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
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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.”
- 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.)”
- 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
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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.