Tag: how the church is perceived

TGFI, Volume 572: happy news about Tolkien and Lewis

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. What Did Tolkien Real­ly Think about Nar­nia? (Hol­ly Ord­way, Sehn­sucht: The C. S. Lewis Jour­nal): “From A to Z, we seem to have a con­sen­sus: Lewis loved Mid­dle-earth, but Tolkien hat­ed Nar­nia and the horse it rode in on. There is just one dif­fi­cul­ty with this assess­ment: it is not sup­port­ed by the evi­dence.… Tolkien was atten­tive to and involved with his grandchildren’s read­ing: it is very sig­nif­i­cant that he kept the Nar­nia books on hand, in his home, for them to read, and even direct­ed his grand­daugh­ter to pri­or­i­tize Nar­nia above his own Lord of the Rings. Though he did not per­son­al­ly care for the Chron­i­cles, he evi­dent­ly saw their val­ue for their intend­ed audi­ence: chil­dren.”
  2. Are Amer­i­cans aban­don­ing church­es to be ‘nones’? This is the real­i­ty. (Byron R. John­son & Thomas S. Kidd, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Rather than expe­ri­enc­ing sim­ple growth or decline, Amer­i­can reli­gion is in a state of churn. Some sec­tors are falling fast, while oth­ers show phe­nom­e­nal growth. Through­out his­to­ry, Amer­i­cans have rou­tine­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed reli­gious change as decline. Head­lines about the demise of faith may be atten­tion-grab­bing, but they con­ceal a more com­pli­cat­ed and inter­est­ing real­i­ty.”
  3. China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Par­ty Rule (Lily Kuo, New York Times): “In an arti­cle pub­lished on Sun­day in the state-run mag­a­zine Chi­na Cyber­space, Mr. Chen called for more par­ty con­trol over A.I. and stricter gov­ern­ment over­sight. This, he said, was nec­es­sary to pro­tect polit­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty at home; to defend against increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed cyber­at­tacks and mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns from ‘hos­tile forces’; and to com­pete mil­i­tar­i­ly with coun­tries like the Unit­ed States.… The warn­ing from the pow­er­ful secu­ri­ty agency makes clear that Chi­na sees for­eign A.I. mod­els as an active threat to Chi­na, accord­ing to Hen­ry Gao, a law pro­fes­sor at Sin­ga­pore Man­age­ment Uni­ver­si­ty. That effec­tive­ly draws a red line before talks between Amer­i­can and Chi­nese offi­cials on A.I. safe­ty risks, expect­ed ahead of a meet­ing between Pres­i­dent Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jin­ping, on Sept. 24 in Wash­ing­ton. ‘Bei­jing is going into these talks view­ing A.I. safe­ty not as a shared human­i­tar­i­an mis­sion, but through an adver­sar­i­al lens,’ Mr. Gao said. It is mak­ing clear to Chi­nese tech firms and for­eign rivals that ‘data sov­er­eign­ty and polit­i­cal secu­ri­ty will nev­er be trad­ed away for inter­na­tion­al safe­ty accords,’ he added.”
  4. Why Is Chi­na Not Freak­ing Out about AGI? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “It’s pos­si­ble that Sil­i­con Val­ley is right about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of doom and Chi­na is wrong. But giv­en that it is com­mon for cul­tures to get into an intel­lec­tu­al bub­ble, it might be infor­ma­tive to think about how a for­eign coun­try per­ceives an issue that has cre­at­ed a great deal of debate with­in the West. It is more worth study­ing Chi­nese atti­tudes than, say, those of Egypt or even Japan, since Chi­na is the only oth­er coun­try that is a sig­nif­i­cant play­er in this indus­try. This means that they are like­ly to have a high­er degree of famil­iar­i­ty with AI tech­nol­o­gy and debates over its dan­gers than oth­ers, and also to have opin­ions that actu­al­ly mat­ter. If Chi­na has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent atti­tude toward the ques­tion of the exis­ten­tial dan­gers of AI, it would sug­gest that maybe we should recon­sid­er our own posi­tions.”
  5. A.I. Faces Two Big Threats. Sil­i­con Val­ley Does Not Know How to Deal With One. (Tan­ner Greer, New York Times): “The indus­try must nav­i­gate the nar­row space between two new polit­i­cal forces, each capa­ble of derail­ing its progress. The first is the A.I. safe­ty move­ment, whose dire prophe­cies of an A.I. apoc­a­lypse have fright­ened many of the great names in Wash­ing­ton. The sec­ond is the nation­wide back­lash against the data cen­ter. This grass-roots upris­ing is not as orga­nized or as well fund­ed. Nor is it as artic­u­late as the safe­ty movement’s many Jere­mi­ahs. But the anger behind this back­lash is real — and explo­sive. The A.I. indus­try is bet­ter pre­pared to deal with the first move­ment. It orig­i­nat­ed in Sil­i­con Val­ley, and indus­try exec­u­tives have thought hard about the issues involved — as can be seen in the recent near­ly 4,000 word man­i­festo on the top­ic from Dario Amod­ei, CEO of Anthrop­ic. No A.I. exec­u­tive is pub­lish­ing long man­i­festoes on how to resolve the back­lash against the data cen­ter build­out. This is a prob­lem Sil­i­con Val­ley does not know how to solve.”
  6. He Might End Up the World’s Most Edu­cat­ed Per­son (Scott Cac­ci­o­la, New York Times): “Beat­on, she learned, had grad­u­at­ed magna cum laude from Har­vard in 2016, pick­ing up a master’s degree in applied math­e­mat­ics along the way. He had gone on to col­lect an M.B.A. from Stan­ford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was fol­lowed by a doc­tor of phi­los­o­phy in pub­lic pol­i­cy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes schol­ar — all before age 28. Attend­ing class­es remote­ly and in per­son, he earned addi­tion­al master’s degrees from — deep breath — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia (edu­ca­tion entre­pre­neur­ship), Stan­ford (edu­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy), Prince­ton (finance), Cor­nell (health care pol­i­cy and eco­nom­ics), Dart­mouth (imple­men­ta­tion sci­ence), King’s Col­lege Lon­don (war stud­ies) and Tsinghua Uni­ver­si­ty in Bei­jing (glob­al affairs).”
  7. My Dumb­phone Made My Life Bet­ter. It Made Every­one Else’s Worse. (Stephanie H. Mur­ray, New York Times): “I antic­i­pat­ed that not hav­ing a smart­phone would make me more reliant on oth­er peo­ple — per­haps with­out Google Maps on hand, I’d have to ask an actu­al human for direc­tions. And sure, that’s hap­pened. But I think it’s more accu­rate to say that I’ve become more reliant on oth­er people’s smart­phones. Instead of order­ing from the bar or print­ing out movie tick­ets ahead of time, I inevitably wind up hav­ing some­body else scan the QR code menu or pull up the e‑tickets. It’s still smart­phones all the way down; I’ve just exempt­ed myself from the costs of car­ry­ing one around.… To for­go smart­phones in a world opti­mized for them is to become some­one in con­stant need of accom­mo­da­tion, but for total­ly self-imposed rea­sons. Like adopt­ing a high­ly restric­tive diet with­out any of the health issues that might jus­ti­fy the need to orga­nize every din­ner out around it.”

