Christianity For Modern Pagans: Vanity of Human Reason, of Dogmatism, and of the Philosophers

why Chris­tian­i­ty has such a coun­ter­cul­tur­al per­spec­tive on sex

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through an anno­tat­ed trans­la­tion of Pascal’s Pensees called Chris­tian­i­ty For Mod­ern Pagans, I’ll post the thoughts I’m email­ing the stu­dents here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2020. The read­ing sched­ule is online.

This week we’re talk­ing about chap­ters 7–9, the van­i­ty of human rea­son, of dog­ma­tism, and of the philoso­phers.

The thing that stood out most to me is the skep­ti­cism that Pas­cal applies to rea­son. Recall that he is one of the great­est sci­en­tists in his­to­ry and that his pio­neer­ing work laid the foun­da­tion for many fields of study. He knows well what rea­son can achieve, and as a result he also real­izes its lim­i­ta­tions.

…demon­stra­tion is not the only instru­ment for con­vinc­ing us. How few things can be demon­strat­ed! Proofs only con­vince the mind; habit pro­vides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed…. We must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain our­selves in that belief…, for it is too much trou­ble to have the proofs always present before us…. When we believe only by the strength of our con­vic­tion and the automa­ton is inclined to believe the oppo­site, that is not enough. We must there­fore make both parts of us believe: the mind by rea­sons, which need to be seen only once in a life­time, and the automa­ton by habit.

Pas­cal, Pensee 821 (pages 99–100)

This is bril­liant, although the trans­la­tion feels clum­sy to me. Kreeft’s com­men­tary on this is help­ful:

…once rea­son has con­vinced us to believe, we require the aid of good habits to over­come bad habit­u­al ten­den­cies in the oppo­site direc­tion. There­fore we must act as if we believed, go to church and so forth, thus habit­u­at­ing the automa­ton to obey what rea­son has dis­cov­ered to be true. Habit is not an hon­est sub­sti­tute for rea­son, but it is an hon­est and need­ed ser­vant to rea­son. If we try to fight against irra­tional­i­ty with rea­son alone, we will lose. We need crud­er weapons too.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 821, page 100

This is one rea­son that Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty is often so instru­men­tal in some­one’s con­ver­sion. Rea­son, like a map, can guide peo­ple to Christ but only if they actu­al­ly fol­low the direc­tions. Oth­er parts of their self must be engaged for the jour­ney to take place, and these parts are most com­mon­ly called forth through rela­tion­ships.

It also occurs to me that this may be a good way to explain why Chris­tian­i­ty has such a coun­ter­cul­tur­al per­spec­tive on sex. Sex engages the whole per­son and can either do so in a way that rein­forces the gospel mes­sage or in a way that under­mines it (see Eph­esians 5:31–32 and 1 Cor 6:12–20). Paul lays this out in Romans 1:18–27

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heav­en against all the god­less­ness and wicked­ness of peo­ple, who sup­press the truth by their wicked­ness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the cre­ation of the world God’s invis­i­ble qualities—his eter­nal pow­er and divine nature—have been clear­ly seen, being under­stood from what has been made, so that peo­ple are with­out excuse.

21For although they knew God, they nei­ther glo­ri­fied him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their think­ing became futile and their fool­ish hearts were dark­ened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glo­ry of the immor­tal God for images made to look like a mor­tal human being and birds and ani­mals and rep­tiles.

24There­fore God gave them over in the sin­ful desires of their hearts to sex­u­al impu­ri­ty for the degrad­ing of their bod­ies with one anoth­er. 25They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and wor­shiped and served cre­at­ed things rather than the Creator—who is for­ev­er praised. Amen.

26Because of this, God gave them over to shame­ful lusts. Even their women exchanged nat­ur­al sex­u­al rela­tions for unnat­ur­al ones. 27In the same way the men also aban­doned nat­ur­al rela­tions with women and were inflamed with lust for one anoth­er. Men com­mit­ted shame­ful acts with oth­er men, and received in them­selves the due penal­ty for their error.

Romans 1:18–27 (NIV)

When peo­ple reject the knowl­edge of God, they must build lives to rein­force that rejec­tion of God. Paul says they do it using idols and sex, and he adds that they suf­fer for it. Of course they do. They are liv­ing based on a false con­cep­tion of human nature, which makes it inevitable that there will be need­less pain. Paula recent­ly had a plate shat­ter in the microwave. We had both assumed it was microwave-safe, but because we were wrong the shat­ter­ing was inevitable. The cause of the dam­age was the inter­ac­tion of invis­i­ble things (the microwaves and the mol­e­c­u­lar struc­ture of the plate), but the result­ing dam­age was eas­i­ly observed. Sad­ly, our cul­ture (and many lives with­in it) are shat­ter­ing and the rea­sons are invis­i­ble to many peo­ple.

Oth­er thoughts from these chap­ters that stood out to me:

To rea­son is to rely on rea­son, and to rely on rea­son is an act of faith, not of rea­son. There­fore rea­son pre­sup­pos­es faith… Indeed, how could rea­son itself be val­i­dat­ed? There are only three pos­si­bil­i­ties: (1) by some­thing sub­ra­tional, like ani­mal instinct (which is obvi­ous­ly absurd: How can the infe­ri­or val­i­date the supe­ri­or?); or (2) by some­thing ratio­nal, by a piece of rea­son­ing (which is also absurd: How can the part jus­ti­fy the whole? All rea­son is on tri­al; how dare the one piece of rea­son­ing you use to jus­ti­fy all rea­son­ing be exempt from tri­al?); or (3) by some­thing super­ra­tional, by faith in God (which is the only pos­si­bil­i­ty left).

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 131, pages 110–111

FWIW, I think Kreeft’s inclu­sion of God in the third point is valid but it’s real­ly some­thing he should argue for. I think many skep­tics would counter that some­thing like the pla­ton­ic laws of log­ic could stand in for God in option 3, which is true but does­n’t get them as far away from God as they think. Hav­ing read oth­er things by Kreeft, I believe he has had this argu­ment before and is mere­ly announc­ing check­mate when it is still not obvi­ous to his oppo­nent that the game is over.

You can think skep­ti­cism, but you can’t live it.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 131, page 111

Philoso­phers and the­olo­gians do not prac­tice what they preach any bet­ter than the rest of us–less, if they preach bet­ter than the rest of us.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 142, page 117

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 258

Is 650 a lot? it depends. Pen­nies? No. Mur­ders? Yes. Coro­n­avirus cas­es? Depends on where they spread.

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. Church­es Emerge as Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cas­es (Kate Con­ger, Jack Healy and Lucy Tomp­kins, New York Times): “More than 650 coro­n­avirus cas­es have been linked to near­ly 40 church­es and reli­gious events across the Unit­ed States since the begin­ning of the pan­dem­ic, with many of them erupt­ing over the last month as Amer­i­cans resumed their pre-pan­dem­ic activ­i­ties, accord­ing to a New York Times database.” 
    • Are Church­es “A Major Source of Coro­n­avirus Cases?” (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “If I have $3,000,000 in the bank and you give me anoth­er $650, you’d hard­ly be in the posi­tion to claim that you had made a major con­tri­bu­tion to my wealth. Sim­i­lar­ly, adding 650 cas­es to America’s total case­load of 3 mil­lion is no more than a blip that leaves 99.98% attrib­ut­able to oth­er causes.”
    • Church­es, Coro­n­avirus, and the New York Times (Ed Stet­zer, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It is strange (at best) to use words like ‘major’ and ‘erupted’ when describ­ing 650 cas­es. On that point, the head­line is mis­lead­ing. Hav­ing 650 cas­es in my coun­ty might be news, but 650 nation­al­ly out of three mil­lion cas­es is a head­line look­ing for a sto­ry. The real sto­ry is this: church­es are gath­er­ing and remark­ably few infec­tions are tak­ing place.”
  2. Amer­i­ca’s Racial Progress (David French, Nation­al Review): “There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that Amer­i­ca has a long his­to­ry of bru­tal and shame­ful mis­treat­ment of racial minori­ties — with black Amer­i­cans its chief vic­tims. And sec­ond, that Amer­i­ca is a great nation, and that Amer­i­can cit­i­zens (and cit­i­zens of the world) should be grate­ful for its found­ing. Per­haps no nation has done more good for more peo­ple than the Unit­ed States. It was and is a bea­con of lib­er­ty and pros­per­i­ty in a world long awash in tyran­ny and poverty.”
  3. A Let­ter on Jus­tice and Open Debate (many sig­na­to­ries, Harpers): “The restric­tion of debate, whether by a repres­sive gov­ern­ment or an intol­er­ant soci­ety, invari­ably hurts those who lack pow­er and makes every­one less capa­ble of demo­c­ra­t­ic par­tic­i­pa­tion. The way to defeat bad ideas is by expo­sure, argu­ment, and per­sua­sion, not by try­ing to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between jus­tice and free­dom, which can­not exist with­out each other.”
    • Promi­nent Artists and Writ­ers Warn of an ‘Intolerant Cli­mate’ (Jen­nifer Schuessler and Eliz­a­beth A. Har­ris, New York Times): “‘We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sit­ting around writ­ing this letter,’ Mr. Williams, who is African-Amer­i­can, said. ‘It includes plen­ty of Black thinkers, Mus­lim thinkers, Jew­ish thinkers, peo­ple who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.’”
    • end­ing the cha­rade (Fred­die deBoer, per­son­al blog): “Please, think for a minute and con­sid­er: what does it say when a com­plete­ly gener­ic endorse­ment of free speech and open debate is in and of itself imme­di­ate­ly diag­nosed as anti-pro­gres­sive, as anti-left?”(emphasis in orig­i­nal)
  4. Lazarus Chak­w­era: Malaw­i’s pres­i­dent who ‘argued with God’ (BBC): “In the unmis­tak­able cadence of a preach­er, Malaw­i’s new Pres­i­dent, Lazarus Chak­w­era, appealed for uni­ty in his coun­try short­ly after he was sworn in on Sun­day. The day of the week seemed fit­ting as the for­mer head of the Malawi Assem­blies of God, one of the largest Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions in the coun­try, treat­ed the stage like a pul­pit to inspire fer­vour with his words.”
  5. Slate Star Codex and Sil­i­con Valley’s War Against the Media (Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York­er): “The divi­sion between the Grey and Blue tribes is often ren­dered in the sim­plis­tic terms of a demo­graph­ic encounter between white, nerdi­ly enti­tled men in hood­ies on one side and diverse, effete, artis­tic snobs on the other.” Inter­est­ing through­out. 
  6. Chris­tian­i­ty’s Covert Suc­cess (Mark Too­ley, Prov­i­dence) “I quote an Indi­an pro­fes­sor who says that Chris­tian­i­ty pro­ceeds in two ways, through conversion—which is obvi­ous, that’s how peo­ple tend to think Chris­tian­i­ty precedes—but he then says, through sec­u­lar­iza­tion. And I think he’s absolute­ly right. And I think that the assump­tion of peo­ple in the West that the sec­u­lar is some­how neu­tral, that if you’re sec­u­lar, you’ve some­how escaped the bounds of cul­tur­al con­tin­gency, couldn’t be more wrong.”
  7. On Reli­gion, the Supreme Court Pro­tects the Right to Be Dif­fer­ent (Michael McConnell, New York Times): “The court may be polit­i­cal, but its pol­i­tics is of the mid­dle, and of a par­tic­u­lar kind of mid­dle, one that is com­mit­ted to plu­ral­ism and dif­fer­ence rather than to the advance­ment of par­tic­u­lar moral stances.” The author is a Stan­ford law prof.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Vanity and the Vanity of Human Justice

