Tag: politics

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 473



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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 467



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

This is vol­ume 467, a num­ber which has strict­ly increas­ing dig­its when writ­ten nor­mal­ly as well as when writ­ten in bases 7 (12357) and 9 (5689).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Col­leges Can’t Say They Weren’t Warned (David French, New York Times): “In the after­math of the Oct. 7 Hamas ter­ror­ist attack on Israel, a num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties were tak­en by sur­prise by the sheer sus­tained dis­rup­tion and by the anti­se­mit­ic ani­mos­i­ty on their cam­pus­es. They strug­gled to respond effec­tive­ly. As the war con­tin­ues — and as the con­flict with Hezbol­lah esca­lates on Israel’s north­ern bor­der — uni­ver­si­ties can no longer claim to be sur­prised. They know what might hap­pen this school year, and this knowl­edge has legal sig­nif­i­cance. If they fail to pro­tect the free speech of stu­dents or to pro­tect stu­dents from anti­se­mit­ic or Islam­o­pho­bic harass­ment, there will be con­se­quences.”
  2. Strand­ed in Space? NASA Doesn’t See the Star­lin­er Astro­nauts That Way. (Ken­neth Chang, New York Times): “If you go some­where expect­ing an eight-day trip and end up not being able to leave for eight months, most peo­ple would con­sid­er that ‘strand­ed.’… All sum­mer, NASA and Boe­ing offi­cials have been reluc­tant to use the words, ‘stuck’ and ‘strand­ed,’ which would add anoth­er black mark to a space­craft that has been delayed for years by tech­ni­cal set­backs.”
  3. Augus­tine, AI, and the Demon Heuris­tic (Robert Cot­ton, Mere Ortho­doxy): “One does not have to dig deep into the com­ments sec­tion of a Chat­G­PT demo video to find some­one con­vinced that there’s some­thing demon­ic about it. At the risk of keep­ing com­pa­ny with the most para­noid of the ter­mi­nal­ly online, I would like to add anoth­er point which makes this posi­tion plausible–that there is some­thing of the demon­ic to recent AI devel­op­ments.… I think we should be quite alarmed by how we are approach­ing Arti­fi­cial Gen­er­al Intel­li­gence (AGI) and how it appears to look. If this theur­gic vision of idol­a­try is Bib­li­cal­ly true, we should be wor­ried that there are malig­nant actors attempt­ing to gain a foothold. The veneer of dis­en­chant­ment to which tech­nol­o­gy so effec­tive­ly pre­tends is, in fact, quite capa­ble of hid­ing a very old and very mag­i­cal strat­a­gem.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing and brings com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed (to me) evi­dence to the table.
  4. Faith abounds at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, but don’t be sur­prised (Jack Jenk­ins, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “The faith-fueled mes­sag­ing [at the DNC] may have sur­prised some con­ser­v­a­tives, but it’s hard­ly news to any­one who kept a close eye on lib­er­als over the past decade or so. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, although home to a grow­ing (and siz­able) sub­set of reli­gious­ly unaf­fil­i­at­ed vot­ers, remains major­i­ty reli­gious and major­i­ty Chris­t­ian, accord­ing to the Pub­lic Reli­gion Research Insti­tute. More to the point: Although peo­ple of faith have long been at home among its ranks, reli­gious rhetoric at Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty con­ven­tions has gar­nered more head­lines in recent years, with the 2016 gath­er­ing fea­tur­ing a prime­time address from a promi­nent pas­tor and the 2020 event includ­ing an entire sec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to faith.”
  5. Col­lege Fresh­man, Stick the Land­ing (Vince Green­wald, Gospel Coali­tion): “Know ahead of time that you won’t find a per­fect church. There are no per­fect church­es. You’re just look­ing for a healthy and faith­ful one. So after your short church-shop­ping phase, make the piv­ot from eval­u­a­tion to par­tic­i­pa­tion. Pur­sue mem­ber­ship. Look for oppor­tu­ni­ties to serve. Bring some friends. And resist the urge to church shop indef­i­nite­ly. Plants don’t grow well when they’re con­stant­ly uproot­ed and trans­plant­ed. Nei­ther do Chris­tians.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I would add to the arti­cle: look for an on-cam­pus fel­low­ship such as Chi Alpha. They will help you find a church as well as in many oth­er prac­ti­cal ways.
  6. The Sil­i­con Val­ley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the Amer­i­can Tech Elite (Tan­ner Greer, blog): “I laugh some­times at the com­plaints I see on human­i­ties twit­ter bewail­ing the shal­low read­ing habits of the tech-bro. The tech­nol­o­gy broth­ers read—a lot! I am sure more nov­els are read every year on Sand Hill Road than on Capi­tol Hill. Wash­ing­ton func­tionar­ies sim­ply do not live a life of the mind. If Sil­i­con Val­ley tech­nol­o­gists do not always live such a life, they at least pre­tend to.… You can divide most of these [beloved by Sil­i­con Val­ley] titles into five over­ar­ch­ing cat­e­gories: works of spec­u­la­tive or sci­ence fic­tion; his­tor­i­cal case stud­ies of ambi­tious men or impor­tant moments in the his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy; books that out­line gen­er­al prin­ci­ples of physics, math, or cog­ni­tive sci­ence; books that out­line the oper­at­ing prin­ci­ples and busi­ness strat­e­gy of suc­cess­ful start-ups; and final­ly, nar­ra­tive his­to­ries of suc­cess­ful start-ups them­selves.”
  7. Praise for Price Goug­ing (John Cochrane, Sub­stack): “We should praise price-goug­ing. Yes, pass a new fed­er­al law, one that over­rides the many state laws against price goug­ing.… Price goug­ing directs scarce sup­ply to the peo­ple who real­ly need it, encour­ages new sup­ply to come in, encour­ages hold­ing stock­piles for a rainy day, encour­ages effi­cient use of stock­piles we have sit­ting around, and encour­ages peo­ple to sub­sti­tute for less scarce goods when they can.”
    • The author is an econ­o­mist at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.

