The Gratitude of a Preacher

As a preacher I have a lot to be thankful for. First, of course, I have the sorts of things everyone should be thankful for. I’m thankful for puppies and kittens and stars. I’m thankful for my health and for my family. I’m thankful that I live in a peaceful place in this war-torn and violent world.

But there are some additional things that I as a minister ought to be grateful for, and three are on my mind today. I am grateful for those I minister to, I am grateful for those I used to minister to, and I am grateful for those who make it possible.

First, I am grateful for those I minister to. So often in his letters Paul expresses thanks to God for the people he ministers to:

1 Thess 3:9 may be the most powerful of these verses:

How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of our God because of you? (NIV)

I can relate to Paul — the students in Chi Alpha bring me joy. Actual delight. Words fail me at times. And this isn’t a one-off sentiment Paul expresses:

  • 1 Cor 1:4 – “I always thank my God for you”
  • Eph 1:16 – “I have not stopped giving thanks for you”
  • Col 1:3 – “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you”
  • 1 Thess 1:2 – “We always thank God for all of you”
  • 2 Thess 1:3 – “We ought always to thank God for you” (all these are from the NIV)

Paul knew that when you’re a minister, you should realize that the people God has given you are a gift. More fully, you are a gift to them and they are a gift to you.

Someone like me should be grateful that anyone shows up to hear me preach. I minister to busy Stanford students. These people have been working all week. They’ve got homework to get done. They have textbooks to read. And they’ve got cute people to woo. And they’re gonna take time every Wednesday night to walk across campus and listen to me talk about the Bible? And then they’re going to find me throughout the week to ask me questions about God and how to follow Him more fully and wisely? That’s wild!

I am grateful to them, and I am grateful to God for them. My students are amazing and I love them so much.

Second, I am grateful for those I ministered to years ago.

In 3 John 1:4 the apostle tells us

I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth. (NIV)

Paula and I recently took a trip to DC, New York, and Boston to visit some of our alumni. It was so exciting to catch up with everyone, but one of the things that made the biggest impression on me was meeting children who only exist because God called Paula and me to minister at Stanford over two decades ago. Their parents met in Chi Alpha, and likely would not have begun to date had we not provided the environment in which their relationship grew. And now there are kids. Actual adorable humans of infinite worth who exist as a direct result of our ministry. It’s wonderful.

Seeing our alumni filled me with inexpressible joy, especially when I spoke to so many of them about the churches they attend and how their faith has grown through the years.

Our alumni are extraordinary people and I am always touched when they have time to meet with their old college pastor, and even more when they have kind words to share and fond memories to reminisce over.

Third, I am grateful for those who make it possible.

In Philippians 1:3–5, Paul says

3 Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God. 4 Whenever I pray, I make my requests for all of you with joy, 5 for you have been my partners in spreading the Good News about Christ from the time you first heard it until now. (NLT)

Paul is so thankful for the Philippians that he thanks God for them every time he prays because they are his “partners in spreading the Good News about Christ.” What that means is unclear until you come to the end of the letter. In Philippians 4:15–16 he explains

15 As you know, you Philippians were the only ones who gave me financial help when I first brought you the Good News and then traveled on from Macedonia. No other church did this. 16 Even when I was in Thessalonica you sent help more than once.(NLT)

The Philippians partnered with Paul by sending him money to help him do ministry. And Paul was grateful.

So am I. Our ministry is only possible because of a whole lot of people like the Philippians. They give us financial help and Paula and I are so very thankful.

So I’m grateful. And if you’re a student in Chi Alpha now, or if you were a student in Chi Alpha years ago, or if you are one of our financial partners, know this: I am especially grateful for you this Thanksgiving. May you be blessed.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 479

