Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 150

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Crim­i­nal Gang Used a Drone Swarm To Obstruct an FBI Hostage Raid (Patrick Tuck­er, Defense One): “Nefar­i­ous use of drones is like­ly to get worse before it gets bet­ter, accord­ing to sev­er­al gov­ern­ment offi­cials who spoke on the pan­el. There is no easy or quick tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tion.” Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff.
  2. The Sharp Sting of the Baby­lon Bee (Mark Hem­ing­way, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “It’s safe to say that thus far, to the extent it has noticed, sec­u­lar Amer­i­ca is con­found­ed by the suc­cess of the Baby­lon Bee.”
  3. The Sex­u­al Revolution’s Angry Chil­dren (Kay Hymowitz, City Jour­nal): “What [old­er fem­i­nists] don’t fac­tor into their judg­ment is that they ben­e­fit­ed from the lin­ger­ing cul­tur­al cap­i­tal of ear­li­er, more man­ner­ly gen­er­a­tions. Long-estab­lished courtship norms don’t dis­ap­pear overnight, after all…. The sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion stripped young women of the social sup­port they need to play gate­keep­er, just as it deprived men of a pos­i­tive vision, or even a rea­son, for self-restraint. Rec­og­niz­ing those loss­es is where any ref­or­ma­tion has to start.”
  4. Addi­tion­al thoughts on the tragedy of Alfie Evans:
    • King Solomon, The False Moth­er, and Alfie Evans (Devo­rah Gold­man, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Like King Solomon, the courts in Eng­land were pre­sent­ed with a straight­for­ward ques­tion: To whom does this child belong? To Solomon, the true par­ent was unques­tion­ably the one will­ing to sac­ri­fice for the child, to safe­guard his life even at the expense of nev­er see­ing him again.” 🔥 🔥 🔥
    • A more tem­per­ate, insight­ful argu­ment: The Alfie Evans case shows lib­er­al indi­vid­u­al­ism has gone too far (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[This case illus­trates] the dan­ger of let­ting the cen­turies-long progress of lib­er­al indi­vid­u­al­ism go too far in break­ing open the fam­i­ly and assign­ing its func­tions to the state… After all, the irra­tional, over­pow­er­ing love of par­ent for child is the only rea­son most of us are alive, despite hav­ing spent the first years of our life vom­it­ing, soil­ing our­selves and destroy­ing every­thing we could reach. If that love can see us to a healthy adult­hood, it can prob­a­bly see us to a decent death.”
    • Alfie Evans and the Experts (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…a decent soci­ety allows fam­i­lies lee­way to defy med­ical con­sen­sus: not only for the sake of parental rights and reli­gious beliefs, not only because bias­es around race and class and faith creep into med­ical deci­sion-mak­ing, but also because in hard cas­es the offi­cial med­ical con­sen­sus often doesn’t come close to grasp­ing all the pos­si­bil­i­ties, and let­ting peo­ple go their own way is often the only way to dis­cov­er where it’s wrong.”
  5. The Redis­tri­b­u­tion of Sex (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…our wide­spread iso­la­tion and unhap­pi­ness and steril­i­ty might be dealt with by reviv­ing or adapt­ing old­er ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chasti­ty and per­ma­nence and the spe­cial respect owed to the celi­bate. But this is not the nat­ur­al response for a soci­ety like ours. Instead we tend to look for fix­es that seem to build on pre­vi­ous rev­o­lu­tions, rather than reverse them.” An excel­lent fol­low-up to last week’s bul­let point 7.
  6. Three arti­cles about evan­gel­i­cals and pol­i­tics:
    • The Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” I agree with Kevin’s sev­en points to an almost shock­ing extent. We’ve nev­er met but it’s like we had a long, ram­bling con­ver­sa­tion and both came to the same con­clu­sions.
    • Trump’s lat­est appeal to evan­gel­i­cals: a new office to pro­tect reli­gious lib­er­ty (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Vox): “Trump’s ini­tia­tive seems to expand pre­vi­ous offices’ remit in a num­ber of ways. For starters, the office isn’t just focus­ing on com­mu­ni­ty-based or char­i­ta­ble ini­tia­tives. Accord­ing to the Reli­gion News Ser­vice, it’s also charged with inform­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of ‘any fail­ures of the exec­u­tive branch to com­ply with reli­gious lib­er­ty pro­tec­tions under law.’ The Trump admin­is­tra­tion has con­sis­tent­ly been a cham­pi­on of reli­gious lib­er­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly inso­far as it per­tains to evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian caus­es…. The reach of this office also seems broad­er than its pre­de­ces­sors. Unlike in oth­er admin­is­tra­tions, the office will work with all gov­ern­ment agen­cies, even those with­out depart­ment-spe­cif­ic faith-based ini­tia­tives.”
    • An Open Let­ter to Trump’s Evan­gel­i­cal Defend­ers (David French, Nation­al Review): “We are not told that the ends of good poli­cies jus­ti­fy silence in the face of sin. Indeed — and this mes­sage goes out specif­i­cal­ly to the politi­cians and pun­dits who go on tele­vi­sion and say things they do not believe (you know who you are) to pro­tect this admin­is­tra­tion and to pre­serve their pres­ence in the halls of the pow­er — there is spe­cif­ic scrip­ture that applies to you: ‘Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put dark­ness for light and light for dark­ness, who put bit­ter for sweet and sweet for bit­ter!’”
  7. What Democ­rats Don’t Under­stand About Con­sumers (Mor­gan Orta­gus & Chris­tos Makridis, Fox Busi­ness): yup. That’s our own Chris­tos. Here’s the part that stood out the most to me: “Chris­tos Makridis is a PhD can­di­date at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, a Dig­i­tal Fel­low at the MIT Sloan Ini­tia­tive on the Dig­i­tal Econ­o­my, and a non-res­i­dent fel­low at the Har­vard Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment Cyber Secu­ri­ty Ini­tia­tive.” WHAAAT? If you didn’t catch that, he’s con­cur­rent­ly con­nect­ed to Stan­ford, Har­vard, and MIT.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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 149

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 Ugly Cod­ed Cri­tique of Chick-Fil-A’s Chris­tian­i­ty (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “A few years ago, a well-known pro­gres­sive com­men­ta­tor mused to his large Twit­ter fol­low­ing that some­times he wish­es all the Chris­tians would just dis­ap­pear. I would like to believe he was sim­ply too unin­formed to real­ize that he was wish­ing for a whiter world.” This arti­cle makes an impor­tant point that you may find use­ful in cam­pus dis­cus­sions. It is in response to the very odd Chick-Fil‑A’s Creepy Infil­tra­tion Of New York City (Dan Piepen­bring, New York­er). Rec­om­mend­ed to me by an alum­nus.
  2. Church Of The Don­ald (Ruth Gra­ham, Politi­co): “Trump per­son­al­ly has appeared 11 times on CBN since his cam­paign began; in 2017 alone, he gave more inter­views to CBN than to CNN, ABC or CBS…. Chris­t­ian broad­cast­ers offer an unmedi­at­ed chan­nel to the liv­ing rooms of a remark­ably wide swath of Amer­i­can believ­ers, an audi­ence more polit­i­cal­ly and racial­ly diverse than you might expect. TBN alone has more local sta­tions to its name than Fox or the three major net­works.” Insight­ful and rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. When the Rohingya Came, This Chris­t­ian Hos­pi­tal Was Ready (Sarah Eekhof Zyl­stra, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): this is a grip­ping sto­ry and dif­fi­cult to excerpt. Wow.
  4. Alfie Evans and Our Moral Cross­roads (Charles Camosy, First Things): “Alfie Evans’s death is being aimed by the very peo­ple whose voca­tion it is to help and pro­tect him. The dif­fer­ence in Alfie’s case is that, because he has con­tin­ued to breathe, the pre­tense of ‘removal of bur­den­some treat­ment’ is patent­ly absurd. In a sit­u­a­tion that was no doubt dis­tress­ing to those who hoped he would die, Alfie’s con­tin­u­ing to breathe has clar­i­fied the true object of the act of remov­ing his ven­ti­la­tor.” The more I read about this case the angri­er I become.
  5. Alan Jacobs: a Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­al for the inter­net age (David J. Michael, Amer­i­ca): “…he was pub­lish­ing schol­ar­ly work with­in his field but was increas­ing­ly devot­ing time to writ­ing essays and the­o­log­i­cal pieces for Chris­t­ian mag­a­zines and jour­nals. Switch­ing back and forth could be dis­ori­ent­ing, and he spent sev­er­al years debat­ing and pray­ing about which audi­ence he should focus on. ‘At one point, I just had an epiphany: You don’t get to choose.You’re gonna have to write for your schol­ar­ly peers, and you’re gonna have to write for your fel­low Chris­tians because you have things to say to both audi­ences. So, that means, you got­ta learn to code switch.’” I am a big fan of Alan Jacobs’ writ­ing.
  6. Dear Human­i­ties Profs: We Are The Prob­lem (Eric Ben­nett, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Three gen­er­a­tions ago, lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors exchanged a rig­or­ous­ly defined sphere of exper­tise, to which they could speak with author­i­ty, for a much wider field to which they could speak with vir­tu­al­ly no pow­er at all…. Lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sors have affect­ed Amer­i­ca more by sleep­ing in its down­town hotels and eat­ing in its fast-food restau­rants than by telling one anoth­er where real prospects for free­dom lay. ” Oof. That’s a sol­id blow, right there. The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Prov­i­dence Col­lege.
  7. Uncan­ny Vul­vas (Diana Fleis­chman, Jaco­bite Mag­a­zine): “Video games and social media already under­mine the native psy­cho­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms that make us work towards sta­tus — they sup­ply more imme­di­ate rewards and take far less effort than any­thing we work towards out in the real world. Sex robots are only going to make that worse, espe­cial­ly for young men.” Def­i­nite­ly not a Chris­t­ian arti­cle. From a some­what relat­ed Chris­t­ian stand­point: The Eco­nom­ics of Sex­u­al Puri­ty (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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 148

