Category: Links

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.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 477

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. Some post-elec­tion analy­sis, with the reminder that I do not endorse every­thing I share. I share them because they made me think.
    • Amaz­ing quote from the Stan­ford Review: It’s Time For Stan­ford to Accept Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump (Again) (Edi­to­r­i­al, Stan­ford Review): “Stan­ford stu­dents often for­get to con­sid­er that the world around them votes too—and that the world does not have the same con­cerns. As one peer remarked, ‘I found out some of the din­ing hall staff vot­ed for Trump and lowkey for­got they got to vote too.’ ”
    • 10 Rea­sons You Did­n’t See This Com­ing (Kon­stan­tin Kisin, Sub­stack): “Amer­i­cans are extreme­ly prac­ti­cal peo­ple. They care about what works, not what sounds good. In Europe, we pro­duce great writ­ers and intel­lec­tu­als. In Amer­i­ca they pro­duce (and attract) great engi­neers, busi­ness­men and investors. Because of this, they care less about Trump’s rhetoric than you do and more about his poli­cies than you do.”
      • Kisin is a Russ­ian-born immi­grant to Britain. Inter­est­ing to see how at least one for­eign­er per­ceives the results US elec­tion.
    • Don­ald Trump Is the Pres­i­dent for Post-Chris­t­ian Amer­i­ca (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “It’s hard to com­plain that he’s crude when we live in a crude soci­ety and peo­ple like that way — except when it comes to him. In fact, com­pared to the rest of the coun­try, Trump is a retro mod­el of rec­ti­tude when it comes to not drink­ing or doing drugs, hav­ing a relent­less work eth­ic, wear­ing suits, etc.”
    • Democ­rats Picked the Wrong Women’s Rights Issue (Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press): “Democ­rats bet big on ‘repro­duc­tive rights’ this elec­tion cycle, even offer­ing free abor­tions at their nation­al con­ven­tion. But the strat­e­gy didn’t pay off. Not only was abor­tion a flop with the elec­torate, it was Republicans—not Democrats—who pushed the win­ning women’s‑rights issue: fight­ing the encroach­ment of bio­log­i­cal men into women’s spaces and sports.”
    • How a Lati­no wave car­ried Trump to vic­to­ry (Daniel McCarthy, The Spec­ta­tor): “The fact is that left-wing cul­tur­al atti­tudes in Amer­i­ca, and in the West as a whole, are them­selves very ‘Euro­pean’ and seem often irrel­e­vant or repug­nant to peo­ple of oth­er cul­tures and racial back­grounds. White pro­gres­sive Amer­i­cans think of their views as being uni­ver­sal, but they are real­ly very spe­cif­ic to their own group. White lib­er­als believe, for exam­ple, that mas­culin­i­ty is ‘tox­ic’ and the world needs more female lead­ers. They also believe that ‘anti-racism’ requires ‘affir­ma­tive action’ or racial quotes to give blacks in par­tic­u­lar more rep­re­sen­ta­tion in posi­tions of pow­er and pres­tige. White lib­er­al­ism is the rea­son Kamala Har­ris was named as Joe Biden’s run­ning mate in 2020. She wasn’t a pop­u­lar politi­cian – and as this elec­tion proved, she still isn’t. But she was the right sex and colour to sat­is­fy the require­ments of white lib­er­als. Lati­nos are not white lib­er­als.”
    • How Dif­fer­ent Groups Vot­ed in the 2024 Elec­tion (Bri­an McGill, Antho­ny DeBar­ros and Caitlin Ostroff, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Here are the results of a sur­vey of over 120,000 reg­is­tered vot­ers, com­piled by the Asso­ci­at­ed Press, which offer a look at vot­ing pat­terns and trends among var­i­ous groups in the elec­torate and what issues were the most impor­tant to vot­ers head­ing into Elec­tion Day. Num­bers will update as respons­es are added and the survey’s weight­ing adjusts.”
