Tag: sports

TGFI, Volume 547: canine cancer cure and paying college athletes

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tech boss uses AI and Chat­G­PT to cre­ate can­cer vac­cine for his dying dog (Natasha Bita, The Aus­tralian): “Heart­bro­ken when his fur-baby was diag­nosed with a dead­ly mast cell can­cer in 2024, Mr Conyn­g­ham threw thou­sands of dol­lars at vet­eri­nary chemother­a­py and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treat­ment with a cus­tom mRNA can­cer vac­cine over the Christ­mas break, the ten­nis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recov­ery that has astound­ed researchers at the cut­ting-edge of human can­cer treat­ments.… [A sci­en­tist said,] ‘Usu­al­ly we don’t sup­port direct-to-con­sumer type DNA sequenc­ing because while gen­er­at­ing data for genomics is rel­a­tive­ly easy for us, inter­ro­gat­ing that data is real­ly hard and chal­leng­ing,’ he said. But Paul said, ‘No wor­ries, I’m a data ana­lyst and I’ll fig­ure this out with the help of Chat­G­PT’.”
    • Note that he did not cure the can­cer, just treat­ed it. Stun­ning nonethe­less.
  2. The Dan­ger of AI Isn’t Mis­in­for­ma­tion. It’s Mis-For­ma­tion. (Jonathan Sams, The Gospel Coali­tion): “In each of these exam­ples, it’s pos­si­ble AI could churn out a bib­li­cal­ly accu­rate answer. But the dan­ger isn’t pure­ly a mat­ter of mis­in­for­ma­tion; it’s a mat­ter of for­ma­tion. The real issue is what habit­u­al AI use does to us. It turns into mus­cle mem­o­ry that, over time, will reshape basic Chris­t­ian habits like what we pay atten­tion to, what we expect, and where we look for coun­sel.”
  3. Pay­ing Col­lege Ath­letes Has Cre­at­ed a Mess. It Was Still the Right Thing to Do. (Joe Nocera, The Free Press): “What is a prob­lem, I acknowl­edge, is the trans­fer por­tal. In the bad old days, ath­letes couldn’t trans­fer with­out los­ing a year of eligibility—even if the coach who had recruit­ed them left for green­er pas­tures. But when play­ers switch two or three times in the course of their col­lege career, that cre­ates a whole oth­er set of prob­lems. Small­er schools, in par­tic­u­lar, have a dif­fi­cult time hold­ing on to their best play­ers because the major sports schools pick them off with NIL offers. (Pre­dic­tion: There will be few­er upsets in this year’s tour­na­ment than there used to be.) Col­lege ath­letes have become free agents rather than col­lege stu­dents. One astound­ing sta­tis­tic: In the South­east­ern Con­fer­ence, only one bas­ket­ball play­er spent four years at the same school. One!”
  4. Sex is not a sym­bol (Kris­ten Sanders, Sub­stack): “But there are a few threads in some of the con­ver­sa­tions swirling about fer­til­i­ty that I think we might pull on. For one, mar­riage, and not sex, is the metaphor for union between God and humans. This mat­ters quite a bit! .…What I object to, most strong­ly, is a view of God and his work­ings in the world that relies on a ‘hid­den’ order or struc­ture that it is our job to dis­cov­er. God is present in the world with­out hid­ing behind every tree or bush. In say­ing that sex is a gift, we are say­ing all that we need to say about it. Mak­ing it sacred, for me, actu­al­ly impedes the kind of divi­sions being made in Leviti­cus between the holy and the pro­fane. The pro­fane is sim­ply that which is good, but not good for use in the order of revealed knowl­edge of God. It is good for its own sake. For it, we can return thanks, joy­ful­ly, rel­ish­ing its gifts- of com­mu­nion and hos­pi­tal­i­ty, of sex­u­al­i­ty and its nour­ish­ments, of chil­dren if they are grant­ed to us. None of these need to be made holy to be good. That is how we receive the world as gift.”
  5. The mys­te­ri­ous Red­di­tor who’s chang­ing the way we do laun­dry (Alex Abad-San­tos, Vox): “He has sin­gle­hand­ed­ly changed the way peo­ple do laun­dry. He is the rea­son the word ‘lipase’ has become a top­ic of con­ver­sa­tion across elder mil­len­ni­al group chats. He can move the mar­ket. His adher­ents clam­or for their face­less cham­pi­on to give them advice. They praise him for a 12-hour process called ‘spa day’ and post their dis­gust­ing but sat­is­fy­ing results for the world to see.… Most of the world uses pow­dered laun­dry deter­gent, which allows for more enzyme flex­i­bil­i­ty; Amer­i­cans gen­er­al­ly pre­fer liq­uid, which doesn’t always con­tain these pre­cious enzymes.”
  6. Scrip­ture, Cre­ation, and Accom­mo­da­tion (Michael Hor­ton, Sub­stack): “[I]n 1896 Andrew Dick­son White intro­duced the fic­tion that, through its pro­mo­tion by Bertrand Rus­sell and many oth­er promi­nent thinkers, has proved influ­en­tial. White says, ‘Calvin took the lead (against Coper­ni­can­ism) in his Com­men­tary on Gen­e­sis, by con­demn­ing all who assert­ed that the earth is not at the cen­tre of the uni­verse. He clinched the mat­ter by the usu­al ref­er­ence to the first verse of the nine­ty-third psalm, and asked, ‘Who will ven­ture to place the author­i­ty of Coper­ni­cus above that of the Holy Spir­it?’’ How­ev­er, Calvin nev­er men­tions Coper­ni­cus, here or any­where else, and he does not con­demn helio­cen­trists. As [Mar­garet] Osler notes, ‘Few astronomers adopt­ed Coper­ni­can astron­o­my dur­ing the first fifty years fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of De rev­o­lu­tion­ibus.’ This includ­ed Bacon, of course, so it would not be sur­pris­ing if Calvin was not even aware of Coper­ni­cus. More egre­gious is White’s spu­ri­ous quo­ta­tion, put into cir­cu­la­tion by F. W. Far­rar a decade ear­li­er and, through White, passed on by Bertrand Rus­sell and many oth­ers. Instead, what Calvin says is that scrip­ture is accom­mo­dat­ed dis­course. Regard­ing Gen­e­sis 1 he cau­tioned, ‘The Holy Spir­it had no inten­tion to teach astron­o­my.’ ”
    • I con­sid­er myself well-informed in this area, and Hor­ton has got some good info here I don’t recall run­ning across before.
  7. Amer­i­can Din­er Goth­ic (Robert Mar­i­ani, The New Atlantis): “You’re in a small town in Wis­con­sin, the heart of Nor­mal Amer­i­ca. The trans­gen­der assis­tant man­ag­er at CVS has a sep­tum pierc­ing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads ‘Finn.’ A block away, the 4channer con­struc­tion work­er in the Sam Hyde shoot­er shirt lis­tens to Bladee and plots his impend­ing viral­i­ty. At Tar­get, the ani­me sec­tion has metas­ta­sized from one shelf to an entire aisle. These aren’t ran­dom weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aes­thet­ic bleed­ing through the cubi­cles: ani­me stick­ers on lap­tops, Dis­cord run­ning on sec­ond mon­i­tors. They’re a new Amer­i­can type, young but trans-gen­er­a­tional, as dis­tinc­tive as the orga­ni­za­tion man or the val­ley girl once were. I call them din­er­goths: what you get when eco­nom­ic mobil­i­ty dies, sub­urbs become psy­chic deserts, and Dis­cord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 544: Outworking Your Fork and the Olympics

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. You Can’t Out­work Your Fork (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “More and more peo­ple are rec­og­niz­ing we’re liv­ing in Baby­lon. How do we live in Baby­lon? By tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. Remem­ber what Daniel did in the first chap­ter of his book? He refused to eat from the king’s table. Remem­ber, he was a cap­tive. He had no con­trol over his life and yet, he took respon­si­bil­i­ty for what he ate. Like­wise, as Christ fol­low­ers, we have to take con­trol over the things that enter our minds and hearts. We have to be respon­si­ble for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. We have to be inten­tion­al about what we read, what we watch, what we talk about and what we think about.… You’re in con­trol of your mind and your heart. Feed them well. After all, you can’t out­work your fork.”
  2. Olympic thoughts:
    • Alysa Liu com­pletes incred­i­ble come­back to win gold in fig­ure skat­ing (Les Car­pen­ter, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Lat­er, as she stood in a room beneath the stands, Liu recount­ed her wait through Sakamo­to and Nakai’s per­for­mances, telling how much she enjoys watch­ing them skate and was hop­ing they would skate real­ly well before the world. She was asked if she want­ed the gold at that point. ‘I don’t need this,’ she said, look­ing down at the medal around her neck, which matched the new gold dress she ordered for the Olympic free skate. ‘What I need­ed was the stage, and I got that, so I was all good. No mat­ter what hap­pened, you would have been fine. If that was a prob­lem, if I fell on every jump, I would still be wear­ing this dress.’ .…it was hard to know whether the real­i­ty would ever hit her. It might not mat­ter. She was thrilled she had skat­ed well; she was thrilled she had two new dress­es for the Olympics and a third for Sat­ur­day night’s Olympic gala; she was thrilled her fam­i­ly got to watch her skate.… Win­ning an Olympic gold medal seemed very far down the list of what was impor­tant to her at that point.”
