Tag: slavery

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 509: a Christian assassin, Harvard Law Review, Juneteenth

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. Stop Striv­ing and Have a Baby (Nicholas Clair­mont, The Free Press): “…hav­ing kids isn’t just pos­si­ble, think­able, or doable. It’s actu­al­ly super fun, mas­sive­ly eas­i­er than any­one tells you, and so ener­giz­ing and clar­i­fy­ing that if you are an ambi­tious per­son, you should have a kid out of pure per­son­al self­ish­ness.”
  2. Friends say Min­neso­ta shoot­ing sus­pect was deeply reli­gious and con­ser­v­a­tive (Jim Mus­t­ian & Michael Bieseck­er, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Friends and for­mer col­leagues inter­viewed by AP described Boel­ter as a devout Chris­t­ian who attend­ed an evan­gel­i­cal church and went to cam­paign ral­lies for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.”
    • In response: The Prob­lem of the Chris­t­ian Assas­sin (David French, The New York Times): “Our nation is relearn­ing a les­son that it nev­er should have for­got­ten. Extrem­ist Chris­t­ian lan­guage and the­ol­o­gy can lead to extreme Chris­t­ian vio­lence in the same way that extreme lan­guage can lead to extreme vio­lence in oth­er faith tra­di­tions and among peo­ple who have no faith at all. Chris­tians aren’t bet­ter than any­one else. We’re fash­ioned from the same human clay, and we’re sus­cep­ti­ble to the same temp­ta­tions and fail­ures.”
  3. The Gospel Does­n’t Impart a Lens, but a Life (Steven M. Bryan, Mere Ortho­doxy): “I sus­pect that some of the ways that we speak about those who aban­don Chris­t­ian faith and become sec­u­lar mir­rors a sec­u­lar under­stand­ing of what it means to become a Chris­t­ian in the first place. To speak about ‘de-con­struc­tion’ implies that becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is a mat­ter of con­struct­ing a ‘world­view.’ It risks rat­i­fy­ing the claim that becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is some­thing like becom­ing a Marx­ist or a nation­al­ist or even a post­mod­ernist. It is sim­ply to dis­man­tle one sto­ry about the world and to con­struct anoth­er. To speak about ‘de-con­ver­sion’ implies that the Gospel imparts a lens, not life.”
    • The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Trin­i­ty Evan­gel­i­cal Divin­i­ty School.
  4. What Church Do You Attend? Maybe More Than One, Sur­vey Finds (Adelle Banks, Roys Report): “Researchers for the mul­ti­year Hart­ford Insti­tute for Reli­gion Research study found that 46% of some 24,000 church­go­ers respond­ing to their sur­vey report­ed active engage­ment with more than one church.”
  5. Matt Ygle­sias on debat­ing (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In prac­tice, one big rea­son to debate is so you can put four peo­ple on the floor and attract an audi­ence and some pub­lic atten­tion, yet with­out slight­ing any one of the ‘stars’ by mak­ing it a pan­el. As a method of truth-seek­ing, I do not think pub­lic debate does very well.”
  6. Exclu­sive: Har­vard Law Review Axes 85 Per­cent of Sub­mis­sions Using Race-Con­scious Rubric, Doc­u­ments Show (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “The Free Bea­con obtained more than 500 doc­u­ments from the journal’s two lat­est vol­umes, includ­ing the one cur­rent­ly in pro­duc­tion. The new doc­u­ments are all from 2024 and 2025—after the Supreme Court banned affir­ma­tive action at universities—and span four dis­tinct stages of the arti­cle selec­tion process. They pro­vide the most com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture yet of the racial and ide­o­log­i­cal pref­er­ences at the elite law review, which has become a key front in the Trump administration’s war on Har­vard and is now the sub­ject of three fed­er­al probes. The doc­u­ments show that at least 42 dif­fer­ent edi­tors con­sid­ered race or gen­der when mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions in 2024. That num­ber accounts for 40 per­cent of the 104 edi­tors who serve on the jour­nal at any giv­en time, all of whom have a vote in pub­li­ca­tion deci­sions. While some edi­tors rec­om­mend­ed pieces on the grounds that the author was a minor­i­ty, oth­ers paid more atten­tion to the article’s foot­notes, comb­ing through the cita­tions to see how many sources were white, black, or trans­gen­der.”
  7. Arti­cles which appear to have been writ­ten in hon­or of June­teenth:
    • June­teenth Is Our Sec­ond Inde­pen­dence Day (Con­doleeza Rice, The Free Press): “But even though my fam­i­ly has been cel­e­brat­ing June­teenth since my child­hood, it wasn’t until 2021 that Con­gress vot­ed, almost unan­i­mous­ly, to make June­teenth Nation­al Inde­pen­dence Day a fed­er­al hol­i­day. Because many Amer­i­cans are unfa­mil­iar with its sig­nif­i­cance, some, per­haps under­stand­ably, won­der why it need­ed nation­al recog­ni­tion at all. After all, all Amer­i­cans cel­e­brate the Fourth of July—the ulti­mate cel­e­bra­tion of our nation’s found­ing, of our inde­pen­dence and our lib­er­ty.  To me, June­teenth is a recog­ni­tion of what I call America’s sec­ond found­ing.”
      • The author is a fel­low believ­er and also the direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
      • The arti­cle con­tains this stun­ning para­graph: “I was eight years old when, on a Sun­day morn­ing in Sep­tem­ber 1963, the 16th Street Bap­tist Church was bombed. I felt the blast a few blocks away in the church where my father was the pas­tor. Four lit­tle girls, two of whom I knew, were killed.”
    • What Amer­i­can Stu­dents Aren’t Taught About Slav­ery (Cole­man Hugh­es, The Free Press): “What I learned from teach­ing slav­ery to a group of col­lege fresh­men is that many (per­haps most) Amer­i­can kids grad­u­ate high school believ­ing, false­ly, that slav­ery hap­pened only in Amer­i­ca. Their minds are not blown by rehears­ing the bru­tal facts of Amer­i­can slav­ery. Their minds are blown to learn that oth­er bru­tal slaver­ies also exist­ed all over the world. Nor is this his­tor­i­cal amne­sia con­fined to high school stu­dents. The Unit­ed Nations has deemed March 25 a day of remem­brance for the transat­lantic slave trade. There is no UN day of remem­brance for the Arab slave trade, the Bar­bary slave trade, the Indi­an Ocean slave trade, or any of the slaver­ies local­ized to spe­cif­ic regions such as the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent, Chi­na, Korea, and East­ern Europe—each of which account­ed for mil­lions of slaves.… Instead of white­wash­ing the grim facts of Amer­i­can slavery—as Amer­i­can his­to­ry text­books did in the past, and as cer­tain cor­ners of the Amer­i­can right would be all too hap­py to revive—I rec­om­mend tak­ing the oppo­site approach: adding mate­r­i­al rather than sub­tract­ing it. We must include the glob­al and ubiq­ui­tous nature of slav­ery in every school cur­ricu­lum.”
      • The author, him­self African-Amer­i­can and Puer­to Rican, is a jour­nal­ist and a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Austin.
    • Fred­er­ick Dou­glass Found His Mis­sion in the Black Church (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Douglass’s mud­dled expe­ri­ence with evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty mir­rored what many oth­er slaves expe­ri­enced. Many of them came to faith through evan­gel­i­cal­ism and were able to grasp the hope of emancipation—and equal­i­ty. Yet they also saw white evan­gel­i­cal preach­ers espouse proslav­ery doc­trines and com­fort with tear­ing apart Black fam­i­lies to uphold the lucra­tive insti­tu­tion. With this hypocrisy in mind, Dou­glass famous­ly wrote, ‘I love the pure, peace­able, and impar­tial Chris­tian­i­ty of Christ: I there­fore hate the cor­rupt, slave­hold­ing, women-whip­ping, cra­dle-plun­der­ing, par­tial and hyp­o­crit­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty of this land.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 495: Math Points to God, Slavery Persists, and the Gospel Draws Crowds at Stanford

