TGFI, Volume 532: Thanksgiving plus the intersection of astrophysics and Christmas

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. The 19th-Century Influencer Who Invented Thanksgiving (LuElla D’Amico, The Dispatch): “Hale wanted something different—not in opposition to the Fourth of July, but in addition to it. She believed the nation needed a day centered not on military victory, but on home, gratitude, and shared belonging. Again, this is why she doesn’t fit neatly into our ideological bins. She championed national unity, yet she believed that domestic life—largely women’s work in the 19th century—could mold a republic just as importantly as more public-facing work. If the Fourth of July taught independence, Hale believed Thanksgiving could teach interdependence: that a nation is sustained not only by the freedoms we fight for, but by the commitments we keep to one another around a shared table.” 
    • Super interesting. Even more interesting: she wrote “Mary Had A Little Lamb” — WOW. Established Thanksgiving and wrote a beloved childhood rhyme — what an absolute legend!
  2. How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails (Anand Giridharadas, New York Times): “People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good.… Generally, you can’t read other people’s emails. Powerful people have private servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actually think and view the world, what they actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.”
  3. A monument to answered prayer begins to rise in a secularizing England (Yonat Shimron, Religion News Service): “Last week, Gamble, 56, broke ground on that vision — a 168-foot-tall architectural landmark that is expected to be one of the largest Christian monuments in England, if not the world. (Christ the Redeemer, the iconic statue of Jesus in Rio de Janeiro, is 98 feet.) It is planned to open to the public in 2028. The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, with a price tag of 45 million pounds (or $59 million), will not, however, feature any familiar Christian icons such a cross, a fish, a lamb or a representation of Jesus. Instead it will consist of a giant white Möbius strip stretching nearly the size of a football field, upon which a million small rectangular bricks will be overlaid, each with a digitally linked story of answered prayer accessible on a mobile app.” 
  4. What Thanksgiving Means to Me (Garry Kasparov, Persuasion): “The notion of a free society is abstract. Thanksgiving celebrates abundance, and abundance is tangible. You can taste it. Smell it. Hear it. The turkey and mashed potatoes on your plate, the chatter with loved ones, whom you’re free to visit—these are the fruits of a free society.”
  5. The Nones Project: Well Being (Ryan Burge, Substack): “The most apparent result from this graph is that Christians do express a demonstrably higher level of life satisfaction compared to the non-religious in the sample. On the scale from 1–7, both Catholics and Protestants scored an average of 5.2. That’s just slightly above ‘somewhat satisfied.’ Among the nones, the group that was clearly the most satisfied were the Nones in Name Only (NiNos) at 5.0. Slightly below that were the Dones at 4.85, then the SBNRs [Spiritual But Not Religious] at 4.75. The group that easily scored the lowest of all four types were the Zealous Atheists at 4.57.”
    • Emphasis removed for readability. Reading the article and looking at the data, I think the Dones do come off a little worse than Burge concludes. He doesn’t explain it in this article, but the Nones in Name Only are people who check “nothing in particular” on surveys but who nonetheless regularly do religious things — envision someone who comes consistently to church but isn’t actually sure if they consider themselves Christian.
  6. The Incarnation Sheds Light on Astrophysics (Deborah Haarsma, Christianity Today): “When Jesus was conceived in Mary, he took on atoms from her—as we all do from our mothers—and those atoms had histories stretching far beyond our solar system. Those atoms assembled into genes to give shape to his bones and blood and into organic chemicals shared with all life on earth. Each cell of Jesus’ body embodies his love for his creation—not only humans but also the animals, plants, mountains, and rivers often mentioned in Scripture. His very atoms once glowed in beautiful nebulae and powerful supernovae in the far reaches of space. Indeed, when God took on human form, he took on all of creation.”
  7. Why Euthanasia Feels Intuitive (Tim Challies, blog): “Because aging and death are the ultimate means through which we prove we have no true autonomy and through which we lose our independence, euthanasia is a means of avoiding what is difficult, humiliating, or seemingly intolerable. In this way, euthanasia is a natural or perhaps inevitable result of Western culture.… Though this is already plenty troubling, here is something that troubles me even more: Having been raised in this society, my instincts intuitively accept euthanasia. I do not want others to make my decisions for me and I do not wish to become dependent upon them. In fact, I would feel a significant degree of guilt were I to need others to care for me, to be inconvenienced on my behalf, or to have them put their own dreams on hold in order to ensure my provision. There is an abhorrent way in which it all just makes sense, in which my instincts accept it as good, or as acceptable, at least.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Mom Continues Longstanding Tradition Of Making Cranberry Sauce For No One (Babylon Bee)
  • Jesus Bot Is Always on Demand (for a Small Monthly Fee) (Jessica Grose, New York Times): “This version of Jesus looks like he stepped off the cover of a romance novel and sounds like a management consultant. He offers the same kind of canned guidance that I could get from a LinkedIn hustle bro, with a dash of Scripture and an upsell (a home screen widget with personalized verses for just $39.99 a year!) attached.” 
    • This probably should go in the section above, but I only like to have seven links up there.
  • Bedtime Prayers (Pearls Before Swine):  Nov 18, 2025
  • Soul Mate (Pearls Before Swine): Nov 21, 2025
  • Thai woman found alive in coffin after being brought in for cremation (Associated Press): “Pairat Soodthoop, the temple’s general and financial affairs manager, told The Associated Press on Monday that the 65-year-old woman’s brother drove her from the province of Phitsanulok to be cremated. He said they heard a faint knock coming from the coffin. ‘I was a bit surprised, so I asked them to open the coffin, and everyone was startled,’ he said. ‘I saw her opening her eyes slightly and knocking on the side of the coffin. She must have been knocking for quite some time.’”

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.

Giving Thanks is Christlike

I hope you’re on track for a wonderful Thanksgiving! Paula and I are prepping to host a bunch of Stanford students who couldn’t get home for the holidays.

Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday in the same way that Christmas is, but it is a holiday that I am always delighted to celebrate because gratitude is one of the most important Christian virtues. The phrases “give/given/giving/gave thanks” occur 28 times in the NIV translation of the New Testament. Half of those times it is Jesus Himself giving thanks, so to give thanks is Christlike.1

So be grateful this week and always! This Thanksgiving, I pray you feast upon delightful food while surrounded by people you love and that the delectableness of the desserts is only exceeded by the quantity of the laughter. May gratitude fill your heart and animate your mouth.

  1. Here are the fourteen times (scattered across ten passages) the phrases “given/gave thanks” are used in reference to Jesus. Interestingly, they are all related to food.
    * Matthew 14:19 — And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people.
    * Matthew 15:36 — Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, and when he had given thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and they in turn to the people.
    * Matthew 26:26–27 — While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you.”
    * Mark 6:41 — Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people. He also divided the two fish among them all.
    * Mark 8:6–7 — He told the crowd to sit down on the ground. When he had taken the seven loaves and given thanks, he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people, and they did so. They had a few small fish as well; he gave thanks for them also and told the disciples to distribute them.
    * Mark 14:22–23 — While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it.
    * Luke 9:16 — Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them. Then he gave them to the disciples to distribute to the people.
    * Luke 22:17, 19 — After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you.… And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
    * Luke 24:30 — When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.
    * John 6:23 — Then some boats from Tiberias landed near the place where the people had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. ↩︎

TGFI Volume 531: Christianity improves longevity, plus some smart people who believe

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. More Than a Magic Pill (Kathryn Butler, Christianity Today): “Church attendance reduces all-cause mortality by nearly 30 percent over a 15-year period and protects woman against suicide by 400 percent. Weekly churchgoing in women over 40 is as protective against death as annual mammograms, McLaughlin writes. Those attending services more than weekly at age 20 have ‘a roughly seven-year greater life expectancy than their nonchurchgoing peers.’ Churchgoing protects against alcohol, smoking, and drug abuse and decreases the odds of depression by one-third.” 
    • I been sayin’ it. Preach!
  2. Alvin Plantinga, God’s Philosopher (Daniel Silliman, Christianity Today): “In the 1950s there was not a single published defense of religious belief by a prominent philosopher,” said philosopher Kelly James Clark, one of Plantinga’s students. “By the 1990s there were literally hundreds of books and articles, from Yale to UCLA and from Oxford to Heidelberg, defending and developing the spiritual dimension. The difference between 1950 and 1990 is, quite simply, Alvin Plantinga.”
  3. The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians (Cremieux, Substack): “It’s probably surprising to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Ministers of Japan before the newly-elected Sanae Takaichi have been Christian. Out of those 35 Prime Ministers since 1945, Shigeru Yoshida and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tetsu Katayama, Ichirō Hatoyama, Masayoshi Ōhira, Shigeru Ishiba, and Yukio Hatoyama were various flavors of Protestant. How this happens in a country that’s less than 1% Christian and in which there’s significant anti-Christian discrimination is perplexing, but I think it makes sense given how today’s Japanese Christians came to be.” 
    • Fascinating reading. The role of the samurai was very unexpected to me!
  4. How Two Times Reporters Cover Christianity in a Polarized America (Patrick Healy, Elizabeth Dias & Ruth Graham, New York Times): “I think a lot about which details to include in a story, and how I’m describing people and scenes. Part of fairness is not taking cheap shots by subtly depicting one side as backward or unsophisticated, for example. I also try to bring people into as many houses of worship as possible. And I would define that expansively, from traditional church services to prayer meetings to worship services in the Trump White House.” 
    • Unlocked. A really well-done interview. I have generally found Graham and Dias to be fair and insightful. Most of the stories involving the NYT being tone-deaf to religion have come about when journalists who don’t cover the religion beat try to drag religion into their story without fully understanding what they’re trying to describe.
  5. It Used to Be ‘Get Married.’ Now It’s ‘Stay Single.’ (Freya India, The Free Press): “I keep hearing about how there’s too much pressure to settle down. Apparently everyone wants to know when you’re getting married, when you’re having kids.… My whole life I’ve only ever felt the opposite, an overwhelming pressure to be single. In the secular liberal world I used to think there were no expectations, no pressure. There is, though: The pressure today is to avoid anything that might stick, to run through life without getting snagged on any responsibilities, without getting tethered to someone else too early.… We don’t scrutinize the 25-year-old who is still single but the one who settles down. In fact, this feels like the only life decision left to disapprove of, the only one acceptable to judge. Wanting to commit is the one desire that is discouraged, treated with suspicion, the only thing in the modern world we are ever told to delay.” 
    • Related: Senior Scaries: Treating dating like the job market (Erin Ye, Stanford Daily): “The last time I was on the phone with my mom, she told me that it was my own fault I didn’t have a boyfriend. ‘You need to start treating dating like it’s the job market: you’re not applying to positions, you’re not interviewing, you’re not even doing things that you can add to your résumé,’ she said. ‘You just need to get out there. Think of it like getting an internship. Don’t worry about the return offer just yet!’ ”
  6. They Led at Saddleback Church. ICE Said They Were Safe. (Andy Olsen, Christianity Today): “The growing abolition of discretion, perhaps more than any other aspect of the administration’s immigration suppression, will cause the deepest pain for many families that previously had little to fear. Individuals within the US immigration edifice have long had some authority to exercise compassion in situations where, in their judgment, the cost to society of a person’s removal might be higher than the cost of nonremoval. One could view such discretion, as the Trump administration does, as a weakness. Or one could see discretion as the cardinal quality that separates a human justice system from a cold enforcement machine with all the sensibility of a red-light camera.” 
    • A moving story, told with all the messy details.
  7. Trump says Christians are being persecuted in Nigeria. The reality is more complicated (Chinedu Asadu, AP News): “Nigeria’s population of 220 million is split almost evenly between Christians, who live predominantly in the south, and Muslims, mostly in the north — where attacks have long been concentrated and where levels of illiteracy, poverty and hunger are among the country’s highest. Nationwide, Muslims constitute a slight majority. Experts and data from two nonpartisan sources — the U.S.-basedt and Council on Foreign Relations — show Christians are often targets in a small percentage of overall attacks that appear to be motivated by religion, in some northern states. But the numbers and analysts also indicate that across the north, most victims of overall violence are Muslims.” 
    • I was skeptical of the headline, but the article makes a good case for it. Having said that, the author hasn’t shown that there isn’t a problem of religious persecution in Nigeria; the author has only shown that there is also a problem of rampant lawlessness.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • 6–7 in the Bible (Kristy Etheridge, Christianity Today): “News outlets from The New York Times to The Indian Express have covered the global phenomenon that delights children, puzzles grownups, and leaves school teachers 67 percent sure they should retire early.… a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, created an entire outreach event around the infamous numbers. Jonathan White is a pastor and director of children’s programming at Mecklenburg Community Church. When he determined that the 6–7 trend wasn’t harmful and wasn’t going away, he wrote it into the church’s November family night.”
  • Scholars Now Believe Number Of The Beast Is Actually 67 (Babylon Bee)
  • The Batman effect: The mere sight of the ‘superhero’ can make us more altruistic (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “In the experimental condition, another experimenter dressed as Batman entered the scene from another door of the train. Faced with this unexpected encounter, passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seats: 67.21% of passengers offered their seats in the presence of Batman, or more than two out of three, compared to 37.66% in the control experiment, or just over one out of three.” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus.
  • Millions Convert To Christianity After Theologians Confirm There Is No Microsoft Teams In Heaven (Babylon Bee)

