Author: Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 521: mostly Charlie Kirk

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. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A lot of arti­cles about the mur­der of Char­lie Kirk. Even peo­ple who bare­ly knew who Kirk was seem to have been deeply moved by his assas­si­na­tion.
    • Stu­dent accep­tance of vio­lence in response to speech hits a record high (Ryne Weiss & Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, FIRE): “Accord­ing to FIRE’s annu­al Col­lege Free Speech Rank­ings sur­vey, in 2020, the nation­al aver­age showed about 1 in 5 stu­dents said it was ever accept­able to use vio­lence to stop a speak­er. That num­ber has since risen to a dis­turb­ing 1 in 3 stu­dents.”
    • How Great the Chasm That Lay Between Us (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Where to begin? The mur­der of Char­lie Kirk feels dif­fer­ent.… Char­lie Kirk was not an elect­ed offi­cial, but a pri­vate cit­i­zen. He was a com­men­ta­tor and media per­son­al­i­ty. Because of that, this killing feels wider in sym­bol­ism. Tonight, a lot of Amer­i­cans feel like some­one died on their behalf. And there’s some truth in that.”
    • Char­lie Kirk Was Prac­tic­ing Pol­i­tics the Right Way (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “You can dis­like much of what Kirk believed and the fol­low­ing state­ment is still true: Kirk was prac­tic­ing pol­i­tics in exact­ly the right way. He was show­ing up to cam­pus­es and talk­ing with any­one who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effec­tive prac­ti­tion­ers of per­sua­sion.… In the inau­gur­al episode of his pod­cast, Gov. Gavin New­som of Cal­i­for­nia host­ed Kirk, admit­ting that his son was a huge fan. What a tes­ta­ment to Kirk’s project.”
    • After Kirk Killing, Amer­i­cans Agree on One Thing: Some­thing Is Seri­ous­ly Wrong (Shawn Hubler, Edgar San­doval and Audra D. S. Burch, New York Times): “No mat­ter their pol­i­tics, peo­ple said they were deeply unset­tled after the killing of Mr. Kirk… Mr. Kirk’s death at 31 sym­bol­ized for many the col­lapse of what they thought was a basic, com­mon-sense, need-not-be-debat­ed Amer­i­can val­ue: that peo­ple express­ing a polit­i­cal opin­ion should not be shot for it.”
    • Je Suis Char­lie (Bethel McGrew, Sub­stack): “It is unique­ly, vis­cer­al­ly hor­ri­fy­ing: the polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tion of a young hus­band and father who held no polit­i­cal office, nor was he cam­paign­ing for one. He was a polit­i­cal fig­ure, true, but still a pri­vate cit­i­zen. A pri­vate cit­i­zen who, to his killer, for the great crime of exist­ing while vocal­ly mid­dle-of-the-road con­ser­v­a­tive, deserved to die. And not just in the eyes of his killer, as we quick­ly learned.”
      • McGrew is a Chris­t­ian essayist/journalist with a Ph.D. in math and I when I run across her con­tent I usu­al­ly find it help­ful.
    • Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians Mourn Kirk as a Mar­tyr (Eliz­a­beth Dias and Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “‘I’m rack­ing my brain try­ing to think of anoth­er polit­i­cal fig­ure that had a sim­i­lar impact and fol­low­ing who was assas­si­nat­ed, and the only per­son I can think of is Mar­tin Luther King Jr.,’ Mr. Schilling said.”
    • If We Keep This Up, Char­lie Kirk Will Not Be the Last to Die (David French, New York Times): “That’s one thing I respect­ed about Char­lie — and it’s worth empha­siz­ing because the assas­sin attacked him as he spoke on cam­pus — he wasn’t afraid of a debate. He was will­ing to talk to any­one. And when he was shot in the mid­dle of a debate, the assas­sin didn’t just take aim at a pre­cious human being, cre­at­ed in the image of God, he took aim at the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment itself.”
    • Hit­ting The Jugu­lar Of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…I [do not] think it is wrong to ‘politi­cize’ his own hor­ri­ble assas­si­na­tion. Because it was an express­ly polit­i­cal act. It was polit­i­cal because it struck Kirk in the core act of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy: debat­ing his oppo­nents. We don’t know the pre­cise motive behind the mur­der right now, but that’s irrel­e­vant. This was aimed lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly at the jugu­lar of a free soci­ety.”
  2. One of our mil­i­tary alum­ni liked the “hon­esty tax” arti­cle I shared last week and sent me this mono­graph about the same dynam­ic in the mil­i­tary: Lying to Our­selves: Dis­hon­esty in the Army Pro­fes­sion (Leonard Wong & Stephen J. Ger­ras, US Army War Col­lege): “For exam­ple, one colonel described how his brigade com­man­der need­ed to turn in his sit­u­a­tion report on Fri­day, forc­ing the bat­tal­ions to do theirs on Thurs­day, and there­fore the com­pa­nies sub­mit­ted their data on Wednesday—necessitating the com­pa­nies to describe events that had not even occurred yet. The end result was that, while the com­pa­nies gave it their best shot, every­one includ­ing the bat­tal­ion com­man­der knew that the com­pa­ny reports were not accu­rate.”
    • This fact was strik­ing: “In the rush by high­er head­quar­ters to incor­po­rate every good idea into train­ing, the total num­ber of train­ing days required by all manda­to­ry train­ing direc­tives lit­er­al­ly exceeds the num­ber of train­ing days avail­able to com­pa­ny com­man­ders. Com­pa­ny com­man­ders some­how have to fit 297 days of manda­to­ry require­ments into 256 avail­able train­ing days.” It is lit­er­al­ly impos­si­ble for them to ful­fill the require­ments they have to affirm they ful­filled!
  3. The Ser­i­al Killer’s Apol­o­gist (Zac Bis­son­nette, The Free Press): “He then led police to the bod­ies of young men he and Cor­ll had mur­dered with the help of anoth­er accom­plice, David Brooks. In all, 27 men and boys had been killed; Hen­ley was tried and con­vict­ed on six counts of mur­der with mal­ice.… Ramsland’s treat­ment of Hen­ley rep­re­sents ther­a­py cul­ture tak­en to its log­i­cal extreme. There is no vil­lain so odi­ous that he can’t be recast through the lens of a trau­ma framework—and a sym­pa­thet­ic expla­na­tion can always be found through exten­sive talk­ing.”
  4. NASA dis­cov­ers ‘clear­est sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars’ (Kasha Patel, Wash­ing­ton Post): “But the col­or­ful speck­les on the rocks pose an even more allur­ing mys­tery. These fea­tures are two well-known min­er­als made of iron, phos­pho­rus and sul­fur. One called vivian­ite — also some­times referred to as corpse crys­tals — forms dur­ing the decay of organ­ic mate­r­i­al and is blue-green. The oth­er, called greig­ite, shows up as a dull brown. But when these two min­er­als are found togeth­er in sed­i­ments on Earth, Hurowitz said, it’s usu­al­ly a result of micro­bial metab­o­lisms.… The authors acknowl­edge that these min­er­als could have formed with­out microbes — with the involve­ment of heat, for instance. But the new study deter­mined the Mar­t­ian rocks don’t appear to have been heat­ed.”
  5. Strange Gifts of the Spir­it (Sarah Kil­lam Cros­by, Plough): “Ire­naeus, the great sec­ond-cen­tu­ry bish­op of Lyons, wrote that true dis­ci­ples of Christ received and exer­cised spir­i­tu­al gifts grant­ed them through the grace of God. ‘Some real­ly and tru­ly dri­ve out demons, … some have fore­knowl­edge of the future, and visions and prophet­ic speech, and oth­ers lay their hands on the sick and make them well, and as we said, even the dead have been raised and have remained with us for many years.’ Ori­gen like­wise claimed that mirac­u­lous signs and won­ders were still per­formed, though with greater scarci­ty, in the church­es of his day, and Augustine’s City of God recounts sev­er­al mir­a­cles, includ­ing heal­ings and exor­cisms. For these and oth­er patris­tic the­olo­gians, it was clear that super­nat­ur­al gifts of the Spir­it were still present in the life of the church. These texts show that heal­ings, prophe­cies, and oth­er phe­nom­e­na were viewed as part of the pat­tern which had been ini­ti­at­ed at Pen­te­cost.”
  6. Expe­ri­ences Shape Beliefs. They Shouldn’t Deter­mine Them. (Samuel James, Gospel Coali­tion): “When some­one talks about why they’ve changed their con­vic­tions about some­thing, they increas­ing­ly refer to neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences more often than per­sua­sive argu­ments.… It’s not so much about los­ing faith in a creed, but los­ing faith in some­body. There’s a grow­ing ten­den­cy to then iden­ti­fy the per­son in whom we have lost faith as the sum total of their beliefs, and change our think­ing accord­ing­ly. ‘Because X per­son did Y bad thing, this must mean X per­son was wrong about Z idea.’”
  7. Tanks Were Just Tanks, Until Drones Made Them Change (Mar­co Her­nan­dez & Thomas Gib­bons-Neff, New York Times): “…Russia’s and Ukraine’s Sovi­et-era tanks rum­ble across the bat­tle­field cov­ered in anti-drone nets and spikes, dan­gling chains and unwieldy cages. The exte­ri­or trans­for­ma­tions of these hulk­ing vehi­cles are a tes­ta­ment to how quick­ly drones have changed the war in Ukraine in just over three years.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 520: the honesty tax and other counterproductive things

