Tag: apologetically interesting

TGFI Volume 531: Christianity improves longevity, plus some smart people who believe

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. More Than a Magic Pill (Kathryn Butler, Christianity Today): “Church attendance reduces all-cause mortality by nearly 30 percent over a 15-year period and protects woman against suicide by 400 percent. Weekly churchgoing in women over 40 is as protective against death as annual mammograms, McLaughlin writes. Those attending services more than weekly at age 20 have ‘a roughly seven-year greater life expectancy than their nonchurchgoing peers.’ Churchgoing protects against alcohol, smoking, and drug abuse and decreases the odds of depression by one-third.” 
    • I been sayin’ it. Preach!
  2. Alvin Plantinga, God’s Philosopher (Daniel Silliman, Christianity Today): “In the 1950s there was not a single published defense of religious belief by a prominent philosopher,” said philosopher Kelly James Clark, one of Plantinga’s students. “By the 1990s there were literally hundreds of books and articles, from Yale to UCLA and from Oxford to Heidelberg, defending and developing the spiritual dimension. The difference between 1950 and 1990 is, quite simply, Alvin Plantinga.”
  3. The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians (Cremieux, Substack): “It’s probably surprising to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Ministers of Japan before the newly-elected Sanae Takaichi have been Christian. Out of those 35 Prime Ministers since 1945, Shigeru Yoshida and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tetsu Katayama, Ichirō Hatoyama, Masayoshi Ōhira, Shigeru Ishiba, and Yukio Hatoyama were various flavors of Protestant. How this happens in a country that’s less than 1% Christian and in which there’s significant anti-Christian discrimination is perplexing, but I think it makes sense given how today’s Japanese Christians came to be.” 
    • Fascinating reading. The role of the samurai was very unexpected to me!
  4. How Two Times Reporters Cover Christianity in a Polarized America (Patrick Healy, Elizabeth Dias & Ruth Graham, New York Times): “I think a lot about which details to include in a story, and how I’m describing people and scenes. Part of fairness is not taking cheap shots by subtly depicting one side as backward or unsophisticated, for example. I also try to bring people into as many houses of worship as possible. And I would define that expansively, from traditional church services to prayer meetings to worship services in the Trump White House.” 
    • Unlocked. A really well-done interview. I have generally found Graham and Dias to be fair and insightful. Most of the stories involving the NYT being tone-deaf to religion have come about when journalists who don’t cover the religion beat try to drag religion into their story without fully understanding what they’re trying to describe.
  5. It Used to Be ‘Get Married.’ Now It’s ‘Stay Single.’ (Freya India, The Free Press): “I keep hearing about how there’s too much pressure to settle down. Apparently everyone wants to know when you’re getting married, when you’re having kids.… My whole life I’ve only ever felt the opposite, an overwhelming pressure to be single. In the secular liberal world I used to think there were no expectations, no pressure. There is, though: The pressure today is to avoid anything that might stick, to run through life without getting snagged on any responsibilities, without getting tethered to someone else too early.… We don’t scrutinize the 25-year-old who is still single but the one who settles down. In fact, this feels like the only life decision left to disapprove of, the only one acceptable to judge. Wanting to commit is the one desire that is discouraged, treated with suspicion, the only thing in the modern world we are ever told to delay.” 
    • Related: Senior Scaries: Treating dating like the job market (Erin Ye, Stanford Daily): “The last time I was on the phone with my mom, she told me that it was my own fault I didn’t have a boyfriend. ‘You need to start treating dating like it’s the job market: you’re not applying to positions, you’re not interviewing, you’re not even doing things that you can add to your résumé,’ she said. ‘You just need to get out there. Think of it like getting an internship. Don’t worry about the return offer just yet!’ ”
  6. They Led at Saddleback Church. ICE Said They Were Safe. (Andy Olsen, Christianity Today): “The growing abolition of discretion, perhaps more than any other aspect of the administration’s immigration suppression, will cause the deepest pain for many families that previously had little to fear. Individuals within the US immigration edifice have long had some authority to exercise compassion in situations where, in their judgment, the cost to society of a person’s removal might be higher than the cost of nonremoval. One could view such discretion, as the Trump administration does, as a weakness. Or one could see discretion as the cardinal quality that separates a human justice system from a cold enforcement machine with all the sensibility of a red-light camera.” 
    • A moving story, told with all the messy details.
  7. Trump says Christians are being persecuted in Nigeria. The reality is more complicated (Chinedu Asadu, AP News): “Nigeria’s population of 220 million is split almost evenly between Christians, who live predominantly in the south, and Muslims, mostly in the north — where attacks have long been concentrated and where levels of illiteracy, poverty and hunger are among the country’s highest. Nationwide, Muslims constitute a slight majority. Experts and data from two nonpartisan sources — the U.S.-basedt and Council on Foreign Relations — show Christians are often targets in a small percentage of overall attacks that appear to be motivated by religion, in some northern states. But the numbers and analysts also indicate that across the north, most victims of overall violence are Muslims.” 
    • I was skeptical of the headline, but the article makes a good case for it. Having said that, the author hasn’t shown that there isn’t a problem of religious persecution in Nigeria; the author has only shown that there is also a problem of rampant lawlessness.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • 6–7 in the Bible (Kristy Etheridge, Christianity Today): “News outlets from The New York Times to The Indian Express have covered the global phenomenon that delights children, puzzles grownups, and leaves school teachers 67 percent sure they should retire early.… a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, created an entire outreach event around the infamous numbers. Jonathan White is a pastor and director of children’s programming at Mecklenburg Community Church. When he determined that the 6–7 trend wasn’t harmful and wasn’t going away, he wrote it into the church’s November family night.”
  • Scholars Now Believe Number Of The Beast Is Actually 67 (Babylon Bee)
  • The Batman effect: The mere sight of the ‘superhero’ can make us more altruistic (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “In the experimental condition, another experimenter dressed as Batman entered the scene from another door of the train. Faced with this unexpected encounter, passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seats: 67.21% of passengers offered their seats in the presence of Batman, or more than two out of three, compared to 37.66% in the control experiment, or just over one out of three.” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus.
  • Millions Convert To Christianity After Theologians Confirm There Is No Microsoft Teams In Heaven (Babylon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI Volume 530: a Christian doctor, the medical benefits of church attendance, and campus revival

