Tag: sexual assault

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 165

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 157

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. These Har­vard Kids Got the Les­son of Their Lives in the Heart­land (Sale­na Zito, NY Post): “I have been a nation­al polit­i­cal jour­nal­ist for near­ly 15 years. When­ev­er and wher­ev­er I trav­el in this coun­try, I abide by a few sim­ple rules: No planes, no inter­states and no hotels. And def­i­nite­ly no chain restau­rants…. Those sim­ple rules are what intrigued stu­dents at the Har­vard Insti­tute of Pol­i­tics (IOP) after hear­ing me speak at a Piz­za and Pol­i­tics event on the school’s cam­pus last fall.”
  2. Don’t Quit the Repub­li­can Par­ty. Stay and Fight (Michael Wear, Time Mag­a­zine): “The prob­lem is that pol­i­tics is not an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic endeav­or. Inde­pen­dents tend to spurn insti­tu­tions gen­er­al­ly, and then feel vin­di­cat­ed when our insti­tu­tions do not reflect their views. But while Inde­pen­dents think they are send­ing polit­i­cal par­ties a mes­sage, polit­i­cal par­ties do not hear them…. In essence, Inde­pen­dents active­ly min­i­mize their impact on elec­tions and par­ty posi­tions. When peo­ple leave (or fail to join) par­ties in protest, they starve those par­ties of ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty, dri­ving them to their extremes.”
    • On Twit­ter the author (a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer) says “The head­line is mis­lead­ing. My argu­ment is a cau­tion against becom­ing an indy. If you read the arti­cle, I explic­it­ly argue that if you believe the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty more close­ly aligns with your vision of what is best for our nation’s pol­i­tics, you should become a Demo­c­rat.” In case you didn’t know, authors rarely choose their head­lines (or even the titles of their books).
  3. 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.
  4. The Sin Of Silence (Joshua Pease, Wash­ing­ton Post): “With­out a cen­tral­ized the­o­log­i­cal body, evan­gel­i­cal poli­cies and cul­tures vary rad­i­cal­ly, and while some church lead­ers have worked to pre­vent abuse and harass­ment, many have not. The caus­es are man­i­fold: author­i­tar­i­an lead­er­ship, twist­ed the­ol­o­gy, insti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tion, obliv­i­ous­ness about the prob­lem and, per­haps most shock­ing, a dimin­ish­ment of the trau­ma sex­u­al abuse cre­ates — espe­cial­ly sur­pris­ing in a church cul­ture that believes strong­ly in the sanc­ti­ty of sex…. Roger Canaff, a for­mer New York state pros­e­cu­tor who spe­cial­ized in child sex­u­al abuse, tells me that many wor­shipers he encoun­tered felt per­se­cut­ed by the sec­u­lar cul­ture around them — and dis­in­clined to reach out to their per­se­cu­tors for help in solv­ing prob­lems.”
  5. Con­tra Caplan On Arbi­trary Deplor­ing (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “This is my long-wind­ed answer to a ques­tion sev­er­al peo­ple asked on the last links post – why should we pri­or­i­tize respond­ing to China’s mass incar­cer­a­tion of the Uighurs? Aren’t there oth­er equal­ly bad things going on else­where in the world, like malar­ia? Yes. But I had opti­misti­cal­ly thought we had most­ly estab­lished a strong norm around ‘don’t put minori­ties in con­cen­tra­tion camps’. Resources devot­ed to enforc­ing that norm won’t just solve the imme­di­ate prob­lem in Chi­na, they’ll also help main­tain a cred­i­ble taboo against this kind of thing so it’s less like­ly to hap­pen the next time.”
  6. The Hand­maids of Cap­i­tal­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Fem­i­nists were divid­ed over sur­ro­ga­cy and com­mer­cial­ized fer­til­i­ty, but the oppo­si­tion to both prac­tices grad­u­al­ly dis­solved, and now only eccen­tric con­ser­v­a­tives notice the weird resem­blances between Cal­i­for­nia-style sur­ro­ga­cy prac­tices and the hand­maids and econowives of Gilead. They were divid­ed over pornog­ra­phy, often bit­ter­ly — but over time the sex-pos­i­tive side increas­ing­ly won out over the Andrea Dworkin­ish dis­senters, even as the online realm was over­run with images and videos that more than jus­ti­fied her argu­ments. They were, and are, divid­ed over pros­ti­tu­tion, but it’s pret­ty clear that the ver­sion of fem­i­nism that sup­ports the rights of sex work­ers to sell their bod­ies in the mar­ket­place has the intel­lec­tu­al momen­tum.”
  7. More on bor­der fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tions, a pol­i­cy that has been stopped by exec­u­tive order after mas­sive pub­lic out­cry.
    • The Less­er Cru­el­ty On Immi­gra­tion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “it would be use­ful for every­one if the Trump White House just admit­ted that this pol­i­cy was con­ceived as a deter­rent — trau­ma­tiz­ing a cer­tain num­ber of fam­i­lies in the hopes of bring­ing greater order to the bor­der in the long run. That admis­sion would get us clos­er to the hard prob­lem in migra­tion pol­i­cy. Some harsh­ness, some deter­rence, real­ly is unavoid­able in any immi­gra­tion sys­tem that doesn’t sim­ply dis­solve bor­ders. So pol­i­cy­mak­ers are there­fore oblig­ed to choose tol­er­a­ble cru­el­ties over the intol­er­a­ble one that we’re wit­ness­ing in action right now.”
    • Immi­gra­tion: Was A.G. Ses­sions Right to Quote the Bible in Defense of Fam­i­ly Sep­a­ra­tion? (Bruce Ash­ford, per­son­al blog): “Paul is say­ing, in effect, ‘Look, it’s true that Jesus is the ulti­mate Ruler of a cos­mic King­dom while Cae­sar is only the tem­po­rary ruler of a lim­it­ed earth­ly king­dom. But that doesn’t mean you’re above the law. You should be a good cit­i­zen and obey the law except, of course, when God’s law con­flicts with Caesar’s law.’”
    • A case study in the prop­er role of Chris­tians in pol­i­tics (Michael J. Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the case of child sep­a­ra­tion, some of the most effec­tive resis­tance has come from reli­gious lead­ers — Catholic, Protes­tant main­line and even some evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian (see Car­di­nal Tim­o­thy Dolan and Franklin Gra­ham). It was a case study in the prop­er and pos­i­tive role that reli­gion can play in our com­mon life.”
    • Enforce the Bor­der — Humane­ly (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Ille­gal immi­grants are com­mit­ting no moral wrong. They are doing what we might do in their place—as we, by defend­ing bor­ders, are doing what they would do if they were in ours. Like so many human insti­tu­tions, bor­ders are both arbi­trary and indis­pens­able. With­out them, there are no nations. With­out nations, there can be no democ­ra­cy and no lib­er­al­ism. John Lennon may imag­ine that with­out nations there will be only human­i­ty. More like­ly, with­out nations there will only be tribes.”
    • Our Debate On Ille­gal Immi­gra­tion Is A Nation­al Dis­as­ter (David Harsanyi, The Fed­er­al­ist): “The major­i­ty of kids in care of the U.S. Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, most often teenagers, are appre­hend­ed because they’re here with­out any par­ents. It’s a grow­ing prob­lem. In 2013, a lit­tle few­er than 40,000 unac­com­pa­nied minors were appre­hend­ed by the Bor­der Patrol. That was a his­toric high. In 2016 there were near­ly 60,000. This year there are like­ly to be more than 80,000.”
    • Amer­i­can Fam­i­lies Should­n’t Be Sep­a­rat­ed, Either (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg View): “Obvi­ous­ly, a case can be made for enforc­ing the bor­der, but delib­er­ate cru­el­ty is nev­er a good idea. Those chil­dren — inno­cent vic­tims all of them — will like­ly be trau­ma­tized for life…. If you agree with me on this, I’d like to push you one step fur­ther. It’s hor­ri­ble to forcibly sep­a­rate law­break­ing par­ents from their young chil­dren, but we do that to Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, too. Accord­ing to one 2010 study, more than 1.1 mil­lion men and 120,000 women in U.S. jails and pris­ons have chil­dren under the age of 17.” This is one of the most intrigu­ing things I read this week.
    • The Rise of the Amnesty Thugs (David Brooks, New York Times): “For cen­turies, con­ser­v­a­tives have repeat­ed a spe­cif­ic cri­tique against state pow­er. Sta­tism, con­ser­v­a­tives have argued, has a ten­den­cy to become bru­tal­ist and inhu­mane because a bureau­cra­cy can’t see or account for the com­plex­i­ty of real­i­ty. It tries to impose uni­form rules on the organ­ic intri­ca­cy of human rela­tion­ships. Sta­tist social engi­neer­ing projects cause hor­rif­ic suf­fer­ing because in the mind of sta­tists, the abstract rule is more impor­tant than the human being in front of them. The per­son must be crushed for the sake of the abstrac­tion.” Astute insights in this op-ed. Rec­om­mend­ed. Also, the title is slight­ly mis­lead­ing.
    • A Twit­ter thread from an immi­gra­tion attor­ney explain­ing how long­stand­ing this prob­lem has been

