Tag: how the church is perceived

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 501: college students, colleges, and youth in general



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 500: faith, China, and Trump

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

This is the 500th time I’ve com­posed this email. I thought I might do some­thing spe­cial this week to com­mem­o­rate that mile­stone, but there are too many inter­est­ing arti­cles I’ve run across — this will a reg­u­lar install­ment. Enjoy!

Maybe when we get to vol­ume 520 — that will sig­ni­fy ten years of emails.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­cans Haven’t Found a Sat­is­fy­ing Alter­na­tive to Reli­gion (Lau­ren Jack­son, New York Times): “America’s sec­u­lar­iza­tion was an immense social trans­for­ma­tion. Has it left us bet­ter off? Peo­ple are unhap­pi­er than they’ve ever been and the coun­try is in an epi­dem­ic of lone­li­ness. It’s not just sec­u­lar­ism that’s to blame, but those with­out reli­gious affil­i­a­tion in par­tic­u­lar rank low­er on key met­rics of well-being. They feel less con­nect­ed to oth­ers, less spir­i­tu­al­ly at peace and they expe­ri­ence less awe and grat­i­tude reg­u­lar­ly.”
    • Unlocked. Note that this is not in the opin­ion sec­tion (some­what sur­pris­ing­ly, it is in the style sec­tion). The author is an ex-Mor­mon.
  2. Ross Douthat: Why It’s Log­i­cal to Believe in God (Bari Weiss inter­view­ing Ross Douthat, The Free Press): “The book of Gen­e­sis begins with an admo­ni­tion: Fill the Earth, and sub­due it. We’ve done that. We have reached an inter­est­ing point in his­to­ry from a reli­gious point of view. And there’s a real­ly open question—where do we go next? Do we col­lapse? Do we go to the stars? Do we become tran­shu­man? Do we merge with the machines and so on? So, it’s a high-stakes moment. And if God exists and he has inten­tions for us, it’s real­ly impor­tant at a high-stakes moment to take those inten­tions into account. I think of peo­ple like Musk and Alt­man. The con­test for their lit­er­al souls is real­ly impor­tant to the whole future of the human race. If God exists, it’s a big moment. You want belief to win out over the alter­na­tives.”
  3. The Con­ven­tion­al Wis­dom Is That Chi­na Is Beat­ing Us. Non­sense. (Tyler Cowen, The Free Press): “The bot­tom line is that the smartest enti­ties in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be West­ern but like­ly even Amer­i­can in their intel­lec­tu­al and ide­o­log­i­cal ori­en­ta­tions for some while to come.… Mov­ing to a world where the AIs are the smartest enti­ties in Chi­na, rather than the CCP, is for Chi­na a rad­i­cal change—and one the CCP is prob­a­bly very afraid of. Much of the legit­i­ma­cy of the CCP sprang from its claim to be a wise man­ag­er of the Chi­nese lega­cy. But now it will be out­sourc­ing that man­age­ment to West­ern-based AI mod­els. From a West­ern geopo­lit­i­cal point of view, that could end up a lot bet­ter, and more effec­tive, than plant­i­ng a bunch of spies in the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment.”
  4. Chris Tomlin’s New Song Res­ur­rects The World’s Old­est Known Hymn (Bob Smi­etana, The Roys Report): “A new ver­sion of the Oxyrhynchus Hymn debuted last week, cour­tesy of a new trans­la­tion from Dick­son and help from Chris Tom­lin and Ben Field­ing, two of the most pop­u­lar mod­ern wor­ship song­writ­ers.… ‘I think the most the­o­log­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant thing is that it’s a hymn to the Trin­i­ty — Father, Son and Holy Spir­it, the cen­tu­ry before the Nicene Creed,’ he said.”
  5. Belief in an After­life is Increas­ing in the Unit­ed States (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “In that first data col­lec­tion in 1973, about 76% of folks believed in some­thing beyond this life. But by 1990, that fig­ure had crept up to just about 80% and it con­tin­ued to rise very slow­ly from there. Real­ly, from 2000 all the way through 2022, the esti­mates are all basi­cal­ly the same. Even today, the share of Amer­i­cans who believe in life after death is 82%. When peo­ple ask me, “Is the Unit­ed States a reli­gious coun­try?” This is the stat that I’m going to trot out.’ ”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. The Rot­ten Fruit of Oberge­fell: On the Kel­ly Lov­ing Act (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “For the past ten years we have already held, as a nation, that the state defines mar­riage. Why then should the state not also get to define what a par­ent is or what good par­ent­ing is? The Kel­ly Lov­ing Act, in oth­er words, is an obvi­ous out­work­ing of the log­ic of Oberge­fell, the Supreme Court rul­ing that rede­fined mar­riage.”
  7. Trump is all over the news. Here are some things that caught my inter­est. Remem­ber that my shar­ing an arti­cle is not a sign that I agree with it com­plete­ly, it is a mere­ly a sign that I think it makes points or tells a sto­ry worth con­sid­er­ing. See the dis­claimers at the bot­tom: I assure you they are heart­felt.
    • Get Out by Good Fri­day, Feds Say to Afghan Chris­tians (John McCor­ma­ck, The Dis­patch): “Ahmad’s con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty after attend­ing a uni­ver­si­ty in Afghanistan led to his impris­on­ment by the Taliban—where he said he was beat­en and tor­tured via elec­tric shock—before fel­low Chris­tians were able to ran­som him from Tal­iban cap­tiv­i­ty. The same Chris­tians who got Ahmad out of prison then got him out of Afghanistan by help­ing him trav­el to Brazil. Ahmad tra­versed on foot the Dar­ién Gap that con­nects Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca for three days and ultimately—after pre­sent­ing him­self at the south­ern U.S. bor­der seek­ing asylum—made a home for him­self in Raleigh.…  Ahmad, like some oth­er Afghans legal­ly liv­ing in the Unit­ed States, received a let­ter from the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty (DHS) telling him he must leave the coun­try by Good Fri­day.”
    • Prece­dent Trump (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “It has been a dream of the left for ages to get rid of the tax-exempt sta­tus and rel­a­tive auton­o­my of reli­gious institutions—Christian uni­ver­si­ties, char­i­ties, hos­pi­tals, etc. If Trump suc­ceeds in mak­ing the IRS revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt sta­tus, based in no small part on per­son­al oppo­si­tion to what Har­vard teach­es, what will be the prin­ci­pled objec­tion to a Pres­i­dent Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez or Eliz­a­beth War­ren when the Eye of Mor­dor swings right­ward?”
    • No, the Pres­i­dent Has Not Defied a Supreme Court Rul­ing (Jeb Ruben­feld, The Free Press): “Due process is a bul­wark of the Con­sti­tu­tion and the rule of law, and the courts must not allow its vio­la­tion. But Trump oppo­nents, like Pro­fes­sor Sny­der, are mak­ing a mis­take when they try to paint this case as a mas­sive assault on due process. For now at least, this case is anoth­er exam­ple of the hyper­bole over a Trump run-in with the courts out­run­ning the facts of the case.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of con­sti­tu­tion­al law at Yale. I found this arti­cle reas­sur­ing in the abstract, while still being dis­pleased over the par­tic­u­lars of this case. There’s a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between deport­ing some­one from the coun­try and deport­ing them into a for­eign prison.
    • Inside the ‘Trop­i­cal Gulag’ in El Sal­vador Where U.S. Detainees Are Being Held (Annie Cor­re­al, New York Times): “Deaths and phys­i­cal abuse in CECOT remain undoc­u­ment­ed because of a lack of access to inmates or any­one who has been released, said Juani­ta Goe­ber­tus, Amer­i­c­as direc­tor at Human Rights Watch. But, she added, ‘Based on the tor­ture and mis­treat­ment we have doc­u­ment­ed in oth­er pris­ons in El Sal­vador, we have every rea­son to believe that peo­ple sent to CECOT are at high risk of abuse.’ The U.S. gov­ern­ment itself spot­light­ed atroc­i­ties in El Salvador’s pris­ons in 2023. At El Salvador’s two dozen oth­er jails, rights groups have doc­u­ment­ed sys­tem­at­ic tor­ture, forced con­fes­sions and what Noah Bul­lock, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Sal­vado­ran human rights group Cristos­al, calls ‘the inten­tion­al denial of access to basic neces­si­ties like food, water, health care, hygiene.’”
      • I find these alle­ga­tions plau­si­ble because of my belief in deprav­i­ty. Humans do bad things when they have peo­ple com­plete­ly under their con­trol, espe­cial­ly when there is lit­tle exter­nal over­sight or account­abil­i­ty. We may learn in time that the details are off, but the essen­tial com­plaint is almost cer­tain­ly cor­rect.
    • White House of Wor­ship: Chris­t­ian Prayer Rings Out Under Trump (Eliz­a­beth Dias & Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Rou­tine­ly, and often at Mr. Trump’s enthu­si­as­tic direc­tion, senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and allied pas­tors are infus­ing their brand of Chris­t­ian wor­ship into the work­ings of the White House itself, sug­gest­ing that his cam­paign promise to ‘bring back Chris­tian­i­ty’ is tak­ing tan­gi­ble root.… Mr. Trump’s team has host­ed brief­in­gs and lis­ten­ing ses­sions billed as oppor­tu­ni­ties for the lead­ers to share their par­tic­u­lar con­cerns, which have ranged wide­ly: reli­gious lib­er­ty, adop­tion and fos­ter care, the break­down of the nuclear fam­i­ly, human traf­fick­ing, urban pover­ty and anti­semitism, among oth­ers.”
    • All the President’s Pas­tors: Who’s Advis­ing Trump? (Har­vest Prude, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The pres­i­dent hasn’t pub­licly attend­ed a church ser­vice since his inau­gu­ra­tion day, he doesn’t hold mem­ber­ship in a par­tic­u­lar con­gre­ga­tion or denom­i­na­tion, he’s gone back and forth over whether he needs to ask for God’s for­give­ness, and he avoids speak­ing in detail about his per­son­al devo­tion­al life, so what we know about Trump’s faith comes large­ly from the pas­tors around him at the White House—starting with Paula White-Cain.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume #496: Christianity in Silicon Valley, Bogus World Happiness, and Smut

