Tag: how the church is perceived

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 463



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 463, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why your smart­phone might be stop­ping you from fol­low­ing Jesus (Mar­tin Saun­ders, Pre­miere Chris­tian­i­ty): “[Haidt] argues that smart­phones actu­al­ly dri­ve spir­i­tu­al degra­da­tion: ‘[social media] trains peo­ple to think in ways that are exact­ly con­trary to the world’s wis­dom tra­di­tions: Think about your­selves first; be mate­ri­al­is­tic, judge­men­tal, boast­ful, and pet­ty; seek glo­ry as quan­ti­fied by likes and fol­low­ers.’… our dig­i­tal cul­ture isn’t neu­tral; it’s offer­ing a kind of anti-dis­ci­ple­ship.”
  2. Move Over, Math­e­mati­cians, Here Comes AlphaProof (Siob­han Roberts, New York Times): “A pair of Google Deep­Mind mod­els tried their luck with the prob­lem set in the 2024 Inter­na­tion­al Math­e­mat­i­cal Olympiad, or I.M.O., held from July 11 to July 22 about 100 miles west of Lon­don at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bath. The event is said to be the pre­mier math com­pe­ti­tion for the world’s ‘bright­est math­letes,’ accord­ing to a pro­mo­tion­al post on social media. The human prob­lem-solvers — 609 high school stu­dents from 108 coun­tries — won 58 gold medals, 123 sil­ver and 145 bronze. The A.I. per­formed at the lev­el of a sil­ver medal­ist, solv­ing four out of six prob­lems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-wor­thy per­for­mance on an Olympiad’s prob­lems.”
  3. Stand­ing Out, Craft­ing Hooks, and Acci­den­tal­ly Reveal­ing Every­thing That’s Wrong With You (Max Nussen­baum, Sub­stack): “You wouldn’t think that people’s nat­ur­al instinct would be to reveal their full litany of psy­cho­log­i­cal issues in their pro­files, but it actu­al­ly is. They just don’t real­ize that’s what they’re doing.” About a year old.
  4. Online opt-in polls can pro­duce mis­lead­ing results, espe­cial­ly for young peo­ple and His­pan­ic adults (Andrew Mer­cer, Court­ney Kennedy & Scott Keeter, Pew Research): “…sev­er­al recent stud­ies have doc­u­ment­ed large errors in online opt-in sur­veys due to the pres­ence of so-called ‘bogus respon­dents.’ These respon­dents do not answer ques­tions sin­cere­ly; instead, they attempt to com­plete sur­veys with as lit­tle effort as pos­si­ble to earn mon­ey or oth­er rewards. Stud­ies have shown that bogus respon­dents can cause opt-in sur­veys to over­es­ti­mate rare atti­tudes and behav­iors, such as ingest­ing bleach to pro­tect against COVID-19, belief in con­spir­a­cies like Piz­za­gate or sup­port for polit­i­cal vio­lence.”
  5. Patron­age vs. Con­stituent Par­ties (Or Why Repub­li­can Par­ty Lead­ers Mat­ter More Than Demo­c­ra­t­ic Ones) (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…many dis­cus­sions of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics assume that that the struc­tures and oper­a­tional norms of the two par­ties are the same. If these par­ty dif­fer­ences were more wide­ly rec­og­nized, I sus­pect we would see few­er evan­gel­i­cals frus­trat­ed with their lim­it­ed influ­ence over the GOP par­ty plat­form, few­er jour­nal­ists shocked with J.D. Vance’s jour­ney from nev­er-Trump land to MAGA-max­i­mal­ism, and greater alarm among cen­trist Democ­rats about the longer-term influ­ence that the Pales­tine protests will have on the con­tours of their coali­tion.”
  6. Evan­gel­i­cals Must Stop Their Pref­er­en­tial Treat­ment of the Left (James R. Wood, First Things): “Today, cen­trists and those on the right are more fer­tile soil, I believe, because they are more open to real­i­ty. They rec­og­nize that the cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies’ projects to rewrite real­i­ty are destroy­ing civ­i­liza­tion. These refugees crave clar­i­ty about basic moral real­i­ties because of how much con­fu­sion the neg­a­tive world has pro­duced. They are look­ing for voic­es who stand up to the civ­i­liza­tion­al destroyers—maybe even voic­es who bold­ly pro­claim super­nat­ur­al truths.Like the ‘god-fear­ers’ that ear­ly church mis­sion­ar­ies often tar­get­ed, we today need to con­sid­er the ‘real­i­ty-respecters’ in our mis­sion.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Stan­ford’s biggest star lured to Texas Tech with $1 mil­lion deal (Alex Simon, SF Gate): “Canady announced her trans­fer to Texas Tech on Wednes­day, with mul­ti­ple reports quick­ly com­ing out that the Red Raiders’ name, image and like­ness (NIL) col­lec­tive Mata­dor Club, the group of boost­ers sup­port­ing Texas Tech by sign­ing the school’s ath­letes to endorse­ment deals, signed the pitch­er to a one-year deal for over $1 mil­lion.”