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. Accused of Desecration, a Doctor Faces the End of His Life’s Work (Benjamin Weiser, New York Times): “One day in March 2015, surveillance cameras at a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Tokyo captured a man wearing a hooded windbreaker, a white collared shirt and black shoes, dabbing at wooden pillars with oil on his fingertip.… He is Masahide Kanayama, 63, a single, childless doctor who had devoted his life to helping women bear children; a man whose Christian faith was inseparable from his work. He has practiced in Manhattan for nearly three decades and is an expert in endometriosis, a condition in which cells similar to the uterine lining grow outside the uterus. His patients describe how his surgeries ended years of crippling pain and, in some cases, allowed them to have children.” 
    • Unlocked. A fascinating story, brought to my attention by an alumnus. Pray for Dr. Kanayama. 
  2. Church Could Save Your Life? (Rebecca McLaughlin, Substack): “In other words, if you aren’t currently a churchgoer and you start attending weekly, you reduce your chances of developing depression by a third. A medication this effective would be widely prescribed. But while your therapist or doctor may encourage yoga, meditation, or more time outside in nature, he or she almost certainly won’t recommend you go to church. The benefits of ‘organized religion’ don’t fit with the big story we are telling in the West about the goodness of abandoning traditional beliefs.”
  3. It’s Here: Gen‑Z Revival Hits Campuses This Fall (Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, The Gospel Coalition): “Over the last couple of years, perhaps you’ve heard the stories of revival here and there—Asbury, the Salt Company, and various college ministries across the country. Statistics also sounded promising—from England to the United States, more young people report making a personal commitment to Jesus and attending church. The number of people with no religious affiliation, which had been increasing for decades, seemed to stall. To me, it felt like watching a pot of water heat up—there were isolated bubbles but not enough to really call it a boil.” 
    • An encouraging article. Two notes: 
      • I’m not hearing similar reports from any ministry at Stanford (note the Chicago anecdotes, though)
      • The Gospel Coalition’s theological commitments mean that this article is focused on certain ministries. I believe other ministries are seeing similar things nationwide.
  4. ‘I Should Have Quit’ (John Fetterman, The Free Press): “Gisele looked over at me. The corner of my mouth was drooping ever so slightly. The drooping lasted only a second or two, but she had watched a public service announcement on strokes, and it had stayed with her. She spoke to the state trooper who was driving us. ‘I think he’s having a stroke. We have to get to the hospital now.’ I thought she was crazy: ‘What are you talking about? You’re nuts. I’m fine.’ She thought I was crazy: ‘We have to get to the emergency room now!’ The troopers switched on the police lights. We happened to be 10 minutes from Lancaster General Hospital, which specializes in strokes and problems of the heart. Had we been in a rural area of the state, without close access to a hospital, I would have died. I did anyway. I am not entirely sure of the sequence, but during surgery, my heart stopped for several seconds.” 
    • Tears came to my eyes while reading this. Recommended regardless of your political affiliation.
  5. That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I. (Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker): “No realm of culture or entertainment remains untouched by artificial intelligence: Coca-Cola just released a Christmas ad made with A.I. visuals; A.I. actors are being hyped in Hollywood. But the technology has had an especially swift impact on songwriting. A couple of years ago, a smattering of A.I. tracks went viral for using tricks like replicating the voices of pop stars, including Jay‑Z and Drake. Now we’re in the midst of a full-blown A.I. music moment. This month, an A.I. country song called ‘Walk My Walk’ (with percussive claps and forgettable lyrics such as ‘Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk’) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, and passed three million streams on Spotify; the performer behind it is a square-jawed digital avatar named Breaking Rust. In September, Xania Monet, an A.I. R. & B. singer created by a young poet in Mississippi, landed a multimillion-dollar record deal after several Billboard-charting singles.”
  6. Rise of the ‘porno-trolls’: how one porn platform made millions suing its viewers (Tarpley Hitt, The Guardian): “…since September 2017, Vixen’s owners had been pursuing another revenue stream: filing thousands of boilerplate copyright lawsuits against individual ‘John Does’ and collecting millions in settlement fees – a mass litigation campaign one federal judge likened to ‘a hi-tech shakedown’.… According to Westlaw and Pacer data from the past three years, Strike 3 accounted for 50% of the federal copyright docket all on its own. I first heard about Strike 3 in September, when some legal clerk friends mentioned that nearly every judge on their circuit was handling a stack of Strike 3 cases – which are now so consistent as to have become routine.” 
    • I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a porn company would be unethical in any way. How could they treat their users with anything but the utmost respect and courtesy? Treating people with dignity is practically their entire business model.
  7. Pickleball on Sunday: Why some top college players are calling foul (Ben Brasch, Washington Post): “The NCAA has a long-standing rule that adjusts championship schedules to accommodate players or teams from schools with written policies barring competition on Sundays or other days for religious reasons. Twenty-two of the NCAA’s roughly 1,100 member schools have such policies this year, the group told The Washington Post. But pickleball is not an NCAA sport. And it’s not clear whether all three organizations at the forefront of the college game, which includes more than 100 schools, are ready to make a change. Christianity is central to the National Collegiate Pickleball Association, which hosts regional and national tournaments, said its founder, Noah Suemnick. The league’s website prominently references a Bible verse from the Book of Matthew.”

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 529: French revival, gender differences, bogus sociology