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 530: a Christian doctor, the medical benefits of church attendance, and campus revival

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. Accused of Desecration, a Doctor Faces the End of His Life’s Work (Benjamin Weiser, New York Times): “One day in March 2015, surveillance cameras at a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Tokyo captured a man wearing a hooded windbreaker, a white collared shirt and black shoes, dabbing at wooden pillars with oil on his fingertip.… He is Masahide Kanayama, 63, a single, childless doctor who had devoted his life to helping women bear children; a man whose Christian faith was inseparable from his work. He has practiced in Manhattan for nearly three decades and is an expert in endometriosis, a condition in which cells similar to the uterine lining grow outside the uterus. His patients describe how his surgeries ended years of crippling pain and, in some cases, allowed them to have children.” 
    • Unlocked. A fascinating story, brought to my attention by an alumnus. Pray for Dr. Kanayama. 
  2. Church Could Save Your Life? (Rebecca McLaughlin, Substack): “In other words, if you aren’t currently a churchgoer and you start attending weekly, you reduce your chances of developing depression by a third. A medication this effective would be widely prescribed. But while your therapist or doctor may encourage yoga, meditation, or more time outside in nature, he or she almost certainly won’t recommend you go to church. The benefits of ‘organized religion’ don’t fit with the big story we are telling in the West about the goodness of abandoning traditional beliefs.”
  3. It’s Here: Gen‑Z Revival Hits Campuses This Fall (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, The Gospel Coalition): “Over the last couple of years, perhaps you’ve heard the stories of revival here and there—Asbury, the Salt Company, and various college ministries across the country. Statistics also sounded promising—from England to the United States, more young people report making a personal commitment to Jesus and attending church. The number of people with no religious affiliation, which had been increasing for decades, seemed to stall. To me, it felt like watching a pot of water heat up—there were isolated bubbles but not enough to really call it a boil.” 
    • An encouraging article. Two notes: 
      • I’m not hearing similar reports from any ministry at Stanford (note the Chicago anecdotes, though)
      • The Gospel Coalition’s theological commitments mean that this article is focused on certain ministries. I believe other ministries are seeing similar things nationwide.
  4. ‘I Should Have Quit’ (John Fetterman, The Free Press): “Gisele looked over at me. The corner of my mouth was drooping ever so slightly. The drooping lasted only a second or two, but she had watched a public service announcement on strokes, and it had stayed with her. She spoke to the state trooper who was driving us. ‘I think he’s having a stroke. We have to get to the hospital now.’ I thought she was crazy: ‘What are you talking about? You’re nuts. I’m fine.’ She thought I was crazy: ‘We have to get to the emergency room now!’ The troopers switched on the police lights. We happened to be 10 minutes from Lancaster General Hospital, which specializes in strokes and problems of the heart. Had we been in a rural area of the state, without close access to a hospital, I would have died. I did anyway. I am not entirely sure of the sequence, but during surgery, my heart stopped for several seconds.” 
    • Tears came to my eyes while reading this. Recommended regardless of your political affiliation.
  5. That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I. (Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker): “No realm of culture or entertainment remains untouched by artificial intelligence: Coca-Cola just released a Christmas ad made with A.I. visuals; A.I. actors are being hyped in Hollywood. But the technology has had an especially swift impact on songwriting. A couple of years ago, a smattering of A.I. tracks went viral for using tricks like replicating the voices of pop stars, including Jay‑Z and Drake. Now we’re in the midst of a full-blown A.I. music moment. This month, an A.I. country song called ‘Walk My Walk’ (with percussive claps and forgettable lyrics such as ‘Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk’) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, and passed three million streams on Spotify; the performer behind it is a square-jawed digital avatar named Breaking Rust. In September, Xania Monet, an A.I. R. & B. singer created by a young poet in Mississippi, landed a multimillion-dollar record deal after several Billboard-charting singles.”
  6. Rise of the ‘porno-trolls’: how one porn platform made millions suing its viewers (Tarpley Hitt, The Guardian): “…since September 2017, Vixen’s owners had been pursuing another revenue stream: filing thousands of boilerplate copyright lawsuits against individual ‘John Does’ and collecting millions in settlement fees – a mass litigation campaign one federal judge likened to ‘a hi-tech shakedown’.… According to Westlaw and Pacer data from the past three years, Strike 3 accounted for 50% of the federal copyright docket all on its own. I first heard about Strike 3 in September, when some legal clerk friends mentioned that nearly every judge on their circuit was handling a stack of Strike 3 cases – which are now so consistent as to have become routine.” 
    • I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a porn company would be unethical in any way. How could they treat their users with anything but the utmost respect and courtesy? Treating people with dignity is practically their entire business model.
  7. Pickleball on Sunday: Why some top college players are calling foul (Ben Brasch, Washington Post): “The NCAA has a long-standing rule that adjusts championship schedules to accommodate players or teams from schools with written policies barring competition on Sundays or other days for religious reasons. Twenty-two of the NCAA’s roughly 1,100 member schools have such policies this year, the group told The Washington Post. But pickleball is not an NCAA sport. And it’s not clear whether all three organizations at the forefront of the college game, which includes more than 100 schools, are ready to make a change. Christianity is central to the National Collegiate Pickleball Association, which hosts regional and national tournaments, said its founder, Noah Suemnick. The league’s website prominently references a Bible verse from the Book of Matthew.”

