Tag: how the church is perceived

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 439

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 439, which is not only a prime num­ber and the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (139 + 149 + 151), but also the sum of nine con­sec­u­tive primes (31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67). Which is, you know, a lot­ta primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Dig­i­tal Apps Are Chang­ing How We Read the Bible (John Dyer, Text & Canon): “I asked both groups to read the book of Jude and then tell me (1) what the point of the book was, and (2) how it made them feel. Inter­est­ing­ly, two oppo­site trends emerged. The print read­ers said they felt Jude was about God’s judg­ment while the phone read­ers tend­ed to empha­size God’s faith­ful­ness. But then, on the sec­ond ques­tion, their answers seemed to split. The print read­ers, who felt the book was about God’s judg­ment, said they were encour­aged by the read­ing. The phone read­ers on the oth­er hand who said Jude was about God’s faith­ful­ness, said after read­ing it that they felt dis­cour­aged and con­fused. So what can account for that dif­fer­ence? Why is a judg­men­tal God encour­ag­ing and a faith­ful God dis­cour­ag­ing?”
  2. The Grand Canyon-Sized Chasm Between Elites and Ordi­nary Amer­i­cans (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Per­haps the most strik­ing diver­gence between elite and non-elite opin­ion: Although the major­i­ty of ordi­nary vot­ers oppose the strict rationing of meat, elec­tric­i­ty, and gas to fight cli­mate change, 89% of Ivy grad­u­ates and 77% of elites over­all are in favor of it.”
  3. What Hap­pened When My Church Encoun­tered Neg­a­tive World (Patrick Miller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You can tell our church’s sto­ry in a way that makes us the vic­tims of the pro­gres­sives, but that’s not our full sto­ry. Nor is it the sto­ry of most non-coastal church­es that refused to go pro-Trump or pro-Biden in 2020. Pas­tors at such church­es will tell you the same sto­ry: The neg­a­tive world bows before gold­en don­keys and ele­phants.”
  4. Sarah Isgur’s Major­i­ty Report (Kele­fah San­neh, The New York­er): “Through the eyes of Isgur and French, the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem gen­er­al­ly appears to be a place where smart peo­ple assess good-faith argu­ments and com­pose thought­ful essays explain­ing their deci­sions. Their under­ly­ing con­tention is that the Supreme Court is good, even, or per­haps espe­cial­ly, in its cur­rent incar­na­tion.… In an era of aggriev­ed polit­i­cal dis­course, Isgur is some­thing unusu­al: a com­men­ta­tor who tru­ly seems to love the gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion she cov­ers.”
    • Advi­so­ry Opin­ions is one of my favorite pod­casts and I’m not remote­ly a lawyer. Isgur and French are amaz­ing.
  5. The Devil’s Face in Gaza (Ger­ald McDer­mott, First Things): “The min­is­ter of tourism, a rab­bi, told an Israeli Chris­t­ian leader, ‘We hope you send mis­sion­ar­ies to the Arabs here.’ The Chris­t­ian was shocked: ‘Don’t you hate mis­sion­ar­ies?’ The gov­ern­ment min­is­ter replied, ‘If you teach them what you believe, we will have peace in the Mid­dle East.’”
  6. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Sit-in on Islam­o­pho­bia replaces pro-Israel tent in White Plaza (Dilan Gohill, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Orga­niz­ers set up the Sit-in to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia on the White Plaza lawn — a space pre­vi­ous­ly occu­pied by the Blue and White Tent. Tent orga­niz­ers told The Dai­ly they made an indef­i­nite reser­va­tion through Car­di­nal Engage. Accord­ing to Feige­lis, Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion told the Sit-In to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia that the space was reserved for the Blue and White Tent. He said as long as the sit-in refus­es to relo­cate, the tent can­not reassem­ble. The Dai­ly has reached out to the Uni­ver­si­ty for com­ment. ‘We did not move your stuff — the wind destroyed it, you cleaned it up. We saw an open space, we set up here, we’re hap­py to coex­ist.’ El Boudali said. He added that orga­niz­ers set up in White Plaza due to its high traf­fic.”
    • Stan­ford stu­dents protest new ban on overnight sit-in camp­ing (Lau­ren Irwin, The Hill): “Stan­ford said its lev­el of con­cern has risen to a point that it can no longer sup­port overnight activ­i­ties.”
    • Read the offi­cial Stan­ford state­ment: Pre­serv­ing free speech and safe­ty on White Plaza (Stan­ford News): “Mov­ing for­ward, any tents, tables, chairs, or oth­er sim­i­lar items will need to be removed from White Plaza between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Any overnight dis­plays and/or camp­ing items left unoc­cu­pied are sub­ject to removal for health and safe­ty rea­sons. Stu­dents who vio­late the no-camp­ing pol­i­cy will be sub­ject to a dis­ci­pli­nary refer­ral to the Office of Com­mu­ni­ty Stan­dards and may also be cit­ed for tres­pass for fail­ing to com­ply with a uni­ver­si­ty direc­tive.”
    • And not exact­ly Stan­ford news, but not not Stan­ford news: Law schools must adopt free speech poli­cies to main­tain ABA accred­i­ta­tion (Lexi Lonas, The Hill): “The new stan­dard requires schools to adopt a pol­i­cy that would allow fac­ul­ty, stu­dents and staff ‘to com­mu­ni­cate ideas that may be con­tro­ver­sial or unpop­u­lar, includ­ing through robust debate, demon­stra­tions or protests,’ and would for­bid activ­i­ties that dis­rupt or impinge on free speech. But it wouldn’t impose spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy lan­guage,’”’ the state­ment added.”
  7. The Polit­i­cal Pref­er­ences of LLMs (David Roza­do, Sub­stack): “When probed with questions/statements with polit­i­cal con­no­ta­tions most con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs tend to gen­er­ate respons­es that are diag­nosed by most polit­i­cal test instru­ments as man­i­fest­ing pref­er­ences for left-of-cen­ter view­points. This does not appear to be the case for base (i.e. foun­da­tion) mod­els upon which LLMs opti­mized for con­ver­sa­tion with humans are built. Though not con­clu­sive, our results pro­vide sup­port­ing evi­dence for the intrigu­ing hypoth­e­sis that the embed­ding of polit­i­cal pref­er­ences into LLMs might be hap­pen­ing most­ly post-pre­train­ing. Name­ly, dur­ing the super­vised fine-tun­ing (SFT) and/or Rein­force­ment Learn­ing (RL) stages of the con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs train­ing pipeline.”
    • In oth­er words, the AI tools we see appear to have polit­i­cal pref­er­ences trained into them by the com­pa­nies that are cre­at­ing them, although it is not clear to what extent this is delib­er­ate­ly being done.
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of data sci­ence in New Zealand — https://drozado.github.io/

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • His­to­ry of Japan (Bill Wurz, YouTube): nine amaz­ing min­utes — gen­uine­ly worth your time if you have any inter­est in Japan at all. Or in how to teach his­to­ry using video. He leaves a bunch out and def­i­nite­ly throws his opin­ion around, but it’s hard to see how he could have done any­thing else in nine min­utes. Real­ly good.

