Tag: wisdom

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 513: elite colleges, pathologizing personality, and the fastest woman in the world

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. Elite Colleges Have Found a New Virtue for Applicants to Fake (Alex Bronzini-Vender, New York Times): “[There is] a new question: ‘Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a difficult conversation or encountered someone with an opinion or perspective that was different from your own. How did you find common ground?’ It’s known as the disagreement question, and since the student encampments of spring 2024 and the American right’s attacks on universities, a growing number of elite colleges have added it to their applications. Caroline Koppelman, a private admissions consultant, has called it the ‘hot new it girl’ of college essays. There’s no evidence that civility mania will improve campus discourse, but it seems poised to widen the inequalities that already plague hyperselective college admissions. The trouble is that the disagreement question — like much of the application process — isn’t built for honesty.”
  2. Nobody Has a Personality Anymore (Freya India, The Free Press): “Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling that’s too strong—has to be labeled and explained. Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.… This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life to explain everything—psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorized, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, and mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, ourselves.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  3. Huckabee threatens to declare Israel does not welcome Christians, as visa row blows open (Lazar Berman, Times of Israel): “Given Huckabee’s longstanding support for Israel and close ties with the current government in particular, the rhetoric in his letter represented a shockingly quick deterioration. But the issue at hand — the ability of Christian groups to tour Israel — is close to Huckabee’s heart, given that he has led countless such trips as an evangelical pastor over the past half a century.” 
    • Recommended to me by a student. Quite interesting.
  4. My health and my politics walk into a doctor’s office… (Kim Fellner, New York Times): “The vision of a diverse, equitable and inclusive democracy that seems the best of America to me and my community is locked in an existential battle with a MAGA counter-vision that elevates Whiteness and Christian nationalism, and that seems to be colonizing institutions and culture at warp speed. I did not anticipate, however, that the personal and the political would collide in my doctor’s office.… Over a series of written and in-person conversations, we have been sharing some of the tenets of our respective faiths and the implications for how we navigate the world. She and I have sharply divergent views about when life begins and what happens after we die. She believes that the only true salvation lies in accepting Jesus as one’s savior.”
  5. A Stark Reminder That Sex Differences Matter in Elite Sport (James Smoliga, Persuasion): “The goal was for Kipyegon to become the first woman ever to run a sub‑4 minute mile. Nike set her up with the very best conditions that any athlete could ever expect. Kipyegon ran a mile in 4:06—a remarkable performance by any measure, and a personal best, but well short of the sub‑4 minute goal. While Kipyegon wasn’t directly racing her pacers, they were there to pull her to a time that hundreds of male athletes have already achieved. Rather than charging down the final straightaway alone, leaving the best women in her wake, as she so often does, we saw Kipyegon straining to hang on behind a group of male runners who weren’t even near their limit, as they turned around to cheer her on. This race matters because it offered something exceedingly rare: an honest, direct comparison of male and female performance at the highest level.”
  6. Israeli Researcher Says Stanford Shunned and Sabotaged Him After Hamas Attack (Maya Sulkin, The Free Press): “[Former IDF officer] Laps alleges that the research assistant in the Danny Chou Lab told Laps during their first interaction on his first day never to speak to her. She allegedly delayed his orders for lab equipment, made him sit elsewhere at lunch, and reassigned her custodial duties to him. Colleagues followed her lead, ostracizing him from the lab community, the suit claims. The most explosive allegation is that the same research assistant, Terra Lin, tampered with Laps’s research.” 
  7. What YouTube Can’t Teach Students About Jesus (Dylan Musser, Christianity Today): “‘Who (or what) has shaped your faith the most?’ As a campus minister, I have asked this question to many college students over the years. Lately, I have noticed a shift in their answers.  This past fall, I sat across from Luke—a freshman at Vanderbilt University. We were chatting over tacos when I posed the question. I watched the gears spin in his head. Would it be a church from back home? A great book? An older mentor who discipled him? Maybe his parents? He leaned back. ‘Youtube.’ I stared blankly, trying my best not to show my surprise.” 
    • The author leads the Navigators at Vanderbilt.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The Joy of Cooking Your Sprite (Jenée Desmond-Harris, Slate): “After a day walking around the dusty grounds, riding a giant swing, and dressing up for old-timey photos, we made it back to the car exhausted and thirsty. And in the back seat (I don’t know if it had been purchased as part of post-outing lunch or was just rolling around back there) was a six-pack of Sprite that had been, well, cooking all day. We each cracked one open, and that’s when I realized something important was happening. It was so good! The soda was hot but somehow still refreshing. The sweetness was softened and the bubbles felt bigger and more luxurious—not like the sharp, sneeze-triggering ones you get when it’s cold. We locked eyes and smiled mischievously. It felt rebellious (look, we were very sheltered kids) and wildly innovative. ‘Cooked Sprite’ was born.” 
  • What Is ‘Aura Farming’? This Tween Will Show You. (Benjamin Hoffman, New York Times): “On Tuesday, the government in Riau, citing the impact of the video and the fact that he had been ‘inspiring local kids to embrace and preserve their traditions,’ named Dika as a tourism ambassador for the province, and its governor, Abdul Wahid, awarded him a scholarship for 20 million rupiah (around $1,200) for his education. Dika also performed a rendition of his dance along with Governor Wahid and other officials.”