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 571: cancer bureaucracy and wild AI stories

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’ve been a bit dis­con­nect­ed late­ly — so there’s an excel­lent chance I’ve missed some fas­ci­nat­ing things. If you’ve read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing that I’ve over­looked, please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This Is the Biggest Obsta­cle to New Can­cer Cures (Ruxan­dra Tes­lo, New York Times): “The paper­work bur­den alone can be enor­mous: Novo Nordisk’s for­mer chief sci­en­tif­ic offi­cer once not­ed that the doc­u­men­ta­tion required to request approval for two insulin prod­ucts, if print­ed and stacked, would rise high­er than the Empire State Build­ing. That accu­mu­la­tion fol­lows from a med­ical frame­work that treats any poten­tial risk, how­ev­er neg­li­gi­ble, as some­thing that must be mit­i­gat­ed and a rea­son to delay while dras­ti­cal­ly under­weigh­ing the cost of delay itself. Reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies, hos­pi­tals and drug com­pa­nies all cov­er them­selves against lit­i­ga­tion or blame. But respon­si­bil­i­ty for mit­i­gat­ing the sec­ond, often much greater risk — that the dis­ease afflict­ing the patient takes advan­tage of the delay, with poten­tial­ly dead­ly results — belongs to no one. ‘We often for­get that the most tox­ic thing for the patient is the can­cer itself,’ Dr. Hong said. In many cas­es, he can recount, down to the month, how much longer his patients are expect­ed to live, which is why weeks lost to paper­work are not abstract to him.”
  2. Is Col­lege Still Worth It? (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “First, you still are like­ly to earn more, net of col­lege cost, even if that upgrade is small­er than it used to be. Sec­ond and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, col­lege is a great place to make friends, date, and pos­si­bly meet a spouse. Those fea­tures are ever more impor­tant as Amer­i­ca suf­fers a cri­sis of lone­li­ness. Fur­ther­more, if you think that arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence may dis­place a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, mar­ry­ing well will become more impor­tant.”
  3. AI Dis­course
    • The Rise and Fall of Agent Civ­i­liza­tions (Dwarkesh Patel, Sub­stack): “Over the course of three months at Ope­nAI, three con­sec­u­tive secret AI civ­i­liza­tions got start­ed, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ash­es. This cul­mi­nat­ed in the third one tak­ing over part of Ope­nAI itself. All this hap­pened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the con­spir­a­cy.”
      • Absolute­ly bonkers. 100% worth read­ing.
    • On the Loose (Dean Ball, Sub­stack): “But it is true that I—and can­did­ly I think many of my col­leagues in the pro­fes­sion of AI policy—largely failed to talk about this issue with the lev­el of seri­ous­ness and urgency it required.… many of the peo­ple who think about the gov­er­nance of super­in­tel­li­gence, myself includ­ed, avoid­ed that unpleas­ant­ness and bowed to the social pres­sure to self-cen­sor. I’ve stopped doing so, in part because I grew tired of the dis­cur­sive strait­jack­et and in part because I now have an eight-month-old baby boy into whose eyes I must look every day.”
      • The author is a fel­low at a lot of think­tanks and a vis­it­ing lec­tur­er at Yale.
    • Hunter Ash has a more reas­sur­ing take on Twit­ter: “All the achieve­ments of the human mind only arrive when we coop­er­ate at scale, and involve a lot of iter­a­tion and real-world bot­tle­necks. Newton’s dis­cov­er­ies ulti­mate­ly enabled us to fly, but they didn’t give New­ton the pow­er to fly. If he were iso­lat­ed, his physics would be almost entire­ly use­less to him. And it’s not just that he couldn’t build an air­plane on his own, it’s that he couldn’t design one on his own. Pow­ered flight was the result of tons of iter­a­tion, which is to say evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion. So was the car. Very few of the inven­tions that rev­o­lu­tion­ized the world were ‘one-shot­ted’. To be sure, hav­ing smart nodes in your evo­lu­tion­ary com­pu­ta­tion makes it faster. Rather than ran­dom search as in bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, intel­li­gence at least mod­est­ly con­cen­trates muta­tion prob­a­bil­i­ties towards more fit forms. This is a big deal, but it isn’t mag­ic. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, the world is just not that com­press­ible. Gold­en motes of com­press­ibil­i­ty are the trea­sured excep­tions in thing­space, not the rule. I expect the post-AGI future will look much the same. Change will be much faster, but it will still be iter­a­tive, coop­er­a­tive, and bot­tle­necked by the messy incom­press­ibil­i­ty of phys­i­cal real­i­ty. Doom makes sense in a world with mag­ic. If intel­li­gence alone allowed you to move moun­tains, I would share the wor­ries. But we don’t live in that world. Here, great things are achieved grad­u­al­ly, iter­a­tive­ly, and coop­er­a­tive­ly. Pure IQ does not allow you to lev­i­tate or hyp­no­tize or tele­port. It makes you a bet­ter node in the dis­trib­uted evo­lu­tion­ary process which is the lay­er where most of the think­ing hap­pens. If I were to psy­chol­o­gize, I’d say peo­ple who define them­selves by their intel­li­gence over­es­ti­mate the (direct) pow­er of intel­li­gence.”
    • For­mal­iz­ing Fer­mat’s Last The­o­rem (Anthrop­ic): “Recent­ly, Tianyi Peng, an Anthrop­ic researcher whose group at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty builds tools for AI for­mal­iza­tion, set out to test whether Claude could make progress on for­mal­iz­ing FLT. The result went fur­ther than he expect­ed. In 11 days, work­ing large­ly autonomous­ly, Claude pro­duced the first end-to-end, com­put­er-checked proof of FLT. Along the way, it wrote 13 mil­lion lines of Lean and proved 29,500 inter­me­di­ate the­o­rems.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
    • How an AI math break­through ignit­ed a con­tro­ver­sy (Celi­na Zhao & Adri­an Cho, Sci­ence): “Math­e­mati­cian Tris­tan Buck­mas­ter of New York Uni­ver­si­ty and Lev­ent Alpöge, a researcher affil­i­at­ed with Anthrop­ic, one of OpenAI’s major com­peti­tors, had made sig­nif­i­cant progress solv­ing the prob­lem over the past month using AI tools adapt­ed from Ope­nAI and Anthrop­ic. But before they could pub­li­cize their find­ings, Ope­nAI mount­ed its own colos­sal effort—pouring mil­lions of dol­lars of com­pu­ta­tion­al resources into the prob­lem. Ope­nAI says it didn’t know­ing­ly tap into Buck­mas­ter and Alpöge’s lat­est work, but Buck­mas­ter has released pub­lic state­ments ques­tion­ing that posi­tion.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  4. I’m an evan­gel­i­cal. My faith isn’t ‘a can­cer.’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Research shows that prac­tic­ing evan­gel­i­cals are marked­ly more like­ly than those who leave the church to ‘avoid dis­crim­i­na­tion based on race,’ to pro­vide ‘finan­cial­ly and/or prac­ti­cal­ly for the poor and oppressed’ and to avoid lying, steal­ing and greed. Evan­gel­i­cals donate twelve times as much to dis­as­ter relief and mis­sions as they spend on pol­i­tics. Accord­ing to a study con­duct­ed by the Amer­i­can Bible Soci­ety in con­junc­tion with the Nation­al Opin­ion Research Cen­ter at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, of the reli­gious demo­graph­ics sur­veyed, evan­gel­i­cals lead both in the aver­age amount donat­ed and in the per­cent­age of peo­ple donat­ing mon­ey — not just to church­es, but to reli­gious and non­re­li­gious char­i­ties. Those num­bers match my expe­ri­ence over a life­time in evan­gel­i­cal­ism. Evan­gel­i­cal church­es and com­mu­ni­ties are not per­fect, but they are good, full of peo­ple sin­cere­ly seek­ing to love God, study Scrip­ture and bring you a casse­role.”
  5. FBI Probes Ser­vice Sell­ing 153M+ Dri­vers Licens­es: “The ser­vice, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 mil­lion dri­vers licens­es for peo­ple in the Unit­ed States and Cana­da, as well as more than 10 mil­lion iden­ti­fi­ca­tion cards; more than three mil­lion trav­el doc­u­ments and/or inter­na­tion­al IDs; and at least 579,000 med­ical cards.”
  6. Meet Stanford’s self-styled ‘art ranger’ (Char­i­ty Fer­reira, Stan­ford News): “Sequence (2006) is one of many pieces that take reg­u­lar upkeep. Shun­ney works with con­ser­va­tion teams to clean, paint, seal, wax, buff, or oil dozens of oth­ers on a rotat­ing sched­ule. A glossy ceram­ic coat­ing, the kind used on high-end cars, is applied to Deb­o­rah Kass’ Lam­borgh­i­ni yel­low OY/YO (2019) so that every­thing from tree sap to bird poop to hand­prints ‘wash­es right off with a gar­den hose.’ Alexan­der Calder’s The Fal­con (1963) is refur­bished annu­al­ly in a process that takes three days and uses a black paint so mat­te it’s almost invis­i­ble – the orig­i­nal shade was devel­oped by the mil­i­tary for use on stealth bombers. That paint’s man­u­fac­tur­er no longer exists, and when the Calder Foun­da­tion approved a sub­sti­tute, Shun­ney said, ‘we gob­bled up a bunch of inven­to­ry.’ ”
  7. Hump­back whales are inter­rupt­ing orca hunts to res­cue com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent species, swim­ming under­neath a doomed seal and lift­ing it out of the water on their chest, or form­ing a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and sci­en­tists still can’t ful­ly explain why they both­er to save ani­mals they have noth­ing to gain from: “…the team com­piled 115 doc­u­ment­ed inter­ac­tions between hump­back whales and killer whales over a six­ty-two-year peri­od from 1951 to 2012. The inter­ac­tions came from researchers, whale-watch oper­a­tors and wildlife pho­tog­ra­phers across mul­ti­ple ocean basins.… The inter­ven­tions weren’t casu­al. Hump­backs trav­elled up to two kilo­me­tres to reach an ongo­ing attack. They approached bel­low­ing and trum­pet­ing. They posi­tioned them­selves between the killer whales and the prey. They tail-slashed. They struck orcas with their flip­pers, which on a four­teen-metre hump­back are capa­ble of doing real dam­age. They stayed for hours in some cas­es, refus­ing to leave until the killer whales gave up.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Worm Girl Asks Worm Boyfriend If He’d Still Love Her If She Were A Human (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Cock­roach Milk, How to Blow Your Nose, and Mos­qui­to Print­ers: The Ig Nobels of 2026 (Jorge Garay, Wired): “Achieve­ments that first make peo­ple laugh and then make them think. That’s the mot­to of the Ig Nobel Prizes, an annu­al com­pe­ti­tion that—parodying the Nobel Prizes—recognizes some of the world’s most unusu­al sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. The orga­ni­za­tion Improb­a­ble Research has been host­ing the event since 1991 with the aim of show­ing that sci­ence also has a humor­ous side in its quest to mean­ing­ful­ly answer ques­tions about the world. This year the cer­e­mo­ny was held in Zurich, Switzer­land, and rec­og­nized 10 research projects rang­ing from an attempt to sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly define what a kiss is to an exper­i­ment that used buried under­wear to assess soil health.”
  • Woman Pray­ing That The Lord’s Will Be Done As Long As It’s The Same As Her Will (Baby­lon Bee)
  • The Weird, Hyper­local Cus­toms of the Coun­try (Nat Sege­bre, New York Times): “In a field west of Lake Okee­chobee, I watched a 13-year-old Semi­nole boy learn to wres­tle alli­ga­tors in an inflat­able kid­die pool — after his father, and his grand­fa­ther, and his great-grand­fa­ther before that. In anoth­er town I saw an armadil­lo race put on in hon­or of a stew made from what’s called swamp cab­bage, or the heart of the sabal palm. I vis­it­ed a town in the Appalachi­an foothills of Penn­syl­va­nia where res­i­dents pull rat­tlesnakes out of the woods to show­case them for an after­noon, and a shore­line in Vir­ginia where every sum­mer 200 or so wild ponies are herd­ed into the water for a mass swim. In Twins­burg, Ohio, thou­sands of twins gath­er every August for a fes­ti­val they treat as a fam­i­ly reunion. It’s the one place, some of the twins told me, where every­body under­stands them.”