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. How the Ivy League Broke America (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “Students who got into higher-ranking colleges, which demand high secondary-school GPAs, are not substantially more effective after they graduate. In one study of 28,000 young students, those attending higher-ranking universities did only slightly better on consulting projects than those attending lower-ranked universities. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale student would have been only about 1.9 percent more proficient than a student from Cleveland State when measured by the quality of their work. The Yale student would also have been more likely to be a jerk: The researchers found that students from higher-ranking colleges and universities, while nominally more effective than other students, were more likely to pay ‘insufficient attention to interpersonal relationships,’ and in some instances to be ‘less friendly,’ ‘more prone to conflict,’ and ‘less likely to identify with their team.’ ”
    • Interesting throughout. I liked this line — “If we could get to the point where being snobby about going to Stanford seems as ridiculous as being snobby about your great-grandmother’s membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, this would transform not just college admissions but American childhood.”
    • Somewhat related: We Asked for It (Michael W. Clune, The Chronicle of Higher Education): “The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus.… In return for their tuition, students are given the faculty’s high-class political opinions as a form of cultural capital. Thus the public perceives these opinions — on defunding the police, or viewing biological sex as a social construction, or Israel as absolute evil — as markers in a status game. Far from advancing their opinions, professors in fact function to invalidate these views for the majority of Americans who never had the opportunity to attend elite institutions but who are constantly stigmatized for their low-class opinions by the lucky graduates. Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports.”
      • The author is an English professor at Case Western. He throws a lot of strong punches.
  2. Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (Brad East, Christianity Today): “the power of Peterson’s style is his marriage of existential urgency with hermeneutical creativity. He expects the Word to show him wonders. He wrestles with the text—a mystery and a stranger—until he secures a blessing from it. He takes for granted that its depths are bottomless. Do pastors model this posture in the pulpit? Do teachers in the classroom? Do scholars on the page?Christian readers should learn from Peterson’s boldness, his disposition of awe and docility before the sacred page. He opens the scroll with the same spirit as the psalmist: ‘Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law’ (119:18).”
    • Recommended by a colleague. This is one of the best Christian engagements with Jordan Peterson I’ve seen.
  3. In the Era of the Judges (Stiven Peter, Mere Orthodoxy): “The holders of cultural capital have not simply substituted Christian values with an alternative set but promote the very loss of order itself. The only values are no values. That is, our culture promotes libertinism, everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. Sociologically, Hunter calls this the process of dissolution: ‘By dissolution, I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.’ Our culture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is promoted is turning inside ourselves and determining our own values. This process results in the fracturing of society alongside tribes/enclaves of people with similar values.”
    • This is a review of Aaron Renn’s book, and Renn says: “This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens — improving them in the process.”
  4. Rich Inner Death (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Our mental health crisis is usually cast as either a failure of therapeutic techniques—we just haven’t unlocked our trauma well enough yet—or else an unavoidable consequence of climate anxiety, polarization, or bad media. But [perhaps the crisis stems from how we are trained to view the world]. There is a way of living your life as a kind of constant retreat into both the safety and the chaos of your own imagination, and nearly everything about how we learn, communicate, and work as modern people helps us condition for this. We are taught early and often to direct our gaze inward.”
    • Several substantive insights in this article.
  5. Why the Federalist Society Has Been a Great Success (Ed Whelan, Substack): “The Federalist Society’s success has led many on the Left—and, more recently, some envious folks on the Right—to revile and demonize it. But its critics routinely display that they do not understand how it operates and how it has succeeded.… It does not submit amicus briefs. It does not undertake to enlist the public in political undertakings. And it has never done any of these things. And therein lies one of the great keys to its success.”
  6. AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably (Brian Porter & Edouard Machery, Scientific Reports [Nature]): “We collected 5 poems each from 10 well-known English-language poets, spanning much of the history of English poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Samuel Butler (1613–1680), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and Dorothea Lasky (1978- ). Using ChatGPT 3.5, we generated 5 poems ‘in the style of’ each poet. We used a ‘human out of the loop’ paradigm: we used the first 5 poems generated, and did not select the ‘best’ out of a group of poems or provide any feedback or instructions to the model beyond ‘Write a short poem in the style of <poet> ‘. In the first experiment, 1,634 participants were randomly assigned to one of the 10 poets, and presented with 10 poems in random order: 5 poems written by that poet, and 5 generated by AI ‘in the style of’ that poet. For each poem, participants were asked whether they thought the poem was generated by AI or written by a human poet.… Contrary to what earlier studies reported, people now appear unable to reliably distinguish human-out-of-the-loop AI-generated poetry from human-authored poetry written by well-known poets.… Furthermore, people prefer AI-generated poetry to human-authored poetry, consistently rating AI-generated poems more highly than the poems of well-known poets across a variety of qualitative factors.”
    • The authors are at the University of Pittsburgh.
  7. Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings (Paul Bloom, The Chronicle of Higher Education): “You may have heard of the study published in 2020 concluding that Black newborns have higher survival rates when Black doctors attend to them. It got a huge amount of coverage in the popular press. It was even cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent last year on the court’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions. The research, Jackson claimed, shows the benefits of diversity. ‘It saves lives,’ she wrote. The same journal just published a re-analysis of the data. It turns out that the ‘effect is substantially weakened, and often becomes statistically insignificant,’ once you take into account that Black doctors are less likely to see the higher-risk population of newborns with low birth weight. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the re-analysis because I didn’t believe the original finding.… It’s like what someone once said about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Ginger Rogers is doing them backward and in high heels. A published finding that clashes with the political prejudices of reviewers and editors is a Ginger Rogers finding. It had to be twice as good.”
    • The author is a psychology professor (emeritus at Yale, currently at U Toronto).

