Tag: religious freedom

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 194

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 191

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Hol­ly­wood megachurch­es like Hill­song hide their true teach­ings (Drew Goins, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Celebri­ty megachurch­es have every incen­tive to obscure where they stand on LGBTQ peo­ple. One of the con­tem­po­rary enter­tain­ment industry’s strongest claims to social rel­e­vance is stars’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in the fight for LGBT equal­i­ty.”
    • David French fired back: Will Woke Pro­gres­sives Allow Celebri­ties to Be Chris­t­ian? (David French, Nation­al Review): “Here is the dis­tinc­tion that makes no sense. An ortho­dox Chris­t­ian and (to take an exam­ple) a mar­ried sec­u­lar gay employ­ee work side by side. They dis­agree with each oth­er about mat­ters absolute­ly fun­da­men­tal to their lives and iden­ti­ties. The sec­u­lar gay employ­ee believes the Christian’s world­view is false. The Chris­t­ian employ­ee believes the sec­u­lar gay employee’s world­view is false. Why is it unique­ly intol­er­a­ble or even inju­ri­ous for the gay employ­ee to have to share the work­place (much less the indus­try) with the Chris­t­ian? Do they not have the same oblig­a­tions to set aside their dif­fer­ences and treat each oth­er with dig­ni­ty and respect?”
    • A Stan­ford illus­tra­tion: Stan­ford Live part­ners with alleged anti-LGBTQ pro­mot­er for Frost (Car­o­line Ghisolfi, Stan­ford Dai­ly)- “The report alleged that the Anschutz Foun­da­tion fund­ed sev­er­al con­ser­v­a­tive anti-LGBTQ orga­ni­za­tions between 2011 and 2013, includ­ing the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom (ADF), a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian activist group which has ‘repeat­ed­ly advo­cat­ed for the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, both in the U.S. and inter­na­tion­al­ly.’ ” This is an unusu­al way to describe ADF, which is a promi­nent legal orga­ni­za­tion with an envi­able 9–0 record at the Supreme Court. David French, who wrote the arti­cle in the pre­vi­ous bul­let point, is for­mer senior coun­sel for ADF.
  2. Regard­ing Jussie Smol­lett:
    • What The Jussie Smol­lett Sto­ry Reveals (John McWhort­er, The Atlantic(: “Smol­lett doesn’t need the mon­ey he would get from a court set­tle­ment, and he isn’t try­ing to deny some­one high­er office. So why in the world would he fake some­thing like that attack—if he did indeed fake it? The rea­son might be that he has come of age in an era when noth­ing he could have done or said would have made him look more inter­est­ing than being attacked on the basis of his col­or and sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion.” — the most insight­ful take I’ve seen
    • This is fas­ci­nat­ing: Fake Hate Crimes Data­base — the quan­ti­ty of these hoax­es strength­en’s McWhort­er’s point in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle
    • Politi­cians use Jussie Smol­lett, while a 1‑year-old boy shot in the head is set aside (John Cass, Chica­go Tri­bune):- “A few weeks ago, after Smol­lett began telling his tale — in which he’s the hero fight­ing oppres­sion and hatred — a 1‑year-old child was shot in the head.It looked like a street gang may have been tar­get­ing his moth­er. She’s been shot before. The child, Dejon Irv­ing, is on life support.I don’t think there were two dozen detec­tives assigned to Dejon Irving’s case. But he’s not a star to be used by politi­cians in pur­suit of pow­er. He’s not a symbol.Politicians don’t tweet his name. He’s just a lit­tle boy from Chica­go, shot in the head.” Ouch.
    • Peo­ple Fake Can­cer, Too (Fred­die deBoer, per­son­al blog): “I don’t with­hold sym­pa­thy until I ‘get all the facts’ and I don’t begin from a posi­tion of total neu­tral­i­ty. I begin from a posi­tion of sym­pa­thy and lis­ten­ing regard­less of the fact that some peo­ple fake can­cer.”
  3. The Risk Of Pro­gres­sives Talk­ing Over Mar­gin­al­ized Com­mu­ni­ties (Jesse Sin­gal, per­son­al blog): “…if you’re a pro­gres­sive who is call­ing for the Wash­ing­ton foot­ball team to change its name, or for Ralph Northam to resign, because of the harm that foot­ball team name and that gov­er­nor did to mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple, it should feel very weird that the actu­al groups most affect­ed most­ly dis­agree with you, no? Or if it doesn’t feel weird, why doesn’t it feel weird?” — this is an impor­tant point I rarely see dis­cussed.
  4. White suprema­cist Coast Guard offi­cer stock­piled firearms and hit list of Democ­rats for mass ter­ror attack (Haley Britzky, Task & Purpose):“A search of Has­son’s home revealed 15 firearms and over 1,000 rounds of ammo along with a hit list of tar­gets that includ­ed includ­ing promi­nent Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians — includ­ing Sen­ate Minor­i­ty Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speak­er Nan­cy Pel­soi [sic], Demo­c­ra­t­ic new­com­er Rep. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez — and media per­son­al­i­ties like MSNBC’s Joe Scar­bor­ough and Chris Hayes.” 👀
  5. Why Join A Fra­ter­ni­ty (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): rec­om­mend­ing this one for the update at the bot­tom of the post: “There is so much wrong­head­ed­ness in the way uni­ver­si­ties attempt to reg­u­late fra­ter­ni­ties, which has led to dire out­comes, and it is only going to get worse.”
  6. Dear Gay Catholic Priests (Jen­nifer Fitz, Patheos): “I’ve been read­ing about your plight in the New York Times. So let’s go ahead and clear some­thing up right now: Most Catholics don’t give a rip who it is you’re not hav­ing sex with. We know that absti­nence is hard.”
  7. Chris­tian­i­ty Today Appoints Tim­o­thy Dal­rym­ple as New Pres­i­dent and CEO (Mark Gal­li, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “He took his pas­sions for min­istry, learn­ing, and ath­let­ic achieve­ment with him to Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. When his gym­nas­tics career end­ed in a bro­ken neck, he plunged into cam­pus min­istry and over­seas mis­sions trips. He became pres­i­dent of Stanford’s Cam­pus Cru­sade (Cru) chap­ter. It was also at Stan­ford where he met his wife, Joyce. Both helped to lead a Chris­t­ian uni­ty move­ment on cam­pus that brought togeth­er stu­dents from all the university’s Chris­t­ian fel­low­ships to wor­ship God with one anoth­er.” #nerd­na­tion

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 Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From. (Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qual­i­ties.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). (first shared in vol­ume 62)

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 185

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

In case you’re won­der­ing: I just don’t find sto­ries about the Rus­sia inves­ti­ga­tion or the gov­ern­ment shut­down inter­est­ing. I think they’re impor­tant, but few peo­ple are writ­ing things about them that catch my atten­tion. Rec­om­men­da­tions are wel­come.

Also, one of you men­tioned that you some­times can’t open the links. If you, being a broke col­lege stu­dent, ever can’t access an arti­cle because of a pay­wall, try putting http://outline.com/ in front of the link. I did it for the first arti­cle as an exam­ple. Hav­ing said that, please sup­port jour­nal­ism once you are able.

