Tag: family

TGFI, Volume 524: beauty and virality

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘The Idea of the Beau­ti­ful Is a Sig­na­ture of God’: A Q&A With Mar­i­lynne Robin­son (Peter Wehn­er, New York Times): “Calvin says there is not a blade of grass that God cre­at­ed that was not meant to rav­ish us with its beau­ty. The idea of the beau­ti­ful is a sig­na­ture of God, I think for Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and many oth­er peo­ple. This dis­til­la­tion of the joy, the sen­so­ry joy, of being among things in the world. I think the loss of beau­ty is a loss of an intel­lec­tu­al dis­ci­pline, which sci­ence nev­er lost because sci­en­tists always have the right to say a for­mu­la is beau­ti­ful. We in the out­side world, we’ve aban­doned the word and the con­cept. It’s sug­ges­tive that the sci­en­tists use it.”
  2. Per­form­ing Gen­der, Left and Right (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “How each side behaves is a metaphor for its strengths and weak­ness­es as a move­ment. Con­ser­v­a­tives fun­da­men­tal­ly get human nature and are more in tune with it, but tend to indulge in their instincts and act like idiots. Lib­er­als are thought­ful and polite but place a high pri­or­i­ty on emo­tion­al safe­ty and avoid­ing dan­ger­ous or uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions.… These per­son­al­i­ty and aes­thet­ic dif­fer­ences are cen­tral to polit­i­cal divides. So much of pol­i­tics is who you know, and it’s dif­fi­cult to go some­where in a move­ment if you don’t get along with the peo­ple in it. Elites there­fore sort accord­ing to per­son­al­i­ty in addi­tion to ide­ol­o­gy.”
  3. Why Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Is Built for Tik­Tok (Riv­er Page, The Free Press): “Of course evan­gel­i­cals went viral on Tik­Tok. The medi­um is per­fect for the mes­sage; but also, the mes­sage is per­fect for the medi­um. Catholics have art and ancient rit­u­als. Evan­gel­i­cals have rhetoric and emotion—the kind of stuff that trav­els far and wide on a plat­form where you have 15 sec­onds to grab people’s atten­tion.”
  4. Craft Is the Anti­dote to Slop. (Will Mani­dis, Sub­stack): “From Gen­e­sis, man enters not a par­adise with­out labor but a world of inten­tion­al cre­ation. The LORD God places man in the Gar­den of Eden ‘to dress it and to keep it’ (Gen­e­sis 2:15) estab­lish­ing labor not as pun­ish­ment but as sacred voca­tion. This orig­i­nal call­ing invites us to co-cre­ate the King­dom, tend­ing and devel­op­ing the world with inten­tion and care. Our fun­da­men­tal pur­pose is not con­sump­tion but par­tic­i­pa­tion in the ongo­ing work of cre­ation. The ser­pen­t’s temp­ta­tion rep­re­sents the first short­cut in human his­to­ry.… Human­i­ty’s first sin was, in part, choos­ing the easy short­cut over the mean­ing­ful process – pre­fer­ring effort­less gain to the demand­ing but ful­fill­ing work of tend­ing the gar­den.”
  5. Real­iz­ing a desired fam­i­ly size: when should cou­ples start? (Habbe­ma et al, Human Repro­duc­tion): “With­out IVF, cou­ples should start no lat­er than age 32 years for a [90% chance of a] one-child fam­i­ly, at 27 years for a two-child fam­i­ly, and at 23 years for three chil­dren. When cou­ples accept 75% or low­er chances of fam­i­ly com­ple­tion, they can start 4–11 years lat­er.”
    • An alum­nus passed this along to me and I found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. He’s Chris­t­ian. In Nige­ria, That Meant Tor­ture and Prison. (Josh Code, The Free Press): “What came to my mind when I was in deten­tion was that death could be the final result. I knew the con­se­quences of help­ing Mus­lims who have con­vert­ed to Christianity—and also the fact that the police were look­ing for them. So death was what was on my mind.… From the point of my deten­tion to the point where I was released, I was con­stant­ly pray­ing and fast­ing. Because of the way I was pray­ing, the oth­er men detained with me thought I was a pas­tor and were even call­ing me ‘rev­erend’ and ask­ing me to remem­ber them in my prayers, so that the Lord would also deliv­er them from cap­tiv­i­ty. Mind you, they were Mus­lims, not Christians—their deten­tion was not on account of their faith.”
  7. There Are Only Two Gametes (Car­ol Hooven, Tablet): “We call ani­mals that pro­duce sperm ‘male’ and those that pro­duce eggs ‘female.’ That’s about it. The bot­tom line is that there are two gamete types and thus two sex­es. There are no oth­er sex­es, no oth­er repro­duc­tive cat­e­gories. Among main­stream evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists, there is sim­ply no dis­agree­ment on these basic points: The ‘gamet­ic view’ is the estab­lished ortho­doxy of our field. It applies across sex­u­al­ly repro­duc­ing ani­mals and accom­mo­dates all the com­plex­i­ty and vari­a­tion with­in the sex­es. It holds in non­re­pro­duc­tive­ly viable animals—like post­menopausal me—that don’t pro­duce gametes; it holds in male sea­hors­es that get preg­nant; in clown­fish who change from male to female (first pro­duc­ing sperm and then eggs); in females who iden­ti­fy as male (trans men) and take male lev­els of testos­terone and have a deep voice and a thick, bushy beard.”

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 505: porn, divorce, and a delightful philosopher

