Tag: LGBTQ

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 396

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 391

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 391, which is a prod­uct of two of my favorite prime num­bers. 391 = 17 * 23.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Facts Don’t Care About Your Heal­ings (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, ‘jus­tice’ is about law. There’s an objec­tive given­ness to it that tran­scends per­son­al nar­ra­tive or expe­ri­ence, which helps to explain why jus­tice his­tor­i­cal­ly has been right-cod­ed. But this is no longer true. ‘Jus­tice’ is left-cod­ed because it has become nar­ra­ti­val. Jus­tice is what peo­ple talk about when they talk about their per­son­al expe­ri­ences. Jus­tice is the sub­text of peo­ple speak­ing their truth.”
    • This is an excep­tion­al­ly acute bit of cul­tur­al analy­sis. Rec­om­mend­ed for its core insight.
  2. Amer­i­ca’s Cul­ture Is Boom­ing. Real­ly. (Ted Goia, The Free Press): “Con­sid­er the fact that there are now 36 YouTube chan­nels with more than 50 mil­lion subscribers—each of these has far more reach than any record label or news­pa­per.… Can all this trans­form our cul­ture? The sim­ple fact is that it already has. And it will con­tin­ue to do so at an accel­er­at­ing rate.”
    • There are some shock­ing stats in here even if you already know the broad out­lines. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. The Bit­ter End of “Con­tent” (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “So long as adver­tis­ing is the dom­i­nant fund­ing source of the online world, any and every cre­ative plat­form will be a race to the bot­tom. Peo­ple will find ways to abuse the sys­tem to receive atten­tion and mon­ey based on noth­ing more than manip­u­la­tion.”
    • This essay is built around a real­ly impor­tant insight. It’s worth read­ing.
  4. More on Asbury. I find it inter­est­ing that the New York Times, CNN, and the Wash­ing­ton Post all pub­lished rel­a­tive­ly sol­id arti­cles about it.
    • ‘No Celebri­ties Except Jesus’: How Asbury Pro­tect­ed the Revival (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “By evening the crowd had grown to about 3,000, and the uni­ver­si­ty had to set up over­flow rooms. At the same time, an unco­or­di­nat­ed infra­struc­ture of sup­port began to appear. An Asbury stu­dent set up a table and start­ed hand­ing out tea and cof­fee. She said Jesus told her to. A woman in Indi­anapo­lis baked choco­late chip cook­ies for a full day and then drove down to give them away. A pro­fes­sor went and got cas­es of bot­tled water. Piz­za appeared, unbid­den, along with home­made pota­to soup, cake, a table of pro­tein bars, and what one vol­un­teer called ‘all the Chick-fil‑A.’ Some­one vol­un­teered to start orga­niz­ing hous­ing and put up signs with QR codes that peo­ple could scan to start the process of find­ing a place to sleep.”
      • I’ve unlocked the pay­wall for this one. Rec­om­mend­ed for the behind-the-scenes info. Also, the “all the Chick-fil‑A” line made me chuck­le.
    • ‘Wood­stock’ for Chris­tians: Revival Draws Thou­sands to Ken­tucky Town (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The uni­ver­si­ty esti­mates that the revival has drawn more than 50,000 peo­ple to Wilmore, a sleepy town of 6,000 peo­ple where the gro­cery store hosts a week­ly Bible study and police cars read ‘In God We Trust.’ Asbury was found­ed in 1890, and its roots are in the Methodist and Wes­leyan-Holi­ness tra­di­tion, which has a his­tor­i­cal empha­sis on trans­for­ma­tive move­ments of the Holy Spir­it.”
      • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this arti­cle. Includes details that are not in oth­er arti­cles I have read.
    • Why Stu­dents in Ken­tucky Have Been Pray­ing for 250 Hours (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “It all start­ed on Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 8, when Zach Meerkreebs, a vol­un­teer soc­cer coach who had addressed the stu­dent body only twice before, gave an impro­vised ser­mon about love.… In a final, kind of corny throw­away line, he said: ‘I pray that this sits on you guys like an itchy sweater, and you got­ta itch, you got­ta take care of it.’ Meerkreebs told me he was cer­tain that he had ‘total­ly whiffed’ the ser­mon, and imme­di­ate­ly got off stage and texted his wife, ‘Lat­est stinker. I’ll be home soon.’ ”
      • What a won­der­ful anec­dote.
    • A non­stop wor­ship gath­er­ing at a Ken­tucky school echoes an old Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion (AJ Will­ing­ham, CNN): “The Asbury Revival, as it has been called, has cap­tured the atten­tion and imag­i­na­tion of every pos­si­ble cir­cle in the expan­sive Venn dia­gram of Chris­tian­i­ty. Among their end­less debates are some ques­tions like­ly shared by those on the out­side, look­ing in at the com­mo­tion: What in the world is going on here? And what, exact­ly, is a Chris­t­ian revival?”
    • Opin­ion: What is Revival—and is it Hap­pen­ing at Asbury? (Craig Keen­er, The Roys Report): “Calvin­ists dom­i­nat­ed the First Great Awak­en­ing, the Hebrides Revival, and the West Tim­or Revival. Wes­leyans dom­i­nat­ed the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing, the Azusa Street Revival, and the 1950 and 1970 Asbury Revivals. Wit­ness­es from the West Tim­or Revival report­ed a sound like a rush­ing wind. Wit­ness­es from the revival at Pan­di­ta Ramabai’s orphan­age in India report­ed tongues of fire. Mirac­u­lous signs accom­pa­nied evan­ge­lism in the Shan­dong Revival. Why should an infi­nite God fit our box­es?”
      • Keen­er is an emi­nent New Tes­ta­ment schol­ar at Asbury Sem­i­nary (and, I might add, a grad­u­ate of my own sem­i­nary — AGTS).
    • Non­stop wor­ship ser­vice at a Ken­tucky col­lege is spread­ing through Tik­Tok (Amber Fer­gu­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Asbury Uni­ver­si­ty is no stranger to revivals but thanks to social media the lat­est gath­er­ing has sparked both nation­al and inter­na­tion­al atten­tion, attract­ing groups of stu­dents from at least 22 col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to descend upon its cam­pus, and even gain­ing the sup­port of for­mer vice pres­i­dent Mike Pence, who tweet­ed his sup­port of the move­ment.”
      • Pence appar­ent­ly got saved while vis­it­ing Asbury years ago.
      • Also, the byline is sur­pris­ing. She’s not one of their reli­gion beat spe­cial­ists.
  5. Time to Think by Han­nah Barnes review – what went wrong at Gids? (Rachel Cooke, The Guardian): “Han­nah Barnes’s book about the rise and calami­tous fall of the Gen­der Iden­ti­ty Devel­op­ment Ser­vice for chil­dren (Gids), a nation­al­ly com­mis­sioned unit at the Tavi­s­tock and Port­man NHS Foun­da­tion Trust in north Lon­don, is the result of inten­sive work, car­ried out across sev­er­al years.… As Barnes makes per­fect­ly clear, this isn’t a cul­ture war sto­ry. This is a med­ical scan­dal, the full con­se­quences of which may only be under­stood in many years’ time.”
    • Not much new here if you’ve been fol­low­ing. But the info is becom­ing more and more wide­spread.
  6. Sell­ing a Pos­i­tive Cul­ture War Mes­sage (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The high-sta­tus way to oppose wok­e­ness runs away from con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, which are not only false and stu­pid, but have the added effect of por­tray­ing one’s oppo­nents as extreme­ly smart, suc­cess­ful, and com­pe­tent. High-sta­tus oppo­si­tion to wok­e­ness is not only bet­ter elec­toral­ly, but will bring high­er qual­i­ty indi­vid­u­als to the cause that will be will­ing and able to focus on mak­ing impor­tant pol­i­cy changes.”
    • Most­ly about pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Vivek Ramaswamy, but also about larg­er issues of pol­i­tics. Quite inter­est­ing.
  7. Do masks work? (Kate­lyn Jetelina & Kris­ten Pan­tha­gani, Sub­stack): “The sci­en­tif­ic ‘arc’ of mask dis­cov­ery is ongo­ing. Sci­ence is always evolv­ing. Do not let any­one con­vince you of a one word answer to the ques­tion: Do masks work? It depends.”