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 466



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

This is vol­ume 466, which is 1234 in base 7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 465



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

This is vol­ume 465, the 30th tri­an­gu­lar num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 464



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

This is vol­ume 464, which only has two prime fac­tors: 2 and 29.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford in Paris 2024 (Stan­ford News): “A school-record 60 Stan­ford-affil­i­at­ed ath­letes have qual­i­fied to com­pete at the Olympic Games Paris 2024.… Nations rep­re­sent­ed include the Unit­ed States (38), Cana­da (5), Aus­tralia (3), Israel (2), Switzer­land (2), Egypt (1), France (1), Ger­many (1), Greece (1), Hong Kong (1), Nige­ria (1), Philip­pines (1), Sin­ga­pore (1), Spain (1) and Venezuela (1).”
  2. Teach­ers and the Trans­mis­sion of Excel­lence (Matt Clan­cy, New Things Under The Sun): “Here’s a strik­ing fact: through 2022, one in two Nobel prize win­ners in physics, chem­istry, and med­i­cine also had a Nobel prize win­ner as their aca­d­e­m­ic advi­sor.”
    • Men­tor­ship mat­ters, and not just in acad­e­mia. I have a friend who once told me, “You always need to learn up. Look above you and find peo­ple who have already achieved what you hope to achieve and spend as much time around them as you can.”
  3. There Is Almost No ‘Lib­er­al­iz­ing Reli­gion’ in the Unit­ed States (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The more peo­ple go to church, the less lib­er­al they are. That’s true across racial lines. That’s also true in a lot of major Protes­tant tra­di­tions includ­ing a few main­line stal­warts like the Unit­ed Methodist Church and the PCUSA.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  4. The Most Reveal­ing Moment of a Trump Ral­ly (McK­ay Cop­pins, The Atlantic): “To under­stand the evolv­ing psy­chol­o­gy and beliefs of Trump’s reli­gious sup­port­ers, I attempt­ed to review every prayer offered at his cam­paign events since he announced in Novem­ber 2022 that he would run again. Work­ing with a researcher, I com­piled 58 in total, the most recent from June 2024. The result­ing document—at just over 17,000 words—makes for a strange, reveal­ing reli­gious text: benign in some places, blas­phe­mous in oth­ers; con­tra­dic­to­ry and poignant and fright­en­ing and sad and, per­haps most of all, beg­ging for exe­ge­sis.”
    • Inter­est­ing con­cept for an arti­cle. Note that the author is Mor­mon, so fac­tor that in when eval­u­at­ing his reli­gious com­men­tary.
  5. Peo­ple Say Queer Peo­ple Are Born That Way. It’s More Com­pli­cat­ed. (Charles M. Blow, New York Times): “ ‘Born this way’ may, unfor­tu­nate­ly, have been an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. It’s prob­a­bly clos­er to the truth to say that peo­ple are ‘formed this way.’ As the com­plex­i­ty of human sex­u­al­i­ty has become clear­er, sci­en­tists and writ­ers have attempt­ed to add nec­es­sary nuance to the sub­ject. But the slo­gan remains entrenched in the cul­ture.… It is not only unsup­port­able by sci­ence but also does not cap­ture the full real­i­ty of queer expe­ri­ence and is unjust to some mem­bers of the queer com­mu­ni­ty itself.”
    • I am old enough to remem­ber when the “born this way” argu­ment was the dom­i­nant rea­son homo­sex­u­al­i­ty gained widestream accep­tance in Amer­i­ca. Unlocked.
  6. Should Pornog­ra­phy Be Com­plete­ly Banned? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The share of Amer­i­cans who want no restric­tions on porn has nev­er been that high. It was 10% of the sam­ple back in the ear­ly 1970s and today it’s dropped to a very small frac­tion — just 4% of those who took the sur­vey in 2022. So, there’s lit­tle appetite for a lais­sez-faire approach to pornog­ra­phy.”
  7. Cou­ples, Stop Writ­ing Your Own Wed­ding Vows (Cheryl Mendel­son, The Atlantic): “Tra­di­tion­al vows cre­ate an intense moment of qui­et speech that height­ens the exu­ber­ance of the toasts, drink­ing, and danc­ing that fol­low. Replac­ing them with sen­ti­men­tal or jokey words turns the vow-tak­ing into an iron­ic per­for­mance of some­thing the cou­ple is implic­it­ly dis­avow­ing. One of my friends regards tak­ing vows oth­er than the tra­di­tion­al ones as ‘like being on the wit­ness stand and answer­ing the ques­tions you wish you had been asked.’ He and his wife want­ed ‘no irony’ or attempts at wit in their vows, and ‘redact­ed’ theirs from a church rite.”

