Tag: sexual assault

TGFI, Volume 556: therapeutic misadventures, tolerant Protestants, and a dweebocracy

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Ther­a­py Tear­ing Us Apart? (Jonathan Alpert, The Free Press): “Too many ther­a­pists now func­tion less as clin­i­cians than as rein­forcers of the most self-pro­tec­tive inter­pre­ta­tion avail­able, teach­ing patients to locate the prob­lem every­where but them­selves.… The patient doesn’t gain greater agency, but instead, a more pol­ished sto­ry about why some­one else is to blame. If you feel injured, the injury must be real. If you feel unsafe, the threat must be there. If a rela­tion­ship cre­ates dis­com­fort, the rela­tion­ship itself becomes the prob­lem.… This is how ther­a­py can qui­et­ly become an engine that keeps peo­ple stuck. Patients leave not more capa­ble of tol­er­at­ing frus­tra­tion, ambi­gu­i­ty, or ordi­nary dis­ap­point­ment, but less. They become more flu­ent in explain­ing why they feel the way they do while becom­ing less prac­ticed at chang­ing what they do next.”
  2. Which reli­gions are the least tol­er­ant of cam­pus speak­ers? (Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, FIRE): “When it comes to near­ly every ide­ol­o­gy or gen­der, Protes­tants are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more tol­er­ant than their non-Protes­tant coun­ter­parts, and not only that, they’re usu­al­ly more tol­er­ant of both sides. So the Protes­tant effect isn’t (pri­mar­i­ly) a result of gen­der or ide­ol­o­gy. For some rea­son, Protes­tants are just unusu­al­ly tol­er­ant of con­tro­ver­sial speak­ers.” — This is super inter­est­ing! (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  3. Actu­al­ly, Democ­ra­cy Dies in H.R. (Aman­da Taub, New York Times): “The incen­tives for elites to stay loy­al [to dic­ta­tors] have been stud­ied exten­sive­ly, but the rank and file have remained some­thing of a black box.… It turns out that the kinds of career pres­sures famil­iar to employ­ees every­where — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor pro­mo­tion — can be enough to incen­tivize low­er- and midlev­el offi­cials to vio­late pro­fes­sion­al oblig­a­tions, fun­da­men­tal norms and even basic moral­i­ty. The peo­ple who make those deci­sions, the research sug­gests, are nei­ther extrem­ists nor vic­tims. They are often just mid­dling work­ers look­ing for a way to get ahead.”
    • This is a fas­ci­nat­ing insight.
  4. Two arti­cles reflect­ing on sex­u­al vio­lence in the war between Israel and Hamas.
    • What I Learned Cat­a­loging the Sex­u­al Vio­lence of Octo­ber 7 (Cochav Elka­yam-Levy, The Free Press): “Some acts were car­ried out with a lev­el of cru­el­ty that expos­es a dif­fi­cult truth: Our vocab­u­lary is insuf­fi­cient to describe what human beings are capa­ble of doing to one anoth­er.… Sex­u­al vio­lence, when used as an instru­ment of ter­ror, is too often imag­ined in ways that dimin­ish its grav­i­ty, cru­el­ty, and func­tion. It is fre­quent­ly reduced, mis­char­ac­ter­ized, and at times resist­ed pre­cise­ly because it defies com­pre­hen­sion. The dif­fi­cul­ty, even now, lies not in the absence of evi­dence, but in the lim­its of com­pre­hen­sion.”
      • This is a high-lev­el sum­ma­ry with­out the dis­turb­ing graph­ic details that some reports fore­ground.
