Author: Glen

Thoughts on This Fourth of July

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.

When I laid out the read­ing sched­ule for The Four Loves, I did­n’t real­ize that we would read Lewis’ remarks on patri­o­tism on the fourth of July. How delight­ful!

I’ve actu­al­ly writ­ten about this chap­ter of The Four Loves before, so I’ll take a slight­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion today.

Lewis cel­e­brates the love of coun­try as one of the most basic of loves. He points out that the love of your nation is an indis­pens­able part of lov­ing all of human­i­ty.

As the fam­i­ly offers us the first step beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond fam­i­ly self­ish­ness.… those who do not love the fel­low-vil­lagers or the fel­low-towns­men whom they have seen are not like­ly to have got very far towards lov­ing ‘Man’ whom they have not.

This wor­ries some peo­ple, because does­n’t lov­ing your coun­try lead to a dis­like of oth­ers? Not at all! One of the virtues of healthy patri­o­tism is that it allows you to love and respect peo­ple from oth­er nations.

[This kind of patri­o­tism] becomes mil­i­tant only to pro­tect what it loves. In any mind which has a pen­ny­worth of imag­i­na­tion it pro­duces a good atti­tude towards for­eign­ers. How can I love my home with­out com­ing to realise that oth­er men, no less right­ly, love theirs? Once you have realised that the French­men like cafe com­plet just as we like bacon and eggs—why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make every­where else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were dif­fer­ent.

By con­trast, a dis­dain for your own nation will lead to dis­dain for oth­ers. Part of cel­e­brat­ing diver­si­ty is real­iz­ing that you con­tribute to it. Your cul­ture can enrich a for­eign­er just as much as their cul­ture can enrich you, and so to deny them by pre­tend­ing there is noth­ing good about your cul­ture is cru­el.

This does­n’t mean that you need to ignore the flaws of your nation. Lewis devotes sev­er­al pages in this chap­ter to help­ing peo­ple sort through the fact that “the actu­al his­to­ry of every coun­try is full of shab­by and even shame­ful things.” Much of what he says reminds me of the way G.K. Chester­ton talked about patri­o­tism in Ortho­doxy chap­ter 5, “The Flag of This World.” Chesterton’s point is that patri­ots see the flaws of their nation and grieve them. It is because peo­ple love their nation that they want to fix it.

The fol­low­ing from the afore­men­tioned Chester­ton chap­ter is one of my favorite quotes of all time — I beg you to read through it slow­ly.

Let us sup­pose we are con­front­ed with a des­per­ate thing—say Pim­li­co [Glen’s note: Pim­li­co is part of Lon­don]. If we think what is real­ly best for Pim­li­co we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mys­tic and the arbi­trary. It is not enough for a man to dis­ap­prove of Pim­li­co: in that case he will mere­ly cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, cer­tain­ly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pim­li­co: for then it will remain Pim­li­co, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for some­body to love Pim­li­co: to love it with a tran­scen­den­tal tie and with­out any earth­ly rea­son. If there arose a man who loved Pim­li­co, then Pim­li­co would rise into ivory tow­ers and gold­en pin­na­cles; Pim­li­co would attire her­self as a woman does when she is loved. For dec­o­ra­tion is not giv­en to hide hor­ri­ble things: but to dec­o­rate things already adorable. A moth­er does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly with­out it. A lover does not give a girl a neck­lace to hide her neck. If men loved Pim­li­co as moth­ers love chil­dren, arbi­trar­i­ly, because it is THEIRS, Pim­li­co in a year or two might be fair­er than Flo­rence. Some read­ers will say that this is a mere fan­ta­sy. I answer that this is the actu­al his­to­ry of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the dark­est roots of civ­i­liza­tion and you will find them knot­ted round some sacred stone or encir­cling some sacred well. Peo­ple first paid hon­our to a spot and after­wards gained glo­ry for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

When a lot of us tru­ly, sin­cere­ly, and earnest­ly love Amer­i­ca over time, our love (and the efforts that spring from it) will trans­form Amer­i­ca. That’s what has hap­pened in the past, and God will­ing it will con­tin­ue into the future.

Lewis writes about more than patri­o­tism in this chap­ter, and I com­mend the rest of it to you. But today is the Fourth of July, and love of nation seemed like the right theme to focus on. So from me, from C.S. Lewis, and from G.K. Chester­ton: hap­py Inde­pen­dence Day!

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 510: gambling, persecution, and free will

