Category: Links

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 485



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

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

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

Num­bers do fun things.

Things Glen Found Interesting

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

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 484



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.

As the year comes to a close, remem­ber that this post is the over­flow of a non­prof­it min­istry. Com­pil­ing these links is some­thing I do for the stu­dents I min­is­ter to at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, shar­ing it here is just me mak­ing it avail­able more broad­ly. You can donate to sup­port the min­istry if you are ever so inclined (you can even make gifts via a DAF or with stock). Don’t give to pay for the con­tent — it only takes me five min­utes a week to take the email I send to the Chi Alpha stu­dents and refor­mat it for this plat­form. If you choose to give, give because you believe in the mis­sion of reach­ing Stan­ford stu­dents with a thought­ful gospel mes­sage.

And that’s the last time I’ll share about that until next Decem­ber.

Whether you choose to give or not, I hope this email bless­es you and helps you think about God and our world more clear­ly.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Tom Hol­land on How Chris­tian­i­ty Remade the World (Bari Weiss, The Free Press): “It is very dif­fi­cult to overem­pha­size how com­plete­ly mad it was for every­body in the ancient world that some­one who suf­fers cru­ci­fix­ion could in any way be the Mes­si­ah, let alone part of the one God.… The fact that such a per­son could con­ceiv­ably be raised up by cit­i­zens of the Roman Empire as some­one greater than Cae­sar him­self, greater than Augus­tus, is a com­plete­ly shock­ing maneu­ver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shock­ing to them all. The rad­i­cal mes­sage of the cru­ci­fix­ion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
  2. How his­to­ri­an Niall Fer­gu­son became a reli­gious believ­er (Greg Sheri­dan, The Week­end Aus­tralian): “I have embraced Chris­tian­i­ty,” he tells me. “We were all bap­tised, Ayaan and our two sons, togeth­er in Sep­tem­ber (2023). It was the cul­mi­na­tion of a quite pro­tract­ed process. My jour­ney was from athe­ism. My par­ents had left the Church of Scot­land, I think even before I was born. I grew up in a house­hold of sci­ence-mind­ed reli­gious scep­tics. I didn’t go to church and felt quite sure of the wis­dom of that when I was young. How­ev­er, in two phas­es, I lost my faith in athe­ism.… The first phase was that as a his­to­ri­an I realised no soci­ety had been suc­cess­ful­ly organ­ised on the basis of athe­ism. All attempts to do that have been cat­a­stroph­ic. That was an insight that came from study­ing 18th, 19th and 20th-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry. But then the next stage was real­is­ing that no indi­vid­ual can in fact be ful­ly formed or eth­i­cal­ly secure with­out reli­gious faith. That insight has come more recent­ly and has been born of our expe­ri­ence as a fam­i­ly.”
    • Fer­gu­son is a fel­low at Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion.
    • I heard this arti­cle was pay­walled but I was able to access it with no prob­lem. If it is pay­walled, you can see Fer­gu­son talk­ing about his con­ver­sion on Twit­ter.
  3. Why Giv­ing Mat­ters (Arthur C. Brooks, Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty): “Specif­i­cal­ly, here’s what I found. If you have two fam­i­lies that are exact­ly identical—in oth­er words, same reli­gion, same race, same num­ber of kids, same town, same lev­el of edu­ca­tion, and everything’s the same—except that one fam­i­ly gives a hun­dred dol­lars more to char­i­ty than the sec­ond fam­i­ly, then the giv­ing fam­i­ly will earn on aver­age $375 more in income than the non­giv­ing family—and that’s sta­tis­ti­cal­ly attrib­ut­able to the gift.… I final­ly went to a col­league who spe­cial­ized in the psy­chol­o­gy of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, and I said, ‘I’m get­ting this result I can’t under­stand. It doesn’t make sense. It’s like the hand of God or some­thing on the econ­o­my, and I can’t believe it’s true.’ And the first thing he asked was, ‘Why don’t you believe it’s true? You’re a Chris­t­ian, aren’t you?’”
    • This is a few years old (2009), and fea­tures a Catholic speak­ing to Mor­mons. At the time of the speech Brooks was pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute and cur­rent­ly teach­es at Har­vard.
    • Towards the end he sug­gests some causal mech­a­nisms, one of which is that peo­ple per­ceive gen­eros­i­ty to be a lead­er­ship qual­i­ty.
  4. How Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry A.I. Helps Sci­ence Dream Up Big Break­throughs (William J. Broad, New York Times): “In Octo­ber, David Bak­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton shared the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry for his pio­neer­ing research on pro­teins — the knot­ty mol­e­cules that empow­er life. The Nobel com­mit­tee praised him for dis­cov­er­ing how to rapid­ly build com­plete­ly new kinds of pro­teins not found in nature, call­ing his feat ‘almost impos­si­ble.’ In an inter­view before the prize announce­ment, Dr. Bak­er cit­ed bursts of A.I. imag­in­ings as cen­tral to ‘mak­ing pro­teins from scratch.’ The new tech­nol­o­gy, he added, has helped his lab obtain rough­ly 100 patents, many for med­ical care.”
  5. Bring­ing Elon to a knife fight (Jen­nifer Pahlka, Sub­stack): “A lot of the [left-lean­ing] gov­ern­ment tech com­mu­ni­ty is skip­ping the hand wring­ing; they’ve basi­cal­ly just grabbed a bag of pop­corn and are watch­ing in real time as Elon and Vivek learn all the things they’ve known, lived, and absolute­ly hat­ed for their entire time in pub­lic ser­vice. They don’t see DOGE as their sav­ior, but they are feel­ing vin­di­cat­ed after years of shout­ing into the void. I am struck by how dif­fer­ent the tone of the DOGE con­ver­sa­tion is between polit­i­cal lead­ers on the left and the peo­ple who’ve been fight­ing in the imple­men­ta­tion trench­es. One group is ter­ri­fied they’ll suc­ceed. The oth­er is start­ing to ask a sur­pris­ing ques­tion (or at least I am): What if even bil­lion­aires can’t dis­rupt the sys­tem we have built?”
    • The first com­ment is a nec­es­sary com­ple­ment to this essay.
  6. House Mem­ber in Senior Liv­ing Facil­i­ty Draws Fresh Scruti­ny to Aging Con­gress (Catie Edmond­son, New York Times): “Sen­a­tor Charles E. Grass­ley, Repub­li­can of Iowa, is Congress’s eldest mem­ber at 91 years old. In 2023, The New York Times tal­lied 20 law­mak­ers who were at least 80 years old. While the Con­sti­tu­tion lays out a floor for age require­ments for those run­ning for Con­gress, it does not man­date a ceil­ing. That has cre­at­ed a bevy of awk­ward sit­u­a­tions for lead­ers in both par­ties, who have been thrust into the del­i­cate posi­tion of try­ing to nudge out aging law­mak­ers who refuse to release their grip on pow­er.”
  7. Engage Bespoke Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: Reflec­tions from Con­ver­sa­tions on Cam­pus (Mark Legg, The Gospel Coali­tion): “I often encoun­tered the view of faith some­times called ‘bespoke spir­i­tu­al­i­ty,’ a way of engag­ing with reli­gion by pick­ing and choos­ing beliefs and prac­tices that ‘vibe’ with you per­son­al­ly. The stu­dents I met were authen­ti­cal­ly open-mind­ed to Chris­tian­i­ty. How­ev­er, they resist­ed (or often strug­gled to under­stand) the claim that Jesus is the only ‘way,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘life,’ and that ‘no one comes to the Father except through [him]’ (John 14:6).”
    • I did­n’t know it had a label, but it’s every­where at Stan­ford. 

