Tag: apologetically interesting

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 457



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

This is vol­ume 457, the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (149 + 151 + 157) and also appar­ent­ly the index of a prime Euclid num­ber, but I would be lying if I said I knew what that is.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The case for show­ing up to church—even if you don’t believe in God (Emma Camp, Amer­i­ca): “But despite my reg­u­lar church atten­dance for almost two years now, I still haven’t devel­oped a rock-sol­id faith. I’ve joked—and said as much on Twitter—that I only believe in God about 30 per­cent of the time on a good day. My ambiva­lence does set me apart from most of my friends from church, a group that includes a few sem­i­nar­i­ans. But it doesn’t keep me from com­ing back.”
  2. The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs (Ruxan­dra Tes­lo, Sub­stack): “To for­mal­ize this: ‘Any sys­tem that is not explic­it­ly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pret­ty quick­ly.’ That is because most peo­ple, while lik­ing non-con­formism in the abstract and post-fac­to, are not very will­ing to actu­al­ly put up with the per­son­al­i­ty trade-offs of Weird Nerds in prac­tice. There is an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple right now who are think­ing about how to build bet­ter intel­lec­tu­al insti­tu­tions… it’s worth think­ing about what kind of peo­ple one wants to attract in these insti­tu­tions and how to keep them there. And I believe the con­ver­sa­tion here starts with accept­ing a sim­ple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have cer­tain traits that might be less than ide­al, that these traits come ‘in a pack­age’ with oth­er, very good traits, and if one makes fil­ter­ing or pro­mo­tion based on the absence of those traits a pri­or­i­ty, they will miss out on the pos­i­tives.”
  3. An Object Les­son From Covid on How to Destroy Pub­lic Trust (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “If the gov­ern­ment mis­led peo­ple about how Covid is trans­mit­ted, why would Amer­i­cans believe what it says about vac­cines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should peo­ple dis­tin­guish between wild con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and actu­al con­spir­a­cies?… As the expres­sion goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buck­ets, and this buck­et is going to take a very long time to refill.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. ‘Sham’ Surgery Can Actu­al­ly Fix Our Bod­ies. So Why Are Some Against It? (Jere­my How­ick, Sci­ence Alert): “More broad­ly, a review of 53 place­bo-con­trolled surgery tri­als found that sham surgery was as good as the real thing in over half of the stud­ies. Sham knee and back surgery works as well as real surgery for pain. Pre­tend­ing to put brain implants works as well as real implants for reduc­ing migraine attacks. Fake laser surgery works as well as real laser surgery to stop gas­troin­testi­nal bleed­ing. And fake surgery works as well as real surgery for mak­ing sphinc­ters func­tion more effi­cient­ly.”
  5. The Day My Old Church Can­celed Me Was a Very Sad Day (David French, New York Times): “When I left the Repub­li­can Par­ty, I thought a shared faith would pre­serve my denom­i­na­tion­al home. But I was wrong. Race and pol­i­tics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer wel­come in the church I loved.”
    • Unlocked.
  6. Alito’s ‘God­li­ness’ Com­ment Echoes a Broad­er Chris­t­ian Move­ment (Eliz­a­beth Dias and Lisa Lerer, New York Times): “It’s a phrase not com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with legal doc­trine: return­ing Amer­i­ca to ‘a place of god­li­ness.’ And yet when asked by a woman pos­ing as a Catholic con­ser­v­a­tive at a din­ner last week, Jus­tice Samuel A. Ali­to Jr. appeared to endorse the idea.… Now, Supreme Court jus­tices have become caught up in the debate over whether Amer­i­ca is a Chris­t­ian nation. While Jus­tice Ali­to is hard­ly open­ly cham­pi­oning these views, he is embrac­ing lan­guage and sym­bol­ism that line up with a much broad­er move­ment push­ing back against the declin­ing pow­er of Chris­tian­i­ty as a major­i­ty reli­gion in Amer­i­ca.”
    • This caveat is sig­nif­i­cant and should per­haps be high­er placed in the sto­ry: “The Times has not heard the full unedit­ed record­ing and has reviewed only the edit­ed record­ing post­ed online, after the woman who record­ed them, a lib­er­al activist, declined to send the Times the full record­ing.” 
    • Relat­ed: What Exact­ly Did Jus­tice Ali­to Say That Was Wrong? (Marc O. DeGiro­la­mi, New York Times): “Where was the justice’s error? He did not men­tion any pend­ing case or lit­i­ga­tion. He did not name any per­son or par­ty. He did not dis­cuss any spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal or moral mat­ter. Most of the exchange con­sists of the filmmaker’s own goad­ing remarks, fol­lowed by the justice’s vague and ano­dyne affir­ma­tions and replies. About what you might expect when cor­nered at a bor­ing cock­tail par­ty.”
    • Relat­ed: Wild Dis­tor­tions of ‘Secret Record­ing’ of Ali­to (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “You are wel­come of course to dis­agree with Ali­to.… But it’s beyond bizarre to find it news­wor­thy that Ali­to made a pri­vate com­ment that mir­rors pub­lic speech­es he has been giv­ing.”
  7. Against Ambi­tion (Grace Car­roll, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Wineb­urg walked into his class­room intend­ing to make a brief open­ing com­ment about the scene out­side. What fol­lowed — a tirade against a cul­ture of careerism so bla­tant­ly prof­it-moti­vat­ed that stu­dents were being lured, lit­er­al­ly, to flash­ing salaries like moths to flame — ‘sort of took on a life of its own,’ he recalled recent­ly. It’s known col­lo­qui­al­ly among some stu­dents as ‘the rant.’ I was one of the frosh sit­ting in Wineburg’s class that fall. I remem­ber the rant.… most­ly I remem­ber feel­ing like some­one was lift­ing some­thing very heavy off of me, a weight I hadn’t real­ized I was car­ry­ing until it was gone.”

