Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 216

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. No, real­ly. I mean them and they mat­ter. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cops Who Abused Pho­to­shop (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): this is out­ra­geous. Dif­fi­cult to excerpt, but well worth read­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. How Pornog­ra­phy Makes Us Less Human and Less Humane (Matthew Lee Ander­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Beneath pornog­ra­phy is the sup­po­si­tion that the mere fact of our desire for a woman makes us wor­thy of her. And so, not being bound by any kind of norm, desire must pro­ceed end­less­ly. It is no sur­prise that the indus­tri­al­ized, cheap-and-easy sex of pornog­ra­phy has answered and evoked an almost unre­strained sex­u­al greed, which allows us to be gods and god­dess­es with­in the safe­ty of our own fan­tasies. It is for deep and impor­tant rea­sons that the Ten Com­mand­ments use the eco­nom­ic lan­guage of ‘cov­et­ing’ to describe the bad­ness of errant sex­u­al desires.” Many insights in this essay.
    1. Relat­ed: In the Face of Sex­u­al Temp­ta­tion, Repres­sion Is a Sure-Fire Fail­ure (Rachel Gilson, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Repres­sion and avoid­ance are ulti­mate­ly human-cen­tered respons­es. They stuff desire, suf­fo­cate it, ban­ish it, and yet rarely suc­ceed at engen­der­ing true puri­ty. By con­trast, Chris­t­ian asceti­cism reminds us that we are not stronger than desire and then invites us to cast our gaze toward the One who is. It asks the Chris­t­ian to fol­low the sight line of desire—like look­ing down the bar­rel of a gun—and train it on what all desire is ulti­mate­ly sat­is­fied by: the glo­ry of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6).”
    2. Relat­ed What Genet­ics Is Teach­ing Us About Sex­u­al­i­ty (Steven M. Phelps and Robbee Wedow, New York Times): “…genet­ic dif­fer­ences account for rough­ly one-third of the vari­a­tion in same-sex behav­ior.” The authors are pro­fes­sors (one of biol­o­gy at UT Austin and the oth­er of soci­ol­o­gy at Har­vard). They are also both gay men. They are reflect­ing on research pub­lished in the jour­nal Sci­ence: Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genet­ic archi­tec­ture of same-sex sex­u­al behav­ior (which Wedow coau­thored).
  3. What Major­i­ty-World Mis­sions Real­ly Looks Like (Dor­cas Cheng-Tozun, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2015, 9 of the top 20 send­ing countries—including Brazil, the Philip­pines, Chi­na, India, Nige­ria, and South Africa—were in the major­i­ty world (also referred to as the devel­op­ing world), with a total of 101,000 inter­na­tion­al mis­sion­ar­ies.” For con­text, the com­bined total is close to the num­ber sent from the USA.
  4. Why do Chi­nese peo­ple like their gov­ern­ment? (Kaiser Kuo, SupChi­na): “It’s the rare per­son who can tru­ly sep­a­rate, at both an intel­lec­tu­al and an emo­tion­al lev­el, crit­i­cism of his or her coun­try from crit­i­cism of his or her country’s gov­ern­ment — espe­cial­ly if that gov­ern­ment is not, at present, ter­ri­bly embat­tled and is deliv­er­ing basic pub­lic goods in a rea­son­ably com­pe­tent man­ner.”
    1. Relat­ed: 9 ques­tions about the Hong Kong protests you were too embar­rassed to ask (Jen Kir­by, Vox): “”What began as a tar­get­ed protest against a con­tro­ver­sial extra­di­tion bill in June has trans­formed into what feels like a bat­tle for the future of Hong Kong. Pro­test­ers are not just fight­ing their local gov­ern­ment. They’re chal­leng­ing one of the most pow­er­ful coun­tries on earth: Chi­na.
    2. Relat­ed: Hong Kong Democ­ra­cy Activists Arrest­ed Ahead Of Planned March (Emi­ly Feng & Scott Neu­man, NPR): “Joshua Wong, Hong Kong’s most famous pro-democ­ra­cy leader, was arrest­ed on Fri­day along with fel­low activists and politi­cians in what appeared to be a coor­di­nat­ed sweep by the city’s police ahead of a mass anti-gov­ern­ment march that had been planned for the week­end.”
    3. Relat­ed: The One Unit­ed Strug­gle For Free­dom (David Brooks, New York Times): “Many sus­pect Amer­i­ca will nev­er step in to help. The Amer­i­can right no longer believes in spread­ing democ­ra­cy to for­eign­ers. The Amer­i­can left embraces a nation­al nar­ra­tive that empha­sizes slav­ery and oppres­sion, not that Amer­i­ca is a bea­con or an exam­ple. Nei­ther par­ty any longer sees Amer­i­ca as a van­guard nation whose very mis­sion is to advance uni­ver­sal democ­ra­cy and human dig­ni­ty.”
    4. Relat­ed: China’s Spies Are On The Offen­sive (Mike Giglio, The Atlantic): “Espi­onage and coun­teres­pi­onage have been essen­tial tools of state­craft for cen­turies, of course, and U.S. and Chi­nese intel­li­gence agen­cies have been bat­tling one anoth­er for decades. But what these recent cas­es sug­gest is that the intel­li­gence war is escalating—that Chi­na has increased both the scope and the sophis­ti­ca­tion of its efforts to steal secrets from the U.S.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Why Every­thing They Say About The Ama­zon, Includ­ing That It’s The ‘Lungs Of The World,’ Is Wrong (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Forbes): “‘What is hap­pen­ing in the Ama­zon is not excep­tion­al,’ said Coutin­ho. ‘Take a look at Google web search­es search for ‘Ama­zon’ and ‘Ama­zon For­est’ over time. Glob­al pub­lic opin­ion was not as inter­est­ed in the ‘Ama­zon tragedy’ when the sit­u­a­tion was unde­ni­ably worse. The present moment does not jus­ti­fy glob­al hys­te­ria.’ And while fires in Brazil have increased, there is no evi­dence that Ama­zon for­est fires have.” I found this arti­cle quite infor­ma­tive.
  6. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Sides With Nurs­es Who Object to Abor­tion (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Beyond its out­come, this case is a sig­nal of the Trump administration’s pri­or­i­ties: It sees reli­gious free­dom and con­science pro­tec­tions as cen­tral parts of Amer­i­can civ­il rights, and offi­cials plan to enforce those laws.”
    1. Relat­ed: By their tweets you will know them: The Democ­rats’ con­tin­u­ing God gap (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “While the Nones have grown dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the last 20 years, it’s still impor­tant to real­ize that more than six in ten Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy as a Chris­t­ian, accord­ing to the 2018 Coop­er­a­tive Con­gres­sion­al Elec­tion Study. If Democ­rats want to win back the White House, it would behoove them to reach out to those Chris­t­ian vot­ers. How­ev­er, at least on social media, Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates fail to do so.”
    2. Relat­ed: Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty embraces non­re­li­gious vot­ers, crit­i­cizes ‘reli­gious lib­er­ty’ in new res­o­lu­tion (Caleb Parke, Fox News): “The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee (DNC) passed a res­o­lu­tion Sat­ur­day prais­ing the val­ues of ‘reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed’ Amer­i­cans as the ‘largest reli­gious group with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.’ The res­o­lu­tion, which was unan­i­mous­ly passed at the DNC’s sum­mer meet­ing on Aug. 24 in San Fran­cis­co, Calif., was cham­pi­oned by the Sec­u­lar Coali­tion of Amer­i­ca, an orga­ni­za­tion that lob­bies on behalf of athe­ists, agnos­tics, and human­ists on pub­lic pol­i­cy.”
    3. Relat­ed: Michael Wear’s com­men­tary on Twit­ter: “I just want to be clear. This is both polit­i­cal­ly stu­pid, but also, just stu­pid on a fun­da­men­tal lev­el that tran­scends elec­toral pol­i­tics.” (Wear was an Oba­ma staffer)
  7. Let’s have open bor­ders for peo­ple and closed bor­ders for cap­i­tal (Jeff Spross, The Week): “…human beings aren’t the only things that cross bor­ders: goods, ser­vices, and finan­cial cap­i­tal do it all the time as well. A bet­ter response to Trump might not be to debate whether bor­ders should be enforced, but rather enforced against what? Specif­i­cal­ly, the left-pro­gres­sive posi­tion on bor­ders should be some­thing like: max­i­mum enforce­ment against the move­ment of finan­cial cap­i­tal, mod­er­ate enforce­ment against goods and ser­vices, and min­i­mal enforce­ment against peo­ple.”
    1. Relat­ed: Chris­tian­i­ty and Cap­i­tal­ism Recon­sid­ered (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “[the claim] that cap­i­tal­ism makes us wealth­i­er, lets us live longer, and improves our ethics — could be right and even so Chris­tian­i­ty and cap­i­tal­ism might not be com­pat­i­ble. Maybe God doesn’t want us to be rich­er and longer-lived, and maybe there are cer­tain mat­ters of faith­ful­ness that tran­scend what most peo­ple call ‘ethics.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 215

