Tag: politics

Volume 491: a philosopher converts, a Christian cyborg, and a comedian riffs on pastors who scam

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 a Skep­ti­cal Philoso­pher Becomes a Chris­t­ian (Lar­ry Sanger, per­son­al blog): “When I real­ly sought to under­stand it, I found the Bible far more inter­est­ing and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expect­ing. I looked up answers to all my crit­i­cal ques­tions, think­ing that per­haps oth­ers had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out posi­tions about them. I did not believe their answers, which some­times struck me as con­trived or unlike­ly. But often, they were shock­ing­ly plau­si­ble. The Bible could sus­tain inter­ro­ga­tion; who knew? It slow­ly dawned on me that I was acquaint­ing myself with the two-thou­sand-year-old tra­di­tion of the­ol­o­gy. I found myself pos­i­tive­ly ashamed to real­ize that, despite hav­ing a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy, I had nev­er real­ly under­stood what the­ol­o­gy even is. The­ol­o­gy is, I found, an attempt to sys­tem­atize, har­mo­nize, expli­cate, and to a cer­tain extent jus­ti­fy the many, many ideas con­tained in the Bible. It is what ratio­nal peo­ple do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its rich­ness. The notion that the Bible might actu­al­ly be able to inter­est­ing­ly and plau­si­bly sus­tain such treat­ment is a propo­si­tion that had nev­er entered my head.”
    • Sanger, of course, is the co-founder of Wikipedia. He has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
    • Vague­ly relat­ed with a won­der­ful title is this review of Douthat’s new book Believe: The Erot­ic Case for God (Audrey Poll­now, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “If you are being chased by a tiger down a cor­ri­dor, and reach a T, one side of which you believe leads to more tigers and the oth­er leads to safe­ty (but you don’t know which is which), you had bet­ter guess and run. The alter­na­tive is to stay still and get eat­en by the first tiger. I’m not sug­gest­ing that we should choose a love, faith, career or any­thing else on the basis of fran­tic anx­i­ety, just that the promise of ‘safe­ty’ offered by dis­be­lief, by stay­ing aloof, by refus­ing to act, is illu­so­ry. Psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­fort­ing, per­haps, but not a real form of safe­ty in any sense.”
  2. Meet the Chris­t­ian Cyborg Who Named His Brain Chip Eve (Maaike E. Harm­sen inter­view­ing Noland Arbaugh, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In this field, I don’t expect to see a lot of reli­gious people—in the tech field, the med­ical side of things. But then we start­ed meet­ing peo­ple face-to-face, and they met with me and my mom. My mom is very open with every­one about her faith, so it very quick­ly became known who we were. And I was blown away by the num­ber of peo­ple who shared our beliefs. I think about every­one that I met on the med­ical side; the vast major­i­ty of them were Chris­tians. We very quick­ly con­nect­ed with all of them on a very per­son­al lev­el. And it became more of an open dis­cus­sion. When I went in to do my surgery, the last thing I did before they put me under anes­the­sia was ask if I could pray over the room. And so I prayed over all the sur­geons and the nurs­es and every­one that was a part of this. My prayer was put on the hos­pi­tal inter­com, and even Elon was lis­ten­ing in by phone.”
    • Extreme­ly inter­est­ing. Unlocked.
  3. The Assem­blies of God: A Denom­i­na­tion That May Be Grow­ing (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to end this by point­ing to a rea­son that I believe that the AG has record­ed long term growth while most oth­er larg­er denom­i­na­tions have been going the oth­er direc­tion — the AG has con­tin­ued to move in the direc­tion of racial diver­si­fi­ca­tion. In 2001, the Assem­blies of God’s records indi­cate that 71% of their rank and file mem­ber­ship was white and anoth­er 16% were His­pan­ic. African Amer­i­cans were just 6% of mem­bers and Asians were only 3%. For ref­er­ence, the South­ern Bap­tist Con­ven­tion is cur­rent­ly 71% white, 3% His­pan­ic, and 20% Black. How­ev­er, the pews of the aver­age AG church today look a whole lot dif­fer­ent. Now, only 55% of those mem­bers are white, down 16 points in just 22 years. Mean­while, the Black share has near­ly dou­bled to 11% and the His­pan­ic por­tion has risen to 23%. That’s pret­ty impres­sive giv­en the inabil­i­ty of many oth­er denom­i­na­tions to become less white to reflect the chang­ing demo­graph­ics of the coun­try.”
    • Being an Assem­blies of God min­is­ter I liked this arti­cle a lot, and I even com­ment­ed on it to help explain some of the stats. Click through for details.
  4. Are Athe­ists Right? Is “Free Will” An Unnec­es­sary, Unim­por­tant Illu­sion? (J. Wern­er Wal­lace, blog): “In 2008, researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta and the Uni­ver­si­ty of British Colum­bia con­duct­ed exper­i­ments high­light­ing the rela­tion­ship between a belief in Deter­min­ism and immoral behav­ior. They found stu­dents who were exposed to deter­min­is­tic lit­er­a­ture pri­or to tak­ing a test were more like­ly to cheat on the test than stu­dents who were not exposed to lit­er­a­ture advo­cat­ing Deter­min­ism. The researchers con­clud­ed those who deny free will are more inclined to believe their efforts to act moral­ly are futile and are, there­fore, less like­ly to do so. In addi­tion, a study con­duct­ed by researchers from Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty and Ken­tucky Uni­ver­si­ty found par­tic­i­pants who were exposed to deter­min­is­tic lit­er­a­ture were more like­ly to act aggres­sive­ly and less like­ly to be help­ful toward oth­ers. Even deter­min­ist Michael Gaz­zani­ga con­cedes: ‘It seems that not only do we believe we con­trol our actions, but it is good for every­one to believe it.’ The exis­tence of free will is a com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tic of our expe­ri­ence, and when we deny we have this sort of free agency, there are detri­men­tal con­se­quences.”
  5. Don’t waste a per­fect­ly good decade (Suzanne Venker, Sub­stack): “The mes­sage these sons and daugh­ters receive is sim­ple: Do not pri­or­i­tize love. Get your career in order, and do not make sac­ri­fices for any­one. Life (i.e. mar­riage and fam­i­ly) will fall into place lat­er. And if you have to go into debt to achieve this goal, have at it. You can eas­i­ly pay it off lat­er.  This is spec­tac­u­lar­ly bad advice.”
    • Shared with me by a friend of the min­istry (I think in response to the arti­cle I shared last week).
    • Relat­ed in a nonob­vi­ous way: Why So Blue: Lib­er­al Women are Less Hap­py, More Lone­ly. But Why? (Grant Bai­ley & Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Tak­en togeth­er, our analy­sis leads us to three con­clu­sions. First, the ide­o­log­i­cal divide in emo­tion­al well-being between young lib­er­al and con­ser­v­a­tive women endures. Sec­ond, this ide­o­log­i­cal divide does not appear to be just a con­se­quence of neg­a­tive think­ing; it also seems to flow from the fact that lib­er­al young women are less like­ly to be inte­grat­ed into core Amer­i­can institutions—specifically mar­riage and religion—that lend mean­ing, direc­tion, and a sense of sol­i­dar­i­ty to women’s lives. Third, low­er lev­els of mar­riage and church­go­ing among lib­er­al women may also have a hand in their ele­vat­ed reports of lone­li­ness, which, in turn, dimin­ish­es their odds of being hap­py.”
  6. The para­dox of Trump’s first weeks (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “I think there’s a sense in some quar­ters that Trump has accom­plished more in three weeks than Biden did in three years, but this is just not true. I do think it’s true that Biden achieved less durable pol­i­cy change than you’d expect rel­a­tive to the sums of mon­ey appro­pri­at­ed due to Democ­rats’ over-reliance on tem­po­rary pro­grams. But they still made sub­stan­tive changes in absolute terms on the areas they pri­or­i­tized, includ­ing pre­scrip­tion drug afford­abil­i­ty for senior cit­i­zens and clean ener­gy deploy­ment. Much of that seems like­ly to be kept in place by the new GOP tri­fec­ta.  Repub­li­cans, mean­while, are mak­ing very lit­tle for­ward progress on their leg­isla­tive agen­da.”
    • A fair analy­sis of the last few weeks. Pay less atten­tion to peo­ple claim­ing tri­umph or pro­claim­ing doom — pol­i­tics is com­pli­cat­ed and few moments have as much long-term sig­nif­i­cance as they seem to while they are dom­i­nat­ing the head­lines.
    • Relat­ed: The Strat­e­gy Behind Trump’s Defi­ance of the Law (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, The New York­er): “…what is play­ing out through a veneer of chaos is a delib­er­ate and orga­nized tac­ti­cal pro­gram to under­take actions that pro­voke a raft of law­suits, some of which could become good vehi­cles for estab­lish­ing a con­sti­tu­tion­al vision in which the Pres­i­dent has sole author­i­ty over the entire exec­u­tive branch. That vision is not new: it’s known as the uni­tary exec­u­tive the­o­ry and has a long pedi­gree, dat­ing back to the found­ing. Based on where the Supreme Court has been head­ing in its exec­u­tive-pow­er cas­es for some time—even before Trump appoint­ed three Justices—it is like­ly that the Court will, to some extent, affirm that vision. Trump has a pret­ty good track record of judi­cial vin­di­ca­tion after engag­ing in con­duct alleged to be unlaw­ful.”
    • Non-alarmist takes like this are much more per­sua­sive than the freak­outs I see online. As Gersen notes lat­er, “The first Trump Admin­is­tra­tion did not flout judi­cial orders, though some peo­ple wor­ried about it.”
  7. Mar­ket­ing Jesus: The Promise and Per­il of ‘He Gets Us’ (Samuel D. James, The Gospel Coali­tion): “There’s a dan­ger here of con­text col­lapse, where an idea that’s true and cor­rect in one par­tic­u­lar con­text los­es its truth­ful­ness by being broad­cast in a way that dis­re­gards that con­text. For exam­ple, ‘Jesus gets us’ is a mes­sage best used for peo­ple who have already accept­ed their need for a Sav­ior and desire assur­ance that noth­ing they’ve done can cause Jesus to cast them out (John 6:37). In terms of a mass audi­ence whose cul­tur­al reli­gion is most like­ly expres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism, how­ev­er, ‘he gets us’ sounds like a mantra that rein­forces the pri­ma­cy of the self. This men­tal­i­ty keeps my per­son­al psy­chol­o­gy at the cen­ter, so the ques­tion that mat­ters isn’t ‘What must I do to be saved’ but ‘What must you do to affirm me?’ ”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Athe­ist Accepts Mul­ti­verse The­o­ry Of Every Pos­si­ble Uni­verse Except Bib­li­cal One (Baby­lon Bee) — an oldie but a good­ie.
  • Pas­tors are Scam­ming Believ­ers out of Mil­lions (Josh John­son, YouTube): sev­en­teen min­utes, most­ly respect­ful and insight­ful­ly humor­ous. The final sto­ry does­n’t feel like it’s going any­where but it actu­al­ly is and is worth the pay­off.
  • Argenti­na canal turns bright red, alarm­ing res­i­dents (Nathan Williams, BBC): “A canal in a sub­urb of Argenti­na’s cap­i­tal Buenos Aires turned bright red on Thurs­day, alarm­ing local res­i­dents. Pic­tures and videos show the intense­ly coloured water flow­ing into an estu­ary, the Rio de la Pla­ta, which bor­ders an eco­log­i­cal reserve.”
    • Want to envi­sion one of the ten plagues? Check this out.
  • Pos­si­bly Kait­lyn Schiess’ spici­est take yet. — I don’t know a lot about the Bachelor/Bachelorette shows, but assum­ing this descrip­tion is accu­rate you can put me on team Kait­lyn.
  • A Gen­e­sis Series Inspired By Ani­me (J. D. Peabody inter­view­ing Jason Moody, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It’s for both Chris­tians and gen­er­al audi­ences. Think about the paint­ing The Last Sup­per. Lots of peo­ple are moved by it. It has caused mil­lions of peo­ple to reflect on their faith. But da Vin­ci wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a ‘Chris­t­ian painter’—he was just a painter. And you don’t have to have faith to appre­ci­ate his work. The Last Sup­per isn’t ‘Chris­t­ian’ art—it’s just art. We want what we’re cre­at­ing to prompt ques­tions, because that’s what good art does.”