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. Online Sports Gam­bling and Col­lege Stu­dents: A Chris­t­ian Response to a Grow­ing Indus­try (Kim­ber­ley Reeve and Jared Pincin, Chris­t­ian High­er Edu­ca­tion): “Because the Bible does not offer direct guid­ance on the top­ic of gam­bling, Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions take dif­fer­ing posi­tions.… The com­mon thread across these tra­di­tions is that there is a point where gam­bling becomes moral­ly imper­mis­si­ble.”
    • Relat­ed: How to Rein in Run­away Sports Bet­ting (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “A good reg­u­la­to­ry response is sim­ple: ban all win lim­its. Let win­ners win. Bet­tors don’t like lim­its on win­nings. They are obvi­ous­ly unfair. They are also clear­ly a key source of prof­its for com­pa­nies.… Sec­ond­ly, there should be lim­its on how much an indi­vid­ual can lose on a web­site. Once an indi­vid­ual has lost a cer­tain amount of mon­ey, bet­ting web­sites should be required to shut down their account. The harms of gam­bling are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly caused by big-losers, and gam­bling com­pa­nies can iden­ti­fy those big losers and pro­tect them. They don’t do this because they make mon­ey when losers lose.… So no lim­its for win­ning, lim­its for los­ing is a pret­ty rea­son­able reg­u­la­to­ry approach. Win­ners don’t threat­en seri­ous social harms. Losers do. Uncap­ping win­ners and pro­tect­ing losers will also dra­mat­i­cal­ly wors­en the bal­ance sheet of gam­bling sites, forc­ing them to charge high­er spreads on bets, which will deter many gam­blers.”
  2. As Chris­tians Are Slaugh­tered, the World Looks Away (Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press): “The world should have seen it com­ing. Since 2009, Islamists in north­ern Nige­ria have destroyed over 18,000 church­es and, through­out the coun­try, have mur­dered over 50,000 Chris­tians. A fur­ther 5 mil­lion Chris­tians have been dis­placed with­in the coun­try, accord­ing to a 2023 Vat­i­can report.… If West­ern media reports on the per­se­cu­tion at all, it typ­i­cal­ly char­ac­ter­izes it as land dis­putes between neigh­bor­ing eth­nic groups. For instance, after the atroc­i­ties at Yel­wa­ta, the BBC report­ed: ‘The author­i­ties have not blamed any group, but it is safe to assume that there are lots of vic­tims on both sides, as any attack usu­al­ly leads to revenge and then a cycle of vio­lence.’ But where is the evi­dence that Chris­tians are killing Fulani Mus­lims by the hun­dreds, shout­ing ‘Christ is king’ as they hack peo­ple of oth­er faiths to death?”
  3. Pen­te­costals Keep Grow­ing: What the Assem­blies of God’s 2024 Report Shows About the Spir­it-Filled Move­ment (Ed Stet­zer and Todd Kor­pi, Church­Lead­ers): “The AG in the Unit­ed States is a part of the World Assem­blies of God Fel­low­ship (WAGF), which togeth­er makes up one of the largest Protes­tant bod­ies on the plan­et with over 85 mil­lion adher­ents. The WAGF is now larg­er than the Angli­can com­mu­nion, which is often cit­ed as the third-largest Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion. Instead, the WAGF is itself now the third-largest Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tion­al tra­di­tion.”
    • Ed Stet­zer is a professor/dean at the Tal­bot School of The­ol­o­gy, and Todd Kor­pi is a pro­fes­sor at Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. The Assem­blies of God is, of course, the spon­sor of Chi Alpha and the group with which I am ordained.
  4. When Women Are Rad­i­cal­ized (Claire Lehmann, The Dis­patch): “There is grow­ing aware­ness of how young men can be drawn into far-right extrem­ism or misog­y­nis­tic sub­cul­tures, but we in the media—and soci­ety more broadly—pay less atten­tion to how young women become drawn into polit­i­cal sub­cul­tures. Indeed, the terms ‘rad­i­cal­iza­tion’ and ‘women’ are rarely—if ever—seen togeth­er. This over­sight has con­se­quences, because radicalization—defined as rigid com­mit­ment to an ide­o­log­i­cal cause to the point where it dis­torts one’s world­view, harms men­tal health, under­mines rela­tion­ships, or dis­rupts functioning—is not a male-only phe­nom­e­non.”
  5. Solipsism»Determinism (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “A large major­i­ty of my smartest friends insist that deter­min­ism is true. Physics text­books say so, basic log­ic (‘Every effect must have a cause’) says so, and they say so. Who am I to dis­agree? My answer begins with a tru­ism: The foun­da­tion of sci­ence is repeat­ed, care­ful obser­va­tion. If sci­en­tists are allowed to dis­miss piles of repeat­ed, care­ful obser­va­tions as ‘illu­sion,’ there is no sci­ence. Next step: I have a life­time of repeat­ed, care­ful obser­va­tion of my own mind. Via intro­spec­tion, I direct­ly observe myself mak­ing gen­uine choic­es in every wak­ing moment. There­fore: Any ‘sci­en­tif­ic’ the­o­ry that con­tra­dicts these obser­va­tions is, at best, incom­plete.”
  6. God and Woman at Cor­nell (Mary Eber­stadt, First Things): “Why does sec­u­lar­ism flour­ish on col­lege cam­pus­es? Ear­li­er today, some of us were talk­ing about the philoso­pher René Girard, who had an idea that sounds sim­ple, but isn’t: We fig­ure out what we desire by see­ing what oth­er peo­ple desire. That’s part of what hap­pens with stu­dents on cam­pus, and it’s why even those raised in a reli­gious home tend to become more secular—because they don’t see a lot of peo­ple like them­selves in a place like Cor­nell. The idea dawns, even sub­con­scious­ly, ‘Well, maybe there’s a rea­son why they all think dif­fer­ent­ly from me. After all, we’re in a very sophis­ti­cat­ed place with high­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple, so maybe I should be like that.’ That’s the rel­a­tive­ly benign force that dri­ves peo­ple who were raised reli­gious toward sec­u­lar­ism. There is anoth­er force, more malev­o­lent: intim­i­da­tion, the chill­ing effect of being sur­round­ed by, or per­ceiv­ing one­self to be sur­round­ed by, peo­ple who think your belief sys­tem is ridicu­lous. There is also the fact that col­lege is famous­ly the place where a lot of young peo­ple break free from the con­strain­ing Judeo-Chris­t­ian rule­book about sex and mar­riage. These real­i­ties togeth­er con­spire to dri­ve col­lege kids away from faith.”
  7. Audi­ences Prove that Experts Are Dead Wrong (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The rebirth of long­form runs counter to every­thing media experts are ped­dling. They are all try­ing to game the algo­rithm. But they’re mak­ing a huge mis­take. They believe that long­form is doomed. They see that dig­i­tal plat­forms reward ultra-short videos on an end­less scroll. And they under­stand that this works because the inter­face is extreme­ly addic­tive. So short must defeat long in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­place. That’s obvi­ous to them. But all the evi­dence now proves that this isn’t hap­pen­ing.”

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 509: a Christian assassin, Harvard Law Review, Juneteenth

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. Stop Striv­ing and Have a Baby (Nicholas Clair­mont, The Free Press): “…hav­ing kids isn’t just pos­si­ble, think­able, or doable. It’s actu­al­ly super fun, mas­sive­ly eas­i­er than any­one tells you, and so ener­giz­ing and clar­i­fy­ing that if you are an ambi­tious per­son, you should have a kid out of pure per­son­al self­ish­ness.”
  2. Friends say Min­neso­ta shoot­ing sus­pect was deeply reli­gious and con­ser­v­a­tive (Jim Mus­t­ian & Michael Bieseck­er, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Friends and for­mer col­leagues inter­viewed by AP described Boel­ter as a devout Chris­t­ian who attend­ed an evan­gel­i­cal church and went to cam­paign ral­lies for Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.”
    • In response: The Prob­lem of the Chris­t­ian Assas­sin (David French, The New York Times): “Our nation is relearn­ing a les­son that it nev­er should have for­got­ten. Extrem­ist Chris­t­ian lan­guage and the­ol­o­gy can lead to extreme Chris­t­ian vio­lence in the same way that extreme lan­guage can lead to extreme vio­lence in oth­er faith tra­di­tions and among peo­ple who have no faith at all. Chris­tians aren’t bet­ter than any­one else. We’re fash­ioned from the same human clay, and we’re sus­cep­ti­ble to the same temp­ta­tions and fail­ures.”
  3. The Gospel Does­n’t Impart a Lens, but a Life (Steven M. Bryan, Mere Ortho­doxy): “I sus­pect that some of the ways that we speak about those who aban­don Chris­t­ian faith and become sec­u­lar mir­rors a sec­u­lar under­stand­ing of what it means to become a Chris­t­ian in the first place. To speak about ‘de-con­struc­tion’ implies that becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is a mat­ter of con­struct­ing a ‘world­view.’ It risks rat­i­fy­ing the claim that becom­ing a Chris­t­ian is some­thing like becom­ing a Marx­ist or a nation­al­ist or even a post­mod­ernist. It is sim­ply to dis­man­tle one sto­ry about the world and to con­struct anoth­er. To speak about ‘de-con­ver­sion’ implies that the Gospel imparts a lens, not life.”
    • The author is a New Tes­ta­ment pro­fes­sor at Trin­i­ty Evan­gel­i­cal Divin­i­ty School.
  4. What Church Do You Attend? Maybe More Than One, Sur­vey Finds (Adelle Banks, Roys Report): “Researchers for the mul­ti­year Hart­ford Insti­tute for Reli­gion Research study found that 46% of some 24,000 church­go­ers respond­ing to their sur­vey report­ed active engage­ment with more than one church.”
  5. Matt Ygle­sias on debat­ing (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In prac­tice, one big rea­son to debate is so you can put four peo­ple on the floor and attract an audi­ence and some pub­lic atten­tion, yet with­out slight­ing any one of the ‘stars’ by mak­ing it a pan­el. As a method of truth-seek­ing, I do not think pub­lic debate does very well.”
  6. Exclu­sive: Har­vard Law Review Axes 85 Per­cent of Sub­mis­sions Using Race-Con­scious Rubric, Doc­u­ments Show (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “The Free Bea­con obtained more than 500 doc­u­ments from the journal’s two lat­est vol­umes, includ­ing the one cur­rent­ly in pro­duc­tion. The new doc­u­ments are all from 2024 and 2025—after the Supreme Court banned affir­ma­tive action at universities—and span four dis­tinct stages of the arti­cle selec­tion process. They pro­vide the most com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture yet of the racial and ide­o­log­i­cal pref­er­ences at the elite law review, which has become a key front in the Trump administration’s war on Har­vard and is now the sub­ject of three fed­er­al probes. The doc­u­ments show that at least 42 dif­fer­ent edi­tors con­sid­ered race or gen­der when mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions in 2024. That num­ber accounts for 40 per­cent of the 104 edi­tors who serve on the jour­nal at any giv­en time, all of whom have a vote in pub­li­ca­tion deci­sions. While some edi­tors rec­om­mend­ed pieces on the grounds that the author was a minor­i­ty, oth­ers paid more atten­tion to the article’s foot­notes, comb­ing through the cita­tions to see how many sources were white, black, or trans­gen­der.”
  7. Arti­cles which appear to have been writ­ten in hon­or of June­teenth:
    • June­teenth Is Our Sec­ond Inde­pen­dence Day (Con­doleeza Rice, The Free Press): “But even though my fam­i­ly has been cel­e­brat­ing June­teenth since my child­hood, it wasn’t until 2021 that Con­gress vot­ed, almost unan­i­mous­ly, to make June­teenth Nation­al Inde­pen­dence Day a fed­er­al hol­i­day. Because many Amer­i­cans are unfa­mil­iar with its sig­nif­i­cance, some, per­haps under­stand­ably, won­der why it need­ed nation­al recog­ni­tion at all. After all, all Amer­i­cans cel­e­brate the Fourth of July—the ulti­mate cel­e­bra­tion of our nation’s found­ing, of our inde­pen­dence and our lib­er­ty.  To me, June­teenth is a recog­ni­tion of what I call America’s sec­ond found­ing.”
      • The author is a fel­low believ­er and also the direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
      • The arti­cle con­tains this stun­ning para­graph: “I was eight years old when, on a Sun­day morn­ing in Sep­tem­ber 1963, the 16th Street Bap­tist Church was bombed. I felt the blast a few blocks away in the church where my father was the pas­tor. Four lit­tle girls, two of whom I knew, were killed.”
    • What Amer­i­can Stu­dents Aren’t Taught About Slav­ery (Cole­man Hugh­es, The Free Press): “What I learned from teach­ing slav­ery to a group of col­lege fresh­men is that many (per­haps most) Amer­i­can kids grad­u­ate high school believ­ing, false­ly, that slav­ery hap­pened only in Amer­i­ca. Their minds are not blown by rehears­ing the bru­tal facts of Amer­i­can slav­ery. Their minds are blown to learn that oth­er bru­tal slaver­ies also exist­ed all over the world. Nor is this his­tor­i­cal amne­sia con­fined to high school stu­dents. The Unit­ed Nations has deemed March 25 a day of remem­brance for the transat­lantic slave trade. There is no UN day of remem­brance for the Arab slave trade, the Bar­bary slave trade, the Indi­an Ocean slave trade, or any of the slaver­ies local­ized to spe­cif­ic regions such as the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent, Chi­na, Korea, and East­ern Europe—each of which account­ed for mil­lions of slaves.… Instead of white­wash­ing the grim facts of Amer­i­can slavery—as Amer­i­can his­to­ry text­books did in the past, and as cer­tain cor­ners of the Amer­i­can right would be all too hap­py to revive—I rec­om­mend tak­ing the oppo­site approach: adding mate­r­i­al rather than sub­tract­ing it. We must include the glob­al and ubiq­ui­tous nature of slav­ery in every school cur­ricu­lum.”
      • The author, him­self African-Amer­i­can and Puer­to Rican, is a jour­nal­ist and a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Austin.
    • Fred­er­ick Dou­glass Found His Mis­sion in the Black Church (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Douglass’s mud­dled expe­ri­ence with evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty mir­rored what many oth­er slaves expe­ri­enced. Many of them came to faith through evan­gel­i­cal­ism and were able to grasp the hope of emancipation—and equal­i­ty. Yet they also saw white evan­gel­i­cal preach­ers espouse proslav­ery doc­trines and com­fort with tear­ing apart Black fam­i­lies to uphold the lucra­tive insti­tu­tion. With this hypocrisy in mind, Dou­glass famous­ly wrote, ‘I love the pure, peace­able, and impar­tial Chris­tian­i­ty of Christ: I there­fore hate the cor­rupt, slave­hold­ing, women-whip­ping, cra­dle-plun­der­ing, par­tial and hyp­o­crit­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty of this land.’ ”

