Tag: marriage

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 440

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 440, the sum of the first sev­en­teen prime num­bers. 440 = 2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 and that fact makes me hap­py.

Also, I’ve had a busy trav­el sched­ule late­ly and haven’t kept us with as much stuff as I nor­mal­ly do, so this is a short­er com­pi­la­tion than usu­al.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chris­t­ian Super Bowl Ad They SHOULD Have Made | He Saves Us (Jamie Bam­brick, YouTube): one com­pelling minute. I don’t have any­thing against the He Gets Us ads, but this is pret­ty great.
  2. Chris­tians Are Not Ready for the Age of “Adult AI” (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “All vari­ables being equal, it is like­ly that with­in twen­ty years, most online pornog­ra­phy will not fea­ture real human beings. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems are already sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to fab­ri­cate entire bod­ies con­vinc­ing­ly.… It sim­ply won’t do any­more to try to elic­it post-Chris­t­ian out­rage against porn by empha­siz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sex traf­fick­ing or exploita­tion. In the era of dig­i­tal­ly-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, the ques­tion will no longer be, ‘Who was hurt in the mak­ing of this’ (for the prac­ti­cal answer to that ques­tion will be, ‘No one’). Rather, the ques­tion will be, ‘How am I hurt by con­sum­ing this,’ and, ‘Why is this objec­tive­ly wrong for me to enjoy?’ ”
  3. How Chi­na Mis­cal­cu­lat­ed Its Way to a Baby Bust (Liyan Qi, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Fol­low­ing the data release, researchers from Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia and the Shang­hai Acad­e­my of Social Sci­ences pre­dict­ed that Chi­na will have just 525 mil­lion peo­ple by the end of the cen­tu­ry. That’s down from their pre­vi­ous fore­cast of 597 mil­lion and a pre­cip­i­tous drop from 1.4 bil­lion now.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Mar­ry Young (Kasen Stephen­son, Stan­ford Review): “Although I’m now twen­ty-four, I got mar­ried as a twen­ty-two year old under­grad. I then bid farewell to my dorm in Roble and moved into a cozy apart­ment beyond EVGR with my wife. I have found that most of my class­mates are con­vinced that mar­riage is in their future, yet they are quite sur­prised that I mar­ried so young. While it’s dif­fi­cult to exer­cise con­trol over any time­line, I’m a strong advo­cate for get­ting mar­ried young, espe­cial­ly at Stan­ford where young mar­riages are most uncom­mon.”
  5. The Lure of Divorce (Emi­ly Gould, The Cut): “It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were con­tem­plat­ing them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her hus­band thought open­ing their mar­riage might be the answer. Anoth­er friend described the ease of shar­ing cus­tody of his young daugh­ter, then admit­ted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most week­ends. In my chron­i­cal­ly unde­cid­ed state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the dif­fer­ence.”
    • A wild and illu­mi­nat­ing sto­ry, although I sus­pect I am tak­ing away some dif­fer­ent lessons than the author intend­ed.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 432

