Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 167

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 Catholic Church is fac­ing a tremen­dous cri­sis, one poten­tial­ly far big­ger than any I have seen in my life­time. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about it. Here are some pieces I found illu­mi­nat­ing.
    • Protes­tants Should Care Deeply about the Catholic Cat­a­stro­phe (David French, Nation­al Review): “The Church is like a navy, a col­lec­tion of ships unit­ed in pur­pose and in des­ti­na­tion. Each denom­i­na­tion is like a dif­fer­ent ship in that navy, and while each crew is pri­mar­i­ly tasked with the health and well-being of its own ves­sel, it’s also deeply invest­ed in the strength of the fleet. Each ves­sel is more vul­ner­a­ble as the fleet weak­ens. Each ves­sel is stronger sur­round­ed by its pro­tec­tive arma­da. If the anal­o­gy holds, then one of the might­i­est bat­tle­ships in the fleet, the Catholic Church, is tak­ing tor­pe­does left and right.”
    • A Catholic Civ­il War? (Matthew Schmitz, New York Times): “…the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civ­il war. On one side are the tra­di­tion­al­ists, who insist that abuse can be pre­vent­ed only by tighter adher­ence to church doc­trine. On the oth­er side are the lib­er­als, who demand that the church cease con­demn­ing homo­sex­u­al acts and allow gay priests to step out of the clos­et.” This may sound like hyper­bole, but I believe it is accu­rate.
    • Catholics Face A Painful Ques­tion: Is It True? (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In his state­ments on Viganò’s tes­ti­mo­ny last Sun­day, Fran­cis invit­ed jour­nal­ists to use their skills and capac­i­ties to draw con­clu­sions about the mat­ter. And so, on Mon­day morn­ing, I began to try.” This is sad. It seems the only per­son doing actu­al jour­nal­ism on this for a major news­pa­per is… an opin­ion colum­nist. It stinks to high heav­en that the major papers aren’t fero­cious­ly pur­su­ing this.
    • What Did Pope Fran­cis Know? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “this doesn’t mean that the pope should resign — not even if Viganò is ful­ly vin­di­cat­ed. One papal res­ig­na­tion per mil­len­ni­um is more than enough. That cop-out should not be eas­i­ly avail­able to pon­tif­fs con­front­ed with scan­dals, includ­ing scan­dals of their own mak­ing, any more than it should be avail­able to fathers.”
    • Answer­ing Vigano’s Crit­ics (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Again: if the alle­ga­tions are false, you say, ‘They’re false.’ But that’s not what the Pope said. At all. If the Pope thinks he can ignore Vigano as he has ignored the dubia car­di­nals, he is grave­ly mis­tak­en.”
    • Sto­ry of bomb­shell charges against Pope more sur­re­al by the minute (John L. Allen, Jr., Crux): “If there’s one thing any­one who’s cov­ered the Vat­i­can for a long time ought to have learned by now, it’s nev­er to say a par­tic­u­lar sto­ry just can’t get any­more sur­re­al, because trust me — it always can.”
  2. The School Shoot­ings That Weren’t (Anya Kamenetz, Alex­is Arnold, and Emi­ly Car­di­nali, NPR): Dif­fi­cult to excerpt the key data, so here’s the sum­ma­ry: schools report­ed 240 shoot­ings in the 2015–2016 school year, but NPR fol­lowed up and was only able to ver­i­fy 11. How did this hap­pen? “the law of real­ly, real­ly big num­bers. Temkin notes that ‘240 schools is less than half of 1 per­cent,’ of the schools in the sur­vey. ‘It’s in the mar­gin of error.’ ”
  3. There was a reveal­ing ker­fluffle at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria in ado­les­cents and young adults: A study of parental reports (Lisa Littman, PLOS ONE): “The ele­vat­ed num­ber of friends per friend­ship group who became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, the pat­tern of clus­ter out­breaks of trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in these friend­ship groups, the sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of friend­ship groups where the major­i­ty of the mem­bers became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, and the peer group dynam­ics observed all serve to sup­port the plau­si­bil­i­ty of social and peer con­ta­gion for ROGD [Rapid Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria]. The wors­en­ing of men­tal well-being and par­ent-child rela­tion­ships and behav­iors that iso­late teens from their par­ents, fam­i­lies, non-trans­gen­der friends and main­stream sources of infor­ma­tion are par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cern­ing. More research is need­ed to bet­ter under­stand rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria, its impli­ca­tions, and scope.” The research paper in ques­tion.
    • Jour­nal Look­ing Into Study on ‘Rapid-Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “Brown Uni­ver­si­ty and PLOS ONE have dis­tanced them­selves from a con­tro­ver­sial, peer-reviewed pub­lished study on ‘rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria,’ or gen­der iden­ti­ty issues that present not ear­ly and over a life­time but quick­ly, in teenagers and young adults.” This is the neu­tral take.
    • New paper ignites storm over whether teens expe­ri­ence ‘rapid onset’ of trans­gen­der iden­ti­ty (Mered­ith Wad­man, Sci­ence): “The actions by the jour­nal and the uni­ver­si­ty have infu­ri­at­ed some researchers who say the moves tram­ple aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, although the paper remains freely avail­able. ‘This is a sad day for @BrownUniversity, and an indict­ment of the integri­ty of their aca­d­e­m­ic and admin­is­tra­tive lead­er­ship,’ Jef­frey Fli­er, a for­mer dean of Har­vard Med­ical School in Boston and a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine there, tweet­ed on Mon­day.” This is a slight­ly more feisty take.
    • Ryan T. Ander­son on Twit­ter: “If this is the sort of cen­sor­ship that takes place out in the open, just image what’s tak­ing place behind closed doors. All because this research reached polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect con­clu­sion. But when lives are at stake, it’s more impor­tant to be cor­rect than polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect.” A feisty and I sus­pect very accu­rate take.
  4. The French, Com­ing Apart (Christo­pher Cald­well, City Jour­nal): “Since Toc­queville, we have under­stood that our demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties are emu­la­tive. Nobody wants to be thought a big­ot if the mem­ber­ship board of the coun­try club takes pride in its mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. But as the prospect of ris­ing in the world is ham­pered or extin­guished, the induce­ments to ide­o­log­i­cal con­formism weak­en. Dis­sent appears. Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness grows more dra­con­ian. Final­ly the rul­ing class reach­es a dan­ger­ous stage, in which it begins to lose not only its legit­i­ma­cy but also a sense of what its legit­i­ma­cy rest­ed on in the first place.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that’s sort of about France, sort of about Amer­i­ca, and most­ly about West­ern moder­ni­ty.
  5. Chi­na Is Treat­ing Islam Like A Men­tal Ill­ness (Sigal Samuel, The Atlantic): “The med­ical anal­o­gy is one way the gov­ern­ment tries to jus­ti­fy its pol­i­cy of large-scale intern­ment: After all, attempt­ing to inoc­u­late a whole pop­u­la­tion against, say, the flu, requires giv­ing flu shots not just to the already-afflict­ed few, but to a crit­i­cal mass of peo­ple. In fact, using this rhetoric, Chi­na has tried to defend a sys­tem of arrest quo­tas for Uighurs. Police offi­cers con­firmed to Radio Free Asia that they are under orders to meet spe­cif­ic pop­u­la­tion tar­gets when round­ing up peo­ple for intern­ment. In one town­ship, police offi­cials said they were being ordered to send 40 per­cent of the local pop­u­la­tion to the camps.” I’ve men­tioned this before, but it tru­ly is one of the scan­dals of the mod­ern world.
  6. With Flow­ers In Their Hair (Andrew Fer­gu­son, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “The seeds of the destruc­tion of the Haight exper­i­ment could be found in its own antin­o­mi­an­ism, in its orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion. Maybe the whole­sale rejec­tion of time-hon­ored and time-test­ed val­ues — monogamy, mod­er­a­tion, good man­ners, self-denial, self-con­trol, the sanc­ti­ty of pri­vate prop­er­ty, per­son­al account­abil­i­ty to high­er author­i­ties, both mate­r­i­al and spir­i­tu­al — leads to squalor and mis­ery. Maybe the project they’re cel­e­brat­ing in San Fran­cis­co this sum­mer was doomed from the start.” Long and good.
  7. Amer­i­ca Soured on My Mul­tira­cial Fam­i­ly (David French, The Atlantic): “There are three fun­da­men­tal, com­pli­cat­ing truths about adop­tion. First, every sin­gle adop­tion begins with pro­found loss. Through death, aban­don­ment, or even lov­ing sur­ren­der, a child suf­fers the loss of his or her moth­er and father. Sec­ond, the demo­graph­ics of those in need of lov­ing homes do not pre­cise­ly match the demo­graph­ics of those seek­ing a new child. Adop­tive par­ents are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white. Adopt­ed chil­dren are not. Thus, mul­tira­cial fam­i­lies are a nat­ur­al and inevitable con­se­quence of the adop­tion process. Third, Amer­i­can cul­ture has long been obsessed with ques­tions of race and iden­ti­ty.”

