Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 430

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. That’s espe­cial­ly true this week: I skipped last week because of Thanks­giv­ing, and I still feel behind on my read­ing.

This is vol­ume 430, a sphenic num­ber. That means it is the prod­uct of three primes, name­ly 2 · 5 · 43.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford neu­ro­sci­en­tist Andrew Huber­man recent­ly men­tioned that he believes in God. Here’s a 13 minute video of him explain­ing why (YouTube) or you can just watch this two minute excerpt which con­tains the essence of his point (Twit­ter).
    • For the record, I’ve nev­er met Huber­man and do not know what his spe­cif­ic reli­gious beliefs are. I just find it inter­est­ing that a promi­nent pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al affil­i­at­ed with Stan­ford is a believ­er.
  2. This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers (Darbe Saxbe, New York Times): “[Pro­grams designed to help young peo­ple instead] made their men­tal-health prob­lems worse. Under­stand­ing why these efforts back­fired can shed light on how soci­ety can — and can’t — help teenagers who are suf­fer­ing from depres­sion and anx­i­ety.… Teenagers, who are still devel­op­ing their iden­ti­ties, are espe­cial­ly prone to take psy­cho­log­i­cal labels to heart. Instead of ‘I am ner­vous about X,’ a teenag­er might say, ‘I can’t do X because I have anx­i­ety’ — a refram­ing that research shows under­mines resilience by encour­ag­ing peo­ple to view every­day chal­lenges as insur­mount­able.”
    • The author is a psy­chol­o­gy prof at USC.
  3. Reli­gion isn’t sex­u­al­ly repres­sive. Just read the data. (Stephen Cran­ney, Deseret News): “…con­trary to wide­ly held belief, reli­gious peo­ple report bet­ter sex lives, and mar­ried reli­gious cou­ples have more fre­quent and bet­ter sex than oth­ers (non-mar­ried reli­gious peo­ple, intu­itive­ly, have less sex). These results were sup­port­ed by one study that found reli­gious British peo­ple report­ed more sat­is­fy­ing sex lives. A sep­a­rate BYU study, pub­lished by Psy­chol­o­gy of Reli­gion and Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, found sim­i­lar results for mar­ried cou­ples in the U.S. while anoth­er found that high­ly reli­gious peo­ple had high­er sex­u­al ‘pas­sion’ than more mod­er­ate­ly reli­gious peo­ple (non­re­li­gious peo­ple also reflect­ed high­er ‘pas­sion’ lev­els).”
    • This sen­tence made me chuck­le: “It may well be that the most sex­u­al­ly active cam­pus­es in the U.S. aren’t the famous par­ty schools, but rather the more reli­gious­ly con­ser­v­a­tive schools with more mar­ried stu­dents.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist and a demog­ra­ph­er with appoint­ments at Bay­lor’s Insti­tute for the Study of Reli­gion and at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca
  4. Solomon Fried­man is on a mis­sion to save Porn­hub (Andrew Duffy, Ottowa Citzen): “Solomon Fried­man is not some­one read­i­ly defined: He’s a defence lawyer and an organ donor; a firearms advo­cate and an ordained rab­bi; an investor, phil­an­thropist, and pornog­ra­phy mag­nate. If the 37-year-old father of three is not the most inter­est­ing man in Ottawa, then the licensed pilot and part-time law pro­fes­sor is cer­tain­ly one of the busiest.”
    • This is actu­al­ly insane.
  5. Why I No Longer Sup­port the Death Penal­ty (Matthew T. Martens, Cross­way): “8,790 peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death in the Unit­ed States since 1973. One hun­dred and eighty-four of those men and women were exon­er­at­ed as of the end of 2022.11 They were inno­cent of the crimes of which they were con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to die. In oth­er words, we know that at least 2 per­cent of peo­ple sen­tenced to death since 1973 were wrong­ly con­demned. Even if we have iden­ti­fied all of those wrong­ly con­vict­ed and the error rate is ‘only’ 2 per­cent, that is an error rate high­er than I am will­ing to tol­er­ate.… I am unwill­ing to wager anoth­er man’s life. I would not wager my own under those con­di­tions.”
    • The author has recent­ly writ­ten a book about a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive on crim­i­nal jus­tice. He is a defend­er of the death penal­ty as a con­cept yet opposed to it as prac­ticed in Amer­i­ca today.
  6. Tik­Tok par­ent com­pa­ny used AI to opti­mize Lin­ux ker­nel, boost­ing per­for­mance and effi­cien­cy (Matthew Con­natser, Tom’s Hard­ware): “The gen­er­al gist of the pre­sen­ta­tion: ByteDance used AI to make the Lin­ux ker­nel (the core of the oper­at­ing sys­tem) much more effi­cient and per­for­mant across all kinds of hard­ware.… AI opti­miza­tions were able to reduce mem­o­ry usage by 30% — and that was using exist­ing Lin­ux tools, just more effi­cient­ly. Net­work laten­cy was also improved by up to 12% with AI that has pri­or knowl­edge (which would­n’t be hard to obtain on a com­put­er used reg­u­lar­ly).”
  7. On Cul­ture War, Doug Wil­son, and the Moscow Mood (Kevin DeY­oung, per­son­al blog): “My con­cerns are not so much with one or two con­clu­sions that Chris­tians may reach if Wil­son becomes their intel­lec­tu­al men­tor. My big­ger con­cern is with the long-term spir­i­tu­al effects of admir­ing and imi­tat­ing the Moscow mood. For the mood that attracts peo­ple to Moscow is too often incom­pat­i­ble with Chris­t­ian virtue, incon­sid­er­ate of oth­er Chris­tians, and ulti­mate­ly incon­sis­tent with the stat­ed aims of Wilson’s Chris­ten­dom project.”
    • Broad­ly cor­rect, although I think DeY­oung over­states his case a few times. Wil­son does present the gospel more than DeY­oung acknowl­edges and that is one of his appeals. Still, as I said, broad­ly cor­rect.

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 429

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

This is vol­ume 429, a sphenic num­ber (i.e, a num­ber with exact­ly three dis­tinct prime fac­tors).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Clas­si­cal lib­er­als are increas­ing­ly reli­gious (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Not too long ago, I was telling Ezra Klein that I had noticed a rel­a­tive­ly new devel­op­ment in clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism. If a meet an intel­lec­tu­al non-Left­ist, increas­ing­ly they are Niet­zschean, com­pared to days of yore. But if they are clas­si­cal lib­er­al instead, typ­i­cal­ly they are reli­gious as well. That could be Catholic or Jew­ish or LDS or East­ern Ortho­dox, with some Protes­tant thrown into the mix, but Protes­tants com­ing in last. The per­son being reli­gious is now a pre­dic­tor of that same per­son hav­ing non-crazy polit­i­cal views. Clas­si­cal lib­er­al­ism thus, whether you like it or not, has become an essen­tial­ly reli­gious move­ment.”
    • Relat­ed: Why Tyler Cowen Does­n’t Meet Protes­tant Intel­lec­tu­als (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “You would think that after decades of bemoan­ing the ‘scan­dal of the evan­gel­i­cal mind,’ we would be heav­i­ly pro­mot­ing the world class sci­en­tists and oth­er intel­lec­tu­al fig­ures we have. But that isn’t the case. I’m not a sci­en­tist but I’m not chopped liv­er either. I was a part­ner in a con­sult­ing firm, a senior fel­low in a major think tank, and have writ­ten for and been cit­ed in most of the major pub­li­ca­tions in the coun­try (NYT, WSJ, Guardian, Atlantic, etc). But the insti­tu­tion that’s done the most to pro­mote my work is the Catholic-cen­tric First Things mag­a­zine. Undoubt­ed­ly the best career move I could make as a writer on cul­ture, men’s issues, and pub­lic pol­i­cy would be to con­vert to Catholi­cism. That would prob­a­bly open doors to oppor­tu­ni­ties I will not oth­er­wise get.”
      • Renn left out some impor­tant pieces of the puz­zle. It also has to do with the way that decen­tral­ized church author­i­ty oper­ates in the Protes­tant world and the lack of inter­sec­tion between some­one like me and some­one like Andy Stan­ley. We just move in com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent cir­cles. I’m not say­ing I’m the intel­lec­tu­al in this equa­tion, by the way. I am say­ing I know a bunch. I have bap­tized peo­ple who are now pro­fes­sors at Stan­ford, but pick-your-favorite megachurch preach­er has no idea that they exist. And that lack of inter­sec­tion extends to groups like Ver­i­tas and the Trin­i­ty Forum which are doing the kind of work Renn describes, but inde­pen­dent­ly of Sad­dle­back Church or any oth­er evan­gel­i­cal cen­ter of influ­ence. Most influ­en­tial preach­ers are niche celebri­ties who are also pop­ulist intel­lec­tu­als, and that is a very dif­fer­ent thing from an aca­d­e­m­ic or insti­tu­tion­al intel­lec­tu­al. There real­ly isn’t any straight­for­ward way to bring the two togeth­er. And I haven’t even talked about the role of Chris­t­ian uni­ver­si­ties in this sit­u­a­tion, their rela­tion­ship to evan­gel­i­cal influ­encers, and their joint rela­tion­ship to sec­u­lar schol­ars. It would take a whole essay to bring all the pieces togeth­er, and I’m not sure it’s a good use of my time.
    • Relat­ed: She found mean­ing where she least expect­ed it — her child­hood faith (Rachel Mar­tin, NPR): “Hur­witz: But I think what makes me ner­vous about the spir­i­tu­al buf­fet is that what you’re say­ing is, ‘I’m going to take this thing from Bud­dhism that’s so me and this thing from Judaism that’s so me and this from Catholicism.‘   Mar­tin: One-hun­dred per­cent. That’s what I’m doing. Hur­witz: This is what so many of us do, and at the end of the day you’re rein­forc­ing your­self. You’re kind of deify­ing your­self. Mar­tin: Wow. Hur­witz: You’re say­ing, ‘What rein­forces my pre­ex­ist­ing beliefs?’ This is how we con­sume social media, right? But it’s not the pur­pose of these great spir­i­tu­al tra­di­tions.”
    • Also relat­ed: Where Does Reli­gion Come From? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “Some sort of reli­gious atti­tude is essen­tial­ly demand­ed, in my view, by what we know about the uni­verse and the human place with­in it, but every sin­cere searcher is like­ly to fol­low their own idio­syn­crat­ic path.”
      • A fas­ci­nat­ing essay that wan­ders into weird places.
  2. How this Tur­ing Award–winning researcher became a leg­endary aca­d­e­m­ic advi­sor (Sheon Han, MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review): “For­mer stu­dents describe Blum as unwa­ver­ing­ly pos­i­tive, say­ing he had oth­er ways besides crit­i­cism to steer them away from dead ends. ‘He is always smil­ing, but you can see he smiles wider when he likes some­thing. And oh, we want­ed that big smile,’ says Ronitt Rubin­feld, a pro­fes­sor of elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing and com­put­er sci­ence at MIT. Behind the gen­er­al pos­i­tiv­i­ty, Rubin­feld says, is a fine taste for inter­est­ing ideas. Stu­dents could trust they were being guid­ed in the right direc­tion. Come up with a bor­ing idea? Blum, who is known for his ter­ri­ble mem­o­ry, would have most­ly for­got­ten it by your next meet­ing.”
    • I quite liked this one.
  3. There’s anoth­er Chris­t­ian move­ment that’s chang­ing our pol­i­tics. It has noth­ing to do with white­ness or nation­al­ism (John Blake, CNN): “The Social Gospel was a Chris­t­ian move­ment that emerged in late 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca as a response to the obscene lev­els of inequal­i­ty in a rapid­ly indus­tri­al­iz­ing coun­try.… The Social Gospel turned reli­gion into a weapon for eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal reform. Its mes­sage: sav­ing peo­ple from slums was just as impor­tant as sav­ing them from hell. At its peak, the movement’s lead­ers sup­port­ed cam­paigns for eight-hour work­days, the break­ing up of cor­po­rate monop­o­lies and the abo­li­tion of child labor. They spoke from pul­pits, lec­tured across the coun­try and wrote best-sell­ing books.… The Social Gospel move­ment is mak­ing a come­back. Some may argue it nev­er left.”
  4. You Are the Last Line of Defense (Bari Weiss, The Free Press): “I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the peo­ple who, look­ing at facile, exter­nal mark­ers of my iden­ti­ty, one might imag­ine them to be. My allies are peo­ple who believe that Amer­i­ca is good. That the West is good. That human beings—not cultures—are cre­at­ed equal and that say­ing so is essen­tial to know­ing what we are fight­ing for. Amer­i­ca and our val­ues are worth fight­ing for—and that is the pri­or­i­ty of the day.”
  5. UK infant bap­tized before being forced off life sup­port, father says ‘the dev­il’ was in the court­room (Tim­o­thy H.J. Nerozzi, Fox News): “Dean Gre­go­ry, Indi’s father, said before her death that he was inspired to bap­tize his daugh­ter by Chris­t­ian legal vol­un­teers who fought to keep her alive. Dean said he became con­vinced of the exis­tence of the dev­il by his fam­i­ly’s treat­ment in the court­room. ‘I am not reli­gious and I am not bap­tized. But when I was in court, it felt like I had been dragged to hell,’ Dean Gre­go­ry said in a Nov. 6 inter­view with New Dai­ly Com­pass. ‘I thought, if hell exists then heav­en must exist. It was like the dev­il was there. I thought if there’s a dev­il then God must exist.’ ”
    • Heart­break­ing. Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  6. Some Israel/Hamas per­spec­tives:
    • There Should Be More Pub­lic Pres­sure on Hamas (David French, New York Times): “I’m not naïve. I don’t for a moment believe that defeat­ing Hamas and remov­ing it from pow­er solves the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. Israel can­not live up to its own demo­c­ra­t­ic promise or its own lib­er­al ideals if, for exam­ple, it indulges its own dan­ger­ous rad­i­cals. But I do know that plac­ing more pres­sure on Israel than Hamas to end the con­flict and save civil­ian lives is exact­ly back­ward. The inter­na­tion­al sys­tem depends on oppos­ing the aggres­sor and pun­ish­ing crimes. Protests that aim their demands more at Israel than Hamas impede jus­tice, erode the inter­na­tion­al order and under­mine the quest for a real and last­ing peace.”
    • This War Did Not Start a Month Ago (Dalia Hatuqa, New York Times): “To many inside and out­side this war, the bru­tal­i­ty of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks was unthink­able, as have been the scale and feroc­i­ty of Israel’s reprisal. But Pales­tini­ans have been sub­ject to a steady stream of unfath­omable vio­lence — as well as the creep­ing annex­a­tion of their land by Israel and Israeli set­tlers — for gen­er­a­tions. If peo­ple are going to under­stand this lat­est con­flict and see a path for­ward for every­one, we need to be more hon­est, nuanced and com­pre­hen­sive about the recent decades of his­to­ry in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, par­tic­u­lar­ly the impact of occu­pa­tion and vio­lence on the Pales­tini­ans.”
      • A fair­ly straight­for­ward pre­sen­ta­tion of the Pales­tin­ian per­spec­tive.
    • The Strug­gle for Black Free­dom Has Noth­ing to Do with Israel (Cole­man Hugh­es, The Free Press): “There is yet anoth­er incon­ve­nient fact for those who want to reduce the Israeli-Arab con­flict to a com­pe­ti­tion between Euro­pean set­tlers and peo­ple of col­or: the major­i­ty of Israeli Jews are not Euro­pean. They are Mizrahi Jews—hailing from the Mid­dle East and North Africa. What’s more, it is not the Euro­pean Jews but the Mizrahi Jews—who are dif­fi­cult to visu­al­ly dis­tin­guish from Palestinians—that form most of the vot­ing base of the right-wing par­ties that Israel’s crit­ics con­sid­er to be the tru­ly racist ones.”
    • Three arti­cles from The Gospel Coali­tion about the var­i­ous ways Chris­tians think about the promis­es to Israel in the Old Tes­ta­ment. It’s worth sort­ing through your own per­spec­tive. These three essays are from well-respect­ed Chris­t­ian aca­d­e­mics who present their posi­tions con­cise­ly and well.
      • Why the Land Promis­es Belong to Eth­nic Israel (Ger­ald McDer­mott, The Gospel Coali­tion): “First, if the land promise was end­ed with the com­ing of Jesus, then God is not trust­wor­thy. For he promised to Abra­ham and his seed that the land would be theirs for an ever­last­ing pos­ses­sion (Gen. 17:8). Sec­ond, if the land promise to Israel is bro­ken, then so might be God’s promise to renew and restore the heav­ens and the earth. The land promise’s par­tial fulfillment—by bring­ing Jews from the four cor­ners of the earth back to the land start­ing in the eigh­teenth century—is down pay­ment on the promise of a new heav­en and a new earth. Third, it is a deep the­o­log­i­cal rea­son why we should sup­port Israel in this new war against the new Nazism.”
      • The Expect­ed Uni­ver­sal­iza­tion of the Old Tes­ta­ment Land Promis­es (G. K. Beale, The Gospel Coali­tion): “The land promis­es will be ful­filled in a phys­i­cal form when all believ­ers inher­it the earth, but the inau­gu­ra­tion of this ful­fill­ment is main­ly spir­i­tu­al until the final con­sum­ma­tion in a ful­ly phys­i­cal new heav­en and earth. The phys­i­cal way these land promis­es have begun ful­fill­ment is that Christ him­self intro­duced the new cre­ation by his phys­i­cal res­ur­rec­tion.… There­fore, none of the ref­er­ences to the promise of Israel’s land in the Old Tes­ta­ment appears to be relat­ed to the promis­es of eth­nic Israel’s return to the promised land on this present earth.”
      • Israel’s Role in the Land Promise (Dar­rell Bock, The Gospel Coali­tion): “It’s often claimed the New Tes­ta­ment moves the land promise from being about Israel as a peo­ple in the land to being about God’s peo­ple in the world. That’s an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. The ques­tion is whether that uni­ver­sal expan­sion neuters the spe­cif­ic promise made to Israel of a peo­ple in a land.”
  7. The Impru­dence of ‘Dump Them’ (Clare Cof­fey, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “As pru­dence has fall­en out of favor as an aspi­ra­tion, it’s hard not to see the hole it has left. On social media, we try to fill that hole with an end­less pro­lif­er­a­tion of abstract rules to gov­ern human deci­sions. We try to out­source the basis of indi­vid­ual judg­ment to over­ly sim­plis­tic moral equa­tions, and more often than not, we find the math works out to ‘dump them.’ ”