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 mir­a­cle of math (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “In 1960, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Eugene Wign­er iden­ti­fied a meta­phys­i­cal mys­tery for the ages: why are the laws of nature so apt­ly described by math­e­mat­ics? It is a decep­tive­ly sim­ple ques­tion. We think we grasp the answer easily—until we actu­al­ly try to explain it. Wigner’s essay, titled ‘The Unrea­son­able Effec­tive­ness of Math­e­mat­ics in the Nat­ur­al Sci­ences,’ high­lights this enig­ma. The term ‘unrea­son­able’ cap­tures the bewil­der­ing real­i­ty that there is no appar­ent rea­son why math should so flaw­less­ly mir­ror the universe’s behav­iors. This sug­gests, whether intend­ed by Wign­er or not, that the answer to this mys­tery lies beyond the uni­verse.”
    • The author is an astro­physi­cist who now does apolo­get­ics.
    • For those who have nev­er seen it, here is the well-known paper: The Unrea­son­able Effec­tive­ness of Math­e­mat­ics in the Nat­ur­al Sci­ences (Eugene Wign­er, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Pure and Applied Math­e­mat­ics): “The mir­a­cle of the appro­pri­ate­ness of the lan­guage of math­e­mat­ics for the for­mu­la­tion of the laws of physics is a won­der­ful gift which we nei­ther under­stand nor deserve. We should be grate­ful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for bet­ter or for worse, to our plea­sure, even though per­haps also to our baf­fle­ment, to wide branch­es of learn­ing.”
  2. The Secret Cam­paign in Chi­na to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck (Vivan Wang, New York Times): “The out­cry rip­pled nation­wide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chi­nese his­to­ry. The Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty sees pop­u­lar dis­con­tent as a chal­lenge to its author­i­ty, but this was so intense that it seemed even the par­ty would strug­gle to quash it. And yet, it did. To find out how, I tried to track what hap­pened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expan­sive web of intim­i­da­tion at home and abroad, involv­ing mass sur­veil­lance, cen­sor­ship and deten­tions — a cam­paign that con­tin­ues to this day.”
    • Pray for Chi­na reg­u­lar­ly.
    • Relat­ed: slav­ery is not a rel­ic of the past and crops up in unex­pect­ed places. UN judge guilty of forc­ing woman to work as slave (BBC): “Gasps were heard from the pub­lic gallery as the ver­dicts were giv­en, and the court was cleared as the defen­dant appeared unwell.… Mugambe, who was study­ing for a law PhD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, had con­spired with Ugan­dan deputy high com­mis­sion­er John Leonard Muger­wa to arrange for the young woman to come to the UK.”
  3. Jesus Is A Jew (David Brooks, Com­ment): “Jesus is inher­ent­ly mysterious—a lion who is also a lamb. But he is also intel­li­gi­ble. And that’s because he lived an actu­al life in an actu­al his­tor­i­cal con­text.… Jesus is amid the muck and armed with the Word, and yet emerges as a fig­ure ulti­mate­ly alone—a vor­tex of spir­i­tu­al forces con­verg­ing in one per­son, no one else quite like him.”
  4. We Live Like Roy­al­ty and Don’t Know It (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “My wife and I were at a table­ful of smart, well-edu­cat­ed twen­ty-some­things — friends of the bride and groom. The wed­ding, with all its hope and aspi­ra­tion, had put them in mind of the future. As young peo­ple should, they want­ed to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They want­ed the hun­gry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well. But when I men­tioned how remark­able it was that a hun­dred-plus peo­ple could para­chute into a remote, unfa­mil­iar place and eat a gourmet meal untrou­bled by fears for their health and com­fort, they were sur­prised. The hero­ic sys­tems required to bring all the ele­ments of their din­ner to these tables by the sea were invis­i­ble to them. Despite their fine edu­ca­tion, they knew lit­tle about the mech­a­nisms of today’s food, water, ener­gy, and pub­lic-health sys­tems. They want­ed a bet­ter world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.”
    • Relat­ed: Break­fast for Eight Bil­lion (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “Some­time in the 1980s, an unprece­dent­ed change in the human con­di­tion occurred. For the first time in known his­to­ry, the aver­age per­son on Earth had enough to eat all the time.”
  5. The Work­ism Trap (Bob­by Jamieson, Plough): “And a 2018 research arti­cle found that, com­pared to women who grad­u­at­ed from low­er-ranked schools, women who attend­ed elite, selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties do not, on aver­age, earn more per hour, but they do work more. For women, it seems, the ben­e­fits of an elite diplo­ma are more time at work and low­er chances of mar­ry­ing and hav­ing chil­dren.”
    • Vague­ly relat­ed (at least to the excerpt): Are Men OK? (Eamon Whalen, The Nation): “The biggest risk fac­tor for drop­ping out of col­lege, con­trol­ling for every­thing else, is being a man. Those strug­gles have extend­ed to the labor mar­ket. When adjust­ed for infla­tion, most Amer­i­can men today earn around $3,000 less than men did in 1979, which leads to a grim real­iza­tion: Much of the nar­row­ing of the per­sis­tent wage gap between men and women can be explained by the stag­nat­ing wages for men.”
    • Com­ment­ing on the above arti­cle: Cre­at­ing a Per­mis­sion Space for Men’s Issues (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The fem­i­nist movement’s suc­cess depend­ed on telling men they had to change, that there were cer­tain choic­es and behav­iors they could no longer engage in. It also explic­it­ly real­lo­cat­ed resources and posi­tions from men to women.  While I don’t think the sit­u­a­tion with men is sym­met­ri­cal, it strikes me as dubi­ous that noth­ing needs to change with regards to women. For exam­ple, as econ­o­mist Melis­sa Kear­ney, also a Brook­ings affil­i­at­ed schol­ar, doc­u­ment­ed in her superb book The Two-Par­ent Priv­i­lege — I sum­ma­rized some key find­ings — the ben­e­fits of grow­ing up in an intact fam­i­ly vs. a sin­gle par­ent home are over­whelm­ing. The Unit­ed States has the high­est share of its chil­dren liv­ing in sin­gle par­ent homes of any coun­try in the entire world. That’s Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism we could live with­out.” (empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty)
  6. Is Reli­gion Taboo at Stan­ford? (Sloane Wehman, Stan­ford Review): “On the after­noon of Mon­day March 3, hun­dreds of stu­dents con­gre­gat­ed in White Plaza to lis­ten to Cliffe Knech­tle and his son Stu­art Knech­tle debate Chris­tian­i­ty as a part of their ‘Give Me An Answer’ min­istry, a pro­gram that strives to answer tough ques­tions about faith. Cliffe and Stu­art are both pas­tors at Grace Com­mu­ni­ty Church in New Canaan, Con­necti­cut, and Cliffe has been debat­ing stu­dents on Chris­tian­i­ty since devel­op­ing the Give Me An Answer min­istry in 1991.”
  7. How Do You Solve a Prob­lem Like Mar­tinez? (Ben­jamin Flesh­man, SSRN): “All told, there are reports of 175 reli­gious stu­dent groups that were ful­ly denied offi­cial recog­ni­tion since 1990. One hun­dred and nine­teen of those groups were kicked off their cam­pus­es after Mar­tinez was decid­ed. That means that more than twice as many groups have been dere­c­og­nized in the fif­teen years since Mar­tinez than in the twen­ty years before­hand. Part of this is due to the more aggres­sive mass dere­cog­ni­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, and Van­der­bilt. There real­ly weren’t any mas­sive dere­cog­ni­tion cam­paigns pre-Mar­tinez, with the largest being Cal State’s dere­cog­ni­tion of a hand­ful of groups that led to the lit­i­ga­tion in Alpha Delta Chi. When you include the num­ber of recog­ni­tion issues that stopped just short of a full dere­cog­ni­tion, but which still required the inter­ven­tion of legal coun­sel or nation­al orga­ni­za­tions to resolve, the num­bers shoot to 257 total report­ed inci­dents since 1990, with 195 occur­ring post-Mar­tinez. That means rough­ly three times as many total report­ed inci­dents post-Mar­tinez as pre-Mar­tinez.”
    • Men­tions Chi Alpha (not at Stan­ford, just gen­er­al­ly) in a few places. The Beck­et Fund, with whom the author is affil­i­at­ed, are Chi Alpha’s legal rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 472



