Tag: apologetically interesting

TGFI, Volume 543: artificial humanities and a wise wager

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 541: What Forgiveness Takes

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI Volume 529: French revival, gender differences, bogus sociology

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 526: academic biases, reasonable faith, and wild AI

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 523: religion makes you happy and war is terrifying

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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