Tag: social media

TGFI, Volume 576: hell considered politically

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Polit­i­cal Case for Hell (Matthew Kaem­ingk & Sha­di Hamid, Com­ment): “Hell in both Islam and Chris­tian­i­ty is pro­found­ly egal­i­tar­i­an. Sim­ply said, any­body can go there. It doesn’t mat­ter if you are rich or poor, black or white—all peo­ple will receive a judg­ment. There is no way to buy, manip­u­late, or threat­en your way out. All stand before the throne vul­ner­a­ble. In this way, the doc­trine of hell cre­ates a lev­el play­ing field based on an individual’s char­ac­ter rather than their wealth or pow­er. Here on earth, the wealthy can buy their way out of con­se­quences; the pow­er­ful can shield them­selves from jus­tice. When pow­er­ful fig­ures escape justice—whether dic­ta­tors dying peace­ful­ly in exile or cor­po­rate crim­i­nals receiv­ing minor fines for major crimes—it cor­rodes pub­lic faith in demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions. The appar­ent lack of just deserts for the pow­er­ful has polit­i­cal con­se­quences. It feeds pop­ulist rage and demo­c­ra­t­ic cyn­i­cism. In this con­text, the con­cept of ulti­mate jus­tice, of a future hell, serves as a cru­cial safe­ty valve. But hell’s demo­c­ra­t­ic func­tion goes beyond mere deter­rence or con­so­la­tion. Tra­di­tion­al reli­gious con­cep­tions of hell actu­al­ly embody prin­ci­ples that mod­ern democ­ra­cies strive to imple­ment: pro­por­tion­al pun­ish­ment, equal treat­ment for equal crimes, con­sid­er­a­tion of both actions and inten­tions.” — Kaem­ingk is a pro­fes­sor at Fuller The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, and Hamid is a senior fel­low at Brook­ings.
  2. Bible Fam­i­ly Tree — (John Dyer, per­son­al web­site): this is kind of cool
  3. Some Cor­nell-adja­cent thoughts:
    • Four Hours and Three Min­utes in Itha­ca (David French, New York Times): “Last week, Chris­tine Emba wrote a beau­ti­ful and com­pelling guest essay in our pages about the inad­e­qua­cy of con­sent as the pri­ma­ry moral basis for sex­u­al inti­ma­cy. It’s the legal base line, not a moral thresh­old. But what is the moral thresh­old? Con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­tians like me often respond with a pat answer: mar­riage. But even that’s inad­e­quate and incom­plete. Mar­i­tal sex can be every bit as abu­sive and exploita­tive as an encounter in a frat house. Instead of con­sent, I’d sug­gest a dif­fer­ent stan­dard, one that applies not just to sex in mar­riage — and not just to sex alone — but to all of our human inter­ac­tions. Let’s talk about care. In oth­er words, we should con­stant­ly ask our­selves, ‘If I cared for this per­son, what would I do?’ Even if an obvi­ous­ly drunk or high per­son is ask­ing you for sex (though whether that hap­pened in this case is dis­put­ed, espe­cial­ly as events unfold­ed lat­er in the evening) — and even if you’re pow­er­ful­ly attract­ed to that per­son — if you tru­ly cared for the per­son would you ini­ti­ate or engage in an encounter that any sen­tient per­son knows might be deeply regret­ted the next morn­ing, the next day or the next week? Is an orgasm so sacred to you that you can’t wait until sobri­ety to have sex?”
    • A Stan­ford Jane Doe: ‘With­out a head­line, sur­vivors like me will nev­er mat­ter to Stan­ford’ (Anony­mous, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “For two years, I skipped class­es I shared with the per­son who raped me, lived in fear of run­ning into him on cam­pus and missed out on oppor­tu­ni­ties like study abroad due to Stanford’s con­stant resched­ul­ing and delay­ing of pro­ceed­ings. The process swal­lowed half of my time at Stan­ford, only for it to cul­mi­nate in a two year sus­pen­sion, despite Stan­ford find­ing the oth­er stu­dent respon­si­ble for vagi­nal­ly, dig­i­tal­ly and oral­ly rap­ing me. Per this sanc­tion, the per­son who raped me is eli­gi­ble to return to cam­pus and grad­u­ate with his degree as of this fall.… The year I entered Stan­ford, incom­ing fresh­men were assigned Chanel Miller’s mem­oir, Know My Name. The San­ta Clara Coun­ty DA’s Office is the same office that pros­e­cut­ed Brock Turn­er. How do we rec­on­cile the val­ues these insti­tu­tions pub­licly cham­pi­on with the way they han­dled my case?”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. I would add this aligns with my obser­va­tions of Stan­ford. On a few occa­sions I have min­is­tered to a stu­dent deal­ing with the after­math of being raped and what this author describes match­es their expe­ri­ences.
  4. A Tik­Tok Tarot Card Read­er Accused Me of Mur­der. My Life Turned Upside Down. (Rebec­ca Scofield, New York Times): “I was stand­ing in a park lis­ten­ing to my kids play when I opened a Tik­Tok video of a woman I had nev­er met. She showed my fac­ul­ty pro­file pic­ture and con­tact infor­ma­tion, and said that I had orches­trat­ed the mur­ders of four stu­dents at the col­lege where I work, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho. She claimed I was cov­er­ing up an inap­pro­pri­ate roman­tic rela­tion­ship with one of the vic­tims. I didn’t know any of the stu­dents, who had been killed only 11 days before I saw the video. The accuser knew noth­ing about me, lived in Texas and used tarot card read­ings as the only basis for her claims. Over the next sev­er­al weeks, while I was griev­ing with the rest of my com­mu­ni­ty, this Tik­Tok influ­encer uploaded over a hun­dred videos declar­ing that I had com­mit­ted a quadru­ple homi­cide.… So, before you, too, are accused of mur­der on the inter­net, ques­tion the con­tent you are con­sum­ing or cre­at­ing.”
    • The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ida­ho. An absolute­ly wild sto­ry.
  5. AI-relat­ed
    • When AI Is Bet­ter Than Humans (Kather­ine Dee, The Dis­patch): “For many tasks—tasks that should be the exclu­sive province of human beings, like talk ther­a­py or roman­tic intimacy—an astute AI user will quick­ly real­ize that nei­ther embod­i­ment nor expe­ri­ence appear to be pre­req­ui­sites for valu­able respons­es. I have per­son­al expe­ri­ence with this. Late last year, my father passed away sud­den­ly. In my grief, I turned to Anthropic’s Claude. Claude helped me work through my grief much more effec­tive­ly than the grief counselor—and even­tu­al­ly, grief coun­selors—who came high­ly rec­om­mend­ed, includ­ing by peo­ple who I knew and trust­ed.… What do we do if Claude is a bet­ter ther­a­pist in some sit­u­a­tions? And how do we explain to peo­ple that even if it is bet­ter, we should choose a per­son any­way?”
      • A thought­ful essay that ven­tures into unex­pect­ed ter­ri­to­ry.
    • Astra Held Its Ground (Truth) (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “But here is the most remark­able part from one of the authors, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Suvrat Raju: ‘Our ini­tial eval­u­a­tion sug­gest­ed that GPT-6-Astra’s score was in the late eight­ies fol­lowed close­ly by Opus 5.5 But, as we start­ed to inves­ti­gate the mis­takes that the mod­els might have made, the mod­els, espe­cial­ly Astra, insist­ed that they were right and that it was the expert-sup­plied answers that were erro­neous. When we went back to the experts it turned out, in mul­ti­ple instances, that the experts found some sub­tle errors buried deep inside their cal­cu­la­tions. As they revised their answers, Astra’s score start­ed to inch up and it final­ly end­ed up with 98% (49/50).’ In oth­er words, instead, as orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed, of the human answers serv­ing as ground truth to test the AI, the AI answers were ground truth for test­ing the experts.”
  6. As a Child Evan­ge­list, He Roused the Faith­ful. Lat­er He Exposed the Con. (Pene­lope Green, New York Times): “He was good at his job, and he enjoyed being onstage, but he nev­er believed in God. And he cer­tain­ly didn’t believe in hell. By the time he was 14, the nov­el­ty of preach­ing had worn off, for him and his con­gre­gants. His voice was chang­ing, and his father had aban­doned the fam­i­ly and abscond­ed with Marjoe’s earn­ings — some $3 mil­lion, he lat­er esti­mat­ed. Mar­joe decid­ed to leave, too. He drift­ed a bit through his native Cal­i­for­nia, liv­ing first with an old­er woman and then, at 16, mar­ry­ing a girl­friend. He worked as a shoe sales­man, as a bark­er on the San­ta Cruz Wharf and as a door­man at a dance club in Los Ange­les before start­ing a rock band and melt­ing into the nascent hip­pie scene there. Yet by his 20s, he had returned to preach­ing. He need­ed the mon­ey, and missed the lime­light. At first, he thought he might intro­duce his paci­fist beliefs into his ser­mons, skip­ping the sin-and-hell part. That didn’t go over so well — he was not invit­ed back to the church­es where he tried it. So he returned to his revival­ist tech­niques, adding some vocal moves he bor­rowed from Black preach­ers and some phys­i­cal ones from Mick Jag­ger.”
    • A heart­break­ing obit­u­ary, and a reminder that the world still has peo­ple like those Paul warned Tim­o­thy about, preach­ers “who have been robbed of the truth and who think that god­li­ness is a means to finan­cial gain” (1 Tim 6:5).
  7. Amer­i­cans who go to church and trust sci­ence are also more like­ly to believe in ghosts and curs­es, new research shows (Ruiqian Li, Sci­ence News): “Amer­i­cans who trust sci­ence and rea­son more than their church­es’ teach­ings, but still believe in God or attend ser­vices, are also more like­ly to believe in mag­ic than those who pri­or­i­tize reli­gious teach­ings.… What our study adds is a clear­er pic­ture of when trust in sci­ence goes hand in hand with mag­ic: among peo­ple who stay reli­gious but no longer let their church decide what is true.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, volume 534: unfulfilled hopes and why the ESV is overrated