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 428

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

This is vol­ume 428 and I, being an eas­i­ly amused man, am pleased that 4*2=8.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot: How Rivals Became Friends (Joel J. Miller, Rab­bit Room): “Did Charles Williams know what would hap­pen when he invit­ed his mutu­als, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, to tea? One sus­pects. Lewis had long reg­is­tered dis­ap­proval of Eliot’s work. But sure­ly they’d get on in per­son, no? No. It was 1945 and the trio con­vened at the Mitre Hotel in Oxford. The first words out of Eliot’s mouth? ‘Mr. Lewis,’ he exclaimed, ‘you are a much old­er man than you appear in pho­tographs!’ The meet­ing dete­ri­o­rat­ed from there.”
  2. Abun­dance: The Deep­est Real­i­ty (Bethany Lor­den, Stan­ford Review): “It is true, I have nev­er lacked food or shel­ter or any neces­si­ty; yet every day, I see the most priv­i­leged peo­ple in the world live as though they are impov­er­ished. As stu­dents, we hoard our time, fear our midterms, and dread the future. But what if the bless­ings that land­ed us at Stan­ford con­tin­ue into our future? What if our class­es were not a bur­den, but a gift of learn­ing? What if our lives and our soci­ety mir­ror nature, where alpine sun­flow­ers reemerge every spring on the harsh­est tun­dra, where a square foot of dry prairie nour­ish­es three dozen species of plants, where no tree or ani­mal dies with­out sus­tain­ing new life?”
    • Dis­claimer: Bethany is a stu­dent in Chi Alpha. Also, I espe­cial­ly liked this bit: “R&DE seems to assume that stu­dent sat­is­fac­tion is a zero-sum game: the web­site states that ‘Direct swaps between stu­dents are not per­mit­ted, as the hous­ing assign­ment process is meant to be equi­table, and not based on who you know.’ If a room­mate switch makes one stu­dent bet­ter off, then the trade must have exploit­ed anoth­er. Yet by deal­ing with rela­tion­ships as if they were a lim­it­ed resource, R&DE has made them so. Instead of cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ty (by def­i­n­i­tion, a net­work ‘based on who you know’), R&DE has made every­one ‘equi­tably’ mis­er­able.”
  3. Why I Ran Away from Phi­los­o­phy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “It’s true, of course, that a philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem is not dis­proved if its advo­cates are crim­i­nals and tyrants—but this link­age must be a cause for alarm and sus­pi­cion. The bur­den of proof is on those who want to sep­a­rate a person’s core prin­ci­ples from the results they pro­duce in actu­al life.”
    • I some­times bag on util­i­tar­i­an­ism gen­er­al­ly (and some­times specif­i­cal­ly the effec­tive altru­ism move­ment). This essay may help you see why. Utilitarian/consequentialist eth­i­cal sys­tems are just wrong. Not mere­ly wrong in the sense of being incor­rect, but also wrong in the sense of being immoral.
  4. Some Israel / Hamas war arti­cles:
    • Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gam­bit to Cre­ate a ‘Permanent’ State of War (Ben Hub­bard and Maria Abi-Habib, The New York Times): “Thou­sands have been killed in Gaza, with entire fam­i­lies wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Pales­tin­ian neigh­bor­hoods to expans­es of rub­ble, while doc­tors treat scream­ing chil­dren in dark­ened hos­pi­tals with no anes­the­sia. Across the Mid­dle East, fear has spread over the pos­si­ble out­break of a broad­er region­al war. But in the bloody arith­metic of Hamas’s lead­ers, the car­nage is not the regret­table out­come of a big mis­cal­cu­la­tion. Quite the oppo­site, they say: It is the nec­es­sary cost of a great accom­plish­ment — the shat­ter­ing of the sta­tus quo and the open­ing of a new, more volatile chap­ter in their fight against Israel.”
      • Unlocked and well worth read­ing.
    • “No par­ent is going to do that”: Shafai fam­i­ly from Mass­a­chu­setts trapped in Gaza told they can leave with­out their chil­dren (Christi­na Hager, CBS News): “They had the names of my broth­er and his wife on the list, but they did­n’t have the kids,” said Hani Shafai. His broth­er Hazem and his wife Sanaa were excit­ed to see their names on a list cus­toms author­i­ties put out nam­ing peo­ple who could cross into Egypt to safe­ty. The prob­lem was, there was no men­tion of their three chil­dren. “They were told they can cross, but they have to leave the kids behind. And, as you know, no par­ent is going to do that, and he said no,” said Hani Shafai.
      • Bro. Data­base errors hap­pen, I get it. But it seems to me this is the kind of sit­u­a­tion where instead of turn­ing them away you ask them to step to the side, offer them some water and snacks, and have some­one inves­ti­gate to fig­ure out what hap­pened so they can leave with their kids.
    • Inside a Gaza bed­room, sol­diers search­ing for tun­nels find how low Hamas can go (Emanuel Fabi­an, Times of Israel): “In terms of its size, where it led and what it was intend­ed for, the tun­nel was much like the oth­er 90 found in the area. What set it apart, though, was its loca­tion. The shaft had been uncov­ered by sol­diers of the Com­bat Engi­neer­ing Corp­s’ 614th Bat­tal­ion as they car­ried out a sec­ond round of sweeps in a sin­gle-fam­i­ly home — with an out­door swim­ming pool — in an upscale beach­side neigh­bor­hood. Inside a bed­room scat­tered with bright­ly col­ored clothes, under­neath one of three child-sized beds, sol­diers had found a por­tal to where mon­sters were hid­ing.”
    • The “Geno­cide” Canard Against Israel (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “…if Israel were inter­est­ed in the “genocide” of Pales­tin­ian Arabs, it has had the means to accom­plish it for a very long time. And yet, for some rea­son, the Arab pop­u­la­tion of Israel and the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries has explod­ed since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel prop­er have vot­ing rights, and a key pres­ence in the Knes­set.… And real geno­cide is hap­pen­ing else­where in the world right now as well, but it receives a frac­tion of the atten­tion. In Dar­fur, between 2003 and 2005, around 200,000 mem­bers of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa eth­nic groups were mur­dered in a clear case of geno­cide that has recent­ly revived. This year, some 180,000 civil­ians have fled to Chad, pur­sued by the Jan­jaweed — the Ein­satz­grup­pen of cen­tral Africa. If your view is derived from crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, you should be par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned about this geno­cide, since it is direct­ed at black Africans by Islamist Arabs. But the cam­pus left is unin­ter­est­ed.”
    • ‘I Feel a Human Dete­ri­o­ra­tion’ (Lulu Gar­cia-Navar­ro, New York Times): “And when I see peo­ple watch­ing the hor­ri­ble tragedy that is hap­pen­ing here as if it were a Super Bowl of vic­tim­hood, in which you sup­port one team and real­ly don’t care about the oth­er, empa­thy becomes very, very selec­tive. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see oth­er pain.”
  5. Died: Frank Bor­man, Apol­lo 8 Astro­naut Who Broad­cast Gen­e­sis from Space (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “On Decem­ber 24, as a cam­era showed the lunar sur­face pass­ing below a win­dow, the three astro­nauts read the Scrip­ture from a piece of paper. Bor­man went last, clos­ing with vers­es 9 and 10: ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heav­en be gath­ered togeth­er unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gath­er­ing togeth­er of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.’ Then he said, ‘From the crew of Apol­lo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Mer­ry Christ­mas and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.’ ”
  6. Crit­i­cal Grace The­o­ry (Carl True­man, First Things): “Isa­iah, Paul, and Augus­tine are far bet­ter sources of social crit­i­cism than Horkheimer, Mar­cuse, or Cren­shaw. Yes, the world is imper­fect and unjust and filled with strife. Sad­ly, such are the wages of sin. Acknowl­edg­ing the fall of man does not entail a pas­sive accep­tance of injus­tice or evil. The doc­trine of orig­i­nal sin does not entail the con­clu­sion that noth­ing can ever be improved and that efforts of social reform are point­less. But a recog­ni­tion that sin under­lies unjust social sys­tems means that our crit­i­cal the­o­riz­ing must be shaped by our belief in God’s grace and the heal­ing pow­er of for­give­ness, both for our­selves and for oth­ers. No crit­i­cal the­o­ry that fails to place these the­o­log­i­cal truths at the cen­ter of its analy­sis and pro­pos­als is com­pat­i­ble with Chris­tian­i­ty.”
  7. How Ear­ly Morn­ing Class­es Change Aca­d­e­m­ic Tra­jec­to­ries: Evi­dence from a Nat­ur­al Exper­i­ment (Antho­ny Lok­T­ing Yim, SSRN): “Using a nat­ur­al exper­i­ment which ran­dom­ized class times to stu­dents, this study reveals that enrolling in ear­ly morn­ing class­es low­ers stu­dents’ course grades and the like­li­hood of future STEM course enroll­ment. There is a 79% reduc­tion in pur­su­ing the cor­re­spond­ing major and a 26% rise in choos­ing a low­er-earn­ing major, pre­dom­i­nant­ly influ­enced by ear­ly morn­ing STEM class­es. To under­stand the mech­a­nism, I con­duct­ed a sur­vey of under­grad­u­ate stu­dents enrolled in an intro­duc­to­ry course, some of whom were assigned to a 7:30 AM sec­tion.”
    • Dis­clo­sure: I only skimmed the arti­cle. I find it plau­si­ble enough to pass on and am not skep­ti­cal enough of its claims to feel moti­vat­ed to read it thor­ough­ly. The author is an econ­o­mist at Brigham Young Uni­ver­si­ty, and the study is about stu­dents at Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Bot­tom line: avoid ear­ly morn­ing class­es.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • God vs Noth­ing (Pete Holmes, YouTube): one minute, lan­guage is a bit crude but this is bril­liant at points
  • Hard­ball Ques­tions For The Next Debate (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “Hel­lo, and wel­come to the third Repub­li­can pri­ma­ry debate. To shore up declin­ing vot­er inter­est, we’ve decid­ed to make things more inter­est­ing tonight. In this first round, each can­di­date will have to avoid using a spe­cif­ic let­ter of the alpha­bet in their answer. If they slip up, they for­feit their remain­ing time, and the next can­di­date in line gets the floor. Our can­di­dates who have qual­i­fied today are Chris Christie, Nik­ki Haley, Ron DeSan­tis, and Don­ald Trump.”
    • This gets increas­ing­ly absurd and amus­ing and I actu­al­ly laughed out loud at the end.
  • “Octobunk” stacks up fun at Stan­ford (Anna Yang, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In the ear­ly hours of Oct. 20, a group of around 20 fresh­men assem­bled on the Oval, ready to begin the con­struc­tion of the ‘Octo­bunk.’ Their plan was to stack eight dorm beds on top of each oth­er in the Oval, mak­ing a tow­er that cre­at­ed a large bunk bed. Near­ly 100 stu­dents showed up to observe the event at around 2 a.m. — a com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple who had heard of the tremen­dous feat by word-of-mouth, or peo­ple who had sim­ply been walk­ing past.”
    • This is glo­ri­ous and the stu­dents who orga­nized it should auto­mat­i­cal­ly be elect­ed to ASSU and only dis­placed by peo­ple who spark equal or greater joy.