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 463



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

This is vol­ume 463, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why your smart­phone might be stop­ping you from fol­low­ing Jesus (Mar­tin Saun­ders, Pre­miere Chris­tian­i­ty): “[Haidt] argues that smart­phones actu­al­ly dri­ve spir­i­tu­al degra­da­tion: ‘[social media] trains peo­ple to think in ways that are exact­ly con­trary to the world’s wis­dom tra­di­tions: Think about your­selves first; be mate­ri­al­is­tic, judge­men­tal, boast­ful, and pet­ty; seek glo­ry as quan­ti­fied by likes and fol­low­ers.’… our dig­i­tal cul­ture isn’t neu­tral; it’s offer­ing a kind of anti-dis­ci­ple­ship.”
  2. Move Over, Math­e­mati­cians, Here Comes AlphaProof (Siob­han Roberts, New York Times): “A pair of Google Deep­Mind mod­els tried their luck with the prob­lem set in the 2024 Inter­na­tion­al Math­e­mat­i­cal Olympiad, or I.M.O., held from July 11 to July 22 about 100 miles west of Lon­don at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bath. The event is said to be the pre­mier math com­pe­ti­tion for the world’s ‘bright­est math­letes,’ accord­ing to a pro­mo­tion­al post on social media. The human prob­lem-solvers — 609 high school stu­dents from 108 coun­tries — won 58 gold medals, 123 sil­ver and 145 bronze. The A.I. per­formed at the lev­el of a sil­ver medal­ist, solv­ing four out of six prob­lems for a total of 28 points. It was the first time that A.I. has achieved a medal-wor­thy per­for­mance on an Olympiad’s prob­lems.”
  3. Stand­ing Out, Craft­ing Hooks, and Acci­den­tal­ly Reveal­ing Every­thing That’s Wrong With You (Max Nussen­baum, Sub­stack): “You wouldn’t think that people’s nat­ur­al instinct would be to reveal their full litany of psy­cho­log­i­cal issues in their pro­files, but it actu­al­ly is. They just don’t real­ize that’s what they’re doing.” About a year old.
  4. Online opt-in polls can pro­duce mis­lead­ing results, espe­cial­ly for young peo­ple and His­pan­ic adults (Andrew Mer­cer, Court­ney Kennedy & Scott Keeter, Pew Research): “…sev­er­al recent stud­ies have doc­u­ment­ed large errors in online opt-in sur­veys due to the pres­ence of so-called ‘bogus respon­dents.’ These respon­dents do not answer ques­tions sin­cere­ly; instead, they attempt to com­plete sur­veys with as lit­tle effort as pos­si­ble to earn mon­ey or oth­er rewards. Stud­ies have shown that bogus respon­dents can cause opt-in sur­veys to over­es­ti­mate rare atti­tudes and behav­iors, such as ingest­ing bleach to pro­tect against COVID-19, belief in con­spir­a­cies like Piz­za­gate or sup­port for polit­i­cal vio­lence.”
  5. Patron­age vs. Con­stituent Par­ties (Or Why Repub­li­can Par­ty Lead­ers Mat­ter More Than Demo­c­ra­t­ic Ones) (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “…many dis­cus­sions of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics assume that that the struc­tures and oper­a­tional norms of the two par­ties are the same. If these par­ty dif­fer­ences were more wide­ly rec­og­nized, I sus­pect we would see few­er evan­gel­i­cals frus­trat­ed with their lim­it­ed influ­ence over the GOP par­ty plat­form, few­er jour­nal­ists shocked with J.D. Vance’s jour­ney from nev­er-Trump land to MAGA-max­i­mal­ism, and greater alarm among cen­trist Democ­rats about the longer-term influ­ence that the Pales­tine protests will have on the con­tours of their coali­tion.”
  6. Evan­gel­i­cals Must Stop Their Pref­er­en­tial Treat­ment of the Left (James R. Wood, First Things): “Today, cen­trists and those on the right are more fer­tile soil, I believe, because they are more open to real­i­ty. They rec­og­nize that the cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies’ projects to rewrite real­i­ty are destroy­ing civ­i­liza­tion. These refugees crave clar­i­ty about basic moral real­i­ties because of how much con­fu­sion the neg­a­tive world has pro­duced. They are look­ing for voic­es who stand up to the civ­i­liza­tion­al destroyers—maybe even voic­es who bold­ly pro­claim super­nat­ur­al truths.Like the ‘god-fear­ers’ that ear­ly church mis­sion­ar­ies often tar­get­ed, we today need to con­sid­er the ‘real­i­ty-respecters’ in our mis­sion.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  7. Stan­ford’s biggest star lured to Texas Tech with $1 mil­lion deal (Alex Simon, SF Gate): “Canady announced her trans­fer to Texas Tech on Wednes­day, with mul­ti­ple reports quick­ly com­ing out that the Red Raiders’ name, image and like­ness (NIL) col­lec­tive Mata­dor Club, the group of boost­ers sup­port­ing Texas Tech by sign­ing the school’s ath­letes to endorse­ment deals, signed the pitch­er to a one-year deal for over $1 mil­lion.”

