Tag: sexual assault

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 174

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. Your Real Bio­log­i­cal Clock Is You’re Going to Die (Tom Scoc­ca, Hmm Dai­ly): “If you intend to have chil­dren, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not bank­ing extra years as a per­son who is still too young to have chil­dren. You are sub­tract­ing years from the time you will share the world with your chil­dren.” Straight talk young peo­ple need to hear. Make the choic­es you want, but be sure you under­stand their con­se­quences. Read it and then think about it.
  2. Half of Pas­tors Approve of Trump’s Job Per­for­mance (Aaron Earls, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Despite 52 per­cent of Protes­tant pas­tors iden­ti­fy­ing as a Repub­li­can and only 18 per­cent call­ing them­selves a Demo­c­rat in a Life­Way Research sur­vey pri­or to the Novem­ber 2016 elec­tion, only 32 per­cent said they planned to vote for Trump. A full 40 per­cent said they were unde­cid­ed, with 19 per­cent plan­ning to vote for Hillary Clin­ton…. [Now after the elec­tion] there is no lack of data on Pres­i­dent Trump, but many were still hes­i­tant to give an opin­ion.” From an alum­nus who was quite dis­turbed by these num­bers.
    • Relat­ed: Why Evan­gel­i­cals Vot­ed Trump: Debunk­ing the 81% (Ed Stet­zer & Andrew McDon­ald, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The data tells us that most Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals are not look­ing to their pas­tors for polit­i­cal guid­ance, and most pas­tors are not will­ing to touch the sub­ject lest they get burned. Only 4 in 10 respon­dents told us they want­ed advice from their pas­tor on polit­i­cal issues. And only 4 in 10 told us their pas­tor uses Scrip­ture to address polit­i­cal top­ics at least once a month or more. Put anoth­er way, many evan­gel­i­cals are like­ly turn­ing to culture—and often the most out­raged voices—rather than the church for polit­i­cal dis­ci­ple­ship.”
  3. I sup­port affir­ma­tive action. But Har­vard real­ly is hurt­ing Asian Amer­i­cans. (Michael Li, Vox): “As the Har­vard case per­co­lat­ed through the courts this sum­mer, I spoke to a num­ber of Asian-Amer­i­can adults, includ­ing some who are on the fac­ul­ties of elite uni­ver­si­ties. These con­ver­sa­tions took place in hushed tones — one per­son lit­er­al­ly looked over his shoul­der to make sure no one could hear. Invari­ably, peo­ple thought affir­ma­tive action was essen­tial. Just as invari­ably, peo­ple thought maybe, just maybe, Har­vard and oth­er elite schools are long over­due for a hard look in the mir­ror.” The author is senior coun­sel at NYU’s Bren­nan Cen­ter for Jus­tice.
  4. A Reac­tionary Renam­ing: Stan­ford and Eng­lish Lan­guage Pol­i­tics (Hol­lis Rob­bins, LA Review of Books): “Span­ish sol­diers preyed on Native women and Ser­ra endeav­ored — but reg­u­lar­ly failed — to pro­tect them. But on the Atlantic coast, what found­ing Amer­i­can fig­ure isn’t equal­ly impli­cat­ed in the destruc­tion of native cul­ture even if most lived and wrote long after native pop­u­la­tions on the Atlantic coast were dec­i­mat­ed, destroyed, and dri­ven west?” An inter­est­ing cri­tique of Stanford’s deci­sion to move away from Serra’s name. The author is a human­i­ties schol­ar at Sono­ma State Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. Jim Jones & Har­vey Milk: The Secret His­to­ry (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Milk and Jones were friends and allies.” If you know about either of these men and how they are gen­er­al­ly per­ceived, pre­pare to be sur­prised.
  6. More on Kavanaugh because more has been writ­ten (and I’ve run across some good stuff I missed pre­vi­ous­ly)
    • Does Any­one Still Take Both Sex­u­al Assault and Due Process Seri­ous­ly? (Emi­ly Yoffe, The Atlantic): “Sex­u­al vio­lence is a seri­ous nation­al prob­lem. But in the wake of the Kavanaugh hear­ing, it has joined the list of explo­sive­ly par­ti­san issues. Republicans—adopting the rhetor­i­cal style of the president—dismiss accusers. Democ­rats mock the idea that fair­ness and due process are nec­es­sary for the accused. These atti­tudes will be detri­men­tal to the coun­try and are per­ilous for each par­ty.”
    • The media mis­han­dled Kavanaugh — and made Trump a win­ner (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Some argue that all jour­nal­ism involves bias, either hid­den or revealed. But it is one thing to say that objec­tiv­i­ty and fair­ness are ulti­mate­ly unreach­able. It is anoth­er to cease grasp­ing for them. That would be a world of pure­ly pri­vate truths, in which the bold­est liars and dem­a­gogues would thrive.” Ger­son is an evan­gel­i­cal who was a speech­writer in the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.
