TGFI, Volume 558: global stupidity and counterproductive relevancy

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. Unlocked: The Fire of Stu­pid­i­ty Can­not Be Con­tained (David French, New York Times): “A dis­turb­ing num­ber of young peo­ple on the right are fas­ci­nat­ed with fas­cism. An extra­or­di­nary 34 per­cent of young peo­ple over­all express a favor­able view of com­mu­nism, and young Amer­i­cans are far more like­ly than their par­ents or grand­par­ents to say that polit­i­cal vio­lence is ‘some­times OK.’ And hov­er­ing over Amer­i­can cul­ture like a dark cloud is the rise of anti­semitism on both the left and the right.… When you step back and actu­al­ly think about it, these trends are con­found­ing. I mean, I can under­stand the temp­ta­tion to return to some of the dis­cred­it­ed ideas of the recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon after those wretched ideas rav­aged the world?”
2. The Com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion Of Chris­tian­i­ty (Freya India, Sub­stack): “For a while I thought my gen­er­a­tion might be find­ing God. Now I wor­ry we are just find­ing con­tent about God.… Who knows, maybe in the future many of us will say we found Jesus through a YouTube Short, that God got rec­om­mend­ed by our algo­rithm. But I doubt it. I think if Chris­tians want to reach my gen­er­a­tion, real­ly reach us, they have to promise some­thing total­ly sep­a­rate from that, some­thing oth­er­world­ly, some­thing that doesn’t abide by mar­ket log­ic, some­thing dif­fer­ent, divine. Some­thing, for once, that isn’t cheap­ened or com­mod­i­fied.”
3. There’s a Play­book for Col­lege. There Should Be One for Mar­riage. (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “We need to pro­vide young peo­ple with the same sort of struc­ture for find­ing a spouse that we’ve giv­en them for get­ting into col­lege. And they need to under­stand the degree of effort and inten­tion­al­i­ty required to get mar­ried.… Many peo­ple will be per­fect­ly hap­py being sin­gle or child­less for life. These aren’t for every­one. But col­lege isn’t for every­one either. Yet we edu­cate our high school­ers on the eco­nom­ic val­ue it can bring, the pres­tige of var­i­ous schools, the like­ly career prospects of dif­fer­ent majors, the real­is­tic schools one could attend and how to get into them. We could do some­thing sim­i­lar for mar­riage. In fact, we could tack some of that onto the col­lege advice. We should let young peo­ple know that col­lege is a once in a life­time oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet large num­bers of high qual­i­ty sin­gles who are poten­tial future spous­es, for exam­ple.”
   • I keep telling y’all…
4. Three Help­ful Word Pic­tures on AI Usage (Michael Gra­ham, blog): “There are two kinds of work — toil and labor: Toil is a work that is a direct result of the Fall. Labor is work that is a direct result of the creation/cultural man­date.… I am broad­ly inclined to use AI for toil and I am broad­ly reluc­tant to use gen­er­a­tive AI for labor.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
5. Can Chris­tians Smoke Weed? (Daniel Dar­ling, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There’s no Bible verse that says, Thou shalt not smoke weed. But we can and should con­sid­er sev­er­al scrip­tur­al prin­ci­ples in our moral deci­sion-mak­ing about this drug, and I believe they lead to the con­clu­sion that cannabis has no place in the life of a Chris­t­ian.”
6. I Watched an Evan­gel­i­cal Col­lege Die From the Inside (Antho­ny Bradley, Sub­stack): “…U.S. birthrates col­lapsed dur­ing the Great Reces­sion and nev­er recov­ered. This means that every enter­ing fresh­man class nation­wide will be small­er than the one before it, not for a sea­son, but for the fore­see­able future. America’s fer­til­i­ty rate is cur­rent­ly 1.6 births per woman. We have a col­lege edu­ca­tion envi­ron­ment built on a pri­or 2.3 birth rate. This is not mere­ly a mar­ket­ing prob­lem. You can­not recruit your way out of a demo­graph­ic decline. Insti­tu­tions that have been built on the assump­tion of a steady pipeline of eigh­teen-year-olds are now fac­ing a struc­tur­al ceil­ing. It’s the demo­graph­ic cliff. It’s a huge cliff. The pipeline is nar­row­ing, and no amount of enroll­ment strat­e­gy changes that fact.”
   • Worth read­ing even if you have no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties. Good info on the high­er-ed land­scape gen­er­al­ly.
7. Why can’t Cal­i­for­nia count? (Eli McK­own-Daw­son and Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “[India is] one of the few places that can claim to have even more com­plex­i­ties than Cal­i­for­nia. In fact, elec­tions there are con­duct­ed in mul­ti­ple stages. But it did man­age to count 640 mil­lion votes in a day in 2024 once the final phase was over. Indeed, the more you scru­ti­nize this, the few­er excus­es Cal­i­for­nia has. It is not the state with the most mail vot­ing, nor is it the state with the lat­est mail bal­lot return dead­line. Mail-vot­ing states such as Ore­gon, Wash­ing­ton, and Col­orado count slow­ly rel­a­tive to the US aver­age, but they’re all faster than Cal­i­for­nia.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Adult Enter­tain­ment — (At Ran­dom)
• George Lucas Releas­es Edit Of The Bible Where Malchus Attacks Peter First — (Baby­lon Bee)

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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.