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 New Research Shows Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Dri­ves Human Flour­ish­ing – And Why This Mat­ters Now More Than Ever (Chris­tos Makridis, Real Clear Reli­gion): “…reli­gious lib­er­ty is an inte­gral pre­req­ui­site for demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance, aid­ing the process for civic engage­ment and women’s empow­er­ment and reduc­ing the poten­tial for pub­lic and polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. From vol­ume 270.

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 390

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 390, which is the num­ber of unique ways to sum up to 32 (in oth­er words, 32 has 390 dis­tinct par­ti­tions).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Con­cern­ing Asbury:
    • Asbury Pro­fes­sor: We’re Wit­ness­ing a ‘Sur­pris­ing Work of God’ (Tom McCall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “By Thurs­day evening, there was stand­ing room only. Stu­dents had begun to arrive from oth­er uni­ver­si­ties: the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky, the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Cum­ber­lands, Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty, Indi­ana Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty, Ohio Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty, Tran­syl­va­nia Uni­ver­si­ty, Mid­way Uni­ver­si­ty, Lee Uni­ver­si­ty, George­town Col­lege, Mt. Ver­non Nazarene Uni­ver­si­ty, and many oth­ers.… In pre­vi­ous revivals, there has always been fruit that has blessed both the church and soci­ety. For instance, even sec­u­lar his­to­ri­ans acknowl­edge that the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing was piv­otal to bring­ing about the end of slav­ery in our coun­try. Like­wise, I look for­ward to see­ing what fruit God will bring from such a revival in our gen­er­a­tion.”
    • a quirky but pos­i­tive take on Asbury by Lyman Stone (Twit­ter)
    • Anoth­er inter­est­ing take by a PhD stu­dent at Asbury Sem­i­nary (Twit­ter)
    • A non­stop Ken­tucky prayer ‘revival’ is going viral on Tik­Tok, and peo­ple are trav­el­ing thou­sands of miles to take part (Jake Tray­lor, NBC News): “The set­up is sim­ple. No pro­jec­tor screens or high-tech inte­gra­tions, just wood­en sanc­tu­ary chairs filled with peo­ple, and an open altar call with an invi­ta­tion to prayer that still hasn’t end­ed. That equa­tion has been a pow­er­ful recipe on social media. On Tik­Tok and Insta­gram, videos hash­tagged ‘Asbury Revival’ are rack­ing up mil­lions of views. At the time this arti­cle was pub­lished, the hash­tag #asburyre­vival had 24.4 mil­lion views on Tik­Tok.”
    • The Revival at Asbury (Thomas Lyons, Sub­stack): “For what it’s worth, it’s my ini­tial eval­u­a­tion that this is the real deal. None of the hall­marks of man­u­fac­tured revival are present. And I’m not alone in this eval­u­a­tion. As Law­son Stone, an Old Tes­ta­ment Pro­fes­sor at Asbury The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, recent­ly stat­ed on social media, ‘The old saints know.’ Arguably more sig­nif­i­cant for the eval­u­a­tion of the revival’s authen­tic­i­ty than the opin­ions of revival schol­ars are the tes­ti­monies of the pri­or gen­er­a­tions who were present at sim­i­lar moves of God with­in the com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • The author is a schol­ar whose dis­ser­ta­tion focused on revivals.
  2. No Hookups, No ‘Talk­ing,’ and No Breakups: A Bet­ter Way to Date (Charles E. Stokes, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “My wife and I have served as rela­tion­ship men­tors now for 10 years, and as a fam­i­ly schol­ar and pro­fes­sor, I’ve paid atten­tion to every nugget of wis­dom I could glean—not only from aca­d­e­mics but from many of my stu­dents. I have been able to craft a bet­ter approach to dat­ing that I believe improves the chances of suc­cess for sin­gles desir­ing a life­long monog­a­mous rela­tion­ship.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Sam­ford. I am delib­er­ate­ly not includ­ing his pro­posed solu­tion in the excerpt because it’s worth read­ing in full. If you read his sug­ges­tion out of con­text you’ll prob­a­bly form an opin­ion about it too quick­ly.
  3. ‘Hon­or­ing’ Your Father and Moth­er Isn’t Always Bib­li­cal (Karen Wong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But does the Chi­nese under­stand­ing of fil­ial piety real­ly mean exact­ly the same as the bib­li­cal descrip­tion of hon­or­ing par­ents? And can an empha­sis on obey­ing the fifth com­mand­ment over­look or even ratio­nal­ize par­ent-child rela­tion­ships char­ac­ter­ized by con­tention, pain, dis­re­spect, and suf­fer­ing?”
    • Not pay­walled — I have unlocked it for you.
  4. Why Amer­i­ca Needs Foot­ball. Even Its Bru­tal­i­ty. (Ethan Strauss, The Free Press): “Mod­ern life might be unful­fill­ing, but the fact remains you’re unlike­ly to die on a beach sep­a­rat­ed from your entrails. Still, the old imper­a­tives remain. We have war with­in us, whether or not there’s one to wage. And the NFL gives Amer­i­cans that war, as spec­ta­cle, week after week.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I am still skep­ti­cal Amer­i­can foot­ball can sur­vive moms pulling their kids out of the sport and direct­ing them to safer ath­let­ic exploits.
  5. Con­tra Kavanagh On Fideism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “In a free soci­ety, at one or anoth­er point in your life, you’ll actu­al­ly have to form your own opin­ion about some­thing. You’ll do bet­ter at that if you have some prac­tice form­ing opin­ions. When experts have strong opin­ions on some­thing, this is a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to prac­tice your opin­ion-form­ing skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, fig­ure out where you went wrong. This requires peo­ple to have some tol­er­ance for oth­ers doing this.”
    • Start­ed off quite unin­ter­est­ing and then quick­ly ramped up. The ques­tion under con­sid­er­a­tion: how to bal­ance defer­ring to experts with inves­ti­gat­ing things on your own.
    • A fol­low-up Try­ing Again On Fideism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I come back to this exam­ple again and again, but only because it’s so bla­tant: the New York Times ran an arti­cle say­ing that only 36% of econ­o­mists sup­port­ed school vouch­ers, with a strong impli­ca­tion that the pro­fes­sion was major­i­ty against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actu­al­ly, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not respond­ing. If you are too quick to seek epis­temic clo­sure because ‘you have to trust the experts’, you will be easy prey to peo­ple mis­rep­re­sent­ing what they are say­ing.”
  6. McCullough’s Mis­take, and Ours (Adri­an Gaty, Sub­stack): “As long as edu­ca­tion stays true to its past and cul­ti­vates faith and virtue, McCullough’s mis­take doesn’t mat­ter. But once edu­ca­tion becomes unmoored from its ori­gins, once it becomes open­ly hos­tile to reli­gion, we betray our own ori­gins – and con­demn our future – by con­tin­u­ing to ’empha­size’ school­ing. Our founders, pio­neers like the Rev­erend Cut­ler, spread the gospel of pub­lic edu­ca­tion not for its own sake but because such edu­ca­tion in turn spread the Gospel. To achieve that good gov­ern­ment and hap­pi­ness they envi­sioned, our task today is not to encour­age pub­lic edu­ca­tion as it cur­rent­ly exists – it is to remake it in His image.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • This is a fol­low up to the also inter­est­ing This is… Sci­ence! (Adri­an Gaty, Sub­stack): “These are pro­found­ly anti-life, anti-human move­ments – yet they advance by manip­u­lat­ing our human­i­ty, our ten­der­ness, our hatred of sui­cide. Spoil­er alert: the doc­tors and ethi­cists mak­ing these claims about abor­tion and affir­ma­tion are 100% on board with doc­tor-assist­ed sui­cide (which killed over ten thou­sand Cana­di­ans last year). They don’t hate sui­cide, not in the least — but they know that you do. They are using your com­pas­sion to cre­ate a cul­ture of death.”
  7. In Defense of J.K. Rowl­ing (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Take it from one of her for­mer crit­ics. E.J. Roset­ta, a jour­nal­ist who once denounced Rowl­ing for her sup­posed trans­pho­bia, was com­mis­sioned last year to write an arti­cle called ’20 Trans­pho­bic J.K. Rowl­ing Quotes We’re Done With.’ After 12 weeks of report­ing and read­ing, Roset­ta wrote, ‘I’ve not found a sin­gle tru­ly trans­pho­bic mes­sage.’ On Twit­ter she declared, ‘You’re burn­ing the wrong witch.’ ”
    • The tide is turn­ing on Rowl­ing. She’s not where I am ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, but watch­ing her be tarred and feath­ered for say­ing com­mon sense things has been dis­may­ing.