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.

The Four Loves: Introduction

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.

Today we com­plete our first read­ing, the ten pages of chap­ter 1.

What stood out to me is some­thing that prob­a­bly seemed like a throw­away obser­va­tion back in 1960.

I was look­ing for­ward to writ­ing some fair­ly easy pan­e­gyrics on the first sort of love and dis­par­age­ments of the sec­ond. And much of what I was going to say still seems to me to be true…. Every time I have tried to think the thing out along those lines I have end­ed in puz­zles and con­tra­dic­tions. The real­i­ty is more com­pli­cat­ed than I sup­posed.

Lewis knew what he intend­ed to write, but try­ing to work it out clear­ly enough to put it on paper showed him that his think­ing was fuzzy. Con­tra­dic­to­ry, even. Putting feel­ings, impres­sions, and assump­tions into words is clar­i­fy­ing.

gen­er­a­tive AI has entered the chat

Chat­G­PT and its com­peti­tors are tools and they have a place, but please don’t let them under­mine your abil­i­ty to write out a clear argu­ment. Writ­ing what you think is one of the only ways to force your­self to grap­ple with what you think. Talk­ing it out can also help, but it’s not as bru­tal as writ­ing. The flow of con­ver­sa­tion can allow you to gloss over a weak point in your argu­ment, but hav­ing to write out each of your assump­tions and infer­ences on paper does­n’t pro­vide such wig­gle room.

I think most of you know that I write my ser­mons out word-for-word and then try to deliv­er the ser­mon with­out con­sult­ing my notes. Why do I write my ser­mons out if I don’t intend to read the result­ing man­u­script? It’s for pre­cise­ly the rea­sons I men­tioned above: to write it out means that any weak spots in my think­ing become clear. I still make mis­takes in both inter­pre­ta­tion and argu­men­ta­tion, but I avoid a lot of obvi­ous mis­takes that would oth­er­wise crop up. Deliv­er­ing the ser­mon with­out the notes is about bet­ter con­nect­ing with the audi­ence. If my think­ing on the sub­ject is suf­fi­cient­ly clear, I don’t need the notes except for when I’m quot­ing a pas­sage from the Bible or some oth­er source.

How does gen­er­a­tive AI play into this? I don’t use AI to write my ser­mons because the goal isn’t a well-writ­ten ser­mon, the goal is a thought-through ser­mon. And specif­i­cal­ly, a thought-through-by-me ser­mon. A well-writ­ten ser­mon is most­ly the byprod­uct of prepar­ing a well-thought-through ser­mon. And so if I were to use a tool like chat­G­PT to write a ser­mon for me, I would be an actor, not a preach­er. Actors need scripts. Preach­ers need con­vic­tions. I need to know (and I need you to know) that I believe what I preach, and I can only know I believe it ful­ly if I write it myself.

Even if I became con­fi­dent that a Chat­G­PT ser­mon would be bet­ter than mine and you would enjoy it more, that would­n’t sway me. Preach­ing that way would enfee­ble me, per­haps even cor­rupt me. To be a preach­er means many things, but among them is the claim that I real­ly mean it. Not just that I mean the things I say in that spe­cif­ic ser­mon. I have to mean the whole Chris­tian­i­ty thing. To be a preach­er is to claim that I’m doing my best to fol­low Jesus. Even if I nev­er preached a ser­mon against slan­der, if I had a habit of post­ing slan­der­ous things on social media you would nonethe­less judge me a hyp­ocrite and some­one who should be kept away from the pul­pit. To stand in the pul­pit is to stand before God and man and say, “I real­ly mean it and I’m try­ing.” Part of that “real­ly mean­ing it” is man­i­fest in the way I pre­pare ser­mons.

This isn’t a new thing. Even before tools like chat­G­PT came along every preach­er had the option of pla­gia­riz­ing oth­er preach­ers’ ser­mons. It has always been looked down upon, part­ly for its dis­hon­esty (one of the implic­it claim of a ser­mon is “this is what I came up with”) and part­ly because it meant the preach­er was­n’t grow­ing — the act of craft­ing a ser­mon makes you a bet­ter Chris­t­ian (or forces you to embrace hypocrisy) and a clear­er thinker.

