Tag: Stanford

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 301

per­spec­tives on Israel, Bit­coin, and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty

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 301, which is what is known as a Hap­py Num­ber. So there.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cross and the Machine (Paul Kingsnorth, First Things): “It kept hap­pen­ing, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerv­ing. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being … hunt­ed? I want­ed it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no inter­est in Chris­tian­i­ty. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sound­ed pret­ty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I knew it wasn’t over.” A won­der­ful­ly-told con­ver­sion sto­ry.
  2. Why We Should Read What We Cite (Because It Mat­ters) (Joseph Lath­am & Gilly Koritzky, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): “Con­sid­er an aca­d­e­m­ic arti­cle that came out at the height of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and argues that doc­tors’ racist bias­es are a main rea­son for the high­er COVID-19-relat­ed hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and mor­tal­i­ty rates among African Amer­i­cans. It says that ‘there is evi­dence of med­ical bias in the test­ing and treat­ment of African-Amer­i­cans with COVID-19’ and cites this report as the source. The prob­lem? The report con­tains no such evi­dence.” The excerpt does not do it jus­tice. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The authors are psy­chol­o­gists.
  3. How We Got to the Equal­i­ty Act (Matthew Lee Ander­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The sto­ry that evan­gel­i­cals are (mere­ly) vic­tims of pro­gres­sive aggres­sors not only fails to account for the ways in which the LGBT move­ment was shaped by pop­ulist evan­gel­i­cal rhetoric and tac­tics. It also for­gets that the gay lib­er­a­tion move­ment was a direct response to the sys­temic and per­va­sive exclu­sion of les­bian and gay indi­vid­u­als from the struc­tures of our pub­lic life—including from Amer­i­ca itself. Per­fec­tion­ism in pol­i­tics breeds rad­i­cal­ism in response.”
  4. When a Famous Lit­er­ary Crit­ic Unrav­eled Sil­i­con Valley’s Most Sen­sa­tion­al Mur­der Case (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine a vio­lent mur­der at the epi­cen­ter of ear­ly San­ta Clara Valley—soon to be renamed Sil­i­con Val­ley in the pop­u­lar imagination—and an inno­cent man sent to Death Row at San Quentin. But a famous lit­er­ary crit­ic emerges as the super sleuth who gets him freed, amid dark evo­ca­tions of scan­dal involv­ing cor­rupt politi­cians and murky under­world fig­ures. You don’t need to imag­ine it, because it real­ly hap­pened.” A engross­ing Stan­ford sto­ry.
  5. About the cur­rent con­flict in Israel:
    • This was writ­ten before the cur­rent vio­lence: Eight Tips for Read­ing About Israel (Mat­ti Fried­man, Sapir): “If you’re crit­i­cal of open-fire orders on the Gaza fence, you should know how that works on the India-Pak­istan bor­der, or the Turkey-Syr­ia bor­der, or on the perime­ters of U.S. mil­i­tary bases in Afghanistan. Same goes for refugee absorp­tion, press free­dom, minor­i­ty rights, or any­thing. Israel doesn’t always come out look­ing great. But you’ll find that most crit­i­cism of Israel doesn’t com­pare it with any­thing. That’s a sign the dis­cus­sion isn’t about a real coun­try.”
    • Against Israel: A bad part­ner is worse than rain (Fred­die de Boer, Sub­stack): “If every word that they have said about the per­fidy and self-destruc­tion of the Pales­tini­ans was cor­rect, it would make no dif­fer­ence. The moral oblig­a­tion falls on the dom­i­nant par­ty, and Israel is beyond dom­i­nant. The myth­mak­ing about all of the oppor­tu­ni­ties they squan­dered does not make a lick of moral dif­fer­ence.”
    • For Israel: For the Sake of Peace, Israel Must Rout Hamas (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Israel made plen­ty of mis­takes in the run-up to the cur­rent fight­ing, includ­ing heavy-hand­ed polic­ing in Jerusalem at Ramadan and inad­e­quate polic­ing in Arab-Israeli towns that have been hit by mob vio­lence. But there is a vast dif­fer­ence in moral weight between Israel’s mis­cal­cu­la­tions and Hamas’s cal­cu­la­tions, between blun­ders and crimes. That’s some­thing to bear in mind when Pales­tin­ian rock­ets hit Israeli civil­ians by design and Israeli mis­siles hit Pales­tin­ian civil­ians inad­ver­tent­ly.”
    • Against Israel: A Night­mare of Ter­ror Across the Land­scape of Pales­tine (Yousef Munayy­er, The Nation): “In towns through­out Israel, Pales­tini­ans have been beat­en and ter­ror­ized by ram­pag­ing mobs; one man was dragged from his car and bru­tal­ized in what many are describ­ing as a lynch­ing. In the West Bank, Pales­tini­ans have been shot and killed in raids by the Israeli mil­i­tary. In Jerusalem, Pales­tin­ian fam­i­lies, fac­ing the ongo­ing threat of expul­sion, have been harassed by set­tlers and mil­i­tary alike. And across Gaza, Israeli war planes have dropped bomb after bomb, destroy­ing entire apart­ment build­ings. Many have died, many more have been injured. If they man­age to sur­vive, they will wit­ness their soci­ety shat­tered when the smoke clears.”
    • For Israel: The Two Wrongs of the Gaza Nar­ra­tive (David French, The Dis­patch): “Any dis­cus­sion of the law of war often sounds cold and clin­i­cal, even though we’re dis­cussing mat­ters of life and death, includ­ing the inevitable and trag­ic deaths of civil­ians who always suf­fer when wars rage in city centers—especially when jihadists wear civil­ian clothes and embed them­selves in civil­ian struc­tures. When Hamas does so, it vio­lates the law of war by inhibit­ing the dis­tinc­tion between civil­ian and mil­i­tary tar­gets. The legal and moral respon­si­bil­i­ty for result­ing civil­ian deaths rests with Hamas, not Israel.”
    • Against Israel: The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apol­o­gist for the Netanyahu Gov­ern­ment (Bernie Sanders, New York Times): “No one is argu­ing that Israel, or any gov­ern­ment, does not have the right to self-defense or to pro­tect its peo­ple. So why are these words repeat­ed year after year, war after war? And why is the ques­tion almost nev­er asked: ‘What are the rights of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple?’ And why do we seem to take notice of the vio­lence in Israel and Pales­tine only when rock­ets are falling on Israel?”
    • For Israel: The Bad Optics of Fight­ing for Your Life (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “The goal here is the erad­i­ca­tion of the Jew­ish peo­ple. That is the bone-chill­ing truth. That is the core obsta­cle to peace. Any­one who insists that the ongo­ing rock­et bar­rage is about a par­tic­u­lar Israeli gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy must be made to answer for this.”
  6. Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and Eco­nom­ic Free­dom (Chris­tos Makridis, City Jour­nal): “Using data on more than 146 coun­tries since 1996, my research finds that increas­es in reli­gious free­dom pre­cede, and help explain, increas­es in eco­nom­ic free­dom. The log­ic is sim­ple: since reli­gious free­dom fun­da­men­tal­ly involves grant­i­ng indi­vid­u­als the auton­o­my to think and wor­ship in what­ev­er form they wish, it is arguably the most basic of all free­doms. Prop­er­ty rights are of lit­tle use if those who retain them do not have the free­dom to think what they wish and prac­tice what they believe.” Chris­tos, an econ­o­mist at Ari­zona State, is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  7. Rival thoughts on Bit­coin:
    • Bit­coin Is Civ­i­liza­tion (Bal­a­ji S. Srini­vasan, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Bit­coin might seem like a curios­i­ty in a democ­ra­cy with a sta­ble cur­ren­cy. But in coun­tries with deeply unsta­ble economies and author­i­tar­i­an pol­i­tics, it is a life­line. As Alex Glad­stein recent­ly explained in Rea­son Mag­a­zine, Bit­coin has been used by dis­si­dents and activists in places like Cuba, Nige­ria, and Belarus. In Rus­sia, the country’s most promi­nent oppo­si­tion politi­cian and Putin crit­ic, Alex­ei Navaly, has raised mil­lions in Bit­coin. As Glad­stein wrote: ‘Putin can do a lot of things, but he can’t freeze a bit­coin account.’ If you want to under­stand what cryp­to is real­ly about, ask Venezue­lans if they’d rather own bolí­var or Bit­coin.”
    • The Case Against Bit­coin (Michael W. Green, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “In the last week of April, min­ing pools based in Chi­na account­ed for rough­ly 90% of the pro­cess­ing pow­er (‘hash rate’) in the Bit­coin net­work. Rough­ly three weeks ago, a pow­er out­age in the Xin­jiang region of Chi­na result­ed in a plunge in glob­al Bit­coin pro­cess­ing. Bit­coin min­ing — the process of record keep­ing for the ‘immutable’ chain of record on which the Bit­coin net­work depends — is dom­i­nat­ed by enti­ties in coun­tries with the stat­ed objec­tive to harm the inter­ests of the Unit­ed States. Bit­coin pro­po­nents con­tin­u­ous­ly assure us that this is ‘just about to change,’ but the data has not shift­ed in a mean­ing­ful man­ner in the last five years. This is not a decen­tral­ized sys­tem. It is cen­tral­ized in the coun­tries that seek our destruc­tion.”

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 time­ly What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Atlantic): “…one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.” (first shared back in vol­ume 5, note that the first Israel arti­cle in today’s roundup is by the same author).