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. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Hon­esty Tax (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “We set high — stu­pid­ly, coun­ter­pro­duc­tive­ly high — stan­dards and then min­i­mal­ly enforce them because full enforce­ment would be a dis­as­ter. So, almost every­one just lies. Then, the peo­ple you pun­ish are the peo­ple who are unwill­ing to lie, or who don’t know the rules about what kinds of lies are ‘nor­mal’ and what kinds are seri­ous­ly out of bounds. Those less like­ly to know these infor­mal rules are not a ran­dom­ly select­ed group of peo­ple — the more con­nec­tions you have in D.C., the more you know what ‘not to men­tion.’ But lying is bad! Select­ing for liars is bad! This may end up look­ing sort of sim­i­lar to the result you’d get if you just had a rea­son­able pol­i­cy in the first place, but it’s actu­al­ly a lot worse — you screened out every­one who wasn’t will­ing to be dis­hon­est.”
  2. What Is Man, That Thou Art Mind­ful Of Him? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): bril­liant and dif­fi­cult to excerpt. Dwarkesh Patel hosts a pod­cast with God debat­ing Iblis over whether humans are tru­ly intel­li­gent and whether bio­log­i­cal intel­li­gence is even pos­si­ble. Don’t assume it is Chris­t­ian based on the title — it is def­i­nite­ly not.
  3. What Hap­pens If No One Reads (Spencer Kla­van, The Free Press): “If Chat­G­PT could tell you what a meal tastes like, would you not feel the need to eat it? …I asked Grok about The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov and it told me, ‘We’re all a mess of con­tra­dic­tions.’ And so we are. Why didn’t Dos­toyevsky just say that?”
  4. The Mil­lion­aire Who Left Wall Street to Become a Para­medic (Christo­pher Maag, New York Times): “Jonathan Kleis­ner didn’t know what he want­ed to be when he grew up, except a suc­cess. After attend­ing Ford­ham Prep, a Jesuit high school in the Bronx, he went to Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, drop­ping out a semes­ter before grad­u­a­tion to take a job at a small trad­ing firm on Wall Street for $40,000 a year. It was 1991, it looked as if the reces­sion was over and the mood on the street was buoy­ant.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. If for no oth­er rea­son, read to see the sto­ry of 985 pound guy. Absolute­ly wild.
  5. Giv­ing peo­ple mon­ey helped less than I thought it would (Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “Mul­ti­ple large, high-qual­i­ty ran­dom­ized stud­ies are find­ing that guar­an­teed income trans­fers do not appear to pro­duce sus­tained improve­ments in men­tal health, stress lev­els, phys­i­cal health, child devel­op­ment out­comes or employ­ment.”
    • Inspired by the above arti­cle but going in some dif­fer­ent direc­tions: Why I Am Not a Lib­er­al (David Brooks, New York Times): “Piper’s essay kicked up a bit of an inter­net storm. You might have thought the pro­gres­sive reac­tion would have been: We need to keep giv­ing poor peo­ple mon­ey, but we also need to focus on the human and behav­ioral fac­tors that will enable them to build com­fort­able, inde­pen­dent lives. But that wasn’t the reac­tion. The pro­gres­sives I saw dou­bled down on the the­sis: Poor peo­ple just need mon­ey.”
  6. Sick Peo­ple Are Sick (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “It will nev­er stop amaz­ing and depress­ing me, real­ly, when the pub­lic reacts with shock when peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness behave like peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness… In our elite culture’s eager­ness to des­tig­ma­tize, we’ve made men­tal ill­ness unse­ri­ous. We’ve reduced it to Tik­Tok dances and ther­a­peu­tic hash­tags. ‘It’s OK to not be OK,’ says the cheer­ful let­ter­ing, but there’s always the implied caveat: it’s OK so long as ‘not being OK’ looks like cry­ing in an endear­ing way, jour­nal­ing, eat­ing ice cream straight from the car­ton, and then bounc­ing back with resilience. The real tex­ture of seri­ous men­tal ill­ness — the para­noia, the rages, the break­downs, the cata­to­nia — doesn’t fit into that frame­work, so when it arrives peo­ple don’t know how to metab­o­lize it.”
    • This is com­mon at Stan­ford. Peo­ple love the rhetoric of sup­port­ing peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness up until it’s actu­al­ly hard and dis­tress­ing.
  7. Your Rivals Aren’t Respon­si­ble for Mass Shoot­ings (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…while the ten­den­cy to extreme and apoc­a­lyp­tic rhetoric is a con­sis­tent fea­ture of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics (even a demo­c­ra­t­ic birthright), most of the killers shoot­ing up schools and church­es or tar­get­ing politi­cians for assas­si­na­tions are not real­ly par­tic­i­pants in this polar­iza­tion. They aren’t tak­ing wok­e­ness or pop­ulism too lit­er­al­ly or too far; they’re fol­low­ing oth­er direc­tives and act­ing on oth­er pur­pos­es entire­ly.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Tay­lor Swift Engage­ment Over­turned As Ref­er­ee Deter­mines Travis Kel­ce’s Knee Did­n’t Touch The Ground (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Bing (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Ven­mo (Texts from Super­heroes)
  • Wave­func­tion Col­lapse (xkcd)
  • How Ani­me Took Over Amer­i­ca (Joshua Hunt, New York Times): “A recent sur­vey of over 4,000 Amer­i­can adults showed that 42 per­cent of all Gen Z respon­dents watched ani­me every week, far high­er than the 25 per­cent of Gen Z respon­dents who fol­lowed the N.F.L.” — a visu­al­ly stun­ning arti­cle
  • Do Not Dis­turb (Pearls Before Swine)
  • The top col­lege cam­pus­es to find celebri­ties — and their kids (Christo­pher Cameron, New York Post): “Con­grat­u­la­tions, the high school class of 2025 (rah-rah-rah!) is ready to matric­u­late! Your fresh­ly sprout­ed schol­ar spent the last four years grow­ing their GPA, acing their APs and crush­ing their SATs in prepa­ra­tion for brain-bend­ing cur­ricu­lum. But are they ready for the most advan­ta­geous aspect of life at a top col­lege: social­iz­ing with star­dom?  It’s Math­e­mat­ics 101. Half of Hol­ly­wood canoodling x 20 years = a crop of celebri­ty scions who are now rul­ing the cam­pus­es of New England’s old­est insti­tu­tions, as well as the increas­ing­ly com­pet­i­tive so-called ‘new Ivies’ (schools like Notre Dame, New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, Emory, Rice, Van­der­bilt, North­west­ern and Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty).”

