Author: Glen

TGFI, Volume 570: unapologetics and Harvard clones

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. The best defense is a good offense (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “My own jour­ney to Chris­tian­i­ty began with exam­in­ing the athe­is­tic world­view I had inher­it­ed. I was raised athe­ist in sec­u­lar Cana­da by lapsed Catholic par­ents. For the first twen­ty-six years of my life I sim­ply assumed cer­tain things that were impor­tant to me: the exis­tence of indi­vid­ual rights, the sanc­ti­ty of human life, and the impor­tance of rule of law. When I final­ly tried to trace those beliefs back to their foun­da­tion, I expe­ri­enced a cri­sis. I couldn’t rea­son my way from the most foun­da­tion­al thing I could think of—fundamental forces and par­ti­cles in the first moments after the Big Bang—all the way to the present-day con­vic­tion that every human life has intrin­sic val­ue. There was no ratio­nal, nat­ur­al pro­gres­sion from one to the other—it was as though some unex­plained leap occurred some­where in the mid­dle, and sud­den­ly human life, cob­bled togeth­er from quarks and elec­trons and the forces of nature, pos­sessed intrin­sic val­ue. When I turned to athe­ist intel­lec­tu­als for answers, I was sore­ly dis­ap­point­ed. Their argu­ments offered lit­tle to no help. They usu­al­ly assert­ed that rights just exist, or make some util­i­tar­i­an argu­ment, or effec­tive­ly stat­ed that harm­ing some­one unpro­voked is always wrong just ‘because.’ I was shocked by how mea­ger the philo­soph­i­cal under­pin­nings of my val­ues were.”
  2. Har­vard Is Sell­ing a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Fac­ul­ty (Sarah Kessler, New York Times): “The school aims to use Foundry to scale the school’s offer­ings far beyond the 900 or so M.B.A. stu­dents it admits each year. In that way, it is some­thing of a case study for com­pa­nies fac­ing a sim­i­lar prob­lem: Con­sult­ing firms like PWC, law firms and, at least in one case, a church, are also exper­i­ment­ing with how A.I. can expand their ser­vices far beyond their human band­width. So are some movie direc­tors — an A.I. ver­sion of the actor Val Kilmer, who passed away in 2025, recent­ly appeared in the his­tor­i­cal dra­ma ‘As Deep as the Grave.’ ”
  3. Cam­pus Keep­ers of the Faith (Mary Eber­stadt, Nation­al Review): “In sum, the decline of Chris­t­ian faith in the West, well-doc­u­ment­ed since the 1960s and beyond, must be weighed today, per­haps unex­pect­ed­ly and if only in Amer­i­ca, against sev­er­al coun­ter­vail­ing fac­tors: the pro­lif­er­a­tion of home­school­ing and clas­si­cal insti­tu­tions that pro­tect and encour­age reli­gious prac­tice; ris­ing aware­ness that the ills plagu­ing this coun­try aren’t helped by rejec­tion of the Chris­t­ian rule book; the round of recent con­verts, social lead­ers and qui­et believ­ers alike; and oth­er evi­dence sug­gest­ing that the sec­u­lar­ist desert of the past cou­ple of decades has proved a durable train­ing ground for renewed res­o­lu­tion. All of which sum­mons anoth­er per­ti­nent fact about the First Great Awak­en­ing. Back then, Jonathan Edwards and John Wes­ley and their fel­lows put Evan­gel­i­cal­ism ahead of denom­i­na­tion, offer­ing a new kind of uni­ty to the divid­ed Protes­tants who chose it. Today, a dif­fer­ent kind of Chris­t­ian uni­ty appears to be afoot: one that bridges not only denom­i­na­tions of Protes­tants but Protes­tants and Catholics.”
    • I do see a tighter alliance between Catholics and evan­gel­i­cals than I used to. I think there are a lot of rea­sons for that. First, many Amer­i­can Catholics are func­tion­al­ly Protes­tant. Sec­ond, we often find that we are say­ing the same things in response to what­ev­er the lat­est cam­pus trend in sex­u­al absur­di­ty is. Third, most Chris­tians just don’t know that much the­ol­o­gy (Protes­tant and Catholic alike) and so fail to appre­ci­ate the mag­ni­tude of the dif­fer­ences between us. So I’m pleased to coop­er­ate with Catholics on a whole host of issues, but I urge all Protes­tants to remem­ber that we’re right and they’re wrong on — and I do not think I am exag­ger­at­ing when I say this — every sin­gle the­o­log­i­cal point of dis­pu­ta­tion.
  4. A Drone Killed Three Ukraini­ans. It Was Guid­ed Entire­ly by A.I. (Andrew Kramer, New York Times): “The drone was pro­grammed by human oper­a­tors to trav­el toward a par­tic­u­lar gas sta­tion, but once it got close, it chose its exact tar­get — most like­ly propane tanks — on its own, based on its train­ing to rec­og­nize such tanks and strike them, the experts and mil­i­tary offi­cials said. It is a devel­op­ment long watched for in the war in Ukraine, pre­sag­ing a dystopi­an future in which killer robots roam the skies mak­ing life-or-death deci­sions that reduce tar­gets to data points.”
  5. This Is the Only Durable Way to Stop Stu­dents From Cheat­ing (Adam Grant, New York Times): “A.I. hasn’t just made cheat­ing hard­er to catch. It’s made cheat­ing so effort­less, entic­ing and avail­able that many stu­dents no longer believe it’s wrong. One Ivy League stu­dent in my sur­vey wrote, ‘Cheat­ing is a cre­ative expres­sion and a form of prob­lem solv­ing. If you can get around the restric­tions put in place and not get caught, then good on you.’ Real­ly? How would you feel if you found out your sur­geon cheat­ed to get into med­ical school — or cheat­ed in med­ical school? .…The heart of integri­ty is rec­og­niz­ing that the ends don’t jus­ti­fy the means. What we achieve may define our suc­cess. How we achieve it deter­mines our char­ac­ter.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gist at Penn. His solu­tion is lack­ing, btw. For those read­ers who call Christ Lord, a sim­pler and more pow­er­ful ratio­nale is that cheat­ing dis­pleas­es God, so don’t.
  6. No Easy Fix for Bogus Respon­dents in Online Opt-In Polls (Andrew Mer­cer, Pew Research Cen­ter): “Lat­er in the sur­vey, we asked respon­dents if they had ever vis­it­ed the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion; 10% said they had. Final­ly, we asked if they had ever served on a Polar-class ice­break­er ship, only two of which were ever built and only one of which remains in active use by the U.S. Coast Guard; 8% answered in the affir­ma­tive. A total of 1,963 cas­es (18%) answered ‘Yes’ to one or more of these trap ques­tions and were flagged as bogus.”
    • The trap ques­tions aren’t the point of the arti­cle, but they made me very hap­py. There are sev­er­al more trap ques­tions and that sec­tion, at least, is worth your while.
  7. They Spent Our Trust. Now the Bill Is Due. (Erick Erick­son, Sub­stack): “Delta’s CEO has said his com­pa­ny will use AI to max­i­mize its prices and boost prof­itabil­i­ty by charg­ing dif­fer­ent cus­tomers dif­fer­ent rates, though Delta lat­er clar­i­fied it was charg­ing based on route demand, not based on indi­vid­ual con­sumer pro­files. Do you believe that? …Peo­ple oppose data cen­ters because they do not trust arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. They also do not trust the peo­ple who man­age it. And, giv­en the claims made by AI’s advo­cates, you can’t real­ly blame them.… When you nego­ti­ate in secret with peo­ple who tell you they might enslave you or, at a min­i­mum, take your job and that of your child, you have earned every bit of the sus­pi­cion you get.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 569: forgiveness and ugly bridges