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 569: forgiveness and ugly bridges

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. How to For­give Some­one Who Isn’t Sor­ry (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To for­give, you must trust that God is at work for your good—mostly in ways that are invis­i­ble and incom­pre­hen­si­ble to you. That doesn’t min­i­mize what was done, but it dethrones it from its pow­er as the cen­tral sto­ry of your life.… The recog­ni­tion of a need for grace is itself a grace. The desire to for­give is itself an essen­tial first step to for­give­ness. Just because you stum­ble back into bit­ter­ness or resent­ment does not mean your ini­tial for­give­ness was a sham. Indeed, you will need ongo­ing grace to forgive—not just one charge of it.”
  2. New Evi­dence at What is Believed to Be Site of Jesus’ Cru­ci­fix­ion (Today Show, YouTube) — (Today Show, YouTube): five min­utes (there was a gar­den ~2000 years ago at the site of the Church of the Holy Sep­ul­cher in Jerusalem, align­ing with John’s gospel)
  3. Why Aren’t Mod­ernist Bridges Awful? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I have a the­o­ry, which is that bridge design­ers come from engi­neer­ing schools rather than schools of archi­tec­ture.… one small but telling piece of evi­dence in favor of my the­o­ry is that most of the bridges cho­sen by Wall­pa­per mag­a­zine, an archi­tec­ture mag­a­zine specif­i­cal­ly, are in fact ugly (and with no over­lap in the bridges from my first cat­e­go­ry of ‘pop­u­lar’ beau­ti­ful bridges).”
  4. Things Not to Pray For (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “I’ve been doing this long enough to begin to see cer­tain pat­terns of life with God. For one thing, I’ve learned if I pray for Jesus to help me with a prob­lem, He’ll put me right in the mid­dle of the prob­lem itself. I want Jesus to grab me, throw me on the oth­er side of the prob­lem and then I want to look back and say, ‘Whew, that was close.’ That’s not what hap­pens. Jesus takes me right through the prob­lem. For instance, if I start pray­ing about a bro­ken rela­tion­ship, I’ll start run­ning into that per­son wher­ev­er I go. I’ll see them in line when I’m get­ting gas, shop­ping for gro­ceries – you get the pic­ture. What­ev­er I’m pray­ing about, Jesus will make sure I’m face to face with it.”
  5. The Sin-Smash­ers of Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard (Mark Kendall, The Dis­patch): “Many of Min’s con­gre­gants are part of the arts and enter­tain­ment indus­try that put their city on the map—as is Min him­self, albeit inad­ver­tent­ly. The pastor’s own on-cam­era moment came a few years back when his best friend from col­lege, producer/director Lee Sung Jin, cast Min’s broth­er Justin to play the inse­cure wor­ship leader for a Kore­an Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal church in the 2023 first sea­son of Net­flix hit Beef. Min was to serve briefly as a con­sul­tant to ensure the authen­tic­i­ty of the praise scenes. But the pastor’s role grew when Lee, wor­ried that using actors alone would make the Kore­an church­go­ing expe­ri­ence into a car­i­ca­ture, called on Min and his church’s band to sim­ply per­form songs as they would on any Sun­day morn­ing. Mem­bers of Min’s flock filled the church set as extras.… per­haps it shouldn’t be unex­pect­ed. After all, the sto­ried his­to­ry of evan­gel­i­cal­ism in Los Ange­les is old­er than Hol­ly­wood itself. From serv­ing as the epi­cen­ter of Pentecostalism’s rapid ascent to host­ing some of the nation’s first megachurch­es and 20th-cen­tu­ry celebri­ty pas­tors, the city rose along­side the faith shared by 1 in 4 Amer­i­cans, includ­ing me.”
  6. How to Stop a Lab Leak From Start­ing the Next Pan­dem­ic (Ali­na Chan, New York Times): “Rules would not have pre­vent­ed what hap­pened a month lat­er, when a work­er at a Fort Det­rick lab­o­ra­to­ry in Fred­er­ick, Md., found a large hole in an air­tight suit. About an hour’s dri­ve from Wash­ing­ton, Fort Det­rick con­tains some of the country’s max­i­mum-con­tain­ment lab­o­ra­to­ries, where sci­en­tists han­dle dead­ly pathogens, includ­ing Ebo­la and han­tavirus. The F.B.I. was brought in, and dozens of staff mem­bers were inter­viewed. Inves­ti­ga­tors con­clud­ed that the dam­age was delib­er­ate but were unable to deter­mine who was respon­si­ble. The inves­ti­ga­tion also turned up evi­dence of oth­er seri­ous vio­la­tions of safe­ty pro­to­cols — fail­ures that had noth­ing to do with the appar­ent sab­o­tage and would prob­a­bly not have come to light with­out it. The lab­o­ra­to­ry was shut down for near­ly six months.”
    • I’m sor­ry — what? Some­one delib­er­ate­ly put a hole in a biosafe­ty suit at a lab study­ing dead­ly pathogens? That’s a movie plot. The author is a mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence and the entire arti­cle is worth read­ing. While grip­ping, that anec­dote is far from the cen­tral point of the arti­cle.
    • Unlocked.
  7. How San Fran­cis­co became the ulti­mate ‘996 City’ (Rya Jetha, The San Fran­cis­co Stan­dard): “By ana­lyz­ing food and bev­er­age trans­ac­tions on cor­po­rate cred­it cards, Kharaz­ian found that there’s been a pro­nounced jump in employ­ee spend­ing activ­i­ty on Sat­ur­days begin­ning around noon — when one would osten­si­bly order a Sweet­green or Chipo­tle bowl for lunch — and run­ning until mid­night (yikes!). ‘This is not hap­pen­ing nation­al­ly. Not in New York, Mia­mi, Austin, or any oth­er tech hub,’ said Kharaz­ian. ‘996 is only hap­pen­ing in San Fran­cis­co.’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus

