Tag: wisdom

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 416

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 416, which is mild­ly inter­est­ing in the fol­low­ing equa­tion: ‑4162+7682 = 416,768 (note the neg­a­tive in front of 4162)

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. To Be Hap­py, Mar­riage Mat­ters More Than Career (David Brooks, New York Times): “My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about mar­riage. Please respect the tru­ism that if you have a great career and a crap­py mar­riage you will be unhap­py, but if you have a great mar­riage and a crap­py career you will be hap­py. Please use your youth­ful years as a chance to have roman­tic rela­tion­ships, so you’ll have some prac­tice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to mar­ry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the mas­ters.”
    • Unlocked. I am sure the com­ments sec­tion on this arti­cle will explode with out­raged New York Times read­ers, but Brooks is cor­rect and obvi­ous­ly so.
    • Relat­ed: He’s The One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “The woman who dis­cards the tra­di­tion­al ‘Men have to ask me’ social norm has a super­pow­er. Just pro­file guys who meet your stan­dards and take the ini­tia­tive, and you gen­er­ate a menu of prime options. Yes, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom says that a woman can sub­tly let a guy know that she likes him. But this over­looks men’s abject clue­ness­ness and timid­i­ty. Instead, be forth­right. Crazy as it seems, earnest­ly telling your first choice, ‘I should be your girl­friend’ will almost nev­er be mis­tak­en for ‘throw­ing your­self’ at a guy.”
      • Caplan’s fol­low-up to his ear­li­er post help­ing guys screen gals. This one helps gals screen guys. Most of his insights ring true to me.
    • Relat­ed: You Don’t Have Plen­ty of Time (Abby Far­son Pratt, Sub­stack): “There’s an odd pre­oc­cu­pa­tion in our cul­ture with ‘readi­ness,’ as if it were a uni­ver­sal truth. But ‘readi­ness’ is nev­er defined. We’re giv­en the vague, unhelp­ful advice to ‘wait until we’re ready’ to get mar­ried or have kids. What would that even mean? How do you know when you’re ‘ready’ for that kind of respon­si­bil­i­ty? You won’t. You’ll nev­er be ready. Aside from choos­ing a good part­ner, there’s no amount of prepa­ra­tion that will make child-rear­ing eas­i­er or smoother or sim­pler. You become ready through the very act of being mar­ried and rais­ing chil­dren. Lord will­ing, this is the time in your life to rise to the occa­sion and put fears of ‘readi­ness’ to rest.”
  2. Does God Con­trol His­to­ry? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Indeed, while allow­ing for the com­plex­i­ty of debates about what God wills as opposed to what God mere­ly per­mits, prov­i­den­tial­ism is basi­cal­ly inescapable once you posit a divin­i­ty who made the world and acts in his­to­ry. Which is why prov­i­den­tial­ist inter­pre­ta­tions endure among the most lib­er­al Chris­tians as well as the most tra­di­tion­al, with both pro­gres­sive and con­ser­v­a­tive the­olo­gies jus­ti­fy­ing them­selves through read­ings of the ‘signs of the times,’ the sea­sons of his­to­ry, the action of the Holy Spir­it and the like.”
    • Unlocked. I real­ly liked this one.
  3. What Rise of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Jesse Smith, Cur­rent): “What has surged in recent years isn’t Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism so much as the rejec­tion of reli­gion in the pub­lic square. The per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans report­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion has sky­rock­et­ed in the 21st cen­tu­ry, from lit­tle over 5% in 1990 to near­ly 30% in 2021. Most of these peo­ple belonged to a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty at some point. Many did not part on the best of terms and would be hap­py to see the sta­tus of Amer­i­can reli­gion tak­en down a peg.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege.
  4. The Man Who Knows What the World’s Rich­est Peo­ple Want (and How To Get It) (Maxwell Stra­chan, Vice): “To Flem­ings, the con­cept that the world’s rich­est peo­ple are con­spir­ing togeth­er to rig the game in their favor seems fool­ish. He believes the clos­est the rich have come to assem­bling as an illu­mi­nati-like clan is in St. Barts between Christ­mas and New Year’s Eve, because he’s been there. ‘I got­ta tell you, some of the rich­est peo­ple in the world are strug­gling to talk to a girl,’ he said. ‘There is no way these peo­ple are lead­ing some fuck­ing glob­al con­spir­a­cy.’ ”
    • Over­all quite inter­est­ing. From back in June.
  5. Lega­cy admis­sions are cru­cial to America’s high­er edu­ca­tion dom­i­nance (Jamie Beat­on, The Hill): “Oxford was found­ed in 1096. Despite its sto­ried his­to­ry, it has a far small­er dona­tion cul­ture and less engaged alum­ni. Its biggest donors — among them Bill Gates and Steven Schwarz­man — didn’t even attend the uni­ver­si­ty. It has no lega­cy admis­sions, and at points in its his­to­ry, it has strug­gled finan­cial­ly. In con­trast, Har­vard cul­ti­vates an amaz­ing­ly engaged alum­ni com­mu­ni­ty with fre­quent, well-attend­ed reunions, advi­so­ry boards fea­tur­ing all of their promi­nent alum­ni and an aspi­ra­tional mes­sage that once you are a part of this com­mu­ni­ty, it will become your com­mu­ni­ty for life. Lega­cy admis­sions — the prac­tice of pref­er­en­tial­ly admit­ting the chil­dren of alum­ni — is one of the pow­er­ful, tan­gi­ble char­ac­ter­is­tics that helps fos­ter that sense of com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • I have nev­er seen some­one con­trast the elite US schools with their inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts this way. I am sure there is a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to be made, but this made for fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing and I find his argu­ment plau­si­ble.
  6. Stan­ford WBB Star Cameron Brink Opens Up On How NIL Wealth Allowed Her Stay In School Over WNBA (Grayson Weir, Out­kick): “NIL has made it so that Brink can earn just as much mon­ey as an ‘ama­teur’ as she can in the WNBA. It is prob­a­bly more lucra­tive to stay in school than to go pro.… Brink said that her NIL wealth has set her up for the rest of her life. If bas­ket­ball didn’t work out, she could be self-suf­fi­cient. She would ‘con­tin­ue to live com­fort­ably.’ ”
  7. The real rea­son the high­est-paid doc­tors are in the Dako­tas (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Over­all, the aver­age U.S. lawyer can expect about $7.1 mil­lion in life­time income, a bit high­er than a pri­ma­ry-care doc­tor ($6.5 mil­lion) but well behind the broad­er physi­cian aver­age of $10 mil­lion, accord­ing to a sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis of about 2 mil­lion tax records from lawyers and more than 10 mil­lion tax records from doc­tors.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 410

