Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 415

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

This is vol­ume 415, which is the sum of suc­ces­sive squares (72 + 82 + 92 + 102 + 112).

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 414

Once a week, usu­al­ly on Fri­day, 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 414, which is a mul­ti­ple of 23.

A day late because I was trav­el­ing. Next week’s may be delayed as well.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The best pre­dic­tor of hap­pi­ness in Amer­i­ca? Mar­riage (W. Brad­ford Wilcox and David Bass, Unherd): “This truth is borne out yet again in new research from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, which found that mar­riage is the ‘the most impor­tant dif­fer­en­tia­tor’ of who is hap­py in Amer­i­ca, and that falling mar­riage rates are a chief rea­son why hap­pi­ness has declined nation­al­ly. The research, sur­vey­ing thou­sands of respon­dents, revealed a star­tling 30-per­cent­age-point hap­pi­ness divide between mar­ried and unmar­ried Amer­i­cans. This hap­pi­ness boost held true for both men and women.… Oth­er fac­tors do mat­ter — includ­ing income, edu­ca­tion­al achieve­ment, race, and geog­ra­phy — but mar­i­tal sta­tus is most influ­en­tial when it comes to pre­dict­ing hap­pi­ness in the study.”
    • Relat­ed: More on Sin­gle­ness, Mar­riage, and the Church (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “…some read­ers took me to be say­ing that sin­gle peo­ple are in sin or not grow­ing in their faith the way that mar­ried peo­ple are. Not so. There is a pro­found (sub­tle, per­haps, but pro­found) dif­fer­ence between say­ing that some­thing has intrin­sic val­ue in the nor­ma­tive life of an indi­vid­ual or the church, and say­ing that this thing is com­pul­so­ry.”
    • Very help­ful fol­lowup to the arti­cle I shared last week.
  2. The Hard-Drug Decrim­i­nal­iza­tion Dis­as­ter (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “…the sticky fact that pro­po­nents of decrim­i­nal­iza­tion rarely con­front is that addicts are not mere­ly sick peo­ple try­ing to get well, like can­cer suf­fer­ers in need of chemother­a­py. They are peo­ple who often will do just about any­thing to get high, how­ev­er irra­tional, self-destruc­tive or, in some cas­es, crim­i­nal their behav­ior becomes. Addic­tion may be a dis­ease, but it’s also a lifestyle — one that decrim­i­nal­iza­tion does a lot to facil­i­tate. It’s eas­i­er to get high wher­ev­er and how­ev­er you want when the cops are pow­er­less to stop you.”
    • Unlocked.
  3. She’s the One (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Humans are good at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to most mate­r­i­al con­di­tions. You get used to your house, your car, your clothes, your gran­ite coun­ter­top, and your mon­ey. What humans are bad at hedo­nical­ly adapt­ing to is… oth­er peo­ple. If you spend a lot of time around humans whose com­pa­ny you enjoy, you will prob­a­bly be hap­py. If you spend a lot of time around human whose com­pa­ny you detest, you will prob­a­bly be unhap­py. Over your life­time, you will prob­a­bly spend more time around your spouse than any oth­er human. So while find­ing good friends and good co-work­ers is cru­cial for hap­pi­ness, find­ing a good spouse is even more so.”
    • This is full of most­ly-good advice for guys.
  4. What’s going on with the reports of a room-tem­per­a­ture super­con­duc­tor? (John Tim­mer, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The per­fect time to write an arti­cle on those results would be when they’ve been con­firmed by mul­ti­ple labs. But these are not per­fect times. Instead, rumors seem to be fly­ing dai­ly about pos­si­ble con­fir­ma­tion, con­fus­ing and con­tra­dic­to­ry results, and informed dis­cus­sions of why this mate­r­i­al either should or should­n’t work.”
    • Relat­ed: LK-99 Is the Super­con­duc­tor of the Sum­mer (Ken­neth Chang, New York Times): “I tru­ly don’t get the excite­ment about her preprint,” said Dou­glas Natel­son, a pro­fes­sor of physics at Rice Uni­ver­si­ty in Hous­ton. “That’s not to say that it’s wrong, just that the­o­rists and com­pu­ta­tion­al mate­ri­als folks very often pro­duce preprints based on the lat­est claimed mate­r­i­al of inter­est. There’s noth­ing excep­tion­al in that.”
  5. You’re prob­a­bly recy­cling plas­tic wrong. And it’s not your fault. (Robert Gebel­hoff, Wash­ing­ton Post):  “Pic­ture this: You fin­ish a drink from a red Solo cup, and before throw­ing it out, you check the bot­tom of the cup to see the icon­ic recy­cling sym­bol. That means it can be tossed in the recy­cling bin, right? Wrong. Solo cups are made of poly­styrene, a plas­tic that is very dif­fi­cult to recy­cle.… Nowa­days, the only plas­tic items that are con­sis­tent­ly recy­cled are bot­tles and jugs made out of poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late (which is labeled with a ‘1’) and high-den­si­ty poly­eth­yl­ene (labeled with a ‘2’), as a sur­vey of recy­cling facil­i­ties by Green­peace shows. Recy­cling plants typ­i­cal­ly reject almost every­thing else, mean­ing it ends up in land­fills.”
  6. He Held Up a Bank to Get His Own Mon­ey (Raja Abdul­rahim, New York Times): “The cen­tral bank has not allowed depos­i­tors to with­draw more than a few hun­dred dol­lars a month since a finan­cial col­lapse in 2019. So, like oth­er des­per­ate Lebanese before him — some of them sim­i­lar­ly com­pelled by the need for med­ical treat­ment — Mr. al-Haj­jar went to his bank in Novem­ber, threat­en­ing to burn it down unless it gave him some of the $250,000 he had in his account. More than 12 hours lat­er, he left with $25,000 in stacks of cash. ‘If you don’t go in and threat­en to hurt them, they won’t give you any­thing,’ he said months lat­er.”
    • Absolute­ly wild (and sad) sto­ry.
  7. California’s free prison calls are repair­ing estranged rela­tion­ships and aid­ing reha­bil­i­ta­tion (Kwasi Gyam­fi Asiedu & Helen Li, Los Ange­les Times): “At a time when most con­sumers enjoy free or low-cost call­ing, prison phone calls at their peak in Cal­i­for­nia cost more than $6 per 15 min­utes via a pri­vate telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider. That allowed only hur­ried, super­fi­cial con­ver­sa­tions between the sib­lings — with one eye always on the clock.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On The Expe­ri­ence of Being Poor-ish, For Peo­ple Who Aren’t (Anony­mous, Sub­stack): “When some­one is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m try­ing to deter­mine how poor exact­ly they were, there’s one ever­green ques­tion I ask that has nev­er failed to give me a good idea of what kind of sit­u­a­tion I’m deal­ing with. That ques­tion is: ‘How many times have they turned off your water?’.” Fol­low up: Being Poor-ish Revis­it­ed: Read­er Ques­tions These are both real­ly good. From vol­ume 291.

