Tag: abortion

TGFI, Volume 535: marrying young and the depths of Tolkien

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Broth­er I Lost (Megan McAr­dle, The Dis­patch): “For as long as I can remem­ber, I have believed that a woman should be able to decide whether to become a moth­er, and also believed that the life grow­ing inside her should get the same shot as the rest of us at life, lib­er­ty, and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness. Since these two beliefs are fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble, I usu­al­ly man­aged the con­tra­dic­tion by avoid­ing the sub­ject.”
  2. Tough Love: I Don’t Want My 22-Year-Old to Get Mar­ried (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “In case you don’t know how most young women your daughter’s age are spend­ing their twen­ties, allow me to fill you in: surf­ing dat­ing apps, grow­ing more cyn­i­cal and jad­ed by the year, main­tain­ing ‘sit­u­a­tion­ships’ with hot guys who sleep with them when­ev­er it suits them and van­ish when it doesn’t. An entire gen­er­a­tion of young women are let­ting their most for­ma­tive, eli­gi­ble decade slip through their fin­gers like olive oil. A hun­dred first dates. Dozens of booty calls. Learn­ing little—because you can­not learn much from a non-relationship—calling it ‘self-knowl­edge’ while gain­ing noth­ing but UTIs and a draw­er­ful of Plan B.… the truth is: No one’s ever mature enough for mar­riage. No one’s ever entire­ly ready. Nor for the labors and joys of moth­er­hood. We splash through these stages a lit­tle bat­ty and half-blind. If we meet the demands, they change us. That much is inevitable. But until we start to swim, we nev­er real­ly know we can.”
    • Mag­nif­i­cent, rec­om­mend­ed to me by an alum­nus.
  3. The Lost Gen­er­a­tion (Jacob Sav­age, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Over the course of the 2010s, near­ly every mech­a­nism lib­er­al Amer­i­ca used to con­fer pres­tige was reweight­ed along iden­ti­tar­i­an lines.… Most of the men I inter­viewed start­ed out as lib­er­als. Some still are. But to feel the weight of society’s dis­fa­vor can be dis­ori­ent­ing. We mil­len­ni­als were true believ­ers in race and gen­der-blind mer­i­toc­ra­cy, which for all its faults—its naïveté about human nature, its opti­mism in the Amer­i­can Dream—was far supe­ri­or to what replaced it. And to see that vision so spec­tac­u­lar­ly betrayed has engen­dered a skep­ti­cism toward the entire lib­er­al project that won’t soon dis­ap­pear.”
    • The viral­i­ty of this arti­cle (and the host of respons­es it has engen­dered) sug­gests that it has hit a nerve.
  4. AI romance blooms as Japan­ese woman weds vir­tu­al part­ner of her dreams (Kim Kyung-Hoon & Satoshi Sugiya­ma, Reuters): “A year ago, Noguchi took ChatGPT’s advice about what she said was a fraught rela­tion­ship with her human fiance and resolved to break off their engage­ment.… Yasuyu­ki Saku­rai, a wed­ding plan­ner for more than 20 years, said he now almost exclu­sive­ly han­dles mar­riages of clients with vir­tu­al char­ac­ters, aver­ag­ing about one a month.”
    • Shared with me by a hor­ri­fied stu­dent.
  5. What Courage Does for Us (David French, New York Times): “An empha­sis on accom­plish­ment can actu­al­ly breed cow­ardice. Courage can cost you your career. Courage can cost you your life. And so the careerist learns to adapt, to hide when the bul­lets (real or fig­u­ra­tive) start to fly. Sure, the hero can rise to the top, but he or she can also end up dead, and you can’t be a pres­i­dent or a chief exec­u­tive or a mem­ber of Con­gress from the grave.”
    • Unlocked.
    • Relat­ed, also unlocked: The Secret Tri­al of the Gen­er­al Who Refused to Attack Tianan­men Square (Chris Buck­ley, New York Times): “ ‘I said to them that my supe­ri­ors can appoint me, and they can also dis­miss me,’ he recount­ed in court, seem­ing to indi­cate that he was will­ing to lose his job over his deci­sion. One of the gen­er­als at the meet­ing, Dai Jing­sheng, told inves­ti­ga­tors that he and his col­leagues went silent for about a minute while they absorbed Gen­er­al Xu’s defi­ance. ‘Nobody expect­ed words like this from Xu,”‘said Gen­er­al Dai, accord­ing to the tes­ti­mo­ny. Under ques­tion­ing, Gen­er­al Xu acknowl­edged that the mil­i­tary answered to China’s Com­mu­nist Par­ty lead­ers. But he sug­gest­ed that it should also be sub­ject to a broad­er author­i­ty.”
    • Also relat­ed: Man who filmed Uyghur con­cen­tra­tion camps now fights for his own free­dom in the Unit­ed States (Atlas Luk, Sub­stack): “His asy­lum appli­ca­tion, which had an inter­view pend­ing, his valid work per­mit, his New York State driver’s license… in the eyes of ICE, all of these were worth­less because he had ‘entered with­out inspec­tion’ by cus­toms. With the Trump admin­is­tra­tion crack­ing down on ille­gal immi­gra­tion, Broome Coun­ty Jail was over­crowd­ed. Months passed, and Guan Heng wait­ed anx­ious­ly and deject­ed­ly for the out­come of his case. No one knew what this young man from Chi­na had gone through in the past few years; nor did any­one know that the images he had filmed of the Xin­jiang deten­tion camps, at great per­son­al risk, pro­vid­ed cru­cial evi­dence of the Chi­nese author­i­ties’ actions against the Uyghur peo­ple in Xin­jiang. Or that if he were to be deport­ed, he would be fac­ing immense dan­ger.”
  6. Why I Keep Return­ing to Mid­dle-Earth (Michael D.C. Drout, New York Times): “Sub­tle vari­a­tions in Tolkien’s writ­ing style across its 62 chap­ters gen­er­ate the impres­sion that ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a com­pi­la­tion of oth­er texts. This pat­tern is large­ly invis­i­ble even to care­ful read­ers, but new meth­ods of com­put­er-assist­ed analy­sis throw it into sharp relief. An algo­rithm can com­pare the vocab­u­lar­ies of the chap­ters and clus­ter those that are sim­i­lar.… Its chap­ters group in a com­plex hier­ar­chy with three large group­ings and sev­er­al out­liers, a pat­tern of clus­ter­ing not typ­i­cal for a mod­ern nov­el. It is clos­er in form to mul­ti­au­thor com­pos­ite texts from the Mid­dle Ages. Not only do the clus­ters not match the point-of-view char­ac­ters; they don’t seem to be relat­ed to vol­ume, book, set­ting, type of action or pac­ing.… This styl­is­tic vari­a­tion was, at least ini­tial­ly, com­plete­ly unin­ten­tion­al, a byprod­uct of Tolkien’s labo­ri­ous and ago­niz­ing 17-year effort to com­plete the book. Tolkien had aimed to make ‘The Lord of the Rings’ feel as if it had been dis­cov­ered and assem­bled; the frame nar­ra­tive of the book is that it’s a trans­la­tion of a diary that was expand­ed into a his­to­ry and aug­ment­ed by lat­er schol­ars. His strug­gles, prov­i­den­tial­ly, helped him achieve that effect.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. The whole essay is deeply per­son­al and quite mov­ing. The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Wheaton. Unlocked.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

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

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Inter­est­ing

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues like­ly to be of inter­est to Chris­tians in col­lege. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions, so if you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 489

