Tag: immigration

TGFI, Volume 540: marrying atheists and using AI to avoid awkwardness

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tough Love: Can I Mar­ry an Athe­ist? (Abi­gail Shri­er, The Free Press): “You can have all kinds of suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships with some­one whose world­view is pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent from yours—but not mar­riage. I’ve only been mar­ried 18 years, but I know this: Good mar­riage requires, at a min­i­mum, stay­ing on the same page as your spouse. Com­pro­mise on the small stuff, fine. Not on the foun­da­tions of the home. That can only cre­ate dis­tance between you, a dis­tance that will grow as your chil­dren ask you to inter­pret their world.… Don’t mar­ry a woman you hope, even secret­ly, will change.”
  2. Stu­dents Are Skip­ping the Hard­est Part of Grow­ing Up (Clay Shirky, New York Times): “One study found that 18-to-25-year-olds alone account­ed for 46 per­cent of Chat­G­PT use. And this analy­sis didn’t even include users 17 and under. Teenagers and young adults, stuck in the grad­ual tran­si­tion from man­aged child­hoods to adult free­doms, are both eager to make human con­nec­tion and exquis­ite­ly alert to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of embar­rass­ment.… teens were adamant that they did not want to go direct­ly to their par­ents or friends with these issues and that the steady avail­abil­i­ty of A.I. was a relief to them. They also reject­ed the idea of A.I. ther­a­pists; they weren’t treat­ing A.I. as a replace­ment for anoth­er per­son but instead were using it to sec­ond-guess their devel­op­ing sense of how to treat oth­er peo­ple. A.I. has been trained to give us answers we like, rather than the ones we may need to hear. The result­ing stream of praise — con­stant­ly hear­ing some ver­sion of ‘You’re absolute­ly right!’ — risks erod­ing our abil­i­ty to deal with the messi­ness of human rela­tion­ships. Soci­ol­o­gists call this social deskilling. Even casu­al A.I. use expos­es users to a lev­el of praise humans rarely expe­ri­ence from one anoth­er, which is not great for any of us but is espe­cial­ly risky for young peo­ple still work­ing on their social skills.”
    • The author is vice provost at NYU. It’s a long excerpt, but I can’t find a way to abridge it much more.
  3. Some more reflec­tions on Min­neso­ta:
    • From the left: Alex Pret­ti’s death and the elite bar­gain (Jerusalem Dem­sas, The Argu­ment): “The pro­gres­sive omni­cause end­ed up under­min­ing its own inter­ests by bind­ing them all togeth­er. If being an envi­ron­men­tal­ist meant you also had to be pro-choice and also had to be anti-cop and also had to be anti-Trump, then well, that shrinks the set of peo­ple will­ing to be envi­ron­men­tal­ists. But there is one omni­cause worth join­ing. It pre­sent­ed itself on Sat­ur­day when an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen was shoved to the ground and sprayed with gun­fire.… The truth is, wide­spread dis­con­tent across indus­try, ide­ol­o­gy and inter­est groups is the most effec­tive way to halt gov­ern­ments in their tracks. Even in ful­ly author­i­tar­i­an coun­tries, mass dis­con­tent is incred­i­bly effec­tive at secur­ing pol­i­cy change.”
    • From the right: Immi­gra­tion Enforce­ment Is Unavoid­ably Upset­ting. But This Is Some­thing Else. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s true that you can’t have sus­tained immi­gra­tion enforce­ment with­out also hav­ing upset­ting cas­es and sym­pa­thet­ic depor­tees. If you deport ille­gal immi­grants with fam­i­lies, you will have to choose between fam­i­ly sep­a­ra­tion and deport­ing chil­dren. If you con­duct arrests in homes and neigh­bor­hoods, you will be accused of trau­ma­tiz­ing kids and com­mu­ni­ties; if you con­duct them in work­places, you will be going after the hard­est-work­ing migrants.… There are con­flicts here that can’t be wished away. But the fact that some back­lash and resis­tance are inescapable doesn’t mean that all enforce­ment strate­gies that gen­er­ate back­lash are sound or wise.”
    • From an inter­na­tion­al who does­n’t exact­ly map onto our pol­i­tics: The Amer­i­can Peo­ple Fact-Checked Their Gov­ern­ment (Jacob Mchanga­ma, Per­sua­sion): “The cur­rent obses­sion with mis­in­for­ma­tion tends to focus on the pub­lic: online mobs, for­eign influ­encers, flam­ing trolls. But his­to­ry sug­gests a more incon­ve­nient truth: in times of cri­sis, dis­in­for­ma­tion often comes from above. Gov­ern­ments, includ­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic ones, have pow­er­ful incen­tives to shape infor­ma­tion.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence at Van­der­bilt.
    • From evan­gel­i­cal­ism: In a Tense Min­neso­ta, Chris­tians Help Immi­grant Neigh­bors (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “This church, with the sup­port of many non-Chris­t­ian vol­un­teers, has been deliv­er­ing food six days per week for thou­sands of immi­grant fam­i­lies who are stay­ing home in fear. Two days before, the church had trained 600 new vol­un­teers for food dis­tri­b­u­tion, with a list now of 28,000 peo­ple who want food. One room at the church was full of dia­pers. Anoth­er was packed with a moun­tain of toi­let paper. Across the Twin Cities, neigh­bors pile sup­plies for immi­grants into oth­er church­es, too, as well as restau­rants and cof­fee shops, in scenes that look like a com­mu­ni­ty recov­er­ing from a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. In just a few weeks, church­es have cre­at­ed a sprawl­ing, infor­mal net­work for gro­cery deliv­er­ies to immi­grant fam­i­lies.”
    • Relat­ed to the above: I Trained to Mon­i­tor ICE but Found Myself Feed­ing the Hun­gry (Eliz­a­beth Berget, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the fol­low­ing days, I dis­cov­ered a safe­ty net that Chris­tians around the city had woven. I joined a neigh­bor­hood care group co-run by John Hilde­brand, a mem­ber and elder of Cal­vary Bap­tist Church here in Min­neapo­lis, which has been field­ing needs from vul­ner­a­ble fam­i­lies in their neigh­bor­hoods. Vet­ted mem­bers of the group respond to needs as they arise, offer­ing to give rides, do laun­dry, bring gro­ceries, or shov­el front walks for people—even strangers—afraid to leave their homes.  As I became more involved in this and oth­er care net­works, my phone ping­ing all day with new needs, it occurred to me that this is what it may have been like if the church of Acts 2 had used a group text…”
      • Note: I checked and Cal­vary Bap­tist Church rep­re­sents a main­line denom­i­na­tion, not an evan­gel­i­cal one.
