Tag: global christianity

TGFI Volume 531: Christianity improves longevity, plus some smart people who believe

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. More Than a Magic Pill (Kathryn Butler, Christianity Today): “Church attendance reduces all-cause mortality by nearly 30 percent over a 15-year period and protects woman against suicide by 400 percent. Weekly churchgoing in women over 40 is as protective against death as annual mammograms, McLaughlin writes. Those attending services more than weekly at age 20 have ‘a roughly seven-year greater life expectancy than their nonchurchgoing peers.’ Churchgoing protects against alcohol, smoking, and drug abuse and decreases the odds of depression by one-third.” 
    • I been sayin’ it. Preach!
  2. Alvin Plantinga, God’s Philosopher (Daniel Silliman, Christianity Today): “In the 1950s there was not a single published defense of religious belief by a prominent philosopher,” said philosopher Kelly James Clark, one of Plantinga’s students. “By the 1990s there were literally hundreds of books and articles, from Yale to UCLA and from Oxford to Heidelberg, defending and developing the spiritual dimension. The difference between 1950 and 1990 is, quite simply, Alvin Plantinga.”
  3. The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians (Cremieux, Substack): “It’s probably surprising to hear that 20% of the post-World War II Prime Ministers of Japan before the newly-elected Sanae Takaichi have been Christian. Out of those 35 Prime Ministers since 1945, Shigeru Yoshida and Tarō Asō were Catholic, and Tetsu Katayama, Ichirō Hatoyama, Masayoshi Ōhira, Shigeru Ishiba, and Yukio Hatoyama were various flavors of Protestant. How this happens in a country that’s less than 1% Christian and in which there’s significant anti-Christian discrimination is perplexing, but I think it makes sense given how today’s Japanese Christians came to be.” 
    • Fascinating reading. The role of the samurai was very unexpected to me!
  4. How Two Times Reporters Cover Christianity in a Polarized America (Patrick Healy, Elizabeth Dias & Ruth Graham, New York Times): “I think a lot about which details to include in a story, and how I’m describing people and scenes. Part of fairness is not taking cheap shots by subtly depicting one side as backward or unsophisticated, for example. I also try to bring people into as many houses of worship as possible. And I would define that expansively, from traditional church services to prayer meetings to worship services in the Trump White House.” 
    • Unlocked. A really well-done interview. I have generally found Graham and Dias to be fair and insightful. Most of the stories involving the NYT being tone-deaf to religion have come about when journalists who don’t cover the religion beat try to drag religion into their story without fully understanding what they’re trying to describe.
  5. It Used to Be ‘Get Married.’ Now It’s ‘Stay Single.’ (Freya India, The Free Press): “I keep hearing about how there’s too much pressure to settle down. Apparently everyone wants to know when you’re getting married, when you’re having kids.… My whole life I’ve only ever felt the opposite, an overwhelming pressure to be single. In the secular liberal world I used to think there were no expectations, no pressure. There is, though: The pressure today is to avoid anything that might stick, to run through life without getting snagged on any responsibilities, without getting tethered to someone else too early.… We don’t scrutinize the 25-year-old who is still single but the one who settles down. In fact, this feels like the only life decision left to disapprove of, the only one acceptable to judge. Wanting to commit is the one desire that is discouraged, treated with suspicion, the only thing in the modern world we are ever told to delay.” 