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 quiet surge of France’s evangelicals (ENTR, YouTube): twelve minutes. Highly recommended, brought to my attention by a student. The first half is one of the better (albeit inadvertent) apologias for low-church Protestantism you’ll run across.
  2. Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies (Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, Substack): “…overall tolerance for opposing views is low among both male and female students — but the males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics.… In fact, men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be ‘perfectly tolerant’ of opposing views, meaning they would definitely allow any campus speaker.” 
    • One of the embedded charts is actually stunning. And this sentence: “Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.”
  3. Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” (Thomas Kelly, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences) : “In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.” 
    • The author has a PhD in political science from Cal and now works at a thinktank in biosecurity. The excerpt is from the abstract.
    • I am overwhelmed by how absolutely insane this is and that the lies have endured for seven decades. SEVEN DECADES. I care because this study is sometimes used by skeptics to argue against Christianity. As the author says: “When Prophecy Fails spread its influence across psychology, sociology, New Testament studies, and religious studies. Ironically, some [skeptical] New Testament scholars whose raison d’être and specialization is piecing together events from thousands of years ago, eagerly embraced a false narrative that was trivial to fact check.”
  4. The Editor Got a Letter From ‘Dr. B.S.’ So Did a Lot of Other Editors. (Gina Kolata, New York Times): “Letters to the editor from writers using chatbots are flooding the world’s scientific journals, according to new research and journal editors.… There’s a reason authors might turn to A.I., Dr. Rubin noted in an interview. Letters to the editor published in scientific journals are listed in databases that also list journal articles, and Dr. Rubin said that ‘they count as much as an article. For doing a very small amount of work, someone can get an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on their C.V.,’ he said. ‘The incentive to cheat is high,’ he added.” 
    • The opening anecdote is pretty funny.
  5. Some stuff on antisemitism and Zionism: 
    • Why Antisemitism Is ‘Moral Pornography’ (Mary Eberstadt, The Free Press): “Online antisemitism is the new pornography. It is moral pornography. And pornography it is—because like pornography, internet antisemitism is mostly engaged in secretly; like pornography, it delivers illicit thrills to degraded users; and like pornography, its consumption embarrasses users when it comes to light, as is seen whenever people are exposed in public for spewing Jew-hatred online. Christians who were in the forefront of understanding that pornography causes harm should be in the forefront of opposing the moral pornography of antisemitism.” 
      • This is an adaptation of a speech given by a Catholic at a Catholic event, which explains some of the language.
    • Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Christian Zionism (Samuel Goldman, The Free Press): “Beginning in the 1980s, a whole genre of books and articles contended that American Christians’ enthusiasm for Israel was based on an ‘end-times’ scenario derived from the Victorian theologian John Nelson Darby, and mainstreamed by Scofield in the early 20th century.… [In reality, the] history of Christian Zionism in America is far longer and more various than that.”
  6. China’s Christians Are America’s Allies (Elisa Zhai Autry, Substack): “Since its inception, the Communist Party has viewed Christianity as a destabilizing force that undermines party authority and opens doors to foreign interference. Yet, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, every effort to stamp it out has failed. Christianity has flourished amid wars, famine, political purges, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and modern censorship. Today, Chinese Christians are estimated to number as high as 100 million. The party frames Christianity as ‘foreign,’ but history disputes that.… Christians were pillars of China’s modernization long before the party claimed credit. Their contribution was indigenous, not foreign—rooted deeply in Chinese traditions and driven by Chinese believers.” 
    • This is the Substack of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
  7. Some stuff on contemporary American politics, presented in a nonpartisan manner. I am not endorsing the perspectives of the authors, I am merely saying that I found their arguments intriguing: 
    • 16 takeaways from Democrats’ big night (Jerusalem Demsas, Jordan Weissmann, Lakshya Jain , & Kelsey Piper, The Argument): “Anti-Trumpism is a really, really powerful force in American politics. especially in non-presidential elections. In Virginia and New Jersey, the Republican nominees were tied to a very, very unpopular president — and sometimes by choice. Yes, 2026 is going to have higher turnout than 2025 did, but it won’t be on the level of 2024, and from the evidence we have, the drop-off is likely to be disproportionately Republican.”
    • The cosmopolitan conservative (Janan Ganesh, Financial Times): “There is such a thing as a cosmopolitan conservative. When I want to discuss Dubai — and when do I not? — I have to turn to apolitical or right-leaning acquaintances.….  Often, it is fear of causing offence that stops liberal-minded people engaging with vast tracts of the world. And so cultural sensitivity turns into its own kind of parochialism.” 
      • A fascinating (and very brief) article.
    • Inside the DSA’s Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party (Olivia Reingold, The Free Press): “The Free Press reviewed thousands of pages of internal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) documents, which show that the organization’s leaders view Mamdani as a tool in their agenda to abolish prisons and borders, and ultimately end in [sic] what they call the ‘barbaric order of capitalism.’ The DSA, founded in 1982, is a political body dedicated to the doctrine of democratic socialism, which is a variety of socialism that simply specifies how it would like revolution to occur: peacefully, through the subversion of democracy. Mamdani, a dues-paying DSA member since 2017, is the tip of that spear.”
    • The Tocqueville Paradox (Rob Henderson, Substack): “I am 35, one year older than Mamdani, and I can tell you that Millennials and Gen Zers have not really been taught about the failures of socialism. I will point out, with a bit of hyperbole, that in US high schools we get 155 hours on Hitler, three minutes on Stalin, zero on Mao and zero on Pol Pot. And socialism is an idea that sounds good on face value. It promises to take from the rich and give to the poor. That means not only ‘free stuff’ for everyone, but also a sense of fairness.”
    • Progressives Can’t Bear Pregnancy (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “There’s a sense on the left that the act of giving birth is an insane, traumatic thing to do, an infringement on all women’s bodily autonomy.… My most progressive friends talk in hushed tones about wanting kids, as if confessing a vice. One of them, after a few glasses of wine, told me she dreams of being a stay-at-home mother. She couldn’t tell her boyfriend. She couldn’t even tell her closest friend. To say it aloud would feel like a betrayal of everything she is supposed to believe. Extreme progressives turn on women who express entirely ordinary wishes about family.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 527: beyond adolescent atheism, counterproductive peer review, and Girls Gone Bible

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. As we grow out of intellectual adolescence, religion’s popularity soars (Charles Murray, New York Post): “…I had concluded that when religion no longer supplies a framework for thinking about transcendent qualities, artists tend to make their work about their personal preferences, and their personal preferences tended to be self-absorbed and banal. As an unbeliever, what was I to make of that? One option was to infer that the great artists of the past had foolishly imagined they were tapping into the transcendent, and their delusion inspired them. But that line of thought became embarrassing when I confronted their work. Is it plausible that those individuals who achieved things so far beyond the rest of us were uniformly stupid about the great questions? I decided they understood things we don’t. Johann Sebastian Bach does not need to explain himself.”
  2. 1 in 5 chemists have deliberately added errors into their papers during peer review, study finds (Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Chemical and Engineering News): “More than 20% of chemistry researchers have deliberately added information they believe to be incorrect into their manuscripts during the peer review process, in order to get their papers published.”
  3. The Girls Who Found God in a Podcast (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Girls Gone Bible launched in 2023, with a weekly show, and has since amassed more than 20 million listens, and nearly two million followers on Instagram and TikTok combined.… what struck me most about the audience at the Keswick Theater was how normal, how cool, they all were. These weren’t the caricature of ‘Jesus freaks,’ but more like Regina George with eyelash extensions. They spoke about burnout, and loneliness, and how hard it is to get a guy to commit to you, and wanting to take life seriously.”
  4. Two articles about a widespread sin: 
    • Escape the Little Hell of Porn (Marc Sims, The Gospel Coalition): “Hating yourself in the aftermath of habitual sin feels so right because it feels so close to repentance. But it isn’t. Judas hated himself for his sin, but he didn’t repent. What’s the difference between self-hatred and repentance? Real repentance begins with what the sinful woman in Luke 7 does as she weeps over Jesus’s feet. She’s aware of her sin, so she weeps. But she’s also aware of her Savior, so she brings her tears to him.”
    • What Porn Does to Us (Christine Emba, Christianity Today): “That understanding of what women are for can spill out into real life and into real interactions with other people. People say, ‘It’s just pornography. It’s just something I’m watching. It doesn’t have anything to do with my real life.’ That’s not how people work. Our brains aren’t wired like that. And our souls are not wired like that.”
  5. My Dad Is in a Chinese Prison (Grace Jin Drexel, The Free Press): “My dad’s name is Ezra Jin. He is the head pastor of the Zion Church in China, a community with a reach of tens of thousands of Christians across the country who primarily practice their faith online or via small underground churches in rented spaces. They are a community of people whose faith has endured despite a years-long campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to intimidate them into renouncing their faith. In 2018, Chinese police shut down my dad’s church in Beijing, a beautiful sanctuary with over 1,500 congregants. Refusing to cower in the face of a totalitarian regime, my dad got creative. He moved his sermons online, making them accessible to people across the country, and from there, he continued to build his congregation.”
  6. The Appeal of the Campus Right (Julia Steinberg, The Atlantic): “I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2021 as a progressive from Los Angeles, where most of my peers and I had thought of conservatives as, essentially, evil. At a club fair, I signed up for the Stanford Young Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the leftist magazine, The Stanford Sphere. I hoped to live in one of Stanford’s co-op houses, communal living spaces largely focused on left-leaning activism. As the school year got under way, however, I began to notice something that grated on me. Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else.” 
    • Including largely because of the Stanford-specific observations. I don’t believe I ever crossed paths with the author when she was an undergrad.
  7. If You Ask A.I. for Marriage Advice, It’ll Probably Tell You to Get Divorced (Samuel D. James, Substack): “…users who ask AI bots for counseling or therapy—which is right now a lot of people, and is going to be a lot more people in the future—are going to get a lot of answers pulled from Reddit. In other words, these LLMs are going to spitting out answers to questions like, ‘Should I get divorced,’ by repeating how users on Reddit answer those kinds of question. And we know how users on Reddit tend to answer those questions!”

