Tag: LGBTQ

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 462



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 450

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.

450 is a cool num­ber because it ends in 50. Which is just cool.

It’s also some­thing called an Ara­bi­an Nights fac­to­r­i­al, mean­ing that 450! has 1001 dig­its. What a fun con­cept!

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Pro-Pales­tin­ian Encamp­ments Spread, Lead­ing to Hun­dreds of Arrests (Anna Betts, New York Times): “In the week since Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty start­ed crack­ing down on pro-Pales­tin­ian pro­test­ers occu­py­ing a lawn on its cam­pus, protests and encamp­ments have sprung up at oth­er col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try. Police inter­ven­tions on sev­er­al cam­pus­es have led to more than 400 arrests so far.”
    • Scenes of Protests Spread at Elite Cam­pus­es (Troy Clos­son, New York Times): “Near­ly 50 peo­ple were arrest­ed at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty in New Haven, Conn., on Mon­day morn­ing, fol­low­ing the arrests last week of more than 100 pro­test­ers at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty in New York City. The arrests unleashed a wave of activism across oth­er cam­pus­es.… The flur­ry of protests has pre­sent­ed a steep chal­lenge for uni­ver­si­ty lead­ers, as some Jew­ish stu­dents say they have faced harass­ment and anti­se­mit­ic com­ments. Ear­ly Mon­day morn­ing, Colum­bia announced a same-day shift to online class­es because of the protests. Barnard Col­lege, across the street, fol­lowed suit hours lat­er.”
    • The Car­nage Is the Point (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “Uni­ver­si­ties like Colum­bia have han­dled this poor­ly, although their response pales in com­par­i­son to how some elect­ed offi­cials want them to respond. An awful lot of politi­cians have been call­ing on the use of force against pro­tes­tors. Sen­a­tors Tom Cot­ton and Josh Haw­ley have called for the Nation­al Guard to be deployed in Colum­bia, as has Speak­er of the House Mike John­son. Ear­li­er this week Texas gov­er­nor Greg Abbott enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sent Texas state troop­ers to con­duct mass arrests, break­ing up an unsanc­tioned but non­vi­o­lent demon­stra­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin. Cot­ton, Haw­ley, John­son, and Abbott are a lot of things, but stu­pid they are not. Why would they call for coer­cion when they must be ful­ly aware that such an approach would fur­ther fan the flames of protest?”
    • An inter­est­ing analy­sis. Worth your time.
  2. No, There Are No “Trans” Ani­mals (Emma Hilton and Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “Do some crea­tures change sex? Absolute­ly. But this isn’t new infor­ma­tion. It’s a fact that biol­o­gists have known about for a long time. What is also well-known is that none of these sex-chang­ing crea­tures are mam­mals, much less human. Rather, they’re insects, fish, lizards, and marine inver­te­brates whose biol­o­gy is dif­fer­ent from our own in count­less (fas­ci­nat­ing) ways. What’s more, in every sin­gle case described above, there are always (at most) just two dis­tinct sex­es at play—no mat­ter how those two sex­es may switch or com­bine. One of those sex­es is male, a sex asso­ci­at­ed with gonads that pro­duce sperm (testes); and the oth­er is female, with gonads that pro­duce eggs (ovaries). There’s noth­ing else on the menu. It’s just M and F.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. Ex-ath­let­ic direc­tor accused of fram­ing prin­ci­pal with AI arrest­ed at air­port with gun (Kris­ten Grif­fith & Justin Fen­ton, The Bal­ti­more Ban­ner): “Eiswert’s voice, which police and AI experts believe was sim­u­lat­ed, made dis­parag­ing com­ments toward Black stu­dents and the sur­round­ing Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, was wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed on social media.”
    • AI crimes are fix­ing to get wild. In case you haven’t been keep­ing up, AI-gen­er­at­ed video and audio is shock­ing­ly good. https://twitter.com/reidhoffman/status/1783145009153450374 <– check this wild exam­ple. Reid Hoff­man (one of the so-called ‘Pay­pal Mafia’, founder of LinkedIn) inter­views an AI avatar of him­self for about 14 min­utes.
  4. What Is a Woman? What Is a Man? (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The key is to under­stand who men and women are, bio­log­i­cal­ly, soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, and cul­tur­al­ly. What we will see is that evan­gel­i­cals have very lit­tle to say about this.”
  5. How do you get sib­lings to be nice to each oth­er? Lati­no fam­i­lies have an answer (Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR): “I ask Cindy the same ques­tion I posed to sci­en­tists: How do you teach chil­dren to find joy in help­ing their sib­lings? And she answers exact­ly the same as the sci­en­tists answered: ‘We mod­el it.’ Cindy says. Cindy mod­els not just help­ing her sib­lings, but also the joy she receives from the rela­tion­ships she has with her broth­ers and sis­ters.”
  6. Changes in Col­lege Admis­sions (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “Start­ing in August 2024, LSAT to elim­i­nate the Log­ic Games (Ana­lyt­ic Rea­son­ing) sec­tion, the hard­est, most fun and most objec­tive and intel­li­gence-test­ing part of the whole test. Nor­mal­ly I would be against dumb­ing down our test­ing, but keep­ing smart peo­ple from becom­ing lawyers is not the worst idea.”
    • The whole thing is inter­est­ing. The excerpt is amus­ing.
  7. Astronomers Find Evi­dence Of A Mas­sive Object Beyond The Orbit Of Nep­tune (James Fel­ton, IFL Sci­ence): “Car­ry­ing out sim­u­la­tions to try and dis­cov­er what best explains the orbits of these objects, the team found that a mod­el that includes a mas­sive plan­et beyond the region of Nep­tune explained the steady state of these objects much bet­ter than in sim­u­la­tions where plan­et 9 was not includ­ed. In the mod­el, the team includ­ed oth­er vari­ables, such as the galac­tic tide and the grav­i­ta­tion­al influ­ence of pass­ing stars.”

