Tag: academia

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 425

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 425, the sum of 3 con­sec­u­tive primes. 425 = 137 + 139 + 149

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m going to start today’s roundup off with an expla­na­tion of why this email is the way it is. First read this brief arti­cle by Nate Sil­ver: It’s easy to screw up on break­ing news. But you have to admit when you do. (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “This morn­ing, Gallup pub­lished its annu­al poll on trust in the media. Over­all, only 32 per­cent of Amer­i­cans say they trust the mass media ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ to ‘report the news ful­ly, accu­rate­ly and fair­ly’ — tied with 2016 for a record low. ”
    • Sil­ver’s arti­cle made me reflect on how I think about mod­ern jour­nal­ism and then made me want to explain it. First, I do believe jour­nal­ists try to get things right. Places like the NYT and the Wash­ing­ton Post rarely pub­lish false infor­ma­tion and gen­er­al­ly cor­rect false­hoods when they become aware of them. The more spe­cif­ic a claim is the more like­ly it is to be true.
    • Jour­nal­ists do, how­ev­er, fre­quent­ly fail to report true infor­ma­tion they are not inter­est­ed in or excit­ed about. This is rarely a con­scious choice — it’s just a byprod­uct of the way they think about real­i­ty. This comes up espe­cial­ly on so-called “cul­ture war” issues. Many top-notch reporters are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly unaware of and strange­ly incu­ri­ous about many of the facts and sto­ries around trans­gen­derism, mar­riage, reli­gious lib­er­ty, and so on.
    • In fact, news­rooms are so ide­o­log­i­cal­ly mono­cul­tur­al that there are often mas­sive holes in what is report­ed. Not only are reporters blind to incon­ve­nient facts, they are often blind to entire sto­ries and trends. An excel­lent his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of this is when­ev­er the 60s and 70s are remem­bered. Amer­i­ca legit expe­ri­enced a Great Awak­en­ing (the Jesus Peo­ple move­ment) that hap­pened in par­al­lel with the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion. We only ever talk about the sec­ond not because reporters/commentators are sup­press­ing knowl­edge of the Jesus Peo­ple but because they gen­uine­ly are not even aware that they exist­ed or that what hap­pened then is still shap­ing our cul­ture today.
    • And so when I want a fact, I turn to some­place like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Reuters or to a cred­i­ble expert who writes direct­ly to the pub­lic (Ryan Burge is a good exam­ple of this). But when I want an analy­sis, I look for cred­i­ble, sane voic­es both with­in and with­out the con­fines of the media estab­lish­ment. I fre­quent­ly look to places like Sub­stack or niche web­sites like Mere Ortho­doxy or to main­stream media com­men­ta­tors like Ross Douthat or David French or Megan McAr­dle who have a track record of syn­the­siz­ing infor­ma­tion accu­rate­ly and form­ing opin­ions wise­ly.
    • And when I’m read­ing some­thing, I often ask, “Does this per­spec­tive seem plau­si­ble in light of my expe­ri­ence?” Espe­cial­ly when it is a claim about evan­gel­i­cal­ism or charismatic/Pentecostal Chris­tian­i­ty — I like­ly know more about that world than 98% of the staff of the New York Times (and after read­ing some arti­cles I think I know more about it than all their staff put togeth­er). Some­times they take an odd­ball church or reli­gious leader and put their sto­ry for­ward as rep­re­sen­ta­tive when it is not at all.
    • Any­way, there is prob­a­bly a lot more to say about mod­ern media, but what I just said is pret­ty much why this week­ly update fea­tures the mix of con­tent that it does: main­stream media sources for facts and a diverse array of experts for analy­sis, all fil­tered through evan­gel­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties.
    • A relat­ed thought on news con­sump­tion: peri­od­ic­i­ty (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “The more unsta­ble a sit­u­a­tion is, the more rapid­ly it changes, the less valu­able minute-by-minute report­ing is. I don’t know what hap­pened to the hos­pi­tal in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Econ­o­mist shows up I will be bet­ter informed about it than peo­ple who have been rage-refresh­ing their brows­er win­dows for the past sev­er­al days, and I will have suf­fered con­sid­er­ably less emo­tion­al stress.… If you’re read­ing the news sev­er­al times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stim­u­lat­ed.”
  2. Mov­ing on, here are some arti­cles that give con­text for the Israel war on Hamas:
    • Pales­tin­ian right of return mat­ters (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Because it seems to me that what­ev­er you per­son­al­ly think about [the Pales­tin­ian right of return], it is absolute­ly cen­tral to how the Arab world and dias­po­ra Jews and sec­u­lar Israelis all view the con­flict. Which in turn means that it’s cen­tral to the col­lapse of the Two-State Solu­tion as a polit­i­cal con­struct and to the col­lapse of the peace camp in Israeli pol­i­tics that might have been inclined make a deal that was favor­able to Pales­tin­ian inter­ests. There is, in fact, a whole school of thought asso­ci­at­ed with Bill Clin­ton and Amer­i­can nego­tia­tor Den­nis Ross that holds the right of return almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly respon­si­ble for scut­tling the Camp David talks and pre­vent­ing the emer­gence of an inde­pen­dent Pales­tine. Of course, many oth­er well-informed peo­ple deny that’s the case or believe it’s an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. But even if you think it is fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect to say the res­o­lu­tion of this con­flict hinges on the right of return, its cen­tral­i­ty to so many of the nar­ra­tives around this issue makes it an impor­tant con­cept to under­stand.”
    • The For­got­ten His­to­ry of the Term “Pales­tine” (Dou­glas J. Fei­th, Mosa­ic): “The term ‘Pales­tine’ was used for mil­len­nia with­out a pre­cise geo­graph­ic def­i­n­i­tion. That’s not uncommon—think of ‘Tran­scau­ca­sus’ or ‘Mid­west.’ No pre­cise def­i­n­i­tion exist­ed for Pales­tine because none was required. Since the Roman era, the name lacked polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. No nation ever had that name.”
      • This is from back in 2021. Super inter­est­ing stuff.
    • Hamas does not yet under­stand the depth of Israeli resolve (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, Times of Israel): “That ene­my is not the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, of course, even though sup­port for ter­ror attacks is wide­spread among Pales­tini­ans. The ene­my is not exact­ly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The ene­my is the Pales­tin­ian the­o­ry of Israelis that makes the vio­lence seen on Octo­ber 7 seem to many of them a ratio­nal step on the road to lib­er­a­tion rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet anoth­er in a long string of self-inflict­ed dis­as­ters for the Pales­tin­ian cause.… A tragedy is about to unfold in Gaza made worse by the long learn­ing curve it will take for Hamas to grasp the depth of Israeli resolve. It has robbed Israel of any oth­er inter­est but its destruc­tion. In the Israeli mind, any bru­tal­i­ty Hamas can com­mit it will com­mit. And so it can­not be allowed to ever com­mit any act ever again.”
  3. Some Chris­t­ian per­spec­tives
    • Anti­se­mit­ic Vio­lence and Its Shame­ful Defense (Mike Cosper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To be hor­ri­fied by the slaugh­ter of Israeli inno­cents doesn’t require deny­ing the suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. And car­ing for Pales­tin­ian inno­cents doesn’t require being cold or numb to the hor­rors of anti­semitism and Hamas. We can con­demn Hamas while demand­ing account­abil­i­ty from Israeli lead­ers who have foment­ed vio­lence, ele­vat­ed right-wing extrem­ists, and excused vio­la­tions of inter­na­tion­al law. Indeed, Chris­tians should be marked by our will­ing­ness to oppose all injus­tice and to care for Israeli and Pales­tin­ian vic­tims alike. And while that includes under­stand­ing that Pales­tini­ans have suf­fered great injus­tices from the gov­ern­ment of Israel—as well as neigh­bor­ing states of Egypt, Jor­dan, Iran, Lebanon, Syr­ia, and Sau­di Ara­bia, as well as Hamas and the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty itself—it must also include active rejec­tion of anti­semitism.”
    • With­er the Poi­so­nous Plant of Hamas (Tamir Khouri, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In this envi­ron­ment of hatred, racism, and vio­lence, Hamas has exploit­ed young peo­ple with false promis­es. With no hori­zon of hope, Hamas’s adher­ents in Pales­tine sank into dark­ness and helped Hamas vic­tim­ize Israelis too. But it does not have to be this way. As Chris­tians, we believe in the pow­er of redemp­tion. With real hope for the future of this land, these hate­ful move­ments will with­er. For a last­ing peace, we must respect the image of God in Israelis and Pales­tini­ans alike. Is it too much to ask that we don’t see this as a zero-sum game? Shouldn’t both Israelis and Pales­tini­ans live in the dig­ni­ty God intend­ed for us?”
      • The pseu­do­ny­mous author is a Pales­tin­ian Chris­t­ian who is an Israeli cit­i­zen.
