Tag: racism

TGFI, Volume 535: marrying young and the depths of Tolkien

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Broth­er I Lost (Megan McAr­dle, The Dis­patch): “For as long as I can remem­ber, I have believed that a woman should be able to decide whether to become a moth­er, and also believed that the life grow­ing inside her should get the same shot as the rest of us at life, lib­er­ty, and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. Since these two beliefs are fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble, I usu­al­ly man­aged the con­tra­dic­tion by avoid­ing the sub­ject.”
  2. Tough Love: I Don’t Want My 22-Year-Old to Get Mar­ried (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “In case you don’t know how most young women your daughter’s age are spend­ing their twen­ties, allow me to fill you in: surf­ing dat­ing apps, grow­ing more cyn­i­cal and jad­ed by the year, main­tain­ing ‘sit­u­a­tion­ships’ with hot guys who sleep with them when­ev­er it suits them and van­ish when it doesn’t. An entire gen­er­a­tion of young women are let­ting their most for­ma­tive, eli­gi­ble decade slip through their fin­gers like olive oil. A hun­dred first dates. Dozens of booty calls. Learn­ing little—because you can­not learn much from a non-relationship—calling it ‘self-knowl­edge’ while gain­ing noth­ing but UTIs and a draw­er­ful of Plan B.… the truth is: No one’s ever mature enough for mar­riage. No one’s ever entire­ly ready. Nor for the labors and joys of moth­er­hood. We splash through these stages a lit­tle bat­ty and half-blind. If we meet the demands, they change us. That much is inevitable. But until we start to swim, we nev­er real­ly know we can.”
    • Mag­nif­i­cent, rec­om­mend­ed to me by an alum­nus.
  3. The Lost Gen­er­a­tion (Jacob Sav­age, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Over the course of the 2010s, near­ly every mech­a­nism lib­er­al Amer­i­ca used to con­fer pres­tige was reweight­ed along iden­ti­tar­i­an lines.… Most of the men I inter­viewed start­ed out as lib­er­als. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s dis­fa­vor can be dis­ori­ent­ing. We mil­len­ni­als were true believ­ers in race and gen­der-blind mer­i­toc­ra­cy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its opti­mism in the Amer­i­can Dream—was far supe­ri­or to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spec­tac­u­lar­ly betrayed has engen­dered a skep­ti­cism toward the entire lib­er­al project that won’t soon dis­ap­pear.”
    • The viral­i­ty of this arti­cle (and the host of respons­es it has engen­dered) sug­gests that it has hit a nerve.
  4. AI romance blooms as Japan­ese woman weds vir­tu­al part­ner of her dreams (Kim Kyung-Hoon & Satoshi Sugiya­ma, Reuters): “A year ago, Noguchi took ChatGPT’s advice about what she said was a fraught rela­tion­ship with her human fiance and resolved to break off their engage­ment.… Yasuyu­ki Saku­rai, a wed­ding plan­ner for more than 20 years, said he now almost exclu­sive­ly han­dles mar­riages of clients with vir­tu­al char­ac­ters, aver­ag­ing about one a month.”
    • Shared with me by a hor­ri­fied stu­dent.
  5. What Courage Does for Us (David French, New York Times): “An empha­sis on accom­plish­ment can actu­al­ly breed cow­ardice. Courage can cost you your career. Courage can cost you your life. And so the careerist learns to adapt, to hide when the bul­lets (real or fig­u­ra­tive) start to fly. Sure, the hero can rise to the top, but he or she can also end up dead, and you can’t be a pres­i­dent or a chief exec­u­tive or a mem­ber of Con­gress from the grave.”
    • Unlocked.
    • Relat­ed, also unlocked: The Secret Tri­al of the Gen­er­al Who Refused to Attack Tianan­men Square (Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “ ‘I said to them that my supe­ri­ors can appoint me, and they can also dis­miss me,’ he recount­ed in court, seem­ing to indi­cate that he was will­ing to lose his job over his deci­sion. One of the gen­er­als at the meet­ing, Dai Jing­sheng, told inves­ti­ga­tors that he and his col­leagues went silent for about a minute while they absorbed Gen­er­al Xu’s defi­ance. ‘Nobody expect­ed words like this from Xu,”‘said Gen­er­al Dai, accord­ing to the tes­ti­mo­ny. Under ques­tion­ing, Gen­er­al Xu acknowl­edged that the mil­i­tary answered to China’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty lead­ers. But he sug­gest­ed that it should also be sub­ject to a broad­er author­i­ty.”
    • Also relat­ed: Man who filmed Uyghur con­cen­tra­tion camps now fights for his own free­dom in the Unit­ed States (Atlas Luk, Sub­stack): “His asy­lum appli­ca­tion, which had an inter­view pend­ing, his valid work per­mit, his New York State driver’s license… in the eyes of ICE, all of these were worth­less because he had ‘entered with­out inspec­tion’ by cus­toms. With the Trump admin­is­tra­tion crack­ing down on ille­gal immi­gra­tion, Broome Coun­ty Jail was over­crowd­ed. Months passed, and Guan Heng wait­ed anx­ious­ly and deject­ed­ly for the out­come of his case. No one knew what this young man from Chi­na had gone through in the past few years; nor did any­one know that the images he had filmed of the Xin­jiang deten­tion camps, at great per­son­al risk, pro­vid­ed cru­cial evi­dence of the Chi­nese author­i­ties’ actions against the Uyghur peo­ple in Xin­jiang. Or that if he were to be deport­ed, he would be fac­ing immense dan­ger.”
  6. Why I Keep Return­ing to Mid­dle-Earth (Michael D.C. Drout, New York Times): “Sub­tle vari­a­tions in Tolkien’s writ­ing style across its 62 chap­ters gen­er­ate the impres­sion that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a com­pi­la­tion of oth­er texts. This pat­tern is large­ly invis­i­ble even to care­ful read­ers, but new meth­ods of com­put­er-assist­ed analy­sis throw it into sharp relief. An algo­rithm can com­pare the vocab­u­lar­ies of the chap­ters and clus­ter those that are sim­i­lar.… Its chap­ters group in a com­plex hier­ar­chy with three large group­ings and sev­er­al out­liers, a pat­tern of clus­ter­ing not typ­i­cal for a mod­ern nov­el. It is clos­er in form to mul­ti­au­thor com­pos­ite texts from the Mid­dle Ages. Not only do the clus­ters not match the point-of-view char­ac­ters; they don’t seem to be relat­ed to vol­ume, book, set­ting, type of action or pac­ing.… This styl­is­tic vari­a­tion was, at least ini­tial­ly, com­plete­ly unin­ten­tion­al, a byprod­uct of Tolkien’s labo­ri­ous and ago­niz­ing 17-year effort to com­plete the book. Tolkien had aimed to make ‘The Lord of the Rings’ feel as if it had been dis­cov­ered and assem­bled; the frame nar­ra­tive of the book is that it’s a trans­la­tion of a diary that was expand­ed into a his­to­ry and aug­ment­ed by lat­er schol­ars. His strug­gles, prov­i­den­tial­ly, helped him achieve that effect.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. The whole essay is deeply per­son­al and quite mov­ing. The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Wheaton. Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 475

