Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 130

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. There is a small but vocal group of skep­tics who claim that Jesus nev­er exist­ed. Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, a pro­fes­sor of ear­ly Chris­tian­i­ty, takes them down in a series of blog posts.
    • Why The Myth­i­cal Jesus Claim Has No Trac­tion With Schol­ars (Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, per­son­al blog): “The attempts to deny Jesus’ his­tor­i­cal exis­tence are, for any­one acquaint­ed with the rel­e­vant evi­dence, bla­tant­ly sil­ly.”
    • Focus, Focus, Focus! (Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, per­son­al blog): “Anoth­er read­er seems great­ly exer­cised over how much of the Jesus-tra­di­tion Paul recounts in his let­ters, and how much Paul may have known…. Paul ascribes to Jesus a human birth, a min­istry among fel­low Jews, an exe­cu­tion specif­i­cal­ly by Roman cru­ci­fix­ion, named/known sib­lings, and oth­er named indi­vid­u­als who were Jesus’ orig­i­nal com­pan­ions (e.g., Kephas/Peter, John Zebedee).  Indeed, in Paul’s view, it was essen­tial that Jesus is a real human, for the res­ur­rect­ed Jesus is Paul’s mod­el and pro­to-type of the final redemp­tion that Paul believes God will bestow on all who align them­selves with Jesus.”
    • Gee, Dr. Car­ri­er, You’re Real­ly Upset! (Lar­ry Hur­ta­do, per­son­al blog): “This exam­ple will ade­quate­ly serve to illus­trate why Carrier’s work hasn’t had any impact in schol­ar­ly cir­cles.  He gets him­self into a mud­dle.”
  2. Four Ques­tions About Amer­i­can Great­ness (Bret Stephens, New York Times): Dif­fi­cult to excerpt but good. Stephens says Amer­i­ca is great and that to retain our great­ness we must have a prop­er atti­tude toward immi­grants, inde­pen­dent think­ing, fail­ure, and glob­al lead­er­ship. Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend — thank you!
  3. A Police Killing With­out a Hint of Racism (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “No unjust killing of a black per­son should go uncov­ered. But I sus­pect it would be in everyone’s inter­est if jour­nal­ists and activists paid more atten­tion to egre­gious police killings of white peo­ple. If you’re hor­ri­fied by Daniel Shaver’s untime­ly death, yet against Black Lives Mat­ter, con­sid­er that Shaver might well be alive if only the Mesa police depart­ment had long ago adopt­ed reforms of the sort that Black Lives Mat­ter sug­gests.” There is a fol­low-up arti­cle — Footage Of A Police Shoot­ing Jurors Chose Not To Pun­ish.
  4. The world is rely­ing on a flawed psy­cho­log­i­cal test to fight racism (Olivia Gold­hill, Quartz): “meta-analy­ses showed that the [Implic­it Asso­ci­a­tion Test] is no bet­ter at pre­dict­ing dis­crim­i­na­to­ry behav­ior (includ­ing microag­gres­sions) than explic­it mea­sures of explic­it bias, such as the Mod­ern Racism Scale, which eval­u­ates racism sim­ply by ask­ing par­tic­i­pants to state their lev­el of agree­ment with [racist state­ments].”
  5. Sur­vey: Evan­gel­i­cal Label, Beliefs Often At Odds (Bob Smi­etana, Bap­tist Press): “Few­er than half of those who iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cals (45 per­cent) strong­ly agree with core evan­gel­i­cal beliefs…. Only two-thirds (69 per­cent) of evan­gel­i­cals by belief self-iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cals.” This is impor­tant to remem­ber both when read­ing the news and when talk­ing with oth­ers — the label evan­gel­i­cal does­n’t mean what it should. Use­ful­ly illus­trat­ed in visu­al form on Twit­ter.
  6. The Ori­gin of Sil­i­con Valley’s Dys­func­tion­al Atti­tude Toward Hate Speech (Noam Cohen, The New York­er): “Cen­sor­ing a news­group, he explained to those who might not be famil­iar with Usenet, was like pulling a book from cir­cu­la­tion. Since ‘Mein Kampf’ was still on the library shelves, it was hard to imag­ine how any­thing else mer­it­ed removal.” The arti­cle is about Stan­ford, and it led me to entire­ly dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions than the author intend­ed.
  7. The Church’s Fate Is Not Elec­toral: Our Roy Moore Moment (Greg Forster, Gospel Coali­tion): ”There are no Flight 93 moments for the church; there nev­er have been and nev­er will be. Cer­tain­ly God’s peo­ple will con­tin­ue to face per­se­cu­tion from world­ly pow­ers, as we always have. But the idea that we have to com­pro­mise moral stan­dards in order to pre­vent the destruc­tion of the church reflects an appalling fail­ure to grasp where the church’s fate real­ly lies. The church’s fate is not elec­toral; it’s escha­to­log­i­cal. The church’s tri­umph over its ene­mies comes with the King’s return.”
  8. The Supreme Court heard argu­ments on Tues­day about the Col­orado bak­er who refus­es to bake cakes for events he find objec­tion­able — includ­ing gay wed­dings.
    • Argu­ment analy­sis: Con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty lean­ing toward rul­ing for Col­orado bak­er (Amy Howe, SCO­TUS­blog): “Although mak­ing pre­dic­tions based on oral argu­ment is always dan­ger­ous, it seemed very pos­si­ble that there are five votes for Phillips among the court’s more con­ser­v­a­tive jus­tices, even if it is less clear how broad­ly they will rule.”
    • A Baker’s First Amend­ment Rights (Robert P. George and Sherif Gir­gis, New York Times): “You need the First Amend­ment pre­cise­ly when your ideas offend oth­ers or flout the majority’s ortho­dox­ies. And then it pro­tects more than your free­dom to speak your mind; it guards your free­dom not to speak the mind of anoth­er.”
    • We’re lawyers who sup­port same-sex mar­riage. We also sup­port the Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop bak­er. (Dou­glas Lay­cock & Thomas Berg, Vox): “The case tests the nation’s com­mit­ment to lib­er­ty and jus­tice for all. And we aren’t doing well on the part about ‘for all.’ Too many Amer­i­cans, left and right, reli­gious and sec­u­lar, want lib­er­ty for their own side in the cul­ture wars, but not for the oth­er side.” The authors are not just lawyers — they are pro­fes­sors of con­sti­tu­tion­al law.
    • How Not To Advance Gay Mar­riage (David Brooks, New York Times): “If you want to know why we have such a polar­ized, angry and bit­ter soci­ety, one rea­son is we take every dis­agree­ment that could be addressed in con­ver­sa­tion and com­mu­ni­ty and we turn it into a law­suit. We take every moral­ly sup­ple sit­u­a­tion and we hand it over to the legal priest­hood, which by neces­si­ty is a sys­tem of tech­no­crat­ic ratio­nal­ism, strained slip­pery-slope analo­gies and implied coer­cion.”