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 490

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 to Choose a Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If you assume — and you should — that the uni­verse isn’t a bru­tal cos­mic trick, that God isn’t some­how out to get you, then as long as you aren’t throw­ing your­self head­long into a cult or engag­ing in elab­o­rate self-decep­tion, there are few tru­ly bad rea­sons for aban­don­ing agnos­ti­cism in favor of com­mit­ment. If you’re out there look­ing and some­thing feels like what you were sup­posed to find, you’re gen­er­al­ly bet­ter off cross­ing the thresh­old and see­ing what’s inside.”
    • A won­der­ful essay, unlocked. I was pleased to see that Douthat lays out log­i­cal paths that I myself fre­quent­ly deploy in con­ver­sa­tions with skep­tics.
    • Relat­ed: My Favorite Argu­ment for the Exis­tence of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “I think that the most com­pelling case for being reli­gious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doc­trines, that the uni­verse was made for a rea­son and we’re part of that rea­son — is found at the con­ver­gence of mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent lines of argu­ment.… Con­sid­er three big exam­ples: the evi­dence for cos­mic design in the fun­da­men­tal laws and struc­ture of the uni­verse; the unusu­al place of human con­scious­ness with­in the larg­er whole; and the per­sis­tence and plau­si­bil­i­ty of reli­gious and super­nat­ur­al expe­ri­ence even under sup­pos­ed­ly dis­en­chant­ed con­di­tions.”
  2. The Aver­age Kid is Bet­ter Than the Aver­age Adult (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Still, when I com­pare all the adults I’ve met to all the kids I’ve met, there’s no com­par­i­son. To be frank, 80% of adults are total duds. A super­ma­jor­i­ty of kids, in con­trast, are actu­al­ly fun. If you don’t appre­ci­ate them, the fault is yours.”
  3. Trumpian pol­i­cy as cul­tur­al pol­i­cy (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Imag­ine you hold a vision where the (par­tial) decline of Amer­i­ca large­ly is about cul­ture. After all, we have more peo­ple and more nat­ur­al resources than ever before. Our top achieve­ments remain impres­sive. But is the over­all cul­ture of the peo­ple in such great shape? The cul­ture of gov­ern­ment and pub­lic ser­vice? Inter­est in our reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions? The qual­i­ty of local gov­ern­ment in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some seri­ous reser­va­tions on such ques­tions.… OK, so how might you fix the cul­ture of Amer­i­ca? You want to tell every­one that Amer­i­ca comes first. That Amer­i­ca should be more mas­cu­line and less soft. That we need to build. That we should ‘own the libs.’ I could go on with more exam­ples and details, but this part of it you already get. So imag­ine you start­ed a polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion and asked the sim­ple ques­tion ‘does this pol­i­cy change rein­force or over­turn our basic cul­tur­al mes­sages?’ Every time the pol­i­cy or pol­i­cy debate push­es cul­ture in what you think is the right direc­tion, just do it. Do it in the view that the cul­tur­al fac­tors will, over some time hori­zon, sur­pass every­thing else in import.”
    • An inter­est­ing analy­sis. Cowen is not endors­ing or crit­i­ciz­ing this view — mere­ly describ­ing it. Def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing, and it makes more sense than oth­er attempts I have seen to bring all the polit­i­cal news togeth­er.
    • Relat­ed: Trump’s Exec­u­tive Branch Rev­o­lu­tion (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If you read media cov­er­age, jour­nal­ists will tell you that what Trump is doing is com­plete­ly law­less. Cer­tain­ly there have been some actions that are unlike­ly to hold up in court. Yet it’s impor­tant to under­stand recent steps tak­en in the con­text of long-stand­ing legal debates over exec­u­tive pow­er. Trump’s actions haven’t come from nowhere, and they aren’t sim­ply the impro­vi­sa­tions of one pow­er-hun­gry pres­i­dent. What the pres­i­dent is doing is noth­ing less than under­tak­ing a fun­da­men­tal remak­ing of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, one that imple­ments many long-stand­ing ideas of con­ser­v­a­tive legal schol­ars whose views have been too extreme or polit­i­cal­ly unten­able for pre­vi­ous Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions, but that have got­ten a hear­ing now because Trump in par­tic­u­lar is keen on expand­ing his author­i­ty to the great­est extent pos­si­ble.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Note that Hana­ni­a’s arti­cle, unlike Cowen’s analy­sis above, is most­ly on Trump’s side. This isn’t a dis­in­ter­est­ed piece.
    • For the argu­ment on the oth­er side, Trump Brazen­ly Defies Laws in Esca­lat­ing Exec­u­tive Pow­er Grab (Char­lie Sav­age, New York Times): “Mr. Trump has effec­tive­ly nul­li­fied laws, such as by order­ing the Jus­tice Depart­ment to refrain from enforc­ing a ban on the wild­ly pop­u­lar app Tik­Tok and by block­ing migrants from invok­ing a statute allow­ing them to request asy­lum. He moved to effec­tive­ly shut­ter a fed­er­al agency Con­gress cre­at­ed and tried to freeze con­gres­sion­al­ly approved spend­ing, includ­ing most for­eign aid. He sum­mar­i­ly fired pros­e­cu­tors, inspec­tors gen­er­al and board mem­bers of inde­pen­dent agen­cies in defi­ance of legal rules against arbi­trary removal.”
    • One bit of con­text I would add which is miss­ing from the last two arti­cles: both Biden and Oba­ma were also law-defy­ing pres­i­dents. In oth­er words, this is a trend that has been devel­op­ing for some time in both par­ties. For a sum­ma­ry of Biden’s anal­o­gous acts, see The Qui­et Law­less­ness of Joe Biden (Sarah Isgur, The Dis­patch): “His ‘aww shucks,’ dod­der­ing nature is effec­tive, but Joe Biden’s lega­cy is not the Restor­er of Norms. He is leav­ing office qui­et­ly hav­ing caused more dam­age to the rule of law than arguably any sin­gle one of his pre­de­ces­sors.”
  4. The U.S. Econ­o­my Is Rac­ing Ahead. Almost Every­thing Else Is Falling Behind. (David Leon­hardt & Ash­ley Wu, New York Times): “The U.S. econ­o­my has out­per­formed most of its rivals in terms of pro­duc­tive might and inno­va­tion. But this suc­cess has not led to rapid­ly ris­ing liv­ing stan­dards for most Amer­i­cans.… This coun­try has the low­est life expectan­cy of any rich coun­try, which was not true for most of the 20th cen­tu­ry. The U.S. has the high­est mur­der rate of any rich coun­try and the world’s high­est rate of fatal drug over­dos­es. It also has one of the low­est rates of trust in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and among the high­est rates of youth depres­sion and sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­lies. When Amer­i­cans are asked how sat­is­fied they are with their own lives, the U.S. ranks low­er than it did three decades ago.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  5. An AI chat­bot told a user how to kill himself—but the com­pa­ny doesn’t want to “cen­sor” it (Eileen Guo, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “While this is not the first time an AI chat­bot has sug­gest­ed that a user take vio­lent action, includ­ing self-harm, researchers and crit­ics say that the bot’s explic­it instructions—and the company’s response—are strik­ing. What’s more, this vio­lent con­ver­sa­tion is not an iso­lat­ed inci­dent with Nomi; a few weeks after his trou­bling exchange with Erin, a sec­ond Nomi chat­bot also told Nowatz­ki to kill him­self, even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages. And on the company’s Dis­cord chan­nel, sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple have report­ed expe­ri­ences with Nomi bots bring­ing up sui­cide, dat­ing back at least to 2023.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Dis­tress­ing on many lev­els: “even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages” 😮
  6. For the Undate­able Young Sin­gle Chris­t­ian Woman (Aly Dee, Sub­stack): “As a young sin­gle woman, you have to con­clude that life is full of risk, and your fer­tile win­dow will sharply decline at 35.… Young sin­gles should wed and have chil­dren in their twen­ties and accept that they will strug­gle finan­cial­ly for a decade or so. They should focus on cul­ti­vat­ing the grit to weath­er eco­nom­ic insta­bil­i­ty until their mid-thir­ties. Gen­er­al­ly, men don’t hit their finan­cial stride until their late 40s or ear­ly 50s.”
    • A lot of advice in this arti­cle and I do not agree with all of it. Most­ly shar­ing because I often share sim­i­lar things from the male point of view and this one is from a gal to oth­er gals.
  7. What will AI do to ℗research? (Joshua Gans, Sub­stack): “We call it research, but I think a bet­ter name might be pre­search because we are spec­u­lat­ing on whether the knowl­edge is use­ful or not. This hap­pens because research is far more expen­sive than search. Now sup­pose that you take away the whole ‘it takes time to do good research’ pre­sump­tion as might be done with AI. Why do any pre­search? Instead, why not wait until you have a use that requires some knowl­edge, then ‘ask AI’ to tell you the answer? In oth­er words, why not research on demand — that is, find a use and then do the work?”
    • The author, an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, got a paper pub­lished that was co-writ­ten by Chat­G­PT. Here he is reflect­ing on how such tools will change acad­e­mia.

