Tag: pornography

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 430

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. That’s especially true this week: I skipped last week because of Thanksgiving, and I still feel behind on my reading.

This is volume 430, a sphenic number. That means it is the product of three primes, namely 2 · 5 · 43.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman recently mentioned that he believes in God. Here’s a 13 minute video of him explaining why (YouTube) or you can just watch this two minute excerpt which contains the essence of his point (Twitter).
    • For the record, I’ve never met Huberman and do not know what his specific religious beliefs are. I just find it interesting that a prominent public intellectual affiliated with Stanford is a believer.
  2. This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers (Darbe Saxbe, New York Times): “[Programs designed to help young people instead] made their mental-health problems worse. Understanding why these efforts backfired can shed light on how society can — and can’t — help teenagers who are suffering from depression and anxiety.… Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart. Instead of ‘I am nervous about X,’ a teenager might say, ‘I can’t do X because I have anxiety’ — a reframing that research shows undermines resilience by encouraging people to view everyday challenges as insurmountable.”
    • The author is a psychology prof at USC.
  3. Religion isn’t sexually repressive. Just read the data. (Stephen Cranney, Deseret News): “…contrary to widely held belief, religious people report better sex lives, and married religious couples have more frequent and better sex than others (non-married religious people, intuitively, have less sex). These results were supported by one study that found religious British people reported more satisfying sex lives. A separate BYU study, published by Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, found similar results for married couples in the U.S. while another found that highly religious people had higher sexual ‘passion’ than more moderately religious people (nonreligious people also reflected higher ‘passion’ levels).”
    • This sentence made me chuckle: “It may well be that the most sexually active campuses in the U.S. aren’t the famous party schools, but rather the more religiously conservative schools with more married students.”
    • The author is a sociologist and a demographer with appointments at Baylor’s Institute for the Study of Religion and at the Catholic University of America
  4. Solomon Friedman is on a mission to save Pornhub (Andrew Duffy, Ottowa Citzen): “Solomon Friedman is not someone readily defined: He’s a defence lawyer and an organ donor; a firearms advocate and an ordained rabbi; an investor, philanthropist, and pornography magnate. If the 37-year-old father of three is not the most interesting man in Ottawa, then the licensed pilot and part-time law professor is certainly one of the busiest.”
    • This is actually insane.
  5. Why I No Longer Support the Death Penalty (Matthew T. Martens, Crossway): “8,790 people have been sentenced to death in the United States since 1973. One hundred and eighty-four of those men and women were exonerated as of the end of 2022.11 They were innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted and sentenced to die. In other words, we know that at least 2 percent of people sentenced to death since 1973 were wrongly condemned. Even if we have identified all of those wrongly convicted and the error rate is ‘only’ 2 percent, that is an error rate higher than I am willing to tolerate.… I am unwilling to wager another man’s life. I would not wager my own under those conditions.”
    • The author has recently written a book about a Christian perspective on criminal justice. He is a defender of the death penalty as a concept yet opposed to it as practiced in America today.
  6. TikTok parent company used AI to optimize Linux kernel, boosting performance and efficiency (Matthew Connatser, Tom’s Hardware): “The general gist of the presentation: ByteDance used AI to make the Linux kernel (the core of the operating system) much more efficient and performant across all kinds of hardware.… AI optimizations were able to reduce memory usage by 30% — and that was using existing Linux tools, just more efficiently. Network latency was also improved by up to 12% with AI that has prior knowledge (which wouldn’t be hard to obtain on a computer used regularly).”
  7. On Culture War, Doug Wilson, and the Moscow Mood (Kevin DeYoung, personal blog): “My concerns are not so much with one or two conclusions that Christians may reach if Wilson becomes their intellectual mentor. My bigger concern is with the long-term spiritual effects of admiring and imitating the Moscow mood. For the mood that attracts people to Moscow is too often incompatible with Christian virtue, inconsiderate of other Christians, and ultimately inconsistent with the stated aims of Wilson’s Christendom project.”
    • Broadly correct, although I think DeYoung overstates his case a few times. Wilson does present the gospel more than DeYoung acknowledges and that is one of his appeals. Still, as I said, broadly correct.

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 425

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 425, the sum of 3 consecutive primes. 425 = 137 + 139 + 149