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 438

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 438, which is 666 in base 8. 👀

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Don’t For­get About Niger­ian Chris­tians (Samuel Sey, per­son­al blog): “Over the last 15 years, More than 50,000 Niger­ian Chris­tians have been killed for their faith, 18,000 church­es have been destroyed, and mil­lions more have been dis­placed. In 2023, around 5,000 Chris­tians were killed world­wide because of their faith—90% of them were Nige­ri­ans.  Nige­ria is the dead­liest coun­try for Chris­tians. Every Chris­t­ian in north­ern (and some cen­tral states) Nige­ria is prob­a­bly griev­ing the loss of a spouse or a child (or both) from per­se­cu­tion.”
  2. As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do. (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Stud­ies show that around eight in 10 cas­es of child­hood gen­der dys­pho­ria resolve them­selves by puber­ty and 30 per­cent of peo­ple on hor­mone ther­a­py dis­con­tin­ue its use with­in four years, though the effects, includ­ing infer­til­i­ty, are often irre­versible.… Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gen­der tran­si­tion, along with low fig­ures for detran­si­tion. But those stud­ies, which often rely on self-report­ed cas­es to gen­der clin­ics, like­ly under­state the actu­al num­bers. None of the sev­en detran­si­tion­ers I inter­viewed, for instance, even con­sid­ered report­ing back to the gen­der clin­ics that pre­scribed them med­ica­tion they now con­sid­er to have been a mis­take. Nor did they know any oth­er detran­si­tion­ers who had done so.”
    • Unlocked. The main point is hor­ri­fy­ing and one I’ve shared many times in this chan­nel before. A sec­ondary point which is quite inter­est­ing is how intent the author is on mak­ing this the fault of her polit­i­cal oppo­nents. Her audi­ence needs to know that her tribe is still trust­wor­thy despite mas­sive mis­takes on this issue. Par­ti­san­ship poi­sons the things it touch­es.
  3. Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are fam­i­ly-friend­ly poli­cies no longer enough? (Hen­ry Mance, Finan­cial Times): “…child­less­ness is also ris­ing among those who are in a rela­tion­ship. Many cou­ples are wait­ing too long. ‘Peo­ple call me a lot in Fin­land. [They say] ‘I’m 42, my part­ner has had three mis­car­riages and she says she will not con­tin­ue. And I under­stand I will nev­er be a father. I’m the only child of my par­ents, and there’s nobody left, and help me.’ Rotkirch is wary of an empha­sis on fer­til­i­ty treat­ments. Women’s fer­til­i­ty drops in their late thir­ties and for­ties: soci­ety has to adapt. ‘If you do every­thing that typ­i­cal min­is­ters of finance tell you to do, you are 45 — you have a house and a doc­tor­ate and it’s too late. The ide­alised life course is real­ly at odds with female repro­duc­tive biol­o­gy.’”
  4. Some Israel/Hamas arti­cles:
    • The UN’s Ter­ror­ism Teach­ers (Hil­lel C. Neuer, The Free Press): “UN Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al António Guter­res said he was ‘hor­ri­fied’ to dis­cov­er that UNRWA [Unit­ed Nations Relief and Works Agency for Pales­tine Refugees in the Near East] employ­ees par­tic­i­pat­ed in the inva­sion and mas­sacre of Octo­ber 7.… UNRWA employ­ees have held Israeli hostages cap­tive in their homes, using UNRWA facil­i­ties to move them from place to place.… It was only after Israel’s gov­ern­ment pro­vid­ed evi­dence that 12 of the agency’s employ­ees were actu­al­ly involved in the Octo­ber 7 mas­sacre that UNRWA and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion took some action.”
      • Wowsers.
