Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 154

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 Bap­tist Apoc­a­lypse (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “We’re a long way from any final judg­ment on God’s pur­pos­es in the Trump era. But so far the Trump pres­i­den­cy has clear­ly been a kind of apoc­a­lypse — not (yet) in the ‘world-historical calami­ty’ sense of the word, but in the orig­i­nal Greek mean­ing: an unveil­ing, an uncov­er­ing, an expo­sure of truths that had hereto­fore been hidden.”
    • Relat­ed: On Gen­der, Pow­er, and Sin: The Evan­gel­i­cal #MeToo Moment (Richard Beck, per­son­al blog): “A the­o­log­i­cal and bib­li­cal way to say all this is that men’s dom­i­nance over women is a part of the Fal­l’s curse upon human­i­ty. The wound of sin upon gen­der rela­tions is clear in Gen­e­sis 3: ‘He will rule over you.’ So if that’s a part of the curse, why do evan­gel­i­cals think that build­ing the curse into the system–gender subordination–is going to pro­duce any­thing oth­er than cursed outcomes?” I wish the author spent more time build­ing the Bib­li­cal case for his per­spec­tive.
  2. 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.
  3. What I’ve Learned in Twen­ty Years of Mar­riage (Rus­sell Moore, per­son­al blog): “My grand­moth­er wise­ly asked one night when I was final­ly going to ask ‘that girl from Ocean Springs’ to mar­ry me. I answered, ‘When I can afford it.’ She laughed. ‘Honey, I mar­ried your grand­pa in the mid­dle of a Great Depression,’ she said. ‘We made it work. Nobody can afford to get mar­ried. You just mar­ry, and make it work.’ Apart from the gospel, those were, and remain, the most lib­er­at­ing words I ever heard. I bought a ring that wouldn’t impress any­one, then or now, but we were head­ed for the altar. My only regret is that we aren’t today cel­e­brat­ing our twen­ty-first anniver­sary instead of our twentieth.” This is from a few years back and is full of wis­dom.
  4. Title IX Is Too Easy To Abuse (Cait­lyn Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “Is it pos­si­ble for two peo­ple to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sex­u­al­ly assault each oth­er? This is the question—rife with legal, anatom­i­cal, and emo­tion­al improbabilities—to which the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati now address­es itself, and with some urgency, as the insti­tu­tion and three of its employ­ees are cur­rent­ly being sued over an encounter that was sex­u­al for a brief moment, but that just as quick­ly entered the realm of eter­nal return. ”
  5. What­ev­er Hap­pened to Gifts of Lan­guage, Prophe­cy, and Heal­ing? (Andrew Wil­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “taking a longer view by trac­ing our roots back to the ear­ly church fathers leads to some sur­pris­es. We dis­cov­er that some things, though rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al in recent times, are actu­al­ly very nor­mal across the broad­er sweep of human his­to­ry. Angels and demons would be an obvi­ous exam­ple. Or, more sur­pris­ing­ly, mirac­u­lous gifts.”
  6. I was Jor­dan Peterson’s strongest sup­port­er. Now I think he’s dan­ger­ous (Bernard Schiff, The Star): “When he was ren­o­vat­ing his house I invit­ed his fam­i­ly to live with mine. For five months, they occu­pied the third floor of our large house. We had meals togeth­er in the evening and long, colour­ful con­ver­sa­tions. There, away from cam­pus, I saw a man who was devot­ed to his wife and his chil­dren, who were love­ly and gen­tle and for whom I still feel affec­tion. He was atten­tive and thought­ful, stern and kind, play­ful and warm. His wife, Tam­my, appeared to be the keel, the bal­last and the rud­der, and Jor­dan ran the ship.” This is a long pro­file, by turns infor­ma­tive and puz­zling.
  7. The Evan­gel­i­cal Fight to Win Back Cal­i­for­nia (Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Though the state has one of the high­est per­cent­ages of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed adults, the fast grow­ing reli­gious group in the coun­try, that large­ly blue sea is dot­ted with evan­gel­i­cal islands that are large­ly red. One in five adults in the state are evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, accord­ing to the Pew Research Cen­ter, and there are more megachurch­es in Cal­i­for­nia than in any oth­er state.” This arti­cle is most­ly about pol­i­tics, but is inter­est­ing nonethe­less.