    • Your Ques­tions About Nicholas Kristof’s Col­umn on Pales­tini­ans and Sex­u­al Assault (Kath­leen Kings­bury and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Before pub­li­ca­tion, Nick’s report­ing under­went a rig­or­ous vet­ting process by Opinion’s fact-check­ing depart­ment to ensure that every tes­ti­mo­ny and anec­dote he per­son­al­ly report­ed was sup­port­ed by inde­pen­dent sources, as is the case with all sen­si­tive pieces. The Times’s stan­dards and legal teams also reviewed the col­umn and offered feed­back. After pub­li­ca­tion, we reviewed the fac­tu­al chal­lenges that read­ers and oth­ers raised, as is stan­dard prac­tice with any pub­lished piece. Edi­tors found no errors.… Crit­ics who focus on the back­grounds of spe­cif­ic sources often over­look the over­whelm­ing vol­ume and con­sis­ten­cy of such accounts. Nick’s col­umn, ulti­mate­ly, was a call to action, urg­ing those in pow­er to con­demn sex­u­al vio­lence in all its forms.”
  5. An Ope­nAI mod­el has dis­proved a cen­tral con­jec­ture in dis­crete geom­e­try (Ope­nAI): “This proof is an impor­tant mile­stone for the math and AI com­mu­ni­ties. It marks the first time that a promi­nent open prob­lem, cen­tral to a sub­field of math­e­mat­ics, has been solved autonomous­ly by AI. It also demon­strates the depth of rea­son­ing these sys­tems now sup­port.… Fields medal­ist Tim Gow­ers, writ­ing in the com­pan­ion paper, calls the result ‘a mile­stone in AI math­e­mat­ics.’ ”
  6. Stu­dents deserve bet­ter than COLLEGE (Iván Mari­novic, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “By my count, the syl­labus assigns rough­ly 45 pages of canon­i­cal West­ern philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing across the entire quar­ter, against more than 500 pages of con­tem­po­rary work orga­nized around iden­ti­ty, oppres­sion and indige­nous ways of know­ing — Freire, Dan­garem­b­ga, West­over and Kim­mer­er. The ratio is 11:1. There is no Aris­to­tle, no Augus­tine, no Aquinas, no Mon­taigne, no Locke, no Mill, no New­man, no Stein­er, no Bloom — none of the writ­ers who built the case for lib­er­al edu­ca­tion that the course claims to defend. A course adver­tised as a defense of lib­er­al edu­ca­tion has been built with­out the thinkers who defined it.”
    • The author is an account­ing pro­fes­sor in the GSB. This was picked up and reprint­ed by The Free Press as Stan­ford’s War on the West­ern Canon. The bit at the end com­par­ing Stan­ford to its peer insti­tu­tions was instruc­tive.
    • This one gen­er­at­ed a lot of stu­dent dis­cus­sion on our Slack, most­ly empha­siz­ing that more stu­dents should choose to enroll in SLE rather than the default route of COLLEGE. In one stu­den­t’s words, “Espe­cial­ly with COLLEGE being expand­ed to 3 quar­ters, it’s hard to see why stu­dents would pre­fer to take it over SLE. SLE feels, at least for me, to be more effi­cient (cov­er­ing COLLEGE, PWR, and sev­er­al of the WAYS) and effec­tive (in terms of the learn­ing and prepar­ing stu­dents for the rest of their aca­d­e­m­ic career).” Anoth­er stu­dent not­ed “even when SLE does get noticed by the press it still seems hat­ed on. Before frosh year I read an Atlantic piece that crit­i­cized it for hav­ing too much of a mod­ern focus and not engag­ing with old­er sta­ples of the West­ern canon like Gil­gamesh and the Odyssey. The prob­lem is that WE DO cov­er those texts and it was clear that the author mis­un­der­stood the premise of the pro­gram and only read the spring syl­labus.… Any­ways, the point is that SLE is great and every­one should take it!” Incom­ing frosh, take note!
  7. The Secret Elite One Fresh­man Dis­cov­ered at Stan­ford (Anand Girid­haradas, New York Times): “Baker’s first book, ‘How to Rule the World,’ is a rig­or­ous, self-assured, propul­sive, at times ter­ri­fy­ing por­trait of a dwee­boc­ra­cy that ‘sets the agen­da for the plan­et.’ In every age, there is some place that epit­o­mizes how pow­er works. Baker’s Stan­ford is a strong can­di­date, and his book fol­lows in the tra­di­tion of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chron­i­cle ‘Liar’s Pok­er,’ but with more pim­ples and less eye con­tact.”
    • I love this para­graph. This is the same book I post­ed anoth­er review of a few weeks ago.