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. To Hate the Vul­ner­a­ble: Roe at 52 (Nadya Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Do we as a soci­ety real­ize that we tell some peo­ple out­right: Your life is not worth liv­ing.  You do not deserve to live. Your child does not deserve to live. What kind of mon­sters does this make us?”
  2. Win­ning The Lot­tery (Kasen Stephensen, Sub­stack): “Ulti­mate­ly, what I learned at Stan­ford was how to think for myself. Con­front­ed with a cul­ture for­eign to my own upbring­ing and des­per­ate to belong, I looked to my fel­low stu­dents for guid­ance and at times lost sight of the lessons I learned from my fam­i­ly and on my mis­sion. While I appre­ci­ate my new ana­lyt­i­cal skills and blos­som­ing ambi­tion, I reject the premise implic­it at Stan­ford: that your worth is mea­sured by your income, the pres­tige of your job, and your family’s con­nec­tions. I redis­cov­ered the key lessons from my mis­sion: hap­pi­ness, for me, is found in intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, acts of ser­vice, and gen­uine rela­tion­ships with oth­ers, whether with friends, team-mates, fam­i­ly mem­bers, or the woman I would mar­ry.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. The Best Argu­ment for Protes­tantism Is Its Catholic­i­ty (N. Gray Sutan­to, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…Ortlund high­lights how the Reform­ers defend­ed their over­ar­ch­ing the­ol­o­gy in a sur­pris­ing way. Not only, they argued, were Protes­tant posi­tions more bib­li­cal than their non-Protes­tant coun­ter­parts; they were also more catholic—in the sense of fur­ther­ing the goal of a uni­fied church. In their view, Catholic the­olo­gians were the ones depart­ing from apos­tolic and patris­tic, or ear­ly-church, teach­ing. As Ortlund notes,’“the ear­ly Protes­tants argued on catholic and his­tor­i­cal grounds,’ not mere­ly the­o­log­i­cal grounds, against a host of Roman Catholic doc­trines.”
    • A sol­id review of an excel­lent book (What It Means To Be Protes­tant by Gavin Ortlund).
  4. Can reli­gion make you hap­py? Sci­en­tists may soon find out. (Julia Fly­nn Siler, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “A team of schol­ars, in part­ner­ship with polling firm Gallup, has begun a five-year study of over 200,000 par­tic­i­pants from 22 coun­tries, to fig­ure out what leads to what researchers call flour­ish­ing. To flour­ish is to be more than mere­ly hap­py; it’s a met­ric meant to show if peo­ple are ‘liv­ing in a state in which all aspects of a per­son­’s life are good.’… That data isn’t in yet. But the results obtained so far back up what Pew and oth­er researchers have found. The aver­age flour­ish­ing score was 0.23 points high­er for some­one who says that reli­gion is an impor­tant part of their dai­ly life than for some­one who does not – and 0.41 points high­er for some­one who attends a reli­gious ser­vice at least week­ly.”
  5. NBA greats think this D‑II coach is a bas­ket­ball genius. So why don’t you know who he is? (CJ Moore, The New York Times): “Crutch­field, a for­mer math teacher who nev­er played col­lege bas­ket­ball and coached ten­nis before get­ting his big D‑II break at West Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty, sees the game like a math prob­lem and has cre­at­ed his own cal­cu­la­tions.… When he grad­u­at­ed from West Vir­ginia in 1978, Crutch­field want­ed to be a high school bas­ket­ball coach. A year lat­er, he had giv­en up, return­ing to his alma mater to go to law school. ‘Too big a dream,’ he thought. He passed the LSAT and rent­ed an apart­ment in Mor­gan­town. Then he got a call out of nowhere, offer­ing him the boys bas­ket­ball coach­ing posi­tion at a small school in the state’s north­ern pan­han­dle. He’s not even sure who rec­om­mend­ed him. Crutch­field sold his law books, lost the deposit on his apart­ment and moved to Cameron, W.V.”
  6. The Case Against Drink­ing (Sam Kahn, Per­sua­sion): “From as far back as I can remem­ber, my plan had been to be a kind of low-inten­si­ty alco­holic. I hoped that it wouldn’t make me beat my fam­i­ly or wet myself at work, and that it wouldn’t lead to organ fail­ure in the end—always the ques­tion, isn’t it?—but it seemed a gam­ble worth tak­ing. The social life of the West is built almost entire­ly around the copi­ous con­sump­tion of alco­hol, with its pro­fes­sion­al life close­ly adja­cent to that.”
    • A sol­id essay that (cor­rect­ly) defends Pro­hi­bi­tion and makes many good points. I do not think drink­ing is always a sin, but I do not drink myself and am hap­py to encour­age you not to, either.
  7. I used to think my peers were anti­se­mit­ic. Now, I’ve changed my mind. (Julia Segal, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “‘How many of you have heard about this before?’ I ask the wide-eyed clus­ter of Stan­ford stu­dents in our hotel con­fer­ence room. A few sec­onds of silence go by as eyes dart around the room. Final­ly, scat­tered hands go up — approx­i­mate­ly half the room. The thing I was ask­ing if they’d head about? Oct. 7. The mas­sacre of rough­ly 1,300 peo­ple in Israel, in the small farm­ing vil­lages and at a music fes­ti­val. The dead­liest day for Jews since the Holo­caust. Ear­li­er this year, I would have been sur­prised that half the Stan­ford stu­dents in the room had nev­er heard about Oct. 7. But I was com­ing off the tail-end of dozens of inter­views for a trip to vis­it the Nova Exhi­bi­tion in L.A., where the typ­i­cal answer to ‘What have you heard about Oct. 7?’ was ‘to be hon­est, not much,’ and some­times even, ‘I hadn’t heard about it until I saw your email and googled it.’”
    • I’m gen­uine­ly shocked and it puts some of last year’s cam­pus activism into per­spec­tive.