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

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

This week was espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult to nar­row down to just 7 top-lev­el group­ings.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Hop­ing for Right­ly Ordered Desires (O. Alan Noble, Sub­stack): “One of the most dif­fi­cult truths to inter­nal­ize in this life is that you are not promised all that you desire, even when your desires are right­ly ordered. For exam­ple, you may desire friend­ship or a spouse or chil­dren or a job, and none of them are giv­en to you. Or at least, not on the time­line you expect. Each of these are good desires, and when you desire them right­ly (not exces­sive­ly, not before God, not as idols, not self­ish­ly), they are good things to desire and work towards. But God, in his per­fect will, does not promise to give us all our earth­ly desires.”
  2. Bureau­cra­tiz­ing Faith (Stephen Eide, Library of Law & Lib­er­ty): “Those con­cerned about anti-Chris­t­ian bias often frame the FBO [faith-based orga­ni­za­tions] ques­tion as a reli­gious lib­er­ty mat­ter. That fram­ing only clar­i­fies whether reli­gious groups can con­tract with gov­ern­ment. It’s less help­ful in deter­min­ing whether they should. In gen­er­al, an orga­ni­za­tion spir­i­tu­al­ly moti­vat­ed to serve the poor may take pub­lic mon­ey to do so, as long as it doesn’t dis­crim­i­nate based on sect and doesn’t use tax­pay­er dol­lars to evan­ge­lize. But evan­ge­lism is pre­cise­ly how FBOs reach some peo­ple failed by sec­u­lar pro­grams.”
    • I real­ly liked this essay. Lots of great insights.
  3. To Be Hon­est.. I’m Strug­gling with the ESV (Loren­zo Figueroa Cusick, Sub­stack): “The ESV has been revised the fol­low­ing times: 2001, 2002, 2007, 2011, 2016, 2025.  And when it is revised, it always claims to be sim­ply mod­est changes to bet­ter improve ‘accu­ra­cy and clar­i­ty’ (accord­ing to Cross­way). We can applaud when a Bible pub­lish­er wants to make the Bible even bet­ter for its users. Where it gets weird is the fact that they don’t iden­ti­fy (like the NASB, for exam­ple) when they do revise it. They don’t label it the ESV2001, ESV2002, ESV2007, etc. This leads to sit­u­a­tions where the Bible in your library or church bag is dif­fer­ent from the one used by the church.”
    • The ESV is a per­fect­ly ade­quate trans­la­tion — but some of the peo­ple who love it love it way too much. I pre­fer the NIV and the NET (which each have their own draw­backs, because no trans­la­tion is per­fect).
  4. Sor­ry, Liz Gilbert, Mar­ried Women Are (Increas­ing­ly) Hap­pi­est of All (Sophie Ander­son and Brad Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “There’s only one prob­lem with the pro­gres­sive case against mar­riage and fam­i­ly for women: It’s com­plete­ly wrong. Today, mar­ried women live longer, earn more, and report more mean­ing in their lives, com­pared to sin­gle women. They are also marked­ly hap­pi­er than their sin­gle peers, accord­ing to recent research by psy­chol­o­gist Jean Twenge and col­leagues.… lib­er­al mar­ried moms are dra­mat­i­cal­ly more like­ly to say they are hap­py with their lives, com­pared to their sin­gle and child­less peers.”
    • Relat­ed (at least in my mind): How monog­a­mous are humans? A study ranks us between meerkats and beavers. (Vic­to­ria Craw, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Pre­vi­ous work on the role of monogamy in human soci­ety­has relied on fos­sil records or com­par­i­son of mar­riage norms across cul­tures, Dyble said. His research stud­ied the data from human pop­u­la­tions and non­hu­man mam­mal species to find rates of full sib­lings, mean­ing those born to the same moth­er and father.… Analy­sis of near­ly 2 mil­lion human sib­ling rela­tion­ships and more than 60,000 mam­mal rela­tion­ships showed that the pro­por­tion of full sib­lings in the human groups ‘clus­ters close­ly’ with rates seen in social­ly monog­a­mous ani­mals and ‘con­sis­tent­ly exceeds rates seen in non-monog­a­mous mam­mals,’ Dyble wrote. He said the data showed there was a stark dif­fer­ence between groups that were con­sid­ered social­ly monog­a­mous and non­monog­a­mous, based on def­i­n­i­tions from a 2013 study by Cam­bridge researchers.”
  5. Pay Atten­tion to How You Pay Atten­tion (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “What Meta shows me is what Meta most want me to see, which is what­ev­er their pre­dic­tion mod­els believe will get me to spend as much time on their apps as pos­si­ble. The algo­rithms serve the company’s ends, not my ends. If Meta want­ed to know what I want to see, it could ask me. The tech­nol­o­gy has long exist­ed for users to shape their own rec­om­men­da­tions. These com­pa­nies do not offer us con­trol over what we see because they do not want us to have it. They do not want to be bound by who we seek to be tomor­row.”
    • A good essay with a poor title. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  6. No, You Are Not on Indige­nous Land (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “Once the log­ic of land acknowl­edg­ments and ‘decol­o­niza­tion’ is fol­lowed, it leads very quick­ly to some very dark futures.… The gen­er­al prin­ci­ple here is that instead of a dark world of eth­nic cleans­ing in the name of ‘decol­o­niza­tion,’ we should try to build a bright future where Native Amer­i­cans and the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca exist in har­mo­ny and coop­er­a­tion rather than in con­flict.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed even if you think you know what it will say based on the title and the excerpt. The arti­cle has some sur­pris­es.
  7. The Mak­ing of a Tech­no-Nation­al­ist Elite (Tan­ner Greer, Amer­i­can Affairs): “The eco­nom­ic, social, and polit­i­cal activ­i­ties of the East­ern Estab­lish­ment were mutu­al­ly rein­forc­ing pil­lars of a larg­er pro­gram. Mem­bers of the Estab­lish­ment used the wealth gen­er­at­ed by new tech­nolo­gies to secure polit­i­cal influ­ence, used that influ­ence to sus­tain a nation­al mar­ket and legal frame­work geared for yet more tech­no­log­i­cal expan­sion, and then presided over a con­scious effort to pre­serve and trans­mit the val­ues of their class to future gen­er­a­tions, ensur­ing that the uni­ty and dis­ci­pline they gained in shared strug­gle would not dis­si­pate amid pow­er and pros­per­i­ty. Through these means, a tech­no-nation­al­ist elite guid­ed America’s devel­op­ment for more than sev­en­ty years. Under its stew­ard­ship, the Unit­ed States became the world’s wealth­i­est, most indus­tri­al­ly advanced, and most pow­er­ful nation: a true tech­no­log­i­cal repub­lic.… Behind the East­ern Estab­lish­ment stood a dense web of per­son­al ties that bound its fam­i­lies togeth­er. Many of these ties were con­sum­mat­ed, quite lit­er­al­ly, on the mar­riage bed. Karp and Zamiska are loathe to think in these terms. They write a great deal about the engi­neer­ing elite’s wan­ing com­mit­ment to West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, but they have lit­tle to say about its wan­ing com­mit­ment to rais­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of that civ­i­liza­tion. The East­ern Estab­lish­ment was self-con­scious­ly repro­duc­tive: it built schools, endowed uni­ver­si­ties, and found­ed lit­er­al dynas­ties. Part of build­ing ‘a shared cul­ture … that will make pos­si­ble our con­tin­ued sur­vival’ is cre­at­ing the chil­dren who will sur­vive us.”
    • Excel­lent. Long but rec­om­mend­ed. Also, OUCH. The clos­ing four para­graphs of this book review are absolute­ly bru­tal.

