A Less Racially Divided America, Luxury Beliefs & Liberal Christian Political Engagement
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, March 10–16, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business? by John Marshall in The Backchannel:
If you figured out that subscriptions were necessary in 2018, as many publications did, you’re probably also toast.
By the time you see that [advertising revenue] drop off starting in 2017 and 2018 we [TPM] actually had a decent amount of momentum with our subscription business, and then it was a race to build the subscription business at least as fast as the ad business was collapsing. I remember telling a colleague, “We’re going to have to swap out the engine while we’re in flight.”
If you look at that graph you can see that if your business was ads and remained ads you’re toast.
Are The Feds Still Investigating Southern Baptist Sex Abuse? That's A Good Question by Bobby Ross, Jr. in Weekend Plug-in:
“Both sides agree that something has changed with the DOJ’s investigation. They appear to disagree about what that change means.”
In Your Face: Apple’s Friction Eliminators Want to Get Under Your Skin by John Fechtel in The New Atlantis:
The closer the device gets to realizing what you really want, the closer it must draw to your person. And the closer it draws to your person, the more it cuts you off from the world.
No matter how close to our bodies a device gets, it won’t be close enough to rule out ... inconveniences entirely. But this way of putting it suggests that our bodies themselves are the problem, that eliminating friction would mean eliminating our bodies.
No One Has Ever Read Genesis Like This by Francis Spufford in The New York Times:
We want to know what [Marilynne] Robinson thinks of Genesis for the same reason we’d want to know what Tolstoy thought of it.
The Bible, Robinson says in her very first sentence, is a “theodicy,” a justification of the ways of God. And Genesis’ part in that, in her view, is a demonstration of how human freedom can coexist with divine foreknowledge, with a covenanted plan. The descendants of Adam and Eve wander, murder, screw up, get drunk immediately after their most impressive actions, cheat one another out of blessings, engage in a spot of polyamory and then viciously regret it, do harm on the grand scale while doing good on the local one. (Robinson points out, which most commentators do not, that Joseph, while reconciling with his brothers, also contrives to enslave the entire population of Egypt for the pharaoh.) Yet all the while, the faithfulness of God nudges the actions of these fallible people along the path toward law, justice and mercy.
American Politics Is Undergoing a Racial Realignment by John Burn-Murdoch in Financial Times:
A less racially divided America is an America where people vote more based on their beliefs than their identity.
Among Black conservatives whose social circles are predominantly Black, support for Republicans remains anaemic, but among those whose friends, family or colleagues are more diverse, social norms are much weaker and support for the GOP rises.
The Cost of Luxury Beliefs by Glenn Loury with Rob Henderson on The Glenn Show (podcast):
We discuss and debate Rob’s concept of “luxury beliefs,” or beliefs that confer social status on bearers who are wealthy enough to insulate themselves from their consequences while harming those who aren’t.
Are Liberal Christians More Politically Engaged than Conservative Ones? by Ryan Burge in Graphs About Religion:
Liberal Christians are more politically engaged than conservative ones. ... This is especially the case when it comes to white Christians.
Back from Walden Pond by Ian Olson in Plough:
Thoreau’s mistake was thinking that culture is an arbitrary construction obstructing nature, that some authentic layer of being exists below culture.
Music
The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit, and always green:
The trees of nature fruitless be
Compared with Christ the apple tree.
You can't gather grapes
From a bramble bush
Or pick a fig from thorns
Oh, would I like to be
Oh, to be a good tree
Devotional
“In the Beginning”
To understand Jesus as he is presented in the Bible is to understand his story. For, stories are the Bible's default way of reasoning about things. The collection of books that makes up the Bible is, according to the Bible, telling one big story: the story of Jesus (John 5:39).
How does the whole Bible tell the story of Jesus? In brief, the authors of the Bible who knew Jesus realized that what they had experienced with him was like they were re-living the stories of all the other books of the Bible that were written before Jesus. And this is how Jesus himself eventually taught his followers to interpret those books (Luke 24:27).
To see how that makes sense, we’ll have to get into the story, and the usual place to get into a story is “in the beginning.” Those are literally the first words of the first book of the Bible (Genesis 1:1). They are also the first words of the story of Jesus’s life according to his friend John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was present with God, and the Word was God. This one was present with God in the beginning” (John 1:1–2).
To get why this presence “in the beginning” was repeated by John we must read a bit further in Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was extremely empty, and darkness was over the surface of the primordial sea, and the Spirit of God was blowing back and forth over the surface of the water” (Genesis 1:1–2).
John is saying that there is this thing called “the Word” that was present with God when God began to create our world and that this Word really is God: “All things came into existence through him, and without him was not even one thing made.” (John 1:3). So, this Word is a “he”—a person—and through him God created everything.
John is making a subtle point that refers to the similar sounding words for “word” and “say” in the original language of Genesis, Hebrew. In the next verse, we find the first instance of a formula repeated throughout the chapter that describes how God created: “And God said [literally, ‘worded’], “Let there be light,” and there was light” (Genesis 1:3).
Now we can appreciate John’s main point: “And the Word became flesh and resided among us. And we saw his glory—glory like a one-of-a-kind being who came from the Father—full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). What John saw in the goodness of Jesus during the three-and-a-half years they spent together was like the shining light of God (the Father) at creation, and he became convinced that Jesus was the personal Word through whom God had ‘worded’ everything into existence.
Some people ask, “If God created everything, what created God?” This is like asking why triangles have three sides because God is, by definition, the end of our causal explanations. Unless you are willing to live without an answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing or think that stuff has always just sort of been here in some form or another then whatever it is you think basically caused everything else to come into existence is to you, in that way, “god.”
Even if we deal with it in different ways, everyone eventually confronts the mystery of our origins. But John recognized that his friend Jesus was the Mystery of our origins, as revealed in the first book of the Bible, confronting him in the flesh. He and the other Bible writers who know Jesus were persuaded that he was God not only because everything about his life not only evidenced a compelling resemblance to the story of God in the Bible but also completed it in the most satisfying way that could only have been arranged by God himself.
If that’s true, it changes everything. For that reason, I think we should afford the authors of the Bible the basic respect of trying to understand what they were saying in the way that it made sense to them and then decide whether what they said about Jesus also makes sense to us.
Fragment
On Free Will, Evil & Suffering
I believe that human free will is human freed will. That is to say, the only reason we have free will in the first place is that God first granted it at creation and then restored it after the fall. We also see in Scripture that can, under certain conditions, thwart the human will by intervening in a situation. Proverbs 21:1 is a remarkable statement in Scripture, among other examples, about divine prerogative in this regard. So in that perspective, everything we do is by divine permission.
From what I can see two things need to be in place for this to make sense:
1. The good of love to be gained by God having granted us the moral freedom to reject his love and choose evil must be morally outweigh the suffering that resulted from our wrong use of freed will.
2. There must be a coming “restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21) when God will remediate these tragic losses that we suffer in this life.
Finally, between the beginning and the end, answers to the question of evil and suffering in any single case are not available to us, but God takes responsibility for these cases by coming down and suffering evil along with us so that we can know that he is not asking us to do anything that he himself is not willing to do for us.