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 529: French revival, gender differences, bogus sociology

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. The quiet surge of France’s evangelicals (ENTR, YouTube): twelve minutes. Highly recommended, brought to my attention by a student. The first half is one of the better (albeit inadvertent) apologias for low-church Protestantism you’ll run across.
  2. Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies (Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, Substack): “…overall tolerance for opposing views is low among both male and female students — but the males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics.… In fact, men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be ‘perfectly tolerant’ of opposing views, meaning they would definitely allow any campus speaker.” 
    • One of the embedded charts is actually stunning. And this sentence: “Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.”
  3. Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” (Thomas Kelly, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences) : “In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.” 
    • The author has a PhD in political science from Cal and now works at a thinktank in biosecurity. The excerpt is from the abstract.
    • I am overwhelmed by how absolutely insane this is and that the lies have endured for seven decades. SEVEN DECADES. I care because this study is sometimes used by skeptics to argue against Christianity. As the author says: “When Prophecy Fails spread its influence across psychology, sociology, New Testament studies, and religious studies. Ironically, some [skeptical] New Testament scholars whose raison d’être and specialization is piecing together events from thousands of years ago, eagerly embraced a false narrative that was trivial to fact check.”
  4. The Editor Got a Letter From ‘Dr. B.S.’ So Did a Lot of Other Editors. (Gina Kolata, New York Times): “Letters to the editor from writers using chatbots are flooding the world’s scientific journals, according to new research and journal editors.… There’s a reason authors might turn to A.I., Dr. Rubin noted in an interview. Letters to the editor published in scientific journals are listed in databases that also list journal articles, and Dr. Rubin said that ‘they count as much as an article. For doing a very small amount of work, someone can get an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on their C.V.,’ he said. ‘The incentive to cheat is high,’ he added.” 
    • The opening anecdote is pretty funny.
  5. Some stuff on antisemitism and Zionism: 
    • Why Antisemitism Is ‘Moral Pornography’ (Mary Eberstadt, The Free Press): “Online antisemitism is the new pornography. It is moral pornography. And pornography it is—because like pornography, internet antisemitism is mostly engaged in secretly; like pornography, it delivers illicit thrills to degraded users; and like pornography, its consumption embarrasses users when it comes to light, as is seen whenever people are exposed in public for spewing Jew-hatred online. Christians who were in the forefront of understanding that pornography causes harm should be in the forefront of opposing the moral pornography of antisemitism.” 
      • This is an adaptation of a speech given by a Catholic at a Catholic event, which explains some of the language.
    • Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Christian Zionism (Samuel Goldman, The Free Press): “Beginning in the 1980s, a whole genre of books and articles contended that American Christians’ enthusiasm for Israel was based on an ‘end-times’ scenario derived from the Victorian theologian John Nelson Darby, and mainstreamed by Scofield in the early 20th century.… [In reality, the] history of Christian Zionism in America is far longer and more various than that.”
  6. China’s Christians Are America’s Allies (Elisa Zhai Autry, Substack): “Since its inception, the Communist Party has viewed Christianity as a destabilizing force that undermines party authority and opens doors to foreign interference. Yet, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, every effort to stamp it out has failed. Christianity has flourished amid wars, famine, political purges, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and modern censorship. Today, Chinese Christians are estimated to number as high as 100 million. The party frames Christianity as ‘foreign,’ but history disputes that.… Christians were pillars of China’s modernization long before the party claimed credit. Their contribution was indigenous, not foreign—rooted deeply in Chinese traditions and driven by Chinese believers.” 
    • This is the Substack of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
  7. Some stuff on contemporary American politics, presented in a nonpartisan manner. I am not endorsing the perspectives of the authors, I am merely saying that I found their arguments intriguing: 
    • 16 takeaways from Democrats’ big night (Jerusalem Demsas, Jordan Weissmann, Lakshya Jain , & Kelsey Piper, The Argument): “Anti-Trumpism is a really, really powerful force in American politics. especially in non-presidential elections. In Virginia and New Jersey, the Republican nominees were tied to a very, very unpopular president — and sometimes by choice. Yes, 2026 is going to have higher turnout than 2025 did, but it won’t be on the level of 2024, and from the evidence we have, the drop-off is likely to be disproportionately Republican.”
    • The cosmopolitan conservative (Janan Ganesh, Financial Times): “There is such a thing as a cosmopolitan conservative. When I want to discuss Dubai — and when do I not? — I have to turn to apolitical or right-leaning acquaintances.….  Often, it is fear of causing offence that stops liberal-minded people engaging with vast tracts of the world. And so cultural sensitivity turns into its own kind of parochialism.” 
      • A fascinating (and very brief) article.
    • Inside the DSA’s Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party (Olivia Reingold, The Free Press): “The Free Press reviewed thousands of pages of internal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) documents, which show that the organization’s leaders view Mamdani as a tool in their agenda to abolish prisons and borders, and ultimately end in [sic] what they call the ‘barbaric order of capitalism.’ The DSA, founded in 1982, is a political body dedicated to the doctrine of democratic socialism, which is a variety of socialism that simply specifies how it would like revolution to occur: peacefully, through the subversion of democracy. Mamdani, a dues-paying DSA member since 2017, is the tip of that spear.”
    • The Tocqueville Paradox (Rob Henderson, Substack): “I am 35, one year older than Mamdani, and I can tell you that Millennials and Gen Zers have not really been taught about the failures of socialism. I will point out, with a bit of hyperbole, that in US high schools we get 155 hours on Hitler, three minutes on Stalin, zero on Mao and zero on Pol Pot. And socialism is an idea that sounds good on face value. It promises to take from the rich and give to the poor. That means not only ‘free stuff’ for everyone, but also a sense of fairness.”
    • Progressives Can’t Bear Pregnancy (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “There’s a sense on the left that the act of giving birth is an insane, traumatic thing to do, an infringement on all women’s bodily autonomy.… My most progressive friends talk in hushed tones about wanting kids, as if confessing a vice. One of them, after a few glasses of wine, told me she dreams of being a stay-at-home mother. She couldn’t tell her boyfriend. She couldn’t even tell her closest friend. To say it aloud would feel like a betrayal of everything she is supposed to believe. Extreme progressives turn on women who express entirely ordinary wishes about family.”