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 1619 Project (many authors, New York Times Mag­a­zine): “…[many believe] that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, how­ev­er, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unan­i­mous­ly cel­e­brat­ed every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defin­ing con­tra­dic­tions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to his­to­ry (it has come to be observed on Aug. 20), that was when a ship arrived at Point Com­fort in the British colony of Vir­ginia, bear­ing a car­go of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inau­gu­rat­ed a bar­bar­ic sys­tem of chat­tel slav­ery that would last for the next 250 years. This is some­times referred to as the country’s orig­i­nal sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very ori­gin.” The link is to a PDF of the entire issue.
    • A pos­i­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: A Brief His­to­ry of the His­to­ry Wars (Rebec­ca Onion, Slate): “For the sake of our col­lec­tive car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, we would do bet­ter to rec­og­nize these skir­mish­es over Amer­i­can history—in which con­ser­v­a­tives demand that a pos­i­tive vision of our nation’s past, stud­ded with suc­cess­es, inven­tions, and ‘great men,’ take pride of place in our pub­lic culture—as recur­rent episodes in a par­tic­u­lar decades-old front of the cul­ture wars. That way, we could stop wast­ing our good faith on old, dead-end con­ver­sa­tions.”
    • A neg­a­tive lib­er­al reac­tion: The New York Times sur­ren­ders to the left on race (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Through­out the issue of the NYTM, head­lines make, with just slight vari­a­tions, the same rhetor­i­cal move over and over again: ‘Here is some­thing unpleas­ant, unjust, or even down­right evil about life in the present-day Unit­ed States. Bet you did­n’t real­ize that slav­ery is ulti­mate­ly to blame.’ Lack of uni­ver­sal access to health care? High rates of sug­ar con­sump­tion? Cal­lous treat­ment of incar­cer­at­ed pris­on­ers? White record­ing artists ‘steal­ing’ black music? Harsh labor prac­tices? That’s right — all of it, and far more, fol­lows from slav­ery.”
    • A com­pli­cat­ed con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How slav­ery doomed lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment in Amer­i­ca (Philip Klein, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “A num­ber of con­ser­v­a­tives react­ed to the project by brand­ing it as anti-Amer­i­can. But I don’t think that’s fair, at least based on the lead essay I read from Nikole Han­nah-Jones. In fact, her piece is quite the oppo­site. Sure, it chron­i­cles the bru­tal­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion of slav­ery and the cen­tu­ry of oppres­sion, insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­crim­i­na­tion, and racist ter­ror­ism that fol­lowed. Yet the piece is ulti­mate­ly about how she rec­on­ciles that his­to­ry with her patri­o­tism and comes to under­stand her own father’s love of a coun­try that treat­ed him so poor­ly.”
    • A neg­a­tive con­ser­v­a­tive reac­tion: How To Dele­git­imize A Nation (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But who we imag­ine our­selves to be today shapes who we will become tomor­row. If The 1619 Project were mere­ly about expand­ing our com­mon under­stand­ing of the Amer­i­can ori­gins, who could object? It arrives, though, in the midst of an epic cul­ture war over who we are, and who we are going to be.”
    • Relat­ed: Black Amer­i­can His­to­ry Should Give Evan­gel­i­cals a Sense of Per­spec­tive — and Hope (David French, Nation­al Review): “If men and women have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak and pos­sess the courage to tell the truth, they have hope that they can trans­form a nation. What was true for black Amer­i­cans (includ­ing the black Amer­i­can church) in the most dire of cir­cum­stances is still true for con­tem­po­rary Chris­tians in far less try­ing times”
    • In response: In Defense Of Evan­gel­i­cal Cul­tur­al Pes­simism (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “This, I think, is a dis­tinc­tion that makes a big dif­fer­ence re: French’s argu­ment. You can’t cease to be black; you can cease to be Chris­t­ian, or at least mean­ing­ful­ly Chris­t­ian.” This piece is way too long but makes some good points.
  2. Don’t Use These Free-Speech Argu­ments Ever Again (Ken White, The Atlantic): “If you’ve read op-eds about free speech in Amer­i­ca, or lis­tened to talk­ing heads on the news, you’ve almost cer­tain­ly encoun­tered emp­ty, mis­lead­ing, or sim­ply false tropes about the First Amend­ment. Those tired tropes are bar­ri­ers to seri­ous dis­cus­sions about free speech. Any use­ful dis­cus­sion of what the law should be must be informed by an accu­rate view of what the law is.” White is best known under his inter­net alias Pope­hat. Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent.
  3. The Real Prob­lem at Yale Is Not Free Speech (Natalia Dashan, Pal­la­di­um): “The cam­pus ‘free speech’ debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about ‘diver­si­ty’ and ‘inclu­sion.’ The real prob­lems run much deep­er. The real prob­lems start with Mar­cus and me, and the masks we wear for each oth­er…. In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to con­vey the truth. And this is how I end­ed up offer­ing a sand­wich to a man with hun­dreds of mil­lions in a for­eign bank account.” I liked this one a lot.
    • Relat­ed: ‘Lux­u­ry beliefs’ are the lat­est sta­tus sym­bol for rich Amer­i­cans (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Post): “…as trendy clothes and oth­er prod­ucts become more acces­si­ble and afford­able, there is increas­ing­ly less sta­tus attached to lux­u­ry goods. The upper class­es have found a clever solu­tion to this prob­lem: lux­u­ry beliefs. These are ideas and opin­ions that con­fer sta­tus on the rich at very lit­tle cost, while tak­ing a toll on the low­er class.”
  4. How Life Became an End­less, Ter­ri­ble Com­pe­ti­tion (Daniel Markovits, The Atlantic): “Escap­ing the mer­i­toc­ra­cy trap will not be easy. Elites nat­u­ral­ly resist poli­cies that threat­en to under­mine their advan­tages. But it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble to get rich off your own human cap­i­tal with­out exploit­ing your­self and impov­er­ish­ing your inner life, and mer­i­to­crats who hope to have their cake and eat it too deceive them­selves.” The author is a Yale law pro­fes­sor. I found his diag­no­sis more per­sua­sive than his prog­no­sis.
  5. The Com­ing Migra­tion out of Sub-Saha­ran Africa (Christo­pher Cald­well, Nation­al Review): “The pop­u­la­tion pres­sures ema­nat­ing from the Mid­dle East in recent decades, already suf­fi­cient to dri­ve the Euro­pean polit­i­cal sys­tem into con­vul­sions, are going to pale beside those from sub-Saha­ran Africa in decades to come.” Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Why Nice­ness Weak­ens Our Wit­ness (Sharon Hodde Miller, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “We exist in a world that swings between sweet­ness and out­rage, two behav­iors that seem to be at odds with one anoth­er. In real­i­ty, they are two sides of the same coin: a lack of spir­i­tu­al for­ma­tion. When our civil­i­ty isn’t root­ed in some­thing stur­dy and deep, when our good behav­ior isn’t spring­ing from the core of who we are but is instead mere­ly a mask we put on, it is only a mat­ter of time before the façade crum­bles away and our true state is revealed: an entire gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who are real­ly good at look­ing good.” I agree with the sub­stance of this arti­cle, but the title both­ers me. 
  7. Fact-Check­ing Satire — Is Snopes Seri­ous? (Bill Zeis­er, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “the Bee’s founder and minor­i­ty own­er, Adam Ford, took par­tic­u­lar excep­tion to the tone of the Snopes assess­ment. In a lengthy Twit­ter thread, he called Snopes’ han­dling of the piece on Thomas ‘par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious’ and ‘dis­turb­ing.’ He point­ed to a sub­ti­tle that cas­ti­gat­ed the Bee for ‘fan­ning the flames of con­tro­ver­sy’ and ‘mud­dy­ing the details of a news sto­ry’ to the point that it was unclear if the piece qual­i­fied as satire. Ford com­plained that through­out the Snopes sto­ry, sup­pos­ed­ly an ‘objec­tive fact check,’ the assess­ment ‘veered towards pro­nounc­ing a moral judg­ment,’ seem­ing­ly accus­ing the satir­i­cal site of will­ful decep­tion. It is cer­tain­ly under­stand­able how Ford could feel this way: Snopes referred to the Bee’s ‘ruse’ and offered that ‘the Baby­lon Bee has man­aged to fool read­ers with its brand of satire in the past.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 214