    • Every­one Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hear­ings (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “When pub­lic life means the ran­sack­ing of people’s pri­vate lives even when they were in high school, we are cir­cling a deeply illib­er­al drain. A civ­i­lized soci­ety observes a dis­tinc­tion between pub­lic and pri­vate, and this dis­tinc­tion is inte­gral to indi­vid­ual free­dom. Such a dis­tinc­tion was anath­e­ma in old-school monar­chies when the king could arbi­trar­i­ly arrest, jail, or exe­cute you at will, for pri­vate behav­ior or thoughts. These lines are also blurred in author­i­tar­i­an regimes, where the pow­er of the gov­ern­ment knows few lim­its in mon­i­tor­ing a person’s home or pri­vate affairs or cor­re­spon­dence or tax returns or texts. These bound­aries def­i­n­i­tion­al­ly can’t exist in theoc­ra­cies, where the state is inter­est­ed as much in pun­ish­ing and expos­ing sin, as in pre­vent­ing crime. The Iran­ian and Sau­di gov­ern­ments — like the ear­ly mod­ern monar­chies — seek not only to con­trol your body, but also to look into your soul. They know that every­one has a dark side, and this dark side can be exposed in order to destroy peo­ple. All you need is an accu­sa­tion.” This piece is a few weeks old but I missed it. Sul­li­van, if you don’t rec­og­nize the name, is the intel­lec­tu­al father of gay mar­riage. He’s an inter­est­ing chap — he self-iden­ti­fies as a con­ser­v­a­tive and yet sup­port­ed Barack Oba­ma, and he calls him­self a faith­ful Roman Catholic yet had a wed­ding cer­e­mo­ny with his male part­ner. He’s one of the most idio­syn­crat­ic intel­lec­tu­als out there.
    • Why Women Can (and Should) Sup­port Brett Kavanaugh (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a stu­dent at Stan­ford, where Dr. Blasey Ford stud­ied and taught, as a grad­u­ate of Holton-Arms, the high school she attend­ed at the time of the alleged assault, and, rar­er still, as a vocal female con­ser­v­a­tive on cam­pus, I too have been think­ing with about this episode and what it means for women, for men, and for our soci­ety as a whole.” This is our Anni­ka.
  7. The Audac­i­ty of Gen­der-Reveal Par­ties: Anoth­er Step Towards Cul­tur­al Insan­i­ty (Al Mohler, per­son­al blog): “Chris­tians think­ing about this moral con­fu­sion must first stop at the vocab­u­lary used in this article—particularly the word, ‘cis­gen­der.’ Using that term plays into the entire gen­der rev­o­lu­tion. The term indi­cates that some­one born a male is quite com­fort­able with being male. Even adopt­ing the vocab­u­lary, there­fore, becomes an enor­mous prob­lem because the vocab­u­lary assumes that you accept the ide­ol­o­gy of the trans­gen­der revolutionaries—that gen­der flu­id­i­ty exists and that the gen­der assigned at one’s birth may or may not be fac­tu­al.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

I feel as though the last few issues have had a drought of amus­ing things. I think this week makes up for it.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would. First shared in vol­ume 150.

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.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 172

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 did­n’t think I’d be able to send the email this week because I’m preach­ing in rur­al Alas­ka with­out reli­able WiFi, but I was able to grab a bit this morn­ing. As a result, this edi­tion feels a bit big­ger than nor­mal to me — com­pil­ing the list is quick because when­ev­er I read a good arti­cle I throw it on the pile, but edit­ing it down takes time I don’t have today. So here you go. Enjoy!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. First, a bit about Supreme Court nom­i­nee Brett Kavanaugh. I’ve had less time than nor­mal for read­ing this week, so I am cer­tain there are inter­est­ing and insight­ful arti­cles I nev­er stum­bled upon. Send me things you think I missed! Of one thing I am con­vinced: the lev­el of fury on both sides over this nom­i­na­tion is off-the-charts, and both sides seem to under­es­ti­mate just how out­raged the oth­er side is.
    • Only the Truth Can Save Us Now (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “even more than before the hear­ings, my feel­ing after over eight hours in pur­ga­to­ry is that I still real­ly want to know the truth. And sur­pris­ing­ly, I left the long day of tes­ti­mo­ny con­vinced that for all the years that have passed since the sum­mer of 1982, the truth might actu­al­ly be acces­si­ble, and there are obvi­ous ques­tions and avenues of inquiry, unpur­sued by both par­ties, that could bring us clos­er to under­stand­ing which of the two wit­ness­es were telling the real truth.”
    • I Know Brett Kavanaugh, but I Wouldn’t Con­firm Him (Ben­jamin Wittes, The Atlantic): “Faced with cred­i­ble alle­ga­tions of seri­ous mis­con­duct against him, Kavanaugh behaved in a fash­ion unac­cept­able in a jus­tice, it seems pre­pon­der­ant­ly like­ly he was not can­did with the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee on impor­tant mat­ters, and the risk of Ford’s alle­ga­tions being clos­er to the truth than his denial of them is sim­ply too high to place him on the Supreme Court…. As much as I admire Kavanaugh, my con­science would not per­mit me to vote for him.” This makes the most thought­ful case against Kavanaugh. See last week’s edi­tion for a sim­i­lar piece that comes to the oppo­site con­clu­sion.
