Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 279

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Blows to vol­ley­ball star Hay­ley Hod­son’s head changed her life (Patrick Hru­by, LA Times): “The fam­i­ly did not trust Stan­ford. School doc­tors, Hod­son says, had diag­nosed her foot pain as inflam­ma­tion and told her that she wasn’t risk­ing fur­ther injury by play­ing. Med­ical records show that an inde­pen­dent doc­tor sub­se­quent­ly reviewed MRI scans tak­en by Stan­ford and deter­mined she had a stress frac­ture.” Hay­ley was a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  2. My White Priv­i­lege Did­n’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quil­lette): “Not long after, I walked into a sub­ur­ban Bap­tist church, full of strange, unfash­ion­ably dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. I was a Marx­ist, a fem­i­nist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smok­er, and des­per­ate. The love I received in that place is the rea­son that I will defend the rights of fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to my dying breath.” This is amaz­ing. If you only read one thing this week, make it this one. Reminder: titles are rarely cho­sen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an arti­cle.
  3. A pastor’s life depends on a coro­n­avirus vac­cine. Now he faces skep­tics in his church. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Before the pan­dem­ic, the 45-year-old min­is­ter, who nor­mal­ly leads near­ly 2,000 peo­ple, would stand by the entrance to shake hands and offer hugs. Now, before ser­vices, he stays seclud­ed in a room off­stage until it is time to preach while an armed church mem­ber who works for Home­land Secu­ri­ty watch­es the door.”
  4. Amer­i­cans’ Men­tal Health Rat­ings Sink to New Low (Megan Bre­nan, Gallup): “Although the major­i­ty of U.S. adults con­tin­ue to rate their men­tal health as excel­lent (34%) or good (42%), and far few­er say it is only fair (18%) or poor (5%), the lat­est excel­lent rat­ings are eight points low­er than Gallup has mea­sured in any pri­or year.” 
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent because of one very inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic: the only group that showed an increase in men­tal health was week­ly church­go­ers (the week­ly part mat­ters — month­ly church­go­ers expe­ri­enced a decline). I looked at the more detailed PDF and it was unclear to me how they asked about church atten­dance, and of course it is impos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy cau­sa­tion from a sur­vey like this.
    • I found this com­ment by an econ­o­mist on Twit­ter fun­ny: “This is absolute­ly the least sur­pris­ing thing ever. Church folks are like, “The pan­dem­ic sucks, but my church did these 57 things and I’m over­whelmed with peo­ple try­ing to find ways to sup­port dur­ing these times.” Every­body else is like, ‘I’M SO ALONE’” 
  5. The Rise and Fall of Carl Lentz, the Celebri­ty Pas­tor of Hill­song Church (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Soon the church’s cul­tur­al cachet grew out­side Chris­t­ian cir­cles. ‘I knew peo­ple who came to church not because they were Chris­tians but because they thought Carl was hot,’ said Heather McClana­han, who worked for the church in 2014 and 2015.”
    • The Cri­sis of Chris­t­ian Celebri­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “The way I’ve put it in speech­es to young Chris­tians is sim­ply this, ‘Make the easy choice so you don’t have to make the hard choice.’ Say­ing no to the extra drink is much eas­i­er than halt­ing a drunk­en flir­ta­tion.”
  6. Promi­nent evan­gel­i­cals are direct­ing Trump’s sink­ing ship. That feeds doubts about reli­gion. (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When promi­nent Chris­tians affirm absurd polit­i­cal lies with reli­gious fer­vor, non­be­liev­ers have every rea­son to think: ‘Maybe Chris­tians are prone to swal­low­ing absurd reli­gious lies as well. Maybe they are sim­ply cred­u­lous about every­thing.’ If we should encounter some­one who believes — hon­est­ly and adamant­ly believes — in both the exis­tence of the East­er Bun­ny and in the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ, it would nat­u­ral­ly raise ques­tions about the qual­i­ty of his or her believ­ing fac­ul­ties.”
  7. The com­ing war on the hid­den algo­rithms that trap peo­ple in pover­ty (Karen Hao, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): Not until they were stand­ing in the court­room in the mid­dle of a hear­ing did the wit­ness rep­re­sent­ing the state reveal that the gov­ern­ment had just adopt­ed a new algo­rithm. The wit­ness, a nurse, couldn’t explain any­thing about it. “Of course not—they bought it off the shelf,” Gilman says. “She’s a nurse, not a com­put­er sci­en­tist. She couldn’t answer what fac­tors go into it. How is it weight­ed? What are the out­comes that you’re look­ing for? So there I am with my stu­dent attor­ney, who’s in my clin­ic with me, and it’s like, ‘Oh, am I going to cross-exam­ine an algo­rithm?’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

QI’s Gift-Wrap­ping Life Hack! (QI, YouTube): mind blown in less than three min­utes

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To university‐educated media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low‐paying man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon associate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 212, with a fol­low-up shared the next week: How (and Why) to KISSASS (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “…if you’re not a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion­al class, the key to get­ting your per­son­al essays pub­lished in promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions is KISSASS—Keep It Short, Sad, And Sim­ple, Stupid.”

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 278

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Oba­ma Fears for Our Democ­ra­cy (Jef­frey Gold­berg inter­view­ing Barack Oba­ma, The Atlantic) “You men­tioned ear­li­er that I’m in some ways a nev­er-Trump con­ser­v­a­tive. That’s not quite right, but what is true is that tem­pera­men­tal­ly I am sym­pa­thet­ic to a cer­tain strain of con­ser­vatism in the sense that I’m not just a mate­ri­al­ist. I’m not an eco­nom­ic deter­min­ist. I think it’s impor­tant, but I think there are things oth­er than stuff and mon­ey and income—the reli­gious cri­tique of mod­ern soci­ety, that we’ve lost that sense of community.” There is an absurd­ly lengthy intro­duc­tion. Skip down to “Our con­ver­sa­tion has been edit­ed for clar­i­ty and con­ci­sion” about a fifth of the way down the page.
  2. The Chil­dren of Porn­hub (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “The world has often been obliv­i­ous to child sex­u­al abuse, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts. Too late, we pros­e­cute indi­vid­u­als like Jef­frey Epstein or R. Kel­ly. But we should also stand up to cor­po­ra­tions that sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly exploit chil­dren. With Porn­hub, we have Jef­frey Epstein times 1,000.” Kristof goes out of his way to make it clear that he is not con­demn­ing pornog­ra­phy itself, just abuse. I’ll go far­ther: pornog­ra­phy is vile and I think it is a nation­al shame. If you watch porn, know that for­give­ness and free­dom are avail­able in Christ and I a hap­py to talk with you about it.
  3. The Mass Mur­der of Niger­ian Chris­tians (Rab­bi Abra­ham Coop­er and Rev. John­nie Moore, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Officials’ ini­tial refusal to attribute the attack in Kaduna to Islamists—in any form—reflects a black hole of denial that is pro­nounced in Niger­ian pol­i­tics. This endem­ic self-cen­sor­ship has now been absorbed by many pro­fes­sion­als in the for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment who have adopt­ed a pol­i­cy of not men­tion­ing the reli­gious com­po­nents of these out­rages at any cost, in order to pre­vent being accused of politi­ciz­ing reli­gion. This denial serves as an accel­er­ant of reli­gion-fueled conflict—until the facts and blood on the ground can no longer be denied.”
  4. Big Gov­ern­men­t’s Over­looked Amer­i­cans (Nicholas Eber­stadt, Nation­al Review): “How could Amer­i­can health author­i­ties com­plete­ly miss a domes­tic epi­dem­ic of such sever­i­ty and dura­tion? Even dur­ing the Cold War, remem­ber, U.S. researchers were quick­er to spot the advent of the health cri­sis for the work­ing-age pop­u­la­tion of the Sovi­et Union: and this dur­ing the hey­day of Sovi­et dis­in­for­ma­tion and strate­gic decep­tion, long before glas­nost. What­ev­er else may be said about this sig­nal U.S. fail­ure in dis­ease pre­ven­tion and con­trol, it occa­sioned remark­ably lit­tle reflec­tion, self-crit­i­cism, and course cor­rec­tion on the part of America’s pub­lic-health apparatus.” 
  5. The Supreme Court Was Right to Block Cuomo’s Reli­gious Restric­tions (Michael W. McConnell and Max Raskin, New York Times): “In the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, no one knew what worked and what didn’t. Courts were under­stand­ably reluc­tant to sec­ond-guess. But we are now 10 months into the pan­dem­ic. Why are gov­ern­ments still pick­ing and choos­ing among con­sti­tu­tion­al rights with­out explain­ing their reasoning?” McConnell is a Stan­ford law prof, Raskin a law prof at New York Uni­ver­si­ty.
  6. Den­i­grat­ing Hoover (Vic­tor Davis Han­son, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “[Some Stan­ford stu­dents and fac­ul­ty com­plain about Hoover, yet] Hoover schol­ars as a gen­er­al rule do not fix­ate on Stan­ford, whether the Uni­ver­si­ty, its stu­dents or its pro­fes­sors, for their per­ceived laps­es in judge­ment or con­tro­ver­sies that often can arise at large cam­pus­es — such as the recent sen­sa­tion­al alle­ga­tions con­cern­ing admis­sions fraud; a recent Stan­ford affil­i­at­ed vis­it­ing researcher arrest­ed for alleged­ly hid­ing ties with the Chi­nese mil­i­tary; Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion alle­ga­tions that Stan­ford had not prop­er­ly and ful­ly dis­closed, as required, siz­able gifts from Chi­nese gov­ern­ment-relat­ed sources; sex scan­dal alle­ga­tions at the busi­ness school; efforts to dis­rupt a cam­pus speak­er while spread­ing a grotesque anti-Semit­ic fly­er; and gen­er­al con­cern on the cam­pus con­cern­ing a wave of anti-Semit­ic incidents.”
  7. Mis­aligned incen­tives and the scale of incar­cer­a­tion in the Unit­ed States (Aurélie Ouss, Jour­nal of Pub­lic Eco­nom­ics): “Typically, prison is paid for at the state lev­el, but coun­ty employ­ees (such as judges, pros­e­cu­tors or pro­ba­tion offi­cers) deter­mine time spent in cus­tody. I exploit a nat­ur­al exper­i­ment that shift­ed the cost bur­den of juve­nile incar­cer­a­tion from state to coun­ties, keep­ing over­all costs and respon­si­bil­i­ties unchanged. This result­ed in a stark drop in incar­cer­a­tion, and no increase in arrests, sug­gest­ing an over-use of prison when costs are not inter­nal­ized. The large mag­ni­tude of the change sug­gests that mis­aligned incen­tives in crim­i­nal jus­tice may be a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to the cur­rent lev­els of incar­cer­a­tion in the Unit­ed States.” The author is a crim­i­nol­o­gist at U Penn. Found via Tyler Cowen.