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 454



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

This is vol­ume 454, a num­ber whose sym­me­try pleas­es me.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Nones Have Hit a Ceil­ing (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The rise of the nones may be large­ly over now. At least it won’t be increas­ing in the same way that it did in the pri­or thir­ty years. Of course, the ques­tion is why? I don’t know if I have a bul­let­proof answer. I think the eas­i­est expla­na­tion is that a lot of mar­gin­al­ly attached peo­ple switched to ‘no reli­gion’ on sur­veys over the last decade or two. Even­tu­al­ly, there weren’t that many mar­gin­al­ly attached folks any­more. All you had left were the very com­mit­ted reli­gious peo­ple who like­ly won’t become nones for any rea­son. The loose top soil has been scooped off and hauled away, leav­ing noth­ing but hard bedrock under­neath.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  2. ‘Loud-mouthed bul­ly’: CS Lewis satirised Oxford peer in secret poems (Dalya Alberge, The Guardian): “Jok­ing that an infu­ri­at­ed Lewis had per­haps com­posed them dur­ing one of Wyld’s lec­tures, Horobin not­ed that one of them iden­ti­fies Wyld through an acros­tic with the ini­tial let­ters spelling out the name ‘Hen­ry Cecil Wyld’. He added: ‘On the remain­ing blank pages he penned a series of addi­tion­al satir­i­cal vers­es lam­poon­ing Wyld – one in Eng­lish, along­side oth­ers in Latin, Greek, French and even Old Eng­lish.’ ”
    • Even Lewis’s shade was epic and eru­dite. I love this sto­ry. Also, a reminder that every word will be brought into judge­ment — even words uttered (or penned) in secret. I should men­tion he would not yet have been a Chris­t­ian when these poems appear to have been com­posed.
  3. What Do Stu­dents at Elite Col­leges Real­ly Want? (Francesca Mari, New York Times): “…every­one arrived on cam­pus hop­ing to change the world. But what they learn at Har­vard, he said, is that actu­al­ly doing any­thing mean­ing­ful is too hard. Peo­ple give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make mon­ey. Some­one else told me it was com­mon at par­ties to hear their peers say they just want to sell out.”
    • Unlocked
  4. Redefin­ing the sci­en­tif­ic method: as the use of sophis­ti­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods that extend our mind (Alexan­der Krauss, PNAS Nexus): “This study reveals that 25% of all dis­cov­er­ies since 1900 did not apply the com­mon sci­en­tif­ic method (all three features)—with 6% of dis­cov­er­ies using no obser­va­tion, 23% using no exper­i­men­ta­tion, and 17% not test­ing a hypoth­e­sis. Empir­i­cal evi­dence thus chal­lenges the com­mon view of the sci­en­tif­ic method.”
    • From the abstract because it is so suc­cinct­ly put, but the arti­cle itself is easy to read. Rec­om­mend­ed. The author is a philoso­pher of sci­ence at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics.
  5. Amer­i­can Mis­sion­ar­ies Killed in Port-au-Prince (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Crim­i­nal gangs killed near­ly 5,000 peo­ple in Haiti last year. Then, in 2024, the gangs band­ed togeth­er, turned against the politi­cians who had once col­lab­o­rat­ed with them for pow­er, and launched coor­di­nat­ed attacks on the gov­ern­ment. The gangs set police sta­tions on fire, shut down the main air­port and sea­port, and broke open two pris­ons, releas­ing an esti­mat­ed 4,000 inmates. They van­dal­ized gov­ern­ment offices, stormed the Nation­al Palace, and took con­trol of about 80 per­cent of the cap­i­tal.”
  6. Group chats rule the world. (Sri­ram Krish­nan, per­son­al blog): “Most of the inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions in tech now hap­pen in pri­vate group chats: What­sapp, Telegram, Sig­nal, small invite-only Dis­cord groups.… The great cul­ture wars of 2020 meant peo­ple, espe­cial­ly in tech, weren’t com­fort­able shar­ing their views in pub­lic lest they get var­i­ous online mobs after them.”
  7. What ‘Tradwives’—and Some of Their Critics—Miss (Han­nah Ander­son, The Dis­patch): “But women haven’t been unique­ly lied to. Fam­i­lies have been lied to about what their homes can and should be. Men and women alike have been told that their great­est achieve­ments lie out­side of it. And yet, a mar­riage reduced from two ‘careerists’ to one is still serv­ing cor­po­rate inter­ests. At best, a woman sac­ri­fic­ing her career to enable her husband’s career (as Butk­er asserts his wife does and as he coun­seled new female grad­u­ates) miss­es the point. At worst, it enables the very mar­ket­place that desires noth­ing more than to creep into our homes and com­mod­i­fy every expres­sion of good­ness and beau­ty that hap­pens there—even if what we’re sell­ing is tra­di­tion­al­ism.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Tour by Drone (YouTube): six min­utes (it’s a lit­tle long, but the first bit is nice to watch)
  • Will 18 year old Emma Olson FOOL Penn & Teller with a Rubik’s cube? (Penn & Teller Fool Us, YouTube): nine min­utes
  • When an Eel Takes a Bite Then an Octo­pus Might Claim an Eye­ball (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “In each video, the com­mon octo­pus may sac­ri­fice arms, much as lizards drop their tails to dis­tract preda­tors, Dr. Hernán­dez-Urcera said. In the first video, the octo­pus los­es three arms while the one in the sec­ond video los­es two — but they can ful­ly regrow limbs in about 45 days, some lab tests show.”
    • Rarely do I find that news arti­cles are improved by embed­ded videos. This is one of the excep­tions. Very cool.
  • Are Plants Intel­li­gent? If So, What Does That Mean for Your Sal­ad? (Eliz­a­beth A. Har­ris, New York Times): “Obvi­ous­ly we’re ani­mals that need to eat plants. There’s no way around that. But there is a way of imag­in­ing a future with agri­cul­tur­al prac­tices and har­vest­ing prac­tices that are more tuned into the life style of the plant, the things it’s capa­ble of and its pro­cliv­i­ties. This opens up the world of plant ethics.”
    • The arti­cle itself is inter­est­ing. The title made me laugh.

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 447

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

This is vol­ume 447, which I kin­da hoped would be prime. Alas, 447 = 3 · 149.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. One of the Most Over­looked Argu­ments for the Res­ur­rec­tion (Michael J. Kruger, blog): “…the ear­li­est Chris­tians came to believe, against all odds and against all expec­ta­tions, that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead. Notice the dis­tinc­tive nature of this claim. The claim is not that Jesus rose from the dead (though, I think he did). The claim is that the ear­li­est fol­low­ers of Jesus came to believe—and very strong­ly believe— that he did. And that is a whol­ly oth­er mat­ter. Why? Because it is a his­tor­i­cal fact that is not dis­put­ed.”
  2. The Prob­lem With Say­ing ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’ (Alex Byrne and Car­ole K. Hooven, New York Times): “Sexed organ­isms were present on Earth at least a bil­lion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had nev­er evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of lin­guis­tic cer­e­monies in the deliv­ery room or oth­er cul­tur­al prac­tices. Lone­some George, the long-lived Galá­pa­gos giant tor­toise, was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatch­ing. A baby aban­doned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by any­one, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the con­fu­sion sown by some schol­ars, we can be con­fi­dent that the sex bina­ry is not a human inven­tion.”
    • One author is a philoso­pher at MIT, the oth­er an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard. Unlocked.
  3. Rival per­spec­tives on the war between Israel and Hamas
    • https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1775980849944539391 (Cole­man Hugh­es, Twit­ter): a two and a half minute video sym­pa­thet­ic to Israel
    • Bomb First, Ask Ques­tions Lat­er (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “To hit one car is a mis­for­tune; to destroy three cars con­sec­u­tive­ly on a pre-approved route, not so much. The cars were clear­ly marked and in a decon­flic­tion zone — but the IDF pol­i­cy is to tar­get any­where Hamas could be present, even if some civil­ians were killed. As we’ll see, one dead Hamas mem­ber and sev­en dead civil­ians was well with­in the mar­gin of error Israel had set for itself. So it appears they method­i­cal­ly took out each car to make sure they fin­ished the job. No, I don’t believe that Israel delib­er­ate­ly mur­dered the aid work­ers; but I do think that, in con­text, the IDF’s effec­tive rules of engage­ment — strike places like hos­pi­tals and schools because Hamas is there, even though there will be many civil­ian casu­al­ties — made this kind of indif­fer­ence to human life pos­si­ble.”
  4. The Church of Trump: How He’s Infus­ing Chris­tian­i­ty Into His Move­ment (Michael C. Ben­der, New York Times): “The appar­ent effec­tive­ness of such tac­tics has made Mr. Trump the nation’s first major politi­cian to suc­cess­ful­ly sep­a­rate char­ac­ter from pol­i­cy for reli­gious vot­ers, said John Fea, a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school in Penn­syl­va­nia. ‘Trump has split the atom between char­ac­ter and pol­i­cy,’ Mr. Fea said. ‘He did it because he’s real­ly the first one to lis­ten to their griev­ances and take them seri­ous­ly. Does he real­ly care about evan­gel­i­cals? I don’t know. But he’s built a mes­sage to appeal direct­ly to them.’”
    • Unlocked
  5. The Case for Mar­ry­ing an Old­er Man (Gra­zie Sophia Christie, The Cut): “Very soon, we will decide to have chil­dren, and I don’t pan­ic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it ear­ly: on the hol­i­days of some­one who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beau­ti­ful places when I was young and beau­ti­ful, a sym­me­try I rec­om­mend. If such a thing as mater­nal ener­gy exists, mine was nev­er deplet­ed. I spent the last near­ly sev­en years sup­port­ed more than I sup­port and I am still not as old as my hus­band was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does pro­fes­sion­al tenure earn you if not the right to set more lim­its on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least?”
    • A well-writ­ten and unusu­al posi­tion. Not the only path to con­sid­er, but cer­tain­ly a path to con­sid­er.
  6. Break­through in prime num­ber the­o­ry demon­strates primes can be pre­dict­ed (Michael Gibb, Phys.org): “Con­trary to what just about every math­e­mati­cian on Earth will tell you, prime num­bers can be pre­dict­ed, accord­ing to researchers at City Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong (CityUHK) and North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty, U.S.”
  7. Are Mem­bers of the Cler­gy Mis­er­able? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I real­ly want­ed to key in on a few ques­tions about job/life sat­is­fac­tion. The sur­vey repli­cates a ques­tion from ‘The Sat­is­fac­tion with Life Scale.’ The state­ment is sim­ply: In most ways my life is close to my ide­al.… The mean score for this was 5.6 in the cler­gy sam­ple. Among mem­bers of Israel’s Defense Force it was 4.7, among some uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents it was found to 5.23. Among nurs­es it was 3.81. In a sam­ple of peo­ple liv­ing in Colom­bia it was only 3.67. The long and short of it was this — I can’t find anoth­er pop­u­la­tion group that scores high­er on this met­ric than cler­gy.… I’m pret­ty con­fi­dent in say­ing that cler­gy seemed pret­ty con­tent with their sta­tion in life (or at least this was the case before the pan­dem­ic).”
    • Maybe laypeo­ple don’t hear this very often, but I am often in cir­cles where they talk about an epi­dem­ic of min­is­te­r­i­al dis­sat­is­fac­tion. But I’ve nev­er seen it. I love my job and pret­ty much all my peers do, too. What we do is amaz­ing. I’m glad to see a schol­ar vin­di­cat­ing my intu­ition.