      • A LOT of graphs. One detail fas­ci­nat­ing detail: peo­ple who vot­ed for Trump were MORE con­cerned that Kamala Har­ris would lead Amer­i­ca in an author­i­tar­i­an direc­tion than the peo­ple who vot­ed for Har­ris were con­cerned about Trump doing the same. It was tight, but the greater fear was of a Har­ris admin­is­tra­tion.
    • How Could Trump and Abor­tion Rights Both Win? (Jill Fil­ipovic, New York Times): “How could sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of vot­ers cast their bal­lots for legal abor­tion and also for the man who helped make it pos­si­ble to crim­i­nal­ize abor­tion in the first place? Mr. Trump boast­ed about over­turn­ing Roe v. Wade and being the most pro-life pres­i­dent in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, while Kamala Har­ris pledged to use her pres­i­den­tial pow­er to pro­tect and expand a broad range of repro­duc­tive free­doms. Yet, accord­ing to the vote tal­lies released so far, in every state where abor­tion was up for a vote, more vot­ers cast those bal­lots for abor­tion rights than for Ms. Har­ris.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • Pre­dic­tion Mar­kets for the Win (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The pre­dic­tion mar­kets pre­dict­ed the elec­tion out­come more accu­rate­ly and more quick­ly than polls or oth­er fore­cast­ing meth­ods, just as expect­ed from decades of research.”
    • Con­grats To Poly­mar­ket, But I Still Think They Were Mis­priced (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Why [do I think the mar­ket was mis­priced]? In order for an Amer­i­can to use Poly­mar­ket, you have to get a VPN, a Coin­base account, and a Meta­mask wal­let, use the VPN, get cryp­to on the Coin­base account, trans­fer it to the Meta­mask wal­let, con­nect the Meta­mask wal­let to Poly­mar­ket, and buy the shares you want. Abil­i­ty to do this rules out 99% of the US pop­u­la­tion.… I think pre­dic­tion mar­kets are among our sin­gle best sources of truth, but that (as with every source of truth) we need to think crit­i­cal­ly about them and notice the rare times when they fail. If you can’t think crit­i­cal­ly, you’re going to have a hard time, but in that case I would still trust pre­dic­tion mar­kets over any oth­er source (except Metac­u­lus, which is so sim­i­lar to a pre­dic­tion mar­ket that it belongs in the same cat­e­go­ry any­way).”
      • Inter­est­ing con­trar­i­an take on the pre­dic­tion mar­ket’s suc­cess in the elec­tion.
  2. Why Women Use Pornog­ra­phy and How the Church Can Help (Helen Thorne-Allen­son, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The biggest dri­ver of pornog­ra­phy use among the women I’ve met with is anx­i­ety. Life feels over­whelm­ing at times; pornog­ra­phy brings some relief… Maybe unsur­pris­ing­ly, anoth­er big dri­ver among the women I’ve walked along­side (par­tic­u­lar­ly younger women) is a desire to know what sex is like.… The dri­ver we prob­a­bly miss most often in the church is that of man­ag­ing pain.”
  3. Be Per­fect (Ross Byrd, Mere Ortho­doxy): “In the Bible, the word ‘per­fect’ does­n’t mean what we tend to mean by it today. For the writ­ers of Scrip­ture, per­fec­tion has more to do with fin­ished-ness than flaw­less­ness. A thing is called ‘per­fect’ when it is brought to its full matu­ri­ty, when it becomes every­thing it is meant to be. Now, if we apply this def­i­n­i­tion to the Gar­den of Eden, we are forced to con­clude that Eden was not, in fact, per­fect. Eden was good, as Gen­e­sis tells us over and over. He cre­at­ed this and that, and it was good. He cre­at­ed human beings, and it was very good. But it does­n’t say per­fect. In a very impor­tant sense, it was not yet per­fect, because it was not yet com­plete. Eden was the begin­ning. The gar­den was, among oth­er things, a place of poten­tial.”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. I like the core insight in this essay a lot.