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 516: God in history & confused physicists

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Did God Favor France? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[Joan of Arc’s] sto­ry is one of the most exten­sive­ly doc­u­ment­ed cas­es of a mirac­u­lous-seem­ing inter­ven­tion into sec­u­lar his­to­ry, cal­cu­lat­ed to baf­fle, fas­ci­nate and even charm like almost noth­ing else in West­ern his­to­ry. Every­thing in the sto­ry sounds like a pious leg­end con­fab­u­lat­ed cen­turies after the fact. A peas­ant girl with zero polit­i­cal or mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence shows up at a roy­al court, announces a divine mis­sion and makes a series of prophe­cies about what God wants for France that she con­sis­tent­ly ful­fills — a ful­fill­ment that requires not mere­ly some for­tu­nate hap­pen­stance, but her tak­ing com­mand of a medieval army and win­ning an imme­di­ate series of vic­to­ries over an intim­i­dat­ing adver­sary with Alexan­drine or Napoleon­ic skill.”
    • Worth a pon­der.
  2. Physi­cists dis­agree wild­ly on what quan­tum mechan­ics says about real­i­ty, Nature sur­vey shows (Eliz­a­beth Gib­ney, Nature): “Nature asked researchers what they thought was the best inter­pre­ta­tion of quan­tum phe­nom­e­na and inter­ac­tions — that is, their favourite of the var­i­ous attempts sci­en­tists have made to relate the math­e­mat­ics of the the­o­ry to the real world. The largest chunk of respons­es, 36%, favoured the Copen­hagen inter­pre­ta­tion — a prac­ti­cal and often-taught approach. But the sur­vey also showed that sev­er­al, more rad­i­cal, view­points have a healthy fol­low­ing. Asked about their con­fi­dence in their answer, only 24% of respon­dents thought their favoured inter­pre­ta­tion was cor­rect; oth­ers con­sid­ered it mere­ly ade­quate or a use­ful tool in some cir­cum­stances. What’s more, some sci­en­tists who seemed to be in the same camp didn’t give the same answers to fol­low-up ques­tions, sug­gest­ing incon­sis­tent or dis­parate under­stand­ings of the inter­pre­ta­tion they chose.”
  3. How a Chris­t­ian col­lege min­istry glo­ri­fied a sex offend­er and enabled him to keep abus­ing stu­dents (Mike Hix­en­baugh, NBC News): “The pas­tors who shep­herd­ed hun­dreds of high school and col­lege stu­dents to Savala’s home were part of Chi Alpha, a Chris­t­ian min­istry that evan­ge­lizes on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es. Stu­dents seek out Chi Alpha to con­nect with God and each oth­er, through small Bible stud­ies and rol­lick­ing wor­ship ser­vices — and, for more than 30 years, through Savala. Gen­er­a­tions of Chi Alpha lead­ers hailed him as a spir­i­tu­al savant who could answer life’s deep­est mys­ter­ies.”
    • Heart­break­ing. I’ve post­ed about this scan­dal in Texas before (in oth­er words, this is the same scan­dal from a few years ago with addi­tion­al report­ing). Now that it is being cov­ered on NBC the high­er-qual­i­ty jour­nal­ism is uncov­er­ing even more trag­ic details.
  4. Put Down the Sho­far (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “You’re like­ly famil­iar with sho­fars blown in pub­lic, Seder meals for Passover, and cir­cum­ci­sion for baby boys. But as com­mon and well-intend­ed as these may be, I want to explain why I told my stu­dent that, yes, his house church was wrong—or at least, mis­guid­ed.”
    • A the­o­log­i­cal­ly rich arti­cle.
  5. The Sim­ple Truth About the War in Gaza (Cole­man Hugh­es, The Free Press): “Amid these devel­op­ments, it may seem car­toon­ish, even obscene, to say that in the war between Israel and Hamas, Israel is the good guy. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth that’s incred­i­bly easy to for­get amid the day-to-day cov­er­age of this ter­ri­ble war.… Israel’s goal is to live in peace with its neigh­bors. Through­out its 77-year his­to­ry, it has agreed to half a dozen peace deals with the Pales­tini­ans. It vol­un­tar­i­ly left Gaza in 2005. If it had any inter­est in wip­ing Gaza off the map, it could have done so any time in the last sev­er­al decades.”
  6. How the Elite Changed Its Mind on Chris­tian­i­ty (Emma Camp, Rea­son): “As the decline in reli­gious atten­dance has slowed, the past few years have also seen a clear rise in the sta­tus of reli­gion. It’s becom­ing more and more social­ly accept­able to be reli­gious in elite intel­lec­tu­al spaces—something that could have a real impact on how reli­gion is per­ceived by every­one else.… Reli­gion became cool again among the edu­cat­ed elite once it gained an asso­ci­a­tion with good aes­thet­ics, high art, and sacred music—not Bush-era Repub­li­can soft theoc­ra­cy.  Today, one can belong to the ideas-mak­ing class—an aspir­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al or artist—and still be reli­gious, so long as one steers clear of evan­gel­i­cal kitsch. Whether or not a real reli­gious revival is under­way in Amer­i­can pub­lic life, one thing is clear: The cool kids aren’t the smug, stri­dent athe­ists anymore—they’re the Chris­tians.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing, although it reminds me I need to write that essay I’ve been mulling over defend­ing low-church Protes­tantism as the best and most authen­tic expres­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty.
  7. Influ­encer Mis­sion­ar­ies (Lau­ren Jack­son, New York Times): “Church­es are turn­ing to the inter­net to reach new audi­ences. Evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors are bring­ing their famous­ly high-pro­duc­tion ser­mons into ver­ti­cal video. The Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints is pre­sent­ing a diverse, younger image to its 1.4 mil­lion Insta­gram fol­low­ers.”
    • A short arti­cle, not super-infor­ma­tive. Most­ly inter­est­ing because of the trend reach­ing the point that the Times is tak­ing note of it. Also because of some of the small vignettes: “Per­haps that explains the celebri­ty of Father Rafael Capo, 57, a body­build­ing priest in Mia­mi who fus­es fit­ness with faith for his 112,000 Insta­gram fol­low­ers. He often posts pho­tos of him­self lift­ing weights and con­se­crat­ing com­mu­nion.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 405