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 462



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 462, which my sim­ple math brain likes because 4, 6, and 2 are relat­ed num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sebas­t­ian Junger was a skep­tic of the after­life. Then he near­ly died. (Steven Petrow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Junger, a con­firmed athe­ist and an adher­ent of the sci­en­tif­ic method, had been raised by a physi­cist (his father) and a painter (his moth­er). His upbring­ing had left lit­tle room for a spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ence like this one, which turns out to be the cen­tral conun­drum of this book and, I’d ven­ture, his life. The meet­ing with his father was under­stand­ably unnerv­ing. ‘He was dead, I was alive, and I want­ed noth­ing to do with him.’ But, it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only vis­it­ed him but opened the door to the idea that an after­life might actu­al­ly exist.… Ever the reporter, Junger is unwill­ing to write off these expe­ri­ences as hal­lu­ci­na­tions (or any of the oth­er med­ical expla­na­tions). He admits he was hop­ing for evi­dence of an after­life, find­ing hints of it in the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of NDEs that fea­ture see­ing the dead. After all, he writes, ‘there are neu­ro­chem­i­cal expla­na­tions for why peo­ple hal­lu­ci­nate, but not for why they keep hal­lu­ci­nat­ing the same thing.’ ”
    • Unlocked.
  2. Why Is the U.S. Still Pre­tend­ing We Know Gen­der-Affirm­ing Care Works? (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Imag­ine a com­pre­hen­sive review of research on a treat­ment for chil­dren found ‘remark­ably weak evi­dence’ that it was effec­tive. Now imag­ine the med­ical estab­lish­ment shrugged off the con­clu­sions and con­tin­ued pro­vid­ing the same unproven and life-alter­ing treat­ment to its young patients. This is where we are with gen­der med­i­cine in the Unit­ed States.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Ques­tions About Leav­ing Reli­gion (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The most pop­u­lar rea­son [for leav­ing reli­gion] by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin was ‘reli­gious hypocrisy.’ About 42% of the sam­ple chose that rea­son for leav­ing. That was sev­en points high­er than the sec­ond most pop­u­lar — ‘reli­gion doesn’t make sense.’ That was cho­sen by 35% of the sam­ple. The only oth­er response that scored above 30% was reli­gious big­otry (31%).”
  4. Var­i­ous pieces about the assas­si­na­tion attempt on Trump:
    • Pho­to Appears to Cap­ture Path of Bul­let Used in Assas­si­na­tion Attempt (John Ismay, New York Times): “In doc­u­ment­ing the Penn­syl­va­nia cam­paign ral­ly on Sat­ur­day after­noon that turned into an attempt on a for­mer president’s life, Doug Mills, a vet­er­an New York Times pho­tog­ra­ph­er, appeared to cap­ture the image of a bul­let streak­ing past for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump’s head.”
    • It’s 1968 All Over Again (Eli Lake, The Free Press): “The near assas­si­na­tion of Trump is an echo of the vio­lence of 1968, when both Mar­tin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down in a two-month span in the spring of that year. Both were the vic­tims of lone gun­men, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, respec­tive­ly. The mur­ders threw Amer­i­ca into a cycle of riots and crack­downs that cul­mi­nat­ed with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion in Chica­go at the end of August.”
    • Why Are There So Few Assas­si­na­tions? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “Con­sid­er that there are a lot of crazy peo­ple out there who get agi­tat­ed about pol­i­tics. There is also an end­less num­ber of nihilists with noth­ing to live for, but who would prob­a­bly like to see their names in the his­to­ry books. Pow­er­ful firearms are wide­ly avail­able in many advanced nations, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Unit­ed States. In this coun­try, it is com­mon for malls or schools to get shot up by dis­turbed young men who expect to get noth­ing out of the act except that they might end up being part of a news sto­ry for a few days. Why don’t more of these types go after major politi­cians?”
    • Video Shows Crowd Warn­ing Law Enforce­ment About Gun­man Before He Fired at Trump (David Bot­ti, Haley Willis and Malachy Browne, New York Times): “Video tak­en by a bystander shows peo­ple point­ing to the man sus­pect­ed of shoot­ing at for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump at a ral­ly in Penn­syl­va­nia and fran­ti­cal­ly warn­ing law enforce­ment, just two min­utes before the first burst of gun­fire rang out, accord­ing to an analy­sis of the footage by The New York Times.”
  5. Why slav­ery is not America’s orig­i­nal sin (Wil­fred Reil­ly, Spiked): “Mod­ern Amer­i­cans tend to project our pos­i­tive val­ues back into the past while think­ing that our sins are unique­ly bad. What we don’t under­stand is that con­tem­po­rary West­ern beliefs about human dig­ni­ty, inalien­able rights, a right to free­dom, etc, are the excep­tion, not the norm.… Even a few open slave soci­eties con­tin­ue to exist today. In the Islam­ic repub­lic of Mau­ri­ta­nia, ‘the very struc­ture of soci­ety rein­forces slav­ery’.… CNN reporters and ana­lysts claimed that between ’10 per cent to 20 per cent of the [Mau­ri­tan­ian] pop­u­la­tion lives in slav­ery’.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Ken­tucky State. The arti­cle is an excerpt from his new book, which I have not read.