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 427

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.

427 feels kin­da prime-ish, but it’s not. 427 = 61*7.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. ‘Gender-Affirming Care Is Dan­ger­ous. I Know Because I Helped Pio­neer It.’ (Riit­tak­ert­tu Kaltiala, The Free Press): “Soon after our hos­pi­tal began offer­ing hor­mon­al inter­ven­tions for these patients, we began to see that the mir­a­cle we had been promised was not hap­pen­ing. What we were see­ing was just the oppo­site. The young peo­ple we were treat­ing were not thriv­ing. Instead, their lives were dete­ri­o­rat­ing. We thought, what is this? Because there wasn’t a hint in stud­ies that this could hap­pen.”
  2. More Israel/Gaza per­spec­tives:
    • The Decol­o­niza­tion Nar­ra­tive Is Dan­ger­ous and False (Simon Sebag Mon­te­fiore, The Atlantic): “The decol­o­niza­tion nar­ra­tive… holds that Israel is an ‘impe­ri­al­ist-colo­nial­ist’ force, that Israelis are ‘set­tler-colo­nial­ists,’ and that Pales­tini­ans have a right to elim­i­nate their oppres­sors. (On Octo­ber 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as ‘white’ or ‘white-adja­cent’ and Pales­tini­ans as ‘peo­ple of col­or.’ This ide­ol­o­gy, pow­er­ful in the acad­e­my but long over­due for seri­ous chal­lenge, is a tox­ic, his­tor­i­cal­ly non­sen­si­cal mix of Marx­ist the­o­ry, Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da, and tra­di­tion­al anti-Semi­tism from the Mid­dle Ages and the 19th cen­tu­ry. But its cur­rent engine is the new iden­ti­ty analy­sis, which sees his­to­ry through a con­cept of race that derives from the Amer­i­can expe­ri­ence.”
      • Long but good. The author, who is Jew­ish, is well-known for his his­to­ry books (per­haps the best way to describe him is as a non-aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­an).
    • Whose Geno­cide Is It Any­way? (Zachary R. Gold­smith, Quil­lette): “Since the year 2000, the pop­u­la­tion of Gaza has near­ly dou­bled; it boasts the 39th high­est birthrate among the world’s coun­tries, and the aver­age life expectan­cy is near­ly 76 years of age (the aver­age life expectan­cy in the US is just over 77 years of age). If Israel is intent on com­mit­ting geno­cide in Gaza, it is doing a very poor job.… Since the Mid­dle Ages, Jews have been accused of mur­der­ing chil­dren and using their blood for rit­u­al pur­pos­es. This blood libel lives on today in a new form, as the Jews of the state of Israel are accused of pur­pose­ful­ly killing chil­dren in a cam­paign of geno­cide.”
    • Hamas’ Bid for Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Legit­i­ma­cy (Damir Maru­sic, Sub­stack): “…for rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, vio­lence is a polit­i­cal act. Like any num­ber of rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments, Hamas knew exact­ly what it was doing. But in my ini­tial read of its cyn­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion, I didn’t give them their due. They weren’t mere­ly try­ing to tor­pe­do a deal that could be their undo­ing. They were mak­ing a bid for full polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy among Pales­tini­ans.”
      • The author is an edi­tor at the Wash­ing­ton Post.
    • Stop help­ing Hamas win its dis­in­for­ma­tion war (Sam Wineb­urg, Times of Israel): “Along with my col­leagues at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, I have spent the last sev­en years study­ing how peo­ple learn to make bet­ter deci­sions about what to believe online.… Here are four guide­lines for see­ing through the fog and stay­ing sane in the midst of this cur­rent infor­ma­tion war.”
      • The author is an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of edu­ca­tion at Stan­ford.
    • What Hap­pens When There Aren’t Enough Jews to Lynch? (Avi­tal Chizhik-Gold­schmidt, The Free Press): “…a flight from Tel Aviv was land­ing on Sun­day evening at the air­port in the city of Makhachkala. Hun­dreds of peo­ple stormed the air­port to greet that flight—of 45 pas­sen­gers, 15 were Israeli, many of them chil­dren. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ they shout in videos that have emerged online, some men wav­ing Pales­tin­ian flags. On the tar­mac, they attack an air­port employ­ee, who des­per­ate­ly explains: ‘There are no pas­sen­gers here any­more,’ and then exclaims, ‘I am Mus­lim!’ Some of the riot­ers demand­ed to exam­ine the pass­ports of arriv­ing pas­sen­gers, seem­ing­ly try­ing to iden­ti­fy those who were Israeli, and oth­ers searched cars as they were leav­ing. Anoth­er video emerged of two young boys at the air­port, proud­ly declar­ing that they came to ‘kill Jews’ with knives.”
      • Anti­semitism is surg­ing glob­al­ly and it is ter­ri­fy­ing to watch.
    • The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape West­ern Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “These [decades-old Amer­i­can] group­ings still exist — evan­gel­i­cals are still very pro-Israel, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent is a Zion­ist lib­er­al, the pro­gres­sive move­ment is pro-Pales­tin­ian — but in the cur­rent cri­sis you can see a more com­plex align­ment tak­ing shape, with impli­ca­tions that extend beyond the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian ques­tion alone.”
  3. Just the Facts on ‘Geofencing’ (Mag­gie Mac­Far­land Phillips, Real Clear Pol­i­cy): “Data bro­kers, includ­ing Safe­Graph, insist that their infor­ma­tion is anonymized. But it is pre­cise­ly the lack of speci­fici­ty that wor­ries crit­ics. ‘There’s no par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­ual who the gov­ern­ment is sus­pi­cious of,’ Adam Schwartz of the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, told Real­Clear­In­ves­ti­ga­tions. ‘It’s a drag­net.’ More­over, there is no guar­an­tee that the data col­lect­ed through geofenc­ing stays anony­mous. ‘It is often very easy to take sup­pos­ed­ly de-iden­ti­fied data and re-iden­ti­fy a per­son,’ said Schwartz, ‘And it’s very, very easy to do that with loca­tion data.‘”
  4. Movies, Moral Revul­sion, and a Post-Chris­t­ian Age (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “It seems to me that the idea that you can elic­it moral revul­sion mere­ly by depict­ing evil assumes two things. First, it assumes that the realm of the visu­al can be manip­u­lat­ed to bypass tit­il­la­tion and pro­ceed straight to con­dem­na­tion. Sec­ond, it assumes an audi­ence who pos­sess a moral imag­i­na­tion that would both moti­vate and equip them to do this. The first assump­tion could be false. The sec­ond assump­tion absolute­ly is. Sec­u­lar soci­ety, aid­ed by the litur­gi­cal effect of the Inter­net and the porno­graph­ic nature of the Web, has long been feed­ing itself on images of the moral­ly out­ra­geous.”
    • Chris­tians were famous­ly hos­tile towards mass enter­tain­ment a few decades ago. The next gen­er­a­tion of evan­gel­i­cals rebelled against that and too often became uncrit­i­cal­ly accept­ing of all forms of enter­tain­ment. We need to get to place of reject­ing what needs to be reject­ed and allow­ing free­dom oth­er­wise. There are shows you should not watch and songs you should not jam out to. And you should be will­ing to tell peo­ple why, “Yeah, I did­n’t watch Game of Thrones once I real­ized how porno­graph­ic it was.” Or in a paper about a film you had to watch for a class, “The direc­tor made a mis­take includ­ing [what­ev­er it is]: it does­n’t advance the plot or enhance the theme. It actu­al­ly under­mines the pur­pose of the work and seems to have been includ­ed most­ly to appeal to a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al demo­graph­ic, there­by mak­ing the film’s mes­sage need­less­ly inac­ces­si­ble to those not already pre­dis­posed to agree with it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have