    • The Rachel Mitchell Memo -“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to prove. But this case is even weak­er than that. Dr. Ford iden­ti­fied oth­er wit­ness­es to the event, and those wit­ness­es either refut­ed her alle­ga­tions or failed to cor­rob­o­rate them….I do not think that a rea­son­able pros­e­cu­tor would bring this case based on the evi­dence before the Com­mit­tee. Nor do I believe that this evi­dence is suf­fi­cient to sat­is­fy the pre­pon­der­ance-of-the-evi­dence stan­dard.” This is the report writ­ten by the sex-crimes pros­e­cu­tor who inter­viewed Dr. Ford on the Repub­li­cans’ behalf in the Sen­ate hear­ing.
    • A Non-scan­dalous, Non-ide­o­log­i­cal Case Against Brett Kavanaugh (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “I do wor­ry about a Supreme Court where lit­er­al­ly all nine mem­bers received their respec­tive legal edu­ca­tion at either Har­vard or Yale Law.”
    • Con­ser­v­a­tive Women Are Angry About Kavanaugh—And They Think Oth­er Vot­ers Are, Too (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “These women are infu­ri­at­ed with the way the sex­u­al-assault alle­ga­tions against the Supreme Court nom­i­nee Brett Kavanaugh have been han­dled. They are not con­vinced by Ford or any oth­er woman who has come for­ward. They resent the impli­ca­tion that all women should sup­port the accusers. And they believe that this scan­dal will ulti­mate­ly hurt the cause of women who have been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed. Above all, these women, and the women they know, are ready to lash out against Democ­rats in the upcom­ing midterm elec­tions.”
    • The Per­ni­cious Dou­ble Stan­dards Around Brett Kavanaugh’s Drink­ing (Megan Gar­ber, The Atlantic): “There’s been a lot of talk about dou­ble stan­dards of late—rightfully so—and here is one more: the assump­tion that alco­hol is one thing for men and anoth­er for women.” This one comes rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. For the record, you should not get drunk regard­less of your gen­der. Eph­esians 5:18, “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauch­ery. Instead, be filled with the Spir­it.”
    • Poll: Amid Kavanaugh Con­fir­ma­tion Bat­tle, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Enthu­si­asm Edge Evap­o­rates (Domeni­co Mon­ta­naro, NPR): “While Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans are now equal­ly enthu­si­as­tic about the midterms, the sto­ry is very dif­fer­ent for key Demo­c­ra­t­ic base groups and inde­pen­dents. While 82 per­cent of Democ­rats say the midterms are very impor­tant, that’s true of just 60 per­cent of peo­ple under 30, 61 per­cent of Lati­nos and 65 per­cent of inde­pen­dents.”
  2. On the broad­er impli­ca­tions of the Ford/Kavanaugh dra­ma.
    • Six Broad­er Insights From the Kavanaugh Saga So Far (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “Most men are not abusers, yet very large num­bers of women have been abused. So if a man is an abuser, there is a good chance he has abused a fair num­ber of women. That means many well-mean­ing men expe­ri­ence sex­u­al abuse as a rel­a­tive­ly rare phe­nom­e­non. They haven’t done it, and most of their male friends haven’t either. At the same time, most women have abuse, rape or #MeToo sto­ries, and they expe­ri­ence these phe­nom­e­na as rel­a­tive­ly com­mon and often life-alter­ing. Prob­a­bly they also have heard mul­ti­ple such sto­ries from their female friends. This struc­tur­al asym­me­try of per­spec­tives is cru­cial to under­stand­ing the dis­course and the often fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences in opin­ion.”
    • An Age Divid­ed By Sex (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “the cul­ture war as we’ve known it since has not been a sim­ple clash of con­ser­v­a­tives who want to repress and lib­er­als who want to eman­ci­pate. Rather it’s been an ongo­ing argu­ment between two forces — fem­i­nists and reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives — that both want to remor­al­ize Amer­i­can soci­ety, albeit in very dif­fer­ent ways.”
    • The Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Against Itself (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “the whole mer­i­to­crat­ic game… depends on a repro­duc­tion of priv­i­lege that pre­tends to be some­thing else, some­thing fair and open and all about hard work and just deserts. In this game the peo­ple whose priv­i­lege is par­tic­u­lar­ly obvi­ous, the board­ing school­ers and New York toffs and Bethes­da coun­try club­bers, play a cru­cial­ly impor­tant role. It’s not just that their par­ents pay full freight and keep the eco­nom­ics of tuition viable for every­one. It’s that the eliter-than-elite kids them­selves help cre­ate a pro­vi­sion­al inside-the-Ivy hier­ar­chy that lets all the oth­er priv­i­leged kids, the ones who are mere­ly upper-upper mid­dle class, feel the spur of resent­ment and ambi­tion that keeps us run­ning, keeps us com­pet­ing, keeps us sharp and awful in all the ways that mer­i­toc­ra­cy requires.” This is not real­ly about Kavanaugh, but it is cer­tain­ly about the world most of you inhab­it at Stan­ford.
