Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 294

more on Atlanta, puri­ty cul­ture, and oth­er inter­est­ing links

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 293

fea­tur­ing sev­er­al per­spec­tives about the mur­ders in Atlanta

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 293 — a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Arti­cle relat­ed to vio­lence against Asian-Amer­i­cans:
    • Reli­gion, Race, and the Atlanta Mur­ders (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There are so many threads to this knot that need to be slow­ly untan­gled. There are ele­ments relat­ed to pornog­ra­phy, sex traf­fick­ing, reli­gion, evan­gel­i­cal­ism, South­ern Bap­tists, and many oth­ers just out­side our periph­ery. But nei­ther the com­plex­i­ty of this event nor the trib­al­ism of our cul­tur­al dis­course must not allow us to avoid self-reflec­tion and scruti­ny. We must con­front the real­i­ty that some­thing is hor­ri­bly wrong in our midst when a per­son kills to ‘elim­i­nate’ temp­ta­tion.”
    • We Need to Put a Name to This Vio­lence (Jay Caspi­an Kang, New York Times): “There is no shared his­to­ry between, say, Thai immi­grants who saw images of one of their own attacked in San Fran­cis­co, and the Chi­nese-Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion of Oak­land alarmed by the assault in Chinatown.Asian-American iden­ti­ty is frac­tured and often inco­her­ent because it assumes kin­ship between peo­ple who do not speak the same lan­guage, and, in many cas­es, dis­like one anoth­er.” This was writ­ten before the Atlanta mur­ders and is dis­cussing the trend wave of vio­lence more gen­er­al­ly.
    • The Mud­dled His­to­ry of Anti-Asian Vio­lence (Hua Hsu, New York­er): “Some have won­dered if these hor­rif­ic, viral videos con­sti­tute a wave, or if they were just ran­dom inci­dents. When your con­cerns have gone unrec­og­nized for decades, it’s under­stand­able why some with­in the Asian-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty remain so invest­ed in using these high­ly vis­i­ble moments as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to call atten­tion to hate, even if the inci­dents seem more var­ied than that. The wave in ques­tion isn’t just two or three inci­dents.” Also writ­ten before the Atlanta shoot­ings.
    • Racial­iz­ing The Atlanta Mas­sage Par­lor Killings (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It is strik­ing to see how quick­ly our media has racial­ized the nar­ra­tive of the hor­rif­ic mur­ders at the Geor­gia mas­sage par­lors. From what we know so far, the alleged mur­der­er was a young man tor­ment­ed by his com­pul­sive sex­u­al desires. He vis­it­ed mas­sage par­lors in the past, and went to this one to kill the women he once depend­ed on to grat­i­fy his desires. From all the avail­able evi­dence, these killings were the misog­y­nis­tic act of a sex­u­al­ly depraved man.” As is often the case with Dreher, some of the best mate­r­i­al is in the updates at the end (usu­al­ly a com­ment from a read­er that Dreher thought sig­nif­i­cant).
    • When The Nar­ra­tive Replaces The News (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Mass killers, if they are moti­vat­ed by big­otry or hate, tend to let the world know… This mass mur­der­er in Atlanta actu­al­ly denied any such motive, and, to repeat myself, there is no evi­dence for it — and that has been true from the very start.”
    • The Media Got It Wrong: Police Cap­tain Did­n’t Say the Atlanta Spa Killer Was Hav­ing a ‘Bad Day’ (Rob­by Soave, Rea­son): “A police offi­cer excus­ing Long’s actions as mere­ly the result of him hav­ing a ‘bad day’ would indeed be con­temptible. But that’s not what Bak­er did. In fact, many of the peo­ple so infu­ri­at­ed about the quote were mis­led by Rupar’s edit of the video. The full video (the rel­e­vant sec­tion starts at about 13:50) makes clear that Bak­er was not pro­vid­ing his own com­men­tary, but rather sum­ma­riz­ing what Long had told the inves­ti­ga­tors.”
  2. Third Places and the Hori­zons of Male Friend­ships (Ryan McCormick, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, typ­i­cal male friend­ship is dif­fer­ent from typ­i­cal, con­tem­po­rary female friend­ship. A fail­ure to rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ent ways that men and women form inti­mate bonds in friend­ship is what breeds so much con­fu­sion and leads to the mis­di­ag­no­sis of ‘tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty.’” I will add one extra lay­er of diag­no­sis that the author did­n’t address: many in our cul­ture have a hor­ror of male-only spaces. How are we sur­prised to dis­cov­er a dearth of male friend­ships when we view the very exis­tence of mas­cu­line com­mu­ni­ties as evi­dence of some­thing amiss?
  3. The False and Exag­ger­at­ed Claims Still Being Spread About the Capi­tol Riot (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “Despite this alleged bru­tal mur­der tak­ing place in one of the most sur­veilled build­ings on the plan­et, filled that day with hun­dreds of cell­phones tap­ing the events, nobody saw video of it. No pho­tographs depict­ed it. To this day, no autop­sy report has been released. No details from any offi­cial source have been pro­vid­ed.”
    • Fol­low-up: As the Insur­rec­tion Nar­ra­tive Crum­bles, Democ­rats Cling to it More Des­per­ate­ly Than Ever (Glenn Green­wald, Sub­stack): “As I detailed sev­er­al weeks ago, so many of the most har­row­ing and wide­spread media claims about the Jan­u­ary 6 riot proved to be total fab­ri­ca­tions. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Bri­an Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extin­guish­er. No pro­test­er brought zip-ties with them as some pre­med­i­tat­ed plot to kid­nap mem­bers of Con­gress (two riot­ers found them on a table inside). There’s no evi­dence any­one intend­ed to assas­si­nate Mike Pence, Mitt Rom­ney or any­one else.”
    • Relat­ed: Two are charged in the assault of a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died after the Jan. 6 riot. (Katie Ben­ner and Adam Gold­man, New York Times): “The Jus­tice Depart­ment has charged two men in the assault on Bri­an D. Sick­nick, a Capi­tol Police offi­cer who died the day after he fought riot­ers storm­ing the Capi­tol on Jan. 6, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment offi­cial briefed on the case and court doc­u­ments.… It is not clear whether Offi­cer Sick­nick died because of his expo­sure to the spray.”
  4. Covid’s Par­ti­san Errors (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “ ‘Repub­li­cans con­sis­tent­ly under­es­ti­mate risks, while Democ­rats con­sis­tent­ly over­es­ti­mate them.’  …The rea­sons for these ide­o­log­i­cal bias­es aren’t com­plete­ly clear, but they are not shock­ing. Con­ser­v­a­tives tend to be more hos­tile to behav­ior restric­tions and to sci­en­tif­ic research. And lib­er­als some­times over­re­act to social prob­lems.”
  5. Tim­ing the SARS-CoV­‑2 index case in Hubei province (Sci­ence, Jonathan Pekar et al):  “Empir­i­cal obser­va­tion through­out the SARS-CoV­‑2 pan­dem­ic has shown the out­sized role of super­spread­ing events in the prop­a­ga­tion of SARS-CoV­‑2, where­in the aver­age infect­ed per­son does not trans­mit the virus. Our results sug­gest the same dynam­ics like­ly influ­enced the ini­tial estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2 in humans, as only 29.7% of sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics from the pri­ma­ry analy­sis went on to estab­lish self-sus­tain­ing epi­demics. The remain­ing 70.3% of epi­demics went extinct.… Fur­ther­more, the large and high­ly con­nect­ed con­tact net­works char­ac­ter­iz­ing urban areas seem crit­i­cal to the estab­lish­ment of SARS-CoV­‑2. When we sim­u­lat­ed epi­demics where the num­ber of con­nec­tions was reduced by 50% or 75% (with­out rescal­ing per-con­tact trans­mis­si­bil­i­ty), to reflect emer­gence in a rur­al com­mu­ni­ty, the epi­demics went extinct 94.5% or 99.6% of the time, respec­tive­ly.”
    • This is real­ly inter­est­ing. The researchers are large­ly at UCSD. One impli­ca­tion is that there are a LOT more ani­mal-to-human COVID-like infec­tions that sim­ply nev­er make the leap to becom­ing wide­spread. Kind of like music: there are a ton of great musi­cians who just nev­er catch their big break. With­out super­spread­ers, this kind of pan­dem­ic appears unlike­ly. I hope researchers can find a way to address what­ev­er caus­es some­one to be a super­spread­er.
  6. Rais­ing Beef Cat­tle (Tom Blan­ton, Quil­lette): “It is by cher­ry-pick­ing images of the times of con­fine­ment from around the world that the grue­some image of ‘fac­to­ry farms’ is cre­at­ed. Often the images are tak­en from coun­tries that don’t have the human­i­tar­i­an reg­u­la­tions that most West­ern nations have.… If those gen­uine­ly con­cerned for the suf­fer­ing of ani­mals could find it with­in them­selves to rec­og­nize that it is not immoral to slaugh­ter ani­mals humane­ly for food, they would find many allies for the cause of reduc­ing ani­mal suf­fer­ing amongst the peo­ple who raise and work with these ani­mals on a dai­ly basis.”
  7. Could It Be… Genes? (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “This is an arti­cle about how fam­i­ly influ­ences chil­dren with­out a con­sid­er­a­tion of the most direct and pow­er­ful way. The words ‘gene’ and ‘genes’ and ‘genet­ic’ do not appear in this paper. Nei­ther do ‘her­i­ta­ble’ or ‘hered­i­ty’ or ‘hered­i­tary.’ The con­cept of the trans­fer of genet­ic infor­ma­tion from par­ent to off­spring sim­ply does not exist in this men­tal space… in a paper about how fam­i­lies influ­ence the char­ac­ter­is­tics of their chil­dren. I would call this odd, but it’s par for the course in social sci­ence research.”