    • Related: Senior Scaries: Treating dating like the job market (Erin Ye, Stanford Daily): “The last time I was on the phone with my mom, she told me that it was my own fault I didn’t have a boyfriend. ‘You need to start treating dating like it’s the job market: you’re not applying to positions, you’re not interviewing, you’re not even doing things that you can add to your résumé,’ she said. ‘You just need to get out there. Think of it like getting an internship. Don’t worry about the return offer just yet!’ ”
  6. They Led at Saddleback Church. ICE Said They Were Safe. (Andy Olsen, Christianity Today): “The growing abolition of discretion, perhaps more than any other aspect of the administration’s immigration suppression, will cause the deepest pain for many families that previously had little to fear. Individuals within the US immigration edifice have long had some authority to exercise compassion in situations where, in their judgment, the cost to society of a person’s removal might be higher than the cost of nonremoval. One could view such discretion, as the Trump administration does, as a weakness. Or one could see discretion as the cardinal quality that separates a human justice system from a cold enforcement machine with all the sensibility of a red-light camera.” 
    • A moving story, told with all the messy details.
  7. Trump says Christians are being persecuted in Nigeria. The reality is more complicated (Chinedu Asadu, AP News): “Nigeria’s population of 220 million is split almost evenly between Christians, who live predominantly in the south, and Muslims, mostly in the north — where attacks have long been concentrated and where levels of illiteracy, poverty and hunger are among the country’s highest. Nationwide, Muslims constitute a slight majority. Experts and data from two nonpartisan sources — the U.S.-basedt and Council on Foreign Relations — show Christians are often targets in a small percentage of overall attacks that appear to be motivated by religion, in some northern states. But the numbers and analysts also indicate that across the north, most victims of overall violence are Muslims.” 
    • I was skeptical of the headline, but the article makes a good case for it. Having said that, the author hasn’t shown that there isn’t a problem of religious persecution in Nigeria; the author has only shown that there is also a problem of rampant lawlessness.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • 6–7 in the Bible (Kristy Etheridge, Christianity Today): “News outlets from The New York Times to The Indian Express have covered the global phenomenon that delights children, puzzles grownups, and leaves school teachers 67 percent sure they should retire early.… a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, created an entire outreach event around the infamous numbers. Jonathan White is a pastor and director of children’s programming at Mecklenburg Community Church. When he determined that the 6–7 trend wasn’t harmful and wasn’t going away, he wrote it into the church’s November family night.”
  • Scholars Now Believe Number Of The Beast Is Actually 67 (Babylon Bee)
  • The Batman effect: The mere sight of the ‘superhero’ can make us more altruistic (Gaby Clark, Phys.org): “In the experimental condition, another experimenter dressed as Batman entered the scene from another door of the train. Faced with this unexpected encounter, passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seats: 67.21% of passengers offered their seats in the presence of Batman, or more than two out of three, compared to 37.66% in the control experiment, or just over one out of three.” 
    • Recommended by an alumnus.
  • Millions Convert To Christianity After Theologians Confirm There Is No Microsoft Teams In Heaven (Babylon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI Volume 529: French revival, gender differences, bogus sociology

