Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 495: Math Points to God, Slavery Persists, and the Gospel Draws Crowds at Stanford

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The miracle of math (Sarah Salviander, Substack): “In 1960, theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner identified a metaphysical mystery for the ages: why are the laws of nature so aptly described by mathematics? It is a deceptively simple question. We think we grasp the answer easily—until we actually try to explain it. Wigner’s essay, titled ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,’ highlights this enigma. The term ‘unreasonable’ captures the bewildering reality that there is no apparent reason why math should so flawlessly mirror the universe’s behaviors. This suggests, whether intended by Wigner or not, that the answer to this mystery lies beyond the universe.” 
    • The author is an astrophysicist who now does apologetics.
    • For those who have never seen it, here is the well-known paper: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (Eugene Wigner, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics): “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”
  2. The Secret Campaign in China to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck (Vivan Wang, New York Times): “The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it. And yet, it did. To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad, involving mass surveillance, censorship and detentions — a campaign that continues to this day.” 
    • Pray for China regularly.
    • Related: slavery is not a relic of the past and crops up in unexpected places. UN judge guilty of forcing woman to work as slave (BBC): “Gasps were heard from the public gallery as the verdicts were given, and the court was cleared as the defendant appeared unwell.… Mugambe, who was studying for a law PhD at the University of Oxford, had conspired with Ugandan deputy high commissioner John Leonard Mugerwa to arrange for the young woman to come to the UK.” 
      • Some American details from another article: UN Judge, Onetime Columbia University Human Rights Fellow, Found Guilty of Slavery (Matthew Xiao, Washington Free Beacon): “Mugambe was a fellow housed within Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, whose fellows work to ‘address some aspect of a history of gross human rights violations in their society, country, and/or region,’ in 2017.”
  3. Jesus Is A Jew (David Brooks, Comment): “Jesus is inherently mysterious—a lion who is also a lamb. But he is also intelligible. And that’s because he lived an actual life in an actual historical context.… Jesus is amid the muck and armed with the Word, and yet emerges as a figure ultimately alone—a vortex of spiritual forces converging in one person, no one else quite like him.”
  4. We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “My wife and I were at a tableful of smart, well-educated twenty-somethings — friends of the bride and groom. The wedding, with all its hope and aspiration, had put them in mind of the future. As young people should, they wanted to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They wanted the hungry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well. But when I mentioned how remarkable it was that a hundred-plus people could parachute into a remote, unfamiliar place and eat a gourmet meal untroubled by fears for their health and comfort, they were surprised. The heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their dinner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public-health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.” 
    • Related: Breakfast for Eight Billion (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “Sometime in the 1980s, an unprecedented change in the human condition occurred. For the first time in known history, the average person on Earth had enough to eat all the time.”
  5. The Workism Trap (Bobby Jamieson, Plough): “And a 2018 research article found that, compared to women who graduated from lower-ranked schools, women who attended elite, selective universities do not, on average, earn more per hour, but they do work more. For women, it seems, the benefits of an elite diploma are more time at work and lower chances of marrying and having children.” 
    • Vaguely related (at least to the excerpt): Are Men OK? (Eamon Whalen, The Nation): “The biggest risk factor for dropping out of college, controlling for everything else, is being a man. Those struggles have extended to the labor market. When adjusted for inflation, most American men today earn around $3,000 less than men did in 1979, which leads to a grim realization: Much of the narrowing of the persistent wage gap between men and women can be explained by the stagnating wages for men.”
    • Commenting on the above article: Creating a Permission Space for Men’s Issues (Aaron Renn, Substack): “The feminist movement’s success depended on telling men they had to change, that there were certain choices and behaviors they could no longer engage in. It also explicitly reallocated resources and positions from men to women.  While I don’t think the situation with men is symmetrical, it strikes me as dubious that nothing needs to change with regards to women. For example, as economist Melissa Kearney, also a Brookings affiliated scholar, documented in her superb book The Two-Parent Privilege — I summarized some key findings — the benefits of growing up in an intact family vs. a single parent home are overwhelming. The United States has the highest share of its children living in single parent homes of any country in the entire world. That’s American exceptionalism we could live without.” (emphasis removed for readability)
  6. Is Religion Taboo at Stanford? (Sloane Wehman, Stanford Review): “On the afternoon of Monday March 3, hundreds of students congregated in White Plaza to listen to Cliffe Knechtle and his son Stuart Knechtle debate Christianity as a part of their ‘Give Me An Answer’ ministry, a program that strives to answer tough questions about faith. Cliffe and Stuart are both pastors at Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Cliffe has been debating students on Christianity since developing the Give Me An Answer ministry in 1991.” 
  7. How Do You Solve a Problem Like Martinez? (Benjamin Fleshman, SSRN): “All told, there are reports of 175 religious student groups that were fully denied official recognition since 1990. One hundred and nineteen of those groups were kicked off their campuses after Martinez was decided. That means that more than twice as many groups have been derecognized in the fifteen years since Martinez than in the twenty years beforehand. Part of this is due to the more aggressive mass derecognitions at the University of Iowa, California State University, and Vanderbilt. There really weren’t any massive derecognition campaigns pre-Martinez, with the largest being Cal State’s derecognition of a handful of groups that led to the litigation in Alpha Delta Chi. When you include the number of recognition issues that stopped just short of a full derecognition, but which still required the intervention of legal counsel or national organizations to resolve, the numbers shoot to 257 total reported incidents since 1990, with 195 occurring post-Martinez. That means roughly three times as many total reported incidents post-Martinez as pre-Martinez.” 
    • Mentions Chi Alpha (not at Stanford, just generally) in a few places. The Becket Fund, with whom the author is affiliated, are Chi Alpha’s legal representatives.

