Tag: apologetically interesting

TGFI, Volume 548: anxiety, atheism, and China

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 543: artificial humanities and a wise wager

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 541: What Forgiveness Takes

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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 ÅŒhi­ra, 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.