TGFI, Volume 541: What Forgiveness Takes

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. Forgiveness Always Involves the Absorption of a Debt (J. D. Greear, blog): “…if you get jealous of me and start slandering me and really hurt my reputation in the eyes of others, it can be hard to see where the ‘debt’ is. But it’s there. Watch this: Let’s say that after you’ve maligned me, but before I launched my counterattack, you came to me and said you were sorry. And I was feeling magnanimous, so I forgave you. In that moment, what has happened? In forgiving you, I’m saying, ‘I’m not going to punish you or pay you back for what you did. I’m not going to take vengeance on you or seek retaliation; I’m not going to go out and ruin your reputation, and I’m not even going to stay mad at you for the hurt you caused me. I am going to absorb the consequences of your sin.’ You can’t see the financial damage, but the damage is just as real. And someone is still paying for it. Forgiveness always involves the absorption of a debt. The sacrifice of a lamb pictures how God would himself absorb the cost for our sin. But catch this, that only makes sense if God himself is somehow pictured in the lamb—otherwise, killing a lamb in our place is random and cruel.”
  2. Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them (Elsa Johnson, The Times): “The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025–26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate. And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from ‘mushroom mix’.”
  3. New Research Confirms Jesus’s Miracles (T.C. Schmidt, The Gospel Coalition): “The implications are clear: Josephus fully acknowledged Jesus’s miraculous deeds, as other ancient non-Christians did. And this comes from a man raised in first-century Jerusalem, a man who knew those involved in Jesus’s trial, a man who went on to become one of the finest historians the ancient world ever produced. He was also perfectly ready to deny the miraculous—he laughed at the idea of certain wizards casting spells on him when he served as a general, and he unmasked false prophets and charlatans when writing his books of history—but in the case of Jesus, he didn’t claim his miracles were false, or exaggerations, or the stuff of legends. While Josephus wasn’t sure of the source for Jesus’s supernatural deeds, he was sure they happened.” 
    • The title is a bit over the top (perhaps better “New Research Finds Ancient Attestation To Jesus’s Miracles”), but really interesting regardless. This is the same guy who wrote Josephus and Jesus, mentioned previously in TGFI (and still available for free at https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/)
  4. The Real Reason Science is Broken (Tim Requarth, Persuasion): “A study published last month in Nature analyzed 41 million research papers across the natural sciences and found something that should unsettle anyone who believes AI will revolutionize scientific discovery. Yes, scientists who adopt AI tools publish three times more papers and receive nearly five times more citations. Their careers accelerate. But the collective range of scientific topics under investigation shrinks by nearly 5 percent, and researchers’ engagement with one another’s work drops by 22 percent.… AI isn’t accelerating science so much as optimizing scientists to thrive in an already-broken reward system.” 
    • The author is a neuroscience prof at NYU
  5. Unlocked: Christianity at the Super Bowl defies a trend (Paul Putz, Washington Post): “It is a remarkable shift over the course of a century. Christian athletes have successfully turned pro sports — and football in particular — from a space in which Christians were rarely present into one of the most prominent arenas in American life for Christian witness and self-assertion. This transformation did not happen by accident. It is the result of a Christian sports movement that has been growing since the 1950s, as evangelical sports ministries like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Pro Athletes Outreach, and Athletes in Action have built a network of Christian athletes and coaches who find spiritual meaning in and through their shared sports experience.”
  6. The hidden costs of the world’s most expensive schools (Annie Dong, Substack): “One of the most dangerous side effects of attending prestigious institutions is that you are constantly congratulated.… I have been congratulated repeatedly for my entire life, and it’s put me in an odd position where I can no longer distinguish my personal merits from my perceived personal merits. Simultaneously, it’s put me in an odd position where I find myself unable to distinguish others’ personal merits from their perceived personal merits, or lack thereof – otherwise known as elitism.… To be extremely vulnerable, I even have trouble connecting with my cousins because I find it difficult to truly summon a sense of admiration for their achievements and aspirations.”
  7. Eileen Gu: The Winter Olympian who earns $23m a year — but just $100k of it from her sport (Charlotte Harpur, New York Times): “An outlier lies among the list of Forbes’ 2025 world’s highest-paid female athletes. Tennis star Coco Gauff tops the list, earning an estimated $33 million, followed by her peers Aryna Sabalenka ($30m) and Iga Swiatek ($25.1m) but then appears Eileen Gu. The leading trio are household sporting names, freestyle skier Gu is not, but her earnings? $23.1m.… Not every 22-year-old has studied at Stanford and Oxford, does backflips on ski slopes, has posed for Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue and is named one of Time’s 100 most influential people but, Hershman said, ‘for so many younger people, that will be aspirational.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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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.

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