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 On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6)

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 292

there is an absurd­ly long list of enter­tain­ing YouTube videos at the end

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 292, which is the num­ber of ways you can break a dol­lar into two or more coins.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Grow­ing My Faith in the Face of Death (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “Most par­tic­u­lar­ly for me as a Chris­t­ian, Jesus’s cost­ly love, death, and res­ur­rec­tion had become not just some­thing I believed and filed away, but a hope that sus­tained me all day. I pray this prayer dai­ly. Occa­sion­al­ly it elec­tri­fies, but ulti­mate­ly it always calms: And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morn­ing only by your grace, keep me in the joy­ful, live­ly remem­brance that what­ev­er hap­pens, I will some­day know my final ris­ing, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.”
  2. The Emp­ty Reli­gions of Insta­gram (Leigh Stein, New York Times): “I have hard­ly prayed to God since I was a teenag­er, but the pan­dem­ic has cracked open inside me a pro­found yearn­ing for rev­er­ence, humil­i­ty and awe. I have an over­draft on my out­rage account. I want moral author­i­ty from some­one who isn’t shilling a mem­oir or call­ing out her ene­mies on social media for clout.”
  3. Do Lib­er­als Care if Books Dis­ap­pear? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In the last stages of the same-sex mar­riage debate, I nev­er encoun­tered a flick­er of pri­vate doubt from lib­er­al friends. But in the gen­der-iden­ti­ty debate, there are per­va­sive lib­er­al doubts about the cur­rent activist posi­tion. Yet with­out lib­er­al objec­tion, that posi­tion appears to set rules for what Ama­zon will sell.”
  4. The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of America’s Elites (Bari Weiss, City Jour­nal): “So chil­dren learn how the new rules of woke work. The idea of lying in order to please a teacher seems like a phe­nom­e­non from the Sovi­et Union. But the high school­ers I spoke with said that they do ver­sions of this, includ­ing par­rot­ing views they don’t believe in assign­ments so that their grades don’t suf­fer.… One Eng­lish teacher in Los Ange­les tac­it­ly acknowl­edges the prob­lem: she has the class turn off their videos on Zoom and asks each stu­dent to make their name anony­mous so that they can have unin­hib­it­ed dis­cus­sions.”
    • Relat­ed: Pri­vate Schools Have Become Tru­ly Obscene (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Pri­vate schools reg­u­lar­ly make deci­sions that par­ents don’t under­stand. Like ancient peo­ples, the par­ents try to make sense of the clues. They decide that col­lege admis­sions must be the god of pri­vate school—wrong—or that the god must be AP scores, or sports, or insti­tu­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. The god of pri­vate school is money.“A lit­tle uneven but a vis­cer­al­ly fun read.
  5. Can­cel­ing Is Pow­er­less (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Pol­i­tics is about pow­er. Can­cel mobs don’t have it, and they nev­er will. You want­ed repa­ra­tions; you got Dr. Seuss. Maybe time to take a hard look at why.” His fol­low-up Per­haps We Can­not Do Both is also worth­while.
  6. Why Reformed Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Has Splin­tered: Four Approach­es to Race, Pol­i­tics, and Gen­der (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “By virtue of our upbring­ing, our expe­ri­ences, our hurts, our per­son­al­i­ties, our gifts, and our fears, we grav­i­tate toward cer­tain expla­na­tions and often think in famil­iar pat­terns when it comes to the most com­pli­cat­ed and con­tro­ver­sial issues. Why is it that by know­ing what some­one thinks about, say, mask wear­ing that you prob­a­bly have a pret­ty good idea what they think about Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and sys­temic racism?” His break­down of approach­es is help­ful even out­side the Reformed tribe. You can see all four respons­es with­in Chi Alpha. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed if you want a frame­work for under­stand­ing why fel­low believ­ers dis­agree with you.
  7. Two arti­cles about Chi­na:

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 291

fas­ci­nat­ing links from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives

