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
- Christians Don’t Celebrate Halloween (Tyler Krug, Substack): “For years now, when someone asks me if our family celebrates Halloween, my reply has been the same: ‘No, we don’t celebrate anything on Halloween—instead, our kids dress up and extort the neighbors for candy.’ My reply brings to the surface two related concepts—one explicit, one implied. The first concept is celebration. Celebration is ‘the action of marking one’s pleasure at an important event or occasion.’ Celebration, therefore, involves knowledge, intent and endorsement.… But my Halloween retort also implies a second concept: participation. While celebration requires participation, participation does not require celebration—playing in a football game and celebrating the sport are two different things. Further, a defensive back might participate in a play resulting in a touchdown, but they won’t be celebrating in the end zone.”
- Emphasis in original.
- America Is Losing the Gray Zone War for the South China Sea (Raymond Powell, The Dispatch): “America’s continued inability to develop anything approaching a counter-gray-zone strategy is exactly why China employs it. The CCP has figured out that we really like our neat categories and rules-based order: We are either at peace or at war; an action is either legal or illegal; an asset is either military or civilian; a fact is either true or false; crises are to be avoided and de-escalated, not used as opportunities to reset the board in our favor. China’s gray-zone strategy is designed to exploit the myriad gaps and seams that define our conventional and ordered policy frameworks and deterrence models.”
- The Suspected LA Arsonist and the Rise of the Nihilistic Violent Extremists (Peter Savodnik, The Free Press): “He was defined more by what he was against—climate change, Donald Trump, people who ate meat, people who believed in God—than what he was for.… Rinderknecht told the chatbot that he ‘literally burnt the Bible that I had. It felt amazing. I felt so liberated.’ …Rinderknecht came from a religious home. His parents, Joel and Jennifer, were Baptist missionaries who lived in France.”
- We All Live in a Village Now (Yascha Mounk, Substack): “We all live in a village again.… For it turns out that the life of the city, with its attendant freedoms from neighborly supervision and collective constraint, was really just a short interlude in the history of humanity. Facilitated by social media, the village has returned with a vengeance—stripped of its warmth, and supercharged by the cruelty of the crowd.”
- Blue State Blues (River Page, The Free Press): “[The guiding principle of blue states] is paternalism for the law-abiding masses and permissiveness for society’s antisocial underbelly. In other words, living in a blue state means that the government treats you like a child and does everything in its power to make your life just a little more annoying and inconvenient—unless you start openly smoking crack on the street.… I still support labor unions. I still want Medicare for All. But I want my dignity and sanity too. I’d rather be ignored than annoyed.”
- Is terminal lucidity real? (Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, Substack): “As a neuroscientist, my first thoughts when encountering reports [of terminal lucidity] are that they can’t possibly be real. By the time patients with severe dementia actually die, their brains are catastrophically damaged. They typically show no signs of recognizing family members. They often haven’t responded meaningfully to their environment in months or years. Their brains are riddled with plaques and tangles. And they’ve lost 20–50% of their synaptic connections — so much that their brains have visibly shrunk on MRI scans.… And yet, terminal lucidity keeps being reported.… The only prospective study, which followed 100 hospice deaths, found it in 6% of cases. That’s not ubiquitous, but nor is it rare — in the US alone, it would mean around ten thousand cases per year.”
- An interesting complement to the Charles Murray article arguing for the existence of the soul I shared two weeks ago.
- The author is a research scientist at Monash University in Australia.
- The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices (Jodi Kantor, New York Times): “Badly outnumbered, seated for the long haul of life tenure, Justices Kagan and Jackson in particular are divided on the best approach to jobs in which they are more or less sentenced to fail.… Like many others across the left in the era of Donald J. Trump, the liberal justices are in a generational and philosophical struggle over whether to safeguard institutions from within or protest their decline. But unlike politicians, they are doing so in a sealed world so tradition-bound and decorous that closing an opinion ‘I dissent’ instead of ‘I respectfully dissent’ is considered a dramatic statement.”
Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen
- How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank? Meet Larry, the world’s most cited cat (Christie Wilcox, Science): “Larry Richardson appeared to be an early-career mathematician with potential. According to Google Scholar, he’d authored a dozen papers on topics ranging from complex algebras to the structure of mathematical objects, racking up more than 130 citations in 4 years. It would all be rather remarkable—if the studies weren’t complete gibberish. And Larry wasn’t a cat.… [This is not without precedent] In 1975, theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington added his Siamese to one of his single-author papers so the references to ‘we’ would make more sense. As of this year, ‘Felis Domesticus Chester Willard’ has 107 citations.”
- Note: this is from July 2024, so a bit outdated. I did check FDC Willard and his citation count has gone up to 113.
- AI Will Ruin Social Media (SMBC)
- Sexy Costumes for your Church Fall Festival (Matthew Pierce, Substack): “Probably the sexiest man in the Bible is Samson, because he was an idiot with big pecs, and all the Christian ladies are like ‘oooh, I could fix him.’ Samson is your friend from youth group who could walk into a room full of smart, pretty girls, and in five minutes he will be talking to the one crazy girl in the back. And then you are like ‘John, that girl is on probation for stabbing her last boyfriend,’ but he is like ‘bro, I got this,’ but in fact he does not have this, and he never will.”
- Your Brain’s Job (The Oatmeal)
- Document Forgery (xkcd) — I lowkey want to make one of these
- What’s Missing From Your Favorite Chocolate Bar? It May Be Chocolate. (Claire Brown, New York Times): “As the Halloween season boosts demand, some candy companies are replacing expensive cocoa butter with other fats, a swap that means their products no longer meet the U.S. regulatory definition of milk chocolate and can no longer be called that on packaging.”
- The Nightmare Is Over: Supreme Court Outlaws Candy Corn (Babylon Bee)
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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.