Tag: elite colleges

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 441

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

This is vol­ume 441, which is 212 and also the small­est square which is the sum of six con­sec­u­tive cubes: 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63

No amus­ing stuff at the end this week. I’ve been busy trav­el­ing and am vast­ly underamused.😅

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (T. M. Suffield, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Pen­ning­ton describes the beat­i­tudes as ‘divine gold of price­less worth’ that ‘appears to be only dark­ness.’ Like wis­dom say­ings they don’t give up their gold imme­di­ate­ly. They are sup­posed to shock us and I fear we have become over­ly famil­iar with them. Jesus is argu­ing that flour­ish­ing, the good life, requires mourn­ing. The thing the mod­ern world wants to avoid most, sad­ness, is some­how a key to a good life. To us this appears to be pro­found­ly non-flour­ish­ing. The shock we should feel is part of how the beat­i­tudes are meant to work.”
    • This is a wise and per­cep­tive essay. 10/10 rec­om­mend.
  2. How Fem­i­nism Ends (Ginevra Davis, Amer­i­can Affairs Jour­nal): “If the goal of fem­i­nism is to improve the lot of females, then there are dozens of changes, social and sci­en­tif­ic, that could help alle­vi­ate their con­di­tion. But if the goal of fem­i­nism is per­fect sex­u­al equality—that no mind should ever have to make sac­ri­fices, in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or love, because of its body—then the end of fem­i­nism must, nec­es­sar­i­ly, mean the end of females. There is no oth­er way.”
    • A long but fab­u­lous essay. It’s by a Stan­ford grad, inci­den­tal­ly — this is the same author who wrote about Stan­ford’s war on fun a while back. I don’t think we ever crossed paths when she was a stu­dent.
    • Vague­ly relat­ed (but inter­est­ing enough in its own right that I would have includ­ed it regard­less): Stan­ford Med­i­cine study iden­ti­fies dis­tinct brain orga­ni­za­tion pat­terns in women and men (Stan­ford Med­i­cine): “A new study by Stan­ford Med­i­cine inves­ti­ga­tors unveils a new arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence mod­el that was more than 90% suc­cess­ful at deter­min­ing whether scans of brain activ­i­ty came from a woman or a man. The find­ings, pub­lished Feb. 20 in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, help resolve a long-term con­tro­ver­sy about whether reli­able sex dif­fer­ences exist in the human brain and sug­gest that under­stand­ing these dif­fer­ences may be crit­i­cal to address­ing neu­ropsy­chi­atric con­di­tions that affect women and men dif­fer­ent­ly.”
  3. I’m a fos­ter kid who went to Yale —and I think two-par­ent fam­i­lies are more impor­tant than col­lege (Rik­ki Schlott, New York Post): “Even though I was always aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly inclined, the lev­el of dis­or­der in my life was weigh­ing me down so much that I wasn’t in a posi­tion to ful­ly exploit my own capa­bil­i­ties.… I had a class where a pro­fes­sor admin­is­tered an anony­mous poll. Out of the 20 stu­dents, 18 of them had been raised by both of their birth par­ents. That just floored me because where I grew up it was zero.”
  4. Kin­da Nice (Damo­la Morenike­ji, Sub­stack): “A kind per­son will help you under­stand real­i­ty as it is, prompt you to reflect, and nudge you to fine-tune your posi­tion till you get to a place where your res­o­lu­tion is help­ful for you. A nice per­son will tell you what feels good — and often what you think you want to hear at that time — even if it doesn’t help you move past that sit­u­a­tion.”
  5. Our Unhap­py Youth (Antho­ny Esolen, Cri­sis Mag­a­zine): “Instead of ask­ing why they are unhap­py, we might ask why they aren’t hap­py,which might in turn lead us to ask what they have to be hap­py about. That might reveal to us in all its drab­ness what appears to be the most anti­hu­man way of life that any civ­i­liza­tion has ever set­tled into: becalmed with­out rest, somber with­out sobri­ety, abstract­ed with­out thought, licen­tious with­out even the ani­mal vig­or of license; ever shout­ing, but with­out good cheer.”
  6. Are ‘Islamists in Charge of Britain’? (Kon­stan­tin Kisin, The Free Press): “In one sense, the Speaker’s deci­sion was not unfound­ed. MPs real­ly are at risk. Only weeks pri­or, Mike Freer, a Con­ser­v­a­tive MP who rep­re­sents a con­stituen­cy with a sig­nif­i­cant Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, announced that he would not be seek­ing reelec­tion because of threats to him and his fam­i­ly over his sup­port for Israel. Explain­ing his deci­sion, he revealed that he had start­ed wear­ing stab-proof vests when meet­ing con­stituents. In 2021 anoth­er Con­ser­v­a­tive MP, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death by an Islamist at such a meet­ing. In 2017, an Islamist ter­ror­ist mowed down pedes­tri­ans before stab­bing an unarmed police offi­cer to death out­side the gates of Par­lia­ment.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. Gaza’s Past Is Call­ing (Sarah Aziza, Lux Mag­a­zine): “Com­ing up in the 1990s and 2000s, the word ‘Gaza’ was already syn­ony­mous with ‘Hamas’ — a term which, I quick­ly learned, ren­dered an entire pop­u­la­tion mon­strous. I am ashamed I often mum­bled the name — Gaza — when white Amer­i­cans asked about my fam­i­ly ori­gins. It hurt to watch them flinch, to see in their cold stares the impos­si­bil­i­ty that Gaza could ever mean moth­ers, banana, joy. The world they erased — and erase — my father’s fin­gers, draw­ing in the sand. My grandmother’s pigeons, her par­tic­u­lar way of brew­ing tea. The thou­sand, thou­sand feet that have run into the Mediter­ranean, each laugh­ter a dif­fer­ent splash. Gaza, for me, means teem­ing — a cru­el over-con­cen­tra­tion of bod­ies, yes, but at the same time, one of the world’s dens­est points of human love.”

