Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 445

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 444

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

This is vol­ume 444, which is just the same dig­it repeat­ed. I like that. Clean. Classy. Ele­gant.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Rant About Wor­ship Songs (Jere­my Pierce, First Things): “Here are some of the things I real­ly hate in a wor­ship song.”
    • This is bril­liant, from back in 2010.
  2. Top Only­Fans cre­ator mak­ing $300,000 a month turns to Christ, walks away from porn indus­try (John Knox, Not The Bee): “From what I can tell, Nala here isn’t going through a Lil’ Nas X ‘Chris­t­ian era’ where she’s aging out of porn and wants to rebrand her­self as a good girl again before piv­ot­ing to anoth­er grift. All I see is gen­uine joy, like the pros­ti­tute who wept and was for­giv­en at Jesus’ feet.”
    • Includes a video of her shar­ing her tes­ti­mo­ny. I love this part: “The dev­il can tru­ly give you things in this life. He has a bud­get, though. He can only go so far.… The dev­il has a bud­get, but God does not.”
  3. Lati­nos Are Flock­ing to Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty (Marie Arana, The Free Press): “In fact, some researchers project that by 2030, half of the entire pop­u­la­tion of Amer­i­can Lati­nos will iden­ti­fy as Protes­tant evan­gel­i­cals. Com­pare that growth with white evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants, whose num­bers have declined from 23 per­cent of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion in 2006 to 14 per­cent in 2020. With the His­pan­ic population’s pro­ject­ed growth, in less than a decade, we may see forty mil­lion Latinos—a con­gre­ga­tion the size of California—heading to Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal church­es every Sun­day.”
  4. Is Rome a True Church? (Chris Castal­do, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Protes­tants tend to answer the ques­tion of Roman Catholicism’s sta­tus in one of two ways. Look­ing through the lens of the ear­ly creeds (i.e., Nicene and Apos­tles’), some under­stand it to be fun­da­men­tal­ly ortho­dox. The ratio­nale is sim­ple: because the creeds uphold the basic tenets of Chris­tian­i­ty, and Rome upholds those creeds, her apos­tolic­i­ty is affirmed. Roman Catholi­cism is thus regard­ed as ‘inside the pale.’ An alter­na­tive read­ing, one that prob­a­bly informed the Face­book com­ment, is to view the Roman Catholic Church through the lens of the six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Ref­or­ma­tion in which the Coun­cil of Trent anath­e­ma­tized (pro­nounced to be cursed) the doc­trine of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion by faith alone. Because such faith is rec­og­nized as the dri­ving cen­ter of the bib­li­cal gospel, and Rome force­ful­ly repu­di­ates the doc­trine, the Roman Church is there­fore con­sid­ered incom­pat­i­ble with bib­li­cal faith.  I rec­og­nize the log­ic in these posi­tions, but in my opin­ion, both are incom­plete.”
  5. Jour­nal­ism Has a Reli­gion Prob­lem (Andrew T. Walk­er, Nation­al Review): “Jour­nal­ism has a reli­gion prob­lem. More specif­i­cal­ly, jour­nal­ists are either unaware or unwill­ing to admit that their own views, pre­sum­ably untouched by ‘reli­gion,’ are nonethe­less pas­sion­ate­ly held con­vic­tions ground­ed, well, some­where. What do I mean by that? Well, jour­nal­ism that touch­es on reli­gion and pol­i­tics tends to see reli­gious view­points as car­ry­ing a spe­cial bur­den. It goes some­thing like this: ‘Tell me, Mr. Pious, why a diverse pop­u­la­tion should accept your views on moral­i­ty, con­sid­er­ing they come from reli­gion.’ ”
  6. Har­vard Tram­ples the Truth (Mar­tin Kulldorff,City Jour­nal): “…as I dis­cov­ered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a sto­ry of a Har­vard bio­sta­tis­ti­cian and infec­tious-dis­ease epi­demi­ol­o­gist, cling­ing to the truth as the world lost its way dur­ing the Covid pan­dem­ic.… Two Har­vard col­leagues tried to arrange a debate between me and oppos­ing Har­vard fac­ul­ty, but just as with Stan­ford, there were no tak­ers. The invi­ta­tion to debate remains open. The pub­lic should not trust sci­en­tists, even Har­vard sci­en­tists, unwill­ing to debate their posi­tions with fel­low sci­en­tists.”
  7. How the Gaza Min­istry of Health Fakes Casu­al­ty Num­bers (Abra­ham Wyn­er, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “If Hamas’ num­bers are faked or fraud­u­lent in some way, there may be evi­dence in the num­bers them­selves that can demon­strate it. While there is not much data avail­able, there is a lit­tle, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Min­istry released dai­ly casu­al­ty fig­ures that include both a total num­ber and a spe­cif­ic num­ber of women and chil­dren.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of sta­tis­tics at the Whar­ton School, and I find his analy­sis com­pelling.