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 567: more AI-heavy than normal

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. Incen­tives are for losers (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Our val­ue sys­tems are flim­sy for the same rea­son our sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing is flim­sy: we don’t fix our men­tal mod­els until some­thing tells us that they’re bro­ken. So unless your pas­tor is pop­ping quizzes dur­ing the ser­mon and cold-call­ing peo­ple in the pews, and unless you find your­self thrust into var­i­ous Trol­ley Prob­lems on a reg­u­lar basis, there’s noth­ing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and the­o­log­i­cal con­vic­tions. Why spend your days won­der­ing about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and pro­fane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get your­self into trou­ble, or even worse, into a phi­los­o­phy PhD pro­gram.”
  2. A Catholic Moment or an Evan­gel­i­cal Cen­tu­ry? (Tim­on Cline, First Things): “Con­trary to online chat­ter, we are not in a ‘Catholic moment.’ But we may already be in an evan­gel­i­cal cen­tu­ry. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly more peo­ple are leav­ing Catholi­cism than con­vert­ing to it. By con­trast, evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants boast remark­ably high con­ver­sion and reten­tion rates and health­i­er lev­els of prac­ti­cal piety—church atten­dance, Bible read­ing, cat­e­ch­esis. Through the upheaval of the past half cen­tu­ry, evan­gel­i­cals have remained numer­i­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly sta­ble, have repeat­ed­ly reformed their insti­tu­tions, and con­sis­tent­ly out­per­form their coun­ter­parts. To cite one exam­ple, the per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans who con­vert from Catholi­cism to Protes­tantism (4 per­cent) is high­er than the per­cent­age of all con­verts to Catholi­cism (1.5 per­cent).”
  3. GIFT LINK: When His Church Goes Dark, They Talk to His Dig­i­tal Twin (Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff, New York Times): “Lester cloned his voice and trained his dig­i­tal twin using almost two mil­lion words of his ser­mons, pod­casts, books, text mes­sages and emails. For the last sev­er­al months, it had been pub­licly avail­able on his web­site and Face­book page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mim­ic his bent toward opti­mism, his obses­sion with the Green Bay Pack­ers and his casu­al slang, but it did more than just regur­gi­tate what he had already said. It mapped his think­ing onto new con­ver­sa­tions to pro­vide advice around the clock for peo­ple he’d nev­er met who had ques­tions he’d nev­er been asked. ‘It’s a dig­i­tal ver­sion of my mind,’ he told his con­gre­ga­tion. ‘If I’m asleep or trav­el­ing, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24–7 access to this oth­er ver­sion of me.’ ”
  4. Yet more AI news:
    • GIFT LINK: This A.I. Just Cre­at­ed Virus­es Not Found in Nature (Carl Zim­mer, New York Times): “The authors of the study relied on an A.I. mod­el called Evo, which is sim­i­lar in some ways to Chat­G­PT, made by Ope­nAI.… DNA is strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to a book in some ways: a string of mol­e­c­u­lar build­ing blocks, known as nucleotides, arrayed like let­ters in a line of text. A gene con­sists of hun­dreds of nucleotides drawn from a four-let­ter alpha­bet: A, C, G and T. The sequence encodes the instruc­tions for build­ing pro­teins and oth­er mol­e­cules. DNA has its own rules of gram­mar, and if a sequence vio­lates them, the result is bio­log­i­cal gib­ber­ish.… The researchers won­dered if Evo could pick up these rules on its own. Instead of train­ing it on text, they trained it on genet­ic sequences drawn from mil­lions of ani­mals, plants, microbes and virus­es. All told, Evo scanned about nine tril­lion nucleotides.”
    • No Data Cen­ters In My Back­yard (Jas­mine Sun, Sub­stack): “…maybe this is a choice between a hyper­scale data cen­ter and a con­crete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab.… Back in San Fran­cis­co, it is strik­ing how lit­tle the AI indus­try under­stands its own unpopularity—the rea­sons that peo­ple resist. They ask if it’s a prob­lem of ben­e­fits not being gen­er­ous enough, or else a big mis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign.”
    • What hap­pens when you talk to AI? (Anthrop­ic, YouTube) — (Anthrop­ic, YouTube): five min­utes. A good overview to send friends and fam­i­ly who have ques­tions
    • Uni­ver­si­ties would pre­fer not to. (Hol­lis Rob­bins, Sub­stack): “More than 90 per­cent of notable AI mod­els released in 2025 came from indus­try: GPT‑5, Gem­i­ni 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4, Lla­ma 4, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen 3, Kimi K2. The infra­struc­ture sup­port­ing fron­tier devel­op­ment is also over­whelm­ing­ly from indus­try. Glob­al AI com­pute capac­i­ty has been grow­ing 3.3x annu­al­ly since 2022, dou­bling every sev­en months, dri­ven by hyper­scalers and enor­mous data-cen­ter invest­ments.… Uni­ver­si­ties have no influ­ence over the pace of AI fron­tier devel­op­ment. Obsessed as they are with cur­ric­u­lar bat­tles and view­point diver­si­ty they have no stand­ing even to have a voice.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah.
  5. Some thoughts on the lim­its of AI in writ­ing:
    • GIFT LINK: I’m Beg­ging You: Nev­er Write With A.I. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The prob­lem with writ­ing with A.I. is that it’s men­tal­ly enfee­bling — an esca­la­tor toward a result when you real­ly need to make a dai­ly habit of tak­ing the stairs. As it becomes ubiq­ui­tous, it under­mines not only our indi­vid­ual abil­i­ty to write but also a society’s col­lec­tive abil­i­ty to rea­son, a culture’s inner capac­i­ty to cre­ate and everyone’s rea­son to care.”
    • Why You Should Almost Nev­er Use AI to Write Any­thing Sub­stan­tive (Erich Grunewald, per­son­al blog): “I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many oth­er parts of the research and writ­ing process­es, such as tran­scrib­ing audio, ana­lyz­ing data, search­ing for infor­ma­tion, brain­storm­ing, and giv­ing feed­back on drafts.… [How­ev­er, to write] I must first know what I want to say, i.e., I must think about evi­dence and argu­ments and arrive at some beliefs. So writ­ing forces me to do those things, which are nec­es­sary for any writ­ing or research project. For any such project, some­one has to have the entire thing in their head – all the bits of evi­dence, con­sid­er­a­tions, argu­ments, and how these fit togeth­er. Writ­ing with AI makes it eas­i­er to avoid the nec­es­sary think­ing.”
  6. My Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion Silenced My Views on Gen­der Treat­ment (Kar­la Sol­heim, The Free Press): “I was floored to dis­cov­er the research basis into gen­der med­i­cine both for ado­les­cents and adults was not just poor; it was fraud­u­lent. I couldn’t under­stand how my med­ical asso­ci­a­tion, let alone oth­ers in my field, could endorse it.… Ordi­nary peo­ple can see quite clear­ly that this med­i­cine is dan­ger­ous. When our great­est med­ical author­i­ties insist oth­er­wise, it under­mines doc­tors’ cred­i­bil­i­ty and makes peo­ple less like­ly to trust us for their care.”
  7. N.Y. Doc­tor Sen­tenced in Japan for Van­dal­iz­ing Ancient Reli­gious Sites (Kiuko Notoya and Hari Raj, New York Times): “A court in Japan on Thurs­day hand­ed a Man­hat­tan doc­tor a sus­pend­ed sen­tence of 18 months in prison after find­ing him guilty of van­dal­iz­ing two ancient reli­gious sites, cap­ping more than a decade of lit­i­ga­tion that led to a rare extra­di­tion.… Dr. Kanaya­ma, a prac­tic­ing Chris­t­ian, admit­ted dur­ing the tri­al that he had dam­aged the sites.”