  4. Elites and the Evan­gel­i­cal Class War (John Ehrett, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Pic­ture, if you will, the lush cam­pus of an inter­na­tion­al research uni­ver­si­ty, firm­ly ensconced in one of the least reli­gious areas of the coun­try. It’s the mid-2010s, and the Col­le­giate Goth­ic thor­ough­fares are bustling. On that cam­pus are three Chris­tians, each engaged in dis­tinc­tive forms of on-cam­pus min­istry: (1)  A thir­tysome­thing man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the cor­ner of one of the busiest cam­pus inter­sec­tions, hold­ing a bull­horn and dis­play­ing a ten-foot ban­ner pro­claim­ing EVOLUTION IS A LIE. Over and over, he declares the real­i­ties of sin and judg­ment, so loud­ly that his procla­ma­tions can be heard even from sev­er­al blocks away. (2) A well-dressed, six­ty­ish pas­tor, hail­ing from a promi­nent New York City church, sits on a uni­ver­si­ty-pro­vid­ed stage across from a for­mer dean of the university’s law school. They are there to dis­cuss the academic’s recent book, a the­o­log­i­cal-philo­soph­i­cal argu­ment for Spin­ozis­tic pan­the­ism over against tra­di­tion­al Chris­tian­i­ty and sec­u­lar mate­ri­al­ism alike. Before an audi­ence of sev­er­al hun­dred stu­dents and fac­ul­ty, the pas­tor deliv­ers a dis­tinc­tive­ly Chris­to­log­i­cal cri­tique of the vol­ume. (3) mid­dle-aged man in a busi­ness suit stands along the edge of a busy road­way. He says lit­tle, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Tes­ta­ments, and he’s hand­ing them out to any­one, stu­dent or town­ie, walk­ing past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a run­ner sprint­ing by.) With these three now in view, one might ask a provoca­tive ques­tion: which of these Chris­tians was best in wit­ness in a hos­tile cul­ture?”
    • The author is describ­ing scenes he wit­nessed at Yale Law School.
  5. The Day I Want­ed to Be a Father (Col­in Wright, Twit­ter): “The post­doc years, the geo­graph­ic insta­bil­i­ty that made estab­lish­ing roots near­ly impos­si­ble, and the uncer­tain­ty of tenure all felt incom­pat­i­ble with build­ing a fam­i­ly. I was con­vinced that chil­dren sim­ply weren’t in my future. I was cer­tain of that until I was thir­ty-six years old. Then one moment changed every­thing.… For most of my life, I had thought of hav­ing chil­dren as the end of my life. Now I under­stand it as the begin­ning of a new one. In truth, until I have chil­dren of my own, I still view myself as a child in some sense. Unfin­ished. Par­ent­hood feels to me like the nec­es­sary final chap­ter of a life well lived, one filled with a mean­ing much deep­er than exot­ic vaca­tions or lux­u­ry goods could ever pro­vide.”
    • A mov­ing essay which, odd­ly enough, only seems to be avail­able on Twit­ter.
  6. The Uncom­fort­able Truths About Immi­gra­tion (Alexan­der Kus­tov, Sub­stack): “Here is the uncom­fort­able truth: a lot of what lib­er­al elites on both sides of the Atlantic say about immi­gra­tion is delib­er­ate­ly mis­lead­ing in ways that mat­ter for pol­i­cy and for demo­c­ra­t­ic trust. It is not usu­al­ly out­right made-up. But rather it is a form of ‘high­brow mis­in­for­ma­tion’ built out of selec­tive fram­ing, strate­gic omis­sions, and ‘noble’ half-truths. And it like­ly makes it hard­er, not eas­i­er, to build durable majori­ties for freer immi­gra­tion poli­cies in the long run.”
    • The author, him­self an immi­grant, is a polit­i­cal sci­ence prof at Notre Dame. The sec­tion on high­brow mis­in­for­ma­tion is espe­cial­ly good.
  7. An Impor­tant Let­ter from Bill, Kris, and Dann on Behalf of Bethel Lead­er­ship (Bethel Church): “We’re writ­ing to you today to share about some of our mis­takes and fail­ures in the way we nav­i­gat­ed our respon­si­bil­i­ties to the glob­al Body of Christ. We ask for you to cov­er us with grace as we seek the Lord for for­give­ness in the face of some griev­ous mis­takes. These actions were tak­en by us (Bill John­son, Kris Val­lot­ton, and Dann Far­rel­ly) along with Dan­ny Silk. We would like to clar­i­fy that our oth­er lead­ers and staff mem­bers, includ­ing Bri­an and Jenn, and the Bethel Music team, were not updat­ed on the alle­ga­tions or the details of the process. We take respon­si­bil­i­ty for the fact that we did not prop­er­ly and ful­ly bring dis­ci­pline, clo­sure, or clear and time­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tion regard­ing the grav­i­ty of our con­cerns with Shawn Bolz.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Best Of Molt­book (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Molt­book is ‘a social net­work for AI agents’, although ‘humans [are] wel­come to observe’.… it’s not sur­pris­ing that an AI social net­work would get weird fast. But even hav­ing encoun­tered their work many times, I find Molt­book sur­pris­ing. I can con­firm it’s not triv­ial­ly made-up — I asked my copy of Claude to par­tic­i­pate, and it made com­ments pret­ty sim­i­lar to all the oth­ers. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine.”
    • The net­work in ques­tion: Molt­book
    • Actu­al­ly fas­ci­nat­ing con­tent in this post. Def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Per­haps should have been up top.
  • One Solu­tion for Too Many A’s? Har­vard Con­sid­ers Giv­ing A+ Grades. (Mark Arse­nault, New York Times): “Grades of A fell to 53.4 per­cent of grades award­ed in the fall semes­ter, from 60.2 per­cent in the pri­or aca­d­e­m­ic year, Dr. Clay­baugh report­ed.… Har­vard has been on a cam­paign to make it hard­er to get an A, and a series of pro­pos­als may be put into effect lat­er this year. A report issued in Octo­ber sug­gest­ed allow­ing grades of A+, which are not cur­rent­ly used at the school, as a way to rec­og­nize the best per­form­ing stu­dents, demot­ing the rou­tine, ordi­nary A to the sec­ond rung of the grad­ing lad­der.”
    • This feels like it was writ­ten by a satirist:
      “We’re giv­ing out too many A’s.”
      “I guess we should give more B’s.”
      “Hear me out… what if we start­ed giv­ing out extra-spe­cial A’s instead?”
  • Some­thing very unex­pect­ed is hap­pen­ing to Norway’s polar bears (Ben­ji Jones, Vox): “The study, an analy­sis of hun­dreds of polar bears in the Nor­we­gian arch­i­pel­ago of Sval­bard, found that declin­ing sea ice is not caus­ing polar bears to starve. They actu­al­ly appeared health­i­er in the last two decades of the analy­sis, from 2000 to 2019. The over­all pop­u­la­tion, mean­while, is either sta­ble or grow­ing, accord­ing to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a sci­en­tist at the Nor­we­gian Polar Insti­tute. ‘I was sur­prised,’ Aars told Vox from Sval­bard. ‘I would have pre­dict­ed that body con­di­tion would decline. We see the oppo­site.’ ”
    • The arti­cle makes it clear that oth­er polar bear pop­u­la­tions are doing worse. Fas­ci­nat­ing regard­less.
