Tag: mental health

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 482

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Christians Oppose Euthanasia (Brad East, Christianity Today): “Unlike many topics in theology and ethics, this is not an issue on which the church has ever been ambiguous. There were no early church councils to debate the taking of innocent life. It didn’t take centuries of conflict to adjudicate. On the contrary, Christians were known from the start for their adamant rejection of pagan disrespect for those unwanted by their families or deemed socially useless—the unborn and newborn, disabled and elderly.”
  2. When Was Jesus Born? Italian Researcher Puts Christ’s Birth in December, 1 BC (Edward Pentin, National Catholic Register): “[Herod was alive when Jesus was born, and we know Herod died after a lunar eclipse.] Ultimately, based on the most accurate analysis possible today of the visibility to the naked eye of the lunar eclipses, the search for one of it really visible in Judea 2,000 years ago, placed in relation to other chronological and historical elements deduced from the writings of Josephus Flavius and Roman history, leads to a single possible solution — namely, a dating of the death of Herod the Great occurring in AD 2–3, compatible with the conventional beginning of the Christian era — i.e., the Nativity occurred at the end of the year 1 BC.”
  3. Science and Religious Dogmatism (Matías Cabello, SSRN): “But why were nonbelievers and other freethinkers particularly creative? Not because of lack of mysticism. Deists, with their mystical belief in some sort of deity, have been as productive in science as outright atheists (if not more). One possible explanation for their joint abnormally high productivity is that freethinking and atheism opened up a whole path of ideas disconnected from the prevailing thought system.… By the same token, however, it follows that, in a world overwhelmingly populated by atheists, the most ingenious ideas should instead come from the few religiously minded (as long as their theology offers a sufficiently stimulating thought system to discover the secrets of nature). A result consistent with this interpretation is the decline of the atheism coefficient among 20th-century born scientists of table 1. By then, atheism had gone from being a dangerous and unconventional worldview to become widespread among the scientific elite.” 
    • An interesting paper. I don’t buy all its conclusions, but I enjoyed reading it. The excerpt is from at the end and is an important point: nonconformity brings some benefits, but nonconformity changes over time. It looks like heresy when orthodoxy reigns, but nonconformity often looks like orthodoxy when heresy has dominance. And we live in an era of heresy. As Tyler Cowen often comments: the important thinkers of the future will be religious.
    • The author is, funnily enough, an economist teaching at a university named after Martin Luther.
  4. Two articles making similar points: our current aversion to involuntary commitment is cruel to some people who would greatly benefit from the help that their mental illness causes them to resist. 
    • Jordan Neely Needed to Be Institutionalized (Josh Barro, Substack): “One through-line in the story is the immense amount of government resources that were thrown at trying to keep Neely out of trouble. Through police, courts, jails, homeless outreach, and treatment facilities, New York’s taxpayers spent lavishly on an effort to keep Neely alive, in mental health care, and not posing a danger to the public or himself. But it didn’t work because he was insane and he was not forced to accept the care he needed — except during a stint he spent in jail on Rikers Island, when he was successfully medicated.… it would behoove progressives with pat takes about how what Neely really needed was housing and care to know that he was offered these things over and over again by an extremely well-funded social services apparatus. If you wanted him to have housing and care, you needed to be prepared to force them upon him; and if you weren’t, then you don’t have a solution to the problems of people like him.”
    • The Tragedy of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny (Brendan Ruberry, Persuasion): “[Ending involuntary commitment had a perverse effect, because] as it happens, many patients are, in fact, unwilling to submit to treatment, because nothing does more to harm one’s powers of self-awareness, and one’s ability to recognize the necessity of often lengthy protocols, than debilitating mental illness.”
  5. Make Villains Wicked Again (Germán Saucedo, First Things): “The clear images of true evil present in the best fairy tales, ballads, myths, and legends offer both a vision of what is to be avoided at all costs, as well as a vision of virtue. As such, the ‘sympathetic villain’ genre is a symptom of a society that disagrees on what is good and what is evil, or that tries to explain evil away as trauma, psychopathy, or pathology. But to identify and avoid evil, we must first learn to recognize the good. The insistence on subverting villains is a sign we have lost confidence in our belief that we can know what heroism looks like, a heroism that displays the good that would oppose their unrighteousness.”
  6. Insurance companies aren’t the main villain of the U.S. health system (Noah Smith, Substack): “It’s not hard to understand why people hate health insurers. When you interact with the U.S. health care system, the providers — the hospital staff, the doctor, the nurses, the technicians — all just take care of you. The only time they ask you for money during your doctor visit is when you pay your copay at the front desk, and that’s usually not that big — if the bill is big, they’ll send it to you later. So for the most part, your interaction with the providers is just you walking up and asking to be taken care of, and them taking care of you. Your interaction with the health insurer, on the other hand, feels like a struggle against an enemy who wants to destroy you.”
  7. ‘Huge setback’: SF’s massive psychedelic church is leaving the city (Lester Black, SF Gate): “Hodges founded his church in 2019 around the belief that cannabis, magic mushrooms and other psychedelic substances are religious sacraments that give humans spiritual insights. Any adult can join by signing up and paying a $5 membership fee, which gives them access to purchase a wide range of psychedelic products. Last year, the church expanded from its original location in Oakland to a vacant building on Howard Street in San Francisco. The church now counts over 115,000 members.” 
    • Please note that the author is the “Cannabis editor” at SF Gate. Sometimes San Francisco becomes a parody of itself.

