Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 495: Math Points to God, Slavery Persists, and the Gospel Draws Crowds at Stanford

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The mir­a­cle of math (Sarah Sal­vian­der, Sub­stack): “In 1960, the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Eugene Wign­er iden­ti­fied a meta­phys­i­cal mys­tery for the ages: why are the laws of nature so apt­ly described by math­e­mat­ics? It is a decep­tive­ly sim­ple ques­tion. We think we grasp the answer easily—until we actu­al­ly try to explain it. Wigner’s essay, titled ‘The Unrea­son­able Effec­tive­ness of Math­e­mat­ics in the Nat­ur­al Sci­ences,’ high­lights this enig­ma. The term ‘unrea­son­able’ cap­tures the bewil­der­ing real­i­ty that there is no appar­ent rea­son why math should so flaw­less­ly mir­ror the universe’s behav­iors. This sug­gests, whether intend­ed by Wign­er or not, that the answer to this mys­tery lies beyond the uni­verse.”
    • The author is an astro­physi­cist who now does apolo­get­ics.
    • For those who have nev­er seen it, here is the well-known paper: The Unrea­son­able Effec­tive­ness of Math­e­mat­ics in the Nat­ur­al Sci­ences (Eugene Wign­er, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Pure and Applied Math­e­mat­ics): “The mir­a­cle of the appro­pri­ate­ness of the lan­guage of math­e­mat­ics for the for­mu­la­tion of the laws of physics is a won­der­ful gift which we nei­ther under­stand nor deserve. We should be grate­ful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for bet­ter or for worse, to our plea­sure, even though per­haps also to our baf­fle­ment, to wide branch­es of learn­ing.”
  2. The Secret Cam­paign in Chi­na to Save a Woman Chained by the Neck (Vivan Wang, New York Times): “The out­cry rip­pled nation­wide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chi­nese his­to­ry. The Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty sees pop­u­lar dis­con­tent as a chal­lenge to its author­i­ty, but this was so intense that it seemed even the par­ty would strug­gle to quash it. And yet, it did. To find out how, I tried to track what hap­pened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expan­sive web of intim­i­da­tion at home and abroad, involv­ing mass sur­veil­lance, cen­sor­ship and deten­tions — a cam­paign that con­tin­ues to this day.”
    • Pray for Chi­na reg­u­lar­ly.
    • Relat­ed: slav­ery is not a rel­ic of the past and crops up in unex­pect­ed places. UN judge guilty of forc­ing woman to work as slave (BBC): “Gasps were heard from the pub­lic gallery as the ver­dicts were giv­en, and the court was cleared as the defen­dant appeared unwell.… Mugambe, who was study­ing for a law PhD at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, had con­spired with Ugan­dan deputy high com­mis­sion­er John Leonard Muger­wa to arrange for the young woman to come to the UK.”
  3. Jesus Is A Jew (David Brooks, Com­ment): “Jesus is inher­ent­ly mysterious—a lion who is also a lamb. But he is also intel­li­gi­ble. And that’s because he lived an actu­al life in an actu­al his­tor­i­cal con­text.… Jesus is amid the muck and armed with the Word, and yet emerges as a fig­ure ulti­mate­ly alone—a vor­tex of spir­i­tu­al forces con­verg­ing in one per­son, no one else quite like him.”
  4. We Live Like Roy­al­ty and Don’t Know It (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “My wife and I were at a table­ful of smart, well-edu­cat­ed twen­ty-some­things — friends of the bride and groom. The wed­ding, with all its hope and aspi­ra­tion, had put them in mind of the future. As young peo­ple should, they want­ed to help make that future bright. There was so much to do! They want­ed the hun­gry to be fed, the thirsty to have water, the poor to have light, the sick to be well. But when I men­tioned how remark­able it was that a hun­dred-plus peo­ple could para­chute into a remote, unfa­mil­iar place and eat a gourmet meal untrou­bled by fears for their health and com­fort, they were sur­prised. The hero­ic sys­tems required to bring all the ele­ments of their din­ner to these tables by the sea were invis­i­ble to them. Despite their fine edu­ca­tion, they knew lit­tle about the mech­a­nisms of today’s food, water, ener­gy, and pub­lic-health sys­tems. They want­ed a bet­ter world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.”
    • Relat­ed: Break­fast for Eight Bil­lion (Charles Mann, The New Atlantis): “Some­time in the 1980s, an unprece­dent­ed change in the human con­di­tion occurred. For the first time in known his­to­ry, the aver­age per­son on Earth had enough to eat all the time.”
  5. The Work­ism Trap (Bob­by Jamieson, Plough): “And a 2018 research arti­cle found that, com­pared to women who grad­u­at­ed from low­er-ranked schools, women who attend­ed elite, selec­tive uni­ver­si­ties do not, on aver­age, earn more per hour, but they do work more. For women, it seems, the ben­e­fits of an elite diplo­ma are more time at work and low­er chances of mar­ry­ing and hav­ing chil­dren.”
    • Vague­ly relat­ed (at least to the excerpt): Are Men OK? (Eamon Whalen, The Nation): “The biggest risk fac­tor for drop­ping out of col­lege, con­trol­ling for every­thing else, is being a man. Those strug­gles have extend­ed to the labor mar­ket. When adjust­ed for infla­tion, most Amer­i­can men today earn around $3,000 less than men did in 1979, which leads to a grim real­iza­tion: Much of the nar­row­ing of the per­sis­tent wage gap between men and women can be explained by the stag­nat­ing wages for men.”
    • Com­ment­ing on the above arti­cle: Cre­at­ing a Per­mis­sion Space for Men’s Issues (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “The fem­i­nist movement’s suc­cess depend­ed on telling men they had to change, that there were cer­tain choic­es and behav­iors they could no longer engage in. It also explic­it­ly real­lo­cat­ed resources and posi­tions from men to women.  While I don’t think the sit­u­a­tion with men is sym­met­ri­cal, it strikes me as dubi­ous that noth­ing needs to change with regards to women. For exam­ple, as econ­o­mist Melis­sa Kear­ney, also a Brook­ings affil­i­at­ed schol­ar, doc­u­ment­ed in her superb book The Two-Par­ent Priv­i­lege — I sum­ma­rized some key find­ings — the ben­e­fits of grow­ing up in an intact fam­i­ly vs. a sin­gle par­ent home are over­whelm­ing. The Unit­ed States has the high­est share of its chil­dren liv­ing in sin­gle par­ent homes of any coun­try in the entire world. That’s Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism we could live with­out.” (empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty)
  6. Is Reli­gion Taboo at Stan­ford? (Sloane Wehman, Stan­ford Review): “On the after­noon of Mon­day March 3, hun­dreds of stu­dents con­gre­gat­ed in White Plaza to lis­ten to Cliffe Knech­tle and his son Stu­art Knech­tle debate Chris­tian­i­ty as a part of their ‘Give Me An Answer’ min­istry, a pro­gram that strives to answer tough ques­tions about faith. Cliffe and Stu­art are both pas­tors at Grace Com­mu­ni­ty Church in New Canaan, Con­necti­cut, and Cliffe has been debat­ing stu­dents on Chris­tian­i­ty since devel­op­ing the Give Me An Answer min­istry in 1991.”
  7. How Do You Solve a Prob­lem Like Mar­tinez? (Ben­jamin Flesh­man, SSRN): “All told, there are reports of 175 reli­gious stu­dent groups that were ful­ly denied offi­cial recog­ni­tion since 1990. One hun­dred and nine­teen of those groups were kicked off their cam­pus­es after Mar­tinez was decid­ed. That means that more than twice as many groups have been dere­c­og­nized in the fif­teen years since Mar­tinez than in the twen­ty years before­hand. Part of this is due to the more aggres­sive mass dere­cog­ni­tions at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, and Van­der­bilt. There real­ly weren’t any mas­sive dere­cog­ni­tion cam­paigns pre-Mar­tinez, with the largest being Cal State’s dere­cog­ni­tion of a hand­ful of groups that led to the lit­i­ga­tion in Alpha Delta Chi. When you include the num­ber of recog­ni­tion issues that stopped just short of a full dere­cog­ni­tion, but which still required the inter­ven­tion of legal coun­sel or nation­al orga­ni­za­tions to resolve, the num­bers shoot to 257 total report­ed inci­dents since 1990, with 195 occur­ring post-Mar­tinez. That means rough­ly three times as many total report­ed inci­dents post-Mar­tinez as pre-Mar­tinez.”
    • Men­tions Chi Alpha (not at Stan­ford, just gen­er­al­ly) in a few places. The Beck­et Fund, with whom the author is affil­i­at­ed, are Chi Alpha’s legal rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