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

This is vol­ume 472. There are (I am told) 472 ways to tile a 5x5 grid with inte­ger-sized squares (1x1 squares mixed with 2x2 squares and 3x3 squares, etc).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. “We Lost Our Baby”: North Car­oli­na Fam­i­ly Los­es 3 after Climb­ing to Roof to Escape Helene Floods (FOX Weath­er on YouTube, 11 min­utes long): “I want them to remem­ber that there is joy beyond the pain… My son could­n’t be more proud at me for hang­ing on; my par­ents were prob­a­bly lift­ing me up when I was between the two things that were hold­ing me down. They are rejoic­ing at the fact that I now can tell them what God did for me, because it was God. He said, ‘Be still. I am in con­trol, and you will pass on.’ This is a back­fire for the dev­il, because he tried to take me out, and her I am shar­ing the word that my sev­en-year-old is a hero, and my par­ents live on in God’s glo­ry.”
    • You will absolute­ly cry watch­ing this. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. How Tolkien and Lewis Re-enchant­ed a War-Weary World (Lev Gross­man, New York Times): “‘The Myth­mak­ers’ takes us through 20 years of deep intel­lec­tu­al friend­ship between Lewis and Tolkien — which widened to include the social cir­cle around them, known as the Inklings — but it’s just as inter­est­ing when doc­u­ment­ing the slow, regret­table ship­wreck of that friend­ship. Jack and Tollers turned out to be not so very, very like each oth­er after all. After his con­ver­sion, Lewis, loud as ever, became famous as a radio lec­tur­er on Chris­tian­i­ty; this irked the qui­et, rig­or­ous Tolkien, because Lewis had nev­er for­mal­ly stud­ied the­ol­o­gy, and Tolkien would nev­er have lec­tured on any­thing with­out earn­ing six advanced degrees in it first.”
  3. What Would Lecrae Do? (Christi­na Gon­za­lez Ho, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…to hear one of the most tal­ent­ed and dec­o­rat­ed rap­pers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heart­en­ing. What moves me is not the idea that some­day my own work might be noticed by some­one more famous. It’s the thought that a sin­cere, intel­li­gent, and pro­found artist like Kendrick Lamar, some­one who’s seen no end of good ideas and inter­est­ing art, might find some­thing in straight­for­ward­ly Chris­t­ian music that gives him pause, that makes him recon­sid­er.”
    • Christi­na is one of our alum­ni: a for­mer wor­ship leader and offi­cer in our min­istry.
  4. Held Hostage Over­seas? The IRS Wants Your Back Tax­es. (Emma Camp, Rea­son): “Many Amer­i­cans who return home after being ille­gal­ly detained over­seas arrive to find they’ve been billed thou­sands of dol­lars by the IRS—including late fees for unpaid tax­es.… ‘I got one of those bills from the IRS say­ing, you owe this much on this year, you owe this much on this year because of fail­ure to pay on time—here’s the inter­est that’s accrued,’ Wash­ing­ton Post reporter and for­mer hostage Jason Reza­ian told NPR. He faced more than $6,000 in fees for unpaid tax­es after his release, fol­low­ing 544 days of deten­tion in Iran.”
  5. Become Slaves to One Anoth­er (John M. G. Bar­clay, Plough): “Paul under­stands the world not as an emp­ty space in which indi­vid­u­als carve out their pri­vate sphere of free­dom, but as a ter­rain already pop­u­lat­ed by com­pet­ing pow­ers greater than human actors, who only imag­ine that they are free. As far as Paul is con­cerned, our search for an indi­vid­u­at­ed, atom­ized auton­o­my is itself an enslav­ing delu­sion, because we are, and are meant to be, free only as we are formed by rela­tion­ships with God and with oth­ers.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty at the Durham Uni­ver­si­ty in Eng­land. He’s a well-regard­ed Bib­li­cal schol­ar.
  6. I Spent 13 Years Liv­ing as a Man. But After My Spouse’s Exposé, I’m Detran­si­tion­ing. (Tiger Reed, The Free Press): “For detran­si­tion­ers, there is no clear path. Gen­der-affirm­ing clin­i­cians have been ignor­ing and dis­miss­ing our con­cerns. While my tran­si­tion was cov­ered by insur­ance, my detran­si­tion is not. To restore my hair­line and remove my body hair will cost me thou­sands. In the next few years I may have breast recon­struc­tive surgery. There are many ques­tions I don’t have the answers to—such as whether my kids, now rang­ing in age from two to 16 years old, should still call me ‘Dad.’ I am plan­ning to change my name back to Rox­xanne, and to change my license so it says ‘female’ again. But I won­der if I’ll ever pass as a woman.  The gen­der-affirm­ing care mod­el relies on vul­ner­a­ble people’s impatience—rushing them toward major med­ical changes rather than stop­ping to under­stand the root of their pain and suf­fer­ing.”
  7. As America’s Mar­i­jua­na Use Grows, So Do the Harms (Megan Twohey, Danielle Ivory and Car­son Kessler, New York Times): “The accu­mu­lat­ing harm is broad­er and more severe than pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed. And gaps in state reg­u­la­tions, lim­it­ed pub­lic health mes­sag­ing and fed­er­al restraints on research have left many con­sumers, gov­ern­ment offi­cials and even med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers in the dark about such out­comes.… as more peo­ple turn to mar­i­jua­na for help with anx­i­ety, depres­sion and oth­er men­tal health issues, few know that it can cause tem­po­rary psy­chosis and is increas­ing­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the devel­op­ment of chron­ic psy­chot­ic dis­or­ders.”
    • This is sad, both because of the human suf­fer­ing involved and also because some peo­ple seem gen­uine­ly shocked that drugs can have neg­a­tive side-effects.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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 462