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. This col­lege pro­fes­sor gives her stu­dents extra cred­it for going on dates (Lisa Bonos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “She sees con­ver­sa­tions about dat­ing as part of the big ques­tions her class­es tack­le, such as: How should I live my life? What kinds of rela­tion­ships help me to become the kind of per­son I want to be? If stu­dents don’t learn how to date while they’re in col­lege, while sur­round­ed by thou­sands of peers all in a sim­i­lar stage in life, Cronin says, it only gets hard­er to build those skills after grad­u­a­tion.” The pro­fes­sor in ques­tion, Ker­ry Cronin, is a philoso­pher at Boston Col­lege.
    • She has these rules for a first date: “The stu­dent has to ask in per­son (“tex­ting is the dev­il; stop it,” she says in one of her YouTube videos), and the recip­i­ent has to know it’s a date. And if they say they’re busy and to check back with them lat­er, don’t. Just move on. ‘That’s a great skill to build, so that you can have a thick­er skin,’ Cronin says. She believes that the per­son who asks, pays. And the first date shouldn’t cost more than $10, include drugs or alco­hol, or last longer than 90 min­utes…”
    • Those are good guide­lines. Read them again.
  2. I think the fol­low­ing two arti­cles will prove to be among the most con­tro­ver­sial I’ve ever shared. I also think they both con­tain much prac­ti­cal wis­dom that will prove rel­e­vant as the weath­er warms:
    • For the gents: Deal­ing With Nui­sance Lust (Dou­glas Wil­son, per­son­al blog): “Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of this, but not so that you can feel good about indulging your­self. Min­i­mize the seri­ous­ness of it so that you can walk away from a cou­ple of big boobs with­out feel­ing like you have just fought a cos­mic bat­tle with prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers in the heav­en­ly places, for cry­ing out loud. Or, if you like, in anoth­er strat­e­gy of see­ing things right­ly, you could nick­name these breasts of oth­er woman as the ‘prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers.’ What­ev­er you do, take this part of life in stride like a grown-up. Stop react­ing like a horny and con­flict­ed twelve-year-old boy.”
    • For the ladies: Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.”
    • I am aware that these two arti­cles only deal with things from a male per­spec­tive. Sad­ly, I haven’t come across any insight­ful arti­cles that help ladies deal with their own lust or give gen­tle­men advice on how to be help­ful to them. Ladies, if you’ve read some­thing you found tru­ly help­ful, let me know.
  3. Jesus, Take the Con­trol Wheel: South­west Pilot Saw Fly­ing as Min­istry (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Tam­mie Jo Shults—the pilot who guid­ed Flight 1380 to the ground April 17 after a mid­flight engine fail­ure shot debris through a win­dow, killing one passenger—is a rec­og­niz­able fig­ure at the Texas Hill Coun­try church, which aver­ages 900 in wor­ship…. Mul­ti­ple media reports have cit­ed a blog post in which Shults stat­ed being a pilot gave her ‘the oppor­tu­ni­ty to wit­ness for Christ on almost every flight.’” You can glo­ri­fy God in almost any pro­fes­sion — make it your ambi­tion.
  4. Five Great Books on African Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cal His­to­ry (Thomas Kidd, The Gospel Coali­tion): “If I had to pick one African Amer­i­can church leader I wish more Chris­tians knew about, it would prob­a­bly be [Lemuel] Haynes. A Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War sol­dier, Haynes went on to become a pas­tor of a large­ly white church in New Eng­land, a crit­ic of Amer­i­can slav­ery, and an advo­cate of the New Divin­i­ty the­ol­o­gy of Jonathan Edwards’s suc­ces­sors.”
  5. Don­ald Trump, Trag­ic Hero (Vic­tor Davis Han­son, Nation­al Review): “Trag­ic heroes, as they have been por­trayed from Sopho­cles’ plays (e.g., Ajax, Antigone, Oedi­pus Rex, Philoctetes) to the mod­ern west­ern film, are not intrin­si­cal­ly noble. Much less are they like­able. Cer­tain­ly, they can often be obnox­ious and pet­ty, if not dan­ger­ous, espe­cial­ly to those around them.” Han­son is a fel­low at Stanford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  6. The Face­book Tri­als: It’s Not “Our” Data (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…I have hun­dreds of friends on Face­book, most of whom I don’t know well and have nev­er met. But my Face­book friends are friends. We share com­mon inter­ests and, most of the time, I’m hap­py to see what they are think­ing and doing and I’m pleased when they show inter­est in what I’m up to. If, before Face­book exist­ed, I had been asked to list ‘my friends,’ I would have had a hard time nam­ing ten friends, let alone hun­dreds. My Face­book friends didn’t exist before Face­book. My Face­book friend­ships are not sim­ply my data—they are a unique co-cre­ation of myself, my friends, and, yes, Face­book.”
  7. Google Will Now Answer Your The­o­log­i­cal Ques­tions (OpenBible.info): “Google just announced an AI-pow­ered exper­i­ment called Talk to Books, which lets you enter a query and find pas­sages in books that are seman­ti­cal­ly sim­i­lar to your query, not mere­ly pas­sages that hap­pen to match the key­words you chose. For the­ol­o­gy- and Bible-relat­ed ques­tions, it often presents an evan­gel­i­cal per­spec­tive, per­haps because U.S. evan­gel­i­cal pub­lish­ers have been eager for Google to index their books.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • A Divid­ed Coun­try (Pearls Before Swine): this one actu­al­ly made me laugh and not mere­ly chor­tle sen­si­bly.
  • Christ Chel­la (John Crist, Face­book): this is amaz­ing­ly detailed and the more you know the evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture the fun­nier it is

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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 147