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 526: academic biases, reasonable faith, and wild AI

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. We Analyzed University Syllabi. There’s a Monoculture (Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik, Persuasion): “We just completed a study that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the nation’s most contentious topics—racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion. Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy. Not well, as it turns out. Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.” 
    • The authors are professors at the Claremont Colleges (two of political science and the other of philosophy).
  2. Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul? (Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal): “…the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.… A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping. I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment proved that the speed of light doesn’t behave as Newton’s laws said it should.” 
    • By the same author: I Thought I Didn’t Need God. I Was Wrong. (Charles Murray, The Free Press): “My dog is smart enough to perceive a few things about me—the fact that I exist as a distinct individual and that I feed her every morning. She also has some perceptions about my moods and what I want her to do. But these understandings represent only a few trivial aspects of who I am. I am not invisible to my dog, just as God is not invisible to me (I have come to believe), but I am nonetheless unknowable to my dog in any meaningful sense. God is just as unknowable to me.”
    • Murray, an agnostic for most of his life, has just written a new book about faith called Taking Religion Seriously and these are articles meant to generate interest in it.
  3. An AI became a crypto millionaire. Now it’s fighting to become a person (Aidan Walker, BBC): “Regardless of what you call Truth Terminal – an art project, a scam, an emergent sentient entity, an influencer – the bot likely made more money than you did last year. It also made a lot of money for various humans: not just Ayrey, but for the gamblers who turned the quips and riddles the AI posted on X into memecoins, joke-based cryptocurrencies built around trends. At one point, one of these memecoins reached a value of more than $1bn (£740m) before settling around $80m (about £60m).… Many of the details surrounding Truth Terminal are difficult to confirm. The project sits somewhere between technology and spectacle, a dizzying blur of genuine innovation and internet myth.” 
    • Recommended to me by a student. Wild.
  4. Harvard Students Skip Class and Still Get High Grades, Faculty Say (Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times): “Harvard may be partly to blame for encouraging student absences, with a policy that allows students to enroll in two classes that meet at the same time.”
  5. The Inside Story of the Gaza Deal (Amit Segal, The Free Press): “The Americans’ genius was to convert that negative energy into fuel to propel negotiations to their goal. You want Israel to stop? Then let’s end the war, they told the Sunni countries, and thus enlisted them in a framework that seemed impossible: a pan-Arab, almost pan-Muslim commitment to the elimination of Hamas. [Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs] Dermer drafted Netanyahu’s apology for the death of the Qatari security official in the airstrike; in Doha they reciprocated with a goodwill gesture by dramatically toning down Al Jazeera’s hostile tone.” 
    • ‘Bring Them Home’: The Call Finally Being Answered (Matti Friedman, The Free Press): “But of course Israel can’t return to October 6. In the story of Joseph, the captive does reappear—but he’s so different that his own brothers don’t recognize him. About 40 hostages taken alive are now dead, either executed by their captors or killed mistakenly by Israel’s army. In the fighting that has followed October 7, more than 550 soldiers have been killed, and many thousands wounded. The reserve army has been forced past the limits of its manpower and will need years to recover. Israel is, in many ways, a different country.”
  6. The Evil That Is AI Child Porn (Charles Fain Lehman, The Dispatch): “But while OpenAI’s innovation is impressive, it is hard to avoid thinking about how such technology might be misused. That’s in part because it comes just months after a federal court dismissed a charge for possession of artificially-generated child pornography, claiming it was unconstitutional to enforce under the relevant federal child obscenity statute. Such concerns are particularly relevant given some AI companies’ irresponsible approach to issues of child sexualization, as in the recent revelation that Meta had previously allowed its AI services to conduct ‘sensual’ conversations with minors. (It changed its policies after press inquiries and backlash.)”
  7. The Great Feminization (Helen Andrews, Compact Magazine): “The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent. Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female. The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” 
    • This one is controversial, just FYI. Undeniably interesting.
    • Secular pushback: The “Feminization” Discourse as Partisan Hackery (Richard Hanania, Substack): “I would’ve probably nodded along to the Andrews piece if I read it four years ago. But a lot has changed since then, and being a rational, dare I say masculine, thinker means updating as new information comes in. Establishment institutions have gotten much better since the height of the Great Awokening, as their critics have been circling the drain. This has happened at the same time the right has become more masculine-coded, which has to be factored into any analysis about the supposed dangers of feminization.”
    • Some theological pushback from an Australian Anglican theologian: https://x.com/danitreweek/status/1979002052811657289

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 523: religion makes you happy and war is terrifying