  4. Some arti­cles about mod­ern acad­e­mia:
    • Why Big Mon­ey Can’t Eas­i­ly Change Cam­pus Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…donors should find ways to give mon­ey to the actu­al stu­dents — through the Hil­lel or oth­er Jew­ish or Israeli stu­dent groups if you’re espe­cial­ly con­cerned with the Jew­ish place on cam­pus, but more gen­er­al­ly through polit­i­cal or reli­gious groups that promise to work against the school’s dom­i­nant assump­tions, or through stu­dent asso­ci­a­tions that seem to fos­ter free debate, or through cam­pus-adja­cent insti­tu­tions that serve stu­dents but are inde­pen­dent of the schools. But not with the goal of using such stu­dent groups as a means of con­flict with the admin­is­tra­tion or the fac­ul­ty. Rather, with the goal that such groups can become micro­cosms of the uni­ver­si­ty you loved once and fear no longer exists, cells in a body yet to be restored, whose health and flour­ish­ing with­in the large world of Penn or Har­vard or wher­ev­er is an end unto itself.”
      • Ross Douthat speaks noth­ing but truth through­out this essay. If you know any gazil­lion­aires who want to influ­ence the tra­jec­to­ries of elite uni­ver­si­ties have them read this essay and then tell them about Chi Alpha. Men­tion we’d like a build­ing near cam­pus.
    • The War Comes to Stan­ford (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Alma Andi­no, a Jew­ish senior at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, spent the day of Hamas’s attacks against Israel cry­ing and dis­traught. Like many Jews around the coun­try, much of the week­end passed on the phone with fam­i­ly mem­bers, fear­ing for the safe­ty of friends and extend­ed fam­i­ly in Israel. Andino’s fel­low stu­dents in Colum­bae, the social jus­tice and anti­war res­i­den­tial house where she is a res­i­den­tial assis­tant, held her through her pan­ic attacks. ‘I felt so pow­er­less,’ she recalled when we spoke this week. On Mon­day, a friend asked if she’d seen the ban­ner some of her house­mates were prepar­ing to hang on the front of Colum­bae, the house she con­sid­ered to be her com­mu­ni­ty and her home. The sheet bore the slo­gan ‘Zion­ism is geno­cide’ in red let­ters, styled to look as if they were drip­ping with blood.… For Alma Andi­no, events on cam­pus have already reached a break­ing point. After beg­ging her house­mates not to hang the ban­ner, she said the group debat­ed for hours, with the impli­ca­tion they would desist only if a suit­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Israel’s exis­tence could be giv­en. They told her they felt that as stu­dent activists, they need­ed to dis­play a mes­sage that would put them on the right side of his­to­ry. We should be advo­cat­ing for mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, they said. ‘Except for Jews?’ Alma replied. The group scoffed.”
    • What Con­ser­v­a­tives Mis­un­der­stand About Rad­i­cal­ism at Uni­ver­si­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “The ten­sion burst­ing into view right now—between a major­i­ty of schol­ars, for whom ‘decol­o­niza­tion’ means putting few­er white Euro­peans on their syl­labi, and a small minor­i­ty who believe it entails any­thing-goes vio­lent revolution—is the unwel­come and unsur­pris­ing result of uni­ver­si­ties want­i­ng to cos­play rebel­lion while still churn­ing out Wall Street–executive alum­ni who will one day pad endow­ments that are larg­er than Israel’s annu­al defense bud­get.”
      • The title makes this sound more par­ti­san than it is. 100% worth a read and pon­der.
    • Stu­dents for Pogroms in Israel (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Look­ing back on the Man­son killings, Joan Did­ion wrote, ‘Many peo­ple I know in Los Ange­les believe that the Six­ties end­ed abrupt­ly on August 9, 1969, end­ed at the exact moment when word of the mur­ders on Cielo Dri­ve trav­eled like brush­fire through the com­mu­ni­ty, and in a sense this is true. The ten­sion broke that day. The para­noia was ful­filled.’ A few peo­ple I know believe last Saturday’s attack on Israel and the respons­es from left­ist stu­dent groups mark the end of the ‘Great Awok­en­ing.’ Although it is too ear­ly to eval­u­ate the accu­ra­cy of that hypoth­e­sis, cam­pus pol­i­tics have cer­tain­ly trans­formed in recent days. Now we are left won­der­ing whether what comes next is bet­ter or worse than what pre­ced­ed it.”
      • He makes spe­cif­ic men­tion of Stan­ford at one point, although it is hard­ly his focus.
    • Moral con­tro­ver­sies and aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lic health: Notes on nav­i­gat­ing and sur­viv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom chal­lenges (Tyler Van­der­Weele, Glob­al Epi­demi­ol­o­gy): “I think that there needs to be more open dis­cus­sion in acad­e­mia, and in soci­ety, about these mat­ters. Most peo­ple, even those who are deeply con­cerned, seem very uneasy dis­cussing these issues, for fear of being attacked for sim­ply rais­ing them. Col­leagues at Har­vard, rang­ing from an expert in child devel­op­ment to a clin­i­cian pro­vid­ing men­tal health care for teenage girls, have told me that they are uncom­fort­able shar­ing their con­cerns on these mat­ters in many or most set­tings at Har­vard. An evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard like­wise recent­ly came under attack because she explic­it­ly stat­ed that sex was bio­log­i­cal and bina­ry, even though she also not­ed that we can nev­er­the­less respect a per­son­’s gen­der iden­ti­ty. The attack was suf­fi­cient­ly severe, and the admin­is­tra­tion’s response suf­fi­cient­ly weak, that she even­tu­al­ly felt she had no choice but to resign. Rather than open dis­cus­sion, it seems we are often now rely­ing on anony­mous arti­cles, or brave, and sub­se­quent­ly vil­i­fied, authors and whis­tle-blow­ers to raise alter­na­tive view­points. One may strong­ly dis­agree with their posi­tions, but it is not unrea­son­able to raise the ques­tions.”
      • I removed hyper­linked foot­notes from this excerpt for read­abil­i­ty. This is worth read­ing as a mod­el of mature­ly and wise­ly respond­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic intol­er­ance. Not many schol­ars have com­port­ed them­selves with as much class as Van­der­Weele when their views came under attack. Also, I learned in this arti­cle that Van­der­Weele is Catholic. I had assumed he was an evan­gel­i­cal based on some­thing I heard else­where.
  5. Think­ing about the moral dimen­sions of the war
    • The Moral Ques­tions at the Heart of the Gaza War (David French, New York Times): “This is the prob­lem Israeli sol­diers and com­man­ders face. They must pro­tect their cit­i­zens from sav­agery. They must com­ply with the laws of war. And they must make a series of moral choic­es, under extreme duress, that can define them and their nation — all while they face a ter­ror­ist ene­my that appears to pos­sess no con­science at all.”
      • Worth read­ing. As I men­tioned when I shared French’s pre­vi­ous arti­cle, he is more qual­i­fied than any oth­er colum­nist I know to weigh in on this.
    • This Way for the Geno­cide, Ladies and Gen­tle­men (Chris Hedges, Scheer­Post): “I spent sev­en years report­ing on the con­flict, four of them as the Mid­dle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bod­ies of Israeli vic­tims of bus bomb­ings in Jerusalem by Pales­tin­ian sui­cide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, includ­ing chil­dren, in the cor­ri­dors in Dar Al-Shi­fa Hos­pi­tal in Gaza City. I watched Israeli sol­diers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then cal­lous­ly shot in the Khan You­nis refugee camp. I shel­tered from bombs dropped by Israeli war­planes. I climbed over the rub­ble of demol­ished Pales­tin­ian homes and apart­ment blocks along the bor­der with Egypt. I inter­viewed the blood­ied and dazed sur­vivors. I heard the soul crush­ing wails of moth­ers keen­ing over the corpses of their chil­dren.… it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the com­plic­i­ty of an inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that licens­es Israel’s geno­ci­dal slaugh­ter and accel­er­ates a cycle of vio­lence it may not be able to con­trol.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Smart­phones Have Tur­bocharged the Dan­ger of Porn (Mary Har­ring­ton, Wall Street Jour­nal): “It should come as no sur­prise that the per­son­al­ized, tac­tile, portable smart­phone would be the dig­i­tal por­tal of choice for some­thing as inti­mate as porn con­sump­tion. But of the new com­pul­sive behav­iors enabled by smart­phones, few have as intense and imme­di­ate a reward cycle as porn—or as many far-reach­ing con­se­quences.”
  7. Is It Wrong to Cure Blind­ness? (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “The Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, the $40 bil­lion-endowed fund­ing arm of the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, recent­ly took a stand against ableism by propos­ing a change to its mis­sion state­ment, which promis­es to ‘enhance health, length­en life, and reduce ill­ness and dis­abil­i­ty.’ An advi­so­ry com­mit­tee with­in the NIH took issue with the phrase ‘reduce… dis­abil­i­ty,’ writ­ing in a 66-page report pub­lished last Decem­ber that it ‘could be inter­pret­ed as per­pet­u­at­ing ableist beliefs that dis­abled peo­ple are flawed and need to be ‘fixed.’ ”
    • There are legit insane per­spec­tives being nor­mal­ized in the world right now. Cur­ing blind­ness is an unequiv­o­cal good.