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 519: our therapeutic age and transparent mice scalps

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chris­t­ian in a Ther­a­peu­tic Age (Ian Har­ber, Mere Ortho­doxy): “What are ways that Chris­tians can live, wit­ness, and nav­i­gate the com­plex­i­ties of a ther­a­peu­tic cul­ture? I believe there are at least three. 1) Occu­py a dif­fer­ent exis­ten­tial space, 2) Embody a dif­fer­ent sto­ry, and 3) Cul­ti­vate a dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty of life.… The ther­a­peu­tic cul­ture is try­ing to solve real ail­ments. We’re more frac­tured, iso­lat­ed, and devoid of mean­ing-mak­ing roles and insti­tu­tions than ever before. The dig­i­tal age has rap­tured us from our bod­ies and com­mu­ni­ties and drained us of the very things that make us human. But the good truth for our time—and all eternity—is that the God-human, Jesus, has made a way for us to recov­er our human­i­ty”
  2. Researchers turn mouse scalp trans­par­ent to image brain devel­op­ment (Stan­ford News): “Now, by sim­ply rub­bing a solu­tion into a juve­nile mouse’s scalp, researchers at Stan­ford can make the skin trans­par­ent to all vis­i­ble light, allow­ing them to image the devel­op­ing con­nec­tions in a liv­ing mouse’s brain. And because the tech­nique is reversible and non-inva­sive, the researchers can return to the same ani­mal over days and weeks.”
    • Chi Alpha alum­nus and Stan­ford pro­fes­sor Guosong Hong at it again!
  3. Robin West­man and the Rise of Amer­i­can Nihilism (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “All that fin­ger-point­ing obscures a deep­er point: West­man seems to have been dri­ven by an all-con­sum­ing, destruc­tive force, a nihilism—the con­vic­tion that life is mean­ing­less; that words like truth, jus­tice and God are emp­ty slo­gans; that every­thing must be razed. Nihilism is not some obscure aca­d­e­m­ic notion. It stretch­es back to the 19th century—early Russ­ian rad­i­cals were called nihilists—and it has waxed and waned across the past 150 years. Today, you can feel the nihilist impulse cours­ing through Amer­i­ca, which has been most­ly stripped of its faith and a shared nation­al cul­ture and has seen once-great institutions—universities, cor­po­ra­tions, church­es, non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions, the media, the military—become engulfed in scan­dal and politi­ciza­tion.”
  4. They Became Sym­bols for Gazan Star­va­tion. But All 12 Suf­fer from Oth­er Health Prob­lems. (Olivia Rein­gold and Tanya Lukyano­va, The Free Press): “Uncov­er­ing this miss­ing con­text didn’t require in-depth, on-the-ground reporting—or months of inves­tiga­tive work. It took min­utes, and required noth­ing more than a com­put­er with a sta­ble inter­net con­nec­tion. We sim­ply ran the sto­ry sub­jects’ names through Google Trans­late to get the Ara­bic spelling, then searched those names in Ara­bic-lan­guage media. Even a quick scan of the results revealed that many of these chil­dren suf­fer from mus­cle atro­phy, head injuries, or oth­er seri­ous med­ical con­di­tions that help explain their ema­ci­at­ed appear­ance.”
    • A fol­low-up: Jour­nal­ists Against Jour­nal­ism (The Free Press): “Jour­nal­is­tic out­lets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this sto­ry has had more than its share.… In a nor­mal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for get­ting to ground truth. But we don’t live in nor­mal times. And that is not how some of our col­leagues in the news media saw things.… You’ll notice one impor­tant aspect about the uproar: No one is dis­put­ing the facts in our piece.”
  5. Two on Chi­na (or more specif­i­cal­ly, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty):
    • How Chi­na Influ­ences Elec­tions in America’s Biggest City (Michael Forsythe, Jay Root, Bian­ca Pal­laro & David A. Fahren­thold, New York Times): “In New York City, social clubs backed by Chi­na under­mined a con­gres­sion­al can­di­date who once chal­lenged the regime on Chi­nese tele­vi­sion. They helped unseat a state sen­a­tor for attend­ing a ban­quet with the pres­i­dent of Tai­wan. And they con­demned a City Coun­cil can­di­date on social media for sup­port­ing Hong Kong democ­ra­cy. In the past few years, these orga­ni­za­tions have qui­et­ly foiled the careers of politi­cians who opposed China’s author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment while back­ing oth­ers who sup­port­ed poli­cies of the country’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
    • I’m a Stan­ford stu­dent. A Chi­nese agent tried to recruit me as a spy (Elsa John­son, The Times): “After that I start­ed screen­shot­ting our con­ver­sa­tions. I was begin­ning to sus­pect that Charles might be work­ing for the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (CCP) and he could be try­ing to recruit me as a spy. I know it sounds para­noid, but I had heard of oth­er Stan­ford stu­dents receiv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions like this out of the blue — espe­cial­ly those study­ing sci­ence, tech, engi­neer­ing or math­e­mat­ics.…. Thanks to Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties’ open-door pol­i­cy, Chi­nese aca­d­e­mics are allowed to col­lab­o­rate with our smartest researchers and sci­en­tists, and take our advance­ments in AI, robot­ics, weapon­ry and nuclear tech­nol­o­gy back home. This is not an exag­ger­a­tion — it’s the con­clu­sion of a report on the CCP pub­lished last Sep­tem­ber by the House select com­mit­tee on the CCP.”
  6. The Wrong Def­i­n­i­tion of Love (David Brooks, New York Times): “In [our ther­a­py-dri­ven] cul­ture peo­ple are nat­u­ral­ly going to define love as the feel­ing they get when some­body sat­is­fies their crav­ing for pos­i­tive and ten­der atten­tion, not as some­thing they self­less­ly give to anoth­er. In oth­er, less self-ori­ent­ed cul­tures, and in oth­er times, love was seen as some­thing clos­er to self-abne­ga­tion than to self-com­fort. It was seen as a force so pow­er­ful that it could over­come our nat­ur­al self­ish­ness.”
  7. As Stan­ford lays off work­ers, 18 employ­ees made $1 mil­lion or more (Top 25 list­ed) (Braden Cartwright, Palo Alto Dai­ly Post): “At a time when Stan­ford is fir­ing employ­ees to save mon­ey, new­ly released IRS doc­u­ments show the uni­ver­si­ty paid 18 employ­ees $1 mil­lion or more in the pre­vi­ous fis­cal year. Stan­ford announced in July that it was lay­ing off 363 employ­ees this fall as part of a $140 mil­lion bud­get cut caused by reduced fed­er­al research fund­ing and a high­er endow­ment tax.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cat­a­stro­phe (Pearls Before Swine)
  • There’s a Sim­ple Trick to Unshrink Your Clothes, Thanks to Sci­ence (Nisa Sal­im, Sci­enceAl­ert): “If a favourite gar­ment has shrunk in the wash, you can try to res­cue it with this sim­ple method. Gen­tly soak the item in luke­warm water mixed with hair con­di­tion­er or baby sham­poo (approx­i­mate­ly one table­spoon per litre). Then, care­ful­ly stretch the fab­ric back into shape and dry it flat or under gen­tle ten­sion – for exam­ple, by peg­ging the gar­ment to a dry­ing rack.”
    • Read­ing this arti­cle is like read­ing one of those recipe blogs that goes on and on before it gets to the point, but the final bit is inter­est­ing.
  • Gen­era (SMBC)
  • Man Ful­fills The Great Com­mis­sion By Occa­sion­al­ly Wear­ing Nov­el­ty Chris­t­ian T‑Shirt In Pub­lic (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Bill Belichick’s Girl­friend, 24, Wants to Trade­mark ‘Gold Dig­ger’ (Amber Lewis, The Dai­ly Beast): “Jor­don Hud­son wants to make some gold from the gold-dig­ging accu­sa­tions levied at her amid her rela­tion­ship with Bill Belichick, who is esti­mat­ed to be worth $70 mil­lion. The for­mer cheer­leader, 24, filed a trade­mark appli­ca­tion this week through the com­pa­ny she man­ages, TCE Rights Man­age­ment, to cash in on her ‘gold dig­ger’ epi­thet. If her bid is suc­cess­ful, she will launch her own trade­marked jew­el­ry and key chains line, Peo­ple reports.”
  • See­ing infrared: sci­en­tists cre­ate con­tact lens­es that grant ‘super-vision’ (Ian Sam­ple, The Guardian): “In pre­vi­ous work, the research team gave mice near-infrared vision by inject­ing upcon­ver­sion nanopar­ti­cles under the reti­na, the light-sen­si­tive mem­brane at the back of the eye. But not­ing that this ‘may not be read­i­ly accept­ed by humans,’ they searched for a less inva­sive strat­e­gy. Writ­ing in the jour­nal Cell, the sci­en­tists describe how they made soft con­tact lens­es seed­ed with upcon­ver­sion nanopar­ti­cles. When worn, peo­ple could see Morse code-like sig­nals flashed from an infrared LED and tell what direc­tion infrared light came from. Their infrared vision improved when they closed their eyes, because eye­lids block vis­i­ble light more than infrared, so there was less vis­i­ble light to inter­fere.”
    • The arti­cle is a few months old. Wild times.