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 Does the Bible Pass the Bechdel Test? A Data-Dri­ven Look at Women in the Sto­ry of Scrip­ture (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “So does the Bible pass the Bechdel test? This short answer is: yes, there are scenes where two named women have a con­ver­sa­tion not about a man. The longer answer is more com­plex, but also, I think, rich­er.” This is REALLY well done. From vol­ume 268.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 389

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

This is vol­ume 389, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 388

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 388, which has 97 as one of its prime fac­tors. I just think that’s cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Be Open to Spir­i­tu­al Expe­ri­ence. Also, Be Real­ly Care­ful. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But pre­cise­ly because an atti­tude of spir­i­tu­al exper­i­men­ta­tion is rea­son­able, it’s also impor­tant to empha­size some­thing taught by almost every hor­ror movie but nonethe­less skat­ed over in a lot of Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: the impor­tance of being real­ly care­ful in your open­ness, and not just tak­ing the benef­i­cence of the meta­phys­i­cal realm for grant­ed. If the mate­r­i­al uni­verse as we find it is beau­ti­ful but also nat­u­ral­ly per­ilous, and shot through with sin and evil wher­ev­er human agency is at work, there is no rea­son to expect that any spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion would be dif­fer­ent — no rea­son to think that being a ‘psy­cho­naut’ is any less per­ilous than being an astro­naut, even if the dan­ger takes a dif­fer­ent form.””
    • Douthat speak­ing a rare type of truth at the New York Times.
    • Dreher responds to Douthat’s col­umn and goes much deep­er: Psy­cho­nauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganiz­ing Pop Cul­ture (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Douthat is emphat­i­cal­ly cor­rect that one should be extreme­ly care­ful about this stuff. There is no rea­son at all to believe that the spir­i­tu­al realm is benign.”
  2. Lay­offs Broke Big Tech’s Elite Col­lege Hir­ing Pipeline (Anna Kramer, Wired): “…the fact that lay­offs haven’t exclud­ed the grad­u­ates of the top schools clean­ly illus­trates an argu­ment that labor experts, com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sors, and unions have been try­ing to make for years: The skills required for most of the jobs that pow­er these larg­er insti­tu­tions do not actu­al­ly require degrees from the world’s pre­mier com­put­er sci­ence pro­grams. If they did, Meta would hard­ly have choked off the intern­ship pipeline it had spent years build­ing, risk­ing los­ing the trust of a gen­er­a­tion of elite col­lege grad­u­ates.”
  3. On Sci­en­tif­ic Trans­paren­cy, Researcher Degrees Of Free­dom, And That NEJM Study On Youth Gen­der Med­i­cine (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “If you com­pare that to the pro­to­col doc­u­ment, you’ll notice that of the eight key vari­ables the researchers were most inter­est­ed in — ‘gen­der dys­pho­ria, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, trau­ma symp­toms, self-injury, sui­ci­dal­i­ty, body esteem, and qual­i­ty of life’ — the ones I bold­ed are not report­ed in the NEJM paper. That’s six out of eight, or 75% of the vari­ables cov­ered by the researchers’ hypoth­e­sis in their pro­to­col doc­u­ment (includ­ing the ‘offi­cial­ly’ pre­reg­is­tered short­er ver­sion).”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. This is thor­ough. Sin­gal is real­ly, real­ly good at this. I hate to say that I am instinc­tive­ly skep­ti­cal of aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies when they touch on human sex­u­al­i­ty, but I am. It’s stuff like this over and over again.
  4. Pen­te­costal­ism from soup to nuts: A (near) com­plete his­to­ry of this move­ment in Amer­i­ca (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “With­out a doubt, the por­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty known as Pen­te­costal­ism was — by far — the fastest-grow­ing move­ment of the 20th cen­tu­ry, going from zero mem­bers on Jan. 1, 1901 to 644 mil­lion adher­ents world­wide now. It is the pri­ma­ry expres­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty in the Glob­al South. It is the one form of Chris­tian­i­ty to mount a seri­ous chal­lenge to the growth of Islam, main­ly because of its appeal to the very poor and its reliance on the mirac­u­lous.”
  5. Why Not Mars (Maciej CegÅ‚owski, per­son­al web­site): “When the great moment final­ly came, and the astro­nauts had tak­en their first Mar­t­ian self­ie, strict mis­sion rules meant to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and min­i­mize risk would leave the crew depen­dent on the same robots they’d been sent at enor­mous cost to replace. Only the microbes that lived in the space­craft, unin­formed of the mis­sion rules, would be free to go wan­der out­side. They would become the real explor­ers of Mars, and if their luck held, its first colonists.”
    • This is real­ly well-writ­ten!
  6. Mis­in­for­ma­tion on Mis­in­for­ma­tion: Con­cep­tu­al and Method­olog­i­cal Chal­lenges (Sacha Altay, Manon Berriche, & Alber­to Acer­bi, Social Media + Soci­ety): “…the inter­net is not rife with mis­in­for­ma­tion or news, but with memes and enter­tain­ing con­tent.… peo­ple do not believe every­thing they see on the inter­net: the sheer vol­ume of engage­ment should not be con­flat­ed with belief.”
    • From the abstract. The authors are at Oxford, Fon­da­tion Nationale des Sci­ences Poli­tiques, and Brunel.
  7. As Refugees Flood Into U.S., Chi­nese Chris­tians Told To Wait (Susan Crab­tree, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “The Unit­ed States could grant the church mem­bers imme­di­ate emer­gency asy­lum, as it has done for tens of thou­sands of Ukraini­ans flee­ing their war-rav­aged coun­try and the first group of Afghans air­lift­ed into the Unit­ed States amid the chaot­ic U.S. evac­u­a­tion in August 2021. Just this month, Pres­i­dent Biden announced plans to allow Venezue­lans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans flee­ing per­se­cu­tion pri­or­i­ty asy­lum sta­tus as long as they arrived by plane and had pri­vate spon­sors ready to help them reset­tle. When it comes to Chi­nese Chris­tians trapped in lim­bo, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is balk­ing, while offer­ing no expla­na­tion for the dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent treat­ment of these groups of for­eign nation­als seek­ing asy­lum. Human rights advo­cates believe they already have the answer: The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is wary of fur­ther rock­ing the boat with Chi­na amid efforts to repair basic lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The par­ti­cle col­lec­tion that fan­cied itself a physi­cist (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Democritus’s point is that if the atom­ist says both that atoms are all that exist and that col­or, sweet­ness, etc. and the oth­er qual­i­ties of con­scious expe­ri­ence are not to be found in the atoms, then we have a para­dox.” From vol­ume 264.

