­ing in the Unit­ed States. Rough­ly a third of the 50 largest non­prof­its in the coun­try have a faith ori­en­ta­tion. And, 40 per­cent of inter­na­tion­al non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions are faith-inspired.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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 Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

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 287

you would­n’t believe how many awe­some links I cut this week

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 287, a num­ber which is the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes thrice over (287 = 89 + 97 + 101 = 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 = 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Sci­ence of Rea­son­ing With Unrea­son­able Peo­ple (Adam Grant, New York Times): “Social sci­en­tists have found that ask­ing peo­ple how their pre­ferred polit­i­cal poli­cies might work in prac­tice, rather than ask­ing why they favor those approach­es, was more effec­tive in open­ing their minds. As peo­ple strug­gled to explain their ide­al tax leg­is­la­tion or health care plan, they grasped the com­plex­i­ty of the prob­lem and rec­og­nized gaps in their knowl­edge.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Pen­n’s Whar­ton School.
  2. Pelo­ton makes ton­ing your glutes feel spir­i­tu­al. But should Jesus be part of the expe­ri­ence? (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): ‘Nick Stok­er, 41, a Lon­don busi­ness­man, trig­gered hun­dreds of com­ments on the Pelo­ton Red­dit page in April when he post­ed that he took a “Sun­days with Love” ride and thought he was get­ting pan­dem­ic-era “spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tion and uplift­ing music,” but actu­al­ly got some­thing more about God and Chris­tian­i­ty. The ride should have been labeled as Chris­t­ian, he argued. “I don’t want my chil­dren lis­ten­ing to these sort of mes­sages.”’
  3. Thoughts about Chris­tian­i­ty and Amer­i­ca
    • Dis­cern­ing the Dif­fer­ence Between Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and Chris­t­ian Patri­o­tism (David French, The Dis­patch): “I love this coun­try, but I love it with eyes wide open. The aspi­ra­tions of our found­ing have long been tem­pered by the bru­tal real­i­ties of our fall­en nature. The same nation that stormed Normandy’s beach­es to destroy a fas­cist empire simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sus­tained a seg­re­ga­tion­ist regime with­in its own bor­ders. Our virtues do not negate our vices, and our vices do not negate our virtues. Amer­i­ca isn’t 1619 or 1776. It’s 1619 and 1776.”
    • Betray­ing Your Church—And Your Par­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “On Jan­u­ary 6, as an armed mob invad­ed the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Kinzinger said he could feel a dark­ness descend over the Capi­tol. One of his friends in Con­gress, the Okla­homa Repub­li­can Mark­wayne Mullin, heard the same thing from mem­bers of the Capi­tol Police. Kinzinger doesn’t doubt that the dev­il is at work in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. He just sus­pects that the ene­my might be lurk­ing in his own house.”
    • It’s Time to Talk About Vio­lent Chris­t­ian Extrem­ism (Zack Stan­ton inter­view­ing Eliz­a­beth Neu­mann, Politi­co): “Here’s the thing, and I will do my best to explain it from a sec­u­lar per­spec­tive: There’s text in the New Tes­ta­ment where the Apos­tle Paul is admon­ish­ing a church he helped estab­lish: ‘You should be mature adults now in your faith, but I’m still hav­ing to feed you with milk.’ He’s basi­cal­ly say­ing, you should be 18, but you’re still nurs­ing, and we need you to get it togeth­er.… One of my ques­tions is: Are we see­ing in the last four years one of the con­se­quences of that fail­ure? They didn’t mature [in their faith], and they’re very eas­i­ly led astray by what scrip­ture calls ‘false teach­ers.’ My the­sis here is that if we had a more scrip­tural­ly based set of believ­ers in this coun­try — if every­body who calls them­selves a ‘Chris­t­ian’ had actu­al­ly read through, I don’t know, 80 per­cent of the Bible — they would not have been so eas­i­ly deceived.” The inter­vie­wee is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who has served as a Deputy Chief of Staff in the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing.
  4. The chal­lenge of Chi­na:
    • Biden’s Night­mare May Be Chi­na (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Deal­ing with Mitch McConnell will be a piece of cake for Pres­i­dent Biden com­pared with deal­ing with Xi. Biden’s chal­lenge will be to con­strain a Chi­nese leader who has been oppres­sive in Hong Kong, geno­ci­dal in the Xin­jiang region, obdu­rate on trade, ruth­less on human rights and insin­cere on every­thing, while still coop­er­at­ing with Chi­na on issues like cli­mate change, fen­tanyl and North Korea (which many experts expect to resume mis­sile launch­es this year).”
    • ‘Their goal is to destroy every­one’: Uighur camp detainees allege sys­tem­at­ic rape (Matthew Hill, David Cam­panale and Joel Gunter, BBC): “It was unlike­ly that Xi or oth­er top par­ty offi­cials would have direct­ed or autho­rised rape or tor­ture,” Par­ton said, but they would “cer­tain­ly be aware of it. I think they pre­fer at the top just to turn a blind eye. The line has gone out to imple­ment this pol­i­cy with great stern­ness, and that is what is hap­pen­ing.” That left “no real con­straints”, he said. “I just don’t see what the per­pe­tra­tors of these acts would have to hold them back.” I don’t know how this isn’t front page news almost every day. We want to say every­one is as evil as Hitler EXCEPT THE PEOPLE RUNNING ACTUAL CONCENTRATION CAMPS.
    • And thoughts on Tai­wan, which is not Chi­na
      • Under­stand­ing Tai­wanese Nation­al­ism: A His­tor­i­cal Primer in Bul­let Points (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “As some­one who has lived years in both Tai­wan and in Chi­na I can also give a more anec­do­tal assess­ment: the dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries and their respec­tive cul­tures (to say noth­ing of their polit­i­cal sys­tems) is clear. They are sim­ply not the same peo­ple.”
      • Chi­na and the Ques­tion of Tai­wan (Aaron Sarin, Quil­lette): “His­to­ri­an James A. Mill­ward points out that many in his dis­ci­pline have implic­it­ly accept­ed the Par­ty line on Tai­wanese his­to­ry. They will refer, for exam­ple, to the Qing dynasty’s ‘recap­ture of Tai­wan in 1683,’ even though, as Mill­ward explains, ‘no Chi­na-based state—not even an impe­r­i­al dynasty—ha[d] ever ruled the island before.’ Here we see the suc­cess of the CCP’s pro­pa­gan­da, even out­side Chi­na. The truth is that Tai­wan was a Qing acqui­si­tion, and that is the sole basis for Beijing’s claims today.”
      • Fork The Gov­ern­ment (Plan­et Mon­ey, NPR): “As coun­tries around the world strug­gle to han­dle the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, Tai­wan stands out as a rel­a­tive suc­cess sto­ry… so far. Since April, only one local­ly trans­mit­ted case has been report­ed. There have been only sev­en deaths — in the entire coun­try. There are a lot of rea­sons why Tai­wan has been able to keep its infec­tion and death rates so low. For one, it’s an island. Also, it’s dealt with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus epi­dem­ic before. But Tai­wan has also been tak­ing a rel­a­tive­ly exper­i­men­tal approach to the pan­dem­ic with tech­nol­o­gy. Like work­ing with civic hack­ers to code its way out of the pan­dem­ic.” This is a pod­cast episode.
  5. Things relat­ed to the cred­i­bil­i­ty cri­sis in our cul­ture:
    • Nation­al­ism, prej­u­dice, and FDA reg­u­la­tion (Scott Sum­n­er, Econ­Lib): “You say peo­ple shouldn’t be allowed to take a vac­cine unless experts find it to be safe and effec­tive? OK, the UK experts did just that. You say that only the opin­ion of US experts counts because our experts are clear­ly the best? Real­ly, where is the sci­en­tif­ic study that shows that our experts are the best? I thought you said we need­ed to ‘trust the sci­en­tists’? Now you are say­ing we must trust the nation­al­ists?” The author is an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Web­MD, And The Tragedy Of Leg­i­ble Exper­tise (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said some­thing (or been silent about some­thing in a sug­ges­tive way), and then some blog­ger I trust­ed said the oppo­site, and the blog­ger turned out to be right. I real­ize this kind of thing is vul­ner­a­ble to selec­tion bias, but it’s been the same cou­ple of blog­gers through­out, peo­ple who I already trust­ed and already sus­pect­ed might be bet­ter than the experts in a lot of ways.”
    • Where Have All the Great Works Gone? (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “It was obvi­ous to even those who dis­liked Niet­zche that he was a sem­i­nal fig­ure in West­ern thought; it was obvi­ous even to those who dis­agreed with Ibsen that he claimed a sim­i­lar place in West­ern lit­er­a­ture, and so forth. Their ideas might be argued against, but their genius and their influ­ence was unde­ni­able.  Is there any­one who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for?  How about for the last two decades?  The last three?  Or is there any­one at all who is still liv­ing today that might be described this way? In the realm of sci­ence, per­haps. But in the world of social, his­tor­i­cal, eth­i­cal, and polit­i­cal thought, no one comes to mind.”
    • Social Jus­tice, Aus­ter­i­ty, and the Human­i­ties Death Spi­ral (Geoff Shul­len­berg­er, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “How are human­i­ties dis­ci­plines push­ing back against the exis­ten­tial threats they face? Obvi­ous­ly, one can find a vari­ety of argu­ments against cut­backs and the deval­u­a­tion of human­is­tic study. On the oth­er hand, fac­ul­ty mem­bers with­in these fields some­times make what looks like a case against their own val­ue. For exam­ple, the Chica­go announce­ment states that ‘Eng­lish as a dis­ci­pline has a long his­to­ry of pro­vid­ing aes­thet­ic ratio­nal­iza­tions for col­o­niza­tion, exploita­tion, extrac­tion, and anti-Black­ness.’ Those who make fund­ing deci­sions might well ask why such a dis­ci­pline deserves to con­tin­ue exist­ing.” The author teach­es Eng­lish at NYU. It was dif­fi­cult choos­ing which bit to excerpt — def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing if you aspire to acad­e­mia.
    • The Gen­er­al­iz­abil­i­ty Cri­sis (Tal Yarkoni, PsyArx­iv): “Most the­o­ries and hypothe­ses in psy­chol­o­gy are ver­bal in nature, yet their eval­u­a­tion over­whelm­ing­ly relies on infer­en­tial sta­tis­ti­cal pro­ce­dures. The valid­i­ty of the move from qual­i­ta­tive to quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis depends on the ver­bal and sta­tis­ti­cal expres­sions of a hypoth­e­sis being close­ly aligned—that is, that the two must refer to rough­ly the same set of hypo­thet­i­cal obser­va­tions. Here I argue that many appli­ca­tions of sta­tis­ti­cal infer­ence in psy­chol­o­gy fail to meet this basic con­di­tion.” The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at UT Austin. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I lack the exper­tise to eval­u­ate it but find it intu­tive­ly plau­si­ble.
  6. Rise of the Barstool con­ser­v­a­tives (Matthew Walther, The Week): “What Trump rec­og­nized was that there are mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who do not oppose or even care about abor­tion or same-sex mar­riage, much less stem-cell research or any of the oth­er caus­es that had ani­mat­ed tra­di­tion­al social con­ser­v­a­tives. Instead he cor­rect­ly intu­it­ed that the new cul­ture war would be fought over very dif­fer­ent (and more neb­u­lous) issues: vague con­cerns about polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and ‘SJWs,’ oppo­si­tion to the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of so-called crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty about the Amer­i­can flag and the mil­i­tary, the rights of male under­grad­u­ates to engage in for­ni­ca­tion while intox­i­cat­ed with­out fear of the Title IX mafia.” I think there’s some truth here, but I think he under­plays the impor­tance of abor­tion in Trump’s appeal. He nonethe­less puts his fin­ger on an impor­tant part of the way Trump’s coali­tion was forged and the shape of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics mov­ing for­ward.
  7. On GameStop:
    • In the GameStop Fren­zy, What If We’re All the 1 Per­cent? (Michael J. Rhodes, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…we shouldn’t con­fuse fight­ing for a bet­ter seat at the black­jack table with con­fronting an econ­o­my addict­ed to gam­bling.… Jesus doesn’t tell his flock to beat the rich fool at his own game. He invites them to live an eco­nom­ic life free from greed or fear, stor­ing up trea­sure in heav­en by giv­ing gen­er­ous­ly to the poor (Luke 12:33).” The author is an Old Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Carey Bap­tist Col­lege. Worth­while arti­cle.
    • The Insid­ers’ Game (David Sacks, Per­sua­sion): “If there is a Big Lie in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics right now, it is the idea that cen­sor­ship of social media is nec­es­sary to save democ­ra­cy.… What the insid­ers fear is not the end of democ­ra­cy, but the end of their con­trol over it, and the loss of the ben­e­fits they extract from it. Ulti­mate­ly, the bat­tle over speech is just one aspect of a broad­er war for pow­er amid a grow­ing polit­i­cal realign­ment that is not Left ver­sus Right, but rather insid­er ver­sus out­sider.” The author was on the found­ing team at Pay­Pal.
    • Call­ing Wall Street’s Bluff (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “Now the experts tell us that the true price on the mar­ket changes every day, because the fun­da­men­tals are always chang­ing, even though they’re fun­da­men­tal.… Nat­u­ral­ly, peo­ple are some­what sus­pi­cious of this whole sys­tem. Every so often it seems to crash the entire econ­o­my. But even when it’s sup­pos­ed­ly work­ing, some­thing seems off.” Stan­ford alum­nus Josh Haw­ley is, of course, the con­tro­ver­sial Sen­a­tor from Mis­souri.

