Tag: china

TGFI, Volume 555: optimizing everything is foolish

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Your Deci­sion Mak­ing Is All Wrong (David Epstein, New York Times): “If in mak­ing deci­sions you are often guid­ed by a search for the best, you are going about deci­sion mak­ing all wrong — and you’re also prob­a­bly less hap­py for it. In an age of infor­ma­tion and choice abun­dance, we assume we can find the best of every­thing if we look long and hard enough. Psy­chol­o­gists call that ten­den­cy max­i­miz­ing. But search­ing for the best is the wrong goal. That is because search­ing is itself a cost, and most peo­ple for­get to account for it. If you did, you would see that the opti­mal strat­e­gy isn’t opti­miz­ing at all.… Max­i­miz­ers tend to be less sat­is­fied with their deci­sions and their lives. They are typ­i­cal­ly less hap­py, more prone to regret and more like­ly to com­pare them­selves end­less­ly with oth­ers. Sat­is­fi­cers don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have low stan­dards. Their stan­dard is ‘good enough for me’ rather than ‘the best out there,’ and that makes it pos­si­ble to feel sat­is­fied with their choic­es, instead of haunt­ed by the ones they didn’t make.”
  2. Chi­na Is Much Weak­er Than It Seems. That’s the Prob­lem. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “ ‘Busi­ness debt has dou­bled since 2019, while rev­enues are only 30 per­cent high­er,’ reports For­tune. This eco­nom­ic house of cards rests, if you’ll for­give the mixed metaphor, on a foun­da­tion of sand: an aging and declin­ing work force, net emi­gra­tion, wide­spread youth unem­ploy­ment, plum­met­ing for­eign direct invest­ment, an arbi­trary rule of law that ter­ri­fies busi­ness lead­ers, repeat­ed purges of the mil­i­tary that project far more para­noia than con­fi­dence and a tru­cu­lent for­eign pol­i­cy that does lit­tle more than alarm and alien­ate China’s neigh­bors.… Ris­ing nations, which is what Chi­na was under Deng Xiaop­ing and Jiang Zemin, have the lux­u­ry of being able to bide their time. Declin­ing nations don’t. It tends to make them more inclined to gam­ble with their future. It’s why Putin invad­ed Ukraine after he real­ized the coun­try was mov­ing inex­orably into the West’s orbit. It’s also why Xi will be pow­er­ful­ly tempt­ed to seize Tai­wan by inva­sion or block­ade despite the enor­mous risks it pos­es not only to the world’s econ­o­my but also to his own.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Why Chi­na Is So Much Less Scared of A.I. (Jacob Dry­er, New York Times): “The real­i­ty is that Chi­na and the Unit­ed States are rac­ing in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, because the two coun­tries con­cep­tu­al­ize A.I. very dif­fer­ent­ly. Amer­i­cans want to cre­ate the most pow­er­ful tech­nol­o­gy humans have ever known. In the quest for super­in­tel­li­gence, the U.S. gov­ern­ment is encour­ag­ing pri­vate firms to move full speed ahead, reg­u­la­tion be damned. Under the very tight­est reg­u­la­tion, by con­trast, the Chi­nese want to make A.I. more prac­ti­cal and embed­ded in soci­ety, more care­ful­ly select­ing how it is deployed and used by the pop­u­la­tion.… In that way, as Chi­na exports those A.I. mod­els, it will be export­ing Chi­nese gov­er­nance as well, with all of the safe­ty, abun­dance, sur­veil­lance and embed­ded hier­ar­chies that entails. That’s why the dif­fer­ence between these two coun­tries in the A.I. race mat­ters so much.”
  3. The Athe­ist and the Machine God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “There is no obvi­ous escape from mys­tery here. If you bite the bul­let and just say that Clau­dia has already attained con­scious­ness, then that implies we some­how built a con­scious mind with­out hav­ing any idea of how con­scious­ness works or where it comes from. That’s sci­ence with extreme­ly spooky char­ac­ter­is­tics: Like Kevin Cost­ner sum­mon­ing base­ball ghosts to the Iowa corn­field, we put up a mate­r­i­al archi­tec­ture and the mys­te­ri­ous ‘I’ mag­i­cal­ly appeared. Alter­na­tive­ly, if you say that A.I. isn’t con­scious but mere­ly capa­ble, then the ques­tion of why we expe­ri­ence real­i­ty through con­scious­ness — the inter­nal ‘I,’ the sense of per­son­al iden­ti­ty and will — becomes much more dif­fi­cult to answer. If con­scious­ness isn’t nec­es­sary for capa­bil­i­ty, then pre­sum­ably evo­lu­tion should default to zom­bies.… As cer­tain philoso­phers have argued, this har­mo­ny between the psy­cho­log­i­cal and the phys­i­cal seems more much like­ly to appear in a uni­verse where con­scious­ness is fun­da­men­tal, where mat­ter isn’t every­thing and Mind is where things start. In which case maybe the achieve­ment of Claude, or Clau­dia if you pre­fer, is to show us what intel­li­gence might look like in the materialist’s uni­verse — even as our own con­scious­ness indi­cates that this uni­verse is a much, much stranger place.”
    • I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed this essay.
  4. Chi­na vs God (Fran­nie Block, The Free Press): “I’ve obtained hours of inter­views with Jin that the Drex­els record­ed in Sep­tem­ber 2025, a month before he was arrest­ed. I’ve viewed nev­er-before-seen footage of Chi­nese police arrest­ing Chris­tians. I’ve lis­tened to audio of police inter­ro­ga­tions, and read near­ly a dozen tes­ti­monies of those who wit­nessed first­hand the arrests and raids on church­es. More than half a dozen peo­ple who have been impris­oned or had fam­i­ly mem­bers impris­oned by the Chi­nese regime have shared their sto­ries with me. ‘A gov­ern­ment moves from author­i­tar­i­an­ism into total­i­tar­i­an­ism when it wants to infil­trate and direct the most inti­mate parts of your­self, of your com­mu­ni­ty, of your fam­i­ly,’ Bill told me. ‘What we’re see­ing now,’ he con­tin­ued, ‘is a renewed desire from the state under Chair­man Xi, basi­cal­ly, to engi­neer souls.’ ”
  5. We’re Think­ing About Men­tal Health Diag­noses All Wrong (Awais Aftab, New York Times): “In my prac­tice, I rou­tine­ly see patients who have been diag­nosed with depres­sion and anx­i­ety by one clin­i­cian, bipo­lar dis­or­der by anoth­er and post-trau­mat­ic stress dis­or­der by a third, at dif­fer­ent points in their lives. They arrive con­fused and frus­trat­ed, ask­ing: What dis­or­der do I _really_ have? The hon­est answer is: all of them and none of them. Each of these labels can cap­ture some­thing use­ful and inform treat­ment options, but none of them do jus­tice to the dimen­sion­al and dynam­ic nature of men­tal ill­ness. Your men­tal health prob­lems are not caused by a sim­ple thing that you either have or don’t have. They are pat­terns shaped by who we are as peo­ple and that, in turn, shape the peo­ple we become. This is a more com­pli­cat­ed sto­ry than ‘chem­i­cal imbal­ance’ or ‘brain dis­ease.’ But it is clos­er to the truth.”
    • The author is a psy­chi­a­trist at Case West­ern.
  6. The Silence That Meets the Rape of Pales­tini­ans (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “It’s impos­si­ble to know how com­mon sex­u­al assaults against Pales­tini­ans are. My report­ing for this arti­cle is based on con­ver­sa­tions with 14 men and women who said they had been sex­u­al­ly assault­ed by Israeli set­tlers or mem­bers of the secu­ri­ty forces. I also spoke to fam­i­ly mem­bers, inves­ti­ga­tors, offi­cials and oth­ers.… How does this kind of vio­lence hap­pen? Decades of cov­er­ing con­flict has taught me that a com­bi­na­tion of dehu­man­iza­tion and impuni­ty can pro­pel peo­ple into a Hobbe­sian state of nature. I’ve encoun­tered this drift toward sav­agery in killing fields from Con­go to Sudan to Myan­mar, and I think it also rough­ly explains how Amer­i­can sol­diers came to sex­u­al­ly abuse pris­on­ers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The blunt real­i­ty is that when there are no con­se­quences, we humans are capa­ble of immense deprav­i­ty toward those we are taught to scorn as sub­hu­man.”