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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 138

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 read books effi­cient­ly in grad school (Thomas Kidd, per­son­al newslet­ter): “Here’s the method I rec­om­mend for read­ing a book effi­cient­ly: read every word of the intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion of a book. Then read the intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion of each chap­ter word-for-word. With­in each chap­ter, read the first and last sen­tence of each body para­graph. Slow down when it gets inter­est­ing, or when the author hits on your par­tic­u­lar research inter­est.” Kidd is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty. There is a length­i­er arti­cle with relat­ed thoughts titled Effi­cient Read­ing by Karin Wulf, a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at William and Mary.
  2. The Anti-Chris­t­ian Alt-Right (Matthew Rose, First Things): “Almost every­thing writ­ten about the ‘alter­na­tive right’ in main­stream out­lets is wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stu­pid. It is deep. Its ideas are not ridicu­lous. They are seri­ous. To appre­ci­ate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its pres­ence on social media, where its obnox­ious use of insult, obscen­i­ty, and racism has earned it a rep­u­ta­tion for moral idio­cy. The rep­u­ta­tion is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and per­son­al attacks are argu­ments of gen­uine pow­er and expand­ing appeal…. The alt-right is anti-Chris­t­ian. Not by impli­ca­tion or insin­u­a­tion, but by con­fes­sion. Its lead­ing thinkers flaunt their rejec­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty and their desire to con­vert believ­ers away from it.”
  3. News To A For­eign Coun­try (David War­ren, per­son­al blog): “The State has its reli­gion, we have ours. So long as we remain meek and obe­di­ent, to any­thing we are required to sign, the Antichrist him­self wouldn’t care what we think. The trou­ble aris­es only when we fail to sign, salute, or check the right box­es. That is, from the Antichrist’s point of view, a form of defi­ance that requires pun­ish­ment — a pun­ish­ment that we have brought upon our­selves, as will be con­de­scend­ing­ly explained.” This is a tran­scribed speech by a Cana­di­an jour­nal­ist, and it is extreme­ly fiery and very Catholic.
  4. Trans­gen­der Ide­ol­o­gy Is Rid­dled With Con­tra­dic­tions. Here Are the Big Ones. (Ryan T Ander­son, Her­itage): “If gen­der is a social con­struct, how can gen­der iden­ti­ty be innate and immutable? How can one’s iden­ti­ty with respect to a social con­struct be deter­mined by biol­o­gy in the womb? How can one’s iden­ti­ty be unchange­able (immutable) with respect to an ever-chang­ing social con­struct? And if gen­der iden­ti­ty is innate, how can it be ‘flu­id’?”
  5. Mas­sacre in Myan­mar (Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo, Simon Lewis and Antoni Slod­kows­ki, Reuters):  “Reuters has pieced togeth­er what hap­pened in Inn Din in the days lead­ing up to the killing of the 10 Rohingya – eight men and two high school stu­dents in their late teens. Until now, accounts of the vio­lence against the Rohingya in Rakhine state have been pro­vid­ed only by its vic­tims. The Reuters recon­struc­tion draws for the first time on inter­views with Bud­dhist vil­lagers who con­fessed to torch­ing Rohingya homes, bury­ing bod­ies and killing Mus­lims. This account also marks the first time sol­diers and para­mil­i­tary police have been impli­cat­ed by tes­ti­mo­ny from secu­ri­ty per­son­nel them­selves.”
  6. Should We Say “Of Course” To Fem­i­nism? (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “…I would chal­lenge all crit­i­cal­ly-think­ing fem­i­nists to ask the same ques­tion I asked my friend: if this move­ment does­n’t wel­come me, my opin­ions, or my solu­tions, why would I want to be part of it?” Yes, this is our Anni­ka.
  7. Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sex­u­al Assault on Cam­pus?  (Jia Tol­lenti­no, The New York­er):  “In col­lege, every­thing is Janus-faced: what you inter­pret as refuge can lead to dan­ger, and vice ver­sa. One of the most high­ly val­orized social activ­i­ties, black­ing out and hook­ing up, holds the poten­tial for trau­ma with­in it like a seed.”
  8. What Teenagers Are Learn­ing From Online Porn (Mag­gie Jones, New York Times): “But you don’t have to believe that porn leads to sex­u­al assault or that it’s cre­at­ing a gen­er­a­tion of bru­tal men to won­der how it helps shape how teenagers talk and think about sex and, by exten­sion, their ideas about mas­culin­i­ty, fem­i­nin­i­ty, inti­ma­cy and pow­er.” This arti­cle uses graph­ic imagery.
  9. How Chi­nese over­seas stu­dents are learn­ing harsh life lessons (Eric Fish, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post):   “Inter­views with Chi­nese stu­dents study­ing abroad and aca­d­e­mics who research their atti­tudes present a com­plex pic­ture – one in which stu­dents enter and leave with diverse views and iden­ti­ties that often defy clear loy­al­ties or ide­o­log­i­cal labels. But nev­er­the­less, many feel caught in the geopo­lit­i­cal cross­fire – forced to choose a side or keep their heads down.”

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 This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but it’s insight­ful (first shared in vol­ume 32).