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy Final­ly Leaves The Sta­ble And Oh No! Here Comes Lit­tle Bag­pipe Boy! (Baby­lon Bee)
  • Big Jack — a great short sto­ry told in com­ic form. I real­ly enjoyed it. I may have shared it before — I know I’ve read it before.
  • It Pays to Have Long Hair and a Beard in Utah—Jesus Mod­els Are in Demand (Bradley Olson, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Mod­els who look like Jesus are in high demand in Utah. That’s because for a grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple in the state, a pic­ture isn’t com­plete with­out Him. They are hir­ing Jesus look-alikes for fam­i­ly por­traits and wed­ding announce­ments. Mod­els are show­ing up to walk with a new­ly engaged cou­ple through a field, play with young chil­dren in the Bon­neville Salt Flats, and cram in with the fam­i­ly for the annu­al Christ­mas card.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a friend of the min­istry.
    • This bit made me laugh: “Find­ing a mod­el can be dif­fi­cult. Areas of Utah with high con­cen­tra­tions of Mormons—who also call them­selves Lat­ter-day Saints or LDS—tend to lack poten­tial Jesus dop­pel­gängers. Some men who work or vol­un­teer for the church, one of the state’s largest employ­ers, are required to shave every day and keep their hair short.”
  • My Neigh­bor Won’t Stop Pray­ing for Me. What Should I Do? (Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah, New York Times): “The only rea­son you give for object­ing to her prayers is that she has failed to com­ply with your wish­es. Yet I don’t find that she has there­by treat­ed you with dis­re­spect, because I don’t see that you have the right to have those wish­es com­plied with. You seem to be ask­ing her not to do some­thing she thinks there are com­pelling rea­sons to do. I’d have thought that this was dis­re­spect­ful.”
    • This also made me laugh. Chor­tle, even.
  • A 1,000-Year-Old Seed Grows in Israel (Franz Lidz, New York Times): “In 2010, Dr. Sal­lon obtained a mys­te­ri­ous seed from the archae­o­log­i­cal archives of Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty, hop­ing that it could ger­mi­nate. The seed had been dis­cov­ered in a cave dur­ing a 1980s exca­va­tion at Wadi el-Makkuk, a win­ter water chan­nel in the north­ern Judean desert, and was lan­guish­ing in stor­age. After deter­min­ing that the seed was still viable, Dr. Sallon’s research team plant­ed, sprout­ed and care­ful­ly tend­ed it. When the husk was car­bon-dat­ed to between A.D. 993 and A.D. 1202, a thought occurred to Dr. Sal­lon. ‘I won­dered if what ger­mi­nat­ed could be the source­of the balm of Gilead,’ she said. On the hunch that it was, she named the spec­i­men She­ba. Since then, the 1,000-year-old seedling has grown into a stur­dy 12-foot-tall tree with no mod­ern coun­ter­part. Sheba’s painstak­ing revival — kept secret from the pub­lic for 14 years — is detailed in a study that was pub­lished in Sep­tem­ber in the jour­nal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Biol­o­gy.”

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 483

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 Shock of Faith: It’s Noth­ing Like I Thought It Would Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “When reli­gion is seen as belief, then the believ­er lives on a con­tin­u­um between belief and doubt. But when reli­gion is seen as a long­ing, then the believ­er lives on the con­tin­u­um between inten­si­ty and apa­thy. That’s the con­tin­u­um I live on these days.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed, unlocked, sent to me by mul­ti­ple alum­ni.
  2. Archae­ol­o­gists Found a Skele­ton Wear­ing an Amulet That May Change the His­to­ry of Chris­tian­i­ty (Tim New­comb, Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics): “Every oth­er link to reli­able evi­dence of Chris­t­ian life in the north­ern Alpine area of the Roman Empire is at least 50 years younger, all com­ing from the fourth cen­tu­ry A.D.…. The sci­en­tif­ic study is bol­stered by ref­er­ences nev­er found so ear­ly, such as men­tion of Saint Titus, a stu­dent of the Apos­tle Paul, the invo­ca­tion ‘holy, holy, holy!’ which wasn’t more com­mon until the fourth cen­tu­ry A.D., and the phrase ‘bend your knees,’ which is a quote from Paul’s let­ter to the Philip­pi­ans.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. The title is click­bait, but the arti­cle’s con­tent is inter­est­ing.
  3. What if Our Democ­ra­cy Can’t Sur­vive With­out Chris­tian­i­ty? (David French and Jonathan Rauch, New York Times): “It turns out that Chris­tian­i­ty is a load-bear­ing wall in democ­ra­cy, and the founders told us that. They didn’t spec­i­fy that you have to be a Chris­t­ian, per se, but they said that our lib­er­al, sec­u­lar Con­sti­tu­tion, it’s great, as far as it goes, but it relies on virtues like truth­ful­ness and law­ful­ness and the equal dig­ni­ty of every indi­vid­ual. And they under­stood that those have to come from an out­side source. The Con­sti­tu­tion won’t fur­nish them. And the source that they relied on prin­ci­pal­ly was reli­gion to teach those things and to build and trans­mit those val­ues. And it turns out that for most of our his­to­ry, Chris­tian­i­ty has been pret­ty good at that.” 
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  4. Study claims all observ­ables in nature can be mea­sured with a sin­gle con­stant: The sec­ond (Phys.org): “ ‘In Galilean space-time, you need rulers and clocks to mea­sure all the phys­i­cal vari­ables. In rel­a­tivis­tic space-time, how­ev­er, clocks are suf­fi­cient. This is because in rel­a­tiv­i­ty, space and time are so inter­re­lat­ed that a sin­gle unit is suf­fi­cient to describe all quan­ti­ties. High-pre­ci­sion clocks, such as the atom­ic clocks used today, are capa­ble of meet­ing all mea­sure­ment needs,’ says Mat­sas.”
  5. Why are Top Sci­en­tists Leav­ing Har­vard? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Mina tells an incred­i­ble sto­ry of what hap­pened dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. At the time Mina was a fac­ul­ty mem­ber at the Chan School of Pub­lic Health, he is extreme­ly active in advis­ing gov­ern­ments on the pan­dem­ic, and he brings Har­vard mil­lions of dol­lars a year in fund­ing. But when he tries to hire some­one at his lab, the uni­ver­si­ty refus­es because there is hir­ing freeze! Sor­ry, no hir­ing for pan­dem­ic research dur­ing a pan­dem­ic.”
  6. When Gen. George Pat­ton Called on God (Alex Ker­shaw, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Pat­ton instruct­ed his men: ‘Pray when dri­ving. Pray when fight­ing. Pray alone. Pray with oth­ers. Pray by night and pray by day.’ He believed the Third Army’s near­ly 500 chap­lains, rep­re­sent­ing 32 denom­i­na­tions, were as crit­i­cal to vic­to­ry as his tank com­man­ders. ‘He want­ed a chap­lain to be above aver­age in courage,’ O’Neill recalled. ‘In time of bat­tle, he want­ed the chap­lains up front, where the men were dying. And that’s where the Third Army chap­lains went—up front. We lost more chap­lains, pro­por­tion­ate­ly, than any oth­er group.’ ”
    • This is one of those his­tor­i­cal moments that I always mar­vel at when I read about it.
  7. The Abor­tion Lob­by Endan­gers Preg­nant Women (Rachel Roth Ald­hiz­er, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Reclas­si­fy­ing induc­tion of labor—or, rarely, sur­gi­cal res­o­lu­tion for PPROM—as abor­tion care seems to threat­en women’s pre­na­tal care nation­wide. No abor­tion leg­is­la­tion in any state restricts emer­gency pro­ce­dures to pro­tect the life or health of the moth­er. Yet this lin­guis­tic shift could mis­lead physi­cians in states with abor­tion restric­tions into believ­ing that stan­dard treat­ments for preg­nan­cy com­pli­ca­tions may be ille­gal, or at least sub­ject to a high­er stan­dard of physi­cian judg­ment when deter­min­ing a treat­ment course.… Only the abor­tion lob­by and the politi­cians who sup­port it ben­e­fit from these lin­guis­tic games.”