  1. Is Mar­i­jua­na as Safe as We Think? (Mal­colm Glad­well, The New York­er): “The authors assumed that alco­hol use among stu­dents would be a pre­dic­tor of vio­lent behav­ior, and that mar­i­jua­na use would pre­dict the oppo­site. In fact, those who used only mar­i­jua­na were three times more like­ly to be phys­i­cal­ly aggres­sive than abstain­ers were; those who used only alco­hol were 2.7 times more like­ly to be aggres­sive. Obser­va­tion­al stud­ies like these don’t estab­lish cau­sa­tion. But they invite the sort of research that could.”
    • This Reporter Took a Deep Look Into the Sci­ence of Smok­ing Pot. What He Found Is Scary. (Stephanie Mencimer, Moth­er Jones): “I smoked plen­ty of weed in high school and so did all my friends, and none of us jumped off a bal­cony or killed anyone—we could bare­ly get off the couch. But the mar­i­jua­na sold today is not what we smoked, which at 1 per­cent to 2 per­cent THC was the equiv­a­lent of smok­ing oregano. Today’s weed is insane­ly more potent, as are prod­ucts like “wax” and “shatter”—forms of butane hash oil designed to be vaped or dabbed that come pret­ty close to 100 per­cent THC. And these high-poten­cy prod­ucts usu­al­ly con­tain very lit­tle CBD oil, the ingre­di­ent in cannabis that’s sup­posed to account for many of its sup­posed health ben­e­fits.”
  2. Is Sun­screen the New Mar­garine? (Rowan Jacob­sen, Out­side): “Peo­ple of col­or rarely get melanoma. The rate is 26 per 100,000 in Cau­casians, 5 per 100,000 in His­pan­ics, and 1 per 100,000 in African Amer­i­cans. On the rare occa­sion when African Amer­i­cans do get melanoma, it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly lethal—but it’s most­ly a kind that occurs on the palms, soles, or under the nails and is not caused by sun expo­sure. At the same time, African Amer­i­cans suf­fer high rates of dia­betes, heart dis­ease, stroke, inter­nal can­cers, and oth­er dis­eases that seem to improve in the pres­ence of sun­light, of which they may well not be get­ting enough. Because of their genet­i­cal­ly high­er lev­els of melanin, they require more sun expo­sure to pro­duce com­pounds like vit­a­min D, and they are less able to store that vit­a­min for dark­er days. They have much to gain from the sun and lit­tle to fear.”
  3. Leav­ing Reli­gion at Home: Engag­ing Reli­gious Thought and Action in Amer­i­can Soci­ety (Nathalie Kier­sznows­ki, Stan­ford Pol­i­tics): “People’s beliefs about the world will inevitably influ­ence their posi­tions on issues like moral­i­ty, pol­i­tics, dress, gen­der, sex and more. Sim­i­lar­ly, politi­cians will nat­u­ral­ly sup­port leg­is­la­tion in accor­dance with their val­ues, reli­gious or not. Many politi­cians, like Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence, have faced crit­i­cism for allow­ing reli­gion to shape their polit­i­cal deci­sions. It would be unwar­rant­ed, though, to expect Pence to act ‘un-Chris­t­ian’ or ‘non-reli­gious’ exclu­sive­ly at his place of work. The notion of hav­ing both a ‘sec­u­lar pub­lic self’ and a ‘reli­gious pri­vate self’ is impos­si­ble: any pri­vate val­ue sys­tem will influ­ence deci­sions through­out all areas of life.”
  4. The case for going to bed at 2:30 am (Kate Shell­nut, Vox): “My faith doused our cul­tur­al pref­er­ence for ear­ly birds with bib­li­cal back­ing, too, mak­ing me feel even guilti­er. With­in Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism, many expect faith­ful Chris­tians to ded­i­cate the ‘first fruits’ of each day to ‘qui­et time’ with the Lord (prayers, devo­tion­al read­ing, Bible study). Researchers even found peo­ple to be more ‘spir­i­tu­al­ly aware’ ear­ly in the morn­ings. Faced with these expec­ta­tions, I real­ly did ques­tion whether my habits were sin­ful: Was I being self­ish by stay­ing up late? Was I putting pro­duc­tiv­i­ty over the nat­ur­al pat­terns of work and rest?”
  5. China’s Gulag for Mus­lims (Mustafa Aky­ol, New York Times): “…Russia’s gulags are long gone, as is the Com­mu­nist Par­ty of the Sovi­et Union that oper­at­ed them. But now anoth­er dic­ta­tor­ship, ruled by anoth­er Com­mu­nist Par­ty, is oper­at­ing a new chain of pris­ons that evoke mem­o­ry of the gulags — more mod­ern, more high-tech, but no less enslav­ing.”
    • Where Did the One Mil­lion Fig­ure for Deten­tions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From? (Jes­si­ca Batke, Chi­naFile): “Two key stud­ies inde­pen­dent­ly arrived around the one mil­lion mark, by using lim­it­ed data sam­ples to esti­mate what per­cent­age of the eth­nic minor­i­ty Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion is detained. Both stud­ies arrive at a deten­tion rate of 10 per­cent —at least in some areas of Xinjiang—suggesting that just over one mil­lion of the region’s 11 mil­lion eth­nic Uighur pop­u­la­tion could be in the camps.”
  6. Con­querors of the Courts (David Mont­gomery, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The soci­ety itself lob­bies for no poli­cies; it nev­er signs ami­cus briefs or rep­re­sents clients in cas­es. No one at Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton dic­tat­ed Barnett’s moves or told him how to advo­cate for what posi­tions. It’s just that at a few gath­er­ings made pos­si­ble by the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety that Bar­nett hap­pened to attend, synaps­es fired, a cor­ner of the hive mind engaged, and Bar­nett took it from there. Mul­ti­ply that chem­istry tens of thou­sands of times over the past 36 years and you have the Fed­er­al­ist Society’s true source of pow­er.”
  7. Elect­ed lead­ers who weaponize reli­gion are play­ing a dan­ger­ous game (Tul­si Gab­bard, The Hill): “While I absolute­ly believe in the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state as a neces­si­ty to the health of our nation, no Amer­i­can should be asked to renounce his or her faith or mem­ber­ship in a faith-based, ser­vice orga­ni­za­tion in order to hold pub­lic office.” Gab­bard is a Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­gress­woman rep­re­sent­ing Hawaii.