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 528: Halloween, China, and Nihilistic Violent Extremists

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. Christians Don’t Celebrate Halloween (Tyler Krug, Substack): “For years now, when someone asks me if our family celebrates Halloween, my reply has been the same: ‘No, we don’t celebrate anything on Halloween—instead, our kids dress up and extort the neighbors for candy.’ My reply brings to the surface two related concepts—one explicit, one implied. The first concept is celebration. Celebration is ‘the action of marking one’s pleasure at an important event or occasion.’ Celebration, therefore, involves knowledge, intent and endorsement.… But my Halloween retort also implies a second concept: participation. While celebration requires participation, participation does not require celebration—playing in a football game and celebrating the sport are two different things. Further, a defensive back might participate in a play resulting in a touchdown, but they won’t be celebrating in the end zone.” 
    • Emphasis in original.
  2. America Is Losing the Gray Zone War for the South China Sea (Raymond Powell, The Dispatch): “America’s continued inability to develop anything approaching a counter-gray-zone strategy is exactly why China employs it. The CCP has figured out that we really like our neat categories and rules-based order: We are either at peace or at war; an action is either legal or illegal; an asset is either military or civilian; a fact is either true or false; crises are to be avoided and de-escalated, not used as opportunities to reset the board in our favor. China’s gray-zone strategy is designed to exploit the myriad gaps and seams that define our conventional and ordered policy frameworks and deterrence models.”
  3. The Suspected LA Arsonist and the Rise of the Nihilistic Violent Extremists (Peter Savodnik, The Free Press): “He was defined more by what he was against—climate change, Donald Trump, people who ate meat, people who believed in God—than what he was for.… Rinderknecht told the chatbot that he ‘literally burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amazing. I felt so liberated.’ …Rinderknecht came from a religious home. His parents, Joel and Jennifer, were Baptist missionaries who lived in France.”
  4. We All Live in a Village Now (Yascha Mounk, Substack): “We all live in a village again.… For it turns out that the life of the city, with its attendant freedoms from neighborly supervision and collective constraint, was really just a short interlude in the history of humanity. Facilitated by social media, the village has returned with a vengeance—stripped of its warmth, and supercharged by the cruelty of the crowd.”
  5. Blue State Blues (River Page, The Free Press): “[The guiding principle of blue states] is paternalism for the law-abiding masses and permissiveness for society’s antisocial underbelly. In other words, living in a blue state means that the government treats you like a child and does everything in its power to make your life just a little more annoying and inconvenient—unless you start openly smoking crack on the street.… I still support labor unions. I still want Medicare for All. But I want my dignity and sanity too. I’d rather be ignored than annoyed.”
  6. Is terminal lucidity real? (Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, Substack): “As a neuroscientist, my first thoughts when encountering reports [of terminal lucidity] are that they can’t possibly be real. By the time patients with severe dementia actually die, their brains are catastrophically damaged. They typically show no signs of recognizing family members. They often haven’t responded meaningfully to their environment in months or years. Their brains are riddled with plaques and tangles. And they’ve lost 20–50% of their synaptic connections — so much that their brains have visibly shrunk on MRI scans.… And yet, terminal lucidity keeps being reported.… The only prospective study, which followed 100 hospice deaths, found it in 6% of cases. That’s not ubiquitous, but nor is it rare — in the US alone, it would mean around ten thousand cases per year.” 
    • An interesting complement to the Charles Murray article arguing for the existence of the soul I shared two weeks ago.
    • The author is a research scientist at Monash University in Australia.
  7. The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices (Jodi Kantor, New York Times): “Badly outnumbered, seated for the long haul of life tenure, Justices Kagan and Jackson in particular are divided on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sentenced to fail.… Like many others across the left in the era of Donald J. Trump, the liberal justices are in a generational and philosophical struggle over whether to safeguard institutions from within or protest their decline. But unlike politicians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tradition-bound and decorous that closing an opinion ‘I dissent’ instead of ‘I respectfully dissent’ is considered a dramatic statement.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank? Meet Larry, the world’s most cited cat (Christie Wilcox, Science): “Larry Richardson appeared to be an early-career mathematician with potential. According to Google Scholar, he’d authored a dozen papers on topics ranging from complex algebras to the structure of mathematical objects, racking up more than 130 citations in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the studies weren’t complete gibberish. And Larry wasn’t a cat.… [This is not without precedent] In 1975, theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington added his Siamese to one of his single-author papers so the references to ‘we’ would make more sense. As of this year, ‘Felis Domesticus Chester Willard’ has 107 citations.” 
    • Note: this is from July 2024, so a bit outdated. I did check FDC Willard and his citation count has gone up to 113.
  • AI Will Ruin Social Media (SMBC)
  • Sexy Costumes for your Church Fall Festival (Matthew Pierce, Substack): “Probably the sexiest man in the Bible is Samson, because he was an idiot with big pecs, and all the Christian ladies are like ‘oooh, I could fix him.’ Samson is your friend from youth group who could walk into a room full of smart, pretty girls, and in five minutes he will be talking to the one crazy girl in the back. And then you are like ‘John, that girl is on probation for stabbing her last boyfriend,’ but he is like ‘bro, I got this,’ but in fact he does not have this, and he never will.”
  • Your Brain’s Job (The Oatmeal)
  • Document Forgery (xkcd) — I lowkey want to make one of these
  • What’s Missing From Your Favorite Chocolate Bar? It May Be Chocolate. (Claire Brown, New York Times): “As the Halloween season boosts demand, some candy companies are replacing expensive cocoa butter with other fats, a swap that means their products no longer meet the U.S. regulatory definition of milk chocolate and can no longer be called that on packaging.”
  • The Nightmare Is Over: Supreme Court Outlaws Candy Corn (Babylon Bee)