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 20 Argu­ments For God’s Exis­tence (Peter Kreeft, per­son­al web­site): “You may be blessed with a vivid sense of God’s pres­ence; and that is some­thing for which to be pro­found­ly grate­ful. But that does not mean you have no oblig­a­tion to pon­der these argu­ments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they real­ly need. You may even be asked to pro­vide help.” The author is a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. (first shared in vol­ume 116)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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 129

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 home­less who help them­selves get a need­ed lift (Kevin Kel­ly, San Jose Mer­cury News): “LifeMoves, for­mer­ly known as InnVi­sion Shel­ter Net­work, is a 44-year-old [Bay Area] non­prof­it that spe­cial­izes in get­ting indi­vid­u­als into tem­po­rary hous­ing and on a path to per­ma­nent hous­ing. It claims a 93 per­cent suc­cess rate of get­ting home­less fam­i­lies housed and self-suf­fi­cient, and a 72 per­cent suc­cess rate with indi­vid­u­als. There is just one caveat: Peo­ple who receive assis­tance — referred to as clients — must demon­strate a will­ing­ness to bet­ter them­selves.”
    • Relat­ed: 5 Harsh Real­i­ties Of Home­less Camps Nobody Talks About (Evan Symon, Cracked): “If you live in a major Amer­i­can city, you’ve prob­a­bly seen your fair share of home­less camps. They usu­al­ly crop up in emp­ty lots, parks, and Big Rock Can­dy Moun­tains. City gov­ern­ments gen­er­al­ly have them torn down and cleaned up when­ev­er they can. Leav­ing aside whether or not that’s the right way to address home­less­ness, some­body has to do the work of clean­ing those places up. Our source, Car­ol, did just that.”
  2. Peo­ple for sale: Where lives are auc­tioned for $400 (Nima Elba­gir, Raja Razek, Alex Platt and Bry­ony Jones, CNN). There is a text sto­ry at the link, but the embed­ded sev­en minute video is worth watch­ing, espe­cial­ly the first four min­utes. This is a hor­ri­fy­ing devel­op­ment in the migrant cri­sis — slave auc­tions.
  3. How To Think About Vladimir Putin (Christo­pher Cald­well, Imprim­is): “When Putin took pow­er in the win­ter of 1999–2000, his coun­try was defense­less. It was bank­rupt. It was being carved up by its new klep­to­crat­ic elites, in col­lu­sion with its old impe­r­i­al rivals, the Amer­i­cans. Putin changed that…. Russ­ian peo­ple not only tol­er­ate him, they revere him. You can get a bet­ter idea of why he has ruled for 17 years if you remem­ber that, with­in a few years of Communism’s fall, aver­age life expectan­cy in Rus­sia had fall­en below that of Bangladesh. ” This is a slight­ly old­er arti­cle, and so his com­ments about Russia’s role in the U.S. elec­tion aren’t very cur­rent. His broad­er obser­va­tions are worth pon­der­ing.
  4. The Supreme Court hears argu­ments about the Chris­t­ian bak­er who refused to bake a cake for a gay wed­ding on Tues­day. Lots of peo­ple are writ­ing about it.
      • Against the bak­er: The Chris­t­ian Legal Army Behind ‘Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop’ (Sarah Pos­ner, The Nation): “On Decem­ber 5, with the full force of the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment behind it, ADF will be ask­ing the Supreme Court to carve out yawn­ing exemp­tions from civ­il-rights laws for con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians.” (this is less about the case and more about the firm rep­re­sent­ing the bak­er — it’s a hit piece but is full of inter­est­ing info)
      • Against the bak­er: The Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop Case Is Not About Reli­gious Free­dom (Jen­nifer Finney Boy­lan, New York Times): “But Mas­ter­piece has noth­ing to do with reli­gious free­dom. It’s about enshrin­ing a free­dom to dis­crim­i­nate. His­tor­i­cal­ly, reli­gious exemp­tions from the law have occa­sion­al­ly been grant­ed to pro­tect the per­son who holds the belief. But this case is dif­fer­ent, in that it gives an indi­vid­ual the right to harm some­one else. And that’s what the Mas­ter­piece case is about: It would give indi­vid­u­als the right to dis­crim­i­nate.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Barnard Col­lege.
      • Against the bak­er: The Gay Wed­ding Cake Case Isn’t About Free Speech (Andrew Kop­pel­man, The Amer­i­can Prospect).”It is mere­ly telling him that if he sells any prod­ucts to het­ero­sex­u­al cou­ples, he must sell the same prod­ucts to same-sex cou­ples. He is free to refuse to write ‘Sup­port Gay Mar­riage’ on any cakes that he sells, so long as he refus­es that to both gay and het­ero­sex­u­al cus­tomers. So this is an easy case. Phillips should lose.“ The author is a law pro­fes­sor at North­west­ern. This is the strongest argu­ment I have read against the Chris­t­ian bak­er.
      • For the bak­er: Stop Mis­rep­re­sent­ing Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop (David French, Nation­al Review): “Phillips isn’t dis­crim­i­nat­ing against a pro­tect­ed class. I’ll repeat this until I’m blue in the face. He serves gay cus­tomers.”
      • For the bak­er: The Chris­t­ian Baker’s Unan­swered Legal Argu­ment: Why the Strongest Objec­tions Fail (Sherif Gir­gis, Pub­lic Dis­course): “Should an Islam­o­pho­bic sect get to force Mus­lim car­i­ca­tur­ists to sketch mock­ing images of the Prophet? Clear­ly not.” Dis­claimer: Sherif was a room­mate of one of our alum­ni and is an acquain­tance of mine.
  5. Duel­ing per­spec­tives on the fam­i­ly lives of blue state and red state Amer­i­cans:
    • Blue States Prac­tice the Fam­i­ly Val­ues Red States Preach (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “The lib­er­al impulse may be to gloat: Those con­ser­v­a­tives thun­der about ‘fam­i­ly val­ues’ but don’t prac­tice them. But there’s also per­haps a mea­sure of hypocrisy in the blue states. As Cahn and Car­bone put it: ‘Blue fam­i­ly val­ues bris­tle at restric­tions on sex­u­al­i­ty, insis­tence on mar­riage or the stigma­ti­za­tion of sin­gle par­ents. Their secret, how­ev­er, is that they encour­age their chil­dren to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly com­bine pub­lic tol­er­ance with pri­vate dis­ci­pline, and their chil­dren then over­whelm­ing­ly choose to raise their own chil­dren with­in two-par­ent fam­i­lies.’” Kristof is a Pulitzer prize-win­ning jour­nal­ist who was a Rhodes Schol­ar and is on the Board of Over­seers for Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • No, Repub­li­cans Aren’t Hyp­ocrites on Fam­i­ly Val­ues W. Brad­ford Wilcox and Vijay Menon, Politi­co): “In oth­er words, even though South­ern­ers in gen­er­al are at greater risk of fam­i­ly insta­bil­i­ty than North­ern­ers, Repub­li­cans in the South enjoy marked­ly high­er lev­els of fam­i­ly sta­bil­i­ty than their fel­low citizens—a fam­i­ly sta­bil­i­ty advan­tage that puts them above Democ­rats and inde­pen­dents in the North. Anoth­er way to put this: It’s blue and pur­ple Amer­i­cans in the South who are real­ly pulling down fam­i­ly sta­bil­i­ty in the South, not red Amer­i­cans.” Wilcox is a soci­ol­o­gy prof at UVA, where Minon is also a grad stu­dent.
  6. We Did­n’t Become Chris­tians Because Of The Huck­sters (Michael Wear, Fath­om): “If the world crit­i­cizes the pride of some­one who claims the name of Christ—or who won the votes of those who do—point them to Jesus, who was born into pover­ty, who instruct­ed his fol­low­ers to take the low posi­tion, and hum­bled him­self on the way to the cross…. There is noth­ing so wrong with the poor exam­ple of Chris­tians that can’t be solved by pro­claim­ing the per­fect exam­ple of Christ.”
  7.  Stan­ford can take Junipero Ser­ra’s name off its build­ings, but it can’t purge him from its his­to­ry (Char­lotte Allen, LA Times): “The Main Quad, part of a mas­ter plan designed by land­scape archi­tect Fred­er­ick Law Olm­stead, imi­tates Serra’s mis­sions (with some Romanesque touch­es). Besides the Mall and the boule­vard, oth­er cam­pus streets are named after his fri­ar-dis­ci­ples (Lasuén and Fran­cis­co Palóu), as well as José de Gálvez, the inspec­tor gen­er­al for New Spain who facil­i­tat­ed Serra’s mis­sion­ary work in Alta Cal­i­for­nia. If the Stan­ford activists aim to oblit­er­ate Serra’s pres­ence from their cam­pus, they’ve got their work cut out for them.” I didn’t know Ser­ra’s influ­ence was so per­va­sive at Stan­ford.