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 410, which hap­pens to be the HTTP sta­tus code for a resource being per­ma­nent­ly gone.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How elite schools like Stan­ford became fix­at­ed on the AI apoc­a­lypse (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Stu­dents who join the AI safe­ty com­mu­ni­ty some­times get more than free boba. Just as EA con­fer­ences once meant trav­el­ing the world and hav­ing one-on-one meet­ings with wealthy, influ­en­tial donors, Open Philanthropy’s new uni­ver­si­ty fel­low­ship offers a hefty direct deposit: under­grad­u­ate lead­ers receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insur­ance, and up to $100,000 a year to cov­er group expens­es.”
    • Bro — what? Stan­ford won’t even let us pay for a guest speak­er with out­side funds. It’s not clear that the under­grad stu­dents lead­ers at Stan­ford are mak­ing $80k a year, but it’s not clear that they’re not, either. Some stu­dent some­where is, and that’s wild.
  2. Where’s Wal­do? How to Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Prove You Found Him With­out Reveal­ing Where He Is (Jack Murtagh, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can):  “Amaz­ing­ly, every claim that I can prove to you with a tra­di­tion­al math­e­mat­i­cal proof can also be proved in zero knowl­edge. Take your favorite result in math, and you could in prin­ci­ple prove it to a friend while show­ing them bup­kes about how it works. This is a pro­found dis­cov­ery about the nature of proof itself. Cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing.”
    • Zero-knowl­edge proofs are wild. That last sen­tence “cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing” helped me real­ize that there are inter­est­ing par­al­lels to how peo­ple come to faith.
      • It is usu­al­ly an inter­ac­tive process. God begins to draw some­one repeat­ed­ly.
      • It is a prob­a­bilis­tic process. Things keep hap­pen­ing to the soon-to-be con­vert that don’t make sense. I mean, sure they could have hap­pened by chance because any­thing can hap­pen by chance. But they keep hap­pen­ing in a way that is exceed­ing­ly improb­a­ble.
      • The new con­vert’s con­fi­dence in God far exceeds their under­stand­ing of God.
    • God — the orig­i­nal zero-knowl­edge prover. To wax Aris­totelian, He is the unproved prover.
  3. Pas­tor Douša’s case shows the U.S. is not immune to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs on dis­sent (Scott Welder, Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy): “…DHS retal­i­at­ed against Pas­tor Douša for min­is­ter­ing to migrants and refugees in Mex­i­co in Decem­ber 2018 by restrict­ing her Trust­ed Trav­el­er priv­i­leges; sub­ject­ing her to extra screen­ing at the south­ern bor­der; and telling Mex­i­can author­i­ties, false­ly, that there was ‘a great pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that she did not have ‘ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion to be in Mex­i­co’ and sug­gest­ing that the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment ‘deny [her] entry to Mex­i­co’ and ‘send [her] back to the Unit­ed States.’ A CBP offi­cial lat­er admit­ted that the request to Mex­i­can author­i­ties was ‘cre­ative writ­ing,’ ‘with­out any basis.’ But DHS’s actions made it more dif­fi­cult for Pas­tor Douša to con­tin­ue her min­istry, even­tu­al­ly caus­ing her to lim­it her activ­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and to end her min­istry in Mex­i­co alto­geth­er.”
  4. On some of the recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • Why the Cham­pi­ons of Affir­ma­tive Action Had to Leave Asian Amer­i­cans Behind (Jay Caspi­an Kang, The New York­er): “Asian Amer­i­cans, the group whom the suit was sup­pos­ed­ly about, have been odd­ly absent from the con­ver­sa­tions that have fol­lowed the rul­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness of the affir­ma­tive-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have most­ly ignored the Asian Amer­i­can plain­tiffs and cho­sen, instead, to relit­i­gate the same argu­ments about mer­it, white suprema­cy, and priv­i­lege. Dur­ing the five years I spent cov­er­ing this case, the com­men­ta­tors defend­ing affir­ma­tive action almost nev­er dis­proved the cen­tral claim that dis­crim­i­na­tion was tak­ing place against Asian Amer­i­cans, even as they dis­missed the plain­tiffs as pawns who had been duped by a con­ser­v­a­tive legal activist. They almost always redi­rect­ed the con­ver­sa­tion to some­thing else—often lega­cy admis­sions.”
    • On Race and Acad­e­mia (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “As an aca­d­e­m­ic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these expe­ri­ences in inter­views and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve nev­er shared them in an arti­cle like this one. The respons­es I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion move me to ven­ture it. The cul­ture that a pol­i­cy helps put into place can be as impor­tant as the pol­i­cy itself. And in my life­time, racial pref­er­ences in acad­e­mia — not mere­ly when it comes to under­grad­u­ate admis­sions but also mov­ing on to grad school and job appli­ca­tions and teach­ing careers — have been not only a set of for­mal and infor­mal poli­cies but also the grounds for a cul­ture of per­cep­tions and assump­tions.”
      • This is a very raw and vul­ner­a­ble piece. Rec­om­mend­ed. His Ph.D. is from Stan­ford.
    • Cov­er­ing the 303 Cre­ative deci­sion: Why do reporters keep ignor­ing the fine print? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “I wish reporters would be hon­est in admit­ting that much of the anger expressed over the ver­dict stems from how Lorie Smith out­wit­ted her oppo­nents by fil­ing suit first, rather than endur­ing  a string of law­suits like what Jack Phillips is hav­ing to endure. I’m look­ing for that inves­tiga­tive piece on the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion that, after hav­ing been reproved twice now by the Supreme Court, hasn’t changed its ways at all. Where is that New York­er take-out on Autumn Scar­di­na, the trans­gen­der attor­ney whose per­son­al vendet­ta against Phillips just nev­er ends because the courts have giv­en her a free pass? I’m wait­ing.”
    • My Win at the Supreme Court Is a Win for All Amer­i­cans (Lorie Smith, Real Clear Reli­gion): “I can’t say every­thing every­one wants me to. I can’t pre­tend to agree with every idea pre­sent­ed to me. None of us can. None of us should have to. Each of us should be free to pur­sue truth, hold to our faith, respect­ful­ly speak our beliefs, and thought­ful­ly live them out day by day, with­out the gov­ern­ment telling us what to believe or say. If that’s the free­dom you want – for your­self, for your fam­i­ly and friends, for all of those who share your ideas and con­vic­tions – then my vic­to­ry is a vic­to­ry for you. What­ev­er you may think of me and my beliefs, we’re all freer today than we were yes­ter­day. I hope you find that cause for cel­e­bra­tion.”
      • The author is the vic­to­ri­ous plain­tiff in the gay wed­ding web­site case.
    • The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “The deci­sion means that gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not mis­use the law to com­pel speech or exclude from the mar­ket­place peo­ple whose beliefs it dislikes.That’s a win for all Americans—whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or holds dif­fer­ent beliefs. Each of us has the right to decide for our­selves what mes­sages we will communicate—in our words, in our art, in our voice—without inter­fer­ence from the gov­ern­ment. The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind.”
      • The author is the lawyer who argued this case before the Supreme Court. She is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, btw.
  5. Chris­tians: More Like Jesus or Phar­isees? (Bar­na Research Group): “In this nation­wide study of self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians, the goal was to deter­mine whether Chris­tians have the actions and atti­tude of Jesus as they inter­act with oth­ers or if they are more akin to the beliefs and behav­iors of Phar­isees, the self-right­eous sect of reli­gious lead­ers described in the New Tes­ta­ment.… The find­ings reveal that most self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians in the U.S. are char­ac­ter­ized by hav­ing the atti­tudes and actions researchers iden­ti­fied as Phar­i­saical. Just over half of the nation’s Christians—using the broad­est def­i­n­i­tion of those who call them­selves Christians—qualify for this cat­e­go­ry (51%). They tend to have atti­tudes and actions that are char­ac­ter­ized by self-right­eous­ness.”
    • This research is a decade old, but quite inter­est­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • I do have some reser­va­tions about the method­ol­o­gy. Some of the ques­tions are just wrong. For exam­ple, cat­e­go­riz­ing “I lis­ten to oth­ers to learn their sto­ry before telling them about my faith” being Christ­like rather than Phar­i­saical isn’t real­ly a Bib­li­cal stance, it’s just a per­son­al opin­ion. It may be a shrewd strat­e­gy and over­all com­mend­able, but I don’t see Jesus lis­ten­ing to a lot of sto­ries in the Bible. It’s a poor­ly cho­sen ques­tion for this scale. Quib­bles like that aside, I think the over­all vibe prob­a­bly sol­id.
  6. Liv­ing on a prayer? How attend­ing wor­ship can improve your phys­i­cal and men­tal health. (Phil McGraw and John White, USA Today): “Despite the proven health ben­e­fits, reli­gios­i­ty is on the decline in Amer­i­ca. The fastest-grow­ing reli­gious seg­ment of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is now ‘nones’ − those who pro­fess no reli­gion. We’re not here to evan­ge­lize, but as a doc­tor and a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, it’s impor­tant to note that a decline of reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive health effects.”
    • I love that the authors are Dr. Phil and the chief med­ical offi­cer at Web­MD. To the aver­age Amer­i­can they’ve prob­a­bly got more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any med­ical asso­ci­a­tion or even the NIH, FDA, and CDC.
  7. How to Do Great Work (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the fron­tier, notice gaps, explore promis­ing ones. This is how prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physi­cists.… What should you do if you’re young and ambi­tious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along pas­sive­ly, assum­ing the prob­lem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no sys­tem­at­ic pro­ce­dure you can fol­low. When you read biogra­phies of peo­ple who’ve done great work, it’s remark­able how much luck is involved. They dis­cov­er what to work on as a result of a chance meet­ing, or by read­ing a book they hap­pen to pick up. So you need to make your­self a big tar­get for luck, and the way to do that is to be curi­ous. Try lots of things, meet lots of peo­ple, read lots of books, ask lots of ques­tions.”
    • This is super-long but worth­while. He ram­bles and is mis­tak­en at points, but his core insights are sol­id and impor­tant.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What 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. From vol­ume 286.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 400

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.