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. Is the World Ready for a Reli­gious Come­back? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s one thing to get non­be­liev­ers to offer kind words for ‘cul­tur­al’ Chris­tian­i­ty or endorse the soci­o­log­i­cal util­i­ty of church­go­ing. The chal­lenge is to go fur­ther, to per­suade anx­ious mod­erns that reli­gion is more than mere­ly prag­mat­i­cal­ly use­ful, more than just a wist­ful hope — that a reli­gious frame­work actu­al­ly makes much more sense of real­i­ty than the alleged­ly hard­head­ed mate­ri­al­ist alter­na­tive.”
    • Dis­cuss­es three books Douthat thinks are help­ful.
  2. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Dou­bled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (Nicholas Con­fes­sore, New York Times): “Striv­ing to touch ‘every indi­vid­ual on cam­pus,’ as the school puts it, Michi­gan has poured rough­ly a quar­ter of a bil­lion dol­lars into D.E.I. since 2016, accord­ing to an inter­nal pre­sen­ta­tion I obtained.… Michigan’s own data sug­gests that in striv­ing to become more diverse and equi­table, the school has also become less inclu­sive: In a sur­vey released in late 2022, stu­dents and fac­ul­ty mem­bers report­ed a less pos­i­tive cam­pus cli­mate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belong­ing. Stu­dents were less like­ly to inter­act with peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent race or reli­gion or with dif­fer­ent pol­i­tics — the exact kind of engage­ment D.E.I. pro­grams, in the­o­ry, are meant to fos­ter.”
    • Relat­ed: I Don’t Want to Live in a Mono­cul­ture, and Nei­ther Do You (David French, New York Times): “In my expe­ri­ence, the more ide­o­log­i­cal­ly or the­o­log­i­cal­ly ‘pure’ an insti­tu­tion becomes, the more wrong it is like­ly to be, espe­cial­ly if it takes on a dif­fi­cult or com­plex task. Ide­o­log­i­cal mono­cul­tures aren’t just bad for the minor­i­ty that’s silenced, harassed or can­celed when­ev­er its mem­bers raise their voic­es in dis­sent. It’s ter­ri­ble for the con­fi­dent major­i­ty — and for the con­fi­dent majority’s cause.”
  3. U.S. Study on Puber­ty Block­ers Goes Unpub­lished Because of Pol­i­tics, Doc­tor Says (Azeen Gho­rayshi, New York Times): “An influ­en­tial doc­tor and advo­cate of ado­les­cent gen­der treat­ments said she had not pub­lished a long-await­ed study of puber­ty-block­ing drugs because of the charged Amer­i­can polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment.… She said she was con­cerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use block­ers because it doesn’t impact them,’ refer­ring to trans­gen­der ado­les­cents.”
    • JK Rowl­ing sum­ma­rized the sto­ry well: ‘We must not pub­lish a study that says we’re harm­ing chil­dren because peo­ple who say we’re harm­ing chil­dren will use the study as evi­dence that we’re harm­ing chil­dren, which might make it dif­fi­cult for us to con­tin­ue harm­ing chil­dren.’
  4. Our Robot Sto­ries Haven’t Pre­pared Us for A.I. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In most of these sto­ries, the defin­ing aspects of human­i­ty are some com­bi­na­tion of free will, strong emo­tion and moral­i­ty. The robot begins as a being fol­low­ing its pro­gram­ming and mys­ti­fied by human emo­tion­al­i­ty, and over time it begins to choose, to act freely, to cut its strings and ulti­mate­ly to love.… We have been trained for a future in which robots think like us but don’t feel like us, and there­fore need to be guid­ed out of mere­ly intel­lec­tu­al self-con­scious­ness into a deep­er aware­ness of emo­tion­al­i­ty, of heart as well as head. We are get­ting a real­i­ty where our bots seem so deeply emo­tion­al — lov­ing, car­ing, heart­felt — that it’s hard to dis­tin­guish them from human beings, and indeed, some of us find their appar­ent warmth a refuge from a dif­fi­cult or cru­el world.”
  5. How I Learned To Stop Crit­i­ciz­ing Every­thing (Eboo Patel, Per­sua­sion): “I’m not sad that I read those crit­i­cal the­o­rists. I think it’s a use­ful per­spec­tive to have. My prob­lem is that I deformed the world to fit a nar­row world­view, and I let it direct my life. The big­ger prob­lem is that this par­a­digm has become a regime in cer­tain quar­ters of high­er edu­ca­tion. You are coerced into hold­ing that world­view and pun­ished if you utter ideas out­side of its scope. Crit­i­cal the­o­ry is like a sharp kitchen knife: very use­ful for some things, like cut­ting meat, but if you eat your cere­al with it, you’ll hurt your­self. And if you point it at some­one else, then it’s a weapon. In some cir­cles, on some cam­pus­es, every oth­er uten­sil has been removed from the intel­lec­tu­al cut­lery draw­er, replaced with sharp kitchen knives.”
  6. Both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans can pass the Ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing Test (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “We first chal­lenged each side to pre­tend to be the oth­er side, and then we had both sides try to dis­tin­guish between the truth-tellers and the fak­ers. If par­ti­sans have no idea who the oth­er side is or what they believe, it should be hard for peo­ple to do a con­vinc­ing impres­sion of the oppo­site par­ty. So let’s see!”
    • Inter­est­ing study. In the foot­notes he men­tioned he gath­ered the data in 2019 but nev­er got around to pub­lish­ing it. Just FYI
  7. It’s Ratio­nal And Humane To Lack Strong Polit­i­cal Beliefs (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “We don’t need the aver­age per­son to have strong beliefs about what the right anti-pover­ty pol­i­cy is, and I would argue it’s a waste of time to devote too many hours to some­thing like that, because it’s hope­less­ly com­plex and even experts who devote their lives to that sub­ject dis­agree on the basics. Plus, many of the experts — on this and every oth­er sub­ject — are them­selves incom­pe­tent, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly cap­tured, or oth­er­wise unlike­ly to help lead you clos­er to use­ful insights.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. This post is a bit odd in that it’s unlocked but to read the whole thing you have to read it in the Sub­stack app. You can read the first part for free and that’s enough to get the gist and tell whether you want to read the rest of it.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 405

a bunch of depress­ing arti­cles 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 405, which is 43 + 53 + 63

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. That Hel­lo Spir­it (Leopold van den Daele & Mat­teo Per­p­er, The Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The admin­is­tra­tion has as its goal the total re-cre­ation of cam­pus social life, a rather mut­ed con­cep­tion of the Spir­it of Stan­ford, from the top-down. They will throw mon­ey at the prob­lem, estab­lish more offices, and more advi­so­ry boards. They will change the fine print of the rules and reg­u­la­tions for throw­ing par­ties, and they will bom­bard you with facts that demon­stra­bly prove all is swell. But we believe that a thriv­ing cam­pus social life emerges nat­u­ral­ly when every­one feels like they belong to one fam­i­ly; it can­not be bought. It is our respon­si­bil­i­ty to bring about the change we want to see, from the bot­tom-up, one inter­ac­tion at a time: Say­ing hel­lo is the heart of com­mu­ni­ty.”
  2. How Con­gress Gets Rich from Insid­er Trad­ing (YouTube): thir­ty well-done min­utes about a bipar­ti­san prob­lem. I’ve read a lot of the arti­cles ref­er­enced before, but this is an excel­lent com­pi­la­tion with impec­ca­ble pre­sen­ta­tion. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. No One Is Immune (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “We went from Chris­t­ian pub­lic fig­ures warn­ing about the social and legal dan­gers of LGBTQ ‘civ­il rights’ to Chris­t­ian pub­lic fig­ures cham­pi­oning LGBTQ ‘civ­il rights’ in just two decades. And in some cas­es, they are the exact same per­son.”
    • A sol­id essay that makes an impor­tant point. Any time your the­ol­o­gy leads you to con­clude that some of God’s laws in the Old Tes­ta­ment are sin­ful (as opposed to mere­ly not bind­ing upon us), your the­ol­o­gy is wrong. This is a wide-rang­ing prin­ci­ple which, when con­sis­tent­ly fol­lowed, will make peo­ple annoyed with you. It is nonethe­less cor­rect. “The Law of the Lord is per­fect” (Psalm 19:7) and “the law is holy, and the com­mand­ment is holy, right­eous and good” (Romans 7:12).
  4. How evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian writer Jemar Tis­by became a radioac­tive sym­bol of ‘wok­e­ness’ (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Lerone Mar­tin, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of reli­gious stud­ies and direc­tor of the Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Research and Edu­ca­tion Insti­tute at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, said that evan­gel­i­cals have long found it eas­i­er to label Black lead­ers as left­ists or Marx­ists rather than to deal with the real­i­ty of racism.”
  5. The ‘I’ in BIPOC (Sher­man Alex­ie, Per­sua­sion): “And here I must stress that Indi­ans, whether con­ser­v­a­tive, cen­trist, or lib­er­al, have a unique place in the Unit­ed States that BIPOC doesn’t even begin to address. BIPOC is an acronym that’s too plain to accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent Indi­an people’s com­plex rela­tion­ship with our coun­try.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Chi Alpha ‘Men­tor’ Daniel Savala Arrest­ed on Sex Abuse Charges (Josh Shep­herd, The Roys Report): “On Fri­day morn­ing, Savala, 67, was arrest­ed by the U.S. Mar­shals Lone Star Fugi­tive Task Force at his res­i­dence in down­town Hous­ton and booked at the Fort Bend Coun­ty Jail in Rich­mond, Texas. He was charged with con­tin­u­ous sex­u­al abuse of a child under age 14.… On May 23, Chris Hundl, for­mer leader of the Chi Alpha chap­ter at Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty and pas­tor of Moun­tain Val­ley Fel­low­ship in Waco, was arrest­ed on iden­ti­cal charges in Waco.… the North Texas Dis­trict Coun­cil of the Assem­blies of God (AoG) said its inves­ti­ga­tion of Hundl and oth­ers linked to Savala prompt­ed Hundl’s removal from his pas­toral duties and Chi Alpha lead­er­ship as of May 4. AoG dis­trict offi­cials said they also noti­fied child pro­tec­tive ser­vices in Texas and have rec­om­mend­ed that Hundl be dis­missed as an AoG min­is­ter.”
    • Read­ing this was like get­ting punched in the gut.
  7. Defin­ing Reli­gion in the Court (Mark Movs­esian, First Things): “…a focus on [reli­gion expressed in] com­mu­ni­ty accords with an impor­tant goal of reli­gious free­dom: the pro­mo­tion of pri­vate asso­ci­a­tions that encour­age coop­er­a­tive projects and check state pow­er. As Toc­queville explained, the despot­ic state desires noth­ing more than for indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens to feel iso­lat­ed from and indif­fer­ent to oth­ers, so that it can divide and dom­i­nate them all. By encour­ag­ing peo­ple to iden­ti­fy with and look out for one anoth­er, pri­vate asso­ci­a­tions mil­i­tate against self-cen­tered­ness and social iso­la­tion and help keep the state in check. Reli­gious groups per­form this func­tion espe­cial­ly well. No asso­ci­a­tions have been bet­ter, his­tor­i­cal­ly, at pro­mot­ing coop­er­a­tive social projects and defy­ing state oppression—as dic­ta­tors down the cen­turies have learned.”