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 quiet surge of France’s evangelicals (ENTR, YouTube): twelve minutes. Highly recommended, brought to my attention by a student. The first half is one of the better (albeit inadvertent) apologias for low-church Protestantism you’ll run across.
  2. Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies (Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, Substack): “…overall tolerance for opposing views is low among both male and female students — but the males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics.… In fact, men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be ‘perfectly tolerant’ of opposing views, meaning they would definitely allow any campus speaker.” 
    • One of the embedded charts is actually stunning. And this sentence: “Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.”
  3. Debunking “When Prophecy Fails” (Thomas Kelly, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences) : “In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.” 
    • The author has a PhD in political science from Cal and now works at a thinktank in biosecurity. The excerpt is from the abstract.
    • I am overwhelmed by how absolutely insane this is and that the lies have endured for seven decades. SEVEN DECADES. I care because this study is sometimes used by skeptics to argue against Christianity. As the author says: “When Prophecy Fails spread its influence across psychology, sociology, New Testament studies, and religious studies. Ironically, some [skeptical] New Testament scholars whose raison d’être and specialization is piecing together events from thousands of years ago, eagerly embraced a false narrative that was trivial to fact check.”
  4. The Editor Got a Letter From ‘Dr. B.S.’ So Did a Lot of Other Editors. (Gina Kolata, New York Times): “Letters to the editor from writers using chatbots are flooding the world’s scientific journals, according to new research and journal editors.… There’s a reason authors might turn to A.I., Dr. Rubin noted in an interview. Letters to the editor published in scientific journals are listed in databases that also list journal articles, and Dr. Rubin said that ‘they count as much as an article. For doing a very small amount of work, someone can get an article in The New England Journal of Medicine on their C.V.,’ he said. ‘The incentive to cheat is high,’ he added.” 
    • The opening anecdote is pretty funny.
  5. Some stuff on antisemitism and Zionism: 
    • Why Antisemitism Is ‘Moral Pornography’ (Mary Eberstadt, The Free Press): “Online antisemitism is the new pornography. It is moral pornography. And pornography it is—because like pornography, internet antisemitism is mostly engaged in secretly; like pornography, it delivers illicit thrills to degraded users; and like pornography, its consumption embarrasses users when it comes to light, as is seen whenever people are exposed in public for spewing Jew-hatred online. Christians who were in the forefront of understanding that pornography causes harm should be in the forefront of opposing the moral pornography of antisemitism.” 
      • This is an adaptation of a speech given by a Catholic at a Catholic event, which explains some of the language.
    • Tucker Carlson Is Wrong About Christian Zionism (Samuel Goldman, The Free Press): “Beginning in the 1980s, a whole genre of books and articles contended that American Christians’ enthusiasm for Israel was based on an ‘end-times’ scenario derived from the Victorian theologian John Nelson Darby, and mainstreamed by Scofield in the early 20th century.… [In reality, the] history of Christian Zionism in America is far longer and more various than that.”
  6. China’s Christians Are America’s Allies (Elisa Zhai Autry, Substack): “Since its inception, the Communist Party has viewed Christianity as a destabilizing force that undermines party authority and opens doors to foreign interference. Yet, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, every effort to stamp it out has failed. Christianity has flourished amid wars, famine, political purges, the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and modern censorship. Today, Chinese Christians are estimated to number as high as 100 million. The party frames Christianity as ‘foreign,’ but history disputes that.… Christians were pillars of China’s modernization long before the party claimed credit. Their contribution was indigenous, not foreign—rooted deeply in Chinese traditions and driven by Chinese believers.” 
    • This is the Substack of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
  7. Some stuff on contemporary American politics, presented in a nonpartisan manner. I am not endorsing the perspectives of the authors, I am merely saying that I found their arguments intriguing: 
    • 16 takeaways from Democrats’ big night (Jerusalem Demsas, Jordan Weissmann, Lakshya Jain , & Kelsey Piper, The Argument): “Anti-Trumpism is a really, really powerful force in American politics. especially in non-presidential elections. In Virginia and New Jersey, the Republican nominees were tied to a very, very unpopular president — and sometimes by choice. Yes, 2026 is going to have higher turnout than 2025 did, but it won’t be on the level of 2024, and from the evidence we have, the drop-off is likely to be disproportionately Republican.”
    • The cosmopolitan conservative (Janan Ganesh, Financial Times): “There is such a thing as a cosmopolitan conservative. When I want to discuss Dubai — and when do I not? — I have to turn to apolitical or right-leaning acquaintances.….  Often, it is fear of causing offence that stops liberal-minded people engaging with vast tracts of the world. And so cultural sensitivity turns into its own kind of parochialism.” 
      • A fascinating (and very brief) article.
    • Inside the DSA’s Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party (Olivia Reingold, The Free Press): “The Free Press reviewed thousands of pages of internal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) documents, which show that the organization’s leaders view Mamdani as a tool in their agenda to abolish prisons and borders, and ultimately end in [sic] what they call the ‘barbaric order of capitalism.’ The DSA, founded in 1982, is a political body dedicated to the doctrine of democratic socialism, which is a variety of socialism that simply specifies how it would like revolution to occur: peacefully, through the subversion of democracy. Mamdani, a dues-paying DSA member since 2017, is the tip of that spear.”
    • The Tocqueville Paradox (Rob Henderson, Substack): “I am 35, one year older than Mamdani, and I can tell you that Millennials and Gen Zers have not really been taught about the failures of socialism. I will point out, with a bit of hyperbole, that in US high schools we get 155 hours on Hitler, three minutes on Stalin, zero on Mao and zero on Pol Pot. And socialism is an idea that sounds good on face value. It promises to take from the rich and give to the poor. That means not only ‘free stuff’ for everyone, but also a sense of fairness.”
    • Progressives Can’t Bear Pregnancy (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “There’s a sense on the left that the act of giving birth is an insane, traumatic thing to do, an infringement on all women’s bodily autonomy.… My most progressive friends talk in hushed tones about wanting kids, as if confessing a vice. One of them, after a few glasses of wine, told me she dreams of being a stay-at-home mother. She couldn’t tell her boyfriend. She couldn’t even tell her closest friend. To say it aloud would feel like a betrayal of everything she is supposed to believe. Extreme progressives turn on women who express entirely ordinary wishes about family.”