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 297

slight­ly weird­er arti­cles than the usu­al (and more fun videos)

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 297, which is known as a Kaprekar Num­ber. It’s such a weird thing I can bare­ly believe it has a name. To sim­pli­fy a bit, if you square the num­ber and split the dig­its in half and they add back up to the orig­i­nal num­ber, it’s a Kaprekar num­ber. Since 2972 = 88,209 and 297 = 88 + 209, that means 297 is one of these odd numer­i­cal enti­ties.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. About police shoot­ings: I’m real­ly sad and I also don’t have any arti­cles because I haven’t read any­thing inter­est­ing about them in rela­tion to the most recent episodes. If you find some­thing — espe­cial­ly some­thing writ­ten from a thought­ful Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive — please do let me know.
  2. Can the Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Find God? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “To be dropped into [a world like this] and not be per­sis­tent­ly open to reli­gious pos­si­bil­i­ties seems much more like prej­u­dice than ratio­nal­i­ty.”
    • Relat­ed: Anoth­er Obsta­cle to Elite Reli­gion (Audrey Poll­now, Sub­stack): “One friend—a very admirable per­son who has devot­ed their life to learn­ing and ser­vice rather than to acquir­ing mon­ey or prestige—told me that they could nev­er become a Chris­t­ian because the inabil­i­ty to be ‘good enough’ in the achieve­ment depart­ment would make them depressed.”
    • Relat­ed: Why the Church Is Los­ing the Next Gen­er­a­tion (Rus­sell Moore, newslet­ter): “If peo­ple reject the church because they reject Jesus and the gospel, we should be sad­dened but not sur­prised.  But what hap­pens when peo­ple reject the church because they think we reject Jesus and the gospel?”
    • Relat­ed: Can Amer­i­ca’s ‘Civ­il Reli­gion’ Still Unite The Coun­try? (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “Amer­i­cans are expect­ed to hold their hands over their hearts when they recite the Pledge of Alle­giance or stand for the nation­al anthem. Young peo­ple are taught to regard the coun­try’s founders almost as saints. The ‘self-evi­dent’ truths list­ed in the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the key pro­vi­sions of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion and the Bill of Rights have acquired the sta­tus of scrip­ture in the U.S. con­scious­ness.” The scare quotes around ‘self-evi­dent’ are weird.
  3. On Lov­ing Mor­tals (Cur­tis Yarvin, Athwart): “Here’s a catch-22, or a Meno’s Para­dox of sorts: why should these young men live well with­out a fam­i­ly for whom to do it, and why should young women tol­er­ate (much less love) men who don’t live well? Lov­ing a mor­tal saved me, and count­less oth­er men I know, from the Achil­lean fate, but in most cas­es it seems some­thing like a mir­a­cle.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent, who called it enthralling.
  4. Stan­ford activists ‘Dis­turbed the War’ in the 1960s and 1970s (Lenny Siegel, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “After watch­ing the play, ‘Alice in ROTC-Land,’ thou­sands of demon­stra­tors poured out of Frost Amphithe­ater to con­front police. Inci­den­tal­ly, that per­for­mance launched the act­ing career of Sigour­ney Weaver, who played the title role.” Inter­est­ing and also very weird. The author seems to want Stan­ford to be a democ­ra­cy as though it were a gov­ern­ment. Full of fas­ci­nat­ing anec­dotes.
  5. The Splin­ter­ing of the Evan­gel­i­cal Soul (Tim­o­thy Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This [col­lapse of media integri­ty] presents an extra­or­di­nary chal­lenge for Chris­t­ian dis­ci­ple­ship. Media con­sump­tion has been climb­ing for years, and it soared amid the pan­dem­ic. Mem­bers of our con­gre­ga­tions may spend a few hours a week in the Word of God (which should always be the Christian’s most impor­tant source of infor­ma­tion and author­i­ty) but 40 hours or more main­lin­ing the ani­mosi­ties of the day.” The author is a Stan­ford grad.
  6. A The­ol­o­gy of Free Speech (Brad Lit­tle­john, Gospel Coali­tion): “Thus, as Chris­tians, we must clear­ly affirm that free­dom of speech can be a great good. But it is an instru­men­tal good, a means to the end of pro­claim­ing truth and encour­ag­ing right­eous­ness. It is not an end in itself, as if the mere free­dom to open our mouths were sacro­sanct. We have a moral right to speak truth in due sea­son. We have no moral right to slan­der, deceive, curse, or insult. In order to secure our moral right to speak truth, how­ev­er, we gen­er­al­ly need to defend a legal right that includes a right to speak false­hood.” This is quite good.
  7. Whith­er the Reli­gious Left? (Matthew Sit­man, The New Repub­lic): “Unlike the bland con­for­mi­ty of civic reli­gion, the prophet­ic calls of par­tic­u­lar­is­tic faiths rarely line up with the needs of polit­i­cal par­ties. This cuts both ways: The reli­gious left, in all its diver­si­ty, will nev­er be a reli­able ally of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, nor will the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty always be a com­fort­able home for the reli­gious left.… That means the reli­gious left faces sim­i­lar dilem­mas as the social­ist left: dis­cern­ing how far and how fast to push, how to relate high ideals to the real­i­ties of main­stream par­ties.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). 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 294

more on Atlanta, puri­ty cul­ture, and oth­er inter­est­ing links

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 294, which is neat because 111152 — 2942 = 123,456,789. Num­bers are fun!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. On anti-Asian vio­lence:
    • The Racism Virus: Anti-Asian Attacks Surge (NBC News, YouTube): fifty-two min­utes, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. From before the Atlanta shoot­ings.
    • Race and False Hate Crime Nar­ra­tives (Heather Mac Don­ald, Quil­lette): “Per­haps a rev­e­la­tion of anti-Asian ani­mus will emerge, but for now, Long appears to have tar­get­ed pre­sumed sex work­ers who hap­pened, giv­en the demo­graph­ics of the mas­sage trade in Atlanta, to be Asian. Long intend­ed to tar­get a busi­ness in Flori­da next that made pornog­ra­phy, he told police. The employ­ees there were unlike­ly to be Asian.” The author is a Stan­ford Law School grad.
    • I am sur­prised at how divi­sive the ques­tion of motive has been. Regard­less of motive in this spe­cif­ic case, I think it is clear that the Atlanta attacks were wicked and also that many Asian-Amer­i­cans encounter prej­u­dice that too often esca­lates into vio­lence.
  2. On Chris­t­ian sex­u­al teach­ings:
    • Atlanta Suspect’s Fix­a­tion on Sex Is Famil­iar Thorn for Evan­gel­i­cals (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture he was raised in, he said, ‘teach­es women to hate their bod­ies, as the source of temp­ta­tion, and it teach­es men to hate their minds, which lead them into lust and sex­u­al immoral­i­ty.’ ”
    • Why the Atlanta Mas­sacre Trig­gered a Con­ver­sa­tion About Puri­ty Cul­ture (David French, The Dis­patch): “Plac­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for male puri­ty on women harms women. It cre­ates an impos­si­ble bur­den. You can­not oppress women enough to pro­tect men from them­selves. You can ban porn, ban explic­it TV and movies of all types, put women in long dress­es, pro­hib­it make­up, and require courtship con­tracts, and you still will not solve the prob­lem of sin.”
    • Nev­er The Demons (Samuel D. James, Let­ter & Litur­gy): “I’m all for inter­ro­gat­ing the harm­ful effects of some church cul­tures, but I’m not sure why we don’t even linger over the news of a young man’s mur­der­ing eight peo­ple to ‘elim­i­nate temp­ta­tion’ long enough to see the demon­ic forces that Jesus clear­ly saw every­where he went. And when that sto­ry is quick­ly fol­lowed by anoth­er mass mur­der in Col­orado? The news cycle just resets, and the blood is on the hands of the GOP, or all Mus­lims, or puri­ty cul­ture, or can­cel culture…name your ide­o­log­i­cal ene­my, and you can find some­one promi­nent lay­ing hor­ror at their feet. Nev­er the demons.”
    • On puri­ty cul­ture and vio­lence, briefly (Samuel D. James, Let­ter & Litur­gy): “I think sto­ries [like the NYT arti­cle] are frus­trat­ing because they offer gen­uine insight mixed with a jour­nal­is­tic fram­ing that is deeply untrust­wor­thy. Brad Onishi, Jeff Chu, and Samuel Perry—the three voic­es brought in to crit­i­cize evan­gel­i­cal puri­ty culture—are all exam­ples of LGBT-affirm­ing post-evan­gel­i­cal­ism. Because of this fram­ing, the sub­text of the arti­cle is that there are real­ly only two choic­es for evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians: dou­ble down on hat­ing women and empow­er­ing shoot­ers like Robert Long, or aban­don core evan­gel­i­cal doc­trines. This is exact­ly the pos­ture that defines near­ly all anti-puri­ty cul­ture writ­ing I see, which is why I get so frus­trat­ed by it, even when it makes gen­uine­ly help­ful points…”
    • Ques­tions for David French on the Con­nec­tions between the Atlanta Killer and Puri­ty Cul­ture (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “What is the con­nec­tion between the killer and tox­ic puri­ty the­ol­o­gy and cul­ture? The piece assumes a con­nec­tion but nev­er gets around to demon­strat­ing one. And that leads to the weird expe­ri­ence of read­ing some­thing where I agree with vir­tu­al­ly every sin­gle word and yet find that the actu­al argu­ment doesn’t hold togeth­er.”
    • How church­es talk about sex­u­al­i­ty can mean life or death. We saw that in Robert Long. (Rachel Den­hol­lan­der, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Sex­u­al­i­ty divorced from per­son­hood is the foun­da­tion of objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and vio­lence. The evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty has yet to grap­ple with its own ver­sion of this same mind-set and the deep dam­age it has, and will con­tin­ue, to do.”
  3. Chris­t­ian Bak­er Sued Again for Refus­ing to Bake a Cake (Colleen Slevin, Asso­ci­at­ed Press @ Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Autumn Scar­di­na attempt­ed to order the birth­day cake on the same day in 2017 that the high court announced it would hear bak­er Jack Phillips’s appeal in the wed­ding cake case. Scar­di­na, an attor­ney, request­ed a cake that was blue on the out­side and pink on the inside in hon­or of her gen­der tran­si­tion.”
    • The Nev­er-End­ing Per­se­cu­tion of Jack Phillips (David Harsyani, Nation­al Review): “You may not be sur­prised to learn that Scar­di­na hadn’t asked the most famous Chris­t­ian bak­er in the nation to cre­ate a ‘tran­si­tion’ cake by hap­pen­stance. Phillips’s lawyers sus­pect Scar­di­na called — the name appeared on the caller ID — to request ‘an image of Satan smok­ing mar­i­jua­na.’ Lat­er, an email was sent to the shop request­ing ‘a three-tiered white cake’ with a ‘large fig­ure of Satan, lick­ing a nine inch black Dil­do … that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.’ ”
    • Col­orado Bak­er Faces Long Line Of Peo­ple Out­side Wait­ing To Be Oppressed By Him (Baby­lon Bee): “Phillips had anoth­er busy day, but in the end, all his cus­tomers were sat­is­fied, those who want­ed cakes receiv­ing beau­ti­ful cakes and those who want­ed to get dis­crim­i­nat­ed against get­ting dis­crim­i­nat­ed against. Philips is now con­sid­er­ing open­ing anoth­er branch just to not make peo­ple cakes, as he is appar­ent­ly the only cakeshop in the coun­try that does that, and it’s in high demand.” Nor­mal­ly I’d put a Baby­lon Bee arti­cle in the amus­ing sec­tion, but this one belongs here.
  4. Stan­ford’s silence does­n’t sur­prise wrestling champ: ‘Prob­a­bly more mad at me’ (Ann Kil­lion, SF Chron­i­cle): “Stan­ford ath­let­ics did not imme­di­ate­ly respond to a request for com­ment on Griffith’s nation­al title. On Sat­ur­day the ath­let­ic depart­ment Twit­ter account @GoStanford tweet­ed, ‘Shane Grif­fith is a nation­al cham­pi­on. The red­shirt sopho­more com­plet­ed his run at the NCAA cham­pi­onships atop the podi­um, Sat­ur­day, at the Enter­prise Cen­ter.’ The dry mes­sage was notably miss­ing the excla­ma­tion points and emo­jis that accom­pa­ny almost every oth­er post.”
  5. What It Takes To Go From Slav­ery To Free­dom (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “ ‘When you are a slave, you don’t have to think,’ Yeon­mi told me. ‘In North Korea you can’t say I. You can just say we. We love the col­or red. Or we love kim­chi. You know every answer. In North Korea, every­thing is deter­mined for you before you are born, based on your family’s stand­ing in the par­ty. You don’t think: What do I study? Where do I live? Who do I mar­ry? They decide.  I remem­ber after I pub­lished my book one of my first inter­views was with NPR and they asked me about free­dom. I said free­dom was painful and con­fus­ing. I think they were expect­ing me to say free­dom was awe­some.’ But the truth was more com­pli­cat­ed. ‘It was so painful to be free. I some­times thought in the begin­ning if there was a guar­an­tee to go back to North Korea and not get exe­cut­ed and just live on frozen pota­toes I might go back.’ ” WOW. What an inter­view. Com­ing some­day to a ser­mon near you.
  6. The Bur­den of Proof (Jim­my Akin, per­son­al blog): “When­ev­er two peo­ple dis­agree and one wants the oth­er to change his view, then the per­son advo­cat­ing the change always has to shoul­der the bur­den of proof.” The cen­tral nugget is in the excerpt, but there’s more there (includ­ing an inter­est­ing Catholic per­spec­tive on Sola Scrip­tura).
  7. Why Are Few­er Young Adults Hav­ing Casu­al Sex? (Scott J. South & Lei Lei, Socius): “Among young women, the decline in the fre­quen­cy of drink­ing alco­hol explains about one quar­ter of the drop in the propen­si­ty to have casu­al sex. Among young men, declines in drink­ing fre­quen­cy, an increase in com­put­er gam­ing, and the grow­ing per­cent­age who core­side with their par­ents all con­tribute sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the decline in casu­al sex.” See also the “a while ago” link below.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). 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 286