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 An Epi­dem­ic of Dis­be­lief (Bar­bara Bradley Hager­ty, The Atlantic): “Historically, inves­ti­ga­tors had assumed that some­one who assaults a stranger by the rail­road tracks is noth­ing like the man who assaults his co‐worker or his girl­friend. But it turns out that the space between acquain­tance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleve­land inves­ti­ga­tors uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance‐rape kits, they were sur­prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force iden­ti­fied dozens of mys­tery rapists this way.” Infu­ri­at­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 211.

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 277

After assem­bling them, I real­ized the first link is about the friend zone and the final link is about man­ly wed­ding rings.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How To Get Out Of The Friend Zone (Aaron Renn, The Mas­culin­ist): “Friend­ships between men and women have the char­ac­ter­is­tic that they often evolve into asym­me­try of intent, which is exploita­tive if it per­sists…. remem­ber, just as no woman is under any oblig­a­tion to go out on a date with a man such as you, you are under no oblig­a­tion to be a friend to women.”
    • Every once in a while I like to toss out some­thing sure to rile peo­ple up, just to make sure you’re all pay­ing atten­tion. 
  2. God Mode Acti­vat­ed: Meet the Gamers Bring­ing Jesus to Twitch (Christo­pher Hut­ton, Medi­um): “Dustin Phillips is a blond-haired, beard­ed children’s pas­tor in Texas who also serves as GMA’s CEO. On Twitch, he goes by the han­dle Pas­tor­Doost­yn and is known as the “demon-slay­ing pas­tor.” He preach­es the gospel to his 1,400 fol­low­ers while stream­ing games like Doom and Poke­mon.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who was no doubt pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on finals. 
  3. Boy Scouts Face At Least 82,000 Sex Abuse Claims (Min­istry Watch): “Today is the dead­line set by a bank­rupt­cy court for fil­ing a sex-abuse claim against the Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca (BSA). The num­ber of claims so far filed now exceed 82,000, far more than the 9,000 claims filed in Catholic Church cas­es.”
    • Some of you have heard me say this before: the sex­u­al abuse scan­dal in the church is hor­rif­ic, yet it will be dwarfed by what we uncov­er about sex­u­al abuse in pub­lic schools and in youth orga­ni­za­tions. The church­es deserve rebuke for their han­dling of the wicked­ness in their ranks; sad­ly, I doubt that you will hear near­ly as much about the far more mas­sive scan­dals lurk­ing in non­re­li­gious insti­tu­tions.
  4. Andy Stan­ley on Evan­gel­i­cals After Trump (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “In the Gospels, Jesus calls on his fol­low­ers to go out, teach his mes­sage, and bap­tize peo­ple. Stan­ley has orga­nized his life around this imper­a­tive, called ‘the Great Com­mis­sion.’ The ques­tion for evan­gel­i­cals, now, is whether the unde­ni­able asso­ci­a­tion between Trump and their ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty will make that work hard­er. ‘Has this group of peo­ple who have some­how become “evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers”’ aligned with Trump ‘hurt the Church’s abil­i­ty to reach peo­ple out­side the Church? Absolute­ly,’ Stan­ley said. But he’s not over­ly wor­ried: A year or two from now, he said, ‘all that goes away.’ New lead­ers will rise up. The Trump era of evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ry will fade. Stan­ley chuck­led. ‘And this will just be, for a lot of peo­ple, a bad dream.’”
    • Relat­ed: The Cul­tur­al Con­se­quences of Very, Very Repub­li­can Chris­tian­i­ty (David French, The Dis­patch): “What’s the cul­tur­al effect of a very, very Repub­li­can Chris­tian­i­ty? It’s way too sim­ple to say that it impairs the abil­i­ty of Chris­tians to reach their friends and neigh­bors. In some places it enhances the church’s appeal and inte­grates Chris­tians with­in their com­mu­ni­ty. In oth­er places it cre­ates a host of chal­lenges and need­less­ly alien­ates Chris­tians from their fel­low cit­i­zens.” Insight­ful.
  5. Vic­tim­hood or Devel­op­ment? (Glenn Loury, John McWhort­er, Shel­by Steele and Eli Steele, Quil­lette): “Again, the biggest mis­take we made is to buy into the idea that our vic­tim­iza­tion by racism was our source of pow­er rather than our self, our skills, our tal­ents, our devel­op­ment. As vic­tims, we had won a great civ­il rights move­ment. The down­side is it seduced us.” A fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion to eaves­drop on. You can also watch it on video.
  6. Madi­son Cawthorn, the GOP’s young star, arrives in Wash­ing­ton (Matthew Kas­sel, Jew­ish Insid­er): “He… seemed to believe that evan­ge­lism was a call­ing on par with pub­lic ser­vice. ‘If all you are is friends with oth­er Chris­tians, then how are you ever going to lead some­body to Christ?’ Cawthorn mused. ‘If you’re not want­i­ng to lead some­body to Christ, then you’re prob­a­bly not real­ly a Chris­t­ian.’”
    • I share that arti­cle to pro­vide con­text for this arti­cle: New­ly Elect­ed GOP Con­gress­man Madi­son Cawthorn Has Tried to Con­vert Jews to Chris­tian­i­ty (Pilar Melen­dez, The Dai­ly Beast): “Madi­son Cawthorn, the North Car­oli­na Repub­li­can who will become the youngest mem­ber of Con­gress in his­to­ry, has admit­ted he tried to con­vert Jews and Mus­lims to Chris­tian­i­ty.” The jour­nal­ist seems gen­uine­ly shocked.
    • Con­trast that with Con­vert Me If You Can (David Harsyani, Nation­al Review): “To be hon­est, I’m often sur­prised at how shy Chris­tians are at [evan­ge­lism]. As a hea­then, though, I am flat­tered by the atten­tion. And as a per­son in pos­ses­sion of free will, I am also uncon­cerned.” 
  7. Pas­tor John MacArthur and Cal­i­for­nia church clos­ings: Why isn’t this a nation­al sto­ry? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Indoor wor­ship ser­vices are banned in Cal­i­for­nia, a state of megachurch­es. You don’t have to be a reli­gion expert to know that restric­tion wasn’t going to fly, espe­cial­ly when stores and oth­er busi­ness­es had no sim­i­lar restric­tions…. Again, reli­gious folks see a chasm between how they’re treat­ed and how oth­er pro­tes­tors are treat­ed. And in-per­son nude danc­ing is a form of pro­tect­ed cul­tur­al expres­sion, as opposed to pub­lic wor­ship?”

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 Man­ly wed­ding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Out­line): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a cam­ou­flage ring, part­ly to sig­nal my deep com­mit­ment to irony and part­ly to get bet­ter ser­vice at the auto parts store.” I real­ly enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wed­ding bands in the not‐too‐distant future. First shared in vol­ume 210.