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 137

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. My Lar­ry Nas­sar Tes­ti­mo­ny Went Viral. But There’s More to the Gospel Than For­give­ness. (Mor­gan Lee inter­view­ing Rachael Den­hol­lan­der, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “One of the areas where Chris­tians don’t do well is in acknowl­edg­ing the dev­as­ta­tion of the wound. We can tend to gloss over the dev­as­ta­tion of any kind of suf­fer­ing but espe­cial­ly sex­u­al assault, with Chris­t­ian plat­i­tudes like God works all things togeth­er for good or God is sov­er­eign. Those are very good and glo­ri­ous bib­li­cal truths, but when they are mis­ap­plied in a way to damp­en the hor­ror of evil, they ulti­mate­ly damp­en the good­ness of God. Good­ness and dark­ness exist as oppo­sites. If we pre­tend that the dark­ness isn’t dark, it damp­ens the beau­ty of the light.”
  2. Want to see a spat between two bril­liant the­olo­gians?
    • The New Tes­ta­ment in the strange words of David Bent­ley Hart (N.T. Wright, The Chris­t­ian Cen­tu­ry): “When a the­olo­gian of the stature of David Bent­ley Hart offers a ‘piti­less­ly lit­er­al trans­la­tion’ of the New Tes­ta­ment that is ‘not shaped by lat­er the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal his­to­ry’ and aims to make ‘the famil­iar strange, nov­el, and per­haps new­ly com­pelling,’ we are eager to see the result. He promis­es to bring out the ‘wild­ly indis­crim­i­nate polypho­ny’ of the writ­ers’ styles and emphases, con­verg­ing on their ‘vibrant cer­tain­ty that his­to­ry has been invad­ed by God in Christ in such a way that noth­ing can stay as it was.’ But his two main claims (to be ‘lit­er­al’ and ‘undog­mat­ic’) are not borne out, and the promise of dis­play­ing the strange­ness of ear­ly Chris­t­ian life dis­ap­pears behind dif­fer­ent kinds of strange­ness.”
    • A Reply To N.T. Wright (David Bent­ley Hart, Eclec­tic Ortho­doxy): “[A rebut­tal] where­in, at long last, our author unbur­dens him­self of a great num­ber of com­plaints he has long wished to make against that pious man’s earnest but prob­lem­at­ic approach to the New Tes­ta­ment, embell­ished with a few moments of sly mock­ery, but ulti­mate­ly intend­ed as a good-natured—albeit inflexible—expression of deep dis­agree­ment.”
    • Trans­lat­ing the N. T. Wright and David Bent­ley Hart Tus­sle  (Caleb Lind­gren, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While the ver­bal spar­ring is both sharp and enter­tain­ing (and per­haps off-putting to cer­tain sen­si­bil­i­ties), there is a valu­able point at the heart of this debate—one that is worth not­ing as these two Bible schol­ar­ship heavy-hit­ters take swings at each other’s work.”
  3. Fake porn is the new fake news, and the inter­net isn’t ready (Nicole Lee, Engad­get): “Moth­er­board recent­ly uncov­ered a dis­turb­ing new trend on Red­dit, in which users cre­ate AI-gen­er­at­ed porno­graph­ic clips by swap­ping oth­er peo­ple’s faces onto porn stars…. Need­less to say, this has fright­en­ing con­se­quences. Not only does this open the door for a hor­ri­fy­ing new kind of revenge porn, where a venge­ful ex could slap your face on an X‑rated video, it also opens a Pan­do­ra’s box of fears where noth­ing on the inter­net can ever be trust­ed.” The embed­ded (non-sketchy) gif is alarm­ing­ly real­is­tic. The tech­nol­o­gy is already good enough that we’re at a tip­ping point, and it will only get more effec­tive in the future.
  4. A Work­out-Track­ing App Acci­den­tal­ly Revealed The Loca­tion Of A Bunch Of Secret Mil­i­tary Bases And Sol­diers’ Names (Digg): “Stra­va, a GPS-enabled mobile app that allows users to track their run­ning, bik­ing and swim­ming work­outs, is attract­ing con­tro­ver­sy after observers noticed that its glob­al work­out heatmap appar­ent­ly revealed the loca­tion of secret mil­i­tary bases and the exer­cise habits of indi­vid­ual troops on those bases.” Oops. Tech­nol­o­gy has con­se­quences. Remem­ber that, you star­tup­py types.
  5. The Abor­tion Memo (David Brooks, New York Times): “I’m ask­ing us to rethink our pri­or­i­ties. What does Amer­i­ca need most right now? One of our talk­ing points is that late-term abor­tions are extreme­ly rare. If they are extreme­ly rare, why are we giv­ing them pri­or­i­ty over all of our oth­er issues com­bined?”
  6. The female price of male plea­sure (Lili Loof­bourow, The Week): “Because if you’re going to wax poet­ic about male plea­sure, you had bet­ter be ready to talk about its secret, unpleas­ant, ubiq­ui­tous cousin: female pain. Research shows that 30 per­cent of women report pain dur­ing vagi­nal sex, 72 per­cent report pain dur­ing anal sex, and ‘large pro­por­tions’ don’t tell their part­ners when sex hurts.” First, fas­ci­nat­ing because I had no idea. Sec­ond, because the author is so cocooned in assump­tions stem­ming from the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion that she doesn’t seem to have con­sid­ered whether this is a symp­tom of the whole thing being unhealthy and mis­tak­en on key points.
  7. Show­ing Off To the Uni­verse: Bea­cons For The After­life of Our Civ­i­liza­tion (Steven Wol­fram, per­son­al blog): “There’s a thought exper­i­ment I’ve long found use­ful. Imag­ine a very advanced civ­i­liza­tion, that’s able to move things like stars and plan­ets around at will. What arrange­ment would they put them in? Maybe they’d want to make a ‘bea­con of pur­pose’. And maybe—like Kant—one could think that would be achiev­able by set­ting up some ‘rec­og­niz­able’ geo­met­ric pat­tern. Like how about an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle? But no, that won’t do. Because for exam­ple the Tro­jan aster­oids actu­al­ly form an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle with Jupiter and the Sun already, just as a result of physics. And pret­ty soon one real­izes that there’s actu­al­ly noth­ing the aliens could do to ‘prove their pur­pose’. The con­fig­u­ra­tion of stars in the sky may look kind of ran­dom to us (except, of course, that we still see con­stel­la­tions in it). But there’s noth­ing to say that looked at in the right way it doesn’t actu­al­ly rep­re­sent some grand pur­pose.” A long but fas­ci­nat­ing essay about how dif­fi­cult it is to encode a mes­sage that unam­bigu­ous­ly com­mu­ni­cates intel­li­gence. Rel­e­vance to nat­ur­al the­ol­o­gy should be obvi­ous (although Wol­fram, being an athe­ist, goes in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion).
  8. Some of our stu­dents and alum­ni have pub­lished things recent­ly:
    • The One Les­son We Do Not Learn at Stan­ford (Hugh Zhang, The Stan­ford Review): “If we fail to devel­op the type of char­ac­ter need­ed to resist temp­ta­tion when the stakes are so low, how can we be trust­ed to resist them when they are high­er? What we do at Stan­ford is less harm­ful than the fail­ings of the pow­er­ful. But it is only less harm­ful because our pow­er is yet lim­it­ed. When those in promi­nent posi­tions act as we do, we right­ly fear for society’s well being…. If we tru­ly believe that the duty of a uni­ver­si­ty is to pre­pare us for our respon­si­bil­i­ties in the world beyond these idyl­lic palm trees, then the most impor­tant les­son we can learn here at Stan­ford is the age old les­son of integri­ty: the abil­i­ty to do what is right even when no one is look­ing.”
    • Can I Help You? (Ryan Eber­hardt, per­son­al blog): “My friend Arjun com­mit­ted sui­cide last Sep­tem­ber. I’m ‘over it’ in as much of a func­tion­al sense as pos­si­ble, but I still think about him all the time. I miss him so much. He was among my best friends in high school…. I wish I could tell him about all the things I’m up to these days, brain­storm things for me to pur­sue after grad­u­a­tion, and ask for his advice. That will nev­er hap­pen again. But here’s the fun­ny thing: I don’t know if I would be so eager to talk to him if he weren’t dead. Death has an inter­est­ing way of doing that.”
    • Revers­ing the Curse: A Spir­i­tu­al Guide to Decod­ing Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (Femi Olu­tade, Medi­um): “For those of you who are root­ed in a faith tra­di­tion but can’t under­stand how a pop­u­lar, ‘sec­u­lar’ rap album can be a faith­ful wit­ness to Jesus’s life and mis­sion, Kendrick — and Jesus for that mat­ter — may sur­prise you. For any­one who is still search­ing for how truth and jus­tice emerge from the shad­ow of racism and oppres­sion, I present to you the sto­ries of hip hop and Judeo-Chris­t­ian scrip­tures in the hope that you can find in them the kind of trans­for­ma­tion that I have expe­ri­enced.” Femi releas­ing this free online book bit by bit. Seth, who writes the for­ward is also one of our alum­ni.
    • Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice (Rebekah Fen­ton, Kev­in­MD): “Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice dur­ing the class­room phase. Why do we only show rash­es on Cau­casian patients? Why do we only learn to rec­og­nize how men present with MIs? Why do we not address how obe­si­ty impacts exam find­ings? Med­ical edu­ca­tion favors the white, thin, male patient. I’ve seen his chest X‑ray, I’ve exam­ined his abdomen, I know his symp­toms, and I’ve seen his rash­es.”

