Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 247

Arti­cles rang­ing from how to share your faith dur­ing the pan­dem­ic to Amish health­care poli­cies to the lim­i­ta­tions of lock­downs. Enjoy!

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Amish Health Care Sys­tem (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by how many of today’s biggest eco­nom­ic prob­lems just mys­te­ri­ous­ly failed to exist in the past. Our grand­par­ents eas­i­ly paid for col­lege with sum­mer jobs, raised three or four kids on a sin­gle income, and bought hous­es in their 20s or 30s and nev­er wor­ried about rent or evic­tion again. And yes, they got med­ical care with­out health insur­ance, and avoid­ed the kind of med­ical bank­rupt­cies we see too fre­quent­ly today. How did this work so well? Are there ways to make it work today?”
    • I would say unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing except near­ly every­thing on Slate Star Codex is fas­ci­nat­ing; in fact, the more eso­teric the top­ic the bet­ter.
    • Fol­low-up: Employ­er Pro­vid­ed Health Insur­ance Delen­da Est (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Most of my patients have insur­ance; most of them are well-off; most of them are intel­li­gent enough that they should be able to nav­i­gate the bureau­cra­cy. Lis­ten to the usu­al debate around insur­ance, and you would expect them to be the win­ners of our sys­tem; the rich peo­ple who can turn their finan­cial advan­tage into bet­ter care. And yet bare­ly a day goes by with­out a reminder that it doesn’t work this way.”
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus News and Com­men­tary 
    • Amid Pan­dem­ic, Hong Kong Arrests Major Pro-Democ­ra­cy Fig­ures (Elaine Yu and Austin Ramzy, NY Times): “The virus has halt­ed protests around the world, forc­ing peo­ple to stay home and giv­ing the author­i­ties new laws for lim­it­ing pub­lic gath­er­ings and detain­ing peo­ple with less fear of pub­lic blow­back while many res­i­dents remained under lock­downs or observ­ing lim­its on their move­ment. But the arrests on Sat­ur­day in Hong Kong, along with a renewed push for nation­al secu­ri­ty leg­is­la­tion in the city, could anger pro­test­ers and rein­vig­o­rate mass demon­stra­tions that had tapered off.”
    • Lock­downs Don’t Work (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Lock­downs don’t work. These oth­er policies—travel restric­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its, cen­tral­ized quar­an­tine, mask require­ments, and school cancellations—do work. Because COVID is an extreme­ly severe dis­ease that, if left unchecked, will kill hun­dreds of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans, it is vital­ly impor­tant that pol­i­cy­mak­ers focus their efforts on poli­cies that do work (masks, cen­tral quar­an­tines, trav­el restric­tions, school can­cel­la­tions, large-assem­bly lim­its), and avoid imple­ment­ing dra­con­ian, unpop­u­lar poli­cies that don’t work (lock­downs).”
    • Lock­down Social­ism will col­lapse (Arnold Kling, per­son­al blog): “you can stay in your res­i­dence, but pay­ing rent or pay­ing your mort­gage is option­al…. you can obtain gro­ceries and shop on line, but hav­ing a job is option­al…. if you own a small busi­ness, you don’t need rev­enue, because the gov­ern­ment will keep send­ing checks.”
    • We Can’t Go on Like This Much Longer (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “…protests against our total shut­down, while puny now, will doubt­less grow. The psy­cho­log­i­cal dam­age — not count­ing the phys­i­cal toll — caused by this deeply unnat­ur­al way of life is going to inten­si­fy. We remain human beings, a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly social mam­mal, and we ori­ent our­selves in time, look­ing for­ward to the future. When that future has been sus­pend­ed, humans come undone.”
    • How not to say the wrong thing to health-care work­ers (Dorothy R. Novick, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…a per­son in any giv­en cir­cle should send love and com­pas­sion inward, to those in small­er cir­cles, and process per­son­al grief out­ward, to those in larg­er cir­cles…. Com­fort in, grief out.”
    • It’s Time To Build (Marc Andreesen, blog): “The things we build in huge quan­ti­ties, like com­put­ers and TVs, drop rapid­ly in price. The things we don’t, like hous­ing, schools, and hos­pi­tals, sky­rock­et in price. What’s the Amer­i­can dream? The oppor­tu­ni­ty to have a home of your own, and a fam­i­ly you can pro­vide for. We need to break the rapid­ly esca­lat­ing price curves for hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, and health­care, to make sure that every Amer­i­can can real­ize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.”
    • In response: Why We Can’t Build (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The insti­tu­tions through which Amer­i­cans build have become biased against action rather than toward it. They’ve become, in polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Fran­cis Fukuyama’s term, ‘vetoc­ra­cies,’ in which too many actors have veto rights over what gets built. That’s true in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. It’s true in state and local gov­ern­ments. It’s even true in the pri­vate sec­tor.”
    • How to Pro­tect Civ­il Lib­er­ties in a Pan­dem­ic (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “In emer­gen­cies, [the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the ACLU] reflect­ed in an inter­view ear­li­er this month, gov­ern­ment offi­cials jus­ti­fy new pow­ers by point­ing to the extra­or­di­nary chal­lenges of the moment. Yet long after the emer­gency pass­es, they tend to assert those very same pow­ers as if they are the new nor­mal…. ‘We are still lit­i­gat­ing pow­ers in 2020 that were adopt­ed in 2001.’”
  3. Chris­t­ian Coro­n­avirus News & Com­men­tary
    • COVID-19 Is Not God’s Judg­ment (Jim Deni­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…bib­li­cal judg­ments through dis­ease are super­nat­ur­al in ori­gin. When God sent ‘boils’ on Egypt, they broke out instant­ly ‘on man and beast’ through­out the land. The ‘pesti­lence’ of Rev­e­la­tion will come by one of the ‘four horse­men of the apoc­a­lypse,’ not a wet mar­ket in Wuhan. Every­thing sci­en­tists can tell us about COVID-19 is that the virus evolved from oth­er virus­es. It is nat­ur­al, not super­nat­ur­al.” 
    • If Liquor Stores Are Essen­tial, Why Isn’t Church? (Michael McConnel & Max Raskin, NY Times): “It is not for gov­ern­ment offi­cials to decide whether reli­gious wor­ship is essen­tial; the First Amend­ment already decid­ed that. The ques­tion is whether, and how, it may be con­duct­ed with­out undue risk to pub­lic health.” McConnell is a Stan­ford law prof.
    • Pan­dem­ic Evan­ge­lism: Spread­ing the Gospel, not the Virus (Peter Cush­man, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “Step 1: Fer­vent­ly Pray for the Lost… Step 2: Tell the Lost You’re Pray­ing for Them… Step 3a: Tell the Lost about Christ: Rec­og­niz­ing Oppor­tu­ni­ties.” This is a series of blog posts which is not yet fin­ished. The indi­vid­ual posts so far → step one, step two, step 3a.
    • Covid-19 has killed mul­ti­ple bish­ops and pas­tors with­in the nation’s largest black Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Church of God in Christ, the country’s biggest African Amer­i­can Pen­te­costal denom­i­na­tion, has tak­en a deep and painful lead­er­ship hit with reports of at least a dozen to up to 30 bish­ops and promi­nent cler­gy dying of covid-19…”
    • Under fire from many, Samaritan’s Purse finds an unlike­ly cham­pi­on (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “In the course of the past four weeks, Tilson, who is not reli­gious and had nev­er heard of Franklin Gra­ham, the con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian leader of Samaritan’s Purse, has become one of the field hospital’s most ded­i­cat­ed vol­un­teers and cham­pi­ons.”
  4. Is the World Ignor­ing a Chris­t­ian Geno­cide in Nige­ria? (Lela Gilbert, Prov­i­dence): “Those of us who track reli­gious free­dom vio­la­tions and Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion agree with those who increas­ing­ly speak of anoth­er geno­cide. Mur­der­ous inci­dents are act­ed out with accel­er­at­ing fre­quen­cy, per­pe­trat­ed pri­mar­i­ly by two ter­ror groups—Boko Haram and Fulani jihadis. Tens of thou­sands of Nige­ri­ans have been slaugh­tered in the last decade. But their sto­ries rarely appear in main­stream West­ern news reports.”
  5. Four arti­cles more par­ti­san than those I often share:
    • On the right: End the Glob­al­iza­tion Gravy Train (J.D Vance, The Amer­i­can Mind): “West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion was, in fact, built by figures—one in par­tic­u­lar whose res­ur­rec­tion we just celebrated—who rec­og­nized that mate­r­i­al con­sump­tion, while nec­es­sary and impor­tant, was hard­ly the only good worth pur­su­ing.” 
    • On the left: Study­ing Fas­cist Pro­pa­gan­da by Day, Watch­ing Trump’s Coro­n­avirus Updates by Night (Andrew Marantz, The New York­er): “[Yale pro­fes­sor Jason] Stan­ley isn’t, or isn’t main­ly, a schol­ar of pub­lic pol­i­cy; he is a philoso­pher of lan­guage. When he insin­u­ates that Trump is a fascist—and you don’t have to be a philoso­pher of lan­guage to catch the insinuation—he means that Trump talks like a fas­cist, not nec­es­sar­i­ly that he gov­erns like one.” Sent my way by a con­cerned alum­nus.
    • On the right: Evan­gel­i­cals Need More Prag­ma­tism and Less Moral­ism (Daniel Strand, Prov­i­dence): “Many evan­gel­i­cals have expressed their dis­il­lu­sion at both polit­i­cal par­ties because nei­ther seems to line up with their beliefs. Democ­rats seem antag­o­nis­tic to Chris­t­ian con­vic­tions, and Repub­li­cans ral­ly to defend and sup­port a pres­i­dent whose char­ac­ter would not exact­ly line up with Chris­t­ian stan­dards, let alone those of used car salesman—my apolo­gies to used car sales­men. To all this, I say good.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of ethics at the USAF Air War Col­lege.
    • On the left: We Are Liv­ing In A Failed State (George Pack­er, The Atlantic): “When the virus came here, it found a coun­try with seri­ous under­ly­ing con­di­tions, and it exploit­ed them ruth­less­ly. Chron­ic ills—a cor­rupt polit­i­cal class, a scle­rot­ic bureau­cra­cy, a heart­less econ­o­my, a divid­ed and dis­tract­ed public—had gone untreat­ed for years. We had learned to live, uncom­fort­ably, with the symp­toms. It took the scale and inti­ma­cy of a pan­dem­ic to expose their severity—to shock Amer­i­cans with the recog­ni­tion that we are in the high-risk cat­e­go­ry.”
  6. The Decline of the Jury (Peter Hitchens, First Things): “For with­out a jury, any tri­al is sim­ply a process by which the state reas­sures itself that it has got the right man. A group of state employ­ees, none of them espe­cial­ly dis­tin­guished, are asked to con­firm the views of oth­er state employ­ees. With a jury, the gov­ern­ment can­not know the out­come and must prove its case. And so the faint, phan­tas­mal ide­al of the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence takes on actu­al flesh and bones and stands in the path of pow­er.”

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 For an eye-open­ing (and dis­may­ing) expe­ri­ence, read What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic). (first shared back in vol­ume 5): “one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly intervene.”