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Delu­sion of Porn’s Harm­less­ness (Chris­tine Emba, New York Times): “Despite sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that a del­uge of pornog­ra­phy has had a neg­a­tive impact on mod­ern soci­ety, there is a curi­ous refusal, espe­cial­ly in pro­gres­sive cir­cles, to pub­licly admit dis­ap­proval of porn. Crit­i­ciz­ing porn goes against the norm of non­judg­men­tal­ism for peo­ple who like to con­sid­er them­selves for­ward-think­ing, thought­ful and open-mind­ed.… But a lack of judg­ment some­times comes at the expense of dis­cern­ment. As a soci­ety, we are allow­ing our desires to con­tin­ue to be mold­ed in exper­i­men­tal ways, for prof­it, by an indus­try that does not have our best inter­ests at heart.”
  2. Divorce, Fam­i­ly Arrange­ments, and Chil­dren’s Adult Out­comes (Andrew C. John­ston,  Mag­gie R. Jones  & Nolan G. Pope, NBER): “We find that parental divorce reduces chil­dren’s adult earn­ings and col­lege res­i­dence while increas­ing incar­cer­a­tion, mor­tal­i­ty, and teen births.”
    • This paper will have sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence — expect to see its find­ings quot­ed in op-eds and pub­lic debates. The authors are at UT Austin, the Cen­sus Bureau, and U of Mary­land. Excerpt is from the abstract. It’s a 30 page paper with about 30 more pages of graphs and charts.
  3. Two per­spec­tives on AI:
    • Everyone’s Using AI To Cheat at School. That’s a Good Thing. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “Unlike many peo­ple who believe this spells the end of qual­i­ty Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion, I think this cri­sis is ulti­mate­ly good news. And not just because I believe Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion was already in a pro­found crisis—the result of ide­o­log­i­cal cap­ture, polit­i­cal mono­cul­ture, and extreme conformism—long before the LLMs. These mod­els are such great cheat­ing aids because they are also such great teach­ers. Often they are bet­ter than the human teach­ers we put before our kids, and they are far cheap­er at that. They will not union­ize or attend pro-Hamas protests.”
    • Why We’re Unlike­ly to Get Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence Any­time Soon (Cade Metz, New York Times): “It is indis­putable that today’s machines have already eclipsed the human brain in some ways, but that has been true for a long time. A cal­cu­la­tor can do basic math faster than a human. Chat­bots like Chat­G­PT can write faster, and as they write, they can instant­ly draw on more texts than any human brain could ever read or remem­ber. These sys­tems are exceed­ing human per­for­mance on some tests involv­ing high-lev­el math and cod­ing. But peo­ple can­not be reduced to these bench­marks.”
  4. Remem­ber­ing Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre (1929–2025) (Christo­pher Kac­zor, Word on Fire): “Mac­In­tyre was proud nev­er to have earned a PhD: ‘I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain edu­cat­ed.’ How­ev­er, his pro­lif­ic research won him ten hon­orary doc­tor­ates and appoint­ments as Cor­re­spond­ing Fel­low of the British Acad­e­my, an Hon­orary Mem­ber of the Roy­al Irish Acad­e­my, and Fel­low of the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Sci­ences. He held aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tions at Oxford, Yale, Man­ches­ter, Leeds, Essex, Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, Aarhus, Bran­deis, Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, Welles­ley Col­lege, Van­der­bilt, Lon­don Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­si­ty, Duke, and three appoint­ments at Prince­ton. But he found a last­ing home at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame.”
    • Full of delight­ful anec­dotes about an amaz­ing Catholic philoso­pher.
  5. An Efil­ist Just Bombed a Fer­til­i­ty Clin­ic. Was This Bound To Hap­pen? (Kather­ine Dee, Sub­stack): “In 2006 the South African philoso­pher David Benatar pub­lished Bet­ter Nev­er to Have Been, argu­ing that exis­tence itself is harm, because, accord­ing to him, the absence of pain is always good while the absence of plea­sure mat­ters only to some­one forced to miss it. His book sup­plied the term anti­na­tal­ism and the asym­met­ri­cal equa­tion that sus­tains it: any new birth inevitably adds suf­fer­ing to the ledger.… To make a long sto­ry short—too short, in fact, there’s a doc­u­men­tary worth of sto­ry in this—Gary Mosh­er, an iras­ci­ble vlog­ger and erst­while ama­teur physi­cist best known as Inmend­ham, end­ed up coin­ing efil­ism—‘life’ spelled backwards—during this peri­od to insist that every sen­tient organ­ism is a fac­to­ry for pain and ought to be snuffed out.”
    • Actu­al­ly wild. I often crit­i­cize util­i­tar­i­an­ism and its off­shoots, this sto­ry illus­trates the things I warn about in a trag­ic way.
  6. The Man Who Knew When to Step Down (David French, New York Times): “We live in a coun­try that is pos­i­tive­ly obsessed with career suc­cess and thus defines peo­ple through their work more than through their fam­i­ly — or even their indi­vid­ual virtue. In many of America’s elite cir­cles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains? Again, this isn’t sim­ply a prob­lem for judges and politi­cians. The prob­lem isn’t sole­ly how the pow­er­ful define them­selves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and hon­or. It takes a per­son of real for­ti­tude and self-respect sim­ply to walk away.”
  7. The myth of the sin­gle mar­ket (Luis Gar­i­cano, Sub­stack): “The IMF puts the hid­den cost of trad­ing goods inside the EU at the equiv­a­lent of a 45% tar­iff. For ser­vices the fig­ure climbs to 110%, high­er than Trump’s ‘Lib­er­a­tion day’ tar­iffs on Chi­nese imports—measures many saw as a near-embar­go.… As a result, actu­al trade between EU coun­tries is less than half that between US states.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and a for­mer EU mem­ber of par­lia­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Hid­den In Okla­homa Is The Only All-You-Can Eat Chick-Fil‑A In Amer­i­ca (Natal­ie Avi­la, Mashed): “Since 2005, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Okla­homa has offered its stu­dents all-you-can-eat Chick-fil‑A, serv­ing chick­en sand­wich­es, nuggets, waf­fle fries, and sauces. It’s locat­ed inside the Couch Restau­rants Din­er, a food hall attached to a fresh­man dorm that always offers unlim­it­ed bites. The din­ing hall wel­comes cur­rent uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, employ­ees, and guests of both.”
  • Move Toward The Light (Loose Parts)
  • Gen­tly (SMBC)

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 503: unwise vulnerability, college cheating, and imperfect moms