      • Whole­some, com­mend­able, and encour­ag­ing. Plus look at the sheer joy on her face in the sec­ond pho­to of the piece (the top-down one).
    • What Eileen Gu Has Done is Total­ly Ordi­nary, Usu­al­ly Invites Zero Con­tro­ver­sy, and Has Rou­tine­ly Ben­e­fit­ted the Unit­ed States (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “What’s strik­ing is how selec­tive the con­cern is. When for­eign-born ath­letes become Amer­i­cans in time to com­pete for Team USA, we don’t sud­den­ly become tex­tu­al lit­er­al­ists about nation­al­i­ty statutes, we just cel­e­brate the medal haul. Only when affil­i­a­tion flows the oth­er way do we dis­cov­er a new­found rev­er­ence for puri­ty in cit­i­zen­ship law. The prac­tice of ath­letes com­pet­ing for coun­tries oth­er than their birth­place isn’t a scan­dal; it’s a cor­ner­stone of mod­ern Olympic sports!”
  3. A Chi­nese official’s use of Chat­G­PT acci­den­tal­ly revealed a glob­al intim­i­da­tion oper­a­tion (Sean Lyn­gaas, CNN): “The Chi­nese law enforce­ment offi­cial used Chat­G­PT like a diary to doc­u­ment the alleged covert cam­paign of sup­pres­sion, Ope­nAI said. In one instance, Chi­nese oper­a­tors alleged­ly dis­guised them­selves as US immi­gra­tion offi­cials to warn a US-based Chi­nese dis­si­dent that their pub­lic state­ments had sup­pos­ed­ly bro­ken the law, accord­ing to the Chat­G­PT user. In anoth­er case, they describe an effort to use forged doc­u­ments from a US coun­ty court to try to get a Chi­nese dissident’s social media account tak­en down.”
  4. “Help! All the Kids are Becom­ing Catholic/Orthodox” (Austin Sug­gs, Sub­stack): “Catholi­cism and East­ern Ortho­doxy don’t just offer a way of _seeing_ the world, they offer a _culture to immerse your­self in_ that so many peo­ple feel devoid of. I take it as no coin­ci­dence that the rise of inter­est in tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty coin­cid­ed with the rise of inter­est in sites like ancestry.com or grow­ing nationalism—both of which, in their own way, are try­ing to offer peo­ple a sense of shared, com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty root­ed in the past. To focus on doc­trine to the exclu­sion of com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty when inves­ti­gat­ing why peo­ple con­vert would be fol­ly. Protes­tants must have an answer to this if they want to keep peo­ple.”
  5. Against witch­craft (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Over­all, using your intu­ition is mas­sive­ly over­rat­ed in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go hay­wire. You’re bet­ter off court­ing like you’re arrang­ing your own mar­riage, not like you’re star­ring in a rom com.”
    • Much sen­si­ble (albeit non-Chris­t­ian) wis­dom in this arti­cle. Although the first four para­graphs are kin­da unhinged.
    • I decid­ed to look up the oth­er entries in this series. AMAZING. 9/10 rec­om­mend with the excep­tion of her sec­ond arti­cle which I skipped for being less rel­e­vant to like­ly read­ers of this sen­tence.
    • How to find a hus­band (and why you should want one) (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “So I got mar­ried recent­ly. I’ve decid­ed to take his name, so this blog is going to be now under the name Aria Schreck­er.… Find­ing a spouse should be the num­ber one pri­or­i­ty in your life. The right part­ner will make every oth­er goal in your life eas­i­er to achieve. If your pri­or­i­ty is your career, you will prob­a­bly be more suc­cess­ful with a well-cho­sen spouse. In some cas­es this will be a part­ner in a sim­i­lar field and you guys can pass each oth­er net­works and gos­sip. In some cas­es you may pre­fer some­one who is will­ing to put their career on the back­burn­er and sup­port you by tak­ing care of every­thing else in your life. If you’re aim­ing for suc­cess in pol­i­tics, or the arts, or you work tire­less­ly for a real­ly impor­tant altru­is­tic cause, then mar­ry­ing some­one with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.”
    • The wall is real but not for the rea­sons you think (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Every day that pass­es, eli­gi­ble bach­e­lors in your age range start dat­ing the women they are going to mar­ry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main rea­sons. (1) There’s some­thing wrong with him/ (2) There’s some­thing wrong with her. (3) Bad luck. As you get old­er the men who are attrac­tive, want to get mar­ried, and don’t have ruinous per­son­al­i­ty prob­lems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girl­friends, aren’t inter­est­ed in seri­ous dat­ing, and/or have been seri­al­ly reject­ed by women after get­ting into rela­tion­ships with them. Obvi­ous­ly lots of sin­gle old­er men are still mar­riage-wor­thy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfor­tu­nate sources of incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty. But the more time pass­es, the less like­ly this becomes.”
  6. It’s Not His Fault He Used the N‑Word (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “As con­tro­ver­sies go, this one was immac­u­late. Unlike pre­vi­ous inci­dents of this type, there was no risk that the alleged hate speech would turn out to be an acci­den­tal mala­prop­ism, or an out­right fab­ri­ca­tion, or, as in one mem­o­rable case from 2021, a man who was mis­heard while try­ing to get the atten­tion of the mas­cot for the Col­orado Rock­ies, a pur­ple pol­ka-dot­ted tricer­atops named Dinger. This was an actu­al utter­ance of the actu­al no-no word, caught on actu­al cam­era and broad­cast on the actu­al BBC. If ever there was an iron­clad case for can­cel­la­tion—! Ah, but wait: Remem­ber, John David­son has Tourette’s syn­drome, which also makes this an actu­al case of the phe­nom­e­non col­lo­qui­al­ly known as the Oppres­sion Olympics.”
    • The twist at the end is stun­ning. I won’t spoil it. In a tweet about it, the author said, “When I learned why David­son was in the audi­ence my soul left my body.”
    • On a per­son­al note: one of my good friends in col­lege had Touret­te’s like this. I can attest that bro did high­ly offen­sive stuff on the reg­u­lar that I guar­an­tee he had absolute­ly zero con­trol over nor any poor inten­tion behind.
  7. Big­ger is not always bet­ter (Will Gibbs, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “She lived an ordi­nary life. Had kids, divorced, worked, retired, babysat and even­tu­al­ly passed away. But, her impact was any­thing but ordi­nary. She ran one of the few preschools in my home­town for twen­ty years. She deliv­ered dona­tions every Mon­day of the month to the local food pantry. She trav­eled with my church’s youth group to rehouse roofs and build ADA acces­si­ble hous­ing for less for­tu­nate peo­ple in our area.… When she passed away, my pas­tor start­ed get­ting stopped in the streets. Every­body every­where — even peo­ple he had walked by for years with­out a con­ver­sa­tion — want­ed to per­son­al­ly give their sym­pa­thies and express how big of an impact she had on them.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 541: What Forgiveness Takes

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. For­give­ness Always Involves the Absorp­tion of a Debt (J. D. Greear, blog): “…if you get jeal­ous of me and start slan­der­ing me and real­ly hurt my rep­u­ta­tion in the eyes of oth­ers, it can be hard to see where the ‘debt’ is. But it’s there. Watch this: Let’s say that after you’ve maligned me, but before I launched my coun­ter­at­tack, you came to me and said you were sor­ry. And I was feel­ing mag­nan­i­mous, so I for­gave you. In that moment, what has hap­pened? In for­giv­ing you, I’m say­ing, ‘I’m not going to pun­ish you or pay you back for what you did. I’m not going to take vengeance on you or seek retal­i­a­tion; I’m not going to go out and ruin your rep­u­ta­tion, and I’m not even going to stay mad at you for the hurt you caused me. I am going to absorb the con­se­quences of your sin.’ You can’t see the finan­cial dam­age, but the dam­age is just as real. And some­one is still pay­ing for it. For­give­ness always involves the absorp­tion of a debt. The sac­ri­fice of a lamb pic­tures how God would him­self absorb the cost for our sin. But catch this, that only makes sense if God him­self is some­how pic­tured in the lamb—otherwise, killing a lamb in our place is ran­dom and cru­el.”