a bunch of depress­ing arti­cles this week

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

This is vol­ume 405, which is 43 + 53 + 63

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have We Need a New Media Sys­tem (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The flaw in the sys­tem is that even the biggest news com­pa­nies now oper­ate under the assump­tion that at least half their poten­tial audi­ence isn’t lis­ten­ing. This leads to all sorts of prob­lems, and the fact that the eas­i­est way to keep your own demo­graph­ic is to feed it neg­a­tive sto­ries about oth­ers is only the most obvi­ous. On all sides, we now lean into inflam­ma­to­ry car­i­ca­tures, because the finan­cial incen­tives encour­age it.” From vol­ume 284.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 300

some of the arti­cles have high­er-qual­i­ty argu­ments than the norm

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

This is vol­ume 300, which is how many Spar­tans it takes to fend off a Per­sian army.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Men Behave Bad­ly — A Review (Rob Hen­der­son, Quil­lette): “Intrigu­ing­ly, men and women con­verge in their answers when asked what per­cent­age of men would be will­ing to com­mit rape. Women esti­mate that about one-third of men would com­mit rape if there were no con­se­quences, and about one-third of men report that they would com­mit rape if they believed they could get away with it.” The author is a PhD can­di­date at Cam­bridge review­ing a book by a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing through­out. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Proof That Polit­i­cal Priv­i­lege Is Harm­ful for Chris­tian­i­ty (Nilay Saiya, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a peer-reviewed study pub­lished this month in the jour­nal Soci­ol­o­gy of Reli­gion, my coau­thor and I chal­lenge the per­ceived wis­dom that edu­ca­tion and afflu­ence spell Christianity’s demise. In our sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of a glob­al sam­ple of 166 coun­tries from 2010 to 2020, we find that the most impor­tant deter­mi­nant of Chris­t­ian vital­i­ty is the extent to which gov­ern­ments give offi­cial sup­port to Chris­tian­i­ty through their laws and poli­cies. How­ev­er, it is not in the way devout believ­ers might expect.”
  3. The Redemp­tion of Justin Bieber (Zach Baron, GQ): “And then there is God. If you ask Chance the Rap­per why he and his friend seem so hap­py in an indus­try that tends to grind peo­ple to dust, he will answer with­out hes­i­ta­tion. ‘Both of us, our secret sauce is Jesus,’ Chance says. ‘Justin doesn’t fake the funk. He goes to Jesus with his prob­lems, he goes to Jesus with his suc­cess­es. He calls me just to talk about Jesus.’ ”
  4. In Decid­ing Ful­ton v. Philadel­phia, the Supreme Court Should Remem­ber That Fos­ter Care Is for the Chil­dren (James Dwyer, Nation­al Review): “But fos­ter care is not a pub­lic accom­mo­da­tion nor a ser­vice to ‘the pub­lic.’ Chil­dren are not gener­ic goods for sale (like donuts or cups of cof­fee), to which every­one has an equal right. Instead, when the gov­ern­ment is mak­ing deci­sions on behalf of fos­ter chil­dren, it is oblig­at­ed to act only in that child’s best inter­est.” The author is a law prof at William and Mary and this arti­cle is real­ly good.
  5. Pan­dem­ic-relat­ed:
    • COVID-19 Rewired Our Brains (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “At some point, the pan­dem­ic — the pro­vi­sion­al and prac­ti­cal judg­ments in favor of cau­tion that can jus­ti­fy restric­tive behav­iors — became an unshake­able moral pur­pose. Actu­al weigh­ing of risks went out the win­dow: There’s a dead­ly dis­ease out there; my actions can con­tribute to the end of the dis­ease or to its spread­ing in per­pe­tu­ity. ” This artic­u­lates some­thing I’ve dim­ly felt. Very good.
    • The Lib­er­als Who Can’t Quit Lock­down (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “But per­son­al deci­sions dur­ing the coro­n­avirus cri­sis are fraught because they seem sym­bol­ic of people’s broad­er val­ue sys­tems. When vac­ci­nat­ed adults refuse to see friends indoors, they’re work­ing through the trau­ma of the past year, in which the bro­ken­ness of America’s med­ical sys­tem was so evi­dent. When they keep their kids out of play­grounds and urge friends to stay dis­tanced at small out­door pic­nics, they are con­tin­u­ing the spir­it of the past year, when civic duty has been expressed through lone­ly asceti­cism. For many peo­ple, this kind of behav­ior is a form of good cit­i­zen­ship. That’s a hard idea to give up.”