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 443

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

This, vol­ume 443, is a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Four Ways of Look­ing at Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…to chart the sup­posed reach of Chris­t­ian nation­al­ism, a sur­vey from the Pub­lic Reli­gion Research Insti­tute asks respon­dents whether they agree with the for­mu­la­tion ‘U.S. laws should be based on Chris­t­ian val­ues.’ But some­one who says yes might just be agree­ing with King’s ‘Let­ter From Birm­ing­ham Jail’ or the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, not endors­ing a legal code based on Deuteron­o­my.”
    • Unlocked.
  2. Relat­ed: If It Were Me, I’d Try Not Help­ing the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists (Jake Meador, Mere Ortho­doxy): “A demo­c­ra­t­ic life is not the high­est thing or the best thing. But as a way of liv­ing amongst our neigh­bors and seek­ing to live a life of con­science under the law, it is a very good thing. The Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists, with their strong man pol­i­tics, sup­port for rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence, and obses­sion with racial sol­i­dar­i­ty would destroy all of that. What wor­ries me now, though, is not the Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists them­selves. Frankly, many of them are too reck­less, undis­ci­plined, and reac­tive to be able to accom­plish the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change they seek. What wor­ries me is that there are a great many social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers who love the demo­c­ra­t­ic life who are con­stant­ly being called ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ists’ by the likes of Hei­di Przy­by­la for believ­ing things that are utter­ly unre­mark­able in Chris­t­ian his­to­ry. If our sec­u­lar media out­lets con­tin­ue to tell them that ‘Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism’ is the belief in things vir­tu­al­ly all Chris­tians across his­to­ry have believed, I fear they will lis­ten. And they will find these eth­no-nation­al­ist total­i­tar­i­an aspi­rants and, not real­iz­ing what they are doing, they will make com­mon cause with them.”
    • This is one of the most help­ful pieces I’ve seen on Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism. It’s a bit long, but eas­i­ly skim­ma­ble to zero in on the parts you find most inter­est­ing.
  3. What hap­pened after a man got 217 coro­n­avirus shots (Rachel Pan­nett, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Going into the study, the researchers had spec­u­lat­ed that hav­ing so many shots could cause his immune sys­tem to become fatigued. Vac­cines cre­ate immune mem­o­ry cells that are on stand­by, ready to rapid­ly acti­vate the body’s defens­es in the event of an infec­tion. But in fact, the researchers found that the man had more of these immune cells — known as T‑cells — than a con­trol group that had received the stan­dard three-dose vac­cine reg­i­men. They also did not detect any fatigue in these cells, which they said were just as effec­tive as those of peo­ple who had received a typ­i­cal num­ber of coro­n­avirus shots.”
  4. Alba­nia to speed up EU acces­sion using Chat­G­PT (Alice Tay­lor, Eurac­tiv): “The Alban­ian gov­ern­ment will use Chat­G­PT to trans­late thou­sands of pages of EU legal mea­sures and pro­vi­sions into shqip (Alban­ian lan­guage) and then inte­grate them into exist­ing legal struc­tures, fol­low­ing an agree­ment with the CEO of the par­ent com­pa­ny, Ope­nAI, Mira Murati, who was born in Alba­nia.… on 13 Decem­ber, at the EU sum­mit in Brus­sels, he will present the project and a suc­cess­ful test of ‘the Alban­ian mod­el of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence for the inter­po­si­tion of the leg­is­la­tion totalling 280,000 pages of legal mea­sures of the EU.’”
  5. I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train (Steve Charnok, Metro): “While the 17-year-old does indeed live on trains, he does so entire­ly legal­ly. And with a sur­pris­ing amount of com­fort. Lasse trav­els 600 miles a day through­out Ger­many aboard Deutsche Bahn trains. He trav­els first class, sleeps on night trains, has break­fast in DB lounges and takes show­ers in pub­lic swim­ming pools and leisure cen­tres, all using his unlim­it­ed annu­al rail­card.”

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 442

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 441

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

This is vol­ume 441, which is 212 and also the small­est square which is the sum of six con­sec­u­tive cubes: 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63

No amus­ing stuff at the end this week. I’ve been busy trav­el­ing and am vast­ly underamused.😅

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (T. M. Suffield, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Pen­ning­ton describes the beat­i­tudes as ‘divine gold of price­less worth’ that ‘appears to be only dark­ness.’ Like wis­dom say­ings they don’t give up their gold imme­di­ate­ly. They are sup­posed to shock us and I fear we have become over­ly famil­iar with them. Jesus is argu­ing that flour­ish­ing, the good life, requires mourn­ing. The thing the mod­ern world wants to avoid most, sad­ness, is some­how a key to a good life. To us this appears to be pro­found­ly non-flour­ish­ing. The shock we should feel is part of how the beat­i­tudes are meant to work.”
