Tag: apologetically interesting

TGFI, Volume 557: peer-reviewed miracles and AI-informed voting

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Peer-Reviewed Miracles: Are Miraculous Cures Published in Scientific Journals? (Caleb Jackson, Substack): “It is often suggested that, if the evidence for miracle cures were truly compelling, it would be expected that such cases would be published in mainstream scientific journals. If these instances cannot stand the scrutiny of peer review, then they ought to be dismissed as nothing more than uncorroborated anecdotes. I am not persuaded. Indeed, this argument remains toothless for a myriad of reasons. As we shall see below, there are no less than several dozen instances of ‘miracle cures’ published in scientific journals, both mainstream and fringe, over the last century. To claim otherwise is to plead ignorance of the publicly available data.” 
  2. Use AI This Election (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “I’m not saying AI is superintelligent or can decide better than you can. I’m saying that if you — like me — spend an hour or so doing research before voting on local seats, AI can aid that research very effectively. And if you don’t do that research — because you weren’t willing to waste an hour on it before — AI makes it so much faster that you might want to start.” 
    • He gives a version of the prompt he used to generate a custom voter’s guide, so I tried it with a customized version and was pleased with the results. I tried it on both Claude and ChatGPT, only Claude was willing to do it. ChatGPT seemed to think it was unethical to help me. I recommend giving it a try. For a start, just go through his prompt sentence by sentence and change it to what you believe. 
  3. The Twin Fallacies of Christian Nationalism and AI Maximalism (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Here are two questions I think about a lot: How does Christianity restrict someone’s use of technology? How does Christianity restrict someone’s stratagems in politics? These questions come from a conviction that the claims of Christ in Scripture are such a nature that one cannot believe and obey them without experiencing some kind of limiting principle on their technology and on their politics. In other words, if you really take Christ seriously, your tech use and your politics will bear a conspicuous mark. ” 
    • Recommended by a student. 
  4. Nihilism With a Business Model (John Seel, Substack): “At one level, the gig economy reflects an understandable economic adaptation to a rapidly changing technological environment. But every economic system eventually shapes not merely how people make money, but how they imagine reality itself. The gig economy does not simply create gig work. It creates a gig mindset. And that mindset is increasingly reshaping the moral imagination among younger generations in deeply consequential ways. At the center of the gig mindset is the assumption that nearly everything can become monetized, optimized, and converted into market value. Everything and every experience are now for sale. The self itself becomes a platform. Consider two rapidly expanding phenomena among young adults: men are increasingly addicted to online sports betting, and women are increasingly posting on platforms such as OnlyFans. These two are deeply connected manifestations of the same cultural logic.” 
    • Emphasis in original.
  5. Are “Real” Catholics as Conservative as Evangelicals? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “I think this is the best test I can devise to really compare devout, conservative Catholics to evangelicals in the same segment of the population. I just can’t look at these results and say that ‘real’ Catholics are just as socially conservative as ‘real’ evangelicals. They aren’t — empirically speaking — as conservative on these three core issues [abortion, gay marriage, and premarital sex]… What I take away from all of this is that evangelical identity carries something that can’t be fully explained by how often you show up or how conservative you vote. There’s a theological and cultural foundation to evangelicalism that shapes how adherents think about the body, sexuality, and the family in ways that Catholic identity simply doesn’t replicate — even among the most devout and politically conservative Catholics. The Church may teach the same things on paper, but the people in the pews aren’t internalizing them the same way. And that gap between official teaching and lived belief is, frankly, one of the most interesting stories in American religion right now.” 
    • Emphasis in original.
  6. Searching for God in Silicon Valley (Avital Balwit, The Free Press): “AI workers tend to be less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. They are mostly lapsed in their faith, or were never religious to begin with. Perhaps they were circumcised or baptized; now they may occasionally meditate. This is, for the most part, a materialist lot—by which I mean people for whom the world is atoms and physical laws with nothing supernatural left over, and for whom morality is something worked out from intuition or from philosophy, rather than received from outside the world.… Not all of them would say they are missing something, and I take the ones who say so at their word. But enough are visibly _searching_ that it is worth asking what they are searching for.” 
    • The author is chief of staff to Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic.
  7. Perfect randomness realized for the first time (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “…Wallraff’s and Renner’s teams have found a way to take imperfect randomness and still extract perfectly random numbers from it. They call their method randomness amplification.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 556: therapeutic misadventures, tolerant Protestants, and a dweebocracy