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 387

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 387, which I learned today is the low­est num­ber with a sort-then-add per­sis­tence of 10, which is a real­ly weird con­cept. Take 387 and add it to 378 (the dig­its sort­ed) and you get 765. Take 765 and add it to 567 to get 1332. Then sort that to add 1233. Keep doing that until you get an answer whose dig­its are already sort­ed (appear in increas­ing order). It takes 10 iter­a­tions to get there. Some­one dis­cov­ered this. Math­e­mati­cians are both won­der­ful and weird.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Under Munic­i­pal Reg­u­la­tions, UK Abor­tion Clin­ics ‘Safe’ From Silent Prayer (David Roach, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Adam Smith-Con­nor prayed silent­ly on a pub­lic street in Bournemouth, Eng­land, ear­li­er this month, his back to an abor­tion clin­ic. When com­mu­ni­ty safe­ty offi­cers asked what he was doing, he told them he was ‘pray­ing for [his] son, who is deceased.’ The offi­cers expressed con­do­lences but then said Smith-Con­nor, a 49-year-old phys­i­cal ther­a­pist and British army vet­er­an, was ‘in breach’ of a Pub­lic Space Pro­tec­tion Order (PSPO), accord­ing to a video of the inci­dent. Lat­er he was fined.”
    • I’ve been fol­low­ing these sto­ries on social media, this is the first decent write­up of them that I’ve seen. It blew my mind when I first saw it and I assumed some cops mis­un­der­stood a pol­i­cy. Nope. Insane and demon­ic. I’ve long known that you don’t have the right to free speech in the U.K. I did­n’t real­ize you also lacked the right to free silence.
  2. AI Stuff
    • OY, A.I. (Jaron Lanier, Tablet): “The prob­lem wasn’t that Israelites want­ed to craft a calf, but that they wor­shipped it, even though it was a thing they had just made. The calf was social nar­cis­sism and amne­sia. Jews have always had a prob­lem of get­ting bored, of not get­ting enough of a charge from what­ev­er is going on. The Israelites wait­ing for Moses to come back down were bored enough to go nuts. We peo­ple, not just Jews, still make gold­en calves all the time. Adam Smith’s invis­i­ble hand, cor­po­ra­tions-as-per­sons, the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, Wikipedia, the lat­est AI pro­grams. All the same. All a bunch of peo­ple being sub­sumed to cre­ate an imag­i­nary super­hero.” An inter­est­ing the­o­log­i­cal reflec­tion on AI by a guy I don’t remem­ber hear­ing of before but clear­ly should have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
    • What if you could talk to the Bible? (Andrew Gao, Twit­ter): See biblegpt.org
    • AI Ser­mon Out­line Gen­er­a­tor (John Dyer, Open­Bible): “To start, please enter up to 5 Bible pas­sages. The AI will then gen­er­ate 4 ser­mon the­sis state­ments, or main argu­ments, based on the pas­sages. After you choose a the­sis state­ment you like, it will gen­er­ate an out­line for you.”
    • Put Not Your Trust in Chat­G­PT, for Now (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Here is a sys­tem that will turn my head: You take an emp­ty sys­tem, and it has the capa­bil­i­ty of learn­ing lan­guage at the speed of a child. The way kids acquire lan­guage is tru­ly mind-blow­ing. And not just lan­guage, but even if you go open the cup­board door—they see some­thing once, and they fig­ure out how to do it. The sys­tem that this Google engi­neer was talk­ing about, it was giv­en tril­lions of exam­ples in order to get some sense of intel­li­gence out of it. It con­sumed ridicu­lous amounts of ener­gy, where­as a lit­tle kid’s brain requires the pow­er of a flash­light, and it’s able to learn lan­guage. We’re not any­where close to that kind of gen­er­al AI.” The inter­vie­wee has a PhD in physics and works in AI -https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomkehler
    • Five Days in Class with Chat­G­PT (Thomas Rid, The Alper­ovitch Insti­tute): “Last week brought two relat­ed fea­tures of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in edu­ca­tion into sharp relief: the first is that all that talk about pla­gia­rism and cheat­ing and abuse is unin­spir­ing and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Yes, some unam­bi­tious stu­dents will use this new tool to cov­er sub­par per­for­mance, and yes, we could talk about how to detect or dis­in­cen­tivize such behav­ior. The far more inspir­ing con­ver­sa­tion is a dif­fer­ent one: how can the most cre­ative, the most ambi­tious, and the most bril­liant stu­dents achieve even bet­ter results faster?” An engag­ing and thought-pro­vok­ing case study.
  3. Five Rules for an Aging World (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “There are two kinds of peo­ple in the world: Those who believe the defin­ing chal­lenge of the 21st cen­tu­ry will be cli­mate change, and those who know that it will be the birth dearth, the pop­u­la­tion bust, the old age of the world.”
  4. What­ev­er Hap­pened to Light Verse? (Kevin Mims, Quil­lette): “Part of this seems to be due to what has late­ly been termed ‘elite over­pro­duc­tion.’ In pre­vi­ous eras, much of America’s jour­nal­ism, poet­ry, and fic­tion were writ­ten by peo­ple who not only lacked an elite col­lege edu­ca­tion, many of them lacked any col­lege edu­ca­tion at all. Nei­ther Ogden Nash nor Dorothy Park­er earned a col­lege degree (nor, for that mat­ter, did Emi­ly Dick­in­son, H.D., Robert Frost, and any num­ber of oth­er ‘seri­ous’ poets of pre­vi­ous eras). But for half a cen­tu­ry now, most of America’s most promi­nent jour­nal­ists, poets, and nov­el­ists have been grad­u­ates of elite uni­ver­si­ties. And, because the lec­ture is a pri­ma­ry method of deliv­er­ing edu­ca­tion at schools like Har­vard and Yale and Stan­ford, much con­tem­po­rary jour­nal­ism, poet­ry, and fic­tion reads like a lec­ture.”
  5. Has Church Abuse Activism Tak­en a Wrong Turn? (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “So why do so few peo­ple want to say ‘evil’ and so many more seem to say ‘tox­ic’? Because the word ‘evil’ evokes moral absolutes, where­as the word ‘tox­ic’ is impres­sion-cod­ed. An evil regime mer­its oppo­si­tion, even sac­ri­fi­cial oppo­si­tion. A tox­ic cul­ture mer­its qui­et quit­ting and self-care after­wards.”
  6. A clus­ter of LGBT-relat­ed arti­cles I stum­bled upon this week:
    • The first of two reac­tions to an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion about LGBT issues: L’Esprit d’Escalier, Dish­cast Edi­tion (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I did not give an argu­ment about why the Chris­t­ian sex­u­al eth­ic is good. I real­ize that it’s because for me, it’s total­ly a mat­ter of obe­di­ence. As I’ve explained many times, and did again on Andrew’s show, once I under­stood that my own sex­u­al activ­i­ty was the only bar­ri­er to accept­ing Christ, and once I saw what a mess I was mak­ing of my life by stand­ing firm for what I believed was my sex­u­al free­dom, I knew that I had a choice to make: I could have my sex­u­al free­dom, or I could have Christ. Any­thing short of mak­ing that sac­ri­fice was dis­hon­est.”
    • The oth­er guy’s per­spec­tive (along with fas­ci­nat­ing com­men­tary from lis­ten­ers): Rod Dreher On His Crises Of Faith And Fam­i­ly (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “He’s cur­rent­ly writ­ing a book about bring­ing the enchant­ment back to Chris­tian­i­ty in a time of grow­ing sec­u­lar­ism. He was enchant­ed him­self after tak­ing LSD in col­lege, putting him on the path to Chris­tian­i­ty — some­thing he hasn’t talked about in pub­lic until now. We’ve been spar­ring online for a cou­ple of decades, while remain­ing friends.”
    • ‘Isla Bryson’ and the mad­ness of Scotland’s gen­der bill (Alex Massie, The Spec­ta­tor): “More­over, some 50 per cent of Scot­tish inmates only dis­cov­ered their new gen­der iden­ti­ty after they were charged by police. Bryson now adds to this num­ber. This seems dubi­ous­ly con­ve­nient to the point of being sus­pi­cious and it can­not sen­si­bly be thought ‘trans­pho­bic’ to think so. Some­thing is hap­pen­ing here, even if it is con­sid­ered indeco­rous to spec­u­late on pre­cise­ly what is occur­ring.… Ulti­mate­ly, this is a dis­agree­ment between fan­ta­sists and real­ists and it is deplorable to realise that the major­i­ty of Scot­tish par­lia­men­tar­i­ans are signed-up mem­bers of the fan­ta­sy club.”
    • Ivan Provorov jer­seys sell out days after NHL play­er refus­es to wear LGBT pride jer­sey (Luke Gen­tile, Wash­ing­ton Exam­in­er): “Jer­seys for Philadel­phia Fly­ers defense­man Ivan Provorov have sold out online days after the 26-year-old refused to wear a gay pride-themed jer­sey for reli­gious rea­sons. Both NHL Shop and Fanat­ics have list­ed Provorov’s jer­seys as ‘almost gone,’ and there are no longer any men’s jer­seys with his name and num­ber avail­able. On Fanat­ics, the defense­man is list­ed as hav­ing the most pop­u­lar men’s jer­sey, wom­en’s jer­sey, and sweat­shirt, and his Brand­ed Backer shirt is being adver­tised as the most pop­u­lar sell­er relat­ed to the Philadel­phia Fly­ers, accord­ing to the online store.”
    • The Myth of “Reli­able Research” in Pedi­atric Gen­der Med­i­cine: A crit­i­cal eval­u­a­tion of the Dutch Studies—and research that has fol­lowed (Abbruzzese, Levine & Mason, Jour­nal of Sex & Mar­i­tal Ther­a­py): “Our analy­sis of the Dutch pro­to­col has been writ­ten with three goals in mind. First, we want­ed to defin­i­tive­ly refute the claims that the foun­da­tion­al Dutch research rep­re­sents ‘sol­id prospec­tive research’ that pro­vides reli­able evi­dence of net ben­e­fits of youth gen­der tran­si­tion. In fact, it is much bet­ter described as case series—one of the low­est lev­els of evi­dence avail­able (Dekkers et al., 2012, Math­es & Pieper, 2017). Sec­ond, we aimed to demon­strate that the type of non-com­par­a­tive, short-term research that the gen­der med­i­cine estab­lish­ment con­tin­ues to pur­sue is inca­pable of gen­er­at­ing reli­able infor­ma­tion. And third and most impor­tant­ly, we want­ed to remind the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty that med­i­cine is a dou­ble-edged sword capa­ble of both much good and much harm. The bur­den of proof—demonstrating that a treat­ment does more good than harm—is on those pro­mot­ing the inter­ven­tion, not on those con­cerned about the harms.” I am sure there will be arti­cles cri­tiquing this in com­ing days, but wow. The authors did not come to play.
    • You Don’t Want A Pure­ly Bio­log­i­cal, Apo­lit­i­cal Tax­on­o­my Of Men­tal Dis­or­ders (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten):  “The peo­ple ask­ing for apo­lit­i­cal tax­onomies want an inco­her­ent thing. They want some­thing which doesn’t think about pol­i­tics at all, and which simul­ta­ne­ous­ly is more polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect than any oth­er tax­on­o­my. Or if ‘polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness’ sounds too dis­mis­sive, we can rephrase it as: ‘they want some­thing that doesn’t think about ethics and prac­ti­cal­i­ty at all, but which is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly more eth­i­cal­ly cor­rect and prag­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect than oth­er tax­onomies’.” Super spicy, short, and says things out loud which most peo­ple avoid.
  7. Who’s More Irra­tional — The Reli­gious or the Irre­li­gious? (Den­nis Prager, syn­di­cat­ed col­umn): “The truth is that today the sec­u­lar have a vir­tu­al monop­oly on irra­tional beliefs. One proof is that col­leges have become the most irra­tional insti­tu­tions in the coun­try. Not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, they are also the most sec­u­lar insti­tu­tions in our soci­ety. In fact, the for­mer is a result of the lat­ter.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Church Forests of Ethiopia (YouTube): nine min­utes. This com­men­tary by Rod Dreher was what brought the video to my atten­tion. Watch the video before you read the com­men­tary. These forests are a beau­ti­ful pic­ture of the way the Church bless­es the world around it, and what the Church must do to thrive in the envi­ron­ment we find our­selves in. From vol­ume 262.