Pas­cal diag­nosed our mod­ern dys­func­tions 350 years ago.

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through an anno­tat­ed trans­la­tion of Pascal’s Pensees called Chris­tian­i­ty For Mod­ern Pagans, I’ll post the thoughts I’m email­ing the stu­dents here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2020. The read­ing sched­ule is online.

One rea­son I appre­ci­ate read­ing writ­ers from the dis­tant past is that when they make an obser­va­tion rel­e­vant to mod­ern times it is usu­al­ly more pow­er­ful than if it was uttered by one of our con­tem­po­raries.

It reminds me of an excerpt from C. S. Lewis’ intro­duc­tion to a trans­la­tion of Athana­sius’ On The Incar­na­tion of the Word of God:

Every age has its own out­look. It is spe­cial­ly good at see­ing cer­tain truths and spe­cial­ly liable to make cer­tain mis­takes. We all, there­fore, need the books that will cor­rect the char­ac­ter­is­tic mis­takes of our own peri­od. And that means the old books. All con­tem­po­rary writ­ers share to some extent the con­tem­po­rary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Noth­ing strikes me more when I read the con­tro­ver­sies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usu­al­ly assum­ing with­out ques­tion a good deal which we should now absolute­ly deny. They thought that they were as com­plete­ly opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secret­ly united—united with each oth­er and against ear­li­er and lat­er ages—by a great mass of com­mon assump­tions. We may be sure that the char­ac­ter­is­tic blind­ness of the twen­ti­eth century—the blind­ness about which pos­ter­i­ty will ask, “But how could they have thought that?“—lies where we have nev­er sus­pect­ed it, and con­cerns some­thing about which there is untrou­bled agree­ment between Hitler and Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can ful­ly escape this blind­ness, but we shall cer­tain­ly increase it, and weak­en our guard against it, if we read only mod­ern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggra­vate the error with which we are already dan­ger­ous­ly ill. The only pal­lia­tive is to keep the clean sea breeze of the cen­turies blow­ing through our minds, and this can be done only by read­ing old books. Not, of course, that there is any mag­ic about the past. Peo­ple were no clev­er­er then than they are now; they made as many mis­takes as we. But not the same mis­takes. They will not flat­ter us in the errors we are already com­mit­ting; and their own errors, being now open and pal­pa­ble, will not endan­ger us. Two heads are bet­ter than one, not because either is infal­li­ble, but because they are unlike­ly to go wrong in the same direc­tion. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a cor­rec­tive as the books of the past, but unfor­tu­nate­ly we can­not get at them.

C. S. Lewis

With that in mind, two of Pas­cal’s obser­va­tions struck me as espe­cial­ly pre­scient:

The mind nat­u­ral­ly believes and the will nat­u­ral­ly loves, so that when there are no true objects for them they nec­es­sar­i­ly become attached to false ones.  

Pas­cal, Pensée 661 (page 77)

Hun­dreds of years ago, Pas­cal accu­rate­ly diag­nosed the mod­ern Amer­i­can. Our decep­tive­ly sec­u­lar age is full of reli­gion, and for many peo­ple pol­i­tics is their pre­ferred form of wor­ship. Look back over my Fri­day “Issachar” emails and you will see many exam­ples of the reli­gious dynam­ics in our cul­tur­al debates; in fact, the very first arti­cle I ever shared was Joseph Bot­tum’s The Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas and this week I’m like­ly to share David French’s Amer­i­ca Is in the Grips of a Fun­da­men­tal­ist Revival.

As your pas­tor I urge you: don’t par­tic­i­pate in the crazy of what­ev­er group you tend to vote with. You already have a reli­gion, so you are free to treat pol­i­tics as sig­nif­i­cant but not ulti­mate. Back in the 90’s, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist J. Budziszews­ki wrote two arti­cles back-to-back for First Things, The Prob­lem With Lib­er­al­ism and The Prob­lem With Con­ser­v­a­tivism. Read them both, espe­cial­ly read the one that describes your team. You won’t res­onate with every cri­tique in either arti­cle, but you will find much to think about.

Mov­ing on, I also appre­ci­at­ed one of Pas­cal’s com­ments which is rel­e­vant to social media:

We are not sat­is­fied with the life we have in our­selves and our own being. We want to lead an imag­i­nary life in the eyes of oth­ers, and so we try to make an impres­sion. We strive con­stant­ly to embell­ish and pre­serve our imag­i­nary being, and neglect the real one.

Pas­cal, Pensée 806 (page 79)

Read­ing this Pensée brought to mind Madi­son Fis­cher’s asser­tion that ditch­ing social media was key to her win­ning a medal as a com­pet­i­tive climber.

“I cared so much about what every­one thought of me that it became out­sourced con­fi­dence…. I couldn’t step out of the rep­u­ta­tion I forged online so I lived in a world of enti­tle­ment. Pride in my accom­plish­ments made me con­tent, and con­tent­ed­ness is poi­son to a young ath­lete who has to stay hun­gry if she wants to stay com­pet­i­tive.”

Madi­son Fis­ch­er

She real­ized that she faced a choice: actu­al­ly become a more com­pet­i­tive climber or spend her time try­ing to look like what peo­ple thought a com­pet­i­tive climber should be.

In a sim­i­lar man­ner, we can actu­al­ly strive to be like Jesus or we can instead try to become what oth­er peo­ple think a fol­low­er of Jesus should be. In oth­er words, we can either fol­low Jesus or we can fol­low oth­er peo­ple. We can fol­low Christ or a crowd.

This is about more than social media, but it’s def­i­nite­ly about social media as well. You prob­a­bly know that I am on Face­book and Twit­ter, so clear­ly I’m not about to tell you to delete your accounts. But I do urge you to be aware of the temp­ta­tions they cre­ate. Med­i­tate on Matthew 6:1, “Be care­ful not to prac­tice your right­eous­ness in front of oth­ers to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heav­en.”

Oth­er tid­bits I appre­ci­at­ed:

The athe­ist argues: “If there were a God, how could there be injustice?” To which Pas­cal replies: “If there is injus­tice, there must be true jus­tice for it to be rel­a­tive to and a defect of; and this true jus­tice is not found on Earth or in man, there­fore it must exist in Heav­en and God.” Either there or nowhere; and if nowhere, then “everything is per­mis­si­ble”. But not every­thing is per­mis­si­ble. There­fore there must be a God.

Kreeft com­ment­ing on Pensée 697, page 94

And I par­tic­u­lar­ly like this one. It’s true of babies, and it’s true of adults. Dif­fer­ent tri­fles, same psy­chol­o­gy.

A tri­fle con­soles us because a tri­fle upsets us.

