Kicking Off The 2019 Chi Alpha Summer Reading Project

book cover - celebration of discipline

Blog read­ers: Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford is engag­ing in our annu­al sum­mer read­ing project. As we read through Cel­e­bra­tion of Dis­ci­pline by Richard Fos­ter, I’ll post my thoughts here (which will large­ly con­sist of excerpts I found insight­ful). They are all tagged sum­mer-read­ing-project-2019. The sched­ule is online.

Celebration of Discipline — Introduction and Chapter One

Remem­ber that we’re sav­ing the pref­ace and fore­word for lat­er. For now we’re just read­ing the intro­duc­tion and the first chap­ter.

Chapter One — The Spiritual Disciplines: Door To Liberation

“Super­fi­cial­i­ty is the curse of our age. The doc­trine of instant sat­is­fac­tion is a pri­ma­ry spir­i­tu­al prob­lem. The des­per­ate need today is not for a greater num­ber of intel­li­gent peo­ple, or gift­ed peo­ple, but for deep peo­ple.”

page 1

BOOM! What a start to a book. Fos­ter wrote those words over 40 years ago and the prob­lem has only inten­si­fied. Our soci­ety has col­lec­tive­ly become the thorny soil in Matthew 13:22 — the wor­ries of this world choke out the work of the Spir­it with­in us.

The solu­tion, Fos­ter says, is to cul­ti­vate a pat­tern of liv­ing that breeds depth. Things like prayer and fast­ing and con­fes­sion are like a firmware update for our souls.

The prob­lem is that we’re not sure how to do these things. This book is meant to be a how-to man­u­al to help us emu­late the dis­ci­plined lifestyles por­trayed in the Bible.

The dis­ci­plines Fos­ter empha­sizes are vital because with­out them we have only willpow­er to rely upon, and willpow­er does­n’t work as well as we hope.

Willpow­er will nev­er suc­ceed in deal­ing with the deeply ingrained habits of sin. Emmet Fox writes, “As soon as you resist men­tal­ly any unde­sir­able or unwant­ed cir­cum­stance, you there­by endow it with more power–power which it will use against you, and you will have deplet­ed your own resources to that exact same extent.”

page 5

With the dis­ci­plines we are train­ing, with­out them we are only try­ing. Train­ing trumps try­ing.

This gets close to the the­sis under­ly­ing the entire book — the for­ma­tion of habits like fast­ing and prayer bear fruit in a way that willpow­er does not. As Fos­ter observes:

“A farmer is help­less to grow grain; all he can do is pro­vide the right con­di­tions for the grow­ing of grain. He cul­ti­vates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the nat­ur­al forces of the earth take over, and up comes the grain. This is the way it is with the Spir­i­tu­al Disciplines—they are a way of sow­ing to the Spir­it. The Dis­ci­plines are God’s way of get­ting us into the ground; they put us where he can work with­in us and trans­form us. By them­selves the Spir­i­tu­al Dis­ci­plines can do noth­ing; they can only get us to the place where some­thing can be done. They are God’s means of grace.”

page 7

Next week we begin get­ting prac­ti­cal as we study the dis­ci­pline of Chris­t­ian med­i­ta­tion. I hope you’re excit­ed!

UPDATE: I did­n’t include any excerpts from the intro­duc­tion but I high­ly rec­om­mend read­ing it and espe­cial­ly focus­ing on the key role laypeo­ple played in men­tor­ing this pas­tor. Assum­ing your call is to the mar­ket­place or acad­e­mia, make it your ambi­tion to grow into a Chris­t­ian layper­son mature enough to dis­ci­ple a pas­tor. How awe­some would that be?

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 207

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. Eleven arrests, dou­ble the tear gas fired dur­ing Occu­py move­ment and 81 injured: police chief paints dis­turb­ing pic­ture of Hong Kong extra­di­tion bill protests (Ng Kang-chung & Christy Leung, South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): “In a post­mortem on Thurs­day of the clash­es between offi­cers and pro­test­ers who had sur­round­ed the Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil build­ing and admin­is­tra­tive head­quar­ters the day before, Com­mis­sion­er of Police Stephen Lo Wai-chung said more than 150 rounds of tear gas had been fired – almost dou­ble that on the first day of the Occu­py demon­stra­tions – and about 20 bean­bag rounds, as well as ‘several’ rounds of rub­ber bullets.” See also these relat­ed pho­tos from AP.
    • What Hong Kong’s Free­dom Means to the World (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “Circa 2019, Hong Kong is a study in the creep­ing pow­er and increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of autoc­ra­cy. While it is pos­si­ble there could be a Tianan­men-like mas­sacre in the streets of Hong Kong, it is more like­ly that its main­land over­lords will opt for more sub­tle ways of chok­ing off Hong Kong’s remain­ing auton­o­my and freedoms.”
    • Hong Kong and the Future of Free­dom (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “When Ronald Rea­gan called the Sovi­et Union ‘the focus of evil in the mod­ern world,’ one promi­nent lib­er­al writer denounced him as ‘primitive.’ But it was such rhetoric that gave courage to dis­si­dents and dream­ers on the oth­er side of the wall. What’s real­ly prim­i­tive is to look upon the oppres­sion of oth­ers and, whether out of defi­cient sym­pa­thy or exces­sive sophis­ti­ca­tion, remain silent.”
  2. The Pol­i­tics of Dystopia (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Liberalism has nev­er done as well as it thinks at resolv­ing its own crises. America’s gravest moral evil, chat­tel slav­ery, was defeat­ed by an author­i­tar­i­an pres­i­dent in a reli­gious civ­il war, not by pro­ce­du­ral­ism or con­sti­tu­tion­al debate. The cri­sis of the 1930s end­ed hap­pi­ly for lib­er­al­ism because a reac­tionary impe­ri­al­ist with­stood Adolf Hitler and a rev­o­lu­tion­ary Bol­she­vik crushed him. The lib­er­al peace that fol­lowed may depend on fear of the atom­ic bomb.”
    • Relat­ed: A High-School Porn Star’s Cry for Help (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The prob­lem is that there are some very old human impuls­es that must now con­tend with porn. One of them is the ten­den­cy of deeply trou­bled teenage girls to act out sex­u­al­ly as a kind of dis­tress sig­nal, an attempt to get the atten­tion of adults who may not be get­ting the mes­sage that they’re in a crisis.”
    • Relat­ed? JON STEWART Goes OFF On Con­gress (YouTube): a remark­able nine-minute clip. The next day the bill was passed in com­mit­tee and now awaits a full vote.
  3. The restau­rant own­er who asked for 1‑star Yelp reviews (Zachary Crock­ett, The Hus­tle): “In 2014, chef Davide Cer­re­ti­ni adver­tised a spe­cial that would for­ev­er change his fate: Any­one who left his restau­rant a 1‑star review on Yelp would get 25% off a pizza.” This is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Her Evan­gel­i­cal Megachurch Was Her World. Then Her Daugh­ter Said She Was Molest­ed by a Min­is­ter. (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Ms. Bragg said that all she want­ed was a church home that would care for her fam­i­ly. Evan­gel­i­cals in Dal­las are enam­ored with the Vil­lage, with Mr. Chan­dler and with all the church rep­re­sents, she said recent­ly. She start­ed to cry.”
    • That strong New York Times #Church­Too hor­ror sto­ry – with clues point­ing to big SBC issues (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “The auton­o­my of the local con­gre­ga­tion is a con­cept at the very heart of what Bap­tists (and oth­er “free church” bod­ies) believe about THE CHURCH, as in the New Tes­ta­ment Body of Christ. Ask­ing Bap­tists to tweak that doc­trine — cre­at­ing an author­i­ta­tive insti­tu­tion to han­dle this cri­sis — would be like ask­ing Catholics to knock the pope off the Throne of St. Peter.”
    • Matt Chan­dler’s South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion ‘inter­view’ shows how not to deal with bad press (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Until these pas­tors wise up and decide to take abuse seri­ous­ly — don’t assign a junior staff mem­ber to the prob­lem — we’re going to keep on report­ing more of these cas­es. To para­phrase a George San­tayana quote, Bap­tists who do not learn his­to­ry are doomed to repeat it again and again and again.”
  5. A Soci­ol­o­gist of Reli­gion on Protes­tants, Porn, and the “Purity Indus­tri­al Com­plex” (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “What I found is that, what­ev­er we think pornog­ra­phy is doing, those effects tend to be ampli­fied when we’re talk­ing about con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants. It seems to be unique­ly harm­ful to con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants’ men­tal health, their sense of self, their own identities—certainly their inti­mate relationships—in ways that don’t tend to be as harm­ful for peo­ple who don’t have that kind of moral prob­lem with it.” Chotin­er is inter­view­ing Samuel Per­ry, a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa.
  6. The Rise Of Pro­gres­sive Occultism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, The Amer­i­can Inter­est): “For an increas­ing num­ber of left-lean­ing millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any orga­nized religion—occult spir­i­tu­al­i­ty isn’t just a form of per­son­al prac­tice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a meta­phys­i­cal can­vas for the Amer­i­can cul­ture wars in the post-Trump era: pit­ting the self-iden­ti­fied Davids of seem­ing­ly sec­u­lar pro­gres­sivism against the Goliath of nation­al­ist evan­gel­i­cal Christianity.”
    • The arti­cle ends with an amaz­ing quote: “Back in 1992, Chris­t­ian broad­cast­er Pat Robert­son warned of the dan­gers of fem­i­nism, pre­dict­ing that it would induce ‘women to leave their husbands.…practice witch­craft, destroy cap­i­tal­ism and become lesbians.’ Many of today’s witch­es would hap­pi­ly agree.” 👀
  7. Is Chris­tian­i­ty los­ing to Islam? (Paul Seabright, Asia Times): “On a world scale – what­ev­er pop­ulists may say – Chris­tian­i­ty is not strug­gling; it is in more vig­or­ous shape than it has ever been. And the mar­ket­place is where most of the reli­gious action is going to take place in this cen­tu­ry. As in many oth­er mar­ket­places, there are large returns to economies of scale for those who can work out how to exploit them. That is why cor­po­rate reli­gion is here to stay – and why we should expect it to con­sol­i­date its dominance.” The author is an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor in France.