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 439

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

This is vol­ume 439, which is not only a prime num­ber and the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (139 + 149 + 151), but also the sum of nine con­sec­u­tive primes (31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67). Which is, you know, a lot­ta primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Dig­i­tal Apps Are Chang­ing How We Read the Bible (John Dyer, Text & Canon): “I asked both groups to read the book of Jude and then tell me (1) what the point of the book was, and (2) how it made them feel. Inter­est­ing­ly, two oppo­site trends emerged. The print read­ers said they felt Jude was about God’s judg­ment while the phone read­ers tend­ed to empha­size God’s faith­ful­ness. But then, on the sec­ond ques­tion, their answers seemed to split. The print read­ers, who felt the book was about God’s judg­ment, said they were encour­aged by the read­ing. The phone read­ers on the oth­er hand who said Jude was about God’s faith­ful­ness, said after read­ing it that they felt dis­cour­aged and con­fused. So what can account for that dif­fer­ence? Why is a judg­men­tal God encour­ag­ing and a faith­ful God dis­cour­ag­ing?”
  2. The Grand Canyon-Sized Chasm Between Elites and Ordi­nary Amer­i­cans (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Per­haps the most strik­ing diver­gence between elite and non-elite opin­ion: Although the major­i­ty of ordi­nary vot­ers oppose the strict rationing of meat, elec­tric­i­ty, and gas to fight cli­mate change, 89% of Ivy grad­u­ates and 77% of elites over­all are in favor of it.”
  3. What Hap­pened When My Church Encoun­tered Neg­a­tive World (Patrick Miller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You can tell our church’s sto­ry in a way that makes us the vic­tims of the pro­gres­sives, but that’s not our full sto­ry. Nor is it the sto­ry of most non-coastal church­es that refused to go pro-Trump or pro-Biden in 2020. Pas­tors at such church­es will tell you the same sto­ry: The neg­a­tive world bows before gold­en don­keys and ele­phants.”
  4. Sarah Isgur’s Major­i­ty Report (Kele­fah San­neh, The New York­er): “Through the eyes of Isgur and French, the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem gen­er­al­ly appears to be a place where smart peo­ple assess good-faith argu­ments and com­pose thought­ful essays explain­ing their deci­sions. Their under­ly­ing con­tention is that the Supreme Court is good, even, or per­haps espe­cial­ly, in its cur­rent incar­na­tion.… In an era of aggriev­ed polit­i­cal dis­course, Isgur is some­thing unusu­al: a com­men­ta­tor who tru­ly seems to love the gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion she cov­ers.”
    • Advi­so­ry Opin­ions is one of my favorite pod­casts and I’m not remote­ly a lawyer. Isgur and French are amaz­ing.
  5. The Devil’s Face in Gaza (Ger­ald McDer­mott, First Things): “The min­is­ter of tourism, a rab­bi, told an Israeli Chris­t­ian leader, ‘We hope you send mis­sion­ar­ies to the Arabs here.’ The Chris­t­ian was shocked: ‘Don’t you hate mis­sion­ar­ies?’ The gov­ern­ment min­is­ter replied, ‘If you teach them what you believe, we will have peace in the Mid­dle East.’”
  6. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Sit-in on Islam­o­pho­bia replaces pro-Israel tent in White Plaza (Dilan Gohill, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Orga­niz­ers set up the Sit-in to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia on the White Plaza lawn — a space pre­vi­ous­ly occu­pied by the Blue and White Tent. Tent orga­niz­ers told The Dai­ly they made an indef­i­nite reser­va­tion through Car­di­nal Engage. Accord­ing to Feige­lis, Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion told the Sit-In to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia that the space was reserved for the Blue and White Tent. He said as long as the sit-in refus­es to relo­cate, the tent can­not reassem­ble. The Dai­ly has reached out to the Uni­ver­si­ty for com­ment. ‘We did not move your stuff — the wind destroyed it, you cleaned it up. We saw an open space, we set up here, we’re hap­py to coex­ist.’ El Boudali said. He added that orga­niz­ers set up in White Plaza due to its high traf­fic.”
    • Stan­ford stu­dents protest new ban on overnight sit-in camp­ing (Lau­ren Irwin, The Hill): “Stan­ford said its lev­el of con­cern has risen to a point that it can no longer sup­port overnight activ­i­ties.”
    • Read the offi­cial Stan­ford state­ment: Pre­serv­ing free speech and safe­ty on White Plaza (Stan­ford News): “Mov­ing for­ward, any tents, tables, chairs, or oth­er sim­i­lar items will need to be removed from White Plaza between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Any overnight dis­plays and/or camp­ing items left unoc­cu­pied are sub­ject to removal for health and safe­ty rea­sons. Stu­dents who vio­late the no-camp­ing pol­i­cy will be sub­ject to a dis­ci­pli­nary refer­ral to the Office of Com­mu­ni­ty Stan­dards and may also be cit­ed for tres­pass for fail­ing to com­ply with a uni­ver­si­ty direc­tive.”
    • And not exact­ly Stan­ford news, but not not Stan­ford news: Law schools must adopt free speech poli­cies to main­tain ABA accred­i­ta­tion (Lexi Lonas, The Hill): “The new stan­dard requires schools to adopt a pol­i­cy that would allow fac­ul­ty, stu­dents and staff ‘to com­mu­ni­cate ideas that may be con­tro­ver­sial or unpop­u­lar, includ­ing through robust debate, demon­stra­tions or protests,’ and would for­bid activ­i­ties that dis­rupt or impinge on free speech. But it wouldn’t impose spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy lan­guage,’”’ the state­ment added.”
  7. The Polit­i­cal Pref­er­ences of LLMs (David Roza­do, Sub­stack): “When probed with questions/statements with polit­i­cal con­no­ta­tions most con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs tend to gen­er­ate respons­es that are diag­nosed by most polit­i­cal test instru­ments as man­i­fest­ing pref­er­ences for left-of-cen­ter view­points. This does not appear to be the case for base (i.e. foun­da­tion) mod­els upon which LLMs opti­mized for con­ver­sa­tion with humans are built. Though not con­clu­sive, our results pro­vide sup­port­ing evi­dence for the intrigu­ing hypoth­e­sis that the embed­ding of polit­i­cal pref­er­ences into LLMs might be hap­pen­ing most­ly post-pre­train­ing. Name­ly, dur­ing the super­vised fine-tun­ing (SFT) and/or Rein­force­ment Learn­ing (RL) stages of the con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs train­ing pipeline.”
    • In oth­er words, the AI tools we see appear to have polit­i­cal pref­er­ences trained into them by the com­pa­nies that are cre­at­ing them, although it is not clear to what extent this is delib­er­ate­ly being done.
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of data sci­ence in New Zealand — https://drozado.github.io/

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • His­to­ry of Japan (Bill Wurz, YouTube): nine amaz­ing min­utes — gen­uine­ly worth your time if you have any inter­est in Japan at all. Or in how to teach his­to­ry using video. He leaves a bunch out and def­i­nite­ly throws his opin­ion around, but it’s hard to see how he could have done any­thing else in nine min­utes. Real­ly good.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 435

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

This is vol­ume 435, a tri­an­gu­lar num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 434