    • Believe Sci­ence: Get Vac­ci­nat­ed. Then Relax. (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, once we are stuck inside it is very hard to unstick our­selves. I’m try­ing to remind myself of this truth when I find myself want­i­ng to berate friends who, ful­ly vac­ci­nat­ed, look at me with crazy eyes when I sug­gest com­ing over for din­ner. PTSD might be too strong a descrip­tor, but it’s not so far off either.”
    • Data Shows White Evan­gel­i­cals And Catholics More Like­ly to Get Vac­cine Than ‘Nones’ and Gen­er­al Pub­lic (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion Unplugged): “…when the sam­ple is bro­ken down into the three of the largest reli­gious groups: White evan­gel­i­cals, White Catholics and the reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed, some dis­par­i­ties begin to emerge. It’s note­wor­thy that White Chris­tians were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to get the vac­cine than the gen­er­al pub­lic between Jan­u­ary and April. In the lat­est wave of the sur­vey, near­ly 60% of White Catholics had been vac­ci­nat­ed and just about half of White evan­gel­i­cals said the same. It was the reli­gious “nones” that were lag­ging far behind, with only 31% indi­cat­ing that they had received one dose.” That is def­i­nite­ly not the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from the media, but it is the impres­sion I’ve got­ten from my friends. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Patents are Not the Prob­lem! (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Patents are not the prob­lem. All of the vac­cine man­u­fac­tur­ers are try­ing to increase sup­ply as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. Bil­lions of dos­es are being produced–more than ever before in the his­to­ry of the world. Licens­es are wide­ly avail­able.… Plas­tic bags are a big­ger bot­tle­neck than patents. The US embar­go on vac­cine sup­plies to India was pre­cise­ly that the Biden admin­is­tra­tion used the DPA to pri­or­i­tize things like biore­ac­tor bags and fil­ters to US sup­pli­ers and that meant that India’s Serum Insti­tute was hav­ing trou­ble get­ting its pro­duc­tion lines ready for Novavax. Cure­Vac, anoth­er poten­tial mRNA vac­cine, is also find­ing it dif­fi­cult to find sup­plies due to US restric­tions (which means sup­plies are short every­where).” Loose­ly relat­ed, but such a glo­ri­ous rant I had to share it.
    • The ori­gin of COVID: Did peo­ple or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? (Nicholas Wade, Bul­letin of the Atom­ic Sci­en­tists): “Sci­ence is sup­pos­ed­ly a self-cor­rect­ing com­mu­ni­ty of experts who con­stant­ly check each other’s work. So why didn’t oth­er virol­o­gists point out that the Ander­sen group’s argu­ment was full of absurd­ly large holes? Per­haps because in today’s uni­ver­si­ties speech can be very cost­ly. Careers can be destroyed for step­ping out of line. Any virol­o­gist who chal­lenges the community’s declared view risks hav­ing his next grant appli­ca­tion turned down by the pan­el of fel­low virol­o­gists that advis­es the gov­ern­ment grant dis­tri­b­u­tion agency.” Very thor­ough, very read­able, very per­sua­sive. There is a real chance humans are respon­si­ble for COVID and we need to inves­ti­gate it.
  6. How the Pen­ta­gon Start­ed Tak­ing U.F.O.s Seri­ous­ly (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “Despite the fact that most adults car­ry around excep­tion­al­ly good cam­era tech­nol­o­gy in their pock­ets, most U.F.O. pho­tos and videos remain mad­den­ing­ly indis­tinct, but the for­mer Pen­ta­gon offi­cial implied that the gov­ern­ment pos­sess­es stark visu­al doc­u­men­ta­tion; Eli­zon­do and Mel­lon have said the same thing.”
  7. I Became a Moth­er at 25, and I’m Not Sor­ry I Didn’t Wait (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “But what of hav­ing chil­dren — or get­ting mar­ried, for that mat­ter — before estab­lish­ing one­self? That is: What to say to the young per­son who might con­sid­er those kinds of com­mit­ments if not for the final­i­ty of it all, the sense that she may be mak­ing some­body else before know­ing who she her­self real­ly is?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 278

