Tag: religious freedom

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 228

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Tale of Two Church­es (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, NY Review of Books): “To many reli­gious peo­ple, there’s no such thing as coin­ci­dence: Pas­tor Jay and Pas­tor Der­rick felt acute­ly the prophet­ic nature of their union tak­ing place just the day before the shoot­ing. It felt as though, in the midst of the chaos and the con­fu­sion, God was using them to write a bet­ter sto­ry. The Lord had guid­ed them to their merg­er at exact­ly the right time to redi­rect the anger and pain in the com­mu­ni­ty to a high­er, holy pur­pose.”
    • This my must-read link of the week. SO GOOD. I almost cried.
    • Kind of relat­ed but only mar­gin­al­ly: Pray­ing for Hong Kong Can Be Polit­i­cal­ly Disruptive—Even in Amer­i­ca  (D Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dif­fer­ent ori­gins among eth­nic Chi­nese immi­grants can fos­ter dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views, with more Chris­tians from Chi­na sup­port­ing the poli­cies of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, and those from else­where often more crit­i­cal of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
  2. ‘Absolute­ly No Mer­cy’: Leaked Files Expose How Chi­na Orga­nized Mass Deten­tions of Mus­lims (Austin Ramzy and Chris Buck­ley, NY Times): “…one of the most sig­nif­i­cant leaks of gov­ern­ment papers from inside China’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty in decades. They pro­vide an unprece­dent­ed inside view of the con­tin­u­ing clam­p­down in Xin­jiang, in which the author­i­ties have cor­ralled as many as a mil­lion eth­nic Uighurs, Kaza­khs and oth­ers into intern­ment camps and pris­ons over the past three years.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. More Preg­nan­cy, Less Crime (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “More gen­er­al­ly, how­ev­er, there are pol­i­cy impli­ca­tion if we think beyond the imme­di­ate results. First, these results show that crime isn’t sim­ply a prod­uct of fam­i­ly back­ground, pover­ty and neglect. Crime is a choice.”
    • The orig­i­nal study: Fam­i­ly For­ma­tion and Crime (Max­im Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose, job mar­ket paper, pdf link): “Our event-study analy­sis indi­cates that preg­nan­cy trig­gers sharp declines in crime rival­ing any known inter­ven­tion.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Dat­ing Mar­ket (Tyro Part­ners, pdf link): “With the advent of online dat­ing, women in prime repro­duc­tive age are in the dom­i­nant posi­tion in the dat­ing mar­ket for the first time in human history.This comes with huge social ram­i­fi­ca­tions.” The authors are hedge fund guys. Inter­est­ing through­out and at times quite amus­ing. I espe­cial­ly com­mend to you the chart at the bot­tom of the page 5 con­trast­ed with the chart at the top of page 6.
  4. Thread on the protests in Iran (Shay Khatiri, Twit­ter): “Dur­ing its first 24 hours, it’s already been the most vio­lent protests in decades, if not ever. 1979 rev­o­lu­tion did not reach this lev­el of vio­lence.”
    • Amnesty Says At Least 106 Killed In Iran Protests (John Gam­brell, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Days of protests in Iran over ris­ing fuel prices and a sub­se­quent gov­ern­ment crack­down have killed at least 106 peo­ple across the Islam­ic Repub­lic, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al said Tues­day, cit­ing ‘cred­i­ble reports.’”
  5. Why Some Peo­ple Are Impos­si­bly Tal­ent­ed (David Rob­son, BBC): “…influ­en­tial sci­en­tists are much more like­ly to have diverse inter­ests out­side their pri­ma­ry area of research than the aver­age sci­en­tist, for instance. Stud­ies have found that Nobel Prize-win­ning sci­en­tists are about 25 times more like­ly to sing, dance or act than the aver­age sci­en­tist. They are also 17 times more like­ly to cre­ate visu­al art, 12 times more like­ly to write poet­ry and four times more like­ly to be a musi­cian.”
  6. 2019 Reli­gious Free­dom Index (Beck­et Law): “If Amer­i­ca is becom­ing less reli­gious, as some polls indi­cate, does that nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it is also becom­ing less sup­port­ive of reli­gious lib­er­ty pro­tec­tions? Are we, in fact, divid­ed on ques­tions of reli­gious free­dom?… With a cur­rent score of 67, the 2019 Index indi­cates strong sup­port for reli­gious free­dom pro­tec­tions. ”
  7. Why Did the Wall Fall, 30 Years Ago? (George Weigel, First Things): “Get­ting this his­to­ry straight is impor­tant, not just as a mat­ter of intel­lec­tu­al hygiene but for the future. Pub­lic offi­cials who do not grasp the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to the col­lapse of Euro­pean com­mu­nism and the emer­gence of new democ­ra­cies in cen­tral and east­ern Europe are unlike­ly to appre­ci­ate the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to free and vir­tu­ous 21st-cen­tu­ry soci­eties and to 21st-cen­tu­ry democ­ra­cy.”

