Tag: theology

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 325

Vol­ume 325. Since 3+2=5, I con­sid­er that aus­pi­cious.

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 325, which I think is kind of cool since 3 + 2 = 5 (I am, as they say, eas­i­ly amused).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some faith & pol­i­tics con­tent. The last two are a bit par­ti­san.
    • A Chris­t­ian Defense of Amer­i­can Clas­si­cal Lib­er­al­ism (David French, The Dis­patch): “There is no per­fect form of gov­ern­ment on this side of the new heav­ens and the new earth. But the alter­na­tives to clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism suf­fer by com­par­i­son to the imper­fect sys­tem we pos­sess. When post-lib­er­als mag­ni­fy the pow­er of the state, they risk degrad­ing the dig­ni­ty of the indi­vid­ual. When they trust the wis­dom of rulers, they neglect their own fall­en nature. Peo­ple are of incal­cu­la­ble worth, and we are stained with sin. Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism rec­og­nizes both real­i­ties. We dis­re­gard its pro­tec­tions at our pro­found per­il.”
    • The “Chop” and Lib­er­al­is­m’s Cri­sis of Mean­ing (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “With­out a coher­ent moral frame­work, con­tem­po­rary pro­gres­sivism has to con­stant­ly man­u­fac­ture norms and enforce them not through shared com­mu­ni­ty stig­mas but by author­i­ty struc­tures. The new norms, though, are not infused with mean­ing. Inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty is Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy with rig­or mor­tis: the cold, clam­my remains of long dead Protes­tant social eth­ic.” That final sen­tence… wow.
    • The Cau­tion­ary Tale of Fran­cis Collins (Justin Lee, First Things): “[Collins] showed that it was pos­si­ble for an evan­gel­i­cal from a work­ing-class back­ground to rise to the heights of sci­en­tif­ic and bureau­crat­ic accom­plish­ment. His pres­ence in the halls of med­ical pow­er was also a tes­ta­ment to the har­mo­ny of faith and rea­son. Collins has cham­pi­oned the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of sci­ence and reli­gion and encour­aged Chris­tians to accept the­is­tic evo­lu­tion through his best­selling 2006 book The Lan­guage of God and a spin-off orga­ni­za­tion, BioL­o­gos. His wit­ness is sin­gu­lar, and sin­gu­lar­ly powerful—if we don’t look too close­ly.” I have con­flict­ed feel­ings about this arti­cle (I think it is undu­ly harsh on Dr. Collins), but it is a per­spec­tive I have encoun­tered sev­er­al times. I’m also not sure it belongs under the pol­i­tics bul­let point, but it’s at least adja­cent.
    • Faith trumps Trump in Vir­ginia (Tony Carnes, A Jour­ney Through NYC Reli­gions): “Youngkin goes to an evan­gel­i­cal Epis­co­pal church Holy Trin­i­ty Church and pro­vides a retreat cen­ter for FOCUS (Fel­low­ship of Chris­tians in Uni­ver­si­ties & Schools), an evan­gel­i­cal out­reach to prep school stu­dents. In UK Youngkin served on the exec­u­tive com­mit­tee of Holy Trin­i­ty Bromp­ton (the home church of the Alpha course). The GOP Lt Gov­er­nor-elect Win­some Sears is an African Amer­i­can who head­ed a home­less min­istry for the Sal­va­tion Army (as well as being vice pres­i­dent of the Board of Edu­ca­tion for Vir­ginia, an elect­ed offi­cial, and a Marine). Attor­ney Gen­er­al-elect Jason Miyares is a Lati­no Chris­t­ian, a mem­ber of Galilee Epis­co­pal Church, an evan­gel­i­cal lean­ing Epis­co­pal church.” Brief but super inter­est­ing.
    • Pence says James Madi­son and the Bible helped him cer­ti­fy elec­tion results against Trump’s wish­es (Tim­o­thy Bel­la, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The for­mer vice pres­i­dent, whose answer was met with applause from the Iowa City audi­ence, denied that he was advised it would hurt his chances of run­ning for pres­i­dent if he fol­lowed Trump’s plan. ‘Every­thing you’ve recit­ed rel­a­tive to me is false,’ he said to the audi­ence mem­ber. Pence, refer­ring to the oath he took to uphold the Con­sti­tu­tion, also cit­ed a Bible verse he said he leaned on: ‘Psalm 15 says he who keeps his oath even when it hurts.’ ”
  2. Pan­dem­ic restric­tions were a blow to reli­gious lib­er­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, NY Post): “Of all the unequal impacts of the pan­dem­ic, the costs of state and local restric­tions that fell square­ly on reli­gious house­holds seem under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed. Although every­one felt the effects of nation­al and state quar­an­tines, and Amer­i­cans strug­gled with men­tal health more broad­ly, my paper shows that reli­gious adher­ents, espe­cial­ly Catholics or oth­er Chris­tians, expe­ri­enced unique harm. Even more trou­bling is that the costs of shut­downs for places of wor­ship were not lim­it­ed to the con­gre­gants. Evi­dence from a Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty study led up by Byron John­son shows that faith-based orga­ni­za­tions shoul­der the bulk of the home­less­ness bur­den in cities, car­ing for the least for­tu­nate. In this sense, cut­ting off in-per­son wor­ship simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cuts off one of the pri­ma­ry ways that hous­es of wor­ship serve their broad­er com­mu­ni­ties.”
  3. Bil­lion­aire Seeks to Build Large­ly Win­dow­less Dorm In ‘Social and Psy­cho­log­i­cal Exper­i­ment’ (Aaron Gor­don, Vice): “Accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent, 94 per­cent of dorm rooms in Munger Hall [at UCSB] will be tiny, win­dow­less pods that open onto a cen­tral com­mon area. And it will stuff so many stu­dents [4,500] into such a small space that Den­nis McFad­den, the archi­tect who resigned from the university’s review com­mit­tee, said in his res­ig­na­tion let­ter it ‘would qual­i­fy as the eighth dens­est neigh­bor­hood on the plan­et, falling just short of Dha­ka, Bangladesh.’ McFad­den said the uni­ver­si­ty had pro­vid­ed no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for ignor­ing estab­lished research that nat­ur­al light and views of the out­doors are vital to healthy liv­ing, except to say they were bound to Munger’s vision.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    1. Munger rebuts: Munger on con­tro­ver­sial UCSB dorm: Fake win­dows are bet­ter than real win­dows (CNN). He is total­ly and awe­some­ly intran­si­gent.
  4. What Hap­pened to Matt Taib­bi? (Ross Barkan, New York Mag­a­zine): “ ‘One of the moments that solid­i­fied in my mind the dif­fi­cult path I’d have going for­ward in main­stream media, and that pushed me toward the deci­sion to do Sub­stack full-time, came when I did a cam­paign piece on Biden for Rolling Stone,’ Taib­bi said. ‘I was notic­ing what every­one else saw, that the man was hav­ing trou­ble remem­ber­ing things, among oth­er issues. I called back some of the med­ical sources who were glad to vio­late the ‘Gold­wa­ter rule’ against diag­nos­ing peo­ple from afar to talk to me about Trump being crazy, just to ask for their assess­ment of Biden. None respond­ed, and one lit­er­al­ly hung up on me. Even off the record they wouldn’t talk about it. It hit me in that moment that Trump had so fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the busi­ness that even sources were behav­ing dif­fer­ent­ly, and I’d have to adapt one way or the oth­er.’ ”
  5. Katharine Bir­bals­ingh is right: chil­dren do have orig­i­nal sin (Theo Hob­son, The Spec­ta­tor): “When my son was about six he heard some­thing at school about slav­ery but was not quite clear what it was all about. So I spelled it out. I told him that a slave was some­one that some­one else owned and ordered around and prob­a­bly mis­treat­ed. I wait­ed for the prop­er response of moral hor­ror to show on his inno­cent fea­tures. Instead he said, ‘Cool, I want one!’” What a phe­nom­e­nal open­ing anec­dote.
  6. Lib­er­als Read, Con­ser­v­a­tives Watch TV (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “Con­ser­v­a­tive media per­fect­ing the ‘info­tain­ment’ genre of news com­men­tary brought peo­ple into pol­i­tics that a gen­er­a­tion ear­li­er would’ve paid more atten­tion to pro­fes­sion­al wrestling or mon­ster truck ral­lies instead. Lib­er­al­ism has cap­tured a com­bi­na­tion of an overe­d­u­cat­ed class with more desire for sta­tus than intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty along with men­tal­ly ill indi­vid­u­als who in the 1990s might have joined some apo­lit­i­cal sub­cul­ture instead of becom­ing pas­sion­ate about race and gen­der issues.” Very long and insight­ful arti­cle (9,000ish words)
  7. Sur­vey: One-third of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents have expe­ri­enced anti­semitism (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News): “…the most com­mon form of anti­semitism was offen­sive com­ments online. Only 1% of stu­dents were vic­tims of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence, and only 1% were threat­ened with vio­lence. In all, the sur­vey found 43% of Jew­ish col­lege stu­dents had expe­ri­enced and/or wit­nessed anti­se­mit­ic activ­i­ty in the past year. Among those who wit­nessed it, the most com­mon expe­ri­ence was see­ing swastikas around cam­pus or van­dal­ism to Jew­ish fra­ter­ni­ties, soror­i­ties and cul­tur­al build­ings.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 165.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 320

