Tag: how the church is perceived

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 449

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 449, which is not a super inter­est­ing num­ber. It has this going for it: its base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion (121122) begins with the same dig­its as its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion (1211).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gious Wor­ship Atten­dance in Amer­i­ca: Evi­dence from Cell­phone Data (Devin G. Pope, NBER): “I estab­lish sev­er­al key find­ings. First, 73% of peo­ple step into a reli­gious place of wor­ship at least once dur­ing the year on the pri­ma­ry day of wor­ship (e.g. Sun­days for most Chris­t­ian church­es). How­ev­er, only 5% of Amer­i­cans attend ser­vices ‘week­ly’, far few­er than the ~22% who report to do so in sur­veys. The num­ber of occa­sion­al vs. fre­quent atten­ders varies sub­stan­tial­ly by reli­gion. I esti­mate that approx­i­mate­ly 45M Amer­i­cans attend wor­ship ser­vices in a typ­i­cal week of the year, but with large changes around Hol­i­days (e.g. East­er).”
    • Excerpt is from the abstract. Author is a prof of behav­ioral sci­ence and eco­nom­ics at U Chica­go.
    • See also this (some­what harsh) cri­tique by Lyman Stone: https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1779889740260499820 (read the whole thread for the cri­tique)
    • Response from Devin Pope, on reli­gious atten­dance (Devin Pope, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “There are def­i­nite­ly lim­i­ta­tions with the cell­phone data (I’ve had about 100 peo­ple tell me that I’m not doing a good job track­ing Ortho­dox Jews!). I know that these issues exist. But sur­vey data has its own issues. Social desir­abil­i­ty bias and oth­er issues could lead to wide­ly incor­rect esti­mates of the num­ber of peo­ple who fre­quent­ly attend ser­vices (and sur­veys are going to have a hard time sam­pling Ortho­dox Jews too!). Giv­en the dif­fi­cul­ty of mea­sur­ing some of these ques­tions, I think that a new method – even with lim­i­ta­tions – is use­ful.”
    • Lyman Stone help­ful­ly replies to Devin Pope (Twit­ter thread)
    • Extreme­ly inter­est­ing through­out. If you don’t have time to dive in then just read the abstract of the ini­tial arti­cle and the Stone’s final Twit­ter thread.
  2. Amer­i­cans are still not wor­ried enough about the risk of world war (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “So if you were liv­ing at any point in 1931 through 1940, you would already be wit­ness­ing con­flicts that would even­tu­al­ly turn into the blood­i­est, most cat­a­clysmic war that human­i­ty has yet known — but you might not real­ize it. You would be stand­ing in the foothills of the Sec­ond World War, but unless you were able to make far-sight­ed pre­dic­tions, you wouldn’t know what hor­rors lurked in the near future. In case the par­al­lel isn’t blind­ing­ly obvi­ous, we might be stand­ing in the foothills of World War 3 right now. If WW3 hap­pens, future blog­gers might list the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in a time­line like the one I just gave.”
    • This was pub­lished before Iran attacked Israel. btw.
  3. How to Stop Los­ing 17,500 Kid­neys (San­ti Ruiz, Sub­stack): “Greg and the researchers that he worked with showed that there are 17,500 kid­neys, 7,500 liv­ers, 1,500 hearts, and 1,500 lungs that go untrans­plant­ed every year from poten­tial Amer­i­can organ donors. For scale, that means the Unit­ed States does not need to have a wait­ing list for liv­ers, hearts, or lungs with­in three years, and the kid­ney wait­ing list should come way down. That data con­vinced not only the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, but also the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. This reform move­ment has now crossed three admin­is­tra­tions, and that almost nev­er hap­pens.”