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 425

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

This is vol­ume 425, the sum of 3 con­sec­u­tive primes. 425 = 137 + 139 + 149

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m going to start today’s roundup off with an expla­na­tion of why this email is the way it is. First read this brief arti­cle by Nate Sil­ver: It’s easy to screw up on break­ing news. But you have to admit when you do. (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “This morn­ing, Gallup pub­lished its annu­al poll on trust in the media. Over­all, only 32 per­cent of Amer­i­cans say they trust the mass media ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ to ‘report the news ful­ly, accu­rate­ly and fair­ly’ — tied with 2016 for a record low. ”
    • Sil­ver’s arti­cle made me reflect on how I think about mod­ern jour­nal­ism and then made me want to explain it. First, I do believe jour­nal­ists try to get things right. Places like the NYT and the Wash­ing­ton Post rarely pub­lish false infor­ma­tion and gen­er­al­ly cor­rect false­hoods when they become aware of them. The more spe­cif­ic a claim is the more like­ly it is to be true.
    • Jour­nal­ists do, how­ev­er, fre­quent­ly fail to report true infor­ma­tion they are not inter­est­ed in or excit­ed about. This is rarely a con­scious choice — it’s just a byprod­uct of the way they think about real­i­ty. This comes up espe­cial­ly on so-called “cul­ture war” issues. Many top-notch reporters are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly unaware of and strange­ly incu­ri­ous about many of the facts and sto­ries around trans­gen­derism, mar­riage, reli­gious lib­er­ty, and so on.
    • In fact, news­rooms are so ide­o­log­i­cal­ly mono­cul­tur­al that there are often mas­sive holes in what is report­ed. Not only are reporters blind to incon­ve­nient facts, they are often blind to entire sto­ries and trends. An excel­lent his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of this is when­ev­er the 60s and 70s are remem­bered. Amer­i­ca legit expe­ri­enced a Great Awak­en­ing (the Jesus Peo­ple move­ment) that hap­pened in par­al­lel with the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion. We only ever talk about the sec­ond not because reporters/commentators are sup­press­ing knowl­edge of the Jesus Peo­ple but because they gen­uine­ly are not even aware that they exist­ed or that what hap­pened then is still shap­ing our cul­ture today.
    • And so when I want a fact, I turn to some­place like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Reuters or to a cred­i­ble expert who writes direct­ly to the pub­lic (Ryan Burge is a good exam­ple of this). But when I want an analy­sis, I look for cred­i­ble, sane voic­es both with­in and with­out the con­fines of the media estab­lish­ment. I fre­quent­ly look to places like Sub­stack or niche web­sites like Mere Ortho­doxy or to main­stream media com­men­ta­tors like Ross Douthat or David French or Megan McAr­dle who have a track record of syn­the­siz­ing infor­ma­tion accu­rate­ly and form­ing opin­ions wise­ly.
    • And when I’m read­ing some­thing, I often ask, “Does this per­spec­tive seem plau­si­ble in light of my expe­ri­ence?” Espe­cial­ly when it is a claim about evan­gel­i­cal­ism or charismatic/Pentecostal Chris­tian­i­ty — I like­ly know more about that world than 98% of the staff of the New York Times (and after read­ing some arti­cles I think I know more about it than all their staff put togeth­er). Some­times they take an odd­ball church or reli­gious leader and put their sto­ry for­ward as rep­re­sen­ta­tive when it is not at all.
    • Any­way, there is prob­a­bly a lot more to say about mod­ern media, but what I just said is pret­ty much why this week­ly update fea­tures the mix of con­tent that it does: main­stream media sources for facts and a diverse array of experts for analy­sis, all fil­tered through evan­gel­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties.
    • A relat­ed thought on news con­sump­tion: peri­od­ic­i­ty (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “The more unsta­ble a sit­u­a­tion is, the more rapid­ly it changes, the less valu­able minute-by-minute report­ing is. I don’t know what hap­pened to the hos­pi­tal in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Econ­o­mist shows up I will be bet­ter informed about it than peo­ple who have been rage-refresh­ing their brows­er win­dows for the past sev­er­al days, and I will have suf­fered con­sid­er­ably less emo­tion­al stress.… If you’re read­ing the news sev­er­al times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stim­u­lat­ed.”
  2. Mov­ing on, here are some arti­cles that give con­text for the Israel war on Hamas:
    • Pales­tin­ian right of return mat­ters (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Because it seems to me that what­ev­er you per­son­al­ly think about [the Pales­tin­ian right of return], it is absolute­ly cen­tral to how the Arab world and dias­po­ra Jews and sec­u­lar Israelis all view the con­flict. Which in turn means that it’s cen­tral to the col­lapse of the Two-State Solu­tion as a polit­i­cal con­struct and to the col­lapse of the peace camp in Israeli pol­i­tics that might have been inclined make a deal that was favor­able to Pales­tin­ian inter­ests. There is, in fact, a whole school of thought asso­ci­at­ed with Bill Clin­ton and Amer­i­can nego­tia­tor Den­nis Ross that holds the right of return almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly respon­si­ble for scut­tling the Camp David talks and pre­vent­ing the emer­gence of an inde­pen­dent Pales­tine. Of course, many oth­er well-informed peo­ple deny that’s the case or believe it’s an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. But even if you think it is fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect to say the res­o­lu­tion of this con­flict hinges on the right of return, its cen­tral­i­ty to so many of the nar­ra­tives around this issue makes it an impor­tant con­cept to under­stand.”
    • The For­got­ten His­to­ry of the Term “Pales­tine” (Dou­glas J. Fei­th, Mosa­ic): “The term ‘Pales­tine’ was used for mil­len­nia with­out a pre­cise geo­graph­ic def­i­n­i­tion. That’s not uncommon—think of ‘Tran­scau­ca­sus’ or ‘Mid­west.’ No pre­cise def­i­n­i­tion exist­ed for Pales­tine because none was required. Since the Roman era, the name lacked polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. No nation ever had that name.”
      • This is from back in 2021. Super inter­est­ing stuff.
    • Hamas does not yet under­stand the depth of Israeli resolve (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, Times of Israel): “That ene­my is not the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, of course, even though sup­port for ter­ror attacks is wide­spread among Pales­tini­ans. The ene­my is not exact­ly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The ene­my is the Pales­tin­ian the­o­ry of Israelis that makes the vio­lence seen on Octo­ber 7 seem to many of them a ratio­nal step on the road to lib­er­a­tion rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet anoth­er in a long string of self-inflict­ed dis­as­ters for the Pales­tin­ian cause.… A tragedy is about to unfold in Gaza made worse by the long learn­ing curve it will take for Hamas to grasp the depth of Israeli resolve. It has robbed Israel of any oth­er inter­est but its destruc­tion. In the Israeli mind, any bru­tal­i­ty Hamas can com­mit it will com­mit. And so it can­not be allowed to ever com­mit any act ever again.”
  3. Some Chris­t­ian per­spec­tives
    • Anti­se­mit­ic Vio­lence and Its Shame­ful Defense (Mike Cosper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To be hor­ri­fied by the slaugh­ter of Israeli inno­cents doesn’t require deny­ing the suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. And car­ing for Pales­tin­ian inno­cents doesn’t require being cold or numb to the hor­rors of anti­semitism and Hamas. We can con­demn Hamas while demand­ing account­abil­i­ty from Israeli lead­ers who have foment­ed vio­lence, ele­vat­ed right-wing extrem­ists, and excused vio­la­tions of inter­na­tion­al law. Indeed, Chris­tians should be marked by our will­ing­ness to oppose all injus­tice and to care for Israeli and Pales­tin­ian vic­tims alike. And while that includes under­stand­ing that Pales­tini­ans have suf­fered great injus­tices from the gov­ern­ment of Israel—as well as neigh­bor­ing states of Egypt, Jor­dan, Iran, Lebanon, Syr­ia, and Sau­di Ara­bia, as well as Hamas and the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty itself—it must also include active rejec­tion of anti­semitism.”
    • With­er the Poi­so­nous Plant of Hamas (Tamir Khouri, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In this envi­ron­ment of hatred, racism, and vio­lence, Hamas has exploit­ed young peo­ple with false promis­es. With no hori­zon of hope, Hamas’s adher­ents in Pales­tine sank into dark­ness and helped Hamas vic­tim­ize Israelis too. But it does not have to be this way. As Chris­tians, we believe in the pow­er of redemp­tion. With real hope for the future of this land, these hate­ful move­ments will with­er. For a last­ing peace, we must respect the image of God in Israelis and Pales­tini­ans alike. Is it too much to ask that we don’t see this as a zero-sum game? Shouldn’t both Israelis and Pales­tini­ans live in the dig­ni­ty God intend­ed for us?”
      • The pseu­do­ny­mous author is a Pales­tin­ian Chris­t­ian who is an Israeli cit­i­zen.
  4. Some arti­cles about mod­ern acad­e­mia:
    • Why Big Mon­ey Can’t Eas­i­ly Change Cam­pus Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…donors should find ways to give mon­ey to the actu­al stu­dents — through the Hil­lel or oth­er Jew­ish or Israeli stu­dent groups if you’re espe­cial­ly con­cerned with the Jew­ish place on cam­pus, but more gen­er­al­ly through polit­i­cal or reli­gious groups that promise to work against the school’s dom­i­nant assump­tions, or through stu­dent asso­ci­a­tions that seem to fos­ter free debate, or through cam­pus-adja­cent insti­tu­tions that serve stu­dents but are inde­pen­dent of the schools. But not with the goal of using such stu­dent groups as a means of con­flict with the admin­is­tra­tion or the fac­ul­ty. Rather, with the goal that such groups can become micro­cosms of the uni­ver­si­ty you loved once and fear no longer exists, cells in a body yet to be restored, whose health and flour­ish­ing with­in the large world of Penn or Har­vard or wher­ev­er is an end unto itself.”
      • Ross Douthat speaks noth­ing but truth through­out this essay. If you know any gazil­lion­aires who want to influ­ence the tra­jec­to­ries of elite uni­ver­si­ties have them read this essay and then tell them about Chi Alpha. Men­tion we’d like a build­ing near cam­pus.
    • The War Comes to Stan­ford (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Alma Andi­no, a Jew­ish senior at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, spent the day of Hamas’s attacks against Israel cry­ing and dis­traught. Like many Jews around the coun­try, much of the week­end passed on the phone with fam­i­ly mem­bers, fear­ing for the safe­ty of friends and extend­ed fam­i­ly in Israel. Andino’s fel­low stu­dents in Colum­bae, the social jus­tice and anti­war res­i­den­tial house where she is a res­i­den­tial assis­tant, held her through her pan­ic attacks. ‘I felt so pow­er­less,’ she recalled when we spoke this week. On Mon­day, a friend asked if she’d seen the ban­ner some of her house­mates were prepar­ing to hang on the front of Colum­bae, the house she con­sid­ered to be her com­mu­ni­ty and her home. The sheet bore the slo­gan ‘Zion­ism is geno­cide’ in red let­ters, styled to look as if they were drip­ping with blood.… For Alma Andi­no, events on cam­pus have already reached a break­ing point. After beg­ging her house­mates not to hang the ban­ner, she said the group debat­ed for hours, with the impli­ca­tion they would desist only if a suit­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Israel’s exis­tence could be giv­en. They told her they felt that as stu­dent activists, they need­ed to dis­play a mes­sage that would put them on the right side of his­to­ry. We should be advo­cat­ing for mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, they said. ‘Except for Jews?’ Alma replied. The group scoffed.”
    • What Con­ser­v­a­tives Mis­un­der­stand About Rad­i­cal­ism at Uni­ver­si­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “The ten­sion burst­ing into view right now—between a major­i­ty of schol­ars, for whom ‘decol­o­niza­tion’ means putting few­er white Euro­peans on their syl­labi, and a small minor­i­ty who believe it entails any­thing-goes vio­lent revolution—is the unwel­come and unsur­pris­ing result of uni­ver­si­ties want­i­ng to cos­play rebel­lion while still churn­ing out Wall Street–executive alum­ni who will one day pad endow­ments that are larg­er than Israel’s annu­al defense bud­get.”
      • The title makes this sound more par­ti­san than it is. 100% worth a read and pon­der.
    • Stu­dents for Pogroms in Israel (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Look­ing back on the Man­son killings, Joan Did­ion wrote, ‘Many peo­ple I know in Los Ange­les believe that the Six­ties end­ed abrupt­ly on August 9, 1969, end­ed at the exact moment when word of the mur­ders on Cielo Dri­ve trav­eled like brush­fire through the com­mu­ni­ty, and in a sense this is true. The ten­sion broke that day. The para­noia was ful­filled.’ A few peo­ple I know believe last Saturday’s attack on Israel and the respons­es from left­ist stu­dent groups mark the end of the ‘Great Awok­en­ing.’ Although it is too ear­ly to eval­u­ate the accu­ra­cy of that hypoth­e­sis, cam­pus pol­i­tics have cer­tain­ly trans­formed in recent days. Now we are left won­der­ing whether what comes next is bet­ter or worse than what pre­ced­ed it.”
      • He makes spe­cif­ic men­tion of Stan­ford at one point, although it is hard­ly his focus.
    • Moral con­tro­ver­sies and aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lic health: Notes on nav­i­gat­ing and sur­viv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom chal­lenges (Tyler Van­der­Weele, Glob­al Epi­demi­ol­o­gy): “I think that there needs to be more open dis­cus­sion in acad­e­mia, and in soci­ety, about these mat­ters. Most peo­ple, even those who are deeply con­cerned, seem very uneasy dis­cussing these issues, for fear of being attacked for sim­ply rais­ing them. Col­leagues at Har­vard, rang­ing from an expert in child devel­op­ment to a clin­i­cian pro­vid­ing men­tal health care for teenage girls, have told me that they are uncom­fort­able shar­ing their con­cerns on these mat­ters in many or most set­tings at Har­vard. An evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard like­wise recent­ly came under attack because she explic­it­ly stat­ed that sex was bio­log­i­cal and bina­ry, even though she also not­ed that we can nev­er­the­less respect a per­son­’s gen­der iden­ti­ty. The attack was suf­fi­cient­ly severe, and the admin­is­tra­tion’s response suf­fi­cient­ly weak, that she even­tu­al­ly felt she had no choice but to resign. Rather than open dis­cus­sion, it seems we are often now rely­ing on anony­mous arti­cles, or brave, and sub­se­quent­ly vil­i­fied, authors and whis­tle-blow­ers to raise alter­na­tive view­points. One may strong­ly dis­agree with their posi­tions, but it is not unrea­son­able to raise the ques­tions.”
      • I removed hyper­linked foot­notes from this excerpt for read­abil­i­ty. This is worth read­ing as a mod­el of mature­ly and wise­ly respond­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic intol­er­ance. Not many schol­ars have com­port­ed them­selves with as much class as Van­der­Weele when their views came under attack. Also, I learned in this arti­cle that Van­der­Weele is Catholic. I had assumed he was an evan­gel­i­cal based on some­thing I heard else­where.
  5. Think­ing about the moral dimen­sions of the war
    • The Moral Ques­tions at the Heart of the Gaza War (David French, New York Times): “This is the prob­lem Israeli sol­diers and com­man­ders face. They must pro­tect their cit­i­zens from sav­agery. They must com­ply with the laws of war. And they must make a series of moral choic­es, under extreme duress, that can define them and their nation — all while they face a ter­ror­ist ene­my that appears to pos­sess no con­science at all.”
      • Worth read­ing. As I men­tioned when I shared French’s pre­vi­ous arti­cle, he is more qual­i­fied than any oth­er colum­nist I know to weigh in on this.
    • This Way for the Geno­cide, Ladies and Gen­tle­men (Chris Hedges, Scheer­Post): “I spent sev­en years report­ing on the con­flict, four of them as the Mid­dle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bod­ies of Israeli vic­tims of bus bomb­ings in Jerusalem by Pales­tin­ian sui­cide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, includ­ing chil­dren, in the cor­ri­dors in Dar Al-Shi­fa Hos­pi­tal in Gaza City. I watched Israeli sol­diers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then cal­lous­ly shot in the Khan You­nis refugee camp. I shel­tered from bombs dropped by Israeli war­planes. I climbed over the rub­ble of demol­ished Pales­tin­ian homes and apart­ment blocks along the bor­der with Egypt. I inter­viewed the blood­ied and dazed sur­vivors. I heard the soul crush­ing wails of moth­ers keen­ing over the corpses of their chil­dren.… it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the com­plic­i­ty of an inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that licens­es Israel’s geno­ci­dal slaugh­ter and accel­er­ates a cycle of vio­lence it may not be able to con­trol.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Smart­phones Have Tur­bocharged the Dan­ger of Porn (Mary Har­ring­ton, Wall Street Jour­nal): “It should come as no sur­prise that the per­son­al­ized, tac­tile, portable smart­phone would be the dig­i­tal por­tal of choice for some­thing as inti­mate as porn con­sump­tion. But of the new com­pul­sive behav­iors enabled by smart­phones, few have as intense and imme­di­ate a reward cycle as porn—or as many far-reach­ing con­se­quences.”
  7. Is It Wrong to Cure Blind­ness? (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “The Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, the $40 bil­lion-endowed fund­ing arm of the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, recent­ly took a stand against ableism by propos­ing a change to its mis­sion state­ment, which promis­es to ‘enhance health, length­en life, and reduce ill­ness and dis­abil­i­ty.’ An advi­so­ry com­mit­tee with­in the NIH took issue with the phrase ‘reduce… dis­abil­i­ty,’ writ­ing in a 66-page report pub­lished last Decem­ber that it ‘could be inter­pret­ed as per­pet­u­at­ing ableist beliefs that dis­abled peo­ple are flawed and need to be ‘fixed.’ ”
    • There are legit insane per­spec­tives being nor­mal­ized in the world right now. Cur­ing blind­ness is an unequiv­o­cal good.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic): “…one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly inter­vene.” This is an old arti­cle I share peri­od­i­cal­ly, I think I first shared it way back in my fifth Fri­day email. Help­ful in pars­ing media cov­er­age in the cur­rent war.