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 Why Being a Fos­ter Child Made Me a Con­ser­v­a­tive (Rob Hen­der­son, New York Times): “Individuals have rights. But they also have respon­si­bil­i­ties. For instance, when I say par­ents should pri­or­i­tize their chil­dren over their careers, there is a sense of unease among my peers. They think I want to blame indi­vid­u­als rather than a neb­u­lous foe like pover­ty. They are most­ly right.” The author just grad­u­at­ed from Yale. Worth read­ing regard­less of your polit­i­cal alle­giances. First shared in vol­ume 153.

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 206

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. 30 Years After Tianan­men, a Chi­nese Mil­i­tary Insid­er Warns: Nev­er For­get (Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “…Ms. Jiang’s deci­sion to chal­lenge the silence car­ries an extra polit­i­cal charge because she is not only an army vet­er­an but also the daugh­ter of the mil­i­tary elite. Her father was a gen­er­al, and she was born and raised in mil­i­tary com­pounds. She proud­ly enlist­ed in the People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army about 50 years ago, and in pho­tos from her time as a mil­i­tary jour­nal­ist, she stands beam­ing in her green army uni­form, a note­book in hand and cam­era hang­ing from her neck.”
  2. Clarence Thomas’s Dan­ger­ous Idea (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And in any oth­er area of pol­i­cy Thomas’s point about how legal abor­tion appears, in the aggre­gate, to act in racist and eugenic ways would be tak­en as an indi­ca­tor that some­thing more than just eman­ci­pa­tion is at work. ”
  3. If you have not been fol­low­ing it, a remark­able argu­ment has devel­oped in the world of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive intel­li­gentsia. The quick­ness with which oth­ers have jumped into shows that there’s a real divi­sion here.
    • Against David French-ism (Sohrab Ahmari, First Things): “Progressives under­stand that cul­ture war means dis­cred­it­ing their oppo­nents and weak­en­ing or destroy­ing their insti­tu­tions. Con­ser­v­a­tives should approach the cul­ture war with a sim­i­lar real­ism. Civil­i­ty and decen­cy are sec­ondary val­ues. They reg­u­late com­pli­ance with an estab­lished order and ortho­doxy. We should seek to use these val­ues to enforce our order and our ortho­doxy, not pre­tend that they could ever be neu­tral. To rec­og­nize that enmi­ty is real is its own kind of moral duty.”
    • What Sohrab Ahmari Gets Wrong (David French, Nation­al Review): “I firm­ly believe that the defense of these polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al val­ues must be con­duct­ed in accor­dance with scrip­tur­al admo­ni­tions to love your ene­mies, to bless those who per­se­cute you, with full knowl­edge that the ‘Lord’s ser­van­t’ must be ‘kind to every­one, able to teach, and patient­ly endure evil.’”
    • What A Clash Between Con­ser­v­a­tives Reveals (Alan Jacobs, The Atlantic): “It’s impor­tant to note that Ahmari sees the dif­fer­ences between him and French as root­ed, ulti­mate­ly, in their dif­fer­ent Chris­t­ian tra­di­tions: Catholi­cism for Ahmari—who recent­ly pub­lished a mem­oir of his conversion—and evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tantism. But whether this is indeed the heart of the mat­ter, the dis­pute so far hasn’t fall­en out that way. Some Catholics are with French, some Protes­tants with Ahmari.”
      • A fol­low-up piece Jacobs pub­lished on his own blog, well worth read­ing on its own. Fair Play To You (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “Conscience exemp­tions ain’t what they used to be — about that there is sure­ly no dis­agree­ment. The dis­pute is sim­ply whether that’s good or bad.” This post con­tains a beau­ti­ful imag­i­nary dia­log which I high­ly com­mend to you — read that if you read noth­ing else.
    • The Ahmari/French debate: A read­ing list (Joe Carter, Acton Insti­tute): the lev­el of debate this has kicked off is amaz­ing. Click here to see all the ins and outs.
  4. These Men Say the Boy Scouts’ Sex Abuse Prob­lem Is Worse Than Any­one Knew (Eliana Dock­ter­man, Time): “‘They were reporting…that they were a whole­some organization,’ says Tim Kos­noff, one of the attor­neys, ‘when they were kick­ing out child moles­ters at the rate of one every two days for 100 years.’”
  5. Deep­fake Pro­pa­gan­da Is Not A Real Prob­lem (Rus­sell Bran­dom, The Verge): “In any of these cas­es, attack­ers had the motive and the resources to pro­duce a deep­fake video. The tech­nol­o­gy is cheap, eas­i­ly avail­able, and tech­ni­cal­ly straight­for­ward. But giv­en the option of fab­ri­cat­ing video evi­dence, each group seems to have decid­ed it wasn’t worth the trou­ble. Instead we saw news arti­cles made up from whole cloth, or videos edit­ed to take on a sin­is­ter meaning.”
  6. There was a con­tro­ver­sy recent­ly when Trump showed up at a church and the pas­tor prayed for him.
    • On Pray­ing for the Pres­i­dent (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “What’s remark­able about this prayer is not that it hap­pened, but that it shows how thor­ough­ly the Trump era has opened the way for cyn­i­cism and out­rage over even mun­dane, pre­dictable Chris­t­ian behavior.”
    • David Platt Asks God to Grant Trump ‘All the Grace He Needs to Gov­ern’ (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Platt is in an inter­est­ing posi­tion. For years, he’s preached against the Amer­i­can focus on “self-advancement, self-esteem, and self-suf­fi­cien­cy” and “individualism, mate­ri­al­ism, and universalism.” And now he’s the pas­tor of a sub­ur­ban Wash­ing­ton con­gre­ga­tion full of Chris­tians who work on the Hill, a place once deemed ‘a holy des­ti­na­tion for GOP sen­a­tors and Bush aides.’”
    • Prayer For The Pres­i­dent (David Platt): this is Platt’s let­ter to the con­gre­ga­tion explain­ing his actions. “At the end of my ser­mon at the 1:00 wor­ship gath­er­ing, I stepped to the side for what I thought would be a cou­ple of moments in qui­et reflec­tion as we pre­pared to take the Lord’s Sup­per. But I was imme­di­ate­ly called back­stage and told that the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States was on his way to the church, would be there in a mat­ter of min­utes, and would like for us to pray for him.”
    • In case you’re won­der­ing, I would 100% have done what Platt did. And I would have done it for Oba­ma, Clin­ton, Bush, or who­ev­er. I would have done it for Nero. I can­not under­stand how this is con­tro­ver­sial or is being per­ceived as par­ti­san.
  7. Asym­met­ric Weapons Gone Bad (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Every day we do things that we can’t eas­i­ly jus­ti­fy. If some­one were to argue that we shouldn’t do the thing, they would win eas­i­ly. We would respond by cut­ting that per­son out of our life, and con­tin­u­ing to do the thing.” This entire series of arti­cles (this is the fourth, the oth­ers are linked at the top of it) is 100% worth read­ing. It’s a very inter­est­ing way to think about the lim­its of rea­son and the wis­dom hid­den in tra­di­tion.