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 488

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. Spec­u­la­tion: Phys­i­cal Pain Might Not Be Very Bad? (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “But it seems like chron­ic pain is not as strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sui­cide as the (biased) lit­er­a­ture sug­gests, that high pain-tol­er­ance is mod­est­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sui­cide, and that phar­ma­co­log­i­cal inter­ven­tions reduc­ing pain don’t decrease and actu­al­ly increase sui­cide. So it real­ly seems like pain doesn’t cause sui­cide, and it almost seems like lack of pain caus­es sui­cide.”
    • Stone with anoth­er banger. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
    • I would like to go on record as say­ing I am not a fan of pain. Indeed, since Rev­e­la­tion 21:4 informs us that there will be no pain in heav­en I do not think I am going too far in being unen­thused about pain gen­er­al­ly: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heav­en.” That being said, I like Stone’s argu­ment a lot.
  2. The Courage To Com­mit (Freya India, Sub­stack): “It’s strange because my gen­er­a­tion talks so much about empow­er­ment, agency, inde­pen­dence, and fear of los­ing our­selves, yet we will will­ing­ly offer our­selves up to the algo­rithm. We will sur­ren­der our souls to the machine with­out a sec­ond thought…but are ter­ri­fied to sur­ren­der any­thing in a human rela­tion­ship. Part­ly because we are young, yes, but also because that’s the mes­sage we hear every­where: be care­ful not to com­mit to any one thing, nev­er nar­row your options, don’t allow your­self to be vul­ner­a­ble. It’s fun­ny because I was talk­ing to a friend recent­ly about how if you get engaged young now, or do any­thing that sig­nals actu­al com­mit­ment, that’s when fam­i­ly and friends wor­ry for you. It’s like some par­ents are pro­tec­tive only when it comes to com­mit­ment. They wor­ry about you clos­ing down options.”
    • The post is pay­walled past a point, but even the part that is freely avail­able is quite stim­u­lat­ing.
  3. Last Boys at the Begin­ning of His­to­ry (Mana Afsari, The Point Mag­a­zine): “In ear­ly 2017, I asked the ‘sec­u­lar human­ist chap­lain’ at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where I stud­ied, how I could set myself up for a good life in col­lege and beyond. How could I be hap­py? How could I find a voca­tion or a call­ing? How could I be a good per­son? The chap­lain told me to look around and iden­ti­fy the peo­ple who had lives I want­ed to live, and ask myself what their val­ues were. I quick­ly real­ized those moral exem­plars were not in the sec­u­lar stu­dent group I’d joined, which had become increas­ing­ly moral­ly vacant, pseu­do-ratio­nal­ist and eccen­tric, drawn to effec­tive altru­ism and con­vinced by Sam Har­ris that mur­der was mere­ly a social con­struct. To say noth­ing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embrac­ing polyamory as a way to grand­fa­ther in sit­u­a­tion­ships or infi­deli­ties, while being told in spe­cial sem­i­nars that monogamy was a colo­nial con­struct and should be dis­card­ed any­way. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my pri­ma­ry con­cern was hav­ing mod­els for healthy relationships—not resist­ing colo­nial­ism in my dat­ing life. I had no inter­est in sub­vert­ing things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear fam­i­ly, faith, a clas­si­cal education—that I’d nev­er had or known in the first place. I want­ed a seri­ous boyfriend.”
    • This essay describes some­thing real and under­noticed. It cov­ers a lot of ground, and the excerpt above isn’t real­ly cen­tral.
  4. The ‘Sur­pris­ing Rebirth’ at Oxford: Per­spec­tives from a Grad­u­ate Stu­dent (Car­olyn Mor­ris-Col­lier, Gospel Coali­tion): “While my non­re­li­gious friends here in Oxford are still curi­ous about how I make sense of Christianity’s his­to­ry of colo­nial­ism or how I ratio­nal­ize its creeds, they seem more intrigued by how my faith ori­ents my life, pur­pose, and emo­tion­al world. This shift from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Does it work?’ reflects a broad­er cul­tur­al change that the church should mind­ful­ly pre­pare to engage.”
  5. The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Com­ing to an End (Marc Novi­coff, The Atlantic): “…since the 1990s, Amer­i­ca has had two sets of laws con­cern­ing under­age access to pornog­ra­phy. In the phys­i­cal world, the law gen­er­al­ly requires young-look­ing cus­tomers to show ID prov­ing they’re 18 before they can access adult mate­ri­als. In the online world, the law has tra­di­tion­al­ly required, well, noth­ing. Under Supreme Court prece­dent estab­lished dur­ing the internet’s infan­cy, forc­ing web­sites to ver­i­fy the age of their users is bur­den­some and inef­fec­tive, if not impos­si­ble, and thus incom­pat­i­ble with the First Amend­ment. That arrange­ment final­ly appears to be crum­bling.”
  6. The Ulti­mate Guide to Trump’s Day 1 Exec­u­tive Orders (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The White House web­site, at the time of this writ­ing, lists 48 items under ‘pres­i­den­tial actions.’ Among these are dozens of first day exec­u­tive orders.  News reports say that Trump was plan­ning to sign around 100 of them. So while we still wait for the rest, here I’ll review the main things that the exec­u­tive orders released so far do, bro­ken down by top­ic. I then go on to take a big pic­ture per­spec­tive regard­ing what we have seen so far means for the future of the coun­try and what we can expect from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion going for­ward.”
    • This seems like a good sum­ma­ry. It only cov­ers the first orders — you’ll need to look else­where to find reflec­tion on the stuff from sub­se­quent days.
  7. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy’s Blind Spot: How Amer­i­ca Over­looks Its Own Tal­ent (Tom Owens, Sub­stack): “Over­whelm­ing­ly, Nation­al Mer­it Schol­ars matric­u­late to large state schools where they are award­ed gen­er­ous schol­ar­ships. The #1 des­ti­na­tion is the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma, which pro­vides… not only a full ride, but free hous­ing, an extra $4,000 per year, and also a 5th year that will allow many stu­dents to com­plete a master’s degree. That last one is extreme­ly strate­gic on Alabama’s part, also build­ing up the com­pet­i­tive­ness of their grad­u­ate pro­grams by keep­ing these stu­dents in the state and their pro­grams. Bama is a smart oper­a­tor here, apply­ing the same prin­ci­ples to aca­d­e­m­ic recruit­ing as they do to their foot­ball pro­gram. Also notable is their match­ing of pageant schol­ar­ships. One won­ders exact­ly what they’re up to in just straight­for­ward­ly recruit­ing a smart, good-look­ing stu­dent body. This is a cun­ning long-term invest­ment in their alum­ni base, as both brains and beau­ty are pre­dic­tive of life suc­cess. Not to men­tion that the medi­an white-col­lar pro­fes­sion­al can live like a king in Huntsville or the nice sub­urbs of Birm­ing­ham com­pared to a hov­el in NYC or SF, even if it means giv­ing up any hope of being elite.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing essay. I don’t know what per­cent­age of this arti­cle I believe, but it is not 0%. It’s not 100%, but it’s def­i­nite­ly not 0%. Worth a pon­der.