  2. Near­ly 40% of Stan­ford under­grad­u­ates claim they’re dis­abled. I’m one of them (Elsa John­son, The Times): “The gam­ing even extends to our meals. Stan­ford requires most under­grad­u­ates liv­ing on cam­pus to pur­chase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025–26 aca­d­e­m­ic year. But stu­dents can get exempt­ed if they claim a reli­gious dietary restric­tion that the col­lege kitchens can­not accom­mo­date. And so, some stu­dents I know claim to be devout mem­bers of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all liv­ing crea­tures — includ­ing small insects and root veg­eta­bles. The stu­dents I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal mon­ey at Whole Foods instead and enjoy fresh­ly made sal­ads and oth­er yum­my dish­es, while the rest of us are stuck with col­lege meals, like burg­ers made part­ly from ‘mush­room mix’.”
  3. New Research Con­firms Jesus’s Mir­a­cles (T.C. Schmidt, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The impli­ca­tions are clear: Jose­phus ful­ly acknowl­edged Jesus’s mirac­u­lous deeds, as oth­er ancient non-Chris­tians did. And this comes from a man raised in first-cen­tu­ry Jerusalem, a man who knew those involved in Jesus’s tri­al, a man who went on to become one of the finest his­to­ri­ans the ancient world ever pro­duced. He was also per­fect­ly ready to deny the miraculous—he laughed at the idea of cer­tain wiz­ards cast­ing spells on him when he served as a gen­er­al, and he unmasked false prophets and char­la­tans when writ­ing his books of history—but in the case of Jesus, he didn’t claim his mir­a­cles were false, or exag­ger­a­tions, or the stuff of leg­ends. While Jose­phus wasn’t sure of the source for Jesus’s super­nat­ur­al deeds, he was sure they hap­pened.”
    • The title is a bit over the top (per­haps bet­ter “New Research Finds Ancient Attes­ta­tion To Jesus’s Mir­a­cles”), but real­ly inter­est­ing regard­less. This is the same guy who wrote Jose­phus and Jesus, men­tioned pre­vi­ous­ly in TGFI (and still avail­able for free at https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/)
  4. The Real Rea­son Sci­ence is Bro­ken (Tim Requar­th, Per­sua­sion): “A study pub­lished last month in Nature ana­lyzed 41 mil­lion research papers across the nat­ur­al sci­ences and found some­thing that should unset­tle any­one who believes AI will rev­o­lu­tion­ize sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery. Yes, sci­en­tists who adopt AI tools pub­lish three times more papers and receive near­ly five times more cita­tions. Their careers accel­er­ate. But the col­lec­tive range of sci­en­tif­ic top­ics under inves­ti­ga­tion shrinks by near­ly 5 per­cent, and researchers’ engage­ment with one another’s work drops by 22 per­cent.… AI isn’t accel­er­at­ing sci­ence so much as opti­miz­ing sci­en­tists to thrive in an already-bro­ken reward sys­tem.”
    • The author is a neu­ro­science prof at NYU
  5. Unlocked: Chris­tian­i­ty at the Super Bowl defies a trend (Paul Putz, Wash­ing­ton Post): “It is a remark­able shift over the course of a cen­tu­ry. Chris­t­ian ath­letes have suc­cess­ful­ly turned pro sports — and foot­ball in par­tic­u­lar — from a space in which Chris­tians were rarely present into one of the most promi­nent are­nas in Amer­i­can life for Chris­t­ian wit­ness and self-asser­tion. This trans­for­ma­tion did not hap­pen by acci­dent. It is the result of a Chris­t­ian sports move­ment that has been grow­ing since the 1950s, as evan­gel­i­cal sports min­istries like the Fel­low­ship of Chris­t­ian Ath­letes, Pro Ath­letes Out­reach, and Ath­letes in Action have built a net­work of Chris­t­ian ath­letes and coach­es who find spir­i­tu­al mean­ing in and through their shared sports expe­ri­ence.”
  6. The hid­den costs of the world’s most expen­sive schools (Annie Dong, Sub­stack): “One of the most dan­ger­ous side effects of attend­ing pres­ti­gious insti­tu­tions is that you are con­stant­ly con­grat­u­lat­ed.… I have been con­grat­u­lat­ed repeat­ed­ly for my entire life, and it’s put me in an odd posi­tion where I can no longer dis­tin­guish my per­son­al mer­its from my per­ceived per­son­al mer­its. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, it’s put me in an odd posi­tion where I find myself unable to dis­tin­guish oth­ers’ per­son­al mer­its from their per­ceived per­son­al mer­its, or lack there­of – oth­er­wise known as elit­ism.… To be extreme­ly vul­ner­a­ble, I even have trou­ble con­nect­ing with my cousins because I find it dif­fi­cult to tru­ly sum­mon a sense of admi­ra­tion for their achieve­ments and aspi­ra­tions.”
  7. Eileen Gu: The Win­ter Olympian who earns $23m a year — but just $100k of it from her sport (Char­lotte Harpur, New York Times): “An out­lier lies among the list of Forbes’ 2025 world’s high­est-paid female ath­letes. Ten­nis star Coco Gauff tops the list, earn­ing an esti­mat­ed $33 mil­lion, fol­lowed by her peers Ary­na Sabalen­ka ($30m) and Iga Swiatek ($25.1m) but then appears Eileen Gu. The lead­ing trio are house­hold sport­ing names, freestyle ski­er Gu is not, but her earn­ings? $23.1m.… Not every 22-year-old has stud­ied at Stan­ford and Oxford, does back­flips on ski slopes, has posed for Sports Illustrated’s swim­suit issue and is named one of Time’s 100 most influ­en­tial peo­ple but, Her­sh­man said, ‘for so many younger peo­ple, that will be aspi­ra­tional.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 538: missionary spies and Minneapolis reflections

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. God’s Spooks: Reli­gion, Spy­ing, and the Cold War (Matthew Avery Sut­ton, Church Life Jour­nal): “Since its incep­tion, the CIA has used mis­sion­ar­ies and oth­er reli­gious activists for intel­li­gence and espi­onage work; it has used reli­gion as an effec­tive pro­pa­gan­da tool, and its agents have even posed as cler­gy. CIA agents and reli­gious activists man­aged to keep their part­ner­ships most­ly hid­den until the 1970s. But in the wake of Viet­nam and Water­gate, numer­ous jour­nal­ists and then Con­gress began scru­ti­niz­ing the agency more close­ly. They revealed to the world that the CIA had been employ­ing mis­sion­ar­ies to fur­ther its agen­da and that some reli­gious activists were receiv­ing sub­stan­tial rewards for their work on the government’s behalf. In fact, the CIA and reli­gious activists have long col­lab­o­rat­ed to achieve numer­ous pol­i­cy goals.”
    • Super fas­ci­nat­ing. My denom­i­na­tion receives spe­cif­ic men­tion: “The Assem­blies of God, which had a large and active mis­sion­ary out­reach, qui­et­ly instruct­ed work­ers to avoid CIA col­lab­o­ra­tion. How­ev­er, church lead­ers did not want to go on record pub­licly against the CIA.”
  2. Report: More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians world­wide face ‘high lev­els’ of per­se­cu­tion (Gina Chris­t­ian, OSV News): “More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians — or 1 in 7 believ­ers world­wide — face ‘high lev­els of per­se­cu­tion and dis­crim­i­na­tion for their faith,’ accord­ing to a new report.… Specif­i­cal­ly, Open Doors focus­es on col­lect­ing data on Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion in six key areas: restric­tions or dan­gers on prac­tic­ing faith in pri­vate, fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, nation­al and church life, as well as the lev­els of vio­lence — men­tal, phys­i­cal and sex­u­al — Chris­tians face in the 150 nations Open Doors mon­i­tors. Each area is scored, with each coun­try then receiv­ing an over­all score out of 100 for the sever­i­ty of Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, with scores of 81–100 des­ig­nat­ed as ‘extreme,’ 61–80 ‘very high’ and 41–60 ‘high.’”
  3. Not So Sec­u­lar Swe­den (Joel Hall­dorf, Com­ment): “In high­ly sec­u­lar soci­eties, zoomers tend to be more reli­gious than their boomer par­ents. Nowhere, the study con­clud­ed, was that pat­tern clear­er than in Swe­den, once the poster child of sec­u­lar­ism.… Swe­den once set the glob­al bench­mark for sec­u­lar ratio­nal­i­ty, and every­body expect­ed the world to fol­low our path. Now the qui­et stir­rings of faith here in the north—more con­fir­ma­tions, new mem­ber­ships, con­ver­sa­tions once unthinkable—show that his­to­ry has a way of hum­bling even the most con­fi­dent nar­ra­tives. Iron­clad soci­o­log­i­cal the­o­ries often insist that the cur­rent moment is our inevitable future. But his­to­ry sel­dom fol­lows straight lines.”
