Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 329

a short­er than usu­al roundup

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

This is the 329th install­ment. 329 is, appar­ent­ly, the num­ber of forests (a type of graph) with 10 ver­tices.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Lov­ing Lies (Bill Adair, Air Mail): “Inter­view­ing Glass can be frus­trat­ing, because he frets so much about get­ting every detail right. He’ll stop mid­sen­tence to pon­der the month or day that some­thing hap­pened. Was that lunch in late 2014 or ear­ly 2015? He’ll check. He knows he has a rep­u­ta­tion as a liar and that he has already blown a life­time of cred­i­bil­i­ty.”
    • Quite a sto­ry. You will need to pro­vide your email address to unlock it and it is 100% worth it.
  2. Den­zel Wash­ing­ton, Man on Fire (Mau­reen Dowd, New York Times): “The ene­my is the inner me,” he said. “The Bible says in the last days — I don’t know if it’s the last days, it’s not my place to know — but it says we’ll be lovers of our­selves. The No. 1 pho­to­graph today is a self­ie, ‘Oh, me at the protest.’ ‘Me with the fire.’ ‘Follow me.’ ‘Listen to me.’ We’re liv­ing in a time where peo­ple are will­ing to do any­thing to get fol­lowed. What is the long or short-term effect of too much infor­ma­tion? It’s going fast and it can be manip­u­lat­ed obvi­ous­ly in a myr­i­ad of ways. And peo­ple are led like sheep to slaughter.”
  3. What I told the stu­dents of Prince­ton (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “…I want you to think for a moment about a young woman here at Prince­ton. She’s a mag­nif­i­cent ath­lete named Ellie Mar­quardt, an all-Amer­i­can swim­mer who set an Ivy League record in the 500-meter freestyle event as a fresh­man. Just before Thanks­giv­ing, Ellie was defeat­ed in the 500-meter, the event she held the record in, by almost 14 sec­onds by a 22 year old bio­log­i­cal male at Penn who was com­pet­ing on the men’s team as recent­ly as Novem­ber of 2019. That male ath­lete now holds mul­ti­ple U.S. records in women’s swim­ming, eras­ing the hard work of so many of our best female ath­letes, and mak­ing a mock­ery of the rights women fought for gen­er­a­tions to achieve.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  4. Even on U.S. Cam­pus­es, Chi­na Cracks Down on Stu­dents Who Speak Out (Sebas­t­ian Rotel­la, ProP­ub­li­ca): “As the regime of Chi­nese Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping reach­es across bor­ders to con­trol its cit­i­zens wher­ev­er they are, its assaults on aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom have inten­si­fied, accord­ing to U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials, aca­d­e­mics, dis­si­dents and oth­er experts. Chi­nese intel­li­gence offi­cers are mon­i­tor­ing cam­pus­es across the Unit­ed States with online sur­veil­lance and an array of infor­mants moti­vat­ed by mon­ey, ambi­tion, fear or authen­tic patri­o­tism. A com­ment in class about Tai­wan or a speech at a ral­ly about Tibet can result in retal­i­a­tion against stu­dents and their rel­a­tives back home.”
  5. Polit­i­cal arti­cles which caught my atten­tion:
    • I Couldn’t Vote for Trump, but I’m Grate­ful for His Supreme Court Picks (Eri­ka Bachiochi, New York Times): “Mr. Trump’s eco­nom­ic pop­ulism (at least in rhetoric) blast­ed through the lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that has tend­ed to dom­i­nate the G.O.P., a lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that has made the party’s alliance with pro-lif­ers one of strange bed­fel­lows indeed. If the G.O.P. wants to be of any rel­e­vance in a post-Roe world — after all, with Roe gone, those sin­gle-issue vot­ers will be free to look else­where — it will have to offer the coun­try the matrix of eth­nic diver­si­ty and eco­nom­ic sol­i­dar­i­ty that Mr. Trump stum­bled upon, but with­out the divi­sive­ness of the man him­self.”
    • Democ­rats fall flat with ‘Latinx’ lan­guage (Marc Caputo & Sab­ri­na Rodriguez, Politi­co): “The num­bers sug­gest that using Lat­inx is a vio­la­tion of the polit­i­cal Hip­po­crat­ic Oath, which is to first do no elec­toral harm,” said Aman­di, whose firm advised Barack Obama’s suc­cess­ful His­pan­ic out­reach nation­wide in his two pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns. “Why are we using a word that is pre­ferred by only 2 per­cent, but offends as many as 40 per­cent of those vot­ers we want to win?” Shared with me by a stu­dent well-suit­ed to assess this controversy. 
    • [Stan­ford] Sen­ate again denies Mike Pence event fund­ing at meet­ing revot­ing on grants (Itzel Luna, Stan­ford Daily):  “Five sen­a­tors vot­ed in favor of SCR’s $6,000 fund­ing request to bring for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence to cam­pus in the win­ter quar­ter. Eight sen­a­tors abstained and no one vot­ed against the fund­ing which, accord­ing to the sen­a­tors, con­sti­tut­ed a fail­ure to receive major­i­ty approval.” This reads like a par­o­dy of stu­dent gov­ern­ment.
    • Young Dems more like­ly to despise the oth­er par­ty (Neal Roth­schild, Axios): “[Among col­lege stu­dents,] 5% of Repub­li­cans said they would­n’t be friends with some­one from the oppo­site par­ty, com­pared to 37% of Democ­rats. 71% of Democ­rats would­n’t go on a date with some­one with oppos­ing views, ver­sus 31% of Republicans.30% of Democ­rats — and 7% of Repub­li­cans — would­n’t work for some­one who vot­ed dif­fer­ent­ly from them.”

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 Is Christ­mas a Pagan Rip-off? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “…whatever the Christ­mas hol­i­day has become today, it start­ed as a copy­cat of well-estab­lished pagan hol­i­days. If you like Christ­mas, you have Sat­ur­na­lia and Sol Invic­tus to thank. That’s the sto­ry, and every­one from lib­er­al Chris­tians to con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians to non-Chris­tians seem to agree that it’s true. Except that it isn’t.” From vol­ume 280.

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 328

Every­thing from bap­tisms to abor­tion to per­ceived noos­es. Also self-repli­cat­ing robots which is noth­ing to wor­ry about at all.