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. Religious People Are Happier Than Non-Religious People (Ryan Burge, Substack): “To go back to where I started — let me just say the one true thing again. Highly active religious people are happier than non-religious people. There’s no other way to spin this data than this simple conclusion.” 
    • Emphasis in original. The author is a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.
  2. I’ve Seen the Future of War. Europe Isn’t Ready for It. (Niall Ferguson, The Free Press): : “Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine is now in its fourth year—or its 12th, if you date it from the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Since February 2022, the country has cycled through three wars. First it was a tank war, in which columns of Russian tanks fought a bungled blitzkrieg. Then it became an artillery war, in which the two sides traded fire from entrenched positions. Now, however, it’s almost entirely a drone war, with a supporting role for small and highly vulnerable infantry units. The question is how well Europeans understand this. The people of Poland, Romania, Estonia, and (perhaps) Denmark all now know that Russian drones are capable of entering their airspace. But have they truly grasped what that implies?” 
    • The author is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. I am told he is a fairly recent convert to Christianity, although I have never met him personally and only know of his faith through public sources.
  3. What Women Wish They’d Known Before Trying to Get Pregnant (Olga Khazan, The Atlantic): “When Anna De Souza was in her early 30s, she asked her ob-gyn when she should start thinking about having kids. ‘When you were 26,’ she remembers the doctor saying. She was surprised. She’d had some sense that fertility decreases with age but didn’t know how significant the drop-off was. No doctor had ever told her, and she certainly didn’t learn about it in school.” 
    • Unlocked. This is a drum I will keep beating — most of you should plan to have kids earlier than your peers!
  4. Some thoughts on free speech: 
    • The Censorship You Practice Today Will Be Used Against You Tomorrow (Greg Lukianoff, New York Times): “I don’t like having to make a case for human rights such as freedom of speech by appealing to self-interest; these are supposed to be rights whose importance transcends one’s personal needs. But for political partisans, it’s often the only argument that cuts through. So here’s my practical warning: The weapon that you reach for today will be used against you tomorrow. Using your opponents’ nastiest tools doesn’t persuade them to disarm; it inspires retaliation. Tit for tat, forever and ever.”
    • How not to limit free speech (Ed Feser, personal blog): “There is a presumption, then, in favor of free expression, precisely because it facilitates the natural end of our rational powers. However, not all forms of expression are protected by this presumption, because not all forms of expression have anything to do with our rational powers. For example, pornography does not appeal to our rationality and in no way contributes to discovering truth or to debate by which we might root out error.… pornography is in no way protected by the natural right to free speech.” 
      • The author is a devout Catholic who is also a philosophy professor. This is a helpful essay that covers a lot of ground.
  5. How My Dad Helped Me Master My Autism (Leland Vittert, The Free Press): “Today, most parents would probably send a kid like me to therapy. Even back then, a diagnosis might have gotten me significant special treatment. But my dad knew that there wasn’t a teacher or therapist who could step in and suddenly make me fit in. The world wasn’t going to adapt to me, and he wasn’t going to try to make it. There would be no therapists or accommodations. If I was going to succeed, he would have to adapt me to the world.”
  6. I visited Gaza. The food aid surprised me. (Ken Isaacs, Washington Post): “The main provider of food assistance in the Gaza Strip today arguably is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organization backed by the United States and Israel. GHF has faced harsh criticism for its work in Gaza, with United Nations agencies and nongovernmental organizations publishing a letter in July urging donors and countries not to fund the foundation’s work and to instead revert to a solely U.N.-led response. I arrived in Gaza a skeptic of GHF but left an advocate. Simply put, the common portrayal of this organization radically distorts reality.” 
    • The author works for Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief agency.
  7. Two viral clips from the same event (Charlie Kirk’s memorial service). 
    • Erika Kirk on Husband’s Assassin: “I forgive him.” (C‑SPAN, YouTube): two minutes
    • “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.” (C‑SPAN, YouTube): five minutes (the famous bit is at about the one minute mark)
    • Watch them both before you read the articles that comment on them. Having watched them, I think some commentators are subtly distorting them. Watch for yourself, and then mull the responses.
    • Why MAGA Evangelicals Can Cheer Love and Hate at the Same Time (David French, New York Times): “Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God? My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity.”
    • The Biggest Tent (The Dispatch): “The funeral was what I thought it would be. Until Erika Kirk spoke, and then it was something else.… The last place you would look for grace in American public life in 2025 is at a Republican political rally, especially one where the usual lust for ruthlessness has been juiced by wrath and grief. For Mrs. Kirk to muster it in this setting, at this moment, despite the singular anguish with which she’s been burdened, felt almost miraculous even to a non-believer like me.… I’ve heard of political ‘big tents,’ but I’ve never heard of one big enough to accommodate two moral systems that aren’t just contradictory but irreconcilable. ‘Christ’s message, followed by its very antithesis,’ philosophy professor Edward Feser wrote of the contrast between Kirk’s and Trump’s remarks. ‘It’s almost as if the audience is being put to a test.’ ”
    • Erika Kirk and America’s Religious Revival (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “By dawn, the lines to get into State Farm Stadium stretched for blocks. People camped out overnight to secure a place.… By mid-morning, the 73,000-seat stadium was full. Organizers opened the arena next door for overflow, but even that quickly reached capacity. In total, an estimated 200,000 people turned out—more than Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral in 1968.”
    • Is Erika Kirk the Future of MAGA? (Matthew Continetti, The Free Press): “Never had I seen someone upstage President Trump. It happened Sunday. Trump spoke for longer than Erika. But she had already brought down the house. Her forgiveness and hope moved the nation. Clearly Trump was mulling over her eulogy. When he slyly contrasted his style with Charlie’s, Trump kiddingly apologized. ‘I hate my opponent and don’t want the best for them,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Erika.’ When was the last time Trump apologized? Then he added, ‘Erika, you can talk to me and the whole group, but maybe they can convince me that that’s not right, but I can’t stand my opponent.’ Even the president can learn from Erika Kirk.”
    • ‘I Hate My Opponent’: Trump’s Remarks at Kirk Memorial Distill His Politics (Nick Catoggio, New York Times): “When asked about the divergent messages from the president and Mrs. Kirk, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on Monday that the president was ‘authentically himself.’” 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Meet the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize winners (Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica): “Diet sodas and other zero-calorie drinks are a mainstay of the modern diet, thanks to the development of artificial sweeteners whose molecules can’t be metabolized by the human body. The authors of this paper are intrigued by the notion of zero-calorie foods, which they believe could be achieved by increasing the satisfying volume and mass of food without increasing the calories. And they have just the additive for that purpose: polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), more commonly known as Teflon. Yes, the stuff they use on nonstick cookware. They insist that Teflon is inert, heat-resistant, impervious to stomach acid, tasteless, cost-effective, and available in handy powder form for easy mixing into food. They recommend a ratio of three parts food to one part Teflon powder.” 
    • I lowkey wanna eat a teflon-stuffed meal now.
  • Sheep (SMBC)
  • ‘Very mean squirrel’ seeking food has sent at least 2 people to the ER in a California city (AP News)
  • Sinful, Rebellious Homeschooler Stays Up Past 9:30 To Read Chronicles Of Narnia (Babylon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 500: faith, China, and Trump

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

This is the 500th time I’ve composed this email. I thought I might do something special this week to commemorate that milestone, but there are too many interesting articles I’ve run across — this will a regular installment. Enjoy!