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 276

I real­ly like the sto­ries of the shame­less­ly sketchy judge near 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.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Azerbaijan’s drones owned the bat­tle­field in Nagorno-Karabakh — and showed future of war­fare (Robyn Dixon, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a mat­ter of months, how­ev­er, Nagorno-Karabakh has become per­haps the most pow­er­ful exam­ple of how small and rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive attack drones can change the dimen­sions of con­flicts once dom­i­nat­ed by ground bat­tles and tra­di­tion­al air power.”
  2. The U.S. Divorce Rate Has Hit a 50-Year Low (Wendy Wang, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Divorce in Amer­i­ca has been falling fast in recent years, and it just hit a record low in 2019. For every 1,000 mar­riages in the last year, only 14.9 end­ed in divorce, accord­ing to the new­ly released Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey data from the Cen­sus Bureau. This is the low­est rate we have seen in 50 years. It is even slight­ly low­er than 1970, when 15 mar­riages end­ed in divorce per 1,000 marriages.”
  3. Gen­der Activists Are Try­ing to Can­cel My Book. Why is Sil­i­con Val­ley Help­ing Them? (Abi­gail Shri­er, Quil­lette): “This is what cen­sor­ship looks like in 21st-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. It isn’t the gov­ern­ment send­ing police to your home. It’s Sil­i­con Val­ley oli­gop­o­lists imple­ment­ing black­outs and appeas­ing social-jus­tice mobs, while send­ing dis­fa­vored ideas down mem­o­ry holes. And the forces of cen­sor­ship are win­ning. Not only because their efforts to cen­sor leave almost no trace. They are win­ning because, thus far, most Amer­i­cans have been con­tent to sur­ren­der vir­tu­al­ly every lib­er­ty in exchange for the lux­u­ry of hav­ing prod­ucts deliv­ered to their door.”
    • Relat­ed: How cor­po­ra­tions can delete your exis­tence (Gavin Haynes, Unherd): “In the bank­ing system’s capac­i­ty to dis­able the indi­vid­ual with­out pro-active­ly doing them harm, there’s an echo of the ele­gance of the Chi­nese government’s social credit.”
  4. On the valid­i­ty of the elec­tion:
    • Who’s cov­er­ing this? Are charis­mat­ics and Pen­te­costals behind Trump’s refusal to con­cede? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…these folks are a sub­set — a move­ment among charismatics/pentecostals — of a Chris­t­ian sub­set and not well known to the gen­er­al pub­lic. How­ev­er, when you have flocks of Repub­li­cans call­ing foul on the elec­tion and the president’s most high-pro­file pas­tor is hav­ing night­ly prayer meet­ings because she is cer­tain that prophets have decreed four more years for Trump, it’s time more reporters give a listen.”
    • How we can be con­fi­dent that Trump’s vot­er fraud claims are baloney (Hen­ry Olsen, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mass vot­er fraud should be rel­a­tive­ly easy to detect, even if it might be dif­fi­cult to prove. Since we elect pres­i­dents through the elec­toral col­lege, polit­i­cal oper­a­tives try­ing to nefar­i­ous­ly pro­duce a vic­to­ry would focus on states crit­i­cal to an elec­toral col­lege major­i­ty…. None of these ear­ly warn­ing signs of fraud appear in the results.”
    • The Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion Was Legit­i­mate. Con­spir­a­cies Are Not. (David French, The Dis­patch): “The count­ing must con­tin­ue and all legal chal­lenges must be heard, but as of this moment there is nothing—absolutely nothing—that should cause Amer­i­cans to believe that this elec­tion was ille­git­i­mate, and it is shame­ful and dan­ger­ous for any­one to sug­gest or allege otherwise.”
    • A Primer in Basic Elec­toral Skep­ti­cism (Dou­glas Wil­son, blog): “We have reports that every­thing is fine and nor­mal. We have reports of vot­er fraud. We do not know which reports are true. But we do know which reports are cen­sored. And if that doesn’t tell you some­thing, then you are not pay­ing attention.”
    • Means, motive, and oppor­tu­ni­ty (Ed Fes­er, blog): “…some main­stream his­to­ri­ans and jour­nal­ists, includ­ing lib­er­al ones, think that these states were indeed stolen from Nixon [in 1960]. For exam­ple, Kennedy biog­ra­ph­er Sey­mour Hersh judges that the elec­tion was stolen. His­to­ri­an Robert Dallek thinks that at least Illi­nois was stolen, via Daley’s polit­i­cal machine. His­to­ri­an William Rorabaugh thinks that Nixon may have been cheat­ed out of as many as 100,000 to 200,000 votes in Johnson’s cor­rupt Texas.” Wild stuff that I did not know. The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Pasade­na City Col­lege. 
    • My own view: the elec­tion was valid and of course there was cheat­ing. Peo­ple cheat at cards, peo­ple cheat on their tax­es. Why in the world would­n’t peo­ple try to cheat in an elec­tion? But it seems unlike­ly to me that despite all the eyes on the process any cheat­ing was sig­nif­i­cant enough to change the out­come of the elec­tion. Hav­ing said that, it is inevitable that peo­ple are skep­ti­cal. The media and the tech firms have made them­selves so par­ti­san that they have for­feit­ed the trust which would be very handy for them to have right now.
  5. Lessons from the elec­tion
    • When Polit­i­cal Prophe­cies Don’t Come to Pass (Craig Keen­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, many Chris­tians have lis­tened to lead­ers proph­esy that Trump would again win the elec­tion. Some, such as Jere­mi­ah John­son, have con­tin­ued to affirm that their prophe­cy will turn out to be true in the end. Oth­ers, such as Kris Val­lot­ton, have pub­licly apol­o­gized. For now, many will decide that the prophe­cy was con­tin­gent, mist­imed or, more like­ly, mistaken.” This is out­stand­ing.
    • Why Cal­i­for­nia Reject­ed Racial Pref­er­ences Again (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “As I under­stand the state’s his­to­ry, the country’s his­to­ry, and the world’s his­to­ry, gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not be trust­ed to fac­tor race into deci­sion mak­ing with­out treat­ing peo­ple unjust­ly, and inter­group stig­mas and resent­ments tend to increase when any group is giv­en pref­er­en­tial treatment.”
    • May God Bless Pres­i­dent Biden (David French, The Dis­patch): “So here’s my sim­ple prayer for Pres­i­dent Biden: May God bless him and grant him the wis­dom to know what’s just, the courage to do what’s just, and the sta­mi­na to with­stand the rig­ors of the most dif­fi­cult job in the world. May his vir­tu­ous plans pre­vail and may his unright­eous efforts fail. And may God pro­tect him from all harm.” Amen.
    • A Moment Of Per­il (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “But the broad real­i­ty remains that in order to obtain and wield polit­i­cal pow­er, Democ­rats need to embrace can­di­dates who are less reflec­tive of the pro­gres­sive world­view of young col­lege grad­u­ates, and they need to run them in states that are less right-wing than Alaba­ma or Montana.”
    • How 2020 Killed Off Democ­rats’ Demo­graph­ic Hopes (Zack Stan­ton, Politi­co): “For years, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty has oper­at­ed under one immutable assump­tion: Long-term demo­graph­ic trends would give the par­ty some­thing like a per­ma­nent major­i­ty as the coun­try as a whole grows less white and more urban. Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s reliance on the pol­i­tics of racial resent­ment would only quick­en the process, solid­i­fy­ing sup­port for Democ­rats among peo­ple of col­or. Then came Novem­ber 3, 2020. And all those assump­tions now seem like total nonsense.” An inter­view with David Shor. 
    • Lat­inX-plain­ing the elec­tion (Anto­nio Gar­cia-Mar­tinez, The Pull Request): “The prob­lem with bas­ing a polit­i­cal plat­form on white guilt is that, at some point, you run out of either whites or guilt. Which is what hap­pens in a tru­ly major­i­ty-minor­i­ty nation when non-whites (at least as cur­rent­ly defined) assume their equal place in the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal firmament.” The author nor­mal­ly writes about tech­nol­o­gy issues (hence the title of the newslet­ter).
  6. Sec­u­lar­iza­tion and the Tribu­la­tions of the Amer­i­can Work­ing-Class (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I praise the schol­ar­ship and courage of Bri­an N. Wheaton.”
    • Relat­ed: Get­ting Past the Gate­keep­ers (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Your gate­keep­ers want you to write a book more like the one they would have writ­ten. If you do make revi­sions, make them in such a way that the book becomes not less your own, but even more your own. That’s not pride. If God con­de­scends to allow cer­tain insights to the his­to­ri­ans on your board, how won­der­ful! Let them write about them! Read and learn from them! But if He con­de­scends to allow cer­tain oth­er insights to you, you should write about yours, not theirs.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin. 
  7. COVID-relat­ed
    • Super-spread­er wed­ding par­ty shows COVID hol­i­day dan­gers (Karen Kaplan, LA Times): “Only 55 peo­ple attend­ed the Aug. 7 recep­tion at the Big Moose Inn in Millinock­et. But one of those guests arrived with a coro­n­avirus infec­tion. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 oth­er peo­ple. Sev­en of them died. None of the vic­tims who lost their lives had attend­ed the party.”
    • COVID-19 Mobil­i­ty Net­work Mod­el­ing (Stan­ford): “Our mod­el pre­dicts that a small minor­i­ty of ‘superspreader’ POIs [points of inter­est] account for a large major­i­ty of infec­tions and that restrict­ing max­i­mum occu­pan­cy at each POI is more effec­tive than uni­form­ly reduc­ing mobility.” Click on “Simulation” and play around with the Reli­gious Orga­ni­za­tions tog­gle. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry, who drew my atten­tion espe­cial­ly to fig­ures 2d and 3c in the appen­dix of the paper.

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 Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion. First shared in vol­ume 206.

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 275

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Elec­tion stuff is at the bot­tom. I’d say read at your per­il, but there’s some gen­uine­ly fas­ci­nat­ing stuff in there. There will be a TON of analy­sis pieces next week, so please for­ward me any that you find insight­ful.