  4. Why We’re Still Athe­ists (Kat­ja Hoy­er, Plough): “I, on the oth­er hand, often won­dered even as a child what the point of life was if all you did is grow up, work, die, and be erased. When I lost rel­a­tives, friends, and pets, I knew I had lost them for­ev­er, while oth­ers held out for some form of reunion in anoth­er life or at least the idea that souls con­tin­ued to exist some­where. On an abstract lev­el, I began to under­stand why most of human­i­ty finds com­fort, sure­ty, and pur­pose in reli­gion. But by the time I worked this out, it was entire­ly an intel­lec­tu­al mind game to me. I had grown up in a world that made sense with­out God and noth­ing could change that now.”
    • A very inter­est­ing essay about why East Ger­many is so athe­ist, writ­ten by an athe­ist reflect­ing on it.
  5. Are Reli­gious Peo­ple More Fear­ful? (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “I am real­ly sur­prised at how few of these fac­tors actu­al­ly ‘pop’ in this analy­sis. That was true for things like income, age, mar­i­tal sta­tus, view of the Bible, and reli­gious impor­tance. None of those had a mea­sur­able impact on the fear index. Also, I didn’t find a sin­gle fac­tor that clear­ly led to high­er lev­els of expressed fear. How­ev­er, there were four vari­ables in this analy­sis that pre­dict­ed a low­er score on the fear index. They were: being white, being male, hav­ing a high­er lev­el of edu­ca­tion, and increased church atten­dance.”
    • Empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty.
  6. St. Junipero Ser­ra: An Unjust­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Fig­ure (Bri­an Gabriel, The Euro­pean Con­ser­v­a­tive): “In present-day dis­course, the actions of the mis­sion­ar­ies and the Span­ish sol­diers are often con­flat­ed, but the mis­sion­ar­ies’ pater­nal­is­tic atti­tude toward the tribes actu­al­ly often led them to pro­tect the tribes from the more rapa­cious and unsa­vory behav­ior of the sol­diers. It’s true enough that the tribes were some­times forced to labor in the fields, and their free­dom of move­ment was restrict­ed once they con­vert­ed to Catholi­cism. The mis­sions them­selves were often built in part, at least, by the tribes­men, some­times under duress. But the harsh treat­ment, while strik­ing the mod­ern observ­er as cru­el and tor­tu­ous, was seen by the mis­sion­ar­ies as essen­tial to the natives’ spir­i­tu­al sal­va­tion. Today, many of their descen­dants remain Catholic. The val­ue of the mis­sion­ar­ies’ actions can nev­er be rec­og­nized by a mod­ern world that doesn’t allow for spir­i­tu­al effects.”
    • I have long believed, even as a very Protes­tant per­son, that Junipero Ser­ra has got­ten a bum rap in Cal­i­for­nia (and at Stan­ford).
  7. Rod­ney Alcala Didn’t Kill Me. Forty Years Lat­er, I Asked Him Why (Alice Feir­ing, New York Mag­a­zine): “Four-decades-plus lat­er, I learned his real name when it flashed across a tele­vi­sion screen beneath his famil­iar face and orange jump­suit: ‘Rod­ney Alcala, The Dat­ing Game Ser­i­al Killer, Sen­tenced to Death.’ It couldn’t be the same man, I’d thought to myself. But after hours of Googling I had to accept the truth: Jon Burg­er was an alias; he was the win­ning bach­e­lor on The Dat­ing Game nine years after I met him; and he is believed to have been one of the most pro­lif­ic of ser­i­al killers, offi­cial­ly respon­si­ble for at least sev­en mur­ders with author­i­ties esti­mat­ing his real body count at about 130.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent who says, “Very well writ­ten, chill­ing sto­ry. The author is lucky to be alive.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • How to Do Action Com­e­dy (Every Frame a Paint­ing, YouTube): nine min­utes about what makes Jack­ie Chan so great, and why his for­eign films are bet­ter than his Amer­i­can films in impor­tant ways.