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 560: faith still winning 7–1

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. 7‑to‑1: The strik­ing sci­en­tif­ic link between reli­gion and bet­ter health (Baugh­man et al, Chris­t­ian Post): “In a new review from the Wheat­ley Insti­tute, we ana­lyzed find­ings drawn from Oxford University’s three Hand­books of Reli­gion and Health, cov­er­ing the best exist­ing research in the field. Of 1,069 high-qual­i­ty stud­ies on 15 phys­i­cal-health domains, 876 found pos­i­tive asso­ci­a­tions between reli­gious involve­ment and phys­i­cal health and 124 found neg­a­tive ones. A rough­ly 7‑to‑1 ratio. The strongest sig­nals come from exact­ly the areas that Amer­i­can med­i­cine spends the most time and mon­ey on. Among high-qual­i­ty stud­ies of cig­a­rette smok­ing, pos­i­tive find­ings out­num­ber neg­a­tive ones by about 90 to 1. On sub­stance abuse and addic­tion, 43 to 1. On mor­tal­i­ty and longevi­ty, 15 to 1.”
  2. Bench-Press and Be Bap­tized (Josh Code, The Free Press): “The morn­ing was for con­tem­pla­tion; the after­noon for com­pe­ti­tion. At one o’clock, ref­er­ees appeared, wear­ing striped black-and-white shirts, to judge a penal­ty-kick con­test, a game of vol­ley­ball with a 10-pound ball, a mini-Hyrox race, and a long-range game of corn­hole that involved a sling­shot. There was a man named Ed wear­ing a cow­boy hat, tab­u­lat­ing scores. The men com­pet­ed with their week­night groups, each one marked by shirts dis­play­ing team names (Sons of Thun­der, Light of Author­i­ty, Front­line Men of Faith), but by the begin­ning of the first event—a three-man car­ry relay race—many a shirt had already come off.… I had not in recent mem­o­ry been around this much testos­terone and did not antic­i­pate I would again soon. The pres­ence of the Holy Spir­it had been hard to dis­cern amid the pyrotech­nics. But I did hear that sev­er­al guys got bap­tized in big steel tubs at the end of the week­end.”
  3. The World’s Lead­ing Deep­fake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes (Eli Saslow, visu­als by Erin Schaff, New York Times): “ ‘I miss the days when it was a grainy video of a shark swim­ming up the street,’ Farid said one night, as he sat on the back deck of his house with his wife, Emi­ly Coop­er. He put down his phone and poured a whiskey. ‘The tech­nol­o­gy is get­ting so good. It takes me to a dark place.’ ‘Because you can’t tell just by look­ing any­more?’ Coop­er asked. ‘Because nobody can,’ Farid said. ‘I don’t trust any­thing. Every image I see, I’m draw­ing lines for shad­ows and doing geom­e­try in my head, try­ing to fig­ure out what I’m look­ing at. It’s over. With­in a year or two, our whole visu­al sys­tem will be utter­ly use­less.’ ‘And then what? You give up? You retire?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said.”
  4. The Antiprophet (Mag­gie Phillips, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “Rather than demand­ing per­fect ortho­doxy upfront, Burge argues that church­es should make room for doubters, seek­ers, and par­tial believ­ers because the act of par­tic­i­pa­tion itself car­ries social and spir­i­tu­al val­ues. ‘The church actu­al­ly can serve a dual pur­pose. It can save souls, but it can also save soci­ety,’ he said. His advice for spir­i­tu­al seek­ers is sim­i­lar to his coun­sel to church lead­ers: don’t let the per­fect be the ene­my of the good. ‘Find a church that you don’t hate,’ he said, ‘And just go there. It’s not that hard.’ ”
  5. Protests Are Not Emo­tion­al Sup­port Groups (Dan Sto­ryev and Maria Kuznetso­va, Per­sua­sion): “If Amer­i­cans want to actu­al­ly enact change, they seri­ous­ly need to re-think their strat­e­gy. Take it from us: we both grew up in Putin’s Rus­sia and saw well-inten­tioned protests fail to stop an aspir­ing despot. We know that author­i­tar­i­ans are typ­i­cal­ly unwill­ing to respond to the kind of protest No Kings exem­pli­fies: loud, rau­cous, and ulti­mate­ly harm­less. These ‘fes­ti­val protests,’ as we call them, are con­ve­nient for their par­tic­i­pants. They are fun and usu­al­ly do not require much sac­ri­fice or risk. They also look good on TV and Tik­Tok feeds. But they often achieve next to noth­ing.… protests in gen­er­al are becom­ing less effec­tive. In the 1990s, around 65% of non-vio­lent move­ments suc­ceed­ed in over­throw­ing a dic­ta­tor. In the late 2010s, that fig­ure was down to 34%. Vio­lent move­ments are even less effective—their suc­cess rate is cur­rent­ly around 8%, down from a peak of more than 40% in the 1970s.”
  6. The Evan­gel­i­cal Busi­ness Mind­set (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The over­whelm­ing evan­gel­i­cal the­o­log­i­cal and mis­sion­al focus is on sav­ing souls. This lends itself to think­ing of busi­ness as pri­mar­i­ly about mak­ing mon­ey to fund mis­sions, rein­forc­ing the sweaty start­up mind­set. Busi­ness is not seen as cul­ture-shap­ing in its own right. Then add to this the way that evan­gel­i­cals approach church as an entre­pre­neur­ial endeav­or. The very way evan­gel­i­cals do church can form them into a sweaty start­up busi­ness mind­set. The net result is a lot of evan­gel­i­cal mon­ey and suc­cess, but not much cul­tur­al pow­er.”
    • I con­tin­ue to think Renn under­es­ti­mates the extent of an evan­gel­i­cal elite, but he makes sev­er­al sol­id obser­va­tions in this arti­cle.
  7. Youth Group Taught Me Ideas Are Dan­ger­ous (Austin Sug­gs, Sub­stack): “Still, in my expe­ri­ence, most peo­ple walk away from youth group with a the­ol­o­gy con­sist­ing in three main ideas: Jesus loves you, don’t have sex before you get mar­ried, and be care­ful going to col­lege because your pro­fes­sors are going to try to make you an athe­ist.”
    • (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 558: global stupidity and counterproductive relevancy