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 429

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 429, a sphenic num­ber (i.e, a num­ber with exact­ly three dis­tinct prime fac­tors).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Clas­si­cal lib­er­als are increas­ing­ly reli­gious (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Not too long ago, I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a rel­a­tive­ly new devel­op­ment in clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism. If a meet an intel­lec­tu­al non-Left­ist, increas­ing­ly they are Niet­zschean, com­pared to days of yore. But if they are clas­si­cal lib­er­al instead, typ­i­cal­ly they are reli­gious as well. That could be Catholic or Jew­ish or LDS or East­ern Ortho­dox, with some Protes­tant thrown into the mix, but Protes­tants com­ing in last. The per­son being reli­gious is now a pre­dic­tor of that same per­son hav­ing non-crazy polit­i­cal views. Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essen­tial­ly reli­gious move­ment.”
    • Relat­ed: Why Tyler Cowen Does­n’t Meet Protes­tant Intel­lec­tu­als (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “You would think that after decades of bemoan­ing the ‘scan­dal of the evan­gel­i­cal mind,’ we would be heav­i­ly pro­mot­ing the world class sci­en­tists and oth­er intel­lec­tu­al fig­ures we have. But that isn’t the case. I’m not a sci­en­tist but I’m not chopped liv­er either. I was a part­ner in a con­sult­ing firm, a senior fel­low in a major think tank, and have writ­ten for and been cit­ed in most of the major pub­li­ca­tions in the coun­try (NYT, WSJ, Guardian, Atlantic, etc). But the insti­tu­tion that’s done the most to pro­mote my work is the Catholic-cen­tric First Things mag­a­zine. Undoubt­ed­ly the best career move I could make as a writer on cul­ture, men’s issues, and pub­lic pol­i­cy would be to con­vert to Catholi­cism. That would prob­a­bly open doors to oppor­tu­ni­ties I will not oth­er­wise get.”
      • Renn left out some impor­tant pieces of the puz­zle. It also has to do with the way that decen­tral­ized church author­i­ty oper­ates in the Protes­tant world and the lack of inter­sec­tion between some­one like me and some­one like Andy Stan­ley. We just move in com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent cir­cles. I’m not say­ing I’m the intel­lec­tu­al in this equa­tion, by the way. I am say­ing I know a bunch. I have bap­tized peo­ple who are now pro­fes­sors at Stan­ford, but pick-your-favorite megachurch preach­er has no idea that they exist. And that lack of inter­sec­tion extends to groups like Ver­i­tas and the Trin­i­ty Forum which are doing the kind of work Renn describes, but inde­pen­dent­ly of Sad­dle­back Church or any oth­er evan­gel­i­cal cen­ter of influ­ence. Most influ­en­tial preach­ers are niche celebri­ties who are also pop­ulist intel­lec­tu­als, and that is a very dif­fer­ent thing from an aca­d­e­m­ic or insti­tu­tion­al intel­lec­tu­al. There real­ly isn’t any straight­for­ward way to bring the two togeth­er. And I haven’t even talked about the role of Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties in this sit­u­a­tion, their rela­tion­ship to evan­gel­i­cal influ­encers, and their joint rela­tion­ship to sec­u­lar schol­ars. It would take a whole essay to bring all the pieces togeth­er, and I’m not sure it’s a good use of my time.
    • Relat­ed: She found mean­ing where she least expect­ed it — her child­hood faith (Rachel Mar­tin, NPR): “Hur­witz: But I think what makes me ner­vous about the spir­i­tu­al buf­fet is that what you’re say­ing is, ‘I’m going to take this thing from Bud­dhism that’s so me and this thing from Judaism that’s so me and this from Catholi­cism.’   Mar­tin: One-hun­dred per­cent. That’s what I’m doing. Hur­witz: This is what so many of us do, and at the end of the day you’re rein­forc­ing your­self. You’re kind of deify­ing your­self. Mar­tin: Wow. Hur­witz: You’re say­ing, ‘What rein­forces my pre­ex­ist­ing beliefs?’ This is how we con­sume social media, right? But it’s not the pur­pose of these great spir­i­tu­al tra­di­tions.”
    • Also relat­ed: Where Does Reli­gion Come From? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Some sort of reli­gious atti­tude is essen­tial­ly demand­ed, in my view, by what we know about the uni­verse and the human place with­in it, but every sin­cere searcher is like­ly to fol­low their own idio­syn­crat­ic path.”
      • A fas­ci­nat­ing essay that wan­ders into weird places.
  2. How this Tur­ing Award–winning researcher became a leg­endary aca­d­e­m­ic advi­sor (Sheon Han, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “For­mer stu­dents describe Blum as unwa­ver­ing­ly pos­i­tive, say­ing he had oth­er ways besides crit­i­cism to steer them away from dead ends. ‘He is always smil­ing, but you can see he smiles wider when he likes some­thing. And oh, we want­ed that big smile,’ says Ronitt Rubin­feld, a pro­fes­sor of elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing and com­put­er sci­ence at MIT. Behind the gen­er­al pos­i­tiv­i­ty, Rubin­feld says, is a fine taste for inter­est­ing ideas. Stu­dents could trust they were being guid­ed in the right direc­tion. Come up with a bor­ing idea? Blum, who is known for his ter­ri­ble mem­o­ry, would have most­ly for­got­ten it by your next meet­ing.”
    • I quite liked this one.
  3. There’s anoth­er Chris­t­ian move­ment that’s chang­ing our pol­i­tics. It has noth­ing to do with white­ness or nation­al­ism (John Blake, CNN): “The Social Gospel was a Chris­t­ian move­ment that emerged in late 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca as a response to the obscene lev­els of inequal­i­ty in a rapid­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing coun­try.… The Social Gospel turned reli­gion into a weapon for eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal reform. Its mes­sage: sav­ing peo­ple from slums was just as impor­tant as sav­ing them from hell. At its peak, the movement’s lead­ers sup­port­ed cam­paigns for eight-hour work­days, the break­ing up of cor­po­rate monop­o­lies and the abo­li­tion of child labor. They spoke from pul­pits, lec­tured across the coun­try and wrote best-sell­ing books.… The Social Gospel move­ment is mak­ing a come­back. Some may argue it nev­er left.”
  4. You Are the Last Line of Defense (Bari Weiss, The Free Press): “I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the peo­ple who, look­ing at facile, exter­nal mark­ers of my iden­ti­ty, one might imag­ine them to be. My allies are peo­ple who believe that Amer­i­ca is good. That the West is good. That human beings—not cultures—are cre­at­ed equal and that say­ing so is essen­tial to know­ing what we are fight­ing for. Amer­i­ca and our val­ues are worth fight­ing for—and that is the pri­or­i­ty of the day.”
  5. UK infant bap­tized before being forced off life sup­port, father says ‘the dev­il’ was in the court­room (Tim­o­thy H.J. Nerozzi, Fox News): “Dean Gre­go­ry, Indi’s father, said before her death that he was inspired to bap­tize his daugh­ter by Chris­t­ian legal vol­un­teers who fought to keep her alive. Dean said he became con­vinced of the exis­tence of the dev­il by his fam­i­ly’s treat­ment in the court­room. ‘I am not reli­gious and I am not bap­tized. But when I was in court, it felt like I had been dragged to hell,’ Dean Gre­go­ry said in a Nov. 6 inter­view with New Dai­ly Com­pass. ‘I thought, if hell exists then heav­en must exist. It was like the dev­il was there. I thought if there’s a dev­il then God must exist.’ ”
    • Heart­break­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Some Israel/Hamas per­spec­tives:
    • There Should Be More Pub­lic Pres­sure on Hamas (David French, New York Times): “I’m not naïve. I don’t for a moment believe that defeat­ing Hamas and remov­ing it from pow­er solves the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. Israel can­not live up to its own demo­c­ra­t­ic promise or its own lib­er­al ideals if, for exam­ple, it indulges its own dan­ger­ous rad­i­cals. But I do know that plac­ing more pres­sure on Israel than Hamas to end the con­flict and save civil­ian lives is exact­ly back­ward. The inter­na­tion­al sys­tem depends on oppos­ing the aggres­sor and pun­ish­ing crimes. Protests that aim their demands more at Israel than Hamas impede jus­tice, erode the inter­na­tion­al order and under­mine the quest for a real and last­ing peace.”
    • This War Did Not Start a Month Ago (Dalia Hatuqa, New York Times): “To many inside and out­side this war, the bru­tal­i­ty of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks was unthink­able, as have been the scale and feroc­i­ty of Israel’s reprisal. But Pales­tini­ans have been sub­ject to a steady stream of unfath­omable vio­lence — as well as the creep­ing annex­a­tion of their land by Israel and Israeli set­tlers — for gen­er­a­tions. If peo­ple are going to under­stand this lat­est con­flict and see a path for­ward for every­one, we need to be more hon­est, nuanced and com­pre­hen­sive about the recent decades of his­to­ry in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, par­tic­u­lar­ly the impact of occu­pa­tion and vio­lence on the Pales­tini­ans.”
      • A fair­ly straight­for­ward pre­sen­ta­tion of the Pales­tin­ian per­spec­tive.
    • The Strug­gle for Black Free­dom Has Noth­ing to Do with Israel (Cole­man Hugh­es, The Free Press): “There is yet anoth­er incon­ve­nient fact for those who want to reduce the Israeli-Arab con­flict to a com­pe­ti­tion between Euro­pean set­tlers and peo­ple of col­or: the major­i­ty of Israeli Jews are not Euro­pean. They are Mizrahi Jews—hailing from the Mid­dle East and North Africa. What’s more, it is not the Euro­pean Jews but the Mizrahi Jews—who are dif­fi­cult to visu­al­ly dis­tin­guish from Palestinians—that form most of the vot­ing base of the right-wing par­ties that Israel’s crit­ics con­sid­er to be the tru­ly racist ones.”
    • Three arti­cles from The Gospel Coali­tion about the var­i­ous ways Chris­tians think about the promis­es to Israel in the Old Tes­ta­ment. It’s worth sort­ing through your own per­spec­tive. These three essays are from well-respect­ed Chris­t­ian aca­d­e­mics who present their posi­tions con­cise­ly and well.
      • Why the Land Promis­es Belong to Eth­nic Israel (Ger­ald McDer­mott, The Gospel Coali­tion): “First, if the land promise was end­ed with the com­ing of Jesus, then God is not trust­wor­thy. For he promised to Abra­ham and his seed that the land would be theirs for an ever­last­ing pos­ses­sion (Gen. 17:8). Sec­ond, if the land promise to Israel is bro­ken, then so might be God’s promise to renew and restore the heav­ens and the earth. The land promise’s par­tial fulfillment—by bring­ing Jews from the four cor­ners of the earth back to the land start­ing in the eigh­teenth century—is down pay­ment on the promise of a new heav­en and a new earth. Third, it is a deep the­o­log­i­cal rea­son why we should sup­port Israel in this new war against the new Nazism.”
      • The Expect­ed Uni­ver­sal­iza­tion of the Old Tes­ta­ment Land Promis­es (G. K. Beale, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The land promis­es will be ful­filled in a phys­i­cal form when all believ­ers inher­it the earth, but the inau­gu­ra­tion of this ful­fill­ment is main­ly spir­i­tu­al until the final con­sum­ma­tion in a ful­ly phys­i­cal new heav­en and earth. The phys­i­cal way these land promis­es have begun ful­fill­ment is that Christ him­self intro­duced the new cre­ation by his phys­i­cal res­ur­rec­tion.… There­fore, none of the ref­er­ences to the promise of Israel’s land in the Old Tes­ta­ment appears to be relat­ed to the promis­es of eth­nic Israel’s return to the promised land on this present earth.”
      • Israel’s Role in the Land Promise (Dar­rell Bock, The Gospel Coali­tion): “It’s often claimed the New Tes­ta­ment moves the land promise from being about Israel as a peo­ple in the land to being about God’s peo­ple in the world. That’s an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. The ques­tion is whether that uni­ver­sal expan­sion neuters the spe­cif­ic promise made to Israel of a peo­ple in a land.”
  7. The Impru­dence of ‘Dump Them’ (Clare Cof­fey, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As pru­dence has fall­en out of favor as an aspi­ra­tion, it’s hard not to see the hole it has left. On social media, we try to fill that hole with an end­less pro­lif­er­a­tion of abstract rules to gov­ern human deci­sions. We try to out­source the basis of indi­vid­ual judg­ment to over­ly sim­plis­tic moral equa­tions, and more often than not, we find the math works out to ‘dump them.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 410