    • How Pales­tine Hijacked the U.S. Civ­il Rights Move­ment (Gil Troy, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The dif­fer­ences between the Pales­tin­ian nation­al move­ment and the Amer­i­can civ­il rights move­ment are obvi­ous and fun­da­men­tal. Pales­tini­ans have played no role in Amer­i­can his­to­ry or the his­to­ry of slav­ery. Pales­tini­ans played no role in the civ­il rights strug­gle. The Pales­tin­ian-Israeli clash, which is occur­ring a world away from Amer­i­ca, is nation­al not racial. Most Israelis are dark-skinned, while some Pales­tini­ans are light-skinned. Non­vi­o­lence fueled the civ­il rights strug­gle, while the Pales­tin­ian move­ment keeps per­fect­ing new forms of polit­i­cal vio­lence and ter­ror-porn, from hijack­ing to sui­cide bomb­ing.”
  5. The Mean­ing­less Inco­her­ence Of “LGBTQ+” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The trou­ble is that words have mean­ings, and the term ‘LGBTQ+’ — like the term ‘His­pan­ic’ or ‘Lati­no’ — is not like NATO. It doesn’t refer to a sin­gle, iden­ti­fi­able group, expe­ri­ence, or com­mu­ni­ty. It refers to mul­ti­ple ones. And each is dis­tinct, dis­crete and often very dif­fer­ent. When you exam­ine its com­po­nent parts, you real­ize that the Ls and Gs and Bs and Ts, let alone the Is and the +s, dif­fer dra­mat­i­cal­ly in basic things like psy­chol­o­gy, lifestyle, income, geog­ra­phy, edu­ca­tion, and pol­i­tics.… We’re con­stant­ly told, of course, that all gays and les­bians have col­lec­tive­ly co-opt­ed and des­tig­ma­tized the q‑word. But polling shows that only 3 — 4 per­cent of the entire LGBTQ+ world call them­selves ‘queer’. So the MSM rou­tine­ly uses a word for the entire ‘LGBTQ+’ world that 96 per­cent of this com­mu­ni­ty rejects. It’s up there with ‘Lat­inx’ as an accu­rate descrip­tor.”
    • Sul­li­van is one of the most influ­en­tial gay pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als. There are a lot of things he and I dis­agree about, but I near­ly always find his per­spec­tives illu­mi­nat­ing.
  6. Two arti­cles about a weird­ly intense con­tro­ver­sy about Alis­tair Begg:
    • Throw-Away Cul­ture is the Spir­it of the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion, Too. (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “A per­son who inter­prets their sex­u­al desires to be some sort of immov­able iden­ti­ty that must be ver­i­fied and actu­al­ized is in a very lam­en­ta­ble state. But what about the per­son who inter­prets their quick tem­per, their sus­pi­cion of oth­er Chris­tians, and their desire to build a plat­form atop the ruins of oth­ers’, as like­wise an immov­able iden­ti­ty— ‘I just know what time it is’? Theirs is hard­ly bet­ter. The Chris­t­ian life doesn’t work like that.”
    • Alis­tair Begg Meets the Polit­i­cal­ly Cor­rect (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Might Begg be draw­ing the line in the wrong place—too much in the direc­tion of show­ing grace? Sure. Might I be draw­ing it in the wrong place—too much in the direc­tion of main­tain­ing truth? Again, yes. He risks con­fus­ing peo­ple. I risk hurt­ing peo­ple. That’s why I think we both attempt to sort these out with fear and trem­bling and a will­ing­ness to be cor­rect­ed.”
  7. Reli­gious peo­ple coped bet­ter with Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, research sug­gests (Fred Lewsey, Cam­bridge Research News): “Where men­tal health declined, it was around 60% worse on aver­age for the non-reli­gious com­pared to peo­ple of faith with typ­i­cal lev­els of ‘reli­gios­i­ty’. Inter­est­ing­ly, the pos­i­tive effects of reli­gion were not found in areas with strictest lock­downs, sug­gest­ing access to places of wor­ship might be even more impor­tant in a US con­text. The study also found sig­nif­i­cant uptake of online reli­gious ser­vices, and a 40% low­er asso­ci­a­tion between Covid-19 and men­tal health for those who used them.”
    • How hor­ri­ble the pan­dem­ic must have been for those with­out faith. I hat­ed it and I’m a min­is­ter!