Vol­ume 400… it’s big and round. It’s also a square num­ber. Much to like about 400.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Treat Stu­dents Like Future Par­ents, Not Just Future Employ­ees (Mary Frances Myler, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Even though stu­dents may not always think of them­selves as such, it is ful­ly rea­son­able for uni­ver­si­ties to treat them as future spous­es and par­ents. Indeed, it is odd that uni­ver­si­ties instill the knowl­edge and habits that empow­er a stu­dent to climb the cor­po­rate lad­der after grad­u­a­tion but ignore the virtues prop­er to famil­ial voca­tions.… The dif­fi­cul­ty of bal­anc­ing the pur­suit of a career and hav­ing a fam­i­ly is noth­ing new; it just isn’t talked about at uni­ver­si­ties. Start­ing the con­ver­sa­tion would help the stu­dents who already know that they desire mar­riage and a fam­i­ly, and it would open a new hori­zon to those who haven’t con­sid­ered these pos­si­bil­i­ties for their future.”
  2. Demons be gone: meet­ing America’s new exor­cists (Elle Hardy, The Guardian): “There are only three things you need to get Satan out of your life: a buck­et, a pen and Broth­er Mike’s two-page ques­tion­naire. Unlike those megachurch preach­ers and their plas­tic smiles, Broth­er Mike Smith doesn’t make out­landish claims – not in his mind, at least. He’s not ped­dling ‘crap’, he says. As the leader of a mod­est min­istry he calls Hard­core Chris­tian­i­ty in down­town Phoenix, Ari­zona, he only claims that he can set you free from demons 100% of the time – if you fol­low his instruc­tions to the let­ter.”
    • This arti­cle is a wild ride. Def­i­nite­ly a jaw-drop­ping moment with Don and Lily at the end.
  3. They’re the Hap­pi­est Peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. We Called Them to Ask Why. (Aaron Zit­ner, Wall Street Journal):“America’s hap­pi­est peo­ple have a few traits in com­mon: They val­ue com­mu­ni­ty and close per­son­al rela­tion­ships. They tend to believe in God. And they gen­er­al­ly are old­er, often in their retire­ment years.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Great News for Female Aca­d­e­mics! (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In an exten­sive sur­vey, meta-analy­sis, and new research, Ceci, Kahn and Williams show that the sit­u­a­tion for women in acad­e­mia is in many domains good to great. For exam­ple, in hir­ing for tenure the evi­dence is strong that women are advan­taged. More­over, women are advan­taged espe­cial­ly in fields where they have rel­a­tive­ly low rep­re­sen­ta­tion (GEMP: geo­sciences, engi­neer­ing, eco­nom­ics, mathematics/computer sci­ence, and phys­i­cal sci­ence).… It should be not­ed that the Ceci, Kahn and Williams paper is an adver­sar­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tion”
  5. After Fast­ing Deaths, Kenyan Police Find Dozens Buried on Preacher’s Prop­er­ty (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the for­est com­pound owned by the founder of Good News Inter­na­tion­al Church, Kenyan police have dis­cov­ered dozens of starv­ing peo­ple and 65 bod­ies buried in unmarked graves. They arrest­ed two peo­ple who weren’t starv­ing: the church’s leader, Paul Macken­zie, and Mackenzie’s min­istry part­ner, pas­tor Zablon Wa Yesu.… The [Nation­al Coun­cil of Church­es] called on cit­i­zens to avoid church­es that do not have a prop­er gov­er­nance struc­ture, refuse to meet in the open, or rely on a pas­tor to pray for mem­bers instead of being encour­aged to pray to God them­selves.”
    • The dif­fer­ence between a quirky church and a flat-out tox­ic church is not so sub­tle as some peo­ple sup­pose.
  6. Elite Law Schools Boy­cotted the U.S. News Rank­ings. Now, They May Be Pay­ing a Price. (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York TImes): “Last week, U.S. News pre­viewed its first rank­ings since the boy­cott — for the top dozen or so law and med­ical schools only — and now, it seems, many of these same schools care quite a lot about their por­tray­al in the publication’s peck­ing order.… ‘The lev­el of inter­est in our rank­ings, includ­ing from those schools that decline to par­tic­i­pate in our sur­vey, has been beyond any­thing we have expe­ri­enced in the past,’ U.S. News wrote on its web­site, explain­ing why it was delay­ing the release.”
  7. Lean Into Neg­a­tive Emo­tions. It’s the Healthy Thing to Do (Melin­da Wen­ner Moy­er, NYT): “Avoid­ing or sup­press­ing feel­ings can be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive, too. In a small clin­i­cal tri­al, researchers asked peo­ple to put one of their hands into an ice water bath and to either accept their feel­ings of pain or to sup­press them. Those who tried to sup­press their feel­ings report­ed more pain and couldn’t endure the ice water for as long as those who accept­ed their dis­com­fort … If we aren’t focus­ing our time and ener­gy on cri­tiquing our feel­ings, we have more time and ener­gy to bet­ter our lives and change the world.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

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 To Get Out Of The Friend Zone (Aaron Renn, The Mas­culin­ist): “Friend­ships between men and women have the char­ac­ter­is­tic that they often evolve into asym­me­try of intent, which is exploita­tive if it per­sists…. remem­ber, just as no woman is under any oblig­a­tion to go out on a date with a man such as you, you are under no oblig­a­tion to be a friend to women.” Every once in a while I like to toss out some­thing sure to rile peo­ple up, just to make sure you’re all pay­ing atten­tion. From vol­ume 277. 

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 349

much about Dobbs, Roe, and the impli­ca­tions there­of

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

I wish this issue was less rushed (and there­fore bet­ter edit­ed and more com­pact), but I’ve been deal­ing with a fam­i­ly emer­gency and have had less time to read and write than nor­mal.