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 unfor­tu­nate­ly date-spe­cif­ic Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

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 182

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. If They Weren’t Tak­ing Notes, How Did the Dis­ci­ples Remem­ber Jesus’s Exact Teach­ing? The 3‑Step Process for For­mu­lat­ing the 4 Gospels (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “I might not be able to tell you what I did last week, but I could give you a three-hour lec­ture about Jesus and the Jew­ish roots of the Last Sup­per with zero prepa­ra­tion because I have been talk­ing about it all the time for the last ten years. That’s one key dif­fer­ence between rehearsed mem­o­ries and inci­den­tal mem­o­ries.”
  2. What Straight‑A Stu­dents Get Wrong (Adam Grant, New York Times): “The evi­dence is clear: Aca­d­e­m­ic excel­lence is not a strong pre­dic­tor of career excel­lence. Across indus­tries, research shows that the cor­re­la­tion between grades and job per­for­mance is mod­est in the first year after col­lege and triv­ial with­in a hand­ful of years. For exam­ple, at Google, once employ­ees are two or three years out of col­lege, their grades have no bear­ing on their per­for­mance.” The author is an orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist at Penn’s Whar­ton School.
    • This arti­cle was sent to me by an alum­na who said, “I some­times skipped Chi Alpha or oth­er mean­ing­ful activ­i­ties with friends for that one extra hour of study­ing, which I now regret.”
  3. Hun­dreds of sex abuse alle­ga­tions found in fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es across U.S. (Sarah Smith, Star-Telegram): “One hun­dred and six­ty-eight church lead­ers were accused or con­vict­ed of com­mit­ting sex­u­al crimes against chil­dren, the inves­ti­ga­tion found. At least 45 of the alleged abusers con­tin­ued in min­istry after accu­sa­tions came to the atten­tion of church author­i­ties or law enforce­ment.… Inde­pen­dent fun­da­men­tal Bap­tist church­es preach sep­a­ra­tion: Stay sep­a­rate from the world, sep­a­rate from non-believ­ers and sep­a­rate from Chris­tians who do not believe as they do. That includes South­ern Bap­tists, who are deemed by the strict sect as too lib­er­al.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing stuff.
  4. Chi­na cracks down on Chris­tians — a new era of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion has arrived (Nina Shea and Bob Fu, Fox News): “The government’s repres­sion against the church­es is being done in the name of Pres­i­dent Xi Jinping’s ‘sini­ciza­tion’ cam­paign, osten­si­bly to strength­en Chi­nese cul­ture. How­ev­er, it increas­ing­ly appears aimed at remov­ing the Bible and its teach­ings from Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty.” (relat­ed cov­er­age at the New York Times)
    • My Dec­la­ra­tion of Faith­ful Dis­obe­di­ence (Wang Yi, Chris­t­ian Dai­ly Reporter): “As a pas­tor, my dis­obe­di­ence is one part of the gospel com­mis­sion. Christ’s great com­mis­sion requires of us great dis­obe­di­ence. The goal of dis­obe­di­ence is not to change the world but to tes­ti­fy about anoth­er world.” A now-impris­oned pas­tor wrote this let­ter with instruc­tions that it be pub­lished if he was detained for more than 48 hours. STRAIGHT FIRE.
  5. Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop and how “reli­gious lib­er­ty” became so tox­ic (Andrew Kop­pel­man, Vox): “Deep dis­agree­ment about moral fun­da­men­tals is noth­ing new; it is what reli­gious diver­si­ty con­sists of. That ought to include dis­agree­ment about such fraught mat­ters as sex­u­al­i­ty. Moral dis­agree­ment about things that mat­ter a lot is an inevitable con­se­quence of a free soci­ety. The best we can hope for is to live peace­ful­ly togeth­er in mutu­al con­tempt.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Fair­ness For All’: Smart Pol­i­tics, Or A Sell­out? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…there real­ly is a ques­tion of jus­tice with­in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have to face. We may sin­cere­ly believe that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is moral­ly wrong, but at what point does the com­mon good require that we agree that gay peo­ple have a right to be wrong? Espe­cial­ly because we are ask­ing them to agree that we have a right to be wrong (in their eyes) too.”
    • Response to the above: Mis­guid­ed Pro­pos­al From Chris­t­ian Lead­ers and LGBT Activists Is Any­thing but ‘Fair­ness for All’ (Ryan T. Ander­son, The Dai­ly Sig­nal): “Estab­lish­ing bad pub­lic pol­i­cy for every­one and then exempt­ing select reli­gious insti­tu­tions is not act­ing for the com­mon good—and is cer­tain­ly not fair for all. And there are bet­ter ways for­ward for those who seek com­pro­mise.”
    • Kin­da dif­fer­ent, but kin­da relat­ed: The Cul­ture Wars Are Ancient His­to­ry (Peter Lei­thart, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The real fight isn’t between reli­gion and sec­u­lar­ism, but between two kinds of reli­gion. His book makes the case that today’s cul­ture war shares much in com­mon with the cul­ture war that rocked ancient Rome.” Insight­ful.
  6. The Case Against Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…mer­i­to­crats are often edu­cat­ed to be bad lead­ers, and bad peo­ple, in a very spe­cif­ic way — a way of arro­gant intel­li­gence unmoored from his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence, ambi­tion untem­pered by self-sac­ri­fice. The way of the ‘best and the bright­est’ at the dawn of the tech­no­crat­ic era and the ‘smartest guys in the room’ decades lat­er, the way of the arson­ists of late-2000s Wall Street and the ‘move fast and break things’ cul­ture of Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Is Sex Social­ly Con­struct­ed? (Alex Byrne, Arc Dig­i­tal): “Clear­ly many ani­mals have belonged to the cat­e­go­ry female (or male) with­out exist­ing with­in a soci­ety of any kind. Indeed, there would have been females and males even if life on Earth had been destroyed by an aster­oid half a bil­lion years ago and humans had nev­er evolved. Female and male are there­fore not social­ly con­struct­ed cat­e­gories; that is, sex is not social­ly con­struct­ed.” Byrne is the head of MIT’s depart­ment of lin­guis­tics and phi­los­o­phy. I shared a relat­ed arti­cle of his back in issue 177.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 175