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 What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic): “…one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.” This is an old arti­cle I share peri­od­i­cal­ly, I think I first shared it way back in my fifth Fri­day email. Help­ful in pars­ing media cov­er­age in the cur­rent war.

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 424

lots of arti­cles from an emo­tion­al­ly drain­ing week

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 424, which is sym­met­ri­cal and also the sum of 10 con­sec­u­tive primes. 424 = 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Today’s roundup was dif­fi­cult to assem­ble. First, there are the obvi­ous emo­tion­al chal­lenges of read­ing too much about the hor­rif­ic raid by Hamas. If you are won­der­ing whether you should dive deeply into orig­i­nal sources (Insta­gram sto­ries from on the field, etc), no you should not. It will harm your soul. Sec­ond, there is a whole sea of infor­ma­tion and opin­ions and I have a very small buck­et. Third, it was a busy week (and today in par­tic­u­lar was quite hec­tic for me). All that hav­ing been said, if you find oth­er inter­est­ing sto­ries about the unfold­ing sit­u­a­tion in Israel, please send them my way.

  1. The best/most inter­est­ing sto­ries I’ve seen about the Hamas attack on Israel.
    • ‘We’re Going to Die Here’ (Yair Rosen­berg, The Atlantic): “First I’m hear­ing this gun­fire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road, then I hear it from the neigh­bor­hood, and then I hear it out­side my win­dow. I’m in the room with my wife, and I hear the gun­fire direct­ly out­side my win­dow, as well as shout­ing. I under­stand Ara­bic. I under­stood exact­ly what was hap­pen­ing: that Hamas has infil­trat­ed our kib­butz, that there are ter­ror­ists out­side my win­dow, and that I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls, and I don’t know if any­one is going to come to save us.”
      • This is an amaz­ing sto­ry. 100% worth read­ing.
    • The attacks on Israel, and the response. (Isaac Saul, Tan­gle): “Am I pro-Israel or pro-Pales­tine? I have no idea. I’m pro-not-killing-civil­ians. I’m pro-not-trap­ping-mil­lions-of-peo­ple-in-open-air-pris­ons. I’m pro-not-shoot­ing-grand­mas-in-the-back-of-the-head. I’m pro-not-flat­ten­ing-apart­ment-com­plex­es. I’m pro-not-rap­ing-women-and-tak­ing-hostages. I’m pro-not-unjust­ly-impris­on­ing-peo­ple-with­out-due-process. I’m pro-free­dom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we nev­er see in this con­flict any­more. What­ev­er this is, I want none of it.”
      • This is a well-done roundup fea­tur­ing diverse view­points.
    • Dark­ness Vis­i­ble (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The more I’ve thought and read about Israel, the more it seems that its found­ing was both a moral neces­si­ty and a prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty. The moral neces­si­ty is proven by last week­end. If Jews can be sub­ject to a medieval pogrom in their own coun­try in 2023, what hope could they ever have with­out a coun­try at all? The prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty lies in the sim­ple fact that the state of Israel was cre­at­ed on land laden with deep reli­gious sym­bol­ism, where much of the exist­ing pop­u­la­tion did not give con­sent, and despite the ear­ly promise, no coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans was ever con­struct­ed along­side it.”
      • A more com­pre­hen­sive essay than many I’ve read so far.
    • What It Would Mean to Treat Hamas Like ISIS (David French, New York Times): “…Israel’s goal is not to pun­ish Hamas but to defeat it — to remove it from pow­er in Gaza the way the Iraqi mil­i­tary, the Unit­ed States and their allies removed ISIS from Mosul, Fal­lu­ja, Rama­di and every oth­er city ISIS con­trolled in Iraq. That can’t be accom­plished by air pow­er alone. If remov­ing Hamas from pow­er is the goal, then that almost cer­tain­ly means sol­diers and tanks fight­ing in Gazan cities, block by block, house to house in an area of rough­ly two mil­lion peo­ple. The pur­pose of this newslet­ter is to give you a primer on both the mil­i­tary dif­fi­cul­ty of the task and the human­i­tar­i­an con­straints on it, along with the lim­i­ta­tions that are unique to Israel.”
      • Unlocked — a thor­ough arti­cle from an author with high­ly rel­e­vant exper­tise.
    • Hamas prac­ticed in plain sight, post­ing video of mock attack weeks before bor­der breach (Michael Beiseck­er &  Sarah El Deeb, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “A slick­ly pro­duced two-minute pro­pa­gan­da video post­ed to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12 shows fight­ers using explo­sives to blast through a repli­ca of the bor­der gate, sweep in on pick­up trucks and then move build­ing by build­ing through a full-scale recon­struc­tion of an Israeli town, fir­ing auto­mat­ic weapons at human-sil­hou­et­ted paper tar­gets. The Islam­ic mil­i­tant group’s live-fire exer­cise dubbed oper­a­tion ‘Strong Pil­lar’ also had mil­i­tants in body armor and com­bat fatigues car­ry­ing out oper­a­tions that includ­ed the destruc­tion of mock-ups of the wall’s con­crete tow­ers and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions anten­na, just as they would do for real in the dead­ly attack last Sat­ur­day.”
    • As Deaths Soar in Gaza From Israeli Strikes, Egypt Offers Aid, but No Exit (Declan Walsh, New York Times): “Egypt has long insist­ed that Israel must solve the Pales­tin­ian issue with­in its bor­ders, to keep alive aspi­ra­tions for a future Pales­tin­ian state. Allow­ing large num­bers of Gazans to cross over, even as refugees, would ‘revive the idea that Sinai is the alter­na­tive coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans,’ said Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty. A relat­ed sce­nario that wor­ries Egypt is that it could end up as the de fac­to admin­is­tra­tor of Gaza.”
      • Egypt, of course, is the only nation besides Israel that shares a bor­der with the Gaza Strip. It is often over­looked by Amer­i­cans because we don’t know our geog­ra­phy very well, but Egypt is equal­ly involved in pre­vent­ing the migra­tion of the Pales­tini­ans in Gaza.
    • How Hamas breached Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’ (Samuel Grana­dos, Ruby Mellen, Lau­ren Tier­ney, Artur Galocha, Cate Brown and Aaron Steck­el­berg, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The fence was breached at 29 points, accord­ing to the Israel Defense Forces. Though there wereIs­raeli guard tow­ers posi­tioned every 500 feet along the perime­ter of the wall at some points, the fight­ers appeared to encounter lit­tle resis­tance. The bor­der was min­i­mal­ly staffed, it soon became apparent,with much of Israel’s mil­i­tary divert­ed to focus on unrest in the West Bank.”
      • Detailed and quite inter­est­ing. Also not very long to read.
    • The Pro­gres­sives Who Flunked the Hamas Test (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “In the fevered world of social media, pro­gres­sive activists have often sought to dis­cred­it hate­ful state­ments and unjust poli­cies by describ­ing them as ‘vio­lence,’ even ‘geno­cide.’ This ten­den­cy seems grotesque if the same activists are not pre­pared to crit­i­cize Hamas, a group whose found­ing char­ter is explic­it­ly geno­ci­dal… Fit­ting Israel into the inter­sec­tion­al frame­work has always been dif­fi­cult, because its Jew­ish cit­i­zens are both his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed—the sur­vivors of an attempt to wipe them out entire­ly—and cur­rent­ly in a dom­i­nant posi­tion over the Pales­tini­ans, as demon­strat­ed by the Netanyahu government’s deci­sion to restrict pow­er and water sup­plies to Gaza. The sim­plis­tic log­ic of pop inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty can­not rec­on­cile this, and the sub­ject caused schisms with­in the left long before Saturday’s attacks.”
      • This one is espe­cial­ly worth read­ing for uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents. It high­lights weak­ness­es in a per­spec­tive you are often taught from.
    • A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer one (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, The Times of Israel): “Hamas seemed to do every­thing pos­si­ble to shift Israeli psy­chol­o­gy from a com­fort­able faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. And it will soon learn the scale of that mis­cal­cu­la­tion. A strong Israel may tol­er­ate a bel­liger­ent Hamas on its bor­der; a weak­er one can­not. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources wor­ry­ing about the human­i­tar­i­an fall­out from a Gaza ground war; a more vul­ner­a­ble Israel can­not. A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer Israel. Hamas was once a tol­er­a­ble threat. It just made itself an intol­er­a­ble one, all while con­vinc­ing Israelis they are too vul­ner­a­ble and weak to respond with the old restraint.”
  2. Some theological/Christian per­spec­tives:
    • The Way Out is Through: Peace Must Start with the End of Hamas (Marc LiVec­che, Prov­i­dence): “Israel must do every­thing pos­si­ble to min­i­mize the toil on the inno­cent, and to mul­ti­ply hell on the mon­sters.”
      • The author is a research fel­low at the Naval War Col­lege and is writ­ing about just war the­o­ry as it applies to the con­flict between Israel and Hamas.
    • Amid Israel-Hamas War, Local Chris­tians Seek Right­eous Anger and Gospel Hope (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Noth­ing about this sit­u­a­tion is right or good,” said Lisa Loden, a Mes­sian­ic Jew­ish mem­ber of the Beth­le­hem Insti­tute of Peace and Jus­tice. “But there is a strong desire to see the Lord use these events to draw peo­ple to him­self.”
    • Israel’s 9/11: The Need for Moral Clar­i­ty (Bernard N. Howard and Ivan Mesa, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Moral clar­i­ty also allows for suit­ably one-sided prayer. It’s right to pray for the swift defeat of Hamas. The mur­der­ous oper­a­tions room of Hamas will nev­er pro­vide good lead­er­ship for the Pales­tini­ans liv­ing in Gaza. We should by all means pray for both-sided things too: the sal­va­tion of peo­ple on both sides; the pro­tec­tion, heal­ing, and com­fort of peo­ple on both sides; and the growth of the church that lives inside the bor­ders of both nations. Even as we pray for these both-sided things, let us bold­ly call on our God to thwart, frus­trate, and defeat the one side that is hell-bent on ter­ror­ism.”
    • Amer­i­can Chris­tians Should Stand with Israel under Attack (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Some­times, espe­cial­ly in the ear­ly moments of any war, we may be uncer­tain about who is right and who is wrong. There is no such moral con­fu­sion here. Hamas—and its state sponsors—attacked inno­cent peo­ple, as they have done repeat­ed­ly in the past, this time employ­ing a force and bru­tal­i­ty pre­vi­ous­ly unseen.… As Chris­tians, we should pay spe­cial atten­tion to vio­lence direct­ed toward Israel—just as we would pay spe­cial atten­tion to a vio­lent attack on a mem­ber of our extend­ed fam­i­ly. After all, we are graft­ed on to the promise made to Abra­ham (Rom. 11:17). Our Lord Jesus was and is a Jew­ish man from Galilee.”
  3. Some Stan­ford-con­nect­ed arti­cles:
    • This Was Nev­er Sup­posed to Hap­pen (Amichai Magen, Per­sua­sion): “Ana­lysts keen to con­vey the mag­ni­tude of Octo­ber 7th to Amer­i­can audi­ences have already tagged it Israel’s Pearl Har­bor or 9/11. Nei­ther label ade­quate­ly cap­tures the day’s true sig­nif­i­cance. A more accu­rate name might be some­thing like ‘Israel’s civic Yom Kip­pur.’ Why? Because the very exis­tence of the State of Israel was sup­posed to guar­an­tee that a day like this would nev­er hap­pen. In the Yom Kip­pur War of Octo­ber 1973—when Egypt and Syr­ia launched a sur­prise assault—Israel lost some 2,700 sol­diers, but it man­aged to effec­tive­ly pro­tect its civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. No Israeli towns or vil­lages were ever breached. The social con­tract was hon­ored, albeit at a ter­ri­ble price. On Octo­ber 7, 2023, it was pri­mar­i­ly civil­ians who were killed, maimed, and kid­napped. This was the day when the IDF wasn’t there to defend the peo­ple it was cre­at­ed to pro­tect.”
      • The author, him­self Israeli, is a Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor and Fel­low in Israel Stud­ies at the Free­man-Spogli Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • The impact of Hamas’ dev­as­tat­ing attack (Matthew Wigler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Like most Jews, I seek the peace and secu­ri­ty of Israel as a Jew­ish state in the indige­nous home­land of the Jew­ish peo­ple, a safe haven after mil­len­nia of per­se­cu­tion where Jews can final­ly claim con­trol over their own des­tiny. Like­wise, like most Jews, I also dream of a future of dig­ni­ty and free­dom for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, who, by the very same prin­ci­ples of self-deter­mi­na­tion, deserve a state of their own in a land that they too have called home for many cen­turies. How­ev­er, Hamas’ ide­ol­o­gy of hate and meth­ods of ter­ror­ism are con­trary to that vision.”
  4. Oth­er inter­est­ing stuff not relat­ed to the war:
    • 5 Rea­sons Gen Z Is Primed for Spir­i­tu­al Renew­al (Kyle Richter & Patrick Miller, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Our last meet­ing of the year was big­ger than the first. We start­ed with 300 stu­dents and end­ed with 400. That nev­er hap­pens. Then in the fall of this year, it hap­pened again: 500 stu­dents attend­ed our first meet­ing; 600 showed up the next week. This doesn’t hap­pen.But it did. And it’s not unique to us. As we talk to cam­pus min­is­ters and pas­tors from San Fran­cis­co to Jack­sonville, Billings to Atlanta, DC to Dal­las, we know we aren’t alone. Some will urge cau­tion before draw­ing con­clu­sions. Isn’t this the era of dechurch­ing, decon­struc­tion, and ris­ing “nones”? But data lags behind real­i­ty and we don’t want the church to miss what may be hap­pen­ing.”
    • The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics (Jai, Sub­stack): “The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics says that when you observe or inter­act with a prob­lem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the prob­lem worse, even if you make it slight­ly bet­ter, the eth­i­cal bur­den of the prob­lem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In par­tic­u­lar, if you inter­act with a prob­lem and ben­e­fit from it, you are a com­plete mon­ster. I don’t sub­scribe to this school of thought, but it seems pret­ty pop­u­lar.”
      • A few years old, but real­ly good.
    • Repro­ducibil­i­ty tri­al: 246 biol­o­gists get dif­fer­ent results from same data sets (Anil Oza, Nature): “In a mas­sive exer­cise to exam­ine repro­ducibil­i­ty, more than 200 biol­o­gists analysed the same sets of eco­log­i­cal data — and got wide­ly diver­gent results. The first sweep­ing study1 of its kind in ecol­o­gy demon­strates how much results in the field can vary, not because of dif­fer­ences in the envi­ron­ment, but because of sci­en­tists’ ana­lyt­i­cal choic­es.”