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 435

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

This is vol­ume 435, a tri­an­gu­lar num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Ground of Our Assur­ance (D. A. Car­son, YouTube): three and a half excel­lent min­utes
  2. No, Not Every­one Needs Ther­a­py (Freya India, Sub­stack): “… there are peo­ple who now feel pres­sured to get pro­fes­sion­al help for nor­mal neg­a­tive emotions—teens and pre-teens con­vinced the rea­son they’re sad some­times is because they’re bro­ken and haven’t paid enough to be healed. Now not going to ther­a­py is a red flag. Seek­ing sup­port from friends and fam­i­ly is exploit­ing their ’emo­tion­al labour’. And men are shamed for pre­fer­ring to chat to their mates about their prob­lems than pay a stranger, like that one Bet­ter­Help ad where a woman dis­miss­es a guy she’s dat­ing because he ‘doesn’t do ther­a­py’. Think about that! How have we reached the point where we’re stig­ma­tis­ing peo­ple for not need­ing men­tal health sup­port?”
  3. What If There Is No Such Thing as ‘Bib­li­cal’ Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty? (Brady Bow­man, Mere Ortho­doxy): “…the ‘pro­duc­tiv­i­ty mind­set’ seems to me, at least in some ways, deeply incon­gru­ent with the Bible’s vision of real­i­ty. To say it more sim­ply, to adopt an out­look dom­i­nat­ed by speed and effi­cien­cy and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is to adopt a per­spec­tive that is alien to the writ­ers of Scrip­ture.…”
  4. New tech­nol­o­gy inter­prets archae­o­log­i­cal find­ings from Bib­li­cal times (Tel Aviv Uni­ver­si­ty, Phys.org): “Apply­ing their method to find­ings from ancient Gath (Tell es-Safi in cen­tral Israel), the researchers val­i­dat­ed the Bib­li­cal account, ‘About this time Haz­a­el King of Aram went up and attacked Gath and cap­tured it. Then he turned to attack Jerusalem’ (2 Kings 12, 18). They explain that, unlike pre­vi­ous meth­ods, the new tech­nique can deter­mine whether a cer­tain item (such as a mud brick) under­went a fir­ing event even at rel­a­tive­ly low tem­per­a­tures, from 200°C and up.”
  5. US Intel­li­gence Shows Flawed Chi­na Mis­siles Led Xi to Purge Army (Peter Mar­tin and Jen­nifer Jacobs, Bloomberg): “The cor­rup­tion inside China’s Rock­et Force and through­out the nation’s defense indus­tri­al base is so exten­sive that US offi­cials now believe Xi is less like­ly to con­tem­plate major mil­i­tary action in the com­ing years than would oth­er­wise have been the case, accord­ing to the peo­ple, who asked not to be named dis­cussing intel­li­gence.”
    • This may be the most impor­tant bit of geopo­lit­i­cal news you read this year.
  6. The Mis­guid­ed War on the SAT (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “With the Supreme Court’s restric­tion of affir­ma­tive action last year, emo­tions around col­lege admis­sions are run­ning high. The debate over stan­dard­ized test­ing has become caught up in deep­er ques­tions about inequal­i­ty in Amer­i­ca and what pur­pose, ulti­mate­ly, the nation’s uni­ver­si­ties should serve. But the data sug­gests that test­ing crit­ics have drawn the wrong bat­tle lines. If test scores are used as one fac­tor among oth­ers — and if col­leges give appli­cants cred­it for hav­ing over­come adver­si­ty — the SAT and ACT can help cre­ate diverse class­es of high­ly tal­ent­ed stu­dents. Restor­ing the tests might also help address a dif­fer­ent frus­tra­tion that many Amer­i­cans have with the admis­sions process at elite uni­ver­si­ties: that it has become too opaque and uncon­nect­ed to mer­it.”
    • Not the main point of the essay, but worth com­ment­ing that pol­i­tics poi­sons what­ev­er it polar­izes.
  7. The Pecu­liar Sto­ry of C. S. Lewis and Janie King Moore (Bethel McGrew, First Things): “Lewis’s let­ters from this peri­od are marked by an under­stat­ed deep relief. He wrote to a fre­quent cor­re­spon­dent that he was only just begin­ning to appre­ci­ate ‘how bad it was’ in hind­sight. And yet, though we miss the works he might have writ­ten under dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, we might also won­der whether the books we have would have been the same, had duty not com­pelled him to die to self every day for the sake of one frag­ile, impos­si­ble old woman. In the end, his own words rang as true for him­self as they did for every­one else: ‘Whether we like it or not God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.’”

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 434

On (most) Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. I skipped last week due to the hol­i­days.

Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

This is vol­ume 434, a num­ber which is a palin­drome. It is also the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes: 434 = 61 + 67 + 71 + 73 + 79 + 83