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 494: Religion at Elite Schools, Why Shrimp Must Die, and Funny Videos

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. What Does Religion Look Like At Elite Universities? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “Yeah, again, I am not bowled over by any huge differences in the religious attendance of students at Ivy league schools versus non-selective institutions. 49% of students who attend prestigious schools attend church less than once a year compared to 46% of students who go to a non-selective school. So, those at the top end are slightly less religiously active, but three points is certainly not a chasm. That’s the general trend here when comparing across all types of attendance levels. For students at non-selective schools, 19% say they attend religious services about weekly or more. It’s 14% of those at selective schools. Again, a gap, but a relatively small one.”
  2. Did God create logic? (J. Budziszewski, blog): “To say that He created logic would be to suggest that He could have done differently and created illogic – that He could have allowed contradictions such as a man who is a donkey, or a two which is a three. But if I make a sentence by placing the words ‘God can’ before a string of nonsense, that doesn’t make the sentence true, would it? Sentences like ‘Can God make a man who is not a man but a donkey?’ or ‘Can God make a two which is a three?’ wouldn’t even rise to the level of being meaningful questions. They would be like asking ‘Can God moongoggle tweedledee?’ So we shouldn’t say that God cannot do these things, but that they cannot be done. A lot of things are excluded from divine omnipotence not because God doesn’t have the power to do them, but because in their very nature they are not ‘doable’ or possible.” 
    • The author is a professor of philosophy at UT Austin.
  3. Three More Reasons Shrimp Must Die (Lyman Stone, Substack): “All that to say, I am not insensitive to the intuition many of us have that animal torturing really is bad for some reason we struggle to articulate. I think it’s because we all intuit that animal-torturers are usually people okay with torturing humans too. But this leads to the wrong intuition that animal pain per se is the yardstick here, when really virtue is the yardstick: in fact people who are unusually empathetic to animals are probably also people unusually willing to torture humans.”
  4. The Government Knows A.G.I. is Coming (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “And while there is so much else going on in the world to cover, I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human history, A.I. will have been the thing that matters.” 
    • A very long interview with the Biden admin’s special adviser on AI which I found worthwhile.
    • This part in particular I’ll be thinking about: “Samuel Hammond, who’s an economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, had this piece months back called ‘Ninety-Five Theses on A.I.’ One point he makes that I think about a lot is: If we had the capacity for perfect enforcement, a lot of our current laws would be constricting. Laws are written with the knowledge that human labor is scarce. And there’s this question of what happens when the surveillance state gets really good. What happens when A.I. makes the police state a very different kind of thing than it is? What happens when we have warfare of endless drones?”
  5. He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Mr. Renn has an unusual profile for someone who has captured the attention of American evangelicalism. He is not a pastor, an academic or a politician. He has no institutional affiliations with high-profile evangelical organizations. He is a mild-mannered former consultant with a wide-ranging Substack whose topics include urban policy, self-improvement and masculinity.” 
    • Aaron Renn is a name familiar to readers of this email. This is a pretty good profile. Unlocked.
  6. How to Think About Using Government Funds for Christian Charity (Matthew Loftus, Mere Orthodoxy): “As long as we live in biological bodies, ‘biopolitics’ are unavoidable and a natural law perspective does not distinguish between the government’s role in preventing a malicious human actor that threatens your life or a nonhuman virus, fire, or cancer cell. In either case, the government has a responsibility to prevent deaths that it is capable of preventing.” 
    • A thoughtful piece; I found it helpful.
  7. Roman Catholic Apologetics Is Surging Online. Intended Audience? Protestants. (Andrew Voigt, The Gospel Coalition): “Where Protestant apologetics is more focused on winning the secular world to Christ, Roman Catholic apologetics often has a different audience in mind: their ‘separated brethren.’ Targeting Protestants is explicitly encouraged.”

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 493: Christianity stabilizes in America, the truth about a spying monk, & why denominations struggle

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. Christianity’s Decline in U.S. Appears to Have Halted, Major Study Shows (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.… The survey finds that 62 percent of adults in the United States describe themselves as Christians, including 40 percent who identify as Protestant and 19 percent who are Catholic.”
  2. No Longer I Who Live (Anthony David, Comment): “Two years ago, I was ready to abandon a biography I’d spent years trying to write when a fellow historian threw me a lifeline. The book was about the triple agent Hermann Keller (1905–1970), a Benedictine mole embedded by conspirators against Hitler into the upper echelons of the SS. Keller reported not only to the German resistance but also to the Vatican and the British MI6. In the history of espionage, few spies penetrated deeper into enemy ranks.” 
    • The article is absolutely fascinating, especially for the detail that before her research Keller was widely regarded as a villain and not a hero. “By early 2011, I had finished the book on [another guy], which was set to be published in Austria. A few weeks before I was due to return the galleys, I shared them with a monk at the Dormition who had asked to review the manuscript before publication. When he saw what I wrote about Keller, he cautioned me against taking historians at their word. I should talk to someone who knew him before passing judgment.” She did primary research and realized the existing consensus was very wrong. Her discovery resonated with me. The more I read the more skeptical I become of extreme allegations against dead Christians. Virtually every time I dig into something in detail (the history of missions, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the church in Prohibition, etc) I discover that the default understanding of educated people is wrong and predictably so. This isn’t to say all of church history is exemplary — some events deserve condemnation. But even the bad events usually weren’t as bad as commonly imagined. I find that most Stanford students’ assumptions about the history of the church and of Christians is WAY more negative than justified by the historical record.
  3. what if its just life (Kristen Sanders, Substack): “Discernment is something many Christians unconsciously despise. Many would rather have the rules given to them, without deviation, than choose for themselves. No one wants to be left holding the bag of their own life.”
  4. How Universities Get Away With Hiring Radicals (John D. Sailer, City Journal): “Usually, a postdoctoral fellowship is just a small step in a scholar’s career. After a fellowship ends, former postdocs apply to competitive positions on the open market. The diversity-focused fellow-to-faculty model modifies this pathway. First, the programs’ administrators select fellows with special attention to how they contribute to diversity. Fellows are then heavily favored for—often guaranteed—tenure-track positions, bypassing a competitive search. It’s a side-door into the faculty lounge.… Over the last five years, one in 20 tenure-track hires in the UC System were former president’s or chancellor’s postdoctoral fellows.”
  5. Is Distrust Driving the Rise in Non-Denominationalism? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “Non-denominationalism is predicated on the collapse of institutional trust. Americans, for myriad reasons, do not trust major institutions. Banks, unions, big business, media and government are all viewed with deep skepticism. Nameless and faceless CEOs and bureaucrats are wasting your money and taking your freedom. In religion, there’s a simple solution to this. Kill the denominations. Voila. No more unaccountable head office that wastes your money on projects to spruce up the national headquarters. In a non-denominational church, all the people who decide where the money goes are sitting right next to you in the pew. That’s a whole lot more accountability.”
  6. Would You Rather Have Married Young? (Lillian Fishman, Metropolitan Review): “This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.”
  7. Some Miracles Happen Supernaturally. Others Happen ‘Hypernaturally.’ (John Van Sloten, Christianity Today): “Keathley defines hypernaturalism as the ‘extraordinary use of natural law by the God described in the Bible. When God acts hypernaturally, He employs natural law and natural phenomena in an extraordinary way to bring about His will.’… Perhaps this category helps people hold two opposites together: that the world operates in an empirically explainable way (a more basic definition of providence) and that God occasionally intervenes to accomplish his will (through an exercise of special providence). Hypernaturalism describes one facet of how providence and miracle overlap.”