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 291, which is not a very inter­est­ing num­ber. It’s 3 · 97, which I guess is some­thing.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State (Ben Mauk, New York­er): “On his sec­ond day of deten­tion, a mem­ber of the camp admin­is­tra­tion came to see him. Kok­teubai asked when he would learn what he was accused of doing. He was sur­prised to learn that he wouldn’t be ques­tioned at all. ‘If you hadn’t com­mit­ted a crime, you wouldn’t have end­ed up here,’ the admin­is­tra­tor told him. ‘So there is some­thing you are here for.’ ” The graph­ics inter­fere with the read­ing expe­ri­ence, but it’s worth­while.
  2. On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good.
  3. David Shor on Why Trump Was Good for the GOP and How Dems Can Win in 2022 (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “But when I look at the 2020 elec­tion, I see that we ran against the most unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can ever to run for pres­i­dent — and we ran lit­er­al­ly the most pop­u­lar fig­ure in our par­ty whose last name is not Oba­ma — and we only nar­row­ly won the Elec­toral Col­lege. If Biden had done 0.3 per­cent worse, then Don­ald Trump would have won reelec­tion…” This is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly fas­ci­nat­ing in a very non­par­ti­san way (although the inter­vie­wee is extreme­ly par­ti­san).
  4. In pan­dem­ic news:
    • 5 Pan­dem­ic Mis­takes We Keep Repeat­ing (Zeynep Tufek­ci, The Atlantic): “One of the most impor­tant prob­lems under­min­ing the pan­dem­ic response has been the mis­trust and pater­nal­ism that some pub­lic-health agen­cies and experts have exhib­it­ed toward the pub­lic.… And yet, from the begin­ning, a good chunk of the pub­lic-fac­ing mes­sag­ing and news arti­cles implied or claimed that vac­cines won’t pro­tect you against infect­ing oth­er peo­ple or that we didn’t know if they would, when both were false.” Watch­ing peo­ple reject accu­rate infor­ma­tion about the pan­dem­ic because high-sta­tus peo­ple rail against it has been like watch­ing my skep­ti­cal friends reject the gospel because of peer pres­sure. IT’S GOOD NEWS — BELIEVE IT! The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UNC.
    • Pan­dem­ic Approach­es: The Dif­fer­ences Between Flori­da, Cal­i­for­nia (Noel King, Greg Allen, & Eric West­er­velt, NPR): “In Decem­ber, Cal­i­for­nia had a spike, and Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som reim­posed a stay-at-home order and a busi­ness lock­down order that was recent­ly lift­ed. At the same time, cas­es were spik­ing in Flori­da. But every­thing stayed open, includ­ing schools. So which approach works?” Spoil­er: Flori­da is look­ing pret­ty good.
    • Stop Say­ing We Can’t Go Back to Nor­mal After Vac­cines (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Rea­son): “Nor­mal­cy is the whole point of vac­ci­na­tion, and these vac­cines can get us there. So when pub­lic health advice says “no” to nor­mal­cy even after vac­ci­na­tion, it mis­leads the pub­lic and wild­ly under­sells the vac­cines. A year into this, that’s cru­el and dispir­it­ing.… there must be a firm end date to those pub­lic mea­sures for every­one. I can’t say exact­ly when it should be, nor do I think a sin­gle nation­al date would make sense. I’m envi­sion­ing some­thing like six weeks after vac­cines have become avail­able (as in, you can eas­i­ly get an appoint­ment) to all who want them in a giv­en city, coun­ty, or state.”
    • Not Gath­er­ing with the Church Hurts You Spir­i­tu­al­ly (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Jesus designed Chris­tian­i­ty and the progress of our dis­ci­ple­ship to cen­ter around gath­er­ings. The math is there­fore sim­ple: Gath­er­ing with the church is spir­i­tu­al­ly good for you. Not phys­i­cal­ly gath­er­ing with the church spir­i­tu­al­ly hurts you.”
    • The Secret Life of a Coro­n­avirus (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “With sci­en­tists adrift in an ocean of def­i­n­i­tions, philoso­phers have rowed out to offer life­lines.” What a glo­ri­ous sen­tence. Also, I began the arti­cle sym­pa­thet­ic to the idea that virus­es are alive and we draw our bound­aries too tight­ly, which is what the author wants me to believe. But his argu­ments were so weak that I’ve flipped to: “not alive, mere­ly inter­ac­tive.”
    • The rise of the nox­ious con­tract (David B. Grusky et al, Stan­ford Cen­ter On Pover­ty and Inequal­i­ty): “We observed that many peo­ple ‘com­pare down­ward’ by empha­siz­ing their priv­i­lege rel­a­tive to those less for­tu­nate, that oth­ers ‘look out­ward’ in recog­ni­tion that times of cri­sis require band­ing togeth­er, and that yet oth­ers ‘look inward’ as they cope with unusu­al­ly stress­ful chal­lenges. Although many ways of cop­ing are there­fore in play, none of them entail invid­i­ous com­par­isons that then lead to resent­ment or con­flict.” An analy­sis of whether peo­ple who have to work in-per­son are resent­ful of those who telecom­mute. Spoil­er: not so much. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. On Ryan Ander­son­’s book being dropped by Ama­zon:
    • Ryan T. Ander­son Was Made For This Moment (Rod Dreher inter­view­ing Ryan T. Ander­son, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…most every­one agrees that a hos­pi­tal shouldn’t refuse to treat some­one for Covid because they iden­ti­fy as LGBT. But, thank God, that doesn’t seem to have actu­al­ly ever hap­pened. Still when peo­ple hear about a law that bans LGBT dis­crim­i­na­tion, that’s what they have in mind. They don’t real­ize what it means for sex-reas­sign­ment pro­ce­dures in gen­er­al, let alone what it means for chil­dren with gen­der dys­pho­ria in par­tic­u­lar. So activists pull on people’s heart­strings by say­ing we need a law ban­ning tru­ly unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion (which is vir­tu­al­ly non-exis­tent) and then that law isn’t nuanced and mea­sured, but a rad­i­cal bill impos­ing a rad­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy. A law that is sold as a shield pro­tect­ing vul­ner­a­ble minori­ties ends up being a sword to per­se­cute peo­ple who don’t embrace a new sex­u­al ortho­doxy.”
    • Book Ban­ning in an Age of Ama­zon (Abi­gail Shri­er, Sub­stack): “Remem­ber where you were in Feb­ru­ary of 2021. Con­gress fought over a sec­ond impeach­ment of an ex-pres­i­dent. The states debat­ed whether forced tru­an­cy would make life eas­i­er for America’s teach­ers. And earth’s largest bookseller—(Internal mot­to: ‘Work Hard. Have Fun. Make his­to­ry.’)—began qui­et­ly delet­ing books.”
  6. Killing The SAT Means Hurt­ing Minori­ties (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “There’s a rea­son why white Hol­ly­wood celebs cheat the sys­tem. It’s the only way their less gift­ed kids can win out over the dis­ad­van­taged. Want to max­i­mize priv­i­lege? Make admis­sions depen­dent sole­ly on teacher rec­om­men­da­tions, school grades, and per­son­al essays. Want to min­i­mize it? Abol­ish lega­cy admis­sions, and use the SAT.” I gen­uine­ly do not under­stand how this is con­tro­ver­sial. The data is clear and over­whelm­ing.
  7. Ele­vat­ing the Role of Faith-Inspired Impact in the Social Sec­tor (Jeri Eck­hart Queenan, Peter Grunert, and Devin Mur­phy, The Bridges­pan Group): “Giv­ing to reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed orga­ni­za­tions (which includes dona­tions to con­gre­ga­tions) rep­re­sents near­ly one-third of all giv­ing in the Unit­ed States. Rough­ly a third of the 50 largest non­prof­its in the coun­try have a faith ori­en­ta­tion. And, 40 per­cent of inter­na­tion­al non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions are faith-inspired.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 290