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

This is vol­ume 462, which my sim­ple math brain likes because 4, 6, and 2 are relat­ed num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sebas­t­ian Junger was a skep­tic of the after­life. Then he near­ly died. (Steven Petrow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Junger, a con­firmed athe­ist and an adher­ent of the sci­en­tif­ic method, had been raised by a physi­cist (his father) and a painter (his moth­er). His upbring­ing had left lit­tle room for a spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ence like this one, which turns out to be the cen­tral conun­drum of this book and, I’d ven­ture, his life. The meet­ing with his father was under­stand­ably unnerv­ing. ‘He was dead, I was alive, and I want­ed noth­ing to do with him.’ But, it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only vis­it­ed him but opened the door to the idea that an after­life might actu­al­ly exist.… Ever the reporter, Junger is unwill­ing to write off these expe­ri­ences as hal­lu­ci­na­tions (or any of the oth­er med­ical expla­na­tions). He admits he was hop­ing for evi­dence of an after­life, find­ing hints of it in the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of NDEs that fea­ture see­ing the dead. After all, he writes, ‘there are neu­ro­chem­i­cal expla­na­tions for why peo­ple hal­lu­ci­nate, but not for why they keep hal­lu­ci­nat­ing the same thing.’ ”
    • Unlocked.
  2. Why Is the U.S. Still Pre­tend­ing We Know Gen­der-Affirm­ing Care Works? (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Imag­ine a com­pre­hen­sive review of research on a treat­ment for chil­dren found ‘remark­ably weak evi­dence’ that it was effec­tive. Now imag­ine the med­ical estab­lish­ment shrugged off the con­clu­sions and con­tin­ued pro­vid­ing the same unproven and life-alter­ing treat­ment to its young patients. This is where we are with gen­der med­i­cine in the Unit­ed States.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Ques­tions About Leav­ing Reli­gion (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The most pop­u­lar rea­son [for leav­ing reli­gion] by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin was ‘reli­gious hypocrisy.’ About 42% of the sam­ple chose that rea­son for leav­ing. That was sev­en points high­er than the sec­ond most pop­u­lar — ‘reli­gion doesn’t make sense.’ That was cho­sen by 35% of the sam­ple. The only oth­er response that scored above 30% was reli­gious big­otry (31%).”
  4. Var­i­ous pieces about the assas­si­na­tion attempt on Trump:
    • Pho­to Appears to Cap­ture Path of Bul­let Used in Assas­si­na­tion Attempt (John Ismay, New York Times): “In doc­u­ment­ing the Penn­syl­va­nia cam­paign ral­ly on Sat­ur­day after­noon that turned into an attempt on a for­mer president’s life, Doug Mills, a vet­er­an New York Times pho­tog­ra­ph­er, appeared to cap­ture the image of a bul­let streak­ing past for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump’s head.”
    • It’s 1968 All Over Again (Eli Lake, The Free Press): “The near assas­si­na­tion of Trump is an echo of the vio­lence of 1968, when both Mar­tin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down in a two-month span in the spring of that year. Both were the vic­tims of lone gun­men, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, respec­tive­ly. The mur­ders threw Amer­i­ca into a cycle of riots and crack­downs that cul­mi­nat­ed with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion in Chica­go at the end of August.”
    • Why Are There So Few Assas­si­na­tions? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “Con­sid­er that there are a lot of crazy peo­ple out there who get agi­tat­ed about pol­i­tics. There is also an end­less num­ber of nihilists with noth­ing to live for, but who would prob­a­bly like to see their names in the his­to­ry books. Pow­er­ful firearms are wide­ly avail­able in many advanced nations, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Unit­ed States. In this coun­try, it is com­mon for malls or schools to get shot up by dis­turbed young men who expect to get noth­ing out of the act except that they might end up being part of a news sto­ry for a few days. Why don’t more of these types go after major politi­cians?”
    • Video Shows Crowd Warn­ing Law Enforce­ment About Gun­man Before He Fired at Trump (David Bot­ti, Haley Willis and Malachy Browne, New York Times): “Video tak­en by a bystander shows peo­ple point­ing to the man sus­pect­ed of shoot­ing at for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump at a ral­ly in Penn­syl­va­nia and fran­ti­cal­ly warn­ing law enforce­ment, just two min­utes before the first burst of gun­fire rang out, accord­ing to an analy­sis of the footage by The New York Times.”
  5. Why slav­ery is not America’s orig­i­nal sin (Wil­fred Reil­ly, Spiked): “Mod­ern Amer­i­cans tend to project our pos­i­tive val­ues back into the past while think­ing that our sins are unique­ly bad. What we don’t under­stand is that con­tem­po­rary West­ern beliefs about human dig­ni­ty, inalien­able rights, a right to free­dom, etc, are the excep­tion, not the norm.… Even a few open slave soci­eties con­tin­ue to exist today. In the Islam­ic repub­lic of Mau­ri­ta­nia, ‘the very struc­ture of soci­ety rein­forces slav­ery’.… CNN reporters and ana­lysts claimed that between ’10 per cent to 20 per cent of the [Mau­ri­tan­ian] pop­u­la­tion lives in slav­ery’.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Ken­tucky State. The arti­cle is an excerpt from his new book, which I have not read.
  6. The Hid­den Mar­riage Mar­ket (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Today, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties func­tion as arranged match­mak­ing ser­vices. Charles Murray’s term of art in Com­ing Apart is ‘the col­lege sort­ing machine.’ The mech­a­nism where­by peo­ple with dis­tinc­tive tastes and pref­er­ences are brought togeth­er into edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions and the labor force.… It’s true that most col­lege grad­u­ates don’t meet their spouse in col­lege. But by grad­u­at­ing, you then, as Caplan notes, enter a refined dat­ing pool for the rest of your life.”
  7. Some stuff from the elec­tion and elec­tion-adja­cent realm, focused on the Repub­li­can side because they just had their con­ven­tion and Trump put forth Vance as his VP:
    • The changes in vibes — why did they hap­pen? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Anoth­er way to put it is that Trump was a high­ly vul­ner­a­ble, defeat­ed Pres­i­dent, fac­ing numer­ous legal charges and indeed an actu­al felony con­vic­tion. Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next elec­tion. In con­cep­tu­al terms, how exact­ly did that hap­pen? I had been think­ing it would be a good cog­ni­tive test to ask peo­ple why they think the vibes have changed, and then to grade their answers for intel­li­gence, insight, and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty.”
      • Cowen offers inter­est­ing hypothe­ses.
    • How J.D. Vance Reject­ed Evan­gel­i­cal­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “He explic­it­ly sees reli­gion through the lens of socio-eco­nom­ic sta­tus. Once he saw that it was pos­si­ble to be Chris­t­ian in the world of the elites, it became inter­est­ing and cred­i­ble to him again. Note again that it’s Catholics and Mor­mons who are key to this, not any sort of Protes­tants. At the time of this inter­view, Vance was still explor­ing Catholi­cism, to which he lat­er con­vert­ed.… There’s also some­thing in evan­gel­i­cal­ism that’s just off-putting to a lot of peo­ple like Vance. It’s not just the work­ing class Pen­te­costal con­gre­ga­tions like the one I was raised in (which was very sim­i­lar to Vance’s expe­ri­ence). The aver­age sub­ur­ban megachurch is also incred­i­bly cringe. I like to dis­tin­guish between mid­dle class and striv­er class. Evan­gel­i­cal­ism appeals to the mid­dle class, but much less so to the striv­er class.”
      • Renn is not wrong about the dynam­ics at play, but he is over­look­ing the pres­ence of min­istries like Chi Alpha on these elite cam­pus­es which are usu­al­ly larg­er (in terms of week­ly atten­dance) and per­ceived to be more vibrant than the Catholic min­istries.
      • A fol­l0w-up Catholic Con­ver­sion­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “It’s worth not­ing that although intel­lec­tu­als often con­vert from evan­gel­i­cal­ism to Catholi­cism, a lot more peo­ple over all con­vert the oth­er direc­tion, from Catholi­cism to evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
      • If any­one thinks Catholi­cism is cor­rect on the mer­its, then become a Catholic. I strong­ly dis­agree with you, but fol­low your con­vic­tions. But to any­one tempt­ed to con­vert to Catholi­cism or any­thing else pri­mar­i­ly because it makes your social life / career prospects bet­ter, I urge you to recon­sid­er.
    • How Yale Pro­pelled J.D. Vance’s Career (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Sofia Nel­son, a for­mer class­mate who is trans­gen­der and was once a close friend of both Mr. Vance and his wife, recalled that Mr. Vance deliv­ered home-baked treats when they under­went top surgery. But years of friend­ship end­ed in 2021 over his sup­port for an Arkansas bill oppos­ing trans­gen­der care for minors.”
      • Inter­est­ing when you ignore the par­ti­san dynam­ic and instead focus on the cul­tur­al col­li­sion at Yale.
    • The Pop­ulist GOP and its Yale Law and Har­vard Law Lead­ers (Orin S. Kerr, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “…pop­ulist con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers are fine with vot­ing for con­ser­v­a­tive grad­u­ates of elite law schools because hav­ing attend­ed those school affords con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians a sort of vet­er­an sta­tus of its own. The politi­cians run­ning for GOP office don’t speak fond­ly of their time at these schools. Instead, they present their time at Har­vard Law or Yale Law as a dif­fi­cult test of strength that they passed. They spent three years in the trench­es of lib­er­al­ism and they emerged vic­to­ri­ous. They are now bat­tle-hard­ened and ready to fight the lib­er­als while in polit­i­cal office. From that per­spec­tive, grad­u­at­ing from these schools isn’t a prob­lem. Instead, like a medal on a mil­i­tary uni­form, it’s a cre­den­tial.”
      • This piece is pret­ty good, but it over­looks the delib­er­ate pipeline that both sides have set up to scout and route promis­ing young can­di­dates from elite uni­ver­si­ties into polit­i­cal tracks. There are all kinds of con­fer­ences and grants and intern­ships to facil­i­tate this.
    • Is the Repub­li­can Par­ty Becom­ing Pro-Choice? (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee pro­posed its 2024 GOP par­ty plat­form in Mil­wau­kee on July 8, and for the first time in forty years, this plat­form does not include sup­port for a nation­al abor­tion ban. Instead, the GOP’s anti-abor­tion posi­tions are soft­ened and many of the par­ty’s pre­vi­ous pro-life com­mit­ments have been removed.… the GOP appears to be piv­ot­ing. Trump claims to hold a fed­er­al­ist posi­tion on abor­tion, but in prac­tice he con­demns only states that pass pro-life protections—such as Florida—while say­ing noth­ing about states with per­mis­sive abor­tion regimes.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • She Didn’t Like His Song, So She Tried to Eat Him (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “Dr. Gould believes that a female may be able to tell whether a male is bet­ter for mat­ing or eat­ing based on the strength of his calls. This means males take a huge risk when try­ing to attract mates. ‘You’ve real­ly got to give props to the male frogs out there, that they are putting their lives on the line to repro­duce,’ Dr. Gould said.”
  • Denom­i­na­tions Host Game Night (Kei­th Fos­key, YouTube): two min­utes of fun­ny with some talkey-talkey at the end
  • The Death of Hob­bies (Sher­ry Ning, Sub­stack): “Scrolling through an end­less trail of short videos and watch­ing cook­ing shows is plea­sur­able because it feels good, but it would be wrong to say you actu­al­ly enjoy it. It would be much more enjoy­able to learn how to cook and roll up your sleeves in the kitchen. When we par­tic­i­pate in the motion, we turn from a con­sumer into a cre­ator. And the act of cre­ation is vital to us because we all uncon­scious­ly strive to seek mean­ing beyond the mate­r­i­al world: There is some­thing divine about cre­at­ing. To bring forth some­thing out of noth­ing, to have some­thing exist because of you, to leave your mark on the world. Every cre­ative act—from devel­op­ing a soft­ware to writ­ing a book to mak­ing a large bowl of salad—is a minia­ture Gen­e­sis.”
    • This one real­ly belongs above, but I did­n’t have space for it with my self-imposed lim­it of 7 big bul­let points. I con­vinced myself it belongs here since it has to do with recre­ation.