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love L.A.(Natal­ie Benes, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “Here was the truth that the L.A. girls under­stand bet­ter than any­one: when you are ‘vul­ner­a­ble’ and ‘authen­tic,’ when you ‘des­tig­ma­tize your trau­ma’ the way we were always encour­aged to do, you are adver­tis­ing that oth­er peo­ple in your life have treat­ed you bad­ly. When you men­tion at a cock­tail par­ty that you had a mom who threw din­ner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eye­brows, or a land­lord who shaft­ed you on your secu­ri­ty deposit, or what­ev­er else, the wrong per­son hears ‘he got away with it, why can’t I?’ He spots a wound­ed deer unable to pro­tect itself, per­pet­u­al­ly sep­a­rat­ed from the hap­py herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfair­ness in the fact that peo­ple who have been dealt the most hard­ships in life are the least served by ‘liv­ing their truth.’ ”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle. The wis­dom it offers is incom­plete but real — and it is wis­dom many young peo­ple need to hear. The author is a Yale grad and I think many Stan­ford stu­dents could ben­e­fit from her insight.
  2. Every­one Is Cheat­ing Their Way Through Col­lege (James D. Walsh, New York Mag­a­zine): “It isn’t as if cheat­ing is new. But now, as one stu­dent put it, ‘the ceil­ing has been blown off.’ Who could resist a tool that makes every assign­ment eas­i­er with seem­ing­ly no con­se­quences? After spend­ing the bet­ter part of the past two years grad­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed papers, Troy Jol­limore, a poet, philoso­pher, and Cal State Chico ethics pro­fes­sor, has con­cerns. ‘Mas­sive num­bers of stu­dents are going to emerge from uni­ver­si­ty with degrees, and into the work­force, who are essen­tial­ly illit­er­ate,’ he said. ‘Both in the lit­er­al sense and in the sense of being his­tor­i­cal­ly illit­er­ate and hav­ing no knowl­edge of their own cul­ture, much less any­one else’s.’ ”
  3. On moth­ers:
    • On Mother’s Day: Stop blam­ing moms and start tak­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty for your life (Zachary Got­tlieb, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Then one night, the ‘Morn­ing Show’ video popped up on my phone. Among the GenZ influ­encers talk­ing about why they cut their ‘tox­ic’ and ‘nar­cis­sis­tic’ moms out of their lives, the algo­rithm fed me its coun­ter­point. And while Alex might have seemed unhinged in her out­burst, what she said about the weight of her daughter’s expec­ta­tions rang true. Mes­mer­ized, I watched it sev­er­al times in a row, and then I had a real­iza­tion: maybe we kids were guilty of a kind of nar­cis­sism too?”
      • There is a weird rab­bit trail in this arti­cle about gen­der which great­ly weak­ens it (because some of y’all blame your dads instead of / in addi­tion to your moms), but the core point hones in on a great weak­ness many young peo­ple pos­sess. To all col­lege stu­dents: your par­ents are peo­ple, too. They did some things well and some things bad­ly and now we are where we are. If they did some­thing crim­i­nal then pros­e­cute them, but oth­er­wise many peo­ple need an epiphany like the author of this arti­cle.
      • Hav­ing said that, some of you have some tru­ly bad par­ents. I’m not say­ing treat unhealthy peo­ple like they’re won­der­ful in every way and invite them to come mess up your life. I am say­ing that at some point you have to take respon­si­bil­i­ty for who you’ve become regard­less of your folks’ health or unhealth. 
      • Anoth­er way to put this: most of you will go on to be good par­ents who nonethe­less cause your chil­dren pain and frus­tra­tion in addi­tion to all the good you do in their lives. Fol­low the Gold­en Rule and regard your par­ents now like you hope your own chil­dren regard you some­day.
    • My Mom was a Pray­ing Woman…But not Like You Think (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “To under­stand my moth­er, you have to know she had no ado­les­cence. Her moth­er died when she was twelve and overnight, my moth­er became an adult. She had three younger sis­ters, and she felt it became her respon­si­bil­i­ty to raise them. My mom start­ed dri­ving when she was four­teen. She didn’t go get a license. She just start­ed dri­ving. The sher­iff pulled her over once and told her to get a license, but he didn’t give her a tick­et. My mom kept dri­ving.”
      • A beau­ti­ful (and instruc­tive) sto­ry.
  4. Peo­ple Are Los­ing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spir­i­tu­al Fan­tasies (Miles Klee, Rolling Stone): “Speak­ing to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who request­ed anonymi­ty, said her part­ner of sev­en years fell under the spell of Chat­G­PT in just four or five weeks, first using it to orga­nize his dai­ly sched­ule but soon regard­ing it as a trust­ed com­pan­ion. ‘He would lis­ten to the bot over me,’ she says. ‘He became emo­tion­al about the mes­sages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The mes­sages were insane and just say­ing a bunch of spir­i­tu­al jar­gon,’ she says, not­ing that they described her part­ner in terms such as ‘spi­ral starchild’ and ‘riv­er walk­er.’ ‘It would tell him every­thing he said was beau­ti­ful, cos­mic, ground­break­ing,’ she says. ‘Then he start­ed telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teach­ing him how to talk to God, or some­times that the bot was God — and then that he him­self was God.’”
  5. The Three Lay­ers of the Mar­riage Pyra­mid (J. D. Greear, blog): “Mar­riage, in oth­er words, is fun­da­men­tal­ly about friend­ship. Not child-rear­ing. Not sex. Friend­ship. Which means that what you should most be look­ing for when you date is some­one who can be your friend. Because that’s God’s earth­ly pur­pose for mar­riage. Think of it like build­ing a pyra­mid with spir­i­tu­al, emo­tion­al, and phys­i­cal lay­ers.”
  6. Yes, Har­vard Deserves Due Process (Greg Lukianoff & Adam Gold­stein, Per­sua­sion): “This isn’t the first time the Civ­il Rights Act has been mis­used in this way. Under the Oba­ma and Biden admin­is­tra­tions, the Depart­ments of Jus­tice and Edu­ca­tion issued Title IX enforce­ment let­ters pres­sur­ing uni­ver­si­ties to rewrite sex­u­al mis­con­duct pro­ce­dures and to adopt uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly over­broad def­i­n­i­tions of sex­u­al harass­ment. It was wrong then to use enforce­ment let­ters to make uncon­sti­tu­tion­al demands of insti­tu­tions, and it is wrong now. If the gov­ern­ment believes it has the pow­er to do this through ordi­nary process­es, it should use them. If the gov­ern­ment does not believe it has that pow­er, it shouldn’t.”
    • FIRE (with which the two authors are asso­ci­at­ed) and the Beck­et Fund are two praise­wor­thy law firms. Each has tak­en up part of the man­tle the ACLU claims to bear, and we are all blessed by their prin­ci­pled advo­ca­cy.
