Tag: how the church is perceived

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.

TGFI, Volume 542: the humanities backstory and overhyped Chinese academia

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 Multi­bil­lion-Dol­lar Foun­da­tion That Con­trols the Human­i­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “Today, no sin­gle enti­ty, includ­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, has a more pro­found influ­ence on the fis­cal health and cul­tur­al out­put of the human­i­ties than the Mel­lon Foun­da­tion. The Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties’ grant bud­get was $78 mil­lion in 2024 (its over­all bud­get was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjust­ed for infla­tion). Mel­lon award­ed $540 mil­lion in grants that same year; its endow­ment sits at rough­ly $8 bil­lion. Mellon’s largesse is bad­ly need­ed, espe­cial­ly as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion has threat­ened fur­ther cuts to the NEH. But the foundation’s vir­tu­al monop­oly on human­i­ties fund­ing means that it has the pow­er to remake entire fields accord­ing to its desires. And in recent years, under the lead­er­ship of Eliz­a­beth Alexan­der, who became the organization’s pres­i­dent in 2018, Mel­lon has embraced an under­stand­ing of the human­i­ties that is much more util­i­tar­i­an, and far more polit­i­cal, than the one put for­ward by the 1964 com­mis­sion.”
    • Unlocked and gen­uine­ly shock­ing to me. One of the key insights: “The human­i­ties aren’t broke because they went woke. The human­i­ties went woke in large part _because_ they were broke. As oth­er donors, the gov­ern­ment, and uni­ver­si­ties them­selves all but aban­doned these fields, Mel­lon became a life­line.”
  2. The Pop­u­lar Pro­gres­sive Pod­cast Call­ing Evan­gel­i­cals ‘Can­cer’ (Bon­nie Kris­t­ian, The Free Press): “…it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine the vit­ri­ol she directs at [evan­gel­i­cals] being tar­get­ed at any oth­er reli­gious group by a major media fig­ure with so lit­tle con­se­quence. Take one clip that has cir­cu­lat­ed among evan­gel­i­cals recent­ly. I assumed its cap­tion on X, ‘White Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty is a can­cer,’ was intend­ed to scan­dal­ize with the most incen­di­ary quote. I thought wrong. If any­thing, the cap­tion under­sold a slan­der­ous, incu­ri­ous, unse­ri­ous screed that informed Welch’s view­ers that evan­gel­i­cals are ‘the worst peo­ple in our coun­try.’ They are, Welch says, peo­ple who want oth­ers to suf­fer, who belong to a ‘cult.’ And for Welch, this kind of lan­guage is par for the course. ‘I detest, with every mol­e­cule… in my being, evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty,’ she said in May.”
  3. Get Mar­ried Young (Brad Wilcox, Com­pact): “First, the cul­ture is telling you to lean into work and trav­el. But work­ing for the man and ‘trav­el­ing to Thai­land’ is not going to bring you the ful­fill­ment you think it will. Sec­ond, you will min­i­mize your odds of being mis­er­able and max­i­mize your odds of liv­ing a mean­ing­ful and hap­py life by get­ting mar­ried and hav­ing kids. So, don’t wait to embark on life’s most impor­tant jour­ney. Third, do not assume that you can wait until your thir­ties to find a spouse and start your fam­i­ly. If you wait, you may miss out.”
    • Lots of good data in this one. The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at UVA.