links con­tain­ing both good and bad news for evan­gel­i­cals

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 290, which is an inter­est­ing num­ber because it is both the prod­uct of three primes (= 2 â‹… 5 â‹… 29) as well as the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes (= 67 + 71+ 73 +79).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Evan­gel­i­cals in Amer­i­ca: The Stats May Sur­prise You (Ryan Burge, Gospel Coali­tion): “…after look­ing at the data for the last 10 years as a quan­ti­ta­tive social sci­en­tist, I can say with cer­tain­ty that although there are clear rea­sons for con­cern, evan­gel­i­cal pres­ence in the Unit­ed States is stronger than ever before.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and also a pas­tor in a non-evan­gel­i­cal denom­i­na­tion.
  2. Reli­gious Com­mu­ni­ty and Human Flour­ish­ing (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In some cas­es, our results close­ly repli­cat­ed past work. For exam­ple, we found that, even after con­trol­ling for the fac­tors above, indi­vid­u­als who attend­ed reli­gious ser­vices week­ly or more were 16% less like­ly to become depressed, and saw a 29% reduc­tion in smok­ing and 34% reduc­tion in heavy drink­ing. These results match rea­son­ably close­ly results from sev­er­al pri­or stud­ies, includ­ing the pri­or meta-analy­ses men­tioned above. Some­what strik­ing­ly, but again in line with pri­or analy­sis, week­ly ser­vice atten­dees were 26% less like­ly to die dur­ing the fol­low-up peri­od.” Van­der­Weele , him­self a Chris­t­ian, is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard and I have shared some of his work before.
  3. When Ama­zon Erased My Book (Ryan T. Ander­son, First Things): “Ama­zon nev­er informed me or my pub­lish­er that it was remov­ing my book. And Amazon’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives haven’t respond­ed to our inquiries about it. Per­haps they’re cit­ing a reli­gious objec­tion to sell­ing my book? Or maybe they only sell books with which they agree? (If so, they have a lot of explain­ing to do about why they car­ry Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.) If there’s a reli­gious or speech objec­tion, let’s hear it.” His book is quite good and is still avail­able at Barnes & Noble. Ama­zon, how­ev­er, sells 5/6 of the books in Amer­i­ca. Being delist­ed by them seri­ous­ly affects the mar­ket­place of ideas.
    • Damna­tio memo­ri­ae (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “But to me, the most inter­est­ing point for reflec­tion is this: The cen­sors at Ama­zon clear­ly believe there is only one rea­son to read a book. You read a book because you agree with it and want it to con­firm what you already believe. Imag­ine, for instance, a trans­gen­der activist who wants to under­stand the posi­tion held by Ryan Ander­son and peo­ple like him in order bet­ter to refute it. That per­son can’t get a copy of the book through Ama­zon any more than a sym­pa­thet­ic read­er like me can.”  The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Bay­lor whose writ­ing I have fea­tured before.
  4. Not all ‘anti-racist’ ideas are good ones. The left isn’t being hon­est about this. (Matthew Ygle­sias, Wash­ing­ton Post): “More broad­ly, iden­ti­fy­ing a racial gap and declar­ing it to be racist is often insuf­fi­cient. Such an approach impedes actu­al­ly think­ing about prob­lems — par­tic­u­lar­ly in media, aca­d­e­m­ic and non­prof­it cir­cles, where the accu­sa­tion of racism can car­ry severe con­se­quences. And so to avoid con­tro­ver­sy, peo­ple avoid impor­tant debates rather than risk­ing offense.”
  5. The Covid Emer­gency Must End (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “A major set­back is always pos­si­ble, but right now, the con­di­tions for the end of the emer­gency seem like­ly to arrive some­time in the sum­mer, not at Christ­mas­time.”
    • School Clo­sures Have Failed America’s Chil­dren (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Yes, it’s hard to open schools dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. But pri­vate schools most­ly man­aged to, and that’s true not only of rich board­ing schools but also of strapped Catholic schools. As a nation, we fought to keep restau­rants and malls open — but we didn’t make schools a sim­i­lar pri­or­i­ty, so needy chil­dren were left behind”
  6. 1 in 6 Gen Z adults are LGBT. And this num­ber could con­tin­ue to grow. (Saman­tha Schmidt, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Research from the Williams Insti­tute at the UCLA School of Law has sim­i­lar­ly found that a key dri­ver of the growth in the LGBT com­mu­ni­ty has been a surge in bisex­u­al women and girls. Bisex­u­al women make up the largest group of LGBT adults — about 35 per­cent, accord­ing to a Williams Insti­tute analy­sis of data from three pop­u­la­tion-based sur­veys. More than one in 10 U.S. high school youth iden­ti­fies as les­bian, gay or bisex­u­al. And among them, 75 per­cent are female and 77 per­cent iden­ti­fy as bisex­u­al.” The cheer­lead­ing aside, it’s a very inter­est­ing arti­cle — espe­cial­ly if you think about oth­er ways to frame it.
    • Anoth­er per­spec­tive on the same data: Two Sex­es. Infi­nite Gen­ders. (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “It turns out that in 2020, only 1.4 per­cent of US adults are gay men, and only 0.7 per­cent are les­bians. So all the gays and les­bians amount to a lit­tle over 2 per­cent of the country’s adults. And that seems about right to me. The sur­prise, how­ev­er, is that there are now almost as many peo­ple iden­ti­fy­ing as ‘trans’ as ‘les­bian’.… Bisex­u­als, at 54.6 per­cent of all ‘LGBT’ iden­ti­fiers, are now a major­i­ty, and in Gen Z, clock in at 72 per­cent! The qual­i­fi­ca­tion to this is that only 3.7 per­cent of bisex­u­als live with some­one of the same sex while over 30 per­cent live with some­one of the oppo­site sex.”
  7. Inside a Bat­tle Over Race, Class and Pow­er at Smith Col­lege (Michael Pow­ell, New York Times): “The sto­ry high­lights the ten­sions between a student’s deeply felt sense of per­son­al truth and facts that are at odds with it.” What is super-weird to me is that I’ve seen peo­ple on social media say, “See? It’s more com­pli­cat­ed than crit­ics are mak­ing it out to be.” But… it’s not. Read­ing the details mere­ly fills in the out­line of the sto­ry I had picked up from oth­er sources.

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 two arti­cles from back in the 90’s, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote them back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism, and if you nev­er have before I encour­age you to read them both. Espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. (first shared in a non-Fri­day blog post)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 289

A col­lec­tion of links rang­ing from the future of Amer­i­ca to the impacts of hypocrisy.

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 289, which is a Fried­man num­ber because 289 = (8 + 9)2