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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 223

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. Ethiopia’s Evan­gel­i­cal Prime Min­is­ter Wins Nobel Peace Prize (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The son of a Mus­lim father and Ortho­dox moth­er, Ahmed is a Protes­tant Pen­te­costal, or ‘Pen­tay,’ like many Ethiopi­an politi­cians. His faith is seen as a dri­ving fac­tor in his push for peace.”
  2. Alge­ria Forces Chris­tians Out of the Country’s Largest Church­es (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At least 15 Protes­tant churches—out of only about 46 in the country—have been shut­tered since Jan­u­ary 2018, accord­ing to the Chris­t­ian advo­ca­cy group Mid­dle East Con­cern. The coun­try, home to just 125,000 Chris­tians, few­er than 1 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, ranks 22nd on Open Doors’ World Watch List. Chris­t­ian con­gre­ga­tions strug­gle to reg­is­ter with the gov­ern­ment agency tasked with reg­u­lat­ing non-Mus­lim wor­ship, per a 2006 law. It nev­er con­venes and has not issued a sin­gle approval.”
  3. The Per­ilous Pow­er of the Preacher’s Wife (Kate Bowler, New York TImes): “Ordained pro­gres­sive women secure a mea­sure of insti­tu­tion­al sway, but they lack the cul­tur­al cap­i­tal of their con­ser­v­a­tive coun­ter­parts. My research shows that con­ser­v­a­tive women gain con­sid­er­able influ­ence with­out insti­tu­tion­al pow­er, and lib­er­al women gain insti­tu­tion­al pow­er with­out con­sid­er­able influ­ence.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Duke Divin­i­ty School and I have spot­light­ed arti­cles by her three times pre­vi­ous­ly, in vol­ume 37, vol­ume 116, and vol­ume 143.
  4. The delud­ed cult of social jus­tice (John Gray, UnHerd): “Sel­dom have the demands of jus­tice been so man­i­fest­ly fad­dish. Increas­ing­ly, jus­tice is seen as not an attribute of legal sys­tems but of entire soci­eties. At the same time it is believed to be owed to groups more than indi­vid­u­als. In these cir­cum­stances, every­thing depends on whether the group to which peo­ple are deemed to be belong is in vogue.” The author is a retired pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy (Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics) and a well-known athe­ist. 
  5. How to Con­vince an Athe­ist that God Exists (John Ellis, per­son­al blog): “I didn’t become an athe­ist because that’s what I want­ed; I became an athe­ist because I believed it was the truth. So, stand­ing on that side­walk while try­ing not to think about my mom pray­ing for me, I cursed a God I didn’t even believe exist­ed.”
  6. Some thoughts about China’s gov­ern­ment:
    • What are the Options Part III: The Big­ger Pic­ture (Christo­pher Bald­ing, per­son­al blog): “The Unit­ed States must be pre­pared to lay­out a vision for the val­ue it wants to pro­mote, to make the biggest sac­ri­fices to real­ize those val­ues, share the ben­e­fits with aligned coun­tries, and deny ben­e­fits to adver­sary or non­aligned coun­tries.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I linked to anoth­er of Balding’s posts about Chi­na back in vol­ume 162. 
    • Here’s a grow­ing list of com­pa­nies bow­ing to Chi­na cen­sor­ship pres­sure (Natasha Pinon, Mash­able): “Major glob­al com­pa­nies have been bow­ing to both direct and indi­rect pres­sure from Chi­na’s polit­i­cal lead­ers to con­trol how the eco­nom­ic pow­er­house of a coun­try is por­trayed for some time.”