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 Spir­i­tu­al Shape of Polit­i­cal Ideas (Joseph Bot­tum, The Week­ly Stan­dard): many mod­ern polit­i­cal ideas are derived from Chris­t­ian the­o­log­i­cal con­cepts. (first shared in vol­ume 1)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

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 153

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. Fed­er­al Agen­cies Lost Track of Near­ly 1,500 Migrant Chil­dren Placed With Spon­sors (Ron Nixon, New York Times): “…the agency had lost track of near­ly 1,500 migrant chil­dren it placed with spon­sors in the Unit­ed States, rais­ing con­cerns they could end up in the hands of human traf­fick­ers or be used as labor­ers by peo­ple pos­ing as relatives.” This is an arti­cle from April about kids who arrive alone at the bor­der, but I can’t help but think of it when I hear sto­ries about new poli­cies sep­a­rat­ing kids from their fam­i­lies at the bor­der. If I am read­ing this cor­rect­ly, they lost track of 20% of the minors they placed. Out­ra­geous­ly unacceptable. 
  2. The Wrath of God Poured Out — The Humil­i­a­tion of the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion (Albert Mohler, per­son­al blog): this is pure fire. I pray lead­ers in the Assem­blies of God will act with sim­i­lar courage should it become nec­es­sary.  
  3. What Our Iden­ti­ty Search­es Real­ly Reveal (Eric Park­er, Gospel Coali­tion): “the most sig­nif­i­cant ques­tion in under­stand­ing per­son­al iden­ti­ty is not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘Whose am I?’… This one turn of phrase might be the most sig­nif­i­cant turn of thought we could ever make. But since many of us haven’t made that turn of thought, we inhab­it con­struct­ed iden­ti­ties rather than received identities.”
  4. Chi­na’s social cred­it sys­tem has blocked peo­ple from tak­ing 11 mil­lion flights and 4 mil­lion train trips (Tara Fran­cis Chan, Busi­ness Insid­er): “a for­mer offi­cial, Hou Yunchun, is quot­ed as say­ing the sys­tem needs to be improved so ‘discredited peo­ple become bankrupt.’”
  5. 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.
  6. Mar­riage name game: What kind of guy would take his wife’s last name? (Phys.org): “[The study] found that among men with less than a high school degree, 10.3 per­cent report­ed chang­ing their sur­name. Among men with a high school degree but no col­lege, it was 3.6 per­cent, and among men with any col­lege, only 2 per­cent. None of the men sur­veyed who had an advanced degree changed their name.”
  7. The Racism Tread­mill (Cole­man Hugh­es, Quil­lette): “In an econ­o­my increas­ing­ly based on cog­ni­tive labor, it’s hard to imag­ine a cul­tur­al fea­ture more harm­ful than a social­ly-enforced taboo on aca­d­e­m­ic striv­ing. But wor­ries about the harm caused by the ‘acting white’ epi­thet have been met with skep­ti­cism by progressives.” The author is an under­grad at Colum­bia University. 