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 432, a num­ber pleas­ant to look at because of the smooth­ly decreas­ing dig­its. Also, 432 = 4 · 33 · 22, which is kin­da cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Two Par­ents Are the Ulti­mate Priv­i­lege (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “Two par­ents com­bined have more resources than one. Two par­ents in a home bring in the earnings—or at least the earn­ings capac­i­ty—of two adults. And so, in a very straight­for­ward way, we see that kids grow­ing up in sin­gle-moth­er homes are five times more like­ly to live in pover­ty than kids grow­ing up in mar­ried par­ent homes. (Kids in sin­gle-father homes are three times as like­ly to live in pover­ty.) Some of that reflects the fact that peo­ple with low­er lev­els of edu­ca­tion or income are more like­ly to become sin­gle par­ents. But even if you com­pare across moms of the same edu­ca­tion group, you see that kids who grow up in a house­hold with two par­ents have house­hold incomes that are about twice as high. That means that those par­ents are pay­ing for things like a nicer house in a safe neigh­bor­hood with good school dis­tricts. But they also spend more time with their kids. We see that kids who grow up with mar­ried par­ents have more parental time invest­ed in them: read­ing to your kid, talk­ing to your kid, dri­ving your kids to activ­i­ties. If there are two par­ents in the house­hold, there’s just more time capac­i­ty.”
    • The inter­vie­wee, Melis­sa Kear­ney, is an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land.
    • This part near the end also caught my atten­tion: “You write that you would speak to your fel­low schol­ars about your plans for writ­ing this book, and they would say things along the lines of, ‘I tend to agree about all of this, but are you sure you want to be out there say­ing this pub­licly?’ How many areas of research, inquiry, and basic curios­i­ty about the most impor­tant things in our lives and cul­ture are third rail now? If it’s taboo to write a book say­ing two par­ents in a house are bet­ter mate­ri­al­ly than one, what else is off-lim­its, and what can we do to com­bat that?”
  2. Some links relat­ed to acad­e­mia, con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny, and speech in gen­er­al:
    • You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a Col­lege Admin­is­tra­tor (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “Why are these hor­ri­ble, no-win posi­tions? Because the pri­ma­ry job of any col­lege dean or uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent is to deal with the most spoiled, enti­tled, pig-head­ed inter­est groups imag­in­able. First, there are the stu­dents…”
    • Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff is a hard­er ques­tion than for stu­dents or fac­ul­ty. Stu­dents will move on, and a lot of fac­ul­ty hate each oth­er any­way, and don’t have to work togeth­er very much. Plus the pro­tec­tion of tenure was (sup­pos­ed­ly?) designed to sup­port free­dom of speech and opin­ion, even ‘per­ceived to be offen­sive’ opin­ions. As for stu­dents, we want them to be exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent opin­ions in their youth, even if some of those opin­ions are bad or stu­pid. Staff in these regards are dif­fer­ent.”
    • What the Uni­ver­si­ty Pres­i­dents Got Right and Wrong About Anti­se­mit­ic Speech (David French, New York Times): “I’m a for­mer lit­i­ga­tor who spent much of my legal career bat­tling cen­sor­ship on col­lege cam­pus­es, and the thing that struck me about the pres­i­dents’ answers wasn’t their legal insuf­fi­cien­cy but rather their stun­ning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the pres­i­dents’ under­stand­ing of the law, that has cre­at­ed a cam­pus cri­sis.”
    • Penn’s Lead­er­ship Resigns Amid Con­tro­ver­sies Over Anti­semitism (Stephanie Saul and Alan Blind­er, New York Times): “The pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, M. Eliz­a­beth Mag­ill, resigned on Sat­ur­day, four days after her tes­ti­mo­ny at a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing in which she seemed to evade the ques­tion of whether stu­dents who called for the geno­cide of Jews should be dis­ci­plined.… Ms. Mag­ill, a for­mer Stan­ford Law School dean and Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia provost, had come to the uni­ver­si­ty as part of a wave of women to lead Ivy League col­leges.”
  3. Some reflec­tions on the war between Israel and Hamas:
    • Who’s a ‘Col­o­niz­er’? How an Old Word Became a New Weapon (Roger Cohen, New York Times): “The clash over pur­port­ed Israeli colo­nial­ism is part of some­thing larg­er, a pro­found move­ment in people’s minds. The Pales­tin­ian nation­al strug­gle has become the cause of the jus­tice-seek­ing dis­pos­sessed through­out the world. At the same time, the quest of the Jews to find refuge in a nation­al home­land as the only answer to being the peren­ni­al out­cast has become a bat­tle to demon­strate that, far from being colo­nial­ist, Israel is a diverse nation large­ly formed by a gath­er­ing-in of the per­se­cut­ed.”
      • Cov­ers a lot of ground, broad­ly help­ful.
    • What Jus­tice Requires in Gaza (Jack Omer-Jacka­man, Per­sua­sion): “How much injus­tice can a war con­tain before it is no longer a just war? His­to­ry is cer­tain­ly replete with wars we con­sid­er just on the whole, but which were lit­tered with gross vio­la­tions of human rights and decen­cy. What was true on Octo­ber 7th is true today: Hamas is a mass-rap­ing, civil­ian-slaugh­ter­ing, baby-kid­nap­ping evil, whose defeat should be sup­port­ed by all friends of Israel and all friends of Pales­tine. But I can­not be silent when my own rea­son and my own heart con­clude that Gazan civil­ians are not being suf­fi­cient­ly pro­tect­ed. In the fail­ure of Israeli strikes to dis­tin­guish between civil­ian and ter­ror­ist, and in the ham­per­ing of human­i­tar­i­an aid efforts, too much of this war is being fought unjust­ly.”
  4. In 2024, the Ten­sion Between Macro­cul­ture and Micro­cul­ture Will Turn into War (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The clash has reached some kind of bru­tal tip­ping point. I believe it’s about to turn into war. The fact that 2024 is an elec­tion year will esca­late the con­flict. Just wait and see. But even right now you can feel the ground shak­ing.… [alter­na­tive plat­forms are out­per­form­ing Hol­ly­wood.] This seems impos­si­ble. A sin­gle indi­vid­ual liv­ing in Greenville, North Car­oli­na defeats enor­mous glob­al busi­ness­es with tens of thou­sands of employ­ees and decades of experience—and does it repeat­ed­ly every month. But that’s exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing stats in here.
    • Relat­ed (at least to me): When the New York Times lost its way (James Ben­net, The Econ­o­mist): “This is a bit of a para­dox. The new news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems ide­al­is­tic, yet it has grown from cyn­i­cal roots in acad­e­mia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objec­tive truth; that there is only nar­ra­tive, and that there­fore who­ev­er con­trols the nar­ra­tive – who­ev­er gets to tell the ver­sion of the sto­ry that the pub­lic hears – has the whip hand. What mat­ters, in oth­er words, is not truth and ideas in them­selves, but the pow­er to deter­mine both in the pub­lic mind. By con­trast, the old news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems cyn­i­cal on its sur­face. It used to bug me that my edi­tors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any per­son in pow­er was a lie. And the pur­suit of objec­tiv­i­ty can seem rep­til­ian, even nihilis­tic, in its abju­ra­tion of a fixed posi­tion in moral con­tests. But the basis of that old news­room approach was ide­al­is­tic: the notion that pow­er ulti­mate­ly lies in truth and ideas, and that the cit­i­zens of a plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy, not lead­ers of any sort, must be trust­ed to judge both.”
    • This one is very long but I found it com­pelling.
  5. Con­ser­v­a­tives are suing law firms over diver­si­ty efforts. It’s work­ing. (Julian Mark and Tay­lor Telford, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Ken­ji Yoshi­no, a law pro­fes­sor and direc­tor of the Meltzer Cen­ter for Diver­si­ty, Inclu­sion and Belong­ing at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, said tar­get­ing law firms is effec­tive because it can serve as a warn­ing to oth­er indus­tries. ‘If you sue a law firm, then the law firm gets up to speed very, very quick­ly on what is per­mis­si­ble and what’s imper­mis­si­ble,’ Yoshi­no said, not­ing that many law firms advise For­tune 500 com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and non­prof­its. ‘It’s a way of get­ting the mes­sage out about peo­ple need­ing to flip over their poli­cies in a wide vari­ety of domains — not just fel­low­ships, but hir­ing, recruit­ing retreats and the like.’”
    • Inter­est­ing. I don’t remem­ber hav­ing seen this strat­e­gy (sue law firms to bring about broad­er cul­tur­al change) used by either the left or the right before. Is it an inno­va­tion or am I just not remem­ber­ing some­thing in his­to­ry?
  6. How 1 in 4 Coun­tries Restrict Reli­gious Con­ver­sion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The USCIRF report grouped the laws into four cat­e­gories. First, anti-pros­e­ly­tiz­ing laws restrict wit­ness­ing of one’s faith in 29 nations, includ­ing in Indone­sia, Israel, and Rus­sia. In Moroc­co, for exam­ple, it is ille­gal to cause a Mus­lim to ques­tion his or her reli­gion. The sec­ond cat­e­go­ry of inter­faith mar­riage is restrict­ed in 25 nations, includ­ing in Jor­dan, the Philip­pines, and Sin­ga­pore. In Qatar, for exam­ple, if a wife con­verts to Islam but the hus­band does not, a judge may annul their mar­riage. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment laws—the third category—in 7 nations restrict the right of an indi­vid­ual to for­mal­ly con­vert to anoth­er reli­gion, includ­ing in Iraq, Malaysia, and Turkey. Myan­mar, for exam­ple, requires con­verts to sub­mit an appli­ca­tion and be sub­ject to ques­tion­ing about the gen­uine­ness of the con­ver­sion. And final­ly, apos­ta­sy laws in 7 nations make con­ver­sion ille­gal, includ­ing in Brunei, Mau­ri­ta­nia, and Sau­di Ara­bia. In Yemen, for exam­ple, the pun­ish­ment is death.”
  7. A Kore­an Sect Tar­get­ed New Zealand Chris­tians. Did Church­es Respond Effec­tive­ly? (Will­liam Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors even­tu­al­ly con­vinced their recruits that God per­mits lying if it is done for ‘God’s will.’ Before Josh’s ses­sions com­menced in Jan­u­ary 2019, his men­tor warned him to keep them a secret, point­ing to Abraham’s silence before head­ing out to sac­ri­fice Isaac in Gen­e­sis 22. Josh con­coct­ed a sto­ry about teach­ing pri­vate gui­tar lessons three morn­ings a week, a lie he told his par­ents, his girl­friend, and Stu­dent Life col­leagues. When church lead­ers and a cam­pus staff work­er con­front­ed Josh with evi­dence that he was attend­ing Shin­cheon­ji class­es, his Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors gave him step-by-step instruc­tions on how to deny his involve­ment. They even gave Josh pre-writ­ten let­ters express­ing ‘inex­plic­a­ble hurt and con­fu­sion’ about his fam­i­ly and friends’ accu­sa­tions and claim­ing that he was no longer involved in Shin­cheon­ji activ­i­ties. Josh sent the let­ter to the church yet con­tin­ued his class­es, and in May 2019 he ‘passed over’ into the group.”
    • Relat­ed: Escap­ing High-Con­trol Reli­gious Groups (William Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[If a friend is in a cult,] try to main­tain the rela­tion­ship and com­mu­ni­ca­tion at all costs. Mak­ing direct state­ments like ‘You’re in a cult!’ or ‘You’re deceived!’ are not help­ful. Cult mem­bers have often been warned that ‘a man’s ene­mies will be the mem­bers of his own house­hold’ (Matt. 10:36), so to con­front their group will be to ful­fill prophe­cies giv­en to them by their lead­ers and fur­ther prove the group to be cor­rect. It’s impor­tant not to dri­ve them fur­ther into the group. Ask your­self what need the group is ful­fill­ing in your loved one’s life.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 420