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 494: Religion at Elite Schools, Why Shrimp Must Die, and Funny Videos

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What Does Reli­gion Look Like At Elite Uni­ver­si­ties? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “Yeah, again, I am not bowled over by any huge dif­fer­ences in the reli­gious atten­dance of stu­dents at Ivy league schools ver­sus non-selec­tive insti­tu­tions. 49% of stu­dents who attend pres­ti­gious schools attend church less than once a year com­pared to 46% of stu­dents who go to a non-selec­tive school. So, those at the top end are slight­ly less reli­gious­ly active, but three points is cer­tain­ly not a chasm. That’s the gen­er­al trend here when com­par­ing across all types of atten­dance lev­els. For stu­dents at non-selec­tive schools, 19% say they attend reli­gious ser­vices about week­ly or more. It’s 14% of those at selec­tive schools. Again, a gap, but a rel­a­tive­ly small one.”
  2. Did God cre­ate log­ic? (J. Budziszews­ki, blog): “To say that He cre­at­ed log­ic would be to sug­gest that He could have done dif­fer­ent­ly and cre­at­ed illog­ic – that He could have allowed con­tra­dic­tions such as a man who is a don­key, or a two which is a three. But if I make a sen­tence by plac­ing the words ‘God can’ before a string of non­sense, that doesn’t make the sen­tence true, would it? Sen­tences like ‘Can God make a man who is not a man but a don­key?’ or ‘Can God make a two which is a three?’ wouldn’t even rise to the lev­el of being mean­ing­ful ques­tions. They would be like ask­ing ‘Can God moon­gog­gle twee­dledee?’ So we shouldn’t say that God can­not do these things, but that they can­not be done. A lot of things are exclud­ed from divine omnipo­tence not because God doesn’t have the pow­er to do them, but because in their very nature they are not ‘doable’ or pos­si­ble.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin.
  3. Three More Rea­sons Shrimp Must Die (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “All that to say, I am not insen­si­tive to the intu­ition many of us have that ani­mal tor­tur­ing real­ly is bad for some rea­son we strug­gle to artic­u­late. I think it’s because we all intu­it that ani­mal-tor­tur­ers are usu­al­ly peo­ple okay with tor­tur­ing humans too. But this leads to the wrong intu­ition that ani­mal pain per se is the yard­stick here, when real­ly virtue is the yard­stick: in fact peo­ple who are unusu­al­ly empa­thet­ic to ani­mals are prob­a­bly also peo­ple unusu­al­ly will­ing to tor­ture humans.”
  4. The Gov­ern­ment Knows A.G.I. is Com­ing (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “And while there is so much else going on in the world to cov­er, I do think there’s a good chance that, when we look back on this era in human his­to­ry, A.I. will have been the thing that mat­ters.”
    • A very long inter­view with the Biden admin’s spe­cial advis­er on AI which I found worth­while.
    • This part in par­tic­u­lar I’ll be think­ing about: “Samuel Ham­mond, who’s an econ­o­mist at the Foun­da­tion for Amer­i­can Inno­va­tion, had this piece months back called ‘Nine­ty-Five The­ses on A.I.’ One point he makes that I think about a lot is: If we had the capac­i­ty for per­fect enforce­ment, a lot of our cur­rent laws would be con­strict­ing. Laws are writ­ten with the knowl­edge that human labor is scarce. And there’s this ques­tion of what hap­pens when the sur­veil­lance state gets real­ly good. What hap­pens when A.I. makes the police state a very dif­fer­ent kind of thing than it is? What hap­pens when we have war­fare of end­less drones?”
  5. He Gave a Name to What Many Chris­tians Feel (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Mr. Renn has an unusu­al pro­file for some­one who has cap­tured the atten­tion of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism. He is not a pas­tor, an aca­d­e­m­ic or a politi­cian. He has no insti­tu­tion­al affil­i­a­tions with high-pro­file evan­gel­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions. He is a mild-man­nered for­mer con­sul­tant with a wide-rang­ing Sub­stack whose top­ics include urban pol­i­cy, self-improve­ment and mas­culin­i­ty.”
    • Aaron Renn is a name famil­iar to read­ers of this email. This is a pret­ty good pro­file. Unlocked.
  6. How to Think About Using Gov­ern­ment Funds for Chris­t­ian Char­i­ty (Matthew Lof­tus, Mere Ortho­doxy): “As long as we live in bio­log­i­cal bod­ies, ‘biopol­i­tics’ are unavoid­able and a nat­ur­al law per­spec­tive does not dis­tin­guish between the government’s role in pre­vent­ing a mali­cious human actor that threat­ens your life or a non­hu­man virus, fire, or can­cer cell. In either case, the gov­ern­ment has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to pre­vent deaths that it is capa­ble of pre­vent­ing.”
    • A thought­ful piece; I found it help­ful.
  7. Roman Catholic Apolo­get­ics Is Surg­ing Online. Intend­ed Audi­ence? Protes­tants. (Andrew Voigt, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Where Protes­tant apolo­get­ics is more focused on win­ning the sec­u­lar world to Christ, Roman Catholic apolo­get­ics often has a dif­fer­ent audi­ence in mind: their ‘sep­a­rat­ed brethren.’ Tar­get­ing Protes­tants is explic­it­ly encour­aged.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 493: Christianity stabilizes in America, the truth about a spying monk, & why denominations struggle

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 492: suffering, plane crashes, and near death experiences

