Tag: science

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 285

anoth­er fair­ly brief roundup

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

Fun fact: 285 is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares (1+4+9+16…+81).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Will Get to Herd Immu­ni­ty in 2021…One Way or Anoth­er (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “By July it will all be over. The only ques­tion is how many peo­ple have to die between now and then? Youyang Gu, whose pro­jec­tions have been among the most accu­rate, projects that the Unit­ed States will have reached herd immu­ni­ty by July, with about half of the immu­ni­ty com­ing from vac­ci­na­tions and half from infec­tions. Long before we reach herd immu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, the infec­tion and death rates will fall. Gu is pro­ject­ing that by March infec­tions will be half what they are now and by May about one-tenth the cur­rent rate. The drop will catch peo­ple by sur­prise just like the increase. We are not good at expo­nen­tials.” I hope this is right!
    • Relat­ed: Unit­ed King­dom vs Unit­ed States Vac­cine Fight (Poli­math, Sub­stack): “The Unit­ed States has vac­ci­nat­ed more indi­vid­u­als by far than any oth­er coun­try in the world. One in four of all COVID vac­ci­na­tions in the world have tak­en place in the Unit­ed States. The three coun­tries that are doing the best per-capi­ta (Israel, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, and Bahrain) are all incred­i­bly small and dense.” This is short and encour­ag­ing.
  2. Failed Trump Prophe­cies Offer a Les­son in Humil­i­ty (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “The failed prophe­cies of Don­ald Trump’s reelec­tion may have dam­aged the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the US inde­pen­dent Charis­mat­ic wing of evan­gel­i­cal­ism more than any event since the tel­e­van­ge­list scan­dals of the 1980s. They have led some out­siders to crit­i­cize Chris­tian­i­ty itself and right­ly call us to introspection.“Keener is one of my favorite NT schol­ars.
  3. Two Worlds: So Much Pros­per­i­ty, So Much Skep­ti­cism (Mor­gan Housel, Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “I want to tell you two of the biggest eco­nom­ic sto­ries that aren’t get­ting enough atten­tion. One is that house­hold finances might be in the best shape they’ve ever been in. Ever. That might sound crazy, and it’s easy to over­look because of the sec­ond sto­ry: Covid has dumped kerosene on wealth inequal­i­ty in ways we’ve yet to ful­ly grasp.”
  4. The Case For Wood­en Pews (Yuval Levin, Deseret Mag­a­zine): “It is not exact­ly a cri­sis of belief in the teach­ings of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion [that under­mines faith], but rather a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in the insti­tu­tions that claim to embody them. In oth­er words, Amer­i­cans aren’t los­ing their faith in God. Eighty-sev­en per­cent of the pub­lic expressed belief in God last year in Gallup’s fig­ures, which is rough­ly the lev­el poll­sters have found for many decades. What Amer­i­cans do have trou­ble believ­ing, how­ev­er, is that our insti­tu­tions — our church­es, sem­i­nar­ies, reli­gious schools and char­i­ties — remain capa­ble of form­ing trust­wor­thy peo­ple who actu­al­ly exhib­it the integri­ty they preach.” Sol­id, although the title is mis­lead­ing.
  5. Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign.
  6. What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine.
  7. Rise of the zom­bie ants: why hype is creep­ing into sci­en­tif­ic papers. (Gem­ma Con­roy, Nature Index): “The review found that near­ly half of these stud­ies uncov­ered incon­sis­ten­cies between abstracts and their full text, with 19% cit­ing major dis­crep­an­cies. Two stud­ies cit­ed exam­ples where non-sig­nif­i­cant results were framed in over­ly opti­mistic terms in the abstracts.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books I find use­ful]. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syllabus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their courses.”  First shared in vol­ume 217.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 281

inter­est­ing things from Christ­mas week 2020

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.

As fore­told, slight­ly delayed this week and will like­ly be a day off next week as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Apply­ing Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples in the work­place (Vann Ky, per­son­al blog): “These prin­ci­ples have helped me devel­op work ethics and make an impact, not just at my cur­rent com­pa­ny but also when I was a col­lege stu­dent.” Vann is an alum­na.
  2. When You Can’t Just ‘Trust the Sci­ence’ (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Last month [the CDC’s] Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee on Immu­niza­tion Prac­tices pro­duced a work­ing doc­u­ment that’s a mas­ter­piece of para-sci­en­tif­ic effort, in which ques­tions that are legit­i­mate­ly med­ical and sci­en­tif­ic (who will the vac­cine help the most), ques­tions that are more logis­ti­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal (which pat­tern of dis­tri­b­u­tion will be eas­i­er to put in place) and moral ques­tions about who deserves a vac­cine are all jum­bled up, assessed with a form of pseu­do-rig­or that resem­bles some­one bluff­ing the way through a McK­in­sey job inter­view and then used to jus­ti­fy the con­clu­sion that we should vac­ci­nate essen­tial work­ers before seniors … because seniors are more like­ly to be priv­i­leged and white.”
    • Why Did So Many Doc­tors Become Nazis? (Ash­ley K. Fer­nades, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “It is wor­thy of empha­sis that although many pro­fes­sions (includ­ing law) were ‘tak­en in’ by Nazi phi­los­o­phy, doc­tors and nurs­es had a pecu­liar­ly strong attrac­tion to it. Robert N. Proc­tor (1988) notes that physi­cians joined the Nazi par­ty in droves (near­ly 50% by 1945), much high­er than any oth­er pro­fes­sion. Physi­cians were sev­en times more like­ly to join the SS than oth­er employed Ger­man males.” The author is a physi­cian and a bioethi­cist at The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty. 
    • Ore­gon Hos­pi­tals Did­n’t Have Short­ages. So Why Were Dis­abled Peo­ple Denied Care? (Joseph Shapiro, NPR): “There’s no rea­son that these exam­ples would occur more fre­quent­ly in Ore­gon than in oth­er states. But the fight for that anony­mous woman with an intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty peeled back the cur­tain on health care deci­sion-mak­ing in Ore­gon in a way that did not hap­pen in oth­er states. That activism led to change in Ore­gon — includ­ing anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion leg­is­la­tion and new statewide poli­cies.”
    • How Much Herd Immu­ni­ty Is Enough? (Don­ald G. McNeil, New York Times): “In a tele­phone inter­view the next day, Dr. Fau­ci acknowl­edged that he had slow­ly but delib­er­ate­ly been mov­ing the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, part­ly based on new sci­ence, and part­ly on his gut feel­ing that the coun­try is final­ly ready to hear what he real­ly thinks.”
  3. The Death and Life of an Admis­sions Algo­rithm (Lilah Burke, Insid­er High­er Edu­ca­tion): “For exam­ple, let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion con­tain­ing the words ‘best,’ ‘award,’ ‘research’ or ‘Ph.D.’ are pre­dic­tive of admis­sion — and can lead to a high­er score — while let­ters con­tain­ing the words ‘good,’ ‘lass,’ ‘pro­gram­ming’ or ‘tech­nol­o­gy’ are pre­dic­tive of rejec­tion. A high­er grade point aver­age means an appli­cant is more like­ly to be accept­ed, as does the name of an elite col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty on the résumé. With­in the sys­tem, insti­tu­tions were encod­ed into the cat­e­gories ‘elite,’ ‘good’ and ‘oth­er,’ based on a sur­vey of UT com­put­er sci­ence fac­ul­ty.”
    • Inter­est­ing­ly, the crit­i­cisms peo­ple made of the algo­rithm are not actu­al­ly crit­i­cisms of the algo­rithm. They are crit­i­cisms of the admis­sions com­mit­tee itself.
  4. An Advent Lament in the Pan­dem­ic (Michael Luo, The New York­er): “The pan­dem­ic in 2020 has held a mir­ror to Chris­tian­i­ty, just as the epi­demics of antiq­ui­ty did, but today’s reflec­tion car­ries the poten­tial to repulse rather than attract.”
    • Curi­ous­ly, the spe­cif­ic exam­ples he cites are most­ly pos­i­tive but he allows the neg­a­tive exam­ple to col­or the entire piece. This is what I have seen as well — vir­tu­al­ly all church­es are act­ing respon­si­bly but the pub­lic focus is on the ones that aren’t.
  5. Why Does It Mat­ter that Jesus Was Born of a Vir­gin? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “Even if pro­fess­ing Chris­tians accept the vir­gin birth, many would have a hard time artic­u­lat­ing why the doc­trine real­ly mat­ters.”
  6. A Game Design­er’s Analy­sis of QAnon (Reed Berkowitz, Medi­um): “When I saw QAnon, I knew exact­ly what it was and what it was doing. I had seen it before. I had almost built it before. It was gaming’s evil twin. A game that plays peo­ple.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. 117 Wit­ness­es Detail North Korea’s Per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Drawn from expe­ri­ences stretch­ing from 1990 to 2019, KFI’s report lists scores of vio­la­tions. These include 36 instances of pun­ish­ment met­ed out to fam­i­ly mem­bers, 36 instances of tor­ture, and 20 exe­cu­tions. Women and girls rep­re­sent 60 per­cent of the vic­tims.… Chris­tians total near­ly 80 per­cent: 215 cas­es.” The 98 page report which inspired this arti­cle is Per­se­cut­ing Faith:Documenting reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions in North Korea

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 Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly accountable.” First shared in vol­ume 214.

