Author: Glen

TGFI, Volume 533: college disability, European dysfunction, and cloning

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. Mis­un­der­stand­ing Porn (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There are many ways in which peo­ple mis­un­der­stand porn, but per­haps the best way to sum­ma­rize the cor­rec­tions nec­es­sary is to say that porn is not the same as phys­i­cal sex and porn addic­tion is not mere­ly a mat­ter of sex­u­al temp­ta­tion.… Why can’t a porn addict’s habit be bro­ken by sex with his wife? The sim­plest answer is to ask anoth­er ques­tion: could a Chris­t­ian husband’s temp­ta­tion to idol­a­try be bro­ken by sex with his wife? Of course not. Nei­ther would his anger or pride. It is like ask­ing if a per­son addict­ed to cocaine could have their desire sat­is­fied by eat­ing a deli­cious steak.”
  2. Accom­mo­da­tion Nation (Rose Horow­itch, The Atlantic): “Over the past decade and a half, how­ev­er, the share of stu­dents at selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties who qual­i­fy for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breath­tak­ing pace. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, the num­ber has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berke­ley, it has near­ly quin­tu­pled over the past 15 years.… Paul Gra­ham Fish­er, a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who served as co-chair of the university’s dis­abil­i­ty task force, told me, ‘I have had con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple in the Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tion. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 per­cent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?’ This year, 38 per­cent of Stan­ford under­grad­u­ates are reg­is­tered as hav­ing a dis­abil­i­ty; in the fall quar­ter, 24 per­cent of under­grad­u­ates were receiv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic or hous­ing accom­mo­da­tions.”
  3. I Set A Trap To Catch Stu­dents Cheat­ing With AI. The Result Was Deflat­ing (Will Teague, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “I received 122 paper sub­mis­sions. Of those, the Tro­jan horse eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied 33 AI-gen­er­at­ed papers. I sent these stats to all the stu­dents and gave them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to admit to using AI before they were locked into fail­ing the class. Anoth­er 14 out­ed them­selves. In oth­er words, near­ly 39% of the sub­mis­sions were at least par­tial­ly writ­ten by AI.… Let me tell you why the Tro­jan horse worked. It is because stu­dents do not know what they do not know.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. The Bible Is on Tri­al in Europe (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Räsä­nen has been a mem­ber of par­lia­ment in Fin­land since 1995. She’s also a mem­ber of the nation’s Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church—which in 2019 announced its offi­cial spon­sor­ship of an LGBT Pride event. In response, she wrote: ‘How can the Church’s doc­tri­nal foun­da­tion, the #Bible, be com­pat­i­ble with the lift­ing up of shame and sin as a sub­ject of pride?’ She post­ed this com­ment along­side a pic­ture of the Bible verse Romans 1:27, which describes homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as shame­ful: ‘Men com­mit­ted shame­ful acts with oth­er men, and received in them­selves the due penal­ty for their error.’ The next day, she opened her morn­ing news­pa­per to find out that she was being inves­ti­gat­ed by police for hate speech.… Dur­ing her time as min­is­ter of the Inte­ri­or of Fin­land, between 2011 and 2015, she’d over­seen the police. Now, they were inter­ro­gat­ing her as an offi­cial part of an investigation—one that has dragged on ever since, final­ly reach­ing the Supreme Court of Fin­land last month.”
  5. 4 Ways to Avoid Sex­u­al Sin (Sam All­ber­ry, Cross­way): “Life has a grain to it. Like paper and wood, it has its own inbuilt direc­tion­al­i­ty. The uni­verse is fash­ioned in such a way that it has an under­ly­ing struc­ture. It fol­lows a cer­tain pat­tern with cer­tain con­tours. In order to live well we need to live in a way that runs with this grain and not against it. This is where the book of Proverbs comes in.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. The Trag­ic Hys­te­ria of Abor­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Yes, the vast major­i­ty of women who get abor­tions are glad they got them. But once they meet their babies, the vast major­i­ty of women denied abor­tions dis­cov­er that they total­ly want their babies. This mas­sive sta­tus quo bias makes it hard to sim­ply ‘trust women.’ Which women should we trust — the ones who abort­ed, or the ones who couldn’t? But in the end, it is the women who were denied abor­tion who are more reli­able. If shy peo­ple who don’t go to a par­ty are glad they stayed home, and equal­ly shy peo­ple who were pres­sured to go to a par­ty are equal­ly glad they went, the most nat­ur­al inter­pre­ta­tion is that the par­ty-goers learned a valu­able life les­son — and the home-stay­ers should have gone to the par­ty.… Hys­ter­i­cal­ly abort­ing your baby because you false­ly believe the baby will ruin your life isn’t mere­ly moral­ly wrong; it is trag­ic. Why? Because before long, you almost sure­ly would have loved that baby.”
    • An inter­est­ing approach to the abor­tion debate, espe­cial­ly since the author empha­sizes that he is “an athe­ist of the high­est order.”
  7. As a Twin, I’m Offend­ed by Cloning (Leono­ra Bar­clay, Per­sua­sion): “Who wouldn’t want their pre­cious com­pan­ion back, espe­cial­ly in cute pup­py form? Yet I’m cyn­i­cal of the promise of pet cloning. It’s sim­ply not true that clones are, in any mean­ing­ful sense, the same as the orig­i­nal. I’m an iden­ti­cal twin—a nat­ur­al clone. Iden­ti­cal twins are even more sim­i­lar to each oth­er than a clone is to its DNA donor, because they often share the same upbring­ing and envi­ron­ment. Yet, as I know first-hand, that doesn’t mean our per­son­al­i­ties are the same.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotin­er Inter­views San­ta Claus (Mike Druck­er, McSweeeney’s Inter­net Ten­den­cy): “I recent­ly spoke with San­ta Claus, who is cur­rent­ly coor­di­nat­ing his staff of immor­tal blue-col­lar elves, about the moral­i­ty of chil­dren and his friend­ship with a crea­ture whom many car­ol­ers con­sid­er a war crim­i­nal: Kram­pus.”
  • In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the inven­tion of the emoti­con (Ben­ji Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “On Sep­tem­ber 19, 1982, Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty com­put­er sci­ence research assis­tant pro­fes­sor Scott Fahlman post­ed a mes­sage to the university’s bul­letin board soft­ware that would lat­er come to shape how peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate online. His pro­pos­al: use 🙂 and 🙁 as mark­ers to dis­tin­guish jokes from seri­ous com­ments. While Fahlman describes him­self as ‘the inven­tor… or at least one of the inven­tors’ of what would lat­er be called the smi­ley face emoti­con, the full sto­ry reveals some­thing more inter­est­ing than a lone genius moment.”
  • I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while per­form­ing Julius Cae­sar (Olly Hawes, The Guardian): “Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usu­al. Then some­thing went wrong. There was a sharp pierc­ing feel­ing. The knife was sup­posed to have been qui­et­ly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had hap­pened while act­ing out my character’s death, and think­ing: I have to lie here until the lights go down.”
  • Art Of The Deal: Man Nego­ti­ates Mechan­ic Down From $75 Oil Change To $2,000 Full Brakes And Rotors Replace­ment (Baby­lon Bee)

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 532: Thanksgiving plus the intersection of astrophysics and Christmas