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 Ian McE­wan ‘dubious’ about schools study­ing his books, after he helped son with essay and got a C+ (Han­nah Fur­ness, The Tele­graph): this is a real arti­cle. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 205

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. #MeToo Comes For Mar­tin Luther King (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I wish none of this were true, and per­haps we will learn when the record­ings are even­tu­al­ly released that these claims are not true, but I very much doubt it. David Garrow’s rep­u­ta­tion as a civ­il rights move­ment his­to­ri­an is beyond reproach, and as a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist, Gar­row can­not be said to have polit­i­cal motives for try­ing to dis­cred­it King. “ This is very sad. I knew King was adul­ter­ous, but these alle­ga­tions go far beyond that.
  2. Christo­pher Hitchens and his Chris­t­ian friends (Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridge­head): “Christopher Hitchens is remem­bered by the god­less as a man who tru­ly hat­ed Chris­tians and want­ed to utter­ly destroy Chris­tian­i­ty. In pub­lic, in front of his admir­ers, he main­tained that posi­tion even as the grave yawned at him. But as was always the case with Christo­pher Hitchens, there was quite a bit more to the story.”
  3. These two sto­ries are very dif­fer­ent and yet very sim­i­lar.
    • Los­ing Reli­gion and Find­ing Ecsta­sy in Hous­ton (Jia Tolenti­no, The New York­er): “I won­der if I would have stayed reli­gious if I had grown up in a place oth­er than Hous­ton and a time oth­er than now. I won­der how dif­fer­ent I would be if I had been able to find the feel­ing of devot­ed self-destruc­tion only through God. Instead, I have con­fused reli­gion with drugs, drugs with music, music with reli­gion. I can’t tell whether my incli­na­tion toward ecsta­sy is a sign that I still believe in God, or if it was only because of that ecsta­t­ic ten­den­cy that I ever believed at all.”
      • Tolenti­no has a way with words and her arti­cle, though sad, is enter­tain­ing­ly writ­ten. Over at GetRe­li­gion, Dou­glas LeBlanc offers the obser­va­tion: “Tolentino’s child­hood expe­ri­ences appar­ent­ly left her think­ing that the main point of Chris­tian­i­ty is to live in an unbreak­able bub­ble of bliss. If that’s the case, Ecsta­sy makes per­fect sense as the most tempt­ing sub­sti­tute for God.”
    • Come­di­an Pete Holmes was a good Chris­t­ian guy. Then his wife left him, and things got weird. (Daniel Burke, CNN): “…I thought that the lines were to God were closed, but they aren’t. We were taught that God spoke direct­ly to his prophets and the authors of the New Tes­ta­ment, and then Paul, and then it was over. And then I took mush­rooms, and I was like, ‘It ain’t over!’”
  4. Can We Believe? (Andrew Kla­van, City Jour­nal): “In any case, sci­en­tists used to accuse reli­gious peo­ple of invent­ing a ‘God of the Gaps’—that is, using reli­gion to explain away what sci­ence had not yet uncov­ered. But mul­ti­vers­es and sim­u­la­tions seem very much like a Sci­ence of the Gaps, jer­ry-rigged noth­ings designed to cir­cum­vent the sim­plest expla­na­tion for the real­i­ty we know.”
    • This is the same Andrew Kla­van who spoke on cam­pus recent­ly. I was unable to attend his talk (being busy preach­ing at the same time), but every­one I know who went found it quite com­pelling despite the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing it.
  5. See the World Like a Title IX Bureau­crat (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “[The Prince­ton stu­dents’ pro­pos­als] illus­trate an under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed ten­sion in the approach of today’s stu­dent activists, who simul­ta­ne­ous­ly express out­rage at the bad behav­ior of admin­is­tra­tive bureau­cra­cies and fight to expand their size and pow­er… Prince­ton bureau­crats have been focused on cam­pus sex­u­al assault for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry now. And in the telling of the stu­dent activists, they’ve yet to meet even min­i­mal eth­i­cal and pro­ce­dur­al stan­dards. So why pour mil­lions more into the same hier­ar­chies, expand­ing the might, mea­sured in total staff, of their leaders?”
  6. Five Insights Chris­tian­i­ty Brings to Pol­i­tics (Michael Math­e­son Miller, Law & Lib­er­ty): “It is impor­tant to note that a Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is not sim­ply a sec­u­lar vision of gov­ern­ment with reli­gion sprin­kled on top. Sec­u­lar­ism is not neu­tral. A Chris­t­ian vision of gov­ern­ment is ground­ed in key the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal ideas about the nature of God and real­i­ty, the impor­tance of jus­tice, the val­ue of free­dom, the role of the fam­i­ly, and a rich under­stand­ing of the human per­son as cre­at­ed in the image of God, made for flour­ish­ing, and called to an eter­nal destiny.” This arti­cle is a par­tic­u­lar­ly Catholic way of think­ing about this sub­ject (one of sev­er­al Catholic approach­es, I should add).
    • On a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal note: The man who pre­dict­ed Trump’s vic­to­ry says Democ­rats may have to impeach him to have a chance in 2020 (Chris Cil­liz­za, CNN): “Lichtman, a pro­fes­sor at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Wash­ing­ton, DC, was the most promi­nent voice pre­dict­ing Don­ald Trump’s vic­to­ry in the run-up to the 2016 elec­tion. When Trump won, it marked the 9th(!) straight pres­i­den­tial elec­tion where Licht­man had cor­rect­ly pre­dict­ed the Elec­toral Col­lege win­ner. (That’s all the way back to 1984, for you math wizards.)”
      • Caveat lec­tor. There are a lot of pun­dits, and at least one of them being right about the last 9 elec­tions by chance isn’t that improb­a­ble (unless I’m miss­ing some­thing there are only 512 dif­fer­ent out­comes if you are only con­sid­er­ing the two major par­ties). Inter­est­ing nonethe­less.
  7. Self-cen­sor­ship on Cam­pus Is Bad for Sci­ence (Lau­na Mar­jo­la, The Atlantic): “Sadly, stu­dents do not seem to real­ize that their good inten­tions may lead them to resist learn­ing sci­en­tif­ic facts, and can even harm their own goal of help­ing women and eth­nic minorities.” The author is a biol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at Williams Col­lege.

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 If I Were 22 Again (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “There have been about 18,340 days since I turned 22, and I think I have read my Bible on more of those days than I have eat­en. I have cer­tain­ly read my Bible on more of those days that I have watched tele­vi­sion or videos.… Read your Bible every day of your life. If you have time for break­fast, nev­er say that you don’t have time for God’s word.” This whole thing is real­ly good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 151.

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 204

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.