    • See this insight­ful response: Brett Kavanaugh and the Lim­its of Social-Class Priv­i­lege for Con­ser­v­a­tives (David French, Nation­al Review): “The social bat­tles of the elite col­lege rep­re­sent the squab­bling of men and women at the tip of the priv­i­lege spear in the most pow­er­ful nation in the his­to­ry of the plan­et. But as real as these pet­ty resent­ments were and are, they pale in com­par­i­son to the most impor­tant thing. They miss the real roots of Ivy rage. Brett Kavanaugh’s true sin isn’t his con­nec­tions, his pop­u­lar­i­ty, or his prep school. His true sin is that he’s a con­ser­v­a­tive. And now he’s a par­tic­u­lar kind of con­ser­v­a­tive — a con­ser­v­a­tive who mat­ters, a con­ser­v­a­tive who will have the pow­er (and might actu­al­ly have the con­vic­tions) to threat­en one or more of the most sacred ele­ments of pro­gres­sive jurispru­dence. He can poten­tial­ly affect the law and the cul­ture in a pro­found way. So what we’re watch­ing is the sys­tem­at­ic revo­ca­tion of his elite priv­i­lege.”
    • One of the Best Speech­es You Will Ever Hear from the Sen­ate Floor (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “I believe that we have a wide­spread lega­cy of sex­u­al assault in this coun­try. I believe we don’t have much of a shared sex­u­al eth­ic right now—and we haven’t for quite some time—and I think hor­ri­ble stuff has hap­pened, and con­tin­ues to hap­pen. I’ve wept with the vic­tims of sex­u­al assault, and I believe the advo­ca­cy groups’ data that between one-fifth and one-third of Amer­i­can women have been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed at some point in their lives. And giv­en that most women have many oth­er impor­tant women in their lives—a mom, and a daugh­ter, sis­ters, and a cou­ple of close friends—it means that the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Amer­i­can women have been deeply affect­ed, deeply hurt, by the tragedy of sex­u­al vio­lence.” The speech is by Ben Sasse, a for­mer sem­i­nary pres­i­dent now serv­ing as a sen­a­tor from Nebras­ka.
    • Rage Pol­i­tics On The Left (R. R. Reno, First Things): “Of the utopi­an dreams of the 1960s, only the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion has attained cul­tur­al dom­i­nance. To a great degree, we as a soci­ety believe in the promis­es of that rev­o­lu­tion: that sex can be safe; that men and women can enjoy sex­u­al free­dom to the same degree and in the same way; that sex need have noth­ing to do with chil­dren; that sex is pure­ly pri­vate. These promis­es are back­stopped by abor­tion, the con­sti­tu­tion­al sta­tus of which fuels the urgency sur­round­ing the Kavanaugh appoint­ment.”
      • In a sim­i­lar vein: Believ­abil­i­ty Is The Road To Nation­al Ruin (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “When pol­i­tics becomes sole­ly a mat­ter of ‘I believe’ ver­sus ‘I believe,’ it descends into a raw con­test for pow­er. His­tor­i­cal­ly, it’s been fas­cists, not lib­er­als, who tend to win such con­tests.”
    • I was sex­u­al­ly assault­ed and thought it was my fault. It’s past time for a 1980s reck­on­ing. (Kirsten Pow­ers, USA Today): “There is a prob­lem, though, and it’s this: The cul­ture failed to give us the lan­guage to describe such vio­la­tions, and made us feel that talk­ing about what hap­pened to an author­i­ty fig­ure would only make things worse for us. For­tu­nate­ly for women, what hap­pened in the 1980s isn’t stay­ing in the 1980s. It’s a reck­on­ing that is well over­due.”
  3. Steel­man­ning the NIM­BYs (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “San Fran­cis­co is easy to hate. Even a lot of the peo­ple who already live there hate it. They hate the streets piled with dis­card­ed nee­dles and human waste. They hate the traf­fic (fifth worst in the world) and the crime (third most prop­er­ty crime in the US). They hate liv­ing five peo­ple to a three-bed­room apart­ment. They hate hav­ing aggres­sive peo­ple scream incom­pre­hen­si­ble things at them on the side­walk. They hate the var­i­ous mutu­al­ly hos­tile tran­sit sys­tems that inter­lock in a sys­tem I would call byzan­tine except that at least you could get around medieval Con­stan­tino­ple with­out check­ing whether the Muni and Cal­Train were mys­te­ri­ous­ly fail­ing to con­nect to each oth­er today. They hate that every­one else in the city hates them, from vis­i­ble KILL ALL TECHIES graf­fi­ti on their com­mute to work, to a sub­tle mood of seething resent­ment from every­one they meet. They hate the omnipresent bill­boards expect­ing them to have strong opin­ions on apps. I’m not say­ing every­one in San Fran­cis­co hates it. There are peo­ple who like all sorts of things. Some peo­ple like being tied up, whipped, and elec­tro­cut­ed by strangers. And a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of these peo­ple live in San Fran­cis­co. I am just say­ing this isn’t a coin­ci­dence.”