deli­cious news nuggets of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to thought­ful Chris­tians and peo­ple con­nect­ed to Stan­ford

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

This is vol­ume 320, which is 28 + 26.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Mis­takes We Can­not Make Again (David French, The Dis­patch): “…if peo­ple of faith are to be con­cerned about jus­tice (and they are!), then jus­tice is rarely more imme­di­ate and impor­tant than when con­fronting both the scourge of crime and the tragedy of excess enforce­ment and mass incar­cer­a­tion.”
  2. A Cog in the Col­lege Admis­sions Scan­dal Speaks Out (Bil­ly Witz, New York Times): “Van­de­mo­er, unlike the oth­ers accused in the plot, did not per­son­al­ly gain in the trans­ac­tions. He hand­ed checks total­ing $770,000 from Singer to Stan­ford devel­op­ment offi­cers, who planned to use the mon­ey for new boats.… So as he told his sto­ry to Stanford’s inves­ti­ga­tors, he won­dered why no one had ever come to him when the indict­ments came down, not­ing that even fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors had acknowl­edged he did not enrich him­self from the scheme. It rein­forced the notion that he was sim­ply an asset — a name­less, expend­able cog in a cor­po­ra­tion with a $29 bil­lion endow­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Stan­ford does not come off look­ing good at all.
  3. Stan­ford stu­dents are more like­ly to wear masks on bicy­cles than hel­mets (Maxwell Mey­er, Stan­ford Review): “In April of this year, I wit­nessed some­thing on the Stan­ford cam­pus that will be seared into my mem­o­ry for­ev­er: a stu­dent on a bicy­cle, wear­ing flip-flops, Air­Pods in ear, going the wrong way through a round­about in an active con­struc­tion zone, with no hel­met. But like any good fol­low­er of sci­ence, the stu­dent was wear­ing a dis­pos­able blue face mask — for safe­ty, I guess.” Should he desire to, Mey­er will become a well-known nation­al com­men­ta­tor some­day. He’s quite good.
  4. Why I Am a Con­spir­a­cy The­o­rist (Hans Boers­ma, First Things): “When rulers man­date vac­cine pass­ports and estab­lish elab­o­rate elec­tron­ic sys­tems to police com­pli­ance, it doesn’t take a great deal of imag­i­na­tion to see how the same sys­tem might be used—and in the eyes of many should be used—to reg­u­late car­bon emis­sions, expen­di­tures, and even opin­ions. After all, it’s not just the coro­n­avirus that is dan­ger­ous. So are cli­mate change, social inequal­i­ty, and cer­tain moral and reli­gious con­vic­tions. Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly, trav­el­ing from vac­cine pass­ports to a social cred­it system—the kind that Chi­na already has in place—takes no time at all.… This is not an argu­ment against vac­ci­na­tion per se. It is an argu­ment to take con­spir­a­cy theorists—David fore­most among them—seriously.” The author is an Angli­can the­olo­gian.
  5. The Pub­lic Con­tin­ues to Under­es­ti­mate COVID’s Age Dis­crim­i­na­tion (David Wal­lace-Wells, NY Mag­a­zine): “After 18 months of pub­lic-health guid­ance pro­mot­ing uni­ver­sal vig­i­lance, I think hard­ly any Amer­i­can has a clear view of just how dra­mat­ic these dif­fer­en­tials are. All else being equal, an unvac­ci­nat­ed 66-year old is about 30 times more like­ly to die, giv­en a con­firmed case, than an unvac­ci­nat­ed 36-year-old, and some­one over 85 is over 10,000 times more at risk of dying than a child under 10.… a vac­ci­nat­ed 80-year-old has about the same mor­tal­i­ty risk as an unvac­ci­nat­ed 50-year-old, and an unvac­ci­nat­ed 30-year-old has a low­er risk than a vac­ci­nat­ed 45-year-old.”
  6. Inside the Church That Preach­es ‘Wives Need to Be Led with a Firm Hand’ (Sarah Stanko­rb, Vice): “Moth­er Kirk can be a joy­ous, faith­ful com­mu­ni­ty. But the con­ser­v­a­tive con­gre­ga­tion also is at odds with Moscow’s more lib­er­al pop­u­la­tion (sur­round­ing Latah coun­ty vot­ed for Pres­i­dent Biden in 2020). Depend­ing upon whom you ask, the town either hosts a Calvin­ist utopia or a patri­ar­chal cult in which women must sub­mit or face dis­ci­pline at home and at church. At the cen­ter of it all is noto­ri­ous­ly con­tro­ver­sial Dou­glas Wil­son, the fire­brand pas­tor who has been pre­sid­ing over his Moth­er Kirk fief­dom for more than 40 years.” Many of the details in this sto­ry are very bad.
    • A Taste of Novem­ber in the Air (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Inci­den­tal­ly, in case you are curi­ous, I haven’t read the Vice piece because I did read the ques­tions that the writer sent to Nan­cy and to me while ‘research­ing,’ and the said ques­tions were all more loaded than the entrees at Tater’s, Home of the Grand Stuffed Pota­to Buf­fet. Way too many bacon bits.… If you read any­thing that unset­tles you, and you would like par­tic­u­lar answers to spe­cif­ic ques­tions, we have made them read­i­ly avail­able. On the top of this page, over to the right, we have a box called Crit­i­cal Ques­tions.” Wilson’s response to the Vice piece. 
  7. Unpop­ulism (David Leon­hardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick, New York Times): “In elite cir­cles, includ­ing Capi­tol Hill, peo­ple often mis­un­der­stand Amer­i­can pub­lic opin­ion in a spe­cif­ic way. They imag­ine that the medi­an vot­er resem­bles a type of polit­i­cal mod­er­ate who is quite com­mon in those elite cir­cles — some­body who is social­ly lib­er­al and fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive.… In the rest of the coun­try, how­ev­er, this ide­o­log­i­cal com­bi­na­tion is not so com­mon, polls show. If any­thing, more Amer­i­cans can accu­rate­ly be described as the oppo­site — social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive and eco­nom­i­cal­ly lib­er­al. That’s true across racial groups, includ­ing among Black and His­pan­ic vot­ers.” Not pay­walled.