Pas­cal, Pensée 43 (page 75)

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 257

a short­er col­lec­tion of links than those I’ve shared recent­ly

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. Stop Fir­ing the Inno­cent (Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic): “Cafferty was pun­ished for an offense he insists he did not com­mit. Shor was pun­ished for doing some­thing that most wouldn’t even con­sid­er objec­tion­able. Wadi was pun­ished for the sins of his daugh­ter. What all of these rather dif­fer­ent cas­es have in com­mon is that none of the peo­ple who were deprived of a liveli­hood in the name of fight­ing racism appear to have been guilty of actu­al­ly per­pet­u­at­ing racism.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins. 
    • This is an essen­tial fol­low-up: pun­ish­ing the inno­cent (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “…for those who want to effect social change by expo­sure and sham­ing, pun­ish­ing the inno­cent is a fea­ture of their sys­tem, not a bug. It increas­es fear, which increas­es dis­ci­pline, not only of one­self but of oth­ers. And every employ­er who fires an employ­ee because they’re afraid of a social-media mob draws us clos­er to a ful­ly Panop­tic soci­ety, a social tyran­ny with an effi­cien­cy beyond the dreams of total­i­tar­i­an soci­eties of the past.” This reminds me of the clas­sic post Plan­et of Cops by Fred­dy deBoer.
  2. The Min­neapo­lis street cor­ner where George Floyd was killed has become a Chris­t­ian revival­ist site. (Ruth Gra­ham, Slate): “‘I would describe this as revival and awakening,’ said Joshua Giles, a local pas­tor who has been com­ing to the site to pray and preach for sev­er­al weeks. Giles, who is Black, said he has tak­en part in con­ver­sions and spon­ta­neous bap­tisms there, and that at least one woman had been mirac­u­lous­ly healed of per­sis­tent pain in her arm.”
    • I found the way Gra­ham framed one min­is­ter’s crit­i­cism of the Black Lives Mat­ter orga­ni­za­tion inter­est­ing. I don’t think it’s an unusu­al per­spec­tive — it was pre­sent­ed on Tues­day by sports anchor (and Colum­bia grad) Mar­cel­lus Wiley: https://twitter.com/SFY/status/1278064470435090438 (three minute video)
    • It’s also inter­est­ing to com­pare Wor­ship­pers Con­tin­ue ‘Uni­ty Revival’ at George Floyd Memo­r­i­al Despite Push­back (Tay­lor Berglund, Charis­ma News). The reports large­ly align, I’m just fas­ci­nat­ed by how reporter­s’ inter­ests and con­texts shape the ques­tions they ask and the answers they empha­size. I am pret­ty sure both reporters are Chris­t­ian, although I sus­pect they grav­i­tate to dif­fer­ent church­es.
  3. Is Tim Scott the Most Influ­en­tial Leg­is­la­tor in Con­gress? (Declan Gar­vey, The Dis­patch): “To Scott, his black­ness and his par­ti­san affil­i­a­tion makes per­fect sense: He’s lived the Amer­i­can dream, ris­ing from pover­ty to build a series of suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es. He’s a devout Chris­t­ian com­mit­ted to the preser­va­tion of reli­gious lib­er­ty. But to inter­lop­ers pro­ject­ing their own expe­ri­ences and beliefs onto him, two of his three core iden­ti­ties are in direct con­tra­dic­tion with one anoth­er. Lean­ing too hard into one elic­its accu­sa­tions of being trai­tor­ous to the other.’” Utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. How a Great Pow­er Falls Apart (Charles King, For­eign Affairs): “Faced with a series of exter­nal shocks and inter­nal crises, and pur­sued by more dynam­ic and adapt­able com­peti­tors abroad, his coun­try had far less life in it than any­one at the time could see. All coun­tries end. Every soci­ety has its own rock bot­tom, obscured by dark­ness until impact is immi­nent. Already in the sixth cen­tu­ry, Amal­rik wrote, goats were graz­ing in the Roman Forum.” The author is an inter­na­tion­al rela­tions Pro­fes­sor at George­town. Rel­e­vant for both Amer­i­ca and Chi­na.
  5. Pas­tors on Social Media (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “… you are wrestling against prin­ci­pal­i­ties and pow­ers, and those pow­ers have keen eyes for your desire for a big­ger audi­ence and your church mem­ber­s’ affin­i­ty for oth­er forms of social rein­force­ment. They want you to believe that oth­er forms of wis­dom are more reli­able than God’s Word, oth­er audi­ences more impor­tant than your hum­ble con­gre­ga­tion, oth­er plat­forms more pow­er­ful for speak­ing, oth­er kinds of impact you can make more last­ing and sig­nif­i­cant. The sec­ond you begin to believe these things you have begun to com­pro­mise your call­ing as a pastor.” This is a fire hydrant of wis­dom, and most of it is rel­e­vant to every­one.
  6. On Behalf Of Envi­ron­men­tal­ists, I Apol­o­gize For The Cli­mate Scare (Mike Shel­len­berg­er, Quil­lette): “Climate change is hap­pen­ing. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most seri­ous envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem. I may seem like a strange per­son to be say­ing all of this. I have been a cli­mate activist for 20 years and an envi­ron­men­tal­ist for 30.”
    • The author’s book is cur­rent­ly the #1 best sell­er in envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence on Ama­zon. This arti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Forbes (where he is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor) but they took it down in the ensu­ing con­tro­ver­sy. Unde­ni­ably inter­est­ing. I don’t have exper­tise in this area, so if he’s wrong please point me to any bet­ter pieces you know of.
  7. The Ghost of Woodrow Wil­son (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…unless the endgame of New Haven’s removal of Colum­bus is the expro­pri­a­tion of white prop­er­ty (Yale’s prop­er­ty, I sup­pose, espe­cial­ly) and its redis­tri­b­u­tion to the Pequots and Mohe­gans, then a con­sis­tent rejec­tion of Columbus’s lega­cy isn’t what my city is embrac­ing. Instead, it’s just doing the same thing as Prince­ton: keep­ing the inher­i­tance, but repu­di­at­ing the bene­fac­tor. Keep­ing the gains, but mak­ing a big show of pro­nounc­ing them ill gotten.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Wretchedness and The Paradox of Greatness and Wretchedness

My favorite of Pas­cal’s thoughts.

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through an anno­tat­ed trans­la­tion of Pascal’s Pensees called Chris­tian­i­ty For Mod­ern Pagans, I’ll post the thoughts I’m email­ing the stu­dents here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2020. The read­ing sched­ule is online.

This read­ing includes the line from Pas­cal that has shaped my thought more than any oth­er of his, “There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough dark­ness for those of a con­trary dis­po­si­tion” (Pas­cal, Pensee 149, page 69). It’s sim­ple obser­va­tion that explains some­thing we observe every day at Stan­ford: the coex­is­tence of smart peo­ple who think God’s exis­tence is blind­ing­ly obvi­ous along­side smart peo­ple who think that God’s nonex­is­tence is blind­ing­ly obvi­ous.

I think about this obser­va­tion fre­quent­ly, and I have come to believe that such exquis­ite bal­ance is itself evi­dence of a mas­ter plan­ner at work behind the scenes. If a flipped coin land­ed on its edge once, we would be astound­ed. If it land­ed on its edge repeat­ed­ly, we would be sure that the coin was rigged. Pas­cal’s point is that real­i­ty is rigged in such a way that strong cas­es can be made for faith and for doubt. Pay atten­tion the next time there is a sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery in an area you might expect to clar­i­fy the exis­tence of God, you will see that the­ists and athe­ists alike rejoice in the dis­cov­ery and write about it with great glee. The coin will have land­ed on its edge once again.

Why would God arrange real­i­ty this way? To reveal our heart. As Pas­cal said ear­li­er in the same Pensee:

‘If he had wished to over­come the obsti­na­cy of the most hard­ened, he could have done so by reveal­ing him­self to them so plain­ly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence, as he will appear on the last day with such thun­der and light­ning and such con­vul­sions of nature that the dead will rise up and the blind­est will see him. This is not the way he wished to appear when he came in mild­ness, because so many men had shown them­selves unwor­thy of his clemen­cy, that he wished to deprive them of the good they did not desire. It was there­fore not right that he should appear in a man­ner man­i­fest­ly divine and absolute­ly capa­ble of con­vinc­ing all men, but nei­ther was it right that his com­ing should be so hid­den that he could not be rec­og­nized by those who sin­cere­ly sought him.

Pas­cal, Pensee 149, page 68

As I heard a pas­tor say once, “You get what you want in eter­ni­ty. Do you want God? You go to Heav­en where He dwells. Do you not want God? You will be free of Him for­ev­er and will go to Hell where He is not.”

Oth­er sec­tions that stuck with me:

It is instruc­tive to com­pare Job and Eccle­si­astes. For this is the com­par­i­son between ancient and mod­ern man. Eccle­si­astes, like mod­ern man, has every­thing and yet has noth­ing because it is only “vanity”. Job, like ancient man, has noth­ing but has every­thing because he has God.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensee 403, page 49

The two most life-chang­ing rev­o­lu­tions in mod­ern times were the sci­en­tif­ic-indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, which taught man to live and think abstract­ly, like an angel; and the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, which taught man to live and think like an ani­mal. The first knows only the head, the sec­ond knows only the hor­mones. Nei­ther knows the heart.

Kreeft’s com­men­tary on Pensees 678 & 121, page 53

Man’s great­ness is so obvi­ous that it can even be deduced from his wretched­ness, for what is nature in ani­mals we call wretched­ness in man, thus rec­og­niz­ing that, if his nature is today like that of the ani­mals, he must have fall­en from some bet­ter state which was once his own…. Who would think him­self unhap­py if he had only one mouth and who would not if he had only one eye? It has prob­a­bly nev­er occurred to any­one to be dis­tressed at not hav­ing three eyes, but those who have none are incon­solable.

Pas­cal, Pensee 117, page 59

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 256

FYI, I offer some of my own thoughts on police towards the end.