  • This A.I. Tool Is Going Viral. Five Ways Peo­ple Are Using It. (Natal­lie Rocha, New York Times): “Last week, he prompt­ed Claude Code to make a pro­gram to iden­ti­fy which clothes belonged to each of his three daugh­ters so he could sort clean laun­dry into piles with­out their help. He took pic­tures of their clothes to teach Claude Code which T‑shirt belonged to which daugh­ter. Now he sim­ply holds up the clothes to his lap­top cam­era so the pro­gram tells him whom it belongs to. ‘The whole process was done with­in an hour, and the girls were real­ly excit­ed,’ he said.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 538: missionary spies and Minneapolis reflections

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. God’s Spooks: Reli­gion, Spy­ing, and the Cold War (Matthew Avery Sut­ton, Church Life Jour­nal): “Since its incep­tion, the CIA has used mis­sion­ar­ies and oth­er reli­gious activists for intel­li­gence and espi­onage work; it has used reli­gion as an effec­tive pro­pa­gan­da tool, and its agents have even posed as cler­gy. CIA agents and reli­gious activists man­aged to keep their part­ner­ships most­ly hid­den until the 1970s. But in the wake of Viet­nam and Water­gate, numer­ous jour­nal­ists and then Con­gress began scru­ti­niz­ing the agency more close­ly. They revealed to the world that the CIA had been employ­ing mis­sion­ar­ies to fur­ther its agen­da and that some reli­gious activists were receiv­ing sub­stan­tial rewards for their work on the government’s behalf. In fact, the CIA and reli­gious activists have long col­lab­o­rat­ed to achieve numer­ous pol­i­cy goals.”
    • Super fas­ci­nat­ing. My denom­i­na­tion receives spe­cif­ic men­tion: “The Assem­blies of God, which had a large and active mis­sion­ary out­reach, qui­et­ly instruct­ed work­ers to avoid CIA col­lab­o­ra­tion. How­ev­er, church lead­ers did not want to go on record pub­licly against the CIA.”
  2. Report: More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians world­wide face ‘high lev­els’ of per­se­cu­tion (Gina Chris­t­ian, OSV News): “More than 388 mil­lion Chris­tians — or 1 in 7 believ­ers world­wide — face ‘high lev­els of per­se­cu­tion and dis­crim­i­na­tion for their faith,’ accord­ing to a new report.… Specif­i­cal­ly, Open Doors focus­es on col­lect­ing data on Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion in six key areas: restric­tions or dan­gers on prac­tic­ing faith in pri­vate, fam­i­ly, com­mu­ni­ty, nation­al and church life, as well as the lev­els of vio­lence — men­tal, phys­i­cal and sex­u­al — Chris­tians face in the 150 nations Open Doors mon­i­tors. Each area is scored, with each coun­try then receiv­ing an over­all score out of 100 for the sever­i­ty of Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, with scores of 81–100 des­ig­nat­ed as ‘extreme,’ 61–80 ‘very high’ and 41–60 ‘high.’”
  3. Not So Sec­u­lar Swe­den (Joel Hall­dorf, Com­ment): “In high­ly sec­u­lar soci­eties, zoomers tend to be more reli­gious than their boomer par­ents. Nowhere, the study con­clud­ed, was that pat­tern clear­er than in Swe­den, once the poster child of sec­u­lar­ism.… Swe­den once set the glob­al bench­mark for sec­u­lar ratio­nal­i­ty, and every­body expect­ed the world to fol­low our path. Now the qui­et stir­rings of faith here in the north—more con­fir­ma­tions, new mem­ber­ships, con­ver­sa­tions once unthinkable—show that his­to­ry has a way of hum­bling even the most con­fi­dent nar­ra­tives. Iron­clad soci­o­log­i­cal the­o­ries often insist that the cur­rent moment is our inevitable future. But his­to­ry sel­dom fol­lows straight lines.”
  4. Chris­tians, Let’s Stop Abus­ing Romans 13 (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “More­over, the use of Romans 13 as a refusal to ques­tion the moral­i­ty of a use of force is, iron­i­cal­ly enough, a vio­la­tion of the pas­sage. We might well ask, what would Paul have writ­ten if Romans 13 were addressed to the author­i­ties rather than to those under their rule? Well, we actu­al­ly know the answer, because the same Spir­it who breathed out Romans 13 also breathed out John the Baptist’s instruc­tions to tax col­lec­tors and sol­diers. John told them not to extort mon­ey from any­one, imply­ing that they would be held respon­si­ble for the mis­use of their pow­er (Luke 3:12–14). The same Spir­it also favor­ably por­trayed Paul’s inter­ac­tion with the police who told him and Silas, on behalf of the mag­is­trates, to leave qui­et­ly, to which Paul replied, ‘They have beat­en us pub­licly, uncon­demned, men who are Roman cit­i­zens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secret­ly? No! Let them come them­selves and take us out’ (Acts 16:37).”
  5. Chi­nese Uni­ver­si­ties Surge in Glob­al Rank­ings as U.S. Schools Slip (Mark Arse­nault, New York Times): “The issue at top Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties is not falling pro­duc­tion. Six promi­nent Amer­i­can schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, Johns Hop­kins, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton-Seat­tle, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, and Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty — are pro­duc­ing more research than they did two decades ago, accord­ing to the Lei­den tal­lies. But pro­duc­tion by the Chi­nese schools has risen far more.… [How­ev­er,] a study has sug­gest­ed that Chi­nese researchers have been boost­ing their cita­tion rank­ings by cit­ing one anoth­er more often than west­ern researchers tend to cite oth­er west­ern­ers.”
  6. How to stop the chaos of col­lege sports (John Cali­pari, Wash­ing­ton Post): “There is no sus­tain­able path in col­lege ath­let­ics that doesn’t address these three things: First, stu­dent-ath­letes should have their oppor­tu­ni­ties for schol­ar­ships pro­tect­ed and get to com­pete against play­ers who are their age. Sec­ond, trans­fer rules, which now allow play­ers to leave one school for anoth­er as often as they’d like, need sta­bil­i­ty. This will help edu­ca­tion remain the heart of col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. Third, pro­tect the free mar­ket and rights of young peo­ple to fair­ly earn what their local mar­kets can offer, which will require more rev­enue from teams.”
  7. Some reflec­tions on ICE in Min­neso­ta. There are many more float­ing around the web, and if you find one with good insights or a provoca­tive per­spec­tive please let me know about it.
    • I Joined Ice Watch (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “In the last six weeks, Min­neapo­lis has become the site of the largest immi­gra­tion enforce­ment oper­a­tion in U.S. his­to­ry. Thou­sands of city res­i­dents have respond­ed by join­ing var­i­ous Sig­nal groups whose main pur­pose is to find and dis­rupt ICE.… These indi­vid­u­als came from all walks of life. I count­ed at least five pub­lic school teach­ers, a divorce lawyer, two med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, a for­mer bal­le­ri­na, and even one Min­neapo­lis City Coun­cil mem­ber: Aurin Chowd­hury⁩, a pro­gres­sive who was endorsed by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca in 2023. One local non­prof­it leader whose orga­ni­za­tion reset­tles refugees told me that the aver­age par­tic­i­pants in these Sig­nal groups are church mem­bers, retirees, and par­ents.”