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 479

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How the Ivy League Broke America (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “Students who got into higher-ranking colleges, which demand high secondary-school GPAs, are not substantially more effective after they graduate. In one study of 28,000 young students, those attending higher-ranking universities did only slightly better on consulting projects than those attending lower-ranked universities. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale student would have been only about 1.9 percent more proficient than a student from Cleveland State when measured by the quality of their work. The Yale student would also have been more likely to be a jerk: The researchers found that students from higher-ranking colleges and universities, while nominally more effective than other students, were more likely to pay ‘insufficient attention to interpersonal relationships,’ and in some instances to be ‘less friendly,’ ‘more prone to conflict,’ and ‘less likely to identify with their team.’ ” 
    • Interesting throughout. I liked this line — “If we could get to the point where being snobby about going to Stanford seems as ridiculous as being snobby about your great-grandmother’s membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, this would transform not just college admissions but American childhood.”
    • Somewhat related: We Asked for It (Michael W. Clune, The Chronicle of Higher Education): “The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus.… In return for their tuition, students are given the faculty’s high-class political opinions as a form of cultural capital. Thus the public perceives these opinions — on defunding the police, or viewing biological sex as a social construction, or Israel as absolute evil — as markers in a status game. Far from advancing their opinions, professors in fact function to invalidate these views for the majority of Americans who never had the opportunity to attend elite institutions but who are constantly stigmatized for their low-class opinions by the lucky graduates. Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports.” 
      • The author is an English professor at Case Western. He throws a lot of strong punches.
  2. Jordan Peterson Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (Brad East, Christianity Today): “the power of Peterson’s style is his marriage of existential urgency with hermeneutical creativity. He expects the Word to show him wonders. He wrestles with the text—a mystery and a stranger—until he secures a blessing from it. He takes for granted that its depths are bottomless. Do pastors model this posture in the pulpit? Do teachers in the classroom? Do scholars on the page?Christian readers should learn from Peterson’s boldness, his disposition of awe and docility before the sacred page. He opens the scroll with the same spirit as the psalmist: ‘Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law’ (119:18).”
    • Recommended by a colleague. This is one of the best Christian engagements with Jordan Peterson I’ve seen.
  3. In the Era of the Judges (Stiven Peter, Mere Orthodoxy): “The holders of cultural capital have not simply substituted Christian values with an alternative set but promote the very loss of order itself. The only values are no values. That is, our culture promotes libertinism, everyone doing what is right in their own eyes. Sociologically, Hunter calls this the process of dissolution: ‘By dissolution, I refer to the deconstruction of the most basic assumptions about reality.’ Our culture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is promoted is turning inside ourselves and determining our own values. This process results in the fracturing of society alongside tribes/enclaves of people with similar values.” 
    • This is a review of Aaron Renn’s book, and Renn says: “This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens — improving them in the process.”
  4. Rich Inner Death (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Our mental health crisis is usually cast as either a failure of therapeutic techniques—we just haven’t unlocked our trauma well enough yet—or else an unavoidable consequence of climate anxiety, polarization, or bad media. But [perhaps the crisis stems from how we are trained to view the world]. There is a way of living your life as a kind of constant retreat into both the safety and the chaos of your own imagination, and nearly everything about how we learn, communicate, and work as modern people helps us condition for this. We are taught early and often to direct our gaze inward.” 
    • Several substantive insights in this article.
  5. Why the Federalist Society Has Been a Great Success (Ed Whelan, Substack): “The Federalist Society’s success has led many on the Left—and, more recently, some envious folks on the Right—to revile and demonize it. But its critics routinely display that they do not understand how it operates and how it has succeeded.… It does not submit amicus briefs. It does not undertake to enlist the public in political undertakings. And it has never done any of these things. And therein lies one of the great keys to its success.”
  6. AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably (Brian Porter & Edouard Machery, Scientific Reports [Nature]): “We collected 5 poems each from 10 well-known English-language poets, spanning much of the history of English poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s-1400), William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Samuel Butler (1613–1680), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and Dorothea Lasky (1978- ). Using ChatGPT 3.5, we generated 5 poems ‘in the style of’ each poet. We used a ‘human out of the loop’ paradigm: we used the first 5 poems generated, and did not select the ‘best’ out of a group of poems or provide any feedback or instructions to the model beyond ‘Write a short poem in the style of <poet> ‘. In the first experiment, 1,634 participants were randomly assigned to one of the 10 poets, and presented with 10 poems in random order: 5 poems written by that poet, and 5 generated by AI ‘in the style of’ that poet. For each poem, participants were asked whether they thought the poem was generated by AI or written by a human poet.… Contrary to what earlier studies reported, people now appear unable to reliably distinguish human-out-of-the-loop AI-generated poetry from human-authored poetry written by well-known poets.… Furthermore, people prefer AI-generated poetry to human-authored poetry, consistently rating AI-generated poems more highly than the poems of well-known poets across a variety of qualitative factors.” 
    • The authors are at the University of Pittsburgh.
  7. Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings (Paul Bloom, The Chronicle of Higher Education): “You may have heard of the study published in 2020 concluding that Black newborns have higher survival rates when Black doctors attend to them. It got a huge amount of coverage in the popular press. It was even cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent last year on the court’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions. The research, Jackson claimed, shows the benefits of diversity. ‘It saves lives,’ she wrote. The same journal just published a re-analysis of the data. It turns out that the ‘effect is substantially weakened, and often becomes statistically insignificant,’ once you take into account that Black doctors are less likely to see the higher-risk population of newborns with low birth weight. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the re-analysis because I didn’t believe the original finding.… It’s like what someone once said about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Ginger Rogers is doing them backward and in high heels. A published finding that clashes with the political prejudices of reviewers and editors is a Ginger Rogers finding. It had to be twice as good.” 
    • The author is a psychology professor (emeritus at Yale, currently at U Toronto).