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 246

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 Small World Net­work of Col­lege Class­es: Impli­ca­tions for Epi­dem­ic Spread on a Uni­ver­si­ty Cam­pus (Wee­den & Corn­well, pre­pub): “If one chose a giv­en stu­dent at ran­dom, that stu­dent is like­ly to attend class with a stu­dent who, in turn, attends class with any oth­er ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dent. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, although it is unlike­ly that any two ran­dom­ly cho­sen stu­dents would be enrolled in the same course, it is high­ly like­ly that they would be enrolled in dif­fer­ent cours­es that both include the same third party.“
    • The authors, pro­fes­sors at Cor­nell, were curi­ous about the poten­tial for dis­ease spread among under­grads at their school. Tak­ing this in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion: the aver­age stu­dent at Stan­ford is like­ly only one or two steps away from Chi Alpha. WOW! Invite your friends!
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus:
    • A Com­ic Strip Tour Of The Wild World Of Pan­dem­ic Mod­el­ing (Zach Wein­er­smith, Mag­gie Koerth, Lau­ra Bron­ner and Jas­mine Mithani, FiveThir­tyEight): dif­fi­cult to excerpt. It’s a com­ic strip.
    • Why can’t you go fish­ing dur­ing the pan­dem­ic? (Matthew Wal­ter, The Week): “Common sense is exact­ly what has been lack­ing through­out this pan­dem­ic. This has been true of near­ly every­one in a posi­tion of author­i­ty. Telling peo­ple that they can­not engage in ordi­nary, whole­some, total­ly risk-free activ­i­ties is not, as Whit­mer recent­ly put it, ‘the best science.’ It is not any kind of science.”
    • When Coro­n­avirus Lock­downs Go Too Far (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…officials micro­manag­ing out­door time and exer­cise — chivvy­ing peo­ple out of parks if they’re doing the wrong thing (read­ing qui­et­ly instead of exer­cis­ing, say) or clos­ing an entire state’s worth of parks, as New Jersey’s gov­er­nor chose to do last week — are crack­ing down on exact­ly the kind of cre­ative and adap­tive behav­iors that a social­ly dis­tanced soci­ety ought to be encouraging.”
    • When Will The Riots Begin? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “From the point of view of the non-elites, the elites with their mod­els and data and pro­jec­tions have shut the econ­o­my down. The news is full of pleas for New York, which always seemed like a sus­pi­cious den of urban inequity, but their home­town is doing fine. The church is closed, the bar is closed, the local plant is closed. Mon­ey is tight. Mean­while the elites are laugh­ing about bing­ing Tiger King on Netflix.”
    • What does this econ­o­mist think of epi­demi­ol­o­gists? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…I have a few rude ques­tions that nobody else seems will­ing to ask, and I gen­uine­ly do not know the answers to these: As a class of sci­en­tists, how much are epi­demi­ol­o­gists paid? Is good or bad news bet­ter for their salaries? How smart are they? What are their aver­age GRE scores? Are they hired into thick, liq­uid aca­d­e­m­ic and insti­tu­tion­al mar­kets? And how mer­i­to­crat­ic are those mar­kets? What is their over­all track record on pre­dic­tions, whether before or dur­ing this crisis?”
      1. A response: From my email, a note about epi­demi­ol­o­gy (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The quan­ti­ta­tive mod­el­ers are gen­er­al­ly much smarter than the peo­ple per­form­ing con­tact trac­ing or qual­i­ta­tive epi­demi­ol­o­gy stud­ies. How­ev­er, if I’m being com­plete­ly hon­est, their intel­li­gence is prob­a­bly low­er than the aver­age engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor – and cer­tain­ly below that of math­e­mati­cians and statisticians.”
      2. A response: A reply to Tyler Cown’s ques­tions on Epi­demi­ol­o­gy: (an anony­mous pro­fes­sor named Joseph, per­son­al blog): “Epidemiologists are typ­i­cal­ly paid above aver­age for aca­d­e­mics, because of their links to med­ical schools. Those in depart­ments of pub­lic health are shame­ful­ly under­paid. Since peo­ple want good news from them, there is some pres­sure to pro­duce good news and most of our scan­dals come from over-opti­mistic forecasts.” 
    • Sus­pend­ing WHO Fund­ing Should Be Just the Begin­ning (Lyman Stone, The Dis­patch): “…the WHO is sim­ply not the orga­ni­za­tion of doc­tors many peo­ple envi­sion. Of the 80 job list­ings cur­rent­ly on the WHO’s web­site, no more than four that I could iden­ti­fy apply to doc­tors at all. Even per­ma­nent career posi­tions on the inter­na­tion­al pro­fes­sion­al payscale usu­al­ly do not require more than a master’s degree in a health-relat­ed field. The WHO is cur­rent­ly hir­ing almost as many media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion staffers as it is epi­demi­o­log­i­cal staffers.”
    • Car­ta’s covid-19 lay­off (Hen­ry Ward, Medi­um): “It is impor­tant that all of you know I per­son­al­ly reviewed every list and every per­son. If you are one of those affect­ed it is because I decid­ed it. Your man­ag­er did not. For the major­i­ty of you it was quite the con­trary. Your man­ag­er fought to keep you and I over­rode them. They are blame­less. If today is your last day, there is only one per­son to blame and it is me.” This is super-classy.
    • The Black Plague (Keean­ga-Yamaht­ta Tay­lor, New York­er): “The old African-Amer­i­can apho­rism “When white Amer­i­ca catch­es a cold, black Amer­i­ca gets pneu­mo­ni­a” has a new, mor­bid twist: when white Amer­i­ca catch­es the nov­el coro­n­avirus, black Amer­i­cans die.”
    • A dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive: Do COVID-19 Racial Dis­par­i­ties Mat­ter? (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “In fact, blacks are more like­ly than whites to die of many diseases—not just this one. In oth­er cas­es, the reverse is true. Accord­ing to CDC mor­tal­i­ty data, whites are more like­ly than blacks to die of chron­ic low­er res­pi­ra­to­ry dis­ease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, liv­er dis­ease, and eight dif­fer­ent types of can­cer. The same think­ing that attrib­ut­es the racial dis­par­i­ty in COVID-19 deaths to sys­temic racism against blacks could be applied equal­ly to argue the exis­tence of sys­temic racism against whites.”
    • Wast­ed time: how San Fran­cis­co failed its home­less pop­u­la­tion amid coro­n­avirus (Vivian Ho, The Guardian): “…many not-for-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions that offered ser­vices to the unhoused were forced to close. Shel­ters that used to allow peo­ple to con­gre­gate dur­ing the day closed their doors. So did gyms with show­ers, busi­ness­es with pub­lic restrooms and even the pub­lic library, where the unhoused can stay dry from the rain.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Chris­tian­i­ty & Coro­n­avirus
    • The Coro­n­avirus and the Will of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Because we are not Jesus, it is a very bad idea to walk around telling strangers how their suf­fer­ing might dis­play the works of God. But as friends, we can par­tic­i­pate in oth­er­s’ dis­cern­ment and pat­tern-seek­ing, and we can try to dis­cern pur­pos­es in our own life — suf­fer­ing as pun­ish­ment, suf­fer­ing as refine­ment, suf­fer­ing as a judg­ment on a nation or soci­ety, suf­fer­ing as an oppor­tu­ni­ty, suf­fer­ing as part of a sto­ry not our own.”
    • Min­istry Lead­ers to ICE: Release Immi­grants and Let Church­es Help (Bekah McNeel, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This week, evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers from nine major orga­ni­za­tions wrote the Trump admin­is­tra­tion to urge offi­cials to release detained immi­grants dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly those who are elder­ly or at high­er risk for con­tract­ing COVID-19.”
    • A Q&A for church­es on gov­ern­ment restric­tions with a reli­gious lib­er­ty attor­ney: Nav­i­gat­ing the ten­sion between church and state dur­ing a pan­dem­ic (Jeff Pick­er­ing, The Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “Ultimately, church­es should approach reli­gious free­dom con­flicts the same way they approach COVID-19: not with fear of suf­fer­ing but with calm con­fi­dence in the good­ness of God. Nei­ther a glob­al pan­dem­ic nor a local bureau­crat can silence the gospel.”
    • Jus­tice Depart­ment takes church’s side in 1st Amend­ment suit (Colleen Long, Michael Bal­samo And Emi­ly Wag­ster Pet­tus, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “The Jus­tice Depart­ment took the rare step on Tues­day of weigh­ing in on the side of a Mis­sis­sip­pi Chris­t­ian church where local offi­cials had tried to stop Holy Week ser­vices broad­cast to con­gre­gants sit­ting in their cars in the park­ing lot.…. Attor­ney Ryan Tuck­er of the Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, which rep­re­sents the church, says there’s a Son­ic Dri­ve-In restau­rant about 200 yards (180 meters) from the church where patrons are still allowed to roll down their win­dows and talk.”
    • Promi­nent Vir­ginia pas­tor who said ‘God is larg­er than this dread­ed virus’ dies of covid-19 (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Earlier in the ser­mon, he said: ‘If I had to deliv­er my own eulo­gy, I’d say, ‘God is greater than any chal­lenge you and I face.’ That would be my epitaph.’”
  4. Athe­ists are the Most Polit­i­cal­ly Active Group in the Unit­ed States (Ryan P Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “At every lev­el on the edu­ca­tion spec­trum, athe­ists and agnos­tics are more polit­i­cal­ly active than Protes­tants or Catholics. More edu­ca­tion leads to high­er lev­els of polit­i­cal activ­i­ty among all reli­gious groups, but the rela­tion­ship is even stronger for athe­ists than oth­er groups. An athe­ist with a grad­u­ate degree par­tic­i­pat­ed in 2.1 polit­i­cal activ­i­ties in the last year. It was 1.8 activ­i­ties for agnos­tics. For Catholics and Protes­tants it’s between 1.3 and 1.4 activ­i­ties. That’s not a small difference.”
  5. The Trump cam­paign wants to win the votes of evan­gel­i­cals of col­or (Julie Zauzmer and Michelle Boorstein , Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Black and Lati­no evan­gel­i­cals] have con­ser­v­a­tive beliefs on social issues such as same-sex mar­riage, which they oppose at rates just slight­ly low­er than white evan­gel­i­cals, and to some extent abor­tion, which would put them in the Repub­li­can camp. But they also tend to favor more legal­ized immi­gra­tion, gov­ern­ment sen­si­tiv­i­ty toward racial jus­tice, and help for the poor, gen­er­al­ly push­ing them toward Demo­c­ra­t­ic candidates.”
  6. The bloody decade: think Amer­i­ca’s divid­ed now? Try the 1970s (William Rose­nau, Spec­ta­tor): “In 1974 alone, there were 2,044 bomb­ings in Amer­i­ca, with 24 peo­ple killed. Vio­lent extrem­ist groups dot­ted the polit­i­cal land­scape in a way they sim­ply do not today.”
  7. Bloomberg News Killed Inves­ti­ga­tion, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife (David Folken­flik. NPR): “Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an inves­ti­ga­tion into the wealth of Com­mu­nist Par­ty elites in Chi­na, fear­ful of reper­cus­sions by the Chi­nese government.The com­pa­ny suc­cess­ful­ly silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters qui­et, 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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” I was remind­ed of this by a con­ver­sa­tion with an alum­nus. The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