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 Rebel Physi­cist Try­ing to Fix Quan­tum Mechan­ics (Bob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Bassi is a prac­tic­ing Catholic and a believ­er in God, some­thing he says is ‘unusual’ but ‘not rare” among his col­leagues at the uni­ver­si­ty. Ein­stein called his own belief that real­i­ty could be under­stood ‘religion,’ and I won­dered if there’s a con­nec­tion between Bassi’s reli­gious faith and that in what has become essen­tial­ly a far-right posi­tion in physics.” I have no opin­ion on the under­ly­ing sci­en­tif­ic con­tro­ver­sy, but Bassi sounds like a fas­ci­nat­ing per­son.
  2. What the Tent­mak­ing Busi­ness Was Real­ly Like for the Apos­tle Paul (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “[It] cost the Apos­tle Paul to write his let­ters, includ­ing the secur­ing of mate­ri­als and the hir­ing of a sec­re­tary to make a copy for him­self. After exten­sive research and cal­cu­la­tion, he deter­mined that on the low side it would have cost him at least $2,000 in today’s cur­ren­cy to write 1 Corinthi­ans. (And that doesn’t include the cost of send­ing some­one like Titus on a long jour­ney to deliv­er it.)” Short and fas­ci­nat­ing.
  3. The Tempt­ing of Neil Gor­such (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We may offi­cial­ly have three branch­es of gov­ern­ment, but Amer­i­cans seem to accept that it’s more like 2.25: A pres­i­den­cy that acts uni­lat­er­al­ly when­ev­er pos­si­ble, a high court that checks the White House and set­tles cul­ture wars, and a Con­gress that occa­sion­al­ly bestirs itself to pass a budget.”
  4. Reli­gious Amer­i­cans Have Less Pos­i­tive Atti­tudes Toward Sci­ence, But This Does Not Extend to Oth­er Cul­tures (Jonathon McPhetres, Jonathan Jong & Miron Zuck­er­man, Social Psy­cho­log­i­cal and Per­son­al­i­ty Sci­ence): “It is com­mon­ly claimed that sci­ence and reli­gion are log­i­cal­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly at odds with one anoth­er. How­ev­er, pre­vi­ous stud­ies have main­ly exam­ined Amer­i­can samples…” Raw data at https://osf.io/t7w6x/ DOI 10.1177/1948550620923239. The authors are pro­fes­sors at MIT, Oxford, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.
  5. “He’s the Cho­sen One to Run Amer­i­ca”: Inside the Cult of Trump, His Ral­lies Are Church and He Is the Gospel (Jeff Sharlet, Van­i­ty Fair): “Nonbelievers roll their eyes over what they see as the gob­s­mack­ing hypocrisy of Trump as a tri­bune of fam­i­ly val­ues, the dopi­ness of the rubes who con­sid­er him a moral man. Non­be­liev­ers, in oth­er words, miss the point. They lack gno­sis. Very few believ­ers deny Trump’s sor­did past. Some turn to the old Chris­t­ian ready-made of redemp­tion: Their man was lost, but now he’s found. Oth­ers love him pre­cise­ly because he is a sinner—if a man of such vast, crass, and open appetites can embody the nation (and real­ly, who is more American—vast, crass, and open—than Trump), then you too, stu­dent of porn, mon­ster truck lover, ulti­mate fight­er in your dreams and games, can claim an anointing.” The title filled me with low expec­ta­tions, but the arti­cle has some inter­est­ing reflec­tions on Gnos­ti­cism in mod­ern Amer­i­ca. 
  6. On reli­gious lib­er­ty:
    • The True Extent of Reli­gious Lib­er­ty in Amer­i­ca, Explained (David French, The Dis­patch): “Yes, it is true that in some respects reli­gious lib­er­ty is ‘under siege.’ There are activists and law­mak­ers who want to push back at mul­ti­ple doc­trines and some rad­i­cals even dream of revok­ing tax exemp­tions from reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions that main­tain tra­di­tion­al teach­ings on sex and gen­der. But if the siege is real, then so is the citadel. Peo­ple of faith in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca enjoy more lib­er­ty and more real polit­i­cal pow­er than any faith com­mu­ni­ty in the devel­oped world.” This is real­ly good.
    • No Longer a Lux­u­ry – Reli­gious Lib­er­ty is a Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Pri­or­i­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, Prov­i­dence): “…increases in reli­gious lib­er­ty are asso­ci­at­ed with robust increas­es in human flour­ish­ing even after con­trol­ling for dif­fer­ences in gross domes­tic prod­uct, the labor force, and mea­sures of eco­nom­ic free­dom. For exam­ple, mov­ing a coun­try that ranks in reli­gious lib­er­ty along the lines of Rus­sia to one that ranks clos­er to the Unit­ed States amounts to an 11 per­cent increase in the share of indi­vid­u­als who say that they are thriving.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. 
    • Torah Is the Air We Breathe (Gil Stu­dent, First Things): “But our spir­i­tu­al­ly impov­er­ished soci­ety views reli­gious prac­tices as mere­ly cul­tur­al expres­sions. It views reli­gious ser­vices as equiv­a­lent to yoga class­es and book club meet­ings. It does not see reli­gion as essen­tial, and there­fore can­not under­stand that Jews don’t serve God as part of our lives; rather, we live to serve God.”
  7. On race, police, and protests
    • Above the Law: The Data Are In on Police, Killing, and Race (Lyman Stone, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “…police killings have made up about one out of every twelve vio­lent deaths of Amer­i­cans between 2010 and 2018. That’s includ­ing Amer­i­can mil­i­tary deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and else­where dur­ing that win­dow. Indeed, more Amer­i­cans died at the hands of police offi­cers dur­ing that peri­od (about 14,400) than died while on active mil­i­tary duty (about 9,400). Police vio­lence in Amer­i­ca is extra­or­di­nary in its inten­si­ty. It is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the actu­al threats fac­ing police offi­cers, and it has risen sig­nif­i­cant­ly in recent years with­out appar­ent justification.”
    • Jew­ish busi­ness­es in Los Ange­les ran­sacked in riots, but only Israeli and Jew­ish media care (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “The Ore­gon­ian called riot-plagued Port­land ‘a city of ply­wood.’ Since then, images have emerged of a dark­er nar­ra­tive, with riot­ers tar­get­ing Jew­ish busi­ness­es. Israeli news­pa­pers ran with this angle this past Sat­ur­day, but by the end of the day, there was noth­ing about the Jew­ish van­dal­ism to be found on the New York Times web­site. Usu­al­ly the Times is pret­ty up on anti-Semi­tism, but it was eas­i­er to find a piece about Anna Win­tour than any men­tions of van­dal­ized Jews.”
    • How Jesus became white — and why it’s time to can­cel that (Emi­ly McFar­lan Miller, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Anderson said that it has been com­mon for peo­ple to depict Jesus as a mem­ber of their cul­ture or their eth­nic group. ‘If a per­son thinks that’s the only pos­si­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jesus, then that’s where the prob­lem starts,’ he said.” It’s almost like por­tray­ing God visu­al­ly leads to trou­ble. I wish God had thought to warn against that.
    • Reflec­tions from a Chris­t­ian schol­ar on Social Jus­tice, Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry, Marx­ism, and Bib­li­cal Ethics (Kel­ly Ham­ren, Face­book): “I have two Eng­lish degrees (B.A. and M.A.) from a Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ty and a Ph.D. in lit­er­a­ture and crit­i­cism from a state uni­ver­si­ty. In my field, Marx­ism is one of the most com­mon­ly stud­ied and most influ­en­tial per­spec­tives, and Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry is also a sig­nif­i­cant force and gain­ing momen­tum.… my stud­ies have con­vinced me that the suf­fer­ings and deaths of mil­lions are not only cor­re­lat­ed with but large­ly caused by the Marx­ist-Lenin­ist agen­da, and I am there­fore deeply opposed to Marx­ism as a frame­work. I hope that, know­ing this, those patient enough to read these notes will acquit me of being a clos­et Marx­ist cov­er­ing a sec­u­lar agen­da with a veneer of Bible verses.” The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Law pro­fes­sor’s response to stu­dent offend­ed by their shirt (Patri­cia Leary, Imgur): “Premise: You are not pay­ing for my opin­ion. Cri­tique: You are not pay­ing me to pre­tend I don’t have one.” Two com­ments: first, this is a few years old. Sec­ond, ini­tial­ly looks made-up but checks out. The author is a pro­fes­sor at Whit­ti­er Law School: Law pro­fes­sor responds to stu­dents who com­plained about her Black Lives Mat­ter shirt (Scott Jaschik, Inside High­er Ed) 
    • The New Truth (Jacob Siegel, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “What we are wit­ness­ing, in the rapid­ly trans­form­ing norms around race, sex, and gen­der, is not an argu­ment at all but a rev­o­lu­tion in moral sen­ti­ment. In all rev­o­lu­tions, the new thing strug­gling to be born makes use of the old sys­tem in order to over­throw it. At present, insti­tu­tions like the uni­ver­si­ty, the press, and the med­ical pro­fes­sion pre­serve the appear­ance of rea­son, empiri­cism, and argu­ment while alter­ing, through edict and coer­cion, the mean­ing of essen­tial terms in the moral lex­i­con, like fair­ness, equal­i­ty, friend­ship, and love.”
    • His­to­ry Shows Free Speech Is The Los­er In Mob Action (Jonathan Tur­ley, per­son­al blog): “What will be left when objec­tion­able pub­lic art and aca­d­e­mics are scrubbed from view? The silence that fol­lows may be com­fort­ing to those who want to remove images or ideas that cause unease. His­to­ry has shown, how­ev­er, that ortho­doxy is nev­er sat­is­fied with silence. It demands speech. Once all the offend­ing stat­ues are down, and all the offend­ing pro­fes­sors are culled, the appetite for col­lec­tive sup­pres­sion will become a demand for col­lec­tive expres­sion.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Of Stat­ues and Sym­bol­ic Mur­der (Wil­fred M. McClay, First Things): “…a great many of the foot sol­diers in this move­ment are young, white, sub­ur­ban, mid­dle-class and col­lege-edu­cat­ed; and that they are work­ing out their sal­va­tion with fear and trem­bling and a dead­ly earnest­ness. The ‘white priv­i­lege’ of which these young peo­ple com­plain is a pro­jec­tion onto oth­ers of the very con­di­tion that they sus­pect and fear in them­selves. Hence the con­vul­sive rage, com­plete with copi­ous gut­ter pro­fan­i­ty, which we have all seen in videos of them. Peo­ple in the grip of such pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal forces will go a long way to expi­ate for their exis­ten­tial sins and rid them­selves of their demons. They are eas­i­ly mobi­lized by oth­ers. Accord­ing to Pew esti­mates, only one out of six Black Lives Mat­ter activists is actu­al­ly black.”
      1. Relat­ed to the last sen­tence: George Floyd Pro­test­er Demo­graph­ics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities (Mobile­Wal­la report) has bar charts based on sur­veilling the cell phones of peo­ple at the protests and infer­ring their demo­graph­ics the way mar­keters do. 
    • A Min­neapo­lis Neigh­bor­hood Vowed to Check Its Priv­i­lege. It’s Already Being Test­ed. (Caitlin Dick­er­son, New York Times): “The impulse many white Pow­der­horn Park res­i­dents have to seek help from com­mu­ni­ty groups rather than from the police is being felt in neigh­bor­hoods across the coun­try. But some are find­ing the com­mit­ment hard to stand by when faced with the com­plex real­i­ties of life. While friends, neigh­bors and even fam­i­ly mem­bers in Pow­der­horn Park agree to avoid call­ing the police at all costs, it has been hard­er to estab­lish where to draw the line.” Read through to the insane final sto­ry. 
    • I don’t often insert my own com­men­tary in these emails, but in this case I’d like to high­light a Bib­li­cal per­spec­tive.
      1. The Bible teach­es that one of the rea­sons that God gives gov­ern­ments author­i­ty is for them to use vio­lence in the pur­suit of jus­tice. Romans 13:4 is key: “the one in author­i­ty is God’s ser­vant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no rea­son. They are God’s ser­vants, agents of wrath to bring pun­ish­ment on the wrongdoer.”
      2. We have free­dom in how we choose to do that as a soci­ety — the Bible does not require that we use police or that we build pris­ons. Hav­ing said that, if we abol­ish domes­tic law enforce­ment then the only alter­na­tives I see are the mil­i­tary, pri­vate busi­ness­es that offer pro­tec­tion for a fee, sanc­tioned vig­i­lan­tism, or mob jus­tice. These are not appeal­ing options. Some com­bi­na­tion of unbundling police work, reduc­ing crim­i­nal laws while rethink­ing the sanc­tions for vio­lat­ing them, and increas­ing police pay while impos­ing high­er stan­dards for police con­duct seems like a bet­ter path for­ward.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Christianity For Modern Pagans: Order & Method