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 518

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, The Free Press): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good.”
    • FYI: the cov­er image is risque.
  2. Here’s What Hap­pened When I Made My Col­lege Stu­dents Put Away Their Phones (Ezekiel J. Emanuel, New York Times): “To help sell this pol­i­cy, I pre­sent­ed in the first lec­ture of the course a study show­ing that stu­dents who were required to take class notes by hand retained sig­nif­i­cant­ly more infor­ma­tion than stu­dents who used com­put­ers. The rea­son is that with com­put­ers, stu­dents can type as fast as I speak and strive for ver­ba­tim tran­scripts, but there is almost no men­tal pro­cess­ing of the class’s con­tent. Con­verse­ly, vir­tu­al­ly no one can hand write 125 words per minute for 90 min­utes. Thus, hand­writ­ten notes require simul­ta­ne­ous men­tal pro­cess­ing to deter­mine the impor­tant points that need record­ing. This pro­cess­ing encodes the mate­r­i­al in the brain dif­fer­ent­ly and facil­i­tates longer-term reten­tion. The data on the dis­tract­ing effect of mobile phones — even when they are face down and turned off — are strong.”
    • The author is a med school prof at Penn.
  3. Is mod­er­ate drink­ing actu­al­ly healthy? Sci­en­tists say the idea is out­dat­ed. (Stan­ford News): “We have bought into a sto­ry­line about alco­hol that, when you real­ly look at the facts, is not there,” Stafford said. “There is a mythol­o­gy about alco­hol hav­ing pos­i­tive ben­e­fits as well as alco­hol being neu­tral for human health.”
  4. Trump’s Tac­tics Mean Many Inter­na­tion­al Stu­dents Won’t Make It to Cam­pus (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York Times): “In Chi­na and India, there have been few visa appoint­ments avail­able for stu­dents in recent months, and some­times none at all, accord­ing to the Asso­ci­a­tion of Inter­na­tion­al Edu­ca­tors, also known as NAFSA, a pro­fes­sion­al orga­ni­za­tion. If visa prob­lems per­sist, new inter­na­tion­al stu­dent enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges could drop by 30 to 40 per­cent over­all this fall, a loss of 150,000 stu­dents, accord­ing to the group’s analy­sis.”
  5. What Hap­pens When an Entire Sci­en­tif­ic Field Changes Its Mind (Charles Mann, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “[There is] a pop­u­lar notion of sci­en­tif­ic progress as a series of upheavals in which mav­er­icks throw out the entrenched views of the past.… But that’s not how sci­ence works. Or, more pre­cise­ly, it’s not how sci­ence works except in two spe­cif­ic, rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al cir­cum­stances. The first is when research dis­ci­plines are young, thin­ly pop­u­lat­ed and just devel­op­ing instru­ments of suf­fi­cient pow­er to test their ini­tial beliefs, as was the case with the Michel­son-Mor­ley exper­i­ment and Pasteur’s fer­men­ta­tion. The sec­ond, pos­si­bly more con­se­quen­tial sit­u­a­tion is when sci­en­tif­ic find­ings lead to so much pub­lic inter­est that they become of con­cern to polit­i­cal author­i­ties.”
  6. A two-parter about Chi­na from a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins:
    • The Case for China’s Strength (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “In the Unit­ed States, the Col­lege Board has recent­ly announced that it will dras­ti­cal­ly reduce the length of read­ing pas­sages; rather than giv­ing stu­dents who are tak­ing the SATs texts that are about 600 words in length, and ask­ing them a few ques­tions about each, they will hence­forth be giv­en texts that are about 150 words in length, and only have to answer a sin­gle ques­tion about each. This means that Chi­nese high school stu­dents tak­ing their Eng­lish exam now like­ly face a more chal­leng­ing test in a for­eign lan­guage than Amer­i­cans tak­ing the SAT do in their native tongue. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this page from last year’s exam.”
    • The Cracks in China’s Rise (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “The country’s high mod­ernist eth­ic allowed it to build tens of thou­sands of miles of high-speed rail­way tracks in the course of a cou­ple of decades; but it is also the rea­son why one year’s favored indus­tri­al sec­tors reli­ably seem to turn into next year’s sources of waste and over­pro­duc­tion. The country’s extent of cen­tral­iza­tion cre­ates a giant mar­ket increas­ing­ly unit­ed by shared norms and a com­mon lan­guage; but the extent to which local cul­tures and lan­guages are being flat­tened also con­tributes to a grow­ing sense of alien­ation. None of this should be sur­pris­ing. When coun­tries are in their first spurt of growth, the advan­tages of the mod­el are often evi­dent, and its short­com­ings invis­i­ble. It is when they mature, and the prob­lems they need to solve become increas­ing­ly com­plex, that the draw­backs come into view.”
  7. The Many Jobs of a Reli­gious Leader (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The one real­ly sig­nif­i­cant find­ing for me is that very few mem­bers of the cler­gy report that they went straight into min­istry as a young per­son. In fact, 66% of the folks in the sam­ple of reli­gious lead­ers said that they had a career out­side reli­gion before they became a mem­ber of the cler­gy. I’m not sure if the aver­age per­son knows that — most pas­tors you see didn’t go straight from Bible Col­lege to Divin­i­ty School to full-time min­istry.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 517: being timely for church and some Chi Alpha props

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Being Late to Church Mat­ters (Joe Carter, The Gospel Coali­tion): “If we believe the ser­vice is pri­mar­i­ly about what we can get out of it—uplifting music, an encour­ag­ing ser­mon, fel­low­ship with friends—then arriv­ing late makes sense. After all, we can still catch most of the ‘good stuff.’ But if you under­stand cor­po­rate wor­ship as some­thing we do togeth­er as the body of Christ—if you see it as our col­lec­tive offer­ing of praise to our Creator—then show­ing up late takes on a dif­fer­ent mean­ing entire­ly. We’re not just show­ing up late; we’re miss­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to ful­ly par­tic­i­pate in some­thing the Lord has designed to form us as his peo­ple.”
  2. My expe­ri­ence at the Stan­ford Ver­i­tas Forum: Hen­nessy and Gelsinger on lead­er­ship, ethics and AI (Pedro David Espinoza, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The forum was mod­er­at­ed by Elli Schulz ’25, pres­i­dent of Chi Alpha Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship and vice pres­i­dent of Vox Clara, a stu­dent-run mag­a­zine part­nered with Ver­i­tas. It offered a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect with lead­ers who have shaped the tech world while reflect­ing on iden­ti­ty, pur­pose, ethics, and faith. Elli, whom I’ve known since 2022 through Chi Alpha — one of Stanford’s most diverse and largest Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tions — brought calm con­fi­dence, light­heart­ed humor and sharp ques­tions to guide the hour-long con­ver­sa­tion. She was the ide­al mod­er­a­tor, giv­en her pas­sion for apolo­get­ics and ded­i­ca­tion to faith and work.”
    • Includ­ing entire­ly because it makes Chi Alpha look good.
  3. My Reli­gion is “Some­thing Else” (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “…young peo­ple don’t know what the word Protes­tant means any­more, and that’s going to cause major prob­lems in mea­sur­ing reli­gion going for­ward.… Among the youngest adults in the sam­ple, almost none of them select­ed Protes­tant. In fact, few­er than 10% did so until you get into respon­dents in their late 30s. In con­trast, large num­bers sim­ply said they were Chris­t­ian—at least 20% of those in their late teens and ear­ly 20s.”
  4. The Book That Can Inspire Both a Pope and a Politi­cian (Randy Boy­ago­da, New York Times): “In oth­er words, the two most promi­nent Amer­i­can Catholics [J. D. Vance and Pope Leo] have each been pro­found­ly influ­enced by a 1,600-year-old book about why the Roman Empire was falling apart. What makes it so con­vinc­ing, and why are pow­er­ful peo­ple still turn­ing to it for guid­ance and insight?”
    • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor. Rec­om­mend­ed by the moth­er of an alum­nus.
  5. Stop Ask­ing Kids If They’re Depressed (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “Kids are wild­ly sug­gestible, espe­cial­ly where psy­chi­atric symp­toms are con­cerned. Ask a kid repeat­ed­ly if he might be depressed—how about now? Are you sure?—and he just might decide that he is. Intro­duce ‘gen­der dys­pho­ria’ into a peer group, and a swath of sev­enth grade girls are like­ly to decide they were born in the wrong body. Intro­duce ‘test­ing anx­i­ety’ or ‘social pho­bia,’ or ‘sui­ci­dal­i­ty’ to them, and many teens are like­ly to decide: I have that, too. There is a rea­son clin­i­cians keep anorex­ia patients from social­iz­ing unsu­per­vised in a hos­pi­tal ward; anorex­ia is pro­found­ly social­ly con­ta­gious.”
  6. Cana­da Is Killing Itself (Elaina Plott Cal­abro, The Atlantic): “One day, admin­is­ter­ing a lethal injec­tion to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legit­i­mate as a ton­sil­lec­to­my, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and dia­betes combined—surpassing coun­tries where assist­ed dying has been legal for far longer.”
    • A sad read with some gen­uine­ly shock­ing quotes. Unlocked.
  7. What Kids Told Us About How to Get Them Off Their Phones (Lenore Ske­nazy, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic): “Chil­dren want to meet up in per­son, no screens or super­vi­sion. But because so many par­ents restrict their abil­i­ty to social­ize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hov­er­ing: their phones.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • For­give­ness (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Apos­tles Quick­ly Start Act­ing Pious As They Notice Luke Watch­ing And Tak­ing Notes (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Pana­ma Playlists: “I found the real Spo­ti­fy accounts of celebri­ties, politi­cians, and jour­nal­ists. Many use their real names. With a lit­tle inves­ti­gat­ing, I could say with near-cer­tain­ty: yep, this is that per­son.  I’ve been scrap­ing their playlists for over a year. Some indi­vid­u­als even have a set­ting enabled that dis­plays their last played song. I scraped this con­tin­u­ous­ly, so I know what songs they played, how many times, and when.  The Pana­ma Papers revealed hid­den bank accounts. This reveals hid­den tastes.”