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 Revolt of the Fem­i­nist Law Profs (Wes­ley Yang, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The sex bureau­cra­cy, in oth­er words, piv­ot­ed from pun­ish­ing sex­u­al vio­lence to impos­ing a nor­ma­tive vision of ide­al sex, to which stu­dents are held admin­is­tra­tive­ly account­able.” This is a very good piece.
  2. Skillet’s John Coop­er on Apos­ta­sy Among Young Chris­t­ian Lead­ers (George Brahm, Cogent Chris­tian­i­ty: “I’ve been say­ing for 20 years (and seemed prob­a­bly quite judg­men­tal to some of my peers) that we are in a dan­ger­ous place when the church is look­ing to 20 year old wor­ship singers as our source of truth. We now have a church cul­ture that learns who God is from singing mod­ern praise songs rather than from the teach­ings of the Word.”
  3. Jef­frey Epstein and When to Take Con­spir­a­cies Seri­ous­ly (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Most con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are false. But often some of the things they’re try­ing to explain are real.” Refresh­ing san­i­ty.
  4. Depor­ta­tion of a Chaldean Chris­t­ian to Iraq, and where he died, gets some decent cov­er­age (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “The more you look into this sto­ry, the more dis­turb­ing it gets. Mindy Belz, report­ing for World, wrote that a third coun­try had offered to take Aldaoud but that U.S. immi­gra­tion author­i­ties refused. Putting him on a plane to Najaf was an inten­tion­al twist of cru­el­ty. Appar­ent­ly, it was not an acci­dent that he was sent there instead of Bagh­dad.”
  5. The Last Days of John Allen Chau (Alex Per­ry, Out­side Mag­a­zine): “.…to those who know the tribes best, John’s mis­sion did not spell the end of the Sen­tine­lese. To them, he rep­re­sent­ed a pos­si­ble means of sur­vival.“ Chi Alpha makes an appear­ance in this arti­cle. Relat­ed links back in vol­umes 179 and 180.
  6. Jeff Bezos is qui­et­ly let­ting his char­i­ties do some­thing rad­i­cal — what­ev­er they want (Theodore Schleifer, Vox Recode): “Giv­ing $100 mil­lion to non­prof­its based on lit­tle pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion and then let­ting them run with it sounds, on its face, like a recipe for dis­as­ter. It con­jures the image of fat-and-hap­py char­i­ty lead­ers milk­ing extrav­a­gant salaries from oth­ers’ gen­eros­i­ty, or prof­li­gate spend­ing on extra­ne­ous over­head — or even out­right fraud…. Well, here’s the sur­prise: Mul­ti­ple experts told Recode this strat­e­gy actu­al­ly makes a lot of sense. They think phil­an­thropies should give non­prof­its sub­stan­tial­ly more lee­way.”
    1. Related(ish): Mis­sion­al Mis­con­cep­tion #1 (Sup­port Fig­ures) (Seth Calla­han, per­son­al blog): “If the [Post Office] were a non-prof­it, faith-based orga­ni­za­tion, with all of their employ­ees being respon­si­ble to cov­er their own oper­at­ing costs… then each employ­ee would need to have a month­ly sup­port lev­el of $11,837.69. That fig­ure does not rep­re­sent what your mail­man gets PAID, mind you. It is how much it COSTS for your mail­man to per­form the ser­vices that are required of him: trans­porta­tion and stor­age of goods, pack­ing sup­plies, vehi­cle main­te­nance, health­care, retire­ment, social security…etc. His take-home pay (what he lives off of) is a small per­cent­age of those oper­at­ing costs.”
  7. The Reli­gious Hunger of the Rad­i­cal Right (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, New York Times): “Unlike Islamist jihadists, the online com­mu­ni­ties of incels, white suprema­cists and anti-Semit­ic con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists make no meta­phys­i­cal truth claims, do not focus on God and offer no promise of an after­life or reward. But they ful­fill the func­tions that soci­ol­o­gists gen­er­al­ly attribute to a reli­gion: They give their mem­bers a mean­ing­ful account of why the world is the way it is.” 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 213

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. Sev­er­al arti­cles relat­ed to the mass shoot­ings:
  2. Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have a porn prob­lem, stud­ies show, but not the one you think (Jana Riess, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Draw­ing on numer­ous stud­ies, Per­ry finds that, despite the sta­tis­ti­cal find­ing that con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians are less like­ly to use porn, the per­cep­tion with­in evan­gel­i­cal church­es is that this has become an enor­mous prob­lem for the faith­ful.”
  3. What Ails the Right Isn’t (Just) Racism (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Put anoth­er way, the right is cor­rect that cry­ing wolf mat­ters. And the left is cor­rect that The Boy Who Cried Wolf ends with a wolf feast­ing on folks who con­clud­ed that they shouldn’t wor­ry about wolves because one kid fibbed.” I found this far more inter­est­ing than the title led me to antic­i­pate.
  4. Against Against Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “I wor­ry the move­ment against bil­lion­aire char­i­ty is on track to dam­age char­i­ty a whole lot more than it dam­ages bil­lion­aires.” This is a very inter­est­ing essay, and he has a fol­low-up, High­lights From The Com­ments on Bil­lion­aire Phil­an­thropy, which thought­ful­ly responds to crit­i­cisms. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  5. How (and Why) to KISSASS (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “…if you’re not a mem­ber of the pro­fes­sion­al class, the key to get­ting your per­son­al essays pub­lished in promi­nent pub­li­ca­tions is KISSASS—Keep It Short, Sad, And Sim­ple, Stu­pid.” This is a fol­low-up to an arti­cle I shared pre­vi­ous­ly and I found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Car­ol Swain Worked to Hold Politi­cians Account­able. Then She Felt God Call Her to Run. (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Swain, change has been a recur­ring theme in her life. She went from low-income sin­gle moth­er to Ivy League aca­d­e­m­ic, from Demo­c­rat to Repub­li­can media com­men­ta­tor, and from Jehovah’s Wit­ness turned non-church­go­er to com­mit­ted fol­low­er of Christ.” What a fas­ci­nat­ing lady.
  7. Why I’m Not A Lib­er­al (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “Because lib­er­al­ism is based on indi­vid­ual rights, it nat­u­ral­ly favors the indi­vid­ual assert­ing his rights against tra­di­tion­al social sub­jects, whether they be the com­mu­ni­ty, the fam­i­ly, or even his own mar­riage. If a clas­si­cal­ly lib­er­al sys­tem has no effect on the val­ues of soci­ety, it is an aston­ish­ing coin­ci­dence that wher­ev­er lib­er­al polit­i­cal arrange­ments emerge, a new lib­er­al under­stand­ing of mar­riage even­tu­al­ly replaces the pre­vi­ous Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings as the legal and social real­i­ty.” This essay cov­ers a lot of ground.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 212