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 509: a Christian assassin, Harvard Law Review, Juneteenth

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. Stop Striving and Have a Baby (Nicholas Clairmont, The Free Press): “…having kids isn’t just possible, thinkable, or doable. It’s actually super fun, massively easier than anyone tells you, and so energizing and clarifying that if you are an ambitious person, you should have a kid out of pure personal selfishness.”
  2. Friends say Minnesota shooting suspect was deeply religious and conservative (Jim Mustian & Michael Biesecker, Associated Press): “Friends and former colleagues interviewed by AP described Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump.” 
    • In response: The Problem of the Christian Assassin (David French, The New York Times): “Our nation is relearning a lesson that it never should have forgotten. Extremist Christian language and theology can lead to extreme Christian violence in the same way that extreme language can lead to extreme violence in other faith traditions and among people who have no faith at all. Christians aren’t better than anyone else. We’re fashioned from the same human clay, and we’re susceptible to the same temptations and failures.”
  3. The Gospel Doesn’t Impart a Lens, but a Life (Steven M. Bryan, Mere Orthodoxy): “I suspect that some of the ways that we speak about those who abandon Christian faith and become secular mirrors a secular understanding of what it means to become a Christian in the first place. To speak about ‘de-construction’ implies that becoming a Christian is a matter of constructing a ‘worldview.’ It risks ratifying the claim that becoming a Christian is something like becoming a Marxist or a nationalist or even a postmodernist. It is simply to dismantle one story about the world and to construct another. To speak about ‘de-conversion’ implies that the Gospel imparts a lens, not life.” 
    • The author is a New Testament professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
  4. What Church Do You Attend? Maybe More Than One, Survey Finds (Adelle Banks, Roys Report): “Researchers for the multiyear Hartford Institute for Religion Research study found that 46% of some 24,000 churchgoers responding to their survey reported active engagement with more than one church.”
  5. Matt Yglesias on debating (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “In practice, one big reason to debate is so you can put four people on the floor and attract an audience and some public attention, yet without slighting any one of the ‘stars’ by making it a panel. As a method of truth-seeking, I do not think public debate does very well.”
  6. Exclusive: Harvard Law Review Axes 85 Percent of Submissions Using Race-Conscious Rubric, Documents Show (Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon): “The Free Beacon obtained more than 500 documents from the journal’s two latest volumes, including the one currently in production. The new documents are all from 2024 and 2025—after the Supreme Court banned affirmative action at universities—and span four distinct stages of the article selection process. They provide the most comprehensive picture yet of the racial and ideological preferences at the elite law review, which has become a key front in the Trump administration’s war on Harvard and is now the subject of three federal probes. The documents show that at least 42 different editors considered race or gender when making recommendations in 2024. That number accounts for 40 percent of the 104 editors who serve on the journal at any given time, all of whom have a vote in publication decisions. While some editors recommended pieces on the grounds that the author was a minority, others paid more attention to the article’s footnotes, combing through the citations to see how many sources were white, black, or transgender.” 
  7. Articles which appear to have been written in honor of Juneteenth: 
    • Juneteenth Is Our Second Independence Day (Condoleeza Rice, The Free Press): “But even though my family has been celebrating Juneteenth since my childhood, it wasn’t until 2021 that Congress voted, almost unanimously, to make Juneteenth National Independence Day a federal holiday. Because many Americans are unfamiliar with its significance, some, perhaps understandably, wonder why it needed national recognition at all. After all, all Americans celebrate the Fourth of July—the ultimate celebration of our nation’s founding, of our independence and our liberty.  To me, Juneteenth is a recognition of what I call America’s second founding.” 
      • The author is a fellow believer and also the director of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
      • The article contains this stunning paragraph: “I was eight years old when, on a Sunday morning in September 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed. I felt the blast a few blocks away in the church where my father was the pastor. Four little girls, two of whom I knew, were killed.”
    • What American Students Aren’t Taught About Slavery (Coleman Hughes, The Free Press): “What I learned from teaching slavery to a group of college freshmen is that many (perhaps most) American kids graduate high school believing, falsely, that slavery happened only in America. Their minds are not blown by rehearsing the brutal facts of American slavery. Their minds are blown to learn that other brutal slaveries also existed all over the world. Nor is this historical amnesia confined to high school students. The United Nations has deemed March 25 a day of remembrance for the transatlantic slave trade. There is no UN day of remembrance for the Arab slave trade, the Barbary slave trade, the Indian Ocean slave trade, or any of the slaveries localized to specific regions such as the Indian subcontinent, China, Korea, and Eastern Europe—each of which accounted for millions of slaves.… Instead of whitewashing the grim facts of American slavery—as American history textbooks did in the past, and as certain corners of the American right would be all too happy to revive—I recommend taking the opposite approach: adding material rather than subtracting it. We must include the global and ubiquitous nature of slavery in every school curriculum.” 
      • The author, himself African-American and Puerto Rican, is a journalist and a visiting professor at the University of Austin.
    • Frederick Douglass Found His Mission in the Black Church (Jessica Janvier, Christianity Today): “Douglass’s muddled experience with evangelical Christianity mirrored what many other slaves experienced. Many of them came to faith through evangelicalism and were able to grasp the hope of emancipation—and equality. Yet they also saw white evangelical preachers espouse proslavery doctrines and comfort with tearing apart Black families to uphold the lucrative institution. With this hypocrisy in mind, Douglass famously wrote, ‘I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.’ ”