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

TGFI, Volume 524: beauty and virality

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘The Idea of the Beau­ti­ful Is a Sig­na­ture of God’: A Q&A With Mar­i­lynne Robin­son (Peter Wehn­er, New York Times): “Calvin says there is not a blade of grass that God cre­at­ed that was not meant to rav­ish us with its beau­ty. The idea of the beau­ti­ful is a sig­na­ture of God, I think for Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and many oth­er peo­ple. This dis­til­la­tion of the joy, the sen­so­ry joy, of being among things in the world. I think the loss of beau­ty is a loss of an intel­lec­tu­al dis­ci­pline, which sci­ence nev­er lost because sci­en­tists always have the right to say a for­mu­la is beau­ti­ful. We in the out­side world, we’ve aban­doned the word and the con­cept. It’s sug­ges­tive that the sci­en­tists use it.”
  2. Per­form­ing Gen­der, Left and Right (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “How each side behaves is a metaphor for its strengths and weak­ness­es as a move­ment. Con­ser­v­a­tives fun­da­men­tal­ly get human nature and are more in tune with it, but tend to indulge in their instincts and act like idiots. Lib­er­als are thought­ful and polite but place a high pri­or­i­ty on emo­tion­al safe­ty and avoid­ing dan­ger­ous or uncom­fort­able sit­u­a­tions.… These per­son­al­i­ty and aes­thet­ic dif­fer­ences are cen­tral to polit­i­cal divides. So much of pol­i­tics is who you know, and it’s dif­fi­cult to go some­where in a move­ment if you don’t get along with the peo­ple in it. Elites there­fore sort accord­ing to per­son­al­i­ty in addi­tion to ide­ol­o­gy.”
  3. Why Evan­gel­i­cal­ism Is Built for Tik­Tok (Riv­er Page, The Free Press): “Of course evan­gel­i­cals went viral on Tik­Tok. The medi­um is per­fect for the mes­sage; but also, the mes­sage is per­fect for the medi­um. Catholics have art and ancient rit­u­als. Evan­gel­i­cals have rhetoric and emotion—the kind of stuff that trav­els far and wide on a plat­form where you have 15 sec­onds to grab people’s atten­tion.”
  4. Craft Is the Anti­dote to Slop. (Will Mani­dis, Sub­stack): “From Gen­e­sis, man enters not a par­adise with­out labor but a world of inten­tion­al cre­ation. The LORD God places man in the Gar­den of Eden ‘to dress it and to keep it’ (Gen­e­sis 2:15) estab­lish­ing labor not as pun­ish­ment but as sacred voca­tion. This orig­i­nal call­ing invites us to co-cre­ate the King­dom, tend­ing and devel­op­ing the world with inten­tion and care. Our fun­da­men­tal pur­pose is not con­sump­tion but par­tic­i­pa­tion in the ongo­ing work of cre­ation. The ser­pen­t’s temp­ta­tion rep­re­sents the first short­cut in human his­to­ry.… Human­i­ty’s first sin was, in part, choos­ing the easy short­cut over the mean­ing­ful process – pre­fer­ring effort­less gain to the demand­ing but ful­fill­ing work of tend­ing the gar­den.”
  5. Real­iz­ing a desired fam­i­ly size: when should cou­ples start? (Habbe­ma et al, Human Repro­duc­tion): “With­out IVF, cou­ples should start no lat­er than age 32 years for a [90% chance of a] one-child fam­i­ly, at 27 years for a two-child fam­i­ly, and at 23 years for three chil­dren. When cou­ples accept 75% or low­er chances of fam­i­ly com­ple­tion, they can start 4–11 years lat­er.”
    • An alum­nus passed this along to me and I found it fas­ci­nat­ing.
  6. He’s Chris­t­ian. In Nige­ria, That Meant Tor­ture and Prison. (Josh Code, The Free Press): “What came to my mind when I was in deten­tion was that death could be the final result. I knew the con­se­quences of help­ing Mus­lims who have con­vert­ed to Christianity—and also the fact that the police were look­ing for them. So death was what was on my mind.… From the point of my deten­tion to the point where I was released, I was con­stant­ly pray­ing and fast­ing. Because of the way I was pray­ing, the oth­er men detained with me thought I was a pas­tor and were even call­ing me ‘rev­erend’ and ask­ing me to remem­ber them in my prayers, so that the Lord would also deliv­er them from cap­tiv­i­ty. Mind you, they were Mus­lims, not Christians—their deten­tion was not on account of their faith.”
  7. There Are Only Two Gametes (Car­ol Hooven, Tablet): “We call ani­mals that pro­duce sperm ‘male’ and those that pro­duce eggs ‘female.’ That’s about it. The bot­tom line is that there are two gamete types and thus two sex­es. There are no oth­er sex­es, no oth­er repro­duc­tive cat­e­gories. Among main­stream evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists, there is sim­ply no dis­agree­ment on these basic points: The ‘gamet­ic view’ is the estab­lished ortho­doxy of our field. It applies across sex­u­al­ly repro­duc­ing ani­mals and accom­mo­dates all the com­plex­i­ty and vari­a­tion with­in the sex­es. It holds in non­re­pro­duc­tive­ly viable animals—like post­menopausal me—that don’t pro­duce gametes; it holds in male sea­hors­es that get preg­nant; in clown­fish who change from male to female (first pro­duc­ing sperm and then eggs); in females who iden­ti­fy as male (trans men) and take male lev­els of testos­terone and have a deep voice and a thick, bushy beard.”