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. Few­er Sex Part­ners Means a Hap­pi­er Mar­riage (Olga Khaz­an, The Atlantic): “Nicholas Wolfin­ger, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah, has found that Amer­i­cans who have only ever slept with their spous­es are most like­ly to report being in a ‘very hap­py’ mar­riage. Mean­while, the low­est odds of mar­i­tal happiness—about 13 per­cent­age points low­er than the one-part­ner women—belong to women who have had six to 10 sex­u­al part­ners in their lives.”
    • This arti­cle was inspired by the longer and even more fas­ci­nat­ing Does Sex­u­al His­to­ry Affect Mar­i­tal Hap­pi­ness? (Nicholas Wolfin­ger, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “For a com­bined sam­ple of men and women, spous­es report­ing only one life­time sex­u­al part­ner are 7% more like­ly to be hap­py than are those with oth­er part­ners in their past. This is larg­er than the five-per­cent­age-point dif­fer­ence asso­ci­at­ed with a four-year col­lege degree, larg­er than the six-point dif­fer­ence that comes with attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices sev­er­al times a month or more, and larg­er than the boost that comes with hav­ing an income above the nation­al medi­an.”
  2. 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.
  3. Find­ing ‘Com­mon Good’ Among Evan­gel­i­cals In The Polit­i­cal Sea­son (Sarah McCam­mon, NPR): “On a recent evening in Hous­ton, under the heavy branch­es of live oak trees, Doug Pagitt stood before a cou­ple dozen peo­ple gath­ered on blue fold­ing chairs on the Rice Uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus. ‘You’ve heard it said that to be a true Chris­t­ian, you must vote like a Repub­li­can,’ he said. ‘But we are here to be remind­ed that just ain’t so.’”
    • Relat­ed: Cory Book­er could be a can­di­date for the ‘reli­gious left’ (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Ques­tions about reli­gion can par­a­lyze some politi­cians, but not [Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen­a­tor] Cory Book­er. If any­thing, the top­ic seems to relax him. Sit­ting in his spa­cious but spar­tan office on Capi­tol Hill in ear­ly Octo­ber, the sen­a­tor propped his sneak­ered feet up on his desk and waxed poet­ic about spir­i­tu­al mat­ters, bounc­ing between dis­cus­sions of Jesus’ dis­ci­ples, hous­ing pol­i­cy and his own reli­gious prac­tices.”
  4. The White House Says Social­ism Is a Threat. It’s Right. (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Who would have thought that an attack on social­ism would be so con­tro­ver­sial? But these days it is. The White House’s Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers issued a report called ‘The Oppor­tu­ni­ty Costs of Social­ism’ to a scathing recep­tion on social media: ‘dreck,’ said the econ­o­mist Justin Wolfers, while Paul Krug­man referred to it as ‘amaz­ing­ly dis­hon­est.’ I’m here to tell you that I have read the entire report, and many of the sources it cites, and most of it is cor­rect.” FYI: one of our alum­ni helped to write the report in ques­tion.
  5. The Car­a­van Is a Chal­lenge to the Integri­ty of U.S. Bor­ders (David Frum, The Atlantic): “If lib­er­als insist that only fas­cists will defend bor­ders, then vot­ers will hire fas­cists to do the job lib­er­als will not do.” That sen­tence is one of the most hon­est things I’ve heard in the recent immi­gra­tion debate. When decid­ing what immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy you deem best, rec­og­nize that you have to fac­tor in how pas­sion­ate­ly oth­er­wise apo­lit­i­cal peo­ple feel about this.
  6. A Chris­t­ian Man Receives Jus­tice (David French, Nation­al Review): “gov­ern­ment offi­cials demon­strat­ed sub­stan­tial intol­er­ance in the name of ‘inclu­sion’ and rather than seek­ing solu­tions that allowed each mem­ber of the com­mu­ni­ty to exer­cise their lib­er­ty (to enjoy rights to cakes and con­science, for exam­ple), they took sides against Chris­tians, using their pow­er to send a clear mes­sage: Tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty is incom­pat­i­ble with the pro­gres­sive state. That is not a deci­sion the Con­sti­tu­tion empow­ers them to make.”
  7. The midterms are already hacked. You just don’t know it yet. (Ben­jamin Wof­ford, Vox): “The secu­ri­ty expert at a big tech cor­po­ra­tion, who spoke on back­ground in order to speak frankly about elec­tion vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, put it this way: ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the Pentagon’s [secu­ri­ty mea­sures], elec­tions have prob­a­bly moved from a 2 to a 3.’” Very alarm­ing.

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 173

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. Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Chris­t­ian Doc­tor Who Heals Rape Vic­tims (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[Dr. Denis] Muk­wege is the son of a Pen­te­costal min­is­ter and was inspired to pur­sue med­i­cine after trav­el­ing with his father to pray for the sick. Panzi Hos­pi­tal, which he found­ed in 1999, is man­aged by the Pen­te­costal Church­es in Cen­tral Africa (CEPAC).”
  2. Turk­ish court orders release of U.S. pas­tor Andrew Brun­son (Erin Cun­ning­ham, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In his final state­ment to the court just before the ver­dict was issued, Brun­son said: ‘I’m an inno­cent man. I love Jesus. I love this coun­try,’ and broke down in tears.”
  3. So many peo­ple have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put oth­er peo­ple’s pri­va­cy in jeop­ardy (Deb­o­rah Net­burn, Los Ange­les Times): “…once 3 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have uploaded their genomes to pub­lic geneal­o­gy web­sites, near­ly every­one in the U.S. would be iden­ti­fi­able by their DNA alone and just a few addi­tion­al clues. More than 1 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have already pub­lished their genet­ic infor­ma­tion, and dozens more do so every day.” The under­ly­ing research: Iden­ti­ty infer­ence of genom­ic data using long-range famil­ial search­es (Erlich, Shor, Pe’er, and Car­mi, Sci­ence)
  4. Pol­i­tics as the New Reli­gion for Pro­gres­sive Democ­rats (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­ers, who may or may not be asso­ci­at­ed with oth­er civic insti­tu­tions, seem most excit­ed about sup­port­ing or donat­ing to caus­es, going to ral­lies, and express­ing opin­ions online, among oth­er activ­i­ties. Polit­i­cal engage­ment may be pro­vid­ing these Amer­i­cans with a new form of iden­ti­ty.”
  5. I Left Same-Sex Romance for Love (Rachel Gilson, Gospel Coali­tion): “If giv­ing free rein to my desires was the key to life, why had it only some­times brought me hap­pi­ness? Just as often, I reaped medi­oc­rity or pain. Con­trary to what I believed, pur­su­ing my nat­ur­al desires did not cre­ate ful­fill­ment, nor were my desires ful­ly trust­wor­thy just because they were, and are, ‘real.’ An itch can be very real, yelling out to be scratched. But for some ail­ments, scratch­ing just deep­ens the wound. A dif­fer­ent cure must be found.” The author is a cam­pus min­is­ter and a Yale grad. If you find this arti­cle intrigu­ing, she also has a per­son­al web­site: https://rachelgilson.com/
  6. Amer­i­cans Strong­ly Dis­like PC Cul­ture (Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic): “Among the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, a full 80 per­cent believe that “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is a prob­lem in our coun­try.” Even young peo­ple are uncom­fort­able with it, includ­ing 74 per­cent ages 24 to 29, and 79 per­cent under age 24. On this par­tic­u­lar issue, the woke are in a clear minor­i­ty across all ages. Youth isn’t a good proxy for sup­port of polit­i­cal correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either. Whites are ever so slight­ly less like­ly than aver­age to believe that polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness is a prob­lem in the coun­try: 79 per­cent of them share this sen­ti­ment. Instead, it is Asians (82 per­cent), His­pan­ics (87 per­cent), and Amer­i­can Indi­ans (88 per­cent) who are most like­ly to oppose polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness…. Three quar­ters of African Amer­i­cans oppose polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness.” The author is a lec­tur­er on gov­ern­ment at Har­vard.
  7. Mak­ing What Har­vard Is About Trans­par­ent (Raz­ib Khan, per­son­al blog): “…a few years ago the pres­i­dent of Har­vard declared that the insti­tu­tion was all about inclu­sion. On the face of it that is just a bald-faced lie, and every­one knows it. Har­vard is about exclu­sion, selec­tion, and cura­tion. ‘Inclu­sion’ actu­al­ly meant that there are cer­tain views and back­grounds that Har­vard is going to curate and encour­age. Which is fine. But an insti­tu­tion which excludes >95% of those who apply for admis­sion is by def­i­n­i­tion not inclu­sive and open.” The essay is about Har­vard but also applies to schools like it (look­ing at you, Stan­ford). You won’t agree with every­thing, but a lot will ring true.

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 169

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

This one is com­ing to you from Seoul. I’ve been super busy on this mis­sion trip, so these are select­ed from a less wide range than nor­mal.