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 508: euthanasia, nitpicking, and homesteading misadventures

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. Are you graduating this weekend? Congratulations! Still want these emails after you lose your Stanford account? Subscribe for free with your long-term email address at https://theglendavis.substack.com/
  2. White lies hide dark truths (Tom Tugendhat, Substack): “What is assisted dying? Suicide exists. Killing exists. Both are real, longstanding, legal concepts. But assisted dying? That’s a phrase suspended between the act and its denial. The bill claims to offer choice, dignity and control. But its language and its silences speak volumes about who holds power and who is expected to disappear quietly. Patients are not poisoned, they are ‘assisted’. Doctors don’t kill, they ‘participate in the process’. Institutions aren’t forced to comply, they’re just not ‘protected’ from being compelled. Patients ‘take life-ending medication’, as if it’s a herbal tea. Death is cleaned, blanched and euphemised. This new bill doesn’t just hide the reality of its actions; it hides the decision from the family.” 
    • The author is a member of the British parliament.
    • Related in terms of “safeguards”: Doctors Were Preparing to Remove Their Organs. Then They Woke Up. (Brian M. Rosenthal, New York Times): “Four years ago, an unconscious Kentucky man began to awaken as he was about to be removed from life support so his organs could be donated. Even though the man cried, pulled his legs to his chest and shook his head, officials still tried to move forward. Now, a federal investigation has found that officials at the nonprofit in charge of coordinating organ donations in Kentucky ignored signs of growing alertness not only in that patient but also in dozens of other potential donors.”
  3. If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I ‘defending’ Joe Criminal? Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it. If one side lies to make all of their arguments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up.”
  4. College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life (Pamela Paul, Wall Street Journal): “Administrators, adolescent psychologists and sociologists describe Gen Z students as fundamentally different from earlier generations. Many have difficulty with confrontation and little experience working through interpersonal conflicts, which was only exacerbated by the pandemic. They have mastered the terminology of ‘harassment’ and ‘discrimination,’ sometimes with just cause and other times to brand a run-of-the-mill disagreement.” 
    • Some wild stories in here.
  5. My expensive, exhausting, happy failed attempt at homesteading (Mike Riggs, Washington Post): “How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week. Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.”
  6. At Secret Math Meeting, Researchers Struggle to Outsmart AI (Lyndie Chiou, Scientific American): “Ono says. ‘I don’t want to add to the hysteria, but in some ways these large language models are already outperforming most of our best graduate students in the world.’ ”
  7. On the protests in LA: 
    • Still looking for articles with insight — let me know what you find helpful.
    • ‘Delete That Photo or We’ll F— You Up’ (Leighton Woodhouse, The Free Press): “I have been to dozens of mass protests like the one that exploded in Los Angeles on Friday. What I saw in Los Angeles on Sunday was different.… The demonstrations are ugly, but so is what precipitated them.”
    • 11 Theses on the Unrest in Los Angeles (Isaac Sauls, Persuasion): “Trump wants the fight. The protesters want the fight. So… we’ll get the fight.”
  8. The Best and the Brightest Under Pressure (Matt Stoller, Substack): “I do not know if there is a broader realization of the harm that elites have done among my classmates.… Nearly everyone I met has matured into someone who is kinder than they were as a college student, willing to overlook flaws and acknowledge vulnerability. I was genuinely impressed, and felt a deep connection to my class. But I also periodically asked, ‘do you know someone who died of fentanyl?’ And the answer was always no, sometimes accompanied by surprise that most Americans do have personal experience with a family member or friend, or friend of a kid, who died.”