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 408

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

This is vol­ume 408, the 8th Pell Num­ber, a sequence use­ful in approx­i­mat­ing the square root of 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Com­pe­ti­tion for Believ­ers in Africa Is Trans­form­ing Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Nicholas Bariyo & Gben­ga Aking­bule, Wall Street Jour­nal): “On a recent Sun­day morn­ing in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, mem­bers of the faith­ful clutched their hymn books and chant­ed God’s prais­es as they danced to the beat of tam­bourines. A preach­er led the con­gre­ga­tion in pray­ing for the health of their chil­dren and suc­cess at work. The ser­vice resem­bled Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty, a move­ment that orig­i­nat­ed in the U.S. and has swept Africa in the last few decades. But the par­tic­i­pants weren’t Chris­tians. They were Mus­lims, prac­tic­ing an ecsta­t­ic style of wor­ship that has devel­oped in response to the chal­lenge posed by Pen­te­costal­ism. Across sub-Saha­ran Africa, reli­gion today is in fer­ment as dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam vie for believers—a con­test that is trans­form­ing both faiths and dis­rupt­ing long-estab­lished terms of coex­is­tence.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. I believe I have unlocked the pay­wall on this one.
  2. Cal­i­for­nia restau­rant used fake priest to get work­ers to con­fess “sins,” feds say (Aimee Pic­chi, CBS News): “In court doc­u­ments, a serv­er at the restau­rant, Maria Par­ra, tes­ti­fied that she found her con­ver­sa­tion with the alleged priest ‘unlike nor­mal con­fes­sions,’ where she would talk about what she want­ed to con­fess, accord­ing to a court doc­u­ment reviewed by CBS Mon­ey­Watch. Instead, the priest told her that he would ask ques­tions ‘to get the sins out of me.’ ”
  3. Slav­ery in the Bible | Dr. Esau Mccaul­ley (Jude 3 Project, YouTube): sev­en min­utes.
  4. Sports Writ­ers Out, Zoomer Tik­Tok­ers In (Ethan Strauss, Sub­stack): “There’s a real malev­o­lent genius to con­coct­ing a cuck­ish char­ac­ter who pals around with the high-sta­tus Cavin­ders, but only as the butt of their jokes. He’s lit­er­al­ly mod­el­ing los­ing mon­ey towards the Betr cof­fers, while hang­ing out with mod­els. Some­one actu­al­ly came up with a means for habit­u­at­ing young men into an attrac­tive form of fail­ing as part of an ‘organic’-looking humil­i­a­tion fan­ta­sy.”
  5. Data Fal­si­fi­ca­da (Part 1): “Clus­ter­fake” (Uri Simon­sohn, Leif Nel­son & Joe Sim­mons, Data Cola­da): “That’s right: Two dif­fer­ent peo­ple inde­pen­dent­ly faked data for two dif­fer­ent stud­ies in a paper about dis­hon­esty.”
    • There was empha­sis in orig­i­nal which I removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. U.S.-Funded Sci­en­tist Among Three Chi­nese Researchers Who Fell Ill Amid Ear­ly Covid-19 Out­break (Michael R. Gor­don, Wall Street Jour­nal): “A promi­nent sci­en­tist who worked on coro­n­avirus projects fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment is one of three Chi­nese researchers who became sick with an unspec­i­fied ill­ness dur­ing the ini­tial out­break of Covid-19, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer U.S. offi­cials.”
    • A less san­i­tized pre­sen­ta­tion of the same facts: First Peo­ple Sick­ened By COVID-19 Were Chi­nese Sci­en­tists At Wuhan Insti­tute Of Virol­o­gy, Say US Gov­ern­ment Sources (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Matt Taib­bi & Alex Gutentag, Sub­stack): “Sources with­in the US gov­ern­ment say that three of the ear­li­est peo­ple to become infect­ed with SARS-CoV­‑2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were mem­bers of the Wuhan lab sus­pect­ed to have leaked the pan­dem­ic virus. As such, not only do we know there were WIV sci­en­tists who had devel­oped COVID-19-like ill­ness­es in Novem­ber 2019, but also that they were work­ing with the clos­est rel­a­tives of SARS-CoV­‑2, and insert­ing gain-of-func­tion fea­tures unique to it.”
  7. REVIEW EXCLUSIVE—Catch Him if You Can: Meet Will Cur­ry (Josi­ah Jon­er, Stan­ford Review): “Will Curry’s sto­ry is long and complex—but most of all, enthralling. He is a liv­ing sto­ry of some­one who lived the adven­tur­ous life that so many desire yet nev­er actu­al­ly live, includ­ing many at Stan­ford trapped in a cul­ture of monot­o­ny. Is all of the sto­ry he told me true? Maybe, or maybe not. Will is, after all, a com­pet­i­tive pok­er play­er who has pulled off bluffs in the past. But regard­less, Will’s sto­ry is far from over. In fact, I think it’s real­ly only begun.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs. From vol­ume 286.

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 315

some extra­or­di­nar­i­ly inter­est­ing arti­cles this week — high­ly rec­om­mend­ed

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.

Today’s num­ber is 315, which is north­west when mea­sured on a com­pass.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Only­Fans and the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion (Samuel D. James, First Things): “If you look care­ful­ly, you can see how sobri­quets such as ‘sex work­er’ give away the game. The con­tem­po­rary lib­er­at­ed social order is an order of work­ers: naked bod­ies labor­ing round the clock, sac­ri­fic­ing dig­ni­ty and rep­u­ta­tion for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to nib­ble the crumbs that fall from Big Tech’s table. Our civilization’s efforts to com­mod­i­fy sex­u­al­i­ty can­not deliv­er what they promise. It is impos­si­ble to make sex a prod­uct or sub­scrip­tion; the clos­est thing is human traf­fick­ing, which, as it turns out, is a fea­ture and not a bug of the adult con­tent indus­try.” Straight fire.
  2. The World Is Cat­e­chiz­ing Us Whether We Real­ize It or Not (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “It is worth remem­ber­ing David Well’s famous def­i­n­i­tion: world­li­ness is what­ev­er makes right­eous­ness look strange and sin look nor­mal. Here’s the real­i­ty fac­ing every Chris­t­ian in the West: the mon­ey, pow­er, and pres­tige of the main­stream media, big time sports, big busi­ness, big tech, and almost all the insti­tu­tions of edu­ca­tion and enter­tain­ment are invest­ed in mak­ing sin look nor­mal.”
  3. Nike’s End of Men (Ethan Strauss, Sub­stack): “For all the talk of a racial reck­on­ing with­in major indus­tries, Nike’s main prob­lem is this: It’s a com­pa­ny built on mas­culin­i­ty, most specif­i­cal­ly Michael Jordan’s alpha dog brand of it. Now, due to its own ambi­tions, scan­dals, and intel­lec­tu­al trends, Nike finds mas­culin­i­ty prob­lem­at­ic enough to loud­ly reject.” This is WAY more inter­est­ing than I antic­i­pat­ed.
  4. Tet­lock and the Tal­iban (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “I have a PhD in polit­i­cal sci­ence with a focus on inter­na­tion­al rela­tions. Most peo­ple in my posi­tion would tell you that you should give my opin­ions on my top­ic of exper­tise more weight because of my cre­den­tials. I believe if any­thing, you should hold my degree against me, as get­ting a PhD is prob­a­bly the most inef­fi­cient way to under­stand a top­ic, and a per­son seek­ing that cre­den­tial has shown that they don’t under­stand that. I think I’ve been right on Afghanistan and oth­er Amer­i­can inter­ven­tions because of good intel­lec­tu­al habits, includ­ing a gen­uine con­cern with what is true. But that has lit­tle to do with any train­ing I got from polit­i­cal sci­ence.” This piece is quite good. I feel like I should add a dis­claimer like, “Warn­ing: aca­d­e­m­ic heresy ahead.”
  5. ‘When My Satire Becomes Pop­u­lar, I Must Ask, What Is the Prob­lem?’ (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “[Pop­u­lar satirists] can’t say, ‘I’m call­ing out pow­er.’ No, you are pow­er. Satirists must inter­ro­gate their own posi­tion­al­i­ty. I try to say, ‘How am I impli­cat­ed in this thing per­son­al­ly?’ Because satire nev­er used to be pop­u­lar.… So when my satire becomes pop­u­lar, I must ask, What is the prob­lem? Why are there so many peo­ple that are com­fort­able with my work?” A very per­cep­tive inter­view with Elnathan John. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  6. Hos­pi­tals and Insur­ers Didn’t Want You to See These Prices. Here’s Why. (Sarah Kliff & Josh Katz, New York Times): “This year, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment ordered hos­pi­tals to begin pub­lish­ing a prized secret: a com­plete list of the prices they nego­ti­ate with pri­vate insur­ers.… data from the hos­pi­tals that have com­plied hints at why the pow­er­ful indus­tries want­ed this infor­ma­tion to remain hid­den.” This is reveal­ing and irri­tat­ing.
  7. About Afghanistan:
    • We Must Learn From Our Defeat (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “We must learn the lessons of our fail­ure with great urgency. Amer­i­can pri­ma­cy has insu­lat­ed Amer­i­ca from the pains of our defeat. This will not be true for much longer. As I type these words my nation hur­tles towards a dark and uncer­tain future. The chal­lenge posed by an ambi­tious and revi­sion­ist Com­mu­nist Par­ty of Chi­na dwarfs any prob­lem a move­ment of illit­er­ate pop­py farm­ers could cre­ate. We have wast­ed the prof­its of our imperi­um away; in this more fee­ble state we now con­front the chal­lenge of a cen­tu­ry. We must not face it armed with the dys­func­tion of our past two decades. We must relearn how to be seri­ous.”
    • US spe­cial oper­a­tions vets car­ry out dar­ing mis­sion to save Afghan allies (James Gor­don Meek, ABC News): “The Afghan oper­a­tors, assets, inter­preters and their fam­i­lies were known as ‘pas­sen­gers’ and they were being guid­ed remote­ly by ‘shep­herds,’ who are, in most cas­es their loy­al for­mer U.S. spe­cial oper­a­tions forces and CIA com­rades and com­man­ders, accord­ing to chat room com­mu­ni­ca­tions viewed by ABC News.… Look­ing back at an effort that saved at least, by their count, 630 Afghan lives, Red­man expressed deep frus­tra­tion ‘that our own gov­ern­ment did­n’t do this. We did what we should do, as Amer­i­cans.’ ” Amaz­ing.
    • Three major net­works devot­ed a full five min­utes to Afghanistan in 2020 (Jim Lobe, Respon­si­ble State­craft): “If the U.S. gov­ern­ment was caught up short by the dra­mat­ic denoue­ment of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, view­ers of the three major net­works must have been tak­en entire­ly by sur­prise. Out of a com­bined 14,000-plus min­utes of the nation­al evening news broad­cast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five min­utes were devot­ed to Afghanistan…”
    • Let’s Not Pre­tend That the Way We With­drew From Afghanistan Was the Prob­lem (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “I will not pre­tend that I know how we should have left Afghanistan. But nei­ther do a lot of peo­ple dom­i­nat­ing the air­waves right now. And the con­fi­dent pro­nounce­ments to the con­trary over the past two weeks leave me wor­ried that Amer­i­ca has learned lit­tle. We are still hold­ing not just to the illu­sion of our con­trol, but to the illu­sion of our knowl­edge.”
    • The eco­nom­ics of Tal­iban finance (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “An exam­ple of Islamist gov­er­nance can be found on the stretch of road from Kab­ul to the Mile 78 bor­der cross­ing in south-west Farah province that bor­ders Iran. The road has more than 25 gov­ern­ment check­points and a fee is charged at mul­ti­ple points on the jour­ney. By con­trast, the Tal­iban who police the same road have far few­er check­points and give a receipt, so only a sin­gle pay­ment is nec­es­sary.” Very inter­est­ing, sum­ma­riz­ing a pay­walled piece.