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 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.” From vol­ume 284.

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 389

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 389, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty Can Still Come Back (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “There was no such thing as monasticism—through which pagan North­ern Europe was turned Christian—until there was. There was no Ref­or­ma­tion until there was. There was no revival that turned Methodists and Bap­tists into cul­tur­al­ly dom­i­nant forces in the mid­west­ern and south­east­ern Unit­ed States—until there was. There was no East African Revival, led pri­mar­i­ly by African peo­ple, that helped turn Africa from a 9 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent in 1900 into a 50 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent today—until there was. Chris­tian­i­ty, like its founder, does not go from strength to strength but from death to res­ur­rec­tion.”
  2. Is the Pub­lic Domain Just?: Bib­li­cal Stew­ard­ship and Legal Pro­tec­tion For Tra­di­tion­al Knowl­edge Assets (Ruth L. Okedi­ji, The Colum­bia Jour­nal of Law and the Arts): “The Arti­cle pro­pos­es a the­o­log­i­cal frame­work of ‘bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship’ root­ed in ima­go Dei—the foun­da­tion­al con­cept inform­ing Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings of human nature and social interaction—to address the socio-moral dimen­sions that are con­sti­tu­tive of TK [tra­di­tion­al knowl­edge] sys­tems and the insti­tu­tion­al con­text in which they unfold. The bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship frame­work focus­es on the coop­er­a­tive and kin­ship arrange­ments that enable and sus­tain pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty for TK.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law and a sol­id Chris­t­ian. I just heard her speak and the per­son intro­duc­ing her men­tioned this arti­cle as an exam­ple of how bold she is in inte­grat­ing her faith into her schol­ar­ship.
  3. Some COVID per­spec­tives
    • Sure­ly Right (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the only sen­si­ble posi­tion is to advo­cate for ear­ly and wide­spread vac­cine access, be high­ly crit­i­cal of all the pol­i­tick­ing about vac­cine tim­ing around the elec­tion, and to avoid man­dates unless you intend to enforce them at gun­point.… Because we live in a world where the default is not to vac­ci­nate, pol­i­tics poi­sons every­thing it touch­es, and the child­hood man­dates are his­tor­i­cal acci­dents that could very well fall to con­cert­ed polit­i­cal action.”
      • A brief, fas­ci­nat­ing read.
    • Why the Odds Are Stacked Against a Promis­ing New Covid Drug (Ben­jamin Mueller, The New York Times): “By for­ti­fy­ing the body’s own mech­a­nisms for quash­ing an invad­ing virus, they can poten­tial­ly help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and oth­er virus­es with the poten­tial to kin­dle future pan­demics.… For all of its promise, though, the drug — called pegy­lat­ed inter­fer­on lamb­da — faces an uncer­tain road [due to the FDA].”
    • Not pay­walled. Infu­ri­at­ing. Out­ra­geous. Ridicu­lous.
    • Bureau­crats: “COVID is so bad we need to change every aspect of soci­ety to deal with it. But don’t change our bureau­cra­cy. It’s not THAT bad.”
  4. Boston Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vides update on CTE study, dis­cov­ers brain dis­ease in 92 per­cent of ex-NFL play­ers ana­lyzed (Vic­to­ria Her­nan­dez, USA Today): “The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty CTE Cen­ter stud­ied the brains of 376 deceased for­mer NFL play­ers and diag­nosed 345 of them with chron­ic trau­mat­ic encephalopa­thy. This is 91.7 per­cent of those stud­ied.”
    • I’ve been say­ing this for about two stu­dent gen­er­a­tions now, but foot­bal­l’s days are num­bered in Amer­i­ca. It’s hard to imag­ine the sport sur­viv­ing the sorts of reforms that would be nec­es­sary.
  5. I Thought I Was Sav­ing Trans Kids. Now I’m Blow­ing the Whis­tle. (Jamie Reed, The Free Press): “I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and polit­i­cal­ly to the left of Bernie Sanders.… I’m now mar­ried to a trans man, and togeth­er we are rais­ing my two bio­log­i­cal chil­dren from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage and three fos­ter chil­dren we hope to adopt.… Giv­en the secre­cy and lack of rig­or­ous stan­dards that char­ac­ter­ize youth gen­der tran­si­tion across the coun­try, I believe that to ensure the safe­ty of Amer­i­can chil­dren, we need a mora­to­ri­um on the hor­mon­al and sur­gi­cal treat­ment of young peo­ple with gen­der dys­pho­ria.”
    • Not sur­pris­ing if you’ve been fol­low­ing this top­ic, but depress­ing and with new anec­dotes.
  6. Chat­G­PT Is a Blur­ry JPEG of the Web (Ted Chi­ang, The New York­er): “Think of Chat­G­PT as a blur­ry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the infor­ma­tion on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the infor­ma­tion of a high­er-res­o­lu­tion image, but, if you’re look­ing for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approx­i­ma­tion. But, because the approx­i­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed in the form of gram­mat­i­cal text, which Chat­G­PT excels at cre­at­ing, it’s usu­al­ly accept­able. You’re still look­ing at a blur­ry JPEG, but the blur­ri­ness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the pic­ture as a whole look less sharp.”
    • This is a good anal­o­gy.
  7. A Black Pro­fes­sor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell (Vin­cent Lloyd, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Each stu­dent read from a pre­pared state­ment about how the sem­i­nar per­pet­u­at­ed anti-black vio­lence in its con­tent and form, how the black stu­dents had been harmed, how I was guilty of count­less microag­gres­sions, includ­ing through my body lan­guage, and how stu­dents didn’t feel safe because I didn’t imme­di­ate­ly cor­rect views that failed to treat anti-black­ness as the cause of all the world’s ills.… I am a black pro­fes­sor, I direct­ed my university’s black-stud­ies pro­gram, I lead anti-racism and trans­for­ma­tive-jus­tice work­shops, and I have pub­lished books on anti-black racism and prison abo­li­tion. I live in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly black neigh­bor­hood of Philadel­phia, my daugh­ter went to an Afro­cen­tric school, and I am on the board of our local black cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Vil­lano­va (which is not, to be clear, the loca­tion of this deba­cle).

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 Uncon­scious Learn­ing Under­lies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in Peo­ple Who Can Uncon­scious­ly Pre­dict Com­plex Pat­terns (Sci Tech Dai­ly): “Indi­vid­u­als who can uncon­scious­ly pre­dict com­plex pat­terns, an abil­i­ty called implic­it pat­tern learn­ing, are like­ly to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who cre­ates pat­terns of events in the uni­verse, accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.” Shock­er: peo­ple who see real­i­ty clear­ly are more like­ly to per­ceive God’s hand at work in real­i­ty. From vol­ume 267.

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 386

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.

