Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 140

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 gun debate has flared up again in the wake of a school shoot­ing.
  2. Lying to Inves­ti­ga­tors Should­n’t Be a Crime (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “Pros­e­cu­tors want to catch you in a lie because, when they can’t prove an under­ly­ing crime, it’s often easy to prove that you lied to them. That’s where the prob­lem aris­es. I’ve been telling my aston­ished law stu­dents for decades that except in cer­tain well-defined cir­cum­stances, lying to inves­ti­ga­tors shouldn’t be a crime.” Carter is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale. I strong­ly endorse this view.
  3. Let’s Fix Peer Review (Ray Tru­ant, per­son­al blog): “When we apply for a grant or want to pub­lish our sci­ence, we secret­ly get the work reviewed by our peers, some of which are com­pet­ing with us for pre­cious fund­ing, or a bizarre ver­sion of fame. Under the veil of anonymi­ty, a review­er can write any­thing, includ­ed false state­ments, or incor­rect state­ments to jus­ti­fy a deci­sion. The deci­sion is most often, ‘do not fund’ or ‘reject’, even if the review is based off of inac­cu­ra­cies, lack of exper­tise, or even bla­tant slan­der. There are no rules, there are no reper­cus­sions.” Tru­ant is a bio­chemist at McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty in Cana­da.
  4. Jane Stanford’s Speech (Jane Stan­ford, stanford.edu): A stu­dent had to read this for a class a while back, and was struck by how selec­tive­ly it is quot­ed by the uni­ver­si­ty. The orig­i­nal doc­u­ment is thor­ough­ly reli­gious. “An impres­sion has gone forth that we were indif­fer­ent to reli­gious influ­ences and instruc­tions being taught here. I am quite sure that if all could be made to under­stand that this project was born from a great sor­row, the great­est that par­ents can endure, that the Cre­ator has led us through the deep waters out into the sun­shine of faith and and belief in a future life; that we have whol­ly and entire­ly as far as pos­si­ble giv­en our lives to Him; and only ask that He will guide us to do His will; that every stone that has been laid into the build­ings of this Uni­ver­si­ty but num­bers the prayers that have been offered up to our Heav­en­ly Father for strength, guid­ance, and help. That we should for­get His love and mer­cy and be indif­fer­ent as to the Chris­t­ian influ­ence to be used among the stu­dents, it would be an impos­si­bil­i­ty.”
  5. [Har­vard] Places HCFA On ‘Pro­ba­tion’ After Group Barred Stu­dent in Same-Sex Rela­tion­ship from Lead­er­ship (Car­o­line Engel­may­er & Michael Xie, Har­vard Crim­son): “The Office of Stu­dent Life has placed reli­gious group Har­vard Col­lege Faith and Action on ‘admin­is­tra­tive pro­ba­tion’ for a year after the orga­ni­za­tion pres­sured a female mem­ber of its stu­dent lead­er­ship to resign in Sep­tem­ber fol­low­ing her deci­sion to date a woman.… Col­lege admin­is­tra­tors told them HCFA is the first-ever cam­pus group to be placed on admin­is­tra­tive pro­ba­tion.”
  6. Mean­while on the Farm, Lone­ly Men and Women of Faith: The Expe­ri­ence of Reli­gious Stu­dents at Stan­ford (Ben Simon, Stan­ford Review): “It may be unrea­son­able to expect a sec­u­lar insti­tu­tion like Stan­ford to ful­ly accom­mo­date each student’s reli­gious needs. With that said, Stan­ford goes far beyond the let­ter of the law when it comes to eth­nic or racial diver­si­ty, but it does lit­tle to go out of its way to help reli­gious stu­dents.”
  7. As more jour­nal­ists report on Ice­land’s cir­cum­ci­sion saga, the coun­try gets a rab­bi (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “As Robert George of Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty – for­mer chair­man of the U.S. Com­mis­sion on Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom – not­ed in a series of tweets recent­ly, a coun­try ban­ning cir­cum­ci­sion effec­tive­ly bans Jews from liv­ing there. Dit­to for Mus­lims…. [How­ev­er] Gun­nars­dót­tir told the news­pa­per she ‘didn’t think it was nec­es­sary to con­sult’ with the island’s small Jew­ish and Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion before propos­ing the anti-cir­cum­ci­sion bill, adding ‘I didn’t see it as a reli­gious mat­ter.’” That last detail is telling. Reli­gious illit­er­a­cy caus­es real harms.
  8. Read My Lips: No New Admin­is­tra­tors (Berber Jin, Stan­ford Review): “Though admin­is­tra­tive offices are obvi­ous­ly nec­es­sary for the university’s oper­a­tion, their self-serv­ing incen­tives should make us wary of their expan­sion. Unlike fac­ul­ty, who gain pres­tige through qual­i­ty teach­ing and inno­v­a­tive research, admin­is­tra­tors move up the career lad­der by expand­ing bureau­cra­cy.” The Review has been on fire late­ly.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a debate between two pas­tors on guns I shared back in vol­ume 48 – both are very thought­ful and are skill­ful debaters.  Here is the con­ver­sa­tion so far. All the posts are pret­ty short.

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 139

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. Illib­er­al Democ­ra­cy (Kyle Harp­er, First Things): “The fact that democ­ra­cy at its out­set was so flat­ly illib­er­al shows that the mod­ern syn­the­sis of lib­er­al­ism and democ­ra­cy is not inevitable or nec­es­sary.” Harp­er is a pro­fes­sor of clas­sics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa review­ing a book by Stan­ford clas­sics pro­fes­sor Ober.
  2. How much to spend on an engage­ment ring (Ramit Sethi, per­son­al blog): “Look at your own finan­cial sit­u­a­tion to decide what you can com­fort­ably afford. I asked more than 1,500 of my read­ers, and depend­ing on income, peo­ple typ­i­cal­ly spent between 4% and 8% of their year­ly income.” Sethi is a Stan­ford grad who is obsessed with per­son­al finance. Gen­tle­men: read this post even if you’re not in a rela­tion­ship right now. It’s infor­ma­tion you will almost cer­tain­ly need some­day.
    • Relat­ed: Plan­ning a Wed­ding? Say Yes to the Guests and Spend Less on the Dress (Scott Stan­ley and Gale­na Rhoad­es, Insti­tute For Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “the evi­dence sug­gests that the types of wed­dings asso­ci­at­ed with low­er like­li­hood of divorce are those that are rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive but are high in atten­dance.” The authors are pro­fes­sors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Den­ver.
    • Also relat­ed and bet­ter than the title makes it sound: The Bur­den­some Myth of Roman­tic Love (David C. Dol­lahite and Bet­sy Van­Den­Berghe, First Things):  “…in order for a rela­tion­ship to flour­ish, exis­ten­tial needs should be met out­side it. In study after study, the most suc­cess­ful mar­riages tend to unite reli­gious cou­ples whose shared beliefs con­duce to sta­bil­i­ty and sat­is­fac­tion. These mar­riages not only buck the trends of divorce, abuse, neglect, vio­lence, and dys­func­tion, but also ben­e­fit from the incen­tive reli­gion offers for cou­ples to work togeth­er for some­thing out­side the self.”
  3. We All Live on Cam­pus Now  (Andrew Sul­li­van, NY Mag­a­zine): “When elite uni­ver­si­ties shift their entire world­view away from lib­er­al edu­ca­tion as we have long known it toward the imper­a­tives of an iden­ti­ty-based ‘social jus­tice’ move­ment, the broad­er cul­ture is in dan­ger of drift­ing away from lib­er­al democ­ra­cy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our soci­ety is a sys­tem of inter­lock­ing and oppres­sive pow­er struc­tures based around immutable char­ac­ter­is­tics like race or sex or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, then soon­er rather than lat­er, this will be reflect­ed in our cul­ture at large.” What hap­pens on cam­pus does­n’t stay on cam­pus. On the plus side, this is why cam­pus min­istry can change the world.
  4. How the Nation­al Prayer Break­fast sparked an unusu­al meet­ing between Mus­lims and evan­gel­i­cals (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The first time I met an imam in my neigh­bor­hood, we’re five min­utes into the con­ver­sa­tion, and he said: ‘Do you think I’m going to hell?’ I said: ‘That’s what my tra­di­tion teach­es, yes.’ He said: ‘Good, I think you’re going to hell, too, so now we can have an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion.’” The arti­cle also draws a use­ful dis­tinc­tion between inter­faith and mul­ti­faith activ­i­ties.
  5. Oh God, That’s Me: The Hor­ror In The Mir­ror (Rolf Degen, Google Plus): “When adults who have nev­er before seen their own reflec­tion are con­front­ed with a mir­ror for the first time, they go through an unset­tling expe­ri­ence…” Degen is a sci­ence jour­nal­ist, although this isn’t a ful­ly worked out piece of jour­nal­ism.
  6. Here’s What North Korea Lets You See When You Trav­el There (Fabi­an Muir, Buz­zfeed): “It has occurred to me that per­haps some peo­ple feel cer­tain images are con­trived because their com­po­si­tion makes them feel like tableaux. Such skep­ti­cism riles me since it’s dif­fi­cult not to take it per­son­al­ly when an indi­vid­ual who has nev­er even vis­it­ed North Korea believes they know more on the top­ic than some­one who has com­plet­ed a two-year project and stud­ied every text avail­able.” The top com­ment is insight­ful.
  7. Let’s Ban Porn (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…we are sup­posed to be in the midst of a great sex­u­al reassess­ment, a clear­ing-out of assump­tions that serve misog­y­ny and impose bad sex on semi-will­ing women. And such a reassess­ment will be incom­plete if it nev­er recon­sid­ers our sur­ren­der to the idea that many teenagers, most young men espe­cial­ly, will get their sex edu­ca­tion from online smut.” Tyler Cowen is sym­pa­thet­ic but wor­ries about unin­tend­ed con­se­quences: Should We Cen­sor Porn? (Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion).
    • Also from Douthat’s col­umn: “So if you want bet­ter men by any stan­dard, there is every rea­son to regard ubiq­ui­tous pornog­ra­phy as an obsta­cle — and to sus­pect that between vir­tu­al real­i­ty and creepy forms of cus­tomiza­tion, its influ­ence is only like­ly to get worse. But unlike many struc­tur­al forces with which moral­ists of the left and right con­tend, porn is also just a prod­uct — some­thing made and dis­trib­uted and sold, and there­fore sub­ject to reg­u­la­tion and restric­tion if we so desire. The belief that it should not be restrict­ed is a mis­take; the belief that it can­not be cen­sored is a super­sti­tion.”