  1. On What Athe­ists Say There Is (M. Antho­ny Mills, Soci­ety of Catholic Sci­en­tists): “Accord­ing to the athe­ist, the theist’s error is believ­ing in one too many things. Yet, for the the­ist, the dis­agree­ment is not about the exis­tence of one par­tic­u­lar thing, but ‘about every­thing,’ as Mac­In­tyre puts it.” The begin­ning and end are excel­lent. The mid­dle mud­dles unless you have very pre­cise philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests. The author has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. 
  2. Atten­tion Sean Feucht and evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers: Hatred of the press is hurt­ing your cause (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Get­ting rebuffed when­ev­er I tried to inter­view him got rather tir­ing when I noticed how he was tweet­ing his vex­a­tion with media cov­er­age while plan­ning a huge Chris­t­ian con­cert on the Mall that day. Note to pub­lic fig­ures: When you con­tin­u­al­ly refuse to give reporters access, don’t be sur­prised when their cov­er­age isn’t what you’d like.”
  3. Future of Chris­t­ian Mar­riage: Mark Reg­nerus in New Book Stud­ies It & Advis­es (Rachel Lu, Nation­al Review): “This is the book to read if you’ve won­dered whether young Chris­tians around the world are more success­ful than their sec­u­lar coun­ter­parts at find­ing love.”
    • Relat­ed but not direct­ly: A Case for Lat­er Mar­riage (Elise Ehrhard, First Things): “The lat­er mar­ry­ing age in the Unit­ed States is here to stay, and there is no rea­son for peo­ple of faith to fear it. In fact, we should embrace it as a good thing.”
  4. Supreme Court Recon­sid­ers Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Rule in Fos­ter Care Case (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The city is reach­ing out and telling a pri­vate reli­gious ministry—which has been doing this work for two centuries—how to run its inter­nal affairs. And try­ing to coerce it to make state­ments that are con­trary to its reli­gious beliefs as a con­di­tion of con­tin­u­ing to par­tic­i­pate in the reli­gious exer­cise that they have car­ried out in Philadel­phia for two cen­turies.” Hon­est­ly, this case could be far more impor­tant than the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. I am cau­tious­ly hope­ful. 
  5. Gre­ta Thun­berg Hears Your Excus­es. She Is Not Impressed. (David March­ese, New York Times): “It some­times gets awk­ward: In Swe­den we have this phe­nom­e­non called Jan­te­la­gen. It’s when some­one is famous, and the peo­ple around use up all their ener­gy to ignore the fact that the per­son is famous.” This is a fun inter­view. I sus­pect I would like Gre­ta but I doubt she would like me. 
  6. Some elec­tion stuff:
    • Why Evan­gel­i­cals Aren’t What They Used to Be (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, New York Times): “There has recent­ly been talk of aban­don­ing the label ‘evan­gel­i­cal’ among those who answer to the descrip­tor, large­ly because of its trans­for­ma­tion into a main­ly polit­i­cal term.” Bru­enig is a Roman Catholic and a con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing writer. 
    • Why Evan­gel­i­cals Dis­agree on the Pres­i­dent (Tim Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tiantiy Today): “Our inabil­i­ty to under­stand the ratio­nal­i­ty of an oppos­ing view­point is more often a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion on our part than a fail­ure of ratio­nal­i­ty on theirs. The dif­fer­ence between the camps can­not be that one side is tru­ly Chris­t­ian while the oth­er is not, or that either side pos­sess­es a monop­oly on good ideas and good inten­tions.” Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tor. I think the author cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fies the two camps in evan­gel­i­cal­ism, but is wrong in his assess­ment of their cause. The author is, inci­den­tal­ly, a Stan­ford grad.
    • In Search Of Heal­ing (Gene Wein­garten, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate has riv­en fam­i­lies, destroyed ancient friend­ships, test­ed mar­riages. The stakes are so ele­vat­ed, the alter­na­tives so stark, the con­se­quences so poten­tial­ly dire, that the prin­ci­pal emo­tion gen­er­at­ed — inflamed by high­ly par­ti­san media, and social media, on the left and the right — is some­thing that very much resem­bles hatred.” This might hon­est­ly be my favorite read of the week. The end is amaz­ing.
    • ‘You are no longer my moth­er’: A divid­ed Amer­i­ca will strug­gle to heal after Trump era (Tim Reid, Gabriel­la Borter, & Michael Mar­ti­na, Reuters): “She is not sure those rifts with friends and fam­i­ly will ever mend, because each believes the oth­er to have a total­ly alien val­ue sys­tem.”
    • What the Vot­ers Are Try­ing to Tell Us (David Brooks, New York Times): “…elec­tions are edu­ca­tion­al events. Vot­ers are not always wise, but they are usu­al­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble. They know more about their own lives than we in our infor­ma­tion bub­bles do, and they almost always tell us some­thing impor­tant.”
    • Tak­ing new seats and retain­ing old ones, a string of con­gres­sion­al vic­to­ries for Stan­ford alums (Sari­na Deb and Yash Dalmia, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Ten Stan­ford alum­ni were re-elect­ed to their posi­tions in Con­gress in Tuesday’s elec­tions — sev­en in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and three in the Sen­ate.”
    • Three per­spec­tives on race and the elec­tion:
      1. Lati­no Evan­gel­i­cals Boost Trump in Flori­da and Texas (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This year, Amer­i­cans saw the con­trast between Lati­no vot­ers from dif­fer­ent back­grounds play out in two major metro areas in US swing states—Maricopa Coun­ty in Ari­zona and Mia­mi-Dade Coun­ty in Flori­da.”
      2. Trump’s gains with His­pan­ic vot­ers should prompt some pro­gres­sive rethink­ing (Matthew Ygle­sias, Vox): “What if many US His­pan­ics sim­ply don’t see the racial pol­i­tics of the Trump era the way intel­lec­tu­als — whose think­ing and writ­ing on struc­tur­al racism and white suprema­cy have gained broad influ­ence in recent years — think they should?”
      3. The Trump vote is ris­ing among Blacks and His­pan­ics, despite the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom (Musa al-Ghar­bi, NBC News): “Per­cep­tions of Trump as racist seem to be a core dri­ving force push­ing whites toward the Democ­rats. Why would the oppo­site pat­tern be hold­ing among minor­i­ty vot­ers — i.e. the very peo­ple the pres­i­dent is pur­port­ed­ly being racist against?” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colum­bia and wrote this before the elec­tion. 

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 APA Meet­ing: A Photo‐Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the other.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing. First shared in vol­ume 204.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 274