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.

The Four Loves: Friendship

The Four Loves by CS Lewis

Some of us are read­ing through C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves this sum­mer for the Chi Alpha Sum­mer Read­ing Project. Every oth­er week I’ll post some reflec­tions on the read­ings. 

First, I should men­tion that I was sup­posed to post this last week but got dis­tract­ed by some trav­el and lost my sense of which week it was.

Sec­ond, I should men­tion that I post­ed some thoughts on this chap­ter back in 2018 on a pre­vi­ous sum­mer read-through. My obser­va­tions here are slight­ly dif­fer­ent, so con­sid­er check­ing out that pre­vi­ous post (which includes a humor­ous video).

Today we’re going to look at Lewis’s thoughts on friend­ship (phil­ia / φιλία). This chap­ter is full of wis­dom, and it also includes some thoughts that might push you a bit. If you haven’t read it (or if you did and are hun­gry for more), the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle chan­nel has Lewis giv­ing the lec­ture upon which this chap­ter is based. The tran­script of his speech is also avail­able. 

With the pre­am­ble out of the way, here are some thoughts from this read­ing:

Some of the most strik­ing insights in this chap­ter revolve around the unique nature of friend­ship. Unlike oth­er forms of love, friend­ship is com­plete­ly option­al and inher­ent­ly cen­tered on com­mon inter­ests. As Lewis says:

Friend­ship aris­es out of mere Com­pan­ion­ship when two or more of the com­pan­ions dis­cov­er that they have in com­mon some insight or inter­est or even taste which the oth­ers do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique trea­sure (or bur­den). The typ­i­cal expres­sion of open­ing Friend­ship would be some­thing like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’

It can be almost any­thing that trig­gers a friend­ship: a hob­by, a fan­dom, a shared expe­ri­ence, or even a shared annoy­ance. Mov­ing from acquain­tance­ship to friend­ship usu­al­ly requires dis­cov­er­ing some com­mon­al­i­ty. Grasp­ing this explains why some peo­ple strug­gle to make friends (as opposed to com­pan­ions):

That is why those pathet­ic peo­ple who simply“want friends” can nev­er make any. The very con­di­tion of hav­ing Friends is that we should want some­thing else besides Friends. Where the truth­ful answer to the ques­tion Do you see the same truth? would be “I see noth­ing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friend­ship can arise though Affec­tion of course may. There would be noth­ing for the Friend­ship to be about; and Friend­ship must be about some­thing, even if it were only an enthu­si­asm for domi­noes or white mice. Those who have noth­ing can share noth­ing; those who are going nowhere can have no fel­low-trav­ellers.

And so if you strug­gle with forg­ing friend­ships, find some­thing you care about and look for some­one who also cares about that thing.

This sug­gests that if you are part of Chi Alpha at Stan­ford, then you’re well-poised to devel­op great friends. You’ve already got your faith in com­mon, and on top of that you both have the expe­ri­ence of being a stu­dent at Stan­ford, and in addi­tion you have the expe­ri­ence of Chi Alpha. That may already be enough to trig­ger a friend­ship, and if you add to that mix even just one more thing like a cer­tain sport or a spe­cif­ic fan­dom or a shared sense of humor then the poten­tial for a sig­nif­i­cant friend­ship is quite high. 

There are, how­ev­er, bar­ri­ers. Lewis at one point observes that if the world ever makes “pri­va­cy and unplanned leisure impos­si­ble” then we will cre­ate a world “where all are Com­pan­ions and none are Friends.”

That is a keen insight, and it leads me to make this sor­row­ful obser­va­tion: Stan­ford stu­dents, you are play­ing on hard mode. The way we use our phones makes moments of true pri­va­cy hard­er and hard­er to find (social media is often a blight, and the way some of you share your loca­tions with each oth­er is a source of much need­less dra­ma), and the typ­i­cal Stan­ford sched­ule means that unplanned leisure is often noth­ing more than a dream. If you want to deep­en your friend­ships, rebel against the tyran­ny of your phone and also against the insane demands Stan­ford cul­ture puts upon your time.

Despite these chal­lenges, be encour­aged! As Lewis reminds us:

…we think we have cho­sen our peers. In real­i­ty, a few years’ dif­fer­ence in the dates of our births, a few more miles between cer­tain hous­es, the choice of one uni­ver­si­ty instead of anoth­er, post­ing to dif­fer­ent reg­i­ments, the acci­dent of a top­ic being raised or not raised at a first meet­ing any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Chris­t­ian, there are, strict­ly speak­ing, no chances. A secret Mas­ter of the Cer­e­monies has been at work. Christ, who said to the dis­ci­ples “Ye have not cho­sen me, but I have cho­sen you,” can tru­ly say to every group of Chris­t­ian friends “You have not cho­sen one anoth­er but I have cho­sen you for one anoth­er.”

So if you lack friend­ships, pray that God opens your eyes to see that poten­tial friends are already around you, and fur­ther pray that He bless­es you with self-aware­ness and wis­dom as you build those rela­tion­ships.

And if you have friends, thank God for them and be care­ful to con­tin­ue cul­ti­vat­ing those rela­tion­ships.

In either case, slow down (cre­ate space for unplanned leisure) and try to relate to your phones and social media in such a way that you’ve got moments of pri­va­cy.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 516: God in history & confused physicists

