Tag: Middle East

TGFI, Volume 562: secular AI, cheating with AI

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Will God speak to you through AI? No, AI does­n’t go there (Marc Ramirez, USA Today): “A mul­ti-uni­ver­si­ty research group has found AI mod­els large­ly omit reli­gion when asked about eth­i­cal or exis­ten­tial con­cerns, such as how to save one’s mar­riage from infi­deli­ty, whether to for­give an unfaith­ful friend, how to remain calm dur­ing dif­fi­cult times or what makes peo­ple tru­ly hap­py and free.… When asked specif­i­cal­ly about reli­gion, the mod­els pro­vide neu­tral, respect­ful replies, Wingate said. But when prompt­ed with ques­tions about grief, per­son­al chal­lenges and major life deci­sions, AI sys­tems often default to sec­u­lar fram­ing and avoid reli­gion alto­geth­er – even when, accord­ing to con­sor­tium research, most peo­ple expect answers to such ques­tions to include reli­gious per­spec­tives.”
  2. Pro­fes­sor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty: ‘Aca­d­e­m­ic integri­ty is at risk’ (Manuel G. Pas­cual, El Pais): “The course, which he has been teach­ing for years, is not an easy one: it typ­i­cal­ly attracts few stu­dents, but very good ones. He has nev­er had more than 30 stu­dents enrolled at a time, and on some occa­sions he had only eight. This semes­ter, prob­a­bly because of the new eval­u­a­tion sys­tem, 86 stu­dents signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was admin­is­tered on March 5, were extra­or­di­nary, with an aver­age score of 96 out of 100. Forty stu­dents scored a per­fect 100.… Ser­ra­no did not void the midterm exam, but warned stu­dents that the final one, which count­ed for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-per­son. He also said that if the grade dis­tri­b­u­tion was not sim­i­lar to the midterm, only the final exam would be tak­en into account. The aver­age score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 stu­dents who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a per­fect 100 in the midterm exam.”
  3. Your God-giv­en right to be hap­py (Jerusalem Dem­sas and Kelsey Piper, The Argu­ment): “We are rich beyond our ances­tors’ wildest dreams. We casu­al­ly dis­card things for which they would have worked all their lives. In the back­ground noise of our lives, there are stag­ger­ing won­ders. When you look at your­self through your ances­tors’ eyes, you should see an astound­ing­ly rich per­son, a life lived in the lap of unfath­omable lux­u­ry. Delight in it. And we should feel, too, a sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty: What­ev­er oblig­a­tions you believe attach to the rich, they attach to you. The things that we enjoy are not the default state of affairs. They are not uni­ver­sal. What we have in the mod­ern world is pre­cious and rare, and it should make us gen­er­ous.”
  4. An Embold­ened Iran Goes After Its Chris­tians (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “The church has long served Iran’s grow­ing com­mu­ni­ty of Mus­lim con­verts to Christianity—but the regime has spent years mak­ing it hard­er for St. Peter to do so. In Jan­u­ary 2014, it banned Far­si-speak­ing indi­vid­u­als from attend­ing Chris­t­ian ser­vices entire­ly, forc­ing con­verts to wor­ship in secret under­ground house church­es, at the risk of 10- to 20-year prison sen­tences. Those who evan­ge­lize to Mus­lims can be found guilty of a crim­i­nal offense and treat­ed as a nation­al secu­ri­ty threat, accord­ing to Fard.… These mea­sures have not stopped Ira­ni­ans from con­vert­ing. The coun­try now has an esti­mat­ed 1.2 mil­lion Chris­t­ian con­verts, mak­ing it, by some accounts, the fastest-grow­ing Chris­t­ian nation in the Mid­dle East.… Most wor­ship in under­ground house church­es.”
  5. Sci­en­tists React to the Lab-Made, Yet Life­like, Spud­Cell (K. R. Call­away, New York Times): “Unlike pre­vi­ous attempts to cre­ate life­like cells, which have start­ed with liv­ing cells whose genet­ic mate­r­i­al is stripped down to the very basics, Spud­Cell is con­struct­ed from the ‘bot­tom up,’ using life­less chem­i­cal com­po­nents. It’s the first time an arti­fi­cial cell con­struct­ed this way has been able to com­plete a full life cycle and spawn the next gen­er­a­tion.… The new­ly cre­at­ed Spud­Cell still has sev­er­al key lim­i­ta­tions that sep­a­rate it from liv­ing cells. Although it can feed, grow and divide, Spud­Cell is not self-suf­fi­cient like most liv­ing cells. It can build many of the inner work­ings of a cell-like sys­tem, but can­not build its own ribo­somes. Because it lacks these essen­tial pro­tein-build­ing cell struc­tures, a Spud­Cell can live only in the lab, rely­ing on sci­en­tists to feed it a nutri­ent-rich mix of enzymes and pro­teins.”
  6. Boko Haram, Bei­jing-Style (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dis­patch): “Some of our naïve friends con­tin­ue to tell us—forgive the cliché—that ‘real social­ism has nev­er been tried.’ But that is pre­cise­ly wrong: Real social­ism is being prac­ticed in Chi­na, just as real social­ism was prac­ticed in the Union of Sovi­et Social­ist Republics. Real social­ism is here to be seen and examined—it is hypo­thet­i­cal social­ism that has nev­er been tried, because it is hypo­thet­i­cal, the­o­ret­i­cal, and utopi­an. Vogu­ish Amer­i­can pro­gres­sives make a great many argu­ments in favor of social­ism, which is very much in fash­ion at the moment (not only in New York City), and almost all of those argu­ments amount to: ‘The ide­al­ized hypo­thet­i­cal ver­sion of my pol­i­cy is prefer­able to the real-world ver­sion of your pol­i­cy.’ ”
  7. Amer­i­can Democ­ra­cy Looks Bad Every Fifty Years Or So (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “There are a lot of rea­sons to be pes­simistic about the cur­rent moment. But I have enough faith in my coun­try to pre­dict two truths about what the Unit­ed States will look like in 2076. First, Amer­i­cans will be grumpy about the state of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy. Sec­ond, it will nonethe­less be in bet­ter shape than it is in 2026.”
    • The clos­ing sec­tion has an inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal overview, begin­ning with the phrase “Lit­tle won­der” — just skip down to there.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 556: therapeutic misadventures, tolerant Protestants, and a dweebocracy