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 Too Much Dark Mon­ey in Almonds (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every­one always talks about how much mon­ey there is in pol­i­tics. This is the wrong fram­ing. The right fram­ing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so lit­tle mon­ey in pol­i­tics? But Ansolabehere focus­es on elec­tions, and the mys­tery is wider than that. Sure, dur­ing the 2018 elec­tion, can­di­dates, par­ties, PACs, and out­siders com­bined spent about $5 bil­lion – $2.5 bil­lion on Democ­rats, $2 bil­lion on Repub­li­cans, and $0.5 bil­lion on third par­ties. And although that sounds like a lot of mon­ey to you or me, on the nation­al scale, it’s puny. The US almond indus­try earns $12 bil­lion per year. Amer­i­cans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on can­di­dates last year.” It builds to a sur­pris­ing twist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 219.

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 284

a small col­lec­tion because it’s too over­whelm­ing oth­er­wise

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

I made an extra effort to keep this to sev­en entries today, oth­er­wise it would have been thir­ty (no joke — that’s what I began culling from).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Only the Church Can Tru­ly Defeat a Chris­t­ian Insur­rec­tion (David French, The Dis­patch): “I would bet that most of my read­ers would instant­ly label the exact same event Islam­ic ter­ror­ism if Islam­ic sym­bols filled the crowd, if Islam­ic music played in the loud­speak­ers, and if mem­bers of the crowd shout­ed ‘Allahu Akbar’ as they charged the Capi­tol.”
  2. The Roman Road from Insur­rec­tion (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “If the world rejects us because of Christ and him cru­ci­fied, so much the worse for the world. If the world rejects us because they think Christ is just a mas­cot for what we would already be sup­port­ing or doing even if Jesus were still dead, then God have mer­cy on us.”
    • The author is pres­i­dent of the Ethics & Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion. A few years ago I remem­ber telling one of our inter­na­tion­al stu­dents that if he want­ed a healthy Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, Rus­sell Moore need­ed to be one of his go-to reads.
  3. Every­thing Is Bro­ken (Alana New­house, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Being on a ship near­ly 4 mil­lion square miles in area along with 330 mil­lion oth­er peo­ple and real­iz­ing the entire hull is pock­marked with holes is ter­ri­fy­ing.” Wide-rang­ing.
  4. The Great Unrav­el­ing (Bari Weiss, Sub­Stack): “I don’t know the answer. But I know that you have to be sort of strange to stand apart and refuse to join Team Red or Team Blue. These strange ones are the ones who think that polit­i­cal vio­lence is wrong, that mob jus­tice is nev­er just and the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence is always right. These are the ones who are skep­ti­cal of state and cor­po­rate pow­er, even when it is clamp­ing down on peo­ple they despise.”
  5. We Need a New Media Sys­tem (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The flaw in the sys­tem is that even the biggest news com­pa­nies now oper­ate under the assump­tion that at least half their poten­tial audi­ence isn’t lis­ten­ing. This leads to all sorts of prob­lems, and the fact that the eas­i­est way to keep your own demo­graph­ic is to feed it neg­a­tive sto­ries about oth­ers is only the most obvi­ous. On all sides, we now lean into inflam­ma­to­ry car­i­ca­tures, because the finan­cial incen­tives encour­age it.”
  6. ‘Our souls are dead’: how I sur­vived a Chi­nese ‘re-edu­ca­tion’ camp for Uighurs (Gul­ba­har Haiti­wa­ji with Rozenn Mor­gat, The Guardian): “Women like me, who emerged from the camps, are no longer who we once were. We are shad­ows; our souls are dead. I was made to believe that my loved ones, my hus­band and my daugh­ter, were ter­ror­ists. I was so far away, so alone, so exhaust­ed and alien­at­ed, that I almost end­ed up believ­ing it. My hus­band, Ker­im, my daugh­ters Gul­hu­mar and Gul­ni­gar – I denounced your ‘crimes’ I begged for­give­ness from the Com­mu­nist par­ty for atroc­i­ties that nei­ther you nor I com­mit­ted.”
    • I think this ranks among the great evils of his­to­ry and it is hap­pen­ing right now. I am shocked I don’t see high­er lev­els of out­rage and pub­lic respons­es to it on the inter­na­tion­al stage.
  7. Why Has Israel Suc­ceed­ed At COVID Vac­ci­na­tion? (Elad Gil, per­son­al blog): “Many coun­tries and states have been too focused on ‘fair­ness’ and ‘equi­ty’ so have frozen their vac­ci­na­tion efforts in place, or put in place large fines for ‘mis­used virus’. Remem­ber — every­one will even­tu­al­ly get vac­ci­nat­ed. The more shots in arms, the bet­ter, with an empha­sis on the old and comor­bid. And also remem­ber, we are in the mid­dle of a ‘once in a cen­tu­ry pan­dem­ic’- it is more impor­tant to move fast to save lives than to cre­ate and enforce com­plex rules.”
    • The author is a Sil­i­con Val­ley entre­pre­neur and is, far as I can tell, com­plete­ly cor­rect. The fail­ure of the states and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment on this issue is astound­ing. The entire pan­dem­ic has been a demon­stra­tion of our bipar­ti­san polit­i­cal incom­pe­tence.

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 Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 283

per­spec­tives on a day stu­dents will cov­er in their US His­to­ry class­es

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. WHAT HAPPENED

    • Mad­ness on Capi­tol Hill (Andrew McCormick, The Nation): “For all the vio­lence in the air, the mood was less coup and more col­lege foot­ball tail­gate. Pop songs blared from speak­ers. Some­where, snare drums went rat-a-tat-tat. And the chants were so loud they rum­bled in your chest.” This is the most vivid arti­cle I have come upon so far.

    • ‘Is This Real­ly Hap­pen­ing?’: The Siege of Con­gress, Seen From the Inside (var­i­ous, Politi­co): “One mem­ber at one point, a Demo­c­rat, Steve Cohen, yelled over towards the Repub­li­can side of the room and said, ‘Call Trump and tell him to call this off.’ And then a lit­tle bit lat­er on, a law­mak­er sit­ting on the Repub­li­can side shot back and said some­thing along the lines of, ‘I bet you lib­er­als are glad now you didn’t defund the police.’”This is amaz­ing. And read­ing this I have a much more pos­i­tive view of the front­line police response than I had gleaned from pre­vi­ous report­ing. The issue was high­er in the com­mand struc­ture.

    • Let me tell you about my expe­ri­ence at yes­ter­day’s Trump Ral­ly. (Not The Bee): “Again, pic­tures nev­er do a crowd jus­tice, but I went to a Big 10 col­lege foot­ball school, I know what tens of thou­sands of peo­ple looks like, and this was that at least.”