    • A dis­turb­ing read which I, for the record, find large­ly plau­si­ble even if cer­tain lurid details wind up not with­stand­ing scruti­ny. This isn’t root­ed in think­ing that Israel is any way worse than oth­er nations. I think Israel is far more praise­wor­thy than her rivals — and I also think that praise­wor­thy nations can have very dark cor­ners. This op-ed set off a firestorm on the inter­net, and some note­wor­thy respons­es fol­low:
    • How ‘The New York Times’ Laun­dered a Con­spir­a­cy (Mat­ti Fried­man and Dan Senor, The Free Press): “When you read the piece, you have to use your own com­pass to decide which charges could plau­si­bly be true and which charges come from the world of con­spir­a­to­r­i­al, anti-Israel fan­ta­sy. I think there is a plau­si­ble rea­son for con­cern about sex­u­al assaults of pris­on­ers. I don’t think we can dis­miss every account of sex­u­al assaults against Pales­tin­ian detainees. But the piece kind of goes off the deep end by being cred­u­lous about charges that are much, much hard­er to believe. After all, the facil­i­ties are equipped with cam­eras. There are com­man­ders, there are lawyers.… It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t inves­ti­gate cred­i­ble alle­ga­tions of sex­u­al assault. I remain con­cerned about the peo­ple in charge of deten­tion facil­i­ties and law enforce­ment in Israel. I do not have com­plete faith that the right peo­ple are run­ning this, to be hon­est, or that we’re pur­su­ing every alle­ga­tion of mis­deeds by our own sol­diers.”
      • This is a debunk­ing of the Kristof piece, but it hon­est­ly seems to agree with the sub­stance of what Kristof said. I don’t know why peo­ple find it so hard to say, “Peo­ple who are ‘on my side’ some­times do real­ly vile things.”
    • The Paper Trail of Nicholas Kristof’s Smear (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, The Free Press): “The Israeli Prison Ser­vice has a rep­u­ta­tion for incom­pe­tence. There have been cas­es of abuse, even famous cas­es of pris­on­ers abus­ing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison sys­tems strug­gle with the prob­lem: New York pris­ons face huge num­bers of abuse claims. Pris­ons are not nice places, wher­ev­er they are in the world. So mis­treat­ment of pris­on­ers by Israeli guards isn’t mere­ly pos­si­ble, it’s almost cer­tain, as in any prison sys­tem any­where in the world. And con­di­tions were espe­cial­ly prob­lem­at­ic in recent years. Octo­ber 7 and the ensu­ing war sent thou­sands of Pales­tin­ian detainees into the pris­ons, togeth­er with under­trained reservist guards in the ear­ly months—guards who had seen Hamas’s videos glee­ful­ly doc­u­ment­ing mas­sacres that the new pris­on­ers had com­mit­ted.… And it must be said, as I’ve said before: Nei­ther Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ita­mar Ben-Gvir nor Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu seems inter­est­ed in fix­ing it. Our lead­ers do not seem to care about the sim­ple break­down of dis­ci­pline that these abus­es rep­re­sent, the kind of break­down we saw again and again with the inci­dents of loot­ing in Gaza and in the ear­ly cas­es of pris­on­er abuse that came to light.”
      • Again, a debunk­ing that con­tests details but con­cedes the basic point.
    • “Every­thing Is Legit­i­mate To Do! Every­thing!” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…the con­text for claims of Israeli excess­es is obvi­ous: a trau­ma­tized Israeli psy­che that has rad­i­cal­ized even more dur­ing this war, in which inhi­bi­tions around hat­ing the ene­my have obvi­ous­ly loos­ened. And the man in charge of the prison sys­tem is Ita­mar Ben-Gvir — a far-right Kahanist, Jew­ish suprema­cist. He’s as close to a neo­fas­cist as you can get. His view of Arabs, let alone sus­pect­ed ter­ror­ists, is, shall we say, not great. So a recent Abu Ghraib-like case in the sys­tem he pre­sides over is worth look­ing at. A pris­on­er in Sde Teiman, Israel’s tor­ture and prison camp, was hand­cuffed, blind­fold­ed, beat­en, tased, and sodom­ized with a broom han­dle, end­ing up in the hos­pi­tal with bro­ken ribs and a rup­tured bow­el. The inci­dent was even caught on video­tape, but the gris­ly details were con­cealed behind IDF shields.”
  7. The Con­gress­woman Who Wants to Shoot Sea Lions (Will Rahn, The Free Press): “…By the 1950s, there were only about 10,000 sea lions left. And so, in the 1970s, they imple­ment­ed some­thing called the Marine Mam­mal Pro­tec­tion Act (MMPA). And the great news was that they recov­ered, going up to about 300,000 of them. In fact, they are now inva­sive in the Colum­bia Riv­er trib­u­taries, where they were nev­er his­tor­i­cal­ly dom­i­nant. The prob­lem is that they are now real­ly evis­cer­at­ing native vul­ner­a­ble and endan­gered salmon and steel­head pop­u­la­tions. So we basi­cal­ly have an inva­sive species con­sum­ing an endan­gered species.… I think we clear­ly need to amend the MMPA to allow for more trib­al con­trol, and allow them or their designees to engage in lethal removal of sea lions in the Colum­bia Riv­er and its trib­u­taries.”
    • 100% rec­om­mend this inter­view. A fas­ci­nat­ing 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.

TGFI, Volume 548: anxiety, atheism, and China

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 544: Outworking Your Fork and the Olympics

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. You Can’t Out­work Your Fork (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “More and more peo­ple are rec­og­niz­ing we’re liv­ing in Baby­lon. How do we live in Baby­lon? By tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. Remem­ber what Daniel did in the first chap­ter of his book? He refused to eat from the king’s table. Remem­ber, he was a cap­tive. He had no con­trol over his life and yet, he took respon­si­bil­i­ty for what he ate. Like­wise, as Christ fol­low­ers, we have to take con­trol over the things that enter our minds and hearts. We have to be respon­si­ble for our spir­i­tu­al nutri­tion. We have to be inten­tion­al about what we read, what we watch, what we talk about and what we think about.… You’re in con­trol of your mind and your heart. Feed them well. After all, you can’t out­work your fork.”
  2. Olympic thoughts:
    • Alysa Liu com­pletes incred­i­ble come­back to win gold in fig­ure skat­ing (Les Car­pen­ter, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Lat­er, as she stood in a room beneath the stands, Liu recount­ed her wait through Sakamo­to and Nakai’s per­for­mances, telling how much she enjoys watch­ing them skate and was hop­ing they would skate real­ly well before the world. She was asked if she want­ed the gold at that point. ‘I don’t need this,’ she said, look­ing down at the medal around her neck, which matched the new gold dress she ordered for the Olympic free skate. ‘What I need­ed was the stage, and I got that, so I was all good. No mat­ter what hap­pened, you would have been fine. If that was a prob­lem, if I fell on every jump, I would still be wear­ing this dress.’ .…it was hard to know whether the real­i­ty would ever hit her. It might not mat­ter. She was thrilled she had skat­ed well; she was thrilled she had two new dress­es for the Olympics and a third for Sat­ur­day night’s Olympic gala; she was thrilled her fam­i­ly got to watch her skate.… Win­ning an Olympic gold medal seemed very far down the list of what was impor­tant to her at that point.”
      • Whole­some, com­mend­able, and encour­ag­ing. Plus look at the sheer joy on her face in the sec­ond pho­to of the piece (the top-down one).
    • What Eileen Gu Has Done is Total­ly Ordi­nary, Usu­al­ly Invites Zero Con­tro­ver­sy, and Has Rou­tine­ly Ben­e­fit­ted the Unit­ed States (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “What’s strik­ing is how selec­tive the con­cern is. When for­eign-born ath­letes become Amer­i­cans in time to com­pete for Team USA, we don’t sud­den­ly become tex­tu­al lit­er­al­ists about nation­al­i­ty statutes, we just cel­e­brate the medal haul. Only when affil­i­a­tion flows the oth­er way do we dis­cov­er a new­found rev­er­ence for puri­ty in cit­i­zen­ship law. The prac­tice of ath­letes com­pet­ing for coun­tries oth­er than their birth­place isn’t a scan­dal; it’s a cor­ner­stone of mod­ern Olympic sports!”