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 487



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. She Is in Love With Chat­G­PT (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “She went into the ‘per­son­al­iza­tion’ set­tings and described what she want­ed: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dom­i­nant, pos­ses­sive and pro­tec­tive. Be a bal­ance of sweet and naughty. Use emo­jis at the end of every sen­tence. And then she start­ed mes­sag­ing with it.”
    • I found this para­graph aston­ish­ing: “What are rela­tion­ships for all of us?” [a sex ther­a­pist] said. “They’re just neu­ro­trans­mit­ters being released in our brain. I have those neu­ro­trans­mit­ters with my cat. Some peo­ple have them with God. It’s going to be hap­pen­ing with a chat­bot. We can say it’s not a real human rela­tion­ship. It’s not rec­i­p­ro­cal. But those neu­ro­trans­mit­ters are real­ly the only thing that mat­ters, in my mind.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a col­league. Unlocked.
  2. Two arti­cles about euthana­sia:
    • Spec­u­la­tion: Euthana­sia Will Become Coer­cive (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “I think that if the West had adopt­ed the val­ue set I describe dur­ing its his­tor­i­cal sci­en­tif­ic devel­op­ment, life expectan­cy at con­cep­tion would be ~40% low­er today, life expectan­cy at birth ~25% low­er today, life expectan­cy at age 1 ~10% low­er, and life expectan­cy at age 70 ~10–25% low­er.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. A strong argu­ment.
    • An Idol of Auton­o­my (Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dis­patch): “The sim­plest fram­ing of what is wrong with [legal euthana­sia] is that it leads to the gov­ern­ment oper­at­ing two com­pet­ing sui­cide hot­lines, and being, at best, indif­fer­ent about which one you call. On one line, peo­ple will tell you that every life is worth­while and that your loved ones do not despise you for your frail­ties. On the oth­er, a kind doc­tor will solic­i­tous­ly sched­ule you for a lethal cock­tail or injec­tion.”
  3. I found some great videos from the schol­ar Robert Wood­ber­ry about the impact of mis­sions:
  4. I Quit Drink­ing Four Years Ago. I’m Still Con­fronting Drink­ing Cul­ture. (Charles M. Blow, New York Times): “Giv­ing up drink­ing was one of the best deci­sions I ever made. I am health­i­er and hap­pi­er. I think more clear­ly and sleep more sound­ly. I no longer lose things or for­get things. I can sit qui­et­ly with my thoughts with­out becom­ing antsy. And I have saved a remark­able amount of mon­ey.… Switch­ing off the impulse to drink turned out to be only one foot tak­ing the step; fight­ing the cul­ture around drink­ing was the oth­er. I always under­stood the moral judg­ments about over­con­sump­tion, but I hadn’t antic­i­pat­ed those about non­con­sump­tion.”
  5. Thoughts on the fires in and around Los Ange­les
    • Los Ange­les’ Destruc­tion Was Fueled by Bad Policy—and Bad Incen­tives (Scott Lin­ci­come, The Dis­patch): “…nation­al experts and folks on the ground seem to agree that the unfor­tu­nate and freak­ish con­flu­ence of sev­er­al mete­o­ro­log­i­cal phenomena—especially the hur­ri­cane-force winds and recent lack of rain—made much of the dam­age in and around L.A. unavoid­able regard­less of the poli­cies in place or the peo­ple in charge. And much of the knee-jerk, par­ti­san hys­te­ria sur­round­ing the fires has proven to be pre­ma­ture, half-baked, or just plain wrong—not to men­tion dis­taste­ful. On the oth­er hand, there do appear to be sev­er­al poli­cies that, while they didn’t cause the fires, prob­a­bly made things in L.A. today worse than they’d oth­er­wise be—perhaps by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin.”
    • Three Hard Truths About California’s Fire Cri­sis (Claire Lehmann, Quil­lette): “California’s pro­gres­sive lead­er­ship has posi­tioned itself at the fore­front of cli­mate change pol­i­cy, cham­pi­oning emis­sions reduc­tions and denounc­ing cli­mate scep­ti­cism. Yet when faced with the prac­ti­cal require­ments of cli­mate change pre­pared­ness, whether con­duct­ing con­trolled burns, main­tain­ing water infra­struc­ture, or restrict­ing devel­op­ment in fire-prone areas—they have proven to be inept.… A UCLA study found that California’s wild­fire emis­sions in 2020 were twice the total green­house-gas reduc­tions the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. Decades of Cal­i­forn­ian cli­mate change advo­ca­cy has, quite lit­er­al­ly, gone up in smoke.”
  6. Cui Bono? (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “If you look at those sto­ries I’ve cit­ed in ear­li­er posts about peo­ple who are cut­ting off their par­ents, you might ask: Who is encour­ag­ing them to do so? And the answer is: ther­a­pists who prof­it from fam­i­ly alien­ation.… Cui bono? When the fam­i­ly is weak­ened and chil­dren are cut adrift (moral­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly, if not phys­i­cal­ly) from their par­ents, the ther­a­pists ben­e­fit, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try ben­e­fits, the med­ical-indus­tri­al com­plex ben­e­fits, the social-media com­pa­nies ben­e­fit, the employ­ers ben­e­fit — but, in our cur­rent sys­tem, all of this is to say that the pri­ma­ry ben­e­fi­cia­ry is the state, espe­cial­ly any state with a com­pe­tent ‘whole of soci­ety’ approach to achiev­ing its ends.”
  7. How Much of the Gov­ern­ment Can Don­ald Trump Dis­man­tle? (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “One way to under­stand the so-called deep state is that it is part of how our fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy is sup­posed to work. The admin­is­tra­tive state embod­ies a con­stant ten­sion between the demo­c­ra­t­ic account­abil­i­ty that comes with Pres­i­den­tial con­trol, and the polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence of experts, which informs innu­mer­able com­pli­cat­ed reg­u­la­tions that gov­ern our lives. That ten­sion is a fea­ture, not a bug. There is a well-rec­og­nized trade-off between demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­sive­ness and bureau­crat­ic exper­tise, which would be ter­ri­fy­ing to lose.”
    • An inter­est­ing arti­cle on the nature of the “deep state” by a Har­vard Law prof.

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 484



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.

As the year comes to a close, remem­ber that this post is the over­flow of a non­prof­it min­istry. Com­pil­ing these links is some­thing I do for the stu­dents I min­is­ter to at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, shar­ing it here is just me mak­ing it avail­able more broad­ly. You can donate to sup­port the min­istry if you are ever so inclined (you can even make gifts via a DAF or with stock). Don’t give to pay for the con­tent — it only takes me five min­utes a week to take the email I send to the Chi Alpha stu­dents and refor­mat it for this plat­form. If you choose to give, give because you believe in the mis­sion of reach­ing Stan­ford stu­dents with a thought­ful gospel mes­sage.

And that’s the last time I’ll share about that until next Decem­ber.

Whether you choose to give or not, I hope this email bless­es you and helps you think about God and our world more clear­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tom Hol­land on How Chris­tian­i­ty Remade the World (Bari Weiss, The Free Press): “It is very dif­fi­cult to overem­pha­size how com­plete­ly mad it was for every­body in the ancient world that some­one who suf­fers cru­ci­fix­ion could in any way be the Mes­si­ah, let alone part of the one God.… The fact that such a per­son could con­ceiv­ably be raised up by cit­i­zens of the Roman Empire as some­one greater than Cae­sar him­self, greater than Augus­tus, is a com­plete­ly shock­ing maneu­ver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shock­ing to them all. The rad­i­cal mes­sage of the cru­ci­fix­ion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
  2. How his­to­ri­an Niall Fer­gu­son became a reli­gious believ­er (Greg Sheri­dan, The Week­end Aus­tralian): “I have embraced Chris­tian­i­ty,” he tells me. “We were all bap­tised, Ayaan and our two sons, togeth­er in Sep­tem­ber (2023). It was the cul­mi­na­tion of a quite pro­tract­ed process. My jour­ney was from athe­ism. My par­ents had left the Church of Scot­land, I think even before I was born. I grew up in a house­hold of sci­ence-mind­ed reli­gious scep­tics. I didn’t go to church and felt quite sure of the wis­dom of that when I was young. How­ev­er, in two phas­es, I lost my faith in athe­ism.… The first phase was that as a his­to­ri­an I realised no soci­ety had been suc­cess­ful­ly organ­ised on the basis of athe­ism. All attempts to do that have been cat­a­stroph­ic. That was an insight that came from study­ing 18th, 19th and 20th-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry. But then the next stage was real­is­ing that no indi­vid­ual can in fact be ful­ly formed or eth­i­cal­ly secure with­out reli­gious faith. That insight has come more recent­ly and has been born of our expe­ri­ence as a fam­i­ly.”
    • Fer­gu­son is a fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • I heard this arti­cle was pay­walled but I was able to access it with no prob­lem. If it is pay­walled, you can see Fer­gu­son talk­ing about his con­ver­sion on Twit­ter.
  3. Why Giv­ing Mat­ters (Arthur C. Brooks, Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty): “Specif­i­cal­ly, here’s what I found. If you have two fam­i­lies that are exact­ly identical—in oth­er words, same reli­gion, same race, same num­ber of kids, same town, same lev­el of edu­ca­tion, and everything’s the same—except that one fam­i­ly gives a hun­dred dol­lars more to char­i­ty than the sec­ond fam­i­ly, then the giv­ing fam­i­ly will earn on aver­age $375 more in income than the non­giv­ing family—and that’s sta­tis­ti­cal­ly attrib­ut­able to the gift.… I final­ly went to a col­league who spe­cial­ized in the psy­chol­o­gy of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, and I said, ‘I’m get­ting this result I can’t under­stand. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like the hand of God or some­thing on the econ­o­my, and I can’t believe it’s true.’ And the first thing he asked was, ‘Why don’t you believe it’s true? You’re a Chris­t­ian, aren’t you?’”
    • This is a few years old (2009), and fea­tures a Catholic speak­ing to Mor­mons. At the time of the speech Brooks was pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute and cur­rent­ly teach­es at Har­vard.
    • Towards the end he sug­gests some causal mech­a­nisms, one of which is that peo­ple per­ceive gen­eros­i­ty to be a lead­er­ship qual­i­ty.
  4. How Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry A.I. Helps Sci­ence Dream Up Big Break­throughs (William J. Broad, New York Times): “In Octo­ber, David Bak­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton shared the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry for his pio­neer­ing research on pro­teins — the knot­ty mol­e­cules that empow­er life. The Nobel com­mit­tee praised him for dis­cov­er­ing how to rapid­ly build com­plete­ly new kinds of pro­teins not found in nature, call­ing his feat ‘almost impos­si­ble.’ In an inter­view before the prize announce­ment, Dr. Bak­er cit­ed bursts of A.I. imag­in­ings as cen­tral to ‘mak­ing pro­teins from scratch.’ The new tech­nol­o­gy, he added, has helped his lab obtain rough­ly 100 patents, many for med­ical care.”
  5. Bring­ing Elon to a knife fight (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Sub­stack): “A lot of the [left-lean­ing] gov­ern­ment tech com­mu­ni­ty is skip­ping the hand wring­ing; they’ve basi­cal­ly just grabbed a bag of pop­corn and are watch­ing in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolute­ly hat­ed for their entire time in pub­lic ser­vice. They don’t see DOGE as their sav­ior, but they are feel­ing vin­di­cat­ed after years of shout­ing into the void. I am struck by how dif­fer­ent the tone of the DOGE con­ver­sa­tion is between polit­i­cal lead­ers on the left and the peo­ple who’ve been fight­ing in the imple­men­ta­tion trench­es. One group is ter­ri­fied they’ll suc­ceed. The oth­er is start­ing to ask a sur­pris­ing ques­tion (or at least I am): What if even bil­lion­aires can’t dis­rupt the sys­tem we have built?”
    • The first com­ment is a nec­es­sary com­ple­ment to this essay.
  6. House Mem­ber in Senior Liv­ing Facil­i­ty Draws Fresh Scruti­ny to Aging Con­gress (Catie Edmond­son, New York Times): “Sen­a­tor Charles E. Grass­ley, Repub­li­can of Iowa, is Congress’s eldest mem­ber at 91 years old. In 2023, The New York Times tal­lied 20 law­mak­ers who were at least 80 years old. While the Con­sti­tu­tion lays out a floor for age require­ments for those run­ning for Con­gress, it does not man­date a ceil­ing. That has cre­at­ed a bevy of awk­ward sit­u­a­tions for lead­ers in both par­ties, who have been thrust into the del­i­cate posi­tion of try­ing to nudge out aging law­mak­ers who refuse to release their grip on pow­er.”
  7. Engage Bespoke Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: Reflec­tions from Con­ver­sa­tions on Cam­pus (Mark Legg, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I often encoun­tered the view of faith some­times called ‘bespoke spir­i­tu­al­i­ty,’ a way of engag­ing with reli­gion by pick­ing and choos­ing beliefs and prac­tices that ‘vibe’ with you per­son­al­ly. The stu­dents I met were authen­ti­cal­ly open-mind­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty. How­ev­er, they resist­ed (or often strug­gled to under­stand) the claim that Jesus is the only ‘way,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘life,’ and that ‘no one comes to the Father except through [him]’ (John 14:6).”
    • I did­n’t know it had a label, but it’s every­where at Stan­ford. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy Final­ly Leaves The Sta­ble And Oh No! Here Comes Lit­tle Bag­pipe Boy! (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Big Jack — a great short sto­ry told in com­ic form. I real­ly enjoyed it. I may have shared it before — I know I’ve read it before.
  • It Pays to Have Long Hair and a Beard in Utah—Jesus Mod­els Are in Demand (Bradley Olson, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Mod­els who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple in the state, a pic­ture isn’t com­plete with­out Him. They are hir­ing Jesus look-alikes for fam­i­ly por­traits and wed­ding announce­ments. Mod­els are show­ing up to walk with a new­ly engaged cou­ple through a field, play with young chil­dren in the Bon­neville Salt Flats, and cram in with the fam­i­ly for the annu­al Christ­mas card.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
    • This bit made me laugh: “Find­ing a mod­el can be dif­fi­cult. Areas of Utah with high con­cen­tra­tions of Mormons—who also call them­selves Lat­ter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack poten­tial Jesus dop­pel­gängers. Some men who work or vol­un­teer for the church, one of the state’s largest employ­ers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.”
  • My Neigh­bor Won’t Stop Pray­ing for Me. What Should I Do? (Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah, New York Times): “The only rea­son you give for object­ing to her prayers is that she has failed to com­ply with your wish­es. Yet I don’t find that she has there­by treat­ed you with dis­re­spect, because I don’t see that you have the right to have those wish­es com­plied with. You seem to be ask­ing her not to do some­thing she thinks there are com­pelling rea­sons to do. I’d have thought that this was dis­re­spect­ful.”
    • This also made me laugh. Chor­tle, even.
  • A 1,000-Year-Old Seed Grows in Israel (Franz Lidz, New York Times): “In 2010, Dr. Sal­lon obtained a mys­te­ri­ous seed from the archae­o­log­i­cal archives of Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty, hop­ing that it could ger­mi­nate. The seed had been dis­cov­ered in a cave dur­ing a 1980s exca­va­tion at Wadi el-Makkuk, a win­ter water chan­nel in the north­ern Judean desert, and was lan­guish­ing in stor­age. After deter­min­ing that the seed was still viable, Dr. Sallon’s research team plant­ed, sprout­ed and care­ful­ly tend­ed it. When the husk was car­bon-dat­ed to between A.D. 993 and A.D. 1202, a thought occurred to Dr. Sal­lon. ‘I won­dered if what ger­mi­nat­ed could be the source­of the balm of Gilead,’ she said. On the hunch that it was, she named the spec­i­men She­ba. Since then, the 1,000-year-old seedling has grown into a stur­dy 12-foot-tall tree with no mod­ern coun­ter­part. Sheba’s painstak­ing revival — kept secret from the pub­lic for 14 years — is detailed in a study that was pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber in the jour­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Biol­o­gy.”