some very strong arti­cles in this roundup

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

This is the 286th of these roundups. 286 is a tetra­he­dral num­ber, which basi­cal­ly means you could stack 286 mar­bles into a three-sided pyra­mid (four sides if you count the base).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Cal­i­for­nia Is Cleans­ing Jews From His­to­ry (Emi­ly Benedek, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area moth­er of two grown chil­dren who describes her­self as a life­long Demo­c­rat, was fur­ther sur­prised to dis­cov­er that a list of 154 influ­en­tial peo­ple of col­or did not include Dr. Mar­tin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Jus­tice Thur­good Mar­shall, though it includ­ed many vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. There was even a flat­ter­ing descrip­tion of Pol Pot, the com­mu­nist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was respon­si­ble for the mur­der of a quar­ter of the Cam­bo­di­an pop­u­la­tion dur­ing the 1970s.” THIS IS WILD.
  2. 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, and I fea­tured anoth­er arti­cle by him recent­ly.
  3. In Which I Final­ly Lose My Mind (Poli­Math, Sub­stack): “After a rea­son­able amount of time for the vac­ci­na­tion to pro­duce an immune response (aim for 2 weeks), you are not in dan­ger and you are not a dan­ger to oth­ers. Yes, wear a mask for social cohe­sion or to fol­low the rules or just gen­er­al­ly to be polite. Wash your hands, use your com­mon sense, and ignore the news writ­ten by peo­ple who seem to want this cri­sis to last for­ev­er. Make it a pri­or­i­ty to get your sec­ond dose on sched­ule. Once you are vac­ci­nat­ed with the sec­ond dose, this cri­sis is over for you.” The author is
  4. The Reli­gious Roots of Our Free Enter­prise Sys­tem (Alan Wolfe, New York Times): “What does an eso­teric con­cept like Calvin­ist sote­ri­ol­o­gy have to do with the rise of mod­ern eco­nom­ics? Does lais­sez-faire have its roots in the arcane Quin­quar­tic­u­lar Con­tro­ver­sy? Can one find the ori­gins of the wel­fare state in post­mil­len­ni­al­ist escha­tol­ogy? Ques­tions like these, accord­ing to the Har­vard econ­o­mist Ben­jamin M. Fried­man, are essen­tial to under­stand­ing his dis­ci­pline today.”
  5. How Red­di­tors Beat Hedge Funds at Their Own Game(Stop) (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “Anoth­er less-than-pop­ulist aspect of this dra­ma is that the hedge fund that’s been hard­est hit — Melvin Cap­i­tal — did not become the favored tar­get of Wall­Street­Bets on account of its unique avarice or unscrupu­lous­ness, but rather, its excep­tion­al trans­paren­cy.… Thus, for Wall Street, the upshot of all this is going to be: Nev­er let reg­u­la­tors or the pub­lic know what your short posi­tions are. Which doesn’t seem like a huge win for ‘the 99 per­cent.’”
    • A youth pas­tor inter­viewed about the stock mar­ket on MSNBC (Twit­ter): I’ve men­tioned before that some Chris­tians are too ten­ta­tive when speak­ing about the gospel in high-pro­file media envi­ron­ments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pas­tor at Beach­point Church in Orange Coun­ty.
    • The GameStop Fias­co Proves We’re in a ‘Meme Stock’ Bub­ble (James Surowiec­ki, Medi­um): “The point, then, is that even though GameStop’s cur­rent stock price is utter­ly irra­tional — it will nev­er make enough mon­ey to jus­ti­fy a $6 bil­lion mar­ket cap — the way Red­di­tors and oth­ers have dri­ven its price up has been quite smart.”
    • The GameStop Reck­on­ing Was a Long Time Com­ing (Kevin Roose, New York Times): “If you can get past the all-caps luna­cy and strange inside jar­gon, the Red­di­tors make some good points. Big banks and hedge funds real­ly do play by dif­fer­ent rules than retail investors. Wall Street banks real­ly did get bailed out after the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis while Main Street home­own­ers suf­fered. M.B.A.s in fan­cy suits are prob­a­bly no more like­ly to give you good invest­ing advice than guys on YouTube with names like ‘Roar­ingKit­ty.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  7. Two Stan­ford-rel­e­vant arti­cles:
    • Edi­tor’s Note: The Twi­light of Stan­ford (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “Stanford’s rep­u­ta­tion, which attract­ed me and count­less oth­ers to the Uni­ver­si­ty, offers stu­dents a stake in the birth­place of Sil­i­con Val­ley, the world’s epi­cen­ter of cre­ativ­i­ty and risk. Stan­ford stu­dents are less elit­ist than our East Coast peers, and more well-round­ed: Stan­ford offers ameni­ties, like Greek life and com­pet­i­tive ath­let­ic teams, absent in ear­li­er iter­a­tions of the pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty. The university’s unstruc­tured cur­ricu­lum expects its stu­dents to either suc­ceed at the high­est lev­el in their own are­nas, or cre­ate entire­ly new spheres for suc­cess. Stan­ford rev­els in non­con­for­mi­ty and exper­i­men­ta­tion. It was through these char­ac­ter­is­tics that Stan­ford gained its pres­tige. I do believe that this Stan­ford once exist­ed. But it is close to destruc­tion, has­tened by a caste of admin­is­tra­tors, par­a­sites who jump from one top uni­ver­si­ty to anoth­er, who care only for rais­ing Stan­ford’s rank­ings, and lack an inti­mate under­stand­ing of what makes Stan­ford spe­cial.” Anni­ka is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
    • The Edu­ca­tion of Josh Haw­ley (Ruairi Arri­eta-Ken­na and and Emi­ly Cadei, Politi­co): “Oth­er class­mates, how­ev­er, say that while Haw­ley was ardent­ly against abor­tion, his faith dur­ing col­lege seemed less an obvi­ous moti­va­tion for his polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions and more a guide for his social inter­ac­tions. Friends of Hawley’s told POLITICO they didn’t ever see Haw­ley drink, smoke or ‘bring a girl back’ to his dorm room. By many accounts, he pre­ferred to stay in and study on week­end nights than to go out and par­ty.” I found this arti­cle fas­ci­nat­ing. His evan­gel­i­cal ethics were so incom­pre­hen­si­ble to some of the peo­ple quot­ed in this arti­cle (the bit about the danc­ing girl was par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing). Also, I won­der why it focus­es on his time at Stan­ford and not Yale.