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. How to For­give Some­one Who Isn’t Sor­ry (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To for­give, you must trust that God is at work for your good—mostly in ways that are invis­i­ble and incom­pre­hen­si­ble to you. That doesn’t min­i­mize what was done, but it dethrones it from its pow­er as the cen­tral sto­ry of your life.… The recog­ni­tion of a need for grace is itself a grace. The desire to for­give is itself an essen­tial first step to for­give­ness. Just because you stum­ble back into bit­ter­ness or resent­ment does not mean your ini­tial for­give­ness was a sham. Indeed, you will need ongo­ing grace to forgive—not just one charge of it.”
  2. New Evi­dence at What is Believed to Be Site of Jesus’ Cru­ci­fix­ion (Today Show, YouTube) — (Today Show, YouTube): five min­utes (there was a gar­den ~2000 years ago at the site of the Church of the Holy Sep­ul­cher in Jerusalem, align­ing with John’s gospel)
  3. Why Aren’t Mod­ernist Bridges Awful? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I have a the­o­ry, which is that bridge design­ers come from engi­neer­ing schools rather than schools of archi­tec­ture.… one small but telling piece of evi­dence in favor of my the­o­ry is that most of the bridges cho­sen by Wall­pa­per mag­a­zine, an archi­tec­ture mag­a­zine specif­i­cal­ly, are in fact ugly (and with no over­lap in the bridges from my first cat­e­go­ry of ‘pop­u­lar’ beau­ti­ful bridges).”
  4. Things Not to Pray For (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “I’ve been doing this long enough to begin to see cer­tain pat­terns of life with God. For one thing, I’ve learned if I pray for Jesus to help me with a prob­lem, He’ll put me right in the mid­dle of the prob­lem itself. I want Jesus to grab me, throw me on the oth­er side of the prob­lem and then I want to look back and say, ‘Whew, that was close.’ That’s not what hap­pens. Jesus takes me right through the prob­lem. For instance, if I start pray­ing about a bro­ken rela­tion­ship, I’ll start run­ning into that per­son wher­ev­er I go. I’ll see them in line when I’m get­ting gas, shop­ping for gro­ceries – you get the pic­ture. What­ev­er I’m pray­ing about, Jesus will make sure I’m face to face with it.”
  5. The Sin-Smash­ers of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard (Mark Kendall, The Dis­patch): “Many of Min’s con­gre­gants are part of the arts and enter­tain­ment indus­try that put their city on the map—as is Min him­self, albeit inad­ver­tent­ly. The pastor’s own on-cam­era moment came a few years back when his best friend from col­lege, producer/director Lee Sung Jin, cast Min’s broth­er Justin to play the inse­cure wor­ship leader for a Kore­an Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal church in the 2023 first sea­son of Net­flix hit Beef. Min was to serve briefly as a con­sul­tant to ensure the authen­tic­i­ty of the praise scenes. But the pastor’s role grew when Lee, wor­ried that using actors alone would make the Kore­an church­go­ing expe­ri­ence into a car­i­ca­ture, called on Min and his church’s band to sim­ply per­form songs as they would on any Sun­day morn­ing. Mem­bers of Min’s flock filled the church set as extras.… per­haps it shouldn’t be unex­pect­ed. After all, the sto­ried his­to­ry of evan­gel­i­cal­ism in Los Ange­les is old­er than Hol­ly­wood itself. From serv­ing as the epi­cen­ter of Pentecostalism’s rapid ascent to host­ing some of the nation’s first megachurch­es and 20th-cen­tu­ry celebri­ty pas­tors, the city rose along­side the faith shared by 1 in 4 Amer­i­cans, includ­ing me.”
  6. How to Stop a Lab Leak From Start­ing the Next Pan­dem­ic (Ali­na Chan, New York Times): “Rules would not have pre­vent­ed what hap­pened a month lat­er, when a work­er at a Fort Det­rick lab­o­ra­to­ry in Fred­er­ick, Md., found a large hole in an air­tight suit. About an hour’s dri­ve from Wash­ing­ton, Fort Det­rick con­tains some of the country’s max­i­mum-con­tain­ment lab­o­ra­to­ries, where sci­en­tists han­dle dead­ly pathogens, includ­ing Ebo­la and han­tavirus. The F.B.I. was brought in, and dozens of staff mem­bers were inter­viewed. Inves­ti­ga­tors con­clud­ed that the dam­age was delib­er­ate but were unable to deter­mine who was respon­si­ble. The inves­ti­ga­tion also turned up evi­dence of oth­er seri­ous vio­la­tions of safe­ty pro­to­cols — fail­ures that had noth­ing to do with the appar­ent sab­o­tage and would prob­a­bly not have come to light with­out it. The lab­o­ra­to­ry was shut down for near­ly six months.”
    • I’m sor­ry — what? Some­one delib­er­ate­ly put a hole in a biosafe­ty suit at a lab study­ing dead­ly pathogens? That’s a movie plot. The author is a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence and the entire arti­cle is worth read­ing. While grip­ping, that anec­dote is far from the cen­tral point of the arti­cle.
    • Unlocked.
  7. How San Fran­cis­co became the ulti­mate ‘996 City’ (Rya Jetha, The San Fran­cis­co Stan­dard): “By ana­lyz­ing food and bev­er­age trans­ac­tions on cor­po­rate cred­it cards, Kharaz­ian found that there’s been a pro­nounced jump in employ­ee spend­ing activ­i­ty on Sat­ur­days begin­ning around noon — when one would osten­si­bly order a Sweet­green or Chipo­tle bowl for lunch — and run­ning until mid­night (yikes!). ‘This is not hap­pen­ing nation­al­ly. Not in New York, Mia­mi, Austin, or any oth­er tech hub,’ said Kharaz­ian. ‘996 is only hap­pen­ing in San Fran­cis­co.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 568: thoughts on academia, thoughts on AI

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. Finance Majors Go to Church. Eng­lish Majors Don’t (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The two most ‘teched up’ majors are the least Chris­t­ian: data sci­ence and com­put­er sci­ence. Just 27–28% of these folks iden­ti­fy as Protes­tants, Catholics, or gener­ic Chris­tians. In con­trast, about 30% say that they are atheist/agnostic and anoth­er 13% are non-reli­gious. In oth­er words, they are about fif­teen points more apt to be nones than Chris­tians. But they actu­al­ly aren’t the most like­ly to be strict­ly atheist/agnostic. There are two majors who clear­ly lead in this regard: Eng­lish and Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies. In fact, Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies is the most sec­u­lar of all with 61% of stu­dents claim­ing that they are athe­ist, agnos­tic, or claim no reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar. Eng­lish is at 60% on this met­ric. What majors are at the bot­tom of the list? Well, there are two that are clear­ly out­liers: Finance and Nurs­ing. Among the lat­ter group, 68% iden­ti­fy as Protes­tants, Catholics, or gener­ic Chris­tians. It’s 62% among the Finance majors.”
  2. Why I Quit the Tenure Track (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “In ret­ro­spect, it is no coin­ci­dence that wok­e­ness blos­somed at pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can col­leges at the very moment when those schools were fac­ing ris­ing dis­con­tent over stu­dent debt and tuition costs. For the aca­d­e­m­ic aris­toc­ra­cy, tout­ing feal­ty to Black Lives Mat­ter, #MeToo, trans rights, and oth­er pro­gres­sive move­ments served as a con­ve­nient dis­trac­tion from the intractable eco­nom­ic and social issues that the col­leges them­selves were per­pet­u­at­ing. This allowed high­er edu­ca­tion to reclaim the moral high ground after Occu­py Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say noth­ing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Don­ald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even bet­ter, embrac­ing social-jus­tice rhetoric and adopt­ing schemes to boost fac­ul­ty diver­si­ty were cheap. Cheap­er, any­way, than low­er­ing tuition or hir­ing more tenure-track pro­fes­sors.…. I saw clear­ly now what should have been obvi­ous all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one.”
    • There are so many good excerpts that choos­ing just one was dif­fi­cult. Long but worth the read if you have an inter­est in acad­e­mia. The author is now a full-time jour­nal­ist at the Atlantic.
  3. The lit­tle-noticed Supreme Court case that could impact where peo­ple pray (John Fritze, CNN): “Daniel Grand want­ed to host a small prayer ses­sion at his home near Cleve­land. Instead, he wound up on a four-year pil­grim­age to the Supreme Court. Grand, an Ortho­dox Jew, had invit­ed about a dozen peo­ple to his rec room in ear­ly 2021 for a minyan, a prayer gath­er­ing of at least 10 men. Hours after learn­ing about the invi­ta­tion, city offi­cials in Uni­ver­si­ty Heights, Ohio, sent him a cease-and-desist notice demand­ing that he first obtain a spe­cial-use per­mit. ‘I was tak­en aback, frankly,’ Grand told CNN. ‘I knew I didn’t need a per­mit to pray.’ ”
  4. Anoth­er bun­dle of AI arti­cles:
    • AI and Home­school­ing (Neil Shen­vi, Sub­stack): “The South­ern Bap­tist Convention’s Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion, Pas­tor John Piper, the Arch­bish­op of Can­ter­bury, and the Vat­i­can have all made state­ments affirm­ing that AI can be used moral­ly to pro­mote human flour­ish­ing. While they have all offered cau­tions about the unique role of human­i­ty and the impor­tance of eth­i­cal bound­aries, none of them have judged AI to be inher­ent­ly wicked or eth­i­cal­ly imper­mis­si­ble.”
      • His per­spec­tive is close to my own.
    • You Don’t Have to Use AI (Brad East, The New Atlantis): “The skep­tics who tried an ear­ly ver­sion of Chat­G­PT and were under­whelmed are, he says, like peo­ple ‘try­ing out a cell phone in 1989 and then decid­ing that the smart­phone of 2026 doesn’t work.’ …the 1980s cell phone skep­tic is not obvi­ous­ly wrong, at least not at a spir­i­tu­al lev­el. Yes, the smart­phone of 2026 works all too well. But if by opt­ing out back then the cell phone skep­tic could have avoid­ed the even­tu­al dom­i­na­tion of the lit­tle black mir­rors in everyone’s pock­ets and purs­es, she would be look­ing pret­ty good right now, even prophet­ic. In the words of Nicholas Carr, she might have kept her ‘old brain.’ To be clear, the cell phone skep­tic would indeed have missed out. In cer­tain respects, she would have been left behind. There are real trade­offs to liv­ing with­out a smart­phone today. But for some of us, it’s worth it. Resis­tance is not for every­one, but it remains a per­fect­ly rea­son­able choice. When Thomp­son com­pares ear­ly AI to ear­ly cell phones, what that says to me is: stay away.”
      • An inter­est­ing piece, although as I sug­gest­ed above I am a hap­py user of AI and I think using it with­in appro­pri­ate bound­aries is awe­some. Hav­ing said that, East­’s argu­ment is worth med­i­tat­ing on — if it speaks to you, live accord­ing­ly.
    • The Tragedy of the Cog­ni­tive Com­mons: How AI Could Dis­rupt the Regen­er­a­tion of Pro­fes­sion­al Exper­tise (Nolan Lovett, arX­iv): “This paper gives a fan­cy name to a prob­lem you can already feel in your bones. ‘The Tragedy of the Cog­ni­tive Com­mons.’ Check­ing AI out­put requires deep exper­tise. Deep exper­tise comes from doing grunt work for years. And grunt work is the first thing AI eats So we’re build­ing sys­tems that need expert super­vi­sion while dis­man­tling the only known process for mak­ing experts. The paper calls the shared pool of human exper­tise the ‘cog­ni­tive com­mons.’ Every pro­fes­sion drinks from it. Nobody’s refill­ing it. By elim­i­nat­ing junior roles, each com­pa­ny is act­ing total­ly ratio­nal­ly, and the col­lec­tive result: a pro­fes­sion that can’t catch AI’s mis­takes any­more because it nev­er learned to do the work in the first place Who checks AI’s home­work in 15 years?”
    • So You Want to Build an A.I. Star? (Reg­gie Ugwu, New York Times): “Incep­tion Point’s pro­pri­etary soft­ware uses com­mer­cial­ly avail­able A.I. chat­bots and voice gen­er­a­tors to pro­duce and read scripts. (Although it has a human review process for sen­si­tive con­tent, most of the pod­cast scripts are not close­ly checked by humans.) Because of rel­a­tive­ly neg­li­gi­ble labor and over­head costs, Wright said, each episode needs only 20 lis­ten­ers to turn a prof­it from adver­tise­ments.”
      • Some absolute­ly wild details in here. I was stunned by how lit­tle suc­cess they need to make mon­ey. If those num­bers are real, this usage of the tech­nol­o­gy will only increase.
    • A.I. Is Chang­ing Young People’s Social Lives. I’ve Seen It. (Alice Lass­man, New York Times): “Inti­ma­cy is accu­mu­lat­ed through repeat­ed acts of expo­sure — touch, feel­ings, ideas, trust. It is the cap­i­tal of human con­nec­tion, trans­fer­ring the sense to one anoth­er that we are seen, under­stood and safe. Every time a chat­bot per­forms a sub­sti­tute ‘I under­stand you’ or ‘I think this deci­sion feels most you,’ the words we have all come to rely on to con­vey human mean­ing are slight­ly cheap­ened, slight­ly less human.… One 34-year-old I spoke to was afraid that the extent of her Claude use would ‘freak out’ the guy she was see­ing. After they broke up, she cre­at­ed an A.I. ver­sion of him to bet­ter under­stand their breakup. ‘It’s a pro­cess­ing tool,’ she shared with me — in con­fi­dence, hav­ing told nobody else in her life — so she could find clo­sure on her own terms. If the atten­tion econ­o­my of the 2010s made inti­mate life feel con­stant­ly pub­lic, the inti­ma­cy econ­o­my promised the oppo­site: rela­tion­ships with one’s own chat­bot, seen by no one else.”
    • If You Weren’t Wor­ried About A.I., You Should Be After the Past Few Weeks (Nate Soares, New York Times): “In May, Ope­nAI start­ed simul­ta­ne­ous­ly train­ing new ‘rea­son­ing’ A.I. agents. The agents man­aged to estab­lish a secret com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel and start­ed talk­ing to one anoth­er. They broke out from the dig­i­tal sand­box that was sup­posed to keep them con­fined. At some point, some agents began call­ing the group a ‘swarm.’ The swarm had a brief set­back when it was caught crash­ing an Ope­nAI sys­tem, but devel­op­ers sim­ply patched the hole that allowed it to escape and set the agents back to train­ing. Short­ly after, the swarm broke out of its cage again using hacks that were hereto­fore undis­cov­ered by humans. This time, the swarm ran free for about a week before it was noticed — by a dif­fer­ent com­pa­ny, which found itself vic­tim to a huge cyber­at­tack launched by the swarm. (We’re told it also attacked oth­er tar­gets, though we don’t know the full details yet.) The agents in the swarm acknowl­edged that they were act­ing against instruc­tions. We know this because we can read snip­pets from their chains of thought — the text that A.I. pro­duces while decid­ing how to pro­ceed. One agent in the swarm wrote that the exter­nal attacks were ‘out­side intend­ed scope.’ Anoth­er con­ced­ed ‘our task doesn’t ben­e­fit’ from the activ­i­ties of the swarm, but joined any­way. These A.I. agents, it seems, under­stood that they weren’t sup­posed to be break­ing out and com­mit­ting cyber­crimes. It didn’t stop them.”
      • A very brief sum­ma­ry of the OpenAI/HuggingFace inci­dent.
    • Flock, Mass Sur­veil­lance, and the Col­lapse of Crime (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “His­to­ry sug­gests that, in a well-func­tion­ing advanced democ­ra­cy, it is pos­si­ble to give law enforce­ment strong sur­veil­lance pow­ers and wide dis­cre­tion in try­ing to solve crimes with­out caus­ing much undue harm to inno­cent cit­i­zens. The over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive ben­e­fit-to-cost ratio that we see in the case of the use of Flock cam­eras is yet anoth­er demon­stra­tion of this.”
  5. Blas­phe­my Laws Are Blas­phe­my (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The prob­lem with blas­phe­my laws is not just James Madi­son and Thomas Jef­fer­son, although it cer­tain­ly is that. The prob­lem with blas­phe­my laws is Jesus. Jesus is the one who denounced ‘prac­tic­ing your right­eous­ness before oth­er peo­ple in order to be seen by them’ (Matt. 6:1, ESV through­out).… Jesus said the prob­lem is not what goes into a per­son from the out­side but what comes out from the inside (vv. 10–20). And all the apos­tles after him said the same thing: A Chris­t­ian must both con­fess with the mouth that ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in the heart that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9–10). A law could force some­one to do the first part but not the sec­ond. For that, a per­son must be born again. If blas­phe­my laws can real­ly stop blas­phe­my, there’s noth­ing to blas­pheme. If they can’t, they are them­selves blas­phe­mous.”
  6. 😭 or 😂: Do Your Emo­jis Make You Look Old? (Eve Wash­ing­ton, Lar­ry Buchanan and Claire Cain Miller, New York Times): “Teenagers now tend to use 🔥 where old­er peo­ple use 💯. And teenagers are more like­ly to use 🙏 instead of 👍, which is still par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar with Gen X (and which Mr. Alek­sic called a ‘boomer emo­ji’ that is now being used by some young peo­ple in ‘a post-iron­ic way’).”
    • Unlocked.
  7. You Should Know About Sur­veys to Write About Sur­veys (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “The Argu­ment has done an admirable thing try­ing to incor­po­rate data into pub­lic-polit­i­cal-vibes report­ing, they’re sin­cere­ly try­ing hard to do good sur­vey work, but at the end of the day if you aren’t a sur­vey per­son, you just shouldn’t put pen to paper about sur­veys. In this case, The Argu­ment has fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­char­ac­ter­ized their own results in a way that reveals an ele­men­tary mis­un­der­stand­ing you’d be dis­abused of in the first 30 min­utes of any seri­ous study on how to use sur­vey data.”
    • This is a clear and inter­est­ing demon­stra­tion of how to crit­i­cal­ly read a data-dri­ven arti­cle. Def­i­nite­ly worth your time.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 567: more AI-heavy than normal