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 a com­pelling series of arti­cles on Chi­na by a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins (who also hap­pens to be a Stan­ford grad): China’s Mas­ter Plan: A Glob­al Mil­i­tary Threat, China’s Mas­ter Plan: Export­ing an Ide­ol­o­gy, China’s Mas­ter Plan: A World­wide Web of Insti­tu­tions and China’s Mas­ter Plan: How The West Can Fight Back (Hal Brand, Bloomberg). The mon­ey quote from the sec­ond arti­cle: “If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democ­ra­cy, China’s lead­ers crave a world that is safe for author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” First shared in vol­ume 156.

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 316

an unusu­al den­si­ty of thought­ful arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex

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 316, which is cool because leg­endary Stan­ford CS pro­fes­sor Don Knuth wrote a book called 3:16 Bible Texts Illu­mi­nat­ed in which he ana­lyzes every chap­ter 3 verse 16 in the Bible as a means of bring­ing his aca­d­e­m­ic exper­tise to bear upon his faith.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Curse of Ham: Get­ting It Hor­ri­bly Wrong (Stephen Le Feu­vre, The Gospel Coali­tion Africa): “In bib­li­cal Hebrew, the name ‘Cush’ seems to mean ‘Ethiopi­an’ or ‘black­ness’. Black African nations seem­ing­ly devel­oped from the off­spring of Cush. But that is exact­ly where the so-called curse of Ham is mis­ap­plied. The curse nev­er fell on Ham or on Cush. For what­ev­er rea­son, not tru­ly giv­en in the text, it fell on Canaan. In Gen­e­sis 9:25 Noah pours out his anger, ‘Cursed be Canaan!’ There is no record of a bib­li­cal curse put on the descen­dants of Cush or the nations of Africa.”
    1. A slight­ly old­er arti­cle that I’m shar­ing this week for obvi­ous rea­sons. If you’ve recent­ly heard the phrase “Curse of Canaan” or “Curse of Ham” this arti­cle will help you sort out what it means.
  2. Why the UN’s Dire Cli­mate Change Report Is Ded­i­cat­ed to an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Houghton, who died of com­pli­ca­tions relat­ed to COVID-19 in 2020 at the age of 88, was the chief edi­tor of the first three IPCC reports and an ear­ly, influ­en­tial leader call­ing for action on cli­mate change. His con­cerns about green­house gas­es, ris­ing tem­per­a­ture aver­ages, dying coral reefs, blis­ter­ing heat waves, and increas­ing­ly extreme weath­er were informed by his train­ing at as atmos­pher­ic physi­cist and his com­mit­ment to sci­ence. They also come out of his evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of God, the bib­li­cal accounts of humanity’s rela­tion­ship to cre­ation, and what it means for a Chris­t­ian to fol­low Christ.”
  3. A clus­ter of arti­cles about rela­tion­ships and sex:
    • Can Chris­t­ian Sin­gles Thrive? (Anna Broad­way, Plough): “The glob­al church has at least eighty-five mil­lion more women than men among adults thir­ty or old­er; the US church has twen­ty-five mil­lion more women. Even if some of those women have or find spous­es out­side the faith, that leaves mil­lions who can’t ever mar­ry – a real­i­ty the church has yet to face. Instead, most Chris­tians I met around the world treat­ed het­ero­sex­u­al mar­riage as the pri­ma­ry nar­ra­tive axis in life.”
    • Is Noth­ing Sacred? Reli­gion and Sex (Dou­glas T. Ken­rick, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “High­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple often wait many years past puber­ty to set­tle down, as they delay start­ing a fam­i­ly for up to a decade while attend­ing col­lege and grad­u­ate school. Those indi­vid­u­als do not want strong pro­hi­bi­tions against pre­mar­i­tal sex­u­al­i­ty and birth con­trol because it would mean they’d need to remain celi­bate for many years, and com­plete­ly sup­press their post-puber­tal sex­u­al urges until they get their Ph.D., M.D., or law degree, and then wait a lit­tle longer until they find a part­ner with whom to set­tle down. Wee­den has sug­gest­ed that the links between reli­gion and repro­duc­tive strat­e­gy account for many of the heat­ed moral con­flicts between the reli­gious right and the irre­li­gious aca­d­e­m­ic elit­ists on the left.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of social psy­chol­o­gy at Ari­zona State and I think this is very insight­ful.
    • The Prob­lem With Being Cool About Sex (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “Yet here is the conun­drum fac­ing fem­i­nist writ­ers: Our enlight­ened values—less stig­ma regard­ing unwed moth­ers, the accep­tance of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty, greater eco­nom­ic free­dom for women, the avail­abil­i­ty of con­tra­cep­tion, and the embrace of con­sent culture—haven’t trans­lat­ed into any­thing like a par­adise of guilt-free fun.” A very non-Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive that unex­pect­ed­ly aligns with impor­tant Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions at a few points.
  4. Why Poet­ry Is So Cru­cial Right Now (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Both poet­ry and prayer remind us that there is more to say about real­i­ty than can be said in words though, in both, we use words to try to glimpse what is beyond words. And they both make space to name our deep­est long­ings, lamen­ta­tions, and loves.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a NYT colum­nist. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  5. When Migrants Come Knock­ing (Edmund Wald­stein, Plough): “The nation-state com­bines the worst fea­tures of polit­i­cal and impe­r­i­al com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the advan­tages of a small com­mu­ni­ty found­ed in friend­ship and mutu­al trust among cit­i­zens actu­al­ly liv­ing a com­mon life, but pre­serves the com­mu­nal ego­ism and hatred of out­siders typ­i­cal of such small com­mu­ni­ties. It lacks the capa­cious­ness and abil­i­ty to unite many nations typ­i­cal of ancient empires, but has all of their mil­i­tarism and libido dom­i­nan­di.” A wide-rang­ing Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on refugees; rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Why I Vot­ed For the Athe­ist Pres­i­dent of Harvard’s Chap­lain Group (Pete Williamson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Har­vard has no ‘chief chap­lain,’ and the pres­i­dent of the Har­vard Chap­lains does not direct spir­i­tu­al life on cam­pus. We are a decen­tral­ized, non­hier­ar­chi­cal com­mu­ni­ty of inde­pen­dent chap­lain­cies, with about 40 chap­lains span­ning rough­ly 25 denom­i­na­tions, orga­ni­za­tions, tra­di­tions, and reli­gions.… Chap­lain pres­i­dents are cho­sen not to reflect whose tra­di­tion is ascen­dant, nor as a reward to the most influ­en­tial chap­lain. They are not an indi­ca­tor of a bold new vision for the Har­vard Chap­lains.”
  7. A Third Par­ty Won’t Save Us (Alexan­der H. Cohen, Per­sua­sion): “It’s true that some third par­ties have his­tor­i­cal­ly bro­ken the mold, notably in the pre-Civ­il War era. The Repub­li­can Par­ty itself began as an insur­gent, anti-slav­ery third par­ty. But the rules have changed. The Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties have been in pow­er so long that they have con­scious­ly designed a sys­tem that pro­tects their dom­i­nance and dis­cour­ages the orga­ni­za­tion of new third par­ties.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Clark­son Uni­ver­si­ty.