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. Tourist Jour­nal­ism Ver­sus the Work­ing Class (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “To uni­ver­si­ty-edu­cat­ed media pro­fes­sion­als like Car­ole Cad­wal­ladr, James Blood­worth, and John Oliv­er, an Ama­zon ware­house must seem like the Black Hole of Cal­cut­ta. But I’ve done low-pay­ing man­u­al labor for most of my work­ing life, and rarely have I appre­ci­at­ed a job as much as my role as an Ama­zon asso­ciate.” I learned many things from this arti­cle.
  2. Six­teen and Evan­gel­i­cal (Lau­ra Turn­er, Slate): “A world with­out God wouldn’t make sense to me. But it now makes sense to many of my friends. I final­ly under­stand that we nev­er had a shared faith struc­ture. We went to the same church, some of us for years. We heard the same ser­mons, slept in the same cab­ins at camp, read the same books of the Bible, lis­tened to the same music. But we went home to dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies.” The author is John & Nan­cy Ortberg’s daugh­ter.
  3. Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Report­ed­ly Bans All Mar­tial Arts Groups With­out Warn­ing Over Email (Jin Hyun, NextShark): “Accord­ing to Choi, the university’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion behind the shut­down can be sum­ma­rized in four points: ‘the groups like to unof­fi­cial­ly prac­tice dur­ing dead week, they recruit pro­fes­sion­al, inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned coach­es to run their prac­tices, they com­pete and reg­u­lar­ly win nation­al cham­pi­onships with­out Uni­ver­si­ty help, they par­tic­i­pate heav­i­ly in the local com­mu­ni­ty by teach­ing stu­dents, alum­ni, and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers.’”
    • Stan­ford often seems con­flict­ed about whether its under­grads are future lead­ers to be empow­ered or lia­bil­i­ties to be micro­man­aged.
  4. As admin­is­tra­tors walk back ‘insuf­fi­cient’ response, police reveal noose may have been on cam­pus since March (Ele­na Shao and Daniel Mar­tinez-Krams, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The new infor­ma­tion comes amid crit­i­cism of Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors’ response to the inci­dent, and one day after they held a sol­i­dar­i­ty ral­ly and town hall. A self-care event is sched­uled to take place Fri­day after­noon.” There have been a lot of arti­cles about this — but this once grabbed me with the tid­bit in the head­line. SINCE MARCH?
  5. On Court Prophets and Wilder­ness Prophets  (Tim­o­thy Dal­rym­ple, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Whether you view Trump as a David or an Antipas, whether you serve at the court of the resplen­dent king or stand over against the court from the wilder­ness, one thing Nathan and John the Bap­tist held in com­mon was that both were will­ing to con­demn unright­eous­ness in their rulers—even if it cost them every­thing.”
    • Also polit­i­cal: The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty Is Actu­al­ly Three Par­ties (Thomas Edsall, New York Times): “What the data demon­strates is that the group con­tain­ing the largest pro­por­tion of minor­i­ty vot­ers is the most skep­ti­cal of some of the most pro­gres­sive poli­cies embraced by Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates like Eliz­a­beth War­ren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Har­ris.” Per­haps the most inter­est­ing part of this op-ed is when he talks about the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences of favor­ing small donors over large donors.
  6. In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons (Paul Mozur, New York Times): “The police offi­cers wres­tled with Col­in Che­ung in an unmarked car. They need­ed his face. They grabbed his jaw to force his head in front of his iPhone. They slapped his face. They shout­ed, ‘Wake up!’ They pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr. Che­ung had dis­abled his phone’s facial-recog­ni­tion login with a quick but­ton mash as soon as they grabbed him.”
  7. Canada’s bizarre trans-wax­ing con­tro­ver­sy (Bren­dan O’Neill, Spiked): “Yaniv says if the case is lost then a dan­ger­ous prece­dent will be set for trans peo­ple. In truth, the real dan­ger is if Yaniv wins the case, because that would set a prece­dent where­by the law could require that women must touch penis­es or risk los­ing their jobs. It would be pro­found­ly misog­y­nis­tic.” The lan­guage in this piece is vul­gar at times but in my esti­ma­tion not reck­less­ly so. Rod Dreher sums things up pith­ily with the head­line: From ‘Bake My Cake’ to ‘Wax My Tes­ti­cles’ (The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive)
    • Relat­ed: Lib­er­als’ aston­ish­ing­ly rad­i­cal shift on gen­der (Damon Link­er, The Week): “Slaves every­where pre­sum­ably know that they are unfree, even if they accept the legit­i­ma­cy of the sys­tem and the mas­ter that keeps them enslaved. But what is this bondage we could­n’t even begin to per­ceive in 2009 that in under a decade has become a bur­den so oner­ous that it pro­duces a demand for the over­turn­ing of well-set­tled rules and assump­tions, some of which (‘the gen­der bina­ry’) go all the way back to the ear­li­est ori­gins of human civ­i­liza­tion?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Are Satanists of the MS-13 gang an under-covered sto­ry on the reli­gion beat? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of news com­men­tary. My favorite bit: “How does one get out of MS-13? An opin­ion piece in the New York Times this past April gives a sur­pris­ing response: Go to a Pen­te­costal church.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 158.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 211