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 426

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

This is vol­ume 426, and I am absurd­ly pleased that 4+2=6. In some regards I am very easy to amuse.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Keep­ing the Faith at Stan­ford (Isabel­la Griepp, The Stan­ford Review): “Stay­ing true to your faith is a seri­ous under­tak­ing at a place like Stan­ford, but it can also be the most reward­ing part of your time on cam­pus. It is vital that you use your first quar­ter in col­lege to get plugged into Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • The author is in Chi Alpha.
  2. How Rich Donors and Loose Rules Are Trans­form­ing Col­lege Sports (David A. Fahren­thold and Bil­ly Witz, New York Times): “One play­er at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty now makes $750,000 a year, accord­ing to the group that pays him. At Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, some play­ers not only get a pay­check — they get a free car lease to boot, cour­tesy of a donor col­lec­tive.… The New York Times iden­ti­fied more than 120 col­lec­tives, includ­ing at least one for every school in each of the five major col­lege foot­ball con­fer­ences. The aver­age starter at a big-time foot­ball pro­gram now takes in about $103,000 a year, accord­ing to Open­dorse, a com­pa­ny that process­es pay­ments to the play­ers for the col­lec­tives.”
  3. 15 Rea­sons Why Mass Media Employ­ees Act Like Pro­pa­gan­dists (Caitlin John­ston, per­son­al blog): “Just because a lot of the mass media’s pro­pa­gan­dis­tic behav­ior can be explained with­out secret con­spir­a­cies doesn’t mean secret con­spir­a­cies aren’t hap­pen­ing. In 1977 Carl Bern­stein pub­lished an arti­cle titled ‘The CIA and the Media’ report­ing that the CIA had covert­ly infil­trat­ed America’s most influ­en­tial news out­lets and had over 400 reporters who it con­sid­ered assets in a pro­gram known as Oper­a­tion Mock­ing­bird. We are told that this sort of covert infil­tra­tion doesn’t hap­pen any­more today, but that’s absurd.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus in response my com­men­tary last week on how to think about jour­nal­ism. Most of the 15 rea­sons seem to revolve around this insight: jour­nal­ists respond to incen­tives and the sys­tem pro­vides rewards that ben­e­fit them but not their readers/viewers. We should remain mind­ful of this.
  4. Two arti­cles about man­hood:
    • Under­stand­ing the Young Male Syn­drome (Rob K Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “In his cross-cul­tur­al research, the psy­chol­o­gist Mar­tin J. Sea­ger has found 3 con­sis­tent require­ments to achieve the sta­tus of man­hood in var­i­ous soci­eties around the world. First, the indi­vid­ual must be a fight­er and a win­ner. Sec­ond, he must be a provider and pro­tec­tor. And third, he must main­tain mas­tery and con­trol of him­self at all times. Across cul­tures, there seems to be an implic­it under­stand­ing of what being a man is… Indeed, mas­culin­i­ty is wide­ly con­sid­ered to be an arti­fi­cial­ly induced sta­tus, achiev­able only through test­ing and care­ful instruc­tion. Real men do not sim­ply emerge like but­ter­flies from their boy­ish cocoons. Rather, they must be care­ful­ly shaped, nur­tured, coun­seled, and prod­ded into man­hood.”
      • This is long and worth read­ing for any­one who has an inter­est in gen­der dynam­ics.
    • News Men Can Use (Aaron Renn, Sub­stack): “I also do these prac­ti­cal posts because it’s impor­tant for those of us Chris­t­ian lay peo­ple who have skills and knowl­edge to step up and share them. The truth is, pas­tors aren’t life coach­es and often don’t know what they are talk­ing about in areas out­side of their core com­pe­ten­cy in preach­ing the Bible and the­ol­o­gy. So it’s unfair and even dan­ger­ous to rely on them to be gen­er­al pur­pose guides to life. That means lay peo­ple have to be will­ing to step up in the areas where they have real insight and expe­ri­ence.”
      • I can­not endorse the point Renn makes in this excerpt strong­ly enough. There’s a lot pas­tors don’t know. I get ner­vous when I hear a min­is­ter opin­ing pub­licly on a top­ic I know the Bible says very lit­tle about.
      • When you look for pas­tors, look for those with enough humil­i­ty to know that they are not an expert in things like busi­ness, law, pol­i­tics, lead­er­ship, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions, con­sult­ing, biol­o­gy, astro­physics, invest­ment bank­ing, immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy, etc. There may be spe­cif­ic state­ments in some of those fields that pas­tors can make with God’s author­i­ty, but they are sure­ly lim­it­ed.
      • You want a pas­tor who speaks con­fi­dent­ly where the Bible speaks clear­ly and speaks cau­tious­ly where the Bible is silent. But as a Chris­t­ian layper­son, you should feel empow­ered to speak con­fi­dent­ly when you have rel­e­vant knowl­edge in your field of exper­tise.
  5. Two Chris­tians — one on the left and one on the right.
    • On the left: Shawn Fain’s Old-Time Reli­gion (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, The Atlantic): “ ‘One of the first things I do every day when I get up is I crack open my devo­tion­al for a dai­ly read­ing, and I pray. Ear­li­er this week, I was struck by the dai­ly read­ing, which seemed to speak direct­ly to the moment we find our­selves in,’ Fain explained in his speech. The com­men­tary Fain read observed that great acts of faith are rarely born of care­ful cal­cu­la­tion, and most often include an ele­ment of fear. ‘When I made the deci­sion to run for pres­i­dent of our union, it was a test of my faith, because I sure as hell had doubts,’ Fain said. ‘So I told myself: Either you believe it’s pos­si­ble to stand up and make a dif­fer­ence, or you don’t. And if you don’t believe, then shut up and stay on the side­line.’ ”
    • On the right: Evan­gel­i­cal Mike John­son ‘Raised Up’ as House Speak­er (Jack Jenk­ins, a Reli­gion News Ser­vice wire sto­ry reprint­ed in Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “John­son has been tied to mul­ti­ple Bap­tist church­es over the years and cur­rent­ly attends Cypress Bap­tist Church in Ben­ton, Louisiana, accord­ing to the Louisiana Bap­tist Mes­sage. He is also a for­mer lawyer and com­mu­ni­ca­tions staffer with the Alliance Defense Fund, which lat­er became known as Alliance Defend­ing Free­dom, a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian legal firm.”
  6. What “Latino” Miss­es (Luis Par­rales, Per­sua­sion): “Lati­nos are proud of their ances­try, espe­cial­ly when it’s relat­ed to nation­al ori­gin. But most don’t accept the sig­nif­i­cance or the weight of eth­no­ra­cial iden­ti­ty that our dis­course projects onto them. It’s an atti­tude that’s not exact­ly col­or-blind or post-racial; it sim­ply rec­og­nizes how race, eth­nic­i­ty, nation­al ori­gin (or what­ev­er label we use to cat­e­go­rize peo­ple) often blend togeth­er.”
  7. More com­men­tary on the Israel/Gaza war:
    • I Don’t See a Bet­ter Way Out (Ned Lazarus, The Atlantic): “I have ded­i­cat­ed much of my pro­fes­sion­al life to seek­ing peace­ful change in this con­flict, try­ing to lis­ten to and under­stand Israelis and Pales­tini­ans and find ways to work toward peace or jus­tice or coex­is­tence or mutu­al under­stand­ing or any­thing bet­ter than what there is now.… I see no way out of the night­mare so long as Hamas con­tin­ues to rule the Gaza Strip, and no viable way to remove it from pow­er with­out an Israeli ground offen­sive.”
      • The author is a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al affairs at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • The Prob­lem of West Bank Set­tle­ments (Tomas Pueyo, Sub­stack): “You can’t under­stand the Pales­tin­ian per­spec­tive with­out under­stand­ing the issue of set­tle­ments in the West Bank. It’s their biggest source of irri­ta­tion, it makes many Pales­tini­an­s’ lives insuf­fer­able, and it’s prob­a­bly Israel’s most con­tentious pol­i­cy. So let’s under­stand why Israel is there in the first place, why it’s build­ing set­tle­ments there, and what will hap­pen to them.”
      • Look­ing over his Sub­stack, the author has writ­ten sev­er­al arti­cles about Israel and Pales­tine late­ly and they seem to be well-researched and are also try­ing to present the strongest, fairest argu­ments from both sides. Rec­om­mend­ed.
    • Debunk­ing Myths About Israel & Pales­tine (Gur­winder, Sub­stack): “Israel must curb its fanat­i­cal ele­ments — its bombs are hit­ting too many civil­ians, its set­tle­ment-build­ing is out of con­trol, its Supreme Court is under attack by its own gov­ern­ment, and its ultra-ortho­dox cit­i­zens are rapid­ly out­breed­ing its sec­u­lar ones. But Israel’s excess­es are Hamas’s norms. Fur­ther, it’s the only lib­er­al democ­ra­cy in a sea of autoc­ra­cies, and unlike all of them it’s will­ing to open­ly crit­i­cize itself and set high human­i­tar­i­an stan­dards even if it can’t always meet them.”
    • Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Day (Antonin Scalia, C‑SPAN): eleven min­utes of now-deceased Supreme Court Jus­tice Antonin Scalia speak­ing about the Holo­caust and the high­ly-edu­cat­ed and refined soci­ety that pro­duced it.
    • For Israel, There Are No Good Options Now (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “I wish I had some sane idea of what hap­pens now. We can only grieve for all those inno­cents trapped in this hell. All I can say is that if Israel con­tin­ues to wage war in Gaza with this lev­el of civil­ian casu­al­ties, and con­tin­ues to expand its foot­print on the West Bank this aggres­sive­ly at the same time, and responds to West­ern requests to take a pause and think things through with anger and defi­ance, it will be hard to sus­tain West­ern sup­port indef­i­nite­ly.”
    • A War Against the Jews (Michael Oren, Sub­stack): “…dead Jews buy us only so much sym­pa­thy. In fact, there is prob­a­bly a for­mu­la. Six mil­lion dead in the Holo­caust pro­cured us rough­ly 25 years of grace before the Euro­peans refused to refu­el the U.S. planes bring­ing life­sav­ing muni­tions to Israel dur­ing the Yom Kip­pur War in 1973. Four­teen hun­dred butchered Jews bought us a lit­tle less than two week­s’ worth of pos­i­tive cov­er­age.”
      • The author is a for­mer Israeli politi­cian and served as Israel’s ambas­sador to the US.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Wrong Psalm (Tim Hawkins, YouTube): four amus­ing min­utes
  • AI Humor (SMBC): the mouseover text on this one is actu­al­ly wise
  • Self-Esteem (SMBC)
  • The Flori­da Man Games: includ­ing such gems as “EVADING ARREST OBSTACLE COURSE: Jump over fences, through back yards, and away from actu­al police offi­cers to earn your free­dom!” and “A CATALYTIC CONVERTER, 2 BIKES, AND A HANDFUL OF COPPER PIPES: RACE AGAINST TIME: Com­pete head to head in a race that lets you live a day in the life of a Flori­da man headline“ 
  • A store let cus­tomers steal shoes — if they could out­run a pro sprint­er (Kyle Mel­nick, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Some cus­tomers thought­the man­agers were jok­ing, but they still took the chance. Most did not rec­og­nize Zeze — who has run the 100-meter dash in 9.99 sec­onds and the 200-meter dash in 19.97 sec­onds — or know he was a pro­fes­sion­al sprint­er. Zeze wore a black polo and a band on his left arm that said ‘SECURITY.’ Zeze eas­i­ly caught the first run­ner, who grabbed a pair ofblack shoes around 11:30 a.m. and ran away on a busy side­walk. Zeze said he sprint­ed at about 35 per­cent of his max­i­mum speed to catch most cus­tomers.”