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 386

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.

386 is inter­est­ing because it feels like it ought to have lots of divi­sors, but it’s just 2 · 193. Of course you can dou­ble any prime, but it still sur­pris­es me when I run across it. Primes dou­bled are, by def­i­n­i­tion, exact­ly as rare as primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why I am a Chris­t­ian (James Choi, Yale Fac­ul­ty Web­site): “There are things about Chris­tian­i­ty that are con­fus­ing or hard to accept as true. But in math, if we start with axioms that are sol­id, then we can prove easy the­o­rems based on those axioms, and then use those easy the­o­rems to prove coun­ter­in­tu­itive, seem­ing­ly false the­o­rems. We can believe the hard the­o­rems because we have con­fi­dence in the axioms and the easy the­o­rems. To me, the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ is the fun­da­men­tal the­o­rem of Chris­tian­i­ty. If we can gain con­fi­dence in this, then this pro­vides a foun­da­tion for us to have faith in the rest of the claims of Chris­tian­i­ty.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of finance at Yale. He’s had a ver­sion of this page on his offi­cial web­site ever since he was a sopho­more at Har­vard. He kept it up while apply­ing to grad school and while going on the job mar­ket. Respect.
  2. Why the Media is Hon­est and Good (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “My advice is to read the main­stream media, and trust the facts they present, while ques­tion­ing the nar­ra­tives. Under­stand where the bias­es are and cor­rect for them. Read some of their crit­ics too, but under­stand that those crit­ics are almost more biased and less intel­li­gent and hon­est than those that they attack. The few media crit­ics who are bet­ter than the press are rare and deserve your sup­port. The excep­tion here is any­thing hav­ing to do with race, gen­der, or sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, where you should under­stand that estab­lish­ment jour­nal­ists are try­ing their best but can’t be trust­ed because they’ve lost their minds, or are scared of those that have, and you’d be bet­ter off lis­ten­ing to peo­ple with can­ce­lable views.”
  3. The bat­tle of the stan­dards: why the US and UK can’t stop fight­ing the met­ric sys­tem (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “It all went back to Nim­rod, he was say­ing. Nim­rod, great-grand­son of Noah and the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord,’ who had attempt­ed to unite the world’s pop­u­la­tion by build­ing the Tow­er of Babel so that human­i­ty might climb up to Heav­en itself. ‘And God inter­vened, stop­ping him from build­ing the tow­er,’ said Tony. God then spread human­i­ty across the globe, divid­ing us up into dif­fer­ent nations with their own lan­guages and tra­di­tions. As Tony under­stood the mes­sage of the Tow­er of Babel, it was that ‘Peo­ple should live in dis­tinct nations because it pro­vides a uni­fy­ing force in their lives. It gives them a sense of pur­pose.’”
  4. What if Diver­si­ty Train­ings Are Doing More Harm Than Good? (Jesse Sin­gal, New York Times): “Over the years, social sci­en­tists who have con­duct­ed care­ful reviews of the evi­dence base for diver­si­ty train­ings have fre­quent­ly come to dis­cour­ag­ing con­clu­sions. Though diver­si­ty train­ings have been around in one form or anoth­er since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever sub­ject­ed to rig­or­ous eval­u­a­tion, and those that are most­ly appear to have lit­tle or no pos­i­tive long-term effects… Some diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives might actu­al­ly wors­en the D.E.I. cli­mates of the orga­ni­za­tions that pay for them.”
  5. If Affir­ma­tive Action Ends, Col­lege Admis­sions May Be Changed For­ev­er (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Col­leges are plan­ning behind the scenes for the court rul­ing, though they are reluc­tant to release plans, wor­ried about poten­tial­ly open­ing them­selves up to legal action. ‘“‘We don’t want to get ahead of the court, and we don’t want to give the court any ideas,’”’ Dr. Pérez said.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Who is includ­ed by “inclu­sive” lan­guage? (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “…one thing you’d learn in a fan­cy Amer­i­can school is why you shouldn’t talk about the eco­nom­ic under­de­vel­op­ment of Africa like this. You’d learn bet­ter eti­quette. Or at least dif­fer­ent eti­quette — eti­quette that will dif­fer­en­ti­ate you from less sophis­ti­cat­ed peo­ple who might run around say­ing offen­sive things about pover­ty in the Glob­al South. For instance, a per­son with­out a prop­er edu­ca­tion might refer to the coun­tries in ques­tion as ‘the third world’ with­out hav­ing read Marc Silver’s Jan­u­ary 2021 NPR piece about why this is offen­sive. But to Bright’s point, speak­ing dif­fer­ent­ly doesn’t actu­al­ly change any­thing.  And that, per­haps, is a big part of the appeal.”
  7. NHL play­er refus­es to wear Pride Night jer­sey dur­ing warm-ups, cit­ing reli­gious beliefs (Jared Gans, The Hill): “I respect every­body, and I respect everybody’s choic­es. My choice is to stay true to myself and my reli­gion,” he said while tak­ing ques­tions in the Fly­ers’ lock­er room after the team’s 5–2 vic­to­ry over the Ana­heim Ducks. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
    • Sim­ple faith­ful­ness is a beau­ti­ful thing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A Bib­li­cal Cri­tique of Sec­u­lar Jus­tice and Crit­i­cal The­o­ry (Tim Keller, Gospel In Life): “In the Bible Chris­tians have an ancient, rich, strong, com­pre­hen­sive, com­plex, and attrac­tive under­stand­ing of jus­tice. Bib­li­cal jus­tice dif­fers in sig­nif­i­cant ways from all the sec­u­lar alter­na­tives, with­out ignor­ing the con­cerns of any of them. Yet Chris­tians know lit­tle about bib­li­cal jus­tice, despite its promi­nence in the Scrip­tures.” The read of the week. From vol­ume 262