This is not an anti-AI rant. I will some­times use gen­er­a­tive AI after I’ve writ­ten my ser­mon. I will give it prompts like “Here is the man­u­script of a ser­mon I intend to preach to a group of Stan­ford stu­dents. What’s the biggest blind spot in this ser­mon?” or “What’s the most dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique you can make of it?” or “Is there any­one this might need­less­ly offend?” And then I’ll take that feed­back and use it to refine the ser­mon. Using AI like this is fine because it forces me to strength­en my think­ing and wres­tle with my con­vic­tions. At times the AI has sug­gest­ed that I should take out a poten­tial­ly offen­sive claim or tone down some rhetoric and I’ve thought, “Nah — this is what peo­ple need to hear and this is how they need to hear it.” Oth­er times I con­sid­er the feed­back and say, “Huh — I had­n’t thought about it that way. Yeah, let me reword that so that I’m mak­ing the point I intend to make and not being dis­tract­ing­ly offen­sive.”

Obvi­ous­ly, none of you are preach­ers (at least, none of you has that as a key part of your job). But there is prob­a­bly some area of your life where you need to be able to think clear­ly and to know that you have thought clear­ly. Don’t allow the won­der­ful tool of gen­er­a­tive AI to keep you from devel­op­ing that skill. If you’d like to mull that over, I rec­om­mend the won­der­ful and very short sto­ry The Whis­per­ing Ear­ring.

Lewis, of course, had no idea that such a thing as gen­er­a­tive AI would ever be invent­ed. He just men­tioned that his think­ing about love was unclear until he tried to write about it. One of the beau­ties of read­ing a well-thought-through book is that it con­tin­ues to have rel­e­vance decades after it was writ­ten and that its insights are rel­e­vant to new domains that did not exist when its argu­ments were craft­ed.

If you’re not read­ing The Four Loves with us, I high­ly rec­om­mend it. You can down­load a free copy at archive.org.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 508: euthanasia, nitpicking, and homesteading misadventures

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. Are you grad­u­at­ing this week­end? Con­grat­u­la­tions! Still want these emails after you lose your Stan­ford account? Sub­scribe for free with your long-term email address at https://theglendavis.substack.com/
  2. White lies hide dark truths (Tom Tugend­hat, Sub­stack): “What is assist­ed dying? Sui­cide exists. Killing exists. Both are real, long­stand­ing, legal con­cepts. But assist­ed dying? That’s a phrase sus­pend­ed between the act and its denial. The bill claims to offer choice, dig­ni­ty and con­trol. But its lan­guage and its silences speak vol­umes about who holds pow­er and who is expect­ed to dis­ap­pear qui­et­ly. Patients are not poi­soned, they are ‘assist­ed’. Doc­tors don’t kill, they ‘par­tic­i­pate in the process’. Insti­tu­tions aren’t forced to com­ply, they’re just not ‘pro­tect­ed’ from being com­pelled. Patients ‘take life-end­ing med­ica­tion’, as if it’s a herbal tea. Death is cleaned, blanched and euphemised. This new bill doesn’t just hide the real­i­ty of its actions; it hides the deci­sion from the fam­i­ly.”
    • The author is a mem­ber of the British par­lia­ment.
    • Relat­ed in terms of “safe­guards”: Doc­tors Were Prepar­ing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up. (Bri­an M. Rosen­thal, New York Times): “Four years ago, an uncon­scious Ken­tucky man began to awak­en as he was about to be removed from life sup­port so his organs could be donat­ed. Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, offi­cials still tried to move for­ward. Now, a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion has found that offi­cials at the non­prof­it in charge of coor­di­nat­ing organ dona­tions in Ken­tucky ignored signs of grow­ing alert­ness not only in that patient but also in dozens of oth­er poten­tial donors.”
  3. If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Cor­rect It (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “If you say Joe Crim­i­nal com­mit­ted ten mur­ders and five rapes, and I object that it was actu­al­ly only six mur­ders and two rapes, then why am I ‘defend­ing’ Joe Crim­i­nal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to cor­rect it. If one side lies to make all of their argu­ments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up.”
  4. Col­lege Stu­dents Are Using ‘No Con­tact Orders’ to Block Each Oth­er in Real Life (Pamela Paul, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Admin­is­tra­tors, ado­les­cent psy­chol­o­gists and soci­ol­o­gists describe Gen Z stu­dents as fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions. Many have dif­fi­cul­ty with con­fronta­tion and lit­tle expe­ri­ence work­ing through inter­per­son­al con­flicts, which was only exac­er­bat­ed by the pan­dem­ic. They have mas­tered the ter­mi­nol­o­gy of ‘harass­ment’ and ‘dis­crim­i­na­tion,’ some­times with just cause and oth­er times to brand a run-of-the-mill dis­agree­ment.”
    • Some wild sto­ries in here.
  5. My expen­sive, exhaust­ing, hap­py failed attempt at home­steading (Mike Rig­gs, Wash­ing­ton Post): “How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s straw­ber­ry demand? I still don’t know. We ded­i­cat­ed 80 square feet to straw­ber­ries last sea­son. The bugs ate half our har­vest, and the oth­er half equaled rough­ly what our kid could eat in a week. Have you ever grown peas? Give them some­thing to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heav­ens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost crim­i­nal mis­use of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 min­utes to shell a sin­gle serv­ing. Mean­while, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Wal­mart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.”
  6. At Secret Math Meet­ing, Researchers Strug­gle to Out­smart AI (Lyn­die Chiou, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “Ono says. ‘I don’t want to add to the hys­te­ria, but in some ways these large lan­guage mod­els are already out­per­form­ing most of our best grad­u­ate stu­dents in the world.’ ”
  7. On the protests in LA:
    • Still look­ing for arti­cles with insight — let me know what you find help­ful.
    • ‘Delete That Pho­to or We’ll F— You Up’ (Leighton Wood­house, The Free Press): “I have been to dozens of mass protests like the one that explod­ed in Los Ange­les on Fri­day. What I saw in Los Ange­les on Sun­day was dif­fer­ent.… The demon­stra­tions are ugly, but so is what pre­cip­i­tat­ed them.”
    • 11 The­ses on the Unrest in Los Ange­les (Isaac Sauls, Per­sua­sion): “Trump wants the fight. The pro­test­ers want the fight. So… we’ll get the fight.”
  8. The Best and the Bright­est Under Pres­sure (Matt Stoller, Sub­stack): “I do not know if there is a broad­er real­iza­tion of the harm that elites have done among my class­mates.… Near­ly every­one I met has matured into some­one who is kinder than they were as a col­lege stu­dent, will­ing to over­look flaws and acknowl­edge vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. I was gen­uine­ly impressed, and felt a deep con­nec­tion to my class. But I also peri­od­i­cal­ly asked, ‘do you know some­one who died of fen­tanyl?’ And the answer was always no, some­times accom­pa­nied by sur­prise that most Amer­i­cans do have per­son­al expe­ri­ence with a fam­i­ly mem­ber or friend, or friend of a kid, who died.”