    • Steel­man­ning refers to the oppo­site of attack­ing a straw man argu­ment. Instead of mak­ing your opponent’s argu­ment weak­er, you strength­en it as much as you can.
    • Coun­ter­point: YIMBY! (Scott Sum­n­er, Econ­Lib): “Think of it this way. Lots of par­ents don’t let their kids play out­side by them­selves, because oth­er par­ents don’t let their kids play out­side. If you choose to be the excep­tion, then (unlike dur­ing the 1960s) your kid is the only one avail­able for pedophiles to prey upon. Lots of the anti-NIM­BY feel­ing comes from a false per­cep­tion of what the real estate mar­ket would look like if com­plete lais­sez-faire were adopt­ed, based on the cur­rent dis­tort­ed mar­ket.”
  4. The Dis­ap­pear­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive Pro­fes­sor (Jon A. Shields, Nation­al Affairs): “Pro­fes­sors are even less tol­er­ant of evan­gel­i­cals, whom they asso­ciate with social con­ser­vatism. Near­ly 60% of anthro­pol­o­gists, 50% of lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors, 39% of polit­i­cal sci­en­tists and soci­ol­o­gists, 34% of phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors, and 29% of his­to­ri­ans say they would be less inclined to hire evan­gel­i­cals. Yancey fur­ther found that female pro­fes­sors expressed more anti-con­ser­v­a­tive bias than men, per­haps in part because female pro­fes­sors tend to be more pro­gres­sive than their male peers.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment at Clare­mont McKen­na.
  5. The Big Hack: How Chi­na Used a Tiny Chip to Infil­trate U.S. Com­pa­nies (Jor­dan Robert­son and Michael Rieey, Bloomberg): “Nest­ed on the servers’ moth­er­boards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much big­ger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ orig­i­nal design. Ama­zon report­ed the dis­cov­ery to U.S. author­i­ties, send­ing a shud­der through the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. Elemental’s servers could be found in Depart­ment of Defense data cen­ters, the CIA’s drone oper­a­tions, and the onboard net­works of Navy war­ships. And Ele­men­tal was just one of hun­dreds of Super­mi­cro cus­tomers. Dur­ing the ensu­ing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years lat­er, inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined that the chips allowed the attack­ers to cre­ate a stealth door­way into any net­work that includ­ed the altered machines. Mul­ti­ple peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter say inves­ti­ga­tors found that the chips had been insert­ed at fac­to­ries run by man­u­fac­tur­ing sub­con­trac­tors in Chi­na.”
    • This bit made me chuck­le: “Two of Elemental’s biggest ear­ly clients were the Mor­mon church, which used the tech­nol­o­gy to beam ser­mons to con­gre­ga­tions around the world, and the adult film indus­try, which did not.”
  6. How Do Chris­tians Fit Into the Two-Par­ty Sys­tem? They Don’t (Tim Keller, New York Times): “Chris­tians are pushed toward two main options. One is to with­draw and try to be apo­lit­i­cal. The sec­ond is to assim­i­late and ful­ly adopt one party’s whole pack­age in order to have your place at the table. Nei­ther of these options is valid.”
  7. Are You a Young Evan­gel­i­cal? We Want to Hear From You Ahead of the Midterm Elec­tions (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “If you are an evan­gel­i­cal born after 1980, I’d love to hear about the rela­tion­ship between your faith and pol­i­tics today. And if you grew up evan­gel­i­cal and your views are shift­ing, feel free to share that, too. We may pub­lish a selec­tion of the respons­es.” Take a few min­utes and respond to this — you might get print­ed in the New York Times.

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  Book Review: See­ing Like A State (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Peas­ants didn’t like per­ma­nent sur­names. Their own sys­tem was quite rea­son­able for them: John the bak­er was John Bak­er, John the black­smith was John Smith, John who lived under the hill was John Under­hill, John who was real­ly short was John Short. The same per­son might be John Smith and John Under­hill in dif­fer­ent con­texts, where his sta­tus as a black­smith or place of ori­gin was more impor­tant. But the gov­ern­ment insist­ed on giv­ing every­one a sin­gle per­ma­nent name, unique for the vil­lage, and track­ing who was in the same fam­i­ly as whom. Resis­tance was intense.” This is long and amaz­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 95)

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 170

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. So I was most­ly ignor­ing the Kavanaugh nom­i­na­tion, but this week things turned way up. Wow. Here are the arti­cles that have helped to shape my think­ing.