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 380

I found a remark­ably strong list of arti­cles to choose from this week — what float­ed to the top is worth pon­der­ing

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 380, which one web­site claims is the num­ber of 13-bead neck­lace pat­terns you can cre­ate if you have only two col­ors of beads. That seems real­ly low to me so I must not under­stand the way they define pat­terns and I don’t want to do the math, so that’s my num­ber fac­toid for the week.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Euthana­sia Has Done to Cana­da (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “The idea that human rights encom­pass a right to self-destruc­tion, the con­ceit that peo­ple in a state of ter­ri­ble suf­fer­ing and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty are real­ly ‘free’ to make a choice that ends all choic­es, the idea that a heal­ing pro­fes­sion should include death in its bat­tery of treat­ments — these are inher­ent­ly destruc­tive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cru­el brave new world, a dehu­man­iz­ing final chap­ter for the lib­er­al sto­ry.”
    • Woman fea­tured in pro-euthana­sia com­mer­cial want­ed to live, say friends (Tristin Hop­per, Nation­al Post): “In sev­er­al more egre­gious cas­es, Cana­di­ans have even been offered MAID in lieu of prop­er med­ical treat­ment. Last month, a House of Com­mons com­mit­tee heard about five sep­a­rate inci­dents of Cana­di­an Armed Forces vet­er­ans being offered MAID after seek­ing assis­tance with issues rang­ing from depres­sion to PTSD. Most recent­ly, for­mer par­a­lympian Chris­tine Gau­thi­er went pub­lic with her sto­ry of being offered MAID by a Vet­er­ans Affairs case­work­er after she com­plained about delays in installing an in-home chair­lift.”
  2. What Too Lit­tle For­give­ness Does to Us (Tim Keller, New York Times): “…there must be the recog­ni­tion that for­give­ness does not con­tra­dict the pur­suit of jus­tice. Rather, it is its pre­con­di­tion. For­giv­ing is not excus­ing. To for­give some­thing, you must name it as the evil it is.… [But] if you don’t for­give inter­nal­ly, you won’t con­front the wrong­do­ers for justice’s sake or for future vic­tims’ sake or for God’s sake. You will be doing it for your sake, and the project will go awry. ”
  3. Anato­my of a Can­cel­la­tion (Scott Yenor, First Things): “The Title IX charges marked an esca­la­tion and, strange­ly, a path to qua­si-vic­to­ry.… I had been prepar­ing for it for years, know­ing that some­one who treads on con­tro­ver­sial top­ics such as the fam­i­ly and fem­i­nism would even­tu­al­ly face the ire of the university’s civ­il rights regime. All my lec­tures for the past five years are record­ed and stored. All stu­dent com­mu­ni­ca­tions and grades are saved. I had kept detailed records on whom I called on dur­ing each class.”
    • Remark­able. Will prob­a­bly enter my ros­ter of clas­sics I repost at the bot­tom of these emails.
  4. Remem­ber­ing What Repen­tance Looks Like (David French, The Dis­patch): “Any per­son can live a life of great mean­ing and hon­or far removed from the spot­light. And not one of us is capa­ble of peer­ing into a man’s heart to know when he’s changed. But let me sug­gest a clear warn­ing sign that repen­tance isn’t real—when a pow­er­ful per­son doesn’t just ask for for­give­ness but also seeks restora­tion to the life they lived before. No one is enti­tled to be a pas­tor or a politi­cian, and there are times when the con­tin­ued quest for those posi­tions is itself a sign that a per­son sim­ply doesn’t under­stand the price they should pay when they’ve com­mit­ted a seri­ous wrong.”
  5. When Gay Rights Clash With Reli­gious Free­dom (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “Ms. Smith serves gay cus­tomers. She would not refuse to build a web­site for some­one sim­ply because the per­son is gay. She specif­i­cal­ly does not want her ser­vices to be used as part of a cel­e­bra­tion of a same-sex wed­ding. We make sim­i­lar allowances for oth­er ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences. A pro-choice artist should not be com­pelled to make a logo for a pro-life ral­ly. A pro­gres­sive par­ty plan­ner should not be required to take on a Trump PAC as a client. A gay web design­er ought not be forced to cre­ate a site pro­mot­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive church.”
    • Relat­ed: The Respect for Mar­riage Act Is Also a Vic­to­ry for Same-Sex-Mar­riage Oppo­nents (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “When this bill is signed into law, there will be a fed­er­al statute that makes a res­o­lu­tion of con­flict between reli­gious free­dom and gay-rights claims explic­it in a way that it arguably was not before, clear­ly favor­ing a reli­gious group over a gay couple—even though the con­flict involves open ques­tions on the rela­tion­ship between the First Amend­ment and antidis­crim­i­na­tion laws.”
    • Gersen is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law.
  6. More about Chat­G­PT and AI gen­er­al­ly
    • Does Chat­G­PT Mean Robots Are Com­ing For the Skilled Jobs? (Paul Krug­man, New York Times): “OK, I didn’t write the para­graph you just read; Chat­G­PT did, in response to the ques­tion ‘How will A.I. affect the demand for knowl­edge work­ers?’ The give­away, to me at least, is that I still refuse to use ‘impact’ as a verb. And it didn’t explic­it­ly lay out exact­ly why we should, over­all, expect no impact on aggre­gate employ­ment. But it was arguably bet­ter than what many humans, includ­ing some peo­ple who imag­ine them­selves smart, would have writ­ten.” Nobel lau­re­ate Paul Krug­man opin­ing on the poten­tial impact of tech­nol­o­gy like Chat­G­PT.
    • The Mechan­i­cal Pro­fes­sor (Ethan Mol­lick, Sub­stack): “But, rather than be scared of AI, we should think about how these sys­tems pro­vide us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to help extend our own capa­bil­i­ties. Think of it like hav­ing an intern, but one who just hap­pens to work instan­teous­ly, can write both code and sol­id descrip­tive writ­ing, and has a large chunk of the world’s knowl­edge in their brain.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of man­age­ment at the Whar­ton School.
    • Before the flood (Samuel Ham­mond, Sub­stack): “In par­tic­u­lar, I sus­pect near-term AI will break a lot of things, start­ing with our lega­cy insti­tu­tions. The firmware of the US gov­ern­ment is 70+ years old. We val­i­date people’s iden­ti­ty with a nine dig­it num­ber­ing sys­tem cre­at­ed in 1936. The Admin­is­tra­tive Pro­ce­dure Act, which gov­erns all reg­u­la­to­ry process, came only ten years lat­er. The IRS Mas­ter File runs on assem­bly from the 1960s. Our labor laws are from the assem­bly line era. Unem­ploy­ment Insur­ance — the safe­ty-net for help­ing peo­ple adjust to employ­ment shocks from AI or oth­er­wise — is so bro­ken that Con­gress found it eas­i­er to give every­one an extra $600 a week and live with $150 bil­lion worth of fraud than to recruit the retired Cobol engi­neers nec­es­sary to sim­ply update the code. There is a great deal of ruin in this nation.” The author is the direc­to­ry of social pol­i­cy for the Niska­nen Cen­ter.
    • How come GPT can seem so bril­liant one minute and so breath­tak­ing­ly dumb the next? (Gary Mar­cus, Sub­stack): “GPT doesn’t talk ran­dom­ly, because it’s pas­tich­ing things actu­al peo­ple said. (Or, more often, syn­onyms and para­phras­es of those things.) When GPT gets things right, it is often com­bin­ing bits that don’t belong togeth­er, but not quite in ran­dom ways, but rather in ways where there is some over­lap in some aspect or anoth­er.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • What are the pol­i­tics of Chat­G­PT? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Most of all, I see Chat­G­PT as ‘pro-West­ern’ in its per­spec­tive, while grant­i­ng there are dif­fer­ent visions of what this means. I also see Chat­G­PT as ‘con­tro­ver­sy min­i­miz­ing,’ for both com­mer­cial rea­sons but also for sim­ply wish­ing to get on with the sub­stan­tive work with a min­i­mum of exter­nal fuss. I would not myself have built it so dif­fer­ent­ly, and note that the bias may lie in the train­ing data rather than any bias­es of the cre­ators.”
  7. Air­plane Mode to Become Obso­lete in the EU (Nik­ki Main, Giz­mo­do): “It’s been said that the rea­son for ban­ning cell phone use on air­planes is because it could inter­fere with the pilot’s nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems. How­ev­er, Busi­ness Insid­er report­ed in 2017 that the FCC instat­ed the air­plane cell phone ban to ‘pro­tect against radio inter­fer­ence to cell phone net­works on the ground.’ If all air­lines allowed cell phone access at 40,000 feet in the air, mul­ti­ple cell tow­ers on the ground could pick up on ser­vice from active cell phones which could crowd the ground net­works, dis­rupt­ing ser­vice, accord­ing to the out­let.”
    • This one intrigues me because it calls into ques­tion a sit­u­a­tion so many of us take for grant­ed. I, for one, would not like there to be phone calls on air­planes (hard to read or watch a movie with that going on next to you). But stay­ing touch via text would be nice.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Unites Most Grad­u­ates of Selec­tive Col­leges? An Intact Fam­i­ly (Nicholas Zill & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “… even after con­trol­ling for par­ent edu­ca­tion, fam­i­ly income, and stu­dent race and eth­nic­i­ty, being raised by one’s mar­ried birth par­ents pro­vides an addi­tion­al boost to one’s chances of get­ting through Prince­ton.” From vol­ume 254.