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

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 152

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. Love, Again: on a celi­bate breakup and what hap­pened after. (Wes­ley Hill, Com­ment Mag­a­zine): “For a long time, I found absti­nence rel­a­tive­ly easy. It’s not trendy to admit this, but I didn’t expe­ri­ence a sex­less adult­hood to be a fate worse than death, in part, per­haps, because I tried not to rev up my libido by see­ing how close I could get to the line of inter­course with­out step­ping over it…. What I didn’t real­ize, though, is that, for the inten­tion­al­ly absti­nent, giv­ing up sex is only part of the deal, and there’s more than one line you can step across.”
  2. Let’s Not For­get How Wrong Our Crime Data Are (Cathy O’Neil, Bloomberg): “A year after Trump was elect­ed, the num­ber of report­ed rapes among the Lati­no pop­u­la­tion of Hous­ton declined by 40 per­cent, a strong indi­ca­tion that peo­ple became afraid to report the crimes. Police often don’t take rape vic­tim­s’ reports seri­ous­ly, a prob­lem that is prob­a­bly even worse for male vic­tims. So how can we get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the under­ly­ing rate of crime? Sur­veys typ­i­cal­ly don’t help: Peo­ple who get away with com­mit­ting seri­ous offens­es aren’t like­ly to admit it, even if they’re guar­an­teed anonymi­ty. The one notable excep­tion is mar­i­jua­na use, which — though still ille­gal in most places — is mild and social­ly accept­able enough that peo­ple are will­ing to tell the truth. Hence, if we com­pare the report­ed rate of mar­i­jua­na use to the arrest data, we can gain some insight into how use­ful the lat­ter real­ly is. The pic­ture isn’t pret­ty. The lat­est gov­ern­ment sur­veys, for exam­ple, sug­gest that black and white Amer­i­cans use mar­i­jua­na at about the same rate. Yet blacks get arrest­ed about four times more often than whites — and 15 times more often in Man­hat­tan, accord­ing to a recent New York Times analysis.” The author has her Ph.D. in math­e­mat­ics from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.
  3. This week the US moved our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem on the 70th anniver­sary of Israel’s mod­ern instan­ti­a­tion. Vio­lence ensued.
    • Israel faces out­cry over Gaza killings dur­ing Jerusalem embassy protests (Oliv­er Holmes and Hazem Balousha, The Guardian): “Gaza has had its blood­i­est day in years on Mon­day after Israeli forces shot and killed 58 Pales­tini­ans and wound­ed at least 1,200 as tens of thou­sands protest­ed along the fron­tier against the open­ing of the US embassy in Jerusalem.”
    • The Real Dis­pute Dri­ving the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian Con­flict (Yos­si Klein Hale­vi, The Atlantic): “Abbas’s speech only con­firmed for many Israelis that this con­flict isn’t pri­mar­i­ly about redress­ing the Pales­tin­ian griev­ances over the con­se­quences of the events of 1967—the occu­pa­tion of the West Bank and Gaza—but of 1948: the cre­ation of Israel. Even if we were to uproot every last set­tle­ment and with­draw to the 1967 lines, some Israelis say, it won’t bring us any clos­er to peace, because the real Pales­tin­ian griev­ance is Israel’s exis­tence…. Israelis and Pales­tini­ans are caught in what could be called a “cycle of denial.” The Pales­tin­ian nation­al move­ment denies Israel’s legit­i­ma­cy, and Israel in turn denies the Pales­tini­an­s’ nation­al sov­er­eign­ty. The cycle of denial has defined this shared exis­tence since the cre­ation of Israel 70 years ago.”
    • Pulling an arti­cle I first shared back in vol­ume 5: What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Atlantic): “…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.”
    • Israel’s Mas­sacre of Pales­tin­ian Civil­ians Should Spark Horror—and Action (Ian S. Lustick, The Nation): “As doc­u­ment­ed by the Israeli mil­i­tary, there are now more Pales­tini­ans under the con­trol of the Israeli state than there are Jews. Indeed, for all intents and pur­pos­es the Pales­tini­ans of Gaza and of the West Bank are already with­in the Jew­ish state. They are cit­i­zens of no oth­er coun­try, no oth­er rec­og­nized state. As mea­sured by how much impact the State of Israel has over the inti­mate details of their lives, and indeed over whether they will live at all, they are as much inhab­i­tants of the State of Israel as black slaves were inhab­i­tants of the Unit­ed States or as Africans in the Ban­tus­tans were inhab­i­tants of apartheid South Africa.” The author is a poli sci pro­fes­sor at Penn.
    • Israel Has the Right and Oblig­a­tion to Defend Its Bor­der with Dead­ly Force (David French, Nation­al Review): “What would you have Israel do when thou­sands of peo­ple march on the bor­der, some armed, some not? What would you have Israel do when you know that ter­ror­ists are cer­tain­ly mixed in that crowd, peo­ple who’d glad­ly shoot or stab Israeli civil­ians if they were ever to gain access to Israeli towns?”
  4. Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijack­ing Utopia (Scott Alexan­der, Slate Star Codex):  “I grudg­ing­ly for­give cap­i­tal­ism the mis­ery it caus­es, because it’s the engine that lifts coun­tries out of pover­ty. It’s a pre­con­di­tion for a free and pros­per­ous soci­ety; attempts to over­throw it have so con­sis­tent­ly led to pover­ty, tyran­ny, or geno­cide that we no longer believe its pro­po­nents’ earnest oaths that this time they’ve got it right. For right now, there’s no good alter­na­tive. But if we have a basic jobs guar­an­tee, it will cause all the same mis­ery, and I won’t for­give it.“ This is a long arti­cle — skim it. Over­all a very strong argu­ment.
  5. An athe­ist Mus­lim on what the left and right get wrong about Islam (Sean Illing, Vox): “I think the left has a blind spot when it comes to Islam and the right has a blind spot when it comes to Muslims.” This arti­cle is an inter­est­ing mix of insight and fol­ly.
  6. Inter­est­ing obser­va­tions from a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist (Cor­rinne McConaughy, Twit­ter): “How hard is it to reach into pol­i­tics and say simul­ta­ne­ous­ly that you are owed more and less than you have been giv­en? Like, that’s a hard argu­ment to make—so hard that the elites try­ing to explain this sort of ten­sion keep whiff­ing past it.” She is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty. I don’t know if she is a Chris­t­ian, but the way she word­ed that bit was very gospel­ish.
  7. The Fall of The Ger­man Empire (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “And think­ing about the Euro­pean Union this way, as a Ger­man­ic empire as well as a lib­er­al-cos­mopoli­tan project, is a help­ful way of under­stand­ing how it might ulti­mate­ly fal­l…. if the test of Europe’s uni­ty feels like a test for lib­er­al democ­ra­cy, it’s a mis­take to see it only in those terms. It is also a strug­gle of nations against empire, of the Continent’s small­er coun­tries against Ger­man mas­tery and North­ern Euro­pean inter­ests, in which pop­ulist par­ties are being elect­ed to resist poli­cies the cen­ter sought to impose upon the periph­ery with­out a vote.”