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 420, a num­ber with cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance and also two inter­est­ing math­e­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties. 420 = 101 + 103 + 107 + 109 = 20 x 21. In oth­er words, it is both the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes and also the prod­uct of two con­sec­u­tive num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. We Are Repa­ganiz­ing (Louise Per­ry, First Things): “The supreme­ly strange thing about Chris­tian­i­ty in anthro­po­log­i­cal terms is that it takes a top­sy-turvy atti­tude toward weak­ness and strength. To put it crude­ly, most cul­tures look at the pow­er­ful and the wealthy and assume that they must be doing some­thing right to have attained such might. The poor are poor because of some fail­ing of their own, whether in this life or the last. The small­ness and fee­ble­ness of women and chil­dren is a sign that they must be com­mand­ed by men. The suf­fer­ing of slaves is not an argu­ment against slav­ery, but an argu­ment against allow­ing one­self to be enslaved. Most cultures—perfectly logically—glorify war­riors and kings, not those at the bot­tom of the heap. But Chris­tian­i­ty takes a per­verse atti­tude toward sta­tus and puts that per­ver­si­ty at the heart of the the­ol­o­gy. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong’ is a baf­fling and alarm­ing claim to any­one from a soci­ety untouched by the strange­ness of the Jesus move­ment.”
    • This is a remark­able essay about Chris­tian­i­ty by a non-Chris­t­ian. 10/10 rec­om­mend.
  2. Ross Douthat’s The­o­ries of Per­sua­sion (Isaac Chotin­er, The New York­er): “This is not con­spir­a­cy-adja­cent, but I think that nice sec­u­lar peo­ple like you and Sam are sort of blind to some obvi­ous super­nat­ur­al real­i­ties about the world. I think lots of peo­ple have good rea­sons to end up in that kind of ter­ri­to­ry. And the ques­tion I don’t know the answer to is: Why is it so nat­ur­al once you’re in that ter­ri­to­ry to go all the way to where R.F.K. is?” He con­tin­ued, “I spend a lot of my own intel­lec­tu­al ener­gy try­ing not to let my sort of eccen­tric views blind me to the fact that the estab­lish­ment still gets a lot of bor­ing, obvi­ous things right.”
    • I found this interview/profile of Douthat charm­ing.
  3. Sin­gle­ness Is Not a Sin (Lyman Stone, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mar­riage is insti­tut­ed for mutu­al ser­vice by spous­es and joint ser­vice to the next gen­er­a­tion. Celiba­cy is insti­tut­ed for ser­vice to the church (not as a require­ment for church ser­vice but as a pos­si­ble aid to it). Wid­ows like­wise are com­mand­ed to be hos­pitable and help­ful to younger peo­ple. Unless sin­gle­ness is clear­ly defined as a state that has some pur­pose ori­ent­ed toward the good of the neigh­bor (not just inci­den­tal­ly ben­e­fi­cial but pur­po­sive­ly so), it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand what pos­si­ble endorse­ment the sta­tus can be giv­en. It is not sin­ful, but it is not good.”
  4. Let’s Have a Talk About Edu­ca­tion and Reli­gious Atten­dance (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I just don’t know how you look at all this data that I’ve brought to bear and con­clude that there’s not a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship between edu­ca­tion and reli­gious atten­dance. You most cer­tain­ly can­not con­clude that it’s a neg­a­tive rela­tion­ship. That finds basi­cal­ly no sup­port in this data at all. There’s some evi­dence that the rela­tion­ship may not be sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, but for me, the regres­sion clears that up. Peo­ple who are more edu­cat­ed are more like­ly to be attend­ing a reli­gious ser­vice in the local house of wor­ship this week­end than those with a high school diplo­ma or less. That’s what the pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence tells me.”
    • A deep­er dive than you often find on this top­ic. Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. ‘O Slay the Wicked’: How Chris­tians Sing Curs­es (Greg Morse, Desir­ing God): “Do we ever say any­thing uncom­fort­able in the pres­ence of evil — or worse, do we even care? The psalmists did. We accuse them of cru­el­ty; they accuse us of a twist­ed sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. We accuse them of not con­sid­er­ing man; they accuse us of not con­sid­er­ing God.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Before You Share Your Faith! How to Be ‘Evan­ge­lism Ready’ (Matt Smethurst, The Gospel Coali­tion): a 16 minute pod­cast rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I liked the con­tent, the deliv­ery was less grip­ping than I expect­ed. Worth­while.
  7. Book Review: Elon Musk (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I think Elon Musk is 1‑in‑1,000 lev­el intel­li­gent — which is great, but means there are still 300,000 peo­ple in Amer­i­ca smarter than he is. I think he wins by being 1‑in-10,000,000 intense.”
    • This review is full of fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ries. 10/10 rec­om­mend if you have any inter­est what­so­ev­er in Elon Musk.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 416

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 416, which is mild­ly inter­est­ing in the fol­low­ing equa­tion: ‑4162+7682 = 416,768 (note the neg­a­tive in front of 4162)

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. To Be Hap­py, Mar­riage Mat­ters More Than Career (David Brooks, New York Times): “My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about mar­riage. Please respect the tru­ism that if you have a great career and a crap­py mar­riage you will be unhap­py, but if you have a great mar­riage and a crap­py career you will be hap­py. Please use your youth­ful years as a chance to have roman­tic rela­tion­ships, so you’ll have some prac­tice when it comes time to wed. Even if you’re years away, please read books on how to decide whom to mar­ry. Read George Eliot and Jane Austen. Start with the mas­ters.”
    • Unlocked. I am sure the com­ments sec­tion on this arti­cle will explode with out­raged New York Times read­ers, but Brooks is cor­rect and obvi­ous­ly so.
    • Relat­ed: He’s The One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “The woman who dis­cards the tra­di­tion­al ‘Men have to ask me’ social norm has a super­pow­er. Just pro­file guys who meet your stan­dards and take the ini­tia­tive, and you gen­er­ate a menu of prime options. Yes, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom says that a woman can sub­tly let a guy know that she likes him. But this over­looks men’s abject clue­ness­ness and timid­i­ty. Instead, be forth­right. Crazy as it seems, earnest­ly telling your first choice, ‘I should be your girl­friend’ will almost nev­er be mis­tak­en for ‘throw­ing your­self’ at a guy.”
      • Caplan’s fol­low-up to his ear­li­er post help­ing guys screen gals. This one helps gals screen guys. Most of his insights ring true to me.
    • Relat­ed: You Don’t Have Plen­ty of Time (Abby Far­son Pratt, Sub­stack): “There’s an odd pre­oc­cu­pa­tion in our cul­ture with ‘readi­ness,’ as if it were a uni­ver­sal truth. But ‘readi­ness’ is nev­er defined. We’re giv­en the vague, unhelp­ful advice to ‘wait until we’re ready’ to get mar­ried or have kids. What would that even mean? How do you know when you’re ‘ready’ for that kind of respon­si­bil­i­ty? You won’t. You’ll nev­er be ready. Aside from choos­ing a good part­ner, there’s no amount of prepa­ra­tion that will make child-rear­ing eas­i­er or smoother or sim­pler. You become ready through the very act of being mar­ried and rais­ing chil­dren. Lord will­ing, this is the time in your life to rise to the occa­sion and put fears of ‘readi­ness’ to rest.”
  2. Does God Con­trol His­to­ry? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Indeed, while allow­ing for the com­plex­i­ty of debates about what God wills as opposed to what God mere­ly per­mits, prov­i­den­tial­ism is basi­cal­ly inescapable once you posit a divin­i­ty who made the world and acts in his­to­ry. Which is why prov­i­den­tial­ist inter­pre­ta­tions endure among the most lib­er­al Chris­tians as well as the most tra­di­tion­al, with both pro­gres­sive and con­ser­v­a­tive the­olo­gies jus­ti­fy­ing them­selves through read­ings of the ‘signs of the times,’ the sea­sons of his­to­ry, the action of the Holy Spir­it and the like.”
    • Unlocked. I real­ly liked this one.
  3. What Rise of Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Jesse Smith, Cur­rent): “What has surged in recent years isn’t Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism so much as the rejec­tion of reli­gion in the pub­lic square. The per­cent­age of Amer­i­cans report­ing no reli­gious affil­i­a­tion has sky­rock­et­ed in the 21st cen­tu­ry, from lit­tle over 5% in 1990 to near­ly 30% in 2021. Most of these peo­ple belonged to a reli­gious com­mu­ni­ty at some point. Many did not part on the best of terms and would be hap­py to see the sta­tus of Amer­i­can reli­gion tak­en down a peg.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Bene­dic­tine Col­lege.
  4. The Man Who Knows What the World’s Rich­est Peo­ple Want (and How To Get It) (Maxwell Stra­chan, Vice): “To Flem­ings, the con­cept that the world’s rich­est peo­ple are con­spir­ing togeth­er to rig the game in their favor seems fool­ish. He believes the clos­est the rich have come to assem­bling as an illu­mi­nati-like clan is in St. Barts between Christ­mas and New Year’s Eve, because he’s been there. ‘I got­ta tell you, some of the rich­est peo­ple in the world are strug­gling to talk to a girl,’ he said. ‘There is no way these peo­ple are lead­ing some fuck­ing glob­al con­spir­a­cy.’ ”
    • Over­all quite inter­est­ing. From back in June.
  5. Lega­cy admis­sions are cru­cial to America’s high­er edu­ca­tion dom­i­nance (Jamie Beat­on, The Hill): “Oxford was found­ed in 1096. Despite its sto­ried his­to­ry, it has a far small­er dona­tion cul­ture and less engaged alum­ni. Its biggest donors — among them Bill Gates and Steven Schwarz­man — didn’t even attend the uni­ver­si­ty. It has no lega­cy admis­sions, and at points in its his­to­ry, it has strug­gled finan­cial­ly. In con­trast, Har­vard cul­ti­vates an amaz­ing­ly engaged alum­ni com­mu­ni­ty with fre­quent, well-attend­ed reunions, advi­so­ry boards fea­tur­ing all of their promi­nent alum­ni and an aspi­ra­tional mes­sage that once you are a part of this com­mu­ni­ty, it will become your com­mu­ni­ty for life. Lega­cy admis­sions — the prac­tice of pref­er­en­tial­ly admit­ting the chil­dren of alum­ni — is one of the pow­er­ful, tan­gi­ble char­ac­ter­is­tics that helps fos­ter that sense of com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • I have nev­er seen some­one con­trast the elite US schools with their inter­na­tion­al coun­ter­parts this way. I am sure there is a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to be made, but this made for fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing and I find his argu­ment plau­si­ble.
  6. Stan­ford WBB Star Cameron Brink Opens Up On How NIL Wealth Allowed Her Stay In School Over WNBA (Grayson Weir, Out­kick): “NIL has made it so that Brink can earn just as much mon­ey as an ‘ama­teur’ as she can in the WNBA. It is prob­a­bly more lucra­tive to stay in school than to go pro.… Brink said that her NIL wealth has set her up for the rest of her life. If bas­ket­ball didn’t work out, she could be self-suf­fi­cient. She would ‘con­tin­ue to live com­fort­ably.’ ”
  7. The real rea­son the high­est-paid doc­tors are in the Dako­tas (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Over­all, the aver­age U.S. lawyer can expect about $7.1 mil­lion in life­time income, a bit high­er than a pri­ma­ry-care doc­tor ($6.5 mil­lion) but well behind the broad­er physi­cian aver­age of $10 mil­lion, accord­ing to a sophis­ti­cat­ed analy­sis of about 2 mil­lion tax records from lawyers and more than 10 mil­lion tax records from doc­tors.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 414