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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 128

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom.

Since this is issue 128 and that’s an impor­tant num­ber in base 2 and I’m a nerd, I’m going to tweak this issue slight­ly by giv­ing my actu­al opin­ion (or at least the brief ver­sion of it) after each arti­cle.

Also, I am sad that so much of this week’s email is about sex­u­al harass­ment. There’s a lot of stuff I would glad­ly link to if I saw it. To give a few exam­ples: I’d love to see thought­ful arti­cles about what’s hap­pen­ing in Zim­bab­we, some insights about the amaz­ing tumult in Sau­di Ara­bia, some­thing more com­pre­hen­sive about Richard Spencer’s vis­it to cam­pus (ide­al­ly some­thing that deals with the way he treat­ed stu­dents, with the accu­ra­cy of his core claims about Islam, and with the admin­is­tra­tion’s deci­sion to bar the doors once peo­ple left con­sid­ered in light of the heck­ler’s veto), and a piece about how India is devel­op­ing com­pared with Chi­na. But nope — this week there’s a ton of stuff about men being jerks sprin­kled with a hand­ful of oth­er obser­va­tions.

If you find more edi­fy­ing fare, please send it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. There are so many sex­u­al assault sto­ries in the news right now. It’s over­whelm­ing. The one I find most inter­est­ing at the moment is the sto­ry of Repub­li­can state leg­is­la­tor Wes Good­man, who made vul­gar and unwel­come sex­u­al advances to many young men. Rod Dreher has a strong series of posts about it.
    • Wes Good­man And Reli­gious Con­ser­vatism, Inc. (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Turns out that Ohio State Rep. Wes Good­man, has been lead­ing a secret promis­cu­ous gay life, despite being mar­ried and oppos­ing LGBT rights in his career as a con­ser­v­a­tive activist and leg­is­la­tor. The sto­ry is lurid, includ­ing alle­ga­tions (with screen­shots) that he propo­si­tioned col­lege stu­dents who were polit­i­cal activists, invit­ing them to join him (and some­times him and his wife) for sex.”
    • More Wes Good­man Fall­out (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “ You can­not judge an entire reli­gion — any reli­gion — entire­ly by the worst behav­ior of its adher­ents, any more than you can judge it entire­ly by the best behav­ior of its adher­ents. Nev­er­the­less, it’s a dodge when Chris­t­ian lead­ers say, ‘Oh, Bil­ly Gra­ham is who Evan­gel­i­cals are, not Wes Good­man,’ or ‘St. Tere­sa of Cal­cut­ta is who Catholics are, not Father Geoghan.’ All of us are the best and the worst of our com­mu­nions. You, with all your sins and all your virtues, are who Catholics/Orthodox/Protestants are, or who Jews are, or Mus­lims, and so forth. We are both our ideals and our fail­ure to live up to those ideals.”
    • One Of Wes Goodman’s Marks Speaks (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “But I hope that Wes is, like me, a sin­ner with a future. And this is the sec­ond rea­son that I have not de-friend­ed him yet. Now is the time for him to hearti­ly repent of his sins, believe in Jesus Christ and sin­cere­ly and hon­est­ly intend by the help of God and the Holy Spir­it hence­forth to amend his life. Often, the jour­ney in sack­cloth and ash­es is a lone­some one and one fraught with depres­sion. I have been there. But I hope that if Wes intends to make it, he real­izes he doesn’t have to do so alone.”
    • How Wash­ing­ton, DC Preda­tors Tar­get Interns (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To answer the sec­ond question—how sex­u­al preda­tors operate—I want to begin by talk­ing a bit about the kind of place Wash­ing­ton was when I lived there in the ear­ly 2010s. Wash­ing­ton is a city that turns over a large sec­tor of its work­force every four months. Rough­ly cor­re­spond­ing with the aca­d­e­m­ic year, thou­sands of interns — for the branch­es of gov­ern­ment, for the non-prof­its, for the con­sult­ing firms, for the star­tups — arrive, some­times by plane with a sin­gle suit­case and some­times in their par­ents’ SUVs with the back seats cov­ered with card­board box­es.”
    • Glen’s take: I know some of you are con­sid­er­ing a life in pub­lic ser­vice. Keep Num­bers 32:23  — “your sin will find you out” — close to your heart. The reck­on­ing is com­ing not only for the state leg­is­la­tor in ques­tion but also for those who cov­ered up for him.
    • Relat­ed: The absurd argu­ments we make to defend Roy Moore and Al Franken are get­ting dan­ger­ous (Rus­sell Moore, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Once the next gen­er­a­tion comes to see that pro­gres­sives don’t real­ly care about ‘social jus­tice’ or that con­ser­v­a­tives don’t real­ly care about ‘fam­i­ly val­ues’ except as rhetor­i­cal tools, they will walk away, toward some­thing else. Note the col­laps­ing trust in insti­tu­tions, seen in vir­tu­al­ly every sur­vey of younger Amer­i­cans. Many fac­tors account for this, but one dri­ving fac­tor is cyn­i­cism, the idea that insti­tu­tions are just about keep­ing pow­er for those who already have it.”
    • Also relat­ed: The Dan­ger of Know­ing You’re on the ‘Right Side of His­to­ry’ (Andrew Sul­li­van, NY Mag): “There is a moment here. No par­ty is immune from evil; no tribe has a monop­oly of good. If these bipar­ti­san sex-abuse rev­e­la­tions can begin to under­mine the trib­al­ism that so poi­sons our pub­lic life, to reveal that beneath the tribes, we are all flawed and human, they may not only be a long-over­due turn­ing point for women. They may be a water­shed for all of us.”
  2. What Do We Do with the Art of Mon­strous Men? (Claire Ded­er­er, The Paris Review): “They did or said some­thing awful, and made some­thing great. The awful thing dis­rupts the great work; we can’t watch or lis­ten to or read the great work with­out remem­ber­ing the awful thing. Flood­ed with knowl­edge of the maker’s mon­strous­ness, we turn away, over­come by dis­gust. Or … we don’t. We con­tin­ue watch­ing, sep­a­rat­ing or try­ing to sep­a­rate the artist from the art.” The lan­guage in this piece is vul­gar.
    • Glen’s take: From a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive, some­one like Bill Cos­by or Woody Allen is only a extreme exam­ple of a larg­er issue. Most Hol­ly­wood prod­ucts were made by peo­ple who sleep around or watch porn or oth­er­wise vio­late basic Bib­li­cal norms. If wicked­ness in the cre­ator taints all their cre­ative prod­ucts then there’s very lit­tle for a Chris­t­ian to read, to lis­ten to, or to watch. Cre­ative works stand or fall on their own apart from the moral virtue of the cre­ator. 1 Corinthi­an 5:9–13 has rel­e­vance for how we relate to cul­ture at large.
  3. Apple Sab­o­tages Itself (Justin Lee, First Things): “A def­i­n­i­tion of speech nar­row enough to exclude dec­o­ra­tive arts will almost cer­tain­ly exclude source code as well. The FBI could eas­i­ly use such a prece­dent in court to com­pel Apple to write code capa­ble of breach­ing their iPhone users’ pri­va­cy.”
    • Glen’s take: I am 100% on the side of Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop. Jack Phillips is right and his crit­ics are dan­ger­ous­ly wrong. If he los­es his case, unin­tend­ed con­se­quences will abound. This arti­cle high­lights one.
  4. Report­ing on Paula White and the White House (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): this is a fol­low-up to the pro­file of White I shared last week and it con­tains more fas­ci­nat­ing anec­dotes. “Much of what she told me about 2007, her year from hell when she got divorced, her church was los­ing mem­bers and she was inves­ti­gat­ed by a U.S. Sen­ate com­mit­tee didn’t make it into the final draft but she lost 20 pounds dur­ing that time. ‘I had my first glass of wine in 2007,’ she said. ‘I asked God per­mis­sion to cuss. I used every word except His in vain. I searched for what door I’d left open for all this to go wrong.’”
    • Glen’s take: Read­ing these arti­cles makes me think I would like Paula White. Then again, I’m par­tial to Paulas. 🙂
  5. Repub­li­cans’ beliefs are bend­ing to Trump. Here’s why they might not even notice. (Bri­an Resnick, Vox): “…when peo­ple change their mind on a sub­ject, they have a hard time recall­ing that they ever felt anoth­er way. It’s an intrigu­ing find­ing in part because it affirms that peo­ple think their beliefs are more sta­ble than they actu­al­ly are.”
    • Glen’s take: As a pas­tor I observe this all the time. We are all less ratio­nal than we believe. “Who­ev­er trusts in his own mind is a fool” (Proverbs 28:26a, ESV).
  6. Why would-be par­ents should choose to get mar­ried (The Econ­o­mist): “You could make enough con­fet­ti for a sum­mer of wed­dings with all the aca­d­e­m­ic papers that show how much chil­dren gain from being brought up in sta­ble, lov­ing fam­i­lies, and how much they suf­fer when those fam­i­lies break down…. And one strong claim that can be made for mar­riage is that it appears to glue par­ents togeth­er more tight­ly than any oth­er arrange­ment.”
    • Glen’s take: It’s enough to make you think God’s plan is wise. Shock­ing. Also, in case you’ve ever won­dered: the Econ­o­mist does­n’t iden­ti­fy which authors wrote which arti­cles. It’s a phi­los­o­phy of theirs.
  7. What Are the Lessons of the Post-Wein­stein Moment? (Rebec­ca Trais­ter and Ross Douthat, The Cut): “I do think porn has had some sort of weird effect on the male imag­i­na­tion. And that mas­tur­ba­tion plus a moral­i­ty of con­sent con­vinces some men to think, Okay, I accept that the rules say, I can’t actu­al­ly rape you but under the rules of con­sent, I’m just stand­ing over here, you know, doing my own thing.”
    • Glen’s take: Wow. A civ­il and intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion between two very dif­fer­ent peo­ple who find com­mon ground amidst their dif­fer­ences (where they dif­fer I large­ly agree with Douthat). A hun­dred mil­lion more con­ver­sa­tions like this and our cul­ture might get health­i­er.