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).

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 151

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. These Bombs Led Me To Christ (Kim Phuc Phan Thi, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “You have seen my pic­ture a thou­sand times. It’s a pic­ture that made the world gasp—a pic­ture that defined my life. I am nine years old, run­ning along a pud­dled road­way in front of an expres­sion­less sol­dier, arms out­stretched, naked, shriek­ing in pain and fear, the dark con­tour of a napalm cloud bil­low­ing in the distance.” WHOA.
  2. 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.
  3. What Hap­pened To Alan Der­showitz? (Evan Man­dery, Politi­co Mag­a­zine): “Talking to him, it’s not hard to get the impres­sion that expos­ing that truth—the hypocrisy of both sides—may be his ulti­mate project. As he sees it, the best way to achieve his goal—and to get it the atten­tion it deserves—is by defend­ing the most odi­ous clients in the most provoca­tive pos­si­ble way on the very prin­ci­ples lib­er­als claim to love.” I real­ly liked this arti­cle.
  4. A Mus­lim Among Israeli Set­tlers (Waja­hat Ali, The Atlantic): “Ever since the cre­ation of the mod­ern state of Israel—a mir­a­cle for the Jews, the Nak­ba (‘catastrophe’) for the Palestinians—Jerusalem’s dai­ly weath­er fore­cast could be described as sun­ny with a slight chance of apocalypse.”
  5. Give Amnesty for Col­lege Writ­ings (David Lat, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Collegiate scrib­blings from decades ago should have no bear­ing on one’s fit­ness for pub­lic office, and mak­ing an issue of them is bad for the coun­try. Col­lege is tra­di­tion­al­ly a time of exper­i­men­ta­tion and explo­ration. We adopt and dis­card ideas and try out dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties, some­times in rapid suc­ces­sion. These iden­ti­ties often bear lit­tle resem­blance to our mature selves— Hillary Clin­ton was once a ‘Goldwater girl,’ while Clarence Thomas was a Black Pan­ther sympathizer—but explor­ing them is how we learn about our­selves and acquire wisdom—how we grow up.”
    • Speak­ing of col­lege writ­ings, here are two pieces by Stan­ford stu­dents. They are pre­sent­ed with­out any impli­ca­tion that these are views the authors will lat­er recant; rather, by putting them here as sub-bul­let points I can tell myself I lim­it­ed myself to sev­en top­ics this week.
    • Think the Right Cares About Free Speech? Not Always. (Anni­ka Nordquist, Stan­ford Review): “Within Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, free­dom of speech is a top­ic of great self-right­eous­ness on both fronts. As the Left adopts an increas­ing­ly politi­cized def­i­n­i­tion of ‘hate speech,’ includ­ing even the most mun­dane top­ics like ‘microaggressions,’ the Right pats itself on the back for defend­ing nat­ur­al lib­er­ties. Yet in Poland, where pro­gres­sives have been vot­ed almost entire­ly out of gov­ern­ment, the Right instead restricts the speech of the Left.” That’s our very own Anni­ka.
    • The Orig­i­nal Sin of Stan­ford Din­ing (Andrew Fried­man, Stan­ford Review): “Currently 12 admin­is­tra­tors run R&DE, along with numer­ous assis­tants. If admin­is­tra­tors object to turn­ing the school’s food ser­vice into a land­lord, it is like­ly because they know leas­ing space to third par­ty ven­dors, besides being bet­ter for every­one else, could be done by a sin­gle per­son, with­out the bureau­crat­ic bloat of the cur­rent system.”
  6. A real-life Lord of the Flies: the trou­bling lega­cy of the Rob­bers Cave exper­i­ment (David Shari­at­madari, The Guardian): “The ‘Robbers Cave exper­i­men­t’ is con­sid­ered sem­i­nal by social psy­chol­o­gists, still one of the best-known exam­ples of ‘realistic con­flict the­o­ry’. It is often cit­ed in mod­ern research. But was it sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly rig­or­ous? And why were the results of the Mid­dle Grove exper­i­ment – where the researchers couldn’t get the boys to fight – sup­pressed? … [The researcher’s method was] think of the the­o­ry first and then find a way to get the results that match it. If the results say some­thing else? Bury them.”
  7. A Design Lab Is Mak­ing Rit­u­als for Sec­u­lar Peo­ple (Sigal Samuel, The Atlantic): “Ritual Design Lab has its roots in Stanford’s Insti­tute of Design, where Ozenc and Hagan both teach. In 2015, they pro­posed a new course on rit­u­al design. To their sur­prise, more than 100 stu­dents signed up. Most were secular.” I large­ly agree with Rod Dreher’s take: New Rit­u­als For Self-Wor­ship

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

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 150

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 149

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 148

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 147

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 146

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

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Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 145

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.