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 492: suffering, plane crashes, and near death experiences

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Best Argument Against Having Faith in God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “One interesting point about [suffering] is that while it’s often folded into the briefs for atheism that claim to rely primarily on hard evidence and science, it isn’t properly speaking an argument that some creating power does not exist. Rather it’s an argument about the nature of that power, a claim that the particular kind of God envisioned by many believers and philosophers — all powerful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find ourselves, and therefore that this kind of God does not exist. The other interesting point about this argument is that while its core evidence is empirical, in the sense that terrible forms of suffering obviously exist and can be extensively enumerated, its power fundamentally rests on an intuition about just how much suffering is too much. By this I mean that many people who emphasize the problem of evil would concede that a good God might allow some form of pain and suffering within a material creation for various good reasons.”
  2. Why Are So Many Planes Crashing? (Lyman Stone, Substack): “Now let’s zoom out and just ask: are incidents of any cause getting more common? They aren’t.… [Also] I don’t see any meaningful uptick over time in fatality incidents. Actually they’ve clearly declined since the early 1990s or even early 2000s. Which is wild, since total amounts of flights have massively increased! Note that I am including known incidents through February 18, 2025 in those figures above!”
    • Emphasis removed. Lots of charts.
  3. It’s Going To Take More Than An Executive Order To Truly Protect Women’s Sports (Kate Bierly, Daily Caller): “Since the 1990s, Congress has steadily abdicated its responsibility to legislate, opting instead to let the executive branch take the political heat. Members of Congress, more concerned with reelection than with the duty to govern, prefer to pass the buck. An executive order commands only the executive branch, requiring federal agencies to comply. But its power is inherently limited. Regulatory authority has been reined in, especially after the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Chevron deference. No longer can agencies broadly interpret congressional statutes to impose sweeping regulations. Now, their authority is confined strictly to what Congress has explicitly granted them. This limits the scope of what Trump’s latest executive order can achieve. His directive to the Department of Education to restrict women’s sports to biological females is bound by statutory interpretation, which blue states can challenge.… This is why congressional action is necessary, because reliance on executive orders and judicial interpretation fosters legal instability.” 
    • Written by one of our alumni.
  4. 70 Christians found beheaded in church in DRC (Open Doors): “According to field sources, at around 4am last Thursday (13 February) suspected militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – a group with ties to so-called Islamic State (IS) – approached homes in Mayba in the territory of Lubero, saying: ‘Get out, get out and don’t make any noise.’ Twenty Christian men and women came out and were captured. Shaken by this incident, people from the local community in Mayba later gathered to work out how to release those held captive. However, ADF militants surrounded the village and captured a further 50 believers.”
  5. The kernel of truth in gender stereotypes: Consider the avocado, not the apple (Eagly & Hall, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology): “…in 85% of [the 673] comparisons [from across the 43 studies], participants got the direction [of gender difference] right.… Our review suggests that Allport’s (1954/1988, p. 190) classic and widely cited kernel of truth metaphor is incorrect for gender stereotypes unless this kernel is more like the seed of an avocado than an apple.” 
    • The authors are professors at Northwestern and Northeastern, a combination I found funny.
  6. Learnings from 1,000+ Near-Death Experiences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, University of Virginia (Tim Ferriss, personal blog): “I started out as a materialist skeptic. After 50 years, I’m still skeptical, but I’m no longer a materialist. I think that’s a dead end when it comes to explaining near-death experiences and other phenomena like this.… About five percent of the general population—or one to every 20 people—has had a near-death experience. Secondly, they are not associated in any way with mental illness. People who are perfectly normal have these NDEs in abnormal situations that can happen to anybody.” 
  7. Miranda July’s Lucrative Fantasies (Freddie deBoer, Substack): “The anti-monogamists constantly insist that monogamy is just too romantic to build a life on, that it’s contrary to human nature. But what could possibly be more romantic, in the most childish sense, than the belief that you’ll stay attractive and romantically desirable for your entire life? That you’ll simply cycle endlessly between willing partners who you find attractive and who feel the same about you and who you’ll happily let go of as soon as you’re bored, and you’ll keep doing that in a state of bliss until you die? You’d call that, what, realistic?” 
    • deBoer, as I often remind people, an atheist socialist who is nonetheless very clear-minded on some topics. He is nearly always entertaining to read.

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.