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 527: beyond adolescent atheism, counterproductive peer review, and Girls Gone Bible

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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 501: college students, colleges, and youth in general



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.

I’ve had a scattered week, so a lil’ less content than usual here. Enjoy!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Secular College Students Find Ordinary Christianity Persuasive (Dylan Musser, The Gospel Coalition): “I serve as a campus minister at one of the most prestigious and secular universities in the South, and I’ve noticed that many students have become disenchanted with secularism.… The visible beauty of ordinary Christian living is a persuasive apologetic for today’s students. It may encourage even skeptical students to reconsider a faith they’ve dismissed.” 
    • The author does campus ministry at Vanderbilt.
  2. How Gen Z Became the Most Gullible Generation (Catherine Kim, Politico): “It’s a startling reality about Gen Z, backed up by multiple studies and what we can all see for ourselves: The most online generation is also the worst at discerning fact from fiction on the internet.”
  3. The Road to Campus Serfdom (John O. McGinnis, Law & Liberty): “Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.” 
    • The author is a law professor at Northwestern.
  4. The Christian and Jewish Israelis Protecting West Bank Palestinians (Jill Nelson, Christianity Today): “Jonathan Pex is concerned about his Palestinian Bedouin neighbors in the West Bank’s South Hebron Hills. They’re sheepherders who live in an expansive cave outfitted with solar electricity, ten minutes from Pex’s home. The region has seen an uptick in Israeli settler violence against Palestinians since the October 2023 Hamas attacks, and the Palestinian family is afraid they may be next on the settlers’ hit list, as they’ve had several disputes with their neighbors over grazing rights.… ‘I’m going to do whatever I can to support them,’ Pex said. ‘Jesus would have really had a heart for these people.’” 
    • A fascinating story.
  5. Make Christianity cool again: Why Gen Z is flocking to church (Helen Coffey, The Independent): “Interestingly, a major piece of research on teenage wellbeing conducted by scientists at the University of Oxford and Swansea University last year found that just three elements strongly correlated with better adolescent mental health: getting enough sleep, regular exercise and – wait for it – attending religious services.” 
    • A British perspective on religious renewal among young people.

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 499: OCD, Morality, and Tariffs