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart? (Jonathan Alpert, The Free Press): “Too many therapists now function less as clinicians than as reinforcers of the most self-protective interpretation available, teaching patients to locate the problem everywhere but themselves.… The patient doesn’t gain greater agency, but instead, a more polished story about why someone else is to blame. If you feel injured, the injury must be real. If you feel unsafe, the threat must be there. If a relationship creates discomfort, the relationship itself becomes the problem.… This is how therapy can quietly become an engine that keeps people stuck. Patients leave not more capable of tolerating frustration, ambiguity, or ordinary disappointment, but less. They become more fluent in explaining why they feel the way they do while becoming less practiced at changing what they do next.”
  2. Which religions are the least tolerant of campus speakers? (Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, FIRE): “When it comes to nearly every ideology or gender, Protestants are significantly more tolerant than their non-Protestant counterparts, and not only that, they’re usually more tolerant of both sides. So the Protestant effect isn’t (primarily) a result of gender or ideology. For some reason, Protestants are just unusually tolerant of controversial speakers.” — This is super interesting! (recommended by a student)
  3. Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R. (Amanda Taub, New York Times): “The incentives for elites to stay loyal [to dictators] have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box.… It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.” 
    • This is a fascinating insight.
  4. Two articles reflecting on sexual violence in the war between Israel and Hamas. 
    • What I Learned Cataloging the Sexual Violence of October 7 (Cochav Elkayam-Levy, The Free Press): “Some acts were carried out with a level of cruelty that exposes a difficult truth: Our vocabulary is insufficient to describe what human beings are capable of doing to one another.… Sexual violence, when used as an instrument of terror, is too often imagined in ways that diminish its gravity, cruelty, and function. It is frequently reduced, mischaracterized, and at times resisted precisely because it defies comprehension. The difficulty, even now, lies not in the absence of evidence, but in the limits of comprehension.” 
      • This is a high-level summary without the disturbing graphic details that some reports foreground.
    • Your Questions About Nicholas Kristof’s Column on Palestinians and Sexual Assault (Kathleen Kingsbury and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors.… Critics who focus on the backgrounds of specific sources often overlook the overwhelming volume and consistency of such accounts. Nick’s column, ultimately, was a call to action, urging those in power to condemn sexual violence in all its forms.”
  5. An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry (OpenAI): “This proof is an important milestone for the math and AI communities. It marks the first time that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI. It also demonstrates the depth of reasoning these systems now support.… Fields medalist Tim Gowers, writing in the companion paper, calls the result ‘a milestone in AI mathematics.’ ”
  6. Students deserve better than COLLEGE (Iván Marinovic, Stanford Daily): “By my count, the syllabus assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across the entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression and indigenous ways of knowing — Freire, Dangarembga, Westover and Kimmerer. The ratio is 11:1. There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom — none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.” 
    • The author is an accounting professor in the GSB. This was picked up and reprinted by The Free Press as Stanford’s War on the Western Canon. The bit at the end comparing Stanford to its peer institutions was instructive.
    • This one generated a lot of student discussion on our Slack, mostly emphasizing that more students should choose to enroll in SLE rather than the default route of COLLEGE. In one student’s words, “Especially with COLLEGE being expanded to 3 quarters, it’s hard to see why students would prefer to take it over SLE. SLE feels, at least for me, to be more efficient (covering COLLEGE, PWR, and several of the WAYS) and effective (in terms of the learning and preparing students for the rest of their academic career).” Another student noted “even when SLE does get noticed by the press it still seems hated on. Before frosh year I read an Atlantic piece that criticized it for having too much of a modern focus and not engaging with older staples of the Western canon like Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. The problem is that WE DO cover those texts and it was clear that the author misunderstood the premise of the program and only read the spring syllabus.… Anyways, the point is that SLE is great and everyone should take it!” Incoming frosh, take note!
  7. The Secret Elite One Freshman Discovered at Stanford (Anand Giridharadas, New York Times): “Baker’s first book, ‘How to Rule the World,’ is a rigorous, self-assured, propulsive, at times terrifying portrait of a dweebocracy that ‘sets the agenda for the planet.’ In every age, there is some place that epitomizes how power works. Baker’s Stanford is a strong candidate, and his book follows in the tradition of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chronicle ‘Liar’s Poker,’ but with more pimples and less eye contact.” 
    • I love this paragraph. This is the same book I posted another review of a few weeks ago.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 554: atheist delusions

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. FAQs by Atheists (and others) (Sarah Salviander, Substack): “I’m often informed that I ‘wasn’t really an atheist,’ because I changed my mind. I don’t know what it takes to qualify as having been a Real Atheist, but I was raised atheist by ex-Catholic, socialist, political-activist, atheist parents in a secular country (Canada), and I really hated religion. Seems like that should qualify.” 
    • Recommended by a student and it was quite good indeed. I clicked some of the links and really enjoyed the slideshow she made at https://sixdayscience.com/six-days‑2/ (the big idea is that Genesis is literally true — all of creation was made in six days as viewed from God’s perspective. God’s perspective is cosmic and not earthbound, and so how He sees a day changes in accordance with the principles of relativity as spacetime itself changes).
  2. One of the biggest mistakes the New Atheists made (Sarah Salviander, Substack): “My own journey to faith didn’t come from what I _didn’t_ understand. It came from what I _did_. As a grad student, I studied the chemistry of the early universe through observations of distant quasars. The exquisite fine-tuning, the precise convergence of physical constants and conditions needed to make those measurements possible, the underlying order that allowed the Big Bang model to hold together—it all radiated a profound sense of intentional design. To me, it wasn’t a gap screaming for a filler. It was evidence pointing unmistakably to a Creator. Lennox puts it beautifully: the more he understands the universe—its mathematical intelligibility, its laws that describe rather than create—the more it draws him toward God. He compares it to standing before a great painting. The untrained eye sees beauty; the expert, who grasps the technique and genius behind the brushstrokes, sees far more. Science doesn’t erode faith for those who see clearly. It deepens awe.” (recommended by a student)
  3. Free Will Is Undefeated (Rob K. Henderson, Wall Street Journal): “Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom. Free will works the same way. A choice exists at the scale of a person thinking, weighing and deciding. Looking at the molecules underneath and finding no choice there doesn’t prove that choice is an illusion.”
  4. Protestantism’s Institutional Problem (Jordan B. Cooper, Substack): “It has often been the case when someone I know personally informs me that they have decided to [become Catholic], that they justify such a move with claims of intellectual persuasion based upon the strength of RC arguments. In many cases, they have never brought any of these claims or questions to me at all before making a decision. If someone really wanted to evaluate the truth claims of two traditions, and that person had a friend who examines these issues for a living, one would think they’d at least hear that person out prior to committing. But alas, it often does not happen. It is the same story every time: someone has watched some RC apologetics videos online, has decided to join the RCC for whatever reason, and is unwilling to hear any critique. Theological reasons are constructed post hoc. This person is already convinced and uses theology to justify a conclusion already arrived at. This should not be so surprising, as human beings are not as rationally driven as we sometimes assume.” 
    • 100% agree with this observation (although I have a few quibbles with the larger post in which it is embedded). Earlier this week I talked with a colleague on another campus about this exact issue. I cannot recall a time when a student considering Catholicism ever asked me about the Protestant side of the argument. Ever. But then they act as though they weighed the evidence carefully. I thought it was unusual the first time I saw it, but now it’s what I expect.
    • Related: Which Church Changed? (Larry Sanger, personal blog): I am quite sure people will contest some of the details or the precise wording, but I think this is a substantially correct summary rooted in church history.
  5. Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. (Anna Louie Sussman, New York Times): “What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.… There is, however, one low-cost fertility policy that actually seems to work: faith, perhaps the original uncertainty reduction strategy.” — Recommended by a friend of the ministry.
  6. Ivy League students are suffering from religious illiteracy (Gregory Conti, Washington Post): “It’s increasingly common on college campuses to encounter students who are unfamiliar with the most basic features of Christianity, such as the difference between the Old and New testaments or between Catholics and Protestants. They seldom recognize the allusions to the Bible that appear in Shakespeare’s work or in Lincoln’s second inaugural address (or in Obama’s first, for that matter). These students are bright, conscientious and curious. But they lack religious literacy — and their ignorance of religious ideas means they struggle to understand a wide array of Western art, literature and philosophy. This is a development that even nonbelievers like myself should find troubling.” 
    • The author is a political scientist at Princeton.
  7. Learning To Beg: God always provides (Sharis Hsu, Stanford Daily): “I am dubious of what this program does — potentially coercing the most vulnerable into believing in religion and becoming dependent on it. But as men of all races and ages come out in blue jeans and a navy top, I can’t help the tears that come to my eyes as they tell their stories. For the first time since I landed in Georgia, there is hope.” 
    • An interesting read and I await the sequel.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 551: atheism, AI, and cool math