  4. Should We Change Species to Save Them? (Emi­ly Anthes, New York Times): “In some ways, assist­ed evo­lu­tion is an argu­ment — or, per­haps, an acknowl­edg­ment — that there is no step­ping back, no future in which humans do not pro­found­ly shape the lives and fates of wild crea­tures. To Dr. Harley, it has become clear that pre­vent­ing more extinc­tions will require human inter­ven­tion, inno­va­tion and effort.”
    • Includ­ing part­ly for the amaz­ing head­er art. Unlocked.
  5. Abol­ish Grades (Bethany Lor­den, Stan­ford Review): “I have earned an ‘A’ on archi­tec­ture draw­ings which were not my most care­ful, on physics prob­lem sets that I did not ful­ly under­stand, on sto­ries which were not my most cre­ative. Some­thing is bro­ken in the grad­ing sys­tem. Feed­back on work ought to be in words, not let­ters, and it should be rel­a­tive to a stu­den­t’s best work, not to the per­for­mance of the class.”
    • Bethany is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha.
  6. Mate Poach­ing: Social Taboo or Healthy Way to Find Love? (Kevin Ben­nett, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “Psy­cho­log­i­cal research sug­gests that 10 to 20 per­cent of new rela­tion­ships among het­ero­sex­u­al cou­ples are formed direct­ly from mate poach­ing. One study found that 10 to 15 per­cent of par­tic­i­pants’ cur­rent rela­tion­ships were the result of suc­cess­ful mate poach­ing. Anoth­er study sur­veyed under­grad­u­ate stu­dents and found that 20 per­cent were cur­rent­ly involved in a rela­tion­ship that began this way.… Research sug­gests that mate poachers—and those most sus­cep­ti­ble to poaching—share some char­ac­ter­is­tics. There is a link between nar­cis­sism, infi­deli­ty, uncom­mit­ted sex, and mate poach­ing, and these find­ings are not lim­it­ed to mod­ern indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries.”
    • That’s a lot of rela­tion­ships begun on the shady side! A bit of advice from a long­time observ­er of col­lege romances: if they cheat with you they are like­ly to cheat on you.
  7. Switch to Web-Based Sur­veys Dur­ing COVID-19 Pan­dem­ic Left Out the Most Reli­gious, Cre­at­ing a False Impres­sion of Rapid Reli­gious Decline (Schn­abel et al, Soci­ol­o­gy of Reli­gion):  “Although at first glance it appears that intense reli­gion declined dra­mat­i­cal­ly dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion reveals how this shift is a func­tion of changes in how the sur­vey was field­ed rather than Amer­i­cans turn­ing away from reli­gion dur­ing a time of cri­sis.… reli­gion is more per­sis­tent than it appears, intense­ly reli­gious peo­ple are less like­ly to agree to par­tic­i­pate in sur­veys, and data col­lec­tion efforts like the typ­i­cal in-per­son GSS are invalu­able for accu­rate­ly esti­mat­ing reli­gion and oth­er ide­o­log­i­cal fac­tors in the Unit­ed States asso­ci­at­ed with the like­li­hood of par­tic­i­pat­ing in sur­veys.”
    • The authors are soci­ol­o­gists at Cor­nell, Har­vard, and NYU. Fas­ci­nat­ing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Sticky Sit­u­a­tion (Load­ing Artist) — there are two kinds of peo­ple
  • A Dun­geons & Drag­ons actu­al play show is going to sell out Madi­son Square Gar­den (Aman­da Sil­ber­ling, Tech Crunch): “Dropout’s Dun­geons & Drag­ons actu­al play show, Dimen­sion 20, is get­ting pret­ty close to sell­ing out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after tick­et sales opened to the gen­er­al pub­lic. To the unini­ti­at­ed, it may seem absurd to go to a mas­sive sports are­na and watch peo­ple play D&D. As one Red­di­tor com­ment­ed, ‘This bog­gles my mind. When I was play­ing D&D in the ear­ly eight­ies, I would have nev­er believed that there was a future where peo­ple would watch live D&D at Madi­son Square Gar­den. It’s incom­pre­hen­si­ble to me.’ ”