Volume 491: a philosopher converts, a Christian cyborg, and a comedian riffs on pastors who scam

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. How a Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian (Larry Sanger, personal blog): “When I really sought to understand it, I found the Bible far more interesting and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expecting. I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them. I did not believe their answers, which sometimes struck me as contrived or unlikely. But often, they were shockingly plausible. The Bible could sustain interrogation; who knew? It slowly dawned on me that I was acquainting myself with the two-thousand-year-old tradition of theology. I found myself positively ashamed to realize that, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is. Theology is, I found, an attempt to systematize, harmonize, explicate, and to a certain extent justify the many, many ideas contained in the Bible. It is what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness. The notion that the Bible might actually be able to interestingly and plausibly sustain such treatment is a proposition that had never entered my head.” 
    • Sanger, of course, is the co-founder of Wikipedia. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
    • Vaguely related with a wonderful title is this review of Douthat’s new book Believe: The Erotic Case for God (Audrey Pollnow, Compact Magazine): “If you are being chased by a tiger down a corridor, and reach a T, one side of which you believe leads to more tigers and the other leads to safety (but you don’t know which is which), you had better guess and run. The alternative is to stay still and get eaten by the first tiger. I’m not suggesting that we should choose a love, faith, career or anything else on the basis of frantic anxiety, just that the promise of ‘safety’ offered by disbelief, by staying aloof, by refusing to act, is illusory. Psychologically comforting, perhaps, but not a real form of safety in any sense.”
  2. Meet the Christian Cyborg Who Named His Brain Chip Eve (Maaike E. Harmsen interviewing Noland Arbaugh, Christianity Today): “In this field, I don’t expect to see a lot of religious people—in the tech field, the medical side of things. But then we started meeting people face-to-face, and they met with me and my mom. My mom is very open with everyone about her faith, so it very quickly became known who we were. And I was blown away by the number of people who shared our beliefs. I think about everyone that I met on the medical side; the vast majority of them were Christians. We very quickly connected with all of them on a very personal level. And it became more of an open discussion. When I went in to do my surgery, the last thing I did before they put me under anesthesia was ask if I could pray over the room. And so I prayed over all the surgeons and the nurses and everyone that was a part of this. My prayer was put on the hospital intercom, and even Elon was listening in by phone.” 
    • Extremely interesting. Unlocked.
  3. The Assemblies of God: A Denomination That May Be Growing (Ryan Burge, Substack): “I wanted to end this by pointing to a reason that I believe that the AG has recorded long term growth while most other larger denominations have been going the other direction — the AG has continued to move in the direction of racial diversification. In 2001, the Assemblies of God’s records indicate that 71% of their rank and file membership was white and another 16% were Hispanic. African Americans were just 6% of members and Asians were only 3%. For reference, the Southern Baptist Convention is currently 71% white, 3% Hispanic, and 20% Black. However, the pews of the average AG church today look a whole lot different. Now, only 55% of those members are white, down 16 points in just 22 years. Meanwhile, the Black share has nearly doubled to 11% and the Hispanic portion has risen to 23%. That’s pretty impressive given the inability of many other denominations to become less white to reflect the changing demographics of the country.” 
    • Being an Assemblies of God minister I liked this article a lot, and I even commented on it to help explain some of the stats. Click through for details.
  4. Are Atheists Right? Is “Free Will” An Unnecessary, Unimportant Illusion? (J. Werner Wallace, blog): “In 2008, researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of British Columbia conducted experiments highlighting the relationship between a belief in Determinism and immoral behavior. They found students who were exposed to deterministic literature prior to taking a test were more likely to cheat on the test than students who were not exposed to literature advocating Determinism. The researchers concluded those who deny free will are more inclined to believe their efforts to act morally are futile and are, therefore, less likely to do so. In addition, a study conducted by researchers from Florida State University and Kentucky University found participants who were exposed to deterministic literature were more likely to act aggressively and less likely to be helpful toward others. Even determinist Michael Gazzaniga concedes: ‘It seems that not only do we believe we control our actions, but it is good for everyone to believe it.’ The existence of free will is a common characteristic of our experience, and when we deny we have this sort of free agency, there are detrimental consequences.” 
  5. Don’t waste a perfectly good decade (Suzanne Venker, Substack): “The message these sons and daughters receive is simple: Do not prioritize love. Get your career in order, and do not make sacrifices for anyone. Life (i.e. marriage and family) will fall into place later. And if you have to go into debt to achieve this goal, have at it. You can easily pay it off later.  This is spectacularly bad advice.” 
    • Shared with me by a friend of the ministry (I think in response to the article I shared last week).
    • Related in a nonobvious way: Why So Blue: Liberal Women are Less Happy, More Lonely. But Why? (Grant Bailey & Brad Wilcox, Institute for Family Studies): “Taken together, our analysis leads us to three conclusions. First, the ideological divide in emotional well-being between young liberal and conservative women endures. Second, this ideological divide does not appear to be just a consequence of negative thinking; it also seems to flow from the fact that liberal young women are less likely to be integrated into core American institutions—specifically marriage and religion—that lend meaning, direction, and a sense of solidarity to women’s lives. Third, lower levels of marriage and churchgoing among liberal women may also have a hand in their elevated reports of loneliness, which, in turn, diminishes their odds of being happy.”
  6. The paradox of Trump’s first weeks (Matt Yglesias, Substack): “I think there’s a sense in some quarters that Trump has accomplished more in three weeks than Biden did in three years, but this is just not true. I do think it’s true that Biden achieved less durable policy change than you’d expect relative to the sums of money appropriated due to Democrats’ over-reliance on temporary programs. But they still made substantive changes in absolute terms on the areas they prioritized, including prescription drug affordability for senior citizens and clean energy deployment. Much of that seems likely to be kept in place by the new GOP trifecta.  Republicans, meanwhile, are making very little forward progress on their legislative agenda.” 
    • A fair analysis of the last few weeks. Pay less attention to people claiming triumph or proclaiming doom — politics is complicated and few moments have as much long-term significance as they seem to while they are dominating the headlines.
    • Related: The Strategy Behind Trump’s Defiance of the Law (Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker): “…what is playing out through a veneer of chaos is a deliberate and organized tactical program to undertake actions that provoke a raft of lawsuits, some of which could become good vehicles for establishing a constitutional vision in which the President has sole authority over the entire executive branch. That vision is not new: it’s known as the unitary executive theory and has a long pedigree, dating back to the founding. Based on where the Supreme Court has been heading in its executive-power cases for some time—even before Trump appointed three Justices—it is likely that the Court will, to some extent, affirm that vision. Trump has a pretty good track record of judicial vindication after engaging in conduct alleged to be unlawful.”
    • Non-alarmist takes like this are much more persuasive than the freakouts I see online. As Gersen notes later, “The first Trump Administration did not flout judicial orders, though some people worried about it.”
  7. Marketing Jesus: The Promise and Peril of ‘He Gets Us’ (Samuel D. James, The Gospel Coalition): “There’s a danger here of context collapse, where an idea that’s true and correct in one particular context loses its truthfulness by being broadcast in a way that disregards that context. For example, ‘Jesus gets us’ is a message best used for people who have already accepted their need for a Savior and desire assurance that nothing they’ve done can cause Jesus to cast them out (John 6:37). In terms of a mass audience whose cultural religion is most likely expressive individualism, however, ‘he gets us’ sounds like a mantra that reinforces the primacy of the self. This mentality keeps my personal psychology at the center, so the question that matters isn’t ‘What must I do to be saved’ but ‘What must you do to affirm me?’ ” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Atheist Accepts Multiverse Theory Of Every Possible Universe Except Biblical One (Babylon Bee) — an oldie but a goodie. 
  • Pastors are Scamming Believers out of Millions (Josh Johnson, YouTube): seventeen minutes, mostly respectful and insightfully humorous. The final story doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere but it actually is and is worth the payoff.
  • Argentina canal turns bright red, alarming residents (Nathan Williams, BBC): “A canal in a suburb of Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires turned bright red on Thursday, alarming local residents. Pictures and videos show the intensely coloured water flowing into an estuary, the Rio de la Plata, which borders an ecological reserve.” 
    • Want to envision one of the ten plagues? Check this out.
  • Possibly Kaitlyn Schiess’ spiciest take yet. — I don’t know a lot about the Bachelor/Bachelorette shows, but assuming this description is accurate you can put me on team Kaitlyn.
  • A Genesis Series Inspired By Anime (J. D. Peabody interviewing Jason Moody, Christianity Today): “It’s for both Christians and general audiences. Think about the painting The Last Supper. Lots of people are moved by it. It has caused millions of people to reflect on their faith. But da Vinci wasn’t necessarily a ‘Christian painter’—he was just a painter. And you don’t have to have faith to appreciate his work. The Last Supper isn’t ‘Christian’ art—it’s just art. We want what we’re creating to prompt questions, because that’s what good art does.” 