  3. A Chi­nese official’s use of Chat­G­PT acci­den­tal­ly revealed a glob­al intim­i­da­tion oper­a­tion (Sean Lyn­gaas, CNN): “The Chi­nese law enforce­ment offi­cial used Chat­G­PT like a diary to doc­u­ment the alleged covert cam­paign of sup­pres­sion, Ope­nAI said. In one instance, Chi­nese oper­a­tors alleged­ly dis­guised them­selves as US immi­gra­tion offi­cials to warn a US-based Chi­nese dis­si­dent that their pub­lic state­ments had sup­pos­ed­ly bro­ken the law, accord­ing to the Chat­G­PT user. In anoth­er case, they describe an effort to use forged doc­u­ments from a US coun­ty court to try to get a Chi­nese dissident’s social media account tak­en down.”
  4. “Help! All the Kids are Becom­ing Catholic/Orthodox” (Austin Sug­gs, Sub­stack): “Catholi­cism and East­ern Ortho­doxy don’t just offer a way of _seeing_ the world, they offer a _culture to immerse your­self in_ that so many peo­ple feel devoid of. I take it as no coin­ci­dence that the rise of inter­est in tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty coin­cid­ed with the rise of inter­est in sites like ancestry.com or grow­ing nationalism—both of which, in their own way, are try­ing to offer peo­ple a sense of shared, com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty root­ed in the past. To focus on doc­trine to the exclu­sion of com­mu­nal iden­ti­ty when inves­ti­gat­ing why peo­ple con­vert would be fol­ly. Protes­tants must have an answer to this if they want to keep peo­ple.”
  5. Against witch­craft (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Over­all, using your intu­ition is mas­sive­ly over­rat­ed in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go hay­wire. You’re bet­ter off court­ing like you’re arrang­ing your own mar­riage, not like you’re star­ring in a rom com.”
    • Much sen­si­ble (albeit non-Chris­t­ian) wis­dom in this arti­cle. Although the first four para­graphs are kin­da unhinged.
    • I decid­ed to look up the oth­er entries in this series. AMAZING. 9/10 rec­om­mend with the excep­tion of her sec­ond arti­cle which I skipped for being less rel­e­vant to like­ly read­ers of this sen­tence.
    • How to find a hus­band (and why you should want one) (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “So I got mar­ried recent­ly. I’ve decid­ed to take his name, so this blog is going to be now under the name Aria Schreck­er.… Find­ing a spouse should be the num­ber one pri­or­i­ty in your life. The right part­ner will make every oth­er goal in your life eas­i­er to achieve. If your pri­or­i­ty is your career, you will prob­a­bly be more suc­cess­ful with a well-cho­sen spouse. In some cas­es this will be a part­ner in a sim­i­lar field and you guys can pass each oth­er net­works and gos­sip. In some cas­es you may pre­fer some­one who is will­ing to put their career on the back­burn­er and sup­port you by tak­ing care of every­thing else in your life. If you’re aim­ing for suc­cess in pol­i­tics, or the arts, or you work tire­less­ly for a real­ly impor­tant altru­is­tic cause, then mar­ry­ing some­one with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.”
    • The wall is real but not for the rea­sons you think (Aria Schreck­er, Sub­stack): “Every day that pass­es, eli­gi­ble bach­e­lors in your age range start dat­ing the women they are going to mar­ry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main rea­sons. (1) There’s some­thing wrong with him/ (2) There’s some­thing wrong with her. (3) Bad luck. As you get old­er the men who are attrac­tive, want to get mar­ried, and don’t have ruinous per­son­al­i­ty prob­lems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girl­friends, aren’t inter­est­ed in seri­ous dat­ing, and/or have been seri­al­ly reject­ed by women after get­ting into rela­tion­ships with them. Obvi­ous­ly lots of sin­gle old­er men are still mar­riage-wor­thy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfor­tu­nate sources of incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty. But the more time pass­es, the less like­ly this becomes.”
  6. It’s Not His Fault He Used the N‑Word (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “As con­tro­ver­sies go, this one was immac­u­late. Unlike pre­vi­ous inci­dents of this type, there was no risk that the alleged hate speech would turn out to be an acci­den­tal mala­prop­ism, or an out­right fab­ri­ca­tion, or, as in one mem­o­rable case from 2021, a man who was mis­heard while try­ing to get the atten­tion of the mas­cot for the Col­orado Rock­ies, a pur­ple pol­ka-dot­ted tricer­atops named Dinger. This was an actu­al utter­ance of the actu­al no-no word, caught on actu­al cam­era and broad­cast on the actu­al BBC. If ever there was an iron­clad case for can­cel­la­tion—! Ah, but wait: Remem­ber, John David­son has Tourette’s syn­drome, which also makes this an actu­al case of the phe­nom­e­non col­lo­qui­al­ly known as the Oppres­sion Olympics.”
    • The twist at the end is stun­ning. I won’t spoil it. In a tweet about it, the author said, “When I learned why David­son was in the audi­ence my soul left my body.”
    • On a per­son­al note: one of my good friends in col­lege had Touret­te’s like this. I can attest that bro did high­ly offen­sive stuff on the reg­u­lar that I guar­an­tee he had absolute­ly zero con­trol over nor any poor inten­tion behind.
  7. Big­ger is not always bet­ter (Will Gibbs, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “She lived an ordi­nary life. Had kids, divorced, worked, retired, babysat and even­tu­al­ly passed away. But, her impact was any­thing but ordi­nary. She ran one of the few preschools in my home­town for twen­ty years. She deliv­ered dona­tions every Mon­day of the month to the local food pantry. She trav­eled with my church’s youth group to rehouse roofs and build ADA acces­si­ble hous­ing for less for­tu­nate peo­ple in our area.… When she passed away, my pas­tor start­ed get­ting stopped in the streets. Every­body every­where — even peo­ple he had walked by for years with­out a con­ver­sa­tion — want­ed to per­son­al­ly give their sym­pa­thies and express how big of an impact she had on them.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 542: the humanities backstory and overhyped Chinese academia

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Multi­bil­lion-Dol­lar Foun­da­tion That Con­trols the Human­i­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “Today, no sin­gle enti­ty, includ­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, has a more pro­found influ­ence on the fis­cal health and cul­tur­al out­put of the human­i­ties than the Mel­lon Foun­da­tion. The Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties’ grant bud­get was $78 mil­lion in 2024 (its over­all bud­get was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjust­ed for infla­tion). Mel­lon award­ed $540 mil­lion in grants that same year; its endow­ment sits at rough­ly $8 bil­lion. Mellon’s largesse is bad­ly need­ed, espe­cial­ly as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has threat­ened fur­ther cuts to the NEH. But the foundation’s vir­tu­al monop­oly on human­i­ties fund­ing means that it has the pow­er to remake entire fields accord­ing to its desires. And in recent years, under the lead­er­ship of Eliz­a­beth Alexan­der, who became the organization’s pres­i­dent in 2018, Mel­lon has embraced an under­stand­ing of the human­i­ties that is much more util­i­tar­i­an, and far more polit­i­cal, than the one put for­ward by the 1964 com­mis­sion.”
    • Unlocked and gen­uine­ly shock­ing to me. One of the key insights: “The human­i­ties aren’t broke because they went woke. The human­i­ties went woke in large part _because_ they were broke. As oth­er donors, the gov­ern­ment, and uni­ver­si­ties them­selves all but aban­doned these fields, Mel­lon became a life­line.”
  2. The Pop­u­lar Pro­gres­sive Pod­cast Call­ing Evan­gel­i­cals ‘Can­cer’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, The Free Press): “…it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine the vit­ri­ol she directs at [evan­gel­i­cals] being tar­get­ed at any oth­er reli­gious group by a major media fig­ure with so lit­tle con­se­quence. Take one clip that has cir­cu­lat­ed among evan­gel­i­cals recent­ly. I assumed its cap­tion on X, ‘White Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty is a can­cer,’ was intend­ed to scan­dal­ize with the most incen­di­ary quote. I thought wrong. If any­thing, the cap­tion under­sold a slan­der­ous, incu­ri­ous, unse­ri­ous screed that informed Welch’s view­ers that evan­gel­i­cals are ‘the worst peo­ple in our coun­try.’ They are, Welch says, peo­ple who want oth­ers to suf­fer, who belong to a ‘cult.’ And for Welch, this kind of lan­guage is par for the course. ‘I detest, with every mol­e­cule… in my being, evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty,’ she said in May.”
  3. Get Mar­ried Young (Brad Wilcox, Com­pact): “First, the cul­ture is telling you to lean into work and trav­el. But work­ing for the man and ‘trav­el­ing to Thai­land’ is not going to bring you the ful­fill­ment you think it will. Sec­ond, you will min­i­mize your odds of being mis­er­able and max­i­mize your odds of liv­ing a mean­ing­ful and hap­py life by get­ting mar­ried and hav­ing kids. So, don’t wait to embark on life’s most impor­tant jour­ney. Third, do not assume that you can wait until your thir­ties to find a spouse and start your fam­i­ly. If you wait, you may miss out.”