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 423

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, vol­ume 423, is the sum of 13 con­sec­u­tive prime num­bers: 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Fam­i­ly Break­down Hits Girls (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Ours is a cul­ture obsessed with trau­ma! We think we can get PTSD from uni­ver­si­ty speak­ers and stu­pid jokes and elec­tion results. And yet it’s also a cul­ture which large­ly ignores and even glam­or­is­es what seems to me one of the most obvi­ous trau­mas of all?? If any­thing qual­i­fies as traumatic—as in, an emo­tion­al­ly dis­tress­ing event that leaves a last­ing impact—surely it’s fam­i­ly break­down, which real­ly does seem to stay with peo­ple, shape their view of love and life and just keep play­ing out, over and over?”
  2. All About That Tenor: Why Men Don’t Sing in Wor­ship (Kelsey Cramer McGin­nis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The low­er rate of musi­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion among men… has a lot to do with the male voice itself—its range and pat­terns of development—and social­iza­tion in a cul­ture where so many men are uncom­fort­able with their own voic­es…. Men hear high­er, wider vocal ranges from pop­u­lar singers and wor­ship lead­ers; Chris Tom­lin and Phil Wick­ham have famous­ly impres­sive tenor ranges, far out of reach for most male voic­es.”
    • Unlocked, rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. The Real Prob­lem With the Super­rich (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Oth­er than from sheer jeal­ousy, why should any­one object to some peo­ple hav­ing far more wealth than oth­ers?… wealth is a means to polit­i­cal pow­er, and those who crave wealth tend to be the sorts of per­sons who crave pow­er too. You can run an oli­garchy if some peo­ple are super­rich – and some oli­garchies are bet­ter than oth­ers — but if you try to run a repub­lic that way, you will lose it.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle from a Chris­t­ian philoso­pher at UT Austin.
  4. Andy Stanley’s ‘Uncon­di­tion­al’ Con­tra­dic­tion (Sam All­ber­ry, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I have always been sin­gle. On the whole, it has been deeply joy­ous. But I am not immune from temp­ta­tion, and when any leader sug­gests to me that chaste obe­di­ence to Christ in sin­gle­ness is not sus­tain­able, he is say­ing the very same thing to me that the Dev­il says.”
    • Unlocked. The whole thing is worth read­ing for con­text.
  5. Amer­i­ca is now pay­ing more in inter­est on its record $33 tril­lion debt than on nation­al defense — here’s who holds the IOUs (Ser­ah Louis, Yahoo Finance): “America’s gross nation­al debt hit an eye-water­ing $33 tril­lion for the first time in Sep­tem­ber — mere months after eclips­ing the $32 tril­lion mark ear­li­er in the year. The U.S. is also cur­rent­ly spend­ing more to pay inter­est on the nation­al debt than it does on nation­al defense, accord­ing to the Treasury’s month­ly state­ment.”
    • What a stun­ning sta­tis­tic.
  6. The Labor Mar­ket Returns of Being An Artist: Evi­dence from the Unit­ed States, 2006–2021 (Chris­tos Makridis, SSRN): “First, I find a decline in the rel­a­tive earn­ings of artists to non-artists from zero to a 15% dis­ad­van­tage. After con­trol­ling for demo­graph­ic dif­fer­ences, the decline is sharp­er, declin­ing from a 15% earn­ings dis­ad­van­tage to 30%. That the inclu­sion of demo­graph­ic con­trols rais­es the earn­ings gap sug­gests there is pos­i­tive selec­tion into the arts. Sec­ond, these dif­fer­ences decline in mag­ni­tude to 4.4%, but remain sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, after exploit­ing vari­a­tion among artists and non-artists in the same indus­try-year and major occu­pa­tion. Third, when restrict­ing the set of indi­vid­u­als to those with at least a col­lege degree, those with a fine arts degree also incur an earn­ings and employ­ment penal­ty even if they work in the arts. These results high­light the increas­ing finan­cial pre­car­i­ous­ness of artists over the past decade.”
    • The excerpt is from the abstract. Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  7. Unbib­li­cal Schol­ar­ship (Alan Jacobs, The Hedge­hog Review): “If we can insist—as many (though not enough) grad­u­ate pro­grams still do—that stu­dents learn lan­guages oth­er than Eng­lish in order to pur­sue the study of Eng­lish writ­ers, then we can also insist that they acquire bib­li­cal lit­er­a­cy. Every grad­u­ate stu­dent in the human­i­ties should be required to take a course in the Eng­lish Bible, a course that, among oth­er things, requires the mem­o­riza­tion and recita­tion of large chunks of the bib­li­cal text.”

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 421

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 421, a twin prime num­ber (cf 419) which is also the sum of five con­sec­u­tive primes: 421 = 73 + 79 + 83 + 89 + 97.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Hun­dreds of stu­dents bap­tized after Unite Auburn wor­ship ser­vice (Brady Tal­bert, WSFA News): “Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty senior Michael Floyd said he will nev­er for­get what he wit­nessed on cam­pus Tues­day night. ‘I’ve seen Auburn bas­ket­ball beat Ken­tucky, I’ve seen Auburn foot­ball beat Alaba­ma, but I have nev­er seen some­thing like I did on Tues­day night,’ Floyd said. Thou­sands packed­Neville Are­na for a night of wor­ship. When it was end­ing, one stu­dent want­ed to be bap­tized. With­out a tub, crowds start­ed gath­er­ing at the lake at Auburn’s Red Barn, where rough­ly 200 peo­ple ulti­mate­ly gave their lives to Christ.”
  2. Gen­der, Sex­u­al Ori­en­ta­tion and Reli­gion Among Amer­i­can Col­lege Stu­dents (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “What real­ly kicked this off was a report from Brown Uni­ver­si­ty that indi­cat­ed that 38% of their stu­dent body iden­ti­fies as homo­sex­u­al, bisex­u­al, queer, asex­u­al, pan­sex­u­al, ques­tion­ing, or oth­er. When that same poll was con­duct­ed ten years ear­li­er, that share was just 14%. Is Brown an out­lier here? Or are huge per­cent­ages of col­lege stu­dents not straight and/or not cis­gen­der? The sur­vey gave sev­en total options for gen­der. The first thing that needs to be point­ed out is that the vast, vast major­i­ty of young peo­ple iden­ti­fy as man or woman. In fact, this was the choice of 98.2% of all respon­dents in the sur­vey. In oth­er words, about one in fifty col­lege aged stu­dents iden­ti­fies as non­bi­na­ry, genderqueer/genderfluid, agen­der, unsure, or pre­fer not to say.… 72% of the sam­ple iden­ti­fies as straight. Anoth­er 12% says that they are bisex­u­al and 5% indi­cates that they are gay/lesbian. These three response options encom­pass about 90% of all respon­dents in the sam­ple. About two per­cent iden­ti­fy as pan­sex­u­al or queer or unsure.”
    • Full of inter­est­ing data, empha­sis in orig­i­nal. I believe Brown is accu­rate­ly report­ing its data, and I also believe Brown (and Stan­ford) are out­liers in this regard.
    • Of par­tic­u­lar note: “The groups that are the least like­ly to say that they are straight are athe­ists at 55% and agnos­tics at 53%. It’s pret­ty stag­ger­ing to con­sid­er that near­ly half of young atheists/agnostics are not het­ero­sex­u­al. Noth­ing in par­tic­u­lars are not far behind, either, at 62%. The nones are much less like­ly to be straight com­pared to their reli­gious coun­ter­parts.” (empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty)
  3. The Hud­dled Mass­es At The Bor­der (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Lampe­dusa is a pic­turesque, rocky Ital­ian island in the Mediter­ranean between Tunisia and Sici­ly, with gor­geous beach­es and a small pop­u­la­tion of around 6,000. In just five days last week, its pop­u­la­tion tripled, as 11,000 migrants showed up in at least 199 boats, over­whelm­ing resources. The cen­ter for accom­mo­dat­ing migrants was designed for 600.”
    • Amaz­ing sta­tis­tics. The essay touch­es on Europe but focus­es on Amer­i­ca. Over­all a worth­while read what­ev­er your instincts on immi­gra­tion.
  4. The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won (Nan­cy Rom­mel­mann, The Free Press): “While Schlegel attends a non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian church and describes her faith as ‘very impor­tant to me,’ she had no desire to impose her moral­i­ty on oth­ers over the age of eigh­teen. ‘Adults have rights, so I get it,’ she says, explain­ing that all she want­ed was to craft a bill mak­ing it hard­er for kids to access videos like.…”
    • I’ve shared sto­ries about this Louisiana law before, but I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked this one.
  5. Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the spread of diver­si­ty state­ments isn’t real­ly a mech­a­nism to flush out and can­cel non­com­formists. It cre­ates con­for­mi­ty more invis­i­bly, by train­ing would-be aca­d­e­mics to adver­tise them­selves as ide­o­log­i­cal team play­ers and by screen­ing out job can­di­dates who don’t quite under­stand the rules of pro­gres­sive dis­course — who imag­ine, for instance, that adver­tis­ing their desire to ‘treat every­one the same’ is an ade­quate anti-racist com­mit­ment.”
  6. Mul­ti­ply by 37: A Sur­pris­ing­ly Accu­rate Rule of Thumb for Con­vert­ing Effect Sizes from Stan­dard Devi­a­tions to Per­centile Points (Paul T. von Hip­pel, preprint PDF):  “Edu­ca­tion­al researchers often report effect sizes in stan­dard devi­a­tion units (SD), but SD effects are hard to inter­pret. Effects are eas­i­er to inter­pret in per­centile points, but con­ver­sion from SDs to per­centile points involves a cal­cu­la­tion that is not intu­itive to edu­ca­tion­al stake­hold­ers. We point out that, if the out­come vari­able is nor­mal­ly dis­trib­uted, sim­ply mul­ti­ply­ing the SD effect by 37 usu­al­ly gives an excel­lent approx­i­ma­tion to the per­centile-point effect. For stu­dents in the [20%-80% range], the approx­i­ma­tion is accu­rate to with­in 1 per­centile point for effect sizes of up to 0.8 SD (or 29 to 30 per­centile points).”
    • Don’t have an intu­ition for stats? This is a use­ful rule of thumb. The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy, soci­ol­o­gy, sta­tis­tics and data sci­ence at UT Austin.
  7. In a first, sci­en­tists light up blue LED with an AA bat­tery (Ameya Pale­ja, Inter­est­ing Engi­neer­ing): “Con­ven­tion­al­ly used blue LEDs have a high turn-on volt­age of 4V for a lumi­nance of 100 cd per square meter (cd/m2). This might not sound very high, but at the indus­tri­al lev­el, it brings about issues since the volt­age is beyond what can be sup­plied by a typ­i­cal lithi­um-ion bat­tery.”
    • This legit­i­mate­ly sounds cool and could be very use­ful long-term: “An RGB LED mod­ule can pro­duce any col­or for the dis­play by using three col­ors: red, green, and blue. While red and green LEDs work well, the blue LED has been tricky from an ener­gy effi­cien­cy per­spec­tive.”
    • How­ev­er, this head­line remind­ed me that we used to go to the moon. Now we cel­e­brate blue lights.