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 those of any orga­ni­za­tion I work for or 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 166

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. God’s May­or in Guatemala (Dale Han­son Bourke, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the so-called North­ern Tri­an­gle of Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, the coun­tries of Hon­duras, El Sal­vador, and Guatemala form a vio­lent tri­ad. The mur­der rate is high­er in this region than in most active war zones. Gangs, car­tels, and vig­i­lantes impose their will, tak­ing over or co-opt­ing legit­i­mate police forces and rou­tine­ly ter­ror­iz­ing aver­age cit­i­zens…. In the mid­dle of this vio­lence sits the town of San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, a pic­turesque oasis of calm with a pop­u­la­tion of about 6,000 peo­ple. What sets this place apart are the efforts of Jeaneth Ordoñez, the Chris­t­ian may­or who has unit­ed the towns­peo­ple in their quest to keep the munic­i­pal­i­ty free of the vio­lence and upheaval that sur­rounds them.”
  2. No alco­hol safe to drink, glob­al study con­firms (Lau­rel Ives, BBC): “A large new glob­al study pub­lished in the Lancet has con­firmed pre­vi­ous research which has shown that there is no safe lev­el of alco­hol con­sump­tion. The researchers admit mod­er­ate drink­ing may pro­tect against heart dis­ease but found that the risk of can­cer and oth­er dis­eases out­weighs these pro­tec­tions.” The under­ly­ing research: Alco­hol use and bur­den for 195 coun­tries and ter­ri­to­ries, 1990–2016: a sys­tem­at­ic analy­sis for the Glob­al Bur­den of Dis­ease Study 2016 (The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31310–2)
  3. Chris­tians to Sci­ence: Leave Ani­mals the Way God Designed Them—Except Mos­qui­toes (Rebec­ca Ran­dall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mess­ing with nature or God’s plan was a top con­cern for those opposed to engi­neer­ing ani­mal meat to be more nutri­tious (22%), bring­ing back an extinct species (23%), or mak­ing aquar­i­um fish glow (18%). The rea­son cit­ed most often to oppose cre­at­ing glow­ing fish was sim­ply that it is unnec­es­sary and friv­o­lous (48%).” Appar­ent­ly I am an out­lier. Make the fish glow, make meat more nutri­tious, and deal with mos­qui­to-borne dis­ease. I real­ly like the way the Kenyan researcher quot­ed in the arti­cle encour­ages us to tar­get the par­a­site and not the car­ri­er. We are made in the image of God so that we can exer­cise domin­ion over Cre­ation!
  4. The Peter Prin­ci­ple is a joke tak­en seri­ous­ly. Is it true? (Tim Har­ford, Finan­cial Times): “The authors of the paper dis­cov­ered that the best sales­peo­ple were more like­ly to be pro­mot­ed, and that they were then ter­ri­ble man­agers. The bet­ter they had been in sales, the worse their teams per­formed once they arrived in a man­age­r­i­al role. What’s more, peo­ple were not pro­mot­ed for behav­iour that might seem cor­re­lat­ed with man­age­r­i­al abil­i­ty — in par­tic­u­lar, those who col­lab­o­rat­ed with oth­ers were not reward­ed for doing so. What mat­tered were sales, pure and sim­ple.” It may be the case that you should dress for the job you want, but if you want to get pro­mot­ed you had bet­ter rock the job you have.
  5. Gay Men Are Dif­fer­ent, Says Gay Male Read­er (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Well-mean­ing straight lib­er­als just do not get it, and lots of gay men will not crit­i­cize any­thing gay men col­lec­tive­ly do because they think it will result in both lots of anger from oth­er gay men as well as the empow­er­ment of ide­o­log­i­cal ene­mies who want to, say, ban gay mar­riage. Men and women are fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent and a male-female sex­u­al cul­ture is not going to be the same as a male-male sex­u­al cul­ture.” I sus­pect this will con­sid­ered con­tro­ver­sial by one set of read­ers and com­mon sense by anoth­er, and that the groups will not break down along pre­dictable lines.
  6. How the inter­net has changed dat­ing (The Econ­o­mist): “…a 2013 study researchers from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go showed that mar­riages that start­ed online were less like­ly to end in break-up and were asso­ci­at­ed with high­er lev­els of sat­is­fac­tion than mar­riages of the same vin­tage between sim­i­lar cou­ples who had met offline: the dif­fer­ence was not huge, but it was sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant.”
  7. What Trump Knew and Vot­ers Did­n’t (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “…Trump vot­ers went to the polls unaware that a sum exceed­ing most of their annu­al salaries was expend­ed to keep that [Trump paid off a porn star] from them. Even if the pay­ment had been total­ly legal, it would’ve con­sti­tut­ed a delib­er­ate, immoral, clas­si­cal­ly politi­cian-like effort to mis­lead vot­ers about the choice before them. But the pay­ment was not legal. It vio­lat­ed cam­paign-finance laws—and it was not a mere­ly acci­den­tal and tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of an over­ly com­pli­cat­ed or con­tro­ver­sial pro­vi­sion.” This arti­cle is a pret­ty good and suc­cinct sum­ma­ry of the cur­rent debate about Trump.

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 Can I Learn To Receive – And Give – Crit­i­cism In Light Of The Cross?(Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “A believ­er is one who iden­ti­fies with all that God affirms and con­demns in Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion. In oth­er words, in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s judg­ment of me; and in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of me. Both have a rad­i­cal impact on how we take and give crit­i­cism.” This is based on a longer arti­cle (4 page PDF). (first shared in vol­ume 63)

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).