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 413

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 issue 413, which I have been told is a struc­tured hexag­o­nal dia­mond num­ber. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds very impres­sive. I also know that 413 = 7 · 59, which I find both cool and under­stand­able.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m a Con­tin­u­a­tion­ist with Can­cer. I Still Believe in Heal­ings. (Tim Shorey, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I live my life and face my can­cer some­where between seem­ing­ly sin­cere ‘namers and claimers’ who expect heal­ing every time and seem­ing­ly sur­ren­dered ‘if-the-Lord-willers’ whose prayers affirm God’s heal­ing pow­er but whose caveats and qual­i­fiers make it sound like he’s not like­ly to use it. God alone knows the heart. But the tone of the for­mer par­ty can sound like pre­sump­tion mas­querad­ing as faith, while the tone of the lat­ter can sound like doubt mas­querad­ing as humil­i­ty.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who appro­pri­ate­ly asks, “if you read this, please also pray for the author, Tim Shorey.”
  2. Date to mar­ry, not to have fun (Bethany Man­del, The Spec­ta­tor): “A lot of things are impor­tant in a mar­riage: love, respect, trust, laugh­ter. But per­haps most impor­tant is to remem­ber that it’s a part­ner­ship for life; and as such, dat­ing should not be con­sid­ered fun, but instead like a job inter­view for the most impor­tant role you’ll ever have, that of a spouse. If you were inter­view­ing for a job, would you allow the process to drag on, long after you know it’s the right fit (or not)?”
    • Broad­ly agree, with the pro­vi­sion that this is advice about dat­ing rela­tion­ship and not just about going on dates. In oth­er words, go on dates to have fun and then care­ful­ly dis­cern who is a good match for pro­gress­ing into a seri­ous dat­ing rela­tion­ship. Too many Chris­tians want to know they want to mar­ry some­one before they go out for cof­fee with them, and that’s a lot of pres­sure to put on a lat­te.
    • Relat­ed: Swip­ing and Dat­ing Pref­er­ences (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Here’s a sketch of what might be hap­pen­ing: Men high on the Dark Tri­ad (psy­chopa­thy, nar­cis­sism, Machi­avel­lian­ism) use dat­ing apps. They might make up 10–20% of users. They go on a ram­page, sleep­ing with lots of women, play­ing games with them, lead­ing them on, ghost­ing them, lying to them, etc. Dark Tri­ad men are excel­lent impos­tors; they are good at mim­ic­k­ing desir­able roman­tic qual­i­ties, and are thus able to pro­cure lots of sex part­ners. The women they sleep with become dis­il­lu­sioned. These women begin to behave in psy­cho­path­ic and nar­cis­sis­tic ways to pro­tect them­selves from emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and pain, and per­haps as a way to even the score with ‘men’ as a cat­e­go­ry. They learn to avoid Dark Tri­ad men and exploit nor­mal men. These men become con­fused and upset, and begin to treat oth­er women the same way to ‘get even.’ In short, Dark Tri­ad men mis­treat women, who then mis­treat ordi­nary men, who then mis­treat ordi­nary women. Bad behav­ior dri­ves out the good. A sys­tem tai­lor-made for psy­cho­path­ic males (dat­ing apps facil­i­tate anonymi­ty, super­fi­cial­i­ty, and decep­tion) pre­dictably gives rise to a defect-defect equi­lib­ri­um.”
    • Full of inter­est­ing data.
  3. Study of Elite Col­lege Admis­sions Data Sug­gests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qual­i­fi­ca­tion (Aatish Bha­tia, Claire Cain Miller and Josh Katz, New York Times): “Elite col­leges have long been filled with the chil­dren of the rich­est fam­i­lies: At Ivy League schools, one in six stu­dents has par­ents in the top 1 per­cent.… For appli­cants with the same SAT or ACT score, chil­dren from fam­i­lies in the top 1 per­cent were 34 per­cent more like­ly to be admit­ted than the aver­age appli­cant, and those from the top 0.1 per­cent were more than twice as like­ly to get in.”
  4. Why won’t Indi­ana Jones con­vert to some­thing after all he has seen in his life? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, On Reli­gion): “What we want to know is why he is always back to square one at the start of every adven­ture – a skep­tic, or even a scoffer. I mean, think about it: He has seen the Ark of the Covenant opened and the destroy­ing angels pour out God’s vengeance on his ene­mies. He has seen the sacred Hin­du stones come to life. …He has seen the true cup of Christ heal his own father from a fatal gun­shot wound – on screen, with no ambi­gu­i­ty.”
    • It’s reveal­ing about mod­ern assump­tions that almost no one thinks to ask this ques­tion.
  5. Are We Liv­ing Through ‘End Times’? (Bari Weiss inter­view­ing Peter Turchin, The Free Press): “Elite over­pro­duc­tion turns out to be the best pre­dic­tor of a cri­sis to come. It is essen­tial­ly ubiq­ui­tous in the pre-cri­sis peri­ods of all soci­eties. I used the game of musi­cal chairs to illus­trate it, except in the usu­al game, you start with 11 play­ers and ten chairs, and one per­son los­es. Here, instead of remov­ing chairs, you keep chairs con­stant, and we add more play­ers. You can imag­ine the amount of chaos that is going to hap­pen. Now let’s con­nect this to the over­pro­duc­tion of wealthy peo­ple in the Unit­ed States. As more and more of them become play­ers in pol­i­tics, they dri­ve up the price of get­ting into office. And more impor­tant­ly, the more peo­ple are vying for these posi­tions, the more peo­ple are going to be frus­trat­ed. They’re going to be losers. But humans don’t have to fol­low rules. This is the dark side of com­pe­ti­tion: if it’s too extreme, it cre­ates con­di­tions for peo­ple to start to break rules.”
    • Turchin is a social sci­en­tist at U Conn. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • The author explains the rela­tion­ship between what he does and the sci­ence fic­tion we see in the Foun­da­tion series: Psy­chohis­to­ry and Clio­dy­nam­ics (Peter Turchin, per­son­al blog): “Pre­dic­tion is over­rat­ed. What we real­ly should be striv­ing for, with our social sci­ence, is abil­i­ty to bring about desir­able out­comes and to avoid unwant­ed out­comes. What’s the point of pre­dict­ing future, if it’s very bleak and we are not able to change it? We would be like the per­son con­demned to hang before sun­rise – per­fect knowl­edge of the future, zero abil­i­ty to do any­thing about it.”
  6. Bad Def­i­n­i­tions Of “Democ­ra­cy” And “Account­abil­i­ty” Shade Into Total­i­tar­i­an­ism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “You could, in the­o­ry, define ‘demo­c­ra­t­ic’ this way, so that the more areas of life are sub­ject­ed to the con­trol of a (demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed) gov­ern­ment, the more demo­c­ra­t­ic your soci­ety is. But in that case, the most demo­c­ra­t­ic pos­si­ble soci­ety is total­i­tar­i­an­ism — a soci­ety where the gov­ern­ment con­trols every facet of life, includ­ing what reli­gion you prac­tice, who you mar­ry, and what job you work at. In this soci­ety there would be no room for human free­dom.”
  7. The Impor­tance Of Say­ing “Yes” To The “But” (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “One of the endur­ing frus­tra­tions of liv­ing in a polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized coun­try is the evap­o­ra­tion of nuance. As the mus­cles of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy atro­phy, and as cul­tur­al trib­al­ism infects everyone’s con­scious­ness, it becomes more and more dif­fi­cult to say, ‘Yes, but …’ Every­one hates the but. It com­pli­cates; it mud­dles; it can dis­able a slo­gan; and punc­ture a polit­i­cal­ly use­ful myth.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Reli­gious Com­mu­ni­ty and Human Flour­ish­ing (Tyler J. Van­der­Weele, Psy­chol­o­gy Today): “In some cas­es, our results close­ly repli­cat­ed past work. For exam­ple, we found that, even after con­trol­ling for the fac­tors above, indi­vid­u­als who attend­ed reli­gious ser­vices week­ly or more were 16% less like­ly to become depressed, and saw a 29% reduc­tion in smok­ing and 34% reduc­tion in heavy drink­ing. These results match rea­son­ably close­ly results from sev­er­al pri­or stud­ies, includ­ing the pri­or meta-analy­ses men­tioned above. Some­what strik­ing­ly, but again in line with pri­or analy­sis, week­ly ser­vice atten­dees were 26% less like­ly to die dur­ing the fol­low-up peri­od.” Van­der­Weele, him­self a Chris­t­ian, is an epi­demi­ol­o­gist at Har­vard and I have shared some of his work before. From vol­ume 290.

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 412

On Fri­days (Sat­ur­days when I feel ill on Fri­day) 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.