Maybe when we get to volume 520 — that will signify ten years of emails.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion (Lauren Jackson, New York Times): “America’s secularization was an immense social transformation. Has it left us better off? People are unhappier than they’ve ever been and the country is in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just secularism that’s to blame, but those without religious affiliation in particular rank lower on key metrics of well-being. They feel less connected to others, less spiritually at peace and they experience less awe and gratitude regularly.” 
    • Unlocked. Note that this is not in the opinion section (somewhat surprisingly, it is in the style section). The author is an ex-Mormon.
  2. Ross Douthat: Why It’s Logical to Believe in God (Bari Weiss interviewing Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “The book of Genesis begins with an admonition: Fill the Earth, and subdue it. We’ve done that. We have reached an interesting point in history from a religious point of view. And there’s a really open question—where do we go next? Do we collapse? Do we go to the stars? Do we become transhuman? Do we merge with the machines and so on? So, it’s a high-stakes moment. And if God exists and he has intentions for us, it’s really important at a high-stakes moment to take those intentions into account. I think of people like Musk and Altman. The contest for their literal souls is really important to the whole future of the human race. If God exists, it’s a big moment. You want belief to win out over the alternatives.”
  3. The Conventional Wisdom Is That China Is Beating Us. Nonsense. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come.… Moving to a world where the AIs are the smartest entities in China, rather than the CCP, is for China a radical change—and one the CCP is probably very afraid of. Much of the legitimacy of the CCP sprang from its claim to be a wise manager of the Chinese legacy. But now it will be outsourcing that management to Western-based AI models. From a Western geopolitical point of view, that could end up a lot better, and more effective, than planting a bunch of spies in the Chinese government.”
  4. Chris Tomlin’s New Song Resurrects The World’s Oldest Known Hymn (Bob Smietana, The Roys Report): “A new version of the Oxyrhynchus Hymn debuted last week, courtesy of a new translation from Dickson and help from Chris Tomlin and Ben Fielding, two of the most popular modern worship songwriters.… ‘I think the most theologically significant thing is that it’s a hymn to the Trinity — Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the century before the Nicene Creed,’ he said.” 
  5. Belief in an Afterlife is Increasing in the United States (Ryan Burge, Substack): “In that first data collection in 1973, about 76% of folks believed in something beyond this life. But by 1990, that figure had crept up to just about 80% and it continued to rise very slowly from there. Really, from 2000 all the way through 2022, the estimates are all basically the same. Even today, the share of Americans who believe in life after death is 82%. When people ask me, “Is the United States a religious country?” This is the stat that I’m going to trot out.’ ” 
    • Emphasis removed for readability.
  6. The Rotten Fruit of Obergefell: On the Kelly Loving Act (Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy): “For the past ten years we have already held, as a nation, that the state defines marriage. Why then should the state not also get to define what a parent is or what good parenting is? The Kelly Loving Act, in other words, is an obvious outworking of the logic of Obergefell, the Supreme Court ruling that redefined marriage.”
  7. Trump is all over the news. Here are some things that caught my interest. Remember that my sharing an article is not a sign that I agree with it completely, it is a merely a sign that I think it makes points or tells a story worth considering. See the disclaimers at the bottom: I assure you they are heartfelt. 
    • Get Out by Good Friday, Feds Say to Afghan Christians (John McCormack, The Dispatch): “Ahmad’s conversion to Christianity after attending a university in Afghanistan led to his imprisonment by the Taliban—where he said he was beaten and tortured via electric shock—before fellow Christians were able to ransom him from Taliban captivity. The same Christians who got Ahmad out of prison then got him out of Afghanistan by helping him travel to Brazil. Ahmad traversed on foot the Darién Gap that connects Central and South America for three days and ultimately—after presenting himself at the southern U.S. border seeking asylum—made a home for himself in Raleigh.…  Ahmad, like some other Afghans legally living in the United States, received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) telling him he must leave the country by Good Friday.”
    • Precedent Trump (Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch): “It has been a dream of the left for ages to get rid of the tax-exempt status and relative autonomy of religious institutions—Christian universities, charities, hospitals, etc. If Trump succeeds in making the IRS revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, based in no small part on personal opposition to what Harvard teaches, what will be the principled objection to a President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Elizabeth Warren when the Eye of Mordor swings rightward?”
    • No, the President Has Not Defied a Supreme Court Ruling (Jeb Rubenfeld, The Free Press): “Due process is a bulwark of the Constitution and the rule of law, and the courts must not allow its violation. But Trump opponents, like Professor Snyder, are making a mistake when they try to paint this case as a massive assault on due process. For now at least, this case is another example of the hyperbole over a Trump run-in with the courts outrunning the facts of the case.” 
      • The author is a professor of constitutional law at Yale. I found this article reassuring in the abstract, while still being displeased over the particulars of this case. There’s a significant difference between deporting someone from the country and deporting them into a foreign prison.
    • Inside the ‘Tropical Gulag’ in El Salvador Where U.S. Detainees Are Being Held (Annie Correal, New York Times): “Deaths and physical abuse in CECOT remain undocumented because of a lack of access to inmates or anyone who has been released, said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. But, she added, ‘Based on the torture and mistreatment we have documented in other prisons in El Salvador, we have every reason to believe that people sent to CECOT are at high risk of abuse.’ The U.S. government itself spotlighted atrocities in El Salvador’s prisons in 2023. At El Salvador’s two dozen other jails, rights groups have documented systematic torture, forced confessions and what Noah Bullock, the executive director of the Salvadoran human rights group Cristosal, calls ‘the intentional denial of access to basic necessities like food, water, health care, hygiene.’” 
      • I find these allegations plausible because of my belief in depravity. Humans do bad things when they have people completely under their control, especially when there is little external oversight or accountability. We may learn in time that the details are off, but the essential complaint is almost certainly correct.
    • White House of Worship: Christian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump (Elizabeth Dias & Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Routinely, and often at Mr. Trump’s enthusiastic direction, senior administration officials and allied pastors are infusing their brand of Christian worship into the workings of the White House itself, suggesting that his campaign promise to ‘bring back Christianity’ is taking tangible root.… Mr. Trump’s team has hosted briefings and listening sessions billed as opportunities for the leaders to share their particular concerns, which have ranged widely: religious liberty, adoption and foster care, the breakdown of the nuclear family, human trafficking, urban poverty and antisemitism, among others.”
    • All the President’s Pastors: Who’s Advising Trump? (Harvest Prude, Christianity Today): “The president hasn’t publicly attended a church service since his inauguration day, he doesn’t hold membership in a particular congregation or denomination, he’s gone back and forth over whether he needs to ask for God’s forgiveness, and he avoids speaking in detail about his personal devotional life, so what we know about Trump’s faith comes largely from the pastors around him at the White House—starting with Paula White-Cain.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 499: OCD, Morality, and Tariffs



On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Next week is volume 500. I can’t decide whether it will be just another issue or something a lil’ different.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. In his own words: Colts RT Braden Smith’s desperate, life-threatening fight vs OCD (Joel A. Erickson, Indianapolis Star): “Smith has always gone to church, but he’d committed fully to his Christian faith, and an obsessive-compulsive disorder began to warp his faith into something sinister. From the outside, it looked like Smith was diving deep into his faith. He devoured the Bible, quoted Scripture, sought out believers for conversations. He prayed constantly and started listening to Christian music exclusively. Internally, a disorder Smith didn’t realize he had was twisting the words. ‘There’s the actual, real, true, living God,’ Smith said. ‘And then there’s my OCD god, and the OCD god is this condemning (deity). It’s like every wrong move you make, it’s like smacking the ruler against his hand. “Another bad move like that and you’re out of here.“ ‘” 
    • A gripping story.
  2. Appealing to Moral Sentiments in an Amoral Age (O. Alan Noble, Substack): “…the moral sentiments people have can be real indications of spiritual realities.
    The anxiety a young woman feels about her identity may be a real indication that expressive individualism is hollow. The loneliness a young woman feels in vapid, greedy sexual relationships may be a real indication that sex was created for union (and procreation). Instead of treating emotions as random or irrelevant or conceding that negative emotions are exclusively the purview of the therapist and psychiatrist, we acknowledge that the felt experiences of young women are a sign pointing them to who they were created to be. And this isn’t just true for young women. I think there are many young men who need to hear this approach as well.”
  3. About the tariffs: 
    • Trade deficits do not make a country poorer (Noah Smith, Substack): “Does using your credit card to buy a washing machine from Target mean that Target has ripped you off? No. Does it make you poorer when you use your credit card to buy a washing machine from Target? Nope. You now have less money, but you have more stuff. In just the same way, a trade deficit means that the U.S. has less money and more stuff. It does not mean America is poorer, or that it has been ripped off by foreigners.” 
      • This is a helpful explainer of some key concepts which are in the news.
    • Donald Trump’s economic masterplan (Yanis Varoufakis, Unherd): “Though we risk the abyss staring back when we attempt to gaze into Trump’s mind, we do need a grasp of his thinking on three fundamental questions: why does he believe that America is exploited by the rest of the world? What is his vision for a new international order in which America can be ‘great’ again? How does he plan to bring it about? Only then can we produce a sensible critique of Trump’s economic masterplan.” 
      • Recommended to me by an alumnus. The things I find most interesting about this one is (a) it’s by a foreign expert [an economist who served as the Greek minister of finance] and (b) although written in February it anticipated the type of tariff that was implemented (trade imbalance tariffs) instead of what had been expected (reciprocal tariffs).
    • There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness (Jennifer Burns, New York Times): “Mr. Trump’s tariffs aren’t really about tariffs. They are the opening gambit in a more ambitious plan to smash the world’s economic and geopolitical order and replace it with something intended to better serve American interests. This plan is often referred to as the Mar-a-Lago Accord.” 
      • The author is a history professor at Stanford.
  4. What Age Do People Around the World Think Is Best to Reach Major Life Milestones? (Janell Fetterolf et al, Pew Research): “When is the right time in life to get married or have a child? What is the best age to buy a home? Is there an ideal age for retirement? We asked adults in 18 mostly middle-income countries what they think is the best age to reach these life milestones. Overall, there is a lot of agreement around the world. On average across the countries surveyed, people say it is best to get married and have a first child around 26 years old.… Generally, people across the 18 countries surveyed think it’s best to get married in one’s mid-20s. Average ideal ages range from 21.2 in Bangladesh to 28.9 in Argentina.” 
    • Emphasis in original.
  5. Why Palestinian Christians Feel Betrayed by American Christians (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Fewer than 2 percent of West Bank Palestinians today are Christian, but they are an influential minority who endure the same land grabs and hardships as the majority Muslim population.” 
    • It is a short column, but one thing I wish Kristof had parsed out were the differences between Palestinian evangelicals and Palestinian Catholics and Palestinian mainline Protestants. I think they each have different things to say. 
    • Recommended by a student.
  6. Nearly 300 Students Have Had Visas Revoked and Could Face Deportation (Vimal Patel, Miriam Jordan & Halina Bennet, New York Times): “Nearly 300 international students were abruptly stripped of their ability to stay in the United States in recent days, according to universities and media reports, sowing fear among students and confusion at schools scrambling to help students facing detention and possible deportation.… In some cases, immigration officers have arrested international students related to their involvement in pro-Palestinian causes. In other cases, students had committed legal infractions, such as driving over the speed limit or while intoxicated, often years ago, several immigration lawyers said in interviews. But lawyers said the Trump administration had often given no reason at all, leaving them to guess why students were targeted.… The United States issued more than 400,000 visas to students in 2024.” 
    • While I am sure almost all international students find the policies distressing, they should find the data in this article reassuring. To date fewer than one tenth of one percent of international students have had their visas revoked. 300/400000 = .00075 
  7. Institutions Don’t Maintain Themselves (James Diddams, Christianity Today): “Jesus told Peter to forgive the brother or sister who sins against him ‘not seven times, but seventy-seven times’ (Matt. 18:21–22). I’ve come to think Christians have some obligation of forgiveness to our institutions, too—some duty of love and sacrifice to preserve and repair these rightfully time-honored ways of organizing and shaping our lives.… Where did we ever get the idea that these institutions would somehow maintain themselves? That they would always be there for us, meeting all our hopes, in perfect working order, without repair or forgiveness from us?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 498: Armageddon, arXiv, and penguins