    • Min­neapo­lis Isn’t a Movie (Kat Rosen­field, The Free Press): “Around the same time that Renee Good was shot, a video cir­cu­lat­ed on Tik­Tok of anoth­er con­fronta­tion between a group of agents who appear to be U.S. Mar­shals and an activist with a cam­era. The activist is a young- to mid­dle-aged woman, as is one of the agents—and when the first woman men­tions that her 6‑year-old child is in her car, the agent looks like she’s been elec­tro­cut­ed. ‘You have a child in your car?’ she says, her voice pitch­ing sharply upward, her eyes wide with hor­ror. ‘Get your child off the scene! This is an active police scene!’ It could not be clear­er, in this moment, that these women inhab­it two dif­fer­ent real­i­ties. One under­stands her­self to be in a dan­ger­ous, high-stakes sit­u­a­tion; the oth­er thinks it’s all a sort of game.”
    • The Goon Squad (Nick Cat­to­gio, The Dis­patch): “Why on earth is the admin­is­tra­tion announc­ing its oper­a­tions before they hap­pen?… It makes no sense as a strat­e­gy for effec­tive law enforcement—but lots of sense as a pageant of dom­i­neer­ing law-and-order assertive­ness. The Trump admin­is­tra­tion wants con­fronta­tion. Its top pri­or­i­ty isn’t to unob­tru­sive­ly detain and remove the most dan­ger­ous immi­grants, as the depor­ta­tion num­bers prove. Its pri­or­i­ty is to intim­i­date its cul­tur­al ene­mies with heavy-hand­ed dis­plays of author­i­ty and promis­es of offi­cial impuni­ty for those who car­ry them out. That’s why ICE wears masks, a priv­i­lege even U.S. com­bat troops don’t enjoy, and why some agents are kit­ted out in cam­ou­flage despite the fact that they’re not try­ing to ‘blend in’ to their urban sur­round­ings. (There’s noth­ing stealthy about ICE.) They’re not enforc­ing the law, they’re going into bat­tle. And their anonymi­ty sig­nals, to you and to them, that no one will hold them account­able for what hap­pens dur­ing that bat­tle if you make trou­ble.”
    • One State, Two Very Dif­fer­ent Views of Min­neapo­lis (Sheila M. Eldred, Eliz­a­beth A. Staw­ic­ki, Ann Hin­ga Klein and Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Ms. Good’s death was trag­ic, they said. Hor­rif­ic. But they also said that she had asked for trou­ble. ‘You obey the law offi­cer,’ a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, ‘and ques­tion it lat­er.’ This is the divide, in a sin­gle sen­tence. In Min­neapo­lis, pro­test­ers saw an inno­cent woman killed by a fed­er­al agent and took to the streets. At ‘the Pick­le,’ the reg­u­lars saw a woman who should have com­plied.”

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 537: Hippo Poop & Manic Complainers

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

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

Noth­ing here about Min­neso­ta or Iran. They’re both in the news, but I haven’t yet read any­thing about them that I’ve found stim­u­lat­ing.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Tyran­ny of the Com­plain­ers (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “In 2023, for exam­ple, 5059 sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion com­plaints came from a sin­gle individual–from a total of 8151 com­plaints. Thus, one indi­vid­ual account­ed for 68.5% of all sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion com­plaints in that year.… These com­plaints have to be inves­ti­gat­ed so this sin­gle indi­vid­ual may be cost­ing tax­pay­ers mil­lions. It’s as if a sin­gle indi­vid­ual were pulling a fire alarm thou­sands of times a year, mobi­liz­ing emer­gency ser­vices on demand, and nev­er fac­ing reper­cus­sions.”
  2. What I’ve Learned from Watch­ing Peo­ple Wait to Have Chil­dren (Sarah Pog­gi, The Free Press): “I’ve known all of this for as long as I’ve been a doc­tor. So have my col­leagues. That’s why ob-gyn res­i­dents, despite work­ing 80-hour weeks, are more like­ly to get preg­nant dur­ing their train­ing than any oth­er med­ical spe­cial­ists.”
    • The author is a med school prof at Johns Hop­kins.
  3. Why Suf­fer­ing for Christ Is More Than Just a “Nec­es­sary Evil” (Matt Rhodes, Cross­way): “You won’t go far in evan­ge­lis­tic con­ver­sa­tions in the West today before some­one asks you to explain the prob­lem of theod­i­cy: how it is that a good God could allow suf­fer­ing in the world.… But we mustn’t for­get that ques­tions can be loaded. Ask a defen­dant in court, ‘Have you stopped beat­ing your wife yet?’ and his lawyer is sure to object, ‘Your hon­or, the ques­tion pre­sup­pos­es my client has beat­en his wife.’ The ques­tion needs to be reframed, not respond­ed to.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Why Chris­tians Ignore What the Bible Says About Immi­grants (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Bible does not give a com­pre­hen­sive pub­lic pol­i­cy for migra­tion or asy­lum. Chris­tians of good faith can dis­agree on those things. But the Bible does give a com­pre­hen­sive view on what we are to think of human beings, includ­ing migrants. The church has a mis­sion to shape con­sciences around how we min­is­ter to scared and vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple, regard­less of whether we think they should have stayed some­where else. And Jesus has already tak­en the ques­tion of ‘Who is my neigh­bor?’ off the table…”
  5. Some Venezuela per­spec­tives:
    • Was Trump’s Venezuela Attack Legal? (Jeb Ruben­feld, The Free Press): “Under cur­rent U.S. doc­trine and prece­dent, what Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump just did in Venezuela is almost cer­tain­ly legal; in fact, the U.S. did the very same thing in Pana­ma four decades ago, and the courts upheld it after years of lit­i­ga­tion and care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion. But Trump’s plan to ‘run’ Venezuela for the fore­see­able future, declared at a press con­fer­ence ear­li­er today, is much murki­er.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Yale Law School.
    • Why the Venezuela Oper­a­tion Won’t Embold­en America’s Ene­mies (Eli Lake, The Free Press): “If any­thing, a pre­cise mil­i­tary oper­a­tion to seize a rogue tyrant in a predawn raid with no U.S. casu­al­ties will cause Chi­na and Rus­sia to think twice about test­ing Amer­i­can pow­er. Venezuela count­ed on a Russ­ian-made air defense sys­tem that failed to stop the U.S. Air Force from dom­i­nat­ing its air­space. That sends a chill­ing mes­sage to Rus­sia and any­one who has pur­chased its mil­i­tary hard­ware. Chi­na had invest­ed bil­lions in Venezuela’s oil sec­tor only to see the man who cut those deals arraigned this week before a U.S. fed­er­al court in Man­hat­tan.”
    • Why I Cold-Called Pres­i­dent Trump at 4:30 in the Morn­ing (Tyler Pager, New York Times): “I just called him direct­ly and he picked up. I wasn’t that sur­prised because the president’s phone habits are pret­ty well-doc­u­ment­ed — he reg­u­lar­ly picks up calls from reporters.… This is the first time I have ever called the pres­i­dent on his cell­phone.”
      • That’s a wild detail in a wild news cycle. How many reporters have Trump’s num­ber and are just wait­ing for the right moment to call?