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 165

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. Our Hope Is Com­ing (Steven Lon­go­ria, Deni­son Forum): “The world we live in would tell us that hope is close­ly tied to doubt. To say ‘I hope it doesn’t rain tomor­row’ car­ries with it a fear that it will like­ly rain…. Bib­li­cal hope is some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent. It con­veys a state of con­fi­dence, secu­ri­ty, and lack of wor­ry.” Steven is an alum­nus of our min­istry who is cur­rent­ly study­ing at Dal­las The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. Go, Steven!
  2. 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.” Rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. #Church­Too
    • What Would Jesus Do? Clean House In The Catholic Church. (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Con­gre­gants] do not expect the church to be per­fect; even St. Peter, after all, denied Christ three times. But they do expect to find the reflec­tion of Christ there. Accord­ing to news reports, the church hier­ar­chy in Penn­syl­va­nia and beyond has already denied Christ’s gospel three times: once when it shel­tered preda­tors in silence; once when it failed to remove every­one who was involved in cov­er­ing up any crime; and again when two of the six dio­ce­ses involved tried to shut down the grand jury inves­ti­ga­tion that pro­duced the report. Now they face the same choice Peter did.” Straight fire.
    • Why Men Like Me Should Not Be Priests (Daniel Matt­son, First Things): “Most of the hor­rif­ic abuse detailed in the Penn­syl­va­nia Grand Jury report involved ado­les­cent boys and young men. This isn’t pedophil­ia…. If the Church wants to avoid sex scan­dals, it must stop ordain­ing the sorts of men who have the hard­est time remain­ing chaste.” This arti­cle is full of details I did not know. Fas­ci­nat­ing and no doubt a light­ning rod for con­tro­very.
    • How the Wil­low Creek Church Scan­dal Has Stunned the Evan­gel­i­cal World (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times): “The sud­den res­ig­na­tion of Wil­low Creek Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s top lead­ers fol­low­ing sex­u­al harass­ment alle­ga­tions against Rev. Bill Hybels, their found­ing pas­tor, has shak­en evan­gel­i­cals far from the church’s base in the Chica­go sub­urbs. There are few big­ger names in the evan­gel­i­cal world than Mr. Hybels, and few church­es more influ­en­tial than Wil­low Creek. Chris­tians world­wide looked to it as a mod­el of smart lead­er­ship.”
    • These two scan­dals are espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing when jux­ta­posed. The Roman Catholic Church is the most hier­ar­chi­cal of denom­i­na­tions with author­i­ty flow­ing down from the Pope. Wil­low Creek is a non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al con­gre­ga­tion and is com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent of exter­nal author­i­ty. They rep­re­sent two extremes of church gov­er­nance and the rev­e­la­tion of their moral fail­ures demon­strate that the prob­lem of sin is not solved by rules. See Colos­sians 2:20–23.
    • Relat­ed: Evan­gel­i­cal Puri­ty Cul­ture Taught Me to Ratio­nal­ize My Sex­u­al Assault (Bec­ca Andrews, Moth­er Jones): “I under­stood my role: I was a sex­u­al gate­keep­er. Men, we were taught, are bur­dened by God with insa­tiable lust. Women, of course, are not, so it makes sense that we are expect­ed to cre­ate the bound­aries. We are respon­si­ble for what we wear, but more broad­ly, we are tasked with defin­ing con­sent, as thorny as that may seem…. The stakes are high in puri­ty cul­ture. Every slipup is a strike against any hope of a suc­cess­ful mar­riage.” Although inter­est­ing, the arti­cle doesn’t quite make the case that the title implies.
    • For the record: nev­er keep a crim­i­nal mat­ter pri­vate because you fear your report will hurt the pub­lic per­cep­tion of a reli­gious body, polit­i­cal enti­ty, or any oth­er insti­tu­tion. Souls are eter­nal, orga­ni­za­tions are not. Indi­vid­u­als are more impor­tant than insti­tu­tions. This is true even of denom­i­na­tions and indi­vid­ual con­gre­ga­tions — Jesus died for the Church and not for a brand. 1 Corinthi­ans 6:1–7 tells us to for­bear in civ­il mat­ters, but when it comes to crim­i­nal mat­ters Romans 13:1–7 is the rel­e­vant pas­sage.
  4. Social Injus­tice and the Gospel (John MacArthur, Grace To You): “I am con­vinced the only long-term solu­tion to every brand of eth­nic ani­mus is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ alone are the bar­ri­ers and divid­ing walls between peo­ple groups bro­ken down, the enmi­ty abol­ished, and dif­fer­ing cul­tures and eth­nic groups bound togeth­er in one new peo­ple (Eph­esians 2:14–15). The black lead­ers with whom I min­is­tered dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment shared that con­vic­tion. The evan­gel­i­cals who are say­ing the most and talk­ing the loud­est these days about what’s referred to as ‘social jus­tice’ seem to have a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive.” This is appar­ent­ly the first in a series.
  5. “Let The Whore­house Burn!” (Christo­pher Cald­well, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “‘As of this evening,’ said Pierre Moscovi­ci in Lux­em­bourg in June, ‘the Greek cri­sis is over.’ Moscovi­ci, a French Social­ist politi­cian who serves as the eco­nom­ics com­mis­sion­er of the Euro­pean Union, was mak­ing quite a claim…. Today, despite what Pierre Moscovi­ci and his col­leagues said in Lux­em­bourg, Greek debt, at 179 per­cent, is high­er still. The lat­est E.U. deal requires Greece to run large bud­get sur­plus­es until the year 2060 to repay the debts brought on by the E.U.’s own mis­man­age­ment. The coun­try is in some respects worse off than it was when Greek pro­test­ers mobbed the par­lia­ment in May 2010, howl­ing, ‘Let the whore­house burn!’”
  6. Norway’s hid­den scan­dal (Tim Whewell, BBC): “His con­vic­tion puts the spot­light back on a sys­tem which has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cised by some par­ents – and by lead­ing Nor­we­gian pro­fes­sion­als in the child­care field – for being too quick to put chil­dren into care, split­ting fam­i­lies unnec­es­sar­i­ly. The dis­graced psy­chi­a­trist has had his pro­fes­sion­al licence revoked, mean­ing he can­not work in the same field again. But par­ents who’ve lost cus­tody of chil­dren in cas­es he was involved in believe all his pre­vi­ous deci­sions should be reviewed.” This is out­ra­geous.
  7. Col­orado Defies the Supreme Court, Renews Per­se­cu­tion of a Chris­t­ian Bak­er (David French, Nation­al Review): “On the very day that Phillips won his case at the Supreme Court, a per­son emailed with yet anoth­er delib­er­ate­ly offen­sive design request: “I’m think­ing a three-tiered white cake. Cheese­cake frost­ing. And the top­per should be a large fig­ure of Satan, lick­ing a 9″ black Dil­do. I would like the dil­do to be an actu­al work­ing mod­el, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake. I can pro­vide it for you if you don’t have the means to pro­cure one your­self.” And final­ly, two days lat­er, a per­son iden­ti­fy­ing as ‘Autumn Marie’ vis­it­ed Phillips’s shop and request­ed a cake fea­tur­ing a pen­ta­gram. Accord­ing to ADF, ‘Phillips believes that per­son was Autumn Scar­di­na.’ Rather than rec­og­niz­ing Scardina’s con­duct as noth­ing more than a bad-faith cam­paign of harass­ment, Aubrey Ele­nis, the direc­tor of the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Divi­sion, found on June 28 ‘prob­a­ble cause’ to believe that Phillips vio­lat­ed Scardina’s civ­il rights….”
    • Relat­ed: When oppo­si­tion to reli­gious lib­er­ty becomes sil­ly, pet­ty, and vin­dic­tive (Andrew T. Walk­er. Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “When our cre­ative direc­tor walked into my office to noti­fy me [that our min­istry was being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against by a com­pa­ny], my first response was to smile. Why? Because the ERLC had been the vic­tim of dis­crim­i­na­tion, and I knew an oppor­tu­ni­ty like this meant the ERLC could pur­sue the moral high ground. What pro­gres­sivism does to dis­senters, we would not do to them…. No law­suit was nec­es­sary. No media storm was called for. We have zero desire to force the dis­crim­i­nat­ing com­pa­ny to agree with us or com­ply with our demands. No one was hold­ing the oth­er hostage to their ide­o­log­i­cal expec­ta­tions. The pow­er of choice and the free­dom of view­point diver­si­ty allowed two actors to pur­sue a path­way of plu­ral­ism.”

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 Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From.(Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qual­i­ties.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). This serendip­i­tous­ly hap­pened to be next in the sequence of old­er links. It fits very well with the above arti­cle about evan­gel­i­cal puri­ty cul­ture. (first shared in vol­ume 62)

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).