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 hilar­i­ous 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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 127

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.

Also, next issue is vol­ume 128, an impor­tant com­put­er sci­ence num­ber. I should do some­thing to make it spe­cial. If you have an idea, let me know.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Endur­ing Appeal of Creepy Chris­tian­i­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “The Bible doesn’t have a clear, spe­cif­ic pre­scrip­tion for every life chal­lenge. But rather than seek­ing God prayer­ful­ly and with deep humil­i­ty and rev­er­ence, we want answers, now. And thus we grav­i­tate to those peo­ple who pur­port to offer more than the Bible.”
  2. Chi­na Tells Chris­tians to Replace Images of Jesus with Com­mu­nist Pres­i­dent (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘Many poor house­holds have plunged into pover­ty because of ill­ness in the fam­i­ly. Some resort­ed to believ­ing in Jesus to cure their ill­ness­es,’ the head of the gov­ern­ment cam­paign told SCMP. ‘But we tried to tell them that get­ting ill is a phys­i­cal thing, and that the peo­ple who can real­ly help them are the Com­mu­nist Par­ty and Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Xi.’”
  3. She led Trump to Christ: The rise of the tel­e­van­ge­list who advis­es the White House (Julia Duin, Wash­ing­ton Post): This is an amaz­ing pro­file. “White insists that lec­tur­ing Trump is not her job. ‘I don’t preach to any­one on behav­ior mod­i­fi­ca­tion,’ she says. ‘There are things I can speak, but that’s not anyone’s busi­ness what I say. Why would I as a pas­tor expose that rela­tion­ship? Every­one needs a safe place in life, and pas­tors can be people’s safe place. That’s why I have this rela­tion­ship, because I don’t talk about it.’”
    • Speak­ing of Trump’s evan­gel­i­cal advi­sors… What Trump’s Evan­gel­i­cal Advis­ers Took Out of Egypt (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Rosen­berg thanked [Egypt­ian Pres­i­dent] Sisi for res­cu­ing Egypt and its Chris­tians from the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. He com­mend­ed the pres­i­dent for reach­ing out to Jews and to Roman Catholics. ‘But there is one group I don’t see: evan­gel­i­cals,’ he told Sisi. ‘It’s not your fault; prob­a­bly we haven’t asked. But would you like us to bring a del­e­ga­tion of lead­ers to come and vis­it you?’”
  4. A Har­vest Of Wit­ness­es (William Mum­ma, First Things): “The fight for reli­gious lib­er­ty is not a sub-cat­e­go­ry of the elec­toral con­test between Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats. It is a strug­gle over whether the state has the author­i­ty to ban­ish the great­est rival to tem­po­ral pow­er that exists. It is the age-old con­test between the King and the Church, between Cae­sar and the Truth. It is a con­test over who gets to decide: ‘What is truth?’” The piece is a lit­tle par­ti­san, but makes an impor­tant point.
  5. The Politi­ciza­tion of Moth­er­hood (James Taran­to, Wall Street Jour­nal): “The premise of Ms. Komisar’s book—backed by research in psy­chol­o­gy, neu­ro­science and epigenetics—is that ‘moth­ers are bio­log­i­cal­ly nec­es­sary for babies,’ and not only for the obvi­ous rea­sons of preg­nan­cy and birth. ‘Babies are much more neu­ro­log­i­cal­ly frag­ile than we’ve ever under­stood,’ Ms. Komis­ar says.”
  6. Stan­ford Stu­dents Pre­tend to Sup­port Free Speech, Stum­ble at Final Hur­dle (Stan­ford Review, Sam Wolfe): “…at 8:40 p.m., 20 min­utes after he began his talk, over 150 mem­bers of the crowd osten­si­bly gath­ered to hear him speak prompt­ly stood up and left, while Ara­bic music blared from Blue­tooth speak­ers con­cealed around the hall. The stu­dents, plant­ed by SAI, had arrived at the event ear­ly to clog up the venue. As a result, dozens of stu­dents, many of whom were pre­sum­ably inter­est­ed in start­ing a gen­uine dia­logue with Spencer about his views and rebuff­ing him, were turned away. I myself arrived at about 7:20 for an event sched­uled to begin an hour lat­er, and was one of the last peo­ple admit­ted… imag­ine if they had, instead of occu­py­ing the seats and sub­se­quent­ly vacat­ing them, sim­ply blocked oth­ers from enter­ing, and left the seats unfilled that way. The result would have been the same, the inten­tion large­ly the same, and their actions right­ly con­demned. This was bet­ter than vio­lence, yes, bet­ter than shout­ing Spencer down. But the protest was a delib­er­ate attempt to block stu­dents from engag­ing with Spencer in any capac­i­ty.”
  7. Police: ‘Every 16-year-old girl in Fres­no’ has been tar­get­ed by sex trade recruiters (Rory Apple­ton, Fres­no Bee): the entire sto­ry is hor­ri­fy­ing. This seg­ment caught my eye: “It is rare for boys to be traf­ficked, Chas­tain said, but it does hap­pen. It is even more dif­fi­cult for detec­tives to dis­cov­er these vic­tims because it is almost always done in total secre­cy, as even crim­i­nal gangs believe traf­fick­ing boys goes too far.” The instinct to con­sid­er your­self an okay per­son because at least you don’t do _______ is present even in very wicked peo­ple.
  8. Solar eclipse of 1207 BC helps to date pharaohs (Col­in Humphreys and Graeme Wadding­ton, Astron­o­my and Geo­physics): “How­ev­er, a plau­si­ble alter­na­tive mean­ing [to the sun and moon stand­ing still in Joshua 10] is that the Sun and Moon stopped doing what they nor­mal­ly do: they stopped shin­ing.” File under spec­u­la­tive — I am not con­vinced. If true, how­ev­er, this would be evi­dence for the lat­er date of the Exo­dus (13th cen­tu­ry vs 15th cen­tu­ry). The authors have been using astron­o­my to study the Bible for some time (see, for exam­ple, The Date of the Cru­ci­fix­ion writ­ten back in 1985).