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 245

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. Some East­er thoughts:
    • God­for­sak­en For Us (Fred Sanders, The Scrip­to­ri­um Dai­ly): “The words of Jesus here make promi­nent the name God (Eli, Eli). Jesus cries the name of God human­ly from a human place. One rea­son he does [not call God Father], I think, is that what is being enact­ed here on the cross is the Divine-Human encounter over sin. The one who has tak­en the place of the sin­ner is being pun­ished by exile, pre­cise­ly as a human, pre­cise­ly by God. To put this in the back­ground and reach out instead for Father-Son lan­guage in the para­phrased telling of this sto­ry is to tac­it­ly accept the propo­si­tion that what is hap­pen­ing on the cross reveals more about the Trin­i­ty (God in him­self) than about the incar­na­tion (God meet­ing man) or the atone­ment (sin meet­ing justice).”
    • Christ Suf­fered for Our Sins, but He Did­n’t Go to Hell for Them (Brad East inter­view­ing Matthew Emer­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The biggest [mis­con­cep­tion about what hap­pened when Jesus died] is prob­a­bly the idea that Christ, dur­ing his descent, went to hell and was tor­ment­ed there.”
  2. Chris­tian­i­ty and Coro­n­avirus:
    • Uncer­tain­ty and the Chris­t­ian (Ephraim Rad­ner, First Things): “Uncertainty is at the cen­ter of the Chris­t­ian voca­tion. Uncer­tain­ty may not com­pre­hen­sive­ly describe that voca­tion, but it defines it in an essen­tial way. Many Chris­tians will and do reject this claim, I real­ize. ‘We know with cer­tain­ty all that is impor­tant to know!’ they will say. God is in con­trol; God is good; God rewards the faith­ful; Jesus is Lord, and in him death and sin are defeat­ed; the gates of Hell will not pre­vail against the church, and heav­en awaits us. These are indeed Big Pic­ture cer­tain­ties. But the Big Pic­ture isn’t all there is to God’s real­i­ty or to the Christian’s life. Small pic­tures are the bits that make up the Big Picture’s mosaic.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of his­tor­i­cal the­ol­o­gy at Wycliffe Col­lege in Cana­da.
    • Coro­n­avirus Search­es Lead Mil­lions to Hear About Jesus (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Millions of wor­ried peo­ple who have turned to Google with their anx­i­ety over COVID-19 have end­ed up con­nect­ing with Chris­t­ian evan­ge­lists in their search results—leading to a spike in online con­ver­sions in March.”
    • The Men and Women Who Run Toward the Dying (Bari Weiss, New York Times): “Before the plague hit, the pri­ma­ry job of hos­pi­tal chap­lains was tend­ing to patients and their fam­i­lies. Now the empha­sis has shift­ed to car­ing for their own colleagues.”
    • Charis­mat­ic Chris­tians who believe in the pow­er of faith heal­ings are try­ing them over the phone  (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘I pray for peo­ple on the phone, and there is no dif­fer­ence in the spir­it realm,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mat­ter if you’re touch­ing or not. It’s not about me, it’s about God and releas­ing his spir­it to take con­trol over the ele­ments of the body and speak life into them and to the disease.’”
    • Dur­ing the Coro­n­avirus Out­break, I Miss Singing at Church (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “We must embrace social dis­tanc­ing, for as long is as need­ed, to pro­tect our health care sys­tem and the very real, fleshy bod­ies of mil­lions of people.But we also need to col­lec­tive­ly notice that some­thing pro­found is lost by hav­ing to inter­act with the world and our neigh­bors in most­ly dis­em­bod­ied, dig­i­tal ways. This is some­thing to lament and to grieve. And like all grief, it expos­es the val­ue and glo­ry of the thing that was lost.”
  3. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus:
    • What Every­one’s Get­ting Wrong About the Toi­let Paper Short­age (Will Ore­mus, Medi­um): “In short, the toi­let paper indus­try is split into two, large­ly sep­a­rate mar­kets: com­mer­cial and con­sumer. The pan­dem­ic has shift­ed the lion’s share of demand to the lat­ter. Peo­ple actu­al­ly do need to buy sig­nif­i­cant­ly more toi­let paper dur­ing the pan­dem­ic — not because they’re mak­ing more trips to the bath­room, but because they’re mak­ing more of them at home. With some 75% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion under stay-at-home orders, Amer­i­cans are no longer using the restrooms at their work­place, in schools, at restau­rants, at hotels, or in airports.”
    • Even Now, Crim­i­nal Defen­dants Have Rights (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Consider a poor per­son arrest­ed on sus­pi­cion of drunk dri­ving. Nor­mal­ly he would be arraigned and receive a pub­lic defend­er with­in 48 hours of arrest. Now he could sit in jail for a week with­out an attor­ney before get­ting the oppor­tu­ni­ty to tell his side of things to a judge.”
    • Apple and Google will make track­ing tech­nol­o­gy to fight coro­n­avirus (Adam Clark Estes and Shirin Ghaf­fary, Vox): “Apple and Google plan to build con­tact-trac­ing func­tion­al­i­ty into the oper­at­ing sys­tems of the phones them­selves, which might sound a lit­tle tricky for folks who wor­ry about being tracked with­out their con­sent. As the New York Times points out, by build­ing the tool direct­ly into the oper­at­ing sys­tem, Apple and Google effec­tive­ly ensure that the con­tact-trac­ing sys­tem can run 24 hours a day, rather than only when a par­tic­u­lar app is open.”
      • How Pri­va­cy-Friend­ly Con­tact Trac­ing Can Help Stop the Spread of Covid-19 (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al blog): con­tains a com­ic that explains the idea very clear­ly.
      • Why Blue­tooth apps are bad at dis­cov­er­ing new cas­es of COVID-19 (Casey New­ton, The Verge): “‘If I am in the wide open, my Blue­tooth and your Blue­tooth might ping each oth­er even if you’re much more than six feet away,’ Mostashari said. ‘You could be through the wall from me in an apart­ment, and it could ping that we’re hav­ing a prox­im­i­ty event. You could be on a dif­fer­ent floor of the build­ing and it could ping. You could be bik­ing by me in the open air and it could ping.’” This is a pret­ty sol­id crit­i­cism.
    • In the Fog of Coro­n­avirus, There Are No Experts (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[In the movie ‘Contagion’] only insti­tu­tions can be trust­ed; out­sider ‘knowledge’ leads only to the grave. That’s the movie; the real­i­ty has been oth­er­wise. In our actu­al pan­dem­ic, most of the insti­tu­tions that we asso­ciate with pub­lic health exper­tise and trust­ed med­ical author­i­ty have failed more cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly than Trump has.”
    • I’m Con­cerned About “US”: A Black Doc­tor’s Plea for Racial COVID19 Data (Rebekah Fen­ton, Medi­um): “I noticed a trend among the obit­u­ar­ies I read. They fea­ture high num­bers of Black peo­ple. They look like me, like my family’s friend. A fam­i­ly in Chica­go has lost two sis­ters, Patri­cia and Wan­da Frieson, to coro­n­avirus at 61 and 63. Arnold Obey, an avid marathon run­ner and retired prin­ci­pal in New York, died at 73. But the ages of Black and brown vic­tims were also low­er than I expect­ed. Dez-Ann Romain at 36. Dave Edwards at 48. Kious Kel­ly, an assis­tant nurse man­ag­er, at 48.” Rebekah is an alum­na of Chi Alpha.
    • Flat­ten The Curve (Ohio Depart­ment of Health, YouTube): thir­ty well-done sec­onds
  4. S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay.
  5. The Sit­u­a­tion With Vik­tor Orban (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I count myself an admir­er of many of the things Vik­tor Orban has done, espe­cial­ly his moves to pro­tect Hun­gar­i­an sov­er­eign­ty, the par­tic­u­lar­i­ty of its cul­ture, and to resist migra­tion being forced upon Hun­gary. This does not mean I sup­port every­thing he does — I hon­est­ly don’t fol­low Orban close­ly enough to have an informed opin­ion — but I think on bal­ance, he has been good for Hun­gary, and for Europe. I would have a lot more con­fi­dence for the future were I liv­ing in a coun­try gov­erned by Vik­tor Orban than by Angela Merkel.” I don’t know why I find this sub­ject so fas­ci­nat­ing. Maybe it’s just because Dreher does and I love read­ing his writ­ing.

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 Let­ter To My Younger Self (Ryan Leaf, The Player’s Tri­bune): “Congratulations. You offi­cial­ly have it all — mon­ey, pow­er and pres­tige. All the things that are impor­tant, right?… That’s you, young Ryan Leaf, at his absolute finest: arro­gant, boor­ish and nar­cis­sis­tic. You think you’re on top of the world and that you’ve got all the answers. Well I’m sor­ry to have to tell you this, but the truth is….” Such a grip­ping let­ter. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. (first shared in vol­ume 99)

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 244

The­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tives on the pan­dem­ic, some inter­est­ing news tid­bits, the state of Stan­ford ath­let­ic fan­dom, and a good reminder that Mor­monism is not a Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tion.

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. Chris­t­ian Coro­n­avirus Per­spec­tives
    • Chris­tian­i­ty Offers No Answers About the Coro­n­avirus (N.T. Wright, Time): “Supposing real human wis­dom doesn’t mean being able to string togeth­er some dodgy spec­u­la­tions and say, ‘So that’s all right then?’ What if, after all, there are moments such as T. S. Eliot rec­og­nized in the ear­ly 1940s, when the only advice is to wait with­out hope, because we’d be hop­ing for the wrong thing? Ratio­nal­ists (includ­ing Chris­t­ian ratio­nal­ists) want expla­na­tions; Roman­tics (includ­ing Chris­t­ian roman­tics) want to be giv­en a sigh of relief. But per­haps what we need more than either is to recov­er the bib­li­cal tra­di­tion of lament.”
      • Please remem­ber that authors do not usu­al­ly pick the head­lines for their arti­cles. In this case espe­cial­ly the lev­el of mis­match between the title and the arti­cle is strik­ing.
    • Sur­prised by Hope­less­ness: A Response to NT Wright (Andy Davis, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Despite what T. S. Eliot says, Chris­tians know exact­ly what to hope for. We’ve been clear­ly instruct­ed by God’s prophet­ic Word, and there­fore, we should be radi­ant with hope—an unshak­able con­vic­tion that the future is inde­scrib­ably bright. The world is ‘with­out hope and with­out God’ (Eph. 2:14); so when Chris­tians radi­ate hope, the world notices and is moved to ask us to give a rea­son for the hope with­in us (1 Pet. 3:15).”
    • Like the Mer­chants of Baby­lon (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “The Bible tells us that God’s deal­ings with mankind are often mys­te­ri­ous, and so we should nev­er rush to glib expla­na­tions. But His works are not absolute­ly inscrutable. When Jesus rebuked the peo­ple for mis­read­ing the col­lapse of the tow­er of Siloam, and for the inci­dent where Pilate killed the men of Galilee (Luke 13:1–5), He rebuked them, not for read­ing mean­ing into the sto­ry, but for hav­ing read the wrong mean­ing into the story.”
    • How An Evil Virus Points to the Crush­ing Weight of the Fall (David French, The Dis­patch): “Last night, my wife and I were walk­ing through our neigh­bor­hood and saw a pas­tor friend in his back­yard. We stopped him and had a love­ly con­ver­sa­tion while main­tain­ing prop­er social dis­tanc­ing from the side­walk. As we shared our own bur­dens and stress­es, he made an impor­tant obser­va­tion – this moment demon­strates so clear­ly our need for a sav­ior. By that, he meant far, far more than the idea that we need some of that ‘old-time reli­gion’ before we meet our mak­er. No, he meant that a bro­ken world eager­ly awaits the redemp­tion declared in Rev­e­la­tions 21, when the Lord declares, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’”
    • The Book of Com­mon Prayer: Prayers for Plagues and Times of Great Sick­ness (Richard Beck, per­son­al blog): “Have pity upon us mis­er­able sin­ners, who now are vis­it­ed with great sick­ness and mor­tal­i­ty; that like as thou didst then accept of an atone­ment, and didst com­mand the destroy­ing Angel to cease from pun­ish­ing, so it may now please thee to with­draw from us this plague and griev­ous sick­ness; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
    • The Apoc­a­lypse as an ‘Unveiling’: What Reli­gion Teach­es Us About the End Times (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “For peo­ple of many faiths, and even none at all, it can feel late­ly like the end of the world is near. Not only is there a plague, but hun­dreds of bil­lions of locusts are swarm­ing East Africa. Wild­fires have rav­aged Aus­tralia, killing an untold num­ber of ani­mals. A recent earth­quake in Utah even shook the Salt Lake Tem­ple to the top of its icon­ic spire, caus­ing the gold­en trum­pet to fall from the angel Moroni’s right hand.”
  2. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus Com­men­tary
    • Tips from some­one with 50 years of social dis­tanc­ing expe­ri­ence (Rae Ellen Bichell, Min­neso­ta Pub­lic Radio): “Keep track of some­thing…. In the era of COVID-19, he sug­gests track­ing what you can — or can’t — find at the gro­cery store. Or, bet­ter yet, par­tic­i­pat­ing in some cit­i­zen sci­ence, like a project called CoCo­RaHS that tracks rain­fall across the country.”
    • It’s Time to Face Facts, Amer­i­ca: Masks Work (Fer­ris Jabr, Wired): “The col­lec­tive evi­dence makes a strong case for uni­ver­sal mask wear­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic. Masks are not a sub­sti­tute for oth­er inter­ven­tions; they must always be used in com­bi­na­tion with social dis­tanc­ing and hand hygiene.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. 
    • The Coro­n­avirus and the Con­ser­v­a­tive Mind (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the sup­posed con­ser­v­a­tive mind is more attuned to exter­nal threat and inter­nal con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, more inclined to sup­port author­i­ty and hier­ar­chy, and fear sub­ver­sion and dis­sent. And so the polit­i­cal respons­es to the pan­dem­ic have put these psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ries to a very inter­est­ing test.” This is an angle that nev­er would have occurred to me but which is obvi­ous­ly worth explor­ing. 
    • Coro­n­avirus maps and charts show COVID-19 symp­toms, spread, death rate (Busi­ness Insid­er): “These 22 charts and graph­ics lay out what you need to know as the out­break con­tin­ues to progress.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. This is only mar­gin­al­ly about the coro­n­avirus: An inside look at the hos­pi­tal going up in Cen­tral Park (Tony Carnes, A Jour­ney Through NYC Reli­gions): “The heart of Cen­tral Park is Bethes­da Foun­tain, which was built to com­mem­o­rate the heal­ing pow­er of Jesus at the Pool of Bethes­da in Israel. Fred­er­ic Law Olm­st­ed, the park’s design­er, hoped that the park would pro­vide spir­i­tu­al refresh­ment to urban mass­es from their tra­vails. Now, a Chris­t­ian min­istry is real­iz­ing the sym­bol­ism in the 21st Cen­tu­ry by erect­ing a crit­i­cal care hos­pi­tal at the park’s 97th Street Trans­verse and Fifth Avenue…. Samaritan’s Purse med­ical per­son­nel use the twen­ty sec­onds while they wash their hands to pray for each of their patients by name. It is fit­ting that they do that at their present location.”
    • What a heart­warm­ing sto­ry. Who could be opposed?
    • Oh, wait. De Bla­sio “Very Con­cerned” About Anti-Gay Evan­gel­i­cal Group Run­ning Cen­tral Park Coro­n­avirus Hos­pi­tal (Jake Offen­hartz, The Gothamist): “Mayor Bill de Bla­sio said the city will keep a close eye on the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ist group oper­at­ing a field hos­pi­tal in Cen­tral Park, amid grow­ing fears that some New York­ers could face dis­crim­i­na­tion and sub­stan­dard care from the reli­gious organization.”
    • And New York­ers Are Right to Be Skep­ti­cal of Evan­gel­i­cal-Run Coro­n­avirus Ward in Cen­tral Park (Jonathan Mer­rit, The Dai­ly Beast): “The vast major­i­ty of New York­ers are not Chris­t­ian, and if they find them­selves wheez­ing for air due to COVID-19, they don’t want to be pros­e­ly­tized while receiv­ing treat­ment. They too have rea­son to be skep­ti­cal of the organization’s makeshift hospital.” 
    • Some amus­ing com­ments I saw in response, “I think they’re actu­al­ly afraid that the vol­un­teers will give away Chick-Fil‑A sand­wich­es” and “If the may­or had been as con­cerned about the coro­n­avirus as he is about the Chris­tians then New York would look very dif­fer­ent today.” Ouch.
  4. Dona­tions: From Bribery to Benev­o­lence (Jas­mine Ker­ber, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “A spec­trum exists between bribery and benev­o­lence, and dona­tions fall in var­i­ous places along that con­tin­u­um. Oper­a­tion Var­si­ty Blues high­light­ed the most cor­rupt ‘dona­tions’; for­mer Stan­ford sail­ing coach John Van­de­mo­er plead­ed guilty to accept­ing a bribe, not an altru­is­tic con­tri­bu­tion to athletics.” Jas­mine is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
    • I shared an arti­cle that dis­cussed phil­an­thropy from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive back in vol­ume 213.
  5. At least the seats are red: Why is Stan­ford Sta­di­um often emp­ty? (Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As nation­al Heis­man vot­ers did not vote for Chris­t­ian McCaf­frey ’18 because they could not both­er to watch his games, Stan­ford stu­dents would not bike over to Stan­ford Sta­di­um for [his] games. ‘I will nev­er for­get this,’ McCaf­frey told The Ath­let­ic. ‘My sopho­more year against UCLA, I had a heck of a game. I biked back to my dorm, I’m kind of on a high horse. I walk in, and six or sev­en peo­ple asked where I was! I think I had some­thing like 243 yards rush­ing, four touch­downs. And they didn’t know where I was!’”
  6. 3 Types of Skep­tics (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “1. Those who need answer­s…. 2. Those who don’t like the answer­s…. 3. Those who need healing.”
  7. Are Mor­mons Chris­tians?: A Review of “The Saints of Zion: An Intro­duc­tion to Mor­mon The­ol­o­gy” (Tim Miller, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “He makes clear that Mor­mons are not Chris­tians, but does so by point­ing out that this has been the claim of the Mor­mon church itself through­out his­to­ry (despite recent attempts to argue differently).”