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 482

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 Chris­tians Oppose Euthana­sia (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Unlike many top­ics in the­ol­o­gy and ethics, this is not an issue on which the church has ever been ambigu­ous. There were no ear­ly church coun­cils to debate the tak­ing of inno­cent life. It didn’t take cen­turies of con­flict to adju­di­cate. On the con­trary, Chris­tians were known from the start for their adamant rejec­tion of pagan dis­re­spect for those unwant­ed by their fam­i­lies or deemed social­ly useless—the unborn and new­born, dis­abled and elder­ly.”
  2. When Was Jesus Born? Ital­ian Researcher Puts Christ’s Birth in Decem­ber, 1 BC (Edward Pentin, Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter): “[Herod was alive when Jesus was born, and we know Herod died after a lunar eclipse.] Ulti­mate­ly, based on the most accu­rate analy­sis pos­si­ble today of the vis­i­bil­i­ty to the naked eye of the lunar eclipses, the search for one of it real­ly vis­i­ble in Judea 2,000 years ago, placed in rela­tion to oth­er chrono­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal ele­ments deduced from the writ­ings of Jose­phus Flav­ius and Roman his­to­ry, leads to a sin­gle pos­si­ble solu­tion — name­ly, a dat­ing of the death of Herod the Great occur­ring in AD 2–3, com­pat­i­ble with the con­ven­tion­al begin­ning of the Chris­t­ian era — i.e., the Nativ­i­ty occurred at the end of the year 1 BC.”
  3. Sci­ence and Reli­gious Dog­ma­tism (Matías Cabel­lo, SSRN): “But why were non­be­liev­ers and oth­er free­thinkers par­tic­u­lar­ly cre­ative? Not because of lack of mys­ti­cism. Deists, with their mys­ti­cal belief in some sort of deity, have been as pro­duc­tive in sci­ence as out­right athe­ists (if not more). One pos­si­ble expla­na­tion for their joint abnor­mal­ly high pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is that free­think­ing and athe­ism opened up a whole path of ideas dis­con­nect­ed from the pre­vail­ing thought sys­tem.… By the same token, how­ev­er, it fol­lows that, in a world over­whelm­ing­ly pop­u­lat­ed by athe­ists, the most inge­nious ideas should instead come from the few reli­gious­ly mind­ed (as long as their the­ol­o­gy offers a suf­fi­cient­ly stim­u­lat­ing thought sys­tem to dis­cov­er the secrets of nature). A result con­sis­tent with this inter­pre­ta­tion is the decline of the athe­ism coef­fi­cient among 20th-cen­tu­ry born sci­en­tists of table 1. By then, athe­ism had gone from being a dan­ger­ous and uncon­ven­tion­al world­view to become wide­spread among the sci­en­tif­ic elite.”
    • An inter­est­ing paper. I don’t buy all its con­clu­sions, but I enjoyed read­ing it. The excerpt is from at the end and is an impor­tant point: non­con­for­mi­ty brings some ben­e­fits, but non­con­for­mi­ty changes over time. It looks like heresy when ortho­doxy reigns, but non­con­for­mi­ty often looks like ortho­doxy when heresy has dom­i­nance. And we live in an era of heresy. As Tyler Cowen often com­ments: the impor­tant thinkers of the future will be reli­gious.
    • The author is, fun­ni­ly enough, an econ­o­mist teach­ing at a uni­ver­si­ty named after Mar­tin Luther.
  4. Two arti­cles mak­ing sim­i­lar points: our cur­rent aver­sion to invol­un­tary com­mit­ment is cru­el to some peo­ple who would great­ly ben­e­fit from the help that their men­tal ill­ness caus­es them to resist.
    • Jor­dan Neely Need­ed to Be Insti­tu­tion­al­ized (Josh Bar­ro, Sub­stack): “One through-line in the sto­ry is the immense amount of gov­ern­ment resources that were thrown at try­ing to keep Neely out of trou­ble. Through police, courts, jails, home­less out­reach, and treat­ment facil­i­ties, New York’s tax­pay­ers spent lav­ish­ly on an effort to keep Neely alive, in men­tal health care, and not pos­ing a dan­ger to the pub­lic or him­self. But it didn’t work because he was insane and he was not forced to accept the care he need­ed — except dur­ing a stint he spent in jail on Rik­ers Island, when he was suc­cess­ful­ly med­icat­ed.… it would behoove pro­gres­sives with pat takes about how what Neely real­ly need­ed was hous­ing and care to know that he was offered these things over and over again by an extreme­ly well-fund­ed social ser­vices appa­ra­tus. If you want­ed him to have hous­ing and care, you need­ed to be pre­pared to force them upon him; and if you weren’t, then you don’t have a solu­tion to the prob­lems of peo­ple like him.”
    • The Tragedy of Jor­dan Neely and Daniel Pen­ny (Bren­dan Ruber­ry, Per­sua­sion): “[End­ing invol­un­tary com­mit­ment had a per­verse effect, because] as it hap­pens, many patients are, in fact, unwill­ing to sub­mit to treat­ment, because noth­ing does more to harm one’s pow­ers of self-aware­ness, and one’s abil­i­ty to rec­og­nize the neces­si­ty of often lengthy pro­to­cols, than debil­i­tat­ing men­tal ill­ness.”
  5. Make Vil­lains Wicked Again (Ger­mán Sauce­do, First Things): “The clear images of true evil present in the best fairy tales, bal­lads, myths, and leg­ends offer both a vision of what is to be avoid­ed at all costs, as well as a vision of virtue. As such, the ‘sym­pa­thet­ic vil­lain’ genre is a symp­tom of a soci­ety that dis­agrees on what is good and what is evil, or that tries to explain evil away as trau­ma, psy­chopa­thy, or pathol­o­gy. But to iden­ti­fy and avoid evil, we must first learn to rec­og­nize the good. The insis­tence on sub­vert­ing vil­lains is a sign we have lost con­fi­dence in our belief that we can know what hero­ism looks like, a hero­ism that dis­plays the good that would oppose their unright­eous­ness.”
  6. Insur­ance com­pa­nies aren’t the main vil­lain of the U.S. health sys­tem (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “It’s not hard to under­stand why peo­ple hate health insur­ers. When you inter­act with the U.S. health care sys­tem, the providers — the hos­pi­tal staff, the doc­tor, the nurs­es, the tech­ni­cians — all just take care of you. The only time they ask you for mon­ey dur­ing your doc­tor vis­it is when you pay your copay at the front desk, and that’s usu­al­ly not that big — if the bill is big, they’ll send it to you lat­er. So for the most part, your inter­ac­tion with the providers is just you walk­ing up and ask­ing to be tak­en care of, and them tak­ing care of you. Your inter­ac­tion with the health insur­er, on the oth­er hand, feels like a strug­gle against an ene­my who wants to destroy you.”
  7. ‘Huge set­back’: SF’s mas­sive psy­che­del­ic church is leav­ing the city (Lester Black, SF Gate): “Hodges found­ed his church in 2019 around the belief that cannabis, mag­ic mush­rooms and oth­er psy­che­del­ic sub­stances are reli­gious sacra­ments that give humans spir­i­tu­al insights. Any adult can join by sign­ing up and pay­ing a $5 mem­ber­ship fee, which gives them access to pur­chase a wide range of psy­che­del­ic prod­ucts. Last year, the church expand­ed from its orig­i­nal loca­tion in Oak­land to a vacant build­ing on Howard Street in San Fran­cis­co. The church now counts over 115,000 mem­bers.”
    • Please note that the author is the “Cannabis edi­tor” at SF Gate. Some­times San Fran­cis­co becomes a par­o­dy of itself.