    •  ‘What else could I do?’ NJ Rep. Kim helps clean up Capi­tol (Mike Catal­i­ni, AP News): “‘When you see some­thing you love that’s bro­ken you want to fix it. I love the Capi­tol. I‘m hon­ored to be there,’ he said. ‘This build­ing is extra­or­di­nary and the rotun­da in par­tic­u­lar is just awe-inspir­ing. How many count­less gen­er­a­tions have been inspired in that room? It real­ly broke my heart and I just felt com­pelled to do some­thing. … What else could I do?’” A pro­file of the man behind a pho­to you’ve no doubt seen.

  2. WHAT HAPPENED IN CONTEXT

    • America’s His­to­ry of Polit­i­cal Vio­lence (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “Ear­ly reac­tions to the incur­sion tend­ed toward the cat­a­stroph­ic, and more than one jour­nal­ist spoke of a ‘coup,’ the death of the Repub­lic, and ‘civ­il war.’ By evening calmer heads and cool­er emo­tions began to emerge as the riot­ers were arrest­ed and dis­persed, reveal­ing less a Bol­she­vik storm­ing of the Win­ter Palace than a LARP­ing event by QAnon para­noids.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.

    •  The Five Crises of the Amer­i­can Regime (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “In the past eight months, two Capi­tol Hills have fall­en. Two shock­ing events sym­bol­ize the abdi­ca­tion of author­i­ty by America’s rul­ing class, an abdi­ca­tion that has led to what can be described, not with­out exag­ger­a­tion, as the slow-motion dis­in­te­gra­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca in its present form.… What is the mean­ing of these dystopi­an scenes? Many Democ­rats claim that Repub­li­cans are destroy­ing the repub­lic. Many Repub­li­cans claim the reverse. They are both cor­rect.” The author is a pro­fes­sor in the UT Austin school of pub­lic affairs. This is the most com­pre­hen­sive (and to my mind, large­ly cor­rect) analy­sis I’ve come across.

    • Vio­lence in the Capi­tol, Dan­gers in the After­math (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “One need not dis­miss the lam­en­ta­ble actions of yes­ter­day to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly reject efforts to apply terms that are plain­ly inap­plic­a­ble: attempt­ed coup, insur­rec­tion, sedi­tion.… That the only per­son shot was a pro­test­er killed by an armed agent of the state by itself makes clear how irre­spon­si­ble these terms are.” 

  3. THEOLOGICAL/RELIGIOUS COMMENTARY

    • Chris­t­ian Lead­ers Pray for Peace and Safe­ty Amid Capi­tol Mob (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Pas­tor Rick War­ren called the attack ‘domes­tic ter­ror­ism,’ while South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion (SBC) Ethics & Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion pres­i­dent Rus­sell Moore con­demned their actions as ‘immoral, unjust, dan­ger­ous, and inex­cus­able’ and called on the pres­i­dent to direct his sup­port­ers to ‘stop this dan­ger­ous and anti-con­sti­tu­tion­al anar­chy.’ ”There’s a wide roundup of voic­es here.

    • Like A Fire Shut Up In My Bones (Paul Shult, Luther­ans For Racial Jus­tice): “My thoughts I share with you are shaped by my call­ing as a pas­tor. I am not a polit­i­cal sci­ence major, a lawyer, a pub­lic pol­i­cy expert, or a busi­ness own­er. I don’t want to argue pol­i­tics, which is very dif­fi­cult because so much in our nation and in Chris­tian­i­ty has become politi­cized. So, here are my thoughts around just a few things I think are impor­tant to con­sid­er — per­haps they can be help­ful to some.” The author pas­tors a church near cam­pus that sev­er­al of our stu­dents have attend­ed (one of them brought this arti­cle to my atten­tion).

    • The Gospel in a Democ­ra­cy Under Assault (Rus­sell Moore, Gospel Coali­tion): “Coun­tries can fall. I hope this one doesn’t. But, either way, let’s not fall with it.”

    • Ille­git­i­mate Times (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “So it is look­ing as though one way or anoth­er we are going to have to learn how to live under a gov­ern­ment we believe to be at bot­tom ille­git­i­mate. And that looks to be the case no mat­ter what hap­pens today, actu­al­ly, which hap­pens to be Jan­u­ary 6, the day when Con­gress rat­i­fies the votes of the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden is con­firmed, which seems like­ly, a very large num­ber of Amer­i­cans will believe he got there by fraud­u­lent means. And if Trump is confirmed—by some sort of extra­or­di­nary long shot—that irreg­u­lar process, what­ev­er it was, will be con­sid­ered by a very large num­ber of Amer­i­cans to have been fraud­u­lent in a very dif­fer­ent way. And even though a larg­er num­ber of Chris­tians will be in the first group, our num­bers in both groups will not be insignif­i­cant.” Please note, this is from before the events in ques­tion! I share it because it con­tains some very unusu­al insights.

  4. APOLOGETICALLY INTERESTING
    • Why Reli­gious Cou­ples Thrive in a Pan­dem­ic (Liz HoChing & Spencer James, Real Clear Reli­gion): “It is no sur­prise there­fore that home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to be high­ly sat­is­fied with their sex­u­al rela­tion­ship, com­pared with cou­ples in a shared sec­u­lar rela­tion­ship. Women in shared home-wor­ship­ping rela­tion­ships were found to be twice as like­ly to be sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fied from the inter­na­tion­al data, and three-times as like­ly to be sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fied from data gath­ered in the Unit­ed States. These are num­bers that can­not be ignored.”
      • There are many inter­est­ing quotes I could have cho­sen. I pick this one because it is some­thing I com­mon­ly see come up in research and yet so con­trary to the pre­vail­ing nar­ra­tive in our cul­ture. And also because most of you are yet to pick your spouse — this is a reminder to pick some­one who shares your vibrant faith in the Lord.
    • Stand­ing By: The Spa­tial Orga­ni­za­tion of Coer­cive Insti­tu­tions in Chi­na (Adam Y. Liu and Charles Chang, Social Sci­ence Research): “We find that police sta­tions are more like­ly to be locat­ed with­in walk­ing dis­tance of for­eign reli­gious sites (church­es) than oth­er sites (tem­ples), even after con­trol­ling for the esti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion with­in 1km of each site and a set of key site attrib­ut­es.” The authors are schol­ars at the Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty of Sin­ga­pore and at Yale, respec­tive­ly.
    • Inter­est­ing tid­bits from the arti­cle itself (the above is from the abstract):
      • “…among all major reli­gions in Chi­na, Chris­tian­i­ty has since the late 19th cen­tu­ry been per­sis­tent­ly viewed by the Chi­nese state—the incum­bent athe­is­tic par­ty state in particular—as the most threat­en­ing to social order and state pow­er.”
      • “…one of the most con­sis­tent and sur­pris­ing social sci­en­tif­ic find­ings is the extent of the involve­ment of reli­gious groups in large scale social and polit­i­cal move­ments.”
      • “Schol­ars find that the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry and civic atti­tudes embed­ded in Chris­tian­i­ty make its believ­ers more like­ly to engage in col­lec­tive con­tention.”
      • “In a sharp con­trast, the par­ty state sees oth­er reli­gions, such as Bud­dhism, as not only non-threat­en­ing, but also con­ducive to strength­en­ing its grip on pow­er. In some instances, local offi­cials have even sup­port­ed the con­struc­tion of non-West­ern reli­gious sites as an explic­it way to counter the grow­ing influ­ence of Chris­tian­i­ty in their juris­dic­tions.”
    • Let me be clear: I lack the exper­tise to eval­u­ate their find­ings. What I find fas­ci­nat­ing is the mat­ter-of-fact way these schol­ars refer to a con­sen­sus in their field about Chris­tian­i­ty. It is inter­est­ing to read this in con­junc­tion with the news about this week.
  5. UNRELATED THINGS
    • Rev. William Bar­ber on Greed, Pover­ty and Evan­gel­i­cal Pol­i­tics (David March­ese, New York Times): “Very few reli­gious lead­ers are able to inspire polit­i­cal action on the part of large num­bers of peo­ple who don’t share their church, their denom­i­na­tion or their faith. Yet the Rev. Dr. William Bar­ber, senior pas­tor of Green­leaf Chris­t­ian Church in Golds­boro, N.C., has done just that.” This is an inter­est­ing (and at times per­plex­ing) inter­view.
    • some prob­lems don’t have solu­tions, or the demand game (Fred­die DeBoer, per­son­al blog): “Here’s the real­i­ty with pornog­ra­phy: it may very well be very bad, and there is prob­a­bly noth­ing that we can do about it. Tech­nol­o­gy changed the world and made some­thing for which their is huge demand effort­less­ly easy to trans­mit and receive. And that’s that; that’s the sto­ry of pornog­ra­phy. Some prob­lems don’t have solu­tions.” The author, an athe­ist social­ist, inad­ver­tent­ly comes close to agree­ing with Jesus that “the poor you will have with you always.”
    • Inside RZIM, Staff Push Lead­ers to Take Respon­si­bil­i­ty for Scan­dal (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At an online all-staff meet­ing in mid-Octo­ber, how­ev­er, RZIM speak­er Sam All­ber­ry, who offi­ci­at­ed at Zacharias’s grave­side ser­vice, asked why ‘min­istry team­mates’ had been includ­ed in the offi­cial denial. They had not been con­sult­ed before lead­er­ship craft­ed the unsigned state­ment deny­ing the claims. ‘Why are you putting words in my mouth?’ said All­ber­ry, accord­ing to peo­ple who attend­ed the meet­ing. ‘Frankly, I believe these women and find their alle­ga­tions to be cred­i­ble.’”
      • This makes me very sad. Also, there’s a per­son­al cau­tion in here. One of the details is that Zacharias lied about small­er things. If you ever see me lying or exag­ger­at­ing (except for obvi­ous humor), please call me on it. I’d rather be embar­rassed social­ly in the moment than lay the foun­da­tion for ruin lat­er.
    • The Awok­en­ing Will Not Bring an End to the Night­mare (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Inter­faith Youth Core) : “…the whites who seem most eager to con­demn ‘ide­o­log­i­cal racism’ (i.e. peo­ple say­ing, think­ing or feel­ing the ‘wrong’ things about minori­ties), and who are most osten­ta­tious in demon­strat­ing their own ‘wok­e­ness,’ also tend to be the peo­ple who ben­e­fit the most from what soci­ol­o­gists describe as ‘insti­tu­tion­al’ or ‘sys­temic’ racism. Con­se­quent­ly, the places in Amer­i­ca with the high­est con­cen­tra­tions of whites who are ‘with it’ also hap­pen to be the most unequal places in the coun­try.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia.
    • Mak­ing pol­i­cy for a low-trust world (Matthew Ygle­sias, sub­stack): “The cor­rect way to respond to a low-trust envi­ron­ment is not to dou­ble down on pro­ce­du­ral­ism, but to com­mit your­self to the ‘it does exact­ly what it says on the tin’ prin­ci­ple and imple­ment poli­cies that have the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics: It’s easy for every­one, whether they agree with you or dis­agree with you, to under­stand what it is you say you are doing. It’s easy for every­one to see whether or not you are, in fact, doing what you said you would do. It’s easy for you and your team to meet the goal of doing the thing that you said you would do.”
    • Like Preach­er-Politi­cians Before Him, Sen­a­tor Raphael Warnock Will Keep His Pul­pit (Adelle Banks, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “ ‘It’s unusu­al for a pas­tor to get involved in some­thing as messy as pol­i­tics, but I see this as a con­tin­u­a­tion of a life of ser­vice: first as an agi­ta­tor, then an advo­cate, and hope­ful­ly next as a leg­is­la­tor’” Warnock said as he was clos­ing in on the top spot of a wide-open pri­ma­ry. ‘I say I’m step­ping up to my next call­ing to serve, not step­ping down from the pul­pit.’ ” I did not know this his­to­ry, and after read­ing it I am pleased to inform you that if I am elect­ed to the US Sen­ate I will con­tin­ue to min­is­ter with Chi Alpha at Stan­ford.
    • The Real Prob­lem with 4‑Letter Words (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, Gospel Coali­tion): “Curs­ing falls into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. Strict­ly speak­ing, pro­fan­i­ties are words that desacral­ize what is holy. Words mis­us­ing the names of God and his judg­ments are pro­fane; the worst of these are blasphemy.While pro­fan­i­ties are relat­ed to the divine, obscen­i­ties are relat­ed to the human. This cat­e­go­ry of words serves to coarsen bod­i­ly func­tions (whether sex­u­al or excre­to­ry).… Anoth­er cat­e­go­ry of curse words con­sists of those the cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist Steven Pinker calls ‘abu­sive.’ ”
    • California’s Donor-Dis­clo­sure Law Threat­ens Reli­gious Char­i­ties (John Bursch, Real Clear Reli­gion): “Not once has the attor­ney gen­er­al giv­en a con­vinc­ing rea­son for col­lect­ing donors’ names and address­es en masse. His office has effec­tive­ly reg­u­lat­ed char­i­ties for decades with­out that infor­ma­tion. In 10 years, the attor­ney gen­er­al only used donor lists in five out of 540 inves­ti­ga­tions. And even in those five, he could have obtained the same infor­ma­tion through tar­get­ed sub­poe­nas or audits, all with­out risk­ing the mas­sive dis­clo­sure of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion from all reg­is­tered char­i­ties.”
    • The New Strain: How Bad Is It? (Bren­dan Foht and Ari Schul­man, The New Atlantis): “The steps that most need to be tak­en in response to the new strain are the same ones that should have been tak­en for the last year any­way, but that our gov­ern­ment has proved large­ly unable or unwill­ing to take. An effec­tive regime of test­ing, trac­ing, and iso­lat­ing, for exam­ple, has been need­ed through­out the pan­dem­ic, but nev­er real­ly imple­ment­ed.” One of the authors post­ed on Twit­ter: “In the course of work­ing on this piece, my con­cern about the new Covid strain went from about a 4 to an 8.5, with the remain­ing 1.5 com­posed most­ly of gen­er­al­ized skep­ti­cism and moti­vat­ed dis­be­lief.”