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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 138

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 read books effi­cient­ly in grad school (Thomas Kidd, per­son­al newslet­ter): “Here’s the method I rec­om­mend for read­ing a book effi­cient­ly: read every word of the intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion of a book. Then read the intro­duc­tion and con­clu­sion of each chap­ter word-for-word. With­in each chap­ter, read the first and last sen­tence of each body para­graph. Slow down when it gets inter­est­ing, or when the author hits on your par­tic­u­lar research inter­est.” Kidd is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty. There is a length­i­er arti­cle with relat­ed thoughts titled Effi­cient Read­ing by Karin Wulf, a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at William and Mary.
  2. The Anti-Chris­t­ian Alt-Right (Matthew Rose, First Things): “Almost every­thing writ­ten about the ‘alter­na­tive right’ in main­stream out­lets is wrong in one respect. The alt-right is not stu­pid. It is deep. Its ideas are not ridicu­lous. They are seri­ous. To appre­ci­ate this fact, one needs to inquire beyond its pres­ence on social media, where its obnox­ious use of insult, obscen­i­ty, and racism has earned it a rep­u­ta­tion for moral idio­cy. The rep­u­ta­tion is deserved, but do not be deceived. Behind its online tantrums and per­son­al attacks are argu­ments of gen­uine pow­er and expand­ing appeal…. The alt-right is anti-Chris­t­ian. Not by impli­ca­tion or insin­u­a­tion, but by con­fes­sion. Its lead­ing thinkers flaunt their rejec­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty and their desire to con­vert believ­ers away from it.”
  3. News To A For­eign Coun­try (David War­ren, per­son­al blog): “The State has its reli­gion, we have ours. So long as we remain meek and obe­di­ent, to any­thing we are required to sign, the Antichrist him­self wouldn’t care what we think. The trou­ble aris­es only when we fail to sign, salute, or check the right box­es. That is, from the Antichrist’s point of view, a form of defi­ance that requires pun­ish­ment — a pun­ish­ment that we have brought upon our­selves, as will be con­de­scend­ing­ly explained.” This is a tran­scribed speech by a Cana­di­an jour­nal­ist, and it is extreme­ly fiery and very Catholic.
  4. Trans­gen­der Ide­ol­o­gy Is Rid­dled With Con­tra­dic­tions. Here Are the Big Ones. (Ryan T Ander­son, Her­itage): “If gen­der is a social con­struct, how can gen­der iden­ti­ty be innate and immutable? How can one’s iden­ti­ty with respect to a social con­struct be deter­mined by biol­o­gy in the womb? How can one’s iden­ti­ty be unchange­able (immutable) with respect to an ever-chang­ing social con­struct? And if gen­der iden­ti­ty is innate, how can it be ‘flu­id’?”
  5. Mas­sacre in Myan­mar (Wa Lone, Kyaw Soe Oo, Simon Lewis and Antoni Slod­kows­ki, Reuters):  “Reuters has pieced togeth­er what hap­pened in Inn Din in the days lead­ing up to the killing of the 10 Rohingya – eight men and two high school stu­dents in their late teens. Until now, accounts of the vio­lence against the Rohingya in Rakhine state have been pro­vid­ed only by its vic­tims. The Reuters recon­struc­tion draws for the first time on inter­views with Bud­dhist vil­lagers who con­fessed to torch­ing Rohingya homes, bury­ing bod­ies and killing Mus­lims. This account also marks the first time sol­diers and para­mil­i­tary police have been impli­cat­ed by tes­ti­mo­ny from secu­ri­ty per­son­nel them­selves.”
  6. Should We Say “Of Course” To Fem­i­nism? (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “…I would chal­lenge all crit­i­cal­ly-think­ing fem­i­nists to ask the same ques­tion I asked my friend: if this move­ment does­n’t wel­come me, my opin­ions, or my solu­tions, why would I want to be part of it?” Yes, this is our Anni­ka.
  7. Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sex­u­al Assault on Cam­pus?  (Jia Tol­lenti­no, The New York­er):  “In col­lege, every­thing is Janus-faced: what you inter­pret as refuge can lead to dan­ger, and vice ver­sa. One of the most high­ly val­orized social activ­i­ties, black­ing out and hook­ing up, holds the poten­tial for trau­ma with­in it like a seed.”
  8. What Teenagers Are Learn­ing From Online Porn (Mag­gie Jones, New York Times): “But you don’t have to believe that porn leads to sex­u­al assault or that it’s cre­at­ing a gen­er­a­tion of bru­tal men to won­der how it helps shape how teenagers talk and think about sex and, by exten­sion, their ideas about mas­culin­i­ty, fem­i­nin­i­ty, inti­ma­cy and pow­er.” This arti­cle uses graph­ic imagery.
  9. How Chi­nese over­seas stu­dents are learn­ing harsh life lessons (Eric Fish, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post):   “Inter­views with Chi­nese stu­dents study­ing abroad and aca­d­e­mics who research their atti­tudes present a com­plex pic­ture – one in which stu­dents enter and leave with diverse views and iden­ti­ties that often defy clear loy­al­ties or ide­o­log­i­cal labels. But nev­er­the­less, many feel caught in the geopo­lit­i­cal cross­fire – forced to choose a side or keep their heads down.”

