Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 359

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.

359 is the 72nd prime num­ber, and is also what is known as a Sophie Ger­main prime because if you dou­ble it and add 1 the result (719) is also prime.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Faith The Ene­my of Sci­ence? (Glen Scriven­er, Twit­ter): a good 90 sec­ond video
  2. I Don’t Want to See a High School Foot­ball Coach Pray­ing at the 50-Yard Line (Anne Lam­ott, New York Times): “How do peo­ple like me who believe entire­ly in sci­ence and rea­son also believe that prayer can heal and restore? Well, I’ve seen it hap­pen a thou­sand times in my own incon­se­quen­tial life. God seems like a total showoff to me, if per­haps unnec­es­sar­i­ly cryp­tic.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing op-ed.
  3. On mas­culin­i­ty:
    • Against the Extrem­ism of the Amer­i­can Mas­culin­i­ty Debate (David French, The Dis­patch): “While there are many mil­lions of men and boys who do quite well in our coun­try, the vast major­i­ty of our nation’s young men are falling behind their female peers. I quot­ed this sta­tis­tic in my last newslet­ter, but it’s worth quot­ing again: Men account for 70 per­cent of the decline in enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.”
    • So Jor­dan Peter­son post­ed a video mes­sage to the Church. Mes­sage to the Chris­t­ian Church­es (Jor­dan Peter­son, YouTube: eleven min­utes. It’s gen­er­at­ed thoughts:
    • Church: Where Are The Men? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Peter­son means it lit­er­al­ly when he com­plains here that most church­es offer noth­ing for young men. Men feel unwant­ed in these fem­i­nized precincts, and there is often noth­ing much to attract or hold them to con­gre­ga­tion­al life.” This post is LONG and ven­tures deep­er into church his­to­ry than I expect­ed it to.
    • Jor­dan Peterson’s “Message to Chris­t­ian Church­es” Is Non­sense (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “He’s found an audi­ence and that’s fine, but when Peter­son steers out­side of his lane, you can tell. And on Wednes­day, Peter­son veered well out­side of his lane with this ‘Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es.’ It is ridicu­lous.”
    • Cross­ing the Jor­dan (Matthew Hosier, Think­The­ol­o­gy): “There is much about this mes­sage that I find salu­tary and invig­o­rat­ing. As I say, it made me laugh and cry and cheer. Although, with­out clar­i­ty about the aton­ing work of Christ on the cross, with­out a prop­er notion of grace, Peterson’s appeal rep­re­sents only a robust Pela­gian­ism and is there­fore insuf­fi­cient to deal with our most fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. Pela­gian­ism does not offer a solu­tion to the prob­lem of orig­i­nal sin; at best it can ame­lio­rate the symp­toms, not cure the dis­ease.”
  4. Book Review: The Man From The Future (Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexan­der): “…after a life­time of cul­tur­al­ly-Jew­ish athe­ism, he wished to be bap­tized. His daugh­ter attrib­uted her father’s ‘change of heart’ to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small prob­a­bil­i­ty of gain­ing a bet­ter after­life is worth the rel­a­tive­ly triv­ial cost of a deathbed con­ver­sion. Even as his pow­ers desert­ed him, John von Neu­mann remained a game the­o­rist to the end.” Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
  5. Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl that led to Indi­ana abor­tion draw­ing inter­na­tion­al atten­tion (Bethany Bruner, Mon­roe Trombly, Tony Cook, The Colum­bus Dis­patch): “A Colum­bus man has been charged with impreg­nat­ing a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose trav­el to Indi­ana to seek an abor­tion led to inter­na­tion­al atten­tion fol­low­ing the Supreme Court’s deci­sion to over­turn Roe v Wade and acti­va­tion of Ohio’s abor­tion law.”
  6. Whose breath are you breath­ing? (Farah Han­cock, Radio New Zealand): “At 5737ppm, the equiv­a­lent of one in every sev­en breaths I took on the bus was air oth­er peo­ple had breathed out. I texted a friend: ‘OMG, the read­ings are so high I may as well let the oth­er pas­sen­gers lick my face!’ I was being a lit­tle gross, because even accord­ing to a sci­en­tist, it is a lit­tle gross. ‘You can think of it as spit par­ti­cles, tiny spit par­ti­cles are what you are breath­ing in,’ says Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land aerosol chemist Dr Joel Rinde­laub. ‘It’s breath back­wash that gets peo­ple infect­ed.’ ”
    • First, “breath back­wash” is a mag­nif­i­cent term. Kudos. Sec­ond, I’m pret­ty sure the math is more com­pli­cat­ed than the arti­cle makes it seem. I would nonethe­less love see­ing CO2 meters in pub­lic places.
  7. How Uni­ver­si­ties Weaponize Fresh­man Ori­en­ta­tion (Abi­gail Antho­ny, Nation­al Review): “Ide­al­ly, fresh­man ori­en­ta­tion should be a pro­ce­dur­al, social assim­i­la­tion to famil­iar­ize stu­dents with the resources the uni­ver­si­ty offers and how to access them. How­ev­er, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty under­took a mis­sion to present incom­ing stu­dents with sex­u­al, moral, and polit­i­cal guid­ance, whol­ly omit­ting wide­ly held per­spec­tives and effec­tive­ly insu­lat­ing pro­gres­sive views from intel­lec­tu­al tri­al. More­over, atten­dance at these events was com­pul­so­ry, thus con­sti­tut­ing an ide­o­log­i­cal haz­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The lines in this checker­board pat­tern are straight (Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s work on some ran­dom blog)
  • Turn­about (The Far Side)
  • Down Mem­o­ry Lame (Load­ing Artist) — relat­able
  • Humans Will Believe Any­thing They Hear (Bengt Wash­burn, YouTube): six min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. It sound­ed famil­iar so I searched the archives and saw I shared it back in vol­ume 310. It was def­i­nite­ly worth watch­ing again!
  • “Eat the Rich” ice cream truck sells $10 pop­si­cles shaped like Bezos, Musk, oth­ers (Khristo­pher J. Brooks, CBS News): “An artists’ col­lec­tive in Brook­lyn is sell­ing pop­si­cles shaped like bil­lion­aires includ­ing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with the tagline ‘Eat the Rich.’ But the $10 price tag on the frozen treats has some peo­ple point­ing out the irony of crit­i­ciz­ing the world’s wealth­i­est while engag­ing in ‘peak cap­i­tal­ism.’ ” Warn­ing: auto­plays unre­lat­ed videos.
  • BMW starts sell­ing heat­ed seat sub­scrip­tions for $18 a month (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “Car­mak­ers have always charged cus­tomers more mon­ey for high-end fea­tures, of course, but the dynam­ic is very dif­fer­ent when soft­ware, rather than hard­ware, is the lim­it­ing fac­tor. Charg­ing more for high-end fea­tures feels dif­fer­ent when you already own them In the case of heat­ed seats, for exam­ple, BMW own­ers already have all the nec­es­sary com­po­nents, but BMW has sim­ply placed a soft­ware block on their func­tion­al­i­ty that buy­ers then have to pay to remove.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. This actu­al­ly prob­a­bly belongs up in the seri­ous cat­e­go­ry because it’s an omen of the future.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have 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.” At the time I first shared it I said, “This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.” I did a quick lit­er­a­ture church and the result seems to be hold­ing. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 358

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 358, a num­ber whose base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion ends in its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 3583 is 111021, and 3587 is 1021.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cul­ture War That More Chris­tians Should Be Fight­ing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “But the peo­ple who debate the moral­i­ty (or lack there­of) of Dis­ney or Hob­by Lob­by rarely dis­cuss how much paid time off these com­pa­nies pro­vide employ­ees or whether they pay a liv­ing wage or what the wealth dis­par­i­ty is between their top and bot­tom earn­ers or whether they have ade­quate mater­ni­ty leave poli­cies or how much a cor­po­ra­tion finan­cial­ly gives back to a com­mu­ni­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Sur­pris­ing Case for Mar­ry­ing Young (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Our analy­ses indi­cate that reli­gious men and women who mar­ried in their twen­ties with­out cohab­it­ing first — a pat­tern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a ‘T’ — have the low­est odds of divorce in Amer­i­ca today.”
  3. I should have loved biol­o­gy (James Somers, per­son­al blog): “In the text­books, aston­ish­ing facts were pre­sent­ed with­out aston­ish­ment. Some­one prob­a­bly told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoul­ders, say­ing how crazy that was.”
  4. Con­cern­ing abor­tion and the Supreme Court:
    • Chris­tians Should Rejoice Over Dobbs (Carl True­man, First Things): “Nobody of whom I am aware, for exam­ple, regards the lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz in 1945 as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing. No child freed that day was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that his lib­er­a­tors were mem­bers of the Red Army, act­ing on Stalin’s orders. Yet the Red Army was engaged in a mil­i­tary action that, in the long term, would lead to the noto­ri­ous Iron Cur­tain divid­ing Europe. Nobody regards the fall of Hitler as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing, even though it was only made pos­si­ble by the Amer­i­cans and the British strik­ing a deal with Joseph Stal­in. Yes, Trump is obnox­ious, but he isn’t Stal­in, and he did deliv­er on the abor­tion issue. Dobbs is a moment for joy.”
    • Here’s the Sur­pris­ing Back­sto­ry of the Down­fall of Roe v. Wade (Mark Hem­ing­way, Real Clear Inves­ti­ga­tions): “…con­ser­v­a­tive activists have long argued the pro-life move­ment was a moral cause on par with the civ­il rights move­ment – and ignor­ing the strate­gies com­mon­ly used to get the Supreme Court’s atten­tion would amount to uni­lat­er­al dis­ar­ma­ment in a lot of impor­tant legal bat­tles.”
    • SCOTUS Jus­tices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cit­ed Her Boss­es to End Roe (Kara Voght & Tim Dick­in­son, Rolling Stone): “In the shad­ow of the high court, across the street from its cham­bers, sits a clus­ter of unas­sum­ing row hous­es known only to the ini­ti­at­ed as ‘Min­istry Row.’ The strip is host to evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal groups that have spent the past sev­er­al decades push­ing Belt­way con­ser­v­a­tives to embrace the reli­gious right’s polit­i­cal caus­es…”
    • In a Post-Roe World, We Can Avoid Pit­ting Moth­ers Against Babies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, New York Times): “The first per­son to see us was anoth­er ultra­sound tech­ni­cian. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heart­beat. ‘It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,’ she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice soft­ened a lit­tle, ‘You don’t have to think of it that way.’ For her, part of pro­vid­ing care was deny­ing there was any room for grief. But when the sur­geon came in, he began by express­ing his con­do­lences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby.”
    • There’s a fol­low-up at My Ectopic Preg­nan­cies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to write about Camil­lian to describe not just what is allowed but what can be offered to par­ents who are los­ing their child when the doc­tors acknowl­edge their child as a child, rather than min­i­miz­ing their loss.” This one is a sad reminder of how cru­el peo­ple can be.
    • Angry about Roe, many jour­nal­ists focus on cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters as vil­lains behind it all (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Like, the CPCs have out­wit­ted the abor­tion clin­ics when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what many preg­nant women real­ly want and it’s clear the abor­tion facil­i­ties have suf­fered finan­cial loss­es as a result. How about ask­ing peo­ple at the lat­ter hard ques­tions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad mar­ket­ing deci­sion that was? Hint: It might have to do with the free ultra­sounds offered by the CPCs. Offer­ing this ser­vice was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it real­ly cried out for cov­er­age. But, you know. That wasn’t news.”
    • ‘The Pro-Life Gen­er­a­tion’: Young Women Fight Against Abor­tion Rights (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Young women whose activism is not con­nect­ed to reli­gious belief are rel­a­tive new­com­ers to the move­ment, where they make up a small but bois­ter­ous niche. Kristin Turn­er start­ed a chap­ter of a youth cli­mate group in her home­town, Red­ding, Calif. Her Insta­gram bio includes her pro­nouns (she/they) and sup­port for Black Lives Mat­ter. She describes her­self as a fem­i­nist, an athe­ist and a left­ist. At 20, she is also the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for Pro­gres­sive Anti-Abor­tion Upris­ing, whose goals include edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about ‘the exploita­tive influ­ence of the Abor­tion Indus­tri­al Com­plex through an anti-cap­i­tal­ist lens.‘”
  5. See­ing Like a Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins and I hope he is cor­rect.
  6. Why I’m Giv­ing Up Tenure at UCLA (Joseph Man­son, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Grad­u­al­ly, one hire at a time, prac­ti­tion­ers of ‘crit­i­cal’ (i.e. left­ist, post­mod­ernist) anthro­pol­o­gy, some of them lying about their beliefs dur­ing job inter­views, came to com­prise the department’s most influ­en­tial clique. These mil­i­tant fac­ul­ty mem­bers recruit­ed even more mil­i­tant grad­u­ate stu­dents to work with them.”
  7. Trans­gen­der-relat­ed:
    • Trans­for­ma­tion of a Trans­gen­der Teen (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Martin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of justice,” said Falls Church Angli­can rec­tor Sam Fer­gu­son, who has spent time with mul­ti­ple tran­si­tion­ing young adults and their fam­i­lies. “The Bible also envi­sions the long arc of redemp­tion, which aims at the res­ur­rec­tion of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the begin­ning. Our Cre­ator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chro­mo­some, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemp­tion, not against it.”
    • Pro­nouns and Cas­es Involv­ing Trans­gen­der Par­ties (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “For a bit of the fac­tu­al back­sto­ry, which may be rel­e­vant because it may illus­trate how use of pro­nouns might col­or read­ers’ per­spec­tive: Peti­tion­er C.G. was found to have sex­u­al­ly assault­ed a 14-year-old boy (whom the opin­ion calls Alan, a pseu­do­nym) who had been ‘diag­nosed with autism’ and who was appar­ent­ly work­ing in school at three grades below his age lev­el. At the time, C.G., who was 15 and who would a year lat­er be 300–345 pounds and 6’4” or 6′5″, was appar­ent­ly per­ceived by peo­ple, or at least by Alan, as male.” For a lit­tle more on the case: No First Amend­ment Right to Legal Name Change (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Uh oh! (The Far Side)
  • Study Finds 92% Of Cal­i­for­ni­ans Who Flee The State Don’t Sur­vive First Win­ter (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Clas­sic (The Far Side)
  • Magi­cian Dan White Proves Fate Real­ly Exists (The Tonight Show, YouTube): ten and a half min­utes.
  • Fright­en­ing But 100% True Facts About Guns (Baby­lon Bee, YouTube): four min­utes. The first part is the fun­ni­est, it drags a lit­tle at the end.
  • Tru­ly Hum­bled to Be the Author of This Arti­cle (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and espe­cial­ly if you’re around the high-sta­tus world of the achieva­trons, you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must nev­er tweet about any event that could actu­al­ly lead to humil­i­ty. Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I went to a par­ty, and nobody noticed me.’ Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I got fired for incom­pe­tence.’ The whole point of humil­i­ty dis­play is to sig­nal that you are hum­bled by your own mag­nif­i­cent accom­plish­ments. We can all be hum­bled by an awe­some moun­tain or the infini­tude of the night sky, but to be hum­bled by being in the pres­ence of yourself—that is a sign of tru­ly great humil­i­ty.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have 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. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 357