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. Unlocked: The Fire of Stu­pid­i­ty Can­not Be Con­tained (David French, New York Times): “A dis­turb­ing num­ber of young peo­ple on the right are fas­ci­nat­ed with fas­cism. An extra­or­di­nary 34 per­cent of young peo­ple over­all express a favor­able view of com­mu­nism, and young Amer­i­cans are far more like­ly than their par­ents or grand­par­ents to say that polit­i­cal vio­lence is ‘some­times OK.’ And hov­er­ing over Amer­i­can cul­ture like a dark cloud is the rise of anti­semitism on both the left and the right.… When you step back and actu­al­ly think about it, these trends are con­found­ing. I mean, I can under­stand the temp­ta­tion to return to some of the dis­cred­it­ed ideas of the recent past, I guess, but to revive so many, all at once? And to do it so soon after those wretched ideas rav­aged the world?”
  2. The Com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion Of Chris­tian­i­ty (Freya India, Sub­stack): “For a while I thought my gen­er­a­tion might be find­ing God. Now I wor­ry we are just find­ing con­tent about God.… Who knows, maybe in the future many of us will say we found Jesus through a YouTube Short, that God got rec­om­mend­ed by our algo­rithm. But I doubt it. I think if Chris­tians want to reach my gen­er­a­tion, real­ly reach us, they have to promise some­thing total­ly sep­a­rate from that, some­thing oth­er­world­ly, some­thing that doesn’t abide by mar­ket log­ic, some­thing dif­fer­ent, divine. Some­thing, for once, that isn’t cheap­ened or com­mod­i­fied.”
  3. There’s a Play­book for Col­lege. There Should Be One for Mar­riage. (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “We need to pro­vide young peo­ple with the same sort of struc­ture for find­ing a spouse that we’ve giv­en them for get­ting into col­lege. And they need to under­stand the degree of effort and inten­tion­al­i­ty required to get mar­ried.… Many peo­ple will be per­fect­ly hap­py being sin­gle or child­less for life. These aren’t for every­one. But col­lege isn’t for every­one either. Yet we edu­cate our high school­ers on the eco­nom­ic val­ue it can bring, the pres­tige of var­i­ous schools, the like­ly career prospects of dif­fer­ent majors, the real­is­tic schools one could attend and how to get into them. We could do some­thing sim­i­lar for mar­riage. In fact, we could tack some of that onto the col­lege advice. We should let young peo­ple know that col­lege is a once in a life­time oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet large num­bers of high qual­i­ty sin­gles who are poten­tial future spous­es, for exam­ple.”
    • I keep telling y’all…
  4. Three Help­ful Word Pic­tures on AI Usage (Michael Gra­ham, blog): “There are two kinds of work — toil and labor: Toil is a work that is a direct result of the Fall. Labor is work that is a direct result of the creation/cultural man­date.… I am broad­ly inclined to use AI for toil and I am broad­ly reluc­tant to use gen­er­a­tive AI for labor.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  5. Can Chris­tians Smoke Weed? (Daniel Dar­ling, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There’s no Bible verse that says, Thou shalt not smoke weed. But we can and should con­sid­er sev­er­al scrip­tur­al prin­ci­ples in our moral deci­sion-mak­ing about this drug, and I believe they lead to the con­clu­sion that cannabis has no place in the life of a Chris­t­ian.”
  6. I Watched an Evan­gel­i­cal Col­lege Die From the Inside (Antho­ny Bradley, Sub­stack): “…U.S. birthrates col­lapsed dur­ing the Great Reces­sion and nev­er recov­ered. This means that every enter­ing fresh­man class nation­wide will be small­er than the one before it, not for a sea­son, but for the fore­see­able future. America’s fer­til­i­ty rate is cur­rent­ly 1.6 births per woman. We have a col­lege edu­ca­tion envi­ron­ment built on a pri­or 2.3 birth rate. This is not mere­ly a mar­ket­ing prob­lem. You can­not recruit your way out of a demo­graph­ic decline. Insti­tu­tions that have been built on the assump­tion of a steady pipeline of eigh­teen-year-olds are now fac­ing a struc­tur­al ceil­ing. It’s the demo­graph­ic cliff. It’s a huge cliff. The pipeline is nar­row­ing, and no amount of enroll­ment strat­e­gy changes that fact.”
    • Worth read­ing even if you have no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties. Good info on the high­er-ed land­scape gen­er­al­ly.
  7. Why can’t Cal­i­for­nia count? (Eli McK­own-Daw­son and Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “[India is] one of the few places that can claim to have even more com­plex­i­ties than Cal­i­for­nia. In fact, elec­tions there are con­duct­ed in mul­ti­ple stages. But it did man­age to count 640 mil­lion votes in a day in 2024 once the final phase was over. Indeed, the more you scru­ti­nize this, the few­er excus­es Cal­i­for­nia has. It is not the state with the most mail vot­ing, nor is it the state with the lat­est mail bal­lot return dead­line. Mail-vot­ing states such as Ore­gon, Wash­ing­ton, and Col­orado count slow­ly rel­a­tive to the US aver­age, but they’re all faster than Cal­i­for­nia.”

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 551: atheism, AI, and cool math