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 425

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

This is vol­ume 425, the sum of 3 con­sec­u­tive primes. 425 = 137 + 139 + 149

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m going to start today’s roundup off with an expla­na­tion of why this email is the way it is. First read this brief arti­cle by Nate Sil­ver: It’s easy to screw up on break­ing news. But you have to admit when you do. (Nate Sil­ver, Sub­stack): “This morn­ing, Gallup pub­lished its annu­al poll on trust in the media. Over­all, only 32 per­cent of Amer­i­cans say they trust the mass media ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ to ‘report the news ful­ly, accu­rate­ly and fair­ly’ — tied with 2016 for a record low. ”
    • Sil­ver’s arti­cle made me reflect on how I think about mod­ern jour­nal­ism and then made me want to explain it. First, I do believe jour­nal­ists try to get things right. Places like the NYT and the Wash­ing­ton Post rarely pub­lish false infor­ma­tion and gen­er­al­ly cor­rect false­hoods when they become aware of them. The more spe­cif­ic a claim is the more like­ly it is to be true.
    • Jour­nal­ists do, how­ev­er, fre­quent­ly fail to report true infor­ma­tion they are not inter­est­ed in or excit­ed about. This is rarely a con­scious choice — it’s just a byprod­uct of the way they think about real­i­ty. This comes up espe­cial­ly on so-called “cul­ture war” issues. Many top-notch reporters are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly unaware of and strange­ly incu­ri­ous about many of the facts and sto­ries around trans­gen­derism, mar­riage, reli­gious lib­er­ty, and so on.
    • In fact, news­rooms are so ide­o­log­i­cal­ly mono­cul­tur­al that there are often mas­sive holes in what is report­ed. Not only are reporters blind to incon­ve­nient facts, they are often blind to entire sto­ries and trends. An excel­lent his­tor­i­cal exam­ple of this is when­ev­er the 60s and 70s are remem­bered. Amer­i­ca legit expe­ri­enced a Great Awak­en­ing (the Jesus Peo­ple move­ment) that hap­pened in par­al­lel with the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion. We only ever talk about the sec­ond not because reporters/commentators are sup­press­ing knowl­edge of the Jesus Peo­ple but because they gen­uine­ly are not even aware that they exist­ed or that what hap­pened then is still shap­ing our cul­ture today.
    • And so when I want a fact, I turn to some­place like the NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Reuters or to a cred­i­ble expert who writes direct­ly to the pub­lic (Ryan Burge is a good exam­ple of this). But when I want an analy­sis, I look for cred­i­ble, sane voic­es both with­in and with­out the con­fines of the media estab­lish­ment. I fre­quent­ly look to places like Sub­stack or niche web­sites like Mere Ortho­doxy or to main­stream media com­men­ta­tors like Ross Douthat or David French or Megan McAr­dle who have a track record of syn­the­siz­ing infor­ma­tion accu­rate­ly and form­ing opin­ions wise­ly.
    • And when I’m read­ing some­thing, I often ask, “Does this per­spec­tive seem plau­si­ble in light of my expe­ri­ence?” Espe­cial­ly when it is a claim about evan­gel­i­cal­ism or charismatic/Pentecostal Chris­tian­i­ty — I like­ly know more about that world than 98% of the staff of the New York Times (and after read­ing some arti­cles I think I know more about it than all their staff put togeth­er). Some­times they take an odd­ball church or reli­gious leader and put their sto­ry for­ward as rep­re­sen­ta­tive when it is not at all.
    • Any­way, there is prob­a­bly a lot more to say about mod­ern media, but what I just said is pret­ty much why this week­ly update fea­tures the mix of con­tent that it does: main­stream media sources for facts and a diverse array of experts for analy­sis, all fil­tered through evan­gel­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties.
    • A relat­ed thought on news con­sump­tion: peri­od­ic­i­ty (Alan Jacobs, per­son­al blog): “The more unsta­ble a sit­u­a­tion is, the more rapid­ly it changes, the less valu­able minute-by-minute report­ing is. I don’t know what hap­pened to the hos­pi­tal in Gaza, but if I wait until the next issue of the Econ­o­mist shows up I will be bet­ter informed about it than peo­ple who have been rage-refresh­ing their brows­er win­dows for the past sev­er­al days, and I will have suf­fered con­sid­er­ably less emo­tion­al stress.… If you’re read­ing the news sev­er­al times a day, you’re not being informed, you’re being stim­u­lat­ed.”
  2. Mov­ing on, here are some arti­cles that give con­text for the Israel war on Hamas:
    • Pales­tin­ian right of return mat­ters (Matt Ygle­sias, Sub­stack): “Because it seems to me that what­ev­er you per­son­al­ly think about [the Pales­tin­ian right of return], it is absolute­ly cen­tral to how the Arab world and dias­po­ra Jews and sec­u­lar Israelis all view the con­flict. Which in turn means that it’s cen­tral to the col­lapse of the Two-State Solu­tion as a polit­i­cal con­struct and to the col­lapse of the peace camp in Israeli pol­i­tics that might have been inclined make a deal that was favor­able to Pales­tin­ian inter­ests. There is, in fact, a whole school of thought asso­ci­at­ed with Bill Clin­ton and Amer­i­can nego­tia­tor Den­nis Ross that holds the right of return almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly respon­si­ble for scut­tling the Camp David talks and pre­vent­ing the emer­gence of an inde­pen­dent Pales­tine. Of course, many oth­er well-informed peo­ple deny that’s the case or believe it’s an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. But even if you think it is fac­tu­al­ly incor­rect to say the res­o­lu­tion of this con­flict hinges on the right of return, its cen­tral­i­ty to so many of the nar­ra­tives around this issue makes it an impor­tant con­cept to under­stand.”
    • The For­got­ten His­to­ry of the Term “Pales­tine” (Dou­glas J. Fei­th, Mosa­ic): “The term ‘Pales­tine’ was used for mil­len­nia with­out a pre­cise geo­graph­ic def­i­n­i­tion. That’s not uncommon—think of ‘Tran­scau­ca­sus’ or ‘Mid­west.’ No pre­cise def­i­n­i­tion exist­ed for Pales­tine because none was required. Since the Roman era, the name lacked polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. No nation ever had that name.”
      • This is from back in 2021. Super inter­est­ing stuff.
    • Hamas does not yet under­stand the depth of Israeli resolve (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, Times of Israel): “That ene­my is not the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, of course, even though sup­port for ter­ror attacks is wide­spread among Pales­tini­ans. The ene­my is not exact­ly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The ene­my is the Pales­tin­ian the­o­ry of Israelis that makes the vio­lence seen on Octo­ber 7 seem to many of them a ratio­nal step on the road to lib­er­a­tion rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet anoth­er in a long string of self-inflict­ed dis­as­ters for the Pales­tin­ian cause.… A tragedy is about to unfold in Gaza made worse by the long learn­ing curve it will take for Hamas to grasp the depth of Israeli resolve. It has robbed Israel of any oth­er inter­est but its destruc­tion. In the Israeli mind, any bru­tal­i­ty Hamas can com­mit it will com­mit. And so it can­not be allowed to ever com­mit any act ever again.”
  3. Some Chris­t­ian per­spec­tives
    • Anti­se­mit­ic Vio­lence and Its Shame­ful Defense (Mike Cosper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “To be hor­ri­fied by the slaugh­ter of Israeli inno­cents doesn’t require deny­ing the suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. And car­ing for Pales­tin­ian inno­cents doesn’t require being cold or numb to the hor­rors of anti­semitism and Hamas. We can con­demn Hamas while demand­ing account­abil­i­ty from Israeli lead­ers who have foment­ed vio­lence, ele­vat­ed right-wing extrem­ists, and excused vio­la­tions of inter­na­tion­al law. Indeed, Chris­tians should be marked by our will­ing­ness to oppose all injus­tice and to care for Israeli and Pales­tin­ian vic­tims alike. And while that includes under­stand­ing that Pales­tini­ans have suf­fered great injus­tices from the gov­ern­ment of Israel—as well as neigh­bor­ing states of Egypt, Jor­dan, Iran, Lebanon, Syr­ia, and Sau­di Ara­bia, as well as Hamas and the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty itself—it must also include active rejec­tion of anti­semitism.”
    • With­er the Poi­so­nous Plant of Hamas (Tamir Khouri, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In this envi­ron­ment of hatred, racism, and vio­lence, Hamas has exploit­ed young peo­ple with false promis­es. With no hori­zon of hope, Hamas’s adher­ents in Pales­tine sank into dark­ness and helped Hamas vic­tim­ize Israelis too. But it does not have to be this way. As Chris­tians, we believe in the pow­er of redemp­tion. With real hope for the future of this land, these hate­ful move­ments will with­er. For a last­ing peace, we must respect the image of God in Israelis and Pales­tini­ans alike. Is it too much to ask that we don’t see this as a zero-sum game? Shouldn’t both Israelis and Pales­tini­ans live in the dig­ni­ty God intend­ed for us?”
      • The pseu­do­ny­mous author is a Pales­tin­ian Chris­t­ian who is an Israeli cit­i­zen.
  4. Some arti­cles about mod­ern acad­e­mia:
    • Why Big Mon­ey Can’t Eas­i­ly Change Cam­pus Pol­i­tics (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…donors should find ways to give mon­ey to the actu­al stu­dents — through the Hil­lel or oth­er Jew­ish or Israeli stu­dent groups if you’re espe­cial­ly con­cerned with the Jew­ish place on cam­pus, but more gen­er­al­ly through polit­i­cal or reli­gious groups that promise to work against the school’s dom­i­nant assump­tions, or through stu­dent asso­ci­a­tions that seem to fos­ter free debate, or through cam­pus-adja­cent insti­tu­tions that serve stu­dents but are inde­pen­dent of the schools. But not with the goal of using such stu­dent groups as a means of con­flict with the admin­is­tra­tion or the fac­ul­ty. Rather, with the goal that such groups can become micro­cosms of the uni­ver­si­ty you loved once and fear no longer exists, cells in a body yet to be restored, whose health and flour­ish­ing with­in the large world of Penn or Har­vard or wher­ev­er is an end unto itself.”
      • Ross Douthat speaks noth­ing but truth through­out this essay. If you know any gazil­lion­aires who want to influ­ence the tra­jec­to­ries of elite uni­ver­si­ties have them read this essay and then tell them about Chi Alpha. Men­tion we’d like a build­ing near cam­pus.
    • The War Comes to Stan­ford (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Alma Andi­no, a Jew­ish senior at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, spent the day of Hamas’s attacks against Israel cry­ing and dis­traught. Like many Jews around the coun­try, much of the week­end passed on the phone with fam­i­ly mem­bers, fear­ing for the safe­ty of friends and extend­ed fam­i­ly in Israel. Andino’s fel­low stu­dents in Colum­bae, the social jus­tice and anti­war res­i­den­tial house where she is a res­i­den­tial assis­tant, held her through her pan­ic attacks. ‘I felt so pow­er­less,’ she recalled when we spoke this week. On Mon­day, a friend asked if she’d seen the ban­ner some of her house­mates were prepar­ing to hang on the front of Colum­bae, the house she con­sid­ered to be her com­mu­ni­ty and her home. The sheet bore the slo­gan ‘Zion­ism is geno­cide’ in red let­ters, styled to look as if they were drip­ping with blood.… For Alma Andi­no, events on cam­pus have already reached a break­ing point. After beg­ging her house­mates not to hang the ban­ner, she said the group debat­ed for hours, with the impli­ca­tion they would desist only if a suit­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for Israel’s exis­tence could be giv­en. They told her they felt that as stu­dent activists, they need­ed to dis­play a mes­sage that would put them on the right side of his­to­ry. We should be advo­cat­ing for mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties, they said. ‘Except for Jews?’ Alma replied. The group scoffed.”
    • What Con­ser­v­a­tives Mis­un­der­stand About Rad­i­cal­ism at Uni­ver­si­ties (Tyler Austin Harp­er, The Atlantic): “The ten­sion burst­ing into view right now—between a major­i­ty of schol­ars, for whom ‘decol­o­niza­tion’ means putting few­er white Euro­peans on their syl­labi, and a small minor­i­ty who believe it entails any­thing-goes vio­lent revolution—is the unwel­come and unsur­pris­ing result of uni­ver­si­ties want­i­ng to cos­play rebel­lion while still churn­ing out Wall Street–executive alum­ni who will one day pad endow­ments that are larg­er than Israel’s annu­al defense bud­get.”
      • The title makes this sound more par­ti­san than it is. 100% worth a read and pon­der.
    • Stu­dents for Pogroms in Israel (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “Look­ing back on the Man­son killings, Joan Did­ion wrote, ‘Many peo­ple I know in Los Ange­les believe that the Six­ties end­ed abrupt­ly on August 9, 1969, end­ed at the exact moment when word of the mur­ders on Cielo Dri­ve trav­eled like brush­fire through the com­mu­ni­ty, and in a sense this is true. The ten­sion broke that day. The para­noia was ful­filled.’ A few peo­ple I know believe last Saturday’s attack on Israel and the respons­es from left­ist stu­dent groups mark the end of the ‘Great Awok­en­ing.’ Although it is too ear­ly to eval­u­ate the accu­ra­cy of that hypoth­e­sis, cam­pus pol­i­tics have cer­tain­ly trans­formed in recent days. Now we are left won­der­ing whether what comes next is bet­ter or worse than what pre­ced­ed it.”
      • He makes spe­cif­ic men­tion of Stan­ford at one point, although it is hard­ly his focus.
    • Moral con­tro­ver­sies and aca­d­e­m­ic pub­lic health: Notes on nav­i­gat­ing and sur­viv­ing aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom chal­lenges (Tyler Van­der­Weele, Glob­al Epi­demi­ol­o­gy): “I think that there needs to be more open dis­cus­sion in acad­e­mia, and in soci­ety, about these mat­ters. Most peo­ple, even those who are deeply con­cerned, seem very uneasy dis­cussing these issues, for fear of being attacked for sim­ply rais­ing them. Col­leagues at Har­vard, rang­ing from an expert in child devel­op­ment to a clin­i­cian pro­vid­ing men­tal health care for teenage girls, have told me that they are uncom­fort­able shar­ing their con­cerns on these mat­ters in many or most set­tings at Har­vard. An evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist at Har­vard like­wise recent­ly came under attack because she explic­it­ly stat­ed that sex was bio­log­i­cal and bina­ry, even though she also not­ed that we can nev­er­the­less respect a per­son­’s gen­der iden­ti­ty. The attack was suf­fi­cient­ly severe, and the admin­is­tra­tion’s response suf­fi­cient­ly weak, that she even­tu­al­ly felt she had no choice but to resign. Rather than open dis­cus­sion, it seems we are often now rely­ing on anony­mous arti­cles, or brave, and sub­se­quent­ly vil­i­fied, authors and whis­tle-blow­ers to raise alter­na­tive view­points. One may strong­ly dis­agree with their posi­tions, but it is not unrea­son­able to raise the ques­tions.”
      • I removed hyper­linked foot­notes from this excerpt for read­abil­i­ty. This is worth read­ing as a mod­el of mature­ly and wise­ly respond­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic intol­er­ance. Not many schol­ars have com­port­ed them­selves with as much class as Van­der­Weele when their views came under attack. Also, I learned in this arti­cle that Van­der­Weele is Catholic. I had assumed he was an evan­gel­i­cal based on some­thing I heard else­where.
  5. Think­ing about the moral dimen­sions of the war
    • The Moral Ques­tions at the Heart of the Gaza War (David French, New York Times): “This is the prob­lem Israeli sol­diers and com­man­ders face. They must pro­tect their cit­i­zens from sav­agery. They must com­ply with the laws of war. And they must make a series of moral choic­es, under extreme duress, that can define them and their nation — all while they face a ter­ror­ist ene­my that appears to pos­sess no con­science at all.”
      • Worth read­ing. As I men­tioned when I shared French’s pre­vi­ous arti­cle, he is more qual­i­fied than any oth­er colum­nist I know to weigh in on this.
    • This Way for the Geno­cide, Ladies and Gen­tle­men (Chris Hedges, Scheer­Post): “I spent sev­en years report­ing on the con­flict, four of them as the Mid­dle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bod­ies of Israeli vic­tims of bus bomb­ings in Jerusalem by Pales­tin­ian sui­cide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, includ­ing chil­dren, in the cor­ri­dors in Dar Al-Shi­fa Hos­pi­tal in Gaza City. I watched Israeli sol­diers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then cal­lous­ly shot in the Khan You­nis refugee camp. I shel­tered from bombs dropped by Israeli war­planes. I climbed over the rub­ble of demol­ished Pales­tin­ian homes and apart­ment blocks along the bor­der with Egypt. I inter­viewed the blood­ied and dazed sur­vivors. I heard the soul crush­ing wails of moth­ers keen­ing over the corpses of their chil­dren.… it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the com­plic­i­ty of an inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty that licens­es Israel’s geno­ci­dal slaugh­ter and accel­er­ates a cycle of vio­lence it may not be able to con­trol.”
      • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  6. Smart­phones Have Tur­bocharged the Dan­ger of Porn (Mary Har­ring­ton, Wall Street Jour­nal): “It should come as no sur­prise that the per­son­al­ized, tac­tile, portable smart­phone would be the dig­i­tal por­tal of choice for some­thing as inti­mate as porn con­sump­tion. But of the new com­pul­sive behav­iors enabled by smart­phones, few have as intense and imme­di­ate a reward cycle as porn—or as many far-reach­ing con­se­quences.”
  7. Is It Wrong to Cure Blind­ness? (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “The Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health, the $40 bil­lion-endowed fund­ing arm of the Depart­ment of Health and Human Ser­vices, recent­ly took a stand against ableism by propos­ing a change to its mis­sion state­ment, which promis­es to ‘enhance health, length­en life, and reduce ill­ness and dis­abil­i­ty.’ An advi­so­ry com­mit­tee with­in the NIH took issue with the phrase ‘reduce… dis­abil­i­ty,’ writ­ing in a 66-page report pub­lished last Decem­ber that it ‘could be inter­pret­ed as per­pet­u­at­ing ableist beliefs that dis­abled peo­ple are flawed and need to be ‘fixed.’ ”
    • There are legit insane per­spec­tives being nor­mal­ized in the world right now. Cur­ing blind­ness is an unequiv­o­cal good.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have What The Media Gets Wrong About Israel (Mat­tie Fried­man, The Atlantic): “…one of the most impor­tant aspects of the media-sat­u­rat­ed con­flict between Jews and Arabs is also the least cov­ered: the press itself. The West­ern press has become less an observ­er of this con­flict than an actor in it, a role with con­se­quences for the mil­lions of peo­ple try­ing to com­pre­hend cur­rent events, includ­ing pol­i­cy­mak­ers who depend on jour­nal­is­tic accounts to under­stand a region where they con­sis­tent­ly seek, and fail, to pro­duc­tive­ly intervene.” This is an old arti­cle I share peri­od­i­cal­ly, I think I first shared it way back in my fifth Fri­day email. Help­ful in pars­ing media cov­er­age in the cur­rent war.