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 462



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

This is vol­ume 462, which my sim­ple math brain likes because 4, 6, and 2 are relat­ed num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Sebas­t­ian Junger was a skep­tic of the after­life. Then he near­ly died. (Steven Petrow, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Junger, a con­firmed athe­ist and an adher­ent of the sci­en­tif­ic method, had been raised by a physi­cist (his father) and a painter (his moth­er). His upbring­ing had left lit­tle room for a spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ence like this one, which turns out to be the cen­tral conun­drum of this book and, I’d ven­ture, his life. The meet­ing with his father was under­stand­ably unnerv­ing. ‘He was dead, I was alive, and I want­ed noth­ing to do with him.’ But, it’s hard to unsee what you’ve seen: His father had not only vis­it­ed him but opened the door to the idea that an after­life might actu­al­ly exist.… Ever the reporter, Junger is unwill­ing to write off these expe­ri­ences as hal­lu­ci­na­tions (or any of the oth­er med­ical expla­na­tions). He admits he was hop­ing for evi­dence of an after­life, find­ing hints of it in the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of NDEs that fea­ture see­ing the dead. After all, he writes, ‘there are neu­ro­chem­i­cal expla­na­tions for why peo­ple hal­lu­ci­nate, but not for why they keep hal­lu­ci­nat­ing the same thing.’ ”
    • Unlocked.
  2. Why Is the U.S. Still Pre­tend­ing We Know Gen­der-Affirm­ing Care Works? (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Imag­ine a com­pre­hen­sive review of research on a treat­ment for chil­dren found ‘remark­ably weak evi­dence’ that it was effec­tive. Now imag­ine the med­ical estab­lish­ment shrugged off the con­clu­sions and con­tin­ued pro­vid­ing the same unproven and life-alter­ing treat­ment to its young patients. This is where we are with gen­der med­i­cine in the Unit­ed States.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. We Asked the Nones a Bunch of Ques­tions About Leav­ing Reli­gion (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The most pop­u­lar rea­son [for leav­ing reli­gion] by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin was ‘reli­gious hypocrisy.’ About 42% of the sam­ple chose that rea­son for leav­ing. That was sev­en points high­er than the sec­ond most pop­u­lar — ‘reli­gion doesn’t make sense.’ That was cho­sen by 35% of the sam­ple. The only oth­er response that scored above 30% was reli­gious big­otry (31%).”
  4. Var­i­ous pieces about the assas­si­na­tion attempt on Trump:
    • Pho­to Appears to Cap­ture Path of Bul­let Used in Assas­si­na­tion Attempt (John Ismay, New York Times): “In doc­u­ment­ing the Penn­syl­va­nia cam­paign ral­ly on Sat­ur­day after­noon that turned into an attempt on a for­mer president’s life, Doug Mills, a vet­er­an New York Times pho­tog­ra­ph­er, appeared to cap­ture the image of a bul­let streak­ing past for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump’s head.”
    • It’s 1968 All Over Again (Eli Lake, The Free Press): “The near assas­si­na­tion of Trump is an echo of the vio­lence of 1968, when both Mar­tin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were gunned down in a two-month span in the spring of that year. Both were the vic­tims of lone gun­men, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, respec­tive­ly. The mur­ders threw Amer­i­ca into a cycle of riots and crack­downs that cul­mi­nat­ed with the Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion in Chica­go at the end of August.”
    • Why Are There So Few Assas­si­na­tions? (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “Con­sid­er that there are a lot of crazy peo­ple out there who get agi­tat­ed about pol­i­tics. There is also an end­less num­ber of nihilists with noth­ing to live for, but who would prob­a­bly like to see their names in the his­to­ry books. Pow­er­ful firearms are wide­ly avail­able in many advanced nations, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Unit­ed States. In this coun­try, it is com­mon for malls or schools to get shot up by dis­turbed young men who expect to get noth­ing out of the act except that they might end up being part of a news sto­ry for a few days. Why don’t more of these types go after major politi­cians?”
    • Video Shows Crowd Warn­ing Law Enforce­ment About Gun­man Before He Fired at Trump (David Bot­ti, Haley Willis and Malachy Browne, New York Times): “Video tak­en by a bystander shows peo­ple point­ing to the man sus­pect­ed of shoot­ing at for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump at a ral­ly in Penn­syl­va­nia and fran­ti­cal­ly warn­ing law enforce­ment, just two min­utes before the first burst of gun­fire rang out, accord­ing to an analy­sis of the footage by The New York Times.”
  5. Why slav­ery is not America’s orig­i­nal sin (Wil­fred Reil­ly, Spiked): “Mod­ern Amer­i­cans tend to project our pos­i­tive val­ues back into the past while think­ing that our sins are unique­ly bad. What we don’t under­stand is that con­tem­po­rary West­ern beliefs about human dig­ni­ty, inalien­able rights, a right to free­dom, etc, are the excep­tion, not the norm.… Even a few open slave soci­eties con­tin­ue to exist today. In the Islam­ic repub­lic of Mau­ri­ta­nia, ‘the very struc­ture of soci­ety rein­forces slav­ery’.… CNN reporters and ana­lysts claimed that between ’10 per cent to 20 per cent of the [Mau­ri­tan­ian] pop­u­la­tion lives in slav­ery’.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Ken­tucky State. The arti­cle is an excerpt from his new book, which I have not read.
  6. The Hid­den Mar­riage Mar­ket (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Today, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties func­tion as arranged match­mak­ing ser­vices. Charles Murray’s term of art in Com­ing Apart is ‘the col­lege sort­ing machine.’ The mech­a­nism where­by peo­ple with dis­tinc­tive tastes and pref­er­ences are brought togeth­er into edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions and the labor force.… It’s true that most col­lege grad­u­ates don’t meet their spouse in col­lege. But by grad­u­at­ing, you then, as Caplan notes, enter a refined dat­ing pool for the rest of your life.”
  7. Some stuff from the elec­tion and elec­tion-adja­cent realm, focused on the Repub­li­can side because they just had their con­ven­tion and Trump put forth Vance as his VP:
    • The changes in vibes — why did they hap­pen? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Anoth­er way to put it is that Trump was a high­ly vul­ner­a­ble, defeat­ed Pres­i­dent, fac­ing numer­ous legal charges and indeed an actu­al felony con­vic­tion. Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next elec­tion. In con­cep­tu­al terms, how exact­ly did that hap­pen? I had been think­ing it would be a good cog­ni­tive test to ask peo­ple why they think the vibes have changed, and then to grade their answers for intel­li­gence, insight, and intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty.”
      • Cowen offers inter­est­ing hypothe­ses.
    • How J.D. Vance Reject­ed Evan­gel­i­cal­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “He explic­it­ly sees reli­gion through the lens of socio-eco­nom­ic sta­tus. Once he saw that it was pos­si­ble to be Chris­t­ian in the world of the elites, it became inter­est­ing and cred­i­ble to him again. Note again that it’s Catholics and Mor­mons who are key to this, not any sort of Protes­tants. At the time of this inter­view, Vance was still explor­ing Catholi­cism, to which he lat­er con­vert­ed.… There’s also some­thing in evan­gel­i­cal­ism that’s just off-putting to a lot of peo­ple like Vance. It’s not just the work­ing class Pen­te­costal con­gre­ga­tions like the one I was raised in (which was very sim­i­lar to Vance’s expe­ri­ence). The aver­age sub­ur­ban megachurch is also incred­i­bly cringe. I like to dis­tin­guish between mid­dle class and striv­er class. Evan­gel­i­cal­ism appeals to the mid­dle class, but much less so to the striv­er class.”
      • Renn is not wrong about the dynam­ics at play, but he is over­look­ing the pres­ence of min­istries like Chi Alpha on these elite cam­pus­es which are usu­al­ly larg­er (in terms of week­ly atten­dance) and per­ceived to be more vibrant than the Catholic min­istries.
      • A fol­l0w-up Catholic Con­ver­sion­ism (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “It’s worth not­ing that although intel­lec­tu­als often con­vert from evan­gel­i­cal­ism to Catholi­cism, a lot more peo­ple over all con­vert the oth­er direc­tion, from Catholi­cism to evan­gel­i­cal­ism.”
      • If any­one thinks Catholi­cism is cor­rect on the mer­its, then become a Catholic. I strong­ly dis­agree with you, but fol­low your con­vic­tions. But to any­one tempt­ed to con­vert to Catholi­cism or any­thing else pri­mar­i­ly because it makes your social life / career prospects bet­ter, I urge you to recon­sid­er.
    • How Yale Pro­pelled J.D. Vance’s Career (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Sofia Nel­son, a for­mer class­mate who is trans­gen­der and was once a close friend of both Mr. Vance and his wife, recalled that Mr. Vance deliv­ered home-baked treats when they under­went top surgery. But years of friend­ship end­ed in 2021 over his sup­port for an Arkansas bill oppos­ing trans­gen­der care for minors.”
      • Inter­est­ing when you ignore the par­ti­san dynam­ic and instead focus on the cul­tur­al col­li­sion at Yale.
    • The Pop­ulist GOP and its Yale Law and Har­vard Law Lead­ers (Orin S. Kerr, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy): “…pop­ulist con­ser­v­a­tive vot­ers are fine with vot­ing for con­ser­v­a­tive grad­u­ates of elite law schools because hav­ing attend­ed those school affords con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians a sort of vet­er­an sta­tus of its own. The politi­cians run­ning for GOP office don’t speak fond­ly of their time at these schools. Instead, they present their time at Har­vard Law or Yale Law as a dif­fi­cult test of strength that they passed. They spent three years in the trench­es of lib­er­al­ism and they emerged vic­to­ri­ous. They are now bat­tle-hard­ened and ready to fight the lib­er­als while in polit­i­cal office. From that per­spec­tive, grad­u­at­ing from these schools isn’t a prob­lem. Instead, like a medal on a mil­i­tary uni­form, it’s a cre­den­tial.”
      • This piece is pret­ty good, but it over­looks the delib­er­ate pipeline that both sides have set up to scout and route promis­ing young can­di­dates from elite uni­ver­si­ties into polit­i­cal tracks. There are all kinds of con­fer­ences and grants and intern­ships to facil­i­tate this.
    • Is the Repub­li­can Par­ty Becom­ing Pro-Choice? (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee pro­posed its 2024 GOP par­ty plat­form in Mil­wau­kee on July 8, and for the first time in forty years, this plat­form does not include sup­port for a nation­al abor­tion ban. Instead, the GOP’s anti-abor­tion posi­tions are soft­ened and many of the par­ty’s pre­vi­ous pro-life com­mit­ments have been removed.… the GOP appears to be piv­ot­ing. Trump claims to hold a fed­er­al­ist posi­tion on abor­tion, but in prac­tice he con­demns only states that pass pro-life protections—such as Florida—while say­ing noth­ing about states with per­mis­sive abor­tion regimes.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • She Didn’t Like His Song, So She Tried to Eat Him (Joshua Rapp Learn, New York Times): “Dr. Gould believes that a female may be able to tell whether a male is bet­ter for mat­ing or eat­ing based on the strength of his calls. This means males take a huge risk when try­ing to attract mates. ‘You’ve real­ly got to give props to the male frogs out there, that they are putting their lives on the line to repro­duce,’ Dr. Gould said.”
  • Denom­i­na­tions Host Game Night (Kei­th Fos­key, YouTube): two min­utes of fun­ny with some talkey-talkey at the end
  • The Death of Hob­bies (Sher­ry Ning, Sub­stack): “Scrolling through an end­less trail of short videos and watch­ing cook­ing shows is plea­sur­able because it feels good, but it would be wrong to say you actu­al­ly enjoy it. It would be much more enjoy­able to learn how to cook and roll up your sleeves in the kitchen. When we par­tic­i­pate in the motion, we turn from a con­sumer into a cre­ator. And the act of cre­ation is vital to us because we all uncon­scious­ly strive to seek mean­ing beyond the mate­r­i­al world: There is some­thing divine about cre­at­ing. To bring forth some­thing out of noth­ing, to have some­thing exist because of you, to leave your mark on the world. Every cre­ative act—from devel­op­ing a soft­ware to writ­ing a book to mak­ing a large bowl of salad—is a minia­ture Gen­e­sis.”
    • This one real­ly belongs above, but I did­n’t have space for it with my self-imposed lim­it of 7 big bul­let points. I con­vinced myself it belongs here since it has to do with recre­ation.