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. Inside the White House Bible Study group (Owen Amos, BBC): “But is a bible study for Cab­i­net mem­bers, with polit­i­cal themes, not a merg­ing of church and state? ‘I believe in insti­tu­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion, but not influ­en­tial sep­a­ra­tion,’ [Drollinger] says. ‘No mat­ter what the insti­tu­tion is — the fam­i­ly, com­merce, edu­ca­tion — it needs the bul­wark pre­cepts of the word of God in order to func­tion cor­rect­ly… But the minute I start to amal­ga­mate the church and the state insti­tu­tion­al­ly, then I’m into theoc­ra­cy.’”
  2. Why you stink at fact-check­ing (Lisa Fazio, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “First, peo­ple have a gen­er­al bias to believe that things are true. (After all, most things that we read or hear are true.) In fact, there’s some evi­dence that we ini­tial­ly process all state­ments as true and that it then takes cog­ni­tive effort to men­tal­ly mark them as false. Sec­ond, peo­ple tend to accept infor­ma­tion as long as it’s close enough to the cor­rect infor­ma­tion. Nat­ur­al speech often includes errors, paus­es and repeats. (‘She was wear­ing a blue – um, I mean, a black, a black dress.’) One idea is that to main­tain con­ver­sa­tions we need to go with the flow – accept infor­ma­tion that is ‘good enough’ and just move on.” The author is a psych pro­fes­sor at Van­der­bilt.
  3. One extra glass of wine ‘will short­en your life by 30 min­utes’ (Sarah Bose­ly, The Guardian): “The risks for a 40-year-old of drink­ing over the rec­om­mend­ed dai­ly lim­it were com­pa­ra­ble to smok­ing, said one lead­ing sci­en­tist. ‘Above two units a day, the death rates steadi­ly climb,’ said David Spiegel­hal­ter, Win­ton pro­fes­sor for the pub­lic under­stand­ing of risk at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge.” This is cer­tain­ly going to be con­test­ed research, but it caught my eye.
  4. The 10-Year Baby Win­dow That Is the Key to the Women’s Pay Gap (Claire Cain Miller, NY Times): “When women have their first child between age 25 and 35, their pay nev­er recov­ers, rel­a­tive to that of their hus­bands. Yet women who have their first baby either before 25 or after 35 — before their careers get start­ed or once they’re estab­lished — even­tu­al­ly close the pay gap with their hus­bands.”
  5. Two dif­fer­ent analy­ses of California’s state pol­i­tics:
    • CA is awe­some! The Great Les­son of Cal­i­for­nia in America’s New Civ­il War (Peter Ley­den and Ruy Teix­eira, Medi­um): “Cal­i­for­nia today pro­vides a mod­el for Amer­i­ca as a whole. This mod­el of pol­i­tics and gov­ern­ment is by no means per­fect, but it is far ahead of the nation in com­ing to terms with the inex­orable dig­i­tal, glob­al, sus­tain­able trans­for­ma­tion of our era. It is a thriv­ing work in progress that gives hope that Amer­i­ca can pull out of the polit­i­cal mess we’re in.”
    • CA is a train wreck! Cal­i­for­nia Is the Mod­el for Nation­al Divorce, Not Demo­c­ra­t­ic Dom­i­na­tion (David French, Nation­al Review): “…it turns out that Cal­i­for­nia pol­i­tics and poli­cies are repel­lent to mil­lions of Cal­i­for­ni­ans. Between 2007 and 2016 rough­ly 6 mil­lion Cal­i­for­nia res­i­dents left the state. Only 5 mil­lion peo­ple moved to Cal­i­for­nia from oth­er Amer­i­can states. And where did a plu­ral­i­ty of for­mer Cal­i­for­ni­ans go? Texas.”
  6. The Sam Har­ris Debate (Ezra Klein, Vox): this is a long, inter­est­ing debate part­ly about Charles Mur­ray but ulti­mate­ly about much deep­er issues.
    • Sam Har­ris: “How can we get to a world where the max­i­mum num­ber of peo­ple thrive? I view iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics as among the worst pieces of soft­ware you can be run­ning to try to get there. I want to get to a world where, I mean, it’s Mar­tin Luther King’s claim about the con­tent of your char­ac­ter, rather than the col­or of your skin. That is the goal, and if you want to reverse engi­neer that goal, giv­ing pri­ma­cy to iden­ti­ty is one of the worst things you can do.”
    • Ezra Klein: “To Har­ris… iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics is some­thing oth­ers do. To me, it’s some­thing we all do, and that he and many oth­ers refuse to admit they’re doing. This is one of the advan­tages of being the major­i­ty group: Your con­cerns get cod­ed as con­cerns; it’s every­one else who is play­ing iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics.”
  7. There was a big ker­fluff­fle about The Atlantic fir­ing colum­nist Kevin Williams over his views on abor­tion. I was real­ly stunned by how much ink was spilled over it — this is just a small sam­ple. The authors make inter­est­ing obser­va­tions about dis­agree­ment in Amer­i­ca.
    • Kevin Williamson, Thought Crim­i­nal (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Nation­al Review): “Edi­tors or own­ers should have absolute author­i­ty to con­trol what appears in the pages of their mag­a­zines. How they exer­cise that author­i­ty, i.e., how much ortho­doxy they want to impose or how much free-for-all they want to encour­age, is a pru­den­tial ques­tion (and one I often have strong opin­ions about). What edi­tors should not have any con­trol over is what their writ­ers are allowed to think.”
    • Among The Abor­tion Extrem­ists (Ross Douthat, NY Times):  “…this is a case study in exact­ly the prob­lem estab­lish­ment edi­tors are try­ing to address by widen­ing their pool of writ­ers: the inabil­i­ty of con­tem­po­rary lib­er­al­ism to see itself from the out­side, as it looks to the many peo­ple who for some rea­son, class or reli­gion or his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence, are not ful­ly indoc­tri­nat­ed into its increas­ing­ly inco­her­ent mix of ortho­dox­ies. By this I mean that my pro-choice friends endors­ing Williamson’s sack­ing can’t see that his extrem­ism is mir­rored in their own…”
    • Bias against con­ser­v­a­tives works like any oth­er prej­u­dice (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In a bet­ter world, this moment would help us under­stand each oth­er, and come to some sort of rea­son­able agree­ment, rather than swear­ing mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion. That’s because what con­ser­v­a­tives are say­ing about media bias sounds a lot like what lib­er­als are say­ing about race and gen­der — and vice ver­sa.”
    • Con­grats, Jeff Gold­berg. You Just Mar­tyred Kevin Williamson. (Jack Schae­fer, Politi­co): “I’ve long admired Williamson’s writ­ing, if not his ideas, for the way he’s inter­nal­ized Michael Kinsley’s warn­ing that if you’re afraid to go too far, you won’t go far enough. Williamson almost always goes too far, tak­ing his argu­ments to thought fron­tiers where there are no roads, no mobile phone ser­vice and some­times bare­ly enough air to breathe.”
    • A Twit­ter thread by Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig giv­ing anoth­er point of view: “So the mar­ket incen­tives inside the rightwing media world — the things you need to do to get ahead there — are oppo­site those out­side of it. To put it anoth­er way: You can get famous trig­ger­ing libs, but if you’re real­ly good at it, well…it works?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Grace­ful­ly Graces Me (YouTube): I am grate­ful that our wor­ship team doesn’t sing songs like this
  • Nev­er Throw Any­thing Away (Pearls Before Swine): I am pig, to the tremen­dous con­ster­na­tion of my wife.
  • What is Skim Milk? The FDA ver­sus Dairy Farm­ers (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “South Moun­tain Cream­ery sells skim milk, i.e. milk with the fat skimmed off. The FDA, how­ev­er, wants skim milk to con­tain as many vit­a­mins as whole milk so they define skim milk as includ­ing vit­a­min A and D. If farm­ers want to sell skim milk and call it ‘skim milk’ they have to add vit­a­mins. To avoid pros­e­cu­tion the FDA is requir­ing South Moun­tain Cream­ery to label their skim milk, ‘imi­ta­tion skim milk’! Yes. War is Peace. Free­dom is Slav­ery. Real Skim Milk is Imi­ta­tion Skim Milk.” This is actu­al­ly true. I still found it amus­ing.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