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 How Pornog­ra­phy Makes Us Less Human and Less Humane (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Beneath pornog­ra­phy is the sup­po­si­tion that the mere fact of our desire for a woman makes us wor­thy of her. And so, not being bound by any kind of norm, desire must pro­ceed end­less­ly. It is no sur­prise that the indus­tri­al­ized, cheap-and-easy sex of pornog­ra­phy has answered and evoked an almost unre­strained sex­u­al greed, which allows us to be gods and god­dess­es with­in the safe­ty of our own fan­tasies. It is for deep and impor­tant rea­sons that the Ten Com­mand­ments use the eco­nom­ic lan­guage of ‘cov­et­ing’ to describe the bad­ness of errant sex­u­al desires.” First shared in vol­ume 216.

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 282

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Per­fec­tion­ism Has Made the Pan­dem­ic Worse (Miles Kim­ball, per­son­al blog): “I’ve noticed one reg­u­lar­i­ty in how the US (and many oth­er coun­tries) have han­dled the pan­dem­ic: per­fec­tion­ism has been get­ting in the way of a quick and pow­er­ful response. Every lit­tle bit would have helped reduce the repro­duc­tion ratio of the coro­n­avirus, but only things that were big bits were allowed.” The author is an econ­o­mist at UC Boul­der.
    • Pub­lic health bod­ies may be talk­ing at us, but they’re actu­al­ly talk­ing to each oth­er (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…when a large group acts as though a com­pli­cat­ed prob­lem is a no-brain­er, that doesn’t mean the solu­tion is obvi­ous; it means some­thing has gone bad­ly wrong.”
    • My vac­cine crack­pot­tery: a con­fes­sion (Scott Aaron­son, per­son­al blog): “I think [our fail­ure] will be clear to future gen­er­a­tions, who’ll write PhD the­ses explor­ing how it was pos­si­ble that we invent­ed mul­ti­ple effec­tive covid vac­cines in mere days or weeks, but then sim­ply sat on those vac­cines for a year, tick­ing off box­es called ‘Phase I,’ ‘Phase II,’ etc. while civ­i­liza­tion hung in the bal­ance.” The author is a CS prof at UT Austin.
    • Small Num­ber of Covid Patients Devel­op Severe Psy­chot­ic Symp­toms (Pam Bel­luck, New York Times): “[she] had become infect­ed with the coro­n­avirus in the spring. She had expe­ri­enced only mild phys­i­cal symp­toms from the virus, but, months lat­er, she heard a voice that first told her to kill her­self and then told her to kill her chil­dren.” Shared with me by a stu­dent who not­ed it is both inter­est­ing and freaky. This real­ly high­lights what a bul­let we dodged with this pan­dem­ic — can you imag­ine a plague whose main effect was to make peo­ple vio­lent­ly psy­chot­ic? Soci­ety would end. Full-on zom­bie apoc­a­lypse.
  2. Rick War­ren On The Year We Had (Cameron Strang, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “We have led over 16,000 peo­ple to Christ since March. We’re in revival. We’re aver­ag­ing about 80 peo­ple a day com­ing to Christ—80 peo­ple a day.… Of those 16,000 peo­ple who have come to Christ, over 12,000 of them have come through per­son­al, one-on-one wit­ness­ing by my mem­bers. Not led to Christ by my ser­mons. By one on one evan­ge­liz­ing.”
  3. East Africa fears sec­ond wave — of locust swarms (Navin Singh Khad­ka, BBC): “New swarms of desert locusts are threat­en­ing the liveli­hoods of mil­lions of peo­ple in the Horn of Africa and Yemen despite a year of con­trol efforts, the Unit­ed Nations has warned.” This is the lat­est news con­cern­ing an arti­cle from August an alum­nus recent­ly shared with me: The Bib­li­cal locust plagues of 2020 (David Nja­gi, BBC): “In 2020, locusts have swarmed in large num­bers in dozens of coun­tries, includ­ing Kenya, Ethiopia, Ugan­da, Soma­lia, Eritrea, India, Pak­istan, Iran, Yemen, Oman and Sau­di Ara­bia. When swarms affect sev­er­al coun­tries at once in very large num­bers, it is known as a plague.”
  4. Why You Can’t Meet God Over Zoom (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “The very inad­e­qua­cy of church ser­vices, Zoom and oth­er­wise, is a reminder we do not come into church­es to encounter a life les­son on how to raise our chil­dren or to learn to be good Amer­i­cans, what­ev­er that means. Our aim is much more auda­cious. We are attempt­ing to encounter God and, in so doing, find our­selves, pos­si­bly for the first time.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton Col­lege.
    • This isn’t real­ly a knock on McCaul­ley so much as an obser­va­tion and a hope: many Chris­tians who write for pub­li­ca­tions like the NYT lead with the neg­a­tives and slow­ly build to their point that “church isn’t so bad real­ly and maybe some­day you should check it out.” I won­der if that is a byprod­uct of the edi­to­r­i­al process or if it is sim­ply a selec­tion effect in the sort of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­al who wants to (and is per­mit­ted to) write an op-ed for a cul­tur­al­ly influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tion.
    • Think­ing about this puts me in mind of Eri­ca Camp­bel­l’s song I Luh God (YouTube, three min­utes). It swept through our min­istry a few years ago, I think because it scratched an itch in our stu­dents. Our stu­dents had dance par­ties to it after our wor­ship ser­vices. She sang with con­fi­dent joy: “I luh God, you don’t luh God? What’s wrong with chu?”
    • When we dis­cuss the faith as though it were a series of syl­lo­gisms we’re being fool­ish. Peo­ple’s ques­tions need answers, cer­tain­ly. But all the answers in the world will do no good if, at some lev­el, peo­ple don’t hope Chris­tian­i­ty is true. We must kin­dle hope before we go to the trou­ble of over­com­ing objec­tions to hope.
    • I say all that to say this: if you ever write an op-ed for the New York Times, do apolo­get­ics with­out being apolo­getic. Bring as much joy to it as you can and let your writ­ing be filled with win­some con­fi­dence. We need a whole flock of Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­als with the swag­ger of a G.K. Chester­ton.
  5. High­er Edu­ca­tion Risks No Longer Being Worth It – Here’s How to Change Course (Chris­tos Makridis, Quil­lette): “For all the talk about racial equi­ty in col­leges, you would think that fac­ul­ty would be work­ing with local small busi­ness own­ers, espe­cial­ly minori­ties, to men­tor and equip them to dri­ve greater prof­itabil­i­ty and impact. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that rarely hap­pens.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  6. The Church Needs Prophets, But It Wants Lawyers (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian cul­ture is rife with con­gre­gants look­ing for lawyers, not prophets and not pas­tors. The church-shop­ping phe­nom­e­non puts us in church­es that make us feel quite com­fort­able, and the sheer num­ber of avail­able con­gre­ga­tions (espe­cial­ly in the South and parts of the Mid­west) makes us quite mobile.”
    • I almost did­n’t share this one because I thought it was more use­ful for min­istry lead­ers, but after I had men­tal­ly deep-sixed it a stu­dent emailed me and said: “I think it could be use­ful for Chris­tians who find them­selves frus­trat­ed by and unable to sup­port blan­ket crit­i­cism of the church and of orga­nized reli­gion from the left, but also dis­sat­is­fied by respons­es from the right that frame any crit­i­cism as part of a cul­ture war and triv­i­al­ize issues with­in the church as just a few bad exam­ples. I think for me it also was help­ful in think­ing of how I might respond to non-Chris­tians when these kinds of crit­i­cisms come up in con­ver­sa­tion and how I can be both defend Chris­tian­i­ty and the good parts of the church while acknowl­edg­ing con­tin­ued bro­ken­ness and need for improve­ment. It also hap­pened to tie in nice­ly with a ser­mon I heard on Sun­day about how Chris­tians have no prob­lem rec­og­niz­ing sin as the cause of bro­ken­ness in the world but often point to the sins of oth­ers, whether of peers, lead­ers, or past gen­er­a­tions, instead of their own sin as the cause of that bro­ken­ness. In that sense I think it both helped me think about how to process the fail­ings of promi­nent Chris­tians and talk about them with non-believ­ers as well as be remind­ed by these fail­ings to remem­ber that beyond defend­ing the church, my response as an indi­vid­ual should also be to iden­ti­fy and root out sin in my own life even when the dam­age is not as obvi­ous to my com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. WHAT HAPPENS ON JANUARY 6th (Ben Sasse, Face­book): “There is some vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle – and the media flat­ly declar­ing from on high that ‘there is no fraud!’ has made things worse. It has height­ened pub­lic dis­trust, because there are, in fact, doc­u­ment­ed cas­es of vot­er fraud every elec­tion cycle. But the cru­cial ques­tions are: (A) What evi­dence do we have of fraud? and (B) Does that evi­dence sup­port the belief in fraud on a scale so sig­nif­i­cant that it could have changed the out­come? We have lit­tle evi­dence of fraud, and what evi­dence we do have does not come any­where close to adding up to a dif­fer­ent win­ner of the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.”
    • Sasse is one of the Nebras­ka sen­a­tors and is also a for­mer sem­i­nary pres­i­dent. Mis­souri sen­a­tor Josh Haw­ley, who this seems to be aimed at, is also an out­spo­ken believ­er on Capi­tol Hill. Haw­ley, inci­den­tal­ly, did his under­grad at Stan­ford. He grad­u­at­ed the year we were launch­ing Chi Alpha, so our paths have nev­er crossed.
    • Haw­ley does­n’t have a state­ment as com­pre­hen­sive as Sasse’s, but here is an excerpt from his press release: “I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy the elec­toral col­lege results on Jan­u­ary 6 with­out rais­ing the fact that some states, par­tic­u­lar­ly Penn­syl­va­nia, failed to fol­low their own state elec­tion laws. And I can­not vote to cer­ti­fy with­out point­ing out the unprece­dent­ed effort of mega cor­po­ra­tions, includ­ing Face­book and Twit­ter, to inter­fere in this elec­tion, in sup­port of Joe Biden.”
    • I gen­er­al­ly avoid polit­i­cal posts like this because I find the minu­tia of pol­i­tics unin­ter­est­ing. In this case, the fact that two evan­gel­i­cals who are nor­mal­ly polit­i­cal allies are hav­ing a sub­stan­tive and pub­lic dis­agree­ment intrigues me.