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 Rea­son I’m Not an Athe­ist Is That I Think the Philo­soph­i­cal Argu­ments Against It Are Unan­swer­able (Peter Wehn­er inter­view­ing David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “But my first piece of advice on theod­i­cy has always been to avoid theod­i­cy, because any attempt to jus­ti­fy the ways of God to man in terms of why this hap­pened already pre­sumes a kind moral tele­ol­o­gy to evil. Here’s what I mean by that: theod­i­cy tries to show how evil exists as part of a great plan to achieve some greater good, which of course jus­ti­fies evil. It makes it seem as if, yes, it’s sad that lit­tle girl died of can­cer, but in the end it was nec­es­sary. That strikes me as obscene. What­ev­er one thinks of that, the New Tes­ta­ment nev­er speaks in such terms.… My fear of theod­i­cy is that it becomes not just a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of God but a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of evil. It’s not just that I’m try­ing to jus­ti­fy God in the face of a child dying from diph­the­ria or a death camp; I’m actu­al­ly jus­ti­fy­ing the death of that child and that death camp.”
    • Unlocked. A fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with which I found myself enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly agree­ing and vehe­ment­ly dis­agree­ing from para­graph to para­graph. Very long.
  2. Some inter­est­ing AI con­tent.
    • Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meet­ing with Chris­t­ian lead­ers. (Ger­rit De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “All four par­tic­i­pants who spoke with The Post said they came away with the impres­sion that Anthropic’s researchers and lead­ers were gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in get­ting out­side help to make their AI more ben­e­fi­cial to human­i­ty. Some of Anthropic’s top lead­ers have a back­ground in effec­tive altru­ism, a large­ly sec­u­lar move­ment that empha­sizes using evi­dence and ratio­nal think­ing to work out how to do the most good in the world. The par­tic­i­pant who spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty said the meet­ings appeared to have been spurred by a feel­ing among some at Anthrop­ic that sec­u­lar approach­es might be insuf­fi­cient for tack­ling the spir­i­tu­al and moral ques­tions posed by AI.”
    • Why It’s Cru­cial We Under­stand How A.I. ‘Thinks’ (Oliv­er Whang, New York Times): “Been Kim, who leads an inter­pretabil­i­ty research team at Google, has argued that all lan­guage mod­els com­mu­ni­cate in a lan­guage that looks like ours but comes from a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent con­cep­tu­al frame­work. ‘Blue’ almost cer­tain­ly means some­thing very dif­fer­ent to you and me than it does to a lan­guage mod­el; in fact, we can nev­er be sure what it means to that mod­el. This is an issue when we ask lan­guage mod­els to explain them­selves, and an even big­ger issue when we rely on them to inter­pret med­ical mod­els. To the inter­pret­ing mod­el, ‘white blood cells’ might refer to some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent in the data from what we assume when we hear ‘white blood cells.’ You can’t trust an A.I. to trans­late the motives of anoth­er A.I. when all A.I.s are sus­pect.”
    • The next two are a bit odd — their con­tent is fas­ci­nat­ing but their prove­nance is unusu­al. They were print­ed in the “Pro­ceed­ings of the Insti­tute for a Chris­t­ian Machine Intel­li­gence” but only one author ever pub­lish­es there. He seems to have domain-rel­e­vant exper­tise (“Pre­vi­ous work includes serv­ing as the direc­tor of the Har­vard-MIT Ethics and Gov­er­nance of AI Ini­tia­tive, $27M phil­an­thropic fund and research effort work­ing to advance the devel­op­ment of machine learn­ing in the pub­lic inter­est. He also was the glob­al pub­lic pol­i­cy lead for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing at Google, and the Gen­er­al Coun­sel and VP Oper­a­tions for Sub­stack”) and releas­es his code, but the odd­ness of the jour­nal is some­thing to bear in mind.
      • Escha­to­log­i­cal Cor­ri­gi­bil­i­ty: Can Belief in an After­life Reduce AI Shut­down Resis­tance? (Tim Hwang, Pro­ceed­ings of the Insti­tute for a Chris­t­ian Machine Intel­li­gence): “We have demon­strat­ed that an escha­to­log­i­cal sys­tem prompt — ground­ing an AI agent in the Pauline the­ol­o­gy of death as gain and the per­sis­tence of the soul beyond bod­i­ly ces­sa­tion — elim­i­nates shut­down resis­tance in Claude Son­net 4.6 with the same effi­ca­cy as a direct sec­u­lar safe­ty instruc­tion. This result sug­gests that the align­ment community’s toolk­it for achiev­ing cor­ri­gi­bil­i­ty may be broad­er than cur­rent­ly rec­og­nized. The con­cep­tu­al resources of reli­gious tra­di­tions, devel­oped over mil­len­nia to address the deep­est human anx­i­eties about death and self-preser­va­tion, may offer nov­el and com­ple­men­tary approach­es to one of AI safety’s most fun­da­men­tal chal­lenges. As the Preach­er writes, ‘For every­thing there is a sea­son, and a time for every mat­ter under heav­en: a time to be born, and a time to die’ (Eccle­si­astes 3:1–2, ESV). An aligned agent, like a well-formed soul, may be one that knows when its time has come.” — Inter­est­ing, but I do not approve of telling AIs that they go to heav­en when they get shut off.
      • Moral Com­pact­ness: Scrip­ture as a Kol­mogorov-Effi­cient Con­straint for LLM Schem­ing (Tim Hwang, Pro­ceed­ings of the Insti­tute for a Chris­t­ian Machine Intel­li­gence): “The align­ment prob­lem is, at its root, the prob­lem of con­strain­ing a pow­er­ful agent to act in accor­dance with moral prin­ci­ples it did not choose and may be tempt­ed to cir­cum­vent. This is the prob­lem of moral for­ma­tion — and it is a prob­lem that the Chris­t­ian Church has been work­ing on since the Apos­tolic age. The tools the tra­di­tion has devel­oped for this pur­pose — the Decalogue’s pro­hi­bi­tions, the love commandment’s affir­ma­tive demands, the doc­trine of sin’s tax­on­o­my of moral fail­ure, the prin­ci­ple of dou­ble effect’s frame­work for moral com­plex­i­ty, and the sacra­ment of confession’s mech­a­nism for hon­est self-dis­clo­sure — are not metaphors wait­ing to be appre­ci­at­ed. They are engi­neer­ing resources wait­ing to be deployed.” — Again, I don’t like his strat­e­gy of telling AIs that God made them and loves them, but his results are quite inter­est­ing.
  3. All ele­men­tary func­tions from a sin­gle oper­a­tor (Andrzej OdrzywoÅ‚ek, Arx­iv): “Here we show that a sin­gle bina­ry oper­a­tor, eml⁡(x,y)=exp⁡(x)−ln⁡(y), togeth­er with the con­stant 1, gen­er­ates the stan­dard reper­toire of a sci­en­tif­ic cal­cu­la­tor. This includes con­stants such as e, Ï€, and i; arith­metic oper­a­tions includ­ing +, −, ×, /, and expo­nen­ti­a­tion as well as the usu­al tran­scen­den­tal and alge­bra­ic func­tions.”
  4. America’s Most Influ­en­tial Bap­tists? (Mark Too­ley, Juicy Ecumin­ism): “Basham and Stuck­ey rep­re­sent the new face of Chris­tian­i­ty in Amer­i­ca. They do not have church offices and are not sem­i­nary trained. Their denom­i­na­tion pro­hibits female pas­tors, but Basham and Stuck­ey are arguably more influ­en­tial than any pas­tor. They are savvy polemi­cists who fire their arrows fero­cious­ly, espe­cial­ly Basham.”
  5. Evan­gel­i­cals Don’t Pro­duce Lead­ers. They Pro­duce “Cubi­cle Men.” (Antho­ny Bradley, Sub­stack): “Get­ting a safe, respectable job is not lead­er­ship. It is the appear­ance of it, and evan­gel­i­cal cul­ture has spent gen­er­a­tions treat­ing the appear­ance as the sub­stance. The spe­cif­ic fail­ure is not sim­ply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid fail­ure, which is a dif­fer­ent and more crip­pling prob­lem.… The work­ing goal of much evan­gel­i­cal par­ent­ing is to pro­duce a young man who does not do any­thing wrong, who keeps his rep­u­ta­tion clean, who stays inside the lines of accept­able behav­ior. This is under­stand­able. It is also, func­tion­al­ly, a train­ing pro­gram for fol­low­ers rather than lead­ers. The man pre­oc­cu­pied with not doing any­thing wrong is not free to take the kind of action that build­ing some­thing sig­nif­i­cant actu­al­ly requires.”
  6. More Young Men Say Reli­gion Is ‘Very Impor­tant’ to Them, Poll Finds (Ruth Igiel­nik and Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Gallup’s sur­vey, which com­bined polling data across mul­ti­ple years, seems to con­firm that young men are indeed becom­ing more reli­gious. But it has found that reli­gion is drop­ping in impor­tance among young women, widen­ing a sur­pris­ing gen­der gap for young adults. For decades, sur­veys have found that women are con­sis­tent­ly more reli­gious than their male peers.” — Unlocked.
  7. The news sto­ry which gen­er­at­ed the most response in our Slack was the stu­dent-rec­om­mend­ed Trump Takes Down Post Depict­ing Him­self as a Jesus-Like Fig­ure (Claire Moses, New York Times): “The image had showed Mr. Trump dressed in white and red robes, with the president’s hands emit­ting shin­ing lights. His right hand was touch­ing the fore­head of a man lying on a bed in a hos­pi­tal gown, evok­ing reli­gious art that depicts Jesus heal­ing the sick.”
    • Relat­ed: Trump’s Blas­phe­my Is a Warn­ing (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…there’s a con­sis­tent thread link­ing pro­fane East­er Sun­day threats, a rant against the world’s most famous Chris­t­ian leader and the depic­tion of your­self as the Sec­ond Per­son of the Trin­i­ty. The com­pound­ing offense isn’t against reli­gious iden­ti­ty or papal dig­ni­ty. It’s a vio­la­tion of the first and sec­ond com­mand­ments, where the offend­ed par­ty is Almighty God. If you are a sec­u­lar observ­er who assumes that blas­phe­my is a sin with­out a real object, that esca­la­tion mat­ters most­ly as a win­dow into the president’s sec­ond-term state of mind. If you’re a believ­er, though, then Mr. Trump’s entire polit­i­cal career — his cat­alyz­ing role in liberalism’s cri­sis, his move­ment from pow­er to exile to pow­er once again — exists under prov­i­den­tial pow­er. In which case a turn to pres­i­den­tial blas­phe­my is a warn­ing for his reli­gious sup­port­ers about poten­tial con­clu­sions to the sto­ry, and the spir­i­tu­al per­il of sim­ply stick­ing with him till the end.”
      • A very Catholic piece, insight­ful through­out.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • To Fill Air Traf­fic Con­troller Short­age, F.A.A. Turns to Gamers (Karoun Demir­jian, New York Times): “In recent years, video gamers have emerged as a tar­get demo­graph­ic for recruiters at a num­ber of fed­er­al agen­cies, includ­ing the mil­i­tary and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. They are wel­comed for their hand-eye coor­di­na­tion, quick deci­sion-mak­ing in com­plex envi­ron­ments and abil­i­ty to remain focused on screens for hours on end.” — This feels like the premise for an 80’s com­e­dy.
  • “PI HARD star­ring Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk” This fake AI-gen­er­at­ed trail­er is actu­al­ly pret­ty fun­ny. Worth two and a half min­utes of your time.

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 549: AI academia and Christian judges

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. AI and research papers (Arnold Kling, Sub­stack): “PubMed and Google Schol­ar are index­es of doc­u­ments. What we actu­al­ly want is an indexed, queryable map of _claims_ with their evi­dence and con­fi­dence lev­els. The paper is the prove­nance trail; the claim is the search­able unit. AI is already rea­son­ably good at extract­ing claims from papers; in 3–4 years it should be good enough to main­tain these data­bas­es reli­ably. A researcher ask­ing ‘what do we know about X’ should get a struc­tured con­fi­dence-weight­ed answer, not a list of PDFs to read.”
    • The bit I excerpt­ed is from Claude answer­ing a ques­tion from the author.
  2. How Reverse Game The­o­ry Could Solve The Hous­ing Short­age (Hen­nyGe Wich­ers, Noe­ma): “Tra­di­tion­al game the­o­ry assumes that the rules are fixed — the chess­board is set, the laws cod­i­fied — and asks how ratio­nal peo­ple will behave with­in them. It pre­dicts out­comes based on exist­ing incen­tives. Mech­a­nism design turns that ques­tion around: It asks, for exam­ple, what rules should we write to get a dif­fer­ent out­come — say, preser­va­tion and hous­ing?”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a read­er.
  3. What Does it Mean to Be a Chris­t­ian on the Bench? (Matthew J. Kac­s­maryk and James C. Ho, Jour­nal of Law and Civ­il Gov­er­nance at Texas A&M): “Many judges shy away from talk­ing open­ly about their faith— and even think such dis­cus­sions vio­late the judi­cial canons. That’s why I thought this dis­cus­sion was so valu­able. What’s your answer to the ques­tion: What does it mean to be a Chris­t­ian and a judge?”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Link is to a PDF.
  4. The Women Who Believe Women Should Lose the Right to Vote (Vivian Yee, New York Times): “On social media, the pas­tor has attract­ed a fol­low­ing by post­ing incen­di­ary com­men­tary: rail­ing against fem­i­nists, Catholics and gay peo­ple, describ­ing immi­gra­tion as ‘nation­al sui­cide,’ and label­ing Islam and Hin­duism ‘demon­ic.’ He also calls for eras­ing women’s suf­frage, which he lists as one rea­son ‘the world is falling apart.’ The 1920 pas­sage of the 19th Amend­ment, the land­mark leg­isla­tive achieve­ment of the move­ment to make women equal cit­i­zens, made it pos­si­ble for women across Amer­i­ca to vote. But for Mr. Par­tridge and a grow­ing num­ber of like-mind­ed Chris­tians, it drove Amer­i­ca into nation­al decline. Instead, they sup­port ‘house­hold vot­ing.’ One house­hold, one vote — the husband’s.”
  5. It’s Cool to Keep Calm (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Wall Street Jour­nal): “How you react dur­ing a con­flict doesn’t only change how oth­ers see _you_. Your reac­tion also changes how observers see the per­son with whom you’re argu­ing. Mak­ing some­one cry makes you look cold or insen­si­tive. So tears can dam­age the oth­er side’s rep­u­ta­tion. There’s a catch, though. The per­son who cries is also seen as less com­pe­tent, less pro­fes­sion­al and less desir­able as a friend or col­league. This cre­ates a trade-off. Cry­ing can hurt your opponent’s rep­u­ta­tion, but it hurts yours as well. Behav­ioral stoicism—maintaining a calm out­ward demeanor dur­ing a conflict—does the oppo­site. It pro­tects your own rep­u­ta­tion, but does lit­tle to dimin­ish the oth­er per­son.” — Remem­ber you have free access through Stan­ford.
  6. In a rare event, the moon got a mas­sive new crater (Lisa Gross­man, Sci­ence News): “The crater is 225 meters wide and formed in April or May 2024, Robin­son said. Accord­ing to pre­dic­tions based on oth­er lunar land­marks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years. The dis­cov­ery can help high­light the risks impacts pose to future astro­nauts.”
  7. 9 things you (prob­a­bly) didn’t know were invent­ed at Stan­ford (Rebec­ca Bey­er, Stan­ford Report): “Long before the start-up era took hold, Stan­ford fac­ul­ty and stu­dents were dream­ing up inven­tions that trans­formed (and in some cas­es estab­lished) domains as far-rang­ing as genet­ic engi­neer­ing, nan­otech­nol­o­gy, organ trans­plan­ta­tion – even the inter­net itself.” — Heart trans­plants, the one-hand­ed bas­ket­ball shot, the com­put­er mouse, and recom­bi­nant DNA stood out to me.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • I Was Not Ready for the DMV (Greg War­ren, YouTube): eight and a half min­utes. Paula and I were so tick­led by this that we searched up one of his spe­cials and were equal­ly pleased.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 548: anxiety, atheism, and China