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 507: kindness, China, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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. How Kind­ness Became Crim­i­nal­ized (Anas­ta­sia Boden, The Dis­patch): “Three years ago, the city of Tempe, Ari­zona, was cel­e­brat­ing Austin Davis as a hero. It even gave him an award for his char­i­ta­ble work, which includ­ed dri­ving the city’s home­less peo­ple to addic­tion or men­tal health ser­vices and putting on Sun­day pic­nics, where he shared food with those who were hun­gry. Last sum­mer, he was jailed for the same work.”
    • This arti­cle is very much worth your time.
  2. The Mass Trau­ma of Porn (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her child­hood, when she men­tions, some­what casu­al­ly, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He intro­duced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had got­ten her first peri­od, with­out her par­ents know­ing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time some­thing more extreme. By ten it seemed nor­mal. By eleven, she was watch­ing reg­u­lar­ly on her own. She is calm about this, reas­sur­ing you that this has hap­pened to most of her friends. Would any­one think this was nor­mal? Part of com­ing-of-age, her healthy devel­op­ment? Explor­ing her sex­u­al­i­ty? Or would we call this abuse? This is exact­ly what is hap­pen­ing to chil­dren today when we hand them a smart­phone. But instead of one stranger intro­duc­ing them to porn, it is a bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try, prof­it­ing from their trau­ma.”
  3. Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be old­er than thought, experts say (Nico­la Davis, The Guardian): “While some scrolls were radio­car­bon dat­ed in the 1990s, Popović said schol­ars did not tack­le the prob­lem of cas­tor oil con­t­a­m­i­na­tion – a sub­stance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the man­u­scripts, but which could skew results.”
    • The schol­ar­ly study is avail­able at PLOS One: Dat­ing ancient man­u­scripts using radio­car­bon and AI-based writ­ing style analy­sis
    • Note that when the arti­cle says stuff like “Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be old­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, with some bib­li­cal texts dat­ing from the time of their orig­i­nal authors” it means some­thing dif­fer­ent than I would mean. When I talk about the orig­i­nal author of Daniel, I mean Daniel. That’s not the assump­tion they’re work­ing under. Set­ting that aside, the big take­away is that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly old­er than we thought, and that should encour­age Chris­tians because it shows that the tex­tu­al evi­dence for the Old Tes­ta­ment is even stronger than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized.
  4. Some Chi­na-relat­ed news
    • Why Tai­wan Is the West Berlin of Our Time (Jay Sophal­kalyan, The Dis­patch): “At this junc­ture, Tai­wan occu­pies that same fate­ful role West Berlin did. It stands unbowed along the fault line between tyran­ny and liberty—a free soci­ety that, by the cold arith­metic of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, ought not to exist. But the stakes are even high­er.… this small island nation is an irrefutable repu­di­a­tion of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s ide­o­log­i­cal creed. It proves that pros­per­i­ty does not neces­si­tate repres­sion, and that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is nei­ther a West­ern impo­si­tion nor a cul­tur­al anomaly—it is a uni­ver­sal aspi­ra­tion spring­ing from the shared yearn­ings of the human spir­it.”
    • Fac­ing a Pre­car­i­ous Future in Hong Kong (Peter Maize, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chan believes that Hong Kong church­es are with­in a 10-year grace peri­od before the gov­ern­ment impos­es any sig­nif­i­cant changes. He says Flow is will­ing to coop­er­ate to a cer­tain degree. For exam­ple, he would put a Chi­nese flag on their stage if the gov­ern­ment requires it. Yet for require­ments that go against the Bible, ‘we will fol­low Jesus,’ Chan said. ‘We will not com­pro­mise our faith. We’re men­tal­ly pre­pared for the future.’ That prepa­ra­tion includes a delib­er­ate deci­sion not to keep a data­base of mem­bers and an expec­ta­tion that the Flow Church might dis­ap­pear soon.”
  5. Come to Me, All You Net­work­ing Techies (Natal­ie Mead, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s not easy to be a Chris­t­ian in the Bay Area. I’ve lived in San Fran­cis­co for 12 years. But it’s often imprac­ti­cal, even impos­si­ble, for Chris­tians to put down roots here.… I know many techies whose faith didn’t sur­vive the pres­sure to suc­ceed, the mon­ey, and the cul­tur­al indoc­tri­na­tion. Mine did only by God’s grace. So when a friend on the East Coast shared a recent New York Times sto­ry about a Chris­t­ian ‘revival’ occur­ring in Sil­i­con Val­ley, I groaned—not because I’m against revival in the Bay Area! I was just skep­ti­cal of its sup­posed locus: the tech indus­try.”
  6. Fel­low­ship in the Fiery Fur­nace: Do Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion Nar­ra­tives Tran­scend Racial Divides? (Brook­lyn Walk­er & Paul A. Djupe, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “In this arti­cle, we show that reli­gious threat, or beliefs that your reli­gious group is the tar­get of per­se­cu­tion, can actu­al­ly bring togeth­er peo­ple across America’s deep and per­sis­tent racial divide. As polit­i­cal sci­en­tists con­tin­ue to wres­tle with the mean­ing of racial dif­fer­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, our work sug­gests that oth­er types of iden­ti­ties, like reli­gious iden­ti­ties, and the threat that makes those iden­ti­ties salient, should be an impor­tant part of the con­ver­sa­tion.”
  7. How Cer­tain Are Cler­gy of their Faith? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “There’s a state­ment in this sur­vey, ‘My reli­gion would be the best one for all peo­ple no mat­ter their back­ground or cur­rent reli­gion’ that real­ly gets to the heart of the mat­ter. This is a great exam­ple of how the evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of reli­gion dif­fers from oth­er faith groups. In this sam­ple, 93% of the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors said that their reli­gion was the best one for all peo­ple. That was 22 points high­er than Black Protes­tants. It was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than Catholic priests and main­line Protes­tant pas­tors. For the Catholics, 58% thought that they had a supe­ri­or per­spec­tive and it was a bare major­i­ty of the main­line at 51%. I do want to note that the non-Chris­t­ian cler­gy had a much dif­fer­ent approach here — a major­i­ty dis­agreed that they had a supe­ri­or world­view.”
    • Lots of fas­ci­nat­ing stats in this brief arti­cle.

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 506: isms, nonsense responders, and tap water