lots of arti­cles from a busy week — skim the titles and you’ll find at least one that intrigues you

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.

357 is an idoneal num­ber, only 65 of which are known to exist (and there are at most 2 more). A num­ber is idoneal if there is no way to write it as ab+bc+ac where a, b and c are all dif­fer­ent pos­i­tive num­bers. I did­n’t know idoneal num­bers exist­ed until today. Here’s a paper about them.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Relat­ed Arti­cles (Inter­est­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing)
    • GPT‑3 is ‑right now- already more than capa­ble of enabling stu­dent pla­gia­rism (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “I can­not empha­size enough that this is not ‘some­time vague­ly in the next five years’, nor is it ‘acces­si­ble only to stu­dents with a back­ground in comp sci’. It’s a 6 cents per thou­sand words pla­gia­rism ser­vice avail­able to every­one right now.… One idea- play around with your own ques­tions before assign­ing them to stu­dents and make sure GPT‑3 has trou­ble answer­ing them.” This is actu­al­ly quite stun­ning.
    • AI Wrote and Per­formed a Jer­ry Sein­feld Rou­tine (YouTube): one minute. GPT‑3 wrote a Jer­ry Sein­feld joke and this YouTube chan­nel did a deep­fake of his voice deliv­er­ing it. Not per­fect… but sur­pris­ing­ly good.
    • Google Engi­neer on His Sen­tient AI Claim (Bloomberg Tech­nol­o­gy, YouTube): ten min­utes. This is, to be clear, a dif­fer­ent AI sys­tem than GPT‑3.
    • ‘An Invis­i­ble Cage’: How Chi­na Is Polic­ing the Future (Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao & John Liu, New York Times): “The lat­est gen­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy digs through the vast amounts of data col­lect­ed on their dai­ly activ­i­ties to find pat­terns and aber­ra­tions, promis­ing to pre­dict crimes or protests before they hap­pen. They tar­get poten­tial trou­ble­mak­ers in the eyes of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment — not only those with a crim­i­nal past but also vul­ner­a­ble groups, includ­ing eth­nic minori­ties, migrant work­ers and those with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness. They can warn the police if a vic­tim of a fraud tries to trav­el to Bei­jing to peti­tion the gov­ern­ment for pay­ment or a drug user makes too many calls to the same num­ber. They can sig­nal offi­cers each time a per­son with a his­to­ry of men­tal ill­ness gets near a school.” Empha­sis added.
  2. Weed users near­ly 25% more like­ly to need emer­gency care and hos­pi­tal­iza­tion (Sandee LaM­otte, CNN): “When com­pared with peo­ple who did not use mar­i­jua­na, cannabis users were 22% more like­ly to vis­it an emer­gency depart­ment or be hos­pi­tal­ized, the study revealed. The find­ing held true even after adjust­ing the analy­sis for over 30 oth­er con­found­ing fac­tors, includ­ing oth­er illic­it drug use, alco­hol use and tobac­co smok­ing.”
  3. Some Supreme Court arti­cles:
    • Dobbs Is Not the Only Rea­son to Ques­tion the Legit­i­ma­cy of the Supreme Court (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Our polit­i­cal sys­tem is not designed for polit­i­cal par­ties this dif­fer­ent, and this antag­o­nis­tic. It wasn’t designed for polit­i­cal par­ties at all. The three branch­es of our sys­tem were intend­ed to check each oth­er through com­pe­ti­tion. Instead, par­ties com­pete and coop­er­ate across branch­es, and pow­er in one can be used to build pow­er in anoth­er — as McConnell well under­stood.”
    • The End of Roe Is Just the Begin­ning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…any con­fi­dent pre­dic­tion about this ruling’s con­se­quences is prob­a­bly a fool­ish one. There can be no cer­tain­ty about the future of abor­tion pol­i­tics because for almost 50 years all pol­i­cy debates have been over­shad­owed by judi­cial con­tro­ver­sy, and only now are we about to find out what the con­test real­ly looks like. It’s mere­ly the end of the begin­ning; the true end, in what­ev­er set­tle­ment or vic­to­ry, lies ahead.”
    • After Dobbs, mar­ried women keep­ing their sur­names regains polit­i­cal mean­ing (Kim­ber­ly A. Ham­lin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, sur­veys esti­mate that between 10 per­cent and 20 per­cent of Amer­i­can women keep their maid­en names, though the per­cent­age is high­er for women with advanced degrees and those who mar­ry lat­er in life. Debates about sur­names are, in essence, debates about women’s auton­o­my. Do we regard women as indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens or, pri­mar­i­ly, as wives and moth­ers?” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mia­mi Uni­ver­si­ty (in Ohio).
    • Vouch­ers for Reli­gious Schools Don’t Threat­en the Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State (Chris Freiman, Sub­stack): “Crit­ics of vouch­ers fail to dis­tin­guish between a direct sub­sidy for reli­gion and a tax-fund­ed enti­tle­ment dis­trib­uted to cit­i­zens who may use that enti­tle­ment for reli­gious pur­pos­es.… Cit­i­zens should be free to use school vouch­ers for pri­vate reli­gious edu­ca­tion because every­one should be free to use their state-sup­plied resources to pur­sue their own good in their own way, whether their good is reli­gious or not.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at William & Mary. This is pithy and well argued.
    • The Supreme Court hands the reli­gious right a big vic­to­ry by lying about the facts of a case (Ian Mill­his­er, Vox): “Kennedy will no doubt inspire oth­er teach­ers and coach­es to behave sim­i­lar­ly to Coach Kennedy, but those teach­ers and coach­es will do so at their own per­il. Gorsuch’s opin­ion doesn’t weigh whether a coach is allowed to do what Kennedy actu­al­ly did. That remains an open ques­tion, because the Court did not actu­al­ly decide that case.” A while ago I men­tioned that Mill­his­er often has a hard time under­stand­ing those he dis­agrees with or por­tray­ing them sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly. I give you exhib­it A.
    • Court’s Excel­lent Rul­ing in Coach Kennedy Case (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “The school dis­trict dis­ci­plined him only for his deci­sion to per­sist in pray­ing qui­et­ly with­out his play­ers after three games in 2015. It sought to restrict his actions at least in part because of their reli­gious char­ac­ter. Its poli­cies were not neu­tral toward reli­gion. Nor were they gen­er­al­ly applic­a­ble: In response to Kennedy’s reli­gious exer­cise, the dis­trict imposed on him a post-game oblig­a­tion to super­vise stu­dents that it did not impose on oth­er mem­bers of the coach­ing staff.” You would not know any of these facts had you only read Mill­his­er’s arti­cle.
    • Jus­tice Thomas and Lov­ing v. Vir­ginia (Josh Black­man, Rea­son): “…Lov­ing was premised on both the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause and the Due Process Clause. Even if you reject sub­stan­tive due process, you could still find that Lov­ing reached the cor­rect result on the basis of the Equal Pro­tec­tion Clause. After all, the law lit­er­al­ly treats peo­ple dif­fer­ent­ly on the basis of their race. Two white peo­ple can get mar­ried, but a white per­son and a black per­son can­not. Even the most con­ser­v­a­tive jurists would deem such a law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.”
    • Politi­co, Axios, and NBC News ped­dle a weird smear of Clarence Thomas (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Thomas didn’t claim that the cells of abort­ed chil­dren are in the vac­cines, but NBC News, Politi­co, and Axios all wrote as if he did. They were dead wrong on an eas­i­ly check­able fact. How did this hap­pen? How did three out­lets all ‘fact check’ a claim Thomas nev­er made, imply­ing or stat­ing that he did make it?”
  4. The Cathe­dral Vs. Yeshi­va (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “How will­ful­ly blind do you have to be to say that Yeshi­va is not a reli­gious insti­tu­tion? Some­thing tells me that the judge had her mind made up before the first argu­ments were heard. Anoth­er thing that ticks me off is that LGBT rights are wide­ly accept­ed and cel­e­brat­ed in near­ly every col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty in this land. Yeshi­va is one of a rel­a­tive hand­ful of insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion where peo­ple who choose to attend do not have to vio­late their reli­gious con­sciences by burn­ing a pinch of incense to the LGBT Cae­sar. But the Grand Inquisi­tors of the new reli­gion will not tol­er­ate any dis­sent. Their god is a jeal­ous god.” The updates at the end are worth read­ing.
  5. A Can­did Con­ver­sa­tion with Reporter Jeanne Lenz­er on Uncov­er­ing Cor­po­rate Influ­ence in Med­i­cine and the Media for Over Two Decades (Paul Thack­er, Sub­stack): “I called the Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion and found out that they were tak­ing Genen­tech mon­ey, and when I asked them about any finan­cial con­flicts among their pan­elists, they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. When we put peo­ple on a pan­el, we insist on finan­cial dis­clo­sure.’ I said, ‘Fine, would you send me those dis­clo­sures?’ They said, ‘We don’t dis­close dis­clo­sures.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. From Aug 2021. Also, that excerpt is fun­ny.
  6. Ire­land’s COVID Response, Part 4: The Def­i­n­i­tion of Insan­i­ty… (Sam Enwright, Sub­stack): “The vac­cines proved that our civil­i­sa­tion is still capa­ble of great­ness on the scale of the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet, can the aver­age per­son on the street even name a sin­gle indi­vid­ual that designed and built them? This New York Times arti­cle about Katal­in Karikó, pio­neer of mRNA tech­nol­o­gy, is unbe­liev­ably depress­ing. She spent decades on the fringes of acad­e­mia strug­gling to get research fund­ing or recog­ni­tion. After Salk devel­oped the polio vac­cine, peo­ple par­tied in the streets. Today, we get end­less screeds about how ‘tech can’t save us’ and Big Phar­ma is ‘prof­it­ing from pain’. I’m not say­ing there is no mer­it to these com­plaints. But a word of advice: before you crit­i­cise, go to where peo­ple are doing tru­ly extra­or­di­nary things, and observe. Lis­ten, for ye have much to learn.”
    • This is much bet­ter than the title might lead you to assume.
  7. Acad­e­mia
    • Account­ing For Col­lege Costs (John Went­worth, Less Wrong): “In this post, we’ll dig into the account­ing data for col­lege costs, espe­cial­ly for 4‑year pri­vate non­prof­it col­leges. The main the­o­ry we’ll end up at, based on the account­ing data, is that col­lege costs are dri­ven main­ly by a large increase in diver­si­ty of cours­es avail­able, which results in much low­er student/faculty ratios, and cor­re­spond­ing­ly high­er costs per stu­dent.”
    • It’s Time to Review the Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (Willy Chert­man, CSPI): “Insti­tu­tion­al Review Boards (IRBs) are ethics com­mit­tees, ide­al­ly com­posed of sci­en­tif­ic peers and lay com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, that review research before it can be con­duct­ed. Their osten­si­ble pur­pose is to pro­tect research sub­jects from research harms. But often­times, IRBs are cost­ly, slow, and do more harm than good. They cen­sor con­tro­ver­sial research, invent harms where none exist, and by des­ig­nat­ing cer­tain cat­e­gories of sub­jects as ‘vul­ner­a­ble,’ cause a cor­re­spond­ing dimin­ish­ment in research on those sub­jects.”