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 490

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. How to Choose a Religion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If you assume — and you should — that the universe isn’t a brutal cosmic trick, that God isn’t somehow out to get you, then as long as you aren’t throwing yourself headlong into a cult or engaging in elaborate self-deception, there are few truly bad reasons for abandoning agnosticism in favor of commitment. If you’re out there looking and something feels like what you were supposed to find, you’re generally better off crossing the threshold and seeing what’s inside.” 
    • A wonderful essay, unlocked. I was pleased to see that Douthat lays out logical paths that I myself frequently deploy in conversations with skeptics.
    • Related: My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument.… Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.”
  2. The Average Kid is Better Than the Average Adult (Bryan Caplan, Substack): “Still, when I compare all the adults I’ve met to all the kids I’ve met, there’s no comparison. To be frank, 80% of adults are total duds. A supermajority of kids, in contrast, are actually fun. If you don’t appreciate them, the fault is yours.”
  3. Trumpian policy as cultural policy (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture. After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before. Our top achievements remain impressive. But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape? The culture of government and public service? Interest in our religious organizations? The quality of local government in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions.… OK, so how might you fix the culture of America? You want to tell everyone that America comes first. That America should be more masculine and less soft. That we need to build. That we should ‘own the libs.’ I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get. So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question ‘does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?’ Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import.” 
    • An interesting analysis. Cowen is not endorsing or criticizing this view — merely describing it. Definitely worth reading, and it makes more sense than other attempts I have seen to bring all the political news together.
    • Related: Trump’s Executive Branch Revolution (Richard Hanania, Substack): “If you read media coverage, journalists will tell you that what Trump is doing is completely lawless. Certainly there have been some actions that are unlikely to hold up in court. Yet it’s important to understand recent steps taken in the context of long-standing legal debates over executive power. Trump’s actions haven’t come from nowhere, and they aren’t simply the improvisations of one power-hungry president. What the president is doing is nothing less than undertaking a fundamental remaking of the federal government, one that implements many long-standing ideas of conservative legal scholars whose views have been too extreme or politically untenable for previous Republican administrations, but that have gotten a hearing now because Trump in particular is keen on expanding his authority to the greatest extent possible.” 
      • Fascinating. Note that Hanania’s article, unlike Cowen’s analysis above, is mostly on Trump’s side. This isn’t a disinterested piece.
    • For the argument on the other side, Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab (Charlie Savage, New York Times): “Mr. Trump has effectively nullified laws, such as by ordering the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing a ban on the wildly popular app TikTok and by blocking migrants from invoking a statute allowing them to request asylum. He moved to effectively shutter a federal agency Congress created and tried to freeze congressionally approved spending, including most foreign aid. He summarily fired prosecutors, inspectors general and board members of independent agencies in defiance of legal rules against arbitrary removal.”
    • One bit of context I would add which is missing from the last two articles: both Biden and Obama were also law-defying presidents. In other words, this is a trend that has been developing for some time in both parties. For a summary of Biden’s analogous acts, see The Quiet Lawlessness of Joe Biden (Sarah Isgur, The Dispatch): “His ‘aww shucks,’ doddering nature is effective, but Joe Biden’s legacy is not the Restorer of Norms. He is leaving office quietly having caused more damage to the rule of law than arguably any single one of his predecessors.”
  4. The U.S. Economy Is Racing Ahead. Almost Everything Else Is Falling Behind. (David Leonhardt & Ashley Wu, New York Times): “The U.S. economy has outperformed most of its rivals in terms of productive might and innovation. But this success has not led to rapidly rising living standards for most Americans.… This country has the lowest life expectancy of any rich country, which was not true for most of the 20th century. The U.S. has the highest murder rate of any rich country and the world’s highest rate of fatal drug overdoses. It also has one of the lowest rates of trust in the federal government and among the highest rates of youth depression and single-parent families. When Americans are asked how satisfied they are with their own lives, the U.S. ranks lower than it did three decades ago.” 
    • Recommended by a friend of the ministry.
  5. An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it (Eileen Guo, MIT Technology Review): “While this is not the first time an AI chatbot has suggested that a user take violent action, including self-harm, researchers and critics say that the bot’s explicit instructions—and the company’s response—are striking. What’s more, this violent conversation is not an isolated incident with Nomi; a few weeks after his troubling exchange with Erin, a second Nomi chatbot also told Nowatzki to kill himself, even following up with reminder messages. And on the company’s Discord channel, several other people have reported experiences with Nomi bots bringing up suicide, dating back at least to 2023.” 
    • Recommended by a student. Distressing on many levels: “even following up with reminder messages” 😮
  6. For the Undateable Young Single Christian Woman (Aly Dee, Substack): “As a young single woman, you have to conclude that life is full of risk, and your fertile window will sharply decline at 35.… Young singles should wed and have children in their twenties and accept that they will struggle financially for a decade or so. They should focus on cultivating the grit to weather economic instability until their mid-thirties. Generally, men don’t hit their financial stride until their late 40s or early 50s.” 
    • A lot of advice in this article and I do not agree with all of it. Mostly sharing because I often share similar things from the male point of view and this one is from a gal to other gals.
  7. What will AI do to ℗research? (Joshua Gans, Substack): “We call it research, but I think a better name might be presearch because we are speculating on whether the knowledge is useful or not. This happens because research is far more expensive than search. Now suppose that you take away the whole ‘it takes time to do good research’ presumption as might be done with AI. Why do any presearch? Instead, why not wait until you have a use that requires some knowledge, then ‘ask AI’ to tell you the answer? In other words, why not research on demand — that is, find a use and then do the work?” 
    • The author, an economist at the University of Toronto, got a paper published that was co-written by ChatGPT. Here he is reflecting on how such tools will change academia.