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 Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot. First shared in vol­ume 215.

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 280

I think this is the first time two of the arti­cles are by alum­ni. Maybe some­day it will be all sev­en!

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.

Next Fri­day is Christ­mas and a week lat­er is New Year’s Day, so I’ll prob­a­bly either skip the next two weeks or send some­thing out on Thursday/Saturday.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Christ­mas a Pagan Rip-off? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “…what­ev­er the Christ­mas hol­i­day has become today, it start­ed as a copy­cat of well-estab­lished pagan hol­i­days. If you like Christ­mas, you have Sat­ur­na­lia and Sol Invic­tus to thank. That’s the sto­ry, and every­one from lib­er­al Chris­tians to con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians to non-Chris­tians seem to agree that it’s true. Except that it isn’t.”
  2. What I Saw At The Jeri­cho March (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Let me repeat this: a black Evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor denounced witch­es and Marx­ists and blew a sho­far to defend Don­ald Trump’s pres­i­den­cy. If you had gone back in his­to­ry a decade and told the world that this would hap­pen one day on the Nation­al Mall, they would have put you in an asy­lum. Now you would be for­giv­en for think­ing that our coun­try has become an asy­lum.” This is long and engross­ing.
    • The Dan­ger­ous Idol­a­try of Chris­t­ian Trump­ism (David French, The Dis­patch): “A sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of the Chris­t­ian pub­lic has fall­en for con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, has mixed nation­al­ism with the Chris­t­ian gospel, has sub­sti­tut­ed a bizarre mys­ti­cism for rea­son and evi­dence, and rages in fear and anger against their polit­i­cal opponents—all in the name of pre­serv­ing Don­ald Trump’s pow­er.” 
    • The Cult of Chris­t­ian Trump­ism (Michael Hor­ton, Gospel Coali­tion): “My pub­lic call­ing is not to bind Chris­t­ian con­sciences to my own polit­i­cal posi­tions. Rather, as a min­is­ter of the Word, I am join­ing oth­ers in sound­ing the alarm that a line has been crossed into rank spir­i­tu­al adul­tery.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of the­ol­o­gy.
    • A Defense Of Jeri­cho March Crit­i­cism (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “The kind of crazy talk at the Jeri­cho March ral­ly is going to get us all tar­get­ed by the state, and by woke­sters in insti­tu­tions, but will not advance our cause one bit. Besides, as a con­ser­v­a­tive and a Chris­t­ian whose writ­ing in recent years has been dom­i­nat­ed by anger and anx­i­ety over the loss of reli­gious and civ­il lib­er­ties in the face of wok­e­ness, I can say with­out a doubt that I would not want to live in a coun­try gov­erned by the rad­i­cal nation­al­ism and emo­tivist Chris­tian­i­ty of the Jeri­cho Marchers.” A fol­low-up to the long and engross­ing piece atop this sec­tion.
  3. Why the coro­n­avirus vac­cine may not be acces­si­ble for the peo­ple who need it most (Rebekah Fen­ton, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Gov­ern­ment author­i­ties should keep this in mind. The most respect­ed mem­bers of a com­mu­ni­ty may not be those with the most edu­ca­tion or the fan­ci­est titles. Church­es, com­mu­ni­ty orga­ni­za­tions and health-out­reach pro­grams often know the needs of the peo­ple they serve, have long records of meet­ing them, and have estab­lished strong bonds of trust….. Pub­lic health offi­cials should respect these lead­ers’ com­mit­ment to ser­vice and involve them at the plan­ning stages, instead of just rely­ing on them to spread the word after deci­sions are made.” Rebekah, a doc­tor in Chica­go, is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
    • The Elder­ly vs. Essen­tial Work­ers: Who Should Get the Coro­n­avirus Vac­cine First? (Abby Good­nough and Jan Hoff­man, New York Times): “Ulti­mate­ly, the choice comes down to whether pre­vent­ing death or curb­ing the spread of the virus and return­ing to some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy is the high­est pri­or­i­ty. ‘If your goal is to max­i­mize the preser­va­tion of human life, then you would bias the vac­cine toward old­er Amer­i­cans,’ Dr. Scott Got­tlieb, the for­mer Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion com­mis­sion­er, said recent­ly. ‘If your goal is to reduce the rate of infec­tion, then you would pri­or­i­tize essen­tial work­ers’…. The trade-off between the two is mud­died by the fact that the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘essen­tial work­ers’ used by the C.D.C. com­pris­es near­ly 70 per­cent of the Amer­i­can work force.”
    • A crit­i­cal Twit­ter thread about vac­cine roll­out plans (David Algo­nquin, Twit­ter)
  4. Does Reli­gious Affil­i­a­tion Pro­tect Peo­ple’s Well-Being? Evi­dence from the Great Reces­sion after Cor­rect­ing for Selec­tion Effects (Chris­tos Makridis, Byron John­son and Harold G. Koenig, Jour­nal for the Sci­en­tif­ic Study of Reli­gion): “Using Gallup’s U.S. Dai­ly Poll between 2008 and 2017, we find that those who are engaged in their local church and view their faith as impor­tant to their lives have not only high­er lev­els of sub­jec­tive well-being, but also acycli­cal lev­els. We show that the acycli­cal­i­ty of sub­jec­tive well-being among Chris­tians is not dri­ven by selec­tion effects or the pres­ence of greater social cap­i­tal, but rather a sense of pur­pose over the busi­ness cycle inde­pen­dent of finan­cial cir­cum­stances.” You should have access to the full text using your Stan­ford login. Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry and is an econ­o­mist in Wash­ing­ton, DC. 
  5. Like It Or Not, Keira Bell Has Opened Up a Real Con­ver­sa­tion About Gen­der Dys­pho­ria (Quil­lette): “In the debate about tran­si­tion­ing chil­dren who expe­ri­ence gen­der dys­pho­ria, Ms. Bell’s case rep­re­sents an impor­tant turn­ing point. Ms. Bell, now 23, was 16 years old when she pre­sent­ed to the Tavi­s­tock Cen­tre in Lon­don, which runs Britain’s Gen­der Iden­ti­ty Devel­op­ment Ser­vice. In a land­mark rul­ing deliv­ered ear­li­er this month, a British court upheld her claim that she’d been rushed through gen­der reas­sign­ment with­out prop­er safe­guards.” The author is unlist­ed, although this is per­haps sim­ply a web­site error.
  6. Nuclear weapons agency breached amid mas­sive cyber onslaught (Natasha Bertrand and Eric Wolff, Politi­co): “They found sus­pi­cious activ­i­ty in net­works belong­ing to the Fed­er­al Ener­gy Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion (FERC), San­dia and Los Alam­os nation­al lab­o­ra­to­ries in New Mex­i­co and Wash­ing­ton, the Office of Secure Trans­porta­tion at NNSA, and the Rich­land Field Office of the DOE. The hack­ers have been able to do more dam­age at FERC than the oth­er agen­cies, and offi­cials there have evi­dence of high­ly mali­cious activ­i­ty, the offi­cials said, but did not elab­o­rate.”
    • Why the US gov­ern­ment hack is lit­er­al­ly keep­ing secu­ri­ty experts awake at night (Bri­an Fung, CNN): “I woke up in the mid­dle of the night last night just sick to my stom­ach,” said There­sa Pay­ton, who served as White House Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer under Pres­i­dent George W. Bush. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m at a 9 — and it’s not because of what I know; it’s because of what we still don’t know.”
    • I Was the Home­land Secu­ri­ty Advis­er to Trump. We’re Being Hacked.(Thomas Bossart, New York Times): “The log­i­cal con­clu­sion is that we must act as if the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment has con­trol of all the net­works it has pen­e­trat­ed. But it is unclear what the Rus­sians intend to do next. The access the Rus­sians now enjoy could be used for far more than sim­ply spy­ing.… Domes­tic and geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions could esca­late quite eas­i­ly if they use their access for malign influ­ence and mis­in­for­ma­tion — both hall­marks of Russ­ian behav­ior.”
  7. Porn­hub Removes Major­i­ty of Videos in a Vic­to­ry for Exo­dus Cry (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “An announce­ment on Porn­hub claims it has bet­ter poli­cies than oth­er plat­forms and blames Exo­dus Cry and the Nation­al Cen­ter on Sex­u­al Exploita­tion for tar­get­ing the site. ’These are orga­ni­za­tions ded­i­cat­ed to abol­ish­ing pornog­ra­phy, ban­ning mate­r­i­al they claim is obscene, and shut­ting down com­mer­cial sex work.’” Shared with me by an alum­nus.