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 it’s insight­ful (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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 137

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. My Lar­ry Nas­sar Tes­ti­mo­ny Went Viral. But There’s More to the Gospel Than For­give­ness. (Mor­gan Lee inter­view­ing Rachael Den­hol­lan­der, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “One of the areas where Chris­tians don’t do well is in acknowl­edg­ing the dev­as­ta­tion of the wound. We can tend to gloss over the dev­as­ta­tion of any kind of suf­fer­ing but espe­cial­ly sex­u­al assault, with Chris­t­ian plat­i­tudes like God works all things togeth­er for good or God is sov­er­eign. Those are very good and glo­ri­ous bib­li­cal truths, but when they are mis­ap­plied in a way to damp­en the hor­ror of evil, they ulti­mate­ly damp­en the good­ness of God. Good­ness and dark­ness exist as oppo­sites. If we pre­tend that the dark­ness isn’t dark, it damp­ens the beau­ty of the light.”
  2. Want to see a spat between two bril­liant the­olo­gians?
    • The New Tes­ta­ment in the strange words of David Bent­ley Hart (N.T. Wright, The Chris­t­ian Cen­tu­ry): “When a the­olo­gian of the stature of David Bent­ley Hart offers a ‘piti­less­ly lit­er­al trans­la­tion’ of the New Tes­ta­ment that is ‘not shaped by lat­er the­o­log­i­cal and doc­tri­nal his­to­ry’ and aims to make ‘the famil­iar strange, nov­el, and per­haps new­ly com­pelling,’ we are eager to see the result. He promis­es to bring out the ‘wild­ly indis­crim­i­nate polypho­ny’ of the writ­ers’ styles and emphases, con­verg­ing on their ‘vibrant cer­tain­ty that his­to­ry has been invad­ed by God in Christ in such a way that noth­ing can stay as it was.’ But his two main claims (to be ‘lit­er­al’ and ‘undog­mat­ic’) are not borne out, and the promise of dis­play­ing the strange­ness of ear­ly Chris­t­ian life dis­ap­pears behind dif­fer­ent kinds of strange­ness.”
    • A Reply To N.T. Wright (David Bent­ley Hart, Eclec­tic Ortho­doxy): “[A rebut­tal] where­in, at long last, our author unbur­dens him­self of a great num­ber of com­plaints he has long wished to make against that pious man’s earnest but prob­lem­at­ic approach to the New Tes­ta­ment, embell­ished with a few moments of sly mock­ery, but ulti­mate­ly intend­ed as a good-natured—albeit inflexible—expression of deep dis­agree­ment.”
    • Trans­lat­ing the N. T. Wright and David Bent­ley Hart Tus­sle  (Caleb Lind­gren, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While the ver­bal spar­ring is both sharp and enter­tain­ing (and per­haps off-putting to cer­tain sen­si­bil­i­ties), there is a valu­able point at the heart of this debate—one that is worth not­ing as these two Bible schol­ar­ship heavy-hit­ters take swings at each other’s work.”
  3. Fake porn is the new fake news, and the inter­net isn’t ready (Nicole Lee, Engad­get): “Moth­er­board recent­ly uncov­ered a dis­turb­ing new trend on Red­dit, in which users cre­ate AI-gen­er­at­ed porno­graph­ic clips by swap­ping oth­er peo­ple’s faces onto porn stars…. Need­less to say, this has fright­en­ing con­se­quences. Not only does this open the door for a hor­ri­fy­ing new kind of revenge porn, where a venge­ful ex could slap your face on an X‑rated video, it also opens a Pan­do­ra’s box of fears where noth­ing on the inter­net can ever be trust­ed.” The embed­ded (non-sketchy) gif is alarm­ing­ly real­is­tic. The tech­nol­o­gy is already good enough that we’re at a tip­ping point, and it will only get more effec­tive in the future.
  4. A Work­out-Track­ing App Acci­den­tal­ly Revealed The Loca­tion Of A Bunch Of Secret Mil­i­tary Bases And Sol­diers’ Names (Digg): “Stra­va, a GPS-enabled mobile app that allows users to track their run­ning, bik­ing and swim­ming work­outs, is attract­ing con­tro­ver­sy after observers noticed that its glob­al work­out heatmap appar­ent­ly revealed the loca­tion of secret mil­i­tary bases and the exer­cise habits of indi­vid­ual troops on those bases.” Oops. Tech­nol­o­gy has con­se­quences. Remem­ber that, you star­tup­py types.
  5. The Abor­tion Memo (David Brooks, New York Times): “I’m ask­ing us to rethink our pri­or­i­ties. What does Amer­i­ca need most right now? One of our talk­ing points is that late-term abor­tions are extreme­ly rare. If they are extreme­ly rare, why are we giv­ing them pri­or­i­ty over all of our oth­er issues com­bined?”
  6. The female price of male plea­sure (Lili Loof­bourow, The Week): “Because if you’re going to wax poet­ic about male plea­sure, you had bet­ter be ready to talk about its secret, unpleas­ant, ubiq­ui­tous cousin: female pain. Research shows that 30 per­cent of women report pain dur­ing vagi­nal sex, 72 per­cent report pain dur­ing anal sex, and ‘large pro­por­tions’ don’t tell their part­ners when sex hurts.” First, fas­ci­nat­ing because I had no idea. Sec­ond, because the author is so cocooned in assump­tions stem­ming from the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion that she doesn’t seem to have con­sid­ered whether this is a symp­tom of the whole thing being unhealthy and mis­tak­en on key points.
  7. Show­ing Off To the Uni­verse: Bea­cons For The After­life of Our Civ­i­liza­tion (Steven Wol­fram, per­son­al blog): “There’s a thought exper­i­ment I’ve long found use­ful. Imag­ine a very advanced civ­i­liza­tion, that’s able to move things like stars and plan­ets around at will. What arrange­ment would they put them in? Maybe they’d want to make a ‘bea­con of pur­pose’. And maybe—like Kant—one could think that would be achiev­able by set­ting up some ‘rec­og­niz­able’ geo­met­ric pat­tern. Like how about an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle? But no, that won’t do. Because for exam­ple the Tro­jan aster­oids actu­al­ly form an equi­lat­er­al tri­an­gle with Jupiter and the Sun already, just as a result of physics. And pret­ty soon one real­izes that there’s actu­al­ly noth­ing the aliens could do to ‘prove their pur­pose’. The con­fig­u­ra­tion of stars in the sky may look kind of ran­dom to us (except, of course, that we still see con­stel­la­tions in it). But there’s noth­ing to say that looked at in the right way it doesn’t actu­al­ly rep­re­sent some grand pur­pose.” A long but fas­ci­nat­ing essay about how dif­fi­cult it is to encode a mes­sage that unam­bigu­ous­ly com­mu­ni­cates intel­li­gence. Rel­e­vance to nat­ur­al the­ol­o­gy should be obvi­ous (although Wol­fram, being an athe­ist, goes in a dif­fer­ent direc­tion).
  8. Some of our stu­dents and alum­ni have pub­lished things recent­ly:
    • The One Les­son We Do Not Learn at Stan­ford (Hugh Zhang, The Stan­ford Review): “If we fail to devel­op the type of char­ac­ter need­ed to resist temp­ta­tion when the stakes are so low, how can we be trust­ed to resist them when they are high­er? What we do at Stan­ford is less harm­ful than the fail­ings of the pow­er­ful. But it is only less harm­ful because our pow­er is yet lim­it­ed. When those in promi­nent posi­tions act as we do, we right­ly fear for society’s well being…. If we tru­ly believe that the duty of a uni­ver­si­ty is to pre­pare us for our respon­si­bil­i­ties in the world beyond these idyl­lic palm trees, then the most impor­tant les­son we can learn here at Stan­ford is the age old les­son of integri­ty: the abil­i­ty to do what is right even when no one is look­ing.”
    • Can I Help You? (Ryan Eber­hardt, per­son­al blog): “My friend Arjun com­mit­ted sui­cide last Sep­tem­ber. I’m ‘over it’ in as much of a func­tion­al sense as pos­si­ble, but I still think about him all the time. I miss him so much. He was among my best friends in high school…. I wish I could tell him about all the things I’m up to these days, brain­storm things for me to pur­sue after grad­u­a­tion, and ask for his advice. That will nev­er hap­pen again. But here’s the fun­ny thing: I don’t know if I would be so eager to talk to him if he weren’t dead. Death has an inter­est­ing way of doing that.”
    • Revers­ing the Curse: A Spir­i­tu­al Guide to Decod­ing Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (Femi Olu­tade, Medi­um): “For those of you who are root­ed in a faith tra­di­tion but can’t under­stand how a pop­u­lar, ‘sec­u­lar’ rap album can be a faith­ful wit­ness to Jesus’s life and mis­sion, Kendrick — and Jesus for that mat­ter — may sur­prise you. For any­one who is still search­ing for how truth and jus­tice emerge from the shad­ow of racism and oppres­sion, I present to you the sto­ries of hip hop and Judeo-Chris­t­ian scrip­tures in the hope that you can find in them the kind of trans­for­ma­tion that I have expe­ri­enced.” Femi releas­ing this free online book bit by bit. Seth, who writes the for­ward is also one of our alum­ni.
    • Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice (Rebekah Fen­ton, Kev­in­MD): “Med­ical edu­ca­tion sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly ignores the diver­si­ty of med­ical prac­tice dur­ing the class­room phase. Why do we only show rash­es on Cau­casian patients? Why do we only learn to rec­og­nize how men present with MIs? Why do we not address how obe­si­ty impacts exam find­ings? Med­ical edu­ca­tion favors the white, thin, male patient. I’ve seen his chest X‑ray, I’ve exam­ined his abdomen, I know his symp­toms, and I’ve seen his rash­es.”