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Did God Favor France? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[Joan of Arc’s] sto­ry is one of the most exten­sive­ly doc­u­ment­ed cas­es of a mirac­u­lous-seem­ing inter­ven­tion into sec­u­lar his­to­ry, cal­cu­lat­ed to baf­fle, fas­ci­nate and even charm like almost noth­ing else in West­ern his­to­ry. Every­thing in the sto­ry sounds like a pious leg­end con­fab­u­lat­ed cen­turies after the fact. A peas­ant girl with zero polit­i­cal or mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence shows up at a roy­al court, announces a divine mis­sion and makes a series of prophe­cies about what God wants for France that she con­sis­tent­ly ful­fills — a ful­fill­ment that requires not mere­ly some for­tu­nate hap­pen­stance, but her tak­ing com­mand of a medieval army and win­ning an imme­di­ate series of vic­to­ries over an intim­i­dat­ing adver­sary with Alexan­drine or Napoleon­ic skill.”
    • Worth a pon­der.
  2. Physi­cists dis­agree wild­ly on what quan­tum mechan­ics says about real­i­ty, Nature sur­vey shows (Eliz­a­beth Gib­ney, Nature): “Nature asked researchers what they thought was the best inter­pre­ta­tion of quan­tum phe­nom­e­na and inter­ac­tions — that is, their favourite of the var­i­ous attempts sci­en­tists have made to relate the math­e­mat­ics of the the­o­ry to the real world. The largest chunk of respons­es, 36%, favoured the Copen­hagen inter­pre­ta­tion — a prac­ti­cal and often-taught approach. But the sur­vey also showed that sev­er­al, more rad­i­cal, view­points have a healthy fol­low­ing. Asked about their con­fi­dence in their answer, only 24% of respon­dents thought their favoured inter­pre­ta­tion was cor­rect; oth­ers con­sid­ered it mere­ly ade­quate or a use­ful tool in some cir­cum­stances. What’s more, some sci­en­tists who seemed to be in the same camp didn’t give the same answers to fol­low-up ques­tions, sug­gest­ing incon­sis­tent or dis­parate under­stand­ings of the inter­pre­ta­tion they chose.”
  3. How a Chris­t­ian col­lege min­istry glo­ri­fied a sex offend­er and enabled him to keep abus­ing stu­dents (Mike Hix­en­baugh, NBC News): “The pas­tors who shep­herd­ed hun­dreds of high school and col­lege stu­dents to Savala’s home were part of Chi Alpha, a Chris­t­ian min­istry that evan­ge­lizes on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es. Stu­dents seek out Chi Alpha to con­nect with God and each oth­er, through small Bible stud­ies and rol­lick­ing wor­ship ser­vices — and, for more than 30 years, through Savala. Gen­er­a­tions of Chi Alpha lead­ers hailed him as a spir­i­tu­al savant who could answer life’s deep­est mys­ter­ies.”
    • Heart­break­ing. I’ve post­ed about this scan­dal in Texas before (in oth­er words, this is the same scan­dal from a few years ago with addi­tion­al report­ing). Now that it is being cov­ered on NBC the high­er-qual­i­ty jour­nal­ism is uncov­er­ing even more trag­ic details.
  4. Put Down the Sho­far (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “You’re like­ly famil­iar with sho­fars blown in pub­lic, Seder meals for Passover, and cir­cum­ci­sion for baby boys. But as com­mon and well-intend­ed as these may be, I want to explain why I told my stu­dent that, yes, his house church was wrong—or at least, mis­guid­ed.”
    • A the­o­log­i­cal­ly rich arti­cle.
  5. The Sim­ple Truth About the War in Gaza (Cole­man Hugh­es, The Free Press): “Amid these devel­op­ments, it may seem car­toon­ish, even obscene, to say that in the war between Israel and Hamas, Israel is the good guy. But it’s the truth. And it’s a truth that’s incred­i­bly easy to for­get amid the day-to-day cov­er­age of this ter­ri­ble war.… Israel’s goal is to live in peace with its neigh­bors. Through­out its 77-year his­to­ry, it has agreed to half a dozen peace deals with the Pales­tini­ans. It vol­un­tar­i­ly left Gaza in 2005. If it had any inter­est in wip­ing Gaza off the map, it could have done so any time in the last sev­er­al decades.”
  6. How the Elite Changed Its Mind on Chris­tian­i­ty (Emma Camp, Rea­son): “As the decline in reli­gious atten­dance has slowed, the past few years have also seen a clear rise in the sta­tus of reli­gion. It’s becom­ing more and more social­ly accept­able to be reli­gious in elite intel­lec­tu­al spaces—something that could have a real impact on how reli­gion is per­ceived by every­one else.… Reli­gion became cool again among the edu­cat­ed elite once it gained an asso­ci­a­tion with good aes­thet­ics, high art, and sacred music—not Bush-era Repub­li­can soft theoc­ra­cy.  Today, one can belong to the ideas-mak­ing class—an aspir­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al or artist—and still be reli­gious, so long as one steers clear of evan­gel­i­cal kitsch. Whether or not a real reli­gious revival is under­way in Amer­i­can pub­lic life, one thing is clear: The cool kids aren’t the smug, stri­dent athe­ists anymore—they’re the Chris­tians.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing, although it reminds me I need to write that essay I’ve been mulling over defend­ing low-church Protes­tantism as the best and most authen­tic expres­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty.
  7. Influ­encer Mis­sion­ar­ies (Lau­ren Jack­son, New York Times): “Church­es are turn­ing to the inter­net to reach new audi­ences. Evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors are bring­ing their famous­ly high-pro­duc­tion ser­mons into ver­ti­cal video. The Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints is pre­sent­ing a diverse, younger image to its 1.4 mil­lion Insta­gram fol­low­ers.”
    • A short arti­cle, not super-infor­ma­tive. Most­ly inter­est­ing because of the trend reach­ing the point that the Times is tak­ing note of it. Also because of some of the small vignettes: “Per­haps that explains the celebri­ty of Father Rafael Capo, 57, a body­build­ing priest in Mia­mi who fus­es fit­ness with faith for his 112,000 Insta­gram fol­low­ers. He often posts pho­tos of him­self lift­ing weights and con­se­crat­ing com­mu­nion.”

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 515: go deep in community, plus missionaries with shotguns

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Com­pound Inter­est in an Atten­tion Econ­o­my (Austin Car­ty, Front Porch Repub­lic): “The pre­vail­ing log­ic of twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can cul­ture sug­gests that the pur­suit of new expe­ri­ence is, in and of itself, a nec­es­sary form of cap­i­tal with­out which one is ipso fac­to barred from the pos­si­bil­i­ty of liv­ing a rich life. But my own expe­ri­ence, cor­rob­o­rat­ed by many of the peo­ple I’ve talked with, sug­gests that the pur­suit of new expe­ri­ence is, just as often as not, the cause of our despair not the cure; for to keep shift­ing atten­tion from one thing to the next is almost always to drain one’s spir­i­tu­al and men­tal and emo­tion­al bank account, not to deliv­er a mean­ing­ful return. Mean­while, con­tra pop­u­lar opin­ion, there is some­thing life-giv­ing about root­ing one­self in a sin­gle community—about invest­ing our­selves in a mutu­al fund, so to speak—and watch­ing the invest­ment slow­ly grow at com­pound inter­est.”
  2. ‘A com­put­er, a radio, a drone and a shot­gun’: how mis­sion­ar­ies are reach­ing out to Brazil’s iso­lat­ed peo­ples (John Reid and Daniel Biaset­to, The Guardian): “Mis­sion­ary activ­i­ty now threat­ens 13 of the 29 iso­lat­ed peo­ples that Brazil offi­cial­ly recog­nis­es as defin­i­tive­ly con­firmed, accord­ing to the fed­er­al prosecutor’s office.”
    • This was actu­al­ly a pret­ty encour­ag­ing arti­cle over­all, despite the use of lan­guage like “threat­ens.”
  3. Trend­ing thoughts about Gaza:
    • The Price of Flour Shows the Hunger Cri­sis in Gaza (Amit Segal, The Free Press): “Dis­cussing these find­ings, The Free Press’s Haviv Ret­tig Gur high­light­ed Spitzer’s key chal­lenge in con­vinc­ing Israelis that Gaza is indeed fac­ing a hunger cri­sis: ‘It’s hard to con­vince Israelis of that because lit­er­al­ly every­thing said to them for 22 months on this top­ic has been a fic­tion.’ ”
    • Is Gaza Starv­ing? Search­ing for the Truth in an Infor­ma­tion War. (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Free Press): “Over the years, Israelis have been accused of fake mas­sacres and rapes. The country’s actions are lied about almost dai­ly by peo­ple describ­ing them­selves as jour­nal­ists, ana­lysts, and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Unit­ed Nations, often using sta­tis­tics that are them­selves untrue. For peo­ple here in Israel, the con­stant bar­rage of libel—like the more lit­er­al bar­rages of rockets—is sim­ply a fact of life. After years of this, aver­age Israelis do what peo­ple do when con­front­ed with lunatics on the New York sub­way: They tune it out.… a senior fig­ure in the Israeli mil­i­tary told one of my col­leagues at the end of last week that while there isn’t mass star­va­tion as claimed by pro-Hamas pro­pa­gan­da, Gaza real­ly is on the brink this time.”
    • How Israel’s War Became Unjust (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…Israel has made a strate­gic choice, try­ing to sep­a­rate food dis­tri­b­u­tion from a sys­tem that it argues Hamas was exploit­ing for its own pur­pos­es. But if your strate­gic choice leads to chil­dren dying of star­va­tion when the food is avail­able to feed them, then a civ­i­lized nation has to make a dif­fer­ent choice — even if that makes things eas­i­er for its ene­mies to some degree.”
  4. Till Words Do Us Part (Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dis­patch): “Clas­si­cal­ly, the mar­riage vows are not about the par­tic­u­lar cou­ple stand­ing at the altar—they’re about the insti­tu­tion the cou­ple is choos­ing to enter. Clas­si­cal vows (for bet­ter, for worse, etc) have last­ed with only minor revi­sions for a thou­sand years. They are intend­ed to suit every cou­ple, uncus­tomized, and they enu­mer­ate the promis­es that must be kept for a mar­riage to be a mar­riage. But cus­tomized vows fre­quent­ly min­gle seri­ous promis­es with ones that can­not or should not be kept.”
  5. The Nat­ur­al Law Is Not Enough. The Nat­ur­al Law Is All We Have. (Andrew T. Walk­er, Pub­lic Dis­course): “…any attempt to con­struct a moral and polit­i­cal order must grap­ple with two com­pet­ing truths: the ima­go Dei makes moral rea­son­ing pos­si­ble, but orig­i­nal sin ensures that moral rea­son­ing will often be con­test­ed, sup­pressed, cor­rupt­ed, or ignored. This is the para­dox of our moment. The nat­ur­al law is writ­ten on every heart (Romans 2:15), but hearts are wound­ed and rea­son cloud­ed. We have access to moral truth, but not con­sen­sus. Hence, the nat­ur­al law is not enough. But it is still the best we have.”
  6. Desider­a­ta for a Protes­tant The­ol­o­gy of the Body (Sub­stack): “But I think there are, in fact, dis­tinc­tive­ly Protes­tant ways to approach the ques­tion of sex­u­al­i­ty and repro­duc­tion- and I sus­pect some of the dearth of con­ver­sa­tion about these top­ics reflects a cer­tain Protes­tant sen­si­bil­i­ty. It also reflects the bound­aries of what might be pos­si­ble with a Protes­tant view. So here are a few ‘desider­a­ta’- a fan­cy way of say­ing ‘things we ought to con­sid­er’, in order to build a Protes­tant the­ol­o­gy of the body.”
    • The author is a the­olo­gian at Gor­don-Con­well.
  7. How the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing Helped Make Amer­i­ca (Thomas Kidd, The Dis­patch): “Amer­i­cans might assume that the height of their nation’s reli­gious com­mit­ment was around its Found­ing. Some like­wise fig­ure that spir­i­tu­al­ly, it’s been going down­hill ever since. But in many ways, Amer­i­ca became increas­ing­ly reli­gious through the first half of the 19th cen­tu­ry.”
    • Kidd is one of the great­est liv­ing evan­gel­i­cal his­to­ri­ans.