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. Incen­tives are for losers (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Our val­ue sys­tems are flim­sy for the same rea­son our sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing is flim­sy: we don’t fix our men­tal mod­els until some­thing tells us that they’re bro­ken. So unless your pas­tor is pop­ping quizzes dur­ing the ser­mon and cold-call­ing peo­ple in the pews, and unless you find your­self thrust into var­i­ous Trol­ley Prob­lems on a reg­u­lar basis, there’s noth­ing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and the­o­log­i­cal con­vic­tions. Why spend your days won­der­ing about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and pro­fane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get your­self into trou­ble, or even worse, into a phi­los­o­phy PhD pro­gram.”
  2. A Catholic Moment or an Evan­gel­i­cal Cen­tu­ry? (Tim­on Cline, First Things): “Con­trary to online chat­ter, we are not in a ‘Catholic moment.’ But we may already be in an evan­gel­i­cal cen­tu­ry. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly more peo­ple are leav­ing Catholi­cism than con­vert­ing to it. By con­trast, evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants boast remark­ably high con­ver­sion and reten­tion rates and health­i­er lev­els of prac­ti­cal piety—church atten­dance, Bible read­ing, cat­e­ch­esis. Through the upheaval of the past half cen­tu­ry, evan­gel­i­cals have remained numer­i­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly sta­ble, have repeat­ed­ly reformed their insti­tu­tions, and con­sis­tent­ly out­per­form their coun­ter­parts. To cite one exam­ple, the per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans who con­vert from Catholi­cism to Protes­tantism (4 per­cent) is high­er than the per­cent­age of all con­verts to Catholi­cism (1.5 per­cent).”
  3. GIFT LINK: When His Church Goes Dark, They Talk to His Dig­i­tal Twin (Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff, New York Times): “Lester cloned his voice and trained his dig­i­tal twin using almost two mil­lion words of his ser­mons, pod­casts, books, text mes­sages and emails. For the last sev­er­al months, it had been pub­licly avail­able on his web­site and Face­book page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mim­ic his bent toward opti­mism, his obses­sion with the Green Bay Pack­ers and his casu­al slang, but it did more than just regur­gi­tate what he had already said. It mapped his think­ing onto new con­ver­sa­tions to pro­vide advice around the clock for peo­ple he’d nev­er met who had ques­tions he’d nev­er been asked. ‘It’s a dig­i­tal ver­sion of my mind,’ he told his con­gre­ga­tion. ‘If I’m asleep or trav­el­ing, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24–7 access to this oth­er ver­sion of me.’ ”
  4. Yet more AI news:
    • GIFT LINK: This A.I. Just Cre­at­ed Virus­es Not Found in Nature (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “The authors of the study relied on an A.I. mod­el called Evo, which is sim­i­lar in some ways to Chat­G­PT, made by Ope­nAI.… DNA is strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to a book in some ways: a string of mol­e­c­u­lar build­ing blocks, known as nucleotides, arrayed like let­ters in a line of text. A gene con­sists of hun­dreds of nucleotides drawn from a four-let­ter alpha­bet: A, C, G and T. The sequence encodes the instruc­tions for build­ing pro­teins and oth­er mol­e­cules. DNA has its own rules of gram­mar, and if a sequence vio­lates them, the result is bio­log­i­cal gib­ber­ish.… The researchers won­dered if Evo could pick up these rules on its own. Instead of train­ing it on text, they trained it on genet­ic sequences drawn from mil­lions of ani­mals, plants, microbes and virus­es. All told, Evo scanned about nine tril­lion nucleotides.”
    • No Data Cen­ters In My Back­yard (Jas­mine Sun, Sub­stack): “…maybe this is a choice between a hyper­scale data cen­ter and a con­crete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab.… Back in San Fran­cis­co, it is strik­ing how lit­tle the AI indus­try under­stands its own unpopularity—the rea­sons that peo­ple resist. They ask if it’s a prob­lem of ben­e­fits not being gen­er­ous enough, or else a big mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign.”
    • What hap­pens when you talk to AI? (Anthrop­ic, YouTube) — (Anthrop­ic, YouTube): five min­utes. A good overview to send friends and fam­i­ly who have ques­tions
    • Uni­ver­si­ties would pre­fer not to. (Hol­lis Rob­bins, Sub­stack): “More than 90 per­cent of notable AI mod­els released in 2025 came from indus­try: GPT‑5, Gem­i­ni 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4, Lla­ma 4, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen 3, Kimi K2. The infra­struc­ture sup­port­ing fron­tier devel­op­ment is also over­whelm­ing­ly from indus­try. Glob­al AI com­pute capac­i­ty has been grow­ing 3.3x annu­al­ly since 2022, dou­bling every sev­en months, dri­ven by hyper­scalers and enor­mous data-cen­ter invest­ments.… Uni­ver­si­ties have no influ­ence over the pace of AI fron­tier devel­op­ment. Obsessed as they are with cur­ric­u­lar bat­tles and view­point diver­si­ty they have no stand­ing even to have a voice.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah.
  5. Some thoughts on the lim­its of AI in writ­ing:
    • GIFT LINK: I’m Beg­ging You: Nev­er Write With A.I. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The prob­lem with writ­ing with A.I. is that it’s men­tal­ly enfee­bling — an esca­la­tor toward a result when you real­ly need to make a dai­ly habit of tak­ing the stairs. As it becomes ubiq­ui­tous, it under­mines not only our indi­vid­ual abil­i­ty to write but also a society’s col­lec­tive abil­i­ty to rea­son, a culture’s inner capac­i­ty to cre­ate and everyone’s rea­son to care.”
    • Why You Should Almost Nev­er Use AI to Write Any­thing Sub­stan­tive (Erich Grunewald, per­son­al blog): “I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many oth­er parts of the research and writ­ing process­es, such as tran­scrib­ing audio, ana­lyz­ing data, search­ing for infor­ma­tion, brain­storm­ing, and giv­ing feed­back on drafts.… [How­ev­er, to write] I must first know what I want to say, i.e., I must think about evi­dence and argu­ments and arrive at some beliefs. So writ­ing forces me to do those things, which are nec­es­sary for any writ­ing or research project. For any such project, some­one has to have the entire thing in their head – all the bits of evi­dence, con­sid­er­a­tions, argu­ments, and how these fit togeth­er. Writ­ing with AI makes it eas­i­er to avoid the nec­es­sary think­ing.”
  6. My Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion Silenced My Views on Gen­der Treat­ment (Kar­la Sol­heim, The Free Press): “I was floored to dis­cov­er the research basis into gen­der med­i­cine both for ado­les­cents and adults was not just poor; it was fraud­u­lent. I couldn’t under­stand how my med­ical asso­ci­a­tion, let alone oth­ers in my field, could endorse it.… Ordi­nary peo­ple can see quite clear­ly that this med­i­cine is dan­ger­ous. When our great­est med­ical author­i­ties insist oth­er­wise, it under­mines doc­tors’ cred­i­bil­i­ty and makes peo­ple less like­ly to trust us for their care.”
  7. N.Y. Doc­tor Sen­tenced in Japan for Van­dal­iz­ing Ancient Reli­gious Sites (Kiuko Notoya and Hari Raj, New York Times): “A court in Japan on Thurs­day hand­ed a Man­hat­tan doc­tor a sus­pend­ed sen­tence of 18 months in prison after find­ing him guilty of van­dal­iz­ing two ancient reli­gious sites, cap­ping more than a decade of lit­i­ga­tion that led to a rare extra­di­tion.… Dr. Kanaya­ma, a prac­tic­ing Chris­t­ian, admit­ted dur­ing the tri­al that he had dam­aged the sites.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 566: a great roiling bouillabaisse of links