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 Con­ser­v­a­tives Clash on the Goal of Gov­ern­ment (Jonathan Lee­man, Prov­i­dence): “There is no neu­tral­i­ty. The pub­lic square is a bat­tle­ground of gods. Our cul­ture wars are wars of reli­gion. For the time being, lib­er­al­ism keeps us from pick­ing up sixteenth-century swords for those wars, which is no small achieve­ment. But don’t assume it won’t con­trol us with the sub­tler tools of a twenty-first cen­tu­ry legal total­i­tar­i­an­ism.” Insight­ful reflec­tions on how Chris­tians should form their polit­i­cal posi­tions. First shared in vol­ume 218.

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 279

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. Blows to vol­ley­ball star Hay­ley Hod­son’s head changed her life (Patrick Hru­by, LA Times): “The fam­i­ly did not trust Stan­ford. School doc­tors, Hod­son says, had diag­nosed her foot pain as inflam­ma­tion and told her that she wasn’t risk­ing fur­ther injury by play­ing. Med­ical records show that an inde­pen­dent doc­tor sub­se­quent­ly reviewed MRI scans tak­en by Stan­ford and deter­mined she had a stress frac­ture.” Hay­ley was a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  2. My White Priv­i­lege Did­n’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quil­lette): “Not long after, I walked into a sub­ur­ban Bap­tist church, full of strange, unfash­ion­ably dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. I was a Marx­ist, a fem­i­nist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smok­er, and des­per­ate. The love I received in that place is the rea­son that I will defend the rights of fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to my dying breath.” This is amaz­ing. If you only read one thing this week, make it this one. Reminder: titles are rarely cho­sen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an arti­cle.
  3. A pastor’s life depends on a coro­n­avirus vac­cine. Now he faces skep­tics in his church. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Before the pan­dem­ic, the 45-year-old min­is­ter, who nor­mal­ly leads near­ly 2,000 peo­ple, would stand by the entrance to shake hands and offer hugs. Now, before ser­vices, he stays seclud­ed in a room off­stage until it is time to preach while an armed church mem­ber who works for Home­land Secu­ri­ty watch­es the door.”
  4. Amer­i­cans’ Men­tal Health Rat­ings Sink to New Low (Megan Bre­nan, Gallup): “Although the major­i­ty of U.S. adults con­tin­ue to rate their men­tal health as excel­lent (34%) or good (42%), and far few­er say it is only fair (18%) or poor (5%), the lat­est excel­lent rat­ings are eight points low­er than Gallup has mea­sured in any pri­or year.” 
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent because of one very inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic: the only group that showed an increase in men­tal health was week­ly church­go­ers (the week­ly part mat­ters — month­ly church­go­ers expe­ri­enced a decline). I looked at the more detailed PDF and it was unclear to me how they asked about church atten­dance, and of course it is impos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy cau­sa­tion from a sur­vey like this.
    • I found this com­ment by an econ­o­mist on Twit­ter fun­ny: “This is absolute­ly the least sur­pris­ing thing ever. Church folks are like, “The pan­dem­ic sucks, but my church did these 57 things and I’m over­whelmed with peo­ple try­ing to find ways to sup­port dur­ing these times.” Every­body else is like, ‘I’M SO ALONE’” 
  5. The Rise and Fall of Carl Lentz, the Celebri­ty Pas­tor of Hill­song Church (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Soon the church’s cul­tur­al cachet grew out­side Chris­t­ian cir­cles. ‘I knew peo­ple who came to church not because they were Chris­tians but because they thought Carl was hot,’ said Heather McClana­han, who worked for the church in 2014 and 2015.”
    • The Cri­sis of Chris­t­ian Celebri­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “The way I’ve put it in speech­es to young Chris­tians is sim­ply this, ‘Make the easy choice so you don’t have to make the hard choice.’ Say­ing no to the extra drink is much eas­i­er than halt­ing a drunk­en flir­ta­tion.”
  6. Promi­nent evan­gel­i­cals are direct­ing Trump’s sink­ing ship. That feeds doubts about reli­gion. (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When promi­nent Chris­tians affirm absurd polit­i­cal lies with reli­gious fer­vor, non­be­liev­ers have every rea­son to think: ‘Maybe Chris­tians are prone to swal­low­ing absurd reli­gious lies as well. Maybe they are sim­ply cred­u­lous about every­thing.’ If we should encounter some­one who believes — hon­est­ly and adamant­ly believes — in both the exis­tence of the East­er Bun­ny and in the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ, it would nat­u­ral­ly raise ques­tions about the qual­i­ty of his or her believ­ing fac­ul­ties.”
  7. The com­ing war on the hid­den algo­rithms that trap peo­ple in pover­ty (Karen Hao, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): Not until they were stand­ing in the court­room in the mid­dle of a hear­ing did the wit­ness rep­re­sent­ing the state reveal that the gov­ern­ment had just adopt­ed a new algo­rithm. The wit­ness, a nurse, couldn’t explain any­thing about it. “Of course not—they bought it off the shelf,” Gilman says. “She’s a nurse, not a com­put­er sci­en­tist. She couldn’t answer what fac­tors go into it. How is it weight­ed? What are the out­comes that you’re look­ing for? So there I am with my stu­dent attor­ney, who’s in my clin­ic with me, and it’s like, ‘Oh, am I going to cross-exam­ine an algo­rithm?’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

QI’s Gift-Wrap­ping Life Hack! (QI, YouTube): mind blown in less than three min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To university-educated media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low-paying man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon asso­ciate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 212, with a fol­low-up shared the next week: How (and Why) to KISSASS (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “…if you’re not a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion­al class, the key to get­ting your per­son­al essays pub­lished in promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions is KISSASS—Keep It Short, Sad, And Sim­ple, Stu­pid.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 278