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 514: Jephthah, Europe, and the Enchanted Broccoli Forest

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Jesus Is the Key to All Scrip­ture (Peter Lei­thart, First Things): “We’re incred­u­lous. ‘All things’ in Scrip­ture are ful­filled in him? Real­ly? Every­thing? Ehud thrust­ing a sword into obese Eglon? Jael crack­ing Sisera’s skull with a tent peg? David clip­ping and heap­ing up two hun­dred Philis­tine fore­skins? Jehu glee­ful­ly slaugh­ter­ing sons of Ahab? We dodge and backpedal, pro­tect­ing Jesus from his hermeneu­ti­cal excess. ‘Every episode and per­son con­tributes to the sto­ry of Jesus,’ we say. ‘But not every sin­gle per­son or event is direct­ly about Jesus.’ There’s some­thing to that, but it’s often a cop-out. And it keeps us from grasp­ing the height and depth of Jesus’s glo­ry. Jeph­thah is a test case.”
    • An engag­ing arti­cle with strong insights about Jeph­thah’s sto­ry.
  2. I Once Thought Euro­peans Lived as Well as Amer­i­cans. Not Any­more. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “I was shocked recent­ly to learn that more Euro­peans die of heat death—largely due to lack of air-conditioning—than Amer­i­cans die from gun­shot wounds. I’m not say­ing Amer­i­ca isn’t more dan­ger­ous in cer­tain ways: We have high­er non-gun mur­der rates and per­ilous weath­er pat­terns, among oth­er prob­lems. But it turns out Euro­pean bureau­cra­cy is lit­er­al­ly dead­ly.… Cir­ca 2025, my sub­jec­tive judg­ment is that Amer­i­can liv­ing stan­dards are 20 to 30 per­cent high­er than those in West­ern Europe. That dif­fer­ence is like­ly to grow.”
  3. Uni­ver­si­ty sus­pends EBF, Kairos after Title VI inves­ti­ga­tions (Francesca Pin­ney, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Fol­low­ing stu­dent com­plaints to Stanford’s Title VI Office, the Uni­ver­si­ty deter­mined that both hous­es vio­lat­ed Title VI, the fed­er­al law that pro­hibits harass­ment and dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race, col­or or nation­al ori­gin in edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions.”
    • The details are kind of wild and may shock you if you’re not used to Stan­ford rhetoric. One stu­dent com­ment­ed, “Tbh, that’s what most of NSO and my first quar­ter at Stan­ford felt like, and I was def­i­nite­ly told sim­i­lar things by folks in my dorm, etc.”
  4. Some reflec­tions on exer­cise:
    • Don’t Skip Leg Day or the Lord’s Day (Sean DeMars, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Exer­cise pre­vents me from falling into two seri­ous sins: sloth and idol­a­try. When I stop car­ing about my body, I drift toward pas­siv­i­ty and excuse-mak­ing, and I become sloth­ful. When I over­pri­or­i­tize fit­ness, I start build­ing my iden­ti­ty around per­for­mance or image, which is a form of idol­a­try. But when fit­ness is teth­ered to call­ing and is viewed as fuel for long-term min­istry, exer­cise finds its right­ful place. It’s not ulti­mate, but it’s impor­tant. The heart­beat of this lit­tle the­ol­o­gy of exer­cise is that redeemed bod­ies should be used in the ser­vice of joy, love, and mis­sion.”
    • How Exer­cise Fights Anx­i­ety and Depres­sion (Erik Vance, New York Times): “Decades of research have estab­lished that exer­cise has a pos­i­tive effect on men­tal health. In stud­ies of patients with mild to mod­er­ate depres­sion, for exam­ple, a wide range of exer­cise reg­i­mens has been shown to be as effec­tive as med­ica­tions like SSRIs (though the best results gen­er­al­ly involve a com­bi­na­tion of the two).”
  5. Inclu­siv­i­ty In Health­care Should Not Be Val­ued Above Our Para­mount Man­date: First, Do No Harm (Jan­havi Nilekani, Sub­stack): “In the spring of 2022, a 50-year-old grand­fa­ther in North Car­oli­na decid­ed that he want­ed his daughter’s new­born to suck­le at his nip­ple.… Because this par­tic­u­lar man iden­ti­fied as a trans­gen­der woman, doc­tors and aca­d­e­mics from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty whole­heart­ed­ly sup­port­ed his ‘unique desire’. Indeed, they pub­lished a research paper in Breast­feed­ing Med­i­cine, pro­vid­ing details of the cock­tail of hor­mones and drugs they used. With these, he was able to pro­duce secre­tions, that were admin­is­tered to his grand­child. The paper does not have a sin­gle sen­tence about the poten­tial impact on the grand­child. It is an unimag­in­able breach of ethics. An adult male’s desire to be affirmed as a woman should nev­er be met by feed­ing an exper­i­men­tal drug-infused sub­stance to new­borns with no capac­i­ty to con­sent.… Such exper­i­ments are pos­si­ble only because med­i­cine, in the push towards inclu­siv­i­ty, is for­get­ting our own core val­ue: first, do no harm.”
    • Shar­ing most­ly for the shock­ing intro­duc­to­ry sto­ry. The entire thing is long and prob­a­bly does not cov­er new ground for reg­u­lar read­ers. It is well-argued, though.
  6. The Per­verse Eco­nom­ics of Assist­ed Sui­cide (Louise Per­ry, New York Times): “There is a very clear prob­lem with assist­ed sui­cide in its new guise: The state, with its almighty pow­er, is tasked with both pay­ing for the sup­port of the old and dis­abled and reg­u­lat­ing their dying.… organs of the state that are tasked with solv­ing an impos­si­ble finan­cial prob­lem — how to pay for more old peo­ple with less mon­ey — will be inex­orably tugged toward what looks to a mind­less bureau­cra­cy like a ‘solu­tion.’ ”
  7. Rea­son, Rev­e­la­tion, and Rev­o­lu­tion (Joseph Locon­te, The Dis­patch): “Colo­nial assump­tions about nat­ur­al rights, human equal­i­ty, reli­gious lib­er­ty, gov­ern­ment by con­sent, the right of rev­o­lu­tion: Each drew heav­i­ly from Locke’s writ­ings, which were con­sid­ered manda­to­ry read­ing for edu­cat­ed Amer­i­cans. As we’ll see, the colonists were heirs of the Lock­ean tra­di­tion. As a result, free­dom, rea­son, and rev­e­la­tion formed a con­cep­tu­al trin­i­ty in the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. The pow­er­ful alliance of these ideas helps to explain the aston­ish­ing and endur­ing influ­ence of the Amer­i­can exam­ple. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, non­sense talk about the mean­ing and legit­i­ma­cy of the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment is almost as ingrained in the New Right as in the pro­gres­sive left.”
    • A strong defense of Locke against his crit­ics on the right. The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor and a Chris­t­ian pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al.