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 Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 315

some extra­or­di­nar­i­ly inter­est­ing arti­cles this week — high­ly rec­om­mend­ed

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Ian McE­wan ‘dubi­ous’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 312

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.

312 is an idoneal num­ber (which appar­ent­ly there are only 65, 66 or 67 of — it’s wild how in math you can prove things that seem total­ly impos­si­ble to prove).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Bere­ans Had No Bibles: Re-envi­sion­ing Acts 17 (Grif­fin Gulledge, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The Bere­ans had no Bibles. It was rare for aver­age folks in the ear­ly church to have an indi­vid­ual copy of the Scrip­tures. Indeed, it wasn’t until the Ref­or­ma­tion era that mass pro­duc­tion of God’s Word was even pos­si­ble. What they had instead was a community—in this case the synagogue—which had a col­lec­tion of writ­ings we know as the Old Tes­ta­ment.”
  2. How Big Tech Tar­gets Faith Groups for Cen­sor­ship (Joshua D. Hold­en­ried, Real Clear Reli­gion): “Most tech com­pa­nies’ user agree­ments ban con­tent that dis­crim­i­nates on the basis of reli­gion, yet their poli­cies enable them to engage in such dis­crim­i­na­tion them­selves.”
    • That is a very suc­cinct way to express the hypocrisy. Put that sen­tence in your pock­et — you will have occa­sion to use it more than you’d like in the future.
  3. Becer­ra and Biden Betray Med­ical Pro­fes­sion­als Being Forced to Assist in Abor­tions (Roger Sev­eri­no, Nation­al Review):  “The facts were stun­ning in their clar­i­ty, the vic­tim was extreme­ly cred­i­ble and sym­pa­thet­ic, and the vio­la­tor remained entire­ly cal­lous and unre­pen­tant. The UVMMC mat­ter was the most open and shut con­science case in over a decade. I say was, because on Fri­day, the DOJ qui­et­ly, and vol­un­tar­i­ly, dis­missed the case. No admis­sion of guilt, no injunc­tion, no cor­rec­tive action, no set­tle­ment, no noth­ing.”
  4. Relat­ed to health care:
    • Mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty lands man in Hawaii men­tal hos­pi­tal (Jen­nifer Sin­co Kelle­her, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Instead, against Spriestersbach’s protests that he wasn’t Castle­ber­ry, he was even­tu­al­ly com­mit­ted to the Hawaii State Hos­pi­tal. ‘Yet, the more Mr. Spriesters­bach vocal­ized his inno­cence by assert­ing that he is not Mr. Castle­ber­ry, the more he was declared delu­sion­al and psy­chot­ic by the H.S.H. staff and doc­tors and heav­i­ly med­icat­ed… despite his con­tin­u­al denial of being Mr. Castle­ber­ry and pro­vid­ing all of his rel­e­vant iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and places where he was locat­ed dur­ing Mr. Castleberry’s court appear­ances, no one would believe him or take any mean­ing­ful steps to ver­i­fy his iden­ti­ty and deter­mine that what Mr. Spriesters­bach was telling the truth – he was not Mr. Castle­ber­ry.’ No one believed him — not even his var­i­ous pub­lic defend­ers — until a hos­pi­tal psy­chi­a­trist final­ly lis­tened.”
    • Dance Till We Die (Ari Schul­man, The New Atlantis): “Covid secu­ri­ty the­ater is when we claim our actions are aimed at fight­ing Covid, but actu­al­ly part of our moti­va­tion is just to give the impres­sion that we’re fight­ing Covid. Gen­uine­ly fight­ing Covid may or may not be one of our goals too, but what makes the­ater the­ater is that per­for­mance is one of our goals.”
      • Pro­vides an inter­est­ing defense of wise secu­ri­ty the­ater while also absolute­ly slam­ming what we got in its place.
    • Adum­bra­tions Of Adu­canum­ab (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I wor­ry that peo­ple are going to come away from this with some con­clu­sion like ‘wow, the FDA seemed real­ly unpre­pared to han­dle COVID.’ No. It’s not that spe­cif­ic. Every sin­gle thing the FDA does is like this. Every sin­gle hour of every sin­gle day the FDA does things exact­ly this stu­pid and destruc­tive, and the only rea­son you nev­er hear about the oth­ers is because they’re about some dis­ease with a name like Schmoe’s Syn­drome and a few hun­dred cas­es nation­wide instead of some­thing big and media-wor­thy like coro­n­avirus. I am a doc­tor and some­times I have to deal with the Schmoe’s Syn­dromes of the world and every f@$king time there is some sto­ry about the FDA doing some­thing exact­ly this awful and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive.”
    • We Walk Among You (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “I do not want my men­tal ill­ness to be accept­ed by strangers. I hate it and I hate myself for hav­ing it. Men­tal ill­ness is not an expres­sion of the beau­ty of every indi­vid­ual who has it but the most ugly ele­ment of their most ugly selves.… The worst part of this car­i­ca­ture of kind­ness towards the men­tal­ly ill may seem con­tra­dic­to­ry: it extin­guish­es the capac­i­ty for mer­cy. For only the guilty can be shown mer­cy; that is the most essen­tial qual­i­ty of mer­cy, its only mean­ing. And I am guilty. Many of us who suf­fer from men­tal ill­ness are. Per­haps some­day our cul­ture will mature enough to under­stand that what we need is not to be absolved, nor to be exon­er­at­ed, nor to be excused, but to be for­giv­en.”
  5. Anato­my of a Bad Idea: Affir­ma­tive Con­sent (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “So you get this huge pol­i­cy change at hun­dreds of uni­ver­si­ties that does effec­tive­ly noth­ing to stop sex­u­al assault, infringes on the rights of the accused, and func­tions as a make-work pro­gram for over­paid ‘con­sul­tants’ and lib­er­al writ­ers, all while most peo­ple qui­et­ly rec­og­nize that nobody fol­lows it, and sup­port for that emp­ty pol­i­cy is enforced with mis­sion­ary zeal not by true believ­ers but almost entire­ly by peo­ple who are too scared to ask whether any of it makes any sense.”
    • My hot take? “No means no” and “yes means yes” are both pale imi­ta­tions of “I do means I do” — and until we move back from con­sent to covenant we’re going to have lots of need­less suf­fer­ing.
  6. On Hun­gary
    1. Hun­gary is No Mod­el for the Amer­i­can Right (David French, The Dis­patch): “If you’ve been a con­ser­v­a­tive for any length of time, you’ve like­ly had what I like to call the ‘Swe­den con­ver­sa­tion,’ or per­haps the ‘Den­mark debate.’ A social­ist-lean­ing pro­gres­sive friend will wax elo­quent about the Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries that com­bine high stan­dards of liv­ing with gen­er­ous wel­fare states and ask, ‘Why not here?’ .… Well, Hun­gary is the new right’s Den­mark. Except that Hun­gary is a much worse place to live than Den­mark.”
    2. “My favorite things Hun­gary” — my revi­sion­ist take (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Way back in 2011, when I was vis­it­ing Hun­gary, I did a post in typ­i­cal MR style: My Favorite Things Hun­gary. I had no par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal point in mind, and indeed the cur­rent dis­putes over Hun­gary did not quite exist back then. Nonethe­less, if you sur­vey the list, just about every one of my favorites list­ed end­ed up leav­ing Hun­gary. The one excep­tion, as far as I can tell, is film direc­tor Béla Tarr, but he is a crit­ic of both nation­al­ism and Orban. All the rest left Hun­gary.”
    3. Unpa­tri­ot­ic Con­ser­v­a­tivesTM 2021 (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I can’t think of any­thing in recent mem­o­ry that has been more reveal­ing of where we Amer­i­cans actu­al­ly stand polit­i­cal­ly than Tuck­er Carlson’s vis­it to Hun­gary. As I wrote in The Spec­ta­tor a cou­ple of days ago, Hun­gary is a coun­try with lots of trou­bles, includ­ing cor­rup­tion. I won’t go once again into list­ing all the rea­sons why it’s impor­tant for West­ern right-of-cen­ter peo­ple to come here and learn from the Hun­gar­i­ans — I’ve been blog­ging about that all sum­mer; I invite you to go through the archives here — so I’m going to try to boil it down.”
      • Dreher has a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than most Amer­i­can com­men­ta­tors, and I include him because his argu­ment is inter­est­ing. I tru­ly know almost noth­ing about Orban or Hun­gar­i­an pol­i­tics — but I am intrigued by how divi­sive Orban is in Amer­i­ca.