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 518

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, The Free Press): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good.”
    • FYI: the cov­er image is risque.
  2. Here’s What Hap­pened When I Made My Col­lege Stu­dents Put Away Their Phones (Ezekiel J. Emanuel, New York Times): “To help sell this pol­i­cy, I pre­sent­ed in the first lec­ture of the course a study show­ing that stu­dents who were required to take class notes by hand retained sig­nif­i­cant­ly more infor­ma­tion than stu­dents who used com­put­ers. The rea­son is that with com­put­ers, stu­dents can type as fast as I speak and strive for ver­ba­tim tran­scripts, but there is almost no men­tal pro­cess­ing of the class’s con­tent. Con­verse­ly, vir­tu­al­ly no one can hand write 125 words per minute for 90 min­utes. Thus, hand­writ­ten notes require simul­ta­ne­ous men­tal pro­cess­ing to deter­mine the impor­tant points that need record­ing. This pro­cess­ing encodes the mate­r­i­al in the brain dif­fer­ent­ly and facil­i­tates longer-term reten­tion. The data on the dis­tract­ing effect of mobile phones — even when they are face down and turned off — are strong.”
    • The author is a med school prof at Penn.
  3. Is mod­er­ate drink­ing actu­al­ly healthy? Sci­en­tists say the idea is out­dat­ed. (Stan­ford News): “We have bought into a sto­ry­line about alco­hol that, when you real­ly look at the facts, is not there,” Stafford said. “There is a mythol­o­gy about alco­hol hav­ing pos­i­tive ben­e­fits as well as alco­hol being neu­tral for human health.”
  4. Trump’s Tac­tics Mean Many Inter­na­tion­al Stu­dents Won’t Make It to Cam­pus (Anemona Har­to­col­lis, New York Times): “In Chi­na and India, there have been few visa appoint­ments avail­able for stu­dents in recent months, and some­times none at all, accord­ing to the Asso­ci­a­tion of Inter­na­tion­al Edu­ca­tors, also known as NAFSA, a pro­fes­sion­al orga­ni­za­tion. If visa prob­lems per­sist, new inter­na­tion­al stu­dent enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges could drop by 30 to 40 per­cent over­all this fall, a loss of 150,000 stu­dents, accord­ing to the group’s analy­sis.”
  5. What Hap­pens When an Entire Sci­en­tif­ic Field Changes Its Mind (Charles Mann, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “[There is] a pop­u­lar notion of sci­en­tif­ic progress as a series of upheavals in which mav­er­icks throw out the entrenched views of the past.… But that’s not how sci­ence works. Or, more pre­cise­ly, it’s not how sci­ence works except in two spe­cif­ic, rel­a­tive­ly unusu­al cir­cum­stances. The first is when research dis­ci­plines are young, thin­ly pop­u­lat­ed and just devel­op­ing instru­ments of suf­fi­cient pow­er to test their ini­tial beliefs, as was the case with the Michel­son-Mor­ley exper­i­ment and Pasteur’s fer­men­ta­tion. The sec­ond, pos­si­bly more con­se­quen­tial sit­u­a­tion is when sci­en­tif­ic find­ings lead to so much pub­lic inter­est that they become of con­cern to polit­i­cal author­i­ties.”
  6. A two-parter about Chi­na from a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins:
    • The Case for China’s Strength (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “In the Unit­ed States, the Col­lege Board has recent­ly announced that it will dras­ti­cal­ly reduce the length of read­ing pas­sages; rather than giv­ing stu­dents who are tak­ing the SATs texts that are about 600 words in length, and ask­ing them a few ques­tions about each, they will hence­forth be giv­en texts that are about 150 words in length, and only have to answer a sin­gle ques­tion about each. This means that Chi­nese high school stu­dents tak­ing their Eng­lish exam now like­ly face a more chal­leng­ing test in a for­eign lan­guage than Amer­i­cans tak­ing the SAT do in their native tongue. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this page from last year’s exam.”
    • The Cracks in China’s Rise (Yascha Mounk, Sub­stack): “The country’s high mod­ernist eth­ic allowed it to build tens of thou­sands of miles of high-speed rail­way tracks in the course of a cou­ple of decades; but it is also the rea­son why one year’s favored indus­tri­al sec­tors reli­ably seem to turn into next year’s sources of waste and over­pro­duc­tion. The country’s extent of cen­tral­iza­tion cre­ates a giant mar­ket increas­ing­ly unit­ed by shared norms and a com­mon lan­guage; but the extent to which local cul­tures and lan­guages are being flat­tened also con­tributes to a grow­ing sense of alien­ation. None of this should be sur­pris­ing. When coun­tries are in their first spurt of growth, the advan­tages of the mod­el are often evi­dent, and its short­com­ings invis­i­ble. It is when they mature, and the prob­lems they need to solve become increas­ing­ly com­plex, that the draw­backs come into view.”
  7. The Many Jobs of a Reli­gious Leader (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “The one real­ly sig­nif­i­cant find­ing for me is that very few mem­bers of the cler­gy report that they went straight into min­istry as a young per­son. In fact, 66% of the folks in the sam­ple of reli­gious lead­ers said that they had a career out­side reli­gion before they became a mem­ber of the cler­gy. I’m not sure if the aver­age per­son knows that — most pas­tors you see didn’t go straight from Bible Col­lege to Divin­i­ty School to full-time min­istry.”

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 498: Armageddon, arXiv, and penguins