Once a week, usu­al­ly on Fri­day, 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 414, which is a mul­ti­ple of 23.

A day late because I was trav­el­ing. Next week’s may be delayed as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The best pre­dic­tor of hap­pi­ness in Amer­i­ca? Mar­riage (W. Brad­ford Wilcox and David Bass, Unherd): “This truth is borne out yet again in new research from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, which found that mar­riage is the ‘the most impor­tant dif­fer­en­tia­tor’ of who is hap­py in Amer­i­ca, and that falling mar­riage rates are a chief rea­son why hap­pi­ness has declined nation­al­ly. The research, sur­vey­ing thou­sands of respon­dents, revealed a star­tling 30-per­cent­age-point hap­pi­ness divide between mar­ried and unmar­ried Amer­i­cans. This hap­pi­ness boost held true for both men and women.… Oth­er fac­tors do mat­ter — includ­ing income, edu­ca­tion­al achieve­ment, race, and geog­ra­phy — but mar­i­tal sta­tus is most influ­en­tial when it comes to pre­dict­ing hap­pi­ness in the study.”
    • Relat­ed: More on Sin­gle­ness, Mar­riage, and the Church (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…some read­ers took me to be say­ing that sin­gle peo­ple are in sin or not grow­ing in their faith the way that mar­ried peo­ple are. Not so. There is a pro­found (sub­tle, per­haps, but pro­found) dif­fer­ence between say­ing that some­thing has intrin­sic val­ue in the nor­ma­tive life of an indi­vid­ual or the church, and say­ing that this thing is com­pul­so­ry.”
    • Very help­ful fol­lowup to the arti­cle I shared last week.
  2. The Hard-Drug Decrim­i­nal­iza­tion Dis­as­ter (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “…the sticky fact that pro­po­nents of decrim­i­nal­iza­tion rarely con­front is that addicts are not mere­ly sick peo­ple try­ing to get well, like can­cer suf­fer­ers in need of chemother­a­py. They are peo­ple who often will do just about any­thing to get high, how­ev­er irra­tional, self-destruc­tive or, in some cas­es, crim­i­nal their behav­ior becomes. Addic­tion may be a dis­ease, but it’s also a lifestyle — one that decrim­i­nal­iza­tion does a lot to facil­i­tate. It’s eas­i­er to get high wher­ev­er and how­ev­er you want when the cops are pow­er­less to stop you.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. She’s the One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Humans are good at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to most mate­r­i­al con­di­tions. You get used to your house, your car, your clothes, your gran­ite coun­ter­top, and your mon­ey. What humans are bad at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to is… oth­er peo­ple. If you spend a lot of time around humans whose com­pa­ny you enjoy, you will prob­a­bly be hap­py. If you spend a lot of time around human whose com­pa­ny you detest, you will prob­a­bly be unhap­py. Over your life­time, you will prob­a­bly spend more time around your spouse than any oth­er human. So while find­ing good friends and good co-work­ers is cru­cial for hap­pi­ness, find­ing a good spouse is even more so.”
    • This is full of most­ly-good advice for guys.
  4. What’s going on with the reports of a room-tem­per­a­ture super­con­duc­tor? (John Tim­mer, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The per­fect time to write an arti­cle on those results would be when they’ve been con­firmed by mul­ti­ple labs. But these are not per­fect times. Instead, rumors seem to be fly­ing dai­ly about pos­si­ble con­fir­ma­tion, con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­to­ry results, and informed dis­cus­sions of why this mate­r­i­al either should or should­n’t work.”
    • Relat­ed: LK-99 Is the Super­con­duc­tor of the Sum­mer (Ken­neth Chang, New York Times): “I tru­ly don’t get the excite­ment about her preprint,” said Dou­glas Natel­son, a pro­fes­sor of physics at Rice Uni­ver­si­ty in Hous­ton. “That’s not to say that it’s wrong, just that the­o­rists and com­pu­ta­tion­al mate­ri­als folks very often pro­duce preprints based on the lat­est claimed mate­r­i­al of inter­est. There’s noth­ing excep­tion­al in that.”
  5. You’re prob­a­bly recy­cling plas­tic wrong. And it’s not your fault. (Robert Gebel­hoff, Wash­ing­ton Post):  “Pic­ture this: You fin­ish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throw­ing it out, you check the bot­tom of the cup to see the icon­ic recy­cling sym­bol. That means it can be tossed in the recy­cling bin, right? Wrong. Solo cups are made of poly­styrene, a plas­tic that is very dif­fi­cult to recy­cle.… Nowa­days, the only plas­tic items that are con­sis­tent­ly recy­cled are bot­tles and jugs made out of poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late (which is labeled with a ‘1’) and high-den­si­ty poly­eth­yl­ene (labeled with a ‘2’), as a sur­vey of recy­cling facil­i­ties by Green­peace shows. Recy­cling plants typ­i­cal­ly reject almost every­thing else, mean­ing it ends up in land­fills.”
  6. He Held Up a Bank to Get His Own Mon­ey (Raja Abdul­rahim, New York Times): “The cen­tral bank has not allowed depos­i­tors to with­draw more than a few hun­dred dol­lars a month since a finan­cial col­lapse in 2019. So, like oth­er des­per­ate Lebanese before him — some of them sim­i­lar­ly com­pelled by the need for med­ical treat­ment — Mr. al-Haj­jar went to his bank in Novem­ber, threat­en­ing to burn it down unless it gave him some of the $250,000 he had in his account. More than 12 hours lat­er, he left with $25,000 in stacks of cash. ‘If you don’t go in and threat­en to hurt them, they won’t give you any­thing,’ he said months lat­er.”
    • Absolute­ly wild (and sad) sto­ry.
  7. California’s free prison calls are repair­ing estranged rela­tion­ships and aid­ing reha­bil­i­ta­tion (Kwasi Gyam­fi Asiedu & Helen Li, Los Ange­les Times): “At a time when most con­sumers enjoy free or low-cost call­ing, prison phone calls at their peak in Cal­i­for­nia cost more than $6 per 15 min­utes via a pri­vate telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider. That allowed only hur­ried, super­fi­cial con­ver­sa­tions between the sib­lings — with one eye always on the clock.”

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 The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good. From vol­ume 291.

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 412

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I feel ill on Fri­day) 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.