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 266

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. Do You ‘Believe in Science’…or Not? (Jacob Hess, Pub­lic Square): “…what if we’re wit­ness­ing the true nature of sci­ence in its full glo­ry? Not as an ora­cle that speaks in some mono­lith­ic voice. But as an argument—between oth­er­wise thought­ful and good-heart­ed peo­ple all seek­ing truth, but read­ing the data dif­fer­ent­ly, defin­ing terms dif­fer­ent­ly, empha­siz­ing dif­fer­ent indi­ca­tors in deter­min­ing what is true and trust­wor­thy, etc. If so, rather than wait­ing for Sci­ence to declare the truth of a matter—maybe we need to start doing some­thing else: Think­ing for ourselves.” This was a much bet­ter arti­cle than I expect­ed.
  2. Aca­d­e­mics Are Real­ly, Real­ly Wor­ried About Their Free­dom (John McWhort­er, The Atlantic): “One pro­fes­sor notes, ‘Even with tenure and author­i­ty, I wor­ry that stu­dents could file spu­ri­ous Title IX com­plaints … or that stu­dents could boy­cott me or remove me as Chair.’ I have no rea­son to sup­pose that he is being dra­mat­ic, because exact­ly this, he says, hap­pened to his predecessor.” The author is a lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia.
    • Relat­ed: The Denial of Can­cel Cul­ture (Eric Kauf­mann, Quil­lette): “Academics don’t dis­crim­i­nate more than oth­er edu­cat­ed pro­fes­sion­als, and the Right dis­crim­i­nates as much as the Left, but the fact the Left out­num­bers the Right 6:1 (9:1 among cur­rent [social sci­ences and human­i­ties] staff) means that con­ser­v­a­tives and Leavers expe­ri­ence a far high­er dis­crim­i­na­to­ry effect than the left-lib­er­al major­i­ty. On a four-per­son hir­ing pan­el, a Leaver faces an 80 per­cent chance of discrimination.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics at Birk­beck Col­lege in the UK.
  3. Arti­cles Relat­ed To Race, Racism and Relat­ed Top­ics
    • Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty’s White-Suprema­cy Prob­lem (David Luo, New York­er): “…Christian nation­al­ism is not the same as per­son­al reli­gios­i­ty. In fact, reli­gious commitment—as mea­sured by church atten­dance, prayer, and Scrip­ture reading—tends to improve atti­tudes on race, serv­ing as a pro­gres­sive influ­ence. This sug­gests the root of the white church’s prob­lem may not be ‘Christianity proper,’ as Dou­glass put it, so much as the cul­ture around white Chris­tian­i­ty, which nar­rows and dimin­ish­es the Amer­i­can project.” This arti­cle cov­ers a lot of ground and not all of it with equal insight (or per­haps fair­ness is the word I’m look­ing for), but as a whole well-done.
    • Black Chris­tians Play a Cru­cial Role in Ath­lete Activism (Paul Putz , Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While some black Chris­t­ian ath­letes have abstained from the recent wave of activism in sta­di­ums and arenas—Orlando Mag­ic for­ward Jonathan Isaac, for exam­ple, cit­ed his under­stand­ing of the gospel when declin­ing to ful­ly par­tic­i­pate in a pre-game racial jus­tice ceremony—far more have played a lead­ing role.”
    • I was the woman sur­round­ed by BLM pro­test­ers at a D.C. restau­rant. Here’s why I didn’t raise my fist. (Lau­ren Vic­tor, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Last week, I went out to din­ner in D.C. with a friend. As we sat out­side at a neigh­bor­hood restau­rant, a group of pro­test­ers sur­round­ed our table and demand­ed that I raise my fist in sup­port of the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment. I had marched repeat­ed­ly in the past sev­er­al months in sup­port of their cause, but I refused their demands. That inter­ac­tion wound up in a viral video that with­in 48 hours had been viewed more than 12 mil­lion times.” This is fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • ‘You’re Not Allowed To Film’: The Fight for Con­trol Over Who Reports From Port­land (Nan­cy Rom­mel­mann, Rea­son): “I can­not say who came up with these anti-cam­era bat­tle cries. But it’s easy to under­stand why pro­test­ers use them: to shape the nar­ra­tive the coun­try sees about the protests. And that nar­ra­tive, in my esti­ma­tion after many weeks cov­er­ing street clash­es in a city where I lived for 15 years, is 90 per­cent [men­da­cious nonsense].”
    • Don’t take your guns to town, son (Tim Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “In life, there are hor­ri­ble sit­u­a­tions in which there are no good deci­sions or where it is extreme­ly easy to make the wrong deci­sion. So when we can avoid these hor­ri­ble sit­u­a­tions, we ought to.”
      • This is an insight with wide-rang­ing appli­ca­tion. It’s why you shouldn’t bring guns to a protest and also why there are some par­ties on cam­pus you shouldn’t go to.
    • Police reforms inspired by George Floyd face defeat in CA (Edi­to­r­i­al Board, Sacra­men­to Bee): “The leg­is­la­tors who authored these cru­cial reforms deserve sup­port and recog­ni­tion for walk­ing the walk. But Cal­i­for­ni­ans must also remem­ber the names of any leg­is­la­tors who took a knee to hon­or Black Lives Mat­ter in front of the cam­eras and then, behind the scenes, bowed down to police groups to kill much-need­ed reforms.”
  4. The Social Fab­ric of the US Is Fray­ing Severe­ly, if Not Unrav­el­ling (Glenn Green­wald, The Inter­cept): “Why is vir­tu­al­ly every met­ric of men­tal and spir­i­tu­al dis­ease — sui­cide, depres­sion, anx­i­ety dis­or­ders, addic­tion, and alco­holism — increas­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly, rapid­ly, in the rich­est coun­try on earth, one filled with advanced tech­nolo­gies and at least the pre­tense of lib­er­al democracy?”
  5. Boy­cotts Can’t Be a Test of Moral Puri­ty (Zephyr Tea­chout, The Atlantic): “We don’t ask peo­ple to boy­cott libraries in order to change library rules; we don’t ask peo­ple to boy­cott high­ways to ask for them to be safer; we don’t demand that you buy only bot­tled water while protest­ing water-util­i­ty governance.” The delight­ful­ly-named author is a law prof at Ford­ham. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. On pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics:
    • What You Should Know About the 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty Plat­form (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “Why should Chris­tians care about a doc­u­ment that few non-politi­cians will ever read? Because of the influ­ence the two major par­ty plat­forms have on pub­lic pol­i­cy. While the plat­form is not bind­ing on the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee or any oth­er politi­cians, polit­i­cal sci­en­tists have found that over the past 30 years law­mak­ers in Con­gress tend to vote in line with their party’s plat­form: 89 per­cent of the time for Repub­li­cans, and 79 per­cent of the time for Democrats.“
    • What You Should Know About the 2020 Repub­li­can Par­ty Plat­form (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “This arti­cle will pro­vide, with­out com­men­tary, an out­line of the Repub­li­can plat­form as it relates to sev­er­al social issues. Every state­ment is either a direct quote or a sum­ma­ry of the platform’s position.”