  4. Chris­tians, Let’s Stop Abus­ing Romans 13 (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “More­over, the use of Romans 13 as a refusal to ques­tion the moral­i­ty of a use of force is, iron­i­cal­ly enough, a vio­la­tion of the pas­sage. We might well ask, what would Paul have writ­ten if Romans 13 were addressed to the author­i­ties rather than to those under their rule? Well, we actu­al­ly know the answer, because the same Spir­it who breathed out Romans 13 also breathed out John the Baptist’s instruc­tions to tax col­lec­tors and sol­diers. John told them not to extort mon­ey from any­one, imply­ing that they would be held respon­si­ble for the mis­use of their pow­er (Luke 3:12–14). The same Spir­it also favor­ably por­trayed Paul’s inter­ac­tion with the police who told him and Silas, on behalf of the mag­is­trates, to leave qui­et­ly, to which Paul replied, ‘They have beat­en us pub­licly, uncon­demned, men who are Roman cit­i­zens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secret­ly? No! Let them come them­selves and take us out’ (Acts 16:37).”
  5. Chi­nese Uni­ver­si­ties Surge in Glob­al Rank­ings as U.S. Schools Slip (Mark Arse­nault, New York Times): “The issue at top Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties is not falling pro­duc­tion. Six promi­nent Amer­i­can schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, Johns Hop­kins, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton-Seat­tle, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty — are pro­duc­ing more research than they did two decades ago, accord­ing to the Lei­den tal­lies. But pro­duc­tion by the Chi­nese schools has risen far more.… [How­ev­er,] a study has sug­gest­ed that Chi­nese researchers have been boost­ing their cita­tion rank­ings by cit­ing one anoth­er more often than west­ern researchers tend to cite oth­er west­ern­ers.”
  6. How to stop the chaos of col­lege sports (John Cali­pari, Wash­ing­ton Post): “There is no sus­tain­able path in col­lege ath­let­ics that doesn’t address these three things: First, stu­dent-ath­letes should have their oppor­tu­ni­ties for schol­ar­ships pro­tect­ed and get to com­pete against play­ers who are their age. Sec­ond, trans­fer rules, which now allow play­ers to leave one school for anoth­er as often as they’d like, need sta­bil­i­ty. This will help edu­ca­tion remain the heart of col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. Third, pro­tect the free mar­ket and rights of young peo­ple to fair­ly earn what their local mar­kets can offer, which will require more rev­enue from teams.”
  7. Some reflec­tions on ICE in Min­neso­ta. There are many more float­ing around the web, and if you find one with good insights or a provoca­tive per­spec­tive please let me know about it.
    • I Joined Ice Watch (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “In the last six weeks, Min­neapo­lis has become the site of the largest immi­gra­tion enforce­ment oper­a­tion in U.S. his­to­ry. Thou­sands of city res­i­dents have respond­ed by join­ing var­i­ous Sig­nal groups whose main pur­pose is to find and dis­rupt ICE.… These indi­vid­u­als came from all walks of life. I count­ed at least five pub­lic school teach­ers, a divorce lawyer, two med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, a for­mer bal­le­ri­na, and even one Min­neapo­lis City Coun­cil mem­ber: Aurin Chowd­hury⁩, a pro­gres­sive who was endorsed by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca in 2023. One local non­prof­it leader whose orga­ni­za­tion reset­tles refugees told me that the aver­age par­tic­i­pants in these Sig­nal groups are church mem­bers, retirees, and par­ents.”
    • Min­neapo­lis Isn’t a Movie (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “Around the same time that Renee Good was shot, a video cir­cu­lat­ed on Tik­Tok of anoth­er con­fronta­tion between a group of agents who appear to be U.S. Mar­shals and an activist with a cam­era. The activist is a young- to mid­dle-aged woman, as is one of the agents—and when the first woman men­tions that her 6‑year-old child is in her car, the agent looks like she’s been elec­tro­cut­ed. ‘You have a child in your car?’ she says, her voice pitch­ing sharply upward, her eyes wide with hor­ror. ‘Get your child off the scene! This is an active police scene!’ It could not be clear­er, in this moment, that these women inhab­it two dif­fer­ent real­i­ties. One under­stands her­self to be in a dan­ger­ous, high-stakes sit­u­a­tion; the oth­er thinks it’s all a sort of game.”
    • The Goon Squad (Nick Cat­to­gio, The Dis­patch): “Why on earth is the admin­is­tra­tion announc­ing its oper­a­tions before they hap­pen?… It makes no sense as a strat­e­gy for effec­tive law enforcement—but lots of sense as a pageant of dom­i­neer­ing law-and-order assertive­ness. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion wants con­fronta­tion. Its top pri­or­i­ty isn’t to unob­tru­sive­ly detain and remove the most dan­ger­ous immi­grants, as the depor­ta­tion num­bers prove. Its pri­or­i­ty is to intim­i­date its cul­tur­al ene­mies with heavy-hand­ed dis­plays of author­i­ty and promis­es of offi­cial impuni­ty for those who car­ry them out. That’s why ICE wears masks, a priv­i­lege even U.S. com­bat troops don’t enjoy, and why some agents are kit­ted out in cam­ou­flage despite the fact that they’re not try­ing to ‘blend in’ to their urban sur­round­ings. (There’s noth­ing stealthy about ICE.) They’re not enforc­ing the law, they’re going into bat­tle. And their anonymi­ty sig­nals, to you and to them, that no one will hold them account­able for what hap­pens dur­ing that bat­tle if you make trou­ble.”
    • One State, Two Very Dif­fer­ent Views of Min­neapo­lis (Sheila M. Eldred, Eliz­a­beth A. Staw­ic­ki, Ann Hin­ga Klein and Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Ms. Good’s death was trag­ic, they said. Hor­rif­ic. But they also said that she had asked for trou­ble. ‘You obey the law offi­cer,’ a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, ‘and ques­tion it lat­er.’ This is the divide, in a sin­gle sen­tence. In Min­neapo­lis, pro­test­ers saw an inno­cent woman killed by a fed­er­al agent and took to the streets. At ‘the Pick­le,’ the reg­u­lars saw a woman who should have com­plied.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 513: elite colleges, pathologizing personality, and the fastest woman in the world

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. Elite Col­leges Have Found a New Virtue for Appli­cants to Fake (Alex Bronzi­ni-Vender, New York Times): “[There is] a new ques­tion: ‘Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tion or encoun­tered some­one with an opin­ion or per­spec­tive that was dif­fer­ent from your own. How did you find com­mon ground?’ It’s known as the dis­agree­ment ques­tion, and since the stu­dent encamp­ments of spring 2024 and the Amer­i­can right’s attacks on uni­ver­si­ties, a grow­ing num­ber of elite col­leges have added it to their appli­ca­tions. Car­o­line Kop­pel­man, a pri­vate admis­sions con­sul­tant, has called it the ‘hot new it girl’ of col­lege essays. There’s no evi­dence that civil­i­ty mania will improve cam­pus dis­course, but it seems poised to widen the inequal­i­ties that already plague hyper­s­e­lec­tive col­lege admis­sions. The trou­ble is that the dis­agree­ment ques­tion — like much of the appli­ca­tion process — isn’t built for hon­esty.”
  2. Nobody Has a Per­son­al­i­ty Any­more (Freya India, The Free Press): “Today, every per­son­al­i­ty trait is seen as a prob­lem to be solved. Any­thing too human—every habit, every eccen­tric­i­ty, every feel­ing that’s too strong—has to be labeled and explained. Ther­a­py-speak has tak­en over our lan­guage. It is ruin­ing how we talk about romance and rela­tion­ships, nar­row­ing how we think about hurt and suf­fer­ing, and now, we are los­ing the words for who we are. Nobody has a per­son­al­i­ty any­more.… This is part of a deep­er instinct in mod­ern life to explain everything—psychologically, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly. Every­thing about us is caused, cat­e­go­rized, and can be cor­rect­ed. We talk in the­o­ries, frame­works, sys­tems, struc­tures, dri­ves, moti­va­tions, and mech­a­nisms. But in exchange for expla­na­tion, we lost mys­tery, romance, and late­ly, our­selves.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Huck­abee threat­ens to declare Israel does not wel­come Chris­tians, as visa row blows open (Lazar Berman, Times of Israel): “Giv­en Huckabee’s long­stand­ing sup­port for Israel and close ties with the cur­rent gov­ern­ment in par­tic­u­lar, the rhetoric in his let­ter rep­re­sent­ed a shock­ing­ly quick dete­ri­o­ra­tion. But the issue at hand — the abil­i­ty of Chris­t­ian groups to tour Israel — is close to Huckabee’s heart, giv­en that he has led count­less such trips as an evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor over the past half a cen­tu­ry.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent. Quite inter­est­ing.
  4. My health and my pol­i­tics walk into a doctor’s office… (Kim Fell­ner, New York Times): “The vision of a diverse, equi­table and inclu­sive democ­ra­cy that seems the best of Amer­i­ca to me and my com­mu­ni­ty is locked in an exis­ten­tial bat­tle with a MAGA counter-vision that ele­vates White­ness and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, and that seems to be col­o­niz­ing insti­tu­tions and cul­ture at warp speed. I did not antic­i­pate, how­ev­er, that the per­son­al and the polit­i­cal would col­lide in my doctor’s office.… Over a series of writ­ten and in-per­son con­ver­sa­tions, we have been shar­ing some of the tenets of our respec­tive faiths and the impli­ca­tions for how we nav­i­gate the world. She and I have sharply diver­gent views about when life begins and what hap­pens after we die. She believes that the only true sal­va­tion lies in accept­ing Jesus as one’s sav­ior.”