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 481

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. Sales of Bibles Are Boom­ing, Fueled by First-Time Buy­ers and New Ver­sions (Jef­frey A. Tra­cht­en­berg, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Wor­ries about the econ­o­my, con­flicts abroad and uncer­tain­ty over the elec­tion pushed read­ers toward the pub­li­ca­tion in droves. Bible sales are up 22% in the U.S. through the end of Octo­ber, com­pared with the same peri­od last year, accord­ing to book track­er Cir­cana BookScan. By con­trast, total U.S. print book sales were up less than 1% in that peri­od.”
  2. Does Pol­i­tics Belong in the Church? Does the Church Belong in Pol­i­tics? (Carl S. H. Hen­ry, Juicy Ecu­menism): “Does the church belong in pol­i­tics? Inso­far as it owns land and build­ings the church clear­ly has civic oblig­a­tions and should ren­der to Cae­sar what is prop­er­ly Caesar’s. As an insti­tu­tion ground­ed on a divine dis­clo­sure of truth and moral­i­ty, more­over, the church is man­dat­ed to pro­claim pub­licly the revealed prin­ci­ples by which Christ the King of kings will ulti­mate­ly judge nations and states and does so even now. The church as such must also stim­u­late mem­bers to apply scrip­tur­al prin­ci­ples with sound rea­son and in good con­science to cur­rent polit­i­cal con­cerns, in quest of pre­ferred poli­cies and pro­grams pro­mo­tive of jus­tice and peace. Since God wills the state as an instru­men­tal­i­ty for pre­serv­ing jus­tice and restrain­ing dis­or­der, the church should urge mem­bers to engage in polit­i­cal affairs to their utmost com­pe­tence and abil­i­ty, to vote faith­ful­ly and intel­li­gent­ly, to engage in the polit­i­cal process at all lev­els, and to seek and hold pub­lic office. The church is not, how­ev­er, to use the mech­a­nisms of gov­ern­ment to legal­ly impose upon soci­ety at large her the­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ments. The church must increas­ing­ly clar­i­fy when obe­di­ence to God requires dis­obe­di­ence to the state and, no less, when dis­obe­di­ence to the state con­sti­tutes dis­obe­di­ence to God.”
    • From 1984, a tran­scrip­tion of a speech by a key voice in the emer­gence of Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cal­ism. This speech, with updates to replace 80’s ref­er­ences, could be giv­en today.
  3. Ryugu aster­oid sam­ple rapid­ly col­o­nized by ter­res­tri­al life despite strict con­t­a­m­i­na­tion con­trol (Justin Jack­son, Phys.org): “NASA tries to avoid intro­duc­ing Earth microbes to Mars by con­struct­ing probes and lan­ders in clean­room envi­ron­ments and has found the task near­ly impos­si­ble. There have been species of microbes dis­cov­ered in NASA clean rooms that not only evade dis­in­fec­tion meth­ods but also adapt to using clean­ing agents as a food source.”
    • That last sen­tence is stun­ning. This is how British researchers tried (and failed) to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of an aster­oid sam­ple: “Trans­port­ed to Earth in a her­met­i­cal­ly sealed cham­ber, the sam­ple was opened in nitro­gen in a class 10,000 clean room to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. Indi­vid­ual par­ti­cles were picked with ster­il­ized tools and stored under nitro­gen in air­tight con­tain­ers. Before analy­sis, the sam­ple under­went Nano-X-ray com­put­ed tomog­ra­phy and was embed­ded in an epoxy resin block for scan­ning elec­tron microscopy.”
  4. Deus in machi­na: Swiss church installs AI-pow­ered Jesus (Ashifa Kas­sam, The Guardian):“The small, unadorned church… in the Swiss city of Lucerne… installed an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered Jesus capa­ble of dia­logu­ing in 100 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. After train­ing the AI pro­gram in the­o­log­i­cal texts, vis­i­tors were then invit­ed to pose ques­tions to a long-haired image of Jesus beamed through a lat­tice­work screen… More than 1,000 peo­ple – includ­ing Mus­lims and vis­it­ing tourists from as far as Chi­na and Viet­nam – took up the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­act with the avatar… two-thirds of them had found it to be a ‘“‘spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ence.’”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who calls the arti­cle “har­row­ing.”
  5. Why hous­ing short­ages cause home­less­ness (Sal­im Furth, Works in Progress): “…most peo­ple at risk of home­less­ness man­age to remain housed by stay­ing with oth­ers. The high­er rate of home­less­ness in high-cost areas is most­ly explained by the inabil­i­ty of the fam­i­ly and friends of poten­tial­ly home­less peo­ple to afford extra liv­ing space.”
    • Some thoughts in response: https://x.com/lymanstoneky/status/1864706992369205381
    • This arti­cle match­es my expe­ri­ence: plen­ty of peo­ple in Louisiana and Mis­souri had spare rooms to let peo­ple use. Almost no one I know has a spare room in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Peo­ple bare­ly even have yards here.
  6. Why Chris­tians Should Care About Oak Flat (Robert P. George, First Things): “For those of us who gath­er in tra­di­tion­al hous­es of wor­ship, Apache spir­i­tu­al prac­tices might feel remote or alien. A patch of Ari­zona wilder­ness bears lit­tle resem­blance to the church­es, syn­a­gogues, mosques, and tem­ples we regard as sacred space. Yet our tra­di­tion of reli­gious free­dom, prop­er­ly under­stood, has nev­er been about pro­tect­ing only what is famil­iar or con­ve­nient. Nor has it been a sim­ple live-and-let-live com­pro­mise, a frag­ile truce in which we agree to tol­er­ate one another’s prac­tices for the sake of peace. It is instead a com­mit­ment to a fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that acknowl­edges our nature as ratio­nal beings, bear­ers of pro­found, inher­ent, and equal dig­ni­ty, capa­ble of order­ing our lives toward the good, the true, and the holy.”
    • Rob­bie George is, of course, a law prof at Prince­ton and an out­spo­ken Catholic.
  7. America’s best-known prac­ti­tion­er of youth gen­der med­i­cine is being sued (Jesse Sin­gal, The Econ­o­mist): “Ms Breen said she is doing sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter today—partly, she believes, sim­ply because she ceased tak­ing testos­terone. But well before that, she ditched the ther­a­pist Dr Olson-Kennedy referred her to, who she said fix­at­ed entire­ly on her gen­der iden­ti­ty. She switched to a dialec­ti­cal behav­iour­al ther­a­pist whom she described as a god­send, with whom she had her first-ever in-depth con­ver­sa­tions about the phys­i­cal and sex­u­al abuse she endured ear­li­er in life. Ms Breen said she was fair­ly con­fi­dent that if she’d had these con­ver­sa­tions at age 12, she wouldn’t have pur­sued med­ical tran­si­tion. She has been left with per­ma­nent med­ical con­se­quences: a low­er voice than she wants, an Adam’s Apple that dis­tress­es her, the prospect of breast recon­struc­tion if she wants to par­tial­ly regain a female shape, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that she is infer­tile due to the years she spent on testos­terone.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Defend­er of the Basic (YouTube, Col­lege­Hu­mor): five min­utes with only one mild­ly off-col­or inter­change. I agree with this video direc­tion­al­ly but hap­pen to have dif­fer­ent (but equal­ly basic) aes­thet­ic pref­er­ences than many of those high­light­ed. 
  • NASA Rock­et Engine Fire­place (NASA, YouTube): want a nerdy fire­place on your TV dur­ing the hol­i­days? NASA’s got you. 8 hours of a rock­et in a fire­place in 4k.
  • Who Needs Con­gress When You Have Cameo? (Joseph Bern­stein, New York Times): “He’s avail­able for birth­day wish­es (‘Any time you hit a zero it’s a big one, but turn­ing 70 is pret­ty epic’), wed­ding con­grat­u­la­tions (‘Mar­riage is an amaz­ing insti­tu­tion’) and pep talks (‘Even on tough days, find the good in it, find the pride in the work’) — all start­ing at $500. Mr. Gaetz is hap­py to poke fun at his pro­fes­sion­al set­back, con­trast­ing his failed nom­i­na­tion with the suc­cess of one of his Cameo cus­tomers who just became a part­ner in a law firm.”