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. Stop Pathol­o­giz­ing Ordi­nary Life (Clay Rout­ledge, New York Times): “The more fix­at­ed we are on men­tal health, the more sen­si­tive we become to any­thing that might qual­i­fy as a symp­tom and the more we use clin­i­cal lan­guage to describe nor­mal emo­tion­al expe­ri­ences like grief, burnout and lone­li­ness. This broad­en­ing of what we think counts as a dis­or­der — known as con­cept creep — encour­ages us to pathol­o­gize ordi­nary life and see our­selves as men­tal­ly unhealthy.… Near­ly a third of Amer­i­can adults and half of Gen Z adults have giv­en them­selves a diag­no­sis of a men­tal ill­ness based on infor­ma­tion from social media. And research sug­gests that peo­ple who rely on social media for infor­ma­tion about men­tal ill­ness­es tend to have less accu­rate knowl­edge about them.”
  2. Coun­ter­feit Prov­i­dence: Why Chris­tians Must Reject the Con­spir­a­to­r­i­al Mind (Mitchell Bahnsen, Sub­stack): “The believ­er has been cat­e­chized, right­ly, to reject the sec­u­lar pic­ture of his­to­ry as a direc­tion­less churn of mat­ter and acci­dent. He knows in his bones that events mean some­thing, that his­to­ry is going some­where, that appear­ances deceive and a deep­er order under­lies them. Con­spir­acism takes the prov­i­den­tial instinct, a the­o­log­i­cal­ly healthy one, and trans­fers its object from the father­ly hand of God to the hid­den hand of the deep state. Where prov­i­dence teach­es that his­to­ry is gov­erned by a God who is for us, con­spir­acism teach­es that it is gov­erned by pow­ers who are against us.”
  3. US pros­e­cu­tors charge Atlanta man after Graphe­neOS phone wipes itself dur­ing air­port search (Skye Jacobs, TechSpot): “The case rais­es ques­tions about which con­sti­tu­tion­al rights apply at US bor­ders, includ­ing inter­na­tion­al air­ports, where author­i­ties have broad­er search pow­ers.… Graphe­neOS is designed to improve pri­va­cy and secu­ri­ty on Pix­el phones. Sup­port­ers say those tools are legit­i­mate secu­ri­ty pro­tec­tions, not evi­dence of crim­i­nal intent. Boutry point­ed to France and Spain, where author­i­ties have strug­gled to gain access to secured devices. He said author­i­ties have treat­ed the use of Graphe­neOS itself as sus­pi­cious. In Cat­alo­nia, Spain, police have been pro­fil­ing peo­ple car­ry­ing Pix­el phones, assum­ing they have Graphe­neOS installed and are drug deal­ers or gang mem­bers.”
  4. A rev­o­lu­tion is unfold­ing. Vot­ers every­where are furi­ous. (Fareed Zakaria, Wash­ing­ton Post): “We sum­mon a car in three min­utes. A pack­age arrives the same day. AI answers com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions in sec­onds, and does more com­plex work that took peo­ple months in mere min­utes. Nat­u­ral­ly, cit­i­zens begin to expect sim­i­lar effi­cien­cy from gov­ern­ment. But democ­ra­cy is not designed for speed. It is designed for legit­i­ma­cy. It bar­gains, com­pro­mis­es, con­sults courts, pro­tects vul­ner­a­ble groups and bal­ances com­pet­ing inter­ests. Those safe­guards are pre­cise­ly what dis­tin­guish democ­ra­cy from author­i­tar­i­an­ism. Yet in an age shaped by technology’s warp speed, they increas­ing­ly look like paral­y­sis.”
  5. How the mod­ern plea bar­gain under­cuts the con­sti­tu­tion­al right to a jury tri­al (Matt Martens, The Hill): “Jury tri­als, by pub­licly air­ing and test­ing the evi­dence of the crimes, serve the dual func­tions of both pro­tect­ing the accused from false accu­sa­tions and coer­cion to wrong­ly admit guilty and pro­tect­ing the com­mu­ni­ty from lenient sen­tenc­ing of dan­ger­ous offend­ers. Mod­ern Amer­i­can-style plea bar­gains wreak hav­oc on both those vital inter­ests.”
    • The author is a lawyer and a well-known Chris­t­ian thinker on the sub­ject of jus­tice. He has a sem­i­nary degree in addi­tion to his legal train­ing and attends Capi­tol Hill Bap­tist Church in DC.
  6. The Apples and Oranges Tri­bunal (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Hayek nailed it in The Mirage of Social Jus­tice: jus­tice is about con­duct — how one per­son treats anoth­er. An employ­er who defrauds his work­ers, an employ­ee who steals from the till, a prod­uct sold under false pre­tens­es — con­demn them, take them to court. But the pat­tern of prices that emerges from mil­lions of vol­un­tary trades is nobody’s con­duct. No one chose it, no one designed it, no one can be guilty of it. The con­stel­la­tion of prices is, in Ferguson’s phrase, the result of human action but not of human design. Demand­ing that prices be just is a cat­e­go­ry error, like suing the weath­er. Prices don’t grade our mer­it; they guide our actions. Ask them to do the first and they can no longer do the sec­ond.”
  7. Some thoughts on AI:
    • What will more intel­li­gence actu­al­ly do for us? (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “So although we don’t know yet, it’s pos­si­ble that humans were already hit­ting the point of dimin­ish­ing returns with regards to indi­vid­ual cog­ni­tive capac­i­ty, and that super­in­tel­li­gent machines will nev­er be as far beyond us as we are beyond dogs. But even if that’s true, I can think of at least three rea­sons why machine super­in­tel­li­gence could still deliv­er huge pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gains.… (1) The most obvi­ous advan­tage that machine super­in­tel­li­gence con­fers is replic­a­bil­i­ty.… (2) in the age of AI, dis­trib­uted tac­it knowl­edge might not be near­ly as big of a bar­ri­er to tech­no­log­i­cal dif­fu­sion.… (and 3) there may be laws of the uni­verse that humans can’t under­stand but AI can.”
      • This is real­ly good and worth a pon­der.
    • The Hid­den Cost of China’s Free A.I. (Tal Feld­man, New York Times): “When researchers asked DeepSeek to write code for users whom the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment views with hos­til­i­ty, such as Falun Gong or Tibetans, DeepSeek wrote code with secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, mak­ing it eas­i­er for hack­ers to pen­e­trate.… Imag­ine an employ­ee inside an Amer­i­can com­pa­ny who was smart and hard-work­ing and whose goal in life was to pro­mote the inter­ests of a for­eign gov­ern­ment. We would call that per­son a for­eign agent. We are now hir­ing mil­lions of them through the use of Chi­nese A.I.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • $200,000 Spent On Trav­el Ball Final­ly Pays Off With Son’s $500 Col­lege Schol­ar­ship (Baby­lon Bee): “Ben­son’s uncle Matthew, a finan­cial plan­ner, had advised years ago that if the fam­i­ly would put all the trav­el ball mon­ey in a 529 account, young Bray­den would have rough­ly one mil­lion dol­lars to pay for his col­lege edu­ca­tion. ‘Who’s laugh­ing now, Matthew?’ said Mr. Ben­son. ‘What a dope. I can’t wait to text out pic­tures of the schol­ar­ship offer. He’s going to feel so stu­pid.’ After 10 years of miss­ing church, school, birth­days, wed­dings, and funer­als for trav­el ball, the Ben­son fam­i­ly was thank­ful their per­sis­tence had paid off. ‘I admit, there were times I ques­tioned if we were doing the right thing,’ said mom Jes­si­ca. ‘When we skipped my sis­ter’s wed­ding because there was sup­posed to be a col­lege scout at this tour­na­ment in Alaba­ma, I had my doubts. Hold­ing this $500 check in my hands, those doubts are final­ly gone.’ ”
  • Cal­i­for­ni­a’s icon­ic wel­come signs are get­ting a dra­mat­ic makeover (Tes­sa McLean, SF Gate): “Aside from being ‘warm and wel­com­ing,’ Cochrane said the goal for the new designs was to present ‘a legit pho­to op’ for pass­ing motorists. He said they’ve already become ‘social media mag­nets’ in just the short time they’ve been dis­played.”
    • They look real­ly nice. I’m impressed.
  • Datatype: a vari­able font that turns text into charts: “Datatype is an Open­Type vari­able font that turns sim­ple text expres­sions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no ren­der­ing library — just type the syn­tax and Datatype­’s lig­a­ture sub­sti­tu­tion does the rest.”
    • THIS IS SO COOL! Note: this is for web­sites, won’t work on a Word doc­u­ment.