This one is com­ing out extra-ear­ly today because my sched­ule has been and will con­tin­ue to be absurd­ly busy for the next bit. Prayers appre­ci­at­ed!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How lawyers are dis­tort­ing reli­gious free­dom (Asma Uddin, Deseret News): “Last sum­mer, the court decid­ed Trump v. Hawaii (the trav­el ban case) only three weeks after it decid­ed Mas­ter­piece Cakeshop v. Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion, which involved a Chris­t­ian bak­er who refused on reli­gious grounds to bake a wed­ding cake for a gay cou­ple…. The stark con­trast in the court’s approach to anti-reli­gious hos­til­i­ty raised the ques­tion: Does reli­gious free­dom apply equal­ly to Mus­lims and Chris­tians? But in all the pan­ic and pun­dit­ry that ensued, Amer­i­cans over­looked a crit­i­cal fac­tor: The lawyers chal­leng­ing the ban left out legal argu­ments under the Free Exer­cise Clause that, if not omit­ted, might have changed the outcome.” This is a very good (and some­what dis­cour­ag­ing) op-ed.
  2. Lit­er­a­ture as Flat­tery (James McEl­roy, Amer­i­can Affairs Jour­nal): “Contemporary Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture is cre­ative­ly exhaust­ed because free indi­rect style places the read­er above the char­ac­ter­s…. Char­ac­ters have to be blind to the obvi­ous for the sto­ry to work. We are told this style is all about engen­der­ing empa­thy, but in actu­al­i­ty it func­tions by cre­at­ing stunt­ed char­ac­ters. The read­er is trained to look down at oth­ers, and the writer becomes obse­quious to the oh-so-intel­li­gent read­er­s’ egos, always telling them, ‘Look how smart you are.’”
  3. The APA Meet­ing: A Pho­to-Essay (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex): “Were there real­ly more than twice as many ses­sions on glob­al warm­ing as on obses­sive com­pul­sive dis­or­der? Three times as many on immi­gra­tion as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exag­ger­ate this. There was still a lot of real­ly meaty sci­en­tif­ic dis­cus­sion if you sought it out. But over­all the bal­ance was pret­ty strik­ing…. If you want to mod­el the APA, you could do worse than a giant fire­hose that takes in phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny mon­ey at one end, and shoots lec­tures about social jus­tice out the other.” This is fun­ny, ram­bling, insight­ful com­men­tary on the Amer­i­can Psy­chi­atric Association’s annu­al meet­ing.
  4. Two Stan­ford sto­ries:
    • What I Learned When I Called Out an Anti-Semit­ic Car­toon­ist at Stan­ford Ear­li­er This Month (Ari Hoff­man, Mosa­ic): “Perhaps my most sur­pris­ing real­iza­tion was how few are those will­ing to speak pub­licly, under their own name. After my op-ed appeared, some indi­vid­u­als approached me to say they agreed with me but didn’t have the nec­es­sary elo­quence to speak out. To them I would reply: what mat­ters is not poet­ics but principles.” What I found fas­ci­nat­ing about this arti­cle is how uni­ver­sal the prin­ci­ples he artic­u­lates are. If you are a Chris­t­ian debat­ing whether and how to speak out about an issue that grieves you, you will find help­ful advice here.
    • From Mid­west Drug Deal­er to The Farm: Jason Spyres Shares His Inspir­ing Sto­ry (Yas­min Sam­rai, Stan­ford Review): “To jus­ti­fy his crim­i­nal behav­iour, he told him­self that though sell­ing pot was ille­gal, it wasn’t immoral. This the­o­ry came crash­ing down when two gangs broke into his house, split his head open, and robbed him. When Spyres dis­cov­ered that the bur­glars had near­ly mis­tak­en his house for his neighbor’s, he real­ized that sell­ing drugs put oth­er people’s safe­ty in jeop­ardy. ‘I was shocked and sick­ened with myself,’ he recalled. ‘I was part of a black mar­ket and my actions had unin­tend­ed consequences.’” What a wild sto­ry.
  5. The Impos­si­ble Future of Chris­tians in the Mid­dle East (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The num­bers in Iraq are espe­cial­ly stark: Before the Amer­i­can inva­sion, as many as 1.4 mil­lion Chris­tians lived in the coun­try. Today, few­er than 250,000 remain—an 80 per­cent drop in less than two decades.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Reli­gious Men Can Be Devot­ed Dads, Too (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Jason S. Car­roll & Lau­rie DeRose, New York Times): “It turns out that fem­i­nism and faith both have high expec­ta­tions of hus­bands and fathers, if for very dif­fer­ent ide­o­log­i­cal rea­sons, and that both result in high­er-qual­i­ty mar­riages for women.”
    • The title is fun­ny and was prob­a­bly not cho­sen by the authors (that’s usu­al­ly the case in news­pa­pers). This op-ed is a sum­ma­ry of some find­ings from their larg­er report The Ties That Bind: Is Faith a Glob­al Force for Good or Ill in the Fam­i­ly? , where they dis­cov­er, among oth­er things, that “When it comes to rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty in het­ero­sex­u­al rela­tion­ships, high­ly reli­gious cou­ples enjoy high­er-qual­i­ty rela­tion­ships and more sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, com­pared to less/mixed reli­gious cou­ples and sec­u­lar cou­ples. For instance, women in high­ly reli­gious rela­tion­ships are about 50% more like­ly to report that they are strong­ly sat­is­fied with their sex­u­al rela­tion­ship than their sec­u­lar and less reli­gious counterparts.”
  7. Why Chris­tian­i­ty Quit Grow­ing in Korea (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, The Gospel Coali­tion): “By 1970, 18 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion was Chris­t­ian; by 2000, it was 31 per­cent. (Those counts include Protes­tants and Catholics.) By 2006, South Korea was send­ing out more mis­sion­ar­ies than any oth­er coun­try except the much-larg­er Unit­ed States. By 2015, Seoul was behind only Hous­ton and Dal­las in num­ber of megachurches—and Seoul’s were much larg­er…. And then, things stalled. Growth slowed way down, and church atten­dance began to shrink.” A long and very inter­est­ing arti­cle.

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 provoca­tive “In Defense of Flog­ging” (Peter Moskos, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — the author is a for­mer police offi­cer and now a crim­i­nol­o­gist at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York. This one was first shared back before I start­ed send­ing these emails in a blog post called Pun­ish­ment.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

UPDATE: I mis­tak­en­ly attrib­uted the sto­ry about Jason Spyres to the Stan­ford Dai­ly. It was actu­al­ly in the Stan­ford Review. I’ve cor­rect­ed the offend­ing para­graph.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 203