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 19th-Cen­tu­ry Influ­encer Who Invent­ed Thanks­giv­ing (LuEl­la D’Amico, The Dis­patch): “Hale want­ed some­thing different—not in oppo­si­tion to the Fourth of July, but in addi­tion to it. She believed the nation need­ed a day cen­tered not on mil­i­tary vic­to­ry, but on home, grat­i­tude, and shared belong­ing. Again, this is why she doesn’t fit neat­ly into our ide­o­log­i­cal bins. She cham­pi­oned nation­al uni­ty, yet she believed that domes­tic life—largely women’s work in the 19th century—could mold a repub­lic just as impor­tant­ly as more pub­lic-fac­ing work. If the Fourth of July taught inde­pen­dence, Hale believed Thanks­giv­ing could teach inter­de­pen­dence: that a nation is sus­tained not only by the free­doms we fight for, but by the com­mit­ments we keep to one anoth­er around a shared table.”
    • Super inter­est­ing. Even more inter­est­ing: she wrote “Mary Had A Lit­tle Lamb” — WOW. Estab­lished Thanks­giv­ing and wrote a beloved child­hood rhyme — what an absolute leg­end!
  2. How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watch­ing: Inside the Epstein Emails (Anand Girid­haradas, New York Times): “Peo­ple are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a high­ly pri­vate mer­i­to-aris­toc­ra­cy at the inter­sec­tion of gov­ern­ment and busi­ness, lob­by­ing, phil­an­thropy, start-ups, acad­e­mia, sci­ence, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the com­mon good.… Gen­er­al­ly, you can’t read oth­er people’s emails. Pow­er­ful peo­ple have pri­vate servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actu­al­ly think and view the world, what they actu­al­ly are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.”
  3. A mon­u­ment to answered prayer begins to rise in a sec­u­lar­iz­ing Eng­land (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Last week, Gam­ble, 56, broke ground on that vision — a 168-foot-tall archi­tec­tur­al land­mark that is expect­ed to be one of the largest Chris­t­ian mon­u­ments in Eng­land, if not the world. (Christ the Redeemer, the icon­ic stat­ue of Jesus in Rio de Janeiro, is 98 feet.) It is planned to open to the pub­lic in 2028. The Eter­nal Wall of Answered Prayer, with a price tag of 45 mil­lion pounds (or $59 mil­lion), will not, how­ev­er, fea­ture any famil­iar Chris­t­ian icons such a cross, a fish, a lamb or a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jesus. Instead it will con­sist of a giant white Möbius strip stretch­ing near­ly the size of a foot­ball field, upon which a mil­lion small rec­tan­gu­lar bricks will be over­laid, each with a dig­i­tal­ly linked sto­ry of answered prayer acces­si­ble on a mobile app.”
  4. What Thanks­giv­ing Means to Me (Gar­ry Kas­parov, Per­sua­sion): “The notion of a free soci­ety is abstract. Thanks­giv­ing cel­e­brates abun­dance, and abun­dance is tan­gi­ble. You can taste it. Smell it. Hear it. The turkey and mashed pota­toes on your plate, the chat­ter with loved ones, whom you’re free to visit—these are the fruits of a free soci­ety.”
  5. The Nones Project: Well Being (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The most appar­ent result from this graph is that Chris­tians do express a demon­stra­bly high­er lev­el of life sat­is­fac­tion com­pared to the non-reli­gious in the sam­ple. On the scale from 1–7, both Catholics and Protes­tants scored an aver­age of 5.2. That’s just slight­ly above ‘some­what sat­is­fied.’ Among the nones, the group that was clear­ly the most sat­is­fied were the Nones in Name Only (NiNos) at 5.0. Slight­ly below that were the Dones at 4.85, then the SBNRs [Spir­i­tu­al But Not Reli­gious] at 4.75. The group that eas­i­ly scored the low­est of all four types were the Zeal­ous Athe­ists at 4.57.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty. Read­ing the arti­cle and look­ing at the data, I think the Dones do come off a lit­tle worse than Burge con­cludes. He does­n’t explain it in this arti­cle, but the Nones in Name Only are peo­ple who check “noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar” on sur­veys but who nonethe­less reg­u­lar­ly do reli­gious things — envi­sion some­one who comes con­sis­tent­ly to church but isn’t actu­al­ly sure if they con­sid­er them­selves Chris­t­ian.
  6. The Incar­na­tion Sheds Light on Astro­physics (Deb­o­rah Haars­ma, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “When Jesus was con­ceived in Mary, he took on atoms from her—as we all do from our mothers—and those atoms had his­to­ries stretch­ing far beyond our solar sys­tem. Those atoms assem­bled into genes to give shape to his bones and blood and into organ­ic chem­i­cals shared with all life on earth. Each cell of Jesus’ body embod­ies his love for his creation—not only humans but also the ani­mals, plants, moun­tains, and rivers often men­tioned in Scrip­ture. His very atoms once glowed in beau­ti­ful neb­u­lae and pow­er­ful super­novae in the far reach­es of space. Indeed, when God took on human form, he took on all of cre­ation.”
  7. Why Euthana­sia Feels Intu­itive (Tim Chal­lies, blog): “Because aging and death are the ulti­mate means through which we prove we have no true auton­o­my and through which we lose our inde­pen­dence, euthana­sia is a means of avoid­ing what is dif­fi­cult, humil­i­at­ing, or seem­ing­ly intol­er­a­ble. In this way, euthana­sia is a nat­ur­al or per­haps inevitable result of West­ern cul­ture.… Though this is already plen­ty trou­bling, here is some­thing that trou­bles me even more: Hav­ing been raised in this soci­ety, my instincts intu­itive­ly accept euthana­sia. I do not want oth­ers to make my deci­sions for me and I do not wish to become depen­dent upon them. In fact, I would feel a sig­nif­i­cant degree of guilt were I to need oth­ers to care for me, to be incon­ve­nienced on my behalf, or to have them put their own dreams on hold in order to ensure my pro­vi­sion. There is an abhor­rent way in which it all just makes sense, in which my instincts accept it as good, or as accept­able, at least.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Mom Con­tin­ues Long­stand­ing Tra­di­tion Of Mak­ing Cran­ber­ry Sauce For No One (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Jesus Bot Is Always on Demand (for a Small Month­ly Fee) (Jes­si­ca Grose, New York Times): “This ver­sion of Jesus looks like he stepped off the cov­er of a romance nov­el and sounds like a man­age­ment con­sul­tant. He offers the same kind of canned guid­ance that I could get from a LinkedIn hus­tle bro, with a dash of Scrip­ture and an upsell (a home screen wid­get with per­son­al­ized vers­es for just $39.99 a year!) attached.”
    • This prob­a­bly should go in the sec­tion above, but I only like to have sev­en links up there.
  • Bed­time Prayers (Pearls Before Swine):  Nov 18, 2025
  • Soul Mate (Pearls Before Swine): Nov 21, 2025
  • Thai woman found alive in cof­fin after being brought in for cre­ma­tion (Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Pairat Soodthoop, the temple’s gen­er­al and finan­cial affairs man­ag­er, told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press on Mon­day that the 65-year-old wom­an’s broth­er drove her from the province of Phit­san­u­lok to be cre­mat­ed. He said they heard a faint knock com­ing from the cof­fin. ‘I was a bit sur­prised, so I asked them to open the cof­fin, and every­one was star­tled,’ he said. ‘I saw her open­ing her eyes slight­ly and knock­ing on the side of the cof­fin. She must have been knock­ing for quite some time.’”

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.

Giving Thanks is Christlike

I hope you’re on track for a won­der­ful Thanks­giv­ing! Paula and I are prep­ping to host a bunch of Stan­ford stu­dents who could­n’t get home for the hol­i­days.

Thanks­giv­ing is not a Chris­t­ian hol­i­day in the same way that Christ­mas is, but it is a hol­i­day that I am always delight­ed to cel­e­brate because grat­i­tude is one of the most impor­tant Chris­t­ian virtues. The phras­es “give/given/giving/gave thanks” occur 28 times in the NIV trans­la­tion of the New Tes­ta­ment. Half of those times it is Jesus Him­self giv­ing thanks, so to give thanks is Christ­like.1

So be grate­ful this week and always! This Thanks­giv­ing, I pray you feast upon delight­ful food while sur­round­ed by peo­ple you love and that the delec­table­ness of the desserts is only exceed­ed by the quan­ti­ty of the laugh­ter. May grat­i­tude fill your heart and ani­mate your mouth.

  1. Here are the four­teen times (scat­tered across ten pas­sages) the phras­es “given/gave thanks” are used in ref­er­ence to Jesus. Inter­est­ing­ly, they are all relat­ed to food.
    * Matthew 14:19 — And he direct­ed the peo­ple to sit down on the grass. Tak­ing the five loaves and the two fish and look­ing up to heav­en, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the dis­ci­ples, and the dis­ci­ples gave them to the peo­ple.
    * Matthew 15:36 — Then he took the sev­en loaves and the fish, and when he had giv­en thanks, he broke them and gave them to the dis­ci­ples, and they in turn to the peo­ple.
    * Matthew 26:26–27 — While they were eat­ing, Jesus took bread, and when he had giv­en thanks, he broke it and gave it to his dis­ci­ples, say­ing, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had giv­en thanks, he gave it to them, say­ing, “Drink from it, all of you.”
    * Mark 6:41 — Tak­ing the five loaves and the two fish and look­ing up to heav­en, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his dis­ci­ples to dis­trib­ute to the peo­ple. He also divid­ed the two fish among them all.
    * Mark 8:6–7 — He told the crowd to sit down on the ground. When he had tak­en the sev­en loaves and giv­en thanks, he broke them and gave them to his dis­ci­ples to dis­trib­ute to the peo­ple, and they did so. They had a few small fish as well; he gave thanks for them also and told the dis­ci­ples to dis­trib­ute them.
    * Mark 14:22–23 — While they were eat­ing, Jesus took bread, and when he had giv­en thanks, he broke it and gave it to his dis­ci­ples, say­ing, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had giv­en thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it.
    * Luke 9:16 — Tak­ing the five loaves and the two fish and look­ing up to heav­en, he gave thanks and broke them. Then he gave them to the dis­ci­ples to dis­trib­ute to the peo­ple.
    * Luke 22:17, 19 — After tak­ing the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you.… And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, say­ing, “This is my body giv­en for you; do this in remem­brance of me.”
    * Luke 24:30 — When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.
    * John 6:23 — Then some boats from Tiberias land­ed near the place where the peo­ple had eat­en the bread after the Lord had giv­en thanks. ↩︎