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 478

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. When a Stanford Bible Study Led to an AI Startup (Emily Belz, Christianity Today): “Hadassah Betapudi and Elijah Kim met at a Christian fellowship at Stanford in 2022 and got to know each other by leading a Bible study together. Soon the duo—with their backgrounds in data organizing and computer science—was building an artificial intelligence startup.”
    • The article never names Chi Alpha, but they are both leaders in our ministry. Super cool! Their startup is Esslo, which helps students with their college application essays.
  2. I Believe in Miracles. Just Not All of Them. (David French, New York Times): “As the surgery date approached, I got a call from a dear friend, Ruth Okediji. Ruth was the leader of my law school Christian fellowship, and she’s now a professor at Harvard Law School. I’ll never forget her first words. ‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘The Lord has healed you.’ My initial reaction was frustration. I was resigned to the surgery, and I wanted encouragement, not false hope. As a Christian, I believe that God is real and works miracles. But I didn’t consider that he would work a miracle on me. My prayers were of the conventional kind that I grew up with — prayers that doctors would have wisdom and that I’d have the courage to face the challenge of the surgery. But Ruth’s prayer was different. She asked God for healing, and she said that God had granted her prayer. I woke up the next morning without any pain at all. I had no pain the entire day. The next day was pain-free as well, and so was the next. The doctors reintroduced bland, solid food to my diet, and I consumed it voraciously. By Thanksgiving, I’d gained most of my weight back, and a colonoscopy later showed no evidence of the disease at all. My doctor was surprised. I was surprised (and overjoyed). I knew that ulcerative colitis could have remission periods, but this one stuck. And in the 29 years since, I’ve never had a recurrence.”
  3. The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports. It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.… The impacts include a 28% overall increase in bankruptcies (!).… When the home team suffers an upset loss while sports betting is legal, domestic violence that day goes up by 9% for the day, with lingering effects.”
  4. Artificial Intelligence and Relationships: 1 in 4 Young Adults Believe AI Partners Could Replace Real-life Romance (Wendy Wang and Michael Toscano, Institute for Family Studies): “Young men are more likely than young women to believe that AI has the potential to replace real-life romantic relationships (28% vs. 22%). As shown earlier, young men are generally more open to AI friendships than young women, which parallels the gender difference in their views of AI’s potential for romance.… Among single young adults, those who watch porn online at least once a day are twice as likely as those who rarely, if ever watch porn to say they are open to an AI romance.”
  5. The Right Without Wrong (Dustin Guastella, Jacobin): “For secular liberals who have made ‘believing science’ their own kind of religion, the possible waning of Christian conservatism may seem like a blessing long overdue. What if it isn’t?… In the Christian story, we are all equally fallen. Our original sin unites us in a kind of negative equilibrium. By recasting Christianity as a unique perversion, a cancerous growth that destroyed the glorious Roman Empire from within (or a virus introduced by Jews, that ancient enemy of the Right, from without), reactionaries can freely reject our primordial equality to instead embrace the supposedly natural hierarchies evident in the outcome of market competition, the body-obsessed ‘vitalism’ that privileges physical strength over the effete idealism of the Enlightenment, and also, seemingly without fail, an aggressive, unashamed form of scientific racism.”
    • Jacobin is a socialist magazine — fascinating to see how one of their authors feels about the rise of the post-religious right.
  6. We Need to Fix Voting in America Now (Wilfred Reilly, National Review): “Simply put, there is no way to know the real rate of voter fraud in America, so long as the U.S.A. does not require citizens to vote in person or show an ID when they vote.… Recall that a competently done scan-and-purge of the rolls in Iowa alone turned up almost two orders of magnitude more registered noncitizens than the number that The Experts™ discovered nationwide — fully 0.5 percent–1 percent of the state’s electorate in some off-year races. Saying that these folks do not exist because they have never been jailed is like saying that there cannot really be 1 million-plus daily users of The Pirate Bay and similar sites, because there are so few annual prosecutions for internet crimes.”
    • The author is a political science professor. He presents data I’ve never heard before.
  7. A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives (Musa al-Gharbi, Substack): “According to Forbes, more than 50 other billionaires also threw their weight behind Trump. So far so good for the preferred narrative. But here’s the twist: even more billionaires — 83 to be precise — supported the Democratic nominee. Kamala had 60 percent more billionaire backers than Donald Trump did. And billionaires like Oprah and Mark Cuban hit the campaign trail serving as surrogates for Harris in much the same way as Musk supported Trump. If we want to look at who ‘big money’ tried to push into office this cycle, the answer is disconcerting.… Overall, this cycle, Democrats raised roughly twice as much money as their opponents. In the months after Joe Biden dropped out, Democrats raised more than $1 billion – more than three times as much as Republicans brought in over the same period – largely thanks to enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris within Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Big Law.”