    • Chi­na’s Vision of Vic­to­ry? (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “So-called influ­ence oper­a­tions are aimed at the ene­mies China’s lead­ers fear most: the ones who pose an ide­o­log­i­cal, not a geopo­lit­i­cal, threat to the Com­mu­nist Par­ty. These are the hos­tile forces that threat­en the sta­bil­i­ty of the Com­mu­nist regime, and many of them—from Chris­tians and Uighurs flee­ing reli­gious per­se­cu­tion to Tai­wanese, Hong Kongers, and oth­ers of Chi­nese descent who dare imag­ine dif­fer­ent futures for their people—live in Amer­i­ca. As long as these groups can safe­ly assem­ble and freely speak with­in the Unit­ed States, Amer­i­ca will be seen as a threat to the Chi­nese par­ty-state. Sim­i­lar fears have already led Bei­jing to demand ide­o­log­i­cal feal­ty from its for­eign debtors. China’s lead­ers do not ask clients to change their sys­tem of gov­ern­ment but to squelch crit­i­cism of Chi­nese com­mu­nism inside their bor­ders.” Greer has appeared once before in vol­ume 217.
    • China’s Loom­ing Class Strug­gle (Joel Kotkin, Quil­lette): “Ini­tial­ly, China’s progress lift­ed up all class­es, rais­ing as many as 850 mil­lion peo­ple out of extreme pover­ty in 40 years, one of the great­est eco­nom­ic accom­plish­ments in his­to­ry. Yet the boom has been less suc­cess­ful in cre­at­ing a West­ern-style mass mid­dle class which ana­lyst Nan Chen esti­mates at rough­ly 12 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. ‘Rather than repli­cat­ing the mid­dle-class growth of post-World War II Amer­i­ca,’ she observes, ‘Chi­na appears to have skipped that stage alto­geth­er and head­ed straight for a mod­el of extra­or­di­nary pro­duc­tiv­i­ty but dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dis­trib­uted wealth.’” Kotkin is a pro­fes­sor of urban stud­ies at Chap­man Uni­ver­si­ty.
  7. Attor­ney Gen­er­al William P. Barr Deliv­ers Remarks to the Law School and the de Nico­la Cen­ter for Ethics and Cul­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame (William Barr, Depart­ment of Jus­tice): “From the Found­ing Era onward, there was strong con­sen­sus about the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious lib­er­ty in the Unit­ed States. The imper­a­tive of pro­tect­ing reli­gious free­dom was not just a nod in the direc­tion of piety. It reflects the Framers’ belief that reli­gion was indis­pens­able to sus­tain­ing our free sys­tem of gov­ern­ment.” (you can watch a video of the speech instead)
    • What Barr Got Right — And What He Might Add (Howard Husock, Nation­al Review): “Barr stands accused of endors­ing some sort of Chris­t­ian theoc­ra­cy. Barr, of course, hard­ly endorsed the idea the church–state divide should be erased in the Unit­ed States. Nor did he insist that only the reli­gious could live a healthy and pro­duc­tive life. Rather, he sin­gled out for crit­i­cism those who believe that, in effect, gov­ern­ment social pro­grams could replace the virtues instilled by reli­gion. It’s an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion.”
    • William Barr Is Neck-Deep in Extrem­ist Catholic Insti­tu­tions (Joan Walsh, The Nation): “In a histri­on­ic speech at Notre Dame Law School on Fri­day, he blamed ‘sec­u­lar­ists’ and ‘so-called pro­gres­sives’ for destroy­ing soci­ety and pre­cip­i­tat­ing the crises of fam­i­ly dis­so­lu­tion, crime, and drugs, while talk­ing of a war between reli­gious and non­re­li­gious Amer­i­cans.”
    • Bill Barr: Reli­gious Lib­er­ty War­rior (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It’s a stan­dard defense of religion’s role in Amer­i­can life. It would have been unre­mark­able for any US Attor­ney Gen­er­al, Repub­li­can or Demo­c­rat, pri­or to 2008 to have giv­en. But now, many on the Left have become so hate­ful of reli­gion that Barr’s speech strikes the ears of peo­ple like Nobel Prize-win­ning econ­o­mist Paul Krug­man as the hand­i­work of a Cos­sack pro­pa­gan­dist…” I prob­a­bly include more arti­cles from Dreher than any­one else because he is so amaz­ing­ly pro­lif­ic and often writes about top­ics I am inter­est­ed in.