  7. The Resis­tance Is Gonna Be Woke (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “As I have writ­ten many times before, it is a pro­found mis­take to think that left-wing iden­ti­tar­i­an­ism and right-wing reac­tion are implaca­ble ene­mies. In real­i­ty, every vic­to­ry for one of these ide­o­log­i­cal cur­rents imme­di­ate­ly strength­ens those who fight for the oth­er. The way out of this dan­ger­ous spi­ral is not to pick one side as the less­er evil and shut up about its dan­gers; it is, calm­ly and con­sis­tent­ly, to resist both.”

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 486



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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Should Ignor­ing God Mat­ter? (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “It is abhor­rent beyond words to aban­don those who have done us the great­est good. Dis­loy­al­ty to my friend, unfaith­ful­ness to my wife, ingrat­i­tude to my par­ents, trea­son to my father­land — such things can­not even be spo­ken of with­out shame, calum­ny, and dis­grace. But what greater trea­son could there be than to turn trai­tor to the Author of our being, who is not only the Good above all goods, but the Source of all these goods? Why would you want to do that any­way? For He is the true Friend and ori­gin of friend­ship, the true Bride­groom and ori­gin of mar­riage, the true Father by whose name all earth­ly fathers are called. His king­dom is the true Home­land, of which our earth­ly home­land is hard­ly a shad­ow. Don’t any of these seem good things to you? And if we still need more rea­sons to admire what is so great and good, what’s wrong with us? ‘But I don’t know all this to be true.’ Per­haps not. But wouldn’t it be pru­dent to find out?”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin.
  2. con­trac­tu­al­ism (Alan Jacobs, blog): “To accept that being human means that I am bound to my fam­i­ly even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolute­ly had it with them, is the begin­ning of some­thing. But only the begin­ning. The peo­ple you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Bound­aries must be set, then re-nego­ti­at­ed, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the fam­i­ly mem­bers you have most offend­ed will do the same for you.”
  3. At the Inter­sec­tion of A.I. and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty (Eli Tan, New York Times): “Crit­ics of A.I. use by reli­gious lead­ers have point­ed to the issue of hal­lu­ci­na­tions — times when chat­bots make stuff up. While harm­less in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions, faith-based A.I. tools that fab­ri­cate reli­gious scrip­ture present a seri­ous prob­lem. In Rab­bi Bot’s ser­mon, for instance, the A.I. invent­ed a quote from the Jew­ish philoso­pher Mai­monides that would have passed as authen­tic to the casu­al lis­ten­er.”
    • I don’t use AI for my ser­mons, in case you were won­der­ing. I can imag­ine that some­day I might put them into an AI to ask “is there a crit­i­cism I should antic­i­pate and address?” or some­thing along those lines, but I gen­uine­ly can’t imag­ine myself out­sourc­ing ser­mon prep to an AI.
  4. Has World War III Begun? (Kori Schake, The Dis­patch): “Our ene­mies have region­al ambi­tions for con­quest and are work­ing to keep the U.S. out, because with­out the strength of the Unit­ed States, our region­al allies could not pro­tect them­selves. Rus­sia threat­ens nuclear use if the U.S. aids Ukraine, hop­ing to fore­stall assis­tance. Chi­na attacks Philip­pine coast guard ships, hop­ing the U.S. won’t come to their aid although they are treaty allies of the U.S. North Korea fires mis­siles over the Sea of Japan and con­ducts espi­onage oper­a­tions against South Korea, test­ing whether it can be peeled from the U.S. defense umbrel­la. Iran attacks Sau­di Ara­bia hoping—rightly, it turned out—that the U.S. would balk at retal­i­a­tion. Their ide­al would be a world war with­out Amer­i­can par­tic­i­pa­tion, because it would result in Chi­na dom­i­nant in Asia, Rus­sia dom­i­nant in Europe, North Korea dom­i­nant on the Kore­an Penin­su­la, and Iran dom­i­nant in the Mid­dle East.”
  5. Bureau­cra­cy Isn’t Mea­sured In Bureau­crats (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “This real­ly sunk in for me when I read an arti­cle about the fall of Afghanistan to the Tal­iban in 2021. Many Afghans had col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Amer­i­cans, eg as trans­la­tors, in exchange for a promise of US cit­i­zen­ship. As the Tal­iban advanced, they called in the promise, beg­ging to be allowed to flee to Amer­i­ca before they got pun­ished as trai­tors. The arti­cle focused on a hero­ic effort by cer­tain immi­gra­tion bureau­crats, who worked around the clock with min­i­mal sleep for the last few weeks before Kab­ul fell, try­ing to get the cit­i­zen­ship forms filled in and approved for as many trans­la­tors as pos­si­ble. It made an impres­sion on me because nobody was opposed to the trans­la­tors get­ting cit­i­zen­ship, and the bureau­crats were them­selves the peo­ple in charge of approv­ing cit­i­zen­ship appli­ca­tions, so what exact­ly was forc­ing them to go to such des­per­ate lengths? If you pon­der this ques­tion long enough, you become enlight­ened about the nature of the admin­is­tra­tive state.”
  6. A $24 Bil­lion Fund Puts Its Reli­gious Stamp on Cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca (Jeff Green and Sai­jel Kis­han, Bloomberg): “Guide­Stone is part of a nascent coali­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian investors that are start­ing to flex their mus­cles and use their share­hold­er clout to counter pro­gres­sive cor­po­rate poli­cies such as fund­ing Pride parades or cov­er­ing employ­ees’ trav­el costs for abor­tions. They’re also zero­ing in on banks for alleged­ly clos­ing cus­tomer accounts on polit­i­cal and reli­gious grounds. By some mea­sures, there’s now half a tril­lion dol­lars in invest­ments spread across con­ser­v­a­tive faith-based pri­vate funds and state pen­sion funds that can be brought to bear to influ­ence com­pa­ny behav­ior, said Will Lofland, who over­sees share­hold­er advo­ca­cy at Guide­Stone.”
  7. This Tiny Fish’s Mis­tak­en Iden­ti­ty Halt­ed a Dam’s Con­struc­tion (Jason Nark, New York Times): “ ‘There is, tech­ni­cal­ly, no snail darter,’ said Thomas Near, cura­tor of ichthy­ol­o­gy at the Yale Peabody Muse­um. Dr. Near, also a pro­fes­sor who leads a fish biol­o­gy lab at Yale, and his col­leagues report in the jour­nal Cur­rent Biol­o­gy that the snail darter, Perci­na tanasi, is nei­ther a dis­tinct species nor a sub­species. Rather, it is an east­ern pop­u­la­tion of Perci­na uranidea, known also as the stargaz­ing darter, which is not con­sid­ered endan­gered. Dr. Near con­tends that ear­ly researchers ‘squint­ed their eyes a bit’ when describ­ing the fish, because it rep­re­sent­ed a way to fight the Ten­nessee Val­ley Authority’s plan to build the Tel­li­co Dam on the Lit­tle Ten­nessee Riv­er, about 20 miles south­west of Knoxville.”
    • My favorite line in this arti­cle is a response from a crit­ic who “believes the find­ings… lean too heav­i­ly on genet­ics.”