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 489

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 488

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. Speculation: Physical Pain Might Not Be Very Bad? (Lyman Stone, Substack): “But it seems like chronic pain is not as strongly associated with suicide as the (biased) literature suggests, that high pain-tolerance is modestly associated with suicide, and that pharmacological interventions reducing pain don’t decrease and actually increase suicide. So it really seems like pain doesn’t cause suicide, and it almost seems like lack of pain causes suicide.” 
    • Stone with another banger. Highly recommended. 
    • I would like to go on record as saying I am not a fan of pain. Indeed, since Revelation 21:4 informs us that there will be no pain in heaven I do not think I am going too far in being unenthused about pain generally: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That being said, I like Stone’s argument a lot.
  2. The Courage To Commit (Freya India, Substack): “It’s strange because my generation talks so much about empowerment, agency, independence, and fear of losing ourselves, yet we will willingly offer ourselves up to the algorithm. We will surrender our souls to the machine without a second thought…but are terrified to surrender anything in a human relationship. Partly because we are young, yes, but also because that’s the message we hear everywhere: be careful not to commit to any one thing, never narrow your options, don’t allow yourself to be vulnerable. It’s funny because I was talking to a friend recently about how if you get engaged young now, or do anything that signals actual commitment, that’s when family and friends worry for you. It’s like some parents are protective only when it comes to commitment. They worry about you closing down options.” 
    • The post is paywalled past a point, but even the part that is freely available is quite stimulating.
  3. Last Boys at the Beginning of History (Mana Afsari, The Point Magazine): “In early 2017, I asked the ‘secular humanist chaplain’ at the University of Southern California, where I studied, how I could set myself up for a good life in college and beyond. How could I be happy? How could I find a vocation or a calling? How could I be a good person? The chaplain told me to look around and identify the people who had lives I wanted to live, and ask myself what their values were. I quickly realized those moral exemplars were not in the secular student group I’d joined, which had become increasingly morally vacant, pseudo-rationalist and eccentric, drawn to effective altruism and convinced by Sam Harris that murder was merely a social construct. To say nothing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embracing polyamory as a way to grandfather in situationships or infidelities, while being told in special seminars that monogamy was a colonial construct and should be discarded anyway. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my primary concern was having models for healthy relationships—not resisting colonialism in my dating life. I had no interest in subverting things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear family, faith, a classical education—that I’d never had or known in the first place. I wanted a serious boyfriend.” 
    • This essay describes something real and undernoticed. It covers a lot of ground, and the excerpt above isn’t really central. 
  4. The ‘Surprising Rebirth’ at Oxford: Perspectives from a Graduate Student (Carolyn Morris-Collier, Gospel Coalition): “While my nonreligious friends here in Oxford are still curious about how I make sense of Christianity’s history of colonialism or how I rationalize its creeds, they seem more intrigued by how my faith orients my life, purpose, and emotional world. This shift from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Does it work?’ reflects a broader cultural change that the church should mindfully prepare to engage.”
  5. The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Coming to an End (Marc Novicoff, The Atlantic): “…since the 1990s, America has had two sets of laws concerning underage access to pornography. In the physical world, the law generally requires young-looking customers to show ID proving they’re 18 before they can access adult materials. In the online world, the law has traditionally required, well, nothing. Under Supreme Court precedent established during the internet’s infancy, forcing websites to verify the age of their users is burdensome and ineffective, if not impossible, and thus incompatible with the First Amendment. That arrangement finally appears to be crumbling.”
  6. The Ultimate Guide to Trump’s Day 1 Executive Orders (Richard Hanania, Substack): “The White House website, at the time of this writing, lists 48 items under ‘presidential actions.’ Among these are dozens of first day executive orders.  News reports say that Trump was planning to sign around 100 of them. So while we still wait for the rest, here I’ll review the main things that the executive orders released so far do, broken down by topic. I then go on to take a big picture perspective regarding what we have seen so far means for the future of the country and what we can expect from the Trump administration going forward.” 
    • This seems like a good summary. It only covers the first orders — you’ll need to look elsewhere to find reflection on the stuff from subsequent days.
  7. Meritocracy’s Blind Spot: How America Overlooks Its Own Talent (Tom Owens, Substack): “Overwhelmingly, National Merit Scholars matriculate to large state schools where they are awarded generous scholarships. The #1 destination is the University of Alabama, which provides… not only a full ride, but free housing, an extra $4,000 per year, and also a 5th year that will allow many students to complete a master’s degree. That last one is extremely strategic on Alabama’s part, also building up the competitiveness of their graduate programs by keeping these students in the state and their programs. Bama is a smart operator here, applying the same principles to academic recruiting as they do to their football program. Also notable is their matching of pageant scholarships. One wonders exactly what they’re up to in just straightforwardly recruiting a smart, good-looking student body. This is a cunning long-term investment in their alumni base, as both brains and beauty are predictive of life success. Not to mention that the median white-collar professional can live like a king in Huntsville or the nice suburbs of Birmingham compared to a hovel in NYC or SF, even if it means giving up any hope of being elite.” 
    • A fascinating essay. I don’t know what percentage of this article I believe, but it is not 0%. It’s not 100%, but it’s definitely not 0%. Worth a ponder.