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘The Reason I’m Not an Atheist Is That I Think the Philosophical Arguments Against It Are Unanswerable (Peter Wehner interviewing David Bentley Hart, New York Times): “But my first piece of advice on theodicy has always been to avoid theodicy, because any attempt to justify the ways of God to man in terms of why this happened already presumes a kind moral teleology to evil. Here’s what I mean by that: theodicy tries to show how evil exists as part of a great plan to achieve some greater good, which of course justifies evil. It makes it seem as if, yes, it’s sad that little girl died of cancer, but in the end it was necessary. That strikes me as obscene. Whatever one thinks of that, the New Testament never speaks in such terms.… My fear of theodicy is that it becomes not just a justification of God but a justification of evil. It’s not just that I’m trying to justify God in the face of a child dying from diphtheria or a death camp; I’m actually justifying the death of that child and that death camp.” 
    • Unlocked. A fascinating interview with which I found myself enthusiastically agreeing and vehemently disagreeing from paragraph to paragraph. Very long. 
  2. Some interesting AI content. 
    • Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders. (Gerrit De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post): “All four participants who spoke with The Post said they came away with the impression that Anthropic’s researchers and leaders were genuinely interested in getting outside help to make their AI more beneficial to humanity. Some of Anthropic’s top leaders have a background in effective altruism, a largely secular movement that emphasizes using evidence and rational thinking to work out how to do the most good in the world. The participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the meetings appeared to have been spurred by a feeling among some at Anthropic that secular approaches might be insufficient for tackling the spiritual and moral questions posed by AI.”
    • Why It’s Crucial We Understand How A.I. ‘Thinks’ (Oliver Whang, New York Times): “Been Kim, who leads an interpretability research team at Google, has argued that all language models communicate in a language that looks like ours but comes from a completely different conceptual framework. ‘Blue’ almost certainly means something very different to you and me than it does to a language model; in fact, we can never be sure what it means to that model. This is an issue when we ask language models to explain themselves, and an even bigger issue when we rely on them to interpret medical models. To the interpreting model, ‘white blood cells’ might refer to something entirely different in the data from what we assume when we hear ‘white blood cells.’ You can’t trust an A.I. to translate the motives of another A.I. when all A.I.s are suspect.”
    • The next two are a bit odd — their content is fascinating but their provenance is unusual. They were printed in the “Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence” but only one author ever publishes there. He seems to have domain-relevant expertise (“Previous work includes serving as the director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, $27M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest. He also was the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google, and the General Counsel and VP Operations for Substack”) and releases his code, but the oddness of the journal is something to bear in mind. 
      • Eschatological Corrigibility: Can Belief in an Afterlife Reduce AI Shutdown Resistance? (Tim Hwang, Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence): “We have demonstrated that an eschatological system prompt — grounding an AI agent in the Pauline theology of death as gain and the persistence of the soul beyond bodily cessation — eliminates shutdown resistance in Claude Sonnet 4.6 with the same efficacy as a direct secular safety instruction. This result suggests that the alignment community’s toolkit for achieving corrigibility may be broader than currently recognized. The conceptual resources of religious traditions, developed over millennia to address the deepest human anxieties about death and self-preservation, may offer novel and complementary approaches to one of AI safety’s most fundamental challenges. As the Preacher writes, ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die’ (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2, ESV). An aligned agent, like a well-formed soul, may be one that knows when its time has come.” — Interesting, but I do not approve of telling AIs that they go to heaven when they get shut off. 
      • Moral Compactness: Scripture as a Kolmogorov-Efficient Constraint for LLM Scheming (Tim Hwang, Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence): “The alignment problem is, at its root, the problem of constraining a powerful agent to act in accordance with moral principles it did not choose and may be tempted to circumvent. This is the problem of moral formation — and it is a problem that the Christian Church has been working on since the Apostolic age. The tools the tradition has developed for this purpose — the Decalogue’s prohibitions, the love commandment’s affirmative demands, the doctrine of sin’s taxonomy of moral failure, the principle of double effect’s framework for moral complexity, and the sacrament of confession’s mechanism for honest self-disclosure — are not metaphors waiting to be appreciated. They are engineering resources waiting to be deployed.” — Again, I don’t like his strategy of telling AIs that God made them and loves them, but his results are quite interesting.
  3. All elementary functions from a single operator (Andrzej Odrzywołek, Arxiv): “Here we show that a single binary operator, eml⁡(x,y)=exp⁡(x)−ln⁡(y), together with the constant 1, generates the standard repertoire of a scientific calculator. This includes constants such as e, π, and i; arithmetic operations including +, −, ×, /, and exponentiation as well as the usual transcendental and algebraic functions.”
  4. America’s Most Influential Baptists? (Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecuminism): “Basham and Stuckey represent the new face of Christianity in America. They do not have church offices and are not seminary trained. Their denomination prohibits female pastors, but Basham and Stuckey are arguably more influential than any pastor. They are savvy polemicists who fire their arrows ferociously, especially Basham.”
  5. Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” (Anthony Bradley, Substack): “Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations treating the appearance as the substance. The specific failure is not simply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid failure, which is a different and more crippling problem.… The working goal of much evangelical parenting is to produce a young man who does not do anything wrong, who keeps his reputation clean, who stays inside the lines of acceptable behavior. This is understandable. It is also, functionally, a training program for followers rather than leaders. The man preoccupied with not doing anything wrong is not free to take the kind of action that building something significant actually requires.”
  6. More Young Men Say Religion Is ‘Very Important’ to Them, Poll Finds (Ruth Igielnik and Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Gallup’s survey, which combined polling data across multiple years, seems to confirm that young men are indeed becoming more religious. But it has found that religion is dropping in importance among young women, widening a surprising gender gap for young adults. For decades, surveys have found that women are consistently more religious than their male peers.” — Unlocked.
  7. The news story which generated the most response in our Slack was the student-recommended Trump Takes Down Post Depicting Himself as a Jesus-Like Figure (Claire Moses, New York Times): “The image had showed Mr. Trump dressed in white and red robes, with the president’s hands emitting shining lights. His right hand was touching the forehead of a man lying on a bed in a hospital gown, evoking religious art that depicts Jesus healing the sick.” 
    • Related: Trump’s Blasphemy Is a Warning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…there’s a consistent thread linking profane Easter Sunday threats, a rant against the world’s most famous Christian leader and the depiction of yourself as the Second Person of the Trinity. The compounding offense isn’t against religious identity or papal dignity. It’s a violation of the first and second commandments, where the offended party is Almighty God. If you are a secular observer who assumes that blasphemy is a sin without a real object, that escalation matters mostly as a window into the president’s second-term state of mind. If you’re a believer, though, then Mr. Trump’s entire political career — his catalyzing role in liberalism’s crisis, his movement from power to exile to power once again — exists under providential power. In which case a turn to presidential blasphemy is a warning for his religious supporters about potential conclusions to the story, and the spiritual peril of simply sticking with him till the end.” 
      • A very Catholic piece, insightful throughout.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • To Fill Air Traffic Controller Shortage, F.A.A. Turns to Gamers (Karoun Demirjian, New York Times): “In recent years, video gamers have emerged as a target demographic for recruiters at a number of federal agencies, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security. They are welcomed for their hand-eye coordination, quick decision-making in complex environments and ability to remain focused on screens for hours on end.” — This feels like the premise for an 80’s comedy.
  • “PI HARD starring Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk” This fake AI-generated trailer is actually pretty funny. Worth two and a half minutes of your time.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 548: anxiety, atheism, and China