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 460



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

This is vol­ume 460, a large­ly unin­ter­est­ing num­ber. It’s a mul­ti­ple of 23, so I guess that’s kin­da cool (for a cer­tain def­i­n­i­tion of cool).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Your Con­sti­tu­tion­al Right to Be a Pirate (A.J. Jacobs, The Free Press): “It may not get much pub­lic­i­ty, but there it is, smack-dab in Arti­cle I, Sec­tion 8 of the Con­sti­tu­tion: Con­gress has the pow­er to grant cit­i­zens ‘let­ters of mar­que and reprisal.’ Mean­ing that, with Congress’s per­mis­sion, pri­vate cit­i­zens can load weapons onto their fish­ing boats, head out to the high seas, cap­ture ene­my ves­sels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patri­ot­ic pirates were known as ‘pri­va­teers.’ ”
  2. the Pen­ta­teuch in brief out­line (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “As Robert Alter has point­ed out, the long-time obses­sion with sources among schol­ars of the Hebrew Bible — their slight­ly mad-eyed teas­ing out of the con­tri­bu­tions of their posit­ed authors J, E, D, and P — led them to the assump­tion that ‘the redac­tors were in the grip of a kind of man­ic trib­al com­pul­sion, dri­ven again and again to include units of tra­di­tion­al mate­r­i­al … for rea­sons they them­selves could not have explained.’ Yet if that were true, why does an out­line of the Pen­ta­teuch look so order­ly — indeed, almost exces­sive­ly so?”
  3. The Codger-in-Chief (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “[We are see­ing] cov­er­age that bears more of a pass­ing resem­blance to what I saw dur­ing the Tod­dler-in-Chief days. In oth­er words, there are some dis­turb­ing par­al­lels in how Biden’s staffers are talk­ing about him to the press when com­pared to Trump’s White House staffers. Fur­ther­more, I strong­ly sus­pect the staffers now talk­ing to the press are high­er-rank­ing than, say, the deputy direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy.”
    • I read a lot of post-debate arti­cles, most of them strong­ly par­ti­san one way or the oth­er. This one sum­ma­rizes a lot of threads well. The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Tufts.
    • Not direct­ly relat­ed, but also relat­ed to the upcom­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion — My Unset­tling Inter­view With Steve Ban­non (David Brooks, New York Times): “I should empha­size that I wasn’t try­ing to debate Ban­non or rebut his beliefs; I want­ed to under­stand how he sees the cur­rent moment. I want­ed to under­stand the glob­al pop­ulist surge from the inside.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Unlocked.
  4. Notes From a For­mer­ly Unpromis­ing Young Per­son (Rebec­ca Sny­der, New York Times): “My sit­u­a­tion was this: I was fin­ish­ing my sopho­more year of high school and had prob­a­bly attend­ed few­er days than I’d missed. I’d failed near­ly all my class­es, and my tran­script boast­ed a 0.47. (I say ‘boast­ed’ because you real­ly do have to miss quite a lot of school to fail so spec­tac­u­lar­ly.) Then there were the fist­fights. The weed. The acid.… [Yet] some­one had tak­en the time to meet me, to lis­ten and to ulti­mate­ly believe I had poten­tial. When Mr. Spencer sat in the admis­sions office of North Cen­tral Col­lege and said, ‘I’m going to take a chance on you, Rachel Sny­der,’ those were prob­a­bly the most impor­tant words of my life.”
  5. Why a New Con­ser­v­a­tive Brain Trust Is Reset­tling Across Amer­i­ca (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The idea was a ‘fra­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ty,’ as one leader put it, that pri­or­i­tized in-per­son meet­ings. The result was the all-male Soci­ety for Amer­i­can Civic Renew­al, an invi­ta­tion-only social orga­ni­za­tion reserved for Chris­tians.… Mem­bers must be male, belong to a ‘Trini­tar­i­an Chris­t­ian’ church, a broad cat­e­go­ry that includes Catholics and Protes­tants, but not mem­bers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Lat­ter-day Saints. Mem­bers must also describe them­selves as ‘unhy­phen­at­ed Amer­i­cans,’ a ref­er­ence to Theodore Roosevelt’s speech urg­ing the full assim­i­la­tion of immi­grants.”
    • Both the exis­tence of this move­ment and the way it is report­ed on are inter­est­ing. Unlocked.
  6. Lov­ing Amer­i­ca Means Expect­ing More From It (Esau McCaul­ley, New York Times): “Too often we wor­ry that if we tell our chil­dren about our com­plex and some­times dark his­to­ry, their response will be debil­i­tat­ing shame. But instead of lying to our youth, we can give them a task that demands the best of them. We can call upon them to close the often-gap­ing chasm between our ideals and prac­tices. This is the gift the past offers us, a chance to flee old evils and pur­sue new goods.”
  7. Revival and Rev­o­lu­tion (John Fea, Com­mon­weal): “Since Evan­gel­i­cal­ism is an inher­ent­ly pop­ulist and anti-intel­lec­tu­al move­ment, most born-again Chris­tians do not trust aca­d­e­mics and rely instead on such ‘experts.’ When they need to know some­thing about sci­ence, they turn to Ken Ham, host of the pop­u­lar radio show Answers in Gen­e­sis and founder of the Cre­ation Muse­um in Peters­burg, Ken­tucky. They get their psy­chol­o­gy and social phi­los­o­phy from James Dob­son, the long­time cul­ture war­rior and founder of the lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion Focus on the Fam­i­ly. Their polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy comes from sources like Fox News’s Sean Han­ni­ty, the Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty Stand­ing for Free­dom Cen­ter, or the Robert­son School of Gov­ern­ment at Pat Robertson’s Regent Uni­ver­si­ty. And for Amer­i­can his­to­ry, con­ser­v­a­tive Evan­gel­i­cals turn to David Bar­ton, the founder and CEO of Wall­Builders, an Evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion in Ale­do, Texas.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry prof at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school.