  • Har­vey Epstein for New York City Coun­cil (Sat­ur­day Night Live, YouTube): two and a half min­utes I found absolute­ly hilar­i­ous. What’s even fun­nier is that it’s about a real politi­cian.
  • Vote (Texts From Super­heroes)
  • Diet (Pearls Before Swine) — actu­al­ly, though

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 476



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

This is a short­er-than-nor­mal edi­tion because I’ve had a busy week and haven’t read as much as I nor­mal­ly do.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. There’s more herd­ing in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scot­tish High­lands (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “How many [recent polls] showed the race in either direc­tion with­in 2.5 per­cent­age points, close enough that you could basi­cal­ly call it a tie? Well, 193 of them did, or 78 per­cent. That’s way more than you should get in the­o­ry — even if the can­di­dates are actu­al­ly exact­ly tied in all sev­en states, which they almost cer­tain­ly aren’t.… Based on a bino­mi­al dis­tri­b­u­tion — which assumes that all polls are inde­pen­dent of one anoth­er, which the­o­ret­i­cal­ly they should be — it’s real­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­l­ly unlike­ly. Specif­i­cal­ly, the odds are 1 in 9.5 tril­lion against at least this many polls show­ing such a close mar­gin.”
  2. Chris­tian­i­ty Today’s pod­cast The Bul­letin ran inter­views with three Chris­tians vot­ing dif­fer­ent ways. Pre­sent­ed in the order in which they aired:
    • Vot­ing Third Par­ty (Matt Martens): “He’s a tri­al lawyer, a for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor, a sem­i­nary grad­u­ate, a legal ethics pro­fes­sor, and an award-win­ning author. Martens’s writ­ing has appeared in The Wall Street Jour­nal, The Wash­ing­ton Post, and oth­er out­lets, and he has spo­ken at numer­ous uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try.”
    • Vot­ing Demo­c­rat (David French): “He’s a colum­nist for The New York Times and a for­mer senior edi­tor of The Dis­patch. He’s the author most recent­ly of Divid­ed We Fall: Amer­i­ca’s Seces­sion Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.”
    • Vot­ing Repub­li­can (Eric Teet­sel): “Teet­sel was vice pres­i­dent of gov­ern­ment rela­tions at The Her­itage Foun­da­tion, was chief of staff to US sen­a­tor Josh Haw­ley of Mis­souri, and served as pres­i­dent of the Fam­i­ly Pol­i­cy Alliance of Kansas.”
  3. What econ­o­mists don’t know (Scott Sum­n­er, Sub­stack): “I am not impressed when some­one tells me that a small homo­ge­neous coun­try has less inequal­i­ty than the US. I am impressed by the fact that almost every sin­gle eth­nic group in Amer­i­ca is more suc­cess­ful than the equiv­a­lent eth­nic group in their home coun­try.… Right now, the US econ­o­my is the envy of the world. Before we replace free mar­kets with an indus­tri­al pol­i­cy, we might wish to com­pare upside and down­side risks from inter­ven­tion­ism. Giv­en that our liv­ing stan­dards are cur­rent­ly the high­est in the world (at least for coun­tries of more than 10 mil­lion), in which direc­tion are the risks the great­est?”
    • The author is an econ pro­fes­sor at Bent­ley.
  4. How Many Con­ti­nents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers. (Matt Kaplan, New York Times): “The dis­pute aris­es in part because there are real­ly two types of con­ti­nents: Those rec­og­nized by cul­tures around the world, and those rec­og­nized by geol­o­gists. Cul­tures can define a con­ti­nent any way they want, while geol­o­gists have to use a def­i­n­i­tion. And geo­log­i­cal research in recent years has made defin­ing con­ti­nen­tal bound­aries less sim­ple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evi­dence of unex­pect­ed con­ti­nen­tal mate­r­i­al.”