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 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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 136

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. Trump has been pres­i­dent for about a year now. Here are some per­spec­tives (if you only read one, read the one you think you’ll dis­agree with most):
    • Trump’s first year was even worse than feared (Eugene Robin­son, Wash­ing­ton Post):  “Many of us began 2017 with the con­sol­ing thought that the Don­ald Trump pres­i­den­cy couldn’t pos­si­bly be as bad as we feared. It turned out to be worse.”
    • I wasn’t a Trump sup­port­er. I am now. (Mol­lie Hem­ing­way, Wash­ing­ton Post): “My expec­ta­tions were low — so low that he could have met them by sim­ply not being Pres­i­dent Hillary Clin­ton. But a year into this pres­i­den­cy, he’s exceed­ed those expec­ta­tions by quite a bit. I’m thrilled.”
    • ‘Vision, Chutz­pah and Some Testos­terone’ (New York Times): “Grant­ed we have the most unpres­i­den­tial pres­i­dent of our time. Crude, rude, clue­less dude — but I believe, with the help of his friends, he’s stum­bling through one of the most effec­tive pres­i­den­cies in mem­o­ry.” This is from a col­lec­tion of let­ters to the NY Times by Trump sup­port­ers.
    • This one trick explains the pat­tern of con­ser­v­a­tive praise for Trump’s first year (Dan Drezn­er, Wash­ing­ton Post): “All of this is con­sis­tent with assess­ments that Trump’s first year, even from a con­ser­v­a­tive per­spec­tive, has been pret­ty mediocre.”
    • Trump So Far Is More Farce Than Tragedy (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “A vast gulf between the things Trump says he wants — which are, indeed, often author­i­tar­i­an — and the things that actu­al­ly hap­pen is the essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic of his presidency’s first year.… his cab­i­net looks a lot like a gener­ic Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tion, whose efforts lib­er­als under­stand­ably oppose and some­times deplore, but which are not remote­ly like the work­ings of a fas­cist cabal cir­ca 1935.”
    • Pres­i­dent Trump’s First Year, in 14 Met­rics (Mike Niz­za, Blomberg View): “Last year our colum­nists select­ed a range of con­ven­tion­al and whim­si­cal met­rics by which to judge the suc­cess of the new pres­i­dent. We revis­it them here. Bot­tom line: By these mea­sures, he’s doing bet­ter than his oppo­nents will admit and worse than his sup­port­ers believe.”
  2. Is every­thing you think you know about depres­sion wrong? (Johann Hari, The Guardian): “Once you set­tle into a sto­ry about your pain, you are extreme­ly reluc­tant to chal­lenge it. It was like a leash I had put on my dis­tress to keep it under some con­trol. I feared that if I messed with the sto­ry I had lived with for so long, the pain would run wild, like an unchained ani­mal. Yet the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence was show­ing me some­thing clear, and I couldn’t ignore it.”
    • This reminds me of an arti­cle that made an impres­sion upon me back in 2003: The Pur­suit of Hap­pi­ness (Ben­jamin Healy inter­view­ing Carl Elliott, The Atlantic): “On Prozac, Sisy­phus might well push the boul­der back up the moun­tain with more enthu­si­asm and more cre­ativ­i­ty. I do not want to deny the ben­e­fits of psy­choac­tive med­ica­tion. I just want to point out that Sisy­phus is not a patient with a men­tal health prob­lem. To see him as a patient with a men­tal health prob­lem is to ignore cer­tain larg­er aspects of his predica­ment con­nect­ed to boul­ders, moun­tains, and eter­ni­ty.”
    • See also Stay­ing Awake Is A Sur­pris­ing­ly Effec­tive Way To Treat Depres­sion (Lin­da Ged­des, Digg):  “‘Sleep depri­va­tion real­ly has oppo­site effects in healthy peo­ple and those with depres­sion,’ says Benedet­ti. If you’re healthy and you don’t sleep, you’ll feel in a bad mood. But if you’re depressed, it can prompt an imme­di­ate improve­ment in mood, and in cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties.”
  3. Fol­low up to last week: Bolivia’s Pres­i­dent Revokes Evan­ge­lism Restric­tions (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Pres­i­dent Evo Morales Ayma announced that he will tell the South Amer­i­can nation’s Leg­isla­tive Assem­bly to repeal the entire penal code in the wake of recent changes that, among oth­er tweaks, intro­duced severe restric­tions on reli­gious free­dom.”
  4. Of Mon­ey and Morals (Alex Mayyasi, Aeon): “Today, a banker lis­ten­ing to a the­olo­gian seems like a curios­i­ty, a cat­e­go­ry error. But for most of his­to­ry, this kind of dia­logue was the norm.” I was reluc­tant to read this piece because I’ve read oth­ers that were off-putting­ly ill-informed, but I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised.
  5. It’s the (Democ­ra­cy-Poi­son­ing) Gold­en Age of Free Speech (Zeynep Tufek­ci, Wired): “The most effec­tive forms of cen­sor­ship today involve med­dling with trust and atten­tion, not muz­zling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of cen­sor­ship at all. They look like viral or coor­di­nat­ed harass­ment cam­paigns, which har­ness the dynam­ics of viral out­rage to impose an unbear­able and dis­pro­por­tion­ate cost on the act of speak­ing out.”