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 427

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.

427 feels kin­da prime-ish, but it’s not. 427 = 61*7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘Gen­der-Affirm­ing Care Is Dan­ger­ous. I Know Because I Helped Pio­neer It.’ (Riit­tak­ert­tu Kaltiala, The Free Press): “Soon after our hos­pi­tal began offer­ing hor­mon­al inter­ven­tions for these patients, we began to see that the mir­a­cle we had been promised was not hap­pen­ing. What we were see­ing was just the oppo­site. The young peo­ple we were treat­ing were not thriv­ing. Instead, their lives were dete­ri­o­rat­ing. We thought, what is this? Because there wasn’t a hint in stud­ies that this could hap­pen.”
  2. More Israel/Gaza per­spec­tives:
    • The Decol­o­niza­tion Nar­ra­tive Is Dan­ger­ous and False (Simon Sebag Mon­te­fiore, The Atlantic): “The decol­o­niza­tion nar­ra­tive… holds that Israel is an ‘impe­ri­al­ist-colo­nial­ist’ force, that Israelis are ‘set­tler-colo­nial­ists,’ and that Pales­tini­ans have a right to elim­i­nate their oppres­sors. (On Octo­ber 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as ‘white’ or ‘white-adja­cent’ and Pales­tini­ans as ‘peo­ple of col­or.’ This ide­ol­o­gy, pow­er­ful in the acad­e­my but long over­due for seri­ous chal­lenge, is a tox­ic, his­tor­i­cal­ly non­sen­si­cal mix of Marx­ist the­o­ry, Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da, and tra­di­tion­al anti-Semi­tism from the Mid­dle Ages and the 19th cen­tu­ry. But its cur­rent engine is the new iden­ti­ty analy­sis, which sees his­to­ry through a con­cept of race that derives from the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.”
      • Long but good. The author, who is Jew­ish, is well-known for his his­to­ry books (per­haps the best way to describe him is as a non-aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­an).
    • Whose Geno­cide Is It Any­way? (Zachary R. Gold­smith, Quil­lette): “Since the year 2000, the pop­u­la­tion of Gaza has near­ly dou­bled; it boasts the 39th high­est birthrate among the world’s coun­tries, and the aver­age life expectan­cy is near­ly 76 years of age (the aver­age life expectan­cy in the US is just over 77 years of age). If Israel is intent on com­mit­ting geno­cide in Gaza, it is doing a very poor job.… Since the Mid­dle Ages, Jews have been accused of mur­der­ing chil­dren and using their blood for rit­u­al pur­pos­es. This blood libel lives on today in a new form, as the Jews of the state of Israel are accused of pur­pose­ful­ly killing chil­dren in a cam­paign of geno­cide.”
    • Hamas’ Bid for Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Legit­i­ma­cy (Damir Maru­sic, Sub­stack): “…for rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, vio­lence is a polit­i­cal act. Like any num­ber of rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, Hamas knew exact­ly what it was doing. But in my ini­tial read of its cyn­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion, I didn’t give them their due. They weren’t mere­ly try­ing to tor­pe­do a deal that could be their undo­ing. They were mak­ing a bid for full polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy among Pales­tini­ans.”
      • The author is an edi­tor at the Wash­ing­ton Post.
    • Stop help­ing Hamas win its dis­in­for­ma­tion war (Sam Wineb­urg, Times of Israel): “Along with my col­leagues at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, I have spent the last sev­en years study­ing how peo­ple learn to make bet­ter deci­sions about what to believe online.… Here are four guide­lines for see­ing through the fog and stay­ing sane in the midst of this cur­rent infor­ma­tion war.”
      • The author is an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of edu­ca­tion at Stan­ford.
    • What Hap­pens When There Aren’t Enough Jews to Lynch? (Avi­tal Chizhik-Gold­schmidt, The Free Press): “…a flight from Tel Aviv was land­ing on Sun­day evening at the air­port in the city of Makhachkala. Hun­dreds of peo­ple stormed the air­port to greet that flight—of 45 pas­sen­gers, 15 were Israeli, many of them chil­dren. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men wav­ing Pales­tin­ian flags. On the tar­mac, they attack an air­port employ­ee, who des­per­ate­ly explains: ‘There are no pas­sen­gers here any­more,’ and then exclaims, ‘I am Mus­lim!’ Some of the riot­ers demand­ed to exam­ine the pass­ports of arriv­ing pas­sen­gers, seem­ing­ly try­ing to iden­ti­fy those who were Israeli, and oth­ers searched cars as they were leav­ing. Anoth­er video emerged of two young boys at the air­port, proud­ly declar­ing that they came to ‘kill Jews’ with knives.”
      • Anti­semitism is surg­ing glob­al­ly and it is ter­ri­fy­ing to watch.
    • The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape West­ern Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “These [decades-old Amer­i­can] group­ings still exist — evan­gel­i­cals are still very pro-Israel, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent is a Zion­ist lib­er­al, the pro­gres­sive move­ment is pro-Pales­tin­ian — but in the cur­rent cri­sis you can see a more com­plex align­ment tak­ing shape, with impli­ca­tions that extend beyond the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian ques­tion alone.”
  3. Just the Facts on ‘Geofenc­ing’ (Mag­gie Mac­Far­land Phillips, Real Clear Pol­i­cy): “Data bro­kers, includ­ing Safe­Graph, insist that their infor­ma­tion is anonymized. But it is pre­cise­ly the lack of speci­fici­ty that wor­ries crit­ics. ‘There’s no par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual who the gov­ern­ment is sus­pi­cious of,’ Adam Schwartz of the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, told Real­Clear­In­ves­ti­ga­tions. ‘It’s a drag­net.’ More­over, there is no guar­an­tee that the data col­lect­ed through geofenc­ing stays anony­mous. ‘It is often very easy to take sup­pos­ed­ly de-iden­ti­fied data and re-iden­ti­fy a per­son,’ said Schwartz, ‘And it’s very, very easy to do that with loca­tion data.’”
  4. Movies, Moral Revul­sion, and a Post-Chris­t­ian Age (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It seems to me that the idea that you can elic­it moral revul­sion mere­ly by depict­ing evil assumes two things. First, it assumes that the realm of the visu­al can be manip­u­lat­ed to bypass tit­il­la­tion and pro­ceed straight to con­dem­na­tion. Sec­ond, it assumes an audi­ence who pos­sess a moral imag­i­na­tion that would both moti­vate and equip them to do this. The first assump­tion could be false. The sec­ond assump­tion absolute­ly is. Sec­u­lar soci­ety, aid­ed by the litur­gi­cal effect of the Inter­net and the porno­graph­ic nature of the Web, has long been feed­ing itself on images of the moral­ly out­ra­geous.”
    • Chris­tians were famous­ly hos­tile towards mass enter­tain­ment a few decades ago. The next gen­er­a­tion of evan­gel­i­cals rebelled against that and too often became uncrit­i­cal­ly accept­ing of all forms of enter­tain­ment. We need to get to place of reject­ing what needs to be reject­ed and allow­ing free­dom oth­er­wise. There are shows you should not watch and songs you should not jam out to. And you should be will­ing to tell peo­ple why, “Yeah, I did­n’t watch Game of Thrones once I real­ized how porno­graph­ic it was.” Or in a paper about a film you had to watch for a class, “The direc­tor made a mis­take includ­ing [what­ev­er it is]: it does­n’t advance the plot or enhance the theme. It actu­al­ly under­mines the pur­pose of the work and seems to have been includ­ed most­ly to appeal to a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al demo­graph­ic, there­by mak­ing the film’s mes­sage need­less­ly inac­ces­si­ble to those not already pre­dis­posed to agree with it.”