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Our God­less era is dead (Paul Kingsnorth, UnHerd): “I grew up believ­ing in things which I now look on very dif­fer­ent­ly. To put career before fam­i­ly. To accu­mu­late wealth as a mark­er of sta­tus. To treat sex as recre­ation. To reflex­ive­ly mock author­i­ty and tra­di­tion. To put indi­vid­ual desire before com­mu­ni­ty respon­si­bil­i­ty. To treat the world as so much dead mat­ter to be inter­ro­gat­ed by the sci­en­tif­ic process. To assume our ances­tors were thick­er than us. I did all of this, or tried to, for years. Most of us did, I sup­pose. Per­haps above all, and per­haps at the root of all, there was one teach­ing that per­me­at­ed every­thing. It was to treat reli­gion as some­thing both prim­i­tive and obso­lete. Sim­ply a bunch of fairy sto­ries invent­ed by the igno­rant. Sim­ply a mech­a­nism of social con­trol. Noth­ing to do with us, here, now, in our very mod­ern, sex­u­al­ly lib­er­at­ed, choose-your-own-adven­ture world.”
  2. Part of a Chris­tian’s Job is to Point Out that Mod­ern Life Stinks (Samue D. James, Sub­stack): “Part of the evan­gel­i­cal wit­ness right now should be to point out that mod­ern life stinks. Its tech­nol­o­gy makes us lone­ly. Its sex­u­al­i­ty makes us emp­ty. Its psy­chother­a­py makes us self-obsessed. Many peo­ple are on the brink of obliv­ion, held back in some cas­es only by med­ica­tion or polit­i­cal iden­ti­ty. We strug­gle to artic­u­late why we should con­tin­ue to live. Evan­gel­i­cals should jump in here.”
    • The end is straight fire.
  3. Uni­ver­si­ties Are Not on the Lev­el (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “I per­son­al­ly have also devel­oped a more neg­a­tive view of col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties over the last decade, and my rea­son is sim­ple: I increas­ing­ly find these insti­tu­tions to be dis­hon­est. A lot of the research com­ing out of them does not aim at truth, whether because it is politi­cized or for more venal rea­sons. The social jus­tice mes­sag­ing they wrap them­selves in is often insin­cere. Their pub­lic account­ings of the rea­sons for their inter­nal actions are often implau­si­ble. They lie about the role that race plays in their admis­sions and hir­ing prac­tices. And some­times, espe­cial­ly at the grad­u­ate lev­el, they con­fer degrees whose val­ue they know will not jus­ti­fy the time and mon­ey that stu­dents invest to get them. The most recent deba­cle at Har­vard, in which large swathes of acad­e­mia seem to have con­ve­nient­ly for­got­ten what the term ‘pla­gia­rism’ means so they don’t have to admit that Clau­dine Gay engaged in it, is only the lat­est exam­ple of the lying that is endem­ic on cam­pus.”
    • Relat­ed: Har­vard Couldn’t Save Both Clau­dine Gay and Itself (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The Ivy League believes in its pro­gres­sive doc­trines, but not as much as it believes in its own indis­pens­abil­i­ty, its per­ma­nent role as an incu­ba­tor of priv­i­lege and influ­ence.”
    • Also relat­ed: The Clau­dine Gay Affair (Fred­er­ick M. Hess, Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute): “High­er ed doesn’t have many friends on the right. In my expe­ri­ence, elite col­lege lead­ers aren’t all that both­ered by this (some seem per­verse­ly proud of it). Well, when pub­licly-sup­port­ed, high­ly vis­i­ble insti­tu­tions choose to take sides in polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al fights, there are con­se­quences. With the right hav­ing lost faith in high­er ed and becom­ing increas­ing­ly com­fort­able push­ing back on the col­lege car­tel, cam­pus lead­ers had bet­ter strap in for a bumpy ride.”
      • Brief and inter­est­ing, espe­cial­ly the per­son­al con­nec­tion to Clau­dine Gay.
  4. My Bible Read­ing Feels Flat — What Can I Do? (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “Is there some­thing you can do to move from ears attend­ing to words and minds grasp­ing for knowl­edge to hearts expe­ri­enc­ing pleas­ant­ness of what is with­in? Is there any­thing you can do? [The writer of Proverbs 22 says] yes, and the words he uses go like this: ‘Apply your heart to what your ear has heard and the knowl­edge that’s form­ing in your mind.’”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
  5. Did Islam­ic beliefs trig­ger the use of rape in Hamas attacks? If ‘yes,’ reporters should say so (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Well, what hap­pened to these Israeli women was off the charts and it’s about time reporters called it out for what it was. The attack­ers believed that their vio­lence was sanc­tioned by reli­gion, just as much as it was dri­ven by revenge. Hin­du human-rights activists have no illu­sions about these real­i­ties. I chanced upon a polit­i­cal Hin­du site that com­pares the Hamas bru­tal­i­ties against Jew­ish women with Mus­lim inva­sions of India and the mass rapes of Hin­du women as recent­ly as 1971.… [it blames] the whole rape-and-sex-slav­ery empha­sis of invad­ing Islam­ic hordes on Islam allow­ing each man four wives and lim­it­less slaves and con­cu­bines. The lat­ter real­ly aren’t in vogue in the 21st cen­tu­ry but ISIS had a huge sex slave sys­tem going among cap­tive Yazi­di women in Iraq and Syr­ia rough­ly from 2014–2017.”
    • This is a dis­turb­ing read. Also, this is not an indict­ment of Islam as a whole, but it is cer­tain­ly an indict­ment of some Mus­lim the­olo­gies.