  6. The Hid­den Mar­riage Mar­ket (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Today, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties func­tion as arranged match­mak­ing ser­vices. Charles Murray’s term of art in Com­ing Apart is ‘the col­lege sort­ing machine.’ The mech­a­nism where­by peo­ple with dis­tinc­tive tastes and pref­er­ences are brought togeth­er into edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions and the labor force.… It’s true that most col­lege grad­u­ates don’t meet their spouse in col­lege. But by grad­u­at­ing, you then, as Caplan notes, enter a refined dat­ing pool for the rest of your life.”
  7. Some stuff from the elec­tion and elec­tion-adja­cent realm, focused on the Repub­li­can side because they just had their con­ven­tion and Trump put forth Vance as his VP:
    • The changes in vibes — why did they hap­pen? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Anoth­er way to put it is that Trump was a high­ly vul­ner­a­ble, defeat­ed Pres­i­dent, fac­ing numer­ous legal charges and indeed an actu­al felony con­vic­tion. Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next elec­tion. In con­cep­tu­al terms, how exact­ly did that hap­pen? I had been think­ing it would be a good cog­ni­tive test to ask peo­ple why they think the vibes have changed, and then to grade their answers for intel­li­gence, insight, and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty.”
      • Cowen offers inter­est­ing hypothe­ses.
    • How J.D. Vance Reject­ed Evan­gel­i­cal­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “He explic­it­ly sees reli­gion through the lens of socio-eco­nom­ic sta­tus. Once he saw that it was pos­si­ble to be Chris­t­ian in the world of the elites, it became inter­est­ing and cred­i­ble to him again. Note again that it’s Catholics and Mor­mons who are key to this, not any sort of Protes­tants. At the time of this inter­view, Vance was still explor­ing Catholi­cism, to which he lat­er con­vert­ed.… There’s also some­thing in evan­gel­i­cal­ism that’s just off-putting to a lot of peo­ple like Vance. It’s not just the work­ing class Pen­te­costal con­gre­ga­tions like the one I was raised in (which was very sim­i­lar to Vance’s expe­ri­ence). The aver­age sub­ur­ban megachurch is also incred­i­bly cringe. I like to dis­tin­guish between mid­dle class and striv­er class. Evan­gel­i­cal­ism appeals to the mid­dle class, but much less so to the striv­er class.”
      • Renn is not wrong about the dynam­ics at play, but he is over­look­ing the pres­ence of min­istries like Chi Alpha on these elite cam­pus­es which are usu­al­ly larg­er (in terms of week­ly atten­dance) and per­ceived to be more vibrant than the Catholic min­istries.
      • A fol­l0w-up Catholic Con­ver­sion­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “It’s worth not­ing that although intel­lec­tu­als often con­vert from evan­gel­i­cal­ism to Catholi­cism, a lot more peo­ple over all con­vert the oth­er direc­tion, from Catholi­cism to evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
      • If any­one thinks Catholi­cism is cor­rect on the mer­its, then become a Catholic. I strong­ly dis­agree with you, but fol­low your con­vic­tions. But to any­one tempt­ed to con­vert to Catholi­cism or any­thing else pri­mar­i­ly because it makes your social life / career prospects bet­ter, I urge you to recon­sid­er.
    • How Yale Pro­pelled J.D. Vance’s Career (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Sofia Nel­son, a for­mer class­mate who is trans­gen­der and was once a close friend of both Mr. Vance and his wife, recalled that Mr. Vance deliv­ered home-baked treats when they under­went top surgery. But years of friend­ship end­ed in 2021 over his sup­port for an Arkansas bill oppos­ing trans­gen­der care for minors.”
      • Inter­est­ing when you ignore the par­ti­san dynam­ic and instead focus on the cul­tur­al col­li­sion at Yale.
    • The Pop­ulist GOP and its Yale Law and Har­vard Law Lead­ers (Orin S. Kerr, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “…pop­ulist con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers are fine with vot­ing for con­ser­v­a­tive grad­u­ates of elite law schools because hav­ing attend­ed those school affords con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians a sort of vet­er­an sta­tus of its own. The politi­cians run­ning for GOP office don’t speak fond­ly of their time at these schools. Instead, they present their time at Har­vard Law or Yale Law as a dif­fi­cult test of strength that they passed. They spent three years in the trench­es of lib­er­al­ism and they emerged vic­to­ri­ous. They are now bat­tle-hard­ened and ready to fight the lib­er­als while in polit­i­cal office. From that per­spec­tive, grad­u­at­ing from these schools isn’t a prob­lem. Instead, like a medal on a mil­i­tary uni­form, it’s a cre­den­tial.”
      • This piece is pret­ty good, but it over­looks the delib­er­ate pipeline that both sides have set up to scout and route promis­ing young can­di­dates from elite uni­ver­si­ties into polit­i­cal tracks. There are all kinds of con­fer­ences and grants and intern­ships to facil­i­tate this.