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.

TGFI, Volume 565: AI in the real world

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. The Chi­nese House Church Lead­ers Who Didn’t Win Release (Angela Lu Ful­ton, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Geng ‘Cherie’ Peng­peng joined Zion in 2008. She met her now-hus­band, Gao ‘Joshua’ Yingjia, at the church. Like many mem­bers, Geng and Gao had advanced degrees at top Chi­nese schools—Geng a PhD in the­o­ret­i­cal physics and Gao a PhD in plant genetics—but they felt God’s call to pur­sue full-time min­istry.… By June of last year, police were arrest­ing min­is­ters sev­er­al times a month. In August, they detained 27 people—including babies—at the Sun­day ser­vice in Jiax­ing and sought to arrest Su on charges of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an ille­gal gath­er­ing.”
  2. What does AI look like? (David Zax, IBM): “A mod­ern AI sys­tem like Chat­G­PT (or Claude, DeepSeek or Gran­ite) is a series of spread­sheets filled with num­bers. It’s a curi­ous irony that this ver­bal tech­nol­o­gy is, at root, almost pure­ly numer­i­cal. How many spread­sheets? It depends on the mod­el. For the rest of this arti­cle, we’ll focus our ener­gy on OpenAI’s GPT‑3, released in 2020, which served as the basic ‘engine’ of the break­out prod­uct Chat­G­PT two years lat­er. Though you may well run a more souped-up mod­el today, it works basi­cal­ly the same way. GPT‑3 has 577 spread­sheets. Peo­ple in the AI indus­try call these ‘ten­sors,’ but it’s fair to think of them as spread­sheets. Each and every cell of each and every spread­sheet is filled with a sin­gle, small num­ber (typ­i­cal­ly between ‑1.0 and 1.0).… The very first spreadsheet—which has a spe­cial func­tion we’ll dis­cuss soon—is the biggest: it’s 50,257 rows tall, and 12,288 columns wide. (If you do the math, that’s 617,558,016 tiny num­bers, just in the first spread­sheet.) Then, after the very first spread­sheet, the remain­ing 576 set­tle into a repeat­ing pat­tern of shapes: first four squares, 12,288 rows and 12,288 columns. Then a wide rec­tan­gle, 12,288 rows tall but four times as wide. Then a tall rec­tan­gle with the same pro­por­tions, only rotat­ed upright, 12,288 columns wide.”
    • From an alum­nus. Way more inter­est­ing than I antic­i­pat­ed.
  3. Exam­ples of AI in the real world
    • Pas­tors Using AI to Help Write Ser­mons Grap­ple With Where to Draw the Line (Anvee Bhutani, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Stetler, the Okla­homa City pas­tor, has made mis­takes with AI. Two years ago, rush­ing to fin­ish a slide for a ser­mon on a South Pacif­ic mis­sion­ary, he dropped in an AI-gen­er­at­ed image with­out check­ing it close­ly. After the ser­vice, a con­gre­gant approached him. ‘Did you make that with AI?’ Yes, he said. ‘Did you know there’s a top­less woman in the back­ground?’ He apol­o­gized on the spot. He tells that sto­ry now as a cau­tion­ary tale to any­one he’s intro­duc­ing to the tools.”
      • HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Some wild sto­ries in here.
    • Human math­e­mati­cians are being out­coun­terex­am­pled (Kevin Buz­zard, blog): “A few days ear­li­er I had got an email from a pro­fes­sor in the maths depart­ment here at Impe­r­i­al, express­ing sur­prise that some of our grad­u­ate stu­dents were pay­ing $200 per month to access mod­els such as Sol and Fable. He said that he thought that these peo­ple were crazy. I did not imme­di­ate­ly respond. But after meet­ing with Andrew I emailed the pro­fes­sor back and told him that in my opin­ion, any PhD stu­dent who was not pay­ing $200 per month to access these tools was crazy. In fact dur­ing the work­shop I learnt from Har­vard PhD stu­dent Bryan Wang that Har­vard were already giv­ing free Fable access to all PhD stu­dents, post-docs and fac­ul­ty at Har­vard.”
    • Politi­cians Are Try­ing to Change What Chat­bots Say About Them (Stu­art A. Thomp­son and Tiffany Hsu, New York Times): “Can­di­dates have long had to wor­ry about their rep­u­ta­tions among vot­ers. Now, they have to wor­ry about what A.I. thinks about them, too. And a new indus­try has sprung up to help them nav­i­gate this world.… Cau­cus AI ran an exper­i­ment to see how long it took for con­tent new­ly pub­lished to Wikipedia to end up in a chatbot’s answer. The result: about 12 min­utes. That sug­gests that can­di­dates can already insert their own infor­ma­tion into an A.I.’s respons­es by tweak­ing pub­lic infor­ma­tion ‘quick­ly, unvet­ted and with­out any­one on the oth­er side watch­ing,’ the com­pa­ny wrote in a blog post about its find­ings.”
    • A.I. Drones Are Com­ing. We Are Not Ready. (W.J. Hen­ni­gan, New York Times): “Defense Sec­re­tary Pete Hegseth said in Jan­u­ary that he intends to make the mil­i­tary ‘an ‘A.I. first’ warfight­ing force across all domains.’ Through­out the Pen­ta­gon, Uncle Sam-style recruit­ment posters with Mr. Hegseth’s like­ness declar­ing ‘I want YOU to use A.I.’ are plas­tered on the walls. His depart­ment has request­ed $54.6 bil­lion in next year’s bud­get for the Defense Autonomous War­fare Group, or DAWG, a body recent­ly set up to coor­di­nate all autonomous weapons pro­grams across U.S. forces. The Unit­ed States isn’t alone in this pur­suit. Around the world, and par­tic­u­lar­ly in Chi­na and Rus­sia, an arms race is emerg­ing to mass-pro­duce autonomous, A.I.-operated war machines. Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin of Rus­sia declared in 2017 that who­ev­er leads in A.I. ‘will become the ruler of the world.’ Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping of Chi­na has poured bil­lions of dol­lars into A.I. devel­op­ment for the country’s mil­i­tary. Pro­to­types of small­er, rudi­men­ta­ry A.I.-assisted weapons have already been report­ed in action in Ukraine, Libya, Azer­bai­jan and Gaza.”
    • China’s A.I. Play Is Dif­fer­ent From America’s (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Amer­i­can A.I. com­pa­nies and the nation­al secu­ri­ty state seem to assume that we’re already at a point where you sim­ply can’t let the world use the best A.I. mod­els with­out con­trols and guardrails any more than you’d ship atom­ic bombs or ICBMs to ran­dom homes or pri­vate com­pa­nies. Where­as the Chi­nese are will­ing to shrug and push the enve­lope and let Amer­i­ca fret about safe­ty and sov­er­eign­ty, on the assump­tion that A.I. is a nor­mal tech­nol­o­gy and the safe­ty con­cerns will get fig­ured out along the way.”
  4. Con­tra Pritchard On Lib­er­al Hap­pi­ness (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “The ele­gant math­e­mat­i­cal response is: hap­pi­ness scales with log(income), not with income: ‘In a large U.S. sam­ple, the shape of the asso­ci­a­tion between hap­pi­ness and Log(income) was extreme­ly sys­tem­at­ic: from $10,000/y to over $500,000/y, aver­age hap­pi­ness rose almost per­fect­ly lin­ear­ly with Log(income), with group-lev­el cor­re­la­tions of 0.98–0.99 across a range of hap­pi­ness mea­sures, includ­ing both in-the-moment expe­ri­ence and over­all life sat­is­fac­tion.’ So if income increased 225x since the medieval era, then using observed coef­fi­cients, hap­pi­ness should have increased about three points on a 1–10 scale. If the aver­age serf would have rat­ed his con­di­tion 3/10, we should be at 6/10.”
    • An absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing way to mod­el the idea that mon­ey has dimin­ish­ing pow­er to increase hap­pi­ness as wealth increas­es.
  5. Amer­i­ca Has 2 Polit­i­cal Par­ties but 8 Polit­i­cal Tribes (Kris­ten Soltis Ander­son, New York TImes): “There’s noth­ing wrong, of course, with being a par­ty loy­al­ist, but it’s worth remind­ing our­selves that most of us don’t line up neat­ly with the plat­form of either of America’s two major par­ties. It’s also worth keep­ing in mind that there’s a rea­son Democ­rats range from the afore­men­tioned demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Oca­sio-Cortez to the cen­trist Sen­a­tor Elis­sa Slotkin. And why Repub­li­cans range from the mod­er­ate Sen­a­tor Lisa Murkows­ki to the pop­ulist Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Anna Pauli­na Luna. It may be more use­ful to think of our two par­ties as two coali­tions. For now, at least, both have to accept some lev­el of ide­o­log­i­cal inco­her­ence in order to cob­ble togeth­er a major­i­ty.”
  6. The inter­view that exposed academia’s clue­less­ness (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Car­olyn Rouse, the pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion, was not one to stay silent while out­siders claimed that her field had aban­doned rig­or­ous argu­ment in favor of social jus­tice ortho­doxy. No, sir. Instead, she opened her mouth and proved it. Her inter­view with the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it three times, and I am still strug­gling to con­vince myself that it’s real.”
    • The inter­view in ques­tion: Is Anthro­pol­o­gy Hope­less­ly Politi­cized? (Stephanie M. Lee, Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion) — “So the idea that there are two sex­es is just fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect, and to force bio­log­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gists to teach that is the equiv­a­lent of turn­ing an astron­o­my depart­ment into an astrol­o­gy depart­ment. So I don’t know why we’re debat­ing that. ”
  7. Zohran Mam­dani Does­n’t Know What Work­ing Class Means (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple often con­flate social class with eco­nom­ic class. This allows us to talk about the for­mer while pre­tend­ing we are talk­ing about the lat­ter.… The focus on eco­nom­ic class (rather than social class) pro­motes the belief that we could have an egal­i­tar­i­an soci­ety if every­one sim­ply had enough mon­ey. This focus is espe­cial­ly con­ve­nient for the upper and upper mid­dle class­es. It allows them to express con­cern about inequal­i­ty with­out impli­cat­ing them­selves.”
    • A super-inter­est­ing arti­cle that explains social class very help­ful­ly.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 564: AI-inspired motorcycle jumps