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 419

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 419, a twin prime num­ber (paired with 421).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Cli­mate Change Paper Pub­lished (Patrick T Brown, The Free Press): “In the­o­ry, sci­en­tif­ic research should prize curios­i­ty, dis­pas­sion­ate objec­tiv­i­ty, and a com­mit­ment to uncov­er­ing the truth. Sure­ly those are the qual­i­ties that edi­tors of sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals should val­ue. In real­i­ty, though, the bias­es of the edi­tors (and the review­ers they call upon to eval­u­ate sub­mis­sions) exert a major influ­ence on the col­lec­tive out­put of entire fields. They select what gets pub­lished from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is con­duct­ed more broad­ly. Savvy researchers tai­lor their stud­ies to max­i­mize the like­li­hood that their work is accept­ed. I know this because I am one of them.”
  2. Tex­ting With AI Jesus (Casey Chalk, First Things): “Text With Jesus rep­re­sents the age-old human vice of pride. Through our cre­ativ­i­ty and bril­liance, we seek to ascend to God’s lev­el, to be like him, and even to dic­tate terms to the divine. Or rather, the app is a dia­bol­i­cal inver­sion of this: Instead of being trans­formed into God’s image, we aim to make him into our own.”
  3. Bap­tized Bronze Age Per­vert (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “So-called ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ is a renais­sance of 19th cen­tu­ry ‘blood and soil’ nation­al­ism with some ‘Chris­tiany’ lan­guage sprin­kled on top.… They are bap­tiz­ing the lan­guage, ethos, and ethics of a Niet­zschean pagan—a lit­er­al antichrist. An awful lot of ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ sounds to me like Bap­tized Bronze Age Per­vert. Per­verse, is right.”
  4. Who Has The Best Food? (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “It is a fun ques­tion going around the inter­net this past week, so here we go. In par­tic­u­lar, peo­ple focused on the ques­tion of France vs. Amer­i­ca. As one would expect, those on the French side think those on the Amer­i­can side are crazy, it is insult­ing to even con­sid­er this a ques­tion. Those on the Amer­i­can side like food.… What I love most about Amer­i­can food, and eat­ing in Amer­i­ca in gen­er­al, is that it is the oppo­site of the French mis­take of try­ing to impress you or waste your time. Amer­i­can food wants you to be hap­py, it wants to give you the expe­ri­ence you want and not hold back, it val­ues your time and it does not much care how it looks doing it.”
  5. Burn­ing Man is a cap­i­tal­ist lie (Mary Har­ring­ton, UnHerd): “Some­times described as an exper­i­ment in ‘rad­i­cal self-suf­fi­cien­cy’, Burn­ing Man is per­haps more accu­rate­ly an exper­i­ment in cre­at­ing a rad­i­cal post-scarci­ty soci­ety by hav­ing done all your shop­ping ahead of time.”
  6. How to actu­al­ly win back trust in news. (Isaac Saul, Tan­gle): “Now, there are a few things worth not­ing here. One is that a reporter who is lib­er­al is not defin­i­tive­ly a biased lib­er­al reporter. There are fair jour­nal­ists and there are hacks. I know a lot of jour­nal­ists with lib­er­al polit­i­cal beliefs who are hard­er on Democ­rats pre­cise­ly because they care about fair­ness and about how Democ­rats act. I know a lot of lib­er­al jour­nal­ists whose pol­i­tics you’d nev­er spot by read­ing their report­ing.…  This, in some ways, actu­al­ly cre­ates an unex­pect­ed imbal­ance in the media: Con­ser­v­a­tive jour­nal­ists and pun­dits, sens­ing that they are the minor­i­ty in the space, are far more reluc­tant to crit­i­cize ‘their side.’ Lib­er­al jour­nal­ists and pun­dits, under­stand­ing that they can ‘stick out’ or earn cred­it by being hard on both sides, are more will­ing to do so. It’s com­pli­cat­ed. Just because The New York Times is over­whelm­ing­ly made up of peo­ple who prob­a­bly vote for Democ­rats does­n’t mean that it’s always going to play nice with Demo­c­ra­t­ic politi­cians. My favorite exam­ple to cite is that it was The New York Times that broke the ‘Hillary emails’ sto­ry, which effec­tive­ly ruined her polit­i­cal career.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. The Misog­y­ny Myth (John Tier­ney, City Jour­nal): “Gen­der dis­par­i­ties gen­er­al­ly mat­ter only if they work against women. In com­put­ing its Glob­al Gen­der Gap, the much-quot­ed annu­al report, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum has explic­it­ly ignored male dis­ad­van­tages: if men fare worse on a par­tic­u­lar dimen­sion, a coun­try still gets a per­fect score for equal­i­ty on that mea­sure. Prod­ded by the fed­er­al Title IX law ban­ning sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion in schools, edu­ca­tors have con­cen­trat­ed on elim­i­nat­ing dis­par­i­ties in ath­let­ics but not in oth­er extracur­ric­u­lar pro­grams, which most­ly skew female. The fact that there are now three female col­lege stu­dents for every two males is of no con­cern to the White House Gen­der Pol­i­cy Coun­cil. Its ‘Nation­al Strat­e­gy on Gen­der Equi­ty and Equal­i­ty’ doesn’t even men­tion boys’ strug­gles in school, instead focus­ing exclu­sive­ly on new ways to help female stu­dents get fur­ther ahead.”
    • Long, worth the read espe­cial­ly if you’re unfa­mil­iar with the argu­ments that mod­ern soci­ety is struc­tured to advan­tage women over men.
    • Relat­ed: How Then Should Men Live? (Mike Cosper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The new social script for women is at once pur­pose­ful and lib­er­tar­i­an. Girls can do any­thing, as the slo­gan goes, including—if they want—pursuing a tra­di­tion­al mod­el of mar­riage and fam­i­ly. Mean­while, Reeves says, men have yet to find our new social script. The old role of bread­win­ner, pro­tec­tor, and spir­i­tu­al head of the house­hold isn’t mere­ly viewed as quaint; it’s often seen as pater­nal­is­tic or worse.”
    • I also believe this to be relat­ed: Sec­u­lar­iza­tion Begins at Home (Lyman Stone, The Insti­tute For Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “By now, it should be clear that child­hood, includ­ing before age 13, is the key bat­tle­ground for reli­gious for­ma­tion, not adult­hood. By the time a child goes to col­lege, much of the reli­gious ques­tion has already been set­tled.… For par­ents to keep their kids in the faith, they must recap­ture their influ­ence. Shield chil­dren from school­ing envi­ron­ments that rel­e­gate faith to a sec­ond-class top­ic, deny access to unsu­per­vised online com­mu­ni­ties and pornog­ra­phy, and have dai­ly, par­ent-led activ­i­ties cen­tered on fam­i­ly sol­i­dar­i­ty around shared faith. Fam­i­lies that do these things still have extreme­ly high rates of suc­cess­ful reli­gious trans­mis­sion, but fam­i­lies who trust that chil­dren will ‘pick it up along the way’ fail to trans­mit their reli­gious beliefs, and sud­den­ly find to their great sur­prise that their 20-some­thing chil­dren cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly reject their faith.”