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 410, which hap­pens to be the HTTP sta­tus code for a resource being per­ma­nent­ly gone.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How elite schools like Stan­ford became fix­at­ed on the AI apoc­a­lypse (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Stu­dents who join the AI safe­ty com­mu­ni­ty some­times get more than free boba. Just as EA con­fer­ences once meant trav­el­ing the world and hav­ing one-on-one meet­ings with wealthy, influ­en­tial donors, Open Philanthropy’s new uni­ver­si­ty fel­low­ship offers a hefty direct deposit: under­grad­u­ate lead­ers receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insur­ance, and up to $100,000 a year to cov­er group expens­es.”
    • Bro — what? Stan­ford won’t even let us pay for a guest speak­er with out­side funds. It’s not clear that the under­grad stu­dents lead­ers at Stan­ford are mak­ing $80k a year, but it’s not clear that they’re not, either. Some stu­dent some­where is, and that’s wild.
  2. Where’s Wal­do? How to Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Prove You Found Him With­out Reveal­ing Where He Is (Jack Murtagh, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can):  “Amaz­ing­ly, every claim that I can prove to you with a tra­di­tion­al math­e­mat­i­cal proof can also be proved in zero knowl­edge. Take your favorite result in math, and you could in prin­ci­ple prove it to a friend while show­ing them bup­kes about how it works. This is a pro­found dis­cov­ery about the nature of proof itself. Cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing.”
    • Zero-knowl­edge proofs are wild. That last sen­tence “cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing” helped me real­ize that there are inter­est­ing par­al­lels to how peo­ple come to faith.
      • It is usu­al­ly an inter­ac­tive process. God begins to draw some­one repeat­ed­ly.
      • It is a prob­a­bilis­tic process. Things keep hap­pen­ing to the soon-to-be con­vert that don’t make sense. I mean, sure they could have hap­pened by chance because any­thing can hap­pen by chance. But they keep hap­pen­ing in a way that is exceed­ing­ly improb­a­ble.
      • The new con­vert’s con­fi­dence in God far exceeds their under­stand­ing of God.
    • God — the orig­i­nal zero-knowl­edge prover. To wax Aris­totelian, He is the unproved prover.
  3. Pas­tor Douša’s case shows the U.S. is not immune to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs on dis­sent (Scott Welder, Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy): “…DHS retal­i­at­ed against Pas­tor Douša for min­is­ter­ing to migrants and refugees in Mex­i­co in Decem­ber 2018 by restrict­ing her Trust­ed Trav­el­er priv­i­leges; sub­ject­ing her to extra screen­ing at the south­ern bor­der; and telling Mex­i­can author­i­ties, false­ly, that there was ‘a great pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that she did not have ‘ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion to be in Mex­i­co’ and sug­gest­ing that the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment ‘deny [her] entry to Mex­i­co’ and ‘send [her] back to the Unit­ed States.’ A CBP offi­cial lat­er admit­ted that the request to Mex­i­can author­i­ties was ‘cre­ative writ­ing,’ ‘with­out any basis.’ But DHS’s actions made it more dif­fi­cult for Pas­tor Douša to con­tin­ue her min­istry, even­tu­al­ly caus­ing her to lim­it her activ­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and to end her min­istry in Mex­i­co alto­geth­er.”
  4. On some of the recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • Why the Cham­pi­ons of Affir­ma­tive Action Had to Leave Asian Amer­i­cans Behind (Jay Caspi­an Kang, The New York­er): “Asian Amer­i­cans, the group whom the suit was sup­pos­ed­ly about, have been odd­ly absent from the con­ver­sa­tions that have fol­lowed the rul­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness of the affir­ma­tive-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have most­ly ignored the Asian Amer­i­can plain­tiffs and cho­sen, instead, to relit­i­gate the same argu­ments about mer­it, white suprema­cy, and priv­i­lege. Dur­ing the five years I spent cov­er­ing this case, the com­men­ta­tors defend­ing affir­ma­tive action almost nev­er dis­proved the cen­tral claim that dis­crim­i­na­tion was tak­ing place against Asian Amer­i­cans, even as they dis­missed the plain­tiffs as pawns who had been duped by a con­ser­v­a­tive legal activist. They almost always redi­rect­ed the con­ver­sa­tion to some­thing else—often lega­cy admis­sions.”
    • On Race and Acad­e­mia (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “As an aca­d­e­m­ic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these expe­ri­ences in inter­views and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve nev­er shared them in an arti­cle like this one. The respons­es I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion move me to ven­ture it. The cul­ture that a pol­i­cy helps put into place can be as impor­tant as the pol­i­cy itself. And in my life­time, racial pref­er­ences in acad­e­mia — not mere­ly when it comes to under­grad­u­ate admis­sions but also mov­ing on to grad school and job appli­ca­tions and teach­ing careers — have been not only a set of for­mal and infor­mal poli­cies but also the grounds for a cul­ture of per­cep­tions and assump­tions.”
      • This is a very raw and vul­ner­a­ble piece. Rec­om­mend­ed. His Ph.D. is from Stan­ford.
    • Cov­er­ing the 303 Cre­ative deci­sion: Why do reporters keep ignor­ing the fine print? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “I wish reporters would be hon­est in admit­ting that much of the anger expressed over the ver­dict stems from how Lorie Smith out­wit­ted her oppo­nents by fil­ing suit first, rather than endur­ing  a string of law­suits like what Jack Phillips is hav­ing to endure. I’m look­ing for that inves­tiga­tive piece on the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion that, after hav­ing been reproved twice now by the Supreme Court, hasn’t changed its ways at all. Where is that New York­er take-out on Autumn Scar­di­na, the trans­gen­der attor­ney whose per­son­al vendet­ta against Phillips just nev­er ends because the courts have giv­en her a free pass? I’m wait­ing.”
    • My Win at the Supreme Court Is a Win for All Amer­i­cans (Lorie Smith, Real Clear Reli­gion): “I can’t say every­thing every­one wants me to. I can’t pre­tend to agree with every idea pre­sent­ed to me. None of us can. None of us should have to. Each of us should be free to pur­sue truth, hold to our faith, respect­ful­ly speak our beliefs, and thought­ful­ly live them out day by day, with­out the gov­ern­ment telling us what to believe or say. If that’s the free­dom you want – for your­self, for your fam­i­ly and friends, for all of those who share your ideas and con­vic­tions – then my vic­to­ry is a vic­to­ry for you. What­ev­er you may think of me and my beliefs, we’re all freer today than we were yes­ter­day. I hope you find that cause for cel­e­bra­tion.”
      • The author is the vic­to­ri­ous plain­tiff in the gay wed­ding web­site case.
    • The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “The deci­sion means that gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not mis­use the law to com­pel speech or exclude from the mar­ket­place peo­ple whose beliefs it dislikes.That’s a win for all Americans—whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or holds dif­fer­ent beliefs. Each of us has the right to decide for our­selves what mes­sages we will communicate—in our words, in our art, in our voice—without inter­fer­ence from the gov­ern­ment. The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind.”
      • The author is the lawyer who argued this case before the Supreme Court. She is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, btw.
  5. Chris­tians: More Like Jesus or Phar­isees? (Bar­na Research Group): “In this nation­wide study of self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians, the goal was to deter­mine whether Chris­tians have the actions and atti­tude of Jesus as they inter­act with oth­ers or if they are more akin to the beliefs and behav­iors of Phar­isees, the self-right­eous sect of reli­gious lead­ers described in the New Tes­ta­ment.… The find­ings reveal that most self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians in the U.S. are char­ac­ter­ized by hav­ing the atti­tudes and actions researchers iden­ti­fied as Phar­i­saical. Just over half of the nation’s Christians—using the broad­est def­i­n­i­tion of those who call them­selves Christians—qualify for this cat­e­go­ry (51%). They tend to have atti­tudes and actions that are char­ac­ter­ized by self-right­eous­ness.”
    • This research is a decade old, but quite inter­est­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • I do have some reser­va­tions about the method­ol­o­gy. Some of the ques­tions are just wrong. For exam­ple, cat­e­go­riz­ing “I lis­ten to oth­ers to learn their sto­ry before telling them about my faith” being Christ­like rather than Phar­i­saical isn’t real­ly a Bib­li­cal stance, it’s just a per­son­al opin­ion. It may be a shrewd strat­e­gy and over­all com­mend­able, but I don’t see Jesus lis­ten­ing to a lot of sto­ries in the Bible. It’s a poor­ly cho­sen ques­tion for this scale. Quib­bles like that aside, I think the over­all vibe prob­a­bly sol­id.
  6. Liv­ing on a prayer? How attend­ing wor­ship can improve your phys­i­cal and men­tal health. (Phil McGraw and John White, USA Today): “Despite the proven health ben­e­fits, reli­gios­i­ty is on the decline in Amer­i­ca. The fastest-grow­ing reli­gious seg­ment of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is now ‘nones’ − those who pro­fess no reli­gion. We’re not here to evan­ge­lize, but as a doc­tor and a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, it’s impor­tant to note that a decline of reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive health effects.”
    • I love that the authors are Dr. Phil and the chief med­ical offi­cer at Web­MD. To the aver­age Amer­i­can they’ve prob­a­bly got more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any med­ical asso­ci­a­tion or even the NIH, FDA, and CDC.
  7. How to Do Great Work (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the fron­tier, notice gaps, explore promis­ing ones. This is how prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physi­cists.… What should you do if you’re young and ambi­tious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along pas­sive­ly, assum­ing the prob­lem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no sys­tem­at­ic pro­ce­dure you can fol­low. When you read biogra­phies of peo­ple who’ve done great work, it’s remark­able how much luck is involved. They dis­cov­er what to work on as a result of a chance meet­ing, or by read­ing a book they hap­pen to pick up. So you need to make your­self a big tar­get for luck, and the way to do that is to be curi­ous. Try lots of things, meet lots of peo­ple, read lots of books, ask lots of ques­tions.”
    • This is super-long but worth­while. He ram­bles and is mis­tak­en at points, but his core insights are sol­id and impor­tant.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. From vol­ume 286.

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 409

Read it for the amus­ing bits at the end.