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 417

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

This is vol­ume 417, which is clear­ly not prime because 4+1+7=12, but the prime fac­tor­iza­tion is sur­pris­ing: it’s 3·139.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Advice for Stu­dents Enter­ing Col­lege (Robert P. George, Mir­ror of Jus­tice): “As the new aca­d­e­m­ic year begins, I have some advice for con­ser­v­a­tive and reli­gious­ly obser­vant stu­dents who are enter­ing col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties in which their beliefs will place them in the minor­i­ty, and per­haps make them feel like ‘out­siders.’ ”
  2. Glo­ri­fy­ing God and Glo­ri­fy­ing Moun­tains (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “As I drove along the road I couldn’t help but notice how many peo­ple put them­selves between the cam­era and the moun­tain so that the moun­tain was mere­ly a prop, the back­drop for a pho­to that fea­tured them­selves. Often these influ­encers would be doing some­thing showy or wear­ing some­thing skimpy that was meant to draw the eye to them­selves rather than to the moun­tain behind. They made them­selves the focus of the pho­to­graph rather than the moun­tain. They stole the glo­ry of the moun­tain by using it to glo­ri­fy them­selves. And this helps us under­stand how we can fail to glo­ri­fy God. We place our­selves in the fore­ground so that God winds up in the back­ground.”
  3. A sin­gle reform that could save 100,000 lives imme­di­ate­ly (Ned Brooks and ML Cavanaugh, LA Times): “The head of the Nation­al Kid­ney Foun­da­tion tes­ti­fied in March that Medicare spends an esti­mat­ed $136 bil­lion, near­ly 25% of its expen­di­tures, on the care of peo­ple with a kid­ney dis­ease. Of that, $50 bil­lion is spent on peo­ple with end-stage kid­ney dis­ease, on par with the entire U.S. Marine Corps bud­get.… The Nation­al Organ Trans­plant Act pro­hibits com­pen­sat­ing kid­ney donors, which is strange in that in Amer­i­can soci­ety, it’s com­mon to pay for plas­ma, bone mar­row, hair, sperm, eggs and even sur­ro­gate preg­nan­cies. We already pay to cre­ate and sus­tain life. Anoth­er way to think about this, as one bioethi­cist points out: ‘Every per­son in the chain of liv­ing organ dona­tion, except one, prof­its.’ The hos­pi­tal gets paid, the doc­tors and nurs­es and staff get paid, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try gets paid and the recip­i­ent is the main ben­e­fi­cia­ry. Every­one ben­e­fits except the donors, who get reim­bursed only for their expens­es.”
  4. With­out Belief in a God, But Nev­er With­out Belief In A Dev­il (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Per­son­al­ly, I saw this when I first arrived at Yale. I recall being stunned at how sta­tus anx­i­ety per­vad­ed elite col­lege cam­pus­es. Inter­nal­ly, I thought, ‘You’ve already made it, what are you so stressed out about?’ Hof­fer, though, would say these stu­dents believed they had almost made it. That is why they were so aggra­vat­ed. The clos­er they got to real­iz­ing their ambi­tions, the more frus­trat­ed they became about not already achiev­ing them.”
  5. Why are Charis­mat­ics so Weird? (Sam Storms, per­son­al blog): “There are approx­i­mate­ly 645 mil­lion peo­ple in the world today who iden­ti­fy as either Pen­te­costal or charis­mat­ic. Among them there are cer­tain lead­ers and pop­u­lar voic­es who believe ‘weird’ things and have amassed a con­sid­er­able fol­low­ing among those who are gullible and undis­cern­ing. But for every one mis­guid­ed teacher or inter­net per­son­al­i­ty there are thou­sands of faith­ful and bib­li­cal­ly root­ed, gospel-cen­tered pas­tors and pro­fes­sors in the charis­mat­ic com­mu­ni­ty. And for every one of those who naive­ly falls for the ‘weird’ things said and done there are, again, thou­sands who do not.”
  6. Should I Offer My Pro­nouns? (Kara Bet­tis Car­val­ho, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Ear­li­er this year, Atlantic jour­nal­ist George Pack­er argued against what he called ‘equi­ty lan­guage’ and the often unrea­son­able pres­sure it puts on the cul­ture. It is polite and dig­ni­fy­ing to ‘address peo­ple as they request,’ Pack­er wrote, but equi­ty lan­guage isn’t organ­ic; it’s being ‘hand­ed down in com­mu­niqués writ­ten by obscure ‘experts’ who pur­port to speak for vague­ly defined ‘com­mu­ni­ties,’ remain­ing unan­swer­able to a pub­lic that’s being moral­ly coerced.’ New lan­guage makes ide­o­log­i­cal claims, he wrote. ‘If you accept the change—as, in cer­tain con­texts, you’ll sure­ly feel you must—then you also acqui­esce in the argu­ment.’ ”
    • Unlocked. Allows peo­ple from mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives to make their argu­ments.
  7. When few do great harm (Inquis­i­tive Bird, Sub­stack): “Anoth­er notable fact: approx­i­mate­ly half of vio­lent crime con­vic­tions were com­mit­ted by peo­ple who already had 3 or more vio­lent crime con­vic­tions. In oth­er words, if after being con­vict­ed of 3 vio­lent crimes peo­ple were pre­vent­ed from fur­ther offend­ing, half of vio­lent crime con­vic­tions would have been avoid­ed.… The fact that a small minor­i­ty is respon­si­ble for a large chunk of crime is true for shoplift­ing and bur­glar­ies as well, per­haps to an even greater extent. Data from New York City finds that a tiny num­ber of shoplifters com­mit thou­sands of theft. The police stat­ed that near­ly a third of all shoplift­ing arrests in the city in 2022 involved just 327 peo­ple, who col­lec­tive­ly were arrest­ed and rear­rest­ed more than 6,000 times. Thus 0.00386% of New York City’s pop­u­la­tion (327 out of 8.468 mil­lion, 1 in ~26,000) account­ed for near­ly a third of all shoplift­ing arrests in the city.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.