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 473



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 473, the largest known number whose square (223729) uses different digits than when it is raised to the 4th power (50054665441).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Evangelistic Shift (Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy): “So what accounts for this shift and how should Christians respond? The answer to the first question might be surprisingly simple: The shift dates back to the growing awareness, acceptance, and promotion of transgender sexual identities in mainstream American culture. This shift, dating to the mid 2010s and probably peaking in the early 2020s, did two things that fundamentally changed the evangelistic landscape for Christians in America.”
  2. Willful ignorance of the male suicide crisis (Richard V. Reeves, Substack): “It’s essentially impossible to come away from this [New Yorker] essay without a strong sense that the teen suicide crisis is, in fact, a teen girl suicide crisis. That is absolutely false. In fact, for every five teenagers dying from suicide, four are likely to be boys.”
  3. Is Evangelicalism Really Protestant? (Aaron Renn, Substack): “Every time I read a book that describes the religious history of America that talks about the nature of Protestantism in the country, it strikes me that the Protestantism of the American past is alien to today’s evangelicalism. They are different enough to raise the question as to whether or not American evangelicalism is actually Protestant in important ways.… All is not well for American Christianity to say the least. It’s easy to point at trends in the world to explain this, but given the manifest and widely publicized problems within evangelicalism, I would submit that at least as much time should go into introspection and internal reform.”
  4. Yes, Third-Trimester Abortions Are Happening in America (Emma Camp, The Atlantic): “…Colorado, which is home to clinics that perform third-trimester abortions, recorded 137 third-trimester abortions in 2023. That’s only one state—eight other states, plus Washington, D.C., have no restrictions on third-trimester abortions. Just a few minutes from my office building in D.C., a clinic offers abortions up to nearly 32 weeks. In nearby Bethesda, Maryland, a clinic performs abortions up to 35 weeks’ gestation.… Americans are broadly uncomfortable with third-trimester abortions. A 2023 Gallup poll found that although more than two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal in the first trimester, just 22 percent think it should be legal in the third. And a 2021 Associated Press poll found that just 8 percent of respondents believe that third-trimester abortions should be legal in all cases.”
  5. A Defense of Legacy Admissions, the Surprising Engine of Meritocracy (Teddy Ganea, Stanford Review): “The purpose of college admissions isn’t to create a new elite from scratch. It’s to meld meritorious non-elites with the existing elite, to incorporate fresh talent and ideas into the highest echelons of power. It should be a win-win-win: established elites benefit from new merit, new merit benefits from elite connections and resources, and society benefits from a more meritocratic elite. Legacy admissions is a prerequisite for this mission statement, because you can’t meld together two groups if one of them is missing.… Critics of legacy admissions ignore the key reality of human history: that the existing elite is almost always deeply entrenched, and breaking into it requires more than just individual talent — it requires access. And this is where legacy admissions play their most crucial role: by enabling meritorious non-elites to mix with the existing elite, they open up the real opportunity for upward mobility.” 
    • Well-argued and provocative. My favorite kind of article!
  6. 55/45 is a really close race (Nate Silver, Substack): “I’ve never seen an election in which the forecast spent more time in the vicinity of 50/50, and I probably never will… on average, since our forecast relaunch on July 30, Harris has won 49.4 percent of simulations, and Trump has won 50.2 percent. (These don’t quite add up to 100 because of the slim possibility of a 269–269 Electoral College tie.) People understand intuitively that a 50/50 or 49/51 forecast is a toss-up. If the forecast is 55/45 in some direction instead, however, confusion can abound — even though this isn’t any different from 50/50 for most practical purposes. Some of the problem is that people can confuse this forecast for a prediction of vote share: if Harris were to win 55 percent of the vote and Trump 45 percent, that would be the biggest landslide in an American election since Ronald Reagan in 1984. But that’s not what this forecast is saying. Rather, it’s that Harris will win the Electoral College about 11 times out of 20 and Trump will win it 9 times out of 20: still basically a toss-up, just with the coin weighted ever so slightly in Harris’s favor.”
  7. Don’t Vote Like Your Life Depended on It (Chris Stirewalt, The Dispatch): “Politicians and media hype merchants tell us every cycle that this is the most important election in history, but the truth is that in a nation with stable system of elections held in a free, fair manner and abundant constitutional protections for political minorities, the knowledge that no election is the final word helps us to live in relative harmony.… It’s not the end of anything if the party opposite your own wins an election, just the continuation of a 235-year long argument that, Lord willing, will go on for another 235.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Doctor admits wearing disguise to poison mom’s partner with fake covid shot (Leo Sands, Washington Post): “A British doctor has been found guilty of attempting to kill his mother’s longtime partner by disguising himself as a nurse and injecting his elderly victim with a flesh-eating toxic substance while pretending to administer a routine coronavirus vaccination.” 
    • I do not mean to suggest that attempted murder is less serious than the sorts of things included above — but I do mean to suggest this is a story you will read because it is wild more than because it has anything to do with your life.
  • The ‘Goth’ Volleyball Player Was Actually Toning Things Down (Callie Holtermann, New York Times): “I was in a film study meeting with my whole team, and I was telling one of my teammates that I was so confused why my Instagram was blowing up. And Allison [Voigt, her team’s head coach] turned to me and showed me Twitter, and was like, ‘You’re going viral. You have two million views right now.’ I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to do or what was going to happen from this.”