  5. A Stark Reminder That Sex Dif­fer­ences Mat­ter in Elite Sport (James Smoli­ga, Per­sua­sion): “The goal was for Kipye­gon to become the first woman ever to run a sub‑4 minute mile. Nike set her up with the very best con­di­tions that any ath­lete could ever expect. Kipye­gon ran a mile in 4:06—a remark­able per­for­mance by any mea­sure, and a per­son­al best, but well short of the sub‑4 minute goal. While Kipye­gon wasn’t direct­ly rac­ing her pac­ers, they were there to pull her to a time that hun­dreds of male ath­letes have already achieved. Rather than charg­ing down the final straight­away alone, leav­ing the best women in her wake, as she so often does, we saw Kipye­gon strain­ing to hang on behind a group of male run­ners who weren’t even near their lim­it, as they turned around to cheer her on. This race mat­ters because it offered some­thing exceed­ing­ly rare: an hon­est, direct com­par­i­son of male and female per­for­mance at the high­est lev­el.”
  6. Israeli Researcher Says Stan­ford Shunned and Sab­o­taged Him After Hamas Attack (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “[For­mer IDF offi­cer] Laps alleges that the research assis­tant in the Dan­ny Chou Lab told Laps dur­ing their first inter­ac­tion on his first day nev­er to speak to her. She alleged­ly delayed his orders for lab equip­ment, made him sit else­where at lunch, and reas­signed her cus­to­di­al duties to him. Col­leagues fol­lowed her lead, ostra­ciz­ing him from the lab com­mu­ni­ty, the suit claims. The most explo­sive alle­ga­tion is that the same research assis­tant, Ter­ra Lin, tam­pered with Laps’s research.”
  7. What YouTube Can’t Teach Stu­dents About Jesus (Dylan Muss­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘Who (or what) has shaped your faith the most?’ As a cam­pus min­is­ter, I have asked this ques­tion to many col­lege stu­dents over the years. Late­ly, I have noticed a shift in their answers.  This past fall, I sat across from Luke—a fresh­man at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty. We were chat­ting over tacos when I posed the ques­tion. I watched the gears spin in his head. Would it be a church from back home? A great book? An old­er men­tor who dis­ci­pled him? Maybe his par­ents? He leaned back. ‘Youtube.’ I stared blankly, try­ing my best not to show my sur­prise.”
    • The author leads the Nav­i­ga­tors at Van­der­bilt.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The Joy of Cook­ing Your Sprite (Jenée Desmond-Har­ris, Slate): “After a day walk­ing around the dusty grounds, rid­ing a giant swing, and dress­ing up for old-timey pho­tos, we made it back to the car exhaust­ed and thirsty. And in the back seat (I don’t know if it had been pur­chased as part of post-out­ing lunch or was just rolling around back there) was a six-pack of Sprite that had been, well, cook­ing all day. We each cracked one open, and that’s when I real­ized some­thing impor­tant was hap­pen­ing. It was so good! The soda was hot but some­how still refresh­ing. The sweet­ness was soft­ened and the bub­bles felt big­ger and more luxurious—not like the sharp, sneeze-trig­ger­ing ones you get when it’s cold. We locked eyes and smiled mis­chie­vous­ly. It felt rebel­lious (look, we were very shel­tered kids) and wild­ly inno­v­a­tive. ‘Cooked Sprite’ was born.” 
  • What Is ‘Aura Farm­ing’? This Tween Will Show You. (Ben­jamin Hoff­man, New York Times): “On Tues­day, the gov­ern­ment in Riau, cit­ing the impact of the video and the fact that he had been ‘inspir­ing local kids to embrace and pre­serve their tra­di­tions,’ named Dika as a tourism ambas­sador for the province, and its gov­er­nor, Abdul Wahid, award­ed him a schol­ar­ship for 20 mil­lion rupi­ah (around $1,200) for his edu­ca­tion. Dika also per­formed a ren­di­tion of his dance along with Gov­er­nor Wahid and oth­er offi­cials.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 492: suffering, plane crashes, and near death experiences

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 Best Argu­ment Against Hav­ing Faith in God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “One inter­est­ing point about [suf­fer­ing] is that while it’s often fold­ed into the briefs for athe­ism that claim to rely pri­mar­i­ly on hard evi­dence and sci­ence, it isn’t prop­er­ly speak­ing an argu­ment that some cre­at­ing pow­er does not exist. Rather it’s an argu­ment about the nature of that pow­er, a claim that the par­tic­u­lar kind of God envi­sioned by many believ­ers and philoso­phers — all pow­er­ful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find our­selves, and there­fore that this kind of God does not exist. The oth­er inter­est­ing point about this argu­ment is that while its core evi­dence is empir­i­cal, in the sense that ter­ri­ble forms of suf­fer­ing obvi­ous­ly exist and can be exten­sive­ly enu­mer­at­ed, its pow­er fun­da­men­tal­ly rests on an intu­ition about just how much suf­fer­ing is too much. By this I mean that many peo­ple who empha­size the prob­lem of evil would con­cede that a good God might allow some form of pain and suf­fer­ing with­in a mate­r­i­al cre­ation for var­i­ous good rea­sons.”
  2. Why Are So Many Planes Crash­ing? (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “Now let’s zoom out and just ask: are inci­dents of any cause get­ting more com­mon? They aren’t.… [Also] I don’t see any mean­ing­ful uptick over time in fatal­i­ty inci­dents. Actu­al­ly they’ve clear­ly declined since the ear­ly 1990s or even ear­ly 2000s. Which is wild, since total amounts of flights have mas­sive­ly increased! Note that I am includ­ing known inci­dents through Feb­ru­ary 18, 2025 in those fig­ures above!”
    • Empha­sis removed. Lots of charts.
  3. It’s Going To Take More Than An Exec­u­tive Order To Tru­ly Pro­tect Women’s Sports (Kate Bier­ly, Dai­ly Caller): “Since the 1990s, Con­gress has steadi­ly abdi­cat­ed its respon­si­bil­i­ty to leg­is­late, opt­ing instead to let the exec­u­tive branch take the polit­i­cal heat. Mem­bers of Con­gress, more con­cerned with reelec­tion than with the duty to gov­ern, pre­fer to pass the buck. An exec­u­tive order com­mands only the exec­u­tive branch, requir­ing fed­er­al agen­cies to com­ply. But its pow­er is inher­ent­ly lim­it­ed. Reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty has been reined in, espe­cial­ly after the Supreme Court’s recent deci­sion to over­turn Chevron def­er­ence. No longer can agen­cies broad­ly inter­pret con­gres­sion­al statutes to impose sweep­ing reg­u­la­tions. Now, their author­i­ty is con­fined strict­ly to what Con­gress has explic­it­ly grant­ed them. This lim­its the scope of what Trump’s lat­est exec­u­tive order can achieve. His direc­tive to the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion to restrict women’s sports to bio­log­i­cal females is bound by statu­to­ry inter­pre­ta­tion, which blue states can chal­lenge.… This is why con­gres­sion­al action is nec­es­sary, because reliance on exec­u­tive orders and judi­cial inter­pre­ta­tion fos­ters legal insta­bil­i­ty.”
    • Writ­ten by one of our alum­ni.
  4. 70 Chris­tians found behead­ed in church in DRC (Open Doors): “Accord­ing to field sources, at around 4am last Thurs­day (13 Feb­ru­ary) sus­pect­ed mil­i­tants from the Allied Demo­c­ra­t­ic Forces (ADF) – a group with ties to so-called Islam­ic State (IS) – approached homes in May­ba in the ter­ri­to­ry of Lubero, say­ing: ‘Get out, get out and don’t make any noise.’ Twen­ty Chris­t­ian men and women came out and were cap­tured. Shak­en by this inci­dent, peo­ple from the local com­mu­ni­ty in May­ba lat­er gath­ered to work out how to release those held cap­tive. How­ev­er, ADF mil­i­tants sur­round­ed the vil­lage and cap­tured a fur­ther 50 believ­ers.”
  5. The ker­nel of truth in gen­der stereo­types: Con­sid­er the avo­ca­do, not the apple (Eagly & Hall, Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Social Psy­chol­o­gy): “…in 85% of [the 673] com­par­isons [from across the 43 stud­ies], par­tic­i­pants got the direc­tion [of gen­der dif­fer­ence] right.… Our review sug­gests that All­port’s (1954/1988, p. 190) clas­sic and wide­ly cit­ed ker­nel of truth metaphor is incor­rect for gen­der stereo­types unless this ker­nel is more like the seed of an avo­ca­do than an apple.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at North­west­ern and North­east­ern, a com­bi­na­tion I found fun­ny.