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 164

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. Two con­trast­ing per­spec­tives on who is real­ly win­ning in Amer­i­ca, both inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished by smart peo­ple in the same high-pro­file mag­a­zine:
    • Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jor­dan Peter­son (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “There are many legit­i­mate rea­sons to dis­agree with him on a num­ber of sub­jects, and many peo­ple of good will do. But there is no coher­ent rea­son for the left’s oblit­er­at­ing and irra­tional hatred of Jor­dan Peter­son. What, then, accounts for it? It is because the left, while it cur­rent­ly seems ascen­dant in our hous­es of cul­ture and art, has in fact entered its deca­dent late phase, and it is deeply vul­ner­a­ble.”
    • Con­ser­v­a­tives Are Scared, Even Under Trump (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “While lib­er­al activist groups paint Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Wash­ing­ton as an unmit­i­gat­ed for­ward march of con­ser­v­a­tive vic­to­ries, con­ser­v­a­tive activist groups—including Weber’s—don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly per­ceive things the same way. Rather, some of these groups see the next few years under Trump as a brief win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate defens­es against a cul­ture that is mov­ing away from them. In parts of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, the long-game strat­e­gy is to defend their posi­tion by devolv­ing pow­er away from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the Supreme Court, using the momen­tum of the Trump years to bat­ten down the hatch­es against the inevitable cul­tur­al storms ahead.”
  2. Final text of Jew­ish nation-state law, approved by the Knes­set ear­ly on July 19 (Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel): “The law for the first time enshrines Israel as ‘the nation­al home of the Jew­ish peo­ple.’ The law becomes one of the so-called Basic Laws, which, like a con­sti­tu­tion, guide Israel’s legal sys­tem and are usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult to repeal than reg­u­lar laws.” Unlike most arti­cles, this includes the full (trans­lat­ed) text of the law, and it is worth read­ing if you’ve only seen it excerpt­ed. It’s not long.
    • I believe this is the Israeli law that infu­ri­at­ed Stan­ford stu­dent Hamzeh Daoud (see last week’s install­ment for details).
    • Israel’s New Law: A Tale of Two Nation-States (Robert Nichol­son, Prov­i­dence): “The Pales­tine Basic Law (2003) defines Pales­tine as part of the Arab world and Arab uni­ty as a sin­gu­lar goal of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. The law also defines Ara­bic as Palestine’s offi­cial lan­guage, Jerusalem as its offi­cial cap­i­tal, and Islam as its offi­cial reli­gion. This basic law serves as a tem­po­rary con­sti­tu­tion for the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty until a sov­er­eign State of Pales­tine is estab­lished. In the mean­time, the law gov­erns dai­ly life inside the West Bank and to some extent Gaza. On July 19 the Israeli Knes­set passed a sim­i­lar basic law.” This was incred­i­bly help­ful con­text to me.
    • Under the Law: Israeli Chris­tians Wor­ry About Sec­ondary Sta­tus in Jew­ish Nation-State (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘This law out­lines that Israel’s demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues are sec­ondary for non-Jews,’ said Sha­dia Qubti, a Pales­tin­ian evan­gel­i­cal liv­ing in Nazareth. ‘It sends a clear mes­sage that my lan­guage is not wel­come and con­se­quent­ly, nei­ther is my cul­tur­al and eth­nic iden­ti­ty.’”
  3. A Bet­ter Way to Ban Alex Jones (David French, New York Times): “The good news is that tech com­pa­nies don’t have to rely on vague, mal­leable and hot­ly con­test­ed def­i­n­i­tions of hate speech to deal with con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists like Mr. Jones. The far bet­ter option would be to pro­hib­it libel or slan­der on their plat­forms…. Pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions can ban who­ev­er they like. But if com­pa­nies like Face­book are eager to nav­i­gate speech con­tro­ver­sies in good faith, they would do well to learn from the cen­turies of legal devel­op­ments in Amer­i­can law. When cre­at­ing a true mar­ket­place of ideas, why not let the First Amend­ment be your guide?”
    • His fol­low-up: A First Amend­ment Peace Plan for the Twit­ter Wars (David French, Nation­al Review): “As I dug down into objec­tions to my pro­posed First Amend­ment frame­work, I often found that the objec­tions were ulti­mate­ly based on a desire to dis­crim­i­nate on the basis of view­point, on a desire to use the pow­er of the plat­form to priv­i­lege some voic­es and sup­press oth­ers.”
  4. A Kind of Home­less­ness: Evan­gel­i­cals of Col­or in the Trump Era (Melani McAl­is­ter, Reli­gion & Pol­i­tics): “Yet the head­lines about ‘evan­gel­i­cal’ sup­port for the pres­i­dent and his agen­da mean that evan­gel­i­cals of col­or can seem to be an invis­i­ble community—rarely acknowl­edged by jour­nal­ists even when they go to the same church­es or claim a sim­i­lar the­ol­o­gy. White evan­gel­i­cals are numer­i­cal­ly dominant—although declining—but their opin­ions dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dom­i­nate U.S. media report­ing on how the­o­log­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants think, vote, and believe. At one lev­el, the racial dif­fer­ence is emi­nent­ly pre­dictable. Sure­ly the white­ness of white evan­gel­i­cals is cru­cial to under­stand­ing their polit­i­cal beliefs and their vot­ing pat­terns. As Janelle Wong shows in her new book, Immi­grants, Evan­gel­i­cals, and Pol­i­tics in an Era of Demo­graph­ic Change, although evan­gel­i­cals of any giv­en race are more con­ser­v­a­tive than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion of that race, evan­gel­i­cals of col­or over­all are far less con­ser­v­a­tive than white evan­gel­i­cals. Indeed, they are less con­ser­v­a­tive than white peo­ple over­all.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Amer­i­can Stud­ies and Inter­na­tion­al Affairs at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. How Trump Rad­i­cal­ized ICE (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic): “By the begin­ning of Barack Obama’s sec­ond term, immi­gra­tion had become one of the high­est pri­or­i­ties of fed­er­al law enforce­ment: Half of all fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tions were for immi­gra­tion-relat­ed crimes. In 2012, Con­gress appro­pri­at­ed $18 bil­lion for immi­gra­tion enforce­ment. It spent $14 bil­lion for all the oth­er major crim­i­nal law-enforce­ment agen­cies com­bined: the FBI; the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion; the Secret Ser­vice; the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms, and Explo­sives; and the U.S. Mar­shals Ser­vice.” ICE is much, much big­ger than I real­ized. This is a real­ly impor­tant arti­cle.
  6. Oh, The Human­i­ties! (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the years since the Great Reces­sion have been ‘bru­tal for almost every major in the human­i­ties.’ They’ve also been bad for ‘social sci­ence fields that most close­ly resem­ble human­is­tic ones — soci­ol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions and polit­i­cal sci­ence.’ Mean­while the sci­ences and engi­neer­ing have gained at the expense of human­ism…”
  7. Bethel Church Sur­vives Red­ding Carr Fire, But Still Faces Heat (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Bethel’s part, staff said the church could not act as an evac­u­a­tion zone because of its prox­im­i­ty to the blaze and because there is a sin­gle entry and exit point to the cam­pus, which is itself sur­round­ed by brush. The Red Cross said Bethel offered to be an evac­u­a­tion site, but was turned down because of the campus’s near­ness to the fire…. The church has, how­ev­er, flexed its con­sid­er­able min­istry mus­cle and finan­cial resources, encour­ag­ing dona­tions to aid relief efforts. Bethel is also part­ner­ing with the Red Cross and the Sal­va­tion Army in response to the Carr fire, Far­rel­ly said.”
    • Relat­ed: Osteen’s church was sim­i­lar­ly crit­i­cized after Hur­ri­cane Har­vey, also with what seem to me to be scant fac­tu­al grounds. Dis­cussed back in vol­ume 116.
    • Also (ten­u­ous­ly) relat­ed: Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Dev­as­tat­ing Fires Are Man-Caused — But Not In The Way They Tell Us (Chuck DeVore, Forbes): “ In the 1850s and 1860s, the typ­i­cal Sier­ra land­scape was of open fields of grass punc­tu­at­ed by iso­lat­ed pine stands and a few scat­tered oak trees. The first branch­es on the pine trees start­ed about 20 feet up—lower branch­es hav­ing been burned off by low-inten­si­ty grass­fires. California’s Native Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion had for years shaped this land­scape with fire to encour­age the grass­lands and boost the game ani­mal pop­u­la­tion. As the Gold Rush remade mod­ern Cal­i­for­nia, tim­ber was har­vest­ed and replant­ed. Fires were sup­pressed because they threat­ened homes as well as burned up a valu­able resource. The land­scape filled in with trees, but the trees were har­vest­ed every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, how­ev­er, that cycle began to be dis­rupt­ed with increas­ing­ly bur­den­some reg­u­la­tions. The tim­ber har­vest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped com­plete­ly, espe­cial­ly on the almost 60% of Cal­i­for­nia for­est land owned by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.”

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 Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘per­fect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

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).