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 483

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 Shock of Faith: It’s Noth­ing Like I Thought It Would Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “When reli­gion is seen as belief, then the believ­er lives on a con­tin­u­um between belief and doubt. But when reli­gion is seen as a long­ing, then the believ­er lives on the con­tin­u­um between inten­si­ty and apa­thy. That’s the con­tin­u­um I live on these days.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, unlocked, sent to me by mul­ti­ple alum­ni.
  2. Archae­ol­o­gists Found a Skele­ton Wear­ing an Amulet That May Change the His­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty (Tim New­comb, Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics): “Every oth­er link to reli­able evi­dence of Chris­t­ian life in the north­ern Alpine area of the Roman Empire is at least 50 years younger, all com­ing from the fourth cen­tu­ry A.D.…. The sci­en­tif­ic study is bol­stered by ref­er­ences nev­er found so ear­ly, such as men­tion of Saint Titus, a stu­dent of the Apos­tle Paul, the invo­ca­tion ‘holy, holy, holy!’ which wasn’t more com­mon until the fourth cen­tu­ry A.D., and the phrase ‘bend your knees,’ which is a quote from Paul’s let­ter to the Philip­pi­ans.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The title is click­bait, but the arti­cle’s con­tent is inter­est­ing.
  3. What if Our Democ­ra­cy Can’t Sur­vive With­out Chris­tian­i­ty? (David French and Jonathan Rauch, New York Times): “It turns out that Chris­tian­i­ty is a load-bear­ing wall in democ­ra­cy, and the founders told us that. They didn’t spec­i­fy that you have to be a Chris­t­ian, per se, but they said that our lib­er­al, sec­u­lar Con­sti­tu­tion, it’s great, as far as it goes, but it relies on virtues like truth­ful­ness and law­ful­ness and the equal dig­ni­ty of every indi­vid­ual. And they under­stood that those have to come from an out­side source. The Con­sti­tu­tion won’t fur­nish them. And the source that they relied on prin­ci­pal­ly was reli­gion to teach those things and to build and trans­mit those val­ues. And it turns out that for most of our his­to­ry, Chris­tian­i­ty has been pret­ty good at that.” 
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Study claims all observ­ables in nature can be mea­sured with a sin­gle con­stant: The sec­ond (Phys.org): “ ‘In Galilean space-time, you need rulers and clocks to mea­sure all the phys­i­cal vari­ables. In rel­a­tivis­tic space-time, how­ev­er, clocks are suf­fi­cient. This is because in rel­a­tiv­i­ty, space and time are so inter­re­lat­ed that a sin­gle unit is suf­fi­cient to describe all quan­ti­ties. High-pre­ci­sion clocks, such as the atom­ic clocks used today, are capa­ble of meet­ing all mea­sure­ment needs,’ says Mat­sas.”
  5. Why are Top Sci­en­tists Leav­ing Har­vard? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Mina tells an incred­i­ble sto­ry of what hap­pened dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. At the time Mina was a fac­ul­ty mem­ber at the Chan School of Pub­lic Health, he is extreme­ly active in advis­ing gov­ern­ments on the pan­dem­ic, and he brings Har­vard mil­lions of dol­lars a year in fund­ing. But when he tries to hire some­one at his lab, the uni­ver­si­ty refus­es because there is hir­ing freeze! Sor­ry, no hir­ing for pan­dem­ic research dur­ing a pan­dem­ic.”
  6. When Gen. George Pat­ton Called on God (Alex Ker­shaw, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Pat­ton instruct­ed his men: ‘Pray when dri­ving. Pray when fight­ing. Pray alone. Pray with oth­ers. Pray by night and pray by day.’ He believed the Third Army’s near­ly 500 chap­lains, rep­re­sent­ing 32 denom­i­na­tions, were as crit­i­cal to vic­to­ry as his tank com­man­ders. ‘He want­ed a chap­lain to be above aver­age in courage,’ O’Neill recalled. ‘In time of bat­tle, he want­ed the chap­lains up front, where the men were dying. And that’s where the Third Army chap­lains went—up front. We lost more chap­lains, pro­por­tion­ate­ly, than any oth­er group.’ ”
    • This is one of those his­tor­i­cal moments that I always mar­vel at when I read about it.
  7. The Abor­tion Lob­by Endan­gers Preg­nant Women (Rachel Roth Ald­hiz­er, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Reclas­si­fy­ing induc­tion of labor—or, rarely, sur­gi­cal res­o­lu­tion for PPROM—as abor­tion care seems to threat­en women’s pre­na­tal care nation­wide. No abor­tion leg­is­la­tion in any state restricts emer­gency pro­ce­dures to pro­tect the life or health of the moth­er. Yet this lin­guis­tic shift could mis­lead physi­cians in states with abor­tion restric­tions into believ­ing that stan­dard treat­ments for preg­nan­cy com­pli­ca­tions may be ille­gal, or at least sub­ject to a high­er stan­dard of physi­cian judg­ment when deter­min­ing a treat­ment course.… Only the abor­tion lob­by and the politi­cians who sup­port it ben­e­fit from these lin­guis­tic games.”

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 473



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.

This is vol­ume 473, the largest known num­ber whose square (223729) uses dif­fer­ent dig­its than when it is raised to the 4th pow­er (50054665441).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Evan­ge­lis­tic Shift (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “So what accounts for this shift and how should Chris­tians respond? The answer to the first ques­tion might be sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple: The shift dates back to the grow­ing aware­ness, accep­tance, and pro­mo­tion of trans­gen­der sex­u­al iden­ti­ties in main­stream Amer­i­can cul­ture. This shift, dat­ing to the mid 2010s and prob­a­bly peak­ing in the ear­ly 2020s, did two things that fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the evan­ge­lis­tic land­scape for Chris­tians in Amer­i­ca.”
  2. Will­ful igno­rance of the male sui­cide cri­sis (Richard V. Reeves, Sub­stack): “It’s essen­tial­ly impos­si­ble to come away from this [New York­er] essay with­out a strong sense that the teen sui­cide cri­sis is, in fact, a teen girl sui­cide cri­sis. That is absolute­ly false. In fact, for every five teenagers dying from sui­cide, four are like­ly to be boys.”
  3. Is Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Real­ly Protes­tant? (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “Every time I read a book that describes the reli­gious his­to­ry of Amer­i­ca that talks about the nature of Protes­tantism in the coun­try, it strikes me that the Protes­tantism of the Amer­i­can past is alien to today’s evan­gel­i­cal­ism. They are dif­fer­ent enough to raise the ques­tion as to whether or not Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism is actu­al­ly Protes­tant in impor­tant ways.… All is not well for Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty to say the least. It’s easy to point at trends in the world to explain this, but giv­en the man­i­fest and wide­ly pub­li­cized prob­lems with­in evan­gel­i­cal­ism, I would sub­mit that at least as much time should go into intro­spec­tion and inter­nal reform.”
  4. Yes, Third-Trimester Abor­tions Are Hap­pen­ing in Amer­i­ca (Emma Camp, The Atlantic): “…Col­orado, which is home to clin­ics that per­form third-trimester abor­tions, record­ed 137 third-trimester abor­tions in 2023. That’s only one state—eight oth­er states, plus Wash­ing­ton, D.C., have no restric­tions on third-trimester abor­tions. Just a few min­utes from my office build­ing in D.C., a clin­ic offers abor­tions up to near­ly 32 weeks. In near­by Bethes­da, Mary­land, a clin­ic per­forms abor­tions up to 35 weeks’ ges­ta­tion.… Amer­i­cans are broad­ly uncom­fort­able with third-trimester abor­tions. A 2023 Gallup poll found that although more than two-thirds of Amer­i­cans believe abor­tion should be legal in the first trimester, just 22 per­cent think it should be legal in the third. And a 2021 Asso­ci­at­ed Press poll found that just 8 per­cent of respon­dents believe that third-trimester abor­tions should be legal in all cas­es.”
  5. A Defense of Lega­cy Admis­sions, the Sur­pris­ing Engine of Mer­i­toc­ra­cy (Ted­dy Ganea, Stan­ford Review): “The pur­pose of col­lege admis­sions isn’t to cre­ate a new elite from scratch. It’s to meld mer­i­to­ri­ous non-elites with the exist­ing elite, to incor­po­rate fresh tal­ent and ideas into the high­est ech­e­lons of pow­er. It should be a win-win-win: estab­lished elites ben­e­fit from new mer­it, new mer­it ben­e­fits from elite con­nec­tions and resources, and soci­ety ben­e­fits from a more mer­i­to­crat­ic elite. Lega­cy admis­sions is a pre­req­ui­site for this mis­sion state­ment, because you can’t meld togeth­er two groups if one of them is miss­ing.… Crit­ics of lega­cy admis­sions ignore the key real­i­ty of human his­to­ry: that the exist­ing elite is almost always deeply entrenched, and break­ing into it requires more than just indi­vid­ual tal­ent — it requires access. And this is where lega­cy admis­sions play their most cru­cial role: by enabling mer­i­to­ri­ous non-elites to mix with the exist­ing elite, they open up the real oppor­tu­ni­ty for upward mobil­i­ty.”
    • Well-argued and provoca­tive. My favorite kind of arti­cle!
  6. 55/45 is a real­ly close race (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “I’ve nev­er seen an elec­tion in which the fore­cast spent more time in the vicin­i­ty of 50/50, and I prob­a­bly nev­er will… on aver­age, since our fore­cast relaunch on July 30, Har­ris has won 49.4 per­cent of sim­u­la­tions, and Trump has won 50.2 per­cent. (These don’t quite add up to 100 because of the slim pos­si­bil­i­ty of a 269–269 Elec­toral Col­lege tie.) Peo­ple under­stand intu­itive­ly that a 50/50 or 49/51 fore­cast is a toss-up. If the fore­cast is 55/45 in some direc­tion instead, how­ev­er, con­fu­sion can abound — even though this isn’t any dif­fer­ent from 50/50 for most prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es. Some of the prob­lem is that peo­ple can con­fuse this fore­cast for a pre­dic­tion of vote share: if Har­ris were to win 55 per­cent of the vote and Trump 45 per­cent, that would be the biggest land­slide in an Amer­i­can elec­tion since Ronald Rea­gan in 1984. But that’s not what this fore­cast is say­ing. Rather, it’s that Har­ris will win the Elec­toral Col­lege about 11 times out of 20 and Trump will win it 9 times out of 20: still basi­cal­ly a toss-up, just with the coin weight­ed ever so slight­ly in Harris’s favor.”
  7. Don’t Vote Like Your Life Depend­ed on It (Chris Stire­walt, The Dis­patch): “Politi­cians and media hype mer­chants tell us every cycle that this is the most impor­tant elec­tion in his­to­ry, but the truth is that in a nation with sta­ble sys­tem of elec­tions held in a free, fair man­ner and abun­dant con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions for polit­i­cal minori­ties, the knowl­edge that no elec­tion is the final word helps us to live in rel­a­tive har­mo­ny.… It’s not the end of any­thing if the par­ty oppo­site your own wins an elec­tion, just the con­tin­u­a­tion of a 235-year long argu­ment that, Lord will­ing, will go on for anoth­er 235.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Doc­tor admits wear­ing dis­guise to poi­son mom’s part­ner with fake covid shot (Leo Sands, Wash­ing­ton Post): “A British doc­tor has been found guilty of attempt­ing to kill his mother’s long­time part­ner by dis­guis­ing him­self as a nurse and inject­ing his elder­ly vic­tim with a flesh-eat­ing tox­ic sub­stance while pre­tend­ing to admin­is­ter a rou­tine coro­n­avirus vac­ci­na­tion.”
    • I do not mean to sug­gest that attempt­ed mur­der is less seri­ous than the sorts of things includ­ed above — but I do mean to sug­gest this is a sto­ry you will read because it is wild more than because it has any­thing to do with your life.
  • The ‘Goth’ Vol­ley­ball Play­er Was Actu­al­ly Ton­ing Things Down (Cal­lie Holter­mann, New York Times): “I was in a film study meet­ing with my whole team, and I was telling one of my team­mates that I was so con­fused why my Insta­gram was blow­ing up. And Alli­son [Voigt, her team’s head coach] turned to me and showed me Twit­ter, and was like, ‘You’re going viral. You have two mil­lion views right now.’ I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to do or what was going to hap­pen from this.”