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Archae­ol­o­gists find first evi­dence of epic bib­li­cal bat­tle at ‘Armaged­don’ (Rossel­la Ter­catin, The Times of Israel): “For the first time, a team of Israeli archae­ol­o­gists has uncov­ered ancient arti­facts at north­ern Israel’s ‘Armaged­don’ site that might offer proof of an epic bat­tle doc­u­ment­ed in the books of Kings II and Chron­i­cles between a king of Judah and an Egypt­ian pharaoh. Two aca­d­e­m­ic papers pub­lished ear­li­er this year explained how an unprece­dent­ed amount of 7th-cen­tu­ry BCE Egypt­ian pot­tery was found in recent exca­va­tions at Megid­do, sug­gest­ing that Egypt­ian sol­diers were indeed in the right bib­li­cal place at what could be the right bib­li­cal peri­od.”
  2. ‘I Applied for a Work Visa—and Was Thrown in Prison for Weeks’ (Jas­mine Mooney, The Free Press): “Then I was tak­en to the nurse’s office for a med­ical check. She asked what had hap­pened to me and said she had nev­er seen a Cana­di­an here before. When I told her my sto­ry, she looked at me, grabbed my hand, and said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ I told her I had only recent­ly found God, but that I now believed in God more than any­thing. ‘I believe God brought you here for a rea­son,’ she said. ‘I know it feels like your life is in a mil­lion pieces, but you will be okay. Through this, I think you are going to find a way to help oth­ers.’ She asked if she could pray for me. I held her hands and wept.”
  3. Inside arXiv—the Most Trans­for­ma­tive Plat­form in All of Sci­ence (Sheon Han, Wired): “For sci­en­tists, imag­in­ing a world with­out arX­iv is like the rest of us imag­in­ing one with­out pub­lic libraries or GPS. But a look at its inner work­ings reveals that it isn’t a fric­tion­less utopia of open-access knowl­edge. Over the years, arXiv’s per­ma­nence has been threat­ened by every­thing from bureau­crat­ic strife to out­dat­ed code to even, once, a spy scan­dal. In the words of Ginsparg, who usu­al­ly redi­rects inter­view requests to an FAQ document—on arX­iv, no less—and tried to talk me out of vis­it­ing him in per­son, arX­iv is ‘a child I sent off to col­lege but who keeps com­ing back to camp out in my liv­ing room, behav­ing bad­ly.’”
  4. Rubio Orders U.S. Diplo­mats to Scour Stu­dent Visa Appli­cants’ Social Media (Edward Wong, New York Times): “As a sen­a­tor from Flori­da, Mr. Rubio pressed the Biden administration’s State Depart­ment, run by Antony J. Blinken, to can­cel the visas of stu­dents involved in cam­pus protests against Israel’s mil­i­tary cam­paign in Gaza. Since becom­ing sec­re­tary of state in late Jan­u­ary, Mr. Rubio has revoked per­haps 300 or more visas, many of them belong­ing to stu­dents, he told reporters last Thurs­day. He said he had been sign­ing let­ters dai­ly revok­ing visas.”
  5. Trump’s intu­itions on tar­iffs won’t help Amer­i­cans (or pen­guins) (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “…I spent the twi­light hours gog­gling at the Trump administration’s new tar­iff sched­ule, try­ing to grasp its log­ic. For exam­ple, the tar­iffs on the Heard and McDon­ald islands, which have pop­u­la­tions of zero, except for the pen­guins and assort­ed oth­er ani­mals. I mean, I’m glad that the rapa­cious wad­dlers will no longer fleece Amer­i­can con­sumers by dump­ing their shod­dy goods on our mar­kets. But still the thing vexed me … what do pen­guins export? Besides nature doc­u­men­taries, I mean. Obvi­ous­ly some­one at the White House, pos­si­bly a soon-to-be-ex intern, pulled up a list of ter­ri­to­ries with­out check­ing whether those ter­ri­to­ries were, you know, inhab­it­ed.”
    • Unlocked. As McAr­dle notes, a sin­gle absur­di­ty like that is not unusu­al for a mas­sive fed­er­al pol­i­cy. She moves quick­ly to a sub­stan­tive cri­tique.
    • Relat­ed: Kak­istoc­ra­cy as a Nat­ur­al Result of Pop­ulism (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The for­mu­la of ‘reci­procity’ being used is so stu­pid I approach the top­ic with awe, and have an almost super­sti­tious feel­ing that if I even describe it I’ll some­how become stu­pid­er myself… The word ‘kak­istoc­ra­cy’ means rule by those least suit­ed to gov­ern. His argu­ment, sim­i­lar to one I’ve made before, is that Trump only cares about loy­al­ty, and a move­ment that pri­or­i­tizes loy­al­ty to a sin­gle extreme­ly flawed man is going to facil­i­tate the worst peo­ple ris­ing to the top.”
      • A wild rant, plus I learned a new word.
  6. The Great­est Hate Hoax of All Time? The Cana­di­an ‘Mass Graves’ Lie Unrav­els (Wil­fred Reil­ly, Nation­al Review): “…there is a rough­ly 0.00 per­cent chance that there are actu­al­ly 200 dead Native kids interred on the grounds of a well-known board­ing school that oper­at­ed until 1978. Such things hap­pen in the Saw movies, not in urban mod­ern Cana­da. And, as I note in my ear­li­er piece on this top­ic: ‘Kam­loops Res­i­den­tial School is locat­ed smack-dab in the mid­dle of both the well-known Kam­loops Indi­an Reser­va­tion and the 100,000 per­son city of Kam­loops in British Colum­bia.’ Not­ing this him­self, Dr. Rouil­lard asks: ‘Is it real­ly cred­i­ble that the remains of 200 chil­dren were buried clan­des­tine­ly in a mass grave, on the reserve itself, with­out any reac­tion from the Band Coun­cil, until last sum­mer?’”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Ken­tucky State (which I learned today is a HBCU) whose schol­ar­ship focus­es on hate crime hoax­es.
  7. ‘Our Kids Are the Least Flour­ish­ing Gen­er­a­tion We Know Of’ (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Teenagers are des­per­ate for pres­tige. And what the social media com­pa­nies did — and we know this from things that insid­ers have said — is they hacked that. Nor­mal­ly, through­out his­to­ry, to become pres­ti­gious, you had to become a good archer or a good leader or a good bas­ket weaver. You had to do some­thing in the world. And then peo­ple would respect you, and you would gain social sta­tus. That’s the way it always used to be. What social media is able to do is say: You don’t have to do any­thing. Just do what­ev­er it takes to get peo­ple to fol­low you. And bin­go — you’ve got pres­tige.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. Long but worth­while. I should men­tion that at the end Haidt rec­om­mends three books he wants every 20something to read. I am hap­py to endorse the lat­ter two. Replace the first with the New Tes­ta­ment.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • An AI Gen­er­at­ed Com­ic (on Twit­ter)
  • Author­ship The­o­ries (SMBC) — let the read­er under­stand its rel­e­vance to Bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship
  • ‘Mon­ster’ under bed in Kansas town leads to arrest (Wil Day, KSN): “The Bar­ton Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office says a babysit­ter was putting the chil­dren to bed when one of them told her that a “mon­ster” was under their bed. The babysit­ter, hop­ing to com­fort the child by show­ing them there was noth­ing, looked under the bed and came face-to-face with a man hid­ing under­neath. There was an alter­ca­tion, and the babysit­ter and a child were knocked over.”
    • THERE WAS ACTUALLY A MONSTER UNDER THE BED. That kid ain’t nev­er falling asleep again.
  • Basic Instruc­tions (Basic Instruc­tions): the first pan­el is what got me: “for now”
  • Pen­guin Tar­iffs (Dork Tow­er)