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 480

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. I Give Thanks in the Bright Dark­ness (Christi­na Gon­za­lez Ho, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “It seems that, his­tor­i­cal­ly, Thanks­giv­ing was not meant to be a pure­ly cel­e­bra­to­ry day, a time to lux­u­ri­ate in self-sat­is­fac­tion, but rather a day to hold grat­i­tude in ten­sion with sor­row, suf­fer­ing, and sin—to acknowl­edge the bright­ness and dark­ness that always exist simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in the world.”
    • Christi­na is an alum­nus of Chi Alpha.
  2. The Con­quest of Canaan Explained in 6 Min­utes (Gavin Ortlund, YouTube). Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. This is a top­ic I think I explain pret­ty well, but Ortlund does it bet­ter. Worth your time if the destruc­tion of the Canaan­ite cul­tures both­ers you.
  3. And They Began to Be Mer­ry (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dis­patch): “The mir­a­cle at Cana isn’t water becom­ing wine—any old magi­cian could do that sort of thing. What­ev­er it was that Jesus was about, it wasn’t stu­pid par­ty tricks. The mir­a­cle is that the Ruler of the Uni­verse cared about such a lit­tle thing as the social anx­i­eties of a bunch of nobod­ies in an obscure lit­tle cor­ner of the world of no par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, and that He loved them the way a father loves his children—and what kind of father offers just enough at a time like that when he has, at his dis­pos­al, the very best?… The super­nat­ur­al stuff is one thing, but con­sid­er the mag­nif­i­cence of that ges­ture, the sheer auda­cious style of it. I do not care if you are the most cyn­i­cal athe­ist walk­ing the Earth—it is impos­si­ble not to admire the panache. He bends real­i­ty into a new shape, makes the uni­verse fol­low new rules, to help out a friend, and He does it cool—nobody even knows what hap­pened except for the wait­ers.”
  4. What I Wish Some­one Had Told Me About Moth­er­hood (Daniela J. Lamas, New York Times): “For my gen­er­a­tion— and, I’d argue, espe­cial­ly for women in my gen­er­a­tion — the deci­sion of whether to have a child has become high­ly fraught. It’s tied up with our desires for ful­fill­ing careers, our will­ing­ness to risk a shift in the iden­ti­ties and lives we have built. It’s tied up in an under­stand­ing of all that went into mak­ing moth­er­hood a choice that we get to make. With so much at stake, it is so easy to become par­a­lyzed by inde­ci­sion. But per­haps what I would have want­ed to hear when I was dither­ing was some­thing like this: Hav­ing a child has been extra­or­di­nary.… And for some rea­son, I feel almost embar­rassed to admit how much I love being a moth­er. I spent my adult life until now with this idea that I was dif­fer­ent from — and maybe even a lit­tle supe­ri­or to — my peers who chose to spend time build­ing their fam­i­lies. I was so wor­ried about what a child would mean for my career. But what I did not antic­i­pate was that what I would want itself would change.”
  5. This Mav­er­ick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time (Christo­pher Cald­well, New York Times): “Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of some­thing para­dox­i­cal about the neolib­er­al project: For the glob­al econ­o­my to be ‘free,’ it must be con­strained. What the pro­po­nents of neolib­er­al­ism mean by a free mar­ket is a dereg­u­lat­ed mar­ket. But get­ting to dereg­u­la­tion is trick­i­er than it looks because in free soci­eties, reg­u­la­tions are the result of people’s sov­er­eign right to make their own rules. The more demo­c­ra­t­ic the world’s soci­eties are, the more idio­syn­crat­ic they will be, and the more their eco­nom­ic rules will diverge. But that is exact­ly what busi­ness­es can­not tol­er­ate — at least not under glob­al­iza­tion. Mon­ey and goods must be able to move fric­tion­less­ly and effi­cient­ly across bor­ders. This requires a uni­form set of laws. Some­how, democ­ra­cy is going to have to give way.”
    • Cald­well is an inter­est­ing thinker, so as soon as I saw his byline I knew I had to read the arti­cle. Worth a pon­der.
  6. ‘A God Who Con­tin­u­al­ly Sur­pris­es Us’: A Q&A With a The­olo­gian Who Changed His Mind About Gay Mar­riage (Peter Wehn­er, New York Times): “…I would say that the way I was appeal­ing to the Bible or the way I was inter­pret­ing the Bible was too nar­row­ly focused on the few texts in Scrip­ture that do say some­thing explic­it­ly about homo­sex­u­al rela­tion­ships. The dic­tum in Leviti­cus is that for a man to lie with a man as with a woman is an abom­i­na­tion. And those texts had a cer­tain impact on my opin­ion. But I think I was I was far too nar­row in the way I thought about how the Bible speaks to issues like this. What I came to think over time is that what the Bible shows is not some iso­lat­ed proof texts or iso­lat­ed state­ments of law, but it shows us a much big­ger pic­ture of God as a God who con­tin­u­al­ly sur­pris­es us, con­tin­u­al­ly sur­pris­es his peo­ple with the scope of gen­eros­i­ty and grace and mer­cy.”
    • This is one of many reveal­ing moments in this inter­view. Hays stopped believ­ing what the Bible actu­al­ly says in favor of what he takes the deep­er mes­sage of the Bible to be. It’s as though he sub­or­di­nates the real text of the Bible to the hypo­thet­i­cal text of the Bible in his head.
    • This arti­cle makes me sad. Shar­ing because it’s a clear­er-than-usu­al pre­sen­ta­tion of an argu­ment that I often encounter, and its clar­i­ty makes the weak­ness­es of the revi­sion­ist posi­tion more evi­dent.
  7. How Uni­ver­si­ties Cracked Down on Pro-Pales­tin­ian Activism (Isabelle Taft, New York Times): “Uni­ver­si­ties have seen just under 950 protest events this semes­ter so far, com­pared to 3,000 last semes­ter, accord­ing to a log at the Non­vi­o­lent Action Lab at Har­vard University’s Ash Cen­ter. About 50 peo­ple have been arrest­ed so far this school year at protests on high­er edu­ca­tion cam­pus­es, accord­ing to num­bers gath­ered by The New York Times, com­pared to over 3,000 last semes­ter. When stu­dents have protest­ed this fall, admin­is­tra­tors have often enforced — to the let­ter — new rules cre­at­ed in response to last spring’s unrest. The moves have cre­at­ed scenes that would have been hard to imag­ine pre­vi­ous­ly, par­tic­u­lar­ly at uni­ver­si­ties that once cel­e­brat­ed their his­to­ry of stu­dent activism.”