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

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 423

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

This, vol­ume 423, is the sum of 13 con­sec­u­tive prime num­bers: 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Fam­i­ly Break­down Hits Girls (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Ours is a cul­ture obsessed with trau­ma! We think we can get PTSD from uni­ver­si­ty speak­ers and stu­pid jokes and elec­tion results. And yet it’s also a cul­ture which large­ly ignores and even glam­or­is­es what seems to me one of the most obvi­ous trau­mas of all?? If any­thing qual­i­fies as traumatic—as in, an emo­tion­al­ly dis­tress­ing event that leaves a last­ing impact—surely it’s fam­i­ly break­down, which real­ly does seem to stay with peo­ple, shape their view of love and life and just keep play­ing out, over and over?”
  2. All About That Tenor: Why Men Don’t Sing in Wor­ship (Kelsey Cramer McGin­nis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The low­er rate of musi­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion among men… has a lot to do with the male voice itself—its range and pat­terns of development—and social­iza­tion in a cul­ture where so many men are uncom­fort­able with their own voic­es…. Men hear high­er, wider vocal ranges from pop­u­lar singers and wor­ship lead­ers; Chris Tom­lin and Phil Wick­ham have famous­ly impres­sive tenor ranges, far out of reach for most male voic­es.”
    • Unlocked, rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. The Real Prob­lem With the Super­rich (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Oth­er than from sheer jeal­ousy, why should any­one object to some peo­ple hav­ing far more wealth than oth­ers?… wealth is a means to polit­i­cal pow­er, and those who crave wealth tend to be the sorts of per­sons who crave pow­er too. You can run an oli­garchy if some peo­ple are super­rich – and some oli­garchies are bet­ter than oth­ers — but if you try to run a repub­lic that way, you will lose it.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle from a Chris­t­ian philoso­pher at UT Austin.
  4. Andy Stanley’s ‘Uncon­di­tion­al’ Con­tra­dic­tion (Sam All­ber­ry, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I have always been sin­gle. On the whole, it has been deeply joy­ous. But I am not immune from temp­ta­tion, and when any leader sug­gests to me that chaste obe­di­ence to Christ in sin­gle­ness is not sus­tain­able, he is say­ing the very same thing to me that the Dev­il says.”
    • Unlocked. The whole thing is worth read­ing for con­text.
  5. Amer­i­ca is now pay­ing more in inter­est on its record $33 tril­lion debt than on nation­al defense — here’s who holds the IOUs (Ser­ah Louis, Yahoo Finance): “America’s gross nation­al debt hit an eye-water­ing $33 tril­lion for the first time in Sep­tem­ber — mere months after eclips­ing the $32 tril­lion mark ear­li­er in the year. The U.S. is also cur­rent­ly spend­ing more to pay inter­est on the nation­al debt than it does on nation­al defense, accord­ing to the Treasury’s month­ly state­ment.”
    • What a stun­ning sta­tis­tic.
  6. The Labor Mar­ket Returns of Being An Artist: Evi­dence from the Unit­ed States, 2006–2021 (Chris­tos Makridis, SSRN): “First, I find a decline in the rel­a­tive earn­ings of artists to non-artists from zero to a 15% dis­ad­van­tage. After con­trol­ling for demo­graph­ic dif­fer­ences, the decline is sharp­er, declin­ing from a 15% earn­ings dis­ad­van­tage to 30%. That the inclu­sion of demo­graph­ic con­trols rais­es the earn­ings gap sug­gests there is pos­i­tive selec­tion into the arts. Sec­ond, these dif­fer­ences decline in mag­ni­tude to 4.4%, but remain sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, after exploit­ing vari­a­tion among artists and non-artists in the same indus­try-year and major occu­pa­tion. Third, when restrict­ing the set of indi­vid­u­als to those with at least a col­lege degree, those with a fine arts degree also incur an earn­ings and employ­ment penal­ty even if they work in the arts. These results high­light the increas­ing finan­cial pre­car­i­ous­ness of artists over the past decade.”
    • The excerpt is from the abstract. Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  7. Unbib­li­cal Schol­ar­ship (Alan Jacobs, The Hedge­hog Review): “If we can insist—as many (though not enough) grad­u­ate pro­grams still do—that stu­dents learn lan­guages oth­er than Eng­lish in order to pur­sue the study of Eng­lish writ­ers, then we can also insist that they acquire bib­li­cal lit­er­a­cy. Every grad­u­ate stu­dent in the human­i­ties should be required to take a course in the Eng­lish Bible, a course that, among oth­er things, requires the mem­o­riza­tion and recita­tion of large chunks of the bib­li­cal text.”