    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 416

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

    This is vol­ume 416, which is mild­ly inter­est­ing in the fol­low­ing equa­tion: ‑4162+7682 = 416,768 (note the neg­a­tive in front of 4162)

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. To Be Hap­py, Mar­riage Mat­ters More Than Career (David Brooks, New York Times): “My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about mar­riage. Please respect the tru­ism that if you have a great career and a crap­py mar­riage you will be unhap­py, but if you have a great mar­riage and a crap­py career you will be hap­py. Please use your youth­ful years as a chance to have roman­tic rela­tion­ships, so you’ll have some prac­tice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to mar­ry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the mas­ters.”
      • Unlocked. I am sure the com­ments sec­tion on this arti­cle will explode with out­raged New York Times read­ers, but Brooks is cor­rect and obvi­ous­ly so.
      • Relat­ed: He’s The One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “The woman who dis­cards the tra­di­tion­al ‘Men have to ask me’ social norm has a super­pow­er. Just pro­file guys who meet your stan­dards and take the ini­tia­tive, and you gen­er­ate a menu of prime options. Yes, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom says that a woman can sub­tly let a guy know that she likes him. But this over­looks men’s abject clue­ness­ness and timid­i­ty. Instead, be forth­right. Crazy as it seems, earnest­ly telling your first choice, ‘I should be your girl­friend’ will almost nev­er be mis­tak­en for ‘throw­ing your­self’ at a guy.”
        • Caplan’s fol­low-up to his ear­li­er post help­ing guys screen gals. This one helps gals screen guys. Most of his insights ring true to me.
      • Relat­ed: You Don’t Have Plen­ty of Time (Abby Far­son Pratt, Sub­stack): “There’s an odd pre­oc­cu­pa­tion in our cul­ture with ‘readi­ness,’ as if it were a uni­ver­sal truth. But ‘readi­ness’ is nev­er defined. We’re giv­en the vague, unhelp­ful advice to ‘wait until we’re ready’ to get mar­ried or have kids. What would that even mean? How do you know when you’re ‘ready’ for that kind of respon­si­bil­i­ty? You won’t. You’ll nev­er be ready. Aside from choos­ing a good part­ner, there’s no amount of prepa­ra­tion that will make child-rear­ing eas­i­er or smoother or sim­pler. You become ready through the very act of being mar­ried and rais­ing chil­dren. Lord will­ing, this is the time in your life to rise to the occa­sion and put fears of ‘readi­ness’ to rest.”
    2. Does God Con­trol His­to­ry? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Indeed, while allow­ing for the com­plex­i­ty of debates about what God wills as opposed to what God mere­ly per­mits, prov­i­den­tial­ism is basi­cal­ly inescapable once you posit a divin­i­ty who made the world and acts in his­to­ry. Which is why prov­i­den­tial­ist inter­pre­ta­tions endure among the most lib­er­al Chris­tians as well as the most tra­di­tion­al, with both pro­gres­sive and con­ser­v­a­tive the­olo­gies jus­ti­fy­ing them­selves through read­ings of the ‘signs of the times,’ the sea­sons of his­to­ry, the action of the Holy Spir­it and the like.”
      • Unlocked. I real­ly liked this one.
    3. What Rise of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Jesse Smith, Cur­rent): “What has surged in recent years isn’t Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism so much as the rejec­tion of reli­gion in the pub­lic square. The per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans report­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion has sky­rock­et­ed in the 21st cen­tu­ry, from lit­tle over 5% in 1990 to near­ly 30% in 2021. Most of these peo­ple belonged to a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty at some point. Many did not part on the best of terms and would be hap­py to see the sta­tus of Amer­i­can reli­gion tak­en down a peg.”
      • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege.
    4. The Man Who Knows What the World’s Rich­est Peo­ple Want (and How To Get It) (Maxwell Stra­chan, Vice): “To Flem­ings, the con­cept that the world’s rich­est peo­ple are con­spir­ing togeth­er to rig the game in their favor seems fool­ish. He believes the clos­est the rich have come to assem­bling as an illu­mi­nati-like clan is in St. Barts between Christ­mas and New Year’s Eve, because he’s been there. ‘I got­ta tell you, some of the rich­est peo­ple in the world are strug­gling to talk to a girl,’ he said. ‘There is no way these peo­ple are lead­ing some fuck­ing glob­al con­spir­a­cy.’ ”
      • Over­all quite inter­est­ing. From back in June.
    5. Lega­cy admis­sions are cru­cial to America’s high­er edu­ca­tion dom­i­nance (Jamie Beat­on, The Hill): “Oxford was found­ed in 1096. Despite its sto­ried his­to­ry, it has a far small­er dona­tion cul­ture and less engaged alum­ni. Its biggest donors — among them Bill Gates and Steven Schwarz­man — didn’t even attend the uni­ver­si­ty. It has no lega­cy admis­sions, and at points in its his­to­ry, it has strug­gled finan­cial­ly. In con­trast, Har­vard cul­ti­vates an amaz­ing­ly engaged alum­ni com­mu­ni­ty with fre­quent, well-attend­ed reunions, advi­so­ry boards fea­tur­ing all of their promi­nent alum­ni and an aspi­ra­tional mes­sage that once you are a part of this com­mu­ni­ty, it will become your com­mu­ni­ty for life. Lega­cy admis­sions — the prac­tice of pref­er­en­tial­ly admit­ting the chil­dren of alum­ni — is one of the pow­er­ful, tan­gi­ble char­ac­ter­is­tics that helps fos­ter that sense of com­mu­ni­ty.”
      • I have nev­er seen some­one con­trast the elite US schools with their inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts this way. I am sure there is a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to be made, but this made for fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing and I find his argu­ment plau­si­ble.
    6. Stan­ford WBB Star Cameron Brink Opens Up On How NIL Wealth Allowed Her Stay In School Over WNBA (Grayson Weir, Out­kick): “NIL has made it so that Brink can earn just as much mon­ey as an ‘ama­teur’ as she can in the WNBA. It is prob­a­bly more lucra­tive to stay in school than to go pro.… Brink said that her NIL wealth has set her up for the rest of her life. If bas­ket­ball didn’t work out, she could be self-suf­fi­cient. She would ‘con­tin­ue to live com­fort­ably.’ ”
    7. The real rea­son the high­est-paid doc­tors are in the Dako­tas (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Over­all, the aver­age U.S. lawyer can expect about $7.1 mil­lion in life­time income, a bit high­er than a pri­ma­ry-care doc­tor ($6.5 mil­lion) but well behind the broad­er physi­cian aver­age of $10 mil­lion, accord­ing to a sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis of about 2 mil­lion tax records from lawyers and more than 10 mil­lion tax records from doc­tors.”

    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 413

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

    This is issue 413, which I have been told is a struc­tured hexag­o­nal dia­mond num­ber. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds very impres­sive. I also know that 413 = 7 · 59, which I find both cool and under­stand­able.