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Chris­tian­i­ty Was “Bor­der­line Ille­gal” in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Now It’s the New Reli­gion (Zoë Bernard, Van­i­ty Fair): “It used to be that the 20-some­thing whiz kid who cod­ed a viral game and dropped out of Stan­ford was a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist dar­ling. ‘VCs used to throw mon­ey at that guy,’ said a woman who man­ages com­mu­ni­ca­tions at a top-tier ven­ture firm. ‘Now if some­one comes in and says, ‘I love my par­ents so much, I grew up going to church, and then I joined the Army and that’s what gives me my work eth­ic,’ VCs will be like, ’Oh my God, that guy. Let’s fund that guy.’’ ”
  2. Sex With­out Women (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “…the force that through the green fuse dri­ves the flower (and the mon­ey) is het­ero­sex­u­al male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so var­ied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a gen­er­a­tion of men who think of porn not as a back­up to hav­ing sex, but as an improve­ment on it. They pre­fer it.”
  3. The World Hap­pi­ness Report Is a Sham (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “When you walk around the—admittedly beautiful—centers of Copen­hagen or Stock­holm, you rarely see any­body smile. Could these real­ly be the hap­pi­est places in the whole wide world? So, to hon­or World Hap­pi­ness Day, I final­ly decid­ed to fol­low my hunch, and look into the research on this top­ic more deeply. What I found was worse than I’d imag­ined. To put it polite­ly, the World Hap­pi­ness Report is beset with method­olog­i­cal prob­lems. To put it blunt­ly, it is a sham.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Johns Hop­kins.
  4. We Were Bad­ly Mis­led About the Event That Changed Our Lives (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “If any­one needs con­vinc­ing that the next pan­dem­ic is only an acci­dent away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a pres­ti­gious sci­en­tif­ic jour­nal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virol­o­gy (yes, the same insti­tu­tion), describe tak­ing sam­ples of virus­es found in bats (yes, the same ani­mal) and exper­i­ment­ing to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pan­dem­ic risk.… Why haven’t we learned our les­son? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the req­ui­site steps to keep us safe, with­out also admit­ting it was always risky. And that per­haps we were mis­led on pur­pose.”
  5. The real­i­ty of pros­ti­tu­tion is not com­plex. It is sim­ple (Rachel Moran, Psy­che): “So many of these women’s sto­ries stay with me: the 19-year-old French girl who got into pros­ti­tu­tion as a direct result of watch­ing a TV series that depict­ed pros­ti­tu­tion as glam­orous and empow­er­ing; the mid-20s Aus­tralian woman who believed – because well-fund­ed NGOs told her to believe – that ‘sex work’ was legit­i­mate employ­ment; or the ear­ly 20s Ger­man woman who told me that, because pimp­ing had been decrim­i­nalised in her coun­try, she’d got the mes­sage that what was legal­ly sanc­tioned sure­ly had to be OK. Just about every man in Ger­many seemed to have got the same mes­sage, and the result was social car­nage.”
    • The author was a pros­ti­tute from the ages of 15 to 22.
  6. As Trump Attacks Elite Col­leges, Their Usu­al Allies Are Nowhere in Sight (Ginia Bel­lafante, New York Times): “Pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties have come to find adver­saries in many worlds, among the work­ing class, among rich alum­ni, among high­ly edu­cat­ed pro­gres­sives who find them self-regard­ing.”
  7. Pow­er of Babel: Real-Time AI Trans­la­tion May Be Com­ing to Church Near You (Ale­ja Hert­zler-McCain, The Roys Report): “John Mehl, a teach­ing pas­tor at Colorado’s Tim­ber­line Church, and Miguel Flo­res Rob­les, the drum­mer in the wor­ship band at Timberline’s Wind­sor cam­pus, get along well, even though they don’t under­stand each other’s lan­guage. Flo­res, who is only flu­ent in Span­ish, also is unable to com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with the leader of the wor­ship band he plays for, even as he enjoys Mehl’s ser­mons, which are in Eng­lish. The answer to this rid­dle is arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence real-time trans­la­tion, a tech­nol­o­gy that has yet to become wide­spread in hous­es of wor­ship but is already pro­vid­ing a way for con­gre­ga­tions to wel­come mem­bers who don’t speak their lan­guage.”
    • I find it amus­ing that in the arti­cle Tim­ber­line is described as “non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al” although it is an Assem­blies of God con­gre­ga­tion.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 494: Religion at Elite Schools, Why Shrimp Must Die, and Funny Videos