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 328, which is the year that one of my favorite church lead­ers became a bish­op: Athana­sius.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Supreme Court recon­sid­ers abor­tion:
    • The Supreme Court seems poised to uphold Mississippi’s abor­tion law. (Adam Lip­tak, New York Times): “The Supreme Court seemed poised on Wednes­day to uphold a Mis­sis­sip­pi law that bans abor­tions after 15 weeks of preg­nan­cy, based on some­times tense and heat­ed ques­tion­ing at a momen­tous argu­ment in the most impor­tant abor­tion case in decades. Such a rul­ing would be flat­ly at odds with what the court has said was the cen­tral hold­ing of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 deci­sion that estab­lished a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion and pro­hib­it­ed states from ban­ning the pro­ce­dure before fetal via­bil­i­ty, or around 23 weeks. But the court’s six-mem­ber con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty seemed divid­ed about whether to stop at 15 weeks, for now at least, or whether to over­rule Roe entire­ly, allow­ing states to ban abor­tions at any time or entire­ly.”
    • For a free, non­pay­walled analy­sis check out Major­i­ty of court appears poised to roll back abor­tion rights (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog)
    • Why Roe Will Fall And Oberge­fell Won’t (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “In Roe, the Court tried to jump­start a con­sen­sus and failed to secure it, with pub­lic opin­ion very sim­i­lar now to where it was half a cen­tu­ry ago. In Oberge­fell, the Court wait­ed until there was major­i­ty sup­port, which arrived, accord­ing to Gallup, in 2011, and the Court then val­i­dat­ed a still-grow­ing soci­etal con­sen­sus four years lat­er.”
  2. Low­er­ing the Vot­ing Age (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Peo­ple who dis­cuss low­er­ing the vot­ing age – not only those for it but also those against – assume that it would mean a trans­fer of polit­i­cal influ­ence to the young. That is absurd. It would mean no such thing. Although the very young are often very sure of their opin­ions and con­vinced that they have made up their own minds, they lack the matu­ri­ty to form their minds independently. So to low­er the vot­ing age would not mean increas­ing the polit­i­cal influ­ence of the young. It would only mean increas­ing the polit­i­cal clout of those who have influ­ence through the young.”
    • That’s a real­ly good point I had­n’t con­sid­ered. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy and of gov­ern­ment at UT Austin.
  3. Horse Troughs, Hot Tubs and Hash­tags: Bap­tism Is Get­ting Wild (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Con­tem­po­rary evan­gel­i­cal bap­tisms are often rau­cous affairs. Instead of sub­dued hymns and mur­murs, think roar­ing mod­ern wor­ship music, fist pumps, tears and bois­ter­ous cheer­ing. There are pho­tog­ra­phers, self­ie sta­tions and hash­tags for social media. One church in Texas calls its reg­u­lar mass bap­tism event a ‘plunge par­ty.’ ”
    • This is an inter­est­ing arti­cle most­ly for how inter­est­ing utter­ly nor­mal things can seem to NY Times read­ers.
  4. She set out to save her daugh­ter from fen­tanyl. She had no idea what she would face on the streets of San Fran­cis­co (Heather Knight, San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle): “I asked Jes­si­ca if she thought she would ever leave San Fran­cis­co. ‘It’s like a vor­tex,’ she said. ‘I want to get out of here. But why the f— would I leave here if I have every­thing I need giv­en to me? It might be enabling or it might be keep­ing you in a cycle, but at least you can sur­vive,’ she con­tin­ued. ‘That’s bet­ter than a lot of places.’ ”
    • The wages of sin is death. What a gut-punch of a sto­ry.
  5. Race Pan­ic! Stan­ford inves­ti­gates “cords with loops that may rep­re­sent noos­es” (Maxwell Mey­er, Stan­ford Review): “Call­ing out and address­ing racism? No, these Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tors are com­mit­ted to invent­ing racism. Though, I must hand it to them: Dean Hicks and her ‘insti­tu­tion­al equi­ty’ side­kick Mr. Dunk­ley might not real­ize it, but there is a beau­ti­ful, almost poet­ic irony to the tim­ing of their email. They rushed to inform Stan­ford stu­dents of an alleged race inci­dent on the very day that the crim­i­nal tri­al of Jussie Smol­lett, the great­est of all race hoax­ers, began in Chica­go. That lit­tle coin­ci­dence is the cher­ry on top of this giant farce.”
    • Mey­er’s take is, as far as I can tell, entire­ly cor­rect. If those loops looked at all like noos­es we’d have pho­tos.
  6. Team builds first liv­ing robots—that can repro­duce (Joshua Brown, Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont press release): “Some peo­ple may find this exhil­a­rat­ing. Oth­ers may react with con­cern, or even ter­ror, to the notion of a self-repli­cat­ing biotech­nol­o­gy. For the team of sci­en­tists, the goal is deep­er under­stand­ing.”
  7. The Busi­ness of Extract­ing Knowl­edge from Aca­d­e­m­ic Pub­li­ca­tions (Markus Strass­er, per­son­al blog): “I had to wrap my head around the fact that close to noth­ing of what makes sci­ence actu­al­ly work is pub­lished as text on the web. Research ques­tions that can be answered log­i­cal­ly through just read­ing papers and con­nect­ing the dots don’t require a biotech corp to be formed around them. There’s much less log­ic and deduc­tion hap­pen­ing than you’d expect in a sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­pline.”
    • Long and poor­ly for­mat­ted, but with an inter­est­ing core idea. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Elisha and the She‐bears (Peter J Williams, Twit­ter): an insight­ful Twit­ter thread about a dis­turb­ing OT sto­ry. The author is the War­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge. First shared in vol­ume 179.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 327

Two weeks of con­tent dis­tilled into one. It’s like juice con­cen­trate!