    • This is a wise and per­cep­tive essay. 10/10 rec­om­mend.
  2. How Fem­i­nism Ends (Ginevra Davis, Amer­i­can Affairs Jour­nal): “If the goal of fem­i­nism is to improve the lot of females, then there are dozens of changes, social and sci­en­tif­ic, that could help alle­vi­ate their con­di­tion. But if the goal of fem­i­nism is per­fect sex­u­al equality—that no mind should ever have to make sac­ri­fices, in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or love, because of its body—then the end of fem­i­nism must, nec­es­sar­i­ly, mean the end of females. There is no oth­er way.”
    • A long but fab­u­lous essay. It’s by a Stan­ford grad, inci­den­tal­ly — this is the same author who wrote about Stan­ford’s war on fun a while back. I don’t think we ever crossed paths when she was a stu­dent.
    • Vague­ly relat­ed (but inter­est­ing enough in its own right that I would have includ­ed it regard­less): Stan­ford Med­i­cine study iden­ti­fies dis­tinct brain orga­ni­za­tion pat­terns in women and men (Stan­ford Med­i­cine): “A new study by Stan­ford Med­i­cine inves­ti­ga­tors unveils a new arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence mod­el that was more than 90% suc­cess­ful at deter­min­ing whether scans of brain activ­i­ty came from a woman or a man. The find­ings, pub­lished Feb. 20 in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, help resolve a long-term con­tro­ver­sy about whether reli­able sex dif­fer­ences exist in the human brain and sug­gest that under­stand­ing these dif­fer­ences may be crit­i­cal to address­ing neu­ropsy­chi­atric con­di­tions that affect women and men dif­fer­ent­ly.”
  3. I’m a fos­ter kid who went to Yale —and I think two-par­ent fam­i­lies are more impor­tant than col­lege (Rik­ki Schlott, New York Post): “Even though I was always aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly inclined, the lev­el of dis­or­der in my life was weigh­ing me down so much that I wasn’t in a posi­tion to ful­ly exploit my own capa­bil­i­ties.… I had a class where a pro­fes­sor admin­is­tered an anony­mous poll. Out of the 20 stu­dents, 18 of them had been raised by both of their birth par­ents. That just floored me because where I grew up it was zero.”
  4. Kin­da Nice (Damo­la Morenike­ji, Sub­stack): “A kind per­son will help you under­stand real­i­ty as it is, prompt you to reflect, and nudge you to fine-tune your posi­tion till you get to a place where your res­o­lu­tion is help­ful for you. A nice per­son will tell you what feels good — and often what you think you want to hear at that time — even if it doesn’t help you move past that sit­u­a­tion.”
  5. Our Unhap­py Youth (Antho­ny Esolen, Cri­sis Mag­a­zine): “Instead of ask­ing why they are unhap­py, we might ask why they aren’t hap­py,which might in turn lead us to ask what they have to be hap­py about. That might reveal to us in all its drab­ness what appears to be the most anti­hu­man way of life that any civ­i­liza­tion has ever set­tled into: becalmed with­out rest, somber with­out sobri­ety, abstract­ed with­out thought, licen­tious with­out even the ani­mal vig­or of license; ever shout­ing, but with­out good cheer.”
  6. Are ‘Islamists in Charge of Britain’? (Kon­stan­tin Kisin, The Free Press): “In one sense, the Speaker’s deci­sion was not unfound­ed. MPs real­ly are at risk. Only weeks pri­or, Mike Freer, a Con­ser­v­a­tive MP who rep­re­sents a con­stituen­cy with a sig­nif­i­cant Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, announced that he would not be seek­ing reelec­tion because of threats to him and his fam­i­ly over his sup­port for Israel. Explain­ing his deci­sion, he revealed that he had start­ed wear­ing stab-proof vests when meet­ing con­stituents. In 2021 anoth­er Con­ser­v­a­tive MP, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death by an Islamist at such a meet­ing. In 2017, an Islamist ter­ror­ist mowed down pedes­tri­ans before stab­bing an unarmed police offi­cer to death out­side the gates of Par­lia­ment.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. Gaza’s Past Is Call­ing (Sarah Aziza, Lux Mag­a­zine): “Com­ing up in the 1990s and 2000s, the word ‘Gaza’ was already syn­ony­mous with ‘Hamas’ — a term which, I quick­ly learned, ren­dered an entire pop­u­la­tion mon­strous. I am ashamed I often mum­bled the name — Gaza — when white Amer­i­cans asked about my fam­i­ly ori­gins. It hurt to watch them flinch, to see in their cold stares the impos­si­bil­i­ty that Gaza could ever mean moth­ers, banana, joy. The world they erased — and erase — my father’s fin­gers, draw­ing in the sand. My grandmother’s pigeons, her par­tic­u­lar way of brew­ing tea. The thou­sand, thou­sand feet that have run into the Mediter­ranean, each laugh­ter a dif­fer­ent splash. Gaza, for me, means teem­ing — a cru­el over-con­cen­tra­tion of bod­ies, yes, but at the same time, one of the world’s dens­est points of human love.”