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 475

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. Is the World Ready for a Reli­gious Come­back? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s one thing to get non­be­liev­ers to offer kind words for ‘cul­tur­al’ Chris­tian­i­ty or endorse the soci­o­log­i­cal util­i­ty of church­go­ing. The chal­lenge is to go fur­ther, to per­suade anx­ious mod­erns that reli­gion is more than mere­ly prag­mat­i­cal­ly use­ful, more than just a wist­ful hope — that a reli­gious frame­work actu­al­ly makes much more sense of real­i­ty than the alleged­ly hard­head­ed mate­ri­al­ist alter­na­tive.”
    • Dis­cuss­es three books Douthat thinks are help­ful.
  2. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Dou­bled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? (Nicholas Con­fes­sore, New York Times): “Striv­ing to touch ‘every indi­vid­ual on cam­pus,’ as the school puts it, Michi­gan has poured rough­ly a quar­ter of a bil­lion dol­lars into D.E.I. since 2016, accord­ing to an inter­nal pre­sen­ta­tion I obtained.… Michigan’s own data sug­gests that in striv­ing to become more diverse and equi­table, the school has also become less inclu­sive: In a sur­vey released in late 2022, stu­dents and fac­ul­ty mem­bers report­ed a less pos­i­tive cam­pus cli­mate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belong­ing. Stu­dents were less like­ly to inter­act with peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent race or reli­gion or with dif­fer­ent pol­i­tics — the exact kind of engage­ment D.E.I. pro­grams, in the­o­ry, are meant to fos­ter.”
    • Relat­ed: I Don’t Want to Live in a Mono­cul­ture, and Nei­ther Do You (David French, New York Times): “In my expe­ri­ence, the more ide­o­log­i­cal­ly or the­o­log­i­cal­ly ‘pure’ an insti­tu­tion becomes, the more wrong it is like­ly to be, espe­cial­ly if it takes on a dif­fi­cult or com­plex task. Ide­o­log­i­cal mono­cul­tures aren’t just bad for the minor­i­ty that’s silenced, harassed or can­celed when­ev­er its mem­bers raise their voic­es in dis­sent. It’s ter­ri­ble for the con­fi­dent major­i­ty — and for the con­fi­dent majority’s cause.”
  3. U.S. Study on Puber­ty Block­ers Goes Unpub­lished Because of Pol­i­tics, Doc­tor Says (Azeen Gho­rayshi, New York Times): “An influ­en­tial doc­tor and advo­cate of ado­les­cent gen­der treat­ments said she had not pub­lished a long-await­ed study of puber­ty-block­ing drugs because of the charged Amer­i­can polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment.… She said she was con­cerned the study’s results could be used in court to argue that ‘we shouldn’t use block­ers because it doesn’t impact them,’ refer­ring to trans­gen­der ado­les­cents.”
    • JK Rowl­ing sum­ma­rized the sto­ry well: ‘We must not pub­lish a study that says we’re harm­ing chil­dren because peo­ple who say we’re harm­ing chil­dren will use the study as evi­dence that we’re harm­ing chil­dren, which might make it dif­fi­cult for us to con­tin­ue harm­ing chil­dren.’
  4. Our Robot Sto­ries Haven’t Pre­pared Us for A.I. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “In most of these sto­ries, the defin­ing aspects of human­i­ty are some com­bi­na­tion of free will, strong emo­tion and moral­i­ty. The robot begins as a being fol­low­ing its pro­gram­ming and mys­ti­fied by human emo­tion­al­i­ty, and over time it begins to choose, to act freely, to cut its strings and ulti­mate­ly to love.… We have been trained for a future in which robots think like us but don’t feel like us, and there­fore need to be guid­ed out of mere­ly intel­lec­tu­al self-con­scious­ness into a deep­er aware­ness of emo­tion­al­i­ty, of heart as well as head. We are get­ting a real­i­ty where our bots seem so deeply emo­tion­al — lov­ing, car­ing, heart­felt — that it’s hard to dis­tin­guish them from human beings, and indeed, some of us find their appar­ent warmth a refuge from a dif­fi­cult or cru­el world.”