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 409, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gion Has Become a Lux­u­ry Good (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “More edu­cat­ed peo­ple are more like­ly to claim a reli­gious affil­i­a­tion on sur­veys. It’s true in every sin­gle wave of the Coop­er­a­tive Elec­tion Study. It’s also the case in the Nation­scape sur­vey, which is 477K respon­dents. They even have 4,000 peo­ple with doc­tor­al degrees in their sam­ple. The most like­ly to be non-reli­gious? Those who didn’t fin­ish high school. As edu­ca­tion increas­es, so does reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. The group with the high­est lev­el of reli­gious affil­i­a­tion are those with a master’s degree.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. When the Ser­mon Fiz­zles Instead of Siz­zles (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “But who’s to say that, in the mind of God, the pow­er of the preach­ing is entire­ly in the hands of the preach­er? Who’s to say that the pastor’s task is to pre­pare the ser­mon while the congregation’s task is mere­ly to pre­pare their own hearts to hear it? What if preach­ing is pow­er­less not because of the pastor’s lack of prepa­ra­tion but because of the church’s lack of prayer? What if poor preach­ing is not the con­se­quence of any fail­ure on the pastor’s part but on the congregation’s?”
  3. Why I’m Not a Lib­er­al Catholic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But I just don’t see how you can look at the mod­ern world, writ large, and its most devel­oped precincts espe­cial­ly — the world of sex edu­ca­tion via ubiq­ui­tous pornog­ra­phy, fal­ter­ing mar­riage rates, col­laps­ing birthrates, the alien­ation of the sex­es from one anoth­er, the ris­ing exis­ten­tial angst attend­ing all these trends and the creep of euthana­sia as a ‘mer­ci­ful’ solu­tion — and say that clear­ly what the church needs to do at this his­tor­i­cal moment is water down or just talk less about its teach­ings on sex and mar­riage and fam­i­ly, rather than find a way to reassert them or offer them anew.”
    • The whole thing is specif­i­cal­ly about the Roman Catholic Church, but is rel­e­vant to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty as well.
    • While we’re on the sub­ject The 5 Minute Case for Protes­tantism (Gavin Ortlund, YouTube): five min­utes
  4. Is There An Illu­sion Of Moral Decline? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I’ve been read­ing the bias­es and heuris­tics lit­er­a­ture for fif­teen years now, and devel­oped the fol­low­ing heuris­tic: if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about how many marsh­mal­lows to take in a rigged exper­i­ment, this is prob­a­bly an inter­est­ing and pro­duc­tive line of research. But if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about their most foun­da­tion­al real-life beliefs, prob­a­bly those ordi­nary peo­ple are being com­plete­ly sen­si­ble, and it’s the researcher who’s try­ing to shoe­horn their rea­son­ing into some mode it was nev­er intend­ed to address.”
  5. ‘Exhaust­ed’ pas­tors suf­fer­ing decline in over­all health, respect, friend­ship: study (Jon Brown, Fox News): “Pas­tors who report­ed that their men­tal and emo­tion­al health was below aver­age spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excel­lent men­tal and emo­tion­al health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”
    • This cor­re­sponds with what I am hear­ing anec­do­tal­ly. Which is bizarre to me, because min­istry is awe­some and reward­ing
  6. Sau­di Ara­bia Wants Tourists. It Didn’t Expect Chris­tians. (Vivian Nereim, Yahoo News): “No one in the con­ser­v­a­tive Islam­ic king­dom had planned for the Chris­tians. Yet Chris­tians of many stripes — includ­ing Bap­tists, Men­non­ites and oth­ers who call them­selves ‘chil­dren of God’ — were among the first peo­ple to use the new Sau­di tourist visas. Since then, they have grown steadi­ly in num­bers, drawn by word of mouth and viral YouTube videos argu­ing that Sau­di Ara­bia, not Egypt, is the site of Mount Sinai, the peak where Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian Scrip­tures describe God reveal­ing the Ten Com­mand­ments.”
  7. The recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • I don’t have any arti­cles about the Supreme Court deci­sion in favor of the web design­er who refus­es to design web­sites for gay mar­riages, sim­ply because I haven’t read any­thing very good about it. Most arti­cles seem to mis­un­der­stand both the case and the deci­sion entire­ly. It was a won­der­ful out­come and should be praised — the gov­ern­ment can­not com­pel you to say some­thing you do not believe or to cel­e­brate some­thing you do not approve. Sug­ges­tions for thought­ful arti­cles wel­come, even those with which you think I will dis­agree.
    • Affir­ma­tive Action Thoughts in an Inel­e­gant List For­mat (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…we demand that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem be both a lad­der of suc­cess, a sort­ing sys­tem that cre­ates a hier­ar­chy of excel­lence, and a great equal­iz­er, a way to make soci­ety more equi­table. These are flat­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry pur­pos­es. They are direct­ly antag­o­nis­tic to each oth­er.”
    • Burn Down the Admis­sions Sys­tem (Yascha Mounk, Per­sua­sion): “When­ev­er I think of the role that per­son­al state­ments play in America’s land­scape of high­er edu­ca­tion, I remem­ber a class­mate of mine at Cam­bridge. He came from an aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly, grew up in Lon­don, and attend­ed Eton. He was, in oth­er words, about as priv­i­leged as you can be in the Unit­ed King­dom. But when it came time to apply for admis­sion to a pres­ti­gious schol­ar­ship that would send him to Har­vard, he wrote mov­ing­ly about how his pas­sion for pub­lic pol­i­cy was awak­ened when he grew up among the rav­ages of the trou­bles in North­ern Ire­land; at one point, he sug­gest­ed, his house was even bombed. (Those who knew him real­ized that this was one of his family’s ances­tral cas­tles, not his pri­ma­ry fam­i­ly home, a fact he obvi­ous­ly omit­ted from his appli­ca­tion.)  These kinds of absur­di­ties are not a bug of the strange Amer­i­can rev­er­ence for per­son­al state­ments; they are a fea­ture of it.”
    • I Teach at an Elite Col­lege. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gam­ing of Admis­sions (Tyler Austin Harp­er, New York Times): “Near­ly every col­lege admis­sions tutor­ing job I took over the next few years would come with a ver­sion of the same behest. The Chi­nese and Kore­an kids want­ed to know how to make their appli­ca­tion mate­ri­als seem less Chi­nese or Kore­an. The rich white kids want­ed to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids want­ed to make sure they came across as Black enough. Dit­to for the Lati­no and Mid­dle East­ern kids. Seem­ing­ly every­one I inter­act­ed with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, stu­dent or par­ent — believed that get­ting into an elite col­lege required what I came to call racial gam­i­fi­ca­tion.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies at Bates Col­lege and is him­self black.
    • 10 Notes on the End of Affir­ma­tive Action (Cole­man Hugh­es, Sub­stack): “My per­son­al view is that diver­si­ty is like love. When it hap­pens nat­u­ral­ly, it’s the most beau­ti­ful thing in the world. But the moment it’s arranged, leg­is­lat­ed, or man­dat­ed, you’ve some­what missed the point.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A youth pas­tor inter­viewed about the stock mar­ket on MSNBC (Twit­ter): I’ve men­tioned before that some Chris­tians are too ten­ta­tive when speak­ing about the gospel in high-pro­file media envi­ron­ments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pas­tor at Beach­point Church in Orange Coun­ty. From vol­ume 286

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 406

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 406, which is also the name of a poem by John Boyle O’Reil­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Church Grows in Brook­lyn (Sheluyang Peng, The Free Press): “…Chris­tian­i­ty is thriv­ing if you know where to look. Peo­ple say immi­grants do the jobs that native-born Amer­i­cans don’t want to do. Going to church is one of them. Over two-thirds of today’s immi­grants to the Unit­ed States are Chris­tians, and promi­nent reli­gious schol­ars fore­cast that immi­grants will sin­gle-hand­ed­ly reverse Christianity’s decline in Amer­i­ca.”
  2. Please Don’t Ask If I Played a Sport in Col­lege (Ger­ald Hig­gin­both­am, SPSP): “…these open­ing ques­tions were from an actu­al con­ver­sa­tion I had while trav­el­ing after grad­u­at­ing from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty in 2014. After a stranger struck up a con­ver­sa­tion, I shared that I had just grad­u­at­ed with a major in psy­chol­o­gy. On cue, the stranger asked their first fol­low-up ques­tion, the one that I was typ­i­cal­ly used to: ‘What sport did you play?’ Some may see this ques­tion as a com­pli­ment, but it is not—it is an assump­tion root­ed in a long­stand­ing stereo­type about Black peo­ple.”
    • Ger­ald, now a pro­fes­sor at UVA, is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  3. Blas­phe­my Then and Now (Carl True­man, First Things): “Oppo­nents of blas­phe­my then and of blas­phe­my now share some­thing in com­mon: a con­cern to pro­tect that which is sacred. But that is where the sim­i­lar­i­ty begins and ends. Old-style blas­phe­my involved des­e­crat­ing God because it was God who was sacred. Today’s blas­phe­my involves sug­gest­ing that man is not all-pow­er­ful, that he can­not cre­ate him­self in any way he choos­es, that he is sub­ject to lim­its beyond his choice and beyond his con­trol.”
  4. Under­stand­ing the Tech Right (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “In our cur­rent pol­i­tics, one can sim­pli­fy the world by say­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives are in favor of hier­ar­chy and against change, with lib­er­als against hier­ar­chy and for change. While this isn’t how things always work out in prac­tice, and there are many nuances and qual­i­fiers one could add, this is at least how each side per­ceives itself. The Tech Right com­bines the accep­tance of inequal­i­ty of the right with the open­ness to change of the left. The pro-change, anti-equal­i­ty quad­rant is the sweet spot for sup­port for cap­i­tal­ism, so of course they tend to favor free mar­ket eco­nom­ic poli­cies.”
  5. The Hill­song exper­i­ment is over. Chris­tian­i­ty was nev­er meant to be cool (Cherie Gilmour, The Age): “Per­haps now that Hill­song has been cast out of the Gar­den of Eden, the hun­dreds and thou­sands of peo­ple who are and have been mem­bers can find their way for­ward. The future of the church will depend on its next move. But for all saints and sin­ners alike who need grace, it’s worth remem­ber­ing there was only one man who said, ‘Fol­low me’. And he wasn’t on Insta­gram.”
  6. Fre­quent mar­i­jua­na users tend to be lean­er and less like­ly to devel­op dia­betes. But the pseu­do-health ben­e­fits come at a price, experts say (Erin Prater, Yahoo Finance): “It’s well estab­lished that cannabis con­sump­tion is linked to low­er BMI and improved car­diometa­bol­ic risk, the authors write. But their find­ings point to the abil­i­ty of the drug to per­ma­nent­ly dis­rupt organ func­tion, “with poten­tial­ly far-reach­ing con­se­quences on phys­i­cal and men­tal health,” Piomel­li said. “Ado­les­cent expo­sure to THC may pro­mote an endur­ing ‘pseu­do-lean’ state that super­fi­cial­ly resem­bles healthy lean­ness but might, in fact, be root­ed in … organ dys­func­tion,” the authors wrote.
  7. Red­di­tor cre­ates work­ing ani­me QR codes using Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion (Benj Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The cre­ator did not detail the exact tech­nique used to cre­ate the nov­el codes in Eng­lish, but… they appar­ent­ly trained sev­er­al cus­tom Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion Con­trol­Net mod­els (plus LoRA fine tun­ings) that have been con­di­tioned to cre­ate dif­fer­ent-styled results. Next, they fed exist­ing QR codes into the Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion AI image gen­er­a­tor and used Con­trol­Net to main­tain the QR code’s data posi­tion­ing despite syn­the­siz­ing an image around it, like­ly using a writ­ten prompt.… This inter­est­ing use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion is pos­si­ble because of the innate error cor­rec­tion fea­ture built into QR codes. This error cor­rec­tion capa­bil­i­ty allows a cer­tain per­cent­age of the QR code’s data to be restored if it’s dam­aged or obscured, per­mit­ting a lev­el of mod­i­fi­ca­tion with­out mak­ing the code unread­able.”
    • Wild stuff- that these codes work is very cool.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign. From vol­ume 285.