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 hear­kens back to the 90’s, when polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. I encour­age you to read them both — espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

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 356

from the week abor­tion fell

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 356, which is a hap­py num­ber (some­thing I learned about only today). A hap­py num­ber is a num­ber whose dig­its when squared sum to 1 if the process is repeat­ed long enough. 356 takes six iter­a­tions.

  1. 356 ==> 32+52+62 = 9+25+36 = 70.
  2. 70 ==> 72+02 = 49.
  3. 49 ==> 42+92 = 16+81 = 97.
  4. 97 ==> 92+72 = 81+49 = 130
  5. 130 ==> 12+32+02 = 1+9+0 = 10
  6. 10 ==> 12 + 02 = 1

I got way more into that than I expect­ed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The huge news today is that abor­tion is no longer a con­sti­tu­tion­al right in Amer­i­ca. I expect deep­er analy­ses to appear by next week — most colum­nists appear to be sav­ing their big pieces for the Sun­day papers. Send rec­om­men­da­tions my way!
    • What changed from Jus­tice Alito’s draft opin­ion to final rul­ing on Roe (Kel­ly Hoop­er, Politi­co): “…Ali­to did add to his orig­i­nal opin­ion, with a fierce rebut­tal of the court’s lib­er­al dis­senters, plus a direct shot at Chief Jus­tice John Roberts in the final text. Roberts was the only con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tice on the court to side with its three lib­er­als, mak­ing the final vote 5–4 in the deci­sion to strike down Roe and give states the green light to ban abor­tion.”
    • Supreme Court over­turns con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog): “Stare deci­sis, Ali­to stressed, ‘is not a strait­jack­et’ when a rul­ing is griev­ous­ly incor­rect.… Notably, the dis­senters fin­ished by not­ing only that they dis­sent­ed, omit­ting the word ‘respect­ful­ly’ that com­mon­ly accom­pa­nies the dis­sent.”
      • A good sum­ma­ry of the opin­ion. The author used to teach at Stan­ford Law School. That last sen­tence is impor­tant.
    • From the right: The Land is Bright (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Some desire to down­play this vic­to­ry or even to lament the man­ner of it. We should not. Fed­er­al law in Amer­i­ca once rec­og­nized a right to kill unborn chil­dren. Now it does not. Our feel­ings should be unam­bigu­ous: it is a great good that over half the states in our union are soon like­ly to have laws grant­i­ng sweep­ing pro­tec­tions to the unborn. And we can just say that it is good.”
    • From the left: Which rights are next on the Supreme Court’s chop­ping block? (Ian Mill­houser, Vox): “In any event, the future of rights oth­er than abor­tion will like­ly need to be lit­i­gat­ed. There is no doubt that Thomas would hap­pi­ly light many exist­ing rights on fire. And there is lit­tle doubt that Ali­to, based on his Oberge­fell dis­sent, would also hap­pi­ly tear down same-sex mar­riage. But it takes five votes to strip away an exist­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al right, and it remains to be seen whether Jus­tices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Bar­rett — con­ser­v­a­tives who some­times break with Alito’s most aggres­sive attempts to dri­ve the law to the right — will sup­port mass roll­backs of exist­ing rights.”
      • Mill­houser is often hyper­bol­ic and fails to read ideas he dis­agrees with fair­ly, but this is a pret­ty good sum­ma­ry.
    • From the right: The Supreme Court strikes down Roe and Casey (Albert Mohler, World): “…pro-life Amer­i­cans have learned not to assume any­thing and to wait to see any deci­sion in the black and white of plain text. Well, we have the plain text. It is explo­sive. It is earth­shak­ing.… It is an answer to prayer.”
      • The author is a sem­i­nary pres­i­dent and also the pres­i­dent of the Evan­gel­i­cal The­o­log­i­cal Soci­ety.
    • From the left: Get­ting Real About the Post‑‘Roe’ World (Scott Lemieux, The Amer­i­can Prospect): “The the­o­ry went that Repub­li­can elites didn’t real­ly want to over­rule Roe, but were mere­ly pre­tend­ing to for the sake of pan­der­ing to their base. This nar­ra­tive was always false; the sur­vival of Roe was always a high­ly con­tin­gent fluke, the prod­uct of sev­er­al mis­takes by Repub­li­can pres­i­dents.”
    • From the right: The Long Bat­tle to Over­turn Roe (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “There are at least two large rea­sons that the long bat­tle to over­turn Roe has suc­ceed­ed. First, pro-lif­ers did not heed Casey’s com­mand that they give up on work­ing to defend the lives of unborn human beings, and they remained a pow­er­ful polit­i­cal force in the Repub­li­can par­ty, all the more so as near­ly all Democ­rats had aban­doned the pro-life cause. Sec­ond, the con­ser­v­a­tive legal move­ment grew and flour­ished, thanks in large part to the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety and to Jus­tice Scalia and Jus­tice Thomas.”
    • From the left: Repub­li­cans Are Will­ing to Pay a Polit­i­cal Price to Ban Abor­tion. It’s Up to Democ­rats to Make Them Pay It. (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “After the draft deci­sion leaked, Democ­rats brought a wish-list bill to the floor of both cham­bers that even pro-choice Repub­li­cans — even Sen. Susan Collins — were able to com­fort­ably vote against on the grounds that it was too extreme, more expan­sive than Casey. Democ­rats need to break the agen­da into pieces.… Unlike a catch-all bill, there are many indi­vid­ual ideas about pro­tect­ing abor­tion rights that are very broad­ly pop­u­lar — bring­ing them to the floor puts Repub­li­cans in the posi­tion of either vot­ing for poli­cies to pro­tect abor­tion rights, or going home to defend votes that are actu­al­ly hard to defend in elec­tion cam­paigns.”
      • Both par­ties should do this on a whole host of issues. Pol­i­tics would change quick­ly if our lead­ers gov­erned this way. Bar­ro is right about the shrewd strat­e­gy, but I think it unlike­ly that his par­ty will heed him.
  2. Made in Amer­i­ca: Goods Exports by State (Raul Amoros, Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist): “Texas has been the top export­ing state in the U.S. for an incred­i­ble 20 years in a row. Last year, Texas export­ed $375 bil­lion worth of goods, which is more than Cal­i­for­nia ($175 bil­lion), New York ($85 bil­lion), and Louisiana ($77 bil­lion) com­bined. The state’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ing export cat­e­go­ry is petro­le­um and coal prod­ucts, but it’s also impor­tant to men­tion that Texas led the nation in tech exports for the ninth straight year. Cal­i­for­nia was the sec­ond high­est exporter of goods in 2021 with a total val­ue of $175 bil­lion, an increase of 12% from the pre­vi­ous year.”
    • Sur­pris­es here, rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal.
  3. Mike Pence and the Chris­t­ian Con­flict on Jan­u­ary 6 (David French, The Dis­patch): “A healthy nation­al cul­ture both con­demns cow­ardice and hon­ors val­or, even when val­or is sim­ply part of the job. And we should do both with an immense mea­sure of humil­i­ty. How many of us have proven our own courage under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances? Pence faced threats to his fam­i­ly, threats to him­self, threats to his pow­er, and threats to the rest of his career. How many of us have pre­vailed in the face of such pressure?  To scorn courage in such cir­cum­stances fur­ther incen­tivizes cow­ardice. At least the cow­ard­ly retain their polit­i­cal pow­er and their polit­i­cal home.”
  4. In Defense of Polit­i­cal Esca­la­tion (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “If our ulti­mate goal is return­ing to a nor­mal­cy in which gov­ern­ment agen­cies and cor­po­ra­tions treat all Amer­i­cans fair­ly regard­less of view­point, how are we to achieve this? At a min­i­mum, we must acknowl­edge that these insti­tu­tions are already weaponized and their artillery points only in one direc­tion: against the oppo­nents of the left.”
    • To my knowl­edge Shri­er is not reli­gious and is in no way con­ser­v­a­tive, but she is artic­u­lat­ing an argu­ment that I see fre­quent­ly on the right (most famous­ly in the French/Ahmari dust­up). It ani­mates Trump­ism and is one of the rea­sons DeSan­tis is so pop­u­lar on the right and that Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives have such a fas­ci­na­tion with Orban in Hun­gary.
  5. Pen­te­costal­s’ Polit­i­cal War­fare (Miguel Pet­rosky, The Reveal­er): “Issues like abor­tion and same-sex mar­riage, and even fears of creep­ing ‘Marx­ism,’ have long been of con­cern to some fac­tions of Amer­i­can con­ser­vatism. But in parts of the Pen­te­costal and charis­mat­ic world, these issues con­tain cos­mic impli­ca­tions for the country’s rela­tion­ship with God. In the Hebrew Scrip­tures, each of Israel’s kings either ‘did what was right’ or ‘did what was evil’ in the eyes of God—with either bless­ings or curs­es for the king­dom. Since Pen­te­costals view them­selves as being a con­tin­u­a­tion of the bib­li­cal nar­ra­tive, they are cer­tain God will judge Amer­i­ca by the issues they view as stray­ing from the Bible.”
  6. Leaked Audio From 80 Inter­nal Tik­Tok Meet­ings Shows That US User Data Has Been Repeat­ed­ly Accessed From Chi­na (Emi­ly Bak­er-White, Buz­zFeed News): “Law­mak­er­s’ fear that the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment will be able to get its hands on Amer­i­can data through ByteDance is root­ed in the real­i­ty that Chi­nese com­pa­nies are sub­ject to the whims of the author­i­tar­i­an Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, which has been crack­ing down on its home­grown tech giants over the last year. The risk is that the gov­ern­ment could force ByteDance to col­lect and turn over infor­ma­tion as a form of ‘data espi­onage.’ There is, how­ev­er, anoth­er con­cern: that the soft pow­er of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment could impact how ByteDance exec­u­tives direct their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts to adjust the levers of TikTok’s pow­er­ful ‘For You’ algo­rithm, which rec­om­mends videos to its more than 1 bil­lion users. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, has called Tik­Tok ‘a Tro­jan horse the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty can use to influ­ence what Amer­i­cans see, hear, and ulti­mate­ly think.’ ”
  7. Quest to Con­quer a Dis­ease (Amy Lynn Smith, AG News): “Gib­son met Hong as he ate lunch with anoth­er intern in the stu­dent union. Hong asked to join them, and after­ward Gib­son and Hong began meet­ing for tea or cof­fee every week. Gib­son learned that Hong, the night before he intro­duced him­self, had a dream in which a man encour­aged Hong to meet peo­ple on cam­pus. Hong lat­er came to rec­og­nize the man in the dream as Jesus. A friend­ship devel­oped between Hong and Gib­son.”
    • This is about two of our alum­ni: Dan Gib­son, who did his min­istry train­ing with Chi Alpha Stan­ford sev­er­al years ago, and Guosong “Frank” Hong who did his PhD here and is now a pro­fes­sor.