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 Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

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 135

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. Match Made in Mar­row (Jad Abum­rad & Robert Krul­wich, Radi­o­lab): this is a pod­cast fea­tur­ing some­one we’ve brought to cam­pus before: a magi­cian named Jim Munroe. Sev­er­al alum­ni emailed/texted me to ask if I had heard it. Jim is a good mod­el in this pod­cast of how to inter­act with the media — he is forth­right about his faith while remain­ing lik­able. He’s not per­fect in all of his respons­es, which in some ways makes him even bet­ter as a role mod­el.
  2. Anoth­er pod­cast episode you might find inter­est­ing: Is mir­a­cle heal­ing for real? Ken Fish vs Frances Janusz (Justin Brier­ly, Unbe­liev­able): Unbe­liev­able is a week­ly radio pro­gram in the UK that brings two peo­ple, usu­al­ly a Chris­t­ian and a skep­tic, togeth­er in dia­log about a spe­cif­ic top­ic. FYI: I’ve post­ed a list of pod­casts I lis­ten to.
  3. How ‘Cheap Sex’ Is Chang­ing Our Lives – and Our Pol­i­tics (Park Mac­Dougald, New York Mag­a­zine): “Vir­tu­al­ly no one… is hap­py with the state of male­ness today, and yet the male behav­ior we wit­ness today seems a ratio­nal, if short-sight­ed, response to their cir­cum­stances.”
    • See also Jor­dan Peterson’s inter­view on BBC Chan­nel 4 (YouTube). It’s long but quite inter­est­ing and parts of it are rel­e­vant to the state of mas­culin­i­ty in North Amer­i­ca. Peter­son is a clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to. He is con­tro­ver­sial — see What’s So Dan­ger­ous About Jor­dan Peter­son (Tom Bartlett, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “He’s also heard the crit­i­cism, includ­ing from some long­time col­leagues, that he fails to couch his lan­guage care­ful­ly and as a result naïve­ly wades into fraught con­ver­sa­tions about gen­der and race.”
  4. Bolivia Makes Evan­ge­lism a Crime (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “As always, the lev­el of enforce­ment will deter­mine how harm­ful to reli­gious free­dom the new restric­tions prove to be.”
  5. Today was the annu­al Ral­ly for Life in Wash­ing­ton, DC so there have been a lot of arti­cles about abor­tion this week.
    • Does the Pro-Life Move­ment Have Sci­ence on Its Side? (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “When Colleen Mal­loy, a neona­tol­o­gist and fac­ul­ty mem­ber at North­west­ern Uni­ver­si­ty, dis­cuss­es abor­tion with her col­leagues, she says, ‘it’s kind of like the emper­or is not wear­ing any clothes.’ Med­ical teams spend enor­mous effort, time, and mon­ey to deliv­er babies safe­ly and nurse pre­ma­ture infants back to health. Yet physi­cians often sup­port abor­tion, even late into fetal devel­op­ment. As med­ical tech­niques have become increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed, Mal­loy said, she has felt this ten­sion acute­ly: A hand­ful of med­ical cen­ters in major cities can now per­form surg­eries on genet­i­cal­ly abnor­mal fetus­es while they’re still in the womb. Many are the same age as the small num­ber of fetus­es abort­ed in the sec­ond or third trimesters of a mother’s preg­nan­cy. ‘The more I advanced in my field of neona­tol­ogy, the more it just became the log­i­cal choice to rec­og­nize the devel­op­ing fetus for what it is: a fetus, instead of some sort of sub-human form,’ Mal­loy said. ‘It just became so obvi­ous that these were just devel­op­ing humans.’”
    • Trump Backs Health-Care Work­ers Who Object to Pro­vid­ing Abor­tions (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “All of these laws are already on the books. But now, HHS is promis­ing to enforce these statutes more aggres­sive­ly. ‘For too long, gov­ern­ments big and small have treat­ed con­science claims with hos­til­i­ty instead of pro­tec­tion,’ said Sev­eri­no in the press release. ‘But change is com­ing and it begins here and now.’”
    • Why Trump is tar­get­ing health work­ers’ reli­gious objec­tions (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A con­cern among many is that reli­gious free­dom is becom­ing a par­ti­san issue depen­dent on who­ev­er sits in office, said Michael Wear, who did reli­gious out­reach for Oba­ma. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion, he said, has done lit­tle on reli­gious free­dom issues that will have much last­ing change. ‘The next admin­is­tra­tion could scrap this office their first day in,’ Wear said. ‘It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly putting [reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives] in a bet­ter sit­u­a­tion when they’re not in a favor­able posi­tion polit­i­cal­ly.’”
    • No, Politi­co, Con­science Pro­tec­tions Are Nei­ther ‘So-Called’ Nor ‘Con­tro­ver­sial’ (Casey Mat­tox, The Fed­er­al­ist): “Gov­ern­ment shouldn’t force peo­ple to vio­late their con­sciences. Until recent­ly, that opin­ion hasn’t been par­tic­u­lar­ly con­tro­ver­sial, even where actu­al con­tro­ver­sial issues like abor­tion were involved. One can sup­port abor­tion and still think gov­ern­ment shouldn’t dis­crim­i­nate against med­ical pro­fes­sion­als who don’t per­form abor­tions.” This arti­cle is a response to Trump to over­haul HHS office, shield health work­ers with moral objec­tions (Dan Dia­mond And Jen­nifer Haberko­rn, Politi­co)
  6. The Church Needs a Mas­ter­class in How to Apol­o­gize for Sex­u­al Assault (Abby Per­ry, Christ and Pop Cul­ture): “Abuse of pow­er, refusal to admit sin in its full­ness, and grasp­ing author­i­ty with clenched fists have no place in God’s king­dom. His is an econ­o­my of inter­twined jus­tice and grace, one that looks sin in the face and is repelled by it, not min­i­miz­ing its grotesque nature but cov­er­ing it with true grace. True grace does not thin­ly veil gross moral fail­ure and allow those who com­mit it to con­tin­ue wield­ing pow­er, but offers dis­ci­pline, dis­ci­ple­ship, care, wise coun­sel, and friend­ship as means of walk­ing with a per­son who has fall­en.”
  7. Wow. Asiz Ansari. First a sum­ma­ry, then links to com­men­tary. The con­tro­ver­sy around Babe.net’s Aziz Ansari sto­ry, explained (Car­o­line Framke, Vox): “The Babe.net report is marked­ly dif­fer­ent from any of the oth­ers that have come out since the New York Times broke the sto­ry of Har­vey Weinstein’s decades of alleged abuse in Octo­ber. It is not about work­place harass­ment; nor does it inter­view mul­ti­ple vic­tims to por­tray a pat­tern of abuse. It is about a sin­gle woman who was excit­ed to go out to din­ner with a come­di­an she liked, before quick­ly becom­ing uncom­fort­able with the tenor of his aggres­sive advances once they went back to his apart­ment.”
    • The Humil­i­a­tion of Aziz Ansari (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic):  “I thought it would take a lit­tle longer for the hit squad of priv­i­leged young white women to open fire on brown-skinned men. I had assumed that on the basis of inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty and all that, they’d stay laser focused on col­lege-edu­cat­ed white men for anoth­er few months. But we’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is start­ing to sweep up all sorts of peo­ple into its con­fla­gra­tion: the mon­strous, the cru­el, and the sim­ply unlucky.”
    • The Aziz Ansari deba­cle proves it’s time for a new sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In fact, it seems we have these sorts of pub­lic air­ings of female sex­u­al mis­ery all the time now, which sug­gests to me that some­thing is wrong with our sex­u­al cul­ture that can’t sim­ply be explained by posit­ing that women are insuf­fi­cient­ly aware of their rights and lib­er­ties.”
    • Lis­ten to the ‘Bad Fem­i­nists’ (Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “How has the most empow­ered gen­er­a­tion of women in all of human his­to­ry come to feel less con­trol over their bod­ies than their grand­moth­ers did?”
    • Puri­ty and Prej­u­dice (Samuel D. James, First Things): “If noth­ing else, the fail­ure of con­tem­po­rary sex­u­al pol­i­tics to deliv­er a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for women should make us recon­sid­er our assump­tions about progress. Why have decades of porn and pills failed to snuff out male priv­i­lege?”
    • If I may inter­ject my unso­licit­ed opin­ion: boy, wouldn’t it be great if there were clear rules gov­ern­ing sex­u­al behav­ior? And imag­ine how much clar­i­ty would ensue if they were con­nect­ed to pub­lic dec­la­ra­tions of con­sent. That would be won­der­ful! #ifon­ly #ohwait #back­tothe­bible