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 440

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

This is vol­ume 440, the sum of the first sev­en­teen prime num­bers. 440 = 2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 and that fact makes me hap­py.

Also, I’ve had a busy trav­el sched­ule late­ly and haven’t kept us with as much stuff as I nor­mal­ly do, so this is a short­er com­pi­la­tion than usu­al.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Chris­t­ian Super Bowl Ad They SHOULD Have Made | He Saves Us (Jamie Bam­brick, YouTube): one com­pelling minute. I don’t have any­thing against the He Gets Us ads, but this is pret­ty great.
  2. Chris­tians Are Not Ready for the Age of “Adult AI” (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “All vari­ables being equal, it is like­ly that with­in twen­ty years, most online pornog­ra­phy will not fea­ture real human beings. Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems are already sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to fab­ri­cate entire bod­ies con­vinc­ing­ly.… It sim­ply won’t do any­more to try to elic­it post-Chris­t­ian out­rage against porn by empha­siz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sex traf­fick­ing or exploita­tion. In the era of dig­i­tal­ly-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, the ques­tion will no longer be, ‘Who was hurt in the mak­ing of this’ (for the prac­ti­cal answer to that ques­tion will be, ‘No one’). Rather, the ques­tion will be, ‘How am I hurt by con­sum­ing this,’ and, ‘Why is this objec­tive­ly wrong for me to enjoy?’ ”
  3. How Chi­na Mis­cal­cu­lat­ed Its Way to a Baby Bust (Liyan Qi, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Fol­low­ing the data release, researchers from Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty in Aus­tralia and the Shang­hai Acad­e­my of Social Sci­ences pre­dict­ed that Chi­na will have just 525 mil­lion peo­ple by the end of the cen­tu­ry. That’s down from their pre­vi­ous fore­cast of 597 mil­lion and a pre­cip­i­tous drop from 1.4 bil­lion now.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Mar­ry Young (Kasen Stephen­son, Stan­ford Review): “Although I’m now twen­ty-four, I got mar­ried as a twen­ty-two year old under­grad. I then bid farewell to my dorm in Roble and moved into a cozy apart­ment beyond EVGR with my wife. I have found that most of my class­mates are con­vinced that mar­riage is in their future, yet they are quite sur­prised that I mar­ried so young. While it’s dif­fi­cult to exer­cise con­trol over any time­line, I’m a strong advo­cate for get­ting mar­ried young, espe­cial­ly at Stan­ford where young mar­riages are most uncom­mon.”
  5. The Lure of Divorce (Emi­ly Gould, The Cut): “It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were con­tem­plat­ing them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her hus­band thought open­ing their mar­riage might be the answer. Anoth­er friend described the ease of shar­ing cus­tody of his young daugh­ter, then admit­ted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most week­ends. In my chron­i­cal­ly unde­cid­ed state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the dif­fer­ence.”
    • A wild and illu­mi­nat­ing sto­ry, although I sus­pect I am tak­ing away some dif­fer­ent lessons than the author intend­ed.