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 305

more sub­lists than nor­mal

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.

305 is appar­ent­ly the 5th ‘hexag­o­nal prism num­ber’, which total­ly sounds made up and I am slight­ly skep­ti­cal of. This is because 305 = (n + 1)(3n2 + 3n + 1) where n=4 (pre­sum­ably the first hexag­o­nal prism num­ber is 1, when n=0).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Fad­ing of For­give­ness (Tim Keller, Car­dus): “In oth­er words, we no longer ground our val­ues in the sacred. We sim­ply treat the val­ues them­selves as sacred.… When the moral norms are detached from faith in a just God, it detach­es them also from faith in a mer­ci­ful and for­giv­ing God. In such a ‘sec­u­lar reli­gion,’ devi­a­tion from norms is sim­ply unfor­give­able.” Full of insights.
  2. Lov­ing the Foreigners—Even When They Have a Dead­ly Dis­ease (Hwee Hwee Tan, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While migrant work­ers had long lived chal­leng­ing lives in Sin­ga­pore, it was their unique vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty dur­ing the cir­cuit-break­er peri­od that real­ly woke up local Chris­tians to the need to help them—in both the short and long term.”
  3. A cri­sis inside Amer­i­ca’s largest evan­gel­i­cal denom­i­na­tion:
    • Rus­sell Moore’s Warn­ings Should Bring a Reck­on­ing (David French, The Dis­patch): “Chris­tians, let me ask you a ques­tion. When the #MeToo move­ment launched… did you think, ‘Stop obsess­ing over scan­dal. Most mem­bers of the media and most folks in Hol­ly­wood are good peo­ple’? Or did you think that mul­ti­ple pow­er­ful Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions were beset with deep cul­tur­al and spir­i­tu­al prob­lems? .… #MeToo did reveal moral rot. But let’s flip it all around. When you heard about cor­rup­tion and sex­u­al mis­con­duct at America’s largest Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty, what did you think? What did you think when you read about the sex­u­al scan­dal at Hill­song or when you learned about Ravi Zacharias’ record of abuse and his ministry’s ter­ri­ble mis­treat­ment of whistle­blow­ers? Did you pause to con­sid­er the larg­er impli­ca­tions of a decade of sex­u­al pre­da­tion at one of America’s largest Chris­t­ian camps or the camp’s efforts to intim­i­date and coerce vic­tims into silence?” I don’t often tip my hand, but FYI Moore and French are two of my favorite evan­gel­i­cal cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tors. If they ever agree on some­thing, you can be pret­ty sure that is my posi­tion as well.
    • The Scan­dal Rock­ing the Evan­gel­i­cal World (Pete Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “And the rot that has been so pow­er­ful­ly and so painful­ly exposed by Rus­sell Moore is not an indict­ment of Jesus any more than the fail­ures of the reli­gious author­i­ties in first-cen­tu­ry Pales­tine were. A the­olo­gian recent­ly remind­ed me that the Church is not the hope of the world; its pur­pose is to be a wit­ness to the hope of the world, even if that wit­ness is often imper­fect. But those of us of the Chris­t­ian faith do seem to be over­do­ing the imper­fect part.”
    • Where Did All the Evan­gel­i­cal Prophets Go? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The god­less­ness of the left maps very clean­ly onto the evan­gel­i­cal church’s radar because its insti­tu­tions and lead­ers are watch­ing for it all the time, but the god­less­ness of the right is obvi­ous­ly not yet some­thing some­one can talk about con­fi­dent­ly, expect­ing their denom­i­na­tion or eccle­si­as­ti­cal sup­port sys­tem to back them on.” Some good insights here.
  4. The future of Amer­i­ca:
    • A calm per­spec­tive: Are We Des­tined for a Trump Coup in 2024? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Then keep in mind, too, that in the event of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024, Biden, not Trump, will enjoy the presidency’s pow­ers; Kamala Har­ris, not Mike Pence, will pre­side over the elec­toral count; and Trump will be four years old­er, unlike­ly to run a fourth time, and there­fore some­what less intim­i­dat­ing in defeat.”
    • Alarmed from the left: 9/11 and 1/6 (Tim­o­thy Sny­der, Sub­stack): “The sce­nario then goes like this. The Repub­li­cans win back the House and Sen­ate in 2022, in part thanks to vot­er sup­pres­sion. The Repub­li­can can­di­date in 2024 los­es the pop­u­lar vote by sev­er­al mil­lion and the elec­toral vote by the mar­gin of a few states. State leg­is­la­tures, claim­ing fraud, alter the elec­toral count vote. The House and Sen­ate accept that altered count. The los­ing can­di­date becomes the pres­i­dent. We no longer have ‘demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment.’ And peo­ple are angry. No one is seek­ing to hide that this is the plan.”  The author is a his­to­ri­an at Yale.
    • Alarmed from the right: Our Increas­ing­ly Unrec­og­niz­able Civ­i­liza­tion (Mark Steyn, Imprim­is): “…one notices that Amer­i­ca is far­ther down this road than any oth­er coun­try in the West­ern world. In oth­er words, at this moment of cri­sis for West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, or for what we used to call Chris­ten­dom, the lead­ing coun­try of the free world is pulling the wrong way.” Sent my way by a friend of the min­istry.
  5. A few thoughts on depres­sion (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “For some rea­son, human com­pa­ny helps. In fact, it is the sin­gle thing that helps the most. But not the kind of com­pa­ny a sad per­son needs. What a depressed per­son needs is sim­ply to talk to peo­ple, not about their prob­lems or their neg­a­tive thoughts or their depres­sion, but about any­thing else — music, ani­mals, sci­ence. The most help­ful top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion, I’ve found, is absur­di­ty — just talk­ing about utter­ly ridicu­lous things, gross things, vul­gar offen­sive things, bizarre things. Shared activ­i­ties, like going on a hike or play­ing sports, are OK, but talk­ing is much, much more impor­tant.”
  6. Once a Bas­tion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Iden­ti­ty Cri­sis (Michael Pow­ell, New York Times): “I got the sense it was more impor­tant for A.C.L.U. staff to iden­ti­fy with clients and pro­gres­sive caus­es than to stand on prin­ci­ple,” he said in a recent inter­view. “Lib­er­als are leav­ing the First Amend­ment behind.”
  7. Some snap­shots of acad­e­mia:
    • The Native Schol­ar Who Wasn’t (Sarah Viren, New York Times): “Of the 1,500 uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tors list­ed as Native Amer­i­can at the time, said Bill Cross, who helped found the Amer­i­can Indian/Alaska Native Pro­fes­sors Asso­ci­a­tion, “we’re look­ing real­is­ti­cal­ly at one-third of those being Indi­ans.”
    • Gripped by ‘Din­ner Par­ty-gate,’ Yale Law Con­fronts a Ven­omous Divide (Sarah Lyell and Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “At the law school, the episode has exposed bit­ter divi­sions in a top-ranked insti­tu­tion strug­gling to adapt at a moment of roil­ing social change. Stu­dents reg­u­lar­ly attack their pro­fes­sors, and one anoth­er, for their schol­ar­ship, pro­fes­sion­al choic­es and per­ceived polit­i­cal views. In a place awash in rumor and anony­mous accu­sa­tions, almost no one would speak on the record.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 303