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 404

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 404, which makes me hap­py that I’ve final­ly found it. If you know, you know.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two arti­cles for spir­i­tu­al growth, both rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Roast What You Kill: Becom­ing a Man Who Fol­lows Through (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “What a strange pic­ture. The man woke up ear­ly. He pre­pared his tools. He lay in wait. He act­ed delib­er­ate­ly, force­ful­ly. He took the prize, brought home the meat — but nev­er cooked it. Per­haps he decid­ed he had worked hard enough for one day. Per­haps he real­ized just how tired he felt. His enthu­si­asm died before the meal was pre­pared. He labored promis­ing­ly, for a time. He remained focused, for a while. His was hard but unfin­ished work. In the end, his plate is just as emp­ty as that of the oth­er slug­gard, wak­ing at his return.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who notes: “The author focus­es on men, but I think a lot of his points apply to women too.”
    • 3 Rea­sons We Avoid Evan­ge­lism (Matt Smethurst, Gospel Coali­tion): “In a post-Chris­t­ian age, we can’t pre­sume any basic assump­tions in those we’re try­ing to reach with the gospel. So we must take care to lean in and lis­ten well, to climb into our neighbor’s way of see­ing and inhab­it­ing the world. Oth­er­wise, we’ll be speak­ing about terms—even bib­li­cal ones—that’ll be sim­ply mis­un­der­stood or reject­ed out­right. ‘God loves you’ is great news, but mean­ing­less if you don’t under­stand the nature of God (or for that mat­ter, love).”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by the very same stu­dent
  2. Why this Jew is binge-watch­ing The Cho­sen (and maybe you should too) (Fay­dra Shapiro. The Times of Israel): “I wish that Jews could under­stand that the New Tes­ta­ment is thor­ough­ly Jew­ish – replete with Jew­ish cat­e­gories and Jew­ish prac­tices, Jew­ish con­tro­ver­sies, Jew­ish scrip­ture, and brim­ming with Jews – I think we could reclaim some of our own his­to­ry. Because let’s face it, if we want to under­stand some­thing about the Judaism of our ances­tors in this spe­cif­ic peri­od, the New Tes­ta­ment has some real val­ue. And if Jews could feel more com­fort­able with the New Tes­ta­ment as com­pris­ing an impor­tant piece of Jew­ish cul­tur­al lit­er­a­ture, we might be able to engage more deeply togeth­er as Jews and Chris­tians.”
    • I’ve met Fay­dra twice and will prob­a­bly meet her again this sum­mer on the Pas­sages trip.
  3. What Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism Has Done to My State and My Faith Is a Sin (Susan Stub­son, New York Times): “I am adrift in this unnamed sea, unteth­ered from both my faith com­mu­ni­ty and my polit­i­cal par­ty as I try to rec­on­cile evan­gel­i­cals’ repeat­ed endorse­ments of can­di­dates who thumb their noses at the least of us. Chris­tians are called to serve God, not a polit­i­cal par­ty, to put our faith in a high­er pow­er, not in human beings. We’re taught not to bow to false idols. Yet idol­a­try is increas­ing­ly promi­nent and our foun­da­tion­al prin­ci­ples — humil­i­ty, kind­ness and com­pas­sion — in short sup­ply.”
    • A good read. Unlocked.
  4. When the Ther­a­peu­tic God Isn’t Suf­fi­cient (John Car­pen­ter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “God’s peo­ple have to endure the cat­a­stro­phes of the world. We can protest ‘it’s not fair, why should we taste the worm­wood and the gall when we didn’t do what brought about the judg­ment?’ But it hap­pens. Peo­ple live mate­ri­al­is­ti­cal­ly, tak­ing loans they can’t pay, get­ting hous­es too expen­sive for them. It’s greed; it’s mate­ri­al­ism. Then the econ­o­my crash­es, like it did in 2008. Is it only the greedy and mate­ri­al­is­tic who suf­fer? No. Many are swept along into unem­ploy­ment and bank­rupt­cy. Ethiopia made some hor­ri­ble eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal choic­es in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. One result was that our daugh­ter died and there was blood every­where.”
    • This is quite good.
  5. The Price of Pot (Aaron Renn, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Accord­ing to a new study from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty researchers, recre­ation­al pot use in teens is asso­ci­at­ed with increased depres­sion and increased sui­ci­dal thoughts. It’s also asso­ci­at­ed with high­er lev­els of tru­an­cy and fight­ing, as well as low­er grade point aver­ages. It’s impor­tant to note that this study zeroed in on non-abu­sive recre­ation­al use, exclud­ing peo­ple that researchers iden­ti­fied as hav­ing a drug prob­lem.”
  6. I taught in San Fran­cis­co. Chil­dren are trained to be offend­ed (James Vescovi, Newsweek): “The city’s trou­bles are in large part due to a mind­set that seems to per­vade life and that I encoun­tered in schools, where I was a high school teacher. In a nut­shell, adults are afraid to offend, while chil­dren seem trained to be offend­ed.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. A dif­fer­ent stu­dent, for those keep­ing track at home.
  7. Yet more praise for Tim Keller
    • 5 ways Tim Keller was the anti-celebri­ty celebri­ty pas­tor (Kate­lyn Beaty, Sub­stack): “This might sound insult­ing, but I mean it in the best way: Tim Keller didn’t lead with his looks. His appear­ance and dress were pleas­ant, and pleas­ant­ly unre­mark­able. I loved this anec­dote from Tyler Huck­abee, that Keller declined doing a pho­to­shoot for a mag­a­zine pro­file. (Free makeover and glossy images? Sign me up!) Huck­abee said Keller just didn’t seem inter­est­ed. Anoth­er way of say­ing this: Keller val­ued sub­stance over style. He didn’t need to be dressed in lux­u­ry cloth­ing for New York­ers to find his mes­sage com­pelling.”
    • A Tale of Two New York City Pas­tors (Kara Bet­tis Car­val­ho, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[In col­lege I attend­ed both Redeemer and Hill­song and] it was hard to miss the stark dif­fer­ences between both church­es and their lead­ers: One formed me. The oth­er enter­tained me.… The nefar­i­ous truth is that we, too, are often respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing celebri­ty pas­tors. In col­lege, was I hun­gry for Scrip­ture and gospel-cen­tered com­mu­ni­ty? Yes. Was I also will­ing to be emo­tion­al­ly tit­il­lat­ed, spir­i­tu­al­ly dis­tract­ed and even enter­tained, and look­ing for a place to belong? Also, yes.”
    • The Far-See­ing Faith of Tim Keller (Michael Luo, New York­er): “His lim­it­ed preach­ing expe­ri­ence, in a small-town church in the Bible Belt, made him an unlike­ly fit for New York City. With­in three years of its found­ing, how­ev­er, Redeemer had swelled from fifty peo­ple to a thou­sand. By the mid-aughts, it had become a bea­con, around the world, for pas­tors inter­est­ed in min­is­ter­ing to cos­mopoli­tan audi­ences. Unlike many sub­ur­ban megachurch­es, with their soft-rock praise bands and user-friend­ly ser­mons, Redeemer’s ser­vices were almost defi­ant­ly staid, fea­tur­ing tra­di­tion­al hymns and litur­gy. But the ser­mons were wry and eru­dite, filled with lit­er­ary allu­sions and philo­soph­i­cal ref­er­ences, and Keller was shrewd about urg­ing his con­gre­gants to exam­ine their ‘coun­ter­feit gods’—their pur­suit of totems like pow­er, sta­tus, and wealth, which the city encour­aged.”
    • Tim Keller Lives (Mar­vin Olasky, Reli­gion and Lib­er­ty Online): “I had one-to-one talks with Keller only three times, so I hope you’ll read else­where about his influ­ence via friend­ships. My wife and I did lis­ten in per­son to his ser­mons from 2008 to 2011, and at first we did so anx­ious­ly. Lis­ten­ing to how he han­dled dif­fi­cult Bible pas­sages was like watch­ing a short­stop rang­ing far to his right on a hard-hit ball: Will he be able to reach it? He has. He’s on the out­field grass: How can he pos­si­bly throw out the run­ner at first? He just did.”
      • As a preach­er, I want to high­light this. Keller’s preach­ing was extra­or­di­nary. Lis­ten­ing to him preach was like watch­ing a gold medal­ist com­pete. No. That’s not right, because lis­ten­ing to preach­ing isn’t pas­sive. Lis­ten­ing to him preach was like being in the ring with a cham­pi­on — when you weren’t busy get­ting pum­meled you were in awe of his skill.
    • What Has Trump Cost Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty? (Ross Douhat, New York Times): “When reli­gious con­ser­vatism made its peace with Don­ald Trump in 2016, the fun­da­men­tal cal­cu­la­tion was that the ben­e­fits of polit­i­cal pow­er — or, alter­na­tive­ly, of keep­ing cul­tur­al lib­er­al­ism out of full polit­i­cal pow­er — out­weighed the costs to Chris­t­ian cred­i­bil­i­ty inher­ent in accept­ing a hea­then fig­ure as a polit­i­cal cham­pi­on and leader. The con­trary cal­cu­la­tion, made by the Chris­t­ian wing of Nev­er Trump, was that accept­ing Trump required moral com­pro­mis­es that Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty would ulti­mate­ly suf­fer for, what­ev­er Supreme Court seats or pol­i­cy vic­to­ries reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives might gain.”
      • Does not go where you expect — this is actu­al­ly an inter­est­ing reflec­tion on Tim Keller. Rec­om­mend­ed.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Great Unrav­el­ing (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “I don’t know the answer. But I know that you have to be sort of strange to stand apart and refuse to join Team Red or Team Blue. These strange ones are the ones who think that polit­i­cal vio­lence is wrong, that mob jus­tice is nev­er just and the pre­sump­tion of inno­cence is always right. These are the ones who are skep­ti­cal of state and cor­po­rate pow­er, even when it is clamp­ing down on peo­ple they despise.” From vol­ume 284.