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 Ian McE­wan ‘dubi­ous’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 217

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. A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.” I just found this blog and am lov­ing it.
  2. When Faith Comes Up, Stu­dents Avert Their Eyes (Michael Roth, The Atlantic): “As a non­be­liev­er myself, I am not try­ing to con­vert any stu­dent to any reli­gion. Yet how to dis­cuss reli­gious faith in class pos­es a major chal­lenge for non­re­li­gious col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. How can such an insti­tu­tion claim to edu­cate stu­dents about ideas, cul­ture, and ways of life if stu­dents, pro­fes­sors, or both are uncom­fort­able when talk­ing about some­thing that’s been cen­tral to human­i­ty through­out record­ed his­to­ry?” Roth is a his­to­ri­an and the pres­i­dent of Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. The Pint-Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Very enter­tain­ing.
  4. Elite Fail­ure Has Brought Amer­i­cans to the Edge of an Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “What Amer­i­cans young and old are aban­don­ing is not so much the promise of fam­i­ly, faith, and nation­al pride as the trust that America’s exist­ing insti­tu­tions can be relied on to pro­vide for them.”
    • Use­ful­ly read along­side The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad (James Fal­lows, The Atlantic): “Gov­ern­men­tal ‘fail­ure’ comes down to an inabil­i­ty to match a society’s resources to its biggest oppor­tu­ni­ties and needs. This is the clear­est stan­dard by which cur­rent U.S. nation­al gov­er­nance fails. In prin­ci­ple, almost noth­ing is beyond America’s capac­i­ties. In prac­tice, almost every big task seems too hard. Yet for our own era’s coun­ter­parts to duchies and monasteries—for state and local gov­ern­ments, and for cer­tain large pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing uni­ver­si­ties and some companies—the coun­try is still main­ly func­tion­al, in exact­ly the areas where nation­al gov­er­nance has failed.”
    • Relat­ed: How Uni­ver­si­ties Have Been Part of the Prob­lem (And Can Be Part of the Solu­tion) for America’s Civic Crises (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): “Stu­dents are taught to real­ly hone their crit­i­cal capac­i­ties at uni­ver­si­ty – but what of their affir­ma­tive ones? Put anoth­er way, there is a big focus on iden­ti­fy­ing prob­lems, crit­i­ciz­ing, prob­lema­tiz­ing, decon­struct­ing, high­light­ing dif­fer­ences, etc. – but much less on com­ing up with prac­ti­cal solu­tions, or explain­ing what works, what is good (and why), or acknowl­edg­ing what the peo­ple we engage are right about, or build­ing con­sen­sus through the things we share in com­mon. These are not skills that are pri­or­i­tized in high­er edu­ca­tion today.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Also see his com­pan­ion piece Aca­d­e­m­ic and Polit­i­cal Elit­ism at Inside High­er Ed.
  5. Can Jesus Close the Wage Gap? Inside Hill­song’s Insta­gram-Fueled Wom­en’s Move­ment (Hay­ley Phe­lan, Elle): “This year’s theme, ‘Be Found in the New,’ is tak­en from the Book of Rev­e­la­tion. But if you didn’t know that, the pam­phlet could be an Urban Out­fit­ters cat­a­log or an Ever­lane lookbook—a sign of both Hillsong’s cul­tur­al flu­en­cy and mar­keters’ aware­ness of con­sumer fatigue. A new sofa or cute leg­gings are just the win­dow dress­ing in a life of purpose—a way to tran­scend exhaus­tion, lone­li­ness, and low self-esteem, and step into a world of our own mak­ing. Which, when you get right down to it, sounds a lot like reli­gion.”
  6. Five Things They Don’t Tell You About Slav­ery (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “None of the oth­er soci­eties taint­ed by slav­ery pro­duced the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, a Wash­ing­ton, Jef­fer­son, and Hamil­ton, the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, or a tra­di­tion of lib­er­ty that inspired peo­ple around the world for cen­turies. If we don’t keep that in mind, as well as the broad­er con­text of slav­ery, we aren’t giv­ing this coun­try — or his­to­ry — its due.” The title is not great but the arti­cle is quite inter­est­ing. 
  7. Home­less­ness and the high cost of liv­ing (Chris­tos Makridis, The Hill): “…econ­o­mists have reached a con­sen­sus that the pri­ma­ry dri­ver behind increas­ing hous­ing prices and rental rates is the pres­ence of, and increase in, land use restric­tions. Put sim­ply, land use restric­tions, or hous­ing mar­ket reg­u­la­tions more gen­er­al­ly, place restric­tions on the types of struc­tures that can be built — that either implic­it­ly or explic­it­ly raise the cost for devel­op­ers.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.

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 What Is It Like to Be a Man? (Phil Christ­man, The Hedge­hog Review): “I live out my mas­culin­i­ty most often as a per­verse avoid­ance of com­fort: the refusal of good clothes, mois­tur­iz­er, painkillers; hard phys­i­cal train­ing, pur­sued for its own sake and not because I enjoy it; a sense that there is a set amount of phys­i­cal pain or self-imposed dis­ci­pline that I owe the uni­verse.” Very well-written. Every­one will like­ly find parts they res­onate with and parts they reject. The author is a lec­tur­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan and based on his CV seems to be a fair­ly devot­ed Epis­co­palian. First shared in vol­ume 178.