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 410

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 410, which hap­pens to be the HTTP sta­tus code for a resource being per­ma­nent­ly gone.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How elite schools like Stan­ford became fix­at­ed on the AI apoc­a­lypse (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Stu­dents who join the AI safe­ty com­mu­ni­ty some­times get more than free boba. Just as EA con­fer­ences once meant trav­el­ing the world and hav­ing one-on-one meet­ings with wealthy, influ­en­tial donors, Open Philanthropy’s new uni­ver­si­ty fel­low­ship offers a hefty direct deposit: under­grad­u­ate lead­ers receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insur­ance, and up to $100,000 a year to cov­er group expens­es.”
    • Bro — what? Stan­ford won’t even let us pay for a guest speak­er with out­side funds. It’s not clear that the under­grad stu­dents lead­ers at Stan­ford are mak­ing $80k a year, but it’s not clear that they’re not, either. Some stu­dent some­where is, and that’s wild.
  2. Where’s Wal­do? How to Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Prove You Found Him With­out Reveal­ing Where He Is (Jack Murtagh, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can):  “Amaz­ing­ly, every claim that I can prove to you with a tra­di­tion­al math­e­mat­i­cal proof can also be proved in zero knowl­edge. Take your favorite result in math, and you could in prin­ci­ple prove it to a friend while show­ing them bup­kes about how it works. This is a pro­found dis­cov­ery about the nature of proof itself. Cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing.”
    • Zero-knowl­edge proofs are wild. That last sen­tence “cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing” helped me real­ize that there are inter­est­ing par­al­lels to how peo­ple come to faith.
      • It is usu­al­ly an inter­ac­tive process. God begins to draw some­one repeat­ed­ly.
      • It is a prob­a­bilis­tic process. Things keep hap­pen­ing to the soon-to-be con­vert that don’t make sense. I mean, sure they could have hap­pened by chance because any­thing can hap­pen by chance. But they keep hap­pen­ing in a way that is exceed­ing­ly improb­a­ble.
      • The new con­vert’s con­fi­dence in God far exceeds their under­stand­ing of God.
    • God — the orig­i­nal zero-knowl­edge prover. To wax Aris­totelian, He is the unproved prover.
  3. Pas­tor Douša’s case shows the U.S. is not immune to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs on dis­sent (Scott Welder, Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy): “…DHS retal­i­at­ed against Pas­tor Douša for min­is­ter­ing to migrants and refugees in Mex­i­co in Decem­ber 2018 by restrict­ing her Trust­ed Trav­el­er priv­i­leges; sub­ject­ing her to extra screen­ing at the south­ern bor­der; and telling Mex­i­can author­i­ties, false­ly, that there was ‘a great pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that she did not have ‘ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion to be in Mex­i­co’ and sug­gest­ing that the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment ‘deny [her] entry to Mex­i­co’ and ‘send [her] back to the Unit­ed States.’ A CBP offi­cial lat­er admit­ted that the request to Mex­i­can author­i­ties was ‘cre­ative writ­ing,’ ‘with­out any basis.’ But DHS’s actions made it more dif­fi­cult for Pas­tor Douša to con­tin­ue her min­istry, even­tu­al­ly caus­ing her to lim­it her activ­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and to end her min­istry in Mex­i­co alto­geth­er.”
  4. On some of the recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • Why the Cham­pi­ons of Affir­ma­tive Action Had to Leave Asian Amer­i­cans Behind (Jay Caspi­an Kang, The New York­er): “Asian Amer­i­cans, the group whom the suit was sup­pos­ed­ly about, have been odd­ly absent from the con­ver­sa­tions that have fol­lowed the rul­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness of the affir­ma­tive-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have most­ly ignored the Asian Amer­i­can plain­tiffs and cho­sen, instead, to relit­i­gate the same argu­ments about mer­it, white suprema­cy, and priv­i­lege. Dur­ing the five years I spent cov­er­ing this case, the com­men­ta­tors defend­ing affir­ma­tive action almost nev­er dis­proved the cen­tral claim that dis­crim­i­na­tion was tak­ing place against Asian Amer­i­cans, even as they dis­missed the plain­tiffs as pawns who had been duped by a con­ser­v­a­tive legal activist. They almost always redi­rect­ed the con­ver­sa­tion to some­thing else—often lega­cy admis­sions.”
    • On Race and Acad­e­mia (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “As an aca­d­e­m­ic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these expe­ri­ences in inter­views and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve nev­er shared them in an arti­cle like this one. The respons­es I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion move me to ven­ture it. The cul­ture that a pol­i­cy helps put into place can be as impor­tant as the pol­i­cy itself. And in my life­time, racial pref­er­ences in acad­e­mia — not mere­ly when it comes to under­grad­u­ate admis­sions but also mov­ing on to grad school and job appli­ca­tions and teach­ing careers — have been not only a set of for­mal and infor­mal poli­cies but also the grounds for a cul­ture of per­cep­tions and assump­tions.”
      • This is a very raw and vul­ner­a­ble piece. Rec­om­mend­ed. His Ph.D. is from Stan­ford.
    • Cov­er­ing the 303 Cre­ative deci­sion: Why do reporters keep ignor­ing the fine print? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “I wish reporters would be hon­est in admit­ting that much of the anger expressed over the ver­dict stems from how Lorie Smith out­wit­ted her oppo­nents by fil­ing suit first, rather than endur­ing  a string of law­suits like what Jack Phillips is hav­ing to endure. I’m look­ing for that inves­tiga­tive piece on the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion that, after hav­ing been reproved twice now by the Supreme Court, hasn’t changed its ways at all. Where is that New York­er take-out on Autumn Scar­di­na, the trans­gen­der attor­ney whose per­son­al vendet­ta against Phillips just nev­er ends because the courts have giv­en her a free pass? I’m wait­ing.”
    • My Win at the Supreme Court Is a Win for All Amer­i­cans (Lorie Smith, Real Clear Reli­gion): “I can’t say every­thing every­one wants me to. I can’t pre­tend to agree with every idea pre­sent­ed to me. None of us can. None of us should have to. Each of us should be free to pur­sue truth, hold to our faith, respect­ful­ly speak our beliefs, and thought­ful­ly live them out day by day, with­out the gov­ern­ment telling us what to believe or say. If that’s the free­dom you want – for your­self, for your fam­i­ly and friends, for all of those who share your ideas and con­vic­tions – then my vic­to­ry is a vic­to­ry for you. What­ev­er you may think of me and my beliefs, we’re all freer today than we were yes­ter­day. I hope you find that cause for cel­e­bra­tion.”
      • The author is the vic­to­ri­ous plain­tiff in the gay wed­ding web­site case.
    • The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “The deci­sion means that gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not mis­use the law to com­pel speech or exclude from the mar­ket­place peo­ple whose beliefs it dislikes.That’s a win for all Americans—whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or holds dif­fer­ent beliefs. Each of us has the right to decide for our­selves what mes­sages we will communicate—in our words, in our art, in our voice—without inter­fer­ence from the gov­ern­ment. The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind.”
      • The author is the lawyer who argued this case before the Supreme Court. She is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, btw.
  5. Chris­tians: More Like Jesus or Phar­isees? (Bar­na Research Group): “In this nation­wide study of self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians, the goal was to deter­mine whether Chris­tians have the actions and atti­tude of Jesus as they inter­act with oth­ers or if they are more akin to the beliefs and behav­iors of Phar­isees, the self-right­eous sect of reli­gious lead­ers described in the New Tes­ta­ment.… The find­ings reveal that most self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians in the U.S. are char­ac­ter­ized by hav­ing the atti­tudes and actions researchers iden­ti­fied as Phar­i­saical. Just over half of the nation’s Christians—using the broad­est def­i­n­i­tion of those who call them­selves Christians—qualify for this cat­e­go­ry (51%). They tend to have atti­tudes and actions that are char­ac­ter­ized by self-right­eous­ness.”
    • This research is a decade old, but quite inter­est­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • I do have some reser­va­tions about the method­ol­o­gy. Some of the ques­tions are just wrong. For exam­ple, cat­e­go­riz­ing “I lis­ten to oth­ers to learn their sto­ry before telling them about my faith” being Christ­like rather than Phar­i­saical isn’t real­ly a Bib­li­cal stance, it’s just a per­son­al opin­ion. It may be a shrewd strat­e­gy and over­all com­mend­able, but I don’t see Jesus lis­ten­ing to a lot of sto­ries in the Bible. It’s a poor­ly cho­sen ques­tion for this scale. Quib­bles like that aside, I think the over­all vibe prob­a­bly sol­id.
  6. Liv­ing on a prayer? How attend­ing wor­ship can improve your phys­i­cal and men­tal health. (Phil McGraw and John White, USA Today): “Despite the proven health ben­e­fits, reli­gios­i­ty is on the decline in Amer­i­ca. The fastest-grow­ing reli­gious seg­ment of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is now ‘nones’ − those who pro­fess no reli­gion. We’re not here to evan­ge­lize, but as a doc­tor and a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, it’s impor­tant to note that a decline of reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive health effects.”
    • I love that the authors are Dr. Phil and the chief med­ical offi­cer at Web­MD. To the aver­age Amer­i­can they’ve prob­a­bly got more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any med­ical asso­ci­a­tion or even the NIH, FDA, and CDC.
  7. How to Do Great Work (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the fron­tier, notice gaps, explore promis­ing ones. This is how prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physi­cists.… What should you do if you’re young and ambi­tious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along pas­sive­ly, assum­ing the prob­lem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no sys­tem­at­ic pro­ce­dure you can fol­low. When you read biogra­phies of peo­ple who’ve done great work, it’s remark­able how much luck is involved. They dis­cov­er what to work on as a result of a chance meet­ing, or by read­ing a book they hap­pen to pick up. So you need to make your­self a big tar­get for luck, and the way to do that is to be curi­ous. Try lots of things, meet lots of peo­ple, read lots of books, ask lots of ques­tions.”
    • This is super-long but worth­while. He ram­bles and is mis­tak­en at points, but his core insights are sol­id and impor­tant.

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 What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. From vol­ume 286.