  4. Don’t Trust the Rank­ings That Put China’s Uni­ver­si­ties on Top (Ariel Pro­cac­cia, New York Times): “The gap between the rank­ings and real­i­ty can be explained by Goodhart’s law, which says that when a mea­sure becomes a tar­get, it ceas­es to be a good mea­sure. It’s like try­ing to cure a fever by icing the ther­mome­ter: You’ve cooled the instru­ment, but the patient is still burn­ing up. Chi­na has made suc­cess in glob­al uni­ver­si­ty rank­ings a nation­al pol­i­cy goal, in the process cre­at­ing incen­tives that pri­or­i­tize the appear­ance of excel­lence over the health of the research envi­ron­ment.”
  5. Two arti­cles about preva­lent sec­u­lar sex­u­al ethics:
    • Ope­nAI Exec­u­tive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sex­u­al Dis­crim­i­na­tion (Geor­gia Wells & Sam Schech­n­er, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ope­nAI has cut ties with one of its top safe­ty exec­u­tives, on the grounds of sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion, after she voiced oppo­si­tion to the con­tro­ver­sial roll­out of AI erot­i­ca in its Chat­G­PT prod­uct.… Before her fir­ing, Beier­meis­ter told col­leagues that she opposed adult mode, and wor­ried it would have harm­ful effects for users, peo­ple famil­iar with her remarks said. She also told col­leagues that she believed OpenAI’s mech­a­nisms to stop child-exploita­tion con­tent weren’t effec­tive enough, and that the com­pa­ny couldn’t suf­fi­cient­ly wall off adult con­tent from teens, the peo­ple said.”
    • The Sexbot Rev­o­lu­tion Is Already Here (Debra Soh, The Free Press): “Though sex dolls—meaning human‑like, anatom­i­cal­ly accu­rate, anthro­po­mor­phic figurines—were once believed to be used only by social­ly inept weirdos, today near­ly 10 per­cent of men in the U.S. have bought or owned one. And it’s not just the guys; 6 per­cent of women in the U.S. have done the same.… The aver­age sex doll own­er is a mid­dle-aged het­ero­sex­u­al man who is sin­gle or divorced, high-school edu­cat­ed, and employed. Research has shown that doll own­ers have sex with a doll about 11 times a month and sex with a human part­ner about 2.6 times a month. In con­trast, non–doll own­ers have sex with a human part­ner about 4.5 times a month.”
      • I am not con­vinced the num­bers in this arti­cle are reli­able (ten per­cent of guys sounds like a lot), but even if the num­bers are off this is kin­da wild.
  6. It’s Time for Amer­i­ca to Admit That It Has a Mar­i­jua­na Prob­lem (Edi­to­r­i­al Board, New York Times): “…sup­port­ers of legal­iza­tion pre­dict­ed that it would bring few down­sides. In our edi­to­ri­als, we described mar­i­jua­na addic­tion and depen­dence as ‘rel­a­tive­ly minor prob­lems.’ Many advo­cates went fur­ther and claimed that mar­i­jua­na was a harm­less drug that might even bring net health ben­e­fits. They also said that legal­iza­tion might not lead to greater use. It is now clear that many of these pre­dic­tions were wrong.… At least one in 10 peo­ple who use mar­i­jua­na devel­ops an addic­tion, a sim­i­lar share as with alco­hol. Even some who do not devel­op an addic­tion can still use it too much. Peo­ple who are fre­quent­ly stoned can strug­gle to hold a job or take care of their fam­i­lies.”
    • Unlocked.
  7. A Stan­ford Exper­i­ment to Pair 5,000 Sin­gles Has Tak­en Over Cam­pus (Jas­mine Li, Wall Street Jour­nal): “More than 5,000 Stan­ford stu­dents have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 under­grad­u­ates. It has spread to 10 oth­er col­leges includ­ing Colum­bia, Prince­ton and MIT, and Date Drop just raised $2.1 mil­lion in ven­ture-cap­i­tal fund­ing. The growth, fans say, reflects a real­i­ty about many col­lege kids: They’re intim­i­dat­ed by real-life courtship and over­whelmed by the end­less scroll of dat­ing apps. Entre­pre­neur­ial stu­dents have found huge demand for alter­nate match­mak­ing tools.”