386 is inter­est­ing because it feels like it ought to have lots of divi­sors, but it’s just 2 · 193. Of course you can dou­ble any prime, but it still sur­pris­es me when I run across it. Primes dou­bled are, by def­i­n­i­tion, exact­ly as rare as primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I am a Chris­t­ian (James Choi, Yale Fac­ul­ty Web­site): “There are things about Chris­tian­i­ty that are con­fus­ing or hard to accept as true. But in math, if we start with axioms that are sol­id, then we can prove easy the­o­rems based on those axioms, and then use those easy the­o­rems to prove coun­ter­in­tu­itive, seem­ing­ly false the­o­rems. We can believe the hard the­o­rems because we have con­fi­dence in the axioms and the easy the­o­rems. To me, the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ is the fun­da­men­tal the­o­rem of Chris­tian­i­ty. If we can gain con­fi­dence in this, then this pro­vides a foun­da­tion for us to have faith in the rest of the claims of Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of finance at Yale. He’s had a ver­sion of this page on his offi­cial web­site ever since he was a sopho­more at Har­vard. He kept it up while apply­ing to grad school and while going on the job mar­ket. Respect.
  2. Why the Media is Hon­est and Good (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “My advice is to read the main­stream media, and trust the facts they present, while ques­tion­ing the nar­ra­tives. Under­stand where the bias­es are and cor­rect for them. Read some of their crit­ics too, but under­stand that those crit­ics are almost more biased and less intel­li­gent and hon­est than those that they attack. The few media crit­ics who are bet­ter than the press are rare and deserve your sup­port. The excep­tion here is any­thing hav­ing to do with race, gen­der, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, where you should under­stand that estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ists are try­ing their best but can’t be trust­ed because they’ve lost their minds, or are scared of those that have, and you’d be bet­ter off lis­ten­ing to peo­ple with can­ce­lable views.”
  3. The bat­tle of the stan­dards: why the US and UK can’t stop fight­ing the met­ric sys­tem (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “It all went back to Nim­rod, he was say­ing. Nim­rod, great-grand­son of Noah and the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord,’ who had attempt­ed to unite the world’s pop­u­la­tion by build­ing the Tow­er of Babel so that human­i­ty might climb up to Heav­en itself. ‘And God inter­vened, stop­ping him from build­ing the tow­er,’ said Tony. God then spread human­i­ty across the globe, divid­ing us up into dif­fer­ent nations with their own lan­guages and tra­di­tions. As Tony under­stood the mes­sage of the Tow­er of Babel, it was that ‘Peo­ple should live in dis­tinct nations because it pro­vides a uni­fy­ing force in their lives. It gives them a sense of pur­pose.’”
  4. What if Diver­si­ty Train­ings Are Doing More Harm Than Good? (Jesse Sin­gal, New York Times): “Over the years, social sci­en­tists who have con­duct­ed care­ful reviews of the evi­dence base for diver­si­ty train­ings have fre­quent­ly come to dis­cour­ag­ing con­clu­sions. Though diver­si­ty train­ings have been around in one form or anoth­er since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever sub­ject­ed to rig­or­ous eval­u­a­tion, and those that are most­ly appear to have lit­tle or no pos­i­tive long-term effects… Some diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives might actu­al­ly wors­en the D.E.I. cli­mates of the orga­ni­za­tions that pay for them.”
  5. If Affir­ma­tive Action Ends, Col­lege Admis­sions May Be Changed For­ev­er (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Col­leges are plan­ning behind the scenes for the court rul­ing, though they are reluc­tant to release plans, wor­ried about poten­tial­ly open­ing them­selves up to legal action. ‘“‘We don’t want to get ahead of the court, and we don’t want to give the court any ideas,’”’ Dr. Pérez said.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Who is includ­ed by “inclu­sive” lan­guage? (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “…one thing you’d learn in a fan­cy Amer­i­can school is why you shouldn’t talk about the eco­nom­ic under­de­vel­op­ment of Africa like this. You’d learn bet­ter eti­quette. Or at least dif­fer­ent eti­quette — eti­quette that will dif­fer­en­ti­ate you from less sophis­ti­cat­ed peo­ple who might run around say­ing offen­sive things about pover­ty in the Glob­al South. For instance, a per­son with­out a prop­er edu­ca­tion might refer to the coun­tries in ques­tion as ‘the third world’ with­out hav­ing read Marc Silver’s Jan­u­ary 2021 NPR piece about why this is offen­sive. But to Bright’s point, speak­ing dif­fer­ent­ly doesn’t actu­al­ly change any­thing.  And that, per­haps, is a big part of the appeal.”
  7. NHL play­er refus­es to wear Pride Night jer­sey dur­ing warm-ups, cit­ing reli­gious beliefs (Jared Gans, The Hill): “I respect every­body, and I respect everybody’s choic­es. My choice is to stay true to myself and my reli­gion,” he said while tak­ing ques­tions in the Fly­ers’ lock­er room after the team’s 5–2 vic­to­ry over the Ana­heim Ducks. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
    • Sim­ple faith­ful­ness is a beau­ti­ful thing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A Bib­li­cal Cri­tique of Sec­u­lar Jus­tice and Crit­i­cal The­o­ry (Tim Keller, Gospel In Life): “In the Bible Chris­tians have an ancient, rich, strong, com­pre­hen­sive, com­plex, and attrac­tive under­stand­ing of jus­tice. Bib­li­cal jus­tice dif­fers in sig­nif­i­cant ways from all the sec­u­lar alter­na­tives, with­out ignor­ing the con­cerns of any of them. Yet Chris­tians know lit­tle about bib­li­cal jus­tice, despite its promi­nence in the Scrip­tures.” The read of the week. From vol­ume 262

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 383

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I offi­ci­ate a wed­ding on Fri­day — con­grats Alex & Andrea!) 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.

Hap­py New Year! Most of my read­ers know this, but this bun­dle of links is an over­flow from a min­istry called Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. Today is Decem­ber 31st, which is the biggest giv­ing day of the year. If you are inclined toward gen­eros­i­ty on New Year’s Eve, con­sid­er mak­ing a year-end dona­tion to sup­port the min­istry.

This is vol­ume 383, which is both a prime num­ber and a palin­drome. Not too shab­by, 383. Hold your head up high among the num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rea­sons to believe, Christ­mas edi­tion:
    • How Would You Prove That God Per­formed a Mir­a­cle? (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “Josh Brown directs the pro­gram in neu­ro­science at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Bloom­ing­ton. He has pub­lished dozens of arti­cles on top­ics like the neur­al basis of deci­sion mak­ing in the brain. He has wire-rimmed glass­es and a calm, method­i­cal way of speak­ing. And after almost two decades of keep­ing rel­a­tive­ly qui­et, he is now speak­ing open­ly about his most sur­pris­ing research find­ing: He believes that God mirac­u­lous­ly healed him of a brain tumor.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is a his­to­ri­an at UNC.
    • When Mary Met the Angel (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘Sci­ence is the descrip­tion of how God choos­es to work most of the time,’ writes Rus­sell Cow­burn, a pro­fes­sor of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. ‘We know dead bod­ies don’t come back to life accord­ing to sci­ence. And yet Chris­tian­i­ty is built on the obser­va­tion that Jesus came back to life. I am very hap­py to say that at that spe­cial moment, God was act­ing dif­fer­ent­ly.’ Like many oth­er world-class sci­en­tists I’ve interviewed—including Fran­cis Collins, for­mer direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health—Prof. Cow­burn came to faith in Jesus as an adult. He is not just try­ing to make sci­en­tif­ic sense of a child­hood faith that he can­not shed.”
      • Dis­claimer: I know the author and am thrilled she was invit­ed to write about faith for the WSJ.
    • A Christ­mas Con­ver­sa­tion About Christ (Nico­las Kristof inter­view­ing Rus­sell Moore, New York Times): “The most impor­tant blind spot is per­haps miss­ing why so many of us are drawn to faith in the first place. We real­ly do believe the Gospel is Good News that answers the deep­est long­ings of the human heart. I would just rec­om­mend that peo­ple read one of the Gospels with an open mind. Jesus loves New York Times read­ers, too.”
  2. A Dark­ness Revealed (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…the great chal­lenge here, as ever, is to strive to see our ances­tors and our con­tem­po­raries with moral clar­i­ty, not white­wash­ing their sins and fail­ings with poet­ic mem­o­ry, while also rec­og­niz­ing their virtues — and in all cas­es, nev­er, ever allow­ing their full human­i­ty, the good and the bad alike, to be assim­i­lat­ed into the realm of ideas.”
    • I found this grip­ping. A man wres­tles with the not-entire­ly-sur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion that his father was in the KKK.
  3. Urbana Mis­sions Con­fer­ence That Once Drew 20,000 Expect­ed to Fall Far Short (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry Watch): “Jao said that lin­ger­ing con­cerns over COVID-19 and the country’s eco­nom­ic woes are help­ing to dri­ve pro­ject­ed atten­dance down for the con­fer­ence, usu­al­ly held every three years, but delayed until this year by the pan­dem­ic. Like many church­es, he said, Inter­Var­si­ty and oth­er cam­pus min­istries are still rebuild­ing their atten­dance.”
  4. Our First Close­up Image of Mars Was a Paint-By-Num­bers Pas­tel Draw­ing (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al blog): “On July 15, 1965, NASA’s Mariner 4 probe flew with­in 6,118 miles of the sur­face of Mars, cap­tur­ing images as it passed over the plan­et. The image data was trans­mit­ted back to sci­en­tists on Earth, but they didn’t have a good way to quick­ly ren­der a pho­to­graph from it. They deter­mined that the fastest way to see what Mariner 4 had seen was to print out the imag­ing data as a series of num­bers, paste them into a grid, buy a set of pas­tels from a near­by art store, and do a paint-by-num­bers job with the pas­tels on the data grid.”
    • This is actu­al­ly beau­ti­ful.
  5. Amer­i­cans Have Found Their Hap­py Place (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “Two econ­o­mists, David G. Blanch­flower of Dart­mouth and Alex Bryson of Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, have come up with a new and more intu­itive way to mea­sure well-being. The results are strik­ing. If you con­sid­er US states as com­pa­ra­ble to coun­tries, 16 of the top 20 polit­i­cal units in the world for well-being are in the US — includ­ing the top sev­en.”
  6. The Media Very Rarely Lies (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “The point is: the media rarely lies explic­it­ly and direct­ly. Reporters rarely say spe­cif­ic things they know to be false. When the media mis­in­forms peo­ple, it does so by mis­in­ter­pret­ing things, exclud­ing con­text, or sig­nal-boost­ing some events while ignor­ing oth­ers, not by par­tic­i­pat­ing in some bright-line cat­e­go­ry called ‘mis­in­for­ma­tion’.”
    • Fol­low-up: Sor­ry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I find it real­ly inter­est­ing that so many com­menters were so resis­tant to the idea that the worst and dumb­est con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries of our time don’t involve out­right lies. I think all of us — not just cen­sors — want to main­tain the com­fort­ing illu­sion that the bad peo­ple are doing some­thing fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than the good peo­ple, some­thing that marks them as Obvi­ous­ly Bad in bright neon paint.”
  7. Is the right win­ning the com­e­dy wars? (Con­stance Grady, Vox): “It’s as though there’s some sort of fun­da­men­tal dis­con­nect between right and left on the issue of com­e­dy. On a very basic lev­el, the two sides seem to dis­agree on the ques­tion of what a joke should look like, what it’s okay to joke about, and what is so under threat that to joke about it would be unthink­able. No one seems sure how to talk about the dif­fer­ence, exact­ly. They just know that they want to be the fun­ny ones.”