    • Is the Repub­li­can Par­ty Becom­ing Pro-Choice? (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee pro­posed its 2024 GOP par­ty plat­form in Mil­wau­kee on July 8, and for the first time in forty years, this plat­form does not include sup­port for a nation­al abor­tion ban. Instead, the GOP’s anti-abor­tion posi­tions are soft­ened and many of the par­ty’s pre­vi­ous pro-life com­mit­ments have been removed.… the GOP appears to be piv­ot­ing. Trump claims to hold a fed­er­al­ist posi­tion on abor­tion, but in prac­tice he con­demns only states that pass pro-life protections—such as Florida—while say­ing noth­ing about states with per­mis­sive abor­tion regimes.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • She Didn’t Like His Song, So She Tried to Eat Him (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “Dr. Gould believes that a female may be able to tell whether a male is bet­ter for mat­ing or eat­ing based on the strength of his calls. This means males take a huge risk when try­ing to attract mates. ‘You’ve real­ly got to give props to the male frogs out there, that they are putting their lives on the line to repro­duce,’ Dr. Gould said.”
  • Denom­i­na­tions Host Game Night (Kei­th Fos­key, YouTube): two min­utes of fun­ny with some talkey-talkey at the end
  • The Death of Hob­bies (Sher­ry Ning, Sub­stack): “Scrolling through an end­less trail of short videos and watch­ing cook­ing shows is plea­sur­able because it feels good, but it would be wrong to say you actu­al­ly enjoy it. It would be much more enjoy­able to learn how to cook and roll up your sleeves in the kitchen. When we par­tic­i­pate in the motion, we turn from a con­sumer into a cre­ator. And the act of cre­ation is vital to us because we all uncon­scious­ly strive to seek mean­ing beyond the mate­r­i­al world: There is some­thing divine about cre­at­ing. To bring forth some­thing out of noth­ing, to have some­thing exist because of you, to leave your mark on the world. Every cre­ative act—from devel­op­ing a soft­ware to writ­ing a book to mak­ing a large bowl of salad—is a minia­ture Gen­e­sis.”
    • This one real­ly belongs above, but I did­n’t have space for it with my self-imposed lim­it of 7 big bul­let points. I con­vinced myself it belongs here since it has to do with recre­ation.

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 460



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 460, a large­ly unin­ter­est­ing num­ber. It’s a mul­ti­ple of 23, so I guess that’s kin­da cool (for a cer­tain def­i­n­i­tion of cool).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Your Con­sti­tu­tion­al Right to Be a Pirate (A.J. Jacobs, The Free Press): “It may not get much pub­lic­i­ty, but there it is, smack-dab in Arti­cle I, Sec­tion 8 of the Con­sti­tu­tion: Con­gress has the pow­er to grant cit­i­zens ‘let­ters of mar­que and reprisal.’ Mean­ing that, with Congress’s per­mis­sion, pri­vate cit­i­zens can load weapons onto their fish­ing boats, head out to the high seas, cap­ture ene­my ves­sels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patri­ot­ic pirates were known as ‘pri­va­teers.’ ”
  2. the Pen­ta­teuch in brief out­line (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “As Robert Alter has point­ed out, the long-time obses­sion with sources among schol­ars of the Hebrew Bible — their slight­ly mad-eyed teas­ing out of the con­tri­bu­tions of their posit­ed authors J, E, D, and P — led them to the assump­tion that ‘the redac­tors were in the grip of a kind of man­ic trib­al com­pul­sion, dri­ven again and again to include units of tra­di­tion­al mate­r­i­al … for rea­sons they them­selves could not have explained.’ Yet if that were true, why does an out­line of the Pen­ta­teuch look so order­ly — indeed, almost exces­sive­ly so?”
  3. The Codger-in-Chief (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “[We are see­ing] cov­er­age that bears more of a pass­ing resem­blance to what I saw dur­ing the Tod­dler-in-Chief days. In oth­er words, there are some dis­turb­ing par­al­lels in how Biden’s staffers are talk­ing about him to the press when com­pared to Trump’s White House staffers. Fur­ther­more, I strong­ly sus­pect the staffers now talk­ing to the press are high­er-rank­ing than, say, the deputy direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy.”
    • I read a lot of post-debate arti­cles, most of them strong­ly par­ti­san one way or the oth­er. This one sum­ma­rizes a lot of threads well. The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Tufts.
    • Not direct­ly relat­ed, but also relat­ed to the upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion — My Unset­tling Inter­view With Steve Ban­non (David Brooks, New York Times): “I should empha­size that I wasn’t try­ing to debate Ban­non or rebut his beliefs; I want­ed to under­stand how he sees the cur­rent moment. I want­ed to under­stand the glob­al pop­ulist surge from the inside.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Unlocked.