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 Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 131

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 West­ern Elite from a Chi­nese Per­spec­tive (Puzhong Yao, Amer­i­can Affairs): “Cer­tain beliefs are as ubiq­ui­tous among the peo­ple I went to school with as smog was in Shi­ji­azhuang. The doc­trines that shape the world­views and cul­tur­al assump­tions at elite West­ern insti­tu­tions like Cam­bridge, Stan­ford, and Gold­man Sachs have become almost reli­gious. Nev­er­the­less, I hope that the per­spec­tive of a can­did Chi­nese athe­ist can be of some instruc­tion to them.” This is quite fun­ny in places, espe­cial­ly his expe­ri­ences at the Stan­ford GSB.
  2. Uni­ver­si­ty evicts Chris­t­ian club over lead­er­ship faith require­ment (Caleb Parke, Fox News): “‘The [Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa] knows that what it is doing to BLinC is unfair, ille­gal, and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al,’ the com­plaint pre­pared by the firm says, adding that, while BLinC only requires adher­ence to their beliefs for their lead­ers and not their mem­bers, uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­cy is that cam­pus orga­ni­za­tions can require mem­bers to believe a cer­tain way.’” Read the actu­al legal com­plaint — it’s straight fire. I was espe­cial­ly tick­led by para­graph 76.
  3. How Cul­ture Affects Depres­sion (Mar­i­an­na Pogosyan, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “How­ev­er, teach­ing peo­ple that this very com­plex social, cul­tur­al, and bio­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non is entire­ly bio­log­i­cal can back­fire. It encour­ages peo­ple to ignore envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, and instead, essen­tial­ize depres­sion as a char­ac­ter­is­tic of them­selves and their biol­o­gy.” An inter­view with a George­town psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor.
  4. The War­lock Hunt (Claire Berlin­s­ki, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “Giv­en the events of recent weeks, we can be cer­tain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preser­va­tion will cease to speak of any­thing per­son­al, any­thing sex­u­al, in our pres­ence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are lis­ten­ing. They will adopt in our pres­ence great def­er­ence to our exquis­ite sen­si­tiv­i­ty and frailty. Many women seem pos­i­tive­ly joy­ful at this prospect. The Rev­o­lu­tion has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?”
  5. Evan­gel­i­cals and Domes­tic Vio­lence: Are Chris­t­ian Men More Abu­sive? (Brad Wilcox, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “…church­go­ing evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant hus­bands were the least like­ly to be engaged in abu­sive behav­ior…. Although the empir­i­cal sto­ry of reli­gion and domes­tic vio­lence looks good for prac­tic­ing believ­ers, it’s much less rosy for oth­ers. My research sug­gests that the most vio­lent hus­bands in Amer­i­ca are nom­i­nal evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants who attend church infre­quent­ly or not at all.” Brings to mind Rev 3:15–16 — be hot or cold, not luke­warm. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  6. I read many arti­cles about the Alaba­ma elec­tion — these stood out.
    • Roy Moore and the Invis­i­ble Reli­gious Right  (Ben­jamin Wal­lace-Wells, The New York­er): “…what was most notable about the pas­tors on Moore’s list was their obscu­ri­ty. I found a list of the pas­tors of the thir­ty-six largest church­es in Alaba­ma, assem­bled this sum­mer by the Web site of the Birm­ing­ham News; no pas­tor on that list appeared on Moore’s. I called lead­ers with­in the deeply con­ser­v­a­tive South­ern Bap­tist Church—the largest denom­i­na­tion in Alaba­ma and, for decades, the core of the reli­gious right—and was told that not a sin­gle affil­i­at­ed South­ern Bap­tist pas­tor in the state was open­ly allied with Moore.”
    • Roy Moore Had Low­est White Evan­gel­i­cal Sup­port Of Any Alaba­ma Repub­li­can In The 21st Cen­tu­ry (Lyman Stone, The Fed­er­al­ist): “Exit polls from the Alaba­ma Sen­ate spe­cial elec­tion on Tues­day show that Roy Moore got 80 per­cent of the white evan­gel­i­cal vote, but nonethe­less went down to defeat. This is shock­ing, because white evan­gel­i­cals are a big share of Alabama’s pop­u­la­tion…. So if it’s a big vot­ing bloc and they’re 80 per­cent for a can­di­date, shouldn’t that can­di­date win?”
    • For a crit­i­cal take on the above claim: Is it pos­si­ble that white evan­gel­i­cals swung the Alaba­ma elec­tion against Roy Moore? (Scott Clement, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Moore’s sup­port among white evan­gel­i­cals is his­tor­i­cal­ly low for a Repub­li­can. At the same time, the drop-off in Moore’s sup­port among oth­er white groups from pre­vi­ous elec­tions (par­tic­u­lar­ly non-evan­gel­i­cals, white women and whites with col­lege degrees) is far larg­er, indi­cat­ing that evan­gel­i­cals were far less like­ly than oth­er typ­i­cal Repub­li­can vot­ers to alter their par­ty sup­port with Moore as a can­di­date.”
    • And more gen­er­al­ly: Pro-life Vot­ers and Pro-Choice Politi­cians (Michael Wear, per­son­al blog): “The way some invoke con­science in pol­i­tics reflects an odd moral­i­ty that puts one’s con­science at risk for sup­port­ing a can­di­date who oppos­es Roe v. Wade, but ratio­nal­izes away moral respon­si­bil­i­ty for a can­di­date who inten­tion­al­ly seeks to dis­en­fran­chise African-Amer­i­cans or restrict the right of wor­ship for Mus­lims or wan­ton­ly breaks up fam­i­lies through depor­ta­tion or mass incar­cer­a­tion. Per­haps abor­tion as a polit­i­cal issue car­ries greater moral weight than these oth­er issues—an idea some pro-lif­ers seem a bit too eager to accept, I have to say—but is there no con­flu­ence of evil that can affect the vot­ing cal­cu­la­tion of the pro-life per­son who believes their con­science requires them to vote for who­ev­er the pro-life can­di­date hap­pens to be?” Wear, an evan­gel­i­cal, was an Oba­ma White House staffer.
    • Also more gen­er­al­ly: Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evan­gel­i­cal Repub­li­can (Peter Wehn­er, New York Times): “the events of the past few years — and the past few weeks — have shown us that the Repub­li­can Par­ty and the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment (or large parts of them, at least), have become what I once would have thought of as lib­er­al car­i­ca­tures. Assume you were a per­son of the left and an athe­ist, and you decid­ed to cre­ate a cou­ple of peo­ple in a lab­o­ra­to­ry to dis­cred­it the Repub­li­can Par­ty and white evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty. You could hard­ly choose two more per­fect men than Don­ald Trump and Roy Moore.” (this one came rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  7. Is Alp­haZe­ro real­ly a sci­en­tif­ic break­through in AI? (Jose Cama­cho Col­la­dos, Medi­um):  “I am a researcher in the broad field of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI), spe­cial­ized in Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing. I am also a chess Inter­na­tion­al Mas­ter, cur­rent­ly the top play­er in South Korea although prac­ti­cal­ly inac­tive for the last few years due to my full-time research posi­tion…. How­ev­er, there are rea­son­able doubts about the valid­i­ty of the over­ar­ch­ing claims that arise from a care­ful read­ing of AlphaZero’s paper.”  I was recent­ly hyp­ing this to some­one and clear­ly did not know as much about it as I thought. Inter­est­ing push­back.
  8. And last but not least : Want to raise employ­ee morale? Treat every day as an exper­i­ment (Chris­tos Makridis, Medi­um): our very own Chris­tos con­tin­ues to put his work out into the pub­lic square. Go, Chris­tos!