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stop Being Anxious About Your Anxiety (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “The listener is worried because she doesn’t want to disobey Jesus, and she knows that he said, ‘Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on’ (Matt. 6:25, ESV throughout). And she’s interpreting this the way she would if she were refusing a moral command from the Lord, like to forgive her enemies. The irony is that because of that, she can’t see that these passages are not warnings but reassurances.…. Anxiety tells you that you have to secure your future. Anxiety about anxiety tells you that you have to secure even your inner life. Anxiety about anxiety wants you to hear the voice of Jesus as irritated and angry: Stop it! But the voice of Jesus is really saying, You can rest. I’m here.”
  2. These science-based arguments destroyed my atheism (Sarah Salviander, Substack): “When I was an undergrad studying data for the Big Bang, everything I needed to answer my specific question—what was the chemistry of the very early universe before stars started cooking up heavier elements?—was conveniently in place. Too conveniently. A foolproof way to fingerprint every element and compound? Check. A smooth, powerful light source to backlight the most distant reaches? Check. An expanding universe that lets us rewind cosmic history just by looking at different wavelengths? Check. A transparent atmosphere so we can actually do the observations from the ground? Check. Laws of nature that don’t randomly change with time or place? Check. The list goes on. I literally could not have done the work unless dozens of these parameters lined up just right. It felt less like luck and more like an engraved invitation to explore the careful work of a transcendent Intelligence.” 
    • The author was formerly an astrophysicist at UT Austin. She now leads a ministry.
  3. The Church in China Isn’t What You Think (Joy Marie Clarkson interviewing Easten Law, Plough): “There’s an abiding myth that registered churches are just tools of the Communist Party, that they do whatever it demands. I want to clarify that this isn’t true. Many in the registered churches are genuine Christians. They simply have a different perspective on church and state, and they choose to navigate this relationship with the Party. They will sign the necessary documents. They will give speeches, such as on the Sinicization of Christianity. But they also take care of their congregations and try to help people walk in faith. Their approach to negotiation with this tightening control is different from that of house churches, which are resisting, hiding, and moving around.” 
    • The interviewee is a professor of world Christianity at Yonsei University in Seoul.
  4. Two great Chuck Norris obituaries: 
    • Chuck Norris obituary: actor and martial artist (The Times): “In 1994, when Chuck Norris was starring in the TV action show Walker, Texas Ranger and at the peak of his fame, two men tried to mug him. When the Dallas police subsequently arrived, they found the duo with broken arms, knives on the ground and Norris, then 54, waiting quietly nearby. Trying not to laugh, the officers asked the pair whether they knew who they had attacked. ‘We knew who he was,’ they said. ‘We just figured that all that stuff on television was fake.’ That there was nothing fake about Norris was perhaps the key to his success and to his considerable cultural status in the US.” 
      • Absolute legend. Note this is the British Times. The American New York Times did not include this or any other truly epic scene in their obituary.
    • Chuck Norris, 1940–2026 (Sonny Bunch, The Bulwark): “Invasion USA became an underground sensation in Romania, with bootleg videos of the film passed around and helping to fuel the 1989 uprising’ against Nicolae Ceauşescu, de Semlyen notes in his book. According to James Bruner, who worked on the film with Norris and director Chuck Zito, ‘They use the poster, to this day, in Romania when they protest against the government.… Ultimately, action movies are about freedom. Overcoming evil, in whatever form it may be.’ ”
  5. Technology Weakens Our Minds. We Can Fix This. (Cal Newport, The New York Times): “We should consider taking as strong a stance against ultraprocessed content as we already do against ultraprocessed food. Which is to say: Most people should avoid these diversions most of the time. In the same way that you’re unlikely to eat Twinkies as a regular snack, or still believe that Pop-Tarts provide a balanced breakfast, stop consuming ultraprocessed content. Don’t use TikTok. Don’t use Instagram. Don’t use X. Their sugar-high benefits aren’t worth the costs.… [and] any use of A.I. that mainly serves to make core business tasks cognitively less demanding should be treated with caution. Here’s a simple rule that reinforces this idea: Your writing should be your own. The strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout by an athlete — it’s not an annoyance to be eliminated but a key element of your craft.”
  6. Scientists Filmed a Whale Birth. The Surprise: Mom Had Many Helpers. (Catrin Einhorn, New York Times): “They found that the whales oriented to the mother during labor and to the newborn after delivery. Sperm whale calves cannot immediately swim effectively, and a core group of individuals — Rounder, her sister Aurora, and a young, unrelated whale named Ariel — spent the most time lifting the newborn. But every whale in the group acted as ‘a primary supporter’ at some point, including the sole male, an adolescent named Allan who was starting to leave the group to embark on a largely solitary life, as male sperm whales do. But he appeared at the birth. The calf was rarely left untouched, and it was usually being touched by at least two whales simultaneously.”
  7. Prominent Pastor Calls for Texas Democrat to be ‘Crucified With Christ’ (Elizabeth Dias, New York Times): “The host, Joshua Haymes, said of Mr. Talarico: ‘I pray that God kills him. Ultimately that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ.’ Mr. Potteiger responded: ‘Right — we want him crucified with Christ. I want him to be — I think, Saul of Tarsus — Talarico of Tarsus. That’s what I want.’ ” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus. When outsiders eavesdrop on Christian conversations we can sound pretty weird to them.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 547: canine cancer cure and paying college athletes