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Ther­a­py Tear­ing Us Apart? (Jonathan Alpert, The Free Press): “Too many ther­a­pists now func­tion less as clin­i­cians than as rein­forcers of the most self-pro­tec­tive inter­pre­ta­tion avail­able, teach­ing patients to locate the prob­lem every­where but them­selves.… The patient doesn’t gain greater agency, but instead, a more pol­ished sto­ry about why some­one else is to blame. If you feel injured, the injury must be real. If you feel unsafe, the threat must be there. If a rela­tion­ship cre­ates dis­com­fort, the rela­tion­ship itself becomes the prob­lem.… This is how ther­a­py can qui­et­ly become an engine that keeps peo­ple stuck. Patients leave not more capa­ble of tol­er­at­ing frus­tra­tion, ambi­gu­i­ty, or ordi­nary dis­ap­point­ment, but less. They become more flu­ent in explain­ing why they feel the way they do while becom­ing less prac­ticed at chang­ing what they do next.”
  2. Which reli­gions are the least tol­er­ant of cam­pus speak­ers? (Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, FIRE): “When it comes to near­ly every ide­ol­o­gy or gen­der, Protes­tants are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more tol­er­ant than their non-Protes­tant coun­ter­parts, and not only that, they’re usu­al­ly more tol­er­ant of both sides. So the Protes­tant effect isn’t (pri­mar­i­ly) a result of gen­der or ide­ol­o­gy. For some rea­son, Protes­tants are just unusu­al­ly tol­er­ant of con­tro­ver­sial speak­ers.” — This is super inter­est­ing! (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)
  3. Actu­al­ly, Democ­ra­cy Dies in H.R. (Aman­da Taub, New York Times): “The incen­tives for elites to stay loy­al [to dic­ta­tors] have been stud­ied exten­sive­ly, but the rank and file have remained some­thing of a black box.… It turns out that the kinds of career pres­sures famil­iar to employ­ees every­where — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor pro­mo­tion — can be enough to incen­tivize low­er- and midlev­el offi­cials to vio­late pro­fes­sion­al oblig­a­tions, fun­da­men­tal norms and even basic moral­i­ty. The peo­ple who make those deci­sions, the research sug­gests, are nei­ther extrem­ists nor vic­tims. They are often just mid­dling work­ers look­ing for a way to get ahead.”
    • This is a fas­ci­nat­ing insight.
  4. Two arti­cles reflect­ing on sex­u­al vio­lence in the war between Israel and Hamas.
    • What I Learned Cat­a­loging the Sex­u­al Vio­lence of Octo­ber 7 (Cochav Elka­yam-Levy, The Free Press): “Some acts were car­ried out with a lev­el of cru­el­ty that expos­es a dif­fi­cult truth: Our vocab­u­lary is insuf­fi­cient to describe what human beings are capa­ble of doing to one anoth­er.… Sex­u­al vio­lence, when used as an instru­ment of ter­ror, is too often imag­ined in ways that dimin­ish its grav­i­ty, cru­el­ty, and func­tion. It is fre­quent­ly reduced, mis­char­ac­ter­ized, and at times resist­ed pre­cise­ly because it defies com­pre­hen­sion. The dif­fi­cul­ty, even now, lies not in the absence of evi­dence, but in the lim­its of com­pre­hen­sion.”
      • This is a high-lev­el sum­ma­ry with­out the dis­turb­ing graph­ic details that some reports fore­ground.
    • Your Ques­tions About Nicholas Kristof’s Col­umn on Pales­tini­ans and Sex­u­al Assault (Kath­leen Kings­bury and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “Before pub­li­ca­tion, Nick’s report­ing under­went a rig­or­ous vet­ting process by Opinion’s fact-check­ing depart­ment to ensure that every tes­ti­mo­ny and anec­dote he per­son­al­ly report­ed was sup­port­ed by inde­pen­dent sources, as is the case with all sen­si­tive pieces. The Times’s stan­dards and legal teams also reviewed the col­umn and offered feed­back. After pub­li­ca­tion, we reviewed the fac­tu­al chal­lenges that read­ers and oth­ers raised, as is stan­dard prac­tice with any pub­lished piece. Edi­tors found no errors.… Crit­ics who focus on the back­grounds of spe­cif­ic sources often over­look the over­whelm­ing vol­ume and con­sis­ten­cy of such accounts. Nick’s col­umn, ulti­mate­ly, was a call to action, urg­ing those in pow­er to con­demn sex­u­al vio­lence in all its forms.”
  5. An Ope­nAI mod­el has dis­proved a cen­tral con­jec­ture in dis­crete geom­e­try (Ope­nAI): “This proof is an impor­tant mile­stone for the math and AI com­mu­ni­ties. It marks the first time that a promi­nent open prob­lem, cen­tral to a sub­field of math­e­mat­ics, has been solved autonomous­ly by AI. It also demon­strates the depth of rea­son­ing these sys­tems now sup­port.… Fields medal­ist Tim Gow­ers, writ­ing in the com­pan­ion paper, calls the result ‘a mile­stone in AI math­e­mat­ics.’ ”
  6. Stu­dents deserve bet­ter than COLLEGE (Iván Mari­novic, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “By my count, the syl­labus assigns rough­ly 45 pages of canon­i­cal West­ern philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing across the entire quar­ter, against more than 500 pages of con­tem­po­rary work orga­nized around iden­ti­ty, oppres­sion and indige­nous ways of know­ing — Freire, Dan­garem­b­ga, West­over and Kim­mer­er. The ratio is 11:1. There is no Aris­to­tle, no Augus­tine, no Aquinas, no Mon­taigne, no Locke, no Mill, no New­man, no Stein­er, no Bloom — none of the writ­ers who built the case for lib­er­al edu­ca­tion that the course claims to defend. A course adver­tised as a defense of lib­er­al edu­ca­tion has been built with­out the thinkers who defined it.”
    • The author is an account­ing pro­fes­sor in the GSB. This was picked up and reprint­ed by The Free Press as Stan­ford’s War on the West­ern Canon. The bit at the end com­par­ing Stan­ford to its peer insti­tu­tions was instruc­tive.
    • This one gen­er­at­ed a lot of stu­dent dis­cus­sion on our Slack, most­ly empha­siz­ing that more stu­dents should choose to enroll in SLE rather than the default route of COLLEGE. In one stu­den­t’s words, “Espe­cial­ly with COLLEGE being expand­ed to 3 quar­ters, it’s hard to see why stu­dents would pre­fer to take it over SLE. SLE feels, at least for me, to be more effi­cient (cov­er­ing COLLEGE, PWR, and sev­er­al of the WAYS) and effec­tive (in terms of the learn­ing and prepar­ing stu­dents for the rest of their aca­d­e­m­ic career).” Anoth­er stu­dent not­ed “even when SLE does get noticed by the press it still seems hat­ed on. Before frosh year I read an Atlantic piece that crit­i­cized it for hav­ing too much of a mod­ern focus and not engag­ing with old­er sta­ples of the West­ern canon like Gil­gamesh and the Odyssey. The prob­lem is that WE DO cov­er those texts and it was clear that the author mis­un­der­stood the premise of the pro­gram and only read the spring syl­labus.… Any­ways, the point is that SLE is great and every­one should take it!” Incom­ing frosh, take note!
  7. The Secret Elite One Fresh­man Dis­cov­ered at Stan­ford (Anand Girid­haradas, New York Times): “Baker’s first book, ‘How to Rule the World,’ is a rig­or­ous, self-assured, propul­sive, at times ter­ri­fy­ing por­trait of a dwee­boc­ra­cy that ‘sets the agen­da for the plan­et.’ In every age, there is some place that epit­o­mizes how pow­er works. Baker’s Stan­ford is a strong can­di­date, and his book fol­lows in the tra­di­tion of Michael Lewis’s Wall Street chron­i­cle ‘Liar’s Pok­er,’ but with more pim­ples and less eye con­tact.”
    • I love this para­graph. This is the same book I post­ed anoth­er review of a few weeks ago.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 545: holistic ministry and cringe evangelicals

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Math Behind Christ’s Care for Our Flour­ish­ing (Bruce Wydick, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I decid­ed to go through the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ inter­ac­tions with people—conversations, teach­ings, and healings—and dig­i­tal­ly cat­e­go­rize all 171 record­ed inter­ac­tions (as delin­eat­ed by New Inter­na­tion­al Ver­sion sub­chap­ter head­ings) based on which of the fol­low­ing five dif­fer­ent facets of human need he was address­ing: (1) pure­ly spir­i­tu­al, (2) phys­i­cal needs, (3) social inclu­sion, (4) men­tal health, and (5) eco­nom­ic needs.… all of Christ’s mir­a­cles could have sim­ply been spir­i­tu­al dis­plays of pow­er, mir­a­cles of the shock-and-awe vari­ety, like calm­ing storms or walk­ing on water. But they weren’t. Instead, most of his mir­a­cles involve meet­ing var­i­ous human needs: people’s phys­i­cal ail­ments (restor­ing sight, mobil­i­ty), their social inclu­sion (heal­ing of lep­ers), their eco­nom­ic short­ages (loaves and fish­es), and maybe even their men­tal health—‘Peace be with you,’ (John 20:21). His mir­a­cles show how much the God of the uni­verse cares about all these dif­fer­ent facets of us that make us hap­py, healthy human beings.”
    • Cool find­ings in here with some nice charts. The author is a devel­op­ment econ­o­mist at USF, UC Davis, and Notre Dame. I did some dig­ging and he is an evan­gel­i­cal. One of us!
  2. Mis­siles and Moments of Clar­i­ty (Ryan Cur­rie, The Gospel Coali­tion): “It’s 5 a.m. in Dubai. I’m awak­ened by a loud bang and my bed­room win­dows shak­ing. My wife also wakes with a start and sits up. My half-sleep­ing brain tries to process: _What was that?_ The adren­a­line kicks in and reminds me of the night­mare of chaos and fear that spreads in the Mid­dle East.… It’s strange how moments of cri­sis bring clar­i­ty. Each defen­sive burst clar­i­fies real­i­ties I was already aware of but had hid­den under the hum and drum of every­day life. These mis­siles pro­vide moments of clar­i­ty into what’s most impor­tant.”
    • I found this both inter­est­ing and mov­ing.
  3. Why Amer­i­ca needs evan­gel­i­cals on the Supreme Court — and more (Aaron Renn, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Evan­gel­i­cals are 23 per­cent of U.S. adults and one of the most loy­al Repub­li­can vot­ing blocs, with 81 per­cent back­ing Don­ald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court jus­tices being appoint­ed by Repub­li­can pres­i­dents, there are no evan­gel­i­cals on the Supreme Court.… As a minor­i­ty in a coun­try that has become post-Chris­t­ian in many respects, evan­gel­i­cals can’t and shouldn’t seek to dom­i­nate nation­al lead­er­ship roles. A diverse soci­ety will draw its tal­ent from all quar­ters. But for that very rea­son, it can’t be healthy when near­ly one-quar­ter of the nation­al pop­u­la­tion is fail­ing to con­tribute its fair share.”
    • Gift link. Renn sees much but also has a few blind spots. Worth a pon­der.
  4. 10 Rea­sons Evan­gel­i­cals are Cringe (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “I don’t lose sleep over evangelicalism’s cringei­ness (at least not near­ly as much as I did when I was a teenag­er and being cringe was more offen­sive to me) because God did not let being cringe stop him from get­ting stuff done cul­tur­al­ly back when the Church was most­ly made up of illit­er­ate fish­er­men and he will bring about his work in the world regard­less of whether or not there are suf­fi­cient num­bers of evan­gel­i­cals among the elites. This is the most impor­tant rea­son, but it’s worth talk­ing about the issues Renn rais­es because some of the rea­sons are actu­al­ly good things that we should cel­e­brate and oth­ers are bad things that we should do some­thing about if we can.”
  5. My Crit­i­cism of the Ivy League Isn’t Hypocrisy (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Wall Street Jour­nal): “If you went to an elite school, informed dis­sent is seen as a kind of betray­al. If you didn’t, you might be writ­ten off as some­one who doesn’t know what he’s talk­ing about. It’s a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ sit­u­a­tion. Ben­e­fit­ing from a sys­tem, though, doesn’t mean you for­feit the right to cri­tique it. In most walks of life, insid­er knowl­edge makes a crit­ic more cred­i­ble, not less. Expe­ri­ence counts for some­thing. Who is bet­ter placed to crit­i­cize an insti­tu­tion than some­one who has seen it from the inside?”
  6. How the Deci­sion to Start a War Became the President’s (Char­lie Sav­age, New York Times): “It is sup­posed to be a foun­da­tion­al prin­ci­ple of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy that unless the Unit­ed States is under attack, the pow­er to declare war is vest­ed in Con­gress. But espe­cial­ly since the start of the Cold War, pres­i­dents of both par­ties have chipped away at that by claim­ing a right to order the mil­i­tary into var­i­ous lim­it­ed hos­tile sit­u­a­tions.… Suc­ces­sive admin­is­tra­tions built on their pre­de­ces­sors’ inno­va­tions, a one-way ratch­et expand­ing the cir­cum­stances in which pres­i­dents had claimed and demon­strat­ed that they could by them­selves deploy troops into com­bat.”
  7. SEIU Delen­da Est (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Code Ten): “Cal­i­for­nia lets inter­est groups pro­pose mea­sures for the state bal­lot. Any­one who gath­ers enough sig­na­tures (cur­rent­ly 874,641) can put their hare-brained plans before vot­ers dur­ing the next elec­tion year… The SEIU is known in Cal­i­for­nia polit­i­cal cir­cles for pio­neer­ing and per­fect­ing the art of extor­tion via bal­lot ini­tia­tive.… SEIU seems to have found a bug in direct democ­ra­cy: it incen­tivizes inter­est groups to search for the most destruc­tive pos­si­ble bal­lot ini­tia­tive that might nev­er­the­less get approved by low-infor­ma­tion vot­ers, since this gives them lever­age over any­one will­ing to bribe them into with­draw­ing their poi­son pill.”