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 463



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

This is vol­ume 463, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 451

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 451, which feels like it is maybe a prime num­ber but it turns out that 451 = 11 · 41.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Was Paul a Slave? (Mark R. Fairchild and Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Rec­on­cil­ing the Phar­isee, Hebrew of Hebrews, Ara­ma­ic-speak­ing zealot Paul with the Roman cit­i­zen, glo­be­trot­ting, Greek-speak­ing Paul seems impos­si­ble. Unless, that is, we con­sid­er the ear­ly church’s rec­ol­lec­tion of Paul’s upbring­ing as a child in an enslaved fam­i­ly. ‘The man­u­mis­sion of Paul’s father solves these prob­lems,’ Ries­ner told me.”
    • The title is a lit­tle mis­lead­ing — the ques­tion is real­ly whether Paul was born a slave and lat­er freed (they do explain Acts 22:28, “When Paul told the com­man­der in Acts 22:28 that he was ‘born’ a Roman cit­i­zen, that word, gen­nao, can refer to birth or adop­tion. Freed Roman slaves were often adopt­ed into their master’s fam­i­ly and giv­en a Roman name and cit­i­zen­ship.”
    • The authors are schol­ars with rel­e­vant exper­tise. The mid­dle sec­tion of the arti­cle is where all the meat is and makes some good points. The open­ing and clos­ing felt like fluff to me.
    • Unlocked.
  2. Stuff about the col­lege protests
    • For most peo­ple, pol­i­tics is about fit­ting in (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple are try­ing to fig­ure out where they fit in — who’s on their side and who isn’t. And this works in both direc­tions: peo­ple can be attract­ed to a group or neg­a­tive­ly polar­ized by it.… Notice what’s miss­ing from my list? The notion of pol­i­tics as a bat­tle of ideas.”
    • Col­lege pro­test­ers seek amnesty to keep arrests and sus­pen­sions from trail­ing them (Joce­lyn Geck­er, AP News): “Petocz said protest­ing in high school was what helped get him into Van­der­bilt and secure a mer­it schol­ar­ship for activists and orga­niz­ers. His col­lege essay was about orga­niz­ing walk­outs in rur­al Flori­da to oppose Gov. Ron DeSan­tis’ anti-LGBTQ poli­cies. ‘Van­der­bilt seemed to love that,’ Petocz said.’ ”
    • What Stu­dents Read Before They Protest (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[Read­ing the syl­labus explains] the two things that seem so dis­pro­por­tion­ate in these protests and the cul­ture that sur­rounds them. First, it explains why this con­flict attracts such a scale of on-cam­pus atten­tion and action and dis­rup­tion, while so many oth­er wars and crises (Sudan, Con­go, Arme­nia, Bur­ma, Yemen …) are bare­ly noticed or ignored. Sec­ond, it explains why the atten­tion seems to leap so quick­ly past cri­tique into car­i­ca­ture, past sym­pa­thy for the Pales­tini­ans into jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for Hamas, past con­dem­na­tion of Israeli pol­i­cy into anti-Semi­tism.”
    • In an Online World, a New Gen­er­a­tion of Pro­test­ers Choos­es Anonymi­ty (Nicholas Fan­dos, New York Times): “On cam­pus­es from New Eng­land to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, stu­dents lead­ing one of the largest protest move­ments in decades have increas­ing­ly strapped on face masks and check­ered Pales­tin­ian kaf­fiyehs in a polar­iz­ing bid to pro­tect their anonymi­ty even as they demand uni­ver­si­ties and gov­ern­ments be held to account. The choice rep­re­sents a sharp break by many, though not all, of these stu­dents from ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions of uni­ver­si­ty activists, who gained their moral force in part by putting their words on record and their futures in jeop­ardy for a larg­er cause.”
    • How Pro­test­ers Can Actu­al­ly Help Pales­tini­ans (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “…this may sound zany, but how about rais­ing mon­ey to send as many of your stu­dent lead­ers as pos­si­ble this sum­mer to live in the West Bank and learn from Pales­tini­ans there (while engag­ing with Israelis on the way in or out)? West Bank mon­i­tors say that a recent Israeli crack­down on for­eign­ers help­ing Pales­tini­ans, by deny­ing entry or deport­ing peo­ple, has made this more dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble. Stu­dent vis­i­tors must be pru­dent and cau­tious but could study Ara­bic, teach Eng­lish and vol­un­teer with human rights orga­ni­za­tions on the ground. Pales­tini­ans in parts of the West Bank are under siege, peri­od­i­cal­ly attacked by set­tlers and in need of observers and advo­cates.”
  3. Some stuff about gen­der:
    • The Bat­tle of the Sex­es Needs a Truce (Thomas Adamo and Isabel­la Griepp, Stan­ford Review): “We must acknowl­edge how soci­ety has lied to both men and women since they were boys and girls—lies that have done noth­ing but bring about dishar­mo­ny between the sex­es. In seek­ing to empow­er young girls, par­ents and teach­ers have de-empha­sized the innate dif­fer­ences between the sex­es. And, any dif­fer­ences between the sex­es were explained in terms of how men had his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed women, rather than the unique and valu­able char­ac­ter­is­tics that men and women inher­ent­ly pos­sess.”
      • The authors are stu­dents in Chi Alpha.
    • The Mas­culin­i­ty Pyra­mid (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A man who is over­ly con­cerned with how he is dif­fer­ent from women is miss­ing the holy instinct of Adam, who first notices the same­ness of Eve and sec­ond notices their dif­fer­ences (Gen 2:23).”
    • Scripts for Healthy Mas­culin­i­ty (Seth Troutt, Mere Ortho­doxy): “…men ought to be dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed from God, ani­mals, boys, and women. When prop­er­ly con­sid­ered, those four dis­tinc­tions yield the four core mas­cu­line virtues of humil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from God), dis­ci­pline (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from ani­mals), respon­si­bil­i­ty (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from boys), and chival­ry (in our dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from women).”
  4. There’s Real­ly No Good Rea­son to Use Tik­Tok (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Tik­Tok is, in my view, a social media plat­form devoid of pos­i­tive ben­e­fit. I do not mean by that that it is whol­ly evil or can­not be used except sin­ful­ly. Rather, I think Tik­Tok sim­ply lacks any mer­it as a plat­form and is only use­ful in the sense that it is pas­sive­ly enter­tain­ing. This is also how I would describe things like soap operas, pro­fes­sion­al wrestling, and the nation­al hot dog eat­ing con­test. The dif­fer­ence, though, between Tik­Tok and those things, is that Tik­Tok is 1) addic­tive, 2) active­ly cor­ro­sive to think­ing, and 3) mar­ket­ed to and con­sumed by an enor­mous num­ber of chil­dren.”

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 442

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 442nd edi­tion of these emails. 442 is the sum of eight con­sec­u­tive prime num­bers: 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67 + 71

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The State of the Cul­ture, 2024 (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The tech plat­forms aren’t like the Medici in Flo­rence, or those oth­er rich patrons of the arts. They don’t want to find the next Michelan­ge­lo or Mozart. They want to cre­ate a world of junkies—because they will be the deal­ers. Addic­tion is the goal.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. Includes an anec­dote about a Stan­ford under­grad near the end.
  2. Men Are From Mer­cury, Women Are From Nep­tune (David French, New York Times): “…if there are pre-exist­ing polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences between men and women — and it’s true that in aggre­gate men are more con­ser­v­a­tive than women — then those dif­fer­ences will be exac­er­bat­ed as men spend more time with men, and women spend more time with women. The more that men and women live sep­a­rate lives, the more we would expect to see sep­a­rate beliefs.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent, and I high­ly rec­om­mend it to you.
  3. My Mom’s Rules For Cults (Ben Lan­dau-Tay­lor, Sub­stack): “…when I was 25 years old I told my par­ents I was mov­ing to San Fran­cis­co to join a new-wave rad­i­cal move­ment and a self-devel­op­ment psy­chol­o­gy I‑swear-we’re-not-a-cult group. And she sat me down and gave me three things to check before I went: 1. Are the mem­bers of the group in con­tact with their fam­i­lies? 2. How does the group react when mem­bers are close with friends who don’t share the group’s beliefs and ide­ol­o­gy? Is this dis­cour­aged? Is it seen as nor­mal and healthy? 3. How does the group relate to for­mer mem­bers who have left? Are they old friends who are wel­come at par­ties, or are they vile trai­tors, or what? In my expe­ri­ence this is the best and fastest way to tell the dif­fer­ence…”
  4. ‘I Said, ‘What’s Your Plan About Mar­riage and Dat­ing?’ And There Was Silence.’ (Jane Coas­ton, New York Times): “I was talk­ing to a grad­u­ate stu­dent recent­ly. He had a very clear sense of his plan for school­ing and work, and then I said, ‘What’s your plan about mar­riage and dat­ing?’ And there was silence. He didn’t real­ly have a plan. I think that’s part of the chal­lenge — that peo­ple are not being inten­tion­al enough about seek­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet, date and mar­ry young adults in their world.”
    • An inter­view with Brad Wilcox, who is often cit­ed in these updates. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  5. The Rise of the Non-Chris­t­ian Evan­gel­i­cal (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Nine per­cent of Repub­li­can Jews self-iden­ti­fy as evan­gel­i­cal, com­pared to 3% of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Jews. For Mus­lims, the gap is huge: 32% vs 11%. It’s also fair­ly large for Bud­dhists (16% vs 6%) and Hin­dus (18% vs 10%). You can even see it among noth­ing in par­tic­u­lars. 19% of the Repub­li­cans are evan­gel­i­cals; it’s just 9% of the Democ­rats.”
    • Wild and inter­est­ing.
  6. The Takeover (Nee­tu Arnold, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…even in the van­ish­ing­ly rare event that uni­ver­si­ties attempt to cul­ti­vate an envi­ron­ment of aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom and free speech on cam­pus, it will nev­er ful­ly apply to spon­sored inter­na­tion­al stu­dents from coun­tries with author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments. In many ways, this defeats the main pur­pose of hav­ing inter­na­tion­al stu­dents on Amer­i­can cam­pus­es in the first place: the free and open cul­tur­al exchange that occurs between them and Amer­i­can stu­dents. What kind of skewed cul­tur­al edu­ca­tion will Amer­i­can stu­dents receive about Sau­di Ara­bia and Chi­na if their friends from those coun­tries aren’t even allowed to crit­i­cize their own gov­ern­ments, and if the main source of teach­ing and schol­ar­ship on such coun­tries comes out of ‘cen­ters’ fund­ed by those gov­ern­ments?”
    • This is an odd arti­cle. Lots of inter­est­ing stats framed strange­ly, but def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing.
  7. Acad­e­mi­a’s “Pre­tendi­an” Prob­lem Stems From a Few Very Obvi­ous and Basic Real­i­ties (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “You’ve cre­at­ed a fierce­ly com­pet­i­tive process in which a seg­ment of peo­ple are giv­en a very large advan­tage, there are few if any objec­tive mark­ers that can dis­prove that some­one is a mem­ber of that seg­ment, and you’ve declared it offen­sive to ques­tion whether some­one real­ly is a mem­ber of that seg­ment, out­side of very spe­cif­ic sce­nar­ios. (When I was in acad­e­mia peo­ple spoke very dark­ly about the con­cept of ever ques­tion­ing someone’s indige­nous iden­ti­ty, called it the act of a col­o­niz­er, etc etc.) The obvi­ous ques­tion is… what did you think was going to hap­pen? Human­i­ties and social sci­ences depart­ments have, through the con­di­tions described above, rung the din­ner bell for peo­ple pre­tend­ing to have indige­nous her­itage. They now act shocked when such peo­ple show up. I find it disin­gen­u­ous and unto­ward. This behav­ior is the prod­uct of the incen­tives that you your­self built.”