    • What Would a Seri­ous Inves­ti­ga­tion of Brett Kavanaugh Look Like? (Jean­nie Suk Ger­son, New York­er): “…Kavanaugh does not stand to lose some­thing that he already has. He is peti­tion­ing the pub­lic for the priv­i­lege of hold­ing one of the high­est pub­lic offices in the coun­try, and he should have to per­suade us that he didn’t do what he is accused of doing. ”
    • The Kavanaugh Deba­cle (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I am glad that Ford will have a chance to speak her mind, and that Kavanaugh will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to defend him­self. But I think this will only make things worse for all of us. If Kavanaugh gets a Sen­ate vote, and pre­vails, he will for­ev­er be taint­ed as a Supreme Court jus­tice. If he is forced to with­draw (that is, with­out fur­ther evi­dence against him emerg­ing), or is vot­ed down, he will become a mar­tyr to many, and will, as the Wall Street Jour­nal edi­to­r­i­al page said, legit­imize ‘weaponiz­ing every sex­u­al assault alle­ga­tion no mat­ter the evi­dence.’”
    • I Believe Her (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “I have been entire­ly agnos­tic about Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nom­i­na­tion. Repub­li­can pres­i­dents nom­i­nate con­ser­v­a­tive judges, and Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dents nom­i­nate lib­er­al judges. This guy sound­ed like he was entire­ly qual­i­fied for the job. When Dianne Fein­stein made her announce­ment about the super-secret mys­tery let­ter by the anony­mous woman that she had sent to the FBI, I thought it was a Hail Mary pass aimed at scotch­ing the nom­i­na­tion, the kind of dis­taste­ful tac­tic that makes peo­ple hate pol­i­tics.”
    • In Eval­u­at­ing Cred­i­bil­i­ty, the Signs Point in Brett Kavanaugh’s Favor (Dan McLaugh­lin, Nation­al Review): “It’s always a good idea, in pol­i­tics, to eval­u­ate accu­sa­tions against your friends as if they were made against your ene­mies, and to eval­u­ate accu­sa­tions against your ene­mies as if they were made against your friends.” This is a very thor­ough argu­ment.
  2. The Unlike­ly Endurance of Chris­t­ian Rock (Kele­fah San­neh, The New York­er): “On Billboard’s list of the twen­ty most pop­u­lar rock songs of 2017, ful­ly half of them were by bands whose mem­bers have espoused the Chris­t­ian faith.” A strik­ing claim, but you have to count Mor­mons as Chris­tians for the math to work. A fas­ci­nat­ing and well-researched arti­cle nonethe­less.
  3. The Tiny Blond Bible Teacher Tak­ing on the Evan­gel­i­cal Polit­i­cal Machine (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Where­as her crit­i­cisms of church lead­ers were once veiled, she now speaks her mind freely. She blogged ici­ly about meet­ing a promi­nent male the­olo­gian who looked her up and down and told her she was pret­ti­er than anoth­er famous female Bible teacher. She has cas­ti­gat­ed the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment for sell­ing its soul to buy polit­i­cal wins. “
  4. The Oth­er Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (Isaac Stone Fish, The New Repub­lic): “There is an epi­dem­ic of self-cen­sor­ship at U.S. uni­ver­si­ties on the sub­ject of Chi­na, one that lim­its debate and fun­nels stu­dents and aca­d­e­mics away from top­ics like­ly to offend the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
    • From some­one not wor­ried about offend­ing Chi­na: The People’s Repub­lic of Cru­el­ty (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “In the list of what ails Chi­na — slow­ing growth; cor­rupt offi­cial­dom; a declin­ing birth rate; a trade war with the U.S.; Xi Jinping’s cult of per­son­al­i­ty; the inher­ent dis­con­nect between a pol­i­tics of repres­sion and the spir­it of inno­va­tion — the regime’s war on the soul doesn’t usu­al­ly rank high. But it mat­ters most. It means the regime has made an ene­my of the one thing it can­not kill, cap­ture, erad­i­cate or cure. At some point it will either have to aban­don the strug­gle or destroy itself in the effort, much as the Sovi­et Union did.”
  5. So a Chica­go priest who was once abused burns a rain­bow-cross flag: All heck breaks out (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): the title is click­baity, but the arti­cle deliv­ers. “Well, here is a hot-but­ton sto­ry if I’ve ever seen one.”
  6. The Lib­er­al­ism of the Reli­gious Right (Emi­ly Ekins, New York Times): “Reli­gion appears to actu­al­ly be mod­er­at­ing con­ser­v­a­tive atti­tudes, par­tic­u­lar­ly on some of the most polar­iz­ing issues of our time: race, immi­gra­tion and iden­ti­ty. Church­go­ing Trump vot­ers have more favor­able feel­ings toward African-Amer­i­cans, His­pan­ics, Asians, Jews, Mus­lims and immi­grants com­pared with non­re­li­gious Trump vot­ers. This holds up even while account­ing for demo­graph­ic fac­tors like edu­ca­tion and race.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. What Do We Owe Her Now? (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘The exam­i­na­tion that I did was con­sis­tent with what [Wyatt] said,’ [Nurse] Schi­a­vo told me when I con­tact­ed her this May to dis­cuss her find­ing. ‘That girl was raped.’ As I read her exam notes aloud to her over the phone, Schi­a­vo began to fill in details on her own. She remem­bered Wyatt’s case all these years lat­er, right down to the fact that she was nev­er called to court to tes­ti­fy about it.” This is a depress­ing sto­ry, well-researched.