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why will the impor­tant thinkers of the future be reli­gious ones? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Fourth, if you live amongst the intel­li­gentsia, being reli­gious is one active form of rebel­lion. Rebel­lious­ness is gross­ly cor­re­lat­ed with intel­lec­tu­al inno­va­tion, again even if the vari­ance of qual­i­ty increas­es.” Cowen is not reli­gious him­self.
  2. Book Review: The Cult Of Smart (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “DeBoer recalls hear­ing an immi­grant moth­er proud­ly describe her old­er kid’s achieve­ments in math, sci­ence, etc, “and then her younger son ran by, and she said, off­hand, ‘This one, he is maybe not so smart.’ ” DeBoer was orig­i­nal­ly shocked to hear some­one describe her own son that way, then real­ized that he would­n’t have thought twice if she’d dis­missed him as unath­let­ic, or bad at music. Intel­li­gence is con­sid­ered such a basic mea­sure of human worth that to dis­miss some­one as unin­tel­li­gent seems like con­sign­ing them into the out­er dark­ness.”
    • Nor­mal­ly the best thing about Alexan­der’s blog is his book reviews. This one was just okay (smart and well-writ­ten but not astound­ing) and then all of a sud­den he turned his rant up to 11. Hang in until you reach the phrase “child prison.” If you’re not sold at that point, stop read­ing.
  3. The “Major­i­ty-Minor­i­ty” Myth (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Most demo­graph­ic esti­mates of the ‘white’ pop­u­la­tion are based on the Cen­sus def­i­n­i­tion: ‘non-His­pan­ic white.’ But what of ‘His­pan­ic whites’ — those whose lin­eage may come from South or Latin Amer­i­ca in eth­nic­i­ty but who also iden­ti­fy racial­ly and social­ly as white? If you include them in this cat­e­go­ry, Amer­i­ca remains two-thirds ‘white’ all the way through 2060 and beyond.” A fas­ci­nat­ing read.
  4. ‘Hor­ri­ble’: Wit­ness­es recall mas­sacre in Ethiopi­an holy city (Cara Anna, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Bod­ies with gun­shot wounds lay in the streets for days in Ethiopia’s holi­est city. At night, res­i­dents lis­tened in hor­ror as hye­nas fed on the corpses of peo­ple they knew. But they were for­bid­den from bury­ing their dead by the invad­ing Eritre­an sol­diers.… some 800 peo­ple were killed that week­end at the church and around the city.”
  5. The Dou­ble­thinkers (Natan Sha­ran­sky with Gil Troy, Tablet Mag­a­zine):  “Step by lib­er­at­ing step, I was run­ning toward free­dom. By the time I was impris­oned in 1977, I had been free for at least four years. As thrilling as it was to be released from prison after nine long years in 1986, leav­ing the prison of dou­ble­think years ear­li­er made me even more euphor­ic.” The author has had quite the life — begin­ning as a sci­en­tist in Sovi­et Rus­sia, becom­ing a dis­si­dent, and then even­tu­al­ly reach­ing Israel and becom­ing a politi­cian.
    • Relat­ed: Fir­ing Actors for Being Con­ser­v­a­tive Is Anoth­er Hol­ly­wood Black­list (Jonathan Chait, New York Mag­a­zine): “What’s most strik­ing about the news cov­er­age of Carano’s defen­es­tra­tion is the utter absence of any scruti­ny of her employ­er or her (now-for­mer) agency. The tone of the report­ing sim­ply con­veys her posts as though they were a series of pet­ty crimes, the pun­ish­ment of which is inevitable and self-evi­dent­ly jus­ti­fied. The prin­ci­ple that an actor ought to be fired for express­ing unsound polit­i­cal views has sim­ply fad­ed into the back­ground.”
    • Also relat­ed: Gina Cara­no and Crowd-Sourced McCarthy­ism (Bari Weiss, newslet­ter): “Things have got­ten so ridicu­lous so quick­ly — Bon Appetit is cur­rent­ly going back and edit­ing insuf­fi­cient­ly sen­si­tive recipes in what they call (I kid you not) an ‘archive repair effort’ — that my base­line assump­tion is that 99 per­cent of can­cel­la­tions are unwar­rant­ed. In oth­er words, peo­ple are los­ing their jobs and their rep­u­ta­tions not for vio­lat­ing gen­uine taboos but for sim­ple mis­takes, minor sins or absolute non­sense.”
    • And a dif­fer­ent relat­ed sto­ry:  Whistle­blow­er at Smith Col­lege Resigns Over Racism (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “Under the guise of racial progress, Smith Col­lege has cre­at­ed a racial­ly hos­tile envi­ron­ment in which indi­vid­ual acts of dis­crim­i­na­tion and hos­til­i­ty flour­ish. In this envi­ron­ment, people’s worth as human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty and respect, is deter­mined by the col­or of their skin.”  
  6. ‘You Are One Step Away from Com­plete and Total Insan­i­ty’ (David French, The Dis­patch): “This has been a dif­fi­cult newslet­ter to write. I’ve had to con­front my own neg­li­gence. I’m a Chris­t­ian writer and jour­nal­ist, and I paid insuf­fi­cient atten­tion to Thompson’s ini­tial claims. I was only vague­ly aware of her alle­ga­tions at the time, and had I dug down into the sto­ry, it would have been obvi­ous that Zacharias’s account had seri­ous prob­lems. It is no excuse to say that I can’t cov­er every­thing. I should have cov­ered this. I’m ter­ri­bly sor­ry I did not.”
    • Relat­ed: The Wreck­age of Ravi Zacharias (Rusell Moore, newslet­ter): “Your sal­va­tion and dis­ci­ple­ship are not depen­dent on whether the preach­er from whom you heard the gospel is gen­uine, but rather on whether the gospel itself is gen­uine. It is. Preda­tors often move for­ward by hid­ing behind mim­ic­ked truth. Preda­to­ry film­mak­ers pro­ceed by learn­ing how to make good films. Preda­to­ry politi­cians go for­ward by hon­ing polit­i­cal skills. Fraud­u­lent reli­gious lead­ers often ped­dle false doc­trine, but some of them also traf­fic in true doc­trines by which they have not per­son­al­ly been trans­formed. Yes, wolves often come with false doc­trine. But that does not mean that wolves are lim­it­ed to the flocks that tol­er­ate false doc­trine. In infil­trat­ing a sheep pen, a wolf will come in the skin of a sheep, not that of a goat.”
    • Also relat­ed: Ravi Zacharias, Rich Mullins, and a Raga­muf­fin Lega­cy (Esther O’Reil­ly, Patheos): “As I was reflect­ing on all this recent­ly, my mind went back to anoth­er fig­ure who was a ‘celebri­ty Chris­t­ian’ in his own way, yet attained this sta­tus reluc­tant­ly, almost by acci­dent. This fig­ure also had a mag­net­ic appeal, also had a lucra­tive and pop­u­lar min­istry, and also used his plat­form to address the chal­lenges of the Chris­t­ian walk. He also spoke often about sin, grace, moral puri­ty and spir­i­tu­al integri­ty, while wrestling with pri­vate sin. I’m speak­ing about Chris­t­ian singer-song­writer Rich Mullins…” Rich Mullins is actu­al­ly one of my heroes.
  7. Essen­tial­ly Fer­tile: Notes Toward a Land Eth­ic (Jacque­lyn Lee, First Things): “What­ev­er one’s opin­ion about cli­mate change—true, false, man-made, nat­ur­al course of events, the most acute prob­lem human­i­ty faces, left­ist uni­corn, etc.—it’s unde­ni­able that the aver­age Amer­i­can is estranged from the land. That the earth is humanity’s sole source of food and water is as inescapable as ‘male and female he cre­at­ed them.’ And just as con­ser­v­a­tives insist that with­out a right­ly ordered sex­u­al eth­ic soci­ety will be in dis­ar­ray, so should we insist that with­out a right­ly ordered ‘land eth­ic’ soci­ety is unsus­tain­able.” I was not sure what to expect as I began read­ing this arti­cle and was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How To Ask Your Men­tors For Help (Derek Sivers): this is super-short and very good. Excerpt­ing it would ruin it. Read the whole thing. First shared in vol­ume 224.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 288