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 480

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Give Thanks in the Bright Dark­ness (Christi­na Gon­za­lez Ho, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It seems that, his­tor­i­cal­ly, Thanks­giv­ing was not meant to be a pure­ly cel­e­bra­to­ry day, a time to lux­u­ri­ate in self-sat­is­fac­tion, but rather a day to hold grat­i­tude in ten­sion with sor­row, suf­fer­ing, and sin—to acknowl­edge the bright­ness and dark­ness that always exist simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in the world.”
    • Christi­na is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
  2. The Con­quest of Canaan Explained in 6 Min­utes (Gavin Ortlund, YouTube). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. This is a top­ic I think I explain pret­ty well, but Ortlund does it bet­ter. Worth your time if the destruc­tion of the Canaan­ite cul­tures both­ers you.
  3. And They Began to Be Mer­ry (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dis­patch): “The mir­a­cle at Cana isn’t water becom­ing wine—any old magi­cian could do that sort of thing. What­ev­er it was that Jesus was about, it wasn’t stu­pid par­ty tricks. The mir­a­cle is that the Ruler of the Uni­verse cared about such a lit­tle thing as the social anx­i­eties of a bunch of nobod­ies in an obscure lit­tle cor­ner of the world of no par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, and that He loved them the way a father loves his children—and what kind of father offers just enough at a time like that when he has, at his dis­pos­al, the very best?… The super­nat­ur­al stuff is one thing, but con­sid­er the mag­nif­i­cence of that ges­ture, the sheer auda­cious style of it. I do not care if you are the most cyn­i­cal athe­ist walk­ing the Earth—it is impos­si­ble not to admire the panache. He bends real­i­ty into a new shape, makes the uni­verse fol­low new rules, to help out a friend, and He does it cool—nobody even knows what hap­pened except for the wait­ers.”
  4. What I Wish Some­one Had Told Me About Moth­er­hood (Daniela J. Lamas, New York Times): “For my gen­er­a­tion— and, I’d argue, espe­cial­ly for women in my gen­er­a­tion — the deci­sion of whether to have a child has become high­ly fraught. It’s tied up with our desires for ful­fill­ing careers, our will­ing­ness to risk a shift in the iden­ti­ties and lives we have built. It’s tied up in an under­stand­ing of all that went into mak­ing moth­er­hood a choice that we get to make. With so much at stake, it is so easy to become par­a­lyzed by inde­ci­sion. But per­haps what I would have want­ed to hear when I was dither­ing was some­thing like this: Hav­ing a child has been extra­or­di­nary.… And for some rea­son, I feel almost embar­rassed to admit how much I love being a moth­er. I spent my adult life until now with this idea that I was dif­fer­ent from — and maybe even a lit­tle supe­ri­or to — my peers who chose to spend time build­ing their fam­i­lies. I was so wor­ried about what a child would mean for my career. But what I did not antic­i­pate was that what I would want itself would change.”
  5. This Mav­er­ick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of some­thing para­dox­i­cal about the neolib­er­al project: For the glob­al econ­o­my to be ‘free,’ it must be con­strained. What the pro­po­nents of neolib­er­al­ism mean by a free mar­ket is a dereg­u­lat­ed mar­ket. But get­ting to dereg­u­la­tion is trick­i­er than it looks because in free soci­eties, reg­u­la­tions are the result of people’s sov­er­eign right to make their own rules. The more demo­c­ra­t­ic the world’s soci­eties are, the more idio­syn­crat­ic they will be, and the more their eco­nom­ic rules will diverge. But that is exact­ly what busi­ness­es can­not tol­er­ate — at least not under glob­al­iza­tion. Mon­ey and goods must be able to move fric­tion­less­ly and effi­cient­ly across bor­ders. This requires a uni­form set of laws. Some­how, democ­ra­cy is going to have to give way.”
    • Cald­well is an inter­est­ing thinker, so as soon as I saw his byline I knew I had to read the arti­cle. Worth a pon­der.
  6. ‘A God Who Con­tin­u­al­ly Sur­pris­es Us’: A Q&A With a The­olo­gian Who Changed His Mind About Gay Mar­riage (Peter Wehn­er, New York Times): “…I would say that the way I was appeal­ing to the Bible or the way I was inter­pret­ing the Bible was too nar­row­ly focused on the few texts in Scrip­ture that do say some­thing explic­it­ly about homo­sex­u­al rela­tion­ships. The dic­tum in Leviti­cus is that for a man to lie with a man as with a woman is an abom­i­na­tion. And those texts had a cer­tain impact on my opin­ion. But I think I was I was far too nar­row in the way I thought about how the Bible speaks to issues like this. What I came to think over time is that what the Bible shows is not some iso­lat­ed proof texts or iso­lat­ed state­ments of law, but it shows us a much big­ger pic­ture of God as a God who con­tin­u­al­ly sur­pris­es us, con­tin­u­al­ly sur­pris­es his peo­ple with the scope of gen­eros­i­ty and grace and mer­cy.”
    • This is one of many reveal­ing moments in this inter­view. Hays stopped believ­ing what the Bible actu­al­ly says in favor of what he takes the deep­er mes­sage of the Bible to be. It’s as though he sub­or­di­nates the real text of the Bible to the hypo­thet­i­cal text of the Bible in his head.
    • This arti­cle makes me sad. Shar­ing because it’s a clear­er-than-usu­al pre­sen­ta­tion of an argu­ment that I often encounter, and its clar­i­ty makes the weak­ness­es of the revi­sion­ist posi­tion more evi­dent.
  7. How Uni­ver­si­ties Cracked Down on Pro-Pales­tin­ian Activism (Isabelle Taft, New York Times): “Uni­ver­si­ties have seen just under 950 protest events this semes­ter so far, com­pared to 3,000 last semes­ter, accord­ing to a log at the Non­vi­o­lent Action Lab at Har­vard University’s Ash Cen­ter. About 50 peo­ple have been arrest­ed so far this school year at protests on high­er edu­ca­tion cam­pus­es, accord­ing to num­bers gath­ered by The New York Times, com­pared to over 3,000 last semes­ter. When stu­dents have protest­ed this fall, admin­is­tra­tors have often enforced — to the let­ter — new rules cre­at­ed in response to last spring’s unrest. The moves have cre­at­ed scenes that would have been hard to imag­ine pre­vi­ous­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly at uni­ver­si­ties that once cel­e­brat­ed their his­to­ry of stu­dent activism.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 454