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 477

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. Some post-election analysis, with the reminder that I do not endorse everything I share. I share them because they made me think.
    • Amazing quote from the Stanford Review: It’s Time For Stanford to Accept President Donald Trump (Again) (Editorial, Stanford Review): “Stanford students often forget to consider that the world around them votes too—and that the world does not have the same concerns. As one peer remarked, ‘I found out some of the dining hall staff voted for Trump and lowkey forgot they got to vote too.’ ”
    • 10 Reasons You Didn’t See This Coming (Konstantin Kisin, Substack): “Americans are extremely practical people. They care about what works, not what sounds good. In Europe, we produce great writers and intellectuals. In America they produce (and attract) great engineers, businessmen and investors. Because of this, they care less about Trump’s rhetoric than you do and more about his policies than you do.”
      • Kisin is a Russian-born immigrant to Britain. Interesting to see how at least one foreigner perceives the results US election.
    • Donald Trump Is the President for Post-Christian America (Aaron Renn, Substack): “It’s hard to complain that he’s crude when we live in a crude society and people like that way — except when it comes to him. In fact, compared to the rest of the country, Trump is a retro model of rectitude when it comes to not drinking or doing drugs, having a relentless work ethic, wearing suits, etc.”
    • Democrats Picked the Wrong Women’s Rights Issue (Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press): “Democrats bet big on ‘reproductive rights’ this election cycle, even offering free abortions at their national convention. But the strategy didn’t pay off. Not only was abortion a flop with the electorate, it was Republicans—not Democrats—who pushed the winning women’s‑rights issue: fighting the encroachment of biological men into women’s spaces and sports.”
    • How a Latino wave carried Trump to victory (Daniel McCarthy, The Spectator): “The fact is that left-wing cultural attitudes in America, and in the West as a whole, are themselves very ‘European’ and seem often irrelevant or repugnant to people of other cultures and racial backgrounds. White progressive Americans think of their views as being universal, but they are really very specific to their own group. White liberals believe, for example, that masculinity is ‘toxic’ and the world needs more female leaders. They also believe that ‘anti-racism’ requires ‘affirmative action’ or racial quotes to give blacks in particular more representation in positions of power and prestige. White liberalism is the reason Kamala Harris was named as Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020. She wasn’t a popular politician – and as this election proved, she still isn’t. But she was the right sex and colour to satisfy the requirements of white liberals. Latinos are not white liberals.”
    • How Different Groups Voted in the 2024 Election (Brian McGill, Anthony DeBarros and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Journal): “Here are the results of a survey of over 120,000 registered voters, compiled by the Associated Press, which offer a look at voting patterns and trends among various groups in the electorate and what issues were the most important to voters heading into Election Day. Numbers will update as responses are added and the survey’s weighting adjusts.”
      • A LOT of graphs. One detail fascinating detail: people who voted for Trump were MORE concerned that Kamala Harris would lead America in an authoritarian direction than the people who voted for Harris were concerned about Trump doing the same. It was tight, but the greater fear was of a Harris administration.
    • How Could Trump and Abortion Rights Both Win? (Jill Filipovic, New York Times): “How could significant numbers of voters cast their ballots for legal abortion and also for the man who helped make it possible to criminalize abortion in the first place? Mr. Trump boasted about overturning Roe v. Wade and being the most pro-life president in American history, while Kamala Harris pledged to use her presidential power to protect and expand a broad range of reproductive freedoms. Yet, according to the vote tallies released so far, in every state where abortion was up for a vote, more voters cast those ballots for abortion rights than for Ms. Harris.”
      • Recommended by a student.
    • Prediction Markets for the Win (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “The prediction markets predicted the election outcome more accurately and more quickly than polls or other forecasting methods, just as expected from decades of research.”
    • Congrats To Polymarket, But I Still Think They Were Mispriced (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “Why [do I think the market was mispriced]? In order for an American to use Polymarket, you have to get a VPN, a Coinbase account, and a Metamask wallet, use the VPN, get crypto on the Coinbase account, transfer it to the Metamask wallet, connect the Metamask wallet to Polymarket, and buy the shares you want. Ability to do this rules out 99% of the US population.… I think prediction markets are among our single best sources of truth, but that (as with every source of truth) we need to think critically about them and notice the rare times when they fail. If you can’t think critically, you’re going to have a hard time, but in that case I would still trust prediction markets over any other source (except Metaculus, which is so similar to a prediction market that it belongs in the same category anyway).”
      • Interesting contrarian take on the prediction market’s success in the election.
  2. Why Women Use Pornography and How the Church Can Help (Helen Thorne-Allenson, The Gospel Coalition): “The biggest driver of pornography use among the women I’ve met with is anxiety. Life feels overwhelming at times; pornography brings some relief… Maybe unsurprisingly, another big driver among the women I’ve walked alongside (particularly younger women) is a desire to know what sex is like.… The driver we probably miss most often in the church is that of managing pain.”
  3. Be Perfect (Ross Byrd, Mere Orthodoxy): “In the Bible, the word ‘perfect’ doesn’t mean what we tend to mean by it today. For the writers of Scripture, perfection has more to do with finished-ness than flawlessness. A thing is called ‘perfect’ when it is brought to its full maturity, when it becomes everything it is meant to be. Now, if we apply this definition to the Garden of Eden, we are forced to conclude that Eden was not, in fact, perfect. Eden was good, as Genesis tells us over and over. He created this and that, and it was good. He created human beings, and it was very good. But it doesn’t say perfect. In a very important sense, it was not yet perfect, because it was not yet complete. Eden was the beginning. The garden was, among other things, a place of potential.”
    • Emphasis in original. I like the core insight in this essay a lot.
  4. Why We’re Still Atheists (Katja Hoyer, Plough): “I, on the other hand, often wondered even as a child what the point of life was if all you did is grow up, work, die, and be erased. When I lost relatives, friends, and pets, I knew I had lost them forever, while others held out for some form of reunion in another life or at least the idea that souls continued to exist somewhere. On an abstract level, I began to understand why most of humanity finds comfort, surety, and purpose in religion. But by the time I worked this out, it was entirely an intellectual mind game to me. I had grown up in a world that made sense without God and nothing could change that now.”
    • A very interesting essay about why East Germany is so atheist, written by an atheist reflecting on it.
  5. Are Religious People More Fearful? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “I am really surprised at how few of these factors actually ‘pop’ in this analysis. That was true for things like income, age, marital status, view of the Bible, and religious importance. None of those had a measurable impact on the fear index. Also, I didn’t find a single factor that clearly led to higher levels of expressed fear. However, there were four variables in this analysis that predicted a lower score on the fear index. They were: being white, being male, having a higher level of education, and increased church attendance.”
    • Emphasis removed for readability.
  6. St. Junipero Serra: An Unjustly Controversial Figure (Brian Gabriel, The European Conservative): “In present-day discourse, the actions of the missionaries and the Spanish soldiers are often conflated, but the missionaries’ paternalistic attitude toward the tribes actually often led them to protect the tribes from the more rapacious and unsavory behavior of the soldiers. It’s true enough that the tribes were sometimes forced to labor in the fields, and their freedom of movement was restricted once they converted to Catholicism. The missions themselves were often built in part, at least, by the tribesmen, sometimes under duress. But the harsh treatment, while striking the modern observer as cruel and tortuous, was seen by the missionaries as essential to the natives’ spiritual salvation. Today, many of their descendants remain Catholic. The value of the missionaries’ actions can never be recognized by a modern world that doesn’t allow for spiritual effects.”
    • I have long believed, even as a very Protestant person, that Junipero Serra has gotten a bum rap in California (and at Stanford).
  7. Rodney Alcala Didn’t Kill Me. Forty Years Later, I Asked Him Why (Alice Feiring, New York Magazine): “Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his familiar face and orange jumpsuit: ‘Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.’ It couldn’t be the same man, I’d thought to myself. But after hours of Googling I had to accept the truth: Jon Burger was an alias; he was the winning bachelor on The Dating Game nine years after I met him; and he is believed to have been one of the most prolific of serial killers, officially responsible for at least seven murders with authorities estimating his real body count at about 130.”
    • Recommended by a student who says, “Very well written, chilling story. The author is lucky to be alive.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How to Do Action Comedy (Every Frame a Painting, YouTube): nine minutes about what makes Jackie Chan so great, and why his foreign films are better than his American films in important ways.
  • Harvey Epstein for New York City Council (Saturday Night Live, YouTube): two and a half minutes I found absolutely hilarious. What’s even funnier is that it’s about a real politician.
  • Vote (Texts From Superheroes)
  • Diet (Pearls Before Swine) — actually, though