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through an anno­tat­ed trans­la­tion of Pas­cal’s Pensees called Chris­tian­i­ty For Mod­ern Pagans, I’ll post the thoughts I’m email­ing the stu­dents here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2020. The read­ing sched­ule is online.

The theme that seems most impor­tant to me from this first week’s read­ings (the pref­ace and the chap­ters Order & Method) is the need to under­stand the heart behind some­one’s skep­ti­cism. We must gen­uine­ly love our skep­ti­cal friends if we are to per­suade them.

Their intel­lec­tu­al ques­tions are real and have to be answered hon­est­ly, but the cries of the heart (Chris­tian­i­ty is intol­er­ant, faith is for igno­rant peo­ple, becom­ing a Chris­t­ian would make me into some­one I would­n’t like, fol­low­ing Jesus would mean aban­don­ing fun) are far more impor­tant.

I find when I speak with unbe­liev­ers on cam­pus their first ques­tions to me are often tests: they want to see how I respond to pure­ly intel­lec­tu­al inquiries before they begin rais­ing the issues that real­ly keep them from faith. And some­times they don’t even know the real rea­sons they won’t con­sid­er Chris­tian­i­ty. A reply I’ve found help­ful is, “I’ll answer your ques­tion as best I can, but I’m curi­ous: if I answer it to your sat­is­fac­tion will you seri­ous­ly con­sid­er becom­ing a Chris­t­ian? If not, what would still hold you back?”

What do you think Stan­ford stu­dents’ biggest heart objec­tions are to Chris­tian­i­ty? I’m curi­ous what you notice as you speak with your friends.

And now a few excerpts from the read­ing I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed:

In the past, the dif­fi­cul­ty in accept­ing Chris­tian­i­ty was its sec­ond point, sal­va­tion. Every­one in pre­mod­ern soci­eties knew sin was real, but many doubt­ed sal­va­tion. Today it is the exact oppo­site: every­body is saved, but there is no sin to be saved from. Thus what orig­i­nal­ly came into the world as “good news” strikes the mod­ern mind as bad news, as guilt-rid­den, moral­is­tic and “judgmental”. (page 26, Kreeft’s com­men­tary on pensee 6)

Page 26 (from Kreeft’s com­men­tary on pensee 6)

If he exalts him­self, I hum­ble him.
If he hum­bles him­self, I exalt him.
And I go on con­tra­dict­ing him
Until he under­stands
That he is a mon­ster that pass­es all under­stand­ing.

Page 37 (Pas­cal speak­ing, pensee 130)

When we want to cor­rect some­one use­ful­ly and show him he is wrong, we must see from what point of view he is approach­ing the mat­ter, for it is usu­al­ly right from that point of view, and we must admit this, but show him the point of view from which it is wrong. This will please him, because he will see that he was not wrong but mere­ly failed to see every aspect of the ques­tion.

Page 39 (Pas­cal speak­ing, pensee 701)

Our reli­gion is wise and fool­ish: wise, because it is the most learned and most strong­ly based on mir­a­cles, prophe­cies, etc., fool­ish, because it is not all this which makes peo­ple belong to it. . . . What makes them believe is the Cross. . . . And so St. Paul, who came with wis­dom and signs, said that he came with nei­ther wis­dom nor signs, for he came to con­vert, but those who come only to con­vince may say they come with wis­dom and signs.

Page 42 (Pas­cal speak­ing, pensee 842)

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 255

Again, the stand­alone stuff is up top and the cur­rent news items are towards the end.