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a 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).

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 128

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Since this is issue 128 and that’s an impor­tant num­ber in base 2 and I’m a nerd, I’m going to tweak this issue slight­ly by giv­ing my actu­al opin­ion (or at least the brief ver­sion of it) after each arti­cle.

Also, I am sad that so much of this week’s email is about sex­u­al harass­ment. There’s a lot of stuff I would glad­ly link to if I saw it. To give a few exam­ples: I’d love to see thought­ful arti­cles about what’s hap­pen­ing in Zim­bab­we, some insights about the amaz­ing tumult in Sau­di Ara­bia, some­thing more com­pre­hen­sive about Richard Spencer’s vis­it to cam­pus (ide­al­ly some­thing that deals with the way he treat­ed stu­dents, with the accu­ra­cy of his core claims about Islam, and with the admin­is­tra­tion’s deci­sion to bar the doors once peo­ple left con­sid­ered in light of the heck­ler’s veto), and a piece about how India is devel­op­ing com­pared with Chi­na. But nope — this week there’s a ton of stuff about men being jerks sprin­kled with a hand­ful of oth­er obser­va­tions.

If you find more edi­fy­ing fare, please send it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. There are so many sex­u­al assault sto­ries in the news right now. It’s over­whelm­ing. The one I find most inter­est­ing at the moment is the sto­ry of Repub­li­can state leg­is­la­tor Wes Good­man, who made vul­gar and unwel­come sex­u­al advances to many young men. Rod Dreher has a strong series of posts about it.
    • Wes Good­man And Reli­gious Con­ser­vatism, Inc. (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Turns out that Ohio State Rep. Wes Good­man, has been lead­ing a secret promis­cu­ous gay life, despite being mar­ried and oppos­ing LGBT rights in his career as a con­ser­v­a­tive activist and leg­is­la­tor. The sto­ry is lurid, includ­ing alle­ga­tions (with screen­shots) that he propo­si­tioned col­lege stu­dents who were polit­i­cal activists, invit­ing them to join him (and some­times him and his wife) for sex.”
    • More Wes Good­man Fall­out (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “ You can­not judge an entire reli­gion — any reli­gion — entire­ly by the worst behav­ior of its adher­ents, any more than you can judge it entire­ly by the best behav­ior of its adher­ents. Nev­er­the­less, it’s a dodge when Chris­t­ian lead­ers say, ‘Oh, Bil­ly Gra­ham is who Evan­gel­i­cals are, not Wes Good­man,’ or ‘St. Tere­sa of Cal­cut­ta is who Catholics are, not Father Geoghan.’ All of us are the best and the worst of our com­mu­nions. You, with all your sins and all your virtues, are who Catholics/Orthodox/Protestants are, or who Jews are, or Mus­lims, and so forth. We are both our ideals and our fail­ure to live up to those ideals.”
    • One Of Wes Goodman’s Marks Speaks (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But I hope that Wes is, like me, a sin­ner with a future. And this is the sec­ond rea­son that I have not de-friend­ed him yet. Now is the time for him to hearti­ly repent of his sins, believe in Jesus Christ and sin­cere­ly and hon­est­ly intend by the help of God and the Holy Spir­it hence­forth to amend his life. Often, the jour­ney in sack­cloth and ash­es is a lone­some one and one fraught with depres­sion. I have been there. But I hope that if Wes intends to make it, he real­izes he doesn’t have to do so alone.”
    • How Wash­ing­ton, DC Preda­tors Tar­get Interns (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To answer the sec­ond question—how sex­u­al preda­tors operate—I want to begin by talk­ing a bit about the kind of place Wash­ing­ton was when I lived there in the ear­ly 2010s. Wash­ing­ton is a city that turns over a large sec­tor of its work­force every four months. Rough­ly cor­re­spond­ing with the aca­d­e­m­ic year, thou­sands of interns — for the branch­es of gov­ern­ment, for the non-prof­its, for the con­sult­ing firms, for the star­tups — arrive, some­times by plane with a sin­gle suit­case and some­times in their par­ents’ SUVs with the back seats cov­ered with card­board box­es.”
    • Glen’s take: I know some of you are con­sid­er­ing a life in pub­lic ser­vice. Keep Num­bers 32:23  — “your sin will find you out” — close to your heart. The reck­on­ing is com­ing not only for the state leg­is­la­tor in ques­tion but also for those who cov­ered up for him.
    • Relat­ed: The absurd argu­ments we make to defend Roy Moore and Al Franken are get­ting dan­ger­ous (Rus­sell Moore, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Once the next gen­er­a­tion comes to see that pro­gres­sives don’t real­ly care about ‘social jus­tice’ or that con­ser­v­a­tives don’t real­ly care about ‘fam­i­ly val­ues’ except as rhetor­i­cal tools, they will walk away, toward some­thing else. Note the col­laps­ing trust in insti­tu­tions, seen in vir­tu­al­ly every sur­vey of younger Amer­i­cans. Many fac­tors account for this, but one dri­ving fac­tor is cyn­i­cism, the idea that insti­tu­tions are just about keep­ing pow­er for those who already have it.”
    • Also relat­ed: The Dan­ger of Know­ing You’re on the ‘Right Side of His­to­ry’ (Andrew Sul­li­van, NY Mag): “There is a moment here. No par­ty is immune from evil; no tribe has a monop­oly of good. If these bipar­ti­san sex-abuse rev­e­la­tions can begin to under­mine the trib­al­ism that so poi­sons our pub­lic life, to reveal that beneath the tribes, we are all flawed and human, they may not only be a long-over­due turn­ing point for women. They may be a water­shed for all of us.”
  2. What Do We Do with the Art of Mon­strous Men? (Claire Ded­er­er, The Paris Review): “They did or said some­thing awful, and made some­thing great. The awful thing dis­rupts the great work; we can’t watch or lis­ten to or read the great work with­out remem­ber­ing the awful thing. Flood­ed with knowl­edge of the maker’s mon­strous­ness, we turn away, over­come by dis­gust. Or … we don’t. We con­tin­ue watch­ing, sep­a­rat­ing or try­ing to sep­a­rate the artist from the art.” The lan­guage in this piece is vul­gar.
    • Glen’s take: From a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive, some­one like Bill Cos­by or Woody Allen is only a extreme exam­ple of a larg­er issue. Most Hol­ly­wood prod­ucts were made by peo­ple who sleep around or watch porn or oth­er­wise vio­late basic Bib­li­cal norms. If wicked­ness in the cre­ator taints all their cre­ative prod­ucts then there’s very lit­tle for a Chris­t­ian to read, to lis­ten to, or to watch. Cre­ative works stand or fall on their own apart from the moral virtue of the cre­ator. 1 Corinthi­an 5:9–13 has rel­e­vance for how we relate to cul­ture at large.
  3. Apple Sab­o­tages Itself (Justin Lee, First Things): “A def­i­n­i­tion of speech nar­row enough to exclude dec­o­ra­tive arts will almost cer­tain­ly exclude source code as well. The FBI could eas­i­ly use such a prece­dent in court to com­pel Apple to write code capa­ble of breach­ing their iPhone users’ pri­va­cy.”
    • Glen’s take: I am 100% on the side of Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop. Jack Phillips is right and his crit­ics are dan­ger­ous­ly wrong. If he los­es his case, unin­tend­ed con­se­quences will abound. This arti­cle high­lights one.
  4. Report­ing on Paula White and the White House (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fol­low-up to the pro­file of White I shared last week and it con­tains more fas­ci­nat­ing anec­dotes. “Much of what she told me about 2007, her year from hell when she got divorced, her church was los­ing mem­bers and she was inves­ti­gat­ed by a U.S. Sen­ate com­mit­tee didn’t make it into the final draft but she lost 20 pounds dur­ing that time. ‘I had my first glass of wine in 2007,’ she said. ‘I asked God per­mis­sion to cuss. I used every word except His in vain. I searched for what door I’d left open for all this to go wrong.’”
    • Glen’s take: Read­ing these arti­cles makes me think I would like Paula White. Then again, I’m par­tial to Paulas. 🙂
  5. Repub­li­cans’ beliefs are bend­ing to Trump. Here’s why they might not even notice. (Bri­an Resnick, Vox): “…when peo­ple change their mind on a sub­ject, they have a hard time recall­ing that they ever felt anoth­er way. It’s an intrigu­ing find­ing in part because it affirms that peo­ple think their beliefs are more sta­ble than they actu­al­ly are.”
    • Glen’s take: As a pas­tor I observe this all the time. We are all less ratio­nal than we believe. “Who­ev­er trusts in his own mind is a fool” (Proverbs 28:26a, ESV).
  6. Why would-be par­ents should choose to get mar­ried (The Econ­o­mist): “You could make enough con­fet­ti for a sum­mer of wed­dings with all the aca­d­e­m­ic papers that show how much chil­dren gain from being brought up in sta­ble, lov­ing fam­i­lies, and how much they suf­fer when those fam­i­lies break down…. And one strong claim that can be made for mar­riage is that it appears to glue par­ents togeth­er more tight­ly than any oth­er arrange­ment.”
    • Glen’s take: It’s enough to make you think God’s plan is wise. Shock­ing. Also, in case you’ve ever won­dered: the Econ­o­mist does­n’t iden­ti­fy which authors wrote which arti­cles. It’s a phi­los­o­phy of theirs.
  7. What Are the Lessons of the Post-Wein­stein Moment? (Rebec­ca Trais­ter and Ross Douthat, The Cut): “I do think porn has had some sort of weird effect on the male imag­i­na­tion. And that mas­tur­ba­tion plus a moral­i­ty of con­sent con­vinces some men to think, Okay, I accept that the rules say, I can’t actu­al­ly rape you but under the rules of con­sent, I’m just stand­ing over here, you know, doing my own thing.”
    • Glen’s take: Wow. A civ­il and intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion between two very dif­fer­ent peo­ple who find com­mon ground amidst their dif­fer­ences (where they dif­fer I large­ly agree with Douthat). A hun­dred mil­lion more con­ver­sa­tions like this and our cul­ture might get health­i­er.