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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 134

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. ‘Walk­ing a line’: The shrewd tac­tics of the White House’s evan­gel­i­cal gate­keep­er (Michelle Boorstein & Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, The Wash­ing­ton Post):  “The Sen­ate race in Alaba­ma and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist Roy Moore? ‘I’m not involved.’ Trump’s pen­chant for lying? ‘I don’t want to get into it. Because I don’t focus on those things.’ The GOP tax law that bit­ter­ly divid­ed reli­gious lead­ers? ‘I don’t think there’s an answer.’ ‘For me, that’s all noise,’ he said. ‘It’s not that it isn’t impor­tant, but I don’t have time for all that… If I did dig into it, I might have stronger opin­ions, and that would be a dis­trac­tion for me.’”
  2. The Top 50 Coun­tries Where It’s Most Dan­ger­ous to Fol­low Jesus (Sarah Zyl­stra, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For decades, North Korea has clear­ly been the world’s worst per­se­cu­tor of Chris­tians. But now, anoth­er nation near­ly match­es it.” Spoil­er alert: Afghanistan.
  3. Clas­si­cal Lib­er­al­ism Strikes Out (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Thus, the irony: indi­vid­u­al­ism and sta­tism are not oppo­sites, but grow togeth­er in tan­dem. In our dai­ly par­ti­san pol­i­tics, we have tend­ed to pit indi­vid­u­al­ism against sta­tism – Ayn Rand against Karl Marx – with con­ser­v­a­tives claim­ing to be indi­vid­u­al­ists and pro­gres­sives claim­ing to sup­port an expan­sive state. But what we have wit­nessed is the simul­ta­ne­ous growth of both the state and the rise of indi­vid­u­al­ism, not as oppo­sites, but as nec­es­sary part­ners. The world has nev­er seen a more indi­vid­u­al­is­tic soci­ety nor a more encom­pass­ing state. The state has empow­ered itself by claim­ing to empow­er the indi­vid­ual.” This is a very stim­u­lat­ing inter­view with Notre Dame pro­fes­sor Patrick Deneen. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. High­er Edu­ca­tion Is Drown­ing In BS (Chris­t­ian Smith, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Ideas and their accom­pa­ny­ing prac­tices have con­se­quences. What is formed in col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties over decades shows up for bet­ter or worse in the char­ac­ter and qual­i­ty of our pub­lic ser­vants, polit­i­cal cam­paigns, pub­lic-pol­i­cy debates, cit­i­zen par­tic­i­pa­tion, social cap­i­tal, media pro­gram­ming, low­er school edu­ca­tion, con­sumer pref­er­ences, busi­ness ethics, enter­tain­ments, and much more. And the long-term cor­ro­sive effects on pol­i­tics and cul­ture can also be repaired only over the long term, if ever. There are no quick fix­es here.” Side note: I’ve met Dr. Smith, who is a soci­ol­o­gist at Notre Dame, before. He’s a smart cook­ie. 
  5. Oprah: Prophet, Priest­ess … Queen? (Ross Douthat, New York Times):  “Amer­i­can cul­ture is divid­ed between three broad approach­es to reli­gious ques­tions: one tra­di­tion­al, one spir­i­tu­al and one sec­u­lar. The tra­di­tion­al approach takes var­i­ous forms (Catholic and Protes­tant, Mus­lim and Ortho­dox Jew­ish) but its instincts are creedal, con­fes­sion­al, dog­mat­ic; it believes in a spe­cif­ic rev­e­la­tion, a spe­cif­ic author­i­ty and a spe­cif­ic holy book, and seeks to con­form itself to teach­ings hand­ed down from the reli­gious past. The sec­u­lar approach is post-reli­gious, sci­en­tis­tic, con­vinced that the lab­o­ra­to­ry and the micro­scope will ulti­mate­ly account for every­thing that mat­ters, while hope­ful­ly jus­ti­fy­ing a lib­er­al society’s still-some­what-Chris­t­ian moral com­mit­ments along the way. But in between sec­u­lar­ism and tra­di­tion­al­ism lies the most Amer­i­can approach to mat­ters of faith….”
  6. Can We Teach Our­selves to Believe? (Agnes Callard, New York Times): “Pas­cal seems to con­cede that try­ing to believe is a mat­ter of wish­ful think­ing, self-decep­tion or self-manip­u­la­tion. He thinks we should do it any­way. But I think our hope of becom­ing bet­ter peo­ple — whether in respect of reli­gion, friend­ship or jus­tice, or in any num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways — rests on the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there is a more straight­for­ward and less self-abas­ing way to try to believe.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. 
  7. The Legion Lone­ly (Steven Thomas, Hazlitt): “Friend­ship in adult­hood is a chal­lenge for a lot of peo­ple. On aver­age, both men and women start to lose friends around age 25, and con­tin­ue to lose friends steadi­ly for the rest of our lives.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Obsti­na­cy In Belief (C.S. Lewis, The Sewa­nee Review): this is a reward­ing essay from way back in 1955. (first shared in vol­ume 6).

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 133

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. Frac­tured West (Michael Tot­ten, City Jour­nal): “…I inter­viewed a gay Native Amer­i­can who sports an ‘I Stand with Stand­ing Rock’ T‑shirt on his Face­book page. You might think that a gay Native Amer­i­can must have vot­ed for Hillary Clin­ton, but you would be wrong.” This is a tremen­dous­ly fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about Ore­gon pol­i­tics.
    • Speak­ing of Ore­gon: Col­lec­tive Action Kills Inno­va­tion (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Most of the rest of the America–where peo­ple pump their own gas every­day with­out a sec­ond thought–is hav­ing a good laugh at Oregon’s expense. But I am not here to laugh because in every state but one where you can pump your own gas you can’t open a bar­ber­shop with­out a license.”
  2. The Hard­est Work­ers Don’t Do the Best Work (Jer­ry Useem, Bloomberg View): “It turned out that some peo­ple who did less just accom­plished less. But the top per­form­ers also did less, and seemed to have a knack for fig­ur­ing out how to side­step inessen­tial tasks to obsess on a few impor­tant things.”
  3. Real­i­ty Has A Sur­pris­ing Amount of Detail (John Sal­vati­er, per­son­al blog): “The impor­tant details you haven’t noticed are invis­i­ble to you, and the details you have noticed seem com­plete­ly obvi­ous and you see right through them. This all makes makes it dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how you could be miss­ing some­thing impor­tant.”
  4. Why you can’t blame mass incar­cer­a­tion on the war on drugs (Ger­man Lopez, Vox): “It’s not drug offens­es that are dri­ving mass incar­cer­a­tion, but vio­lent ones. It’s not the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment that’s behind mass incar­cer­a­tion, but a whole host of prison sys­tems down to the local and state lev­el. It’s not sole­ly police and law­mak­ers lead­ing to more incar­cer­a­tion and lengthy prison sen­tences, but pros­e­cu­tors who are by and large out of the polit­i­cal spot­light.”
  5. “Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Sil­i­con Valley’s Secre­tive, Orgias­tic Dark Side (Emi­ly Chang, Van­i­ty Fair): “Rich men expect­ing casu­al sex­u­al access to women is any­thing but a new par­a­digm. But many of the A‑listers in Sil­i­con Val­ley have some­thing unique in com­mon: a lone­ly ado­les­cence devoid of con­tact with the oppo­site sex.”
  6. Two Tax­pay­ers, Two Def­i­n­i­tions of ‘Pro­gres­sive’ (Ramesh Pon­nu­ru, Bloomberg View): “…lib­er­al analy­ses of the tax cut empha­size that it gen­er­al­ly rais­es after-tax income more for high earn­ers than for low earn­ers. Con­ser­v­a­tive analy­ses tend to point out that low­er earn­ers will gen­er­al­ly see their tax bills decline by the same per­cent­age that high­er earn­ers will (and some­times will see them drop more). Nei­ther side is dis­tort­ing the truth. They’re look­ing at the same thing from dif­fer­ent angles.”
  7. When Democ­ra­cy Hinges On a Sin­gle Vote (Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View): “…it turns out that we don’t count votes ter­ri­bly well. A 2012 study found that although some meth­ods of tab­u­lat­ing bal­lots are bet­ter than oth­ers, we can gen­er­al­ly expect an error rate of 1 to 2 per­cent. Although we can’t pre­dict which way the errors will fall, it’s unlike­ly that they will sum pre­cise­ly to zero – in oth­er words, there will always be mis­takes. So each time we count, we can expect a dif­fer­ent result.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale.
  8. Mak­ing Chi­na Great Again (Evan Osnos, The New York­er): “For years, China’s star­tups lagged behind those in Sil­i­con Val­ley. But there is more par­i­ty now. Of the forty-one pri­vate com­pa­nies world­wide that reached “uni­corn” sta­tus in 2017—meaning they had val­u­a­tions of a bil­lion dol­lars or more—fifteen are Chi­nese and sev­en­teen are Amer­i­can.” Also, I found this bit very amus­ing: “In the city of Shen­zhen, the local gov­ern­ment uses facial recog­ni­tion to deter jay­walk­ers. (At busy inter­sec­tions, it posts their names and I.D. pic­tures on a screen at the road­side.) In Bei­jing, the gov­ern­ment uses facial-recog­ni­tion machines in pub­lic rest rooms to stop peo­ple from steal­ing toi­let paper; it lim­its users to six­ty cen­time­tres with­in a nine-minute peri­od.”