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 Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super‐short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing. First shared in vol­ume 224.

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 355

Two pieces crit­i­cal of Stan­ford plus lots more.

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 355, which is 5 times 71. It’s also appar­ent­ly the num­ber of labeled topolo­gies with 4 ele­ments, but I think know­ing that it is 5 · 71 is cool­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cles about Stan­ford:
    • Stanford’s War on Social Life (Ginevra Davis, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The Uni­ver­si­ty sent a clear mes­sage with its treat­ment of the Band. Spon­ta­neous orga­ni­za­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they could become chaot­ic, con­tro­ver­sial, or oth­er­wise a space for break­ing rules, were now some­thing to be con­trolled. Rather than treat­ing free­dom and spon­tane­ity as strengths, the dynam­ic became one where stu­dents had to jus­ti­fy their projects and ideas while under sus­pi­cion from admin­is­tra­tors. Stu­dent life was becom­ing dom­i­nat­ed by restric­tive bureau­cra­cy.” I believe this is sub­stan­tial­ly cor­rect.
    • How I Almost Did­n’t Grad­u­ate From Stan­ford (Maxwell Mey­er, Sub­stack): “Appar­ent­ly, in order to grad­u­ate from Stan­ford while not offi­cial­ly enrolled, I need­ed to be placed in a spe­cial 0‑unit ‘course’ that exists only on paper. And because Stan­ford requires boost­er vac­cines in order to enroll in cours­es, the degree progress office was lit­er­al­ly unable to place me in the fake course.”
  2. The Google engi­neer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As he talked to LaM­DA about reli­gion, Lemoine, who stud­ied cog­ni­tive and com­put­er sci­ence in col­lege, noticed the chat­bot talk­ing about its rights and per­son­hood, and decid­ed to press fur­ther. In anoth­er exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robot­ics.” Spec­u­la­tive and dis­put­ed.
  3. This traf­fic stop between a Black man and a White state troop­er began with fear. It end­ed with a sur­pris­ing act of kind­ness (John Blake, CNN): “Doty closed his tick­et book and opened his car door. He walked back over to Wilk­er­son­’s car and turned to Ged­dis. ‘Sir, do you mind if I ask what kind of can­cer you have?’ ‘No, I don’t mind. I have colon can­cer.’ Doty took a deep breath and looked at Ged­dis. ‘Can I pray for you?’ Doty said.” Heart­warm­ing.
  4. In the world of med­i­cine:
    • A turn­ing point in can­cer (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “The con­ver­gence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor direct­ly or the blood (known as liq­uid biopsy)—matched with the appro­pri­ate ther­a­py is lead­ing to out­comes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncol­o­gists.”
    • The Bat­tle Over Gen­der Ther­a­py (Emi­ly Bazelon, New York Times): “ ‘Being trans comes with goals — this is what to do,’ Butzen says. ‘It comes with a sup­port net­work and a cause to fight for.’ Online, where the stakes start rel­a­tive­ly low, teenagers in pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ties can trade in a cis­gen­der, het­ero­sex­u­al, white iden­ti­ty — the epit­o­me of priv­i­lege and oppres­sion — to join a com­mu­ni­ty with a clear claim to being mar­gin­al­ized and deserv­ing of pro­tec­tion.”
      • It is sig­nif­i­cant that this report­ing is in New York Times. This is a long arti­cle and it was dif­fi­cult to find a pas­sage to excerpt. I am con­fi­dent the jour­nal­ist would not con­sid­er this a rep­re­sen­ta­tive excerpt nor the one she con­sid­ers most impor­tant.
  5. Pro­fes­sors Need the Pow­er to Fire Diver­si­ty Bureau­crats (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “At present, sanc­tions in high­er edu­ca­tion flow in one direc­tion: Diver­si­ty bureau­crats exert con­trol over fac­ul­ty mem­bers whose speech alleged­ly under­mines inclu­sion. I pro­pose giv­ing fac­ul­ty the pow­er to inves­ti­gate, sanc­tion, and fire diver­si­ty offi­cials if they under­mine free speech. Admin­is­tra­tive abus­es will con­tin­ue as long as bureau­crats can pun­ish speech, even in fla­grant vio­la­tion of uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­cy, with­out any con­se­quences.” I like this. I don’t think it’s struc­tural­ly pos­si­ble at most uni­ver­si­ties, but I like this.
  6. Inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive:
    • Five Blunt Truths About the War in Ukraine (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The Rus­sians are run­ning out of pre­ci­sion-guid­ed weapons. The Ukraini­ans are run­ning out of Sovi­et-era muni­tions. The world is run­ning out of patience for the war. The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is run­ning out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chi­nese are watch­ing.… an army that can­not wage a high-tech war, rel­a­tive­ly low on col­lat­er­al dam­age, will wage a low-tech war, appalling­ly high on such dam­age. Ukraine, by its own esti­mates, is suf­fer­ing 20,000 casu­al­ties a month. By con­trast, the U.S. suf­fered about 36,000 casu­al­ties in Iraq over sev­en years of war. For all its brav­ery and resolve, Kyiv can hold off — but not defeat — a neigh­bor more than three times its size in a war of attri­tion.”
    • China’s mil­i­tary expan­sion is reach­ing a dan­ger­ous tip­ping point (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Chi­na is build­ing the capa­bil­i­ty to use nuclear black­mail to deter a U.S. inter­ven­tion if it invades Tai­wan, fol­low­ing Russia’s mod­el. China’s region­al mil­i­tary pres­ence is expand­ing, includ­ing a secret naval base in Cam­bo­dia and a secret mil­i­tary coop­er­a­tion agree­ment with the Solomon Islands. Chi­na has devel­oped new tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing hyper­son­ic mis­siles and anti­satel­lite lasers, to keep the U.S. mil­i­tary at bay in a Tai­wan sce­nario. And now, Chi­na no longer rec­og­nizes the Tai­wan Strait as inter­na­tion­al waters.”
  7. Ele­phant in the Zoom (Ryan Grim, The Inter­cept): “…Planned Par­ent­hood, NARAL Pro-Choice Amer­i­ca, and oth­er repro­duc­tive health orga­ni­za­tions had sim­i­lar­ly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between com­pet­ing fac­tions of their orga­ni­za­tions, most often break­ing down along staff-ver­sus-man­age­ment lines. It’s also true of the pro­gres­sive advo­ca­cy space across the board, which has, more or less, effec­tive­ly ceased to func­tion. The Sier­ra Club, Demos, the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union, Col­or of Change, the Move­ment for Black Lives, Human Rights Cam­paign, Time’s Up, the Sun­rise Move­ment, and many oth­er orga­ni­za­tions have seen wrench­ing and debil­i­tat­ing tur­moil in the past cou­ple years.”

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 Impor­tance of Stu­pid­i­ty in Sci­en­tif­ic Research (Mar­tin A. Schwartz, Jour­nal of Cell Sci­ence): “At some point, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to why she had left grad­u­ate school. To my utter aston­ish­ment, she said it was because it made her feel stu­pid. After a cou­ple of years of feel­ing stu­pid every day, she was ready to do some­thing else. I had thought of her as one of the bright­est peo­ple I knew and her sub­se­quent career sup­ports that view. What she said both­ered me. I kept think­ing about it; some­time the next day, it hit me. Sci­ence makes me feel stu­pid too. It’s just that I’ve got­ten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I active­ly seek out new oppor­tu­ni­ties to feel stupid.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale. First shared in vol­ume 221.