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. ismism (J. Budziszews­ki, blog): “Ismism – four syl­la­bles, ‘izzum izzum’ — is the bad men­tal habit of crit­i­ciz­ing a propo­si­tion not on its own terms, but in terms of the ‘ism’ which one takes it to express. For exam­ple, sup­pose Sheila is con­cerned that young peo­ple who mar­ry are tying the knot lat­er and lat­er in life. Bri­an snorts, ‘You’re one of those con­ju­gal­ists.’ Then he crit­i­cizes Sheila for oth­er beliefs which he him­self asso­ciates with so-called con­ju­gal­ism. For instance, he protests ‘I don’t think every­one has to mar­ry.’ But Sheila didn’t say that every­one has to mar­ry. She may not even think so, and it doesn’t fol­low as a con­clu­sion from her premise. Ismism is guilt by asso­ci­a­tion: ‘Your belief must be wrong, because I, per­son­al­ly, group it with oth­er beliefs I con­sid­er wrong.’ ”
    • The author is a phi­los­o­phy prof at UT Austin.
  2. Fas­ci­nat­ing: “non­sense respon­ders” sig­nif­i­cant­ly affect sur­vey data https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1926128833947738321
    • The entire thread is worth read­ing. Bot­tom line from a tweet near the end of the thread: “Men­tal­ly adjust sur­vey results in your head if you don’t see the authors rig­or­ous­ly work­ing to remove non­sense respon­ders.”
  3. How to Find Ancient Assyr­i­an Cities Using Eco­nom­ics (Max Tabar­rok, Sub­stack): “In ancient Kaneš, court tran­scripts, trad­ing con­tracts, and mer­chant account­ing were all record­ed on clay tablets. Clay tablets pre­serve well, so this peri­od is in some ways bet­ter known then the next sev­er­al thou­sand years of his­to­ry. The authors claim that ‘the clos­est com­pa­ra­ble cor­po­ra of ancient trade data are almost 3,000 years lat­er, com­ing, for exam­ple, from the medieval Ital­ian mer­chant archives and the Cairo Genizah’.… The cher­ry on top: the entire city burned in a fire, pre­serv­ing the clay records to be recov­ered forty cen­turies lat­er. The authors use some nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing and man­u­al inspec­tion to nar­row down from tens of thou­sands of tablets to sev­er­al hun­dred unam­bigu­ous men­tions of trade between two of 25 Ana­to­lian cities that have enough trade con­nec­tions with each oth­er to be iden­ti­fied in a grav­i­ty mod­el.”
  4. Star Har­vard busi­ness pro­fes­sor stripped of tenure, fired for manip­u­lat­ing data in stud­ies on dis­hon­esty (Richard Pol­li­na, New York Post): “A renowned Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an inves­ti­ga­tion found she fab­ri­cat­ed data on mul­ti­ple stud­ies focused on dis­hon­esty.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. Doug Wil­son Has Spent Decades Push­ing for a Chris­t­ian Theoc­ra­cy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Lis­ten­ing. (Ian Ward, Politi­co): “In Moscow, Wil­son explained that his polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy is not theo­crat­ic in the com­mon­ly under­stood sense of a gov­ern­ment run exclu­sive­ly by the church. To the con­trary, he main­tains that God ordains earth­ly author­i­ty in three sep­a­rate spheres of life: the church, the fam­i­ly and the civ­il gov­ern­ment. With­in each of these spheres, the rel­e­vant author­i­ties must abide by scrip­tur­al com­mand­ments. In the famil­ial sphere, for instance, par­ents must edu­cate their chil­dren accord­ing to Bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples, and wives must sub­or­di­nate them­selves to their hus­bands in accor­dance with a covenan­tal view of the fam­i­ly. In the sphere of civ­il gov­ern­ment, offi­cials should strive to bring the law in line with Bib­li­cal com­mand­ments, although those prin­ci­ples don’t have to be applied ‘wood­en­ly,’ as Wil­son put it: Gov­ern­ments do not have to enforce the Bib­li­cal man­date that house­holds build balustrades on their roofs, but they should enforce the prin­ci­ple that home­own­ers are liable for risks incurred on their prop­er­ty. Above all, Wil­son believes, the three spheres of earth­ly author­i­ty must remain sep­a­rate.”
    • This is a far more informed arti­cle than I expect­ed it to be. The jour­nal­ist (Ian Ward) and the sub­ject (Doug Wil­son) have both been fea­tured in these emails before. I high­ly rec­om­mend this arti­cle as an exam­ple of what fair report­ing of a reli­gious per­son looks like.
    • For a taste of Wilson’s style, check out his response to this and a few oth­er arti­cles about him: Pete Hegseth, Me, and Meet­ing with Impor­tant Jews (Doug Wil­son, per­son­al blog).
    • My quick take on Wil­son: when he is right he is very right and when he is wrong he is very wrong, and whether he is right or wrong he is almost always con­fi­dent and enter­tain­ing.
  6. The Unpar­al­leled Dai­ly Mir­a­cle of Tap Water (A. Cerisse Cohen, New York Times): “Dur­ing a two-year stint in Mon­tana, I went on long hikes and sipped stream water, shock­ing­ly cold and straight from the glac­i­ers, but oth­er than that, I drank from the tap. And then I land­ed in Los Ange­les, where every­one I met used a fil­ter.… Thanks to warn­ings from seem­ing­ly every­one around me in the city, I began to wor­ry about things I nev­er before con­sid­ered threat­en­ing, like dust (could cause can­cer), any­thing with seeds (could cause can­cer) or cer­tain plan­e­tary con­fig­u­ra­tions (respon­si­ble for all oth­er mis­for­tunes). If I put my purse on the floor, or ori­ent­ed my bed the wrong way, it was endan­ger­ing my ener­gy! Maybe I’d been lulled into a false sense of secu­ri­ty about every­day life.”
    • Drink tap water. It’s awe­some.
  7. U.S. Will ‘Aggres­sive­ly’ Revoke Visas of Chi­nese Stu­dents, Rubio Says (Edward Wong, New York Times): “Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Rubio announced on Wednes­day evening that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion would work to ‘aggres­sive­ly revoke’ visas of Chi­nese stu­dents, includ­ing those with ties to the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty or who are study­ing in ‘crit­i­cal fields.’.… In 2020, offi­cials in the first Trump admin­is­tra­tion can­celed the visas of more than 1,000 Chi­nese grad­u­ate stu­dents and researchers after announc­ing they were ban­ning from cam­pus­es Chi­nese cit­i­zens with direct ties to mil­i­tary uni­ver­si­ties in their coun­try. It was the first time the U.S. gov­ern­ment had moved to bar a cat­e­go­ry of Chi­nese stu­dents from get­ting access to Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties, a ban the Biden admin­is­tra­tion kept in place.”

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 505: porn, divorce, and a delightful philosopher

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 Delu­sion of Porn’s Harm­less­ness (Chris­tine Emba, New York Times): “Despite sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that a del­uge of pornog­ra­phy has had a neg­a­tive impact on mod­ern soci­ety, there is a curi­ous refusal, espe­cial­ly in pro­gres­sive cir­cles, to pub­licly admit dis­ap­proval of porn. Crit­i­ciz­ing porn goes against the norm of non­judg­men­tal­ism for peo­ple who like to con­sid­er them­selves for­ward-think­ing, thought­ful and open-mind­ed.… But a lack of judg­ment some­times comes at the expense of dis­cern­ment. As a soci­ety, we are allow­ing our desires to con­tin­ue to be mold­ed in exper­i­men­tal ways, for prof­it, by an indus­try that does not have our best inter­ests at heart.”
  2. Divorce, Fam­i­ly Arrange­ments, and Chil­dren’s Adult Out­comes (Andrew C. John­ston,  Mag­gie R. Jones  & Nolan G. Pope, NBER): “We find that parental divorce reduces chil­dren’s adult earn­ings and col­lege res­i­dence while increas­ing incar­cer­a­tion, mor­tal­i­ty, and teen births.”
    • This paper will have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence — expect to see its find­ings quot­ed in op-eds and pub­lic debates. The authors are at UT Austin, the Cen­sus Bureau, and U of Mary­land. Excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a 30 page paper with about 30 more pages of graphs and charts.
  3. Two per­spec­tives on AI:
    • Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “Unlike many peo­ple who believe this spells the end of qual­i­ty Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, I think this cri­sis is ulti­mate­ly good news. And not just because I believe Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion was already in a pro­found crisis—the result of ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture, polit­i­cal mono­cul­ture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs. These mod­els are such great cheat­ing aids because they are also such great teach­ers. Often they are bet­ter than the human teach­ers we put before our kids, and they are far cheap­er at that. They will not union­ize or attend pro-Hamas protests.”
    • Why We’re Unlike­ly to Get Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence Any­time Soon (Cade Metz, New York Times): “It is indis­putable that today’s machines have already eclipsed the human brain in some ways, but that has been true for a long time. A cal­cu­la­tor can do basic math faster than a human. Chat­bots like Chat­G­PT can write faster, and as they write, they can instant­ly draw on more texts than any human brain could ever read or remem­ber. These sys­tems are exceed­ing human per­for­mance on some tests involv­ing high-lev­el math and cod­ing. But peo­ple can­not be reduced to these bench­marks.”
  4. Remem­ber­ing Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre (1929–2025) (Christo­pher Kac­zor, Word on Fire): “Mac­In­tyre was proud nev­er to have earned a PhD: ‘I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain edu­cat­ed.’ How­ev­er, his pro­lif­ic research won him ten hon­orary doc­tor­ates and appoint­ments as Cor­re­spond­ing Fel­low of the British Acad­e­my, an Hon­orary Mem­ber of the Roy­al Irish Acad­e­my, and Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences. He held aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tions at Oxford, Yale, Man­ches­ter, Leeds, Essex, Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, Aarhus, Bran­deis, Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, Welles­ley Col­lege, Van­der­bilt, Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, and three appoint­ments at Prince­ton. But he found a last­ing home at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame.”
    • Full of delight­ful anec­dotes about an amaz­ing Catholic philoso­pher.
  5. An Efil­ist Just Bombed a Fer­til­i­ty Clin­ic. Was This Bound To Hap­pen? (Kather­ine Dee, Sub­stack): “In 2006 the South African philoso­pher David Benatar pub­lished Bet­ter Nev­er to Have Been, argu­ing that exis­tence itself is harm, because, accord­ing to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of plea­sure mat­ters only to some­one forced to miss it. His book sup­plied the term anti­na­tal­ism and the asym­met­ri­cal equa­tion that sus­tains it: any new birth inevitably adds suf­fer­ing to the ledger.… To make a long sto­ry short—too short, in fact, there’s a doc­u­men­tary worth of sto­ry in this—Gary Mosh­er, an iras­ci­ble vlog­ger and erst­while ama­teur physi­cist best known as Inmend­ham, end­ed up coin­ing efil­ism—‘life’ spelled backwards—during this peri­od to insist that every sen­tient organ­ism is a fac­to­ry for pain and ought to be snuffed out.”
    • Actu­al­ly wild. I often crit­i­cize util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its off­shoots, this sto­ry illus­trates the things I warn about in a trag­ic way.
  6. The Man Who Knew When to Step Down (David French, New York Times): “We live in a coun­try that is pos­i­tive­ly obsessed with career suc­cess and thus defines peo­ple through their work more than through their fam­i­ly — or even their indi­vid­ual virtue. In many of America’s elite cir­cles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains? Again, this isn’t sim­ply a prob­lem for judges and politi­cians. The prob­lem isn’t sole­ly how the pow­er­ful define them­selves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and hon­or. It takes a per­son of real for­ti­tude and self-respect sim­ply to walk away.”
  7. The myth of the sin­gle mar­ket (Luis Gar­i­cano, Sub­stack): “The IMF puts the hid­den cost of trad­ing goods inside the EU at the equiv­a­lent of a 45% tar­iff. For ser­vices the fig­ure climbs to 110%, high­er than Trump’s ‘Lib­er­a­tion day’ tar­iffs on Chi­nese imports—measures many saw as a near-embar­go.… As a result, actu­al trade between EU coun­tries is less than half that between US states.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and a for­mer EU mem­ber of par­lia­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hid­den In Okla­homa Is The Only All-You-Can Eat Chick-Fil‑A In Amer­i­ca (Natal­ie Avi­la, Mashed): “Since 2005, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa has offered its stu­dents all-you-can-eat Chick-fil‑A, serv­ing chick­en sand­wich­es, nuggets, waf­fle fries, and sauces. It’s locat­ed inside the Couch Restau­rants Din­er, a food hall attached to a fresh­man dorm that always offers unlim­it­ed bites. The din­ing hall wel­comes cur­rent uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, employ­ees, and guests of both.”
  • Move Toward The Light (Loose Parts)
  • Gen­tly (SMBC)