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 466



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 466, which is 1234 in base 7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Following Jesus in the Desert of Mental Illness (Samuel D. James, Substack): “Bryant writes that a breakthrough for him came when he realized that Christ had not committed himself to Bryant’s plans, but to Bryant himself. Once the life that Bryant had planned for himself disintegrated, he was left with deeply painful questions about whether Jesus had stopped loving him. But eventually he realized that Christ wanted something more for Bryant than his own (good) desires. He wanted Christ for him. He wanted dependence on the cross.”
  2. Danger, AI Scientist, Danger (Zvi Mowshowitz, Substack): “[Did you hear about] the automated AI Scientist that tried to rewrite its code to get around resource restrictions and launch new instances of itself while downloading bizarre Python libraries? Its name is Sakana AI. (魚≈סכנה). As in, in hebrew, that literally means ‘danger’, baby. ”
  3. Election-related stuff:
    • Voting Isn’t A Window Into the Soul (Jonah Goldberg, The Dispatch): “The idea that voting is a window into someone’s soul strikes me as almost a theological heresy and a failure of empathetic imagination. It assumes that the person who voted wrong—or right—sees the world the same way you do and that they invest the same moral, philosophical, and political significance in their vote that you do in yours.”
    • Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’ (Ezra Klein interviewing Nate Silver, New York Times): “What you seem to be doing in the book is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of risk tolerance and thinking about risk. And you wrote something that caught my eye: ‘Covid made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces.’ And you go on to say, ‘People are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance and that this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote.’ ” 
      • An interesting (and kinda long) interview.
  4. Christianity and politics intersecting in various ways: 
    • Trump has put social conservatives in a dilemma (Ed Feser, personal blog): “…I will set out the relevant moral principles for deciding how to vote when faced with a choice between candidates whose positions on matters related to abortion, marriage, and the like are gravely immoral. Finally, I will discuss how these principles apply to the present case.” 
      • Feser is my favorite living philosopher. Written from a Catholic perspective but addressed to a broader audience.
    • A pastor said his pro-Trump prophecies came from God. His brother called him a fake. (Danielle Paquette, Washington Post): “On the morning he could no longer stand it, the preacher was sipping coffee at his kitchen table. The house was quiet. The boys weren’t up yet. Josiah Johnson wanted to savor the peace, but his attention drifted to his younger brother, the one he had decided was a false prophet. How many souls, he wondered, was that Christian influencer manipulating on social media right now? Hundreds of thousands followed Jeremiah, who’d helped popularize the far-right belief that God handpicked Donald Trump to lead the United States.” 
      • Long, interesting, sad.
    • My Old Church’s Fundamentalist Wing Canceled Me (David French and Vishakha Darbha, New York Times): “What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, ‘I’m not voting for Trump,’ they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, ‘It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.’… What that does is it raises the stakes to this eternal level. And what ends up happening is they just sweep aside all of these scriptures about loving your enemies, being kind to those, blessing those who persecute you. All of that is just swept aside in favor of the burning certainty and ferocity of the culture war.”
    • The All-Male Christian Group Seeking a Resurrection in the Trump Era (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Evangelical Christians have been a reliable Republican voting bloc since the 1980s, but they have historically been averse to hearing overtly partisan messages in spiritual settings. That has been shifting in recent years, as some high-profile conservatives, like Mr. Kirk and others at the conference, have characterized political engagement as a pastoral obligation. Some pastors who have leaned into preaching on topics like abortion and gender issues have seen their churches boom in a time of broad declines in attendance.” 
      • Pretty good article, although I take strong issue with the last sentence. Abortion and gender issues aren’t political simply because there is a partisan divide on them. Christians have been talking about human nature and sexual ethics since before America was a nation and should the Lord tarry we will continue after America is a distant memory.
  5. They All Got Mysterious Brain Diseases. They’re Fighting to Learn Why (Greg Donahue, New York Times)“In the context of a cluster of atypical cases that had stumped some of the most experienced scientists in Canada, Marrero believed that Jansen had not only overstepped his bounds but had failed to address the situation’s most critical questions: ‘Why so many young? Why so many in one area? Why so many in one family?’ Many of Marrero’s colleagues in the working group agreed. In a leaked email from last year, one of them referred to Jansen’s findings as a ‘loophole’ through which the politicians have eagerly leaped to conclude nothing coherent is going on.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  6. Have National Abortion Numbers Increased Since the Dobbs Decision? (John McCormack, The Dispatch): “At first glance, headlines generated by that report might lead the casual reader to assume anti-abortion laws haven’t done anything to achieve their intended purpose of saving lives. But even if the new report is accurate (more on that below), other studies show that there are likely tens of thousands of infants and toddlers alive today because of laws allowed by the Dobbs decision.”
  7. Reservoir of liquid water found deep in Martian rocks (Victoria Gill, BBC): “The Insight probe was only able to record directly from the crust beneath its feet, but the researchers expect that there will be similar reservoirs across the planet. If that is the case, they estimate that there is enough liquid water on Mars to form a layer across the surface that would be more than half a mile deep. However, they point out, the location of this Martian groundwater is not good news for billionaires with Mars colonisation plans who might want to tap into it. ‘It’s sequestered 10–20km deep in the crust,’ explained Prof Manga.”