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 354

there’s a real­ly fun opti­cal illu­sion at the end as a reward for per­se­ver­ing

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 354, which is the sum of the first four 4th pow­ers: 14+24+34+44 = 1+16+81+256=354.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When to Dis­trust Your Pas­tor (Gar­rett Kell, Gospel Coali­tion): “Shep­herds should be known by their sheep. Appear­ing in the pul­pit is only a small part of a pastor’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. If church mem­bers lack any vis­i­bil­i­ty into their pas­tors’ lives, they are unable to ‘con­sid­er the out­come of their way of life, and imi­tate their faith’ (Heb. 13:7).”
  2. Con­cern­ing mar­riage:
    • The ben­e­fits of mar­riage shouldn’t only be for elites (Brad Wilcox, Deseret News): “We’re think­ing here of the way in which the U.S. mil­i­tary has increased the rate of mar­riage among its ranks, many of whom are from work­ing-class back­grounds. What’s also inter­est­ing is the research sug­gests there is vir­tu­al­ly no racial gap in mar­riage in the mil­i­tary. Whites and Blacks mar­ry at about the same rate. What’s the military’s secret? It pro­vides great ben­e­fits and doesn’t give them to cohab­it­ing cou­ples. In oth­er words, it priv­i­leges mar­riage. The rest of the gov­ern­ment should do like­wise.” Inter­est­ing through­out.
    • I Mar­ried the Wrong Per­son, and I’m So Glad I Did (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “I want to nor­mal­ize sig­nif­i­cant peri­ods of con­fu­sion, exhaus­tion, grief and unful­fill­ment in mar­riage. There’s an old­er cou­ple I know who are in their fifth decade of mar­riage. They are fun­ny and kind and, by almost any stan­dard, the pic­ture of #rela­tion­ship­goals. Ear­ly on in our mar­riage they told us, ‘There are times in mar­riage when the Bible’s call to love your ene­mies and the call to love your spouse are the same call.’ ”
  3. Con­cern­ing Ukraine:
    • West­ern Lead­ers Ought to Take Esca­la­tion Over Ukraine Seri­ous­ly (Michael Lopate and Bear Brau­moeller, War On The Rocks): “Most wars will either be far less lethal or far more lethal than the medi­an. The bot­tom 50 per­cent of wars have an aver­age of about 2,900 bat­tle deaths, while the top 50 per­cent have an aver­age of 653,000, and it is effec­tive­ly a coin-flip which half any giv­en war will end up in. In Ukraine, after three months and with no end in sight, West­ern ana­lysts esti­mate at least 20,000 fatal­i­ties, putting this war well into the top half of con­flicts.”
      • The authors are polit­i­cal sci­en­tists at The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty (if you did not know, hav­ing “The” in the uni­ver­si­ty’s name is very impor­tant to Ohions).
    • Of Sanc­tions and Strate­gic Bombers (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “This is most clear in our recent sanc­tions cam­paign against the Rus­sians. As with strate­gic bomb­ing, the entire enter­prise is premised on exploit­ing a psy­cho­log­i­cal and social divide between ruler and ruled that might not exist. Like our grand­fa­thers before us, we have a dif­fi­cult time accept­ing that the every­day cit­i­zen of an author­i­tar­i­an regime might be moti­vat­ed to sac­ri­fice their lives and liv­ing stan­dards for abstract, nation­al­ist ideals. As in World War II, we deny these civil­ians cul­pa­bil­i­ty for the war while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly devis­ing tac­tics that make them the first tar­get of our fury.”
      • This is an inter­est­ing cri­tique of eco­nom­ic sanc­tions as a tool in inter­na­tion­al rela­tions.
  4. What Amer­i­ca Needs Is a Lib­er­al­ism That Builds (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “…the Empire State Build­ing was con­struct­ed in just over a year. We are rich­er than we were then, and our tech­nol­o­gy far out­paces what was avail­able in 1930. And yet does any­one seri­ous­ly believe such a project would take a year today?”
  5. What Comes After the Reli­gious Right? (Nate Hochman, New York Times): “Rather than invo­ca­tions of Scrip­ture, the right’s appeal is a defense of a broad­er, belea­guered Amer­i­can way of life. For exam­ple, the lan­guage of parental rights is rarely, if ever, reli­gious, but it speaks to the per­va­sive sense that Amer­i­can fam­i­lies are fight­ing back against pro­gres­sive ide­o­logues over con­trol of the class­room.”
  6. Your Kids Are Not Doomed (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Over the past few years, I’ve been asked one ques­tion more than any oth­er. It comes up at speech­es, at din­ners, in con­ver­sa­tion. It’s the most pop­u­lar query when I open my pod­cast to sug­ges­tions, time and again. It comes in two forms. The first: Should I have kids, giv­en the cli­mate cri­sis they will face? The sec­ond: Should I have kids, know­ing they will con­tribute to the cli­mate cri­sis the world faces?”
  7. The African Roots of the Day of Pen­te­cost (Daniel Isgrigg, per­son­al blog): “If Oden is right, the first Pen­te­costal church was in the home of an African dis­ci­ple. Is it any won­der, then, that the mod­ern Pen­te­costal Move­ment was launched by a prayer meet­ing at an African Amer­i­can home that was led by the a son of an African slave? Or that an African Amer­i­can mis­sion on Azusa Street became the nexus for a glob­al revival that changed Chris­tian­i­ty? Or is it any won­der that African spir­i­tu­al­i­ty has shaped Pen­te­costal wor­ship aes­thet­ics such as shout­ing, danc­ing, and tarrying?  Final­ly, if Pen­te­cost began in an African woman’s home, is it any won­der that Pen­te­costal­ism has includ­ed women as co-labor­ers and pro­claimers of the gospel around the world?”

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 Too Much Dark Mon­ey in Almonds (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Everyone always talks about how much mon­ey there is in pol­i­tics. This is the wrong fram­ing. The right fram­ing is Ansolabehere et al’s: why is there so lit­tle mon­ey in pol­i­tics? But Ansolabehere focus­es on elec­tions, and the mys­tery is wider than that. Sure, dur­ing the 2018 elec­tion, can­di­dates, par­ties, PACs, and out­siders com­bined spent about $5 bil­lion – $2.5 bil­lion on Democ­rats, $2 bil­lion on Repub­li­cans, and $0.5 bil­lion on third par­ties. And although that sounds like a lot of mon­ey to you or me, on the nation­al scale, it’s puny. The US almond indus­try earns $12 bil­lion per year. Amer­i­cans spent about 2.5x as much on almonds as on can­di­dates last year.” It builds to a sur­pris­ing twist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 219.

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 353

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 353, the 71st prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I saw this gem on Twit­ter: “I don’t wish to sound apoc­a­lyp­tic about this, but one has the sense that at present our soci­ety is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly char­ac­ter­ized by wild­ly dis­pro­por­tion­ate account­abil­i­ty for triv­ial trans­gres­sions and zero account­abil­i­ty for pro­found insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure.” (David Polan­sky, co-founder of LinkedIn)
  2. The Rob­ber Baroness of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia (Maia Sil­ber, New York­er): “The university’s most vital pur­pose, Stan­ford explained in an address to its Board of Trustees a few years after her husband’s death, was the devel­op­ment of the student’s ‘soul germ.’ She urged the trustees to eschew class­rooms in favor of shops and work­shops that would ‘dig­ni­fy labor’ by teach­ing future work­ers to ‘use their hands deft­ly and use­ful­ly.’ Stan­ford believed that, in addi­tion to pro­vid­ing voca­tion­al train­ing, the uni­ver­si­ty should incul­cate the val­ues of faith, thrift, and absti­nence of var­i­ous kinds. She and her hus­band banned alco­hol from the dor­mi­to­ries and capped the num­ber of women under­grad­u­ates at five hun­dred.”
  3. 78 Min­utes (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “I know it’s a sta­tis­ti­cal anom­aly. I know it almost nev­er hap­pens. I know there are a mil­lion things I wor­ry less about that hap­pen with greater reg­u­lar­i­ty and worse effects; but those things are unfor­tu­nate, and this is evil. Mis­for­tune is awful, but this was some­thing worse. This was tor­ture. This was cru­el. This was inten­tion­al. The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters.”
  4. How did the IR com­mu­ni­ty get Russia/Ukraine so wrong? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The IR com­mu­ni­ty is risk-averse, and pre­serv­ing of its aca­d­e­m­ic rep­u­ta­tions, and thus its mem­bers are less will­ing to make bold pre­dic­tions than say pun­dits are. You might even think that is good, all things con­sid­ered, but it will help explain the missed pre­dic­tions here.” Many inter­est­ing con­sid­er­a­tions, fol­low-up at Data on IR schol­ars and their views on Russia/Ukraine.
  5. Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Polit­i­cal Iden­ti­ty (Eric Kauf­mann, CSPI): “The youth­ful surge is main­ly about LGBT iden­ti­ty, with con­sid­er­ably less change in sex­u­al behav­ior. The rise is great­est for bisex­u­al­i­ty, espe­cial­ly among females, with less change for gays and les­bians. The growth in LGBT iden­ti­fi­ca­tion shows no signs of slow­ing down among the young, but there is com­pelling evi­dence that gen­der non­con­for­mi­ty peaked around 2020 and declined in 2021. It appears less preva­lent among teenagers than those in their ear­ly twen­ties.” Plus a fas­ci­nat­ing Twit­ter thread by the author high­light­ing key details — so much data in this piece to con­tem­plate. Spicy through­out.
  6. The Pope’s Secret Back Chan­nel to Hitler (David Kertzer, The Atlantic): “As the head of a large inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion, his over­rid­ing aim in nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler’s emis­sary was pro­tect­ing the insti­tu­tion­al resources and pre­rog­a­tives of the Roman Catholic Church in the Third Reich. If the only goal was to pro­tect the wel­fare of the insti­tu­tion­al Church, his efforts could well be judged a suc­cess. But for those who see the papa­cy as a posi­tion of great moral lead­er­ship, the rev­e­la­tions of Pius XII’s secret nego­ti­a­tions with Hitler must come as a sharp dis­ap­point­ment.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. We Need to Com­pli­cate the Neg­a­tive World (Trevin Wax, Gospel Coali­tion): “…tak­ing a stand for true Chris­tian­i­ty has always been cost­ly. Chris­t­ian min­is­ters lost their jobs in the 1960s for doing noth­ing more than allow­ing African Amer­i­cans to attend wor­ship! In some way or anoth­er, we’ve been in the neg­a­tive world since the time of the New Tes­ta­ment, but the form of that hos­til­i­ty toward the faith changes depend­ing on the place and the era. And the opportunities—where soci­ety smiles on aspects of Christianity—change too. We live in pos­i­tive, neu­tral, and neg­a­tive worlds simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, depend­ing on the issue.“This is quite good.

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 New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs, and I fea­tured anoth­er arti­cle by him short­ly before this one. First shared back in 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 352