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 Fer­til­i­ty rate: ‘Jaw-drop­ping’ glob­al crash in chil­dren being born (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Chi­na, cur­rent­ly the most pop­u­lous nation in the world, is expect­ed to peak at 1.4 bil­lion in four years’ time before near­ly halv­ing to 732 mil­lion by 2100. India will take its place.” From a long-term per­spec­tive, this is pos­si­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant news you will read this year. Some of you will still be alive when China’s pop­u­la­tion is half what it is now. And it’s not just Chi­na — many nations are on the same path (with only a few siz­able ones head­ed in the oppo­site direc­tion). From vol­ume 259

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 375

a week full of wild arti­cles

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 375, which can also be writ­ten at 3·53. I like the threes on either side of the five.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Truth Cops: Leaked Doc­u­ments Out­line DHS’s Plans to Police Dis­in­for­ma­tion (Ken Klip­pen­stein & Lee Fang, The Inter­cept): “DHS’s mis­sion to fight dis­in­for­ma­tion, stem­ming from con­cerns around Russ­ian influ­ence in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, began tak­ing shape dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion and over efforts to shape dis­cus­sions around vac­cine pol­i­cy dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.”
    • This is the arti­cle of the week and it’s not close. Wow. Some more excerpts:
    • “U.S. offi­cials have rou­tine­ly lied about an array of issues, from the caus­es of its wars in Viet­nam and Iraq to their more recent obfus­ca­tion around the role of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health in fund­ing the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s coro­n­avirus research. That track record has not pre­vent­ed the U.S. gov­ern­ment from seek­ing to become arbiters of what con­sti­tutes false or dan­ger­ous infor­ma­tion on inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal top­ics.”
    • This bit was wild: “Dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion, the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty, in an email to an offi­cial at Twit­ter, for­ward­ed infor­ma­tion about a poten­tial threat to crit­i­cal U.S. infra­struc­ture, cit­ing FBI warn­ings, in this case about an account that could imper­il elec­tion sys­tem integri­ty. The Twit­ter user in ques­tion had 56 fol­low­ers, along with a bio that read ‘dm us your weed store loca­tions (hoes be mad, but this is a par­o­dy account),’ under a ban­ner image of Blu­cifer, the 32-foot-tall demon­ic horse sculp­ture fea­tured at the entrance of the Den­ver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port.”
  2. Neg­a­tive World Arrives in Aus­tralia (Simon Kennedy, Mere Ortho­doxy): “This was a water­shed cul­tur­al moment for Aus­tralia, and pos­si­bly for the West. A man with out­stand­ing cre­den­tials was told that, because of some ser­mons preached by some­one else from almost a decade ago, he need­ed to recon­sid­er his fit for the role he had just been appoint­ed to. For all we know, Thor­burn may dis­agree with these ser­mons. He may nev­er have been aware of them or lis­tened to them. The bot­tom line here was guilt-by-asso­ci­a­tion.”
  3. Black, Chris­t­ian and Tran­scend­ing the Polit­i­cal Bina­ry (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “The con­ser­v­a­tive and pro­gres­sive approach­es are not the only way to approach pol­i­tics. Every­thing that doesn’t fit isn’t ille­git­i­mate. Once we real­ize those aren’t the only two approach­es, then we open up space for peo­ple of col­or, peo­ple of faith and oth­ers who are polit­i­cal­ly home­less to real­ly have a voice and help heal some­thing that’s been bro­ken and won’t be fixed by either of those two sides.”
  4. Racial Dis­crim­i­na­tion Is Not the Path to Racial Jus­tice (David French, The Dis­patch): “If schools tru­ly want to pri­or­i­tize diver­si­ty, they should focus on class. Fos­ter­ing greater class-based diver­si­ty can help achieve greater diver­si­ty across the board: More racial diver­si­ty, more eco­nom­ic diver­si­ty, more ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty, and more diver­si­ty on the basis of reli­gion. Empha­siz­ing diver­si­ty of class doesn’t just cre­ate a stu­dent body that looks like Amer­i­ca. It cre­ates a stu­dent body that is like Amer­i­ca.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Racial Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics: A Warn­ing From Sara­je­vo (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “White racial con­scious­ness is taboo for a good his­tor­i­cal rea­son, but any­one with a lick of com­mon sense has to see that you can­not keep attack­ing white peo­ple as moral­ly bad because of the col­or of their skin, and pun­ish them in pub­lic and pri­vate life because they are white, with­out invit­ing push­back.”
    • We are play­ing with fire when it comes to race in Amer­i­ca and pray we open our eyes before the flames rage out of con­trol.
  5. Stan­ford knew about the cam­pus imposter for a year. He kept com­ing back. (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic safe­ty depart­ment have been aware since at least Decem­ber 2021 that William Cur­ry, the Alaba­ma native who was removed from cam­pus Thurs­day, had pre­tend­ed to be a Stan­ford stu­dent and lived in mul­ti­ple Uni­ver­si­ty dorms, accord­ing to com­mu­ni­ca­tions obtained by The Dai­ly.” Very detailed. A well-report­ed sto­ry.
    • Imposter recounts his time on cam­pus (Theo Bak­er, The Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Cur­ry said he lied to peo­ple in high school about attend­ing Stan­ford and claimed his par­ents believed he was enrolled in the Uni­ver­si­ty. He con­firmed many ele­ments of the Daily’s report­ing and even mes­saged a Dai­ly reporter after the inter­view, say­ing ‘always my duty to help my fel­low stu­dents.’ ” — empha­sis added. Less inter­est­ing than the main sto­ry, but still intrigu­ing.
    • In oth­er Stan­ford news, Stan­ford Tree gets the axe, sus­pend­ed until Jan­u­ary (Car­o­line Chen & Yana Kim, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In the fall of 2020, the Band tran­si­tioned from a Vol­un­tary Stu­dent Orga­ni­za­tion (VSO) to being under the Depart­ment of Ath­let­ics (DAPER). At the same time, its Con­sti­tu­tion, which allowed stu­dent self-expres­sion such as kneel­ing dur­ing the nation­al anthem and tap­ing ‘Abol­ish ICE’ on the back of their jack­ets, was dis­solved, accord­ing to Band social chair and recruiter Noah Bartlett ’23, who described there being a sig­nif­i­cant ‘cul­ture shift’ since he joined the Band in 2019.” HOW DARE YOU SAY WE DON’T LIKE FUN! NO FUN FOR YOU!
  6. NYC judge rules polyamorous unions enti­tled to same legal pro­tec­tions as 2‑person rela­tion­ships (Julia Mus­to, NY Post): “In the case at hand, Bac­dayan notes how changes since 1989 play a role, includ­ing changes to the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘fam­i­ly.’ She notes the law has rapid­ly pro­ceed­ed in rec­og­niz­ing that it is pos­si­ble for a child to have more than two legal par­ents. ‘Why then, except for the very real pos­si­bil­i­ty of implic­it majori­tar­i­an ani­mus, is the lim­i­ta­tion of two per­sons insert­ed into the def­i­n­i­tion of a fam­i­ly-like rela­tion­ship for the pur­pos­es of receiv­ing the same pro­tec­tions from evic­tion accord­ed to legal­ly for­mal­ized or blood rela­tion­ships?’ asked Bac­dayan.”
    • “Two per­son rela­tion­ships”
    • This is from ear­ly last month
  7. Mod­er­a­tion Is Dif­fer­ent From Cen­sor­ship (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “A min­i­mum viable prod­uct for mod­er­a­tion with­out cen­sor­ship is for a plat­form to do exact­ly the same thing they’re doing now — remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts — but have an opt-in set­ting, ‘see banned posts’. If you per­son­al­ly choose to see harass­ing and offen­sive con­tent, you can tog­gle that set­ting, and every­thing bad will reap­pear.” The meme near the top made me chuck­le.