This is vol­ume 349, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The big news this week is the leak of the Supreme Court draft opin­ion por­tend­ing a rever­sal of Roe v Wade.
    • It’s not often that I inter­ject my own views into one of these week­ly roundups, but giv­en the con­tentious­ness of this issue I think it is only fair you know where I am com­ing from. I am pro-life. In sol­i­dar­i­ty with the Christ­mas sto­ry (where­in God became incar­nate in the womb) and with Chris­tians through­out the ages, I believe abor­tion is a bad thing and the rare cas­es where it is med­ical­ly nec­es­sary to save the life of the moth­er are trag­ic. I am grate­ful that the Supreme Court appears to be on the verge of right­ing a great injus­tice for which they are respon­si­ble in the first place. Fur­ther­more, I do not view this as a par­ti­san issue even though it is com­mon­ly per­ceived that way: there are pro-life Democ­rats as well as pro-life Repub­li­cans. In fact, there would be many more pro-life Democ­rats in office were it not for a con­cert­ed effort to mar­gin­al­ize them with­in the par­ty.
    • If you have not read this clas­sic arti­cle in the Atlantic I sug­gest you read it before any­thing else: The Dis­hon­esty of the Abor­tion Debate (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The truth is that the best argu­ment on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowl­edge that fact, you aren’t speak­ing or even think­ing hon­est­ly about the issue. You cer­tain­ly aren’t going to con­vince any­body. Only the truth has the pow­er to move.”
    • If Roe Is Dead (Col­in Hansen, Gospel Coali­tion): “If Roe is dead, more chil­dren will live.… this is the day so many of us have labored and prayed to see. We can rejoice that God has heard our pleas that he would rec­ti­fy this injus­tice. And we can move for­ward in every way pos­si­ble to pro­tect as many chil­dren as we can: by ban­ning abor­tion where pos­si­ble, by bol­ster­ing cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters, by build­ing stronger fos­ter care sys­tems, and much more.”
    • Receiv­ing Jus­tice with Grat­i­tude (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It has com­mon­ly been sug­gest­ed that oppos­ing Roe v Wade is moral­ly ille­git­i­mate unless it is accom­pa­nied with a kind of max­i­mal­ist sup­port for a social safe­ty net. In oth­er words, it has been sug­gest­ed that you’re not real­ly pro-life if you oppose abor­tion but sup­port cap­i­tal­ism; you’re not real­ly pro-life if you hate Roe v. Wade but don’t vote for can­di­dates who vow to redis­trib­ute wealth; you’re not real­ly pro-life if all you want is to stop abor­tion rather than pro­vid­ing exten­sive care and sup­port for baby and moth­er.… Receive jus­tice with grat­i­tude.” This gets to close to some­thing I’ve been try­ing to artic­u­late to myself, but it’s not quite what I want to say. But it’s close.
    • State­ment on the leaked Ali­to draft opin­ion in Dobbs (Robert George, Mir­ror of Jus­tice): “If, as the leaked draft opin­ion seems to sug­gest, the Supreme Court has decid­ed to reverse Roe and return the ques­tion of abor­tion entire­ly to the leg­isla­tive domain, then the pro-life move­ment faces a new set of challenges—challenges even more daunt­ing than over­turn­ing Roe. In the face of pro­found oppo­si­tion from the wealth­i­est, most pow­er­ful, and most influ­en­tial forces and insti­tu­tions in the coun­try, the move­ment needs to extend the pro­tec­tions of law on terms of fair­ness and equal­i­ty to moth­ers and chil­dren alike. Going still fur­ther, it needs to work in both the pub­lic and pri­vate spheres to pro­vide nec­es­sary sup­port for moth­ers and chil­dren, nev­er allow­ing their inter­ests or well-being to be pit­ted against each oth­er. To its great cred­it, the pro-life move­ment has been doing this since before Roe v. Wade—again, in the face of hos­til­i­ty from the most pow­er­ful forces. We will need now to do more and bet­ter. We can and we will.” Robert George is a law pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton.
    • If Roe v. Wade Is Over­turned, What’s Next? (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “It may also be only a mat­ter of time, if Mis­sis­sip­pi pre­vails, before pro-life legal efforts turn toward get­ting the Supreme Court to rec­og­nize the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of the fetus. These efforts would focus on the same part of the Con­sti­tu­tion that was pre­vi­ous­ly held to pro­vide the right to abor­tion, the Four­teenth Amend­ment, which pro­hibits states from depriv­ing ‘any per­son of life, lib­er­ty, or prop­er­ty with­out due process of law.’” The author is a Har­vard Law prof.
    • About post-Roe pol­i­tics and Biden’s evolv­ing doc­trines on choos­ing to ‘abort a child’ (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Once upon a time, Sen. Joe Biden was almost a pro-life Catholic Demo­c­rat. This may be the rea­son — as jour­nal­ists fre­quent­ly note — that he seems uncom­fort­able say­ing ‘abor­tion’ in pub­lic remarks.”
    • An arti­cle by some­one out­raged: Of Course the Con­sti­tu­tion Has Noth­ing to Say About Abor­tion (Jill Lep­ore, The New York­er): “This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Jus­tice Samuel Ali­to is sur­prised that there is so lit­tle writ­ten about abor­tion in a four-thou­sand-word doc­u­ment craft­ed by fifty-five men in 1787. As it hap­pens, there is also noth­ing at all in that doc­u­ment, which sets out fun­da­men­tal law, about preg­nan­cy, uterus­es, vagi­nas, fetus­es, pla­cen­tas, men­stru­al blood, breasts, or breast milk. There is noth­ing in that doc­u­ment about women at all.”
      • Over­all a good arti­cle (although I think it demon­strates the oppo­site of what it intends to demon­strate). Also, although the rhetoric in the excerpt is pow­er­ful, it’s unfair — there’s also noth­ing in the Con­sti­tu­tion about testes, sperm or penis­es. I find this is often the case in the abor­tion debate: pow­er­ful rhetoric that cov­ers over weak­ness­es in the the sub­stance of the argu­ment.
    • Anoth­er not-thrilled per­spec­tive: God Damn Amer­i­ca (Jack Mirkin­son, Sub­stack): “The final opin­ion could dif­fer, but what we have in front of us is an extrem­ist, ille­git­i­mate opin­ion from an extrem­ist, ille­git­i­mate court, one that sees women as serfs and breed­ers, that sees queer peo­ple as sub­hu­man, that sees minori­ties of every kind as dirt under its col­lec­tive shoe. It is hap­pi­ly drag­ging us into the dark ages. Ali­to and every­one who joins him are evil peo­ple. No hell is too hot for them.”