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 Book Review: See­ing Like A State (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Peasants didn’t like per­ma­nent sur­names. Their own sys­tem was quite rea­son­able for them: John the bak­er was John Bak­er, John the black­smith was John Smith, John who lived under the hill was John Under­hill, John who was real­ly short was John Short. The same per­son might be John Smith and John Under­hill in dif­fer­ent con­texts, where his sta­tus as a black­smith or place of ori­gin was more impor­tant. But the gov­ern­ment insist­ed on giv­ing every­one a sin­gle per­ma­nent name, unique for the vil­lage, and track­ing who was in the same fam­i­ly as whom. Resis­tance was intense.” This is long and amaz­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 95)

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 243

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. Recov­er­ing Friend­ship (Devo­rah Gold­man, Pub­lic Dis­course): “And then you go at it, ham­mer and tongs, far into the night, night after night; or walk­ing through fine coun­try that nei­ther gives a glance to, each learn­ing the weight of the other’s punch­es, and often more like mutu­al­ly respect­ful ene­mies than friends. Actu­al­ly (though it nev­er seems so at the time) you mod­i­fy one another’s thought; out of this per­pet­u­al dog­fight a com­mu­ni­ty of mind and a deep affec­tion emerge.”
  2. In God We Divide (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “The more reli­gious­ly engaged a white vot­er is, the more like­ly he or she will be a Repub­li­can; the less reli­gious the vot­er, the more like­ly to be a Demo­c­rat. But, as we shall see it’s not that sim­ple: The deep­er you go, the more com­plex it gets.”
    • Note the adjec­tive “white” in the first sen­tence — almost all dis­cus­sion about the pol­i­tics of reli­gious peo­ple focus­es on white vot­ers. The piece lat­er acknowl­edges vot­ers of col­or but doesn’t explore how their faith influ­ences their votes. Instead non-white evan­gel­i­cals are usu­al­ly treat­ed as though faith is irrel­e­vant to their polit­i­cal views, which is absurd. All that to say: the arti­cle has inter­est­ing insights but bear in mind its crip­pling lim­i­ta­tion.
  3. Is Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal in Israel Myth? Or Real­i­ty? (Ralph Hawkins, Logos): “When I was work­ing on my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion about the Ebal site, I spent a week with Zer­tal. One morn­ing while we were dri­ving to the site, he told me his crit­ics had accused him of try­ing to prove the Bible. They said he imposed a cul­tic inter­pre­ta­tion onto the stone struc­ture he had found. He explained, though, that he had been born and raised in Ein She­mer, Israeli kib­butz that was affil­i­at­ed with a sec­u­lar move­ment. He said he had grown up believ­ing that the Bible was full of myths. When he did his grad­u­ate work in archae­ol­o­gy, he did it at Tel Aviv, the most lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, where those views were rein­forced. He insist­ed he had not embarked on his exca­va­tion at Mount Ebal in order to prove the Bible. What he found there, how­ev­er, had a pro­found effect on him. He said, ‘I became a believ­er at Mount Ebal.’”
    • I love sto­ries like this. Archae­ol­o­gy and the Bible is fas­ci­nat­ing to me.
  4. Chris­tian­i­ty & Coro­n­avirus
    • When Coro­na Makes Us More Like The New Tes­ta­ment (Andrew Wil­son, Think The­ol­o­gy): “In a num­ber of curi­ous ways, the Coro­n­avirus out­break is mak­ing us more like the New Tes­ta­ment church.” See also Sam Allberry’s Twit­ter thread about God’s Pur­pos­es In Pan­dem­ic. It reminds me of Num­bers 11:18–20.
    • Coro­n­avirus, Courage, and the Sec­ond Temp­ta­tion of Christ (David French, The Dis­patch): “Shun per­for­ma­tive reck­less­ness. Do not pre­sume that our faith makes us immune to the laws of biol­o­gy and viral trans­mis­sion. At the same time, believ­ers should not shrink from pur­pose­ful and sac­ri­fi­cial per­son­al risk. There may come a time when you must care for those who are sick. Do so with­out reser­va­tion, but do so pru­dent­ly with the knowl­edge that you should not impute your risks to others.”
    • Can­celed Mis­sion Trips Expect­ed to Have Long-Term Fall­out (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Approximately 20 per­cent of all US-based inter­na­tion­al mis­sion work each year is done by short-term vol­un­teers, accord­ing to an analy­sis by soci­ol­o­gist of reli­gion Robert Wuth­now. That trans­lates to 1.6 mil­lion US church mem­bers annu­al­ly going on inter­na­tion­al mis­sion trips and doing work val­ued at $1.1 bil­lion (not count­ing prepa­ra­tion time and trav­el days).”
    • Church as a Non-Essen­tial Ser­vice (Matthew Schmitz, First Things): “Judg­ing by the response of many reli­gious lead­ers, church is a non-essen­tial ser­vice. We are capa­ble of tak­ing pru­dent mea­sures to keep our super­mar­kets open, but not our sanc­tu­ar­ies. Coro­n­avirus has shown what we val­ue. In Penn­syl­va­nia, beer dis­trib­u­tors are deemed essen­tial. In San Fran­cis­co and New York, cannabis dis­pen­saries are.” This is actu­al­ly a con­tri­bu­tion to an online dust­up but I find it more inter­est­ing than the dis­pute itself.
    • Dig­i­tal Com­mu­nion: His­to­ry, The­ol­o­gy, and Prac­tices (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “A few weeks ago, I post­ed a graph­ic that attempts to show that the ele­ments of a ser­vice that are trans­ac­tion­al or broad­cast ori­ent­ed are usu­al­ly the eas­i­est to move online, but the rela­tion­al parts of church are often the most challenging—and most overlooked—elements of dig­i­tal church.”
    • In Leviti­cus, an unex­pect­ed les­son in sur­viv­ing quar­an­tine (Rachel Sha­ran­sky Danziger, For­ward): “Before, I could nev­er under­stand why we should learn in so much detail about every lit­tle rit­u­al in the Taber­na­cle, and who does what, and when. Now, as I work hard to make our new­ly claus­tro­pho­bic home into a place of calm and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, I under­stand the book’s insis­tence on such details.” A Jew­ish per­spec­tive.
  5. Gen­er­al Coro­n­avirus Com­men­tary
    • That Dis­com­fort You’re Feel­ing Is Grief (Scott Beri­na­to, Har­vard Busi­ness Review): “There is some­thing pow­er­ful about nam­ing this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, ‘I’m telling my cowork­ers I’m hav­ing a hard time,’ or ‘I cried last night.’ When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emo­tions need motion. It’s impor­tant we acknowl­edge what we go through.”
      • Pas­toral aside: this is (some of) you. Paula and I have both talked to peo­ple who have been mourn­ing with­out real­iz­ing what they were doing. You are griev­ing. A few days ago I uploaded a two-minute video reflect­ing on Psalm 137:1 which touch­es on this.
    • Leisure in a Time of Coro­n­avirus (Nathan Schlueter, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Schools are closed. Sports and music lessons are can­celled. Every­one is at home. What are you going to do? Instead of allow­ing coro­n­avirus con­trol your life, why not plan for leisure? Use this time to do the things you are always wish­ing you had the time to do—or do bet­ter. Now you have that time, so do those things.”
    • Face Masks: Much More Than You Want­ed To Know (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Some peo­ple with swine flu trav­elled on a plane from New York to Chi­na, and many fel­low pas­sen­gers got infect­ed. Some researchers looked at whether pas­sen­gers who wore masks through­out the flight stayed health­i­er. The answer was very much yes. They were able to track down 9 peo­ple who got sick on the flight and 32 who didn’t. 0% of the sick pas­sen­gers wore masks, com­pared to 47% of the healthy pas­sen­gers. Anoth­er way to look at that is that 0% of mask-wear­ers got sick, but 35% of non-wear­ers did. This was a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence, and of obvi­ous applic­a­bil­i­ty to the cur­rent question.”
    • The Fog of Pan­dem­ic (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “The U.S. is fight­ing a war with extreme uncer­tain­ties. It may be weeks before we know whether we are flat­ten­ing the coro­n­avirus curve, and months before we know what kind of econ­o­my we’ll have in the sec­ond half of this year.”
    • When can we let up? Explor­ing how to relax coro­n­avirus lock­downs (Stat News): “The approach get­ting the most sup­port is one that experts have long doubt­ed could work with a res­pi­ra­to­ry virus: aggres­sive case find­ing, con­tact trac­ing, com­mu­ni­ty sur­veil­lance, iso­la­tion of cas­es, and quar­an­ti­ning of con­tacts. Both Sin­ga­pore and South Korea used that, allow­ing them to make tac­ti­cal deci­sions about schools (most­ly open in both coun­tries) and pub­lic move­ment, spar­ing them from shut­ting down to the extent that the U.S. and many coun­tries in Europe have.”
    • Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic: We Need the Skep­tics (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “When a bad thing hap­pens to a good per­son, we are tempt­ed to rage at God. When innu­mer­able bad things hap­pen to half of every­one we know, we rage at each other.”
    • On Coro­n­avirus, Rea­son To Hope (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): This week we saw FDA approval of new test­ing sys­tems from Roche and from Abbott labs that run tests ten times faster than cur­rent meth­ods. To give you an idea of what this means, Roche brags that their Cobas 8800 machine can process over 3000 tests per day. Until today, Louisiana hadn’t had a total of 3000 peo­ple test­ed. Roche is now mak­ing and ship­ping 400,000 test kits per week in the US, while Abbott is mak­ing a mil­lion of their test kits each week. Those sys­tems will be com­ing online this com­ing week…. And there are more com­pa­nies in the process of get­ting approval. In two weeks, we should be able to test 150,000 – 200,000 Amer­i­cans dai­ly, and that means that we don’t all need to stay home anymore.”
      • You can see the num­ber of tests admin­is­tered so far at The COVID Track­ing Project — this is one of the best indi­ca­tors to keep an eye on because it deter­mines the reli­a­bil­i­ty of every oth­er sta­tis­tic.
    • The World After Coro­n­avirus (Yuval Noah Harari, Finan­cial Times): “But tem­po­rary mea­sures have a nasty habit of out­last­ing emer­gen­cies, espe­cial­ly as there is always a new emer­gency lurk­ing on the hori­zon. My home coun­try of Israel, for exam­ple, declared a state of emer­gency dur­ing its 1948 War of Inde­pen­dence, which jus­ti­fied a range of tem­po­rary mea­sures from press cen­sor­ship and land con­fis­ca­tion to spe­cial reg­u­la­tions for mak­ing pud­ding (I kid you not). The War of Inde­pen­dence has long been won, but Israel nev­er declared the emer­gency over, and has failed to abol­ish many of the ‘temporary’ mea­sures of 1948 (the emer­gency pud­ding decree was mer­ci­ful­ly abol­ished in 2011).”
    • Safe­ty Pro­to­cols and Zones of Quar­an­tine (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In oth­er words, this part of the virus response should tran­si­tion to a health and safe­ty reg­u­la­to­ry con­cern that is impor­tant, but han­dled like most of the oth­ers. For exam­ple, poor food hygiene can also kill you, but gov­ern­ments gen­er­al­ly don’t respond by decid­ing which cuisines are essen­tial and which are not. Rather, any­one will­ing to fol­low the safe­ty rules can put up any menu they want. So it should be for eco­nom­ic activ­i­ties of all kinds.”