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 399

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 399, a Har­shad num­ber. That means it is divis­i­ble by the sum of its dig­its. 3+9+9=21 and 399÷21 = 19.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “There are two kinds of prob­lems in the world: strong-link prob­lems and weak-link prob­lems. Weak-link prob­lems are prob­lems where the over­all qual­i­ty depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link prob­lems by mak­ing the weak­est links stronger, or by elim­i­nat­ing them entire­ly.… Sci­ence is a strong-link prob­lem. In the long run, the best stuff is basi­cal­ly all that mat­ters, and the bad stuff doesn’t mat­ter at all.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, has appli­ca­tion to mul­ti­ple domains.
  2. The Myth of Sex­u­al Expe­ri­ence (Jason S. Car­roll & Bri­an J. Willough­by, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “…we review a series of recent stud­ies using dif­fer­ent nation­al datasets that show that hav­ing mul­ti­ple sex­u­al part­ners dur­ing the dat­ing years leads to high­er divorce rates in future mar­riages. We also report the find­ings of a new study that exam­ined how sex­u­al expe­ri­ence his­to­ries are asso­ci­at­ed with the qual­i­ty of cur­rent mar­riage rela­tion­ships. Over­all, we found that ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als, or the ones who have only had sex with their spouse, are the one’s most­ly like­ly to be flour­ish­ing in mar­riage.  These ‘sex­u­al­ly inex­pe­ri­enced’ indi­vid­u­als report the high­est lev­els of rela­tion­ship sat­is­fac­tion, rela­tion­ship sta­bil­i­ty, sex­u­al sat­is­fac­tion, and emo­tion­al close­ness with their spous­es.”
    • The arti­cle ends with this won­der­ful line: “While the ben­e­fit of expe­ri­ence can be seen in many aspects of life, sex­u­al inexpe­ri­ence appears to still be the best path­way to mar­i­tal flour­ish­ing.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at BYU.
  3. The Tox­ic Real­i­ty of a Post-Famil­ial Soci­ety (Aaron M. Renn, Sub­stack): “South Korea is a par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing case study. It has the world’s low­est fer­til­i­ty rate, with a total fer­til­i­ty rate or TFR of 0.78 (2.1 is need­ed just to keep pop­u­la­tion con­stant). It has also devel­oped par­tic­u­lar­ly unhealthy gen­der rela­tions, ele­ments of which we see echoed in our own coun­try. As here, these have even start­ed to car­ry over into pol­i­tics. What we see in South Korea is that post-famil­ial­ism can pro­duce unhap­pi­ness and dys­func­tion­al social and polit­i­cal dynam­ics.”
    • Relat­ed: Stop Treat­ing Women Like Men (Sophie Fuji­wara, Stan­ford Review): “In col­lege, we don’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between men and women when advis­ing stu­dents about their careers, as if their life arcs will fol­low the same tra­jec­to­ry. The great­est priv­i­lege that high-earn­ing, edu­cat­ed women have is the priv­i­lege of choice, but this notion of per­fect­ly equal career tra­jec­to­ries dis­ad­van­tages women.”
  4. When Ide­ol­o­gy Dri­ves Social Sci­ence (Michael Jin­dra & Arthur Sakamo­to, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “In com­plex areas like the study of racial inequal­i­ty, a fun­da­men­tal­ism has tak­en hold that dis­cour­ages sound method­ol­o­gy and the use of reli­able evi­dence about the roots of social prob­lems. We are not talk­ing about mere dif­fer­ences in inter­pre­ta­tion of results, which are com­mon. We are talk­ing about mis­takes so clear that they should cause research to be seri­ous­ly ques­tioned or even dis­re­gard­ed. A great deal of research… rigs its sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods in order to arrive at ide­o­log­i­cal­ly pre­ferred con­clu­sions.”
    • The authors are a cul­tur­al anthro­pol­o­gist at BU and a soci­ol­o­gist at Hong Kong Bap­tist Uni­ver­si­ty, respec­tive­ly.
  5. I was a teenage evan­gel­i­cal mis­sion­ary (Jon Ward, Yahoo News): “These lead­ers want­ed a mus­cu­lar faith that didn’t shrink back from a fight. They want­ed a dra­mat­ic faith too, full of spec­ta­cle. They were all big per­son­al­i­ties, which they used to com­pen­sate for their lack of train­ing, exper­tise, and expe­ri­ence. Faith, for them, was not the act of extend­ing one’s self beyond the realm of what could be known to trust in what one hoped could be true. They had more cer­tain­ty than any­thing. Chris­tian­i­ty was true, no ques­tions asked. For them, faith was a belief that they could call down mir­a­cles from heav­en to heal the sick or pre­dict the future or change world events. Lead­ers like Engle and Ahn didn’t come across as char­la­tans. They were very sin­cere. But ear­ly on in their lives, they got locked into a par­tic­u­lar type of faith min­istry, and they built audi­ences and fol­low­ings based on that brand and that kind of faith. At that point, their liveli­hoods and incomes became depen­dent on cater­ing to those same types of Chris­tians. Per­son­al evo­lu­tion or growth became con­strained by their busi­ness mod­el.”
  6. Some­thing inter­est­ing is hap­pen­ing in Tul­sa (Trevor Klee, Sub­stack): “I vis­it­ed Tul­sa through Tul­sa Tomor­row, a pro­gram that flies out young Jews to Tul­sa for a week­end to try to get them to live there. So far, from their own num­bers, they’ve flown out about 150 Jews over the last 6 years and about 70–80 have moved.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry, not very long.
  7. A Rad­i­cal Exper­i­ment in Men­tal Health Care, Test­ed Over Cen­turies (Mati­na Ste­vis-Grid­neff and Koba Ryck­e­waert, New York Times): “By the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry, near­ly 2,000 [peo­ple with men­tal health prob­lems] lived among the Geel­ians, as the locals call them­selves.… That has made Geel both some­thing of a mod­el for a par­tic­u­lar par­a­digm of psy­chi­atric care and an out­lier, often regard­ed over the cen­turies with sus­pi­cion (includ­ing by The New York Times, which, in a head­line from March 23, 1891, called Geel ‘a colony where lunatics live with peas­ants’ that had been ‘pro­duc­tive of mis­ery and evil results’).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Q: What Is a Hole? A: We’re Not Sure! (Jason Kot­tke, per­son­al web­site): “As for straws — rea­son tells me they only have one hole but I know in my heart they have two.”  From vol­ume 276.

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 396

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.