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 146

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. Every­one Got The Pulse Mas­sacre Sto­ry Com­plete­ly Wrong (Melis­sa Jelt­sen, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “…in acquit­ting Salman, 31, on Fri­day, a jury also deliv­ered a ver­dict on the sto­ry we’d told our­selves about the killings: We’d got­ten it wrong. In the wake of the shoot­ing, the media and pub­lic focused on cer­tain details, many of which were lat­er deter­mined to be unfound­ed, and dis­count­ed oth­ers, like Mateen’s own expla­na­tion for his actions.” This is a must-read. It’s amaz­ing how wrong the cul­tur­al con­sen­sus is. 
  2. Altered Brain Devel­op­men­tal Tra­jec­to­ries in Ado­les­cents After Ini­ti­at­ing Drink­ing (Adolf Pfef­fer­baum, et al, Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Psy­chi­a­try): “Ini­ti­a­tion of drink­ing dur­ing ado­les­cence, with or with­out mar­i­jua­na co-use, dis­or­dered nor­mal brain growth tra­jec­to­ries.” Ado­les­cence is defined as up to 21 in this study, which means most col­lege stu­dents should be far more leery of alco­hol than they are. 
  3. “Engag­ing the Cul­ture” Doesn’t Work Because Chris­t­ian Beliefs Are a Mark of Low Sta­tus (Dean Abbot, Patheos): “Evan­gel­i­cals sought to engage the cul­ture by being rel­e­vant, by cre­at­ing works of art, by offer­ing good argu­ments for their posi­tions. None of these addressed the real prob­lem: that Chris­t­ian belief sim­ply isn’t cool, and that very few peo­ple want to low­er their social sta­tus by iden­ti­fy­ing pub­licly with it.”
    • See also his fol­low-up Tra­di­tion­al Chris­t­ian Belief and Low Social Sta­tus: Four Respons­es: “The cul­tur­al shift that dis­lodged tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty from its place as the foun­da­tion of Amer­i­can cul­ture has pro­voked a num­ber of respons­es among believ­ers. Though these respons­es may seem infi­nite­ly var­ied on the sur­face, the bulk of them can actu­al­ly be cat­e­go­rized under four head­ings: accom­mo­da­tion, appease­ment, accep­tance and aggres­sion.”
    • And the sequel to that, The Low Social Sta­tus of Chris­t­ian Belief Is Part of a Larg­er Prob­lem: “In Christianity’s place, a new default reli­gion stands. In this sys­tem, the human prob­lem is lack of lib­er­ty, specif­i­cal­ly the lack of lib­er­ty for each indi­vid­ual to deter­mine his own val­ues, pur­pose and morals. The solu­tion is to lib­er­ate oth­ers by advo­cat­ing, even in an abstract and risk-free way, for ‘social jus­tice.’”
  4. Plumbers and Priests (Tony Wood­lief, per­son­al blog): “I don’t know how I got to the point where I’m inclined to dis­be­lieve any­thing an aca­d­e­m­ic claims. I’m not anti-intel­lec­tu­al. I read stuff. I even hold a PhD, and a Mas­ter of Fine Arts on top of that. I can show you math­e­mat­i­cal­ly why a sin­gle-mem­ber plu­ral­i­ty vot­ing sys­tem tends to yield two major par­ties, and for the chas­er I can hit you with an expli­ca­tion of the roots of lit­er­ary mod­ernism.… [and yet] the fact is I don’t have any con­fi­dence in those N.C. State find­ings.” The author has a Ph.D. in polit­i­cal sci­ence. I almost didn’t include this one, but I can’t stop think­ing about it.
  5. ‘I Know I Will Be Crit­i­cized’: The Lati­no Evan­gel­i­cal Who Advis­es Trump on Immi­gra­tion (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times):  “Mr. Rodriguez rep­re­sents a grow­ing seg­ment of the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment, and one that is often over­looked in all the atten­tion paid to the white evan­gel­i­cals serv­ing as Mr. Trump’s cheer­lead­ers. One in four evan­gel­i­cals in the Unit­ed States is now an immi­grant or the child of one. In the younger gen­er­a­tion of evan­gel­i­cals, there are now more His­pan­ic peo­ple than non-His­pan­ic whites.” Dis­clo­sure: I have met Sam­my but don’t know him. We’re in the same denom­i­na­tion.
  6. Some news from the glob­al church:
      • Mis­sion­ar­ies at bor­der spread Chris­tian­i­ty to North Korea (Hyung-jin Kim And Ger­ry Shih, AP News): “Among the mis­sion­ar­ies and pas­tors killed under mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances in recent years is the Rev. Han Chung-rye­ol, a Chi­nese pas­tor of Kore­an descent who head­ed a front-line church in the Chi­nese bor­der town of Chang­bai before he was found dead of mul­ti­ple stab wounds and a punc­tured skull in April 2016, rais­ing sus­pi­cions that North Korea was involved.”
      • Chi­na Bans Bibles from Online Sell­ers Like Ama­zon (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “Two days before the Bibles were banned from online pur­chase, the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment released a doc­u­ment out­lin­ing how it intends to pro­mote ‘Chi­nese Chris­tian­i­ty’ over the next five years. Accord­ing to the doc­u­ment, one of the government’s key objec­tives is to rein­ter­pret and retrans­late the Bible in order to enhance ‘Chi­nese-style Chris­tian­i­ty and the­ol­o­gy.’”
      • Meet the First Female Evan­gel­i­cal Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date of Colom­bia (Deann Alford, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “My pub­lic par­tic­i­pa­tion fol­lows a bib­li­cal mod­el. The Bible teach­es that we must be wit­ness­es of the Lord when­ev­er we are. In the last cen­tu­ry, US mis­sion­ar­ies taught that pol­i­tics was of the dev­il, and the church here was apa­thet­ic. For­tu­nate­ly, we’re wak­ing up. But we must wake up prop­er­ly, mind­ful to not con­fuse the church with a polit­i­cal par­ty.”
      • Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian Singer Los­es Cos­ta Rica Pres­i­den­tial Race (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The evan­gel­i­cal can­di­date had emerged from obscu­ri­ty to take a plu­ral­i­ty of the vote in the first round of the pres­i­den­tial race…. Despite his loss, Alvara­do Muñoz’s suc­cess is ‘a cul­tur­al game chang­er,’ says Dou­glass Sul­li­van-González, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­sis­sip­pi Hon­ors Col­lege dean who has done reli­gious research in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca. ‘[Evangéli­cos] are now going to be seen a polit­i­cal chal­lenge thanks to the suc­cess of Fabri­cio Alvara­do, said Sul­li­van-González.”
  7. Two relat­ed arti­cles by the Chair­man of the US Com­mis­sion on Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom (he is also a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Vil­lano­va).
    • Reli­gious Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, Sec­u­lar Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, and Oth­er Threats to Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom (Daniel Mark, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Serv­ing on USCIRF, which mon­i­tors and reports on the worst reli­gious free­dom sit­u­a­tions in the world, I am acute­ly aware of how our chal­lenges at home pale in com­par­i­son to what goes on abroad. But the les­son from this is not what you think. It’s not that we should feel so good as to become com­pla­cent about our own present cir­cum­stances. On the con­trary, the painful inter­na­tion­al scene should be an ever-present reminder to us of how rare, how pre­cious, and how vul­ner­a­ble reli­gious free­dom is—and how vig­i­lant we must be in defend­ing it.” 
    • Domes­tic Chal­lenges to Reli­gious Lib­er­ty From Left and Right (Daniel Mark, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “One cen­tral con­se­quence of this denial of human nature is that it leads ineluctably to a denial of human rights. With­out a firm view of human nature, we can­not con­struct a coher­ent account of human rights. I am aware, of course, that the peo­ple I have in mind here claim all sorts of things in the name of human rights. But the new menu of human rights is selec­tive, sub­jec­tive, and, final­ly, inde­fen­si­ble.”  

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How To Pray A Psalm (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): prayer life need a boost? Give this a try. (first shared in vol­ume 69)

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 145

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’ve been trav­el­ing a lot this week, so I haven’t done as much online read­ing as nor­mal. A few of these links are actu­al­ly left­overs from pre­vi­ous weeks that did­n’t quite make the orig­i­nal cut. Let me know if I over­looked some­thing you think I’d find inter­est­ing!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I’m Hap­py My Son Mar­ried at 20 (Rebec­ca Brew­ster Steven­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The preva­lent mes­sage in our cul­ture is that young adult­hood is the time to build a foun­da­tion for a healthy life. Those in their ear­ly 20s are encour­aged to pur­sue edu­ca­tion, trav­el, and gain life expe­ri­ence, all unhin­dered by wed­lock. Mar­riage is viewed by many as some­thing that comes only after ade­quate time to devel­op per­son­al iden­ti­ty and estab­lish a strong finan­cial foot­ing. But inher­ent in this delay is a real­i­ty we as par­ents are very cog­nizant of: Young adults, like all of us, are sex­u­al beings. When mar­riage is delayed, so is the oppor­tu­ni­ty to expe­ri­ence sex­u­al inti­ma­cy with­in God’s para­me­ters of a mar­riage covenant.”
  2. Stan­ford’s Pro­posed Renam­ing Prin­ci­ples: when I read the prin­ci­ples, my ini­tial thought was that Serra’s name was secure on cam­pus. But at least one stu­dent strong­ly dis­agrees.  
  3. The Per­ils of Paid Con­tent (Andrew Pot­ter, In Due Course): “When I was a stu­dent jour­nal­ist, it was axiomat­ic that adver­tis­ing was the biggest threat to inde­pen­dent media. Putting your liveli­hood in the hands of cap­i­tal­ists meant, ipso fac­to, doing their bid­ding. Expe­ri­ence is a great teacher though, and when I start­ed work­ing as an edi­tor at a news­pa­per, I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to dis­cov­er that you didn’t wake up every day to a swarm of calls from out­raged adver­tis­ers threat­en­ing to pull their cam­paigns if we didn’t smarten up….  But you know who does com­plain a lot? Sub­scribers do, end­less­ly.”
  4. Last Fall This Schol­ar Defend­ed Colo­nial­ism. Now He’s Defend­ing Him­self. (Vimal Patel, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “There are two sep­a­rate issues. One is the sub­stan­tive issue of colo­nial­ism. I think the acad­e­my remains high­ly illib­er­al and intol­er­ant of my view­point. It remains the case that most of the peo­ple who sup­port­ed me didn’t sup­port me because they agreed with my argu­ment. I think my sup­port­ers came in two types: those who agreed with my argu­ment, and oth­ers who said that even bad argu­ments that have gone through the process of being pub­lished should be respond­ed to, not silenced.”
  5. Empire State Of Mind (Doug Mack, Slate): “If you can find Iowa on the map and rat­tle off a few facts about the state (corn, cau­cus­es, Field of Dreams, a real­ly big state fair), you should be able to do the same for Puer­to Rico, which has a larg­er pop­u­la­tion. That’s espe­cial­ly impor­tant for lead­ers in Wash­ing­ton, giv­en that the ter­ri­to­ries have no full-fledged con­gres­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of their own, and giv­en that a cer­tain base­line lev­el of knowl­edge is a pre­req­ui­site for sound pol­i­cy­mak­ing.”
  6. The Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca Scan­dal, in 3 Para­graphs (Robin­son Mey­er, The Atlantic): “About 270,000 peo­ple installed Kogan’s app on their Face­book account. But as with any Face­book devel­op­er at the time, Kogan could access data about those users or their friends. And when Kogan’s app asked for that data, it saved that infor­ma­tion into a pri­vate data­base instead of imme­di­ate­ly delet­ing it. Kogan pro­vid­ed that pri­vate data­base, con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion about 50 mil­lion Face­book users, to the vot­er-pro­fil­ing com­pa­ny Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca. Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca used it to make 30 mil­lion ‘psy­cho­graph­ic’ pro­files about vot­ers.
  7. John Bolton Is Right About the U.N. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The U.N. is a nev­er-end­ing scan­dal dis­guised as an ever­last­ing hope. The hope is that dia­logue can over­come dis­trust and col­lec­tive secu­ri­ty can be made to work in the inter­ests of human­i­ty. Real­i­ty says oth­er­wise. Trust is estab­lished by deeds, not words. Col­lec­tive secu­ri­ty is a recipe for inter­na­tion­al paral­y­sis or worse. Just ask the peo­ple of Alep­po.”