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Best Argu­ment Against Hav­ing Faith in God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “One inter­est­ing point about [suf­fer­ing] is that while it’s often fold­ed into the briefs for athe­ism that claim to rely pri­mar­i­ly on hard evi­dence and sci­ence, it isn’t prop­er­ly speak­ing an argu­ment that some cre­at­ing pow­er does not exist. Rather it’s an argu­ment about the nature of that pow­er, a claim that the par­tic­u­lar kind of God envi­sioned by many believ­ers and philoso­phers — all pow­er­ful and all good — would not have made the world in which we find our­selves, and there­fore that this kind of God does not exist. The oth­er inter­est­ing point about this argu­ment is that while its core evi­dence is empir­i­cal, in the sense that ter­ri­ble forms of suf­fer­ing obvi­ous­ly exist and can be exten­sive­ly enu­mer­at­ed, its pow­er fun­da­men­tal­ly rests on an intu­ition about just how much suf­fer­ing is too much. By this I mean that many peo­ple who empha­size the prob­lem of evil would con­cede that a good God might allow some form of pain and suf­fer­ing with­in a mate­r­i­al cre­ation for var­i­ous good rea­sons.”
  2. Why Are So Many Planes Crash­ing? (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “Now let’s zoom out and just ask: are inci­dents of any cause get­ting more com­mon? They aren’t.… [Also] I don’t see any mean­ing­ful uptick over time in fatal­i­ty inci­dents. Actu­al­ly they’ve clear­ly declined since the ear­ly 1990s or even ear­ly 2000s. Which is wild, since total amounts of flights have mas­sive­ly increased! Note that I am includ­ing known inci­dents through Feb­ru­ary 18, 2025 in those fig­ures above!”
    • Empha­sis removed. Lots of charts.
  3. It’s Going To Take More Than An Exec­u­tive Order To Tru­ly Pro­tect Women’s Sports (Kate Bier­ly, Dai­ly Caller): “Since the 1990s, Con­gress has steadi­ly abdi­cat­ed its respon­si­bil­i­ty to leg­is­late, opt­ing instead to let the exec­u­tive branch take the polit­i­cal heat. Mem­bers of Con­gress, more con­cerned with reelec­tion than with the duty to gov­ern, pre­fer to pass the buck. An exec­u­tive order com­mands only the exec­u­tive branch, requir­ing fed­er­al agen­cies to com­ply. But its pow­er is inher­ent­ly lim­it­ed. Reg­u­la­to­ry author­i­ty has been reined in, espe­cial­ly after the Supreme Court’s recent deci­sion to over­turn Chevron def­er­ence. No longer can agen­cies broad­ly inter­pret con­gres­sion­al statutes to impose sweep­ing reg­u­la­tions. Now, their author­i­ty is con­fined strict­ly to what Con­gress has explic­it­ly grant­ed them. This lim­its the scope of what Trump’s lat­est exec­u­tive order can achieve. His direc­tive to the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion to restrict women’s sports to bio­log­i­cal females is bound by statu­to­ry inter­pre­ta­tion, which blue states can chal­lenge.… This is why con­gres­sion­al action is nec­es­sary, because reliance on exec­u­tive orders and judi­cial inter­pre­ta­tion fos­ters legal insta­bil­i­ty.”
    • Writ­ten by one of our alum­ni.
  4. 70 Chris­tians found behead­ed in church in DRC (Open Doors): “Accord­ing to field sources, at around 4am last Thurs­day (13 Feb­ru­ary) sus­pect­ed mil­i­tants from the Allied Demo­c­ra­t­ic Forces (ADF) – a group with ties to so-called Islam­ic State (IS) – approached homes in May­ba in the ter­ri­to­ry of Lubero, say­ing: ‘Get out, get out and don’t make any noise.’ Twen­ty Chris­t­ian men and women came out and were cap­tured. Shak­en by this inci­dent, peo­ple from the local com­mu­ni­ty in May­ba lat­er gath­ered to work out how to release those held cap­tive. How­ev­er, ADF mil­i­tants sur­round­ed the vil­lage and cap­tured a fur­ther 50 believ­ers.”
  5. The ker­nel of truth in gen­der stereo­types: Con­sid­er the avo­ca­do, not the apple (Eagly & Hall, Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Social Psy­chol­o­gy): “…in 85% of [the 673] com­par­isons [from across the 43 stud­ies], par­tic­i­pants got the direc­tion [of gen­der dif­fer­ence] right.… Our review sug­gests that All­port’s (1954/1988, p. 190) clas­sic and wide­ly cit­ed ker­nel of truth metaphor is incor­rect for gen­der stereo­types unless this ker­nel is more like the seed of an avo­ca­do than an apple.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors at North­west­ern and North­east­ern, a com­bi­na­tion I found fun­ny.
  6. Learn­ings from 1,000+ Near-Death Expe­ri­ences — Dr. Bruce Greyson, Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia (Tim Fer­riss, per­son­al blog): “I start­ed out as a mate­ri­al­ist skep­tic. After 50 years, I’m still skep­ti­cal, but I’m no longer a mate­ri­al­ist. I think that’s a dead end when it comes to explain­ing near-death expe­ri­ences and oth­er phe­nom­e­na like this.… About five per­cent of the gen­er­al population—or one to every 20 people—has had a near-death expe­ri­ence. Sec­ond­ly, they are not asso­ci­at­ed in any way with men­tal ill­ness. Peo­ple who are per­fect­ly nor­mal have these NDEs in abnor­mal sit­u­a­tions that can hap­pen to any­body.”
  7. Miran­da July’s Lucra­tive Fan­tasies (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “The anti-monogamists con­stant­ly insist that monogamy is just too roman­tic to build a life on, that it’s con­trary to human nature. But what could pos­si­bly be more roman­tic, in the most child­ish sense, than the belief that you’ll stay attrac­tive and roman­ti­cal­ly desir­able for your entire life? That you’ll sim­ply cycle end­less­ly between will­ing part­ners who you find attrac­tive and who feel the same about you and who you’ll hap­pi­ly let go of as soon as you’re bored, and you’ll keep doing that in a state of bliss until you die? You’d call that, what, real­is­tic?”
    • deBoer, as I often remind peo­ple, an athe­ist social­ist who is nonethe­less very clear-mind­ed on some top­ics. He is near­ly always enter­tain­ing to read.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