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 439

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

This is vol­ume 439, which is not only a prime num­ber and the sum of three con­sec­u­tive primes (139 + 149 + 151), but also the sum of nine con­sec­u­tive primes (31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61 + 67). Which is, you know, a lot­ta primes.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Dig­i­tal Apps Are Chang­ing How We Read the Bible (John Dyer, Text & Canon): “I asked both groups to read the book of Jude and then tell me (1) what the point of the book was, and (2) how it made them feel. Inter­est­ing­ly, two oppo­site trends emerged. The print read­ers said they felt Jude was about God’s judg­ment while the phone read­ers tend­ed to empha­size God’s faith­ful­ness. But then, on the sec­ond ques­tion, their answers seemed to split. The print read­ers, who felt the book was about God’s judg­ment, said they were encour­aged by the read­ing. The phone read­ers on the oth­er hand who said Jude was about God’s faith­ful­ness, said after read­ing it that they felt dis­cour­aged and con­fused. So what can account for that dif­fer­ence? Why is a judg­men­tal God encour­ag­ing and a faith­ful God dis­cour­ag­ing?”
  2. The Grand Canyon-Sized Chasm Between Elites and Ordi­nary Amer­i­cans (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Per­haps the most strik­ing diver­gence between elite and non-elite opin­ion: Although the major­i­ty of ordi­nary vot­ers oppose the strict rationing of meat, elec­tric­i­ty, and gas to fight cli­mate change, 89% of Ivy grad­u­ates and 77% of elites over­all are in favor of it.”
  3. What Hap­pened When My Church Encoun­tered Neg­a­tive World (Patrick Miller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “You can tell our church’s sto­ry in a way that makes us the vic­tims of the pro­gres­sives, but that’s not our full sto­ry. Nor is it the sto­ry of most non-coastal church­es that refused to go pro-Trump or pro-Biden in 2020. Pas­tors at such church­es will tell you the same sto­ry: The neg­a­tive world bows before gold­en don­keys and ele­phants.”
  4. Sarah Isgur’s Major­i­ty Report (Kele­fah San­neh, The New York­er): “Through the eyes of Isgur and French, the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem gen­er­al­ly appears to be a place where smart peo­ple assess good-faith argu­ments and com­pose thought­ful essays explain­ing their deci­sions. Their under­ly­ing con­tention is that the Supreme Court is good, even, or per­haps espe­cial­ly, in its cur­rent incar­na­tion.… In an era of aggriev­ed polit­i­cal dis­course, Isgur is some­thing unusu­al: a com­men­ta­tor who tru­ly seems to love the gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion she cov­ers.”
    • Advi­so­ry Opin­ions is one of my favorite pod­casts and I’m not remote­ly a lawyer. Isgur and French are amaz­ing.
  5. The Devil’s Face in Gaza (Ger­ald McDer­mott, First Things): “The min­is­ter of tourism, a rab­bi, told an Israeli Chris­t­ian leader, ‘We hope you send mis­sion­ar­ies to the Arabs here.’ The Chris­t­ian was shocked: ‘Don’t you hate mis­sion­ar­ies?’ The gov­ern­ment min­is­ter replied, ‘If you teach them what you believe, we will have peace in the Mid­dle East.’”
  6. Some Stan­ford news:
    • Sit-in on Islam­o­pho­bia replaces pro-Israel tent in White Plaza (Dilan Gohill, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Orga­niz­ers set up the Sit-in to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia on the White Plaza lawn — a space pre­vi­ous­ly occu­pied by the Blue and White Tent. Tent orga­niz­ers told The Dai­ly they made an indef­i­nite reser­va­tion through Car­di­nal Engage. Accord­ing to Feige­lis, Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tion told the Sit-In to Stop Islam­o­pho­bia that the space was reserved for the Blue and White Tent. He said as long as the sit-in refus­es to relo­cate, the tent can­not reassem­ble. The Dai­ly has reached out to the Uni­ver­si­ty for com­ment. ‘We did not move your stuff — the wind destroyed it, you cleaned it up. We saw an open space, we set up here, we’re hap­py to coex­ist.’ El Boudali said. He added that orga­niz­ers set up in White Plaza due to its high traf­fic.”
    • Stan­ford stu­dents protest new ban on overnight sit-in camp­ing (Lau­ren Irwin, The Hill): “Stan­ford said its lev­el of con­cern has risen to a point that it can no longer sup­port overnight activ­i­ties.”
    • Read the offi­cial Stan­ford state­ment: Pre­serv­ing free speech and safe­ty on White Plaza (Stan­ford News): “Mov­ing for­ward, any tents, tables, chairs, or oth­er sim­i­lar items will need to be removed from White Plaza between the hours of 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. Any overnight dis­plays and/or camp­ing items left unoc­cu­pied are sub­ject to removal for health and safe­ty rea­sons. Stu­dents who vio­late the no-camp­ing pol­i­cy will be sub­ject to a dis­ci­pli­nary refer­ral to the Office of Com­mu­ni­ty Stan­dards and may also be cit­ed for tres­pass for fail­ing to com­ply with a uni­ver­si­ty direc­tive.”
    • And not exact­ly Stan­ford news, but not not Stan­ford news: Law schools must adopt free speech poli­cies to main­tain ABA accred­i­ta­tion (Lexi Lonas, The Hill): “The new stan­dard requires schools to adopt a pol­i­cy that would allow fac­ul­ty, stu­dents and staff ‘to com­mu­ni­cate ideas that may be con­tro­ver­sial or unpop­u­lar, includ­ing through robust debate, demon­stra­tions or protests,’ and would for­bid activ­i­ties that dis­rupt or impinge on free speech. But it wouldn’t impose spe­cif­ic pol­i­cy lan­guage,’”’ the state­ment added.”
  7. The Polit­i­cal Pref­er­ences of LLMs (David Roza­do, Sub­stack): “When probed with questions/statements with polit­i­cal con­no­ta­tions most con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs tend to gen­er­ate respons­es that are diag­nosed by most polit­i­cal test instru­ments as man­i­fest­ing pref­er­ences for left-of-cen­ter view­points. This does not appear to be the case for base (i.e. foun­da­tion) mod­els upon which LLMs opti­mized for con­ver­sa­tion with humans are built. Though not con­clu­sive, our results pro­vide sup­port­ing evi­dence for the intrigu­ing hypoth­e­sis that the embed­ding of polit­i­cal pref­er­ences into LLMs might be hap­pen­ing most­ly post-pre­train­ing. Name­ly, dur­ing the super­vised fine-tun­ing (SFT) and/or Rein­force­ment Learn­ing (RL) stages of the con­ver­sa­tion­al LLMs train­ing pipeline.”
    • In oth­er words, the AI tools we see appear to have polit­i­cal pref­er­ences trained into them by the com­pa­nies that are cre­at­ing them, although it is not clear to what extent this is delib­er­ate­ly being done.
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of data sci­ence in New Zealand — https://drozado.github.io/

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • His­to­ry of Japan (Bill Wurz, YouTube): nine amaz­ing min­utes — gen­uine­ly worth your time if you have any inter­est in Japan at all. Or in how to teach his­to­ry using video. He leaves a bunch out and def­i­nite­ly throws his opin­ion around, but it’s hard to see how he could have done any­thing else in nine min­utes. Real­ly good.