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 Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” First shared in vol­ume 150. 

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 242

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.

A lot of links this week. Can you tell I’m on lock­down in the Bay Area? Since some of you are, too, you’ll have time to read them! 😂

Kid­ding aside, I nev­er assume any­one reads all of these. Skim the links and open the ones that inter­est you in new tabs, but be sure to open all the amus­ing stuff at the end — you need it.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pan­dem­ic Visu­al­iz­ers:
  2. Chris­t­ian Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives:
    • The Emo­tion­al Impact Of Cam­pus Clo­sures (Michele Phoenix, per­son­al blog): “There are few things in life as pre­dictable as one’s col­lege tra­jec­to­ry. From the dread­ed fresh­man-fif­teen to changes in aca­d­e­m­ic majors or find­ing out last minute that you’re two cred­its short… It all plays out accord­ing to an estab­lished time­line. Then comes a virus that upends every­thing and predictability—one of the pri­ma­ry sta­bi­liz­ing fac­tors of our lives—suddenly morphs into a whirl­wind of shift­ing unknowns.”
      • Relat­ed: Unfin­ished nar­ra­tives (Jes­si­ca de la Paz, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Everyday there’s anoth­er email, and with every email anoth­er string of hope we wear hang­ing around our necks is yanked off, and we’re left with a red impres­sion of where it once was. My immi­grant par­ents who fought tooth and nail for me and my broth­ers won’t get to see me walk across the stage to get my diplo­ma. There will be no pho­tos or laugh­ter-filled reception.” Jes­si­ca is a Chi Alpha stu­dent. She is also quot­ed in this Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle: To Fight Coro­n­avirus, Col­leges Sent Stu­dents Home. Now Will They Refund Tuition?
    • In Coro­n­avirus Pan­dem­ic, Chris­tian­i­ty Has Ancient Lessons (Lyman Stone, For­eign Pol­i­cy): “The mod­ern world has sud­den­ly become reac­quaint­ed with the old­est trav­el­ing com­pan­ion of human his­to­ry: exis­ten­tial dread and the fear of unavoid­able, inscrutable death. No vac­cine or antibi­ot­ic will save us for the time being. Because this expe­ri­ence has become for­eign to mod­ern peo­ple, we are, by and large, psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly under­equipped for the cur­rent coro­n­avirus pandemic.” Side note: I have very much enjoyed the author on Twit­ter.
    • Respond­ing to Pan­demics: 4 Lessons from Church His­to­ry (Glen Scriven­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “Plagues inten­si­fy the nat­ur­al course of life. They inten­si­fy our own sense of mor­tal­i­ty and frailty. They also inten­si­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties to dis­play coun­ter­cul­tur­al, coun­ter­con­di­tion­al love. The church rose to the chal­lenge in the sec­ond cen­tu­ry, win­ning both admir­ers and also converts.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. A longer ver­sion is avail­able as a 45 minute YouTube video (which, full con­fes­sion, I have not watched). 
    • The­o­log­i­cal Reflec­tions on the Pan­dem­ic (Bri­an Tabb, Gospel Coali­tion): “All people—rich and poor, young and old, reli­gious and non-religious—are sus­cep­ti­ble to sick­ness and are cer­tain to die one day. Yet for fol­low­ers of Jesus, sick­ness tests our faith, reveals our hope, and moves us to be zeal­ous for good works.”
    • Plague and Prov­i­dence: What Huldrych Zwingli Taught Me About Trust­ing God (Stephen Ecch­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “I first came across Huldrych Zwingli’s ‘Plague Song’ while study­ing the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews: ‘Help, Lord God, help in this trou­ble! I think death is at the door. Stand before me, Christ, for you have over­come him.’”
    • Does Reli­gion Impact What Peo­ple Are Afraid Of? (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “Among Protes­tants who nev­er attend church, their total num­ber of fears is no dif­fer­ent than Catholics at just about six­teen. How­ev­er, as a Protes­tant increas­es their fre­quen­cy of wor­ship atten­dance their total num­ber of fears begins to decline. Among Protes­tants who attend more than once a week, the mod­el pre­dicts just 11.5 fears – which is sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant from both low attend­ing Protes­tants and all Catholics.”
    • This is not the end of the world, accord­ing to Chris­tians who study the end of the world (Julie Zauzmer and Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Could this be a sign of the apoc­a­lypse? It sure might feel apoc­a­lyp­tic. But not if you ask Chris­t­ian writ­ers and pas­tors who have spent years focus­ing their mes­sage on the Book of Rev­e­la­tion — the New Testament’s final book.”
  3. Gen­er­al Pan­dem­ic Think­pieces:
    • Buzz Aldrin has some advice for Amer­i­cans in quar­an­tine (Eric Berg­er, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “Buzz Aldrin knows a thing or two about quar­an­tines. After return­ing from the Moon in 1969, Aldrin, Neil Arm­strong, and Michael Collins spent 21 days in quar­an­tine to pre­vent the spread of any con­ta­gions they might have brought back from the lunar surface.” Very short. Mild­ly amus­ing.
    • NIH Direc­tor: ‘We’re on an Expo­nen­tial Curve’ (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “When I asked him how he sees faith now, in his late 60s, com­pared with how he saw things in his late 20s, he told me, ‘I think I’ve also arrived at a place where my faith has become a real­ly strong sup­port for deal­ing with life’s strug­gles. It took me awhile, I think—that sense that God is suf­fi­cient and that I don’t have to be strong in every circumstance.’” Fran­cis Collins is a sol­id believ­er who we co-host­ed to speak at Stan­ford around a decade ago. Good inter­view. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
    • A fias­co in the mak­ing? As the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic takes hold, we are mak­ing deci­sions with­out reli­able data (John Ioan­ni­dis, Stat News): “The most valu­able piece of infor­ma­tion for answer­ing those ques­tions would be to know the cur­rent preva­lence of the infec­tion in a ran­dom sam­ple of a pop­u­la­tion and to repeat this exer­cise at reg­u­lar time inter­vals to esti­mate the inci­dence of new infec­tions. Sad­ly, that’s infor­ma­tion we don’t have.” The author is a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine, of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and pop­u­la­tion health, of bio­med­ical data sci­ence, and of sta­tis­tics.
    • Chi­na Is Avoid­ing Blame by Trolling the World (Sha­di Hamid, The Atlantic): “A gov­ern­ment is not a race. It’s a regime—and eas­i­ly one of the worst and most bru­tal in our life­time. Crit­i­ciz­ing author­i­tar­i­an regimes for what they do out­side their own bor­ders and to their own peo­ple is sim­ply call­ing things as they are. To do oth­er­wise is to for­go analy­sis and accu­ra­cy in the name of assuag­ing a regime that deserves no such consideration.”
      • Relat­ed: Don’t blame ‘China’ for the coro­n­avirus — blame the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (Josh Rogin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Let’s stop say­ing ‘Chinese virus’ — not because every­one who uses it is racist, but because it need­less­ly plays into the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s attempts to divide us and deflect our atten­tion from their bad actions. Let’s just call it the ‘CCP virus.’ That’s more accu­rate and offends only those who deserve it.”
    • “Dishonesty…Is Always an Indi­ca­tor of Weak­ness”: Tuck­er Carl­son on How He Brought His Coro­n­avirus Mes­sage to Mar-a-Lago (Joe Hagan, Van­i­ty Fair): “I felt I had a moral oblig­a­tion to be use­ful in what­ev­er small way I could, and, you know, I don’t have any actu­al author­i­ty. I’m just a talk show host. But I felt—and my wife strong­ly felt—that I had a moral oblig­a­tion to try and be help­ful in what­ev­er way pos­si­ble. I’m not an advis­er to the per­son or any­one else oth­er than my chil­dren. And I mean that. And you can ask any­body in the White House or out how many times have I gone to the White House to give my opin­ion on things. Because I don’t do that. And in gen­er­al I real­ly dis­ap­prove of peo­ple stray­ing too far out­side their lanes and act­ing like just because they have sol­id rat­ings, they have a right to con­trol pub­lic pol­i­cy. I don’t believe that. I think it’s wrong.” Unex­pect­ed­ly fas­ci­nat­ing.
    • Coro­nalinks 3/19/20 (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I’m usu­al­ly pret­ty harsh on Bay Area gov­ern­ments here. So I want to give cred­it where cred­it is due: they’ve react­ed to the coro­n­avirus epi­dem­ic with a lev­el of swift­ness and feroc­i­ty they usu­al­ly reserve for attempts to build new housing.” I am includ­ing the link entire­ly for that glo­ri­ous line. The rest is worth­while, but that line is majes­tic.
    • Coro­n­avirus: The Ham­mer and the Dance (Tom­sa Pueyo, Medi­um): “This is prob­a­bly the sin­gle biggest, most impor­tant mis­take peo­ple make when think­ing about this stage: they think it will keep them home for months. This is not the case at all. In fact, it is like­ly that our lives will go back to close to normal.”
      • The author is quite crit­i­cal of the USA. Maybe it’s because I live in Sil­i­con Val­ley and am cur­rent­ly on lock­down, but I think we’re respond­ing pret­ty aggres­sive­ly. Hon­est­ly, I think we’re doing bet­ter than most coun­tries around the world (def­i­nite­ly not Sin­ga­pore, though — respect to that island tech­noc­ra­cy). Also, Amer­i­ca often takes a while to mobi­lize in response to great chal­lenges but once we do the strength of our response is stag­ger­ing. We engage in relent­less and pub­lic self-crit­i­cism that leads us to over­com­pen­sate; for exam­ple, the news keep empha­siz­ing that we are piti­ful­ly behind on test kits. It is true that we were inex­cus­ably behind. How­ev­er, our capac­i­ty for test­ing is explod­ing — pre­cise­ly because every­one believes we are piti­ful­ly behind. There remain oth­er areas in which we are still falling flat, and they are hav­ing bright spot­lights trained upon them. So I’m cau­tious­ly opti­mistic. Things will be bad but not near­ly as bad as they could have been. For all of her faults, Amer­i­ca is still pret­ty amaz­ing.
      • Also, the author inex­plic­a­bly trusts China’s reports about their cur­rent lev­els of infec­tion. Giv­en extreme­ly recent his­to­ry, that is per­plex­ing.
    • Why Telling Peo­ple They Don’t Need Masks Back­fired (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “It used to be said that back in the Sovi­et Union, if there was a line, you first got in line and then fig­ured out what the line was for — peo­ple knew that there were going to be short­ages and that the author­i­ties often lied, so they hoarded.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at UNC. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • We’re not going back to nor­mal (Gideon Lich­field, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “…one can imag­ine a world in which, to get on a flight, per­haps you’ll have to be signed up to a ser­vice that tracks your move­ments via your phone. The air­line wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infect­ed peo­ple or dis­ease hot spots. There’d be sim­i­lar require­ments at the entrance to large venues, gov­ern­ment build­ings, or pub­lic trans­port hubs. There would be tem­per­a­ture scan­ners every­where, and your work­place might demand you wear a mon­i­tor that tracks your tem­per­a­ture or oth­er vital signs.” Shared by a con­cerned stu­dent.
  4. Non-pan­dem­ic (YES!!!!):
    • Book Review: Hoover (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Herbert Hoover is the first stu­dent at Stan­ford. Not just a mem­ber of the first grad­u­at­ing class. Lit­er­al­ly the first stu­dent. He arrives at the dorms two months ear­ly to get a head start on var­i­ous mon­ey-mak­ing schemes, includ­ing dis­trib­ut­ing news­pa­pers, deliv­er­ing laun­dry, tend­ing live­stock, and help­ing oth­er stu­dents reg­is­ter. He would lat­er sell some of these busi­ness­es to oth­er stu­dents and start more, oper­at­ing a con­stant churn of enter­pris­es through­out his col­lege career. His aca­d­e­mics remain mediocre, and he con­tin­ues to have few friends – until he tries out for the foot­ball team in sopho­more year. He has zero ath­let­ic tal­ent and fails mis­er­ably, but the coach (whose eye for tal­ent appar­ent­ly tran­scends ath­let­ics) spots poten­tial in Hoover and asks him to come on as team man­ag­er. In this role, Hoover is an unqual­i­fied suc­cess. He turns the team’s debt into a sur­plus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berke­ley vs. Stan­ford foot­ball match played on Thanks­giv­ing which remains a beloved Stan­ford foot­ball tradition.” Long but good (if you are inter­est­ed in Stan­ford, pres­i­den­tial his­to­ry, or clever thoughts).
      • Relat­ed: Scott Alexan­der on Her­bert Hoover (Scott Sum­n­er, The Library of Eco­nom­ics and Lib­er­ty): “Hoover was not the most tal­ent­ed per­son to ever become Pres­i­dent, but he was prob­a­bly the most com­pe­tent. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his areas of com­pe­tence did not dove­tail with the prob­lems fac­ing the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s. Hoover was very good at orga­niz­ing large endeav­ors, but the prob­lems faced by the US dur­ing the ear­ly 1930s were macro­eco­nom­ic in nature. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, being a good admin­is­tra­tor doesn’t have much cor­re­la­tion with under­stand­ing macroeconomics.”
    • ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ at the Muse­um of the Bible are all forg­eries (Michael Greshko, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “Loll insist­ed on inde­pen­dence. Not only would the Muse­um of the Bible have no say on the team’s find­ings, her report would be final—and would have to be released to the pub­lic. The Muse­um of the Bible agreed to the terms. ‘Honestly, I’ve nev­er worked with a muse­um that was so up-front,’ Loll says.”
      • The Muse­um of the Bible comes off look­ing pret­ty good in this arti­cle. I feel bad for them.
    • Porn Restric­tion for Real­ists (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…a world where the tube-sites are gone and peo­ple must go back to pay­ing for their porn is a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment over the world we live in now. This world is pos­si­ble: it exist­ed two decades ago. Tech­no­log­i­cal change is part of what hap­pened, but only part. Just as impor­tant in the cre­ation of the new, porn-flushed world we live are legal pro­tec­tions giv­en to web­sites like Porn­Hub and X Ham­ster which allow them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for the theft their busi­ness mod­el is based on. It also allows them to dodge lia­bil­i­ty for much worse sins.”
    • Learn­ing From His­to­ry: How Con­gress Can Pro­tect Both Rights and Beliefs (Don Bonker, Real­Clear­Reli­gion): “Back in 1984, I received an unex­pect­ed call from Sen­a­tor Mark Hat­field (R‑OR), a high­ly regard­ed Repub­li­can who chaired the pow­er­ful Sen­ate Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee. I won­dered, why would he call a young Demo­c­rat who had no sig­nif­i­cant posi­tion and lit­tle influ­ence in the halls of Congress?”