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. I’m a Con­tin­u­a­tion­ist with Can­cer. I Still Believe in Heal­ings. (Tim Shorey, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I live my life and face my can­cer some­where between seem­ing­ly sin­cere ‘namers and claimers’ who expect heal­ing every time and seem­ing­ly sur­ren­dered ‘if-the-Lord-willers’ whose prayers affirm God’s heal­ing pow­er but whose caveats and qual­i­fiers make it sound like he’s not like­ly to use it. God alone knows the heart. But the tone of the for­mer par­ty can sound like pre­sump­tion mas­querad­ing as faith, while the tone of the lat­ter can sound like doubt mas­querad­ing as humil­i­ty.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who appro­pri­ate­ly asks, “if you read this, please also pray for the author, Tim Shorey.”
    2. Date to mar­ry, not to have fun (Bethany Man­del, The Spec­ta­tor): “A lot of things are impor­tant in a mar­riage: love, respect, trust, laugh­ter. But per­haps most impor­tant is to remem­ber that it’s a part­ner­ship for life; and as such, dat­ing should not be con­sid­ered fun, but instead like a job inter­view for the most impor­tant role you’ll ever have, that of a spouse. If you were inter­view­ing for a job, would you allow the process to drag on, long after you know it’s the right fit (or not)?”
      • Broad­ly agree, with the pro­vi­sion that this is advice about dat­ing rela­tion­ship and not just about going on dates. In oth­er words, go on dates to have fun and then care­ful­ly dis­cern who is a good match for pro­gress­ing into a seri­ous dat­ing rela­tion­ship. Too many Chris­tians want to know they want to mar­ry some­one before they go out for cof­fee with them, and that’s a lot of pres­sure to put on a lat­te.
      • Relat­ed: Swip­ing and Dat­ing Pref­er­ences (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Here’s a sketch of what might be hap­pen­ing: Men high on the Dark Tri­ad (psy­chopa­thy, nar­cis­sism, Machi­avel­lian­ism) use dat­ing apps. They might make up 10–20% of users. They go on a ram­page, sleep­ing with lots of women, play­ing games with them, lead­ing them on, ghost­ing them, lying to them, etc. Dark Tri­ad men are excel­lent impos­tors; they are good at mim­ic­k­ing desir­able roman­tic qual­i­ties, and are thus able to pro­cure lots of sex part­ners. The women they sleep with become dis­il­lu­sioned. These women begin to behave in psy­cho­path­ic and nar­cis­sis­tic ways to pro­tect them­selves from emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and pain, and per­haps as a way to even the score with ‘men’ as a cat­e­go­ry. They learn to avoid Dark Tri­ad men and exploit nor­mal men. These men become con­fused and upset, and begin to treat oth­er women the same way to ‘get even.’ In short, Dark Tri­ad men mis­treat women, who then mis­treat ordi­nary men, who then mis­treat ordi­nary women. Bad behav­ior dri­ves out the good. A sys­tem tai­lor-made for psy­cho­path­ic males (dat­ing apps facil­i­tate anonymi­ty, super­fi­cial­i­ty, and decep­tion) pre­dictably gives rise to a defect-defect equi­lib­ri­um.”
      • Full of inter­est­ing data.
    3. Study of Elite Col­lege Admis­sions Data Sug­gests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qual­i­fi­ca­tion (Aatish Bha­tia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz, New York Times): “Elite col­leges have long been filled with the chil­dren of the rich­est fam­i­lies: At Ivy League schools, one in six stu­dents has par­ents in the top 1 per­cent.… For appli­cants with the same SAT or ACT score, chil­dren from fam­i­lies in the top 1 per­cent were 34 per­cent more like­ly to be admit­ted than the aver­age appli­cant, and those from the top 0.1 per­cent were more than twice as like­ly to get in.”
    4. Why won’t Indi­ana Jones con­vert to some­thing after all he has seen in his life? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, On Reli­gion): “What we want to know is why he is always back to square one at the start of every adven­ture – a skep­tic, or even a scoffer. I mean, think about it: He has seen the Ark of the Covenant opened and the destroy­ing angels pour out God’s vengeance on his ene­mies. He has seen the sacred Hin­du stones come to life. …He has seen the true cup of Christ heal his own father from a fatal gun­shot wound – on screen, with no ambi­gu­i­ty.”
      • It’s reveal­ing about mod­ern assump­tions that almost no one thinks to ask this ques­tion.
    5. Are We Liv­ing Through ‘End Times’? (Bari Weiss inter­view­ing Peter Turchin, The Free Press): “Elite over­pro­duc­tion turns out to be the best pre­dic­tor of a cri­sis to come. It is essen­tial­ly ubiq­ui­tous in the pre-cri­sis peri­ods of all soci­eties. I used the game of musi­cal chairs to illus­trate it, except in the usu­al game, you start with 11 play­ers and ten chairs, and one per­son los­es. Here, instead of remov­ing chairs, you keep chairs con­stant, and we add more play­ers. You can imag­ine the amount of chaos that is going to hap­pen. Now let’s con­nect this to the over­pro­duc­tion of wealthy peo­ple in the Unit­ed States. As more and more of them become play­ers in pol­i­tics, they dri­ve up the price of get­ting into office. And more impor­tant­ly, the more peo­ple are vying for these posi­tions, the more peo­ple are going to be frus­trat­ed. They’re going to be losers. But humans don’t have to fol­low rules. This is the dark side of com­pe­ti­tion: if it’s too extreme, it cre­ates con­di­tions for peo­ple to start to break rules.”
      • Turchin is a social sci­en­tist at U Conn. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
      • The author explains the rela­tion­ship between what he does and the sci­ence fic­tion we see in the Foun­da­tion series: Psy­chohis­to­ry and Clio­dy­nam­ics (Peter Turchin, per­son­al blog): “Pre­dic­tion is over­rat­ed. What we real­ly should be striv­ing for, with our social sci­ence, is abil­i­ty to bring about desir­able out­comes and to avoid unwant­ed out­comes. What’s the point of pre­dict­ing future, if it’s very bleak and we are not able to change it? We would be like the per­son con­demned to hang before sun­rise – per­fect knowl­edge of the future, zero abil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.”
    6. Bad Def­i­n­i­tions Of “Democ­ra­cy” And “Account­abil­i­ty” Shade Into Total­i­tar­i­an­ism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “You could, in the­o­ry, define ‘demo­c­ra­t­ic’ this way, so that the more areas of life are sub­ject­ed to the con­trol of a (demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed) gov­ern­ment, the more demo­c­ra­t­ic your soci­ety is. But in that case, the most demo­c­ra­t­ic pos­si­ble soci­ety is total­i­tar­i­an­ism — a soci­ety where the gov­ern­ment con­trols every facet of life, includ­ing what reli­gion you prac­tice, who you mar­ry, and what job you work at. In this soci­ety there would be no room for human free­dom.”
    7. The Impor­tance Of Say­ing “Yes” To The “But” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “One of the endur­ing frus­tra­tions of liv­ing in a polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized coun­try is the evap­o­ra­tion of nuance. As the mus­cles of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy atro­phy, and as cul­tur­al trib­al­ism infects everyone’s con­scious­ness, it becomes more and more dif­fi­cult to say, ‘Yes, but …’ Every­one hates the but. It com­pli­cates; it mud­dles; it can dis­able a slo­gan; and punc­ture a polit­i­cal­ly use­ful myth.”

    Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

    Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

    Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Reli­gious Com­mu­ni­ty and Human Flour­ish­ing (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In some cas­es, our results close­ly repli­cat­ed past work. For exam­ple, we found that, even after con­trol­ling for the fac­tors above, indi­vid­u­als who attend­ed reli­gious ser­vices week­ly or more were 16% less like­ly to become depressed, and saw a 29% reduc­tion in smok­ing and 34% reduc­tion in heavy drink­ing. These results match rea­son­ably close­ly results from sev­er­al pri­or stud­ies, includ­ing the pri­or meta-analy­ses men­tioned above. Some­what strik­ing­ly, but again in line with pri­or analy­sis, week­ly ser­vice atten­dees were 26% less like­ly to die dur­ing the fol­low-up peri­od.” Van­der­Weele, him­self a Chris­t­ian, is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard and I have shared some of his work before. From vol­ume 290.

    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 411

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

    This is vol­ume 411, which is the num­ber you used to dial to get direc­to­ry assis­tance from the phone com­pa­ny. It’s now slang for infor­ma­tion, so an emi­nent­ly appro­pri­ate num­ber for today’s com­pi­la­tion.