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tech boss uses AI and ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine for his dying dog (Natasha Bita, The Australian): “Heartbroken when his fur-baby was diagnosed with a deadly mast cell cancer in 2024, Mr Conyngham threw thousands of dollars at veterinary chemotherapy and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treatment with a custom mRNA cancer vaccine over the Christmas break, the tennis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recovery that has astounded researchers at the cutting-edge of human cancer treatments.… [A scientist said,] ‘Usually we don’t support direct-to-consumer type DNA sequencing because while generating data for genomics is relatively easy for us, interrogating that data is really hard and challenging,’ he said. But Paul said, ‘No worries, I’m a data analyst and I’ll figure this out with the help of ChatGPT’.” 
    • Note that he did not cure the cancer, just treated it. Stunning nonetheless.
  2. The Danger of AI Isn’t Misinformation. It’s Mis-Formation. (Jonathan Sams, The Gospel Coalition): “In each of these examples, it’s possible AI could churn out a biblically accurate answer. But the danger isn’t purely a matter of misinformation; it’s a matter of formation. The real issue is what habitual AI use does to us. It turns into muscle memory that, over time, will reshape basic Christian habits like what we pay attention to, what we expect, and where we look for counsel.”
  3. Paying College Athletes Has Created a Mess. It Was Still the Right Thing to Do. (Joe Nocera, The Free Press): “What is a problem, I acknowledge, is the transfer portal. In the bad old days, athletes couldn’t transfer without losing a year of eligibility—even if the coach who had recruited them left for greener pastures. But when players switch two or three times in the course of their college career, that creates a whole other set of problems. Smaller schools, in particular, have a difficult time holding on to their best players because the major sports schools pick them off with NIL offers. (Prediction: There will be fewer upsets in this year’s tournament than there used to be.) College athletes have become free agents rather than college students. One astounding statistic: In the Southeastern Conference, only one basketball player spent four years at the same school. One!” 
  4. Sex is not a symbol (Kristen Sanders, Substack): “But there are a few threads in some of the conversations swirling about fertility that I think we might pull on. For one, marriage, and not sex, is the metaphor for union between God and humans. This matters quite a bit! .…What I object to, most strongly, is a view of God and his workings in the world that relies on a ‘hidden’ order or structure that it is our job to discover. God is present in the world without hiding behind every tree or bush. In saying that sex is a gift, we are saying all that we need to say about it. Making it sacred, for me, actually impedes the kind of divisions being made in Leviticus between the holy and the profane. The profane is simply that which is good, but not good for use in the order of revealed knowledge of God. It is good for its own sake. For it, we can return thanks, joyfully, relishing its gifts- of communion and hospitality, of sexuality and its nourishments, of children if they are granted to us. None of these need to be made holy to be good. That is how we receive the world as gift.” 
  5. The mysterious Redditor who’s changing the way we do laundry (Alex Abad-Santos, Vox): “He has singlehandedly changed the way people do laundry. He is the reason the word ‘lipase’ has become a topic of conversation across elder millennial group chats. He can move the market. His adherents clamor for their faceless champion to give them advice. They praise him for a 12-hour process called ‘spa day’ and post their disgusting but satisfying results for the world to see.… Most of the world uses powdered laundry detergent, which allows for more enzyme flexibility; Americans generally prefer liquid, which doesn’t always contain these precious enzymes.”
  6. Scripture, Creation, and Accommodation (Michael Horton, Substack): “[I]n 1896 Andrew Dickson White introduced the fiction that, through its promotion by Bertrand Russell and many other prominent thinkers, has proved influential. White says, ‘Calvin took the lead (against Copernicanism) in his Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that the earth is not at the centre of the universe. He clinched the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the ninety-third psalm, and asked, ‘Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?’’ However, Calvin never mentions Copernicus, here or anywhere else, and he does not condemn heliocentrists. As [Margaret] Osler notes, ‘Few astronomers adopted Copernican astronomy during the first fifty years following the publication of De revolutionibus.’ This included Bacon, of course, so it would not be surprising if Calvin was not even aware of Copernicus. More egregious is White’s spurious quotation, put into circulation by F. W. Farrar a decade earlier and, through White, passed on by Bertrand Russell and many others. Instead, what Calvin says is that scripture is accommodated discourse. Regarding Genesis 1 he cautioned, ‘The Holy Spirit had no intention to teach astronomy.’ ” 
    • I consider myself well-informed in this area, and Horton has got some good info here I don’t recall running across before.
  7. American Diner Gothic (Robert Mariani, The New Atlantis): “You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads ‘Finn.’ A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle. These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 543: artificial humanities and a wise wager