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 481

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. Sales of Bibles Are Boom­ing, Fueled by First-Time Buy­ers and New Ver­sions (Jef­frey A. Tra­cht­en­berg, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Wor­ries about the econ­o­my, con­flicts abroad and uncer­tain­ty over the elec­tion pushed read­ers toward the pub­li­ca­tion in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of Octo­ber, com­pared with the same peri­od last year, accord­ing to book track­er Cir­cana BookScan. By con­trast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that peri­od.”
  2. Does Pol­i­tics Belong in the Church? Does the Church Belong in Pol­i­tics? (Carl S. H. Hen­ry, Juicy Ecu­menism): “Does the church belong in pol­i­tics? Inso­far as it owns land and build­ings the church clear­ly has civic oblig­a­tions and should ren­der to Cae­sar what is prop­er­ly Caesar’s. As an insti­tu­tion ground­ed on a divine dis­clo­sure of truth and moral­i­ty, more­over, the church is man­dat­ed to pro­claim pub­licly the revealed prin­ci­ples by which Christ the King of kings will ulti­mate­ly judge nations and states and does so even now. The church as such must also stim­u­late mem­bers to apply scrip­tur­al prin­ci­ples with sound rea­son and in good con­science to cur­rent polit­i­cal con­cerns, in quest of pre­ferred poli­cies and pro­grams pro­mo­tive of jus­tice and peace. Since God wills the state as an instru­men­tal­i­ty for pre­serv­ing jus­tice and restrain­ing dis­or­der, the church should urge mem­bers to engage in polit­i­cal affairs to their utmost com­pe­tence and abil­i­ty, to vote faith­ful­ly and intel­li­gent­ly, to engage in the polit­i­cal process at all lev­els, and to seek and hold pub­lic office. The church is not, how­ev­er, to use the mech­a­nisms of gov­ern­ment to legal­ly impose upon soci­ety at large her the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments. The church must increas­ing­ly clar­i­fy when obe­di­ence to God requires dis­obe­di­ence to the state and, no less, when dis­obe­di­ence to the state con­sti­tutes dis­obe­di­ence to God.”
    • From 1984, a tran­scrip­tion of a speech by a key voice in the emer­gence of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism. This speech, with updates to replace 80’s ref­er­ences, could be giv­en today.
  3. Ryugu aster­oid sam­ple rapid­ly col­o­nized by ter­res­tri­al life despite strict con­t­a­m­i­na­tion con­trol (Justin Jack­son, Phys.org): “NASA tries to avoid intro­duc­ing Earth microbes to Mars by con­struct­ing probes and lan­ders in clean­room envi­ron­ments and has found the task near­ly impos­si­ble. There have been species of microbes dis­cov­ered in NASA clean rooms that not only evade dis­in­fec­tion meth­ods but also adapt to using clean­ing agents as a food source.”
    • That last sen­tence is stun­ning. This is how British researchers tried (and failed) to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of an aster­oid sam­ple: “Trans­port­ed to Earth in a her­met­i­cal­ly sealed cham­ber, the sam­ple was opened in nitro­gen in a class 10,000 clean room to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. Indi­vid­ual par­ti­cles were picked with ster­il­ized tools and stored under nitro­gen in air­tight con­tain­ers. Before analy­sis, the sam­ple under­went Nano-X-ray com­put­ed tomog­ra­phy and was embed­ded in an epoxy resin block for scan­ning elec­tron microscopy.”
  4. Deus in machi­na: Swiss church installs AI-pow­ered Jesus (Ashifa Kas­sam, The Guardian):“The small, unadorned church… in the Swiss city of Lucerne… installed an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered Jesus capa­ble of dia­logu­ing in 100 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. After train­ing the AI pro­gram in the­o­log­i­cal texts, vis­i­tors were then invit­ed to pose ques­tions to a long-haired image of Jesus beamed through a lat­tice­work screen… More than 1,000 peo­ple – includ­ing Mus­lims and vis­it­ing tourists from as far as Chi­na and Viet­nam – took up the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­act with the avatar… two-thirds of them had found it to be a ‘“‘spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ence.’”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who calls the arti­cle “har­row­ing.”
  5. Why hous­ing short­ages cause home­less­ness (Sal­im Furth, Works in Progress): “…most peo­ple at risk of home­less­ness man­age to remain housed by stay­ing with oth­ers. The high­er rate of home­less­ness in high-cost areas is most­ly explained by the inabil­i­ty of the fam­i­ly and friends of poten­tial­ly home­less peo­ple to afford extra liv­ing space.”
    • Some thoughts in response: https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1864706992369205381
    • This arti­cle match­es my expe­ri­ence: plen­ty of peo­ple in Louisiana and Mis­souri had spare rooms to let peo­ple use. Almost no one I know has a spare room in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Peo­ple bare­ly even have yards here.
  6. Why Chris­tians Should Care About Oak Flat (Robert P. George, First Things): “For those of us who gath­er in tra­di­tion­al hous­es of wor­ship, Apache spir­i­tu­al prac­tices might feel remote or alien. A patch of Ari­zona wilder­ness bears lit­tle resem­blance to the church­es, syn­a­gogues, mosques, and tem­ples we regard as sacred space. Yet our tra­di­tion of reli­gious free­dom, prop­er­ly under­stood, has nev­er been about pro­tect­ing only what is famil­iar or con­ve­nient. Nor has it been a sim­ple live-and-let-live com­pro­mise, a frag­ile truce in which we agree to tol­er­ate one another’s prac­tices for the sake of peace. It is instead a com­mit­ment to a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that acknowl­edges our nature as ratio­nal beings, bear­ers of pro­found, inher­ent, and equal dig­ni­ty, capa­ble of order­ing our lives toward the good, the true, and the holy.”
    • Rob­bie George is, of course, a law prof at Prince­ton and an out­spo­ken Catholic.
  7. America’s best-known prac­ti­tion­er of youth gen­der med­i­cine is being sued (Jesse Sin­gal, The Econ­o­mist): “Ms Breen said she is doing sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter today—partly, she believes, sim­ply because she ceased tak­ing testos­terone. But well before that, she ditched the ther­a­pist Dr Olson-Kennedy referred her to, who she said fix­at­ed entire­ly on her gen­der iden­ti­ty. She switched to a dialec­ti­cal behav­iour­al ther­a­pist whom she described as a god­send, with whom she had her first-ever in-depth con­ver­sa­tions about the phys­i­cal and sex­u­al abuse she endured ear­li­er in life. Ms Breen said she was fair­ly con­fi­dent that if she’d had these con­ver­sa­tions at age 12, she wouldn’t have pur­sued med­ical tran­si­tion. She has been left with per­ma­nent med­ical con­se­quences: a low­er voice than she wants, an Adam’s Apple that dis­tress­es her, the prospect of breast recon­struc­tion if she wants to par­tial­ly regain a female shape, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that she is infer­tile due to the years she spent on testos­terone.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Defend­er of the Basic (YouTube, Col­lege­Hu­mor): five min­utes with only one mild­ly off-col­or inter­change. I agree with this video direc­tion­al­ly but hap­pen to have dif­fer­ent (but equal­ly basic) aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences than many of those high­light­ed. 
  • NASA Rock­et Engine Fire­place (NASA, YouTube): want a nerdy fire­place on your TV dur­ing the hol­i­days? NASA’s got you. 8 hours of a rock­et in a fire­place in 4k.
  • Who Needs Con­gress When You Have Cameo? (Joseph Bern­stein, New York Times): “He’s avail­able for birth­day wish­es (‘Any time you hit a zero it’s a big one, but turn­ing 70 is pret­ty epic’), wed­ding con­grat­u­la­tions (‘Mar­riage is an amaz­ing insti­tu­tion’) and pep talks (‘Even on tough days, find the good in it, find the pride in the work’) — all start­ing at $500. Mr. Gaetz is hap­py to poke fun at his pro­fes­sion­al set­back, con­trast­ing his failed nom­i­na­tion with the suc­cess of one of his Cameo cus­tomers who just became a part­ner in a law firm.”