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. This roundup has more spir­i­tu­al­ly enrich­ing con­tent than usu­al.
      • The Shep­herd Boy Who Wasn’t (Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If we stick only to the ‘God can use any­one’ read­ing of David’s ori­gin sto­ry, we cel­e­brate God’s ele­va­tion of the over­looked and risk miss­ing God’s clear warn­ing to the ele­vat­ed: It can hap­pen to you. But if we see David for who he real­ly was, we real­ize that every great man or woman who ris­es to pow­er in the church is only one rooftop stroll away from a David-sized crash.”
        • I have unlocked this arti­cle. It’s longer than it needs to be, but good. The author is a pro­fes­sor of Old Tes­ta­ment at Hunt­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
      • Fear­ing God as Sons, Not Slaves (Ben Edwards, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “This dis­tinc­tion is per­haps most clear­ly seen in Exo­dus 20: ‘And all the peo­ple were watch­ing and hear­ing the thun­der and the light­ning flash­es, and the sound of the trum­pet, and the moun­tain smok­ing; and when the peo­ple saw it all, they trem­bled and stood at a dis­tance. 19 Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us your­self and we will lis­ten; but do not have God speak to us, or we will die!’ How­ev­er, Moses said to the peo­ple, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you will not sin.’’ Moses tells Israel: ‘Don’t be afraid, but fear.’ The Israelites were tempt­ed to cow­er in ter­ror as they beheld God’s majesty. But the fear they tru­ly need­ed was one that would lead them to avoid sin.”
        • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal
      • Why I Gave Up Drink­ing (Sarah Bessey, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I think that con­vic­tion has got­ten a bit of a bad rap in the Church over the past lit­tle while. It’s under­stand­able. We have an over­cor­rec­tion to a lot of the legal­ism and bound­ary-mark­er Chris­tian­i­ty that dam­aged so many, the behav­iour mod­i­fi­ca­tion and rule-mak­ing and impo­si­tion of oth­er people’s con­vic­tions onto our own souls. But in our steer­ing away from legal­ism, I won­der if we left the road to holi­ness or began to for­get that God also cares about what we do and how we do it and why.”
        • From last year, but was just rec­om­mend­ed to me by a friend. It’s good.
      • Why Do We Go to Church? (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “Why do so many of us who claim to be Chris­tians nev­er attend church? I know every­one has their rea­sons, but here’s the hard truth: Jesus loves the church. He gave His life for the church. Jesus con­sid­ers the church to be His bride. I don’t care how close you are to Jesus, you can’t tell Him His wife is ugly. If we love Jesus, then we love His church. If you don’t love the church, then there’s rea­son to ques­tion if you love Jesus.”
      • Rap­ture (Pre­cept Austin): “In our day, the Rap­ture has come under attack by many. Some think it rep­re­sents the nov­el teach­ings of ‘defeatist Chris­tians.’ Oth­ers think it is pure fan­ta­sy. Still oth­ers seem to savor the idea of the Church going through the events of the Tribu­la­tion in order to ‘prove her met­al’ or refine her. We find it dif­fi­cult to under­stand why there is such oppo­si­tion by Chris­tians to the idea that the bride­groom would come for His bride pri­or to pour­ing forth His wrath (John 14:1–3)?”
        • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent and I quite liked this one. I’m pret­ty famil­iar with the argu­ments in favor of a pret­ribu­la­tion­al rap­ture (a posi­tion I myself hold), but there was stuff in here that was new to me.
    2. Why Match School And Stu­dent Rank? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…elite col­leges are machines for laun­der­ing priv­i­lege. That is: Har­vard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented peo­ple, and 25% rich/powerful peo­ple. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart peo­ple get to net­work with elites, which is the first step to becom­ing elite them­selves. And the rich peo­ple get mixed in so thor­ough­ly with a pool of smart/talented peo­ple that every­one assumes they must be smart/talented them­selves. After all, they have a degree from Har­vard!”
    3. A Church’s Quest for Enchant­ment (Mag­gie Phllips, Tablet): “[Pen­te­costal­ism] began in the 19th cen­tu­ry, with the par­al­lel devel­op­ment through­out the Anglos­phere of a grass­roots spir­i­tu­al enthu­si­asm ground­ed in per­son­al expe­ri­ence. Its the­ol­o­gy is root­ed in his­to­ry both ancient and more con­tem­po­rary: a key event in the Chris­t­ian Bible’s Book of the Acts of the Apos­tles, as well as the the­ol­o­gy of John Wes­ley, who is rec­og­nized as the father of Method­ism. In the U.S., its cat­a­lyst is usu­al­ly iden­ti­fied as a reli­gious revival move­ment that began in Los Ange­les in 1906; over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, it still enjoys a wide­spread pres­ence in the U.S., and is a rapid­ly grow­ing glob­al phe­nom­e­non.”
      • This is actu­al­ly a pret­ty good overview of Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty for a sec­u­lar audi­ence. She gets a few details wrong, but over­all this is sol­id.
    4. The Church in a Time of Gen­der War (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “What I am say­ing is that I now believe most evan­gel­i­cal church­es should look at their sin­gle mem­bers with both eyes open: an appre­ci­a­tion for the won­der­ful poten­tial of their sea­son of life, but also a desire and strat­e­gy, as the Lord per­mits, to find ways to get these peo­ple Chris­t­ian spous­es. In oth­er words, I don’t think we should fear admit­ting that mar­riage is, in the major­i­ty of sit­u­a­tions we will come across, prefer­able to sin­gle­ness.”
      • Some peo­ple think I empha­size romance too much. I actu­al­ly won­der if I empha­size it too lit­tle.
      • Also, not reflect­ed in the excerpt but very much at the heart of the piece is the author’s con­cern that men and women in our cul­ture are col­lec­tive­ly believ­ing the worst of each oth­er and assum­ing the answer is for the oth­er gen­der to become more like them. He’s get­ting at some­thing real here. I think Chi Alpha has a health­i­er dat­ing cul­ture than oth­er places at Stan­ford, and I still see the ten­den­cies James cri­tiques in this piece in mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty.
      • Men are awe­some. Women are awe­some. You should prob­a­bly want to get mar­ried. Which means you should prob­a­bly go on dates.
    5. Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilder­ness. (Chris­tine Emba, Wash­ing­ton Post): “To the extent that any vision of ‘non­tox­ic’ mas­culin­i­ty is pro­posed, it ends up sound­ing more like stereo­typ­i­cal fem­i­nin­i­ty than any­thing else: Guys should learn to be more sen­si­tive, qui­et and social­ly apt, seem­ing­ly overnight.… I’m con­vinced that men are in a cri­sis. And I strong­ly sus­pect that end­ing it will require a pos­i­tive vision of what mas­culin­i­ty entails that is par­tic­u­lar — that is, nei­ther neu­tral nor inter­change­able with fem­i­nin­i­ty. Still, I find myself reluc­tant to ful­ly artic­u­late one. There’s a rea­son a lot of the writ­ing on the cri­sis in mas­culin­i­ty ends at the diag­no­sis stage.”
      • Unlocked. Sol­id over­all but amus­ing­ly clue­less at a few points. 
      • Relat­ed, although the author dis­claims it: Fight­ing (Marc Andreesen, Sub­stack): “At a pri­vate con­fer­ence this week, I was asked what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Mixed Mar­tial Arts (MMA) train­ing, Elon Musk’s chal­lenge to a cage fight, and pub­lic reports that a Zuckerberg/Musk MMA fight may well hap­pen lat­er this year, per­haps in the actu­al Roman Colos­se­um. I said, ‘I think that’s all great.’ And in this post I explain why.… I was also asked whether I con­sid­er Mark and Elon to be role mod­els to chil­dren in their embrace of fight­ing, and I said, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, yes. And I fur­ther rec­om­mend­ed to the audi­ence that they have their chil­dren trained in MMA, as my wife and I are.”
    6. The Tri­umph of the Good Samar­i­tan (Ash Mil­ton, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The activist defend­ers of the tent cities had seized on a moral lan­guage deeply ingrained in West­ern soci­eties. The notion of duty to neigh­bors, espe­cial­ly those who are poor and vul­ner­a­ble, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong inher­i­tance from Chris­tian­i­ty. But they were using con­cepts they did not care to under­stand. For the activists, the home­less weren’t neigh­bors in any rec­i­p­ro­cal sense, just a bat­ter­ing ram to use in their own con­flicts with soci­ety. By rhetor­i­cal­ly re-premis­ing neigh­bor­ly duties as a one-way rela­tion­ship of trib­ute and def­er­ence paid to the wretched by soci­ety, they ren­dered the very moral con­cepts they invoked use­less. They demand­ed neigh­bor­ly duties from strangers but pro­vid­ed no pos­si­bil­i­ty of those involved ever becom­ing any­thing like real neigh­bors to each oth­er.”
      • A bit longer than nec­es­sary, but quite good.
    7. Who’s Afraid of Moms for Lib­er­ty? (Robert Pondis­cio, The Free Press): “Moms for Lib­er­ty is the beat­ing heart of this country’s move­ment of angry parents—and Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion has nev­er seen any­thing quite like it.… The basic thrust of Moms for Liberty’s advocacy—that par­ents, not the gov­ern­ment, should have the ulti­mate say in what chil­dren are taught in pub­lic schools—has legs. Not one sub­group in McLaughlin’s crosstabs—Trump or Biden vot­ers; pro-life or pro-choice; black, white, or His­pan­ic; urban, rur­al, or suburban—disagrees.”

    Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

    Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

    Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Book Review: The Cult Of Smart (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “DeBoer recalls hear­ing an immi­grant moth­er proud­ly describe her old­er kid’s achieve­ments in math, sci­ence, etc, “and then her younger son ran by, and she said, off­hand, ‘This one, he is maybe not so smart.’ ” DeBoer was orig­i­nal­ly shocked to hear some­one describe her own son that way, then real­ized that he wouldn’t have thought twice if she’d dis­missed him as unath­let­ic, or bad at music. Intel­li­gence is con­sid­ered such a basic mea­sure of human worth that to dis­miss some­one as unin­tel­li­gent seems like con­sign­ing them into the out­er dark­ness.” Nor­mal­ly the best thing about Alexander’s blog is his book reviews. This one was just okay (smart and well-writ­ten but not astound­ing) and then all of a sud­den he turned his rant up to 11. Hang in until you reach the phrase “child prison.” If you’re not sold at that point, stop read­ing. From vol­ume 289.

    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 410

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

    This is vol­ume 410, which hap­pens to be the HTTP sta­tus code for a resource being per­ma­nent­ly gone.