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 277

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 248

One of the best expla­na­tions of reli­gious lib­er­ty I have read, along with arti­cles about the pan­dem­ic, UFOs, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, and a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with a pas­tor.

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

I’m a lit­tle hap­py because the num­ber 248 seems cool to me. If I ever reach 1248 I’ll think it’s even cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and the Com­mon Good (Nation­al Affairs, William Haun): “Many of today’s pro­gres­sives, con­ser­v­a­tives, and lib­er­tar­i­ans [can­not] explain why reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar and reli­gious exer­cise in par­tic­u­lar should shape the com­mon good, even when they go against the grain of sec­u­lar visions adopt­ed in law.” This is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant link I’ve shared in quite a while. Not light read­ing but worth­while. The author is a lawyer for the Beck­et Fund.
  2. Erwin McManus: The Peace­able War­rior (Paul J. Pas­tor, Out­reach Mag­a­zine): “I talked to some­one last Sun­day who said, ‘I’m here because some­body invit­ed me. I didn’t want to come.’ [Laughs] She actu­al­ly said, ‘I’m mean, jad­ed and cyn­i­cal. I don’t believe in God or reli­gion. I think it’s all a sham.’ I said, ‘You’re real­ly dis­ap­point­ed, aren’t you?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you like us,’ I said. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what to do with that.’ ” (the excerpt is actu­al­ly from part 2 of the inter­view and the sto­ry gets even bet­ter). I only stum­bled upon this slight­ly old­er arti­cle because it won a Mag­gie award for best inter­view of 2019.
  3. Coro­n­avirus News & Per­spec­tives
    • Com­par­ing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Com­par­ing Apples to Oranges (Jere­my Samuel Faust, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “When reports about the nov­el coro­n­avirus SARS-CoV­‑2 began cir­cu­lat­ing ear­li­er this year and ques­tions were being raised about how the ill­ness it caus­es, COVID-19, com­pared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emer­gency med­i­cine res­i­den­cy and over three and a half years as an attend­ing physi­cian, I had almost nev­er seen any­one die of the flu. I could only remem­ber one trag­ic pedi­atric case.” The author is an instruc­tor at Har­vard Med­ical School. Fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Takes Pics Of Peo­ple In Pub­lic From 2 Per­spec­tives And It Shows How Eas­i­ly The Media Can Manip­u­late Real­i­ty (Liu­ci­ja Ado­maite and Denis Tymulis, Bored Pan­da): “‘The prox­im­i­ty of peo­ple has wide­ly been debat­ed in Den­mark in the past weeks. Dan­ish politi­cians and author­i­ties have fre­quent­ly referred to images which they believed to show mem­bers of the pub­lic behav­ing in dis­agree­ment with the gen­er­al guide­lines.’ As a nation­al pho­to news agency that sup­plies visu­al cov­er­age on the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, ‘we became aware that our con­tri­bu­tion could be mis­read.’” A pic­ture is worth 1000 words, not all of them hon­est.
    • Seattle’s Lead­ers Let Sci­en­tists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not (Charles Duhigg ‚New York­er): “Con­stan­tine told me, ‘Jeff rec­og­nized what he was ask­ing for was imprac­ti­cal. He said if we advised social dis­tanc­ing right away there would be zero accep­tance. And so the ques­tion was: What can we say today so that peo­ple will be ready to hear what we need to say tomor­row?’ In e‑mails and phone calls, the men began play­ing a game: What was the most extreme advice they could give that peo­ple wouldn’t scoff at? Con­sid­er­ing what would like­ly be hap­pen­ing four days from then, what would they regret not hav­ing said?”
    • A Vir­ginia preach­er believed ‘God can heal any­thing.’ Then he caught coro­n­avirus. (Peter Jami­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the days after Lan­don suc­cumbed to covid-19, his death brought words of sym­pa­thy from peo­ple who knew him — and jeers from peo­ple who didn’t. The New York Post, the Dai­ly Mail and an athe­ist blog pub­lished arti­cles seiz­ing on his March 13 Face­book post. Lan­don was posthu­mous­ly attacked as a vic­tim of mis­guid­ed beliefs — in the assur­ances of his pres­i­dent and the pro­tec­tions of his God.”
    • Infor­ma­tion Can Do What Lock­downs Can’t (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Amer­i­cans, like peo­ple in almost every coun­try, were quick­er to under­stand the risks than most of the peo­ple who gov­ern us. Alas, had our lead­ers tak­en the threat seri­ous­ly a month ear­li­er, and com­mu­ni­cat­ed the risks to Amer­i­cans more explic­it­ly, COVID could have been a flash in the pan. Instead, many thou­sands of Amer­i­cans are going to die unnec­es­sary deaths.”
    • Why Did YouTube Remove The Doc­tors’ Brief­ing? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…I absolute­ly believe that it’s wrong to cen­sor what qual­i­fied med­ical pro­fes­sion­als (read: not quacks) are say­ing about the cri­sis, which is so unique in our expe­ri­ence as a nation. A strong lock­down was nec­es­sary at first. If there is good med­ical evi­dence that the lock­down, and relat­ed pub­lic health strate­gies, might be doing more harm that good at this date, then let’s hear that argu­ment.”
    • Relat­ed: The Inevitable Coro­n­avirus Cen­sor­ship Cri­sis is Here (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The peo­ple who want to add a cen­sor­ship regime to a health cri­sis are more dan­ger­ous and more stu­pid by leaps and bounds than a pres­i­dent who tells peo­ple to inject dis­in­fec­tant. It’s aston­ish­ing that they don’t see this.”