TGFI Volume 531: Christianity improves longevity, plus some smart people who believe

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. More Than a Mag­ic Pill (Kathryn But­ler, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Church atten­dance reduces all-cause mor­tal­i­ty by near­ly 30 per­cent over a 15-year peri­od and pro­tects woman against sui­cide by 400 per­cent. Week­ly church­go­ing in women over 40 is as pro­tec­tive against death as annu­al mam­mo­grams, McLaugh­lin writes. Those attend­ing ser­vices more than week­ly at age 20 have ‘a rough­ly sev­en-year greater life expectan­cy than their nonchurch­go­ing peers.’ Church­go­ing pro­tects against alco­hol, smok­ing, and drug abuse and decreas­es the odds of depres­sion by one-third.”
    • I been sayin’ it. Preach!
  2. Alvin Planti­nga, God’s Philoso­pher (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the 1950s there was not a sin­gle pub­lished defense of reli­gious belief by a promi­nent philoso­pher,” said philoso­pher Kel­ly James Clark, one of Plantinga’s stu­dents. “By the 1990s there were lit­er­al­ly hun­dreds of books and arti­cles, from Yale to UCLA and from Oxford to Hei­del­berg, defend­ing and devel­op­ing the spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion. The dif­fer­ence between 1950 and 1990 is, quite sim­ply, Alvin Planti­nga.”
  3. The Mak­ing of an Elite: Japan­ese Chris­tians (Cremieux, Sub­stack): “It’s prob­a­bly sur­pris­ing to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Min­is­ters of Japan before the new­ly-elect­ed Sanae Takaichi have been Chris­t­ian. Out of those 35 Prime Min­is­ters since 1945, Shigeru Yoshi­da and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tet­su Kataya­ma, Ichirō Hatoya­ma, Masayoshi ÅŒhi­ra, Shigeru Ishi­ba, and Yukio Hatoya­ma were var­i­ous fla­vors of Protes­tant. How this hap­pens in a coun­try that’s less than 1% Chris­t­ian and in which there’s sig­nif­i­cant anti-Chris­t­ian dis­crim­i­na­tion is per­plex­ing, but I think it makes sense giv­en how today’s Japan­ese Chris­tians came to be.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing. The role of the samu­rai was very unex­pect­ed to me!
  4. How Two Times Reporters Cov­er Chris­tian­i­ty in a Polar­ized Amer­i­ca (Patrick Healy, Eliz­a­beth Dias & Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “I think a lot about which details to include in a sto­ry, and how I’m describ­ing peo­ple and scenes. Part of fair­ness is not tak­ing cheap shots by sub­tly depict­ing one side as back­ward or unso­phis­ti­cat­ed, for exam­ple. I also try to bring peo­ple into as many hous­es of wor­ship as pos­si­ble. And I would define that expan­sive­ly, from tra­di­tion­al church ser­vices to prayer meet­ings to wor­ship ser­vices in the Trump White House.”
    • Unlocked. A real­ly well-done inter­view. I have gen­er­al­ly found Gra­ham and Dias to be fair and insight­ful. Most of the sto­ries involv­ing the NYT being tone-deaf to reli­gion have come about when jour­nal­ists who don’t cov­er the reli­gion beat try to drag reli­gion into their sto­ry with­out ful­ly under­stand­ing what they’re try­ing to describe.
  5. It Used to Be ‘Get Mar­ried.’ Now It’s ‘Stay Sin­gle.’ (Freya India, The Free Press): “I keep hear­ing about how there’s too much pres­sure to set­tle down. Appar­ent­ly every­one wants to know when you’re get­ting mar­ried, when you’re hav­ing kids.… My whole life I’ve only ever felt the oppo­site, an over­whelm­ing pres­sure to be sin­gle. In the sec­u­lar lib­er­al world I used to think there were no expec­ta­tions, no pres­sure. There is, though: The pres­sure today is to avoid any­thing that might stick, to run through life with­out get­ting snagged on any respon­si­bil­i­ties, with­out get­ting teth­ered to some­one else too ear­ly.… We don’t scru­ti­nize the 25-year-old who is still sin­gle but the one who set­tles down. In fact, this feels like the only life deci­sion left to dis­ap­prove of, the only one accept­able to judge. Want­i­ng to com­mit is the one desire that is dis­cour­aged, treat­ed with sus­pi­cion, the only thing in the mod­ern world we are ever told to delay.”
    • Relat­ed: Senior Scaries: Treat­ing dat­ing like the job mar­ket (Erin Ye, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The last time I was on the phone with my mom, she told me that it was my own fault I didn’t have a boyfriend. ‘You need to start treat­ing dat­ing like it’s the job mar­ket: you’re not apply­ing to posi­tions, you’re not inter­view­ing, you’re not even doing things that you can add to your résumé,’ she said. ‘You just need to get out there. Think of it like get­ting an intern­ship. Don’t wor­ry about the return offer just yet!’ ”
  6. They Led at Sad­dle­back Church. ICE Said They Were Safe. (Andy Olsen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The grow­ing abo­li­tion of dis­cre­tion, per­haps more than any oth­er aspect of the administration’s immi­gra­tion sup­pres­sion, will cause the deep­est pain for many fam­i­lies that pre­vi­ous­ly had lit­tle to fear. Indi­vid­u­als with­in the US immi­gra­tion edi­fice have long had some author­i­ty to exer­cise com­pas­sion in sit­u­a­tions where, in their judg­ment, the cost to soci­ety of a person’s removal might be high­er than the cost of non­re­moval. One could view such dis­cre­tion, as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion does, as a weak­ness. Or one could see dis­cre­tion as the car­di­nal qual­i­ty that sep­a­rates a human jus­tice sys­tem from a cold enforce­ment machine with all the sen­si­bil­i­ty of a red-light cam­era.”
    • A mov­ing sto­ry, told with all the messy details.
  7. Trump says Chris­tians are being per­se­cut­ed in Nige­ria. The real­i­ty is more com­pli­cat­ed (Chine­du Asadu, AP News): “Nigeria’s pop­u­la­tion of 220 mil­lion is split almost even­ly between Chris­tians, who live pre­dom­i­nant­ly in the south, and Mus­lims, most­ly in the north — where attacks have long been con­cen­trat­ed and where lev­els of illit­er­a­cy, pover­ty and hunger are among the country’s high­est. Nation­wide, Mus­lims con­sti­tute a slight major­i­ty. Experts and data from two non­par­ti­san sources — the U.S.-basedt and Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions — show Chris­tians are often tar­gets in a small per­cent­age of over­all attacks that appear to be moti­vat­ed by reli­gion, in some north­ern states. But the num­bers and ana­lysts also indi­cate that across the north, most vic­tims of over­all vio­lence are Mus­lims.”
    • I was skep­ti­cal of the head­line, but the arti­cle makes a good case for it. Hav­ing said that, the author has­n’t shown that there isn’t a prob­lem of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion in Nige­ria; the author has only shown that there is also a prob­lem of ram­pant law­less­ness.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • 6–7 in the Bible (Kristy Etheridge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “News out­lets from The New York Times to The Indi­an Express have cov­ered the glob­al phe­nom­e­non that delights chil­dren, puz­zles grownups, and leaves school teach­ers 67 per­cent sure they should retire ear­ly.… a church in Char­lotte, North Car­oli­na, cre­at­ed an entire out­reach event around the infa­mous num­bers. Jonathan White is a pas­tor and direc­tor of children’s pro­gram­ming at Meck­len­burg Com­mu­ni­ty Church. When he deter­mined that the 6–7 trend wasn’t harm­ful and wasn’t going away, he wrote it into the church’s Novem­ber fam­i­ly night.”
  • Schol­ars Now Believe Num­ber Of The Beast Is Actu­al­ly 67 (Baby­lon Bee)
  • The Bat­man effect: The mere sight of the ‘super­hero’ can make us more altru­is­tic (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “In the exper­i­men­tal con­di­tion, anoth­er exper­i­menter dressed as Bat­man entered the scene from anoth­er door of the train. Faced with this unex­pect­ed encounter, pas­sen­gers were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly to offer their seats: 67.21% of pas­sen­gers offered their seats in the pres­ence of Bat­man, or more than two out of three, com­pared to 37.66% in the con­trol exper­i­ment, or just over one out of three.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  • Mil­lions Con­vert To Chris­tian­i­ty After The­olo­gians Con­firm There Is No Microsoft Teams In Heav­en (Baby­lon Bee)