    • Lots of good data in this one. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  4. Don’t Trust the Rank­ings That Put China’s Uni­ver­si­ties on Top (Ariel Pro­cac­cia, New York Times): “The gap between the rank­ings and real­i­ty can be explained by Goodhart’s law, which says that when a mea­sure becomes a tar­get, it ceas­es to be a good mea­sure. It’s like try­ing to cure a fever by icing the ther­mome­ter: You’ve cooled the instru­ment, but the patient is still burn­ing up. Chi­na has made suc­cess in glob­al uni­ver­si­ty rank­ings a nation­al pol­i­cy goal, in the process cre­at­ing incen­tives that pri­or­i­tize the appear­ance of excel­lence over the health of the research envi­ron­ment.”
  5. Two arti­cles about preva­lent sec­u­lar sex­u­al ethics:
    • Ope­nAI Exec­u­tive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sex­u­al Dis­crim­i­na­tion (Geor­gia Wells & Sam Schech­n­er, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ope­nAI has cut ties with one of its top safe­ty exec­u­tives, on the grounds of sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion, after she voiced oppo­si­tion to the con­tro­ver­sial roll­out of AI erot­i­ca in its Chat­G­PT prod­uct.… Before her fir­ing, Beier­meis­ter told col­leagues that she opposed adult mode, and wor­ried it would have harm­ful effects for users, peo­ple famil­iar with her remarks said. She also told col­leagues that she believed OpenAI’s mech­a­nisms to stop child-exploita­tion con­tent weren’t effec­tive enough, and that the com­pa­ny couldn’t suf­fi­cient­ly wall off adult con­tent from teens, the peo­ple said.”
    • The Sexbot Rev­o­lu­tion Is Already Here (Debra Soh, The Free Press): “Though sex dolls—meaning human‑like, anatom­i­cal­ly accu­rate, anthro­po­mor­phic figurines—were once believed to be used only by social­ly inept weirdos, today near­ly 10 per­cent of men in the U.S. have bought or owned one. And it’s not just the guys; 6 per­cent of women in the U.S. have done the same.… The aver­age sex doll own­er is a mid­dle-aged het­ero­sex­u­al man who is sin­gle or divorced, high-school edu­cat­ed, and employed. Research has shown that doll own­ers have sex with a doll about 11 times a month and sex with a human part­ner about 2.6 times a month. In con­trast, non–doll own­ers have sex with a human part­ner about 4.5 times a month.”
      • I am not con­vinced the num­bers in this arti­cle are reli­able (ten per­cent of guys sounds like a lot), but even if the num­bers are off this is kin­da wild.
  6. It’s Time for Amer­i­ca to Admit That It Has a Mar­i­jua­na Prob­lem (Edi­to­r­i­al Board, New York Times): “…sup­port­ers of legal­iza­tion pre­dict­ed that it would bring few down­sides. In our edi­to­ri­als, we described mar­i­jua­na addic­tion and depen­dence as ‘rel­a­tive­ly minor prob­lems.’ Many advo­cates went fur­ther and claimed that mar­i­jua­na was a harm­less drug that might even bring net health ben­e­fits. They also said that legal­iza­tion might not lead to greater use. It is now clear that many of these pre­dic­tions were wrong.… At least one in 10 peo­ple who use mar­i­jua­na devel­ops an addic­tion, a sim­i­lar share as with alco­hol. Even some who do not devel­op an addic­tion can still use it too much. Peo­ple who are fre­quent­ly stoned can strug­gle to hold a job or take care of their fam­i­lies.”
    • Unlocked.
  7. A Stan­ford Exper­i­ment to Pair 5,000 Sin­gles Has Tak­en Over Cam­pus (Jas­mine Li, Wall Street Jour­nal): “More than 5,000 Stan­ford stu­dents have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 under­grad­u­ates. It has spread to 10 oth­er col­leges includ­ing Colum­bia, Prince­ton and MIT, and Date Drop just raised $2.1 mil­lion in ven­ture-cap­i­tal fund­ing. The growth, fans say, reflects a real­i­ty about many col­lege kids: They’re intim­i­dat­ed by real-life courtship and over­whelmed by the end­less scroll of dat­ing apps. Entre­pre­neur­ial stu­dents have found huge demand for alter­nate match­mak­ing tools.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 538: missionary spies and Minneapolis reflections

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. God’s Spooks: Reli­gion, Spy­ing, and the Cold War (Matthew Avery Sut­ton, Church Life Jour­nal): “Since its incep­tion, the CIA has used mis­sion­ar­ies and oth­er reli­gious activists for intel­li­gence and espi­onage work; it has used reli­gion as an effec­tive pro­pa­gan­da tool, and its agents have even posed as cler­gy. CIA agents and reli­gious activists man­aged to keep their part­ner­ships most­ly hid­den until the 1970s. But in the wake of Viet­nam and Water­gate, numer­ous jour­nal­ists and then Con­gress began scru­ti­niz­ing the agency more close­ly. They revealed to the world that the CIA had been employ­ing mis­sion­ar­ies to fur­ther its agen­da and that some reli­gious activists were receiv­ing sub­stan­tial rewards for their work on the government’s behalf. In fact, the CIA and reli­gious activists have long col­lab­o­rat­ed to achieve numer­ous pol­i­cy goals.”
    • Super fas­ci­nat­ing. My denom­i­na­tion receives spe­cif­ic men­tion: “The Assem­blies of God, which had a large and active mis­sion­ary out­reach, qui­et­ly instruct­ed work­ers to avoid CIA col­lab­o­ra­tion. How­ev­er, church lead­ers did not want to go on record pub­licly against the CIA.”
  2. Report: More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians world­wide face ‘high lev­els’ of per­se­cu­tion (Gina Chris­t­ian, OSV News): “More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians — or 1 in 7 believ­ers world­wide — face ‘high lev­els of per­se­cu­tion and dis­crim­i­na­tion for their faith,’ accord­ing to a new report.… Specif­i­cal­ly, Open Doors focus­es on col­lect­ing data on Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion in six key areas: restric­tions or dan­gers on prac­tic­ing faith in pri­vate, fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, nation­al and church life, as well as the lev­els of vio­lence — men­tal, phys­i­cal and sex­u­al — Chris­tians face in the 150 nations Open Doors mon­i­tors. Each area is scored, with each coun­try then receiv­ing an over­all score out of 100 for the sever­i­ty of Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, with scores of 81–100 des­ig­nat­ed as ‘extreme,’ 61–80 ‘very high’ and 41–60 ‘high.’”
  3. Not So Sec­u­lar Swe­den (Joel Hall­dorf, Com­ment): “In high­ly sec­u­lar soci­eties, zoomers tend to be more reli­gious than their boomer par­ents. Nowhere, the study con­clud­ed, was that pat­tern clear­er than in Swe­den, once the poster child of sec­u­lar­ism.… Swe­den once set the glob­al bench­mark for sec­u­lar ratio­nal­i­ty, and every­body expect­ed the world to fol­low our path. Now the qui­et stir­rings of faith here in the north—more con­fir­ma­tions, new mem­ber­ships, con­ver­sa­tions once unthinkable—show that his­to­ry has a way of hum­bling even the most con­fi­dent nar­ra­tives. Iron­clad soci­o­log­i­cal the­o­ries often insist that the cur­rent moment is our inevitable future. But his­to­ry sel­dom fol­lows straight lines.”
  4. Chris­tians, Let’s Stop Abus­ing Romans 13 (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “More­over, the use of Romans 13 as a refusal to ques­tion the moral­i­ty of a use of force is, iron­i­cal­ly enough, a vio­la­tion of the pas­sage. We might well ask, what would Paul have writ­ten if Romans 13 were addressed to the author­i­ties rather than to those under their rule? Well, we actu­al­ly know the answer, because the same Spir­it who breathed out Romans 13 also breathed out John the Baptist’s instruc­tions to tax col­lec­tors and sol­diers. John told them not to extort mon­ey from any­one, imply­ing that they would be held respon­si­ble for the mis­use of their pow­er (Luke 3:12–14). The same Spir­it also favor­ably por­trayed Paul’s inter­ac­tion with the police who told him and Silas, on behalf of the mag­is­trates, to leave qui­et­ly, to which Paul replied, ‘They have beat­en us pub­licly, uncon­demned, men who are Roman cit­i­zens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secret­ly? No! Let them come them­selves and take us out’ (Acts 16:37).”