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 486



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. Why Should Ignoring God Matter? (J. Budziszewski, personal blog): “It is abhorrent beyond words to abandon those who have done us the greatest good. Disloyalty to my friend, unfaithfulness to my wife, ingratitude to my parents, treason to my fatherland — such things cannot even be spoken of without shame, calumny, and disgrace. But what greater treason could there be than to turn traitor to the Author of our being, who is not only the Good above all goods, but the Source of all these goods? Why would you want to do that anyway? For He is the true Friend and origin of friendship, the true Bridegroom and origin of marriage, the true Father by whose name all earthly fathers are called. His kingdom is the true Homeland, of which our earthly homeland is hardly a shadow. Don’t any of these seem good things to you? And if we still need more reasons to admire what is so great and good, what’s wrong with us? ‘But I don’t know all this to be true.’ Perhaps not. But wouldn’t it be prudent to find out?” 
    • The author is a professor of philosophy at UT Austin.
  2. contractualism (Alan Jacobs, blog): “To accept that being human means that I am bound to my family even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolutely had it with them, is the beginning of something. But only the beginning. The people you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Boundaries must be set, then re-negotiated, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the family members you have most offended will do the same for you.”
  3. At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality (Eli Tan, New York Times): “Critics of A.I. use by religious leaders have pointed to the issue of hallucinations — times when chatbots make stuff up. While harmless in certain situations, faith-based A.I. tools that fabricate religious scripture present a serious problem. In Rabbi Bot’s sermon, for instance, the A.I. invented a quote from the Jewish philosopher Maimonides that would have passed as authentic to the casual listener.” 
    • I don’t use AI for my sermons, in case you were wondering. I can imagine that someday I might put them into an AI to ask “is there a criticism I should anticipate and address?” or something along those lines, but I genuinely can’t imagine myself outsourcing sermon prep to an AI.
  4. Has World War III Begun? (Kori Schake, The Dispatch): “Our enemies have regional ambitions for conquest and are working to keep the U.S. out, because without the strength of the United States, our regional allies could not protect themselves. Russia threatens nuclear use if the U.S. aids Ukraine, hoping to forestall assistance. China attacks Philippine coast guard ships, hoping the U.S. won’t come to their aid although they are treaty allies of the U.S. North Korea fires missiles over the Sea of Japan and conducts espionage operations against South Korea, testing whether it can be peeled from the U.S. defense umbrella. Iran attacks Saudi Arabia hoping—rightly, it turned out—that the U.S. would balk at retaliation. Their ideal would be a world war without American participation, because it would result in China dominant in Asia, Russia dominant in Europe, North Korea dominant on the Korean Peninsula, and Iran dominant in the Middle East.”
  5. Bureaucracy Isn’t Measured In Bureaucrats (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “This really sunk in for me when I read an article about the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021. Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths? If you ponder this question long enough, you become enlightened about the nature of the administrative state.”
  6. A $24 Billion Fund Puts Its Religious Stamp on Corporate America (Jeff Green and Saijel Kishan, Bloomberg): “GuideStone is part of a nascent coalition of conservative Christian investors that are starting to flex their muscles and use their shareholder clout to counter progressive corporate policies such as funding Pride parades or covering employees’ travel costs for abortions. They’re also zeroing in on banks for allegedly closing customer accounts on political and religious grounds. By some measures, there’s now half a trillion dollars in investments spread across conservative faith-based private funds and state pension funds that can be brought to bear to influence company behavior, said Will Lofland, who oversees shareholder advocacy at GuideStone.”
  7. This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction (Jason Nark, New York Times): “ ‘There is, technically, no snail darter,’ said Thomas Near, curator of ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum. Dr. Near, also a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered. Dr. Near contends that early researchers ‘squinted their eyes a bit’ when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.” 
    • My favorite line in this article is a response from a critic who “believes the findings… lean too heavily on genetics.”

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 484



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.