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 273

Hon­est­ly, there are too many polit­i­cal arti­cles in this one.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How does Google’s monop­oly hurt you? Try these search­es. (Geof­frey Fowler, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Googling didn’t used to require so much … scrolling. On some search­es, it’s like Where’s Wal­do but for infor­ma­tion. With­out us even real­iz­ing it, the Internet’s most-used web­site has been get­ting worse. On too many queries, Google is more inter­est­ed in mak­ing search lucra­tive than a bet­ter prod­uct for us.”
  2. A shad­owy AI ser­vice has trans­formed thou­sands of women’s pho­tos into fake nudes: ‘Make fan­ta­sy a real­i­ty’ (Drew Har­well, Wash­ing­ton Post): “An arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence ser­vice freely avail­able on the Web has been used to trans­form more than 100,000 women’s images into nude pho­tos with­out the women’s knowl­edge or con­sent, trig­ger­ing fears of a new wave of dam­ag­ing ‘deep­fakes’ that could be used for harass­ment or black­mail. Users of the auto­mat­ed ser­vice can anony­mous­ly sub­mit a pho­to of a clothed woman and receive an altered ver­sion with the cloth­ing removed.” Well, that’s not ter­ri­fy­ing at all. 
  3. Of Course We’re Not a Democ­ra­cy (Mike Lee, First Things): “Our sys­tem of gov­ern­ment is best described as a con­sti­tu­tion­al repub­lic. Pow­er is not found in mere majori­ties, but in care­ful­ly bal­anced pow­er.” The author is a US Sen­a­tor (R — Utah).
  4. Should the Pro­fes­sion­al Be Polit­i­cal? (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “The Coin­base deci­sion cap­tured the atten­tion of CEOs, tech work­ers, and mem­bers of the media who are ask­ing them­selves a time­ly ques­tion: What role, if any, should polit­i­cal activism play in the work­place? If Coinbase’s approach doesn’t lead to a staff exo­dus or legal set­backs or some oth­er unfore­seen harm, it is like­ly to be adopt­ed at oth­er companies––probably for the better––because it is well suit­ed to help­ing work­places stay diverse and inclu­sive in a polar­ized moment.”
  5. Elec­tion-relat­ed arti­cles
    • My favorite polit­i­cal ad of 2020 (Twit­ter): 30 sec­onds, and I am quite seri­ous. 
    • The Spir­i­tu­al Bless­ing of Polit­i­cal Home­less­ness (David French, The Dis­patch): “More and more, thought­ful (main­ly young) Chris­tians say to me, ‘I’m pro-life, I believe in reli­gious free­dom and free speech, I think we should wel­come immi­grants and refugees, and I des­per­ate­ly want racial rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. Where do I fit in?’ The answer is clear. Nowhere. And that truth is a bless­ing, if you embrace it.”
    • Poli­cies, Per­sons, and Paths to Ruin (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “Actu­al­ly, this is a long-over­due arti­cle attempt­ing to explain why I remain baf­fled that so many Chris­tians con­sid­er the sins of unre­pen­tant sex­u­al immoral­i­ty (porneia), unre­pen­tant boast­ful­ness (ala­zoneia), unre­pen­tant vul­gar­i­ty (ais­chrolo­gia), unre­pen­tant fac­tious­ness (dichostasi­ai), and the like, to be only tox­ic for our nation, while poli­cies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switch­ing, free­dom-lim­it­ing, and social­is­tic over­reach are viewed as dead­ly.” 
    • Could Trump Be A Christ-Fig­ure: A Response to John Piper About Trump (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “I don’t know if Trump is who the media says he is, I can only go off what I hear him say and see him do. Take away the accu­sa­tions of xeno­pho­bia, racism, and misog­y­ny and what do you have? An alleged sor­did past with women (me too) and a present of enact­ing the poli­cies I agree with.” The title is so provoca­tive and I almost didn’t read it, but I found it gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing. The title is over-the-top, though.
    • Why Most Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are Polit­i­cal Con­ser­v­a­tives (JP More­land, per­son­al blog): “Suf­fice it to say that, when care­ful­ly exam­ined, the texts show that the state is not to be in the busi­ness of show­ing com­pas­sion or pro­vid­ing pos­i­tive rights for its cit­i­zens through its use of coer­cive pow­er (e.g. tax­a­tion). These are mat­ters of indi­vid­ual moral respon­si­bil­i­ty and oblig­a­tion for the peo­ple of God (and var­i­ous char­i­ties). Rather, the state is the pro­tec­tor of neg­a­tive rights.” The link is to a short blog entry that con­tains a link to a 20 page PDF. The excerpt is from the PDF. The author is a philoso­pher at Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty and brought up some points about the Old Tes­ta­ment I had nev­er con­sid­ered before. 
    • 2020 Polls: Vot­ers Have Nev­er Been More Divid­ed by Gen­der (Eric Levitz, NY Mag­a­zine): “And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprece­dent­ed­ly sin­gle; they also appear to be unprece­dent­ed­ly unin­ter­est­ed in het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty: Accord­ing to pri­vate polling shared with Intel­li­gencer by Demo­c­ra­t­ic data sci­en­tist David Shor, rough­ly 30 per­cent of Amer­i­can women under 25 iden­ti­fy as LGBT; for women over 60, that fig­ure is less than 5 per­cent.” 👀👀👀
    • A response: No Fam­i­lies, No Chil­dren, No Future (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “There is noth­ing remote­ly nor­mal about that num­ber. It is a sign of a deeply deca­dent cul­ture — that is, a cul­ture that lacks the where­with­al to sur­vive. The most impor­tant thing that a gen­er­a­tion can do is pro­duce the next gen­er­a­tion. No fam­i­lies, no chil­dren, no future.”
    • How fas­cist is Pres­i­dent Trump? There’s still a for­mu­la for that. (John McNeill, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a fed­er­al, decen­tral­ized state with con­sti­tu­tion­al checks and bal­ances, it’s hard­er to gov­ern as a fas­cist than to run as one. Trump’s polit­i­cal out­look and behav­ior bear many sim­i­lar­i­ties to those of fas­cist lead­ers, but he has not ruled like an authen­tic fas­cist.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at George­town. 
    • ICE Detainees in Geor­gia Say They Had Unneed­ed Surg­eries (Caitlin Dick­er­son, Seth Freed Wessler and Miri­am Jor­dan, New York Times): “Immi­grants detained at an ICE-con­tract­ed cen­ter in Geor­gia said they had inva­sive gyne­col­o­gy pro­ce­dures that they lat­er learned might have been unnec­es­sary.” About a month old, rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • In a year of polit­i­cal anger, unde­cid­ed vot­ers inspire a spe­cial kind of scorn (Mau­ra Jud­kis, Wash­ing­ton Post): “With so much on the line, the Unde­cid­eds have become more mys­ti­fy­ing — and frus­trat­ing — than ever. Nobody believes they are real. Oh, and every­one hates them.”
  6. The Real Caus­es of Human Sex Dif­fer­ences (David C. Geary>, Quil­lette): “Peo­ple have many stereo­types about boys and men and girls and women and most of them are accu­rate and, if any­thing, under­es­ti­mate the mag­ni­tude of actu­al sex differences.The key ques­tion is whether these stereo­typed beliefs cre­ate a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy or are large­ly a descrip­tion of sex dif­fer­ences that chil­dren and adults have observed in their day-to-day life.” The author is an evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri 
  7. Glob­al things to remem­ber in prayer:
    • Niger­ian forces killed 12 peace­ful pro­test­ers, Amnesty says (Sam Olukoya And Lekan Oyekan­mi, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “At least 56 peo­ple have died dur­ing two weeks of wide­spread demon­stra­tions against police vio­lence, includ­ing 38 on Tues­day, the group said…. cit­ing eye­wit­ness­es, video footage and hos­pi­tal reports.”
    • Nige­ria Is Mur­der­ing Its Cit­i­zens (Chi­ma­man­da Ngozi Adichie, New York Times): “The Niger­ian state has turned on its peo­ple. The only rea­son to shoot into a crowd of peace­ful cit­i­zens is to ter­ror­ize: to kill some and make the oth­ers back down. It is a colos­sal and unfor­giv­able crime.”
    • Turks and Arme­ni­ans Rec­on­cile in Christ. Can Azeris Join Them? (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bey­tel became a Chris­t­ian in 2000. But it was not until 2009 when he met Jacob Purs­ley, an Amer­i­can min­is­ter to Turkey, that he began to wres­tle with his share in the nation­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. The spir­i­tu­al growth of the church is hin­dered by the uncon­fessed sin of geno­cide, Purs­ley implored the believ­ers. He urged Turk­ish Chris­tians to seek rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with Arme­ni­ans, on behalf of the nation.”
    • Azer­bai­jan Evan­gel­i­cals: Con­flict with Arme­ni­ans Is Not a Reli­gious War (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):“Originally a ‘Mus­lim athe­ist’ from a well-edu­cat­ed fam­i­ly, he was saved in 1991 after fol­low­ing a beau­ti­ful girl and her mys­te­ri­ous leather-bound book to a Bible study. With­in a year, he was assis­tant pas­tor, and in 1997 he was ordained a min­is­ter in the Greater Grace Chris­t­ian move­ment.” Includ­ing entire­ly for that lumi­nous excerpt. 
    • Biden and Big Tech have Poland and Hun­gary in their crosshairs (Glad­den Pap­pin, Newsweek): “The real rea­son that Poland and Hun­gary have been demo­nized in the Unit­ed States is that they rep­re­sent a suc­cess­ful alter­na­tive to the failed Amer­i­can com­bi­na­tion of indus­tri­al and fam­i­ly col­lapse.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Dal­las. I don’t have strong opin­ions about Euro­pean pol­i­tics, but I am struck by how pas­sion­ate some Amer­i­cans are about them.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Mag­i­cal Think­ing (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Building a com­put­er is pre­cise­ly anal­o­gous to putting togeth­er a bit of mag­i­cal sleight of hand. It is a clever exer­cise in sim­u­la­tion, noth­ing more. And the con­vinc­ing­ness of the sim­u­la­tion is as com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant in the one case as it is in the oth­er. Say­ing ‘Gee, AI pro­grams can do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is intelligence!’ is like say­ing ‘Gee, Penn and Teller do such amaz­ing things. Maybe it real­ly is magic!’” Fes­er is one of my favorite philoso­phers. First shared in vol­ume 197, and I recall a CS major telling me how much he dis­agreed with it.