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 Every­thing That’s Wrong Of Rac­coons (Mal­lo­ry Ort­berg, The Toast): “Once when my dog died a pas­sel of rac­coons showed up in the back­yard as if to say ‘Now that he’s gone, we own the night,’ and they didn’t flinch when I yelled at them, and I found it dis­re­spect­ful to 1) me per­son­al­ly and 2) the entire flow of the food chain. Don’t dis­re­spect me if you can’t eat me, you false-night-dogs.” (first shared in vol­ume 97)

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 241

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. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus and Chris­tian­i­ty:
    • Love in the Time of Coro­n­avirus — Andy Crouch (Andy Crouch, The Prax­is Jour­nal): “…while gov­ern­ment at all lev­els can enforce a cer­tain amount of behav­ior change, for exam­ple through quar­an­tines and “lock­downs,” it is almost impos­si­ble for coer­cive author­i­ty to increase people’s capac­i­ty for love and ser­vice to oth­ers. This is the role of faith and above all, we believe, the Chris­t­ian faith. Equip­ping Chris­tians for moments like this is the role of Chris­t­ian lead­ers.” THIS. READ THIS.
    • What Mar­tin Luther Teach­es Us About Coro­n­avirus (Emmy Yang, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a cli­mate of fear sur­round­ing the out­break, I come back to Luther’s let­ter for guid­ance. As a med­ical stu­dent and a future physi­cian, I have a clear voca­tion­al com­mit­ment to car­ing for the sick—whether they have coro­n­avirus, tuber­cu­lo­sis, or influen­za. Pre­cau­tions I will take, yes. But I am remind­ed by Luther that they are indi­vid­u­als deserv­ing of care all the same.”
    • Here is an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Luther’s orig­i­nal let­ter: Whether One May Flee From A Dead­ly Plague: “Since it is gen­er­al­ly true of Chris­tians that few are strong and many are weak, one sim­ply can­not place the same bur­den upon every­one. A per­son who has a strong faith can drink poi­son and suf­fer no harm, Mark 16[:18], while one who has a weak faith would there­by drink to his death.”
    • Wuhan Pas­tor: Pray with Us (anony­mous, Chi­na­Source): “Thus, my broth­ers and sis­ters, I encour­age you to be strong in Christ’s love. If we more deeply expe­ri­ence death in this pesti­lence, under­stand­ing the gospel, we may more deeply expe­ri­ence Christ’s love, and grow ever near­er to God.”
    • How DC Church­es Respond­ed When the Gov­ern­ment Banned Pub­lic Gath­er­ings Dur­ing the Span­ish Flu of 1918 (Caleb Morell, 9 Marks): “Dur­ing one of the worst epi­demics to ever hit our coun­try, church­es respect­ed the direc­tives of the gov­ern­ment for a lim­it­ed time out of neigh­bor­ly love and in order to pro­tect pub­lic health. Even when church­es began to dis­agree with the Com­mis­sion­ers’ per­spec­tive, they con­tin­ued to abide by their orders.”
    • Should Your Church Stop Meet­ing to Slow COVID-19? How 3 Seat­tle Church­es Decid­ed. (Daniel Chin, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “After work­ing for WHO and then the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion in Chi­na, my wife and I moved to Seat­tle in 2015 to lead the foundation’s work to con­trol tuber­cu­lo­sis in sev­er­al coun­tries. For a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry, I’ve answered a call­ing as a fol­low­er of Christ to stop the spread of dis­eases and work to elim­i­nate them, and now I heed that call­ing to speak to my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ to take this epi­dem­ic seri­ous­ly and respond.” The author is an evan­gel­i­cal and a physi­cian who spe­cial­izes in infec­tious dis­eases.
  2. Con­cern­ing Coro­n­avirus More Gen­er­al­ly:
    • How Much Worse the Coro­n­avirus Could Get, in Charts (Nicholas Kristof and Stu­art A. Thomp­son, NY Times): “What’s at stake in this coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic? How many Amer­i­cans can become infect­ed? How many might die? The answers depend on the actions we take — and, cru­cial­ly, on when we take them. Work­ing with infec­tious dis­ease epi­demi­ol­o­gists, we devel­oped this inter­ac­tive tool that lets you see what may lie ahead in the Unit­ed States and how much of a dif­fer­ence it could make if offi­cials act quick­ly.” Note that this is not pay­walled. Many promi­nent news orga­ni­za­tions have kind­ly made their pan­dem­ic news freely avail­able.
    • Why it’s so hard to pin down the risk of dying from coro­n­avirus (Marc Lip­sitch, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Sev­er­al esti­mates have sug­gest­ed that the risk of dying, for those infect­ed with covid-19 and show­ing its flu-like symp­toms, is around 1 or 2 per­cent. Elder­ly adults have a con­sid­er­ably high­er risk of both becom­ing infect­ed and dying, as do peo­ple with com­pro­mised immune sys­tems. The esti­mates might change as new data arrive, but the range of 1 to 2 per­cent for fatal­i­ties among the symp­to­matic seems to be the con­sen­sus for now. The over­all fatal­i­ty rate for peo­ple infect­ed with covid-19 will be low­er — pos­si­bly much low­er — when we know how many peo­ple are infect­ed but asymp­to­matic.” The author is a Har­vard epi­demi­ol­o­gist. 
    • COVID-19 Event Risk Assess­ment Plan­ner (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Now here is the most impor­tant point. It’s the size of the group, not the num­ber of car­ri­ers that most dri­ves the result. For exam­ple, sup­pose our esti­mate of the num­ber of car­ri­ers if off by a fac­tor of 10–that is instead of 20,000 there are just 2000 car­ri­ers in the Unit­ed States. In this case, the prob­a­bil­i­ty of at least one car­ri­er at a big event of 100,000 drops not by a fac­tor of ten but just to 45%. In oth­er words, large events are a bad idea even in sce­nar­ios with just a small num­ber of car­ri­ers.” (source code for the embed­ded graph is at https://github.com/jsweitz/covid-19-event-risk-planner) The code and the graph come from a biol­o­gist at Geor­gia Tech and the expla­na­tion comes from an econ­o­mist at George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Track­Coro­na — COVID-19 Track­er and Live Map — one of the peo­ple run­ning the web­site is a Stan­ford under­grad. 
    • Coro­n­avirus: Why You Must Act Now (Tomas Pueyo, Medi­um): “Coun­tries that act fast can reduce the num­ber of deaths by a fac­tor of ten. And that’s just count­ing the fatal­i­ty rate. Act­ing fast also dras­ti­cal­ly reduces the cas­es, mak­ing this even more of a no-brain­er.”
    • How Chi­na’s “Bat Woman” Hunt­ed Down Virus­es from SARS to the New Coro­n­avirus (Jane Qiu, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Shi—a virol­o­gist who is often called China’s ‘bat woman’ by her col­leagues because of her virus-hunt­ing expe­di­tions in bat caves over the past 16 years—walked out of the con­fer­ence she was attend­ing in Shang­hai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle.
    • $1 mil­lion plus in Emer­gent Ven­tures Prizes for coro­n­avirus work (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I believe that we should be using prizes to help inno­vate and com­bat the coro­n­avirus. When are prizes bet­ter than grants? The case for prizes is stronger when you don’t know who is like­ly to make the break­through, you val­ue the final out­put more than the process, there is an urgency to solu­tions (tal­ent devel­op­ment is too slow), suc­cess is rel­a­tive­ly easy to define, and efforts and invest­ments are like­ly to be under­com­pen­sat­ed. All of these apply to the threat from the coro­n­avirus.”
    • COVID-19 reduces eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty, which reduces pol­lu­tion, which saves lives. (Mar­shall Burke, G‑Feed): “…dis­rup­tion is only like­ly to increase in com­ing days in regions where the epi­dem­ic is just begin­ning. Strange­ly, this dis­rup­tion could also have unex­pect­ed health ben­e­fits — and these ben­e­fits could be quite large in cer­tain parts of the world.” Real­i­ty is com­pli­cat­ed.
    • How social dis­tanc­ing for coro­n­avirus could cause a lone­li­ness epi­dem­ic (Ezra Klein, Vox): “Make no mis­take: The rapid imple­men­ta­tion of social dis­tanc­ing is nec­es­sary to flat­ten the coro­n­avirus curve and pre­vent the cur­rent pan­dem­ic from wors­en­ing. But just as the coro­n­avirus fall­out threat­ens to cause an eco­nom­ic reces­sion, it’s also going to cause what we might call a “social reces­sion”: a col­lapse in social con­tact that is par­tic­u­lar­ly hard on the pop­u­la­tions most vul­ner­a­ble to iso­la­tion and lone­li­ness — old­er adults and peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties or pre­ex­ist­ing health con­di­tions.”
    • The effect of trav­el restric­tions on the spread of the 2019 nov­el coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) out­break (Chi­nazzi et al, Sci­ence): “The trav­el quar­an­tine around Wuhan has only mod­est­ly delayed the epi­dem­ic spread to oth­er areas of Main­land Chi­na…. The mod­el indi­cates that while the Wuhan trav­el ban was ini­tial­ly effec­tive at reduc­ing inter­na­tion­al case impor­ta­tions, the num­ber of cas­es observed out­side Main­land Chi­na will resume its growth after 2–3 weeks from cas­es that orig­i­nat­ed else­where.”
  3. Keep It Sim­ple (Ed Fes­er, First Things): “Math­e­mat­ics appears to describe a realm of enti­ties with qua­si-­di­vine attrib­ut­es. The series of nat­ur­al num­bers is infi­nite. That one and one equal two and two and two equal four could not have been oth­er­wise. Such math­e­mat­i­cal truths nev­er begin being true or cease being true; they hold eter­nal­ly and immutably. The lines, planes, and fig­ures stud­ied by the geome­ter have a kind of per­fec­tion that the objects of our ­expe­ri­ence lack. Math­e­mat­i­cal objects seem ­imma­te­r­i­al and known by pure rea­son rather than through the sens­es.” This is a very inter­est­ing review of a book by William Lane Craig.
  4. Con­cern­ing Woody Allen:
    • Woody Allen: Issues and Prin­ci­ples (Steven Brust, per­son­al blog): “Pre­sump­tion of inno­cence in the courts is the legal reflec­tion of the prin­ci­ple that we need to be cer­tain some­one is guilty before inflict­ing pun­ish­ment, that, ‘it is bet­ter 10 guilty men go free than one inno­cent man be pun­ished.’ The prin­ci­ple pre-dates its legal reflec­tion, which, in West­ern soci­ety, we can find in sixth Cen­tu­ry Rome, as well as both Tal­mu­dic and Islam­ic law. The prin­ci­ple has always been fought for by the oppressed, and for good rea­son: it is the oppressed who are most vul­ner­a­ble, and most like­ly to be abused both by the legal sys­tem and bour­geois pub­lic opin­ion. Those who want to chuck the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence, whether in law or in the pub­lic are­na, are doing the work of the oppres­sors.” The author is a social­ist, which I men­tion because the next author is very con­ser­v­a­tive. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion. 
    • The Woody Allen Witch Hunt (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But we are not sup­posed to live in a soci­ety in which some­one who has mere­ly been accused of a hor­ri­ble thing finds him­self unable to pub­lish a book telling his side of the sto­ry, or silenced because the cul­tur­al winds have shift­ed. Thir­ty years ago, or less, chil­dren who made accu­sa­tions against pow­er­ful men were not believed. Women too. It is not progress to go from dis­be­liev­ing women and chil­dren as a mat­ter of course to believ­ing them reflex­ive­ly. We think we are advanc­ing jus­tice, but real­ly we are just rear­rang­ing our prej­u­dices.” The author is a very con­ser­v­a­tive, which I men­tion because the pre­vi­ous author is a social­ist. When thought­ful peo­ple from dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed tribes call foul it is worth pay­ing atten­tion.
  5. How Many Nones Are There? Maybe More than We Thought (Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “When you com­pare those who say they have “no reli­gion” in the GSS, to those who say they are either athe­ist, agnos­tic, or noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar in the CCES, a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence emerges…. The upshot is this: the share of Amer­i­cans who have no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion is near­ly a third of the Unit­ed States, not the 23.1% fig­ure which comes from the GSS.”