  5. How I Learned To Stop Crit­i­ciz­ing Every­thing (Eboo Patel, Per­sua­sion): “I’m not sad that I read those crit­i­cal the­o­rists. I think it’s a use­ful per­spec­tive to have. My prob­lem is that I deformed the world to fit a nar­row world­view, and I let it direct my life. The big­ger prob­lem is that this par­a­digm has become a regime in cer­tain quar­ters of high­er edu­ca­tion. You are coerced into hold­ing that world­view and pun­ished if you utter ideas out­side of its scope. Crit­i­cal the­o­ry is like a sharp kitchen knife: very use­ful for some things, like cut­ting meat, but if you eat your cere­al with it, you’ll hurt your­self. And if you point it at some­one else, then it’s a weapon. In some cir­cles, on some cam­pus­es, every oth­er uten­sil has been removed from the intel­lec­tu­al cut­lery draw­er, replaced with sharp kitchen knives.”
  6. Both Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans can pass the Ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing Test (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “We first chal­lenged each side to pre­tend to be the oth­er side, and then we had both sides try to dis­tin­guish between the truth-tellers and the fak­ers. If par­ti­sans have no idea who the oth­er side is or what they believe, it should be hard for peo­ple to do a con­vinc­ing impres­sion of the oppo­site par­ty. So let’s see!”
    • Inter­est­ing study. In the foot­notes he men­tioned he gath­ered the data in 2019 but nev­er got around to pub­lish­ing it. Just FYI
  7. It’s Ratio­nal And Humane To Lack Strong Polit­i­cal Beliefs (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “We don’t need the aver­age per­son to have strong beliefs about what the right anti-pover­ty pol­i­cy is, and I would argue it’s a waste of time to devote too many hours to some­thing like that, because it’s hope­less­ly com­plex and even experts who devote their lives to that sub­ject dis­agree on the basics. Plus, many of the experts — on this and every oth­er sub­ject — are them­selves incom­pe­tent, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly cap­tured, or oth­er­wise unlike­ly to help lead you clos­er to use­ful insights.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent. This post is a bit odd in that it’s unlocked but to read the whole thing you have to read it in the Sub­stack app. You can read the first part for free and that’s enough to get the gist and tell whether you want to read the rest of it.

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 474

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 Talk About God and Pol­i­tics in Polar­ized Times (Seth Free­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The key is three words: para­phrase, praise, and probe. The method: Pri­vate­ly, over cof­fee or a meal, nudge the con­ver­sa­tion into a Big Top­ic and ask your friend what they think about it. Then: 1) Para­phrase: Repeat the gist of your friend’s thoughts so well they say, ‘Exact­ly!’ 2) Praise: High­light any­thing they said that you can sin­cere­ly hon­or.  3) Probe: Ask about your con­cerns, curiosi­ties, and con­fu­sions as a co-seek­er of truth. Do this two or three times. Then, share your own per­spec­tive and let the con­ver­sa­tion unfold from there, return­ing to para­phrase, praise, probe when­ev­er there’s ten­sion.”
    • Prac­ti­cal and rec­om­mend­ed. The author, a Chris­t­ian, is a pro­fes­sor of con­flict man­age­ment and nego­ti­a­tion at the NYU Stern School of Busi­ness and Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty.
  2. What Lad­ders Are You Climb­ing? (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “…admit that hier­ar­chy is ubiq­ui­tous, we are all try­ing to achieve goals in life using some the­o­ry of how to get there, and that it’s a good thing if men of good char­ac­ter and com­pe­tence seek and achieve posi­tions of com­men­su­rate pow­er, respon­si­bil­i­ty, influ­ence, and sta­tus.”