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 327, and 327 is the largest num­ber such that it togeth­er with its dou­ble and triple con­tain every dig­it 1–9 once: 327 dou­bled is 654 and tripled it is 981. Odd but cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Teacher Who Nev­er Spoke (Mau­reeen Swinger, Plough): “The sum­mer my broth­er Duane turned twen­ty, a for­mi­da­ble young man stayed with us on a break from the Ivy League. He had nev­er, to anyone’s knowl­edge, lost an argu­ment. Sev­er­al weeks into his vis­it, my moth­er walked into the din­ing room where my broth­er and his friend were, in the­o­ry, eat­ing lunch. In real­i­ty, both men were sit­ting at the table with locked jaws. One didn’t have to say, ‘I need you to eat.’ The oth­er didn’t need to say, ‘Hell, no.’ They both knew exact­ly what was going on: the Ivy Lea­guer was los­ing an argu­ment to my broth­er, who had nev­er learned to speak.”
    • This is from a while ago (2017), but I must have missed it. Sim­ply astound­ing. I wept while read­ing it. Any­one tak­ing a class where Peter Singer’s phi­los­o­phy is high­ly regard­ed should read this ASAP.
  2. She was sold to a stranger so her fam­i­ly could eat as Afghanistan crum­bles (Anna Coren, Jessie Yeung and Abdul Basir Bina, CNN): “Mag­ul, a 10-year-old girl in neigh­bor­ing Ghor province, cries every day as she pre­pares to be sold to a 70-year-old man to set­tle her fam­i­ly’s debts. Her par­ents had bor­rowed 200,000 Afgha­nis ($2,200) from a neigh­bor in their vil­lage — but with­out a job or sav­ings, they have no way of return­ing the mon­ey.”
    • This is one of the most depress­ing things I have read in some time.
  3. What hap­pens when peo­ple in Texas can’t get abor­tions: ‘Diapers save a lot more babies than ultra­sound­s’ (Casey Parks, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I always tell peo­ple, ‘Diapers save a lot more babies than ultrasounds.’ ” Har­ing said. “I don’t want an ultra­sound machine. I want tons of dia­pers. Buy me $20,000, $40,000, $50,000 worth of dia­pers because if you have a woman who comes in with four kids — yeah, look­ing at the baby, she real­izes it’s a human being. But if you tell her, ‘I’m going to give you dia­pers for all four kids,’ believe me, the dia­pers for all four kids is going to save that baby a lot quick­er than a lit­tle pen­nant on the screen.”
    • It’s rare to read a sym­pa­thet­ic sto­ry about a pro-life cen­ter in a major Amer­i­can news­pa­per.
  4. Philip Yancey’s Mes­sage of Grace (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Yancey told the par­ents in the audi­ence that, bib­li­cal­ly, God grieves as much as they do; that God loves their chil­dren as much as they do; and that God is deeply pained by the state of this bro­ken world. To his sur­prise, he found his faith affirmed rather than shat­tered. He wit­nessed in per­son some­thing the the­olo­gian Miroslav Volf wrote on the day after the New­town shoot­ings: ‘Those who observe suf­fer­ing are tempt­ed to reject God; those who expe­ri­ence it often can­not give up on God, their solace and their agony.’ ”
    • This is one of the most gospel-cen­tric arti­cles I have read in a major pub­li­ca­tion in quite some time.
  5. When All The Media Nar­ra­tives Col­lapse (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major sto­ries, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Don­ald Trump accused the MSM of being ‘fake news’ the more assid­u­ous­ly they tried to prove him right.”
  6. His Rea­sons for Oppos­ing Trump Were Bib­li­cal. Now a Top Chris­t­ian Edi­tor Is Out. (Ben Smith, New York Times): “As the long­time edi­tor of World, a Chris­t­ian news orga­ni­za­tion that has a web­site, a biweek­ly mag­a­zine and a set of pod­casts, Mr. Olasky has deliv­ered a mix of hard news and watch­dog arti­cles about the evan­gel­i­cal realm under a jour­nal­is­tic phi­los­o­phy he calls ‘bib­li­cal objec­tiv­i­ty.’ It involves tak­ing strong stands where the Bible is clear, which has led World to oppose abor­tion rights and sup­port refugees, he says, and to fol­low reportable facts where the Bible doesn’t pro­vide clear guid­ance.”
  7. Some pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives:
    • The Covid pan­dem­ic is not tak­ing the very best of turns (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “While the fog of war is thick right now, the ear­ly data on Nu sug­gests that it may be a big deal. Even if it’s not, how­ev­er, it has been obvi­ous since we got the vac­cines that vac­cine escape is a con­cern. You can debate whether the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a vac­cine escap­ing vari­ant is 20% or 80%, but in any case we need effec­tive con­tin­gency plans in place. If we fail to respond effec­tive­ly to Nu, that will be a con­sid­er­ably greater insti­tu­tion­al fail­ure than any­thing that hap­pened at the out­set of the pan­dem­ic. We’ve had almost two years since the first COVID case and one year from the vac­cine approvals to pre­pare. So I ask: what is the plan for the vac­cine-escap­ing vari­ant?”
    • The Weird­ness of Gov­ern­ment Vari­a­tion in COVID-19 Respons­es (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “But imag­ine at the start of the pan­dem­ic, some­one had said to you ‘Every­one will face the exis­tence of the same dis­ease, and have access to the exact same tools to fight it. But in some EU coun­tries or US states, peo­ple won’t be allowed to leave their house and have to cov­er their faces in pub­lic. In oth­er places, gov­ern­ment will just leave peo­ple alone. Vast dif­fer­ences of this sort will exist across juris­dic­tions that are sim­i­lar on objec­tive met­rics of how bad the pan­dem­ic is at any par­tic­u­lar moment.’ I would’ve found this to be a very unlike­ly out­come! You could’ve con­vinced me EU states would do very lit­tle on COVID-19, or that they would do lock­downs every­where. I would not have believed that you could have two neigh­bor­ing coun­tries that have sim­i­lar num­bers, but one of them forces every­one to stay home, while the oth­er doesn’t. This is the kind of extreme vari­a­tion in pol­i­cy we don’t see in oth­er areas.”
    • The Vac­cine Moment, part one (Paul Kingsnorth, Sub­stack): “Covid is a rev­e­la­tion. It has lain bare splits in the social fab­ric that were always there but could be ignored in bet­ter times. It has revealed the com­pli­ance of the lega­cy media and the pow­er of Sil­i­con Val­ley to curate and con­trol the pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion. It has con­firmed the sly dis­hon­esty of polit­i­cal lead­ers, and their ulti­mate obei­sance to cor­po­rate pow­er. It has shown up ‘The Sci­ence’ for the com­pro­mised ide­ol­o­gy it is. Most of all, it has revealed the author­i­tar­i­an streak that lies beneath so many peo­ple, and which always emerges in fear­ful times.”
    • A tweet that made me laugh: “The WHO chose Omi­cron over Nu for the vari­ant of con­cern, prob­a­bly because it sounds too much like ‘new.’ But the next let­ter is not Omi­cron but Xi. Was that a lit­tle too on the nose?” (Jared Wal­czak, Twit­ter)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 326

I had to cut this down from 20 can­di­date links to 7. It was gru­el­ing. Only gold remains.