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. Why Ditch­ing Insta­gram Earned me the Podi­um (Madi­son Fis­ch­er, per­son­al blog): “I cared so much about what every­one thought of me that it became out­sourced con­fi­dence…. Pride in my accom­plish­ments made me con­tent, and con­tent­ed­ness is poi­son to a young ath­lete who has to stay hun­gry if she wants to stay competitive.”
  2. The Finan­cial Fin­ish Line (Christi­na Dar­nell, Min­istry Watch): “Giving has always been anoth­er bedrock prin­ci­ple for the Barn­harts. The com­pa­ny com­mit­ted to giv­ing half of their prof­its to min­istry. The oth­er half goes to grow­ing the busi­ness. The first year, they gave away $50,000. The next year, it was $150,000. It grew to $1 mil­lion a year—then $1 mil­lion a month.” An inspir­ing sto­ry.
  3. On Cul­tures That Build (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “In the 21st cen­tu­ry, the main ques­tion in Amer­i­can social life is not ‘how do we make that happen?’ but ‘how do we get man­age­ment to take our side?’ This is a learned response, and a cul­ture which has inter­nal­ized it will not be a cul­ture that ‘builds.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Amer­i­ca’s Insti­tu­tions Are Fail­ing (Derek Thomp­son, The Atlantic): “Whatever the true cause for our fail­ure, when I look at the twin cat­a­stro­phes of this annus hor­ri­bilis, the plague and the police protests, what strikes me is that America’s safe­keep­ing insti­tu­tions have for­got­ten how to prop­er­ly see the threats of the 21st cen­tu­ry and move quick­ly to respond to them. Those who deny his­to­ry may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed.”
  4. Is There a Reli­gious Left? (Casey Cep, New York­er): “The daugh­ter of a Bap­tist preach­er who was once the dean of the Howard Uni­ver­si­ty School of Divin­i­ty, New­some came by her faith and her preach­ing hon­est­ly, yet almost all of the pub­lic­i­ty that fol­lowed her act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence [tak­ing down the Con­fed­er­ate flag] stripped her protest of its the­o­log­i­cal tenor. Such is the fate of much of the activism of the so-called reli­gious left: if it is suc­cess­ful, it is sub­sumed by broad­er caus­es and coali­tions; if it fails, it is forgotten.” 
  5. Race in Amer­i­ca
    • Most US Pas­tors Speak Out in Response to George Floy­d’s Death (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Nearly all US pas­tors (94%) agree that ‘the church has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to denounce racism,’ and most (62%) say their church has made a state­ment on the unrest stem­ming from the May 25 death of George Floyd, accord­ing to a Bar­na Church Pulse Poll released today. The poll, con­duct­ed over the past week, also found that 76 per­cent of pas­tors say the church should sup­port peace­ful protests occur­ring in response to Floyd’s killing.”
    • What the Bible Has to Say About Black Anger (Esau McCauley, New York Times): “Jesus expe­ri­enced the real­i­ty of state-spon­sored ter­ror. That is why the black Chris­t­ian has always felt a par­tic­u­lar kin­ship with this cru­ci­fied king from an oppressed eth­nic group. The cross helps us make sense of the lynch­ing tree.” The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Wheaton. 
    • On the Unjust Death of George Floyd and Racism in Amer­i­ca (Mar­co Rubio, The Pub­lic Dis­course): “Like before, the lat­est unrest has giv­en rise to voic­es argu­ing that the foun­da­tions of our repub­lic are built on sys­temic racism and must there­fore be brought down. The only dif­fer­ence is that this time claims like these don’t just come from the fringes of our pol­i­tics. Like before, we also have voic­es who say that today race is a fac­tor only in indi­vid­ual cas­es, dis­tinct from our soci­ety at large. Both of these views are wrong.” This was a speech giv­en on the floor of the Sen­ate.
    • Racist Police Vio­lence Recon­sid­ered (John McWhort­er, Quil­lette): “…these fig­ures are not nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dence of police racism. Accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post‘s data­base, over 95 per­cent of the peo­ple fatal­ly shot by police offi­cers in 2019 were male, and no seri­ous-mind­ed per­son argues that this is evi­dence of sys­temic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the dis­pro­por­tion­ate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of black men among those killed by cops?” McWhort­er is a pro­fes­sor of lin­guis­tics at Colum­bia. 
    • Sto­ries and Data (Cole­man Hugh­es, City Jour­nal): “…the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it.” The author is a fel­low at the Man­hat­tan Insti­tute.
    • A Few Bad Apples? Racial Bias in Polic­ing (Felipe Goncalves & Steven Mel­lo, SSRN): “Using a bunch­ing esti­ma­tion design and data from the Flori­da High­way Patrol, we show that minori­ties are less like­ly to receive a dis­count on their speed­ing tick­ets than white dri­vers. Dis­ag­gre­gat­ing this dif­fer­ence to the indi­vid­ual police offi­cer, we find that 40% of offi­cers explain all of the aggre­gate discrimination.” 40% is HUGE!
    • Why I Stopped Talk­ing About Racial Rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and Start­ed Talk­ing About White Suprema­cy (Erna Kim Hack­ett, Inher­i­tance Mag­a­zine): “The term white suprema­cy labels the prob­lem more accu­rate­ly. It locates the prob­lem on white­ness and its sys­tems. It focus­es on out­comes, not inten­tions. It is col­lec­tive, not indi­vid­ual. It makes white­ness uncom­fort­able and respon­si­ble. And that is important.” Shared with me by a stu­dent.
  6. On Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism:
    • The Amer­i­can Sovi­et Men­tal­i­ty (Izabel­la Tabarovsky, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The mobs that per­form the unan­i­mous con­dem­na­tion rit­u­als of today do not fol­low orders from above. But that does not dimin­ish their pow­er to exert pres­sure on those under their influ­ence. Those of us who came out of the col­lec­tivist Sovi­et cul­ture under­stand these dynam­ics instinctively.” The author is a schol­ar with the Wil­son Cen­ter.
    • Is There Still Room for Debate? (Andrew Sul­li­van, New York Mag­a­zine): “Liberalism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spir­it to it. A spir­it that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ide­ol­o­gy — friend­ship, art, love, sex, schol­ar­ship, fam­i­ly. A spir­it that seeks not to impose ortho­doxy but to open up the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the human mind and soul.”
    • The Amer­i­can Press Is Destroy­ing Itself (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “It isn’t the whole sto­ry, but it’s demon­stra­bly true that vio­lence, arson, and riot­ing are occur­ring. How­ev­er, because it is polit­i­cal­ly unten­able to dis­cuss this in ways that do not sug­gest sup­port, reporters have been twist­ing them­selves into knots. We are see­ing head­lines pre­vi­ous­ly imag­in­able only in The Onion, e.g., ‘27 police offi­cers injured dur­ing large­ly peace­ful anti-racism protests in London.’”
    • The woke rev­o­lu­tion in Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism has begun (Damon Link­er, The Week): “In place of dif­fi­cul­ty, com­plex­i­ty, and com­pli­ca­tion, today’s jour­nal­is­tic rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies crave tidy moral lessons with clear vil­lains and heroes. They cham­pi­on sim­plic­i­ty, embrace moral uplift, and seek out evil­do­ers to demonize.” See also his ear­li­er col­umn Don’t will­ful­ly ignore the com­plex­i­ty of what’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 254

The less time­ly stuff is up top this time and there are a lot of mag­ic videos at the bot­tom.