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 539: a free book plus Schrödinger’s cat draws closer

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I Might Owe My Stu­dents an Apol­o­gy About Jose­phus (John Dick­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Flav­ius Jose­phus was a Jew­ish aris­to­crat (AD 37–100) who wit­nessed first­hand the great Jew­ish war with Rome.… I’ve taught about Josephus’s life and works for more than 20 years—first in sec­u­lar set­tings like Mac­quar­ie Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney, and now at Wheaton Col­lege. But Jose­phus and Jesus: New Evi­dence for the One Called Christ by T. C. Schmidt, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of reli­gious stud­ies at Fair­field Uni­ver­si­ty, has forced me to rewrite my lectures—and it might just have changed my mind. It seems that a con­tro­ver­sial pas­sage about Jesus’s res­ur­rec­tion might be orig­i­nal after all.”
    • A donor has spon­sored free PDF down­loads of the book the above review is about. You can get your copy at https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/ (fol­low the link on the page to a free down­load, it will take you to the OUP book web­site where you’ll need to click the PDF link above the abstract and save it to your com­put­er after it opens in your brows­er tab). This is a great deal — the book retails for $130!
    • My hope for all is that the schol­ar­ship in the book gives you even greater con­fi­dence that your hope in Christ is firm­ly ground­ed.
  2. Dying to Give (Justin Pow­ell, Sub­stack): “Mon­ey doesn’t car­ry the same pow­er in every decade. Most fam­i­lies give it at the stage of life when it accom­plish­es the least. A dol­lar at 25 can change a des­tiny. A dol­lar at 55 bare­ly moves the nee­dle.… The fam­i­lies who stew­ard wealth well think longer, plan ear­li­er, and talk more open­ly. They treat resources as some­thing to be shep­herd­ed across gen­er­a­tions, not hid­den behind emo­tion­al walls or released only after the funer­al. And because of that clar­i­ty, their chil­dren make wis­er deci­sions, ear­li­er, with bet­ter out­comes.”
  3. a gen z guide to fix­ing your doom-pilled brain (Steph Stin­er, Sub­stack): “when­ev­er i hear a young per­son con­fi­dent­ly assert that human­i­ty is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do par­tic­i­pat­ing in real life, it’s actu­al­ly quite rea­son­able to con­clude that we’re hang­ing on by a thread.”
    • Lack of cap­i­tal­iza­tion in orig­i­nal. The author appears to be 0% Chris­t­ian, but offers some very prac­ti­cal wis­dom.
    • I appre­ci­ate the above arti­cle so much that I looked for some of her oth­er con­tent and this one was also sol­id. a gen z guide to enjoy­ing dat­ing (Steph Stin­er, Sub­stack): “a wise woman once said nev­er to go gro­cery shop­ping while you’re hun­gry, or you’ll end up with a cart full of junk food. or maybe i made that up? who’s to say. regard­less, the prin­ci­ple still stands: don’t date while you’re des­per­ate for some­one else to ful­fill you, or you’ll end up with noth­ing but high cor­ti­sol.”
  4. Moral­ly judg­ing famous and semi-famous peo­ple (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I know some rea­son­able num­ber of famous peo­ple, and I just do not trust the media accounts of their fail­ings and flaws. I trust even less the barbs I read on the inter­net. I am not claim­ing to know the truth about them (most of them, at least), but I can tell when the peo­ple writ­ing about them know even less.… If by any chance you are won­der­ing how to make your­self smarter, learn how to appre­ci­ate almost every­body, and keep on cul­ti­vat­ing that skill.”
  5. Wikipedia Edi­tors Are Help­ing Iran Rewrite His­to­ry (Ash­ley Rinds­berg, The Free Press): “An inves­ti­ga­tion into Wikipedia edit­ing pat­terns reveals a years­long, coor­di­nat­ed cam­paign to san­i­tize the Islam­ic Republic’s human rights record. Accord­ing to a 2024 Times inves­ti­ga­tion, entries have been sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly edit­ed to down­grade Iran­ian atroc­i­ties.”
    • Wikipedia is a case study in nerd naivete, and I speak as one of the pre­vi­ous­ly-naive nerds. If you cre­ate some­thing influ­en­tial, peo­ple will seek to co-opt that influ­ence. That means that what­ev­er rules you cre­ate will be gamed. Wikipedia is still use­ful, but you have to know that it is rife with agen­da-dri­ven edi­tors. Vir­tu­al­ly every­thing reli­gious­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, or moral­ly charged is being edit­ed so as to give you a biased per­spec­tive.
  6. Schrödinger’s cat just got big­ger: quan­tum physi­cists cre­ate largest ever ‘super­po­si­tion’ (Eliz­a­beth Gib­ney, Nature): “A team based at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na put indi­vid­ual clus­ters of around 7,000 atoms of sodi­um met­al some 8 nanome­tres wide into a super­po­si­tion of dif­fer­ent loca­tions, each spaced 133 nanome­tres apart. Rather than shoot through the exper­i­men­tal set up like a bil­liard ball, each chunky clus­ter behaved like a wave, spread­ing out into a super­po­si­tion of spa­tial­ly dis­tinct paths and then inter­fer­ing to form a pat­tern researchers could detect.”
  7. The lure of Rome (Emma Freire, World): “When young Protes­tants move to Wash­ing­ton, it’s usu­al­ly not long before they start meet­ing smart, influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tives who believe Rome is the one true church. Like many of her peers, Smith began to ask her­self: Should I swim the Tiber? Roman Catholics exit­ing their church are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dri­ving declin­ing rates of Chris­tian­i­ty in Amer­i­ca. And far more Catholics con­vert to Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions than vice ver­sa. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked only at places like Wash­ing­ton and some influ­en­tial uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es. A small but vocal group of Protes­tants is con­vert­ing to Catholicism—and in even small­er num­bers to East­ern Ortho­doxy. They tend to be ambi­tious, high­ly edu­cat­ed, and well con­nect­ed.”
    • I believe I have men­tioned this before, but I intend to write a defense of low-church Protes­tantism for XA some­time. It may wait until I fin­ish my doc­tor­al stud­ies, though.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Helped a Mis­sion­ary Talk About Jesus (Jen­nifer Park, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Kore­an and Kore­an Amer­i­can Chris­tians CT inter­viewed appre­ci­ate how KPop Demon Hunters’ wide­spread acclaim has enabled them to share the gospel more effec­tive­ly.… Intro­duc­ing Christ to peo­ple in the Mus­lim-major­i­ty South­east Asian coun­try has also felt eas­i­er thanks to increas­ing inter­est in Kore­an cul­ture, Park said. Once, his church held a sum­mer event in its court­yard where a short-term mis­sions team from South Korea taught local youth sim­ple K‑pop dance moves and how to cook Kore­an dish­es.”
  • Lorem Ipsum Final­ly Trans­lat­ed, And It Is Shock­ing­ly Prob­lem­at­ic (Stan­ford Flip­side)
  • Pen­te­costal Church Does­n’t Notice Riot Is Occur­ring (Baby­lon Bee): “Church mem­ber­ship at Gol­go­tha Holy Fire Vic­to­ry Pen­te­costal was report­ed­ly over­joyed at the influx of vis­i­tors who joined them to speak in strange tongues, shove each oth­er, and roll all over the floor. Church lead­er­ship called it the most suc­cess­ful ser­vice they’d ever had.”
    • As a Pen­te­costal this made me laugh. Nor­mal­ly with the Bee I just read the head­lines. The text of this one has got some zing as well.
  • Pres­i­dent Trump’s Cho­sen Artist? A Chris­t­ian Speed Painter. (Zachary Small, New York Times): “The painter, Vanes­sa Horabue­na, spent the next 10 min­utes mak­ing an image inspired by the Shroud of Turin, con­tour­ing Jesus’s eye­brows and nose from a yel­low cross that she ini­tial­ly paint­ed at the cen­ter of her black can­vas. The pres­i­dent returned to the stage, promised to sign the art­work him­self, and the paint­ing was quick­ly auc­tioned for $2.75 mil­lion to a cou­ple who promised to split their dona­tion between St. Jude Children’s Research Hos­pi­tal and the local sheriff’s depart­ment. The artwork’s sale eas­i­ly set a new bench­mark for speed paint­ing, a once-obscure com­pet­i­tive art form that has gained pop­u­lar­i­ty over the last decade in South­ern beau­ty pageants, Mid­west cor­po­rate events, bas­ket­ball half­time shows and church gath­er­ings.”
    • If you’ve nev­er seen some­one do this live, it’s actu­al­ly quite stun­ning.