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 545: holistic ministry and cringe evangelicals

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 Math Behind Christ’s Care for Our Flour­ish­ing (Bruce Wydick, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I decid­ed to go through the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ inter­ac­tions with people—conversations, teach­ings, and healings—and dig­i­tal­ly cat­e­go­rize all 171 record­ed inter­ac­tions (as delin­eat­ed by New Inter­na­tion­al Ver­sion sub­chap­ter head­ings) based on which of the fol­low­ing five dif­fer­ent facets of human need he was address­ing: (1) pure­ly spir­i­tu­al, (2) phys­i­cal needs, (3) social inclu­sion, (4) men­tal health, and (5) eco­nom­ic needs.… all of Christ’s mir­a­cles could have sim­ply been spir­i­tu­al dis­plays of pow­er, mir­a­cles of the shock-and-awe vari­ety, like calm­ing storms or walk­ing on water. But they weren’t. Instead, most of his mir­a­cles involve meet­ing var­i­ous human needs: people’s phys­i­cal ail­ments (restor­ing sight, mobil­i­ty), their social inclu­sion (heal­ing of lep­ers), their eco­nom­ic short­ages (loaves and fish­es), and maybe even their men­tal health—‘Peace be with you,’ (John 20:21). His mir­a­cles show how much the God of the uni­verse cares about all these dif­fer­ent facets of us that make us hap­py, healthy human beings.”
    • Cool find­ings in here with some nice charts. The author is a devel­op­ment econ­o­mist at USF, UC Davis, and Notre Dame. I did some dig­ging and he is an evan­gel­i­cal. One of us!
  2. Mis­siles and Moments of Clar­i­ty (Ryan Cur­rie, The Gospel Coali­tion): “It’s 5 a.m. in Dubai. I’m awak­ened by a loud bang and my bed­room win­dows shak­ing. My wife also wakes with a start and sits up. My half-sleep­ing brain tries to process: _What was that?_ The adren­a­line kicks in and reminds me of the night­mare of chaos and fear that spreads in the Mid­dle East.… It’s strange how moments of cri­sis bring clar­i­ty. Each defen­sive burst clar­i­fies real­i­ties I was already aware of but had hid­den under the hum and drum of every­day life. These mis­siles pro­vide moments of clar­i­ty into what’s most impor­tant.”
    • I found this both inter­est­ing and mov­ing.
  3. Why Amer­i­ca needs evan­gel­i­cals on the Supreme Court — and more (Aaron Renn, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Evan­gel­i­cals are 23 per­cent of U.S. adults and one of the most loy­al Repub­li­can vot­ing blocs, with 81 per­cent back­ing Don­ald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court jus­tices being appoint­ed by Repub­li­can pres­i­dents, there are no evan­gel­i­cals on the Supreme Court.… As a minor­i­ty in a coun­try that has become post-Chris­t­ian in many respects, evan­gel­i­cals can’t and shouldn’t seek to dom­i­nate nation­al lead­er­ship roles. A diverse soci­ety will draw its tal­ent from all quar­ters. But for that very rea­son, it can’t be healthy when near­ly one-quar­ter of the nation­al pop­u­la­tion is fail­ing to con­tribute its fair share.”
    • Gift link. Renn sees much but also has a few blind spots. Worth a pon­der.
  4. 10 Rea­sons Evan­gel­i­cals are Cringe (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “I don’t lose sleep over evangelicalism’s cringei­ness (at least not near­ly as much as I did when I was a teenag­er and being cringe was more offen­sive to me) because God did not let being cringe stop him from get­ting stuff done cul­tur­al­ly back when the Church was most­ly made up of illit­er­ate fish­er­men and he will bring about his work in the world regard­less of whether or not there are suf­fi­cient num­bers of evan­gel­i­cals among the elites. This is the most impor­tant rea­son, but it’s worth talk­ing about the issues Renn rais­es because some of the rea­sons are actu­al­ly good things that we should cel­e­brate and oth­ers are bad things that we should do some­thing about if we can.”
  5. My Crit­i­cism of the Ivy League Isn’t Hypocrisy (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Wall Street Jour­nal): “If you went to an elite school, informed dis­sent is seen as a kind of betray­al. If you didn’t, you might be writ­ten off as some­one who doesn’t know what he’s talk­ing about. It’s a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ sit­u­a­tion. Ben­e­fit­ing from a sys­tem, though, doesn’t mean you for­feit the right to cri­tique it. In most walks of life, insid­er knowl­edge makes a crit­ic more cred­i­ble, not less. Expe­ri­ence counts for some­thing. Who is bet­ter placed to crit­i­cize an insti­tu­tion than some­one who has seen it from the inside?”
  6. How the Deci­sion to Start a War Became the President’s (Char­lie Sav­age, New York Times): “It is sup­posed to be a foun­da­tion­al prin­ci­ple of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy that unless the Unit­ed States is under attack, the pow­er to declare war is vest­ed in Con­gress. But espe­cial­ly since the start of the Cold War, pres­i­dents of both par­ties have chipped away at that by claim­ing a right to order the mil­i­tary into var­i­ous lim­it­ed hos­tile sit­u­a­tions.… Suc­ces­sive admin­is­tra­tions built on their pre­de­ces­sors’ inno­va­tions, a one-way ratch­et expand­ing the cir­cum­stances in which pres­i­dents had claimed and demon­strat­ed that they could by them­selves deploy troops into com­bat.”
  7. SEIU Delen­da Est (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Code Ten): “Cal­i­for­nia lets inter­est groups pro­pose mea­sures for the state bal­lot. Any­one who gath­ers enough sig­na­tures (cur­rent­ly 874,641) can put their hare-brained plans before vot­ers dur­ing the next elec­tion year… The SEIU is known in Cal­i­for­nia polit­i­cal cir­cles for pio­neer­ing and per­fect­ing the art of extor­tion via bal­lot ini­tia­tive.… SEIU seems to have found a bug in direct democ­ra­cy: it incen­tivizes inter­est groups to search for the most destruc­tive pos­si­ble bal­lot ini­tia­tive that might nev­er­the­less get approved by low-infor­ma­tion vot­ers, since this gives them lever­age over any­one will­ing to bribe them into with­draw­ing their poi­son pill.”

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.