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 536: Christian nationalism and Jesus in Home Alone

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.

As the year comes to a close, remem­ber that this post is the over­flow of a non­prof­it min­istry. Com­pil­ing these links is some­thing I do for the stu­dents I min­is­ter to at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, shar­ing it here is just me mak­ing it avail­able more broad­ly. You can donate to sup­port the min­istry if you are ever so inclined (you can even make gifts via a DAF or with stock). Don’t give to pay for the con­tent — it only takes me five min­utes a week to take the email I send to the Chi Alpha stu­dents and refor­mat it for this plat­form. If you choose to give, give because you believe in the mis­sion of reach­ing Stan­ford stu­dents with a thought­ful gospel mes­sage.

And that’s the last time I’ll share about that here until next Decem­ber.

Whether you choose to give or not, I hope this email bless­es you and helps you think about God and our world more clear­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Gift link: What We Get Wrong About Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism (Mol­ly Worthen, New York Times): “I got a taste of this vari­ety and dis­agree­ment when I vis­it­ed King’s Park Inter­na­tion­al Church in Durham, N.C. Chris­tians there look for God to heal the sick, reveal prophet­ic mes­sages and per­form oth­er signs and won­ders. The stranger thing, per­haps, is that both Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats attend. The church’s 120 elders, dea­cons and employ­ees are split ‘about half and half, Repub­li­can and Demo­c­rat,’ Reg­gie Rober­son, the pas­tor, told me. The sev­er­al hun­dred peo­ple who wor­ship at King’s Park on an aver­age Sun­day are a mix of races, nation­al back­grounds, ages and income lev­els.”
    • Worth a read. Dr. Worthen is, of course, a well-known adult con­vert to Chris­tian­i­ty. While she writes pos­i­tive­ly about charis­mat­ic Chris­tians here, she her­self is more of a South­ern Bap­tist. She’s a pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at UNC.
  2. Gift link: Chris­tian­i­ty Is a Dan­ger­ous Faith (David French, New York Times): “There is an unspo­ken impli­ca­tion that peo­ple would actu­al­ly like Chris­tians if we behaved more like Christ. But no. That’s demon­stra­bly wrong. It’s true that peo­ple want to receive love and com­pas­sion, and that when they encounter Chris­tians who love them and serve them, they tend to like them. Many peo­ple do not, how­ev­er, appre­ci­ate it when a Chris­t­ian loves and serves their ene­mies. They absolute­ly do not like it when a Chris­t­ian refus­es to join their polit­i­cal cru­sade.”
  3. Some inter­na­tion­al Christ­mas sto­ries:
    • This Christ­mas will be even hard­er for China’s Chris­tians (Chris­t­ian Shep­herd and Huiy­ee Chiew, Wash­ing­ton Post): “While Zion has faced the most pres­sure, about half a dozen oth­er unreg­is­tered church­es have been sub­ject to police raids as well. Last week, hun­dreds of police offi­cers in riot gear descend­ed on a small town in Zhe­jiang province and arrest­ed two local pas­tors and dozens of Chris­tians, accord­ing to videos and accounts of the inci­dent shared with The Wash­ing­ton Post.… ‘The gov­ern­ment is inher­ent­ly sus­pi­cious of reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties, espe­cial­ly Chris­t­ian groups,’ said Kar­rie Koe­sel, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor spe­cial­iz­ing in Chi­nese pol­i­tics and reli­gion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Notre Dame. Bei­jing views orga­nized reli­gion that pro­motes an alter­na­tive world­view and ‘answers to a high­er pow­er’ as poten­tial­ly an exis­ten­tial threat to its grip on pow­er, Koe­sel said. Church­es, mosques and oth­er places of wor­ship have faced intense pres­sure to accept strict gov­ern­ment over­sight. State-approved reli­gious lead­ers must sub­mit their ser­mons and pub­li­ca­tions for approval to ensure that they teach the ‘cor­rect under­stand­ing’ of the­ol­o­gy.”