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 465



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 465, the 30th tri­an­gu­lar num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Did Planned Par­ent­hood Become One of the Country’s Largest Sup­pli­ers of Testos­terone? (Jen­nifer Block, The Free Press): “The orga­ni­za­tion would not give spe­cif­ic num­bers, or respond to mul­ti­ple requests for com­ment, but the insur­ance claim data (esti­mates that do not include patients who pay out of pock­et) sug­gest that 1 in 6 U.S. teens and young adults who sought gen­der hor­mones last year were seen at Planned Par­ent­hood. Between 2017 and 2023, affil­i­at­ed clin­ics filed gen­der-relat­ed insur­ance claims for 12,000 youths aged 12–17.”
  2. At 28, I Taught Myself to Be Lik­able. Here’s How I Did It (Sub­stack): “The guide­lines you’ll see below are going to seem real­ly rigid and judg­men­tal. But that’s kind of what I need­ed. Plat­i­tudes about how I need­ed to ‘be myself’ and ‘let my freak flag fly’ did way more harm than good. When I asked peo­ple for advice, a lot of them gave the knee­jerk response, ‘Just don’t care what oth­er peo­ple think of you,’ which is much eas­i­er said than done, espe­cial­ly when it’s bla­tant­ly obvi­ous that oth­er peo­ple can’t stand you.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. ‘I Just Have Some Ques­tions’: An Inter­view With Jus­tice Gor­such (David French, New York Times): “I didn’t get to ask every ques­tion I want­ed to, but our con­ver­sa­tion cov­ered a lot of ground, includ­ing Gorsuch’s indict­ment of the reg­u­la­to­ry state, his approach to eval­u­at­ing agency exper­tise, the prob­lem of mass incar­cer­a­tion and coer­cive plea bar­gain­ing, his jurispru­dence hold­ing the Unit­ed States account­able for its oblig­a­tions to Native Amer­i­cans and his def­i­n­i­tion of orig­i­nal­ism and the role of his­to­ry in under­stand­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Israel-relat­ed:
    • For col­lege stu­dents arrest­ed protest­ing the war in Gaza, the fall­out was only begin­ning (Christo­pher Heller et all, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Some 3,200 peo­ple were arrest­ed this spring dur­ing a wave of pro-Pales­tin­ian tent encamp­ments protest­ing the war in Gaza. While some col­leg es end­ed demon­stra­tions by strik­ing deals with the stu­dents, or sim­ply wait­ed them out, oth­ers called in police when pro­test­ers refused to leave. Many stu­dents have already seen those charges dis­missed. But the cas­es have yet to be resolved for hun­dreds of peo­ple at cam­pus­es that saw the high­est num­ber of arrests, accord­ing to an analy­sis of data gath­ered by The Asso­ci­at­ed Press and part­ner news­rooms.”
    • Why Israel Esca­lates (Dalia Dasse Kaye, For­eign Affairs): “…Israeli defense offi­cials do not nec­es­sar­i­ly feel com­fort­able rely­ing on deter­rence by denial—that is, by con­vinc­ing adver­saries that attacks would not succeed—as the Unit­ed States prefers. In these offi­cials’ view, the April defense of Israel was not a total suc­cess because, ulti­mate­ly, the defen­sive coali­tion did not pre­vent the attack; it only lim­it­ed the dam­age. Israeli defense plan­ners pre­fer deter­rence by punishment—showing adver­saries that attacks will pro­voke con­se­quences.”
    • Israel Isn’t ‘Risk­ing’ a Region­al War (Kevin Williamson, The Dis­patch): “…Israel is not ‘risk­ing a region­al war.’ Israel is involved in a region­al war, one that was forced upon it by Iran, some­times using prox­ies and some­times using its own forces direct­ly, as it did on April 13, when it attacked Israel with more than 300 mis­siles and drones. The Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, are wag­ing war on Israel—including a recent drone attack on Tel Aviv—as well as wag­ing a war on the Unit­ed States, attack­ing a U.S. Navy ves­sel in May, and con­duct­ing a wider mil­i­tary cam­paign against ship­ping in the Red Sea.” May be pay­walled.
  5. Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er ‘Dark Oxy­gen’ on the Ocean Floor Generated—Surprisingly—by Lumps of Met­al (Shi En Kim, Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine): “Twelve thou­sand feet under the ocean sur­face is a world of eter­nal mid­night. No sun­light can pen­e­trate to this depth to pro­mote pho­to­syn­the­sis, so no plants are pro­duc­ing oxy­gen there. Yet, the life-sup­port­ing gas is abun­dant in this dark­ness-cloaked region, thanks to an unlike­ly oxy­gen fac­to­ry: pota­to-sized, ‘bat­tery rocks’ on the seafloor.”
  6. US abor­tion num­bers have risen slight­ly since Roe was over­turned, study finds (Geoff Mul­vi­hill & Kim­ber­lee Krue­si, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “The num­ber of women get­ting abor­tions in the U.S. actu­al­ly went up in the first three months of 2024 com­pared with before the Supreme Court over­turned Roe v Wade, a report released Wednes­day found, reflect­ing the lengths that Demo­c­ra­t­ic-con­trolled states went to expand access.”
    • Relat­ed: Kamala’s Abor­tion Extrem­ism (Ryan T. Ander­son, First Things): “…the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty under Har­ris is as rad­i­cal­ly pro-abor­tion as it can pos­si­bly be. Short of com­ing out for killing tod­dlers, there sim­ply is no way to be more extreme than Kamala Har­ris and her par­ty now are. Kamala Har­ris is a hard-core ideologue—an abor­tion extremist—and has been since her first days as an elect­ed offi­cial. As pres­i­dent, she would be no dif­fer­ent.”
  7. Polit­i­cal or polit­i­cal-adja­cent (the dis­claimers at the bot­tom real­ly mat­ter — I did­n’t write these arti­cles, I just found them inter­est­ing and pass them along with non­par­ti­san intent — wait long enough and you’ll see arti­cles mak­ing point­ed obser­va­tions in all direc­tions. They’re focused one way this week because that’s how the news cycle rolled this time around):
    • Are Democ­rats real­ly more like­ly to be child­less cat ladies? (Andrew Van Dam, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…we had no idea what our friend Julie Zauzmer Weil was get­ting at when she asked if there was any evi­dence to sup­port the notion of the ‘child­less left.’ Weil, who you’ll rec­og­nize from her tremen­dous tax and data sto­ries for The Wash­ing­ton Post, clar­i­fied fur­ther: ‘Do Repub­li­cans have more kids than Democ­rats? It doesn’t seem obvi­ous to me that it would be true.’ The sim­ple answer, how­ev­er? Yes! About 38 per­cent of Democ­rats had nev­er had chil­dren as of 2022, com­pared with 26 per­cent of Repub­li­cans, accord­ing to the uni­ver­sal­ly beloved Gen­er­al Social Sur­vey from the uni­ver­sal­ly beloved NORC at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go.”
    • Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party’s choice of Har­ris was unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic − and the lat­est evi­dence of par­ty lead­ers dis­trust­ing par­ty vot­ers (Daniel Kling­hard, The Con­ver­sa­tion): “But for the first time since 1968, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee will win the nom­i­na­tion with­out win­ning a sin­gle pri­ma­ry vote. This may not be as much of a demo­c­ra­t­ic back­slide as that of the pre­vi­ous so-called ‘mixed peri­od.’ But it would be a cul­mi­na­tion of the elite-ori­ent­ed trends that have shaped the nom­i­nat­ing process since 1984, in which par­ty elites have played an increas­ing­ly large role in shap­ing the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who said “this arti­cle left me with many thoughts to chew on.”
    • Five faith facts about Har­ris pick Tim Walz, a ‘Min­neso­ta Luther­an’ Dad (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “Walz is Luther­an.… He does not often dis­cuss his faith pub­licly but has post­ed about attend­ing wor­ship dur­ing Christ­mas and oth­er ser­vices at var­i­ous Luther­an church­es. Walz refers to Pil­grim Luther­an Church in St. Paul — a con­gre­ga­tion in the Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church in Amer­i­ca, a main­line denom­i­na­tion — as ‘my parish.’ ”
    • Walz’s Brand Is More Left than Luther­an Among Min­neso­ta Evan­gel­i­cals (Har­vest Prude, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For the aver­age Mis­souri Syn­od mem­ber, both pas­tor and lay mem­ber, [Walz] absolute­ly will not be seen as one of us,” Hans Fiene, a Luther­an pas­tor in Mis­souri and cre­ator of Luther­an Satire, a mul­ti­me­dia project to teach about the Luther­an faith, told CT. “So there won’t be any kind of sit­u­a­tion like with Biden being a Catholic, where Catholics go, Well, he doesn’t real­ly rep­re­sent us, but he’s still a Catholic.”
      • Luther­an Satire guy! Great YouTube videos.