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 326, which makes me a lit­tle hap­py because last week I observed that 3 +2 = 5 and this week we can see a sim­i­lar coin­ci­dence with mul­ti­pli­ca­tion: 3 â‹… 2 = 6.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. U.S. mis­sion­ar­ies have long tried to con­vert the ‘unreached’ in the Ama­zon. Now Indige­nous groups are fight­ing back. (Ter­rence McCoy, Wash­ing­ton Post): “But the bib­li­cal com­mis­sion that fol­low­ers of Jesus ‘make dis­ci­ples of all nations’ is increas­ing­ly col­lid­ing with the laws of man in Brazil, where the right to vol­un­tary iso­la­tion is enshrined in the con­sti­tu­tion and where it’s ille­gal to con­tact iso­lat­ed Indige­nous groups with­out gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion.”
    • The details in the sto­ry show that things are more com­plex than the head­line leads you to believe. The indige­nous peo­ple are divid­ed — some want the mis­sion­ar­ies and some do not. The ones who do not are rep­re­sent­ed by a lawyer and he is the focus of this sto­ry. Sure­ly the rights of those who wish to hear new ideas should also be respect­ed? The peo­ple who applaud this devel­op­ment are almost cer­tain­ly glad that they don’t believe what their ances­tors believed, but they appar­ent­ly hope these peo­ple are not exposed to mul­ti­ple reli­gious per­spec­tives.
    • There is prob­a­bly close to a 100% inverse cor­re­la­tion between those who believe the indige­nous peo­ple should be able to keep out­siders away and those who believe Amer­i­ca should build a wall. It’s an inter­est­ing ide­o­log­i­cal con­sis­ten­cy test. And this would be more than a wall with con­trolled access — this would be a force field.
  2. How I Became Extreme­ly Open-Mind­ed (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “When I set out to write about the entire chron­ic-ill­ness expe­ri­ence, I hes­i­tat­ed over whether to tell this kind of sto­ry. After all, if you’re try­ing to con­vince skep­ti­cal read­ers to take chron­ic sick­ness seri­ous­ly, and to make the case for the med­ical-out­sider view of how to treat Lyme dis­ease, report­ing that you’ve been dab­bling in pseu­do­science and that it works is a good way to con­firm every stereo­type about chron­ic ail­ments and their treat­ment…” Engross­ing.
  3. Truth, jus­tice and the tor­tur­ing of tol­er­ance (Karen Swal­low Pri­or, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Too many in the church have tol­er­at­ed too much for too long. To be sure, sit­u­a­tions can be com­pli­cat­ed. Motives and actions can be mixed. Facts can be dis­put­ed. Per­spec­tives can dif­fer. Pic­tures can be incom­plete. Nev­er­the­less, some things are clear­ly and sim­ply wrong. It takes wis­dom to dis­cern what should be tol­er­at­ed and what should not.” The sto­ry starts in one place and winds up some­where com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. Some pan­dem­ic and pan­dem­ic-adja­cent news:
    • Vac­cines for Chil­dren (5–11 years old) (Matt Shapiro, Sub­stack): “There seemed to be a resilient faith among the doc­tors in this dis­cus­sion that the only appro­pri­ate way to move for­ward would be to make the vac­cine avail­able and then trust par­ents and care­givers to take into con­sid­er­a­tion all the risks and make the right deci­sions giv­en the evi­dence that is avail­able. Hear­ing them say this is so strange to me because that is exact­ly my posi­tion.” This is good, sane com­men­tary.
    • How SARS-CoV­‑2 in Amer­i­can deer could alter the course of the glob­al pan­dem­ic (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “Now vet­eri­nar­i­ans at Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty have found active SARS-CoV­‑2 infec­tions in at least 30% of deer test­ed across Iowa dur­ing 2020. Their study, pub­lished online last week, sug­gests that white-tailed deer could become what’s known as a reser­voir for SARS-CoV­‑2. That is, the ani­mals could car­ry the virus indef­i­nite­ly and spread it back to humans peri­od­i­cal­ly. If that’s the case, it would essen­tial­ly dash any hopes of elim­i­nat­ing or erad­i­cat­ing the virus in the U.S. — and there­fore from the world — says vet­eri­nary virol­o­gist Suresh Kuchipu­di at Penn State, who co-led the study.”
      • Have they tried mask­ing the deer?
    • Good morn­ing. Is it time to start mov­ing back to nor­mal­cy? (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “The bot­tom line is that Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple that we unthink­ing­ly accept in oth­er parts of life. And there is not going to be a day when we wake up to head­lines pro­claim­ing that Covid is defeat­ed. In many ways, the future of the virus has arrived. All of which rais­es the ques­tion of which pre­cau­tions should end — now or soon — and which should become per­ma­nent.”
      • Gonna tip my hand here: we should accept that COVID is not going away, lament those we have lost, rejoice that we have vac­cines and are even start­ing to see effec­tive treat­ments emerge, and get on with life. Unvac­ci­nat­ed peo­ple have made their choice and I’m hap­py to respect it, dou­bly so now that deer seem to be repos­i­to­ries for COVID (wide­spread ani­mal infec­tions under­mine the only strong argu­ment I know for vac­cine man­dates — name­ly that the unvac­ci­nat­ed allow the virus to cir­cu­late and per­haps mutate).
    • God’s Mer­cy in a New Malar­ia Vac­cine (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra inter­views Kel­ly Chibale, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Sci­ence is a gift from God, out of his mer­cy for us. As a sci­en­tist, I am doing God’s work, attempt­ing to alle­vi­ate human suf­fer­ing in part­ner­ship with God. And oth­er Chris­tians can­not say that we don’t need the sci­en­tif­ic part of the body of Christ. The fin­ger can­not say it doesn’t need the nose (1 Cor. 12:12–27).” The inter­vie­wee is a pro­fes­sor of Organ­ic Chem­istry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cape Town.
  5. Meta-analy­sis sug­gests that emo­tion­al intel­li­gence is declin­ing among col­lege stu­dents (Beth Ell­wood, Psy Post): “West­ern cul­ture has under­gone remark­able change in the past 20 years. For one, a rise in eco­nom­ic lib­er­al­ism and free-mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism has encour­aged an envi­ron­ment of com­pet­i­tive indi­vid­u­al­ism. Sec­ond­ly, social media emerged and has grown rapid­ly, along with smart­phone tech­nol­o­gy. Stud­ies sug­gest these changes may have led to gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ences in per­son­al­i­ty, reveal­ing gen­er­a­tional ris­es in nar­cis­sism, self-esteem, self-focus, and mate­ri­al­ism.”
    • This feels relat­ed: A “proliferation of admin­is­tra­tors”: fac­ul­ty reflect on two decades of rapid expan­sion (Philip Mousav­izadeh, Yale Dai­ly News): “Lau­ren Noble, the founder and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the William F. Buck­ley Jr. pro­gram at Yale, point­ed to the fact that the num­ber of Yale’s admin­is­tra­tors today exceeds the num­ber of fac­ul­ty — 5,066 com­pared to 4,937 — which ‘rais­es impor­tant ques­tions about the university’s allo­ca­tion of resources,’ she said. ‘It’s unclear how such a sig­nif­i­cant increase advances Yale’s mis­sion.’ ”
    • For con­text, there are only 4,664 under­grads at Yale: more than one admin­is­tra­tor per stu­dent! Not all admin­is­tra­tors deal with stu­dents (some work with fac­ul­ty, for exam­ple), but that is still a stun­ning com­par­i­son.
  6. Some thoughts about crit­i­cal race the­o­ry in schools:
    • The Woke Meet Their Match: Par­ents (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “And when the Democ­rats and the main­stream media insist that CRT is not being taught in high schools, they’re being way too cute. Of course K‑12 kids in Virginia’s pub­lic schools are not explic­it­ly read­ing the col­lect­ed works of Der­rick Bell or Richard Del­ga­do — no more than Catholic school kids in third grade are study­ing cri­tiques of Aquinas. But they are being taught in a school sys­tem now thor­ough­ly com­mit­ted to the ide­ol­o­gy and world­view of CRT, by teach­ers who have been mar­i­nat­ed in it, and whose unions have cham­pi­oned it.… To use a term the woke might under­stand, it is, in fact, struc­tur­al.”
    • “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” and actu­al edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy, part one (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Stan­dard­ized test­ing has become a weird dis­course flash­point, but I think every­one agrees that you can, in prin­ci­ple, assess someone’s com­pe­tence in a giv­en sub­ject area with a test. And if you want to com­pare dif­fer­ent peo­ple, you need to give them the same test. It’s only by mak­ing com­par­isons across class­rooms and across time that we are able to per­sua­sive­ly demon­strate that par­tic­u­lates are bad for school per­for­mance, healthy meals are good for school per­for­mance, and air con­di­tion­ing improves school per­for­mance in the sum­mer.”
    • “Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry” and actu­al edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy, part two (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “That said, my view on [teach­ing his­to­ry] as a K‑12 edu­ca­tion issue has always had two parts:
      • Pub­lic schools are pub­lic, and to some extent, they inevitably have to reflect mass opin­ion. You can try to buck that trend and lose the school board elec­tion, hand­ing all con­trol over to right-wingers who don’t even think pub­lic schools should exist, or you can acknowl­edge that in a patri­ot­ic coun­try you basi­cal­ly have to come up with a way to craft a patri­ot­ic nar­ra­tive that’s also inclu­sive.
      • This is not actu­al­ly very sig­nif­i­cant. The kids who are good at school will go on to attend selec­tive col­leges where they will absolute­ly be exposed to left-wing intel­lec­tu­al­s’ thoughts on patri­o­tism and Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. The kids who are not good at school, mean­while, are not pay­ing close atten­tion to the con­tent of his­to­ry class­es.”
  7. How NFTs Cre­ate Val­ue (Steve Kaczyn­s­ki and Scott Duke Komin­ers, Har­vard Busi­ness Review): “But NFTs don’t just pro­vide a kind of dig­i­tal ‘deed.’ Because blockchains are pro­gram­ma­ble, it’s pos­si­ble to endow NFTs with fea­tures that enable them to expand their pur­pose over time, or even to pro­vide direct util­i­ty to their hold­ers. In oth­er words, NFTs can do things — or let their own­ers do things — in both dig­i­tal spaces and the phys­i­cal world. In this sense, NFTs can func­tion like mem­ber­ship cards or tick­ets, pro­vid­ing access to events, exclu­sive mer­chan­dise, and spe­cial dis­counts — as well as serv­ing as dig­i­tal keys to online spaces where hold­ers can engage with each oth­er. More­over, because the blockchain is pub­lic, it’s even pos­si­ble to send addi­tion­al prod­ucts direct­ly to any­one who owns a giv­en token. All of this gives NFT hold­ers val­ue over and above sim­ple own­er­ship — and pro­vides cre­ators with a vec­tor to build a high­ly engaged com­mu­ni­ty around their brands.” This is the first expla­na­tion of NFTs I’ve read that makes them sound use­ful.