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 476



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 a shorter-than-normal edition because I’ve had a busy week and haven’t read as much as I normally do.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. There’s more herding in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scottish Highlands (Nate Silver, Substack): “How many [recent polls] showed the race in either direction within 2.5 percentage points, close enough that you could basically call it a tie? Well, 193 of them did, or 78 percent. That’s way more than you should get in theory — even if the candidates are actually exactly tied in all seven states, which they almost certainly aren’t.… Based on a binomial distribution — which assumes that all polls are independent of one another, which theoretically they should be — it’s realllllllllllllly unlikely. Specifically, the odds are 1 in 9.5 trillion against at least this many polls showing such a close margin.”
  2. Christianity Today’s podcast The Bulletin ran interviews with three Christians voting different ways. Presented in the order in which they aired:
    • Voting Third Party (Matt Martens): “He’s a trial lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, a seminary graduate, a legal ethics professor, and an award-winning author. Martens’s writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other outlets, and he has spoken at numerous universities across the country.”
    • Voting Democrat (David French): “He’s a columnist for The New York Times and a former senior editor of The Dispatch. He’s the author most recently of Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”
    • Voting Republican (Eric Teetsel): “Teetsel was vice president of government relations at The Heritage Foundation, was chief of staff to US senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, and served as president of the Family Policy Alliance of Kansas.”
  3. What economists don’t know (Scott Sumner, Substack): “I am not impressed when someone tells me that a small homogeneous country has less inequality than the US. I am impressed by the fact that almost every single ethnic group in America is more successful than the equivalent ethnic group in their home country.… Right now, the US economy is the envy of the world. Before we replace free markets with an industrial policy, we might wish to compare upside and downside risks from interventionism. Given that our living standards are currently the highest in the world (at least for countries of more than 10 million), in which direction are the risks the greatest?”
    • The author is an econ professor at Bentley.
  4. How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers. (Matt Kaplan, New York Times): “The dispute arises in part because there are really two types of continents: Those recognized by cultures around the world, and those recognized by geologists. Cultures can define a continent any way they want, while geologists have to use a definition. And geological research in recent years has made defining continental boundaries less simple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evidence of unexpected continental material.”

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 475

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. Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s one thing to get nonbelievers to offer kind words for ‘cultural’ Christianity or endorse the sociological utility of churchgoing. The challenge is to go further, to persuade anxious moderns that religion is more than merely pragmatically useful, more than just a wistful hope — that a religious framework actually makes much more sense of reality than the allegedly hardheaded materialist alternative.”
    • Discusses three books Douthat thinks are helpful.
  2. The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (Nicholas Confessore, New York Times): “Striving to touch ‘every individual on campus,’ as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained.… Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.”
    • Related: I Don’t Want to Live in a Monoculture, and Neither Do You (David French, New York Times): “In my experience, the more ideologically or theologically ‘pure’ an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task. Ideological monocultures aren’t just bad for the minority that’s silenced, harassed or canceled whenever its members raise their voices in dissent. It’s terrible for the confident majority — and for the confident majority’s cause.”
  3. U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says (Azeen Ghorayshi, New York Times): “An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment.… She said she was concerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use blockers because it doesn’t impact them,’ referring to transgender adolescents.”
    • JK Rowling summarized the story well: ‘We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.’
  4. Our Robot Stories Haven’t Prepared Us for A.I. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In most of these stories, the defining aspects of humanity are some combination of free will, strong emotion and morality. The robot begins as a being following its programming and mystified by human emotionality, and over time it begins to choose, to act freely, to cut its strings and ultimately to love.… We have been trained for a future in which robots think like us but don’t feel like us, and therefore need to be guided out of merely intellectual self-consciousness into a deeper awareness of emotionality, of heart as well as head. We are getting a reality where our bots seem so deeply emotional — loving, caring, heartfelt — that it’s hard to distinguish them from human beings, and indeed, some of us find their apparent warmth a refuge from a difficult or cruel world.”
  5. How I Learned To Stop Criticizing Everything (Eboo Patel, Persuasion): “I’m not sad that I read those critical theorists. I think it’s a useful perspective to have. My problem is that I deformed the world to fit a narrow worldview, and I let it direct my life. The bigger problem is that this paradigm has become a regime in certain quarters of higher education. You are coerced into holding that worldview and punished if you utter ideas outside of its scope. Critical theory is like a sharp kitchen knife: very useful for some things, like cutting meat, but if you eat your cereal with it, you’ll hurt yourself. And if you point it at someone else, then it’s a weapon. In some circles, on some campuses, every other utensil has been removed from the intellectual cutlery drawer, replaced with sharp kitchen knives.”
  6. Both Democrats and Republicans can pass the Ideological Turing Test (Adam Mastroianni, Substack): “We first challenged each side to pretend to be the other side, and then we had both sides try to distinguish between the truth-tellers and the fakers. If partisans have no idea who the other side is or what they believe, it should be hard for people to do a convincing impression of the opposite party. So let’s see!”
    • Interesting study. In the footnotes he mentioned he gathered the data in 2019 but never got around to publishing it. Just FYI
  7. It’s Rational And Humane To Lack Strong Political Beliefs (Jesse Singal, Substack): “We don’t need the average person to have strong beliefs about what the right anti-poverty policy is, and I would argue it’s a waste of time to devote too many hours to something like that, because it’s hopelessly complex and even experts who devote their lives to that subject disagree on the basics. Plus, many of the experts — on this and every other subject — are themselves incompetent, ideologically captured, or otherwise unlikely to help lead you closer to useful insights.”
    • Recommended by a student. This post is a bit odd in that it’s unlocked but to read the whole thing you have to read it in the Substack app. You can read the first part for free and that’s enough to get the gist and tell whether you want to read the rest of it.