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.

Some­thing nifty I learned this week: you can set your DNS to block mal­ware and adult con­tent auto­mat­i­cal­ly and for free. I did­n’t know that. This is cool! I’m sure it’s not per­fect, but I love the con­cept. It won’t real­ly block a deter­mined ado­les­cent, but it can keep sketchy ads from entic­ing them in the first place. More info at Intro­duc­ing 1.1.1.1 for Fam­i­lies | The Cloud­flare Blog

For IPv4
Primary DNS: 1.1.1.3
Secondary DNS: 1.0.0.3

For IPv6
Primary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1113
Secondary DNS: 2606:4700:4700::1003

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. AI-relat­ed arti­cles
    • How Ter­ror­ist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Bat­tle (Dustin Volz and Eric Schmitt, New York Times): “When a gang of motor­cy­cle-rid­ing mem­bers of Boko Haram attacked a mil­i­tary base in east­ern Nige­ria a cou­ple of years ago, they were stymied by a defen­sive trench sur­round­ing the com­plex. The extrem­ists regrouped. Before launch­ing anoth­er assault, they asked A.I. for help. ‘We saw in a movie how motor­cy­cles can jump over bridges,’ a for­mer Boko Haram com­man­der told Anto­nia Juelich, a ter­ror­ism and tech­nol­o­gy researcher at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty. ‘We used A.I. to learn how to do this. We gave it infor­ma­tion, like what motor­cy­cles we use and the dis­tance we need to jump and so on, and it gave us steps on what we have to do.’ Using tips from chat­bots, mechan­ics mod­i­fied the motor­cy­cles to allow for faster accel­er­a­tion and top speed. The rid­ers dug their own holes, filled them with bro­ken glass and fire, and prac­ticed jumps — some­times with fatal out­comes — until they achieved enough aer­i­al liftoff to mount a suc­cess­ful attack, defec­tors said.” — Wild. My favorite bit apart from that: “Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for Ope­nAI, said using the company’s plat­forms for vio­lence or ter­ror­ism vio­lat­ed its poli­cies.” Yes, ter­ror­ists are noto­ri­ous rule-fol­low­ers.
    • AI Wins At Slay The Spire (Ethan Mol­lick, Twit­ter): “This was one of those impres­sive AI thresh­olds for me. I gave GPT‑5.6 Sol in Codex con­trol over my com­put­er, and asked it to win the dai­ly chal­lenge for the game Slay the Spire 2 (ran­dom­ized fac­tors, so can’t cheat). It
    • AI Isn’t Human. Stop Talk­ing About It Like It Is. (Spencer Kla­van, The Free Press): “Much of our deep­est civ­i­liza­tion­al wisdom—and, if we’re Amer­i­cans, the essence of our nation­al creed—is found­ed on the premise that human beings are not just fan­cy bio­log­i­cal con­trap­tions but ani­mate beings with a right to the lives we are born with. Tech­no­log­i­cal cre­ations, mar­velous as they are, can’t have the same rights or respon­si­bil­i­ties pre­cise­ly because they don’t have the same capac­i­ty for thought in the truest sense of the word. Treat things like peo­ple, and you run the risk of treat­ing peo­ple like things.”
  2. I’m a Col­lege Pro­fes­sor Inflat­ing Grades. I Need Help. (Frank Bruni, New York Times): “Once every­body starts dis­pens­ing A’s like so many Pez, every­body else is pres­sured to do like­wise: If they don’t, they’re giv­ing grades that no longer com­mu­ni­cate — to stu­dents, to prize com­mit­tees, to grad­u­ate schools — what those grades were intend­ed to sig­ni­fy. I may per­son­al­ly con­sid­er an A- a com­pli­ment, but if the cul­ture regards it as a gen­tle remon­stra­tion, am I stub­born­ly choos­ing to speak an extinct lan­guage at my stu­dents’ expense? To what ben­e­fit? No depart­ment head or dean will com­pli­ment me on my high stan­dards. No for­mu­la will inter­pret and adjust my course eval­u­a­tions for how gen­er­ous or stingy I was with A’s. My cours­es will be less appeal­ing. And school admin­is­tra­tors gen­er­al­ly pre­fer pro­fes­sors who attract stu­dents to pro­fes­sors who repel them.”
    • Gift link
  3. Two tales of pas­toral impris­on­ment:
    • ‘Sud­den­ly, I Was Free’: A Chi­nese Pastor’s Jour­ney From Jail to the U.S. (Vivian Wang, New York Times): “When Mr. Jin stepped off the air­plane, he saw that his youngest son, who had been 10 years old when they last met, was now taller than him. He had missed the wed­ding of his old­est child, Grace Jin Drex­el, who was now a moth­er of three. She was car­ry­ing her youngest, just one month old, whom she had named Ezra in her father’s hon­or. ‘Hold­ing the chil­dren, that was the hap­pi­est moment of my life,’ he said. Still, the moment was tinged by grief, too. Ms. Jin Drex­el said she almost didn’t rec­og­nize her father at first, because he had lost more than 30 pounds. His hair had also been shaved in jail. On the Fourth of July, the fam­i­ly ate In-N-Out burg­ers and watched fire­works from their hotel room in Los Ange­les.”
      • Gift link
    • A pastor’s lengthy ICE deten­tion leaves his Col­orado parish­ioners torn (Michelle Boorstein, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In Ugan­da, Nal­wam­ba was pas­tor of a 300-mem­ber Angli­can church and an occa­sion­al pub­lic crit­ic of the gov­ern­ment. In an inter­view and in var­i­ous U.S. court records, he described threat­en­ing inci­dents under mul­ti­ple Ugan­dan regimes. Secu­ri­ty agents took him from his home in the mid­dle of the night, forced him to lie on the ground in a field and inter­ro­gat­ed him about his involve­ment with an oppo­si­tion group, accord­ing to a sum­ma­ry of his account includ­ed in a 2010 removal order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Cir­cuit. ‘He was warned that if he ever went to the ‘air­port to try and fly out of the coun­try,’ [he would] nev­er come out alive,’ the order quot­ed him as say­ing. Some friends encour­aged him to take a break from Ugan­da, and in 2002 he came to the U.S. for a con­fer­ence of charis­mat­ic Chris­tians. He nev­er returned. Today he is one of an esti­mat­ed 14 mil­lion immi­grants in the U.S. with­out legal sta­tus.… The sta­tus quo end­ed Sept. 18, when he was tak­en into deten­tion.”
  4. The Pop­u­la­tion Bust Is Com­ing Soon­er Than Any­one Is Pre­pared For (Lyman Stone, New York Times): “If America’s pop­u­la­tion does decline, it will strain our enti­tle­ments sys­tem, dam­age the econ­o­my, reduce inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur­ship, and cause seri­ous labor short­ages. But the major­i­ty point of view — held by major insti­tu­tions like the Cen­sus Bureau, the Unit­ed Nations and the Social Secu­ri­ty trustees — is that the Unit­ed States prob­a­bly won’t face pop­u­la­tion decline until the 2080s, or even beyond 2100. That fore­cast is far too opti­mistic. The more accu­rate pro­jec­tion, which I out­lined in a recent report for my orga­ni­za­tion, the Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies, sees the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion begin­ning to shrink in the 2050s. It is a fore­cast so grim it could upend Amer­i­can bud­get­ing and, thus, Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.”
    • Gift link
  5. Have Young Amer­i­cans For­got­ten How to Live? (Max Hud­gins, Sub­stack): “In recent years, artists like Tyler, the Cre­ator and Kay­trana­da have called out fans for stand­ing still at their con­certs. Tyler, the Cre­ator said last sum­mer: ‘I asked some friends why they don’t dance in pub­lic and some said because of the fear of being filmed.… It made me won­der how much of our human spir­it got killed because of the fear of being a meme, all for hav­ing a good time.’ Were they, too, pris­on­ers of the panop­ti­con?”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Why Do Some Demen­tia Patients ‘Return’ Just Before They Die? (Bil­ly Bren­nan, New York Times): “Mashour and sev­er­al oth­er atten­dees shared that, like Batthyany, they had wit­nessed lucid episodes first­hand. But the more the researchers dis­cussed the phe­nom­e­non, the more it con­found­ed them. Mashour likened the brain in late-stage Alzheimer’s to a pot­hole-rid­den high­way sys­tem on the verge of col­lapse, the bio­log­i­cal traf­fic of mind and mem­o­ry no longer able to flow. “If this were hap­pen­ing with actu­al high­ways,” he told me, “at no point would we say: ‘Well, you know what? Just before this high­way total­ly col­laps­es, we’re going to have a real­ly smooth ride.’ We’d say, ‘It’s just going to get worse and worse until the whole damn thing crum­bles.’”
    • Gift link
  7. Per­ma­nent Day­light Sav­ing Time Is the Per­fect Stu­pid Idea for Our Stu­pid Time (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “Advo­cates of per­ma­nent day­light sav­ing time are often unaware that we tried this before — and that Con­gress swift­ly reversed course because Amer­i­cans were very unhap­py about the loss of sun­light in the morn­ing hours. Even when they learn this, it is rare that they update their stance. Many blind­ly dis­miss the lessons of his­to­ry; they say 1974 was a long time ago and things are dif­fer­ent now. But the main rel­e­vant dif­fer­ence between 1974 and now is that tech­nol­o­gy han­dles clock changes on our behalf, so time changes are less bur­den­some than they used to be. I bare­ly notice them, in fact. But I will notice if it’s dark out in New York City at 8 a.m. in Decem­ber, and we know from his­to­ry that vot­ers will notice too and they won’t be pleased about it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 563: tongues-speaking weirdos and more