top­ics range from the pan­dem­ic to a Bib­li­cal view of UFOs

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 303rd edi­tion, which is fun because 303 is a lucky num­ber, a cat­e­go­ry of num­bers that gives us insight into prime num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Dr. Fran­cis Collins Dis­cuss­es The Com­plex­i­ties Of Herd Immu­ni­ty (Col­bert Report, YouTube): sev­en min­utes. Dr. Collins is a fel­low believ­er and emi­nent sci­en­tist. He flat-out shares his tes­ti­mo­ny! Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  2. Why I Did­n’t “Just Bake the Cake” (Jack Phillips, First Things): “My com­mit­ment to God and to the truth of a book I believe to be his holy Word is the defin­ing premise of my life, the focus of my faith, and the guid­ing direc­tive for my actions. If you ask me to sep­a­rate all of that from my work, from my deci­sions, from my art … I sim­ply can’t do that. Not just won’t—can’t. It’s like ask­ing a con­trac­tor to build a great build­ing, but first remove the foun­da­tion.”
  3. It’s Time to Devel­op a Bib­li­cal Ufol­o­gy (Kyle Beshears, The­ol­o­gy in the Mid­dle): “What is the rela­tion­ship, if any, between UAP phe­nom­e­na and Chris­t­ian angelolo­gies and demonolo­gies? How does the doc­trine of the ima­go Dei fit in? Can our the­ol­o­gy of the fall address extrater­res­tri­als? What if they arrive deny­ing the lord­ship of Christ (Gal 1:8; 1 John 2:22)? What if they arrive pro­claim­ing the lord­ship of Christ (Rom 10:9)?”
  4. The Myth of the Val­ue-Neu­tral Mar­ket (Mark Movs­esyian, First Things): “The neu­tral mar­ket does not cre­ate tol­er­ance for diverse views; rather, it’s the oth­er way around. Tol­er­ance for diverse views cre­ates the neu­tral mar­ket; when tol­er­ance dis­ap­pears, the mar­ket becomes as polar­ized as every­thing else.”
  5. The future of war is bizarre and ter­ri­fy­ing (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “The world may yet explode into anoth­er WW2-style con­fla­gra­tion, or the kind of nuclear holo­caust we feared dur­ing the Cold War. If so, then my bet is that drones will dom­i­nate that bat­tle­field. But most of the mod­ern mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies led them­selves to a very dif­fer­ent kind of great-pow­er war — a war of con­stant snip­ing and harass­ment. Assas­sin drones, cyber­at­tacks, info ops, and bioweapons raise the pos­si­bil­i­ty of nev­er-end­ing low-grade attacks that are below the thresh­old of mas­sive retal­i­a­tion.”
  6. For Cos­mopoli­tan Chris­tians, Sec­u­lar Approval Is a Com­mon Temp­ta­tion (Justin E. Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We need Chris­tians who aren’t smit­ten with the cul­ture or mere­ly pro­fi­cient at regur­gi­tat­ing its litur­gy. We need believ­ers who can wres­tle with sec­u­lar thought, affirm­ing the mer­its and oppos­ing the lies. Chris­tians must be con­fi­dent and dis­tinct­ly Chris­t­ian in our fields—boldly speak­ing up when the emper­or is strid­ing around with no clothes. When change is nec­es­sary, we must cor­rect the mis­takes of our elders by mov­ing clos­er to the Bible, not fur­ther from it.”
  7. Some thoughts about Wuhan:
    • The medi­a’s lab leak fias­co (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “If some­thing is a 70–30 issue but the 30 are keep­ing their heads down, it can look like a 98–2 issue.… There is just more dis­agree­ment and dis­sen­sion than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to peo­ple and speak to them in a more relaxed way. My strong sus­pi­cion is that this is true across domains of exper­tise, and is cre­at­ing a lot of bub­bles of fake con­sen­sus that can become very mis­lead­ing.”
    • Check­ing Facts Even If One Can’t (Zeynep Tufek­ci, Sub­stack): “If any­thing, all this over­reach and hur­ry to declare every­thing a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry or ‘not fol­low­ing the sci­ence’ just helps erode what trust author­i­ties or fact-check­ers may have had in their pro­nounce­ments. Imag­ine that in a few years, we do get some evi­dence that real­ly helps resolve the ques­tion one way or the oth­er, and the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty were indeed able achieve a con­sen­sus of sorts. Who’d believe it after this?”
    • The Con­sid­er­able, If Cir­cum­stan­tial, Evi­dence of a Wuhan Lab Leak (Jim Ger­aghty, Nation­al Review): “Per­haps the least plau­si­ble argu­ment in oppo­si­tion to the lab-leak the­o­ry is that the staff of the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy or oth­er Chi­nese facil­i­ties are just too dili­gent to ever make a con­se­quen­tial mis­take. The orig­i­nal SARS virus had acci­den­tal­ly leaked from the Chi­nese Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy in Bei­jing, part of China’s Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol. Twice.” The com­pi­la­tion of the evi­dence is com­pelling. To use a legal image, if I was a on a jury I’d vote to con­vict unless the oppos­ing coun­sel had some slam dunk argu­ments — and in this sit­u­a­tion the oppos­ing coun­sel is fran­ti­cal­ly try­ing to get the case dis­missed before it comes to court.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). 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 285

anoth­er fair­ly brief 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.