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).

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 144

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. Exten­sive Data Shows Pun­ish­ing Reach of Racism for Black Boys (Emi­ly Bad­ger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce And Kevin Quealy, NY Times): “The authors, includ­ing the Stan­ford econ­o­mist Raj Chet­ty and two cen­sus researchers, Mag­gie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter, tried to iden­ti­fy neigh­bor­hoods where poor black boys do well, and as well as whites. ‘The prob­lem,’ Mr. Chet­ty said, ‘is that there are essen­tial­ly no such neigh­bor­hoods in Amer­i­ca.’ And, intrigu­ing­ly, these pock­ets — includ­ing parts of the Mary­land sub­urbs of Wash­ing­ton, and cor­ners of Queens and the Bronx — were the places where many low­er-income black chil­dren had fathers at home. Poor black boys did well in such places, whether their own fathers were present or not.”
    • The main take­away from this research is that Amer­i­can soci­ety is fail­ing black men. The sole ray of hope I saw in the arti­cle was in the para­graph above: poor black boys appar­ent­ly do as well as sim­i­lar­ly-sit­u­at­ed poor white boys if there are black fathers near­by. It’s stun­ning: a dense gath­er­ing of fathers can bring health even into father­less sit­u­a­tions. The fam­i­ly is a basic build­ing block of soci­ety and we weak­en it at great risk. I’m shocked this result from the study hasn’t received more cov­er­age.
  2. Mar­riage Has Become a Tro­phy (Andrew Cher­lin, The Atlantic): “For many peo­ple, regard­less of sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, a wed­ding is no longer the first step into adult­hood that it once was, but, often, the last. It is a cel­e­bra­tion of all that two peo­ple have already done, unlike a tra­di­tion­al wed­ding, which was a cel­e­bra­tion of what a cou­ple would do in the future.” The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Johns Hop­kins.
  3. This Preach­er Would Be Hap­py to Share Your Bowl of Açaí (Lau­ra Wil­son, New York Times): “Pas­tors today who want to start a min­istry for those 40 and under fol­low a well-trav­eled path. First, they lease an old the­ater or club. Next, they find great singers and back­up musi­cians. A fog machine on stage is nice. A church should also have a catchy logo or catch­phrase that can be stamped onto mer­chan­dise and brand­ed — socks, knit hats, shoes and sweat­shirts. (An online pop-up shop on Memo­r­i­al Day sold $10,000 in mer­chan­dise its first hour, Mr. Veach said.) And last­ly, church­es need a mon­ey app — Zoe uses Push­pay — to make it easy for church­go­ers to tithe with a swipe on their smart­phones.”
    • I thought this was an odd para­graph: “‘Insta­gram built our church,’ he said one after­noon at his office here a block from the El Rey The­ater. ‘Isn’t that fas­ci­nat­ing?’ Mr. Veach believes he can save souls by being the hip and hap­py-go-lucky preach­er, the one you want to share a bowl of açaí with at Back­yard Bowls on Bev­er­ly Boule­vard, who declines to pub­licly dis­cuss pol­i­tics in the Trump era because it’s hard to min­is­ter if no one wants to come to church. Jesus is sup­posed to be fun, right? ‘I want to be loud and dumb,’ Mr. Veach said with a wide, toothy grin. ‘That’s my goal. If we aren’t mak­ing peo­ple laugh, what are we doing? What is the point?’”
  4. Why Cloud­flare Let An Extrem­ist Strong­hold Burn (Steven John­son, Wired): “Lit­er­al­ly, I woke up in a bad mood and decid­ed some­one shouldn’t be allowed on the inter­net. No one should have that pow­er.” I shared one of the relat­ed arti­cles back in issue 136, but didn’t real­ize it was the theme of the whole issue: The (Divi­sive, Cor­ro­sive, Democ­ra­cy-Poi­son­ing) Gold­en Age of Free Speech. The oth­er arti­cles are worth check­ing out as well. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend.
  5. Ter­ry Crews: How to Have, Do and Be All You Want (Tim Fer­riss Pod­cast): this is a mov­ing inter­view. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Worth men­tion­ing: Ter­ry Crews is pub­lic about his Chris­t­ian faith on social media, although it does not come through in this inter­view. I men­tion that because he says some things about guilt and shame towards the end that are not quite right the­o­log­i­cal­ly, but are still worth think­ing about.  
  6. God Made Me Black On Pur­pose (Tim Alber­ta, Politi­co): “A pil­lar of the area’s African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty, the shop fea­tures aging walls cov­ered in pho­tos, news clip­pings and oth­er para­pher­na­lia. Two indi­vid­u­als in par­tic­u­lar are lion­ized: Barack Oba­ma, the country’s first black pres­i­dent; and Scott, the first black sen­a­tor from the South since Reconstruction—and the only African-Amer­i­can ever to serve in both cham­bers of Con­gress. Both are chil­dren of sin­gle moth­ers, but polit­i­cal­ly, the pair have lit­tle in com­mon: Oba­ma, a lib­er­al Demo­c­rat raised pri­mar­i­ly by well-off whites in Hawaii before adopt­ing Chicago’s impov­er­ished South Side as his polit­i­cal base; Scott, a con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­can who grew up poor in North Charleston, and whose ini­tial tick­et to D.C. was punched by afflu­ent vot­ers in the state’s three-quar­ters-white 1st Con­gres­sion­al Dis­trict. Still, they are mem­bers of a small fraternity—two of just 10 African-Amer­i­cans ever to serve in the Senate—and both are an immea­sur­able source of pride for the bar­ber shop and its cus­tomers.”
    • One detail from lat­er in the arti­cle that stood out to me: Scott got saved in col­lege at a Bible study. Col­lege min­istry mat­ters. Also, the way he became a Repub­li­can is actu­al­ly real­ly fun­ny. Search the arti­cle for the phrase, “Scott knew imme­di­ate­ly he would run; what he didn’t know was for which par­ty.”
  7. How many hours does it take to make a friend? (Jef­frey Hall, Jour­nal of Social and Per­son­al Rela­tion­ships):  “Tak­en togeth­er, results sug­gest that the chance of tran­si­tion­ing from casu­al friend to friend is greater than 50% after around 80–100 hr togeth­er. Results sug­gest that the chance of tran­si­tion­ing from friends to good/best friends is greater than 50% after 119 hr over 3 weeks and 219 hr over 3 months.” The author is a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas.