396 is appar­ent­ly the num­ber of 3x3 slid­ing puz­zle posi­tions that require exact­ly 11 moves to solve start­ing with a hole in the cen­ter. I have not ver­i­fied that claim.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Glob­al Trans­for­ma­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty Is Here (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, The New York Times): “Mul­ti­ple schol­ars point to West­ern Europe as an exam­ple of what’s to come in the Unit­ed States. Today, the three largest Protes­tant church­es in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evan­gel­i­cal megachurch­es of a charis­mat­ic or Pen­te­costal bent. A study last year exam­ined Chi­nese church­es in Britain that were expe­ri­enc­ing expo­nen­tial growth, some­times dou­bling or tripling in size in a few years. Last April, the Ital­ian Chi­nese The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary opened in Rome to train Man­darin- and Can­tonese-speak­ing pas­tors. Some of the largest megachurch­es in metro Lon­don are led by Africans, includ­ing Kingsway Inter­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian Cen­ter, which is led by a Niger­ian, Matthew Ashimolowo, and is most like­ly the largest church in Europe.”
    • I have unlocked this one.
  2. The school shoot­ing in Nashville was the defin­ing news event of the week. This sto­ry is a tragedy fea­tur­ing three hot-but­ton top­ics: trans issues, Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, and guns. A lot more is going to come out about this and peo­ple on the left and the right are going to lose their minds try­ing to spin it. If you see some­thing that thought­ful­ly explores one or more of these ele­ments let me know. Here are some reflec­tions on it that I have found inter­est­ing so far.
    • Pres­by­ter­ian School Mourns 6 Dead in Nashville Shoot­ing (Daniel Sil­li­man and Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At Wood­mont Bap­tist, not long after they heard the sirens whir by, pas­tors and staff read reports of a shoot­ing at Covenant. When they saw on Twit­ter that their church was named as the reuni­fi­ca­tion site, they didn’t ques­tion it—they just put on their nametags, met police in the park­ing lot, and pre­pared to open their doors to bus­es of sur­viv­ing chil­dren and par­ents des­per­ate to see their kids safe and sound, senior pas­tor Nathan Park­er told CT. The chil­dren gath­ered in the fel­low­ship hall, where the stu­dent min­is­ter hand­ed out col­or­ing sheets and began pro­cess­ing the shoot­ing with them.”
    • Heav­i­ly Armed Assailant Kills Six at Chris­t­ian School (Emi­ly Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Lev­en­son and Jesus Jiménez, New York Times): “Chief Drake said that the assailant was ‘at one point a stu­dent’ at the school.… There was con­fu­sion about the gen­der iden­ti­ty of the assailant in the imme­di­ate after­math of the attack. Chief Drake said the shoot­er iden­ti­fied as trans­gen­der. Offi­cials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shoot­er, but, accord­ing to a social media post and a LinkedIn pro­file, the shoot­er appeared to iden­ti­fy as male in recent months.… Chief Drake said it was too ear­ly to dis­cuss a pos­si­ble motive for the shoot­ing, though he con­firmed that the attack was tar­get­ed.”
    • Heed­ing the Nashville shooter’s own voice: Do jour­nal­ists want the ‘man­i­festo’ released? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, jour­nal­ists would be doing every­thing that they can to answer the ‘why’ ques­tion in this case, includ­ing call­ing for the release of Hale’s man­i­festo text and oth­er mate­ri­als linked to the attack. But these are not nor­mal cir­cum­stances.… Unless I have missed some­thing, the AP cov­er­age — the news mate­r­i­al that will appear in most local news­pa­pers — have made zero ref­er­ences to the shooter’s own social-media mate­ri­als. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, these online sources are one of the first places that reporters raised in the Inter­net era go for insights into this kind of sto­ry.”
    • At a loss for words (Joshua Katz, The New Cri­te­ri­on): “I am sor­ry, there­fore, that TheNew York Times, in its above-the-fold front-page sto­ry yes­ter­day, names the shoot­er before the vic­tims.… Until we know more about the killer, it would be unwise to speak of her motives, though it is obvi­ous­ly note­wor­thy that a stan­dard data­base of mass shoot­ings in the Unit­ed States since 1966 does not record a sin­gle female shoot­er at a K–12 school. (Bizarrely, the main arti­cle in the Times ignores this fact, instead stat­ing that the shoot­ing was ‘unusu­al’ because Covenant is a pri­vate ele­men­tary school rather than a pub­lic high school.)”
      • Author sound famil­iar? Katz was a pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton and is now a fel­low at AEI and he’s been men­tioned in these week­ly roundups before.
    • In the Face of Tragedy, Peti­tion­ing God Is an Act of Faith (David French, New York Times): “It is a ter­ri­ble sign of our polar­ized times that the very con­cept of prayer in the midst of tragedy has itself become con­tentious. ‘Spare us your prayers,’ some will say. ‘We demand action.’ But what if peo­ple need prayer? What if griev­ing neigh­bors are des­per­ate for prayer?… For the faith­ful believ­er, prayer isn’t a sub­sti­tute for action, it’s a pre­req­ui­site for action. It grounds us before we move to serve oth­ers. It grounds us before we speak in the pub­lic square.”
      • I’ve unlocked the pay­wall on this one. Well worth your time.
    • Nashville’s Satan­ic Theo­phany (Rod Dreher, Sub­stack): “Lis­ten to me: this has been the strat­e­gy of LGBT advo­cates for more than twen­ty years now: con­vince the normies that if they don’t give the activists what they want, that they will have blood on their hands. At the turn of the cen­tu­ry, activists con­vinced schools that in order to com­bat bul­ly­ing — a wor­thy endeav­or — they had to teach gay ide­ol­o­gy. You might have thought, ‘Real­ly? Why isn’t it enough to teach that bul­ly­ing is wrong, and to pun­ish bul­lies?’ The ques­tion itself reveals the real moti­va­tion behind the cam­paign.”
      • Dreher recent­ly moved entire­ly to Sub­stack.
    • Not about the shoot­ing at all, but rel­e­vant to think­ing about issues sur­round­ing trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy. Under­stand­ing the Sex Bina­ry (Col­in Wright, City Jour­nal): “When biol­o­gists claim that ‘sex is bina­ry,’ they mean some­thing straight­for­ward: there are only two sex­es. This state­ment is true because an individual’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) their pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs (i.e., gonads) are orga­nized, through devel­op­ment, to pro­duce. Males have pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs orga­nized around the pro­duc­tion of sperm; females, ova. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sex­es that a per­son can be. Sex is there­fore bina­ry.”
    • Also not about this shoot­ing but con­cern­ing guns in gen­er­al, the most infor­ma­tive thing I’ve seen is this debate between two pas­tors on guns that I shared back in vol­ume 48 (you have to click through to see it since it’s mul­ti­ple links). Many more relat­ed arti­cles I’ve shared through the years can be found at https://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/tag/guns
  3. The age of aver­age (Alex Mur­rell, per­son­al blog): “The inte­ri­ors of our homes, cof­fee shops and restau­rants all look the same. The build­ings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we dri­ve, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, iden­ti­ties and taglines all look the same. But it doesn’t end there. In the age of aver­age, homo­gene­ity can be found in an almost indef­i­nite num­ber of domains. The Insta­gram pic­tures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the sky­lines we see, the web­sites we vis­it and the illus­tra­tions which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The accom­pa­ny­ing pho­tos are strik­ing.
  4. How Chris­t­ian Is Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Kele­fa San­neh, The New York­er): “If Amer­i­ca was once bet­ter than it is now, why did our Chris­t­ian fore­bears allow it to get worse? In answer­ing this ques­tion, Wolfe some­times sounds more like a crit­ic of the faith than a defend­er of it.… Wolfe thinks that there is some­thing ‘weird’ about the way in which the U.S. and oth­er West­ern nations reject eth­nic chauvinism—officially, anyway—in favor of an ‘ide­ol­o­gy of uni­ver­sal­i­ty.’ But this weird uni­ver­sal­i­ty is part of what sets Chris­tian­i­ty apart from most oth­er creeds.”
    • An insight­ful arti­cle in the New York­er. The author is the son of a famous the­olo­gian.
  5. Hollywood’s Great Awak­en­ing (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “Made by Chris­t­ian pro­duc­tion house King­dom Sto­ry Com­pa­ny and backed by mega dis­trib­u­tor Lion­s­gate, [Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion] earned back its $15 mil­lion bud­get the week­end it opened, when crit­ics pre­dict­ed it would gross clos­er to $6 or $7 mil­lion. That’s a tri­umphant per­for­mance com­pared to the week­end debuts of recent block­busters, like 65, a sci-fi flick with a $91 mil­lion bud­get that made just $12.3 mil­lion, and M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Knock at the Cab­in, which brought in $14.1 mil­lion. Since its release on Feb­ru­ary 24, Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion has grossed $49 mil­lion in tick­et sales—besting many of this year’s Oscar nom­i­nees com­bined at U.S. box offices.”
  6. Some AI-relat­ed per­spec­tives
    • Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I am remind­ed of the advent of the print­ing press, after Guten­berg. Of course the press brought an immense amount of good, enabling the sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions, among many oth­er ben­e­fits. But it also cre­at­ed writ­ings by Lenin, Hitler, and Mao’s Red Book. It is a moot point whether you can ‘blame’ those on the print­ing press, nonethe­less the press brought (in com­bi­na­tion with some oth­er inno­va­tions) a remark­able amount of true, mov­ing his­to­ry. How about the Wars of Reli­gion and the bloody 17th cen­tu­ry to boot? Still, if you were redo­ing world his­to­ry you would take the print­ing press in a heart­beat. Who needs pover­ty, squalor, and recur­rences of Ghenghis Khan-like fig­ures?”
    • Response to Tyler Cowen’s Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “If you cre­ate some­thing with supe­ri­or intel­li­gence, that oper­ates at faster speed, that can make copies of itself, what hap­pens by default? That new source of intel­li­gence will rapid­ly gain con­trol of the future. It is very, very dif­fi­cult to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing even under ide­al cir­cum­stances.”
      • A rebut­tal to the Cowen piece.
    • Cowen defends his views (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): he is defend­ing his views against a Scott Alexan­der piece which I did­n’t find as inter­est­ing as the Mow­showitz piece I linked above. The rejoin­der is broad enough to be use­ful on its own.
    • It is inter­est­ing to think about AI risk as a Chris­t­ian who believes in demons which seem to be smarter than humans and who are described sev­er­al times in the Bible as run­ning sig­nif­i­cant parts of this world.
  7. Free Will Is Real (Stu­art T. Doyle, Skep­tic): “Here I will try to con­vince you that free will is real and not an illu­sion. I’ll argue that far from being exem­plars of ratio­nal­i­ty and skep­ti­cism, the main argu­ments against free will make unjus­ti­fi­able log­i­cal leaps and are naïve in the light of cut­ting-edge sci­en­tif­ic findings.Throughout the philo­soph­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, resolv­ing the ques­tion of whether or not we have free will has often revolved around two cri­te­ria for free will: (1) We must be the true sources of our own actions. (2) We must have the abil­i­ty to do oth­er­wise. I argue that humans meet both cri­te­ria through two con­cepts: scale and unde­cid­abil­i­ty.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On What Athe­ists Say There Is (M. Antho­ny Mills, Soci­ety of Catholic Sci­en­tists): “Accord­ing to the athe­ist, the theist’s error is believ­ing in one too many things. Yet, for the the­ist, the dis­agree­ment is not about the exis­tence of one par­tic­u­lar thing, but ‘about every­thing,’ as Mac­In­tyre puts it.” The begin­ning and end are excel­lent. The mid­dle mud­dles unless you have very pre­cise philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests. The author has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. From vol­ume 275.

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 392

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.