  6. Learn­ings from 1,000+ Near-Death Expe­ri­ences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia (Tim Fer­riss, per­son­al blog): “I start­ed out as a mate­ri­al­ist skep­tic. After 50 years, I’m still skep­ti­cal, but I’m no longer a mate­ri­al­ist. I think that’s a dead end when it comes to explain­ing near-death expe­ri­ences and oth­er phe­nom­e­na like this.… About five per­cent of the gen­er­al population—or one to every 20 people—has had a near-death expe­ri­ence. Sec­ond­ly, they are not asso­ci­at­ed in any way with men­tal ill­ness. Peo­ple who are per­fect­ly nor­mal have these NDEs in abnor­mal sit­u­a­tions that can hap­pen to any­body.”
  7. Miran­da July’s Lucra­tive Fan­tasies (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “The anti-monogamists con­stant­ly insist that monogamy is just too roman­tic to build a life on, that it’s con­trary to human nature. But what could pos­si­bly be more roman­tic, in the most child­ish sense, than the belief that you’ll stay attrac­tive and roman­ti­cal­ly desir­able for your entire life? That you’ll sim­ply cycle end­less­ly between will­ing part­ners who you find attrac­tive and who feel the same about you and who you’ll hap­pi­ly let go of as soon as you’re bored, and you’ll keep doing that in a state of bliss until you die? You’d call that, what, real­is­tic?”
    • deBoer, as I often remind peo­ple, an athe­ist social­ist who is nonethe­less very clear-mind­ed on some top­ics. He is near­ly always enter­tain­ing to read.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 489

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. To Hate the Vul­ner­a­ble: Roe at 52 (Nadya Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Do we as a soci­ety real­ize that we tell some peo­ple out­right: Your life is not worth liv­ing.  You do not deserve to live. Your child does not deserve to live. What kind of mon­sters does this make us?”
  2. Win­ning The Lot­tery (Kasen Stephensen, Sub­stack): “Ulti­mate­ly, what I learned at Stan­ford was how to think for myself. Con­front­ed with a cul­ture for­eign to my own upbring­ing and des­per­ate to belong, I looked to my fel­low stu­dents for guid­ance and at times lost sight of the lessons I learned from my fam­i­ly and on my mis­sion. While I appre­ci­ate my new ana­lyt­i­cal skills and blos­som­ing ambi­tion, I reject the premise implic­it at Stan­ford: that your worth is mea­sured by your income, the pres­tige of your job, and your family’s con­nec­tions. I redis­cov­ered the key lessons from my mis­sion: hap­pi­ness, for me, is found in intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, acts of ser­vice, and gen­uine rela­tion­ships with oth­ers, whether with friends, team-mates, fam­i­ly mem­bers, or the woman I would mar­ry.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. The Best Argu­ment for Protes­tantism Is Its Catholic­i­ty (N. Gray Sutan­to, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…Ortlund high­lights how the Reform­ers defend­ed their over­ar­ch­ing the­ol­o­gy in a sur­pris­ing way. Not only, they argued, were Protes­tant posi­tions more bib­li­cal than their non-Protes­tant coun­ter­parts; they were also more catholic—in the sense of fur­ther­ing the goal of a uni­fied church. In their view, Catholic the­olo­gians were the ones depart­ing from apos­tolic and patris­tic, or ear­ly-church, teach­ing. As Ortlund notes,’“the ear­ly Protes­tants argued on catholic and his­tor­i­cal grounds,’ not mere­ly the­o­log­i­cal grounds, against a host of Roman Catholic doc­trines.”
    • A sol­id review of an excel­lent book (What It Means To Be Protes­tant by Gavin Ortlund).
  4. Can reli­gion make you hap­py? Sci­en­tists may soon find out. (Julia Fly­nn Siler, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “A team of schol­ars, in part­ner­ship with polling firm Gallup, has begun a five-year study of over 200,000 par­tic­i­pants from 22 coun­tries, to fig­ure out what leads to what researchers call flour­ish­ing. To flour­ish is to be more than mere­ly hap­py; it’s a met­ric meant to show if peo­ple are ‘liv­ing in a state in which all aspects of a per­son­’s life are good.’… That data isn’t in yet. But the results obtained so far back up what Pew and oth­er researchers have found. The aver­age flour­ish­ing score was 0.23 points high­er for some­one who says that reli­gion is an impor­tant part of their dai­ly life than for some­one who does not – and 0.41 points high­er for some­one who attends a reli­gious ser­vice at least week­ly.”
  5. NBA greats think this D‑II coach is a bas­ket­ball genius. So why don’t you know who he is? (CJ Moore, The New York Times): “Crutch­field, a for­mer math teacher who nev­er played col­lege bas­ket­ball and coached ten­nis before get­ting his big D‑II break at West Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty, sees the game like a math prob­lem and has cre­at­ed his own cal­cu­la­tions.… When he grad­u­at­ed from West Vir­ginia in 1978, Crutch­field want­ed to be a high school bas­ket­ball coach. A year lat­er, he had giv­en up, return­ing to his alma mater to go to law school. ‘Too big a dream,’ he thought. He passed the LSAT and rent­ed an apart­ment in Mor­gan­town. Then he got a call out of nowhere, offer­ing him the boys bas­ket­ball coach­ing posi­tion at a small school in the state’s north­ern pan­han­dle. He’s not even sure who rec­om­mend­ed him. Crutch­field sold his law books, lost the deposit on his apart­ment and moved to Cameron, W.V.”
  6. The Case Against Drink­ing (Sam Kahn, Per­sua­sion): “From as far back as I can remem­ber, my plan had been to be a kind of low-inten­si­ty alco­holic. I hoped that it wouldn’t make me beat my fam­i­ly or wet myself at work, and that it wouldn’t lead to organ fail­ure in the end—always the ques­tion, isn’t it?—but it seemed a gam­ble worth tak­ing. The social life of the West is built almost entire­ly around the copi­ous con­sump­tion of alco­hol, with its pro­fes­sion­al life close­ly adja­cent to that.”
    • A sol­id essay that (cor­rect­ly) defends Pro­hi­bi­tion and makes many good points. I do not think drink­ing is always a sin, but I do not drink myself and am hap­py to encour­age you not to, either.
  7. I used to think my peers were anti­se­mit­ic. Now, I’ve changed my mind. (Julia Segal, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “‘How many of you have heard about this before?’ I ask the wide-eyed clus­ter of Stan­ford stu­dents in our hotel con­fer­ence room. A few sec­onds of silence go by as eyes dart around the room. Final­ly, scat­tered hands go up — approx­i­mate­ly half the room. The thing I was ask­ing if they’d head about? Oct. 7. The mas­sacre of rough­ly 1,300 peo­ple in Israel, in the small farm­ing vil­lages and at a music fes­ti­val. The dead­liest day for Jews since the Holo­caust. Ear­li­er this year, I would have been sur­prised that half the Stan­ford stu­dents in the room had nev­er heard about Oct. 7. But I was com­ing off the tail-end of dozens of inter­views for a trip to vis­it the Nova Exhi­bi­tion in L.A., where the typ­i­cal answer to ‘What have you heard about Oct. 7?’ was ‘to be hon­est, not much,’ and some­times even, ‘I hadn’t heard about it until I saw your email and googled it.’”
    • I’m gen­uine­ly shocked and it puts some of last year’s cam­pus activism into per­spec­tive.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 470



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

This is vol­ume 470, a rel­a­tive­ly unin­ter­est­ing num­ber. There are few­er links than usu­al this week owing to some trav­el. I did­n’t have much time to read and I’m exhaust­ed today.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Can AI Help a Stu­dent Get Into Stan­ford or Yale? (Lau­ren Cof­fey, Inside High­er Ed): “Lee is among hun­dreds of stu­dents try­ing out Esslo—whose name is a mashup of the words ‘essay’ and ‘Elo,’ a rank­ing sys­tem used in chess and esports. The pro­gram is the brain­child of two Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents look­ing to tack­le what they believe is one of the most stress­ful parts of col­lege appli­ca­tions: the admis­sions essay.”
    • The two Stan­ford stu­dents in ques­tion are part of Chi Alpha. Way to go, guys! The web­site: https://www.esslo.org/ — if you know any high school seniors, pass the link their way.