    • With US Bor­ders Closed by Covid-19, How Will I Afford Insulin? (James Stout, Undark): “Dur­ing months when I teach as an adjunct pro­fes­sor and am cov­ered by my university’s insur­ance plan, I stock up as much insulin as I can. Dur­ing the remain­der of the year, I do what thou­sands of oth­ers do: I cross the bor­der to Mex­i­co where, just 12 miles from my house in San Diego, I can buy the same med­i­cine at one-tenth of the price.” Sent my way by a stu­dent.
  4. UFO Sight­ings: They Deserve to Be Tak­en More Seri­ous­ly (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “The offi­cial release of some pre­vi­ous­ly leaked UFO videos tak­en by U.S. navy pilots has sparked renewed inter­est in the big­ger ques­tions. For sure those fly­ing objects are uniden­ti­fied, but how much atten­tion should we earth­lings devote to this issue? I am struck by the con­trast between those who see this as an impor­tant ques­tion and those who think the whole thing will turn out to be an error or some kind of opti­cal illu­sion.”
  5. On the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty: 
    • Chi­na Has a Post-Pan­dem­ic Dream for Hong Kong (Yi-Zheng Lian, New York Times): “But the recent devel­op­ments actu­al­ly are remark­able. For the first time, the tra­di­tion­al pan-dems are being treat­ed as ene­mies just like the sep­a­ratists. And for the first time, Bei­jing is vio­lat­ing the very let­ter of the Basic Law, which it itself has pro­mul­gat­ed; the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment typ­i­cal­ly only con­torts the law and dis­torts its spir­it.”
    • The End of the Har­vard Cen­tu­ry (Mat­teo N. Wong, Har­vard Crim­son): “Chi­nese offi­cials reg­u­lar­ly deliv­er com­plaints to uni­ver­si­ties host­ing events on sen­si­tive issues and even offer schol­ars mon­ey to mod­i­fy research crit­i­cal of Chi­na.… giv­en Harvard’s sta­tus in the inter­na­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic hier­ar­chy, Chi­nese author­i­ties may be par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the Uni­ver­si­ty. ‘We’ve had Chi­nese cit­i­zens at Har­vard, who are clear­ly doing the bid­ding of the Chi­nese state, com­ing and sit­ting in on talks and tak­ing notes and report­ing back,’ Per­ry says. She sim­i­lar­ly sus­pects Chi­nese cit­i­zens of report­ing on vis­it­ing Chi­nese schol­ars’ activ­i­ties.” This arti­cle is quite long but fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Amer­i­ca is awak­en­ing to Chi­na. This is a clar­i­on call to seize the moment. (Mitt Rom­ney, Wash­ing­ton Post): “China’s alarm­ing mil­i­tary build-up is not wide­ly dis­cussed out­side clas­si­fied set­tings, but Amer­i­cans should not take com­fort in our dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly large mil­i­tary bud­get. The gov­ern­ment of Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping doesn’t report its actu­al defense spend­ing. An apples-to-apples analy­sis demon­strates that China’s annu­al pro­cure­ment of mil­i­tary hard­ware is near­ly iden­ti­cal to ours; but because our mil­i­tary has mis­sions around the world, this means that in the Pacif­ic, where Chi­na con­cen­trates its fire­pow­er, it will have mil­i­tary supe­ri­or­i­ty.”
    • I was arrest­ed in Hong Kong. It’s part of China’s larg­er plan.(Mar­tin C. M. Lee , Wash­ing­ton Post): “Hong Kong peo­ple now face two plagues from Chi­na: the coro­n­avirus and attacks on our most basic human rights. We can all hope a vac­cine is soon devel­oped for the coro­n­avirus. But once Hong Kong’s human rights and rule of law are rolled back, the fatal virus of author­i­tar­i­an rule will be here to stay.”
  6. My Native Amer­i­can father drew the Land O’Lakes maid­en. She was nev­er a stereo­type. (Robert Des­Jar­lait, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mia’s van­ish­ing has prompt­ed a social media meme: ‘They Got Rid of The Indi­an and Kept the Land.’ That isn’t too far from the truth. Mia, the stereo­type that wasn’t, leaves behind a land­scape void­ed of iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry. For those of us who are Amer­i­can Indi­an, it’s a his­to­ry that is all too famil­iar.”
  7. By Biden’s Own Stan­dards, He Is Guilty As Charged (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “On Friday’s Morn­ing Joe, Biden laid out a sim­ple process for judg­ing him: Lis­ten respect­ful­ly to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or dis­prove her spe­cif­ic claim. The objec­tive truth, Biden argued, is what mat­ters. I agree with him. But this was emphat­i­cal­ly not the stan­dard Biden favored when judg­ing men in col­lege. If Biden were a stu­dent, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evi­dence pro­vid­ed, who was charg­ing him, who was a wit­ness, and no right to ques­tion the accuser.”
    • This arti­cle is about col­lege Title IX pro­ceed­ings using Tara Reade and Joe Biden as illus­tra­tions. If its inclu­sion comes off as par­ti­san, bear in mind that the author intends to vote for Biden.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Dol­phins swim in bio­lu­mi­nes­cent waves in New­port Beach (YouTube): three min­utes
  • Obvi­ous­ly Con­fused Amash Runs For Pres­i­dent Even Though We Already Have Two Choic­es (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Unusu­al­ly Heavy Call Vol­umes (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Lat­est Com­put­er Mod­el Pre­dicts Between 0 And 12.6 Bil­lion New COVID-19 Deaths By Sum­mer (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Steve Har­vey Gets Tie Stolen by Pick­pock­et Bob Arno (Steve Har­vey Show, YouTube): sev­en min­utes, rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent

    • Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

    Why Do You Send This Email?

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

    Disclaimer

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

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 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 214

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 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.” This is a very good piece.
  2. Skillet’s John Coop­er on Apos­ta­sy Among Young Chris­t­ian Lead­ers (George Brahm, Cogent Chris­tian­i­ty: “I’ve been say­ing for 20 years (and seemed prob­a­bly quite judg­men­tal to some of my peers) that we are in a dan­ger­ous place when the church is look­ing to 20 year old wor­ship singers as our source of truth. We now have a church cul­ture that learns who God is from singing mod­ern praise songs rather than from the teach­ings of the Word.”
  3. Jef­frey Epstein and When to Take Con­spir­a­cies Seri­ous­ly (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Most con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are false. But often some of the things they’re try­ing to explain are real.” Refresh­ing san­i­ty.
  4. Depor­ta­tion of a Chaldean Chris­t­ian to Iraq, and where he died, gets some decent cov­er­age (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “The more you look into this sto­ry, the more dis­turb­ing it gets. Mindy Belz, report­ing for World, wrote that a third coun­try had offered to take Aldaoud but that U.S. immi­gra­tion author­i­ties refused. Putting him on a plane to Najaf was an inten­tion­al twist of cru­el­ty. Appar­ent­ly, it was not an acci­dent that he was sent there instead of Bagh­dad.”
  5. The Last Days of John Allen Chau (Alex Per­ry, Out­side Mag­a­zine): “.…to those who know the tribes best, John’s mis­sion did not spell the end of the Sen­tine­lese. To them, he rep­re­sent­ed a pos­si­ble means of sur­vival.“ Chi Alpha makes an appear­ance in this arti­cle. Relat­ed links back in vol­umes 179 and 180.
  6. Jeff Bezos is qui­et­ly let­ting his char­i­ties do some­thing rad­i­cal — what­ev­er they want (Theodore Schleifer, Vox Recode): “Giv­ing $100 mil­lion to non­prof­its based on lit­tle pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion and then let­ting them run with it sounds, on its face, like a recipe for dis­as­ter. It con­jures the image of fat-and-hap­py char­i­ty lead­ers milk­ing extrav­a­gant salaries from oth­ers’ gen­eros­i­ty, or prof­li­gate spend­ing on extra­ne­ous over­head — or even out­right fraud…. Well, here’s the sur­prise: Mul­ti­ple experts told Recode this strat­e­gy actu­al­ly makes a lot of sense. They think phil­an­thropies should give non­prof­its sub­stan­tial­ly more lee­way.”
    1. Related(ish): Mis­sion­al Mis­con­cep­tion #1 (Sup­port Fig­ures) (Seth Calla­han, per­son­al blog): “If the [Post Office] were a non-prof­it, faith-based orga­ni­za­tion, with all of their employ­ees being respon­si­ble to cov­er their own oper­at­ing costs… then each employ­ee would need to have a month­ly sup­port lev­el of $11,837.69. That fig­ure does not rep­re­sent what your mail­man gets PAID, mind you. It is how much it COSTS for your mail­man to per­form the ser­vices that are required of him: trans­porta­tion and stor­age of goods, pack­ing sup­plies, vehi­cle main­te­nance, health­care, retire­ment, social security…etc. His take-home pay (what he lives off of) is a small per­cent­age of those oper­at­ing costs.”
  7. The Reli­gious Hunger of the Rad­i­cal Right (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, New York Times): “Unlike Islamist jihadists, the online com­mu­ni­ties of incels, white suprema­cists and anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists make no meta­phys­i­cal truth claims, do not focus on God and offer no promise of an after­life or reward. But they ful­fill the func­tions that soci­ol­o­gists gen­er­al­ly attribute to a reli­gion: They give their mem­bers a mean­ing­ful account of why the world is the way it is.” 

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 Plan­et of Cops (Fred­die de Boer, per­son­al blog): “The woke world is a world of snitch­es, infor­mants, rats. Go to any space con­cerned with social jus­tice and what will you find? End­less sur­veil­lance. Every­body is to be judged. Every­one is under sus­pi­cion. Every­thing you say is to be scoured, picked over, ana­lyzed for any pos­si­ble offense. Everyone’s a detec­tive in the Divi­sion of Prob­lem­at­ics, and they walk the beat 24/7…. I don’t know how peo­ple can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly talk about prison abo­li­tion and restor­ing the idea of for­give­ness to lit­er­al crim­i­nal jus­tice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kan­ga­roo court sys­tem.” First shared in vol­ume 161.

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.