a heart­break­ing week

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 352, which is (I am informed) the num­ber of ways to place 9 queens on a 9×9 chess­board so that they can­not attack each oth­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The South­ern Bap­tist abuse cri­sis:
    • South­ern Bap­tists Refused to Act on Abuse, Despite Secret List of Pas­tors (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Guide­post Solu­tions, the third-par­ty inves­tiga­tive firm, wants the 13-mil­lion-mem­ber denom­i­na­tion to cre­ate an online data­base of abusers, offer com­pen­sa­tion for sur­vivors, sharply lim­it non-dis­clo­sure agree­ments, and estab­lish a new enti­ty ded­i­cat­ed to respond­ing to abuse. The direc­tives in the 288-page report will sound famil­iar for sur­vivors and advo­cates, who have been call­ing for those mea­sures all along.”
    • This Is the South­ern Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Indeed, the very ones who rebuked me and oth­ers for using the word cri­sis in ref­er­ence to South­ern Bap­tist sex­u­al abuse not only knew that there was such a cri­sis but were qui­et­ly doc­u­ment­ing it, even as they told those fight­ing for reform that such crimes rarely hap­pened among “people like us.” When I read the back-and-forth between some of these pres­i­dents, high-rank­ing staff, and their lawyers, I can­not help but won­der what else this can be called but a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy.”
    • No Athe­ist Has Done This Much Dam­age to the Chris­t­ian Faith (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “It’s near­ly impos­si­ble to over­state how much dam­age these new revelations—these nec­es­sary and long-over­due revelations—are doing to the Chris­t­ian wit­ness. No athe­ist, no sec­u­lar­ists or mate­ri­al­ists, could inflict near­ly as much dam­age to the Chris­t­ian faith as these lead­ers with­in the Chris­t­ian Church have done.“This is a gen­er­al prin­ci­ple: skep­tics rarely hurt the Church. Chris­tians, though, hurt the Church all the time.
    • Avoid­ing Finan­cial And Gov­er­nance Dis­as­ters (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “…in some very impor­tant ways, sex­u­al abuse and sex­u­al harass­ment in the church are effects. They are con­se­quences. They are fruits, not the root, of the problem.So what’s the cause? It’s pret­ty un-glam­orous. It doesn’t gen­er­ate as many head­lines, and when it does gen­er­ate a head­line, that head­line tends to be ignored, or quick­ly for­got­ten. And that cause is mon­ey. More specif­i­cal­ly, the love of mon­ey.… So, at a min­i­mum, I think we evan­gel­i­cals should be spend­ing as much time under­stand­ing and uncov­er­ing finan­cial fraud as we spend on sex­u­al abuse and tox­ic lead­er­ship.”
    • How the ‘Apocalyptic’ South­ern Bap­tist Report Almost Didn’t Hap­pen (Bob Smi­etana, Min­istry­Watch): “In oth­er words, the Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee would be put in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing itself. Then-Pres­i­dent J.D. Greear was ready to move on when Benkert stood up at a micro­phone with a motion of his own, based on anoth­er sec­tion of bylaw 29. ‘I would like the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a motion to over­rule the Com­mit­tee on Order of Busi­ness at the appro­pri­ate time,’ he said. Benkert’s motion was met with applause. Then a sec­ond, and then almost all of the 15,000 local church del­e­gates, known as mes­sen­gers, raised their yel­low vot­ing cards in the air—far more than the two-thirds major­i­ty need­ed to over­rule the com­mit­tee.”
    • In ref­er­ence to the imme­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing arti­cle: know­ing how the sys­tem works is real­ly impor­tant. I’ve seen shady stuff hap­pen at some meet­ings but was­n’t quick enough to get to the floor or was­n’t sure enough of the rules to inter­vene. In a busi­ness meet­ing knowl­edge tru­ly is pow­er.
    • In ref­er­ence to the larg­er sto­ry, there are so many things hap­pen­ing here:
    • This is an occa­sion for lamen­ta­tion. I have long said that the Protes­tant sex­u­al abuse cri­sis will dwarf the Catholic Church’s (because we tend to have less control/screening of min­is­ters) and that both will be dwarfed by the pub­lic school cri­sis (which is yet to ful­ly reveal itself but I believe will be far worse).
    • The South­ern Bap­tist exec­u­tives gen­uine­ly had less con­trol over the situation(s) than some of their crit­ics allege, but they had far more con­trol than they pre­tend­ed and when they did act it was often to con­ceal wicked things.
    • The fact that the SBC com­mis­sioned this report and made it pub­lic is very much to their cred­it and over time will loom larg­er in the remem­brance of this.
    • The scope of the abuse, while broad, appears to be less than I feared.
    •  The SBC legal team and the for­mer exec­u­tives come off look­ing like evil reli­gious lead­ers writ­ten by a lazy hack writer. It’s stag­ger­ing­ly bad.
    • This entire deba­cle is ger­mane to the Tim Keller/winsomeness debate: do we oper­ate accord­ing to the stan­dards of our cul­ture or the stan­dards of the King­dom? Christ demands anoth­er way, and if that opens us up to neg­a­tive cul­tur­al con­se­quences (whether elec­toral defeats or ruinous law­suits) then so be it.
  2. The school shoot­ing:
    • A fourth-grad­er who sur­vived the shoot­ing says she smeared friend’s blood on her­self to appear dead (Nora Neus, CNN): “Miah said she was scared the gun­man would come back to kill her and a few oth­er sur­viv­ing friends. So, she put her hands in her friend’s blood, who laid next to her— and already looked dead—and then smeared it all over her­self to appear dead.… She says after­wards, she over­heard talk of police wait­ing out­side the school. Recount­ing this dur­ing the inter­view, she start­ed cry­ing, say­ing she just didn’t under­stand why they didn’t come inside and get them.” Heart­break­ing. Details are still com­ing out, and none of them are good.
    • Texas school shoot­er Sal­vador Ramos once cut up his face with knives ‘just for fun,’ friends say (Yaron Stein­buch, New York Post): “The gun­man who slaugh­tered 19 kids and two teach­ers at a Texas ele­men­tary school report­ed­ly exhib­it­ed increas­ing­ly bizarre behav­ior lead­ing up to the ram­page – includ­ing cut­ting up his face with knives just ‘for fun,’ friends said.”
    • Pass and Enforce Red Flag Laws. Now. (David French, The Dis­patch): “Mass killings are their own thing. Mass shoot­ers are fre­quent­ly law-abid­ing, right up until the moment when they com­mit mass mur­der. Mass shoot­ings are often metic­u­lous­ly planned, which means that they can cir­cum­vent com­mon gun con­trol laws. For exam­ple, the Buf­fa­lo shoot­er legal­ly pur­chased the weapon he used and then ille­gal­ly mod­i­fied it to make it more lethal. So when we talk about com­mon gun con­trol pro­pos­als after mass shootings—whether we’re refer­ring to expand­ed back­ground checks, assault weapons bans, or lim­its on mag­a­zine capacity—the gen­er­al rule is that none of those mea­sures, even if imple­ment­ed, would have actu­al­ly pre­vent­ed any recent mass shoot­ing.” This is a thought­ful piece with a spe­cif­ic and con­struc­tive pol­i­cy sug­ges­tion.
    • The Chil­dren Who Kill Chil­dren (Samuel D. James, First Things): “There are some who sneer at peo­ple, like me, who offer prayers in times like these. Prayer, they say, is non-action: an inef­fec­tive, mean­ing­less piety meant to main­tain the sta­tus quo on gun con­trol. Yet it’s these same scoffers who instinc­tive­ly piv­ot to the top­ic of gun con­trol when­ev­er a child takes the lives of oth­er chil­dren, and their polit­i­cal rage is no less a reli­gious recita­tion sim­ply because they con­fuse Con­gress for God. An inabil­i­ty to talk about any­thing oth­er than gun con­trol threat­ens to dead­en our lament and neu­tral­ize a vital con­ver­sa­tion about why so many of our country’s most lost, most hate­ful peo­ple are boys with their whole lives ahead of them.” This is a strong arti­cle.
    • ‘The Onion’ has repub­lished a grim head­line about mass shoot­ings 21 times since 2014 (Rachel Treis­man, NPR): “There are a cou­ple of inevitable respons­es to a mass shoot­ing in Amer­i­ca: funer­als and fundrais­ers, prayers from politi­cians and the resur­fac­ing of one par­tic­u­lar arti­cle from satir­i­cal site The Onion. ‘No Way To Pre­vent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Reg­u­lar­ly Hap­pens’ has been repub­lished 21 times in almost exact­ly eight years.” The rep­e­ti­tion of this head­line has prob­a­bly shift­ed more hearts than any oth­er argu­ment I am aware of.
  3. Covid was liberalism’s endgame (Matthew B. Craw­ford, Unherd): “The inno­va­tion achieved here is in the way gov­ern­ment con­ceives its sub­jects: not as cit­i­zens whose con­sid­ered con­sent must be secured, but as par­ti­cles to be steered through a sci­ence of behav­iour man­age­ment that relies on our pre-reflec­tive cog­ni­tive bias­es.”
  4. A Com­mit­ment to Kind­ness Does Not Mean Sur­ren­der­ing Your Con­vic­tions (David French, The Dis­patch): “Time and again I read about how bad things are now, how vile the left has become, and how a com­mit­ment to ‘win­some­ness’ or kind­ness is sim­ply inad­e­quate to the moment. Even worse, it’s some­times seen as evi­dence of weak­ness or fear—an effort cur­ry favor with peo­ple who hate you.  But the con­ver­sa­tion con­sis­tent­ly mis­con­strues what com­mit­ments to civil­i­ty and decen­cy do and don’t mean—that civil­i­ty is some­how a short­hand for sur­ren­der on mat­ters of deep con­vic­tion. It is not. Or that a com­mit­ment to civil­i­ty implies an aver­sion to con­flict and a timid­i­ty in the face of oppo­si­tion. It does not.”
  5. The LGBT­sQew­ing of Amer­i­ca (Alexan­der Zuba­tov, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “We have strong­ly sug­ges­tive evi­dence, more­over, that social cues can play causal roles in sway­ing impres­sion­able teens to adopt new sex­u­al iden­ti­ties.… The sim­ple mes­sage such research con­veys is some­thing that those of us who have not lost touch with our child­hood and our awk­ward teen years will find unsur­pris­ing, and indeed, even obvi­ous: Most kids and teens are works in progress and unde­cid­ed and con­fused about many key aspects of their lives.”
  6. In Par­tial, Grudg­ing Defense Of The Hear­ing Voic­es Move­ment (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I still remem­ber a patient who asked me if I could cure his anx­i­ety with­in a week. I told him absolute­ly not — med­ica­tions take a few weeks to even kick in, and man­ag­ing anx­i­ety can be a life­long process — and why did he need a cure in a week any­way? He said he was an inspi­ra­tional speak­er on the top­ic ‘How I Over­came My Anx­i­ety’, and he had a speech sched­uled next week, but was too anx­ious to work on it. I think about this per­son often.” Inter­est­ing through­out and the anec­dote I excerpt­ed is actu­al­ly tan­gen­tial to the main point.
  7. Why This Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Says All Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Should “Die in a Fire” (Nathan Robin­son inter­view­ing Nicholas Weaver, Cur­rent Affairs): “Is it accu­rate to sum­ma­rize what you were say­ing before as, essen­tial­ly: There is no prob­lem that cryp­tocur­ren­cy solves, and to the extent that it is func­tion­al, it does things worse than we can already do them with exist­ing elec­tron­ic pay­ment sys­tems. To the extent it has advan­tages, the advan­tage is doing crimes. And every oth­er claim made for the supe­ri­or­i­ty of cryp­tocur­ren­cy as cur­ren­cy falls apart if you scru­ti­nize it.” This spicy meat­ball comes rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  8. Glob­al reli­gious per­se­cu­tion:
    • The faces from China’s Uyghur deten­tion camps (John Sud­worth, BBC): “The doc­u­ments pro­vide some of the strongest evi­dence to date for a pol­i­cy tar­get­ing almost any expres­sion of Uyghur iden­ti­ty, cul­ture or Islam­ic faith — and of a chain of com­mand run­ning all the way up to the Chi­nese leader, Xi Jin­ping.”
    • Niger­ian Chris­tians Protest Deborah’s Death (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Two weeks ago, in Nigeria’s north­west­ern-most state of Soko­to, Deb­o­rah Samuel was beat­en to death and set on fire by fel­low stu­dents at She­hu Sha­gari Col­lege of Edu­ca­tion. Offi­cials and police inter­vened in vain.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 351