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Does Reli­gion Look Like At Elite Uni­ver­si­ties? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Yeah, again, I am not bowled over by any huge dif­fer­ences in the reli­gious atten­dance of stu­dents at Ivy league schools ver­sus non-selec­tive insti­tu­tions. 49% of stu­dents who attend pres­ti­gious schools attend church less than once a year com­pared to 46% of stu­dents who go to a non-selec­tive school. So, those at the top end are slight­ly less reli­gious­ly active, but three points is cer­tain­ly not a chasm. That’s the gen­er­al trend here when com­par­ing across all types of atten­dance lev­els. For stu­dents at non-selec­tive schools, 19% say they attend reli­gious ser­vices about week­ly or more. It’s 14% of those at selec­tive schools. Again, a gap, but a rel­a­tive­ly small one.”
  2. Did God cre­ate log­ic? (J. Budziszews­ki, blog): “To say that He cre­at­ed log­ic would be to sug­gest that He could have done dif­fer­ent­ly and cre­at­ed illog­ic – that He could have allowed con­tra­dic­tions such as a man who is a don­key, or a two which is a three. But if I make a sen­tence by plac­ing the words ‘God can’ before a string of non­sense, that doesn’t make the sen­tence true, would it? Sen­tences like ‘Can God make a man who is not a man but a don­key?’ or ‘Can God make a two which is a three?’ wouldn’t even rise to the lev­el of being mean­ing­ful ques­tions. They would be like ask­ing ‘Can God moon­gog­gle twee­dledee?’ So we shouldn’t say that God can­not do these things, but that they can­not be done. A lot of things are exclud­ed from divine omnipo­tence not because God doesn’t have the pow­er to do them, but because in their very nature they are not ‘doable’ or pos­si­ble.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin.
  3. Three More Rea­sons Shrimp Must Die (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “All that to say, I am not insen­si­tive to the intu­ition many of us have that ani­mal tor­tur­ing real­ly is bad for some rea­son we strug­gle to artic­u­late. I think it’s because we all intu­it that ani­mal-tor­tur­ers are usu­al­ly peo­ple okay with tor­tur­ing humans too. But this leads to the wrong intu­ition that ani­mal pain per se is the yard­stick here, when real­ly virtue is the yard­stick: in fact peo­ple who are unusu­al­ly empa­thet­ic to ani­mals are prob­a­bly also peo­ple unusu­al­ly will­ing to tor­ture humans.”
  4. The Gov­ern­ment Knows A.G.I. is Com­ing (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “And while there is so much else going on in the world to cov­er, I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human his­to­ry, A.I. will have been the thing that mat­ters.”
    • A very long inter­view with the Biden admin’s spe­cial advis­er on AI which I found worth­while.
    • This part in par­tic­u­lar I’ll be think­ing about: “Samuel Ham­mond, who’s an econ­o­mist at the Foun­da­tion for Amer­i­can Inno­va­tion, had this piece months back called ‘Nine­ty-Five The­ses on A.I.’ One point he makes that I think about a lot is: If we had the capac­i­ty for per­fect enforce­ment, a lot of our cur­rent laws would be con­strict­ing. Laws are writ­ten with the knowl­edge that human labor is scarce. And there’s this ques­tion of what hap­pens when the sur­veil­lance state gets real­ly good. What hap­pens when A.I. makes the police state a very dif­fer­ent kind of thing than it is? What hap­pens when we have war­fare of end­less drones?”
  5. He Gave a Name to What Many Chris­tians Feel (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Mr. Renn has an unusu­al pro­file for some­one who has cap­tured the atten­tion of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism. He is not a pas­tor, an aca­d­e­m­ic or a politi­cian. He has no insti­tu­tion­al affil­i­a­tions with high-pro­file evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions. He is a mild-man­nered for­mer con­sul­tant with a wide-rang­ing Sub­stack whose top­ics include urban pol­i­cy, self-improve­ment and mas­culin­i­ty.”
    • Aaron Renn is a name famil­iar to read­ers of this email. This is a pret­ty good pro­file. Unlocked.
  6. How to Think About Using Gov­ern­ment Funds for Chris­t­ian Char­i­ty (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “As long as we live in bio­log­i­cal bod­ies, ‘biopol­i­tics’ are unavoid­able and a nat­ur­al law per­spec­tive does not dis­tin­guish between the government’s role in pre­vent­ing a mali­cious human actor that threat­ens your life or a non­hu­man virus, fire, or can­cer cell. In either case, the gov­ern­ment has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to pre­vent deaths that it is capa­ble of pre­vent­ing.”
    • A thought­ful piece; I found it help­ful.
  7. Roman Catholic Apolo­get­ics Is Surg­ing Online. Intend­ed Audi­ence? Protes­tants. (Andrew Voigt, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Where Protes­tant apolo­get­ics is more focused on win­ning the sec­u­lar world to Christ, Roman Catholic apolo­get­ics often has a dif­fer­ent audi­ence in mind: their ‘sep­a­rat­ed brethren.’ Tar­get­ing Protes­tants is explic­it­ly encour­aged.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 493: Christianity stabilizes in America, the truth about a spying monk, & why denominations struggle

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Christianity’s Decline in U.S. Appears to Have Halt­ed, Major Study Shows (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “After years of decline, the Chris­t­ian pop­u­la­tion in the Unit­ed States has been sta­ble for sev­er­al years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, accord­ing to a major new sur­vey from the Pew Research Cen­ter. And the num­ber of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed Amer­i­cans, which had grown steadi­ly for years, has also lev­eled off.… The sur­vey finds that 62 per­cent of adults in the Unit­ed States describe them­selves as Chris­tians, includ­ing 40 per­cent who iden­ti­fy as Protes­tant and 19 per­cent who are Catholic.”
  2. No Longer I Who Live (Antho­ny David, Com­ment): “Two years ago, I was ready to aban­don a biog­ra­phy I’d spent years try­ing to write when a fel­low his­to­ri­an threw me a life­line. The book was about the triple agent Her­mann Keller (1905–1970), a Bene­dic­tine mole embed­ded by con­spir­a­tors against Hitler into the upper ech­e­lons of the SS. Keller report­ed not only to the Ger­man resis­tance but also to the Vat­i­can and the British MI6. In the his­to­ry of espi­onage, few spies pen­e­trat­ed deep­er into ene­my ranks.”
    • The arti­cle is absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, espe­cial­ly for the detail that before her research Keller was wide­ly regard­ed as a vil­lain and not a hero. “By ear­ly 2011, I had fin­ished the book on [anoth­er guy], which was set to be pub­lished in Aus­tria. A few weeks before I was due to return the gal­leys, I shared them with a monk at the Dor­mi­tion who had asked to review the man­u­script before pub­li­ca­tion. When he saw what I wrote about Keller, he cau­tioned me against tak­ing his­to­ri­ans at their word. I should talk to some­one who knew him before pass­ing judg­ment.” She did pri­ma­ry research and real­ized the exist­ing con­sen­sus was very wrong. Her dis­cov­ery res­onat­ed with me. The more I read the more skep­ti­cal I become of extreme alle­ga­tions against dead Chris­tians. Vir­tu­al­ly every time I dig into some­thing in detail (the his­to­ry of mis­sions, the Cru­sades, the Inqui­si­tion, the church in Pro­hi­bi­tion, etc) I dis­cov­er that the default under­stand­ing of edu­cat­ed peo­ple is wrong and pre­dictably so. This isn’t to say all of church his­to­ry is exem­plary — some events deserve con­dem­na­tion. But even the bad events usu­al­ly weren’t as bad as com­mon­ly imag­ined. I find that most Stan­ford stu­dents’ assump­tions about the his­to­ry of the church and of Chris­tians is WAY more neg­a­tive than jus­ti­fied by the his­tor­i­cal record.
  3. what if its just life (Kris­ten Sanders, Sub­stack): “Dis­cern­ment is some­thing many Chris­tians uncon­scious­ly despise. Many would rather have the rules giv­en to them, with­out devi­a­tion, than choose for them­selves. No one wants to be left hold­ing the bag of their own life.”
  4. How Uni­ver­si­ties Get Away With Hir­ing Rad­i­cals (John D. Sail­er, City Jour­nal): “Usu­al­ly, a post­doc­tor­al fel­low­ship is just a small step in a scholar’s career. After a fel­low­ship ends, for­mer post­docs apply to com­pet­i­tive posi­tions on the open mar­ket. The diver­si­ty-focused fel­low-to-fac­ul­ty mod­el mod­i­fies this path­way. First, the pro­grams’ admin­is­tra­tors select fel­lows with spe­cial atten­tion to how they con­tribute to diver­si­ty. Fel­lows are then heav­i­ly favored for—often guaranteed—tenure-track posi­tions, bypass­ing a com­pet­i­tive search. It’s a side-door into the fac­ul­ty lounge.… Over the last five years, one in 20 tenure-track hires in the UC Sys­tem were for­mer president’s or chancellor’s post­doc­tor­al fel­lows.”
  5. Is Dis­trust Dri­ving the Rise in Non-Denom­i­na­tion­al­ism? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Non-denom­i­na­tion­al­ism is pred­i­cat­ed on the col­lapse of insti­tu­tion­al trust. Amer­i­cans, for myr­i­ad rea­sons, do not trust major insti­tu­tions. Banks, unions, big busi­ness, media and gov­ern­ment are all viewed with deep skep­ti­cism. Name­less and face­less CEOs and bureau­crats are wast­ing your mon­ey and tak­ing your free­dom. In reli­gion, there’s a sim­ple solu­tion to this. Kill the denom­i­na­tions. Voila. No more unac­count­able head office that wastes your mon­ey on projects to spruce up the nation­al head­quar­ters. In a non-denom­i­na­tion­al church, all the peo­ple who decide where the mon­ey goes are sit­ting right next to you in the pew. That’s a whole lot more account­abil­i­ty.”
  6. Would You Rather Have Mar­ried Young? (Lil­lian Fish­man, Met­ro­pol­i­tan Review): “This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowl­edge work­er, a writer, a left­ist — might regret her inde­pen­dent youth and wish she had mar­ried a lov­ing per­son at a young age. I’d asso­ci­at­ed this idea with a type of wom­an­hood we con­sid­ered total­ly out­side of our zone of inter­est: anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism, a belief in the pri­ma­cy of moth­er­hood. I was blind­sided by the sug­ges­tion that we might be bet­ter peo­ple if we were recused from for­ma­tive inde­pen­dence and strug­gle. I looked around at my friends and acquain­tances, espe­cial­ly the mar­ried ones, and won­dered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor cap­tains of their own ships, unmoored and often lone­ly, were in fact not remote­ly nec­es­sary or enlight­en­ing.”
  7. Some Mir­a­cles Hap­pen Super­nat­u­ral­ly. Oth­ers Hap­pen ‘Hyper­nat­u­ral­ly.’ (John Van Sloten, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Keath­ley defines hyper­nat­u­ral­ism as the ‘extra­or­di­nary use of nat­ur­al law by the God described in the Bible. When God acts hyper­nat­u­ral­ly, He employs nat­ur­al law and nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na in an extra­or­di­nary way to bring about His will.’… Per­haps this cat­e­go­ry helps peo­ple hold two oppo­sites togeth­er: that the world oper­ates in an empir­i­cal­ly explain­able way (a more basic def­i­n­i­tion of prov­i­dence) and that God occa­sion­al­ly inter­venes to accom­plish his will (through an exer­cise of spe­cial prov­i­dence). Hyper­nat­u­ral­ism describes one facet of how prov­i­dence and mir­a­cle over­lap.”