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 432

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

This is vol­ume 432, a num­ber pleas­ant to look at because of the smooth­ly decreas­ing dig­its. Also, 432 = 4 · 33 · 22, which is kin­da cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Two Par­ents Are the Ulti­mate Priv­i­lege (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “Two par­ents com­bined have more resources than one. Two par­ents in a home bring in the earnings—or at least the earn­ings capac­i­ty—of two adults. And so, in a very straight­for­ward way, we see that kids grow­ing up in sin­gle-moth­er homes are five times more like­ly to live in pover­ty than kids grow­ing up in mar­ried par­ent homes. (Kids in sin­gle-father homes are three times as like­ly to live in pover­ty.) Some of that reflects the fact that peo­ple with low­er lev­els of edu­ca­tion or income are more like­ly to become sin­gle par­ents. But even if you com­pare across moms of the same edu­ca­tion group, you see that kids who grow up in a house­hold with two par­ents have house­hold incomes that are about twice as high. That means that those par­ents are pay­ing for things like a nicer house in a safe neigh­bor­hood with good school dis­tricts. But they also spend more time with their kids. We see that kids who grow up with mar­ried par­ents have more parental time invest­ed in them: read­ing to your kid, talk­ing to your kid, dri­ving your kids to activ­i­ties. If there are two par­ents in the house­hold, there’s just more time capac­i­ty.”
    • The inter­vie­wee, Melis­sa Kear­ney, is an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land.
    • This part near the end also caught my atten­tion: “You write that you would speak to your fel­low schol­ars about your plans for writ­ing this book, and they would say things along the lines of, ‘I tend to agree about all of this, but are you sure you want to be out there say­ing this pub­licly?’ How many areas of research, inquiry, and basic curios­i­ty about the most impor­tant things in our lives and cul­ture are third rail now? If it’s taboo to write a book say­ing two par­ents in a house are bet­ter mate­ri­al­ly than one, what else is off-lim­its, and what can we do to com­bat that?”
  2. Some links relat­ed to acad­e­mia, con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny, and speech in gen­er­al:
    • You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a Col­lege Admin­is­tra­tor (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “Why are these hor­ri­ble, no-win posi­tions? Because the pri­ma­ry job of any col­lege dean or uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent is to deal with the most spoiled, enti­tled, pig-head­ed inter­est groups imag­in­able. First, there are the stu­dents…”
    • Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff is a hard­er ques­tion than for stu­dents or fac­ul­ty. Stu­dents will move on, and a lot of fac­ul­ty hate each oth­er any­way, and don’t have to work togeth­er very much. Plus the pro­tec­tion of tenure was (sup­pos­ed­ly?) designed to sup­port free­dom of speech and opin­ion, even ‘per­ceived to be offen­sive’ opin­ions. As for stu­dents, we want them to be exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent opin­ions in their youth, even if some of those opin­ions are bad or stu­pid. Staff in these regards are dif­fer­ent.”
    • What the Uni­ver­si­ty Pres­i­dents Got Right and Wrong About Anti­se­mit­ic Speech (David French, New York Times): “I’m a for­mer lit­i­ga­tor who spent much of my legal career bat­tling cen­sor­ship on col­lege cam­pus­es, and the thing that struck me about the pres­i­dents’ answers wasn’t their legal insuf­fi­cien­cy but rather their stun­ning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the pres­i­dents’ under­stand­ing of the law, that has cre­at­ed a cam­pus cri­sis.”
    • Penn’s Lead­er­ship Resigns Amid Con­tro­ver­sies Over Anti­semitism (Stephanie Saul and Alan Blind­er, New York Times): “The pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, M. Eliz­a­beth Mag­ill, resigned on Sat­ur­day, four days after her tes­ti­mo­ny at a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing in which she seemed to evade the ques­tion of whether stu­dents who called for the geno­cide of Jews should be dis­ci­plined.… Ms. Mag­ill, a for­mer Stan­ford Law School dean and Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia provost, had come to the uni­ver­si­ty as part of a wave of women to lead Ivy League col­leges.”
  3. Some reflec­tions on the war between Israel and Hamas:
    • Who’s a ‘Col­o­niz­er’? How an Old Word Became a New Weapon (Roger Cohen, New York Times): “The clash over pur­port­ed Israeli colo­nial­ism is part of some­thing larg­er, a pro­found move­ment in people’s minds. The Pales­tin­ian nation­al strug­gle has become the cause of the jus­tice-seek­ing dis­pos­sessed through­out the world. At the same time, the quest of the Jews to find refuge in a nation­al home­land as the only answer to being the peren­ni­al out­cast has become a bat­tle to demon­strate that, far from being colo­nial­ist, Israel is a diverse nation large­ly formed by a gath­er­ing-in of the per­se­cut­ed.”
      • Cov­ers a lot of ground, broad­ly help­ful.
    • What Jus­tice Requires in Gaza (Jack Omer-Jacka­man, Per­sua­sion): “How much injus­tice can a war con­tain before it is no longer a just war? His­to­ry is cer­tain­ly replete with wars we con­sid­er just on the whole, but which were lit­tered with gross vio­la­tions of human rights and decen­cy. What was true on Octo­ber 7th is true today: Hamas is a mass-rap­ing, civil­ian-slaugh­ter­ing, baby-kid­nap­ping evil, whose defeat should be sup­port­ed by all friends of Israel and all friends of Pales­tine. But I can­not be silent when my own rea­son and my own heart con­clude that Gazan civil­ians are not being suf­fi­cient­ly pro­tect­ed. In the fail­ure of Israeli strikes to dis­tin­guish between civil­ian and ter­ror­ist, and in the ham­per­ing of human­i­tar­i­an aid efforts, too much of this war is being fought unjust­ly.”
  4. In 2024, the Ten­sion Between Macro­cul­ture and Micro­cul­ture Will Turn into War (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The clash has reached some kind of bru­tal tip­ping point. I believe it’s about to turn into war. The fact that 2024 is an elec­tion year will esca­late the con­flict. Just wait and see. But even right now you can feel the ground shak­ing.… [alter­na­tive plat­forms are out­per­form­ing Hol­ly­wood.] This seems impos­si­ble. A sin­gle indi­vid­ual liv­ing in Greenville, North Car­oli­na defeats enor­mous glob­al busi­ness­es with tens of thou­sands of employ­ees and decades of experience—and does it repeat­ed­ly every month. But that’s exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing stats in here.
    • Relat­ed (at least to me): When the New York Times lost its way (James Ben­net, The Econ­o­mist): “This is a bit of a para­dox. The new news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems ide­al­is­tic, yet it has grown from cyn­i­cal roots in acad­e­mia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objec­tive truth; that there is only nar­ra­tive, and that there­fore who­ev­er con­trols the nar­ra­tive – who­ev­er gets to tell the ver­sion of the sto­ry that the pub­lic hears – has the whip hand. What mat­ters, in oth­er words, is not truth and ideas in them­selves, but the pow­er to deter­mine both in the pub­lic mind. By con­trast, the old news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems cyn­i­cal on its sur­face. It used to bug me that my edi­tors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any per­son in pow­er was a lie. And the pur­suit of objec­tiv­i­ty can seem rep­til­ian, even nihilis­tic, in its abju­ra­tion of a fixed posi­tion in moral con­tests. But the basis of that old news­room approach was ide­al­is­tic: the notion that pow­er ulti­mate­ly lies in truth and ideas, and that the cit­i­zens of a plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy, not lead­ers of any sort, must be trust­ed to judge both.”
    • This one is very long but I found it com­pelling.
  5. Con­ser­v­a­tives are suing law firms over diver­si­ty efforts. It’s work­ing. (Julian Mark and Tay­lor Telford, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Ken­ji Yoshi­no, a law pro­fes­sor and direc­tor of the Meltzer Cen­ter for Diver­si­ty, Inclu­sion and Belong­ing at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, said tar­get­ing law firms is effec­tive because it can serve as a warn­ing to oth­er indus­tries. ‘If you sue a law firm, then the law firm gets up to speed very, very quick­ly on what is per­mis­si­ble and what’s imper­mis­si­ble,’ Yoshi­no said, not­ing that many law firms advise For­tune 500 com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and non­prof­its. ‘It’s a way of get­ting the mes­sage out about peo­ple need­ing to flip over their poli­cies in a wide vari­ety of domains — not just fel­low­ships, but hir­ing, recruit­ing retreats and the like.’”
    • Inter­est­ing. I don’t remem­ber hav­ing seen this strat­e­gy (sue law firms to bring about broad­er cul­tur­al change) used by either the left or the right before. Is it an inno­va­tion or am I just not remem­ber­ing some­thing in his­to­ry?
  6. How 1 in 4 Coun­tries Restrict Reli­gious Con­ver­sion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The USCIRF report grouped the laws into four cat­e­gories. First, anti-pros­e­ly­tiz­ing laws restrict wit­ness­ing of one’s faith in 29 nations, includ­ing in Indone­sia, Israel, and Rus­sia. In Moroc­co, for exam­ple, it is ille­gal to cause a Mus­lim to ques­tion his or her reli­gion. The sec­ond cat­e­go­ry of inter­faith mar­riage is restrict­ed in 25 nations, includ­ing in Jor­dan, the Philip­pines, and Sin­ga­pore. In Qatar, for exam­ple, if a wife con­verts to Islam but the hus­band does not, a judge may annul their mar­riage. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment laws—the third category—in 7 nations restrict the right of an indi­vid­ual to for­mal­ly con­vert to anoth­er reli­gion, includ­ing in Iraq, Malaysia, and Turkey. Myan­mar, for exam­ple, requires con­verts to sub­mit an appli­ca­tion and be sub­ject to ques­tion­ing about the gen­uine­ness of the con­ver­sion. And final­ly, apos­ta­sy laws in 7 nations make con­ver­sion ille­gal, includ­ing in Brunei, Mau­ri­ta­nia, and Sau­di Ara­bia. In Yemen, for exam­ple, the pun­ish­ment is death.”
  7. A Kore­an Sect Tar­get­ed New Zealand Chris­tians. Did Church­es Respond Effec­tive­ly? (Will­liam Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors even­tu­al­ly con­vinced their recruits that God per­mits lying if it is done for ‘God’s will.’ Before Josh’s ses­sions com­menced in Jan­u­ary 2019, his men­tor warned him to keep them a secret, point­ing to Abraham’s silence before head­ing out to sac­ri­fice Isaac in Gen­e­sis 22. Josh con­coct­ed a sto­ry about teach­ing pri­vate gui­tar lessons three morn­ings a week, a lie he told his par­ents, his girl­friend, and Stu­dent Life col­leagues. When church lead­ers and a cam­pus staff work­er con­front­ed Josh with evi­dence that he was attend­ing Shin­cheon­ji class­es, his Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors gave him step-by-step instruc­tions on how to deny his involve­ment. They even gave Josh pre-writ­ten let­ters express­ing ‘inex­plic­a­ble hurt and con­fu­sion’ about his fam­i­ly and friends’ accu­sa­tions and claim­ing that he was no longer involved in Shin­cheon­ji activ­i­ties. Josh sent the let­ter to the church yet con­tin­ued his class­es, and in May 2019 he ‘passed over’ into the group.”
    • Relat­ed: Escap­ing High-Con­trol Reli­gious Groups (William Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[If a friend is in a cult,] try to main­tain the rela­tion­ship and com­mu­ni­ca­tion at all costs. Mak­ing direct state­ments like ‘You’re in a cult!’ or ‘You’re deceived!’ are not help­ful. Cult mem­bers have often been warned that ‘a man’s ene­mies will be the mem­bers of his own house­hold’ (Matt. 10:36), so to con­front their group will be to ful­fill prophe­cies giv­en to them by their lead­ers and fur­ther prove the group to be cor­rect. It’s impor­tant not to dri­ve them fur­ther into the group. Ask your­self what need the group is ful­fill­ing in your loved one’s life.”

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 430

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. That’s espe­cial­ly true this week: I skipped last week because of Thanks­giv­ing, and I still feel behind on my read­ing.