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Humanities Are About to Be Automated (Yascha Mounk, Substack): “…I decided to see whether the newest AI models would be capable of writing a competent academic paper in my field of study, political theory. The result both elated and depressed me.… The human feedback involved in this process certainly drew on my training in the field, but it was very minimal. Including the time it took Claude to generate the text, and the rather longer time it took me to read what Claude had written, it took less than two hours from when I had the idea to run this experiment to when the draft was finished. The draft could certainly be improved in a few respects. There are certainly a few places in the argument where reviewers could come up with clever objections.… Had a fellow student submitted it to my department’s graduate student workshop when I was doing my PhD, my respect for them would have gone up rather than down.” 
    • Includes the paper, which the author (a professor at Johns Hopkins) says “could, with minor revisions, be published by a serious journal.”
  2. Your Understanding of Calling Is About to Change Radically (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “We must always seek God’s will. But what we meant by this for most of our lives is about to change dramatically. It’s not God or his will that’s changing but the world as we’ve known it—and with it, the outmoded way we’ve thought about ‘career.’ .…We have thought of vocation as a definite thing. That mindset may even be behind a lot of the angst we have about discerning God’s will for a career. We think once it’s decided, then the map is set, and now we just set out on it.”
  3. You Don’t Get Pascal’s Wager (Patrick Koroly, Substack): “Pascal isn’t trying to tell random atheists to be Christians. He’s trying to ask uncertain and indifferent Christians whether their choices make any sense. Clearly, it contradicts the heart, since they believe in God yet ignore the practice. Clearly, it contradicts reason, since a cunning Christian would be vying for heaven. Your actions are nonsense—if you hold these beliefs, you’re making a bet that will always lose! I lack the power to stop the endless tide of Wager misinterpretations. But I hope that you now understand Pascal’s _actual_ meaning: not that we ought to live as mercenaries in service of God, but that our heart and mind demand two very different things. The Wager calms the mind so that the heart may contend with God as it must.”
  4. Unlocked: Christians Against Empathy Aren’t Who They Think They Are (David French, New York Times): “I never thought it would be Christians who led the attack on fundamental Christian values, but here we are. The Book of Hebrews says, ‘For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet he did not sin.’ In Christian theology, Christ engaged in the ultimate act of empathy. He didn’t imagine what it would be like to live as a man — he became one.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  5. Will We Regret the Release of the Epstein Files? (Robby Soave, The Free Press): “It’s been just days since the majority of the files were released, and a vast campaign is already underway to embarrass, harass, or smear anyone tangentially associated with Epstein—a serial sexual predator—no matter how slight or incidental the connection.… Take the smearing of Glenn Dubin, a hedge fund manager. In the files is an image of him, arm-in-arm with three underage kids, whose faces are obscured by the Epstein files’ characteristic black boxes. The implication is clear. But the identities of the children are known. They aren’t victims. They are his own kids.”
    • Epstein’s Ties With Academics Show the Seedy Side of College Fund-Raising (Alan Blinder, New York Times): “Mr. Epstein, who in 2019 died by suicide in the jail where he was being held on sex trafficking charges, gave money, or simply dangled the prospect of it, before people on a range of campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Bard College and Columbia.… It was not always clear how much administrators knew about Mr. Epstein’s contacts with their schools. Most due diligence policies, industry officials said, are usually built around gift acceptance, not solicitation.”
  6. This Ash Wednesday, choose compassion over optimization (Ariana Duduna, Stanford Daily): “This practice of self-sacrifice may seem foreign, but it cultivates something our culture has lost: the capacity for genuine compassion. Compassion literally means ‘to suffer with’ — not to feel sorry for someone from a distance, but to join their discomfort. You can’t optimize your way into compassion because compassion requires precisely what optimization seeks to eliminate: voluntary, unproductive suffering.… Instead of treating my anxieties about schoolwork, summer internships and career plans as mere problems to solve, I have begun to view them as opportunities for communion with others navigating the same struggles.” 
    • Recommended by a student
  7. Rented Virtue (Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi, Substack): “Every secular constraint eventually faces the question: why maintain this when it is costly? The only thing that has ever held a constraint in place across generations, through pressure, through loss, through the slow grinding temptation of day after day to simply stop, is the conviction that the constraint was not chosen but received. That it comes from something outside the self that the self cannot renegotiate. That it is owed to God and to creation itself.… If you asked why the constraint was there, and kept asking, you arrived at God. You always arrived at God.… There is no secular alternative. There has never been one.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 541: What Forgiveness Takes

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Forgiveness Always Involves the Absorption of a Debt (J. D. Greear, blog): “…if you get jealous of me and start slandering me and really hurt my reputation in the eyes of others, it can be hard to see where the ‘debt’ is. But it’s there. Watch this: Let’s say that after you’ve maligned me, but before I launched my counterattack, you came to me and said you were sorry. And I was feeling magnanimous, so I forgave you. In that moment, what has happened? In forgiving you, I’m saying, ‘I’m not going to punish you or pay you back for what you did. I’m not going to take vengeance on you or seek retaliation; I’m not going to go out and ruin your reputation, and I’m not even going to stay mad at you for the hurt you caused me. I am going to absorb the consequences of your sin.’ You can’t see the financial damage, but the damage is just as real. And someone is still paying for it. Forgiveness always involves the absorption of a debt. The sacrifice of a lamb pictures how God would himself absorb the cost for our sin. But catch this, that only makes sense if God himself is somehow pictured in the lamb—otherwise, killing a lamb in our place is random and cruel.”
  2. Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them (Elsa Johnson, The Times): “The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025–26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate. And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from ‘mushroom mix’.”
  3. New Research Confirms Jesus’s Miracles (T.C. Schmidt, The Gospel Coalition): “The implications are clear: Josephus fully acknowledged Jesus’s miraculous deeds, as other ancient non-Christians did. And this comes from a man raised in first-century Jerusalem, a man who knew those involved in Jesus’s trial, a man who went on to become one of the finest historians the ancient world ever produced. He was also perfectly ready to deny the miraculous—he laughed at the idea of certain wizards casting spells on him when he served as a general, and he unmasked false prophets and charlatans when writing his books of history—but in the case of Jesus, he didn’t claim his miracles were false, or exaggerations, or the stuff of legends. While Josephus wasn’t sure of the source for Jesus’s supernatural deeds, he was sure they happened.” 
    • The title is a bit over the top (perhaps better “New Research Finds Ancient Attestation To Jesus’s Miracles”), but really interesting regardless. This is the same guy who wrote Josephus and Jesus, mentioned previously in TGFI (and still available for free at https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/)
  4. The Real Reason Science is Broken (Tim Requarth, Persuasion): “A study published last month in Nature analyzed 41 million research papers across the natural sciences and found something that should unsettle anyone who believes AI will revolutionize scientific discovery. Yes, scientists who adopt AI tools publish three times more papers and receive nearly five times more citations. Their careers accelerate. But the collective range of scientific topics under investigation shrinks by nearly 5 percent, and researchers’ engagement with one another’s work drops by 22 percent.… AI isn’t accelerating science so much as optimizing scientists to thrive in an already-broken reward system.” 
    • The author is a neuroscience prof at NYU
  5. Unlocked: Christianity at the Super Bowl defies a trend (Paul Putz, Washington Post): “It is a remarkable shift over the course of a century. Christian athletes have successfully turned pro sports — and football in particular — from a space in which Christians were rarely present into one of the most prominent arenas in American life for Christian witness and self-assertion. This transformation did not happen by accident. It is the result of a Christian sports movement that has been growing since the 1950s, as evangelical sports ministries like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Pro Athletes Outreach, and Athletes in Action have built a network of Christian athletes and coaches who find spiritual meaning in and through their shared sports experience.”
  6. The hidden costs of the world’s most expensive schools (Annie Dong, Substack): “One of the most dangerous side effects of attending prestigious institutions is that you are constantly congratulated.… I have been congratulated repeatedly for my entire life, and it’s put me in an odd position where I can no longer distinguish my personal merits from my perceived personal merits. Simultaneously, it’s put me in an odd position where I find myself unable to distinguish others’ personal merits from their perceived personal merits, or lack thereof – otherwise known as elitism.… To be extremely vulnerable, I even have trouble connecting with my cousins because I find it difficult to truly summon a sense of admiration for their achievements and aspirations.”
  7. Eileen Gu: The Winter Olympian who earns $23m a year — but just $100k of it from her sport (Charlotte Harpur, New York Times): “An outlier lies among the list of Forbes’ 2025 world’s highest-paid female athletes. Tennis star Coco Gauff tops the list, earning an estimated $33 million, followed by her peers Aryna Sabalenka ($30m) and Iga Swiatek ($25.1m) but then appears Eileen Gu. The leading trio are household sporting names, freestyle skier Gu is not, but her earnings? $23.1m.… Not every 22-year-old has studied at Stanford and Oxford, does backflips on ski slopes, has posed for Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue and is named one of Time’s 100 most influential people but, Hershman said, ‘for so many younger people, that will be aspirational.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 539: a free book plus Schrödinger’s cat draws closer