412 is the sum of twelve con­sec­u­tive primes: 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. If Satan Took Up Mar­riage Coun­sel­ing  (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog) : “If Satan took up mar­riage coun­sel­ing, he would want peo­ple to believe mar­riage is so risky that it is best to post­pone it almost indef­i­nite­ly, that it is so sig­nif­i­cant and per­ilous an under­tak­ing that peo­ple should not even con­sid­er it until they have com­plet­ed their edu­ca­tion, begun a career, and become well estab­lished in life. He would espe­cial­ly want young peo­ple to antic­i­pate it with a sense of dread instead of excite­ment.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Well worth your time.
  2. Spir­its of the Cloud: A Demonolo­gy of the Inter­net (Thomas Har­mon, The Amer­i­can Mind): “…there is much wis­dom that can be gained by turn­ing to ancient sources to under­stand how these mys­te­ri­ous forces oper­ate and how to resist them. In brief, they oper­ate by prey­ing on our imag­i­na­tions and desires, which are often­times obscure even to us, espe­cial­ly when we try to pen­e­trate the veil between present and future or between human and divine by some sort of mag­i­cal or tech­ni­cal means. James Lind­say zeroes in on this aspect: ‘Demons influ­ence peo­ple through their emo­tions and their inter­pre­ta­tions of fea­tures of their lives.’ Since they are airy, and proud of their ele­va­tion over our earth­i­ness, they have a weak­ness: humil­i­ty and an embrace of our earth­bound bod­ies (as a mat­ter of fact, the word ‘humil­i­ty’ is derived from a Latin word mean­ing ‘dirt’ or ‘earth’, humus).”
    • The author is a Catholic the­olo­gian.
  3. Many on dat­ing apps are already in rela­tion­ships or aren’t seek­ing actu­al dates, new study finds (Angela Yang, NBC News): “Hope­ful swipers look­ing to find their next part­ners on dat­ing apps have grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned in recent years, and a new study reveals the poten­tial root of their dif­fi­cul­ties: Many dat­ing app users aren’t seek­ing roman­tic mee­tups at all. Half of near­ly 1,400 Tin­der users sur­veyed said they weren’t inter­est­ed in actu­al­ly find­ing dates, accord­ing to research pub­lished last month. Near­ly two-thirds report­ed they were already in rela­tion­ships, and some were mar­ried while they were using the app.”
    • Just meet some­one cute and flirt with them in real life. Like, say, in your cam­pus min­istry or church.
  4. What’s Wrong With the “What’s Wrong With Men” Dis­course (Conor Fitzger­ald, Sub­stack): “…men find ther­a­py and the ther­a­peu­tic world­view alien and unhelp­ful. Even the flim­si­est male spec­i­men has psy­cho­log­i­cal needs relat­ed to accom­plish­ment, strength, use­ful­ness and capa­bil­i­ty; an atmos­phere of uncon­di­tion­al empa­thy and unre­strained emo­tion­al dis­clo­sure can be poi­so­nous to those things. What­ev­er the rea­son, men under­stand that ther­a­py (the prac­tice) is most­ly just the med­ical cod­i­fi­ca­tion of a typ­i­cal­ly female world­view as objec­tive­ly true and cor­rect. Most men aren’t going to be inter­est­ed in join­ing a con­ver­sa­tion con­duct­ed in that spir­it.”
    • This is very well put. The whole essay is inter­est­ing. Ignore the typos and dig in!
    • Relat­ed: Gen­der cri­sis is real­ly a mar­riage cri­sis (Inez Step­man, Tri­bune-Demo­c­rat): “…women with few or no ties to the oppo­site sex in the form of mar­riage and fam­i­ly are diverg­ing sharply not only from the views of men, but also from those of their mar­ried sis­ters. Mar­ried men, unmar­ried men and mar­ried women are reg­is­ter­ing pri­mar­i­ly the same polit­i­cal pref­er­ences, with only small gaps in vot­ing pat­terns between them, while sin­gle women are run­ning fast in the oppo­site direc­tion from the rest. For exam­ple, a poll in the past round of midterms found mar­ried peo­ple of both sex­es and sin­gle men all going for Repub­li­cans by major­i­ty mar­gins with­in a hand­ful of points of each oth­er (52% to 59%). Sin­gle women, on the oth­er hand, went strong­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic by a land­slide of 68% to 31%.”
  5. Stan­ford Pres­i­dent Will Resign After Report Found Flaws in His Research (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Dr. Tessier-Lav­i­gne, 63, will relin­quish the pres­i­den­cy at the end of August but remain at the uni­ver­si­ty as a pro­fes­sor of biol­o­gy.”
    • Tessier-Lav­i­gne mat­ter shows why run­ning a lab is a full-time job (H. Hold­en Thorp, Sci­ence): “I had seen many researchers who had tak­en big admin­is­tra­tive jobs strug­gle with over­see­ing their research group. Many inci­dents sim­i­lar to those involv­ing Tessier-Lav­i­gne arose because the prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tors were too busy attend­ing to their oth­er high-pro­file jobs. David Bal­ti­more had to resign as pres­i­dent of Rock­e­feller Uni­ver­si­ty when sci­en­tif­ic mis­con­duct in his lab­o­ra­to­ry was uncov­ered (he lat­er became the pres­i­dent of the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, and like Tessier-Lav­i­gne, was not found to have direct knowl­edge of the mis­con­duct). In a dif­fer­ent set of prob­lem­at­ic inter­ac­tions relat­ed to research, José Basel­ga resigned as head of Memo­r­i­al Sloan-Ket­ter­ing Can­cer Cen­ter because he failed to dis­close (inten­tion­al­ly or not) indus­try rela­tion­ships in papers pub­lished by his research group. These exam­ples reflect how tend­ing to a major admin­is­tra­tive posi­tion and run­ning a lab­o­ra­to­ry at the same time are sim­ply too much for one per­son.”
    • Richard Saller to take over as inter­im pres­i­dent in Sep­tem­ber (Ori­ana Riley, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty is a huge oper­a­tion with a $9 bil­lion bud­get — about 10 times larg­er than the first Roman emper­or Augus­tus had for the whole empire,” Saller wrote. “I have a steep learn­ing curve ahead of me.”
  6. Reli­gion as a Cul­tur­al and Polit­i­cal Iden­ti­ty (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple like the *idea* of reli­gion, with­out the actu­al trap­pings of said reli­gion. They are the kind of folks that talk about con­cepts like bib­li­cal val­ues with­out every step­ping foot inside a church. They want (pri­mar­i­ly) Chris­t­ian val­ues to be pro­tect­ed, but they don’t actu­al­ly want to spend much time under­stand­ing the the­ol­o­gy around the val­ues. For them, reli­gion has become a social and cul­tur­al mark­er — not a spir­i­tu­al one. It’s basi­cal­ly become anoth­er cud­gel in the cul­ture war. So, when the debate heats up over issues of sex­u­al­i­ty, gen­der, or abor­tion these are the kind of folks who will post memes on Face­book that include ref­er­ences to scrip­ture vers­es, despite the fact that they them­selves nev­er read the Bible.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. The Con­sum­ing Fire of Love (Peter J. Lei­thart, First Things): “God isn’t ter­ri­fy­ing because he’s unlov­ing. He’s ter­ri­fy­ing because Love is terrifying—undiluted love, love that refus­es com­pro­mise with evil, love that will not nego­ti­ate away the good of the beloved by allow­ing the beloved to set the terms of her love, love that promis­es a good and a future beyond all the beloved can ask or imag­ine.”