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 Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Minimize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘principalities and powers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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 240

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I often bury my per­spec­tive, but here is my two ¢ on the Coro­n­avirus: Amer­i­ca is respond­ing to this dis­ease so bad­ly that I find it hard to believe. Giv­en the amaz­ing­ly com­pe­tent peo­ple who pop­u­late this coun­try, our col­lec­tive inep­ti­tude is stag­ger­ing.
    • Deal­ing With a Once-In-A-Cen­tu­ry Pathogen (Claire Lehmann, Quil­lette): “In ear­ly Octo­ber 1918, when the Span­ish flu hit the east coast of the Unit­ed States, the health com­mis­sion­er of St Louis, Max Starkloff, ordered the clo­sure of schools, movie the­aters, saloons, sport­ing events and oth­er pub­lic gath­er­ing spots. While the mea­sures were protest­ed by some cit­i­zens, the quar­an­tine went ahead. A month lat­er, as the pan­dem­ic raged on, he ordered the clo­sure of all busi­ness, with a few excep­tions, such as banks. While dras­tic quar­an­tine mea­sures were being imple­ment­ed in St Louis, the health com­mis­sion­er of Philadel­phia, Wilmer Krusen, gave per­mis­sion for a parade for the war effort to go ahead in his city. It is report­ed that with­in 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hos­pi­tals was filled, and in the week end­ing Octo­ber 5th, 1918, 2,600 peo­ple in Philadel­phia had died, with the fig­ure almost dou­bling a week lat­er. At the end of the out­break, St Louis had the low­est record­ed death rate in the US, while in Philadel­phia mor­tu­ar­ies over­flowed and ‘bodies [were] piled up on sidewalks.’”
    • Coro­n­avirus: Links, Spec­u­la­tion, Open Thread (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “If we hadn’t let our cul­ture reach the point where gov­ern­ments ban things by default and review at leisure, and where indi­vid­ual ini­tia­tive is frowned upon in favor of wait­ing for offi­cial per­mis­sion to do the right thing, we could have recov­ered from all of these mis­takes. Hos­pi­tals would have used their exist­ing tests which they already have more than enough of, doc­tors would have had per­mis­sion to test sus­pi­cious cas­es at their dis­cre­tion, and we would have had a chance to catch infec­tions ear­ly before they could spread. If the gov­ern­ment didn’t already reg­u­late adren­a­line, bus­pirone, insulin, and genet­ic test­ing to the point of near-unavail­abil­i­ty, maybe peo­ple would have thought it was weird­er, or raised more of a fuss, when they start­ed doing it for coro­n­avirus tests.”
    • Exclu­sive: The Strongest Evi­dence Yet That Amer­i­ca Is Botch­ing Coro­n­avirus Test­ing (Robin­son Mey­er & Alex­is C. Madri­gal, The Atlantic): “Testing is the first and most impor­tant tool in under­stand­ing the epi­demi­ol­o­gy of a dis­ease out­break. In the Unit­ed States, a series of fail­ures has com­bined with the decen­tral­ized nature of our health-care sys­tem to hand­i­cap the nation’s abil­i­ty to see the sever­i­ty of the out­break in hard numbers.”
    • Before and after: coro­n­avirus emp­ties world’s busiest spaces  (Agence France-Presse, The Guardian): “Empty pub­lic squares, a high­way with no cars on it and desert­ed holy sites – a series of strik­ing satel­lite images have revealed the impact of the coro­n­avirus epi­dem­ic on some of the world’s busiest spaces.”
    • Prepar­ing Your Church For Coro­n­avirus (Lyman Stone, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Thus, Chris­tians have two cru­cial duties. First, not to use plague, and the fear of the death of the body, as an excuse to aban­don our God-giv­en duties. We must care for the sick, both the sick in soul and in body. Where dis­ease kills par­ents, we must care for the chil­dren. Where dis­ease kills chil­dren, we must tend to the wounds of the fam­i­ly. Where dis­ease spreads fear, we must be bold in faith. But we should not be idiots. We have a moral oblig­a­tion to pro­tect oth­ers by lim­it­ing the spread of dis­ease. To ignore that duty mur­ders our neighbors.” A bit long but excel­lent. 
  2. Men Too Eas­i­ly For­got­ten (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “Real men do not bul­ly. Real men do not watch porn. Real men do not abuse women. Real men do not live at home after col­lege play­ing video games in their parent’s base­ment. Amen to what real men are not, but what, then, is a real man? Can we not say more than just a male who doesn’t do bad? We need men who not only avoid evil but embody what is good. There is a pro­found dif­fer­ence. One sees man­hood as an incur­able ill­ness of soci­ety to be man­aged; the oth­er, a pil­lar to build civ­i­liza­tion upon.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Low-Income Col­lege Stu­dents Are Being Taxed Like Trust-Fund Babies (Eri­ca L. Green, New York Times): “In the past, a stu­dent from a house­hold with a joint income of $50,000 who was award­ed a schol­ar­ship that cov­ered $11,500 in room and board would be taxed at their par­ents’ rate of 12 per­cent. Under the new law, that mon­ey would be taxed up to 35 percent.” This is a few months old, shared with me by a stu­dent. For the record, this is insane.
  4. The oth­er way to lose a war (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Some crit­ics like to chalk up pro­longed Amer­i­can engage­ment in places like Afghanistan and Iraq to war­mon­ger­ing or realpoli­tik or some oth­er sin­is­ter moti­va­tion. In my opin­ion, that is the reverse of the truth. The fault of those who advo­cate such engage­ment isn’t world­ly cyn­i­cism, but oth­er­world­ly idealism.” Thought­ful and thought-pro­vok­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed. 
  5. My Same-Sex Attrac­tion Has an Answer (Rachel Gilson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For peo­ple like me who expe­ri­ence same-sex attrac­tion, the world begs us to believe that our authen­tic selves are only found in giv­ing in. It promis­es hero sta­tus if we sub­mit to our attrac­tions. Our desires whis­per, like a ser­pent in a gar­den, that there is no death in going against God’s Word.”
  6. The lure of ‘cool’ brain research is sti­fling psy­chother­a­py  (Allen Frances, Aeon): “…I can affirm con­fi­dent­ly that there are no neat answers in psy­chi­a­try. The best we can do is embrace an ecu­meni­cal four-dimen­sion­al mod­el that includes all pos­si­ble con­trib­u­tors to human func­tion­ing: the bio­log­i­cal, the psy­cho­log­i­cal, the social, and the spir­i­tu­al. Reduc­ing peo­ple to just one ele­ment – their brain func­tion­ing, or their psy­cho­log­i­cal ten­den­cies, or their social con­text, or their strug­gle for mean­ing – results in a flat, dis­tort­ed image that leaves out more than it can capture.” The author was chair of the psy­chi­a­try depart­ment at Duke. 
  7. Let’s Decon­struct a Decon­ver­sion Sto­ry: The Case of Rhett and Link (Alisa Childers, Gospel Coali­tion): “Our cul­tur­al moment is a caul­dron of infor­ma­tion and celebri­ty wor­ship in which the cult of per­son­al­i­ty can fer­ment and grow. With every hit of the ‘like’ but­ton, the per­son­al­i­ties we’ve sub­scribed to have become our author­i­ties for truth.”
    • Red Flags in the Spir­i­tu­al Decon­struc­tion of My Old Friends Rhett and Link (Shel­by Abbot, per­son­al blog): “After they left staff with Cru, I kept in touch with the guys for a few years. But time and life hap­pened, and my com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them fad­ed. Every now and then I’d send a mes­sage, but both Rhett and Link stopped rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing. I fig­ured they prob­a­bly changed their num­bers and email address­es, or had too many DM’s from fans to find my ran­dom mes­sages say­ing hel­lo. [After hear­ing their] per­son­al spir­i­tu­al decon­struc­tion sto­ries. It sud­den­ly made a lot sense to me why I nev­er heard back from them.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selective pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools. The reli­gion in ques­tion is not Method­ism or Catholi­cism but an extreme ver­sion of the belief sys­tem of the lib­er­al elite: the lib­er­al pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, and cre­ative class­es, which pro­vide a large major­i­ty of stu­dents enrolled at such places and an even larg­er major­i­ty of fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tors who work at them. To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