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 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 390

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 390, which is the num­ber of unique ways to sum up to 32 (in oth­er words, 32 has 390 dis­tinct par­ti­tions).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Con­cern­ing Asbury:
    • Asbury Pro­fes­sor: We’re Wit­ness­ing a ‘Sur­pris­ing Work of God’ (Tom McCall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “By Thurs­day evening, there was stand­ing room only. Stu­dents had begun to arrive from oth­er uni­ver­si­ties: the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky, the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Cum­ber­lands, Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty, Indi­ana Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty, Ohio Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty, Tran­syl­va­nia Uni­ver­si­ty, Mid­way Uni­ver­si­ty, Lee Uni­ver­si­ty, George­town Col­lege, Mt. Ver­non Nazarene Uni­ver­si­ty, and many oth­ers.… In pre­vi­ous revivals, there has always been fruit that has blessed both the church and soci­ety. For instance, even sec­u­lar his­to­ri­ans acknowl­edge that the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing was piv­otal to bring­ing about the end of slav­ery in our coun­try. Like­wise, I look for­ward to see­ing what fruit God will bring from such a revival in our gen­er­a­tion.”
    • a quirky but pos­i­tive take on Asbury by Lyman Stone (Twit­ter)
    • Anoth­er inter­est­ing take by a PhD stu­dent at Asbury Sem­i­nary (Twit­ter)
    • A non­stop Ken­tucky prayer ‘revival’ is going viral on Tik­Tok, and peo­ple are trav­el­ing thou­sands of miles to take part (Jake Tray­lor, NBC News): “The set­up is sim­ple. No pro­jec­tor screens or high-tech inte­gra­tions, just wood­en sanc­tu­ary chairs filled with peo­ple, and an open altar call with an invi­ta­tion to prayer that still hasn’t end­ed. That equa­tion has been a pow­er­ful recipe on social media. On Tik­Tok and Insta­gram, videos hash­tagged ‘Asbury Revival’ are rack­ing up mil­lions of views. At the time this arti­cle was pub­lished, the hash­tag #asburyre­vival had 24.4 mil­lion views on Tik­Tok.”
    • The Revival at Asbury (Thomas Lyons, Sub­stack): “For what it’s worth, it’s my ini­tial eval­u­a­tion that this is the real deal. None of the hall­marks of man­u­fac­tured revival are present. And I’m not alone in this eval­u­a­tion. As Law­son Stone, an Old Tes­ta­ment Pro­fes­sor at Asbury The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, recent­ly stat­ed on social media, ‘The old saints know.’ Arguably more sig­nif­i­cant for the eval­u­a­tion of the revival’s authen­tic­i­ty than the opin­ions of revival schol­ars are the tes­ti­monies of the pri­or gen­er­a­tions who were present at sim­i­lar moves of God with­in the com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • The author is a schol­ar whose dis­ser­ta­tion focused on revivals.
  2. No Hookups, No ‘Talk­ing,’ and No Breakups: A Bet­ter Way to Date (Charles E. Stokes, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “My wife and I have served as rela­tion­ship men­tors now for 10 years, and as a fam­i­ly schol­ar and pro­fes­sor, I’ve paid atten­tion to every nugget of wis­dom I could glean—not only from aca­d­e­mics but from many of my stu­dents. I have been able to craft a bet­ter approach to dat­ing that I believe improves the chances of suc­cess for sin­gles desir­ing a life­long monog­a­mous rela­tion­ship.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Sam­ford. I am delib­er­ate­ly not includ­ing his pro­posed solu­tion in the excerpt because it’s worth read­ing in full. If you read his sug­ges­tion out of con­text you’ll prob­a­bly form an opin­ion about it too quick­ly.
  3. ‘Hon­or­ing’ Your Father and Moth­er Isn’t Always Bib­li­cal (Karen Wong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But does the Chi­nese under­stand­ing of fil­ial piety real­ly mean exact­ly the same as the bib­li­cal descrip­tion of hon­or­ing par­ents? And can an empha­sis on obey­ing the fifth com­mand­ment over­look or even ratio­nal­ize par­ent-child rela­tion­ships char­ac­ter­ized by con­tention, pain, dis­re­spect, and suf­fer­ing?”
    • Not pay­walled — I have unlocked it for you.
  4. Why Amer­i­ca Needs Foot­ball. Even Its Bru­tal­i­ty. (Ethan Strauss, The Free Press): “Mod­ern life might be unful­fill­ing, but the fact remains you’re unlike­ly to die on a beach sep­a­rat­ed from your entrails. Still, the old imper­a­tives remain. We have war with­in us, whether or not there’s one to wage. And the NFL gives Amer­i­cans that war, as spec­ta­cle, week after week.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I am still skep­ti­cal Amer­i­can foot­ball can sur­vive moms pulling their kids out of the sport and direct­ing them to safer ath­let­ic exploits.
  5. Con­tra Kavanagh On Fideism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “In a free soci­ety, at one or anoth­er point in your life, you’ll actu­al­ly have to form your own opin­ion about some­thing. You’ll do bet­ter at that if you have some prac­tice form­ing opin­ions. When experts have strong opin­ions on some­thing, this is a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to prac­tice your opin­ion-form­ing skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, fig­ure out where you went wrong. This requires peo­ple to have some tol­er­ance for oth­ers doing this.”
    • Start­ed off quite unin­ter­est­ing and then quick­ly ramped up. The ques­tion under con­sid­er­a­tion: how to bal­ance defer­ring to experts with inves­ti­gat­ing things on your own.
    • A fol­low-up Try­ing Again On Fideism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I come back to this exam­ple again and again, but only because it’s so bla­tant: the New York Times ran an arti­cle say­ing that only 36% of econ­o­mists sup­port­ed school vouch­ers, with a strong impli­ca­tion that the pro­fes­sion was major­i­ty against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actu­al­ly, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not respond­ing. If you are too quick to seek epis­temic clo­sure because ‘you have to trust the experts’, you will be easy prey to peo­ple mis­rep­re­sent­ing what they are say­ing.”
  6. McCullough’s Mis­take, and Ours (Adri­an Gaty, Sub­stack): “As long as edu­ca­tion stays true to its past and cul­ti­vates faith and virtue, McCullough’s mis­take doesn’t mat­ter. But once edu­ca­tion becomes unmoored from its ori­gins, once it becomes open­ly hos­tile to reli­gion, we betray our own ori­gins – and con­demn our future – by con­tin­u­ing to ’empha­size’ school­ing. Our founders, pio­neers like the Rev­erend Cut­ler, spread the gospel of pub­lic edu­ca­tion not for its own sake but because such edu­ca­tion in turn spread the Gospel. To achieve that good gov­ern­ment and hap­pi­ness they envi­sioned, our task today is not to encour­age pub­lic edu­ca­tion as it cur­rent­ly exists – it is to remake it in His image.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • This is a fol­low up to the also inter­est­ing This is… Sci­ence! (Adri­an Gaty, Sub­stack): “These are pro­found­ly anti-life, anti-human move­ments – yet they advance by manip­u­lat­ing our human­i­ty, our ten­der­ness, our hatred of sui­cide. Spoil­er alert: the doc­tors and ethi­cists mak­ing these claims about abor­tion and affir­ma­tion are 100% on board with doc­tor-assist­ed sui­cide (which killed over ten thou­sand Cana­di­ans last year). They don’t hate sui­cide, not in the least — but they know that you do. They are using your com­pas­sion to cre­ate a cul­ture of death.”
  7. In Defense of J.K. Rowl­ing (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Take it from one of her for­mer crit­ics. E.J. Roset­ta, a jour­nal­ist who once denounced Rowl­ing for her sup­posed trans­pho­bia, was com­mis­sioned last year to write an arti­cle called ’20 Trans­pho­bic J.K. Rowl­ing Quotes We’re Done With.’ After 12 weeks of report­ing and read­ing, Roset­ta wrote, ‘I’ve not found a sin­gle tru­ly trans­pho­bic mes­sage.’ On Twit­ter she declared, ‘You’re burn­ing the wrong witch.’ ”
    • The tide is turn­ing on Rowl­ing. She’s not where I am ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, but watch­ing her be tarred and feath­ered for say­ing com­mon sense things has been dis­may­ing.