  5. Chi­nese Uni­ver­si­ties Surge in Glob­al Rank­ings as U.S. Schools Slip (Mark Arse­nault, New York Times): “The issue at top Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties is not falling pro­duc­tion. Six promi­nent Amer­i­can schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, Johns Hop­kins, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton-Seat­tle, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty — are pro­duc­ing more research than they did two decades ago, accord­ing to the Lei­den tal­lies. But pro­duc­tion by the Chi­nese schools has risen far more.… [How­ev­er,] a study has sug­gest­ed that Chi­nese researchers have been boost­ing their cita­tion rank­ings by cit­ing one anoth­er more often than west­ern researchers tend to cite oth­er west­ern­ers.”
  6. How to stop the chaos of col­lege sports (John Cali­pari, Wash­ing­ton Post): “There is no sus­tain­able path in col­lege ath­let­ics that doesn’t address these three things: First, stu­dent-ath­letes should have their oppor­tu­ni­ties for schol­ar­ships pro­tect­ed and get to com­pete against play­ers who are their age. Sec­ond, trans­fer rules, which now allow play­ers to leave one school for anoth­er as often as they’d like, need sta­bil­i­ty. This will help edu­ca­tion remain the heart of col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. Third, pro­tect the free mar­ket and rights of young peo­ple to fair­ly earn what their local mar­kets can offer, which will require more rev­enue from teams.”
  7. Some reflec­tions on ICE in Min­neso­ta. There are many more float­ing around the web, and if you find one with good insights or a provoca­tive per­spec­tive please let me know about it.
    • I Joined Ice Watch (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “In the last six weeks, Min­neapo­lis has become the site of the largest immi­gra­tion enforce­ment oper­a­tion in U.S. his­to­ry. Thou­sands of city res­i­dents have respond­ed by join­ing var­i­ous Sig­nal groups whose main pur­pose is to find and dis­rupt ICE.… These indi­vid­u­als came from all walks of life. I count­ed at least five pub­lic school teach­ers, a divorce lawyer, two med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, a for­mer bal­le­ri­na, and even one Min­neapo­lis City Coun­cil mem­ber: Aurin Chowd­hury⁩, a pro­gres­sive who was endorsed by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca in 2023. One local non­prof­it leader whose orga­ni­za­tion reset­tles refugees told me that the aver­age par­tic­i­pants in these Sig­nal groups are church mem­bers, retirees, and par­ents.”
    • Min­neapo­lis Isn’t a Movie (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “Around the same time that Renee Good was shot, a video cir­cu­lat­ed on Tik­Tok of anoth­er con­fronta­tion between a group of agents who appear to be U.S. Mar­shals and an activist with a cam­era. The activist is a young- to mid­dle-aged woman, as is one of the agents—and when the first woman men­tions that her 6‑year-old child is in her car, the agent looks like she’s been elec­tro­cut­ed. ‘You have a child in your car?’ she says, her voice pitch­ing sharply upward, her eyes wide with hor­ror. ‘Get your child off the scene! This is an active police scene!’ It could not be clear­er, in this moment, that these women inhab­it two dif­fer­ent real­i­ties. One under­stands her­self to be in a dan­ger­ous, high-stakes sit­u­a­tion; the oth­er thinks it’s all a sort of game.”
    • The Goon Squad (Nick Cat­to­gio, The Dis­patch): “Why on earth is the admin­is­tra­tion announc­ing its oper­a­tions before they hap­pen?… It makes no sense as a strat­e­gy for effec­tive law enforcement—but lots of sense as a pageant of dom­i­neer­ing law-and-order assertive­ness. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion wants con­fronta­tion. Its top pri­or­i­ty isn’t to unob­tru­sive­ly detain and remove the most dan­ger­ous immi­grants, as the depor­ta­tion num­bers prove. Its pri­or­i­ty is to intim­i­date its cul­tur­al ene­mies with heavy-hand­ed dis­plays of author­i­ty and promis­es of offi­cial impuni­ty for those who car­ry them out. That’s why ICE wears masks, a priv­i­lege even U.S. com­bat troops don’t enjoy, and why some agents are kit­ted out in cam­ou­flage despite the fact that they’re not try­ing to ‘blend in’ to their urban sur­round­ings. (There’s noth­ing stealthy about ICE.) They’re not enforc­ing the law, they’re going into bat­tle. And their anonymi­ty sig­nals, to you and to them, that no one will hold them account­able for what hap­pens dur­ing that bat­tle if you make trou­ble.”
    • One State, Two Very Dif­fer­ent Views of Min­neapo­lis (Sheila M. Eldred, Eliz­a­beth A. Staw­ic­ki, Ann Hin­ga Klein and Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Ms. Good’s death was trag­ic, they said. Hor­rif­ic. But they also said that she had asked for trou­ble. ‘You obey the law offi­cer,’ a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, ‘and ques­tion it lat­er.’ This is the divide, in a sin­gle sen­tence. In Min­neapo­lis, pro­test­ers saw an inno­cent woman killed by a fed­er­al agent and took to the streets. At ‘the Pick­le,’ the reg­u­lars saw a woman who should have com­plied.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 528: Halloween, China, and Nihilistic Violent Extremists

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Chris­tians Don’t Cel­e­brate Hal­loween (Tyler Krug, Sub­stack): “For years now, when some­one asks me if our fam­i­ly cel­e­brates Hal­loween, my reply has been the same: ‘No, we don’t cel­e­brate any­thing on Halloween—instead, our kids dress up and extort the neigh­bors for can­dy.’ My reply brings to the sur­face two relat­ed concepts—one explic­it, one implied. The first con­cept is cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion is ‘the action of mark­ing one’s plea­sure at an impor­tant event or occa­sion.’ Cel­e­bra­tion, there­fore, involves knowl­edge, intent and endorse­ment.… But my Hal­loween retort also implies a sec­ond con­cept: par­tic­i­pa­tion. While cel­e­bra­tion requires par­tic­i­pa­tion, par­tic­i­pa­tion does not require celebration—playing in a foot­ball game and cel­e­brat­ing the sport are two dif­fer­ent things. Fur­ther, a defen­sive back might par­tic­i­pate in a play result­ing in a touch­down, but they won’t be cel­e­brat­ing in the end zone.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. Amer­i­ca Is Los­ing the Gray Zone War for the South Chi­na Sea (Ray­mond Pow­ell, The Dis­patch): “America’s con­tin­ued inabil­i­ty to devel­op any­thing approach­ing a counter-gray-zone strat­e­gy is exact­ly why Chi­na employs it. The CCP has fig­ured out that we real­ly like our neat cat­e­gories and rules-based order: We are either at peace or at war; an action is either legal or ille­gal; an asset is either mil­i­tary or civil­ian; a fact is either true or false; crises are to be avoid­ed and de-esca­lat­ed, not used as oppor­tu­ni­ties to reset the board in our favor. China’s gray-zone strat­e­gy is designed to exploit the myr­i­ad gaps and seams that define our con­ven­tion­al and ordered pol­i­cy frame­works and deter­rence mod­els.”
  3. The Sus­pect­ed LA Arson­ist and the Rise of the Nihilis­tic Vio­lent Extrem­ists (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “He was defined more by what he was against—climate change, Don­ald Trump, peo­ple who ate meat, peo­ple who believed in God—than what he was for.… Rinderknecht told the chat­bot that he ‘lit­er­al­ly burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amaz­ing. I felt so lib­er­at­ed.’ …Rinderknecht came from a reli­gious home. His par­ents, Joel and Jen­nifer, were Bap­tist mis­sion­ar­ies who lived in France.”
  4. We All Live in a Vil­lage Now (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “We all live in a vil­lage again.… For it turns out that the life of the city, with its atten­dant free­doms from neigh­bor­ly super­vi­sion and col­lec­tive con­straint, was real­ly just a short inter­lude in the his­to­ry of human­i­ty. Facil­i­tat­ed by social media, the vil­lage has returned with a vengeance—stripped of its warmth, and super­charged by the cru­el­ty of the crowd.”
  5. Blue State Blues (Riv­er Page, The Free Press): “[The guid­ing prin­ci­ple of blue states] is pater­nal­ism for the law-abid­ing mass­es and per­mis­sive­ness for society’s anti­so­cial under­bel­ly. In oth­er words, liv­ing in a blue state means that the gov­ern­ment treats you like a child and does every­thing in its pow­er to make your life just a lit­tle more annoy­ing and inconvenient—unless you start open­ly smok­ing crack on the street.… I still sup­port labor unions. I still want Medicare for All. But I want my dig­ni­ty and san­i­ty too. I’d rather be ignored than annoyed.”