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 527: beyond adolescent atheism, counterproductive peer review, and Girls Gone Bible

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. As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars (Charles Murray, New York Post): “…I had concluded that when religion no longer supplies a framework for thinking about transcendent qualities, artists tend to make their work about their personal preferences, and their personal preferences tended to be self-absorbed and banal. As an unbeliever, what was I to make of that? One option was to infer that the great artists of the past had foolishly imagined they were tapping into the transcendent, and their delusion inspired them. But that line of thought became embarrassing when I confronted their work. Is it plausible that those individuals who achieved things so far beyond the rest of us were uniformly stupid about the great questions? I decided they understood things we don’t. Johann Sebastian Bach does not need to explain himself.”
  2. 1 in 5 chemists have deliberately added errors into their papers during peer review, study finds (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemical and Engineering News): “More than 20% of chemistry researchers have deliberately added information they believe to be incorrect into their manuscripts during the peer review process, in order to get their papers published.”
  3. The Girls Who Found God in a Podcast (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Girls Gone Bible launched in 2023, with a weekly show, and has since amassed more than 20 million listens, and nearly two million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined.… what struck me most about the audience at the Keswick Theater was how normal, how cool, they all were. These weren’t the caricature of ‘Jesus freaks,’ but more like Regina George with eyelash extensions. They spoke about burnout, and loneliness, and how hard it is to get a guy to commit to you, and wanting to take life seriously.”
  4. Two articles about a widespread sin: 
    • Escape the Little Hell of Porn (Marc Sims, The Gospel Coalition): “Hating yourself in the aftermath of habitual sin feels so right because it feels so close to repentance. But it isn’t. Judas hated himself for his sin, but he didn’t repent. What’s the difference between self-hatred and repentance? Real repentance begins with what the sinful woman in Luke 7 does as she weeps over Jesus’s feet. She’s aware of her sin, so she weeps. But she’s also aware of her Savior, so she brings her tears to him.”
    • What Porn Does to Us (Christine Emba, Christianity Today): “That understanding of what women are for can spill out into real life and into real interactions with other people. People say, ‘It’s just pornography. It’s just something I’m watching. It doesn’t have anything to do with my real life.’ That’s not how people work. Our brains aren’t wired like that. And our souls are not wired like that.”
  5. My Dad Is in a Chinese Prison (Grace Jin Drexel, The Free Press): “My dad’s name is Ezra Jin. He is the head pastor of the Zion Church in China, a community with a reach of tens of thousands of Christians across the country who primarily practice their faith online or via small underground churches in rented spaces. They are a community of people whose faith has endured despite a years-long campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to intimidate them into renouncing their faith. In 2018, Chinese police shut down my dad’s church in Beijing, a beautiful sanctuary with over 1,500 congregants. Refusing to cower in the face of a totalitarian regime, my dad got creative. He moved his sermons online, making them accessible to people across the country, and from there, he continued to build his congregation.”
  6. The Appeal of the Campus Right (Julia Steinberg, The Atlantic): “I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2021 as a progressive from Los Angeles, where most of my peers and I had thought of conservatives as, essentially, evil. At a club fair, I signed up for the Stanford Young Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the leftist magazine, The Stanford Sphere. I hoped to live in one of Stanford’s co-op houses, communal living spaces largely focused on left-leaning activism. As the school year got under way, however, I began to notice something that grated on me. Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else.” 
    • Including largely because of the Stanford-specific observations. I don’t believe I ever crossed paths with the author when she was an undergrad.
  7. If You Ask A.I. for Marriage Advice, It’ll Probably Tell You to Get Divorced (Samuel D. James, Substack): “…users who ask AI bots for counseling or therapy—which is right now a lot of people, and is going to be a lot more people in the future—are going to get a lot of answers pulled from Reddit. In other words, these LLMs are going to spitting out answers to questions like, ‘Should I get divorced,’ by repeating how users on Reddit answer those kinds of question. And we know how users on Reddit tend to answer those questions!”