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. Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate capitalism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

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 256

FYI, I offer some of my own thoughts on police towards the end.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Rebel Physi­cist Try­ing to Fix Quan­tum Mechan­ics (Bob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Bassi is a prac­tic­ing Catholic and a believ­er in God, some­thing he says is ‘unusual’ but ‘not rare” among his col­leagues at the uni­ver­si­ty. Ein­stein called his own belief that real­i­ty could be under­stood ‘religion,’ and I won­dered if there’s a con­nec­tion between Bassi’s reli­gious faith and that in what has become essen­tial­ly a far-right posi­tion in physics.” I have no opin­ion on the under­ly­ing sci­en­tif­ic con­tro­ver­sy, but Bassi sounds like a fas­ci­nat­ing per­son.
  2. What the Tent­mak­ing Busi­ness Was Real­ly Like for the Apos­tle Paul (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “[It] cost the Apos­tle Paul to write his let­ters, includ­ing the secur­ing of mate­ri­als and the hir­ing of a sec­re­tary to make a copy for him­self. After exten­sive research and cal­cu­la­tion, he deter­mined that on the low side it would have cost him at least $2,000 in today’s cur­ren­cy to write 1 Corinthi­ans. (And that doesn’t include the cost of send­ing some­one like Titus on a long jour­ney to deliv­er it.)” Short and fas­ci­nat­ing.
  3. The Tempt­ing of Neil Gor­such (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We may offi­cial­ly have three branch­es of gov­ern­ment, but Amer­i­cans seem to accept that it’s more like 2.25: A pres­i­den­cy that acts uni­lat­er­al­ly when­ev­er pos­si­ble, a high court that checks the White House and set­tles cul­ture wars, and a Con­gress that occa­sion­al­ly bestirs itself to pass a budget.”
  4. Reli­gious Amer­i­cans Have Less Pos­i­tive Atti­tudes Toward Sci­ence, But This Does Not Extend to Oth­er Cul­tures (Jonathon McPhetres, Jonathan Jong & Miron Zuck­er­man, Social Psy­cho­log­i­cal and Per­son­al­i­ty Sci­ence): “It is com­mon­ly claimed that sci­ence and reli­gion are log­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly at odds with one anoth­er. How­ev­er, pre­vi­ous stud­ies have main­ly exam­ined Amer­i­can samples…” Raw data at https://osf.io/t7w6x/ DOI 10.1177/1948550620923239. The authors are pro­fes­sors at MIT, Oxford, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.
  5. “He’s the Cho­sen One to Run Amer­i­ca”: Inside the Cult of Trump, His Ral­lies Are Church and He Is the Gospel (Jeff Sharlet, Van­i­ty Fair): “Nonbelievers roll their eyes over what they see as the gob­s­mack­ing hypocrisy of Trump as a tri­bune of fam­i­ly val­ues, the dopi­ness of the rubes who con­sid­er him a moral man. Non­be­liev­ers, in oth­er words, miss the point. They lack gno­sis. Very few believ­ers deny Trump’s sor­did past. Some turn to the old Chris­t­ian ready-made of redemp­tion: Their man was lost, but now he’s found. Oth­ers love him pre­cise­ly because he is a sinner—if a man of such vast, crass, and open appetites can embody the nation (and real­ly, who is more American—vast, crass, and open—than Trump), then you too, stu­dent of porn, mon­ster truck lover, ulti­mate fight­er in your dreams and games, can claim an anointing.” The title filled me with low expec­ta­tions, but the arti­cle has some inter­est­ing reflec­tions on Gnos­ti­cism in mod­ern Amer­i­ca. 
  6. On reli­gious lib­er­ty:
    • The True Extent of Reli­gious Lib­er­ty in Amer­i­ca, Explained (David French, The Dis­patch): “Yes, it is true that in some respects reli­gious lib­er­ty is ‘under siege.’ There are activists and law­mak­ers who want to push back at mul­ti­ple doc­trines and some rad­i­cals even dream of revok­ing tax exemp­tions from reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions that main­tain tra­di­tion­al teach­ings on sex and gen­der. But if the siege is real, then so is the citadel. Peo­ple of faith in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca enjoy more lib­er­ty and more real polit­i­cal pow­er than any faith com­mu­ni­ty in the devel­oped world.” This is real­ly good.
    • No Longer a Lux­u­ry – Reli­gious Lib­er­ty is a Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Pri­or­i­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, Prov­i­dence): “…increases in reli­gious lib­er­ty are asso­ci­at­ed with robust increas­es in human flour­ish­ing even after con­trol­ling for dif­fer­ences in gross domes­tic prod­uct, the labor force, and mea­sures of eco­nom­ic free­dom. For exam­ple, mov­ing a coun­try that ranks in reli­gious lib­er­ty along the lines of Rus­sia to one that ranks clos­er to the Unit­ed States amounts to an 11 per­cent increase in the share of indi­vid­u­als who say that they are thriving.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
    • Torah Is the Air We Breathe (Gil Stu­dent, First Things): “But our spir­i­tu­al­ly impov­er­ished soci­ety views reli­gious prac­tices as mere­ly cul­tur­al expres­sions. It views reli­gious ser­vices as equiv­a­lent to yoga class­es and book club meet­ings. It does not see reli­gion as essen­tial, and there­fore can­not under­stand that Jews don’t serve God as part of our lives; rather, we live to serve God.”
  7. On race, police, and protests
    • Above the Law: The Data Are In on Police, Killing, and Race (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “…police killings have made up about one out of every twelve vio­lent deaths of Amer­i­cans between 2010 and 2018. That’s includ­ing Amer­i­can mil­i­tary deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and else­where dur­ing that win­dow. Indeed, more Amer­i­cans died at the hands of police offi­cers dur­ing that peri­od (about 14,400) than died while on active mil­i­tary duty (about 9,400). Police vio­lence in Amer­i­ca is extra­or­di­nary in its inten­si­ty. It is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the actu­al threats fac­ing police offi­cers, and it has risen sig­nif­i­cant­ly in recent years with­out appar­ent justification.”
    • Jew­ish busi­ness­es in Los Ange­les ran­sacked in riots, but only Israeli and Jew­ish media care (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “The Ore­gon­ian called riot-plagued Port­land ‘a city of ply­wood.’ Since then, images have emerged of a dark­er nar­ra­tive, with riot­ers tar­get­ing Jew­ish busi­ness­es. Israeli news­pa­pers ran with this angle this past Sat­ur­day, but by the end of the day, there was noth­ing about the Jew­ish van­dal­ism to be found on the New York Times web­site. Usu­al­ly the Times is pret­ty up on anti-Semi­tism, but it was eas­i­er to find a piece about Anna Win­tour than any men­tions of van­dal­ized Jews.”
    • How Jesus became white — and why it’s time to can­cel that (Emi­ly McFar­lan Miller, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Anderson said that it has been com­mon for peo­ple to depict Jesus as a mem­ber of their cul­ture or their eth­nic group. ‘If a per­son thinks that’s the only pos­si­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jesus, then that’s where the prob­lem starts,’ he said.” It’s almost like por­tray­ing God visu­al­ly leads to trou­ble. I wish God had thought to warn against that.
    • Reflec­tions from a Chris­t­ian schol­ar on Social Jus­tice, Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry, Marx­ism, and Bib­li­cal Ethics (Kel­ly Ham­ren, Face­book): “I have two Eng­lish degrees (B.A. and M.A.) from a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty and a Ph.D. in lit­er­a­ture and crit­i­cism from a state uni­ver­si­ty. In my field, Marx­ism is one of the most com­mon­ly stud­ied and most influ­en­tial per­spec­tives, and Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry is also a sig­nif­i­cant force and gain­ing momen­tum.… my stud­ies have con­vinced me that the suf­fer­ings and deaths of mil­lions are not only cor­re­lat­ed with but large­ly caused by the Marx­ist-Lenin­ist agen­da, and I am there­fore deeply opposed to Marx­ism as a frame­work. I hope that, know­ing this, those patient enough to read these notes will acquit me of being a clos­et Marx­ist cov­er­ing a sec­u­lar agen­da with a veneer of Bible verses.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Law pro­fes­sor’s response to stu­dent offend­ed by their shirt (Patri­cia Leary, Imgur): “Premise: You are not pay­ing for my opin­ion. Cri­tique: You are not pay­ing me to pre­tend I don’t have one.” Two com­ments: first, this is a few years old. Sec­ond, ini­tial­ly looks made-up but checks out. The author is a pro­fes­sor at Whit­ti­er Law School: Law pro­fes­sor responds to stu­dents who com­plained about her Black Lives Mat­ter shirt (Scott Jaschik, Inside High­er Ed) 
    • The New Truth (Jacob Siegel, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What we are wit­ness­ing, in the rapid­ly trans­form­ing norms around race, sex, and gen­der, is not an argu­ment at all but a rev­o­lu­tion in moral sen­ti­ment. In all rev­o­lu­tions, the new thing strug­gling to be born makes use of the old sys­tem in order to over­throw it. At present, insti­tu­tions like the uni­ver­si­ty, the press, and the med­ical pro­fes­sion pre­serve the appear­ance of rea­son, empiri­cism, and argu­ment while alter­ing, through edict and coer­cion, the mean­ing of essen­tial terms in the moral lex­i­con, like fair­ness, equal­i­ty, friend­ship, and love.”
    • His­to­ry Shows Free Speech Is The Los­er In Mob Action (Jonathan Tur­ley, per­son­al blog): “What will be left when objec­tion­able pub­lic art and aca­d­e­mics are scrubbed from view? The silence that fol­lows may be com­fort­ing to those who want to remove images or ideas that cause unease. His­to­ry has shown, how­ev­er, that ortho­doxy is nev­er sat­is­fied with silence. It demands speech. Once all the offend­ing stat­ues are down, and all the offend­ing pro­fes­sors are culled, the appetite for col­lec­tive sup­pres­sion will become a demand for col­lec­tive expres­sion.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Of Stat­ues and Sym­bol­ic Mur­der (Wil­fred M. McClay, First Things): “…a great many of the foot sol­diers in this move­ment are young, white, sub­ur­ban, mid­dle-class and col­lege-edu­cat­ed; and that they are work­ing out their sal­va­tion with fear and trem­bling and a dead­ly earnest­ness. The ‘white priv­i­lege’ of which these young peo­ple com­plain is a pro­jec­tion onto oth­ers of the very con­di­tion that they sus­pect and fear in them­selves. Hence the con­vul­sive rage, com­plete with copi­ous gut­ter pro­fan­i­ty, which we have all seen in videos of them. Peo­ple in the grip of such pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal forces will go a long way to expi­ate for their exis­ten­tial sins and rid them­selves of their demons. They are eas­i­ly mobi­lized by oth­ers. Accord­ing to Pew esti­mates, only one out of six Black Lives Mat­ter activists is actu­al­ly black.”
      1. Relat­ed to the last sen­tence: George Floyd Pro­test­er Demo­graph­ics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities (Mobile­Wal­la report) has bar charts based on sur­veilling the cell phones of peo­ple at the protests and infer­ring their demo­graph­ics the way mar­keters do. 
    • A Min­neapo­lis Neigh­bor­hood Vowed to Check Its Priv­i­lege. It’s Already Being Test­ed. (Caitlin Dick­er­son, New York Times): “The impulse many white Pow­der­horn Park res­i­dents have to seek help from com­mu­ni­ty groups rather than from the police is being felt in neigh­bor­hoods across the coun­try. But some are find­ing the com­mit­ment hard to stand by when faced with the com­plex real­i­ties of life. While friends, neigh­bors and even fam­i­ly mem­bers in Pow­der­horn Park agree to avoid call­ing the police at all costs, it has been hard­er to estab­lish where to draw the line.” Read through to the insane final sto­ry. 
    • I don’t often insert my own com­men­tary in these emails, but in this case I’d like to high­light a Bib­li­cal per­spec­tive.
      1. The Bible teach­es that one of the rea­sons that God gives gov­ern­ments author­i­ty is for them to use vio­lence in the pur­suit of jus­tice. Romans 13:4 is key: “the one in author­i­ty is God’s ser­vant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no rea­son. They are God’s ser­vants, agents of wrath to bring pun­ish­ment on the wrongdoer.”
      2. We have free­dom in how we choose to do that as a soci­ety — the Bible does not require that we use police or that we build pris­ons. Hav­ing said that, if we abol­ish domes­tic law enforce­ment then the only alter­na­tives I see are the mil­i­tary, pri­vate busi­ness­es that offer pro­tec­tion for a fee, sanc­tioned vig­i­lan­tism, or mob jus­tice. These are not appeal­ing options. Some com­bi­na­tion of unbundling police work, reduc­ing crim­i­nal laws while rethink­ing the sanc­tions for vio­lat­ing them, and increas­ing police pay while impos­ing high­er stan­dards for police con­duct seems like a bet­ter path for­ward.