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 “Major­i­ty-Minor­i­ty” Myth (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Most demo­graph­ic esti­mates of the ‘white’ pop­u­la­tion are based on the Cen­sus def­i­n­i­tion: ‘non-His­pan­ic white.’ But what of ‘His­pan­ic whites’ — those whose lin­eage may come from South or Latin Amer­i­ca in eth­nic­i­ty but who also iden­ti­fy racial­ly and social­ly as white? If you include them in this cat­e­go­ry, Amer­i­ca remains two-thirds ‘white’ all the way through 2060 and beyond.” A fas­ci­nat­ing read. From vol­ume 289

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 411

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 411, which is the num­ber you used to dial to get direc­to­ry assis­tance from the phone com­pa­ny. It’s now slang for infor­ma­tion, so an emi­nent­ly appro­pri­ate num­ber for today’s com­pi­la­tion.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This roundup has more spir­i­tu­al­ly enrich­ing con­tent than usu­al.
    • The Shep­herd Boy Who Wasn’t (Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If we stick only to the ‘God can use any­one’ read­ing of David’s ori­gin sto­ry, we cel­e­brate God’s ele­va­tion of the over­looked and risk miss­ing God’s clear warn­ing to the ele­vat­ed: It can hap­pen to you. But if we see David for who he real­ly was, we real­ize that every great man or woman who ris­es to pow­er in the church is only one rooftop stroll away from a David-sized crash.”
      • I have unlocked this arti­cle. It’s longer than it needs to be, but good. The author is a pro­fes­sor of Old Tes­ta­ment at Hunt­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Fear­ing God as Sons, Not Slaves (Ben Edwards, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “This dis­tinc­tion is per­haps most clear­ly seen in Exo­dus 20: ‘And all the peo­ple were watch­ing and hear­ing the thun­der and the light­ning flash­es, and the sound of the trum­pet, and the moun­tain smok­ing; and when the peo­ple saw it all, they trem­bled and stood at a dis­tance. 19 Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us your­self and we will lis­ten; but do not have God speak to us, or we will die!’ How­ev­er, Moses said to the peo­ple, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you will not sin.’’ Moses tells Israel: ‘Don’t be afraid, but fear.’ The Israelites were tempt­ed to cow­er in ter­ror as they beheld God’s majesty. But the fear they tru­ly need­ed was one that would lead them to avoid sin.”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal
    • Why I Gave Up Drink­ing (Sarah Bessey, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I think that con­vic­tion has got­ten a bit of a bad rap in the Church over the past lit­tle while. It’s under­stand­able. We have an over­cor­rec­tion to a lot of the legal­ism and bound­ary-mark­er Chris­tian­i­ty that dam­aged so many, the behav­iour mod­i­fi­ca­tion and rule-mak­ing and impo­si­tion of oth­er people’s con­vic­tions onto our own souls. But in our steer­ing away from legal­ism, I won­der if we left the road to holi­ness or began to for­get that God also cares about what we do and how we do it and why.”
      • From last year, but was just rec­om­mend­ed to me by a friend. It’s good.
    • Why Do We Go to Church? (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “Why do so many of us who claim to be Chris­tians nev­er attend church? I know every­one has their rea­sons, but here’s the hard truth: Jesus loves the church. He gave His life for the church. Jesus con­sid­ers the church to be His bride. I don’t care how close you are to Jesus, you can’t tell Him His wife is ugly. If we love Jesus, then we love His church. If you don’t love the church, then there’s rea­son to ques­tion if you love Jesus.”
    • Rap­ture (Pre­cept Austin): “In our day, the Rap­ture has come under attack by many. Some think it rep­re­sents the nov­el teach­ings of ‘defeatist Chris­tians.’ Oth­ers think it is pure fan­ta­sy. Still oth­ers seem to savor the idea of the Church going through the events of the Tribu­la­tion in order to ‘prove her met­al’ or refine her. We find it dif­fi­cult to under­stand why there is such oppo­si­tion by Chris­tians to the idea that the bride­groom would come for His bride pri­or to pour­ing forth His wrath (John 14:1–3)?”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent and I quite liked this one. I’m pret­ty famil­iar with the argu­ments in favor of a pret­ribu­la­tion­al rap­ture (a posi­tion I myself hold), but there was stuff in here that was new to me.
  2. Why Match School And Stu­dent Rank? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…elite col­leges are machines for laun­der­ing priv­i­lege. That is: Har­vard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented peo­ple, and 25% rich/powerful peo­ple. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart peo­ple get to net­work with elites, which is the first step to becom­ing elite them­selves. And the rich peo­ple get mixed in so thor­ough­ly with a pool of smart/talented peo­ple that every­one assumes they must be smart/talented them­selves. After all, they have a degree from Har­vard!”
  3. A Church’s Quest for Enchant­ment (Mag­gie Phllips, Tablet): “[Pen­te­costal­ism] began in the 19th cen­tu­ry, with the par­al­lel devel­op­ment through­out the Anglos­phere of a grass­roots spir­i­tu­al enthu­si­asm ground­ed in per­son­al expe­ri­ence. Its the­ol­o­gy is root­ed in his­to­ry both ancient and more con­tem­po­rary: a key event in the Chris­t­ian Bible’s Book of the Acts of the Apos­tles, as well as the the­ol­o­gy of John Wes­ley, who is rec­og­nized as the father of Method­ism. In the U.S., its cat­a­lyst is usu­al­ly iden­ti­fied as a reli­gious revival move­ment that began in Los Ange­les in 1906; over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, it still enjoys a wide­spread pres­ence in the U.S., and is a rapid­ly grow­ing glob­al phe­nom­e­non.”
    • This is actu­al­ly a pret­ty good overview of Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty for a sec­u­lar audi­ence. She gets a few details wrong, but over­all this is sol­id.
  4. The Church in a Time of Gen­der War (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “What I am say­ing is that I now believe most evan­gel­i­cal church­es should look at their sin­gle mem­bers with both eyes open: an appre­ci­a­tion for the won­der­ful poten­tial of their sea­son of life, but also a desire and strat­e­gy, as the Lord per­mits, to find ways to get these peo­ple Chris­t­ian spous­es. In oth­er words, I don’t think we should fear admit­ting that mar­riage is, in the major­i­ty of sit­u­a­tions we will come across, prefer­able to sin­gle­ness.”
    • Some peo­ple think I empha­size romance too much. I actu­al­ly won­der if I empha­size it too lit­tle.
    • Also, not reflect­ed in the excerpt but very much at the heart of the piece is the author’s con­cern that men and women in our cul­ture are col­lec­tive­ly believ­ing the worst of each oth­er and assum­ing the answer is for the oth­er gen­der to become more like them. He’s get­ting at some­thing real here. I think Chi Alpha has a health­i­er dat­ing cul­ture than oth­er places at Stan­ford, and I still see the ten­den­cies James cri­tiques in this piece in mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty.
    • Men are awe­some. Women are awe­some. You should prob­a­bly want to get mar­ried. Which means you should prob­a­bly go on dates.
  5. Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilder­ness. (Chris­tine Emba, Wash­ing­ton Post): “To the extent that any vision of ‘non­tox­ic’ mas­culin­i­ty is pro­posed, it ends up sound­ing more like stereo­typ­i­cal fem­i­nin­i­ty than any­thing else: Guys should learn to be more sen­si­tive, qui­et and social­ly apt, seem­ing­ly overnight.… I’m con­vinced that men are in a cri­sis. And I strong­ly sus­pect that end­ing it will require a pos­i­tive vision of what mas­culin­i­ty entails that is par­tic­u­lar — that is, nei­ther neu­tral nor inter­change­able with fem­i­nin­i­ty. Still, I find myself reluc­tant to ful­ly artic­u­late one. There’s a rea­son a lot of the writ­ing on the cri­sis in mas­culin­i­ty ends at the diag­no­sis stage.”
    • Unlocked. Sol­id over­all but amus­ing­ly clue­less at a few points. 
    • Relat­ed, although the author dis­claims it: Fight­ing (Marc Andreesen, Sub­stack): “At a pri­vate con­fer­ence this week, I was asked what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Mixed Mar­tial Arts (MMA) train­ing, Elon Musk’s chal­lenge to a cage fight, and pub­lic reports that a Zuckerberg/Musk MMA fight may well hap­pen lat­er this year, per­haps in the actu­al Roman Colos­se­um. I said, ‘I think that’s all great.’ And in this post I explain why.… I was also asked whether I con­sid­er Mark and Elon to be role mod­els to chil­dren in their embrace of fight­ing, and I said, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, yes. And I fur­ther rec­om­mend­ed to the audi­ence that they have their chil­dren trained in MMA, as my wife and I are.”
  6. The Tri­umph of the Good Samar­i­tan (Ash Mil­ton, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The activist defend­ers of the tent cities had seized on a moral lan­guage deeply ingrained in West­ern soci­eties. The notion of duty to neigh­bors, espe­cial­ly those who are poor and vul­ner­a­ble, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong inher­i­tance from Chris­tian­i­ty. But they were using con­cepts they did not care to under­stand. For the activists, the home­less weren’t neigh­bors in any rec­i­p­ro­cal sense, just a bat­ter­ing ram to use in their own con­flicts with soci­ety. By rhetor­i­cal­ly re-premis­ing neigh­bor­ly duties as a one-way rela­tion­ship of trib­ute and def­er­ence paid to the wretched by soci­ety, they ren­dered the very moral con­cepts they invoked use­less. They demand­ed neigh­bor­ly duties from strangers but pro­vid­ed no pos­si­bil­i­ty of those involved ever becom­ing any­thing like real neigh­bors to each oth­er.”
    • A bit longer than nec­es­sary, but quite good.
  7. Who’s Afraid of Moms for Lib­er­ty? (Robert Pondis­cio, The Free Press): “Moms for Lib­er­ty is the beat­ing heart of this country’s move­ment of angry parents—and Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion has nev­er seen any­thing quite like it.… The basic thrust of Moms for Liberty’s advocacy—that par­ents, not the gov­ern­ment, should have the ulti­mate say in what chil­dren are taught in pub­lic schools—has legs. Not one sub­group in McLaughlin’s crosstabs—Trump or Biden vot­ers; pro-life or pro-choice; black, white, or His­pan­ic; urban, rur­al, or suburban—disagrees.”