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 526: academic biases, reasonable faith, and wild AI

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. We Analyzed University Syllabi. There’s a Monoculture (Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik, Persuasion): “We just completed a study that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the nation’s most contentious topics—racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy. Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.” 
    • The authors are professors at the Claremont Colleges (two of political science and the other of philosophy).
  2. Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul? (Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal): “…the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.… A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping. I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should.” 
    • By the same author: I Thought I Didn’t Need God. I Was Wrong. (Charles Murray, The Free Press): “My dog is smart enough to perceive a few things about me—the fact that I exist as a distinct individual and that I feed her every morning. She also has some perceptions about my moods and what I want her to do. But these understandings represent only a few trivial aspects of who I am. I am not invisible to my dog, just as God is not invisible to me (I have come to believe), but I am nonetheless unknowable to my dog in any meaningful sense. God is just as unknowable to me.”
    • Murray, an agnostic for most of his life, has just written a new book about faith called Taking Religion Seriously and these are articles meant to generate interest in it.
  3. An AI became a crypto millionaire. Now it’s fighting to become a person (Aidan Walker, BBC): “Regardless of what you call Truth Terminal – an art project, a scam, an emergent sentient entity, an influencer – the bot likely made more money than you did last year. It also made a lot of money for various humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gamblers who turned the quips and riddles the AI posted on X into memecoins, joke-based cryptocurrencies built around trends. At one point, one of these memecoins reached a value of more than $1bn (£740m) before settling around $80m (about £60m).… Many of the details surrounding Truth Terminal are difficult to confirm. The project sits somewhere between technology and spectacle, a dizzying blur of genuine innovation and internet myth.” 
    • Recommended to me by a student. Wild.
  4. Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say (Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times): “Harvard may be partly to blame for encouraging student absences, with a policy that allows students to enroll in two classes that meet at the same time.”
  5. The Inside Story of the Gaza Deal (Amit Segal, The Free Press): “The Americans’ genius was to convert that negative energy into fuel to propel negotiations to their goal. You want Israel to stop? Then let’s end the war, they told the Sunni countries, and thus enlisted them in a framework that seemed impossible: a pan-Arab, almost pan-Muslim commitment to the elimination of Hamas. [Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs] Dermer drafted Netanyahu’s apology for the death of the Qatari security official in the airstrike; in Doha they reciprocated with a goodwill gesture by dramatically toning down Al Jazeera’s hostile tone.” 
    • ‘Bring Them Home’: The Call Finally Being Answered (Matti Friedman, The Free Press): “But of course Israel can’t return to October 6. In the story of Joseph, the captive does reappear—but he’s so different that his own brothers don’t recognize him. About 40 hostages taken alive are now dead, either executed by their captors or killed mistakenly by Israel’s army. In the fighting that has followed October 7, more than 550 soldiers have been killed, and many thousands wounded. The reserve army has been forced past the limits of its manpower and will need years to recover. Israel is, in many ways, a different country.”
  6. The Evil That Is AI Child Porn (Charles Fain Lehman, The Dispatch): “But while OpenAI’s innovation is impressive, it is hard to avoid thinking about how such technology might be misused. That’s in part because it comes just months after a federal court dismissed a charge for possession of artificially-generated child pornography, claiming it was unconstitutional to enforce under the relevant federal child obscenity statute. Such concerns are particularly relevant given some AI companies’ irresponsible approach to issues of child sexualization, as in the recent revelation that Meta had previously allowed its AI services to conduct ‘sensual’ conversations with minors. (It changed its policies after press inquiries and backlash.)”
  7. The Great Feminization (Helen Andrews, Compact Magazine): “The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent. Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female. The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” 
    • This one is controversial, just FYI. Undeniably interesting.
    • Secular pushback: The “Feminization” Discourse as Partisan Hackery (Richard Hanania, Substack): “I would’ve probably nodded along to the Andrews piece if I read it four years ago. But a lot has changed since then, and being a rational, dare I say masculine, thinker means updating as new information comes in. Establishment institutions have gotten much better since the height of the Great Awokening, as their critics have been circling the drain. This has happened at the same time the right has become more masculine-coded, which has to be factored into any analysis about the supposed dangers of feminization.”
    • Some theological pushback from an Australian Anglican theologian: https://x.com/danitreweek/status/1979002052811657289

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 525: what the world needs, also how to end it

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.