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 378

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 378, which is appar­ent­ly the max­i­mum num­ber of objects you can slice a cube into using 13 cuts.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Jesus Christ, Stream­ing Star (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Con­ceived by a lit­tle-known cre­ator, fea­tur­ing no major stars and fund­ed pri­mar­i­ly, at first, through small con­tri­bu­tions with­out the sup­port of a Hol­ly­wood stu­dio, [The Cho­sen] began on an obscure pro­pri­etary app and is now giv­en away for free. Its I.P. is 2,000 years old. But despite the long odds, the faith-based dra­ma series has become a bona fide phe­nom­e­non in many parts of Chris­t­ian cul­ture, attract­ing a fer­vent ecu­meni­cal fan­dom while remain­ing almost invis­i­ble to oth­ers.”
  2. How Col­leges and Sports-Bet­ting Com­pa­nies ‘Cae­sarized’ Cam­pus Life (Anna Betts, Andrew Lit­tle, Eliz­a­beth Sander, Alexan­dra Tremayne-Pen­gel­ly & Walt Bog­danich, New York Times): “The deals came togeth­er large­ly in pri­vate, The Times found, with min­i­mal dis­cus­sion on cam­pus about their poten­tial impact on stu­dents, ath­letes and the integri­ty of col­lege sports.”
    • I love that the lead author is named Betts.
  3. AI Con­quers Diplo­ma­cy (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Keep in mind that since the game is zero-sum to do well the AI must con­vince humans to do what is NOT in their inter­est. We real­ly do need to invest more in the align­ment prob­lem.”
  4. Respons­es to the pro­posed “Respect for Mar­riage Act”
    • No respect for reli­gious free­dom in the “Respect for Mar­riage Act” (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “[This leg­is­la­tion] fuels hos­til­i­ty towards Amer­i­cans who hold beliefs about mar­riage root­ed in hon­or­able or philo­soph­i­cal premises.It impos­es a new oblig­a­tion to rec­og­nize same-sex rela­tion­ships on reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions that work close­ly with gov­ern­ment. It cre­ates new tools for pro­gres­sive activists and the Depart­ment of Jus­tice to enforce that oblig­a­tion. It gives the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice a new argu­ment for tak­ing tax-exempt sta­tus away from reli­gious non-prof­its. It makes reli­gious free­dom and free speech cas­es hard­er to win by ele­vat­ing the fed­er­al government’s inter­est in same-sex mar­riage.”
    • Why I Changed My Mind About Law and Mar­riage, Again (David French, The Dis­patch): “I agree with Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia pro­fes­sor Dou­glas Lay­cock. ‘The act con­tains “impor­tant pro­tec­tions” for reli­gious lib­er­ty, includ­ing “an explic­it state­ment by Con­gress that “diverse beliefs about the role of gen­der in marriage”—including the belief that mar­riage is between a man and woman rather than between per­sons of the same sex—“are held by rea­son­able and sin­cere peo­ple based on decent and hon­or­able philo­soph­i­cal premis­es” and that such beliefs “are due prop­er respect.“ ‘ Oth­er pro­vi­sions pro­vide pro­tec­tions for the tax exemp­tions for reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions, hold that reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions don’t have to par­tic­i­pate in the sol­em­niza­tion of same-sex mar­riages, and specif­i­cal­ly reject the approach of the Equal­i­ty Act, which sought to under­mine the Reli­gious Free­dom Restora­tion Act.”
    • Respect For Mar­riage Act: An Impru­dent Com­pro­mise (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “[Law­mak­ers] have to make their polit­i­cal deci­sions rec­og­niz­ing the social and cul­tur­al real­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­ca, a coun­try where a major­i­ty of young peo­ple prize sex­u­al auton­o­my more than reli­gious lib­er­ty, and who love gay more than God. That’s not like­ly to get any bet­ter, and is in fact like­ly to get far worse. What then? I don’t iden­ti­fy with David French’s eager­ness to com­pro­mise, and I would draw the lines of com­pro­mise in dif­fer­ent places … but French seems to under­stand the shaky ground on which Chris­t­ian trads stand bet­ter than a lot of peo­ple who are right about mar­riage do.” Dreher is respond­ing to a dif­fer­ent arti­cle by French than the one below, which was print­ed a day lat­er.
    • An Open Let­ter to Those Who Think I’ve Lost My Chris­t­ian Faith (David French, The Dis­patch): “…read the text of the bill. Does that lan­guage tru­ly give the IRS a ‘new argu­ment for tax­ing tax-exempt sta­tus away’? And does the act cre­ate ‘new tools for pro­gres­sive activists and the Depart­ment of Jus­tice’ to enforce an oblig­a­tion to rec­og­nize same-sex mar­riages on ‘reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions that work close­ly with gov­ern­ment’? [It does not.]”
  5. Two arti­cles describ­ing how out-of-con­trol euthana­sia is get­ting in some coun­tries:
    • Sched­uled to Die: The Rise of Canada’s Assist­ed Sui­cide Pro­gram (Rupa Sub­ra­manya, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Next March, the gov­ern­ment is sched­uled to expand the pool of eli­gi­ble sui­cide-seek­ers to include the men­tal­ly ill and ‘mature minors.’ Accord­ing to Canada’s Depart­ment of Jus­tice, par­ents are gen­er­al­ly ‘enti­tled to make treat­ment deci­sions on their children’s behalf. The mature minor doc­trine, how­ev­er, allows chil­dren deemed suf­fi­cient­ly mature to make their own treat­ment deci­sions.…’ Dr. Dawn Davies, a pal­lia­tive care physi­cian who sup­port­ed MAiD when it was first con­ceived, said she had ‘tons of wor­ries’ about where this might lead. She could imag­ine kids with per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­ders or oth­er men­tal health issues say­ing they want­ed to die. ‘Some of them will mean it, some of them won’t,’ she said. ‘And we won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be able to dis­cern who is who.’ ”
    • “Safe­guards” Can­not Make Euthana­sia Safe (Robert Clarke, First Things): “There is a clear slip­pery slope from approv­ing euthana­sia in rare ter­mi­nal cas­es to approv­ing just about any men­tal health diag­noses. Twen­ty-three-year-old Shan­ti de Corte was recent­ly euth­a­nized due to the men­tal trau­ma she suf­fered from the 2016 Brus­sels air­port ter­ror­ist attack, after which she ‘nev­er felt safe.’ Her death sig­nals our society’s fail­ure to sup­port the vul­ner­a­ble and wound­ed. We have aban­doned authen­tic care and com­pas­sion in favor of death.”
  6. Mega­lopo­lis: how coastal west Africa will shape the com­ing cen­tu­ry (Howard W French, The Guardian): “By 2100, the Lagos-Abid­jan stretch is pro­ject­ed to be the largest zone of con­tin­u­ous, dense habi­ta­tion on earth, with some­thing in the order of half a bil­lion peo­ple [all in one giant mega­lopo­lis].”