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 466



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.

This is vol­ume 466, which is 1234 in base 7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Fol­low­ing Jesus in the Desert of Men­tal Ill­ness (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Bryant writes that a break­through for him came when he real­ized that Christ had not com­mit­ted him­self to Bryant’s plans, but to Bryant him­self. Once the life that Bryant had planned for him­self dis­in­te­grat­ed, he was left with deeply painful ques­tions about whether Jesus had stopped lov­ing him. But even­tu­al­ly he real­ized that Christ want­ed some­thing more for Bryant than his own (good) desires. He want­ed Christ for him. He want­ed depen­dence on the cross.”
  2. Dan­ger, AI Sci­en­tist, Dan­ger (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “[Did you hear about] the auto­mat­ed AI Sci­en­tist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restric­tions and launch new instances of itself while down­load­ing bizarre Python libraries? Its name is Sakana AI. (魚≈סכנה). As in, in hebrew, that lit­er­al­ly means ‘dan­ger’, baby. ”
  3. Elec­tion-relat­ed stuff:
    • Vot­ing Isn’t A Win­dow Into the Soul (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “The idea that vot­ing is a win­dow into someone’s soul strikes me as almost a the­o­log­i­cal heresy and a fail­ure of empa­thet­ic imag­i­na­tion. It assumes that the per­son who vot­ed wrong—or right—sees the world the same way you do and that they invest the same moral, philo­soph­i­cal, and polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance in their vote that you do in yours.”
    • Nate Sil­ver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mis­takes of the ‘Indi­go Blob’ (Ezra Klein inter­view­ing Nate Sil­ver, New York Times): “What you seem to be doing in the book is mak­ing an inter­est­ing cut in soci­ety between peo­ple with dif­fer­ent forms of risk tol­er­ance and think­ing about risk. And you wrote some­thing that caught my eye: ‘Covid made those risk pref­er­ences pub­lic, worn on our prover­bial sleeves and our lit­er­al faces.’ And you go on to say, ‘Peo­ple are becom­ing more bifur­cat­ed in their risk tol­er­ance and that this affects every­thing from who we hang out with to how we vote.’ ”
      • An inter­est­ing (and kin­da long) inter­view.
  4. Chris­tian­i­ty and pol­i­tics inter­sect­ing in var­i­ous ways:
    • Trump has put social con­ser­v­a­tives in a dilem­ma (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “…I will set out the rel­e­vant moral prin­ci­ples for decid­ing how to vote when faced with a choice between can­di­dates whose posi­tions on mat­ters relat­ed to abor­tion, mar­riage, and the like are grave­ly immoral. Final­ly, I will dis­cuss how these prin­ci­ples apply to the present case.”
      • Fes­er is my favorite liv­ing philoso­pher. Writ­ten from a Catholic per­spec­tive but addressed to a broad­er audi­ence.
    • A pas­tor said his pro-Trump prophe­cies came from God. His broth­er called him a fake. (Danielle Paque­tte, Wash­ing­ton Post): “On the morn­ing he could no longer stand it, the preach­er was sip­ping cof­fee at his kitchen table. The house was qui­et. The boys weren’t up yet. Josi­ah John­son want­ed to savor the peace, but his atten­tion drift­ed to his younger broth­er, the one he had decid­ed was a false prophet. How many souls, he won­dered, was that Chris­t­ian influ­encer manip­u­lat­ing on social media right now? Hun­dreds of thou­sands fol­lowed Jere­mi­ah, who’d helped pop­u­lar­ize the far-right belief that God hand­picked Don­ald Trump to lead the Unit­ed States.”
      • Long, inter­est­ing, sad.
    • My Old Church’s Fun­da­men­tal­ist Wing Can­celed Me (David French and Vishakha Darb­ha, New York Times): “What you’re see­ing through­out Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty now is the fun­da­men­tal­ist wing is real­ly exert­ing itself. And so what that means is when you encounter some­body who’s a fun­da­men­tal­ist and you say, ‘I’m not vot­ing for Trump,’ they often don’t look at that as a debat­able point for which Chris­tians in good will can dis­agree. They will look at this and say, ‘It is the nat­ur­al and inevitable con­se­quence of apply­ing Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ples that you will sup­port Don­ald Trump.’… What that does is it rais­es the stakes to this eter­nal lev­el. And what ends up hap­pen­ing is they just sweep aside all of these scrip­tures about lov­ing your ene­mies, being kind to those, bless­ing those who per­se­cute you. All of that is just swept aside in favor of the burn­ing cer­tain­ty and feroc­i­ty of the cul­ture war.”
    • The All-Male Chris­t­ian Group Seek­ing a Res­ur­rec­tion in the Trump Era (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians have been a reli­able Repub­li­can vot­ing bloc since the 1980s, but they have his­tor­i­cal­ly been averse to hear­ing overt­ly par­ti­san mes­sages in spir­i­tu­al set­tings. That has been shift­ing in recent years, as some high-pro­file con­ser­v­a­tives, like Mr. Kirk and oth­ers at the con­fer­ence, have char­ac­ter­ized polit­i­cal engage­ment as a pas­toral oblig­a­tion. Some pas­tors who have leaned into preach­ing on top­ics like abor­tion and gen­der issues have seen their church­es boom in a time of broad declines in atten­dance.”
      • Pret­ty good arti­cle, although I take strong issue with the last sen­tence. Abor­tion and gen­der issues aren’t polit­i­cal sim­ply because there is a par­ti­san divide on them. Chris­tians have been talk­ing about human nature and sex­u­al ethics since before Amer­i­ca was a nation and should the Lord tar­ry we will con­tin­ue after Amer­i­ca is a dis­tant mem­o­ry.
  5. They All Got Mys­te­ri­ous Brain Dis­eases. They’re Fight­ing to Learn Why (Greg Don­ahue, New York Times)“In the con­text of a clus­ter of atyp­i­cal cas­es that had stumped some of the most expe­ri­enced sci­en­tists in Cana­da, Mar­rero believed that Jansen had not only over­stepped his bounds but had failed to address the situation’s most crit­i­cal ques­tions: ‘Why so many young? Why so many in one area? Why so many in one fam­i­ly?’ Many of Marrero’s col­leagues in the work­ing group agreed. In a leaked email from last year, one of them referred to Jansen’s find­ings as a ‘loop­hole’ through which the politi­cians have eager­ly leaped to con­clude noth­ing coher­ent is going on.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Have Nation­al Abor­tion Num­bers Increased Since the Dobbs Deci­sion? (John McCor­ma­ck, The Dis­patch): “At first glance, head­lines gen­er­at­ed by that report might lead the casu­al read­er to assume anti-abor­tion laws haven’t done any­thing to achieve their intend­ed pur­pose of sav­ing lives. But even if the new report is accu­rate (more on that below), oth­er stud­ies show that there are like­ly tens of thou­sands of infants and tod­dlers alive today because of laws allowed by the Dobbs deci­sion.”
  7. Reser­voir of liq­uid water found deep in Mar­t­ian rocks (Vic­to­ria Gill, BBC): “The Insight probe was only able to record direct­ly from the crust beneath its feet, but the researchers expect that there will be sim­i­lar reser­voirs across the plan­et. If that is the case, they esti­mate that there is enough liq­uid water on Mars to form a lay­er across the sur­face that would be more than half a mile deep. How­ev­er, they point out, the loca­tion of this Mar­t­ian ground­wa­ter is not good news for bil­lion­aires with Mars coloni­sa­tion plans who might want to tap into it. ‘It’s sequestered 10–20km deep in the crust,’ explained Prof Man­ga.”