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 163

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. Chi­na and its creepy facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy tar­gets Uighur Mus­lims (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “China’s Mus­lims are akin to Germany’s Jews in the 1930s; a group of hap­less peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent reli­gion that the gov­ern­ment gets to exper­i­ment on. They’re already shov­ing rough­ly 800,000 Mus­lims into intern­ment camps and oth­er Mus­lims world­wide aren’t real­ly notic­ing.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing.
  2. There was quite the clam­or recent­ly about anti­semitism at Stan­ford.
    • Stan­ford Stu­dent Threat­ens Vio­lence against Pro-Israel Stu­dents (Dov Green­burg, Nation­al Review): “In mid July, Hamzeh Daoud, a stu­dent at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, pub­licly post­ed on Face­book: ‘I’m gonna phys­i­cal­ly fight Zion­ists on cam­pus next year.’ If his mean­ing wasn’t clear enough, Hamzeh con­tin­ued, ‘And after I abol­ish your ass I’ll go ahead and work every day for the rest of my life to abol­ish your pet­ty ass eth­no-suprema­cist, set­tler-colo­nial state.’ While not reflec­tive of Stanford’s val­ues, the sen­ti­ment of this hate­ful post reveals the state of con­tem­po­rary life on cam­pus­es.”
    • Daoud resigns from Nor­cliffe RA posi­tion (Julia Ingram and Hold­en Fore­man, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Hamzeh Daoud ’20 has resigned from his Res­i­dent Assis­tant posi­tion in Nor­cliffe House, he announced in a state­ment to The Dai­ly on Fri­day after­noon.”
    • Op Ed: State­ment from Hamzeh Daoud (Hamzeh Daoud, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “After spend­ing a few hours away from Face­book, I read over my post again and real­ized how infused it was with the same hatred that has caused my own fam­i­ly so much suf­fer­ing. It was the antithe­sis of why I chose this path in life. A slop­py com­ment made dur­ing an emo­tion-filled reac­tion to yet anoth­er lay­er of trau­ma, the com­ment did not con­vey my val­ues, who I am cur­rent­ly, or who I hope to become.”
    • I know some of you know Hamzeh, so this prob­a­bly feels a good deal more per­son­al than many of the arti­cles I share. Please remem­ber that what you put on social media actu­al­ly mat­ters. James 1:19 is a use­ful mem­o­ry verse for every­one with a Face­book or Twit­ter account: “My dear broth­ers and sis­ters, take note of this: Every­one should be quick to lis­ten, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
  3. At Prayer Break­fast, Guests Seek Access to a Dif­fer­ent High­er Pow­er (Ken­neth P. Vogel and Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Some describe the gath­er­ing as sim­i­lar to the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, except that Jesus is the orga­niz­ing principle….With its rel­a­tive lack of diplo­mat­ic pro­to­cols and press cov­er­age, the prayer break­fast set­ting is ide­al for for­eign fig­ures who might not oth­er­wise be able to eas­i­ly get face time with top Amer­i­can offi­cials, because of unsa­vory rep­u­ta­tions or a lack of an offi­cial gov­ern­ment perch, accord­ing to lob­by­ists who help arrange such trips. They also con­tend that it is eas­i­er to secure visas when the break­fast is list­ed as a des­ti­na­tion.”
  4. Jeff Ses­sions announces a reli­gious lib­er­ty task force to com­bat “dan­ger­ous” sec­u­lar­ism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Vox): “In a bold speech deliv­ered at the Jus­tice Department’s Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Sum­mit, Ses­sions char­ac­ter­ized the task force as a nec­es­sary step in fac­ing down the pre­vail­ing forces of sec­u­lar­ism. ‘A dan­ger­ous move­ment, unde­tect­ed by many, is now chal­leng­ing and erod­ing our great tra­di­tion of reli­gious free­dom,’ he said, which ‘must be con­front­ed and defeat­ed.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Jeff Ses­sions thinks Chris­tians are under siege in Amer­i­ca (Christo­pher Shea inter­views Nel­son Tebbe, Vox): One part stood out to me: “The Supreme Court has not decid­ed a reli­gious free­dom case in a way that’s adverse to the inter­est of Chris­tians for the past few terms. I can’t think of a sin­gle reli­gious free­dom case that they’ve lost.”
    • The above point is very mud­dled. The things that keep going to the Supreme Court are pre­cise­ly the things we have a prob­lem with. Do you know what we don’t have a prob­lem with? Can­ni­bal­ism. We’ve got cul­tur­al con­sen­sus on that. But reli­gious lib­er­ty? That keeps going to the courts and get­ting suc­cess­ful­ly appealed to the very top because local and state gov­ern­ments keep try­ing to vio­late it. It is a sim­ple fact that sig­nif­i­cant voic­es in our cul­ture view reli­gious lib­er­ty with reac­tions rang­ing from sus­pi­cion to hos­til­i­ty. Exam­ples abound (includ­ing these two Vox arti­cles).
  5. How Catholic Bish­ops Are Shap­ing Health Care In Rur­al Amer­i­ca (Anna Maria Bar­ry-Jester and Amelia Thom­son-DeVeaux, FiveThir­tyEight): “Best esti­mates sug­gest that one in six hos­pi­tal beds and many of the nation’s largest non­prof­it health sys­tems are Catholic-owned or ‑affil­i­at­ed. From 2001 to 2016, the num­ber of Catholic-affil­i­at­ed hos­pi­tals in the U.S. grew by 22 per­cent, even as the total num­ber of hos­pi­tals in the U.S. shrunk, accord­ing to research by Merg­er­Watch and the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union.”
    • A response: Stan­dard Pro­ce­dures (Leah Libresco Sargeant, First Things): “When she lays out my options, there real­ly is just one option: the stan­dard of repro­duc­tive care. But I have two rea­sons to say no: I am a Catholic and I am a sta­tis­ti­cian. It was faith and rea­son, the two ways of know­ing that St. John Paul II called the ‘two wings on which the human spir­it ris­es to the con­tem­pla­tion of truth,’ that led me to dig in my heels dur­ing my third mis­car­riage.” FYI: the author used to write for FiveThir­tyEight.
    • Anoth­er response: What FiveThir­tyEight gets wrong about Catholic hos­pi­tals (Stephanie Slade, Amer­i­ca Mag­a­zine): “That the A.C.L.U. threw away its com­mit­ment to reli­gious free­dom in the name of abor­tion rights is bad enough. A jour­nal­is­tic enter­prise as osten­si­bly sane and data-dri­ven as FiveThir­tyEight­should think twice before fol­low­ing the same path.”
  6. “Hyp­not­ic Mass Phe­nom­e­na” (Flo­ri­an Schwab inter­view with Peter Thiel, Die Welt­woche): “The advanced tech­no­log­i­cal civ­i­liza­tion of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry is a com­pli­cat­ed world where it is not pos­si­ble for any­body to think through every­thing for them­selves. You can­not be a poly­math in quite the way peo­ple were in the 18th cen­tu­ry enlight­en­ments. You can­not be like Goethe. So there is some need to lis­ten to experts, to defer to oth­er peo­ple. And then, there is always the dan­ger of that going too far and peo­ple not think­ing crit­i­cal­ly. This hap­pens in spades in Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Spies Are More Com­mon, and Bor­ing, Than You Think (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “John Negro­ponte, for­mer direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence, admit­ted in 2006 that the U.S. was deploy­ing about 100,000 spies around the world. Giv­en that the U.S. is the world’s tech­nol­o­gy and mil­i­tary leader, and yet has a rel­a­tive­ly small share of glob­al pop­u­la­tion, is it so crazy to think the num­ber of peo­ple spy­ing on us is larg­er than that?”

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 Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

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).