this week’s news was full of stuff I did not like

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 351st install­ment. 351 is, I am told, the small­est num­ber such that it and its sur­round­ing num­bers are all prod­ucts of 4 or more primes (in the case of 351=3·3·3·13).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My Col­lege Stu­dents Are Not OK  (Jonathan Malesic, New York Times): “High­er edu­ca­tion is now at a turn­ing point. The accom­mo­da­tions for the pan­dem­ic can either end or be made per­ma­nent. The task won’t be easy, but uni­ver­si­ties need to help stu­dents rebuild their abil­i­ty to learn. And to do that, every­one involved — stu­dents, fac­ul­ties, admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic at large — must insist on in-per­son class­es and high expec­ta­tions for fall 2022 and beyond.” The author has a PhD in reli­gious stud­ies and was a tenured the­ol­o­gy prof, but now teach­es writ­ing at anoth­er uni­ver­si­ty. His per­son­al jour­ney seems inter­est­ing.
  2. MIT, Har­vard sci­en­tists find AI can rec­og­nize race from X‑rays — and nobody knows how (Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe): “Ghas­se­mi and her col­leagues remain baf­fled, but she sus­pects it has some­thing to do with melanin, the pig­ment that deter­mines skin col­or. Per­haps X‑rays and CT scan­ners detect the high­er melanin con­tent of dark­er skin, and embed this infor­ma­tion in the dig­i­tal image in some fash­ion that human users have nev­er noticed before. It’ll take a lot more research to be sure.”
  3. Pan­dem­ic news, not great this week:
    • The Covid Capit­u­la­tion (Eric Topol, Sub­stack): “To recap, we have a high­ly unfa­vor­able pic­ture of: (1) accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new vari­ants; (2) pro­gres­sive­ly high­er trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty and infec­tious­ness; (4) sub­stan­tial­ly less pro­tec­tion from trans­mis­sion by vac­cines and boost­ers; (5) some reduc­tion on vaccine/booster pro­tec­tion against hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and death; (6) high vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty from infec­tion-acquired immu­ni­ty only; and (7) like­li­hood of more nox­ious new vari­ants in the months ahead” The author is a pro­fes­sor of mol­e­c­u­lar med­i­cine at the Scripps Insti­tute.
    • Per­ma­nent Pan­dem­ic (Justin E. H. Smith, Harper’s Mag­a­zine): “That the polit­i­cal is always biopo­lit­i­cal, in at least this gen­er­al sense, may be a fact that recedes from view in those rare moments when things are func­tion­ing smooth­ly. At such times, the var­i­ous doc­u­ments that gov­ern­ments make us fill out and sign, or fill out on our behalf when we are born, mar­ried, arrest­ed, or dead; the var­i­ous licens­es we get renewed; and the accred­i­ta­tions we col­lect come to appear as ends in them­selves rather than as part of a vast appa­ra­tus that lim­its what we can do with our own bod­ies.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Paris.
    • The new Covid equi­lib­ri­um (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I know many of you like to say ‘No worse than the com­mon cold!’ Well, the thing is…the com­mon cold impos­es con­sid­er­able costs on the world. Imag­ine a new com­mon cold, which you catch a few times a year, with some sliv­er of the pop­u­la­tion get­ting some form of Long Covid. One 2003 esti­mate sug­gest­ed that the com­mon cold costs us $40 bil­lion a year, and in a typ­i­cal year I don’t get a cold even once.… Even under mild con­cep­tions of cur­rent Covid, it is entire­ly plau­si­ble to believe that the costs of Covid will run into the tril­lions over the next ten years.”
    • With Plung­ing Enroll­ment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Pub­lic Schools (Shawn Hubler, New York Times): “No over­rid­ing expla­na­tion has emerged yet for the wide­spread drop-off. But experts point to two poten­tial caus­es: Some par­ents became so fed up with remote instruc­tion or mask man­dates that they start­ed home-school­ing their chil­dren or send­ing them to pri­vate or parochial schools that large­ly remained open dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. And oth­er fam­i­lies were thrown into such tur­moil by pan­dem­ic-relat­ed job loss­es, home­less­ness and school clo­sures that their chil­dren sim­ply dropped out.”
  4. Abor­tion-relat­ed:
    • Roe draft is a reminder that reli­gion’s role in pol­i­tics is old­er than the repub­lic (Ron Elv­ing, NPR): “The ques­tion aris­es: Since when did so much of our pol­i­tics have to do with reli­gion? And the answer is, since the begin­ning – and even before. Reli­gion was a dri­ving and deter­mi­na­tive force in pol­i­tics on this con­ti­nent even before the ‘Unit­ed States’ had been formed.And it has been brought to bear in wide­ly dis­parate caus­es. Reli­gion has been invoked to con­demn slav­ery and seg­re­ga­tion, to ban alco­hol and the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion­ary sci­ence and to bol­ster anti-war move­ments.”
    • When an Abor­tion Is Pro-Life (Matthew Lof­tus, New York Times): “I view my work as a physi­cian as part of a bat­tle against bro­ken­ness in the phys­i­cal health of my patients, a bat­tle whose tide was turned when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible teach­es that our phys­i­cal bod­ies will one day be res­ur­rect­ed as Christ’s was, mys­te­ri­ous­ly trans­formed but some­how also con­tin­u­ous with our present flesh and blood — like a seed is trans­formed into a plant. I teach and work along­side local health pro­fes­sion­als so that we can care holis­ti­cal­ly for peo­ple in need, fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of Jesus, the heal­er.… Here, I think the excep­tion proves the rule: End­ing a child’s life before birth is so wrong that only sav­ing anoth­er life could be worth it.” This is a remark­able op-ed.
    • A cri­tique of the reli­gious pro-life move­ment: The Reli­gious Right and the Abor­tion Myth (Ran­dall Balmer, Politi­co): “White evan­gel­i­cals in the 1970s did not mobi­lize against Roe v. Wade, which they con­sid­ered a Catholic issue. They orga­nized instead to defend racial seg­re­ga­tion in evan­gel­i­cal insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Bob Jones Uni­ver­si­ty. To sug­gest oth­er­wise is to per­pe­trate what I call the abor­tion myth, the fic­tion that the gen­e­sis of the Reli­gious Right — the pow­er­ful evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal move­ment that has reshaped Amer­i­can pol­i­tics over the past four decades — lay in oppo­si­tion to abor­tion.”
    • But actu­al­ly no: What every­one gets wrong about evan­gel­i­cals and abor­tion (Gillian Frank & Neil J. Young, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Twelve years before the Roe deci­sion, a young woman wrote to the lead­ing U.S. evan­ge­list, the Rev. Bil­ly Gra­ham, with the fol­low­ing ques­tion: ‘Through a young and fool­ish sin, I had an abor­tion. I now feel guilty of mur­der. How can I ever know for­give­ness?’ Gra­ham, whose syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per col­umn ‘My Answer’ reached mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, replied: ‘Abor­tion is as vio­lent a sin against God, nature, and one’s self as one can com­mit.’ Gra­ham telegraphed evan­gel­i­cal­s’ unease with abor­tion, which would become increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal in the com­ing years.”
    • Real­ly actu­al­ly no: There’s been some dis­cus­sion about how evan­gel­i­cals in the U.S. didn’t start oppos­ing abor­tion until the late 1970s – sev­er­al years after Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s a lot more nuance to that his­to­ry. (Andrew Lewis, Twit­ter): an inter­est­ing thread from a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati.
    • As in strong­ly no: Ballmer also mis­rep­re­sent­ed the legal aspects of this sto­ry (Jon White­head, Twit­ter)
  5. How Mary White­house Waged War on Pornog­ra­phy (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “White­house was mocked for pre­dict­ing that sex­u­al mes­sag­ing would soon tar­get chil­dren; it is now the norm for LGBT con­tent to appear on children’s TV shows and in sto­ry­books. She warned that films such as Bernar­do Bertolucci’s Last Tan­go in Paris crossed a line; it was lat­er revealed that the rape scene in the movie deeply trau­ma­tized the scene’s young actress, who received vile treat­ment at the hands of old­er men. On the big cul­tur­al ques­tions, White­house was right and her crit­ics were wrong.”
  6. Nao­mi Judd: ‘It’s scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so togeth­er side’ (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Nao­mi Judd thought she under­stood the ties that bind coun­try-music stars and their audi­ence – then one aggres­sive fan went and joined the Pen­te­costal church the Judd fam­i­ly called home. ‘It real­ly bur­dened me,’ said Judd, after sign­ing hun­dreds of her ‘Love Can Build a Bridge’ mem­oir back in 1993. ‘I just don’t sign auto­graphs at church. The best way I can explain it to chil­dren … is to say, ‘Hon­ey, Jesus is the star.’ ” What a great open­ing sto­ry.
  7. On the shoot­ings:
    • Faith on the ground in Buf­fa­lo: Voice Buf­fa­lo exec­u­tive direc­tor Denise Walden (Adelle M. Banks, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “They are some of the matri­archs and the pil­lars of our com­mu­ni­ty. They will be missed in ways that I don’t think I can do jus­tice to describ­ing, but who bring joy to this com­mu­ni­ty. They’re the ones who help stand and hold this com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er.”
    • The FAQs: What Chris­tians Should Know About the ‘Great Replace­men­t’ The­o­ry (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “The recent shoot­ing in Buf­fa­lo is the fifth ter­ror­ist attack in the past five years in which a white suprema­cist gun­man made ref­er­ence to the Great Replace­ment con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.… Chris­tians should be the first to decry the racism and xeno­pho­bia of the the­o­ry, along with con­demn­ing the vio­lence it has per­pet­u­at­ed.”
    • Doc­tor Who Fought Church Gun­man Remem­bered as Kind Pro­tec­tor (Julie Wat­son, Min­istry Watch): “The fam­i­ly and sports med­i­cine physi­cian was like fam­i­ly to the staff and he encour­aged them to learn kung fu, telling them about the impor­tance of know­ing self-defense tech­niques. He also learned how to han­dle a gun for that same rea­son. That pre­pared­ness com­bined with Cheng’s serene dis­po­si­tion like­ly gave him a pro­cliv­i­ty for act­ing hero­ical­ly, accord­ing to active shoot­er experts.… Author­i­ties cred­it Cheng’s quick action with sav­ing per­haps dozens of lives at a cel­e­bra­to­ry lun­cheon for con­gre­gants and their for­mer pas­tor at Irvine Tai­wanese Pres­by­ter­ian Church, which wor­ships at Gene­va Pres­by­ter­ian Church in the Orange Coun­ty com­mu­ni­ty of Lagu­na Woods.”
    • After Shoot­ing, Church­es Nav­i­gate Chi­na-Tai­wan Ten­sions Under the Sur­face (Kate Shell­nutt & Sean Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As soon as they heard that a gun­man attacked a Tai­wanese church in Cal­i­for­nia on Sun­day, some Tai­wanese cor­rect­ly assumed polit­i­cal motives.… The shoot­ing sus­pect, David Wen­wei Chou, was born and raised in Tai­wan but con­sid­ers him­self Chi­nese. (Chi­na cur­rent­ly claims Tai­wan as its ter­ri­to­ry.) He left notes in Chi­nese in his car stat­ing he did not believe Tai­wan should be inde­pen­dent from Chi­na. Chi­nese social media cir­cu­lat­ed pho­tos of Chou indi­cat­ing that he was a leader of a Chi­nese pro-uni­fi­ca­tion orga­ni­za­tion in Las Vegas.”