  2. Evan­ge­lize Like You’re a Sin­ner (Claude Atcho, Gospel Coali­tion): “The Samar­i­tan woman’s bold wit­ness teach­es us a truth some­times deemed too sim­plis­tic: the key to apolo­get­ics isn’t pithy answers or irrefutable argu­ments but a sense of awe in Jesus that can’t be silenced.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. As a Sin­gle Man, I Felt Lit­tle Pres­sure to Get Mar­ried. I Wish I Had. (Brett McCrack­en, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Sin­gle­ness and mar­riage can both be good when they’re done for God’s glo­ry and take a cru­ci­form shape. And when cho­sen for self­ish rea­sons or lived out in unhealthy ways, both sin­gle­ness and mar­riage can also be bad. I’m not mak­ing an argu­ment for one being uni­ver­sal­ly bet­ter than the oth­er. I’m sim­ply observ­ing that in our cul­tur­al moment, and per­haps in cer­tain cul­tur­al con­texts (like mine in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia), argu­ments for the good of mar­riage need to be sound­ed more urgent­ly.”
  4. How Stan­ford and Its West Coast Brethren Planned for Long Road Trips in Con­fer­ence Realign­ment (Pat Forde, Sports Illus­trat­ed): “The Car­di­nal are mak­ing their Atlantic Coast Con­fer­ence debut on Sept. 20, at Syra­cuse. The fol­low­ing week, Stan­ford will vis­it Clem­son. Of all the hands realign­ing schools have been dealt, this is the sin­gle worst one in foot­ball. None of the oth­er Pac-12 diaspora—in the ACC, Big Ten or Big 12—will play league road games on con­sec­u­tive weeks. And these are three-time-zone sojourns of 5,000 miles or more round trip.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 463



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

This is vol­ume 463, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why your smart­phone might be stop­ping you from fol­low­ing Jesus (Mar­tin Saun­ders, Pre­miere Chris­tian­i­ty): “[Haidt] argues that smart­phones actu­al­ly dri­ve spir­i­tu­al degra­da­tion: ‘[social media] trains peo­ple to think in ways that are exact­ly con­trary to the world’s wis­dom tra­di­tions: Think about your­selves first; be mate­ri­al­is­tic, judge­men­tal, boast­ful, and pet­ty; seek glo­ry as quan­ti­fied by likes and fol­low­ers.’… our dig­i­tal cul­ture isn’t neu­tral; it’s offer­ing a kind of anti-dis­ci­ple­ship.”
  2. Move Over, Math­e­mati­cians, Here Comes AlphaProof (Siob­han Roberts, New York Times): “A pair of Google Deep­Mind mod­els tried their luck with the prob­lem set in the 2024 Inter­na­tion­al Math­e­mat­i­cal Olympiad, or I.M.O., held from July 11 to July 22 about 100 miles west of Lon­don at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bath. The event is said to be the pre­mier math com­pe­ti­tion for the world’s ‘bright­est math­letes,’ accord­ing to a pro­mo­tion­al post on social media. The human prob­lem-solvers — 609 high school stu­dents from 108 coun­tries — won 58 gold medals, 123 sil­ver and 145 bronze. The A.I. per­formed at the lev­el of a sil­ver medal­ist, solv­ing four out of six prob­lems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-wor­thy per­for­mance on an Olympiad’s prob­lems.”
  3. Stand­ing Out, Craft­ing Hooks, and Acci­den­tal­ly Reveal­ing Every­thing That’s Wrong With You (Max Nussen­baum, Sub­stack): “You wouldn’t think that people’s nat­ur­al instinct would be to reveal their full litany of psy­cho­log­i­cal issues in their pro­files, but it actu­al­ly is. They just don’t real­ize that’s what they’re doing.” About a year old.
  4. Online opt-in polls can pro­duce mis­lead­ing results, espe­cial­ly for young peo­ple and His­pan­ic adults (Andrew Mer­cer, Court­ney Kennedy & Scott Keeter, Pew Research): “…sev­er­al recent stud­ies have doc­u­ment­ed large errors in online opt-in sur­veys due to the pres­ence of so-called ‘bogus respon­dents.’ These respon­dents do not answer ques­tions sin­cere­ly; instead, they attempt to com­plete sur­veys with as lit­tle effort as pos­si­ble to earn mon­ey or oth­er rewards. Stud­ies have shown that bogus respon­dents can cause opt-in sur­veys to over­es­ti­mate rare atti­tudes and behav­iors, such as ingest­ing bleach to pro­tect against COVID-19, belief in con­spir­a­cies like Piz­za­gate or sup­port for polit­i­cal vio­lence.”
  5. Patron­age vs. Con­stituent Par­ties (Or Why Repub­li­can Par­ty Lead­ers Mat­ter More Than Demo­c­ra­t­ic Ones) (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…many dis­cus­sions of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics assume that that the struc­tures and oper­a­tional norms of the two par­ties are the same. If these par­ty dif­fer­ences were more wide­ly rec­og­nized, I sus­pect we would see few­er evan­gel­i­cals frus­trat­ed with their lim­it­ed influ­ence over the GOP par­ty plat­form, few­er jour­nal­ists shocked with J.D. Vance’s jour­ney from nev­er-Trump land to MAGA-max­i­mal­ism, and greater alarm among cen­trist Democ­rats about the longer-term influ­ence that the Pales­tine protests will have on the con­tours of their coali­tion.”
  6. Evan­gel­i­cals Must Stop Their Pref­er­en­tial Treat­ment of the Left (James R. Wood, First Things): “Today, cen­trists and those on the right are more fer­tile soil, I believe, because they are more open to real­i­ty. They rec­og­nize that the cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies’ projects to rewrite real­i­ty are destroy­ing civ­i­liza­tion. These refugees crave clar­i­ty about basic moral real­i­ties because of how much con­fu­sion the neg­a­tive world has pro­duced. They are look­ing for voic­es who stand up to the civ­i­liza­tion­al destroyers—maybe even voic­es who bold­ly pro­claim super­nat­ur­al truths.Like the ‘god-fear­ers’ that ear­ly church mis­sion­ar­ies often tar­get­ed, we today need to con­sid­er the ‘real­i­ty-respecters’ in our mis­sion.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Stan­ford’s biggest star lured to Texas Tech with $1 mil­lion deal (Alex Simon, SF Gate): “Canady announced her trans­fer to Texas Tech on Wednes­day, with mul­ti­ple reports quick­ly com­ing out that the Red Raiders’ name, image and like­ness (NIL) col­lec­tive Mata­dor Club, the group of boost­ers sup­port­ing Texas Tech by sign­ing the school’s ath­letes to endorse­ment deals, signed the pitch­er to a one-year deal for over $1 mil­lion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 426

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

This is vol­ume 426, and I am absurd­ly pleased that 4+2=6. In some regards I am very easy to amuse.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Keep­ing the Faith at Stan­ford (Isabel­la Griepp, The Stan­ford Review): “Stay­ing true to your faith is a seri­ous under­tak­ing at a place like Stan­ford, but it can also be the most reward­ing part of your time on cam­pus. It is vital that you use your first quar­ter in col­lege to get plugged into Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • The author is in Chi Alpha.
  2. How Rich Donors and Loose Rules Are Trans­form­ing Col­lege Sports (David A. Fahren­thold and Bil­ly Witz, New York Times): “One play­er at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty now makes $750,000 a year, accord­ing to the group that pays him. At Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, some play­ers not only get a pay­check — they get a free car lease to boot, cour­tesy of a donor col­lec­tive.… The New York Times iden­ti­fied more than 120 col­lec­tives, includ­ing at least one for every school in each of the five major col­lege foot­ball con­fer­ences. The aver­age starter at a big-time foot­ball pro­gram now takes in about $103,000 a year, accord­ing to Open­dorse, a com­pa­ny that process­es pay­ments to the play­ers for the col­lec­tives.”
  3. 15 Rea­sons Why Mass Media Employ­ees Act Like Pro­pa­gan­dists (Caitlin John­ston, per­son­al blog): “Just because a lot of the mass media’s pro­pa­gan­dis­tic behav­ior can be explained with­out secret con­spir­a­cies doesn’t mean secret con­spir­a­cies aren’t hap­pen­ing. In 1977 Carl Bern­stein pub­lished an arti­cle titled ‘The CIA and the Media’ report­ing that the CIA had covert­ly infil­trat­ed America’s most influ­en­tial news out­lets and had over 400 reporters who it con­sid­ered assets in a pro­gram known as Oper­a­tion Mock­ing­bird. We are told that this sort of covert infil­tra­tion doesn’t hap­pen any­more today, but that’s absurd.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus in response my com­men­tary last week on how to think about jour­nal­ism. Most of the 15 rea­sons seem to revolve around this insight: jour­nal­ists respond to incen­tives and the sys­tem pro­vides rewards that ben­e­fit them but not their readers/viewers. We should remain mind­ful of this.
  4. Two arti­cles about man­hood:
    • Under­stand­ing the Young Male Syn­drome (Rob K Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “In his cross-cul­tur­al research, the psy­chol­o­gist Mar­tin J. Sea­ger has found 3 con­sis­tent require­ments to achieve the sta­tus of man­hood in var­i­ous soci­eties around the world. First, the indi­vid­ual must be a fight­er and a win­ner. Sec­ond, he must be a provider and pro­tec­tor. And third, he must main­tain mas­tery and con­trol of him­self at all times. Across cul­tures, there seems to be an implic­it under­stand­ing of what being a man is… Indeed, mas­culin­i­ty is wide­ly con­sid­ered to be an arti­fi­cial­ly induced sta­tus, achiev­able only through test­ing and care­ful instruc­tion. Real men do not sim­ply emerge like but­ter­flies from their boy­ish cocoons. Rather, they must be care­ful­ly shaped, nur­tured, coun­seled, and prod­ded into man­hood.”