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 474

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. How to Talk About God and Politics in Polarized Times (Seth Freeman, Christianity Today): “The key is three words: paraphrase, praise, and probe. The method: Privately, over coffee or a meal, nudge the conversation into a Big Topic and ask your friend what they think about it. Then: 1) Paraphrase: Repeat the gist of your friend’s thoughts so well they say, ‘Exactly!’ 2) Praise: Highlight anything they said that you can sincerely honor.  3) Probe: Ask about your concerns, curiosities, and confusions as a co-seeker of truth. Do this two or three times. Then, share your own perspective and let the conversation unfold from there, returning to paraphrase, praise, probe whenever there’s tension.”
    • Practical and recommended. The author, a Christian, is a professor of conflict management and negotiation at the NYU Stern School of Business and Columbia University.
  2. What Ladders Are You Climbing? (Aaron Renn, Substack): “…admit that hierarchy is ubiquitous, we are all trying to achieve goals in life using some theory of how to get there, and that it’s a good thing if men of good character and competence seek and achieve positions of commensurate power, responsibility, influence, and status.”
  3. Too Many Laws—and Too Little Judging (Anastasia Boden, The Dispatch): “As of 2018, federal statutes in the U.S. Code span 60,000 pages. The Federal Register, which contains federal regulations, makes up another 188,000 pages. Some estimate it would take more than three years to read the Federal Register, let alone understand it. And those figures don’t take into account the thousands of informal guidance documents that can also carry the force of law.”
  4. Forget the Lies About Waiting: Why marriage and kids early are the ultimate flex (Anthony Bradley, Substack): “The modern world may tell you to wait—to find yourself first, to achieve financial security, or to experience the world—but the truth is that marriage offers all of these things and more.”
    • The author is a research fellow at the Acton Institute and a professor of religion at Kuyper College. This article is targeted specifically at young men (although it is likely of interest to gals as well).
  5. Negative effects of childhood spanking may be overstated, study claims (Adriana Diaz, New York Post): “The topic of whether or not spanking is an effective or harmful form of punishment has sparked considerable discussion for generations. Previous research has established a strong correlation between physical punishment and negative outcomes for children, but much of this work did not account for pre-existing behavioral issues in children. This made it challenging to determine whether spanking directly causes problems or if it is more commonly employed with children who already exhibit behavioral difficulties.”
  6. Rachel Levine Must Resign (Andrew Sullivan, Substack): “…the discovery from a lawsuit against the State of Alabama over its ban on the medical sex reassignment of children has left me reeling. It shows a staggering level of bad faith from the transqueer lobby, and, also, from Rachel Levine — the Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS. Read the amicus brief here. Everything in this piece is based on it. The broad contours laid out in the brief were already known. But, with discovery, the specific details of private, internal emails make this medical scandal even more vivid.”
    • Sullivan, I remind you, has been called the father of gay marriage. Reading what pro-trans lobbyists and clinicians say to one another when off the record has left him deeply rattled. In his words, “Forgive me for the passion. But this amicus brief set my head and heart aflame.”
  7. Nobel economics prize goes to 3 economists who found that freer societies are more likely to prosper (Daniel Niemann, Mike Corder & Paul Wiseman, AP News): “In their work, the winners looked, for instance, at the city of Nogales, which straddles the U.S.-Mexico border. Despite sharing the same geography, climate and a common culture, life is very different on either side of the border. In Nogales, Arizona, to the north, residents are relatively well-off and live long lives; most children graduate from high school. To the south, in Mexico’s Nogales, Sonora, residents are much poorer, and organized crime and corruption abound. The difference, the economists found, is a U.S. system that protects property rights and gives citizens a say in their government.”
    • There is also an interesting summary of their conclusions about why some colonized countries are doing really well now and others are not. Recommended by a  friend.