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.

Volume 491: a philosopher converts, a Christian cyborg, and a comedian riffs on pastors who scam

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How a Skep­ti­cal Philoso­pher Becomes a Chris­t­ian (Lar­ry Sanger, per­son­al blog): “When I real­ly sought to under­stand it, I found the Bible far more inter­est­ing and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expect­ing. I looked up answers to all my crit­i­cal ques­tions, think­ing that per­haps oth­ers had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out posi­tions about them. I did not believe their answers, which some­times struck me as con­trived or unlike­ly. But often, they were shock­ing­ly plau­si­ble. The Bible could sus­tain inter­ro­ga­tion; who knew? It slow­ly dawned on me that I was acquaint­ing myself with the two-thou­sand-year-old tra­di­tion of the­ol­o­gy. I found myself pos­i­tive­ly ashamed to real­ize that, despite hav­ing a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy, I had nev­er real­ly under­stood what the­ol­o­gy even is. The­ol­o­gy is, I found, an attempt to sys­tem­atize, har­mo­nize, expli­cate, and to a cer­tain extent jus­ti­fy the many, many ideas con­tained in the Bible. It is what ratio­nal peo­ple do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its rich­ness. The notion that the Bible might actu­al­ly be able to inter­est­ing­ly and plau­si­bly sus­tain such treat­ment is a propo­si­tion that had nev­er entered my head.”
    • Sanger, of course, is the co-founder of Wikipedia. He has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
    • Vague­ly relat­ed with a won­der­ful title is this review of Douthat’s new book Believe: The Erot­ic Case for God (Audrey Poll­now, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “If you are being chased by a tiger down a cor­ri­dor, and reach a T, one side of which you believe leads to more tigers and the oth­er leads to safe­ty (but you don’t know which is which), you had bet­ter guess and run. The alter­na­tive is to stay still and get eat­en by the first tiger. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should choose a love, faith, career or any­thing else on the basis of fran­tic anx­i­ety, just that the promise of ‘safe­ty’ offered by dis­be­lief, by stay­ing aloof, by refus­ing to act, is illu­so­ry. Psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­fort­ing, per­haps, but not a real form of safe­ty in any sense.”
  2. Meet the Chris­t­ian Cyborg Who Named His Brain Chip Eve (Maaike E. Harm­sen inter­view­ing Noland Arbaugh, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In this field, I don’t expect to see a lot of reli­gious people—in the tech field, the med­ical side of things. But then we start­ed meet­ing peo­ple face-to-face, and they met with me and my mom. My mom is very open with every­one about her faith, so it very quick­ly became known who we were. And I was blown away by the num­ber of peo­ple who shared our beliefs. I think about every­one that I met on the med­ical side; the vast major­i­ty of them were Chris­tians. We very quick­ly con­nect­ed with all of them on a very per­son­al lev­el. And it became more of an open dis­cus­sion. When I went in to do my surgery, the last thing I did before they put me under anes­the­sia was ask if I could pray over the room. And so I prayed over all the sur­geons and the nurs­es and every­one that was a part of this. My prayer was put on the hos­pi­tal inter­com, and even Elon was lis­ten­ing in by phone.”
    • Extreme­ly inter­est­ing. Unlocked.
  3. The Assem­blies of God: A Denom­i­na­tion That May Be Grow­ing (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to end this by point­ing to a rea­son that I believe that the AG has record­ed long term growth while most oth­er larg­er denom­i­na­tions have been going the oth­er direc­tion — the AG has con­tin­ued to move in the direc­tion of racial diver­si­fi­ca­tion. In 2001, the Assem­blies of God’s records indi­cate that 71% of their rank and file mem­ber­ship was white and anoth­er 16% were His­pan­ic. African Amer­i­cans were just 6% of mem­bers and Asians were only 3%. For ref­er­ence, the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion is cur­rent­ly 71% white, 3% His­pan­ic, and 20% Black. How­ev­er, the pews of the aver­age AG church today look a whole lot dif­fer­ent. Now, only 55% of those mem­bers are white, down 16 points in just 22 years. Mean­while, the Black share has near­ly dou­bled to 11% and the His­pan­ic por­tion has risen to 23%. That’s pret­ty impres­sive giv­en the inabil­i­ty of many oth­er denom­i­na­tions to become less white to reflect the chang­ing demo­graph­ics of the coun­try.”
    • Being an Assem­blies of God min­is­ter I liked this arti­cle a lot, and I even com­ment­ed on it to help explain some of the stats. Click through for details.
  4. Are Athe­ists Right? Is “Free Will” An Unnec­es­sary, Unim­por­tant Illu­sion? (J. Wern­er Wal­lace, blog): “In 2008, researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta and the Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia con­duct­ed exper­i­ments high­light­ing the rela­tion­ship between a belief in Deter­min­ism and immoral behav­ior. They found stu­dents who were exposed to deter­min­is­tic lit­er­a­ture pri­or to tak­ing a test were more like­ly to cheat on the test than stu­dents who were not exposed to lit­er­a­ture advo­cat­ing Deter­min­ism. The researchers con­clud­ed those who deny free will are more inclined to believe their efforts to act moral­ly are futile and are, there­fore, less like­ly to do so. In addi­tion, a study con­duct­ed by researchers from Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty and Ken­tucky Uni­ver­si­ty found par­tic­i­pants who were exposed to deter­min­is­tic lit­er­a­ture were more like­ly to act aggres­sive­ly and less like­ly to be help­ful toward oth­ers. Even deter­min­ist Michael Gaz­zani­ga con­cedes: ‘It seems that not only do we believe we con­trol our actions, but it is good for every­one to believe it.’ The exis­tence of free will is a com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tic of our expe­ri­ence, and when we deny we have this sort of free agency, there are detri­men­tal con­se­quences.”
  5. Don’t waste a per­fect­ly good decade (Suzanne Venker, Sub­stack): “The mes­sage these sons and daugh­ters receive is sim­ple: Do not pri­or­i­tize love. Get your career in order, and do not make sac­ri­fices for any­one. Life (i.e. mar­riage and fam­i­ly) will fall into place lat­er. And if you have to go into debt to achieve this goal, have at it. You can eas­i­ly pay it off lat­er.  This is spec­tac­u­lar­ly bad advice.”
    • Shared with me by a friend of the min­istry (I think in response to the arti­cle I shared last week).
    • Relat­ed in a nonob­vi­ous way: Why So Blue: Lib­er­al Women are Less Hap­py, More Lone­ly. But Why? (Grant Bai­ley & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Tak­en togeth­er, our analy­sis leads us to three con­clu­sions. First, the ide­o­log­i­cal divide in emo­tion­al well-being between young lib­er­al and con­ser­v­a­tive women endures. Sec­ond, this ide­o­log­i­cal divide does not appear to be just a con­se­quence of neg­a­tive think­ing; it also seems to flow from the fact that lib­er­al young women are less like­ly to be inte­grat­ed into core Amer­i­can institutions—specifically mar­riage and religion—that lend mean­ing, direc­tion, and a sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty to women’s lives. Third, low­er lev­els of mar­riage and church­go­ing among lib­er­al women may also have a hand in their ele­vat­ed reports of lone­li­ness, which, in turn, dimin­ish­es their odds of being hap­py.”
  6. The para­dox of Trump’s first weeks (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “I think there’s a sense in some quar­ters that Trump has accom­plished more in three weeks than Biden did in three years, but this is just not true. I do think it’s true that Biden achieved less durable pol­i­cy change than you’d expect rel­a­tive to the sums of mon­ey appro­pri­at­ed due to Democ­rats’ over-reliance on tem­po­rary pro­grams. But they still made sub­stan­tive changes in absolute terms on the areas they pri­or­i­tized, includ­ing pre­scrip­tion drug afford­abil­i­ty for senior cit­i­zens and clean ener­gy deploy­ment. Much of that seems like­ly to be kept in place by the new GOP tri­fec­ta.  Repub­li­cans, mean­while, are mak­ing very lit­tle for­ward progress on their leg­isla­tive agen­da.”
    • A fair analy­sis of the last few weeks. Pay less atten­tion to peo­ple claim­ing tri­umph or pro­claim­ing doom — pol­i­tics is com­pli­cat­ed and few moments have as much long-term sig­nif­i­cance as they seem to while they are dom­i­nat­ing the head­lines.
    • Relat­ed: The Strat­e­gy Behind Trump’s Defi­ance of the Law (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, The New York­er): “…what is play­ing out through a veneer of chaos is a delib­er­ate and orga­nized tac­ti­cal pro­gram to under­take actions that pro­voke a raft of law­suits, some of which could become good vehi­cles for estab­lish­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al vision in which the Pres­i­dent has sole author­i­ty over the entire exec­u­tive branch. That vision is not new: it’s known as the uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry and has a long pedi­gree, dat­ing back to the found­ing. Based on where the Supreme Court has been head­ing in its exec­u­tive-pow­er cas­es for some time—even before Trump appoint­ed three Justices—it is like­ly that the Court will, to some extent, affirm that vision. Trump has a pret­ty good track record of judi­cial vin­di­ca­tion after engag­ing in con­duct alleged to be unlaw­ful.”
    • Non-alarmist takes like this are much more per­sua­sive than the freak­outs I see online. As Gersen notes lat­er, “The first Trump Admin­is­tra­tion did not flout judi­cial orders, though some peo­ple wor­ried about it.”
  7. Mar­ket­ing Jesus: The Promise and Per­il of ‘He Gets Us’ (Samuel D. James, The Gospel Coali­tion): “There’s a dan­ger here of con­text col­lapse, where an idea that’s true and cor­rect in one par­tic­u­lar con­text los­es its truth­ful­ness by being broad­cast in a way that dis­re­gards that con­text. For exam­ple, ‘Jesus gets us’ is a mes­sage best used for peo­ple who have already accept­ed their need for a Sav­ior and desire assur­ance that noth­ing they’ve done can cause Jesus to cast them out (John 6:37). In terms of a mass audi­ence whose cul­tur­al reli­gion is most like­ly expres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism, how­ev­er, ‘he gets us’ sounds like a mantra that rein­forces the pri­ma­cy of the self. This men­tal­i­ty keeps my per­son­al psy­chol­o­gy at the cen­ter, so the ques­tion that mat­ters isn’t ‘What must I do to be saved’ but ‘What must you do to affirm me?’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Athe­ist Accepts Mul­ti­verse The­o­ry Of Every Pos­si­ble Uni­verse Except Bib­li­cal One (Baby­lon Bee) — an oldie but a good­ie.
  • Pas­tors are Scam­ming Believ­ers out of Mil­lions (Josh John­son, YouTube): sev­en­teen min­utes, most­ly respect­ful and insight­ful­ly humor­ous. The final sto­ry does­n’t feel like it’s going any­where but it actu­al­ly is and is worth the pay­off.
  • Argenti­na canal turns bright red, alarm­ing res­i­dents (Nathan Williams, BBC): “A canal in a sub­urb of Argenti­na’s cap­i­tal Buenos Aires turned bright red on Thurs­day, alarm­ing local res­i­dents. Pic­tures and videos show the intense­ly coloured water flow­ing into an estu­ary, the Rio de la Pla­ta, which bor­ders an eco­log­i­cal reserve.”
    • Want to envi­sion one of the ten plagues? Check this out.
  • Pos­si­bly Kait­lyn Schiess’ spici­est take yet. — I don’t know a lot about the Bachelor/Bachelorette shows, but assum­ing this descrip­tion is accu­rate you can put me on team Kait­lyn.
  • A Gen­e­sis Series Inspired By Ani­me (J. D. Peabody inter­view­ing Jason Moody, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s for both Chris­tians and gen­er­al audi­ences. Think about the paint­ing The Last Sup­per. Lots of peo­ple are moved by it. It has caused mil­lions of peo­ple to reflect on their faith. But da Vin­ci wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a ‘Chris­t­ian painter’—he was just a painter. And you don’t have to have faith to appre­ci­ate his work. The Last Sup­per isn’t ‘Chris­t­ian’ art—it’s just art. We want what we’re cre­at­ing to prompt ques­tions, because that’s what good art does.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 485