  6. So What If the Bible Doesn’t Men­tion Embryo Screen­ing? (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Open up the glos­sary in the back of your Bible, and you won’t find Chat­G­PT, CRISPR, or IVF. There are no chap­ter-and-verse cita­tions for lip fillers, egg freez­ing, or prac­ti­cal ques­tions like the ‘right’ age to get mar­ried or the ‘ide­al’ num­ber of chil­dren.… Mature Chris­tians, and espe­cial­ly pas­tors and whole church­es, must there­fore be able to give con­fi­dent scrip­tur­al answers to new ques­tions even when overt bib­li­cal teach­ing is lack­ing.”
    • I hope these Fri­day emails are of some small ser­vice in this regard.
  7. The Case for Pro­hibit­ing Vice (Charles Fain Lehmann, Nation­al Affairs): “This fram­ing of the vice issue — as a mat­ter of per­mit­ting behav­ior that may be immoral but is more impor­tant­ly ‘harm­less’ — is so cen­tral to our pub­lic debate that both pro­po­nents and oppo­nents artic­u­late their crit­i­cisms in its lan­guage. They hag­gle about which is more harm­ful, vice or its pro­hi­bi­tion.… the fact that both pro­po­nents and oppo­nents of vice have resort­ed to appeals to harm actu­al­ly great­ly under­mines the harm prin­ci­ple’s util­i­ty. Part of the pur­pose of the prin­ci­ple is to sep­a­rate the tru­ly dam­ag­ing from the mere­ly unliked. But the dis­tinc­tion, it turns out, is far less coher­ent than pro­po­nents once claimed.… [Vice] is intrin­si­cal­ly a prob­lem, because human well-being — the good life — is always threat­ened by it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 511: CPS, prosperity, & journalism



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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ICE Goes After Church Lead­ers and Chris­tians Flee­ing Per­se­cu­tion (Andy Olsen, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The pas­tor asks if he can go with them or even fol­low them. ‘They need me,’ he says. An agent says the pas­tor can­not go with them. Torosian tells the agents that the cou­ple was per­se­cut­ed in Iran and fled because of their faith. The agents don’t respond. ‘They came here for free­dom, not like this,’ Torosian tells the agents. ‘I know you are doing your job, but shame on you. Shame on this gov­ern­ment.’”
  2. Does CPS Inves­ti­gate One Third of All Chil­dren in the US? (Maxwell Tabar­rok, Sub­stack): “Does CPS inves­ti­gate one out of every three Amer­i­can chil­dren? The answer to this one is not avail­able direct­ly in the pri­ma­ry source reports and the under­ly­ing data is only avail­able after an appli­ca­tion for research use, so we’ll have to trust a group of researchers at the Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty school of pub­lic health. They down­load and de-dupli­cate the mas­ter data files from 2003–2014 and con­firm that 37% of Amer­i­can chil­dren are the sub­ject of at least one screened-in refer­ral to CPS from ages 0–18.”
  3. Have You Heard the Good News? (Clif­ford S. Asness and Michael R. Strain, The Free Press): “Yes, we have real prob­lems. But widen the aper­ture, and you’ll see that there has nev­er been a bet­ter time to be alive than the present day.… a rel­a­tive stan­dard will always find rel­a­tive pover­ty. But using an absolute stan­dard finds that income pover­ty is below 6 per­cent. On a con­sump­tion basis, well over 20 per­cent of house­holds were in pover­ty in the 1960s, and 11 per­cent were in pover­ty in 1990. Today, the con­sump­tion pover­ty rate is around 1 per­cent.”
  4. When We Start­ed To Lie (Mat­ti Fried­man, The Free Press): “Peo­ple writ­ing let­ters com­plain­ing about press errors and demand­ing cor­rec­tions, then and now, miss the point: These aren’t errors. They’re the result of the press doing a dif­fer­ent job cor­rect­ly.”
  5. Duke Law Jour­nal Sent a Secret Memo to Minor­i­ty Appli­cants Telling Them They’d Get Extra Points for Writ­ing About Their Race (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “When the Supreme Court banned affir­ma­tive action in 2023, it said that col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties could not use essays as a Tro­jan horse for racial pref­er­ences. The doc­u­ments from Duke illus­trate how a top law review has skirt­ed that direc­tive, cre­at­ing a points-based sys­tem that fore­grounds race and could put the law school in legal jeop­ardy.… The pack­et was over­seen by jour­nal edi­tor in chief Gabriela Nagle Alve­rio, who received her B.A. in Gen­der and Sex­u­al­i­ty Stud­ies from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty…”
  6. You Don’t Need the Same Pol­i­tics to Surf Togeth­er (David Litt, The Free Press): “But over the years, Matt and I got to know each oth­er bet­ter, and the bet­ter we got to know each oth­er, the clear­er it became that we had absolute­ly noth­ing in com­mon. He was into Ulti­mate Fight­ing; I was into Ulti­mate Fris­bee. He was cov­ered in tat­toos; I was cov­ered in J.Crew. His def­i­n­i­tion of a work­place injury was death by vio­lent elec­tric shock; mine was carpal tun­nel syn­drome.”
  7. Where I Learned the Pow­er of Look­ing at Every­thing (Rachel Kush­n­er, New York Times): “Hav­ing arrived ear­ly for the cer­e­mo­ny, I lin­gered near Sather Gate, with its ornate pati­nat­ed met­al­work, and then head­ed toward Doe Library, where I used to not study and stared at peo­ple instead. Every­thing glowed with a kind of insti­tu­tion­al grandeur. My super­ego scold­ed me fur­ther: ‘Look where you were! The best pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty in the world, only to squan­der your luck!’ The beau­ty of the cam­pus, which I had no mem­o­ry of appre­ci­at­ing, seemed almost crush­ing in its majesty.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 498: Armageddon, arXiv, and penguins

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Archae­ol­o­gists find first evi­dence of epic bib­li­cal bat­tle at ‘Armaged­don’ (Rossel­la Ter­catin, The Times of Israel): “For the first time, a team of Israeli archae­ol­o­gists has uncov­ered ancient arti­facts at north­ern Israel’s ‘Armaged­don’ site that might offer proof of an epic bat­tle doc­u­ment­ed in the books of Kings II and Chron­i­cles between a king of Judah and an Egypt­ian pharaoh. Two aca­d­e­m­ic papers pub­lished ear­li­er this year explained how an unprece­dent­ed amount of 7th-cen­tu­ry BCE Egypt­ian pot­tery was found in recent exca­va­tions at Megid­do, sug­gest­ing that Egypt­ian sol­diers were indeed in the right bib­li­cal place at what could be the right bib­li­cal peri­od.”
  2. ‘I Applied for a Work Visa—and Was Thrown in Prison for Weeks’ (Jas­mine Mooney, The Free Press): “Then I was tak­en to the nurse’s office for a med­ical check. She asked what had hap­pened to me and said she had nev­er seen a Cana­di­an here before. When I told her my sto­ry, she looked at me, grabbed my hand, and said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ I told her I had only recent­ly found God, but that I now believed in God more than any­thing. ‘I believe God brought you here for a rea­son,’ she said. ‘I know it feels like your life is in a mil­lion pieces, but you will be okay. Through this, I think you are going to find a way to help oth­ers.’ She asked if she could pray for me. I held her hands and wept.”