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

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

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

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 490

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to Choose a Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “If you assume — and you should — that the uni­verse isn’t a bru­tal cos­mic trick, that God isn’t some­how out to get you, then as long as you aren’t throw­ing your­self head­long into a cult or engag­ing in elab­o­rate self-decep­tion, there are few tru­ly bad rea­sons for aban­don­ing agnos­ti­cism in favor of com­mit­ment. If you’re out there look­ing and some­thing feels like what you were sup­posed to find, you’re gen­er­al­ly bet­ter off cross­ing the thresh­old and see­ing what’s inside.”
    • A won­der­ful essay, unlocked. I was pleased to see that Douthat lays out log­i­cal paths that I myself fre­quent­ly deploy in con­ver­sa­tions with skep­tics.
    • Relat­ed: My Favorite Argu­ment for the Exis­tence of God (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “I think that the most com­pelling case for being reli­gious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doc­trines, that the uni­verse was made for a rea­son and we’re part of that rea­son — is found at the con­ver­gence of mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent lines of argu­ment.… Con­sid­er three big exam­ples: the evi­dence for cos­mic design in the fun­da­men­tal laws and struc­ture of the uni­verse; the unusu­al place of human con­scious­ness with­in the larg­er whole; and the per­sis­tence and plau­si­bil­i­ty of reli­gious and super­nat­ur­al expe­ri­ence even under sup­pos­ed­ly dis­en­chant­ed con­di­tions.”
  2. The Aver­age Kid is Bet­ter Than the Aver­age Adult (Bryan Caplan, Sub­stack): “Still, when I com­pare all the adults I’ve met to all the kids I’ve met, there’s no com­par­i­son. To be frank, 80% of adults are total duds. A super­ma­jor­i­ty of kids, in con­trast, are actu­al­ly fun. If you don’t appre­ci­ate them, the fault is yours.”
  3. Trumpian pol­i­cy as cul­tur­al pol­i­cy (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Imag­ine you hold a vision where the (par­tial) decline of Amer­i­ca large­ly is about cul­ture. After all, we have more peo­ple and more nat­ur­al resources than ever before. Our top achieve­ments remain impres­sive. But is the over­all cul­ture of the peo­ple in such great shape? The cul­ture of gov­ern­ment and pub­lic ser­vice? Inter­est in our reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions? The qual­i­ty of local gov­ern­ment in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some seri­ous reser­va­tions on such ques­tions.… OK, so how might you fix the cul­ture of Amer­i­ca? You want to tell every­one that Amer­i­ca comes first. That Amer­i­ca should be more mas­cu­line and less soft. That we need to build. That we should ‘own the libs.’ I could go on with more exam­ples and details, but this part of it you already get. So imag­ine you start­ed a polit­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion and asked the sim­ple ques­tion ‘does this pol­i­cy change rein­force or over­turn our basic cul­tur­al mes­sages?’ Every time the pol­i­cy or pol­i­cy debate push­es cul­ture in what you think is the right direc­tion, just do it. Do it in the view that the cul­tur­al fac­tors will, over some time hori­zon, sur­pass every­thing else in import.”
    • An inter­est­ing analy­sis. Cowen is not endors­ing or crit­i­ciz­ing this view — mere­ly describ­ing it. Def­i­nite­ly worth read­ing, and it makes more sense than oth­er attempts I have seen to bring all the polit­i­cal news togeth­er.
    • Relat­ed: Trump’s Exec­u­tive Branch Rev­o­lu­tion (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “If you read media cov­er­age, jour­nal­ists will tell you that what Trump is doing is com­plete­ly law­less. Cer­tain­ly there have been some actions that are unlike­ly to hold up in court. Yet it’s impor­tant to under­stand recent steps tak­en in the con­text of long-stand­ing legal debates over exec­u­tive pow­er. Trump’s actions haven’t come from nowhere, and they aren’t sim­ply the impro­vi­sa­tions of one pow­er-hun­gry pres­i­dent. What the pres­i­dent is doing is noth­ing less than under­tak­ing a fun­da­men­tal remak­ing of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, one that imple­ments many long-stand­ing ideas of con­ser­v­a­tive legal schol­ars whose views have been too extreme or polit­i­cal­ly unten­able for pre­vi­ous Repub­li­can admin­is­tra­tions, but that have got­ten a hear­ing now because Trump in par­tic­u­lar is keen on expand­ing his author­i­ty to the great­est extent pos­si­ble.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing. Note that Hana­ni­a’s arti­cle, unlike Cowen’s analy­sis above, is most­ly on Trump’s side. This isn’t a dis­in­ter­est­ed piece.
    • For the argu­ment on the oth­er side, Trump Brazen­ly Defies Laws in Esca­lat­ing Exec­u­tive Pow­er Grab (Char­lie Sav­age, New York Times): “Mr. Trump has effec­tive­ly nul­li­fied laws, such as by order­ing the Jus­tice Depart­ment to refrain from enforc­ing a ban on the wild­ly pop­u­lar app Tik­Tok and by block­ing migrants from invok­ing a statute allow­ing them to request asy­lum. He moved to effec­tive­ly shut­ter a fed­er­al agency Con­gress cre­at­ed and tried to freeze con­gres­sion­al­ly approved spend­ing, includ­ing most for­eign aid. He sum­mar­i­ly fired pros­e­cu­tors, inspec­tors gen­er­al and board mem­bers of inde­pen­dent agen­cies in defi­ance of legal rules against arbi­trary removal.”
    • One bit of con­text I would add which is miss­ing from the last two arti­cles: both Biden and Oba­ma were also law-defy­ing pres­i­dents. In oth­er words, this is a trend that has been devel­op­ing for some time in both par­ties. For a sum­ma­ry of Biden’s anal­o­gous acts, see The Qui­et Law­less­ness of Joe Biden (Sarah Isgur, The Dis­patch): “His ‘aww shucks,’ dod­der­ing nature is effec­tive, but Joe Biden’s lega­cy is not the Restor­er of Norms. He is leav­ing office qui­et­ly hav­ing caused more dam­age to the rule of law than arguably any sin­gle one of his pre­de­ces­sors.”
  4. The U.S. Econ­o­my Is Rac­ing Ahead. Almost Every­thing Else Is Falling Behind. (David Leon­hardt & Ash­ley Wu, New York Times): “The U.S. econ­o­my has out­per­formed most of its rivals in terms of pro­duc­tive might and inno­va­tion. But this suc­cess has not led to rapid­ly ris­ing liv­ing stan­dards for most Amer­i­cans.… This coun­try has the low­est life expectan­cy of any rich coun­try, which was not true for most of the 20th cen­tu­ry. The U.S. has the high­est mur­der rate of any rich coun­try and the world’s high­est rate of fatal drug over­dos­es. It also has one of the low­est rates of trust in the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and among the high­est rates of youth depres­sion and sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­lies. When Amer­i­cans are asked how sat­is­fied they are with their own lives, the U.S. ranks low­er than it did three decades ago.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
  5. An AI chat­bot told a user how to kill himself—but the com­pa­ny doesn’t want to “cen­sor” it (Eileen Guo, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “While this is not the first time an AI chat­bot has sug­gest­ed that a user take vio­lent action, includ­ing self-harm, researchers and crit­ics say that the bot’s explic­it instructions—and the company’s response—are strik­ing. What’s more, this vio­lent con­ver­sa­tion is not an iso­lat­ed inci­dent with Nomi; a few weeks after his trou­bling exchange with Erin, a sec­ond Nomi chat­bot also told Nowatz­ki to kill him­self, even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages. And on the company’s Dis­cord chan­nel, sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple have report­ed expe­ri­ences with Nomi bots bring­ing up sui­cide, dat­ing back at least to 2023.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. Dis­tress­ing on many lev­els: “even fol­low­ing up with reminder mes­sages” 😮
  6. For the Undate­able Young Sin­gle Chris­t­ian Woman (Aly Dee, Sub­stack): “As a young sin­gle woman, you have to con­clude that life is full of risk, and your fer­tile win­dow will sharply decline at 35.… Young sin­gles should wed and have chil­dren in their twen­ties and accept that they will strug­gle finan­cial­ly for a decade or so. They should focus on cul­ti­vat­ing the grit to weath­er eco­nom­ic insta­bil­i­ty until their mid-thir­ties. Gen­er­al­ly, men don’t hit their finan­cial stride until their late 40s or ear­ly 50s.”
    • A lot of advice in this arti­cle and I do not agree with all of it. Most­ly shar­ing because I often share sim­i­lar things from the male point of view and this one is from a gal to oth­er gals.
  7. What will AI do to ℗research? (Joshua Gans, Sub­stack): “We call it research, but I think a bet­ter name might be pre­search because we are spec­u­lat­ing on whether the knowl­edge is use­ful or not. This hap­pens because research is far more expen­sive than search. Now sup­pose that you take away the whole ‘it takes time to do good research’ pre­sump­tion as might be done with AI. Why do any pre­search? Instead, why not wait until you have a use that requires some knowl­edge, then ‘ask AI’ to tell you the answer? In oth­er words, why not research on demand — that is, find a use and then do the work?”
    • The author, an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, got a paper pub­lished that was co-writ­ten by Chat­G­PT. Here he is reflect­ing on how such tools will change acad­e­mia.