This is vol­ume 430, a sphenic num­ber. That means it is the prod­uct of three primes, name­ly 2 · 5 · 43.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford neu­ro­sci­en­tist Andrew Huber­man recent­ly men­tioned that he believes in God. Here’s a 13 minute video of him explain­ing why (YouTube) or you can just watch this two minute excerpt which con­tains the essence of his point (Twit­ter).
    • For the record, I’ve nev­er met Huber­man and do not know what his spe­cif­ic reli­gious beliefs are. I just find it inter­est­ing that a promi­nent pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al affil­i­at­ed with Stan­ford is a believ­er.
  2. This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers (Darbe Saxbe, New York Times): “[Pro­grams designed to help young peo­ple instead] made their men­tal-health prob­lems worse. Under­stand­ing why these efforts back­fired can shed light on how soci­ety can — and can’t — help teenagers who are suf­fer­ing from depres­sion and anx­i­ety.… Teenagers, who are still devel­op­ing their iden­ti­ties, are espe­cial­ly prone to take psy­cho­log­i­cal labels to heart. Instead of ‘I am ner­vous about X,’ a teenag­er might say, ‘I can’t do X because I have anx­i­ety’ — a refram­ing that research shows under­mines resilience by encour­ag­ing peo­ple to view every­day chal­lenges as insur­mount­able.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at USC.
  3. Reli­gion isn’t sex­u­al­ly repres­sive. Just read the data. (Stephen Cran­ney, Deseret News): “…con­trary to wide­ly held belief, reli­gious peo­ple report bet­ter sex lives, and mar­ried reli­gious cou­ples have more fre­quent and bet­ter sex than oth­ers (non-mar­ried reli­gious peo­ple, intu­itive­ly, have less sex). These results were sup­port­ed by one study that found reli­gious British peo­ple report­ed more sat­is­fy­ing sex lives. A sep­a­rate BYU study, pub­lished by Psy­chol­o­gy of Reli­gion and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, found sim­i­lar results for mar­ried cou­ples in the U.S. while anoth­er found that high­ly reli­gious peo­ple had high­er sex­u­al ‘pas­sion’ than more mod­er­ate­ly reli­gious peo­ple (non­re­li­gious peo­ple also reflect­ed high­er ‘pas­sion’ lev­els).”
    • This sen­tence made me chuck­le: “It may well be that the most sex­u­al­ly active cam­pus­es in the U.S. aren’t the famous par­ty schools, but rather the more reli­gious­ly con­ser­v­a­tive schools with more mar­ried stu­dents.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist and a demog­ra­ph­er with appoint­ments at Bay­lor’s Insti­tute for the Study of Reli­gion and at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca
  4. Solomon Fried­man is on a mis­sion to save Porn­hub (Andrew Duffy, Ottowa Citzen): “Solomon Fried­man is not some­one read­i­ly defined: He’s a defence lawyer and an organ donor; a firearms advo­cate and an ordained rab­bi; an investor, phil­an­thropist, and pornog­ra­phy mag­nate. If the 37-year-old father of three is not the most inter­est­ing man in Ottawa, then the licensed pilot and part-time law pro­fes­sor is cer­tain­ly one of the busiest.”
    • This is actu­al­ly insane.
  5. Why I No Longer Sup­port the Death Penal­ty (Matthew T. Martens, Cross­way): “8,790 peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death in the Unit­ed States since 1973. One hun­dred and eighty-four of those men and women were exon­er­at­ed as of the end of 2022.11 They were inno­cent of the crimes of which they were con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to die. In oth­er words, we know that at least 2 per­cent of peo­ple sen­tenced to death since 1973 were wrong­ly con­demned. Even if we have iden­ti­fied all of those wrong­ly con­vict­ed and the error rate is ‘only’ 2 per­cent, that is an error rate high­er than I am will­ing to tol­er­ate.… I am unwill­ing to wager anoth­er man’s life. I would not wager my own under those con­di­tions.”
    • The author has recent­ly writ­ten a book about a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on crim­i­nal jus­tice. He is a defend­er of the death penal­ty as a con­cept yet opposed to it as prac­ticed in Amer­i­ca today.
  6. Tik­Tok par­ent com­pa­ny used AI to opti­mize Lin­ux ker­nel, boost­ing per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy (Matthew Con­natser, Tom’s Hard­ware): “The gen­er­al gist of the pre­sen­ta­tion: ByteDance used AI to make the Lin­ux ker­nel (the core of the oper­at­ing sys­tem) much more effi­cient and per­for­mant across all kinds of hard­ware.… AI opti­miza­tions were able to reduce mem­o­ry usage by 30% — and that was using exist­ing Lin­ux tools, just more effi­cient­ly. Net­work laten­cy was also improved by up to 12% with AI that has pri­or knowl­edge (which would­n’t be hard to obtain on a com­put­er used reg­u­lar­ly).”
  7. On Cul­ture War, Doug Wil­son, and the Moscow Mood (Kevin DeY­oung, per­son­al blog): “My con­cerns are not so much with one or two con­clu­sions that Chris­tians may reach if Wil­son becomes their intel­lec­tu­al men­tor. My big­ger con­cern is with the long-term spir­i­tu­al effects of admir­ing and imi­tat­ing the Moscow mood. For the mood that attracts peo­ple to Moscow is too often incom­pat­i­ble with Chris­t­ian virtue, incon­sid­er­ate of oth­er Chris­tians, and ulti­mate­ly incon­sis­tent with the stat­ed aims of Wilson’s Chris­ten­dom project.”
    • Broad­ly cor­rect, although I think DeY­oung over­states his case a few times. Wil­son does present the gospel more than DeY­oung acknowl­edges and that is one of his appeals. Still, as I said, broad­ly cor­rect.

