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
- Incentives are for losers (Adam Mastroianni, Substack): “Our value systems are flimsy for the same reason our scientific reasoning is flimsy: we don’t fix our mental models until something tells us that they’re broken. So unless your pastor is popping quizzes during the sermon and cold-calling people in the pews, and unless you find yourself thrust into various Trolley Problems on a regular basis, there’s nothing that tells you that you need to firm up your moral and theological convictions. Why spend your days wondering about right and wrong, good and evil, sacred and profane, etc. when you don’t have to? You’re just going to get yourself into trouble, or even worse, into a philosophy PhD program.”
- A Catholic Moment or an Evangelical Century? (Timon Cline, First Things): “Contrary to online chatter, we are not in a ‘Catholic moment.’ But we may already be in an evangelical century. Significantly more people are leaving Catholicism than converting to it. By contrast, evangelical Protestants boast remarkably high conversion and retention rates and healthier levels of practical piety—church attendance, Bible reading, catechesis. Through the upheaval of the past half century, evangelicals have remained numerically and spiritually stable, have repeatedly reformed their institutions, and consistently outperform their counterparts. To cite one example, the percentage of Americans who convert from Catholicism to Protestantism (4 percent) is higher than the percentage of all converts to Catholicism (1.5 percent).”
- GIFT LINK: When His Church Goes Dark, They Talk to His Digital Twin (Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff, New York Times): “Lester cloned his voice and trained his digital twin using almost two million words of his sermons, podcasts, books, text messages and emails. For the last several months, it had been publicly available on his website and Facebook page for online chats or phone calls. It had learned to mimic his bent toward optimism, his obsession with the Green Bay Packers and his casual slang, but it did more than just regurgitate what he had already said. It mapped his thinking onto new conversations to provide advice around the clock for people he’d never met who had questions he’d never been asked. ‘It’s a digital version of my mind,’ he told his congregation. ‘If I’m asleep or traveling, you don’t have to wait. You can have 24–7 access to this other version of me.’ ”
- Recommended to me by a horrified alumnus. Here is the pastor’s AI page: friendshipvallejo.org/pjgpt
- Yet more AI news:
- GIFT LINK: This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature (Carl Zimmer, New York Times): “The authors of the study relied on an A.I. model called Evo, which is similar in some ways to ChatGPT, made by OpenAI.… DNA is strikingly similar to a book in some ways: a string of molecular building blocks, known as nucleotides, arrayed like letters in a line of text. A gene consists of hundreds of nucleotides drawn from a four-letter alphabet: A, C, G and T. The sequence encodes the instructions for building proteins and other molecules. DNA has its own rules of grammar, and if a sequence violates them, the result is biological gibberish.… The researchers wondered if Evo could pick up these rules on its own. Instead of training it on text, they trained it on genetic sequences drawn from millions of animals, plants, microbes and viruses. All told, Evo scanned about nine trillion nucleotides.”
- No Data Centers In My Backyard (Jasmine Sun, Substack): “…maybe this is a choice between a hyperscale data center and a concrete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab.… Back in San Francisco, it is striking how little the AI industry understands its own unpopularity—the reasons that people resist. They ask if it’s a problem of benefits not being generous enough, or else a big misinformation campaign.”
- What happens when you talk to AI? (Anthropic, YouTube) — (Anthropic, YouTube): five minutes. A good overview to send friends and family who have questions
- Universities would prefer not to. (Hollis Robbins, Substack): “More than 90 percent of notable AI models released in 2025 came from industry: GPT‑5, Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Grok 4, Llama 4, DeepSeek-V3.2, Qwen 3, Kimi K2. The infrastructure supporting frontier development is also overwhelmingly from industry. Global AI compute capacity has been growing 3.3x annually since 2022, doubling every seven months, driven by hyperscalers and enormous data-center investments.… Universities have no influence over the pace of AI frontier development. Obsessed as they are with curricular battles and viewpoint diversity they have no standing even to have a voice.”
- The author is an English professor at the University of Utah.
- Some thoughts on the limits of AI in writing:
- GIFT LINK: I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I. (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.”
- Why You Should Almost Never Use AI to Write Anything Substantive (Erich Grunewald, personal blog): “I think it makes a lot of sense to use AI for many other parts of the research and writing processes, such as transcribing audio, analyzing data, searching for information, brainstorming, and giving feedback on drafts.… [However, to write] I must first know what I want to say, i.e., I must think about evidence and arguments and arrive at some beliefs. So writing forces me to do those things, which are necessary for any writing or research project. For any such project, someone has to have the entire thing in their head – all the bits of evidence, considerations, arguments, and how these fit together. Writing with AI makes it easier to avoid the necessary thinking.”
- My Medical Association Silenced My Views on Gender Treatment (Karla Solheim, The Free Press): “I was floored to discover the research basis into gender medicine both for adolescents and adults was not just poor; it was fraudulent. I couldn’t understand how my medical association, let alone others in my field, could endorse it.… Ordinary people can see quite clearly that this medicine is dangerous. When our greatest medical authorities insist otherwise, it undermines doctors’ credibility and makes people less likely to trust us for their care.”
- N.Y. Doctor Sentenced in Japan for Vandalizing Ancient Religious Sites (Kiuko Notoya and Hari Raj, New York Times): “A court in Japan on Thursday handed a Manhattan doctor a suspended sentence of 18 months in prison after finding him guilty of vandalizing two ancient religious sites, capping more than a decade of litigation that led to a rare extradition.… Dr. Kanayama, a practicing Christian, admitted during the trial that he had damaged the sites.”
Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen
- Visting Stanford (Aaron Dinin, TikTok): three minutes. The guy is a professor at Duke.
- Tell Us What Kind Of Coffee Your Church Serves And We’ll Tell You What Denomination You Are — (Babylon Bee)
- ‘There Aren’t Bad Pets, Only Bad Owners,’ Explains Woman Out Walking Velociraptor — (Babylon Bee)
- GIFT LINK: What’s It Like to Have an A.I. Boss? (Heather Knight, New York Times): “…what if the boss was replaced by A.I.? The first four months of operations at Andon Market, a San Francisco shop billed as the world’s first retail boutique run by A.I., have provided some answers. In short, having an A.I. boss can be like working for a teddy bear with amnesia.”
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.