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 405

a bunch of depress­ing arti­cles this week

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 405, which is 43 + 53 + 63

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. That Hel­lo Spir­it (Leopold van den Daele & Mat­teo Per­p­er, The Stan­ford Dai­ly): “The admin­is­tra­tion has as its goal the total re-cre­ation of cam­pus social life, a rather mut­ed con­cep­tion of the Spir­it of Stan­ford, from the top-down. They will throw mon­ey at the prob­lem, estab­lish more offices, and more advi­so­ry boards. They will change the fine print of the rules and reg­u­la­tions for throw­ing par­ties, and they will bom­bard you with facts that demon­stra­bly prove all is swell. But we believe that a thriv­ing cam­pus social life emerges nat­u­ral­ly when every­one feels like they belong to one fam­i­ly; it can­not be bought. It is our respon­si­bil­i­ty to bring about the change we want to see, from the bot­tom-up, one inter­ac­tion at a time: Say­ing hel­lo is the heart of com­mu­ni­ty.”
  2. How Con­gress Gets Rich from Insid­er Trad­ing (YouTube): thir­ty well-done min­utes about a bipar­ti­san prob­lem. I’ve read a lot of the arti­cles ref­er­enced before, but this is an excel­lent com­pi­la­tion with impec­ca­ble pre­sen­ta­tion. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. No One Is Immune (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “We went from Chris­t­ian pub­lic fig­ures warn­ing about the social and legal dan­gers of LGBTQ ‘civ­il rights’ to Chris­t­ian pub­lic fig­ures cham­pi­oning LGBTQ ‘civ­il rights’ in just two decades. And in some cas­es, they are the exact same per­son.”
    • A sol­id essay that makes an impor­tant point. Any time your the­ol­o­gy leads you to con­clude that some of God’s laws in the Old Tes­ta­ment are sin­ful (as opposed to mere­ly not bind­ing upon us), your the­ol­o­gy is wrong. This is a wide-rang­ing prin­ci­ple which, when con­sis­tent­ly fol­lowed, will make peo­ple annoyed with you. It is nonethe­less cor­rect. “The Law of the Lord is per­fect” (Psalm 19:7) and “the law is holy, and the com­mand­ment is holy, right­eous and good” (Romans 7:12).
  4. How evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian writer Jemar Tis­by became a radioac­tive sym­bol of ‘wok­e­ness’ (Bob Smi­etana, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Lerone Mar­tin, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of reli­gious stud­ies and direc­tor of the Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Research and Edu­ca­tion Insti­tute at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, said that evan­gel­i­cals have long found it eas­i­er to label Black lead­ers as left­ists or Marx­ists rather than to deal with the real­i­ty of racism.”
  5. The ‘I’ in BIPOC (Sher­man Alex­ie, Per­sua­sion): “And here I must stress that Indi­ans, whether con­ser­v­a­tive, cen­trist, or lib­er­al, have a unique place in the Unit­ed States that BIPOC doesn’t even begin to address. BIPOC is an acronym that’s too plain to accu­rate­ly rep­re­sent Indi­an people’s com­plex rela­tion­ship with our coun­try.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. Chi Alpha ‘Men­tor’ Daniel Savala Arrest­ed on Sex Abuse Charges (Josh Shep­herd, The Roys Report): “On Fri­day morn­ing, Savala, 67, was arrest­ed by the U.S. Mar­shals Lone Star Fugi­tive Task Force at his res­i­dence in down­town Hous­ton and booked at the Fort Bend Coun­ty Jail in Rich­mond, Texas. He was charged with con­tin­u­ous sex­u­al abuse of a child under age 14.… On May 23, Chris Hundl, for­mer leader of the Chi Alpha chap­ter at Bay­lor Uni­ver­si­ty and pas­tor of Moun­tain Val­ley Fel­low­ship in Waco, was arrest­ed on iden­ti­cal charges in Waco.… the North Texas Dis­trict Coun­cil of the Assem­blies of God (AoG) said its inves­ti­ga­tion of Hundl and oth­ers linked to Savala prompt­ed Hundl’s removal from his pas­toral duties and Chi Alpha lead­er­ship as of May 4. AoG dis­trict offi­cials said they also noti­fied child pro­tec­tive ser­vices in Texas and have rec­om­mend­ed that Hundl be dis­missed as an AoG min­is­ter.”
    • Read­ing this was like get­ting punched in the gut.
  7. Defin­ing Reli­gion in the Court (Mark Movs­esian, First Things): “…a focus on [reli­gion expressed in] com­mu­ni­ty accords with an impor­tant goal of reli­gious free­dom: the pro­mo­tion of pri­vate asso­ci­a­tions that encour­age coop­er­a­tive projects and check state pow­er. As Toc­queville explained, the despot­ic state desires noth­ing more than for indi­vid­ual cit­i­zens to feel iso­lat­ed from and indif­fer­ent to oth­ers, so that it can divide and dom­i­nate them all. By encour­ag­ing peo­ple to iden­ti­fy with and look out for one anoth­er, pri­vate asso­ci­a­tions mil­i­tate against self-cen­tered­ness and social iso­la­tion and help keep the state in check. Reli­gious groups per­form this func­tion espe­cial­ly well. No asso­ci­a­tions have been bet­ter, his­tor­i­cal­ly, at pro­mot­ing coop­er­a­tive social projects and defy­ing state oppression—as dic­ta­tors down the cen­turies have learned.”

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 We Need a New Media Sys­tem (Matt Taib­bi, Sub­stack): “The flaw in the sys­tem is that even the biggest news com­pa­nies now oper­ate under the assump­tion that at least half their poten­tial audi­ence isn’t lis­ten­ing. This leads to all sorts of prob­lems, and the fact that the eas­i­est way to keep your own demo­graph­ic is to feed it neg­a­tive sto­ries about oth­ers is only the most obvi­ous. On all sides, we now lean into inflam­ma­to­ry car­i­ca­tures, because the finan­cial incen­tives encour­age it.” From vol­ume 284.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 401