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 143

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’m a schol­ar of the “pros­per­i­ty gospel.” It took can­cer to show me I was in its grip. (Kate Bowler, Vox): “Every day I pray the same prayer: God, save me. Save me. Save me. Oh, God, remem­ber my baby boy. Remem­ber my son and my hus­band before you return me to ash­es. Before they walk this earth alone. I plead with a God of Maybe, who may or may not let me col­lect more years. It is a God I love, and a God that breaks my heart.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Duke Divin­i­ty School.
  2. Two intrigu­ing arti­cles on the trans­gen­der move­ment in Amer­i­ca:
    • The Dis­ap­pear­ance of Desire (Sohrab Ahmari, Com­men­tary Mag­a­zine):  “Sex­u­al­i­ty is a bod­i­ly expe­ri­ence. It stretch­es creduli­ty to sug­gest that a trans person’s deci­sion to alter his or her sexed body has noth­ing to do with what he or she wish­es to do with that body—and whom he or she wish­es to attract. Yet, as with gen­der itself, the trans activists treat sex­u­al desire as an abstract and dis­em­bod­ied thing.”
    • Divorc­ing The Trans­gen­der Com­mu­ni­ty (Gretchen Rachel Ham­mond, Tablet Mag­a­zine): the lan­guage in this one is uncouth. “It was then that I began to notice that those trans­gen­der peo­ple who start­ed to speak out as an activist, jour­nal­ist, celebri­ty, orga­niz­er, com­men­ta­tor or even via a social media post were com­ing under attack, not just from the usu­al crowd of Evan­gel­i­cal Con­ser­v­a­tive hys­ter­ics, but increas­ing­ly and unnerv­ing­ly from their own com­mu­ni­ty.”
  3. For the lawyers: Dis­agree­ment is Not Always Dis­crim­i­na­tion: On Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop and the Anal­o­gy to Inter­ra­cial Mar­riage (Ryan Ander­son, George­town Jour­nal of Law and Pub­lic Pol­i­cy): “Col­orado is part of a larg­er nation­al trend in which author­i­ties are using antidis­crim­i­na­tion statutes as swords to pun­ish already mar­gin­al­ized peo­ple (such as sup­port­ers of the con­ju­gal under­stand­ing of mar­riage), rather than as shields to pro­tect peo­ple from unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion (such as African Amer­i­cans in the wake of Jim Crow and today).… sup­port for mar­riage as the union of hus­band and wife is essen­tial­ly dif­fer­ent from oppo­si­tion to inter­ra­cial mar­riage, and that the sta­tus of African Amer­i­cans is impor­tant­ly dif­fer­ent from that of Amer­i­cans who iden­ti­fy as gay. As a result, First Amend­ment pro­tec­tions for peo­ple who act on the belief that mar­riage unites hus­band and wife dif­fer in crit­i­cal ways from hypoth­e­sized First Amend­ment pro­tec­tions for racists—and the courts can dis­tin­guish the two cas­es…. pro­tec­tions for cit­i­zens who sup­port the con­ju­gal under­stand­ing of mar­riage bear much more sim­i­lar­i­ty to pro­tec­tions for pro-life cit­i­zens.”
  4. The Igno­ble Lie (Patrick Deneen, First Things): “This helps explain the strange and often hys­ter­i­cal insis­tence upon equal­i­ty ema­nat­ing from our nation’s most elite and exclu­sive insti­tu­tions. The most absurd recent instance was Har­vard University’s offi­cial effort to elim­i­nate social clubs due to their role in ‘enact­ing forms of priv­i­lege and exclu­sion at odds with our deep­est val­ues,’ in the words of its pres­i­dent. Harvard’s oppo­si­tion to exclu­sion sits com­fort­ably with its admis­sions rate of 5 per­cent (2,056 out of 40,000 appli­cants in 2017). The denial of priv­i­lege and exclu­sion seems to increase in pro­por­tion to an institution’s exclu­siv­i­ty.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Con­sti­tu­tion­al Stud­ies at Notre Dame.
  5. Sex, Lies, and Spies (Dar­rell Cole, Prov­i­dence): “Once the case for employ­ing a spy in the first place has been made, the ques­tion of how to spy comes into focus, and thus one of the major moral prob­lems for spies is try­ing to make a case that lying and sex are just (com­bat) tac­tics…. We can make a clear and con­vinc­ing case that the Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion may sup­port the idea that lies told for the pub­lic good are jus­ti­fi­able. When spies tell such lies in the line of duty, their decep­tions fall into that cat­e­go­ry and, so, are jus­ti­fi­able. Can the same be said for sex in the line of duty? Can manip­u­la­tive sex for the pub­lic good be jus­ti­fi­able?” A fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sion of a ques­tion that had nev­er crossed my mind. The author is an ethics pro­fes­sor at Drew Uni­ver­si­ty.
  6. The Last Temp­ta­tion (Michael Ger­son, The Atlantic): “In a remark­ably free coun­try, many evan­gel­i­cals view their rights as frag­ile, their insti­tu­tions as threat­ened, and their dig­ni­ty as assailed. The sin­gle largest reli­gious demo­graph­ic in the Unit­ed States—representing about half the Repub­li­can polit­i­cal coalition—sees itself as a besieged and dis­re­spect­ed minor­i­ty. In this way, evan­gel­i­cals have become simul­ta­ne­ous­ly more engaged and more alien­at­ed…. It is true that inso­far as Chris­t­ian hos­pi­tals or col­leges have their reli­gious lib­er­ty threat­ened by hos­tile lit­i­ga­tion or gov­ern­ment agen­cies, they have every right to defend their insti­tu­tion­al identities—to advo­cate for a prin­ci­pled plu­ral­ism. But this is dif­fer­ent from evan­gel­i­cals regard­ing them­selves, hys­ter­i­cal­ly and with self-pity, as an oppressed minor­i­ty that requires a strong­man to res­cue it. This is how Trump has invit­ed evan­gel­i­cals to view them­selves.” The author worked in the Bush White House and describes him­self as an evan­gel­i­cal.
    • In response: The True Sin of Amer­i­can Evan­gel­i­cals in the Age of Trump (David French, Nation­al Review): “it mat­ters exact­ly how Evan­gel­i­cals arrived where they are today. It wasn’t the hys­ter­i­cal reac­tion of a self-pity­ing peo­ple. For most it was the sad result of a series of tough choic­es — made in response to dif­fi­cult and unrea­son­able chal­lenges. Even today there are mil­lions of Evan­gel­i­cals — peo­ple who still count them­selves reluc­tant Trump sup­port­ers — who are deeply uneasy with the pres­i­dent and the state of their own reli­gious move­ment. It serves no one’s inter­ests to min­i­mize the legit­i­ma­cy of their deep polit­i­cal con­cern.”
    • My take: Gerson’s essay is very good and French adds a need­ed per­spec­tive. Bonus quote from Gerson’s essay: “The ban­ish­ment of fun­da­men­tal­ism from the cul­tur­al main­stream cul­mi­nat­ed dra­mat­i­cal­ly in a Ten­nessee cour­t­house in 1925. William Jen­nings Bryan, the most promi­nent Chris­t­ian politi­cian of his time, was set against Clarence Dar­row and the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion at the Scopes ‘mon­key tri­al,’ in which a Ten­nessee edu­ca­tor was tried for teach­ing the the­o­ry in high school. Bryan won the case but not the coun­try. The jour­nal­ist and crit­ic H. L. Menck­en pro­vid­ed the account accept­ed by his­to­ry, dis­miss­ing Bryan as ‘a tin pot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a broth­er to the for­lorn pas­tors who bela­bor half-wits in gal­va­nized iron taber­na­cles behind the rail­road yards.’ Fun­da­men­tal­ists became com­ic fig­ures, sub­ject to world-class con­de­scen­sion. It has large­ly slipped the mind of his­to­ry that Bryan was a peace activist as sec­re­tary of state under Woodrow Wil­son and that his pol­i­tics fore­shad­owed the New Deal. And Menck­en was even­tu­al­ly revealed as a racist, an anti-Semi­te, and a eugen­ics advo­cate.” Empha­sis mine. I con­sid­er myself fair­ly well-informed about Amer­i­can reli­gious his­to­ry and found the bold­ed details sur­pris­ing.
  7. The real Down syn­drome prob­lem: Accept­ing geno­cide (George Will, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Ice­land must be pleased that it is close to suc­cess in its pro­gram of geno­cide, but before con­grat­u­lat­ing that nation on its final solu­tion to the Down syn­drome prob­lem, per­haps it might answer a ques­tion: What is this prob­lem? To help under­stand why some peo­ple might ask this ques­tion, meet two chil­dren. One is Agus­ta, age 8, a cit­i­zen of Ice­land. The oth­er is Lucas, age 1, an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen in Dal­ton, Ga., who recent­ly was select­ed to be 2018 ‘Spokes­ba­by’ for the Ger­ber baby food com­pa­ny. They are two exam­ples of the prob­lem. Now, before Ice­land becomes snip­py about the descrip­tion of what it is doing, let us all try to think calm­ly about geno­cide, with­out get­ting judg­men­tal about it. It is sim­ply the delib­er­ate, sys­tem­at­ic attempt to erase a cat­e­go­ry of peo­ple. So, what one thinks about a geno­cide depends on what one thinks about the cat­e­go­ry involved. In Iceland’s case, the cat­e­go­ry is peo­ple with Down syn­drome.”
    • Relat­ed: a Face­book post from one of our sopho­mores (shared with his per­mis­sion): “My par­ents were told that I would be born with down syn­drome and advised to abort me. In response my father pulled us out of the hos­pi­tal’s manda­to­ry coun­sel­ing pro­gram, spent a lot of time in prayer, and decid­ed emphat­i­cal­ly that I would be born. I had no say in the mat­ter, as I was too small to com­mu­ni­cate or under­stand. I could­n’t cry or plead for my life. I could­n’t even look the peo­ple in the eyes who want­ed to kill me. 20 years lat­er, I have my God and my par­ents to thank for defend­ing me, defend­ing an unborn child wrong­ly accused of a crime that car­ried a death sen­tence: a defect. My par­ents had no idea exact­ly where God want­ed to take me, but because of their defense, I’m here, down syn­drome free, sit­ting in a class­room at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.” (source) By the way, he was was not only admit­ted to Stan­ford. He was admit­ted to every sin­gle Ivy League school.