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 479

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 the Ivy League Broke Amer­i­ca (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “Stu­dents who got into high­er-rank­ing col­leges, which demand high sec­ondary-school GPAs, are not sub­stan­tial­ly more effec­tive after they grad­u­ate. In one study of 28,000 young stu­dents, those attend­ing high­er-rank­ing uni­ver­si­ties did only slight­ly bet­ter on con­sult­ing projects than those attend­ing low­er-ranked uni­ver­si­ties. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale stu­dent would have been only about 1.9 per­cent more pro­fi­cient than a stu­dent from Cleve­land State when mea­sured by the qual­i­ty of their work. The Yale stu­dent would also have been more like­ly to be a jerk: The researchers found that stu­dents from high­er-rank­ing col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, while nom­i­nal­ly more effec­tive than oth­er stu­dents, were more like­ly to pay ‘insuf­fi­cient atten­tion to inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships,’ and in some instances to be ‘less friend­ly,’ ‘more prone to con­flict,’ and ‘less like­ly to iden­ti­fy with their team.’ ”
    • Inter­est­ing through­out. I liked this line — “If we could get to the point where being snob­by about going to Stan­ford seems as ridicu­lous as being snob­by about your great-grandmother’s mem­ber­ship in the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, this would trans­form not just col­lege admis­sions but Amer­i­can child­hood.”
    • Some­what relat­ed: We Asked for It (Michael W. Clune, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “The costs of explic­it­ly tying the aca­d­e­m­ic enter­prise to par­ti­san pol­i­tics in a democ­ra­cy were emi­nent­ly fore­see­able and are now com­ing into sharp focus.… In return for their tuition, stu­dents are giv­en the faculty’s high-class polit­i­cal opin­ions as a form of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal. Thus the pub­lic per­ceives these opin­ions — on defund­ing the police, or view­ing bio­log­i­cal sex as a social con­struc­tion, or Israel as absolute evil — as mark­ers in a sta­tus game. Far from advanc­ing their opin­ions, pro­fes­sors in fact func­tion to inval­i­date these views for the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans who nev­er had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to attend elite insti­tu­tions but who are con­stant­ly stig­ma­tized for their low-class opin­ions by the lucky grad­u­ates. Far from rep­re­sent­ing a pow­er­ful avant-garde lead­ing the way to polit­i­cal change, the politi­cized class of pro­fes­sors is a seri­ous polit­i­cal lia­bil­i­ty to any par­ty that it sup­ports.”
      • The author is an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Case West­ern. He throws a lot of strong punch­es.
  2. Jor­dan Peter­son Loves God’s Word. But What About God? (Brad East, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “the pow­er of Peterson’s style is his mar­riage of exis­ten­tial urgency with hermeneu­ti­cal cre­ativ­i­ty. He expects the Word to show him won­ders. He wres­tles with the text—a mys­tery and a stranger—until he secures a bless­ing from it. He takes for grant­ed that its depths are bot­tom­less. Do pas­tors mod­el this pos­ture in the pul­pit? Do teach­ers in the class­room? Do schol­ars on the page?Christian read­ers should learn from Peterson’s bold­ness, his dis­po­si­tion of awe and docil­i­ty before the sacred page. He opens the scroll with the same spir­it as the psalmist: ‘Open my eyes that I may see won­der­ful things in your law’ (119:18).”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a col­league. This is one of the best Chris­t­ian engage­ments with Jor­dan Peter­son I’ve seen.
  3. In the Era of the Judges (Stiv­en Peter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “The hold­ers of cul­tur­al cap­i­tal have not sim­ply sub­sti­tut­ed Chris­t­ian val­ues with an alter­na­tive set but pro­mote the very loss of order itself. The only val­ues are no val­ues. That is, our cul­ture pro­motes lib­er­tin­ism, every­one doing what is right in their own eyes. Soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, Hunter calls this the process of dis­so­lu­tion: ‘By dis­so­lu­tion, I refer to the decon­struc­tion of the most basic assump­tions about real­i­ty.’ Our cul­ture doesn’t enforce any guide to who or what we are, nor what we should do. Instead, what is pro­mot­ed is turn­ing inside our­selves and deter­min­ing our own val­ues. This process results in the frac­tur­ing of soci­ety along­side tribes/enclaves of peo­ple with sim­i­lar val­ues.”
    • This is a review of Aaron Ren­n’s book, and Renn says: “This review is a think piece in its own right. Peter takes my ideas and restates them through his own lens — improv­ing them in the process.”