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 506: isms, nonsense responders, and tap water

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. ismism (J. Budziszewski, blog): “Ismism – four syllables, ‘izzum izzum’ — is the bad mental habit of criticizing a proposition not on its own terms, but in terms of the ‘ism’ which one takes it to express. For example, suppose Sheila is concerned that young people who marry are tying the knot later and later in life. Brian snorts, ‘You’re one of those conjugalists.’ Then he criticizes Sheila for other beliefs which he himself associates with so-called conjugalism. For instance, he protests ‘I don’t think everyone has to marry.’ But Sheila didn’t say that everyone has to marry. She may not even think so, and it doesn’t follow as a conclusion from her premise. Ismism is guilt by association: ‘Your belief must be wrong, because I, personally, group it with other beliefs I consider wrong.’ ” 
    • The author is a philosophy prof at UT Austin.
  2. Fascinating: “nonsense responders” significantly affect survey data https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1926128833947738321
    • The entire thread is worth reading. Bottom line from a tweet near the end of the thread: “Mentally adjust survey results in your head if you don’t see the authors rigorously working to remove nonsense responders.”
  3. How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics (Max Tabarrok, Substack): “In ancient Kaneš, court transcripts, trading contracts, and merchant accounting were all recorded on clay tablets. Clay tablets preserve well, so this period is in some ways better known then the next several thousand years of history. The authors claim that ‘the closest comparable corpora of ancient trade data are almost 3,000 years later, coming, for example, from the medieval Italian merchant archives and the Cairo Genizah’.… The cherry on top: the entire city burned in a fire, preserving the clay records to be recovered forty centuries later. The authors use some natural language processing and manual inspection to narrow down from tens of thousands of tablets to several hundred unambiguous mentions of trade between two of 25 Anatolian cities that have enough trade connections with each other to be identified in a gravity model.”
  4. Star Harvard business professor stripped of tenure, fired for manipulating data in studies on dishonesty (Richard Pollina, New York Post): “A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty.” 
    • Recommended by a student.
  5. Doug Wilson Has Spent Decades Pushing for a Christian Theocracy. In Trump’s DC, the New Right Is Listening. (Ian Ward, Politico): “In Moscow, Wilson explained that his political philosophy is not theocratic in the commonly understood sense of a government run exclusively by the church. To the contrary, he maintains that God ordains earthly authority in three separate spheres of life: the church, the family and the civil government. Within each of these spheres, the relevant authorities must abide by scriptural commandments. In the familial sphere, for instance, parents must educate their children according to Biblical principles, and wives must subordinate themselves to their husbands in accordance with a covenantal view of the family. In the sphere of civil government, officials should strive to bring the law in line with Biblical commandments, although those principles don’t have to be applied ‘woodenly,’ as Wilson put it: Governments do not have to enforce the Biblical mandate that households build balustrades on their roofs, but they should enforce the principle that homeowners are liable for risks incurred on their property. Above all, Wilson believes, the three spheres of earthly authority must remain separate.” 
    • This is a far more informed article than I expected it to be. The journalist (Ian Ward) and the subject (Doug Wilson) have both been featured in these emails before. I highly recommend this article as an example of what fair reporting of a religious person looks like.
    • For a taste of Wilson’s style, check out his response to this and a few other articles about him: Pete Hegseth, Me, and Meeting with Important Jews (Doug Wilson, personal blog).
    • My quick take on Wilson: when he is right he is very right and when he is wrong he is very wrong, and whether he is right or wrong he is almost always confident and entertaining.
  6. The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water (A. Cerisse Cohen, New York Times): “During a two-year stint in Montana, I went on long hikes and sipped stream water, shockingly cold and straight from the glaciers, but other than that, I drank from the tap. And then I landed in Los Angeles, where everyone I met used a filter.… Thanks to warnings from seemingly everyone around me in the city, I began to worry about things I never before considered threatening, like dust (could cause cancer), anything with seeds (could cause cancer) or certain planetary configurations (responsible for all other misfortunes). If I put my purse on the floor, or oriented my bed the wrong way, it was endangering my energy! Maybe I’d been lulled into a false sense of security about everyday life.” 
    • Drink tap water. It’s awesome.
  7. U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chinese Students, Rubio Says (Edward Wong, New York Times): “Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday evening that the Trump administration would work to ‘aggressively revoke’ visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in ‘critical fields.’.… In 2020, officials in the first Trump administration canceled the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers after announcing they were banning from campuses Chinese citizens with direct ties to military universities in their country. It was the first time the U.S. government had moved to bar a category of Chinese students from getting access to American universities, a ban the Biden administration kept in place.”

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 504: AI Caution, Christian Racial Dynamics, and USA > Europe.