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 McCar­dle, 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). (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 142

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Qui­et Exo­dus: Why Black Wor­shipers Are Leav­ing White Evan­gel­i­cal Church­es (Camp­bell Robert­son, NY Times): “As the head­lines of the out­side world turned to police shoot­ings and protest, lit­tle changed inside major­i­ty-white church­es. Black con­gre­gants said that beyond the occa­sion­al vague prayer for heal­ing a divid­ed coun­try, or a dona­tion dri­ve for law enforce­ment, they heard noth­ing.” The dynam­ic described is real and one I have per­son­al­ly wit­nessed.  All in all a pret­ty good arti­cle although it has a few glar­ing blind spots, most­ly because it focus­es almost exclu­sive­ly on those who chose to leave and does­n’t tell the sto­ry of those who chose to stay.
  2. And while we’re talk­ing about race: “I Hope We Have No Crack­ers Here”: EBF Staff Sanc­tion Racial Slur (Anna Mitchell & Philip Clark, Stan­ford Review): “You would think that res­i­dents of a sup­pos­ed­ly pro­gres­sive and racial­ly con­scious house would jump to remove a racial epi­thet from house prop­er­ty.”
  3. This is also rel­e­vant to the first arti­cle: In Don­ald Trump, Evan­gel­i­cals Have Found Their Pres­i­dent (David Brody, New York Times): “In fact, evan­gel­i­cals take the long view on Mr. Trump; they afford him grace when he doesn’t deserve it. Few dis­pute that Mr. Trump may need a lit­tle more grace than oth­ers. But evan­gel­i­cals tru­ly do believe that all peo­ple are flawed, and yet Christ offers them grace. Shouldn’t they do the same for the pres­i­dent?”
  4. This Is How To Pay Col­lege Ath­letes (Patrick Hru­by, Dead­spin): “Because here’s the thing: nobody asks how’s it going to work when it comes to, say, pay­ing den­tists. Or invest­ment bankers. Or pro­gram­mers. Or pro­fes­sors. Or for that mat­ter col­lege coach­es, ath­let­ic direc­tors, and school pres­i­dents. There are no mas­ter com­pen­sa­tion plans for those and hun­dreds of oth­er lines of work because there’s no need for a plan. The very notion of com­ing up with a com­pli­cat­ed, cen­tral­ized set of rules dic­tat­ing how much plumbers can earn and under what cir­cum­stances they can earn it would be un-Amer­i­can…” 
  5. Was the apos­tle Paul mar­ried? Yes, he was. Here’s how we know. (Den­ny Burk, Per­son­al Blog):  “It may be that Paul’s words have impli­ca­tions for all who are unmar­ried, but I think Paul’s ref­er­ence to the unmar­ried refers to wid­ow­ers specif­i­cal­ly. There are a num­ber of rea­sons for this. Not the least of which is the fact that the Greek word for ‘wid­ow­er’ was rarely used in ancient Greek and was nev­er used in the Koine peri­od…. Paul uses the term ‘unmar­ried’ two oth­er times in this chap­ter to refer to those who were pre­vi­ous­ly mar­ried.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Bib­li­cal stud­ies.
  6. Leav­ing Blokesworld: Why You Can’t Have Your Porn and #MeToo (Mea­gan Tyler, Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny: Reli­gion and Ethics): “In one of the few attempts to link #MeToo and porn cul­ture, two Dutch filmmakers asked men to try and dif­fer­en­ti­ate between wom­en’s accounts of sex­u­al assault and scripts from porn films. The com­par­i­son high­lights the dif­fi­cult­ly in dis­cern­ing any dif­fer­ence…. So, for all the men who have been ask­ing what they can do in light of #MeToo, here’s a place start: stop link­ing your sex­u­al arousal to wom­en’s sex­u­al sub­or­di­na­tion. Stop watch­ing porn.”
  7. The Cen­ter Left Is On Life Sup­port (Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty, Nation­al Review): “As lib­er­als backed away from the hard pol­i­tics of mate­r­i­al redis­tri­b­u­tion, they found them­selves try­ing to redis­trib­ute the hon­orif­ic resources of soci­ety. Instead of dra­mat­i­cal­ly expand­ing day care, you could talk about sin­gle moth­ers as heroes.” The author is on the right and is diag­nos­ing a prob­lem he sees across the aisle. His com­ments about redis­trib­ut­ing hon­orifics are insight­ful and remind me of Tyler Cowen’s obser­va­tion that pol­i­tics is often more about rais­ing or low­er­ing some group’s social sta­tus than actu­al­ly solv­ing press­ing prob­lems. 
  8. What’s an Inclu­sion Rid­er? Let the Pro­fes­sor Who Helped Invent the Con­cept Explain (Rebec­ca Kee­gan, Van­i­ty Fair): “Smith said that an inclu­sion rid­er is a pro­vi­sion added to actors’ con­tracts to ensure that cast­ing on pro­duc­tions is more rep­re­sen­ta­tive. ‘It stip­u­lates that in small and sup­port­ing roles, char­ac­ters should reflect the world we live in,’ she said. That includes 50 per­cent gen­der par­i­ty, 40 per­cent inclu­sion for peo­ple of col­or, 5 per­cent L.G.B.T.Q., and 20 per­cent dis­abled.” This is a clever maneu­ver. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, there does not seem to be a pro­vi­sion for high­light­ing evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians accord­ing to our pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion in soci­ety. What if in every sit­com there was a Ned Flan­ders char­ac­ter?