  3. Inside arXiv—the Most Trans­for­ma­tive Plat­form in All of Sci­ence (Sheon Han, Wired): “For sci­en­tists, imag­in­ing a world with­out arX­iv is like the rest of us imag­in­ing one with­out pub­lic libraries or GPS. But a look at its inner work­ings reveals that it isn’t a fric­tion­less utopia of open-access knowl­edge. Over the years, arXiv’s per­ma­nence has been threat­ened by every­thing from bureau­crat­ic strife to out­dat­ed code to even, once, a spy scan­dal. In the words of Ginsparg, who usu­al­ly redi­rects inter­view requests to an FAQ document—on arX­iv, no less—and tried to talk me out of vis­it­ing him in per­son, arX­iv is ‘a child I sent off to col­lege but who keeps com­ing back to camp out in my liv­ing room, behav­ing bad­ly.’”
  4. Rubio Orders U.S. Diplo­mats to Scour Stu­dent Visa Appli­cants’ Social Media (Edward Wong, New York Times): “As a sen­a­tor from Flori­da, Mr. Rubio pressed the Biden administration’s State Depart­ment, run by Antony J. Blinken, to can­cel the visas of stu­dents involved in cam­pus protests against Israel’s mil­i­tary cam­paign in Gaza. Since becom­ing sec­re­tary of state in late Jan­u­ary, Mr. Rubio has revoked per­haps 300 or more visas, many of them belong­ing to stu­dents, he told reporters last Thurs­day. He said he had been sign­ing let­ters dai­ly revok­ing visas.”
  5. Trump’s intu­itions on tar­iffs won’t help Amer­i­cans (or pen­guins) (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…I spent the twi­light hours gog­gling at the Trump administration’s new tar­iff sched­ule, try­ing to grasp its log­ic. For exam­ple, the tar­iffs on the Heard and McDon­ald islands, which have pop­u­la­tions of zero, except for the pen­guins and assort­ed oth­er ani­mals. I mean, I’m glad that the rapa­cious wad­dlers will no longer fleece Amer­i­can con­sumers by dump­ing their shod­dy goods on our mar­kets. But still the thing vexed me … what do pen­guins export? Besides nature doc­u­men­taries, I mean. Obvi­ous­ly some­one at the White House, pos­si­bly a soon-to-be-ex intern, pulled up a list of ter­ri­to­ries with­out check­ing whether those ter­ri­to­ries were, you know, inhab­it­ed.”
    • Unlocked. As McAr­dle notes, a sin­gle absur­di­ty like that is not unusu­al for a mas­sive fed­er­al pol­i­cy. She moves quick­ly to a sub­stan­tive cri­tique.
    • Relat­ed: Kak­istoc­ra­cy as a Nat­ur­al Result of Pop­ulism (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The for­mu­la of ‘reci­procity’ being used is so stu­pid I approach the top­ic with awe, and have an almost super­sti­tious feel­ing that if I even describe it I’ll some­how become stu­pid­er myself… The word ‘kak­istoc­ra­cy’ means rule by those least suit­ed to gov­ern. His argu­ment, sim­i­lar to one I’ve made before, is that Trump only cares about loy­al­ty, and a move­ment that pri­or­i­tizes loy­al­ty to a sin­gle extreme­ly flawed man is going to facil­i­tate the worst peo­ple ris­ing to the top.”
      • A wild rant, plus I learned a new word.
  6. The Great­est Hate Hoax of All Time? The Cana­di­an ‘Mass Graves’ Lie Unrav­els (Wil­fred Reil­ly, Nation­al Review): “…there is a rough­ly 0.00 per­cent chance that there are actu­al­ly 200 dead Native kids interred on the grounds of a well-known board­ing school that oper­at­ed until 1978. Such things hap­pen in the Saw movies, not in urban mod­ern Cana­da. And, as I note in my ear­li­er piece on this top­ic: ‘Kam­loops Res­i­den­tial School is locat­ed smack-dab in the mid­dle of both the well-known Kam­loops Indi­an Reser­va­tion and the 100,000 per­son city of Kam­loops in British Colum­bia.’ Not­ing this him­self, Dr. Rouil­lard asks: ‘Is it real­ly cred­i­ble that the remains of 200 chil­dren were buried clan­des­tine­ly in a mass grave, on the reserve itself, with­out any reac­tion from the Band Coun­cil, until last sum­mer?’”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Ken­tucky State (which I learned today is a HBCU) whose schol­ar­ship focus­es on hate crime hoax­es.
  7. ‘Our Kids Are the Least Flour­ish­ing Gen­er­a­tion We Know Of’ (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Teenagers are des­per­ate for pres­tige. And what the social media com­pa­nies did — and we know this from things that insid­ers have said — is they hacked that. Nor­mal­ly, through­out his­to­ry, to become pres­ti­gious, you had to become a good archer or a good leader or a good bas­ket weaver. You had to do some­thing in the world. And then peo­ple would respect you, and you would gain social sta­tus. That’s the way it always used to be. What social media is able to do is say: You don’t have to do any­thing. Just do what­ev­er it takes to get peo­ple to fol­low you. And bin­go — you’ve got pres­tige.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Long but worth­while. I should men­tion that at the end Haidt rec­om­mends three books he wants every 20something to read. I am hap­py to endorse the lat­ter two. Replace the first with the New Tes­ta­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • An AI Gen­er­at­ed Com­ic (on Twit­ter)
  • Author­ship The­o­ries (SMBC) — let the read­er under­stand its rel­e­vance to Bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship
  • ‘Mon­ster’ under bed in Kansas town leads to arrest (Wil Day, KSN): “The Bar­ton Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office says a babysit­ter was putting the chil­dren to bed when one of them told her that a “mon­ster” was under their bed. The babysit­ter, hop­ing to com­fort the child by show­ing them there was noth­ing, looked under the bed and came face-to-face with a man hid­ing under­neath. There was an alter­ca­tion, and the babysit­ter and a child were knocked over.”
    • THERE WAS ACTUALLY A MONSTER UNDER THE BED. That kid ain’t nev­er falling asleep again.
  • Basic Instruc­tions (Basic Instruc­tions): the first pan­el is what got me: “for now”
  • Pen­guin Tar­iffs (Dork Tow­er)

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 497: Christianity in Space, Redeeming Turkish Delight, and How To Sneeze

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Strand­ed Astro­naut Held Onto Faith in Dark­est Moments: ‘God Was There’ (Sylvia St. Cyr, The Roys Report): “After being strand­ed for nine months in space, vet­er­an NASA astro­naut Bar­ry ‘Butch’ Wilmore is shar­ing how his faith in God kept him going.… Wilmore, a mem­ber and elder of Prov­i­dence Bap­tist Church in Pasade­na, Texas, stayed con­nect­ed with his church through­out his time in space. He even made a few calls to some elder­ly church mem­bers through­out his time strand­ed on the sta­tion, to encour­age them.”