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 272

I cheat­ed when num­ber­ing a few of these

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A DC Church Shows How to Fight for Reli­gious Free­dom (David French, The Dis­patch): “Late Fri­day night a fed­er­al dis­trict court judge in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., hand­ed down a reli­gious lib­er­ty rul­ing that I hope will echo through­out the nation…. It demon­strates how thought­ful Chris­tians can engage in the pub­lic square and defend their lib­er­ty with con­vic­tion while also car­ing for their com­mu­ni­ties and demon­strat­ing extra­or­di­nary patience with pub­lic offi­cials. In oth­er words, in one court case we’re watch­ing what it’s like when Chris­t­ian legal ends are pur­sued through Chris­t­ian moral means.” Excel­lent news with typ­i­cal­ly insight­ful com­men­tary by David French.
  2. Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“
    • Out­stand­ing. There are SO MANY quotable bits in this essay. 
    • Why Is Wok­e­ness Win­ning? (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Critical the­o­ry was once an eso­teric aca­d­e­m­ic pur­suit. Now it has become the core, under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the major­i­ty of Amer­i­can cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, media, cor­po­ra­tions, lib­er­al church­es, NGOs, phil­an­thropies, and, of course, main­stream journalism.”
    • The Fun­da­men­tal­ist War on Wok­e­ness is a War on Chris­t­ian Love (Michael Bird, Patheos): “The whole anti-woke and anti-crit­i­cal race the­o­ry trope strike me as not so much inter­est­ed in oppos­ing pro­gres­sive author­i­tar­i­an­ism and its divi­sive racial pol­i­tics, as much as it serves to deny eth­nic minori­ties have any griev­ances and white church­es have any respon­si­bil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.” Bird is a respect­ed evan­gel­i­cal the­olo­gian. 
  3. Some Stan­ford-relat­ed arti­cles I saw:
    • The Pre­science of Shel­by Steele (Samuel Kro­nen, Quil­lette): “Shelby was the only sib­ling to reject the tenets of mod­ern lib­er­al­ism, and although he and his [twin] broth­er work on the same cam­pus and occa­sion­al­ly pass each oth­er (Shel­by is at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion), the two are not on speak­ing terms.” Not the most reveal­ing excerpt, but prob­a­bly the most inter­est­ing to this audi­ence.
    • An open let­ter from a Stan­ford wrestling par­ent to the Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent (Sarah Traxler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “When address­ing the rea­sons that the 11 sports in par­tic­u­lar are being dis­con­tin­ued, wrestling was cit­ed only in the cat­e­go­ry of com­pet­ing ‘without a full com­ple­ment of scholarships.’ One over-looked rea­son for this is that wrestlers often come from low­er income groups. As such, wrestling stu­dent-ath­letes often qual­i­fy for need-based finan­cial aid, reduc­ing the demand for the full com­ple­ment of ath­let­ic-based scholarships.”
    • My Brief Spell as an Activist (Lucy Kross Wal­lace, Quil­lette): “This was my first intox­i­cat­ing taste of empow­er­ment born from vic­tim­hood. I was vin­di­cat­ed; exu­ber­ant. None of it had been my fault. All my doubts and self-hatred and guilt could be laid to rest. I had been the vic­tim not only of cir­cum­stance and mis­for­tune, but of oppres­sion. The prob­lem was sim­ple, the solu­tion equal­ly so. I didn’t have to change—society did.” The author is a sopho­more at Stan­ford.
  4. A reminder that there are some hor­ri­ble things hap­pen­ing in this world:
    • How Turkey’s Mil­i­tary Adven­tures Decrease Free­dom at Home (Garo Pay­lan, New York Times): “After a decades-long fit­ful truce, the con­flict over the sta­tus of Nagorno-Karabakh — a break­away Armen­ian enclave in Azer­bai­jan — between Azer­bai­jan and Arme­nia resumed last month, lead­ing to a large mil­i­tary deploy­ment, destruc­tion of civil­ian cen­ters and thou­sands of casu­al­ties. In this war, Turkey strong­ly sup­ports Azer­bai­jan, with which it shares eth­nic bonds, and Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan dis­missed glob­al calls for a cease-fire.” The author is a mem­ber of the Turk­ish Par­lia­ment. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • Azer­bai­jan’s assault against Arme­nia threat­ens democ­ra­cy every­where (Chris­tos Makridis & Alex Gal­it­sky, The Hill): “While Azer­bai­jan has attempt­ed to shield itself from inter­na­tion­al scruti­ny by rid­ing on the pres­ence of tense domes­tic pol­i­tics in the Unit­ed States and a glob­al pan­dem­ic, we can­not ignore it any longer. The inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty must rec­og­nize that fail­ure to stand up for reli­gious minori­ties any­where is a threat to them every­where. Inac­tion cre­ates prece­dent and embold­ens dictators.” One of the authors, Chris­tos, is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
    • Chi­na ambas­sador makes veiled threat to Hong Kong-based Cana­di­ans (Helen David­son, The Guardian): “Canada is among sev­er­al coun­tries that sus­pend­ed extra­di­tion agree­ments with Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s impo­si­tion of a sweep­ing nation­al secu­ri­ty law in June. Dozens of MPs recent­ly called for Cana­da to offer ‘safe har­bour’ to pro-democ­ra­cy pro­test­ers flee­ing Hong Kong, prompt­ing the warn­ing from Cong.”
    • Relat­ed from a few weeks ago: ‘You will be put into deten­tion’: For­mer ABC bureau chief tells sto­ry of flee­ing Chi­na for first time (Matthew Car­ney, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “We were instruct­ed to report to a facil­i­ty in north Bei­jing and told to bring my daugh­ter Yas­mine, who was 14 at the time, as she was now part of the inves­ti­ga­tion. This felt like a line in the sand for me. I could not accept that they would involve my chil­dren. At the same time I was fright­ened. It felt like part of the Chi­nese play­book: to go after fam­i­ly mem­bers as a way to exact pun­ish­ment and revenge.”
  5. ‘Hand­maid’ real­i­ty: Deeply reli­gious mar­riages have more spousal equal­i­ty (New York Post): “Religious, home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples also report greater rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, and they are three times more like­ly than less-reli­gious peers to report a sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship. The women don’t appear to be repressed; in fact, they’re gen­er­al­ly more like­ly to say they’re hap­py and that their life has mean­ing and purpose.” And yet again research con­firms Bib­li­cal pre­cepts. Allow me to take his oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer a friend­ly pas­toral reminder to mar­ry anoth­er Chris­t­ian, should you mar­ry. 
    • Why Only Amy Coney Bar­rett Gets to Have It All (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “…to set the record straight, on hand­maids and beyond, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians must do their part to imag­ine a broad­er and more human­iz­ing vision for women’s place in the pub­lic square. Chris­tian­i­ty has always con­tained a lib­er­a­to­ry seed: one that tells women that the human desire to work, cre­ate and shape insti­tu­tions is as impor­tant, even as holy, as their abil­i­ty to bear chil­dren. If Chris­tians don’t like the hand­maid stereo­types, now is the time to be clear on all that Chris­t­ian women can do and be.”
  6. How Chris­tians Should Think About Vot­ing (Michael & Melis­sa Wear, Sub­stack): “When you vote in an elec­tion, with the excep­tion of a write-in bal­lot, you are not vot­ing for your dream can­di­date. Your vote is not an unmedi­at­ed expres­sion of your iden­ti­ty, your vote is a choice between options you did not choose your­self. If you view your vote as an unmedi­at­ed, pure expres­sion of your will, it can be debilitating.” The author is a for­mer Oba­ma White House staffer. The arti­cle itself is very non­par­ti­san. 
    • Lati­no, Evan­gel­i­cal and Polit­i­cal­ly Home­less (Jen­nifer Med­i­na, New York Times): “When Pas­tor Rivera looks at his con­gre­ga­tion of 200 fam­i­lies he sees a micro­cosm of the Lati­no vote in the Unit­ed States: how com­plex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solid­i­fy cru­cial sup­port can fall short. There are not clear ide­o­log­i­cal lines here between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives. Peo­ple care about immi­gra­tion, but are equal­ly con­cerned about reli­gious lib­er­ty and abortion.”
    • Putting this one here is kind of cheat­ing, but I like hav­ing only 7 major top­ics. This is polit­i­cal enough that I’m jus­ti­fy­ing it to myself. The 1619 Chron­i­cles (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Journalists are, most often, in the busi­ness of writ­ing the first rough draft of his­to­ry, not try­ing to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a low­er­case t, fol­low­ing evi­dence in direc­tions unseen, not the capital‑T truth of a pre-estab­lished nar­ra­tive in which incon­ve­nient facts get discarded.”
    • How the 1619 Project took over 2020 (Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Hannah-Jones has fierce­ly defend­ed the 1619 Project. But today, she acknowl­edges that for all the experts she con­sult­ed, she should have sat down with addi­tion­al schol­ars with par­tic­u­lar focus on colo­nial his­to­ry, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War and the Civ­il War, to bet­ter reflect the con­tention in the field.”
  7. For­get What Gen­der Activists Tell You. Here’s What Med­ical Tran­si­tion Looks Like (Scott New­gent, Quil­lette): “I write all this as a 47-year-old trans­gen­der man who tran­si­tioned five years ago. I’m also a par­ent to three teenagers. Though I admire the good inten­tions of par­ents who seek to sup­port their chil­dren, I have seri­ous con­cerns about reck­less acqui­es­cence to a child’s Inter­net-medi­at­ed self-diag­no­sis. Many old­er trans­gen­der folks share these con­cerns, too.”

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 Religion’s health effects should make doubt­ing parish­ioners recon­sid­er leav­ing (John Siniff and Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, USA Today): “Simply from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, the con­tin­u­ing diminu­tion of reli­gious upbring­ing in Amer­i­ca would be bad for health. This is not pros­e­ly­tiz­ing; this is science.” The Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor  last made an appear­ance here back in vol­ume 65. First shared in vol­ume 195.