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 Does the Bible Pass the Bechdel Test? A Data-Dri­ven Look at Women in the Sto­ry of Scrip­ture (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “So does the Bible pass the Bechdel test? This short answer is: yes, there are scenes where two named women have a con­ver­sa­tion not about a man. The longer answer is more com­plex, but also, I think, rich­er.” This is REALLY well done. From vol­ume 268.

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 254

The less time­ly stuff is up top this time and there are a lot of mag­ic videos at the bot­tom.

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Unites Most Grad­u­ates of Selec­tive Col­leges? An Intact Fam­i­ly (Nicholas Zill & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “… even after con­trol­ling for par­ent edu­ca­tion, fam­i­ly income, and stu­dent race and eth­nic­i­ty, being raised by one’s mar­ried birth par­ents pro­vides an addi­tion­al boost to one’s chances of get­ting through Prince­ton.”
  2. What Chris­tians Must Remem­ber about Nuclear Weapons and Arms Con­trol (Peter Feaver & William Inbo­den & Michael Singh, Prov­i­dence): “Before embrac­ing calls for the abo­li­tion of nuclear weapons, thought­ful Chris­tians must con­front two uncom­fort­able facts. First, we live in a fall­en world in which the threats we face are chang­ing, and arguably grow­ing. Sec­ond, the enve­lope of peace and secu­ri­ty in which free soci­eties have thrived for the past eight decades is not self-sustaining—one need only view the recent decline of democ­ra­cies and rise of author­i­tar­i­an threats from Rus­sia and Chi­na. One can detest nuclear weapons and still see their strate­gic val­ue.” The authors are, respec­tive­ly, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Duke, a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy at UT Austin, and a senior fel­low at a think­tank.
  3. Peer Review (Rod­ney Brooks, per­son­al blog): “I came to real­ize that the editor’s job was real, and it required me to deeply under­stand the top­ic of the paper, and the bias­es of the review­ers, and not to treat the ref­er­ees as hav­ing the right to deter­mine the fate of the paper them­selves. As an edi­tor I had to add judge­ment to the process at many steps along the way, and to strive for the process to improve the papers, but also to let in ideas that were new.” The author is a pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of robot­ics at MIT.
  4. JK Rowl­ing Writes about Her Rea­sons for Speak­ing out on Sex and Gen­der Issues (JK Rowl­ing, per­son­al blog): “…I refuse to bow down to a move­ment that I believe is doing demon­stra­ble harm in seek­ing to erode ‘woman’ as a polit­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal class and offer­ing cov­er to preda­tors like few before it.”
  5. More on the NY Times tan­gle last week and what it reveals about our soci­ety
    • Amer­i­ca is chang­ing, and so is the media (Ezra Klein, Vox): “The news media likes to pre­tend that it sim­ply holds up a mir­ror to Amer­i­ca as it is. We don’t want to be seen as actors craft­ing the polit­i­cal debate, agents who make deci­sions that shape the bound­aries of the nation­al dis­course. We are, of course. We always have been.”
    • The Still-Vital Case for Lib­er­al­ism in a Rad­i­cal Age (Jonathan Chait, NY Mag­a­zine): “…it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing author­i­tar­i­an racism is far more impor­tant to the con­clu­sion that left-wing illib­er­al­ism is com­plete­ly unim­por­tant. One can oppose dif­fer­ent evils, even those evils aligned against each oth­er, with­out assign­ing them equal weight.”
    • Why every­one hates the main­stream media (Andrew Pot­ter, Pol­i­cy for Pan­demics): “It’s not a coin­ci­dence that lawyers, jour­nal­ists, and politi­cians are rou­tine­ly ranked as the most dis­liked pro­fes­sions in the world. It’s because the law is not about jus­tice, pol­i­tics is not about democ­ra­cy, and the news is not about infor­ma­tion. But in each case, that is what emerges, by har­ness­ing the sta­tus-con­scious com­pet­i­tive natures of the par­tic­i­pants.” The author is a for­mer jour­nal­ist and edi­tor.
  6. Thoughts on race and racism:
    • George Floyd and Me (Shai Linn, Gospel Coali­tion): “Though I’m deeply griev­ed, I am not with­out hope. Per­son­al­ly, I have lit­tle con­fi­dence in our gov­ern­ment or pol­i­cy­mak­ers to change the sys­temic fac­tors that con­tributed to the George Floyd sit­u­a­tion. But my hope isn’t in the gov­ern­ment. My hope is in the Lord.”
    • Amer­i­can Racism: We’ve Got So Very Far to Go (David French, The Dis­patch): “If polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect pro­gres­sives are often guilty of over-racial­iz­ing Amer­i­can pub­lic dis­course, and they are, polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect con­ser­v­a­tives com­mit the oppo­site sin—and they fil­ter out or angri­ly reject all the infor­ma­tion that con­tra­dicts their the­sis.”
    • This moment cries out for us to con­front race in Amer­i­ca (Con­doleez­za Rice, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Still, we sim­ply must acknowl­edge that soci­ety is not col­or-blind and prob­a­bly nev­er will be. Progress comes when peo­ple treat one anoth­er with respect, as if we were col­or-blind. Unless and until we are hon­est that race is still an anchor around our country’s neck, that shad­ow will nev­er be lift­ed. Our coun­try has a birth defect: Africans and Euro­peans came to this coun­try togeth­er — but one group was in chains.” She is, of course, a fel­low believ­er and also a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who will soon be the direc­tor of the Hoover Insti­tu­tion. 
    • Our Present Moment: Why Is It So Hard? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “I’m think­ing more broad­ly about why race in this coun­try is so dif­fi­cult, and in par­tic­u­lar dif­fi­cult even between peo­ple of good will, between peo­ple in your church of a dif­fer­ent col­or. I’m think­ing about peo­ple who agree on so many oth­er things. And you sing the same songs and you real­ly love Jesus togeth­er. And you read the same Bible, and you real­ly are togeth­er for the gospel. So why is it so divi­sive?” Some real­ly good thoughts in here.
  7. On the protests
    • The protests start­ed out look­ing like 1968. They turned into 1964. (Omar Wasow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For a grow­ing inter­na­tion­al move­ment try­ing to draw atten­tion to the long his­to­ry of racist and bru­tal polic­ing, non­vi­o­lence in the face of police repres­sion is an exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult strat­e­gy to sus­tain. Evi­dence from the 1960s, how­ev­er — and per­haps this month, too — sug­gests using such tac­tics to gen­er­ate media cov­er­age of a press­ing social prob­lem can be a pow­er­ful tool for build­ing a coali­tion for social change.”
    • We often accuse the right of dis­tort­ing sci­ence. But the left changed the coro­n­avirus nar­ra­tive overnight (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, The Guardian): “Two weeks ago we shamed peo­ple for being in the street; today we shame them for not being in the street.”
    • Trib­al­ism Comes for Pan­dem­ic Sci­ence (Yuval Levin, The New Atlantis): “These pub­lic health pro­fes­sion­als are sim­ply admit­ting that their views on the health risks of large gath­er­ings depend on the polit­i­cal valence of those gath­er­ings. Rather than com­part­men­tal­ize their pro­fes­sion­al judg­ment from their polit­i­cal pri­or­i­ties — explain­ing the risks of large protests regard­less of their polit­i­cal con­tent and then sep­a­rate­ly and in a dif­fer­ent con­text express­ing what­ev­er views they might have about that con­tent — they open­ly deny not only the pos­si­bil­i­ty but even the desir­abil­i­ty of detached pro­fes­sion­al advice. This kind of atti­tude inevitably makes it much hard­er for the pub­lic to assess sci­en­tif­ic claims about the pan­dem­ic through any­thing oth­er than a polit­i­cal lens.”
    • The Grow­ing CHAZm in Seat­tle (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It took activists less than 24 hours to dis­cov­er that even their make-believe Duchy of Grand Fen­woke relies on the basic build­ing blocks of any poli­ty. If Seattle’s supine and sausage-spined polit­i­cal lead­er­ship allows this exper­i­ment to con­tin­ue, pret­ty soon you can expect the emer­gence of cur­ren­cy, tax­es, even some kind of char­ter or con­sti­tu­tion. It wouldn’t shock me if they end­ed up cre­at­ing rudi­men­ta­ry courts or even a jail.” Gold­berg is an expert at the mean­der­ing rant. 
    • Anar­chy In Seat­tle (Christo­pher Rufo, City Jour­nal): “The Capi­tol Hill Autonomous Zone has set a dan­ger­ous prece­dent: armed left-wing activists have assert­ed their dom­i­nance of the streets and estab­lished an alter­na­tive polit­i­cal author­i­ty over a large sec­tion of a neigh­bor­hood. They have claimed de fac­to police pow­er over thou­sands of res­i­dents and dozens of businesses—completely out­side of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process. In a mat­ter of days, Antifa-affil­i­at­ed para­mil­i­taries have cre­at­ed a hard­ened bor­der, estab­lished a rudi­men­ta­ry form of gov­ern­ment based on prin­ci­ples of inter­sec­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and forcibly removed unfriend­ly media from the ter­ri­to­ry.”
    • A Dark Cloud For Democ­ra­cy (Carl True­man, First Things): “…this does not entire­ly explain why Min­neapo­lis and not Hong Kong has grabbed the imag­i­na­tion of British youth. After all, Hong Kong is a much more recent part of the British nar­ra­tive; one can watch the dis­man­tling of Hong Kong’s con­sti­tu­tion online and on the tele­vi­sion; and an extreme­ly good case can be made that the British gov­ern­ment is more respon­si­ble for that mess and its poten­tial ame­lio­ra­tion than for the chaos in the Min­neapo­lis police depart­ment. After all, the British can actu­al­ly do some­thing about it—as Boris Johnson’s pledge on immi­gra­tion to the U.K. from Hong Kong indi­cates. So why Min­neapo­lis, not Hong Kong?”
    • If we want bet­ter polic­ing, we’re going to have to spend more, not less (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Reform is thus more like­ly to stick if we co-opt the unions rather than try­ing to break them. Instead of ‘defund the police,’ what if we offloaded the non­ju­di­cial parts of their work, like deal­ing with the home­less and the men­tal­ly ill, to social work­ers, and then ‘stuffed their mouths with gold’ to reform the polic­ing part? We could offer a sig­nif­i­cant salary boost in exchange for accept­ing stricter stan­dards and over­sight, which wouldn’t just ease the polit­i­cal obsta­cles, but pos­si­bly attract high­er-qual­i­ty can­di­dates to the police force.”
    • Most Amer­i­cans Want Police Reform But Don’t Back ‘Defund The Police’ (Ariel Edwards-Levy and Kevin Robil­lard, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “A near-uni­ver­sal major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans sup­port at least some changes to polic­ing in the Unit­ed States fol­low­ing the death of George Floyd in the cus­tody of Min­neapo­lis police, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds. There is major­i­ty sup­port for pro­pos­als cir­cu­lat­ing in Con­gress to ban choke­holds and make it eas­i­er to track and charge offi­cers accused of mis­con­duct. But the idea of ‘defund­ing the police’ has lit­tle sup­port from the pub­lic.”
    • Police Bru­tal­i­ty: The Fer­gu­son Effect (Robert Ver­bruggen, Nation­al Review): “There’s a temp­ta­tion in some quar­ters to think this issue is like gay mar­riage or mar­i­jua­na legal­iza­tion, where there’s a turn­ing point in pub­lic opin­ion and a rapid shift in pol­i­cy and then every­one won­ders what the big deal ever was. See, for exam­ple, Tim Alberta’s piece in Politi­co today, which bizarrely claims we may be see­ing the ‘last stand’ of law-and-order Repub­li­cans and draws those two par­al­lels explic­it­ly. But crime isn’t like that. When the streets become unsafe, pub­lic opin­ion shifts back in favor of the folks who stand between the inno­cents and the bad guys.”

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 The Prob­lem with Dull Knives: What’s the Defense Depart­ment got to do with Code for Amer­i­ca? (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Medi­um): “I have a dis­tinct mem­o­ry of being a kid in the kitchen with my mom, awk­ward­ly and prob­a­bly dan­ger­ous­ly wield­ing a knife, try­ing to cut some tough veg­etable, and defend­ing my actions by say­ing the knife was dull any­way. My mom stopped me and said firm­ly, ‘Jen­ny, a dull knife is much more dan­ger­ous than a sharp knife. You’re strug­gling and using much more force than you should, and that knife is going to end up God Knows Where.’ She was right, of course…. But hav­ing poor tools [for the mil­i­tary] doesn’t make us fight less; it makes us fight bad­ly.” (some empha­sis in the orig­i­nal removed). High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. First shared in vol­ume 155.