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. What Unites Most Grad­u­ates of Selec­tive Col­leges? An Intact Fam­i­ly (Nicholas Zill & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “… even after con­trol­ling for par­ent edu­ca­tion, fam­i­ly income, and stu­dent race and eth­nic­i­ty, being raised by one’s mar­ried birth par­ents pro­vides an addi­tion­al boost to one’s chances of get­ting through Princeton.”
  2. What Chris­tians Must Remem­ber about Nuclear Weapons and Arms Con­trol (Peter Feaver & William Inbo­den & Michael Singh, Prov­i­dence): “Before embrac­ing calls for the abo­li­tion of nuclear weapons, thought­ful Chris­tians must con­front two uncom­fort­able facts. First, we live in a fall­en world in which the threats we face are chang­ing, and arguably grow­ing. Sec­ond, the enve­lope of peace and secu­ri­ty in which free soci­eties have thrived for the past eight decades is not self-sustaining—one need only view the recent decline of democ­ra­cies and rise of author­i­tar­i­an threats from Rus­sia and Chi­na. One can detest nuclear weapons and still see their strate­gic value.” The authors are, respec­tive­ly, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Duke, a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at UT Austin, and a senior fel­low at a think­tank.
  3. Peer Review (Rod­ney Brooks, per­son­al blog): “I came to real­ize that the editor’s job was real, and it required me to deeply under­stand the top­ic of the paper, and the bias­es of the review­ers, and not to treat the ref­er­ees as hav­ing the right to deter­mine the fate of the paper them­selves. As an edi­tor I had to add judge­ment to the process at many steps along the way, and to strive for the process to improve the papers, but also to let in ideas that were new.” The author is a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of robot­ics at MIT.
  4. JK Rowl­ing Writes about Her Rea­sons for Speak­ing out on Sex and Gen­der Issues (JK Rowl­ing, per­son­al blog): “…I refuse to bow down to a move­ment that I believe is doing demon­stra­ble harm in seek­ing to erode ‘woman’ as a polit­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal class and offer­ing cov­er to preda­tors like few before it.”
  5. More on the NY Times tan­gle last week and what it reveals about our soci­ety
    • Amer­i­ca is chang­ing, and so is the media (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The news media likes to pre­tend that it sim­ply holds up a mir­ror to Amer­i­ca as it is. We don’t want to be seen as actors craft­ing the polit­i­cal debate, agents who make deci­sions that shape the bound­aries of the nation­al dis­course. We are, of course. We always have been.”
    • The Still-Vital Case for Lib­er­al­ism in a Rad­i­cal Age (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “…it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing author­i­tar­i­an racism is far more impor­tant to the con­clu­sion that left-wing illib­er­al­ism is com­plete­ly unim­por­tant. One can oppose dif­fer­ent evils, even those evils aligned against each oth­er, with­out assign­ing them equal weight.”
    • Why every­one hates the main­stream media (Andrew Pot­ter, Pol­i­cy for Pan­demics): “It’s not a coin­ci­dence that lawyers, jour­nal­ists, and politi­cians are rou­tine­ly ranked as the most dis­liked pro­fes­sions in the world. It’s because the law is not about jus­tice, pol­i­tics is not about democ­ra­cy, and the news is not about infor­ma­tion. But in each case, that is what emerges, by har­ness­ing the sta­tus-con­scious com­pet­i­tive natures of the participants.” The author is a for­mer jour­nal­ist and edi­tor.
  6. Thoughts on race and racism:
    • George Floyd and Me (Shai Linn, Gospel Coali­tion): “Though I’m deeply griev­ed, I am not with­out hope. Per­son­al­ly, I have lit­tle con­fi­dence in our gov­ern­ment or pol­i­cy­mak­ers to change the sys­temic fac­tors that con­tributed to the George Floyd sit­u­a­tion. But my hope isn’t in the gov­ern­ment. My hope is in the Lord.”
    • Amer­i­can Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go (David French, The Dis­patch): “If polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect pro­gres­sives are often guilty of over-racial­iz­ing Amer­i­can pub­lic dis­course, and they are, polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect con­ser­v­a­tives com­mit the oppo­site sin—and they fil­ter out or angri­ly reject all the infor­ma­tion that con­tra­dicts their thesis.”
    • This moment cries out for us to con­front race in Amer­i­ca (Con­doleez­za Rice, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Still, we sim­ply must acknowl­edge that soci­ety is not col­or-blind and prob­a­bly nev­er will be. Progress comes when peo­ple treat one anoth­er with respect, as if we were col­or-blind. Unless and until we are hon­est that race is still an anchor around our country’s neck, that shad­ow will nev­er be lift­ed. Our coun­try has a birth defect: Africans and Euro­peans came to this coun­try togeth­er — but one group was in chains.” She is, of course, a fel­low believ­er and also a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who will soon be the direc­tor of the Hoover Insti­tu­tion. 
    • Our Present Moment: Why Is It So Hard? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I’m think­ing more broad­ly about why race in this coun­try is so dif­fi­cult, and in par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cult even between peo­ple of good will, between peo­ple in your church of a dif­fer­ent col­or. I’m think­ing about peo­ple who agree on so many oth­er things. And you sing the same songs and you real­ly love Jesus togeth­er. And you read the same Bible, and you real­ly are togeth­er for the gospel. So why is it so divisive?” Some real­ly good thoughts in here.
  7. On the protests
    • The protests start­ed out look­ing like 1968. They turned into 1964. (Omar Wasow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al move­ment try­ing to draw atten­tion to the long his­to­ry of racist and bru­tal polic­ing, non­vi­o­lence in the face of police repres­sion is an exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult strat­e­gy to sus­tain. Evi­dence from the 1960s, how­ev­er — and per­haps this month, too — sug­gests using such tac­tics to gen­er­ate media cov­er­age of a press­ing social prob­lem can be a pow­er­ful tool for build­ing a coali­tion for social change.”
    • We often accuse the right of dis­tort­ing sci­ence. But the left changed the coro­n­avirus nar­ra­tive overnight (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, The Guardian): “Two weeks ago we shamed peo­ple for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.”
    • Trib­al­ism Comes for Pan­dem­ic Sci­ence (Yuval Levin, The New Atlantis): “These pub­lic health pro­fes­sion­als are sim­ply admit­ting that their views on the health risks of large gath­er­ings depend on the polit­i­cal valence of those gath­er­ings. Rather than com­part­men­tal­ize their pro­fes­sion­al judg­ment from their polit­i­cal pri­or­i­ties — explain­ing the risks of large protests regard­less of their polit­i­cal con­tent and then sep­a­rate­ly and in a dif­fer­ent con­text express­ing what­ev­er views they might have about that con­tent — they open­ly deny not only the pos­si­bil­i­ty but even the desir­abil­i­ty of detached pro­fes­sion­al advice. This kind of atti­tude inevitably makes it much hard­er for the pub­lic to assess sci­en­tif­ic claims about the pan­dem­ic through any­thing oth­er than a polit­i­cal lens.”
    • The Grow­ing CHAZm in Seat­tle (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It took activists less than 24 hours to dis­cov­er that even their make-believe Duchy of Grand Fen­woke relies on the basic build­ing blocks of any poli­ty. If Seattle’s supine and sausage-spined polit­i­cal lead­er­ship allows this exper­i­ment to con­tin­ue, pret­ty soon you can expect the emer­gence of cur­ren­cy, tax­es, even some kind of char­ter or con­sti­tu­tion. It wouldn’t shock me if they end­ed up cre­at­ing rudi­men­ta­ry courts or even a jail.” Gold­berg is an expert at the mean­der­ing rant. 
    • Anar­chy In Seat­tle (Christo­pher Rufo, City Jour­nal): “The Capi­tol Hill Autonomous Zone has set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent: armed left-wing activists have assert­ed their dom­i­nance of the streets and estab­lished an alter­na­tive polit­i­cal author­i­ty over a large sec­tion of a neigh­bor­hood. They have claimed de fac­to police pow­er over thou­sands of res­i­dents and dozens of businesses—completely out­side of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process. In a mat­ter of days, Antifa-affil­i­at­ed para­mil­i­taries have cre­at­ed a hard­ened bor­der, estab­lished a rudi­men­ta­ry form of gov­ern­ment based on prin­ci­ples of inter­sec­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and forcibly removed unfriend­ly media from the territory.”
    • A Dark Cloud For Democ­ra­cy (Carl True­man, First Things): “…this does not entire­ly explain why Min­neapo­lis and not Hong Kong has grabbed the imag­i­na­tion of British youth. After all, Hong Kong is a much more recent part of the British nar­ra­tive; one can watch the dis­man­tling of Hong Kong’s con­sti­tu­tion online and on the tele­vi­sion; and an extreme­ly good case can be made that the British gov­ern­ment is more respon­si­ble for that mess and its poten­tial ame­lio­ra­tion than for the chaos in the Min­neapo­lis police depart­ment. After all, the British can actu­al­ly do some­thing about it—as Boris Johnson’s pledge on immi­gra­tion to the U.K. from Hong Kong indi­cates. So why Min­neapo­lis, not Hong Kong?”
    • If we want bet­ter polic­ing, we’re going to have to spend more, not less (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Reform is thus more like­ly to stick if we co-opt the unions rather than try­ing to break them. Instead of ‘defund the police,’ what if we offloaded the non­ju­di­cial parts of their work, like deal­ing with the home­less and the men­tal­ly ill, to social work­ers, and then ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’ to reform the polic­ing part? We could offer a sig­nif­i­cant salary boost in exchange for accept­ing stricter stan­dards and over­sight, which wouldn’t just ease the polit­i­cal obsta­cles, but pos­si­bly attract high­er-qual­i­ty can­di­dates to the police force.”
    • Most Amer­i­cans Want Police Reform But Don’t Back ‘Defund The Police’ (Ariel Edwards-Levy and Kevin Robil­lard, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “A near-uni­ver­sal major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans sup­port at least some changes to polic­ing in the Unit­ed States fol­low­ing the death of George Floyd in the cus­tody of Min­neapo­lis police, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. There is major­i­ty sup­port for pro­pos­als cir­cu­lat­ing in Con­gress to ban choke­holds and make it eas­i­er to track and charge offi­cers accused of mis­con­duct. But the idea of ‘defunding the police’ has lit­tle sup­port from the public.”
    • Police Bru­tal­i­ty: The Fer­gu­son Effect (Robert Ver­bruggen, Nation­al Review): “There’s a temp­ta­tion in some quar­ters to think this issue is like gay mar­riage or mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion, where there’s a turn­ing point in pub­lic opin­ion and a rapid shift in pol­i­cy and then every­one won­ders what the big deal ever was. See, for exam­ple, Tim Alberta’s piece in Politi­co today, which bizarrely claims we may be see­ing the ‘last stand’ of law-and-order Repub­li­cans and draws those two par­al­lels explic­it­ly. But crime isn’t like that. When the streets become unsafe, pub­lic opin­ion shifts back in favor of the folks who stand between the inno­cents and the bad guys.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 253

Spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions for police reform, var­i­ous explain­ers and opin­ion pieces, and some weird news about Tik­Tok and Chris­tian­i­ty.