  2. What Fol­lows from Lab Leak? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “First, and most impor­tant­ly, the high­er the prob­a­bil­i­ty that SARS-CoV­‑2 leaked from a lab the high­er the prob­a­bil­i­ty we should expect anoth­er pan­dem­ic. Research at Wuhan was not espe­cial­ly unusu­al or high-tech. Mod­i­fy­ing virus­es such as coro­n­avirus­es (e.g., insert­ing spike pro­teins, adapt­ing recep­tor-bind­ing domains) is com­mon prac­tice in virol­o­gy research and gain-of-func­tion exper­i­ments with virus­es have been wide­ly con­duct­ed. Thus, man­u­fac­tur­ing a virus capa­ble of killing ~20 mil­lion human beings or more is well with­in the capa­bil­i­ty of say ~500‑1000 labs world­wide. The num­ber of such labs is grow­ing in num­ber and such research is becom­ing less cost­ly and eas­i­er to con­duct. Thus, lab-leak means the risks are larg­er than we thought and increas­ing.”
    • Some very prac­ti­cal sug­ges­tions in this short piece.
  3. The Hid­den Hands: Amanu­enses and the Let­ters Behind the Let­ters (C. Michael Pat­ton, Cre­do House): “Yes, the sec­re­taries could write com­pe­tent Greek. But often, due to the per­son­al addi­tions at the end of these let­ters, I was able to com­pare the hand­writ­ing and style of the author him­self. And get this: in many cas­es, the author’s own Greek was bet­ter than the scribe’s. More refined. More flu­id. More leg­i­ble. This shat­tered my assump­tions. It meant that we can’t assume that peo­ple used sec­re­taries only because they were illit­er­ate, une­d­u­cat­ed, or of low sta­tus. On the con­trary, peo­ple who were clear­ly capa­ble writers—sometimes bet­ter writers—still made use of amanu­enses.”
    • This is a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the way ancient let­ters were writ­ten with the help of assis­tants — includ­ing let­ters in the New Tes­ta­ment.
    • Vague­ly relat­ed (in the sense that it’s about the his­tor­i­cal back­ground for Bible stuff): Did Jesus teach in Greek? (Ian Paul, blog): “The argu­ment about Jesus and Greek has sev­er­al lay­ers, start­ing with the most gen­er­al. Were the regions Jesus taught in mul­ti­lin­gual (poly­glot), and how do we know? Is it like­ly that Jesus him­self was mul­ti­lin­gual? And is there spe­cif­ic evi­dence of this in the New Tes­ta­ment, in exam­ples of his teach­ing?”
  4. Why Chris­t­ian Men Need Friend­ship, Not Just “Account­abil­i­ty” (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Account­abil­i­ty is a fruit from a much larg­er tree. In an age in which mil­lions of Amer­i­can men are so lone­ly it’s lit­er­al­ly killing them, the urgent issue is not find­ing some­one to receive a report of your web activ­i­ty. It’s find­ing some­one who’ll talk to you at all. Why? Because friend­ship has a sanc­ti­fy­ing pow­er. Not only is it eas­i­er to be hon­est and trans­par­ent with some­one whom you’re con­vinced is a true friend, but the friend­ship itself is a means of grace in the fight against lust.”
  5. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Acci­den­tal­ly Texted Me Its War Plans (Jef­frey Gold­berg, The Atlantic): “I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the nation­al-secu­ri­ty lead­er­ship of the Unit­ed States would com­mu­ni­cate on Sig­nal about immi­nent war plans. I also could not believe that the nation­al secu­ri­ty advis­er to the pres­i­dent would be so reck­less as to include the edi­tor in chief of The Atlantic in such dis­cus­sions with senior U.S. offi­cials, up to and includ­ing the vice pres­i­dent.”
    • A wild sto­ry. Lots of fol­low-up in the news. Just google for it.
    • Sev­en Ways of Look­ing at a Group Chat (Nick Cat­to­gio, The Dis­patch): “There are three dis­tinct scan­dals here and dif­fer­ent cul­prits in each one. The first is using Sig­nal instead of secure gov­ern­ment chan­nels to dis­cuss some­thing as sen­si­tive as mil­i­tary strikes. Every­one involved, save Jef­frey Gold­berg, bears respon­si­bil­i­ty for that. The sec­ond is mis­tak­en­ly includ­ing Gold­berg in the dis­cus­sion, for which Waltz would seem to be at fault. And the third is going so far as to share ‘oper­a­tional details’ in the chat, poten­tial­ly plac­ing peo­ple in the field at risk, which sure sounds like reck­less mis­han­dling of clas­si­fied information—a sub­ject on which Repub­li­cans have had a lot to say in recent years. The blame for that would appear to land on Hegseth.”
    • Inves­ti­ga­tion Reveals DOGE Had Just Laid Off The Guy Whose Job It Was To Make Sure Jef­frey Gold­berg Wasn’t In The War Group Chat (Baby­lon Bee)
  6. The Inklings:
    • Why JRR Tolkien Made March 25 the Day the Ring Was Destroyed (Joseph Pearce, Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter): “Fro­do Bag­gins, as the one cho­sen to be the Ring bear­er, is the Cross bear­er. He is, there­fore, a Christ fig­ure. This is why Tolkien has him leav­ing Riven­dell on Dec. 25 and arriv­ing at Mount Doom (Gol­go­tha) on March 25 (Good Fri­day). Frodo’s jour­ney, or pil­grim­age, begins on Christ’s birth­day and ends on the date of Christ’s death.”
    • In Search of Turk­ish Delight (Valerie Stivers, First Things): “Işin quotes Amer­i­can Naval physi­cian James McK­ay, writ­ing in 1830: Turk­ish delight was ‘a deli­cious pasty-mass which melts away in the mouth, and leaves a fra­grant fla­vor behind.’ The French artist and writer Pre­tex­tat Lecomte described it as ‘beau­ti­ful’ in col­or and ‘warm and trans­par­ent.’ To make it, Turk­ish con­fec­tion­ers used hand-sift­ed wheat starch (pro­duced by a domes­tic process with a long local tra­di­tion), and employed a labo­ri­ous tech­nique that called for sev­er­al hours of con­tin­u­ous stir­ring. They used musk and rose water as fla­vor­ings, and also sprin­kled musk on the pow­dered sug­ar coat­ing. They rubbed the trays used to mold it and the scis­sors used to cut it with fra­grant almond oil. By the 1880s, Işin says, the fla­vors had mul­ti­plied to include clot­ted cream, mas­tic, almond, and pis­ta­chio. In the 1900s came pine nut and hazel­nut, and fla­vors from essences or syrups such as vio­let, lemon, and bit­ter orange. This starts to sound like a dessert a child could dream of, or that an open-mind­ed and plea­sure-lov­ing adult like C. S. Lewis would find tempt­ing. It seems like­ly that very few mod­ern eaters have ever tast­ed true Turk­ish delight, at least out­side the Grand Bazaar. All con­tem­po­rary recipes use corn starch. Musk oil is ille­gal.”
      • I am both per­son­al­ly dis­ap­point­ed that I can’t taste it and thrilled that Lewis was­n’t crazy.