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 473



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 473, the largest known number whose square (223729) uses different digits than when it is raised to the 4th power (50054665441).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Evangelistic Shift (Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy): “So what accounts for this shift and how should Christians respond? The answer to the first question might be surprisingly simple: The shift dates back to the growing awareness, acceptance, and promotion of transgender sexual identities in mainstream American culture. This shift, dating to the mid 2010s and probably peaking in the early 2020s, did two things that fundamentally changed the evangelistic landscape for Christians in America.”
  2. Willful ignorance of the male suicide crisis (Richard V. Reeves, Substack): “It’s essentially impossible to come away from this [New Yorker] essay without a strong sense that the teen suicide crisis is, in fact, a teen girl suicide crisis. That is absolutely false. In fact, for every five teenagers dying from suicide, four are likely to be boys.”
  3. Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? (Aaron Renn, Substack): “Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.… All is not well for American Christianity to say the least. It’s easy to point at trends in the world to explain this, but given the manifest and widely publicized problems within evangelicalism, I would submit that at least as much time should go into introspection and internal reform.”
  4. Yes, Third-Trimester Abortions Are Happening in America (Emma Camp, The Atlantic): “…Colorado, which is home to clinics that perform third-trimester abortions, recorded 137 third-trimester abortions in 2023. That’s only one state—eight other states, plus Washington, D.C., have no restrictions on third-trimester abortions. Just a few minutes from my office building in D.C., a clinic offers abortions up to nearly 32 weeks. In nearby Bethesda, Maryland, a clinic performs abortions up to 35 weeks’ gestation.… Americans are broadly uncomfortable with third-trimester abortions. A 2023 Gallup poll found that although more than two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal in the first trimester, just 22 percent think it should be legal in the third. And a 2021 Associated Press poll found that just 8 percent of respondents believe that third-trimester abortions should be legal in all cases.”
  5. A Defense of Legacy Admissions, the Surprising Engine of Meritocracy (Teddy Ganea, Stanford Review): “The purpose of college admissions isn’t to create a new elite from scratch. It’s to meld meritorious non-elites with the existing elite, to incorporate fresh talent and ideas into the highest echelons of power. It should be a win-win-win: established elites benefit from new merit, new merit benefits from elite connections and resources, and society benefits from a more meritocratic elite. Legacy admissions is a prerequisite for this mission statement, because you can’t meld together two groups if one of them is missing.… Critics of legacy admissions ignore the key reality of human history: that the existing elite is almost always deeply entrenched, and breaking into it requires more than just individual talent — it requires access. And this is where legacy admissions play their most crucial role: by enabling meritorious non-elites to mix with the existing elite, they open up the real opportunity for upward mobility.”
    • Well-argued and provocative. My favorite kind of article!
  6. 55/45 is a really close race (Nate Silver, Substack): “I’ve never seen an election in which the forecast spent more time in the vicinity of 50/50, and I probably never will… on average, since our forecast relaunch on July 30, Harris has won 49.4 percent of simulations, and Trump has won 50.2 percent. (These don’t quite add up to 100 because of the slim possibility of a 269–269 Electoral College tie.) People understand intuitively that a 50/50 or 49/51 forecast is a toss-up. If the forecast is 55/45 in some direction instead, however, confusion can abound — even though this isn’t any different from 50/50 for most practical purposes. Some of the problem is that people can confuse this forecast for a prediction of vote share: if Harris were to win 55 percent of the vote and Trump 45 percent, that would be the biggest landslide in an American election since Ronald Reagan in 1984. But that’s not what this forecast is saying. Rather, it’s that Harris will win the Electoral College about 11 times out of 20 and Trump will win it 9 times out of 20: still basically a toss-up, just with the coin weighted ever so slightly in Harris’s favor.”
  7. Don’t Vote Like Your Life Depended on It (Chris Stirewalt, The Dispatch): “Politicians and media hype merchants tell us every cycle that this is the most important election in history, but the truth is that in a nation with stable system of elections held in a free, fair manner and abundant constitutional protections for political minorities, the knowledge that no election is the final word helps us to live in relative harmony.… It’s not the end of anything if the party opposite your own wins an election, just the continuation of a 235-year long argument that, Lord willing, will go on for another 235.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Doctor admits wearing disguise to poison mom’s partner with fake covid shot (Leo Sands, Washington Post): “A British doctor has been found guilty of attempting to kill his mother’s longtime partner by disguising himself as a nurse and injecting his elderly victim with a flesh-eating toxic substance while pretending to administer a routine coronavirus vaccination.”
    • I do not mean to suggest that attempted murder is less serious than the sorts of things included above — but I do mean to suggest this is a story you will read because it is wild more than because it has anything to do with your life.
  • The ‘Goth’ Volleyball Player Was Actually Toning Things Down (Callie Holtermann, New York Times): “I was in a film study meeting with my whole team, and I was telling one of my teammates that I was so confused why my Instagram was blowing up. And Allison [Voigt, her team’s head coach] turned to me and showed me Twitter, and was like, ‘You’re going viral. You have two million views right now.’ I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to do or what was going to happen from this.”