  4. Notes From a For­mer­ly Unpromis­ing Young Per­son (Rebec­ca Sny­der, New York Times): “My sit­u­a­tion was this: I was fin­ish­ing my sopho­more year of high school and had prob­a­bly attend­ed few­er days than I’d missed. I’d failed near­ly all my class­es, and my tran­script boast­ed a 0.47. (I say ‘boast­ed’ because you real­ly do have to miss quite a lot of school to fail so spec­tac­u­lar­ly.) Then there were the fist­fights. The weed. The acid.… [Yet] some­one had tak­en the time to meet me, to lis­ten and to ulti­mate­ly believe I had poten­tial. When Mr. Spencer sat in the admis­sions office of North Cen­tral Col­lege and said, ‘I’m going to take a chance on you, Rachel Sny­der,’ those were prob­a­bly the most impor­tant words of my life.”
  5. Why a New Con­ser­v­a­tive Brain Trust Is Reset­tling Across Amer­i­ca (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The idea was a ‘fra­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ty,’ as one leader put it, that pri­or­i­tized in-per­son meet­ings. The result was the all-male Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al, an invi­ta­tion-only social orga­ni­za­tion reserved for Chris­tians.… Mem­bers must be male, belong to a ‘Trini­tar­i­an Chris­t­ian’ church, a broad cat­e­go­ry that includes Catholics and Protes­tants, but not mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints. Mem­bers must also describe them­selves as ‘unhy­phen­at­ed Amer­i­cans,’ a ref­er­ence to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urg­ing the full assim­i­la­tion of immi­grants.”
    • Both the exis­tence of this move­ment and the way it is report­ed on are inter­est­ing. Unlocked.
  6. Lov­ing Amer­i­ca Means Expect­ing More From It (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “Too often we wor­ry that if we tell our chil­dren about our com­plex and some­times dark his­to­ry, their response will be debil­i­tat­ing shame. But instead of lying to our youth, we can give them a task that demands the best of them. We can call upon them to close the often-gap­ing chasm between our ideals and prac­tices. This is the gift the past offers us, a chance to flee old evils and pur­sue new goods.”
  7. Revival and Rev­o­lu­tion (John Fea, Com­mon­weal): “Since Evan­gel­i­cal­ism is an inher­ent­ly pop­ulist and anti-intel­lec­tu­al move­ment, most born-again Chris­tians do not trust aca­d­e­mics and rely instead on such ‘experts.’ When they need to know some­thing about sci­ence, they turn to Ken Ham, host of the pop­u­lar radio show Answers in Gen­e­sis and founder of the Cre­ation Muse­um in Peters­burg, Ken­tucky. They get their psy­chol­o­gy and social phi­los­o­phy from James Dob­son, the long­time cul­ture war­rior and founder of the lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion Focus on the Fam­i­ly. Their polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy comes from sources like Fox News’s Sean Han­ni­ty, the Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Stand­ing for Free­dom Cen­ter, or the Robert­son School of Gov­ern­ment at Pat Robertson’s Regent Uni­ver­si­ty. And for Amer­i­can his­to­ry, con­ser­v­a­tive Evan­gel­i­cals turn to David Bar­ton, the founder and CEO of Wall­Builders, an Evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion in Ale­do, Texas.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry prof at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school.

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 459



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 459th instal­la­tion, a num­ber I find inter­est­ing sim­ply because 4 + 5 = 9.

I should prob­a­bly men­tion that I’m not shar­ing any arti­cles about last night’s pres­i­den­tial debate today because I want to wait and see how peo­ple are think­ing about the race after a few days. The reac­tions right now are too raw.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A slap in the face for psy­chob­a­b­ble (Janan Ganesh, Finan­cial Times): “I can’t be the only for­eign­er in the US who has been chid­ed for not hav­ing a ther­a­pist by some­one who — choos­ing my words care­ful­ly here — seems to be get­ting uneven results from theirs. If psy­chob­a­b­ble were con­fined to actors going up to col­lect their big cer­tifi­cates, I’d leave it alone. But, like sand, it gets every­where.”
    • Old­er but gold.
  2. Rebels with a reli­gious cause: Meet New York’s avant-garde con­ser­v­a­tives (Leonar­do Bevilac­qua, Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor): “Orig­i­nal­ly from Philadel­phia, Salomé has been a devout Catholic since she was young. She wears a ‘Make Amer­i­ca Great Again’ hat around town some­times as an act of iron­ic defi­ance. And even though she’s a trans­gen­der woman, she prefers the term of an ear­li­er age: cas­tra­to.  But first and fore­most, she says, she’s a child of God.”
    • Inter­est­ing and full of sur­pris­es.
  3. A Par­tial Expla­na­tion of Zoomer Girl Derange­ment (Zin­nia, Sub­stack): “Why are young women today so deranged? Because no one is hon­est with them and they can­not be hon­est with them­selves. Par­ents lie to you, teach­ers lie to you, friends lie to you, every­one lies to you. If any­one dares tell you the truth, they are ostra­cized. My teenage self could only find truth smug­gled away in the dark recess­es of obscure online com­mu­ni­ties; usu­al­ly couched in lay­ers of iron­ic (and sin­cere) big­otry. And while I did not enjoy the big­otry (at the time), I found val­ue in engag­ing with the trans­gres­sive mate­r­i­al I came across because I felt that it expressed truths oth­er­wise unavail­able to me. Today, truth lies with­in the domain of inter­net ghet­tos, siloed away from the rest of polite soci­ety. At best, what soci­ety tells you is entire­ly unhelp­ful: ‘You’re beau­ti­ful just the way you are.’ At worst, what soci­ety tells you is entire­ly destruc­tive: ‘If you feel alien­at­ed by your body, you should maybe con­sid­er a mas­tec­to­my.’ ”
    • A bit vul­gar in places, but inter­est­ing. Kin­da long.