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 438

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

This is vol­ume 438, which is 666 in base 8. 👀

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Don’t For­get About Niger­ian Chris­tians (Samuel Sey, per­son­al blog): “Over the last 15 years, More than 50,000 Niger­ian Chris­tians have been killed for their faith, 18,000 church­es have been destroyed, and mil­lions more have been dis­placed. In 2023, around 5,000 Chris­tians were killed world­wide because of their faith—90% of them were Nige­ri­ans.  Nige­ria is the dead­liest coun­try for Chris­tians. Every Chris­t­ian in north­ern (and some cen­tral states) Nige­ria is prob­a­bly griev­ing the loss of a spouse or a child (or both) from per­se­cu­tion.”
  2. As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do. (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Stud­ies show that around eight in 10 cas­es of child­hood gen­der dys­pho­ria resolve them­selves by puber­ty and 30 per­cent of peo­ple on hor­mone ther­a­py dis­con­tin­ue its use with­in four years, though the effects, includ­ing infer­til­i­ty, are often irre­versible.… Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gen­der tran­si­tion, along with low fig­ures for detran­si­tion. But those stud­ies, which often rely on self-report­ed cas­es to gen­der clin­ics, like­ly under­state the actu­al num­bers. None of the sev­en detran­si­tion­ers I inter­viewed, for instance, even con­sid­ered report­ing back to the gen­der clin­ics that pre­scribed them med­ica­tion they now con­sid­er to have been a mis­take. Nor did they know any oth­er detran­si­tion­ers who had done so.”
    • Unlocked. The main point is hor­ri­fy­ing and one I’ve shared many times in this chan­nel before. A sec­ondary point which is quite inter­est­ing is how intent the author is on mak­ing this the fault of her polit­i­cal oppo­nents. Her audi­ence needs to know that her tribe is still trust­wor­thy despite mas­sive mis­takes on this issue. Par­ti­san­ship poi­sons the things it touch­es.
  3. Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are fam­i­ly-friend­ly poli­cies no longer enough? (Hen­ry Mance, Finan­cial Times): “…child­less­ness is also ris­ing among those who are in a rela­tion­ship. Many cou­ples are wait­ing too long. ‘Peo­ple call me a lot in Fin­land. [They say] ‘I’m 42, my part­ner has had three mis­car­riages and she says she will not con­tin­ue. And I under­stand I will nev­er be a father. I’m the only child of my par­ents, and there’s nobody left, and help me.’ Rotkirch is wary of an empha­sis on fer­til­i­ty treat­ments. Women’s fer­til­i­ty drops in their late thir­ties and for­ties: soci­ety has to adapt. ‘If you do every­thing that typ­i­cal min­is­ters of finance tell you to do, you are 45 — you have a house and a doc­tor­ate and it’s too late. The ide­alised life course is real­ly at odds with female repro­duc­tive biol­o­gy.’”
  4. Some Israel/Hamas arti­cles:
    • The UN’s Ter­ror­ism Teach­ers (Hil­lel C. Neuer, The Free Press): “UN Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al António Guter­res said he was ‘hor­ri­fied’ to dis­cov­er that UNRWA [Unit­ed Nations Relief and Works Agency for Pales­tine Refugees in the Near East] employ­ees par­tic­i­pat­ed in the inva­sion and mas­sacre of Octo­ber 7.… UNRWA employ­ees have held Israeli hostages cap­tive in their homes, using UNRWA facil­i­ties to move them from place to place.… It was only after Israel’s gov­ern­ment pro­vid­ed evi­dence that 12 of the agency’s employ­ees were actu­al­ly involved in the Octo­ber 7 mas­sacre that UNRWA and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion took some action.”
      • Wowsers.
    • How Pales­tine Hijacked the U.S. Civ­il Rights Move­ment (Gil Troy, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “The dif­fer­ences between the Pales­tin­ian nation­al move­ment and the Amer­i­can civ­il rights move­ment are obvi­ous and fun­da­men­tal. Pales­tini­ans have played no role in Amer­i­can his­to­ry or the his­to­ry of slav­ery. Pales­tini­ans played no role in the civ­il rights strug­gle. The Pales­tin­ian-Israeli clash, which is occur­ring a world away from Amer­i­ca, is nation­al not racial. Most Israelis are dark-skinned, while some Pales­tini­ans are light-skinned. Non­vi­o­lence fueled the civ­il rights strug­gle, while the Pales­tin­ian move­ment keeps per­fect­ing new forms of polit­i­cal vio­lence and ter­ror-porn, from hijack­ing to sui­cide bomb­ing.”
  5. The Mean­ing­less Inco­her­ence Of “LGBTQ+” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The trou­ble is that words have mean­ings, and the term ‘LGBTQ+’ — like the term ‘His­pan­ic’ or ‘Lati­no’ — is not like NATO. It doesn’t refer to a sin­gle, iden­ti­fi­able group, expe­ri­ence, or com­mu­ni­ty. It refers to mul­ti­ple ones. And each is dis­tinct, dis­crete and often very dif­fer­ent. When you exam­ine its com­po­nent parts, you real­ize that the Ls and Gs and Bs and Ts, let alone the Is and the +s, dif­fer dra­mat­i­cal­ly in basic things like psy­chol­o­gy, lifestyle, income, geog­ra­phy, edu­ca­tion, and pol­i­tics.… We’re con­stant­ly told, of course, that all gays and les­bians have col­lec­tive­ly co-opt­ed and des­tig­ma­tized the q‑word. But polling shows that only 3 — 4 per­cent of the entire LGBTQ+ world call them­selves ‘queer’. So the MSM rou­tine­ly uses a word for the entire ‘LGBTQ+’ world that 96 per­cent of this com­mu­ni­ty rejects. It’s up there with ‘Lat­inx’ as an accu­rate descrip­tor.”
    • Sul­li­van is one of the most influ­en­tial gay pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als. There are a lot of things he and I dis­agree about, but I near­ly always find his per­spec­tives illu­mi­nat­ing.
  6. Two arti­cles about a weird­ly intense con­tro­ver­sy about Alis­tair Begg:
    • Throw-Away Cul­ture is the Spir­it of the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion, Too. (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “A per­son who inter­prets their sex­u­al desires to be some sort of immov­able iden­ti­ty that must be ver­i­fied and actu­al­ized is in a very lam­en­ta­ble state. But what about the per­son who inter­prets their quick tem­per, their sus­pi­cion of oth­er Chris­tians, and their desire to build a plat­form atop the ruins of oth­ers’, as like­wise an immov­able iden­ti­ty— ‘I just know what time it is’? Theirs is hard­ly bet­ter. The Chris­t­ian life doesn’t work like that.”
    • Alis­tair Begg Meets the Polit­i­cal­ly Cor­rect (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Might Begg be draw­ing the line in the wrong place—too much in the direc­tion of show­ing grace? Sure. Might I be draw­ing it in the wrong place—too much in the direc­tion of main­tain­ing truth? Again, yes. He risks con­fus­ing peo­ple. I risk hurt­ing peo­ple. That’s why I think we both attempt to sort these out with fear and trem­bling and a will­ing­ness to be cor­rect­ed.”
  7. Reli­gious peo­ple coped bet­ter with Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, research sug­gests (Fred Lewsey, Cam­bridge Research News): “Where men­tal health declined, it was around 60% worse on aver­age for the non-reli­gious com­pared to peo­ple of faith with typ­i­cal lev­els of ‘reli­gios­i­ty’. Inter­est­ing­ly, the pos­i­tive effects of reli­gion were not found in areas with strictest lock­downs, sug­gest­ing access to places of wor­ship might be even more impor­tant in a US con­text. The study also found sig­nif­i­cant uptake of online reli­gious ser­vices, and a 40% low­er asso­ci­a­tion between Covid-19 and men­tal health for those who used them.”
    • How hor­ri­ble the pan­dem­ic must have been for those with­out faith. I hat­ed it and I’m a min­is­ter!