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 When Chil­dren Say They’re Trans (Jesse Sin­gal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a con­nec­tion between social influ­ences and gender‐identity explo­ration among ado­les­cents would require ignor­ing a lot of what we know about the devel­op­ing teenage brain—which is more sus­cep­ti­ble to peer influ­ence, more impul­sive, and less adept at weigh­ing long‐term out­comes and con­se­quences than ful­ly devel­oped adult brains—as well as indi­vid­ual sto­ries like Delta’s.” This is a long and bal­anced piece which has gar­nered out­rage in some online cir­cles. First shared in vol­ume 157.

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 238

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 Nuclear Fam­i­ly Was a Mis­take (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you want to sum­ma­rize the changes in fam­i­ly struc­ture over the past cen­tu­ry, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for indi­vid­u­als and more unsta­ble for fam­i­lies. We’ve made life bet­ter for adults but worse for chil­dren. We’ve moved from big, inter­con­nect­ed, and extend­ed fam­i­lies, which helped pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple in soci­ety from the shocks of life, to small­er, detached nuclear fam­i­lies (a mar­ried cou­ple and their chil­dren), which give the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in soci­ety room to max­i­mize their tal­ents and expand their options. The shift from big­ger and inter­con­nect­ed extend­ed fam­i­lies to small­er and detached nuclear fam­i­lies ulti­mate­ly led to a famil­ial sys­tem that lib­er­ates the rich and rav­ages the work­ing-class and the poor.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Will Some­body Please Hate My Ene­mies for Me? (David French, The Dis­patch): “Here’s the end result—millions of Chris­tians have not just decid­ed to hire a hater to defend them from haters and to hire a liar to defend them from liars, they active­ly ignore, ratio­nal­ize, min­i­mize, or deny Trump’s sins.”
    • Not quite in response, but kin­da relat­ed: Under­stand­ing Why Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives Would Vote for Trump (Andrew Walk­er, Nation­al Review): “In my expe­ri­ence, huge num­bers of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives are not proud about vot­ing for Trump. They don’t need any more hot takes denounc­ing them as irre­deemable hyp­ocrites. Their con­sciences bear a dis­com­fort gov­erned by their love for Amer­i­ca and the rep­u­ta­tion of their faith. But if these reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives have to choose between the duel­ing dump­ster fires of either Trump or a pos­si­ble Bernie Sanders pres­i­den­cy, they will vote over­whelm­ing­ly for Trump. And any­one who mis­un­der­stands this will con­tin­ue pro­ject­ing onto reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives the usu­al tired bro­mides that refuse to reck­on with a com­pli­cat­ed situation.”
    • Def­i­nite­ly in response to both arti­cles: Evan­gel­i­cals Still Ago­niz­ing Over Trump (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It’s not sexy to say it, but I don’t hate peo­ple who vote for Trump, I don’t hate peo­ple who vote against Trump, I don’t hate peo­ple who vote for Sanders, or any­body. I don’t believe we are fac­ing a Twi­light Of The Gods show­down between Good and Evil. I believe we are fac­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly vivid, emo­tion­al­ly charged ver­sion of the usu­al choice between deeply flawed can­di­dates. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get worked up into spit­ing the Oth­er, because if I put myself in their shoes, I can see why they would vote as they do, even if I think they’re wrong. Is this luke­warm­ness? OK, it’s luke­warm­ness. But pol­i­tics are not my god, so I don’t care.” 
  3. Is Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry Com­pat­i­ble with Chris­t­ian Faith? (Ger­ald McDer­mott, Juicy Ecu­menism): “Slavery and Jim Crow were evil and sys­temic. Racism is sin. But Chris­tians must not allow their hatred for the sin of racism to so cloud their vision that they put their faith in a phi­los­o­phy that has become a new reli­gion for its devotees—a reli­gion that in sig­nif­i­cant ways con­flicts with his­toric Chris­t­ian faith.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of divin­i­ty at Bee­son.
  4. Gen­er­a­tion Z and Reli­gion: What New Data Show (Melis­sa Deck­man, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “…it appears that the rate of younger Amer­i­cans depart­ing from orga­nized reli­gion is hold­ing steady… As Amer­i­ca heads ever more quick­ly into becom­ing a minor­i­ty major­i­ty nation with respect to race/ethnicity, with White Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca becom­ing a less dom­i­nant pres­ence in soci­ety, schol­ars should pay more atten­tion to how minor­i­ty groups are start­ing to shift their reli­gious behav­ior. My data sug­gest that these groups are look­ing very dif­fer­ent from coun­ter­parts in old­er generations.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Wash­ing­ton Col­lege. 
    • Is the rise of the nones slow­ing? Schol­ars say maybe (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News): “There are a cou­ple of pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for the slow­ing of reli­gious decline: The country’s grow­ing racial diver­si­ty…. The cul­ture war sort­ing is most­ly over…. A chang­ing social desir­abil­i­ty bias”
    • The Decline of Reli­gion May Be Slow­ing (Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “This bomb­shell find­ing sent us run­ning for oth­er datasets. Like all good sci­en­tists, we trust, but ver­i­fy. In this post, we run through evi­dence from the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey, 2018 Coop­er­a­tive Con­gres­sion­al Elec­tion Study (a RIP favorite), and the recent release of the Vot­er Study Group pan­el. The take­away is that the find­ing is val­i­dat­ed – the rate dri­ving up the reli­gious nones has appeared to be slow­ing to a crawl.”
    • Rea­sons to be Cau­tious About a Gen Z “Religious Rebound” (Joseph O. Bak­er, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “…if we look at reli­gious salience, Gen Z is less like­ly to say they are ‘not reli­gious’ (25.3%) com­pared to Mil­len­ni­als (28.4%), but Gen Z is also less like­ly to say they are ‘very reli­gious’ (7.8%) com­pared to Mil­len­ni­als (10.2%). So, if any­thing, Gen Z is more ‘meh’ about religion.”
  5. What Can We Learn from the #MeToo Moments in Gen­e­sis? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “The first book of the Bible is a pic­ture of sin run amuck. Of course, we also find in Gen­e­sis a dis­play of God’s cre­ative pow­er, his plan of redemp­tion, and his sov­er­eign mer­cy in bless­ing his unde­serv­ing peo­ple. But even amid this won­der­ful good news, we see plen­ty of exam­ples of the cor­rupt­ing effects of sin from Gen­e­sis 3 through the end of the book. In par­tic­u­lar, Gen­e­sis is replete with exam­ples of sex­u­al sin.”
  6. Why Did­n’t Ancient Rome have Dun­geons and Drag­ons? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Innovation doesn’t hap­pen very often. How many peo­ple have ever invent­ed a new way of doing any­thing? If sta­sis is the norm, then we should expect that many great ideas are rou­tine­ly over­looked. For an econ­o­mist this is an uncom­fort­able thought because we tend to think that prof­it oppor­tu­ni­ties are quick­ly exploit­ed (no $500 bills on the ground). But while that is cer­tain­ly true for choic­es with­in con­straints it may not be true for choic­es that change constraints.”
  7. No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air (Ed Reg­is, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “accounts of lift exist on two sep­a­rate lev­els of abstrac­tion: the tech­ni­cal and the non­tech­ni­cal. They are com­ple­men­tary rather than con­tra­dic­to­ry, but they dif­fer in their aims. One exists as a strict­ly math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­ry, a realm in which the analy­sis medi­um con­sists of equa­tions, sym­bols, com­put­er sim­u­la­tions and num­bers. There is lit­tle, if any, seri­ous dis­agree­ment as to what the appro­pri­ate equa­tions or their solu­tions are…. But by them­selves, equa­tions are not expla­na­tions, and nei­ther are their solutions.” I had low expec­ta­tions of this arti­cle, but it is pret­ty good.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 236