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. Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists have duty to report on tragedies in coun­tries like Sudan. (Isa­ha Sesay, USA Today): “If the suf­fer­ing of these girls and their par­ents is not enough to make us pay atten­tion to what has hap­pened in Chi­bok, there is some­thing else to con­sid­er: the threat to glob­al secu­ri­ty. The fate of these girls is in many ways a reflec­tion of the Niger­ian fed­er­al government’s long­stand­ing inabil­i­ty to main­tain peace and sta­bil­i­ty in the north­east of the coun­try. Amer­i­cans should see the dis­ap­pear­ance of the Chi­bok girls as a flare, illu­mi­nat­ing the exis­tence of an ‘ungoverned space’ that is fer­tile ground for a pow­er­ful ter­ror­ist group.”
  2. Face­book and Google track what porn you’re watch­ing, even when you’re in incog­ni­to (Iso­bel Ash­er Hamil­ton, Busi­ness Insid­er): “Researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mel­lon, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia ana­lyzed 22,484 pornog­ra­phy sites using a site called webXray to iden­ti­fy track­ing tools feed­ing data back to third par­ties. ‘Our results indi­cate track­ing is endem­ic on pornog­ra­phy web­sites: 93% of pages leak user data to a third-par­ty,’ the study con­cludes.”
    • Num­bers 32:23 comes to mind: “be sure that your sin will find you out.”
    • An unex­pect­ed con­se­quence of porn: Stream­ing online pornog­ra­phy pro­duces as much CO2 as Bel­gium (Michael Le Page, New­Sci­en­tist): “The trans­mis­sion and view­ing of online videos gen­er­ates 300 mil­lion tonnes of car­bon diox­ide a year, or near­ly 1 per cent of glob­al emis­sions. On-demand video ser­vices such as Net­flix account for a third of this, with online porno­graph­ic videos gen­er­at­ing anoth­er third.”
  3. An Epi­dem­ic of Dis­be­lief (Bar­bara Bradley Hager­ty, The Atlantic): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, inves­ti­ga­tors had assumed that some­one who assaults a stranger by the rail­road tracks is noth­ing like the man who assaults his co-work­er or his girl­friend. But it turns out that the space between acquain­tance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleve­land inves­ti­ga­tors uploaded the DNA from the acquain­tance-rape kits, they were sur­prised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes. The task force iden­ti­fied dozens of mys­tery rapists this way.” Infu­ri­at­ing and high­ly rec­om­mend­ed. 
  4. Oil-patch evan­gel­i­cals: How Chris­tian­i­ty and crude fueled the rise of the Amer­i­can right (Dar­ren Dochuk, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In the face of the Rock­e­fellers’ pro­gres­sive way, Tex­an oil­ers cham­pi­oned a the­ol­o­gy of per­son­al encounter with scrip­ture and an active High­er Being. They her­ald­ed church auton­o­my and gospel teach­ings about pros­per­i­ty and end times, a mes­sage that antic­i­pat­ed the vio­lent dis­rup­tions of the oil age and the need to save souls and reap God’s — and the earth’s — rich­es before the world’s end.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Notre Dame and describes an aspect of mod­ern evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ry I had not heard before.
    • An inter­view with the above author: Anoint­ed with Oil: Evan­gel­i­cals and the Petro­le­um Indus­try (Thomas Kidd, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Oil his­to­ri­ans may be sur­prised to hear it, but in some instances oil’s cor­po­rate struc­tures evolved direct­ly out of the the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments of its lead­ers.” The first piece felt a lit­tle hos­tile to me, where­as this one did not at all. 
  5. Stan­ford oppos­es bill that would let col­lege ath­letes in Cal­i­for­nia prof­it from endorse­ments (Ian Park, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The NCAA earns more than $1 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enue from broad­cast­ing rights and cham­pi­onships. In return, stu­dent-ath­letes receive lit­tle to no com­pen­sa­tion, oth­er than schol­ar­ships. Accord­ing to a study by Drex­el Uni­ver­si­ty and the Nation­al Col­lege Play­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, schol­ar­ships aren’t enough for many stu­dent-ath­letes, as sur­veyed ath­letes had to pay col­leges schol­ar­ship short­falls of as much as $17,000.”
    • In oth­er and com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed local news: SF does not have the high­est rents in the Bay Area (Adam Brin­klow, Curbed): “Men­lo Park, home of Face­book, has the high­est rents in the region, aver­ag­ing $4,638 per month. Palo Alto also beat out SF with a star­tling $3,857 per month price tag.” 
    • Else­where in the arti­cle we learn that Red­wood City rents aver­age $1,956. I love Men­lo Park, but there’s no way it is twice as nice as Red­wood City. Sheesh!
  6. Trump vs. Dems: ‘Racist,’ ‘social­ist’ lines drawn for 2020 (Lisa Mas­caro, AP News): “With tweets and a vote, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and House Democ­rats estab­lished the sharp and emo­tion­al­ly raw con­tours of the 2020 elec­tion cam­paigns. In the process, they have cre­at­ed a fraught polit­i­cal frame: ‘racists’ vs. ‘social­ists.’”
    • What Pelosi Ver­sus the Squad Real­ly Means (David Brooks, New York Times): “Lib­er­al­ism arose out of the fact that polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tions, while excit­ing at the out­set, usu­al­ly end up in bru­tal­i­ty, dic­ta­tor­ship and blood. Work­ing with­in the sys­tem is best. Peo­ple who came of age in the past few decades did not grow up in an atmos­phere of assumed lib­er­al­ism. They often grew up in an atmos­phere that cri­tiques it.”
    • ‘It Makes Us Want to Sup­port Him More’ (Peter Nicholas, The Atlantic): “A few con­ced­ed that Trump occa­sion­al­ly fires off an inap­pro­pri­ate tweet, but said his accom­plish­ments in office over­shad­ow any offense. If any­thing, they said, his lan­guage springs from an authen­tic­i­ty they find refresh­ing. None of the peo­ple I spoke with con­sid­ered his com­ments about the con­gress­women racist.”
    • Peo­ple Who Have Screamed ‘Racism’ For Decades Won­der Why No One Is Lis­ten­ing To Them About Trump (Baby­lon Bee): this would nor­mal­ly go down in the amus­ing sec­tion because the head­line is from a satire site, but this is one of those times where the Bee’s insight is rel­e­vant: “‘I mean, we com­pared John McCain to George Wal­lace,’ stat­ed Demo­c­rat Mag­gie Wilkins, ‘and I’m not sure who to com­pare Trump to in order to show he’s an even more wors­er racist.’ Activists are con­sid­er­ing com­ing up with oth­er words to express that Trump is a worse kind of racist. They con­sid­ered ‘white suprema­cist,’ but they’ve been using that a lot late­ly, so it would only mean to most peo­ple that Trump is as bad as the Bet­sy Ross flag. So they tried to invent a new term — dou­ble plus racist — to express how extra racist Trump is, but then remem­bered they already used that on Mitt Rom­ney.”
  7. 5 Rea­sons to Dis­en­tan­gle Sex­u­al­i­ty and Race (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Chris­t­ian sex­u­al ethics were as shock­ing to their orig­i­nal first-cen­tu­ry Gre­co-Roman con­text as they are today. If Chris­tians are to learn from his­to­ry, the les­son must be this: hold fast to Scripture’s rad­i­cal demands, whether the cul­tur­al tide is com­ing in or out. You won’t know which side of his­to­ry you’re on until the last day.” Dis­claimer: I know the author and have col­lab­o­rat­ed with her on events at Stan­ford.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 210

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.

It’s good to be back after last week’s hia­tus.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI Trained on Old Sci­en­tif­ic Papers Makes Dis­cov­er­ies Humans Missed (Madeleine Gre­go­ry, Moth­er­board): “In a study pub­lished in Nature on July 3, researchers from the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry used an algo­rithm called Word2Vec sift through sci­en­tif­ic papers for con­nec­tions humans had missed. Their algo­rithm then spit out pre­dic­tions for pos­si­ble ther­mo­elec­tric mate­ri­als, which con­vert heat to ener­gy and are used in many heat­ing and cool­ing appli­ca­tions.”
  2. Can Chris­t­ian Com­pas­sion Influ­ence How We Treat Migrants? (Alan Cross, The Bul­wark): “Com­pas­sion is not inher­it­ed, either in indi­vid­u­als nor in nations. It must be cul­ti­vat­ed and that cul­ti­va­tion often hap­pens in tri­al when we are test­ed. Amer­i­ca is being test­ed right now. How will we respond to the migrants com­ing to us des­per­ate for help and refuge? How will we respond to the sight of Oscar and Vale­ria drown­ing and being found face down on the banks of Rio Grande in each other’s arms?”
    • Relat­ed: In the ‘bat­tle at the bor­der,’ evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers jos­tle for Trump-era media rel­e­van­cy (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Unless you’ve been under a rock recent­ly, you know much of the coun­try is fix­at­ed on the mess at our bor­der. What’s not as vis­i­ble is how evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are fight­ing among them­selves over all of this.”
    • And yet: Repub­li­cans turn more neg­a­tive toward refugees as num­ber admit­ted to U.S. plum­mets (Han­nah Har­tig, Pew Research): “By more than two-to-one (68% to 25%), white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants say the U.S. does not have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees. Oth­er reli­gious groups are more like­ly to say the U.S. does have this respon­si­bil­i­ty. And opin­ions among reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults are near­ly the reverse of those of white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants: 65% say the U.S. has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to accept refugees into the coun­try, while just 31% say it does not.”
  3. Man­ly wed­ding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Out­line): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly con­sid­ered buy­ing a cam­ou­flage ring, part­ly to sig­nal my deep com­mit­ment to irony and part­ly to get bet­ter ser­vice at the auto parts store.” I real­ly enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wed­ding bands in the not-too-dis­tant future.
  4. Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians Face A Deep­en­ing Cri­sis (Peter Wehn­er, The Atlantic): “Cop­pock men­tioned to me the pow­er­ful exam­ple of St. Ambrose, the bish­op of Milan, who was will­ing to rebuke the Roman Emper­or Theo­do­sius for the latter’s role in mas­sacring civil­ians as pun­ish­ment for the mur­der of one of his gen­er­als. Ambrose refused to allow the Church to become a polit­i­cal prop, despite con­cerns that doing so might endan­ger him. Ambrose spoke truth to pow­er. (Theo­do­sius end­ed up seek­ing penance, and Ambrose went on to teach, con­vert, and bap­tize St. Augus­tine.) Prox­im­i­ty to pow­er is fine for Chris­tians, Cop­pock told me, but only so long as it does not cor­rupt their moral sense, only so long as they don’t allow their faith to become polit­i­cal­ly weaponized. Yet that is pre­cise­ly what’s hap­pen­ing today.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I wish that the Amer­i­can church was more vis­i­bly dis­mayed at some of Trump’s obvi­ous sins. I remind peo­ple of all polit­i­cal incli­na­tions that you can sup­port someone’s over­all agen­da and still rebuke them for acts of wicked­ness. In fact, being will­ing to do so makes your sup­port more mean­ing­ful. So vote for who­ev­er you want, and hold the lead­ers you sup­port to a high stan­dard.
  5. Taiwan’s Sta­tus is a Geopo­lit­i­cal Absur­di­ty (Chris Hor­ton, The Atlantic): “’Taiwan’s gov­ern­ment is demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elected—we have a pres­i­dent, we have a par­lia­ment,’ For­eign Min­is­ter Joseph Wu said plain­tive­ly at a brief­ing for for­eign media ear­li­er this year. At the time, his gov­ern­ment was try­ing to be includ­ed in the World Health Assem­bly. (It was ulti­mate­ly blocked by Chi­na.) ‘We issue visas, we issue pass­ports,’ he said, prac­ti­cal­ly plead­ing. ‘We have a mil­i­tary and a cur­ren­cy … Tai­wan exists by itself; Tai­wan is not a part of any oth­er coun­try.’”
  6. Robespierre’s Amer­i­ca (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The data con­firm what one hears and expe­ri­ences anec­do­tal­ly all the time: In the prover­bial land of the free, peo­ple live in mor­tal fear of a moral faux pas. Opin­ions that were con­sid­ered rea­son­able and nor­mal a few years ago are increas­ing­ly deliv­ered in whis­pers. Pro­fes­sors fear their stu­dents. Pub­lish­ers drop books at the slight­est whiff of social-media con­tro­ver­sy.”
  7. Gay Rites Are Civ­il Rites (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “‘Civ­il reli­gion’ is a sur­pris­ing place for social jus­tice to end up. Gay pride start­ed at Stonewall as a giant ****-you to civ­il soci­ety. Home­less peo­ple, addicts, and sex work­ers told the police where they could shove their respectable val­ues. But there was anoth­er major world reli­gion that start­ed with beg­gars, lep­ers, and pros­ti­tutes, wasn’t there? One that told the Phar­isees where to shove their respectable val­ues.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 209