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 Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a follow-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 213.

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 279

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Blows to vol­ley­ball star Hay­ley Hod­son’s head changed her life (Patrick Hru­by, LA Times): “The fam­i­ly did not trust Stan­ford. School doc­tors, Hod­son says, had diag­nosed her foot pain as inflam­ma­tion and told her that she wasn’t risk­ing fur­ther injury by play­ing. Med­ical records show that an inde­pen­dent doc­tor sub­se­quent­ly reviewed MRI scans tak­en by Stan­ford and deter­mined she had a stress frac­ture.” Hay­ley was a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  2. My White Priv­i­lege Did­n’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quil­lette): “Not long after, I walked into a sub­ur­ban Bap­tist church, full of strange, unfash­ion­ably dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. I was a Marx­ist, a fem­i­nist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smok­er, and des­per­ate. The love I received in that place is the rea­son that I will defend the rights of fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to my dying breath.” This is amaz­ing. If you only read one thing this week, make it this one. Reminder: titles are rarely cho­sen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an arti­cle.
  3. A pastor’s life depends on a coro­n­avirus vac­cine. Now he faces skep­tics in his church. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Before the pan­dem­ic, the 45-year-old min­is­ter, who nor­mal­ly leads near­ly 2,000 peo­ple, would stand by the entrance to shake hands and offer hugs. Now, before ser­vices, he stays seclud­ed in a room off­stage until it is time to preach while an armed church mem­ber who works for Home­land Secu­ri­ty watch­es the door.”
  4. Amer­i­cans’ Men­tal Health Rat­ings Sink to New Low (Megan Bre­nan, Gallup): “Although the major­i­ty of U.S. adults con­tin­ue to rate their men­tal health as excel­lent (34%) or good (42%), and far few­er say it is only fair (18%) or poor (5%), the lat­est excel­lent rat­ings are eight points low­er than Gallup has mea­sured in any pri­or year.” 
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent because of one very inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic: the only group that showed an increase in men­tal health was week­ly church­go­ers (the week­ly part mat­ters — month­ly church­go­ers expe­ri­enced a decline). I looked at the more detailed PDF and it was unclear to me how they asked about church atten­dance, and of course it is impos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy cau­sa­tion from a sur­vey like this.
    • I found this com­ment by an econ­o­mist on Twit­ter fun­ny: “This is absolute­ly the least sur­pris­ing thing ever. Church folks are like, “The pan­dem­ic sucks, but my church did these 57 things and I’m over­whelmed with peo­ple try­ing to find ways to sup­port dur­ing these times.” Every­body else is like, ‘I’M SO ALONE’” 
  5. The Rise and Fall of Carl Lentz, the Celebri­ty Pas­tor of Hill­song Church (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Soon the church’s cul­tur­al cachet grew out­side Chris­t­ian cir­cles. ‘I knew peo­ple who came to church not because they were Chris­tians but because they thought Carl was hot,’ said Heather McClana­han, who worked for the church in 2014 and 2015.”
    • The Cri­sis of Chris­t­ian Celebri­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “The way I’ve put it in speech­es to young Chris­tians is sim­ply this, ‘Make the easy choice so you don’t have to make the hard choice.’ Say­ing no to the extra drink is much eas­i­er than halt­ing a drunk­en flir­ta­tion.”
  6. Promi­nent evan­gel­i­cals are direct­ing Trump’s sink­ing ship. That feeds doubts about reli­gion. (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When promi­nent Chris­tians affirm absurd polit­i­cal lies with reli­gious fer­vor, non­be­liev­ers have every rea­son to think: ‘Maybe Chris­tians are prone to swal­low­ing absurd reli­gious lies as well. Maybe they are sim­ply cred­u­lous about every­thing.’ If we should encounter some­one who believes — hon­est­ly and adamant­ly believes — in both the exis­tence of the East­er Bun­ny and in the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ, it would nat­u­ral­ly raise ques­tions about the qual­i­ty of his or her believ­ing fac­ul­ties.”
  7. The com­ing war on the hid­den algo­rithms that trap peo­ple in pover­ty (Karen Hao, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): Not until they were stand­ing in the court­room in the mid­dle of a hear­ing did the wit­ness rep­re­sent­ing the state reveal that the gov­ern­ment had just adopt­ed a new algo­rithm. The wit­ness, a nurse, couldn’t explain any­thing about it. “Of course not—they bought it off the shelf,” Gilman says. “She’s a nurse, not a com­put­er sci­en­tist. She couldn’t answer what fac­tors go into it. How is it weight­ed? What are the out­comes that you’re look­ing for? So there I am with my stu­dent attor­ney, who’s in my clin­ic with me, and it’s like, ‘Oh, am I going to cross-exam­ine an algo­rithm?’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

QI’s Gift-Wrap­ping Life Hack! (QI, YouTube): mind blown in less than three min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To university-educated media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low-paying man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon asso­ciate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 212, with a fol­low-up shared the next week: How (and Why) to KISSASS (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “…if you’re not a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion­al class, the key to get­ting your per­son­al essays pub­lished in promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions is KISSASS—Keep It Short, Sad, And Sim­ple, Stu­pid.”