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 Are the Wages of Sin Real­ly Death?: Moral and Epi­demi­o­log­ic Obser­va­tions (David Lyle Jef­frey and Jeff Levin, Chris­t­ian Scholar’s Review): “So, are the wages of sin real­ly death? As far as pop­u­la­tion-health research sug­gests, the answer is a guard­ed yes.” The authors are pro­fes­sors at Bay­lor, one of epi­demi­ol­o­gy and the oth­er of lit­er­a­ture. From vol­ume 250. I know I shared it recent­ly. It’s worth shar­ing again.

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 375

a week full of wild arti­cles

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 375, which can also be writ­ten at 3·53. I like the threes on either side of the five.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Truth Cops: Leaked Doc­u­ments Out­line DHS’s Plans to Police Dis­in­for­ma­tion (Ken Klip­pen­stein & Lee Fang, The Inter­cept): “DHS’s mis­sion to fight dis­in­for­ma­tion, stem­ming from con­cerns around Russ­ian influ­ence in the 2016 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, began tak­ing shape dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion and over efforts to shape dis­cus­sions around vac­cine pol­i­cy dur­ing the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.”
    • This is the arti­cle of the week and it’s not close. Wow. Some more excerpts:
    • “U.S. offi­cials have rou­tine­ly lied about an array of issues, from the caus­es of its wars in Viet­nam and Iraq to their more recent obfus­ca­tion around the role of the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health in fund­ing the Wuhan Insti­tute of Virology’s coro­n­avirus research. That track record has not pre­vent­ed the U.S. gov­ern­ment from seek­ing to become arbiters of what con­sti­tutes false or dan­ger­ous infor­ma­tion on inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal top­ics.”
    • This bit was wild: “Dur­ing the 2020 elec­tion, the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty, in an email to an offi­cial at Twit­ter, for­ward­ed infor­ma­tion about a poten­tial threat to crit­i­cal U.S. infra­struc­ture, cit­ing FBI warn­ings, in this case about an account that could imper­il elec­tion sys­tem integri­ty. The Twit­ter user in ques­tion had 56 fol­low­ers, along with a bio that read ‘dm us your weed store loca­tions (hoes be mad, but this is a par­o­dy account),’ under a ban­ner image of Blu­cifer, the 32-foot-tall demon­ic horse sculp­ture fea­tured at the entrance of the Den­ver Inter­na­tion­al Air­port.”
  2. Neg­a­tive World Arrives in Aus­tralia (Simon Kennedy, Mere Ortho­doxy): “This was a water­shed cul­tur­al moment for Aus­tralia, and pos­si­bly for the West. A man with out­stand­ing cre­den­tials was told that, because of some ser­mons preached by some­one else from almost a decade ago, he need­ed to recon­sid­er his fit for the role he had just been appoint­ed to. For all we know, Thor­burn may dis­agree with these ser­mons. He may nev­er have been aware of them or lis­tened to them. The bot­tom line here was guilt-by-asso­ci­a­tion.”
  3. Black, Chris­t­ian and Tran­scend­ing the Polit­i­cal Bina­ry (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “The con­ser­v­a­tive and pro­gres­sive approach­es are not the only way to approach pol­i­tics. Every­thing that doesn’t fit isn’t ille­git­i­mate. Once we real­ize those aren’t the only two approach­es, then we open up space for peo­ple of col­or, peo­ple of faith and oth­ers who are polit­i­cal­ly home­less to real­ly have a voice and help heal some­thing that’s been bro­ken and won’t be fixed by either of those two sides.”
  4. Racial Dis­crim­i­na­tion Is Not the Path to Racial Jus­tice (David French, The Dis­patch): “If schools tru­ly want to pri­or­i­tize diver­si­ty, they should focus on class. Fos­ter­ing greater class-based diver­si­ty can help achieve greater diver­si­ty across the board: More racial diver­si­ty, more eco­nom­ic diver­si­ty, more ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty, and more diver­si­ty on the basis of reli­gion. Empha­siz­ing diver­si­ty of class doesn’t just cre­ate a stu­dent body that looks like Amer­i­ca. It cre­ates a stu­dent body that is like Amer­i­ca.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: Racial Iden­ti­ty Pol­i­tics: A Warn­ing From Sara­je­vo (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “White racial con­scious­ness is taboo for a good his­tor­i­cal rea­son, but any­one with a lick of com­mon sense has to see that you can­not keep attack­ing white peo­ple as moral­ly bad because of the col­or of their skin, and pun­ish them in pub­lic and pri­vate life because they are white, with­out invit­ing push­back.”
    • We are play­ing with fire when it comes to race in Amer­i­ca and pray we open our eyes before the flames rage out of con­trol.
  5. Stan­ford knew about the cam­pus imposter for a year. He kept com­ing back. (Theo Bak­er, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford admin­is­tra­tors and the pub­lic safe­ty depart­ment have been aware since at least Decem­ber 2021 that William Cur­ry, the Alaba­ma native who was removed from cam­pus Thurs­day, had pre­tend­ed to be a Stan­ford stu­dent and lived in mul­ti­ple Uni­ver­si­ty dorms, accord­ing to com­mu­ni­ca­tions obtained by The Dai­ly.” Very detailed. A well-report­ed sto­ry.
    • Imposter recounts his time on cam­pus (Theo Bak­er, The Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Cur­ry said he lied to peo­ple in high school about attend­ing Stan­ford and claimed his par­ents believed he was enrolled in the Uni­ver­si­ty. He con­firmed many ele­ments of the Daily’s report­ing and even mes­saged a Dai­ly reporter after the inter­view, say­ing ‘always my duty to help my fel­low stu­dents.’ ” — empha­sis added. Less inter­est­ing than the main sto­ry, but still intrigu­ing.
    • In oth­er Stan­ford news, Stan­ford Tree gets the axe, sus­pend­ed until Jan­u­ary (Car­o­line Chen & Yana Kim, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In the fall of 2020, the Band tran­si­tioned from a Vol­un­tary Stu­dent Orga­ni­za­tion (VSO) to being under the Depart­ment of Ath­let­ics (DAPER). At the same time, its Con­sti­tu­tion, which allowed stu­dent self-expres­sion such as kneel­ing dur­ing the nation­al anthem and tap­ing ‘Abol­ish ICE’ on the back of their jack­ets, was dis­solved, accord­ing to Band social chair and recruiter Noah Bartlett ’23, who described there being a sig­nif­i­cant ‘cul­ture shift’ since he joined the Band in 2019.” HOW DARE YOU SAY WE DON’T LIKE FUN! NO FUN FOR YOU!
  6. NYC judge rules polyamorous unions enti­tled to same legal pro­tec­tions as 2‑person rela­tion­ships (Julia Mus­to, NY Post): “In the case at hand, Bac­dayan notes how changes since 1989 play a role, includ­ing changes to the def­i­n­i­tion of ‘fam­i­ly.’ She notes the law has rapid­ly pro­ceed­ed in rec­og­niz­ing that it is pos­si­ble for a child to have more than two legal par­ents. ‘Why then, except for the very real pos­si­bil­i­ty of implic­it majori­tar­i­an ani­mus, is the lim­i­ta­tion of two per­sons insert­ed into the def­i­n­i­tion of a fam­i­ly-like rela­tion­ship for the pur­pos­es of receiv­ing the same pro­tec­tions from evic­tion accord­ed to legal­ly for­mal­ized or blood rela­tion­ships?’ asked Bac­dayan.”
    • “Two per­son rela­tion­ships”
    • This is from ear­ly last month
  7. Mod­er­a­tion Is Dif­fer­ent From Cen­sor­ship (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “A min­i­mum viable prod­uct for mod­er­a­tion with­out cen­sor­ship is for a plat­form to do exact­ly the same thing they’re doing now — remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts — but have an opt-in set­ting, ‘see banned posts’. If you per­son­al­ly choose to see harass­ing and offen­sive con­tent, you can tog­gle that set­ting, and every­thing bad will reap­pear.” The meme near the top made me chuck­le.

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 S/NC and the pur­pose of high­er edu­ca­tion (Thomas Slabon, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “As a Ph.D. can­di­date in the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment, I have TA’d or taught eight cours­es, and I want to let you in on an open secret of post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tors: We all hate grad­ing. Every. Sin­gle. One of us. Every TA you’ve ever had has con­tem­plat­ed grad­ing piles of prob­lem sets or papers with dread — and half the rea­son you had a TA in the first place was because your pro­fes­sor want­ed to grade your work even less.” This is a won­der­ful essay. From vol­ume 245.

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.