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 458



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 458, a number with very few factors. 458 = 229 · 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic): “We’re seeing the international transmission of a novel Western theory of mental health. It’s the globalization of Western—and, just maybe, American—despair.… According to the podcast search engine Listen Notes, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. In celebrity media, mental-health testimonials are so common that they’ve spawned a subgenre of summaries of celebrity mental-health testimonials, including ’39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,’ ‘What 22 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression,’ and ’12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Mental Health.’ ” 
    • Polymath Tyler Cowen called this “one of the best and most important pieces of the year.” Unlocked. 
  2. How to get 7th graders to smoke (Adam Mastroianni, Substack): “Nobody thinks they can whip up an iPhone in their garage over the weekend, but most people think they know how to save the children, fix the schools, reform the prisons, overhaul healthcare, repair politics, restore civility, and bring about world peace. Perhaps that’s why we have iPhones and we don’t have any of those other things.” 
    • This is a humbling essay. 
  3. ChatGPT is bullshit (Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, Ethics and Information Technology): “The machines are not trying to communicate something they believe or perceive. Their inaccuracy is not due to misperception or hallucination. As we have pointed out, they are not trying to convey information at all. They are bullshitting.” 
    • The authors are at the University of Glasgow. Apologies for the language, but the language is at the heart of the point the authors are making.
  4. No Longer Pitiable (Jared Hayden, Mere Orthodoxy): “For Paul, what makes singleness ‘better’ is not the absence of sex as such, for neither sex nor marriage is a sin, as he is at pains to show. Rather, singleness is the ‘happier’ state because it provides believers the opportunity to be ‘anxious about the things of the Lord’ rather than ‘worldly things’ because the ‘appointed time has grown very short.’ For Paul, all singles should live devoted to the Lord… one either leverages singleness for the Lord, like Paul; or one leverages it for worldly or sinful purposes, like idle widows (1 Tim 5:13).”
    • A theologically rich essay about singleness. 
  5. Evolution May Be Purposeful And It’s Freaking Scientists Out (Andrea Morris, Forbes): “Noble is neutral on religious matters. Yet he sees compelling evidence that purpose may be fundamental to life. He’s determined to debunk the current scientific paradigm and replace the elevated importance of genes with something much more controversial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained support from the next generation of origins-of-life researchers working to topple the reign of gene-centrism.”
  6. Some articles about the war in Gaza: 
    • Israelis Are Not Watching the Same War You Are (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “We got used to Israel’s calmest decade, in terms of security and casualties. And all of a sudden, people understand that this was not feasible for the long run. That is to say that we will probably have to see more soldiers fighting in the north and in the south for the coming years, maybe decades. And there will be a death toll. It’s not going to be a permanent war but maybe a permanent state of ongoing operations.” 
      • A fascinating (albeit a tad long) interview with an Israeli intellectual.
    • Getting Aid Into Gaza (German Lopez, New York Times): “Israel has enforced opaque rules that turn back trucks meant for Gaza, citing security concerns. Egypt has blocked aid to protest Israel’s military operations. Hamas has stolen, or tried to steal, aid shipments for its own use.” 
      • A reasonably fair-minded article. Examines multiple perspectives.
  7. Abused by the badge (Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson, John D. Harden, Hayden Godfrey & Nate Jones, Washington Post): “A Washington Post investigation has found that over the past two decades, hundreds of law enforcement officers in the United States have sexually abused children while officials at every level of the criminal justice system have failed to protect kids, punish abusers and prevent additional crimes… The Post identified at least 1,800 state and local law enforcement officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.” 
    • I have long said that the people throwing stones at the Roman Catholic Church for their sexual abuse crisis would be stunned with the far worse numbers on child sexual abuse in the public school system (and I stand by that). But I did not foresee this one and I should have. There is authority, therefore there is abuse of authority.
    • Unlocked.

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 452

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.

452 is a product of 113. Specifically, 452 = 4 · 113. A website informed that it is also the closest integer to 7π, but that’s a weird fact.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘I Knew I Would Pay a Price for My Faith’: China Releases Missionary After Seven Years (CJ Wu interviewing John Cao, Christianity Today): “I did not have a Bible while in prison. Although both my mother and my lawyer brought Bibles to my prison, the correctional staff refused to hand them over to me. My mother would write down Bible verses in her letters to me. Yet the police checked our correspondence: If faith was mentioned in my letters, they would not be delivered. Both prisons had small libraries with hundreds of books. I would search for Leo Tolstoy’s books, since there are some Bible verses in his books. When I found them, I’d be very, very happy and copy the verses in my notebook. In the four years I was there, I copied dozens of verses.”
  2. The adolescent mental health mess (Lucy Foulkes, Medium): “We are in a situation where some adolescents are very legitimately experiencing mental health crises, without decent treatment, while others are inaccurately describing typical developmental stress with the language of disorder.… The whole thing is a mess, and a thousand miles away from the original goal of mental health awareness.” 
    • The author is a psychologist at Oxford.
    • Amplified by the New York Times: Are We Talking Too Much About Mental Health? (Ellen Barry, New York Times): “[The] training could encourage ‘co-rumination,’ the kind of long, unresolved group discussion that churns up problems without finding solutions.… Co-rumination appears to be higher in girls, who tend to come into the program more distressed, as well as more attuned to their friends, he said. ‘It might be,’ he said, ‘that they kind of get together and make things a little bit worse for each other.’”