412 is the sum of twelve con­sec­u­tive primes: 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. If Satan Took Up Mar­riage Coun­sel­ing  (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog) : “If Satan took up mar­riage coun­sel­ing, he would want peo­ple to believe mar­riage is so risky that it is best to post­pone it almost indef­i­nite­ly, that it is so sig­nif­i­cant and per­ilous an under­tak­ing that peo­ple should not even con­sid­er it until they have com­plet­ed their edu­ca­tion, begun a career, and become well estab­lished in life. He would espe­cial­ly want young peo­ple to antic­i­pate it with a sense of dread instead of excite­ment.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Well worth your time.
  2. Spir­its of the Cloud: A Demonolo­gy of the Inter­net (Thomas Har­mon, The Amer­i­can Mind): “…there is much wis­dom that can be gained by turn­ing to ancient sources to under­stand how these mys­te­ri­ous forces oper­ate and how to resist them. In brief, they oper­ate by prey­ing on our imag­i­na­tions and desires, which are often­times obscure even to us, espe­cial­ly when we try to pen­e­trate the veil between present and future or between human and divine by some sort of mag­i­cal or tech­ni­cal means. James Lind­say zeroes in on this aspect: ‘Demons influ­ence peo­ple through their emo­tions and their inter­pre­ta­tions of fea­tures of their lives.’ Since they are airy, and proud of their ele­va­tion over our earth­i­ness, they have a weak­ness: humil­i­ty and an embrace of our earth­bound bod­ies (as a mat­ter of fact, the word ‘humil­i­ty’ is derived from a Latin word mean­ing ‘dirt’ or ‘earth’, humus).”
    • The author is a Catholic the­olo­gian.
  3. Many on dat­ing apps are already in rela­tion­ships or aren’t seek­ing actu­al dates, new study finds (Angela Yang, NBC News): “Hope­ful swipers look­ing to find their next part­ners on dat­ing apps have grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned in recent years, and a new study reveals the poten­tial root of their dif­fi­cul­ties: Many dat­ing app users aren’t seek­ing roman­tic mee­tups at all. Half of near­ly 1,400 Tin­der users sur­veyed said they weren’t inter­est­ed in actu­al­ly find­ing dates, accord­ing to research pub­lished last month. Near­ly two-thirds report­ed they were already in rela­tion­ships, and some were mar­ried while they were using the app.”
    • Just meet some­one cute and flirt with them in real life. Like, say, in your cam­pus min­istry or church.
  4. What’s Wrong With the “What’s Wrong With Men” Dis­course (Conor Fitzger­ald, Sub­stack): “…men find ther­a­py and the ther­a­peu­tic world­view alien and unhelp­ful. Even the flim­si­est male spec­i­men has psy­cho­log­i­cal needs relat­ed to accom­plish­ment, strength, use­ful­ness and capa­bil­i­ty; an atmos­phere of uncon­di­tion­al empa­thy and unre­strained emo­tion­al dis­clo­sure can be poi­so­nous to those things. What­ev­er the rea­son, men under­stand that ther­a­py (the prac­tice) is most­ly just the med­ical cod­i­fi­ca­tion of a typ­i­cal­ly female world­view as objec­tive­ly true and cor­rect. Most men aren’t going to be inter­est­ed in join­ing a con­ver­sa­tion con­duct­ed in that spir­it.”
    • This is very well put. The whole essay is inter­est­ing. Ignore the typos and dig in!
    • Relat­ed: Gen­der cri­sis is real­ly a mar­riage cri­sis (Inez Step­man, Tri­bune-Demo­c­rat): “…women with few or no ties to the oppo­site sex in the form of mar­riage and fam­i­ly are diverg­ing sharply not only from the views of men, but also from those of their mar­ried sis­ters. Mar­ried men, unmar­ried men and mar­ried women are reg­is­ter­ing pri­mar­i­ly the same polit­i­cal pref­er­ences, with only small gaps in vot­ing pat­terns between them, while sin­gle women are run­ning fast in the oppo­site direc­tion from the rest. For exam­ple, a poll in the past round of midterms found mar­ried peo­ple of both sex­es and sin­gle men all going for Repub­li­cans by major­i­ty mar­gins with­in a hand­ful of points of each oth­er (52% to 59%). Sin­gle women, on the oth­er hand, went strong­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic by a land­slide of 68% to 31%.”
  5. Stan­ford Pres­i­dent Will Resign After Report Found Flaws in His Research (Stephanie Saul, New York Times): “Dr. Tessier-Lav­i­gne, 63, will relin­quish the pres­i­den­cy at the end of August but remain at the uni­ver­si­ty as a pro­fes­sor of biol­o­gy.”
    • Tessier-Lav­i­gne mat­ter shows why run­ning a lab is a full-time job (H. Hold­en Thorp, Sci­ence): “I had seen many researchers who had tak­en big admin­is­tra­tive jobs strug­gle with over­see­ing their research group. Many inci­dents sim­i­lar to those involv­ing Tessier-Lav­i­gne arose because the prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tors were too busy attend­ing to their oth­er high-pro­file jobs. David Bal­ti­more had to resign as pres­i­dent of Rock­e­feller Uni­ver­si­ty when sci­en­tif­ic mis­con­duct in his lab­o­ra­to­ry was uncov­ered (he lat­er became the pres­i­dent of the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, and like Tessier-Lav­i­gne, was not found to have direct knowl­edge of the mis­con­duct). In a dif­fer­ent set of prob­lem­at­ic inter­ac­tions relat­ed to research, José Basel­ga resigned as head of Memo­r­i­al Sloan-Ket­ter­ing Can­cer Cen­ter because he failed to dis­close (inten­tion­al­ly or not) indus­try rela­tion­ships in papers pub­lished by his research group. These exam­ples reflect how tend­ing to a major admin­is­tra­tive posi­tion and run­ning a lab­o­ra­to­ry at the same time are sim­ply too much for one per­son.”
    • Richard Saller to take over as inter­im pres­i­dent in Sep­tem­ber (Ori­ana Riley, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty is a huge oper­a­tion with a $9 bil­lion bud­get — about 10 times larg­er than the first Roman emper­or Augus­tus had for the whole empire,” Saller wrote. “I have a steep learn­ing curve ahead of me.”
  6. Reli­gion as a Cul­tur­al and Polit­i­cal Iden­ti­ty (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Peo­ple like the *idea* of reli­gion, with­out the actu­al trap­pings of said reli­gion. They are the kind of folks that talk about con­cepts like bib­li­cal val­ues with­out every step­ping foot inside a church. They want (pri­mar­i­ly) Chris­t­ian val­ues to be pro­tect­ed, but they don’t actu­al­ly want to spend much time under­stand­ing the the­ol­o­gy around the val­ues. For them, reli­gion has become a social and cul­tur­al mark­er — not a spir­i­tu­al one. It’s basi­cal­ly become anoth­er cud­gel in the cul­ture war. So, when the debate heats up over issues of sex­u­al­i­ty, gen­der, or abor­tion these are the kind of folks who will post memes on Face­book that include ref­er­ences to scrip­ture vers­es, despite the fact that they them­selves nev­er read the Bible.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  7. The Con­sum­ing Fire of Love (Peter J. Lei­thart, First Things): “God isn’t ter­ri­fy­ing because he’s unlov­ing. He’s ter­ri­fy­ing because Love is terrifying—undiluted love, love that refus­es com­pro­mise with evil, love that will not nego­ti­ate away the good of the beloved by allow­ing the beloved to set the terms of her love, love that promis­es a good and a future beyond all the beloved can ask or imag­ine.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The “Major­i­ty-Minor­i­ty” Myth (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Most demo­graph­ic esti­mates of the ‘white’ pop­u­la­tion are based on the Cen­sus def­i­n­i­tion: ‘non-His­pan­ic white.’ But what of ‘His­pan­ic whites’ — those whose lin­eage may come from South or Latin Amer­i­ca in eth­nic­i­ty but who also iden­ti­fy racial­ly and social­ly as white? If you include them in this cat­e­go­ry, Amer­i­ca remains two-thirds ‘white’ all the way through 2060 and beyond.” A fas­ci­nat­ing read. From vol­ume 289