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.

FYI: there’s an excel­lent chance I won’t be send­ing my Fri­day roundup next week.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Christ in the Camps (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “I humbly reach out to the only fac­tion of Amer­i­cans I know of who have the ear of the admin­is­tra­tion and who care about chil­dren: my broth­ers and sis­ters in Christ who attend evan­gel­i­cal church­es. It seems clear that we are in the midst of a pro­found human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis and that chil­dren are being forced to suf­fer in ter­ri­ble ways. Maybe it was nev­er sup­posed to be this way; maybe the sys­tem just got over­whelmed. But this is a dis­as­ter.” Sear­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. 
    • The hor­ri­fy­ing con­di­tions fac­ing kids in bor­der deten­tion, explained (Dara Lind, Vox): “It is appar­ent that even an admin­is­tra­tion act­ing with the best inter­ests of chil­dren in mind at every turn would be scram­bling right now. But pol­i­cy­mak­ers are split on how much of the cur­rent cri­sis is sim­ply a resource prob­lem — one Con­gress could help by send­ing more resources — and how much is delib­er­ate mis­treat­ment or neglect from an admin­is­tra­tion that doesn’t deserve any more mon­ey or trust.
    • Why a Gov­ern­ment Lawyer Argued Against Giv­ing Immi­grant Kids Tooth­brush­es (Ken White, The Atlantic): “This admin­is­tra­tion is mere­ly the lat­est one to sub­ject immi­grant chil­dren to abu­sive con­di­tions. It’s been 35 years since Jen­ny Flo­res was strip-searched in an adult facil­i­ty. Before Sarah Fabi­an defend­ed con­crete floors and bright lights for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, she defend­ed putting kids in soli­tary con­fine­ment for Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma. The fault lies not with any one admin­is­tra­tion or politi­cian, but with the cul­ture: the ICE and CBP cul­ture that encour­ages the abuse, the cul­ture of the legal apol­o­gists who defend it, and our culture—a large­ly indif­fer­ent Amer­i­ca that hasn’t done a damn thing about it.”
    • Indi­rect­ly relat­ed: I’m a Jour­nal­ist but I Didn’t Ful­ly Real­ize the Ter­ri­ble Pow­er of U.S. Bor­der Offi­cials Until They Vio­lat­ed My Rights and Pri­va­cy (Seth Harp, The Inter­cept): “As I was walk­ing out, I said to Mon­civias and Vil­lar­real, ‘It’s fun­ny, of all the coun­tries I’ve been to, the bor­der guards have nev­er treat­ed me worse than here, in the one coun­try I’m a cit­i­zen of, in the town where I was born.’” This is unset­tling. 
  2. Peo­ple Who Pay Peo­ple to Kill Peo­ple (Rene Chun, The Atlantic): “The authors deter­mined that 2 per­cent of all mur­ders in Aus­tralia were con­tract killings and that con­tracts were, in some cas­es, sur­pris­ing­ly afford­able. One unful­filled con­tract was for 500 Aus­tralian dol­lars; anoth­er job was com­plet­ed for just $2,000.” This is wild to me because those are close to the amounts that a min­is­ter might get paid for preach­ing at a retreat or offi­ci­at­ing a wed­ding. Who knew assas­sins and min­is­ters had sim­i­lar pay scales? Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Some LGBT links (large­ly occa­sioned by Pride Month).
    • A Match Made In Heav­en (Nathaniel Frank, Wash­ing­ton Post): “What may seem like a straight­for­ward chance to cel­e­brate progress actu­al­ly masks a fault line that has divid­ed our move­ment since its start: whether our goal is equal­i­ty or lib­er­a­tion, a fight for the right to be treat­ed like every­one else or the free­dom to be authen­ti­cal­ly our­selves. Do we seek belong­ing in the world as it is (includ­ing the mil­i­tary, mar­riage and par­ent­ing) or the chance to trans­form the world, by throw­ing off repres­sive norms, into a place where all of us — queer and non-queer alike — can be more free?”
    • Response: Stonewall’s ‘Gift’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To an old-school Cas­san­dra like me — one of the Cas­san­dras who was mocked in the 2000s as a para­noid — this entire col­umn reads like an I told you so, and a vin­di­ca­tion of the Law of Mer­it­ed Impos­si­bil­i­ty (‘It will nev­er hap­pen, and when it does, you big­ots will deserve it’). Not that it does a bit of good now.”
    • Rug­by Australia’s “Own Goal” (Peter Singer, Project Syn­di­cate): “Rug­by Aus­tralia would have a stronger basis for its deci­sion if Folau’s post had expressed hatred toward homo­sex­u­als and could have been inter­pret­ed as an incite­ment to vio­lence against them. But the post no more express­es hatred toward homo­sex­u­als than cig­a­rette warn­ings express hatred toward smok­ers.” Yes, this is the famous philoso­pher Peter Singer. I rarely agree with him, but in this case I strong­ly do.
    • The Reli­gious Roots of Pride (Brett Krutzsch, The Advo­cate): “What most Amer­i­cans do not know when they gaze on the parade’s near­ly-naked dancers, ‘dykes on bikes,’ and trans­gen­der teenagers is that Pride parades exist because of a devout Pen­te­costal min­is­ter.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of reli­gion at Haver­ford Col­lege. One quib­ble: describ­ing Troy Per­ry as a “devout Pen­te­costal” is not accu­rate. He said, “
I knew that I was not start­ing anoth­er Pen­te­costal church. I was start­ing a church that would be tru­ly ecu­meni­cal.” (source: the his­to­ry of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Com­mu­ni­ty Church­es). It would be fair to say “ex-Pen­te­costal min­is­ter Troy Per­ry”, though. His back­ground was news to me.
  4. The Chris­t­ian Case for Mar­i­jua­na (Jonathan Mer­ritt, New York Times): “Amer­i­ca is sick, and the Chris­t­ian call to com­pas­sion oblig­ates the faith­ful to act. Chron­ic pain and ill­ness now affect tens of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, and in many cas­es the cause eludes the bright­est med­ical minds. To fight these ail­ments, Amer­i­cans have been pre­scribed mind-alter­ing anti-depres­sants, high­ly addic­tive pain reliev­ers and opi­oids, and all man­ner of legal sub­stances with a list of side effects so long that drug com­mer­cials feel like ‘Sat­ur­day Night Live’ shorts.”
  5. The Per­cep­tion Gap: How False Impres­sions are Pulling Amer­i­cans Apart (Sean Stevens, Het­ero­dox Acad­e­my): Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans sig­nif­i­cant­ly over­es­ti­mate how many peo­ple on the ‘oth­er side’ hold extreme views. Typ­i­cal­ly, their esti­mates are rough­ly dou­ble the actu­al num­bers for a giv­en issue…. Edu­ca­tion seems to increase, rather than mit­i­gate, the Per­cep­tion Gap (just as increased edu­ca­tion has found to track with increased ide­o­log­i­cal prej­u­dice). Col­lege edu­ca­tion results in an espe­cial­ly dis­tort­ed view of Repub­li­cans among lib­er­als in par­tic­u­lar.” The orig­i­nal research is at https://perceptiongap.us/ (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Prob­lem with Dull Knives: What’s the Defense Depart­ment got to do with Code for Amer­i­ca? (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Medi­um): “I have a dis­tinct mem­o­ry of being a kid in the kitchen with my mom, awk­ward­ly and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous­ly wield­ing a knife, try­ing to cut some tough veg­etable, and defend­ing my actions by say­ing the knife was dull any­way. My mom stopped me and said firm­ly, ‘Jen­ny, a dull knife is much more dan­ger­ous than a sharp knife. You’re strug­gling and using much more force than you should, and that knife is going to end up God Knows Where.’ She was right, of course…. But hav­ing poor tools [for the mil­i­tary] doesn’t make us fight less; it makes us fight bad­ly.” (some empha­sis in the orig­i­nal removed). High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 155.