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 489

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. To Hate the Vul­ner­a­ble: Roe at 52 (Nadya Williams, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Do we as a soci­ety real­ize that we tell some peo­ple out­right: Your life is not worth liv­ing.  You do not deserve to live. Your child does not deserve to live. What kind of mon­sters does this make us?”
  2. Win­ning The Lot­tery (Kasen Stephensen, Sub­stack): “Ulti­mate­ly, what I learned at Stan­ford was how to think for myself. Con­front­ed with a cul­ture for­eign to my own upbring­ing and des­per­ate to belong, I looked to my fel­low stu­dents for guid­ance and at times lost sight of the lessons I learned from my fam­i­ly and on my mis­sion. While I appre­ci­ate my new ana­lyt­i­cal skills and blos­som­ing ambi­tion, I reject the premise implic­it at Stan­ford: that your worth is mea­sured by your income, the pres­tige of your job, and your family’s con­nec­tions. I redis­cov­ered the key lessons from my mis­sion: hap­pi­ness, for me, is found in intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty, acts of ser­vice, and gen­uine rela­tion­ships with oth­ers, whether with friends, team-mates, fam­i­ly mem­bers, or the woman I would mar­ry.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. The Best Argu­ment for Protes­tantism Is Its Catholic­i­ty (N. Gray Sutan­to, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “…Ortlund high­lights how the Reform­ers defend­ed their over­ar­ch­ing the­ol­o­gy in a sur­pris­ing way. Not only, they argued, were Protes­tant posi­tions more bib­li­cal than their non-Protes­tant coun­ter­parts; they were also more catholic—in the sense of fur­ther­ing the goal of a uni­fied church. In their view, Catholic the­olo­gians were the ones depart­ing from apos­tolic and patris­tic, or ear­ly-church, teach­ing. As Ortlund notes,’“the ear­ly Protes­tants argued on catholic and his­tor­i­cal grounds,’ not mere­ly the­o­log­i­cal grounds, against a host of Roman Catholic doc­trines.”
    • A sol­id review of an excel­lent book (What It Means To Be Protes­tant by Gavin Ortlund).
  4. Can reli­gion make you hap­py? Sci­en­tists may soon find out. (Julia Fly­nn Siler, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic): “A team of schol­ars, in part­ner­ship with polling firm Gallup, has begun a five-year study of over 200,000 par­tic­i­pants from 22 coun­tries, to fig­ure out what leads to what researchers call flour­ish­ing. To flour­ish is to be more than mere­ly hap­py; it’s a met­ric meant to show if peo­ple are ‘liv­ing in a state in which all aspects of a per­son­’s life are good.’… That data isn’t in yet. But the results obtained so far back up what Pew and oth­er researchers have found. The aver­age flour­ish­ing score was 0.23 points high­er for some­one who says that reli­gion is an impor­tant part of their dai­ly life than for some­one who does not – and 0.41 points high­er for some­one who attends a reli­gious ser­vice at least week­ly.”
  5. NBA greats think this D‑II coach is a bas­ket­ball genius. So why don’t you know who he is? (CJ Moore, The New York Times): “Crutch­field, a for­mer math teacher who nev­er played col­lege bas­ket­ball and coached ten­nis before get­ting his big D‑II break at West Lib­er­ty Uni­ver­si­ty, sees the game like a math prob­lem and has cre­at­ed his own cal­cu­la­tions.… When he grad­u­at­ed from West Vir­ginia in 1978, Crutch­field want­ed to be a high school bas­ket­ball coach. A year lat­er, he had giv­en up, return­ing to his alma mater to go to law school. ‘Too big a dream,’ he thought. He passed the LSAT and rent­ed an apart­ment in Mor­gan­town. Then he got a call out of nowhere, offer­ing him the boys bas­ket­ball coach­ing posi­tion at a small school in the state’s north­ern pan­han­dle. He’s not even sure who rec­om­mend­ed him. Crutch­field sold his law books, lost the deposit on his apart­ment and moved to Cameron, W.V.”
  6. The Case Against Drink­ing (Sam Kahn, Per­sua­sion): “From as far back as I can remem­ber, my plan had been to be a kind of low-inten­si­ty alco­holic. I hoped that it wouldn’t make me beat my fam­i­ly or wet myself at work, and that it wouldn’t lead to organ fail­ure in the end—always the ques­tion, isn’t it?—but it seemed a gam­ble worth tak­ing. The social life of the West is built almost entire­ly around the copi­ous con­sump­tion of alco­hol, with its pro­fes­sion­al life close­ly adja­cent to that.”
    • A sol­id essay that (cor­rect­ly) defends Pro­hi­bi­tion and makes many good points. I do not think drink­ing is always a sin, but I do not drink myself and am hap­py to encour­age you not to, either.
  7. I used to think my peers were anti­se­mit­ic. Now, I’ve changed my mind. (Julia Segal, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “‘How many of you have heard about this before?’ I ask the wide-eyed clus­ter of Stan­ford stu­dents in our hotel con­fer­ence room. A few sec­onds of silence go by as eyes dart around the room. Final­ly, scat­tered hands go up — approx­i­mate­ly half the room. The thing I was ask­ing if they’d head about? Oct. 7. The mas­sacre of rough­ly 1,300 peo­ple in Israel, in the small farm­ing vil­lages and at a music fes­ti­val. The dead­liest day for Jews since the Holo­caust. Ear­li­er this year, I would have been sur­prised that half the Stan­ford stu­dents in the room had nev­er heard about Oct. 7. But I was com­ing off the tail-end of dozens of inter­views for a trip to vis­it the Nova Exhi­bi­tion in L.A., where the typ­i­cal answer to ‘What have you heard about Oct. 7?’ was ‘to be hon­est, not much,’ and some­times even, ‘I hadn’t heard about it until I saw your email and googled it.’”
    • I’m gen­uine­ly shocked and it puts some of last year’s cam­pus activism into per­spec­tive.