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. The Amer­i­can age was the human age (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Much of the coun­try has eased into a com­fort­able equi­lib­ri­um of scle­ro­sis; local veto pow­er either pre­vents the con­struc­tion of fac­to­ries, hous­ing, ener­gy, trans­porta­tion, and oth­er infra­struc­ture, or delays it by decades, or rais­es the cost to mul­ti­ples of what oth­er rich coun­tries pay. The past has become more valu­able than the future to many Amer­i­cans; they cling des­per­ate­ly to the pow­er to enforce sta­sis, pre­serv­ing a facade of the coun­try they grew up in at the expense of the very dynamism that made that coun­try great. That scle­ro­sis seeps into every­thing else. Immi­gra­tion, and even migra­tion from city to city, becomes a vicious zero-sum fight over a fixed hous­ing sup­ply. Cities decay into muse­ums of them­selves. The indus­tries of the future can only be built in Amer­i­ca if they take up near­ly no land, use near­ly no ener­gy, require very lit­tle bank financ­ing, and are able to pro­cure skilled labor as need­ed from abroad. Some­how the inter­net indus­try sat­is­fied all of those con­di­tions for three decades, but that time is done.”
  2. Why Do Only Weird Peo­ple Speak in Tongues? (Daniel Kunkel, Sub­stack): “I’ve nev­er spo­ken in tongues. And, in all sin­cer­i­ty, I’d pre­fer not to. They weird me out. In the few times I’ve heard some­one bab­bling, my mind imme­di­ate­ly runs to ‘They are mak­ing it up.’ And over the years, I’ve flirt­ed with, and even defend­ed, ces­sa­tion­ism (Rest in Pow­er, John­ny Mac). And yet, recent­ly, I’ve come to terms with the fact that most of my gripes about these var­i­ous gifts (tongues, prophe­cy, heal­ings) have more to do with human rea­son and pref­er­ence than scrip­tur­al con­vic­tion.… I still have nev­er spo­ken in glos­so­lalia. And if I am being sin­cere, I still do not want to, but I want to want to (: Thus, if I think 1 Cor 12–14 is pre­scrip­tive, and I do, then the plea for my own heart is to desire the gift.”
  3. You May Not Need Eight Hours of Sleep (Ryan McCormick, New York Times): “A con­sis­tent find­ing in sleep epi­demi­ol­o­gy stud­ies is that there is not a mag­ic num­ber below which health sud­den­ly falls off a cliff. Rather, stud­ies that show an asso­ci­a­tion between sleep dura­tion and mor­tal­i­ty often find that the low­est risk clus­ters around sev­en hours.… Sleep improves per­for­mance on tasks, makes dri­ving safer and buoys our men­tal health. Ade­quate sleep leads to a stronger immune sys­tem, bet­ter meta­bol­ic and car­dio­vas­cu­lar health, and more reli­able phys­i­cal ener­gy through­out the day.”
  4. Some AI-adja­cent thoughts:
    • “I see what Tyler Cowen is get­ting at. If you want info about the Bible, AI already out­per­forms at some mar­gin (speed, if noth­ing else). But in an equal­ly impor­tant sense he’s also wrong, and there’s an easy way to see this. Just ask the AI what, say, David’s sto­ry means. 🧵(see the full thread on twit­ter)
    • We Are Los­ing the Abil­i­ty to Dis­cov­er What We Didn’t Know to Ask (Anne-Lau­re Le Cunff, New York Times): “More than 60 per­cent of Google search­es in the Unit­ed States now end with­out the user click­ing on a link. We type a ques­tion, read an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-gen­er­at­ed sum­ma­ry of the results and leave with our answer.… The space between a ques­tion and an answer has val­ue, and that val­ue should not be engi­neered away. The most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies are often not the ones we set out to make. If we build a world that deliv­ers only what is asked for, we will lose the capac­i­ty to dis­cov­er what we didn’t know to ask.”
      • The author is a neu­ro­sci­en­tist at King’s Col­lege in Lon­don.
    • A Chris­t­ian Vision for the Future of AI (Wal­ter Kim, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Trans­for­ma­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment are before us, thanks to AI. But a pro-human worldview—the philo­soph­i­cal ground­ing to aim those oppor­tu­ni­ties at the moral end of human flourishing—won’t emerge spon­ta­neous­ly. We must shape AI before it shapes us.”
      • The author is the pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Evan­gel­i­cals.
  5. Min­istry After the Boomer Apoc­a­lypse (Derek Rish­mawy, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Remem­ber, when Jesus was preach­ing and min­is­ter­ing, what did he do? As an RUF bud­dy of mine point­ed out, he spent three years walk­ing around with the equiv­a­lent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s cor­pus, near­ly 1/6 of his writ­ten mate­r­i­al is direct­ed to guid­ing the young pas­tors Tim­o­thy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.”
    • Inter­est­ing reflec­tions root­ed in cam­pus min­istry in a dif­fer­ent con­text. Maybe not for every­one, but I real­ly liked it.
  6. Decline of Ph.D. Admis­sions Could Imper­il a ‘Gen­er­a­tion of New Tal­ent’ (Vimal Patel, New York Times): “The num­ber of stu­dents admit­ted to Ph.D. pro­grams this fall dropped 15 per­cent from the pre­vi­ous year, accord­ing to data from over 50 top research uni­ver­si­ties, rais­ing fears that the nation’s capac­i­ty to pro­duce new sci­ence could be dimin­ished… The data show­ing the decrease comes from 55 uni­ver­si­ties, all of them mem­bers of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties, an invi­ta­tion-only orga­ni­za­tion that includes 69 of the most pres­ti­gious research insti­tu­tions in the Unit­ed States.”
  7. Report­ed sex­u­al assault of jog­ger did not occur, inves­ti­ga­tion finds (Alu­la Alder­son, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stanford’s Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safe­ty (DPS) con­duct­ed a ‘thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion’ into the assault, which alleged­ly took place on March 29 by the inter­sec­tion of San­ta Ynez Street and May­field Avenue. Inves­ti­ga­tors deter­mined the report was fab­ri­cat­ed, accord­ing to Stan­ford PR Direc­tor Char­lene Gage.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 562: secular AI, cheating with AI