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 Land of We All (Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire), an essay built on this insight: “Think­ing can not be done cor­po­rate­ly. Nations and com­mit­tees can’t think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no cen­ters, no souls, if you like. Mil­lions and mil­lions of per­sons may hold the same thought, or con­vic­tion or sus­pi­cion, but each and every per­son of those mil­lions must hold it all alone.” (first shared in vol­ume 2)

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 132

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.

There will prob­a­bly be no email next Fri­day — I’m going to be vis­it­ing fam­i­ly and won’t do much read­ing on the inter­net.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Not-So-White Evan­gel­i­cal­ism: How Con­ser­v­a­tive Denom­i­na­tions Actu­al­ly Fare Bet­ter on Diver­si­ty (Rebec­ca Ran­dall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the Unit­ed States today, 1 in 3 self-iden­ti­fied evan­gel­i­cals is non­white, accord­ing to a Sep­tem­ber study from PRRI. This ris­es to 4 in 10 evan­gel­i­cals when mea­sured by the­o­log­i­cal belief, accord­ing to a Decem­ber study from Life­Way Research. Of those that are white, 1 in 3 attends a mul­tira­cial church, report­ed anoth­er study, pub­lished in June in the Review of Reli­gious Research. Researchers Joseph Yi and Christo­pher Graz­i­ul dug into the more than 3,000 respons­es to the 2006 Faith Mat­ters Sur­vey, and found that more than a quar­ter of white evan­gel­i­cals report­ed hav­ing a close His­pan­ic friend. Even more—about 2 out of 5—said they have a close friend that is African Amer­i­can… In oth­er words, evan­gel­i­cals are now more like­ly than main­line Protes­tants to attend mul­tira­cial con­gre­ga­tions and to report African Amer­i­can and His­pan­ic friends.”
  2. The Zeal­ous Faith Of Sec­u­lar­ism (Mary Eber­stadt, First Things): “Pagani­za­tion as we now know it is dri­ven by a new his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non: the devel­op­ment of a rival faith—a rival, sec­u­lar­ist faith which sees Chris­tian­i­ty as a com­peti­tor to be van­quished, rather than as an alter­na­tive set of beliefs to be tol­er­at­ed in an open soci­ety. How do we know this? We know it in part because today’s sec­u­lar­ist faith behaves in ways that only a faith can.”
  3. Is Trump a Bless­ing or Curse for Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives? (Ross Douthat, David French, John Zmi­rak): “A year in, Trump has deliv­ered on many of his spe­cif­ic promis­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly where judi­cial appoint­ments are con­cerned. At the same time, there’s a great deal of angst with­in reli­gious cir­cles about what his per­son­al moral defects and his administration’s deep unpop­u­lar­i­ty mean for Chris­t­ian cul­tur­al wit­ness, and (among evan­gel­i­cals, espe­cial­ly) whether the Trump era is set­ting up a kind of gen­er­a­tional schism that will con­tribute to insti­tu­tion­al Christianity’s cri­sis going for­ward.”
    • Inci­den­tal­ly, I find many peo­ple are unaware of (or unwill­ing to admit) how much Trump has accom­plished. See The Show So Far by Tyler Cowen (Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion), Pres­i­dent Trump’s 2017 Report Card (A First Draft) by Scott Adams, and  A War Trump Won (Ross Douthat, New York Times). Love him or loathe him (appar­ent­ly the only two options), admit that he’s been busy.
    • Relat­ed: Can Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Sur­vive Don­ald Trump and Roy Moore? (Tim Keller, The New York­er): “Some time ago, the word ‘lib­er­al’ was large­ly aban­doned by Democ­rats in favor of the word ‘pro­gres­sive.’ In some ways, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty is more lib­er­al now than when the old­er label was set aside, evi­dence that it is quite pos­si­ble to change the name but keep the sub­stance. The same thing may be hap­pen­ing to evan­gel­i­cal­ism. The move­ment may aban­don, or at least demote, the promi­nence of the name, yet be more com­mit­ted to its the­ol­o­gy and his­toric impuls­es than ever.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  4. Sil­i­con Val­ley Is Turn­ing Into Its Own Worst Fear (Ted Chi­ang, Buz­zfeed): “Bil­lion­aires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a super­in­tel­li­gent AI will stop at noth­ing to achieve its goals because that’s the atti­tude they adopt­ed.” This essay is built on a clever insight that it press­es too far.
  5. What Putin Real­ly Wants (Julia Ioffe, The Atlantic): “[Inter­fer­ing with the US elec­tion] is a stun­ning esca­la­tion of hos­til­i­ties for a trou­bled coun­try whose elites still have only a ten­u­ous grasp of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. And it is clas­si­cal­ly Putin, and clas­si­cal­ly Russ­ian: using dar­ing aggres­sion to mask weak­ness, to avenge deep resent­ments, and, at all costs, to sur­vive.” This is a long arti­cle.
  6. Why We Shouldn’t Let the #MeToo Move­ment Change His­to­ry (David Green­berg, Politi­co): “Today we remem­ber lit­tle more from that era than the taunt that greet­ed pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Grover Cleve­land in 1884—‘Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa?’—when he copped to father­ing a child with an unwed woman. (He weath­ered the sto­ry, prompt­ing the riposte from his sup­port­ers, ‘Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha.’ Two years lat­er, at age 49, he mar­ried a 21-year-old, Frances Fol­som, in the White House.)” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Rut­gers. This one comes rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent and has a dif­fer­ent focus than you prob­a­bly assume from the title and the excerpt.
  7. Glow­ing Auras and ‘Black Mon­ey’: The Pentagon’s Mys­te­ri­ous U.F.O. Pro­gram (Helene Coop­er, Ralph Blu­men­thal and Leslie Kean, New York Times):  “The pro­gram col­lect­ed video and audio record­ings of report­ed U.F.O. inci­dents, includ­ing footage from a Navy F/A‑18 Super Hor­net show­ing an air­craft sur­round­ed by some kind of glow­ing aura trav­el­ing at high speed and rotat­ing as it moves. The Navy pilots can be heard try­ing to under­stand what they are see­ing. ‘There’s a whole fleet of them,’ one exclaims. Defense offi­cials declined to release the loca­tion and date of the inci­dent.”