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 272

I cheat­ed when num­ber­ing a few of these

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 DC Church Shows How to Fight for Reli­gious Free­dom (David French, The Dis­patch): “Late Fri­day night a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., hand­ed down a reli­gious lib­er­ty rul­ing that I hope will echo through­out the nation…. It demon­strates how thought­ful Chris­tians can engage in the pub­lic square and defend their lib­er­ty with con­vic­tion while also car­ing for their com­mu­ni­ties and demon­strat­ing extra­or­di­nary patience with pub­lic offi­cials. In oth­er words, in one court case we’re watch­ing what it’s like when Chris­t­ian legal ends are pur­sued through Chris­t­ian moral means.” Excel­lent news with typ­i­cal­ly insight­ful com­men­tary by David French.
  2. Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“
    • Out­stand­ing. There are SO MANY quotable bits in this essay. 
    • Why Is Wok­e­ness Win­ning? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Crit­i­cal the­o­ry was once an eso­teric aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit. Now it has become the core, under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the major­i­ty of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, media, cor­po­ra­tions, lib­er­al church­es, NGOs, phil­an­thropies, and, of course, main­stream jour­nal­ism.”
    • The Fun­da­men­tal­ist War on Wok­e­ness is a War on Chris­t­ian Love (Michael Bird, Patheos): “The whole anti-woke and anti-crit­i­cal race the­o­ry trope strike me as not so much inter­est­ed in oppos­ing pro­gres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism and its divi­sive racial pol­i­tics, as much as it serves to deny eth­nic minori­ties have any griev­ances and white church­es have any respon­si­bil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.” Bird is a respect­ed evan­gel­i­cal the­olo­gian. 
  3. Some Stan­ford-relat­ed arti­cles I saw:
    • The Pre­science of Shel­by Steele (Samuel Kro­nen, Quil­lette): “Shel­by was the only sib­ling to reject the tenets of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism, and although he and his [twin] broth­er work on the same cam­pus and occa­sion­al­ly pass each oth­er (Shel­by is at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion), the two are not on speak­ing terms.” Not the most reveal­ing excerpt, but prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing to this audi­ence.
    • An open let­ter from a Stan­ford wrestling par­ent to the Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent (Sarah Traxler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When address­ing the rea­sons that the 11 sports in par­tic­u­lar are being dis­con­tin­ued, wrestling was cit­ed only in the cat­e­go­ry of com­pet­ing ‘with­out a full com­ple­ment of schol­ar­ships.’ One over-looked rea­son for this is that wrestlers often come from low­er income groups. As such, wrestling stu­dent-ath­letes often qual­i­fy for need-based finan­cial aid, reduc­ing the demand for the full com­ple­ment of ath­let­ic-based schol­ar­ships.”
    • My Brief Spell as an Activist (Lucy Kross Wal­lace, Quil­lette): “This was my first intox­i­cat­ing taste of empow­er­ment born from vic­tim­hood. I was vin­di­cat­ed; exu­ber­ant. None of it had been my fault. All my doubts and self-hatred and guilt could be laid to rest. I had been the vic­tim not only of cir­cum­stance and mis­for­tune, but of oppres­sion. The prob­lem was sim­ple, the solu­tion equal­ly so. I didn’t have to change—society did.” The author is a sopho­more at Stan­ford.
  4. A reminder that there are some hor­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing in this world:
    • How Turkey’s Mil­i­tary Adven­tures Decrease Free­dom at Home (Garo Pay­lan, New York Times): “After a decades-long fit­ful truce, the con­flict over the sta­tus of Nagorno-Karabakh — a break­away Armen­ian enclave in Azer­bai­jan — between Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia resumed last month, lead­ing to a large mil­i­tary deploy­ment, destruc­tion of civil­ian cen­ters and thou­sands of casu­al­ties. In this war, Turkey strong­ly sup­ports Azer­bai­jan, with which it shares eth­nic bonds, and Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan dis­missed glob­al calls for a cease-fire.” The author is a mem­ber of the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Azer­bai­jan’s assault against Arme­nia threat­ens democ­ra­cy every­where (Chris­tos Makridis & Alex Gal­it­sky, The Hill): “While Azer­bai­jan has attempt­ed to shield itself from inter­na­tion­al scruti­ny by rid­ing on the pres­ence of tense domes­tic pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States and a glob­al pan­dem­ic, we can­not ignore it any longer. The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must rec­og­nize that fail­ure to stand up for reli­gious minori­ties any­where is a threat to them every­where. Inac­tion cre­ates prece­dent and embold­ens dic­ta­tors.” One of the authors, Chris­tos, is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
    • Chi­na ambas­sador makes veiled threat to Hong Kong-based Cana­di­ans (Helen David­son, The Guardian): “Cana­da is among sev­er­al coun­tries that sus­pend­ed extra­di­tion agree­ments with Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s impo­si­tion of a sweep­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty law in June. Dozens of MPs recent­ly called for Cana­da to offer ‘safe har­bour’ to pro-democ­ra­cy pro­test­ers flee­ing Hong Kong, prompt­ing the warn­ing from Cong.”
    • Relat­ed from a few weeks ago: ‘You will be put into deten­tion’: For­mer ABC bureau chief tells sto­ry of flee­ing Chi­na for first time (Matthew Car­ney, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “We were instruct­ed to report to a facil­i­ty in north Bei­jing and told to bring my daugh­ter Yas­mine, who was 14 at the time, as she was now part of the inves­ti­ga­tion. This felt like a line in the sand for me. I could not accept that they would involve my chil­dren. At the same time I was fright­ened. It felt like part of the Chi­nese play­book: to go after fam­i­ly mem­bers as a way to exact pun­ish­ment and revenge.”
  5. ‘Hand­maid’ real­i­ty: Deeply reli­gious mar­riages have more spousal equal­i­ty (New York Post): “Reli­gious, home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples also report greater rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, and they are three times more like­ly than less-reli­gious peers to report a sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship. The women don’t appear to be repressed; in fact, they’re gen­er­al­ly more like­ly to say they’re hap­py and that their life has mean­ing and pur­pose.” And yet again research con­firms Bib­li­cal pre­cepts. Allow me to take his oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer a friend­ly pas­toral reminder to mar­ry anoth­er Chris­t­ian, should you mar­ry. 
    • Why Only Amy Coney Bar­rett Gets to Have It All (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “…to set the record straight, on hand­maids and beyond, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians must do their part to imag­ine a broad­er and more human­iz­ing vision for women’s place in the pub­lic square. Chris­tian­i­ty has always con­tained a lib­er­a­to­ry seed: one that tells women that the human desire to work, cre­ate and shape insti­tu­tions is as impor­tant, even as holy, as their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren. If Chris­tians don’t like the hand­maid stereo­types, now is the time to be clear on all that Chris­t­ian women can do and be.”
  6. How Chris­tians Should Think About Vot­ing (Michael & Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “When you vote in an elec­tion, with the excep­tion of a write-in bal­lot, you are not vot­ing for your dream can­di­date. Your vote is not an unmedi­at­ed expres­sion of your iden­ti­ty, your vote is a choice between options you did not choose your­self. If you view your vote as an unmedi­at­ed, pure expres­sion of your will, it can be debil­i­tat­ing.” The author is a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer. The arti­cle itself is very non­par­ti­san. 
    • Lati­no, Evan­gel­i­cal and Polit­i­cal­ly Home­less (Jen­nifer Med­i­na, New York Times): “When Pas­tor Rivera looks at his con­gre­ga­tion of 200 fam­i­lies he sees a micro­cosm of the Lati­no vote in the Unit­ed States: how com­plex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solid­i­fy cru­cial sup­port can fall short. There are not clear ide­o­log­i­cal lines here between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives. Peo­ple care about immi­gra­tion, but are equal­ly con­cerned about reli­gious lib­er­ty and abor­tion.”
    • Putting this one here is kind of cheat­ing, but I like hav­ing only 7 major top­ics. This is polit­i­cal enough that I’m jus­ti­fy­ing it to myself. The 1619 Chron­i­cles (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Jour­nal­ists are, most often, in the busi­ness of writ­ing the first rough draft of his­to­ry, not try­ing to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a low­er­case t, fol­low­ing evi­dence in direc­tions unseen, not the capital‑T truth of a pre-estab­lished nar­ra­tive in which incon­ve­nient facts get dis­card­ed.”
    • How the 1619 Project took over 2020 (Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Han­nah-Jones has fierce­ly defend­ed the 1619 Project. But today, she acknowl­edges that for all the experts she con­sult­ed, she should have sat down with addi­tion­al schol­ars with par­tic­u­lar focus on colo­nial his­to­ry, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and the Civ­il War, to bet­ter reflect the con­tention in the field.”
  7. For­get What Gen­der Activists Tell You. Here’s What Med­ical Tran­si­tion Looks Like (Scott New­gent, Quil­lette): “I write all this as a 47-year-old trans­gen­der man who tran­si­tioned five years ago. I’m also a par­ent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good inten­tions of par­ents who seek to sup­port their chil­dren, I have seri­ous con­cerns about reck­less acqui­es­cence to a child’s Inter­net-medi­at­ed self-diag­no­sis. Many old­er trans­gen­der folks share these con­cerns, too.”

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 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. First shared in vol­ume 195.