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 433

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 433, a prime num­ber.

A reminder as the year draws to a close: this week­ly roundup of links is an over­flow of the donor-fund­ed min­istry I do with Chi Alpha at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty. If you’re so inclined, con­sid­er an end-of-year dona­tion.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some Christ­mas con­tent:
    • Los­ing Our Grip on Christ­mas (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “In Amer­i­ca, Chris­tian­i­ty isn’t attacked as much as it is usurped. When Chris­tians say, ‘We’d like to cel­e­brate Christ­mas,’ the world says, ‘That’s a great idea. Would you like for us to stay open late so you can buy every­one you love a gift?’ Sud­den­ly, there’s no time to wor­ship. There’s no time to pray. We’re too busy shop­ping.”
    • A Har­mo­ny of the Birth of Jesus: Matthew and Luke (Justin Tay­lor, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Here is a sim­ple chronol­o­gy to show how the events of Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2 fit togeth­er and what each of the gospel authors empha­size. Matthew tells things more through the eyes of Joseph and Luke (who per­haps inter­viewed Mary) tells the events large­ly through her eyes.”
    • Beth­le­hem Can­cels Christ­mas, But Local Pas­tors Still Expect a Holy Night (Sophia Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The words peo­ple once asso­ci­at­ed with Christ­mas were San­ta, tree, gifts, car­ols—all ‘roman­ti­cized’ tra­di­tions from the West, Isaac said. Today, he thinks of words from the Christ­mas sto­ry of the Bible: Cae­sar, cen­sus, mas­sacre, and refugee in Egypt—rel­e­vant to Pales­tini­ans who have to reg­is­ter to trav­el out­side the West Bank and who seek safe­ty in Egypt.”
    • There’s No Christ­mas Lunch Like a Kore­an Amer­i­can Church Lunch (Eric Kim, New York Times): “…59 per­cent of Kore­an Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy as Chris­t­ian. But that num­ber used to be even high­er. For decades, church lunch­es have been piv­otal spaces for Kore­an immi­grants as they estab­lished them­selves in the Unit­ed States, and these meals con­tin­ue to flour­ish as hubs of com­mu­ni­ty bond­ing for many who are the first gen­er­a­tion to arrive here. More than just a meal, they are a key oppor­tu­ni­ty for con­ver­sa­tion, gos­sip and fel­low­ship.”
      • I liked a lot about this arti­cle, but I found it very New-York-Timesy to say that most Kore­an-Amer­i­cans are Chris­t­ian and then to tell sto­ries about how those who have left the church nonethe­less remem­ber it and its food fond­ly.
  2. The Prob­lem With Every­thing Being Porni­fied (Freya India, Sub­stack): “…I find it so frus­trat­ing to see some pro­gres­sives down­play the dan­gers of all this. Those that dis­miss any­one con­cerned about the porni­fi­ca­tion of every­thing as a stuffy con­ser­v­a­tive. And some­how can’t see how the con­tin­u­al loos­en­ing of sex­u­al norms might actu­al­ly empow­er preda­to­ry men, and put pres­sure on vul­ner­a­ble girls? That seems delu­sion­al to me. Let’s just say I have lit­tle patience for those on the left who loud­ly cel­e­brate women sex­u­al­is­ing them­selves online, sell­ing it as fun, fem­i­nist and risk-free, but are then hor­ri­fied to hear about 12 year-olds doing the same thing. C’mon. No won­der they want to. But I also find it frus­trat­ing to see some on the right approach this with what seems like a com­plete lack of com­pas­sion. I don’t think it helps to relent­less­ly ridicule and blame young women for sex­u­al­is­ing them­selves online. I don’t think it’s fair either. We can’t give girls Insta­gram at 12 and then be sur­prised when as young women they base their self-worth on the approval of strangers.”
  3. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence can find your loca­tion in pho­tos, wor­ry­ing pri­va­cy experts (Geoff Brum­fiel, NPR): “The project, known as Pre­dict­ing Image Geolo­ca­tions (or PIGEON, for short) was designed by three Stan­ford grad­u­ate stu­dents in order to iden­ti­fy loca­tions on Google Street View.… [ACLU’s] Stan­ley wor­ries that com­pa­nies might soon use AI to track where you’ve trav­eled, or that gov­ern­ments might check your pho­tos to see if you’ve vis­it­ed a coun­try on a watch­list. Stalk­ing and abuse are also obvi­ous threats, he says. In the past, Stan­ley says, peo­ple have been able to remove GPS loca­tion tag­ging from pho­tos they post online. That may not work any­more.”
  4. In Gaza, Israelis Dis­play Tun­nel Wide Enough to Han­dle Cars (Ronen Bergman, New York Times): “Two mil­i­tary offi­cials inter­viewed after the tour say that recent­ly gath­ered intel­li­gence indi­cat­ed that Israel has gross­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed the size of the under­ground net­work. The sys­tem, which the army pre­vi­ous­ly esti­mat­ed was about 60 miles long, is now believed to be clos­er to 250 miles long, they said.”
  5. William Wilber­force: Abo­li­tion­ist, Reformer, Evan­gel­i­cal (Richard Turn­bull, Reli­gion & Lib­er­ty Online): “What unites these dis­parate indi­vid­u­als? Per­haps three things. First, a pas­sion for a true and live­ly faith that trans­forms the heart. Sec­ond­ly, a holis­tic view of God’s love for the world that saw no con­tra­dic­tion between per­son­al faith and a trans­formed soci­ety. Third­ly, a tenac­i­ty that drove these indi­vid­u­als nev­er to give up, nev­er to give up for Christ.”
    • A sol­id sum­ma­ry of a con­se­quen­tial Chris­tian’s impact. The author is the for­mer prin­ci­pal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
  6. A Tik-Tok-ing Time­bomb: How Tik­Tok’s Glob­al Plat­form Anom­alies Align with the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s Geostrate­gic Objec­tives (Nation­al Con­ta­gion Research Insti­tute): “We then expand­ed our research into top­ics rel­e­vant to the Chi­nese Government’s geopo­lit­i­cal inter­ests: 1) Ukraine-Rus­sia War; 2) Kash­mir Inde­pen­dence; 3) Israel-Hamas War. The con­clu­sions of our research are clear: Whether con­tent is pro­mot­ed or mut­ed on Tik­Tok appears to depend on whether it is aligned or opposed to the inter­ests of the Chi­nese Gov­ern­ment. As the sum­ma­ry data graph below illus­trates, the per­cent­ages of Tik­Tok posts out of Insta­gram posts are con­sis­tent­ly range-bound for gen­er­al polit­i­cal and pop-cul­ture top­ics, but com­plete­ly out-of-bounds for top­ics sen­si­tive to the Chi­nese Gov­ern­ment.”
    • The link is to a 18 page PDF. The research was con­duct­ed in con­junc­tion with Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty. I, for one, am shocked. Who could have pre­dict­ed such a thing from a coun­try oth­er­wise devot­ed to free speech and free mar­kets?
  7. Why Anti­semitism Sprout­ed So Quick­ly on Cam­pus (Jonathan Haidt, Sub­stack): “Com­mon ene­my iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics is arguably the worst way of think­ing one could pos­si­bly teach to young peo­ple in a mul­ti-eth­nic democ­ra­cy such as the Unit­ed States. It is, of course, the ide­o­log­i­cal dri­ve behind most geno­cides. On a more mun­dane lev­el, it can in the­o­ry be used to cre­ate group cohe­sion on teams and in orga­ni­za­tions, and yet the cur­rent aca­d­e­m­ic ver­sion of it plunges orga­ni­za­tions into eter­nal con­flict and dys­func­tion. As long as this way of think­ing is taught any­where on cam­pus, iden­ti­ty-based hatred will find fer­tile ground.”
    • Haidt is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU.