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

In this first email of 2025, I’d like to pass along an alum­nus’s obser­va­tion that 2025 is equal to 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 73 + 83 + 93 which is also equal to (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)2.

Even cool­er, he point­ed out that 2025 equals (20+25)(20/(2*5)) or just (20+25)2

Num­bers do fun things.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Intel­lec­tu­als Found God (Peter Savod­nik, The Free Press): “Instead of smirk­ing at reli­gion, some of our most impor­tant philoso­phers, nov­el­ists, and pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als are now reassess­ing their con­tempt for it. They are won­der­ing if they might have missed some­thing.”
  2. H5N1: Much More Than You Want­ed To Know (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I con­clude that the most plau­si­ble esti­mate for the chance of an H5N1 pan­dem­ic in the next year is 5%.”
    • Pret­ty much exact­ly how much I want­ed to know and explained well. Reas­sur­ing.
  3. How to like every­thing more (Sasha Chapin, Sub­stack): “In my expe­ri­ence, high-lev­el enjoy­ment, like a sport, is com­posed of many inter­lock­ing micro-skills that must be trained indi­vid­u­al­ly, but which rein­force each oth­er.”
  4. Amer­i­ca, the beau­ti­ful (Chris Arnade, Sub­stack): “We are an ide­al for a large por­tion of the world, and while that ide­al isn’t always a real­i­ty that we live up to, very few peo­ple come here, then turn around and go back, because with enough ded­i­ca­tion, you can cre­ate your own form of ful­fill­ment here. The US is a vast fed­er­a­tion of micro com­mu­ni­ties and micro cul­tures, all bound togeth­er by the belief, how­ev­er ten­ta­tive and neb­u­lous, in the Amer­i­can Dream.”
    • A fre­quent crit­ic of Amer­i­ca explains why he loves it nonethe­less.
  5. Africa Has Entered a New Era of War (Gabriele Stein­hauser, Andrew Bar­nett and Emma Brown, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Africa is now expe­ri­enc­ing more con­flicts than at any point since at least 1946, accord­ing to data col­lect­ed by Upp­sala Uni­ver­si­ty in Swe­den and ana­lyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Insti­tute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two insti­tutes have iden­ti­fied 28 state-based con­flicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 coun­tries, more than in any oth­er region in the world and dou­ble the count just a decade and a half ago. That tal­ly doesn’t include con­flicts that don’t involve gov­ern­ment forces, for instance between dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, and whose num­ber has also dou­bled since 2010.”
    • Vast­ly under­re­port­ed in Amer­i­ca. If you ask most Amer­i­cans what wars are rag­ing right now they’d be able to iden­ti­fy Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas and not much else. But there’s a lot else. Wikipedi­a’s sum­ma­ry puts the cur­rent tal­ly at 19 full-blown wars, 20 sig­nif­i­cant con­flicts and 15 skir­mish­es.
  6. Can You Can­cel a Coun­try? (Russ Roberts, Sub­stack): “The fans of set­tler colo­nial­ism love hat­ing Israel because Israel is so young. You can’t return Amer­i­ca to 1619, say. In Amer­i­ca, there are over 325 mil­lion set­tlers and only 7 mil­lion Native Amer­i­cans. Decol­o­niz­ing the Unit­ed States is unimag­in­able. So is decol­o­niz­ing Israel, real­ly. But it’s more imag­in­able than the Unit­ed States. The defend­ers of Israel see Israel as the tip of the sword fight­ing against ter­ror­ism and Jihadism. For the those who use the set­tler colo­nial­ism lens, Hamas is the tip of the sword against set­tler colo­nial­ism.”
    • Roberts is an econ­o­mist, a fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion, and the pres­i­dent of Shalem Col­lege in Jerusalem.
  7. A Cen­tu­ry of Human Detri­tus, Visu­al­ized (Den­nis Over­bye, New York Times): “ ‘The web­site enables many com­par­isons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,’ he said. For instance, humans out­weigh wild ani­mals 10 to 1, a fact that sur­prised Dr. Ménard. (‘In my expe­ri­ence, most peo­ple expect the oppo­site.’) But we weigh only half as much as the live­stock herds we main­tain to eat. Per­haps more omi­nous­ly, humans use 100 times their own mass in plas­tic.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 484



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

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 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. Tom Hol­land on How Chris­tian­i­ty Remade the World (Bari Weiss, The Free Press): “It is very dif­fi­cult to overem­pha­size how com­plete­ly mad it was for every­body in the ancient world that some­one who suf­fers cru­ci­fix­ion could in any way be the Mes­si­ah, let alone part of the one God.… The fact that such a per­son could con­ceiv­ably be raised up by cit­i­zens of the Roman Empire as some­one greater than Cae­sar him­self, greater than Augus­tus, is a com­plete­ly shock­ing maneu­ver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shock­ing to them all. The rad­i­cal mes­sage of the cru­ci­fix­ion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
  2. How his­to­ri­an Niall Fer­gu­son became a reli­gious believ­er (Greg Sheri­dan, The Week­end Aus­tralian): “I have embraced Chris­tian­i­ty,” he tells me. “We were all bap­tised, Ayaan and our two sons, togeth­er in Sep­tem­ber (2023). It was the cul­mi­na­tion of a quite pro­tract­ed process. My jour­ney was from athe­ism. My par­ents had left the Church of Scot­land, I think even before I was born. I grew up in a house­hold of sci­ence-mind­ed reli­gious scep­tics. I didn’t go to church and felt quite sure of the wis­dom of that when I was young. How­ev­er, in two phas­es, I lost my faith in athe­ism.… The first phase was that as a his­to­ri­an I realised no soci­ety had been suc­cess­ful­ly organ­ised on the basis of athe­ism. All attempts to do that have been cat­a­stroph­ic. That was an insight that came from study­ing 18th, 19th and 20th-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry. But then the next stage was real­is­ing that no indi­vid­ual can in fact be ful­ly formed or eth­i­cal­ly secure with­out reli­gious faith. That insight has come more recent­ly and has been born of our expe­ri­ence as a fam­i­ly.”
    • Fer­gu­son is a fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • I heard this arti­cle was pay­walled but I was able to access it with no prob­lem. If it is pay­walled, you can see Fer­gu­son talk­ing about his con­ver­sion on Twit­ter.
  3. Why Giv­ing Mat­ters (Arthur C. Brooks, Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty): “Specif­i­cal­ly, here’s what I found. If you have two fam­i­lies that are exact­ly identical—in oth­er words, same reli­gion, same race, same num­ber of kids, same town, same lev­el of edu­ca­tion, and everything’s the same—except that one fam­i­ly gives a hun­dred dol­lars more to char­i­ty than the sec­ond fam­i­ly, then the giv­ing fam­i­ly will earn on aver­age $375 more in income than the non­giv­ing family—and that’s sta­tis­ti­cal­ly attrib­ut­able to the gift.… I final­ly went to a col­league who spe­cial­ized in the psy­chol­o­gy of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, and I said, ‘I’m get­ting this result I can’t under­stand. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like the hand of God or some­thing on the econ­o­my, and I can’t believe it’s true.’ And the first thing he asked was, ‘Why don’t you believe it’s true? You’re a Chris­t­ian, aren’t you?’”