  1. The Ide­o­log­i­cal Blind­ness at the Heart of Media Bias (David French, Nation­al Review): “It is con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing to me that main­stream media out­lets have some­how con­vinced them­selves of two con­tra­dic­to­ry things at once: 1) They can­not fair­ly cov­er Amer­i­ca with­out a news­room that more or less looks like Amer­i­ca, but 2) they can cov­er Amer­i­can with­out a news­room that thinks like Amer­i­ca.”
  2. God Doesn’t Turn A Blind Eye To Abuse, Nei­ther Should The Church (Rus­sell Moore, Gospel Coali­tion): “Many through­out the cen­turies have sought to pro­tect the rep­u­ta­tion of God by down­play­ing his wrath. To some degree, the impulse here is good, because many have a false view of God as an angry, sullen, puni­tive deity, not as the God of over­flow­ing love Jesus revealed to us. God’s wrath isn’t a tem­per tantrum. On the oth­er hand, those who point us away from the wrath of God do so at the per­il of eclips­ing God’s own rev­e­la­tion of him­self as holy and just, the One who ‘does not leave the guilty unpun­ished’ (Ex. 34:7). At the cross, the apos­tle Paul wrote, God ‘con­demned sin in the flesh’ (Rom. 8:3). This is impor­tant for us to know, espe­cial­ly those who have sur­vived awful things…. At the cross, God’s wrath and God’s love come togeth­er. They don’t can­cel one anoth­er out.”
  3. Remem­ber those arti­cles I shared about the hor­rif­ic Chi­na crack­down on Mus­lims? Now they are turn­ing their atten­tion to Chris­tians (although much less intense­ly — the sit­u­a­tion with the Mus­lims has echoes of con­cen­tra­tion camps).
    • Chi­na Bans Zion, Beijing’s Biggest House Church (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bei­jing author­i­ties threat­ened to close Zion Church last month after the 1,500-member con­gre­ga­tion, one of the Chi­nese capital’s largest house church­es, refused to install sur­veil­lance cam­eras in its sanc­tu­ary. After ser­vices on Sun­day, offi­cials deliv­ered on their threat to the unof­fi­cial Protes­tant con­gre­ga­tion, which meets in a ren­o­vat­ed hall in north­ern Bei­jing. Zion is now banned and its mate­ri­als con­fis­cat­ed.…”
    • Group: Offi­cials destroy­ing cross­es, burn­ing bibles in Chi­na (AP News): “China’s gov­ern­ment is ratch­et­ing up a crack­down on Chris­t­ian con­gre­ga­tions in Bei­jing and sev­er­al provinces, destroy­ing cross­es, burn­ing bibles, shut­ting church­es and order­ing fol­low­ers to sign papers renounc­ing their faith, accord­ing to pas­tors and a group that mon­i­tors reli­gion in Chi­na.”
    • Church raid­ed amid esca­lat­ing crack­down (Chi­naAid): “All across Chi­na, church­es are fac­ing pres­sures unprece­dent­ed since the reign of dic­ta­tor Mao Zedong. In Henan, where a con­cen­trat­ed crack­down is occur­ring, sev­en min­is­ters were arrest­ed and then lat­er released that evening…. Addi­tion­al­ly, local offi­cials in Wen­zhou, Zhe­jiang dis­trib­uted a form col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on the reli­gious beliefs of mid­dle school stu­dents and their par­ents. This could have dan­ger­ous reper­cus­sions, as Chi­nese reg­u­la­tions for­bid par­ents from teach­ing reli­gion to their chil­dren.”
    • Chi­na Mulls Major Restric­tions on Online Min­istries (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chi­nese Chris­tians have one month to tell their gov­ern­ment what they think of pro­posed new rules that ban the shar­ing of prayer, Bible read­ing, bap­tism, com­mu­nion, and oth­er forms of reli­gious activ­i­ty online.“
  4. Vice And Fire (Peter Hitchens, First Things): “As far as I can find out, ­Mar­tin is a lapsed Roman Catholic and has quite banal views about how reli­gion caus­es wars and God is a ‘giant invis­i­ble guy in the sky.’ I do not think he has set out to make an attack on Chris­tian­i­ty. I do not think he espe­cial­ly likes it, but I sus­pect he has dis­card­ed it, and so he has writ­ten an account of a world in which it sim­ply does not exist. His fan­ta­sy great­ly dis­turbs me, because it helps to nor­mal­ize the indif­fer­ence to Chris­tian­i­ty which is a far greater threat to it than active athe­ism.” This is an excel­lent cri­tique of the huge­ly over­rat­ed Game Of Thrones.
  5. After Both­am Jean’s shoot­ing death, his Dal­las church intent on seek­ing jus­tice (Bob­by Ross, Jr., The Chris­t­ian Chron­i­cle): “By all accounts, Both­am Jean was a devot­ed man of faith with a ‘beau­ti­ful’ and ‘pow­er­ful’ singing voice. He was bap­tized at age 10 in his native St. Lucia and moved to the U.S. at age 19 to attend Hard­ing Uni­ver­si­ty in Searcy, Ark., where he often led wor­ship in chapel and served as a min­istry intern with the Col­lege Church of Christ.”
    • Relat­ed: The Worst Police Shoot­ing Yet (David French, Nation­al Review): “We ask police offi­cers to be brave. We ask offi­cers to face a much high­er degree of dan­ger than civil­ians. We ask them to show restraint even in the face of provo­ca­tions and tense con­fronta­tions. There are count­less among them who do all we ask, and more. But we also ask some­thing else: that police offi­cers be sub­ject to the very laws they’re sworn to enforce.”
    • Relat­ed: End Qual­i­fied Immu­ni­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “A police offi­cer killed a com­plete­ly inno­cent man because of the officer’s inex­cus­able mis­take. He escaped crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion. And then he even escaped civ­il lia­bil­i­ty — because of a lit­tle-known, judge-made legal doc­trine called qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty.” Note that French is writ­ing about a dif­fer­ent case in this arti­cle.
    • Relat­ed: Should Cops Be Immune From Law­suits? (Matt Ford, The New Repub­lic): “The prob­lems with qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty mir­ror a deep­er and more dis­turb­ing trend in the law. Courts, which are sup­posed to be the great vin­di­ca­tors of Amer­i­cans’ rights and lib­er­ties, are increas­ing­ly closed off to them.”
  6. Cal­i­for­nia leg­is­la­tor shelves bill to ban paid ‘gay con­ver­sion ther­a­py’ for adults (Melanie Mason, LA TImes): “The news of Low’s deci­sion was laud­ed by oppo­nents to the mea­sure. Jonathan Keller, pres­i­dent of the social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion Cal­i­for­nia Fam­i­ly Coun­cil, said his group was ‘inex­press­ibly grate­ful’ to Low for lis­ten­ing to reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties.”
  7. Does Our Cul­tur­al Obses­sion With Safe­ty Spell the Down­fall of Democ­ra­cy? (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, New York Times): These are “‘the three Great Untruths’ of the cur­rent moment: ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you weak­er’; ‘always trust your feel­ings’; ‘life is a bat­tle between good peo­ple and evil peo­ple.’” This is a review of two books and is quite insight­ful.