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. Behind the Great Fire­wall (Thomas Brown, Quil­lette): “The Chi­nese are proud of Chi­na, not just of 5,000 years of his­to­ry and a glob­al­ly rec­og­nized ancient cul­ture, but of mod­ern Chi­na. Chi­na the indus­try leader, Chi­na the pro­tec­tor of Chi­nese busi­ness, Chi­na the pow­er­ful and beau­ti­ful and rich. Chi­na the unapolo­getic. This is a sto­ry the Chi­nese want to hear and they don’t care if orga­ni­za­tions seem­ing­ly deter­mined to only tell the sup­pos­ed­ly bad things about Chi­na are kept out.”
    • Relat­ed: Polit­i­cal and Prac­ti­cal Impli­ca­tions of the Wuhan Virus (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Chi­nese peo­ple have an inter­est­ing rela­tion­ship with the Par­ty pro­pa­gan­da and cen­sor­ship sys­tem. Chi­nese are well aware that the gov­ern­ment lies to them. What they often have dif­fi­cul­ty dis­cern­ing is what it decides to lie about. Some­times it does not lie. Oth­er times it sim­ply leaves the truth unsaid.”
  2. Sun­day Morn­ing With Kanye (David French, The Dis­patch): “As we made our way close to the stage, I was struck by some­thing unusu­al. I didn’t see any mer­chan­dise for sale. There was no Kanye gear. There were no pro­mo­tions for Kanye. There were no pic­tures of Kanye—at least not that I saw. If you’d just walked up, you’d have no clue that one of the world’s biggest stars was about to perform.”
  3. Wokeademia (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “The game is no longer to advance can­di­dates who are them­selves ‘diverse.’ The game is to stock the fac­ul­ty with peo­ple of a cer­ti­fied ide­o­log­i­cal stripe, who are com­mit­ted to advanc­ing this cause. Tom Sow­ell need not apply.” The author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  4. Why These Young Amer­i­can Chris­tians Embraced Social­ism (Sarah Ngu, Reli­gion & Pol­i­tics): “…their evan­gel­i­cal expe­ri­ences pushed them to take the Bible seri­ous­ly and read it literally—which meant they end­ed up con­clud­ing that being a Chris­t­ian meant car­ing about the poor and dis­trust­ing the state (which, after all, killed Jesus).”
  5. On Killing Human Mon­sters (Mark LiVec­chi, Prov­i­dence): “‘The inter­nal con­di­tion of God’s exter­nal expres­sion of wrath,’ writes the the­olo­gian and rab­bi Abra­ham Joshua Hes­chel, ‘is grief.’ To the best I can deduce, there­in is com­mu­ni­cat­ed the com­plex dis­po­si­tion of the just war­rior.… I do not rejoice that I wor­ship a God who kills. I only rejoice that I wor­ship a God who is will­ing to.” 
  6. What If We Don’t Have to Choose Between Evo­lu­tion and Adam and Eve? (Rebec­ca Ran­dall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If we keep straight what the sci­ence is actu­al­ly say­ing, the sto­ry of Gen­e­sis could be true as lit­er­al­ly as you could imag­ine it, with Adam being cre­at­ed by dust and God breath­ing into his nos­trils and Eve being cre­at­ed from his rib. But evo­lu­tion is hap­pen­ing out­side the Gar­den, and there are peo­ple out there who God cre­at­ed in a dif­fer­ent way and who end up inter­min­gling with Adam and Eve’s descen­dants. It’s not actu­al­ly in con­flict with evo­lu­tion­ary science.” This is an inter­view with S. Joshua Swami­dass, a com­pu­ta­tion­al biol­o­gist at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis. The book he wrote has been get­ting rave reviews.
  7. The Lost His­to­ry of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion (Stan­ley Kurtz, The Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Schol­ars): “In Jan­u­ary of 1987, stu­dents at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty chant­i­ng ‘Hey hey, ho ho, West­ern Culture’s got to go,’ kicked off this cul­ture war. The fis­sure that opened three decades ago at Stanford—between the new mul­ti­cul­tur­al way, on the one hand, and tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can con­cep­tions of his­to­ry and cit­i­zen­ship, on the other—has widened now into a chasm.” This is long and not for every­one. It caught my atten­tion because Stan­ford plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in the nar­ra­tive. The author has a Ph.D. from Har­vard and has taught at both there and at U Chica­go. He is cur­rent­ly a senior fel­low at the Ethics and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Cen­ter.