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

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 131

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 West­ern Elite from a Chi­nese Per­spec­tive (Puzhong Yao, Amer­i­can Affairs): “Cer­tain beliefs are as ubiq­ui­tous among the peo­ple I went to school with as smog was in Shi­ji­azhuang. The doc­trines that shape the world­views and cul­tur­al assump­tions at elite West­ern insti­tu­tions like Cam­bridge, Stan­ford, and Gold­man Sachs have become almost reli­gious. Nev­er­the­less, I hope that the per­spec­tive of a can­did Chi­nese athe­ist can be of some instruc­tion to them.” This is quite fun­ny in places, espe­cial­ly his expe­ri­ences at the Stan­ford GSB.
  2. Uni­ver­si­ty evicts Chris­t­ian club over lead­er­ship faith require­ment (Caleb Parke, Fox News): “‘The [Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa] knows that what it is doing to BLinC is unfair, ille­gal, and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al,’ the com­plaint pre­pared by the firm says, adding that, while BLinC only requires adher­ence to their beliefs for their lead­ers and not their mem­bers, uni­ver­si­ty pol­i­cy is that cam­pus orga­ni­za­tions can require mem­bers to believe a cer­tain way.’” Read the actu­al legal com­plaint — it’s straight fire. I was espe­cial­ly tick­led by para­graph 76.
  3. How Cul­ture Affects Depres­sion (Mar­i­an­na Pogosyan, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “How­ev­er, teach­ing peo­ple that this very com­plex social, cul­tur­al, and bio­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non is entire­ly bio­log­i­cal can back­fire. It encour­ages peo­ple to ignore envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, and instead, essen­tial­ize depres­sion as a char­ac­ter­is­tic of them­selves and their biol­o­gy.” An inter­view with a George­town psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor.
  4. The War­lock Hunt (Claire Berlin­s­ki, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “Giv­en the events of recent weeks, we can be cer­tain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preser­va­tion will cease to speak of any­thing per­son­al, any­thing sex­u­al, in our pres­ence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are lis­ten­ing. They will adopt in our pres­ence great def­er­ence to our exquis­ite sen­si­tiv­i­ty and frailty. Many women seem pos­i­tive­ly joy­ful at this prospect. The Rev­o­lu­tion has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?”
  5. Evan­gel­i­cals and Domes­tic Vio­lence: Are Chris­t­ian Men More Abu­sive? (Brad Wilcox, Chris­tian­i­ty Today):  “…church­go­ing evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant hus­bands were the least like­ly to be engaged in abu­sive behav­ior…. Although the empir­i­cal sto­ry of reli­gion and domes­tic vio­lence looks good for prac­tic­ing believ­ers, it’s much less rosy for oth­ers. My research sug­gests that the most vio­lent hus­bands in Amer­i­ca are nom­i­nal evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants who attend church infre­quent­ly or not at all.” Brings to mind Rev 3:15–16 — be hot or cold, not luke­warm. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  6. I read many arti­cles about the Alaba­ma elec­tion — these stood out.
    • Roy Moore and the Invis­i­ble Reli­gious Right  (Ben­jamin Wal­lace-Wells, The New York­er): “…what was most notable about the pas­tors on Moore’s list was their obscu­ri­ty. I found a list of the pas­tors of the thir­ty-six largest church­es in Alaba­ma, assem­bled this sum­mer by the Web site of the Birm­ing­ham News; no pas­tor on that list appeared on Moore’s. I called lead­ers with­in the deeply con­ser­v­a­tive South­ern Bap­tist Church—the largest denom­i­na­tion in Alaba­ma and, for decades, the core of the reli­gious right—and was told that not a sin­gle affil­i­at­ed South­ern Bap­tist pas­tor in the state was open­ly allied with Moore.”
    • Roy Moore Had Low­est White Evan­gel­i­cal Sup­port Of Any Alaba­ma Repub­li­can In The 21st Cen­tu­ry (Lyman Stone, The Fed­er­al­ist): “Exit polls from the Alaba­ma Sen­ate spe­cial elec­tion on Tues­day show that Roy Moore got 80 per­cent of the white evan­gel­i­cal vote, but nonethe­less went down to defeat. This is shock­ing, because white evan­gel­i­cals are a big share of Alabama’s pop­u­la­tion…. So if it’s a big vot­ing bloc and they’re 80 per­cent for a can­di­date, shouldn’t that can­di­date win?”
    • For a crit­i­cal take on the above claim: Is it pos­si­ble that white evan­gel­i­cals swung the Alaba­ma elec­tion against Roy Moore? (Scott Clement, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Moore’s sup­port among white evan­gel­i­cals is his­tor­i­cal­ly low for a Repub­li­can. At the same time, the drop-off in Moore’s sup­port among oth­er white groups from pre­vi­ous elec­tions (par­tic­u­lar­ly non-evan­gel­i­cals, white women and whites with col­lege degrees) is far larg­er, indi­cat­ing that evan­gel­i­cals were far less like­ly than oth­er typ­i­cal Repub­li­can vot­ers to alter their par­ty sup­port with Moore as a can­di­date.”
    • And more gen­er­al­ly: Pro-life Vot­ers and Pro-Choice Politi­cians (Michael Wear, per­son­al blog): “The way some invoke con­science in pol­i­tics reflects an odd moral­i­ty that puts one’s con­science at risk for sup­port­ing a can­di­date who oppos­es Roe v. Wade, but ratio­nal­izes away moral respon­si­bil­i­ty for a can­di­date who inten­tion­al­ly seeks to dis­en­fran­chise African-Amer­i­cans or restrict the right of wor­ship for Mus­lims or wan­ton­ly breaks up fam­i­lies through depor­ta­tion or mass incar­cer­a­tion. Per­haps abor­tion as a polit­i­cal issue car­ries greater moral weight than these oth­er issues—an idea some pro-lif­ers seem a bit too eager to accept, I have to say—but is there no con­flu­ence of evil that can affect the vot­ing cal­cu­la­tion of the pro-life per­son who believes their con­science requires them to vote for who­ev­er the pro-life can­di­date hap­pens to be?” Wear, an evan­gel­i­cal, was an Oba­ma White House staffer.
    • Also more gen­er­al­ly: Why I Can No Longer Call Myself an Evan­gel­i­cal Repub­li­can (Peter Wehn­er, New York Times): “the events of the past few years — and the past few weeks — have shown us that the Repub­li­can Par­ty and the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment (or large parts of them, at least), have become what I once would have thought of as lib­er­al car­i­ca­tures. Assume you were a per­son of the left and an athe­ist, and you decid­ed to cre­ate a cou­ple of peo­ple in a lab­o­ra­to­ry to dis­cred­it the Repub­li­can Par­ty and white evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty. You could hard­ly choose two more per­fect men than Don­ald Trump and Roy Moore.” (this one came rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  7. Is Alp­haZe­ro real­ly a sci­en­tif­ic break­through in AI? (Jose Cama­cho Col­la­dos, Medi­um):  “I am a researcher in the broad field of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (AI), spe­cial­ized in Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing. I am also a chess Inter­na­tion­al Mas­ter, cur­rent­ly the top play­er in South Korea although prac­ti­cal­ly inac­tive for the last few years due to my full-time research posi­tion…. How­ev­er, there are rea­son­able doubts about the valid­i­ty of the over­ar­ch­ing claims that arise from a care­ful read­ing of AlphaZero’s paper.”  I was recent­ly hyp­ing this to some­one and clear­ly did not know as much about it as I thought. Inter­est­ing push­back.
  8. And last but not least : Want to raise employ­ee morale? Treat every day as an exper­i­ment (Chris­tos Makridis, Medi­um): our very own Chris­tos con­tin­ues to put his work out into the pub­lic square. Go, Chris­tos!

Things Glen Found Amusing

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have a provoca­tive read: In Defense of Flog­ging (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

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.