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 Heart of the Evan­gel­i­cal Cri­sis (Mark Gal­li, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “My next thought was, ‘Well, if I call myself a Chris­t­ian, I should have greater love and desire to know God more deeply. Per­haps I should pray for that.’ And that’s when some­thing occurred to me with great force: I wasn’t sure I want­ed that. I rec­og­nize that was an odd admis­sion for a per­son who claimed to be a good Chris­t­ian. But there it was. I didn’t think I real­ly want­ed to love God more. The rea­sons for that are com­plex and will be touched on lat­er, but the bot­tom line was: I real­ly didn’t want to love God.” First essay in a series.
  2. Abor­tion in Amer­i­ca, explained in 10 facts (Anna North, Vox): “Even though the abor­tion rate has declined, the pro­ce­dure remains com­mon­place. Accord­ing to a 2017 analy­sis by the Guttmach­er Insti­tute, 23.7 per­cent of women in the Unit­ed States will have an abor­tion by the age of 45. Nine­teen per­cent will have one by age 30, and 4.6 per­cent will have one by age 20.”
    • Debunk­ing 9 Myths Sur­round­ing Alabama’s Abor­tion Law (Car­ole Noviel­li, Live Action): “This bill, HB314, was spon­sored by a female law­mak­er, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ter­ri Collins, and was signed into law by female Gov­er­nor Kay Ivey. Pro-life orga­ni­za­tions are led by women. The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court deci­sion, on the oth­er hand, was imposed by all men.”
    • Alaba­ma and Geor­gia Are Throw­ing Down the Gaunt­let against Roe. Good. (David French, Nation­al Review): dif­fi­cult to excerpt. A good sum­ma­ry of the legal strat­e­gy the south­ern states are pur­su­ing.
    • I’m an anti-abor­tion Chris­t­ian. But Alabama’s ban will do more harm than good. (Kather­ine Kelaidis, Vox): “Draconian bans on abor­tion — and frankly any­thing oth­er than lib­er­al access to abor­tions along with com­pre­hen­sive sex edu­ca­tion and access to con­tra­cep­tion — fail to pro­tect human life, both in the womb and out­side of it. This, in itself, should be intol­er­a­ble to any Chris­t­ian, par­tic­u­lar­ly one who views abor­tion as moral­ly suspect.”
    • Why some anti-abor­tion con­ser­v­a­tives think Alabama’s abor­tion law goes too far (Jane Coas­ton, Vox): “A 2018 Gallup poll found that just 29 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe abor­tion should be legal in all cir­cum­stances, but that out­weighs the 18 per­cent of Amer­i­cans who believe abor­tion should be ille­gal in all cir­cum­stances. The vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans think abor­tion should be legal, with restric­tions of some kind (abor­tions being per­mit­ted only with­in the first three months of preg­nan­cy, for example).”
    • That lat­est Pat Robert­son juridi­cal quote: Jour­nal­ists may want to note these inter­est­ing facts (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Robertson is (a) mak­ing a com­ment about legal ques­tions linked to this Alaba­ma law and, (b) also about the polit­i­cal real­i­ties sur­round­ing it. Thus, I am ask­ing: Should jour­nal­ists con­sid­er adding one or two sen­tences to their reports not­ing that Robert­son is (a) a grad­u­ate of Yale Law School and (b) some­one who grew up in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., as the son of a U.S. Sen­a­tor? How many read­ers know these two facts about this famous reli­gious leader?” Wait. What? I had no idea.
    • Most Abor­tion-Mind­ed Women Aren’t Cal­cu­lat­ing Killers. They’re Afraid (Maria Baer, Gospel Coali­tion): the whole thing is worth read­ing — this bit caught my atten­tion but isn’t real­ly close to her main point: “Evil often begets more evil. While many who sup­port so-called abor­tion rights believe they’re serv­ing needy women, they’re over­look­ing one crit­i­cal real­i­ty: Women are often brought—reluctantly—to the abor­tion doc­tor. These women are com­pelled toward abor­tion not by their own empow­er­ing, my-body-is-my-own sense of auton­o­my, but by anoth­er per­son seek­ing con­trol. Angry boyfriends, angry hus­bands, angry moth­ers, angry employers—these are so often the wind at the back of an abor­tion-mind­ed woman.”
  3. Too many men: Chi­na and India bat­tle with the con­se­quences of gen­der imbal­ance (Simon Deny­er & Annie Gowen,South Chi­na Morn­ing Post): this arti­cle is a year old, it’s long but good. “Nothing like this has hap­pened in human his­to­ry. A com­bi­na­tion of cul­tur­al pref­er­ences, gov­ern­ment decree and mod­ern med­ical tech­nol­o­gy in the world’s two largest coun­tries has cre­at­ed a gen­der imbal­ance on a con­ti­nen­tal scale. Men out­num­ber women by 70 mil­lion in Chi­na and Indi­a…. In any giv­en age group, a pro­por­tion of men will fail to find brides, but they will stay in the mar­riage mar­ket, com­pet­ing with younger men to mar­ry younger women. The dis­pro­por­tion keeps grow­ing. By 2050, French demog­ra­ph­er Christophe Guil­mo­to esti­mates, there could be between 150 to 190 men for every 100 women in China’s mar­riage market.”
  4. A few brief obser­va­tions about think­ing clear­ly:
    • Account­ing Iden­ti­ties and the Implic­it The­o­ry of Iner­tia (Nick Rowe, Worth­while Cana­di­an Ini­tia­tive): “Animals can be divid­ed into Car­ni­vores and Non-Car­ni­vores: A = C + NC. There­fore, if we add some wolves to an island of sheep, the num­ber of ani­mals on that island will increase. It’s easy to see why that argu­ment might not be right. Wolves kill sheep. But if you did­n’t know that fact about wolves and sheep, the argu­ment looks very appeal­ing. But the equa­tion A = C + NC tells us absolute­ly noth­ing about the world; it’s an account­ing iden­ti­ty that is true by def­i­n­i­tion. The only thing it tells you is how I have cho­sen to divide up the world into parts. And I can choose an infi­nite num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways to divide the world up into parts.” This is an impor­tant insight.
    • Why Do Exper­i­ments Make Peo­ple Uneasy? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “One fac­tor which comes out of respon­dent com­ments is that the exper­i­ment forces peo­ple to reck­on with the idea that even experts don’t know what the right thing to do is and that con­fes­sion of igno­rance both­ers peo­ple. (This is also one rea­son why peo­ple may pre­fer pun­dits who always ‘know’ the right thing to do even when they man­i­fest­ly do not).”
    • Our first instinct is far too often wrong (Tim Har­ford, Finan­cial Times): “In a mul­ti­ple-choice test, you some­times write down an answer and then have sec­ond thoughts. Is it wise to stay with your first instincts, or bet­ter to switch? Most peo­ple would advise that the ini­tial answer is usu­al­ly bet­ter than the doubt-plagued sec­ond guess…. Researchers have been study­ing this ques­tion since the 1920s. They have over­whelm­ing­ly con­clud­ed both that indi­vid­ual answer changes are more like­ly to be from wrong to right, and that stu­dents who change their answers tend to improve their scores.”
    • The Big Sto­ry You Don’t Read About (David Brooks, New York Times): “How did we in our busi­ness get in the spot where we spend 90 per­cent of our cov­er­age on the 10 per­cent of our lives influ­enced by pol­i­tics and 10 per­cent of our cov­er­age on the 90 per­cent of our lives influ­enced by rela­tion­ship, com­mu­ni­ty and the places we live in every day?”
  5. When Male Run­ners Lose to Women (Ley­land Cec­co, The Wal­rus): “Studies are start­ing to show that male and female bod­ies respond dif­fer­ent­ly to fatigue: dur­ing long peri­ods of exer­cise, the brain mon­i­tors and triages the body’s out­put, reg­u­lat­ing feel­ings of exhaus­tion to ensure the run­ner doesn’t overex­tend them­selves. If the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem sens­es the activ­i­ty is becom­ing too intense, it reduces the muscle’s out­put…. ‘It turns out women have a slight­ly, it seems, bet­ter resis­tance to that kind of fatigue.’”
  6. The Incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of Crit­i­cal The­o­ry and Chris­tian­i­ty (Neil Shen­vi & Pat Sawyer, Gospel Coali­tion): “Christianity pro­vides us with an over­ar­ch­ing meta­nar­ra­tive that runs from cre­ation to redemp­tion: We are crea­tures made in God’s image, who have sinned against him, who need to be res­cued through the aton­ing work of Jesus, and who are called to love both God and neigh­bor. In con­trast, crit­i­cal the­o­ry is asso­ci­at­ed with a meta­nar­ra­tive that runs from oppres­sion to lib­er­a­tion: We are mem­bers either of a dom­i­nant group or of a mar­gin­al­ized group with respect to a giv­en iden­ti­ty mark­er. As such, we either need to divest our­selves of pow­er and seek to lib­er­ate oth­ers, or we need to acquire pow­er and lib­er­ate our­selves by dis­man­tling all struc­tures and insti­tu­tions that sub­ju­gate and oppress. In crit­i­cal the­o­ry, the great­est sin is oppres­sion, and the great­est virtue is the pur­suit of liberation.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): Chris­tians Can­not Be Mis­treat­ed (George Yancey, Patheos): “I believe that some indi­vid­u­als are unable to see anti-Chris­t­ian dis­crim­i­na­tion no mat­ter what evi­dence is pre­sent­ed to them. For them the cul­tur­al nar­ra­tive that Chris­tians are the dom­i­nant group is sim­ply too pow­er­ful for them to con­sid­er alter­na­tive information.” The author, whose work I have fea­tured before, is a soci­ol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Texas.
  7. The ‘3.5% Rule’: How A Small Minor­i­ty Can Change The World (David Rob­son, BBC): “Looking at hun­dreds of cam­paigns over the last cen­tu­ry, Chenoweth found that non­vi­o­lent cam­paigns are twice as like­ly to achieve their goals as vio­lent cam­paigns. And although the exact dynam­ics will depend on many fac­tors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the pop­u­la­tion active­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in the protests to ensure seri­ous polit­i­cal change.”

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 an eye-open­ing (and dis­may­ing) arti­cle, What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic). (first shared back in vol­ume 5): “one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly intervene.”