I keep think­ing one week there won’t be enough con­tent… this isn’t that week

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

This is vol­ume 288. The num­ber 288 is inter­est­ing in that it can also be writ­ten 4! â‹… 3! â‹… 2! â‹… 1!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Long Can COVID Cas­es Keep Plum­met­ing? (David Wal­lace-Wells, NY Mag­a­zine): “It’s insane. It’s total­ly crazy. And so, you’re absolute­ly right, we have cho­sen that the best way for­ward is to live in a state of uncer­tain­ty rather than giv­ing peo­ple all the tools and infor­ma­tion, even if it isn’t per­fect. It turns out that in many cas­es we’d rather not engage with that knowl­edge at all than have any sources of error in what­ev­er it is we’re doing.“An inter­view with a Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gist. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, although be warned that it will frus­trate you with how rea­son­able and yet under­im­ple­ment­ed his sug­ges­tions are. The title is poor­ly cho­sen.
    • The Vac­cine Had to Be Used. He Used It. He Was Fired. (Dan Bar­ry, New York Times): “The Texas doc­tor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vac­cine had been opened on this late Decem­ber night, he had to find 10 eli­gi­ble peo­ple for its remain­ing dos­es before the pre­cious med­i­cine expired. In six hours. [He did and for] his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his gov­ern­ment job and then charged with steal­ing 10 vac­cine dos­es worth a total of $135 — a shun-wor­thy mis­de­meanor that sent his name and mug shot rock­et­ing around the globe.” The doc­tor comes across as a hero and the pros­e­cu­tor as a vil­lain. Not even a real vil­lain — car­toon vil­lain. I am actu­al­ly a lit­tle worked up about this.
  2. 10 Lessons of an MIT Edu­ca­tion (Gian-Car­lo Rota, Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty): “At cer­tain lib­er­al arts col­leges, sports appear to be more impor­tant than class­room sub­jects, and with good rea­son. A sport may be the only train­ing in ‘know­ing how’-in demon­strat­ing cer­ti­fi­able pro­fi­cien­cy-that a stu­dent under­takes at those col­leges. At MIT, sports are a hob­by (how­ev­er pas­sion­ate­ly pur­sued) rather than a cen­tral focus because we offer a wide range of absorb­ing ‘know­ing how’ activ­i­ties.” Appar­ent­ly one of an MIT pro­fes­sor’s advisees archived his fac­ul­ty web­site after his death.
    • Relat­ed: Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (Gian-Car­lo Rota, Notices Of The AMS): “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite prob­lems con­stant­ly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dor­mant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve prob­lems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and peo­ple will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’ ” This link is a PDF.
  3. With a Star Sci­ence Reporter’s Purg­ing, Mob Cul­ture at The New York Times Enters a Strange New Phase (Quil­lette edi­to­r­i­al): “So what we’re left with is the spec­ta­cle of an acclaimed reporter being purged not for malev­o­lent actions, nor even malev­o­lent intent, but rather for mak­ing a cer­tain kind of sound. This is an impor­tant depar­ture from ordi­nary mob­bings because, even in their most dog­mat­ic form, the­o­ries of social jus­tice gen­er­al­ly are at least nom­i­nal­ly con­cerned with the improve­ment of human moral­i­ty, which, cru­cial­ly, is insep­a­ra­ble from the ques­tion of intent. McNeil, on the oth­er hand, is being judged accord­ing to a the­o­ry of wrong­do­ing that presents cer­tain words or phras­es as evil by their mere utter­ance, as with a Har­ry Pot­ter spell.” This is very clev­er­ly writ­ten. Also, extreme­ly cor­rect.
  4. All In One (John Tasioulas, Aeon): “If, for exam­ple, human rights are demands that are gen­er­al­ly high-pri­or­i­ty in nature, such that it’s sel­dom if ever jus­ti­fied to over­ride them, then we lose our grip on that impor­tant idea if we start includ­ing under the head­ing of ‘human rights’ valu­able objec­tives – for exam­ple, access to a high-qual­i­ty inter­net con­nec­tion – that don’t plau­si­bly enjoy that kind of pri­or­i­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The author is a philoso­pher at Oxford.
  5. Ravi Zacharias Hid Hun­dreds of Pic­tures of Women, Abuse Dur­ing Mas­sages, and a Rape Alle­ga­tion (Daniel Sil­li­man and Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “A 12-page report released Thurs­day by Ravi Zacharias Inter­na­tion­al Min­istries (RZIM) con­firms abuse by Zacharias at day spas he owned in Atlanta and uncov­ers five addi­tion­al vic­tims in the US, as well as evi­dence of sex­u­al abuse in Thai­land, India, and Malaysia.” The full report is here (pdf).
  6. We Need Bal­ance When It Comes To Gen­der Dys­phor­ic Kids. I Would Know (Scott New­gent, Newsweek): “So if we are now wak­ing up to the fact that gen­der dys­pho­ria is over-sim­plis­ti­cal­ly con­flat­ed with trans­gen­derism, med­ical treat­ments have under­stud­ied long-term con­se­quences, some are get­ting rich off trans­gen­der med­i­cine and de-tran­si­tion­ers are speak­ing up in sky­rock­et­ing num­bers, why are we only mak­ing it eas­i­er for chil­dren to unques­tion­ing­ly tran­si­tion? We now have the oblig­a­tion to work togeth­er to slow trans med­ical­iza­tion of minors until they are adults and have the capac­i­ty to tru­ly under­stand the life­long con­se­quences of tran­si­tion­ing. As a for­mer les­bian and cur­rent trans man, I main­tain this is not trans­pho­bic.”
  7. How To Be Pro-Life in Joe Biden’s Amer­i­ca (David French, The Dis­patch): “There remains no bar­ri­er for pro-life Amer­i­cans to love their neigh­bor and direct­ly sup­port moth­ers and chil­dren who face dire need. There is even an oppor­tu­ni­ty to enact leg­is­la­tion that can fur­ther ease the fears of young moth­ers and increase their con­fi­dence that they can raise and sup­port a child… Pol­i­tics do mat­ter, cer­tain­ly, but there’s a deep­er truth. Chris­tians don’t need to win Sen­ate races to love their neigh­bors.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 287