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 165

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. Our Hope Is Com­ing (Steven Lon­go­ria, Deni­son Forum): “The world we live in would tell us that hope is close­ly tied to doubt. To say ‘I hope it doesn’t rain tomor­row’ car­ries with it a fear that it will like­ly rain…. Bib­li­cal hope is some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent. It con­veys a state of con­fi­dence, secu­ri­ty, and lack of wor­ry.” Steven is an alum­nus of our min­istry who is cur­rent­ly study­ing at Dal­las The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. Go, Steven!
  2. How the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” Rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. #Church­Too
    • What Would Jesus Do? Clean House In The Catholic Church. (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Con­gre­gants] do not expect the church to be per­fect; even St. Peter, after all, denied Christ three times. But they do expect to find the reflec­tion of Christ there. Accord­ing to news reports, the church hier­ar­chy in Penn­syl­va­nia and beyond has already denied Christ’s gospel three times: once when it shel­tered preda­tors in silence; once when it failed to remove every­one who was involved in cov­er­ing up any crime; and again when two of the six dio­ce­ses involved tried to shut down the grand jury inves­ti­ga­tion that pro­duced the report. Now they face the same choice Peter did.” Straight fire.
    • Why Men Like Me Should Not Be Priests (Daniel Matt­son, First Things): “Most of the hor­rif­ic abuse detailed in the Penn­syl­va­nia Grand Jury report involved ado­les­cent boys and young men. This isn’t pedophil­ia…. If the Church wants to avoid sex scan­dals, it must stop ordain­ing the sorts of men who have the hard­est time remain­ing chaste.” This arti­cle is full of details I did not know. Fas­ci­nat­ing and no doubt a light­ning rod for con­tro­very.
    • How the Wil­low Creek Church Scan­dal Has Stunned the Evan­gel­i­cal World (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times): “The sud­den res­ig­na­tion of Wil­low Creek Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s top lead­ers fol­low­ing sex­u­al harass­ment alle­ga­tions against Rev. Bill Hybels, their found­ing pas­tor, has shak­en evan­gel­i­cals far from the church’s base in the Chica­go sub­urbs. There are few big­ger names in the evan­gel­i­cal world than Mr. Hybels, and few church­es more influ­en­tial than Wil­low Creek. Chris­tians world­wide looked to it as a mod­el of smart lead­er­ship.”
    • These two scan­dals are espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing when jux­ta­posed. The Roman Catholic Church is the most hier­ar­chi­cal of denom­i­na­tions with author­i­ty flow­ing down from the Pope. Wil­low Creek is a non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al con­gre­ga­tion and is com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent of exter­nal author­i­ty. They rep­re­sent two extremes of church gov­er­nance and the rev­e­la­tion of their moral fail­ures demon­strate that the prob­lem of sin is not solved by rules. See Colos­sians 2:20–23.
    • Relat­ed: Evan­gel­i­cal Puri­ty Cul­ture Taught Me to Ratio­nal­ize My Sex­u­al Assault (Bec­ca Andrews, Moth­er Jones): “I under­stood my role: I was a sex­u­al gate­keep­er. Men, we were taught, are bur­dened by God with insa­tiable lust. Women, of course, are not, so it makes sense that we are expect­ed to cre­ate the bound­aries. We are respon­si­ble for what we wear, but more broad­ly, we are tasked with defin­ing con­sent, as thorny as that may seem…. The stakes are high in puri­ty cul­ture. Every slipup is a strike against any hope of a suc­cess­ful mar­riage.” Although inter­est­ing, the arti­cle doesn’t quite make the case that the title implies.
    • For the record: nev­er keep a crim­i­nal mat­ter pri­vate because you fear your report will hurt the pub­lic per­cep­tion of a reli­gious body, polit­i­cal enti­ty, or any oth­er insti­tu­tion. Souls are eter­nal, orga­ni­za­tions are not. Indi­vid­u­als are more impor­tant than insti­tu­tions. This is true even of denom­i­na­tions and indi­vid­ual con­gre­ga­tions — Jesus died for the Church and not for a brand. 1 Corinthi­ans 6:1–7 tells us to for­bear in civ­il mat­ters, but when it comes to crim­i­nal mat­ters Romans 13:1–7 is the rel­e­vant pas­sage.
  4. Social Injus­tice and the Gospel (John MacArthur, Grace To You): “I am con­vinced the only long-term solu­tion to every brand of eth­nic ani­mus is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ alone are the bar­ri­ers and divid­ing walls between peo­ple groups bro­ken down, the enmi­ty abol­ished, and dif­fer­ing cul­tures and eth­nic groups bound togeth­er in one new peo­ple (Eph­esians 2:14–15). The black lead­ers with whom I min­is­tered dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment shared that con­vic­tion. The evan­gel­i­cals who are say­ing the most and talk­ing the loud­est these days about what’s referred to as ‘social jus­tice’ seem to have a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive.” This is appar­ent­ly the first in a series.
  5. “Let The Whore­house Burn!” (Christo­pher Cald­well, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “‘As of this evening,’ said Pierre Moscovi­ci in Lux­em­bourg in June, ‘the Greek cri­sis is over.’ Moscovi­ci, a French Social­ist politi­cian who serves as the eco­nom­ics com­mis­sion­er of the Euro­pean Union, was mak­ing quite a claim…. Today, despite what Pierre Moscovi­ci and his col­leagues said in Lux­em­bourg, Greek debt, at 179 per­cent, is high­er still. The lat­est E.U. deal requires Greece to run large bud­get sur­plus­es until the year 2060 to repay the debts brought on by the E.U.’s own mis­man­age­ment. The coun­try is in some respects worse off than it was when Greek pro­test­ers mobbed the par­lia­ment in May 2010, howl­ing, ‘Let the whore­house burn!’”
  6. Norway’s hid­den scan­dal (Tim Whewell, BBC): “His con­vic­tion puts the spot­light back on a sys­tem which has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cised by some par­ents – and by lead­ing Nor­we­gian pro­fes­sion­als in the child­care field – for being too quick to put chil­dren into care, split­ting fam­i­lies unnec­es­sar­i­ly. The dis­graced psy­chi­a­trist has had his pro­fes­sion­al licence revoked, mean­ing he can­not work in the same field again. But par­ents who’ve lost cus­tody of chil­dren in cas­es he was involved in believe all his pre­vi­ous deci­sions should be reviewed.” This is out­ra­geous.
  7. Col­orado Defies the Supreme Court, Renews Per­se­cu­tion of a Chris­t­ian Bak­er (David French, Nation­al Review): “On the very day that Phillips won his case at the Supreme Court, a per­son emailed with yet anoth­er delib­er­ate­ly offen­sive design request: “I’m think­ing a three-tiered white cake. Cheese­cake frost­ing. And the top­per should be a large fig­ure of Satan, lick­ing a 9″ black Dil­do. I would like the dil­do to be an actu­al work­ing mod­el, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake. I can pro­vide it for you if you don’t have the means to pro­cure one your­self.” And final­ly, two days lat­er, a per­son iden­ti­fy­ing as ‘Autumn Marie’ vis­it­ed Phillips’s shop and request­ed a cake fea­tur­ing a pen­ta­gram. Accord­ing to ADF, ‘Phillips believes that per­son was Autumn Scar­di­na.’ Rather than rec­og­niz­ing Scardina’s con­duct as noth­ing more than a bad-faith cam­paign of harass­ment, Aubrey Ele­nis, the direc­tor of the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Divi­sion, found on June 28 ‘prob­a­ble cause’ to believe that Phillips vio­lat­ed Scardina’s civ­il rights….”
    • Relat­ed: When oppo­si­tion to reli­gious lib­er­ty becomes sil­ly, pet­ty, and vin­dic­tive (Andrew T. Walk­er. Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “When our cre­ative direc­tor walked into my office to noti­fy me [that our min­istry was being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against by a com­pa­ny], my first response was to smile. Why? Because the ERLC had been the vic­tim of dis­crim­i­na­tion, and I knew an oppor­tu­ni­ty like this meant the ERLC could pur­sue the moral high ground. What pro­gres­sivism does to dis­senters, we would not do to them…. No law­suit was nec­es­sary. No media storm was called for. We have zero desire to force the dis­crim­i­nat­ing com­pa­ny to agree with us or com­ply with our demands. No one was hold­ing the oth­er hostage to their ide­o­log­i­cal expec­ta­tions. The pow­er of choice and the free­dom of view­point diver­si­ty allowed two actors to pur­sue a path­way of plu­ral­ism.”