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m going to start today’s roundup off with an explanation of why this email is the way it is. First read this brief article by Nate Silver: It’s easy to screw up on breaking news. But you have to admit when you do. (Nate Silver, Substack): “This morning, Gallup published its annual poll on trust in the media. Overall, only 32 percent of Americans say they trust the mass media ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ to ‘report the news fully, accurately and fairly’ — tied with 2016 for a record low. ”
    • Silver’s article made me reflect on how I think about modern journalism and then made me want to explain it. First, I do believe journalists try to get things right. Places like the NYT and the Washington Post rarely publish false information and generally correct falsehoods when they become aware of them. The more specific a claim is the more likely it is to be true.
    • Journalists do, however, frequently fail to report true information they are not interested in or excited about. This is rarely a conscious choice — it’s just a byproduct of the way they think about reality. This comes up especially on so-called “culture war” issues. Many top-notch reporters are simultaneously unaware of and strangely incurious about many of the facts and stories around transgenderism, marriage, religious liberty, and so on.
    • In fact, newsrooms are so ideologically monocultural that there are often massive holes in what is reported. Not only are reporters blind to inconvenient facts, they are often blind to entire stories and trends. An excellent historical example of this is whenever the 60s and 70s are remembered. America legit experienced a Great Awakening (the Jesus People movement) that happened in parallel with the Sexual Revolution. We only ever talk about the second not because reporters/commentators are suppressing knowledge of the Jesus People but because they genuinely are not even aware that they existed or that what happened then is still shaping our culture today.
    • And so when I want a fact, I turn to someplace like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Reuters or to a credible expert who writes directly to the public (Ryan Burge is a good example of this). But when I want an analysis, I look for credible, sane voices both within and without the confines of the media establishment. I frequently look to places like Substack or niche websites like Mere Orthodoxy or to mainstream media commentators like Ross Douthat or David French or Megan McArdle who have a track record of synthesizing information accurately and forming opinions wisely.
    • And when I’m reading something, I often ask, “Does this perspective seem plausible in light of my experience?” Especially when it is a claim about evangelicalism or charismatic/Pentecostal Christianity — I likely know more about that world than 98% of the staff of the New York Times (and after reading some articles I think I know more about it than all their staff put together). Sometimes they take an oddball church or religious leader and put their story forward as representative when it is not at all.
    • Anyway, there is probably a lot more to say about modern media, but what I just said is pretty much why this weekly update features the mix of content that it does: mainstream media sources for facts and a diverse array of experts for analysis, all filtered through evangelical sensibilities.
    • A related thought on news consumption: periodicity (Alan Jacobs, personal blog): “The more unstable a situation is, the more rapidly it changes, the less valuable minute-by-minute reporting is. I don’t know what happened to the hospital in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Economist shows up I will be better informed about it than people who have been rage-refreshing their browser windows for the past several days, and I will have suffered considerably less emotional stress.… If you’re reading the news several times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stimulated.”
  2. Moving on, here are some articles that give context for the Israel war on Hamas:
    • Palestinian right of return matters (Matt Yglesias, Substack): “Because it seems to me that whatever you personally think about [the Palestinian right of return], it is absolutely central to how the Arab world and diaspora Jews and secular Israelis all view the conflict. Which in turn means that it’s central to the collapse of the Two-State Solution as a political construct and to the collapse of the peace camp in Israeli politics that might have been inclined make a deal that was favorable to Palestinian interests. There is, in fact, a whole school of thought associated with Bill Clinton and American negotiator Dennis Ross that holds the right of return almost single-handedly responsible for scuttling the Camp David talks and preventing the emergence of an independent Palestine. Of course, many other well-informed people deny that’s the case or believe it’s an oversimplification. But even if you think it is factually incorrect to say the resolution of this conflict hinges on the right of return, its centrality to so many of the narratives around this issue makes it an important concept to understand.”
    • The Forgotten History of the Term “Palestine” (Douglas J. Feith, Mosaic): “The term ‘Palestine’ was used for millennia without a precise geographic definition. That’s not uncommon—think of ‘Transcaucasus’ or ‘Midwest.’ No precise definition existed for Palestine because none was required. Since the Roman era, the name lacked political significance. No nation ever had that name.”
      • This is from back in 2021. Super interesting stuff.
    • Hamas does not yet understand the depth of Israeli resolve (Haviv Rettig Gur, Times of Israel): “That enemy is not the Palestinian people, of course, even though support for terror attacks is widespread among Palestinians. The enemy is not exactly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The enemy is the Palestinian theory of Israelis that makes the violence seen on October 7 seem to many of them a rational step on the road to liberation rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet another in a long string of self-inflicted disasters for the Palestinian cause.… A tragedy is about to unfold in Gaza made worse by the long learning curve it will take for Hamas to grasp the depth of Israeli resolve. It has robbed Israel of any other interest but its destruction. In the Israeli mind, any brutality Hamas can commit it will commit. And so it cannot be allowed to ever commit any act ever again.”
  3. Some Christian perspectives
    • Antisemitic Violence and Its Shameful Defense (Mike Cosper, Christianity Today): “To be horrified by the slaughter of Israeli innocents doesn’t require denying the suffering of the Palestinian people. And caring for Palestinian innocents doesn’t require being cold or numb to the horrors of antisemitism and Hamas. We can condemn Hamas while demanding accountability from Israeli leaders who have fomented violence, elevated right-wing extremists, and excused violations of international law. Indeed, Christians should be marked by our willingness to oppose all injustice and to care for Israeli and Palestinian victims alike. And while that includes understanding that Palestinians have suffered great injustices from the government of Israel—as well as neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority itself—it must also include active rejection of antisemitism.”
    • Wither the Poisonous Plant of Hamas (Tamir Khouri, Christianity Today): “In this environment of hatred, racism, and violence, Hamas has exploited young people with false promises. With no horizon of hope, Hamas’s adherents in Palestine sank into darkness and helped Hamas victimize Israelis too. But it does not have to be this way. As Christians, we believe in the power of redemption. With real hope for the future of this land, these hateful movements will wither. For a lasting peace, we must respect the image of God in Israelis and Palestinians alike. Is it too much to ask that we don’t see this as a zero-sum game? Shouldn’t both Israelis and Palestinians live in the dignity God intended for us?”
      • The pseudonymous author is a Palestinian Christian who is an Israeli citizen.
  4. Some articles about modern academia:
    • Why Big Money Can’t Easily Change Campus Politics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…donors should find ways to give money to the actual students — through the Hillel or other Jewish or Israeli student groups if you’re especially concerned with the Jewish place on campus, but more generally through political or religious groups that promise to work against the school’s dominant assumptions, or through student associations that seem to foster free debate, or through campus-adjacent institutions that serve students but are independent of the schools. But not with the goal of using such student groups as a means of conflict with the administration or the faculty. Rather, with the goal that such groups can become microcosms of the university you loved once and fear no longer exists, cells in a body yet to be restored, whose health and flourishing within the large world of Penn or Harvard or wherever is an end unto itself.”
      • Ross Douthat speaks nothing but truth throughout this essay. If you know any gazillionaires who want to influence the trajectories of elite universities have them read this essay and then tell them about Chi Alpha. Mention we’d like a building near campus.
    • The War Comes to Stanford (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Alma Andino, a Jewish senior at Stanford University, spent the day of Hamas’s attacks against Israel crying and distraught. Like many Jews around the country, much of the weekend passed on the phone with family members, fearing for the safety of friends and extended family in Israel. Andino’s fellow students in Columbae, the social justice and antiwar residential house where she is a residential assistant, held her through her panic attacks. ‘I felt so powerless,’ she recalled when we spoke this week. On Monday, a friend asked if she’d seen the banner some of her housemates were preparing to hang on the front of Columbae, the house she considered to be her community and her home. The sheet bore the slogan ‘Zionism is genocide’ in red letters, styled to look as if they were dripping with blood.… For Alma Andino, events on campus have already reached a breaking point. After begging her housemates not to hang the banner, she said the group debated for hours, with the implication they would desist only if a suitable justification for Israel’s existence could be given. They told her they felt that as student activists, they needed to display a message that would put them on the right side of history. We should be advocating for marginalized communities, they said. ‘Except for Jews?’ Alma replied. The group scoffed.”
    • What Conservatives Misunderstand About Radicalism at Universities (Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic): “The tension bursting into view right now—between a majority of scholars, for whom ‘decolonization’ means putting fewer white Europeans on their syllabi, and a small minority who believe it entails anything-goes violent revolution—is the unwelcome and unsurprising result of universities wanting to cosplay rebellion while still churning out Wall Street–executive alumni who will one day pad endowments that are larger than Israel’s annual defense budget.”
      • The title makes this sound more partisan than it is. 100% worth a read and ponder.
    • Students for Pogroms in Israel (Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic): “Looking back on the Manson killings, Joan Didion wrote, ‘Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.’ A few people I know believe last Saturday’s attack on Israel and the responses from leftist student groups mark the end of the ‘Great Awokening.’ Although it is too early to evaluate the accuracy of that hypothesis, campus politics have certainly transformed in recent days. Now we are left wondering whether what comes next is better or worse than what preceded it.”
      • He makes specific mention of Stanford at one point, although it is hardly his focus.
    • Moral controversies and academic public health: Notes on navigating and surviving academic freedom challenges (Tyler VanderWeele, Global Epidemiology): “I think that there needs to be more open discussion in academia, and in society, about these matters. Most people, even those who are deeply concerned, seem very uneasy discussing these issues, for fear of being attacked for simply raising them. Colleagues at Harvard, ranging from an expert in child development to a clinician providing mental health care for teenage girls, have told me that they are uncomfortable sharing their concerns on these matters in many or most settings at Harvard. An evolutionary biologist at Harvard likewise recently came under attack because she explicitly stated that sex was biological and binary, even though she also noted that we can nevertheless respect a person’s gender identity. The attack was sufficiently severe, and the administration’s response sufficiently weak, that she eventually felt she had no choice but to resign. Rather than open discussion, it seems we are often now relying on anonymous articles, or brave, and subsequently vilified, authors and whistle-blowers to raise alternative viewpoints. One may strongly disagree with their positions, but it is not unreasonable to raise the questions.”
      • I removed hyperlinked footnotes from this excerpt for readability. This is worth reading as a model of maturely and wisely responding to academic intolerance. Not many scholars have comported themselves with as much class as VanderWeele when their views came under attack. Also, I learned in this article that VanderWeele is Catholic. I had assumed he was an evangelical based on something I heard elsewhere.
  5. Thinking about the moral dimensions of the war
    • The Moral Questions at the Heart of the Gaza War (David French, New York Times): “This is the problem Israeli soldiers and commanders face. They must protect their citizens from savagery. They must comply with the laws of war. And they must make a series of moral choices, under extreme duress, that can define them and their nation — all while they face a terrorist enemy that appears to possess no conscience at all.”
      • Worth reading. As I mentioned when I shared French’s previous article, he is more qualified than any other columnist I know to weigh in on this.
    • This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen (Chris Hedges, ScheerPost): “I spent seven years reporting on the conflict, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bodies of Israeli victims of bus bombings in Jerusalem by Palestinian suicide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, including children, in the corridors in Dar Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. I watched Israeli soldiers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then callously shot in the Khan Younis refugee camp. I sheltered from bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes. I climbed over the rubble of demolished Palestinian homes and apartment blocks along the border with Egypt. I interviewed the bloodied and dazed survivors. I heard the soul crushing wails of mothers keening over the corpses of their children.… it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.”
      • Recommended by an alumnus.
  6. Smartphones Have Turbocharged the Danger of Porn (Mary Harrington, Wall Street Journal): “It should come as no surprise that the personalized, tactile, portable smartphone would be the digital portal of choice for something as intimate as porn consumption. But of the new compulsive behaviors enabled by smartphones, few have as intense and immediate a reward cycle as porn—or as many far-reaching consequences.”
  7. Is It Wrong to Cure Blindness? (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “The National Institutes of Health, the $40 billion-endowed funding arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, recently took a stand against ableism by proposing a change to its mission statement, which promises to ‘enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.’ An advisory committee within the NIH took issue with the phrase ‘reduce… disability,’ writing in a 66-page report published last December that it ‘could be interpreted as perpetuating ableist beliefs that disabled people are flawed and need to be ‘fixed.’ ”
    • There are legit insane perspectives being normalized in the world right now. Curing blindness is an unequivocal good.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mattie Friedman, The Atlantic): “…one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.” This is an old article I share periodically, I think I first shared it way back in my fifth Friday email. Helpful in parsing media coverage in the current war.