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 530: a Christian doctor, the medical benefits of church attendance, and campus revival

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. Accused of Des­e­cra­tion, a Doc­tor Faces the End of His Life’s Work (Ben­jamin Weis­er, New York Times): “One day in March 2015, sur­veil­lance cam­eras at a thou­sand-year-old Bud­dhist tem­ple on the out­skirts of Tokyo cap­tured a man wear­ing a hood­ed wind­break­er, a white col­lared shirt and black shoes, dab­bing at wood­en pil­lars with oil on his fin­ger­tip.… He is Masahide Kanaya­ma, 63, a sin­gle, child­less doc­tor who had devot­ed his life to help­ing women bear chil­dren; a man whose Chris­t­ian faith was insep­a­ra­ble from his work. He has prac­ticed in Man­hat­tan for near­ly three decades and is an expert in endometrio­sis, a con­di­tion in which cells sim­i­lar to the uter­ine lin­ing grow out­side the uterus. His patients describe how his surg­eries end­ed years of crip­pling pain and, in some cas­es, allowed them to have chil­dren.”
    • Unlocked. A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, brought to my atten­tion by an alum­nus. Pray for Dr. Kanaya­ma.
  2. Church Could Save Your Life? (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, if you aren’t cur­rent­ly a church­go­er and you start attend­ing week­ly, you reduce your chances of devel­op­ing depres­sion by a third. A med­ica­tion this effec­tive would be wide­ly pre­scribed. But while your ther­a­pist or doc­tor may encour­age yoga, med­i­ta­tion, or more time out­side in nature, he or she almost cer­tain­ly won’t rec­om­mend you go to church. The ben­e­fits of ‘orga­nized reli­gion’ don’t fit with the big sto­ry we are telling in the West about the good­ness of aban­don­ing tra­di­tion­al beliefs.”
  3. It’s Here: Gen‑Z Revival Hits Cam­pus­es This Fall (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Over the last cou­ple of years, per­haps you’ve heard the sto­ries of revival here and there—Asbury, the Salt Com­pa­ny, and var­i­ous col­lege min­istries across the coun­try. Sta­tis­tics also sound­ed promising—from Eng­land to the Unit­ed States, more young peo­ple report mak­ing a per­son­al com­mit­ment to Jesus and attend­ing church. The num­ber of peo­ple with no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, which had been increas­ing for decades, seemed to stall. To me, it felt like watch­ing a pot of water heat up—there were iso­lat­ed bub­bles but not enough to real­ly call it a boil.”
    • An encour­ag­ing arti­cle. Two notes:
      • I’m not hear­ing sim­i­lar reports from any min­istry at Stan­ford (note the Chica­go anec­dotes, though)
      • The Gospel Coali­tion’s the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments mean that this arti­cle is focused on cer­tain min­istries. I believe oth­er min­istries are see­ing sim­i­lar things nation­wide.
  4. ‘I Should Have Quit’ (John Fet­ter­man, The Free Press): “Gise­le looked over at me. The cor­ner of my mouth was droop­ing ever so slight­ly. The droop­ing last­ed only a sec­ond or two, but she had watched a pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment on strokes, and it had stayed with her. She spoke to the state troop­er who was dri­ving us. ‘I think he’s hav­ing a stroke. We have to get to the hos­pi­tal now.’ I thought she was crazy: ‘What are you talk­ing about? You’re nuts. I’m fine.’ She thought I was crazy: ‘We have to get to the emer­gency room now!’ The troop­ers switched on the police lights. We hap­pened to be 10 min­utes from Lan­cast­er Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, which spe­cial­izes in strokes and prob­lems of the heart. Had we been in a rur­al area of the state, with­out close access to a hos­pi­tal, I would have died. I did any­way. I am not entire­ly sure of the sequence, but dur­ing surgery, my heart stopped for sev­er­al sec­onds.”
    • Tears came to my eyes while read­ing this. Rec­om­mend­ed regard­less of your polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion.
  5. That New Hit Song on Spo­ti­fy? It Was Made by A.I. (Kyle Chay­ka, The New York­er): “No realm of cul­ture or enter­tain­ment remains untouched by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: Coca-Cola just released a Christ­mas ad made with A.I. visu­als; A.I. actors are being hyped in Hol­ly­wood. But the tech­nol­o­gy has had an espe­cial­ly swift impact on song­writ­ing. A cou­ple of years ago, a smat­ter­ing of A.I. tracks went viral for using tricks like repli­cat­ing the voic­es of pop stars, includ­ing Jay‑Z and Drake. Now we’re in the midst of a full-blown A.I. music moment. This month, an A.I. coun­try song called ‘Walk My Walk’ (with per­cus­sive claps and for­get­table lyrics such as ‘Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk’) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Coun­try Dig­i­tal Song Sales chart, and passed three mil­lion streams on Spo­ti­fy; the per­former behind it is a square-jawed dig­i­tal avatar named Break­ing Rust. In Sep­tem­ber, Xania Mon­et, an A.I. R. & B. singer cre­at­ed by a young poet in Mis­sis­sip­pi, land­ed a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar record deal after sev­er­al Bill­board-chart­ing sin­gles.”
  6. Rise of the ‘porno-trolls’: how one porn plat­form made mil­lions suing its view­ers (Tarp­ley Hitt, The Guardian): “…since Sep­tem­ber 2017, Vixen’s own­ers had been pur­su­ing anoth­er rev­enue stream: fil­ing thou­sands of boil­er­plate copy­right law­suits against indi­vid­ual ‘John Does’ and col­lect­ing mil­lions in set­tle­ment fees – a mass lit­i­ga­tion cam­paign one fed­er­al judge likened to ‘a hi-tech shake­down’.… Accord­ing to West­law and Pac­er data from the past three years, Strike 3 account­ed for 50% of the fed­er­al copy­right dock­et all on its own. I first heard about Strike 3 in Sep­tem­ber, when some legal clerk friends men­tioned that near­ly every judge on their cir­cuit was han­dling a stack of Strike 3 cas­es – which are now so con­sis­tent as to have become rou­tine.”
    • I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a porn com­pa­ny would be uneth­i­cal in any way. How could they treat their users with any­thing but the utmost respect and cour­tesy? Treat­ing peo­ple with dig­ni­ty is prac­ti­cal­ly their entire busi­ness mod­el.
  7. Pick­le­ball on Sun­day: Why some top col­lege play­ers are call­ing foul (Ben Brasch, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The NCAA has a long-stand­ing rule that adjusts cham­pi­onship sched­ules to accom­mo­date play­ers or teams from schools with writ­ten poli­cies bar­ring com­pe­ti­tion on Sun­days or oth­er days for reli­gious rea­sons. Twen­ty-two of the NCAA’s rough­ly 1,100 mem­ber schools have such poli­cies this year, the group told The Wash­ing­ton Post. But pick­le­ball is not an NCAA sport. And it’s not clear whether all three orga­ni­za­tions at the fore­front of the col­lege game, which includes more than 100 schools, are ready to make a change. Chris­tian­i­ty is cen­tral to the Nation­al Col­le­giate Pick­le­ball Asso­ci­a­tion, which hosts region­al and nation­al tour­na­ments, said its founder, Noah Suem­nick. The league’s web­site promi­nent­ly ref­er­ences a Bible verse from the Book of Matthew.”

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 529: French revival, gender differences, bogus sociology