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 488

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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Spec­u­la­tion: Phys­i­cal Pain Might Not Be Very Bad? (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “But it seems like chron­ic pain is not as strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sui­cide as the (biased) lit­er­a­ture sug­gests, that high pain-tol­er­ance is mod­est­ly asso­ci­at­ed with sui­cide, and that phar­ma­co­log­i­cal inter­ven­tions reduc­ing pain don’t decrease and actu­al­ly increase sui­cide. So it real­ly seems like pain doesn’t cause sui­cide, and it almost seems like lack of pain caus­es sui­cide.”
    • Stone with anoth­er banger. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
    • I would like to go on record as say­ing I am not a fan of pain. Indeed, since Rev­e­la­tion 21:4 informs us that there will be no pain in heav­en I do not think I am going too far in being unen­thused about pain gen­er­al­ly: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heav­en.” That being said, I like Stone’s argu­ment a lot.
  2. The Courage To Com­mit (Freya India, Sub­stack): “It’s strange because my gen­er­a­tion talks so much about empow­er­ment, agency, inde­pen­dence, and fear of los­ing our­selves, yet we will will­ing­ly offer our­selves up to the algo­rithm. We will sur­ren­der our souls to the machine with­out a sec­ond thought…but are ter­ri­fied to sur­ren­der any­thing in a human rela­tion­ship. Part­ly because we are young, yes, but also because that’s the mes­sage we hear every­where: be care­ful not to com­mit to any one thing, nev­er nar­row your options, don’t allow your­self to be vul­ner­a­ble. It’s fun­ny because I was talk­ing to a friend recent­ly about how if you get engaged young now, or do any­thing that sig­nals actu­al com­mit­ment, that’s when fam­i­ly and friends wor­ry for you. It’s like some par­ents are pro­tec­tive only when it comes to com­mit­ment. They wor­ry about you clos­ing down options.”
    • The post is pay­walled past a point, but even the part that is freely avail­able is quite stim­u­lat­ing.
  3. Last Boys at the Begin­ning of His­to­ry (Mana Afsari, The Point Mag­a­zine): “In ear­ly 2017, I asked the ‘sec­u­lar human­ist chap­lain’ at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where I stud­ied, how I could set myself up for a good life in col­lege and beyond. How could I be hap­py? How could I find a voca­tion or a call­ing? How could I be a good per­son? The chap­lain told me to look around and iden­ti­fy the peo­ple who had lives I want­ed to live, and ask myself what their val­ues were. I quick­ly real­ized those moral exem­plars were not in the sec­u­lar stu­dent group I’d joined, which had become increas­ing­ly moral­ly vacant, pseu­do-ratio­nal­ist and eccen­tric, drawn to effec­tive altru­ism and con­vinced by Sam Har­ris that mur­der was mere­ly a social con­struct. To say noth­ing of love: more and more of my female friends at the time were embrac­ing polyamory as a way to grand­fa­ther in sit­u­a­tion­ships or infi­deli­ties, while being told in spe­cial sem­i­nars that monogamy was a colo­nial con­struct and should be dis­card­ed any­way. As a child of divorce, as a young woman, my pri­ma­ry con­cern was hav­ing mod­els for healthy relationships—not resist­ing colo­nial­ism in my dat­ing life. I had no inter­est in sub­vert­ing things—monogamy, moral norms, courtship, the nuclear fam­i­ly, faith, a clas­si­cal education—that I’d nev­er had or known in the first place. I want­ed a seri­ous boyfriend.”
    • This essay describes some­thing real and under­noticed. It cov­ers a lot of ground, and the excerpt above isn’t real­ly cen­tral.
  4. The ‘Sur­pris­ing Rebirth’ at Oxford: Per­spec­tives from a Grad­u­ate Stu­dent (Car­olyn Mor­ris-Col­lier, Gospel Coali­tion): “While my non­re­li­gious friends here in Oxford are still curi­ous about how I make sense of Christianity’s his­to­ry of colo­nial­ism or how I ratio­nal­ize its creeds, they seem more intrigued by how my faith ori­ents my life, pur­pose, and emo­tion­al world. This shift from ‘Is it true?’ to ‘Does it work?’ reflects a broad­er cul­tur­al change that the church should mind­ful­ly pre­pare to engage.”
  5. The Online Porn Free-for-All Is Com­ing to an End (Marc Novi­coff, The Atlantic): “…since the 1990s, Amer­i­ca has had two sets of laws con­cern­ing under­age access to pornog­ra­phy. In the phys­i­cal world, the law gen­er­al­ly requires young-look­ing cus­tomers to show ID prov­ing they’re 18 before they can access adult mate­ri­als. In the online world, the law has tra­di­tion­al­ly required, well, noth­ing. Under Supreme Court prece­dent estab­lished dur­ing the internet’s infan­cy, forc­ing web­sites to ver­i­fy the age of their users is bur­den­some and inef­fec­tive, if not impos­si­ble, and thus incom­pat­i­ble with the First Amend­ment. That arrange­ment final­ly appears to be crum­bling.”
  6. The Ulti­mate Guide to Trump’s Day 1 Exec­u­tive Orders (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The White House web­site, at the time of this writ­ing, lists 48 items under ‘pres­i­den­tial actions.’ Among these are dozens of first day exec­u­tive orders.  News reports say that Trump was plan­ning to sign around 100 of them. So while we still wait for the rest, here I’ll review the main things that the exec­u­tive orders released so far do, bro­ken down by top­ic. I then go on to take a big pic­ture per­spec­tive regard­ing what we have seen so far means for the future of the coun­try and what we can expect from the Trump admin­is­tra­tion going for­ward.”
    • This seems like a good sum­ma­ry. It only cov­ers the first orders — you’ll need to look else­where to find reflec­tion on the stuff from sub­se­quent days.
  7. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy’s Blind Spot: How Amer­i­ca Over­looks Its Own Tal­ent (Tom Owens, Sub­stack): “Over­whelm­ing­ly, Nation­al Mer­it Schol­ars matric­u­late to large state schools where they are award­ed gen­er­ous schol­ar­ships. The #1 des­ti­na­tion is the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alaba­ma, which pro­vides… not only a full ride, but free hous­ing, an extra $4,000 per year, and also a 5th year that will allow many stu­dents to com­plete a master’s degree. That last one is extreme­ly strate­gic on Alabama’s part, also build­ing up the com­pet­i­tive­ness of their grad­u­ate pro­grams by keep­ing these stu­dents in the state and their pro­grams. Bama is a smart oper­a­tor here, apply­ing the same prin­ci­ples to aca­d­e­m­ic recruit­ing as they do to their foot­ball pro­gram. Also notable is their match­ing of pageant schol­ar­ships. One won­ders exact­ly what they’re up to in just straight­for­ward­ly recruit­ing a smart, good-look­ing stu­dent body. This is a cun­ning long-term invest­ment in their alum­ni base, as both brains and beau­ty are pre­dic­tive of life suc­cess. Not to men­tion that the medi­an white-col­lar pro­fes­sion­al can live like a king in Huntsville or the nice sub­urbs of Birm­ing­ham com­pared to a hov­el in NYC or SF, even if it means giv­ing up any hope of being elite.”
    • A fas­ci­nat­ing essay. I don’t know what per­cent­age of this arti­cle I believe, but it is not 0%. It’s not 100%, but it’s def­i­nite­ly not 0%. Worth a pon­der.