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’re going back to an arti­cle first shared in vol­ume 95, the long and amaz­ing 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.”

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 126

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. For elites, pol­i­tics is dri­ven by ide­ol­o­gy. For vot­ers, it’s not.  (Ezra Klein, Vox): “In the­o­ry, ide­ol­o­gy comes first and par­ty comes sec­ond. We decide whether we’re for sin­gle-pay­er health care, or same-sex mar­riage, or abor­tion restric­tion, and then we choose the par­ty that most close­ly fits our ideas. You’re a lib­er­al and so you become a Demo­c­rat; you’re a con­ser­v­a­tive and so you become a Repub­li­can. The truth, it seems, is clos­er to the reverse.…”
    • I found the above inter­est­ing to read in con­junc­tion with this arti­cle — it’s on the long side:  The Pri­mal Scream of Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics (Mary Eber­stadt, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “Isn’t it sug­ges­tive that the ear­li­est col­lec­tive artic­u­la­tion of iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics came from the com­mu­ni­ty that was first to suf­fer from the accel­er­at­ed fray­ing of fam­i­ly ties, a har­bin­ger of what came next for all? Iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics can­not be under­stood apart from the pre­ced­ing and con­comi­tant social fact of fam­i­ly implo­sion.”
    • Also rel­e­vant: Con­ser­v­a­tives, Don’t Dis­miss the Sex­u­al Mis­con­duct Claims Against Roy Moore (David French, Nation­al Review): “Each day seems to bring a new sto­ry of yet anoth­er pow­er­ful per­son fac­ing a string of accu­sa­tions. While there is a dan­ger of a witch hunt, the pres­ence of mul­ti­ple claims of mis­con­duct from mul­ti­ple sources should always make us pause — regard­less of whether the alleged abuser comes from the Left or the Right. It’s a moral imper­a­tive that we not deter­mine the verac­i­ty of the alle­ga­tions by the ide­ol­o­gy of the accused.” Roy Moore has been pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned in vol­umes 121 and 31.
  2. Fires Aren’t the Only Threat to the Cal­i­for­nia Dream (Enri­co Moret­ti, NY Times): “Over the past two years, San Fran­cis­co Coun­ty added 38,000 jobs, reach­ing its high­est employ­ment lev­el ever. Yet only 4,500 new hous­ing units were per­mit­ted. For all those new fam­i­lies knock­ing on San Fran­cis­co doors, new units are avail­able for less than 12 per­cent of them. The num­bers for Sil­i­con Val­ley are even worse. This is why the rents sky­rock­et. The prob­lem is large­ly self-inflict­ed: the region has some of the country’s slow­est, most polit­i­cal and cum­ber­some hous­ing approval process­es and most strin­gent land-use restric­tions.” The author is an eco­nom­ics prof at UC Berke­ley.
  3. Sculpt­ed By Evo­lu­tion (David Schmitt, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “…empir­i­cal evi­dence shows that most sex dif­fer­ences are con­spic­u­ous­ly larg­er in cul­tures with more egal­i­tar­i­an gen­der roles—as in Scan­di­navia…. Extremes of sex­u­al free­dom beget larg­er psy­cho­log­i­cal sex dif­fer­ences. Or as explained by Israeli psy­chol­o­gists Shalom Schwartz and Tam­my Rubel-Lif­shitz, it may be that hav­ing few­er gen­dered restric­tions in a cul­ture allows ‘both sex­es to pur­sue more freely the val­ues they inher­ent­ly care about more.’” The author was men­tioned back in vol­ume 113 in con­nec­tion with the Google gen­der memo.
  4. Lib­er­al Tra­di­tion, Yes; Lib­er­al Ide­ol­o­gy, No (R.R. Reno, First Things): this is long, very Catholic, and veers into occa­sion­al bril­liance. Rec­om­mend­ed if that descrip­tion appeals to you. “Lib­er­al­ism, prop­er­ly under­stood, is not a creed; it is a tra­di­tion, a set of insti­tu­tions, and a habit of mind.”
  5. Some­thing Is Wrong On The Inter­net (James Bri­dle, Medi­um): “…I don’t even have kids and right now I just want to burn the whole thing down. Some­one or some­thing or some com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple and things is using YouTube to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly fright­en, trau­ma­tise, and abuse chil­dren, auto­mat­i­cal­ly and at scale, and it forces me to ques­tion my own beliefs about the inter­net, at every lev­el.” This is real­ly inter­est­ing.
  6. John Wal­ton and Israel’s Con­quest of Canaan: Did God Real­ly Com­mand Geno­cide? (Spoil­er Alert: No, he didn’t..and the Israelites didn’t claim he did to jus­ti­fy mass killing either) (Joel Ander­son, per­son­al blog):  “if you object to what is being described in the book of Joshua, that’s like object­ing to the Allies ban­ning Nazism and Nazi sym­bols in Ger­many, or to the Unit­ed States try­ing to get rid of the Tal­iban who had inflict­ed hor­ren­dous atroc­i­ties on the inno­cent Afghani peo­ple. But who in their right mind would do that?”
  7. Are Chris­tians Sup­posed To Be Com­mu­nists? (David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “There were no polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies in the ancient world, no abstract pro­grams for the recon­sti­tu­tion of soci­ety. But if not a polit­i­cal move­ment, the church was a kind of poli­ty, and the form of life it assumed was not mere­ly a prac­ti­cal strat­e­gy for sur­vival, but rather the embod­i­ment of its high­est spir­i­tu­al ideals. Its ‘com­mu­nism’ was hard­ly inci­den­tal to the faith.” This is ulti­mate­ly a med­i­ta­tion on the Greek word koinon­ia. Hart leaves out some impor­tant parts of the New Tes­ta­ment wit­ness (such as 1 Tim 6:17–18 and Acts 5:4) and there­by veers from the truth a lit­tle. Still, any­time some­one gets a the­o­log­i­cal op-ed pub­lished in the NYT I’m impressed.