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 126

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. For elites, pol­i­tics is dri­ven by ide­ol­o­gy. For vot­ers, it’s not.  (Ezra Klein, Vox): “In the­o­ry, ide­ol­o­gy comes first and par­ty comes sec­ond. We decide whether we’re for sin­gle-pay­er health care, or same-sex mar­riage, or abor­tion restric­tion, and then we choose the par­ty that most close­ly fits our ideas. You’re a lib­er­al and so you become a Demo­c­rat; you’re a con­ser­v­a­tive and so you become a Repub­li­can. The truth, it seems, is clos­er to the reverse.…”
    • I found the above inter­est­ing to read in con­junc­tion with this arti­cle — it’s on the long side:  The Pri­mal Scream of Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics (Mary Eber­stadt, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “Isn’t it sug­ges­tive that the ear­li­est col­lec­tive artic­u­la­tion of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics came from the com­mu­ni­ty that was first to suf­fer from the accel­er­at­ed fray­ing of fam­i­ly ties, a har­bin­ger of what came next for all? Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics can­not be under­stood apart from the pre­ced­ing and con­comi­tant social fact of fam­i­ly implo­sion.”
    • Also rel­e­vant: Con­ser­v­a­tives, Don’t Dis­miss the Sex­u­al Mis­con­duct Claims Against Roy Moore (David French, Nation­al Review): “Each day seems to bring a new sto­ry of yet anoth­er pow­er­ful per­son fac­ing a string of accu­sa­tions. While there is a dan­ger of a witch hunt, the pres­ence of mul­ti­ple claims of mis­con­duct from mul­ti­ple sources should always make us pause — regard­less of whether the alleged abuser comes from the Left or the Right. It’s a moral imper­a­tive that we not deter­mine the verac­i­ty of the alle­ga­tions by the ide­ol­o­gy of the accused.” Roy Moore has been pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned in vol­umes 121 and 31.
  2. Fires Aren’t the Only Threat to the Cal­i­for­nia Dream (Enri­co Moret­ti, NY Times): “Over the past two years, San Fran­cis­co Coun­ty added 38,000 jobs, reach­ing its high­est employ­ment lev­el ever. Yet only 4,500 new hous­ing units were per­mit­ted. For all those new fam­i­lies knock­ing on San Fran­cis­co doors, new units are avail­able for less than 12 per­cent of them. The num­bers for Sil­i­con Val­ley are even worse. This is why the rents sky­rock­et. The prob­lem is large­ly self-inflict­ed: the region has some of the country’s slow­est, most polit­i­cal and cum­ber­some hous­ing approval process­es and most strin­gent land-use restric­tions.” The author is an eco­nom­ics prof at UC Berke­ley.
  3. Sculpt­ed By Evo­lu­tion (David Schmitt, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “…empir­i­cal evi­dence shows that most sex dif­fer­ences are con­spic­u­ous­ly larg­er in cul­tures with more egal­i­tar­i­an gen­der roles—as in Scan­di­navia…. Extremes of sex­u­al free­dom beget larg­er psy­cho­log­i­cal sex dif­fer­ences. Or as explained by Israeli psy­chol­o­gists Shalom Schwartz and Tam­my Rubel-Lif­shitz, it may be that hav­ing few­er gen­dered restric­tions in a cul­ture allows ‘both sex­es to pur­sue more freely the val­ues they inher­ent­ly care about more.’” The author was men­tioned back in vol­ume 113 in con­nec­tion with the Google gen­der memo.
  4. Lib­er­al Tra­di­tion, Yes; Lib­er­al Ide­ol­o­gy, No (R.R. Reno, First Things): this is long, very Catholic, and veers into occa­sion­al bril­liance. Rec­om­mend­ed if that descrip­tion appeals to you. “Lib­er­al­ism, prop­er­ly under­stood, is not a creed; it is a tra­di­tion, a set of insti­tu­tions, and a habit of mind.”
  5. Some­thing Is Wrong On The Inter­net (James Bri­dle, Medi­um): “…I don’t even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down. Some­one or some­thing or some com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple and things is using YouTube to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly fright­en, trau­ma­tise, and abuse chil­dren, auto­mat­i­cal­ly and at scale, and it forces me to ques­tion my own beliefs about the inter­net, at every lev­el.” This is real­ly inter­est­ing.
  6. John Wal­ton and Israel’s Con­quest of Canaan: Did God Real­ly Com­mand Geno­cide? (Spoil­er Alert: No, he didn’t..and the Israelites didn’t claim he did to jus­ti­fy mass killing either) (Joel Ander­son, per­son­al blog):  “if you object to what is being described in the book of Joshua, that’s like object­ing to the Allies ban­ning Nazism and Nazi sym­bols in Ger­many, or to the Unit­ed States try­ing to get rid of the Tal­iban who had inflict­ed hor­ren­dous atroc­i­ties on the inno­cent Afghani peo­ple. But who in their right mind would do that?”
  7. Are Chris­tians Sup­posed To Be Com­mu­nists? (David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “There were no polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies in the ancient world, no abstract pro­grams for the recon­sti­tu­tion of soci­ety. But if not a polit­i­cal move­ment, the church was a kind of poli­ty, and the form of life it assumed was not mere­ly a prac­ti­cal strat­e­gy for sur­vival, but rather the embod­i­ment of its high­est spir­i­tu­al ideals. Its ‘com­mu­nism’ was hard­ly inci­den­tal to the faith.” This is ulti­mate­ly a med­i­ta­tion on the Greek word koinon­ia. Hart leaves out some impor­tant parts of the New Tes­ta­ment wit­ness (such as 1 Tim 6:17–18 and Acts 5:4) and there­by veers from the truth a lit­tle. Still, any­time some­one gets a the­o­log­i­cal op-ed pub­lished in the NYT I’m impressed.