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 239

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

I was sick last week and did­n’t have a chance to post. It was refresh­ing to take a break from the infor­ma­tion del­uge that is the mod­ern age!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Coro­n­avirus Is More Than a Dis­ease. It’s a Test. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “So already, the virus has exposed a clear weak spot in what you might call the lib­er­al-glob­al­ist imag­i­na­tion: an overzeal­ous ‘remain calm’ spir­it in the face of the real risks of a hyper-con­nect­ed world.”. 
    • The Pan­dem­ic Is Com­ing (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): Dreher has been post­ing lots of great infor­ma­tion on this. Worth fol­low­ing on this top­ic gen­er­al­ly.
    • China’s Book­stores Band Togeth­er To Sur­vive the Epi­dem­ic (Ken­rick Davis, Sixth Tone): unex­pect­ed­ly inter­est­ing with strik­ing pic­tures.
    • How Fast Can a Virus Destroy a Sup­ply Chain? (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Glob­al sup­ply chains have yet to come apart most­ly because trade and pros­per­i­ty gen­er­al­ly have been ris­ing. But now, for the first time since World War II, the glob­al econ­o­my faces the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a true decou­pling of many trade con­nec­tions. It is not suf­fi­cient­ly well under­stood how rapid that process could be. A com­plex inter­na­tion­al sup­ply chain is frag­ile pre­cise­ly for the same rea­sons it is valu­able — name­ly, it is hard to con­struct and main­tain because it involves so many inter­de­pen­den­cies.”
  2. The boss who put every­one on 70K (Stephanie Hegar­ty, BBC): ‘“Before the $70,000 min­i­mum wage, we were hav­ing between zero and two babies born per year amongst the team,’ he says. ‘And since the announce­ment — and it’s been only about four-and-a-half years — we’ve had more than 40 babies.’”
  3. China’s ‘War on Ter­ror’ uproots fam­i­lies, leaked data shows (Dake Kang, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Rea­sons list­ed for intern­ment include ‘minor reli­gious infec­tion,’ ‘dis­turbs oth­er per­sons by vis­it­ing them with­out rea­sons,’ ‘rel­a­tives abroad,’ ‘think­ing is hard to grasp’ and ‘untrust­wor­thy per­son born in a cer­tain decade.’ The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 per­cent of peo­ple con­sid­ered ‘untrust­wor­thy’ were in the age brack­et of 25 to 29 years, accord­ing to an analy­sis of the data by Zenz.”
  4. Are We Liv­ing Out Romans 1? (Rosario But­ter­field, Desir­ing God): “Romans 1:26 tells us that peo­ple give them­selves over to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty because they wor­ship and serve the cre­ation. There­fore, from God’s point of view, homo­sex­u­al prac­tice is the sex­u­al dis­play of false wor­ship. Well-heeled Gay Pride march­es, with big-mon­ey cor­po­rate spon­sors smil­ing in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the LGBTQ machine, give us a mod­ern-day pic­ture of what wor­ship­ing the crea­ture looks like.”
  5. Chesa Boudin: San Francisco’s Law­less Rev­o­lu­tion­ary (Maxwell Mey­er, The Stan­ford Review) “In Com­rade Gringo’s new San Fran­cis­co, a naked pros­ti­tute on hero­in can defe­cate in a gro­cery store aisle, take up to $950 of goods, walk back to their tent on a city side­walk, steal a hand­gun and drop some nee­dles along the way, and then solic­it sex or drugs‚ or both, to pedes­tri­ans out­side a local busi­ness, with just a cita­tion (if that). But God for­bid that pros­ti­tute should offer those pedes­tri­ans a plas­tic straw, for hell hath no fury like San Fran­cis­co offi­cials when ‘The Plan­et’ is threat­ened.”
    • This rant in a stu­dent paper reads like pro­fes­sion­al pun­dit­ry in a nation­al-lev­el pub­li­ca­tion. I wish to acknowl­edge the author’s excel­lent writ­ing skills.
  6. The Rise and Tri­umph of the Mod­ern Self (Carl True­man, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Every age has its mal­adies, and I for one have no wish to have lived my life in an era when chil­dren worked as chim­ney sweeps or, like my father, grew up in the shad­ow of the Luft­waffe. We do not choose our time, and we must not waste ener­gy lament­ing our time. We need first and fore­most to under­stand our time and then to respond to it with informed wis­dom.”
  7. The Val­ue of Study Abroad Expe­ri­ence in the Labor Mar­ket: Find­ings from a Resume Audit Exper­i­ment (Cheng & Florick, SSRN): “Com­pared to resumes that list no study abroad expe­ri­ence, resumes that list study abroad expe­ri­ence in Asia regard­less of length are about 20 per­cent more like­ly to receive a call­back for an inter­view if the resume stud­ied. The dif­fer­ences in rates increas­es to 25 per­cent when com­par­ing resumes with­out study abroad expe­ri­ence to those that list two-week pro­grams in Asia. Resumes that list study abroad expe­ri­ence in Europe for one year are 20 per­cent less like­ly to receive any call­back and 35 per­cent less like­ly to receiv­ing [sic] a call back for an inter­view, rel­a­tive to resumes that do not list study abroad expe­ri­ence.”

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 some thoughts about slav­ery and the Bible – Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

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 238

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 Nuclear Fam­i­ly Was a Mis­take (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you want to sum­ma­rize the changes in fam­i­ly struc­ture over the past cen­tu­ry, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for indi­vid­u­als and more unsta­ble for fam­i­lies. We’ve made life bet­ter for adults but worse for chil­dren. We’ve moved from big, inter­con­nect­ed, and extend­ed fam­i­lies, which helped pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple in soci­ety from the shocks of life, to small­er, detached nuclear fam­i­lies (a mar­ried cou­ple and their chil­dren), which give the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in soci­ety room to max­i­mize their tal­ents and expand their options. The shift from big­ger and inter­con­nect­ed extend­ed fam­i­lies to small­er and detached nuclear fam­i­lies ulti­mate­ly led to a famil­ial sys­tem that lib­er­ates the rich and rav­ages the work­ing-class and the poor.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Will Some­body Please Hate My Ene­mies for Me? (David French, The Dis­patch): “Here’s the end result—millions of Chris­tians have not just decid­ed to hire a hater to defend them from haters and to hire a liar to defend them from liars, they active­ly ignore, ratio­nal­ize, min­i­mize, or deny Trump’s sins.”
    • Not quite in response, but kin­da relat­ed: Under­stand­ing Why Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives Would Vote for Trump (Andrew Walk­er, Nation­al Review): “In my expe­ri­ence, huge num­bers of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives are not proud about vot­ing for Trump. They don’t need any more hot takes denounc­ing them as irre­deemable hyp­ocrites. Their con­sciences bear a dis­com­fort gov­erned by their love for Amer­i­ca and the rep­u­ta­tion of their faith. But if these reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives have to choose between the duel­ing dump­ster fires of either Trump or a pos­si­ble Bernie Sanders pres­i­den­cy, they will vote over­whelm­ing­ly for Trump. And any­one who mis­un­der­stands this will con­tin­ue pro­ject­ing onto reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives the usu­al tired bro­mides that refuse to reck­on with a com­pli­cat­ed situation.”
    • Def­i­nite­ly in response to both arti­cles: Evan­gel­i­cals Still Ago­niz­ing Over Trump (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It’s not sexy to say it, but I don’t hate peo­ple who vote for Trump, I don’t hate peo­ple who vote against Trump, I don’t hate peo­ple who vote for Sanders, or any­body. I don’t believe we are fac­ing a Twi­light Of The Gods show­down between Good and Evil. I believe we are fac­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly vivid, emo­tion­al­ly charged ver­sion of the usu­al choice between deeply flawed can­di­dates. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get worked up into spit­ing the Oth­er, because if I put myself in their shoes, I can see why they would vote as they do, even if I think they’re wrong. Is this luke­warm­ness? OK, it’s luke­warm­ness. But pol­i­tics are not my god, so I don’t care.” 
  3. Is Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry Com­pat­i­ble with Chris­t­ian Faith? (Ger­ald McDer­mott, Juicy Ecu­menism): “Slavery and Jim Crow were evil and sys­temic. Racism is sin. But Chris­tians must not allow their hatred for the sin of racism to so cloud their vision that they put their faith in a phi­los­o­phy that has become a new reli­gion for its devotees—a reli­gion that in sig­nif­i­cant ways con­flicts with his­toric Chris­t­ian faith.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of divin­i­ty at Bee­son.
  4. Gen­er­a­tion Z and Reli­gion: What New Data Show (Melis­sa Deck­man, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “…it appears that the rate of younger Amer­i­cans depart­ing from orga­nized reli­gion is hold­ing steady… As Amer­i­ca heads ever more quick­ly into becom­ing a minor­i­ty major­i­ty nation with respect to race/ethnicity, with White Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca becom­ing a less dom­i­nant pres­ence in soci­ety, schol­ars should pay more atten­tion to how minor­i­ty groups are start­ing to shift their reli­gious behav­ior. My data sug­gest that these groups are look­ing very dif­fer­ent from coun­ter­parts in old­er generations.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Wash­ing­ton Col­lege. 
    • Is the rise of the nones slow­ing? Schol­ars say maybe (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News): “There are a cou­ple of pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for the slow­ing of reli­gious decline: The country’s grow­ing racial diver­si­ty…. The cul­ture war sort­ing is most­ly over…. A chang­ing social desir­abil­i­ty bias”
    • The Decline of Reli­gion May Be Slow­ing (Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “This bomb­shell find­ing sent us run­ning for oth­er datasets. Like all good sci­en­tists, we trust, but ver­i­fy. In this post, we run through evi­dence from the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey, 2018 Coop­er­a­tive Con­gres­sion­al Elec­tion Study (a RIP favorite), and the recent release of the Vot­er Study Group pan­el. The take­away is that the find­ing is val­i­dat­ed – the rate dri­ving up the reli­gious nones has appeared to be slow­ing to a crawl.”
    • Rea­sons to be Cau­tious About a Gen Z “Religious Rebound” (Joseph O. Bak­er, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “…if we look at reli­gious salience, Gen Z is less like­ly to say they are ‘not reli­gious’ (25.3%) com­pared to Mil­len­ni­als (28.4%), but Gen Z is also less like­ly to say they are ‘very reli­gious’ (7.8%) com­pared to Mil­len­ni­als (10.2%). So, if any­thing, Gen Z is more ‘meh’ about religion.”
  5. What Can We Learn from the #MeToo Moments in Gen­e­sis? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “The first book of the Bible is a pic­ture of sin run amuck. Of course, we also find in Gen­e­sis a dis­play of God’s cre­ative pow­er, his plan of redemp­tion, and his sov­er­eign mer­cy in bless­ing his unde­serv­ing peo­ple. But even amid this won­der­ful good news, we see plen­ty of exam­ples of the cor­rupt­ing effects of sin from Gen­e­sis 3 through the end of the book. In par­tic­u­lar, Gen­e­sis is replete with exam­ples of sex­u­al sin.”
  6. Why Did­n’t Ancient Rome have Dun­geons and Drag­ons? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Innovation doesn’t hap­pen very often. How many peo­ple have ever invent­ed a new way of doing any­thing? If sta­sis is the norm, then we should expect that many great ideas are rou­tine­ly over­looked. For an econ­o­mist this is an uncom­fort­able thought because we tend to think that prof­it oppor­tu­ni­ties are quick­ly exploit­ed (no $500 bills on the ground). But while that is cer­tain­ly true for choic­es with­in con­straints it may not be true for choic­es that change constraints.”
  7. No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air (Ed Reg­is, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “accounts of lift exist on two sep­a­rate lev­els of abstrac­tion: the tech­ni­cal and the non­tech­ni­cal. They are com­ple­men­tary rather than con­tra­dic­to­ry, but they dif­fer in their aims. One exists as a strict­ly math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­ry, a realm in which the analy­sis medi­um con­sists of equa­tions, sym­bols, com­put­er sim­u­la­tions and num­bers. There is lit­tle, if any, seri­ous dis­agree­ment as to what the appro­pri­ate equa­tions or their solu­tions are…. But by them­selves, equa­tions are not expla­na­tions, and nei­ther are their solutions.” I had low expec­ta­tions of this arti­cle, but it is pret­ty good.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67) 

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.