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 478

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. When a Stan­ford Bible Study Led to an AI Start­up (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Hadas­sah Beta­pu­di and Eli­jah Kim met at a Chris­t­ian fel­low­ship at Stan­ford in 2022 and got to know each oth­er by lead­ing a Bible study togeth­er. Soon the duo—with their back­grounds in data orga­niz­ing and com­put­er science—was build­ing an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence start­up.”
    • The arti­cle nev­er names Chi Alpha, but they are both lead­ers in our min­istry. Super cool! Their start­up is Ess­lo, which helps stu­dents with their col­lege appli­ca­tion essays.
  2. I Believe in Mir­a­cles. Just Not All of Them. (David French, New York Times): “As the surgery date approached, I got a call from a dear friend, Ruth Okedi­ji. Ruth was the leader of my law school Chris­t­ian fel­low­ship, and she’s now a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law School. I’ll nev­er for­get her first words. ‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘The Lord has healed you.’ My ini­tial reac­tion was frus­tra­tion. I was resigned to the surgery, and I want­ed encour­age­ment, not false hope. As a Chris­t­ian, I believe that God is real and works mir­a­cles. But I didn’t con­sid­er that he would work a mir­a­cle on me. My prayers were of the con­ven­tion­al kind that I grew up with — prayers that doc­tors would have wis­dom and that I’d have the courage to face the chal­lenge of the surgery. But Ruth’s prayer was dif­fer­ent. She asked God for heal­ing, and she said that God had grant­ed her prayer. I woke up the next morn­ing with­out any pain at all. I had no pain the entire day. The next day was pain-free as well, and so was the next. The doc­tors rein­tro­duced bland, sol­id food to my diet, and I con­sumed it vora­cious­ly. By Thanks­giv­ing, I’d gained most of my weight back, and a colonoscopy lat­er showed no evi­dence of the dis­ease at all. My doc­tor was sur­prised. I was sur­prised (and over­joyed). I knew that ulcer­a­tive col­i­tis could have remis­sion peri­ods, but this one stuck. And in the 29 years since, I’ve nev­er had a recur­rence.”
  3. The Online Sports Gam­bling Exper­i­ment Has Failed (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “When sports gam­bling was legal­ized in Amer­i­ca, I was hope­ful it too could prove a net pos­i­tive force, far supe­ri­or to the pre­vi­ous obnox­ious wave of dai­ly fan­ta­sy sports. It brings me no plea­sure to con­clude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legal­ized mobile gam­bling on sports, let alone casi­no games, has proven to be a huge mis­take. The soci­etal impacts are far worse than I expect­ed.… The impacts include a 28% over­all increase in bank­rupt­cies (!).… When the home team suf­fers an upset loss while sports bet­ting is legal, domes­tic vio­lence that day goes up by 9% for the day, with lin­ger­ing effects.”
  4. Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Rela­tion­ships: 1 in 4 Young Adults Believe AI Part­ners Could Replace Real-life Romance (Wendy Wang and Michael Toscano, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Young men are more like­ly than young women to believe that AI has the poten­tial to replace real-life roman­tic rela­tion­ships (28% vs. 22%). As shown ear­li­er, young men are gen­er­al­ly more open to AI friend­ships than young women, which par­al­lels the gen­der dif­fer­ence in their views of AI’s poten­tial for romance.… Among sin­gle young adults, those who watch porn online at least once a day are twice as like­ly as those who rarely, if ever watch porn to say they are open to an AI romance.”
  5. The Right With­out Wrong (Dustin Guastel­la, Jacobin): “For sec­u­lar lib­er­als who have made ‘believ­ing sci­ence’ their own kind of reli­gion, the pos­si­ble wan­ing of Chris­t­ian con­ser­vatism may seem like a bless­ing long over­due. What if it isn’t?… In the Chris­t­ian sto­ry, we are all equal­ly fall­en. Our orig­i­nal sin unites us in a kind of neg­a­tive equi­lib­ri­um. By recast­ing Chris­tian­i­ty as a unique per­ver­sion, a can­cer­ous growth that destroyed the glo­ri­ous Roman Empire from with­in (or a virus intro­duced by Jews, that ancient ene­my of the Right, from with­out), reac­tionar­ies can freely reject our pri­mor­dial equal­i­ty to instead embrace the sup­pos­ed­ly nat­ur­al hier­ar­chies evi­dent in the out­come of mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion, the body-obsessed ‘vital­ism’ that priv­i­leges phys­i­cal strength over the effete ide­al­ism of the Enlight­en­ment, and also, seem­ing­ly with­out fail, an aggres­sive, unashamed form of sci­en­tif­ic racism.”
    • Jacobin is a social­ist mag­a­zine — fas­ci­nat­ing to see how one of their authors feels about the rise of the post-reli­gious right.
  6. We Need to Fix Vot­ing in Amer­i­ca Now (Wil­fred Reil­ly, Nation­al Review): “Sim­ply put, there is no way to know the real rate of vot­er fraud in Amer­i­ca, so long as the U.S.A. does not require cit­i­zens to vote in per­son or show an ID when they vote.… Recall that a com­pe­tent­ly done scan-and-purge of the rolls in Iowa alone turned up almost two orders of mag­ni­tude more reg­is­tered nonci­t­i­zens than the num­ber that The Experts™ dis­cov­ered nation­wide — ful­ly 0.5 percent–1 per­cent of the state’s elec­torate in some off-year races. Say­ing that these folks do not exist because they have nev­er been jailed is like say­ing that there can­not real­ly be 1 mil­lion-plus dai­ly users of The Pirate Bay and sim­i­lar sites, because there are so few annu­al pros­e­cu­tions for inter­net crimes.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor. He presents data I’ve nev­er heard before.
  7. A Grave­yard of Bad Elec­tion Nar­ra­tives (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Sub­stack): “Accord­ing to Forbes, more than 50 oth­er bil­lion­aires also threw their weight behind Trump. So far so good for the pre­ferred nar­ra­tive. But here’s the twist: even more bil­lion­aires — 83 to be pre­cise — sup­port­ed the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee. Kamala had 60 per­cent more bil­lion­aire back­ers than Don­ald Trump did. And bil­lion­aires like Oprah and Mark Cuban hit the cam­paign trail serv­ing as sur­ro­gates for Har­ris in much the same way as Musk sup­port­ed Trump. If we want to look at who ‘big mon­ey’ tried to push into office this cycle, the answer is dis­con­cert­ing.… Over­all, this cycle, Democ­rats raised rough­ly twice as much mon­ey as their oppo­nents. In the months after Joe Biden dropped out, Democ­rats raised more than $1 bil­lion – more than three times as much as Repub­li­cans brought in over the same peri­od – large­ly thanks to enthu­si­as­tic sup­port for Kamala Har­ris with­in Wall Street, Sil­i­con Val­ley and Big Law.”