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 428

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

This is vol­ume 428 and I, being an eas­i­ly amused man, am pleased that 4*2=8.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot: How Rivals Became Friends (Joel J. Miller, Rab­bit Room): “Did Charles Williams know what would hap­pen when he invit­ed his mutu­als, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, to tea? One sus­pects. Lewis had long reg­is­tered dis­ap­proval of Eliot’s work. But sure­ly they’d get on in per­son, no? No. It was 1945 and the trio con­vened at the Mitre Hotel in Oxford. The first words out of Eliot’s mouth? ‘Mr. Lewis,’ he exclaimed, ‘you are a much old­er man than you appear in pho­tographs!’ The meet­ing dete­ri­o­rat­ed from there.”
  2. Abun­dance: The Deep­est Real­i­ty (Bethany Lor­den, Stan­ford Review): “It is true, I have nev­er lacked food or shel­ter or any neces­si­ty; yet every day, I see the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in the world live as though they are impov­er­ished. As stu­dents, we hoard our time, fear our midterms, and dread the future. But what if the bless­ings that land­ed us at Stan­ford con­tin­ue into our future? What if our class­es were not a bur­den, but a gift of learn­ing? What if our lives and our soci­ety mir­ror nature, where alpine sun­flow­ers reemerge every spring on the harsh­est tun­dra, where a square foot of dry prairie nour­ish­es three dozen species of plants, where no tree or ani­mal dies with­out sus­tain­ing new life?”
    • Dis­claimer: Bethany is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha. Also, I espe­cial­ly liked this bit: “R&DE seems to assume that stu­dent sat­is­fac­tion is a zero-sum game: the web­site states that ‘Direct swaps between stu­dents are not per­mit­ted, as the hous­ing assign­ment process is meant to be equi­table, and not based on who you know.’ If a room­mate switch makes one stu­dent bet­ter off, then the trade must have exploit­ed anoth­er. Yet by deal­ing with rela­tion­ships as if they were a lim­it­ed resource, R&DE has made them so. Instead of cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ty (by def­i­n­i­tion, a net­work ‘based on who you know’), R&DE has made every­one ‘equi­tably’ mis­er­able.”
  3. Why I Ran Away from Phi­los­o­phy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “It’s true, of course, that a philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem is not dis­proved if its advo­cates are crim­i­nals and tyrants—but this link­age must be a cause for alarm and sus­pi­cion. The bur­den of proof is on those who want to sep­a­rate a person’s core prin­ci­ples from the results they pro­duce in actu­al life.”
    • I some­times bag on util­i­tar­i­an­ism gen­er­al­ly (and some­times specif­i­cal­ly the effec­tive altru­ism move­ment). This essay may help you see why. Utilitarian/consequentialist eth­i­cal sys­tems are just wrong. Not mere­ly wrong in the sense of being incor­rect, but also wrong in the sense of being immoral.
  4. Some Israel / Hamas war arti­cles:
    • Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gam­bit to Cre­ate a ‘Per­ma­nent’ State of War (Ben Hub­bard and Maria Abi-Habib, The New York Times): “Thou­sands have been killed in Gaza, with entire fam­i­lies wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Pales­tin­ian neigh­bor­hoods to expans­es of rub­ble, while doc­tors treat scream­ing chil­dren in dark­ened hos­pi­tals with no anes­the­sia. Across the Mid­dle East, fear has spread over the pos­si­ble out­break of a broad­er region­al war. But in the bloody arith­metic of Hamas’s lead­ers, the car­nage is not the regret­table out­come of a big mis­cal­cu­la­tion. Quite the oppo­site, they say: It is the nec­es­sary cost of a great accom­plish­ment — the shat­ter­ing of the sta­tus quo and the open­ing of a new, more volatile chap­ter in their fight against Israel.”
      • Unlocked and well worth read­ing.
    • “No par­ent is going to do that”: Shafai fam­i­ly from Mass­a­chu­setts trapped in Gaza told they can leave with­out their chil­dren (Christi­na Hager, CBS News): “They had the names of my broth­er and his wife on the list, but they did­n’t have the kids,” said Hani Shafai. His broth­er Hazem and his wife Sanaa were excit­ed to see their names on a list cus­toms author­i­ties put out nam­ing peo­ple who could cross into Egypt to safe­ty. The prob­lem was, there was no men­tion of their three chil­dren. “They were told they can cross, but they have to leave the kids behind. And, as you know, no par­ent is going to do that, and he said no,” said Hani Shafai.
      • Bro. Data­base errors hap­pen, I get it. But it seems to me this is the kind of sit­u­a­tion where instead of turn­ing them away you ask them to step to the side, offer them some water and snacks, and have some­one inves­ti­gate to fig­ure out what hap­pened so they can leave with their kids.
    • Inside a Gaza bed­room, sol­diers search­ing for tun­nels find how low Hamas can go (Emanuel Fabi­an, Times of Israel): “In terms of its size, where it led and what it was intend­ed for, the tun­nel was much like the oth­er 90 found in the area. What set it apart, though, was its loca­tion. The shaft had been uncov­ered by sol­diers of the Com­bat Engi­neer­ing Corps’ 614th Bat­tal­ion as they car­ried out a sec­ond round of sweeps in a sin­gle-fam­i­ly home — with an out­door swim­ming pool — in an upscale beach­side neigh­bor­hood. Inside a bed­room scat­tered with bright­ly col­ored clothes, under­neath one of three child-sized beds, sol­diers had found a por­tal to where mon­sters were hid­ing.”
    • The “Geno­cide” Canard Against Israel (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…if Israel were inter­est­ed in the “geno­cide” of Pales­tin­ian Arabs, it has had the means to accom­plish it for a very long time. And yet, for some rea­son, the Arab pop­u­la­tion of Israel and the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries has explod­ed since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel prop­er have vot­ing rights, and a key pres­ence in the Knes­set.… And real geno­cide is hap­pen­ing else­where in the world right now as well, but it receives a frac­tion of the atten­tion. In Dar­fur, between 2003 and 2005, around 200,000 mem­bers of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa eth­nic groups were mur­dered in a clear case of geno­cide that has recent­ly revived. This year, some 180,000 civil­ians have fled to Chad, pur­sued by the Jan­jaweed — the Ein­satz­grup­pen of cen­tral Africa. If your view is derived from crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, you should be par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned about this geno­cide, since it is direct­ed at black Africans by Islamist Arabs. But the cam­pus left is unin­ter­est­ed.”
    • ‘I Feel a Human Dete­ri­o­ra­tion’ (Lulu Gar­cia-Navar­ro, New York Times): “And when I see peo­ple watch­ing the hor­ri­ble tragedy that is hap­pen­ing here as if it were a Super Bowl of vic­tim­hood, in which you sup­port one team and real­ly don’t care about the oth­er, empa­thy becomes very, very selec­tive. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see oth­er pain.”
  5. Died: Frank Bor­man, Apol­lo 8 Astro­naut Who Broad­cast Gen­e­sis from Space (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “On Decem­ber 24, as a cam­era showed the lunar sur­face pass­ing below a win­dow, the three astro­nauts read the Scrip­ture from a piece of paper. Bor­man went last, clos­ing with vers­es 9 and 10: ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heav­en be gath­ered togeth­er unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gath­er­ing togeth­er of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.’ Then he said, ‘From the crew of Apol­lo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Mer­ry Christ­mas and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.’ ”
  6. Crit­i­cal Grace The­o­ry (Carl True­man, First Things): “Isa­iah, Paul, and Augus­tine are far bet­ter sources of social crit­i­cism than Horkheimer, Mar­cuse, or Cren­shaw. Yes, the world is imper­fect and unjust and filled with strife. Sad­ly, such are the wages of sin. Acknowl­edg­ing the fall of man does not entail a pas­sive accep­tance of injus­tice or evil. The doc­trine of orig­i­nal sin does not entail the con­clu­sion that noth­ing can ever be improved and that efforts of social reform are point­less. But a recog­ni­tion that sin under­lies unjust social sys­tems means that our crit­i­cal the­o­riz­ing must be shaped by our belief in God’s grace and the heal­ing pow­er of for­give­ness, both for our­selves and for oth­ers. No crit­i­cal the­o­ry that fails to place these the­o­log­i­cal truths at the cen­ter of its analy­sis and pro­pos­als is com­pat­i­ble with Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  7. How Ear­ly Morn­ing Class­es Change Aca­d­e­m­ic Tra­jec­to­ries: Evi­dence from a Nat­ur­al Exper­i­ment (Antho­ny Lok­T­ing Yim, SSRN): “Using a nat­ur­al exper­i­ment which ran­dom­ized class times to stu­dents, this study reveals that enrolling in ear­ly morn­ing class­es low­ers stu­dents’ course grades and the like­li­hood of future STEM course enroll­ment. There is a 79% reduc­tion in pur­su­ing the cor­re­spond­ing major and a 26% rise in choos­ing a low­er-earn­ing major, pre­dom­i­nant­ly influ­enced by ear­ly morn­ing STEM class­es. To under­stand the mech­a­nism, I con­duct­ed a sur­vey of under­grad­u­ate stu­dents enrolled in an intro­duc­to­ry course, some of whom were assigned to a 7:30 AM sec­tion.”
    • Dis­clo­sure: I only skimmed the arti­cle. I find it plau­si­ble enough to pass on and am not skep­ti­cal enough of its claims to feel moti­vat­ed to read it thor­ough­ly. The author is an econ­o­mist at Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty, and the study is about stu­dents at Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Bot­tom line: avoid ear­ly morn­ing class­es.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • God vs Noth­ing (Pete Holmes, YouTube): one minute, lan­guage is a bit crude but this is bril­liant at points
  • Hard­ball Ques­tions For The Next Debate (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Hel­lo, and wel­come to the third Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry debate. To shore up declin­ing vot­er inter­est, we’ve decid­ed to make things more inter­est­ing tonight. In this first round, each can­di­date will have to avoid using a spe­cif­ic let­ter of the alpha­bet in their answer. If they slip up, they for­feit their remain­ing time, and the next can­di­date in line gets the floor. Our can­di­dates who have qual­i­fied today are Chris Christie, Nik­ki Haley, Ron DeSan­tis, and Don­ald Trump.”
    • This gets increas­ing­ly absurd and amus­ing and I actu­al­ly laughed out loud at the end.
  • “Octo­bunk” stacks up fun at Stan­ford (Anna Yang, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In the ear­ly hours of Oct. 20, a group of around 20 fresh­men assem­bled on the Oval, ready to begin the con­struc­tion of the ‘Octo­bunk.’ Their plan was to stack eight dorm beds on top of each oth­er in the Oval, mak­ing a tow­er that cre­at­ed a large bunk bed. Near­ly 100 stu­dents showed up to observe the event at around 2 a.m. — a com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple who had heard of the tremen­dous feat by word-of-mouth, or peo­ple who had sim­ply been walk­ing past.”
    • This is glo­ri­ous and the stu­dents who orga­nized it should auto­mat­i­cal­ly be elect­ed to ASSU and only dis­placed by peo­ple who spark equal or greater joy.