Fun fact: 285 is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares (1+4+9+16…+81).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Will Get to Herd Immu­ni­ty in 2021…One Way or Anoth­er (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “By July it will all be over. The only ques­tion is how many peo­ple have to die between now and then? Youyang Gu, whose pro­jec­tions have been among the most accu­rate, projects that the Unit­ed States will have reached herd immu­ni­ty by July, with about half of the immu­ni­ty com­ing from vac­ci­na­tions and half from infec­tions. Long before we reach herd immu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, the infec­tion and death rates will fall. Gu is pro­ject­ing that by March infec­tions will be half what they are now and by May about one-tenth the cur­rent rate. The drop will catch peo­ple by sur­prise just like the increase. We are not good at expo­nen­tials.” I hope this is right!
    • Relat­ed: Unit­ed King­dom vs Unit­ed States Vac­cine Fight (Poli­math, Sub­stack): “The Unit­ed States has vac­ci­nat­ed more indi­vid­u­als by far than any oth­er coun­try in the world. One in four of all COVID vac­ci­na­tions in the world have tak­en place in the Unit­ed States. The three coun­tries that are doing the best per-capi­ta (Israel, the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, and Bahrain) are all incred­i­bly small and dense.” This is short and encour­ag­ing.
  2. Failed Trump Prophe­cies Offer a Les­son in Humil­i­ty (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “The failed prophe­cies of Don­ald Trump’s reelec­tion may have dam­aged the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the US inde­pen­dent Charis­mat­ic wing of evan­gel­i­cal­ism more than any event since the tel­e­van­ge­list scan­dals of the 1980s. They have led some out­siders to crit­i­cize Chris­tian­i­ty itself and right­ly call us to introspection.“Keener is one of my favorite NT schol­ars.
  3. Two Worlds: So Much Pros­per­i­ty, So Much Skep­ti­cism (Mor­gan Housel, Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “I want to tell you two of the biggest eco­nom­ic sto­ries that aren’t get­ting enough atten­tion. One is that house­hold finances might be in the best shape they’ve ever been in. Ever. That might sound crazy, and it’s easy to over­look because of the sec­ond sto­ry: Covid has dumped kerosene on wealth inequal­i­ty in ways we’ve yet to ful­ly grasp.”
  4. The Case For Wood­en Pews (Yuval Levin, Deseret Mag­a­zine): “It is not exact­ly a cri­sis of belief in the teach­ings of tra­di­tion­al reli­gion [that under­mines faith], but rather a cri­sis of con­fi­dence in the insti­tu­tions that claim to embody them. In oth­er words, Amer­i­cans aren’t los­ing their faith in God. Eighty-sev­en per­cent of the pub­lic expressed belief in God last year in Gallup’s fig­ures, which is rough­ly the lev­el poll­sters have found for many decades. What Amer­i­cans do have trou­ble believ­ing, how­ev­er, is that our insti­tu­tions — our church­es, sem­i­nar­ies, reli­gious schools and char­i­ties — remain capa­ble of form­ing trust­wor­thy peo­ple who actu­al­ly exhib­it the integri­ty they preach.” Sol­id, although the title is mis­lead­ing.
  5. Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign.
  6. What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine.
  7. Rise of the zom­bie ants: why hype is creep­ing into sci­en­tif­ic papers. (Gem­ma Con­roy, Nature Index): “The review found that near­ly half of these stud­ies uncov­ered incon­sis­ten­cies between abstracts and their full text, with 19% cit­ing major dis­crep­an­cies. Two stud­ies cit­ed exam­ples where non-sig­nif­i­cant results were framed in over­ly opti­mistic terms in the abstracts.”

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 A Study Guide For Human Soci­ety, Part 1 (Tan­ner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two meth­ods [for find­ing good his­to­ry books I find use­ful]. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syl­labus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their cours­es.”  First shared in vol­ume 217.

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 274

I’d be hap­py that this is the last week I’ll share “how to think about vot­ing” arti­cles, except next week I’ll have to share elec­tion think­pieces.

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. White Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca built a faith-based safe­ty net. What hap­pens when it’s gone? (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “‘The aver­age Amer­i­can doesn’t real­ize all the things that church­es do to make soci­ety less awful,’ [pro­fes­sor Burge] said. Church­es and oth­er reli­gious groups tutor kids, feed hun­gry peo­ple, shel­ter the home­less and do a great deal of good, often under the radar, he said. As reli­gious groups shrink, those ser­vices could be lost. Burge fears younger Amer­i­cans, in par­tic­u­lar, don’t see orga­nized reli­gion as use­ful. But ‘it’s one of those things where you don’t know what you had till it is gone.’”
  2. The Sins That Cry Out to Heav­en (Eduar­do Andi­no, First Things): “The Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion speaks of four pec­ca­ta cla­man­tia, or sins that cry out to heav­en for vengeance: mur­der, sodomy, oppres­sion of the poor, and defraud­ing work­ers of their wages…. This is not an arbi­trary col­lec­tion of sins.”
  3. Vot­ing & Faith
    • Meet the Evan­gel­i­cals Who Won’t Vote for Trump, Biden, or Any­body at All (Megan Fowler, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Like many Chris­t­ian non­vot­ers before her, she saw the act of cast­ing a bal­lot as a sign of approval for a polit­i­cal pow­er struc­ture that in many ways opposed the way of Christ. She couldn’t do it. If Jesus brought about his king­dom by lay­ing down his rights and spurn­ing polit­i­cal pow­er, Kennedy want­ed to fol­low his exam­ple.”
    • Of Course Evan­gel­i­cals Should Vote for Trump (Paula White-Cain, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve seen [Don­ald Trump] first­hand as a father, a hus­band, a leader, a busi­ness­man and now the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca. I also rec­og­nize most peo­ple have sec­ond­hand infor­ma­tion that mis­char­ac­ter­izes the man I know.”
    • The Chris­t­ian Case for Joe Biden (Josh Dick­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As the Nation­al Faith Engage­ment Direc­tor for the Biden Cam­paign, I spend my days talk­ing to peo­ple of faith about why I believe Joe is the clear moral choice in this elec­tion. But I haven’t always been a Demo­c­rat. Like many Chris­tians, I grew up Repub­li­can.”
    • A Tale of Two Evan­gel­i­calisms (Joel Hall­dorf, Break­ing Ground): “In the sto­ry of Swedish moder­ni­ty, the demo­c­ra­t­ic wel­fare state trans­formed an unjust and elit­ist soci­ety into a more just one. But the found­ing myth of Unit­ed States is not a sto­ry about free­dom through the state, but free­dom from the state.”
  4. On the media:
    • What Do For­eign Cor­re­spon­dents Think of the U.S.? (The New York­er, YouTube): thir­teen min­utes. I found the first half more inter­est­ing than the last half. It picked back up in the last two min­utes.
    • What I Wish My Chris­t­ian Friends Knew About the News Media (Rob Vaughn, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Are my friends wrong to see the main­stream media as rot­ten and rid­den with ‘fake news’? Yes. At least in sig­nif­i­cant ways, they have that wrong. Sure, we make mis­takes. We have blind spots and faulty assump­tions. But many of the crit­i­cisms are off the mark: they mis­un­der­stand what jour­nal­ism is about; they feed a grow­ing sense that there is no agreed upon real­i­ty and set of facts to which we can all refer; and, as a Chris­t­ian I fear they reflect poor­ly on peo­ple who say they love the truth.”
    • My Res­ig­na­tion From The Inter­cept (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “Today I sent my inten­tion to resign from The Inter­cept, the news out­let I co-found­ed in 2013 with Jere­my Scahill and Lau­ra Poitras, as well as from its par­ent com­pa­ny First Look Media. The final, pre­cip­i­tat­ing cause is that The Intercept’s edi­tors, in vio­la­tion of my con­trac­tu­al right of edi­to­r­i­al free­dom, cen­sored an arti­cle I wrote this week, refus­ing to pub­lish it unless I remove all sec­tions crit­i­cal of Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Joe Biden, the can­di­date vehe­ment­ly sup­port­ed by all New-York-based Inter­cept edi­tors involved in this effort at sup­pres­sion.” This is sad. 
    • How The Inter­cept Aban­doned Its Truth-Seek­ing Mission—And Lost Its Best Jour­nal­ist (Zaid Jilani, Quil­lette): “Green­wald is a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure, but my sense of him is that he’s extreme­ly prin­ci­pled. Although he’s unabashed­ly a man of the liberal-Left—having spent years advo­cat­ing for left-wing caus­es from ani­mal rights to anti-war activism—he has devel­oped an impres­sive (some would call it inflex­i­ble) com­mit­ment to what he sees as basic fair­ness. He doesn’t care about the let­ter next to a politician’s name: Green­wald believes every­one in pow­er should be held account­able at all times.”
    • Two Reli­gion Reporters Cov­er Where Faith and Pol­i­tics Meet (Will Dud­ding, New York Times): “I think [reli­gion and pol­i­tics] seem insep­a­ra­ble part­ly because it’s elec­tion sea­son, and as jour­nal­ists we tend to view things through that lens our­selves. For ordi­nary believ­ers, the con­nec­tion is not always so clear. Some peo­ple clear­ly draw a con­nec­tion between their faith and their views on nation­al pol­i­tics; oth­ers def­i­nite­ly don’t. I try to keep that in mind as a reporter and not force every sto­ry into a polit­i­cal frame.”
  5. Lots of Overnight Tragedies, No Overnight Mir­a­cles (Mor­gan Housel, The Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund): “An impor­tant thing that explains a lot of things is that good news takes time but bad news hap­pens instant­ly.” Rec­om­mend­ed by the par­ent of an alum­nus.
  6. Amer­i­cans Have Lost Sight of What ‘Fas­cism’ Means (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “Words mat­ter because they help order our under­stand­ing of pol­i­tics both at home and abroad. If Cot­ton is a fas­cist, then we don’t know what fas­cism is. And if we don’t know what fas­cism is, then we will strug­gle to iden­ti­fy it when it threat­ens mil­lions of lives—which is pre­cise­ly what is hap­pen­ing today in areas under Beijing’s con­trol.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. The man who wants to help you out of debt – at any cost (J Oliv­er Con­roy, The Guardian): “Ram­sey has made clear that he regards peo­ple like me as over-edu­cat­ed, pen­cil-necked idiots. From a finan­cial point of view, I am in some ways his worst night­mare. I have more than $80,000 in stu­dent debt, most of it from a master’s degree in jour­nal­ism. I work at a famous­ly lib­er­al news­pa­per whose colum­nists like to advo­cate for all the sorts of bleed­ing-heart eco­nom­ic poli­cies he hates.” I’m always fas­ci­nat­ed by news­pa­per arti­cles about high-pro­file Chris­tians. 

