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.
This week was especially difficult to narrow down to just 7 top-level groupings.
Things Glen Found Interesting
- Hoping for Rightly Ordered Desires (O. Alan Noble, Substack): “One of the most difficult truths to internalize in this life is that you are not promised all that you desire, even when your desires are rightly ordered. For example, you may desire friendship or a spouse or children or a job, and none of them are given to you. Or at least, not on the timeline you expect. Each of these are good desires, and when you desire them rightly (not excessively, not before God, not as idols, not selfishly), they are good things to desire and work towards. But God, in his perfect will, does not promise to give us all our earthly desires.”
- Bureaucratizing Faith (Stephen Eide, Library of Law & Liberty): “Those concerned about anti-Christian bias often frame the FBO [faith-based organizations] question as a religious liberty matter. That framing only clarifies whether religious groups can contract with government. It’s less helpful in determining whether they should. In general, an organization spiritually motivated to serve the poor may take public money to do so, as long as it doesn’t discriminate based on sect and doesn’t use taxpayer dollars to evangelize. But evangelism is precisely how FBOs reach some people failed by secular programs.”
- I really liked this essay. Lots of great insights.
- To Be Honest.. I’m Struggling with the ESV (Lorenzo Figueroa Cusick, Substack): “The ESV has been revised the following times: 2001, 2002, 2007, 2011, 2016, 2025. And when it is revised, it always claims to be simply modest changes to better improve ‘accuracy and clarity’ (according to Crossway). We can applaud when a Bible publisher wants to make the Bible even better for its users. Where it gets weird is the fact that they don’t identify (like the NASB, for example) when they do revise it. They don’t label it the ESV2001, ESV2002, ESV2007, etc. This leads to situations where the Bible in your library or church bag is different from the one used by the church.”
- The ESV is a perfectly adequate translation — but some of the people who love it love it way too much. I prefer the NIV and the NET (which each have their own drawbacks, because no translation is perfect).
- Sorry, Liz Gilbert, Married Women Are (Increasingly) Happiest of All (Sophie Anderson and Brad Wilcox, Institute for Family Studies): “There’s only one problem with the progressive case against marriage and family for women: It’s completely wrong. Today, married women live longer, earn more, and report more meaning in their lives, compared to single women. They are also markedly happier than their single peers, according to recent research by psychologist Jean Twenge and colleagues.… liberal married moms are dramatically more likely to say they are happy with their lives, compared to their single and childless peers.”
- Related (at least in my mind): How monogamous are humans? A study ranks us between meerkats and beavers. (Victoria Craw, Washington Post): “Previous work on the role of monogamy in human societyhas relied on fossil records or comparison of marriage norms across cultures, Dyble said. His research studied the data from human populations and nonhuman mammal species to find rates of full siblings, meaning those born to the same mother and father.… Analysis of nearly 2 million human sibling relationships and more than 60,000 mammal relationships showed that the proportion of full siblings in the human groups ‘clusters closely’ with rates seen in socially monogamous animals and ‘consistently exceeds rates seen in non-monogamous mammals,’ Dyble wrote. He said the data showed there was a stark difference between groups that were considered socially monogamous and nonmonogamous, based on definitions from a 2013 study by Cambridge researchers.”
- Pay Attention to How You Pay Attention (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “What Meta shows me is what Meta most want me to see, which is whatever their prediction models believe will get me to spend as much time on their apps as possible. The algorithms serve the company’s ends, not my ends. If Meta wanted to know what I want to see, it could ask me. The technology has long existed for users to shape their own recommendations. These companies do not offer us control over what we see because they do not want us to have it. They do not want to be bound by who we seek to be tomorrow.”
- A good essay with a poor title. Recommended.
- No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land (Noah Smith, Substack): “Once the logic of land acknowledgments and ‘decolonization’ is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures.… The general principle here is that instead of a dark world of ethnic cleansing in the name of ‘decolonization,’ we should try to build a bright future where Native Americans and the United States of America exist in harmony and cooperation rather than in conflict.”
- Recommended even if you think you know what it will say based on the title and the excerpt. The article has some surprises.
- The Making of a Techno-Nationalist Elite (Tanner Greer, American Affairs): “The economic, social, and political activities of the Eastern Establishment were mutually reinforcing pillars of a larger program. Members of the Establishment used the wealth generated by new technologies to secure political influence, used that influence to sustain a national market and legal framework geared for yet more technological expansion, and then presided over a conscious effort to preserve and transmit the values of their class to future generations, ensuring that the unity and discipline they gained in shared struggle would not dissipate amid power and prosperity. Through these means, a techno-nationalist elite guided America’s development for more than seventy years. Under its stewardship, the United States became the world’s wealthiest, most industrially advanced, and most powerful nation: a true technological republic.… Behind the Eastern Establishment stood a dense web of personal ties that bound its families together. Many of these ties were consummated, quite literally, on the marriage bed. Karp and Zamiska are loathe to think in these terms. They write a great deal about the engineering elite’s waning commitment to Western civilization, but they have little to say about its waning commitment to raising the next generation of that civilization. The Eastern Establishment was self-consciously reproductive: it built schools, endowed universities, and founded literal dynasties. Part of building ‘a shared culture … that will make possible our continued survival’ is creating the children who will survive us.”
- Excellent. Long but recommended. Also, OUCH. The closing four paragraphs of this book review are absolutely brutal.
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.