Tag: apologetically interesting

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



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 494: Religion at Elite Schools, Why Shrimp Must Die, and Funny Videos

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 493: Christianity stabilizes in America, the truth about a spying monk, & why denominations struggle

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 492: suffering, plane crashes, and near death experiences

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 490

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 489

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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