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 (Not So) Sec­u­lar Saint (James K.A. Smith, Los Ange­les Review of Books): “Mill’s lega­cy was effec­tive­ly ‘edit­ed’ by his philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­ci­ples, excis­ing any hint of reli­gious life. One would nev­er know from the canon in our phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, for exam­ple, that Mill wrote an appre­cia­tive essay on ‘The­ism.’” First shared in vol­ume 190.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 216

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 208

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 206

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 204

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

This one is com­ing out extra-ear­ly today because my sched­ule has been and will con­tin­ue to be absurd­ly busy for the next bit. Prayers appre­ci­at­ed!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How lawyers are dis­tort­ing reli­gious free­dom (Asma Uddin, Deseret News): “Last sum­mer, the court decid­ed Trump v. Hawaii (the trav­el ban case) only three weeks after it decid­ed Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop v. Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion, which involved a Chris­t­ian bak­er who refused on reli­gious grounds to bake a wed­ding cake for a gay cou­ple…. The stark con­trast in the court’s approach to anti-reli­gious hos­til­i­ty raised the ques­tion: Does reli­gious free­dom apply equal­ly to Mus­lims and Chris­tians? But in all the pan­ic and pun­dit­ry that ensued, Amer­i­cans over­looked a crit­i­cal fac­tor: The lawyers chal­leng­ing the ban left out legal argu­ments under the Free Exer­cise Clause that, if not omit­ted, might have changed the out­come.” This is a very good (and some­what dis­cour­ag­ing) op-ed.
  2. Lit­er­a­ture as Flat­tery (James McEl­roy, Amer­i­can Affairs Jour­nal): “Con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture is cre­ative­ly exhaust­ed because free indi­rect style places the read­er above the char­ac­ters…. Char­ac­ters have to be blind to the obvi­ous for the sto­ry to work. We are told this style is all about engen­der­ing empa­thy, but in actu­al­i­ty it func­tions by cre­at­ing stunt­ed char­ac­ters. The read­er is trained to look down at oth­ers, and the writer becomes obse­quious to the oh-so-intel­li­gent read­ers’ egos, always telling them, ‘Look how smart you are.’”
  3. The APA Meet­ing: A Pho­to-Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the oth­er.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing.
  4. Two Stan­ford sto­ries:
    • What I Learned When I Called Out an Anti-Semit­ic Car­toon­ist at Stan­ford Ear­li­er This Month (Ari Hoff­man, Mosa­ic): “Per­haps my most sur­pris­ing real­iza­tion was how few are those will­ing to speak pub­licly, under their own name. After my op-ed appeared, some indi­vid­u­als approached me to say they agreed with me but didn’t have the nec­es­sary elo­quence to speak out. To them I would reply: what mat­ters is not poet­ics but prin­ci­ples.” What I found fas­ci­nat­ing about this arti­cle is how uni­ver­sal the prin­ci­ples he artic­u­lates are. If you are a Chris­t­ian debat­ing whether and how to speak out about an issue that grieves you, you will find help­ful advice here.
    • From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.’” What a wild sto­ry.
  5. The Impos­si­ble Future of Chris­tians in the Mid­dle East (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The num­bers in Iraq are espe­cial­ly stark: Before the Amer­i­can inva­sion, as many as 1.4 mil­lion Chris­tians lived in the coun­try. Today, few­er than 250,000 remain—an 80 per­cent drop in less than two decades.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Reli­gious Men Can Be Devot­ed Dads, Too (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Jason S. Car­roll & Lau­rie DeRose, New York Times): “It turns out that fem­i­nism and faith both have high expec­ta­tions of hus­bands and fathers, if for very dif­fer­ent ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, and that both result in high­er-qual­i­ty mar­riages for women.”
    • The title is fun­ny and was prob­a­bly not cho­sen by the authors (that’s usu­al­ly the case in news­pa­pers). This op-ed is a sum­ma­ry of some find­ings from their larg­er report The Ties That Bind: Is Faith a Glob­al Force for Good or Ill in the Fam­i­ly? , where they dis­cov­er, among oth­er things, that “When it comes to rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty in het­ero­sex­u­al rela­tion­ships, high­ly reli­gious cou­ples enjoy high­er-qual­i­ty rela­tion­ships and more sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, com­pared to less/mixed reli­gious cou­ples and sec­u­lar cou­ples. For instance, women in high­ly reli­gious rela­tion­ships are about 50% more like­ly to report that they are strong­ly sat­is­fied with their sex­u­al rela­tion­ship than their sec­u­lar and less reli­gious coun­ter­parts.”
  7. Why Chris­tian­i­ty Quit Grow­ing in Korea (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, The Gospel Coali­tion): “By 1970, 18 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion was Chris­t­ian; by 2000, it was 31 per­cent. (Those counts include Protes­tants and Catholics.) By 2006, South Korea was send­ing out more mis­sion­ar­ies than any oth­er coun­try except the much-larg­er Unit­ed States. By 2015, Seoul was behind only Hous­ton and Dal­las in num­ber of megachurches—and Seoul’s were much larg­er…. And then, things stalled. Growth slowed way down, and church atten­dance began to shrink.” A long and very inter­est­ing arti­cle.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have the provoca­tive “In Defense of Flog­ging” (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was first shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

