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
- UC Berkeley math community left at crossroads in wake of OpenAI Navier-Stokes proof (Litong Deng, Daily Californian): “People are complaining that AI is pushing out this 100,000-line formal proof of some major conjecture. I don’t really see what harm this does because you can always ignore this if you want, and then you’re no worse off than before,” Borcherds said. “I think what people are getting upset about is they’re slowly realizing that they are dumb and somehow blaming this on AI, even though it’s not really AI’s fault.” Borcherds, who currently teaches MATH 250A, a graduate-level course on abstract algebra, also said AI would be much better than him at teaching the course. He said AI is more patient and much better at expressing itself than he is and doesn’t get mad when students ask stupid questions. Borcherds himself said he has asked AI “deep mathematical questions” and gets “much better answers from it than (he gets) from any human mathematician.”
- Borcherds is a Fields medalist (1998).
- The Great Fertility Collapse (Russ Roberts interviewing Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, EconTalk): this podcast episode is inspired by a paper the guest co-authored, Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World (NBER). This is an absolutely fascinating discussion, full of gems like why the UN population forecasts are completely untrustworthy and very surprising examples of how a lot of what people assume they know about fertility and demographics is exactly wrong.
- Why Evangelicalism Is Winning (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “But the basic test of any religion, especially any missionary religion, is whether it actually persuades people to practice and believe. And the evangelical model—the entrepreneurial pastor, the adaptable church structures, the emphasis on welcoming seekers and accommodating families, even the suburban and middlebrow aesthetic—clearly works under 21st-century conditions in a way that requires respect and some form of imitation. The vices of evangelicalism need correction and critique. But there will be no 21st-century revival, for Catholicism or any other kind of faith, that doesn’t reckon with the sources of its undeniable success.”
- What the Bible’s Most Political Book Can Teach Us (Michael J. Rhodes, Christianity Today): “Biblical scholars—including me, in my book Reimagining Biblical Politics—have argued Esther might be the most political book in the Bible. The story revolves around matters of state, and in terms of political action, the book has it all. By the time credits roll, we’ve watched Vashti practice civil disobedience by refusing to obey King Ahasuerus’s command (1:12). We’ve seen Mordechai stage a public protest—lamenting in sackcloth and ashes at the very gate of the king (4:1–2)—and serve that same regime by snitching on courtiers caught planning an assassination (2:21–22). Esther’s political career begins when she makes the best of an awful situation, hiding her ethnicity and winning favor on the way to becoming queen. She acts subversively to ensure Haman gets what’s coming to him. By the end, Esther and Mordecai effectively hold public office, writing law from within the empire itself (8:1–2; 7–8). If Esther is arguably the Bible’s most political book, it’s also the most ambiguous.”
- Concerning Christianity Today (to which I am a subscriber):
- Christianity Today, a Voice of Centrist Evangelicalism, Is in Turmoil (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Christianity Today needed to be less like Wheaton and more like TikTok, Mr. Addington told his staff, according to several people who attended the meeting. Warning that layoffs were coming, he ended his presentation with a prayer. A senior editor left the room in tears. Fourteen months later, more than half of the 79 employees at that time have either been laid off or resigned, including an editor in chief and four of the company’s longest-tenured journalists.”
- Why I left Christianity Today (Bonnie Kristian, Substack): “The last pre-pandemic meeting I took ended with an offer to become a columnist for Christianity Today. I happily accepted and wrote for CT in that capacity for three and a half years, then came on staff as a senior editor in the summer of 2023. In late September, I gave notice. Friday was my last day, and this post is about why I left. If you’re new here, fresh from googling me after reading Ruth Graham’s New York Times story about CT, hello! You’ve come to the right place.”
- Roman love (Samuel Hughes, Works in Progress): “Popular mythology holds that a tolerant and affirmative view of human sexuality prevailed in classical Antiquity until it was crushed by puritanical and repressive Christianity. I passively accepted this view until I read Kyle Harper’s celebrated book, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity. Harper shows that, although the standard picture is not entirely wrong, it is so incomplete as to be fundamentally misleading.… By putting together the Jewish prohibition of extramarital sex with Roman monogamy, the early Christians arrived at the idea that each man should be faithful to one woman, just as each woman should be faithful to one man. The novelty of this innovation is hard to overstate: it is not clear that the ideal of exclusive mutual fidelity has ever been invented independently in any other major civilizations, though it was eventually to spread to many non-Christian cultures.”
- How to Survive the Robot Apocalypse (Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “In deprecating the chances of the true robot apocalypse, I’m describing a potential future in which the gravest dangers are held at bay by a pervasive human paranoia, where politics is a struggle between efficiency-maximizers embracing human obsolescence and technophobic populist rebellions, and where civilizational safety requires us to rely on inscrutable intelligences to police other inscrutable intelligences into the distant future. A reasonable person might simply prefer a world without superintelligent AI. But in a world with superintelligence, none of the doom scenarios quite persuade me that humans will be easily steamrolled or go naively into the silicon night.”
Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen
- Jacob Assures New Bride ‘Rachel’ He Wasn’t That Drunk At Wedding Last Night — UPDATE: Oh No — (Babylon Bee)
- Explaining College Football Conferences (John Crist, YouTube): two minutes
- 50 Years In, What’s the Point of U2? Bono and the Edge Have Answers (David Marchese, New York Times): “What you just said about coming up with the fictional names — this always killed me about the band. Bono! Edge! And then … Adam and Larry. Was there any discussion that they should have names too? The Edge: We need to explain the whole name thing. We laughed a lot at that age. We would laugh at each other and ourselves and that was the deal. So the names were not necessarily designed for their heroic aspect. Bono’s very first name was in fact Steinrich Van Haitian Bang Bang Bang, and then I was Inchicore for a while before I became the Edge. Adam for a while was known as Mrs. Byrnes, and Larry for some reason was the Jam Jar. We were borrowing a lot from Monty Python.”
- Kid Rock Talks Eminem Collab ‘Heal My Faith’ & Killing ‘Division’ (Gary Graff, Billboard): “This (album) is about forgiveness and second chances,” Rock said, “trying to heal some of the division in our country. I’m just putting a positive message out there in the world…showing a little more grace, trying to kill some of the division. I am not without sin, and I can’t say I ever will be. But I’m making a conscious effort to spread this better message — and I’m also still Kid motherf–king Rock. At the end of the day, I’m both of those guys. I’m not fundamentally changed, you know? I’m still Kid Rock; I’m gonna drink a beer, smoke a cigar… I’m just on the journey. I feel halfway to Jesus; I hope to be all the way there, but I’m not sure. I don’t know where it all leads. It’s almost as new as me as it is to everyone else.”
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.