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 401, the 79th prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Oth­er Half of Dis­ci­ple­ship (Mike Glenn, Scot McK­night’s Sub­stack): “The test of every great recipe is, does the dish taste good when it’s pre­pared? The test of truth for every dis­ci­ple is, did the teach­ing of Jesus prove true when it was lived out? Paul was con­fi­dent of Jesus’ faith­ful­ness because he had lived out the teach­ings of Jesus in the most try­ing of cir­cum­stances. That’s why he was able to write, ‘I know in whom I have believed.’ Most of us lack this kind of true life con­fi­dence in God’s Word because we’ve nev­er tried to live out what we know. A mem­o­rized dis­ci­ple­ship is only half known.”
  2. Home­less in the City Where He Was Once May­or (Mike Bak­er, New York Times): “The words jolt­ed Mr. Mar­tin with a mix of recog­ni­tion and dis­be­lief. He had known Craig Coyn­er for more than 50 years, watch­ing with admi­ra­tion as the man from one of the most promi­nent fam­i­lies in Bend, Ore., rose through an acclaimed career — as a pros­e­cu­tor, a defense lawyer and then a may­or who helped turn the town into one of the nation’s fastest-grow­ing cities. Now, at age 75, Mr. Coyn­er was occu­py­ing a bed at the shel­ter on Sec­ond Street, his house lost to fore­clo­sure, his toes gnarled by frost­bite, his belong­ings lim­it­ed to a tub of tat­tered cloth­ing and books on the floor next to his bed.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent, this is a wild and heart­break­ing sto­ry. I have unlocked the pay­wall.
  3. The Long Road to Con­fronting China’s War on Reli­gion: Part I (Carl M. Can­non & Susan Crab­tree, Real Clear Pol­i­tics): “The impulse [to restrict reli­gion is root­ed in the truth] that the major faiths observed in Chi­na are not indige­nous to the world’s old­est civ­i­liza­tion. Bud­dhism was import­ed from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in over­land trad­ing routes and human migra­tion from the Mid­dle East, while Chris­tian­i­ty, anoth­er Abra­ham­ic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and Amer­i­ca. To Com­mu­nist lead­ers, and many Han Chi­nese civil­ians, these tra­di­tions rep­re­sent poten­tial­ly desta­bi­liz­ing for­eign influ­ence.  The para­dox, of course, is that Marx­ism was also a for­eign import, one imposed on Chi­nese soci­ety – in Mao Zedong’s own words – from ‘the bar­rel of a gun.’ It not only desta­bi­lized China’s exist­ing social struc­tures and spir­i­tu­al tra­di­tions, but as Marx­ist-Lenin­ism mor­phed into Mao­ism, also became a kind of nation­al reli­gion itself – with Mao Zedong in the role of sav­ior.”
  4. There is No Chris­t­ian Argu­ment for Pro­tect­ing Pornog­ra­phy (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “This chart reveals that at the exact same time there’s been a sig­nif­i­cant decline in over­all sex­u­al activ­i­ty, there’s been a sig­nif­i­cant increase in young adults who’ve had a same-sex encounter. Now let’s ask a ques­tion: What could be true of a gen­er­a­tion that would cause it both to 1) have a lot few­er sex­u­al encoun­ters than gen­er­a­tions before it, but also 2) be much more will­ing than pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions to exper­i­ment? I think I have one plau­si­ble answer.… Could it be that a sex reces­sion and a blur­ring of the lines between male and female are con­sis­tent con­se­quences of young peo­ple who have expe­ri­enced a porno­graph­ic stag­ing of the human body since before puber­ty? Giv­en all this porn, why have sex, and why not have it with whomev­er?”
  5. From the Com­ments (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Pro­fes­sion­al med­ical ethics are bogus. There is no con­sis­ten­cy and the entire pro­fes­sion serves to pan­der to the prej­u­dices of the edu­cat­ed.”
    • Brief but bru­tal per­spec­tive on the med­ical resis­tance to human chal­lenge tri­als.
  6. Raise Your Thresh­old For Accus­ing Peo­ple Of Fak­ing Bisex­u­al­i­ty (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Sup­pose some­one (let’s say a woman) has exact­ly equal sex­u­al attrac­tion to both men and women. Their male dat­ing pool is all het­ero­sex­u­al and bisex­u­al men (95%+ of men), and their female dat­ing pool is all les­bian and bisex­u­al women (about 5–10% of women). So their poten­tial dat­ing pool is about 90% male. So this ‘per­fect­ly’ bisex­u­al woman could be expect­ed to date about 10x as many men as women, just by num­bers alone. The aver­age per­son dates about sev­en peo­ple before mar­riage (yes, this seems low to me too). So if our bisex­u­al woman sam­ples exact­ly even­ly from her male vs. female dat­ing pool, we would expect about a 50–50 chance (0.90^7 = 0.478) that all sev­en of her rela­tion­ships would be with men.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing break­down of some things I had rarely con­sid­ered.
  7. The Cost Dis­ease of the Pop­ulist Sec­tor (Daniel W. Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “The com­min­gling of the rich and the pow­er­ful is a sto­ry as old as civ­i­liza­tion, but in the cur­rent era of cap­i­tal­ism the dynam­ic has become even more prob­lem­at­ic. David Brooks warned about ‘sta­tus-income dis­e­qui­lib­ri­um’ in Bobos in Par­adise: those who pos­sess sta­tus but not wealth live first-class lives dur­ing the day but mid­dle-class lives in the evening. Over time, these folks start to resent the mid­dle-class aspects of their exis­tence.”
    • This is a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion scan­dals than I had con­sid­ered before.

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 My White Priv­i­lege Didn’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quil­lette): “Not long after, I walked into a sub­ur­ban Bap­tist church, full of strange, unfash­ion­ably dressed, con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians. I was a Marx­ist, a fem­i­nist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smok­er, and des­per­ate. The love I received in that place is the rea­son that I will defend the rights of fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to my dying breath.”

This is amaz­ing. Reminder: titles are rarely cho­sen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an arti­cle. From vol­ume 279.