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 465



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.

This is vol­ume 465, the 30th tri­an­gu­lar num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Did Planned Par­ent­hood Become One of the Country’s Largest Sup­pli­ers of Testos­terone? (Jen­nifer Block, The Free Press): “The orga­ni­za­tion would not give spe­cif­ic num­bers, or respond to mul­ti­ple requests for com­ment, but the insur­ance claim data (esti­mates that do not include patients who pay out of pock­et) sug­gest that 1 in 6 U.S. teens and young adults who sought gen­der hor­mones last year were seen at Planned Par­ent­hood. Between 2017 and 2023, affil­i­at­ed clin­ics filed gen­der-relat­ed insur­ance claims for 12,000 youths aged 12–17.”
  2. At 28, I Taught Myself to Be Lik­able. Here’s How I Did It (Sub­stack): “The guide­lines you’ll see below are going to seem real­ly rigid and judg­men­tal. But that’s kind of what I need­ed. Plat­i­tudes about how I need­ed to ‘be myself’ and ‘let my freak flag fly’ did way more harm than good. When I asked peo­ple for advice, a lot of them gave the knee­jerk response, ‘Just don’t care what oth­er peo­ple think of you,’ which is much eas­i­er said than done, espe­cial­ly when it’s bla­tant­ly obvi­ous that oth­er peo­ple can’t stand you.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. ‘I Just Have Some Ques­tions’: An Inter­view With Jus­tice Gor­such (David French, New York Times): “I didn’t get to ask every ques­tion I want­ed to, but our con­ver­sa­tion cov­ered a lot of ground, includ­ing Gorsuch’s indict­ment of the reg­u­la­to­ry state, his approach to eval­u­at­ing agency exper­tise, the prob­lem of mass incar­cer­a­tion and coer­cive plea bar­gain­ing, his jurispru­dence hold­ing the Unit­ed States account­able for its oblig­a­tions to Native Amer­i­cans and his def­i­n­i­tion of orig­i­nal­ism and the role of his­to­ry in under­stand­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Israel-relat­ed:
    • For col­lege stu­dents arrest­ed protest­ing the war in Gaza, the fall­out was only begin­ning (Christo­pher Heller et all, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Some 3,200 peo­ple were arrest­ed this spring dur­ing a wave of pro-Pales­tin­ian tent encamp­ments protest­ing the war in Gaza. While some col­leg es end­ed demon­stra­tions by strik­ing deals with the stu­dents, or sim­ply wait­ed them out, oth­ers called in police when pro­test­ers refused to leave. Many stu­dents have already seen those charges dis­missed. But the cas­es have yet to be resolved for hun­dreds of peo­ple at cam­pus­es that saw the high­est num­ber of arrests, accord­ing to an analy­sis of data gath­ered by The Asso­ci­at­ed Press and part­ner news­rooms.”
    • Why Israel Esca­lates (Dalia Dasse Kaye, For­eign Affairs): “…Israeli defense offi­cials do not nec­es­sar­i­ly feel com­fort­able rely­ing on deter­rence by denial—that is, by con­vinc­ing adver­saries that attacks would not succeed—as the Unit­ed States prefers. In these offi­cials’ view, the April defense of Israel was not a total suc­cess because, ulti­mate­ly, the defen­sive coali­tion did not pre­vent the attack; it only lim­it­ed the dam­age. Israeli defense plan­ners pre­fer deter­rence by punishment—showing adver­saries that attacks will pro­voke con­se­quences.”
    • Israel Isn’t ‘Risk­ing’ a Region­al War (Kevin Williamson, The Dis­patch): “…Israel is not ‘risk­ing a region­al war.’ Israel is involved in a region­al war, one that was forced upon it by Iran, some­times using prox­ies and some­times using its own forces direct­ly, as it did on April 13, when it attacked Israel with more than 300 mis­siles and drones. The Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, are wag­ing war on Israel—including a recent drone attack on Tel Aviv—as well as wag­ing a war on the Unit­ed States, attack­ing a U.S. Navy ves­sel in May, and con­duct­ing a wider mil­i­tary cam­paign against ship­ping in the Red Sea.” May be pay­walled.
  5. Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er ‘Dark Oxy­gen’ on the Ocean Floor Generated—Surprisingly—by Lumps of Met­al (Shi En Kim, Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine): “Twelve thou­sand feet under the ocean sur­face is a world of eter­nal mid­night. No sun­light can pen­e­trate to this depth to pro­mote pho­to­syn­the­sis, so no plants are pro­duc­ing oxy­gen there. Yet, the life-sup­port­ing gas is abun­dant in this dark­ness-cloaked region, thanks to an unlike­ly oxy­gen fac­to­ry: pota­to-sized, ‘bat­tery rocks’ on the seafloor.”
  6. US abor­tion num­bers have risen slight­ly since Roe was over­turned, study finds (Geoff Mul­vi­hill & Kim­ber­lee Krue­si, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “The num­ber of women get­ting abor­tions in the U.S. actu­al­ly went up in the first three months of 2024 com­pared with before the Supreme Court over­turned Roe v Wade, a report released Wednes­day found, reflect­ing the lengths that Demo­c­ra­t­ic-con­trolled states went to expand access.”
    • Relat­ed: Kamala’s Abor­tion Extrem­ism (Ryan T. Ander­son, First Things): “…the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty under Har­ris is as rad­i­cal­ly pro-abor­tion as it can pos­si­bly be. Short of com­ing out for killing tod­dlers, there sim­ply is no way to be more extreme than Kamala Har­ris and her par­ty now are. Kamala Har­ris is a hard-core ideologue—an abor­tion extremist—and has been since her first days as an elect­ed offi­cial. As pres­i­dent, she would be no dif­fer­ent.”
  7. Polit­i­cal or polit­i­cal-adja­cent (the dis­claimers at the bot­tom real­ly mat­ter — I did­n’t write these arti­cles, I just found them inter­est­ing and pass them along with non­par­ti­san intent — wait long enough and you’ll see arti­cles mak­ing point­ed obser­va­tions in all direc­tions. They’re focused one way this week because that’s how the news cycle rolled this time around):
    • Are Democ­rats real­ly more like­ly to be child­less cat ladies? (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…we had no idea what our friend Julie Zauzmer Weil was get­ting at when she asked if there was any evi­dence to sup­port the notion of the ‘child­less left.’ Weil, who you’ll rec­og­nize from her tremen­dous tax and data sto­ries for The Wash­ing­ton Post, clar­i­fied fur­ther: ‘Do Repub­li­cans have more kids than Democ­rats? It doesn’t seem obvi­ous to me that it would be true.’ The sim­ple answer, how­ev­er? Yes! About 38 per­cent of Democ­rats had nev­er had chil­dren as of 2022, com­pared with 26 per­cent of Repub­li­cans, accord­ing to the uni­ver­sal­ly beloved Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey from the uni­ver­sal­ly beloved NORC at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.”
    • Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s choice of Har­ris was unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic − and the lat­est evi­dence of par­ty lead­ers dis­trust­ing par­ty vot­ers (Daniel Kling­hard, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “But for the first time since 1968, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee will win the nom­i­na­tion with­out win­ning a sin­gle pri­ma­ry vote. This may not be as much of a demo­c­ra­t­ic back­slide as that of the pre­vi­ous so-called ‘mixed peri­od.’ But it would be a cul­mi­na­tion of the elite-ori­ent­ed trends that have shaped the nom­i­nat­ing process since 1984, in which par­ty elites have played an increas­ing­ly large role in shap­ing the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who said “this arti­cle left me with many thoughts to chew on.”
    • Five faith facts about Har­ris pick Tim Walz, a ‘Min­neso­ta Luther­an’ Dad (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Walz is Luther­an.… He does not often dis­cuss his faith pub­licly but has post­ed about attend­ing wor­ship dur­ing Christ­mas and oth­er ser­vices at var­i­ous Luther­an church­es. Walz refers to Pil­grim Luther­an Church in St. Paul — a con­gre­ga­tion in the Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, a main­line denom­i­na­tion — as ‘my parish.’ ”
    • Walz’s Brand Is More Left than Luther­an Among Min­neso­ta Evan­gel­i­cals (Har­vest Prude, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For the aver­age Mis­souri Syn­od mem­ber, both pas­tor and lay mem­ber, [Walz] absolute­ly will not be seen as one of us,” Hans Fiene, a Luther­an pas­tor in Mis­souri and cre­ator of Luther­an Satire, a mul­ti­me­dia project to teach about the Luther­an faith, told CT. “So there won’t be any kind of sit­u­a­tion like with Biden being a Catholic, where Catholics go, Well, he doesn’t real­ly rep­re­sent us, but he’s still a Catholic.”
      • Luther­an Satire guy! Great YouTube videos.