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 437

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

This is the 437th com­pi­la­tion, and I was pleased to dis­cov­er that 437 is the prod­uct of 19 and 23, two of my favorite prime num­bers.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A new glob­al gen­der divide is emerg­ing (John Burn-Mur­doch, Finan­cial Times): “Gen Z is two gen­er­a­tions, not one. In coun­tries on every con­ti­nent, an ide­o­log­i­cal gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of mil­lions of peo­ple who occu­py the same cities, work­places, class­rooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sex­es were each spread rough­ly equal­ly across lib­er­al and con­ser­v­a­tive world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 per­cent­age points more lib­er­al than their male con­tem­po­raries.”
  2. Two com­pelling per­son­al sto­ries
    • The 2016 Elec­tion Sent Me Search­ing for Answers (Car­rie Sheffield, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Peo­ple laugh when I admit this, but my con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty result­ed from two pow­er­ful forces: sci­ence and Don­ald Trump. But before that jour­ney began, I need­ed dis­tance from extreme reli­gious trau­ma. I grew up with­in an off­shoot Mor­mon cult, liv­ing with sev­en bio­log­i­cal sib­lings in var­i­ous motor homes, tents, hous­es, and sheds. Besides time spent in home­school­ing, I attend­ed 17 dif­fer­ent pub­lic schools. When I took my ACT test, we lived in a shed with no run­ning water in the Ozarks.”
      • A remark­able tes­ti­mo­ny. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • ‘I should be in prison or dead’: Cameron Black on his jour­ney from cult to cam­pus (Lau­ren Boles, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Born into a cult led by his father, who pro­claimed him­self to be God, Black’s ear­ly life in Sedona, Ariz. was any­thing but ordi­nary. This famil­ial cult con­sist­ed of nine peo­ple and oper­at­ed under uncon­ven­tion­al reli­gious and sex­u­al prac­tices, deeply entan­gled in manip­u­la­tion and abuse, Black said. ‘Don’t try to make sense of it because it doesn’t make sense,” he said as he explained the cult’s phi­los­o­phy. “It’s like my father com­bined the Bible, sci-fi books and ‘The Matrix’ into one big ball of crazy.’ ”
      • Not Chris­t­ian but fas­ci­nat­ing.
  3. Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About Church Atten­dance and Vot­ing for Trump (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “…look at Trump’s two elec­tions. Now, Cul­tur­al Evan­gel­i­cals rise in impor­tance. Three per­cent of all Trump vot­ers were nev­er attend­ing evan­gel­i­cals and anoth­er eight per­cent were sel­dom atten­ders. In both 2016 and 2020, 11% of the Trump coali­tion were Cul­tur­al Evan­gel­i­cals. It was just 6% in 2008, rep­re­sent­ing a near dou­bling [from McCain’s cam­paign]. Also note that 31% of all McCain vot­ers were week­ly attend­ing evan­gel­i­cals. For Rom­ney, this dropped to 28%. In 2016, it went even low­er to 25% of all Trump vot­ers. How­ev­er, this fig­ure rebound­ed in 2020 to 29% of all Trump vot­ers being week­ly attend­ing evan­gel­i­cals.”
  4. Vis­it­ing the Most Impor­tant Com­pa­ny in the World (Nicholas Kristof, New York Times): “…Tai­wan Semi­con­duc­tor Man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­pa­ny, or T.S.M.C., is the only cor­po­ra­tion I can think of in his­to­ry that could cause a glob­al depres­sion if it were forced to halt pro­duc­tion.”
    • What a stun­ning sen­tence.
  5. Is Gen­der Too Trou­bled? (Abi­gail Favale, Church Life Jour­nal): “Gen­der is not part of a per­son, con­tra the Gen­der Uni­corn, but rather encom­pass­es the whole per­son. Thus, gen­der includes one’s sexed bio­log­i­cal struc­ture, as well as the psy­cho­log­i­cal, spir­i­tu­al, and his­tor­i­cal­ly-sit­u­at­ed dimen­sions of human per­son­hood. What is arguably lost in the dichoto­my of sex and gen­der is the whole­ness, the com­plete­ness of the human per­son.… because gen­der can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from sex, in ordi­nary speech we can use these terms as syn­onyms. Yes: I am sug­gest­ing that we inten­tion­al­ly and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly vio­late the taboo against con­flat­ing sex with gen­der, as a strat­e­gy of rein­te­gra­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of wom­en’s stud­ies at Notre Dame. If the excerpt is not clear, the author is advo­cat­ing that Chris­tians delib­er­ate­ly use gen­der and sex inter­change­ably as a way of resist­ing some of the non­sense in our cul­ture.
  6. What We Might Mean by “Lib­er­al Bias” (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “There’s no notion with­in Confessore’s piece that left crit­ics of DEI exist. I imag­ine he and the paper would cite space con­straints. But even accept­ing that expla­na­tion, the omis­sion is con­ve­nient for the NYT’s fun­da­men­tal finan­cial mod­el: it leaves the piece depict­ing a sim­plis­tic and pure­ly bina­ry con­trast of val­ues, where there are on one side the valiant Asso­ciate Vice Pres­i­dents of Stu­dent Expe­ri­ence and on the oth­er the wicked racism-per­pet­u­at­ing Repub­li­cans.”
    • A cri­tique of NYT bias from some­one on the social­ist left.
    • Some­what relat­ed: What Did Top Israeli War Offi­cials Real­ly Say About Gaza? (Yair Rosen­berg, The Atlantic): “In this per­ilous wartime envi­ron­ment, it is essen­tial to know who is say­ing what, and whether they have the author­i­ty to act on it. But while far too many right-wing mem­bers of Israel’s Par­lia­ment have expressed bor­der­line or straight­for­ward­ly geno­ci­dal sen­ti­ments dur­ing the Gaza con­flict, such state­ments attrib­uted to the three peo­ple mak­ing Israel’s actu­al mil­i­tary deci­sions, the vot­ing mem­bers of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the for­mer oppo­si­tion law­mak­er Ben­ny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mis­tak­en or mis­rep­re­sent­ed.”
  7. Fol­low the Mon­ey to the After Par­ty (Megan Basham, First Things): “…dur­ing its ger­mi­na­tion phase, the project hit a road­block. Evan­gel­i­cal donors had lit­tle inter­est in fund­ing an explic­it­ly polit­i­cal Bible study. Thus, to get The After Par­ty off the ground, the trio (all fre­quent crit­ics of evan­gel­i­cals who vot­ed for Don­ald Trump) turned to ‘pre­dom­i­nant­ly pro­gres­sive’ ‘unbe­liev­ers.’ In fact, they turned to sec­u­lar left-wing foun­da­tions.… To offer a pol­i­tics cur­ricu­lum backed by the sec­u­lar left as the church’s solu­tion to idol­a­trous co-opta­tion by the right is like sug­gest­ing that a man who became obese eat­ing cake and ice cream will lose weight by gorg­ing on piz­za and pota­to chips. As a friend told me, ‘If you want the church to be less polit­i­cal, start by focus­ing less on pol­i­tics your­self.’?”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a stu­dent. Sto­ries like this make me sad. I’m remind­ed of 3 John 1:7–8, “For they have gone out for the sake of the name, accept­ing noth­ing from the Gen­tiles. There­fore we ought to sup­port peo­ple like these, that we may be fel­low work­ers for the truth.” (ESV)
    • To be clear, I don’t think that min­istries should always reject fund­ing from non-Chris­t­ian sources any more than Nehemi­ah should have refused sup­plies from the empire for rebuild­ing Jerusalem, I just think we should always do it with our eyes open and with trans­paren­cy about it. It’s risky.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • A Real Super­pow­er (Pearls Before Swine)
  • Despite Neg­a­tive Reviews, ‘Trump Vs. Biden’ Renewed For Sec­ond Sea­son (Baby­lon Bee)
  • You just met a beau­ti­ful girl at church (Matthew Pierce, Sub­stack): “Fel­las, it’s not easy to be a Chris­t­ian woman! Every time they choose what to wear, they have to nav­i­gate between fash­ion trends, puri­ty cul­ture, com­fort, and peer pres­sure! Val­i­date her feel­ings with gen­tle words of affir­ma­tion, such as ‘I can’t see even a lit­tle bit of your bosoms, which is good, because I bet they’re super nice,’ and then make, like, a motion of a rock­et launch­ing into out­er space and do the sound effects with your mouth, to show how your respect for her is going super high right now.”
    • This sub­stack is hit or miss, but this instal­la­tion is a sol­id hit.