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 424

lots of arti­cles from an emo­tion­al­ly drain­ing week

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

This is vol­ume 424, which is sym­met­ri­cal and also the sum of 10 con­sec­u­tive primes. 424 = 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59 + 61.

Things Glen Found Interesting

Today’s roundup was dif­fi­cult to assem­ble. First, there are the obvi­ous emo­tion­al chal­lenges of read­ing too much about the hor­rif­ic raid by Hamas. If you are won­der­ing whether you should dive deeply into orig­i­nal sources (Insta­gram sto­ries from on the field, etc), no you should not. It will harm your soul. Sec­ond, there is a whole sea of infor­ma­tion and opin­ions and I have a very small buck­et. Third, it was a busy week (and today in par­tic­u­lar was quite hec­tic for me). All that hav­ing been said, if you find oth­er inter­est­ing sto­ries about the unfold­ing sit­u­a­tion in Israel, please send them my way.

  1. The best/most inter­est­ing sto­ries I’ve seen about the Hamas attack on Israel.
    • ‘We’re Going to Die Here’ (Yair Rosen­berg, The Atlantic): “First I’m hear­ing this gun­fire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road, then I hear it from the neigh­bor­hood, and then I hear it out­side my win­dow. I’m in the room with my wife, and I hear the gun­fire direct­ly out­side my win­dow, as well as shout­ing. I under­stand Ara­bic. I under­stood exact­ly what was hap­pen­ing: that Hamas has infil­trat­ed our kib­butz, that there are ter­ror­ists out­side my win­dow, and that I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls, and I don’t know if any­one is going to come to save us.”
      • This is an amaz­ing sto­ry. 100% worth read­ing.
    • The attacks on Israel, and the response. (Isaac Saul, Tan­gle): “Am I pro-Israel or pro-Pales­tine? I have no idea. I’m pro-not-killing-civil­ians. I’m pro-not-trap­ping-mil­lions-of-peo­ple-in-open-air-pris­ons. I’m pro-not-shoot­ing-grand­mas-in-the-back-of-the-head. I’m pro-not-flat­ten­ing-apart­ment-com­plex­es. I’m pro-not-rap­ing-women-and-tak­ing-hostages. I’m pro-not-unjust­ly-impris­on­ing-peo­ple-with­out-due-process. I’m pro-free­dom and pro-peace and pro- all the things we nev­er see in this con­flict any­more. What­ev­er this is, I want none of it.”
      • This is a well-done roundup fea­tur­ing diverse view­points.
    • Dark­ness Vis­i­ble (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “The more I’ve thought and read about Israel, the more it seems that its found­ing was both a moral neces­si­ty and a prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty. The moral neces­si­ty is proven by last week­end. If Jews can be sub­ject to a medieval pogrom in their own coun­try in 2023, what hope could they ever have with­out a coun­try at all? The prac­ti­cal insan­i­ty lies in the sim­ple fact that the state of Israel was cre­at­ed on land laden with deep reli­gious sym­bol­ism, where much of the exist­ing pop­u­la­tion did not give con­sent, and despite the ear­ly promise, no coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans was ever con­struct­ed along­side it.”
      • A more com­pre­hen­sive essay than many I’ve read so far.
    • What It Would Mean to Treat Hamas Like ISIS (David French, New York Times): “…Israel’s goal is not to pun­ish Hamas but to defeat it — to remove it from pow­er in Gaza the way the Iraqi mil­i­tary, the Unit­ed States and their allies removed ISIS from Mosul, Fal­lu­ja, Rama­di and every oth­er city ISIS con­trolled in Iraq. That can’t be accom­plished by air pow­er alone. If remov­ing Hamas from pow­er is the goal, then that almost cer­tain­ly means sol­diers and tanks fight­ing in Gazan cities, block by block, house to house in an area of rough­ly two mil­lion peo­ple. The pur­pose of this newslet­ter is to give you a primer on both the mil­i­tary dif­fi­cul­ty of the task and the human­i­tar­i­an con­straints on it, along with the lim­i­ta­tions that are unique to Israel.”
      • Unlocked — a thor­ough arti­cle from an author with high­ly rel­e­vant exper­tise.
    • Hamas prac­ticed in plain sight, post­ing video of mock attack weeks before bor­der breach (Michael Beiseck­er &  Sarah El Deeb, Asso­ci­at­ed Press): “A slick­ly pro­duced two-minute pro­pa­gan­da video post­ed to social media by Hamas on Sept. 12 shows fight­ers using explo­sives to blast through a repli­ca of the bor­der gate, sweep in on pick­up trucks and then move build­ing by build­ing through a full-scale recon­struc­tion of an Israeli town, fir­ing auto­mat­ic weapons at human-sil­hou­et­ted paper tar­gets. The Islam­ic mil­i­tant group’s live-fire exer­cise dubbed oper­a­tion ‘Strong Pil­lar’ also had mil­i­tants in body armor and com­bat fatigues car­ry­ing out oper­a­tions that includ­ed the destruc­tion of mock-ups of the wall’s con­crete tow­ers and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions anten­na, just as they would do for real in the dead­ly attack last Sat­ur­day.”
    • As Deaths Soar in Gaza From Israeli Strikes, Egypt Offers Aid, but No Exit (Declan Walsh, New York Times): “Egypt has long insist­ed that Israel must solve the Pales­tin­ian issue with­in its bor­ders, to keep alive aspi­ra­tions for a future Pales­tin­ian state. Allow­ing large num­bers of Gazans to cross over, even as refugees, would ‘revive the idea that Sinai is the alter­na­tive coun­try for the Pales­tini­ans,’ said Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Cairo Uni­ver­si­ty. A relat­ed sce­nario that wor­ries Egypt is that it could end up as the de fac­to admin­is­tra­tor of Gaza.”
      • Egypt, of course, is the only nation besides Israel that shares a bor­der with the Gaza Strip. It is often over­looked by Amer­i­cans because we don’t know our geog­ra­phy very well, but Egypt is equal­ly involved in pre­vent­ing the migra­tion of the Pales­tini­ans in Gaza.
    • How Hamas breached Israel’s ‘Iron Wal­l’ (Samuel Grana­dos, Ruby Mellen, Lau­ren Tier­ney, Artur Galocha, Cate Brown and Aaron Steck­el­berg, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The fence was breached at 29 points, accord­ing to the Israel Defense Forces. Though there wereIs­raeli guard tow­ers posi­tioned every 500 feet along the perime­ter of the wall at some points, the fight­ers appeared to encounter lit­tle resis­tance. The bor­der was min­i­mal­ly staffed, it soon became apparent,with much of Israel’s mil­i­tary divert­ed to focus on unrest in the West Bank.”
      • Detailed and quite inter­est­ing. Also not very long to read.
    • The Pro­gres­sives Who Flunked the Hamas Test (Helen Lewis, The Atlantic): “In the fevered world of social media, pro­gres­sive activists have often sought to dis­cred­it hate­ful state­ments and unjust poli­cies by describ­ing them as ‘vio­lence,’ even ‘geno­cide.’ This ten­den­cy seems grotesque if the same activists are not pre­pared to crit­i­cize Hamas, a group whose found­ing char­ter is explic­it­ly geno­ci­dal… Fit­ting Israel into the inter­sec­tion­al frame­work has always been dif­fi­cult, because its Jew­ish cit­i­zens are both his­tor­i­cal­ly oppressed—the sur­vivors of an attempt to wipe them out entire­ly—and cur­rent­ly in a dom­i­nant posi­tion over the Pales­tini­ans, as demon­strat­ed by the Netanyahu government’s deci­sion to restrict pow­er and water sup­plies to Gaza. The sim­plis­tic log­ic of pop inter­sec­tion­al­i­ty can­not rec­on­cile this, and the sub­ject caused schisms with­in the left long before Saturday’s attacks.”
      • This one is espe­cial­ly worth read­ing for uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents. It high­lights weak­ness­es in a per­spec­tive you are often taught from.
    • A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer one (Haviv Ret­tig Gur, The Times of Israel): “Hamas seemed to do every­thing pos­si­ble to shift Israeli psy­chol­o­gy from a com­fort­able faith in their own strength to a sense of dire vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. And it will soon learn the scale of that mis­cal­cu­la­tion. A strong Israel may tol­er­ate a bel­liger­ent Hamas on its bor­der; a weak­er one can­not. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources wor­ry­ing about the human­i­tar­i­an fall­out from a Gaza ground war; a more vul­ner­a­ble Israel can­not. A wound­ed, weak­ened Israel is a fiercer Israel. Hamas was once a tol­er­a­ble threat. It just made itself an intol­er­a­ble one, all while con­vinc­ing Israelis they are too vul­ner­a­ble and weak to respond with the old restraint.”
  2. Some theological/Christian per­spec­tives:
    • The Way Out is Through: Peace Must Start with the End of Hamas (Marc LiVec­che, Prov­i­dence): “Israel must do every­thing pos­si­ble to min­i­mize the toil on the inno­cent, and to mul­ti­ply hell on the mon­sters.”
      • The author is a research fel­low at the Naval War Col­lege and is writ­ing about just war the­o­ry as it applies to the con­flict between Israel and Hamas.
    • Amid Israel-Hamas War, Local Chris­tians Seek Right­eous Anger and Gospel Hope (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Nothing about this sit­u­a­tion is right or good,” said Lisa Loden, a Mes­sian­ic Jew­ish mem­ber of the Beth­le­hem Insti­tute of Peace and Jus­tice. “But there is a strong desire to see the Lord use these events to draw peo­ple to himself.”
    • Israel’s 9/11: The Need for Moral Clar­i­ty (Bernard N. Howard and Ivan Mesa, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Moral clar­i­ty also allows for suit­ably one-sided prayer. It’s right to pray for the swift defeat of Hamas. The mur­der­ous oper­a­tions room of Hamas will nev­er pro­vide good lead­er­ship for the Pales­tini­ans liv­ing in Gaza. We should by all means pray for both-sided things too: the sal­va­tion of peo­ple on both sides; the pro­tec­tion, heal­ing, and com­fort of peo­ple on both sides; and the growth of the church that lives inside the bor­ders of both nations. Even as we pray for these both-sided things, let us bold­ly call on our God to thwart, frus­trate, and defeat the one side that is hell-bent on ter­ror­ism.”