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 408

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 408, the 8th Pell Num­ber, a sequence use­ful in approx­i­mat­ing the square root of 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Com­pe­ti­tion for Believ­ers in Africa Is Trans­form­ing Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Nicholas Bariyo & Gben­ga Aking­bule, Wall Street Jour­nal): “On a recent Sun­day morn­ing in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, mem­bers of the faith­ful clutched their hymn books and chant­ed God’s prais­es as they danced to the beat of tam­bourines. A preach­er led the con­gre­ga­tion in pray­ing for the health of their chil­dren and suc­cess at work. The ser­vice resem­bled Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty, a move­ment that orig­i­nat­ed in the U.S. and has swept Africa in the last few decades. But the par­tic­i­pants weren’t Chris­tians. They were Mus­lims, prac­tic­ing an ecsta­t­ic style of wor­ship that has devel­oped in response to the chal­lenge posed by Pen­te­costal­ism. Across sub-Saha­ran Africa, reli­gion today is in fer­ment as dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam vie for believers—a con­test that is trans­form­ing both faiths and dis­rupt­ing long-estab­lished terms of coex­is­tence.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. I believe I have unlocked the pay­wall on this one.
  2. Cal­i­for­nia restau­rant used fake priest to get work­ers to con­fess “sins,” feds say (Aimee Pic­chi, CBS News): “In court doc­u­ments, a serv­er at the restau­rant, Maria Par­ra, tes­ti­fied that she found her con­ver­sa­tion with the alleged priest ‘unlike nor­mal con­fes­sions,’ where she would talk about what she want­ed to con­fess, accord­ing to a court doc­u­ment reviewed by CBS Mon­ey­Watch. Instead, the priest told her that he would ask ques­tions ‘to get the sins out of me.’ ”
  3. Slav­ery in the Bible | Dr. Esau Mccaul­ley (Jude 3 Project, YouTube): sev­en min­utes.
  4. Sports Writ­ers Out, Zoomer Tik­Tok­ers In (Ethan Strauss, Sub­stack): “There’s a real malev­o­lent genius to con­coct­ing a cuck­ish char­ac­ter who pals around with the high-sta­tus Cavin­ders, but only as the butt of their jokes. He’s lit­er­al­ly mod­el­ing los­ing mon­ey towards the Betr cof­fers, while hang­ing out with mod­els. Some­one actu­al­ly came up with a means for habit­u­at­ing young men into an attrac­tive form of fail­ing as part of an ‘organic’-looking humil­i­a­tion fan­ta­sy.”
  5. Data Fal­si­fi­ca­da (Part 1): “Clus­ter­fake” (Uri Simon­sohn, Leif Nel­son & Joe Sim­mons, Data Cola­da): “That’s right: Two dif­fer­ent peo­ple inde­pen­dent­ly faked data for two dif­fer­ent stud­ies in a paper about dis­hon­esty.”
    • There was empha­sis in orig­i­nal which I removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. U.S.-Funded Sci­en­tist Among Three Chi­nese Researchers Who Fell Ill Amid Ear­ly Covid-19 Out­break (Michael R. Gor­don, Wall Street Jour­nal): “A promi­nent sci­en­tist who worked on coro­n­avirus projects fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment is one of three Chi­nese researchers who became sick with an unspec­i­fied ill­ness dur­ing the ini­tial out­break of Covid-19, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer U.S. offi­cials.”
    • A less san­i­tized pre­sen­ta­tion of the same facts: First Peo­ple Sick­ened By COVID-19 Were Chi­nese Sci­en­tists At Wuhan Insti­tute Of Virol­o­gy, Say US Gov­ern­ment Sources (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Matt Taib­bi & Alex Gutentag, Sub­stack): “Sources with­in the US gov­ern­ment say that three of the ear­li­est peo­ple to become infect­ed with SARS-CoV­‑2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were mem­bers of the Wuhan lab sus­pect­ed to have leaked the pan­dem­ic virus. As such, not only do we know there were WIV sci­en­tists who had devel­oped COVID-19-like ill­ness­es in Novem­ber 2019, but also that they were work­ing with the clos­est rel­a­tives of SARS-CoV­‑2, and insert­ing gain-of-func­tion fea­tures unique to it.”
  7. REVIEW EXCLUSIVE—Catch Him if You Can: Meet Will Cur­ry (Josi­ah Jon­er, Stan­ford Review): “Will Curry’s sto­ry is long and complex—but most of all, enthralling. He is a liv­ing sto­ry of some­one who lived the adven­tur­ous life that so many desire yet nev­er actu­al­ly live, includ­ing many at Stan­ford trapped in a cul­ture of monot­o­ny. Is all of the sto­ry he told me true? Maybe, or maybe not. Will is, after all, a com­pet­i­tive pok­er play­er who has pulled off bluffs in the past. But regard­less, Will’s sto­ry is far from over. In fact, I think it’s real­ly only begun.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs. From vol­ume 286.

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 407

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 407, which is the sum of the cubes of its dig­its: 43 + 03 + 73

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Reli­gion Good for Your Health? (David DeSteno, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ongo­ing sur­veys like these, as well as more tar­get­ed stud­ies, show a strong link between reli­gion and bet­ter phys­i­cal and men­tal health. Of course, this doesn’t mean that reli­gion should be pre­scribed as a med­i­cine, either in addi­tion to or in place of oth­er estab­lished treat­ments. The choice to be spir­i­tu­al­ly active is a per­son­al one, and reli­gion is only one of many fac­tors that affect health. Nonethe­less, it’s time for health sci­ences to take reli­gion seri­ous­ly and con­sid­er what it offers the body and mind.”
    • The author is a psych prof at North­east­ern. In this essay he alludes to Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research which I have spot­light­ed on many occa­sions.
  2. Richard Dawkins’ Ex-Right-Hand Man Comes to Christ! (Liv­ing Waters, YouTube): fifty-five min­utes long (near­ly an hour!). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The tes­ti­mo­ny itself kicks in at 37 min­utes in.
  3. Trump’s Jus­tices Didn’t Doom Affir­ma­tive Action. Demog­ra­phy Did. (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “The arrival of large num­bers of immi­grants over the past half-cen­tu­ry has upset the log­ic of affir­ma­tive action in sev­er­al ways. For one thing, white Amer­i­cans no longer dom­i­nate the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem. (They make up only 22 per­cent of the Stan­ford class of 2026, for instance.) Ear­ly on, affir­ma­tive action was also extend­ed to Lati­nos, whose num­bers con­tin­ue to grow. In addi­tion, African and Caribbean immi­grants and their chil­dren now account for more than 40 per­cent of the Black enroll­ment in the Ivy League, which risks crowd­ing out the peo­ple that affir­ma­tive action was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to help.” 
    • Pay­wall is unlocked.
  4. Should Women Preach? Huge Majori­ties of Evan­gel­i­cal Think They Should (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I don’t know how many ways I can show this: the sup­port for women preach­ing on Sun­day morn­ing from behind the pul­pit is strong among evan­gel­i­cals. Even among those who say that the Bible is lit­er­al­ly true and attend church every week, 74% are in favor of women preach­ing.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. Uni­ver­si­ties Shouldn’t Be Ide­o­log­i­cal Church­es (Robert P. George, The Atlantic): “If aca­d­e­m­ic units are per­mit­ted to make state­ments on polit­i­cal issues, then the fol­low­ing will be the case: When con­sid­er­ing a job or tenure can­di­date, vot­ing fac­ul­ty mem­bers will antic­i­pate that he or she, if appoint­ed, will vote on future polit­i­cal state­ments. So they will per­fect­ly rea­son­ably want to know, and will take into account, the candidate’s ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ings and polit­i­cal views and affil­i­a­tions in decid­ing whether to sup­port or oppose the appoint­ment.… After all, vot­ing on polit­i­cal statements—if depart­ments were to be autho­rized to do so and chose to act on that authorization—would be one of the things a fac­ul­ty mem­ber is, as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, hired to do.”
    • Rob­bie George is a gem.
    • I would post more con­tent from The Atlantic but I don’t have a sub­scrip­tion and their pay­wall is pret­ty lim­it­ing.
  6. How Assist­ed Sui­cide Destroys the Loved Ones Left Behind (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The sim­ple, cen­tral argu­ment of the sui­cide activists is that the right to bod­i­ly auton­o­my includes the right to sui­cide, and that legal­iza­tion is nec­es­sary in order to reduce suf­fer­ing in soci­ety. The real­i­ty we see unfold­ing tells a very dif­fer­ent sto­ry. Far from reduc­ing suf­fer­ing, assist­ed sui­cide has become the cat­a­lyst for spread­ing it. In many if not most cas­es, a death by lethal injec­tion trans­fers tem­po­ral suf­fer­ing to heart­bro­ken loved ones who strug­gle to process what has tak­en place.”
  7. The illu­sion of moral decline (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “…two well-known psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na can com­bine to pro­duce an illu­sion of moral decline.… Biased expo­sure means that things always look out­ra­geous: mur­der and arson and fraud, oh my! Biased mem­o­ry means the out­rages of yes­ter­day don’t seem so out­ra­geous today. When things always look bad today but brighter yes­ter­day, con­grat­u­la­tions pal, you got your­self an illu­sion of moral decline. We call this mech­a­nism BEAM (Biased Expo­sure and Mem­o­ry), and it fits with some of our more sur­pris­ing results.”

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 What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine. From vol­ume 285.