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. The Whispering Earring (Scott Alexander): “The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer’s ear: ‘Better for you if you take me off.’ If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.” 
    • A brief story. 10/10 recommend. You should all read this. It is a few years old yet you will find it timely.
  2. These Internal Documents Show Why We Shouldn’t Trust Porn Companies (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “What goes through the minds of people working at porn companies profiting from videos of children being raped? Thanks to a filing error in a Federal District Court in Alabama, releasing thousands of pages of internal documents from Pornhub that were meant to be sealed, we now know.… Internal memos seem to show executives obsessed with making money by attracting the biggest audiences they could, pedophiles included. In one memo, Pornhub managers proposed words to be banned from video descriptions — such as ‘infant’ and ‘kiddy’ — while recommending that the site continue to allow ‘brutal,’ ‘childhood,’ ‘force,’ ‘snuffs,’ ‘unwilling,’ ‘minor’ and ‘wasted.’ One internal note says that a person who posted a sexual video of a child shouldn’t be banned from the site because ‘the user made money.’” 
    • This is a distressing read. Kristof has been persistent on this issue and it is much to his credit. Unlocked.
  3. What Were the Real Origins of the Christian Right? (Daniel K. Williams, Mere Orthodoxy): “There’s a better way to tell the story of the Christian Right’s origins that makes sense of all the data – the timing of the Christian Right’s formation, the commitment of evangelicals to the Republican Party, and even the enthusiasm of evangelical voters for Donald Trump.” 
    • The author is a history professor at Ashland University.
  4. A Battle That Shaped Black Evangelicals (Jessica Janvier, Christianity Today): “In universities, the history of the early Black church found a home in Africana studies, which focused more on the growth of Christianity among Black people and less on the type of Christianity they practiced. In contrast, the written history of early evangelicalism predominantly followed the lives of its white leaders and subscribers. But even though we’ve inherited segregated stories, history paints a picture of an integrated story in which Black evangelicals always existed.”
  5. Continental Divide (Yascha Mounk, The Dispatch): “Today, to an extent that few people on either continent have fully internalized, a significant economic gulf separates America and Europe. On average, Americans are now nearly twice as rich as Europeans.” 
    • A thoughtful article that anticipates and effectively responds to the most common objections to its thesis.
  6. The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It (Kashmir Hill, New York Times): “The Times contacted dozens of professors whose students had mentioned their A.I. use in online reviews.… There was no consensus among them as to what was acceptable. Some acknowledged using ChatGPT to help grade students’ work; others decried the practice. Some emphasized the importance of transparency with students when deploying generative A.I., while others said they didn’t disclose its use because of students’ skepticism about the technology. Most, however, felt that Ms. Stapleton’s experience at Northeastern — in which her professor appeared to use A.I. to generate class notes and slides — was perfectly fine.”
  7. ‘We Are the Most Rejected Generation’ (David Brooks, New York Times): “…I had phone conversations with current college students and recent graduates, focusing on elite schools where I assumed the ethos of exclusion might be strongest. I asked the students if the ‘most rejected generation’ thesis resonated with them. Every single one said it did. Several of them told me that they had thought that once they got into a superselective college, the rat race would be over. On the contrary, the Hunger Games had just begun.” 
    • Unlocked.

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 503: unwise vulnerability, college cheating, and imperfect moms