  4. Rich Inner Death (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “Our men­tal health cri­sis is usu­al­ly cast as either a fail­ure of ther­a­peu­tic techniques—we just haven’t unlocked our trau­ma well enough yet—or else an unavoid­able con­se­quence of cli­mate anx­i­ety, polar­iza­tion, or bad media. But [per­haps the cri­sis stems from how we are trained to view the world]. There is a way of liv­ing your life as a kind of con­stant retreat into both the safe­ty and the chaos of your own imag­i­na­tion, and near­ly every­thing about how we learn, com­mu­ni­cate, and work as mod­ern peo­ple helps us con­di­tion for this. We are taught ear­ly and often to direct our gaze inward.”
    • Sev­er­al sub­stan­tive insights in this arti­cle.
  5. Why the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety Has Been a Great Suc­cess (Ed Whe­lan, Sub­stack): “The Fed­er­al­ist Society’s suc­cess has led many on the Left—and, more recent­ly, some envi­ous folks on the Right—to revile and demo­nize it. But its crit­ics rou­tine­ly dis­play that they do not under­stand how it oper­ates and how it has suc­ceed­ed.… It does not sub­mit ami­cus briefs. It does not under­take to enlist the pub­lic in polit­i­cal under­tak­ings. And it has nev­er done any of these things. And there­in lies one of the great keys to its suc­cess.”
  6. AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry is indis­tin­guish­able from human-writ­ten poet­ry and is rat­ed more favor­ably (Bri­an Porter & Edouard Mach­ery, Sci­en­tif­ic Reports [Nature]): “We col­lect­ed 5 poems each from 10 well-known Eng­lish-lan­guage poets, span­ning much of the his­to­ry of Eng­lish poet­ry: Geof­frey Chaucer (1340s-1400), William Shake­speare (1564–1616), Samuel But­ler (1613–1680), Lord Byron (1788–1824), Walt Whit­man (1819–1892), Emi­ly Dick­in­son (1830–1886), T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), Allen Gins­berg (1926–1997), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), and Dorothea Lasky (1978- ). Using Chat­G­PT 3.5, we gen­er­at­ed 5 poems ‘in the style of’ each poet. We used a ‘human out of the loop’ par­a­digm: we used the first 5 poems gen­er­at­ed, and did not select the ‘best’ out of a group of poems or pro­vide any feed­back or instruc­tions to the mod­el beyond ‘Write a short poem in the style of <poet> ‘. In the first exper­i­ment, 1,634 par­tic­i­pants were ran­dom­ly assigned to one of the 10 poets, and pre­sent­ed with 10 poems in ran­dom order: 5 poems writ­ten by that poet, and 5 gen­er­at­ed by AI ‘in the style of’ that poet. For each poem, par­tic­i­pants were asked whether they thought the poem was gen­er­at­ed by AI or writ­ten by a human poet.… Con­trary to what ear­li­er stud­ies report­ed, peo­ple now appear unable to reli­ably dis­tin­guish human-out-of-the-loop AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry from human-authored poet­ry writ­ten by well-known poets.… Fur­ther­more, peo­ple pre­fer AI-gen­er­at­ed poet­ry to human-authored poet­ry, con­sis­tent­ly rat­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed poems more high­ly than the poems of well-known poets across a vari­ety of qual­i­ta­tive fac­tors.”
    • The authors are at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh.
  7. Why Pro­gres­sives Should Ques­tion Their Favorite Sci­en­tif­ic Find­ings (Paul Bloom, The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion): “You may have heard of the study pub­lished in 2020 con­clud­ing that Black new­borns have high­er sur­vival rates when Black doc­tors attend to them. It got a huge amount of cov­er­age in the pop­u­lar press. It was even cit­ed by Supreme Court Jus­tice Ketan­ji Brown Jack­son in her dis­sent last year on the court’s rul­ing against racial pref­er­ences in col­lege admis­sions. The research, Jack­son claimed, shows the ben­e­fits of diver­si­ty. ‘It saves lives,’ she wrote. The same jour­nal just pub­lished a re-analy­sis of the data. It turns out that the ‘effect is sub­stan­tial­ly weak­ened, and often becomes sta­tis­ti­cal­ly insignif­i­cant,’ once you take into account that Black doc­tors are less like­ly to see the high­er-risk pop­u­la­tion of new­borns with low birth weight. I wasn’t sur­prised when I saw the re-analy­sis because I didn’t believe the orig­i­nal find­ing.… It’s like what some­one once said about Gin­ger Rogers and Fred Astaire: They’re both going through all the same moves, but Gin­ger Rogers is doing them back­ward and in high heels. A pub­lished find­ing that clash­es with the polit­i­cal prej­u­dices of review­ers and edi­tors is a Gin­ger Rogers find­ing. It had to be twice as good.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor (emer­i­tus at Yale, cur­rent­ly at U Toron­to).