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 488

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. Speculation: Physical Pain Might Not Be Very Bad? (Lyman Stone, Substack): “But it seems like chronic pain is not as strongly associated with suicide as the (biased) literature suggests, that high pain-tolerance is modestly associated with suicide, and that pharmacological interventions reducing pain don’t decrease and actually increase suicide. So it really seems like pain doesn’t cause suicide, and it almost seems like lack of pain causes suicide.” 
    • Stone with another banger. Highly recommended. 
    • I would like to go on record as saying I am not a fan of pain. Indeed, since Revelation 21:4 informs us that there will be no pain in heaven I do not think I am going too far in being unenthused about pain generally: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That being said, I like Stone’s argument a lot.
  2. The Courage To Commit (Freya India, Substack): “It’s strange because my generation talks so much about empowerment, agency, independence, and fear of losing ourselves, yet we will willingly offer ourselves up to the algorithm. We will surrender our souls to the machine without a second thought…but are terrified to surrender anything in a human relationship. Partly because we are young, yes, but also because that’s the message we hear everywhere: be careful not to commit to any one thing, never narrow your options, don’t allow yourself to be vulnerable. It’s funny because I was talking to a friend recently about how if you get engaged young now, or do anything that signals actual commitment, that’s when family and friends worry for you. It’s like some parents are protective only when it comes to commitment. They worry about you closing down options.” 
    • The post is paywalled past a point, but even the part that is freely available is quite stimulating.
  3. Last Boys at the Beginning of History (Mana Afsari, The Point Magazine): “In early 2017, I asked the ‘secular humanist chaplain’ at the University of Southern California, where I studied, how I could set myself up for a good life in college and beyond. How could I be happy? How could I find a vocation or a calling? How could I be a good person? The chaplain told me to look around and identify the people who had lives I wanted to live, and ask myself what their values were. I quickly realized those moral exemplars were not in the secular student group I’d joined, which had become increasingly morally vacant, pseudo-rationalist and eccentric, drawn to effective altruism and convinced by Sam Harris that murder was merely a social construct. To say nothing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embracing polyamory as a way to grandfather in situationships or infidelities, while being told in special seminars that monogamy was a colonial construct and should be discarded anyway. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my primary concern was having models for healthy relationships—not resisting colonialism in my dating life. I had no interest in subverting things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear family, faith, a classical education—that I’d never had or known in the first place. I wanted a serious boyfriend.” 
    • This essay describes something real and undernoticed. It covers a lot of ground, and the excerpt above isn’t really central. 
  4. The ‘Surprising Rebirth’ at Oxford: Perspectives from a Graduate Student (Carolyn Morris-Collier, Gospel Coalition): “While my nonreligious friends here in Oxford are still curious about how I make sense of Christianity’s history of colonialism or how I rationalize its creeds, they seem more intrigued by how my faith orients my life, purpose, and emotional world. This shift from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Does it work?’ reflects a broader cultural change that the church should mindfully prepare to engage.”
  5. The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Coming to an End (Marc Novicoff, The Atlantic): “…since the 1990s, America has had two sets of laws concerning underage access to pornography. In the physical world, the law generally requires young-looking customers to show ID proving they’re 18 before they can access adult materials. In the online world, the law has traditionally required, well, nothing. Under Supreme Court precedent established during the internet’s infancy, forcing websites to verify the age of their users is burdensome and ineffective, if not impossible, and thus incompatible with the First Amendment. That arrangement finally appears to be crumbling.”
  6. The Ultimate Guide to Trump’s Day 1 Executive Orders (Richard Hanania, Substack): “The White House website, at the time of this writing, lists 48 items under ‘presidential actions.’ Among these are dozens of first day executive orders.  News reports say that Trump was planning to sign around 100 of them. So while we still wait for the rest, here I’ll review the main things that the executive orders released so far do, broken down by topic. I then go on to take a big picture perspective regarding what we have seen so far means for the future of the country and what we can expect from the Trump administration going forward.” 
    • This seems like a good summary. It only covers the first orders — you’ll need to look elsewhere to find reflection on the stuff from subsequent days.
  7. Meritocracy’s Blind Spot: How America Overlooks Its Own Talent (Tom Owens, Substack): “Overwhelmingly, National Merit Scholars matriculate to large state schools where they are awarded generous scholarships. The #1 destination is the University of Alabama, which provides… not only a full ride, but free housing, an extra $4,000 per year, and also a 5th year that will allow many students to complete a master’s degree. That last one is extremely strategic on Alabama’s part, also building up the competitiveness of their graduate programs by keeping these students in the state and their programs. Bama is a smart operator here, applying the same principles to academic recruiting as they do to their football program. Also notable is their matching of pageant scholarships. One wonders exactly what they’re up to in just straightforwardly recruiting a smart, good-looking student body. This is a cunning long-term investment in their alumni base, as both brains and beauty are predictive of life success. Not to mention that the median white-collar professional can live like a king in Huntsville or the nice suburbs of Birmingham compared to a hovel in NYC or SF, even if it means giving up any hope of being elite.” 
    • A fascinating essay. I don’t know what percentage of this article I believe, but it is not 0%. It’s not 100%, but it’s definitely not 0%. Worth a ponder.