you would­n’t believe how many awe­some links I cut this week

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

This is vol­ume 287, a num­ber which is the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes thrice over (287 = 89 + 97 + 101 = 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 = 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Sci­ence of Rea­son­ing With Unrea­son­able Peo­ple (Adam Grant, New York Times): “Social sci­en­tists have found that ask­ing peo­ple how their pre­ferred polit­i­cal poli­cies might work in prac­tice, rather than ask­ing why they favor those approach­es, was more effec­tive in open­ing their minds. As peo­ple strug­gled to explain their ide­al tax leg­is­la­tion or health care plan, they grasped the com­plex­i­ty of the prob­lem and rec­og­nized gaps in their knowl­edge.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Pen­n’s Whar­ton School.
  2. Pelo­ton makes ton­ing your glutes feel spir­i­tu­al. But should Jesus be part of the expe­ri­ence? (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): ‘Nick Stok­er, 41, a Lon­don busi­ness­man, trig­gered hun­dreds of com­ments on the Pelo­ton Red­dit page in April when he post­ed that he took a “Sun­days with Love” ride and thought he was get­ting pan­dem­ic-era “spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tion and uplift­ing music,” but actu­al­ly got some­thing more about God and Chris­tian­i­ty. The ride should have been labeled as Chris­t­ian, he argued. “I don’t want my chil­dren lis­ten­ing to these sort of mes­sages.”’
  3. Thoughts about Chris­tian­i­ty and Amer­i­ca
    • Dis­cern­ing the Dif­fer­ence Between Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism and Chris­t­ian Patri­o­tism (David French, The Dis­patch): “I love this coun­try, but I love it with eyes wide open. The aspi­ra­tions of our found­ing have long been tem­pered by the bru­tal real­i­ties of our fall­en nature. The same nation that stormed Normandy’s beach­es to destroy a fas­cist empire simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sus­tained a seg­re­ga­tion­ist regime with­in its own bor­ders. Our virtues do not negate our vices, and our vices do not negate our virtues. Amer­i­ca isn’t 1619 or 1776. It’s 1619 and 1776.”
    • Betray­ing Your Church—And Your Par­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “On Jan­u­ary 6, as an armed mob invad­ed the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, Kinzinger said he could feel a dark­ness descend over the Capi­tol. One of his friends in Con­gress, the Okla­homa Repub­li­can Mark­wayne Mullin, heard the same thing from mem­bers of the Capi­tol Police. Kinzinger doesn’t doubt that the dev­il is at work in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. He just sus­pects that the ene­my might be lurk­ing in his own house.”
    • It’s Time to Talk About Vio­lent Chris­t­ian Extrem­ism (Zack Stan­ton inter­view­ing Eliz­a­beth Neu­mann, Politi­co): “Here’s the thing, and I will do my best to explain it from a sec­u­lar per­spec­tive: There’s text in the New Tes­ta­ment where the Apos­tle Paul is admon­ish­ing a church he helped estab­lish: ‘You should be mature adults now in your faith, but I’m still hav­ing to feed you with milk.’ He’s basi­cal­ly say­ing, you should be 18, but you’re still nurs­ing, and we need you to get it togeth­er.… One of my ques­tions is: Are we see­ing in the last four years one of the con­se­quences of that fail­ure? They didn’t mature [in their faith], and they’re very eas­i­ly led astray by what scrip­ture calls ‘false teach­ers.’ My the­sis here is that if we had a more scrip­tural­ly based set of believ­ers in this coun­try — if every­body who calls them­selves a ‘Chris­t­ian’ had actu­al­ly read through, I don’t know, 80 per­cent of the Bible — they would not have been so eas­i­ly deceived.” The inter­vie­wee is an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian who has served as a Deputy Chief of Staff in the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Extreme­ly inter­est­ing.
  4. The chal­lenge of Chi­na:
    • Biden’s Night­mare May Be Chi­na (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Deal­ing with Mitch McConnell will be a piece of cake for Pres­i­dent Biden com­pared with deal­ing with Xi. Biden’s chal­lenge will be to con­strain a Chi­nese leader who has been oppres­sive in Hong Kong, geno­ci­dal in the Xin­jiang region, obdu­rate on trade, ruth­less on human rights and insin­cere on every­thing, while still coop­er­at­ing with Chi­na on issues like cli­mate change, fen­tanyl and North Korea (which many experts expect to resume mis­sile launch­es this year).”
    • ‘Their goal is to destroy every­one’: Uighur camp detainees allege sys­tem­at­ic rape (Matthew Hill, David Cam­panale and Joel Gunter, BBC): “It was unlike­ly that Xi or oth­er top par­ty offi­cials would have direct­ed or autho­rised rape or tor­ture,” Par­ton said, but they would “cer­tain­ly be aware of it. I think they pre­fer at the top just to turn a blind eye. The line has gone out to imple­ment this pol­i­cy with great stern­ness, and that is what is hap­pen­ing.” That left “no real con­straints”, he said. “I just don’t see what the per­pe­tra­tors of these acts would have to hold them back.” I don’t know how this isn’t front page news almost every day. We want to say every­one is as evil as Hitler EXCEPT THE PEOPLE RUNNING ACTUAL CONCENTRATION CAMPS.
    • And thoughts on Tai­wan, which is not Chi­na
      • Under­stand­ing Tai­wanese Nation­al­ism: A His­tor­i­cal Primer in Bul­let Points (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “As some­one who has lived years in both Tai­wan and in Chi­na I can also give a more anec­do­tal assess­ment: the dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries and their respec­tive cul­tures (to say noth­ing of their polit­i­cal sys­tems) is clear. They are sim­ply not the same peo­ple.”
      • Chi­na and the Ques­tion of Tai­wan (Aaron Sarin, Quil­lette): “His­to­ri­an James A. Mill­ward points out that many in his dis­ci­pline have implic­it­ly accept­ed the Par­ty line on Tai­wanese his­to­ry. They will refer, for exam­ple, to the Qing dynasty’s ‘recap­ture of Tai­wan in 1683,’ even though, as Mill­ward explains, ‘no Chi­na-based state—not even an impe­r­i­al dynasty—ha[d] ever ruled the island before.’ Here we see the suc­cess of the CCP’s pro­pa­gan­da, even out­side Chi­na. The truth is that Tai­wan was a Qing acqui­si­tion, and that is the sole basis for Beijing’s claims today.”
      • Fork The Gov­ern­ment (Plan­et Mon­ey, NPR): “As coun­tries around the world strug­gle to han­dle the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, Tai­wan stands out as a rel­a­tive suc­cess sto­ry… so far. Since April, only one local­ly trans­mit­ted case has been report­ed. There have been only sev­en deaths — in the entire coun­try. There are a lot of rea­sons why Tai­wan has been able to keep its infec­tion and death rates so low. For one, it’s an island. Also, it’s dealt with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus epi­dem­ic before. But Tai­wan has also been tak­ing a rel­a­tive­ly exper­i­men­tal approach to the pan­dem­ic with tech­nol­o­gy. Like work­ing with civic hack­ers to code its way out of the pan­dem­ic.” This is a pod­cast episode.
  5. Things relat­ed to the cred­i­bil­i­ty cri­sis in our cul­ture:
    • Nation­al­ism, prej­u­dice, and FDA reg­u­la­tion (Scott Sum­n­er, Econ­Lib): “You say peo­ple shouldn’t be allowed to take a vac­cine unless experts find it to be safe and effec­tive? OK, the UK experts did just that. You say that only the opin­ion of US experts counts because our experts are clear­ly the best? Real­ly, where is the sci­en­tif­ic study that shows that our experts are the best? I thought you said we need­ed to ‘trust the sci­en­tists’? Now you are say­ing we must trust the nation­al­ists?” The author is an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Web­MD, And The Tragedy Of Leg­i­ble Exper­tise (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said some­thing (or been silent about some­thing in a sug­ges­tive way), and then some blog­ger I trust­ed said the oppo­site, and the blog­ger turned out to be right. I real­ize this kind of thing is vul­ner­a­ble to selec­tion bias, but it’s been the same cou­ple of blog­gers through­out, peo­ple who I already trust­ed and already sus­pect­ed might be bet­ter than the experts in a lot of ways.”
    • Where Have All the Great Works Gone? (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “It was obvi­ous to even those who dis­liked Niet­zche that he was a sem­i­nal fig­ure in West­ern thought; it was obvi­ous even to those who dis­agreed with Ibsen that he claimed a sim­i­lar place in West­ern lit­er­a­ture, and so forth. Their ideas might be argued against, but their genius and their influ­ence was unde­ni­able.  Is there any­one who died in the last decade you could make that sort of claim for?  How about for the last two decades?  The last three?  Or is there any­one at all who is still liv­ing today that might be described this way? In the realm of sci­ence, per­haps. But in the world of social, his­tor­i­cal, eth­i­cal, and polit­i­cal thought, no one comes to mind.”
    • Social Jus­tice, Aus­ter­i­ty, and the Human­i­ties Death Spi­ral (Geoff Shul­len­berg­er, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “How are human­i­ties dis­ci­plines push­ing back against the exis­ten­tial threats they face? Obvi­ous­ly, one can find a vari­ety of argu­ments against cut­backs and the deval­u­a­tion of human­is­tic study. On the oth­er hand, fac­ul­ty mem­bers with­in these fields some­times make what looks like a case against their own val­ue. For exam­ple, the Chica­go announce­ment states that ‘Eng­lish as a dis­ci­pline has a long his­to­ry of pro­vid­ing aes­thet­ic ratio­nal­iza­tions for col­o­niza­tion, exploita­tion, extrac­tion, and anti-Black­ness.’ Those who make fund­ing deci­sions might well ask why such a dis­ci­pline deserves to con­tin­ue exist­ing.” The author teach­es Eng­lish at NYU. It was dif­fi­cult choos­ing which bit to excerpt — def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing if you aspire to acad­e­mia.
    • The Gen­er­al­iz­abil­i­ty Cri­sis (Tal Yarkoni, PsyArx­iv): “Most the­o­ries and hypothe­ses in psy­chol­o­gy are ver­bal in nature, yet their eval­u­a­tion over­whelm­ing­ly relies on infer­en­tial sta­tis­ti­cal pro­ce­dures. The valid­i­ty of the move from qual­i­ta­tive to quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis depends on the ver­bal and sta­tis­ti­cal expres­sions of a hypoth­e­sis being close­ly aligned—that is, that the two must refer to rough­ly the same set of hypo­thet­i­cal obser­va­tions. Here I argue that many appli­ca­tions of sta­tis­ti­cal infer­ence in psy­chol­o­gy fail to meet this basic con­di­tion.” The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at UT Austin. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I lack the exper­tise to eval­u­ate it but find it intu­tive­ly plau­si­ble.
  6. Rise of the Barstool con­ser­v­a­tives (Matthew Walther, The Week): “What Trump rec­og­nized was that there are mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who do not oppose or even care about abor­tion or same-sex mar­riage, much less stem-cell research or any of the oth­er caus­es that had ani­mat­ed tra­di­tion­al social con­ser­v­a­tives. Instead he cor­rect­ly intu­it­ed that the new cul­ture war would be fought over very dif­fer­ent (and more neb­u­lous) issues: vague con­cerns about polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and ‘SJWs,’ oppo­si­tion to the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of so-called crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty about the Amer­i­can flag and the mil­i­tary, the rights of male under­grad­u­ates to engage in for­ni­ca­tion while intox­i­cat­ed with­out fear of the Title IX mafia.” I think there’s some truth here, but I think he under­plays the impor­tance of abor­tion in Trump’s appeal. He nonethe­less puts his fin­ger on an impor­tant part of the way Trump’s coali­tion was forged and the shape of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics mov­ing for­ward.
  7. On GameStop:
    • In the GameStop Fren­zy, What If We’re All the 1 Per­cent? (Michael J. Rhodes, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…we shouldn’t con­fuse fight­ing for a bet­ter seat at the black­jack table with con­fronting an econ­o­my addict­ed to gam­bling.… Jesus doesn’t tell his flock to beat the rich fool at his own game. He invites them to live an eco­nom­ic life free from greed or fear, stor­ing up trea­sure in heav­en by giv­ing gen­er­ous­ly to the poor (Luke 12:33).” The author is an Old Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Carey Bap­tist Col­lege. Worth­while arti­cle.
    • The Insid­ers’ Game (David Sacks, Per­sua­sion): “If there is a Big Lie in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics right now, it is the idea that cen­sor­ship of social media is nec­es­sary to save democ­ra­cy.… What the insid­ers fear is not the end of democ­ra­cy, but the end of their con­trol over it, and the loss of the ben­e­fits they extract from it. Ulti­mate­ly, the bat­tle over speech is just one aspect of a broad­er war for pow­er amid a grow­ing polit­i­cal realign­ment that is not Left ver­sus Right, but rather insid­er ver­sus out­sider.” The author was on the found­ing team at Pay­Pal.
    • Call­ing Wall Street’s Bluff (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “Now the experts tell us that the true price on the mar­ket changes every day, because the fun­da­men­tals are always chang­ing, even though they’re fun­da­men­tal.… Nat­u­ral­ly, peo­ple are some­what sus­pi­cious of this whole sys­tem. Every so often it seems to crash the entire econ­o­my. But even when it’s sup­pos­ed­ly work­ing, some­thing seems off.” Stan­ford alum­nus Josh Haw­ley is, of course, the con­tro­ver­sial Sen­a­tor from Mis­souri.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 286