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 Eat, Pray, Code: Rule of St. Bene­dict Becomes Tech Developer’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “SQLite—a data­base man­age­ment engine used in most major browsers, smart phones, Adobe prod­ucts, and Skype—adopted a code of ethics pulled direct­ly from the bib­li­cal pre­cepts set by the ven­er­at­ed sixth‐century monk.” This arti­cle blew my mind. First shared in vol­ume 175.

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 325

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 324

some pre-Hal­loween links

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

This is vol­ume 324, which is 182.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Emp­ty Pews Are an Amer­i­can Pub­lic Health Cri­sis (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele and Bren­dan Case, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious par­tic­i­pa­tion strong­ly pro­motes health and well­ness. This means that Amer­i­can­s’ grow­ing dis­af­fec­tion with orga­nized reli­gion isn’t just bad news for church­es; it also rep­re­sents a pub­lic health cri­sis, one that has been large­ly ignored but the effects of which are like­ly to increase in com­ing years.”
    • The authors are part of the Human Flour­ish­ing Pro­gram at Har­vard. I have quot­ed Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research sev­er­al times in the past.
  2. Some per­spec­tives on the Amer­i­can church:
    • J.D. Vance and the Great Chal­lenge of Chris­t­ian Mal­ice (David French, The Dis­patch): “The real cri­sis [in Amer­i­can Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal engage­ment] is instead a cri­sis of the heart. Our ortho­doxy is under­mined by our actions, and our actions spring forth from the deep­est parts of our being. At a time of ris­ing antipa­thy, a Chris­t­ian polit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty should blaze forth with a radi­ant coun­ter­cul­tur­al embrace of kind­ness and grace. Instead, all too many of us have for­got­ten a fun­da­men­tal truth. There are no ‘right peo­ple’ to hate.”
    • Why ‘Evangelical’ Is Becom­ing Anoth­er Word for ‘Republican’ (Ryan Burge, New York Times): “For instance, in 2008, just 16 per­cent of all self-iden­ti­fied evan­gel­i­cals report­ed their church atten­dance as nev­er or sel­dom. But in 2020, that num­ber jumped to 27 per­cent. In 2008, about a third of evan­gel­i­cals who nev­er attend­ed church said they were polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive. By 2019, that had risen to about 50 per­cent.… [also] more peo­ple are embrac­ing the label who have no attach­ment to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. For exam­ple, the share of Catholics who also iden­ti­fied as evan­gel­i­cals (or born again) rose to 15 per­cent in 2018 from 9 per­cent in 2008. That same pat­tern appears with Mus­lims. In fact, there’s evi­dence that the share of mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints, Ortho­dox Chris­tian­i­ty and Hin­duism who iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cal is larg­er today than it was just a decade ago.”
    • The Evan­gel­i­cal Church Is Break­ing Apart (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Scott Dud­ley, the senior pas­tor at Belle­vue Pres­by­ter­ian Church in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton, refers to this as ‘our idol­a­try of pol­i­tics.’ He’s heard of many con­gre­gants leav­ing their church because it didn’t match their pol­i­tics, he told me, but has nev­er once heard of some­one chang­ing their pol­i­tics because it didn’t match their church’s teach­ing. He often tells his con­gre­ga­tion that if the Bible doesn’t chal­lenge your pol­i­tics at least occa­sion­al­ly, you’re not real­ly pay­ing atten­tion to the Hebrew scrip­tures or the New Tes­ta­ment.”
    • Church Mem­ber­ship Is Not a One-Way Street (Alex Duke, Cross­way): “Think of your church as a light­bulb hooked up to a dim­mer switch in a dark room. Every­thing we do makes our wit­ness brighter or dark­er. Prac­tic­ing mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is one of the surest ways to turn that dim­mer switch up; ignor­ing it is one of the surest ways to turn it down. Mean­ing­ful mem­ber­ship is more impor­tant than you think.”
  3. The Prob­lem With Dave Chap­pelle (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Chap­pelle is not a hap­less vic­tim of a crush­ing ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da; he’s not Bar­ronelle Stutz­man or James Eich. Chap­pelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robe­spierre of the very rev­o­lu­tion that’s after him now. His for­tune was made inside the same pro­gres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ty that threat­ens him, and it is pre­cise­ly Chappelle’s (and many oth­er come­di­ans) skill with which he dis­missed any notion of the sacred that has tak­en root in the peo­ple who are walk­ing out on his un-PC act.” Real­ly sol­id insights here.
  4. The par­ent­ing prob­lem the gov­ern­ment can’t fix (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, The Week): “There is a cul­tur­al weight dan­gling from the yoke of mod­ern Amer­i­can par­ent­hood — one that is prob­a­bly beyond the gov­ern­ment to alle­vi­ate.… Chil­dren are a per­son­al choice and there­fore a per­son­al prob­lem, many peo­ple seem to believe. Have as many as you want — just make sure they don’t both­er the rest of us. The prob­lem is that this cre­do is total­ly out of step with real­i­ty.… par­ent­ing is an inher­ent­ly social occu­pa­tion. Try­ing to cram it into an indi­vid­u­al­ist frame­work, where the costs and con­se­quences of chil­dren fall on par­ents and no one else, dis­torts the whole endeav­or.”
    • I have long thought that dis­lik­ing chil­dren is pro­found­ly hyp­o­crit­i­cal. You were once a child who craved affec­tion and under­stand­ing, how rude to reject chil­dren now that you have learned to nav­i­gate the world more effec­tive­ly.
  5. Sci­en­tists Built an AI to Give Eth­i­cal Advice, But It Turned Out Super Racist (Tony Tran, Futur­ism): “And as is often the case, part of the rea­son Delphi’s answers can get ques­tion­able can like­ly be linked back to how it was cre­at­ed. The folks behind the project drew on some eye­brow-rais­ing sources to help train the AI, includ­ing the ‘Am I the Ass­hole?’ sub­red­dit, the ‘Con­fes­sions’ sub­red­dit, and the ‘Dear Abby’ advice col­umn, accord­ing to the paper the team behind Del­phi pub­lished about the exper­i­ment. It should be not­ed, though, that just the sit­u­a­tions were culled from those sources — not the actu­al replies and answers them­selves.… the team behind Del­phi used Amazon’s crowd­sourc­ing ser­vice Mechan­i­cal­Turk to find respon­dents to actu­al­ly train the AI.”
  6. About Israel and Jew­ish peo­ple:
    • When Your Body Is Some­one Else’s Haunt­ed House (Dara Horn, Bari Weiss’ Sub­stack): “Those girls were not stu­pid, and prob­a­bly not even big­ot­ed. But in their entire­ly typ­i­cal and well-inten­tioned edu­ca­tion, they had learned about Jews main­ly because peo­ple had killed Jews. Like most peo­ple in the world, they had only encoun­tered dead Jews: peo­ple whose sole attribute was that they had been mur­dered, and whose mur­ders served a clear pur­pose, which was to teach us some­thing. Jews were peo­ple who, for moral and edu­ca­tion­al pur­pos­es, were sup­posed to be dead.”
    • Whose Promised Land? A Jour­ney Into a Divid­ed Israel (Patrick Kings­ley & Laeti­tia Van­con, New York Times): “’I believe in the coun­try as long as it doesn’t fight reli­gion, as long as it doesn’t fight me,’ he said. In his view, the new gov­ern­ment has under­mined Israel’s Jew­ish­ness, under­cut­ting the state’s legit­i­ma­cy. ‘If it’s not a Jew­ish state, then we have no right to exist here,’ he said. ‘Our right to exist here is based on the fact that God gave us the land.‘”
    • Pales­tine Isn’t Fer­gu­son (Susie Lin­field, The Atlantic): “Any use­ful analy­sis of the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict requires engag­ing with an unre­solved, frus­trat­ing­ly com­plex, griev­ous­ly resilient strug­gle between two nation­al move­ments, each with a jus­ti­fied claim to the land. Once that effort is aban­doned, a vac­u­um ensues. It is filled by the trans­for­ma­tion of a coun­try into a metaphor; by the rewrit­ing (or ignor­ing) of his­to­ry; by Manichean think­ing; and by the con­ver­sion of lan­guage into a means of per­for­mance rather than a descrip­tion of real­i­ty.”
  7. Learn­ing From Our Defeat: The Skill of the Vul­cans (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…both of these rel­a­tive non-enti­ties were pulled aside from their reg­u­lar posi­tions and hand­ed an addi­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ty— coor­di­na­tor of the Amer­i­can effort in Afghanistan.Read that again: they were both giv­en the same job at the same time. Yet the prob­lem was worse than just dupli­ca­tion of effort and con­fused lines of author­i­ty. The two men were not even aware the oth­er man was work­ing the same port­fo­lio!”