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 409

Read it for the amus­ing bits at the end.

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 409, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gion Has Become a Lux­u­ry Good (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “More edu­cat­ed peo­ple are more like­ly to claim a reli­gious affil­i­a­tion on sur­veys. It’s true in every sin­gle wave of the Coop­er­a­tive Elec­tion Study. It’s also the case in the Nation­scape sur­vey, which is 477K respon­dents. They even have 4,000 peo­ple with doc­tor­al degrees in their sam­ple. The most like­ly to be non-reli­gious? Those who didn’t fin­ish high school. As edu­ca­tion increas­es, so does reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. The group with the high­est lev­el of reli­gious affil­i­a­tion are those with a master’s degree.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. When the Ser­mon Fiz­zles Instead of Siz­zles (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “But who’s to say that, in the mind of God, the pow­er of the preach­ing is entire­ly in the hands of the preach­er? Who’s to say that the pastor’s task is to pre­pare the ser­mon while the congregation’s task is mere­ly to pre­pare their own hearts to hear it? What if preach­ing is pow­er­less not because of the pastor’s lack of prepa­ra­tion but because of the church’s lack of prayer? What if poor preach­ing is not the con­se­quence of any fail­ure on the pastor’s part but on the congregation’s?”
  3. Why I’m Not a Lib­er­al Catholic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But I just don’t see how you can look at the mod­ern world, writ large, and its most devel­oped precincts espe­cial­ly — the world of sex edu­ca­tion via ubiq­ui­tous pornog­ra­phy, fal­ter­ing mar­riage rates, col­laps­ing birthrates, the alien­ation of the sex­es from one anoth­er, the ris­ing exis­ten­tial angst attend­ing all these trends and the creep of euthana­sia as a ‘mer­ci­ful’ solu­tion — and say that clear­ly what the church needs to do at this his­tor­i­cal moment is water down or just talk less about its teach­ings on sex and mar­riage and fam­i­ly, rather than find a way to reassert them or offer them anew.”
    • The whole thing is specif­i­cal­ly about the Roman Catholic Church, but is rel­e­vant to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty as well.
    • While we’re on the sub­ject The 5 Minute Case for Protes­tantism (Gavin Ortlund, YouTube): five min­utes
  4. Is There An Illu­sion Of Moral Decline? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I’ve been read­ing the bias­es and heuris­tics lit­er­a­ture for fif­teen years now, and devel­oped the fol­low­ing heuris­tic: if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about how many marsh­mal­lows to take in a rigged exper­i­ment, this is prob­a­bly an inter­est­ing and pro­duc­tive line of research. But if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about their most foun­da­tion­al real-life beliefs, prob­a­bly those ordi­nary peo­ple are being com­plete­ly sen­si­ble, and it’s the researcher who’s try­ing to shoe­horn their rea­son­ing into some mode it was nev­er intend­ed to address.”
  5. ‘Exhaust­ed’ pas­tors suf­fer­ing decline in over­all health, respect, friend­ship: study (Jon Brown, Fox News): “Pas­tors who report­ed that their men­tal and emo­tion­al health was below aver­age spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excel­lent men­tal and emo­tion­al health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”
    • This cor­re­sponds with what I am hear­ing anec­do­tal­ly. Which is bizarre to me, because min­istry is awe­some and reward­ing
  6. Sau­di Ara­bia Wants Tourists. It Didn’t Expect Chris­tians. (Vivian Nereim, Yahoo News): “No one in the con­ser­v­a­tive Islam­ic king­dom had planned for the Chris­tians. Yet Chris­tians of many stripes — includ­ing Bap­tists, Men­non­ites and oth­ers who call them­selves ‘chil­dren of God’ — were among the first peo­ple to use the new Sau­di tourist visas. Since then, they have grown steadi­ly in num­bers, drawn by word of mouth and viral YouTube videos argu­ing that Sau­di Ara­bia, not Egypt, is the site of Mount Sinai, the peak where Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian Scrip­tures describe God reveal­ing the Ten Com­mand­ments.”
  7. The recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • I don’t have any arti­cles about the Supreme Court deci­sion in favor of the web design­er who refus­es to design web­sites for gay mar­riages, sim­ply because I haven’t read any­thing very good about it. Most arti­cles seem to mis­un­der­stand both the case and the deci­sion entire­ly. It was a won­der­ful out­come and should be praised — the gov­ern­ment can­not com­pel you to say some­thing you do not believe or to cel­e­brate some­thing you do not approve. Sug­ges­tions for thought­ful arti­cles wel­come, even those with which you think I will dis­agree.
    • Affir­ma­tive Action Thoughts in an Inel­e­gant List For­mat (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…we demand that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem be both a lad­der of suc­cess, a sort­ing sys­tem that cre­ates a hier­ar­chy of excel­lence, and a great equal­iz­er, a way to make soci­ety more equi­table. These are flat­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry pur­pos­es. They are direct­ly antag­o­nis­tic to each oth­er.”
    • Burn Down the Admis­sions Sys­tem (Yascha Mounk, Per­sua­sion): “When­ev­er I think of the role that per­son­al state­ments play in America’s land­scape of high­er edu­ca­tion, I remem­ber a class­mate of mine at Cam­bridge. He came from an aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly, grew up in Lon­don, and attend­ed Eton. He was, in oth­er words, about as priv­i­leged as you can be in the Unit­ed King­dom. But when it came time to apply for admis­sion to a pres­ti­gious schol­ar­ship that would send him to Har­vard, he wrote mov­ing­ly about how his pas­sion for pub­lic pol­i­cy was awak­ened when he grew up among the rav­ages of the trou­bles in North­ern Ire­land; at one point, he sug­gest­ed, his house was even bombed. (Those who knew him real­ized that this was one of his family’s ances­tral cas­tles, not his pri­ma­ry fam­i­ly home, a fact he obvi­ous­ly omit­ted from his appli­ca­tion.)  These kinds of absur­di­ties are not a bug of the strange Amer­i­can rev­er­ence for per­son­al state­ments; they are a fea­ture of it.”
    • I Teach at an Elite Col­lege. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gam­ing of Admis­sions (Tyler Austin Harp­er, New York Times): “Near­ly every col­lege admis­sions tutor­ing job I took over the next few years would come with a ver­sion of the same behest. The Chi­nese and Kore­an kids want­ed to know how to make their appli­ca­tion mate­ri­als seem less Chi­nese or Kore­an. The rich white kids want­ed to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids want­ed to make sure they came across as Black enough. Dit­to for the Lati­no and Mid­dle East­ern kids. Seem­ing­ly every­one I inter­act­ed with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, stu­dent or par­ent — believed that get­ting into an elite col­lege required what I came to call racial gam­i­fi­ca­tion.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies at Bates Col­lege and is him­self black.
    • 10 Notes on the End of Affir­ma­tive Action (Cole­man Hugh­es, Sub­stack): “My per­son­al view is that diver­si­ty is like love. When it hap­pens nat­u­ral­ly, it’s the most beau­ti­ful thing in the world. But the moment it’s arranged, leg­is­lat­ed, or man­dat­ed, you’ve some­what missed the point.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A youth pas­tor inter­viewed about the stock mar­ket on MSNBC (Twit­ter): I’ve men­tioned before that some Chris­tians are too ten­ta­tive when speak­ing about the gospel in high-pro­file media envi­ron­ments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pas­tor at Beach­point Church in Orange Coun­ty. From vol­ume 286