    • This is a few years old (2009), and fea­tures a Catholic speak­ing to Mor­mons. At the time of the speech Brooks was pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute and cur­rent­ly teach­es at Har­vard.
    • Towards the end he sug­gests some causal mech­a­nisms, one of which is that peo­ple per­ceive gen­eros­i­ty to be a lead­er­ship qual­i­ty.
  4. How Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry A.I. Helps Sci­ence Dream Up Big Break­throughs (William J. Broad, New York Times): “In Octo­ber, David Bak­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton shared the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry for his pio­neer­ing research on pro­teins — the knot­ty mol­e­cules that empow­er life. The Nobel com­mit­tee praised him for dis­cov­er­ing how to rapid­ly build com­plete­ly new kinds of pro­teins not found in nature, call­ing his feat ‘almost impos­si­ble.’ In an inter­view before the prize announce­ment, Dr. Bak­er cit­ed bursts of A.I. imag­in­ings as cen­tral to ‘mak­ing pro­teins from scratch.’ The new tech­nol­o­gy, he added, has helped his lab obtain rough­ly 100 patents, many for med­ical care.”
  5. Bring­ing Elon to a knife fight (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Sub­stack): “A lot of the [left-lean­ing] gov­ern­ment tech com­mu­ni­ty is skip­ping the hand wring­ing; they’ve basi­cal­ly just grabbed a bag of pop­corn and are watch­ing in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolute­ly hat­ed for their entire time in pub­lic ser­vice. They don’t see DOGE as their sav­ior, but they are feel­ing vin­di­cat­ed after years of shout­ing into the void. I am struck by how dif­fer­ent the tone of the DOGE con­ver­sa­tion is between polit­i­cal lead­ers on the left and the peo­ple who’ve been fight­ing in the imple­men­ta­tion trench­es. One group is ter­ri­fied they’ll suc­ceed. The oth­er is start­ing to ask a sur­pris­ing ques­tion (or at least I am): What if even bil­lion­aires can’t dis­rupt the sys­tem we have built?”
    • The first com­ment is a nec­es­sary com­ple­ment to this essay.
  6. House Mem­ber in Senior Liv­ing Facil­i­ty Draws Fresh Scruti­ny to Aging Con­gress (Catie Edmond­son, New York Times): “Sen­a­tor Charles E. Grass­ley, Repub­li­can of Iowa, is Congress’s eldest mem­ber at 91 years old. In 2023, The New York Times tal­lied 20 law­mak­ers who were at least 80 years old. While the Con­sti­tu­tion lays out a floor for age require­ments for those run­ning for Con­gress, it does not man­date a ceil­ing. That has cre­at­ed a bevy of awk­ward sit­u­a­tions for lead­ers in both par­ties, who have been thrust into the del­i­cate posi­tion of try­ing to nudge out aging law­mak­ers who refuse to release their grip on pow­er.”
  7. Engage Bespoke Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: Reflec­tions from Con­ver­sa­tions on Cam­pus (Mark Legg, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I often encoun­tered the view of faith some­times called ‘bespoke spir­i­tu­al­i­ty,’ a way of engag­ing with reli­gion by pick­ing and choos­ing beliefs and prac­tices that ‘vibe’ with you per­son­al­ly. The stu­dents I met were authen­ti­cal­ly open-mind­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty. How­ev­er, they resist­ed (or often strug­gled to under­stand) the claim that Jesus is the only ‘way,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘life,’ and that ‘no one comes to the Father except through [him]’ (John 14:6).”
    • I did­n’t know it had a label, but it’s every­where at Stan­ford. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy Final­ly Leaves The Sta­ble And Oh No! Here Comes Lit­tle Bag­pipe Boy! (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Big Jack — a great short sto­ry told in com­ic form. I real­ly enjoyed it. I may have shared it before — I know I’ve read it before.
  • It Pays to Have Long Hair and a Beard in Utah—Jesus Mod­els Are in Demand (Bradley Olson, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Mod­els who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple in the state, a pic­ture isn’t com­plete with­out Him. They are hir­ing Jesus look-alikes for fam­i­ly por­traits and wed­ding announce­ments. Mod­els are show­ing up to walk with a new­ly engaged cou­ple through a field, play with young chil­dren in the Bon­neville Salt Flats, and cram in with the fam­i­ly for the annu­al Christ­mas card.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
    • This bit made me laugh: “Find­ing a mod­el can be dif­fi­cult. Areas of Utah with high con­cen­tra­tions of Mormons—who also call them­selves Lat­ter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack poten­tial Jesus dop­pel­gängers. Some men who work or vol­un­teer for the church, one of the state’s largest employ­ers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.”
  • My Neigh­bor Won’t Stop Pray­ing for Me. What Should I Do? (Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah, New York Times): “The only rea­son you give for object­ing to her prayers is that she has failed to com­ply with your wish­es. Yet I don’t find that she has there­by treat­ed you with dis­re­spect, because I don’t see that you have the right to have those wish­es com­plied with. You seem to be ask­ing her not to do some­thing she thinks there are com­pelling rea­sons to do. I’d have thought that this was dis­re­spect­ful.”
    • This also made me laugh. Chor­tle, even.
  • A 1,000-Year-Old Seed Grows in Israel (Franz Lidz, New York Times): “In 2010, Dr. Sal­lon obtained a mys­te­ri­ous seed from the archae­o­log­i­cal archives of Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty, hop­ing that it could ger­mi­nate. The seed had been dis­cov­ered in a cave dur­ing a 1980s exca­va­tion at Wadi el-Makkuk, a win­ter water chan­nel in the north­ern Judean desert, and was lan­guish­ing in stor­age. After deter­min­ing that the seed was still viable, Dr. Sallon’s research team plant­ed, sprout­ed and care­ful­ly tend­ed it. When the husk was car­bon-dat­ed to between A.D. 993 and A.D. 1202, a thought occurred to Dr. Sal­lon. ‘I won­dered if what ger­mi­nat­ed could be the source­of the balm of Gilead,’ she said. On the hunch that it was, she named the spec­i­men She­ba. Since then, the 1,000-year-old seedling has grown into a stur­dy 12-foot-tall tree with no mod­ern coun­ter­part. Sheba’s painstak­ing revival — kept secret from the pub­lic for 14 years — is detailed in a study that was pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber in the jour­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Biol­o­gy.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 479