  3. Perspectives and news about the college protests 
    • The People Setting America on Fire (Park MacDougald, Tablet Magazine): “In fact, it is a mistake both to view the campus protests as a ‘student’ movement and to regard the outsiders as ‘infiltrators’ or somehow separate from the movement. Rather, student activists have been working together with outsiders, with whom they are linked via overlapping activist networks and nationwide organizations.… wealthy donors have been subsidizing months of rolling disruptive street protests by a grab bag of revolutionary and anti-Israel radicals. That leads naturally to a question: To what end?”
    • An Inside Look at the Student Takeover of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall (Sharon Otterman, New York Times): “[The maintenance worker] said he tried to block them and they tried to reason with him to get out of the way, telling him ‘this is bigger than you.’ One person, he recalled, told him he didn’t get paid enough to deal with this. Someone tried to offer him ‘a fistful of cash.’ He said he replied: “I don’t want your money, dude. Just get out of the building.” … Both Mr. Torres and Mr. Wilson said they strongly objected to the tactics of the occupiers, which they said had taken a toll on them. Neither man ever wants to work in Hamilton Hall again.” 
      • A pretty wild story told from a unique perspective
    • How Counterprotesters at U.C.L.A. Provoked Violence, Unchecked for Hours (EIGHT JOURNALISTS!, New York Times): “A New York Times examination of more than 100 videos from clashes at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that violence ebbed and flowed for nearly five hours, mostly with little or no police intervention. The violence had been instigated by dozens of people who are seen in videos counterprotesting the encampment.… Fifteen people were reportedly injured in the attack, according to a letter sent by the president of the University of California system to the board of regents.”
    • Behind the Ivy Intifada (Musa al-Gharbi, Compact Magazine): “Contrary to earlier claims by university and city officials about a large proportion of ‘outside agitators,’ more than 70 percent of those arrested at Columbia had a direct institutional tie to the university. This was reflected in how they were treated after arrest. Most of those swept up were released without charges. Among Columbia affiliates who were formally charged, none faced more than a single misdemeanor charge. Meanwhile, those who faced charges at City College, the nearby public university raided by police the same night, were all hit with felonies. While it’s possible that the City College kids just engaged in more extreme and unlawful activity, it seems more likely that belonging to the elite paid criminal-justice dividends for the Columbia arrestees.” 
      • Wow. Well worth reading. Full of snarky insight. The author is a professor of communication at Stony Brook and is pro-Palestinian.
    • Check Your Privilege (Nick Catoggio, The Dispatch): “Academia could select for kids who show intellectual humility and curiosity, to borrow a point from my colleague Sarah Isgur. Instead they’ve selected for kids who feel not merely entitled to demand that their elders ‘check their privilege’ but morally justified in acting aggressively to make sure they do. All told, one might say that progressives, the great enemies of colonialism, have … colonized higher education over the past half-century. And you know how settler-colonialists are. They can be very defensive when you demand that they vacate territory they regard as rightly theirs. The behavior of campus progressives this month has radiated the sense that American universities are ‘theirs’ in a way that isn’t true of other students. It’s been pointed out repeatedly but can’t be emphasized enough that the sort of disruption in which they’ve engaged wouldn’t be tolerated from those whose political beliefs offended the administration’s leftist orthodoxy.”
  4. Perspectives and news about the war in Gaza 
    • One Photo That Captures the Loss in Gaza (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “An American surgeon who volunteered in Gaza sent me a photo that sears me with its glimpse of overwhelming grief: A woman mourns her young son.… The nurses and other doctors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of complications from malnutrition.”
    • Israel orders Al Jazeera to close its local operation and seizes some of its equipment (Tia Goldenberg and Jon Gambrell, AP News): “The extraordinary order, which includes confiscating broadcast equipment, preventing the broadcast of the channel’s reports and blocking its websites, is believed to be the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet operating in the country.… While including on-the-ground reporting of the war’s casualties, its Arabic arm often publishes verbatim video statements from Hamas and other regional militant groups.… Al Jazeera has been closed or blocked by other Mideast governments.”
    • Kol Hakavod (Russ Roberts, Substack): “Israel going to the finals really shouldn’t float my boat and make my heart sing. But it did. Because here’s the thing. The decision about who advanced to the Eurovision finals tomorrow night was done by a popular vote. There’s no panel of judges in the semifinal round.… Golan advanced. Despite the thousands who marched in the streets and the dozens who booed Golan in the rehearsal hall, probably millions, from the safety of their homes, were able to cast an anonymous vote for Israel.”
  5. The Heresy of Christian Buddhism (Anonymous, Substack): “…while many men can easily recognise the moral evil of debauchery and worldliness, not many see the danger of an ascetic puritanism that pushes too far. Too much emphasis on sin, too much emphasis on humility, too much emphasis on heaven and even too much emphasis on Christ to the exclusion of man soon leads to a Christianity that hates the individual, individuation and the created world. Christianity starts to resemble Buddhism.” 
    • Follow-up: The Buddhist Mood in Evangelicalism (Aaron Renn, Substack): “…the de facto definition of idolatry is wanting anything so much that, if you don’t get it, you are very upset. Hence, the path to avoiding sin and idolatry, the way to please God, is to purge oneself of desires. This is Buddhism. Undoubtedly it would be possible for someone to be engaged in idolatry in some of these cases. But there are a lot of things in this world you should be upset about.”
  6. When Intrusive Thoughts Come (John Beeson, The Gospel Coalition): “Nurture mental playgrounds of gospel creativity.Many of us expend so much energy trying to knock down destructive intrusive thoughts that we have no energy to build constructive imaginations. We believe our minds are dangerous and need to be shut down. But your mind is a gift God intends to be leveraged for his glory. He desires to reshape your mind to become a factory of God-glorifying curiosity.” 
    • Recommended by a student