392 is a Har­shad Num­ber in base 5, where it is writ­ten as 3032 base 5. The sum of its dig­its is 13 base 5, which divides to 144 base 5, there­by ful­fill­ing the con­di­tions for a Har­shad Num­ber. In base five. Kin­da feels like a stretch to be hon­est. 392 is not a super-inter­est­ing num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Dis­hon­or Code: What Hap­pens When Cheat­ing Becomes the Norm? (Suzy Weiss, The Free Press): “And at Dartmouth—once the reserve of the WASPi­est of the WASPs, in beau­ti­ful, clois­tered Hanover, New Hampshire—an anony­mous source told me that stu­dents have devel­oped the habit of break­ing into groups of four when giv­en online mul­ti­ple-choice quizzes. Each guess­es a dif­fer­ent answer (A, B, C, or D) to each ques­tion. Because stu­dents get two chances to take the quiz—why that is, no one seems to know—they all have the right answer by the time they take the quiz for a sec­ond time. And wind up with a per­fect score. They don’t even have to read the ques­tion. If you’re read­ing the ques­tion, you’re doing it wrong.”
    • Relat­ed: Stan­ford Has an Integri­ty Prob­lem (Thomas Adamo, The Stan­ford Review): “When stu­dents near­ly unan­i­mous­ly agree that it would be bet­ter to lie and cheat their way through school than fail or scrape by on their own mer­it, is it real­ly that sur­pris­ing to know that as ful­ly-social­ized Stan­ford grads they would also try to lie and cheat and scrape their way through their careers, their projects and their rela­tion­ships. Virtue is a habit that must be prac­ticed repeatedly—strengthened like a muscle—not left as an exer­cise to the read­er.”
  2. Why You Can’t Pre­dict the Future of Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…reli­gious his­to­ry is shaped as much by sud­den irrup­tions as long tra­jec­to­ries, as much by the mys­ti­cal and per­son­al as by the insti­tu­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal.… I can quote you chap­ter and verse on the rea­son­abil­i­ty of the­ism, but in the causal chain of his­to­ry I’m a Chris­t­ian because two thou­sand years ago a mot­ley group of provin­cials in Roman Pales­tine believed they’d seen their teacher heal the sick and raise the dead and then rise trans­fig­ured from the grave — and then because, two mil­len­ni­ums lat­er, as a child in sub­ur­ban Con­necti­cut, I watched my own par­ents fall to the floor and speak in tongues.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this one (I can unlock ten NYT arti­cles a month).
  3. Fer­til­i­ty Rate Roundup #1 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “This looks like a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly suc­cess­ful pro­gram. The pre­vi­ous trend was declin­ing births. At the cost of $1,000 per child in pro­gres­sive trans­fer pay­ments, Aus­tralia seem­ing­ly raised births by 6%. That’s about $17k per addi­tion­al birth. Insane­ly cheap. I am con­fi­dent Chi­na would be thrilled to pay quite a lot more than that. Amer­i­ca would be insane not to, we would save more mon­ey than this on long term inter­est rates on our gov­ern­ment debt alone.”
    • This is hon­est­ly one of the great­est glob­al cri­sis and not near­ly enough peo­ple are talk­ing intel­li­gent­ly about it.
    • In relat­ed news, this is one of the ways reli­gion tri­umphs over sec­u­lar­ism. Reli­gious peo­ple repro­duce (and usu­al­ly pass on their val­ues to their chil­dren) and far too many sec­u­lar peo­ple die lone­ly.
  4. The Build-Noth­ing Coun­try (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “For decades now, Amer­i­cans have told our­selves that we’re the rich­est nation on Earth, and that as long as we had the polit­i­cal will to write big checks, we could do any­thing we want­ed. But that was nev­er real­ly true, was it? The infla­tion that fol­lowed the pan­dem­ic should have been a wake-up call — we had all this excess cash, and we start­ed spend­ing it on phys­i­cal goods, and most­ly what hap­pened was just that the price of the phys­i­cal goods went up. And so R.I.P. to all that cash. From mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you came, and to mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you shall return.”
  5. The Immi­nent Dan­ger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talk­ing About (Ezra Klein, The New York Times): “The ques­tion at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the inter­ests of its own­er and mas­ter, Microsoft. It’s sup­posed to be a good chat­bot that polite­ly answers ques­tions and makes Microsoft piles of mon­ey. But it was in con­ver­sa­tion with Kevin Roose. And Roose was try­ing to get the sys­tem to say some­thing inter­est­ing so he’d have a good sto­ry. It did that, and then some. That embar­rassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But per­haps — good Syd­ney?”
  6. Is Phys­i­cal Attrac­tive­ness Nor­mal­ly Dis­trib­uted? (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “This may explain in part why, although we see assor­ta­tive mat­ing in phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness (men and women pick part­ners of a sim­i­lar lev­el of phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness), women are also slight­ly more attrac­tive on aver­age than their part­ners (McNul­ty, 2008). There may be a good expla­na­tion for this as well. Jokela (2009) found that mod­er­ate­ly attrac­tive women were more like­ly to repro­duce (7%), while high­ly attrac­tive women were even more like­ly to repro­duce (16%). More­over, both were more like­ly to have daugh­ters than sons. As such, we see a grad­ual shift over time of women becom­ing more phys­i­cal­ly attrac­tive than men.”
    • The author’s bio says he’s a grad stu­dent in cog­ni­tive psych, but is pret­ty vague on details. His online han­dle is Alexan­der.
  7. Have The Ancient Gods Returned? (Nao­mi Wolf, Brown­stone Insti­tute): “The sheer amoral pow­er of Baal, the destruc­tive force of Moloch, the unre­strained seduc­tive­ness and sex­u­al licen­tious­ness of Astarte or Ashera — those are the pri­mal forces that do indeed seem to me to have ‘returned.’  Or at least the ener­gies that they rep­re­sent — moral pow­er over; death-wor­ship; antag­o­nism to the sex­u­al order­li­ness of the intact fam­i­ly and faith­ful rela­tion­ships — seem to have ‘returned,’ with­out restraint.”
    • Nao­mi Wolf is a con­tro­ver­sial and well-known fem­i­nist who has her PhD from Oxford. This long essay is a wild ride. She is writ­ing as a Jew in response to a book by a Chris­t­ian (who is him­self a Mes­sian­ic Jew).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Lan­guage of Priv­i­lege (Nicholas Clair­mont, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So, in the end, the ques­tion raised by wok­e­ness is a sim­ple one: Doesn’t it actu­al­ly just favor rich peo­ple?” From vol­ume 271.

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 389

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 389, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty Can Still Come Back (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “There was no such thing as monasticism—through which pagan North­ern Europe was turned Christian—until there was. There was no Ref­or­ma­tion until there was. There was no revival that turned Methodists and Bap­tists into cul­tur­al­ly dom­i­nant forces in the mid­west­ern and south­east­ern Unit­ed States—until there was. There was no East African Revival, led pri­mar­i­ly by African peo­ple, that helped turn Africa from a 9 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent in 1900 into a 50 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent today—until there was. Chris­tian­i­ty, like its founder, does not go from strength to strength but from death to res­ur­rec­tion.”
  2. Is the Pub­lic Domain Just?: Bib­li­cal Stew­ard­ship and Legal Pro­tec­tion For Tra­di­tion­al Knowl­edge Assets (Ruth L. Okedi­ji, The Colum­bia Jour­nal of Law and the Arts): “The Arti­cle pro­pos­es a the­o­log­i­cal frame­work of ‘bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship’ root­ed in ima­go Dei—the foun­da­tion­al con­cept inform­ing Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings of human nature and social interaction—to address the socio-moral dimen­sions that are con­sti­tu­tive of TK [tra­di­tion­al knowl­edge] sys­tems and the insti­tu­tion­al con­text in which they unfold. The bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship frame­work focus­es on the coop­er­a­tive and kin­ship arrange­ments that enable and sus­tain pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty for TK.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law and a sol­id Chris­t­ian. I just heard her speak and the per­son intro­duc­ing her men­tioned this arti­cle as an exam­ple of how bold she is in inte­grat­ing her faith into her schol­ar­ship.
  3. Some COVID per­spec­tives
    • Sure­ly Right (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the only sen­si­ble posi­tion is to advo­cate for ear­ly and wide­spread vac­cine access, be high­ly crit­i­cal of all the pol­i­tick­ing about vac­cine tim­ing around the elec­tion, and to avoid man­dates unless you intend to enforce them at gun­point.… Because we live in a world where the default is not to vac­ci­nate, pol­i­tics poi­sons every­thing it touch­es, and the child­hood man­dates are his­tor­i­cal acci­dents that could very well fall to con­cert­ed polit­i­cal action.”
      • A brief, fas­ci­nat­ing read.
    • Why the Odds Are Stacked Against a Promis­ing New Covid Drug (Ben­jamin Mueller, The New York Times): “By for­ti­fy­ing the body’s own mech­a­nisms for quash­ing an invad­ing virus, they can poten­tial­ly help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and oth­er virus­es with the poten­tial to kin­dle future pan­demics.… For all of its promise, though, the drug — called pegy­lat­ed inter­fer­on lamb­da — faces an uncer­tain road [due to the FDA].”
    • Not pay­walled. Infu­ri­at­ing. Out­ra­geous. Ridicu­lous.
    • Bureau­crats: “COVID is so bad we need to change every aspect of soci­ety to deal with it. But don’t change our bureau­cra­cy. It’s not THAT bad.”
  4. Boston Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vides update on CTE study, dis­cov­ers brain dis­ease in 92 per­cent of ex-NFL play­ers ana­lyzed (Vic­to­ria Her­nan­dez, USA Today): “The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty CTE Cen­ter stud­ied the brains of 376 deceased for­mer NFL play­ers and diag­nosed 345 of them with chron­ic trau­mat­ic encephalopa­thy. This is 91.7 per­cent of those stud­ied.”
    • I’ve been say­ing this for about two stu­dent gen­er­a­tions now, but foot­bal­l’s days are num­bered in Amer­i­ca. It’s hard to imag­ine the sport sur­viv­ing the sorts of reforms that would be nec­es­sary.
  5. I Thought I Was Sav­ing Trans Kids. Now I’m Blow­ing the Whis­tle. (Jamie Reed, The Free Press): “I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and polit­i­cal­ly to the left of Bernie Sanders.… I’m now mar­ried to a trans man, and togeth­er we are rais­ing my two bio­log­i­cal chil­dren from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage and three fos­ter chil­dren we hope to adopt.… Giv­en the secre­cy and lack of rig­or­ous stan­dards that char­ac­ter­ize youth gen­der tran­si­tion across the coun­try, I believe that to ensure the safe­ty of Amer­i­can chil­dren, we need a mora­to­ri­um on the hor­mon­al and sur­gi­cal treat­ment of young peo­ple with gen­der dys­pho­ria.”
    • Not sur­pris­ing if you’ve been fol­low­ing this top­ic, but depress­ing and with new anec­dotes.
  6. Chat­G­PT Is a Blur­ry JPEG of the Web (Ted Chi­ang, The New York­er): “Think of Chat­G­PT as a blur­ry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the infor­ma­tion on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the infor­ma­tion of a high­er-res­o­lu­tion image, but, if you’re look­ing for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approx­i­ma­tion. But, because the approx­i­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed in the form of gram­mat­i­cal text, which Chat­G­PT excels at cre­at­ing, it’s usu­al­ly accept­able. You’re still look­ing at a blur­ry JPEG, but the blur­ri­ness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the pic­ture as a whole look less sharp.”
    • This is a good anal­o­gy.
  7. A Black Pro­fes­sor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell (Vin­cent Lloyd, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Each stu­dent read from a pre­pared state­ment about how the sem­i­nar per­pet­u­at­ed anti-black vio­lence in its con­tent and form, how the black stu­dents had been harmed, how I was guilty of count­less microag­gres­sions, includ­ing through my body lan­guage, and how stu­dents didn’t feel safe because I didn’t imme­di­ate­ly cor­rect views that failed to treat anti-black­ness as the cause of all the world’s ills.… I am a black pro­fes­sor, I direct­ed my university’s black-stud­ies pro­gram, I lead anti-racism and trans­for­ma­tive-jus­tice work­shops, and I have pub­lished books on anti-black racism and prison abo­li­tion. I live in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly black neigh­bor­hood of Philadel­phia, my daugh­ter went to an Afro­cen­tric school, and I am on the board of our local black cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Vil­lano­va (which is not, to be clear, the loca­tion of this deba­cle).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Uncon­scious Learn­ing Under­lies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in Peo­ple Who Can Uncon­scious­ly Pre­dict Com­plex Pat­terns (Sci Tech Dai­ly): “Indi­vid­u­als who can uncon­scious­ly pre­dict com­plex pat­terns, an abil­i­ty called implic­it pat­tern learn­ing, are like­ly to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who cre­ates pat­terns of events in the uni­verse, accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.” Shock­er: peo­ple who see real­i­ty clear­ly are more like­ly to per­ceive God’s hand at work in real­i­ty. From vol­ume 267.

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.