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 215

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 1619 Project (many authors, New York Times Mag­a­zine): “…[many believe] that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, how­ev­er, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unan­i­mous­ly cel­e­brat­ed every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defin­ing con­tra­dic­tions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to his­to­ry (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), that was when a ship arrived at Point Com­fort in the British colony of Vir­ginia, bear­ing a car­go of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inau­gu­rat­ed a bar­bar­ic sys­tem of chat­tel slav­ery that would last for the next 250 years. This is some­times referred to as the country’s orig­i­nal sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very ori­gin.” The link is to a PDF of the entire issue.
    • A pos­i­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: A Brief His­to­ry of the His­to­ry Wars (Rebec­ca Onion, Slate): “For the sake of our col­lec­tive car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, we would do bet­ter to rec­og­nize these skir­mish­es over Amer­i­can history—in which con­ser­v­a­tives demand that a pos­i­tive vision of our nation’s past, stud­ded with suc­cess­es, inven­tions, and ‘great men,’ take pride of place in our pub­lic culture—as recur­rent episodes in a par­tic­u­lar decades-old front of the cul­ture wars. That way, we could stop wast­ing our good faith on old, dead-end con­ver­sa­tions.”
    • A neg­a­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: The New York Times sur­ren­ders to the left on race (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Through­out the issue of the NYTM, head­lines make, with just slight vari­a­tions, the same rhetor­i­cal move over and over again: ‘Here is some­thing unpleas­ant, unjust, or even down­right evil about life in the present-day Unit­ed States. Bet you did­n’t real­ize that slav­ery is ulti­mate­ly to blame.’ Lack of uni­ver­sal access to health care? High rates of sug­ar con­sump­tion? Cal­lous treat­ment of incar­cer­at­ed pris­on­ers? White record­ing artists ‘steal­ing’ black music? Harsh labor prac­tices? That’s right — all of it, and far more, fol­lows from slav­ery.”
    • A com­pli­cat­ed con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How slav­ery doomed lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment in Amer­i­ca (Philip Klein, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “A num­ber of con­ser­v­a­tives react­ed to the project by brand­ing it as anti-Amer­i­can. But I don’t think that’s fair, at least based on the lead essay I read from Nikole Han­nah-Jones. In fact, her piece is quite the oppo­site. Sure, it chron­i­cles the bru­tal­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery and the cen­tu­ry of oppres­sion, insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­crim­i­na­tion, and racist ter­ror­ism that fol­lowed. Yet the piece is ulti­mate­ly about how she rec­on­ciles that his­to­ry with her patri­o­tism and comes to under­stand her own father’s love of a coun­try that treat­ed him so poor­ly.”
    • A neg­a­tive con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How To Dele­git­imize A Nation (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But who we imag­ine our­selves to be today shapes who we will become tomor­row. If The 1619 Project were mere­ly about expand­ing our com­mon under­stand­ing of the Amer­i­can ori­gins, who could object? It arrives, though, in the midst of an epic cul­ture war over who we are, and who we are going to be.”
    • Relat­ed: Black Amer­i­can His­to­ry Should Give Evan­gel­i­cals a Sense of Per­spec­tive — and Hope (David French, Nation­al Review): “If men and women have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak and pos­sess the courage to tell the truth, they have hope that they can trans­form a nation. What was true for black Amer­i­cans (includ­ing the black Amer­i­can church) in the most dire of cir­cum­stances is still true for con­tem­po­rary Chris­tians in far less try­ing times”
    • In response: In Defense Of Evan­gel­i­cal Cul­tur­al Pes­simism (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “This, I think, is a dis­tinc­tion that makes a big dif­fer­ence re: French’s argu­ment. You can’t cease to be black; you can cease to be Chris­t­ian, or at least mean­ing­ful­ly Chris­t­ian.” This piece is way too long but makes some good points.
  2. Don’t Use These Free-Speech Argu­ments Ever Again (Ken White, The Atlantic): “If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in Amer­i­ca, or lis­tened to talk­ing heads on the news, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly encoun­tered emp­ty, mis­lead­ing, or sim­ply false tropes about the First Amend­ment. Those tired tropes are bar­ri­ers to seri­ous dis­cus­sions about free speech. Any use­ful dis­cus­sion of what the law should be must be informed by an accu­rate view of what the law is.” White is best known under his inter­net alias Pope­hat. Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent.
  3. The Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Lux­u­ry beliefs’ are the lat­est sta­tus sym­bol for rich Amer­i­cans (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Post): “…as trendy clothes and oth­er prod­ucts become more acces­si­ble and afford­able, there is increas­ing­ly less sta­tus attached to lux­u­ry goods. The upper class­es have found a clever solu­tion to this prob­lem: lux­u­ry beliefs. These are ideas and opin­ions that con­fer sta­tus on the rich at very lit­tle cost, while tak­ing a toll on the low­er class.”
  4. How Life Became an End­less, Ter­ri­ble Com­pe­ti­tion (Daniel Markovits, The Atlantic): “Escap­ing the mer­i­toc­ra­cy trap will not be easy. Elites nat­u­ral­ly resist poli­cies that threat­en to under­mine their advan­tages. But it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble to get rich off your own human cap­i­tal with­out exploit­ing your­self and impov­er­ish­ing your inner life, and mer­i­to­crats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive them­selves.” The author is a Yale law pro­fes­sor. I found his diag­no­sis more per­sua­sive than his prog­no­sis.
  5. The Com­ing Migra­tion out of Sub-Saha­ran Africa (Christo­pher Cald­well, Nation­al Review): “The pop­u­la­tion pres­sures ema­nat­ing from the Mid­dle East in recent decades, already suf­fi­cient to dri­ve the Euro­pean polit­i­cal sys­tem into con­vul­sions, are going to pale beside those from sub-Saha­ran Africa in decades to come.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Why Nice­ness Weak­ens Our Wit­ness (Sharon Hodde Miller, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We exist in a world that swings between sweet­ness and out­rage, two behav­iors that seem to be at odds with one anoth­er. In real­i­ty, they are two sides of the same coin: a lack of spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion. When our civil­i­ty isn’t root­ed in some­thing stur­dy and deep, when our good behav­ior isn’t spring­ing from the core of who we are but is instead mere­ly a mask we put on, it is only a mat­ter of time before the façade crum­bles away and our true state is revealed: an entire gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who are real­ly good at look­ing good.” I agree with the sub­stance of this arti­cle, but the title both­ers me. 
  7. Fact-Check­ing Satire — Is Snopes Seri­ous? (Bill Zeis­er, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “the Bee’s founder and minor­i­ty own­er, Adam Ford, took par­tic­u­lar excep­tion to the tone of the Snopes assess­ment. In a lengthy Twit­ter thread, he called Snopes’ han­dling of the piece on Thomas ‘par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious’ and ‘dis­turb­ing.’ He point­ed to a sub­ti­tle that cas­ti­gat­ed the Bee for ‘fan­ning the flames of con­tro­ver­sy’ and ‘mud­dy­ing the details of a news sto­ry’ to the point that it was unclear if the piece qual­i­fied as satire. Ford com­plained that through­out the Snopes sto­ry, sup­pos­ed­ly an ‘objec­tive fact check,’ the assess­ment ‘veered towards pro­nounc­ing a moral judg­ment,’ seem­ing­ly accus­ing the satir­i­cal site of will­ful decep­tion. It is cer­tain­ly under­stand­able how Ford could feel this way: Snopes referred to the Bee’s ‘ruse’ and offered that ‘the Baby­lon Bee has man­aged to fool read­ers with its brand of satire in the past.’”

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 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.” First shared in vol­ume 165. 