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 448

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.

This is vol­ume 448, an untouch­able num­ber. Which is an absolute­ly cool des­ig­na­tion for a num­ber to have.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Gos­sip is good, Stan­ford sci­en­tist sug­gests (Sarayu Pai, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Although gos­sip­ing is typ­i­cal­ly cast in a neg­a­tive light, a study con­duct­ed by researchers from Stan­ford and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land found that gos­sip­ing may be a ben­e­fi­cial prac­tice, as long as infor­ma­tion remains ‘reli­able.’ Study co-author Michele Gelfand, who is a pro­fes­sor at the Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, esti­mates that peo­ple gos­sip an hour a day on aver­age — defined as the ‘exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent, who said “these peo­ple need a dose of the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week : gos­sip is cor­ro­sive!” [Glen’s note — the King­dom prin­ci­ple of the week is a thing we do in our Chi Alpha, and “gos­sip is cor­ro­sive” is one of them]
    • Indeed they do, and this is use­ful launch­ing point for a brief dis­course on gos­sip. In this study, gos­sip is defined as “exchange [of] per­son­al infor­ma­tion about absent third par­ties.” But that’s not what we’re con­demn­ing when we con­demn gos­sip! If some­one tells you, “wow — that Caleb guy is super charm­ing and hand­some” and you reply, “You know he’s mar­ried, right?” then you’ve done noth­ing wrong — that’s not the sin of gos­sip. But if you spread a false neg­a­tive rumor about Caleb “you know he does drugs, right?”, that is the sin of gos­sip. This study con­flates those two very dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions.
    • The sin of gos­sip can be described as bear­ing bad news behind some­one’s back with a bad heart. The bad news can be bad in the sense of being untrue or it can be bad in the sense of unnec­es­sary and unhelp­ful. For more on this help­ful fram­ing, check out What Is Gos­sip? Expos­ing a Com­mon and Dan­ger­ous Sin (Matt Mitchell, Desir­ing God).
    • This is a recur­ring pat­tern, by the way: some researcher wants to study some­thing inter­est­ing but needs to oper­a­tional­ize a vari­able in some unortho­dox way to make the research fea­si­ble. Then they do their research and find some­thing that would be coun­ter­in­tu­itive rel­a­tive to the orig­i­nal mean­ing of the word they’re using (although maybe not that sur­pris­ing giv­en their oper­a­tional­iza­tion of the vari­able), and then the media repeats it as a com­men­tary on the actu­al thing — a thing which the sci­en­tists nev­er stud­ied. In this case, the study did­n’t actu­al­ly ana­lyze the sin of gos­sip, but nonethe­less near the end of the arti­cle we learn that “some stu­dents with pre­vi­ous­ly neg­a­tive views of gos­sip report see­ing it dif­fer­ent­ly in light of this study.”
  2. Why We Fast (Ross Byrd, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Fast­ing is no mag­ic fix. In fact, it’s almost the exact oppo­site of a mag­ic fix. It takes time, patience, and discipline—dare I say, suffering—to see its fruit. But the fruit is no less than the abil­i­ty to see more of God. Here are three ways to under­stand Chris­t­ian fast­ing: 1. Fast­ing makes space for God. 2. Fast­ing inter­rupts and reori­ents our uncon­scious pat­terns. 3. Fast­ing gives us eyes to see the unseen.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. Lots of good insights in this one.
  3. ‘Lit­tle Women’ and the Art of Break­ing Gram­mat­i­cal Rules (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “Curzan notes, for exam­ple, that the use of ‘lit­er­al­ly’ to exag­ger­ate is no recent anom­aly but rather goes back to, for exam­ple, our ‘Lit­tle Women,’ in which Louisa May Alcott has it that at a gath­er­ing ‘the land lit­er­al­ly flowed with milk and hon­ey.’ The March girls, also, would have said ‘sneaked’ where, since just the 1970s, as Curzan charts, we have been increas­ing­ly like­ly to say ‘snuck.’ Are you a lit­tle irked by the youngs say­ing ‘based off of’ rather than ‘based on’? That one threw me when I start­ed hear­ing my stu­dents say­ing it about 15 years ago; Curzan calms us down and demon­strates how ordi­nary and even log­i­cal it is. Curzan is also good on the use of ‘hope­ful­ly’ to mean ‘it is hoped.’ This became a punch­ing bag only in the 1960s — until then, not even gram­mar scolds cared, too busy com­plain­ing that, for exam­ple, the ‘prop­er’ mean­ing of obnox­ious is ‘sub­ject to harm.’” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Some more Israel/Hamas com­men­tary
    • Frac­tured Are the Peace­mak­ers (Sophia Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I spent a week in Israel and the West Bank meet­ing Pales­tin­ian Chris­tians and Mes­sian­ic Jews who are pas­tors, youth lead­ers, YMCA lead­ers, tour guides, lawyers, and stu­dents. Many of them aren’t pro­fes­sion­al peace activists, but all of them, from what I could tell, take seri­ous­ly Jesus’ Ser­mon on the Mount and strive to embody his procla­ma­tion that ‘blessed are the peace­mak­ers, for they will be called chil­dren of God’ (Matt. 5:9). The prob­lem is, I spoke to about two dozen indi­vid­u­als about what peace­mak­ing means and got almost two dozen dif­fer­ent answers.” Unlocked.
    • Israel Has Cre­at­ed a New Stan­dard for Urban War­fare. Why Will No One Admit It? (John Spencer, Newsweek): “In my long career study­ing and advis­ing on urban war­fare for the U.S. mil­i­tary, I’ve nev­er known an army to take such mea­sures to attend to the ene­my’s civil­ian pop­u­la­tion, espe­cial­ly while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly com­bat­ing the ene­my in the very same build­ings. In fact, by my analy­sis, Israel has imple­ment­ed more pre­cau­tions to pre­vent civil­ian harm than any mil­i­tary in history—above and beyond what inter­na­tion­al law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
      • The author is the chair of urban war stud­ies at the Mod­ern War Insti­tute at West Point. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • There Shall Be None to Make Him Afraid: Amer­i­can Lib­er­ty and the Jews (Mike Cosper, Acton Insti­tute): “His­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, the emer­gence of anti-Semi­tism is always a sign of some­thing poi­so­nous tak­ing root in a soci­ety. It doesn’t just spell dan­ger for Jews; it spells dan­ger for every­one. As Bari Weiss has put it, ‘What starts with the Jews nev­er ends with the Jews.’ The rise of anti-Semi­tism in Nazi Ger­many, Sovi­et Rus­sia, and half a dozen Mid­dle East­ern states was quick­ly fol­lowed by oth­er forms of vio­lence, tyran­ny, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism.” This is a long and sol­id arti­cle that cov­ers much more than anti-Semi­tism (although that is at its heart).
  5. Schools are using research to try to improve children’s learn­ing – but it’s not work­ing (Sal­ly Rior­dan, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “A series of ran­domised con­trolled tri­als, includ­ing one look­ing at how to improve lit­er­a­cy through evi­dence, have sug­gest­ed that schools that use meth­ods based on research are not per­form­ing bet­ter than schools that do not.”
    • British con­text, hence the spelling.
  6. The Anti-Frag­ile Bren­dan Eich (Andrew Beck, First Things): “I am not here to com­plain about can­cel cul­ture. Bren­dan Eich does not. He is too busy. He refus­es to be defined by the evil done to him, or by the pur­port­ed het­ero­doxy of his beliefs, but by the work he does and by his char­ac­ter, as known by those clos­est to him. Rather than tak­ing to the air­waves and lean­ing into the role of mar­tyr, as have so many oth­ers who have endured sim­i­lar abuse, Eich nev­er speaks pub­licly about the wrong done to him—not once even in pri­vate to me. Instead, he dili­gent­ly pur­sues his voca­tion.”
  7. The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Move­ment (David French, New York Times): “The old­er I get, the more I’m con­vinced that we sim­ply don’t know who we are — or what we tru­ly believe — until our val­ues car­ry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Repub­li­can Par­ty has made the case that life begins at con­cep­tion. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Repub­li­can Par­ty can’t live with its own phi­los­o­phy. There is no tru­ly pro-life par­ty in the Unit­ed States.”