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] in par­tic­u­lar I have often have use­ful. The first is to Google syl­labi. If you are inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the Roman Repub­lic, Google ‘Roman Repub­lic syl­labus’ and see what pops up. Read a few cours­es and see what books are includ­ed. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you just read a book you thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syllabus’ after­wards and see what oth­er read­ings col­lege pro­fes­sors have paired with that book in their courses.”  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 350

Few­er main top­ics than nor­mal, but a bunch of arti­cles in the top­ics

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 350, and 350 is a very respectable num­ber. I’m impressed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Pol­i­tics Poi­soned the Evan­gel­i­cal Church (Tim Alber­ta, The Atlantic): “Hav­ing grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pas­tor at anoth­er church in town, I’ve spent my life watch­ing evan­gel­i­cal­ism morph from a spir­i­tu­al dis­po­si­tion into a polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty. It’s heart­break­ing. So many peo­ple who love the Lord, who give their time and mon­ey to the poor and the mourn­ing and the per­se­cut­ed, have been reduced to a car­i­ca­ture. But I under­stand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became com­pul­sive­ly polit­i­cal, allow­ing spe­cif­ic eth­i­cal argu­ments to snow­ball into full-blown par­ti­san advo­ca­cy, often in ways that dis­tract­ed from their mis­sion of evan­ge­liz­ing for Christ.”
  2. Being a Polit­i­cal Jour­nal­ist Made Me a Bet­ter Chris­t­ian (Jon Ward, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But Chris­tians can­not be the con­science of the state if we are not first the con­science of whichev­er polit­i­cal par­ty we belong to. We have the dif­fi­cult task of belong­ing to polit­i­cal par­ties and work­ing for the good of the coun­try through those insti­tu­tions, while also stand­ing apart from those par­ties to crit­i­cize them at times for their weak­ness­es, errors, and cor­rup­tions.” The entire essay is delight­ful.
  3. A con­tro­ver­sy about how Chris­tians should engage in the pub­lic square:
    • How I Evolved on Tim Keller (James R. Wood, First Things): “If we assume that win­some­ness will gain a favor­able hear­ing, when Chris­tians con­sis­tent­ly receive heat­ed push­back, we will be tempt­ed to think our con­vic­tions are the prob­lem. If win­some­ness is met with hos­til­i­ty, it is easy to won­der, ‘Are we in the wrong?’ Thus the slide toward sec­u­lar culture’s rea­son­ing is greased. A ‘sec­u­lar-friend­ly’ pol­i­tics has prob­lems sim­i­lar to ‘seek­er-friend­ly’ wor­ship. An exces­sive con­cern to appeal to the unchurched is plagued by the accom­mo­da­tion­ist temp­ta­tion.”
    • A Cri­tique of Tim Keller Reveals the Moral Devo­lu­tion of the New Chris­t­ian Right (The Dis­patch, David French): “Yet even if the des­per­ate times nar­ra­tive were true, the des­per­ate mea­sures ratio­nal­iza­tion suf­fers from pro­found moral defects. The bib­li­cal call to Chris­tians to love your ene­mies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhib­it the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kind­ness, good­ness, faith­ful­ness, gen­tle­ness, and self-control—does not rep­re­sent a set of tac­tics to be aban­doned when times are tough but rather a set of eter­nal moral prin­ci­ples to be applied even in the face of extreme adver­si­ty…
    • Is it Time to Move Past Tim Keller? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “The ques­tion is not whether love of neigh­bor doesn’t work and should be for­got­ten, the ques­tion is what love of neigh­bor demands from us, and whether such love might look dif­fer­ent when the pre­sent­ing moral and spir­i­tu­al needs of our neigh­bors might not be what they were a gen­er­a­tion ago.”
    • some thoughts on Tim Keller (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Like Dio­genes with his lantern, I’m look­ing for one crit­ic of Tim Keller who shows some aware­ness that Chris­tians are com­mand­ed by their Lord to act in cer­tain ways and to refrain from act­ing in oth­ers. To think only in terms of what is effec­tive or strate­gic is to fight on the Devil’s home ground.”
    • This Arti­cle is Not About Tim Keller (James Wood, Amer­i­can Reformer): “How do we know what the future holds for the public’s per­cep­tion of Chris­tians and their attempts to love their neigh­bors through polit­i­cal action? We might be sur­prised what the judg­ments of his­to­ry have in store. Not only do I ques­tion the cer­tain­ty we can have in these assess­ments about how our polit­i­cal actions will impact our long-term gospel wit­ness, but I also think this is a cat­e­go­ry error. Pol­i­tics is not about min­i­miz­ing offense in order to max­i­mize open­ness to the evan­ge­lis­tic mes­sage. Pol­i­tics is, rather, focused on the pur­suit of jus­tice and the just order­ing of soci­ety.”
  4. Against longter­mism (Phil Tor­res, Aeon): “…longter­mism might be one of the most influ­en­tial ide­olo­gies that few peo­ple out­side of elite uni­ver­si­ties and Sil­i­con Val­ley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a for­mer longter­mist who pub­lished an entire book four years ago in defence of the gen­er­al idea, I have come to see this world­view as quite pos­si­bly the most dan­ger­ous sec­u­lar belief sys­tem in the world today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who thinks this is espe­cial­ly impor­tant for Sil­i­con Val­ley peo­ple to hear. From Oct 2021.
  5. More on the Supreme Court and abor­tion
    • How Roe Warped the Repub­lic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And the way Roe was decid­ed made this polar­iza­tion worse. From the per­spec­tive of geog­ra­phy and class, a group of robed lawyers in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., demand­ing that the coun­try sim­ply accept their set­tle­ment on one of the gravest moral ques­tions imag­in­able is the per­fect primer for a pop­ulist revolt. What has hap­pened in sim­i­lar ways with oth­er issues — immi­gra­tion, most notably — hap­pened with abor­tion first: The elite set­tle­ment failed to set­tle the issue, and the back­lash encom­passed not just the issue itself but elite legit­i­ma­cy writ large.”
    • Protest sup­port­ing Roe v. Wade takes over cam­pus (Bryan Steven Mon­ge Ser­ra­no, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “About 250 stu­dents, fac­ul­ty and staff came togeth­er to chant and march.” ]
      • “Takes over cam­pus” is an exag­ger­a­tion. 250 peo­ple? There are class­es larg­er than that. Hav­ing said that, the bulk of the stu­dent body at Stan­ford is unde­ni­ably on the pro-Roe side. I won­der if the small ral­ly indi­cates a lev­el of apa­thy or sim­ply a desire to wait for the actu­al ver­dict to be released.
    • Why I wel­come the prospect of Roe v. Wade being over­turned (Avi Shafran, NBC News): “Roe was a sledge­ham­mer, and wrong­ly wield­ed. In the wake of its rever­sal, cit­i­zens in each state would be charged with using a scalpel to instead craft laws that treat nascent life with respect while accom­mo­dat­ing the pro­tec­tion of women’s well-being.”
      • Inter­est­ing thoughts from a Rab­bi. He comes down in a dif­fer­ent place than most peo­ple you have heard from.
    • How Dare They! (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “What strikes me most in these takes is the under­ly­ing con­tempt for and sus­pi­cion of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process — from many of the same peo­ple who insist they want to save it. How dare vot­ers have a say on abor­tion rights! The issue — which divides the coun­try today as much as it has for decades — is one that appar­ent­ly can­not ever be put up for a vote. On this ques­tion, Democ­rats real­ly do seem to believe that sev­en men alone should make that deci­sion — once, in 1973. Women today, includ­ing one on SCOTUS? Not so much.”
    • Pro-Life Min­istries Have Been Car­ing For Women And Babies For Gen­er­a­tions (War­ren Cole Smith, Min­istry Watch): “More than 2500 pro-life Preg­nan­cy Resource Cen­ters (PRCs) are a com­pas­sion­ate army of staff, donors, and vol­un­teers that num­ber in the hun­dreds of thou­sands. They are com­mit­ted to help­ing women make life-giv­ing choic­es, and they often sup­port these women for years after their babies are born. The total amount of mon­ey these orga­ni­za­tions spend in sup­port of women and babies is not known, but it like­ly exceeds $1 bil­lion annu­al­ly. We should also note that the vast major­i­ty of adop­tions in this coun­try are done by Chris­t­ian fam­i­lies and through Chris­t­ian adop­tion agen­cies.”
    • The Supreme Court Leak Was an Unplanned Com­pli­ca­tion for Preg­nan­cy Cen­ters (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I try to shield my team from it here,” she said, telling them not to get online and try to defend them­selves. “I saw a post on Insta­gram: ‘I’ve nev­er met a pro-life per­son who is address­ing access to health care, acces­si­ble child­care, col­lege education.’ Hun­dreds of peo­ple are com­ment­ing, ‘Yeah I’ve nev­er met one of those.’ I’m think­ing I’m going to lose my mind. We’re here! We’re get­ting women into hous­ing same day, we’re get­ting them out of domes­tic vio­lence same day, we’re get­ting them fur­ni­ture the same day,” Marten con­tin­ued. “For my team to go home every day and turn on the news and social media and get gaslit, say­ing, ‘If you real­ly cared …’ It’s an emo­tion­al toll.”
  6. On Chi­na
    • China’s Bizarre Author­i­tar­i­an-Lib­er­tar­i­an COVID Strat­e­gy (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “On the one hand, Chi­na has con­fined mil­lions of peo­ple to their homes, even to the extent of out­law­ing walk­ing out­side or hav­ing food deliv­ered. Many thou­sands of oth­er peo­ple have been tak­en from their homes and put into quar­an­tine cen­ters. On the oth­er hand, vac­ci­na­tion is not manda­to­ry! I can under­stand author­i­tar­i­an­ism. I can under­stand lib­er­tar­i­an­ism. I have dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing how jail­ing peo­ple, poten­tial­ly with­out food, is ok but requir­ing vac­ci­na­tions is not.”
    • Dra­mat­ic sto­ry of Kyr­gyz Chris­t­ian swept up in Chi­na’s Uyghur repres­sion gets very lit­tle ink (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “While unimag­in­able hor­rors per­sist­ed in the camp, Joseph tes­ti­fied about how God worked in the hearts of the inmates around them. They had no pri­va­cy in any part of the com­plex, with cam­eras in their rooms and micro­phones for mon­i­tor­ing. Thus, 50 to 60 inmates filled the show­er room every day and it was the only place where Joseph could share his faith. The water from the show­er heads made enough noise to mask their conversations.  In the first few months, there was hard­ly any­one who would talk to him about God. Then the ques­tion began. ‘How could God let us be here in this place?’ they would ask. ‘How could God allow our chil­dren to be aban­doned?’ ” Crazy details, espe­cial­ly if you fol­low the links in the arti­cle.
    • Tik­Tok May Be More Dan­ger­ous Than It Looks (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Tik­Tok is owned by ByteDance, a Chi­nese com­pa­ny. And Chi­nese com­pa­nies are vul­ner­a­ble to the whims and the will of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.… TikTok’s real pow­er isn’t over our data. It’s over what users watch and cre­ate. It’s over the opaque algo­rithm that gov­erns what gets seen and what doesn’t. Tik­Tok has been thick with videos back­ing the Russ­ian nar­ra­tive on the war in Ukraine. Media Mat­ters, for instance, tracked an appar­ent­ly coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign dri­ven by 186 Russ­ian Tik­Tok influ­encers who nor­mal­ly post beau­ty tips, prank videos and fluff. And we know that Chi­na has been ampli­fy­ing Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da world­wide. How com­fort­able are we with not know­ing whether the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty decid­ed to weigh in on how the algo­rithm treats these videos?”
    • Why Chi­nese Cul­ture Has Not Con­quered Us All (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Out­side of its own bor­ders, post-Deng Chi­na has a poor record sell­ing the intan­gi­ble. Chi­nese cul­tur­al influ­ence is not com­men­su­rate with China’s eco­nom­ic pow­er or geopo­lit­i­cal heft. For the last two decades observers of Chi­na have pon­dered this mys­tery. Why has China’s grow­ing glob­al promi­nence, pros­per­ous com­mer­cial­ized econ­o­my, and huge glob­al dias­po­ra not led to cul­tur­al influ­ence? Why have both China’s intel­lec­tu­al high cul­ture and its expan­sive pop cul­ture offer­ings failed to take root out­side of the Sinos­phere?” Very thought­ful, as I have come to expect from Greer.

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 Pint‐Size Nation off the Eng­lish Coast (Ian Urbina, The Atlantic): “Though no coun­try for­mal­ly rec­og­nizes Sealand, its sov­er­eign­ty has been hard to deny. Half a dozen times, the British gov­ern­ment and assort­ed oth­er groups, backed by mer­ce­nar­ies, have tried and failed to take over the plat­form by force.” 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.