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 S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay. From vol­ume 245.

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 368

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 368, which is appar­ent­ly how many ways there are to tile a 4×15 rec­tan­gle with the pen­tomi­noes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Grad­u­al­ly, then Sud­den­ly (Lawrence Freed­man, Sub­stack): “It would of course be pre­ma­ture to pro­nounce a com­plete Ukrain­ian vic­to­ry in the war because of one suc­cess­ful and unex­pect­ed break­through. But what has hap­pened over the past few days is of his­toric impor­tance. This offen­sive has over­turned much of what was con­fi­dent­ly assumed about the course of the war.… Rus­sia is los­ing but it has not yet lost. It still occu­pies a large chunk of Ukrain­ian ter­ri­to­ry and still has sub­stan­tial mil­i­tary assets in the coun­try.”
    • Good news from Ukraine. The author is pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of war stud­ies at King’s Col­lege in Lon­don. He’s not some ran­do pop­ping off.
  2. An Icon, Not An Idol (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The Crown rep­re­sents some­thing from the ancient past, a log­i­cal­ly inde­fen­si­ble but emo­tion­al­ly salient sym­bol of some­thing called a nation, some­thing that gives its mem­bers mean­ing and hap­pi­ness. How­ev­er shit­ty the econ­o­my, or awful the prime min­is­ter, or ugly the dis­course, the monarch is able to rep­re­sent the nation all the time. In a liv­ing, breath­ing, mor­tal per­son. The impor­tance of this in a deeply polar­ized and ide­o­log­i­cal world, where fel­low cit­i­zens have come to despise their oppo­nents as ene­mies, is hard to mea­sure. But it mat­ters that divi­sive fig­ures such as Boris John­son or Mar­garet Thatch­er were nev­er required or expect­ed to rep­re­sent the entire nation. It mat­ters that in times of pro­found acri­mo­ny, some­thing unites.”
  3. No Longer Strug­gling To Believe (John W. Kennedy, AG News): “The first week on cam­pus in Con­way, Schiefer went to a Chi Alpha gath­er­ing — on acci­dent. She saw a fly­er adver­tis­ing an event with a band. She appre­ci­at­ed the music, but no so much the lyrics. Jesus kept pop­ping up in the words of the cho­rus­es. ‘It’s not that I hat­ed Chris­tians,’ says the straight­for­ward Schiefer. ‘I just thought they were stu­pid.’ Still, Schiefer left the ini­tial meet­ing with a nag­ging sen­sa­tion that she had a void in her life. That first semes­ter, sev­er­al of her dor­m­mates who treat­ed her with respect reg­u­lar­ly went to Chi Alpha gath­er­ings and they invit­ed her along. Soon she began attend­ing every Mon­day night. ‘I found friend­ship before faith,’ Schiefer says. ‘My class­mates weren’t intim­i­dat­ed by my lack of faith or my ask­ing ques­tions.’ ”
  4. Ex-Alien Judge Speaks Out in Favor of Using the Statu­to­ry Term “Alien” Rather Than “Nonci­t­i­zen” (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “Defend­ers of ‘nonci­t­i­zen’ some­times claim that this word is inter­change­able with alien because every­one is a cit­i­zen of some­where, sans the unusu­al case of the indi­vid­ual who has some­how been ren­dered state­less. This con­tention is not an accu­rate excuse. For one, monar­chies exist. A Span­ish born per­son is a ‘sub­ject’ of the King­dom of Spain, albeit he may have demo­c­ra­t­ic rights. One born in Sau­di Ara­bia is sim­i­lar­ly a ‘sub­ject’ of the House of Saud. Even more, a per­son born in Amer­i­can Samoa or Swains Island is a U.S. nation­al, but not a cit­i­zen; he or she can­not vote in fed­er­al elec­tions nor hold fed­er­al office. These dis­tinc­tions mat­ter. Words mat­ter. Our fed­er­al immi­gra­tion statutes con­cern them­selves with aliens. This word is not a pejo­ra­tive nor an insult. I cer­tain­ly did not con­sid­er it an insult to be referred to as an alien in my depor­ta­tion pro­ceed­ings.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  5. The Debate Over Mus­lim Col­lege Stu­dents Get­ting Secret Mar­riages (Emma Green, The New York­er): “Moha­jir tries to be direct in her book. She writes that ‘there appears to be a pro­found rise in the preva­lence of secret mar­riages among Mus­lim Amer­i­cans, espe­cial­ly polyg­y­nous secret mar­riages,’ in which men take more than one wife. ‘I per­son­al­ly have a major, vis­cer­al reac­tion to polygamy,’ Quraishi-Lan­des, the Wis­con­sin schol­ar, who also edit­ed the book, said. ‘I was, like, ‘I don’t want to nor­mal­ize secret polygamy. I don’t like that.’ Moha­jir replied, ‘Look, the whole book is about real-life rela­tion­ships. And if peo­ple are real­ly in a real-life polyg­a­mous rela­tion­ship, here’s how we can help them make it healthy and not abu­sive.’ ”
    • I had heard of secret mar­riages, but I had­n’t con­sid­ered that secret mar­riages among young Mus­lim men would almost cer­tain­ly be polyg­a­mous.
  6. How the Media Fell for A Racism Sham (Jesse Sin­gal, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “For mil­lions of peo­ple watch­ing this sto­ry unfold, this was yet anoth­er exam­ple of the inerad­i­ca­ble stain of Amer­i­can racism, of just how lit­tle progress we’ve real­ly made. Except it didn’t hap­pen.… All the jour­nal­ists who cred­u­lous­ly report­ed on this event were wrong—and it was an embar­rass­ing kind of wrong, because the red flags were large, numer­ous, and flap­ping loud­ly. Richard­son and her fam­i­ly mem­bers report­ed that racial slurs had been hurled with aban­don, loud­ly and repeat­ed­ly, in a crowd­ed gym filled with more than 5,000 peo­ple. But the jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing this inci­dent nev­er stopped to notice how odd it was that none of these vile slurs were cap­tured by any of the thou­sands of lit­tle hand­held cam­eras in the gym at the time, nor on the big­ger cam­eras record­ing the match. Nor did they find it strange that in the days fol­low­ing the inci­dent, not a sin­gle oth­er eye­wit­ness came forward—none of Richardson’s black team­mates, and none of the play­ers for either team.”
    • I’ve been fol­low­ing this sto­ry, wait­ing for a thor­ough well-put togeth­er piece. This is it. It illu­mi­nates some­thing very sad about con­tem­po­rary media.
  7. Blunt Viet­nam Marine Tells You Exact­ly What Hap­pened To Him (Bill Ehrhart, YouTube): six­teen min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent — extreme­ly inter­est­ing. In the com­ments the film­mak­er rec­om­mends watch­ing Mag­nif­i­cent Viet­nam Green Beret Tells What Hap­pened To Him (David Chris­t­ian, YouTube, one hour long!) to hear an equal­ly artic­u­late but dif­fer­ing per­spec­tive. I have watched excerpts from it and can con­firm he’s a good sto­ry­teller and dis­agrees with the first gent quite strong­ly. Both rec­om­mend­ed if you have the time and are inter­est­ed in war/foreign pol­i­cy.

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 Weath­er­ing the Storm: How Faith Affects Well-Being (Byron John­son & Chris­tos Makridis, Pub­lic Dis­course): “First, and con­sis­tent with pri­or stud­ies, active Chris­tians exhib­it 6 per­cent greater cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and are 6 per­cent­age points more like­ly to report that they are thriving—a mea­sure from Gallup that com­bines respon­dent infor­ma­tion on both cur­rent life sat­is­fac­tion and expect­ed future life sat­is­fac­tion over the next five years. Sec­ond, and at least as impor­tant, we found that SWB is either acycli­cal or slight­ly coun­ter­cycli­cal for active Chris­tians, where­as it is strong­ly pro­cycli­cal for (inac­tive) Chris­tians and the­ists.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. The study which this arti­cle sum­ma­rizes is on SSRN: Does Reli­gious Affil­i­a­tion Pro­tect People’s Well-being? Evi­dence from the Great Reces­sion After Cor­rect­ing for Selec­tion Effects.  From vol­ume 235.