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 230

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 Les­son To Unlearn (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “The most dam­ag­ing thing you learned in school was­n’t some­thing you learned in any spe­cif­ic class. It was learn­ing to get good grades.” Stan­ford stu­dents: if you feel attacked, you are. He is aim­ing at you. Worth pon­der­ing.
  2. The Chris­tians I Know (Eboo Patel, Inside High­er Ed): “Too often when I talk about the impor­tance of pos­i­tive­ly engag­ing reli­gious iden­ti­ty in a pro­gres­sive high­er ed space, the first ques­tion that gets asked is this: ‘Christians hate gays and refugees and poor peo­ple, so why should I cre­ate a space for their identities?’ That’s the same view of Chris­tians that big­ots have of Mus­lims: know­ing only the bad stuff. My hope is that peo­ple will remem­ber that Chris­tians often start and run the pro­grams that pro­vide direct ser­vice to those very peo­ple when they are suf­fer­ing the most.”
  3. British Evan­gel­i­cals Brace for Brex­it (Ken Chit­wood, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The gen­er­al­ly pro-remain stance of British evan­gel­i­cals might be sur­pris­ing to some. How­ev­er, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Andrea Hatch­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South in Sewa­nee, Ten­nessee, found British evan­gel­i­cals are ‘less bound­aried’ and gen­er­al­ly ‘more inter­na­tion­al­ist in out­look’ than either their Angli­can and Pen­te­costal peers or US evan­gel­i­cals. They are also more will­ing to work across polit­i­cal divides.” I find this inter­est­ing for sev­er­al rea­sons, one of which is the way the author sep­a­rates Pen­te­costals from evan­gel­i­cals. Is that a UK thing? In the USA Pen­te­costals are gen­er­al­ly seen as a sub­set of evan­gel­i­cals.
    • Relat­ed: The Begin­ning of the End of the Unit­ed King­dom (First Things): “It may seem hys­ter­i­cal to pro­claim the end to a coun­try that has basi­cal­ly exist­ed in its present form—minus the Repub­lic of Ire­land, of course—since 1707. But the evi­dence is build­ing by the day. In thir­ty years, it is far more like­ly than not that the Unit­ed King­dom will not exist. What will exist is an Eng­land that will be poor­er, frac­tured between the Lon­don elite and the rest of the coun­try, and pos­si­bly sub­ject to demo­graph­ic factionalism.”
    • Relat­ed: The Blun­der­ing Bril­liance of Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “It is this aspect of Boris’s pol­i­tics that some of his close allies insist has been mis­un­der­stood. He has done what no oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive leader in the West has done: He has co-opt­ed and there­by neutered the far right. The reac­tionary Brex­it Par­ty has all but col­lapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immi­gra­tion fer­vor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the eco­nom­ic and social cen­ter under Johnson’s lead­er­ship. And there is a strat­e­gy to this. What Cum­mings and John­son believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for lib­er­al progress, has, through its over­reach and hubris, actu­al­ly become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Con­ti­nent. By forc­ing many very dif­fer­ent coun­tries into one increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful Euro­crat­ic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nation­al­ist reaction.” This one is long but real­ly good. If you enjoy it, I super high­ly rec­om­mend a very amus­ing arti­cle about Boris John­son I shared back in vol­ume 208 (scroll down to the fun­ny sec­tion).
  4. Reli­gion, Reten­tion, and Why We Stay or Go (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “What to make of all this? First, evan­gel­i­cals are doing a good job of keep­ing peo­ple inside the ten­t…. The oth­er thing worth pon­der­ing is that almost no one is mov­ing toward Catholi­cism or main­line Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. Instead, the move­ment is all at the edges of the spec­trum — evan­gel­i­cals on one end, and the nones on the other.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and is him­self an ex-evan­gel­i­cal. 
  5. A guide to hav­ing an actu­al­ly hap­py Christ­mas (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “Mr Mutz found that Chris­tians felt hap­pi­er at Christ­mas, while oth­ers felt less hap­py. Sim­i­lar­ly Messrs Kass­er and Shel­don found that peo­ple who spent more time with their fam­i­lies or engag­ing in reli­gious prac­tices tend­ed to have a bet­ter time of things. Con­sumerism fared less well, accord­ing to Messrs Kass­er and Shel­don; for all the mon­ey and effort buy­ing and wrap­ping gifts, the activ­i­ty ‘apparently con­tributes lit­tle to hol­i­day joy’.”
  6. 200 Researchers, 5 Hypothe­ses, No Con­sis­tent Answers (Christie Aschwan­den, Wired): “When var­i­ous research teams designed their own means of test­ing the very same set of research ques­tions, they came up with diver­gent, and in some cas­es oppos­ing, results. The crowd­sourced study is a dra­mat­ic demon­stra­tion of an idea that’s been wide­ly dis­cussed in light of the repro­ducibil­i­ty crisis—the notion that sub­jec­tive deci­sions researchers make while design­ing their stud­ies can have an enor­mous impact on their observed results. Whether through p‑hacking or via the choic­es they make as they wan­der the gar­den of fork­ing paths, researchers may inten­tion­al­ly or inad­ver­tent­ly nudge their results toward a par­tic­u­lar conclusion.” I don’t think this is sur­pris­ing to any­one who knows many sci­en­tists, but it’s def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing.
  7. Are We in the Midst of a Trans­gen­der Mur­der Epi­dem­ic? (Will­fred Reil­ly, Quil­lette): “The Human Rights Cam­paign main­tains a year-by-year data­base con­tain­ing every known case of a trans­gen­der indi­vid­ual being killed by vio­lent means, and gives this num­ber as 29 in 2017, 26 in 2018, and 22 in 2019. Not only do these fig­ures not reflect a year-by-year increase in attacks on trans persons—they are remark­ably con­sis­tent, and may be trend­ing slight­ly downwards—they also indi­cate that the trans mur­der rate is sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er than the mur­der rate for Amer­i­cans overall.” Any num­ber of mur­ders is too many. Still, I found this inter­est­ing because I hear the con­trary so often. In light of the pre­vi­ous arti­cle, if you know oppos­ing research I’d like to see it. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Ken­tucky State Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “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 222

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 has been a crazy week for me, so a short­er list than nor­mal. Enjoy!

  1. More on Both­am Jean, Amber Guyger, and for­give­ness:
    • Both­am Jean’s Brother’s Offer of For­give­ness Went Viral. His Mother’s Calls for Jus­tice Should Too. (Dore­na Williamson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When a black per­son extends rad­i­cal for­give­ness, we see the grace of the gospel. But when we ignore a black person’s call for jus­tice, we cheap­en that grace. Both are act­ing like the God we serve; we need to lis­ten to them both.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Pas­tor Delonte Gholston’s Face­book post. “I agreed with so much of what this broth­er said and did because what he did is deeply root­ed in the truth of the gospel. What I despise is the ways that the pow­ers love to use sto­ries like these to tell peo­ple who are being active­ly oppressed, ‘why don’t you just for­give like them?’” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Amber Guyger’s Judge Gave Her a Bible and a Hug. Did That Cross a Line? (Sarah Mer­vosh and Nicholas Bogel-Bur­roughs, New York Times): Deb­o­rah Rhode, an expert in legal ethics and the direc­tor of the Cen­ter on the Legal Pro­fes­sion at Stan­ford Law School, said she believed that Judge Kemp’s behav­ior stayed with­in eth­i­cal bounds, espe­cial­ly because it came after the sen­tenc­ing had end­ed. ‘All the judge did is express some bonds of com­mon human­i­ty, and I don’t think we should be pun­ish­ing judges for that,’ she said. ‘If any­thing, our legal sys­tem has suf­fered from an absence of ade­quate com­pas­sion.’”
    • Why a Judge Says She Gave Amber Guyger a Bible, a Hug and Hope of Redemp­tion (Sarah Mer­vosh, New York Times): ““‘She asked me if I thought her life could have pur­pose,’ Judge Kemp recalled. “I said, “I know that it can.” She said, “I don’t know where to start, I don’t have a Bible.”’ Judge Kemp said she thought of the Bible in her cham­bers. “I said, “Well, hold on, I’ll get you a Bible.”’”
    • Don’t Mis­un­der­stand the ‘White Chris­t­ian’ Reac­tion to Brandt Jean’s Act of For­give­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “The moment went so viral not because for­give­ness was expect­ed or white inno­cence was pre­sumed. The moment went viral because the guilt was so obvi­ous, and rage was so under­stand­able. The moment went so viral because it was shock­ing. Brandt Jean demon­strat­ed a lev­el of grace that most Chris­tians (white or oth­er­wise) sim­ply couldn’t com­pre­hend, and they couldn’t com­pre­hend it because the hor­ror inflict­ed on his broth­er was so obvi­ous and so thor­ough­ly unjus­ti­fi­able.”
    • Both­am Jean’s neigh­bor, a key wit­ness in Amber Guyger tri­al, shot to death in Dal­las (Dal­las News): “A key wit­ness in Amber Guyger’s mur­der tri­al was shot and killed Fri­day evening at an apart­ment com­plex near Dal­las’ Med­ical Dis­trict, author­i­ties said.” 👀 Real­i­ty is entire­ly too much like a movie script late­ly.
  2. And some thoughts on Chi­na, Hong Kong, and free­dom.
    • The Chi­na Cul­tur­al Clash (Ben Thomp­son, Strat­e­ch­ery): “The prob­lem from a West­ern per­spec­tive is that the links Clin­ton was so sure would push in only one direc­tion — towards polit­i­cal free­dom — turned out to be two-way streets: Chi­na is not sim­ply resist­ing West­ern ideals of free­dom, but seek­ing to impose their own.”
    • I Can See Clear­ly Now (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “I thought this day was com­ing, but I didn’t expect it to come so soon. I don’t believe Bei­jing expect­ed it to come so soon either: the Chi­nese author­i­ties were play­ing a long game, bid­ing their time and build­ing their pow­er, and I do not think they were rel­ish­ing an imme­di­ate con­fronta­tion with West­ern cap­i­tal­ism. But the Hong Kong protests forced their hand. Bei­jing clear­ly per­ceives these protests as an exis­ten­tial threat, and have decid­ed that the moment has come to go all-in. They have pushed all their chips into the cen­ter of the table … and the cap­i­tal­ists imme­di­ate­ly fold­ed like a Chi­nese-made lawn chair.”
    • In relat­ed news: US announces visa restric­tions on Chi­na for Xin­jiang abus­es (Jen­nifer Hansler, CNN): “The move comes as the State Depart­ment has increased its pub­lic con­dem­na­tion of Chi­na’s arbi­trary deten­tion of up to two mil­lion Uyghurs in ‘in intern­ment camps designed to erase reli­gious and eth­nic iden­ti­ties.’”
  3. Upcom­ing book leaves sci­en­tif­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty for exis­tence of ‘Adam and Eve’ (USA Today): “…a lead­ing pub­lic schol­ar — Joshua Swami­dass, a physi­cian and genome sci­en­tist at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St. Louis, Mis­souri — is mak­ing a bold new attempt to rec­on­cile the bib­li­cal sto­ry of Adam and Eve with what we know about the genet­ic ances­try of the human race…. [He] makes an auda­cious claim: A de novo-cre­at­ed Adam and Eve could very well be uni­ver­sal human ances­tors who lived in the Mid­dle East in the last 6,000–10,000 years. This is not the first attempt to rec­on­cile the Gar­den of Eden sto­ry with sci­ence, but rarely does some­one with Swami­dass’ cre­den­tials do what most sci­en­tists would deem unthink­able: Take the sto­ry seri­ous­ly. How­ev­er, some athe­ist sci­en­tists are tak­ing Swami­dass seri­ous­ly.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York.