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cruise ship sails into New York City port with 44-foot dead whale across its bow (ABC News): “A cruise ship sailed into a New York City port with a 44-foot dead whale across its bow, marine authorities said. The whale, identified as an endangered sei whale, was caught on the ship’s bow when it arrived at the Port of Brooklyn on Saturday, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries spokesperson Andrea Gomez said.” 
    • I guess it’s the nautical equivalent of a car hitting a deer. Yikes.

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 436

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 436, which isn’t an especially interesting number. It is, apparently, nontotient, but even after reading about totients I remain uninterested.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. From Vexing Uncertainty to Intellectual Humility (Michael Dickson, Schizophrenia Bulletin):  “I am a 55-year-old husband, father, friend, and professional philosopher. In 1992, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, a porter found me amongst the cows in the meadows of King’s College, after being there for 2 or 3 days. I was in bad physical shape, having eaten nothing, and apparently getting water from the river. He asked what I was doing. I replied: ‘I’m solving a problem about stochastic calculus.’ This statement was true, but did not answer his question. He took me to the hospital, where I remained for some weeks. It wasn’t the first time that I was psychotic, but it was, maybe, the first time that anybody noticed, the first time that I was unable to hide it from others, and therefore from myself.” 
    • The author is a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. A remarkable (and fairly brief) article. 
  2. GovDocs to the Rescue! Debunking an Immigration Myth (Rosemary Meszaros and Katherine Pennavaria, Policy Commons): “No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or ‘written down wrong’ at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend. Many names did get changed as immigrants settled into their new American lives, but those changes were made several years after arrival and were done by choice of someone in the family.”
  3. A Peaceful Solution on Taiwan Is Slipping Away (Michael Beckley, New York Times): “…Taiwan provokes China simply by being what it is: A prosperous and free society. Taiwan’s blooming national identity threatens China with the prospect of permanent territorial dismemberment; and Taiwan’s elections, rule of law and free press make a mockery of Beijing’s claim that Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy. America’s words can’t change any of that. Chinese law explicitly states that Beijing may use force if possibilities for peaceful unification are ‘completely exhausted.’ Because of politics in Taiwan and the United States, those possibilities are dwindling.” 
    • The author is a political scientist at Tufts.
    • Related: Taiwan’s China-skeptic ruling-party candidate wins presidential election (Emily Feng, NPR): “For security reasons, Taiwan does not allow absentee voting, mandating that all voters cast their ballots in-person, on paper only. The physical ballots are then counted by hand at every polling station, a process that is completely open to the public.” The implication being that they are so worried about Chinese meddling that they engage in radical transparency. Wow.
  4. Xi Jinping Is Not Trying to Make Christianity More Chinese (Fenggang Yang, Christianity Today): “Throughout December, the authorities once again tried hard to contain and curb Christmas celebrations inside and outside churches, prohibited students and others from participating in Christmas activities, and detained some house church leaders to prevent them from organizing congregational gatherings. Yet most churches, both the officially sanctioned churches and unregistered house churches, held Christmas Eve and Christmas Day worship services. The online evangelistic galas by Beijing Zion Church and other house churches on Zoom and other platforms are of high artistic quality. Christians shared discreetly on social media that church leaders baptized a number of new believers despite the current ‘bitter winter’ for churches in China.” 
    • I found this bit fascinating: “Many people in the West may not know that in the Chinese Communist political system, the party’s policy is superior to state laws and trumps the constitution. The Chinafication policy has led to the promulgation of a series of administrative regulations and measures, including the vastly expanded Regulations of Religious Affairs that took effect in 2018.”
    • The author is a professor of sociology at Purdue.
  5. You Need To Be Cringemaxxing (Mary Harrington, Substack): “There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is trying. Here’s the thing though: data consistently show that the happiest people — those who feel that their lives are most filled with purpose and fulfilment — are not necessarily those with kids — it’s those who go to church. Those, in other words, who are not just to be indifferent to cool, but actively anti-cool. The first step to a happy and fulfilled life, it appears, is cringemaxxing.” 
    • Some other vaguely-related life advice: Risk-Aversion Is Killing Romance (Freya India, Substack): “Sometimes it seems to me we’ve become so suspicious of each other’s intentions that we pathologise romance and commitment, and end up psychoanalysing to death behaviour that’s actually decent. Now we take everything that comes with real love—being affected by someone else’s emotions, putting your partner’s needs first, depending on them—and call it damage or anxious attachment or trauma. No! It’s called deep connection! And God, yes, wouldn’t it be much easier if it was a pathology, a disease, one we could diagnose and solve because it’s scary and it comes without guarantees. But it isn’t.”
  6. “How Do I Find the Main Point of a Psalm?” (John Piper, Desiring God): “So, the point is to look at the pieces very carefully, to fit them together in midsize units, to jot down the main points of the midsize units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to organize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all together until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, seven, eight, nine points of the midsize units are in a flow that make one big overarching point. You will be surprised, if you take up pencil and paper and do this, what you will see.” 
    • Recommended by a student
  7. Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts (David Brooks, The New York Times): “…[sometimes I] find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive. Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering.” 
    • Related: No joke: Feds are banning humorous electronic messages on highways (AP News): “Among those that will be disappearing are messages such as ‘Use Yah Blinkah’ in Massachusetts; ‘Visiting in-laws? Slow down, get there late,’ from Ohio; ‘Don’t drive Star Spangled Hammered,’ from Pennsylvania; ‘Hocus pocus, drive with focus’ from New Jersey; and ‘Hands on the wheel, not your meal’ from Arizona.” 
      • You think Stanford hates fun? Try the federal bureaucracy!

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 435

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 435, a triangular number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Ground of Our Assurance (D. A. Carson, YouTube): three and a half excellent minutes
  2. No, Not Everyone Needs Therapy (Freya India, Substack): “… there are people who now feel pressured to get professional help for normal negative emotions—teens and pre-teens convinced the reason they’re sad sometimes is because they’re broken and haven’t paid enough to be healed. Now not going to therapy is a red flag. Seeking support from friends and family is exploiting their ’emotional labour’. And men are shamed for preferring to chat to their mates about their problems than pay a stranger, like that one BetterHelp ad where a woman dismisses a guy she’s dating because he ‘doesn’t do therapy’. Think about that! How have we reached the point where we’re stigmatising people for not needing mental health support?”
  3. What If There Is No Such Thing as ‘Biblical’ Productivity? (Brady Bowman, Mere Orthodoxy): “…the ‘productivity mindset’ seems to me, at least in some ways, deeply incongruent with the Bible’s vision of reality. To say it more simply, to adopt an outlook dominated by speed and efficiency and productivity is to adopt a perspective that is alien to the writers of Scripture.…”
  4. New technology interprets archaeological findings from Biblical times (Tel Aviv University, Phys.org): “Applying their method to findings from ancient Gath (Tell es-Safi in central Israel), the researchers validated the Biblical account, ‘About this time Hazael King of Aram went up and attacked Gath and captured it. Then he turned to attack Jerusalem’ (2 Kings 12, 18). They explain that, unlike previous methods, the new technique can determine whether a certain item (such as a mud brick) underwent a firing event even at relatively low temperatures, from 200°C and up.”
  5. US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi to Purge Army (Peter Martin and Jennifer Jacobs, Bloomberg): “The corruption inside China’s Rocket Force and throughout the nation’s defense industrial base is so extensive that US officials now believe Xi is less likely to contemplate major military action in the coming years than would otherwise have been the case, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing intelligence.” 
    • This may be the most important bit of geopolitical news you read this year.
  6. The Misguided War on the SAT (David Leonhardt, New York Times): “With the Supreme Court’s restriction of affirmative action last year, emotions around college admissions are running high. The debate over standardized testing has become caught up in deeper questions about inequality in America and what purpose, ultimately, the nation’s universities should serve. But the data suggests that testing critics have drawn the wrong battle lines. If test scores are used as one factor among others — and if colleges give applicants credit for having overcome adversity — the SAT and ACT can help create diverse classes of highly talented students. Restoring the tests might also help address a different frustration that many Americans have with the admissions process at elite universities: that it has become too opaque and unconnected to merit.” 
    • Not the main point of the essay, but worth commenting that politics poisons whatever it polarizes.
  7. The Peculiar Story of C. S. Lewis and Janie King Moore (Bethel McGrew, First Things): “Lewis’s letters from this period are marked by an understated deep relief. He wrote to a frequent correspondent that he was only just beginning to appreciate ‘how bad it was’ in hindsight. And yet, though we miss the works he might have written under different circumstances, we might also wonder whether the books we have would have been the same, had duty not compelled him to die to self every day for the sake of one fragile, impossible old woman. In the end, his own words rang as true for himself as they did for everyone else: ‘Whether we like it or not God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.’”