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 Book Review: The Cult Of Smart (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “DeBoer recalls hear­ing an immi­grant moth­er proud­ly describe her old­er kid’s achieve­ments in math, sci­ence, etc, “and then her younger son ran by, and she said, off­hand, ‘This one, he is maybe not so smart.’ ” DeBoer was orig­i­nal­ly shocked to hear some­one describe her own son that way, then real­ized that he wouldn’t have thought twice if she’d dis­missed him as unath­let­ic, or bad at music. Intel­li­gence is con­sid­ered such a basic mea­sure of human worth that to dis­miss some­one as unin­tel­li­gent seems like con­sign­ing them into the out­er dark­ness.” Nor­mal­ly the best thing about Alexander’s blog is his book reviews. This one was just okay (smart and well-writ­ten but not astound­ing) and then all of a sud­den he turned his rant up to 11. Hang in until you reach the phrase “child prison.” If you’re not sold at that point, stop read­ing. From vol­ume 289.

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 402

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 402, which is the unusu­al HTTP sta­tus code for “pay­ment required.” I don’t believe I’ve ever encoun­tered that sta­tus code in the wild.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Mar­tin Luther King, Chris­t­ian Rad­i­cal (Jonathan Eig, Wall Street Jour­nal): “King’s Chris­tian­i­ty presents a chal­lenge to lib­er­als, who are often uncom­fort­able with reli­gion in the pub­lic square, as well as to con­ser­v­a­tives, who are more like­ly to embrace reli­gion in pol­i­tics but don’t align them­selves with the impli­ca­tions of many of King’s core beliefs.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. Why Amer­i­cans Feel More Pain (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Anoth­er big fac­tor in pain dif­fer­ences is class. One study found that poor Amer­i­cans are more than three times as like­ly to report pain as wealthy Amer­i­cans. Anoth­er found that just 2 per­cent of those with grad­u­ate degrees report severe pain, while almost 10 per­cent of high school dropouts do. ‘Basi­cal­ly, if you’ve got a B.A., you’re vac­ci­nat­ed against all of this crap,’ said Deaton, the econ­o­mist. Deaton, Case and Stone found that each suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tion among less-edu­cat­ed Amer­i­cans has report­ed more pain at any giv­en age.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. It’s longer than you might expect, but quite inter­est­ing.
  3. The Dead­ly Things We Do Not See (Anony­mous, World Beyond War): “This was war, in any case. In war peo­ple die. But, as my friends empha­size to me, the peo­ple of Mar­i­upol would have liked not to die. They would have liked to avoid the ordeal alto­geth­er.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Very sober­ing.
  4. Reg­is­tered Sex Offend­er Con­tin­ued to Min­is­ter to Chi Alpha Stu­dents (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Over the past 30 years, well over a hun­dred men involved in Texas chap­ters of the cam­pus min­istry Chi Alpha have seen Daniel Savala naked. At Savala’s house in Hous­ton, he invit­ed them to strip down and talk about spir­i­tu­al issues in his sauna. He offered his bed to overnight guests while sleep­ing in the buff. And at least 13 men report­ed that Savala molest­ed or raped them while they sought his spir­i­tu­al advice as col­lege stu­dents, accord­ing to a new online forum col­lect­ing vic­tims’ sto­ries.”
  5. The Rise of Right-Wing Wokeism (Kevin deY­oung, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The appeal of some­thing like Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism is that it presents a mus­cu­lar alter­na­tive to sur­ren­der and defeat. Few con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians have any­thing like a sophis­ti­cat­ed polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. But they know gay so-called mar­riage is wrong and drag queen sto­ry hour is bad. So if the two choic­es in polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy are (1) sup­port­ing gay ‘mar­riage’ because that’s what plu­ral­ism demands and defend­ing drag queen sto­ry hour as a bless­ing of lib­er­ty or (2) Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism, mil­lions of Chris­tians in this coun­try are going to choose the lat­ter. I imag­ine the same basic equa­tion explains the new­found inter­est in Catholic inte­gral­ism as well.”
  6. It’s my respon­si­bil­i­ty as a crone (Abby Far­son Pratt, Sub­stack): “Near­ly 13 years mar­ried, I feel like it’s my respon­si­bil­i­ty, as a crone, to tutor the youth and encour­age them to stop wait­ing around and get mar­ried already. Please, just do it. What are you wait­ing for? To move in togeth­er? To get your ‘career estab­lished,’ what­ev­er the hell that means? To see if you’re real­ly a ‘good fit’? To get ‘more finan­cial­ly sta­ble’? That’s all blus­ter. We had about $300 to our names when we got mar­ried. We most­ly ate rice and beans for years, sub­sist­ing on my tiny salary, while Guion wrote poems all day, and we were incan­des­cent­ly hap­py. I’m so thank­ful we didn’t wait 10 years, till we were in our ear­ly 30s, set in our ways and com­fort­able with our wealth. Mar­riage would have been a lot hard­er then.”
  7. Why Jour­nal­ists Have More Free­dom Than Pro­fes­sors (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “First, the media is, by def­i­n­i­tion, an out­ward-fac­ing, audi­ence-dri­ven enter­prise, depen­dent on some kind of mass mar­ket for its via­bil­i­ty.… it still cre­ates mar­ket-based checks on cer­tain inter­nal mech­a­nisms of ide­o­log­i­cal enforce­ment. To take a tele­vi­sion exam­ple, it’s not just up to inter­nal opin­ion at Net­flix or HBO whether to air a Dave Chap­pelle spe­cial or keep run­ning Bill Maher’s show; the mass audi­ence gets a pret­ty impor­tant vote as well.”
    • I find his argu­ment com­pelling. Unlocked.
    • This seems to me to be some­what relat­ed (describ­ing how insti­tu­tion­al cul­tures shape behav­ior): Assim­i­lat­ing Women into Male Insti­tu­tions (Arnold Kling, Sub­stack): “When women became accept­ed into lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties, in the pro­fes­sions, and into man­age­r­i­al and exec­u­tive posi­tions in the work place, both men and women held some harm­ful cul­tur­al atti­tudes. Many of us have come to under­stand how men need to change. The need for women to change is less well appre­ci­at­ed.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Why Did So Many Doc­tors Become Nazis? (Ash­ley K. Fer­nades, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “It is wor­thy of empha­sis that although many pro­fes­sions (includ­ing law) were ‘tak­en in’ by Nazi phi­los­o­phy, doc­tors and nurs­es had a pecu­liar­ly strong attrac­tion to it. Robert N. Proc­tor (1988) notes that physi­cians joined the Nazi par­ty in droves (near­ly 50% by 1945), much high­er than any oth­er pro­fes­sion. Physi­cians were sev­en times more like­ly to join the SS than oth­er employed Ger­man males.” The author is a physi­cian and a bioethi­cist at The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty. From vol­ume 281.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 399