    • The fol­low-up is more encour­ag­ing: Amber Wyatt told her sto­ry of rape. This is how the world respond­ed. (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The day after her 29th birth­day, which was also the day after her sto­ry first appeared online, Amber Wyatt, now Wil­son, stood in the show­er in her San Mar­cos home and sobbed — hard, wrench­ing, wrung-out tears. They had been a long time in com­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On 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). 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 167

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 Catholic Church is fac­ing a tremen­dous cri­sis, one poten­tial­ly far big­ger than any I have seen in my life­time. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about it. Here are some pieces I found illu­mi­nat­ing.
    • Protes­tants Should Care Deeply about the Catholic Cat­a­stro­phe (David French, Nation­al Review): “The Church is like a navy, a col­lec­tion of ships unit­ed in pur­pose and in des­ti­na­tion. Each denom­i­na­tion is like a dif­fer­ent ship in that navy, and while each crew is pri­mar­i­ly tasked with the health and well-being of its own ves­sel, it’s also deeply invest­ed in the strength of the fleet. Each ves­sel is more vul­ner­a­ble as the fleet weak­ens. Each ves­sel is stronger sur­round­ed by its pro­tec­tive arma­da. If the anal­o­gy holds, then one of the might­i­est bat­tle­ships in the fleet, the Catholic Church, is tak­ing tor­pe­does left and right.”
    • A Catholic Civ­il War? (Matthew Schmitz, New York Times): “…the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civ­il war. On one side are the tra­di­tion­al­ists, who insist that abuse can be pre­vent­ed only by tighter adher­ence to church doc­trine. On the oth­er side are the lib­er­als, who demand that the church cease con­demn­ing homo­sex­u­al acts and allow gay priests to step out of the clos­et.” This may sound like hyper­bole, but I believe it is accu­rate.
    • Catholics Face A Painful Ques­tion: Is It True? (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In his state­ments on Viganò’s tes­ti­mo­ny last Sun­day, Fran­cis invit­ed jour­nal­ists to use their skills and capac­i­ties to draw con­clu­sions about the mat­ter. And so, on Mon­day morn­ing, I began to try.” This is sad. It seems the only per­son doing actu­al jour­nal­ism on this for a major news­pa­per is… an opin­ion colum­nist. It stinks to high heav­en that the major papers aren’t fero­cious­ly pur­su­ing this.
    • What Did Pope Fran­cis Know? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “this doesn’t mean that the pope should resign — not even if Viganò is ful­ly vin­di­cat­ed. One papal res­ig­na­tion per mil­len­ni­um is more than enough. That cop-out should not be eas­i­ly avail­able to pon­tif­fs con­front­ed with scan­dals, includ­ing scan­dals of their own mak­ing, any more than it should be avail­able to fathers.”
    • Answer­ing Vigano’s Crit­ics (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Again: if the alle­ga­tions are false, you say, ‘They’re false.’ But that’s not what the Pope said. At all. If the Pope thinks he can ignore Vigano as he has ignored the dubia car­di­nals, he is grave­ly mis­tak­en.”
    • Sto­ry of bomb­shell charges against Pope more sur­re­al by the minute (John L. Allen, Jr., Crux): “If there’s one thing any­one who’s cov­ered the Vat­i­can for a long time ought to have learned by now, it’s nev­er to say a par­tic­u­lar sto­ry just can’t get any­more sur­re­al, because trust me — it always can.”
  2. The School Shoot­ings That Weren’t (Anya Kamenetz, Alex­is Arnold, and Emi­ly Car­di­nali, NPR): Dif­fi­cult to excerpt the key data, so here’s the sum­ma­ry: schools report­ed 240 shoot­ings in the 2015–2016 school year, but NPR fol­lowed up and was only able to ver­i­fy 11. How did this hap­pen? “the law of real­ly, real­ly big num­bers. Temkin notes that ‘240 schools is less than half of 1 per­cent,’ of the schools in the sur­vey. ‘It’s in the mar­gin of error.’ ”
  3. There was a reveal­ing ker­fluffle at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria in ado­les­cents and young adults: A study of parental reports (Lisa Littman, PLOS ONE): “The ele­vat­ed num­ber of friends per friend­ship group who became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, the pat­tern of clus­ter out­breaks of trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in these friend­ship groups, the sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of friend­ship groups where the major­i­ty of the mem­bers became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, and the peer group dynam­ics observed all serve to sup­port the plau­si­bil­i­ty of social and peer con­ta­gion for ROGD [Rapid Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria]. The wors­en­ing of men­tal well-being and par­ent-child rela­tion­ships and behav­iors that iso­late teens from their par­ents, fam­i­lies, non-trans­gen­der friends and main­stream sources of infor­ma­tion are par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cern­ing. More research is need­ed to bet­ter under­stand rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria, its impli­ca­tions, and scope.” The research paper in ques­tion.