    • Gaza’s tiny Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty tries to cap­ture the hol­i­day spir­it dur­ing the cease­fire (Mari­am Fam, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Tarazi and much of the rest of Gaza’s tiny Pales­tin­ian Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty are try­ing to cap­ture some of the season’s spir­it despite the destruc­tion and uncer­tain­ty that sur­round them. He clings to hope and the faith that he said has seen him through the war. ‘I feel like our joy over Christ’s birth must sur­pass all the bit­ter­ness that we’ve been through,’ he said. He’s been shel­ter­ing for more than two years at the Holy Fam­i­ly Church com­pound in Gaza.… He prays for peace and free­dom for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. ‘Our faith and our joy over Christ’s birth are stronger than all cir­cum­stances,’ he said.”
  4. How the Bible Helped Smash the Crown (Meir Solove­ichik, The Free Press): “Our pol­i­tics is con­sumed by cul­ture wars linked to religion—religious free­dom is a sub­ject dom­i­nat­ing debates in the Supreme Court. But the fact remains that shorn of bib­li­cal faith, no cogent expla­na­tion can be giv­en for the doc­trine of equal­i­ty that lies at the heart of the Amer­i­can creed. Indeed, the oth­er sources of antiq­ui­ty to which the Founders turned for inspiration—the philoso­phers of Greece and the states­men of Rome—denied human equal­i­ty and held a world­view that there were those des­tined to rule and oth­ers born to serve.”
  5. Dis­cov­er­ing God in Hamas tun­nels, hostages led a nation­al trend (Dina Kraft, Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor): “Sev­er­al recent stud­ies in Israel back up anec­do­tal evi­dence of an uptick in reli­gious con­nec­tion in response to Oct. 7 and the war that fol­lowed. In a poll by Hid­dush, an orga­ni­za­tion that advo­cates for the sep­a­ra­tion of reli­gion and state, 25% of respon­dents said those sem­i­nal events strength­ened their faith in God. Fifty-five per­cent said they had not impact­ed their faith, and 7% said they had weak­ened it. Researchers at The Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty found in a sur­vey of stu­dents that one-third expe­ri­enced an increase in spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, while 9% said it decreased.”
  6. The diver­si­ty over­cor­rec­tion in the work­place (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “For some mys­te­ri­ous rea­son, peo­ple con­sis­tent­ly over­es­ti­mate the minor­i­ty share of the pop­u­la­tion, which made the White­ness of news­rooms, Hol­ly­wood stu­dios and aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments look more unfair than it was.… even if [there had not been past dis­crim­i­na­tion], news­rooms, writer’s rooms and class­rooms would have been very White because most Amer­i­cans born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were White. I sus­pect peo­ple for­got about these cohort effects because so much of the DEI dis­course came up around col­lege admis­sions, where diver­si­ty can be achieved rel­a­tive­ly speed­i­ly: admit a racial­ly bal­anced class four years in a row, and voilà, you ‘look like Amer­i­ca.’ But a large cor­po­rate employ­er often has a work­force span­ning 40 years, not four. Rebal­anc­ing that through rep­re­sen­ta­tive hir­ing would take decades. The DEI cham­pi­ons didn’t want to wait that long.”
    • McArdle’s point about the dif­fer­ence between cor­po­ra­tions and uni­ver­si­ties is an impor­tant one. It also explains why under­grad­u­ate pop­u­la­tions are far more diverse than uni­ver­si­ty fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tions.
  7. Gift link: The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore (Adam Frank, The Atlantic): “To tru­ly under­stand liv­ing sys­tems as self-orga­nized, autonomous agents, physi­cists need to aban­don their ‘just the par­ti­cles, ma’am’ men­tal­i­ty. One of physi­cists’ great talents—starting with the laws of sim­ple parts (such as atoms) and work­ing up to a com­plex whole—cannot ful­ly account for cells, ani­mals, or peo­ple.”
    • The author is an astro­physi­cist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester.