    Things Glen Found Interesting

    1. How elite schools like Stan­ford became fix­at­ed on the AI apoc­a­lypse (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Stu­dents who join the AI safe­ty com­mu­ni­ty some­times get more than free boba. Just as EA con­fer­ences once meant trav­el­ing the world and hav­ing one-on-one meet­ings with wealthy, influ­en­tial donors, Open Philanthropy’s new uni­ver­si­ty fel­low­ship offers a hefty direct deposit: under­grad­u­ate lead­ers receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insur­ance, and up to $100,000 a year to cov­er group expens­es.”
      • Bro — what? Stan­ford won’t even let us pay for a guest speak­er with out­side funds. It’s not clear that the under­grad stu­dents lead­ers at Stan­ford are mak­ing $80k a year, but it’s not clear that they’re not, either. Some stu­dent some­where is, and that’s wild.
    2. Where’s Wal­do? How to Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Prove You Found Him With­out Reveal­ing Where He Is (Jack Murtagh, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can):  “Amaz­ing­ly, every claim that I can prove to you with a tra­di­tion­al math­e­mat­i­cal proof can also be proved in zero knowl­edge. Take your favorite result in math, and you could in prin­ci­ple prove it to a friend while show­ing them bup­kes about how it works. This is a pro­found dis­cov­ery about the nature of proof itself. Cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing.”
      • Zero-knowl­edge proofs are wild. That last sen­tence “cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing” helped me real­ize that there are inter­est­ing par­al­lels to how peo­ple come to faith.
        • It is usu­al­ly an inter­ac­tive process. God begins to draw some­one repeat­ed­ly.
        • It is a prob­a­bilis­tic process. Things keep hap­pen­ing to the soon-to-be con­vert that don’t make sense. I mean, sure they could have hap­pened by chance because any­thing can hap­pen by chance. But they keep hap­pen­ing in a way that is exceed­ing­ly improb­a­ble.
        • The new con­vert’s con­fi­dence in God far exceeds their under­stand­ing of God.
      • God — the orig­i­nal zero-knowl­edge prover. To wax Aris­totelian, He is the unproved prover.
    3. Pas­tor Douša’s case shows the U.S. is not immune to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs on dis­sent (Scott Welder, Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy): “…DHS retal­i­at­ed against Pas­tor Douša for min­is­ter­ing to migrants and refugees in Mex­i­co in Decem­ber 2018 by restrict­ing her Trust­ed Trav­el­er priv­i­leges; sub­ject­ing her to extra screen­ing at the south­ern bor­der; and telling Mex­i­can author­i­ties, false­ly, that there was ‘a great pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that she did not have ‘ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion to be in Mex­i­co’ and sug­gest­ing that the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment ‘deny [her] entry to Mex­i­co’ and ‘send [her] back to the Unit­ed States.’ A CBP offi­cial lat­er admit­ted that the request to Mex­i­can author­i­ties was ‘cre­ative writ­ing,’ ‘with­out any basis.’ But DHS’s actions made it more dif­fi­cult for Pas­tor Douša to con­tin­ue her min­istry, even­tu­al­ly caus­ing her to lim­it her activ­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and to end her min­istry in Mex­i­co alto­geth­er.”
    4. On some of the recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
      • Why the Cham­pi­ons of Affir­ma­tive Action Had to Leave Asian Amer­i­cans Behind (Jay Caspi­an Kang, The New York­er): “Asian Amer­i­cans, the group whom the suit was sup­pos­ed­ly about, have been odd­ly absent from the con­ver­sa­tions that have fol­lowed the rul­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness of the affir­ma­tive-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have most­ly ignored the Asian Amer­i­can plain­tiffs and cho­sen, instead, to relit­i­gate the same argu­ments about mer­it, white suprema­cy, and priv­i­lege. Dur­ing the five years I spent cov­er­ing this case, the com­men­ta­tors defend­ing affir­ma­tive action almost nev­er dis­proved the cen­tral claim that dis­crim­i­na­tion was tak­ing place against Asian Amer­i­cans, even as they dis­missed the plain­tiffs as pawns who had been duped by a con­ser­v­a­tive legal activist. They almost always redi­rect­ed the con­ver­sa­tion to some­thing else—often lega­cy admis­sions.”
      • On Race and Acad­e­mia (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “As an aca­d­e­m­ic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these expe­ri­ences in inter­views and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve nev­er shared them in an arti­cle like this one. The respons­es I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion move me to ven­ture it. The cul­ture that a pol­i­cy helps put into place can be as impor­tant as the pol­i­cy itself. And in my life­time, racial pref­er­ences in acad­e­mia — not mere­ly when it comes to under­grad­u­ate admis­sions but also mov­ing on to grad school and job appli­ca­tions and teach­ing careers — have been not only a set of for­mal and infor­mal poli­cies but also the grounds for a cul­ture of per­cep­tions and assump­tions.”
        • This is a very raw and vul­ner­a­ble piece. Rec­om­mend­ed. His Ph.D. is from Stan­ford.
      • Cov­er­ing the 303 Cre­ative deci­sion: Why do reporters keep ignor­ing the fine print? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “I wish reporters would be hon­est in admit­ting that much of the anger expressed over the ver­dict stems from how Lorie Smith out­wit­ted her oppo­nents by fil­ing suit first, rather than endur­ing  a string of law­suits like what Jack Phillips is hav­ing to endure. I’m look­ing for that inves­tiga­tive piece on the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion that, after hav­ing been reproved twice now by the Supreme Court, hasn’t changed its ways at all. Where is that New York­er take-out on Autumn Scar­di­na, the trans­gen­der attor­ney whose per­son­al vendet­ta against Phillips just nev­er ends because the courts have giv­en her a free pass? I’m wait­ing.”
      • My Win at the Supreme Court Is a Win for All Amer­i­cans (Lorie Smith, Real Clear Reli­gion): “I can’t say every­thing every­one wants me to. I can’t pre­tend to agree with every idea pre­sent­ed to me. None of us can. None of us should have to. Each of us should be free to pur­sue truth, hold to our faith, respect­ful­ly speak our beliefs, and thought­ful­ly live them out day by day, with­out the gov­ern­ment telling us what to believe or say. If that’s the free­dom you want – for your­self, for your fam­i­ly and friends, for all of those who share your ideas and con­vic­tions – then my vic­to­ry is a vic­to­ry for you. What­ev­er you may think of me and my beliefs, we’re all freer today than we were yes­ter­day. I hope you find that cause for cel­e­bra­tion.”
        • The author is the vic­to­ri­ous plain­tiff in the gay wed­ding web­site case.
      • The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “The deci­sion means that gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not mis­use the law to com­pel speech or exclude from the mar­ket­place peo­ple whose beliefs it dislikes.That’s a win for all Americans—whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or holds dif­fer­ent beliefs. Each of us has the right to decide for our­selves what mes­sages we will communicate—in our words, in our art, in our voice—without inter­fer­ence from the gov­ern­ment. The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind.”
        • The author is the lawyer who argued this case before the Supreme Court. She is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, btw.
    5. Chris­tians: More Like Jesus or Phar­isees? (Bar­na Research Group): “In this nation­wide study of self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians, the goal was to deter­mine whether Chris­tians have the actions and atti­tude of Jesus as they inter­act with oth­ers or if they are more akin to the beliefs and behav­iors of Phar­isees, the self-right­eous sect of reli­gious lead­ers described in the New Tes­ta­ment.… The find­ings reveal that most self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians in the U.S. are char­ac­ter­ized by hav­ing the atti­tudes and actions researchers iden­ti­fied as Phar­i­saical. Just over half of the nation’s Christians—using the broad­est def­i­n­i­tion of those who call them­selves Christians—qualify for this cat­e­go­ry (51%). They tend to have atti­tudes and actions that are char­ac­ter­ized by self-right­eous­ness.”
      • This research is a decade old, but quite inter­est­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
      • I do have some reser­va­tions about the method­ol­o­gy. Some of the ques­tions are just wrong. For exam­ple, cat­e­go­riz­ing “I lis­ten to oth­ers to learn their sto­ry before telling them about my faith” being Christ­like rather than Phar­i­saical isn’t real­ly a Bib­li­cal stance, it’s just a per­son­al opin­ion. It may be a shrewd strat­e­gy and over­all com­mend­able, but I don’t see Jesus lis­ten­ing to a lot of sto­ries in the Bible. It’s a poor­ly cho­sen ques­tion for this scale. Quib­bles like that aside, I think the over­all vibe prob­a­bly sol­id.
    6. Liv­ing on a prayer? How attend­ing wor­ship can improve your phys­i­cal and men­tal health. (Phil McGraw and John White, USA Today): “Despite the proven health ben­e­fits, reli­gios­i­ty is on the decline in Amer­i­ca. The fastest-grow­ing reli­gious seg­ment of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is now ‘nones’ − those who pro­fess no reli­gion. We’re not here to evan­ge­lize, but as a doc­tor and a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, it’s impor­tant to note that a decline of reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive health effects.”
      • I love that the authors are Dr. Phil and the chief med­ical offi­cer at Web­MD. To the aver­age Amer­i­can they’ve prob­a­bly got more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any med­ical asso­ci­a­tion or even the NIH, FDA, and CDC.
    7. How to Do Great Work (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the fron­tier, notice gaps, explore promis­ing ones. This is how prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physi­cists.… What should you do if you’re young and ambi­tious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along pas­sive­ly, assum­ing the prob­lem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no sys­tem­at­ic pro­ce­dure you can fol­low. When you read biogra­phies of peo­ple who’ve done great work, it’s remark­able how much luck is involved. They dis­cov­er what to work on as a result of a chance meet­ing, or by read­ing a book they hap­pen to pick up. So you need to make your­self a big tar­get for luck, and the way to do that is to be curi­ous. Try lots of things, meet lots of peo­ple, read lots of books, ask lots of ques­tions.”
      • This is super-long but worth­while. He ram­bles and is mis­tak­en at points, but his core insights are sol­id and impor­tant.

    Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

    Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

    Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. From vol­ume 286.

    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.