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 436

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

This is vol­ume 436, which isn’t an espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing num­ber. It is, appar­ent­ly, non­to­tient, but even after read­ing about totients I remain unin­ter­est­ed.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. From Vex­ing Uncer­tain­ty to Intel­lec­tu­al Humil­i­ty (Michael Dick­son, Schiz­o­phre­nia Bul­letin):  “I am a 55-year-old hus­band, father, friend, and pro­fes­sion­al philoso­pher. In 1992, as a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, a porter found me amongst the cows in the mead­ows of King’s Col­lege, after being there for 2 or 3 days. I was in bad phys­i­cal shape, hav­ing eat­en noth­ing, and appar­ent­ly get­ting water from the riv­er. He asked what I was doing. I replied: ‘I’m solv­ing a prob­lem about sto­chas­tic cal­cu­lus.’ This state­ment was true, but did not answer his ques­tion. He took me to the hos­pi­tal, where I remained for some weeks. It wasn’t the first time that I was psy­chot­ic, but it was, maybe, the first time that any­body noticed, the first time that I was unable to hide it from oth­ers, and there­fore from myself.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na. A remark­able (and fair­ly brief) arti­cle. 
  2. Gov­Docs to the Res­cue! Debunk­ing an Immi­gra­tion Myth (Rose­mary Meszaros and Kather­ine Pen­navaria, Pol­i­cy Com­mons): “No one’s fam­i­ly name was changed, altered, short­ened, butchered, or ‘writ­ten down wrong’ at Ellis Island or any Amer­i­can port. That idea is an urban leg­end. Many names did get changed as immi­grants set­tled into their new Amer­i­can lives, but those changes were made sev­er­al years after arrival and were done by choice of some­one in the fam­i­ly.”
  3. A Peace­ful Solu­tion on Tai­wan Is Slip­ping Away (Michael Beck­ley, New York Times): “…Tai­wan pro­vokes Chi­na sim­ply by being what it is: A pros­per­ous and free soci­ety. Taiwan’s bloom­ing nation­al iden­ti­ty threat­ens Chi­na with the prospect of per­ma­nent ter­ri­to­r­i­al dis­mem­ber­ment; and Taiwan’s elec­tions, rule of law and free press make a mock­ery of Beijing’s claim that Chi­nese cul­ture is incom­pat­i­ble with democ­ra­cy. America’s words can’t change any of that. Chi­nese law explic­it­ly states that Bei­jing may use force if pos­si­bil­i­ties for peace­ful uni­fi­ca­tion are ‘com­plete­ly exhaust­ed.’ Because of pol­i­tics in Tai­wan and the Unit­ed States, those pos­si­bil­i­ties are dwin­dling.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Tufts.
    • Relat­ed: Tai­wan’s Chi­na-skep­tic rul­ing-par­ty can­di­date wins pres­i­den­tial elec­tion (Emi­ly Feng, NPR): “For secu­ri­ty rea­sons, Tai­wan does not allow absen­tee vot­ing, man­dat­ing that all vot­ers cast their bal­lots in-per­son, on paper only. The phys­i­cal bal­lots are then count­ed by hand at every polling sta­tion, a process that is com­plete­ly open to the pub­lic.” The impli­ca­tion being that they are so wor­ried about Chi­nese med­dling that they engage in rad­i­cal trans­paren­cy. Wow.
  4. Xi Jin­ping Is Not Try­ing to Make Chris­tian­i­ty More Chi­nese (Feng­gang Yang, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Through­out Decem­ber, the author­i­ties once again tried hard to con­tain and curb Christ­mas cel­e­bra­tions inside and out­side church­es, pro­hib­it­ed stu­dents and oth­ers from par­tic­i­pat­ing in Christ­mas activ­i­ties, and detained some house church lead­ers to pre­vent them from orga­niz­ing con­gre­ga­tion­al gath­er­ings. Yet most church­es, both the offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned church­es and unreg­is­tered house church­es, held Christ­mas Eve and Christ­mas Day wor­ship ser­vices. The online evan­ge­lis­tic galas by Bei­jing Zion Church and oth­er house church­es on Zoom and oth­er plat­forms are of high artis­tic qual­i­ty. Chris­tians shared dis­creet­ly on social media that church lead­ers bap­tized a num­ber of new believ­ers despite the cur­rent ‘bit­ter win­ter’ for church­es in Chi­na.”
    • I found this bit fas­ci­nat­ing: “Many peo­ple in the West may not know that in the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist polit­i­cal sys­tem, the party’s pol­i­cy is supe­ri­or to state laws and trumps the con­sti­tu­tion. The Chi­nafi­ca­tion pol­i­cy has led to the pro­mul­ga­tion of a series of admin­is­tra­tive reg­u­la­tions and mea­sures, includ­ing the vast­ly expand­ed Reg­u­la­tions of Reli­gious Affairs that took effect in 2018.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy at Pur­due.
  5. You Need To Be Cringe­maxxing (Mary Har­ring­ton, Sub­stack): “There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is try­ing. Here’s the thing though: data con­sis­tent­ly show that the hap­pi­est peo­ple — those who feel that their lives are most filled with pur­pose and ful­fil­ment — are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those with kids — it’s those who go to church. Those, in oth­er words, who are not just to be indif­fer­ent to cool, but active­ly anti-cool. The first step to a hap­py and ful­filled life, it appears, is cringe­maxxing.”
    • Some oth­er vague­ly-relat­ed life advice: Risk-Aver­sion Is Killing Romance (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Some­times it seems to me we’ve become so sus­pi­cious of each other’s inten­tions that we pathol­o­gise romance and com­mit­ment, and end up psy­cho­analysing to death behav­iour that’s actu­al­ly decent. Now we take every­thing that comes with real love—being affect­ed by some­one else’s emo­tions, putting your partner’s needs first, depend­ing on them—and call it dam­age or anx­ious attach­ment or trau­ma. No! It’s called deep con­nec­tion! And God, yes, wouldn’t it be much eas­i­er if it was a pathol­o­gy, a dis­ease, one we could diag­nose and solve because it’s scary and it comes with­out guar­an­tees. But it isn’t.”
  6. “How Do I Find the Main Point of a Psalm?” (John Piper, Desir­ing God): “So, the point is to look at the pieces very care­ful­ly, to fit them togeth­er in mid­size units, to jot down the main points of the mid­size units until you have them all on a half sheet of paper, and then to think and think, and pray and pray, and think and pray and think and pray, and to orga­nize and draw lines, and to try to fit them all togeth­er until they fall into place and you see how these five, six, sev­en, eight, nine points of the mid­size units are in a flow that make one big over­ar­ch­ing point. You will be sur­prised, if you take up pen­cil and paper and do this, what you will see.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent
  7. Death by a Thou­sand Paper Cuts (David Brooks, The New York Times): “…[some­times I] find a prob­lem so mas­sive that I can’t believe I’ve ever writ­ten about any­thing else. This lat­ter expe­ri­ence hap­pened as I looked into the grow­ing bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of Amer­i­can life. It’s not only that grow­ing bureau­cra­cies cost a lot of mon­ey; they also ener­vate Amer­i­can soci­ety. They redis­trib­ute pow­er from work­ers to rule mak­ers, and in so doing sap ini­tia­tive, dis­cre­tion, cre­ativ­i­ty and dri­ve. Once you start pok­ing around, the sta­tis­tics are stag­ger­ing.”
    • Relat­ed: No joke: Feds are ban­ning humor­ous elec­tron­ic mes­sages on high­ways (AP News): “Among those that will be dis­ap­pear­ing are mes­sages such as ‘Use Yah Blinkah’ in Mass­a­chu­setts; ‘Vis­it­ing in-laws? Slow down, get there late,’ from Ohio; ‘Don’t dri­ve Star Span­gled Ham­mered,’ from Penn­syl­va­nia; ‘Hocus pocus, dri­ve with focus’ from New Jer­sey; and ‘Hands on the wheel, not your meal’ from Ari­zona.”
      • You think Stan­ford hates fun? Try the fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy!

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.