    • A pret­ty extreme out­raged per­spec­tive: As the US supreme court moves to end abor­tion, is Amer­i­ca still a free coun­try? (Moira Done­gan, The Guardian): “Some have raised doubts about whether Amer­i­ca can call itself a democ­ra­cy, now that pol­i­cy­mak­ing pow­er has been large­ly tak­en over by the unelect­ed courts – whose deci­sions, like this one, are so rad­i­cal­ly out of step with, and indif­fer­ent to, pub­lic opin­ion. But it is also worth won­der­ing whether any coun­try can call itself a democ­ra­cy that does not pro­tect abor­tion rights.”
      • It is odd to claim now as the point when courts have tak­en over elec­toral pow­er when it was the Supreme Court itself that imposed abor­tion upon every state out­side of their demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es. If this draft is ille­git­i­mate because it’s not a byprod­uct of an elec­toral process, then that’s one more rea­son that Roe v Wade was itself ille­git­i­mate.
    • You can see oth­er abor­tion-relat­ed con­tent from pre­vi­ous week­ly roundups at https://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/tag/abortion
  2. Not relat­ed but relat­ed: Is Sup­port for Sin­gle Moth­er­hood and Cohab­i­ta­tion Falling in the U.S.? (Alysse ElHage, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…as more Amer­i­cans have expe­ri­enced cohab­i­ta­tion, either per­son­al­ly or through watch­ing friends or fam­i­ly cohab­it, more peo­ple are real­iz­ing that liv­ing togeth­er just does not com­pare to mar­riage in terms of rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty or sta­bil­i­ty. That could explain why Pew found a dif­fer­ence based on age. A Pew spokes­woman told me via email, ‘adults ages 30 to 49, 50 to 64, and ages 65+ were more like­ly than in 2018 to say [cohab­i­ta­tion] is a bad thing for soci­ety.’ How­ev­er, there was no sim­i­lar shift among 18 to 29-year-olds.”
  3. About the leak itself:
    • Why the Dobbs Leak Is Dan­ger­ous (Mark Movs­esian, First Things): “In dis­clos­ing the draft opin­ion now, rather than in Feb­ru­ary when it cir­cu­lat­ed, the leak­er pre­sum­ably means to do one of two things. First, the leak­er might hope that pub­lic pres­sure will intim­i­date one or more of the jus­tices and affect the out­come of the case. Pos­si­bly, the leak­er is a con­ser­v­a­tive clerk try­ing to keep Alito’s major­i­ty intact, on the the­o­ry that it would be too embar­rass­ing for a jus­tice to change his or her mind in these cir­cum­stances. More like­ly, though, the leak­er is a pro­gres­sive who hopes an angry pub­lic reac­tion will make a mem­ber of Alito’s major­i­ty recon­sid­er.  Alter­na­tive­ly, the leak­er might know that Jus­tice Ali­to’s major­i­ty is sol­id and that try­ing to change any­one’s mind is use­less. In that case, the leaker’s goal like­ly would be, quite sim­ply, to wreck the Court as an institution—because that is what a leak like this accom­plish­es.” The author is a for­mer Supreme Court clerk and cur­rent­ly a law pro­fes­sor at St. John’s Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • How rare is a Supreme Court breach? Very rare (Josh Ger­stein, Politi­co): “[Law prof and Supreme Court biog­ra­ph­er] Wer­miel said the jus­tices typ­i­cal­ly argue that con­fi­den­tial­i­ty is crit­i­cal to the high court’s oper­a­tion and col­le­gial­i­ty. ‘They think it will chill their delib­er­a­tion with one anoth­er and their can­dor and will­ing­ness to be open in exchange of views,’ Wer­miel said. Some also con­tend that such reports dis­tract from the court’s most endur­ing work: its opin­ions.”
    • Who­dun­nit? (Josh Black­man, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “And a Jus­tice must know that autho­riz­ing this leak would prob­a­bly lead to impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings. I do not think this leak came from a chambers.There is [anoth­er] option: the leak did not come from a cham­bers.… Rather, the leak may have come from some­one with access to the Supreme Court’s draft opin­ions. And his­to­ry sug­gest that this sort of leak is pos­si­ble.” The author is a law prof at South Texas Col­lege of Law.
    • What If The SCOTUS Leak Came From A For­eign Hack? (Josh Black­man, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “But there is anoth­er enti­ty that may want to burn down the Supreme Court, and tear apart the Amer­i­can peo­ple: a for­eign gov­ern­ment. If that was the intent, the plan was suc­cess­ful. Look no fur­ther than the groups pub­lish­ing the address­es of Supreme Court jus­tices. Plus, as a ben­e­fit to for­eign states, the tor­rent of news has tak­en Ukraine out of the head­lines. Through this lens, the hack becomes much more plau­si­ble.”
  4. 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known (Kevin Kel­ly, per­son­al blog): this is some­thing he does every year. My two favorites were: “There is no such thing as being ‘on time.’ You are either late or you are ear­ly. Your choice.” and “Aim to die broke. Give to your ben­e­fi­cia­ries before you die; it’s more fun and use­ful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funer­al home and it should bounce.
  5. What if You Didn’t Have to File a Tax Return? (Jere­my Hor­pedahl, blog): “In ‘Auto­mat­ic Tax Fil­ing: Sim­u­lat­ing a Pre-Pop­u­lat­ed Form 1040,’ the authors use a large sam­ple of tax returns to esti­mate how many tax­pay­ers a pre-filled return would work for. The results are almost split down the mid­dle: it would work well for maybe half of US tax­pay­ers (41–48% of tax­pay­ers, depend­ing on how we are defin­ing suc­cess­ful). For the oth­er half, it wouldn’t give you an accu­rate esti­mate of how much tax you owed. And the errors can be large.“The author is an econ prof at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cen­tral Arkansas (home of a great Chi Alpha, inci­den­tal­ly). I had assumed this was sim­ply a byprod­uct of lob­by­ing, not that there were actu­al tech­ni­cal rea­sons not to do it.
  6. The UFO brief­in­gs on Capi­tol Hill have begun. Law­mak­ers aren’t impressed. (Bryan Ben­der, Politi­co): “Law­mak­ers receiv­ing the lat­est secret brief­in­gs on UFOs say nation­al secu­ri­ty agen­cies still aren’t tak­ing seri­ous­ly the reports of high­ly advanced air­craft of unknown ori­gin vio­lat­ing pro­tect­ed air­space.”
  7. Amer­i­ca flex­es its mar­itime mus­cles! U.S. Air Force suc­cess­ful­ly tests 2,000-pound air-launched ‘quicksink’ bomb and blasts car­go ship out of the sea in one strike (Tom Brown, Dai­ly Mail): “Quicksink risks rel­a­tive­ly low-cost air­craft when com­pared with the dan­ger of los­ing a sub­ma­rine to ene­my retal­i­a­tion after a tor­pe­do strike.… A sin­gle F‑15EX costs $87.7 mil­lion per air­craft, where­as a US sub­ma­rine can cost up to $2.8 bil­lion per unit, accord­ing to Aero Cor­ner.” The accom­pa­ny­ing video is impres­sive.