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 478

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. When a Stan­ford Bible Study Led to an AI Start­up (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Hadas­sah Beta­pu­di and Eli­jah Kim met at a Chris­t­ian fel­low­ship at Stan­ford in 2022 and got to know each oth­er by lead­ing a Bible study togeth­er. Soon the duo—with their back­grounds in data orga­niz­ing and com­put­er science—was build­ing an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence start­up.”
    • The arti­cle nev­er names Chi Alpha, but they are both lead­ers in our min­istry. Super cool! Their start­up is Ess­lo, which helps stu­dents with their col­lege appli­ca­tion essays.
  2. I Believe in Mir­a­cles. Just Not All of Them. (David French, New York Times): “As the surgery date approached, I got a call from a dear friend, Ruth Okedi­ji. Ruth was the leader of my law school Chris­t­ian fel­low­ship, and she’s now a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law School. I’ll nev­er for­get her first words. ‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘The Lord has healed you.’ My ini­tial reac­tion was frus­tra­tion. I was resigned to the surgery, and I want­ed encour­age­ment, not false hope. As a Chris­t­ian, I believe that God is real and works mir­a­cles. But I didn’t con­sid­er that he would work a mir­a­cle on me. My prayers were of the con­ven­tion­al kind that I grew up with — prayers that doc­tors would have wis­dom and that I’d have the courage to face the chal­lenge of the surgery. But Ruth’s prayer was dif­fer­ent. She asked God for heal­ing, and she said that God had grant­ed her prayer. I woke up the next morn­ing with­out any pain at all. I had no pain the entire day. The next day was pain-free as well, and so was the next. The doc­tors rein­tro­duced bland, sol­id food to my diet, and I con­sumed it vora­cious­ly. By Thanks­giv­ing, I’d gained most of my weight back, and a colonoscopy lat­er showed no evi­dence of the dis­ease at all. My doc­tor was sur­prised. I was sur­prised (and over­joyed). I knew that ulcer­a­tive col­i­tis could have remis­sion peri­ods, but this one stuck. And in the 29 years since, I’ve nev­er had a recur­rence.”
  3. The Online Sports Gam­bling Exper­i­ment Has Failed (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “When sports gam­bling was legal­ized in Amer­i­ca, I was hope­ful it too could prove a net pos­i­tive force, far supe­ri­or to the pre­vi­ous obnox­ious wave of dai­ly fan­ta­sy sports. It brings me no plea­sure to con­clude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legal­ized mobile gam­bling on sports, let alone casi­no games, has proven to be a huge mis­take. The soci­etal impacts are far worse than I expect­ed.… The impacts include a 28% over­all increase in bank­rupt­cies (!).… When the home team suf­fers an upset loss while sports bet­ting is legal, domes­tic vio­lence that day goes up by 9% for the day, with lin­ger­ing effects.”
  4. Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Rela­tion­ships: 1 in 4 Young Adults Believe AI Part­ners Could Replace Real-life Romance (Wendy Wang and Michael Toscano, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Young men are more like­ly than young women to believe that AI has the poten­tial to replace real-life roman­tic rela­tion­ships (28% vs. 22%). As shown ear­li­er, young men are gen­er­al­ly more open to AI friend­ships than young women, which par­al­lels the gen­der dif­fer­ence in their views of AI’s poten­tial for romance.… Among sin­gle young adults, those who watch porn online at least once a day are twice as like­ly as those who rarely, if ever watch porn to say they are open to an AI romance.”
  5. The Right With­out Wrong (Dustin Guastel­la, Jacobin): “For sec­u­lar lib­er­als who have made ‘believ­ing sci­ence’ their own kind of reli­gion, the pos­si­ble wan­ing of Chris­t­ian con­ser­vatism may seem like a bless­ing long over­due. What if it isn’t?… In the Chris­t­ian sto­ry, we are all equal­ly fall­en. Our orig­i­nal sin unites us in a kind of neg­a­tive equi­lib­ri­um. By recast­ing Chris­tian­i­ty as a unique per­ver­sion, a can­cer­ous growth that destroyed the glo­ri­ous Roman Empire from with­in (or a virus intro­duced by Jews, that ancient ene­my of the Right, from with­out), reac­tionar­ies can freely reject our pri­mor­dial equal­i­ty to instead embrace the sup­pos­ed­ly nat­ur­al hier­ar­chies evi­dent in the out­come of mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion, the body-obsessed ‘vital­ism’ that priv­i­leges phys­i­cal strength over the effete ide­al­ism of the Enlight­en­ment, and also, seem­ing­ly with­out fail, an aggres­sive, unashamed form of sci­en­tif­ic racism.”
    • Jacobin is a social­ist mag­a­zine — fas­ci­nat­ing to see how one of their authors feels about the rise of the post-reli­gious right.
  6. We Need to Fix Vot­ing in Amer­i­ca Now (Wil­fred Reil­ly, Nation­al Review): “Sim­ply put, there is no way to know the real rate of vot­er fraud in Amer­i­ca, so long as the U.S.A. does not require cit­i­zens to vote in per­son or show an ID when they vote.… Recall that a com­pe­tent­ly done scan-and-purge of the rolls in Iowa alone turned up almost two orders of mag­ni­tude more reg­is­tered nonci­t­i­zens than the num­ber that The Experts™ dis­cov­ered nation­wide — ful­ly 0.5 percent–1 per­cent of the state’s elec­torate in some off-year races. Say­ing that these folks do not exist because they have nev­er been jailed is like say­ing that there can­not real­ly be 1 mil­lion-plus dai­ly users of The Pirate Bay and sim­i­lar sites, because there are so few annu­al pros­e­cu­tions for inter­net crimes.”
    • The author is a polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor. He presents data I’ve nev­er heard before.
  7. A Grave­yard of Bad Elec­tion Nar­ra­tives (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Sub­stack): “Accord­ing to Forbes, more than 50 oth­er bil­lion­aires also threw their weight behind Trump. So far so good for the pre­ferred nar­ra­tive. But here’s the twist: even more bil­lion­aires — 83 to be pre­cise — sup­port­ed the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee. Kamala had 60 per­cent more bil­lion­aire back­ers than Don­ald Trump did. And bil­lion­aires like Oprah and Mark Cuban hit the cam­paign trail serv­ing as sur­ro­gates for Har­ris in much the same way as Musk sup­port­ed Trump. If we want to look at who ‘big mon­ey’ tried to push into office this cycle, the answer is dis­con­cert­ing.… Over­all, this cycle, Democ­rats raised rough­ly twice as much mon­ey as their oppo­nents. In the months after Joe Biden dropped out, Democ­rats raised more than $1 bil­lion – more than three times as much as Repub­li­cans brought in over the same peri­od – large­ly thanks to enthu­si­as­tic sup­port for Kamala Har­ris with­in Wall Street, Sil­i­con Val­ley and Big Law.”

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.