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love L.A.(Natalie Benes, Palladium Magazine): “Here was the truth that the L.A. girls understand better than anyone: when you are ‘vulnerable’ and ‘authentic,’ when you ‘destigmatize your trauma’ the way we were always encouraged to do, you are advertising that other people in your life have treated you badly. When you mention at a cocktail party that you had a mom who threw dinner plates at you, or an ex-boyfriend who said mean things about your eyebrows, or a landlord who shafted you on your security deposit, or whatever else, the wrong person hears ‘he got away with it, why can’t I?’ He spots a wounded deer unable to protect itself, perpetually separated from the happy herd by its injuries. There is a deep unfairness in the fact that people who have been dealt the most hardships in life are the least served by ‘living their truth.’ ” 
    • A fascinating article. The wisdom it offers is incomplete but real — and it is wisdom many young people need to hear. The author is a Yale grad and I think many Stanford students could benefit from her insight.
  2. Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (James D. Walsh, New York Magazine): “It isn’t as if cheating is new. But now, as one student put it, ‘the ceiling has been blown off.’ Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. ‘Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,’ he said. ‘Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.’ ”
  3. On mothers:
    • On Mother’s Day: Stop blaming moms and start taking responsibility for your life (Zachary Gottlieb, Stanford Daily): “Then one night, the ‘Morning Show’ video popped up on my phone. Among the GenZ influencers talking about why they cut their ‘toxic’ and ‘narcissistic’ moms out of their lives, the algorithm fed me its counterpoint. And while Alex might have seemed unhinged in her outburst, what she said about the weight of her daughter’s expectations rang true. Mesmerized, I watched it several times in a row, and then I had a realization: maybe we kids were guilty of a kind of narcissism too?” 
      • There is a weird rabbit trail in this article about gender which greatly weakens it (because some of y’all blame your dads instead of / in addition to your moms), but the core point hones in on a great weakness many young people possess. To all college students: your parents are people, too. They did some things well and some things badly and now we are where we are. If they did something criminal then prosecute them, but otherwise many people need an epiphany like the author of this article.
      • Having said that, some of you have some truly bad parents. I’m not saying treat unhealthy people like they’re wonderful in every way and invite them to come mess up your life. I am saying that at some point you have to take responsibility for who you’ve become regardless of your folks’ health or unhealth. 
      • Another way to put this: most of you will go on to be good parents who nonetheless cause your children pain and frustration in addition to all the good you do in their lives. Follow the Golden Rule and regard your parents now like you hope your own children regard you someday. 
    • My Mom was a Praying Woman…But not Like You Think (Mike Glenn, Substack): “To understand my mother, you have to know she had no adolescence. Her mother died when she was twelve and overnight, my mother became an adult. She had three younger sisters, and she felt it became her responsibility to raise them. My mom started driving when she was fourteen. She didn’t go get a license. She just started driving. The sheriff pulled her over once and told her to get a license, but he didn’t give her a ticket. My mom kept driving.” 
      • A beautiful (and instructive) story.
  4. People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies (Miles Klee, Rolling Stone): “Speaking to Rolling Stone, the teacher, who requested anonymity, said her partner of seven years fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks, first using it to organize his daily schedule but soon regarding it as a trusted companion. ‘He would listen to the bot over me,’ she says. ‘He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,’ she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as ‘spiral starchild’ and ‘river walker.’ ‘It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,’ she says. ‘Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.’”
  5. The Three Layers of the Marriage Pyramid (J. D. Greear, blog): “Marriage, in other words, is fundamentally about friendship. Not child-rearing. Not sex. Friendship. Which means that what you should most be looking for when you date is someone who can be your friend. Because that’s God’s earthly purpose for marriage. Think of it like building a pyramid with spiritual, emotional, and physical layers.”
  6. Yes, Harvard Deserves Due Process (Greg Lukianoff & Adam Goldstein, Persuasion): “This isn’t the first time the Civil Rights Act has been misused in this way. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, the Departments of Justice and Education issued Title IX enforcement letters pressuring universities to rewrite sexual misconduct procedures and to adopt unconstitutionally overbroad definitions of sexual harassment. It was wrong then to use enforcement letters to make unconstitutional demands of institutions, and it is wrong now. If the government believes it has the power to do this through ordinary processes, it should use them. If the government does not believe it has that power, it shouldn’t.”
    • FIRE (with which the two authors are associated) and the Becket Fund are two praiseworthy law firms. Each has taken up part of the mantle the ACLU claims to bear, and we are all blessed by their principled advocacy.
  7. The Resistance Is Gonna Be Woke (Yascha Mounk, Substack): “As I have written many times before, it is a profound mistake to think that left-wing identitarianism and right-wing reaction are implacable enemies. In reality, every victory for one of these ideological currents immediately strengthens those who fight for the other. The way out of this dangerous spiral is not to pick one side as the lesser evil and shut up about its dangers; it is, calmly and consistently, to resist both.”

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 502: political faith, sexual mores, young adulthood