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 202

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 First Rule of Social-Media Cen­sor­ship Is That There Are No Rules (David French, Nation­al Review): “The great val­ue of view­point neu­tral­i­ty is that it com­ports with our sense of fun­da­men­tal fair­ness. It hear­kens back to the image of the blind­fold­ed Lady Jus­tice, hold­ing her scales, indif­fer­ent to the pow­er or priv­i­lege of her peti­tion­ers. Twit­ter and Face­book have removed the blind­fold, thrown away the scales, and cho­sen to wield only the sword.”
    • Relat­ed but less aggres­sive: Facebook’s Unin­tend­ed Con­se­quence (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The deep­er prob­lem is the over­whelm­ing con­cen­tra­tion of tech­ni­cal, finan­cial and moral pow­er in the hands of peo­ple who lack the train­ing, expe­ri­ence, wis­dom, trust­wor­thi­ness, humil­i­ty and incen­tives to exer­cise that pow­er responsibly.”
    • Relat­ed but with a dif­fer­ent empha­sis: The Big Tech Threat (Josh Haw­ley, First Things): “My the­sis is that the evi­dence strong­ly sug­gests there is some­thing deeply trou­bling, maybe even deeply wrong, with the entire social media econ­o­my. My the­sis is that it does not rep­re­sent a source of strength for America’s tomor­row, but is rather a source of peril.” A tran­script of a speech giv­en by a US Sen­a­tor who is a Stan­ford grad and who was speak­ing at the Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  2. We Are Tak­ing Reli­gious Free­dom Too Far (Mar­garet Ren­kl, New York Times): “Religious faith is a pri­vate mat­ter between a believ­er and God. But how a believ­er lives in com­mu­ni­ty with oth­er peo­ple is some­thing dif­fer­ent alto­geth­er. It’s time to stop giv­ing believ­ers a pass just because their beliefs hap­pen to run counter to the laws of the nation they live in.”
    • In response: A New York Times Op-Ed Is Very Wrong About Reli­gious Lib­er­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “She for­mu­lates reli­gious lib­er­ty like this: ‘In this coun­try, cit­ing reli­gious or spir­i­tu­al con­vic­tions is often a sure­fire way to get out of doing some­thing you’re required by law to do.’ This is a com­mon fram­ing on the left. Essen­tial­ly, it’s an argu­ment that reli­gious free­dom is an intru­sion into the law and that reli­gious peo­ple are engaged in a form of spe­cial plead­ing — seek­ing rights and exemp­tions unavail­able to oth­er Amer­i­cans. In real­i­ty, the First Amend­ment is supreme, and when states seek to intrude on reli­gious lib­er­ty, they’re try­ing to get out of some­thing they’re required by law to do. Respect­ing the First Amend­ment is the default oblig­a­tion of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and every state and local gov­ern­ment in the Unit­ed States.”
    • Relat­ed but on a dif­fer­ent top­ic: Health and Human Ser­vices and the Reli­gious-Lib­er­ty War (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “The con­flict between reli­gious lib­er­ty, LGBTQ rights, and abor­tion access is about to inten­si­fy. In the com­ing weeks or months, HHS is expect­ed to issue a revised ver­sion of Rule 1557 of the Afford­able Care Act, which extend­ed nondis­crim­i­na­tion pro­tec­tions to trans­gen­der peo­ple and women who have ter­mi­nat­ed preg­nan­cies. The Supreme Court is also slat­ed to con­sid­er civ­il-rights pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ indi­vid­u­als in sev­er­al high-pro­file upcom­ing cas­es; while those cas­es most­ly involve pro­tec­tions pro­vid­ed under employ­ment law, they sim­i­lar­ly pit reli­gious lib­er­ty against LGBTQ rights.”
  3. Agapáo and Philéo by the Sea of Tiberias (Ron Bel­gau, Spir­i­tu­al Friend­ship): “After break­fast, Peter and Jesus had a con­ver­sa­tion which rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion about how to under­stand the verbs for love—agapáo and philéo—used in the orig­i­nal Greek…. The pas­sage is dif­fi­cult to trans­late because although Eng­lish has always had sep­a­rate nouns for ‘love’ and ‘friendship,’ no Eng­lish speak­er pri­or to Mark Zucker­berg used ‘friend’ as a verb. Trans­la­tors, there­fore, must either trans­late both words as ‘love,’ which los­es a poten­tial nuance in the orig­i­nal, or else must try to some­how make the dif­fer­ence appar­ent in English.” This is the most sat­is­fy­ing expla­na­tion of this pas­sage I have heard.
  4. Amer­i­can church­es must reject lit­er­al­ism and admit we got it wrong on gay peo­ple (Oliv­er Thomas, USA Today): “Churches will con­tin­ue hem­or­rhag­ing mem­bers and mon­ey at an alarm­ing rate until we muster the courage to face the truth: We got it wrong on gays and les­bians. This shouldn’t alarm or sur­prise us. We have learned some things that the ancients — includ­ing Moses and Paul — sim­ply did not know. Not even Jesus…”
    • The author is a retired Amer­i­can Bap­tist min­is­ter.
    • In response: Oliv­er Thomas @USATODAY Says the Amer­i­can Church Got it Wrong on Gay People—And He’s Right (Michael Kruger, per­son­al blog): “In this way, Thomas is right. The church is killing itself, if by the ‘church’ one means the main­line denom­i­na­tions who have aban­doned bib­li­cal author­i­ty. Indeed, sta­tis­tics have shown, plain­ly and incon­tro­vert­ibly, that the main­line denom­i­na­tions are dying and the bible-believ­ing ones are growing.”
    • In response: No, Chris­tian­i­ty Doesn’t Need To Endorse Homo­sex­u­al­i­ty To Grow (Glenn Stan­ton, The Fed­er­al­ist): “When same-sex-attract­ed Chris­tians go to church, they are not choos­ing the pews of church­es Thomas is call­ing us to become. Again, it’s just the oppo­site. Research con­duct­ed joint­ly at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Los Ange­les by schol­ars who are not shy about sup­port­ing gay pol­i­tics found that gay- and les­bian-iden­ti­fied peo­ple are 2.5 times more like­ly to attend church­es that took a more con­ser­v­a­tive view on Chris­tian­i­ty (includ­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty) than the so-called ‘welcoming and affirm­ing’ con­gre­ga­tions that cel­e­brate it.”
  5. What’s wrong with Amer­i­ca? I debate Ben Shapiro.(Sean Illing, Vox): “There are basi­cal­ly two visions of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. One is that Amer­i­ca was found­ed on great moral prin­ci­ples that we failed to live up to his­tor­i­cal­ly and we’ve been striv­ing to ful­fill. The oth­er is that Amer­i­ca is root­ed in racism, big­otry, sex­ism, and homo­pho­bia, and that these great moral prin­ci­ples were the founders mere­ly flat­ter­ing themselves.”
    • This is a very good exchange. Whichev­er side you’re sym­pa­thet­ic to, you’ll enjoy read­ing this inter­view.
  6. Why God Is a He (Den­nis Prager, YouTube): five min­utes. It’s an inter­est­ing way to approach the issue. As a Chris­t­ian I would make a dif­fer­ent argu­ment con­nect­ed to the incar­na­tion and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus as a male, but Prager is an obser­vant Jew and so that line of think­ing is unavail­able to him.
  7. Are All Repub­li­cans Bib­li­cal Lit­er­al­ists? Are All Democ­rats Heretics?(Ryan Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “With the release of the 2018 wave of the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey data, I think that it’s time to take stock of how a person’s view of the Bible is relat­ed to their polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion. Are there bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists who are Democ­rats? How many Repub­li­cans don’t put much stock in the Bible? And, how has the view of the Bible changed over time?”
    • tl;dr — Rough­ly ¼ of Democ­rats and â…“ of Repub­li­cans believe the Bible is the lit­er­al word of God. Rough­ly half of each par­ty think the Bible is inspired but not always to be tak­en lit­er­al­ly. The remain­der in each par­ty believe that the Bible is just ancient fables.

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). 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 201

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 alleged syn­a­gogue shoot­er was a church­go­er who artic­u­lat­ed Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy, prompt­ing tough ques­tions for evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors (Julie Zauzmer, The Wash­ing­ton Post va SF Gate): “Before he alleged­ly walked into a syn­a­gogue in Poway, Cal­i­for­nia and opened fire, John Earnest appears to have writ­ten a sev­en-page let­ter spelling out his core beliefs: That Jew­ish peo­ple, guilty in his view of faults rang­ing from killing Jesus to con­trol­ling the media, deserved to die. That his inten­tion to kill Jews would glo­ri­fy God…. Earnest, 19, was a mem­ber of an OPC con­gre­ga­tion. His father was an elder. He attend­ed reg­u­lar­ly. And in the man­i­festo, the writer spewed not only invec­tive against Jews and racial minori­ties, but also cogent Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy he heard in the pews.”
    • Kin­ism, Cul­tur­al Marx­ism, and the Syn­a­gogue Shoot­er (Joe Carter, Gospel Coali­tion): “Sev­er­al years ago a friend of mine, a Pres­by­ter­ian min­is­ter, asked me to speak to his con­gre­ga­tion about cul­tur­al issues. Dur­ing the dis­cus­sion, an old­er cou­ple asked me a ques­tion about sep­a­ra­tion of eth­nic groups, specif­i­cal­ly white Amer­i­cans from blacks and Jews. I told them I must have mis­un­der­stood their ques­tion, because what they were talk­ing about could be mis­tak­en for pro­mot­ing a view called kin­ism. The wife replied, ‘And what’s wrong with kin­ism?’”
    • Why white nation­al­ism tempts white Chris­tians (Jemar Tis­by, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “I absolute­ly do not believe that pas­tors in the OPC or any sim­i­lar denom­i­na­tion are reg­u­lar­ly spew­ing anti-Semi­tism and racism from the pul­pit or on any oth­er occa­sion. But the rigid exclu­sion of dis­cus­sions of racial injus­tice from the reg­u­lar preach­ing and teach­ing in these church­es means that white nation­al­ists are sel­dom chal­lenged in their beliefs.”
    • a Twit­ter thread in which Duke Kwon talks about this
  2. https://scite.ai/ — this is a cool con­cept. Enter a research paper and it will algo­rith­mi­cal­ly assess whether sub­se­quent research sup­ports or under­mines the con­clu­sions. For exam­ple: https://scite.ai/reports/10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.1615
  3. As church­es are demol­ished at home, Chi­nese Chris­tians find reli­gious free­dom in Kenya (Jen­ni Marsh, CNN): “Kenya is not a place you’d expect to find an under­ground church. Chris­tian­i­ty is the lifeblood of the nation’s pol­i­tics and soci­etal fab­ric, and is cel­e­brat­ed in huge, ram­bunc­tious ser­vices attend­ed by thou­sands of danc­ing and singing wor­shipers. But, in the north­ern stretch­es of the sprawl­ing, traf­fic-choked cap­i­tal of 4 mil­lion peo­ple, an under­ground Chi­nese house church is exact­ly what May Li, wife of a Malaysian-Chi­nese pas­tor, helps to lead — illus­trat­ing just how far the Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s reli­gious crack­down has trav­eled. Li and oth­er Chi­nese Chris­tians in this sto­ry did not want to use their real names for fear of being pun­ished by the gov­ern­ment when they return to Chi­na. The Chi­nese embassy in Nairo­bi has already reached out to the lead­ers of some Chi­nese Chris­t­ian groups in the city and asked them to desist, says Li. Her ser­vice tries to stay below the radar.”
  4. The Belt and Road is about domes­tic inter­est groups, not devel­op­ment (Andrew Bat­son, per­son­al blog): “The broad­er point here is that look­ing at the Belt and Road through the lens of ‘grand strat­e­gy’ or ‘geopol­i­tics,’ as so many com­men­ta­tors do, or even por­tray­ing it as some kind of new phi­los­o­phy of eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment, is quite mis­lead­ing. All of these grand con­cepts are jus­ti­fi­ca­tions invent­ed after the fact for a pat­tern of actions that was already well under­way before Xi Jin­ping made his 2013 speech about the Belt and Road. The Belt and Road is real­ly the expan­sion of a spe­cif­ic part of China’s domes­tic polit­i­cal econ­o­my to the rest of the world.”
  5. Ro Khan­na and the ten­sions of Sil­i­con Val­ley lib­er­al­ism (Ezra Klein, Vox): “Pelosi invit­ed me to her house,” Khan­na recalls. “And when I asked her not to make an endorse­ment, she said, ‘Absolute­ly not. I stand for my incum­bents.’ So I get very dis­cour­aged, and Pelosi could see that. As I’m leav­ing the room, she said, ‘Ro, let me tell you some­thing. If I had wait­ed around, I’d have nev­er been speak­er of the House. Pow­er is nev­er giv­en. It’s always tak­en.’”
  6. Is Times Colum­nist David Brooks a Chris­t­ian or a Jew? (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post via the Salt Lake Tri­bune): “In the world of nation­al colum­nists, David Brooks is a star. But in the past few years, The New York Times writer and author has whipped up fas­ci­na­tion among a cer­tain sub­set of read­ers for a spe­cif­ic, gos­sipy rea­son: They won­der if the Jew­ish writer has become a Chris­t­ian.”
    • Relat­ed: David Brooks’s Con­ver­sion Sto­ry (Ben­jamin Wal­lace-Wells, The New York­er): “For Brooks, this car­ried the clar­i­ty of rev­e­la­tion, and soon he let it be known, among his acquain­tances, that he was expe­ri­enc­ing reli­gious curios­i­ty. An infor­mal com­pe­ti­tion opened for David Brooks’s soul. He received, by his own esti­ma­tion, three hun­dred gifts of spir­i­tu­al books, ‘only one hun­dred of which were dif­fer­ent copies of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Chris­tian­i­ty.’ ”
  7. Ter­ror­ists in Burk­i­na Faso Exe­cute Six at Pen­te­costal Church (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “A dozen gun­men on motor­cy­cles stormed the court­yard of the Sir­gad­ji church after wor­ship, fatal­ly shoot­ing its long­time pas­tor as well as five oth­er con­gre­gants after demand­ing they con­vert to Islam, accord­ing to a state­ment sent to CT by the gen­er­al super­in­ten­dent of the Assem­blies of God in Burk­i­na Faso, Michel Oué­drao­go.”