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.

UPDATE: I mis­tak­en­ly attrib­uted the sto­ry about Jason Spyres to the Stan­ford Dai­ly. It was actu­al­ly in the Stan­ford Review. I’ve cor­rect­ed the offend­ing para­graph.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 202

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 201

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The alleged syn­a­gogue shoot­er was a church­go­er who artic­u­lat­ed Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy, prompt­ing tough ques­tions for evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors (Julie Zauzmer, The Wash­ing­ton Post va SF Gate): “Before he alleged­ly walked into a syn­a­gogue in Poway, Cal­i­for­nia and opened fire, John Earnest appears to have writ­ten a sev­en-page let­ter spelling out his core beliefs: That Jew­ish peo­ple, guilty in his view of faults rang­ing from killing Jesus to con­trol­ling the media, deserved to die. That his inten­tion to kill Jews would glo­ri­fy God…. Earnest, 19, was a mem­ber of an OPC con­gre­ga­tion. His father was an elder. He attend­ed reg­u­lar­ly. And in the man­i­festo, the writer spewed not only invec­tive against Jews and racial minori­ties, but also cogent Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy he heard in the pews.”
    • Kin­ism, Cul­tur­al Marx­ism, and the Syn­a­gogue Shoot­er (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “Sev­er­al years ago a friend of mine, a Pres­by­ter­ian min­is­ter, asked me to speak to his con­gre­ga­tion about cul­tur­al issues. Dur­ing the dis­cus­sion, an old­er cou­ple asked me a ques­tion about sep­a­ra­tion of eth­nic groups, specif­i­cal­ly white Amer­i­cans from blacks and Jews. I told them I must have mis­un­der­stood their ques­tion, because what they were talk­ing about could be mis­tak­en for pro­mot­ing a view called kin­ism. The wife replied, ‘And what’s wrong with kin­ism?’”
    • Why white nation­al­ism tempts white Chris­tians (Jemar Tis­by, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “I absolute­ly do not believe that pas­tors in the OPC or any sim­i­lar denom­i­na­tion are reg­u­lar­ly spew­ing anti-Semi­tism and racism from the pul­pit or on any oth­er occa­sion. But the rigid exclu­sion of dis­cus­sions of racial injus­tice from the reg­u­lar preach­ing and teach­ing in these church­es means that white nation­al­ists are sel­dom chal­lenged in their beliefs.”
    • a Twit­ter thread in which Duke Kwon talks about this
  2. https://scite.ai/ — this is a cool con­cept. Enter a research paper and it will algo­rith­mi­cal­ly assess whether sub­se­quent research sup­ports or under­mines the con­clu­sions. For exam­ple: https://scite.ai/reports/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.1615
  3. As church­es are demol­ished at home, Chi­nese Chris­tians find reli­gious free­dom in Kenya (Jen­ni Marsh, CNN): “Kenya is not a place you’d expect to find an under­ground church. Chris­tian­i­ty is the lifeblood of the nation’s pol­i­tics and soci­etal fab­ric, and is cel­e­brat­ed in huge, ram­bunc­tious ser­vices attend­ed by thou­sands of danc­ing and singing wor­shipers. But, in the north­ern stretch­es of the sprawl­ing, traf­fic-choked cap­i­tal of 4 mil­lion peo­ple, an under­ground Chi­nese house church is exact­ly what May Li, wife of a Malaysian-Chi­nese