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 Dis­solv­ing the Fer­mi Para­dox (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Imagine we knew God flipped a coin. If it came up heads, He made 10 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tion. If it came up tails, He made none besides Earth. Using our one para­me­ter Drake Equa­tion, we deter­mine that on aver­age there should be 5 bil­lion alien civ­i­liza­tions. Since we see zero, that’s quite the para­dox, isn’t it? No. In this case the mean is mean­ing­less. It’s not at all sur­pris­ing that we see zero alien civ­i­liza­tions, it just means the coin must have land­ed tails. SDO say that rely­ing on the Drake Equa­tion is the same kind of error.”  First shared in vol­ume 159.

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 323

Arti­cles about every­thing from Jill Biden’s faith to Yale Law School’s fail­ings to an analy­sis of Amer­i­can divorce to a com­mon-sense argu­ment against pornog­ra­phy. Enjoy!

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.

323 is 17 · 19, which are two of my favorite num­bers. I par­tic­u­lar­ly delight in using them on the microwave.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Evan­gel­i­cal Elites, Fight­ing Each Oth­er (David French, The Dis­patch): “…the old­er cul­ture war cat­e­gories are being sup­ple­ment­ed and some­times sup­plant­ed by a new con­fronta­tion between lib­er­al­ism and illib­er­al­ism. While illib­er­al right and illib­er­al left snarl at any­one not in their tribes, the lib­er­al right and the lib­er­al left are form­ing new rela­tion­ships and new alliances.” An excel­lent piece, and the first com­ment is also worth read­ing (it’s by French him­self about some­thing he  meant to include in the arti­cle).
  2. Jill Biden paid a sur­prise vis­it to the woman who helped her regain faith in God (Jada Yuan, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For five years after the death of her son, Jill Biden says, she lost her faith in God. She ‘felt betrayed, bro­ken’ when Beau died of brain can­cer at 46, and she had stopped going to church or even pray­ing, she told the con­gre­gants of Brook­land Bap­tist Church late Sun­day after­noon. But she found her way back, and over the week­end trav­eled near­ly 500 miles to sur­prise the woman who’d helped her get there.” I was deeply moved by this sto­ry.
  3. A Wor­ri­some Peek Inside Yale Law’s Diver­si­ty Bureau­cra­cy (Conor Frieder­s­forf, The Atlantic): “[Odd­ly,] the diver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors spent many hours on this low-stakes dra­ma among high-IQ adults, afford­ing out­siders an unusu­al peek at their meth­ods and a relat­ed series of cru­cial mis­takes, most stem­ming from an inabil­i­ty or unwill­ing­ness to see how the inter­ests of stu­dents diverge from the inter­ests and incen­tives of their office.”
  4. Two arti­cles dis­cussing the research sug­gest­ing con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er than lib­er­als:
    • From the left: Con­ser­v­a­tives Are Hap­pi­er Than Lib­er­als. Dis­cuss. (Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times): “Ulti­mate­ly, though, this line of inquiry rais­es an even broad­er ques­tion: whether lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives func­tion on fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent moral planes.”
    • From the right: Friends and Ex-Friends (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I admit to being skep­ti­cal of any attempt to quan­ti­fy hap­pi­ness, which is a sub­jec­tive judg­ment. Nev­er­the­less, if it is true that con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er on bal­ance than lib­er­als, I think it has to do with two basic things. First, con­ser­v­a­tives tend to accept that the world will nev­er be per­fect, and find it eas­i­er to live with imper­fec­tions.… Sec­ond, con­ser­v­a­tives tend to care less about polit­i­cal cru­sad­ing.… I don’t know any ordi­nary con­ser­v­a­tives who would cut off a friend over their lib­er­al pol­i­tics.”
  5. The Naked Truth: Porn is Bad For You (Kather­ine Dee, The Amer­i­can Mind): “Com­mon sense is vital­ly use­ful, espe­cial­ly in per­son­al deci­sion-mak­ing. So, here’s what I know. I know that immer­sion in, or even just reg­u­lar usage of, any­thing has an impact on a person’s psy­chol­o­gy.”
  6. The Evo­lu­tion of Divorce (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Nation­al Affairs): “In the case of divorce, as in so many oth­ers, the worst con­se­quences of the social rev­o­lu­tion of the 1960s and ’70s are now felt dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly by the poor and less edu­cat­ed, while the wealthy elites who set off these trans­for­ma­tions in the first place have man­aged to reclaim some­what health­i­er and more sta­ble habits of mar­ried life. This imbal­ance leaves our cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal elites less well attuned to the mag­ni­tude of social dys­func­tion in much of Amer­i­can soci­ety, and leaves the most vul­ner­a­ble Amer­i­cans — espe­cial­ly chil­dren liv­ing in poor and work­ing-class com­mu­ni­ties — even worse off than they would oth­er­wise be.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  7. Is Col­lege Worth It? A Com­pre­hen­sive Return on Invest­ment Analy­sis (Pre­ston Coop­er, FreeOpp): “The analy­sis reveals that a student’s choice of pro­gram is per­haps the most impor­tant finan­cial deci­sion he or she will ever make. Most bachelor’s degree pro­grams in engi­neer­ing, com­put­er sci­ence, eco­nom­ics, and nurs­ing increase life­time earn­ings by $500,000 or more, even after sub­tract­ing the costs of col­lege. But most pro­grams in fields such as art, music, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, and psy­chol­o­gy leave stu­dents finan­cial­ly worse off than if they had nev­er gone to col­lege at all.” Search the table at We Cal­cu­lat­ed Return On Invest­ment For 30,000 Bachelor’s Degrees. Find Yours. (Pre­ston Coop­er, FreeOpp)