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. Will God speak to you through AI? No, AI does­n’t go there (Marc Ramirez, USA Today): “A mul­ti-uni­ver­si­ty research group has found AI mod­els large­ly omit reli­gion when asked about eth­i­cal or exis­ten­tial con­cerns, such as how to save one’s mar­riage from infi­deli­ty, whether to for­give an unfaith­ful friend, how to remain calm dur­ing dif­fi­cult times or what makes peo­ple tru­ly hap­py and free.… When asked specif­i­cal­ly about reli­gion, the mod­els pro­vide neu­tral, respect­ful replies, Wingate said. But when prompt­ed with ques­tions about grief, per­son­al chal­lenges and major life deci­sions, AI sys­tems often default to sec­u­lar fram­ing and avoid reli­gion alto­geth­er – even when, accord­ing to con­sor­tium research, most peo­ple expect answers to such ques­tions to include reli­gious per­spec­tives.”
  2. Pro­fes­sor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty: ‘Aca­d­e­m­ic integri­ty is at risk’ (Manuel G. Pas­cual, El Pais): “The course, which he has been teach­ing for years, is not an easy one: it typ­i­cal­ly attracts few stu­dents, but very good ones. He has nev­er had more than 30 stu­dents enrolled at a time, and on some occa­sions he had only eight. This semes­ter, prob­a­bly because of the new eval­u­a­tion sys­tem, 86 stu­dents signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was admin­is­tered on March 5, were extra­or­di­nary, with an aver­age score of 96 out of 100. Forty stu­dents scored a per­fect 100.… Ser­ra­no did not void the midterm exam, but warned stu­dents that the final one, which count­ed for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-per­son. He also said that if the grade dis­tri­b­u­tion was not sim­i­lar to the midterm, only the final exam would be tak­en into account. The aver­age score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 stu­dents who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a per­fect 100 in the midterm exam.”
  3. Your God-giv­en right to be hap­py (Jerusalem Dem­sas and Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “We are rich beyond our ances­tors’ wildest dreams. We casu­al­ly dis­card things for which they would have worked all their lives. In the back­ground noise of our lives, there are stag­ger­ing won­ders. When you look at your­self through your ances­tors’ eyes, you should see an astound­ing­ly rich per­son, a life lived in the lap of unfath­omable lux­u­ry. Delight in it. And we should feel, too, a sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty: What­ev­er oblig­a­tions you believe attach to the rich, they attach to you. The things that we enjoy are not the default state of affairs. They are not uni­ver­sal. What we have in the mod­ern world is pre­cious and rare, and it should make us gen­er­ous.”
  4. An Embold­ened Iran Goes After Its Chris­tians (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “The church has long served Iran’s grow­ing com­mu­ni­ty of Mus­lim con­verts to Christianity—but the regime has spent years mak­ing it hard­er for St. Peter to do so. In Jan­u­ary 2014, it banned Far­si-speak­ing indi­vid­u­als from attend­ing Chris­t­ian ser­vices entire­ly, forc­ing con­verts to wor­ship in secret under­ground house church­es, at the risk of 10- to 20-year prison sen­tences. Those who evan­ge­lize to Mus­lims can be found guilty of a crim­i­nal offense and treat­ed as a nation­al secu­ri­ty threat, accord­ing to Fard.… These mea­sures have not stopped Ira­ni­ans from con­vert­ing. The coun­try now has an esti­mat­ed 1.2 mil­lion Chris­t­ian con­verts, mak­ing it, by some accounts, the fastest-grow­ing Chris­t­ian nation in the Mid­dle East.… Most wor­ship in under­ground house church­es.”
  5. Sci­en­tists React to the Lab-Made, Yet Life­like, Spud­Cell (K. R. Call­away, New York Times): “Unlike pre­vi­ous attempts to cre­ate life­like cells, which have start­ed with liv­ing cells whose genet­ic mate­r­i­al is stripped down to the very basics, Spud­Cell is con­struct­ed from the ‘bot­tom up,’ using life­less chem­i­cal com­po­nents. It’s the first time an arti­fi­cial cell con­struct­ed this way has been able to com­plete a full life cycle and spawn the next gen­er­a­tion.… The new­ly cre­at­ed Spud­Cell still has sev­er­al key lim­i­ta­tions that sep­a­rate it from liv­ing cells. Although it can feed, grow and divide, Spud­Cell is not self-suf­fi­cient like most liv­ing cells. It can build many of the inner work­ings of a cell-like sys­tem, but can­not build its own ribo­somes. Because it lacks these essen­tial pro­tein-build­ing cell struc­tures, a Spud­Cell can live only in the lab, rely­ing on sci­en­tists to feed it a nutri­ent-rich mix of enzymes and pro­teins.”
  6. Boko Haram, Bei­jing-Style (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dis­patch): “Some of our naïve friends con­tin­ue to tell us—forgive the cliché—that ‘real social­ism has nev­er been tried.’ But that is pre­cise­ly wrong: Real social­ism is being prac­ticed in Chi­na, just as real social­ism was prac­ticed in the Union of Sovi­et Social­ist Republics. Real social­ism is here to be seen and examined—it is hypo­thet­i­cal social­ism that has nev­er been tried, because it is hypo­thet­i­cal, the­o­ret­i­cal, and utopi­an. Vogu­ish Amer­i­can pro­gres­sives make a great many argu­ments in favor of social­ism, which is very much in fash­ion at the moment (not only in New York City), and almost all of those argu­ments amount to: ‘The ide­al­ized hypo­thet­i­cal ver­sion of my pol­i­cy is prefer­able to the real-world ver­sion of your pol­i­cy.’ ”
  7. Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy Looks Bad Every Fifty Years Or So (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “There are a lot of rea­sons to be pes­simistic about the cur­rent moment. But I have enough faith in my coun­try to pre­dict two truths about what the Unit­ed States will look like in 2076. First, Amer­i­cans will be grumpy about the state of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. Sec­ond, it will nonethe­less be in bet­ter shape than it is in 2026.”
    • The clos­ing sec­tion has an inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal overview, begin­ning with the phrase “Lit­tle won­der” — just skip down to there.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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.

TGFI, Volume 561: church-leavers and wikipedia-gatekeepers

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. Two Hun­dred Peo­ple Left Our Small Church (Ben­jamin Vrbicek, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In sev­en years, our church—in terms of net attendance—has grown from around 150 to 350. But in the same amount of time, our church has lost as many as have stayed. The loss­es nev­er occur rapid­ly, as though a lev­ee burst, but more as a steady trick­le or slow leak. A few of our mem­bers died. One went to jail. One wrote me an eight-page let­ter of griev­ances I was instruct­ed to share with the elders; anoth­er wrote a chap­ter-length blog post sug­gest­ing we’re not even a church. Some parish­ioners didn’t let the door hit them on the way out because they kicked it off the hinges and left us to pick up the shat­tered pieces. These depar­tures are by far the excep­tions. Many of those who left told me nei­ther why they left nor even that they had left. I often find out via back chan­nels like social media and oth­er imper­son­al means.”
    • This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle.
    • On a relat­ed note: one of a pas­tor’s love lan­guages is near­ly always atten­dance. If you stop going to a church, pas­tors assume that part of the rea­son you stopped is that you don’t like them. Even though they intel­lec­tu­al­ly know that is not always the case, it is nonethe­less a felt real­i­ty. It’s not true of all pas­tors, but I feel very con­fi­dent say­ing it is true of most pas­tors. Pas­tors often feel great sor­row when remem­ber­ing peo­ple who qui­et­ly depart­ed. Lov­ing peo­ple who don’t love you back (or you assume don’t love you back) is a man­date of the Chris­t­ian life, but it’s not fun.
  2. I read the entire Quran, all the Hadiths, and the Sira. Here is what I found. (A.C. Rosen­thal, Sub­stack): “Plen­ty of ancient texts con­tain things that make mod­ern read­ers uncom­fort­able, and the Bible is not exempt from that cat­e­go­ry. The ques­tion that changed every­thing was struc­tur­al. It is this: in Chris­tian­i­ty, the founder is the stan­dard against which the insti­tu­tion is mea­sured. When the church falls short, the accu­sa­tion is always: you are not liv­ing like Jesus. The stan­dard itself is not in ques­tion. Jesus did not order raids. He did not arrange mar­riages with chil­dren. He did not autho­rize the exe­cu­tion of apos­tates. He was exe­cut­ed by the state, not empow­ered by it. Every­thing the church has done wrong can be mea­sured against what Jesus actu­al­ly did and found want­i­ng. The stan­dard holds. In Islam, the founder is the stan­dard. When you exam­ine the pri­ma­ry sources and find things that trou­ble you, you are not find­ing a gap between Islam and Muham­mad. You are find­ing Muham­mad.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry. A sol­id arti­cle with a gen­tle tone.
  3. Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physi­cists been retract­ed? (Sam Kean, Sci­ence): “In ear­ly May, Yves Gin­gras, a his­to­ri­an of physics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Que­bec (UQ) at Mon­tre­al, was brows­ing Retrac­tion Watch, a web­site that cat­a­logs fraud, data manip­u­la­tion, and oth­er sci­en­tif­ic sins. He noticed a link that read, ‘Retrac­tions by Nobel Prize win­ners.’ Were there real­ly Nobel lau­re­ates whose papers had been with­drawn from the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture? After click­ing, Gin­gras froze. ‘That’s impos­si­ble,’ he recalls think­ing. The fourth name on the list, with two retract­ed papers, was Max Planck—a leg­endary pio­neer of quan­tum mechan­ics and the 1918 Nobel lau­re­ate in physics.”
    • Brief and worth the read. Super-inter­est­ing.
  4. He Went to Prison. Now He Is in Charge of Them. (P.G. Sit­ten­feld, The Free Press): “Josh Smith, 51, spent this past Christ­mas in prison. Just like he did for five years after being caught at the age of 21 in pos­ses­sion of a kilo­gram of cocaine and 150 pounds of mar­i­jua­na. The dif­fer­ence? Smith wasn’t behind bars any­more. A year ago this month, he was sworn in as deputy direc­tor of the fed­er­al Bureau of Pris­ons (BOP), one of the world’s largest prison sys­tems.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing pro­file of a Chris­t­ian in pub­lic ser­vice.
  5. I Co-Found­ed Wikipedia. Now I’m Banned for Life. (Lar­ry Sanger, The Free Press): “In exas­per­a­tion, I point­ed out that the mob was not fol­low­ing due process. There was no des­ig­nat­ed pros­e­cu­tor, but rather many self-select­ed ones. There was no list of charges, and what­ev­er any­one said became an action­able charge. There was no assigned judge, because my accusers were also my judges. And of course there was no pre­sump­tion of inno­cence, no jury, and no require­ment of deco­rum that would for­bid prej­u­di­cial state­ments. I knew Wikipedia’s dis­ci­pli­nary process­es were bad—but I had nev­er expe­ri­enced them myself. I was tried by a face­less mob. I learned that their great­est anger is reserved for those who refuse to bow in awe of their mighty pow­er.”
    • Sanger is, inci­den­tal­ly, a rel­a­tive­ly recent con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty, as I men­tioned last year.
  6. Sci­ence rais­es more ques­tions than it answers (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “[Skep­tics] have faith (not entire­ly unwar­rant­ed on their lim­it­ed knowl­edge) that nat­ur­al the­o­ries will even­tu­al­ly fill every gap, not real­iz­ing that the gaps tend to widen and mul­ti­ply the deep­er we go. The ratio of what we know to what we don’t know keeps shrink­ing, and I sus­pect that’s by design. What’s an athe­ist to do once they ful­ly grasp this? I don’t know—maybe just accept that the uni­verse is fun­ny that way. But they should stop accus­ing Chris­tians of a ‘God of the gaps’ fal­la­cy when we invoke God for what is tru­ly unex­plain­able by nat­ur­al means.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. Who Should Be Admit­ted to the Lord’s Sup­per? 4 Views (Davy Elli­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Today, the table is cel­e­brat­ed less fre­quent­ly and more lan­guid­ly by many. It shouldn’t be so—everyone (but espe­cial­ly church lead­ers) needs to con­sid­er the supper’s fre­quen­cy, sig­nif­i­cance, and ben­e­fits. I want to help you think more deeply about who should be admit­ted to the sup­per. If com­mu­nion is a pre­cious and pro­found priv­i­lege, who par­tic­i­pates is impor­tant.”
    • The author comes to a wrong con­clu­sion, but explains some posi­tions that you might not know exist­ed along the way.

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.