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How the Ivy League Broke Amer­i­ca (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “Stu­dents who got into high­er-rank­ing col­leges, which demand high sec­ondary-school GPAs, are not sub­stan­tial­ly more effec­tive after they grad­u­ate. In one study of 28,000 young stu­dents, those attend­ing high­er-rank­ing uni­ver­si­ties did only slight­ly bet­ter on con­sult­ing projects than those attend­ing low­er-ranked uni­ver­si­ties. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale stu­dent would have been only about 1.9 per­cent more pro­fi­cient than a stu­dent from Cleve­land State when mea­sured by the qual­i­ty of their work. The Yale stu­dent would also have been more like­ly to be a jerk: The researchers found that stu­dents from high­er-rank­ing col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, while nom­i­nal­ly more effec­tive than oth­er stu­dents, were more like­ly to pay ‘insuf­fi­cient atten­tion to inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships,’ and in some instances to be ‘less friend­ly,’ ‘more prone to con­flict,’ and ‘less like­ly to iden­ti­fy with their team.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. I liked this line — “If we could get to the point where being snob­by about going to Stan­ford seems as ridicu­lous as being snob­by about your great-grandmother’s mem­ber­ship in the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, this would trans­form not just col­lege admis­sions but Amer­i­can child­hood.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: We Asked for It (Michael W. Clune, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The costs of explic­it­ly tying the aca­d­e­m­ic enter­prise to par­ti­san pol­i­tics in a democ­ra­cy were emi­nent­ly fore­see­able and are now com­ing into sharp focus.… In return for their tuition, stu­dents are giv­en the faculty’s high-class polit­i­cal opin­ions as a form of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal. Thus the pub­lic per­ceives these opin­ions — on defund­ing the police, or view­ing bio­log­i­cal sex as a social con­struc­tion, or Israel as absolute evil — as mark­ers in a sta­tus game. Far from advanc­ing their opin­ions, pro­fes­sors in fact func­tion to inval­i­date these views for the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans who nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to attend elite insti­tu­tions but who are con­stant­ly stig­ma­tized for their low-class opin­ions by the lucky grad­u­ates. Far from rep­re­sent­ing a pow­er­ful avant-garde lead­ing the way to polit­i­cal change, the politi­cized class of pro­fes­sors is a seri­ous polit­i­cal lia­bil­i­ty to any par­ty that it sup­ports.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Case West­ern. He throws a lot of strong punch­es.
  2. Jor­dan Peter­son Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “the pow­er of Peterson’s style is his mar­riage of exis­ten­tial urgency with hermeneu­ti­cal cre­ativ­i­ty. He expects the Word to show him won­ders. He wres­tles with the text—a mys­tery and a stranger—until he secures a bless­ing from it. He takes for grant­ed that its depths are bot­tom­less. Do pas­tors mod­el this pos­ture in the pul­pit? Do teach­ers in the class­room? Do schol­ars on the page?Christian read­ers should learn from Peterson’s bold­ness, his dis­po­si­tion of awe and docil­i­ty before the sacred page. He opens the scroll with the same spir­it as the psalmist: ‘Open my eyes that I may see won­der­ful things in your law’ (119:18).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a col­league. This is one of the best Chris­t­ian engage­ments with Jor­dan Peter­son I’ve seen.
  3. In the Era of the Judges (Stiv­en Peter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The hold­ers of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal have not sim­ply sub­sti­tut­ed Chris­t­ian val­ues with an alter­na­tive set but pro­mote the very loss of order itself. The only val­ues are no val­ues. That is, our cul­ture pro­motes lib­er­tin­ism, every­one doing what is right in their own eyes. Soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, Hunter calls this the process of dis­so­lu­tion: ‘By dis­so­lu­tion, I refer to the decon­struc­tion of the most basic assump­tions about real­i­ty.’ Our cul­ture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is pro­mot­ed is turn­ing inside our­selves and deter­min­ing our own val­ues. This process results in the frac­tur­ing of soci­ety along­side tribes/enclaves of peo­ple with sim­i­lar val­ues.”
    • This is a review of Aaron Ren­n’s book, and Renn says: “This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens — improv­ing them in the process.”
  4. Rich Inner Death (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Our men­tal health cri­sis is usu­al­ly cast as either a fail­ure of ther­a­peu­tic techniques—we just haven’t unlocked our trau­ma well enough yet—or else an unavoid­able con­se­quence of cli­mate anx­i­ety, polar­iza­tion, or bad media. But [per­haps the cri­sis stems from how we are trained to view the world]. There is a way of liv­ing your life as a kind of con­stant retreat into both the safe­ty and the chaos of your own imag­i­na­tion, and near­ly every­thing about how we learn, com­mu­ni­cate, and work as mod­ern peo­ple helps us con­di­tion for this. We are taught ear­ly and often to direct our gaze inward.”
    • Sev­er­al sub­stan­tive insights in this arti­cle.
  5. Why the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety Has Been a Great Suc­cess (Ed Whe­lan, Sub­stack): “The Fed­er­al­ist Society’s suc­cess has led many on the Left—and, more recent­ly, some envi­ous folks on the Right—to revile and demo­nize it. But its crit­ics rou­tine­ly dis­play that they do not under­stand how it oper­ates and how it has suc­ceed­ed.… It does not sub­mit ami­cus briefs. It does not under­take to enlist the pub­lic in polit­i­cal under­tak­ings. And it has nev­er done any of these things. And there­in lies one of the great keys to its suc­cess.”
  6. AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry is indis­tin­guish­able from human-writ­ten poet­ry and is rat­ed more favor­ably (Bri­an Porter & Edouard Mach­ery, Sci­en­tif­ic Reports [Nature]): “We col­lect­ed 5 poems each from 10 well-known Eng­lish-lan­guage poets, span­ning much of the his­to­ry of Eng­lish poet­ry: Geof­frey Chaucer (1340s-1400), William Shake­speare (1564–1616), Samuel But­ler (1613–1680), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Walt Whit­man (1819–1892), Emi­ly Dick­in­son (1830–1886), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Allen Gins­berg (1926–1997), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and Dorothea Lasky (1978- ). Using Chat­G­PT 3.5, we gen­er­at­ed 5 poems ‘in the style of’ each poet. We used a ‘human out of the loop’ par­a­digm: we used the first 5 poems gen­er­at­ed, and did not select the ‘best’ out of a group of poems or pro­vide any feed­back or instruc­tions to the mod­el beyond ‘Write a short poem in the style of <poet> ‘. In the first exper­i­ment, 1,634 par­tic­i­pants were ran­dom­ly assigned to one of the 10 poets, and pre­sent­ed with 10 poems in ran­dom order: 5 poems writ­ten by that poet, and 5 gen­er­at­ed by AI ‘in the style of’ that poet. For each poem, par­tic­i­pants were asked whether they thought the poem was gen­er­at­ed by AI or writ­ten by a human poet.… Con­trary to what ear­li­er stud­ies report­ed, peo­ple now appear unable to reli­ably dis­tin­guish human-out-of-the-loop AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry from human-authored poet­ry writ­ten by well-known poets.… Fur­ther­more, peo­ple pre­fer AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry to human-authored poet­ry, con­sis­tent­ly rat­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed poems more high­ly than the poems of well-known poets across a vari­ety of qual­i­ta­tive fac­tors.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh.
  7. Why Pro­gres­sives Should Ques­tion Their Favorite Sci­en­tif­ic Find­ings (Paul Bloom, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “You may have heard of the study pub­lished in 2020 con­clud­ing that Black new­borns have high­er sur­vival rates when Black doc­tors attend to them. It got a huge amount of cov­er­age in the pop­u­lar press. It was even cit­ed by Supreme Court Jus­tice Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son in her dis­sent last year on the court’s rul­ing against racial pref­er­ences in col­lege admis­sions. The research, Jack­son claimed, shows the ben­e­fits of diver­si­ty. ‘It saves lives,’ she wrote. The same jour­nal just pub­lished a re-analy­sis of the data. It turns out that the ‘effect is sub­stan­tial­ly weak­ened, and often becomes sta­tis­ti­cal­ly insignif­i­cant,’ once you take into account that Black doc­tors are less like­ly to see the high­er-risk pop­u­la­tion of new­borns with low birth weight. I wasn’t sur­prised when I saw the re-analy­sis because I didn’t believe the orig­i­nal find­ing.… It’s like what some­one once said about Gin­ger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Gin­ger Rogers is doing them back­ward and in high heels. A pub­lished find­ing that clash­es with the polit­i­cal prej­u­dices of review­ers and edi­tors is a Gin­ger Rogers find­ing. It had to be twice as good.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor (emer­i­tus at Yale, cur­rent­ly at U Toron­to).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 464