    • Amer­i­can Chris­tians Should Stand with Israel under Attack (Rus­sell Moore, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Some­times, espe­cial­ly in the ear­ly moments of any war, we may be uncer­tain about who is right and who is wrong. There is no such moral con­fu­sion here. Hamas—and its state sponsors—attacked inno­cent peo­ple, as they have done repeat­ed­ly in the past, this time employ­ing a force and bru­tal­i­ty pre­vi­ous­ly unseen.… As Chris­tians, we should pay spe­cial atten­tion to vio­lence direct­ed toward Israel—just as we would pay spe­cial atten­tion to a vio­lent attack on a mem­ber of our extend­ed fam­i­ly. After all, we are graft­ed on to the promise made to Abra­ham (Rom. 11:17). Our Lord Jesus was and is a Jew­ish man from Galilee.”
  3. Some Stan­ford-con­nect­ed arti­cles:
    • This Was Nev­er Sup­posed to Hap­pen (Amichai Magen, Per­sua­sion): “Ana­lysts keen to con­vey the mag­ni­tude of Octo­ber 7th to Amer­i­can audi­ences have already tagged it Israel’s Pearl Har­bor or 9/11. Nei­ther label ade­quate­ly cap­tures the day’s true sig­nif­i­cance. A more accu­rate name might be some­thing like ‘Israel’s civic Yom Kip­pur.’ Why? Because the very exis­tence of the State of Israel was sup­posed to guar­an­tee that a day like this would nev­er hap­pen. In the Yom Kip­pur War of Octo­ber 1973—when Egypt and Syr­ia launched a sur­prise assault—Israel lost some 2,700 sol­diers, but it man­aged to effec­tive­ly pro­tect its civil­ian pop­u­la­tion. No Israeli towns or vil­lages were ever breached. The social con­tract was hon­ored, albeit at a ter­ri­ble price. On Octo­ber 7, 2023, it was pri­mar­i­ly civil­ians who were killed, maimed, and kid­napped. This was the day when the IDF wasn’t there to defend the peo­ple it was cre­at­ed to pro­tect.”
      • The author, him­self Israeli, is a Vis­it­ing Pro­fes­sor and Fel­low in Israel Stud­ies at the Free­man-Spogli Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • The impact of Hamas’ dev­as­tat­ing attack (Matthew Wigler, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Like most Jews, I seek the peace and secu­ri­ty of Israel as a Jew­ish state in the indige­nous home­land of the Jew­ish peo­ple, a safe haven after mil­len­nia of per­se­cu­tion where Jews can final­ly claim con­trol over their own des­tiny. Like­wise, like most Jews, I also dream of a future of dig­ni­ty and free­dom for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple, who, by the very same prin­ci­ples of self-deter­mi­na­tion, deserve a state of their own in a land that they too have called home for many cen­turies. How­ev­er, Hamas’ ide­ol­o­gy of hate and meth­ods of ter­ror­ism are con­trary to that vision.”
  4. Oth­er inter­est­ing stuff not relat­ed to the war:
    • 5 Rea­sons Gen Z Is Primed for Spir­i­tu­al Renew­al (Kyle Richter & Patrick Miller, The Gospel Coali­tion): “Our last meet­ing of the year was big­ger than the first. We start­ed with 300 stu­dents and end­ed with 400. That nev­er hap­pens. Then in the fall of this year, it hap­pened again: 500 stu­dents attend­ed our first meet­ing; 600 showed up the next week. This doesn’t hap­pen.But it did. And it’s not unique to us. As we talk to cam­pus min­is­ters and pas­tors from San Fran­cis­co to Jack­sonville, Billings to Atlanta, DC to Dal­las, we know we aren’t alone. Some will urge cau­tion before draw­ing con­clu­sions. Isn’t this the era of dechurch­ing, decon­struc­tion, and ris­ing “nones”? But data lags behind real­i­ty and we don’t want the church to miss what may be hap­pen­ing.”
    • The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics (Jai, Sub­stack): “The Copen­hagen Inter­pre­ta­tion of Ethics says that when you observe or inter­act with a prob­lem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the prob­lem worse, even if you make it slight­ly bet­ter, the eth­i­cal bur­den of the prob­lem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In par­tic­u­lar, if you inter­act with a prob­lem and ben­e­fit from it, you are a com­plete mon­ster. I don’t sub­scribe to this school of thought, but it seems pret­ty pop­u­lar.”
      • A few years old, but real­ly good.
    • Repro­ducibil­i­ty tri­al: 246 biol­o­gists get dif­fer­ent results from same data sets (Anil Oza, Nature): “In a mas­sive exer­cise to exam­ine repro­ducibil­i­ty, more than 200 biol­o­gists analysed the same sets of eco­log­i­cal data — and got wide­ly diver­gent results. The first sweep­ing study1 of its kind in ecol­o­gy demon­strates how much results in the field can vary, not because of dif­fer­ences in the envi­ron­ment, but because of sci­en­tist­s’ ana­lyt­i­cal choic­es.”

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 423

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

This, vol­ume 423, is the sum of 13 con­sec­u­tive prime num­bers: 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How Fam­i­ly Break­down Hits Girls (Freya India, Sub­stack): “Ours is a cul­ture obsessed with trau­ma! We think we can get PTSD from uni­ver­si­ty speak­ers and stu­pid jokes and elec­tion results. And yet it’s also a cul­ture which large­ly ignores and even glam­or­is­es what seems to me one of the most obvi­ous trau­mas of all?? If any­thing qual­i­fies as traumatic—as in, an emo­tion­al­ly dis­tress­ing event that leaves a last­ing impact—surely it’s fam­i­ly break­down, which real­ly does seem to stay with peo­ple, shape their view of love and life and just keep play­ing out, over and over?”
  2. All About That Tenor: Why Men Don’t Sing in Wor­ship (Kelsey Cramer McGin­nis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The low­er rate of musi­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion among men… has a lot to do with the male voice itself—its range and pat­terns of development—and social­iza­tion in a cul­ture where so many men are uncom­fort­able with their own voic­es…. Men hear high­er, wider vocal ranges from pop­u­lar singers and wor­ship lead­ers; Chris Tom­lin and Phil Wick­ham have famous­ly impres­sive tenor ranges, far out of reach for most male voices.”
    • Unlocked, rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  3. The Real Prob­lem With the Super­rich (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “Oth­er than from sheer jeal­ousy, why should any­one object to some peo­ple hav­ing far more wealth than oth­ers?… wealth is a means to polit­i­cal pow­er, and those who crave wealth tend to be the sorts of per­sons who crave pow­er too. You can run an oli­garchy if some peo­ple are super­rich – and some oli­garchies are bet­ter than oth­ers — but if you try to run a repub­lic that way, you will lose it.”
    • A thought­ful arti­cle from a Chris­t­ian philoso­pher at UT Austin.
  4. Andy Stanley’s ‘Unconditional’ Con­tra­dic­tion (Sam All­ber­ry, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “I have always been sin­gle. On the whole, it has been deeply joy­ous. But I am not immune from temp­ta­tion, and when any leader sug­gests to me that chaste obe­di­ence to Christ in sin­gle­ness is not sus­tain­able, he is say­ing the very same thing to me that the Dev­il says.”
    • Unlocked. The whole thing is worth read­ing for con­text.
  5. Amer­i­ca is now pay­ing more in inter­est on its record $33 tril­lion debt than on nation­al defense — here’s who holds the IOUs (Ser­ah Louis, Yahoo Finance): “America’s gross nation­al debt hit an eye-water­ing $33 tril­lion for the first time in Sep­tem­ber — mere months after eclips­ing the $32 tril­lion mark ear­li­er in the year. The U.S. is also cur­rent­ly spend­ing more to pay inter­est on the nation­al debt than it does on nation­al defense, accord­ing to the Treasury’s month­ly state­ment.”
    • What a stun­ning sta­tis­tic.
  6. The Labor Mar­ket Returns of Being An Artist: Evi­dence from the Unit­ed States, 2006–2021 (Chris­tos Makridis, SSRN): “First, I find a decline in the rel­a­tive earn­ings of artists to non-artists from zero to a 15% dis­ad­van­tage. After con­trol­ling for demo­graph­ic dif­fer­ences, the decline is sharp­er, declin­ing from a 15% earn­ings dis­ad­van­tage to 30%. That the inclu­sion of demo­graph­ic con­trols rais­es the earn­ings gap sug­gests there is pos­i­tive selec­tion into the arts. Sec­ond, these dif­fer­ences decline in mag­ni­tude to 4.4%, but remain sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant, after exploit­ing vari­a­tion among artists and non-artists in the same indus­try-year and major occu­pa­tion. Third, when restrict­ing the set of indi­vid­u­als to those with at least a col­lege degree, those with a fine arts degree also incur an earn­ings and employ­ment penal­ty even if they work in the arts. These results high­light the increas­ing finan­cial pre­car­i­ous­ness of artists over the past decade.”
    • The excerpt is from the abstract. Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry.
  7. Unbib­li­cal Schol­ar­ship (Alan Jacobs, The Hedge­hog Review): “If we can insist—as many (though not enough) grad­u­ate pro­grams still do—that stu­dents learn lan­guages oth­er than Eng­lish in order to pur­sue the study of Eng­lish writ­ers, then we can also insist that they acquire bib­li­cal lit­er­a­cy. Every grad­u­ate stu­dent in the human­i­ties should be required to take a course in the Eng­lish Bible, a course that, among oth­er things, requires the mem­o­riza­tion and recita­tion of large chunks of the bib­li­cal text.”