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 421

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 421, a twin prime number (cf 419) which is also the sum of five consecutive primes: 421 = 73 + 79 + 83 + 89 + 97.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Hundreds of students baptized after Unite Auburn worship service (Brady Talbert, WSFA News): “Auburn University senior Michael Floyd said he will never forget what he witnessed on campus Tuesday night. ‘I’ve seen Auburn basketball beat Kentucky, I’ve seen Auburn football beat Alabama, but I have never seen something like I did on Tuesday night,’ Floyd said. Thousands packedNeville Arena for a night of worship. When it was ending, one student wanted to be baptized. Without a tub, crowds started gathering at the lake at Auburn’s Red Barn, where roughly 200 people ultimately gave their lives to Christ.”
  2. Gender, Sexual Orientation and Religion Among American College Students (Ryan Burge, Substack): “What really kicked this off was a report from Brown University that indicated that 38% of their student body identifies as homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning, or other. When that same poll was conducted ten years earlier, that share was just 14%. Is Brown an outlier here? Or are huge percentages of college students not straight and/or not cisgender? The survey gave seven total options for gender. The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that the vast, vast majority of young people identify as man or woman. In fact, this was the choice of 98.2% of all respondents in the survey. In other words, about one in fifty college aged students identifies as nonbinary, genderqueer/genderfluid, agender, unsure, or prefer not to say.… 72% of the sample identifies as straight. Another 12% says that they are bisexual and 5% indicates that they are gay/lesbian. These three response options encompass about 90% of all respondents in the sample. About two percent identify as pansexual or queer or unsure.”
    • Full of interesting data, emphasis in original. I believe Brown is accurately reporting its data, and I also believe Brown (and Stanford) are outliers in this regard.
    • Of particular note: “The groups that are the least likely to say that they are straight are atheists at 55% and agnostics at 53%. It’s pretty staggering to consider that nearly half of young atheists/agnostics are not heterosexual. Nothing in particulars are not far behind, either, at 62%. The nones are much less likely to be straight compared to their religious counterparts.” (emphasis removed for readability)
  3. The Huddled Masses At The Border (Andrew Sullivan, Substack): “Lampedusa is a picturesque, rocky Italian island in the Mediterranean between Tunisia and Sicily, with gorgeous beaches and a small population of around 6,000. In just five days last week, its population tripled, as 11,000 migrants showed up in at least 199 boats, overwhelming resources. The center for accommodating migrants was designed for 600.”
    • Amazing statistics. The essay touches on Europe but focuses on America. Overall a worthwhile read whatever your instincts on immigration.
  4. The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won (Nancy Rommelmann, The Free Press): “While Schlegel attends a nondenominational Christian church and describes her faith as ‘very important to me,’ she had no desire to impose her morality on others over the age of eighteen. ‘Adults have rights, so I get it,’ she says, explaining that all she wanted was to craft a bill making it harder for kids to access videos like.…”
    • I’ve shared stories about this Louisiana law before, but I particularly liked this one.
  5. Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the spread of diversity statements isn’t really a mechanism to flush out and cancel noncomformists. It creates conformity more invisibly, by training would-be academics to advertise themselves as ideological team players and by screening out job candidates who don’t quite understand the rules of progressive discourse — who imagine, for instance, that advertising their desire to ‘treat everyone the same’ is an adequate anti-racist commitment.”
  6. Multiply by 37: A Surprisingly Accurate Rule of Thumb for Converting Effect Sizes from Standard Deviations to Percentile Points (Paul T. von Hippel, preprint PDF):  “Educational researchers often report effect sizes in standard deviation units (SD), but SD effects are hard to interpret. Effects are easier to interpret in percentile points, but conversion from SDs to percentile points involves a calculation that is not intuitive to educational stakeholders. We point out that, if the outcome variable is normally distributed, simply multiplying the SD effect by 37 usually gives an excellent approximation to the percentile-point effect. For students in the [20%-80% range], the approximation is accurate to within 1 percentile point for effect sizes of up to 0.8 SD (or 29 to 30 percentile points).”
    • Don’t have an intuition for stats? This is a useful rule of thumb. The author is a professor of public policy, sociology, statistics and data science at UT Austin.
  7. In a first, scientists light up blue LED with an AA battery (Ameya Paleja, Interesting Engineering): “Conventionally used blue LEDs have a high turn-on voltage of 4V for a luminance of 100 cd per square meter (cd/m2). This might not sound very high, but at the industrial level, it brings about issues since the voltage is beyond what can be supplied by a typical lithium-ion battery.”
    • This legitimately sounds cool and could be very useful long-term: “An RGB LED module can produce any color for the display by using three colors: red, green, and blue. While red and green LEDs work well, the blue LED has been tricky from an energy efficiency perspective.”
    • However, this headline reminded me that we used to go to the moon. Now we celebrate blue lights.