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 431

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 431, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is South Korea Dis­ap­pear­ing? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[South Korea cur­rent­ly has] 0.7 births per woman. It’s worth unpack­ing what that means. A coun­try that sus­tained a birthrate at that lev­el would have, for every 200 peo­ple in one gen­er­a­tion, 70 peo­ple in the next one, a depop­u­la­tion exceed­ing what the Black Death deliv­ered to Europe in the 14th cen­tu­ry. Run the exper­i­ment through a sec­ond gen­er­a­tional turnover, and your orig­i­nal 200-per­son pop­u­la­tion falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re near­ing the kind of pop­u­la­tion crash caused by the fic­tion­al super­flu in Stephen King’s ‘The Stand.’ ”
    • Unlocked. The declin­ing birthrate is tru­ly one of the world’s most impor­tant long-term sto­ries. One of the rea­sons is that it will self-cor­rect, but the way that it will self-cor­rect will trans­form soci­eties.
  2. Soft Occultism (Patri­cia Patn­ode, The Amer­i­can Mind): “The new, default spir­i­tu­al iden­ti­ty for young peo­ple in the West is soft occultism, or casu­al witch­ery. This iden­ti­ty can eas­i­ly accom­pa­ny an exist­ing reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, and often does since it is so obvi­ous­ly inte­grat­ed in most aspects of mod­ern West­ern cul­ture.… Sur­veys and sci­en­tists have repeat­ed­ly found that peo­ple who have reli­gious beliefs, espe­cial­ly those who attend a for­mal house of wor­ship, tend to be hap­pi­er than those who don’t. Despite this, soft occultists pre­fer to buy puri­fy­ing green juices and par­tic­i­pate in pseu­do-reli­gious gath­er­ings. They go to Pilates class but not church, med­i­tate on per­son­al ener­gy but don’t pray. Take vit­a­min sup­ple­ments but not com­mu­nion. Sit through ther­a­py but not con­fes­sion.”
  3. The For­got­ten Dis­pute that Could Ignite a War in South Amer­i­ca (Fran­cis­co Toro, Per­sua­sion): “Yes­ter­day, Venezue­lans vot­ed in a non-bind­ing ref­er­en­dum to annex the Esse­qui­bo ter­ri­to­ry, a stretch of jun­gle that makes up around two-thirds of the land­mass of Venezuela’s east­ern neigh­bor, tiny Guyana. Des­per­ate for a win amid a new­ly unit­ed oppo­si­tion and a chron­i­cal­ly sick econ­o­my, the left­ist dic­ta­tor­ship of Nicolás Maduro dust­ed off a musty old dis­pute to fan the nation­al­ist flames. As a mat­ter of inter­na­tion­al law, Maduro has no leg to stand on. A mil­i­tary adven­ture into Esse­qui­bo is improbable—Venezuela’s mil­i­tary remains laser-focused on the one thing it does well, and that’s traf­fick­ing cocaine, not fight­ing wars. But dic­ta­tor­ships are inher­ent­ly unpre­dictable, and the prospect of a mil­i­tary adven­ture is send­ing jit­ters around the region.”
    • Some help­ful back­sto­ry.
  4. San­tos’ Cameo Earn­ings Exceed His House Salary (John John­son, News­er): “San­tos’ House salary stood at $174,000, and Semafor reports he has ‘lined up more than that sum’ in just his first 48 hours on the Cameo plat­form.”
    • This sto­ry seems to sum­ma­rize some­thing impor­tant about the soci­etal moment we are liv­ing in. I invite you to draw your own con­clu­sions about what that impor­tant some­thing is.
  5. What The Algo­rithm Does To Young Girls (Freya India, Per­sua­sion): “…I believe we have some per­son­al agency. But I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant cor­po­ra­tion using the most advanced AI to manip­u­late her behav­ior. Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncon­trolled glob­al social exper­i­ment. We were the first to have our vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and inse­cu­ri­ties fed into a machine that mag­ni­fied and refract­ed them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algo­rithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our iden­ti­ties. Con­vinced us we were sick.”
  6. The Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dents (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­all this was a dark day for Amer­i­can high­er edu­ca­tion. I want you to keep in mind that the incen­tives you saw on dis­play rule so many oth­er parts of the sys­tem, albeit usu­al­ly invis­i­bly. Don’t for­get that. These uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dents have solved for what they think is the equi­lib­ri­um, and it ain’t pret­ty.”
    • You can find the video of the Har­vard, MIT, and Penn pres­i­dents’ Con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny eas­i­ly with a search if you haven’t seen it yet. Here is the spe­cif­ic snip­pet Cowen is com­ment­ing on.
    • Relat­ed: Stan­ford con­demns calls for geno­cide of Jews (Car­o­line Chen, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford ‘unequiv­o­cal­ly’ con­demned ‘calls for the geno­cide of Jews or any peo­ples’.… The state­ment opened with acknowl­edg­ment of ‘the con­text of nation­al dis­course,’ amid nation­al con­tro­ver­sy over a Wednes­day con­gres­sion­al hear­ing where the pres­i­dents of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia appeared to evade ques­tions on dis­ci­plin­ing stu­dents who called for the geno­cide of Jew­ish peo­ple.”
  7. The Prob­lem­at­ic Inklings (G. Con­nor Salter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Of course, see­ing some­one as a saint makes it hard to believe the per­son had flaws. It’s not easy to admit that the Inklings—Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and their friends who met week­ly to share their writings—weren’t the per­fect heroes revered in Chris­t­ian home­school guides. But even­tu­al­ly, we must rec­og­nize that everyone’s life is com­pli­cat­ed.”
    • Sur­pris­ing details I did not know, most­ly about some of the less famous Inklings.

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.