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 411

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 411, which is the num­ber you used to dial to get direc­to­ry assis­tance from the phone com­pa­ny. It’s now slang for infor­ma­tion, so an emi­nent­ly appro­pri­ate num­ber for today’s com­pi­la­tion.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. This roundup has more spir­i­tu­al­ly enrich­ing con­tent than usu­al.
    • The Shep­herd Boy Who Wasn’t (Jor­dan K. Mon­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If we stick only to the ‘God can use any­one’ read­ing of David’s ori­gin sto­ry, we cel­e­brate God’s ele­va­tion of the over­looked and risk miss­ing God’s clear warn­ing to the ele­vat­ed: It can hap­pen to you. But if we see David for who he real­ly was, we real­ize that every great man or woman who ris­es to pow­er in the church is only one rooftop stroll away from a David-sized crash.”
      • I have unlocked this arti­cle. It’s longer than it needs to be, but good. The author is a pro­fes­sor of Old Tes­ta­ment at Hunt­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Fear­ing God as Sons, Not Slaves (Ben Edwards, Detroit Bap­tist The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary): “This dis­tinc­tion is per­haps most clear­ly seen in Exo­dus 20: ‘And all the peo­ple were watch­ing and hear­ing the thun­der and the light­ning flash­es, and the sound of the trum­pet, and the moun­tain smok­ing; and when the peo­ple saw it all, they trem­bled and stood at a dis­tance. 19 Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us your­self and we will lis­ten; but do not have God speak to us, or we will die!’ How­ev­er, Moses said to the peo­ple, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you will not sin.’’ Moses tells Israel: ‘Don’t be afraid, but fear.’ The Israelites were tempt­ed to cow­er in ter­ror as they beheld God’s majesty. But the fear they tru­ly need­ed was one that would lead them to avoid sin.”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal
    • Why I Gave Up Drink­ing (Sarah Bessey, Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine): “I think that con­vic­tion has got­ten a bit of a bad rap in the Church over the past lit­tle while. It’s under­stand­able. We have an over­cor­rec­tion to a lot of the legal­ism and bound­ary-mark­er Chris­tian­i­ty that dam­aged so many, the behav­iour mod­i­fi­ca­tion and rule-mak­ing and impo­si­tion of oth­er people’s con­vic­tions onto our own souls. But in our steer­ing away from legal­ism, I won­der if we left the road to holi­ness or began to for­get that God also cares about what we do and how we do it and why.”
      • From last year, but was just rec­om­mend­ed to me by a friend. It’s good.
    • Why Do We Go to Church? (Mike Glenn, Sub­stack): “Why do so many of us who claim to be Chris­tians nev­er attend church? I know every­one has their rea­sons, but here’s the hard truth: Jesus loves the church. He gave His life for the church. Jesus con­sid­ers the church to be His bride. I don’t care how close you are to Jesus, you can’t tell Him His wife is ugly. If we love Jesus, then we love His church. If you don’t love the church, then there’s rea­son to ques­tion if you love Jesus.”
    • Rap­ture (Pre­cept Austin): “In our day, the Rap­ture has come under attack by many. Some think it rep­re­sents the nov­el teach­ings of ‘defeatist Chris­tians.’ Oth­ers think it is pure fan­ta­sy. Still oth­ers seem to savor the idea of the Church going through the events of the Tribu­la­tion in order to ‘prove her met­al’ or refine her. We find it dif­fi­cult to under­stand why there is such oppo­si­tion by Chris­tians to the idea that the bride­groom would come for His bride pri­or to pour­ing forth His wrath (John 14:1–3)?”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent and I quite liked this one. I’m pret­ty famil­iar with the argu­ments in favor of a pret­ribu­la­tion­al rap­ture (a posi­tion I myself hold), but there was stuff in here that was new to me.
  2. Why Match School And Stu­dent Rank? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…elite col­leges are machines for laun­der­ing priv­i­lege. That is: Har­vard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented peo­ple, and 25% rich/powerful peo­ple. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart peo­ple get to net­work with elites, which is the first step to becom­ing elite them­selves. And the rich peo­ple get mixed in so thor­ough­ly with a pool of smart/talented peo­ple that every­one assumes they must be smart/talented them­selves. After all, they have a degree from Har­vard!”
  3. A Church’s Quest for Enchant­ment (Mag­gie Phllips, Tablet): “[Pen­te­costal­ism] began in the 19th cen­tu­ry, with the par­al­lel devel­op­ment through­out the Anglos­phere of a grass­roots spir­i­tu­al enthu­si­asm ground­ed in per­son­al expe­ri­ence. Its the­ol­o­gy is root­ed in his­to­ry both ancient and more con­tem­po­rary: a key event in the Chris­t­ian Bible’s Book of the Acts of the Apos­tles, as well as the the­ol­o­gy of John Wes­ley, who is rec­og­nized as the father of Method­ism. In the U.S., its cat­a­lyst is usu­al­ly iden­ti­fied as a reli­gious revival move­ment that began in Los Ange­les in 1906; over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, it still enjoys a wide­spread pres­ence in the U.S., and is a rapid­ly grow­ing glob­al phe­nom­e­non.”
    • This is actu­al­ly a pret­ty good overview of Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty for a sec­u­lar audi­ence. She gets a few details wrong, but over­all this is sol­id.
  4. The Church in a Time of Gen­der War (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “What I am say­ing is that I now believe most evan­gel­i­cal church­es should look at their sin­gle mem­bers with both eyes open: an appre­ci­a­tion for the won­der­ful poten­tial of their sea­son of life, but also a desire and strat­e­gy, as the Lord per­mits, to find ways to get these peo­ple Chris­t­ian spous­es. In oth­er words, I don’t think we should fear admit­ting that mar­riage is, in the major­i­ty of sit­u­a­tions we will come across, prefer­able to sin­gle­ness.”
    • Some peo­ple think I empha­size romance too much. I actu­al­ly won­der if I empha­size it too lit­tle.
    • Also, not reflect­ed in the excerpt but very much at the heart of the piece is the author’s con­cern that men and women in our cul­ture are col­lec­tive­ly believ­ing the worst of each oth­er and assum­ing the answer is for the oth­er gen­der to become more like them. He’s get­ting at some­thing real here. I think Chi Alpha has a health­i­er dat­ing cul­ture than oth­er places at Stan­ford, and I still see the ten­den­cies James cri­tiques in this piece in mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty.
    • Men are awe­some. Women are awe­some. You should prob­a­bly want to get mar­ried. Which means you should prob­a­bly go on dates.
  5. Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilder­ness. (Chris­tine Emba, Wash­ing­ton Post): “To the extent that any vision of ‘non­tox­ic’ mas­culin­i­ty is pro­posed, it ends up sound­ing more like stereo­typ­i­cal fem­i­nin­i­ty than any­thing else: Guys should learn to be more sen­si­tive, qui­et and social­ly apt, seem­ing­ly overnight.… I’m con­vinced that men are in a cri­sis. And I strong­ly sus­pect that end­ing it will require a pos­i­tive vision of what mas­culin­i­ty entails that is par­tic­u­lar — that is, nei­ther neu­tral nor inter­change­able with fem­i­nin­i­ty. Still, I find myself reluc­tant to ful­ly artic­u­late one. There’s a rea­son a lot of the writ­ing on the cri­sis in mas­culin­i­ty ends at the diag­no­sis stage.”
    • Unlocked. Sol­id over­all but amus­ing­ly clue­less at a few points. 
    • Relat­ed, although the author dis­claims it: Fight­ing (Marc Andreesen, Sub­stack): “At a pri­vate con­fer­ence this week, I was asked what I think of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent Mixed Mar­tial Arts (MMA) train­ing, Elon Musk’s chal­lenge to a cage fight, and pub­lic reports that a Zuckerberg/Musk MMA fight may well hap­pen lat­er this year, per­haps in the actu­al Roman Colos­se­um. I said, ‘I think that’s all great.’ And in this post I explain why.… I was also asked whether I con­sid­er Mark and Elon to be role mod­els to chil­dren in their embrace of fight­ing, and I said, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, yes. And I fur­ther rec­om­mend­ed to the audi­ence that they have their chil­dren trained in MMA, as my wife and I are.”
  6. The Tri­umph of the Good Samar­i­tan (Ash Mil­ton, Pal­la­di­um Mag­a­zine): “The activist defend­ers of the tent cities had seized on a moral lan­guage deeply ingrained in West­ern soci­eties. The notion of duty to neigh­bors, espe­cial­ly those who are poor and vul­ner­a­ble, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong inher­i­tance from Chris­tian­i­ty. But they were using con­cepts they did not care to under­stand. For the activists, the home­less weren’t neigh­bors in any rec­i­p­ro­cal sense, just a bat­ter­ing ram to use in their own con­flicts with soci­ety. By rhetor­i­cal­ly re-premis­ing neigh­bor­ly duties as a one-way rela­tion­ship of trib­ute and def­er­ence paid to the wretched by soci­ety, they ren­dered the very moral con­cepts they invoked use­less. They demand­ed neigh­bor­ly duties from strangers but pro­vid­ed no pos­si­bil­i­ty of those involved ever becom­ing any­thing like real neigh­bors to each oth­er.”
    • A bit longer than nec­es­sary, but quite good.
  7. Who’s Afraid of Moms for Lib­er­ty? (Robert Pondis­cio, The Free Press): “Moms for Lib­er­ty is the beat­ing heart of this country’s move­ment of angry parents—and Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion has nev­er seen any­thing quite like it.… The basic thrust of Moms for Liberty’s advocacy—that par­ents, not the gov­ern­ment, should have the ulti­mate say in what chil­dren are taught in pub­lic schools—has legs. Not one sub­group in McLaughlin’s crosstabs—Trump or Biden vot­ers; pro-life or pro-choice; black, white, or His­pan­ic; urban, rur­al, or suburban—disagrees.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Book Review: The Cult Of Smart (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “DeBoer recalls hear­ing an immi­grant moth­er proud­ly describe her old­er kid’s achieve­ments in math, sci­ence, etc, “and then her younger son ran by, and she said, off­hand, ‘This one, he is maybe not so smart.’ ” DeBoer was orig­i­nal­ly shocked to hear some­one describe her own son that way, then real­ized that he wouldn’t have thought twice if she’d dis­missed him as unath­let­ic, or bad at music. Intel­li­gence is con­sid­ered such a basic mea­sure of human worth that to dis­miss some­one as unin­tel­li­gent seems like con­sign­ing them into the out­er dark­ness.” Nor­mal­ly the best thing about Alexander’s blog is his book reviews. This one was just okay (smart and well-writ­ten but not astound­ing) and then all of a sud­den he turned his rant up to 11. Hang in until you reach the phrase “child prison.” If you’re not sold at that point, stop read­ing. From vol­ume 289.