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 513: elite colleges, pathologizing personality, and the fastest woman in the world

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Elite Col­leges Have Found a New Virtue for Appli­cants to Fake (Alex Bronzi­ni-Vender, New York Times): “[There is] a new ques­tion: ‘Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tion or encoun­tered some­one with an opin­ion or per­spec­tive that was dif­fer­ent from your own. How did you find com­mon ground?’ It’s known as the dis­agree­ment ques­tion, and since the stu­dent encamp­ments of spring 2024 and the Amer­i­can right’s attacks on uni­ver­si­ties, a grow­ing num­ber of elite col­leges have added it to their appli­ca­tions. Car­o­line Kop­pel­man, a pri­vate admis­sions con­sul­tant, has called it the ‘hot new it girl’ of col­lege essays. There’s no evi­dence that civil­i­ty mania will improve cam­pus dis­course, but it seems poised to widen the inequal­i­ties that already plague hyper­s­e­lec­tive col­lege admis­sions. The trou­ble is that the dis­agree­ment ques­tion — like much of the appli­ca­tion process — isn’t built for hon­esty.”
  2. Nobody Has a Per­son­al­i­ty Any­more (Freya India, The Free Press): “Today, every per­son­al­i­ty trait is seen as a prob­lem to be solved. Any­thing too human—every habit, every eccen­tric­i­ty, every feel­ing that’s too strong—has to be labeled and explained. Ther­a­py-speak has tak­en over our lan­guage. It is ruin­ing how we talk about romance and rela­tion­ships, nar­row­ing how we think about hurt and suf­fer­ing, and now, we are los­ing the words for who we are. Nobody has a per­son­al­i­ty any­more.… This is part of a deep­er instinct in mod­ern life to explain everything—psychologically, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly. Every­thing about us is caused, cat­e­go­rized, and can be cor­rect­ed. We talk in the­o­ries, frame­works, sys­tems, struc­tures, dri­ves, moti­va­tions, and mech­a­nisms. But in exchange for expla­na­tion, we lost mys­tery, romance, and late­ly, our­selves.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Huck­abee threat­ens to declare Israel does not wel­come Chris­tians, as visa row blows open (Lazar Berman, Times of Israel): “Giv­en Huckabee’s long­stand­ing sup­port for Israel and close ties with the cur­rent gov­ern­ment in par­tic­u­lar, the rhetoric in his let­ter rep­re­sent­ed a shock­ing­ly quick dete­ri­o­ra­tion. But the issue at hand — the abil­i­ty of Chris­t­ian groups to tour Israel — is close to Huckabee’s heart, giv­en that he has led count­less such trips as an evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor over the past half a cen­tu­ry.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent. Quite inter­est­ing.
  4. My health and my pol­i­tics walk into a doctor’s office… (Kim Fell­ner, New York Times): “The vision of a diverse, equi­table and inclu­sive democ­ra­cy that seems the best of Amer­i­ca to me and my com­mu­ni­ty is locked in an exis­ten­tial bat­tle with a MAGA counter-vision that ele­vates White­ness and Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, and that seems to be col­o­niz­ing insti­tu­tions and cul­ture at warp speed. I did not antic­i­pate, how­ev­er, that the per­son­al and the polit­i­cal would col­lide in my doctor’s office.… Over a series of writ­ten and in-per­son con­ver­sa­tions, we have been shar­ing some of the tenets of our respec­tive faiths and the impli­ca­tions for how we nav­i­gate the world. She and I have sharply diver­gent views about when life begins and what hap­pens after we die. She believes that the only true sal­va­tion lies in accept­ing Jesus as one’s sav­ior.”
  5. A Stark Reminder That Sex Dif­fer­ences Mat­ter in Elite Sport (James Smoli­ga, Per­sua­sion): “The goal was for Kipye­gon to become the first woman ever to run a sub‑4 minute mile. Nike set her up with the very best con­di­tions that any ath­lete could ever expect. Kipye­gon ran a mile in 4:06—a remark­able per­for­mance by any mea­sure, and a per­son­al best, but well short of the sub‑4 minute goal. While Kipye­gon wasn’t direct­ly rac­ing her pac­ers, they were there to pull her to a time that hun­dreds of male ath­letes have already achieved. Rather than charg­ing down the final straight­away alone, leav­ing the best women in her wake, as she so often does, we saw Kipye­gon strain­ing to hang on behind a group of male run­ners who weren’t even near their lim­it, as they turned around to cheer her on. This race mat­ters because it offered some­thing exceed­ing­ly rare: an hon­est, direct com­par­i­son of male and female per­for­mance at the high­est lev­el.”
  6. Israeli Researcher Says Stan­ford Shunned and Sab­o­taged Him After Hamas Attack (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “[For­mer IDF offi­cer] Laps alleges that the research assis­tant in the Dan­ny Chou Lab told Laps dur­ing their first inter­ac­tion on his first day nev­er to speak to her. She alleged­ly delayed his orders for lab equip­ment, made him sit else­where at lunch, and reas­signed her cus­to­di­al duties to him. Col­leagues fol­lowed her lead, ostra­ciz­ing him from the lab com­mu­ni­ty, the suit claims. The most explo­sive alle­ga­tion is that the same research assis­tant, Ter­ra Lin, tam­pered with Laps’s research.”
  7. What YouTube Can’t Teach Stu­dents About Jesus (Dylan Muss­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘Who (or what) has shaped your faith the most?’ As a cam­pus min­is­ter, I have asked this ques­tion to many col­lege stu­dents over the years. Late­ly, I have noticed a shift in their answers.  This past fall, I sat across from Luke—a fresh­man at Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty. We were chat­ting over tacos when I posed the ques­tion. I watched the gears spin in his head. Would it be a church from back home? A great book? An old­er men­tor who dis­ci­pled him? Maybe his par­ents? He leaned back. ‘Youtube.’ I stared blankly, try­ing my best not to show my sur­prise.”
    • The author leads the Nav­i­ga­tors at Van­der­bilt.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The Joy of Cook­ing Your Sprite (Jenée Desmond-Har­ris, Slate): “After a day walk­ing around the dusty grounds, rid­ing a giant swing, and dress­ing up for old-timey pho­tos, we made it back to the car exhaust­ed and thirsty. And in the back seat (I don’t know if it had been pur­chased as part of post-out­ing lunch or was just rolling around back there) was a six-pack of Sprite that had been, well, cook­ing all day. We each cracked one open, and that’s when I real­ized some­thing impor­tant was hap­pen­ing. It was so good! The soda was hot but some­how still refresh­ing. The sweet­ness was soft­ened and the bub­bles felt big­ger and more luxurious—not like the sharp, sneeze-trig­ger­ing ones you get when it’s cold. We locked eyes and smiled mis­chie­vous­ly. It felt rebel­lious (look, we were very shel­tered kids) and wild­ly inno­v­a­tive. ‘Cooked Sprite’ was born.” 
  • What Is ‘Aura Farm­ing’? This Tween Will Show You. (Ben­jamin Hoff­man, New York Times): “On Tues­day, the gov­ern­ment in Riau, cit­ing the impact of the video and the fact that he had been ‘inspir­ing local kids to embrace and pre­serve their tra­di­tions,’ named Dika as a tourism ambas­sador for the province, and its gov­er­nor, Abdul Wahid, award­ed him a schol­ar­ship for 20 mil­lion rupi­ah (around $1,200) for his edu­ca­tion. Dika also per­formed a ren­di­tion of his dance along with Gov­er­nor Wahid and oth­er offi­cials.”

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.