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 415

On Fridays (or later when I’m busy) 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 415, which is the sum of successive squares (72 + 82 + 92 + 102 + 112).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Simple Law Is Doing the Impossible. It’s Making the Online Porn Industry Retreat. (Marc Novicoff, Politico): “Though the first of its kind, Louisiana’s age-verification bill was not the last. Nearly identical bills have passed in six other states — Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia and Texas — by similarly lopsided margins. In Utah and Arkansas, the bills passed unanimously. The laws were passed by overwhelming margins in legislatures controlled by both parties and signed into law by Democratic and Republican governors alike. In just over a year, age-verification laws have become perhaps the most bipartisan policy in the country, and they are creating havoc in a porn industry that many had considered all but impossible to actually regulate.”
  2. Misreading Scripture with Artificial Eyes (John Boyles, Christianity Today): “First, ChatGPT metaphorizes and individualizes Scripture without a clear method for when and why, without warrant, and often in direct contradiction to the text itself. Second, the bot’s interpretations are ignorant of the interpretive traditions that produce them. Third, because the bot is disembodied, its interpretations are necessarily disembodied—and thus a bot is unable to recognize the realities of Scripture and interpretation. Each of the above tendencies present in AI’s responses is in some way a reflection of historic weaknesses in our own human interpretation.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. China’s Latest Problem: People Don’t Want to Go There (Wenxin Fan, Wall Street Journal): “Nationwide, just 52,000 people arrived to mainland China from overseas on trips organized by travel agencies during the first quarter, the latest period for which national data is available, compared with 3.7 million in the first quarter of 2019. As in past years, nearly half of the visitors came from the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, rather than farther-away places like the U.S. or Europe.”
    • That’s almost a 99% drop in numbers!
  4. What if We’re the Bad Guys Here? (David Brooks, New York Times): “Does this mean that I think the people in my class are vicious and evil? No. Most of us are earnest, kind and public-spirited. But we take for granted and benefit from systems that have become oppressive. Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject. It’s easy to understand why people in less-educated classes would conclude that they are under economic, political, cultural and moral assault — and why they’ve rallied around Trump as their best warrior against the educated class. He understood that it’s not the entrepreneurs who seem most threatening to workers; it’s the professional class.”
    • David Brooks Means Well, But… (Dan Drezner, Substack): “At a superficial level this is a quasi-plausible analysis of what happened in 2016, even if some of his evidence does not quite show what he thinks it shows. If this had been published seven years ago, it would have been trenchant. In 2023, there’s so much to pick apart. The most important point is that the general correlations Brooks takes for granted are not necessarily true, as the 2020 election demonstrated.”
  5. The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma (Eddie Yang, PDF hosted on his website): “I suggest that autocrats suffer from a ‘Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,’ a repression-information trade-off in which citizens’ strategic behavior in the face of repression diminishes the amount of useful information in the data for training AI. This trade-off poses a fundamental limitation in AI’s usefulness for serving as a tool of authoritarian control — the more repression there is, the less information there will be in AI’s training data, and the worse AI will perform. I illustrate this argument using an AI experiment and a unique dataset on censorship in China. I show that AI’s accuracy in censorship decreases with more pre-existing censorship and repression. The drop in AI’s performance is larger during times of crisis, when people reveal their true preferences. I further show that this problem cannot be easily fixed with more data. Ironically, however, the existence of the free world can help boost AI’s ability to censor.”
    • From the abstract. I have skimmed but not read the whole article. The author is a PhD candidate at UC San Diego.
  6. The Obama Factor (David Samuels, Tablet Magazine): “So the conclusion I’ve come to in time is that that best way to understand Barack Obama is that he is a literary creation of Barack Obama, the writer, who authored the novel of his own life and then proceeded to live out this fictional character that he created for himself on the page. Which is remarkable.”
    • This is super long but utterly fascinating if you remember Obama’s presidency.
  7. Let the Tragedy in My Homeland Be a Lesson (Tahir Hamut Izgil, The New York Times): “Little attention was paid as, in the early 2010s, surveillance cameras were installed in every nook and cranny of our cities. When the police began random cellphone checks on the street, people were alarmed at first, but gradually grew used to it. Not long after, when highway checkpoints expanded and multiplied, folks privately expressed concern but ground their teeth and bore it. When, in 2016,police posts were constructed every 200 meters along city streets, people ignored them and hurried past. As time passed, we adapted to these changes and to this new, more authoritarian way of life.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 401

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 401, the 79th prime number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Other Half of Discipleship (Mike Glenn, Scot McKnight’s Substack): “The test of every great recipe is, does the dish taste good when it’s prepared? The test of truth for every disciple is, did the teaching of Jesus prove true when it was lived out? Paul was confident of Jesus’ faithfulness because he had lived out the teachings of Jesus in the most trying of circumstances. That’s why he was able to write, ‘I know in whom I have believed.’ Most of us lack this kind of true life confidence in God’s Word because we’ve never tried to live out what we know. A memorized discipleship is only half known.”
  2. Homeless in the City Where He Was Once Mayor (Mike Baker, New York Times): “The words jolted Mr. Martin with a mix of recognition and disbelief. He had known Craig Coyner for more than 50 years, watching with admiration as the man from one of the most prominent families in Bend, Ore., rose through an acclaimed career — as a prosecutor, a defense lawyer and then a mayor who helped turn the town into one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities. Now, at age 75, Mr. Coyner was occupying a bed at the shelter on Second Street, his house lost to foreclosure, his toes gnarled by frostbite, his belongings limited to a tub of tattered clothing and books on the floor next to his bed.”
    • Recommended by a student, this is a wild and heartbreaking story. I have unlocked the paywall.
  3. The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion: Part I (Carl M. Cannon & Susan Crabtree, Real Clear Politics): “The impulse [to restrict religion is rooted in the truth] that the major faiths observed in China are not indigenous to the world’s oldest civilization. Buddhism was imported from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in overland trading routes and human migration from the Middle East, while Christianity, another Abrahamic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and America. To Communist leaders, and many Han Chinese civilians, these traditions represent potentially destabilizing foreign influence.  The paradox, of course, is that Marxism was also a foreign import, one imposed on Chinese society – in Mao Zedong’s own words – from ‘the barrel of a gun.’ It not only destabilized China’s existing social structures and spiritual traditions, but as Marxist-Leninism morphed into Maoism, also became a kind of national religion itself – with Mao Zedong in the role of savior.”
  4. There is No Christian Argument for Protecting Pornography (Samuel D. James, Substack): “This chart reveals that at the exact same time there’s been a significant decline in overall sexual activity, there’s been a significant increase in young adults who’ve had a same-sex encounter. Now let’s ask a question: What could be true of a generation that would cause it both to 1) have a lot fewer sexual encounters than generations before it, but also 2) be much more willing than previous generations to experiment? I think I have one plausible answer.… Could it be that a sex recession and a blurring of the lines between male and female are consistent consequences of young people who have experienced a pornographic staging of the human body since before puberty? Given all this porn, why have sex, and why not have it with whomever?”
  5. From the Comments (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “Professional medical ethics are bogus. There is no consistency and the entire profession serves to pander to the prejudices of the educated.”
    • Brief but brutal perspective on the medical resistance to human challenge trials.
  6. Raise Your Threshold For Accusing People Of Faking Bisexuality (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “Suppose someone (let’s say a woman) has exactly equal sexual attraction to both men and women. Their male dating pool is all heterosexual and bisexual men (95%+ of men), and their female dating pool is all lesbian and bisexual women (about 5–10% of women). So their potential dating pool is about 90% male. So this ‘perfectly’ bisexual woman could be expected to date about 10x as many men as women, just by numbers alone. The average person dates about seven people before marriage (yes, this seems low to me too). So if our bisexual woman samples exactly evenly from her male vs. female dating pool, we would expect about a 50–50 chance (0.90^7 = 0.478) that all seven of her relationships would be with men.”
    • A fascinating breakdown of some things I had rarely considered.
  7. The Cost Disease of the Populist Sector (Daniel W. Drezner, Substack): “The commingling of the rich and the powerful is a story as old as civilization, but in the current era of capitalism the dynamic has become even more problematic. David Brooks warned about ‘status-income disequilibrium’ in Bobos in Paradise: those who possess status but not wealth live first-class lives during the day but middle-class lives in the evening. Over time, these folks start to resent the middle-class aspects of their existence.”
    • This is a different perspective on political corruption scandals than I had considered before.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have My White Privilege Didn’t Save Me. But God Did (Edie Wyatt, Quillette): “Not long after, I walked into a suburban Baptist church, full of strange, unfashionably dressed, conservative Christians. I was a Marxist, a feminist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smoker, and desperate. The love I received in that place is the reason that I will defend the rights of fundamentalist Christians to my dying breath.”

