TGFI, Volume 540: marrying atheists and using AI to avoid awkwardness

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Tough Love: Can I Marry an Atheist? (Abigail Shrier, The Free Press): “You can have all kinds of successful relationships with someone whose worldview is profoundly different from yours—but not marriage. I’ve only been married 18 years, but I know this: Good marriage requires, at a minimum, staying on the same page as your spouse. Compromise on the small stuff, fine. Not on the foundations of the home. That can only create distance between you, a distance that will grow as your children ask you to interpret their world.… Don’t marry a woman you hope, even secretly, will change.”
2. Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up (Clay Shirky, New York Times): “One study found that 18-to-25-year-olds alone accounted for 46 percent of ChatGPT use. And this analysis didn’t even include users 17 and under. Teenagers and young adults, stuck in the gradual transition from managed childhoods to adult freedoms, are both eager to make human connection and exquisitely alert to the possibility of embarrassment.… teens were adamant that they did not want to go directly to their parents or friends with these issues and that the steady availability of A.I. was a relief to them. They also rejected the idea of A.I. therapists; they weren’t treating A.I. as a replacement for another person but instead were using it to second-guess their developing sense of how to treat other people. A.I. has been trained to give us answers we like, rather than the ones we may need to hear. The resulting stream of praise — constantly hearing some version of ‘You’re absolutely right!’ — risks eroding our ability to deal with the messiness of human relationships. Sociologists call this social deskilling. Even casual A.I. use exposes users to a level of praise humans rarely experience from one another, which is not great for any of us but is especially risky for young people still working on their social skills.” 
   • The author is vice provost at NYU. It’s a long excerpt, but I can’t find a way to abridge it much more.
3. Some more reflections on Minnesota: 
   • From the left: Alex Pretti’s death and the elite bargain (Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument): “The progressive omnicause ended up undermining its own interests by binding them all together. If being an environmentalist meant you also had to be pro-choice and also had to be anti-cop and also had to be anti-Trump, then well, that shrinks the set of people willing to be environmentalists. But there is one omnicause worth joining. It presented itself on Saturday when an American citizen was shoved to the ground and sprayed with gunfire.… The truth is, widespread discontent across industry, ideology and interest groups is the most effective way to halt governments in their tracks. Even in fully authoritarian countries, mass discontent is incredibly effective at securing policy change.”
   • From the right: Immigration Enforcement Is Unavoidably Upsetting. But This Is Something Else. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s true that you can’t have sustained immigration enforcement without also having upsetting cases and sympathetic deportees. If you deport illegal immigrants with families, you will have to choose between family separation and deporting children. If you conduct arrests in homes and neighborhoods, you will be accused of traumatizing kids and communities; if you conduct them in workplaces, you will be going after the hardest-working migrants.… There are conflicts here that can’t be wished away. But the fact that some backlash and resistance are inescapable doesn’t mean that all enforcement strategies that generate backlash are sound or wise.”
   • From an international who doesn’t exactly map onto our politics: The American People Fact-Checked Their Government (Jacob Mchangama, Persuasion): “The current obsession with misinformation tends to focus on the public: online mobs, foreign influencers, flaming trolls. But history suggests a more inconvenient truth: in times of crisis, disinformation often comes from above. Governments, including democratic ones, have powerful incentives to shape information.” 
     • The author is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt.
   • From evangelicalism: In a Tense Minnesota, Christians Help Immigrant Neighbors (Emily Belz, Christianity Today): “This church, with the support of many non-Christian volunteers, has been delivering food six days per week for thousands of immigrant families who are staying home in fear. Two days before, the church had trained 600 new volunteers for food distribution, with a list now of 28,000 people who want food. One room at the church was full of diapers. Another was packed with a mountain of toilet paper. Across the Twin Cities, neighbors pile supplies for immigrants into other churches, too, as well as restaurants and coffee shops, in scenes that look like a community recovering from a natural disaster. In just a few weeks, churches have created a sprawling, informal network for grocery deliveries to immigrant families.”
   • Related to the above: I Trained to Monitor ICE but Found Myself Feeding the Hungry (Elizabeth Berget, Christianity Today): “In the following days, I discovered a safety net that Christians around the city had woven. I joined a neighborhood care group co-run by John Hildebrand, a member and elder of Calvary Baptist Church here in Minneapolis, which has been fielding needs from vulnerable families in their neighborhoods. Vetted members of the group respond to needs as they arise, offering to give rides, do laundry, bring groceries, or shovel front walks for people—even strangers—afraid to leave their homes.  As I became more involved in this and other care networks, my phone pinging all day with new needs, it occurred to me that this is what it may have been like if the church of Acts 2 had used a group text…” 
     • Note: I checked and Calvary Baptist Church represents a mainline denomination, not an evangelical one.