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 208

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 Pray for Refugees Because I Was One. And God Was Faith­ful. (Sun­day Htoo, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When I was in the jun­gle and run­ning for my life, I felt that I would be safe. I felt that some­one I did not know was pray­ing for me. Some­one is run­ning for their life right now in Bur­ma, or anoth­er coun­try torn by war. Please pray for him, for her, for the chil­dren, for the elder­ly, and for a woman who may be preg­nant. Your prayer is full of mean­ing.” If you ignore every oth­er arti­cle to which I link this week, read this.
    • Rel­e­vant: Migrant chil­dren describe neglect at Texas bor­der facil­i­ty (Cedar Attana­sio, Garance Burke and Martha Men­doza, AP News): “‘In my 22 years of doing vis­its with chil­dren in deten­tion I have nev­er heard of this lev­el of inhu­man­i­ty,’ said Hol­ly Coop­er, who co-directs Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis’ Immi­gra­tion Law Clin­ic and rep­re­sents detained youth…. the Bor­der Patrol is hold­ing 15,000 peo­ple, and the agency con­sid­ers 4,000 to be at capac­i­ty.”
    • Also: Is it Chris­t­ian or ille­gal to aid migrants? A hung Tuc­son jury, a fork in the road of faith (Bri­an McLaren, USA Today): “reli­gious lib­er­ty means the free­dom to save refugees in the desert.” I met McLaren once and had a nice con­ver­sa­tion with him. There is zero chance he remem­bers me. There are parts of this op-ed with which I stren­u­ous­ly dis­agree, rec­om­mend­ed nonethe­less.
  2. The Illib­er­al Right Throws a Tantrum (Adam Ser­w­er, The Atlantic): “The Amer­i­can creed has no more devot­ed adher­ents than those who have been his­tor­i­cal­ly denied its promis­es, and no more fair-weath­er friends than those who have tak­en them for grant­ed.”
    • In response: Is The Reli­gious Right Priv­i­leged? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Polit­i­cal­ly, lib­er­al­ism has imposed via the judi­cia­ry, the least demo­c­ra­t­ic branch, a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to abor­tion, a form of lethal vio­lence that the church oppos­es for the same rea­sons it oppos­es infan­ti­cide — and after 50 years of small‑d demo­c­ra­t­ic activism by pro-lif­ers, the pro-choice side seems to be hard­en­ing into a view that such activism is as un-Amer­i­can as racism. Legal­ly, elite lib­er­al­ism is increas­ing­ly embrac­ing argu­ments that would make it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble for the church to oper­ate hos­pi­tals and adop­tion agen­cies today, and per­haps col­leges and gram­mar schools tomor­row. And in its inter­nal life, beneath the post-Protes­tant ten­den­cy I’ve just described, pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics is also nur­tur­ing a fash­ion­able occultism, whose rit­u­als may be prac­ticed some­what iron­i­cal­ly or per­for­ma­tive­ly but whose anti-Catholi­cism seems quite sin­cere.”
    • Relat­ed: Two Painful Truths of America’s Reli­gious Cul­ture War (David French, Nation­al Review): “Here are two painful truths: Sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment is break­ing its promise of lib­er­ty, and the Amer­i­can church is break­ing its promise of virtue.”
  3. What Real­ly Hap­pened to Malaysia’s Miss­ing Air­plane (William Langewi­esche, The Atlantic): “The idea that a sophis­ti­cat­ed machine, with its mod­ern instru­ments and redun­dant com­mu­ni­ca­tions, could sim­ply van­ish seems beyond the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty. It is hard to per­ma­nent­ly delete an email, and liv­ing off the grid is near­ly unachiev­able even when the attempt is delib­er­ate. A Boe­ing 777 is meant to be elec­tron­i­cal­ly acces­si­ble at all times…. All sorts of the­o­rists have made claims, ampli­fied by social media, that ignore the satel­lite data, and in some cas­es also the radar tracks, the air­craft sys­tems, the air-traf­fic-con­trol record, the physics of flight, and the basic con­tours of plan­e­tary geog­ra­phy. ” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent (and, it seems, half the inter­net — this is wide­ly con­sid­ered a must-read arti­cle). The author is a pro­fes­sion­al pilot and a vet­er­an jour­nal­ist
  4. ‘Sing Hal­lelu­jah to the Lord’ has become the unof­fi­cial anthem of the anti-extra­di­tion protest move­ment (Ken­neth Tan, Shang­hai­ist): “Alarmed by reports of police bru­tal­i­ty, many church groups gal­va­nized to par­tic­i­pate in peace protests, call­ing on the author­i­ties to stop the vio­lence. Their pres­ence on the front lines of the protests were help­ful in mak­ing the demon­stra­tions look more like an out­door wor­ship ser­vice rather than the ‘orga­nized riots’ the gov­ern­ment said it had to crack down on to bring back law and order.”
    • Relat­ed: A new kind of Hong Kong activism emerges as pro­test­ers mobi­lize with­out any lead­ers (Alice Su, LA Times): “This time around, pro­test­ers are delib­er­ate­ly lead­er­less, Leung said. ‘It looks quite orga­nized and well-dis­ci­plined. But I’m quite sure you can­not find any­one man­ag­ing the whole thing,’ Leung said, adding that the pro­test­ers’ logis­ti­cal prac­tices — bring­ing sup­plies, set­ting up med­ical sta­tions, rapid mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion — were ‘in-built’ from the last few years of prac­tice. ‘It’s just like a machine or a self-learn­ing AI that can run by them­selves,’ he said.”
    • Relat­ed: check out this drone footage of the protests (3 min­utes, YouTube).
  5. Repa­ra­tions came up in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives on June­teenth. Here are two tes­ti­monies that caught a lot of atten­tion:
    • Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Tes­ti­mo­ny on Repa­ra­tions (Olivia Paschal & Madeleine Carlisle, The Atlantic): “The typ­i­cal black fam­i­ly in this coun­try has one-tenth the wealth of the typ­i­cal white fam­i­ly. Black women die in child­birth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boast­ing the largest prison pop­u­la­tion on the plan­et, of which the descen­dants of the enslaved make up the largest share. The mat­ter of repa­ra­tions is one of mak­ing amends and direct redress, but it is also a ques­tion of cit­i­zen­ship.” (or watch the five minute video on YouTube)
    • My Tes­ti­mo­ny On Repa­ra­tions (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “But the peo­ple who were owed for slav­ery are no longer here, and we’re not enti­tled to col­lect on their debts. Repa­ra­tions, by def­i­n­i­tion, are only giv­en to vic­tims. So the moment you give me repa­ra­tions, you’ve made me into a vic­tim with­out my con­sent. Not just that: you’ve made one-third of black Americans—who con­sis­tent­ly poll against reparations—into vic­tims with­out their con­sent, and black Amer­i­cans have fought too long for the right to define them­selves to be spo­ken for in such a con­de­scend­ing man­ner.” (or watch the six minute video on YouTube)
    • Some­what, kin­da relat­ed: ‘Affir­ma­tive Action Is Not About Equal­i­ty. It’s About Cov­er­ing Ass.’ (Evan Goldstein,Chronicle Review): “What hap­pened is that I went through a trau­ma. I was accused of assault­ing a woman with whom I was hav­ing an extra­mar­i­tal affair. I was pub­licly humil­i­at­ed. I had to with­draw an appoint­ment as under­sec­re­tary of edu­ca­tion in the last years of Reagan’s sec­ond term. I was a crack-cocaine addict; it almost killed me. My wife at the time, God bless her, stayed with me, and we sub­se­quent­ly had two fine sons. But at the time, I was dying. I found Jesus. I got my life togeth­er. They stuck with me at the Kennedy School, but I just couldn’t bear the feel­ing of con­de­scen­sion.” This is an inter­view with Glenn Loury, who was the first black tenured econ pro­fes­sor at Har­vard. He is now an econ­o­mist at Brown.
  6. Ide­ol­o­gy and Facts Col­lide at Ober­lin Col­lege (Daniel McGraw, Quil­lette): “It slow­ly became evi­dent that this case was not about free expres­sion and assem­bly or racial injus­tice and civ­il rights. It was about some­thing more banal. A cow­ard­ly col­lege admin­is­tra­tion picked on a small and vul­ner­a­ble busi­ness in an attempt to fend off accu­sa­tions of racism it was fac­ing from its own stu­dents.”
    • Hon­est­ly, this Twit­ter thread about it is even bet­ter. Jaw-drop­ping details. Read it first and then the above arti­cle if you want a more well-round­ed nar­ra­tive.
  7. How Should Chris­tians Have Sex? (Kate­lyn Beaty, New York Times): “I long for more robust cat­e­gories of right and wrong besides con­sent — a base­line, but only that — and more than a gen­er­al reminder not to be a jerk. I can get that from Dan Sav­age, but I also want to know what Jesus thinks.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A One Para­me­ter Equa­tion That Can Exact­ly Fit Any Scat­ter Plot (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­fit­ting is pos­si­ble with just one para­me­ter and so mod­els with few­er para­me­ters are not nec­es­sar­i­ly prefer­able even if they fit the data as well or bet­ter than mod­els with more para­me­ters.” Researchers take note. The under­ly­ing math­e­mat­ics paper is well-written and inter­est­ing: One Para­me­ter Is Always Enough (Steven T. Pianta­dosi) — among oth­er things, it points out that you can smug­gle in arbi­trar­i­ly large amounts of data into an equa­tion through a sin­gle para­me­ter because a num­ber can have infi­nite dig­its. Obvi­ous once stat­ed, but I don’t know that it ever would have occurred to me. First shared in vol­ume 154.