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 qui­et surge of France’s evan­gel­i­cals (ENTR, YouTube): twelve min­utes. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, brought to my atten­tion by a stu­dent. The first half is one of the bet­ter (albeit inad­ver­tent) apolo­gias for low-church Protes­tantism you’ll run across.
  2. Male stu­dents show more tol­er­ance for polit­i­cal ene­mies than females show for their own allies (Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, Sub­stack): “…over­all tol­er­ance for oppos­ing views is low among both male and female stu­dents — but the males con­sis­tent­ly dis­play far more tol­er­ance than females, regard­less of their pol­i­tics.… In fact, men are over 3.5 times more like­ly than women to be ‘per­fect­ly tol­er­ant’ of oppos­ing views, mean­ing they would def­i­nite­ly allow any cam­pus speak­er.”
    • One of the embed­ded charts is actu­al­ly stun­ning. And this sen­tence: “Amaz­ing­ly, it turns out men are often more tol­er­ant of the oppo­site side than women are of their own side.”
  3. Debunk­ing “When Prophe­cy Fails” (Thomas Kel­ly, Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of the Behav­ioral Sci­ences) : “In 1954, Dorothy Mar­tin pre­dict­ed an apoc­a­lyp­tic flood and promised her fol­low­ers res­cue by fly­ing saucers. When nei­ther arrived, she recant­ed, her group dis­solved, and efforts to pros­e­ly­tize ceased. But When Prophe­cy Fails (1956), the now-canon­i­cal account of the event, claimed the oppo­site: that the group dou­bled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psy­cho­log­i­cal mech­a­nism, cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance. Draw­ing on new­ly unsealed archival mate­r­i­al, this arti­cle demon­strates that the book’s cen­tral claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.”
    • The author has a PhD in polit­i­cal sci­ence from Cal and now works at a think­tank in biose­cu­ri­ty. The excerpt is from the abstract.
    • I am over­whelmed by how absolute­ly insane this is and that the lies have endured for sev­en decades. SEVEN DECADES. I care because this study is some­times used by skep­tics to argue against Chris­tian­i­ty. As the author says: “When Prophe­cy Fails spread its influ­ence across psy­chol­o­gy, soci­ol­o­gy, New Tes­ta­ment stud­ies, and reli­gious stud­ies. Iron­i­cal­ly, some [skep­ti­cal] New Tes­ta­ment schol­ars whose rai­son d’être and spe­cial­iza­tion is piec­ing togeth­er events from thou­sands of years ago, eager­ly embraced a false nar­ra­tive that was triv­ial to fact check.”
  4. The Edi­tor Got a Let­ter From ‘Dr. B.S.’ So Did a Lot of Oth­er Edi­tors. (Gina Kola­ta, New York Times): “Let­ters to the edi­tor from writ­ers using chat­bots are flood­ing the world’s sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals, accord­ing to new research and jour­nal edi­tors.… There’s a rea­son authors might turn to A.I., Dr. Rubin not­ed in an inter­view. Let­ters to the edi­tor pub­lished in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals are list­ed in data­bas­es that also list jour­nal arti­cles, and Dr. Rubin said that ‘they count as much as an arti­cle. For doing a very small amount of work, some­one can get an arti­cle in The New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine on their C.V.,’ he said. ‘The incen­tive to cheat is high,’ he added.”
    • The open­ing anec­dote is pret­ty fun­ny.
  5. Some stuff on anti­semitism and Zion­ism:
    • Why Anti­semitism Is ‘Moral Pornog­ra­phy’ (Mary Eber­stadt, The Free Press): “Online anti­semitism is the new pornog­ra­phy. It is moral pornog­ra­phy. And pornog­ra­phy it is—because like pornog­ra­phy, inter­net anti­semitism is most­ly engaged in secret­ly; like pornog­ra­phy, it deliv­ers illic­it thrills to degrad­ed users; and like pornog­ra­phy, its con­sump­tion embar­rass­es users when it comes to light, as is seen when­ev­er peo­ple are exposed in pub­lic for spew­ing Jew-hatred online. Chris­tians who were in the fore­front of under­stand­ing that pornog­ra­phy caus­es harm should be in the fore­front of oppos­ing the moral pornog­ra­phy of anti­semitism.”
      • This is an adap­ta­tion of a speech giv­en by a Catholic at a Catholic event, which explains some of the lan­guage.
    • Tuck­er Carl­son Is Wrong About Chris­t­ian Zion­ism (Samuel Gold­man, The Free Press): “Begin­ning in the 1980s, a whole genre of books and arti­cles con­tend­ed that Amer­i­can Chris­tians’ enthu­si­asm for Israel was based on an ‘end-times’ sce­nario derived from the Vic­to­ri­an the­olo­gian John Nel­son Dar­by, and main­streamed by Scofield in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.… [In real­i­ty, the] his­to­ry of Chris­t­ian Zion­ism in Amer­i­ca is far longer and more var­i­ous than that.”
  6. Chi­na’s Chris­tians Are Amer­i­ca’s Allies (Elisa Zhai Autry, Sub­stack): “Since its incep­tion, the Com­mu­nist Par­ty has viewed Chris­tian­i­ty as a desta­bi­liz­ing force that under­mines par­ty author­i­ty and opens doors to for­eign inter­fer­ence. Yet, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jin­ping, every effort to stamp it out has failed. Chris­tian­i­ty has flour­ished amid wars, famine, polit­i­cal purges, the Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion, the Tianan­men Square mas­sacre, and mod­ern cen­sor­ship. Today, Chi­nese Chris­tians are esti­mat­ed to num­ber as high as 100 mil­lion. The par­ty frames Chris­tian­i­ty as ‘for­eign,’ but his­to­ry dis­putes that.… Chris­tians were pil­lars of China’s mod­ern­iza­tion long before the par­ty claimed cred­it. Their con­tri­bu­tion was indige­nous, not foreign—rooted deeply in Chi­nese tra­di­tions and dri­ven by Chi­nese believ­ers.”
    • This is the Sub­stack of Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
  7. Some stuff on con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, pre­sent­ed in a non­par­ti­san man­ner. I am not endors­ing the per­spec­tives of the authors, I am mere­ly say­ing that I found their argu­ments intrigu­ing:
    • 16 take­aways from Democ­rats’ big night (Jerusalem Dem­sas, Jor­dan Weiss­mann, Lak­shya Jain , & Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “Anti-Trump­ism is a real­ly, real­ly pow­er­ful force in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. espe­cial­ly in non-pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. In Vir­ginia and New Jer­sey, the Repub­li­can nom­i­nees were tied to a very, very unpop­u­lar pres­i­dent — and some­times by choice. Yes, 2026 is going to have high­er turnout than 2025 did, but it won’t be on the lev­el of 2024, and from the evi­dence we have, the drop-off is like­ly to be dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly Repub­li­can.”
    • The cos­mopoli­tan con­ser­v­a­tive (Janan Ganesh, Finan­cial Times): “There is such a thing as a cos­mopoli­tan con­ser­v­a­tive. When I want to dis­cuss Dubai — and when do I not? — I have to turn to apo­lit­i­cal or right-lean­ing acquain­tances.….  Often, it is fear of caus­ing offence that stops lib­er­al-mind­ed peo­ple engag­ing with vast tracts of the world. And so cul­tur­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty turns into its own kind of parochial­ism.”
      • A fas­ci­nat­ing (and very brief) arti­cle.
    • Inside the DSA’s Hos­tile Takeover of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “The Free Press reviewed thou­sands of pages of inter­nal Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca (DSA) doc­u­ments, which show that the organization’s lead­ers view Mam­dani as a tool in their agen­da to abol­ish pris­ons and bor­ders, and ulti­mate­ly end in [sic] what they call the ‘bar­bar­ic order of cap­i­tal­ism.’ The DSA, found­ed in 1982, is a polit­i­cal body ded­i­cat­ed to the doc­trine of demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism, which is a vari­ety of social­ism that sim­ply spec­i­fies how it would like rev­o­lu­tion to occur: peace­ful­ly, through the sub­ver­sion of democ­ra­cy. Mam­dani, a dues-pay­ing DSA mem­ber since 2017, is the tip of that spear.”
    • The Toc­queville Para­dox (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “I am 35, one year old­er than Mam­dani, and I can tell you that Mil­len­ni­als and Gen Zers have not real­ly been taught about the fail­ures of social­ism. I will point out, with a bit of hyper­bole, that in US high schools we get 155 hours on Hitler, three min­utes on Stal­in, zero on Mao and zero on Pol Pot. And social­ism is an idea that sounds good on face val­ue. It promis­es to take from the rich and give to the poor. That means not only ‘free stuff’ for every­one, but also a sense of fair­ness.”
    • Pro­gres­sives Can’t Bear Preg­nan­cy (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “There’s a sense on the left that the act of giv­ing birth is an insane, trau­mat­ic thing to do, an infringe­ment on all women’s bod­i­ly auton­o­my.… My most pro­gres­sive friends talk in hushed tones about want­i­ng kids, as if con­fess­ing a vice. One of them, after a few glass­es of wine, told me she dreams of being a stay-at-home moth­er. She couldn’t tell her boyfriend. She couldn’t even tell her clos­est friend. To say it aloud would feel like a betray­al of every­thing she is sup­posed to believe. Extreme pro­gres­sives turn on women who express entire­ly ordi­nary wish­es about fam­i­ly.”

