You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting
On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.
Things Glen Found Interesting
- There’s No Separation of Church and Space (Bethel McGrew, Wall Street Journal): “It has long been an inconvenient fact for angry atheists that some of America’s most intrepid space explorers are devout religious believers. Buzz Aldrin performed the first Holy Communion on the Moon, though at the time he was told to keep the moment private. The activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair had sued NASA a few months earlier over Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve broadcast of the Genesis creation narrative.… Atheist biologist P.Z. Meyers recently suffered a flashback to that moment as he contemplated the terrifying prospect of an Easter mini-sermon from Artemis II pilot Victor Glover. Watching the Apollo 8 broadcast as a child was ‘one of the nails in the coffin’ of his religious upbringing. For an atheist, mixing space exploration and religion borders on sacrilege.”
- Things That Are Getting Better (Aaron Renn, Substack): “We have managed to find a cure for about 90% of cystic fibrosis cases, a condition that was previously debilitating and fatal. We now have gene therapy treatments that are enabling some children born deaf to hear. In a slew of other areas from premature births to cancer, we’ve made real progress even if long promised fundamental breakthroughs remain elusive. GLP‑1 treatments promise to basically cure obesity. Life expectancy, which was falling, has now risen back to an all-time high.”
- Ranked: America’s Biggest Christian Groups (Julie R. Peasley, Visual Capitalist): “The comparison highlights a key divide in how these groups are structured. Catholics lead by membership, while the Southern Baptist Convention leads by church count. Non-denominational churches also rank near the top on both measures, reflecting how the composition of American Christianity has shifted over time.”
- The Assemblies of God ranks higher and higher (#7 on this chart). We’ve got one more easy rank to climb, but after that it gets challenging.
- The Pews Prepared the Way: Faith, Revolution, and the American Creed (Cole Claybourn & Joshua Claybourn, Providence): “Decades before Jefferson drafted the Declaration, ministers from across the 13 colonies preached natural rights and the equal standing of all men before God. In 1638, in the newly formed Connecticut Colony, a Puritan minister named Rev. Thomas Hooker delivered an audacious sermon for its time. He stood before the colony’s General Court and declared that ‘The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people’ and that ‘The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance.’ In the 17th century, a minister telling civil authorities that the government owed its existence to the governed, by God’s design, was seditious. Hooker grounded his argument in scripture and Puritan covenant theology. Consent was God’s idea first.”
- Becoming Co-ed: a Protestant Gift to China (Ningning Ma, Se Yan, and Yiling Zhao, SSRN): “A growing literature, starting with Becker and Woessmann (2009), establishes the link between Protestantism and human capital investment. According to the principle of sola scriptura, the Bible is the ultimate authority in the Christian faith, and reading Scripture provides individual access to God’s word. The Protestant emphasis on personal Bible reading led to the promotion of literacy, and Protestantism not only advocated for universal education but also made it accessible to women (Becker and Woessmann, 2008). Closely related to our research is a literature that demonstrates the particularly positive effect of Protestant missions on women’s literacy in developing countries with low gender equality (Calvi et al., 2020; Izumi et al., 2023; Meier zu Selhausen, 2014; Nunn et al., 2014). However, we shift the focus from basic education to higher learning, showing that by pioneering gender-inclusive universities, Protestant missions generated China’s first wave of female elites, thus extending the link between Protestantism and gender equality to upper-tail human capital.”
- I skimmed but did not thoroughly read this paper.
- Does it help to be religious? (Victoria Moul, Substack): “Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? And in particular, why does this seem (to me) to be more true now than it was thirty years ago when I started reading poetry seriously? If anything you might expect the likelihood that any individual good poet has a religious formation to have declined as religious observance has fallen, albeit to different degrees and from very different starting points, in both the UK and the US. By ‘religious’ I don’t mean Christian — I’m thinking equally of poets like Khaled Hakim or Amit Majmudar — and I don’t necessarily mean ‘practicing’ either, and certainly not that the best _poems_ are religious ones. But just that there does seem to be quite a strong correlation between a religious formation or framework influential enough to be audible in the poetry, and pronounced aptitude.”
- The author has a PhD in a related field, but has left academia to focus on being a writer.
- $400 Bibles? Luxurious Scripture Is on the Rise. (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Collectors of premium Bibles tend to share a few characteristics, publishers and experts say: They are typically evangelical Christians who own multiple other Bibles already, and many of them are men. Mr. Arroyo estimates that at least 60 percent of his customers are men. Mr. Wildsmith, the Bible reviewer, said his YouTube audience was about three-quarters male. Some recent surveys have detected Bible reading and church attendance stabilizing or even rising after years of decline, shifts fueled in part by young men.”
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In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar produced shrewd warriors “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a similar way, we need to become wise people whose faith interacts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may continue the tradition of Issachar.
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.