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 271

I’m just glad there’s a mag­ic video 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.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Lan­guage of Priv­i­lege (Nicholas Clair­mont, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So, in the end, the ques­tion raised by wok­e­ness is a sim­ple one: Doesn’t it actu­al­ly just favor rich peo­ple?”
  2. The Stu­dents Left Behind by Remote Learn­ing (Alec MacGillis, ProP­ub­li­ca): “But it was not hard to see how par­ents could have got the impres­sion that chil­dren were at great risk. Towns and cities had closed play­grounds, wrap­ping police tape around them. Peo­ple in heav­i­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic areas were wear­ing masks even on emp­ty streets. There may have been an implic­it­ly polit­i­cal dynam­ic at work: the greater the threat posed by COVID-19, the greater Trump’s fail­ure in not con­tain­ing it.”
    • This is a very long but absolute­ly engross­ing arti­cle. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed that you at least skim it.
  3. Lib­er­al­ism and Its Dis­con­tents (Fran­cis Fukuya­ma, Amer­i­can Pur­pose): “Democ­ra­cy itself is being chal­lenged by author­i­tar­i­an states like Rus­sia and Chi­na that manip­u­late or dis­pense with free and fair elec­tions. But the more insid­i­ous threat aris­es from pop­ulists with­in exist­ing lib­er­al democ­ra­cies who are using the legit­i­ma­cy they gain through their elec­toral man­dates to chal­lenge or under­mine lib­er­al insti­tu­tions.” The author directs the Cen­ter on Democ­ra­cy, Devel­op­ment and the Rule of Law at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. This is from the inau­gur­al issue of a promis­ing new mag­a­zine.
    • Relat­ed: Sui­cide of the Lib­er­als (Gary Saul Mor­son, First Things): “One some­times hears that ‘the pen­du­lum is bound to swing back.’ But how does one know there is a pen­du­lum at all, rather than—let us say—a snow­ball accel­er­at­ing down­hill? It is unwise to com­fort one­self with metaphors. When a par­ty is will­ing to push its pow­er as far as it can go, it will keep going until it meets suf­fi­cient oppo­si­tion.” The author is a human­i­ties prof at North­west­ern.
  4. Diver­si­ty At the Oscars (Fil­ip Mazur­czak, First Things): “At a time of declin­ing read­er­ship world­wide, and because of the mag­i­cal con­nec­tion hun­dreds of mil­lions have to the movies, film is per­haps the most effec­tive medi­um with which to edu­cate peo­ple about his­to­ry. Cer­tain top­ics, such as the Armen­ian Geno­cide or com­mu­nist crimes, deserve a defin­i­tive epic on the scale of Schindler’s List or Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan. But iron­i­cal­ly, the Academy’s new diver­si­ty rules will make it even less like­ly for such top­ics to receive the sil­ver screen treat­ment they deserve.” The author is a Ph.D. can­di­date in his­to­ry.
  5. Arme­nia is under attack by Azer­bai­jan. Hear­ing that is as dis­tress­ing as hear­ing that a Ger­man politi­cian is mak­ing loud com­plaints against the Jews.
    • Arme­ni­ans Fight to Hold Ancient Home­land With­in Azer­bai­jan (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Fierce fight­ing has bro­ken out in the Cau­ca­sus Moun­tains between the Caspi­an and Black Seas, pit­ting Chris­t­ian Arme­ni­ans ver­sus Mus­lim Azeris. But is it right to employ their reli­gious labels?”
    • Defend­ing Chris­t­ian Arme­nia (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Most Amer­i­cans have no idea that in the 20th cen­tu­ry, the Turks waged a true geno­cide against the Armen­ian Chris­t­ian peo­ple. The book to read is 2019’s The Thir­ty-Year Geno­cide: Turkey’s Destruc­tion of Its Chris­t­ian Minori­ties, 1894–1924, by the Israeli his­to­ri­ans Ben­ny Mor­ris and Dror Ze’evi. I had to put it down — a lot — because its record of the atroc­i­ties the Turks wrought on inno­cent Arme­ni­ans in the eth­nic and reli­gious cleans­ing of Turkey was too much to bear.”
    • Turkey is Nor­mal­iz­ing Mil­i­tant Jihadism (Armen V. Sahakyan, Prov­i­dence): “Ankara’s desta­bi­liz­er-in-chief Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan has now extend­ed his men­ac­ing mil­i­tary involve­ment to the South Cau­ca­sus, where Turk­ish army per­son­nel are assist­ing Ankara’s satel­lite state Azer­bai­jan in a mas­sive inva­sion against Art­sakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and Arme­nia. But what grabbed inter­na­tion­al head­lines are the appalling reports of Turkey’s delib­er­ate mis­use of the ‘reli­gious card’ in the Art­sakh-Azer­bai­jan con­flict and its trans­port of 4,000 jihadist ter­ror­ists in Syr­ia to fight against Chris­t­ian Arme­ni­ans.”
  6. I’m going to link to some polit­i­cal arti­cles which inter­est­ed me, some of which are extreme­ly par­ti­san. If you only have time to read one, please read one whose slant you dis­agree with. Giv­en that I could not pos­si­bly agree with all of these arti­cles, I hope it is clear that the stan­dard dis­claimers apply even more than usu­al.
    • What Makes A Vote Moral or Immoral? The Ethics of Vot­ing (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “…I think I would be pas­toral­ly over­step­ping were I to tell you how I think you pos­i­tive­ly should vote, assum­ing there is more than one per­mis­si­ble option (which includes not vot­ing, vot­ing for a third par­ty, writ­ing in a can­di­date, or even civ­il dis­obe­di­ence if you live in a coun­try with com­pul­so­ry vot­ing). At most, I think a pas­tor can, from time to time, warn you against paths you should not take. Sel­dom if ever should he tell you which path you should take, assum­ing that doing so clos­es down oth­er moral­ly per­mis­si­ble paths.”
    • 7 Rea­sons Why It Is Pos­si­ble for Chris­tians to Vote for Trump in 2020 With­out Get­ting a Defiled Con­science and/or Los­ing Their Soul (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “So the pro­pos­al that fol­lows is intend­ed to enable you to go and vote for Trump, ide­al­ly with­out a mask, and not give way after­ward to any temp­ta­tion to flush red or laugh a lit­tle furtive heh heh if asked about it. You are not a crim­i­nal. You are not insane. You are not a fas­cist. You are not a haz­ard to the repub­lic. You are not try­ing to ring in The Handmaid’s Tale. You have good rea­sons, oh ye eas­i­ly gaslit evan­gel­i­cals.”
    • Chris­t­ian Wit­ness Demands That We Defend Truth—and Reject Don­ald Trump (O. Alan Noble, Pub­lic Dis­course): “By its very nature, false­hood breeds chaos. To sup­port Trump would require me to sup­port four more years of epis­te­mo­log­i­cal chaos. I fear that if I were to sup­port his reelec­tion, even grudg­ing­ly, even­tu­al­ly I would find myself apol­o­giz­ing for his lies, and then excus­ing his lies, and then defend­ing his lies, and final­ly believ­ing his lies. Bet­ter men and women than I have grown con­fused in just this way since 2016.”
    • Vot­ing for Life (Ramesh Pon­nu­ru & Robert P. George, Nation­al Review): “Nei­ther of us has endorsed Don­ald Trump. Both of us have been intense­ly crit­i­cal of him on issues of per­son­al char­ac­ter and, in some cas­es, pub­lic pol­i­cy. We do not claim, as some have claimed, that Catholics and oth­er pro-life cit­i­zens have an oblig­a­tion to cast their bal­lot for him. The premis­es of the argu­ment against abor­tion do not by them­selves com­pel such a stance. Peo­ple who share the view that the abor­tion license is a pro­found injus­tice on a mas­sive scale that must be res­olute­ly opposed can reach dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about whether Trump deserves their vote. If, how­ev­er, the con­sid­er­a­tions we have adduced in this essay are sound, they prac­ti­cal­ly pre­clude a vote for Biden.”
    • A new group of evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers forms in sup­port of Biden (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The group favor­ing Biden, set up by long­time evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers Ron Sider and Rich Mouw, includes sev­er­al lead­ers who have since retired from major evan­gel­i­cal insti­tu­tions. Among them is John Huff­man, who was board chair of Chris­tian­i­ty Today mag­a­zine, a life­long Repub­li­can and for­mer pas­tor to Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon. He is plan­ning to vote for a Demo­c­rat for the first time.”
    • “You’re hired” Mul­li­gan review (John Cochrane, per­son­al blog): “For in much of the rhetoric about ‘sci­ence,’ and ‘experts,’ we are exhort­ed to ignore every day truths and the scat­tered infor­ma­tion of actu­al peo­ple, and sur­ren­der to unac­count­able tech­nocrats, who chat and social climb with each oth­er, but who have been wrong about so much late­ly.” The author is a senior fel­low at Hoover. I learned more from this book review than I do from many books.
  7. Scar­let fever mak­ing a come­back thanks to a tox­ic virus, researchers say (Hol­ly Richard­son, Aus­tralia Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion): “Pro­fes­sor Walk­er said while one might expect that a virus infect­ing a bac­te­ria was bad for the bac­te­ria, this was not always so. ‘In this case, the bac­te­r­i­al virus is car­ry­ing three new tox­ins and because it’s car­ry­ing those tox­ins when it infects the bac­te­ria, it gives the bac­te­ria this extra vir­u­lence poten­tial.’” 👀 This is like two supervil­lains team­ing up.

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 An MIT Pro­fes­sor Meets the Author of All Knowl­edge (Ros­alind Picard, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I once thought I was too smart to believe in God. Now I know I was an arro­gant fool who snubbed the great­est Mind in the cosmos—the Author of all sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, art, and every­thing else there is to know. Today I walk humbly, hav­ing received the most unde­served grace. I walk with joy, along­side the most amaz­ing Com­pan­ion any­one could ask for, filled with desire to keep learn­ing and exploring.” First shared in vol­ume 194.

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 270

this one has a lot more domes­tic polit­i­cal con­tent than my typ­i­cal 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.