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 245

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. Some East­er thoughts:
    • God­for­sak­en For Us (Fred Sanders, The Scrip­to­ri­um Dai­ly): “The words of Jesus here make promi­nent the name God (Eli, Eli). Jesus cries the name of God human­ly from a human place. One rea­son he does [not call God Father], I think, is that what is being enact­ed here on the cross is the Divine-Human encounter over sin. The one who has tak­en the place of the sin­ner is being pun­ished by exile, pre­cise­ly as a human, pre­cise­ly by God. To put this in the back­ground and reach out instead for Father-Son lan­guage in the para­phrased telling of this sto­ry is to tac­it­ly accept the propo­si­tion that what is hap­pen­ing on the cross reveals more about the Trin­i­ty (God in him­self) than about the incar­na­tion (God meet­ing man) or the atone­ment (sin meet­ing jus­tice).”
    • Christ Suf­fered for Our Sins, but He Did­n’t Go to Hell for Them (Brad East inter­view­ing Matthew Emer­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The biggest [mis­con­cep­tion about what hap­pened when Jesus died] is prob­a­bly the idea that Christ, dur­ing his descent, went to hell and was tor­ment­ed there.”
  2. Chris­tian­i­ty and Coro­n­avirus:
    • Uncer­tain­ty and the Chris­t­ian (Ephraim Rad­ner, First Things): “Uncer­tain­ty is at the cen­ter of the Chris­t­ian voca­tion. Uncer­tain­ty may not com­pre­hen­sive­ly describe that voca­tion, but it defines it in an essen­tial way. Many Chris­tians will and do reject this claim, I real­ize. ‘We know with cer­tain­ty all that is impor­tant to know!’ they will say. God is in con­trol; God is good; God rewards the faith­ful; Jesus is Lord, and in him death and sin are defeat­ed; the gates of Hell will not pre­vail against the church, and heav­en awaits us. These are indeed Big Pic­ture cer­tain­ties. But the Big Pic­ture isn’t all there is to God’s real­i­ty or to the Christian’s life. Small pic­tures are the bits that make up the Big Picture’s mosa­ic.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of his­tor­i­cal the­ol­o­gy at Wycliffe Col­lege in Cana­da.
    • Coro­n­avirus Search­es Lead Mil­lions to Hear About Jesus (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mil­lions of wor­ried peo­ple who have turned to Google with their anx­i­ety over COVID-19 have end­ed up con­nect­ing with Chris­t­ian evan­ge­lists in their search results—leading to a spike in online con­ver­sions in March.”
    • The Men and Women Who Run Toward the Dying (Bari Weiss, New York Times): “Before the plague hit, the pri­ma­ry job of hos­pi­tal chap­lains was tend­ing to patients and their fam­i­lies. Now the empha­sis has shift­ed to car­ing for their own col­leagues.”
    • Charis­mat­ic Chris­tians who believe in the pow­er of faith heal­ings are try­ing them over the phone  (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘I pray for peo­ple on the phone, and there is no dif­fer­ence in the spir­it realm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re touch­ing or not. It’s not about me, it’s about God and releas­ing his spir­it to take con­trol over the ele­ments of the body and speak life into them and to the dis­ease.’”
    • Dur­ing the Coro­n­avirus Out­break, I Miss Singing at Church (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “We must embrace social dis­tanc­ing, for as long is as need­ed, to pro­tect our health care sys­tem and the very real, fleshy bod­ies of mil­lions of people.But we also need to col­lec­tive­ly notice that some­thing pro­found is lost by hav­ing to inter­act with the world and our neigh­bors in most­ly dis­em­bod­ied, dig­i­tal ways. This is some­thing to lament and to grieve. And like all grief, it expos­es the val­ue and glo­ry of the thing that was lost.”
  3. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus:
    • What Every­one’s Get­ting Wrong About the Toi­let Paper Short­age (Will Ore­mus, Medi­um): “In short, the toi­let paper indus­try is split into two, large­ly sep­a­rate mar­kets: com­mer­cial and con­sumer. The pan­dem­ic has shift­ed the lion’s share of demand to the lat­ter. Peo­ple actu­al­ly do need to buy sig­nif­i­cant­ly more toi­let paper dur­ing the pan­dem­ic — not because they’re mak­ing more trips to the bath­room, but because they’re mak­ing more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion under stay-at-home orders, Amer­i­cans are no longer using the restrooms at their work­place, in schools, at restau­rants, at hotels, or in air­ports.”
    • Even Now, Crim­i­nal Defen­dants Have Rights (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Con­sid­er a poor per­son arrest­ed on sus­pi­cion of drunk dri­ving. Nor­mal­ly he would be arraigned and receive a pub­lic defend­er with­in 48 hours of arrest. Now he could sit in jail for a week with­out an attor­ney before get­ting the oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell his side of things to a judge.”
    • Apple and Google will make track­ing tech­nol­o­gy to fight coro­n­avirus (Adam Clark Estes and Shirin Ghaf­fary, Vox): “Apple and Google plan to build con­tact-trac­ing func­tion­al­i­ty into the oper­at­ing sys­tems of the phones them­selves, which might sound a lit­tle tricky for folks who wor­ry about being tracked with­out their con­sent. As the New York Times points out, by build­ing the tool direct­ly into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, Apple and Google effec­tive­ly ensure that the con­tact-trac­ing sys­tem can run 24 hours a day, rather than only when a par­tic­u­lar app is open.”
    • In the Fog of Coro­n­avirus, There Are No Experts (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[In the movie ‘Con­ta­gion’] only insti­tu­tions can be trust­ed; out­sider ‘knowl­edge’ leads only to the grave. That’s the movie; the real­i­ty has been oth­er­wise. In our actu­al pan­dem­ic, most of the insti­tu­tions that we asso­ciate with pub­lic health exper­tise and trust­ed med­ical author­i­ty have failed more cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly than Trump has.”
    • I’m Con­cerned About “US”: A Black Doc­tor’s Plea for Racial COVID19 Data (Rebekah Fen­ton, Medi­um): “I noticed a trend among the obit­u­ar­ies I read. They fea­ture high num­bers of Black peo­ple. They look like me, like my family’s friend. A fam­i­ly in Chica­go has lost two sis­ters, Patri­cia and Wan­da Frieson, to coro­n­avirus at 61 and 63. Arnold Obey, an avid marathon run­ner and retired prin­ci­pal in New York, died at 73. But the ages of Black and brown vic­tims were also low­er than I expect­ed. Dez-Ann Romain at 36. Dave Edwards at 48. Kious Kel­ly, an assis­tant nurse man­ag­er, at 48.” Rebekah is an alum­na of Chi Alpha.
    • Flat­ten The Curve (Ohio Depart­ment of Health, YouTube): thir­ty well-done sec­onds
  4. S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay.
  5. The Sit­u­a­tion With Vik­tor Orban (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I count myself an admir­er of many of the things Vik­tor Orban has done, espe­cial­ly his moves to pro­tect Hun­gar­i­an sov­er­eign­ty, the par­tic­u­lar­i­ty of its cul­ture, and to resist migra­tion being forced upon Hun­gary. This does not mean I sup­port every­thing he does — I hon­est­ly don’t fol­low Orban close­ly enough to have an informed opin­ion — but I think on bal­ance, he has been good for Hun­gary, and for Europe. I would have a lot more con­fi­dence for the future were I liv­ing in a coun­try gov­erned by Vik­tor Orban than by Angela Merkel.” I don’t know why I find this sub­ject so fas­ci­nat­ing. Maybe it’s just because Dreher does and I love read­ing his writ­ing.

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 Let­ter To My Younger Self (Ryan Leaf, The Player’s Tri­bune): “Con­grat­u­la­tions. You offi­cial­ly have it all — mon­ey, pow­er and pres­tige. All the things that are impor­tant, right?… That’s you, young Ryan Leaf, at his absolute finest: arro­gant, boor­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic. You think you’re on top of the world and that you’ve got all the answers. Well I’m sor­ry to have to tell you this, but the truth is….” Such a grip­ping let­ter. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. (first shared in vol­ume 99)

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 244

The­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tives on the pan­dem­ic, some inter­est­ing news tid­bits, the state of Stan­ford ath­let­ic fan­dom, and a good reminder that Mor­monism is not a Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tion.