  4. Elite mis­in­for­ma­tion is an under­rat­ed prob­lem (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “…all this slop­py work and mis­lead­ing rhetoric is both more impact­ful than a lot of peo­ple real­ize, and also a lot less tac­ti­cal­ly savvy than those doing it think. The prob­lem is that it’s about a mil­lion times eas­i­er to per­suade a high­ly engaged mem­ber of your team of some­thing than it is to per­suade a swing vot­er (who is prob­a­bly skep­ti­cal, cyn­i­cal, and not that engaged with pol­i­tics) or a mem­ber of the oppo­si­tion (who instinc­tive­ly assumes you’re lying about every­thing). So when you put some­thing out there that’s false or mis­lead­ing, you’re about a mil­lion times more like­ly to con­fuse peo­ple who are friend­ly to your cause than to actu­al­ly per­suade any­one worth per­suad­ing.”
  5. It Is Time for Rad­i­cal Can­dor (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dis­patch): “It’s anoth­er lit­tle Bat­tle of Stal­in­grad: It’s a pity some­body has to win; all a decent per­son can do is pray for casu­al­ties.… Because we are gov­erned by imbe­ciles and thieves and mis­cre­ants and degen­er­ates and peo­ple who are will­ing to put up with all that imbe­cil­i­ty and thiev­ery and mis­cre­ance and degen­er­a­cy if it gets them even such a pathet­ic prize as a tem­po­rary seat in the U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives…”
  6. How (and How Not) to Wait (Mark Vroe­gop, Cross­way): “Focus. Adore. Seek. Trust. That’s how you wait on the Lord. It’s how you live on what’s true about God when you don’t know what’s true about your life.… Rather than allow­ing strong emo­tions to hold you hostage, you can embrace a strat­e­gy (FAST) that wel­comes God’s grace into your uncer­tain­ty.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. I feel awk­ward shar­ing this, but I was inter­viewed for a pod­cast. I did not choose the title (nor even the top­ic): Why I am NOT a Calvin­ist: Break­ing Down Every­thing from Calvin­ism, to Can We Lose Our Sal­va­tion (King­dom Come Pod­cast, YouTube): one hour long.

Less Serious Things Which Interested 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 457



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 457, the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (149 + 151 + 157) and also appar­ent­ly the index of a prime Euclid num­ber, but I would be lying if I said I knew what that is.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The case for show­ing up to church—even if you don’t believe in God (Emma Camp, Amer­i­ca): “But despite my reg­u­lar church atten­dance for almost two years now, I still haven’t devel­oped a rock-sol­id faith. I’ve joked—and said as much on Twitter—that I only believe in God about 30 per­cent of the time on a good day. My ambiva­lence does set me apart from most of my friends from church, a group that includes a few sem­i­nar­i­ans. But it doesn’t keep me from com­ing back.”
  2. The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs (Ruxan­dra Tes­lo, Sub­stack): “To for­mal­ize this: ‘Any sys­tem that is not explic­it­ly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pret­ty quick­ly.’ That is because most peo­ple, while lik­ing non-con­formism in the abstract and post-fac­to, are not very will­ing to actu­al­ly put up with the per­son­al­i­ty trade-offs of Weird Nerds in prac­tice. There is an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple right now who are think­ing about how to build bet­ter intel­lec­tu­al insti­tu­tions… it’s worth think­ing about what kind of peo­ple one wants to attract in these insti­tu­tions and how to keep them there. And I believe the con­ver­sa­tion here starts with accept­ing a sim­ple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have cer­tain traits that might be less than ide­al, that these traits come ‘in a pack­age’ with oth­er, very good traits, and if one makes fil­ter­ing or pro­mo­tion based on the absence of those traits a pri­or­i­ty, they will miss out on the pos­i­tives.”
  3. An Object Les­son From Covid on How to Destroy Pub­lic Trust (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “If the gov­ern­ment mis­led peo­ple about how Covid is trans­mit­ted, why would Amer­i­cans believe what it says about vac­cines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should peo­ple dis­tin­guish between wild con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and actu­al con­spir­a­cies?… As the expres­sion goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buck­ets, and this buck­et is going to take a very long time to refill.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. ‘Sham’ Surgery Can Actu­al­ly Fix Our Bod­ies. So Why Are Some Against It? (Jere­my How­ick, Sci­ence Alert): “More broad­ly, a review of 53 place­bo-con­trolled surgery tri­als found that sham surgery was as good as the real thing in over half of the stud­ies. Sham knee and back surgery works as well as real surgery for pain. Pre­tend­ing to put brain implants works as well as real implants for reduc­ing migraine attacks. Fake laser surgery works as well as real laser surgery to stop gas­troin­testi­nal bleed­ing. And fake surgery works as well as real surgery for mak­ing sphinc­ters func­tion more effi­cient­ly.”