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selec­tive pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools. The reli­gion in ques­tion is not Method­ism or Catholi­cism but an extreme ver­sion of the belief sys­tem of the lib­er­al elite: the lib­er­al pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, and cre­ative class­es, which pro­vide a large major­i­ty of stu­dents enrolled at such places and an even larg­er major­i­ty of fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tors who work at them. To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 122

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I knew the fires north of us were bad, but this floored me: Seen From Above: Cal­i­for­nia Fires Reduced Entire Com­mu­ni­ties to Ash (Josh Han­er, Troy Grig­gs and Anjali Singhvi, New York Times).
  2. America’s Many Divides Over Free Speech (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “An under-appre­ci­at­ed fea­ture of the First Amend­ment is that even as it assures that almost every­one will hear that which offends them, it spares the coun­try lots of thorny pol­i­cy fights over speech and expres­sion that would divide an already-polar­ized coun­try deeply along par­ti­san and racial lines.” This arti­cle is full of fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. 6 Things Trump’s Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Memo Does (and Doesn’t) Do (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While crit­ics have char­ac­ter­ized such pro­tec­tions as a ‘license’ to dis­crim­i­nate, reli­gious lib­er­ty experts state that the memo—while a major move—does not do every­thing that advo­cates have hoped or that oppo­nents have feared.”
  4. Study: Anti-Chris­t­ian Bias Has­n’t Grown. It’s Just Got­ten Rich­er (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Soci­ol­o­gist George Yancey ana­lyzed 30-plus years of data to track approval rat­ings for evan­gel­i­cal and fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians. His big take­away: What has changed is not the num­ber of Amer­i­cans who dis­like con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians, but which Amer­i­cans.”
  5. From Aggres­sive Over­tures to Sex­u­al Assault: Har­vey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Sto­ries (Ronan Far­row, New York­er): This is super-dis­turb­ing. I include it only in case you have not heard of the wicked events because the next few entries require an aware­ness of both the charges and their sever­i­ty.
    • The Pigs of Lib­er­al­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Con­sent alone is not a suf­fi­cient guide to ethics…. Old­er rules of moral restraint were broad­er for a rea­son. If your culture’s code is lib­er­tine, don’t be sur­prised that worse things than lib­er­tin­ism flour­ish.”
    • The Integri­ty of Har­vey Weinstein’s Work (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Artists are very rarely saints, but that does not com­pro­mise the worth of the work that they do. Purg­ing his name from the artis­tic record is an injus­tice not sim­ply to Har­vey Wein­stein, but to the truth. We can­not allow our­selves to get into the habit of lying about his­to­ry for moral rea­sons. This is cor­rupt. Yes, this involves stand­ing up for Har­vey Wein­stein, but more than that, it involves stand­ing up for the truth.”
    • Har­vey Wein­stein Con­tract With TWC Allowed For Sex­u­al Harass­ment  (TMZ): Wow. You’d think the board would say, “That’s an odd­ly spe­cif­ic pro­vi­sion to add to the con­tract. Why are you so keen on this?”
  6. Pro­duc­tive on six hours of sleep? You’re delud­ing your­self, expert says (Keri Wig­in­ton, Chica­go Tri­bune): “If you were not to set an alarm clock, would you sleep past it? If the answer is yes, then there is clear­ly more sleep that is need­ed.”
  7. ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insid­ers who fear a smart­phone dystopia (Paul Lewis, The Guardian): “Rosen­stein pur­chased a new iPhone and instruct­ed his assis­tant to set up a parental-con­trol fea­ture to pre­vent him from down­load­ing any apps. He was par­tic­u­lar­ly aware of the allure of Face­book ‘likes’, which he describes as ‘bright dings of pseu­do-plea­sure’ that can be as hol­low as they are seduc­tive. And Rosen­stein should know: he was the Face­book engi­neer who cre­at­ed the ‘like’ but­ton in the first place.”

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How Can I Learn To Receive – And Give – Crit­i­cism In Light Of The Cross? (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “A believ­er is one who iden­ti­fies with all that God affirms and con­demns in Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion. In oth­er words, in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s judg­ment of me; and in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of me. Both have a rad­i­cal impact on how we take and give crit­i­cism.” This is based on a longer arti­cle (4 page PDF). (first shared in vol­ume 63)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 117