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 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 395

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 395, which feels like it ought to have a lot of factors but only has 79 and 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What if Kids Are Sad and Stressed Because Their Parents Are? (David French, New York Times): “The same year that 44 percent of teenagers reported suffering from serious sadness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 41.5 percent of adults reported ‘recent symptoms of an anxiety or depressive disorder,’ an increase from an already high baseline of 36.4 percent just months before. Moreover, while suicide rates have gone up in the youngest cohort of Americans, they still materially lag suicide rates among their parents and grandparents.… Teens do not exist on an island. The connection between parental emotional health and the emotional health of their kids is well established. Moreover, the way parents raise their kids can, of course, directly affect emotional health.” 
    • I have unlocked the paywall on this one.
  2. Company that Trademarked ‘Worship Leader’ Makes Others Drop the Term (Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, Christianity Today): “Since 2016, Authentic Media has owned the rights to the phrase ‘worship leader’ when applied to periodicals, online publications, and websites with resources around worship. Prior to that, the trademark had been owned by Maranatha Music, Worship Leader’s previous owner, since 1993. The company also holds trademarks for ‘worship leader workshop’ and ‘song discovery.’ ”
  3. Is It Time to Quit ‘Quiet Time’? (Dru Johnson and Celina Durgin, Christianity Today): “If today’s common rituals of Bible engagement are not working, then we must disrupt them in favor of deep learning practices. These new habits could consist of communal listening, deep diving, repeated reading of whole books of the Bible, or some other strategy. But the assumption that daily devotions alone will yield scriptural literacy and fluency no longer appears tenable, because it never was.” 
    • Recommended by a student, who says, “The title is very clickbaitish, but the article itself has good points. It’s critiquing the practice of only superficially and passively reading short passages of Scripture isolated from their context in the rest of the Bible and isolated from other believers.”
  4. Education Commentary is Dominated by Optimism Bias (Freddie deBoer, Substack): “The optimism bias in education circles has several orthodoxies. 1. Every student is capable of academic flourishing, and every time a student does not flourish, it must be the result of some sort of error or injustice.… 5. Anyone who disagrees with this doctrine hates children, supports inequality, and doesn’t care about poor people.”
  5. How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT (Tyler Cowen & Alexander T. Tabarrok, SSRN): “One general rule is that you should keep on asking GPT follow-up questions to get more out of it. It is more like squeezing a lemon than throwing a dart at a target.… Don’t be passive, as with GPTs you always need to ask, and it rewards you when you are being demanding.” 
    • A lot of very good advice about using GPT and other LLMs in here in here.
  6. How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives (Musa al-Gharbi, American Affairs Journal): “The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives [showing that conservatives are happier and better-adjusted than liberals] is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well.” 
    • The author is a sociologist at Colombia.
  7. A lot of Stanford-related stories, mostly negative: 
    • The Marvellous Boys of Palo Alto (David Leavitt, The New Yorker): “To grow up in Stanford is to be a son of Stanford in a way that no mere graduate can ever know. Bankman-Fried is a son of Stanford if there ever was one, as am I. And what are sons of Stanford taught? That if we should get into trouble, even real bad trouble, we can rest assured that our parents will bail us out, which is tantamount to resting assured that Stanford will bail us out, since Stanford has taken our parents to its heart and feeds money regularly into their bank accounts and owns the land on which they live. This faith in the certitude of protection, if not unique to the Stanford nation-state, is, I am convinced, one of its most essential aspects.” 
      • The author grew up in the house in which Sam Bankman-Fried is now under house arrest.
    • Stanford’s War Against Its Own Students (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “Any place that sets a bar so high that you have to be literally perfect to get there; and when you get here, if you don’t stay perfect, [Stanford] will punish you with every administrative resource they have for embarrassing them,” Paulmeier added. “To me, that just sounds like an abusive parent, not like an educational institution you should model your kid’s life around.”
    • Stanford’s Dark Hand in Twitter Censorship (Thomas Adamo & Josiah Joner, The Stanford Review): “Emails revealed that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) actively collaborated with Twitter to suppress information they knew was factually true. Taibbi’s investigation revealed that Stanford’s Virality Project ‘recommends that multiple platforms take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’” 
      • Emphasis in original.
    • Next Steps on Protests and Free Speech (Dean Jenny S. Martinez, letter to the Stanford Law School): “I want to set expectations clearly going forward: our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not going to take the form of having the school administration announce institutional positions on a wide range of current social and political issues, make frequent institutional statements about current news events, or exclude or condemn speakers who hold views on social and political issues with whom some or even many in our community disagree. I believe that focus on these types of actions as the hallmark of an ‘inclusive’ environment can lead to creating and enforcing an institutional orthodoxy that is not only at odds with our core commitment to academic freedom, but also that would create an echo chamber that ill prepares students to go out into and act as effective advocates in a society that disagrees about many important issues.” 
      • The dean is spitting straight fire in this letter.

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 Sins That Cry Out to Heaven (Eduardo Andino, First Things): “The Christian tradition speaks of four peccata clamantia, or sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance: murder, sodomy, oppression of the poor, and defrauding workers of their wages…. This is not an arbitrary collection of sins.” From volume 274

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.