  5. The Day My Old Church Can­celed Me Was a Very Sad Day (David French, New York Times): “When I left the Repub­li­can Par­ty, I thought a shared faith would pre­serve my denom­i­na­tion­al home. But I was wrong. Race and pol­i­tics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer wel­come in the church I loved.”
    • Unlocked.
  6. Alito’s ‘God­li­ness’ Com­ment Echoes a Broad­er Chris­t­ian Move­ment (Eliz­a­beth Dias and Lisa Lerer, New York Times): “It’s a phrase not com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with legal doc­trine: return­ing Amer­i­ca to ‘a place of god­li­ness.’ And yet when asked by a woman pos­ing as a Catholic con­ser­v­a­tive at a din­ner last week, Jus­tice Samuel A. Ali­to Jr. appeared to endorse the idea.… Now, Supreme Court jus­tices have become caught up in the debate over whether Amer­i­ca is a Chris­t­ian nation. While Jus­tice Ali­to is hard­ly open­ly cham­pi­oning these views, he is embrac­ing lan­guage and sym­bol­ism that line up with a much broad­er move­ment push­ing back against the declin­ing pow­er of Chris­tian­i­ty as a major­i­ty reli­gion in Amer­i­ca.”
    • This caveat is sig­nif­i­cant and should per­haps be high­er placed in the sto­ry: “The Times has not heard the full unedit­ed record­ing and has reviewed only the edit­ed record­ing post­ed online, after the woman who record­ed them, a lib­er­al activist, declined to send the Times the full record­ing.” 
    • Relat­ed: What Exact­ly Did Jus­tice Ali­to Say That Was Wrong? (Marc O. DeGiro­la­mi, New York Times): “Where was the justice’s error? He did not men­tion any pend­ing case or lit­i­ga­tion. He did not name any per­son or par­ty. He did not dis­cuss any spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal or moral mat­ter. Most of the exchange con­sists of the filmmaker’s own goad­ing remarks, fol­lowed by the justice’s vague and ano­dyne affir­ma­tions and replies. About what you might expect when cor­nered at a bor­ing cock­tail par­ty.”
    • Relat­ed: Wild Dis­tor­tions of ‘Secret Record­ing’ of Ali­to (Ed Whe­lan, Nation­al Review): “You are wel­come of course to dis­agree with Ali­to.… But it’s beyond bizarre to find it news­wor­thy that Ali­to made a pri­vate com­ment that mir­rors pub­lic speech­es he has been giv­ing.”
  7. Against Ambi­tion (Grace Car­roll, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Wineb­urg walked into his class­room intend­ing to make a brief open­ing com­ment about the scene out­side. What fol­lowed — a tirade against a cul­ture of careerism so bla­tant­ly prof­it-moti­vat­ed that stu­dents were being lured, lit­er­al­ly, to flash­ing salaries like moths to flame — ‘sort of took on a life of its own,’ he recalled recent­ly. It’s known col­lo­qui­al­ly among some stu­dents as ‘the rant.’ I was one of the frosh sit­ting in Wineburg’s class that fall. I remem­ber the rant.… most­ly I remem­ber feel­ing like some­one was lift­ing some­thing very heavy off of me, a weight I hadn’t real­ized I was car­ry­ing until it was gone.”

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 453

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. Rec­on­cil­ing Chris­tian­i­ty with intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty (Nadia Jo, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “One of the val­ues Jesus empha­sized most is humil­i­ty, and I strive to imple­ment that val­ue in my intel­lec­tu­al life in addi­tion to my per­son­al life. My ethos of intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty involves curios­i­ty, chal­leng­ing and wrestling with claims and lines of rea­son­ing, flex­i­ble think­ing and respect for peo­ple who put in the same effort. I hope that my non­re­li­gious peers can come to under­stand and appre­ci­ate Christianity’s deep intel­lec­tu­al tra­di­tion, even if they don’t agree with its con­clu­sions. And, I encour­age more Chris­tians to live up to that tra­di­tion and exam­ine their own belief. You’ll prob­a­bly find it more reward­ing than you expect.”
    • Nadia is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  2. Home­less man is brought to church and starts CURSING right in the mid­dle of the ser­mon while the pas­tor is preach­ing on the para­ble of the lost sheep. (Twit­ter): the link title is click­baity, but the video is real­ly good. 17 min­utes but 100% worth your time.
  3. The Sin­gle Chris­t­ian (Alexan­dra DeSanc­tis Marr, Reli­gion & Lib­er­ty Online): “Rather than offer­ing sym­pa­thy to those who are sin­gle for rea­sons out­side their con­trol, Broad­way argues, Chris­tians often send the mes­sage that sin­gle­ness is an afflic­tion endured by those who sim­ply aren’t try­ing hard enough to find a spouse. But, as she explains, there isn’t an easy answer to what is ulti­mate­ly a prob­lem of num­bers: ‘When women out­num­ber men in the church, that leaves three options: polygamy, mar­ry­ing a non-Chris­t­ian or stay­ing sin­gle. Which would you like us to choose?’”