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 Plan­et of Cops (Fred­die de Boer, per­son­al blog): “The woke world is a world of snitch­es, infor­mants, rats. Go to any space con­cerned with social jus­tice and what will you find? End­less sur­veil­lance. Every­body is to be judged. Every­one is under sus­pi­cion. Every­thing you say is to be scoured, picked over, ana­lyzed for any pos­si­ble offense. Everyone’s a detec­tive in the Divi­sion of Prob­lem­at­ics, and they walk the beat 24/7…. I don’t know how peo­ple can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly talk about prison abo­li­tion and restor­ing the idea of for­give­ness to lit­er­al crim­i­nal jus­tice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kan­ga­roo court system.” First shared in vol­ume 161.

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 322

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 322nd install­ment, and today I learned that 322 is the 12th Lucas num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of Evan­gel­i­cal Lead­er­ship (Mark Gal­li, Sub­stack): “This ten­den­cy has only got­ten worse, as now the mark of a suc­cess­ful evan­gel­i­cal writer is to get pub­lished reg­u­lar­ly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s inter­est­ing about such pieces is that (a) such writ­ers make a point that affirms the view of the sec­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion (on top­ics like envi­ron­men­tal care, racial injus­tice, sex­u­al abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evan­gel­i­cals should take the same point of view. How­ev­er, their writ­ing doesn’t reach the mass­es of evan­gel­i­cals who take a con­trary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writ­ers are real­ly inter­est­ed in get­ting those evan­gel­i­cals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the main­stream press. Bet­ter to try to get such a col­umn pub­lished in the most pop­u­lar Pen­te­costal outlet, Charis­ma. Ah, but that would do noth­ing to enhance the pres­tige of evan­gel­i­cals among the culture’s elite.”
    1. This is a SUPER inter­est­ing arti­cle that makes good points… but the author some­how avoid­ed look­ing in a mir­ror while writ­ing it. He was the edi­tor-in-chief of Chris­tian­i­ty Today!
    • Fol­low-up: Falling from Grace into Mer­cy— or Elite Evan­gel­i­cal­ism, Part 2 (Mark Gal­li, Sub­stack): “But one thing about retire­ment is the time one has to reflect on one’s career, and I see more clear­ly how much I was will­ing to go along to get along, and how much I was part of the sys­tem.… I don’t think there is much hope in reform­ing many things that course through the veins of elite evan­gel­i­cals.”
  2. Two of the most dis­tress­ing news items I’ve seen in some time.
  3. Hunt­ing the Satanists (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the world­view of QAnon and Yale’s diver­si­ty office are sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar. Both see a world in which Satan, lit­er­al or metaphor­i­cal, is an active force in the world cor­rupt­ing indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions. Satan is pow­er­ful but hid­den. He only reveals his influ­ence when the cor­rupt­ed slip-up and by the incor­rect use of a word, phrase, or ges­ture reveal their true natures. Since Satan is pow­er­ful and hid­den the good peo­ple must con­stant­ly mon­i­tor every­one.” An astute­ly observed par­al­lel.
  4. It’s Time for a Bet­ter and Smarter Alliance Against Porn (David French, The Dis­patch): “One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing devel­op­ments of mod­ern times has been the way in which Amer­i­can ideas and Amer­i­can con­duct fre­quent­ly con­tra­dict each oth­er. The world of ideas most­ly (though not exclu­sive­ly) has moved left, quick­ly. Ideas move from pro­gres­sive fringe to main­stream with stun­ning speed.… But in the world of con­duct, some­thing else is hap­pen­ing. Social con­ser­v­a­tive lifestyles are mak­ing a come­back. Divorce rates are down. Teen preg­nan­cy is down. Abor­tion rates (abor­tions per 1,000 women) and ratios (abor­tions per 1,000 preg­nan­cies) are way down. Sin­gle par­ent­ing has sta­bi­lized, and the per­cent­age of chil­dren liv­ing with both par­ents is inch­ing up.”
  5. Please Don’t Give Up On Hav­ing Kids Because Of Cli­mate Change (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “If you think priv­i­leged mod­ern Amer­i­cans shouldn’t have chil­dren now because of qual­i­ty-of-life issues [relat­ed to cli­mate change], you implic­it­ly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had chil­dren.”
  6. Two tid­bits from Chi­na:
    • Ter­ror & tourism: Xin­jiang eas­es its grip, but fear remains (Dake Kang, AP News): “Any­time I tried to chat with some­one, the min­ders would draw in close, strain­ing to hear every word. It’s hard to know why Chi­nese author­i­ties have shift­ed to sub­tler meth­ods of con­trol­ling the region. It may be that sear­ing crit­i­cism from the West, along with pun­ish­ing polit­i­cal and com­mer­cial sanc­tions, have pushed author­i­ties to light­en up. Or it may sim­ply be that Chi­na judges it has come far enough in its goal of sub­du­ing the Uyghurs and oth­er most­ly Mus­lim minori­ties to relax its grip.”
    • The Tri­umph and Ter­ror of Wang Hun­ing (N.S. Lyons, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Wang record­ed his obser­va­tions in a mem­oir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book Amer­i­ca Against Amer­i­ca. In it, he mar­vels at home­less encamp­ments in the streets of Wash­ing­ton DC, out-of-con­trol drug crime in poor black neigh­bor­hoods in New York and San Fran­cis­co, and cor­po­ra­tions that seemed to have fused them­selves to and tak­en over respon­si­bil­i­ties of gov­ern­ment.… Amer­i­cans can, he says, per­ceive that they are faced with ‘intri­cate social and cul­tur­al prob­lems,’ they ‘tend to think of them as sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems’ to be solved sep­a­rate­ly. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their prob­lems are in fact all inex­tri­ca­bly inter­linked and have the same root cause: a rad­i­cal, nihilis­tic indi­vid­u­al­ism at the heart of mod­ern Amer­i­can lib­er­al­ism.”
      • Sur­pris­ing­ly engross­ing. One of Chi­na’s key lead­ers has accu­rate­ly diag­nosed cer­tain chal­lenges their nation is fac­ing but his solu­tions are lack­ing (and evil). And he seems to have come to many of his con­vic­tions by vis­it­ing Amer­i­ca and wit­ness­ing our cul­tur­al fol­ly.
  7. Don’t Let Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Claims Mask Bad Faith Argu­ments (Daniel Ben­nett, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Reli­gious lib­er­ty is too impor­tant to let it get mis­used. It’s not a waiv­er to avoid all incon­ve­niences in life or, worse, a tool to make polit­i­cal state­ments. For reli­gious lib­er­ty to sur­vive polit­i­cal and legal scruti­ny in the future, we must safe­guard exemp­tions against abuse.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at John Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have When Chil­dren Say They’re Trans (Jesse Sin­gal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a con­nec­tion between social influ­ences and gender‐identity explo­ration among ado­les­cents would require ignor­ing a lot of what we know about the devel­op­ing teenage brain—which is more sus­cep­ti­ble to peer influ­ence, more impul­sive, and less adept at weigh­ing long‐term out­comes and con­se­quences than ful­ly devel­oped adult brains—as well as indi­vid­ual sto­ries like Delta’s.” This is a long and bal­anced piece which has gar­nered out­rage in some online cir­cles. First shared in vol­ume 157.