pas­tor, helps to lead — illus­trat­ing just how far the Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s reli­gious crack­down has trav­eled. Li and oth­er Chi­nese Chris­tians in this sto­ry did not want to use their real names for fear of being pun­ished by the gov­ern­ment when they return to Chi­na. The Chi­nese embassy in Nairo­bi has already reached out to the lead­ers of some Chi­nese Chris­t­ian groups in the city and asked them to desist, says Li. Her ser­vice tries to stay below the radar.”
  4. The Belt and Road is about domes­tic inter­est groups, not devel­op­ment (Andrew Bat­son, per­son­al blog): “The broad­er point here is that look­ing at the Belt and Road through the lens of ‘grand strat­e­gy’ or ‘geopol­i­tics,’ as so many com­men­ta­tors do, or even por­tray­ing it as some kind of new phi­los­o­phy of eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, is quite mis­lead­ing. All of these grand con­cepts are jus­ti­fi­ca­tions invent­ed after the fact for a pat­tern of actions that was already well under­way before Xi Jin­ping made his 2013 speech about the Belt and Road. The Belt and Road is real­ly the expan­sion of a spe­cif­ic part of China’s domes­tic polit­i­cal econ­o­my to the rest of the world.”
  5. Ro Khan­na and the ten­sions of Sil­i­con Val­ley lib­er­al­ism (Ezra Klein, Vox): “Pelosi invit­ed me to her house,” Khan­na recalls. “And when I asked her not to make an endorse­ment, she said, ‘Absolute­ly not. I stand for my incum­bents.’ So I get very dis­cour­aged, and Pelosi could see that. As I’m leav­ing the room, she said, ‘Ro, let me tell you some­thing. If I had wait­ed around, I’d have nev­er been speak­er of the House. Pow­er is nev­er giv­en. It’s always tak­en.’”
  6. Is Times Colum­nist David Brooks a Chris­t­ian or a Jew? (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post via the Salt Lake Tri­bune): “In the world of nation­al colum­nists, David Brooks is a star. But in the past few years, The New York Times writer and author has whipped up fas­ci­na­tion among a cer­tain sub­set of read­ers for a spe­cif­ic, gos­sipy rea­son: They won­der if the Jew­ish writer has become a Chris­t­ian.”
    • Relat­ed: David Brooks’s Con­ver­sion Sto­ry (Ben­jamin Wal­lace-Wells, The New York­er): “For Brooks, this car­ried the clar­i­ty of rev­e­la­tion, and soon he let it be known, among his acquain­tances, that he was expe­ri­enc­ing reli­gious curios­i­ty. An infor­mal com­pe­ti­tion opened for David Brooks’s soul. He received, by his own esti­ma­tion, three hun­dred gifts of spir­i­tu­al books, ‘only one hun­dred of which were dif­fer­ent copies of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Chris­tian­i­ty.’ ”
  7. Ter­ror­ists in Burk­i­na Faso Exe­cute Six at Pen­te­costal Church (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “A dozen gun­men on motor­cy­cles stormed the court­yard of the Sir­gad­ji church after wor­ship, fatal­ly shoot­ing its long­time pas­tor as well as five oth­er con­gre­gants after demand­ing they con­vert to Islam, accord­ing to a state­ment sent to CT by the gen­er­al super­in­ten­dent of the Assem­blies of God in Burk­i­na Faso, Michel Oué­drao­go.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 198

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 196

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.