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 410

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 410, which hap­pens to be the HTTP sta­tus code for a resource being per­ma­nent­ly gone.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How elite schools like Stan­ford became fix­at­ed on the AI apoc­a­lypse (Nitasha Tiku, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Stu­dents who join the AI safe­ty com­mu­ni­ty some­times get more than free boba. Just as EA con­fer­ences once meant trav­el­ing the world and hav­ing one-on-one meet­ings with wealthy, influ­en­tial donors, Open Philanthropy’s new uni­ver­si­ty fel­low­ship offers a hefty direct deposit: under­grad­u­ate lead­ers receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insur­ance, and up to $100,000 a year to cov­er group expens­es.”
    • Bro — what? Stan­ford won’t even let us pay for a guest speak­er with out­side funds. It’s not clear that the under­grad stu­dents lead­ers at Stan­ford are mak­ing $80k a year, but it’s not clear that they’re not, either. Some stu­dent some­where is, and that’s wild.
  2. Where’s Wal­do? How to Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Prove You Found Him With­out Reveal­ing Where He Is (Jack Murtagh, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can):  “Amaz­ing­ly, every claim that I can prove to you with a tra­di­tion­al math­e­mat­i­cal proof can also be proved in zero knowl­edge. Take your favorite result in math, and you could in prin­ci­ple prove it to a friend while show­ing them bup­kes about how it works. This is a pro­found dis­cov­ery about the nature of proof itself. Cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing.”
    • Zero-knowl­edge proofs are wild. That last sen­tence “cer­tain­ty does not require under­stand­ing” helped me real­ize that there are inter­est­ing par­al­lels to how peo­ple come to faith.
      • It is usu­al­ly an inter­ac­tive process. God begins to draw some­one repeat­ed­ly.
      • It is a prob­a­bilis­tic process. Things keep hap­pen­ing to the soon-to-be con­vert that don’t make sense. I mean, sure they could have hap­pened by chance because any­thing can hap­pen by chance. But they keep hap­pen­ing in a way that is exceed­ing­ly improb­a­ble.
      • The new con­vert’s con­fi­dence in God far exceeds their under­stand­ing of God.
    • God — the orig­i­nal zero-knowl­edge prover. To wax Aris­totelian, He is the unproved prover.
  3. Pas­tor Douša’s case shows the U.S. is not immune to author­i­tar­i­an crack­downs on dis­sent (Scott Welder, Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy): “…DHS retal­i­at­ed against Pas­tor Douša for min­is­ter­ing to migrants and refugees in Mex­i­co in Decem­ber 2018 by restrict­ing her Trust­ed Trav­el­er priv­i­leges; sub­ject­ing her to extra screen­ing at the south­ern bor­der; and telling Mex­i­can author­i­ties, false­ly, that there was ‘a great pos­si­bil­i­ty’ that she did not have ‘ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion to be in Mex­i­co’ and sug­gest­ing that the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment ‘deny [her] entry to Mex­i­co’ and ‘send [her] back to the Unit­ed States.’ A CBP offi­cial lat­er admit­ted that the request to Mex­i­can author­i­ties was ‘cre­ative writ­ing,’ ‘with­out any basis.’ But DHS’s actions made it more dif­fi­cult for Pas­tor Douša to con­tin­ue her min­istry, even­tu­al­ly caus­ing her to lim­it her activ­i­ties in the Unit­ed States and to end her min­istry in Mex­i­co alto­geth­er.”
  4. On some of the recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • Why the Cham­pi­ons of Affir­ma­tive Action Had to Leave Asian Amer­i­cans Behind (Jay Caspi­an Kang, The New York­er): “Asian Amer­i­cans, the group whom the suit was sup­pos­ed­ly about, have been odd­ly absent from the con­ver­sa­tions that have fol­lowed the rul­ing. The repet­i­tive­ness of the affir­ma­tive-action debate has come about, in large part, because both the courts and the media have most­ly ignored the Asian Amer­i­can plain­tiffs and cho­sen, instead, to relit­i­gate the same argu­ments about mer­it, white suprema­cy, and priv­i­lege. Dur­ing the five years I spent cov­er­ing this case, the com­men­ta­tors defend­ing affir­ma­tive action almost nev­er dis­proved the cen­tral claim that dis­crim­i­na­tion was tak­ing place against Asian Amer­i­cans, even as they dis­missed the plain­tiffs as pawns who had been duped by a con­ser­v­a­tive legal activist. They almost always redi­rect­ed the con­ver­sa­tion to some­thing else—often lega­cy admis­sions.”
    • On Race and Acad­e­mia (John McWhort­er, New York Times): “As an aca­d­e­m­ic who is also Black, I have seen up close, over decades, what it means to take race into account. I talked about some of these expe­ri­ences in inter­views and in a book I wrote in 2000, but I’ve nev­er shared them in an arti­cle like this one. The respons­es I’ve seen to the Supreme Court’s deci­sion move me to ven­ture it. The cul­ture that a pol­i­cy helps put into place can be as impor­tant as the pol­i­cy itself. And in my life­time, racial pref­er­ences in acad­e­mia — not mere­ly when it comes to under­grad­u­ate admis­sions but also mov­ing on to grad school and job appli­ca­tions and teach­ing careers — have been not only a set of for­mal and infor­mal poli­cies but also the grounds for a cul­ture of per­cep­tions and assump­tions.”
      • This is a very raw and vul­ner­a­ble piece. Rec­om­mend­ed. His Ph.D. is from Stan­ford.
    • Cov­er­ing the 303 Cre­ative deci­sion: Why do reporters keep ignor­ing the fine print? (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “I wish reporters would be hon­est in admit­ting that much of the anger expressed over the ver­dict stems from how Lorie Smith out­wit­ted her oppo­nents by fil­ing suit first, rather than endur­ing  a string of law­suits like what Jack Phillips is hav­ing to endure. I’m look­ing for that inves­tiga­tive piece on the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Com­mis­sion that, after hav­ing been reproved twice now by the Supreme Court, hasn’t changed its ways at all. Where is that New York­er take-out on Autumn Scar­di­na, the trans­gen­der attor­ney whose per­son­al vendet­ta against Phillips just nev­er ends because the courts have giv­en her a free pass? I’m wait­ing.”
    • My Win at the Supreme Court Is a Win for All Amer­i­cans (Lorie Smith, Real Clear Reli­gion): “I can’t say every­thing every­one wants me to. I can’t pre­tend to agree with every idea pre­sent­ed to me. None of us can. None of us should have to. Each of us should be free to pur­sue truth, hold to our faith, respect­ful­ly speak our beliefs, and thought­ful­ly live them out day by day, with­out the gov­ern­ment telling us what to believe or say. If that’s the free­dom you want – for your­self, for your fam­i­ly and friends, for all of those who share your ideas and con­vic­tions – then my vic­to­ry is a vic­to­ry for you. What­ev­er you may think of me and my beliefs, we’re all freer today than we were yes­ter­day. I hope you find that cause for cel­e­bra­tion.”
      • The author is the vic­to­ri­ous plain­tiff in the gay wed­ding web­site case.
    • The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind (Kris­ten Wag­goner, World): “The deci­sion means that gov­ern­ment offi­cials can­not mis­use the law to com­pel speech or exclude from the mar­ket­place peo­ple whose beliefs it dislikes.That’s a win for all Americans—whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or holds dif­fer­ent beliefs. Each of us has the right to decide for our­selves what mes­sages we will communicate—in our words, in our art, in our voice—without inter­fer­ence from the gov­ern­ment. The state’s author­i­ty does not extend to the human mind.”
      • The author is the lawyer who argued this case before the Supreme Court. She is an Assem­blies of God layper­son, btw.
  5. Chris­tians: More Like Jesus or Phar­isees? (Bar­na Research Group): “In this nation­wide study of self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians, the goal was to deter­mine whether Chris­tians have the actions and atti­tude of Jesus as they inter­act with oth­ers or if they are more akin to the beliefs and behav­iors of Phar­isees, the self-right­eous sect of reli­gious lead­ers described in the New Tes­ta­ment.… The find­ings reveal that most self-iden­ti­fied Chris­tians in the U.S. are char­ac­ter­ized by hav­ing the atti­tudes and actions researchers iden­ti­fied as Phar­i­saical. Just over half of the nation’s Christians—using the broad­est def­i­n­i­tion of those who call them­selves Christians—qualify for this cat­e­go­ry (51%). They tend to have atti­tudes and actions that are char­ac­ter­ized by self-right­eous­ness.”
    • This research is a decade old, but quite inter­est­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • I do have some reser­va­tions about the method­ol­o­gy. Some of the ques­tions are just wrong. For exam­ple, cat­e­go­riz­ing “I lis­ten to oth­ers to learn their sto­ry before telling them about my faith” being Christ­like rather than Phar­i­saical isn’t real­ly a Bib­li­cal stance, it’s just a per­son­al opin­ion. It may be a shrewd strat­e­gy and over­all com­mend­able, but I don’t see Jesus lis­ten­ing to a lot of sto­ries in the Bible. It’s a poor­ly cho­sen ques­tion for this scale. Quib­bles like that aside, I think the over­all vibe prob­a­bly sol­id.
  6. Liv­ing on a prayer? How attend­ing wor­ship can improve your phys­i­cal and men­tal health. (Phil McGraw and John White, USA Today): “Despite the proven health ben­e­fits, reli­gios­i­ty is on the decline in Amer­i­ca. The fastest-grow­ing reli­gious seg­ment of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion is now ‘nones’ − those who pro­fess no reli­gion. We’re not here to evan­ge­lize, but as a doc­tor and a men­tal health pro­fes­sion­al, it’s impor­tant to note that a decline of reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty seems to be asso­ci­at­ed with poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive health effects.”
    • I love that the authors are Dr. Phil and the chief med­ical offi­cer at Web­MD. To the aver­age Amer­i­can they’ve prob­a­bly got more cred­i­bil­i­ty than any med­ical asso­ci­a­tion or even the NIH, FDA, and CDC.
  7. How to Do Great Work (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the fron­tier, notice gaps, explore promis­ing ones. This is how prac­ti­cal­ly every­one who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physi­cists.… What should you do if you’re young and ambi­tious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along pas­sive­ly, assum­ing the prob­lem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no sys­tem­at­ic pro­ce­dure you can fol­low. When you read biogra­phies of peo­ple who’ve done great work, it’s remark­able how much luck is involved. They dis­cov­er what to work on as a result of a chance meet­ing, or by read­ing a book they hap­pen to pick up. So you need to make your­self a big tar­get for luck, and the way to do that is to be curi­ous. Try lots of things, meet lots of peo­ple, read lots of books, ask lots of ques­tions.”
    • This is super-long but worth­while. He ram­bles and is mis­tak­en at points, but his core insights are sol­id and impor­tant.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Thomas Jef­fer­son Could Nev­er Under­stand About Jesus (Vin­son Cun­ning­ham, New York­er): “In the years before eman­ci­pa­tion, the best argu­ments against slav­ery were also argu­ments about God.… Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bed­time read­ing for seek­ers of wis­dom. But those who were weak, or suf­fer­ing, or in urgent trou­ble, would have to look else­where.” This is quite an arti­cle. From vol­ume 286.