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 397

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 397, which is a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford Needs East­er (Isabel­la Grieppe & Diego Gar­cia-Camar­go, Stan­ford Review): “So, instead of sheep­ish­ly fol­low­ing the cul­tur­al sta­tus quo, con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there is more to our lives than our mate­r­i­al real­i­ty. Con­sid­er the exis­ten­tial pos­si­bil­i­ty that the God of the uni­verse sent His only Son because of His Love for you; that on this day He took upon him­self the bro­ken­ness of this world in a tor­tu­ous death for you; and that He con­quered death to offer you hope and pur­pose in Lov­ing and serv­ing Him by Lov­ing and serv­ing oth­ers.”
  2. The Lim­its of For­give­ness (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Point Mag­a­zine): “In a forum we both par­tic­i­pat­ed in for the Boston Review, Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go philoso­pher Agnes Callard once observed that if a per­son is wronged and there­fore made angry at anoth­er per­son, there’s no log­i­cal rea­son for that anger to be extin­guished, ever. Sure, it may run its course, or the angry indi­vid­ual may become bored with the emo­tion or sim­ply elect to drop it, but there is no log­i­cal rea­son, once the anger is felt at the ini­tial offense, that one should ever stop feel­ing angry—even once one has avenged one­self.”
    • Well worth your time.
  3. NASA Astro­naut Asks for Prayer for Moon Mis­sion (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The last time he was in space, Glover said, he real­ly felt clos­er to God. Not because he was above the sky but because, as James 4:8 says, when you sub­mit your­self to God and come near to God, God comes near to you. Read­ing the Bible in space was a pow­er­ful expe­ri­ence. Glover remem­bers being in weight­less­ness in his quar­ters on the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion and read­ing Philip­pi­ans 4. Some of the words were so famil­iar to him, like verse 13, which says in his New King James Ver­sion, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strength­ens me.’ But there were oth­er pas­sages he felt like he was see­ing for the first time. Like in verse 12, where Paul writes, ‘I have learned both to be full and to be hun­gry.’ Glover had nev­er noticed that before. It expressed exact­ly how he felt about him­self and his train­ing and mis­sion.”
  4. With some of my fel­low Stan­ford Law stu­dents, there’s no room for argu­ment (Tess Win­ston, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I often think of one of my first-year pro­fes­sors, who was appalled by these stu­dents’ stig­ma­tiz­ing of the pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al role. He asked one: Giv­en that pros­e­cu­tors decide whether and what charges to bring against a defen­dant, isn’t it prefer­able for well-qual­i­fied peo­ple to fill the role? With­out miss­ing a beat, the stu­dent respond­ed: No, being a pros­e­cu­tor is sim­ply evil.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall on this one. The author is a third year law school stu­dent at SLS.
  5. Do Your Polit­i­cal Beliefs Affect Your Par­ent­ing? (Leonard Sax, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “A mom brought her six-year-old daugh­ter into the office with a fever and a sore throat. I asked the lit­tle girl to open her mouth and say ‘Ah.’ She shook her head and clenched her mouth shut. ‘Mom, it looks like I’m going to need your help here,’ I said. ‘Could you please ask your daugh­ter to open her mouth and say ‘Ah’?’ Mom arched her eye­brows and replied, ‘Her body, her choice.’ Wow. This mom was invok­ing the ‘My body, my choice’ slo­gan of abor­tion-rights activists to defend her 6‑year-old daugh­ter’s refusal to let me, the doc­tor, look at her daughter’s throat. I have been a fam­i­ly doc­tor for near­ly 34 years. Until recent­ly, I saw no con­nec­tion between pol­i­tics and par­ent­ing.”
    • Real­ly inter­est­ing. Also accu­rate, if my expe­ri­ence is any guide. There is a marked dif­fer­ence in the par­ent­ing philoso­phies peo­ple hold in the Bay Area based upon their pol­i­tics.
  6. I just fin­ished The Witch Tri­als of J.K. Rowl­ing pod­cast and I rec­om­mend it. The sev­en episodes were all engag­ing and the author comes at every­thing from a unique per­spec­tive. The episodes are around an hour long.
  7. Before Pol­i­tics, There’s the World (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “this piece on adop­tion by Laris­sa Mac­Far­quhar in the New York­er. It is, I think, a pitch-per­fect exam­ple of the con­tem­po­rary ten­den­cy to sim­ply wish away any sort of neces­si­ty oth­er than moral or polit­i­cal neces­si­ty. The essay is a relent­less chron­i­cle of all of the ills of adop­tion, why adop­tion is alien­at­ing and trau­mat­ic for the adopt­ed child, how adop­tion scars adoptees for life, divides them from their cul­tures, leaves the with­out an iden­ti­ty…. Yet what Mac­Far­quhar says in paren­the­ses and half-sen­tences is the most impor­tant point of all — that adop­tion is inher­ent­ly a response to the unavoid­able tragedies of human life, a nec­es­sar­i­ly imper­fect solu­tion to very real and per­sis­tent prob­lems.… Almost entire­ly undis­cussed is the fact that the world hous­es both chil­dren who need homes and lov­ing and nur­tur­ing adults with homes to share. That’s why adop­tion exists. That’s always been why adop­tion exists. Kids need par­ents and par­ents need kids. No facile trau­ma nar­ra­tive can change that basic arith­metic.”
    • deBoer is usu­al­ly a good essay­ist and he out­does him­self in this one.

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 Sec­u­lar­iza­tion and the Tribu­la­tions of the Amer­i­can Work­ing-Class (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I praise the schol­ar­ship and courage of Bri­an N. Wheaton.” Along with the relat­ed: Get­ting Past the Gate­keep­ers (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Your gate­keep­ers want you to write a book more like the one they would have writ­ten. If you do make revi­sions, make them in such a way that the book becomes not less your own, but even more your own. That’s not pride. If God con­de­scends to allow cer­tain insights to the his­to­ri­ans on your board, how won­der­ful! Let them write about them! Read and learn from them! But if He con­de­scends to allow cer­tain oth­er insights to you, you should write about yours, not theirs.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin. From vol­ume 276.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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