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 207

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. Eleven arrests, dou­ble the tear gas fired dur­ing Occu­py move­ment and 81 injured: police chief paints dis­turb­ing pic­ture of Hong Kong extra­di­tion bill protests (Ng Kang-chung & Christy Leung, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “In a post­mortem on Thurs­day of the clash­es between offi­cers and pro­test­ers who had sur­round­ed the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil build­ing and admin­is­tra­tive head­quar­ters the day before, Com­mis­sion­er of Police Stephen Lo Wai-chung said more than 150 rounds of tear gas had been fired – almost dou­ble that on the first day of the Occu­py demon­stra­tions – and about 20 bean­bag rounds, as well as ‘sev­er­al’ rounds of rub­ber bul­lets.” See also these relat­ed pho­tos from AP.
    • What Hong Kong’s Free­dom Means to the World (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Cir­ca 2019, Hong Kong is a study in the creep­ing pow­er and increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of autoc­ra­cy. While it is pos­si­ble there could be a Tianan­men-like mas­sacre in the streets of Hong Kong, it is more like­ly that its main­land over­lords will opt for more sub­tle ways of chok­ing off Hong Kong’s remain­ing auton­o­my and free­doms.”
    • Hong Kong and the Future of Free­dom (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “When Ronald Rea­gan called the Sovi­et Union ‘the focus of evil in the mod­ern world,’ one promi­nent lib­er­al writer denounced him as ‘prim­i­tive.’ But it was such rhetoric that gave courage to dis­si­dents and dream­ers on the oth­er side of the wall. What’s real­ly prim­i­tive is to look upon the oppres­sion of oth­ers and, whether out of defi­cient sym­pa­thy or exces­sive sophis­ti­ca­tion, remain silent.”
  2. The Pol­i­tics of Dystopia (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Lib­er­al­ism has nev­er done as well as it thinks at resolv­ing its own crises. America’s gravest moral evil, chat­tel slav­ery, was defeat­ed by an author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­dent in a reli­gious civ­il war, not by pro­ce­du­ral­ism or con­sti­tu­tion­al debate. The cri­sis of the 1930s end­ed hap­pi­ly for lib­er­al­ism because a reac­tionary impe­ri­al­ist with­stood Adolf Hitler and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary Bol­she­vik crushed him. The lib­er­al peace that fol­lowed may depend on fear of the atom­ic bomb.”
    • Relat­ed: A High-School Porn Star’s Cry for Help (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The prob­lem is that there are some very old human impuls­es that must now con­tend with porn. One of them is the ten­den­cy of deeply trou­bled teenage girls to act out sex­u­al­ly as a kind of dis­tress sig­nal, an attempt to get the atten­tion of adults who may not be get­ting the mes­sage that they’re in a cri­sis.”
    • Relat­ed? JON STEWART Goes OFF On Con­gress (YouTube): a remark­able nine-minute clip. The next day the bill was passed in com­mit­tee and now awaits a full vote.
  3. The restau­rant own­er who asked for 1‑star Yelp reviews (Zachary Crock­ett, The Hus­tle): “In 2014, chef Davide Cer­re­ti­ni adver­tised a spe­cial that would for­ev­er change his fate: Any­one who left his restau­rant a 1‑star review on Yelp would get 25% off a piz­za.” This is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Her Evan­gel­i­cal Megachurch Was Her World. Then Her Daugh­ter Said She Was Molest­ed by a Min­is­ter. (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Ms. Bragg said that all she want­ed was a church home that would care for her fam­i­ly. Evan­gel­i­cals in Dal­las are enam­ored with the Vil­lage, with Mr. Chan­dler and with all the church rep­re­sents, she said recent­ly. She start­ed to cry.”
  5. A Soci­ol­o­gist of Reli­gion on Protes­tants, Porn, and the “Puri­ty Indus­tri­al Com­plex” (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “What I found is that, what­ev­er we think pornog­ra­phy is doing, those effects tend to be ampli­fied when we’re talk­ing about con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants. It seems to be unique­ly harm­ful to con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants’ men­tal health, their sense of self, their own identities—certainly their inti­mate relationships—in ways that don’t tend to be as harm­ful for peo­ple who don’t have that kind of moral prob­lem with it.” Chotin­er is inter­view­ing Samuel Per­ry, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa.
  6. The Rise Of Pro­gres­sive Occultism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “For an increas­ing num­ber of left-lean­ing millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any orga­nized religion—occult spir­i­tu­al­i­ty isn’t just a form of per­son­al prac­tice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a meta­phys­i­cal can­vas for the Amer­i­can cul­ture wars in the post-Trump era: pit­ting the self-iden­ti­fied Davids of seem­ing­ly sec­u­lar pro­gres­sivism against the Goliath of nation­al­ist evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The arti­cle ends with an amaz­ing quote: “Back in 1992, Chris­t­ian broad­cast­er Pat Robert­son warned of the dan­gers of fem­i­nism, pre­dict­ing that it would induce ‘women to leave their husbands.…practice witch­craft, destroy cap­i­tal­ism and become les­bians.’ Many of today’s witch­es would hap­pi­ly agree.” 👀
  7. Is Chris­tian­i­ty los­ing to Islam? (Paul Seabright, Asia Times): “On a world scale – what­ev­er pop­ulists may say – Chris­tian­i­ty is not strug­gling; it is in more vig­or­ous shape than it has ever been. And the mar­ket­place is where most of the reli­gious action is going to take place in this cen­tu­ry. As in many oth­er mar­ket­places, there are large returns to economies of scale for those who can work out how to exploit them. That is why cor­po­rate reli­gion is here to stay – and why we should expect it to con­sol­i­date its dom­i­nance.” The author is an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor in France.

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 Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Indi­vid­u­als have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” The author just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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.