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Archaeologists find first evidence of epic biblical battle at ‘Armageddon’ (Rossella Tercatin, The Times of Israel): “For the first time, a team of Israeli archaeologists has uncovered ancient artifacts at northern Israel’s ‘Armageddon’ site that might offer proof of an epic battle documented in the books of Kings II and Chronicles between a king of Judah and an Egyptian pharaoh. Two academic papers published earlier this year explained how an unprecedented amount of 7th-century BCE Egyptian pottery was found in recent excavations at Megiddo, suggesting that Egyptian soldiers were indeed in the right biblical place at what could be the right biblical period.”
  2. ‘I Applied for a Work Visa—and Was Thrown in Prison for Weeks’ (Jasmine Mooney, The Free Press): “Then I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me and said she had never seen a Canadian here before. When I told her my story, she looked at me, grabbed my hand, and said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ I told her I had only recently found God, but that I now believed in God more than anything. ‘I believe God brought you here for a reason,’ she said. ‘I know it feels like your life is in a million pieces, but you will be okay. Through this, I think you are going to find a way to help others.’ She asked if she could pray for me. I held her hands and wept.”
  3. Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science (Sheon Han, Wired): “For scientists, imagining a world without arXiv is like the rest of us imagining one without public libraries or GPS. But a look at its inner workings reveals that it isn’t a frictionless utopia of open-access knowledge. Over the years, arXiv’s permanence has been threatened by everything from bureaucratic strife to outdated code to even, once, a spy scandal. In the words of Ginsparg, who usually redirects interview requests to an FAQ document—on arXiv, no less—and tried to talk me out of visiting him in person, arXiv is ‘a child I sent off to college but who keeps coming back to camp out in my living room, behaving badly.’”
  4. Rubio Orders U.S. Diplomats to Scour Student Visa Applicants’ Social Media (Edward Wong, New York Times): “As a senator from Florida, Mr. Rubio pressed the Biden administration’s State Department, run by Antony J. Blinken, to cancel the visas of students involved in campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Since becoming secretary of state in late January, Mr. Rubio has revoked perhaps 300 or more visas, many of them belonging to students, he told reporters last Thursday. He said he had been signing letters daily revoking visas.”
  5. Trump’s intuitions on tariffs won’t help Americans (or penguins) (Megan McArdle, Washington Post): “…I spent the twilight hours goggling at the Trump administration’s new tariff schedule, trying to grasp its logic. For example, the tariffs on the Heard and McDonald islands, which have populations of zero, except for the penguins and assorted other animals. I mean, I’m glad that the rapacious waddlers will no longer fleece American consumers by dumping their shoddy goods on our markets. But still the thing vexed me … what do penguins export? Besides nature documentaries, I mean. Obviously someone at the White House, possibly a soon-to-be-ex intern, pulled up a list of territories without checking whether those territories were, you know, inhabited.” 
    • Unlocked. As McArdle notes, a single absurdity like that is not unusual for a massive federal policy. She moves quickly to a substantive critique.
    • Related: Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism (Richard Hanania, Substack): “The formula of ‘reciprocity’ being used is so stupid I approach the topic with awe, and have an almost superstitious feeling that if I even describe it I’ll somehow become stupider myself… The word ‘kakistocracy’ means rule by those least suited to govern. His argument, similar to one I’ve made before, is that Trump only cares about loyalty, and a movement that prioritizes loyalty to a single extremely flawed man is going to facilitate the worst people rising to the top.” 
      • A wild rant, plus I learned a new word.
  6. The Greatest Hate Hoax of All Time? The Canadian ‘Mass Graves’ Lie Unravels (Wilfred Reilly, National Review): “…there is a roughly 0.00 percent chance that there are actually 200 dead Native kids interred on the grounds of a well-known boarding school that operated until 1978. Such things happen in the Saw movies, not in urban modern Canada. And, as I note in my earlier piece on this topic: ‘Kamloops Residential School is located smack-dab in the middle of both the well-known Kamloops Indian Reservation and the 100,000 person city of Kamloops in British Columbia.’ Noting this himself, Dr. Rouillard asks: ‘Is it really credible that the remains of 200 children were buried clandestinely in a mass grave, on the reserve itself, without any reaction from the Band Council, until last summer?’” 
    • The author is a political scientist at Kentucky State (which I learned today is a HBCU) whose scholarship focuses on hate crime hoaxes.
  7. ‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’ (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Teenagers are desperate for prestige. And what the social media companies did — and we know this from things that insiders have said — is they hacked that. Normally, throughout history, to become prestigious, you had to become a good archer or a good leader or a good basket weaver. You had to do something in the world. And then people would respect you, and you would gain social status. That’s the way it always used to be. What social media is able to do is say: You don’t have to do anything. Just do whatever it takes to get people to follow you. And bingo — you’ve got prestige.” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus. Long but worthwhile. I should mention that at the end Haidt recommends three books he wants every 20something to read. I am happy to endorse the latter two. Replace the first with the New Testament.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • An AI Generated Comic (on Twitter)
  • Authorship Theories (SMBC) — let the reader understand its relevance to Biblical scholarship
  • ‘Monster’ under bed in Kansas town leads to arrest (Wil Day, KSN): “The Barton County Sheriff’s Office says a babysitter was putting the children to bed when one of them told her that a “monster” was under their bed. The babysitter, hoping to comfort the child by showing them there was nothing, looked under the bed and came face-to-face with a man hiding underneath. There was an altercation, and the babysitter and a child were knocked over.” 
    • THERE WAS ACTUALLY A MONSTER UNDER THE BED. That kid ain’t never falling asleep again.
  • Basic Instructions (Basic Instructions): the first panel is what got me: “for now”
  • Penguin Tariffs (Dork Tower)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 497: Christianity in Space, Redeeming Turkish Delight, and How To Sneeze