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 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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 125

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. In my ser­mon this week I allud­ed to the glob­al impact of the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion and men­tioned two out­comes you might have found sur­pris­ing — the spread of democ­ra­cy and the rise of sci­ence. To learn more about the first, check out Robert Wood­ber­ry’s arti­cle The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy, for the sec­ond go inspect Peter Har­rison’s book The Bible, Protes­tantism, and the Rise of Nat­ur­al Sci­ence. For sim­i­lar­ly edi­fy­ing aca­d­e­m­ic reads, check the list of resources at The Gospel and Green Library.
  2. Tues­day was the 500th anniver­sary of the Protes­tant Ref­or­ma­tion. I found two unex­pect­ed­ly sim­i­lar respons­es to it:
    • From a Protes­tant: Which Hen­ry Caused The Ref­or­ma­tion (Carl True­man, First Things): “But if we are tru­ly to under­stand the prob­lems the church faces in today’s world, and respond appro­pri­ate­ly to them, we need to move beyond the blame game, and beyond see­ing the mat­ter in pure­ly the­o­log­i­cal or ide­o­log­i­cal terms. It was the motor car, not Luther nor Calvin, that made the church just one more con­sumer choice. And there­in lies the prob­lem.”
    • From a Catholic: Who Won The Ref­or­ma­tion? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “First, [the dom­i­nant cul­tur­al nar­ra­tive] goes, Protes­tantism replaced the author­i­ty of the church with the author­i­ty of the Bible. Then, once it became clear that nobody could agree on what the Bible meant, the author­i­ty of con­science became pre-emi­nent — and from there we entered nat­u­ral­ly (if with some bloody resis­tance from var­i­ous reac­tionary forces) into the age of lib­er­ty, democ­ra­cy and human rights.”
  3. How the pros­per­i­ty gospel is spark­ing a major change in pre­dom­i­nant­ly Catholic Brazil (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Brazil, which has the most Catholics of any coun­try in the world, is under­go­ing reli­gious debates sim­i­lar to those sparked in 1517 by a fiery Ger­man preach­er named Mar­tin Luther — over church rich­es and cor­rup­tion, polit­i­cal pow­er, and the prop­er way to read the Bible. By 2030, Catholics, now the reli­gious major­i­ty in Brazil, are pro­ject­ed to become a reli­gious minor­i­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed.
  4. Across Myan­mar, Denial of Eth­nic Cleans­ing and Loathing of Rohingya (Han­nah Beech, New York Times): “‘We do some­thing that we call edu­cat­ing the peo­ple,’ said U Pe Myint, the nation’s infor­ma­tion min­is­ter. He acknowl­edged, ‘It looks rather like indoc­tri­na­tion, like in an author­i­tar­i­an or total­i­tar­i­an state.’” This is insane. Also, read­ing this may cause you to revise your opin­ion of the intrin­si­cal­ly peace­ful nature of Bud­dhism and the sig­nif­i­cance of the Nobel Peace Prize.
  5. Jobs Are A Cost, Not A Ben­e­fit (Tim Worstall, Forbes): “It is sim­ply non­sense that we should pre­fer using the labour of more peo­ple to achieve a goal than using less labour to achieve the same goal. Absolute, arrant, non­sense…. Labour is, after all, the sweat of the brow and the break­ing of the back for those who have to do it: peo­ple who would prob­a­bly pre­fer to be enjoy­ing a lit­tle more of that work life bal­ance and some leisure with loved ones if they did­n’t have to be climb­ing wind­mills in the mid­dle of a North Sea gale.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. ‘I Am a Man With Down Syn­drome and My Life Is Worth Liv­ing’ (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Par­ents who car­ry a fetus with Down syn­drome to term, or who are con­flict­ed about whether or not to do so, will almost cer­tain­ly speak with a med­ical pro­fes­sion­al, and per­haps with a coun­selor or reli­gious advis­er. But they are unlike­ly to hear from an adult with Down syndrome—and per­haps unaware that many are lov­ing their lives, bring­ing joy to oth­ers, and giv­ing them­selves to their com­mu­ni­ties.”
  7. Is Athe­ism Irra­tional? (Kel­ly J. Clark, Big Ques­tions Online): “Accord­ing to a cul­tur­al­ly influ­en­tial nar­ra­tive, reli­gious beliefs are irra­tional because they are caused by unre­li­able cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms, where­as athe­ism is ratio­nal because it is the prod­uct of ratio­nal reflec­tion on true beliefs. We have debunked a por­tion of the nar­ra­tive: athe­ism, at least in some cas­es, is cor­re­lat­ed with and medi­at­ed by a cog­ni­tive deficit.”
  8. Pros­ti­tu­tion Reduces Rape (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): Huh. I find it inter­est­ing that even though pros­ti­tu­tion is con­demned through­out the Bible, it was not actu­al­ly out­lawed in Old Tes­ta­ment Israel except in cer­tain spe­cif­ic cir­cum­stances. In light of this research, that makes a lot of sense. See http://www.openbible.info/topics/prostitution to skim some of the key Bible vers­es.