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 278

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Oba­ma Fears for Our Democ­ra­cy (Jef­frey Gold­berg inter­view­ing Barack Oba­ma, The Atlantic) “You men­tioned ear­li­er that I’m in some ways a nev­er-Trump con­ser­v­a­tive. That’s not quite right, but what is true is that tem­pera­men­tal­ly I am sym­pa­thet­ic to a cer­tain strain of con­ser­vatism in the sense that I’m not just a mate­ri­al­ist. I’m not an eco­nom­ic deter­min­ist. I think it’s impor­tant, but I think there are things oth­er than stuff and mon­ey and income—the reli­gious cri­tique of mod­ern soci­ety, that we’ve lost that sense of com­mu­ni­ty.” There is an absurd­ly lengthy intro­duc­tion. Skip down to “Our con­ver­sa­tion has been edit­ed for clar­i­ty and con­ci­sion” about a fifth of the way down the page.
  2. The Chil­dren of Porn­hub (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “The world has often been obliv­i­ous to child sex­u­al abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we pros­e­cute indi­vid­u­als like Jef­frey Epstein or R. Kel­ly. But we should also stand up to cor­po­ra­tions that sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly exploit chil­dren. With Porn­hub, we have Jef­frey Epstein times 1,000.” Kristof goes out of his way to make it clear that he is not con­demn­ing pornog­ra­phy itself, just abuse. I’ll go far­ther: pornog­ra­phy is vile and I think it is a nation­al shame. If you watch porn, know that for­give­ness and free­dom are avail­able in Christ and I a hap­py to talk with you about it.
  3. The Mass Mur­der of Niger­ian Chris­tians (Rab­bi Abra­ham Coop­er and Rev. John­nie Moore, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Offi­cials’ ini­tial refusal to attribute the attack in Kaduna to Islamists—in any form—reflects a black hole of denial that is pro­nounced in Niger­ian pol­i­tics. This endem­ic self-cen­sor­ship has now been absorbed by many pro­fes­sion­als in the for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment who have adopt­ed a pol­i­cy of not men­tion­ing the reli­gious com­po­nents of these out­rages at any cost, in order to pre­vent being accused of politi­ciz­ing reli­gion. This denial serves as an accel­er­ant of reli­gion-fueled conflict—until the facts and blood on the ground can no longer be denied.”
  4. Big Gov­ern­men­t’s Over­looked Amer­i­cans (Nicholas Eber­stadt, Nation­al Review): “How could Amer­i­can health author­i­ties com­plete­ly miss a domes­tic epi­dem­ic of such sever­i­ty and dura­tion? Even dur­ing the Cold War, remem­ber, U.S. researchers were quick­er to spot the advent of the health cri­sis for the work­ing-age pop­u­la­tion of the Sovi­et Union: and this dur­ing the hey­day of Sovi­et dis­in­for­ma­tion and strate­gic decep­tion, long before glas­nost. What­ev­er else may be said about this sig­nal U.S. fail­ure in dis­ease pre­ven­tion and con­trol, it occa­sioned remark­ably lit­tle reflec­tion, self-crit­i­cism, and course cor­rec­tion on the part of America’s pub­lic-health appa­ra­tus.” 
  5. The Supreme Court Was Right to Block Cuomo’s Reli­gious Restric­tions (Michael W. McConnell and Max Raskin, New York Times): “In the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, no one knew what worked and what didn’t. Courts were under­stand­ably reluc­tant to sec­ond-guess. But we are now 10 months into the pan­dem­ic. Why are gov­ern­ments still pick­ing and choos­ing among con­sti­tu­tion­al rights with­out explain­ing their rea­son­ing?” McConnell is a Stan­ford law prof, Raskin a law prof at New York Uni­ver­si­ty.
  6. Den­i­grat­ing Hoover (Vic­tor Davis Han­son, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “[Some Stan­ford stu­dents and fac­ul­ty com­plain about Hoover, yet] Hoover schol­ars as a gen­er­al rule do not fix­ate on Stan­ford, whether the Uni­ver­si­ty, its stu­dents or its pro­fes­sors, for their per­ceived laps­es in judge­ment or con­tro­ver­sies that often can arise at large cam­pus­es — such as the recent sen­sa­tion­al alle­ga­tions con­cern­ing admis­sions fraud; a recent Stan­ford affil­i­at­ed vis­it­ing researcher arrest­ed for alleged­ly hid­ing ties with the Chi­nese mil­i­tary; Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion alle­ga­tions that Stan­ford had not prop­er­ly and ful­ly dis­closed, as required, siz­able gifts from Chi­nese gov­ern­ment-relat­ed sources; sex scan­dal alle­ga­tions at the busi­ness school; efforts to dis­rupt a cam­pus speak­er while spread­ing a grotesque anti-Semit­ic fly­er; and gen­er­al con­cern on the cam­pus con­cern­ing a wave of anti-Semit­ic inci­dents.”
  7. Mis­aligned incen­tives and the scale of incar­cer­a­tion in the Unit­ed States (Aurélie Ouss, Jour­nal of Pub­lic Eco­nom­ics): “Typ­i­cal­ly, prison is paid for at the state lev­el, but coun­ty employ­ees (such as judges, pros­e­cu­tors or pro­ba­tion offi­cers) deter­mine time spent in cus­tody. I exploit a nat­ur­al exper­i­ment that shift­ed the cost bur­den of juve­nile incar­cer­a­tion from state to coun­ties, keep­ing over­all costs and respon­si­bil­i­ties unchanged. This result­ed in a stark drop in incar­cer­a­tion, and no increase in arrests, sug­gest­ing an over-use of prison when costs are not inter­nal­ized. The large mag­ni­tude of the change sug­gests that mis­aligned incen­tives in crim­i­nal jus­tice may be a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to the cur­rent lev­els of incar­cer­a­tion in the Unit­ed States.” The author is a crim­i­nol­o­gist at U Penn. Found via Tyler Cowen.

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 An Epi­dem­ic of Dis­be­lief (Bar­bara Bradley Hager­ty, The Atlantic): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, inves­ti­ga­tors had assumed that some­one who assaults a stranger by the rail­road tracks is noth­ing like the man who assaults his co-worker or his girl­friend. But it turns out that the space between acquain­tance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleve­land inves­ti­ga­tors uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were sur­prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force iden­ti­fied dozens of mys­tery rapists this way.” Infu­ri­at­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 211.

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 277

After assem­bling them, I real­ized the first link is about the friend zone and the final link is about man­ly wed­ding rings.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How To Get Out Of The Friend Zone (Aaron Renn, The Mas­culin­ist): “Friend­ships between men and women have the char­ac­ter­is­tic that they often evolve into asym­me­try of intent, which is exploita­tive if it per­sists…. remem­ber, just as no woman is under any oblig­a­tion to go out on a date with a man such as you, you are under no oblig­a­tion to be a friend to women.”
    • Every once in a while I like to toss out some­thing sure to rile peo­ple up, just to make sure you’re all pay­ing atten­tion. 
  2. God Mode Acti­vat­ed: Meet the Gamers Bring­ing Jesus to Twitch (Christo­pher Hut­ton, Medi­um): “Dustin Phillips is a blond-haired, beard­ed children’s pas­tor in Texas who also serves as GMA’s CEO. On Twitch, he goes by the han­dle Pas­tor­Doost­yn and is known as the “demon-slay­ing pas­tor.” He preach­es the gospel to his 1,400 fol­low­ers while stream­ing games like Doom and Poke­mon.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who was no doubt pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on finals. 
  3. Boy Scouts Face At Least 82,000 Sex Abuse Claims (Min­istry Watch): “Today is the dead­line set by a bank­rupt­cy court for fil­ing a sex-abuse claim against the Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca (BSA). The num­ber of claims so far filed now exceed 82,000, far more than the 9,000 claims filed in Catholic Church cas­es.”
    • Some of you have heard me say this before: the sex­u­al abuse scan­dal in the church is hor­rif­ic, yet it will be dwarfed by what we uncov­er about sex­u­al abuse in pub­lic schools and in youth orga­ni­za­tions. The church­es deserve rebuke for their han­dling of the wicked­ness in their ranks; sad­ly, I doubt that you will hear near­ly as much about the far more mas­sive scan­dals lurk­ing in non­re­li­gious insti­tu­tions.
  4. Andy Stan­ley on Evan­gel­i­cals After Trump (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “In the Gospels, Jesus calls on his fol­low­ers to go out, teach his mes­sage, and bap­tize peo­ple. Stan­ley has orga­nized his life around this imper­a­tive, called ‘the Great Com­mis­sion.’ The ques­tion for evan­gel­i­cals, now, is whether the unde­ni­able asso­ci­a­tion between Trump and their ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty will make that work hard­er. ‘Has this group of peo­ple who have some­how become “evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers”’ aligned with Trump ‘hurt the Church’s abil­i­ty to reach peo­ple out­side the Church? Absolute­ly,’ Stan­ley said. But he’s not over­ly wor­ried: A year or two from now, he said, ‘all that goes away.’ New lead­ers will rise up. The Trump era of evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ry will fade. Stan­ley chuck­led. ‘And this will just be, for a lot of peo­ple, a bad dream.’”
    • Relat­ed: The Cul­tur­al Con­se­quences of Very, Very Repub­li­can Chris­tian­i­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “What’s the cul­tur­al effect of a very, very Repub­li­can Chris­tian­i­ty? It’s way too sim­ple to say that it impairs the abil­i­ty of Chris­tians to reach their friends and neigh­bors. In some places it enhances the church’s appeal and inte­grates Chris­tians with­in their com­mu­ni­ty. In oth­er places it cre­ates a host of chal­lenges and need­less­ly alien­ates Chris­tians from their fel­low cit­i­zens.” Insight­ful.
  5. Vic­tim­hood or Devel­op­ment? (Glenn Loury, John McWhort­er, Shel­by Steele and Eli Steele, Quil­lette): “Again, the biggest mis­take we made is to buy into the idea that our vic­tim­iza­tion by racism was our source of pow­er rather than our self, our skills, our tal­ents, our devel­op­ment. As vic­tims, we had won a great civ­il rights move­ment. The down­side is it seduced us.” A fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion to eaves­drop on. You can also watch it on video.
  6. Madi­son Cawthorn, the GOP’s young star, arrives in Wash­ing­ton (Matthew Kas­sel, Jew­ish Insid­er): “He… seemed to believe that evan­ge­lism was a call­ing on par with pub­lic ser­vice. ‘If all you are is friends with oth­er Chris­tians, then how are you ever going to lead some­body to Christ?’ Cawthorn mused. ‘If you’re not want­i­ng to lead some­body to Christ, then you’re prob­a­bly not real­ly a Chris­t­ian.’”
    • I share that arti­cle to pro­vide con­text for this arti­cle: New­ly Elect­ed GOP Con­gress­man Madi­son Cawthorn Has Tried to Con­vert Jews to Chris­tian­i­ty (Pilar Melen­dez, The Dai­ly Beast): “Madi­son Cawthorn, the North Car­oli­na Repub­li­can who will become the youngest mem­ber of Con­gress in his­to­ry, has admit­ted he tried to con­vert Jews and Mus­lims to Chris­tian­i­ty.” The jour­nal­ist seems gen­uine­ly shocked.
    • Con­trast that with Con­vert Me If You Can (David Harsyani, Nation­al Review): “To be hon­est, I’m often sur­prised at how shy Chris­tians are at [evan­ge­lism]. As a hea­then, though, I am flat­tered by the atten­tion. And as a per­son in pos­ses­sion of free will, I am also uncon­cerned.” 
  7. Pas­tor John MacArthur and Cal­i­for­nia church clos­ings: Why isn’t this a nation­al sto­ry? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Indoor wor­ship ser­vices are banned in Cal­i­for­nia, a state of megachurch­es. You don’t have to be a reli­gion expert to know that restric­tion wasn’t going to fly, espe­cial­ly when stores and oth­er busi­ness­es had no sim­i­lar restric­tions…. Again, reli­gious folks see a chasm between how they’re treat­ed and how oth­er pro­tes­tors are treat­ed. And in-per­son nude danc­ing is a form of pro­tect­ed cul­tur­al expres­sion, as opposed to pub­lic wor­ship?”