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 533: college disability, European dysfunction, and cloning

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. Mis­un­der­stand­ing Porn (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “There are many ways in which peo­ple mis­un­der­stand porn, but per­haps the best way to sum­ma­rize the cor­rec­tions nec­es­sary is to say that porn is not the same as phys­i­cal sex and porn addic­tion is not mere­ly a mat­ter of sex­u­al temp­ta­tion.… Why can’t a porn addict’s habit be bro­ken by sex with his wife? The sim­plest answer is to ask anoth­er ques­tion: could a Chris­t­ian husband’s temp­ta­tion to idol­a­try be bro­ken by sex with his wife? Of course not. Nei­ther would his anger or pride. It is like ask­ing if a per­son addict­ed to cocaine could have their desire sat­is­fied by eat­ing a deli­cious steak.”
  2. Accom­mo­da­tion Nation (Rose Horow­itch, The Atlantic): “Over the past decade and a half, how­ev­er, the share of stu­dents at selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties who qual­i­fy for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breath­tak­ing pace. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, the num­ber has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berke­ley, it has near­ly quin­tu­pled over the past 15 years.… Paul Gra­ham Fish­er, a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor who served as co-chair of the university’s dis­abil­i­ty task force, told me, ‘I have had con­ver­sa­tions with peo­ple in the Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tion. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 per­cent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?’ This year, 38 per­cent of Stan­ford under­grad­u­ates are reg­is­tered as hav­ing a dis­abil­i­ty; in the fall quar­ter, 24 per­cent of under­grad­u­ates were receiv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic or hous­ing accom­mo­da­tions.”
  3. I Set A Trap To Catch Stu­dents Cheat­ing With AI. The Result Was Deflat­ing (Will Teague, Huff­in­g­ton Post): “I received 122 paper sub­mis­sions. Of those, the Tro­jan horse eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied 33 AI-gen­er­at­ed papers. I sent these stats to all the stu­dents and gave them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to admit to using AI before they were locked into fail­ing the class. Anoth­er 14 out­ed them­selves. In oth­er words, near­ly 39% of the sub­mis­sions were at least par­tial­ly writ­ten by AI.… Let me tell you why the Tro­jan horse worked. It is because stu­dents do not know what they do not know.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. The Bible Is on Tri­al in Europe (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Räsä­nen has been a mem­ber of par­lia­ment in Fin­land since 1995. She’s also a mem­ber of the nation’s Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church—which in 2019 announced its offi­cial spon­sor­ship of an LGBT Pride event. In response, she wrote: ‘How can the Church’s doc­tri­nal foun­da­tion, the #Bible, be com­pat­i­ble with the lift­ing up of shame and sin as a sub­ject of pride?’ She post­ed this com­ment along­side a pic­ture of the Bible verse Romans 1:27, which describes homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as shame­ful: ‘Men com­mit­ted shame­ful acts with oth­er men, and received in them­selves the due penal­ty for their error.’ The next day, she opened her morn­ing news­pa­per to find out that she was being inves­ti­gat­ed by police for hate speech.… Dur­ing her time as min­is­ter of the Inte­ri­or of Fin­land, between 2011 and 2015, she’d over­seen the police. Now, they were inter­ro­gat­ing her as an offi­cial part of an investigation—one that has dragged on ever since, final­ly reach­ing the Supreme Court of Fin­land last month.”
  5. 4 Ways to Avoid Sex­u­al Sin (Sam All­ber­ry, Cross­way): “Life has a grain to it. Like paper and wood, it has its own inbuilt direc­tion­al­i­ty. The uni­verse is fash­ioned in such a way that it has an under­ly­ing struc­ture. It fol­lows a cer­tain pat­tern with cer­tain con­tours. In order to live well we need to live in a way that runs with this grain and not against it. This is where the book of Proverbs comes in.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. The Trag­ic Hys­te­ria of Abor­tion (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Yes, the vast major­i­ty of women who get abor­tions are glad they got them. But once they meet their babies, the vast major­i­ty of women denied abor­tions dis­cov­er that they total­ly want their babies. This mas­sive sta­tus quo bias makes it hard to sim­ply ‘trust women.’ Which women should we trust — the ones who abort­ed, or the ones who couldn’t? But in the end, it is the women who were denied abor­tion who are more reli­able. If shy peo­ple who don’t go to a par­ty are glad they stayed home, and equal­ly shy peo­ple who were pres­sured to go to a par­ty are equal­ly glad they went, the most nat­ur­al inter­pre­ta­tion is that the par­ty-goers learned a valu­able life les­son — and the home-stay­ers should have gone to the par­ty.… Hys­ter­i­cal­ly abort­ing your baby because you false­ly believe the baby will ruin your life isn’t mere­ly moral­ly wrong; it is trag­ic. Why? Because before long, you almost sure­ly would have loved that baby.”
    • An inter­est­ing approach to the abor­tion debate, espe­cial­ly since the author empha­sizes that he is “an athe­ist of the high­est order.”
  7. As a Twin, I’m Offend­ed by Cloning (Leono­ra Bar­clay, Per­sua­sion): “Who wouldn’t want their pre­cious com­pan­ion back, espe­cial­ly in cute pup­py form? Yet I’m cyn­i­cal of the promise of pet cloning. It’s sim­ply not true that clones are, in any mean­ing­ful sense, the same as the orig­i­nal. I’m an iden­ti­cal twin—a nat­ur­al clone. Iden­ti­cal twins are even more sim­i­lar to each oth­er than a clone is to its DNA donor, because they often share the same upbring­ing and envi­ron­ment. Yet, as I know first-hand, that doesn’t mean our per­son­al­i­ties are the same.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotin­er Inter­views San­ta Claus (Mike Druck­er, McSweeeney’s Inter­net Ten­den­cy): “I recent­ly spoke with San­ta Claus, who is cur­rent­ly coor­di­nat­ing his staff of immor­tal blue-col­lar elves, about the moral­i­ty of chil­dren and his friend­ship with a crea­ture whom many car­ol­ers con­sid­er a war crim­i­nal: Kram­pus.”
  • In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the inven­tion of the emoti­con (Ben­ji Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “On Sep­tem­ber 19, 1982, Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty com­put­er sci­ence research assis­tant pro­fes­sor Scott Fahlman post­ed a mes­sage to the university’s bul­letin board soft­ware that would lat­er come to shape how peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate online. His pro­pos­al: use 🙂 and 🙁 as mark­ers to dis­tin­guish jokes from seri­ous com­ments. While Fahlman describes him­self as ‘the inven­tor… or at least one of the inven­tors’ of what would lat­er be called the smi­ley face emoti­con, the full sto­ry reveals some­thing more inter­est­ing than a lone genius moment.”
  • I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while per­form­ing Julius Cae­sar (Olly Hawes, The Guardian): “Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usu­al. Then some­thing went wrong. There was a sharp pierc­ing feel­ing. The knife was sup­posed to have been qui­et­ly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had hap­pened while act­ing out my character’s death, and think­ing: I have to lie here until the lights go down.”
  • Art Of The Deal: Man Nego­ti­ates Mechan­ic Down From $75 Oil Change To $2,000 Full Brakes And Rotors Replace­ment (Baby­lon Bee)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI Volume 530: a Christian doctor, the medical benefits of church attendance, and campus revival