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 477

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. Some post-elec­tion analy­sis, with the reminder that I do not endorse every­thing I share. I share them because they made me think.
    • Amaz­ing quote from the Stan­ford Review: It’s Time For Stan­ford to Accept Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump (Again) (Edi­to­r­i­al, Stan­ford Review): “Stan­ford stu­dents often for­get to con­sid­er that the world around them votes too—and that the world does not have the same con­cerns. As one peer remarked, ‘I found out some of the din­ing hall staff vot­ed for Trump and lowkey for­got they got to vote too.’ ”
    • 10 Rea­sons You Did­n’t See This Com­ing (Kon­stan­tin Kisin, Sub­stack): “Amer­i­cans are extreme­ly prac­ti­cal peo­ple. They care about what works, not what sounds good. In Europe, we pro­duce great writ­ers and intel­lec­tu­als. In Amer­i­ca they pro­duce (and attract) great engi­neers, busi­ness­men and investors. Because of this, they care less about Trump’s rhetoric than you do and more about his poli­cies than you do.”
      • Kisin is a Russ­ian-born immi­grant to Britain. Inter­est­ing to see how at least one for­eign­er per­ceives the results US elec­tion.
    • Don­ald Trump Is the Pres­i­dent for Post-Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “It’s hard to com­plain that he’s crude when we live in a crude soci­ety and peo­ple like that way — except when it comes to him. In fact, com­pared to the rest of the coun­try, Trump is a retro mod­el of rec­ti­tude when it comes to not drink­ing or doing drugs, hav­ing a relent­less work eth­ic, wear­ing suits, etc.”
    • Democ­rats Picked the Wrong Women’s Rights Issue (Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press): “Democ­rats bet big on ‘repro­duc­tive rights’ this elec­tion cycle, even offer­ing free abor­tions at their nation­al con­ven­tion. But the strat­e­gy didn’t pay off. Not only was abor­tion a flop with the elec­torate, it was Republicans—not Democrats—who pushed the win­ning women’s‑rights issue: fight­ing the encroach­ment of bio­log­i­cal men into women’s spaces and sports.”
    • How a Lati­no wave car­ried Trump to vic­to­ry (Daniel McCarthy, The Spec­ta­tor): “The fact is that left-wing cul­tur­al atti­tudes in Amer­i­ca, and in the West as a whole, are them­selves very ‘Euro­pean’ and seem often irrel­e­vant or repug­nant to peo­ple of oth­er cul­tures and racial back­grounds. White pro­gres­sive Amer­i­cans think of their views as being uni­ver­sal, but they are real­ly very spe­cif­ic to their own group. White lib­er­als believe, for exam­ple, that mas­culin­i­ty is ‘tox­ic’ and the world needs more female lead­ers. They also believe that ‘anti-racism’ requires ‘affir­ma­tive action’ or racial quotes to give blacks in par­tic­u­lar more rep­re­sen­ta­tion in posi­tions of pow­er and pres­tige. White lib­er­al­ism is the rea­son Kamala Har­ris was named as Joe Biden’s run­ning mate in 2020. She wasn’t a pop­u­lar politi­cian – and as this elec­tion proved, she still isn’t. But she was the right sex and colour to sat­is­fy the require­ments of white lib­er­als. Lati­nos are not white lib­er­als.”
    • How Dif­fer­ent Groups Vot­ed in the 2024 Elec­tion (Bri­an McGill, Antho­ny DeBar­ros and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Here are the results of a sur­vey of over 120,000 reg­is­tered vot­ers, com­piled by the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, which offer a look at vot­ing pat­terns and trends among var­i­ous groups in the elec­torate and what issues were the most impor­tant to vot­ers head­ing into Elec­tion Day. Num­bers will update as respons­es are added and the survey’s weight­ing adjusts.”
      • A LOT of graphs. One detail fas­ci­nat­ing detail: peo­ple who vot­ed for Trump were MORE con­cerned that Kamala Har­ris would lead Amer­i­ca in an author­i­tar­i­an direc­tion than the peo­ple who vot­ed for Har­ris were con­cerned about Trump doing the same. It was tight, but the greater fear was of a Har­ris admin­is­tra­tion.
    • How Could Trump and Abor­tion Rights Both Win? (Jill Fil­ipovic, New York Times): “How could sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of vot­ers cast their bal­lots for legal abor­tion and also for the man who helped make it pos­si­ble to crim­i­nal­ize abor­tion in the first place? Mr. Trump boast­ed about over­turn­ing Roe v. Wade and being the most pro-life pres­i­dent in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, while Kamala Har­ris pledged to use her pres­i­den­tial pow­er to pro­tect and expand a broad range of repro­duc­tive free­doms. Yet, accord­ing to the vote tal­lies released so far, in every state where abor­tion was up for a vote, more vot­ers cast those bal­lots for abor­tion rights than for Ms. Har­ris.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Pre­dic­tion Mar­kets for the Win (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The pre­dic­tion mar­kets pre­dict­ed the elec­tion out­come more accu­rate­ly and more quick­ly than polls or oth­er fore­cast­ing meth­ods, just as expect­ed from decades of research.”
    • Con­grats To Poly­mar­ket, But I Still Think They Were Mis­priced (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Why [do I think the mar­ket was mis­priced]? In order for an Amer­i­can to use Poly­mar­ket, you have to get a VPN, a Coin­base account, and a Meta­mask wal­let, use the VPN, get cryp­to on the Coin­base account, trans­fer it to the Meta­mask wal­let, con­nect the Meta­mask wal­let to Poly­mar­ket, and buy the shares you want. Abil­i­ty to do this rules out 99% of the US pop­u­la­tion.… I think pre­dic­tion mar­kets are among our sin­gle best sources of truth, but that (as with every source of truth) we need to think crit­i­cal­ly about them and notice the rare times when they fail. If you can’t think crit­i­cal­ly, you’re going to have a hard time, but in that case I would still trust pre­dic­tion mar­kets over any oth­er source (except Metac­u­lus, which is so sim­i­lar to a pre­dic­tion mar­ket that it belongs in the same cat­e­go­ry any­way).”
      • Inter­est­ing con­trar­i­an take on the pre­dic­tion mar­ket’s suc­cess in the elec­tion.
  2. Why Women Use Pornog­ra­phy and How the Church Can Help (Helen Thorne-Allen­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The biggest dri­ver of pornog­ra­phy use among the women I’ve met with is anx­i­ety. Life feels over­whelm­ing at times; pornog­ra­phy brings some relief… Maybe unsur­pris­ing­ly, anoth­er big dri­ver among the women I’ve walked along­side (par­tic­u­lar­ly younger women) is a desire to know what sex is like.… The dri­ver we prob­a­bly miss most often in the church is that of man­ag­ing pain.”
  3. Be Per­fect (Ross Byrd, Mere Ortho­doxy): “In the Bible, the word ‘per­fect’ does­n’t mean what we tend to mean by it today. For the writ­ers of Scrip­ture, per­fec­tion has more to do with fin­ished-ness than flaw­less­ness. A thing is called ‘per­fect’ when it is brought to its full matu­ri­ty, when it becomes every­thing it is meant to be. Now, if we apply this def­i­n­i­tion to the Gar­den of Eden, we are forced to con­clude that Eden was not, in fact, per­fect. Eden was good, as Gen­e­sis tells us over and over. He cre­at­ed this and that, and it was good. He cre­at­ed human beings, and it was very good. But it does­n’t say per­fect. In a very impor­tant sense, it was not yet per­fect, because it was not yet com­plete. Eden was the begin­ning. The gar­den was, among oth­er things, a place of poten­tial.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. I like the core insight in this essay a lot.
  4. Why We’re Still Athe­ists (Kat­ja Hoy­er, Plough): “I, on the oth­er hand, often won­dered even as a child what the point of life was if all you did is grow up, work, die, and be erased. When I lost rel­a­tives, friends, and pets, I knew I had lost them for­ev­er, while oth­ers held out for some form of reunion in anoth­er life or at least the idea that souls con­tin­ued to exist some­where. On an abstract lev­el, I began to under­stand why most of human­i­ty finds com­fort, sure­ty, and pur­pose in reli­gion. But by the time I worked this out, it was entire­ly an intel­lec­tu­al mind game to me. I had grown up in a world that made sense with­out God and noth­ing could change that now.”
    • A very inter­est­ing essay about why East Ger­many is so athe­ist, writ­ten by an athe­ist reflect­ing on it.
  5. Are Reli­gious Peo­ple More Fear­ful? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I am real­ly sur­prised at how few of these fac­tors actu­al­ly ‘pop’ in this analy­sis. That was true for things like income, age, mar­i­tal sta­tus, view of the Bible, and reli­gious impor­tance. None of those had a mea­sur­able impact on the fear index. Also, I didn’t find a sin­gle fac­tor that clear­ly led to high­er lev­els of expressed fear. How­ev­er, there were four vari­ables in this analy­sis that pre­dict­ed a low­er score on the fear index. They were: being white, being male, hav­ing a high­er lev­el of edu­ca­tion, and increased church atten­dance.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. St. Junipero Ser­ra: An Unjust­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Fig­ure (Bri­an Gabriel, The Euro­pean Con­ser­v­a­tive): “In present-day dis­course, the actions of the mis­sion­ar­ies and the Span­ish sol­diers are often con­flat­ed, but the mis­sion­ar­ies’ pater­nal­is­tic atti­tude toward the tribes actu­al­ly often led them to pro­tect the tribes from the more rapa­cious and unsa­vory behav­ior of the sol­diers. It’s true enough that the tribes were some­times forced to labor in the fields, and their free­dom of move­ment was restrict­ed once they con­vert­ed to Catholi­cism. The mis­sions them­selves were often built in part, at least, by the tribes­men, some­times under duress. But the harsh treat­ment, while strik­ing the mod­ern observ­er as cru­el and tor­tu­ous, was seen by the mis­sion­ar­ies as essen­tial to the natives’ spir­i­tu­al sal­va­tion. Today, many of their descen­dants remain Catholic. The val­ue of the mis­sion­ar­ies’ actions can nev­er be rec­og­nized by a mod­ern world that doesn’t allow for spir­i­tu­al effects.”
    • I have long believed, even as a very Protes­tant per­son, that Junipero Ser­ra has got­ten a bum rap in Cal­i­for­nia (and at Stan­ford).
  7. Rod­ney Alcala Didn’t Kill Me. Forty Years Lat­er, I Asked Him Why (Alice Feir­ing, New York Mag­a­zine): “Four-decades-plus lat­er, I learned his real name when it flashed across a tele­vi­sion screen beneath his famil­iar face and orange jump­suit: ‘Rod­ney Alcala, The Dat­ing Game Ser­i­al Killer, Sen­tenced to Death.’ It couldn’t be the same man, I’d thought to myself. But after hours of Googling I had to accept the truth: Jon Burg­er was an alias; he was the win­ning bach­e­lor on The Dat­ing Game nine years after I met him; and he is believed to have been one of the most pro­lif­ic of ser­i­al killers, offi­cial­ly respon­si­ble for at least sev­en mur­ders with author­i­ties esti­mat­ing his real body count at about 130.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who says, “Very well writ­ten, chill­ing sto­ry. The author is lucky to be alive.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How to Do Action Com­e­dy (Every Frame a Paint­ing, YouTube): nine min­utes about what makes Jack­ie Chan so great, and why his for­eign films are bet­ter than his Amer­i­can films in impor­tant ways.
  • Har­vey Epstein for New York City Coun­cil (Sat­ur­day Night Live, YouTube): two and a half min­utes I found absolute­ly hilar­i­ous. What’s even fun­nier is that it’s about a real politi­cian.
  • Vote (Texts From Super­heroes)
  • Diet (Pearls Before Swine) — actu­al­ly, though