This is amazing. Reminder: titles are rarely chosen by the author and often do not reflect the essence of an article. From volume 279.

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 362

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.

362 feels like a number that should have lots of factors, but it’s only got the prime factors 2 and 181.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Exploring AI-Assisted Bible Study (John Dyer, personal blog): “I prompted GPT‑3 to generate text for each chapter in the Bible in each category. For example, the prompt to generate a prayer was: “Write 5 prayers inspired by John 3 in the Bible. Remember that the events described here are in the past. First include a short observation or lesson for each prayer, and then write a personal prayer related to the lesson.”  I reviewed the generated text to avoid (or at least minimize) unhelpful or heretical content. I accepted about 90% of GPT‑3’s suggestions on its first pass and regenerated the rest until it gave me something useful. It cost about $150 over six weeks to generate this content, which consists of 71,062 generations and 1.1 million words.”
    • This is the same guy who generated the AI Bible artwork I shared recently (these and other experiments of his are available at http://www.openbible.info/labs/).
  2. What an Overly Pessimistic View of America Gets Wrong (Yascha Mounk interviewing Eboo Patel, Persuasion): “If every institution founded by a faith community in your city disappeared overnight, preschools, hospitals, and universities would be gone. YMCAs would be gone, places where AA groups meet would be gone. Half of your social services would probably be gone. It feels to me that religious identity diversity should be at the center of our national conversation, and I’m curious as to why it’s not.” This conversation is full of wisdom and I highly recommend it.
  3. People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science (Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Wired): “Good romantic partners are difficult to predict with data. Desired romantic partners are easy to predict with data. And that suggests that many of us are dating all wrong.”
    • From later in the article: “…how a person answered questions about themselves was roughly four times more predictive of their relationship happiness than all the traits of their romantic partner combined.”
  4. A Crucial Court Case Exposes the Darkness of America’s Worst Industry (David French, The Dispatch): “If someone wanted to create a system that was designed to facilitate the distribution of child pornography, videos of rape and other kinds of abuse, or revenge porn, it would be hard to construct a more efficient system than MindGeek’s. And the sheer amount of MindGeek’s traffic and the volume of the downloads demonstrates that Pornhub and other sites are injecting poison into American life at an industrial scale.”
    • A student recommended this piece from a month ago in addition to the above: The Fight to Hold Pornhub Accountable (Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker): “Pschorr was surprised by the lack of regulation in the U.S. ‘It was always interesting for me as a German to see that, in the U.S., you’d get I.D.’d if you went to a bar, and if you’re not twenty-one you get in big trouble,’ he said. ‘But if you want to consume porn all you have to do is click ‘Yes, I’m 18,’ and you’re in the realm of dirt.’ ” I found this article interesting because it portrays Christians both favorably and unfavorably in short order.
  5. How Did a Two-Time Killer Get Out to Be Charged Again at Age 83? (Rebecca Davis O’Brien & Ali Watkins, New York Times): “A homeless shelter worker and people close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender identity, Ms. Harvey should have been placed in a homeless shelter for women, given her history of attacking and murdering them.” Read that sentence slowly. Wow. And the last eight paragraphs are jaw dropping.
  6. A large new study offers clues about how lower-income children can rise up the economic ladder. (David Leonhardt, New York Times): “Churches and other religious organizations may have some lessons to teach other parts of society. Although many churches are socioeconomically homogeneous, those with some diversity tend to foster more cross-class interactions than most other social activities. Churchs [sic] have lower levels of what the researchers call socioeconomic ‘friending bias.’ ”
    • Sadly there isn’t more info on the religious dynamic, even though this section of the newsletter is called “How Churches Shine”
    • Although this is a NYT piece, it is not paywalled because it is from their morning newsletter.
  7. Nondenominational Churches Are Adding Millions of Members. Where Are They Coming From? (Ryan P. Burge, Christianity Today): “What is driving the growth of nondenominational churches? While in the past it resulted from a significant portion of individuals leaving a mainline tradition, now it looks like nondenominational congregations are increasing by taking in people who were raised Catholic—which is about a quarter of the general population.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have The Problem Isn’t the ‘Merit,’ It’s the ‘Ocracy’ (Tanner Greer, personal blog): “The American system of government was built on the assumption that the most salient political divides would reflect geography, not ideology or class. The senator from Massachusetts would share bonds in common with the lay citizenry of Boston that he did not share with a senator from South Carolina. On the national sphere this would allow him to represent the interests of his constituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in American history than others; yet because of the way American politicians are elected, this sense of representing the interests of a geographically bounded group of people is more true in the political arena than in most others.” First shared in volume 232