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. Accused of Des­e­cra­tion, a Doc­tor Faces the End of His Life’s Work (Ben­jamin Weis­er, New York Times): “One day in March 2015, sur­veil­lance cam­eras at a thou­sand-year-old Bud­dhist tem­ple on the out­skirts of Tokyo cap­tured a man wear­ing a hood­ed wind­break­er, a white col­lared shirt and black shoes, dab­bing at wood­en pil­lars with oil on his fin­ger­tip.… He is Masahide Kanaya­ma, 63, a sin­gle, child­less doc­tor who had devot­ed his life to help­ing women bear chil­dren; a man whose Chris­t­ian faith was insep­a­ra­ble from his work. He has prac­ticed in Man­hat­tan for near­ly three decades and is an expert in endometrio­sis, a con­di­tion in which cells sim­i­lar to the uter­ine lin­ing grow out­side the uterus. His patients describe how his surg­eries end­ed years of crip­pling pain and, in some cas­es, allowed them to have chil­dren.”
    • Unlocked. A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, brought to my atten­tion by an alum­nus. Pray for Dr. Kanaya­ma.
  2. Church Could Save Your Life? (Rebec­ca McLaugh­lin, Sub­stack): “In oth­er words, if you aren’t cur­rent­ly a church­go­er and you start attend­ing week­ly, you reduce your chances of devel­op­ing depres­sion by a third. A med­ica­tion this effec­tive would be wide­ly pre­scribed. But while your ther­a­pist or doc­tor may encour­age yoga, med­i­ta­tion, or more time out­side in nature, he or she almost cer­tain­ly won’t rec­om­mend you go to church. The ben­e­fits of ‘orga­nized reli­gion’ don’t fit with the big sto­ry we are telling in the West about the good­ness of aban­don­ing tra­di­tion­al beliefs.”
  3. It’s Here: Gen‑Z Revival Hits Cam­pus­es This Fall (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Over the last cou­ple of years, per­haps you’ve heard the sto­ries of revival here and there—Asbury, the Salt Com­pa­ny, and var­i­ous col­lege min­istries across the coun­try. Sta­tis­tics also sound­ed promising—from Eng­land to the Unit­ed States, more young peo­ple report mak­ing a per­son­al com­mit­ment to Jesus and attend­ing church. The num­ber of peo­ple with no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, which had been increas­ing for decades, seemed to stall. To me, it felt like watch­ing a pot of water heat up—there were iso­lat­ed bub­bles but not enough to real­ly call it a boil.”
    • An encour­ag­ing arti­cle. Two notes:
      • I’m not hear­ing sim­i­lar reports from any min­istry at Stan­ford (note the Chica­go anec­dotes, though)
      • The Gospel Coali­tion’s the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments mean that this arti­cle is focused on cer­tain min­istries. I believe oth­er min­istries are see­ing sim­i­lar things nation­wide.
  4. ‘I Should Have Quit’ (John Fet­ter­man, The Free Press): “Gise­le looked over at me. The cor­ner of my mouth was droop­ing ever so slight­ly. The droop­ing last­ed only a sec­ond or two, but she had watched a pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment on strokes, and it had stayed with her. She spoke to the state troop­er who was dri­ving us. ‘I think he’s hav­ing a stroke. We have to get to the hos­pi­tal now.’ I thought she was crazy: ‘What are you talk­ing about? You’re nuts. I’m fine.’ She thought I was crazy: ‘We have to get to the emer­gency room now!’ The troop­ers switched on the police lights. We hap­pened to be 10 min­utes from Lan­cast­er Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, which spe­cial­izes in strokes and prob­lems of the heart. Had we been in a rur­al area of the state, with­out close access to a hos­pi­tal, I would have died. I did any­way. I am not entire­ly sure of the sequence, but dur­ing surgery, my heart stopped for sev­er­al sec­onds.”