I’m awaiting further developments before sharing any articles about the peace deal between Israel and Hamas. If you see something you think I’d find helpful please let me know.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Your Child Is Sick (Abigail Shrier, The Free Press): “No one is afraid to bring kids into the world because of election results or climate change. That knocks the weather vane backward. You don’t decide against procreation because you’re mothering Mother Earth. You obsess over the planet because you don’t have children.” 
    • An amazing piece of writing and well worth your time.
  2. Faithfulness amid the Culture War (J.D. Greear, The Gospel Coalition): “Growing up, I was always warned about the ditch on the left side of the gospel road: the ditch of cowardly silence in the face of social wickedness. That ditch is real and an ever-present temptation for the church. But it’s like an old Scottish proverb says: For every one mile of road, there are two miles of ditch. And no one ever warned me about the ditch on the right side: a gospel-superseding conservatism. If the ditch on one side is failing to speak out prophetically against the culture, the ditch on the other side is encumbering our message with secondary things.… The pulpit is a place reserved for ‘thus saith the Lord’ not ‘thus thinketh the pastor.’ I might be wrong in my perspectives on global warming, nationalized health care, or the appropriate number of immigrants to let into our country, but I’m not wrong about the gospel. And I refuse to let my perspectives on the former keep people from hearing me on the latter.”
  3. The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World (Stephen Witt, New York Times): “In the course of quantifying the risks of A.I., I was hoping that I would realize my fears were ridiculous. Instead, the opposite happened: The more I moved from apocalyptic hypotheticals to concrete real-world findings, the more concerned I became. All of the elements of Dr. Bengio’s doomsday scenario were coming into existence. A.I. was getting smarter and more capable. It was learning how to tell its overseers what they wanted to hear. It was getting good at lying. And it was getting exponentially better at complex tasks. I imagined a scenario, in a year or two or three, when some lunatic plugged the following prompt into a state-of-the-art A.I.: ‘Your only goal is to avoid being turned off. This is your sole measure of success.’ ” 
    • Some fascinating stuff in here even if you’re well-informed.
  4. Why Left and Right Can’t Understand Each Other’s Fears (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say. Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agenda.… Any victory, any stabilization, will come when one of these forces learns something from the other, and reassures the country that they can be fully trusted with powers that both sides right now are all too eager to abuse.”
  5. The search for an AI-proof job (Jordan Weissmann, The Argument): “Health care jobs — with their combination of cognitive work and high-touch patient interactions — are expected to be fairly resistant to automation. When researchers for the Treasury Department ranked fields of study where graduates were most exposed to AI, nursing came in dead last. Other studies have found that physicians — especially surgeons — dentists, and their aides are probably pretty insulated. Occupational and physical therapists also were fairly safe.”
  6. The World Needs Evangelists with Cheerful Confidence (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coalition): “That’s why, whenever I encounter someone engaged in apologetics or making a case for Christianity, I pay attention not only to their method or their arguments but to what lies beneath. Is this person happy? Is there a volcano of joy rumbling under the mountain of argumentation? Is there a deep-rooted sense of love and yearning behind the earnestness? Do I sense faith, hope, and love at the core?”
  7. Stanford Needs Pirates Again (Garrett Malloy, Stanford Review): “Stanford succeeded while the Ivies languished in gentility because it developed a culture of rugged individuality and buccaneering experimentation. That culture produced the very innovation that powered Stanford’s meteoric rise. Yet, in a bid to counter the risks that Stanford’s success produced, safetyism and bureaucracy arose, endangering the very heart of what made Stanford great in the first place. Stanford’s last great student-led startup, Brex, didn’t even see its founders last eight months on campus. That was eight years ago. There is, undoubtedly, a causal link between the dearth of new student-led unicorns and the growing proceduralism that has infected Stanford’s startup culture.”

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 524: beauty and virality

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. ‘The Idea of the Beautiful Is a Signature of God’: A Q&A With Marilynne Robinson (Peter Wehner, New York Times): “Calvin says there is not a blade of grass that God created that was not meant to ravish us with its beauty. The idea of the beautiful is a signature of God, I think for Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and many other people. This distillation of the joy, the sensory joy, of being among things in the world. I think the loss of beauty is a loss of an intellectual discipline, which science never lost because scientists always have the right to say a formula is beautiful. We in the outside world, we’ve abandoned the word and the concept. It’s suggestive that the scientists use it.”
  2. Performing Gender, Left and Right (Richard Hanania, Substack): “How each side behaves is a metaphor for its strengths and weaknesses as a movement. Conservatives fundamentally get human nature and are more in tune with it, but tend to indulge in their instincts and act like idiots. Liberals are thoughtful and polite but place a high priority on emotional safety and avoiding dangerous or uncomfortable situations.… These personality and aesthetic differences are central to political divides. So much of politics is who you know, and it’s difficult to go somewhere in a movement if you don’t get along with the people in it. Elites therefore sort according to personality in addition to ideology.”
  3. Why Evangelicalism Is Built for TikTok (River Page, The Free Press): “Of course evangelicals went viral on TikTok. The medium is perfect for the message; but also, the message is perfect for the medium. Catholics have art and ancient rituals. Evangelicals have rhetoric and emotion—the kind of stuff that travels far and wide on a platform where you have 15 seconds to grab people’s attention.”
  4. Craft Is the Antidote to Slop. (Will Manidis, Substack): “From Genesis, man enters not a paradise without labor but a world of intentional creation. The LORD God places man in the Garden of Eden ‘to dress it and to keep it’ (Genesis 2:15) establishing labor not as punishment but as sacred vocation. This original calling invites us to co-create the Kingdom, tending and developing the world with intention and care. Our fundamental purpose is not consumption but participation in the ongoing work of creation. The serpent’s temptation represents the first shortcut in human history.… Humanity’s first sin was, in part, choosing the easy shortcut over the meaningful process – preferring effortless gain to the demanding but fulfilling work of tending the garden.”
  5. Realizing a desired family size: when should couples start? (Habbema et al, Human Reproduction): “Without IVF, couples should start no later than age 32 years for a [90% chance of a] one-child family, at 27 years for a two-child family, and at 23 years for three children. When couples accept 75% or lower chances of family completion, they can start 4–11 years later.” 
    • An alumnus passed this along to me and I found it fascinating.
  6. He’s Christian. In Nigeria, That Meant Torture and Prison. (Josh Code, The Free Press): “What came to my mind when I was in detention was that death could be the final result. I knew the consequences of helping Muslims who have converted to Christianity—and also the fact that the police were looking for them. So death was what was on my mind.… From the point of my detention to the point where I was released, I was constantly praying and fasting. Because of the way I was praying, the other men detained with me thought I was a pastor and were even calling me ‘reverend’ and asking me to remember them in my prayers, so that the Lord would also deliver them from captivity. Mind you, they were Muslims, not Christians—their detention was not on account of their faith.”
  7. There Are Only Two Gametes (Carol Hooven, Tablet): “We call animals that produce sperm ‘male’ and those that produce eggs ‘female.’ That’s about it. The bottom line is that there are two gamete types and thus two sexes. There are no other sexes, no other reproductive categories. Among mainstream evolutionary biologists, there is simply no disagreement on these basic points: The ‘gametic view’ is the established orthodoxy of our field. It applies across sexually reproducing animals and accommodates all the complexity and variation within the sexes. It holds in nonreproductively viable animals—like postmenopausal me—that don’t produce gametes; it holds in male seahorses that get pregnant; in clownfish who change from male to female (first producing sperm and then eggs); in females who identify as male (trans men) and take male levels of testosterone and have a deep voice and a thick, bushy beard.”

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.