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 422

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

This is vol­ume 422, a num­ber which feels like it should have a lot of prime fac­tors but which only has two: 422 = 2·211.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why reli­gious belief pro­vides a real buffer against sui­cide risk (David H Ros­marin, Psy­che): “The sci­en­tif­ic world in gen­er­al, and the dis­ci­plines of behav­iour­al health in par­tic­u­lar, tend to be biased against mat­ters of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and reli­gion. The exist­ing lit­er­a­ture is enough to show that these fac­tors have large pro­tec­tive effects against sui­cide. If anoth­er vari­able had even half the val­ue for any major pub­lic health con­cern, I sus­pect it would receive sub­stan­tial­ly more atten­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Med­ical School.
  2. Being There (David French, New York Times): “I’ve nev­er met a per­son who wants to lose friends. But I’ve met many, many peo­ple who suf­fer from lone­li­ness and say that they just ‘lost touch.’ What hap­pened? I ask. ‘Life hap­pened,’ they say. At each new stage of life it was eas­i­er to say no to a friend than to say no to work, to a spouse, to one’s kids. And while each indi­vid­ual no can be under­stand­able and even jus­ti­fi­able, the accu­mu­la­tion of noes suf­fo­cates friend­ships, even with­out an argu­ment, a breach or a betray­al.”
  3. Unable to Find Ulti­mate Truth in Zen Bud­dhism, I Turned to Jesus (Sita Slavov, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In Zen, I often felt alone in the trench­es with my dark­est thoughts and feel­ings. And even the most beau­ti­ful moments I expe­ri­enced dur­ing meditation—those moments of delight in God’s creation—were use­less with­out a com­pelling frame­work to process and inte­grate them into my life. In con­trast, when I med­i­tate on God’s Word and pres­ence, the Holy Spir­it sus­tains me in the trench­es, and Scrip­ture pro­vides the frame­work to under­stand my expe­ri­ence.”
    • Unlocked.
  4. Win­ners don’t do irony (Janan Ganesh, Finan­cial Times): “Peo­ple who deal in high­er stakes have to insu­late them­selves from the arch­ness and cyn­i­cism of the wider cul­ture. Irony gets noth­ing done. It is the creed of the pas­sive observ­er. Not every­one who is inca­pable of irony is a win­ner, no. But lots of win­ners are inca­pable of irony.”
  5. New athe­ism has col­lapsed. The tide is turn­ing on belief in God (Justin Brier­ly, Pre­miere Chris­tian­i­ty): “Sci­ence and rea­son alone won’t buy you mean­ing, pur­pose and val­ue. Apart from its inter­nal squab­bles, the real rea­son that New Athe­ism stalled as a cul­tur­al move­ment was that it failed to give peo­ple a sto­ry to live their life by, so peo­ple went look­ing for a sto­ry else­where.”
  6. A green card pro­cess­ing change means US could lose thou­sands of faith lead­ers from abroad (Gio­van­na Dell’Orto, AP News): “A sud­den pro­ce­dur­al change in how the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment process­es green cards for for­eign-born reli­gious work­ers, togeth­er with his­toric highs in num­bers of ille­gal bor­der crossers, means that thou­sands of cler­gy like him are los­ing the abil­i­ty to remain in this coun­try.”
    • This obser­va­tion was inter­est­ing to me: “Those from reli­gious orders with vows of pover­ty, like Catholic nuns and Bud­dhist monks, are espe­cial­ly hard hit, because most oth­er employ­ment visa cat­e­gories require employ­ers to show they’re pay­ing for­eign work­ers pre­vail­ing wages. Since they’re get­ting no wages, they don’t qual­i­fy.”
    • Sen­tences like that are pre­cise­ly why reli­gious exemp­tions are need­ed for some laws — the law on its face seems rea­son­able and is designed to pro­tect work­ers, but it has the effect of harm­ing reli­gious work­ers of mul­ti­ple faiths because the total­ly fine way they do things does­n’t map onto the way most of soci­ety works.
  7. Drones Every­where: How the Tech­no­log­i­cal Rev­o­lu­tion on Ukraine Bat­tle­fields Is Reshap­ing Mod­ern War­fare (Yaroslav Trofi­mov, Wall Street Jour­nal): “ ‘It’s a ques­tion of cost,’ said Phillips O’Brien, a pro­fes­sor of strate­gic stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews in Scot­land. ‘If you can destroy an expen­sive, heavy sys­tem for some­thing that costs much much less, then actu­al­ly the pow­er dif­fer­en­tial between the two coun­tries doesn’t mat­ter as much.’… When it comes to tanks, in par­tic­u­lar, the les­son of the Ukrain­ian war is that tank-on-tank bat­tles have become a rarity—which means that the rel­a­tive sophis­ti­ca­tion of a tank is no longer as impor­tant. Few­er than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by oth­er tanks, accord­ing to Ukrain­ian offi­cials, with the rest suc­cumb­ing to mines, artillery, anti­tank mis­siles and drones.”

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 421

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

This is vol­ume 421, a twin prime num­ber (cf 419) which is also the sum of five con­sec­u­tive primes: 421 = 73 + 79 + 83 + 89 + 97.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Hun­dreds of stu­dents bap­tized after Unite Auburn wor­ship ser­vice (Brady Tal­bert, WSFA News): “Auburn Uni­ver­si­ty senior Michael Floyd said he will nev­er for­get what he wit­nessed on cam­pus Tues­day night. ‘I’ve seen Auburn bas­ket­ball beat Ken­tucky, I’ve seen Auburn foot­ball beat Alaba­ma, but I have nev­er seen some­thing like I did on Tues­day night,’ Floyd said. Thou­sands packed­Neville Are­na for a night of wor­ship. When it was end­ing, one stu­dent want­ed to be bap­tized. With­out a tub, crowds start­ed gath­er­ing at the lake at Auburn’s Red Barn, where rough­ly 200 peo­ple ulti­mate­ly gave their lives to Christ.”
  2. Gen­der, Sex­u­al Ori­en­ta­tion and Reli­gion Among Amer­i­can Col­lege Stu­dents (Ryan Burge, Sub­stack): “What real­ly kicked this off was a report from Brown Uni­ver­si­ty that indi­cat­ed that 38% of their stu­dent body iden­ti­fies as homo­sex­u­al, bisex­u­al, queer, asex­u­al, pan­sex­u­al, ques­tion­ing, or oth­er. When that same poll was con­duct­ed ten years ear­li­er, that share was just 14%. Is Brown an out­lier here? Or are huge per­cent­ages of col­lege stu­dents not straight and/or not cis­gen­der? The sur­vey gave sev­en total options for gen­der. The first thing that needs to be point­ed out is that the vast, vast major­i­ty of young peo­ple iden­ti­fy as man or woman. In fact, this was the choice of 98.2% of all respon­dents in the sur­vey. In oth­er words, about one in fifty col­lege aged stu­dents iden­ti­fies as non­bi­na­ry, genderqueer/genderfluid, agen­der, unsure, or pre­fer not to say.… 72% of the sam­ple iden­ti­fies as straight. Anoth­er 12% says that they are bisex­u­al and 5% indi­cates that they are gay/lesbian. These three response options encom­pass about 90% of all respon­dents in the sam­ple. About two per­cent iden­ti­fy as pan­sex­u­al or queer or unsure.”
    • Full of inter­est­ing data, empha­sis in orig­i­nal. I believe Brown is accu­rate­ly report­ing its data, and I also believe Brown (and Stan­ford) are out­liers in this regard.
    • Of par­tic­u­lar note: “The groups that are the least like­ly to say that they are straight are athe­ists at 55% and agnos­tics at 53%. It’s pret­ty stag­ger­ing to con­sid­er that near­ly half of young atheists/agnostics are not het­ero­sex­u­al. Noth­ing in par­tic­u­lars are not far behind, either, at 62%. The nones are much less like­ly to be straight com­pared to their reli­gious coun­ter­parts.” (empha­sis removed for read­abil­i­ty)
  3. The Hud­dled Mass­es At The Bor­der (Andrew Sul­li­van, Sub­stack): “Lampe­dusa is a pic­turesque, rocky Ital­ian island in the Mediter­ranean between Tunisia and Sici­ly, with gor­geous beach­es and a small pop­u­la­tion of around 6,000. In just five days last week, its pop­u­la­tion tripled, as 11,000 migrants showed up in at least 199 boats, over­whelm­ing resources. The cen­ter for accom­mo­dat­ing migrants was designed for 600.”
    • Amaz­ing sta­tis­tics. The essay touch­es on Europe but focus­es on Amer­i­ca. Over­all a worth­while read what­ev­er your instincts on immi­gra­tion.
  4. The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won (Nan­cy Rom­mel­mann, The Free Press): “While Schlegel attends a non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian church and describes her faith as ‘very impor­tant to me,’ she had no desire to impose her moral­i­ty on oth­ers over the age of eigh­teen. ‘Adults have rights, so I get it,’ she says, explain­ing that all she want­ed was to craft a bill mak­ing it hard­er for kids to access videos like.…”
    • I’ve shared sto­ries about this Louisiana law before, but I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked this one.
  5. Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the spread of diver­si­ty state­ments isn’t real­ly a mech­a­nism to flush out and can­cel non­com­formists. It cre­ates con­for­mi­ty more invis­i­bly, by train­ing would-be aca­d­e­mics to adver­tise them­selves as ide­o­log­i­cal team play­ers and by screen­ing out job can­di­dates who don’t quite under­stand the rules of pro­gres­sive dis­course — who imag­ine, for instance, that adver­tis­ing their desire to ‘treat every­one the same’ is an ade­quate anti-racist com­mit­ment.”
  6. Mul­ti­ply by 37: A Sur­pris­ing­ly Accu­rate Rule of Thumb for Con­vert­ing Effect Sizes from Stan­dard Devi­a­tions to Per­centile Points (Paul T. von Hip­pel, preprint PDF):  “Edu­ca­tion­al researchers often report effect sizes in stan­dard devi­a­tion units (SD), but SD effects are hard to inter­pret. Effects are eas­i­er to inter­pret in per­centile points, but con­ver­sion from SDs to per­centile points involves a cal­cu­la­tion that is not intu­itive to edu­ca­tion­al stake­hold­ers. We point out that, if the out­come vari­able is nor­mal­ly dis­trib­uted, sim­ply mul­ti­ply­ing the SD effect by 37 usu­al­ly gives an excel­lent approx­i­ma­tion to the per­centile-point effect. For stu­dents in the [20%-80% range], the approx­i­ma­tion is accu­rate to with­in 1 per­centile point for effect sizes of up to 0.8 SD (or 29 to 30 per­centile points).”
    • Don’t have an intu­ition for stats? This is a use­ful rule of thumb. The author is a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic pol­i­cy, soci­ol­o­gy, sta­tis­tics and data sci­ence at UT Austin.
  7. In a first, sci­en­tists light up blue LED with an AA bat­tery (Ameya Pale­ja, Inter­est­ing Engi­neer­ing): “Con­ven­tion­al­ly used blue LEDs have a high turn-on volt­age of 4V for a lumi­nance of 100 cd per square meter (cd/m2). This might not sound very high, but at the indus­tri­al lev­el, it brings about issues since the volt­age is beyond what can be sup­plied by a typ­i­cal lithi­um-ion bat­tery.”
    • This legit­i­mate­ly sounds cool and could be very use­ful long-term: “An RGB LED mod­ule can pro­duce any col­or for the dis­play by using three col­ors: red, green, and blue. While red and green LEDs work well, the blue LED has been tricky from an ener­gy effi­cien­cy per­spec­tive.”
    • How­ev­er, this head­line remind­ed me that we used to go to the moon. Now we cel­e­brate blue lights.

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.