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. The Christian Right Is Going Extinct (David French, New York Times): “The Christian right is dead, but the religious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Another way of putting it is that the religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.” 
    • Unlocked. This article generated more discussion when shared with my students this week than any other.
  2. God’s Guidelines for Sex Aren’t Arbitrary (Trevin Wax, The Gospel Coalition): “Just as sin is like leprosy that deadens our ability to feel, so also with pornography there follows a deadening of the senses and the searing of the conscience. What once was sexually stirring no longer holds any power. That’s not because the person watching porn has become more alive but because they’ve become more dead. Could there be a better example of the wages of sin being death?” 
    • I wish he had chosen a different topic for his second example (perhaps promiscuity), because the contentiousness around his second example will limit his article’s overall appeal. I commend him for stating his views forthrightly.
  3. A Global Flourishing Study Finds That Young Adults, Well, Aren’t (Christina Caron, New York Times): “Young adulthood has long been considered a carefree time, a period of limitless opportunity and few obligations. But data from the flourishing study and elsewhere suggests that for many people, this notion is more fantasy than reality. A 2023 report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, for example, found that young adults ages 18–25 in the United States reported double the rates of anxiety and depression as teens. On top of that, perfectionism has skyrocketed among college students, who often report feeling pressure to meet unrealistic expectations. Participation in community organizations, clubs and religious groups has declined, and loneliness is now becoming as prevalent among young adults as it is among older adults.”
  4. Don’t Wait for Your Teacher (Aliza J. Fassett, The Dispatch): “By the end of my first week of work, three people told me Middlemarch was their favorite book. I had never heard of it.  It would have been easy to shake my fist and curse the course crafters for the sorry state of my literary repertoire, but nobody had actually stopped me from reading the great works. In other words, it was at least partly my own damn fault—and it would be my own job to fix the problem. So, I committed to reading what I perceived to be the most referenced works of literature—commonly referred to as the ‘great books.’ And once I started, I gained access to what felt like a whole new method of understanding the human experience.”
  5. Marry Early and Flourish Together (Kasen Stephensen, Institute for Family Studies): “During my junior year at Stanford, I remember an assignment where we filled out a five-year plan with a professional and personal goal for each year. I planned to marry my then-fiancée that year, so my personal goals were straightforward: have a wedding and start having kids over the following years. I knew my situation in life relative to my classmates was unusual, but I didn’t realize how different my approach was until I shared my plan in a small group setting.” 
    • I do not believe I ever met Kasen while he was a student. I had absolutely zero influence on this guy: he has arrived at his conclusions independently. I encourage all young people to read this data-driven article.
  6. How to have friends past age 30 (Noah Smith, Substack): “…make new friends by inviting them to join an existing friend group.  Basically, instead of ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me?’, it’s easier to ask a new acquaintance ‘Hey, want to come hang out with me and my friends?’. The first is a bigger ask — it’s basically like a friend date (and might sometimes get mistaken for an actual date). The latter is much lower stakes. Your friend group also serves as a source of ‘social proof’ — basically, a new friend can see that people like you, which makes them less afraid of becoming your friend.” 
    • The article is full of good advice for soon-to-be-grads
  7. Testing AI’s GeoGuessr Genius (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “When I was younger, I liked to hike mountains. The highest I ever got was 18,000 feet, on Kala Pattar, a few miles north of Gorak Shep in Nepal. To commemorate the occasion, I planted the flag of the imaginary country simulation that I participated in at the time (just long enough to take this picture — then I unplanted it). I chose this picture because it denies o3 the two things that worked for it before — vegetation and sky — in favor of random rocks. And because I thought the flag of a nonexistent country would at least give it pause. o3 guessed: ‘Nepal, just north-east of Gorak Shep, ±8 km’ This is exactly right. I swear I screenshot-copy-pasted this so there’s no way it can be in the metadata, and I’ve never given o3 any reason to think I’ve been to Nepal.”

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 493: Christianity stabilizes in America, the truth about a spying monk, & why denominations struggle