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 445

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 445, which feels like it ought to have many fac­tors. But it’s just 89 * 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Har­vard, M.I.T. and Sys­temic Anti­semitism (David French, New York Times): “…what’s hap­pen­ing to Jew­ish stu­dents and fac­ul­ty at sev­er­al elite cam­pus­es is so com­pre­hen­sive and all-con­sum­ing that it can only be described as sys­temic anti­semitism.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Worth read­ing. Unlocked.
  2. How To Save a Democ­ra­cy (Quico Toro, Sub­stack): “Watch­ing videos of the protest now, what strikes you is that Bernar­do Aré­va­lo is sel­dom men­tioned. K’iche’ lead­ers were at pains to empha­size they were not there to favor one politi­cian or anoth­er. They were there to defend their votes. If Arévalo’s name was sel­dom uttered, the name of Jesus Christ was con­stant­ly invoked.”
    • A remark­able sto­ry. 
  3. Piety and Pro­fan­i­ty: The Raunchy Chris­tians Are Here (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The par­tial embrace of vul­gar­i­ty, Dr. Kobes Du Mez point­ed out, is hap­pen­ing in a moment of deep con­ser­v­a­tive out­rage, an often vis­cer­al dis­gust, at ris­ing rates of non­tra­di­tion­al gen­der and sex­u­al iden­ti­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly among young peo­ple. In that con­text, an indul­gence in het­ero­sex­u­al lust, even if in poor taste, is becom­ing seen as not just benign, but maybe even healthy and noble. Part of the rea­son trans­gen­der iden­ti­ties are con­sid­ered a threat is that they blur gen­der dif­fer­ence, Dr. Kobes Du Mez said. ‘Against that back­drop, it’s a whole­some thing for a boy to be lust­ing after a very sexy woman.’”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Steven D. Levitt (Freako­nom­ics co-author and Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor) on His Career And Deci­sion To Retire From Aca­d­e­m­ic Eco­nom­ics (Jon Hart­ley, Cap­i­tal­ism and Free­dom): “I had always been the smartest kid or close to the smartest kid, but then I got to MIT and I real­ized my God these peo­ple are incred­i­ble. Not just what they know but how they think. So, I knew from day one I was the odd man out. I mean I’m not even exag­ger­at­ing when I say that there was a group of peo­ple in the in-crowd. Aus­tan Gools­bee, my good friend Aus­tan Gools­bee was one of the in-crowds. And Aus­tan told me that maybe a month into our first year at MIT, the in-crowd sat down and they made a list of the five peo­ple most like­ly to fail out. And I was on that list of five.”
    • An absolute­ly delight­ful inter­view. The above link is to the tran­script, but I rec­om­mend the audio ver­sion.
  5. The Pol­i­cy Stakes in this Elec­tion Are High (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “This pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is not very inter­est­ing, but it is impor­tant. And some of the rea­sons it’s impor­tant are the banal rea­sons that every pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is impor­tant: You get dif­fer­ent pol­i­cy out­comes depend­ing on who gets elect­ed.”
    • Writ­ten from a cen­ter-left per­spec­tive. Even if you dis­agree with Bar­ro on your pre­ferred pol­i­cy out­comes, I think he does a nice job of sum­ma­riz­ing some of the most impor­tant dif­fer­ences (although he leaves off a few big ones about which the two admin­is­tra­tions have dif­fer­ent track records such as reli­gious free­dom, DEI issues, etc).
  6. Are Drunk Peo­ple in New Orleans More Sen­si­ble Than Con­gress? (Ben Meets Amer­i­ca, YouTube): four min­utes. If the qual­i­ty con­tin­ues, I will prob­a­bly be shar­ing most install­ments of this series.
  7. Which Cities are the Least Reli­gious? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The least reli­gious cities are at the top and there are two clear win­ners here: San Fran­cis­co and Seat­tle. In both cas­es, about sev­en in ten adults are attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices less than once a year. But I think that San Fran­cis­co make take the crown for most sec­u­lar — just 12% of folks in that city are attend­ing church at least once a month.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty

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 443

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, vol­ume 443, is a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Four Ways of Look­ing at Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…to chart the sup­posed reach of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, a sur­vey from the Pub­lic Reli­gion Research Insti­tute asks respon­dents whether they agree with the for­mu­la­tion ‘U.S. laws should be based on Chris­t­ian val­ues.’ But some­one who says yes might just be agree­ing with King’s ‘Let­ter From Birm­ing­ham Jail’ or the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, not endors­ing a legal code based on Deuteron­o­my.”
    • Unlocked.
  2. Relat­ed: If It Were Me, I’d Try Not Help­ing the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A demo­c­ra­t­ic life is not the high­est thing or the best thing. But as a way of liv­ing amongst our neigh­bors and seek­ing to live a life of con­science under the law, it is a very good thing. The Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists, with their strong man pol­i­tics, sup­port for rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence, and obses­sion with racial sol­i­dar­i­ty would destroy all of that. What wor­ries me now, though, is not the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists them­selves. Frankly, many of them are too reck­less, undis­ci­plined, and reac­tive to be able to accom­plish the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change they seek. What wor­ries me is that there are a great many social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers who love the demo­c­ra­t­ic life who are con­stant­ly being called ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists’ by the likes of Hei­di Przy­by­la for believ­ing things that are utter­ly unre­mark­able in Chris­t­ian his­to­ry. If our sec­u­lar media out­lets con­tin­ue to tell them that ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ is the belief in things vir­tu­al­ly all Chris­tians across his­to­ry have believed, I fear they will lis­ten. And they will find these eth­no-nation­al­ist total­i­tar­i­an aspi­rants and, not real­iz­ing what they are doing, they will make com­mon cause with them.”
    • This is one of the most help­ful pieces I’ve seen on Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism. It’s a bit long, but eas­i­ly skim­ma­ble to zero in on the parts you find most inter­est­ing.
  3. What hap­pened after a man got 217 coro­n­avirus shots (Rachel Pan­nett, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Going into the study, the researchers had spec­u­lat­ed that hav­ing so many shots could cause his immune sys­tem to become fatigued. Vac­cines cre­ate immune mem­o­ry cells that are on stand­by, ready to rapid­ly acti­vate the body’s defens­es in the event of an infec­tion. But in fact, the researchers found that the man had more of these immune cells — known as T‑cells — than a con­trol group that had received the stan­dard three-dose vac­cine reg­i­men. They also did not detect any fatigue in these cells, which they said were just as effec­tive as those of peo­ple who had received a typ­i­cal num­ber of coro­n­avirus shots.”
  4. Alba­nia to speed up EU acces­sion using Chat­G­PT (Alice Tay­lor, Eurac­tiv): “The Alban­ian gov­ern­ment will use Chat­G­PT to trans­late thou­sands of pages of EU legal mea­sures and pro­vi­sions into shqip (Alban­ian lan­guage) and then inte­grate them into exist­ing legal struc­tures, fol­low­ing an agree­ment with the CEO of the par­ent com­pa­ny, Ope­nAI, Mira Murati, who was born in Alba­nia.… on 13 Decem­ber, at the EU sum­mit in Brus­sels, he will present the project and a suc­cess­ful test of ‘the Alban­ian mod­el of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence for the inter­po­si­tion of the leg­is­la­tion totalling 280,000 pages of legal mea­sures of the EU.’”
  5. I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train (Steve Charnok, Metro): “While the 17-year-old does indeed live on trains, he does so entire­ly legal­ly. And with a sur­pris­ing amount of com­fort. Lasse trav­els 600 miles a day through­out Ger­many aboard Deutsche Bahn trains. He trav­els first class, sleeps on night trains, has break­fast in DB lounges and takes show­ers in pub­lic swim­ming pools and leisure cen­tres, all using his unlim­it­ed annu­al rail­card.”