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 358

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 358, a num­ber whose base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion ends in its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 3583 is 111021, and 3587 is 1021.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cul­ture War That More Chris­tians Should Be Fight­ing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “But the peo­ple who debate the moral­i­ty (or lack there­of) of Dis­ney or Hob­by Lob­by rarely dis­cuss how much paid time off these com­pa­nies pro­vide employ­ees or whether they pay a liv­ing wage or what the wealth dis­par­i­ty is between their top and bot­tom earn­ers or whether they have ade­quate mater­ni­ty leave poli­cies or how much a cor­po­ra­tion finan­cial­ly gives back to a com­mu­ni­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Sur­pris­ing Case for Mar­ry­ing Young (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Our analy­ses indi­cate that reli­gious men and women who mar­ried in their twen­ties with­out cohab­it­ing first — a pat­tern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a ‘T’ — have the low­est odds of divorce in Amer­i­ca today.”
  3. I should have loved biol­o­gy (James Somers, per­son­al blog): “In the text­books, aston­ish­ing facts were pre­sent­ed with­out aston­ish­ment. Some­one prob­a­bly told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoul­ders, say­ing how crazy that was.”
  4. Con­cern­ing abor­tion and the Supreme Court:
    • Chris­tians Should Rejoice Over Dobbs (Carl True­man, First Things): “Nobody of whom I am aware, for exam­ple, regards the lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz in 1945 as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing. No child freed that day was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that his lib­er­a­tors were mem­bers of the Red Army, act­ing on Stalin’s orders. Yet the Red Army was engaged in a mil­i­tary action that, in the long term, would lead to the noto­ri­ous Iron Cur­tain divid­ing Europe. Nobody regards the fall of Hitler as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing, even though it was only made pos­si­ble by the Amer­i­cans and the British strik­ing a deal with Joseph Stal­in. Yes, Trump is obnox­ious, but he isn’t Stal­in, and he did deliv­er on the abor­tion issue. Dobbs is a moment for joy.”
    • Here’s the Sur­pris­ing Back­sto­ry of the Down­fall of Roe v. Wade (Mark Hem­ing­way, Real Clear Inves­ti­ga­tions): “…con­ser­v­a­tive activists have long argued the pro-life move­ment was a moral cause on par with the civ­il rights move­ment – and ignor­ing the strate­gies com­mon­ly used to get the Supreme Court’s atten­tion would amount to uni­lat­er­al dis­ar­ma­ment in a lot of impor­tant legal bat­tles.”
    • SCOTUS Jus­tices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cit­ed Her Boss­es to End Roe (Kara Voght & Tim Dick­in­son, Rolling Stone): “In the shad­ow of the high court, across the street from its cham­bers, sits a clus­ter of unas­sum­ing row hous­es known only to the ini­ti­at­ed as ‘Min­istry Row.’ The strip is host to evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal groups that have spent the past sev­er­al decades push­ing Belt­way con­ser­v­a­tives to embrace the reli­gious right’s polit­i­cal caus­es…”
    • In a Post-Roe World, We Can Avoid Pit­ting Moth­ers Against Babies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, New York Times): “The first per­son to see us was anoth­er ultra­sound tech­ni­cian. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heart­beat. ‘It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,’ she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice soft­ened a lit­tle, ‘You don’t have to think of it that way.’ For her, part of pro­vid­ing care was deny­ing there was any room for grief. But when the sur­geon came in, he began by express­ing his con­do­lences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby.”
    • There’s a fol­low-up at My Ectopic Preg­nan­cies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to write about Camil­lian to describe not just what is allowed but what can be offered to par­ents who are los­ing their child when the doc­tors acknowl­edge their child as a child, rather than min­i­miz­ing their loss.” This one is a sad reminder of how cru­el peo­ple can be.
    • Angry about Roe, many jour­nal­ists focus on cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters as vil­lains behind it all (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Like, the CPCs have out­wit­ted the abor­tion clin­ics when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what many preg­nant women real­ly want and it’s clear the abor­tion facil­i­ties have suf­fered finan­cial loss­es as a result. How about ask­ing peo­ple at the lat­ter hard ques­tions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad mar­ket­ing deci­sion that was? Hint: It might have to do with the free ultra­sounds offered by the CPCs. Offer­ing this ser­vice was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it real­ly cried out for cov­er­age. But, you know. That wasn’t news.”
    • ‘The Pro-Life Gen­er­a­tion’: Young Women Fight Against Abor­tion Rights (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Young women whose activism is not con­nect­ed to reli­gious belief are rel­a­tive new­com­ers to the move­ment, where they make up a small but bois­ter­ous niche. Kristin Turn­er start­ed a chap­ter of a youth cli­mate group in her home­town, Red­ding, Calif. Her Insta­gram bio includes her pro­nouns (she/they) and sup­port for Black Lives Mat­ter. She describes her­self as a fem­i­nist, an athe­ist and a left­ist. At 20, she is also the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for Pro­gres­sive Anti-Abor­tion Upris­ing, whose goals include edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about ‘the exploita­tive influ­ence of the Abor­tion Indus­tri­al Com­plex through an anti-cap­i­tal­ist lens.’”
  5. See­ing Like a Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins and I hope he is cor­rect.
  6. Why I’m Giv­ing Up Tenure at UCLA (Joseph Man­son, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Grad­u­al­ly, one hire at a time, prac­ti­tion­ers of ‘crit­i­cal’ (i.e. left­ist, post­mod­ernist) anthro­pol­o­gy, some of them lying about their beliefs dur­ing job inter­views, came to com­prise the department’s most influ­en­tial clique. These mil­i­tant fac­ul­ty mem­bers recruit­ed even more mil­i­tant grad­u­ate stu­dents to work with them.”
  7. Trans­gen­der-relat­ed:
    • Trans­for­ma­tion of a Trans­gen­der Teen (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Mar­tin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of jus­tice,” said Falls Church Angli­can rec­tor Sam Fer­gu­son, who has spent time with mul­ti­ple tran­si­tion­ing young adults and their fam­i­lies. “The Bible also envi­sions the long arc of redemp­tion, which aims at the res­ur­rec­tion of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the begin­ning. Our Cre­ator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chro­mo­some, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemp­tion, not against it.”
    • Pro­nouns and Cas­es Involv­ing Trans­gen­der Par­ties (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “For a bit of the fac­tu­al back­sto­ry, which may be rel­e­vant because it may illus­trate how use of pro­nouns might col­or read­ers’ per­spec­tive: Peti­tion­er C.G. was found to have sex­u­al­ly assault­ed a 14-year-old boy (whom the opin­ion calls Alan, a pseu­do­nym) who had been ‘diag­nosed with autism’ and who was appar­ent­ly work­ing in school at three grades below his age lev­el. At the time, C.G., who was 15 and who would a year lat­er be 300–345 pounds and 6’4” or 6′5″, was appar­ent­ly per­ceived by peo­ple, or at least by Alan, as male.” For a lit­tle more on the case: No First Amend­ment Right to Legal Name Change (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Uh oh! (The Far Side)
  • Study Finds 92% Of Cal­i­for­ni­ans Who Flee The State Don’t Sur­vive First Win­ter (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Clas­sic (The Far Side)
  • Magi­cian Dan White Proves Fate Real­ly Exists (The Tonight Show, YouTube): ten and a half min­utes.
  • Fright­en­ing But 100% True Facts About Guns (Baby­lon Bee, YouTube): four min­utes. The first part is the fun­ni­est, it drags a lit­tle at the end.
  • Tru­ly Hum­bled to Be the Author of This Arti­cle (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and espe­cial­ly if you’re around the high-sta­tus world of the achieva­trons, you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must nev­er tweet about any event that could actu­al­ly lead to humil­i­ty. Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I went to a par­ty, and nobody noticed me.’ Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I got fired for incom­pe­tence.’ The whole point of humil­i­ty dis­play is to sig­nal that you are hum­bled by your own mag­nif­i­cent accom­plish­ments. We can all be hum­bled by an awe­some moun­tain or the infini­tude of the night sky, but to be hum­bled by being in the pres­ence of yourself—that is a sign of tru­ly great humil­i­ty.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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.