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. On the racial divi­sion in Amer­i­ca:
    • How to Make this Moment the Turn­ing Point for Real Change (Barack Oba­ma, Medi­um): “Finally, the more spe­cif­ic we can make demands for crim­i­nal jus­tice and police reform, the hard­er it will be for elect­ed offi­cials to just offer lip ser­vice to the cause and then fall back into busi­ness as usu­al once protests have gone away. The con­tent of that reform agen­da will be dif­fer­ent for var­i­ous communities.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Some spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: “For those who are inter­est­ed in research-based solu­tions to stop police vio­lence, here’s what you need to know — based on the facts and data. A thread. (1/x)” (Samuel Sinyang­we, Twit­ter)
    • More spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als: How to Actu­al­ly Fix Amer­i­ca’s Police (Seth W. Stoughton, Jef­frey J. Noble & Geof­frey P. Alpert, The Atlantic): “‘Overcriminalization’ has been broad­ly dis­cussed; there are so many laws that vio­la­tions are ubiq­ui­tous. If every­one is a crim­i­nal, offi­cers have almost unfet­tered dis­cre­tion to pick and choose which laws to enforce and whom to stop, frisk, search, or arrest.” The authors have an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of exper­tise (a law prof, a crim­i­nol­o­gy prof, and a for­mer offi­cer).
    • I Must Object: A Rebut­tal to Brown Univ.’s Let­ter Decry­ing Per­va­sive Racism in US (Glenn C. Loury, City Jour­nal): “I deeply resent­ed the let­ter. First of all, what makes an admin­is­tra­tor (even a high­ly paid one, with an exalt­ed title) a ‘leader’ of this uni­ver­si­ty? We, the fac­ul­ty, are the only ‘leaders’ wor­thy of men­tion when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-push­ing appa­ratchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unset­tling. Why must this university’s senior admin­is­tra­tion declare, on behalf of the insti­tu­tion as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any sub­tle dif­fer­ences of empha­sis or nuance—interpret con­tentious cur­rent events through a sin­gle lens?” Loury, who is black, is an econ pro­fes­sor at Brown. He did not come to play.
    • Efrem Smith: White Evan­gel­i­cals Need to Hum­ble Them­selves (Bob Smi­etana, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I’ve been encour­aged, espe­cial­ly in the evan­gel­i­cal wing of the church, to see more pas­tors speak­ing out, being bro­ken­heart­ed, call­ing for change. But then there’s also a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of evan­gel­i­cal­ism that is either silent or late to the par­ty when it comes to the church call­ing for justice.”
    • A Nation on Fire Needs the Flames of the Spir­it (Esau McCaul­ley, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There is no oth­er world in which to talk about Jesus than a world in which black men can have their necks stepped on for nine minutes.” The author is an Angli­can priest and a pro­fes­sor of New Tes­ta­ment at Wheaton. 
    • Don’t under­stand the protests? What you’re see­ing is peo­ple pushed to the edge (Kareem Abdul-Jab­bar, LA Times): “…even though we do all the con­ven­tion­al things to raise pub­lic and polit­i­cal aware­ness — write artic­u­late and insight­ful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the con­tin­ued dev­as­ta­tion on CNN, sup­port can­di­dates who promise change — the nee­dle hard­ly budges.”
    • On Days of Dis­or­der (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Notice that this schema is val­ue neu­tral: it describes both the foot­ball hooli­gan and the race riot­er, 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian pogroms and 21st cen­tu­ry Hong Kong street bat­tles. In all of these a cer­tain per­cent­age of the par­tic­i­pants plays the game for fair­ly mun­dane rea­sons: to rev­el in excite­ment or ter­ror, lose them­selves in a rare sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty, belong­ing, or pow­er, or to sim­ply gain the mon­e­tary rewards that come with theft and loot­ing. The pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion will­ing to join a riot to attain these things like­ly reflects the pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion oth­er­wise cut off from them in nor­mal times. Few riot­ers are mar­ried men who must be at work at 8:00 AM the next morning.” This was quite good. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Sim­plic­i­ty Is The Ene­my & Bad Apples (Jonathan Last, The Bul­wark): “What’s hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca right now is large and com­pli­cat­ed. We have a series of prob­lems, some of which over­lap, some of which do not. And attempts to solve them have, his­tor­i­cal­ly, been stymied by con­flat­ing them and believ­ing that they are sim­ple and connected.”
  2. On the pan­dem­ic:
    • The Trea­son of Epi­demi­ol­o­gists (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “The sim­ple fact is that what­ev­er leg­is­la­tion we’re going to get, we’d still get if the protests stopped this morn­ing. In fact, a rea­son­able per­son would con­clude we’d be more like­ly to get it if they stopped now, because the more these things go on, the more oppo­si­tion and resent­ment will grow.” 
    • Relat­ed: “A thread about how protest­ing dur­ing a pan­dem­ic was described when con­ser­v­a­tives were doing it” (Matt Walsh, Twit­ter)
    • Sur­gi­sphere: gov­ern­ments and WHO changed Covid-19 pol­i­cy based on sus­pect data from tiny US com­pa­ny (Melis­sa Dav­ey, Stephanie Kirch­gaess­ner & Sarah Bose­ley, The Guardian): “The World Health Orga­ni­za­tion and a num­ber of nation­al gov­ern­ments have changed their Covid-19 poli­cies and treat­ments on the basis of flawed data from a lit­tle-known US health­care ana­lyt­ics com­pa­ny, also call­ing into ques­tion the integri­ty of key stud­ies pub­lished in some of the world’s most pres­ti­gious med­ical jour­nals. A Guardian inves­ti­ga­tion can reveal the US-based com­pa­ny Sur­gi­sphere, whose hand­ful of employ­ees appear to include a sci­ence fic­tion writer and an adult-con­tent mod­el, has pro­vid­ed data for mul­ti­ple stud­ies on Covid-19 co-authored by its chief exec­u­tive, but has so far failed to ade­quate­ly explain its data or methodology.” This is actu­al­ly nuts.
    • The C.D.C. Wait­ed ‘Its Entire Exis­tence for This Moment.’ What Went Wrong? (Eric Lip­ton, Abby Good­nough, Michael D. Shear, Megan Twohey, Apoor­va Mandavilli,Sheri Fink & Mark Walk­er, New York Times): “…the C.D.C. is risk-averse, per­fec­tion­ist and ill suit­ed to impro­vis­ing in a quick­ly evolv­ing cri­sis — par­tic­u­lar­ly one that shuts down the coun­try and par­a­lyzes the economy.”
  3. The Muse­um of the Bible is win­ning over some of its biggest crit­ics: Jew­ish schol­ars (Men­achem Weck­er, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Mintz believes Jew­ish schol­ars who denounced evan­gel­i­cal tones in the muse­um may have done so because they don’t see eye-to-eye with its polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive own­ers. But, she notes, the muse­um itself caters to Jews. She cites a time when it arranged kosher food for an event in which her hus­band, an Ortho­dox rab­bi, par­tic­i­pat­ed. ‘They were just nice about it,’ she says.”
  4. Chris­t­ian Tik­Tok videos are cen­sored and delet­ed in the US, cre­ators say (Liza Van­den­boom, Reli­gion Unplugged): “Christian con­tent is often cen­sored and removed from Tik­Tok, accord­ing to sev­er­al cre­ators on the plat­form. The Chi­na-based social media app hosts short, snip­py videos rang­ing from inspi­ra­tional mini-speech­es to musi­cal and dance per­for­mances and is pop­u­lar with teenagers and young adults. The plat­form reports over 800 mil­lion active users, with 30 mil­lion active users in the U.S. Researchers have grown con­cerned over the app’s reach and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of it bring­ing Chi­nese-style cen­sor­ship to main­stream U.S. audiences.” 
  5. Tech­noc­ra­cy Is Impos­si­ble (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Leaders should pay atten­tion to sci­en­tists, dra­mat­i­cal­ly more than the cur­rent Pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion does, but an immu­nol­o­gist will say one thing, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent, an econ­o­mist some­thing alto­geth­er oth­er. The var­i­ous sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic dis­ci­plines will not speak with a sin­gle voice, indeed will not speak at all: indi­vid­ual schol­ars will speak, and what they say will arise from a com­bi­na­tion of their schol­ar­ly exper­tise and their beliefs (derived from non-sci­en­tif­ic sources) about what mat­ters most in life, and a good polit­i­cal leader will have the gen­er­al intel­li­gence and moral dis­cern­ment to sift the var­i­ous mes­sages he or she receives and make a deci­sion based on all the rel­e­vant input.”
  6. There was a fight at the New York Times this week. I’m not actu­al­ly that inter­est­ed in the op-ed that pro­voked it, but I am quite inter­est­ed in how the fight is play­ing out. The New York Times occu­pies a spe­cial place in the Amer­i­can media ecosys­tem and fights like this illu­mi­nate some of what is hap­pen­ing beneath the sur­face.
    • New York Times Jour­nal­ists Scared To Have an Op-Ed Page (Matt Welch, Rea­son): “This pub­lish­ing flap, which in com­par­a­tive impor­tance is a sput­ter­ing match next to the hell-infer­no of spring 2020, is nonethe­less sym­bol­ic of a shift bear­ing more tec­ton­ic heft. Our lib­er­al insti­tu­tions, not unlike our con­ser­v­a­tive intel­lec­tu­als, are nois­i­ly aban­don­ing liberalism.”
    • The Inside Sto­ry of the Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times (Rich Lowry, Nation­al Review): “This process, with back and forth over phone, email, and text, extend­ed through the morn­ing and after­noon on Wednes­day. Cot­ton and his team then signed off on the final ver­sion around 2:30 p.m. It was post­ed short­ly after. Then, all hell broke loose.”
    • A Twit­ter thread from NY Times opin­ion colum­nist Bari Weiss: “The civ­il war inside The New York Times between the (most­ly young) wokes the (most­ly 40+) lib­er­als is the same one rag­ing inside oth­er pub­li­ca­tions and com­pa­nies across the coun­try. The dynam­ic is always the same. (Thread.)”
    • ‘New York Times’ Staffers Grill Lead­er­ship Over Tom Cot­ton Op-Ed Dur­ing All-Hands (Lau­ra Wag­n­er, Vice): “…the most infor­ma­tive parts of the meet­ing came from the lengthy ques­tion-and-answer por­tion. Staffers asked for an autop­sy of the piece and how it was pub­lished; if com­pa­ny lead­ers were plan­ning to address James Bennet’s lead­er­ship of the opin­ion sec­tion, which has had ‘several mis­fires’; whether Opin­ion staff edi­tor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘openly bad mouth[ing] younger news col­leagues on a plat­form where they, because of strict com­pa­ny pol­i­cy, could not defend them­selves’; whether the opin­ion sec­tion had sug­gest­ed the top­ic of the op-ed to Cot­ton; and what the Times would do to help retain and sup­port Black employees.”
    • After staff uproar, New York Times says Sen. Tom Cot­ton op-ed urg­ing mil­i­tary incur­sion into U.S. cities ‘did not meet our stan­dard­s’ (Ela­he Iza­di, Paul Farhi and Sarah Elli­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Because of its promi­nence, the Times’s op-ed page and colum­nists often gen­er­ate con­tro­ver­sy, though rarely from with­in the news­pa­per itself. There was wide­spread crit­i­cism in Feb­ru­ary, for exam­ple, when the Times pub­lished an op-ed from a mem­ber of Afghanistan’s Tal­iban, par­tic­u­lar­ly because the paper failed to iden­ti­fy the author’s his­to­ry of involve­ment in ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties. There was lit­tle inter­nal oppo­si­tion to the col­umn, how­ev­er, at least none that spilled into pub­lic view.”
    • New York Times has stopped defend­ing its Tom Cot­ton op-ed (Erik Wem­ple, Wash­ing­ton Post): “As Jack Shafer has not­ed, the Times opin­ion page exists to pro­voke. It has run op-eds by Moam­mar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin and oth­ers. In a Decem­ber 2017 staff meet­ing, Ben­net addressed the dif­fi­cul­ties of judg­ing when a piece goes too far: ‘We’ve pub­lished Vladimir Putin,’ Ben­net said in the meet­ing. ‘Should we not allow Vladimir Putin into our pages? It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say that that would be doing a ser­vice to our read­ers. But as you can see, I mean, I strug­gle to artic­u­late what those bound­aries are.’”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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