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 409

Read it for the amus­ing bits at the end.

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 409, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Reli­gion Has Become a Lux­u­ry Good (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “More edu­cat­ed peo­ple are more like­ly to claim a reli­gious affil­i­a­tion on sur­veys. It’s true in every sin­gle wave of the Coop­er­a­tive Elec­tion Study. It’s also the case in the Nation­scape sur­vey, which is 477K respon­dents. They even have 4,000 peo­ple with doc­tor­al degrees in their sam­ple. The most like­ly to be non-reli­gious? Those who didn’t fin­ish high school. As edu­ca­tion increas­es, so does reli­gious affil­i­a­tion. The group with the high­est lev­el of reli­gious affil­i­a­tion are those with a master’s degree.” Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  2. When the Ser­mon Fiz­zles Instead of Siz­zles (Tim Chal­lies, per­son­al blog): “But who’s to say that, in the mind of God, the pow­er of the preach­ing is entire­ly in the hands of the preach­er? Who’s to say that the pastor’s task is to pre­pare the ser­mon while the congregation’s task is mere­ly to pre­pare their own hearts to hear it? What if preach­ing is pow­er­less not because of the pastor’s lack of prepa­ra­tion but because of the church’s lack of prayer? What if poor preach­ing is not the con­se­quence of any fail­ure on the pastor’s part but on the congregation’s?”
  3. Why I’m Not a Lib­er­al Catholic (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But I just don’t see how you can look at the mod­ern world, writ large, and its most devel­oped precincts espe­cial­ly — the world of sex edu­ca­tion via ubiq­ui­tous pornog­ra­phy, fal­ter­ing mar­riage rates, col­laps­ing birthrates, the alien­ation of the sex­es from one anoth­er, the ris­ing exis­ten­tial angst attend­ing all these trends and the creep of euthana­sia as a ‘mer­ci­ful’ solu­tion — and say that clear­ly what the church needs to do at this his­tor­i­cal moment is water down or just talk less about its teach­ings on sex and mar­riage and fam­i­ly, rather than find a way to reassert them or offer them anew.”
    • The whole thing is specif­i­cal­ly about the Roman Catholic Church, but is rel­e­vant to Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty as well.
    • While we’re on the sub­ject The 5 Minute Case for Protes­tantism (Gavin Ortlund, YouTube): five min­utes
  4. Is There An Illu­sion Of Moral Decline? (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “…I’ve been read­ing the bias­es and heuris­tics lit­er­a­ture for fif­teen years now, and devel­oped the fol­low­ing heuris­tic: if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about how many marsh­mal­lows to take in a rigged exper­i­ment, this is prob­a­bly an inter­est­ing and pro­duc­tive line of research. But if a researcher finds that ordi­nary peo­ple are biased about their most foun­da­tion­al real-life beliefs, prob­a­bly those ordi­nary peo­ple are being com­plete­ly sen­si­ble, and it’s the researcher who’s try­ing to shoe­horn their rea­son­ing into some mode it was nev­er intend­ed to address.”
  5. ‘Exhaust­ed’ pas­tors suf­fer­ing decline in over­all health, respect, friend­ship: study (Jon Brown, Fox News): “Pas­tors who report­ed that their men­tal and emo­tion­al health was below aver­age spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excel­lent men­tal and emo­tion­al health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”
    • This cor­re­sponds with what I am hear­ing anec­do­tal­ly. Which is bizarre to me, because min­istry is awe­some and reward­ing
  6. Sau­di Ara­bia Wants Tourists. It Didn’t Expect Chris­tians. (Vivian Nereim, Yahoo News): “No one in the con­ser­v­a­tive Islam­ic king­dom had planned for the Chris­tians. Yet Chris­tians of many stripes — includ­ing Bap­tists, Men­non­ites and oth­ers who call them­selves ‘chil­dren of God’ — were among the first peo­ple to use the new Sau­di tourist visas. Since then, they have grown steadi­ly in num­bers, drawn by word of mouth and viral YouTube videos argu­ing that Sau­di Ara­bia, not Egypt, is the site of Mount Sinai, the peak where Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian Scrip­tures describe God reveal­ing the Ten Com­mand­ments.”
  7. The recent Supreme Court deci­sions:
    • I don’t have any arti­cles about the Supreme Court deci­sion in favor of the web design­er who refus­es to design web­sites for gay mar­riages, sim­ply because I haven’t read any­thing very good about it. Most arti­cles seem to mis­un­der­stand both the case and the deci­sion entire­ly. It was a won­der­ful out­come and should be praised — the gov­ern­ment can­not com­pel you to say some­thing you do not believe or to cel­e­brate some­thing you do not approve. Sug­ges­tions for thought­ful arti­cles wel­come, even those with which you think I will dis­agree.
    • Affir­ma­tive Action Thoughts in an Inel­e­gant List For­mat (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “…we demand that our edu­ca­tion sys­tem be both a lad­der of suc­cess, a sort­ing sys­tem that cre­ates a hier­ar­chy of excel­lence, and a great equal­iz­er, a way to make soci­ety more equi­table. These are flat­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry pur­pos­es. They are direct­ly antag­o­nis­tic to each oth­er.”
    • Burn Down the Admis­sions Sys­tem (Yascha Mounk, Per­sua­sion): “When­ev­er I think of the role that per­son­al state­ments play in America’s land­scape of high­er edu­ca­tion, I remem­ber a class­mate of mine at Cam­bridge. He came from an aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly, grew up in Lon­don, and attend­ed Eton. He was, in oth­er words, about as priv­i­leged as you can be in the Unit­ed King­dom. But when it came time to apply for admis­sion to a pres­ti­gious schol­ar­ship that would send him to Har­vard, he wrote mov­ing­ly about how his pas­sion for pub­lic pol­i­cy was awak­ened when he grew up among the rav­ages of the trou­bles in North­ern Ire­land; at one point, he sug­gest­ed, his house was even bombed. (Those who knew him real­ized that this was one of his family’s ances­tral cas­tles, not his pri­ma­ry fam­i­ly home, a fact he obvi­ous­ly omit­ted from his appli­ca­tion.)  These kinds of absur­di­ties are not a bug of the strange Amer­i­can rev­er­ence for per­son­al state­ments; they are a fea­ture of it.”
    • I Teach at an Elite Col­lege. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gam­ing of Admis­sions (Tyler Austin Harp­er, New York Times): “Near­ly every col­lege admis­sions tutor­ing job I took over the next few years would come with a ver­sion of the same behest. The Chi­nese and Kore­an kids want­ed to know how to make their appli­ca­tion mate­ri­als seem less Chi­nese or Kore­an. The rich white kids want­ed to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids want­ed to make sure they came across as Black enough. Dit­to for the Lati­no and Mid­dle East­ern kids. Seem­ing­ly every­one I inter­act­ed with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, stu­dent or par­ent — believed that get­ting into an elite col­lege required what I came to call racial gam­i­fi­ca­tion.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies at Bates Col­lege and is him­self black.
    • 10 Notes on the End of Affir­ma­tive Action (Cole­man Hugh­es, Sub­stack): “My per­son­al view is that diver­si­ty is like love. When it hap­pens nat­u­ral­ly, it’s the most beau­ti­ful thing in the world. But the moment it’s arranged, leg­is­lat­ed, or man­dat­ed, you’ve some­what missed the point.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have A youth pas­tor inter­viewed about the stock mar­ket on MSNBC (Twit­ter): I’ve men­tioned before that some Chris­tians are too ten­ta­tive when speak­ing about the gospel in high-pro­file media envi­ron­ments. Not this guy. He just throws down some Bible. He’s the youth pas­tor at Beach­point Church in Orange Coun­ty. From vol­ume 286