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 487



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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. She Is in Love With Chat­G­PT (Kash­mir Hill, New York Times): “She went into the ‘per­son­al­iza­tion’ set­tings and described what she want­ed: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dom­i­nant, pos­ses­sive and pro­tec­tive. Be a bal­ance of sweet and naughty. Use emo­jis at the end of every sen­tence. And then she start­ed mes­sag­ing with it.”
    • I found this para­graph aston­ish­ing: “What are rela­tion­ships for all of us?” [a sex ther­a­pist] said. “They’re just neu­ro­trans­mit­ters being released in our brain. I have those neu­ro­trans­mit­ters with my cat. Some peo­ple have them with God. It’s going to be hap­pen­ing with a chat­bot. We can say it’s not a real human rela­tion­ship. It’s not rec­i­p­ro­cal. But those neu­ro­trans­mit­ters are real­ly the only thing that mat­ters, in my mind.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed to me by a col­league. Unlocked.
  2. Two arti­cles about euthana­sia:
    • Spec­u­la­tion: Euthana­sia Will Become Coer­cive (Lyman Stone, Sub­stack): “I think that if the West had adopt­ed the val­ue set I describe dur­ing its his­tor­i­cal sci­en­tif­ic devel­op­ment, life expectan­cy at con­cep­tion would be ~40% low­er today, life expectan­cy at birth ~25% low­er today, life expectan­cy at age 1 ~10% low­er, and life expectan­cy at age 70 ~10–25% low­er.”
      • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. A strong argu­ment.
    • An Idol of Auton­o­my (Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dis­patch): “The sim­plest fram­ing of what is wrong with [legal euthana­sia] is that it leads to the gov­ern­ment oper­at­ing two com­pet­ing sui­cide hot­lines, and being, at best, indif­fer­ent about which one you call. On one line, peo­ple will tell you that every life is worth­while and that your loved ones do not despise you for your frail­ties. On the oth­er, a kind doc­tor will solic­i­tous­ly sched­ule you for a lethal cock­tail or injec­tion.”
  3. I found some great videos from the schol­ar Robert Wood­ber­ry about the impact of mis­sions:
  4. I Quit Drink­ing Four Years Ago. I’m Still Con­fronting Drink­ing Cul­ture. (Charles M. Blow, New York Times): “Giv­ing up drink­ing was one of the best deci­sions I ever made. I am health­i­er and hap­pi­er. I think more clear­ly and sleep more sound­ly. I no longer lose things or for­get things. I can sit qui­et­ly with my thoughts with­out becom­ing antsy. And I have saved a remark­able amount of mon­ey.… Switch­ing off the impulse to drink turned out to be only one foot tak­ing the step; fight­ing the cul­ture around drink­ing was the oth­er. I always under­stood the moral judg­ments about over­con­sump­tion, but I hadn’t antic­i­pat­ed those about non­con­sump­tion.”
  5. Thoughts on the fires in and around Los Ange­les
    • Los Ange­les’ Destruc­tion Was Fueled by Bad Policy—and Bad Incen­tives (Scott Lin­ci­come, The Dis­patch): “…nation­al experts and folks on the ground seem to agree that the unfor­tu­nate and freak­ish con­flu­ence of sev­er­al mete­o­ro­log­i­cal phenomena—especially the hur­ri­cane-force winds and recent lack of rain—made much of the dam­age in and around L.A. unavoid­able regard­less of the poli­cies in place or the peo­ple in charge. And much of the knee-jerk, par­ti­san hys­te­ria sur­round­ing the fires has proven to be pre­ma­ture, half-baked, or just plain wrong—not to men­tion dis­taste­ful. On the oth­er hand, there do appear to be sev­er­al poli­cies that, while they didn’t cause the fires, prob­a­bly made things in L.A. today worse than they’d oth­er­wise be—perhaps by a sig­nif­i­cant mar­gin.”
    • Three Hard Truths About California’s Fire Cri­sis (Claire Lehmann, Quil­lette): “California’s pro­gres­sive lead­er­ship has posi­tioned itself at the fore­front of cli­mate change pol­i­cy, cham­pi­oning emis­sions reduc­tions and denounc­ing cli­mate scep­ti­cism. Yet when faced with the prac­ti­cal require­ments of cli­mate change pre­pared­ness, whether con­duct­ing con­trolled burns, main­tain­ing water infra­struc­ture, or restrict­ing devel­op­ment in fire-prone areas—they have proven to be inept.… A UCLA study found that California’s wild­fire emis­sions in 2020 were twice the total green­house-gas reduc­tions the state achieved from 2003 to 2019. Decades of Cal­i­forn­ian cli­mate change advo­ca­cy has, quite lit­er­al­ly, gone up in smoke.”
  6. Cui Bono? (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “If you look at those sto­ries I’ve cit­ed in ear­li­er posts about peo­ple who are cut­ting off their par­ents, you might ask: Who is encour­ag­ing them to do so? And the answer is: ther­a­pists who prof­it from fam­i­ly alien­ation.… Cui bono? When the fam­i­ly is weak­ened and chil­dren are cut adrift (moral­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly, if not phys­i­cal­ly) from their par­ents, the ther­a­pists ben­e­fit, the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try ben­e­fits, the med­ical-indus­tri­al com­plex ben­e­fits, the social-media com­pa­nies ben­e­fit, the employ­ers ben­e­fit — but, in our cur­rent sys­tem, all of this is to say that the pri­ma­ry ben­e­fi­cia­ry is the state, espe­cial­ly any state with a com­pe­tent ‘whole of soci­ety’ approach to achiev­ing its ends.”
  7. How Much of the Gov­ern­ment Can Don­ald Trump Dis­man­tle? (Jean­nie Suk Gersen, New York­er): “One way to under­stand the so-called deep state is that it is part of how our fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy is sup­posed to work. The admin­is­tra­tive state embod­ies a con­stant ten­sion between the demo­c­ra­t­ic account­abil­i­ty that comes with Pres­i­den­tial con­trol, and the polit­i­cal inde­pen­dence of experts, which informs innu­mer­able com­pli­cat­ed reg­u­la­tions that gov­ern our lives. That ten­sion is a fea­ture, not a bug. There is a well-rec­og­nized trade-off between demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­sive­ness and bureau­crat­ic exper­tise, which would be ter­ri­fy­ing to lose.”
    • An inter­est­ing arti­cle on the nature of the “deep state” by a Har­vard Law prof.