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 Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From.(Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qual­i­ties.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). This serendip­i­tous­ly hap­pened to be next in the sequence of old­er links. It fits very well with the above arti­cle about evan­gel­i­cal puri­ty cul­ture. (first shared in vol­ume 62)

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).

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 163

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. Chi­na and its creepy facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy tar­gets Uighur Mus­lims (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “China’s Mus­lims are akin to Germany’s Jews in the 1930s; a group of hap­less peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent reli­gion that the gov­ern­ment gets to exper­i­ment on. They’re already shov­ing rough­ly 800,000 Mus­lims into intern­ment camps and oth­er Mus­lims world­wide aren’t real­ly notic­ing.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing.
  2. There was quite the clam­or recent­ly about anti­semitism at Stan­ford.
    • Stan­ford Stu­dent Threat­ens Vio­lence against Pro-Israel Stu­dents (Dov Green­burg, Nation­al Review): “In mid July, Hamzeh Daoud, a stu­dent at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, pub­licly post­ed on Face­book: ‘I’m gonna phys­i­cal­ly fight Zion­ists on cam­pus next year.’ If his mean­ing wasn’t clear enough, Hamzeh con­tin­ued, ‘And after I abol­ish your ass I’ll go ahead and work every day for the rest of my life to abol­ish your pet­ty ass eth­no-suprema­cist, set­tler-colo­nial state.’ While not reflec­tive of Stanford’s val­ues, the sen­ti­ment of this hate­ful post reveals the state of con­tem­po­rary life on cam­pus­es.”
    • Daoud resigns from Nor­cliffe RA posi­tion (Julia Ingram and Hold­en Fore­man, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Hamzeh Daoud ’20 has resigned from his Res­i­dent Assis­tant posi­tion in Nor­cliffe House, he announced in a state­ment to The Dai­ly on Fri­day after­noon.”
    • Op Ed: State­ment from Hamzeh Daoud (Hamzeh Daoud, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “After spend­ing a few hours away from Face­book, I read over my post again and real­ized how infused it was with the same hatred that has caused my own fam­i­ly so much suf­fer­ing. It was the antithe­sis of why I chose this path in life. A slop­py com­ment made dur­ing an emo­tion-filled reac­tion to yet anoth­er lay­er of trau­ma, the com­ment did not con­vey my val­ues, who I am cur­rent­ly, or who I hope to become.”
    • I know some of you know Hamzeh, so this prob­a­bly feels a good deal more per­son­al than many of the arti­cles I share. Please remem­ber that what you put on social media actu­al­ly mat­ters. James 1:19 is a use­ful mem­o­ry verse for every­one with a Face­book or Twit­ter account: “My dear broth­ers and sis­ters, take note of this: Every­one should be quick to lis­ten, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
  3. At Prayer Break­fast, Guests Seek Access to a Dif­fer­ent High­er Pow­er (Ken­neth P. Vogel and Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Some describe the gath­er­ing as sim­i­lar to the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, except that Jesus is the orga­niz­ing principle….With its rel­a­tive lack of diplo­mat­ic pro­to­cols and press cov­er­age, the prayer break­fast set­ting is ide­al for for­eign fig­ures who might not oth­er­wise be able to eas­i­ly get face time with top Amer­i­can offi­cials, because of unsa­vory rep­u­ta­tions or a lack of an offi­cial gov­ern­ment perch, accord­ing to lob­by­ists who help arrange such trips. They also con­tend that it is eas­i­er to secure visas when the break­fast is list­ed as a des­ti­na­tion.”
  4. Jeff Ses­sions announces a reli­gious lib­er­ty task force to com­bat “dan­ger­ous” sec­u­lar­ism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Vox): “In a bold speech deliv­ered at the Jus­tice Department’s Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Sum­mit, Ses­sions char­ac­ter­ized the task force as a nec­es­sary step in fac­ing down the pre­vail­ing forces of sec­u­lar­ism. ‘A dan­ger­ous move­ment, unde­tect­ed by many, is now chal­leng­ing and erod­ing our great tra­di­tion of reli­gious free­dom,’ he said, which ‘must be con­front­ed and defeat­ed.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Jeff Ses­sions thinks Chris­tians are under siege in Amer­i­ca (Christo­pher Shea inter­views Nel­son Tebbe, Vox): One part stood out to me: “The Supreme Court has not decid­ed a reli­gious free­dom case in a way that’s adverse to the inter­est of Chris­tians for the past few terms. I can’t think of a sin­gle reli­gious free­dom case that they’ve lost.”
    • The above point is very mud­dled. The things that keep going to the Supreme Court are pre­cise­ly the things we have a prob­lem with. Do you know what we don’t have a prob­lem with? Can­ni­bal­ism. We’ve got cul­tur­al con­sen­sus on that. But reli­gious lib­er­ty? That keeps going to the courts and get­ting suc­cess­ful­ly appealed to the very top because local and state gov­ern­ments keep try­ing to vio­late it. It is a sim­ple fact that sig­nif­i­cant voic­es in our cul­ture view reli­gious lib­er­ty with reac­tions rang­ing from sus­pi­cion to hos­til­i­ty. Exam­ples abound (includ­ing these two Vox arti­cles).
  5. How Catholic Bish­ops Are Shap­ing Health Care In Rur­al Amer­i­ca (Anna Maria Bar­ry-Jester and Amelia Thom­son-DeVeaux, FiveThir­tyEight): “Best esti­mates sug­gest that one in six hos­pi­tal beds and many of the nation’s largest non­prof­it health sys­tems are Catholic-owned or ‑affil­i­at­ed. From 2001 to 2016, the num­ber of Catholic-affil­i­at­ed hos­pi­tals in the U.S. grew by 22 per­cent, even as the total num­ber of hos­pi­tals in the U.S. shrunk, accord­ing to research by Merg­er­Watch and the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union.”
    • A response: Stan­dard Pro­ce­dures (Leah Libresco Sargeant, First Things): “When she lays out my options, there real­ly is just one option: the stan­dard of repro­duc­tive care. But I have two rea­sons to say no: I am a Catholic and I am a sta­tis­ti­cian. It was faith and rea­son, the two ways of know­ing that St. John Paul II called the ‘two wings on which the human spir­it ris­es to the con­tem­pla­tion of truth,’ that led me to dig in my heels dur­ing my third mis­car­riage.” FYI: the author used to write for FiveThir­tyEight.
    • Anoth­er response: What FiveThir­tyEight gets wrong about Catholic hos­pi­tals (Stephanie Slade, Amer­i­ca Mag­a­zine): “That the A.C.L.U. threw away its com­mit­ment to reli­gious free­dom in the name of abor­tion rights is bad enough. A jour­nal­is­tic enter­prise as osten­si­bly sane and data-dri­ven as FiveThir­tyEight­should think twice before fol­low­ing the same path.”
  6. “Hyp­not­ic Mass Phe­nom­e­na” (Flo­ri­an Schwab inter­view with Peter Thiel, Die Welt­woche): “The advanced tech­no­log­i­cal civ­i­liza­tion of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry is a com­pli­cat­ed world where it is not pos­si­ble for any­body to think through every­thing for them­selves. You can­not be a poly­math in quite the way peo­ple were in the 18th cen­tu­ry enlight­en­ments. You can­not be like Goethe. So there is some need to lis­ten to experts, to defer to oth­er peo­ple. And then, there is always the dan­ger of that going too far and peo­ple not think­ing crit­i­cal­ly. This hap­pens in spades in Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Spies Are More Com­mon, and Bor­ing, Than You Think (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “John Negro­ponte, for­mer direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence, admit­ted in 2006 that the U.S. was deploy­ing about 100,000 spies around the world. Giv­en that the U.S. is the world’s tech­nol­o­gy and mil­i­tary leader, and yet has a rel­a­tive­ly small share of glob­al pop­u­la­tion, is it so crazy to think the num­ber of peo­ple spy­ing on us is larg­er than that?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 162