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 468



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 468, which is written as 3333 in base 5. I find that pretty cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Nearly Half of the World’s Migrants Are Christian (Chloë-Arizona Fodor, Christianity Today): “While Christians make up about 30 percent of the world’s population, the world’s migrants are 47 percent Christian, according to the latest data collected in 2020.… US migrants are much more likely to have a religious identity than the American-born population in general. The influx of religious migrants can have a significant impact on the religious composition of their destination countries. In the case of the US, ‘immigrants are kind of putting the brakes on secularization,’ Kramer said.”
  2. Meet newly crowned Miss USA Alma Cooper M.S. ’25 (Semira Arora, Stanford Daily): “Before Stanford, Cooper graduated in the top five percent of her class at West Point. Currently, she is a part of the highly selective Knight-Hennessy scholarship program, which aims to cultivate multidisciplinary leaders and offers scholars up to three years of funding for graduate studies.”
  3. A Scary Date Can Help You Find a Good Mate (Coltan Scrivner, Substack): “Female participants enjoyed the horror clip the most when watching with a male who displayed mastery, while male participants enjoyed it most in the presence of a distressed female. For males confederates whose photographs were rated less attractive, displaying mastery increased how attractive they were perceived by the female participant that watched the clip with them. In other words, women enjoyed a scary situation more when they experienced it with a man who displayed mastery of their fear, and those men were, in some cases, seen as more attractive than men who displayed indifference or distress.” 
    • The author is a Behavioral Scientist at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark and also has an appointment in the Psychology Department at Arizona State University. The “Recreational Fear Lab” — what an amazing name!
  4. New Training and Tougher Rules: How Colleges Are Trying to Tame Gaza Protests (Alan Blinder, New York Times): “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option — or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.” 
    • Related: At Michigan, Activists Take Over and Shut Down Student Government (Halina Bennet, New York Times): “But last spring, pro-Palestinian activists, running under the Shut It Down party, won control over the student government. They immediately moved to withhold funding for all activities, until the university committed to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s war in Gaza.… When campaigning for student government, the Shut It Down party did not keep its intentions a secret. Its platform ‘ran with one single point: to halt the operations of the University of Michigan Central Student Government,’ Alifa Chowdhury, the president of the party, wrote in a statement to The Times.”
  5. Gossiping Is Fun. It’s Natural. And These People Won’t Do It. (Michal Leibowitz, New York Times): “I found the lives and relationships described by the abstainers compelling. I was intrigued by their optimism, by their grace, by their commitment to judging others by their best features. Which is not to say I’ve sworn off gossip entirely. But I’ve definitely cut back. And what do you know? The less I judge people, the less I want to judge people. The less I complain, the less I want to complain. The less, maybe, that I even see things to complain about.”
  6. How your mindset could affect your response to vaccines (Taylor Kubota, Stanford News): “It’s important to remember that our body’s responses to anything – the medications we take, the foods we eat, and the stress we experience – are influenced by our mindsets as well as the objective properties of those things. And this is also true of the COVID-19 vaccine. Our mindsets about the vaccine can affect not just how we feel afterward but also our experience with side effects. And in some instances, your mindset about the vaccine’s side effects can potentially influence your immune response.” 
    • Recommended to me by a medical doctor.
  7. Can We Be a Little Less Selective With Our Moral Outrage? (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “Of all the world’s injustices, perhaps the saddest is that so many of them are simply ignored.” 
    • A depressing list of a bunch of horrible governments around the world.