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 Philoso­pher Redefin­ing Equal­i­ty (Nathan Heller, New York­er): “When she was three, her moth­er asked, ‘Why do you allow your broth­er to talk for you?’—why didn’t she speak for her­self? ‘Until now, it sim­ply was not necessary,’ Eliz­a­beth said. It was the first full sen­tence that she had ever uttered.” I think that’s the best first sen­tence I’ve ever heard of. A tad long, but rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 189.

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 221

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, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Black Church After Chris­ten­dom (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I don’t know about you, but I can­not recall the last time I wit­nessed more pow­er­ful pub­lic expres­sions of what it means to be a Chris­t­ian than what Brandt Jean and Judge Tam­my Kemp did in that court­room. Guyger — again, a white woman — is going to prison to do time for her crime — but both Mr. Jean and Judge Kemp want­ed her to know that there is hope for her, and redemption.”
    • There are lots of news sources that fea­ture the video clip of Brandt Jean. I chose Dreher’s piece because he also focus­es on the judge. Both of their actions inspire me.
    • I first saw video clips of Brandt Jean’s mov­ing words surg­ing on social media, and I almost imme­di­ate­ly after­wards saw a back­lash which I found per­plex­ing. Some com­menters even sug­gest­ed that there is some­thing racist about lik­ing this video. I think the truth is much more whole­some — Chris­tians love see­ing cost­ly acts of obe­di­ence to Christ. Wit­ness the sim­i­lar reac­tions Chris­tians had to the gospel-fueled tes­ti­mo­ny of Rachael Den­hol­lan­der against Lar­ry Nas­sar and to the Amish community’s for­give­ness of a school shoot­er years ago. There were dif­fer­ent racial dynam­ics but sim­i­lar respons­es from Chris­tians.
  2. The Inter­net Is Over­run With Images of Child Sex­u­al Abuse. What Went Wrong? (Michael Keller and Gabriel Dance, The New York Times): “Pictures of child sex­u­al abuse have long been pro­duced and shared to sat­is­fy twist­ed adult obses­sions. But it has nev­er been like this: Tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies report­ed a record 45 mil­lion online pho­tos and videos of the abuse last year…. the prob­lem of child sex­u­al abuse imagery faces a par­tic­u­lar hur­dle: It gets scant atten­tion because few peo­ple want to con­front the enor­mi­ty and hor­ror of the con­tent, or they wrong­ly dis­miss it as pri­mar­i­ly teenagers send­ing inap­pro­pri­ate selfies.” WARNING — this is very dis­turb­ing. The reporters non-gra­tu­itous­ly describe some of the con­tent. If you sus­pect that the scene pre­ced­ing “The pre­dom­i­nant sound is the child scream­ing and cry­ing” will both­er you, it will.
    • I know some of our alum­ni who work in tech and in pol­i­cy still receive my Fri­day emails. If that is you, you need to read the pre­ced­ing arti­cle.
    • Relat­ed: Porn Cul­ture and Polit­i­cal Courage (Ter­ry Schelling, First Things): “The uncom­fort­able truth is that the rapid growth in child pornog­ra­phy is con­nect­ed to the cul­tur­al nor­mal­iza­tion of online pornog­ra­phy as a whole.”
  3. I Spent Years Search­ing for Magic—I Found God Instead (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Cat­a­pult): “I want­ed mag­ic. I didn’t think too much about mean­ing. Or at least, as long as every­thing meant some­thing, the specifics didn’t seem to mat­ter. Basil could mean love. Thurs­days could mean pow­er. The full moon puri­ty. Why not? The alter­na­tive was that noth­ing meant any­thing at all.” This is won­der­ful­ly writ­ten. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. How Do Chris­tians Fit Into the Two-Par­ty Sys­tem? They Don’t (Tim Keller, New York Times): “I know of a man from Mis­sis­sip­pi who was a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can and a tra­di­tion­al Pres­by­ter­ian. He vis­it­ed the Scot­tish High­lands and found the church­es there as strict and as ortho­dox as he had hoped. No one so much as turned on a tele­vi­sion on a Sun­day. Every­one mem­o­rized cat­e­chisms and Scrip­ture. But one day he dis­cov­ered that the Scot­tish Chris­t­ian friends he admired were (in his view) social­ists. Their under­stand­ing of gov­ern­ment eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy and the state’s respon­si­bil­i­ties was by his lights very left-wing, yet also ground­ed in their Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions. He returned to the Unit­ed States not more polit­i­cal­ly lib­er­al but, in his words, ‘humbled and chastened.’ He real­ized that thought­ful Chris­tians, all try­ing to obey God’s call, could rea­son­ably appear at dif­fer­ent places on the polit­i­cal spec­trum, with loy­al­ties to dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal strategies.”
    • Relat­ed: A Basic Primer on Rights and Oblig­a­tions (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “…the Bible doesn’t say much about rights. It does, how­ev­er, fre­quent­ly address oblig­a­tions, so the key to for­mu­lat­ing a bib­li­cal doc­trine of rights is to flip the doc­trine of obligation.”
  5. How Stan­ford Hides Con­flicts of Inter­est (Daniel “Bob” Fer­reira, Stan­ford Sphere): “We start­ed by going through all 127 full-time, non-cour­tesy pro­fes­sors in Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Bio­engi­neer­ing, and Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, and we checked what Bloomberg, Crunch­base, and the SEC had on them. Then, we went on to ver­i­fy whether this infor­ma­tion was current—through com­pa­ny web­sites, men­tions on their own pub­lic CVs, or media cov­er­age. Final­ly, we removed fac­ul­ty whose links to busi­ness­es had noth­ing to do with biotech.”
  6. Hong Kong: First Line of Defence against a Ris­ing Fas­cist Pow­er (Aaron Sarin, Quil­lette): “China’s gov­ern­ment has only retained the name ‘Communist Par­ty’ because to do oth­er­wise would be a first step towards admit­ting the atroc­i­ties of the past. The sev­er­ing of the link between Xi and Mao would make it pos­si­ble to acknowl­edge that Mao was one of history’s worst vil­lains. This would set a prece­dent for crit­i­cis­ing author­i­ty that would inevitably lead to Xi’s own down­fall. So the name stays, but in truth there is noth­ing ‘communist’ about this Com­mu­nist Par­ty (save its author­i­tar­i­an­ism). In fact, Marx­ist stu­dents, activists, and social work­ers have been arrest­ed and tor­tured since Xi took pow­er, and uni­ver­si­ties have shut down Marx­ist societies.”
    • The Prophet­ic Voice of Hong Kong’s Pro­test­ers (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Many Hong Kong Chris­tians, while com­pris­ing less than 12 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion, have played a promi­nent role in the protests—marching, singing hymns, hold­ing prayer cir­cles, and pro­vid­ing food and shel­ter to oth­er demon­stra­tors. (The Jesus Peo­ple song ‘Sing Hal­lelu­jah to the Lord’ became an unex­pect­ed anthem of the protests, as par­tic­i­pants sang the tune to calm con­fronta­tions with police.) For Chris­tians there, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty may be the great­est exis­ten­tial threat to the Hong Kong church.”
  7. The Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stupid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. This essay is about a decade old but I only recent­ly stum­bled upon it.