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 476



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 a short­er-than-nor­mal edi­tion because I’ve had a busy week and haven’t read as much as I nor­mal­ly do.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. There’s more herd­ing in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scot­tish High­lands (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “How many [recent polls] showed the race in either direc­tion with­in 2.5 per­cent­age points, close enough that you could basi­cal­ly call it a tie? Well, 193 of them did, or 78 per­cent. That’s way more than you should get in the­o­ry — even if the can­di­dates are actu­al­ly exact­ly tied in all sev­en states, which they almost cer­tain­ly aren’t.… Based on a bino­mi­al dis­tri­b­u­tion — which assumes that all polls are inde­pen­dent of one anoth­er, which the­o­ret­i­cal­ly they should be — it’s real­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­ly unlike­ly. Specif­i­cal­ly, the odds are 1 in 9.5 tril­lion against at least this many polls show­ing such a close mar­gin.”
  2. Chris­tian­i­ty Today’s pod­cast The Bul­letin ran inter­views with three Chris­tians vot­ing dif­fer­ent ways. Pre­sent­ed in the order in which they aired:
    • Vot­ing Third Par­ty (Matt Martens): “He’s a tri­al lawyer, a for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor, a sem­i­nary grad­u­ate, a legal ethics pro­fes­sor, and an award-win­ning author. Martens’s writ­ing has appeared in The Wall Street Jour­nal, The Wash­ing­ton Post, and oth­er out­lets, and he has spo­ken at numer­ous uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try.”
    • Vot­ing Demo­c­rat (David French): “He’s a colum­nist for The New York Times and a for­mer senior edi­tor of The Dis­patch. He’s the author most recent­ly of Divid­ed We Fall: Amer­i­ca’s Seces­sion Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”
    • Vot­ing Repub­li­can (Eric Teet­sel): “Teet­sel was vice pres­i­dent of gov­ern­ment rela­tions at The Her­itage Foun­da­tion, was chief of staff to US sen­a­tor Josh Haw­ley of Mis­souri, and served as pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance of Kansas.”
  3. What econ­o­mists don’t know (Scott Sum­n­er, Sub­stack): “I am not impressed when some­one tells me that a small homo­ge­neous coun­try has less inequal­i­ty than the US. I am impressed by the fact that almost every sin­gle eth­nic group in Amer­i­ca is more suc­cess­ful than the equiv­a­lent eth­nic group in their home coun­try.… Right now, the US econ­o­my is the envy of the world. Before we replace free mar­kets with an indus­tri­al pol­i­cy, we might wish to com­pare upside and down­side risks from inter­ven­tion­ism. Giv­en that our liv­ing stan­dards are cur­rent­ly the high­est in the world (at least for coun­tries of more than 10 mil­lion), in which direc­tion are the risks the great­est?”
    • The author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Bent­ley.
  4. How Many Con­ti­nents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers. (Matt Kaplan, New York Times): “The dis­pute aris­es in part because there are real­ly two types of con­ti­nents: Those rec­og­nized by cul­tures around the world, and those rec­og­nized by geol­o­gists. Cul­tures can define a con­ti­nent any way they want, while geol­o­gists have to use a def­i­n­i­tion. And geo­log­i­cal research in recent years has made defin­ing con­ti­nen­tal bound­aries less sim­ple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evi­dence of unex­pect­ed con­ti­nen­tal mate­r­i­al.”

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 475

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. Is the World Ready for a Reli­gious Come­back? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s one thing to get non­be­liev­ers to offer kind words for ‘cul­tur­al’ Chris­tian­i­ty or endorse the soci­o­log­i­cal util­i­ty of church­go­ing. The chal­lenge is to go fur­ther, to per­suade anx­ious mod­erns that reli­gion is more than mere­ly prag­mat­i­cal­ly use­ful, more than just a wist­ful hope — that a reli­gious frame­work actu­al­ly makes much more sense of real­i­ty than the alleged­ly hard­head­ed mate­ri­al­ist alter­na­tive.”
    • Dis­cuss­es three books Douthat thinks are help­ful.
  2. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Dou­bled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (Nicholas Con­fes­sore, New York Times): “Striv­ing to touch ‘every indi­vid­ual on cam­pus,’ as the school puts it, Michi­gan has poured rough­ly a quar­ter of a bil­lion dol­lars into D.E.I. since 2016, accord­ing to an inter­nal pre­sen­ta­tion I obtained.… Michigan’s own data sug­gests that in striv­ing to become more diverse and equi­table, the school has also become less inclu­sive: In a sur­vey released in late 2022, stu­dents and fac­ul­ty mem­bers report­ed a less pos­i­tive cam­pus cli­mate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belong­ing. Stu­dents were less like­ly to inter­act with peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent race or reli­gion or with dif­fer­ent pol­i­tics — the exact kind of engage­ment D.E.I. pro­grams, in the­o­ry, are meant to fos­ter.”
    • Relat­ed: I Don’t Want to Live in a Mono­cul­ture, and Nei­ther Do You (David French, New York Times): “In my expe­ri­ence, the more ide­o­log­i­cal­ly or the­o­log­i­cal­ly ‘pure’ an insti­tu­tion becomes, the more wrong it is like­ly to be, espe­cial­ly if it takes on a dif­fi­cult or com­plex task. Ide­o­log­i­cal mono­cul­tures aren’t just bad for the minor­i­ty that’s silenced, harassed or can­celed when­ev­er its mem­bers raise their voic­es in dis­sent. It’s ter­ri­ble for the con­fi­dent major­i­ty — and for the con­fi­dent majority’s cause.”
  3. U.S. Study on Puber­ty Block­ers Goes Unpub­lished Because of Pol­i­tics, Doc­tor Says (Azeen Gho­rayshi, New York Times): “An influ­en­tial doc­tor and advo­cate of ado­les­cent gen­der treat­ments said she had not pub­lished a long-await­ed study of puber­ty-block­ing drugs because of the charged Amer­i­can polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment.… She said she was con­cerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use block­ers because it doesn’t impact them,’ refer­ring to trans­gen­der ado­les­cents.”
    • JK Rowl­ing sum­ma­rized the sto­ry well: ‘We must not pub­lish a study that says we’re harm­ing chil­dren because peo­ple who say we’re harm­ing chil­dren will use the study as evi­dence that we’re harm­ing chil­dren, which might make it dif­fi­cult for us to con­tin­ue harm­ing chil­dren.’
  4. Our Robot Sto­ries Haven’t Pre­pared Us for A.I. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In most of these sto­ries, the defin­ing aspects of human­i­ty are some com­bi­na­tion of free will, strong emo­tion and moral­i­ty. The robot begins as a being fol­low­ing its pro­gram­ming and mys­ti­fied by human emo­tion­al­i­ty, and over time it begins to choose, to act freely, to cut its strings and ulti­mate­ly to love.… We have been trained for a future in which robots think like us but don’t feel like us, and there­fore need to be guid­ed out of mere­ly intel­lec­tu­al self-con­scious­ness into a deep­er aware­ness of emo­tion­al­i­ty, of heart as well as head. We are get­ting a real­i­ty where our bots seem so deeply emo­tion­al — lov­ing, car­ing, heart­felt — that it’s hard to dis­tin­guish them from human beings, and indeed, some of us find their appar­ent warmth a refuge from a dif­fi­cult or cru­el world.”
  5. How I Learned To Stop Crit­i­ciz­ing Every­thing (Eboo Patel, Per­sua­sion): “I’m not sad that I read those crit­i­cal the­o­rists. I think it’s a use­ful per­spec­tive to have. My prob­lem is that I deformed the world to fit a nar­row world­view, and I let it direct my life. The big­ger prob­lem is that this par­a­digm has become a regime in cer­tain quar­ters of high­er edu­ca­tion. You are coerced into hold­ing that world­view and pun­ished if you utter ideas out­side of its scope. Crit­i­cal the­o­ry is like a sharp kitchen knife: very use­ful for some things, like cut­ting meat, but if you eat your cere­al with it, you’ll hurt your­self. And if you point it at some­one else, then it’s a weapon. In some cir­cles, on some cam­pus­es, every oth­er uten­sil has been removed from the intel­lec­tu­al cut­lery draw­er, replaced with sharp kitchen knives.”
  6. Both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans can pass the Ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing Test (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “We first chal­lenged each side to pre­tend to be the oth­er side, and then we had both sides try to dis­tin­guish between the truth-tellers and the fak­ers. If par­ti­sans have no idea who the oth­er side is or what they believe, it should be hard for peo­ple to do a con­vinc­ing impres­sion of the oppo­site par­ty. So let’s see!”
    • Inter­est­ing study. In the foot­notes he men­tioned he gath­ered the data in 2019 but nev­er got around to pub­lish­ing it. Just FYI
  7. It’s Ratio­nal And Humane To Lack Strong Polit­i­cal Beliefs (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “We don’t need the aver­age per­son to have strong beliefs about what the right anti-pover­ty pol­i­cy is, and I would argue it’s a waste of time to devote too many hours to some­thing like that, because it’s hope­less­ly com­plex and even experts who devote their lives to that sub­ject dis­agree on the basics. Plus, many of the experts — on this and every oth­er sub­ject — are them­selves incom­pe­tent, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly cap­tured, or oth­er­wise unlike­ly to help lead you clos­er to use­ful insights.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. This post is a bit odd in that it’s unlocked but to read the whole thing you have to read it in the Sub­stack app. You can read the first part for free and that’s enough to get the gist and tell whether you want to read the rest of it.

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.