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 372

On Fri­days (appar­ent­ly some Sat­ur­days) 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.

This is vol­ume 372, a num­ber I think is cool because it can be expressed as the sum of suc­ces­sive primes: 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 = 372.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Con­ve­nient, That Kanye West­’s Behav­ior Could Not Pos­si­bly Be Influ­enced by His Men­tal Ill­ness (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Two things I real­ly hate: morals of con­ve­nience and false friends. The types of peo­ple who say ‘men­tal ill­ness doesn’t do that’ are the types to pro­fess sup­port for those with psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders, but only when it’s easy, when the men­tal­ly ill are doing the social­ly approved things like talk­ing to them­selves on the sub­way. Which of course means that they are no friend to the men­tal­ly ill at all; sup­port only means some­thing when it comes at a cost.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: How Kanye West’s Break­down Makes Sense of Our Social Cri­sis (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Insta­bil­i­ty from this artist is hard­ly sur­pris­ing. Sev­er­al years ago, I not­ed that I was wor­ried for the rapper—not because of his men­tal health chal­lenges but because of what Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals often do to celebri­ties who pro­fess faith. Too often we claim them as, at best, mas­cots for ‘our side’ and, at worst, as tro­phies from the cul­ture wars. Over and over, the church has expect­ed things from these fig­ures that they do not have the matu­ri­ty, wis­dom, or even sta­bil­i­ty to han­dle.”
  2. Review: When Nar­cis­sism Comes to Church (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “But this book makes a mon­u­men­tal deci­sion: a deci­sion to put the Bible’s moral lan­guage to the side, to call a dis­or­der what the Bible calls sin, to call self-actu­al­iza­tion what the Bible calls repen­tance. This book’s aver­sion to bib­li­cal cat­e­gories does not empow­er read­ers to con­front spir­i­tu­al­ly abu­sive sys­tems. It instead makes those sys­tems hard­er to dis­rupt.”
    • This is an out­stand­ing book review that puts its fin­ger on a prob­lem I fre­quent­ly notice — when we dis­re­gard Bib­li­cal analy­sis we make it need­less­ly hard to bring Bib­li­cal solu­tions to bear.
  3. The Woman Who Gave the World a Thou­sand Names for God (Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Has there been a sin­gle trans­la­tor in church his­to­ry with Barnwell’s sway? We could talk about Jerome and his Latin Vul­gate, used by the Roman Catholic Church as its prin­ci­pal trans­la­tion for over 1,500 years. There was Luther and his Ger­man-lan­guage Bible. There was England’s King James I, if you cred­it him for com­mis­sion­ing his KJV—or William Tyn­dale if you feel like the KJV was most­ly cribbed from his work.” The claim feels like hyper­bole until you read the arti­cle. Wowsers. What a lega­cy!
  4. How California’s Bul­let Train Went Off the Rails (Ralph Vartabe­di­an, New York Times): “ ‘There were so many things that went wrong,’ Mr. McNa­ma­ra said. ‘[The rail com­pa­ny] was very angry. They told the state they were leav­ing for North Africa, which was less polit­i­cal­ly dys­func­tion­al. They went to Moroc­co and helped them build a rail sys­tem.’ Morocco’s bul­let train start­ed ser­vice in 2018.”
  5. 10 Affir­ma­tions and Denials on Eth­nic Har­mo­ny, Jus­tice, and the Church (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “We sim­ply can­not allow pol­i­tics or sec­u­lar cul­ture to define our terms or deter­mine our beliefs. Jesus puts his fin­ger on eth­nic har­mo­ny and says, ‘Mine.’ There­fore, the aim of these affir­ma­tions and denials is to right­ly rep­re­sent the voice of Jesus Christ. The One who designed eth­nic diver­si­ty has unpar­al­leled author­i­ty and has the final word on the whole issue.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Place­bo Of Affir­ma­tive Action (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “A recent David Shor analy­sis found that, among Demo­c­ra­t­ic poli­cies, affir­ma­tive action was among the most unpop­u­lar — with even less sup­port than ‘defund the police.’ More tan­gi­bly: on the nine occa­sions the pol­i­cy has been put to the elec­toral test since 1996, it has lost eight times, most recent­ly in super-lib­er­al Cal­i­for­nia in 2020.”
  6. Three Para­dox­es of Athe­ism (Neil Shen­vi, per­son­al web­site): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, one of the most attrac­tive fea­tures of athe­ism has been its claim to stark real­ism. No mat­ter how unap­peal­ing a god­less uni­verse may turn out to be, athe­ists claim to be com­mit­ted to adher­ing to the truth at all costs. How­ev­er, in this essay I would like to show that at the very heart of athe­ism are sev­er­al extreme­ly unex­pect­ed para­dox­es, areas in which athe­ism is shown to be in ten­sion with a com­mit­ment to real­ism and a life con­sis­tent with truth.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Spread of Catholic hos­pi­tals lim­its repro­duc­tive care across the U.S. (Frances Stead Sell­ers and Meena Venkatara­manan, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Catholic sys­tems now con­trol about 1 in 7 U.S. hos­pi­tal beds, requir­ing reli­gious doc­trine to guide treat­ment, often to the sur­prise of patients.”
    • The above arti­cle annoyed me and I was pleased to see this response: As Wash­ing­ton Post tar­gets Catholic hos­pi­tals, every reli­gious insti­tu­tion needs to build defens­es (Tim­o­thy P. Car­ney, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er):  “These jour­nal­ists write as if the base­line is total accep­tance of abor­tion, gay mar­riage, and trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy and that the scary new thing is the reli­gious hos­pi­tals or teach­ings that have been around for cen­turies or mil­len­nia. ‘Spread of Catholic hos­pi­tals’ is a fun­ny head­line because Catholics were the ones who invent­ed hos­pi­tals. If you want­ed to write a trend piece, you should real­ly write about the spread of laws and law­suits threat­en­ing Catholic hos­pi­tals, which are actu­al­ly new.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Is Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal in Israel Myth? Or Real­i­ty? (Ralph Hawkins, Logos): “When I was work­ing on my doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion about the Ebal site, I spent a week with Zer­tal. One morn­ing while we were dri­ving to the site, he told me his crit­ics had accused him of try­ing to prove the Bible. They said he imposed a cul­tic inter­pre­ta­tion onto the stone struc­ture he had found. He explained, though, that he had been born and raised in Ein She­mer, Israeli kib­butz that was affil­i­at­ed with a sec­u­lar move­ment. He said he had grown up believ­ing that the Bible was full of myths. When he did his grad­u­ate work in archae­ol­o­gy, he did it at Tel Aviv, the most lib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty in Israel, where those views were rein­forced. He insist­ed he had not embarked on his exca­va­tion at Mount Ebal in order to prove the Bible. What he found there, how­ev­er, had a pro­found effect on him. He said, ‘I became a believ­er at Mount Ebal.’” I love sto­ries like this. Archae­ol­o­gy and the Bible is fas­ci­nat­ing to me. From vol­ume 243.