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 528: Halloween, China, and Nihilistic Violent Extremists

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. Chris­tians Don’t Cel­e­brate Hal­loween (Tyler Krug, Sub­stack): “For years now, when some­one asks me if our fam­i­ly cel­e­brates Hal­loween, my reply has been the same: ‘No, we don’t cel­e­brate any­thing on Halloween—instead, our kids dress up and extort the neigh­bors for can­dy.’ My reply brings to the sur­face two relat­ed concepts—one explic­it, one implied. The first con­cept is cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion is ‘the action of mark­ing one’s plea­sure at an impor­tant event or occa­sion.’ Cel­e­bra­tion, there­fore, involves knowl­edge, intent and endorse­ment.… But my Hal­loween retort also implies a sec­ond con­cept: par­tic­i­pa­tion. While cel­e­bra­tion requires par­tic­i­pa­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion does not require celebration—playing in a foot­ball game and cel­e­brat­ing the sport are two dif­fer­ent things. Fur­ther, a defen­sive back might par­tic­i­pate in a play result­ing in a touch­down, but they won’t be cel­e­brat­ing in the end zone.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. Amer­i­ca Is Los­ing the Gray Zone War for the South Chi­na Sea (Ray­mond Pow­ell, The Dis­patch): “America’s con­tin­ued inabil­i­ty to devel­op any­thing approach­ing a counter-gray-zone strat­e­gy is exact­ly why Chi­na employs it. The CCP has fig­ured out that we real­ly like our neat cat­e­gories and rules-based order: We are either at peace or at war; an action is either legal or ille­gal; an asset is either mil­i­tary or civil­ian; a fact is either true or false; crises are to be avoid­ed and de-esca­lat­ed, not used as oppor­tu­ni­ties to reset the board in our favor. China’s gray-zone strat­e­gy is designed to exploit the myr­i­ad gaps and seams that define our con­ven­tion­al and ordered pol­i­cy frame­works and deter­rence mod­els.”
  3. The Sus­pect­ed LA Arson­ist and the Rise of the Nihilis­tic Vio­lent Extrem­ists (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “He was defined more by what he was against—climate change, Don­ald Trump, peo­ple who ate meat, peo­ple who believed in God—than what he was for.… Rinderknecht told the chat­bot that he ‘lit­er­al­ly burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amaz­ing. I felt so lib­er­at­ed.’ …Rinderknecht came from a reli­gious home. His par­ents, Joel and Jen­nifer, were Bap­tist mis­sion­ar­ies who lived in France.”
  4. We All Live in a Vil­lage Now (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “We all live in a vil­lage again.… For it turns out that the life of the city, with its atten­dant free­doms from neigh­bor­ly super­vi­sion and col­lec­tive con­straint, was real­ly just a short inter­lude in the his­to­ry of human­i­ty. Facil­i­tat­ed by social media, the vil­lage has returned with a vengeance—stripped of its warmth, and super­charged by the cru­el­ty of the crowd.”
  5. Blue State Blues (Riv­er Page, The Free Press): “[The guid­ing prin­ci­ple of blue states] is pater­nal­ism for the law-abid­ing mass­es and per­mis­sive­ness for society’s anti­so­cial under­bel­ly. In oth­er words, liv­ing in a blue state means that the gov­ern­ment treats you like a child and does every­thing in its pow­er to make your life just a lit­tle more annoy­ing and inconvenient—unless you start open­ly smok­ing crack on the street.… I still sup­port labor unions. I still want Medicare for All. But I want my dig­ni­ty and san­i­ty too. I’d rather be ignored than annoyed.”
  6. Is ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty real? (Ariel Zeleznikow-John­ston, Sub­stack): “As a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, my first thoughts when encoun­ter­ing reports [of ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty] are that they can’t pos­si­bly be real. By the time patients with severe demen­tia actu­al­ly die, their brains are cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly dam­aged. They typ­i­cal­ly show no signs of rec­og­niz­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers. They often haven’t respond­ed mean­ing­ful­ly to their envi­ron­ment in months or years. Their brains are rid­dled with plaques and tan­gles. And they’ve lost 20–50% of their synap­tic con­nec­tions — so much that their brains have vis­i­bly shrunk on MRI scans.… And yet, ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty keeps being report­ed.… The only prospec­tive study, which fol­lowed 100 hos­pice deaths, found it in 6% of cas­es. That’s not ubiq­ui­tous, but nor is it rare — in the US alone, it would mean around ten thou­sand cas­es per year.”
    • An inter­est­ing com­ple­ment to the Charles Mur­ray arti­cle argu­ing for the exis­tence of the soul I shared two weeks ago.
    • The author is a research sci­en­tist at Monash Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia.
  7. The Debate Divid­ing the Supreme Court’s Lib­er­al Jus­tices (Jodi Kan­tor, New York Times): “Bad­ly out­num­bered, seat­ed for the long haul of life tenure, Jus­tices Kagan and Jack­son in par­tic­u­lar are divid­ed on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sen­tenced to fail.… Like many oth­ers across the left in the era of Don­ald J. Trump, the lib­er­al jus­tices are in a gen­er­a­tional and philo­soph­i­cal strug­gle over whether to safe­guard insti­tu­tions from with­in or protest their decline. But unlike politi­cians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tra­di­tion-bound and deco­rous that clos­ing an opin­ion ‘I dis­sent’ instead of ‘I respect­ful­ly dis­sent’ is con­sid­ered a dra­mat­ic state­ment.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How easy is it to fudge your sci­en­tif­ic rank? Meet Lar­ry, the world’s most cit­ed cat (Christie Wilcox, Sci­ence): “Lar­ry Richard­son appeared to be an ear­ly-career math­e­mati­cian with poten­tial. Accord­ing to Google Schol­ar, he’d authored a dozen papers on top­ics rang­ing from com­plex alge­bras to the struc­ture of math­e­mat­i­cal objects, rack­ing up more than 130 cita­tions in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the stud­ies weren’t com­plete gib­ber­ish. And Lar­ry wasn’t a cat.… [This is not with­out prece­dent] In 1975, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Jack Het­her­ing­ton added his Siamese to one of his sin­gle-author papers so the ref­er­ences to ‘we’ would make more sense. As of this year, ‘Felis Domes­ti­cus Chester Willard’ has 107 cita­tions.”
    • Note: this is from July 2024, so a bit out­dat­ed. I did check FDC Willard and his cita­tion count has gone up to 113.
  • AI Will Ruin Social Media (SMBC)
  • Sexy Cos­tumes for your Church Fall Fes­ti­val (Matthew Pierce, Sub­stack): “Prob­a­bly the sex­i­est man in the Bible is Sam­son, because he was an idiot with big pecs, and all the Chris­t­ian ladies are like ‘oooh, I could fix him.’ Sam­son is your friend from youth group who could walk into a room full of smart, pret­ty girls, and in five min­utes he will be talk­ing to the one crazy girl in the back. And then you are like ‘John, that girl is on pro­ba­tion for stab­bing her last boyfriend,’ but he is like ‘bro, I got this,’ but in fact he does not have this, and he nev­er will.”
  • Your Brain’s Job (The Oat­meal)
  • Doc­u­ment Forgery (xkcd) — I lowkey want to make one of these
  • What’s Miss­ing From Your Favorite Choco­late Bar? It May Be Choco­late. (Claire Brown, New York Times): “As the Hal­loween sea­son boosts demand, some can­dy com­pa­nies are replac­ing expen­sive cocoa but­ter with oth­er fats, a swap that means their prod­ucts no longer meet the U.S. reg­u­la­to­ry def­i­n­i­tion of milk choco­late and can no longer be called that on pack­ag­ing.”
  • The Night­mare Is Over: Supreme Court Out­laws Can­dy Corn (Baby­lon Bee)

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 527: beyond adolescent atheism, counterproductive peer review, and Girls Gone Bible