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 162

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to Wit­ness to a Dis­tract­ed World (O. Alan Noble, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Let me give you a sce­nario. I believe it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble today to sit down with a non-believ­ing friend and have a pas­sion­ate, lengthy con­ver­sa­tion about the gospel and nev­er plant a seed deeply. Because as soon as you both rise from the table, he pulls out his phone and checks Face­book or responds to a text from his wife…. It was all a kind of rhetor­i­cal dance or game that we play. And the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of the dance is not to win over the oth­er per­son but to define your iden­ti­ty. The game is called expres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism. And most of us play it.”
  2. A Glob­al Guide To State-Spon­sored Trolling (Michael Riley, Lau­ren Etter, and Bib­hu­dat­ta Prad­han, Bloomberg): “‘Peo­ple some­times wor­ry that Azer­bai­jan will shut down Face­book,’ said Katy Pearce, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton who has stud­ied the plat­for­m’s use in that coun­try. ‘Why would it? Face­book is the most effec­tive tool of con­trol the gov­ern­ment has.’”
  3. Hous­ing Costs Reduce The Returns To Edu­ca­tion (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The return to edu­ca­tion, for exam­ple, has increased in the Unit­ed States but it’s less well appre­ci­at­ed that in order to earn high wages col­lege edu­cat­ed work­ers must increas­ing­ly live in expen­sive cities. One con­se­quence is that the net col­lege wage pre­mi­um is not as large as it appears and inequal­i­ty has been over-esti­mat­ed.”
  4. The many deaths of lib­er­al­ism (Daniel Cole and Aure­lian Craiu­tu, Aeon): “The prob­lem for any­one declar­ing the death of lib­er­al­ism is that it has not one but sev­er­al pil­lars and dimen­sions: legal, polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and moral (or reli­gious). The weak­en­ing or dis­ap­pear­ance of one or two lib­er­al pil­lars or tenets would not be enough to declare lib­er­al­ism as a whole dead.”
  5. Epis­toc­ra­cy: a polit­i­cal theorist’s case for let­ting only the informed vote (Sean Illing inter­view­ing Jason Bren­nan, Vox): “I like to say I’m a fan of democ­ra­cy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maid­en, but I think Iron Maid­en has quite a few albums that are ter­ri­ble — and I think democ­ra­cy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best sys­tem we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.” The title is inac­cu­rate — Bren­nan goes so far as to favor extend­ing the right to vote to chil­dren.
  6. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Con­venes the ‘Super Bowl’ of Reli­gious Free­dom (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “This min­is­te­r­i­al, which is real­ly just a fan­cy word for ‘big meet­ing,’ could be inter­pret­ed as the unveil­ing of an ele­ment of the Trump administration’s for­eign-pol­i­cy strat­e­gy. For the last three days, del­e­ga­tions from around the world have gath­ered to hear vic­tims of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion share their sto­ries. Amer­i­can offi­cials have declared in no uncer­tain terms that they believe the Unit­ed States should evan­ge­lize reli­gious lib­er­ty around the world, and that democ­ra­cy is built on a foun­da­tion of free­dom in faith.”
    • Relat­ed: Pence and Pom­peo Make Big Reli­gious Free­dom Pledges (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Vice Pres­i­dent called out coun­tries across the globe, start­ing with Nicaragua where he accused the Orte­ga admin­is­tra­tion of ‘vir­tu­al­ly wag­ing war on the Catholic Church.’ He con­demned China’s per­se­cu­tion of its Tibetan Bud­dhists, Uyghur Mus­lims, and Chris­tians, as well as the actions of its author­i­tar­i­an neigh­bor: North Korea…. Pence also called out Iran. While acknowl­edg­ing that its Chris­tians, Jews, and Baha’i are all per­se­cut­ed by its Shia gov­ern­ment, he specif­i­cal­ly sin­gled out its Sun­ni Kurd pop­u­la­tion…. Russia’s Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es, who have been sub­ject to intense per­se­cu­tion in recent years, were also rec­og­nized by Pence…. The Vice Pres­i­dent also called for an end to anti-Semit­ic attacks in West­ern Europe.”
    • Relat­ed: Turkey Lets Andrew Brun­son Leave Prison (Chris­tian­i­ty Today)
    • Relat­ed: The World’s Next Reli­gious Free­dom Suc­cess Sto­ry: Uzbek­istan? (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘That [pan­el was] dif­fer­ent than any­thing you’ve ever heard from almost any place in the for­mer Sovi­et Union,’ said Chris Seiple, pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of the Insti­tute for Glob­al Engage­ment, who orga­nized the pan­el and will lead a del­e­ga­tion to Uzbek­istan this fall. ‘… They’re insti­tu­tion­al­iz­ing the process of change. That’s the key. The process is the goal.’”
  7. Is There Recourse When Fact Check­ers Get It Wrong? (Kalev Lee­taru, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “In short, through the busi­ness deci­sion of a sin­gle Sil­i­con Val­ley cor­po­ra­tion, fact check­ers have been ele­vat­ed from help­ful ref­er­ence librar­i­ans into a posi­tion of ulti­mate arbi­tra­tor of truth in our online world, with­out the atten­dant checks and bal­ances to mit­i­gate abuse.”

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 No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

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).

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 161

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. Trevor Responds To Crit­i­cism From The French Ambas­sador (Trevor Noah, YouTube): this is a wit­ty and insight­ful 8 minute reflec­tion on the inter­play between eth­nic her­itage and nation­al iden­ti­ty and the ways that Amer­i­cans process things dif­fer­ent­ly than the French.
  2. The New York Yan­kees Are A Moral Abom­i­na­tion (David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “Real­ly, how does a Yan­kees fan’s pride in all those pur­chased cham­pi­onships dif­fer from the self-delu­sion of a man stag­ger­ing out of a bawdy house at dawn, com­pli­ment­ing him­self on his mag­nif­i­cent pow­ers of seduc­tion?” A fun­ny piece of cul­tur­al com­men­tary in the New York Times writ­ten by a the­olo­gian? Yes, please. This col­umn is about way more than base­ball.
  3. Uncom­fort­able Ques­tions in the Wake of Rus­sia Indict­ment 2.0 and Trump’s Press Con­fer­ence With Putin (Jack Gold­smith, Law­fare): “It is no response to say that the Unit­ed States doesn’t med­dle in for­eign elec­tions, because it has in the past—at least as recent­ly as Bill Clinton’s inter­ven­tion in the Russ­ian pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of 1996 and pos­si­bly as recent­ly as the Hillary Clin­ton State Department’s alleged inter­ven­tion in Russia’s 2011 leg­isla­tive elec­tions. And dur­ing the Cold War the Unit­ed States inter­vened in numer­ous for­eign elec­tions, more than twice as often as the Sovi­et Union.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law School. The whole thing is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Free Speech, Cen­sor­ship, Hate Speech, Twit­ter (Steven Brust, per­son­al blog): “Here’s the thing: every defense, every anal­o­gy I’ve seen to jus­ti­fy ask­ing twit­ter to shut down hate speech, has come down, in the last analy­sis, to a defense of prop­er­ty rights. And yet, the most casu­al obser­va­tion ought to tell you that we are now locked in a bat­tle between prop­er­ty rights and human rights. If you must resort to a defense of prop­er­ty rights to bol­ster your argu­ment, I beg to sub­mit that you should either take anoth­er look at what you’re defend­ing, or stop call­ing your­self a pro­gres­sive.” A social­ist defense of free speech.
    • Relat­ed: I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me (Bar­rett Wil­son, Quil­lette): “In my pre­vi­ous life, I was a self-right­eous social jus­tice cru­sad­er. I would use my mid-sized Twit­ter and Face­book plat­forms to sig­nal my wok­e­ness on top­ics such as LGBT rights, rape cul­ture, and racial injus­tice…. Then one day, sud­den­ly, I was accused of some of the very trans­gres­sions I’d called out in oth­ers. I was guilty, of course: There’s no such thing as due process in this world.”
    • Also relat­ed: 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.” This is an old­er piece but I saw it for the first time recent­ly.
  5. For Some Gang Mem­bers In El Sal­vador, The Evan­gel­i­cal Church Offers A Way Out (Emi­ly Green, NPR): “Becom­ing a devot­ed mem­ber of an evan­gel­i­cal church at a young age is the only way many ado­les­cent boys are able to avoid being roped into a gang, Cruz says. And it’s also the only way for them to get out of a gang if they’re in it, short of leav­ing the coun­try.”
  6. Sanc­tu­ary amid hous­ing cri­sis (Wendy Lee, San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle): “With no end in sight to soar­ing hous­ing costs, sev­er­al Bay Area faith orga­ni­za­tions have become a sanc­tu­ary of sorts — not just chan­nel­ing dona­tions and dis­trib­ut­ing food, but also offer­ing a safe place for peo­ple liv­ing in cars or RVs. The arrange­ment has some­times grat­ed on neigh­bors, but for pas­tors, it’s sim­ply an exten­sion of their mis­sion to serve human­i­ty.”
  7. Bald­ing Out (Christo­pher Bald­ing, per­son­al blog): “In Chi­na, there are very few peo­ple who I wit­ness live a tes­ta­ment of their belief. Who knows if the Par­ty mem­ber is a mem­ber because he believes in Marx­ism, Com­mu­nism, Xi-ism, or sim­ply wants a bet­ter apart­ment? Who knows if the per­son who claims to be a believ­er in democ­ra­cy but com­plies with the Par­ty actu­al­ly believes that or just tells the for­eign­er? For­eign­ers in Chi­na in posi­tions of influ­ence who claim to believe in human rights but col­lab­o­rate with the Par­ty to deny Chi­nese cit­i­zens rights need to answer for their actions. I have lit­tle idea what peo­ple in Chi­na believe but I know that if the Par­ty ever falls, there will be more than a bil­lion more peo­ple claim­ing they were clos­et democ­ra­cy advo­cates.” An Amer­i­can pro­fes­sor reflects on Chi­na as he pre­pares to leave. Very inter­est­ing, a bit ram­bly.