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 365

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 365, which is the num­ber of days in most years. In oth­er words, I’ve done the equiv­a­lent of work­ing on this email dai­ly for a year. In real­i­ty I just add a lit­tle bit every day as I’m read­ing things, but it’s still a big sta­tis­tic.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good. And, above all, lis­ten to your moth­er.”
    • Warn­ing: the head­er pic­ture is risque but the arti­cle is worth it. The author is not a Chris­t­ian and unsur­pris­ing­ly comes to some non-Chris­t­ian con­clu­sions — still fas­ci­nat­ing to see a force­ful sec­u­lar rejec­tion of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion.
  2. Racism-relat­ed:
    • Black cou­ple sues after they say home val­u­a­tion ris­es near­ly $300,000 when shown by White col­league (Justin Gam­ble and Vir­ginia Lang­maid, CNN): “Con­nol­ly and Mott lat­er re-applied with anoth­er lender, and ‘white­washed’ their home, accord­ing to the law­suit. This includ­ed remov­ing pho­tos of their Black fam­i­ly from the home, and hav­ing a White col­league present the prop­er­ty to the apprais­er. The suit claims this val­u­a­tion came back at $750,000, more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars high­er than 20/20 Val­u­a­tions’ appraisal of $472,000.”
    • In California’s largest race bias cas­es, Lati­no work­ers are accused of abus­ing Black col­leagues (Mar­got Roo­sevelt, Los Ange­les Times): “Though the agency tracks the race and eth­nic­i­ty of vic­tims, it does not com­pile offi­cial sta­tis­tics on offend­ers. Nor are there data­bas­es of pri­vate cas­es cat­e­go­rized by per­pe­tra­tors’ race. This makes it hard to gauge the extent of anti-Black hos­til­i­ty from Lati­no work­ers. But court fil­ings, vic­tims’ alle­ga­tions and employ­er records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Ange­les and San Fran­cis­co offices involved dis­crim­i­na­tion by Lati­nos, about a third involved white offend­ers and a third were unspe­cif­ic.”
  3. Chris­t­ian Polit­i­cal Ethics Are Upside Down (David French, The Dis­patch): “…both the Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties are utter­ly depen­dent upon their most devout mem­bers for their elec­toral suc­cess. As I’ve not­ed before, non­white Democ­rats (and espe­cial­ly black Democ­rats) are among the most God-fear­ing, church­go­ing mem­bers of Amer­i­can soci­ety. At the same time, the Repub­li­can Par­ty would be irrel­e­vant with­out its own white Evan­gel­i­cal base. The bot­tom line is that Chris­tians in both par­ties have absolute veto pow­er over (at the very least) the party’s nation­al can­di­dates.”
  4. Silent cri­sis of soar­ing excess deaths grip­ping Britain is only tip of the ice­berg (Sarah Knap­ton, The Tele­graph via Yahoo News): “For 14 of the past 15 weeks, Eng­land and Wales have aver­aged around 1,000 extra deaths each week, none of which are due to Covid. If the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry con­tin­ues, the num­ber of non-Covid excess deaths will soon out­strip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more dead­ly than the omi­cron wave. So what is going on? Experts believe deci­sions tak­en by the Gov­ern­ment in the ear­li­est stages of the pan­dem­ic may now be com­ing back to bite. Poli­cies that kept peo­ple indoors, scared them away from hos­pi­tals and deprived them of treat­ment and pri­ma­ry care are final­ly tak­ing their toll.”
  5. The Rise of the Work­er Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Score (Jodi Kan­tor and Arya Sun­daram, New York Times): “…two years ago, her employ­er start­ed requir­ing chap­lains to accrue more of what it called ‘pro­duc­tiv­i­ty points.’ A vis­it to the dying: as lit­tle as one point. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in a funer­al: one and three-quar­ters points. A phone call to griev­ing rel­a­tives: one-quar­ter point.”
  6. Good con­ver­sa­tions have lots of door­knobs (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Con­ver­sa­tion­al affor­dances are things like digres­sions and con­fes­sions and bold claims that beg for a rejoin­der. Talk­ing to anoth­er per­son is like rock climb­ing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist our­selves sky­ward. Maybe that’s why a real­ly good con­ver­sa­tion feels a lit­tle bit like float­ing. What mat­ters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affor­dances.” The author has a PhD in psy­chol­o­gy from Har­vard and is doing a post­doc at Colum­bia study­ing con­ver­sa­tions.
    • Relat­ed: Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “…most of us are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mis­tak­en about how much we will enjoy a social encounter. Com­muters expect­ed to have less pleas­ant rides if they tried to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger. But their actu­al expe­ri­ence was pre­cise­ly the oppo­site. Peo­ple ran­dom­ly assigned to talk with a stranger enjoyed their trips con­sis­tent­ly more than those instruct­ed to keep to them­selves. Intro­verts some­times go into these sit­u­a­tions with par­tic­u­lar­ly low expec­ta­tions, but both intro­verts and extro­verts tend­ed to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions more than rid­ing solo.”
  7. Put Down the Woke Man’s Bur­den (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “The Har­vard being whipped along by the admin­is­tra­tive caste, by con­trast, resem­bles the Children’s Cru­sade of the Mid­dle Ages: wrong cause, wrong army. And it ends up attack­ing the wrong ene­mies.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Relat­ed: Harvard’s Sta­tus as Wealth­i­est School Faces Oil-Rich Con­tender in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas (Janet Lorin & Ser­gio Cha­pa, Bloomberg): “Oil reached a high of $120 a bar­rel ear­li­er this year as a result of a war-induced ener­gy crunch. The rev­enue is expect­ed to help nar­row the gap between the Texas system’s $42.9 bil­lion endow­ment and Harvard’s $53.2 bil­lion as of June 2021. ‘The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas has a cash wind­fall when every­one is look­ing at a poten­tial cash crunch,’ said William Goet­z­mann, a pro­fes­sor of finance and man­age­ment stud­ies at Yale University’s School of Man­age­ment. ‘Adjust­ing your port­fo­lio for social con­cerns is not cost­less.’ ”

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 trans­paren­cy makes the world more opaque. (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The demand for trans­paren­cy seems so innocu­ous. Who could be against greater trans­paren­cy? But trans­paren­cy is inim­i­cal to pri­va­cy. And we care about pri­va­cy in part, because we can be more hon­est and truth­ful in pri­vate than in public.”First shared in vol­ume 233.