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 From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed con­se­quences.’” What a wild sto­ry. First shared in vol­ume 204.

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 263

this one is short­er than nor­mal

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. Pan­demics Aren’t New—Just Look at Plagues in the Bible (Karen Engle, Logos): “With coro­n­avirus on everyone’s mind, ques­tions abound of whether the word ‘pan­dem­ic’ appears in the Bible, too. The short answer is no—’pandemic’ is not in the Bible. How­ev­er, the words “plague” and ‘pesti­lence’ are (no less than 122 times) and often ref­er­ence indi­vid­u­als or nations afflict­ed with a ter­ri­ble ill­ness.”
  2. ‘Chris­tian­i­ty Will Have Pow­er’ (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “‘Trump’s an out­sider, like the rest of us,’ he said. ‘We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is. Is he a man of integri­ty? Absolute­ly not,’ he went on. ‘Does he stand up for some of our moral Chris­t­ian val­ues? Yes.’ The guys agreed. ‘I’m not going to say he’s a Chris­t­ian, but he just doesn’t attack us,’ his friend Jason Mul­der said.” Need­less­ly snarky at times, but one of the rare mus­ings on evan­gel­i­cal Trump sup­port in a promi­nent media source that gets a lot of things right.
    • An inter­est­ing counter-per­spec­tive: Chris­tians want pow­er? Sioux Cen­ter push­es back on New York Times sto­ry (Lee Pitts, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Our church small group [in Sioux Cen­ter] is more diverse than my small groups in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. We enjoy the com­pa­ny of three peo­ple from Mex­i­co, a gen­tle­man from Paraguay, a woman from Japan, an engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor from Ghana and a cou­ple orig­i­nal­ly from that exot­ic place called South Car­oli­na (that’s me). In fact, out of our 12-mem­ber small group, only two orig­i­nal­ly hail from North­west Iowa. Mean­while my D.C. small groups fea­tured all upper mid­dle-class White peo­ple most­ly sport­ing advanced degrees and flashy jobs inside the Belt­way. But the stereo­type would reverse that. My Sioux Cen­ter small group should be all White and my D.C. one would sure­ly be full of diver­si­ty, right? Wrong.” This arti­cle doesn’t real­ly rebut many of the reli­gious claims of the NY Times arti­cle, but it does under­cut some of the cul­tur­al ones.
  3. Wok­e­ness: old reli­gion in a new bot­tle (Sean Collins, Spiked): “What we’re see­ing now is an ampli­fi­ca­tion of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that has no out­let. There’s no way to see peo­ple kneel­ing, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or sway­ing while they hold up can­dles, and avoid acknowl­edg­ing that it’s dri­ven by a spir­i­tu­al desire. I per­ceived this when I wrote about Occu­py Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spir­i­tu­al hunger that is man­i­fest­ing itself more vio­lent­ly. Because to the post-Protes­tants, the world is an out­rage and we are all sin­ners.”
  4. How Megachurch­es Spent Coro­n­avirus Relief Funds (Luke Scorziell, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Accord­ing to Vaughn’s account­ing, the church spent 93 per­cent of the mon­ey on pay­roll. The addi­tion­al 7 per­cent went to rent and util­i­ties. The PPP rules say loans will be con­vert­ed to grants if 75 per­cent of the funds are used for pay­roll and the rest for spec­i­fied needs, includ­ing rent and util­i­ties. The mon­ey helped with more than just pay­ing the bills, how­ev­er. Because Palm Valley’s staff didn’t have to wor­ry about their job secu­ri­ty, they were able to focus ful­ly on car­ing for the church in the pan­dem­ic, Vaughn said.”
  5. Abol­ish the Police? Those Who Sur­vived the Chaos in Seat­tle Aren’t So Sure (Nel­lie Bowles, New York Times): “Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own may­or that the protests in his home­town were peace­ful, with ‘a block par­ty atmos­phere.’ But that was not what he saw through the win­dows of his Seat­tle cof­fee shop.”
    • Relat­ed: replac­ing police with social work­ers (Jes­si­ca Crispin, per­son­al blog): “If we do not have police, an armed squadron of men and women asked to inter­vene in sit­u­a­tions we our­selves can­not man­age, whether that be crime, acute men­tal ill­ness, or vio­lence, then who will we turn to in those sit­u­a­tions? One such pro­pos­al is to replace police with social work­ers. But as my friend R. said to me as we dis­cussed these ideas, ‘I don’t think these peo­ple have inter­act­ed with social work­ers.’ ” This is a per­spec­tive I had not heard before.
  6. Injus­tice, Out­rage, and the Prob­lem of Atheod­i­cy (Pub­lic Square): “In a world with­out God, there is no ulti­mate pur­pose in the injus­tice. And there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty of any ulti­mate prov­i­den­tial redemp­tion. It is just raw, rank, irra­tional injus­tice. And so what is the appro­pri­ate reac­tion? Out­rage! (And per­haps also despair.)” The author is a law prof at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego. Also, bear in mind that Pub­lic Square is the Mor­mon equiv­a­lent of First Things.
  7. Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are ‘Com­plete­ly Garbage’ (Steven Levy, Wired): “The major­i­ty of all US tests are com­plete­ly garbage, wast­ed. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reim­burse at the same lev­el, of course they’re going to take every cus­tomer. Because they are mak­ing ridicu­lous mon­ey, and it’s most­ly rich peo­ple that are get­ting access to that. You have to have the reim­burse­ment sys­tem pay a lit­tle bit extra for 24 hours, pay the nor­mal fee for 48 hours, and pay noth­ing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.”

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 Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

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.