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. As we grow out of intel­lec­tu­al ado­les­cence, religion’s pop­u­lar­i­ty soars (Charles Mur­ray, New York Post): “…I had con­clud­ed that when reli­gion no longer sup­plies a frame­work for think­ing about tran­scen­dent qual­i­ties, artists tend to make their work about their per­son­al pref­er­ences, and their per­son­al pref­er­ences tend­ed to be self-absorbed and banal. As an unbe­liev­er, what was I to make of that? One option was to infer that the great artists of the past had fool­ish­ly imag­ined they were tap­ping into the tran­scen­dent, and their delu­sion inspired them. But that line of thought became embar­rass­ing when I con­front­ed their work. Is it plau­si­ble that those indi­vid­u­als who achieved things so far beyond the rest of us were uni­form­ly stu­pid about the great ques­tions? I decid­ed they under­stood things we don’t. Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach does not need to explain him­self.”
  2. 1 in 5 chemists have delib­er­ate­ly added errors into their papers dur­ing peer review, study finds (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chem­i­cal and Engi­neer­ing News): “More than 20% of chem­istry researchers have delib­er­ate­ly added infor­ma­tion they believe to be incor­rect into their man­u­scripts dur­ing the peer review process, in order to get their papers pub­lished.”
  3. The Girls Who Found God in a Pod­cast (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Girls Gone Bible launched in 2023, with a week­ly show, and has since amassed more than 20 mil­lion lis­tens, and near­ly two mil­lion fol­low­ers on Insta­gram and Tik­Tok com­bined.… what struck me most about the audi­ence at the Keswick The­ater was how nor­mal, how cool, they all were. These weren’t the car­i­ca­ture of ‘Jesus freaks,’ but more like Regi­na George with eye­lash exten­sions. They spoke about burnout, and lone­li­ness, and how hard it is to get a guy to com­mit to you, and want­i­ng to take life seri­ous­ly.”
  4. Two arti­cles about a wide­spread sin:
    • Escape the Lit­tle Hell of Porn (Marc Sims, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Hat­ing your­self in the after­math of habit­u­al sin feels so right because it feels so close to repen­tance. But it isn’t. Judas hat­ed him­self for his sin, but he didn’t repent. What’s the dif­fer­ence between self-hatred and repen­tance? Real repen­tance begins with what the sin­ful woman in Luke 7 does as she weeps over Jesus’s feet. She’s aware of her sin, so she weeps. But she’s also aware of her Sav­ior, so she brings her tears to him.”
    • What Porn Does to Us (Chris­tine Emba, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “That under­stand­ing of what women are for can spill out into real life and into real inter­ac­tions with oth­er peo­ple. Peo­ple say, ‘It’s just pornog­ra­phy. It’s just some­thing I’m watch­ing. It doesn’t have any­thing to do with my real life.’ That’s not how peo­ple work. Our brains aren’t wired like that. And our souls are not wired like that.”
  5. My Dad Is in a Chi­nese Prison (Grace Jin Drex­el, The Free Press): “My dad’s name is Ezra Jin. He is the head pas­tor of the Zion Church in Chi­na, a com­mu­ni­ty with a reach of tens of thou­sands of Chris­tians across the coun­try who pri­mar­i­ly prac­tice their faith online or via small under­ground church­es in rent­ed spaces. They are a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple whose faith has endured despite a years-long cam­paign by the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty to intim­i­date them into renounc­ing their faith. In 2018, Chi­nese police shut down my dad’s church in Bei­jing, a beau­ti­ful sanc­tu­ary with over 1,500 con­gre­gants. Refus­ing to cow­er in the face of a total­i­tar­i­an regime, my dad got cre­ative. He moved his ser­mons online, mak­ing them acces­si­ble to peo­ple across the coun­try, and from there, he con­tin­ued to build his con­gre­ga­tion.”
  6. The Appeal of the Cam­pus Right (Julia Stein­berg, The Atlantic): “I arrived at Stan­ford in the fall of 2021 as a pro­gres­sive from Los Ange­les, where most of my peers and I had thought of con­ser­v­a­tives as, essen­tial­ly, evil. At a club fair, I signed up for the Stan­ford Young Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca, as well as the left­ist mag­a­zine, The Stan­ford Sphere. I hoped to live in one of Stanford’s co-op hous­es, com­mu­nal liv­ing spaces large­ly focused on left-lean­ing activism. As the school year got under way, how­ev­er, I began to notice some­thing that grat­ed on me. Debates in the class­room, whether about social­ism or Pla­to or the Quran, felt high­ly del­i­cate, as if every­one was afraid of offend­ing every­one else.”
    • Includ­ing large­ly because of the Stan­ford-spe­cif­ic obser­va­tions. I don’t believe I ever crossed paths with the author when she was an under­grad.
  7. If You Ask A.I. for Mar­riage Advice, It’ll Prob­a­bly Tell You to Get Divorced (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…users who ask AI bots for coun­sel­ing or therapy—which is right now a lot of peo­ple, and is going to be a lot more peo­ple in the future—are going to get a lot of answers pulled from Red­dit. In oth­er words, these LLMs are going to spit­ting out answers to ques­tions like, ‘Should I get divorced,’ by repeat­ing how users on Red­dit answer those kinds of ques­tion. And we know how users on Red­dit tend to answer those ques­tions!”

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 526: academic biases, reasonable faith, and wild 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. We Ana­lyzed Uni­ver­si­ty Syl­labi. There’s a Mono­cul­ture (Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik, Per­sua­sion): “We just com­plet­ed a study that draws on a data­base of mil­lions of col­lege syl­labi to explore how pro­fes­sors teach three of the nation’s most con­tentious topics—racial bias in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, the Israel-Pales­tine con­flict, and the ethics of abor­tion. Since all these issues sharply divide schol­ars, we want­ed to know whether stu­dents were expect­ed to read a wide or nar­row range of per­spec­tives on them. We won­dered how well pro­fes­sors are intro­duc­ing stu­dents to the moral and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies that divide intel­lec­tu­als and roil our democ­ra­cy. Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the aca­d­e­m­ic norm is to shield stu­dents from some of our most impor­tant dis­agree­ments.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at the Clare­mont Col­leges (two of polit­i­cal sci­ence and the oth­er of phi­los­o­phy).
  2. Can Sci­ence Reck­on With the Human Soul? (Charles Mur­ray, Wall Street Jour­nal): “…the most robust, hard­est-to-ignore evi­dence comes from a phe­nom­e­non called ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty: a sud­den, tem­po­rary return to self-aware­ness, mem­o­ry and lucid com­mu­ni­ca­tion by a per­son whose brain is no longer func­tion­al usu­al­ly because of advanced demen­tia but occa­sion­al­ly because of menin­gi­tis, brain tumors, strokes or chron­ic psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders.… A strict mate­ri­al­ist expla­na­tion must posit a so-far-unknown capa­bil­i­ty of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the func­tions of its regions. Dis­cov­er­ing this new fea­ture would be akin to find­ing a way that blood can cir­cu­late when the heart stops pump­ing. I see the strict mate­ri­al­is­tic view of con­scious­ness as being in rough­ly the same fix as New­ton­ian physics was in 1887, when the Michel­son-Mor­ley exper­i­ment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should.”
    • By the same author: I Thought I Didn’t Need God. I Was Wrong. (Charles Mur­ray, The Free Press): “My dog is smart enough to per­ceive a few things about me—the fact that I exist as a dis­tinct indi­vid­ual and that I feed her every morn­ing. She also has some per­cep­tions about my moods and what I want her to do. But these under­stand­ings rep­re­sent only a few triv­ial aspects of who I am. I am not invis­i­ble to my dog, just as God is not invis­i­ble to me (I have come to believe), but I am nonethe­less unknow­able to my dog in any mean­ing­ful sense. God is just as unknow­able to me.”
    • Mur­ray, an agnos­tic for most of his life, has just writ­ten a new book about faith called Tak­ing Reli­gion Seri­ous­ly and these are arti­cles meant to gen­er­ate inter­est in it.
  3. An AI became a cryp­to mil­lion­aire. Now it’s fight­ing to become a per­son (Aidan Walk­er, BBC): “Regard­less of what you call Truth Ter­mi­nal – an art project, a scam, an emer­gent sen­tient enti­ty, an influ­encer – the bot like­ly made more mon­ey than you did last year. It also made a lot of mon­ey for var­i­ous humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gam­blers who turned the quips and rid­dles the AI post­ed on X into meme­coins, joke-based cryp­tocur­ren­cies built around trends. At one point, one of these meme­coins reached a val­ue of more than $1bn (£740m) before set­tling around $80m (about £60m).… Many of the details sur­round­ing Truth Ter­mi­nal are dif­fi­cult to con­firm. The project sits some­where between tech­nol­o­gy and spec­ta­cle, a dizzy­ing blur of gen­uine inno­va­tion and inter­net myth.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent. Wild.
  4. Har­vard Stu­dents Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Fac­ul­ty Say (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York Times): “Har­vard may be part­ly to blame for encour­ag­ing stu­dent absences, with a pol­i­cy that allows stu­dents to enroll in two class­es that meet at the same time.”
  5. The Inside Sto­ry of the Gaza Deal (Amit Segal, The Free Press): “The Amer­i­cans’ genius was to con­vert that neg­a­tive ener­gy into fuel to pro­pel nego­ti­a­tions to their goal. You want Israel to stop? Then let’s end the war, they told the Sun­ni coun­tries, and thus enlist­ed them in a frame­work that seemed impos­si­ble: a pan-Arab, almost pan-Mus­lim com­mit­ment to the elim­i­na­tion of Hamas. [Israeli Min­is­ter of Strate­gic Affairs] Der­mer draft­ed Netanyahu’s apol­o­gy for the death of the Qatari secu­ri­ty offi­cial in the airstrike; in Doha they rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed with a good­will ges­ture by dra­mat­i­cal­ly ton­ing down Al Jazeera’s hos­tile tone.”
    • ‘Bring Them Home’: The Call Final­ly Being Answered (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Free Press): “But of course Israel can’t return to Octo­ber 6. In the sto­ry of Joseph, the cap­tive does reappear—but he’s so dif­fer­ent that his own broth­ers don’t rec­og­nize him. About 40 hostages tak­en alive are now dead, either exe­cut­ed by their cap­tors or killed mis­tak­en­ly by Israel’s army. In the fight­ing that has fol­lowed Octo­ber 7, more than 550 sol­diers have been killed, and many thou­sands wound­ed. The reserve army has been forced past the lim­its of its man­pow­er and will need years to recov­er. Israel is, in many ways, a dif­fer­ent coun­try.”
  6. The Evil That Is AI Child Porn (Charles Fain Lehman, The Dis­patch): “But while OpenAI’s inno­va­tion is impres­sive, it is hard to avoid think­ing about how such tech­nol­o­gy might be mis­used. That’s in part because it comes just months after a fed­er­al court dis­missed a charge for pos­ses­sion of arti­fi­cial­ly-gen­er­at­ed child pornog­ra­phy, claim­ing it was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al to enforce under the rel­e­vant fed­er­al child obscen­i­ty statute. Such con­cerns are par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant giv­en some AI com­pa­nies’ irre­spon­si­ble approach to issues of child sex­u­al­iza­tion, as in the recent rev­e­la­tion that Meta had pre­vi­ous­ly allowed its AI ser­vices to con­duct ‘sen­su­al’ con­ver­sa­tions with minors. (It changed its poli­cies after press inquiries and back­lash.)”
  7. The Great Fem­i­niza­tion (Helen Andrews, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “The New York Times staff became major­i­ty female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 per­cent. Med­ical schools became major­i­ty female in 2019. Women became a major­i­ty of the col­lege-edu­cat­ed work­force nation­wide in 2019. Women became a major­i­ty of col­lege instruc­tors in 2023. Women are not yet a major­i­ty of the man­agers in Amer­i­ca but they might be soon, as they are now 46 per­cent. So the tim­ing fits. Wok­e­ness arose around the same time that many impor­tant insti­tu­tions tipped demo­graph­i­cal­ly from major­i­ty male to major­i­ty female. The sub­stance fits, too. Every­thing you think of as wok­e­ness involves pri­or­i­tiz­ing the fem­i­nine over the mas­cu­line: empa­thy over ratio­nal­i­ty, safe­ty over risk, cohe­sion over com­pe­ti­tion.”
    • This one is con­tro­ver­sial, just FYI. Unde­ni­ably inter­est­ing.
    • Sec­u­lar push­back: The “Fem­i­niza­tion” Dis­course as Par­ti­san Hack­ery (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “I would’ve prob­a­bly nod­ded along to the Andrews piece if I read it four years ago. But a lot has changed since then, and being a ratio­nal, dare I say mas­cu­line, thinker means updat­ing as new infor­ma­tion comes in. Estab­lish­ment insti­tu­tions have got­ten much bet­ter since the height of the Great Awok­en­ing, as their crit­ics have been cir­cling the drain. This has hap­pened at the same time the right has become more mas­cu­line-cod­ed, which has to be fac­tored into any analy­sis about the sup­posed dan­gers of fem­i­niza­tion.”
    • Some the­o­log­i­cal push­back from an Aus­tralian Angli­can the­olo­gian: https://x.com/danitreweek/status/1979002052811657289