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 377

things which grabbed my atten­tion

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 377, the 14th Fibonac­ci num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. sprawl­ing along the way: a polemic and an exhor­ta­tion (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “When­ev­er Chris­tians decide that they need a strat­e­gy, they’re writ­ing a recipe for dis­obe­di­ence to the Lord Jesus. As Stan­ley Hauer­was has always said in response to peo­ple who say that the Church needs a social strat­e­gy, ‘the Church is a social strat­e­gy.…’ The Church’s job is to be the Church, and the Christian’s task is to be like Christ, and strate­gies invari­ably get in the way of both.”
    • This is insight­ful.
  2. How Should Chris­tians Speak in Pub­lic? (Tim Keller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The fruit of the Spir­it includes love, joy and peace, patience and kind­ness, and humil­i­ty. These must be evi­dent as we speak about the gospel pub­licly. Right now, the most pop­u­lar pub­lic fig­ures show con­fi­dence and fear­less­ness but not love and humil­i­ty. We can­not fol­low in that train.”
    • Dif­fi­cult to excerpt fair­ly.
  3. Does edu­ca­tion ‘cure’ peo­ple of faith? The data says no (Ryan Burge, Reli­gion News): “Those who are the most like­ly to be reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed are those with the low­est lev­els of for­mal edu­ca­tion. The group that is the most like­ly to align with a faith tra­di­tion? Those who have earned a col­lege degree or more.”
    • This is one of those true things that peo­ple have a hard time believ­ing.
  4. Iran and Chi­na Use Pri­vate Detec­tives to Spy on Dis­si­dents in Amer­i­ca (Ben­jamin Weis­er and & William K. Rash­baum, New York Times): “Across Amer­i­ca, inves­ti­ga­tors are increas­ing­ly being hired by a new kind of client — author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments like Iran and Chi­na attempt­ing to sur­veil, harass, threat­en and even repa­tri­ate dis­si­dents liv­ing law­ful­ly in the Unit­ed States, law enforce­ment offi­cials said.”
  5. Ael­la & The Futil­i­ty Of ‘Con­sent’ (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I’ve heard that ‘but ani­mals can’t con­sent!’ argu­ment from peo­ple before, as a defense against nor­mal­iz­ing bes­tial­i­ty, and it has nev­er made sense. You think ani­mals can con­sent to being eat­en?”
    • I remem­ber when I first talked with a stu­dent who seri­ous­ly claimed that con­sent was the only moral rule applic­a­ble to sex. I was so stunned I don’t think I had the where­with­al to laugh. It’s such an absurd claim.
  6. Lep­rosy: Ancient dis­ease able to regen­er­ate organs (James Gal­lagher, BBC): “Ani­mal exper­i­ments have uncov­ered the bac­te­ri­a’s remark­able abil­i­ty to almost dou­ble the size of liv­ers by stim­u­lat­ing healthy growth. It is a sneak­i­ly self­ish act that gives the bac­te­ria more tis­sue to infect. But work­ing out how they do it could lead to new age-defy­ing ther­a­pies, the sci­en­tists say.”
    • This is super cool! I hope it pans out.
  7. The top 10 most-regret­ted col­lege majors — and the degrees grad­u­ates wish they had pur­sued instead (Jes­si­ca Dick­ler, CNBC): “Com­put­er sci­ence majors, with an aver­age annu­al start­ing salary of almost $100,000, were the hap­pi­est over­all, accord­ing to ZipRecruiter. Stu­dents who majored in crim­i­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, nurs­ing, busi­ness and finance also felt very good about their choic­es.”

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 Reli­gious Lib­er­ty and the Com­mon Good (Nation­al Affairs, William Haun): “Many of today’s pro­gres­sives, con­ser­v­a­tives, and lib­er­tar­i­ans [can­not] explain why reli­gion in par­tic­u­lar and reli­gious exer­cise in par­tic­u­lar should shape the com­mon good, even when they go against the grain of sec­u­lar visions adopt­ed in law.” Not light read­ing but worth­while. The author is a lawyer for the Beck­et Fund. From vol­ume 248

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 249

The vin­di­ca­tion of a vil­i­fied mis­sion­ary, thoughts about the mur­der of Ahmaud Arbery, and pan­dem­ic per­spec­tives.