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. America’s Chang­ing Reli­gious Iden­ti­ty (Daniel Cox and Robert Jones, PRRI): There’s a lot of data here. One bit that stood out to me: “Athe­ists and agnos­tics account for a minor­i­ty of all reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed. Most are sec­u­lar. Athe­ists and agnos­tics account for only about one-quar­ter (27%) of all reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans. Near­ly six in ten (58%) reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy as sec­u­lar, some­one who is not reli­gious; 16% of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans nonethe­less report that they iden­ti­fy as a ‘reli­gious per­son.’”
  2. Risky road: Chi­na’s mis­sion­ar­ies fol­low Bei­jing west (BBC): “As a self-declared athe­ist gov­ern­ment, news of Chi­nese Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies get­ting into trou­ble abroad is embar­rass­ing. But at the same time, Bei­jing needs to show it can pro­tect its cit­i­zens as it goes glob­al. As Feng­gang Yang, an expert on reli­gion in Chi­na at Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty, puts it: ‘They thought Chris­tian­i­ty was a west­ern reli­gion import­ed into Chi­na, so how can you export Chris­tian­i­ty from Chi­na?’” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. There was a lot writ­ten about cam­pus sex­u­al assault recent­ly. Here are some stand­outs:
    • The Cam­pus Sex-Crime Tri­bunals Are Los­ing (KC John­son, Com­men­tary Mag­a­zine): “Barrett’s deci­sion marked the 59th judi­cial set­back for a col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty since 2013 in a due-process law­suit brought by a stu­dent accused of sex­u­al assault. (In four addi­tion­al cas­es, the school set­tled a law­suit before any judi­cial deci­sion occurred.) This body of law serves as a tow­er­ing rebuke to the Oba­ma administration’s rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of Title IX, the 1972 law bar­ring sex dis­crim­i­na­tion in schools that receive fed­er­al fund­ing.”
    • The Uncom­fort­able Truth About Cam­pus Rape Pol­i­cy (Emi­ly Yoffe, The Atlantic): “A trou­bling para­dox with­in the activist com­mu­ni­ty, and increas­ing­ly among admin­is­tra­tors, is the belief that while women who make a com­plaint should be giv­en the strong ben­e­fit of the doubt, women who deny they were assault­ed should not nec­es­sar­i­ly be believed. ”
    • The Bad Sci­ence Behind Cam­pus Response to Sex­u­al Assault (Emi­ly Yoffe, The Atlantic): “The spread of an inac­cu­rate sci­ence of trau­ma is an object les­son in how good inten­tions can over­take crit­i­cal think­ing, to poten­tial­ly harm­ful effect.”
    • Here Is Every Crazy Title IX Rape Case Bet­sy DeVos Ref­er­enced, Plus a Bunch More (Rob­by Soave, Rea­son): “Crit­ics of DeVos will say that her plan to reform Title IX is some kind of give­away to rapists. But it’s not. Today, DeVos rec­og­nized a basic and obvi­ous truth that every objec­tive chron­i­cler of the col­lege rape cri­sis already knows: The Oba­ma-era mod­i­fi­ca­tions to Title IX utter­ly failed to bring jus­tice to cam­pus­es.”
  4. To Under­stand Ris­ing Inequal­i­ty, Con­sid­er the Jan­i­tors at Two Top Com­pa­nies, Then and Now (Neil Irwin, New York Times): “The right prod­uct engi­neer or mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive can mean the dif­fer­ence between suc­cess or fail­ure, and com­pa­nies tend to hire such peo­ple as full-time employ­ees and as part of a long-term rela­tion­ship — some­thing like the trans­mis­sion sup­pli­er. What has changed in the last gen­er­a­tion is that com­pa­nies today view more and more of the labor it takes to pro­duce their goods and ser­vices as akin to sta­plers: some­thing to be pro­cured at the time and place need­ed for the low­est price pos­si­ble.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. I also read a lot about DACA this week:
    • Trump’s deci­sion to end DACA, explained (Daniel Bush, PBS New­shour): “In June, 11 attor­neys gen­er­al — from con­ser­v­a­tive states like Texas, Arkansas, West Vir­ginia and Kansas — threat­ened to sue the Trump admin­is­tra­tion unless it took steps by Sept. 5 to end the pro­gram. For months, senior Trump admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have expressed con­cern that DACA would not stand up in court.”
    • Trump Ends DACA, Despite Pleas from Evan­gel­i­cal Advis­ers  (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In addi­tion to the 57 per­cent of US evan­gel­i­cals that favor cit­i­zen­ship and the 19 per­cent that favor depor­ta­tion, 15 per­cent say DACA recip­i­ents should be allowed to become legal res­i­dents but not cit­i­zens, while 9 per­cent don’t know.”
    • Can these Demo­c­ra­t­ic attor­neys gen­er­al save DACA? I asked 9 legal experts. (Sean Illing, Vox): The experts seem pes­simistic.
    • Don­ald Trump is right: Con­gress should pass DACA (Econ­o­mist): “If you could design peo­ple in a lab­o­ra­to­ry to be an adorn­ment to Amer­i­ca they would look like the recip­i­ents of DACA…. They are a high-achiev­ing lot. More than 90% of those now aged over 25 are employed; they cre­ate busi­ness­es at twice the rate of the pub­lic as a whole; many have spous­es and chil­dren who are cit­i­zens. They are Amer­i­can in every sense bar the bureau­crat­ic one.”
    • Rescind­ing DACA Is The Right Thing To Do (David Harsyani, The Fed­er­al­ist): “There are a vast num­ber of sol­id eco­nom­ic and moral argu­ments for legal­iz­ing the chil­dren of ille­gal immi­grants. In sub­stance, I agree with DACA. Yet… the Con­sti­tu­tion makes no allowance for the pres­i­dent to write law ‘if Con­gress doesn’t act.’”
  6. Should a Judge’s Nom­i­na­tion Be Derailed by Her Faith? (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “She and oth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic sen­a­tors on the com­mit­tee seemed trou­bled by Barrett’s Catholic con­vic­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly on the issues of abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage, which came up lat­er dur­ing ques­tion­ing. But when Bar­rett repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that she would uphold the law, regard­less of her per­son­al beliefs, they didn’t seem to believe her.” For a less restrained per­spec­tive, read Demo­c­ra­t­ic McCarthyites (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive).  And it’s not just con­ser­v­a­tives dis­pleased. Check out [Prince­ton] Pres­i­dent Eis­gru­ber asks Sen­ate com­mit­tee to avoid ‘reli­gious test’ in judi­cial appoint­ments (Prince­ton Office of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions).

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a debate I fea­tured way back in vol­ume 48 between two pas­tors on guns – both are very thought­ful and are skill­ful debaters.  All the posts are pret­ty short.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 78

1 Chronicles 12:32 - they "understood the times"
1 Chron­i­cles 12:32 — they “under­stood the times”

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. On Wednes­day I men­tioned how some mod­ern research about speak­ing in tongues aligns very well with Paul’s com­ments about tongues strength­en­ing believ­ers even while their mind is unfruit­ful (1 Cor 14:4, 14). A read­able sum­ma­ry from a few years back is A Neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic Look At Speak­ing In Tongues (Bene­dict Carey, NYT) and also Speak­ing in Tongues: Glos­salalia and Stress Reduc­tion (The Dana Foun­da­tion). If you want to see the actu­al research they are allud­ing to, check out the uni­ver­si­ty press release Lan­guage Cen­ter of the Brain Is Not Under the Con­trol of Sub­jects Who “Speak in Tongues” (U Penn, 2006) or the aca­d­e­m­ic papers Sali­vary Alpha-Amy­lase and Cor­ti­sol Among Pen­te­costals on a Wor­ship and Non­wor­ship Day (Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Human Biol­o­gy, 2013) and Glos­so­lalia is asso­ci­at­ed with dif­fer­ences in bio­mark­ers of stress and arousal among Apos­tolic Pen­te­costals (Reli­gion, Brain and Behav­ior, 2012).
  2. A hor­ri­fy­ing look into the mind of 9/11’s mas­ter­mind, in his own words (Marc Thiessen, Wash­ing­ton Post): Indis­putably inter­est­ing. Two caveats: you should look up the name James E. Mitchell for con­text and there are sure­ly those who tes­ti­fy dif­fer­ent­ly than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Hav­ing said that… fas­ci­nat­ing.
  3. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Experts Stand Togeth­er, on Cas­es Inside Prison Walls (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, On Reli­gion): “There is space enough in our cul­ture to allow dif­fer­ent peo­ple with dif­fer­ent beliefs to live peace­ably in the same land.”
  4. Texas elec­tor who crit­i­cized Trump says he’s resign­ing (Kyle Cheney, Politi­co): “Since I can’t in good con­science vote for Don­ald Trump, and yet have sin­ful­ly made a pledge that I would, the best option I see at this time is to resign my posi­tion as an Elec­tor…. I will sleep well at night know­ing I nei­ther gave in to [the people’s] demands nor caved to my con­vic­tions. I will also mourn the loss of our repub­lic.” The elec­tor is clear­ly a thought­ful Chris­t­ian who made his deci­sion very the­o­log­i­cal­ly. Read his own words about it at Con­flict­ed Elec­tor In A Cor­rupt Col­lege. Even if you dif­fer with his the­ol­o­gy at points, applaud his con­sis­ten­cy. Also note how much Politi­co edit­ed out his the­o­log­i­cal con­vic­tions in their report­ing — a very com­mon occur­rence in major media out­lets.
  5. Gays, Bias, And Pho­ny Sci­ence (Nao­mi Schae­fer Riley,  NY Post): “In the end, nei­ther LaCour nor Hatzen­buehler actu­al­ly did the work to prove their the­ses — because there would be no real con­se­quences if they were caught, and any­way acad­e­mia writ large didn’t want to ‘catch’ them at all.”
  6. The Under­stud­ied Female Sex­u­al Preda­tor (Conor Frieder­dorf, The Atlantic): “In inci­dents of sex­u­al vio­lence report­ed to the Nation­al Crime Vic­tim­iza­tion Sur­vey, 38 per­cent of vic­tims were men…”
  7. Cheat or Go Home: Inside the ‘Dys­func­tion­al Hell’ of Becom­ing a CFB Coach (Matt Hayes, Bleach­er Report): “Auburn offi­cials have always denied it, the NCAA could nev­er nail it down and the statute of lim­i­ta­tions on infrac­tions has long since passed. But here’s the catch: I’ve seen the ledger.” Even if you don’t like sports, this is a worth­while read.

Things Glen Found Amusing

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.