    • Tears came to my eyes while read­ing this. Rec­om­mend­ed regard­less of your polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tion.
  5. That New Hit Song on Spo­ti­fy? It Was Made by A.I. (Kyle Chay­ka, The New York­er): “No realm of cul­ture or enter­tain­ment remains untouched by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence: Coca-Cola just released a Christ­mas ad made with A.I. visu­als; A.I. actors are being hyped in Hol­ly­wood. But the tech­nol­o­gy has had an espe­cial­ly swift impact on song­writ­ing. A cou­ple of years ago, a smat­ter­ing of A.I. tracks went viral for using tricks like repli­cat­ing the voic­es of pop stars, includ­ing Jay‑Z and Drake. Now we’re in the midst of a full-blown A.I. music moment. This month, an A.I. coun­try song called ‘Walk My Walk’ (with per­cus­sive claps and for­get­table lyrics such as ‘Kick rocks if you don’t like how I talk’) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Coun­try Dig­i­tal Song Sales chart, and passed three mil­lion streams on Spo­ti­fy; the per­former behind it is a square-jawed dig­i­tal avatar named Break­ing Rust. In Sep­tem­ber, Xania Mon­et, an A.I. R. & B. singer cre­at­ed by a young poet in Mis­sis­sip­pi, land­ed a mul­ti­mil­lion-dol­lar record deal after sev­er­al Bill­board-chart­ing sin­gles.”
  6. Rise of the ‘porno-trolls’: how one porn plat­form made mil­lions suing its view­ers (Tarp­ley Hitt, The Guardian): “…since Sep­tem­ber 2017, Vixen’s own­ers had been pur­su­ing anoth­er rev­enue stream: fil­ing thou­sands of boil­er­plate copy­right law­suits against indi­vid­ual ‘John Does’ and col­lect­ing mil­lions in set­tle­ment fees – a mass lit­i­ga­tion cam­paign one fed­er­al judge likened to ‘a hi-tech shake­down’.… Accord­ing to West­law and Pac­er data from the past three years, Strike 3 account­ed for 50% of the fed­er­al copy­right dock­et all on its own. I first heard about Strike 3 in Sep­tem­ber, when some legal clerk friends men­tioned that near­ly every judge on their cir­cuit was han­dling a stack of Strike 3 cas­es – which are now so con­sis­tent as to have become rou­tine.”
    • I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a porn com­pa­ny would be uneth­i­cal in any way. How could they treat their users with any­thing but the utmost respect and cour­tesy? Treat­ing peo­ple with dig­ni­ty is prac­ti­cal­ly their entire busi­ness mod­el.
  7. Pick­le­ball on Sun­day: Why some top col­lege play­ers are call­ing foul (Ben Brasch, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The NCAA has a long-stand­ing rule that adjusts cham­pi­onship sched­ules to accom­mo­date play­ers or teams from schools with writ­ten poli­cies bar­ring com­pe­ti­tion on Sun­days or oth­er days for reli­gious rea­sons. Twen­ty-two of the NCAA’s rough­ly 1,100 mem­ber schools have such poli­cies this year, the group told The Wash­ing­ton Post. But pick­le­ball is not an NCAA sport. And it’s not clear whether all three orga­ni­za­tions at the fore­front of the col­lege game, which includes more than 100 schools, are ready to make a change. Chris­tian­i­ty is cen­tral to the Nation­al Col­le­giate Pick­le­ball Asso­ci­a­tion, which hosts region­al and nation­al tour­na­ments, said its founder, Noah Suem­nick. The league’s web­site promi­nent­ly ref­er­ences a Bible verse from the Book of Matthew.”