4. Elites and the Evangelical Class War (John Ehrett, Mere Orthodoxy): “Picture, if you will, the lush campus of an international research university, firmly ensconced in one of the least religious areas of the country. It’s the mid-2010s, and the Collegiate Gothic thoroughfares are bustling. On that campus are three Christians, each engaged in distinctive forms of on-campus ministry: (1)  A thirtysomething man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the corner of one of the busiest campus intersections, holding a bullhorn and displaying a ten-foot banner proclaiming EVOLUTION IS A LIE. Over and over, he declares the realities of sin and judgment, so loudly that his proclamations can be heard even from several blocks away. (2) A well-dressed, sixtyish pastor, hailing from a prominent New York City church, sits on a university-provided stage across from a former dean of the university’s law school. They are there to discuss the academic’s recent book, a theological-philosophical argument for Spinozistic pantheism over against traditional Christianity and secular materialism alike. Before an audience of several hundred students and faculty, the pastor delivers a distinctively Christological critique of the volume. (3) middle-aged man in a business suit stands along the edge of a busy roadway. He says little, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Testaments, and he’s handing them out to anyone, student or townie, walking past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a runner sprinting by.) With these three now in view, one might ask a provocative question: which of these Christians was best in witness in a hostile culture?” 
   • The author is describing scenes he witnessed at Yale Law School.
5. The Day I Wanted to Be a Father (Colin Wright, Twitter): “The postdoc years, the geographic instability that made establishing roots nearly impossible, and the uncertainty of tenure all felt incompatible with building a family. I was convinced that children simply weren’t in my future. I was certain of that until I was thirty-six years old. Then one moment changed everything.… For most of my life, I had thought of having children as the end of my life. Now I understand it as the beginning of a new one. In truth, until I have children of my own, I still view myself as a child in some sense. Unfinished. Parenthood feels to me like the necessary final chapter of a life well lived, one filled with a meaning much deeper than exotic vacations or luxury goods could ever provide.” 
   • A moving essay which, oddly enough, only seems to be available on Twitter.
6. The Uncomfortable Truths About Immigration (Alexander Kustov, Substack): “Here is the uncomfortable truth: a lot of what liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic say about immigration is deliberately misleading in ways that matter for policy and for democratic trust. It is not usually outright made-up. But rather it is a form of ‘highbrow misinformation’ built out of selective framing, strategic omissions, and ‘noble’ half-truths. And it likely makes it harder, not easier, to build durable majorities for freer immigration policies in the long run.” 
   • The author, himself an immigrant, is a political science prof at Notre Dame. The section on highbrow misinformation is especially good.
7. An Important Letter from Bill, Kris, and Dann on Behalf of Bethel Leadership (Bethel Church): “We’re writing to you today to share about some of our mistakes and failures in the way we navigated our responsibilities to the global Body of Christ. We ask for you to cover us with grace as we seek the Lord for forgiveness in the face of some grievous mistakes. These actions were taken by us (Bill Johnson, Kris Vallotton, and Dann Farrelly) along with Danny Silk. We would like to clarify that our other leaders and staff members, including Brian and Jenn, and the Bethel Music team, were not updated on the allegations or the details of the process. We take responsibility for the fact that we did not properly and fully bring discipline, closure, or clear and timely communication regarding the gravity of our concerns with Shawn Bolz.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Best Of Moltbook (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “Moltbook is ‘a social network for AI agents’, although ‘humans [are] welcome to observe’.… it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast. But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it’s not trivially made-up — I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine.” 
  • The network in question: Moltbook
  • Actually fascinating content in this post. Definitely recommended. Perhaps should have been up top.
• One Solution for Too Many A’s? Harvard Considers Giving A+ Grades. (Mark Arsenault, New York Times): “Grades of A fell to 53.4 percent of grades awarded in the fall semester, from 60.2 percent in the prior academic year, Dr. Claybaugh reported.… Harvard has been on a campaign to make it harder to get an A, and a series of proposals may be put into effect later this year. A report issued in October suggested allowing grades of A+, which are not currently used at the school, as a way to recognize the best performing students, demoting the routine, ordinary A to the second rung of the grading ladder.” 
  • This feels like it was written by a satirist:
    “We’re giving out too many A’s.”
    “I guess we should give more B’s.”
    “Hear me out… what if we started giving out extra-special A’s instead?”
• Something very unexpected is happening to Norway’s polar bears (Benji Jones, Vox): “The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. ‘I was surprised,’ Aars told Vox from Svalbard. ‘I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.’ ” 
  • The article makes it clear that other polar bear populations are doing worse. Fascinating regardless.
• This A.I. Tool Is Going Viral. Five Ways People Are Using It. (Natallie Rocha, New York Times): “Last week, he prompted Claude Code to make a program to identify which clothes belonged to each of his three daughters so he could sort clean laundry into piles without their help. He took pictures of their clothes to teach Claude Code which T‑shirt belonged to which daughter. Now he simply holds up the clothes to his laptop camera so the program tells him whom it belongs to. ‘The whole process was done within an hour, and the girls were really excited,’ he said.”

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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.