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 Pornog­ra­phy Makes Us Less Human and Less Humane (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Beneath pornog­ra­phy is the sup­po­si­tion that the mere fact of our desire for a woman makes us wor­thy of her. And so, not being bound by any kind of norm, desire must pro­ceed end­less­ly. It is no sur­prise that the indus­tri­al­ized, cheap-and-easy sex of pornog­ra­phy has answered and evoked an almost unre­strained sex­u­al greed, which allows us to be gods and god­dess­es with­in the safe­ty of our own fan­tasies. It is for deep and impor­tant rea­sons that the Ten Com­mand­ments use the eco­nom­ic lan­guage of ‘cov­et­ing’ to describe the bad­ness of errant sex­u­al desires.” First shared in vol­ume 216.

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 335

spici­er con­tent than nor­mal — you have been warned

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 335. The num­ber 335 is pret­ty cool because it is divis­i­ble by the num­ber of primes below it (335 = 67 · 5, and there are 67 primes less than 335).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No, Reli­gious Free­dom Doesn’t Send Peo­ple to Hell (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious free­dom is a restric­tion on the pow­er of the state to set itself up as a medi­a­tor between God and human­i­ty. It is not an affir­ma­tion of idol­a­try, just as say­ing, ‘The gov­ern­ment shouldn’t take your baby away and raise your chil­dren’ is not an affir­ma­tion of bad par­ent­ing. Say­ing par­ents should raise their chil­dren, instead of the gov­ern­ment, does not mean everyone’s par­ent­ing is good.”
  2. About iden­ti­ty issues
    • No, the Rev­o­lu­tion Isn’t Over (N.S. Lyons, Sub­stack): “In what is rapid­ly becom­ing one of my pre­ferred expla­na­tions for the Rev­o­lu­tion, the evo­lu­tion­ary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has iden­ti­fied ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion’ as hav­ing been one of the top dri­vers of rev­o­lu­tion and civ­il con­flict through­out his­to­ry. He points to the ten­den­cy for deca­dent soci­eties to pro­duce far more overe­d­u­cat­ed elites than there are elite-lev­el jobs, lead­ing to large num­bers of under­em­ployed, resent­ful elite-class intel­lec­tu­als of the type who tend pine after the posi­tion and sta­tus they ‘deserve’ and even­tu­al­ly start spend­ing their free time start­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ary cells.”
      • This is long and full of insight. And very, very spicy. I have no idea who the author is — N.S. Lyons is a pen name for a DC area ana­lyst with exper­tise in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty. I assume he finds the pen name nec­es­sary to pro­tect his pro­fes­sion­al rep­u­ta­tion when he writes about Amer­i­can cul­ture. Did I men­tion it was spicy?
    • The Trans Move­ment Is Not About Rights Any­more (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “This week, the writer Col­in Wright posed on Twit­ter the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘What rights do trans peo­ple cur­rent­ly not have but want that don’t involve replac­ing bio­log­i­cal sex with one’s sub­jec­tive ‘gen­der iden­ti­ty’?’ And the response was, of course, crick­ets. The truth is: the 6–3 Bostock deci­sion places trans peo­ple in every state under the pro­tec­tion of the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964. It’s done. It’s built on the stur­dy pro­hi­bi­tion on sex dis­crim­i­na­tion. A Trump nom­i­nee wrote the rul­ing. What the trans move­ment is now doing, after this com­pre­hen­sive vic­to­ry, is not about rights at all. It is about cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion.”
    • Why I am no longer a tenured pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to (Jor­dan Peter­son, Nation­al Post): “My stu­dents are also part­ly unac­cept­able pre­cise­ly because they are my stu­dents. I am aca­d­e­m­ic per­sona non gra­ta, because of my unac­cept­able philo­soph­i­cal posi­tions. And this isn’t just some incon­ve­nience. These facts ren­dered my job moral­ly unten­able. How can I accept prospec­tive researchers and train them in good con­science know­ing their employ­ment prospects to be min­i­mal?”
    • Being Jew­ish in an Unrav­el­ing Amer­i­ca (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “The bad guy was killed. The good guys were saved. It doesn’t often turn out that way. All the Jews I know—even the atheists—are thank­ing God.  But why, despite my grat­i­tude, do I feel so much rage? Why does it feel like there is so lit­tle com­fort to be found? What has changed? I did not feel this way in the hor­rif­ic after­math of the Tree of Life massacre—the most lethal in all of Amer­i­can Jew­ish his­to­ry.… What I now see is this: In Amer­i­ca cap­tured by trib­al­ism and dehu­man­iza­tion, in an Amer­i­ca swept up by ide­olo­gies that pit us against one anoth­er in a zero-sum game, in an Amer­i­ca enthralled with the poi­so­nous idea that some groups mat­ter more than oth­ers, not all Jews—and not all Jew­ish victims—are treat­ed equal­ly. What seems to mat­ter most to media pun­dits and politi­cians is not the Jews them­selves, but the iden­ti­ties of their attack­ers. And it scares me.”
  3. The Pro-Life Move­men­t’s Moral Dou­ble­s­peak (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “But the mod­ern Chris­t­ian church has put forth a fake real­i­ty in which women are almost always the vic­tim except in rare, extreme cas­es. They seem inca­pable of admit­ting that women who abort their babies know what they are doing. They can’t bring them­selves to even acknowl­edge that women ini­ti­ate about 70% of all divorces. When pas­tors write entire books about mar­riage and nev­er once men­tion the basic and well known fact that women file for the vast major­i­ty of divorces – and that’s every Chris­t­ian mar­riage book I’ve ever read – they aren’t seri­ous peo­ple. They jus­ti­fy and excuse almost any female behav­ior, and even twist real­i­ty to some­how blame men for it.” There are sev­er­al uncom­fort­able insights in this essay.
  4. China’s Births Hit His­toric Low, a Polit­i­cal Prob­lem for Bei­jing (Steven Lee Myers and Alexan­dra Steven­son, New York Times): “The num­ber of births fell to 10.6 mil­lion in 2021, com­pared with 12 mil­lion the year before, accord­ing to fig­ures report­ed on Mon­day by the Nation­al Bureau of Sta­tis­tics. That was few­er even than the num­ber in 1961, when the Great Leap For­ward, Mao Zedong’s eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy, result­ed in wide­spread famine and death.”
  5. Buy Things, Not Expe­ri­ences (Harold Lee, per­son­al blog):  “…the focus on min­i­mal­ism sounds like a new form of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Now that even the poor can afford mate­r­i­al goods, let’s den­i­grate goods while high­light­ing the remain­ing lux­u­ries that only the afflu­ent can enjoy and show off to their friends.”
    • This is a short, well-argued con­trar­i­an take. Stuff like this is cat­nip to me.
  6. About the pan­dem­ic:
    • Hong Kongers Rebel Against Order to Hand Over Ham­sters (Rob Quinn, News­er): “After a woman and 11 ham­sters in the pet shop she worked in test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID, author­i­ties said Tues­day that any­body who bought a ham­ster on or after Dec. 22 should hand it in to be euth­a­nized. But while the ter­ri­to­ry gen­er­al­ly has a high lev­el of com­pli­ance with COVID orders, the ham­ster order was wide­ly seen as a step too far…”
    • To Fight Covid, We Need to Think Less Like Doc­tors (Aaron E. Car­roll, New York Times): “Car­ing for an indi­vid­ual and pro­tect­ing a pop­u­la­tion require dif­fer­ent pri­or­i­ties, prac­tices and ways of think­ing. While it may sound coun­ter­in­tu­itive, to heal the coun­try and put our Covid-19 response on the right track, we need to think less like doc­tors.” The author is both a physi­cian and also the chief health offi­cer at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Omi­cron opti­mist, pes­simist or fatal­ist – which are you? (Tim Har­ford, per­son­al blog): “Is this the point at which we should shrug our shoul­ders and give up? Omi­cron has prompt­ed three kinds of reac­tion: opti­mism, pes­simism and fatal­ism.… What’s con­fus­ing is that all three views may be right. Omi­cron is quite plau­si­bly mild, cat­a­stroph­ic and inevitable all at once.” The author is a British econ­o­mist. 
    • Lying About Covid For ‘Inter­na­tion­al Har­mo­ny’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pan­dem­ic start­ed. It is just about under­stand­able, if not for­giv­able, that Chi­nese sci­en­tists have obfus­cat­ed vital infor­ma­tion about ear­ly cas­es and their work with sim­i­lar virus­es in Wuhan’s lab­o­ra­to­ries: they were sub­ject to fierce edicts from a ruth­less, total­i­tar­i­an regime. It is more shock­ing to dis­cov­er in emails released this week that some west­ern sci­en­tists were also say­ing dif­fer­ent things in pub­lic from what they thought in pri­vate.” Con­tains excerpts from a pay­walled arti­cle.
    • School Clo­sures Were a Cat­a­stroph­ic Error. Pro­gres­sives Still Haven’t Reck­oned With It. (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “It is always eas­i­er to diag­nose these patholo­gies when they are tak­ing place on the oth­er side. You’ve prob­a­bly seen the raft of papers show­ing how vac­cine uptake cor­re­lates with Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ing and COVID deaths cor­re­late with Repub­li­can vot­ing. Per­haps you have mar­veled at the spec­ta­cle of Repub­li­can elites active­ly harm­ing their own audi­ence. But the same thing Fox News hosts were doing to their elder­ly sup­port­ers, pro­gres­sive activists were doing to their side’s young ones.” It may not be obvi­ous, but this arti­cle dove­tails very nice­ly with the Dreher arti­cle about elites not being truth­ful and not reck­on­ing with mis­takes.
  7. The long-term effects of protes­tant activ­i­ties in Chi­na (Yuyu Chen, Hui Wang, Se Yan, Jour­nal of Com­par­a­tive Eco­nom­ics): “Our find­ings imply that late-nine­teenth- and ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Protes­tant mis­sion­ar­ies pio­neered that mod­ern­iza­tion move­ment by dis­sem­i­nat­ing, along with Chris­tian­i­ty, West­ern sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy to even the most remote regions of Chi­na. Such efforts accel­er­at­ed the pace of mod­ern­iza­tion, con­tributed to the accu­mu­la­tion of human cap­i­tal, and reshaped the social val­ues of local peo­ple. Although these his­tor­i­cal lega­cies of mis­sion­ar­ies’ under­tak­ings were sup­pressed dur­ing the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, they rapid­ly resurged and began to con­tribute to socioe­co­nom­ic devel­op­ments when Chi­na began to open up and reform.” The authors appear to be schol­ars at Peking 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 Jesus, Mary, and Joe Jonas (Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Medi­um): “How, in famous­ly lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood and among sta­tis­ti­cal­ly pro­gres­sive mil­len­ni­als, had good old-fashioned evan­ge­lism [sic] gained pop­u­lar­i­ty? In this con­text, a church like Real­i­ty L.A. seemed like some­thing that could nev­er work. But that evening, as I reflect­ed on the trou­bled actress and the psy­chic bru­tal­i­ties inflict­ed by the enter­tain­ment indus­try, it occurred to me that I had under­es­ti­mat­ed Hollywood’s biggest prod­uct: lost souls.” First shared in vol­ume 192 