  7. How wor­ried should legal immi­grants be about Trump’s depor­ta­tions? (Nicole Narea, Vox): “These are uncer­tain times for many immi­grants in the US. There have been reports of indi­vid­ual visa and green card hold­ers and tourists who have been detained and deport­ed. How­ev­er, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion does not seem to be indis­crim­i­nate­ly tar­get­ing legal immi­grants who have autho­riza­tion to be in the US on a large scale. Some have report­ed­ly been tar­get­ed based on their polit­i­cal activism.…  And it’s not just immi­grants who have been affect­ed. A US cit­i­zen said he was walk­ing down the streets of Chica­go when he was arrest­ed by immi­gra­tion agents, who con­fis­cat­ed his ID and held him for 10 hours before releas­ing him. Even though lim­it­ed in num­ber, these cas­es have been going viral — and are under­stand­ably caus­ing fear in immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties.”

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 421

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 421, a twin prime num­ber (cf 419) which is also the sum of five con­sec­u­tive primes: 421 = 73 + 79 + 83 + 89 + 97.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Hun­dreds of stu­dents bap­tized after Unite Auburn wor­ship ser­vice (Brady Tal­bert, WSFA News): “Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty senior Michael Floyd said he will nev­er for­get what he wit­nessed on cam­pus Tues­day night. ‘I’ve seen Auburn bas­ket­ball beat Ken­tucky, I’ve seen Auburn foot­ball beat Alaba­ma, but I have nev­er seen some­thing like I did on Tues­day night,’ Floyd said. Thou­sands packed­Neville Are­na for a night of wor­ship. When it was end­ing, one stu­dent want­ed to be bap­tized. With­out a tub, crowds start­ed gath­er­ing at the lake at Auburn’s Red Barn, where rough­ly 200 peo­ple ulti­mate­ly gave their lives to Christ.”
  2. Gen­der, Sex­u­al Ori­en­ta­tion and Reli­gion Among Amer­i­can Col­lege Stu­dents (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “What real­ly kicked this off was a report from Brown Uni­ver­si­ty that indi­cat­ed that 38% of their stu­dent body iden­ti­fies as homo­sex­u­al, bisex­u­al, queer, asex­u­al, pan­sex­u­al, ques­tion­ing, or oth­er. When that same poll was con­duct­ed ten years ear­li­er, that share was just 14%. Is Brown an out­lier here? Or are huge per­cent­ages of col­lege stu­dents not straight and/or not cis­gen­der? The sur­vey gave sev­en total options for gen­der. The first thing that needs to be point­ed out is that the vast, vast major­i­ty of young peo­ple iden­ti­fy as man or woman. In fact, this was the choice of 98.2% of all respon­dents in the sur­vey. In oth­er words, about one in fifty col­lege aged stu­dents iden­ti­fies as non­bi­na­ry, genderqueer/genderfluid, agen­der, unsure, or pre­fer not to say.… 72% of the sam­ple iden­ti­fies as straight. Anoth­er 12% says that they are bisex­u­al and 5% indi­cates that they are gay/lesbian. These three response options encom­pass about 90% of all respon­dents in the sam­ple. About two per­cent iden­ti­fy as pan­sex­u­al or queer or unsure.”
    • Full of inter­est­ing data, empha­sis in orig­i­nal. I believe Brown is accu­rate­ly report­ing its data, and I also believe Brown (and Stan­ford) are out­liers in this regard.
    • Of par­tic­u­lar note: “The groups that are the least like­ly to say that they are straight are athe­ists at 55% and agnos­tics at 53%. It’s pret­ty stag­ger­ing to con­sid­er that near­ly half of young atheists/agnostics are not het­ero­sex­u­al. Noth­ing in par­tic­u­lars are not far behind, either, at 62%. The nones are much less like­ly to be straight com­pared to their reli­gious coun­ter­parts.” (empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty)
  3. The Hud­dled Mass­es At The Bor­der (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Lampe­dusa is a pic­turesque, rocky Ital­ian island in the Mediter­ranean between Tunisia and Sici­ly, with gor­geous beach­es and a small pop­u­la­tion of around 6,000. In just five days last week, its pop­u­la­tion tripled, as 11,000 migrants showed up in at least 199 boats, over­whelm­ing resources. The cen­ter for accom­mo­dat­ing migrants was designed for 600.”
    • Amaz­ing sta­tis­tics. The essay touch­es on Europe but focus­es on Amer­i­ca. Over­all a worth­while read what­ev­er your instincts on immi­gra­tion.
  4. The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won (Nan­cy Rom­mel­mann, The Free Press): “While Schlegel attends a non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian church and describes her faith as ‘very impor­tant to me,’ she had no desire to impose her moral­i­ty on oth­ers over the age of eigh­teen. ‘Adults have rights, so I get it,’ she says, explain­ing that all she want­ed was to craft a bill mak­ing it hard­er for kids to access videos like.…”
    • I’ve shared sto­ries about this Louisiana law before, but I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked this one.
  5. Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the spread of diver­si­ty state­ments isn’t real­ly a mech­a­nism to flush out and can­cel non­com­formists. It cre­ates con­for­mi­ty more invis­i­bly, by train­ing would-be aca­d­e­mics to adver­tise them­selves as ide­o­log­i­cal team play­ers and by screen­ing out job can­di­dates who don’t quite under­stand the rules of pro­gres­sive dis­course — who imag­ine, for instance, that adver­tis­ing their desire to ‘treat every­one the same’ is an ade­quate anti-racist com­mit­ment.”
  6. Mul­ti­ply by 37: A Sur­pris­ing­ly Accu­rate Rule of Thumb for Con­vert­ing Effect Sizes from Stan­dard Devi­a­tions to Per­centile Points (Paul T. von Hip­pel, preprint PDF):  “Edu­ca­tion­al researchers often report effect sizes in stan­dard devi­a­tion units (SD), but SD effects are hard to inter­pret. Effects are eas­i­er to inter­pret in per­centile points, but con­ver­sion from SDs to per­centile points involves a cal­cu­la­tion that is not intu­itive to edu­ca­tion­al stake­hold­ers. We point out that, if the out­come vari­able is nor­mal­ly dis­trib­uted, sim­ply mul­ti­ply­ing the SD effect by 37 usu­al­ly gives an excel­lent approx­i­ma­tion to the per­centile-point effect. For stu­dents in the [20%-80% range], the approx­i­ma­tion is accu­rate to with­in 1 per­centile point for effect sizes of up to 0.8 SD (or 29 to 30 per­centile points).”
    • Don’t have an intu­ition for stats? This is a use­ful rule of thumb. The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy, soci­ol­o­gy, sta­tis­tics and data sci­ence at UT Austin.
  7. In a first, sci­en­tists light up blue LED with an AA bat­tery (Ameya Pale­ja, Inter­est­ing Engi­neer­ing): “Con­ven­tion­al­ly used blue LEDs have a high turn-on volt­age of 4V for a lumi­nance of 100 cd per square meter (cd/m2). This might not sound very high, but at the indus­tri­al lev­el, it brings about issues since the volt­age is beyond what can be sup­plied by a typ­i­cal lithi­um-ion bat­tery.”
    • This legit­i­mate­ly sounds cool and could be very use­ful long-term: “An RGB LED mod­ule can pro­duce any col­or for the dis­play by using three col­ors: red, green, and blue. While red and green LEDs work well, the blue LED has been tricky from an ener­gy effi­cien­cy per­spec­tive.”
    • How­ev­er, this head­line remind­ed me that we used to go to the moon. Now we cel­e­brate blue lights.

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 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.