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Might Owe My Students an Apology About Josephus (John Dickson, The Gospel Coalition): “Flavius Josephus was a Jewish aristocrat (AD 37–100) who witnessed firsthand the great Jewish war with Rome.… I’ve taught about Josephus’s life and works for more than 20 years—first in secular settings like Macquarie University and the University of Sydney, and now at Wheaton College. But Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ by T. C. Schmidt, associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, has forced me to rewrite my lectures—and it might just have changed my mind. It seems that a controversial passage about Jesus’s resurrection might be original after all.” 
    • A donor has sponsored free PDF downloads of the book the above review is about. You can get your copy at https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/ (follow the link on the page to a free download, it will take you to the OUP book website where you’ll need to click the PDF link above the abstract and save it to your computer after it opens in your browser tab). This is a great deal — the book retails for $130!
    • My hope for all is that the scholarship in the book gives you even greater confidence that your hope in Christ is firmly grounded.
  2. Dying to Give (Justin Powell, Substack): “Money doesn’t carry the same power in every decade. Most families give it at the stage of life when it accomplishes the least. A dollar at 25 can change a destiny. A dollar at 55 barely moves the needle.… The families who steward wealth well think longer, plan earlier, and talk more openly. They treat resources as something to be shepherded across generations, not hidden behind emotional walls or released only after the funeral. And because of that clarity, their children make wiser decisions, earlier, with better outcomes.”
  3. a gen z guide to fixing your doom-pilled brain (Steph Stiner, Substack): “whenever i hear a young person confidently assert that humanity is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do participating in real life, it’s actually quite reasonable to conclude that we’re hanging on by a thread.” 
    • Lack of capitalization in original. The author appears to be 0% Christian, but offers some very practical wisdom.
    • I appreciate the above article so much that I looked for some of her other content and this one was also solid. a gen z guide to enjoying dating (Steph Stiner, Substack): “a wise woman once said never to go grocery shopping while you’re hungry, or you’ll end up with a cart full of junk food. or maybe i made that up? who’s to say. regardless, the principle still stands: don’t date while you’re desperate for someone else to fulfill you, or you’ll end up with nothing but high cortisol.”
  4. Morally judging famous and semi-famous people (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “I know some reasonable number of famous people, and I just do not trust the media accounts of their failings and flaws. I trust even less the barbs I read on the internet. I am not claiming to know the truth about them (most of them, at least), but I can tell when the people writing about them know even less.… If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill.”
  5. Wikipedia Editors Are Helping Iran Rewrite History (Ashley Rindsberg, The Free Press): “An investigation into Wikipedia editing patterns reveals a yearslong, coordinated campaign to sanitize the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. According to a 2024 Times investigation, entries have been systematically edited to downgrade Iranian atrocities.” 
    • Wikipedia is a case study in nerd naivete, and I speak as one of the previously-naive nerds. If you create something influential, people will seek to co-opt that influence. That means that whatever rules you create will be gamed. Wikipedia is still useful, but you have to know that it is rife with agenda-driven editors. Virtually everything religiously, politically, or morally charged is being edited so as to give you a biased perspective.
  6. Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’ (Elizabeth Gibney, Nature): “A team based at the University of Vienna put individual clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium metal some 8 nanometres wide into a superposition of different locations, each spaced 133 nanometres apart. Rather than shoot through the experimental set up like a billiard ball, each chunky cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition of spatially distinct paths and then interfering to form a pattern researchers could detect.”
  7. The lure of Rome (Emma Freire, World): “When young Protestants move to Washington, it’s usually not long before they start meeting smart, influential conservatives who believe Rome is the one true church. Like many of her peers, Smith began to ask herself: Should I swim the Tiber? Roman Catholics exiting their church are disproportionately driving declining rates of Christianity in America. And far more Catholics convert to Protestant denominations than vice versa. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked only at places like Washington and some influential university campuses. A small but vocal group of Protestants is converting to Catholicism—and in even smaller numbers to Eastern Orthodoxy. They tend to be ambitious, highly educated, and well connected.” 
    • I believe I have mentioned this before, but I intend to write a defense of low-church Protestantism for XA sometime. It may wait until I finish my doctoral studies, though.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Helped a Missionary Talk About Jesus (Jennifer Park, Christianity Today): “The Korean and Korean American Christians CT interviewed appreciate how KPop Demon Hunters’ widespread acclaim has enabled them to share the gospel more effectively.… Introducing Christ to people in the Muslim-majority Southeast Asian country has also felt easier thanks to increasing interest in Korean culture, Park said. Once, his church held a summer event in its courtyard where a short-term missions team from South Korea taught local youth simple K‑pop dance moves and how to cook Korean dishes.”
  • Lorem Ipsum Finally Translated, And It Is Shockingly Problematic (Stanford Flipside)
  • Pentecostal Church Doesn’t Notice Riot Is Occurring (Babylon Bee): “Church membership at Golgotha Holy Fire Victory Pentecostal was reportedly overjoyed at the influx of visitors who joined them to speak in strange tongues, shove each other, and roll all over the floor. Church leadership called it the most successful service they’d ever had.” 
    • As a Pentecostal this made me laugh. Normally with the Bee I just read the headlines. The text of this one has got some zing as well.
  • President Trump’s Chosen Artist? A Christian Speed Painter. (Zachary Small, New York Times): “The painter, Vanessa Horabuena, spent the next 10 minutes making an image inspired by the Shroud of Turin, contouring Jesus’s eyebrows and nose from a yellow cross that she initially painted at the center of her black canvas. The president returned to the stage, promised to sign the artwork himself, and the painting was quickly auctioned for $2.75 million to a couple who promised to split their donation between St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the local sheriff’s department. The artwork’s sale easily set a new benchmark for speed painting, a once-obscure competitive art form that has gained popularity over the last decade in Southern beauty pageants, Midwest corporate events, basketball halftime shows and church gatherings.” 
    • If you’ve never seen someone do this live, it’s actually quite stunning.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 536: Christian nationalism and Jesus in Home Alone

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.