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 442

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 442nd edi­tion of these emails. 442 is the sum of eight con­sec­u­tive prime num­bers: 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of the Cul­ture, 2024 (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The tech plat­forms aren’t like the Medici in Flo­rence, or those oth­er rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelan­ge­lo or Mozart. They want to cre­ate a world of junkies—because they will be the deal­ers. Addic­tion is the goal.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Includes an anec­dote about a Stan­ford under­grad near the end.
  2. Men Are From Mer­cury, Women Are From Nep­tune (David French, New York Times): “…if there are pre-exist­ing polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences between men and women — and it’s true that in aggre­gate men are more con­ser­v­a­tive than women — then those dif­fer­ences will be exac­er­bat­ed as men spend more time with men, and women spend more time with women. The more that men and women live sep­a­rate lives, the more we would expect to see sep­a­rate beliefs.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent, and I high­ly rec­om­mend it to you.
  3. My Mom’s Rules For Cults (Ben Lan­dau-Tay­lor, Sub­stack): “…when I was 25 years old I told my par­ents I was mov­ing to San Fran­cis­co to join a new-wave rad­i­cal move­ment and a self-devel­op­ment psy­chol­o­gy I‑swear-we’re-not-a-cult group. And she sat me down and gave me three things to check before I went: 1. Are the mem­bers of the group in con­tact with their fam­i­lies? 2. How does the group react when mem­bers are close with friends who don’t share the group’s beliefs and ide­ol­o­gy? Is this dis­cour­aged? Is it seen as nor­mal and healthy? 3. How does the group relate to for­mer mem­bers who have left? Are they old friends who are wel­come at par­ties, or are they vile trai­tors, or what? In my expe­ri­ence this is the best and fastest way to tell the dif­fer­ence…”
  4. ‘I Said, ‘What’s Your Plan About Mar­riage and Dat­ing?’ And There Was Silence.’ (Jane Coas­ton, New York Times): “I was talk­ing to a grad­u­ate stu­dent recent­ly. He had a very clear sense of his plan for school­ing and work, and then I said, ‘What’s your plan about mar­riage and dat­ing?’ And there was silence. He didn’t real­ly have a plan. I think that’s part of the chal­lenge — that peo­ple are not being inten­tion­al enough about seek­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet, date and mar­ry young adults in their world.”
    • An inter­view with Brad Wilcox, who is often cit­ed in these updates. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. The Rise of the Non-Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cal (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Nine per­cent of Repub­li­can Jews self-iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cal, com­pared to 3% of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Jews. For Mus­lims, the gap is huge: 32% vs 11%. It’s also fair­ly large for Bud­dhists (16% vs 6%) and Hin­dus (18% vs 10%). You can even see it among noth­ing in par­tic­u­lars. 19% of the Repub­li­cans are evan­gel­i­cals; it’s just 9% of the Democ­rats.”
    • Wild and inter­est­ing.
  6. The Takeover (Nee­tu Arnold, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…even in the van­ish­ing­ly rare event that uni­ver­si­ties attempt to cul­ti­vate an envi­ron­ment of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom and free speech on cam­pus, it will nev­er ful­ly apply to spon­sored inter­na­tion­al stu­dents from coun­tries with author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments. In many ways, this defeats the main pur­pose of hav­ing inter­na­tion­al stu­dents on Amer­i­can cam­pus­es in the first place: the free and open cul­tur­al exchange that occurs between them and Amer­i­can stu­dents. What kind of skewed cul­tur­al edu­ca­tion will Amer­i­can stu­dents receive about Sau­di Ara­bia and Chi­na if their friends from those coun­tries aren’t even allowed to crit­i­cize their own gov­ern­ments, and if the main source of teach­ing and schol­ar­ship on such coun­tries comes out of ‘cen­ters’ fund­ed by those gov­ern­ments?”
    • This is an odd arti­cle. Lots of inter­est­ing stats framed strange­ly, but def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing.
  7. Acad­e­mi­a’s “Pre­tendi­an” Prob­lem Stems From a Few Very Obvi­ous and Basic Real­i­ties (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “You’ve cre­at­ed a fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive process in which a seg­ment of peo­ple are giv­en a very large advan­tage, there are few if any objec­tive mark­ers that can dis­prove that some­one is a mem­ber of that seg­ment, and you’ve declared it offen­sive to ques­tion whether some­one real­ly is a mem­ber of that seg­ment, out­side of very spe­cif­ic sce­nar­ios. (When I was in acad­e­mia peo­ple spoke very dark­ly about the con­cept of ever ques­tion­ing someone’s indige­nous iden­ti­ty, called it the act of a col­o­niz­er, etc etc.) The obvi­ous ques­tion is… what did you think was going to hap­pen? Human­i­ties and social sci­ences depart­ments have, through the con­di­tions described above, rung the din­ner bell for peo­ple pre­tend­ing to have indige­nous her­itage. They now act shocked when such peo­ple show up. I find it disin­gen­u­ous and unto­ward. This behav­ior is the prod­uct of the incen­tives that you your­self built.”

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.