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 296

the first two links are among the best I’ve shared in some time

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 296, which is the num­ber of par­ti­tions con­tained in the num­ber 30.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Woke Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Blake Smith, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The con­tem­po­rary ide­al, increas­ing­ly, is no longer some­one so charm­ing­ly per­son­able that oth­ers for­get he is in fact a ruth­less com­peti­tor, but a per­son who so con­vinc­ing­ly nar­rates her hav­ing over­come some kind of social injus­tice that oth­ers for­get she is in fact a ben­e­fi­cia­ry of sys­tems of priv­i­lege.” The author is a his­to­ry prof at U Chica­go. This essay is straight fire, and I believe he took an x‑ray of some of your souls before he wrote it.
  2. Some Prin­ci­ples & Obser­va­tions About Social Jus­tice Pol­i­tics (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Once you have made the pre­ven­tion of emo­tion­al harm the cen­tral focus of your pol­i­tics, you will find your­self run­ning up against the fact that emo­tion­al harm is a ubiq­ui­tous and inerad­i­ca­ble part of the human expe­ri­ence, far beyond the abil­i­ty of any polit­i­cal move­ment to pre­vent.” deBoer, one of my two favorite athe­ist social­ists to read (the oth­er being Steven Brust), brings it with excel­lence in this one. It was hard to find the best excerpt — there are so many.
  3. Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coro­n­avirus (Gina Kola­ta, New York Times): “For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on mes­sen­ger RNA, or mRNA — the genet­ic script that car­ries DNA instruc­tions to each cell’s pro­tein-mak­ing machin­ery. She was con­vinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own med­i­cines, includ­ing vac­cines. But for many years her career at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia was frag­ile. She migrat­ed from lab to lab, rely­ing on one senior sci­en­tist after anoth­er to take her in. She nev­er made more than $60,000 a year.” This is a heart­warm­ing sto­ry that should also make you very sad — it illus­trates how bro­ken the aca­d­e­m­ic sys­tem is and how we came very close to los­ing a life­sav­ing break­through.
  4. This should not hap­pen more than once (Alexan­dra Petri, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The moments when peo­ple make up their secret minds about what is nor­mal and what is accept­able are nev­er big. They are always in pri­vate, when no one can see that you have failed the test, when all you were doing was try­ing to avoid any dis­com­fort, be cool, play along. But there is a price. The price is that the Matt Gaet­zes out there will leave the inter­ac­tion think­ing they have under­stood the world cor­rect­ly. That what they are doing is work­ing. That this is how the world is. But it is the accu­mu­la­tion of these lit­tle assents that make the world this way.” Well-writ­ten and true. Also, don’t take nude pho­tos of your­self nor allow oth­ers to do so. It is unlike­ly you will be hap­py with the out­come.
  5. A Hea­then’s East­er (Steve Randy Wald­man, Inter­flu­id­i­ty): “My the­o­log­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion is about can­dy-wrap­per lev­el. But for what­ev­er it’s worth, I con­sid­er this aspect of Christianity’s found­ing myth or event remark­able, and under­em­pha­sized. ‘For­give them, Father, they know not what they do,’ rep­re­sents a pro­found plea from the lips of a man being painful­ly mur­dered. That a par­ent, one with fire and brim­stone read­i­ly at hand and a noto­ri­ous his­to­ry of smit­ing, would for­give is per­haps even more aston­ish­ing, even more won­der­ful.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  6. The effects of Black Lives Mat­ter protests (Jerusalem Dem­sas, Vox): “[The researcher’s] main find­ing is a 15 to 20 per­cent reduc­tion in lethal use of force by police offi­cers — rough­ly 300 few­er police homi­cides — in cen­sus places that saw BLM protests. Campbell’s research also indi­cates that these protests cor­re­late with a 10 per­cent increase in mur­ders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were some­where between 1,000 and 6,000 more homi­cides than would have been expect­ed if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.”
  7. A whole pas­sel of trans-relat­ed arti­cles:
    • A Truce Pro­pos­al In The Trans Wars (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “In our cur­rent cul­ture, [my] some­what com­pli­cat­ed stance is anath­e­ma.… The pro­por­tion of peo­ple in this debate who seem psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly unsta­ble, emo­tion­al­ly volatile and per­son­al­ly vicious seems larg­er than usu­al.”
    • How Super-Straight Start­ed a Cul­ture War on Tik­Tok (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Most have dat­ing pref­er­ences that don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly imply a neg­a­tive view of peo­ple who fall out­side them––I’d be averse to dat­ing an 18-year-old or a 60-year-old, yet I nei­ther hate nor fear either age cohort––and that they might not be able to change even if they want­ed to. Claims that only big­ots would decline to date a trans per­son strike some com­men­ta­tors as a form of coer­cion.”
    • Keira Bell: My Sto­ry (Keira Bell, Per­sua­sion): “Five years after begin­ning my med­ical tran­si­tion to becom­ing male, I began the process of detran­si­tion­ing. A lot of trans men talk about how you can’t cry with a high dose of testos­terone in your body, and this affect­ed me too: I couldn’t release my emo­tions. One of the first signs that I was becom­ing Keira again was that—thankfully, at last—I was able to cry. And I had a lot to cry about.” This is very sober­ing.
    • A Guide to Neo­pro­nouns (Ezra Mar­cus, New York Times): “Many peo­ple who use neo­pro­nouns don’t just use one set. They select a hand­ful, and show off their col­lec­tions on web­sites like Pronouny.xyz, a site that pro­vides usage exam­ples for neo­pro­nouns. Users make their own Pro­nouny pages, like this one, which includes xe/xem/xyr, moon/moonself, star/starself, bee/beeself, and bun/bunself. ‘Sor­ry if I have too many pro­nouns,’ the page’s cre­ator wrote. ‘You can use just one set or just they/them if they’re too many!!’ ”
    • From a few weeks back: There Is No Epi­dem­ic Of Trans Mur­ders (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “So, of the eleven US mur­ders of trans or gen­der-non­con­form­ing peo­ple this year, only two — the ones in Puer­to Rico — appear to have been prob­a­bly moti­vat­ed by anti-trans hatred. They are still hor­ri­ble — no one deserves to be mur­dered — but the killings do not have the mean­ing that are being attrib­uted to them.”
    • Also slight­ly old­er: ‘A Hot­ly Con­test­ed Issue’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “The stu­dent alleged­ly threat­ened to sue Shawnee State, which in turn pres­sured Meri­wether fur­ther to address the stu­dent in her pre­ferred man­ner. Meri­wether agreed — on the con­di­tion that he could put a dis­claimer in his syl­labus about how he was fol­low­ing the university’s pro­noun pol­i­cy under com­pul­sion, and stat­ing his views about bio­log­i­cal sex and gen­der being one and the same and immutable. Meriwether’s dean reject­ed this as incom­pat­i­ble with the university’s gen­der iden­ti­ty pol­i­cy.… [the Sixth Cir­cuit Court sided with the pro­fes­sor] writ­ing that if pro­fes­sors ‘lacked free-speech pro­tec­tions when teach­ing, a uni­ver­si­ty would wield alarm­ing pow­er to com­pel ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty.’ A uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent could ‘require a paci­fist to declare that war is just, a civ­il rights icon to con­demn the Free­dom Rid­ers, a believ­er to deny the exis­tence of God, or a Sovi­et émi­gré to address his stu­dents as ‘com­rades,’ ’ he wrote. ‘That can­not be.’ ”
    • A very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the same case: A Vic­to­ry For Real­i­ty (Carl True­man, First Things): “The court’s rul­ing is worth read­ing in full. The evi­dent incom­pe­tence and mal­ice of the admin­is­tra­tion is impres­sive, as it ini­tial­ly flip-flops on whether an accept­able com­pro­mise is pos­si­ble and then descends into open hos­til­i­ty toward Meri­wether, includ­ing (but, as lawyers say, not lim­it­ed to) open mock­ery, deri­sion of his faith, and an inves­ti­ga­tion for which he was not asked to pro­vide any wit­ness­es. The court also iden­ti­fies the university’s flip-flop­ping and hos­til­i­ty to Meriwether’s reli­gious views as evi­dence that the mat­ter was not about apply­ing an estab­lished pol­i­cy in a neu­tral way but rather about tar­get­ing the pro­fes­sor for his Chris­t­ian beliefs.”