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 Amer­i­ca in one tweet:“We are liv­ing in an era of woke cap­i­tal­ism in which com­pa­nies pre­tend to care about social jus­tice to sell prod­ucts to peo­ple who pre­tend to hate capitalism.” (Clay Rout­ledge, Twit­ter) First shared in vol­ume 186.

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 190

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. Inside the Secret Face­book War For Mor­mon Hearts and Minds (Kevin Poul­son, The Dai­ly Beast): “We may be resigned to face­less cor­po­ra­tions buy­ing their way into our thoughts, but are we ready for a world where our neigh­bors and in-laws can do the same?” Genius and super-inter­est­ing.
  2. The scan­dal of sex­u­al abuse in South­ern Bap­tist church­es:
    • Part One: Abuse of Faith (Robert Dow­nen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco, Hous­ton Chron­i­cle): “In all, since 1998, rough­ly 380 South­ern Bap­tist church lead­ers and vol­un­teers have faced alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al mis­con­duct, the news­pa­pers found. That includes those who were con­vict­ed, cred­i­bly accused and suc­cess­ful­ly sued, and those who con­fessed or resigned. More of them worked in Texas than in any oth­er state. They left behind more than 700 vic­tims, many of them shunned by their church­es, left to them­selves to rebuild their lives. Some were urged to for­give their abusers or to get abor­tions. About 220 offend­ers have been con­vict­ed or took plea deals, and dozens of cas­es are pending.”
    • Part Two: Offend, then repeat (Robert Dow­nen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco, Hous­ton Chron­i­cle): ”No reli­gion is immune to sex­u­al mis­con­duct in its ranks. But unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which is wrestling with its own sex-abuse scan­dal, Bap­tists don’t answer to a pope or bish­op. Local church auton­o­my is a bedrock foun­da­tion of Bap­tist faith. There’s no dio­cese that assigns priests to a parish. Instead, each church is respon­si­ble for ordain­ing and hir­ing its own ministers.”
    • Part Three: Prey­ing On Teens (Robert Dow­nen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco, Hous­ton Chron­i­cle): “More than 100 South­ern Bap­tists described as for­mer youth pas­tors or youth min­is­ters are now in prison, are reg­is­tered as sex offend­ers or have been charged with sex crimes, the news­pa­pers found. Their most com­mon tar­gets were teenage girls and boys, though small­er chil­dren also were molest­ed, some­times in pas­tors’ stud­ies and Sun­day school rooms.”
    • South­ern Bap­tists and the Scan­dal of Church Sex­u­al Abuse (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “Jesus does not cov­er up sin with­in the tem­ple of his pres­ence. He brings every­thing hid­den to light. We should too. When we down­play or cov­er over what has hap­pened in the name of Jesus to those he loves we are not “protecting” Jesus’ rep­u­ta­tion. We are instead fight­ing Jesus him­self. No church should be frus­trat­ed by the Hous­ton Chronicle’s report­ing, but should thank God for it. The Judg­ment Seat of Christ will be far less ret­i­cent than a news­pa­per series to uncov­er what should nev­er have been hidden.” — he also wrote an op-ed for the New York Times a few days after this: South­ern Bap­tists Face Their #MeToo Moment (Rus­sell Moore, New York Times).
    • The Real­i­ty of Sex­u­al Abuse Hits Home: What Hap­pened? What Do We Do Now? (Al Mohler, per­son­al blog): “Southern Bap­tists, by instinct, have prac­ticed a form of moral­ism that views sex­u­al mis­be­hav­ior as an iso­lat­ed event—deal with it and move on. This sim­plis­tic moral­ism reduces sex­u­al abuse and gloss­es over the sever­i­ty of the crime. Sex­u­al abuse is not an iso­lat­ed act of mis­be­hav­ior; it leaves in its wake scarred vic­tims as well as mali­cious vic­tim­iz­ers. Abuse of this nature snowballs.” This arti­cle has some insight­ful com­men­tary on the unique chal­lenges fac­ing the South­ern Bap­tists because of their struc­ture.
    • Evan­gel­i­cal Apoc­a­lypse (Dale M. Coul­ter, First Things): “As one denom­i­na­tion­al leader point­ed out to me, min­is­ters brought up on charges and dis­missed from one denom­i­na­tion have sim­ply gone to anoth­er for cre­den­tials. It’s not just laity who take advan­tage of evan­gel­i­cal­is­m’s big tent to move around. These open net­works for min­is­te­r­i­al move­ment from one part of evan­gel­i­cal­ism to anoth­er allow sex­u­al abusers to escape judg­ment and start over. We don’t need a data­base of sex­u­al abusers for the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion, we need it for evan­gel­i­cal­ism as a whole.” I don’t know how fea­si­ble that spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tion is, but I do know Coul­ter is point­ing out a real and very hard-to-address prob­lem.
    • In a dif­fer­ent neck of the woods: Why Does the Catholic Church Keep Fail­ing on Sex­u­al Abuse? (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “O’Malley’s career, with all of its suc­cess­es and frus­tra­tions, illu­mi­nates why the sex-abuse cri­sis has once again sub­sumed the Catholic Church—and why this insti­tu­tion, one of the world’s great moral author­i­ties, has been inca­pable of solv­ing one of the most moral­ly straight­for­ward prob­lems of our time.”
  3. Bill Gates tweet­ed out a chart and sparked a huge debate about glob­al pover­ty (Dylan Matthews, Vox): “Hickel argues that focus­ing on data show­ing declines in glob­al pover­ty does polit­i­cal work on behalf of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, defend­ing an inher­ent­ly unjust glob­al sys­tem that has failed res­i­dents of rich and poor nations alike. Pinker agrees that the data sup­ports the idea that cap­i­tal­ism is work­ing for the world’s poor­est, and says that’s a deci­sive rebut­tal of Hickel’s nar­ra­tive of endur­ing persecution.”
  4. An African-Amer­i­can Woman Reflects on the Trans­gen­der Move­ment (Nurid­deen Knight, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Paradoxically, the more our soci­ety tries to free itself from gen­der stereo­types, the more it becomes enslaved to them. By say­ing that peo­ple can be born in a body of the wrong gen­der, trans­gen­der activists are say­ing there is a set of feel­ings that are only allo­cat­ed to women and anoth­er set for men. There­fore, they believe, those who feel things that do not con­form to their sex’s accept­able set of feel­ings must out­ward­ly change their gen­der to match their mind.”
  5. Trevor Noah on Liam Neeson’s Racist Con­fes­sion (YouTube): much more thought­ful than any­thing else I have come across.
  6. 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.’”
    • I am pret­ty sure I shared a sim­i­lar link before, but I can’t find it search­ing my archives. Maybe I cut it at the last minute one week. Fas­ci­nat­ing regard­less.
  7. Sci­ence Is The Evan­gel­i­cal Tro­phy Wife (David Hed­dle, per­son­al blog): “In many evan­gel­i­cal cir­cles, sci­ence has become a tro­phy wife. Put her front and cen­ter, and show her beau­ty in, say, the form of Hub­ble neb­u­lae pho­tographs, with the req­ui­site Psalm 19:1 cap­tion, but do not ever let her speak, for she is like­ly to embar­rass you. Her the­o­log­i­cal util­i­ty is only in the pleas­ant optics, not in the substance.” Beau­ti­ful title.

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 Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘perfect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

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.