Things I’m look­ing for good arti­cles about: the Armenian/Aberbaijani con­flict, what is hap­pen­ing in Hong Kong, and Trump’s COVID diagono­sis. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­cans Increas­ing­ly Believe Vio­lence is Jus­ti­fied if the Oth­er Side Wins (Lar­ry Dia­mond, Lee Drut­man, Tod Lind­berg, Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lil­liana Mason, Politi­co): “At the pres­i­den­tial debate this week, the Repub­li­can can­di­date voiced his con­cern about polit­i­cal violence—left-wing polit­i­cal vio­lence. And the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date like­wise voiced con­cern about polit­i­cal violence—right-wing polit­i­cal vio­lence. They were both right.” The authors are all aca­d­e­mics.
    • Relat­ed: The Truth About Today’s Anar­chists (Farah Stock­man, New York Times): “Mr. Quinn dis­cov­ered a thorny truth about the may­hem that unfold­ed in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Min­neapo­lis. It wasn’t may­hem at all. While talk­ing heads on tele­vi­sion rou­tine­ly described it as a spon­ta­neous erup­tion of anger at racial injus­tice, it was strate­gi­cal­ly planned, facil­i­tat­ed and adver­tised on social media by anar­chists who believed that their actions advanced the cause of racial justice.” 👀 👀 👀. The author is on the NYT edi­to­r­i­al board, so take these claims seri­ous­ly.
  2. Justin Giboney’s Both/AND Pol­i­tics (Sarah Zyl­stra, The Gospel Coali­tion): “In 2015, Giboney, Bara­ka, and Angel Mal­don­a­do start­ed the AND Cam­paign, which aims to con­nect con­vic­tion and com­pas­sion. The orga­ni­za­tion sets out a plat­form you won’t find at either polit­i­cal convention—anti-abortion, pro-social safe­ty nets, pro-fam­i­ly, pro-crim­i­nal jus­tice reform. The point isn’t to endorse leg­is­la­tion or can­di­dates or judi­cial decisions—AND doesn’t do that—but to ‘bring Chris­tians of both par­ties togeth­er on those issues.’ The AND Cam­paign leans left, but has increas­ing­ly become a space for Chris­tians dis­sat­is­fied with both polit­i­cal parties.”
    • I have been fol­low­ing this move­ment with inter­est for some time and this is a good intro­duc­tion.
    • Relat­ed: Evan­gel­i­cal Biden Vot­ers Strad­dle Par­ti­san Divides(Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Pew Research Cen­ter recent­ly found few Amer­i­cans, Repub­li­cans or Democ­rats, have many close friends who sup­port a dif­fer­ent pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in the 2020 race. In reli­gious break­outs pro­vid­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty Today, evan­gel­i­cal Biden sup­port­ers emerged as the excep­tion. Just under half say their close friends dis­agree with them over the upcom­ing election.”
    • Relat­ed: Evan­gel­i­cal Vote Once Again Split on Eth­nic Lines (Aaron Earls, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “President Trump’s advan­tage among evan­gel­i­cals, how­ev­er, comes pri­mar­i­ly from white evan­gel­i­cals, among whom he leads Biden 73 per­cent to 18 per­cent. African Amer­i­cans with evan­gel­i­cal beliefs over­whelm­ing­ly plan to vote for Biden (69% to 19%). Among Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals of oth­er eth­nic­i­ties, how­ev­er, Trump has a 58 per­cent to 32 per­cent lead.”
  3. What is Pen­te­costal­ism? (Doug Clay, Assem­blies of God): “The mod­ern Pen­te­costal move­ment took its name from the moment of the Church’s birth on the Day of Pen­te­cost, as record­ed in Acts 2. Pen­te­costals and charis­mat­ics believe that the gifts of the Spir­it as described in the Bible are active today as the Holy Spir­it empow­ers Christ’s fol­low­ers. Researchers esti­mate this move­ment to now include 669 mil­lion peo­ple — or one in four Chris­tians glob­al­ly — mak­ing it the fastest-grow­ing move­ment in the his­to­ry of Christianity.”
    • The author is the Gen­er­al Super­in­ten­dent (top leader) in the Amer­i­can branch of the Assem­blies of God, the denom­i­na­tion with which I am ordained. We had lunch once in a cafe­te­ria. Nice guy.
  4. For Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Women, Amy Coney Barrett’s Suc­cess Is Per­son­al (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Judge Bar­rett, for them, is a new kind of icon — one they have not seen before in Amer­i­can cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal life: a woman who is both unabashed­ly ambi­tious and deeply reli­gious, who has excelled at the heights of a demand­ing pro­fes­sion even as she speaks open­ly about pri­or­i­tiz­ing her con­ser­v­a­tive Catholic faith and fam­i­ly. Judge Bar­rett has sev­en chil­dren, includ­ing two chil­dren adopt­ed from Haiti and a young son with Down syndrome.”
    • Amy Coney Bar­rett: A New Fem­i­nist Icon (Eri­ka Bachiochi, Politi­co): “Barrett embod­ies a new kind of fem­i­nism, a fem­i­nism that builds upon the praise­wor­thy antidis­crim­i­na­tion work of Gins­burg but then goes fur­ther. It insists not just on the equal rights of men and women, but also on their com­mon respon­si­bil­i­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the realm of fam­i­ly life. In this new fem­i­nism, sex­u­al equal­i­ty is found not in imi­tat­ing men’s capac­i­ty to walk away from an unex­pect­ed preg­nan­cy through abor­tion, but rather in ask­ing men to meet women at a high stan­dard of mutu­al respon­si­bil­i­ty, reci­procity and care.”
    • Amy Coney Bar­rett Deserves to Be on the Supreme Court (Noah Feld­man, Bloomberg): “I got to know Bar­rett more than 20 years ago when we clerked at the Supreme Court dur­ing the 1998–99 term. Of the thir­ty-some clerks that year, all of whom had grad­u­at­ed at the top of their law school class­es and done pres­ti­gious appel­late clerk­ships before com­ing to work at the court, Bar­rett stood out. Mea­sured sub­jec­tive­ly and unsci­en­tif­i­cal­ly by pure legal acu­men, she was one of the two strongest lawyers. The oth­er was Jen­ny Mar­tinez, now dean of the Stan­ford Law School.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law.
    • The Peo­ple of Praise, Charis­mat­ic Catholics, and Fringe Reli­gious Groups (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For peo­ple on the out­side, the charis­mat­ic and Pen­te­costal move­ments may seem odd. But glob­al­ly, some 600 mil­lion peo­ple are affil­i­at­ed with the charis­mat­ic and Pen­te­costal move­ment world­wide. This is not ‘remarkably out of the main­stream’ as one com­men­ta­tor indi­cat­ed. There are 80 mil­lion Angli­cans in the world, com­pared to 600 mil­lion Pen­te­costal / charis­mat­ic / third wave Chris­tians (and, yes, that includes many Anglicans).”
    • Amy Coney Bar­rett and the New Fem­i­nism of Inter­de­pen­dence (Ser­e­na Sig­illi­to, Newsweek): “It’s time for a new kind of fem­i­nism to emerge—and for GOP law­mak­ers to demon­strate that their com­mit­ment to fam­i­ly val­ues is more than just lip ser­vice. That will require two sig­nif­i­cant shifts. The first is a philo­soph­i­cal one, defin­ing a new fem­i­nism of inter­de­pen­dence rather than rad­i­cal auton­o­my. The sec­ond is a polit­i­cal one, pur­su­ing a pro-fam­i­ly eco­nom­ic agenda.”
  5. New Research Shows Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Dri­ves Human Flour­ish­ing – And Why This Mat­ters Now More Than Ever (Chris­tos Makridis, Real Clear Reli­gion): “…religious lib­er­ty is an inte­gral pre­req­ui­site for demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance, aid­ing the process for civic engage­ment and women’s empow­er­ment and reduc­ing the poten­tial for pub­lic and polit­i­cal corruption.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
  6. The Woke and the Un-Woke (Matthew Schmitz, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “In the 1950s, the soci­ol­o­gist Will Her­berg famous­ly described Amer­i­ca as divid­ed into three reli­gious camps: Protes­tant, Catholic, and Jew. These divi­sions were a mat­ter of belong­ing rather than belief. Even an unbe­liev­er would count as belong­ing to one of the three cat­e­gories on the basis of his back­ground and milieu. If a sim­i­lar study were con­duct­ed today, the pic­ture would be rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­en­t… Woke, Trad, and None.”
    • Is the Cul­ture War Lost? (Sarah Haider, Let­ter): “Nearly all our edu­ca­tion­al, media, and non-prof­it insti­tu­tions (includ­ing major grant-mak­ing orga­ni­za­tions) are advanc­ing in one direc­tion. Mean­while, the hearts and minds of the glob­al elite are almost uni­form­ly sup­port­ive of this new sec­u­lar faith.” The author
  7. Rod Dreher Is Not Pes­simistic Enough (Per­ry L. Glanz­er, The Gospel Coali­tion): “We will increas­ing­ly be tempt­ed to deny bits of Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy and ethics to keep our lev­el of com­fort. God save us and help us stand against that spread­ing evil.”
    • This is a review of Rod Dreher’s book Live Not By Lies (which was, inci­den­tal­ly, the num­ber one sell­er on Ama­zon when it was released). Dreher is one of the colum­nists who is often found in these emails. 

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 If Lib­er­als Won’t Enforce Bor­ders, Fas­cists Will (David Frum, The Atlantic): “Demagogues don’t rise by talk­ing about irrel­e­vant issues. Dem­a­gogues rise by talk­ing about issues that mat­ter to peo­ple, and that more con­ven­tion­al lead­ers appear unwill­ing or unable to address: unem­ploy­ment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immi­gra­tion now. Vot­ers get to decide what the country’s prob­lems are. Polit­i­cal elites have to devise solu­tions to those prob­lems. If dif­fi­cult issues go unad­dressed by respon­si­ble lead­ers, they will be exploit­ed by irre­spon­si­ble ones.” I high­light­ed a piece by Frum with a sim­i­lar theme back in issue 175. This is a very thought­ful arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 194.

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.