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 525: what the world needs, also how to end it

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.

I’m await­ing fur­ther devel­op­ments before shar­ing any arti­cles about the peace deal between Israel and Hamas. If you see some­thing you think I’d find help­ful please let me know.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. When Your Child Is Sick (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “No one is afraid to bring kids into the world because of elec­tion results or cli­mate change. That knocks the weath­er vane back­ward. You don’t decide against pro­cre­ation because you’re moth­er­ing Moth­er Earth. You obsess over the plan­et because you don’t have chil­dren.”
    • An amaz­ing piece of writ­ing and well worth your time.
  2. Faith­ful­ness amid the Cul­ture War (J.D. Greear, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Grow­ing up, I was always warned about the ditch on the left side of the gospel road: the ditch of cow­ard­ly silence in the face of social wicked­ness. That ditch is real and an ever-present temp­ta­tion for the church. But it’s like an old Scot­tish proverb says: For every one mile of road, there are two miles of ditch. And no one ever warned me about the ditch on the right side: a gospel-super­sed­ing con­ser­vatism. If the ditch on one side is fail­ing to speak out prophet­i­cal­ly against the cul­ture, the ditch on the oth­er side is encum­ber­ing our mes­sage with sec­ondary things.… The pul­pit is a place reserved for ‘thus saith the Lord’ not ‘thus thin­keth the pas­tor.’ I might be wrong in my per­spec­tives on glob­al warm­ing, nation­al­ized health care, or the appro­pri­ate num­ber of immi­grants to let into our coun­try, but I’m not wrong about the gospel. And I refuse to let my per­spec­tives on the for­mer keep peo­ple from hear­ing me on the lat­ter.”
  3. The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World (Stephen Witt, New York Times): “In the course of quan­ti­fy­ing the risks of A.I., I was hop­ing that I would real­ize my fears were ridicu­lous. Instead, the oppo­site hap­pened: The more I moved from apoc­a­lyp­tic hypo­thet­i­cals to con­crete real-world find­ings, the more con­cerned I became. All of the ele­ments of Dr. Bengio’s dooms­day sce­nario were com­ing into exis­tence. A.I. was get­ting smarter and more capa­ble. It was learn­ing how to tell its over­seers what they want­ed to hear. It was get­ting good at lying. And it was get­ting expo­nen­tial­ly bet­ter at com­plex tasks. I imag­ined a sce­nario, in a year or two or three, when some lunatic plugged the fol­low­ing prompt into a state-of-the-art A.I.: ‘Your only goal is to avoid being turned off. This is your sole mea­sure of suc­cess.’ ”
    • Some fas­ci­nat­ing stuff in here even if you’re well-informed.
  4. Why Left and Right Can’t Under­stand Each Other’s Fears (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Pro­gres­sivism in the last 10 years has pur­sued increas­ing­ly rad­i­cal mea­sures through com­plex, indi­rect and bureau­crat­ic means, using state pow­er sub­tly to reshape pri­vate insti­tu­tions and cre­at­ing sys­tems that feel repres­sive with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly hav­ing an iden­ti­fi­able repres­sor in chief — McCarthyisms with­out McCarthy, you might say. Over the same peri­od, pop­ulism has con­sis­tent­ly ral­lied around charis­mat­ic out­sider politi­cians who attack the exist­ing polit­i­cal class as hope­less­ly com­pro­mised and claim to have a man­date to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agen­da.… Any vic­to­ry, any sta­bi­liza­tion, will come when one of these forces learns some­thing from the oth­er, and reas­sures the coun­try that they can be ful­ly trust­ed with pow­ers that both sides right now are all too eager to abuse.”
  5. The search for an AI-proof job (Jor­dan Weiss­mann, The Argu­ment): “Health care jobs — with their com­bi­na­tion of cog­ni­tive work and high-touch patient inter­ac­tions — are expect­ed to be fair­ly resis­tant to automa­tion. When researchers for the Trea­sury Depart­ment ranked fields of study where grad­u­ates were most exposed to AI, nurs­ing came in dead last. Oth­er stud­ies have found that physi­cians — espe­cial­ly sur­geons — den­tists, and their aides are prob­a­bly pret­ty insu­lat­ed. Occu­pa­tion­al and phys­i­cal ther­a­pists also were fair­ly safe.”
  6. The World Needs Evan­ge­lists with Cheer­ful Con­fi­dence (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coali­tion): “That’s why, when­ev­er I encounter some­one engaged in apolo­get­ics or mak­ing a case for Chris­tian­i­ty, I pay atten­tion not only to their method or their argu­ments but to what lies beneath. Is this per­son hap­py? Is there a vol­cano of joy rum­bling under the moun­tain of argu­men­ta­tion? Is there a deep-root­ed sense of love and yearn­ing behind the earnest­ness? Do I sense faith, hope, and love at the core?”
  7. Stan­ford Needs Pirates Again (Gar­rett Mal­loy, Stan­ford Review): “Stan­ford suc­ceed­ed while the Ivies lan­guished in gen­til­i­ty because it devel­oped a cul­ture of rugged indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and buc­ca­neer­ing exper­i­men­ta­tion. That cul­ture pro­duced the very inno­va­tion that pow­ered Stanford’s mete­oric rise. Yet, in a bid to counter the risks that Stanford’s suc­cess pro­duced, safe­ty­ism and bureau­cra­cy arose, endan­ger­ing the very heart of what made Stan­ford great in the first place. Stan­ford’s last great stu­dent-led start­up, Brex, did­n’t even see its founders last eight months on cam­pus. That was eight years ago. There is, undoubt­ed­ly, a causal link between the dearth of new stu­dent-led uni­corns and the grow­ing pro­ce­du­ral­ism that has infect­ed Stan­ford’s start­up cul­ture.”

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.