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions. If you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stranded Astronaut Held Onto Faith in Darkest Moments: ‘God Was There’ (Sylvia St. Cyr, The Roys Report): “After being stranded for nine months in space, veteran NASA astronaut Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore is sharing how his faith in God kept him going.… Wilmore, a member and elder of Providence Baptist Church in Pasadena, Texas, stayed connected with his church throughout his time in space. He even made a few calls to some elderly church members throughout his time stranded on the station, to encourage them.”
  2. What Follows from Lab Leak? (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “First, and most importantly, the higher the probability that SARS-CoV‑2 leaked from a lab the higher the probability we should expect another pandemic. Research at Wuhan was not especially unusual or high-tech. Modifying viruses such as coronaviruses (e.g., inserting spike proteins, adapting receptor-binding domains) is common practice in virology research and gain-of-function experiments with viruses have been widely conducted. Thus, manufacturing a virus capable of killing ~20 million human beings or more is well within the capability of say ~500‑1000 labs worldwide. The number of such labs is growing in number and such research is becoming less costly and easier to conduct. Thus, lab-leak means the risks are larger than we thought and increasing.” 
    • Some very practical suggestions in this short piece.
  3. The Hidden Hands: Amanuenses and the Letters Behind the Letters (C. Michael Patton, Credo House): “Yes, the secretaries could write competent Greek. But often, due to the personal additions at the end of these letters, I was able to compare the handwriting and style of the author himself. And get this: in many cases, the author’s own Greek was better than the scribe’s. More refined. More fluid. More legible. This shattered my assumptions. It meant that we can’t assume that people used secretaries only because they were illiterate, uneducated, or of low status. On the contrary, people who were clearly capable writers—sometimes better writers—still made use of amanuenses.” 
    • This is a fascinating look at the way ancient letters were written with the help of assistants — including letters in the New Testament.
    • Vaguely related (in the sense that it’s about the historical background for Bible stuff): Did Jesus teach in Greek? (Ian Paul, blog): “The argument about Jesus and Greek has several layers, starting with the most general. Were the regions Jesus taught in multilingual (polyglot), and how do we know? Is it likely that Jesus himself was multilingual? And is there specific evidence of this in the New Testament, in examples of his teaching?”
  4. Why Christian Men Need Friendship, Not Just “Accountability” (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Accountability is a fruit from a much larger tree. In an age in which millions of American men are so lonely it’s literally killing them, the urgent issue is not finding someone to receive a report of your web activity. It’s finding someone who’ll talk to you at all. Why? Because friendship has a sanctifying power. Not only is it easier to be honest and transparent with someone whom you’re convinced is a true friend, but the friendship itself is a means of grace in the fight against lust.”
  5. The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic): “I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.” 
    • A wild story. Lots of follow-up in the news. Just google for it.
    • Seven Ways of Looking at a Group Chat (Nick Cattogio, The Dispatch): “There are three distinct scandals here and different culprits in each one. The first is using Signal instead of secure government channels to discuss something as sensitive as military strikes. Everyone involved, save Jeffrey Goldberg, bears responsibility for that. The second is mistakenly including Goldberg in the discussion, for which Waltz would seem to be at fault. And the third is going so far as to share ‘operational details’ in the chat, potentially placing people in the field at risk, which sure sounds like reckless mishandling of classified information—a subject on which Republicans have had a lot to say in recent years. The blame for that would appear to land on Hegseth.”
    • Investigation Reveals DOGE Had Just Laid Off The Guy Whose Job It Was To Make Sure Jeffrey Goldberg Wasn’t In The War Group Chat (Babylon Bee)
  6. The Inklings:
    • Why JRR Tolkien Made March 25 the Day the Ring Was Destroyed (Joseph Pearce, National Catholic Register): “Frodo Baggins, as the one chosen to be the Ring bearer, is the Cross bearer. He is, therefore, a Christ figure. This is why Tolkien has him leaving Rivendell on Dec. 25 and arriving at Mount Doom (Golgotha) on March 25 (Good Friday). Frodo’s journey, or pilgrimage, begins on Christ’s birthday and ends on the date of Christ’s death.”
    • In Search of Turkish Delight (Valerie Stivers, First Things): “Işin quotes American Naval physician James McKay, writing in 1830: Turkish delight was ‘a delicious pasty-mass which melts away in the mouth, and leaves a fragrant flavor behind.’ The French artist and writer Pretextat Lecomte described it as ‘beautiful’ in color and ‘warm and transparent.’ To make it, Turkish confectioners used hand-sifted wheat starch (produced by a domestic process with a long local tradition), and employed a laborious technique that called for several hours of continuous stirring. They used musk and rose water as flavorings, and also sprinkled musk on the powdered sugar coating. They rubbed the trays used to mold it and the scissors used to cut it with fragrant almond oil. By the 1880s, Işin says, the flavors had multiplied to include clotted cream, mastic, almond, and pistachio. In the 1900s came pine nut and hazelnut, and flavors from essences or syrups such as violet, lemon, and bitter orange. This starts to sound like a dessert a child could dream of, or that an open-minded and pleasure-loving adult like C. S. Lewis would find tempting. It seems likely that very few modern eaters have ever tasted true Turkish delight, at least outside the Grand Bazaar. All contemporary recipes use corn starch. Musk oil is illegal.” 
      • I am both personally disappointed that I can’t taste it and thrilled that Lewis wasn’t crazy.
  7. How worried should legal immigrants be about Trump’s deportations? (Nicole Narea, Vox): “These are uncertain times for many immigrants in the US. There have been reports of individual visa and green card holders and tourists who have been detained and deported. However, the Trump administration does not seem to be indiscriminately targeting legal immigrants who have authorization to be in the US on a large scale. Some have reportedly been targeted based on their political activism.…  And it’s not just immigrants who have been affected. A US citizen said he was walking down the streets of Chicago when he was arrested by immigration agents, who confiscated his ID and held him for 10 hours before releasing him. Even though limited in number, these cases have been going viral — and are understandably causing fear in immigrant communities.”

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.