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 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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 124

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. Nepal Crim­i­nal­izes Chris­t­ian Con­ver­sion and Evan­ge­lism (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Last week, Nepal enact­ed a law to curb evan­ge­lism by crim­i­nal­iz­ing reli­gious con­ver­sion, join­ing neigh­bor­ing coun­tries like India and Pak­istan, where the region’s small-but-grow­ing Chris­t­ian minor­i­ty faces gov­ern­ment threats to their faith.”
  2. Police Cam­eras Had No Effect. Why? (Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “That data is now in, and it shows that [police body cam­eras] did… basi­cal­ly noth­ing.… This is flab­ber­gast­ing.”
  3. Who Wrote Eccle­si­astes and What Does It Mean? (John Wal­ton, Zon­der­van Aca­d­e­m­ic): A good essay over­all, but one of his argu­ments real­ly annoyed me, “The claim in 1:16 and 2:9 that he sur­passed all who were before him in Jerusalem would mean lit­tle if his father were his only pre­de­ces­sor.” Umm… no. There were pre-Israelite kings who reigned in Jerusalem (see Joshua 10, for exam­ple) and the author of Eccle­si­astes is com­par­ing him­self to them as well. 
  4. The Age of Con­sent And Its Dis­con­tents (Ross Douthat, New York Times): Con­sent is an inad­e­quate foun­da­tion for sex­u­al ethics. “…the most self-con­scious­ly pro­gres­sive schools — [tell] us more about the inher­ent prob­lems with ‘con­sent alone’ than does the mess in Hol­ly­wood, because it’s a case where there’s more social equal­i­ty, less boss-on-min­ion pres­sure, and a gen­er­al­ly sex-pos­i­tive cul­ture of exper­i­men­ta­tion … and yet young peo­ple still clear­ly desire and need a sys­tem of rules stronger than con­sent alone to pro­tect them from feel­ing unex­pect­ed rage or shame over how a par­tic­u­lar encounter hap­pened.”
  5. Shrews Shrink Their Heads to Sur­vive Win­ter (Jake Buehler, Giz­mo­do): I some­times for­get how amaz­ing the world is. “The shrews expe­ri­enced some rather incred­i­ble changes, los­ing as much as 20 per­cent of their skulls in the win­ter months, and regain­ing 15 per­cent lat­er in the year…. Along­side the shrink­ing skulls, shrew brains lose a hefty por­tion of their mass, and there is also win­ter reduc­tion in organ size and spine length. In this study, the shrews man­aged to lose about a fifth of their body mass over­all.”
  6.  Pence: US Will Bypass UN and Aid Per­se­cut­ed Iraqi Chris­tians Direct­ly (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): this is encour­ag­ing. Chris­tians in the Mid­dle East are suf­fer­ing great­ly.
  7. Is the Mod­ern Mass Extinc­tion Over­rat­ed? (Kevin Berg­er, Nau­tilus): Appar­ent­ly new species are form­ing faster than old species are becom­ing extinct. “Yes, we’ve wiped out wool­ly mam­moths and ground sloths, and are fin­ish­ing off black rhi­nos and Siber­ian tigers, but the doom is not all gloom. Myr­i­ad species, thanks in large part to humans who inad­ver­tent­ly trans­port them around the world, have blos­somed in new regions, mat­ed with like species and formed new hybrids that have them­selves gone forth and pros­pered. We’re talk­ing mam­mals, birds, trees, insects, microbes—all your flo­ra and fau­na.”

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 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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 123

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. Meet The “Young Saints” Of Bethel Who Go To Col­lege To Per­form Mir­a­cles (Mol­ly Hens­ley-Clan­cy, Buz­zfeed): “Behind Bethel’s rise is the enor­mous tal­ent and ambi­tion of the church’s mag­ne­tiz­ing lead­ers, Bill John­son and Kris Val­lot­ton, who cofound­ed BSSM in 1998. Depend­ing on who you ask, Val­lot­ton and John­son are genius­es, false prophets, or both. What’s unde­ni­able is that with Val­lot­ton at his side, John­son, a fifth-gen­er­a­tion pas­tor, has trans­formed a small, unre­mark­able local church into what Chris­tian­i­ty Today called ‘a hub of a glob­al revival move­ment.’” Fair and inter­est­ing — much bet­ter than oth­er sto­ries I have seen. I know a lot about Bethel and I learned sev­er­al things from this piece.
  2. A Let­ter to Jamie Dimon (and any­one else still strug­gling to under­stand cryp­tocur­ren­cies) (Adam Lud­win, com­pa­ny blog): this is a gen­uine­ly help­ful expla­na­tion of what Bit­coin and oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies are good for. “They’re a new mod­el for cre­at­ing, financ­ing, and oper­at­ing soft­ware ser­vices in a way that is decen­tral­ized top-to-bot­tom. That doesn’t make them bet­ter or worse than exist­ing soft­ware mod­els or the cor­po­rate enti­ties that cre­ate them. As we’ll see lat­er, there are major trade-offs. What we can say is sim­ply that they are rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from soft­ware as we know it today and rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from the forms of orga­ni­za­tion we are used to.”
  3. Meet­ing Mid­dle East Chris­tians is where West­ern stereo­types go to die (John Allen, Crux): “Spend­ing time among the Chris­tians of the Mid­dle East is always an edi­fy­ing expe­ri­ence, but for West­ern­ers it packs a spe­cial punch. That’s because the Chris­t­ian pop­u­la­tion of this peren­ni­al­ly trou­bled region often is where West­ern stereo­types about the Mid­dle East go to die.” The more you fol­low glob­al news the more sur­pris­ing you will con­sid­er the author’s claims to be.
  4. Chi­nese House Church Lead­ers and Tod­dler Arrest­ed After Singing in Pub­lic Park (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Oth­er provinces have been com­ing down espe­cial­ly hard on reli­gious edu­ca­tion for chil­dren. In Zhe­jiang province—where hun­dreds of cross­es were torn off church­es over the past sev­er­al years—elementary and mid­dle school chil­dren weren’t allowed to attend church or Sun­day school this sum­mer.”
  5. 4 Spe­cif­ic Things You Lose When You Leave Chris­tian­i­ty (Kristi Har­ri­son, Cracked) — this is well-writ­ten and heart­break­ing. “I have no idea why any­one thinks church is bor­ing. In my expe­ri­ence, church was not a slog through old songs, tired rit­u­als, or heavy-hand­ed ser­mons; it was an addic­tive, engag­ing expe­ri­ence where I felt like I had a seat at the table with the cre­ator of the Uni­verse.”
  6. Sci­ence v. Sci­ence+ (David Hed­dle, per­son­al blog): “So sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, at least, sci­ence and faith are not incompatible–unless you devise a way to measure/detect the incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty. I have pro­posed two exper­i­ments: 1. I’ll give you ten papers from tier‑1 peer-reviewed jour­nals. Five from athe­ists, five from the­ists, with the names redact­ed. Detect the incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty and accu­rate­ly sep­a­rate the papers into the two groups. 2. Design an exper­i­ment that can be done by an athe­is­tic sci­en­tist and not a the­is­tic sci­en­tist.” The author is a physics pro­fes­sor at Christo­pher New­port Uni­ver­si­ty.
  7. Free­dom not to choose is a faith worth believ­ing in (David Mitchell, The Guardian):  “I always say I’m agnos­tic because I’d like there to be a God – a nice lib­er­al one – but I can’t be sure there is and the idea of reg­u­lar reli­gious obser­vance unnerves me because it would be unusu­al in my peer group. Not a very well thought-through phi­los­o­phy, I know. But in the absence of fam­i­ly or soci­etal pres­sures, in a con­text of almost com­plete reli­gious free­dom, many of us rely on sim­i­lar back-of-an-enve­lope answers to eter­nal ques­tions, because adopt­ing the answers thou­sands of full-time pon­der­ers have come up with over thou­sands of years feels like squan­der­ing that free­dom.” David Mitchell is a British comedian/public intel­lec­tu­al (sort of) — if you’re unfa­mil­iar with him, watch some clips from the British game show Would I Lie To You? A good first clip is David Mitchell’s Code For Note­wor­thi­ness.