      • This is long and worth read­ing for any­one who has an inter­est in gen­der dynam­ics.
    • News Men Can Use (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “I also do these prac­ti­cal posts because it’s impor­tant for those of us Chris­t­ian lay peo­ple who have skills and knowl­edge to step up and share them. The truth is, pas­tors aren’t life coach­es and often don’t know what they are talk­ing about in areas out­side of their core com­pe­ten­cy in preach­ing the Bible and the­ol­o­gy. So it’s unfair and even dan­ger­ous to rely on them to be gen­er­al pur­pose guides to life. That means lay peo­ple have to be will­ing to step up in the areas where they have real insight and expe­ri­ence.”
      • I can­not endorse the point Renn makes in this excerpt strong­ly enough. There’s a lot pas­tors don’t know. I get ner­vous when I hear a min­is­ter opin­ing pub­licly on a top­ic I know the Bible says very lit­tle about.
      • When you look for pas­tors, look for those with enough humil­i­ty to know that they are not an expert in things like busi­ness, law, pol­i­tics, lead­er­ship, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, con­sult­ing, biol­o­gy, astro­physics, invest­ment bank­ing, immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy, etc. There may be spe­cif­ic state­ments in some of those fields that pas­tors can make with God’s author­i­ty, but they are sure­ly lim­it­ed.
      • You want a pas­tor who speaks con­fi­dent­ly where the Bible speaks clear­ly and speaks cau­tious­ly where the Bible is silent. But as a Chris­t­ian layper­son, you should feel empow­ered to speak con­fi­dent­ly when you have rel­e­vant knowl­edge in your field of exper­tise.
  5. Two Chris­tians — one on the left and one on the right.
    • On the left: Shawn Fain’s Old-Time Reli­gion (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “ ‘One of the first things I do every day when I get up is I crack open my devo­tion­al for a dai­ly read­ing, and I pray. Ear­li­er this week, I was struck by the dai­ly read­ing, which seemed to speak direct­ly to the moment we find our­selves in,’ Fain explained in his speech. The com­men­tary Fain read observed that great acts of faith are rarely born of care­ful cal­cu­la­tion, and most often include an ele­ment of fear. ‘When I made the deci­sion to run for pres­i­dent of our union, it was a test of my faith, because I sure as hell had doubts,’ Fain said. ‘So I told myself: Either you believe it’s pos­si­ble to stand up and make a dif­fer­ence, or you don’t. And if you don’t believe, then shut up and stay on the side­line.’ ”
    • On the right: Evan­gel­i­cal Mike John­son ‘Raised Up’ as House Speak­er (Jack Jenk­ins, a Reli­gion News Ser­vice wire sto­ry reprint­ed in Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “John­son has been tied to mul­ti­ple Bap­tist church­es over the years and cur­rent­ly attends Cypress Bap­tist Church in Ben­ton, Louisiana, accord­ing to the Louisiana Bap­tist Mes­sage. He is also a for­mer lawyer and com­mu­ni­ca­tions staffer with the Alliance Defense Fund, which lat­er became known as Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian legal firm.”
  6. What “Lati­no” Miss­es (Luis Par­rales, Per­sua­sion): “Lati­nos are proud of their ances­try, espe­cial­ly when it’s relat­ed to nation­al ori­gin. But most don’t accept the sig­nif­i­cance or the weight of eth­no­ra­cial iden­ti­ty that our dis­course projects onto them. It’s an atti­tude that’s not exact­ly col­or-blind or post-racial; it sim­ply rec­og­nizes how race, eth­nic­i­ty, nation­al ori­gin (or what­ev­er label we use to cat­e­go­rize peo­ple) often blend togeth­er.”
  7. More com­men­tary on the Israel/Gaza war:
    • I Don’t See a Bet­ter Way Out (Ned Lazarus, The Atlantic): “I have ded­i­cat­ed much of my pro­fes­sion­al life to seek­ing peace­ful change in this con­flict, try­ing to lis­ten to and under­stand Israelis and Pales­tini­ans and find ways to work toward peace or jus­tice or coex­is­tence or mutu­al under­stand­ing or any­thing bet­ter than what there is now.… I see no way out of the night­mare so long as Hamas con­tin­ues to rule the Gaza Strip, and no viable way to remove it from pow­er with­out an Israeli ground offen­sive.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al affairs at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • The Prob­lem of West Bank Set­tle­ments (Tomas Pueyo, Sub­stack): “You can’t under­stand the Pales­tin­ian per­spec­tive with­out under­stand­ing the issue of set­tle­ments in the West Bank. It’s their biggest source of irri­ta­tion, it makes many Pales­tini­ans’ lives insuf­fer­able, and it’s prob­a­bly Israel’s most con­tentious pol­i­cy. So let’s under­stand why Israel is there in the first place, why it’s build­ing set­tle­ments there, and what will hap­pen to them.”
      • Look­ing over his Sub­stack, the author has writ­ten sev­er­al arti­cles about Israel and Pales­tine late­ly and they seem to be well-researched and are also try­ing to present the strongest, fairest argu­ments from both sides. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Debunk­ing Myths About Israel & Pales­tine (Gur­winder, Sub­stack): “Israel must curb its fanat­i­cal ele­ments — its bombs are hit­ting too many civil­ians, its set­tle­ment-build­ing is out of con­trol, its Supreme Court is under attack by its own gov­ern­ment, and its ultra-ortho­dox cit­i­zens are rapid­ly out­breed­ing its sec­u­lar ones. But Israel’s excess­es are Hamas’s norms. Fur­ther, it’s the only lib­er­al democ­ra­cy in a sea of autoc­ra­cies, and unlike all of them it’s will­ing to open­ly crit­i­cize itself and set high human­i­tar­i­an stan­dards even if it can’t always meet them.”
    • Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Day (Antonin Scalia, C‑SPAN): eleven min­utes of now-deceased Supreme Court Jus­tice Antonin Scalia speak­ing about the Holo­caust and the high­ly-edu­cat­ed and refined soci­ety that pro­duced it.
    • For Israel, There Are No Good Options Now (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “I wish I had some sane idea of what hap­pens now. We can only grieve for all those inno­cents trapped in this hell. All I can say is that if Israel con­tin­ues to wage war in Gaza with this lev­el of civil­ian casu­al­ties, and con­tin­ues to expand its foot­print on the West Bank this aggres­sive­ly at the same time, and responds to West­ern requests to take a pause and think things through with anger and defi­ance, it will be hard to sus­tain West­ern sup­port indef­i­nite­ly.”
    • A War Against the Jews (Michael Oren, Sub­stack): “…dead Jews buy us only so much sym­pa­thy. In fact, there is prob­a­bly a for­mu­la. Six mil­lion dead in the Holo­caust pro­cured us rough­ly 25 years of grace before the Euro­peans refused to refu­el the U.S. planes bring­ing life­sav­ing muni­tions to Israel dur­ing the Yom Kip­pur War in 1973. Four­teen hun­dred butchered Jews bought us a lit­tle less than two weeks’ worth of pos­i­tive cov­er­age.”
      • The author is a for­mer Israeli politi­cian and served as Israel’s ambas­sador to the US.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Wrong Psalm (Tim Hawkins, YouTube): four amus­ing min­utes
  • AI Humor (SMBC): the mouseover text on this one is actu­al­ly wise
  • Self-Esteem (SMBC)
  • The Flori­da Man Games: includ­ing such gems as “EVADING ARREST OBSTACLE COURSE: Jump over fences, through back yards, and away from actu­al police offi­cers to earn your free­dom!” and “A CATALYTIC CONVERTER, 2 BIKES, AND A HANDFUL OF COPPER PIPES: RACE AGAINST TIME: Com­pete head to head in a race that lets you live a day in the life of a Flori­da man head­line” 
  • A store let cus­tomers steal shoes — if they could out­run a pro sprint­er (Kyle Mel­nick, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Some cus­tomers thought­the man­agers were jok­ing, but they still took the chance. Most did not rec­og­nize Zeze — who has run the 100-meter dash in 9.99 sec­onds and the 200-meter dash in 19.97 sec­onds — or know he was a pro­fes­sion­al sprint­er. Zeze wore a black polo and a band on his left arm that said ‘SECURITY.’ Zeze eas­i­ly caught the first run­ner, who grabbed a pair ofblack shoes around 11:30 a.m. and ran away on a busy side­walk. Zeze said he sprint­ed at about 35 per­cent of his max­i­mum speed to catch most cus­tomers.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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