  6. Is ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty real? (Ariel Zeleznikow-John­ston, Sub­stack): “As a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, my first thoughts when encoun­ter­ing reports [of ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty] are that they can’t pos­si­bly be real. By the time patients with severe demen­tia actu­al­ly die, their brains are cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly dam­aged. They typ­i­cal­ly show no signs of rec­og­niz­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers. They often haven’t respond­ed mean­ing­ful­ly to their envi­ron­ment in months or years. Their brains are rid­dled with plaques and tan­gles. And they’ve lost 20–50% of their synap­tic con­nec­tions — so much that their brains have vis­i­bly shrunk on MRI scans.… And yet, ter­mi­nal lucid­i­ty keeps being report­ed.… The only prospec­tive study, which fol­lowed 100 hos­pice deaths, found it in 6% of cas­es. That’s not ubiq­ui­tous, but nor is it rare — in the US alone, it would mean around ten thou­sand cas­es per year.”
    • An inter­est­ing com­ple­ment to the Charles Mur­ray arti­cle argu­ing for the exis­tence of the soul I shared two weeks ago.
    • The author is a research sci­en­tist at Monash Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia.
  7. The Debate Divid­ing the Supreme Court’s Lib­er­al Jus­tices (Jodi Kan­tor, New York Times): “Bad­ly out­num­bered, seat­ed for the long haul of life tenure, Jus­tices Kagan and Jack­son in par­tic­u­lar are divid­ed on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sen­tenced to fail.… Like many oth­ers across the left in the era of Don­ald J. Trump, the lib­er­al jus­tices are in a gen­er­a­tional and philo­soph­i­cal strug­gle over whether to safe­guard insti­tu­tions from with­in or protest their decline. But unlike politi­cians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tra­di­tion-bound and deco­rous that clos­ing an opin­ion ‘I dis­sent’ instead of ‘I respect­ful­ly dis­sent’ is con­sid­ered a dra­mat­ic state­ment.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How easy is it to fudge your sci­en­tif­ic rank? Meet Lar­ry, the world’s most cit­ed cat (Christie Wilcox, Sci­ence): “Lar­ry Richard­son appeared to be an ear­ly-career math­e­mati­cian with poten­tial. Accord­ing to Google Schol­ar, he’d authored a dozen papers on top­ics rang­ing from com­plex alge­bras to the struc­ture of math­e­mat­i­cal objects, rack­ing up more than 130 cita­tions in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the stud­ies weren’t com­plete gib­ber­ish. And Lar­ry wasn’t a cat.… [This is not with­out prece­dent] In 1975, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Jack Het­her­ing­ton added his Siamese to one of his sin­gle-author papers so the ref­er­ences to ‘we’ would make more sense. As of this year, ‘Felis Domes­ti­cus Chester Willard’ has 107 cita­tions.”
    • Note: this is from July 2024, so a bit out­dat­ed. I did check FDC Willard and his cita­tion count has gone up to 113.
  • AI Will Ruin Social Media (SMBC)
  • Sexy Cos­tumes for your Church Fall Fes­ti­val (Matthew Pierce, Sub­stack): “Prob­a­bly the sex­i­est man in the Bible is Sam­son, because he was an idiot with big pecs, and all the Chris­t­ian ladies are like ‘oooh, I could fix him.’ Sam­son is your friend from youth group who could walk into a room full of smart, pret­ty girls, and in five min­utes he will be talk­ing to the one crazy girl in the back. And then you are like ‘John, that girl is on pro­ba­tion for stab­bing her last boyfriend,’ but he is like ‘bro, I got this,’ but in fact he does not have this, and he nev­er will.”
  • Your Brain’s Job (The Oat­meal)
  • Doc­u­ment Forgery (xkcd) — I lowkey want to make one of these
  • What’s Miss­ing From Your Favorite Choco­late Bar? It May Be Choco­late. (Claire Brown, New York Times): “As the Hal­loween sea­son boosts demand, some can­dy com­pa­nies are replac­ing expen­sive cocoa but­ter with oth­er fats, a swap that means their prod­ucts no longer meet the U.S. reg­u­la­to­ry def­i­n­i­tion of milk choco­late and can no longer be called that on pack­ag­ing.”
  • The Night­mare Is Over: Supreme Court Out­laws Can­dy Corn (Baby­lon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 519: our therapeutic age and transparent mice scalps

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 Chris­t­ian in a Ther­a­peu­tic Age (Ian Har­ber, Mere Ortho­doxy): “What are ways that Chris­tians can live, wit­ness, and nav­i­gate the com­plex­i­ties of a ther­a­peu­tic cul­ture? I believe there are at least three. 1) Occu­py a dif­fer­ent exis­ten­tial space, 2) Embody a dif­fer­ent sto­ry, and 3) Cul­ti­vate a dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty of life.… The ther­a­peu­tic cul­ture is try­ing to solve real ail­ments. We’re more frac­tured, iso­lat­ed, and devoid of mean­ing-mak­ing roles and insti­tu­tions than ever before. The dig­i­tal age has rap­tured us from our bod­ies and com­mu­ni­ties and drained us of the very things that make us human. But the good truth for our time—and all eternity—is that the God-human, Jesus, has made a way for us to recov­er our human­i­ty”
  2. Researchers turn mouse scalp trans­par­ent to image brain devel­op­ment (Stan­ford News): “Now, by sim­ply rub­bing a solu­tion into a juve­nile mouse’s scalp, researchers at Stan­ford can make the skin trans­par­ent to all vis­i­ble light, allow­ing them to image the devel­op­ing con­nec­tions in a liv­ing mouse’s brain. And because the tech­nique is reversible and non-inva­sive, the researchers can return to the same ani­mal over days and weeks.”
    • Chi Alpha alum­nus and Stan­ford pro­fes­sor Guosong Hong at it again!
  3. Robin West­man and the Rise of Amer­i­can Nihilism (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “All that fin­ger-point­ing obscures a deep­er point: West­man seems to have been dri­ven by an all-con­sum­ing, destruc­tive force, a nihilism—the con­vic­tion that life is mean­ing­less; that words like truth, jus­tice and God are emp­ty slo­gans; that every­thing must be razed. Nihilism is not some obscure aca­d­e­m­ic notion. It stretch­es back to the 19th century—early Russ­ian rad­i­cals were called nihilists—and it has waxed and waned across the past 150 years. Today, you can feel the nihilist impulse cours­ing through Amer­i­ca, which has been most­ly stripped of its faith and a shared nation­al cul­ture and has seen once-great institutions—universities, cor­po­ra­tions, church­es, non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions, the media, the military—become engulfed in scan­dal and politi­ciza­tion.”
  4. They Became Sym­bols for Gazan Star­va­tion. But All 12 Suf­fer from Oth­er Health Prob­lems. (Olivia Rein­gold and Tanya Lukyano­va, The Free Press): “Uncov­er­ing this miss­ing con­text didn’t require in-depth, on-the-ground reporting—or months of inves­tiga­tive work. It took min­utes, and required noth­ing more than a com­put­er with a sta­ble inter­net con­nec­tion. We sim­ply ran the sto­ry sub­jects’ names through Google Trans­late to get the Ara­bic spelling, then searched those names in Ara­bic-lan­guage media. Even a quick scan of the results revealed that many of these chil­dren suf­fer from mus­cle atro­phy, head injuries, or oth­er seri­ous med­ical con­di­tions that help explain their ema­ci­at­ed appear­ance.”
    • A fol­low-up: Jour­nal­ists Against Jour­nal­ism (The Free Press): “Jour­nal­is­tic out­lets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this sto­ry has had more than its share.… In a nor­mal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for get­ting to ground truth. But we don’t live in nor­mal times. And that is not how some of our col­leagues in the news media saw things.… You’ll notice one impor­tant aspect about the uproar: No one is dis­put­ing the facts in our piece.”