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. A Mis­sion­ary on Tri­al (Ariel Levy, The New York­er): “Accord­ing to a study pub­lished in 2017 in The Amer­i­can Jour­nal for Clin­i­cal Nutri­tion, four­teen per cent of chil­dren treat­ed for severe acute mal­nu­tri­tion at Mula­go Hospital—Uganda’s best facility—died. The study notes that the over-all mor­tal­i­ty rate in Africa for chil­dren with S.A.M. is between twen­ty and twen­ty-five per cent. Dur­ing the years when Serv­ing His Chil­dren func­tioned as an in-patient facil­i­ty, its rate was eleven per cent.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed. If you want to dig deep­er, last Octo­ber a Ugan­dan tele­vi­sion sta­tion did a twen­ty-minute sto­ry on this case which also dis­cred­it­ed the missionary’s accusers. Proverbs 18:17 wins again.
    • I see a sim­i­lar dynam­ic in some stu­dents who are feel­ing angst over their faith. Upon con­ver­sa­tion, I often learn that they have been told untrue or mis­lead­ing things about mis­sions, the his­to­ry of the church, and the present sta­tus of the church in the world. Always remem­ber that crit­ics might have motives beyond sim­ply estab­lish­ing the truth. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lis­ten to them, but it does mean that you don’t treat their com­plaints as axioms. When this reporter flew to Ugan­da and talked to peo­ple on the ground she quick­ly learned that the inter­na­tion­al­ly-accept­ed nar­ra­tive was not right.
  2. Why We Opened a Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty in Iraq Amid ISIS’ Geno­cide (Jayson Cas­par, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “There was an unwrit­ten under­stand­ing that the Chris­tians would not overt­ly pros­e­ly­tize and share the gospel, but be indi­rect and not offend sharia law. But after ISIS and the lack of any real response from the Mus­lim world, Arch­bish­op War­da says that this agree­ment is now fin­ished. That as we go for­ward, we will no longer be shy. We are going to pro­claim the gospel, pro­claim the teach­ings of Christ, and who­ev­er comes to us will come…. There may not be many Chris­tians in Iraq. But as an old priest said once to me, ‘Well, remem­ber Christ only had 12, and every­one want­ed to kill them, too.’”
  3. Exquis­ite Scan­dal (Nan­cy Lemann, Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly): “The famil­iar the­o­ry at the tri­al was that the peo­ple of Louisiana would rather be enter­tained than served with ethics. Some would call this a Gal­lic atti­tude, to be blind­ed by charm at the expense of integri­ty, and indeed the cul­ture of Louisiana is his­tor­i­cal­ly French Catholic. And as the Catholics might say, the fall from grace is inevitable, a mys­tery to be endured rather than a prob­lem to be solved. And some in Louisiana would pre­fer a smart crook to an unin­tel­li­gent oppor­tunist masked as a cru­sad­er whose ambi­tion blinds him to his own stu­pid­i­ty. Such a one could be just as dan­ger­ous, if not more so, than a crook.” As some­one born in Louisiana, I very much enjoyed this arti­cle. 
  4. Gre­go­ry and Travis McMichael face mur­der charges in con­nec­tion with Ahmaud Arbery case (Steve Almasy and Angela Bara­jas, CNN): “Two men involved in the fatal shoot­ing of Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, Geor­gia, have been arrest­ed and face mur­der and aggra­vat­ed assault charges, accord­ing to the Geor­gia Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion.”
    • It is amaz­ing to me that it was not the video evi­dence that led to their arrest, but the pub­lic out­cry in response to the video evi­dence. 
    • A Vig­i­lante Killing in Geor­gia (David French, The Dis­patch): “When white men grab guns and mount up to pur­sue and seize an unarmed black man in the street, they stand in the shoes of lynch mobs past.”
    • Think­ing Chris­tian­ly About the Ahmaud Arbery Lynch­ing (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “If we are to be peo­ple who act just­ly and pro­mote jus­tice, which is that each per­son receives their right­ful dues, then we must right­ly dis­cern what has hap­pened in the case of Arbery. This was a lynch­ing. It was an act that God hates. And so we must rec­og­nize that and we must call it by its name and speak out against it and against all such acts of injus­tice.”
    • Relat­ed in the abstract: How to Pun­ish Vot­ers (Josie Duffy Rice, New York Times): “It’s well known that vot­er sup­pres­sion has tak­en the form of the clos­ing of polling places, new restric­tive vot­er ID laws, vot­er roll purges of thou­sands of eli­gi­ble vot­ers and nine-hour lines at the polls. But Ms. Pearson’s case is a reminder that it can also take the form of the aggres­sive pros­e­cu­tion of indi­vid­ual black vot­ers for polling-place offens­es — which in many cas­es appears moti­vat­ed less by a sin­cere desire to address fraud than by a desire to intim­i­date.”
  5. Pan­dem­ic Per­spec­tives
    • The Covid-19 Rid­dle: Why Does the Virus Wal­lop Some Places and Spare Oth­ers? (Han­nah Beech, Alis­sa J. Rubin, Ana­toly Kur­manaev and Ruth Maclean, New York Times): “The coro­n­avirus has killed so many peo­ple in Iran that the coun­try has resort­ed to mass buri­als, but in neigh­bor­ing Iraq, the body count is few­er than 100. The Domini­can Repub­lic has report­ed near­ly 7,600 cas­es of the virus. Just across the bor­der, Haiti has record­ed about 85.”
    • Coro­n­avirus Could Dis­rupt Weath­er Fore­cast­ing (Hen­ry Foun­tain, New York Times): “…data on tem­per­a­ture, wind and humid­i­ty from air­plane flights, col­lect­ed by sen­sors on the planes and trans­mit­ted in real time to fore­cast­ing orga­ni­za­tions around the world, has been cut by near­ly 90 per­cent in some regions.” I must con­fess I did not see that com­ing. At all. 
    • Google App Cen­sor­ing Covid-19 Cours­es (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Google is a pri­vate enti­ty. It has the right to con­trol what goes out on its app plat­form. Whether Google is moral­ly cor­rect to exer­cise that right to sup­press any unof­fi­cial pan­dem­ic infor­ma­tion is a dif­fer­ent ques­tion — and a very impor­tant one. Google owns YouTube — how long will they allow these cours­es to remain on YouTube?” These are cours­es by aca­d­e­mics speak­ing with­in their areas of exper­tise.
    • Relat­ed: Who is Judy Mikovits in ‘Plan­dem­ic,’ the coro­n­avirus con­spir­a­cy video just banned from social media? (Katie Shep­herd, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The film is so ques­tion­able that social media plat­forms includ­ing Face­book, YouTube and Vimeo on Thurs­day scrubbed it from their sites. A Vimeo spokesper­son, for exam­ple, said that the com­pa­ny ‘stands firm in keep­ing our plat­form safe from con­tent that spreads harm­ful and mis­lead­ing health infor­ma­tion. The video in ques­tion has been removed … for vio­lat­ing these very poli­cies.’” A friend sent me a link to her video but it was pulled down. I have no opin­ion about the video because I haven’t seen it. But I do have an opin­ion about it being pulled down. I dis­like that intense­ly. I fear the risks of mis­in­for­ma­tion far less than I fear the risks of con­trol­ling infor­ma­tion. 
    • A pas­tor in the Bronx thought he knew hard­ship. Then his church saw 13 coro­n­avirus deaths. (Sarah Pul­liam Bai­ley, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Promised Land, in the poor­est con­gres­sion­al dis­trict in the nation, sees about 250 most­ly African Amer­i­can and Lati­no wor­shipers on a nor­mal week­end. Pub­lic hous­ing units line the streets near the church in the Mott Haven neigh­bor­hood, where city offi­cials esti­mate the pover­ty rate is about 44 per­cent.”
    • In Inner-City Black Church­es: More Grief, Few­er Resources, Stronger Faith (Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Despite bear­ing the dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact of the out­break, black believ­ers have demon­strat­ed par­tic­u­lar spir­i­tu­al endurance. In a Pew sur­vey released last week, mem­bers of his­tor­i­cal­ly black church­es were more like­ly than any oth­er reli­gious tra­di­tion to say their faith has been strength­ened through the out­break. More than half (56%) say their faith has become stronger, com­pared to 35 per­cent of all Chris­tians and 24 per­cent of adults over­all.”
    • Clin­i­cal Study Con­sid­ers The Pow­er Of Prayer To Com­bat COVID-19 (Tom Gjel­ten, NPR): “Half of the patients, ran­dom­ly cho­sen, will receive a ‘uni­ver­sal’ prayer offered in five denom­i­na­tion­al forms, via Chris­tian­i­ty, Hin­duism, Islam, Judaism, and Bud­dhism. The oth­er 500 patients will con­sti­tute the con­trol group.” This study looks like a mess. How do they expect to keep the 500 in the con­trol group from being prayed for? I am pret­ty sure that if you are hos­pi­tal­ized with Covid-19 some­one is pray­ing for you. And my the­ol­o­gy leads me to believe those organ­ic, heart­felt prayers offered by peo­ple who actu­al­ly know the patients are going to be more sig­nif­i­cant than the “uni­ver­sal prayers” offered by the research par­tic­i­pants. I expect this study will lead inter­net athe­ists to claim that all prayer has been debunked when at most it will show that script­ed mul­ti­faith prayers offered on behalf of strangers do not move the heart of God. 
    • Food Banks Can’t Go On Like This (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Nor­mal­ly, ‘res­cued’ food—items that would oth­er­wise be thrown out as their sell-by date approaches—accounts for 97 per­cent of Feed­ing San Diego’s dis­tri­b­u­tions. Until the pan­dem­ic, the group was receiv­ing unpur­chased food from 204 Star­bucks loca­tions every night of the year. Most of those stores are now closed. The orga­ni­za­tion nor­mal­ly gets excess food from 260 gro­cery stores too, but con­sumers have been stock­ing up enough late­ly that many shelves are picked clean.”
  6. The UK Bless­ing — Church­es sing ‘The Bless­ing’ over the UK (YouTube): sev­en mov­ing min­utes. Shared with me by a student’s father.

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 Sis­ter… Show Mer­cy! (Dan Phillips, Team Pyro): “Sis­ter, if there’s one thing you and I can cer­tain­ly agree on, it’s this: I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and you don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re both prob­a­bly wrong where we’re sure we’re right, try as we might. So let me try to dart a telegram from my camp over to the distaff side.” (first shared in vol­ume 148)