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 351

this week’s news was full of stuff I did not like

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 the 351st installment. 351 is, I am told, the smallest number such that it and its surrounding numbers are all products of 4 or more primes (in the case of 351=3·3·3·13).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. My College Students Are Not OK  (Jonathan Malesic, New York Times): “Higher education is now at a turning point. The accommodations for the pandemic can either end or be made permanent. The task won’t be easy, but universities need to help students rebuild their ability to learn. And to do that, everyone involved — students, faculties, administrators and the public at large — must insist on in-person classes and high expectations for fall 2022 and beyond.” The author has a PhD in religious studies and was a tenured theology prof, but now teaches writing at another university. His personal journey seems interesting.
  2. MIT, Harvard scientists find AI can recognize race from X‑rays — and nobody knows how (Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe): “Ghassemi and her colleagues remain baffled, but she suspects it has something to do with melanin, the pigment that determines skin color. Perhaps X‑rays and CT scanners detect the higher melanin content of darker skin, and embed this information in the digital image in some fashion that human users have never noticed before. It’ll take a lot more research to be sure.”
  3. Pandemic news, not great this week:
    • The Covid Capitulation (Eric Topol, Substack): “To recap, we have a highly unfavorable picture of: (1) accelerated evolution of the virus; (2) increased immune escape of new variants; (2) progressively higher transmissibility and infectiousness; (4) substantially less protection from transmission by vaccines and boosters; (5) some reduction on vaccine/booster protection against hospitalization and death; (6) high vulnerability from infection-acquired immunity only; and (7) likelihood of more noxious new variants in the months ahead” The author is a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Institute.
    • Permanent Pandemic (Justin E. H. Smith, Harper’s Magazine): “That the political is always biopolitical, in at least this general sense, may be a fact that recedes from view in those rare moments when things are functioning smoothly. At such times, the various documents that governments make us fill out and sign, or fill out on our behalf when we are born, married, arrested, or dead; the various licenses we get renewed; and the accreditations we collect come to appear as ends in themselves rather than as part of a vast apparatus that limits what we can do with our own bodies.” The author is a philosophy professor at the University of Paris.
    • The new Covid equilibrium (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “I know many of you like to say ‘No worse than the common cold!’ Well, the thing is…the common cold imposes considerable costs on the world. Imagine a new common cold, which you catch a few times a year, with some sliver of the population getting some form of Long Covid. One 2003 estimate suggested that the common cold costs us $40 billion a year, and in a typical year I don’t get a cold even once.… Even under mild conceptions of current Covid, it is entirely plausible to believe that the costs of Covid will run into the trillions over the next ten years.”
    • With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools (Shawn Hubler, New York Times): “No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.”
  4. Abortion-related:
    • Roe draft is a reminder that religion’s role in politics is older than the republic (Ron Elving, NPR): “The question arises: Since when did so much of our politics have to do with religion? And the answer is, since the beginning – and even before. Religion was a driving and determinative force in politics on this continent even before the ‘United States’ had been formed.And it has been brought to bear in widely disparate causes. Religion has been invoked to condemn slavery and segregation, to ban alcohol and the teaching of evolutionary science and to bolster anti-war movements.”
    • When an Abortion Is Pro-Life (Matthew Loftus, New York Times): “I view my work as a physician as part of a battle against brokenness in the physical health of my patients, a battle whose tide was turned when Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The Bible teaches that our physical bodies will one day be resurrected as Christ’s was, mysteriously transformed but somehow also continuous with our present flesh and blood — like a seed is transformed into a plant. I teach and work alongside local health professionals so that we can care holistically for people in need, following in the footsteps of Jesus, the healer.… Here, I think the exception proves the rule: Ending a child’s life before birth is so wrong that only saving another life could be worth it.” This is a remarkable op-ed.
    • A critique of the religious pro-life movement: The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth (Randall Balmer, Politico): “White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue. They organized instead to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University. To suggest otherwise is to perpetrate what I call the abortion myth, the fiction that the genesis of the Religious Right — the powerful evangelical political movement that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades — lay in opposition to abortion.”
    • But actually no: What everyone gets wrong about evangelicals and abortion (Gillian Frank & Neil J. Young, Washington Post): “Twelve years before the Roe decision, a young woman wrote to the leading U.S. evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, with the following question: ‘Through a young and foolish sin, I had an abortion. I now feel guilty of murder. How can I ever know forgiveness?’ Graham, whose syndicated newspaper column ‘My Answer’ reached millions of Americans, replied: ‘Abortion is as violent a sin against God, nature, and one’s self as one can commit.’ Graham telegraphed evangelicals’ unease with abortion, which would become increasingly political in the coming years.”
    • Really actually no: There’s been some discussion about how evangelicals in the U.S. didn’t start opposing abortion until the late 1970s – several years after Roe v. Wade in 1973. There’s a lot more nuance to that history. (Andrew Lewis, Twitter): an interesting thread from a professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati.
    • As in strongly no: Ballmer also misrepresented the legal aspects of this story (Jon Whitehead, Twitter)
  5. How Mary Whitehouse Waged War on Pornography (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “Whitehouse was mocked for predicting that sexual messaging would soon target children; it is now the norm for LGBT content to appear on children’s TV shows and in storybooks. She warned that films such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris crossed a line; it was later revealed that the rape scene in the movie deeply traumatized the scene’s young actress, who received vile treatment at the hands of older men. On the big cultural questions, Whitehouse was right and her critics were wrong.”
  6. Naomi Judd: ‘It’s scary to show that part of you that is the not so smart, not so together side’ (Terry Mattingly, GetReligion): “Naomi Judd thought she understood the ties that bind country-music stars and their audience – then one aggressive fan went and joined the Pentecostal church the Judd family called home. ‘It really burdened me,’ said Judd, after signing hundreds of her ‘Love Can Build a Bridge’ memoir back in 1993. ‘I just don’t sign autographs at church. The best way I can explain it to children … is to say, ‘Honey, Jesus is the star.’ ” What a great opening story.
  7. On the shootings:
    • Faith on the ground in Buffalo: Voice Buffalo executive director Denise Walden (Adelle M. Banks, Religion News Service): “They are some of the matriarchs and the pillars of our community. They will be missed in ways that I don’t think I can do justice to describing, but who bring joy to this community. They’re the ones who help stand and hold this community together.”
    • The FAQs: What Christians Should Know About the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory (Joe Carter, Gospel Coalition): “The recent shooting in Buffalo is the fifth terrorist attack in the past five years in which a white supremacist gunman made reference to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.… Christians should be the first to decry the racism and xenophobia of the theory, along with condemning the violence it has perpetuated.”
    • Doctor Who Fought Church Gunman Remembered as Kind Protector (Julie Watson, Ministry Watch): “The family and sports medicine physician was like family to the staff and he encouraged them to learn kung fu, telling them about the importance of knowing self-defense techniques. He also learned how to handle a gun for that same reason. That preparedness combined with Cheng’s serene disposition likely gave him a proclivity for acting heroically, according to active shooter experts.… Authorities credit Cheng’s quick action with saving perhaps dozens of lives at a celebratory luncheon for congregants and their former pastor at Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church, which worships at Geneva Presbyterian Church in the Orange County community of Laguna Woods.”
    • After Shooting, Churches Navigate China-Taiwan Tensions Under the Surface (Kate Shellnutt & Sean Cheng, Christianity Today): “As soon as they heard that a gunman attacked a Taiwanese church in California on Sunday, some Taiwanese correctly assumed political motives.… The shooting suspect, David Wenwei Chou, was born and raised in Taiwan but considers himself Chinese. (China currently claims Taiwan as its territory.) He left notes in Chinese in his car stating he did not believe Taiwan should be independent from China. Chinese social media circulated photos of Chou indicating that he was a leader of a Chinese pro-unification organization in Las Vegas.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have A Study Guide For Human Society, Part 1 (Tanner Greer, The Scholar’s Stage): “…there are two methods [for finding good history books] in particular I have often have useful. The first is to Google syllabi. If you are interested in the history of the Roman Republic, Google ‘Roman Republic syllabus’ and see what pops up. Read a few courses and see what books are included. Alternatively, if you just read a book you thought was particularly good, put its title into Google and then the word ‘syllabus’ afterwards and see what other readings college professors have paired with that book in their courses.”  First shared in volume 217.