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 Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sister, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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 200

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 big news this week is the hor­rif­ic attacks in Sri Lan­ka on East­er Sun­day. Here are some of the respons­es that caught my inter­est:
    • Sri Lankan Sun­day School Was ‘Will­ing to Die for Christ’ on East­er. Half Did. (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dur­ing Sun­day School, [Prab­ha] had talked to the chil­dren about the impor­tance of repen­tance and receiv­ing Jesus as Lord. Because a recent vehi­cle acci­dent had claimed the lives of six Zion Church mem­bers, he had referred to that event and chal­lenged the chil­dren, ask­ing them if they would be will­ing to even die for Jesus. All the chil­dren had respond­ed by putting their hands up and sig­nalled their fresh ded­i­ca­tion to Jesus by light­ing a sym­bol­ic can­dle. For so many of those chil­dren it would be their final act of wor­ship (2 Tim­o­thy 6:6–8).” WOW
    • Are Chris­tians Priv­i­leged or Per­se­cut­ed? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But if the equa­tion of tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty with priv­i­lege has some rel­e­vance to the actu­al Euro-Amer­i­can sit­u­a­tion, when applied glob­al­ly it’s a gross cat­e­go­ry error…. One of the basic facts of con­tem­po­rary reli­gious his­to­ry is that Chris­tians around the world are per­se­cut­ed on an extra­or­di­nary scale — by mobs and pogroms in India, jihadists and Unit­ed States-allied gov­ern­ments in the Mus­lim world, sec­u­lar total­i­tar­i­ans in Chi­na and North Korea. Yet as an era-defin­ing real­i­ty rather than an episod­ic phe­nom­e­non this real­i­ty is bare­ly vis­i­ble in the West­ern media, and rarely called by name and addressed head-on by West­ern gov­ern­ments and human­i­tar­i­an insti­tu­tions. (‘Islam­o­pho­bia’ looms large; talk of ‘Christo­pho­bia’ is almost nonex­is­tent.)”
    • When Chris­tians Are Under Attack, Mus­lims and the Left Need to Defend Them (Meh­di Hasan): “I am a Mus­lim, and I con­sid­er myself to be on the left, but I’m embar­rassed to admit that in both Mus­lim and left cir­cles, the issue of Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion has been down­played and even ignored for far too long.”
    • Why Con­ser­v­a­tives Are So Angry About Obama’s Ref­er­ence to “East­er Wor­ship­pers” (Ruth Gra­ham, Slate): “I would argue that it takes a true savant of exquis­ite­ly attuned griev­ance col­lec­tion to read an indi­vid­ual ref­er­ence to ‘East­er wor­ship­pers’ as an attempt to avoid acknowl­edg­ing Chris­tian­i­ty. East­er is the most impor­tant hol­i­day in the Chris­t­ian cal­en­dar. ‘East­er’ has no oth­er mean­ing.”
    • Sri Lan­ka attacks: St Antho­ny’s ‘church of mir­a­cles’ a sym­bol of hope (Ayeshea Per­ara, BBC): “Among those gath­ered out­side the church is Pra­bath Bud­dhi­ka. Although Mr Bud­dhi­ka is Bud­dhist by reli­gion, like many oth­ers, he is a strong believ­er in the pow­er of St Antho­ny. ‘My house is right here,’ he said, adding that he’d been attend­ing the church since he was a child and gone along with his fam­i­ly many times.”
    • Why Sri Lan­ka Was Prob­a­bly Not Retal­i­a­tion for Christchurch (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic): “The bomb­ings in Sri Lan­ka were among the more spec­tac­u­lar in the his­to­ry of ter­ror­ism, and they almost cer­tain­ly took more plan­ning than would have been pos­si­ble in the past five weeks. (It may seem easy to get sev­er­al guys to push det­o­na­tor but­tons all at once, in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent loca­tions. But ter­ror­ists are often bum­blers, and the more com­pli­cat­ed the plan, the greater the chance of dis­rup­tion.)”
  2. What About Cap­i­tal­iz­ing Pro­nouns Refer­ring to God? (Randy Alcorn, Eter­nal Per­spec­tives Min­istries): “I have had to fight to get Heav­en cap­i­tal­ized in my books, argu­ing that it is a prop­er noun, and just as real a place as Sat­urn or France. I argue the same for cap­i­tal­iz­ing the New Earth—if we cap­i­tal­ize New Eng­land, why not the redeemed cre­ation that Scrip­ture calls the ‘New Earth’?”
    • This is a very thought­ful per­spec­tive on hon­or­ing God with your writ­ten words.
  3. Is Prison Nec­es­sary? Ruth Wil­son Gilmore Might Change Your Mind (Rachel Kush­n­er, New York Times): “If prison, in its philo­soph­i­cal ori­gin, was meant as a humane alter­na­tive to beat­ings or tor­ture or death, it has trans­formed into a fixed fea­ture of mod­ern life, one that is not known, even by its sup­port­ers and admin­is­tra­tors, for its human­i­ty.”
  4. On East­er Sun­day, Louisiana church looks to rebuild from fires (Ash­ley Cusick, Wash­ing­ton Post via SF Gate): “We got $1,000 from an athe­ist,” Tou­s­saint said with a laugh. ‘He said he did­n’t believe in God, but he don’t believe in burn­ing build­ings down, either.’”
  5. How angry pilots got the Navy to stop dis­miss­ing UFO sight­ings (Dean­na Paul, Wash­ing­ton Post via SF Gate): “A recent uptick in sight­ings of uniden­ti­fied fly­ing objects — or as the mil­i­tary calls them, ‘unex­plained aer­i­al phe­nom­e­na’ — prompt­ed the Navy to draft for­mal pro­ce­dures for pilots to doc­u­ment encoun­ters, a cor­rec­tive mea­sure that for­mer offi­cials say is long over­due.”
    • This being 2019, this is some­how not the most inter­est­ing sto­ry in the news.
  6. And now for some stuff about the major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal par­ties, with par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to reli­gious dynam­ics:
    • Franklin Gra­ham and the High Cost of the Lost Evan­gel­i­cal Wit­ness (David French, Nation­al Review): “The prop­er Evan­gel­i­cal posi­tion toward any pres­i­dent is not hard to artic­u­late, though it is exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to hold to, espe­cial­ly in polar­ized times when one par­ty seems set on lim­it­ing reli­gious lib­er­ty and zeal­ous­ly defend­ing abor­tion: We should pray for pres­i­dents, cri­tique them when they’re wrong, praise them when they’re right, and nev­er, ever impose par­ti­san dou­ble stan­dards.”
    • The Reli­gious Com­po­si­tion of the Two Major Par­ties (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “…nei­ther of the two major par­ties in the Unit­ed States are dom­i­nat­ed by one spe­cif­ic reli­gious group. I know that tons of arti­cles are writ­ten the link between evan­gel­i­cals and Repub­li­cans, but the data indi­cates that over two thirds of Repub­li­cans today are not evan­gel­i­cals. The same is essen­tial­ly true for Democ­rats as well. The largest group for them (the nones) make up just three in ten Democ­rats today.”
    • Relat­ed: The Devout And The Nones (Mark Movs­esian, First Things): “Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans who report that their reli­gious affil­i­a­tion is ‘Strong.’ This per­cent­age has fluc­tu­at­ed a bit over the decades, but the most recent sur­vey puts it at 34 per­cent, a num­ber that has remained basi­cal­ly unchanged since 1975, when 35 per­cent of Amer­i­cans report­ed a strong reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. Appar­ent­ly, the rise of the Nones is not attrib­ut­able to a decline in reli­gious enthu­si­asm among the most strong­ly com­mit­ted.”
    • Meet Stanford’s Con­gres­sion­al Fresh­men (Jean Yung, Dave Sloane, & Tim­o­thy Weath­er­head, Stan­ford Mag­a­zine): inter­est­ing brief pro­files of the five Stan­ford alum­ni who were recent­ly elect­ed to the nation­al leg­is­la­ture. Two Demo­c­ra­t­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tives, two Repub­li­can rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and one Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor.
    • Why Won’t Twit­ter Treat White Suprema­cy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Ban­ning Some Repub­li­can Politi­cians Too. (Joseph Cox and Jason Koe­bler, Moth­er­board): “When a plat­form aggres­sive­ly enforces against ISIS con­tent, for instance, it can also flag inno­cent accounts as well, such as Ara­bic lan­guage broad­cast­ers. Soci­ety, in gen­er­al, accepts the ben­e­fit of ban­ning ISIS for incon­ve­nienc­ing some oth­ers, he said.”
      • I get the impres­sion the authors think this is evi­dence that Repub­li­cans real­ly are white suprema­cists and that the algo­rithms see clear­ly with­out the social pres­sure that holds back truth-tellers. I sus­pect they have the exact oppo­site approach to machine learn­ing when it deliv­ers racist results. I’m spit­balling here, but maybe the bet­ter response is dis­trust algo­rithms a lit­tle more when­ev­er they con­firm your bias­es. Just a thought.
  7. Half of Amer­i­cans Say Evan­gel­i­cals Are Dis­crim­i­nat­ed Against (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Amer­i­cans’ per­cep­tions of dis­crim­i­na­tion tend to be par­ti­san. For instance, 7 in 10 Amer­i­cans on the polit­i­cal right say evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians are sub­ject to dis­crim­i­na­tion, while less than half as many (32%) left-lean­ing Amer­i­cans agree.”