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 195

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. Elite Col­leges Con­stant­ly Tell Low-Income Stu­dents That They Do Not Belong (Clint Smith, The Atlantic): “The priv­i­leged poor are stu­dents who come from low-income back­grounds but attend­ed wealthy pri­vate high schools, giv­ing them a lev­el of famil­iar­i­ty with and access to the social and cul­tur­al cap­i­tal that tend to make peo­ple suc­cess­ful at elite uni­ver­si­ties. The dou­bly dis­ad­van­taged are stu­dents who arrive at these top insti­tu­tions from neigh­bor­hood pub­lic schools, many of which are over­crowd­ed and under­fund­ed. They are schools where these stu­dents have excelled, but that are ill-equipped to give them the socio­cul­tur­al tools nec­es­sary to under­stand the nuances of how these elite col­leges oper­ate.”
    • Relat­ed: The Scan­dals of Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The ‘more mer­i­toc­ra­cy’ argu­ment against both lega­cies and racial quo­tas implic­it­ly assumes that apti­tude — some elixir of I.Q. and work eth­ic — is what our elite pri­mar­i­ly lacks. But is that real­ly our upper class’s prob­lem?”
  2. Evan­gel­i­cals Show No Decline, Despite Trump and Nones (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The fact that evan­gel­i­cals’ share of the pop­u­la­tion remains rel­a­tive­ly sta­ble over the last decade is strik­ing giv­en the con­tin­ued rise of the nones. Evan­gel­i­cals have been able to replace loss­es as fast as they are occur­ring, at least for now.”
  3. Reli­gion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Sim­ply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is sci­ence.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65.
  4. Why The Bible Ain’t Woke (Toby Sumpter, per­son­al blog): “…it is sim­ply not enough to note that Jonathan Edwards, the puri­tans, or the founders of South­ern Sem­i­nary owned slaves. Far more work must be done to demon­strate that these men sinned in their treat­ment of their slaves. And fur­ther­more, even where sin can be clear­ly demon­strat­ed, there must be a bright and shin­ing light of demar­ca­tion between dis­qual­i­fy­ing sin and the endem­ic sins of the human race.” He has unde­ni­ably inter­est­ing things to say, but read his arti­cle in con­junc­tion with the con­tent from Peter Williams and Glenn Miller I shared back in vol­ume 76.
  5. The Reck­on­ing of Mor­ris Dees and the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter (Bob Moser, New York­er): “For those of us who’ve worked in the Pover­ty Palace, putting it all into per­spec­tive isn’t easy, even to our­selves. We were work­ing with a group of ded­i­cat­ed and tal­ent­ed peo­ple, fight­ing all kinds of good fights, mak­ing life mis­er­able for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shad­ows hung over every­thing: the racial and gen­der dis­par­i­ties, the whis­pers about sex­u­al harass­ment, the abus­es that stemmed from the top-down man­age­ment, and the guilt you couldn’t help feel­ing about the legions of donors who believed that their mon­ey was being used, faith­ful­ly and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dix­ie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.”
  6. The need for intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty in psy­cho­log­i­cal sci­ence: Our own stud­ies of active­ly open-mind­ed think­ing as a case study (Stanovich and Toplak, Cog­ni­tion): “it is impor­tant that psy­chol­o­gy main­tain its cred­i­bil­i­ty as a neu­tral arbiter—a cred­i­bil­i­ty that has been vast­ly erod­ed in recent years by empir­i­cal evi­dence of the ide­o­log­i­cal bias in our sci­ence (Ceci and Williams, 2018, Craw­ford and Jus­sim, 2018, Duarte et al., 2015). There is a need for greater intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty in all areas of psy­chol­o­gy, but par­tic­u­lar­ly in those that inter­face with pol­i­tics and socio­cul­tur­al beliefs. Greater intel­lec­tu­al diver­si­ty in our own lab years ago might have pre­vent­ed us from con­tin­u­ing to use items in our AOT scale that inflat­ed neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tions with reli­gios­i­ty.”
    • tl;dr — researchers real­ized that a well-known psy­cho­log­i­cal tool they devel­oped years ago was biased against reli­gious believ­ers, and they con­clud­ed this prob­a­bly hap­pened because their lab was “over­whelm­ing­ly sec­u­lar.” They humbly repent­ed and wrote a paper about their mis­take. Kudos to them.
  7. Athe­ism Is Incon­sis­tent with the Sci­en­tif­ic Method, Prizewin­ning Physi­cist Says (Lee Billings, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “I hon­est­ly think athe­ism is incon­sis­tent with the sci­en­tif­ic method. What I mean by that is, what is athe­ism? It’s a state­ment, a cat­e­gor­i­cal state­ment that express­es belief in non­be­lief.” This is from an inter­view with Marce­lo Gleis­er, Dart­mouth physics prof. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Sad­ly, I got noth­ing this week. In lieu of awe­some links, here’s a mediocre joke: “What’s the best thing to put in a cook­ie? Your teeth!”

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 180

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

This week was espe­cial­ly hard for me to put togeth­er. I stum­bled upon so much insight­ful writ­ing this week! I had to ruth­less­ly elim­i­nate some that I real­ly liked, so I hope you enjoy these gems that sur­vived my ruth­less win­now­ing process.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Slain mis­sion­ary John Chau pre­pared much more than we thought, but are mis­sion­ar­ies still fools? (Ed Stet­zer, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…Mary Ho, who leads All Nations (the agency that sent Chau on mis­sions), indi­cat­ed that he was heav­i­ly vac­ci­nat­ed and even quar­an­tined before going on the mis­sion. The Wash­ing­ton Post report­ed Tues­day night that Chau also under­took lin­guis­tic and med­ical train­ing to pre­pare for the out­reach. These new reports at a min­i­mum chal­lenge the sim­plis­tic image of an adven­ture-seek­ing zealot will­ing to reck­less­ly risk the lives of a remote group of islanders.” By far the best arti­cle I’ve read on this sub­ject.
  2. Lib­er­al Par­ents, Rad­i­cal Chil­dren (David Brooks, New York Times): “In the age of social media, virtue is not defined by how com­pas­sion­ate­ly you act. Virtue is defined by how vehe­ment­ly you react to that which you find offen­sive. Virtue involves the self-dis­play of a cer­tain indig­nant sen­si­bil­i­ty, and any­body who doesn’t dis­play that sen­si­bil­i­ty is moral­ly sus­pect.” An insight­ful col­umn — this excerpt does not do it jus­tice.
    • Relat­ed but not obvi­ous­ly: The Ques­tion With­out A Solu­tion (Alan Jacobs, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “You read all this with a feel­ing of ris­ing hor­ror, and not just because of the phys­i­cal and men­tal and spir­i­tu­al suf­fer­ing. You feel that hor­ror also because it becomes increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult, as the sto­ry pro­gress­es, to imag­ine how the even the worst of the pain could have been avoid­ed. Not one man, or woman, knew a pru­dent rem­e­dy.” Haunt­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
    • More clear­ly relat­ed: Debate ends when we label views we sim­ply dis­agree with as ‘hatred’ (Kenan Malik, The Guardian): “‘It is bet­ter to debate a ques­tion with­out set­tling it,’ observed the 18th-cen­tu­ry French writer Joseph Jou­bert, ‘than to set­tle a ques­tion with­out debat­ing it.’ How naive that sounds today.”
  3. My New Vagi­na Won’t Make Me Hap­py (Andrea Long Chu, New York Times): “Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagi­na as a wound;as a result, it will require reg­u­lar, painful atten­tion to main­tain. This is what I want, but there is no guar­an­tee it will make me hap­pi­er. In fact, I don’t expect it to.”
    • See also this response piece: The New York Times Reveals Painful Truths about Trans­gen­der Lives (Ryan T. Ander­son, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Why should a doc­tor per­form surgery when it won’t make the patient hap­py, it won’t accom­plish its intend­ed goal, it won’t improve the under­ly­ing con­di­tion, it might make the under­ly­ing con­di­tion worse, and it might increase the like­li­hood of sui­cide?” Ander­son was men­tioned in Chu’s op-ed.
  4. Amer­i­can Exor­cism (Mike Mar­i­ani, The Atlantic): “If nei­ther the men­tal-health eval­u­a­tion nor a sub­se­quent phys­i­cal exam turns up a stan­dard expla­na­tion for the person’s afflic­tion, the priest starts to take the case more seri­ous­ly. At this point he may begin look­ing for what the Church con­sid­ers the clas­sic signs of demon­ic pos­ses­sion: facil­i­ty in a lan­guage the per­son has nev­er learned; phys­i­cal strength beyond his or her age or con­di­tion; access to secret knowl­edge; and a vehe­ment aver­sion to God and sacred objects, includ­ing cru­ci­fix­es and holy water.”
  5. What If The Place­bo Effect Isn’t A Trick? (Gary Green­berg, New York Times Mag­a­zine): “The find­ings of the I.B.S. study were in keep­ing with a hypoth­e­sis Kaptchuk had formed over the years: that the place­bo effect is a bio­log­i­cal response to an act of car­ing; that some­how the encounter itself calls forth heal­ing and that the more intense and focused it is, the more heal­ing it evokes.”
  6. For Cal­i­for­ni­ans liv­ing in their cars, a church park­ing lot can briefly be home (Kim­ber­ly Win­ston, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As they often do in hard times, hous­es of wor­ship stepped in. In Chico, a hub for Par­adise refugees, church­es have opened their build­ings and park­ing lots as tem­po­rary shel­ters. But while those church­es have been laud­ed, con­gre­ga­tions in oth­er areas that open their park­ing lots to those they some­times refer to as ‘vehi­cle res­i­dents’ face hur­dles and hos­til­i­ty. Many Bay Area munic­i­pal­i­ties, includ­ing the tech cen­ters of San Fran­cis­co and San Jose, have out­lawed sleep­ing in a car parked on the street overnight, while neigh­bors speak out against hav­ing the home­less next door.”
  7. A Time To Fast (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over one hun­dred years ago researchers demon­strat­ed that calo­rie restric­tion in rats increased lifes­pan, some­times by as much as 50%. Since that time, the find­ing has been repli­cat­ed and extend­ed to pri­mates. A few humans have tak­en up the diet but for most of us easy access to deli­cious food trumps willpow­er. A new paper in Sci­ence reviews the lit­er­a­ture on calo­rie restric­tion and also offers some evi­dence that less restric­tive regimes such as inter­mit­tent fast­ing may have sim­i­lar effects.” A sec­u­lar per­spec­tive on the ben­e­fits of cer­tain types of fast­ing (this is a sum­ma­ry of an arti­cle in the jour­nal Sci­ence).

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 Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

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.