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 This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

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).

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 160

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. Democ­rats Are Wrong About Repub­li­cans. Repub­li­cans Are Wrong About Democ­rats. (Per­ry Bacon Jr., FiveThir­tyEight): “Blacks made up about a quar­ter of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, but Repub­li­cans esti­mat­ed the share at 46 per­cent. Repub­li­cans thought 38 per­cent of Democ­rats were gay, les­bian or bisex­u­al, while the actu­al num­ber was about 6 per­cent. Democ­rats esti­mat­ed that 44 per­cent of Repub­li­cans make more than $250,000 a year. The actu­al share was 2 per­cent. Peo­ple also over­stat­ed the num­bers of these stereo­typ­i­cal groups with­in their own par­ty — Democ­rats thought 29 per­cent of their fel­low Democ­rats were gay, les­bian or bisex­u­al — but they weren’t off by as much as mem­bers of the oth­er par­ty.”
  2. The Social­ist Net­work (Gilad Edel­man, Wash­ing­ton Month­ly): “At the heart of the split between lib­er­als and social­ists, at least in the­o­ry, is the ques­tion of what to do about cap­i­tal­ism. Lib­er­als tend to see it as some­thing that needs to be fixed. Social­ists see it as some­thing to be defeat­ed. They say they do, any­way. As we’ve seen, the Mil­len­ni­al social­ist intel­lec­tu­als aren’t real­ly call­ing for gov­ern­ment takeover of indus­try.”
  3. Affirm­ing Dis­ad­van­tage (John McWhort­er, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “Do I oppose affir­ma­tive action? Not at all. But I sug­gest that what we now ‘affirm’ is dis­ad­van­tage suf­fered by all kinds of peo­ple.” The author is a lin­guis­tics pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia. He earned his Ph.D. at Stan­ford, btw.
  4. Cul­ture War As Class War: How Gay Rights Rein­force Elite Pow­er (Darel E. Paul, First Things): “Priv­i­leg­ing the nor­mal­iza­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty rather than, say, racial inte­gra­tion allows elites to have their diver­si­ty cake and eat it, too.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.
  5. If You Care About NATO You Should Care About Ger­man Mil­i­tary Readi­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “…Germany’s mil­i­tary made head­lines when it used broom­sticks instead of machine guns dur­ing a NATO exer­cise because of a short­age of equip­ment. The lack of real weapons in the Euro­pean Union’s most pop­u­lous nation was seen as symp­to­matic of how under­fund­ed its mil­i­tary has long been.” This is scary.
  6. Learn­ing From ‘The Final Pagan Gen­er­a­tion’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): this is a long and illu­mi­nat­ing post. “Under­stand that we, like the final pagan gen­er­a­tion [in ancient Rome], might think we are fight­ing for tol­er­ance, but our oppo­nents are fight­ing for vic­to­ry. We have to change our tac­tics.” (empha­sis removed)
  7. Pres­i­dent Trump has nom­i­nat­ed Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court Jus­tice. I’ve got a lot of links here — just pick one or two.
    • It Took a Vil­lage to Raise Kavanaugh (David Brooks, New York Times): “Kavanaugh is the prod­uct of a com­mu­ni­ty. He is the prod­uct of a con­ser­v­a­tive legal infra­struc­ture that devel­ops ideas, recruits tal­ent, links ris­ing stars, nur­tures genius, molds and launch­es judi­cial nom­i­nees…. If you empha­size pro­fes­sion­al excel­lence first, if you gain a foothold in society’s main­stream insti­tu­tions, if you build a cohe­sive band of broth­ers and sis­ters, you can trans­form the land­scape of your field.”
    • As Trump picks Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, evan­gel­i­cals rejoice: ‘I will vote for him again’ (Julie Zauzmer, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Many evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors and activists said they would have been pleased with any of the names report­ed to be on Trump’s short­list for the nom­i­na­tion. After all, that was the gam­bit that won Trump so many evan­gel­i­cal votes in 2016: He made the unusu­al move of releas­ing, before he was even pres­i­dent, a list of judges he would con­sid­er for the Supreme Court if elect­ed. And evan­gel­i­cals liked what they saw.”
    • Brett Kavanaugh, Don­ald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, explained (Dylan Matthews, Vox): “Kavanaugh con­tin­ued to com­pile a legal record that would lead to Durbin’s descrip­tion of him as ‘the Zelig or For­rest Gump of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics. You show up at every scene of the crime … whether it is Elián González or the Starr Report, you are there.’”
    • Will Brett Kavanaugh Pass the Reli­gious Right’s New Lit­mus Test? (Sarah Pos­ner, The Nation): “Even with­out the Trump-appoint­ed Kennedy suc­ces­sor, the Court had already expand­ed ‘reli­gious free­dom’ to include pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­ined reli­gious rights.” This is an extreme­ly mis­lead­ing arti­cle, but inter­est­ing in the mis­un­der­stand­ings it reveals.
    • You’ll Hate This Post On Brett Kavanaugh And Free Speech (Ken White, Pope­hat): “Kavanaugh has been an appel­late judge for 12 years and has writ­ten many opin­ions on free speech issues. They trend very pro­tec­tive of free speech, both in sub­stance and in rhetoric.”
    • Judge Kavanaugh and the Sec­ond Amend­ment (David Kopel, Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “Judge Kavanaugh­’s text, his­to­ry, and tra­di­tion method­ol­o­gy for Sec­ond Amend­ment cas­es will not please peo­ple who believe that all gun con­trol is imper­mis­si­ble, nor will it please advo­cates who want to make the Sec­ond Amend­ment a sec­ond-class right.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

I thought the Baby­lon Bee was excep­tion­al­ly fun­ny this week. Maybe I was just feel­ing gig­gly.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Inside Grad­u­ate Admis­sions (Inside High­er Ed, Scott Jaschick): if you plan to apply to grad school, read this. There is one reveal­ing anec­dote about how an admis­sions com­mit­tee treat­ed an appli­ca­tion from a Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dent. My take­away: the pro­fes­sors tried to be fair but found it hard to do, and their stat­ed con­cerns were most­ly about the qual­i­ty of the insti­tu­tion rather than the faith of the appli­cant. Trou­bling nonethe­less. (first shared in vol­ume 32)

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).