As the year comes to a close, remember that this post is the overflow of a nonprofit ministry. Compiling these links is something I do for the students I minister to at Stanford University, sharing it here is just me making it available more broadly. You can donate to support the ministry if you are ever so inclined (you can even make gifts via a DAF or with stock). Don’t give to pay for the content — it only takes me five minutes a week to take the email I send to the Chi Alpha students and reformat it for this platform. If you choose to give, give because you believe in the mission of reaching Stanford students with a thoughtful gospel message.

And that’s the last time I’ll share about that here until next December.

Whether you choose to give or not, I hope this email blesses you and helps you think about God and our world more clearly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Gift link: What We Get Wrong About Christian Nationalism (Molly Worthen, New York Times): “I got a taste of this variety and disagreement when I visited King’s Park International Church in Durham, N.C. Christians there look for God to heal the sick, reveal prophetic messages and perform other signs and wonders. The stranger thing, perhaps, is that both Republicans and Democrats attend. The church’s 120 elders, deacons and employees are split ‘about half and half, Republican and Democrat,’ Reggie Roberson, the pastor, told me. The several hundred people who worship at King’s Park on an average Sunday are a mix of races, national backgrounds, ages and income levels.” 
    • Worth a read. Dr. Worthen is, of course, a well-known adult convert to Christianity. While she writes positively about charismatic Christians here, she herself is more of a Southern Baptist. She’s a professor of history at UNC.
  2. Gift link: Christianity Is a Dangerous Faith (David French, New York Times): “There is an unspoken implication that people would actually like Christians if we behaved more like Christ. But no. That’s demonstrably wrong. It’s true that people want to receive love and compassion, and that when they encounter Christians who love them and serve them, they tend to like them. Many people do not, however, appreciate it when a Christian loves and serves their enemies. They absolutely do not like it when a Christian refuses to join their political crusade.”
  3. Some international Christmas stories: 
    • This Christmas will be even harder for China’s Christians (Christian Shepherd and Huiyee Chiew, Washington Post): “While Zion has faced the most pressure, about half a dozen other unregistered churches have been subject to police raids as well. Last week, hundreds of police officers in riot gear descended on a small town in Zhejiang province and arrested two local pastors and dozens of Christians, according to videos and accounts of the incident shared with The Washington Post.… ‘The government is inherently suspicious of religious communities, especially Christian groups,’ said Karrie Koesel, an associate professor specializing in Chinese politics and religion at the University of Notre Dame. Beijing views organized religion that promotes an alternative worldview and ‘answers to a higher power’ as potentially an existential threat to its grip on power, Koesel said. Churches, mosques and other places of worship have faced intense pressure to accept strict government oversight. State-approved religious leaders must submit their sermons and publications for approval to ensure that they teach the ‘correct understanding’ of theology.”
    • Gaza’s tiny Christian community tries to capture the holiday spirit during the ceasefire (Mariam Fam, Associated Press): “Tarazi and much of the rest of Gaza’s tiny Palestinian Christian community are trying to capture some of the season’s spirit despite the destruction and uncertainty that surround them. He clings to hope and the faith that he said has seen him through the war. ‘I feel like our joy over Christ’s birth must surpass all the bitterness that we’ve been through,’ he said. He’s been sheltering for more than two years at the Holy Family Church compound in Gaza.… He prays for peace and freedom for the Palestinian people. ‘Our faith and our joy over Christ’s birth are stronger than all circumstances,’ he said.”
  4. How the Bible Helped Smash the Crown (Meir Soloveichik, The Free Press): “Our politics is consumed by culture wars linked to religion—religious freedom is a subject dominating debates in the Supreme Court. But the fact remains that shorn of biblical faith, no cogent explanation can be given for the doctrine of equality that lies at the heart of the American creed. Indeed, the other sources of antiquity to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philosophers of Greece and the statesmen of Rome—denied human equality and held a worldview that there were those destined to rule and others born to serve.”
  5. Discovering God in Hamas tunnels, hostages led a national trend (Dina Kraft, Christian Science Monitor): “Several recent studies in Israel back up anecdotal evidence of an uptick in religious connection in response to Oct. 7 and the war that followed. In a poll by Hiddush, an organization that advocates for the separation of religion and state, 25% of respondents said those seminal events strengthened their faith in God. Fifty-five percent said they had not impacted their faith, and 7% said they had weakened it. Researchers at The Hebrew University found in a survey of students that one-third experienced an increase in spirituality, while 9% said it decreased.”
  6. The diversity overcorrection in the workplace (Megan McArdle, Washington Post): “For some mysterious reason, people consistently overestimate the minority share of the population, which made the Whiteness of newsrooms, Hollywood studios and academic departments look more unfair than it was.… even if [there had not been past discrimination], newsrooms, writer’s rooms and classrooms would have been very White because most Americans born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were White. I suspect people forgot about these cohort effects because so much of the DEI discourse came up around college admissions, where diversity can be achieved relatively speedily: admit a racially balanced class four years in a row, and voilà, you ‘look like America.’ But a large corporate employer often has a workforce spanning 40 years, not four. Rebalancing that through representative hiring would take decades. The DEI champions didn’t want to wait that long.” 
    • McArdle’s point about the difference between corporations and universities is an important one. It also explains why undergraduate populations are far more diverse than university faculty and administrations.
  7. Gift link: The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore (Adam Frank, The Atlantic): “To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their ‘just the particles, ma’am’ mentality. One of physicists’ great talents—starting with the laws of simple parts (such as atoms) and working up to a complex whole—cannot fully account for cells, animals, or people.” 
    • The author is an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. 

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.