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 141

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. Plen­ty of the ‘Nones’ Actu­al­ly Head Back to Church (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For athe­ists, the defec­tion rate is about 18 per­cent. Even more strik­ing, about 48 per­cent of agnos­tics defect­ed, as did 42 per­cent of those who described their faith as ‘noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar.’ That’s a stag­ger­ing amount of flux: About half of the agnos­tics in the US in 2010 were no longer agnos­tics by 2014.” There are many details not reflect­ed in this quote — read the whole thing. The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at East­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty.
  2. Holy Ambiva­lence (Brad East, LA Review of Books): “The arc of his­to­ry does not bend toward jus­tice; it bent and cracked long ago under the weight of anoth­er Empire’s injus­tice, under Pon­tius Pilate; now it wends in unknown and some­times wicked ways, under our own dis­or­dered direc­tion. Faith con­fess­es that it has been and will be right­ed, once for all, but we know not when or how the denoue­ment will come; only that it will be beyond his­to­ry.” This is a very thought­ful com­men­tary about how Chris­tians should think about the West­ern world.  The author is a the­ol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Abi­lene Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty.
  3. The Syr­ia Mem­o­ry Hole Is Open­ing Up a Big­ger Dan­ger (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg View): “Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sher­lock Holmes referred to the dog that didn’t bark as a tell­tale sign that some­thing unusu­al was going on dur­ing a horse theft. The rel­a­tive lack of atten­tion being paid to the news that U.S.-backed forces killed 200 to 300 Russ­ian mer­ce­nary sol­diers this month in Syr­ia seems like a non-bark­ing dog to me…. I have found that I know plen­ty of well-edu­cat­ed peo­ple, with grad­u­ate degrees and liv­ing in and near Wash­ing­ton, who aren’t even aware this occurred. The sto­ry has fall­en into a mem­o­ry hole, in part because nei­ther the Amer­i­cans nor the Rus­sians wish to esca­late the con­flict.”
  4. No, Fas­cism Can’t Hap­pen Here (Tyler Cowen, Politi­co): “My argu­ment is pret­ty sim­ple: Amer­i­can fas­cism can­not hap­pen any­more because the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment is so large and unwieldy. It is sim­ply too hard for the fas­cists, or for that mat­ter oth­er rad­i­cal groups, to seize con­trol of.”
  5. Many things were writ­ten about the recent­ly-deceased Bil­ly Gra­ham  this week. Here are a few that caught my eye:
    • How Bil­ly Gra­ham Killed Com­mu­nism with Kind­ness (David Aik­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But 19 years lat­er, at least one major jour­nal­is­tic crit­ic of that day had changed his tune. ‘Gra­ham’s efforts con­tributed to the fall of com­mu­nism, and in no small way,’ said Dan Rather in a 2001 inter­view. ‘He was right; I was wrong, big time.’”
    • What Is Bil­ly Graham’s Friend­ship with Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Worth? (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “King is quot­ed as say­ing, ‘Had it not been for the min­istry of my good friend Dr. Bil­ly Gra­ham, my work in the civ­il rights move­ment would not have been as suc­cess­ful as it has been.’”
    • Gra­ham And The Jews: A Com­plex Con­nec­tion (David Neff, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When Syr­ia and Egypt launched a sur­prise attack on Israel in Octo­ber 1973, it soon became evi­dent that Israel was under severe stress. The Euro­pean pow­ers refused to help. Richard Nixon hes­i­tat­ed to aid Israel for fear of esca­lat­ing inter­na­tion­al ten­sions. But as the cri­sis grew graver, and Israel qui­et­ly threat­ened to use nuclear war­heads, Nixon deliv­ered weapons and sup­plies to sta­bi­lize Israel. Years lat­er, Tanen­baum’s wid­ow told The New York Times that it was only after Gra­ham per­son­al­ly tele­phoned Nixon that the air­lift began.”
    • The Wrong Spite Of His­to­ry (Samuel James, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Social media doesn’t usu­al­ly shock me, but it got me this week. I was gen­uine­ly tak­en aback by the bile and vicious­ness I saw toward Bil­ly Gra­ham and his fam­i­ly from pro­gres­sives, espe­cial­ly LGBT pro­gres­sives. What I saw in dozens of tweets from accounts with shiny blue check­marks was hatred of the sim­plest and most unem­bar­rassed kind. It both­ered me, not least because it threw me: This is Bil­ly Gra­ham we’re talk­ing about. Not a politi­cian, not a cul­ture war­rior. Is it even pos­si­ble to be meek­er and milder as a Chris­t­ian than Bil­ly Gra­ham was, and still actu­al­ly believe the gospel?”
  6. Expro­pri­at­ing land with­out com­pen­sa­tion is impossible—take it from Zim­bab­we (Johann Kirsten and Wandile Sihlobo, Quartz): “South Africa will now begin to reclaim land tak­en from black peo­ple near a cen­tu­ry ago with­out pay­back to the cur­rent own­ers, divid­ing pub­lic sen­ti­ment along fears of a ‘land grab’ and cries for jus­tice. On Feb. 27, law­mak­ers over­whelm­ing­ly vot­ed in favor to amend the con­sti­tu­tion to allow land expro­pri­a­tion with­out com­pen­sa­tion…. If the South African gov­ern­ment seizes pri­vate prop­er­ty for free, some­one some­where with­in the econ­o­my will have to pay.”  The authors are econ­o­mists in South Africa. One is black and one is white.
  7. More on guns — the debate roils on with no sign of abat­ing:
    • A ‘Deeply Lib­er­tar­i­an’ Plan To Restrict Gun Sales (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “The state estab­lish­es a ‘No Gun’ reg­istry. Join­ing is entire­ly vol­un­tary, but upon adding my name, I give up my right to pur­chase a firearm. Not for­ev­er. Not for some set peri­od of time. The waiv­er is in effect only until I change my mind, which I am free to do when­ev­er I like. Sound too easy? This is where the ele­gant part comes in. When I join, I can sup­ply the email address­es for peo­ple who should be noti­fied if I change my mind. If I decide lat­er to drop my name from the reg­istry, nobody can stop me, but there’s a three-week cool­ing-off peri­od.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale.
    • What Crit­ics Don’t Under­stand About Gun Cul­ture (David French, The Atlantic): “Because of the threats against my family—and because I don’t want to be depen­dent on a some­times shock­ing­ly incom­pe­tent gov­ern­ment for my family’s security—I car­ry a weapon. My wife does as well. We’re not scared. We’re pre­pared, and that sense of prepa­ra­tion is con­ta­gious. Con­fi­dence is con­ta­gious. Peo­ple want to be empow­ered. That’s how gun cul­ture is built.”
    • Some Thoughts on School Shoot­ings, Media, and the Con­se­quences of Fear (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Con­trary to com­mon wis­dom, mass shoot­ings also occur in Euro­pean coun­tries. I sus­pect, how­ev­er, that the Finnish media don’t cov­er Ger­man shoot­ings as fre­quent­ly as shoot­ings in Flori­da are cov­ered in Nebraska–as a result the larg­er the media-mar­ket the greater the extent of avail­abil­i­ty bias. In oth­er words, the larg­er the media mar­ket the greater the over-esti­ma­tion of rare but vivid events.”
    • Why Gun Laws May Final­ly Change: Kids Are Lead­ing (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg View): “Chil­dren are effec­tive mes­sen­gers because they are dif­fi­cult to con­vinc­ing­ly attack. It’s eas­i­er to for­give their excess­es and their mis­takes, and they are not con­strained by hav­ing full-time jobs. The very fact that chil­dren are doing some­thing attracts news cov­er­age.”
    • Why Did It Take Two Weeks To Dis­cov­er Park­land Stu­dents’ Astro­turf­ing? (David Hines, The Fed­er­al­ist): “On Twit­ter, I lost track of the num­ber of bluechecks rhap­sodiz­ing over how effec­tive the kids’ orga­ni­za­tion­al instincts were. But orga­niz­ing isn’t instinc­tive. It’s skilled work; you have to learn how to do it, and it takes real­ly a lot of peo­ple. You don’t just get a few mag­i­cal kids who’re amaz­ing and nat­u­ral­ly good at it.” This is an excel­lent arti­cle with a unfor­tu­nate­ly off-putting title. It’s about how real polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy hap­pens.
    • Nation That Calls Trump ‘Hitler’ Demands He Take All Guns Away (Baby­lon Bee)
  8. Beau­ty and the Body of the Behold­er: Raters’ BMI Has Only Lim­it­ed Asso­ci­a­tion with Rat­ings of Attrac­tive­ness of the Oppo­site Sex (many authors, Obe­si­ty: A Research Jour­nal): “In sum­ma­ry, indi­vid­ual vari­a­tions in rat­ings of phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness are large. There was lit­tle sup­port for the idea of mutu­al attrac­tion as a dri­ver for assor­ta­tive mat­ing. Our data sug­gest that despite over­all trends favor­ing lean­er phe­no­types of both sex­es as most attrac­tive, every­one is beau­ti­ful to some­body of the oppo­site sex.” (empha­sis added)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  1. Chris­t­ian Breakup Lines (John Crist, YouTube)
  2. Calvin­ist Dog Cor­rects Own­er: ‘No One Is A Good Boy’ (Baby­lon Bee)
  3. Black Pan­ther star bold­ly pro­claims “I fell in love with Jesus” (Philip Koslos­ki, Aleteia): “One of the caus­es behind that suc­cess is break­out star Leti­tia Wright, who plays T’Challa’s lit­tle sis­ter Shuri, a brainy tech­ni­cian who is one of the most lik­able char­ac­ters of the movie. Inter­est­ing­ly, Wright almost nev­er got the role, as she left act­ing com­plete­ly to purse a rela­tion­ship with God.”

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.

Archives at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/category/links.