    • Jour­nal Look­ing Into Study on ‘Rapid-Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “Brown Uni­ver­si­ty and PLOS ONE have dis­tanced them­selves from a con­tro­ver­sial, peer-reviewed pub­lished study on ‘rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria,’ or gen­der iden­ti­ty issues that present not ear­ly and over a life­time but quick­ly, in teenagers and young adults.” This is the neu­tral take.
    • New paper ignites storm over whether teens expe­ri­ence ‘rapid onset’ of trans­gen­der iden­ti­ty (Mered­ith Wad­man, Sci­ence): “The actions by the jour­nal and the uni­ver­si­ty have infu­ri­at­ed some researchers who say the moves tram­ple aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, although the paper remains freely avail­able. ‘This is a sad day for @BrownUniversity, and an indict­ment of the integri­ty of their aca­d­e­m­ic and admin­is­tra­tive lead­er­ship,’ Jef­frey Fli­er, a for­mer dean of Har­vard Med­ical School in Boston and a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine there, tweet­ed on Mon­day.” This is a slight­ly more feisty take.
    • Ryan T. Ander­son on Twit­ter: “If this is the sort of cen­sor­ship that takes place out in the open, just image what’s tak­ing place behind closed doors. All because this research reached polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect con­clu­sion. But when lives are at stake, it’s more impor­tant to be cor­rect than polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect.” A feisty and I sus­pect very accu­rate take.
  4. The French, Com­ing Apart (Christo­pher Cald­well, City Jour­nal): “Since Toc­queville, we have under­stood that our demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties are emu­la­tive. Nobody wants to be thought a big­ot if the mem­ber­ship board of the coun­try club takes pride in its mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. But as the prospect of ris­ing in the world is ham­pered or extin­guished, the induce­ments to ide­o­log­i­cal con­formism weak­en. Dis­sent appears. Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness grows more dra­con­ian. Final­ly the rul­ing class reach­es a dan­ger­ous stage, in which it begins to lose not only its legit­i­ma­cy but also a sense of what its legit­i­ma­cy rest­ed on in the first place.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that’s sort of about France, sort of about Amer­i­ca, and most­ly about West­ern moder­ni­ty.
  5. Chi­na Is Treat­ing Islam Like A Men­tal Ill­ness (Sigal Samuel, The Atlantic): “The med­ical anal­o­gy is one way the gov­ern­ment tries to jus­ti­fy its pol­i­cy of large-scale intern­ment: After all, attempt­ing to inoc­u­late a whole pop­u­la­tion against, say, the flu, requires giv­ing flu shots not just to the already-afflict­ed few, but to a crit­i­cal mass of peo­ple. In fact, using this rhetoric, Chi­na has tried to defend a sys­tem of arrest quo­tas for Uighurs. Police offi­cers con­firmed to Radio Free Asia that they are under orders to meet spe­cif­ic pop­u­la­tion tar­gets when round­ing up peo­ple for intern­ment. In one town­ship, police offi­cials said they were being ordered to send 40 per­cent of the local pop­u­la­tion to the camps.” I’ve men­tioned this before, but it tru­ly is one of the scan­dals of the mod­ern world.
  6. With Flow­ers In Their Hair (Andrew Fer­gu­son, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “The seeds of the destruc­tion of the Haight exper­i­ment could be found in its own antin­o­mi­an­ism, in its orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion. Maybe the whole­sale rejec­tion of time-hon­ored and time-test­ed val­ues — monogamy, mod­er­a­tion, good man­ners, self-denial, self-con­trol, the sanc­ti­ty of pri­vate prop­er­ty, per­son­al account­abil­i­ty to high­er author­i­ties, both mate­r­i­al and spir­i­tu­al — leads to squalor and mis­ery. Maybe the project they’re cel­e­brat­ing in San Fran­cis­co this sum­mer was doomed from the start.” Long and good.
  7. Amer­i­ca Soured on My Mul­tira­cial Fam­i­ly (David French, The Atlantic): “There are three fun­da­men­tal, com­pli­cat­ing truths about adop­tion. First, every sin­gle adop­tion begins with pro­found loss. Through death, aban­don­ment, or even lov­ing sur­ren­der, a child suf­fers the loss of his or her moth­er and father. Sec­ond, the demo­graph­ics of those in need of lov­ing homes do not pre­cise­ly match the demo­graph­ics of those seek­ing a new child. Adop­tive par­ents are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white. Adopt­ed chil­dren are not. Thus, mul­tira­cial fam­i­lies are a nat­ur­al and inevitable con­se­quence of the adop­tion process. Third, Amer­i­can cul­ture has long been obsessed with ques­tions of race and iden­ti­ty.”

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 those of any orga­ni­za­tion I work for or rep­re­sent.

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 165

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 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.