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tom Holland on How Christianity Remade the World (Bari Weiss, The Free Press): “It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God.… The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all. The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
  2. How historian Niall Ferguson became a religious believer (Greg Sheridan, The Weekend Australian): “I have embraced Christianity,” he tells me. “We were all baptised, Ayaan and our two sons, together in September (2023). It was the culmination of a quite protracted process. My journey was from atheism. My parents had left the Church of Scotland, I think even before I was born. I grew up in a household of science-minded religious sceptics. I didn’t go to church and felt quite sure of the wisdom of that when I was young. However, in two phases, I lost my faith in atheism.… The first phase was that as a historian I realised no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic. That was an insight that came from studying 18th, 19th and 20th-century history. But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith. That insight has come more recently and has been born of our experience as a family.” 
    • Ferguson is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. 
    • I heard this article was paywalled but I was able to access it with no problem. If it is paywalled, you can see Ferguson talking about his conversion on Twitter.
  3. Why Giving Matters (Arthur C. Brooks, Brigham Young University): “Specifically, here’s what I found. If you have two families that are exactly identical—in other words, same religion, same race, same number of kids, same town, same level of education, and everything’s the same—except that one family gives a hundred dollars more to charity than the second family, then the giving family will earn on average $375 more in income than the nongiving family—and that’s statistically attributable to the gift.… I finally went to a colleague who specialized in the psychology of charitable giving, and I said, ‘I’m getting this result I can’t understand. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like the hand of God or something on the economy, and I can’t believe it’s true.’ And the first thing he asked was, ‘Why don’t you believe it’s true? You’re a Christian, aren’t you?’” 
    • This is a few years old (2009), and features a Catholic speaking to Mormons. At the time of the speech Brooks was president of the American Enterprise Institute and currently teaches at Harvard.
    • Towards the end he suggests some causal mechanisms, one of which is that people perceive generosity to be a leadership quality.
  4. How Hallucinatory A.I. Helps Science Dream Up Big Breakthroughs (William J. Broad, New York Times): “In October, David Baker of the University of Washington shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering research on proteins — the knotty molecules that empower life. The Nobel committee praised him for discovering how to rapidly build completely new kinds of proteins not found in nature, calling his feat ‘almost impossible.’ In an interview before the prize announcement, Dr. Baker cited bursts of A.I. imaginings as central to ‘making proteins from scratch.’ The new technology, he added, has helped his lab obtain roughly 100 patents, many for medical care.”
  5. Bringing Elon to a knife fight (Jennifer Pahlka, Substack): “A lot of the [left-leaning] government tech community is skipping the hand wringing; they’ve basically just grabbed a bag of popcorn and are watching in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolutely hated for their entire time in public service. They don’t see DOGE as their savior, but they are feeling vindicated after years of shouting into the void. I am struck by how different the tone of the DOGE conversation is between political leaders on the left and the people who’ve been fighting in the implementation trenches. One group is terrified they’ll succeed. The other is starting to ask a surprising question (or at least I am): What if even billionaires can’t disrupt the system we have built?” 
    • The first comment is a necessary complement to this essay.
  6. House Member in Senior Living Facility Draws Fresh Scrutiny to Aging Congress (Catie Edmondson, New York Times): “Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is Congress’s eldest member at 91 years old. In 2023, The New York Times tallied 20 lawmakers who were at least 80 years old. While the Constitution lays out a floor for age requirements for those running for Congress, it does not mandate a ceiling. That has created a bevy of awkward situations for leaders in both parties, who have been thrust into the delicate position of trying to nudge out aging lawmakers who refuse to release their grip on power.”
  7. Engage Bespoke Spirituality: Reflections from Conversations on Campus (Mark Legg, The Gospel Coalition): “I often encountered the view of faith sometimes called ‘bespoke spirituality,’ a way of engaging with religion by picking and choosing beliefs and practices that ‘vibe’ with you personally. The students I met were authentically open-minded to Christianity. However, they resisted (or often struggled to understand) the claim that Jesus is the only ‘way,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘life,’ and that ‘no one comes to the Father except through [him]’ (John 14:6).”
    • I didn’t know it had a label, but it’s everywhere at Stanford. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Little Drummer Boy Finally Leaves The Stable And Oh No! Here Comes Little Bagpipe Boy! (Babylon Bee)
  • Big Jack — a great short story told in comic form. I really enjoyed it. I may have shared it before — I know I’ve read it before.
  • It Pays to Have Long Hair and a Beard in Utah—Jesus Models Are in Demand (Bradley Olson, Wall Street Journal): “Models who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a growing number of people in the state, a picture isn’t complete without Him. They are hiring Jesus look-alikes for family portraits and wedding announcements. Models are showing up to walk with a newly engaged couple through a field, play with young children in the Bonneville Salt Flats, and cram in with the family for the annual Christmas card.” 
    • Recommended by a friend of the ministry.
    • This bit made me laugh: “Finding a model can be difficult. Areas of Utah with high concentrations of Mormons—who also call themselves Latter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack potential Jesus doppelgängers. Some men who work or volunteer for the church, one of the state’s largest employers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.”
  • My Neighbor Won’t Stop Praying for Me. What Should I Do? (Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times): “The only reason you give for objecting to her prayers is that she has failed to comply with your wishes. Yet I don’t find that she has thereby treated you with disrespect, because I don’t see that you have the right to have those wishes complied with. You seem to be asking her not to do something she thinks there are compelling reasons to do. I’d have thought that this was disrespectful.”
    • This also made me laugh. Chortle, even.
  • A 1,000-Year-Old Seed Grows in Israel (Franz Lidz, New York Times): “In 2010, Dr. Sallon obtained a mysterious seed from the archaeological archives of Hebrew University, hoping that it could germinate. The seed had been discovered in a cave during a 1980s excavation at Wadi el-Makkuk, a winter water channel in the northern Judean desert, and was languishing in storage. After determining that the seed was still viable, Dr. Sallon’s research team planted, sprouted and carefully tended it. When the husk was carbon-dated to between A.D. 993 and A.D. 1202, a thought occurred to Dr. Sallon. ‘I wondered if what germinated could be the sourceof the balm of Gilead,’ she said. On the hunch that it was, she named the specimen Sheba. Since then, the 1,000-year-old seedling has grown into a sturdy 12-foot-tall tree with no modern counterpart. Sheba’s painstaking revival — kept secret from the public for 14 years — is detailed in a study that was published in September in the journal Communications Biology.” 

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.