some very strong arti­cles in this roundup

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Cal­i­for­nia Is Cleans­ing Jews From His­to­ry (Emi­ly Benedek, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area moth­er of two grown chil­dren who describes her­self as a life­long Demo­c­rat, was fur­ther sur­prised to dis­cov­er that a list of 154 influ­en­tial peo­ple of col­or did not include Dr. Mar­tin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Jus­tice Thur­good Mar­shall, though it includ­ed many vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies. There was even a flat­ter­ing descrip­tion of Pol Pot, the com­mu­nist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was respon­si­ble for the mur­der of a quar­ter of the Cam­bo­di­an pop­u­la­tion dur­ing the 1970s.” THIS IS WILD.
  2. The New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs, and I fea­tured anoth­er arti­cle by him recent­ly.
  3. In Which I Final­ly Lose My Mind (Poli­Math, Sub­stack): “After a rea­son­able amount of time for the vac­ci­na­tion to pro­duce an immune response (aim for 2 weeks), you are not in dan­ger and you are not a dan­ger to oth­ers. Yes, wear a mask for social cohe­sion or to fol­low the rules or just gen­er­al­ly to be polite. Wash your hands, use your com­mon sense, and ignore the news writ­ten by peo­ple who seem to want this cri­sis to last for­ev­er. Make it a pri­or­i­ty to get your sec­ond dose on sched­ule. Once you are vac­ci­nat­ed with the sec­ond dose, this cri­sis is over for you.” The author is
  4. The Reli­gious Roots of Our Free Enter­prise Sys­tem (Alan Wolfe, New York Times): “What does an eso­teric con­cept like Calvin­ist sote­ri­ol­o­gy have to do with the rise of mod­ern eco­nom­ics? Does lais­sez-faire have its roots in the arcane Quin­quar­tic­u­lar Con­tro­ver­sy? Can one find the ori­gins of the wel­fare state in post­mil­len­ni­al­ist escha­tol­ogy? Ques­tions like these, accord­ing to the Har­vard econ­o­mist Ben­jamin M. Fried­man, are essen­tial to under­stand­ing his dis­ci­pline today.”
  5. How Red­di­tors Beat Hedge Funds at Their Own Game(Stop) (Eric Levitz, New York Mag­a­zine): “Anoth­er less-than-pop­ulist aspect of this dra­ma is that the hedge fund that’s been hard­est hit — Melvin Cap­i­tal — did not become the favored tar­get of Wall­Street­Bets on account of its unique avarice or unscrupu­lous­ness, but rather, its excep­tion­al trans­paren­cy.… Thus, for Wall Street, the upshot of all this is going to be: Nev­er let reg­u­la­tors or the pub­lic know what your short posi­tions are. Which doesn’t seem like a huge win for ‘the 99 per­cent.’”
    • A youth pas­tor inter­viewed about the stock mar­ket on MSNBC (Twit­ter): I’ve men­tioned before that some Chris­tians are too ten­ta­tive when speak­ing about the gospel in high-pro­file media envi­ron­ments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pas­tor at Beach­point Church in Orange Coun­ty.
    • The GameStop Fias­co Proves We’re in a ‘Meme Stock’ Bub­ble (James Surowiec­ki, Medi­um): “The point, then, is that even though GameStop’s cur­rent stock price is utter­ly irra­tional — it will nev­er make enough mon­ey to jus­ti­fy a $6 bil­lion mar­ket cap — the way Red­di­tors and oth­ers have dri­ven its price up has been quite smart.”
    • The GameStop Reck­on­ing Was a Long Time Com­ing (Kevin Roose, New York Times): “If you can get past the all-caps luna­cy and strange inside jar­gon, the Red­di­tors make some good points. Big banks and hedge funds real­ly do play by dif­fer­ent rules than retail investors. Wall Street banks real­ly did get bailed out after the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis while Main Street home­own­ers suf­fered. M.B.A.s in fan­cy suits are prob­a­bly no more like­ly to give you good invest­ing advice than guys on YouTube with names like ‘Roar­ingKit­ty.’ ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  7. Two Stan­ford-rel­e­vant arti­cles:
    • Edi­tor’s Note: The Twi­light of Stan­ford (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “Stanford’s rep­u­ta­tion, which attract­ed me and count­less oth­ers to the Uni­ver­si­ty, offers stu­dents a stake in the birth­place of Sil­i­con Val­ley, the world’s epi­cen­ter of cre­ativ­i­ty and risk. Stan­ford stu­dents are less elit­ist than our East Coast peers, and more well-round­ed: Stan­ford offers ameni­ties, like Greek life and com­pet­i­tive ath­let­ic teams, absent in ear­li­er iter­a­tions of the pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty. The university’s unstruc­tured cur­ricu­lum expects its stu­dents to either suc­ceed at the high­est lev­el in their own are­nas, or cre­ate entire­ly new spheres for suc­cess. Stan­ford rev­els in non­con­for­mi­ty and exper­i­men­ta­tion. It was through these char­ac­ter­is­tics that Stan­ford gained its pres­tige. I do believe that this Stan­ford once exist­ed. But it is close to destruc­tion, has­tened by a caste of admin­is­tra­tors, par­a­sites who jump from one top uni­ver­si­ty to anoth­er, who care only for rais­ing Stan­ford’s rank­ings, and lack an inti­mate under­stand­ing of what makes Stan­ford spe­cial.” Anni­ka is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
    • The Edu­ca­tion of Josh Haw­ley (Ruairi Arri­eta-Ken­na and and Emi­ly Cadei, Politi­co): “Oth­er class­mates, how­ev­er, say that while Haw­ley was ardent­ly against abor­tion, his faith dur­ing col­lege seemed less an obvi­ous moti­va­tion for his polit­i­cal aspi­ra­tions and more a guide for his social inter­ac­tions. Friends of Hawley’s told POLITICO they didn’t ever see Haw­ley drink, smoke or ‘bring a girl back’ to his dorm room. By many accounts, he pre­ferred to stay in and study on week­end nights than to go out and par­ty.” I found this arti­cle fas­ci­nat­ing. His evan­gel­i­cal ethics were so incom­pre­hen­si­ble to some of the peo­ple quot­ed in this arti­cle (the bit about the danc­ing girl was par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing). Also, I won­der why it focus­es on his time at Stan­ford and not Yale.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 285

anoth­er fair­ly brief roundup

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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