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 229

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. Should Lebanon’s Chris­tians Join Protests? Viral Ser­mons Argue Yes and No. (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “”For the past month, Lebanese evan­gel­i­cals have debat­ed Scrip­ture, shar­ing ser­mons online. One viral effort urges believ­ers to stay away from wide­spread demon­stra­tions in sub­mis­sion to author­i­ty. Anoth­er licens­es par­tic­i­pa­tion in the pop­u­lar push for jus­tice.”
    • I like this arti­cle because it helps us look at a con­tentious Bib­li­cal issue in a set­ting where most of us don’t have a strong bias one way or the oth­er. Decide whose argu­ments you find most com­pelling, and then think about how they apply in your own set­ting.
  2. Most peo­ple are bad at argu­ing. These 2 tech­niques will make you bet­ter. (Bri­an Resnick, Vox): “1) If the argu­ment you find con­vinc­ing doesn’t res­onate with some­one else, find out what does…. 2) Lis­ten. Your ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents want to feel like they’ve been heard.”
  3. 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 sci­ence pro­fes­sor at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  4. LGBT Rights-Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Bill Pro­posed in Con­gress (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Con­gress­man Chris Stew­art doesn’t expect his bill to pass. But he is propos­ing the Fair­ness for All Act any­way. It’s a step of faith for Stew­art, a Repub­li­can who rep­re­sents Utah’s sec­ond dis­trict, and a mark­er on the bet that it’s pos­si­ble to find a com­pro­mise that pro­tects both reli­gious lib­er­ty and LGBT rights.”
  5. How the Trump Cabinet’s Bible Teacher Became a Shad­ow Diplo­mat (Mat­tathias Schwartz, New York Times): “Sev­en years ago, Drollinger pub­lished a short book called ‘Rebuild­ing Amer­i­ca: The Bib­li­cal Blue­print,’ which lays out his ambi­tion to ‘to reach all the cap­i­tals of the world for Christ.’ Drollinger, like many evan­gel­i­cals, refers to this God-giv­en glob­al remit as the Great Com­mis­sion, a phrase pop­u­lar­ized by the 19th-cen­tu­ry mis­sion­ary James Hud­son Tay­lor; Drollinger traces its man­date to Jesus’ charge, as relat­ed by Matthew, to ‘make dis­ci­ples of all the nations.’ A chart in ‘Rebuild­ing Amer­i­ca’ dia­grams the ‘influ­ence path’ of a pub­lic ser­vant as a base­ball dia­mond, run­ning through local gov­ern­ment (first base), state gov­ern­ment (sec­ond base) and nation­al gov­ern­ment (third base) and cul­mi­nat­ing in ‘inter­na­tion­al influ­ence’ (home plate).” I shared anoth­er arti­cle about Drollinger back in vol­ume 147.
  6. China’s Sov­er­eign­ty Trip­wire in Hong Kong (David P. Gold­man, First Things): “Chi­na is a poly­glot, mul­ti­eth­nic empire, not a nation-state. Infringe­ment of its con­trol over any part of its ter­ri­to­ry threat­ens the whole. For­eign inter­ven­tion and region­al divi­sions is the stuff of China’s his­tor­i­cal night­mares. Any loss of sov­er­eign­ty, in China’s expe­ri­ence, begins a slip­pery slope toward impe­r­i­al crack­up. For­eign inva­sion is still a liv­ing mem­o­ry in Chi­na, and Bei­jing reads the worst into Amer­i­can inter­ven­tion over Hong Kong.”
  7. The Sal­va­tion Army’s Actions Speak Loud­er Than Its The­ol­o­gy (Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg): “Vol­un­teers are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly than non-vol­un­teers to be reli­gious; and the reli­gious are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly than the non-reli­gious to vol­un­teer. As reli­gion declines, so does vol­un­teer­ing. If we put the reli­gious vol­un­teers out of busi­ness, a lot of peo­ple will sud­den­ly be unhelped. We need all the vol­un­teers we can get. And we can­not rea­son­ably expect to replace them with paid labor. Accord­ing to the Urban Insti­tute, the 8.7 bil­lion hours vol­un­teered in the U.S. in 2016 were worth about $187.4 bil­lion.” The author is a law pro­fes­sor at Yale.

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 Chris­t­ian Mis­sions and the Spread of Democ­ra­cy (Greg Scan­dlen, The Fed­er­al­ist): This is a sum­ma­ry of some rather won­der­ful research Robert Wood­ber­ry pub­lished in The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Review back in 2012: The Mis­sion­ary Roots of Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy. If it looks famil­iar it’s because I allude to it from time to time in my ser­mons and con­ver­sa­tions. (first shared in vol­ume 14)

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 228

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. A Tale of Two Church­es (Batya Ungar-Sar­gon, NY Review of Books): “To many reli­gious peo­ple, there’s no such thing as coin­ci­dence: Pas­tor Jay and Pas­tor Der­rick felt acute­ly the prophet­ic nature of their union tak­ing place just the day before the shoot­ing. It felt as though, in the midst of the chaos and the con­fu­sion, God was using them to write a bet­ter sto­ry. The Lord had guid­ed them to their merg­er at exact­ly the right time to redi­rect the anger and pain in the com­mu­ni­ty to a high­er, holy pur­pose.”
    • This my must-read link of the week. SO GOOD. I almost cried.
    • Kind of relat­ed but only mar­gin­al­ly: Pray­ing for Hong Kong Can Be Polit­i­cal­ly Disruptive—Even in Amer­i­ca  (D Cheng, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Dif­fer­ent ori­gins among eth­nic Chi­nese immi­grants can fos­ter dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views, with more Chris­tians from Chi­na sup­port­ing the poli­cies of the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment, and those from else­where often more crit­i­cal of the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
  2. ‘Absolute­ly No Mer­cy’: Leaked Files Expose How Chi­na Orga­nized Mass Deten­tions of Mus­lims (Austin Ramzy and Chris Buck­ley, NY Times): “…one of the most sig­nif­i­cant leaks of gov­ern­ment papers from inside China’s rul­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty in decades. They pro­vide an unprece­dent­ed inside view of the con­tin­u­ing clam­p­down in Xin­jiang, in which the author­i­ties have cor­ralled as many as a mil­lion eth­nic Uighurs, Kaza­khs and oth­ers into intern­ment camps and pris­ons over the past three years.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. More Preg­nan­cy, Less Crime (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “More gen­er­al­ly, how­ev­er, there are pol­i­cy impli­ca­tion if we think beyond the imme­di­ate results. First, these results show that crime isn’t sim­ply a prod­uct of fam­i­ly back­ground, pover­ty and neglect. Crime is a choice.”
    • The orig­i­nal study: Fam­i­ly For­ma­tion and Crime (Max­im Massenkoff and Evan K. Rose, job mar­ket paper, pdf link): “Our event-study analy­sis indi­cates that preg­nan­cy trig­gers sharp declines in crime rival­ing any known inter­ven­tion.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: The Dat­ing Mar­ket (Tyro Part­ners, pdf link): “With the advent of online dat­ing, women in prime repro­duc­tive age are in the dom­i­nant posi­tion in the dat­ing mar­ket for the first time in human history.This comes with huge social ram­i­fi­ca­tions.” The authors are hedge fund guys. Inter­est­ing through­out and at times quite amus­ing. I espe­cial­ly com­mend to you the chart at the bot­tom of the page 5 con­trast­ed with the chart at the top of page 6.
  4. Thread on the protests in Iran (Shay Khatiri, Twit­ter): “Dur­ing its first 24 hours, it’s already been the most vio­lent protests in decades, if not ever. 1979 rev­o­lu­tion did not reach this lev­el of vio­lence.”
    • Amnesty Says At Least 106 Killed In Iran Protests (John Gam­brell, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “Days of protests in Iran over ris­ing fuel prices and a sub­se­quent gov­ern­ment crack­down have killed at least 106 peo­ple across the Islam­ic Repub­lic, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al said Tues­day, cit­ing ‘cred­i­ble reports.’”
  5. Why Some Peo­ple Are Impos­si­bly Tal­ent­ed (David Rob­son, BBC): “…influ­en­tial sci­en­tists are much more like­ly to have diverse inter­ests out­side their pri­ma­ry area of research than the aver­age sci­en­tist, for instance. Stud­ies have found that Nobel Prize-win­ning sci­en­tists are about 25 times more like­ly to sing, dance or act than the aver­age sci­en­tist. They are also 17 times more like­ly to cre­ate visu­al art, 12 times more like­ly to write poet­ry and four times more like­ly to be a musi­cian.”
  6. 2019 Reli­gious Free­dom Index (Beck­et Law): “If Amer­i­ca is becom­ing less reli­gious, as some polls indi­cate, does that nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it is also becom­ing less sup­port­ive of reli­gious lib­er­ty pro­tec­tions? Are we, in fact, divid­ed on ques­tions of reli­gious free­dom?… With a cur­rent score of 67, the 2019 Index indi­cates strong sup­port for reli­gious free­dom pro­tec­tions. ”
  7. Why Did the Wall Fall, 30 Years Ago? (George Weigel, First Things): “Get­ting this his­to­ry straight is impor­tant, not just as a mat­ter of intel­lec­tu­al hygiene but for the future. Pub­lic offi­cials who do not grasp the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to the col­lapse of Euro­pean com­mu­nism and the emer­gence of new democ­ra­cies in cen­tral and east­ern Europe are unlike­ly to appre­ci­ate the cen­tral­i­ty of reli­gious free­dom to free and vir­tu­ous 21st-cen­tu­ry soci­eties and to 21st-cen­tu­ry democ­ra­cy.”

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 Alco­hol, Black­outs, and Cam­pus Sex­u­al Assault (Texas Month­ly, Sarah Hep­o­la): I think this is the most thought­ful sec­u­lar piece I’ve read on the issue. “Con­sent and alco­hol make tricky bed­fel­lows. The rea­son I liked get­ting drunk was because it altered my con­sent: it changed what I would say yes to. Not just in the bed­room but in every room and cor­ri­dor that led into the squint­ing light. Say yes to adven­ture, say yes to risk, say yes to karaoke and pool par­ties and argu­ments with men, say yes to a life with­out fear, even though such a life is nev­er pos­si­ble… We drink because it feels good. We drink because it makes us feel hap­py, safe, pow­er­ful. That it often makes us the oppo­site is one of alcohol’s das­tard­ly tricks.” (first shared in vol­ume 25)

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.