  5. Two on Chi­na (or more specif­i­cal­ly, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty):
    • How Chi­na Influ­ences Elec­tions in America’s Biggest City (Michael Forsythe, Jay Root, Bian­ca Pal­laro & David A. Fahren­thold, New York Times): “In New York City, social clubs backed by Chi­na under­mined a con­gres­sion­al can­di­date who once chal­lenged the regime on Chi­nese tele­vi­sion. They helped unseat a state sen­a­tor for attend­ing a ban­quet with the pres­i­dent of Tai­wan. And they con­demned a City Coun­cil can­di­date on social media for sup­port­ing Hong Kong democ­ra­cy. In the past few years, these orga­ni­za­tions have qui­et­ly foiled the careers of politi­cians who opposed China’s author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ment while back­ing oth­ers who sup­port­ed poli­cies of the country’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
    • I’m a Stan­ford stu­dent. A Chi­nese agent tried to recruit me as a spy (Elsa John­son, The Times): “After that I start­ed screen­shot­ting our con­ver­sa­tions. I was begin­ning to sus­pect that Charles might be work­ing for the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (CCP) and he could be try­ing to recruit me as a spy. I know it sounds para­noid, but I had heard of oth­er Stan­ford stu­dents receiv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions like this out of the blue — espe­cial­ly those study­ing sci­ence, tech, engi­neer­ing or math­e­mat­ics.…. Thanks to Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties’ open-door pol­i­cy, Chi­nese aca­d­e­mics are allowed to col­lab­o­rate with our smartest researchers and sci­en­tists, and take our advance­ments in AI, robot­ics, weapon­ry and nuclear tech­nol­o­gy back home. This is not an exag­ger­a­tion — it’s the con­clu­sion of a report on the CCP pub­lished last Sep­tem­ber by the House select com­mit­tee on the CCP.”
  6. The Wrong Def­i­n­i­tion of Love (David Brooks, New York Times): “In [our ther­a­py-dri­ven] cul­ture peo­ple are nat­u­ral­ly going to define love as the feel­ing they get when some­body sat­is­fies their crav­ing for pos­i­tive and ten­der atten­tion, not as some­thing they self­less­ly give to anoth­er. In oth­er, less self-ori­ent­ed cul­tures, and in oth­er times, love was seen as some­thing clos­er to self-abne­ga­tion than to self-com­fort. It was seen as a force so pow­er­ful that it could over­come our nat­ur­al self­ish­ness.”
  7. As Stan­ford lays off work­ers, 18 employ­ees made $1 mil­lion or more (Top 25 list­ed) (Braden Cartwright, Palo Alto Dai­ly Post): “At a time when Stan­ford is fir­ing employ­ees to save mon­ey, new­ly released IRS doc­u­ments show the uni­ver­si­ty paid 18 employ­ees $1 mil­lion or more in the pre­vi­ous fis­cal year. Stan­ford announced in July that it was lay­ing off 363 employ­ees this fall as part of a $140 mil­lion bud­get cut caused by reduced fed­er­al research fund­ing and a high­er endow­ment tax.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cat­a­stro­phe (Pearls Before Swine)
  • There’s a Sim­ple Trick to Unshrink Your Clothes, Thanks to Sci­ence (Nisa Sal­im, Sci­enceAl­ert): “If a favourite gar­ment has shrunk in the wash, you can try to res­cue it with this sim­ple method. Gen­tly soak the item in luke­warm water mixed with hair con­di­tion­er or baby sham­poo (approx­i­mate­ly one table­spoon per litre). Then, care­ful­ly stretch the fab­ric back into shape and dry it flat or under gen­tle ten­sion – for exam­ple, by peg­ging the gar­ment to a dry­ing rack.”
    • Read­ing this arti­cle is like read­ing one of those recipe blogs that goes on and on before it gets to the point, but the final bit is inter­est­ing.
  • Gen­era (SMBC)
  • Man Ful­fills The Great Com­mis­sion By Occa­sion­al­ly Wear­ing Nov­el­ty Chris­t­ian T‑Shirt In Pub­lic (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Bill Belichick’s Girl­friend, 24, Wants to Trade­mark ‘Gold Dig­ger’ (Amber Lewis, The Dai­ly Beast): “Jor­don Hud­son wants to make some gold from the gold-dig­ging accu­sa­tions levied at her amid her rela­tion­ship with Bill Belichick, who is esti­mat­ed to be worth $70 mil­lion. The for­mer cheer­leader, 24, filed a trade­mark appli­ca­tion this week through the com­pa­ny she man­ages, TCE Rights Man­age­ment, to cash in on her ‘gold dig­ger’ epi­thet. If her bid is suc­cess­ful, she will launch her own trade­marked jew­el­ry and key chains line, Peo­ple reports.”
  • See­ing infrared: sci­en­tists cre­ate con­tact lens­es that grant ‘super-vision’ (Ian Sam­ple, The Guardian): “In pre­vi­ous work, the research team gave mice near-infrared vision by inject­ing upcon­ver­sion nanopar­ti­cles under the reti­na, the light-sen­si­tive mem­brane at the back of the eye. But not­ing that this ‘may not be read­i­ly accept­ed by humans,’ they searched for a less inva­sive strat­e­gy. Writ­ing in the jour­nal Cell, the sci­en­tists describe how they made soft con­tact lens­es seed­ed with upcon­ver­sion nanopar­ti­cles. When worn, peo­ple could see Morse code-like sig­nals flashed from an infrared LED and tell what direc­tion infrared light came from. Their infrared vision improved when they closed their eyes, because eye­lids block vis­i­ble light more than infrared, so there was less vis­i­ble light to inter­fere.”
    • The arti­cle is a few months old. Wild times.

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 518

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. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, The Free Press): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good.”
    • FYI: the cov­er image is risque.
  2. Here’s What Hap­pened When I Made My Col­lege Stu­dents Put Away Their Phones (Ezekiel J. Emanuel, New York Times): “To help sell this pol­i­cy, I pre­sent­ed in the first lec­ture of the course a study show­ing that stu­dents who were required to take class notes by hand retained sig­nif­i­cant­ly more infor­ma­tion than stu­dents who used com­put­ers. The rea­son is that with com­put­ers, stu­dents can type as fast as I speak and strive for ver­ba­tim tran­scripts, but there is almost no men­tal pro­cess­ing of the class’s con­tent. Con­verse­ly, vir­tu­al­ly no one can hand write 125 words per minute for 90 min­utes. Thus, hand­writ­ten notes require simul­ta­ne­ous men­tal pro­cess­ing to deter­mine the impor­tant points that need record­ing. This pro­cess­ing encodes the mate­r­i­al in the brain dif­fer­ent­ly and facil­i­tates longer-term reten­tion. The data on the dis­tract­ing effect of mobile phones — even when they are face down and turned off — are strong.”
    • The author is a med school prof at Penn.
  3. Is mod­er­ate drink­ing actu­al­ly healthy? Sci­en­tists say the idea is out­dat­ed. (Stan­ford News): “We have bought into a sto­ry­line about alco­hol that, when you real­ly look at the facts, is not there,” Stafford said. “There is a mythol­o­gy about alco­hol hav­ing pos­i­tive ben­e­fits as well as alco­hol being neu­tral for human health.”
  4. Trump’s Tac­tics Mean Many Inter­na­tion­al Stu­dents Won’t Make It to Cam­pus (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York Times): “In Chi­na and India, there have been few visa appoint­ments avail­able for stu­dents in recent months, and some­times none at all, accord­ing to the Asso­ci­a­tion of Inter­na­tion­al Edu­ca­tors, also known as NAFSA, a pro­fes­sion­al orga­ni­za­tion. If visa prob­lems per­sist, new inter­na­tion­al stu­dent enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges could drop by 30 to 40 per­cent over­all this fall, a loss of 150,000 stu­dents, accord­ing to the group’s analy­sis.”
  5. What Hap­pens When an Entire Sci­en­tif­ic Field Changes Its Mind (Charles Mann, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “[There is] a pop­u­lar notion of sci­en­tif­ic progress as a series of upheavals in which mav­er­icks throw out the entrenched views of the past.… But that’s not how sci­ence works. Or, more pre­cise­ly, it’s not how sci­ence works except in two spe­cif­ic, rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al cir­cum­stances. The first is when research dis­ci­plines are young, thin­ly pop­u­lat­ed and just devel­op­ing instru­ments of suf­fi­cient pow­er to test their ini­tial beliefs, as was the case with the Michel­son-Mor­ley exper­i­ment and Pasteur’s fer­men­ta­tion. The sec­ond, pos­si­bly more con­se­quen­tial sit­u­a­tion is when sci­en­tif­ic find­ings lead to so much pub­lic inter­est that they become of con­cern to polit­i­cal author­i­ties.”