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 472



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 472. There are (I am told) 472 ways to tile a 5x5 grid with integer-sized squares (1x1 squares mixed with 2x2 squares and 3x3 squares, etc).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. “We Lost Our Baby”: North Carolina Family Loses 3 after Climbing to Roof to Escape Helene Floods (FOX Weather on YouTube, 11 minutes long): “I want them to remember that there is joy beyond the pain… My son couldn’t be more proud at me for hanging on; my parents were probably lifting me up when I was between the two things that were holding me down. They are rejoicing at the fact that I now can tell them what God did for me, because it was God. He said, ‘Be still. I am in control, and you will pass on.’ This is a backfire for the devil, because he tried to take me out, and her I am sharing the word that my seven-year-old is a hero, and my parents live on in God’s glory.”
    • You will absolutely cry watching this. Recommended by a student.
  2. How Tolkien and Lewis Re-enchanted a War-Weary World (Lev Grossman, New York Times): “‘The Mythmakers’ takes us through 20 years of deep intellectual friendship between Lewis and Tolkien — which widened to include the social circle around them, known as the Inklings — but it’s just as interesting when documenting the slow, regrettable shipwreck of that friendship. Jack and Tollers turned out to be not so very, very like each other after all. After his conversion, Lewis, loud as ever, became famous as a radio lecturer on Christianity; this irked the quiet, rigorous Tolkien, because Lewis had never formally studied theology, and Tolkien would never have lectured on anything without earning six advanced degrees in it first.”
  3. What Would Lecrae Do? (Christina Gonzalez Ho, Christianity Today): “…to hear one of the most talented and decorated rappers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heartening. What moves me is not the idea that someday my own work might be noticed by someone more famous. It’s the thought that a sincere, intelligent, and profound artist like Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s seen no end of good ideas and interesting art, might find something in straightforwardly Christian music that gives him pause, that makes him reconsider.”
    • Christina is one of our alumni: a former worship leader and officer in our ministry.
  4. Held Hostage Overseas? The IRS Wants Your Back Taxes. (Emma Camp, Reason): “Many Americans who return home after being illegally detained overseas arrive to find they’ve been billed thousands of dollars by the IRS—including late fees for unpaid taxes.… ‘I got one of those bills from the IRS saying, you owe this much on this year, you owe this much on this year because of failure to pay on time—here’s the interest that’s accrued,’ Washington Post reporter and former hostage Jason Rezaian told NPR. He faced more than $6,000 in fees for unpaid taxes after his release, following 544 days of detention in Iran.”
  5. Become Slaves to One Another (John M. G. Barclay, Plough): “Paul understands the world not as an empty space in which individuals carve out their private sphere of freedom, but as a terrain already populated by competing powers greater than human actors, who only imagine that they are free. As far as Paul is concerned, our search for an individuated, atomized autonomy is itself an enslaving delusion, because we are, and are meant to be, free only as we are formed by relationships with God and with others.”
    • The author is a professor of early Christianity at the Durham University in England. He’s a well-regarded Biblical scholar.
  6. I Spent 13 Years Living as a Man. But After My Spouse’s Exposé, I’m Detransitioning. (Tiger Reed, The Free Press): “For detransitioners, there is no clear path. Gender-affirming clinicians have been ignoring and dismissing our concerns. While my transition was covered by insurance, my detransition is not. To restore my hairline and remove my body hair will cost me thousands. In the next few years I may have breast reconstructive surgery. There are many questions I don’t have the answers to—such as whether my kids, now ranging in age from two to 16 years old, should still call me ‘Dad.’ I am planning to change my name back to Roxxanne, and to change my license so it says ‘female’ again. But I wonder if I’ll ever pass as a woman.  The gender-affirming care model relies on vulnerable people’s impatience—rushing them toward major medical changes rather than stopping to understand the root of their pain and suffering.”
  7. As America’s Marijuana Use Grows, So Do the Harms (Megan Twohey, Danielle Ivory and Carson Kessler, New York Times): “The accumulating harm is broader and more severe than previously reported. And gaps in state regulations, limited public health messaging and federal restraints on research have left many consumers, government officials and even medical practitioners in the dark about such outcomes.… as more people turn to marijuana for help with anxiety, depression and other mental health issues, few know that it can cause temporary psychosis and is increasingly associated with the development of chronic psychotic disorders.”
    • This is sad, both because of the human suffering involved and also because some people seem genuinely shocked that drugs can have negative side-effects.

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 471



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 471, apparently the smallest number with the property that its first 4 multiples contain the digit 4.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Concise Theology of Failure (Samuel D. James, Substack): “The gospel fuels risk-taking because we understand that whatever we fail at is nothing compared to the failure that was completely and totally wiped out by the death and resurrection of Jesus. If our worst failure has no power over us, then no other failure has that kind of power, either.”
  2. The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week (John Byron Kuhner, First Things): “I go past the ‘banned books’ displays of 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird and Beloved and The Color Purple and have to laugh: These are the opposite of banned books. These are required books, books that have been assigned reading for American students for generations. They have enjoyed most-favored-title status in the industry from the moment of publication. They are promoted books—relentlessly promoted. Indeed, calling them banned is just the latest morph of a marketing program that hasn’t stopped wanting you to read these books for—in some instances—six or seven decades now.”
  3. The Autonomy Trap (James R. Wood, Plough): “I come from a stock of relationship-quitters. During my childhood, pretty much everyone in my life had divorced at least once, extended family connections were strained, long-term friends were nonexistent, and moves were frequent. Over time I came to adopt a conception of freedom that had destroyed the lives of many around me, and which would threaten to destroy my own as well: the popular idea of freedom as unconstrained choice. Since this is impossible, the default was a more achievable version: the ability to drop commitments and relationships at any point when they become too complicated. Freedom as the license to leave when things get tough.”
  4. Some of Christianity’s Biggest Skeptics Are Becoming Vocal Converts (Nathan Guy, Christianity Today): “…intellectual conversion stories are not new. My own doctoral supervisor at Cambridge—Janet Martin Soskice—converted in college precisely because of Christianity’s intellectual satisfaction. Philosopher Edward Feser returned to the Catholicism of his youth for the same reason. But this trend seems to have increased exponentially in recent years, with a growing number of secular intellectuals making similar declarations.…. It seems many of the bright philosophers graduating from eminent programs and taking positions in prominent universities were—shockingly—theists. And many of them were Christians, bringing their intellectual powers to bear on the apologetic front. These scholars were slowly making inroads among the intelligentsia, and their influence was trickling down into the public square.”
    • The author is a philosophy prof at Harding University. Unlocked.
  5. In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women (Ruth Graham, NYT): “For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers. They attend services more often and are more likely to identify as religious.”
    • Unlocked, recommended by a student
  6. Legalizing Sports Gambling Was a Huge Mistake (Charles Fain Lehman, The Atlantic): “The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.… Looking specifically at online sports gambling, they find that legalization increases the risk that a household goes bankrupt by 25 to 30 percent, and increases debt delinquency. These problems seem to concentrate among young men living in low-income counties—further evidence that those most hurt by sports gambling are the least well-off.”
    • Unlocked.
  7. Confession of a Church Snob (Susy Flory, Substack): “My decision to try this little church, the kind I’d passed by without a thought as I was on my way to my—I’ll be honest—what I viewed as my superior big church, was directly influenced by FF Bruce [a famous Biblical scholar] who wrote in his memoir that even though he didn’t agree with all of the practices and beliefs of the Plymouth Brethren, no matter where he was in the world he looked up the closest little Plymouth Brethren outpost and quietly showed up to serve, whether it was giving, teaching, or putting away folding chairs.”
  8. Mind-Blowing Game Invented by Russian Sociology Student (YouTube, one minute): the significance of the game Werewolf (and social deduction games in general) — recommended by a student

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.