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 504: AI Caution, Christian Racial Dynamics, and USA > Europe.

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 Whis­per­ing Ear­ring (Scott Alexan­der): “The ear­ring is a lit­tle topaz tetra­he­dron dan­gling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whis­pers in the wearer’s ear: ‘Bet­ter for you if you take me off.’ If the wear­er ignores the advice, it nev­er again repeats that par­tic­u­lar sug­ges­tion.”
    • A brief sto­ry. 10/10 rec­om­mend. You should all read this. It is a few years old yet you will find it time­ly.
  2. These Inter­nal Doc­u­ments Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Com­pa­nies (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “What goes through the minds of peo­ple work­ing at porn com­pa­nies prof­it­ing from videos of chil­dren being raped? Thanks to a fil­ing error in a Fed­er­al Dis­trict Court in Alaba­ma, releas­ing thou­sands of pages of inter­nal doc­u­ments from Porn­hub that were meant to be sealed, we now know.… Inter­nal mem­os seem to show exec­u­tives obsessed with mak­ing mon­ey by attract­ing the biggest audi­ences they could, pedophiles includ­ed. In one memo, Porn­hub man­agers pro­posed words to be banned from video descrip­tions — such as ‘infant’ and ‘kid­dy’ — while rec­om­mend­ing that the site con­tin­ue to allow ‘bru­tal,’ ‘child­hood,’ ‘force,’ ‘snuffs,’ ‘unwill­ing,’ ‘minor’ and ‘wast­ed.’ One inter­nal note says that a per­son who post­ed a sex­u­al video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made mon­ey.’”
    • This is a dis­tress­ing read. Kristof has been per­sis­tent on this issue and it is much to his cred­it. Unlocked.
  3. What Were the Real Ori­gins of the Chris­t­ian Right? (Daniel K. Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There’s a bet­ter way to tell the sto­ry of the Chris­t­ian Right’s ori­gins that makes sense of all the data – the tim­ing of the Chris­t­ian Right’s for­ma­tion, the com­mit­ment of evan­gel­i­cals to the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and even the enthu­si­asm of evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers for Don­ald Trump.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Ash­land Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. A Bat­tle That Shaped Black Evan­gel­i­cals (Jes­si­ca Jan­vi­er, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In uni­ver­si­ties, the his­to­ry of the ear­ly Black church found a home in Africana stud­ies, which focused more on the growth of Chris­tian­i­ty among Black peo­ple and less on the type of Chris­tian­i­ty they prac­ticed. In con­trast, the writ­ten his­to­ry of ear­ly evan­gel­i­cal­ism pre­dom­i­nant­ly fol­lowed the lives of its white lead­ers and sub­scribers. But even though we’ve inher­it­ed seg­re­gat­ed sto­ries, his­to­ry paints a pic­ture of an inte­grat­ed sto­ry in which Black evan­gel­i­cals always exist­ed.”
  5. Con­ti­nen­tal Divide (Yascha Mounk, The Dis­patch): “Today, to an extent that few peo­ple on either con­ti­nent have ful­ly inter­nal­ized, a sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic gulf sep­a­rates Amer­i­ca and Europe. On aver­age, Amer­i­cans are now near­ly twice as rich as Euro­peans.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle that antic­i­pates and effec­tive­ly responds to the most com­mon objec­tions to its the­sis.
  6. The Pro­fes­sors Are Using Chat­G­PT, and Some Stu­dents Aren’t Hap­py About It (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “The Times con­tact­ed dozens of pro­fes­sors whose stu­dents had men­tioned their A.I. use in online reviews.… There was no con­sen­sus among them as to what was accept­able. Some acknowl­edged using Chat­G­PT to help grade stu­dents’ work; oth­ers decried the prac­tice. Some empha­sized the impor­tance of trans­paren­cy with stu­dents when deploy­ing gen­er­a­tive A.I., while oth­ers said they didn’t dis­close its use because of stu­dents’ skep­ti­cism about the tech­nol­o­gy. Most, how­ev­er, felt that Ms. Stapleton’s expe­ri­ence at North­east­ern — in which her pro­fes­sor appeared to use A.I. to gen­er­ate class notes and slides — was per­fect­ly fine.”
  7. ‘We Are the Most Reject­ed Gen­er­a­tion’ (David Brooks, New York Times): “…I had phone con­ver­sa­tions with cur­rent col­lege stu­dents and recent grad­u­ates, focus­ing on elite schools where I assumed the ethos of exclu­sion might be strongest. I asked the stu­dents if the ‘most reject­ed gen­er­a­tion’ the­sis res­onat­ed with them. Every sin­gle one said it did. Sev­er­al of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a super­s­e­lec­tive col­lege, the rat race would be over. On the con­trary, the Hunger Games had just begun.”
    • Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • New Pope Now Sec­ond-Most Influ­en­tial Chris­t­ian Named ‘Bob’ (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Nov­el Direc­tion for Trol­ley Prob­lems (SMBC)
  • Mod­ern (xkcd)
  • Even as pope, Leo XIV might have to deal with U.S. tax returns (Vic­to­ria Craw & Julie Zauzmer Weil, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The Unit­ed States gen­er­al­ly requires all cit­i­zens to file an annu­al tax return, even those who live out of the coun­try. But assum­ing he doesn’t renounce his U.S. cit­i­zen­ship, Leo — born in the Chica­go area and known until this week as Robert Pre­vost — has spe­cial tax con­sid­er­a­tions, both as a cler­gy­man and now as the head of a for­eign gov­ern­ment.… it’s pos­si­ble the IRS will issue a pri­vate let­ter specif­i­cal­ly address­ing his sit­u­a­tion. Or Con­gress might even pass a law spelling out the tax sit­u­a­tion of the first Amer­i­can pope, Wal­czak spec­u­lat­ed.”