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 Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

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 226

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m a Cli­mate Sci­en­tist Who Believes in God. Hear Me Out. (Katharine Hay­hoe, New York Times): “…I believe that evan­gel­i­cals who take the Bible seri­ous­ly already care about cli­mate change (although they might not real­ize it). Cli­mate change will strike hard against the very peo­ple we’re told to care for and love, ampli­fy­ing hunger and pover­ty, and increas­ing risks of resource scarci­ty that can exac­er­bate polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty, and even cre­ate or wors­en refugee crises.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Texas Tech and, as it hap­pens, spoke at Stan­ford last night.
  2. Split the Cedars of Lebanon: Evan­gel­i­cals Bal­ance Prayer, Protest, and Pol­i­tics in Ongo­ing Upris­ing (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There can be no uni­ty with pro­test­ers curs­ing and hurl­ing hatred at the polit­i­cal class, he said, urg­ing Chris­t­ian sep­a­ra­tion from such behav­ior. If cit­i­zens are unsat­is­fied, they should vote their offi­cials out. And as for the eco­nom­ic trou­bles, he believes a great God will take care of their needs. Oth­er pas­tors have endorsed demon­stra­tions as a vehi­cle for change. Some have called for prayer and fast­ing. Either way, many of the pre­vi­ous­ly apo­lit­i­cal have become engaged.”
  3. The New Par­ty of the Rich (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “The rich­est 15 per­cent of House dis­tricts are now rep­re­sent­ed by 56 Democ­rats and just 10 Repub­li­cans. In 2018, vot­ers in America’s wealth­i­est coun­ties, cities, and neigh­bor­hoods made a deci­sive turn toward the Democ­rats, and now America’s tra­di­tion­al par­ty of the left—whether it admits it or not—is the par­ty of the rich.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.
  4. How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal.
  5. The Church, inten­sive kin­ship, and glob­al psy­cho­log­i­cal vari­a­tion (Schulz et al, Sci­ence): “…we pro­pose that the West­ern Church (i.e., the branch of Chris­tian­i­ty that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) trans­formed Euro­pean kin­ship struc­tures dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages and that this trans­for­ma­tion was a key fac­tor behind a shift towards a WEIRD­er psy­chol­o­gy.” This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.
  6. It’s Offi­cial: Pres­i­dent Trump Has Tweet­ed More Words Than James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (Chris Wil­son, Time): “In the 1,020 days since he took office, Pres­i­dent Trump’s Twit­ter account has post­ed 266,055 words. Ulysses, which runs about 780 pages, has 264,564. That’s using the same mea­sure of count­ing words with the freely avail­able dig­i­tal ver­sion of the tome on Project Guten­berg. (How one counts words is slight­ly fun­gi­ble depend­ing on, for exam­ple, on how one con­sid­ers hyphens and con­trac­tions, but my fig­ure is very close to var­i­ous oth­er tal­lies).” Wow. That’s a lot of words.
  7. The Dan­gers of Flu­ent Lec­tures (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “The study, involv­ing Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty under­grad­u­ates in large, intro­duc­to­ry physics class­es, com­pared stu­dents’ self reports about what they’d learned with what they’d actu­al­ly learned, as deter­mined by a mul­ti­ple choice tests. Stu­dents were taught using exact­ly the same course mate­ri­als — a key con­trol that many oth­er stud­ies com­par­ing active ver­sus pas­sive learn­ing have failed to estab­lish. But one group learned via active instruc­tion meth­ods for a week at the end of the semes­ter and the oth­er learned via lec­tures from expe­ri­enced and well-regard­ed instruc­tors.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. See a relat­ed link back in vol­ume 218.

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 Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire), an essay built on this insight: “Think­ing can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” (first shared in vol­ume 2)

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 184

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Moral Hor­ror of America’s Pris­ons (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg): “…if you think America’s cur­rent penal sys­tem is the very best we can do, that is about the most pes­simistic ver­dict on this coun­try I have ever heard. Has any­one ever sug­gest­ed that the Amer­i­can prison sys­tem is the world’s best? The can-do atti­tude is one of my favorite fea­tures of Amer­i­can life. We just need to apply it a lit­tle more broad­ly.”
  2. The Num­ber 1 Rea­son For The Decline In Church Atten­dance… (Thom Ranier, Facts & Trends): “Stat­ed sim­ply, the num­ber one rea­son for the decline in church atten­dance is that mem­bers attend with less fre­quen­cy than they did just a few years ago. Allow me to explain. If the fre­quen­cy of atten­dance changes, then atten­dance will respond accord­ing­ly. For exam­ple, if 200 mem­bers attend every week the aver­age atten­dance is, obvi­ous­ly, 200. But if one-half of those mem­bers miss only one out of four weeks, the atten­dance drops to 175. Did you catch that? No mem­bers left the church. Every­one is still rel­a­tive­ly active in the church. But atten­dance declined over 12 per­cent because half the mem­bers changed their atten­dance behav­ior slight­ly.”
  3. Bib­li­cal Archaeology’s Top 10 Dis­cov­er­ies of 2018 (Gor­don Govi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “These dis­cov­er­ies, rel­a­tive­ly insignif­i­cant indi­vid­u­al­ly, join with many oth­er dis­cov­er­ies over the decades to give us a great deal of con­fi­dence in the his­tor­i­cal details con­tained in the Bible.” Note: these are pre­cise­ly the sort of mun­dane, ongo­ing dis­cov­er­ies we would expect from a book describ­ing real peo­ple doing real things in real places. I encour­age you to con­trast it with the texts of oth­er reli­gions.
  4. Facts Are Not Self-Inter­pret­ing (Twit­ter) — this is a short, sound­less video. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. Evan­gel­i­cal Mega-donors Are Rethink­ing Mon­ey in Pol­i­tics (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “‘What Chris­t­ian phil­an­thropists see now, maybe more than in past gen­er­a­tions, is the full land­scape of how they can deploy their [mon­ey] toward the entire­ty of what God cares about,’ said Josh Kwan, who was recent­ly appoint­ed the head of the Gathering—the organization’s first new leader in its three-decade run.”
  6. Two Roads for the New French Right (Mark Lil­la, New York Review of Books): “Con­ti­nen­tal con­ser­vatism going back to the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry has always rest­ed on an organ­ic con­cep­tion of soci­ety. It sees Europe as a sin­gle Chris­t­ian civ­i­liza­tion com­posed of dif­fer­ent nations with dis­tinct lan­guages and cus­toms. These nations are com­posed of fam­i­lies, which are organ­isms, too, with dif­fer­ing but com­ple­men­tary roles and duties for moth­ers, fathers, and chil­dren. On this view, the fun­da­men­tal task of soci­ety is to trans­mit knowl­edge, moral­i­ty, and cul­ture to future gen­er­a­tions, per­pet­u­at­ing the life of the civ­i­liza­tion­al organ­ism. It is not to serve an agglom­er­a­tion of autonomous indi­vid­u­als bear­ing rights.”
    • This arti­cle pro­voked let­ters to the edi­tor to which Lil­la respond­ed: How to Write About the Right: An Exchange. Lil­la ends his rebut­tal with this, “For those con­cerned about the antilib­er­al forces gain­ing strength in world pol­i­tics, the most impor­tant thing is to main­tain one’s sangfroid. Before we judge we must be sure of what exact­ly we are judg­ing. We need to take ideas seri­ous­ly, make dis­tinc­tions, and nev­er pre­sume that the present is just the past in dis­guise. Greil Mar­cus falls into that last trap, I’m afraid, by shift­ing from dis­cussing the affini­ties among coun­tries to imag­in­ing a Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al with poles in the US and Rus­sia. What­ev­er we are fac­ing, it is not twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry fas­cism. Hell keeps on dis­gorg­ing new demons to beset us. And as sea­soned exor­cists know, each must be called by its prop­er name before it can be cast out.”
    • There is some­thing help­ful about read­ing about pol­i­tics in anoth­er cul­ture. If you are inclined to skip this because you’re not French, I encour­age you to at least skim it.

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  Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 180

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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