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 447

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

This is vol­ume 447, which I kin­da hoped would be prime. Alas, 447 = 3 · 149.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. One of the Most Over­looked Argu­ments for the Res­ur­rec­tion (Michael J. Kruger, blog): “…the ear­li­est Chris­tians came to believe, against all odds and against all expec­ta­tions, that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead. Notice the dis­tinc­tive nature of this claim. The claim is not that Jesus rose from the dead (though, I think he did). The claim is that the ear­li­est fol­low­ers of Jesus came to believe—and very strong­ly believe— that he did. And that is a whol­ly oth­er mat­ter. Why? Because it is a his­tor­i­cal fact that is not dis­put­ed.”
  2. The Prob­lem With Say­ing ‘Sex Assigned at Birth’ (Alex Byrne and Car­ole K. Hooven, New York Times): “Sexed organ­isms were present on Earth at least a bil­lion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had nev­er evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of lin­guis­tic cer­e­monies in the deliv­ery room or oth­er cul­tur­al prac­tices. Lone­some George, the long-lived Galá­pa­gos giant tor­toise, was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatch­ing. A baby aban­doned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by any­one, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the con­fu­sion sown by some schol­ars, we can be con­fi­dent that the sex bina­ry is not a human inven­tion.”
    • One author is a philoso­pher at MIT, the oth­er an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard. Unlocked.
  3. Rival per­spec­tives on the war between Israel and Hamas
    • https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1775980849944539391 (Cole­man Hugh­es, Twit­ter): a two and a half minute video sym­pa­thet­ic to Israel
    • Bomb First, Ask Ques­tions Lat­er (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “To hit one car is a mis­for­tune; to destroy three cars con­sec­u­tive­ly on a pre-approved route, not so much. The cars were clear­ly marked and in a decon­flic­tion zone — but the IDF pol­i­cy is to tar­get any­where Hamas could be present, even if some civil­ians were killed. As we’ll see, one dead Hamas mem­ber and sev­en dead civil­ians was well with­in the mar­gin of error Israel had set for itself. So it appears they method­i­cal­ly took out each car to make sure they fin­ished the job. No, I don’t believe that Israel delib­er­ate­ly mur­dered the aid work­ers; but I do think that, in con­text, the IDF’s effec­tive rules of engage­ment — strike places like hos­pi­tals and schools because Hamas is there, even though there will be many civil­ian casu­al­ties — made this kind of indif­fer­ence to human life pos­si­ble.”
  4. The Church of Trump: How He’s Infus­ing Chris­tian­i­ty Into His Move­ment (Michael C. Ben­der, New York Times): “The appar­ent effec­tive­ness of such tac­tics has made Mr. Trump the nation’s first major politi­cian to suc­cess­ful­ly sep­a­rate char­ac­ter from pol­i­cy for reli­gious vot­ers, said John Fea, a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Mes­si­ah Uni­ver­si­ty, an evan­gel­i­cal school in Penn­syl­va­nia. ‘Trump has split the atom between char­ac­ter and pol­i­cy,’ Mr. Fea said. ‘He did it because he’s real­ly the first one to lis­ten to their griev­ances and take them seri­ous­ly. Does he real­ly care about evan­gel­i­cals? I don’t know. But he’s built a mes­sage to appeal direct­ly to them.’”
    • Unlocked
  5. The Case for Mar­ry­ing an Old­er Man (Gra­zie Sophia Christie, The Cut): “Very soon, we will decide to have chil­dren, and I don’t pan­ic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it ear­ly: on the hol­i­days of some­one who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beau­ti­ful places when I was young and beau­ti­ful, a sym­me­try I rec­om­mend. If such a thing as mater­nal ener­gy exists, mine was nev­er deplet­ed. I spent the last near­ly sev­en years sup­port­ed more than I sup­port and I am still not as old as my hus­band was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does pro­fes­sion­al tenure earn you if not the right to set more lim­its on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least?”
    • A well-writ­ten and unusu­al posi­tion. Not the only path to con­sid­er, but cer­tain­ly a path to con­sid­er.
  6. Break­through in prime num­ber the­o­ry demon­strates primes can be pre­dict­ed (Michael Gibb, Phys.org): “Con­trary to what just about every math­e­mati­cian on Earth will tell you, prime num­bers can be pre­dict­ed, accord­ing to researchers at City Uni­ver­si­ty of Hong Kong (CityUHK) and North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty, U.S.”
  7. Are Mem­bers of the Cler­gy Mis­er­able? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I real­ly want­ed to key in on a few ques­tions about job/life sat­is­fac­tion. The sur­vey repli­cates a ques­tion from ‘The Sat­is­fac­tion with Life Scale.’ The state­ment is sim­ply: In most ways my life is close to my ide­al.… The mean score for this was 5.6 in the cler­gy sam­ple. Among mem­bers of Israel’s Defense Force it was 4.7, among some uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents it was found to 5.23. Among nurs­es it was 3.81. In a sam­ple of peo­ple liv­ing in Colom­bia it was only 3.67. The long and short of it was this — I can’t find anoth­er pop­u­la­tion group that scores high­er on this met­ric than cler­gy.… I’m pret­ty con­fi­dent in say­ing that cler­gy seemed pret­ty con­tent with their sta­tion in life (or at least this was the case before the pan­dem­ic).”
    • Maybe laypeo­ple don’t hear this very often, but I am often in cir­cles where they talk about an epi­dem­ic of min­is­te­r­i­al dis­sat­is­fac­tion. But I’ve nev­er seen it. I love my job and pret­ty much all my peers do, too. What we do is amaz­ing. I’m glad to see a schol­ar vin­di­cat­ing my intu­ition.