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 343

a briefer collection than normal

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 343, which has an unusual relationship with the number 18. Namely 343 = 180 + 181 + 182.

I don’t have much access to my computer this week, so this is a briefer collection than the norm. And there may not be an update next week at all — we’ll see.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Readers Around the World Are Praying for Ukraine (Tish Harrison Warren, New York Times): “…prayer is indeed powerful, often in ways we can’t account for. War, whatever else it is, is spiritually dark, even demonic. From the first days of the Russian invasion, religious people and institutions around the world have responded by praying. Written prayers and Psalms can be a lifeline, helping us pray when our own words — and even our own faith — fail.”
    • The last prayer is amazing content for the New York Times and I post it here in full since some of you don’t have access through the NYT paywall:
    • “Father-God, may the attackers’ fingers freeze; may they drop things; may they not see clearly; may their equipment malfunction; may they experience
    • overwhelming hopelessness, enormous fatigue and a complete loss of any desire to fight; may their communication be broken; may there be confusion. Lead them to surrender. Stretch the kilometers before them into endless kilometers of nonadvancement. Remove their leadership and replace them with people who make decisions that reflect a fear of you.
      Oh, God, infuse defenders with incredible surges of renewed alertness, strength, hope, courage. Inspire those who want to help. Show them specific, effective ideas. Move them swiftly and safely.
      The worst is yet to come, Lord, if you do not stop it. But please, no peace where there is no peace. We ask for peace united with righteousness and truth.God of all comfort, be physically present with all the mothers, fathers, grandparents and children who are hiding, hearing, smelling, enduring. Warm them; fill them with food; give them water, toilets, communication with their loved ones, the Gospel, hope in you.
      We repent of making idols of political leaders and news outlets. Forgive us for wanting them to be our gods and saviors. Forgive us for being unreasonable, for not wanting to admit both the good and bad in all of our leaders. It is this spirit that leads us to dictators because we abandon responsibility and reason. We confess the seeds of war that live in our own hearts.
      We humble our hearts, our bodies. We ask you for mercy. Thank you that you love mercy and have all power.”
  2. How Religious Faith Can Shape Success in School (Ilana M. Horwitz, New York Times): “I found that what religion offers teenagers varies by social class. Those raised by professional-class parents, for example, do not experience much in the way of an educational advantage from being religious. In some ways, religion even constrains teenagers’ educational opportunities (especially girls’) by shaping their academic ambitions after graduation; they are less likely to consider a selective college as they prioritize life goals such as parenthood, altruism and service to God rather than a prestigious career. However, teenage boys from working-class families, regardless of race, who were regularly involved in their church and strongly believed in God were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees as moderately religious or nonreligious boys.”
    • I find the tension between faith and wealth interesting. They emerge as rivals in all sorts of situations. The author is a sociologist at Tulane.
  3. This 47-year-old left a $800,000 salary to coach basketball – now his small school is headed to NCAA March Madness (Tom Huddleston, Jr): “In 2016, Aldrich was in the midst of a lucrative career. After being a partner at one of the world’s top law firms, he’d become the chief financial officer of a private equity firm, with a salary of $800,000 per year, he told The Washington Post last week. But then, his best friend and former college basketball teammate Ryan Odom landed the job as head basketball coach at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Odom offered Aldrich a position as director of recruiting, a job that paid only $32,000 per year. But it got Aldrich closer to fulfilling a lifelong dream: a career coaching college basketball. He accepted.” Recommended by a student. I did some digging and turns out the coach is a devout Christian.
  4. The Semiconductor Ecosystem – Explained (Steve Blank, blog): “Controlling advanced chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controllin g the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others.” Recommended by a student.
  5. SF is now boycotting most of the United States (Joe Eskenazi,Mission Local):  “It will come as little surprise to anyone familiar with the M.O. of San Francisco government that we have no tests nor audits nor analysis nor methodology to determine if our travel bans or boycotts are making any difference for the good.… You could argue that, in 2016, San Francisco put itself in the vanguard of a movement. But, in the ensuing six years, nobody else has joined up. ‘No city has reached out to say they want to mirror our rules,’ confirms Chu.” 
  6. The Real Reason That Pornography Can Lead to Male Sexual Dissatisfaction (Ross Pomeroy, Real Clear Science): “…the unrealistic depictions of sex, female partners, and relationships commonly seen in pornography can warp men’s expectations of real-life sex. When heterosexual men expect sex with their partners to be just like the staged fantasies they see on the Internet, this can lead to dissatisfaction and even lower their well-being.”
    • Science, catching up to youth pastors since 2022.
    • Catching up to bad youth pastors, actually. The advice at the end is pretty terrible by almost anyone’s standards.
  7. The Christians Who Think the Ukraine Invasion Means Jesus Is Returning to Earth (Alex Morris, Rolling Stone): “For millennia, end times Christians have tried to shoehorn current events into proof of Jesus’ imminent return, taking cryptic language from the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, Matthew, and Revelation to come up with various theories as to how the world will end. In most of these theories — embraced by conservative evangelical or fundamentalist branches of the faith — an entity referred to as Gog and Magog descends from the ‘far north’ upon a peaceful, reconstituted Israel, whose people had been ‘brought out from the nations, and all now dwell securely,’ as it is described in Ezekiel. The resulting war that follows allows a Messiah to swoop in and come to Israel’s rescue. It also ushers in the end of the world as we know it and the establishment of a new and better kingdom of God on earth.”
    • The author mostly did his homework, but did misspell “pentacostal” later in the essay and definitely gets some of the mentality wrong.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have one I have fondness in my heart for: Manly wedding rings for tough guys who are dudes (Dan Brooks, The Outline): “I don’t hunt, but I briefly considered buying a camouflage ring, partly to signal my deep commitment to irony and partly to get better service at the auto parts store.” I really enjoyed this essay, and I hope that many of you have need of wedding bands in the not‐too‐distant future. First shared in volume 210.

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 323

Articles about everything from Jill Biden’s faith to Yale Law School’s failings to an analysis of American divorce to a common-sense argument against pornography. Enjoy!

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.