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 408

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 408, the 8th Pell Num­ber, a sequence use­ful in approx­i­mat­ing the square root of 2.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Com­pe­ti­tion for Believ­ers in Africa Is Trans­form­ing Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam (Fran­cis X. Roc­ca, Nicholas Bariyo & Gben­ga Aking­bule, Wall Street Jour­nal): “On a recent Sun­day morn­ing in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, mem­bers of the faith­ful clutched their hymn books and chant­ed God’s prais­es as they danced to the beat of tam­bourines. A preach­er led the con­gre­ga­tion in pray­ing for the health of their chil­dren and suc­cess at work. The ser­vice resem­bled Pen­te­costal Chris­tian­i­ty, a move­ment that orig­i­nat­ed in the U.S. and has swept Africa in the last few decades. But the par­tic­i­pants weren’t Chris­tians. They were Mus­lims, prac­tic­ing an ecsta­t­ic style of wor­ship that has devel­oped in response to the chal­lenge posed by Pen­te­costal­ism. Across sub-Saha­ran Africa, reli­gion today is in fer­ment as dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam vie for believers—a con­test that is trans­form­ing both faiths and dis­rupt­ing long-estab­lished terms of coex­is­tence.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. I believe I have unlocked the pay­wall on this one.
  2. Cal­i­for­nia restau­rant used fake priest to get work­ers to con­fess “sins,” feds say (Aimee Pic­chi, CBS News): “In court doc­u­ments, a serv­er at the restau­rant, Maria Par­ra, tes­ti­fied that she found her con­ver­sa­tion with the alleged priest ‘unlike nor­mal con­fes­sions,’ where she would talk about what she want­ed to con­fess, accord­ing to a court doc­u­ment reviewed by CBS Mon­ey­Watch. Instead, the priest told her that he would ask ques­tions ‘to get the sins out of me.’ ”
  3. Slav­ery in the Bible | Dr. Esau Mccaul­ley (Jude 3 Project, YouTube): sev­en min­utes.
  4. Sports Writ­ers Out, Zoomer Tik­Tok­ers In (Ethan Strauss, Sub­stack): “There’s a real malev­o­lent genius to con­coct­ing a cuck­ish char­ac­ter who pals around with the high-sta­tus Cavin­ders, but only as the butt of their jokes. He’s lit­er­al­ly mod­el­ing los­ing mon­ey towards the Betr cof­fers, while hang­ing out with mod­els. Some­one actu­al­ly came up with a means for habit­u­at­ing young men into an attrac­tive form of fail­ing as part of an ‘organic’-looking humil­i­a­tion fan­ta­sy.”
  5. Data Fal­si­fi­ca­da (Part 1): “Clus­ter­fake” (Uri Simon­sohn, Leif Nel­son & Joe Sim­mons, Data Cola­da): “That’s right: Two dif­fer­ent peo­ple inde­pen­dent­ly faked data for two dif­fer­ent stud­ies in a paper about dis­hon­esty.”
    • There was empha­sis in orig­i­nal which I removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. U.S.-Funded Sci­en­tist Among Three Chi­nese Researchers Who Fell Ill Amid Ear­ly Covid-19 Out­break (Michael R. Gor­don, Wall Street Jour­nal): “A promi­nent sci­en­tist who worked on coro­n­avirus projects fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment is one of three Chi­nese researchers who became sick with an unspec­i­fied ill­ness dur­ing the ini­tial out­break of Covid-19, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer U.S. offi­cials.”
    • A less san­i­tized pre­sen­ta­tion of the same facts: First Peo­ple Sick­ened By COVID-19 Were Chi­nese Sci­en­tists At Wuhan Insti­tute Of Virol­o­gy, Say US Gov­ern­ment Sources (Michael Shel­len­berg­er, Matt Taib­bi & Alex Gutentag, Sub­stack): “Sources with­in the US gov­ern­ment say that three of the ear­li­est peo­ple to become infect­ed with SARS-CoV­‑2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were mem­bers of the Wuhan lab sus­pect­ed to have leaked the pan­dem­ic virus. As such, not only do we know there were WIV sci­en­tists who had devel­oped COVID-19-like ill­ness­es in Novem­ber 2019, but also that they were work­ing with the clos­est rel­a­tives of SARS-CoV­‑2, and insert­ing gain-of-func­tion fea­tures unique to it.”
  7. REVIEW EXCLUSIVE—Catch Him if You Can: Meet Will Cur­ry (Josi­ah Jon­er, Stan­ford Review): “Will Curry’s sto­ry is long and complex—but most of all, enthralling. He is a liv­ing sto­ry of some­one who lived the adven­tur­ous life that so many desire yet nev­er actu­al­ly live, includ­ing many at Stan­ford trapped in a cul­ture of monot­o­ny. Is all of the sto­ry he told me true? Maybe, or maybe not. Will is, after all, a com­pet­i­tive pok­er play­er who has pulled off bluffs in the past. But regard­less, Will’s sto­ry is far from over. In fact, I think it’s real­ly only begun.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The New Nation­al Amer­i­can Elite (Michael Lind, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “…from the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion until the late 20th cen­tu­ry, the Amer­i­can elite was divid­ed among region­al oli­garchies. It is only in the last gen­er­a­tion that these region­al patri­ci­ates have been absorbed into a sin­gle, increas­ing­ly homo­ge­neous nation­al oli­garchy, with the same accent, man­ners, val­ues, and edu­ca­tion­al back­grounds from Boston to Austin and San Fran­cis­co to New York and Atlanta. This is a tru­ly epochal devel­op­ment.” Lind is a pro­fes­sor at UT Austin in the school of pub­lic affairs. From vol­ume 286.

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 407

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 407, which is the sum of the cubes of its dig­its: 43 + 03 + 73