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 461



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 461, a prime number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. So You’ve Decided to Vote for an Unfit Candidate (O. Alan Noble, Substack): “Come November, most voters will choose between two presidential candidates, neither of whom are fit for office, as I have previously argued. I’m not just arguing that they are sinners and therefore ‘evil’ in the sense that everyone is fallen; I’m arguing that they are specifically unjust and immoral and unfit for positions of national leadership.… There are many issues to take into account when voting for a candidate, but one of them is how your vote will form your own soul.”
  2. Articles making observations rarely heard in high-status society: 
    • New Research Finds Huge Differences Between Male and Female Brains (Leonard Sax, Psychology Today): “As you can see, there wasn’t a continuum: the female fingerprints of brain activity were quite different from the male fingerprints of resting brain activity, with no overlap. These findings strongly suggest that what’s going on in a woman’s brain at rest is significantly different from what’s going on in a man’s brain at rest.”
    • How divorce never ends (Bridget Phetasy, The Spectator): “All of this is to say something you don’t hear that often: divorce will affect your kids for the rest of their lives, well into adulthood. They will have split holidays and summers. They will have stepparents. Their kids will have step-grandparents. Whatever inheritance they would have been entitled to is often being divvied up with other spouses and their kids. More important than the money, however, is the attention they’ll never get because their parents are dating or remarrying or whatever. They will only be with one parent half of the year — if they’re lucky: we only saw my dad twice a year. They will have to choose who gets Christmas, forever. Or they will be bouncing around at holiday time with their kids, just like the old days.”
    • The Real Problem With Legal Weed (Charles Fain Lehman, New York Times Magazine): “While marijuana may not be as bad as some critics claim, the medical evidence is clear that it can do substantial harm. Marijuana is addictive — around 30 percent of users use compulsively, even as their use harms themselves and the people around them.… Marijuana does hurt a substantial portion of its consumers, often quite badly. And there is no reason to think that businesses won’t sell marijuana to those it hurts, if they’re allowed to. What the alcohol and tobacco markets show us, rather, is that addiction and profit don’t mix well.” 
      • Unlocked.
    • We deserve a more nuanced conversation about working moms (Rachel M. Cohen, Vox): “After the essay on motherhood dread was published, I heard from Sharon Sassler, a Cornell University sociologist who studies relationships and gender. She had recently published a paper on gender wage gaps in the computer science field and found that mothers in computer science actually earned more than childless women (though this ‘wage premium’ was significantly less than what fathers earned). ‘It was difficult for me to find a home for the attached article because reviewers cannot fathom that mothers might out-earn single women, though there is a growing body of evidence that [they] do,’ she wrote in her email to me. ‘It might be selection [bias] … but given that folks have found this across disciplines suggests that the motherhood penalty really needs to be reassessed.’ I was curious about Sassler’s suggestion that moms might actually earn more and that we don’t often hear that because gatekeepers ‘seem to like the narrative that women are always screwed by family.’”
  3. This Is What Elite Failure Looks Like (Oren Cass, New York Times): “Taking the majority’s preferences seriously, even when they conflict with the preferences of more sophisticated experts, is often disparaged as populism. But while elected officials and their technocratic advisers may have special insight into how the people’s goals are best achieved, only the people can determine what those goals should be and whether they are being met…. While policy initiatives so often seek to maximize efficiency and growth, move people to opportunity and redistribute from the economy’s winners to the losers, the typical American has an attachment to place, a focus on family, a commitment to making things, and would accept economic trade-offs in pursuit of those priorities.… The important feature of all these preferences is that they are inherently valid. No set of facts or statistical analyses, to which an expert might have superior access, overrides what people actually value and what trade-offs they would choose to make. Leaders might seek to shape public opinion and alter preferences — indeed, that is part of leading — but they must yield to the outcome. Their obligation is to pursue the community’s priorities, not their own.”
  4. Missionaries Have Gone to Thailand for 200 Years. Why Aren’t There More Christians? (Rebecca Brittingham, Christianity Today): “Yet the freedom that Christians enjoy in Thailand hasn’t translated into a wide acceptance of Christianity by local Thais. Despite nearly 200 years of Protestant missions, only about 1.2 percent of the population are Christians. The question of why Thailand is such difficult soil for the seed of the gospel to grow has plagued missionaries, as many have seen little fruit for the years they’ve spent learning Thai, building relationships, and trying to introduce locals to the gospel.”
  5. I Went From Foster Care to Yale. This Is What I Learned About ‘Luxury Beliefs.’ (Rob K. Henderson, New York Times on YouTube): six minute video. 
    • This is worth watching even if you’re familiar with his ‘luxury beliefs’ concept.
    • I actually had dinner in a group with Rob on Sunday night. We’re not friends — I just saw that he was in town and willing to meet up with people so I DMd him on Twitter. Nice guy.
  6. How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students (Lauren A. Wright, The Atlantic): “Conservative culture warriors argue that education at highly selective colleges is worthless, and recommend that conservative students who don’t want to be silenced or indoctrinated opt out. I disagree. Conservative students experience what higher education has long claimed to offer: exposure to different perspectives, regular practice building and defending coherent arguments, intellectual challenges that spur creativity and growth. Liberal academia has largely robbed liberal students of these rewards.” 
    • The author is a political science professor at Princeton. No paywall.
  7. Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges Into the Public Record (Tracing Woodgrains, Substack): “Wikipedia’s job is to repeat what Reliable Sources say. David Gerard’s mission is to determine what Reliable Sources are, using any arguments at his disposal that instrumentally favor sources he finds agreeable.… From there, it’s simple: Wikipedia editors dutifully etch onto the page, with a neutral point of view, that Huffington Post writers think this, PinkNews editors think that, and experienced Harvard professors who make the mistake of writing for The Free Press think nothing fit for an encyclopedia.” 
    • This is a long, wild article about internet minutiae. But if you’ve ever wondered about bias on Wikipedia, dive in.

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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.