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 445

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

This is vol­ume 445, which feels like it ought to have many fac­tors. But it’s just 89 * 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Har­vard, M.I.T. and Sys­temic Anti­semitism (David French, New York Times): “…what’s hap­pen­ing to Jew­ish stu­dents and fac­ul­ty at sev­er­al elite cam­pus­es is so com­pre­hen­sive and all-con­sum­ing that it can only be described as sys­temic anti­semitism.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Worth read­ing. Unlocked.
  2. How To Save a Democ­ra­cy (Quico Toro, Sub­stack): “Watch­ing videos of the protest now, what strikes you is that Bernar­do Aré­va­lo is sel­dom men­tioned. K’iche’ lead­ers were at pains to empha­size they were not there to favor one politi­cian or anoth­er. They were there to defend their votes. If Arévalo’s name was sel­dom uttered, the name of Jesus Christ was con­stant­ly invoked.”
    • A remark­able sto­ry. 
  3. Piety and Pro­fan­i­ty: The Raunchy Chris­tians Are Here (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The par­tial embrace of vul­gar­i­ty, Dr. Kobes Du Mez point­ed out, is hap­pen­ing in a moment of deep con­ser­v­a­tive out­rage, an often vis­cer­al dis­gust, at ris­ing rates of non­tra­di­tion­al gen­der and sex­u­al iden­ti­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly among young peo­ple. In that con­text, an indul­gence in het­ero­sex­u­al lust, even if in poor taste, is becom­ing seen as not just benign, but maybe even healthy and noble. Part of the rea­son trans­gen­der iden­ti­ties are con­sid­ered a threat is that they blur gen­der dif­fer­ence, Dr. Kobes Du Mez said. ‘Against that back­drop, it’s a whole­some thing for a boy to be lust­ing after a very sexy woman.’”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Steven D. Levitt (Freako­nom­ics co-author and Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Eco­nom­ics Pro­fes­sor) on His Career And Deci­sion To Retire From Aca­d­e­m­ic Eco­nom­ics (Jon Hart­ley, Cap­i­tal­ism and Free­dom): “I had always been the smartest kid or close to the smartest kid, but then I got to MIT and I real­ized my God these peo­ple are incred­i­ble. Not just what they know but how they think. So, I knew from day one I was the odd man out. I mean I’m not even exag­ger­at­ing when I say that there was a group of peo­ple in the in-crowd. Aus­tan Gools­bee, my good friend Aus­tan Gools­bee was one of the in-crowds. And Aus­tan told me that maybe a month into our first year at MIT, the in-crowd sat down and they made a list of the five peo­ple most like­ly to fail out. And I was on that list of five.”
    • An absolute­ly delight­ful inter­view. The above link is to the tran­script, but I rec­om­mend the audio ver­sion.
  5. The Pol­i­cy Stakes in this Elec­tion Are High (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “This pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is not very inter­est­ing, but it is impor­tant. And some of the rea­sons it’s impor­tant are the banal rea­sons that every pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is impor­tant: You get dif­fer­ent pol­i­cy out­comes depend­ing on who gets elect­ed.”
    • Writ­ten from a cen­ter-left per­spec­tive. Even if you dis­agree with Bar­ro on your pre­ferred pol­i­cy out­comes, I think he does a nice job of sum­ma­riz­ing some of the most impor­tant dif­fer­ences (although he leaves off a few big ones about which the two admin­is­tra­tions have dif­fer­ent track records such as reli­gious free­dom, DEI issues, etc).
  6. Are Drunk Peo­ple in New Orleans More Sen­si­ble Than Con­gress? (Ben Meets Amer­i­ca, YouTube): four min­utes. If the qual­i­ty con­tin­ues, I will prob­a­bly be shar­ing most install­ments of this series.
  7. Which Cities are the Least Reli­gious? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The least reli­gious cities are at the top and there are two clear win­ners here: San Fran­cis­co and Seat­tle. In both cas­es, about sev­en in ten adults are attend­ing reli­gious ser­vices less than once a year. But I think that San Fran­cis­co make take the crown for most sec­u­lar — just 12% of folks in that city are attend­ing church at least once a month.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty

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.