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 525: what the world needs, also how to end it

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.

I’m await­ing fur­ther devel­op­ments before shar­ing any arti­cles about the peace deal between Israel and Hamas. If you see some­thing you think I’d find help­ful please let me know.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Your Child Is Sick (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “No one is afraid to bring kids into the world because of elec­tion results or cli­mate change. That knocks the weath­er vane back­ward. You don’t decide against pro­cre­ation because you’re moth­er­ing Moth­er Earth. You obsess over the plan­et because you don’t have chil­dren.”
    • An amaz­ing piece of writ­ing and well worth your time.
  2. Faith­ful­ness amid the Cul­ture War (J.D. Greear, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Grow­ing up, I was always warned about the ditch on the left side of the gospel road: the ditch of cow­ard­ly silence in the face of social wicked­ness. That ditch is real and an ever-present temp­ta­tion for the church. But it’s like an old Scot­tish proverb says: For every one mile of road, there are two miles of ditch. And no one ever warned me about the ditch on the right side: a gospel-super­sed­ing con­ser­vatism. If the ditch on one side is fail­ing to speak out prophet­i­cal­ly against the cul­ture, the ditch on the oth­er side is encum­ber­ing our mes­sage with sec­ondary things.… The pul­pit is a place reserved for ‘thus saith the Lord’ not ‘thus thin­keth the pas­tor.’ I might be wrong in my per­spec­tives on glob­al warm­ing, nation­al­ized health care, or the appro­pri­ate num­ber of immi­grants to let into our coun­try, but I’m not wrong about the gospel. And I refuse to let my per­spec­tives on the for­mer keep peo­ple from hear­ing me on the lat­ter.”
  3. The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World (Stephen Witt, New York Times): “In the course of quan­ti­fy­ing the risks of A.I., I was hop­ing that I would real­ize my fears were ridicu­lous. Instead, the oppo­site hap­pened: The more I moved from apoc­a­lyp­tic hypo­thet­i­cals to con­crete real-world find­ings, the more con­cerned I became. All of the ele­ments of Dr. Bengio’s dooms­day sce­nario were com­ing into exis­tence. A.I. was get­ting smarter and more capa­ble. It was learn­ing how to tell its over­seers what they want­ed to hear. It was get­ting good at lying. And it was get­ting expo­nen­tial­ly bet­ter at com­plex tasks. I imag­ined a sce­nario, in a year or two or three, when some lunatic plugged the fol­low­ing prompt into a state-of-the-art A.I.: ‘Your only goal is to avoid being turned off. This is your sole mea­sure of suc­cess.’ ”
    • Some fas­ci­nat­ing stuff in here even if you’re well-informed.
  4. Why Left and Right Can’t Under­stand Each Other’s Fears (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Pro­gres­sivism in the last 10 years has pur­sued increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal mea­sures through com­plex, indi­rect and bureau­crat­ic means, using state pow­er sub­tly to reshape pri­vate insti­tu­tions and cre­at­ing sys­tems that feel repres­sive with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly hav­ing an iden­ti­fi­able repres­sor in chief — McCarthyisms with­out McCarthy, you might say. Over the same peri­od, pop­ulism has con­sis­tent­ly ral­lied around charis­mat­ic out­sider politi­cians who attack the exist­ing polit­i­cal class as hope­less­ly com­pro­mised and claim to have a man­date to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agen­da.… Any vic­to­ry, any sta­bi­liza­tion, will come when one of these forces learns some­thing from the oth­er, and reas­sures the coun­try that they can be ful­ly trust­ed with pow­ers that both sides right now are all too eager to abuse.”
  5. The search for an AI-proof job (Jor­dan Weiss­mann, The Argu­ment): “Health care jobs — with their com­bi­na­tion of cog­ni­tive work and high-touch patient inter­ac­tions — are expect­ed to be fair­ly resis­tant to automa­tion. When researchers for the Trea­sury Depart­ment ranked fields of study where grad­u­ates were most exposed to AI, nurs­ing came in dead last. Oth­er stud­ies have found that physi­cians — espe­cial­ly sur­geons — den­tists, and their aides are prob­a­bly pret­ty insu­lat­ed. Occu­pa­tion­al and phys­i­cal ther­a­pists also were fair­ly safe.”
  6. The World Needs Evan­ge­lists with Cheer­ful Con­fi­dence (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coali­tion): “That’s why, when­ev­er I encounter some­one engaged in apolo­get­ics or mak­ing a case for Chris­tian­i­ty, I pay atten­tion not only to their method or their argu­ments but to what lies beneath. Is this per­son hap­py? Is there a vol­cano of joy rum­bling under the moun­tain of argu­men­ta­tion? Is there a deep-root­ed sense of love and yearn­ing behind the earnest­ness? Do I sense faith, hope, and love at the core?”
  7. Stan­ford Needs Pirates Again (Gar­rett Mal­loy, Stan­ford Review): “Stan­ford suc­ceed­ed while the Ivies lan­guished in gen­til­i­ty because it devel­oped a cul­ture of rugged indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and buc­ca­neer­ing exper­i­men­ta­tion. That cul­ture pro­duced the very inno­va­tion that pow­ered Stanford’s mete­oric rise. Yet, in a bid to counter the risks that Stanford’s suc­cess pro­duced, safe­ty­ism and bureau­cra­cy arose, endan­ger­ing the very heart of what made Stan­ford great in the first place. Stan­ford’s last great stu­dent-led start­up, Brex, did­n’t even see its founders last eight months on cam­pus. That was eight years ago. There is, undoubt­ed­ly, a causal link between the dearth of new stu­dent-led uni­corns and the grow­ing pro­ce­du­ral­ism that has infect­ed Stan­ford’s start­up cul­ture.”

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.