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Reli­gion Good for Your Health? (David DeSteno, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Ongo­ing sur­veys like these, as well as more tar­get­ed stud­ies, show a strong link between reli­gion and bet­ter phys­i­cal and men­tal health. Of course, this doesn’t mean that reli­gion should be pre­scribed as a med­i­cine, either in addi­tion to or in place of oth­er estab­lished treat­ments. The choice to be spir­i­tu­al­ly active is a per­son­al one, and reli­gion is only one of many fac­tors that affect health. Nonethe­less, it’s time for health sci­ences to take reli­gion seri­ous­ly and con­sid­er what it offers the body and mind.”
    • The author is a psych prof at North­east­ern. In this essay he alludes to Tyler Van­der­Weele’s research which I have spot­light­ed on many occa­sions.
  2. Richard Dawkins’ Ex-Right-Hand Man Comes to Christ! (Liv­ing Waters, YouTube): fifty-five min­utes long (near­ly an hour!). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. The tes­ti­mo­ny itself kicks in at 37 min­utes in.
  3. Trump’s Jus­tices Didn’t Doom Affir­ma­tive Action. Demog­ra­phy Did. (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “The arrival of large num­bers of immi­grants over the past half-cen­tu­ry has upset the log­ic of affir­ma­tive action in sev­er­al ways. For one thing, white Amer­i­cans no longer dom­i­nate the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem. (They make up only 22 per­cent of the Stan­ford class of 2026, for instance.) Ear­ly on, affir­ma­tive action was also extend­ed to Lati­nos, whose num­bers con­tin­ue to grow. In addi­tion, African and Caribbean immi­grants and their chil­dren now account for more than 40 per­cent of the Black enroll­ment in the Ivy League, which risks crowd­ing out the peo­ple that affir­ma­tive action was orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to help.” 
    • Pay­wall is unlocked.
  4. Should Women Preach? Huge Majori­ties of Evan­gel­i­cal Think They Should (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I don’t know how many ways I can show this: the sup­port for women preach­ing on Sun­day morn­ing from behind the pul­pit is strong among evan­gel­i­cals. Even among those who say that the Bible is lit­er­al­ly true and attend church every week, 74% are in favor of women preach­ing.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
  5. Uni­ver­si­ties Shouldn’t Be Ide­o­log­i­cal Church­es (Robert P. George, The Atlantic): “If aca­d­e­m­ic units are per­mit­ted to make state­ments on polit­i­cal issues, then the fol­low­ing will be the case: When con­sid­er­ing a job or tenure can­di­date, vot­ing fac­ul­ty mem­bers will antic­i­pate that he or she, if appoint­ed, will vote on future polit­i­cal state­ments. So they will per­fect­ly rea­son­ably want to know, and will take into account, the candidate’s ide­o­log­i­cal lean­ings and polit­i­cal views and affil­i­a­tions in decid­ing whether to sup­port or oppose the appoint­ment.… After all, vot­ing on polit­i­cal statements—if depart­ments were to be autho­rized to do so and chose to act on that authorization—would be one of the things a fac­ul­ty mem­ber is, as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, hired to do.”
    • Rob­bie George is a gem.
    • I would post more con­tent from The Atlantic but I don’t have a sub­scrip­tion and their pay­wall is pret­ty lim­it­ing.
  6. How Assist­ed Sui­cide Destroys the Loved Ones Left Behind (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “The sim­ple, cen­tral argu­ment of the sui­cide activists is that the right to bod­i­ly auton­o­my includes the right to sui­cide, and that legal­iza­tion is nec­es­sary in order to reduce suf­fer­ing in soci­ety. The real­i­ty we see unfold­ing tells a very dif­fer­ent sto­ry. Far from reduc­ing suf­fer­ing, assist­ed sui­cide has become the cat­a­lyst for spread­ing it. In many if not most cas­es, a death by lethal injec­tion trans­fers tem­po­ral suf­fer­ing to heart­bro­ken loved ones who strug­gle to process what has tak­en place.”
  7. The illu­sion of moral decline (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “…two well-known psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na can com­bine to pro­duce an illu­sion of moral decline.… Biased expo­sure means that things always look out­ra­geous: mur­der and arson and fraud, oh my! Biased mem­o­ry means the out­rages of yes­ter­day don’t seem so out­ra­geous today. When things always look bad today but brighter yes­ter­day, con­grat­u­la­tions pal, you got your­self an illu­sion of moral decline. We call this mech­a­nism BEAM (Biased Expo­sure and Mem­o­ry), and it fits with some of our more sur­pris­ing results.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What Chris­t­ian Cit­i­zens Owe Gov­ern­ment Lead­ers (George P. Wood, Influ­ence Mag­a­zine): “In this new year, with a new pres­i­den­tial admin­is­tra­tion, let us renew our com­mit­ment to pray­ing for our gov­ern­ment offi­cials, to shar­ing the gospel with them, to obey­ing the law and respect­ing the law­givers, and to hold­ing them account­able while giv­ing them our good exam­ple! These are the basic duties of Chris­t­ian cit­i­zen­ship.” This is an excel­lent sum­ma­ry. Dis­claimer: the author is an acquain­tance of mine. From vol­ume 285.

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 406

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 406, which is also the name of a poem by John Boyle O’Reil­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. A Church Grows in Brook­lyn (Sheluyang Peng, The Free Press): “…Chris­tian­i­ty is thriv­ing if you know where to look. Peo­ple say immi­grants do the jobs that native-born Amer­i­cans don’t want to do. Going to church is one of them. Over two-thirds of today’s immi­grants to the Unit­ed States are Chris­tians, and promi­nent reli­gious schol­ars fore­cast that immi­grants will sin­gle-hand­ed­ly reverse Christianity’s decline in Amer­i­ca.”
  2. Please Don’t Ask If I Played a Sport in Col­lege (Ger­ald Hig­gin­both­am, SPSP): “…these open­ing ques­tions were from an actu­al con­ver­sa­tion I had while trav­el­ing after grad­u­at­ing from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty in 2014. After a stranger struck up a con­ver­sa­tion, I shared that I had just grad­u­at­ed with a major in psy­chol­o­gy. On cue, the stranger asked their first fol­low-up ques­tion, the one that I was typ­i­cal­ly used to: ‘What sport did you play?’ Some may see this ques­tion as a com­pli­ment, but it is not—it is an assump­tion root­ed in a long­stand­ing stereo­type about Black peo­ple.”
    • Ger­ald, now a pro­fes­sor at UVA, is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  3. Blas­phe­my Then and Now (Carl True­man, First Things): “Oppo­nents of blas­phe­my then and of blas­phe­my now share some­thing in com­mon: a con­cern to pro­tect that which is sacred. But that is where the sim­i­lar­i­ty begins and ends. Old-style blas­phe­my involved des­e­crat­ing God because it was God who was sacred. Today’s blas­phe­my involves sug­gest­ing that man is not all-pow­er­ful, that he can­not cre­ate him­self in any way he choos­es, that he is sub­ject to lim­its beyond his choice and beyond his con­trol.”
  4. Under­stand­ing the Tech Right (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “In our cur­rent pol­i­tics, one can sim­pli­fy the world by say­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives are in favor of hier­ar­chy and against change, with lib­er­als against hier­ar­chy and for change. While this isn’t how things always work out in prac­tice, and there are many nuances and qual­i­fiers one could add, this is at least how each side per­ceives itself. The Tech Right com­bines the accep­tance of inequal­i­ty of the right with the open­ness to change of the left. The pro-change, anti-equal­i­ty quad­rant is the sweet spot for sup­port for cap­i­tal­ism, so of course they tend to favor free mar­ket eco­nom­ic poli­cies.”
  5. The Hill­song exper­i­ment is over. Chris­tian­i­ty was nev­er meant to be cool (Cherie Gilmour, The Age): “Per­haps now that Hill­song has been cast out of the Gar­den of Eden, the hun­dreds and thou­sands of peo­ple who are and have been mem­bers can find their way for­ward. The future of the church will depend on its next move. But for all saints and sin­ners alike who need grace, it’s worth remem­ber­ing there was only one man who said, ‘Fol­low me’. And he wasn’t on Insta­gram.”
  6. Fre­quent mar­i­jua­na users tend to be lean­er and less like­ly to devel­op dia­betes. But the pseu­do-health ben­e­fits come at a price, experts say (Erin Prater, Yahoo Finance): “It’s well estab­lished that cannabis con­sump­tion is linked to low­er BMI and improved car­diometa­bol­ic risk, the authors write. But their find­ings point to the abil­i­ty of the drug to per­ma­nent­ly dis­rupt organ func­tion, “with poten­tial­ly far-reach­ing con­se­quences on phys­i­cal and men­tal health,” Piomel­li said. “Ado­les­cent expo­sure to THC may pro­mote an endur­ing ‘pseu­do-lean’ state that super­fi­cial­ly resem­bles healthy lean­ness but might, in fact, be root­ed in … organ dys­func­tion,” the authors wrote.
  7. Red­di­tor cre­ates work­ing ani­me QR codes using Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion (Benj Edwards, Ars Tech­ni­ca): “The cre­ator did not detail the exact tech­nique used to cre­ate the nov­el codes in Eng­lish, but… they appar­ent­ly trained sev­er­al cus­tom Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion Con­trol­Net mod­els (plus LoRA fine tun­ings) that have been con­di­tioned to cre­ate dif­fer­ent-styled results. Next, they fed exist­ing QR codes into the Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion AI image gen­er­a­tor and used Con­trol­Net to main­tain the QR code’s data posi­tion­ing despite syn­the­siz­ing an image around it, like­ly using a writ­ten prompt.… This inter­est­ing use of Sta­ble Dif­fu­sion is pos­si­ble because of the innate error cor­rec­tion fea­ture built into QR codes. This error cor­rec­tion capa­bil­i­ty allows a cer­tain per­cent­age of the QR code’s data to be restored if it’s dam­aged or obscured, per­mit­ting a lev­el of mod­i­fi­ca­tion with­out mak­ing the code unread­able.”
    • Wild stuff- that these codes work is very cool.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Only Bib­li­cal Peace­mak­ing Resolves Racial and Polit­i­cal Injus­tice (Justin Giboney, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In 2020, the pan­dem­ic forced Amer­i­cans to dis­tance our­selves phys­i­cal­ly. Our pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ties, and world­views forced us fur­ther apart too. We watch the same occur­rences and walk away not only with dif­fer­ent opin­ions, but with a dif­fer­ent set of facts. And yet, through social media, we’ve bridged our divides just enough to antag­o­nize one anoth­er.” High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The author is pres­i­dent of the AND Cam­paign. From vol­ume 285.

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.