323 is 17 · 19, which are two of my favorite numbers. I particularly delight in using them on the microwave.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Evangelical Elites, Fighting Each Other (David French, The Dispatch): “…the older culture war categories are being supplemented and sometimes supplanted by a new confrontation between liberalism and illiberalism. While illiberal right and illiberal left snarl at anyone not in their tribes, the liberal right and the liberal left are forming new relationships and new alliances.” An excellent piece, and the first comment is also worth reading (it’s by French himself about something he  meant to include in the article).
  2. Jill Biden paid a surprise visit to the woman who helped her regain faith in God (Jada Yuan, Washington Post): “For five years after the death of her son, Jill Biden says, she lost her faith in God. She ‘felt betrayed, broken’ when Beau died of brain cancer at 46, and she had stopped going to church or even praying, she told the congregants of Brookland Baptist Church late Sunday afternoon. But she found her way back, and over the weekend traveled nearly 500 miles to surprise the woman who’d helped her get there.” I was deeply moved by this story.
  3. A Worrisome Peek Inside Yale Law’s Diversity Bureaucracy (Conor Friedersforf, The Atlantic): “[Oddly,] the diversity administrators spent many hours on this low-stakes drama among high-IQ adults, affording outsiders an unusual peek at their methods and a related series of crucial mistakes, most stemming from an inability or unwillingness to see how the interests of students diverge from the interests and incentives of their office.”
  4. Two articles discussing the research suggesting conservatives are happier than liberals:
    • From the left: Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals. Discuss. (Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times): “Ultimately, though, this line of inquiry raises an even broader question: whether liberals and conservatives function on fundamentally different moral planes.”
    • From the right: Friends and Ex-Friends (Rod Dreher, The American Conservative): “I admit to being skeptical of any attempt to quantify happiness, which is a subjective judgment. Nevertheless, if it is true that conservatives are happier on balance than liberals, I think it has to do with two basic things. First, conservatives tend to accept that the world will never be perfect, and find it easier to live with imperfections.… Second, conservatives tend to care less about political crusading.… I don’t know any ordinary conservatives who would cut off a friend over their liberal politics.”
  5. The Naked Truth: Porn is Bad For You (Katherine Dee, The American Mind): “Common sense is vitally useful, especially in personal decision-making. So, here’s what I know. I know that immersion in, or even just regular usage of, anything has an impact on a person’s psychology.”
  6. The Evolution of Divorce (W. Bradford Wilcox, National Affairs): “In the case of divorce, as in so many others, the worst consequences of the social revolution of the 1960s and ’70s are now felt disproportionately by the poor and less educated, while the wealthy elites who set off these transformations in the first place have managed to reclaim somewhat healthier and more stable habits of married life. This imbalance leaves our cultural and political elites less well attuned to the magnitude of social dysfunction in much of American society, and leaves the most vulnerable Americans — especially children living in poor and working-class communities — even worse off than they would otherwise be.” The author is a sociologist at UVA.
  7. Is College Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis (Preston Cooper, FreeOpp): “The analysis reveals that a student’s choice of program is perhaps the most important financial decision he or she will ever make. Most bachelor’s degree programs in engineering, computer science, economics, and nursing increase lifetime earnings by $500,000 or more, even after subtracting the costs of college. But most programs in fields such as art, music, philosophy, religion, and psychology leave students financially worse off than if they had never gone to college at all.” Search the table at We Calculated Return On Investment For 30,000 Bachelor’s Degrees. Find Yours. (Preston Cooper, FreeOpp)

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have Planet of Cops (Freddie de Boer, personal blog): “The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7…. I don’t know how people can simultaneously talk about prison abolition and restoring the idea of forgiveness to literal criminal justice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kangaroo court system.” First shared in volume 161.

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 322

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 the 322nd installment, and today I learned that 322 is the 12th Lucas number.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of Evangelical Leadership (Mark Galli, Substack): “This tendency has only gotten worse, as now the mark of a successful evangelical writer is to get published regularly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s interesting about such pieces is that (a) such writers make a point that affirms the view of the secular publication (on topics like environmental care, racial injustice, sexual abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evangelicals should take the same point of view. However, their writing doesn’t reach the masses of evangelicals who take a contrary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writers are really interested in getting those evangelicals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the mainstream press. Better to try to get such a column published in the most popular Pentecostal outlet, Charisma. Ah, but that would do nothing to enhance the prestige of evangelicals among the culture’s elite.”
    1. This is a SUPER interesting article that makes good points… but the author somehow avoided looking in a mirror while writing it. He was the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today!
    • Follow-up: Falling from Grace into Mercy— or Elite Evangelicalism, Part 2 (Mark Galli, Substack): “But one thing about retirement is the time one has to reflect on one’s career, and I see more clearly how much I was willing to go along to get along, and how much I was part of the system.… I don’t think there is much hope in reforming many things that course through the veins of elite evangelicals.”
  2. Two of the most distressing news items I’ve seen in some time.
  3. Hunting the Satanists (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “…the worldview of QAnon and Yale’s diversity office are surprisingly similar. Both see a world in which Satan, literal or metaphorical, is an active force in the world corrupting individuals and institutions. Satan is powerful but hidden. He only reveals his influence when the corrupted slip-up and by the incorrect use of a word, phrase, or gesture reveal their true natures. Since Satan is powerful and hidden the good people must constantly monitor everyone.” An astutely observed parallel.
  4. It’s Time for a Better and Smarter Alliance Against Porn (David French, The Dispatch): “One of the most fascinating developments of modern times has been the way in which American ideas and American conduct frequently contradict each other. The world of ideas mostly (though not exclusively) has moved left, quickly. Ideas move from progressive fringe to mainstream with stunning speed.… But in the world of conduct, something else is happening. Social conservative lifestyles are making a comeback. Divorce rates are down. Teen pregnancy is down. Abortion rates (abortions per 1,000 women) and ratios (abortions per 1,000 pregnancies) are way down. Single parenting has stabilized, and the percentage of children living with both parents is inching up.”
  5. Please Don’t Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “If you think privileged modern Americans shouldn’t have children now because of quality-of-life issues [related to climate change], you implicitly believe that nobody in the Third World, or nobody before 1900, should ever have had children.”
  6. Two tidbits from China:
    • Terror & tourism: Xinjiang eases its grip, but fear remains (Dake Kang, AP News): “Anytime I tried to chat with someone, the minders would draw in close, straining to hear every word. It’s hard to know why Chinese authorities have shifted to subtler methods of controlling the region. It may be that searing criticism from the West, along with punishing political and commercial sanctions, have pushed authorities to lighten up. Or it may simply be that China judges it has come far enough in its goal of subduing the Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities to relax its grip.”
    • The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning (N.S. Lyons, Palladium Magazine): “Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government.… Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with ‘intricate social and cultural problems,’ they ‘tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems’ to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.”
      • Surprisingly engrossing. One of China’s key leaders has accurately diagnosed certain challenges their nation is facing but his solutions are lacking (and evil). And he seems to have come to many of his convictions by visiting America and witnessing our cultural folly.
  7. Don’t Let Religious Liberty Claims Mask Bad Faith Arguments (Daniel Bennett, Christianity Today): “Religious liberty is too important to let it get misused. It’s not a waiver to avoid all inconveniences in life or, worse, a tool to make political statements. For religious liberty to survive political and legal scrutiny in the future, we must safeguard exemptions against abuse.” The author is a political science professor at John Brown University.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll highlight an older link still worth your consideration. This week we have When Children Say They’re Trans (Jesse Singal, The Atlantic): “ …to deny the possibility of a connection between social influences and gender‐identity exploration among adolescents would require ignoring a lot of what we know about the developing teenage brain—which is more susceptible to peer influence, more impulsive, and less adept at weighing long‐term outcomes and consequences than fully developed adult brains—as well as individual stories like Delta’s.” This is a long and balanced piece which has garnered outrage in some online circles. First shared in volume 157.

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.