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. Chris­t­ian Coro­n­avirus Per­spec­tives
    • Chris­tian­i­ty Offers No Answers About the Coro­n­avirus (N.T. Wright, Time): “Sup­pos­ing real human wis­dom doesn’t mean being able to string togeth­er some dodgy spec­u­la­tions and say, ‘So that’s all right then?’ What if, after all, there are moments such as T. S. Eliot rec­og­nized in the ear­ly 1940s, when the only advice is to wait with­out hope, because we’d be hop­ing for the wrong thing? Ratio­nal­ists (includ­ing Chris­t­ian ratio­nal­ists) want expla­na­tions; Roman­tics (includ­ing Chris­t­ian roman­tics) want to be giv­en a sigh of relief. But per­haps what we need more than either is to recov­er the bib­li­cal tra­di­tion of lament.”
      • Please remem­ber that authors do not usu­al­ly pick the head­lines for their arti­cles. In this case espe­cial­ly the lev­el of mis­match between the title and the arti­cle is strik­ing.
    • Sur­prised by Hope­less­ness: A Response to NT Wright (Andy Davis, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Despite what T. S. Eliot says, Chris­tians know exact­ly what to hope for. We’ve been clear­ly instruct­ed by God’s prophet­ic Word, and there­fore, we should be radi­ant with hope—an unshak­able con­vic­tion that the future is inde­scrib­ably bright. The world is ‘with­out hope and with­out God’ (Eph. 2:14); so when Chris­tians radi­ate hope, the world notices and is moved to ask us to give a rea­son for the hope with­in us (1 Pet. 3:15).”
    • Like the Mer­chants of Baby­lon (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “The Bible tells us that God’s deal­ings with mankind are often mys­te­ri­ous, and so we should nev­er rush to glib expla­na­tions. But His works are not absolute­ly inscrutable. When Jesus rebuked the peo­ple for mis­read­ing the col­lapse of the tow­er of Siloam, and for the inci­dent where Pilate killed the men of Galilee (Luke 13:1–5), He rebuked them, not for read­ing mean­ing into the sto­ry, but for hav­ing read the wrong mean­ing into the sto­ry.”
    • How An Evil Virus Points to the Crush­ing Weight of the Fall (David French, The Dis­patch): “Last night, my wife and I were walk­ing through our neigh­bor­hood and saw a pas­tor friend in his back­yard. We stopped him and had a love­ly con­ver­sa­tion while main­tain­ing prop­er social dis­tanc­ing from the side­walk. As we shared our own bur­dens and stress­es, he made an impor­tant obser­va­tion – this moment demon­strates so clear­ly our need for a sav­ior. By that, he meant far, far more than the idea that we need some of that ‘old-time reli­gion’ before we meet our mak­er. No, he meant that a bro­ken world eager­ly awaits the redemp­tion declared in Rev­e­la­tions 21, when the Lord declares, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”
    • The Book of Com­mon Prayer: Prayers for Plagues and Times of Great Sick­ness (Richard Beck, per­son­al blog): “Have pity upon us mis­er­able sin­ners, who now are vis­it­ed with great sick­ness and mor­tal­i­ty; that like as thou didst then accept of an atone­ment, and didst com­mand the destroy­ing Angel to cease from pun­ish­ing, so it may now please thee to with­draw from us this plague and griev­ous sick­ness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
    • The Apoc­a­lypse as an ‘Unveil­ing’: What Reli­gion Teach­es Us About the End Times (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “For peo­ple of many faiths, and even none at all, it can feel late­ly like the end of the world is near. Not only is there a plague, but hun­dreds of bil­lions of locusts are swarm­ing East Africa. Wild­fires have rav­aged Aus­tralia, killing an untold num­ber of ani­mals. A recent earth­quake in Utah even shook the Salt Lake Tem­ple to the top of its icon­ic spire, caus­ing the gold­en trum­pet to fall from the angel Moroni’s right hand.”
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus Com­men­tary
    • Tips from some­one with 50 years of social dis­tanc­ing expe­ri­ence (Rae Ellen Bichell, Min­neso­ta Pub­lic Radio): “Keep track of some­thing…. In the era of COVID-19, he sug­gests track­ing what you can — or can’t — find at the gro­cery store. Or, bet­ter yet, par­tic­i­pat­ing in some cit­i­zen sci­ence, like a project called CoCo­RaHS that tracks rain­fall across the coun­try.”
    • It’s Time to Face Facts, Amer­i­ca: Masks Work (Fer­ris Jabr, Wired): “The col­lec­tive evi­dence makes a strong case for uni­ver­sal mask wear­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. Masks are not a sub­sti­tute for oth­er inter­ven­tions; they must always be used in com­bi­na­tion with social dis­tanc­ing and hand hygiene.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. 
    • The Coro­n­avirus and the Con­ser­v­a­tive Mind (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the sup­posed con­ser­v­a­tive mind is more attuned to exter­nal threat and inter­nal con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, more inclined to sup­port author­i­ty and hier­ar­chy, and fear sub­ver­sion and dis­sent. And so the polit­i­cal respons­es to the pan­dem­ic have put these psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries to a very inter­est­ing test.” This is an angle that nev­er would have occurred to me but which is obvi­ous­ly worth explor­ing. 
    • Coro­n­avirus maps and charts show COVID-19 symp­toms, spread, death rate (Busi­ness Insid­er): “These 22 charts and graph­ics lay out what you need to know as the out­break con­tin­ues to progress.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. This is only mar­gin­al­ly about the coro­n­avirus: An inside look at the hos­pi­tal going up in Cen­tral Park (Tony Carnes, A Jour­ney Through NYC Reli­gions): “The heart of Cen­tral Park is Bethes­da Foun­tain, which was built to com­mem­o­rate the heal­ing pow­er of Jesus at the Pool of Bethes­da in Israel. Fred­er­ic Law Olm­st­ed, the park’s design­er, hoped that the park would pro­vide spir­i­tu­al refresh­ment to urban mass­es from their tra­vails. Now, a Chris­t­ian min­istry is real­iz­ing the sym­bol­ism in the 21st Cen­tu­ry by erect­ing a crit­i­cal care hos­pi­tal at the park’s 97th Street Trans­verse and Fifth Avenue…. Samaritan’s Purse med­ical per­son­nel use the twen­ty sec­onds while they wash their hands to pray for each of their patients by name. It is fit­ting that they do that at their present loca­tion.”
    • What a heart­warm­ing sto­ry. Who could be opposed?
    • Oh, wait. De Bla­sio “Very Con­cerned” About Anti-Gay Evan­gel­i­cal Group Run­ning Cen­tral Park Coro­n­avirus Hos­pi­tal (Jake Offen­hartz, The Gothamist): “May­or Bill de Bla­sio said the city will keep a close eye on the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist group oper­at­ing a field hos­pi­tal in Cen­tral Park, amid grow­ing fears that some New York­ers could face dis­crim­i­na­tion and sub­stan­dard care from the reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • And New York­ers Are Right to Be Skep­ti­cal of Evan­gel­i­cal-Run Coro­n­avirus Ward in Cen­tral Park (Jonathan Mer­rit, The Dai­ly Beast): “The vast major­i­ty of New York­ers are not Chris­t­ian, and if they find them­selves wheez­ing for air due to COVID-19, they don’t want to be pros­e­ly­tized while receiv­ing treat­ment. They too have rea­son to be skep­ti­cal of the organization’s makeshift hos­pi­tal.” 
    • Some amus­ing com­ments I saw in response, “I think they’re actu­al­ly afraid that the vol­un­teers will give away Chick-Fil‑A sand­wich­es” and “If the may­or had been as con­cerned about the coro­n­avirus as he is about the Chris­tians then New York would look very dif­fer­ent today.” Ouch.
  4. Dona­tions: From Bribery to Benev­o­lence (Jas­mine Ker­ber, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “A spec­trum exists between bribery and benev­o­lence, and dona­tions fall in var­i­ous places along that con­tin­u­um. Oper­a­tion Var­si­ty Blues high­light­ed the most cor­rupt ‘dona­tions’; for­mer Stan­ford sail­ing coach John Van­de­mo­er plead­ed guilty to accept­ing a bribe, not an altru­is­tic con­tri­bu­tion to ath­let­ics.” Jas­mine is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
    • I shared an arti­cle that dis­cussed phil­an­thropy from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive back in vol­ume 213.
  5. At least the seats are red: Why is Stan­ford Sta­di­um often emp­ty? (Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As nation­al Heis­man vot­ers did not vote for Chris­t­ian McCaf­frey ’18 because they could not both­er to watch his games, Stan­ford stu­dents would not bike over to Stan­ford Sta­di­um for [his] games. ‘I will nev­er for­get this,’ McCaf­frey told The Ath­let­ic. ‘My sopho­more year against UCLA, I had a heck of a game. I biked back to my dorm, I’m kind of on a high horse. I walk in, and six or sev­en peo­ple asked where I was! I think I had some­thing like 243 yards rush­ing, four touch­downs. And they didn’t know where I was!’”
  6. 3 Types of Skep­tics (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “1. Those who need answers…. 2. Those who don’t like the answers…. 3. Those who need heal­ing.”
  7. Are Mor­mons Chris­tians?: A Review of “The Saints of Zion: An Intro­duc­tion to Mor­mon The­ol­o­gy” (Tim Miller, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “He makes clear that Mor­mons are not Chris­tians, but does so by point­ing out that this has been the claim of the Mor­mon church itself through­out his­to­ry (despite recent attempts to argue dif­fer­ent­ly).”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 242

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.

A lot of links this week. Can you tell I’m on lock­down in the Bay Area? Since some of you are, too, you’ll have time to read them! 😂

