{"id":4650,"date":"2017-08-18T23:40:59","date_gmt":"2017-08-19T07:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/?p=4646"},"modified":"2017-08-18T23:40:59","modified_gmt":"2017-08-19T07:40:59","slug":"things-glen-found-interesting-volume-114","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2017\/08\/18\/things-glen-found-interesting-volume-114","title":{"rendered":"Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 114"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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.<\/p>\n

Things Glen Found Interesting<\/h3>\n

First, let me say this has been a heartbreaking week. The racism on display in Charlottesville was wicked, and if unrepented of will lead its practitioners to hell. Most of this week\u2019s links are related:<\/p>\n

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  1. Charlottesville: Race and Terror<\/a> (VICE News, Youtube link). This video is worth watching, but be warned that this is disturbing footage. The first two minutes are compelling.<\/li>\n
  2. White supremacy angers Jesus, but does it anger his church?<\/a> (Russell Moore, Washington Post): \u201cOne of the many remarkable things about the picture we get of Jesus in the Gospels is how relatively calm he is. When his disciples are panicking in a life-threatening storm, Jesus is asleep. When villages reject the message, the apostles are angered but Jesus is not. Threatened with arrest and even execution, Jesus meets his accusers with tranquility. The Scriptures show us two things that make Jesus visibly angry: religious hypocrisy and racial supremacist ideology.\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. After Charlottesville, black pastors are confronting how political to get<\/a> (Jeff Stein, Vox): \u201cThe bloodshed has reinvigorated those pastors\u2019 calls for their fellow clergy to preach about political issues, rather than just salvation.\u201d<\/li>\n
  4. \u2018Jews will not replace us\u2019: Why white supremacists go after Jews<\/a> (Yair Rosenberg, Washington Post): \u201cWhen white supremacists are viciously attacking Jews as nonwhite impostors, then any anti-racists worthy of the name must be there to defend them. They cannot impose their own definitions of whiteness on Jews and sidestep their plight.\u201d<\/li>\n
  5. Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?<\/a> (Robin Wright, New Yorker): \u201cMines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts\u2019 predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.\u201d In response, read Our House Divided<\/a> (Ross Douthat, New York Times): \u201c\u2026our divisions induce a particular anxiety because each of our two main factions reigns supreme in one particular arena. Conservatism is (somehow) politically dominant, with control of the legislative and executive branches and a remarkable power in the states. Meanwhile liberalism dominates the cultural commanding heights as never before, with not only academia and the media but also late-night television and sportswriting and even young-adult fiction more monolithically and \u2014 to conservatives \u2014 oppressively progressive. So both sides have reasons to feel threatened, disempowered and surrounded; both can feel as though they exist under a kind of enemy rule.\u201d<\/li>\n
  6. Political Parasites<\/a> (Pete Spiliakos, First Things): \u201c[Trump] is obdurate. He saw that his political enemies were calling for a condemnation and, in his defiance and arrogance, had to show them that they weren\u2019t going to write his scripts.\u201d<\/li>\n
  7. The Rise of the Violent Left<\/a> (Peter Beinart, The Atlantic): \u201cIf you believe the president of the United States is leading a racist, fascist movement that threatens the rights, if not the lives, of vulnerable minorities, how far are you willing to go to stop it?\u201d<\/li>\n
  8. Unmasking the leftist Antifa movement: Activists seek peace through violence<\/a> (Sara Ganim and Chris Welch, CNN): \u201cAntifa members also sometimes launch attacks against people who aren\u2019t physically attacking them. The movement, Crow said, sees alt-right hate speech as violent, and for that, its activists have opted to meet violence with violence.\u201d<\/li>\n
  9. Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements<\/a> (Feinberg, Willer, and Kovacheff, SSRN working paper): One of the authors, Robb Willer, is a professor of sociology at Stanford. \u201cThe activist\u2019s dilemma \u2013 wherein tactics that raise awareness also tend to reduce popular support \u2013 highlights a key challenge faced by social movements struggling to affect progressive change.\u201d<\/li>\n
  10. Trump Is More In Touch Than You Think<\/a> (Rod Dreher, The American Conservative): \u201cThe news media have been seriously distorting public reaction to Trump\u2019s handling of Charlottesville. Whether this is a matter of only seeing what they want to see, or a matter of the talking heads being concentrated among coastal elites of both parties, is a matter of conjecture.\u201d<\/li>\n
  11. Facing Our Legacy of Lynching<\/a> (D. L. Mayfield, Christianity Today): \u201cMore than 4,000 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and the rise of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. Lynching was a brutal public tactic for maintaining white supremacy, frequently used with the tacit blessing of government authorities. It was a part of my heritage I had never been taught\u2026\u201d Note that this piece is independent of the events in Charlottesville.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Things Glen Found Entertaining<\/h3>\n