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 321

I always try to trim these to sev­en items. Cut­ting the 8th was bru­tal this week — so many good options!

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 321, which is not only a num­ber but also a count­down.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Top Trans Doc­tors Blow the Whis­tle on ‘Sloppy’ Care (Abi­gail Shri­er, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “[The] new ortho­doxy has gone too far, accord­ing to two of the most promi­nent providers in the field of trans­gen­der med­i­cine: Dr. Mar­ci Bow­ers, a world-renowned vagino­plas­ty spe­cial­ist who oper­at­ed on real­i­ty-tele­vi­sion star Jazz Jen­nings; and Eri­ca Ander­son, a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia San Francisco’s Child and Ado­les­cent Gen­der Clin­ic. In the course of their careers, both have seen thou­sands of patients. Both are board mem­bers of the World Pro­fes­sion­al Asso­ci­a­tion for Trans­gen­der Health (WPATH), the orga­ni­za­tion that sets the stan­dards world­wide for trans­gen­der med­ical care. And both are trans­gen­der women. Ear­li­er this month, Ander­son told me she sub­mit­ted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warn­ing that many trans­gen­der health­care providers were treat­ing kids reck­less­ly. The Times passed, explain­ing it was ‘out­side our cov­er­age pri­or­i­ties right now.’ ”
    • A sober­ing arti­cle, and also a trag­ic but unsur­pris­ing rev­e­la­tion about the New York Times edi­to­r­i­al team.
  2. High­lights From The Com­ments On Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I might be the only per­son in the world who likes McMan­sions. They just look like nice, pleas­ant build­ings made by peo­ple who want to vague­ly enjoy the place where they live. Prob­a­bly the least offen­sive thing peo­ple are mak­ing these days.”
    • Judg­ing from the com­ments he real­ly struck a chord with the “Whith­er Tar­taria?” piece I linked two weeks ago. Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. What Amer­i­can Chris­tians Hear at Church (Casey Cep, New York­er): “Homiletics—the prop­er name for the art of preaching—is still taught in sem­i­nar­ies and divin­i­ty schools, but it is not often stud­ied out­side of those insti­tu­tions. This is regret­table, since many more Amer­i­cans attend church than sub­scribe to a news­pa­per.… Tak­ing advan­tage of the tech­nolo­gies that have allowed church­es to stream ser­vices and post them online, Pew has stud­ied the length, lan­guage, and con­tent of tens of thou­sands of ser­mons, by denom­i­na­tion and tra­di­tion, most recent­ly for the nine Sun­days before and the Sun­day after last fall’s Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.” Quite inter­est­ing.
  4. Slav­ery vs. White Suprema­cy (Van Gosse & Sean Wilentz, New York Review of Books): “Anti­slav­ery and anti-racist pol­i­tics appeared only in the 1760s—and only in the Amer­i­can colonies. Those pol­i­tics, hailed by lat­er abo­li­tion­ists as of world-his­tor­i­cal impor­tance, engaged blacks and whites, enslaved and free. Inspired by the Revolution’s egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, anti­slav­ery advo­cates over­came pow­er­ful oppo­si­tion and enact­ed the first eman­ci­pa­tions of their kind in his­to­ry, in sev­en of the thir­teen orig­i­nal states.… The Unit­ed States, in short, was found­ed not on slav­ery and white suprema­cy but amid an unprece­dent­ed strug­gle over slav­ery and white suprema­cy, which the Con­sti­tu­tion left open.” Illu­mi­nat­ing let­ters between two his­to­ry pro­fes­sors.
  5. ‘Some are just psy­chopaths’: Chi­nese detec­tive in exile reveals extent of tor­ture against Uyghurs (Rebec­ca Wright, Ivan Wat­son, Zahid Mah­mood and Tom Booth, CNN): “ ‘Kick them, beat them (until they’re) bruised and swollen,’ Jiang said, recall­ing how he and his col­leagues used to inter­ro­gate detainees in police deten­tion cen­ters. ‘Until they kneel on the floor cry­ing.’ Dur­ing his time in Xin­jiang, Jiang said every new detainee was beat­en dur­ing the inter­ro­ga­tion process — includ­ing men, women and chil­dren as young as 14.” The details in this sto­ry are dark. I’ve seen oth­er sto­ries with tes­ti­monies from for­mer pris­on­ers, this one fea­tures one of the guards speak­ing up in addi­tion to sto­ries from pris­on­ers.
  6. Train­ings (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Uni­ver­si­ties don’t usu­al­ly cre­ate their own train­ing mod­ules — they buy prod­ucts from com­pa­nies that spe­cial­ize in that kind of thing. And those com­pa­nies want to save mon­ey by reusing their old code. So they extract the con­tent of their Title IX cours­es and sim­ply stuff new con­tent into the exist­ing frame­works. Easy-peasy. And the upper-lev­el admin­is­tra­tors of the uni­ver­si­ty, who don’t want to spend any more mon­ey on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged mon­ster they’ve been handed. But that cre­ates a big prob­lem: the kind of struc­ture need­ed to com­mu­ni­cate to peo­ple the con­tours of a law and the expec­ta­tions gen­er­at­ed by that law is not the kind of struc­ture need­ed to explore the moral devel­op­ment of a com­mu­ni­ty.”
  7. Yale and the Edu­ca­tion of Gov­ern­ing Elites (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “A pro­gram con­ceived to teach future elites how to wise­ly use state pow­er has mor­phed into a pro­gram teach­ing them how to wise­ly oppose it. This trans­for­ma­tion is one more illus­tra­tion of Dashan’s the­sis. At Yale we see the Amer­i­can predica­ment made con­crete: an entrenched gov­ern­ing class that enjoys the priv­i­leges of elite sta­tus but refus­es to pre­pare for the respon­si­bil­i­ties of elite sta­tion.”

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 Are Satanists of the MS‐13 gang an under‐covered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS‐13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 158.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 320

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

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

This is vol­ume 320, which is 28 + 26.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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