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 Man­ly wed­ding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Out­line): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a cam­ou­flage ring, part­ly to sig­nal my deep com­mit­ment to irony and part­ly to get bet­ter ser­vice at the auto parts store.” I real­ly enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wed­ding bands in the not-too-distant future. First shared in vol­ume 210.

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 276

I real­ly like the sto­ries of the shame­less­ly sketchy judge near the end

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Azerbaijan’s drones owned the bat­tle­field in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of war­fare (Robyn Dixon, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a mat­ter of months, how­ev­er, Nagorno-Karabakh has become per­haps the most pow­er­ful exam­ple of how small and rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive attack drones can change the dimen­sions of con­flicts once dom­i­nat­ed by ground bat­tles and tra­di­tion­al air pow­er.”
  2. The U.S. Divorce Rate Has Hit a 50-Year Low (Wendy Wang, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Divorce in Amer­i­ca has been falling fast in recent years, and it just hit a record low in 2019. For every 1,000 mar­riages in the last year, only 14.9 end­ed in divorce, accord­ing to the new­ly released Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey data from the Cen­sus Bureau. This is the low­est rate we have seen in 50 years. It is even slight­ly low­er than 1970, when 15 mar­riages end­ed in divorce per 1,000 mar­riages.”
  3. Gen­der Activists Are Try­ing to Can­cel My Book. Why is Sil­i­con Val­ley Help­ing Them? (Abi­gail Shri­er, Quil­lette): “This is what cen­sor­ship looks like in 21st-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. It isn’t the gov­ern­ment send­ing police to your home. It’s Sil­i­con Val­ley oli­gop­o­lists imple­ment­ing black­outs and appeas­ing social-jus­tice mobs, while send­ing dis­fa­vored ideas down mem­o­ry holes. And the forces of cen­sor­ship are win­ning. Not only because their efforts to cen­sor leave almost no trace. They are win­ning because, thus far, most Amer­i­cans have been con­tent to sur­ren­der vir­tu­al­ly every lib­er­ty in exchange for the lux­u­ry of hav­ing prod­ucts deliv­ered to their door.”
    • Relat­ed: How cor­po­ra­tions can delete your exis­tence (Gavin Haynes, Unherd): “In the bank­ing system’s capac­i­ty to dis­able the indi­vid­ual with­out pro-active­ly doing them harm, there’s an echo of the ele­gance of the Chi­nese government’s social cred­it.”
  4. On the valid­i­ty of the elec­tion:
    • Who’s cov­er­ing this? Are charis­mat­ics and Pen­te­costals behind Trump’s refusal to con­cede? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…these folks are a sub­set — a move­ment among charismatics/pentecostals — of a Chris­t­ian sub­set and not well known to the gen­er­al pub­lic. How­ev­er, when you have flocks of Repub­li­cans call­ing foul on the elec­tion and the president’s most high-pro­file pas­tor is hav­ing night­ly prayer meet­ings because she is cer­tain that prophets have decreed four more years for Trump, it’s time more reporters give a lis­ten.”
    • How we can be con­fi­dent that Trump’s vot­er fraud claims are baloney (Hen­ry Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mass vot­er fraud should be rel­a­tive­ly easy to detect, even if it might be dif­fi­cult to prove. Since we elect pres­i­dents through the elec­toral col­lege, polit­i­cal oper­a­tives try­ing to nefar­i­ous­ly pro­duce a vic­to­ry would focus on states crit­i­cal to an elec­toral col­lege major­i­ty…. None of these ear­ly warn­ing signs of fraud appear in the results.”
    • The Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion Was Legit­i­mate. Con­spir­a­cies Are Not. (David French, The Dis­patch): “The count­ing must con­tin­ue and all legal chal­lenges must be heard, but as of this moment there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that should cause Amer­i­cans to believe that this elec­tion was ille­git­i­mate, and it is shame­ful and dan­ger­ous for any­one to sug­gest or allege oth­er­wise.”
    • A Primer in Basic Elec­toral Skep­ti­cism (Dou­glas Wil­son, blog): “We have reports that every­thing is fine and nor­mal. We have reports of vot­er fraud. We do not know which reports are true. But we do know which reports are cen­sored. And if that doesn’t tell you some­thing, then you are not pay­ing atten­tion.”
    • Means, motive, and oppor­tu­ni­ty (Ed Fes­er, blog): “…some main­stream his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, includ­ing lib­er­al ones, think that these states were indeed stolen from Nixon [in 1960]. For exam­ple, Kennedy biog­ra­ph­er Sey­mour Hersh judges that the elec­tion was stolen. His­to­ri­an Robert Dallek thinks that at least Illi­nois was stolen, via Daley’s polit­i­cal machine. His­to­ri­an William Rorabaugh thinks that Nixon may have been cheat­ed out of as many as 100,000 to 200,000 votes in Johnson’s cor­rupt Texas.” Wild stuff that I did not know. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Pasade­na City Col­lege. 
    • My own view: the elec­tion was valid and of course there was cheat­ing. Peo­ple cheat at cards, peo­ple cheat on their tax­es. Why in the world would­n’t peo­ple try to cheat in an elec­tion? But it seems unlike­ly to me that despite all the eyes on the process any cheat­ing was sig­nif­i­cant enough to change the out­come of the elec­tion. Hav­ing said that, it is inevitable that peo­ple are skep­ti­cal. The media and the tech firms have made them­selves so par­ti­san that they have for­feit­ed the trust which would be very handy for them to have right now.
  5. Lessons from the elec­tion
    • When Polit­i­cal Prophe­cies Don’t Come to Pass (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, many Chris­tians have lis­tened to lead­ers proph­esy that Trump would again win the elec­tion. Some, such as Jere­mi­ah John­son, have con­tin­ued to affirm that their prophe­cy will turn out to be true in the end. Oth­ers, such as Kris Val­lot­ton, have pub­licly apol­o­gized. For now, many will decide that the prophe­cy was con­tin­gent, mist­imed or, more like­ly, mis­tak­en.” This is out­stand­ing.
    • Why Cal­i­for­nia Reject­ed Racial Pref­er­ences Again (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “As I under­stand the state’s his­to­ry, the country’s his­to­ry, and the world’s his­to­ry, gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not be trust­ed to fac­tor race into deci­sion mak­ing with­out treat­ing peo­ple unjust­ly, and inter­group stig­mas and resent­ments tend to increase when any group is giv­en pref­er­en­tial treat­ment.”
    • May God Bless Pres­i­dent Biden (David French, The Dis­patch): “So here’s my sim­ple prayer for Pres­i­dent Biden: May God bless him and grant him the wis­dom to know what’s just, the courage to do what’s just, and the sta­mi­na to with­stand the rig­ors of the most dif­fi­cult job in the world. May his vir­tu­ous plans pre­vail and may his unright­eous efforts fail. And may God pro­tect him from all harm.” Amen.
    • A Moment Of Per­il (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “But the broad real­i­ty remains that in order to obtain and wield polit­i­cal pow­er, Democ­rats need to embrace can­di­dates who are less reflec­tive of the pro­gres­sive world­view of young col­lege grad­u­ates, and they need to run them in states that are less right-wing than Alaba­ma or Mon­tana.”
    • How 2020 Killed Off Democ­rats’ Demo­graph­ic Hopes (Zack Stan­ton, Politi­co): “For years, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty has oper­at­ed under one immutable assump­tion: Long-term demo­graph­ic trends would give the par­ty some­thing like a per­ma­nent major­i­ty as the coun­try as a whole grows less white and more urban. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s reliance on the pol­i­tics of racial resent­ment would only quick­en the process, solid­i­fy­ing sup­port for Democ­rats among peo­ple of col­or. Then came Novem­ber 3, 2020. And all those assump­tions now seem like total non­sense.” An inter­view with David Shor. 
    • Lat­inX-plain­ing the elec­tion (Anto­nio Gar­cia-Mar­tinez, The Pull Request): “The prob­lem with bas­ing a polit­i­cal plat­form on white guilt is that, at some point, you run out of either whites or guilt. Which is what hap­pens in a tru­ly major­i­ty-minor­i­ty nation when non-whites (at least as cur­rent­ly defined) assume their equal place in the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal fir­ma­ment.” The author nor­mal­ly writes about tech­nol­o­gy issues (hence the title of the newslet­ter).
  6. Sec­u­lar­iza­tion and the Tribu­la­tions of the Amer­i­can Work­ing-Class (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I praise the schol­ar­ship and courage of Bri­an N. Wheaton.”
    • Relat­ed: Get­ting Past the Gate­keep­ers (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Your gate­keep­ers want you to write a book more like the one they would have writ­ten. If you do make revi­sions, make them in such a way that the book becomes not less your own, but even more your own. That’s not pride. If God con­de­scends to allow cer­tain insights to the his­to­ri­ans on your board, how won­der­ful! Let them write about them! Read and learn from them! But if He con­de­scends to allow cer­tain oth­er insights to you, you should write about yours, not theirs.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin. 
  7. COVID-relat­ed
    • Super-spread­er wed­ding par­ty shows COVID hol­i­day dan­gers (Karen Kaplan, LA Times): “Only 55 peo­ple attend­ed the Aug. 7 recep­tion at the Big Moose Inn in Millinock­et. But one of those guests arrived with a coro­n­avirus infec­tion. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 oth­er peo­ple. Sev­en of them died. None of the vic­tims who lost their lives had attend­ed the par­ty.”
    • COVID-19 Mobil­i­ty Net­work Mod­el­ing (Stan­ford): “Our mod­el pre­dicts that a small minor­i­ty of ‘super­spread­er’ POIs [points of inter­est] account for a large major­i­ty of infec­tions and that restrict­ing max­i­mum occu­pan­cy at each POI is more effec­tive than uni­form­ly reduc­ing mobil­i­ty.” Click on “Sim­u­la­tion” and play around with the Reli­gious Orga­ni­za­tions tog­gle. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry, who drew my atten­tion espe­cial­ly to fig­ures 2d and 3c in the appen­dix of the paper.

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 Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion. First shared in vol­ume 206.

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.