Things Glen Found Entertaining/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 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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 122

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 knew the fires north of us were bad, but this floored me: Seen From Above: Cal­i­for­nia Fires Reduced Entire Com­mu­ni­ties to Ash (Josh Han­er, Troy Grig­gs and Anjali Singhvi, New York Times).
  2. America’s Many Divides Over Free Speech (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “An under-appre­ci­at­ed fea­ture of the First Amend­ment is that even as it assures that almost every­one will hear that which offends them, it spares the coun­try lots of thorny pol­i­cy fights over speech and expres­sion that would divide an already-polar­ized coun­try deeply along par­ti­san and racial lines.” This arti­cle is full of fas­ci­nat­ing sta­tis­tics. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. 6 Things Trump’s Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Memo Does (and Doesn’t) Do (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “While crit­ics have char­ac­ter­ized such pro­tec­tions as a ‘license’ to dis­crim­i­nate, reli­gious lib­er­ty experts state that the memo—while a major move—does not do every­thing that advo­cates have hoped or that oppo­nents have feared.”
  4. Study: Anti-Chris­t­ian Bias Has­n’t Grown. It’s Just Got­ten Rich­er (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Soci­ol­o­gist George Yancey ana­lyzed 30-plus years of data to track approval rat­ings for evan­gel­i­cal and fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians. His big take­away: What has changed is not the num­ber of Amer­i­cans who dis­like con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians, but which Amer­i­cans.”
  5. From Aggres­sive Over­tures to Sex­u­al Assault: Har­vey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Sto­ries (Ronan Far­row, New York­er): This is super-dis­turb­ing. I include it only in case you have not heard of the wicked events because the next few entries require an aware­ness of both the charges and their sever­i­ty.
    • The Pigs of Lib­er­al­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Con­sent alone is not a suf­fi­cient guide to ethics…. Old­er rules of moral restraint were broad­er for a rea­son. If your culture’s code is lib­er­tine, don’t be sur­prised that worse things than lib­er­tin­ism flour­ish.”
    • The Integri­ty of Har­vey Weinstein’s Work (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Artists are very rarely saints, but that does not com­pro­mise the worth of the work that they do. Purg­ing his name from the artis­tic record is an injus­tice not sim­ply to Har­vey Wein­stein, but to the truth. We can­not allow our­selves to get into the habit of lying about his­to­ry for moral rea­sons. This is cor­rupt. Yes, this involves stand­ing up for Har­vey Wein­stein, but more than that, it involves stand­ing up for the truth.”
    • Har­vey Wein­stein Con­tract With TWC Allowed For Sex­u­al Harass­ment  (TMZ): Wow. You’d think the board would say, “That’s an odd­ly spe­cif­ic pro­vi­sion to add to the con­tract. Why are you so keen on this?”
  6. Pro­duc­tive on six hours of sleep? You’re delud­ing your­self, expert says (Keri Wig­in­ton, Chica­go Tri­bune): “If you were not to set an alarm clock, would you sleep past it? If the answer is yes, then there is clear­ly more sleep that is need­ed.”
  7. ‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insid­ers who fear a smart­phone dystopia (Paul Lewis, The Guardian): “Rosen­stein pur­chased a new iPhone and instruct­ed his assis­tant to set up a parental-con­trol fea­ture to pre­vent him from down­load­ing any apps. He was par­tic­u­lar­ly aware of the allure of Face­book ‘likes’, which he describes as ‘bright dings of pseu­do-plea­sure’ that can be as hol­low as they are seduc­tive. And Rosen­stein should know: he was the Face­book engi­neer who cre­at­ed the ‘like’ but­ton in the first place.”

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 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.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 121

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 Exchanged Life (J. Hus­don Tay­lor, a let­ter to his sis­ter): “It lit­tle mat­ters to my ser­vant whether I send him to buy a few cash worth of things, or the most expen­sive arti­cles. In either case he looks to me for the mon­ey, and brings me his pur­chas­es. So, if God place me in great per­plex­i­ty, must He not give me much guid­ance; in posi­tions of great dif­fi­cul­ty, much grace; in cir­cum­stances of great pres­sure and tri­al, much strength? No fear that His resources will be unequal to the emer­gency!” (brought to my atten­tion by a stu­dent, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed)
  2. The news from Las Vegas is so heart­break­ing. Here are a few pieces about it and also about the issue of guns more gen­er­al­ly.
  3. A Brief His­to­ry of Ces­sa­tion­ism (Thomas Kidd, Gospel Coali­tion): “In the 1700s and 1800s, sus­pi­cion of claimed mir­a­cles was con­nect­ed to anti-Catholi­cism. Protes­tant crit­ics saw the Catholic tra­di­tion as rid­dled with fake claims of mir­a­cles. Ridi­cul­ing the fake mir­a­cle claims of Catholics (such as icons bleed­ing a liq­uid that turned out to be cher­ry juice) became a sta­ple of Reformed polemics against the Catholic Church. So when seem­ing­ly mirac­u­lous events hap­pened in Protes­tant church­es, even sym­pa­thet­ic observers warned against the threat of bogus mir­a­cles.”
  4. The Lim­its of “Diver­si­ty” (Kele­fa San­neh, The New York­er): “It is pos­si­ble that ‘diver­si­ty’ will ulti­mate­ly prove too weak a term to do all that is asked of it. Con­tem­po­rary advo­cates some­times empha­size, instead, “inclu­sion,” a less neu­tral con­cept, and one that ges­tures at the polit­i­cal agen­das that inevitably shape these debates.”
  5. ‘Pan­icked’ Lon­don train com­muters force open doors, flee onto tracks when man reads the Bible aloud (Dou­glas Per­ry, Ore­gon Live). I’ve said it before — our cul­ture has replaced the fear of God with the fear of reli­gion. It’s a poor trade.
  6. Why the rule of law suf­fers when we have too many laws (Ilya Somin, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Because of the vast scope of cur­rent law, in mod­ern Amer­i­ca the author­i­ties can pin a crime on the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of peo­ple, if they real­ly want to. Whether you get hauled into court or not depends more on the dis­cre­tionary deci­sions of  law enforce­ment offi­cials than on any legal rule…. the rule of law has large­ly been sup­plant­ed by the rule of chance and the rule of exec­u­tive dis­cre­tion. Inevitably, polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy and par­ti­san­ship have a major impact on the lat­ter. For exam­ple, fed­er­al law enforce­ment pri­or­i­ties are very dif­fer­ent under Trump than they were under Oba­ma.”
  7. Roy Moore is a fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ure with a com­pelling sto­ry. He’s the guy you might know as “that Ten Com­mand­ments judge from the South.” He is run­ning for a seat in the US Sen­ate and he just won the pri­ma­ry elec­tion and seems on track to win the gen­er­al elec­tion. There are inter­est­ing times ahead as a result.

Things Glen Found Amusing

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.