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 503: unwise vulnerability, college cheating, and imperfect moms

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. How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love L.A.(Natal­ie Benes, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Here was the truth that the L.A. girls under­stand bet­ter than any­one: when you are ‘vul­ner­a­ble’ and ‘authen­tic,’ when you ‘des­tig­ma­tize your trau­ma’ the way we were always encour­aged to do, you are adver­tis­ing that oth­er peo­ple in your life have treat­ed you bad­ly. When you men­tion at a cock­tail par­ty that you had a mom who threw din­ner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eye­brows, or a land­lord who shaft­ed you on your secu­ri­ty deposit, or what­ev­er else, the wrong per­son hears ‘he got away with it, why can’t I?’ He spots a wound­ed deer unable to pro­tect itself, per­pet­u­al­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the hap­py herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfair­ness in the fact that peo­ple who have been dealt the most hard­ships in life are the least served by ‘liv­ing their truth.’ ”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle. The wis­dom it offers is incom­plete but real — and it is wis­dom many young peo­ple need to hear. The author is a Yale grad and I think many Stan­ford stu­dents could ben­e­fit from her insight.
  2. Every­one Is Cheat­ing Their Way Through Col­lege (James D. Walsh, New York Mag­a­zine): “It isn’t as if cheat­ing is new. But now, as one stu­dent put it, ‘the ceil­ing has been blown off.’ Who could resist a tool that makes every assign­ment eas­i­er with seem­ing­ly no con­se­quences? After spend­ing the bet­ter part of the past two years grad­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed papers, Troy Jol­limore, a poet, philoso­pher, and Cal State Chico ethics pro­fes­sor, has con­cerns. ‘Mas­sive num­bers of stu­dents are going to emerge from uni­ver­si­ty with degrees, and into the work­force, who are essen­tial­ly illit­er­ate,’ he said. ‘Both in the lit­er­al sense and in the sense of being his­tor­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate and hav­ing no knowl­edge of their own cul­ture, much less any­one else’s.’ ”
  3. On moth­ers:
    • On Mother’s Day: Stop blam­ing moms and start tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for your life (Zachary Got­tlieb, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Then one night, the ‘Morn­ing Show’ video popped up on my phone. Among the GenZ influ­encers talk­ing about why they cut their ‘tox­ic’ and ‘nar­cis­sis­tic’ moms out of their lives, the algo­rithm fed me its coun­ter­point. And while Alex might have seemed unhinged in her out­burst, what she said about the weight of her daughter’s expec­ta­tions rang true. Mes­mer­ized, I watched it sev­er­al times in a row, and then I had a real­iza­tion: maybe we kids were guilty of a kind of nar­cis­sism too?”
      • There is a weird rab­bit trail in this arti­cle about gen­der which great­ly weak­ens it (because some of y’all blame your dads instead of / in addi­tion to your moms), but the core point hones in on a great weak­ness many young peo­ple pos­sess. To all col­lege stu­dents: your par­ents are peo­ple, too. They did some things well and some things bad­ly and now we are where we are. If they did some­thing crim­i­nal then pros­e­cute them, but oth­er­wise many peo­ple need an epiphany like the author of this arti­cle.
      • Hav­ing said that, some of you have some tru­ly bad par­ents. I’m not say­ing treat unhealthy peo­ple like they’re won­der­ful in every way and invite them to come mess up your life. I am say­ing that at some point you have to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for who you’ve become regard­less of your folks’ health or unhealth. 
      • Anoth­er way to put this: most of you will go on to be good par­ents who nonethe­less cause your chil­dren pain and frus­tra­tion in addi­tion to all the good you do in their lives. Fol­low the Gold­en Rule and regard your par­ents now like you hope your own chil­dren regard you some­day.
    • My Mom was a Pray­ing Woman…But not Like You Think (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “To under­stand my moth­er, you have to know she had no ado­les­cence. Her moth­er died when she was twelve and overnight, my moth­er became an adult. She had three younger sis­ters, and she felt it became her respon­si­bil­i­ty to raise them. My mom start­ed dri­ving when she was four­teen. She didn’t go get a license. She just start­ed dri­ving. The sher­iff pulled her over once and told her to get a license, but he didn’t give her a tick­et. My mom kept dri­ving.”
      • A beau­ti­ful (and instruc­tive) sto­ry.
  4. Peo­ple Are Los­ing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spir­i­tu­al Fan­tasies (Miles Klee, Rolling Stone): “Speak­ing to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who request­ed anonymi­ty, said her part­ner of sev­en years fell under the spell of Chat­G­PT in just four or five weeks, first using it to orga­nize his dai­ly sched­ule but soon regard­ing it as a trust­ed com­pan­ion. ‘He would lis­ten to the bot over me,’ she says. ‘He became emo­tion­al about the mes­sages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The mes­sages were insane and just say­ing a bunch of spir­i­tu­al jar­gon,’ she says, not­ing that they described her part­ner in terms such as ‘spi­ral starchild’ and ‘riv­er walk­er.’ ‘It would tell him every­thing he said was beau­ti­ful, cos­mic, ground­break­ing,’ she says. ‘Then he start­ed telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teach­ing him how to talk to God, or some­times that the bot was God — and then that he him­self was God.’”
  5. The Three Lay­ers of the Mar­riage Pyra­mid (J. D. Greear, blog): “Mar­riage, in oth­er words, is fun­da­men­tal­ly about friend­ship. Not child-rear­ing. Not sex. Friend­ship. Which means that what you should most be look­ing for when you date is some­one who can be your friend. Because that’s God’s earth­ly pur­pose for mar­riage. Think of it like build­ing a pyra­mid with spir­i­tu­al, emo­tion­al, and phys­i­cal lay­ers.”
  6. Yes, Har­vard Deserves Due Process (Greg Lukianoff & Adam Gold­stein, Per­sua­sion): “This isn’t the first time the Civ­il Rights Act has been mis­used in this way. Under the Oba­ma and Biden admin­is­tra­tions, the Depart­ments of Jus­tice and Edu­ca­tion issued Title IX enforce­ment let­ters pres­sur­ing uni­ver­si­ties to rewrite sex­u­al mis­con­duct pro­ce­dures and to adopt uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly over­broad def­i­n­i­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment. It was wrong then to use enforce­ment let­ters to make uncon­sti­tu­tion­al demands of insti­tu­tions, and it is wrong now. If the gov­ern­ment believes it has the pow­er to do this through ordi­nary process­es, it should use them. If the gov­ern­ment does not believe it has that pow­er, it shouldn’t.”
    • FIRE (with which the two authors are asso­ci­at­ed) and the Beck­et Fund are two praise­wor­thy law firms. Each has tak­en up part of the man­tle the ACLU claims to bear, and we are all blessed by their prin­ci­pled advo­ca­cy.
  7. The Resis­tance Is Gonna Be Woke (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “As I have writ­ten many times before, it is a pro­found mis­take to think that left-wing iden­ti­tar­i­an­ism and right-wing reac­tion are implaca­ble ene­mies. In real­i­ty, every vic­to­ry for one of these ide­o­log­i­cal cur­rents imme­di­ate­ly strength­ens those who fight for the oth­er. The way out of this dan­ger­ous spi­ral is not to pick one side as the less­er evil and shut up about its dan­gers; it is, calm­ly and con­sis­tent­ly, to resist both.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

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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.