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). 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 199

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

If you’ve been fol­low­ing the news, arti­cles about the Mueller report are con­spic­u­ous by their absence in this week’s email. Apolo­gies if you were hop­ing for some­thing on that, but I find it dif­fi­cult to over­state how unin­ter­est­ed I am in this news cycle.

Also, next week will be vol­ume 200. Should I do any­thing spe­cial? Sug­ges­tions are wel­come.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Reli­gious Decline Inevitable in the Unit­ed States? (Ryan Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The results are unam­bigu­ous: those with the least amount of edu­ca­tion are con­sis­tent­ly the most like­ly to iden­ti­fy as reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed. The far right bar in the graph, indi­cat­ing those with a grad­u­ate lev­el edu­ca­tion are almost always the group that is the most like­ly to be reli­gious­ly affil­i­at­ed.”
  2. The new reli­gion: why try­ing to be per­fect is doomed to fail (Oliv­er Burke­man, The Guardian): “It’s one thing to seek sal­va­tion in God, or to stop seek­ing sal­va­tion; but the attempt to engi­neer your own sal­va­tion is doomed to fail. We’re flawed and finite, so we lack the capac­i­ty to work, par­ent or romance our way to per­fec­tion. Try to do so and you’ll only end up strug­gling to exert ever more con­trol over your life – where­as deep rela­tion­ships, and oth­er mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences, require giv­ing up con­trol.”
  3. Now We’re Talk­ing: The Excep­tion­al Life of Paul Coates (Wil S. Hyl­ton, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “There weren’t white cats in hoods, burn­ing cross­es and beat­ing up on black peo­ple, but if you walked through town, the moment you got to the black side, the side­walks would dis­ap­pear, the streets would dis­ap­pear, and now you’re walk­ing in dirt. So the racism was subtle—but as your con­scious­ness expands, the sub­tle­ty melts away and the racism becomes more ran­cid to the eyes and nose.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ father.
  4. Mis­sion­ar­ies are sup­posed to suf­fer … So am I allowed to buy an air con­di­tion­er? (Amy Med­i­na, A Life Over­seas): “If God has called you to work among the upper-class in India, then you’ll need to live like them, in a lux­u­ry apart­ment. If God has called you to work among the coastal tribes of Tan­za­nia, then you’ll need to live like them, in a sim­ple cin­der-block house with a pit toi­let. Each life has its set of chal­lenges. Each life has its set of bless­ings.”
  5. Broke Mil­len­ni­als Are Flock­ing to Finan­cial Guru Dave Ram­sey. Is His Advice Any Good? (Kris­ten Bahler, Mon­ey): “[Young adults are] an audi­ence that mar­keters stake their entire bud­gets on, and he’s speak­ing to them in all the wrong ways. He quotes scrip­ture and Ronald Rea­gan. He calls young peo­ple ‘snowflakes.’ He has absolute­ly no chill, what­so­ev­er. But for a grow­ing swath of millennials—a gen­er­a­tion we’re told is too frag­ile, too god­less, too polit­i­cal­ly correct—his word is gospel.”
  6. Lis­ten­ing at the Great Awok­en­ing (Areo, Darel E. Paul): “…this spring the Great Awok­en­ing final­ly came to my home insti­tu­tion, Williams Col­lege. Admin­is­tra­tors and oth­er cam­pus lead­ers have encour­aged white mem­bers of the col­lege com­mu­ni­ty like myself to lis­ten. Over the past two months, I have striv­en to do exact­ly that…. Lis­ten­ing to these views from mul­ti­ple cam­pus­es helped me real­ize that what seems to be a local dis­course respond­ing to local issues is actu­al­ly a local man­i­fes­ta­tion of an inter­na­tion­al social, polit­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Polit­i­cal Sci­ence at Williams Col­lege.
    • Relat­ed: The End of Empa­thy (Han­na Rosin, NPR): “…new research has scram­bled notions of how empa­thy works as a force in the world. For exam­ple, we often think of ter­ror­ists as shock­ing­ly blind to the suf­fer­ing of inno­cents. But Bre­i­thaupt and oth­er researchers think of them as clas­sic exam­ples of peo­ple afflict­ed with an ‘excess of empa­thy. They feel the suf­fer­ing of their peo­ple.’”
  7. The Gospel of AI: Evan­gel­i­cals Want Tech to Remain Good News (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[The doc­u­ment], com­posed by experts in busi­ness, pub­lic pol­i­cy, tech, ethics, and bib­li­cal the­ol­o­gy, con­sists of 12 arti­cles, each offer­ing bib­li­cal affir­ma­tions and denials about human nature and var­i­ous impli­ca­tions for the future of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. The doc­u­ment empha­sizes God’s pow­er as the author of life and humans’ spe­cial role as image-bear­ers. It most­ly focus­es on con­cep­tu­al and the­o­ret­i­cal frame­works for using AI but also explic­it­ly decries the use of AI for sex­u­al plea­sure as well as ‘manip­u­la­tive and coer­cive’ data col­lec­tion.”
    • See the full doc­u­ment: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: An Evan­gel­i­cal State­ment of Prin­ci­ples: “In light of exis­ten­tial ques­tions posed anew by the emer­gent tech­nol­o­gy of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), we affirm that God has giv­en us wis­dom to approach these issues in light of Scrip­ture and the gospel mes­sage. Chris­tians must not fear the future or any tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment because we know that God is, above all, sov­er­eign over his­to­ry, and that noth­ing will ever sup­plant the image of God in which human beings are cre­at­ed. We rec­og­nize that AI will allow us to achieve unprece­dent­ed pos­si­bil­i­ties, while acknowl­edg­ing the poten­tial risks posed by AI if used with­out wis­dom and care.”

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 Preach­er And Pol­i­tics: Sev­en Thoughts (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I have plen­ty of opin­ions and con­vic­tions. But that’s not what I want my min­istry to be about. That’s not to say I don’t com­ment on abor­tion or gay mar­riage or racism or oth­er issues about the which the Bible speaks clear­ly. And yet, I’m always mind­ful that I can’t sep­a­rate Blog­ger Kevin or Twit­ter Kevin or Pro­fes­sor Kevin from Pas­tor Kevin. As such, my com­ments reflect on my church, whether I intend them to or not. That means I keep more polit­i­cal con­vic­tions to myself than I oth­er­wise would.” First shared in vol­ume 150.

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.