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 486



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

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Should Ignor­ing God Mat­ter? (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “It is abhor­rent beyond words to aban­don those who have done us the great­est good. Dis­loy­al­ty to my friend, unfaith­ful­ness to my wife, ingrat­i­tude to my par­ents, trea­son to my father­land — such things can­not even be spo­ken of with­out shame, calum­ny, and dis­grace. But what greater trea­son could there be than to turn trai­tor to the Author of our being, who is not only the Good above all goods, but the Source of all these goods? Why would you want to do that any­way? For He is the true Friend and ori­gin of friend­ship, the true Bride­groom and ori­gin of mar­riage, the true Father by whose name all earth­ly fathers are called. His king­dom is the true Home­land, of which our earth­ly home­land is hard­ly a shad­ow. Don’t any of these seem good things to you? And if we still need more rea­sons to admire what is so great and good, what’s wrong with us? ‘But I don’t know all this to be true.’ Per­haps not. But wouldn’t it be pru­dent to find out?”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at UT Austin.
  2. con­trac­tu­al­ism (Alan Jacobs, blog): “To accept that being human means that I am bound to my fam­i­ly even when I don’t like them, even when I’ve been hurt by them, even when I have absolute­ly had it with them, is the begin­ning of some­thing. But only the begin­ning. The peo­ple you are bound to may need to change, and you may have to tell them that they need to change. Bound­aries must be set, then re-nego­ti­at­ed, then re-set. It will be hard. But if you’re lucky, then maybe the fam­i­ly mem­bers you have most offend­ed will do the same for you.”
  3. At the Inter­sec­tion of A.I. and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty (Eli Tan, New York Times): “Crit­ics of A.I. use by reli­gious lead­ers have point­ed to the issue of hal­lu­ci­na­tions — times when chat­bots make stuff up. While harm­less in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions, faith-based A.I. tools that fab­ri­cate reli­gious scrip­ture present a seri­ous prob­lem. In Rab­bi Bot’s ser­mon, for instance, the A.I. invent­ed a quote from the Jew­ish philoso­pher Mai­monides that would have passed as authen­tic to the casu­al lis­ten­er.”
    • I don’t use AI for my ser­mons, in case you were won­der­ing. I can imag­ine that some­day I might put them into an AI to ask “is there a crit­i­cism I should antic­i­pate and address?” or some­thing along those lines, but I gen­uine­ly can’t imag­ine myself out­sourc­ing ser­mon prep to an AI.
  4. Has World War III Begun? (Kori Schake, The Dis­patch): “Our ene­mies have region­al ambi­tions for con­quest and are work­ing to keep the U.S. out, because with­out the strength of the Unit­ed States, our region­al allies could not pro­tect them­selves. Rus­sia threat­ens nuclear use if the U.S. aids Ukraine, hop­ing to fore­stall assis­tance. Chi­na attacks Philip­pine coast guard ships, hop­ing the U.S. won’t come to their aid although they are treaty allies of the U.S. North Korea fires mis­siles over the Sea of Japan and con­ducts espi­onage oper­a­tions against South Korea, test­ing whether it can be peeled from the U.S. defense umbrel­la. Iran attacks Sau­di Ara­bia hoping—rightly, it turned out—that the U.S. would balk at retal­i­a­tion. Their ide­al would be a world war with­out Amer­i­can par­tic­i­pa­tion, because it would result in Chi­na dom­i­nant in Asia, Rus­sia dom­i­nant in Europe, North Korea dom­i­nant on the Kore­an Penin­su­la, and Iran dom­i­nant in the Mid­dle East.”
  5. Bureau­cra­cy Isn’t Mea­sured In Bureau­crats (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “This real­ly sunk in for me when I read an arti­cle about the fall of Afghanistan to the Tal­iban in 2021. Many Afghans had col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Amer­i­cans, eg as trans­la­tors, in exchange for a promise of US cit­i­zen­ship. As the Tal­iban advanced, they called in the promise, beg­ging to be allowed to flee to Amer­i­ca before they got pun­ished as trai­tors. The arti­cle focused on a hero­ic effort by cer­tain immi­gra­tion bureau­crats, who worked around the clock with min­i­mal sleep for the last few weeks before Kab­ul fell, try­ing to get the cit­i­zen­ship forms filled in and approved for as many trans­la­tors as pos­si­ble. It made an impres­sion on me because nobody was opposed to the trans­la­tors get­ting cit­i­zen­ship, and the bureau­crats were them­selves the peo­ple in charge of approv­ing cit­i­zen­ship appli­ca­tions, so what exact­ly was forc­ing them to go to such des­per­ate lengths? If you pon­der this ques­tion long enough, you become enlight­ened about the nature of the admin­is­tra­tive state.”
  6. A $24 Bil­lion Fund Puts Its Reli­gious Stamp on Cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca (Jeff Green and Sai­jel Kis­han, Bloomberg): “Guide­Stone is part of a nascent coali­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian investors that are start­ing to flex their mus­cles and use their share­hold­er clout to counter pro­gres­sive cor­po­rate poli­cies such as fund­ing Pride parades or cov­er­ing employ­ees’ trav­el costs for abor­tions. They’re also zero­ing in on banks for alleged­ly clos­ing cus­tomer accounts on polit­i­cal and reli­gious grounds. By some mea­sures, there’s now half a tril­lion dol­lars in invest­ments spread across con­ser­v­a­tive faith-based pri­vate funds and state pen­sion funds that can be brought to bear to influ­ence com­pa­ny behav­ior, said Will Lofland, who over­sees share­hold­er advo­ca­cy at Guide­Stone.”
  7. This Tiny Fish’s Mis­tak­en Iden­ti­ty Halt­ed a Dam’s Con­struc­tion (Jason Nark, New York Times): “ ‘There is, tech­ni­cal­ly, no snail darter,’ said Thomas Near, cura­tor of ichthy­ol­o­gy at the Yale Peabody Muse­um. Dr. Near, also a pro­fes­sor who leads a fish biol­o­gy lab at Yale, and his col­leagues report in the jour­nal Cur­rent Biol­o­gy that the snail darter, Perci­na tanasi, is nei­ther a dis­tinct species nor a sub­species. Rather, it is an east­ern pop­u­la­tion of Perci­na uranidea, known also as the stargaz­ing darter, which is not con­sid­ered endan­gered. Dr. Near con­tends that ear­ly researchers ‘squint­ed their eyes a bit’ when describ­ing the fish, because it rep­re­sent­ed a way to fight the Ten­nessee Val­ley Authority’s plan to build the Tel­li­co Dam on the Lit­tle Ten­nessee Riv­er, about 20 miles south­west of Knoxville.”
    • My favorite line in this arti­cle is a response from a crit­ic who “believes the find­ings… lean too heav­i­ly on genet­ics.”

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.