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to Wit­ness to a Dis­tract­ed World (O. Alan Noble, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Let me give you a sce­nario. I believe it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble today to sit down with a non-believ­ing friend and have a pas­sion­ate, lengthy con­ver­sa­tion about the gospel and nev­er plant a seed deeply. Because as soon as you both rise from the table, he pulls out his phone and checks Face­book or responds to a text from his wife…. It was all a kind of rhetor­i­cal dance or game that we play. And the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of the dance is not to win over the oth­er per­son but to define your iden­ti­ty. The game is called expres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism. And most of us play it.”
  2. A Glob­al Guide To State-Spon­sored Trolling (Michael Riley, Lau­ren Etter, and Bib­hu­dat­ta Prad­han, Bloomberg): “‘Peo­ple some­times wor­ry that Azer­bai­jan will shut down Face­book,’ said Katy Pearce, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton who has stud­ied the plat­for­m’s use in that coun­try. ‘Why would it? Face­book is the most effec­tive tool of con­trol the gov­ern­ment has.’”
  3. Hous­ing Costs Reduce The Returns To Edu­ca­tion (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The return to edu­ca­tion, for exam­ple, has increased in the Unit­ed States but it’s less well appre­ci­at­ed that in order to earn high wages col­lege edu­cat­ed work­ers must increas­ing­ly live in expen­sive cities. One con­se­quence is that the net col­lege wage pre­mi­um is not as large as it appears and inequal­i­ty has been over-esti­mat­ed.”
  4. The many deaths of lib­er­al­ism (Daniel Cole and Aure­lian Craiu­tu, Aeon): “The prob­lem for any­one declar­ing the death of lib­er­al­ism is that it has not one but sev­er­al pil­lars and dimen­sions: legal, polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and moral (or reli­gious). The weak­en­ing or dis­ap­pear­ance of one or two lib­er­al pil­lars or tenets would not be enough to declare lib­er­al­ism as a whole dead.”
  5. Epis­toc­ra­cy: a polit­i­cal theorist’s case for let­ting only the informed vote (Sean Illing inter­view­ing Jason Bren­nan, Vox): “I like to say I’m a fan of democ­ra­cy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maid­en, but I think Iron Maid­en has quite a few albums that are ter­ri­ble — and I think democ­ra­cy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best sys­tem we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.” The title is inac­cu­rate — Bren­nan goes so far as to favor extend­ing the right to vote to chil­dren.
  6. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Con­venes the ‘Super Bowl’ of Reli­gious Free­dom (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “This min­is­te­r­i­al, which is real­ly just a fan­cy word for ‘big meet­ing,’ could be inter­pret­ed as the unveil­ing of an ele­ment of the Trump administration’s for­eign-pol­i­cy strat­e­gy. For the last three days, del­e­ga­tions from around the world have gath­ered to hear vic­tims of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion share their sto­ries. Amer­i­can offi­cials have declared in no uncer­tain terms that they believe the Unit­ed States should evan­ge­lize reli­gious lib­er­ty around the world, and that democ­ra­cy is built on a foun­da­tion of free­dom in faith.”
    • Relat­ed: Pence and Pom­peo Make Big Reli­gious Free­dom Pledges (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Vice Pres­i­dent called out coun­tries across the globe, start­ing with Nicaragua where he accused the Orte­ga admin­is­tra­tion of ‘vir­tu­al­ly wag­ing war on the Catholic Church.’ He con­demned China’s per­se­cu­tion of its Tibetan Bud­dhists, Uyghur Mus­lims, and Chris­tians, as well as the actions of its author­i­tar­i­an neigh­bor: North Korea…. Pence also called out Iran. While acknowl­edg­ing that its Chris­tians, Jews, and Baha’i are all per­se­cut­ed by its Shia gov­ern­ment, he specif­i­cal­ly sin­gled out its Sun­ni Kurd pop­u­la­tion…. Russia’s Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es, who have been sub­ject to intense per­se­cu­tion in recent years, were also rec­og­nized by Pence…. The Vice Pres­i­dent also called for an end to anti-Semit­ic attacks in West­ern Europe.”
    • Relat­ed: Turkey Lets Andrew Brun­son Leave Prison (Chris­tian­i­ty Today)
    • Relat­ed: The World’s Next Reli­gious Free­dom Suc­cess Sto­ry: Uzbek­istan? (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘That [pan­el was] dif­fer­ent than any­thing you’ve ever heard from almost any place in the for­mer Sovi­et Union,’ said Chris Seiple, pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of the Insti­tute for Glob­al Engage­ment, who orga­nized the pan­el and will lead a del­e­ga­tion to Uzbek­istan this fall. ‘… They’re insti­tu­tion­al­iz­ing the process of change. That’s the key. The process is the goal.’”
  7. Is There Recourse When Fact Check­ers Get It Wrong? (Kalev Lee­taru, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “In short, through the busi­ness deci­sion of a sin­gle Sil­i­con Val­ley cor­po­ra­tion, fact check­ers have been ele­vat­ed from help­ful ref­er­ence librar­i­ans into a posi­tion of ulti­mate arbi­tra­tor of truth in our online world, with­out the atten­dant checks and bal­ances to mit­i­gate abuse.”

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 No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

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).

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.