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

This is vol­ume 464, which only has two prime fac­tors: 2 and 29.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford in Paris 2024 (Stan­ford News): “A school-record 60 Stan­ford-affil­i­at­ed ath­letes have qual­i­fied to com­pete at the Olympic Games Paris 2024.… Nations rep­re­sent­ed include the Unit­ed States (38), Cana­da (5), Aus­tralia (3), Israel (2), Switzer­land (2), Egypt (1), France (1), Ger­many (1), Greece (1), Hong Kong (1), Nige­ria (1), Philip­pines (1), Sin­ga­pore (1), Spain (1) and Venezuela (1).”
  2. Teach­ers and the Trans­mis­sion of Excel­lence (Matt Clan­cy, New Things Under The Sun): “Here’s a strik­ing fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize win­ners in physics, chem­istry, and med­i­cine also had a Nobel prize win­ner as their aca­d­e­m­ic advi­sor.”
    • Men­tor­ship mat­ters, and not just in acad­e­mia. I have a friend who once told me, “You always need to learn up. Look above you and find peo­ple who have already achieved what you hope to achieve and spend as much time around them as you can.”
  3. There Is Almost No ‘Lib­er­al­iz­ing Reli­gion’ in the Unit­ed States (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The more peo­ple go to church, the less lib­er­al they are. That’s true across racial lines. That’s also true in a lot of major Protes­tant tra­di­tions includ­ing a few main­line stal­warts like the Unit­ed Methodist Church and the PCUSA.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  4. The Most Reveal­ing Moment of a Trump Ral­ly (McK­ay Cop­pins, The Atlantic): “To under­stand the evolv­ing psy­chol­o­gy and beliefs of Trump’s reli­gious sup­port­ers, I attempt­ed to review every prayer offered at his cam­paign events since he announced in Novem­ber 2022 that he would run again. Work­ing with a researcher, I com­piled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The result­ing document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, reveal­ing reli­gious text: benign in some places, blas­phe­mous in oth­ers; con­tra­dic­to­ry and poignant and fright­en­ing and sad and, per­haps most of all, beg­ging for exe­ge­sis.”
    • Inter­est­ing con­cept for an arti­cle. Note that the author is Mor­mon, so fac­tor that in when eval­u­at­ing his reli­gious com­men­tary.
  5. Peo­ple Say Queer Peo­ple Are Born That Way. It’s More Com­pli­cat­ed. (Charles M. Blow, New York Times): “ ‘Born this way’ may, unfor­tu­nate­ly, have been an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. It’s prob­a­bly clos­er to the truth to say that peo­ple are ‘formed this way.’ As the com­plex­i­ty of human sex­u­al­i­ty has become clear­er, sci­en­tists and writ­ers have attempt­ed to add nec­es­sary nuance to the sub­ject. But the slo­gan remains entrenched in the cul­ture.… It is not only unsup­port­able by sci­ence but also does not cap­ture the full real­i­ty of queer expe­ri­ence and is unjust to some mem­bers of the queer com­mu­ni­ty itself.”
    • I am old enough to remem­ber when the “born this way” argu­ment was the dom­i­nant rea­son homo­sex­u­al­i­ty gained widestream accep­tance in Amer­i­ca. Unlocked.
  6. Should Pornog­ra­phy Be Com­plete­ly Banned? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The share of Amer­i­cans who want no restric­tions on porn has nev­er been that high. It was 10% of the sam­ple back in the ear­ly 1970s and today it’s dropped to a very small frac­tion — just 4% of those who took the sur­vey in 2022. So, there’s lit­tle appetite for a lais­sez-faire approach to pornog­ra­phy.”
  7. Cou­ples, Stop Writ­ing Your Own Wed­ding Vows (Cheryl Mendel­son, The Atlantic): “Tra­di­tion­al vows cre­ate an intense moment of qui­et speech that height­ens the exu­ber­ance of the toasts, drink­ing, and danc­ing that fol­low. Replac­ing them with sen­ti­men­tal or jokey words turns the vow-tak­ing into an iron­ic per­for­mance of some­thing the cou­ple is implic­it­ly dis­avow­ing. One of my friends regards tak­ing vows oth­er than the tra­di­tion­al ones as ‘like being on the wit­ness stand and answer­ing the ques­tions you wish you had been asked.’ He and his wife want­ed ‘no irony’ or attempts at wit in their vows, and ‘redact­ed’ theirs from a church rite.”

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.