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 403

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 403, which is one of those num­bers that feels like it might be prime but is not — it is 13 · 31. I think it’s cool that its prime fac­tors are reversed ver­sions of each oth­er.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Hap­pened to His­to­ri­an Mol­ly Worthen? (Collin Hansen, Gospel Coali­tion Pod­cast). This 90 minute pod­cast episode was rec­om­mend­ed to me more than once, and I final­ly gave it a lis­ten. I high­ly rec­om­mend it. A well-known his­to­ri­an and jour­nal­ist con­vert­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty and tells her sto­ry here. JD Greear and Tim Keller play key roles in the sto­ry.
  2. What the Church Should Do… (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “Sev­er­al times a week, every week, some­body will come up to me and say, “You know what our church should do?” … I’ll smile and say, ‘That’s a great idea. Get back to me when you’ve got it worked out.’ Most peo­ple are very annoyed by my answer. I don’t know why. God had giv­en them that bur­den, not me. I learned a long time ago, I can only do so much. I’ve also learned every fol­low­er of Christ is unique­ly gift­ed and called to serve the Kingdom’s redemp­tive mis­sion in the world.”
  3. Died: Tim Keller, New York City Pas­tor Who Mod­eled Win­some Wit­ness (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Tim Keller, a New York City pas­tor who min­is­tered to young urban pro­fes­sion­als and in the process became a lead­ing exam­ple for how a win­some Chris­t­ian wit­ness could win a hear­ing for the gospel even in unlike­ly places, died on Fri­day at age 72—three years after being diag­nosed with pan­cre­at­ic can­cer.”
    • Tim Keller Prac­ticed the Grace He Preached (Col­in Hansen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “His steadi­ness under this grow­ing hos­til­i­ty gave courage and com­fort to younger lead­ers who became dis­il­lu­sioned by the fall of so many of our for­mer heroes. Even I wor­ried about uncov­er­ing unflat­ter­ing secrets when I began writ­ing his biog­ra­phy. Instead, talk­ing to dozens of Keller’s close friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers who knew him from child­hood only con­firmed my per­son­al expe­ri­ence of him.”
    • He Made Me Want to Be More Like Jesus (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “You see, the point about Tim Keller is that he was gra­cious toward peo­ple who couldn’t repay him, because he knew that Jesus had been gra­cious to him first. Tim real­ly, gen­uine­ly, total­ly believed that he was more sin­ful than he could ever have imag­ined, and more loved by God than he could have ever hoped. He believed this. And this belief spilled out in how he inter­act­ed with oth­ers.”
    • Tim Keller Prac­ticed the Grace He Preached (Col­in Hansen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “His steadi­ness under this grow­ing hos­til­i­ty gave courage and com­fort to younger lead­ers who became dis­il­lu­sioned by the fall of so many of our for­mer heroes. Even I wor­ried about uncov­er­ing unflat­ter­ing secrets when I began writ­ing his biog­ra­phy. Instead, talk­ing to dozens of Keller’s close friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers who knew him from child­hood only con­firmed my per­son­al expe­ri­ence of him.”
    • We nev­er met, but Keller was extreme­ly influ­en­tial on me and I mourn his pass­ing.
  4. How I became a ‘Chris­t­ian nation­al­ist’ (Ken­neth L. Wood­ward, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with find­ing Chris­t­ian nation­al­ists is that no one can agree on what the term means.”
  5. Why Is The Aca­d­e­m­ic Job Mar­ket So Weird? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten):  “Col­leges want two things from their pro­fes­sors. First, they need them to teach class­es. Sec­ond, they need them to do good research, raise the college’s rep­u­ta­tion, and look pres­ti­gious. Col­leges want to pre­tend to stu­dents that the same peo­ple are doing both these jobs, because stu­dents like the idea of being taught by pres­ti­gious thought lead­ers. But they don’t want to actu­al­ly have the same peo­ple do both jobs, because the most valu­able use of pres­ti­gious thought lead­ers’ time is doing research or pro­mot­ing their ideas. Every hour Ein­stein spends in the class­room is an hour he’s not spend­ing in the lab mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies that will rain down hon­ors upon him­self and his insti­tu­tion. And there’s no guar­an­tee Ein­stein is even a good teacher. Solu­tion: hire for two dif­fer­ent posi­tions, but give them the same job title to make things max­i­mal­ly con­fus­ing for stu­dents. Have them occa­sion­al­ly do each oth­ers’ jobs, so stu­dents get even more con­fused. You very con­spic­u­ous­ly hire Ein­stein, and hold out the car­rot of being taught by Ein­stein. But Ein­stein actu­al­ly only teach­es one 400-lev­el sem­i­nar a year, and every oth­er class is taught by the cheap­est per­son able to teach at all.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. Rec­om­mend­ed espe­cial­ly to any­one who aspires to acad­e­mia.
  6. Legal­iz­ing Mar­i­jua­na Is a Big Mis­take (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Of all the ways to win a cul­ture war, the smoothest is to just make the oth­er side seem hope­less­ly uncool. So it’s been with the march of mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion: There have been moral argu­ments about the excess­es of the drug war and med­ical argu­ments about the poten­tial ben­e­fits of pot, but the vibe of the whole debate has pit­ted the chill against the uptight, the cool against the square, the relaxed future against the Prin­ci­pal Skin­ners of the past.”
    • Unlocked and worth your time.
  7. He Told Fol­low­ers to Starve to Meet Jesus. Why Did So Many Do It? (Andrew Hig­gins, New York Times): “As of this past week, 179 bod­ies have been exhumed and moved to a hos­pi­tal mor­tu­ary in the coastal town of Malin­di, around 100 miles east of Shaka­ho­la, for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and autop­sy. The government’s chief pathol­o­gists report­ed last week that while star­va­tion caused many deaths, some of the bod­ies showed signs of death by asphyx­i­a­tion, stran­gu­la­tion or blud­geon­ing. Some had had organs removed, a police affi­davit said.”
    • I shared a news arti­cle about this before,  but this one has more detail. Wild. Unlocked.

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 Every­thing Is Bro­ken (Alana New­house, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Being on a ship near­ly 4 mil­lion square miles in area along with 330 mil­lion oth­er peo­ple and real­iz­ing the entire hull is pock­marked with holes is ter­ri­fy­ing.” Wide-rang­ing. From vol­ume 284.

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 402

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 402, which is the unusu­al HTTP sta­tus code for “pay­ment required.” I don’t believe I’ve ever encoun­tered that sta­tus code in the wild.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mar­tin Luther King, Chris­t­ian Rad­i­cal (Jonathan Eig, Wall Street Jour­nal): “King’s Chris­tian­i­ty presents a chal­lenge to lib­er­als, who are often uncom­fort­able with reli­gion in the pub­lic square, as well as to con­ser­v­a­tives, who are more like­ly to embrace reli­gion in pol­i­tics but don’t align them­selves with the impli­ca­tions of many of King’s core beliefs.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. Why Amer­i­cans Feel More Pain (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Anoth­er big fac­tor in pain dif­fer­ences is class. One study found that poor Amer­i­cans are more than three times as like­ly to report pain as wealthy Amer­i­cans. Anoth­er found that just 2 per­cent of those with grad­u­ate degrees report severe pain, while almost 10 per­cent of high school dropouts do. ‘Basi­cal­ly, if you’ve got a B.A., you’re vac­ci­nat­ed against all of this crap,’ said Deaton, the econ­o­mist. Deaton, Case and Stone found that each suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tion among less-edu­cat­ed Amer­i­cans has report­ed more pain at any giv­en age.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. It’s longer than you might expect, but quite inter­est­ing.
  3. The Dead­ly Things We Do Not See (Anony­mous, World Beyond War): “This was war, in any case. In war peo­ple die. But, as my friends empha­size to me, the peo­ple of Mar­i­upol would have liked not to die. They would have liked to avoid the ordeal alto­geth­er.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Very sober­ing.
  4. Reg­is­tered Sex Offend­er Con­tin­ued to Min­is­ter to Chi Alpha Stu­dents (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Over the past 30 years, well over a hun­dred men involved in Texas chap­ters of the cam­pus min­istry Chi Alpha have seen Daniel Savala naked. At Savala’s house in Hous­ton, he invit­ed them to strip down and talk about spir­i­tu­al issues in his sauna. He offered his bed to overnight guests while sleep­ing in the buff. And at least 13 men report­ed that Savala molest­ed or raped them while they sought his spir­i­tu­al advice as col­lege stu­dents, accord­ing to a new online forum col­lect­ing vic­tims’ sto­ries.”
  5. The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism (Kevin deY­oung, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The appeal of some­thing like Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism is that it presents a mus­cu­lar alter­na­tive to sur­ren­der and defeat. Few con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have any­thing like a sophis­ti­cat­ed polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. But they know gay so-called mar­riage is wrong and drag queen sto­ry hour is bad. So if the two choic­es in polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy are (1) sup­port­ing gay ‘mar­riage’ because that’s what plu­ral­ism demands and defend­ing drag queen sto­ry hour as a bless­ing of lib­er­ty or (2) Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, mil­lions of Chris­tians in this coun­try are going to choose the lat­ter. I imag­ine the same basic equa­tion explains the new­found inter­est in Catholic inte­gral­ism as well.”
  6. It’s my respon­si­bil­i­ty as a crone (Abby Far­son Pratt, Sub­stack): “Near­ly 13 years mar­ried, I feel like it’s my respon­si­bil­i­ty, as a crone, to tutor the youth and encour­age them to stop wait­ing around and get mar­ried already. Please, just do it. What are you wait­ing for? To move in togeth­er? To get your ‘career estab­lished,’ what­ev­er the hell that means? To see if you’re real­ly a ‘good fit’? To get ‘more finan­cial­ly sta­ble’? That’s all blus­ter. We had about $300 to our names when we got mar­ried. We most­ly ate rice and beans for years, sub­sist­ing on my tiny salary, while Guion wrote poems all day, and we were incan­des­cent­ly hap­py. I’m so thank­ful we didn’t wait 10 years, till we were in our ear­ly 30s, set in our ways and com­fort­able with our wealth. Mar­riage would have been a lot hard­er then.”
  7. Why Jour­nal­ists Have More Free­dom Than Pro­fes­sors (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “First, the media is, by def­i­n­i­tion, an out­ward-fac­ing, audi­ence-dri­ven enter­prise, depen­dent on some kind of mass mar­ket for its via­bil­i­ty.… it still cre­ates mar­ket-based checks on cer­tain inter­nal mech­a­nisms of ide­o­log­i­cal enforce­ment. To take a tele­vi­sion exam­ple, it’s not just up to inter­nal opin­ion at Net­flix or HBO whether to air a Dave Chap­pelle spe­cial or keep run­ning Bill Maher’s show; the mass audi­ence gets a pret­ty impor­tant vote as well.”
    • I find his argu­ment com­pelling. Unlocked.
    • This seems to me to be some­what relat­ed (describ­ing how insti­tu­tion­al cul­tures shape behav­ior): Assim­i­lat­ing Women into Male Insti­tu­tions (Arnold Kling, Sub­stack): “When women became accept­ed into lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties, in the pro­fes­sions, and into man­age­r­i­al and exec­u­tive posi­tions in the work place, both men and women held some harm­ful cul­tur­al atti­tudes. Many of us have come to under­stand how men need to change. The need for women to change is less well appre­ci­at­ed.”

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 Why Did So Many Doc­tors Become Nazis? (Ash­ley K. Fer­nades, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “It is wor­thy of empha­sis that although many pro­fes­sions (includ­ing law) were ‘tak­en in’ by Nazi phi­los­o­phy, doc­tors and nurs­es had a pecu­liar­ly strong attrac­tion to it. Robert N. Proc­tor (1988) notes that physi­cians joined the Nazi par­ty in droves (near­ly 50% by 1945), much high­er than any oth­er pro­fes­sion. Physi­cians were sev­en times more like­ly to join the SS than oth­er employed Ger­man males.” The author is a physi­cian and a bioethi­cist at The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty. From vol­ume 281.

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.