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 422

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

This is vol­ume 422, a num­ber which feels like it should have a lot of prime fac­tors but which only has two: 422 = 2·211.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why reli­gious belief pro­vides a real buffer against sui­cide risk (David H Ros­marin, Psy­che): “The sci­en­tif­ic world in gen­er­al, and the dis­ci­plines of behav­iour­al health in par­tic­u­lar, tend to be biased against mat­ters of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and reli­gion. The exist­ing lit­er­a­ture is enough to show that these fac­tors have large pro­tec­tive effects against sui­cide. If anoth­er vari­able had even half the val­ue for any major pub­lic health con­cern, I sus­pect it would receive sub­stan­tial­ly more atten­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Med­ical School.
  2. Being There (David French, New York Times): “I’ve nev­er met a per­son who wants to lose friends. But I’ve met many, many peo­ple who suf­fer from lone­li­ness and say that they just ‘lost touch.’ What hap­pened? I ask. ‘Life hap­pened,’ they say. At each new stage of life it was eas­i­er to say no to a friend than to say no to work, to a spouse, to one’s kids. And while each indi­vid­ual no can be under­stand­able and even jus­ti­fi­able, the accu­mu­la­tion of noes suf­fo­cates friend­ships, even with­out an argu­ment, a breach or a betray­al.”
  3. Unable to Find Ulti­mate Truth in Zen Bud­dhism, I Turned to Jesus (Sita Slavov, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In Zen, I often felt alone in the trench­es with my dark­est thoughts and feel­ings. And even the most beau­ti­ful moments I expe­ri­enced dur­ing meditation—those moments of delight in God’s creation—were use­less with­out a com­pelling frame­work to process and inte­grate them into my life. In con­trast, when I med­i­tate on God’s Word and pres­ence, the Holy Spir­it sus­tains me in the trench­es, and Scrip­ture pro­vides the frame­work to under­stand my expe­ri­ence.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Win­ners don’t do irony (Janan Ganesh, Finan­cial Times): “Peo­ple who deal in high­er stakes have to insu­late them­selves from the arch­ness and cyn­i­cism of the wider cul­ture. Irony gets noth­ing done. It is the creed of the pas­sive observ­er. Not every­one who is inca­pable of irony is a win­ner, no. But lots of win­ners are inca­pable of irony.”
  5. New athe­ism has col­lapsed. The tide is turn­ing on belief in God (Justin Brier­ly, Pre­miere Chris­tian­i­ty): “Sci­ence and rea­son alone won’t buy you mean­ing, pur­pose and val­ue. Apart from its inter­nal squab­bles, the real rea­son that New Athe­ism stalled as a cul­tur­al move­ment was that it failed to give peo­ple a sto­ry to live their life by, so peo­ple went look­ing for a sto­ry else­where.”
  6. A green card pro­cess­ing change means US could lose thou­sands of faith lead­ers from abroad (Gio­van­na Dell’Orto, AP News): “A sud­den pro­ce­dur­al change in how the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment process­es green cards for for­eign-born reli­gious work­ers, togeth­er with his­toric highs in num­bers of ille­gal bor­der crossers, means that thou­sands of cler­gy like him are los­ing the abil­i­ty to remain in this coun­try.”
    • This obser­va­tion was inter­est­ing to me: “Those from reli­gious orders with vows of pover­ty, like Catholic nuns and Bud­dhist monks, are espe­cial­ly hard hit, because most oth­er employ­ment visa cat­e­gories require employ­ers to show they’re pay­ing for­eign work­ers pre­vail­ing wages. Since they’re get­ting no wages, they don’t qual­i­fy.”
    • Sen­tences like that are pre­cise­ly why reli­gious exemp­tions are need­ed for some laws — the law on its face seems rea­son­able and is designed to pro­tect work­ers, but it has the effect of harm­ing reli­gious work­ers of mul­ti­ple faiths because the total­ly fine way they do things does­n’t map onto the way most of soci­ety works.
  7. Drones Every­where: How the Tech­no­log­i­cal Rev­o­lu­tion on Ukraine Bat­tle­fields Is Reshap­ing Mod­ern War­fare (Yaroslav Trofi­mov, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘It’s a ques­tion of cost,’ said Phillips O’Brien, a pro­fes­sor of strate­gic stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews in Scot­land. ‘If you can destroy an expen­sive, heavy sys­tem for some­thing that costs much much less, then actu­al­ly the pow­er dif­fer­en­tial between the two coun­tries doesn’t mat­ter as much.’… When it comes to tanks, in par­tic­u­lar, the les­son of the Ukrain­ian war is that tank-on-tank bat­tles have become a rarity—which means that the rel­a­tive sophis­ti­ca­tion of a tank is no longer as impor­tant. Few­er than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by oth­er tanks, accord­ing to Ukrain­ian offi­cials, with the rest suc­cumb­ing to mines, artillery, anti­tank mis­siles and drones.”

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 420

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

This is vol­ume 420, a num­ber with cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance and also two inter­est­ing math­e­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties. 420 = 101 + 103 + 107 + 109 = 20 x 21. In oth­er words, it is both the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes and also the prod­uct of two con­sec­u­tive num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Are Repa­ganiz­ing (Louise Per­ry, First Things): “The supreme­ly strange thing about Chris­tian­i­ty in anthro­po­log­i­cal terms is that it takes a top­sy-turvy atti­tude toward weak­ness and strength. To put it crude­ly, most cul­tures look at the pow­er­ful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing some­thing right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some fail­ing of their own, whether in this life or the last. The small­ness and fee­ble­ness of women and chil­dren is a sign that they must be com­mand­ed by men. The suf­fer­ing of slaves is not an argu­ment against slav­ery, but an argu­ment against allow­ing one­self to be enslaved. Most cultures—perfectly logically—glorify war­riors and kings, not those at the bot­tom of the heap. But Chris­tian­i­ty takes a per­verse atti­tude toward sta­tus and puts that per­ver­si­ty at the heart of the the­ol­o­gy. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong’ is a baf­fling and alarm­ing claim to any­one from a soci­ety untouched by the strange­ness of the Jesus move­ment.”
    • This is a remark­able essay about Chris­tian­i­ty by a non-Chris­t­ian. 10/10 rec­om­mend.
  2. Ross Douthat’s The­o­ries of Per­sua­sion (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “This is not con­spir­a­cy-adja­cent, but I think that nice sec­u­lar peo­ple like you and Sam are sort of blind to some obvi­ous super­nat­ur­al real­i­ties about the world. I think lots of peo­ple have good rea­sons to end up in that kind of ter­ri­to­ry. And the ques­tion I don’t know the answer to is: Why is it so nat­ur­al once you’re in that ter­ri­to­ry to go all the way to where R.F.K. is?” He con­tin­ued, “I spend a lot of my own intel­lec­tu­al ener­gy try­ing not to let my sort of eccen­tric views blind me to the fact that the estab­lish­ment still gets a lot of bor­ing, obvi­ous things right.”
    • I found this interview/profile of Douthat charm­ing.
  3. Sin­gle­ness Is Not a Sin (Lyman Stone, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mar­riage is insti­tut­ed for mutu­al ser­vice by spous­es and joint ser­vice to the next gen­er­a­tion. Celiba­cy is insti­tut­ed for ser­vice to the church (not as a require­ment for church ser­vice but as a pos­si­ble aid to it). Wid­ows like­wise are com­mand­ed to be hos­pitable and help­ful to younger peo­ple. Unless sin­gle­ness is clear­ly defined as a state that has some pur­pose ori­ent­ed toward the good of the neigh­bor (not just inci­den­tal­ly ben­e­fi­cial but pur­po­sive­ly so), it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand what pos­si­ble endorse­ment the sta­tus can be giv­en. It is not sin­ful, but it is not good.”
  4. Let’s Have a Talk About Edu­ca­tion and Reli­gious Atten­dance (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I just don’t know how you look at all this data that I’ve brought to bear and con­clude that there’s not a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship between edu­ca­tion and reli­gious atten­dance. You most cer­tain­ly can­not con­clude that it’s a neg­a­tive rela­tion­ship. That finds basi­cal­ly no sup­port in this data at all. There’s some evi­dence that the rela­tion­ship may not be sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, but for me, the regres­sion clears that up. Peo­ple who are more edu­cat­ed are more like­ly to be attend­ing a reli­gious ser­vice in the local house of wor­ship this week­end than those with a high school diplo­ma or less. That’s what the pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence tells me.”
    • A deep­er dive than you often find on this top­ic. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. ‘O Slay the Wicked’: How Chris­tians Sing Curs­es (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “Do we ever say any­thing uncom­fort­able in the pres­ence of evil — or worse, do we even care? The psalmists did. We accuse them of cru­el­ty; they accuse us of a twist­ed sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. We accuse them of not con­sid­er­ing man; they accuse us of not con­sid­er­ing God.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Before You Share Your Faith! How to Be ‘Evan­ge­lism Ready’ (Matt Smethurst, The Gospel Coali­tion): a 16 minute pod­cast rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I liked the con­tent, the deliv­ery was less grip­ping than I expect­ed. Worth­while.
  7. Book Review: Elon Musk (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I think Elon Musk is 1‑in‑1,000 lev­el intel­li­gent — which is great, but means there are still 300,000 peo­ple in Amer­i­ca smarter than he is. I think he wins by being 1‑in-10,000,000 intense.”
    • This review is full of fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries. 10/10 rec­om­mend if you have any inter­est what­so­ev­er in Elon Musk.

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.