  3. Too Many Laws—and Too Lit­tle Judg­ing (Anas­ta­sia Boden, The Dis­patch): “As of 2018, fed­er­al statutes in the U.S. Code span 60,000 pages. The Fed­er­al Reg­is­ter, which con­tains fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions, makes up anoth­er 188,000 pages. Some esti­mate it would take more than three years to read the Fed­er­al Reg­is­ter, let alone under­stand it. And those fig­ures don’t take into account the thou­sands of infor­mal guid­ance doc­u­ments that can also car­ry the force of law.”
  4. For­get the Lies About Wait­ing: Why mar­riage and kids ear­ly are the ulti­mate flex (Antho­ny Bradley, Sub­stack): “The mod­ern world may tell you to wait—to find your­self first, to achieve finan­cial secu­ri­ty, or to expe­ri­ence the world—but the truth is that mar­riage offers all of these things and more.”
    • The author is a research fel­low at the Acton Insti­tute and a pro­fes­sor of reli­gion at Kuyper Col­lege. This arti­cle is tar­get­ed specif­i­cal­ly at young men (although it is like­ly of inter­est to gals as well).
  5. Neg­a­tive effects of child­hood spank­ing may be over­stat­ed, study claims (Adri­ana Diaz, New York Post): “The top­ic of whether or not spank­ing is an effec­tive or harm­ful form of pun­ish­ment has sparked con­sid­er­able dis­cus­sion for gen­er­a­tions. Pre­vi­ous research has estab­lished a strong cor­re­la­tion between phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment and neg­a­tive out­comes for chil­dren, but much of this work did not account for pre-exist­ing behav­ioral issues in chil­dren. This made it chal­leng­ing to deter­mine whether spank­ing direct­ly caus­es prob­lems or if it is more com­mon­ly employed with chil­dren who already exhib­it behav­ioral dif­fi­cul­ties.”
  6. Rachel Levine Must Resign (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…the dis­cov­ery from a law­suit against the State of Alaba­ma over its ban on the med­ical sex reas­sign­ment of chil­dren has left me reel­ing. It shows a stag­ger­ing lev­el of bad faith from the tran­squeer lob­by, and, also, from Rachel Levine — the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary for Health at HHS. Read the ami­cus brief here. Every­thing in this piece is based on it. The broad con­tours laid out in the brief were already known. But, with dis­cov­ery, the spe­cif­ic details of pri­vate, inter­nal emails make this med­ical scan­dal even more vivid.”
    • Sul­li­van, I remind you, has been called the father of gay mar­riage. Read­ing what pro-trans lob­by­ists and clin­i­cians say to one anoth­er when off the record has left him deeply rat­tled. In his words, “For­give me for the pas­sion. But this ami­cus brief set my head and heart aflame.”
  7. Nobel eco­nom­ics prize goes to 3 econ­o­mists who found that freer soci­eties are more like­ly to pros­per (Daniel Nie­mann, Mike Corder & Paul Wise­man, AP News): “In their work, the win­ners looked, for instance, at the city of Nogales, which strad­dles the U.S.-Mexico bor­der. Despite shar­ing the same geog­ra­phy, cli­mate and a com­mon cul­ture, life is very dif­fer­ent on either side of the bor­der. In Nogales, Ari­zona, to the north, res­i­dents are rel­a­tive­ly well-off and live long lives; most chil­dren grad­u­ate from high school. To the south, in Mexico’s Nogales, Sono­ra, res­i­dents are much poor­er, and orga­nized crime and cor­rup­tion abound. The dif­fer­ence, the econ­o­mists found, is a U.S. sys­tem that pro­tects prop­er­ty rights and gives cit­i­zens a say in their gov­ern­ment.”
    • There is also an inter­est­ing sum­ma­ry of their con­clu­sions about why some col­o­nized coun­tries are doing real­ly well now and oth­ers are not. Rec­om­mend­ed by a  friend.

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.