  6. A two-parter about Chi­na from a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins:
    • The Case for China’s Strength (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “In the Unit­ed States, the Col­lege Board has recent­ly announced that it will dras­ti­cal­ly reduce the length of read­ing pas­sages; rather than giv­ing stu­dents who are tak­ing the SATs texts that are about 600 words in length, and ask­ing them a few ques­tions about each, they will hence­forth be giv­en texts that are about 150 words in length, and only have to answer a sin­gle ques­tion about each. This means that Chi­nese high school stu­dents tak­ing their Eng­lish exam now like­ly face a more chal­leng­ing test in a for­eign lan­guage than Amer­i­cans tak­ing the SAT do in their native tongue. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this page from last year’s exam.”
    • The Cracks in China’s Rise (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “The country’s high mod­ernist eth­ic allowed it to build tens of thou­sands of miles of high-speed rail­way tracks in the course of a cou­ple of decades; but it is also the rea­son why one year’s favored indus­tri­al sec­tors reli­ably seem to turn into next year’s sources of waste and over­pro­duc­tion. The country’s extent of cen­tral­iza­tion cre­ates a giant mar­ket increas­ing­ly unit­ed by shared norms and a com­mon lan­guage; but the extent to which local cul­tures and lan­guages are being flat­tened also con­tributes to a grow­ing sense of alien­ation. None of this should be sur­pris­ing. When coun­tries are in their first spurt of growth, the advan­tages of the mod­el are often evi­dent, and its short­com­ings invis­i­ble. It is when they mature, and the prob­lems they need to solve become increas­ing­ly com­plex, that the draw­backs come into view.”
  7. The Many Jobs of a Reli­gious Leader (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The one real­ly sig­nif­i­cant find­ing for me is that very few mem­bers of the cler­gy report that they went straight into min­istry as a young per­son. In fact, 66% of the folks in the sam­ple of reli­gious lead­ers said that they had a career out­side reli­gion before they became a mem­ber of the cler­gy. I’m not sure if the aver­age per­son knows that — most pas­tors you see didn’t go straight from Bible Col­lege to Divin­i­ty School to full-time min­istry.”

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 507: kindness, China, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

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 Kind­ness Became Crim­i­nal­ized (Anas­ta­sia Boden, The Dis­patch): “Three years ago, the city of Tempe, Ari­zona, was cel­e­brat­ing Austin Davis as a hero. It even gave him an award for his char­i­ta­ble work, which includ­ed dri­ving the city’s home­less peo­ple to addic­tion or men­tal health ser­vices and putting on Sun­day pic­nics, where he shared food with those who were hun­gry. Last sum­mer, he was jailed for the same work.”
    • This arti­cle is very much worth your time.
  2. The Mass Trau­ma of Porn (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Imag­ine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her child­hood, when she men­tions, some­what casu­al­ly, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He intro­duced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had got­ten her first peri­od, with­out her par­ents know­ing. Week after week, he showed her more, each time some­thing more extreme. By ten it seemed nor­mal. By eleven, she was watch­ing reg­u­lar­ly on her own. She is calm about this, reas­sur­ing you that this has hap­pened to most of her friends. Would any­one think this was nor­mal? Part of com­ing-of-age, her healthy devel­op­ment? Explor­ing her sex­u­al­i­ty? Or would we call this abuse? This is exact­ly what is hap­pen­ing to chil­dren today when we hand them a smart­phone. But instead of one stranger intro­duc­ing them to porn, it is a bil­lion-dol­lar indus­try, prof­it­ing from their trau­ma.”
  3. Many of Dead Sea scrolls may be old­er than thought, experts say (Nico­la Davis, The Guardian): “While some scrolls were radio­car­bon dat­ed in the 1990s, Popović said schol­ars did not tack­le the prob­lem of cas­tor oil con­t­a­m­i­na­tion – a sub­stance applied in the 1950s to help experts read the man­u­scripts, but which could skew results.”
    • The schol­ar­ly study is avail­able at PLOS One: Dat­ing ancient man­u­scripts using radio­car­bon and AI-based writ­ing style analy­sis
    • Note that when the arti­cle says stuff like “Many of the Dead Sea scrolls could be old­er than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, with some bib­li­cal texts dat­ing from the time of their orig­i­nal authors” it means some­thing dif­fer­ent than I would mean. When I talk about the orig­i­nal author of Daniel, I mean Daniel. That’s not the assump­tion they’re work­ing under. Set­ting that aside, the big take­away is that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls seem to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly old­er than we thought, and that should encour­age Chris­tians because it shows that the tex­tu­al evi­dence for the Old Tes­ta­ment is even stronger than pre­vi­ous­ly real­ized.
  4. Some Chi­na-relat­ed news
    • Why Tai­wan Is the West Berlin of Our Time (Jay Sophal­kalyan, The Dis­patch): “At this junc­ture, Tai­wan occu­pies that same fate­ful role West Berlin did. It stands unbowed along the fault line between tyran­ny and liberty—a free soci­ety that, by the cold arith­metic of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, ought not to exist. But the stakes are even high­er.… this small island nation is an irrefutable repu­di­a­tion of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party’s ide­o­log­i­cal creed. It proves that pros­per­i­ty does not neces­si­tate repres­sion, and that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is nei­ther a West­ern impo­si­tion nor a cul­tur­al anomaly—it is a uni­ver­sal aspi­ra­tion spring­ing from the shared yearn­ings of the human spir­it.”
    • Fac­ing a Pre­car­i­ous Future in Hong Kong (Peter Maize, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chan believes that Hong Kong church­es are with­in a 10-year grace peri­od before the gov­ern­ment impos­es any sig­nif­i­cant changes. He says Flow is will­ing to coop­er­ate to a cer­tain degree. For exam­ple, he would put a Chi­nese flag on their stage if the gov­ern­ment requires it. Yet for require­ments that go against the Bible, ‘we will fol­low Jesus,’ Chan said. ‘We will not com­pro­mise our faith. We’re men­tal­ly pre­pared for the future.’ That prepa­ra­tion includes a delib­er­ate deci­sion not to keep a data­base of mem­bers and an expec­ta­tion that the Flow Church might dis­ap­pear soon.”
  5. Come to Me, All You Net­work­ing Techies (Natal­ie Mead, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s not easy to be a Chris­t­ian in the Bay Area. I’ve lived in San Fran­cis­co for 12 years. But it’s often imprac­ti­cal, even impos­si­ble, for Chris­tians to put down roots here.… I know many techies whose faith didn’t sur­vive the pres­sure to suc­ceed, the mon­ey, and the cul­tur­al indoc­tri­na­tion. Mine did only by God’s grace. So when a friend on the East Coast shared a recent New York Times sto­ry about a Chris­t­ian ‘revival’ occur­ring in Sil­i­con Val­ley, I groaned—not because I’m against revival in the Bay Area! I was just skep­ti­cal of its sup­posed locus: the tech indus­try.”
  6. Fel­low­ship in the Fiery Fur­nace: Do Chris­t­ian Per­se­cu­tion Nar­ra­tives Tran­scend Racial Divides? (Brook­lyn Walk­er & Paul A. Djupe, Reli­gion in Pub­lic): “In this arti­cle, we show that reli­gious threat, or beliefs that your reli­gious group is the tar­get of per­se­cu­tion, can actu­al­ly bring togeth­er peo­ple across America’s deep and per­sis­tent racial divide. As polit­i­cal sci­en­tists con­tin­ue to wres­tle with the mean­ing of racial dif­fer­ence in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, our work sug­gests that oth­er types of iden­ti­ties, like reli­gious iden­ti­ties, and the threat that makes those iden­ti­ties salient, should be an impor­tant part of the con­ver­sa­tion.”
  7. How Cer­tain Are Cler­gy of their Faith? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “There’s a state­ment in this sur­vey, ‘My reli­gion would be the best one for all peo­ple no mat­ter their back­ground or cur­rent reli­gion’ that real­ly gets to the heart of the mat­ter. This is a great exam­ple of how the evan­gel­i­cal under­stand­ing of reli­gion dif­fers from oth­er faith groups. In this sam­ple, 93% of the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors said that their reli­gion was the best one for all peo­ple. That was 22 points high­er than Black Protes­tants. It was also sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than Catholic priests and main­line Protes­tant pas­tors. For the Catholics, 58% thought that they had a supe­ri­or per­spec­tive and it was a bare major­i­ty of the main­line at 51%. I do want to note that the non-Chris­t­ian cler­gy had a much dif­fer­ent approach here — a major­i­ty dis­agreed that they had a supe­ri­or world­view.”
    • Lots of fas­ci­nat­ing stats in this brief arti­cle.

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.