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 238

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Nuclear Fam­i­ly Was a Mis­take (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you want to sum­ma­rize the changes in fam­i­ly struc­ture over the past cen­tu­ry, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for indi­vid­u­als and more unsta­ble for fam­i­lies. We’ve made life bet­ter for adults but worse for chil­dren. We’ve moved from big, inter­con­nect­ed, and extend­ed fam­i­lies, which helped pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple in soci­ety from the shocks of life, to small­er, detached nuclear fam­i­lies (a mar­ried cou­ple and their chil­dren), which give the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in soci­ety room to max­i­mize their tal­ents and expand their options. The shift from big­ger and inter­con­nect­ed extend­ed fam­i­lies to small­er and detached nuclear fam­i­lies ulti­mate­ly led to a famil­ial sys­tem that lib­er­ates the rich and rav­ages the work­ing-class and the poor.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Will Some­body Please Hate My Ene­mies for Me? (David French, The Dis­patch): “Here’s the end result—millions of Chris­tians have not just decid­ed to hire a hater to defend them from haters and to hire a liar to defend them from liars, they active­ly ignore, ratio­nal­ize, min­i­mize, or deny Trump’s sins.”
    • Not quite in response, but kin­da relat­ed: Under­stand­ing Why Reli­gious Con­ser­v­a­tives Would Vote for Trump (Andrew Walk­er, Nation­al Review): “In my expe­ri­ence, huge num­bers of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives are not proud about vot­ing for Trump. They don’t need any more hot takes denounc­ing them as irre­deemable hyp­ocrites. Their con­sciences bear a dis­com­fort gov­erned by their love for Amer­i­ca and the rep­u­ta­tion of their faith. But if these reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives have to choose between the duel­ing dump­ster fires of either Trump or a pos­si­ble Bernie Sanders pres­i­den­cy, they will vote over­whelm­ing­ly for Trump. And any­one who mis­un­der­stands this will con­tin­ue pro­ject­ing onto reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives the usu­al tired bro­mides that refuse to reck­on with a com­pli­cat­ed sit­u­a­tion.”
    • Def­i­nite­ly in response to both arti­cles: Evan­gel­i­cals Still Ago­niz­ing Over Trump (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “It’s not sexy to say it, but I don’t hate peo­ple who vote for Trump, I don’t hate peo­ple who vote against Trump, I don’t hate peo­ple who vote for Sanders, or any­body. I don’t believe we are fac­ing a Twi­light Of The Gods show­down between Good and Evil. I believe we are fac­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly vivid, emo­tion­al­ly charged ver­sion of the usu­al choice between deeply flawed can­di­dates. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t get worked up into spit­ing the Oth­er, because if I put myself in their shoes, I can see why they would vote as they do, even if I think they’re wrong. Is this luke­warm­ness? OK, it’s luke­warm­ness. But pol­i­tics are not my god, so I don’t care.” 
  3. Is Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry Com­pat­i­ble with Chris­t­ian Faith? (Ger­ald McDer­mott, Juicy Ecu­menism): “Slav­ery and Jim Crow were evil and sys­temic. Racism is sin. But Chris­tians must not allow their hatred for the sin of racism to so cloud their vision that they put their faith in a phi­los­o­phy that has become a new reli­gion for its devotees—a reli­gion that in sig­nif­i­cant ways con­flicts with his­toric Chris­t­ian faith.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of divin­i­ty at Bee­son.
  4. Gen­er­a­tion Z and Reli­gion: What New Data Show (Melis­sa Deck­man, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “…it appears that the rate of younger Amer­i­cans depart­ing from orga­nized reli­gion is hold­ing steady… As Amer­i­ca heads ever more quick­ly into becom­ing a minor­i­ty major­i­ty nation with respect to race/ethnicity, with White Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca becom­ing a less dom­i­nant pres­ence in soci­ety, schol­ars should pay more atten­tion to how minor­i­ty groups are start­ing to shift their reli­gious behav­ior. My data sug­gest that these groups are look­ing very dif­fer­ent from coun­ter­parts in old­er gen­er­a­tions.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Wash­ing­ton Col­lege. 
    • Is the rise of the nones slow­ing? Schol­ars say maybe (Yonat Shim­ron, Reli­gion News): “There are a cou­ple of pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for the slow­ing of reli­gious decline: The country’s grow­ing racial diver­si­ty…. The cul­ture war sort­ing is most­ly over…. A chang­ing social desir­abil­i­ty bias”
    • The Decline of Reli­gion May Be Slow­ing (Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “This bomb­shell find­ing sent us run­ning for oth­er datasets. Like all good sci­en­tists, we trust, but ver­i­fy. In this post, we run through evi­dence from the Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey, 2018 Coop­er­a­tive Con­gres­sion­al Elec­tion Study (a RIP favorite), and the recent release of the Vot­er Study Group pan­el. The take­away is that the find­ing is val­i­dat­ed – the rate dri­ving up the reli­gious nones has appeared to be slow­ing to a crawl.”
    • Rea­sons to be Cau­tious About a Gen Z “Reli­gious Rebound” (Joseph O. Bak­er, Reli­gion In Pub­lic): “…if we look at reli­gious salience, Gen Z is less like­ly to say they are ‘not reli­gious’ (25.3%) com­pared to Mil­len­ni­als (28.4%), but Gen Z is also less like­ly to say they are ‘very reli­gious’ (7.8%) com­pared to Mil­len­ni­als (10.2%). So, if any­thing, Gen Z is more ‘meh’ about reli­gion.”
  5. What Can We Learn from the #MeToo Moments in Gen­e­sis? (Kevin DeY­oung, Gospel Coali­tion): “The first book of the Bible is a pic­ture of sin run amuck. Of course, we also find in Gen­e­sis a dis­play of God’s cre­ative pow­er, his plan of redemp­tion, and his sov­er­eign mer­cy in bless­ing his unde­serv­ing peo­ple. But even amid this won­der­ful good news, we see plen­ty of exam­ples of the cor­rupt­ing effects of sin from Gen­e­sis 3 through the end of the book. In par­tic­u­lar, Gen­e­sis is replete with exam­ples of sex­u­al sin.”
  6. Why Did­n’t Ancient Rome have Dun­geons and Drag­ons? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Inno­va­tion doesn’t hap­pen very often. How many peo­ple have ever invent­ed a new way of doing any­thing? If sta­sis is the norm, then we should expect that many great ideas are rou­tine­ly over­looked. For an econ­o­mist this is an uncom­fort­able thought because we tend to think that prof­it oppor­tu­ni­ties are quick­ly exploit­ed (no $500 bills on the ground). But while that is cer­tain­ly true for choic­es with­in con­straints it may not be true for choic­es that change con­straints.”
  7. No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air (Ed Reg­is, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “accounts of lift exist on two sep­a­rate lev­els of abstrac­tion: the tech­ni­cal and the non­tech­ni­cal. They are com­ple­men­tary rather than con­tra­dic­to­ry, but they dif­fer in their aims. One exists as a strict­ly math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­ry, a realm in which the analy­sis medi­um con­sists of equa­tions, sym­bols, com­put­er sim­u­la­tions and num­bers. There is lit­tle, if any, seri­ous dis­agree­ment as to what the appro­pri­ate equa­tions or their solu­tions are…. But by them­selves, equa­tions are not expla­na­tions, and nei­ther are their solu­tions.” I had low expec­ta­tions of this arti­cle, but it is pret­ty 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 The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67) 

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.