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 363

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.

This is num­ber 363, which can be rep­re­sent­ed as 31 + 32 + 33 + 34 + 35

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why aren’t smart peo­ple hap­pi­er? (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “My grand­ma does not know how to use the ‘input’ but­ton on her TV’s remote con­trol, but she does know how to raise a fam­i­ly full of good peo­ple who love each oth­er, how to car­ry on through a tragedy, and how to make the per­fect pump­kin pie.… Exclud­ing this kind of intel­li­gence from our def­i­n­i­tions doesn’t just hurt our grandmas—it hurts us too. If you don’t val­ue the abil­i­ty to solve poor­ly defined prob­lems, you’ll nev­er get more of it. You won’t seek out peo­ple who have that abil­i­ty and try to learn from them, nor will you lis­ten to them when they have some­thing impor­tant to say. You’ll spend your whole life try­ing to solve prob­lems with clev­er­ness when what you real­ly need is wis­dom.”
  2. New York City’s Largest Evan­gel­i­cal Church Plans Bil­lion-Dol­lar Devel­op­ment (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “On 10.5 acres of church land, the pro­posed vil­lage would include thou­sands of units of afford­able hous­ing, a trade school, a super­mar­ket, a per­form­ing arts cen­ter, 24/7 child­care for night-shift work­ers, senior liv­ing facil­i­ties, and oth­er ameni­ties designed to revi­tal­ize the East New York neigh­bor­hood.”
    • But I thought church­es were leech­es on soci­ety exploit­ing their tax-exempt sta­tus with­out help­ing their com­mu­ni­ties! I’m sure some­one told me that once. 
  3. When mix­ing faith with fur­ries, things can get hairy (Riley Far­rell, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “…Chris­tians in the fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty are cau­tious about who knows about both their fur­ry and faith­ful selves. Chris­t­ian fur­ries inter­viewed for this sto­ry, includ­ing lead­ers of the group that calls itself the Chris­t­ian Fur­ry Fel­low­ship, asked to be anony­mous, fear­ing ‘doxxing’ from with­in the large­ly sec­u­lar fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty for their Chris­t­ian iden­ti­ty and ostra­ciza­tion from their pro­fes­sion­al lives for their fur­ry hob­by.”
    • This was by far the most unex­pect­ed arti­cle I read this week. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing here. I draw your atten­tion to my dis­claimers.
  4. Fact-Check­ing Ran­dall Balmer’s Urban Leg­end on the Real Ori­gin of the Reli­gious Right (Jonathan White­head, The Gospel Coali­tion): “By the ear­ly 1970s, Evan­gel­i­cals, Catholics, and oth­er reli­gious vot­ers had dis­cov­ered that pol­i­tics would not leave them alone. Then their con­cerns about abor­tion, gov­ern­ment over­reach in schools, sec­u­lar human­ism at the FCC, and an unre­spon­sive ‘born again’ Pres­i­dent all merged into a sin­gle out­let, cre­at­ing a tor­rent of Repub­li­can vot­ers in 1978 and beyond.”
    • I post­ed a debunk­ing of this claim a while ago, but this one is quite good. And the claim gets repeat­ed enough in cer­tain cir­cles that debunk­ings should be repeat­ed as well.
  5. There Is a Sec­u­lar Case for Life (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amidst a squadron of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers, there was a sin­gle athe­ist pro­gres­sive. He was beard­ed, disheveled, and qui­et, but when he spoke every­one fell silent. Every­one leaned for­ward to hear what he had to say. His name was Nat Hentoff. He was a writer for the Vil­lage Voice; he’d pub­lished in Play­boy. He was a pro­gres­sive civ­il lib­er­tar­i­an. He was also one of the most per­sua­sive pro-life voic­es in the land.”
  6. Yearn­ing for a Banana Repub­lic (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “When seri­ous peo­ple talk seri­ous­ly about chang­ing a regime, they’re talk­ing about chang­ing the sys­tem of gov­ern­ment. Regime change in Iraq meant get­ting rid of a total­i­tar­i­an, ter­ror­is­tic dic­ta­tor­ship, not sim­ply replac­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein with a more pli­able and coop­er­a­tive tyrant. America’s regime isn’t on any bal­lot. Sym­bol­i­cal­ly, it is the bal­lot. More prop­er­ly, it is the con­sti­tu­tion­al sys­tem that requires our lead­ers to be elect­ed.”
    • This is straight fire. Not espe­cial­ly par­ti­san but def­i­nite­ly polit­i­cal. Gold­berg is a tremen­dous word­smith.
  7. 1st syn­thet­ic mouse embryos — com­plete with beat­ing hearts and brains — cre­at­ed with no sperm, eggs or womb (Nico­let­ta Lanese, Live Sci­ence): “To achieve this feat, the researchers used only stem cells and a spin­ning device filled with shiny glass vials.”
    • The title is, I think, poor­ly word­ed. These are not embryos assem­bled from raw mate­ri­als; rather, the researchers suc­cess­ful­ly mor­phed a stem cell into an embryo. Which is also amaz­ing!

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have  Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.” First shared in vol­ume 232. (sad­ly, this is pay­walled)

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.