    • That’s a great line by Broad­way.
  4. The Schol­ar of Com­e­dy (David Rem­nick inter­view­ing Jer­ry Sein­feld, The New York­er): “Every artist is only show­ing you his best. When you watch a movie, every scene—they only show you the one take that worked. Sev­en­teen times, they missed it. You’re only see­ing the peak of it. But in standup you got­ta make it hap­pen every night. That’s the dif­fer­ence. That’s why actors, I think, like to do the the­atre. They want to be hon­est. They want to be held to account. And only a live audi­ence holds you to account.”
  5. Chiefs kick­er Har­ri­son Butk­er says Pride Month is exam­ple of ‘dead­ly sin’ dur­ing com­mence­ment speech (Lukas Weese, New York Times): “Kansas City Chiefs kick­er Har­ri­son Butk­er, speak­ing dur­ing a com­mence­ment speech at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege, referred to Pride Month, the events in June demon­strat­ing inclu­siv­i­ty and sup­port for the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty, as an exam­ple of the ‘dead­ly sins’ as he advo­cat­ed for a more con­ser­v­a­tive brand of Catholi­cism.”
    • I am always sur­prised when peo­ple seem sur­prised when reli­gious peo­ple say reli­gious things.
    • Relat­ed: Har­ri­son Butk­er jer­sey sales increase in after­math of Bene­dic­tine Col­lege address (Greg Dai­ley and Ryan Hen­nessy, KCTV 5): “Amid reac­tion to Har­ri­son Butker’s now-viral com­mence­ment speech at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege on Sat­ur­day, the place­kick­er seems to have gained sev­er­al new fans in the process. Accord­ing to NFL.com, Butker’s jer­sey sales are among the most pop­u­lar online. Only Travis Kelce rat­ed high­er than Butk­er, with Mahomes com­ing in right behind the star from Geor­gia Tech.”
    • This is com­mon enough that there is prob­a­bly a term for it: high-sta­tus peo­ple denounce some­thing and or pre­tend it does­n’t exist, where­as many low­er-sta­tus peo­ple real­ly like it. This is a good exam­ple of this, as is the New York Times best­seller list com­pared to actu­al sales num­bers.
  6. Cam­pus protest-relat­ed:
    • See­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty More Clear­ly (David Pozen, blog): “To sim­pli­fy some­what, we might say that pro­fes­sors are grant­ed a num­ber of basic rights with­in the uni­ver­si­ty, includ­ing rights to free speech and due process and qua­si-prop­er­ty rights in the job itself. Stu­dents and staff are grant­ed a par­tial­ly over­lap­ping, though weak­er, bun­dle of rights. What none of us have are gov­er­nance rights against the trustees who real­ly run the place. We enjoy var­i­ous indi­vid­ual priv­i­leges and pro­tec­tions, but not the fran­chise. Legal schol­ars and polit­i­cal sci­en­tists have a term for this sort of arrange­ment, too: lib­er­al autoc­ra­cy.”
      • The author is a law prof at Colum­bia and has some insight­ful thoughts about how shifts in uni­ver­si­ty gov­er­nance in recent years have pro­vid­ed the con­text for how cam­pus­es are respond­ing to protests.
    • Mod­ern Protest Cul­ture is Crip­pled by Inter­net-Brain (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “A trans­for­ma­tion­al protest is one that bears the brunt of real­i­ty and, in so doing, con­vinces oth­ers to join in chang­ing it. The inabil­i­ty to bear this real­i­ty is not just fragili­ty, it is pre­cise­ly the way com­put­er sys­tems work; when the autonomous sys­tem fails to yield a pleas­ant or smooth solu­tion, it must be fixed, not endured. Con­tem­po­rary stu­dent activism reflects the assump­tions and habits of the dig­i­tal era.”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. Bel­gian Gov­ern­ment Will Inter­vene In Cas­es Where Pros­ti­tutes Refuse Sex­u­al Acts Too Often (Amy Hamm, ProP­ub­li­ca): “Pros­ti­tutes are to be grant­ed ‘rights’ to refuse sex­u­al acts, stop sex­u­al acts, per­form sex­u­al acts in the man­ner they pre­fer, and refuse to sit behind Ams­ter­dam-style win­dows (pub­lic fac­ing win­dows where pros­ti­tutes are on dis­play). How­ev­er, should a pros­ti­tute use these ‘rights’ 10 times with­in six months, their pimp can then call on a gov­ern­ment medi­a­tor to inter­vene.”
    • Pimps used to have to beat their pros­ti­tutes. Now they can have the gov­ern­ment use force on their behalf. #progress
    • This is the log­ic of “bake the cake, big­ot” tak­en to its ulti­mate con­clu­sion — con­science is noth­ing and the mar­ket is every­thing and per­son­al con­vic­tions are incon­ve­niences to be tram­pled upon.
    • If, as some fem­i­nists tell us, sex work is real work then you can’t be shocked at stuff like this. If, on the oth­er hand, pros­ti­tu­tion is both a tragedy and a vice you can get out­raged.

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.