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 351

this week’s news was full of stuff I did not like

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 the 351st install­ment. 351 is, I am told, the small­est num­ber such that it and its sur­round­ing num­bers are all prod­ucts of 4 or more primes (in the case of 351=3·3·3·13).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Col­lege Stu­dents Are Not OK  (Jonathan Malesic, New York Times): “High­er edu­ca­tion is now at a turn­ing point. The accom­mo­da­tions for the pan­dem­ic can either end or be made per­ma­nent. The task won’t be easy, but uni­ver­si­ties need to help stu­dents rebuild their abil­i­ty to learn. And to do that, every­one involved — stu­dents, fac­ul­ties, admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic at large — must insist on in-per­son class­es and high expec­ta­tions for fall 2022 and beyond.” The author has a PhD in reli­gious stud­ies and was a tenured the­ol­o­gy prof, but now teach­es writ­ing at anoth­er uni­ver­si­ty. His per­son­al jour­ney seems inter­est­ing.
  2. MIT, Har­vard sci­en­tists find AI can rec­og­nize race from X‑rays — and nobody knows how (Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe): “Ghas­se­mi and her col­leagues remain baf­fled, but she sus­pects it has some­thing to do with melanin, the pig­ment that deter­mines skin col­or. Per­haps X‑rays and CT scan­ners detect the high­er melanin con­tent of dark­er skin, and embed this infor­ma­tion in the dig­i­tal image in some fash­ion that human users have nev­er noticed before. It’ll take a lot more research to be sure.”
  3. Pan­dem­ic news, not great this week:
    • The Covid Capit­u­la­tion (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “To recap, we have a high­ly unfa­vor­able pic­ture of: (1) accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new vari­ants; (2) pro­gres­sive­ly high­er trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty and infec­tious­ness; (4) sub­stan­tial­ly less pro­tec­tion from trans­mis­sion by vac­cines and boost­ers; (5) some reduc­tion on vaccine/booster pro­tec­tion against hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and death; (6) high vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty from infec­tion-acquired immu­ni­ty only; and (7) like­li­hood of more nox­ious new vari­ants in the months ahead” The author is a pro­fes­sor of mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine at the Scripps Insti­tute.
    • Per­ma­nent Pan­dem­ic (Justin E. H. Smith, Harper’s Mag­a­zine): “That the polit­i­cal is always biopo­lit­i­cal, in at least this gen­er­al sense, may be a fact that recedes from view in those rare moments when things are func­tion­ing smooth­ly. At such times, the var­i­ous doc­u­ments that gov­ern­ments make us fill out and sign, or fill out on our behalf when we are born, mar­ried, arrest­ed, or dead; the var­i­ous licens­es we get renewed; and the accred­i­ta­tions we col­lect come to appear as ends in them­selves rather than as part of a vast appa­ra­tus that lim­its what we can do with our own bod­ies.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris.
    • The new Covid equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I know many of you like to say ‘No worse than the com­mon cold!’ Well, the thing is…the com­mon cold impos­es con­sid­er­able costs on the world. Imag­ine a new com­mon cold, which you catch a few times a year, with some sliv­er of the pop­u­la­tion get­ting some form of Long Covid. One 2003 esti­mate sug­gest­ed that the com­mon cold costs us $40 bil­lion a year, and in a typ­i­cal year I don’t get a cold even once.… Even under mild con­cep­tions of cur­rent Covid, it is entire­ly plau­si­ble to believe that the costs of Covid will run into the tril­lions over the next ten years.”
    • With Plung­ing Enroll­ment, a ‘Seis­mic Hit’ to Pub­lic Schools (Shawn Hubler, New York Times): “No over­rid­ing expla­na­tion has emerged yet for the wide­spread drop-off. But experts point to two poten­tial caus­es: Some par­ents became so fed up with remote instruc­tion or mask man­dates that they start­ed home-school­ing their chil­dren or send­ing them to pri­vate or parochial schools that large­ly remained open dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. And oth­er fam­i­lies were thrown into such tur­moil by pan­dem­ic-relat­ed job loss­es, home­less­ness and school clo­sures that their chil­dren sim­ply dropped out.”
  4. Abor­tion-relat­ed:
    • Roe draft is a reminder that reli­gion’s role in pol­i­tics is old­er than the repub­lic (Ron Elv­ing, NPR): “The ques­tion aris­es: Since when did so much of our pol­i­tics have to do with reli­gion? And the answer is, since the begin­ning – and even before. Reli­gion was a dri­ving and deter­mi­na­tive force in pol­i­tics on this con­ti­nent even before the ‘Unit­ed States’ had been formed.And it has been brought to bear in wide­ly dis­parate caus­es. Reli­gion has been invoked to con­demn slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion, to ban alco­hol and the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion­ary sci­ence and to bol­ster anti-war move­ments.”
    • When an Abor­tion Is Pro-Life (Matthew Lof­tus, New York Times): “I view my work as a physi­cian as part of a bat­tle against bro­ken­ness in the phys­i­cal health of my patients, a bat­tle whose tide was turned when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible teach­es that our phys­i­cal bod­ies will one day be res­ur­rect­ed as Christ’s was, mys­te­ri­ous­ly trans­formed but some­how also con­tin­u­ous with our present flesh and blood — like a seed is trans­formed into a plant. I teach and work along­side local health pro­fes­sion­als so that we can care holis­ti­cal­ly for peo­ple in need, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Jesus, the heal­er.… Here, I think the excep­tion proves the rule: End­ing a child’s life before birth is so wrong that only sav­ing anoth­er life could be worth it.” This is a remark­able op-ed.
    • A cri­tique of the reli­gious pro-life move­ment: The Reli­gious Right and the Abor­tion Myth (Ran­dall Balmer, Politi­co): “White evan­gel­i­cals in the 1970s did not mobi­lize against Roe v. Wade, which they con­sid­ered a Catholic issue. They orga­nized instead to defend racial seg­re­ga­tion in evan­gel­i­cal insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Bob Jones Uni­ver­si­ty. To sug­gest oth­er­wise is to per­pe­trate what I call the abor­tion myth, the fic­tion that the gen­e­sis of the Reli­gious Right — the pow­er­ful evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal move­ment that has reshaped Amer­i­can pol­i­tics over the past four decades — lay in oppo­si­tion to abor­tion.”
    • But actu­al­ly no: What every­one gets wrong about evan­gel­i­cals and abor­tion (Gillian Frank & Neil J. Young, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Twelve years before the Roe deci­sion, a young woman wrote to the lead­ing U.S. evan­ge­list, the Rev. Bil­ly Gra­ham, with the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘Through a young and fool­ish sin, I had an abor­tion. I now feel guilty of mur­der. How can I ever know for­give­ness?’ Gra­ham, whose syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per col­umn ‘My Answer’ reached mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, replied: ‘Abor­tion is as vio­lent a sin against God, nature, and one’s self as one can com­mit.’ Gra­ham telegraphed evan­gel­i­cals’ unease with abor­tion, which would become increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal in the com­ing years.”
    • Real­ly actu­al­ly no: There’s been some dis­cus­sion about how evan­gel­i­cals in the U.S. didn’t start oppos­ing abor­tion until the late 1970s – sev­er­al years after Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s a lot more nuance to that his­to­ry. (Andrew Lewis, Twit­ter): an inter­est­ing thread from a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati.
    • As in strong­ly no: Ballmer also mis­rep­re­sent­ed the legal aspects of this sto­ry (Jon White­head, Twit­ter)
  5. How Mary White­house Waged War on Pornog­ra­phy (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “White­house was mocked for pre­dict­ing that sex­u­al mes­sag­ing would soon tar­get chil­dren; it is now the norm for LGBT con­tent to appear on children’s TV shows and in sto­ry­books. She warned that films such as Bernar­do Bertolucci’s Last Tan­go in Paris crossed a line; it was lat­er revealed that the rape scene in the movie deeply trau­ma­tized the scene’s young actress, who received vile treat­ment at the hands of old­er men. On the big cul­tur­al ques­tions, White­house was right and her crit­ics were wrong.”
  6. Nao­mi Judd: ‘It’s scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so togeth­er side’ (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Nao­mi Judd thought she under­stood the ties that bind coun­try-music stars and their audi­ence – then one aggres­sive fan went and joined the Pen­te­costal church the Judd fam­i­ly called home. ‘It real­ly bur­dened me,’ said Judd, after sign­ing hun­dreds of her ‘Love Can Build a Bridge’ mem­oir back in 1993. ‘I just don’t sign auto­graphs at church. The best way I can explain it to chil­dren … is to say, ‘Hon­ey, Jesus is the star.’ ” What a great open­ing sto­ry.
  7. On the shoot­ings:
    • Faith on the ground in Buf­fa­lo: Voice Buf­fa­lo exec­u­tive direc­tor Denise Walden (Adelle M. Banks, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “They are some of the matri­archs and the pil­lars of our com­mu­ni­ty. They will be missed in ways that I don’t think I can do jus­tice to describ­ing, but who bring joy to this com­mu­ni­ty. They’re the ones who help stand and hold this com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er.”
    • The FAQs: What Chris­tians Should Know About the ‘Great Replace­ment’ The­o­ry (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “The recent shoot­ing in Buf­fa­lo is the fifth ter­ror­ist attack in the past five years in which a white suprema­cist gun­man made ref­er­ence to the Great Replace­ment con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.… Chris­tians should be the first to decry the racism and xeno­pho­bia of the the­o­ry, along with con­demn­ing the vio­lence it has per­pet­u­at­ed.”
    • Doc­tor Who Fought Church Gun­man Remem­bered as Kind Pro­tec­tor (Julie Wat­son, Min­istry Watch): “The fam­i­ly and sports med­i­cine physi­cian was like fam­i­ly to the staff and he encour­aged them to learn kung fu, telling them about the impor­tance of know­ing self-defense tech­niques. He also learned how to han­dle a gun for that same rea­son. That pre­pared­ness com­bined with Cheng’s serene dis­po­si­tion like­ly gave him a pro­cliv­i­ty for act­ing hero­ical­ly, accord­ing to active shoot­er experts.… Author­i­ties cred­it Cheng’s quick action with sav­ing per­haps dozens of lives at a cel­e­bra­to­ry lun­cheon for con­gre­gants and their for­mer pas­tor at Irvine Tai­wanese Pres­by­ter­ian Church, which wor­ships at Gene­va Pres­by­ter­ian Church in the Orange Coun­ty com­mu­ni­ty of Lagu­na Woods.”
    • After Shoot­ing, Church­es Nav­i­gate Chi­na-Tai­wan Ten­sions Under the Sur­face (Kate Shell­nutt & Sean Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As soon as they heard that a gun­man attacked a Tai­wanese church in Cal­i­for­nia on Sun­day, some Tai­wanese cor­rect­ly assumed polit­i­cal motives.… The shoot­ing sus­pect, David Wen­wei Chou, was born and raised in Tai­wan but con­sid­ers him­self Chi­nese. (Chi­na cur­rent­ly claims Tai­wan as its ter­ri­to­ry.) He left notes in Chi­nese in his car stat­ing he did not believe Tai­wan should be inde­pen­dent from Chi­na. Chi­nese social media cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos of Chou indi­cat­ing that he was a leader of a Chi­nese pro-uni­fi­ca­tion orga­ni­za­tion in Las Vegas.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.”  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.