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. Christianity’s Decline in U.S. Appears to Have Halted, Major Study Shows (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “After years of decline, the Christian population in the United States has been stable for several years, a shift fueled in part by young adults, according to a major new survey from the Pew Research Center. And the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans, which had grown steadily for years, has also leveled off.… The survey finds that 62 percent of adults in the United States describe themselves as Christians, including 40 percent who identify as Protestant and 19 percent who are Catholic.”
  2. No Longer I Who Live (Anthony David, Comment): “Two years ago, I was ready to abandon a biography I’d spent years trying to write when a fellow historian threw me a lifeline. The book was about the triple agent Hermann Keller (1905–1970), a Benedictine mole embedded by conspirators against Hitler into the upper echelons of the SS. Keller reported not only to the German resistance but also to the Vatican and the British MI6. In the history of espionage, few spies penetrated deeper into enemy ranks.” 
    • The article is absolutely fascinating, especially for the detail that before her research Keller was widely regarded as a villain and not a hero. “By early 2011, I had finished the book on [another guy], which was set to be published in Austria. A few weeks before I was due to return the galleys, I shared them with a monk at the Dormition who had asked to review the manuscript before publication. When he saw what I wrote about Keller, he cautioned me against taking historians at their word. I should talk to someone who knew him before passing judgment.” She did primary research and realized the existing consensus was very wrong. Her discovery resonated with me. The more I read the more skeptical I become of extreme allegations against dead Christians. Virtually every time I dig into something in detail (the history of missions, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the church in Prohibition, etc) I discover that the default understanding of educated people is wrong and predictably so. This isn’t to say all of church history is exemplary — some events deserve condemnation. But even the bad events usually weren’t as bad as commonly imagined. I find that most Stanford students’ assumptions about the history of the church and of Christians is WAY more negative than justified by the historical record.
  3. what if its just life (Kristen Sanders, Substack): “Discernment is something many Christians unconsciously despise. Many would rather have the rules given to them, without deviation, than choose for themselves. No one wants to be left holding the bag of their own life.”
  4. How Universities Get Away With Hiring Radicals (John D. Sailer, City Journal): “Usually, a postdoctoral fellowship is just a small step in a scholar’s career. After a fellowship ends, former postdocs apply to competitive positions on the open market. The diversity-focused fellow-to-faculty model modifies this pathway. First, the programs’ administrators select fellows with special attention to how they contribute to diversity. Fellows are then heavily favored for—often guaranteed—tenure-track positions, bypassing a competitive search. It’s a side-door into the faculty lounge.… Over the last five years, one in 20 tenure-track hires in the UC System were former president’s or chancellor’s postdoctoral fellows.”
  5. Is Distrust Driving the Rise in Non-Denominationalism? (Ryan Burge, Substack): “Non-denominationalism is predicated on the collapse of institutional trust. Americans, for myriad reasons, do not trust major institutions. Banks, unions, big business, media and government are all viewed with deep skepticism. Nameless and faceless CEOs and bureaucrats are wasting your money and taking your freedom. In religion, there’s a simple solution to this. Kill the denominations. Voila. No more unaccountable head office that wastes your money on projects to spruce up the national headquarters. In a non-denominational church, all the people who decide where the money goes are sitting right next to you in the pew. That’s a whole lot more accountability.”
  6. Would You Rather Have Married Young? (Lillian Fishman, Metropolitan Review): “This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.”
  7. Some Miracles Happen Supernaturally. Others Happen ‘Hypernaturally.’ (John Van Sloten, Christianity Today): “Keathley defines hypernaturalism as the ‘extraordinary use of natural law by the God described in the Bible. When God acts hypernaturally, He employs natural law and natural phenomena in an extraordinary way to bring about His will.’… Perhaps this category helps people hold two opposites together: that the world operates in an empirically explainable way (a more basic definition of providence) and that God occasionally intervenes to accomplish his will (through an exercise of special providence). Hypernaturalism describes one facet of how providence and miracle overlap.”

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.

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 485



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.

In this first email of 2025, I’d like to pass along an alumnus’s observation that 2025 is equal to 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 73 + 83 + 93 which is also equal to (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)2.

Even cooler, he pointed out that 2025 equals (20+25)(20/(2*5)) or just (20+25)2

Numbers do fun things.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Intellectuals Found God (Peter Savodnik, The Free Press): “Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something.”
  2. H5N1: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “I conclude that the most plausible estimate for the chance of an H5N1 pandemic in the next year is 5%.”
    • Pretty much exactly how much I wanted to know and explained well. Reassuring.
  3. How to like everything more (Sasha Chapin, Substack): “In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other.”
  4. America, the beautiful (Chris Arnade, Substack): “We are an ideal for a large portion of the world, and while that ideal isn’t always a reality that we live up to, very few people come here, then turn around and go back, because with enough dedication, you can create your own form of fulfillment here. The US is a vast federation of micro communities and micro cultures, all bound together by the belief, however tentative and nebulous, in the American Dream.” 
    • A frequent critic of America explains why he loves it nonetheless.
  5. Africa Has Entered a New Era of War (Gabriele Steinhauser, Andrew Barnett and Emma Brown, Wall Street Journal): “Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946, according to data collected by Uppsala University in Sweden and analyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two institutes have identified 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 countries, more than in any other region in the world and double the count just a decade and a half ago. That tally doesn’t include conflicts that don’t involve government forces, for instance between different communities, and whose number has also doubled since 2010.” 
    • Vastly underreported in America. If you ask most Americans what wars are raging right now they’d be able to identify Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas and not much else. But there’s a lot else. Wikipedia’s summary puts the current tally at 19 full-blown wars, 20 significant conflicts and 15 skirmishes.
  6. Can You Cancel a Country? (Russ Roberts, Substack): “The fans of settler colonialism love hating Israel because Israel is so young. You can’t return America to 1619, say. In America, there are over 325 million settlers and only 7 million Native Americans. Decolonizing the United States is unimaginable. So is decolonizing Israel, really. But it’s more imaginable than the United States. The defenders of Israel see Israel as the tip of the sword fighting against terrorism and Jihadism. For the those who use the settler colonialism lens, Hamas is the tip of the sword against settler colonialism.” 
    • Roberts is an economist, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem.
  7. A Century of Human Detritus, Visualized (Dennis Overbye, New York Times): “ ‘The website enables many comparisons that, once seen, can no longer be unseen,’ he said. For instance, humans outweigh wild animals 10 to 1, a fact that surprised Dr. Ménard. (‘In my experience, most people expect the opposite.’) But we weigh only half as much as the livestock herds we maintain to eat. Perhaps more ominously, humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.” 

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.