Kid­ding aside, I nev­er assume any­one reads all of these. Skim the links and open the ones that inter­est you in new tabs, but be sure to open all the amus­ing stuff at the end — you need it.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic Visu­al­iz­ers:
  2. Chris­t­ian Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives:
    • The Emo­tion­al Impact Of Cam­pus Clo­sures (Michele Phoenix, per­son­al blog): “There are few things in life as pre­dictable as one’s col­lege tra­jec­to­ry. From the dread­ed fresh­man-fif­teen to changes in aca­d­e­m­ic majors or find­ing out last minute that you’re two cred­its short… It all plays out accord­ing to an estab­lished time­line. Then comes a virus that upends every­thing and predictability—one of the pri­ma­ry sta­bi­liz­ing fac­tors of our lives—suddenly morphs into a whirl­wind of shift­ing unknowns.”
      • Relat­ed: Unfin­ished nar­ra­tives (Jes­si­ca de la Paz, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Every­day there’s anoth­er email, and with every email anoth­er string of hope we wear hang­ing around our necks is yanked off, and we’re left with a red impres­sion of where it once was. My immi­grant par­ents who fought tooth and nail for me and my broth­ers won’t get to see me walk across the stage to get my diplo­ma. There will be no pho­tos or laugh­ter-filled recep­tion.” Jes­si­ca is a Chi Alpha stu­dent. She is also quot­ed in this Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle: To Fight Coro­n­avirus, Col­leges Sent Stu­dents Home. Now Will They Refund Tuition?
    • In Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic, Chris­tian­i­ty Has Ancient Lessons (Lyman Stone, For­eign Pol­i­cy): “The mod­ern world has sud­den­ly become reac­quaint­ed with the old­est trav­el­ing com­pan­ion of human his­to­ry: exis­ten­tial dread and the fear of unavoid­able, inscrutable death. No vac­cine or antibi­ot­ic will save us for the time being. Because this expe­ri­ence has become for­eign to mod­ern peo­ple, we are, by and large, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly under­equipped for the cur­rent coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.” Side note: I have very much enjoyed the author on Twit­ter.
    • Respond­ing to Pan­demics: 4 Lessons from Church His­to­ry (Glen Scriven­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “Plagues inten­si­fy the nat­ur­al course of life. They inten­si­fy our own sense of mor­tal­i­ty and frailty. They also inten­si­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties to dis­play coun­ter­cul­tur­al, coun­ter­con­di­tion­al love. The church rose to the chal­lenge in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry, win­ning both admir­ers and also con­verts.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. A longer ver­sion is avail­able as a 45 minute YouTube video (which, full con­fes­sion, I have not watched). 
    • The­o­log­i­cal Reflec­tions on the Pan­dem­ic (Bri­an Tabb, Gospel Coali­tion): “All people—rich and poor, young and old, reli­gious and non-religious—are sus­cep­ti­ble to sick­ness and are cer­tain to die one day. Yet for fol­low­ers of Jesus, sick­ness tests our faith, reveals our hope, and moves us to be zeal­ous for good works.”
    • Plague and Prov­i­dence: What Huldrych Zwingli Taught Me About Trust­ing God (Stephen Ecch­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “I first came across Huldrych Zwingli’s ‘Plague Song’ while study­ing the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews: ‘Help, Lord God, help in this trou­ble! I think death is at the door. Stand before me, Christ, for you have over­come him.’”
    • Does Reli­gion Impact What Peo­ple Are Afraid Of? (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “Among Protes­tants who nev­er attend church, their total num­ber of fears is no dif­fer­ent than Catholics at just about six­teen. How­ev­er, as a Protes­tant increas­es their fre­quen­cy of wor­ship atten­dance their total num­ber of fears begins to decline. Among Protes­tants who attend more than once a week, the mod­el pre­dicts just 11.5 fears – which is sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant from both low attend­ing Protes­tants and all Catholics.”
    • This is not the end of the world, accord­ing to Chris­tians who study the end of the world (Julie Zauzmer and Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Could this be a sign of the apoc­a­lypse? It sure might feel apoc­a­lyp­tic. But not if you ask Chris­t­ian writ­ers and pas­tors who have spent years focus­ing their mes­sage on the Book of Rev­e­la­tion — the New Testament’s final book.”
  3. Gen­er­al Pan­dem­ic Think­pieces:
    • Buzz Aldrin has some advice for Amer­i­cans in quar­an­tine (Eric Berg­er, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “Buzz Aldrin knows a thing or two about quar­an­tines. After return­ing from the Moon in 1969, Aldrin, Neil Arm­strong, and Michael Collins spent 21 days in quar­an­tine to pre­vent the spread of any con­ta­gions they might have brought back from the lunar sur­face.” Very short. Mild­ly amus­ing.
    • NIH Direc­tor: ‘We’re on an Expo­nen­tial Curve’ (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “When I asked him how he sees faith now, in his late 60s, com­pared with how he saw things in his late 20s, he told me, ‘I think I’ve also arrived at a place where my faith has become a real­ly strong sup­port for deal­ing with life’s strug­gles. It took me awhile, I think—that sense that God is suf­fi­cient and that I don’t have to be strong in every cir­cum­stance.’” Fran­cis Collins is a sol­id believ­er who we co-host­ed to speak at Stan­ford around a decade ago. Good inter­view. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • A fias­co in the mak­ing? As the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic takes hold, we are mak­ing deci­sions with­out reli­able data (John Ioan­ni­dis, Stat News): “The most valu­able piece of infor­ma­tion for answer­ing those ques­tions would be to know the cur­rent preva­lence of the infec­tion in a ran­dom sam­ple of a pop­u­la­tion and to repeat this exer­cise at reg­u­lar time inter­vals to esti­mate the inci­dence of new infec­tions. Sad­ly, that’s infor­ma­tion we don’t have.” The author is a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine, of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and pop­u­la­tion health, of bio­med­ical data sci­ence, and of sta­tis­tics.
    • Chi­na Is Avoid­ing Blame by Trolling the World (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “A gov­ern­ment is not a race. It’s a regime—and eas­i­ly one of the worst and most bru­tal in our life­time. Crit­i­ciz­ing author­i­tar­i­an regimes for what they do out­side their own bor­ders and to their own peo­ple is sim­ply call­ing things as they are. To do oth­er­wise is to for­go analy­sis and accu­ra­cy in the name of assuag­ing a regime that deserves no such con­sid­er­a­tion.”
      • Relat­ed: Don’t blame ‘Chi­na’ for the coro­n­avirus — blame the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Let’s stop say­ing ‘Chi­nese virus’ — not because every­one who uses it is racist, but because it need­less­ly plays into the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s attempts to divide us and deflect our atten­tion from their bad actions. Let’s just call it the ‘CCP virus.’ That’s more accu­rate and offends only those who deserve it.”
    • “Dishonesty…Is Always an Indi­ca­tor of Weak­ness”: Tuck­er Carl­son on How He Brought His Coro­n­avirus Mes­sage to Mar-a-Lago (Joe Hagan, Van­i­ty Fair): “I felt I had a moral oblig­a­tion to be use­ful in what­ev­er small way I could, and, you know, I don’t have any actu­al author­i­ty. I’m just a talk show host. But I felt—and my wife strong­ly felt—that I had a moral oblig­a­tion to try and be help­ful in what­ev­er way pos­si­ble. I’m not an advis­er to the per­son or any­one else oth­er than my chil­dren. And I mean that. And you can ask any­body in the White House or out how many times have I gone to the White House to give my opin­ion on things. Because I don’t do that. And in gen­er­al I real­ly dis­ap­prove of peo­ple stray­ing too far out­side their lanes and act­ing like just because they have sol­id rat­ings, they have a right to con­trol pub­lic pol­i­cy. I don’t believe that. I think it’s wrong.” Unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Coro­nalinks 3/19/20 (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m usu­al­ly pret­ty harsh on Bay Area gov­ern­ments here. So I want to give cred­it where cred­it is due: they’ve react­ed to the coro­n­avirus epi­dem­ic with a lev­el of swift­ness and feroc­i­ty they usu­al­ly reserve for attempts to build new hous­ing.” I am includ­ing the link entire­ly for that glo­ri­ous line. The rest is worth­while, but that line is majes­tic.
    • Coro­n­avirus: The Ham­mer and the Dance (Tom­sa Pueyo, Medi­um): “This is prob­a­bly the sin­gle biggest, most impor­tant mis­take peo­ple make when think­ing about this stage: they think it will keep them home for months. This is not the case at all. In fact, it is like­ly that our lives will go back to close to nor­mal.”
      • The author is quite crit­i­cal of the USA. Maybe it’s because I live in Sil­i­con Val­ley and am cur­rent­ly on lock­down, but I think we’re respond­ing pret­ty aggres­sive­ly. Hon­est­ly, I think we’re doing bet­ter than most coun­tries around the world (def­i­nite­ly not Sin­ga­pore, though — respect to that island tech­noc­ra­cy). Also, Amer­i­ca often takes a while to mobi­lize in response to great chal­lenges but once we do the strength of our response is stag­ger­ing. We engage in relent­less and pub­lic self-crit­i­cism that leads us to over­com­pen­sate; for exam­ple, the news keep empha­siz­ing that we are piti­ful­ly behind on test kits. It is true that we were inex­cus­ably behind. How­ev­er, our capac­i­ty for test­ing is explod­ing — pre­cise­ly because every­one believes we are piti­ful­ly behind. There remain oth­er areas in which we are still falling flat, and they are hav­ing bright spot­lights trained upon them. So I’m cau­tious­ly opti­mistic. Things will be bad but not near­ly as bad as they could have been. For all of her faults, Amer­i­ca is still pret­ty amaz­ing.
      • Also, the author inex­plic­a­bly trusts China’s reports about their cur­rent lev­els of infec­tion. Giv­en extreme­ly recent his­to­ry, that is per­plex­ing.
    • Why Telling Peo­ple They Don’t Need Masks Back­fired (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “It used to be said that back in the Sovi­et Union, if there was a line, you first got in line and then fig­ured out what the line was for — peo­ple knew that there were going to be short­ages and that the author­i­ties often lied, so they hoard­ed.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at UNC. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • We’re not going back to nor­mal (Gideon Lich­field, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “…one can imag­ine a world in which, to get on a flight, per­haps you’ll have to be signed up to a ser­vice that tracks your move­ments via your phone. The air­line wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infect­ed peo­ple or dis­ease hot spots. There’d be sim­i­lar require­ments at the entrance to large venues, gov­ern­ment build­ings, or pub­lic trans­port hubs. There would be tem­per­a­ture scan­ners every­where, and your work­place might demand you wear a mon­i­tor that tracks your tem­per­a­ture or oth­er vital signs.” Shared by a con­cerned stu­dent.
  4. Non-pan­dem­ic (YES!!!!):
    • Book Review: Hoover (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Her­bert Hoover is the first stu­dent at Stan­ford. Not just a mem­ber of the first grad­u­at­ing class. Lit­er­al­ly the first stu­dent. He arrives at the dorms two months ear­ly to get a head start on var­i­ous mon­ey-mak­ing schemes, includ­ing dis­trib­ut­ing news­pa­pers, deliv­er­ing laun­dry, tend­ing live­stock, and help­ing oth­er stu­dents reg­is­ter. He would lat­er sell some of these busi­ness­es to oth­er stu­dents and start more, oper­at­ing a con­stant churn of enter­pris­es through­out his col­lege career. His aca­d­e­mics remain mediocre, and he con­tin­ues to have few friends – until he tries out for the foot­ball team in sopho­more year. He has zero ath­let­ic tal­ent and fails mis­er­ably, but the coach (whose eye for tal­ent appar­ent­ly tran­scends ath­let­ics) spots poten­tial in Hoover and asks him to come on as team man­ag­er. In this role, Hoover is an unqual­i­fied suc­cess. He turns the team’s debt into a sur­plus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berke­ley vs. Stan­ford foot­ball match played on Thanks­giv­ing which remains a beloved Stan­ford foot­ball tra­di­tion.” Long but good (if you are inter­est­ed in Stan­ford, pres­i­den­tial his­to­ry, or clever thoughts).
      • Relat­ed: Scott Alexan­der on Her­bert Hoover (Scott Sum­n­er, The Library of Eco­nom­ics and Lib­er­ty): “Hoover was not the most tal­ent­ed per­son to ever become Pres­i­dent, but he was prob­a­bly the most com­pe­tent. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his areas of com­pe­tence did not dove­tail with the prob­lems fac­ing the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s. Hoover was very good at orga­niz­ing large endeav­ors, but the prob­lems faced by the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s were macro­eco­nom­ic in nature. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, being a good admin­is­tra­tor doesn’t have much cor­re­la­tion with under­stand­ing macro­eco­nom­ics.”
    • ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ at the Muse­um of the Bible are all forg­eries (Michael Greshko, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “Loll insist­ed on inde­pen­dence. Not only would the Muse­um of the Bible have no say on the team’s find­ings, her report would be final—and would have to be released to the pub­lic. The Muse­um of the Bible agreed to the terms. ‘Hon­est­ly, I’ve nev­er worked with a muse­um that was so up-front,’ Loll says.”
      • The Muse­um of the Bible comes off look­ing pret­ty good in this arti­cle. I feel bad for them.
    • Porn Restric­tion for Real­ists (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…a world where the tube-sites are gone and peo­ple must go back to pay­ing for their porn is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over the world we live in now. This world is pos­si­ble: it exist­ed two decades ago. Tech­no­log­i­cal change is part of what hap­pened, but only part. Just as impor­tant in the cre­ation of the new, porn-flushed world we live are legal pro­tec­tions giv­en to web­sites like Porn­Hub and X Ham­ster which allow them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for the theft their busi­ness mod­el is based on. It also allows them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for much worse sins.”
    • Learn­ing From His­to­ry: How Con­gress Can Pro­tect Both Rights and Beliefs (Don Bonker, Real­Clear­Reli­gion): “Back in 1984, I received an unex­pect­ed call from Sen­a­tor Mark Hat­field (R‑OR), a high­ly regard­ed Repub­li­can who chaired the pow­er­ful Sen­ate Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee. I won­dered, why would he call a young Demo­c­rat who had no sig­nif­i­cant posi­tion and lit­tle influ­ence in the halls of Con­gress?”

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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