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.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 159

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. Police attacked me for steal­ing a car. It was my own. (Lawrence Cros­by, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Every time I see the video from that Octo­ber 2015 encounter, I expe­ri­ence fear, anger and ter­ror. Fear that the col­or of my skin will make me out to be a crim­i­nal when I have bro­ken no laws. Anger at the bla­tant dis­re­gard for human life and rights that the Con­sti­tu­tion is sup­posed to guar­an­tee to all cit­i­zens. Ter­ror to have come — per­haps — with­in sec­onds of being shot by peo­ple sworn to serve and pro­tect.” Lawrence is an alum­nus of our Chi Alpha min­istry. He just earned his Ph.D. at North­west­ern in Mate­ri­als Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing.
  2. Spi­ders Can Fly Hun­dreds of Miles Using Elec­tric­i­ty (Ed Yong, The Atlantic): “They put the arach­nids on ver­ti­cal strips of card­board in the cen­ter of a plas­tic box, and then gen­er­at­ed elec­tric fields between the floor and ceil­ing of sim­i­lar strengths to what the spi­ders would expe­ri­ence out­doors.… Many of the spi­ders actu­al­ly man­aged to take off, despite being in closed box­es with no air­flow with­in them. And when Mor­ley turned off the elec­tric fields inside the box­es, the bal­loon­ing spi­ders dropped.”
  3. 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.”
  4. Why Sex­ism and Racism Nev­er Diminish–Even When Every­one Becomes Less Sex­ist and Racist (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “When strong sex­ism declines, for exam­ple, the Over­ton win­dow shrinks on one end and expands on the oth­er so that what was once not con­sid­ered sex­ism at all (e.g. ‘men and women have dif­fer­ent pref­er­ences which might explain job choice’) now becomes vio­lent­ly sex­ist.”
  5. For­get About It (Corey Robin, Harper’s Mag­a­zine): “Ever since the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, we’ve been warned against nor­mal­iz­ing Trump. That fear of nor­mal­iza­tion mis­states the prob­lem, though. It’s nev­er the imme­di­ate present, no mat­ter how bad, that gets nor­mal­ized — it’s the not-so-dis­tant past.”
  6. A Time of Reck­on­ing (Mary Eber­stadt, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “Over the years, a great many peo­ple have claimed that sex is mere­ly a pri­vate act between indi­vid­u­als. They’ve been wrong. We know now that pri­vate acts have cumu­la­tive pub­lic effects. Indi­vid­ual choic­es, such as hav­ing chil­dren out of wed­lock, have end­ed up expand­ing the mod­ern wel­fare state, for exam­ple, as the gov­ern­ment has stepped in to sup­port chil­dren who lack fathers. The explo­sion of sex­u­al activ­i­ty thanks to con­tra­cep­tion has been accom­pa­nied by lev­els of divorce, cohab­i­ta­tion, and abor­tion nev­er before seen in his­to­ry.”

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 Read­ing The Whole Bible in 2016: A FAQ (Gospel Coali­tion, Justin Tay­lor): How much time each day would it take you to read the entire Bible in a year? “There are about 775,000 words in the Bible. Divid­ed by 365, that’s 2,123 words a day. The aver­age per­son reads 200 to 250 words per minute. So 2,123 words/day divid­ed by 225 words/minute equals 9.4 min­utes a day.” This arti­cle is full of good advice for what could be the best com­mit­ment you make all year. Do it! (first shared in vol­ume 31 — use­ful for any year)

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).

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.

The Abolition of Man, Chapter 3 & Appendix

The Abo­li­tion of Man by C. S. Lewis

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through three books by C. S. Lewis, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2018. The sched­ule is online.

I hope you’re enjoy­ing the read­ings as much as I am. I had for­got­ten how prophet­ic Lewis is in this lit­tle vol­ume.

If you’ve got­ten a lit­tle behind, there is an excel­lent short sum­ma­ry of all three chap­ters by Arend Smilde at Lewisiana and a 13 page study guide by Dr. David Nau­gle at Dal­las Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty.

I’ll con­tent myself with three quotes that stood out to me:

When all that says ‘It is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains…. those who stand out­side all judge­ments of val­ue can­not have any ground for pre­fer­ring one of their own impuls­es to anoth­er except the emo­tion­al strength of that impulse. (pages 723–724)

This insight alone explains SO MUCH about con­tem­po­rary soci­ety. Strength of feel­ing over­whelms every­thing else in today’s moral dis­course. In fact, emo­tion has become the new deter­min­er of moral val­ues for many peo­ple. Pick vir­tu­al­ly any news sto­ry and you will see this play­ing out, espe­cial­ly when it comes to the debates sur­round­ing the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion and its con­se­quences.

It is not sur­pris­ing that the sex­u­al norms preva­lent in our soci­ety are in direct con­tra­dic­tion to the old ones, because one of the func­tions of the Tao is to be a trel­lis upon which our emo­tions may grow. To revis­it Lewis’s phras­ing from the first chap­ter “Men With­out Chests”, it used to be that the head (rea­son) shaped the chest (emo­tions trained by habit) and there­by gov­erned the bel­ly (desire). But in our time it often hap­pens that the bel­ly shapes the chest and there­by gov­erns the head. Our wants have become self-authen­ti­cat­ing and dom­i­neer­ing.

My oth­er favorite quote from this chap­ter address­es the lim­its of skep­ti­cism:

But you can­not go on ‘explain­ing away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained expla­na­tion itself away. You can­not go on ‘see­ing through’ things for ever. The whole point of see­ing through some­thing is to see some­thing through it. It is good that the win­dow should be trans­par­ent, because the street or gar­den beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the gar­den too? It is no use try­ing to ‘see through’ first prin­ci­ples. If you see through every­thing, then every­thing is trans­par­ent. But a whol­ly trans­par­ent world is an invis­i­ble world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. (page 730)

This reminds me of some­thing Lewis said in the pre­vi­ous chap­ter:

The rebel­lion of new ide­olo­gies against the Tao is a rebel­lion of the branch­es against the tree: if the rebels could suc­ceed they would find that they had destroyed them­selves. The human mind has no more pow­er of invent­ing a new val­ue than of imag­in­ing a new pri­ma­ry colour, or, indeed, of cre­at­ing a new sun and a new sky for it to move in. (page 714)

Rad­i­cal skep­ti­cism is self-defeat­ing. If it suc­ceeds it fails.

Some­thing I often tell peo­ple is that they need to learn to doubt their doubts. Our aca­d­e­m­ic cul­ture con­di­tions us to place doubt in a priv­i­leged posi­tion over trust, but doubt is not a neu­tral thing. Doubt needs a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion just as belief does, and when you are inclined to doubt (whether the word of a friend, a truth of a moral prin­ci­ple, or the accu­ra­cy of a claim) it is worth ask­ing whether the rea­sons for and costs of doubt­ing out­weigh the rea­sons for and costs of trust­ing. Some­times they will, and some­times they will not.

Skep­ti­cism, inci­den­tal­ly, is dif­fer­ent from ask­ing ques­tions. Skep­ti­cism is an entire­ly dif­fer­ent thing than curios­i­ty.

John 12:37 illus­trates the dif­fer­ence: “Even after Jesus had per­formed so many signs in their pres­ence, they still would not believe in him.” Unbe­lief, in this sense, is a choice. It is not that they did not have rea­son to believe in Jesus — it is that they did not want to believe in Jesus. Hebrews 3:12 warns us not to have “an evil, unbe­liev­ing heart.” But we must weigh that against Jude 1:22 which tells us to “be mer­ci­ful to those who doubt”, against the praise giv­en the Bere­ans for their “noble char­ac­ter” in Acts 17:11 for inves­ti­gat­ing the claims of the apos­tle Paul, and against the fact that Thomas is not con­demned for his hes­i­ta­tion to believe in John 20:24–29. Putting them togeth­er, we see that God is not both­ered by hon­est ques­tions but He is opposed to moti­vat­ed skep­ti­cism.

The lat­ter is famous­ly illus­trat­ed by Aldous Hux­ley in his book Ends and Means, “For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the phi­los­o­phy of mean­ing­less­ness was essen­tial­ly an instru­ment of lib­er­a­tion from a cer­tain sys­tem of moral­i­ty. We object­ed to the moral­i­ty because it inter­fered with our sex­u­al free­dom.”

I think there are many peo­ple in our cul­ture like Hux­ley. I pray they learn to doubt their doubts before it is too late.

Side note: Hux­ley was a con­tem­po­rary of Lewis — they actu­al­ly died with­in hours of each oth­er. There’s a fun lit­tle book premised upon this fact called Between Heav­en and Hell by phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Peter Kreeft. It’s a clever dia­log between Lewis, Hux­ley, and John F. Kennedy (who also died with­in hours of these two) as they await the after­life and debate what is going to hap­pen next.

That’s all for this week. Next week we begin read­ing The Four Loves!