Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 432

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 432, a num­ber pleas­ant to look at because of the smooth­ly decreas­ing dig­its. Also, 432 = 4 · 33 · 22, which is kin­da cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why Two Par­ents Are the Ulti­mate Priv­i­lege (Bari Weiss, Sub­stack): “Two par­ents com­bined have more resources than one. Two par­ents in a home bring in the earnings—or at least the earn­ings capac­i­ty—of two adults. And so, in a very straight­for­ward way, we see that kids grow­ing up in sin­gle-moth­er homes are five times more like­ly to live in pover­ty than kids grow­ing up in mar­ried par­ent homes. (Kids in sin­gle-father homes are three times as like­ly to live in pover­ty.) Some of that reflects the fact that peo­ple with low­er lev­els of edu­ca­tion or income are more like­ly to become sin­gle par­ents. But even if you com­pare across moms of the same edu­ca­tion group, you see that kids who grow up in a house­hold with two par­ents have house­hold incomes that are about twice as high. That means that those par­ents are pay­ing for things like a nicer house in a safe neigh­bor­hood with good school dis­tricts. But they also spend more time with their kids. We see that kids who grow up with mar­ried par­ents have more parental time invest­ed in them: read­ing to your kid, talk­ing to your kid, dri­ving your kids to activ­i­ties. If there are two par­ents in the house­hold, there’s just more time capac­i­ty.”
    • The inter­vie­wee, Melis­sa Kear­ney, is an econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land.
    • This part near the end also caught my atten­tion: “You write that you would speak to your fel­low schol­ars about your plans for writ­ing this book, and they would say things along the lines of, ‘I tend to agree about all of this, but are you sure you want to be out there say­ing this pub­licly?’ How many areas of research, inquiry, and basic curios­i­ty about the most impor­tant things in our lives and cul­ture are third rail now? If it’s taboo to write a book say­ing two par­ents in a house are bet­ter mate­ri­al­ly than one, what else is off-lim­its, and what can we do to com­bat that?”
  2. Some links relat­ed to acad­e­mia, con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny, and speech in gen­er­al:
    • You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a Col­lege Admin­is­tra­tor (Dan Drezn­er, Sub­stack): “Why are these hor­ri­ble, no-win posi­tions? Because the pri­ma­ry job of any col­lege dean or uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent is to deal with the most spoiled, enti­tled, pig-head­ed inter­est groups imag­in­able. First, there are the stu­dents…”
    • Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff? (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Free­dom of speech for uni­ver­si­ty staff is a hard­er ques­tion than for stu­dents or fac­ul­ty. Stu­dents will move on, and a lot of fac­ul­ty hate each oth­er any­way, and don’t have to work togeth­er very much. Plus the pro­tec­tion of tenure was (sup­pos­ed­ly?) designed to sup­port free­dom of speech and opin­ion, even ‘per­ceived to be offen­sive’ opin­ions. As for stu­dents, we want them to be exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent opin­ions in their youth, even if some of those opin­ions are bad or stu­pid. Staff in these regards are dif­fer­ent.”
    • What the Uni­ver­si­ty Pres­i­dents Got Right and Wrong About Anti­se­mit­ic Speech (David French, New York Times): “I’m a for­mer lit­i­ga­tor who spent much of my legal career bat­tling cen­sor­ship on col­lege cam­pus­es, and the thing that struck me about the pres­i­dents’ answers wasn’t their legal insuf­fi­cien­cy but rather their stun­ning hypocrisy. And it’s that hypocrisy, not the pres­i­dents’ under­stand­ing of the law, that has cre­at­ed a cam­pus cri­sis.”
    • Penn’s Lead­er­ship Resigns Amid Con­tro­ver­sies Over Anti­semitism (Stephanie Saul and Alan Blind­er, New York Times): “The pres­i­dent of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, M. Eliz­a­beth Mag­ill, resigned on Sat­ur­day, four days after her tes­ti­mo­ny at a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing in which she seemed to evade the ques­tion of whether stu­dents who called for the geno­cide of Jews should be dis­ci­plined.… Ms. Mag­ill, a for­mer Stan­ford Law School dean and Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia provost, had come to the uni­ver­si­ty as part of a wave of women to lead Ivy League col­leges.”
  3. Some reflec­tions on the war between Israel and Hamas:
    • Who’s a ‘Col­o­niz­er’? How an Old Word Became a New Weapon (Roger Cohen, New York Times): “The clash over pur­port­ed Israeli colo­nial­ism is part of some­thing larg­er, a pro­found move­ment in people’s minds. The Pales­tin­ian nation­al strug­gle has become the cause of the jus­tice-seek­ing dis­pos­sessed through­out the world. At the same time, the quest of the Jews to find refuge in a nation­al home­land as the only answer to being the peren­ni­al out­cast has become a bat­tle to demon­strate that, far from being colo­nial­ist, Israel is a diverse nation large­ly formed by a gath­er­ing-in of the per­se­cut­ed.”
      • Cov­ers a lot of ground, broad­ly help­ful.
    • What Jus­tice Requires in Gaza (Jack Omer-Jacka­man, Per­sua­sion): “How much injus­tice can a war con­tain before it is no longer a just war? His­to­ry is cer­tain­ly replete with wars we con­sid­er just on the whole, but which were lit­tered with gross vio­la­tions of human rights and decen­cy. What was true on Octo­ber 7th is true today: Hamas is a mass-rap­ing, civil­ian-slaugh­ter­ing, baby-kid­nap­ping evil, whose defeat should be sup­port­ed by all friends of Israel and all friends of Pales­tine. But I can­not be silent when my own rea­son and my own heart con­clude that Gazan civil­ians are not being suf­fi­cient­ly pro­tect­ed. In the fail­ure of Israeli strikes to dis­tin­guish between civil­ian and ter­ror­ist, and in the ham­per­ing of human­i­tar­i­an aid efforts, too much of this war is being fought unjust­ly.”
  4. In 2024, the Ten­sion Between Macro­cul­ture and Micro­cul­ture Will Turn into War (Ted Gioia, Sub­stack): “The clash has reached some kind of bru­tal tip­ping point. I believe it’s about to turn into war. The fact that 2024 is an elec­tion year will esca­late the con­flict. Just wait and see. But even right now you can feel the ground shak­ing.… [alter­na­tive plat­forms are out­per­form­ing Hol­ly­wood.] This seems impos­si­ble. A sin­gle indi­vid­ual liv­ing in Greenville, North Car­oli­na defeats enor­mous glob­al busi­ness­es with tens of thou­sands of employ­ees and decades of experience—and does it repeat­ed­ly every month. But that’s exact­ly what’s hap­pen­ing.”
    • Fas­ci­nat­ing stats in here.
    • Relat­ed (at least to me): When the New York Times lost its way (James Ben­net, The Econ­o­mist): “This is a bit of a para­dox. The new news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems ide­al­is­tic, yet it has grown from cyn­i­cal roots in acad­e­mia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objec­tive truth; that there is only nar­ra­tive, and that there­fore who­ev­er con­trols the nar­ra­tive – who­ev­er gets to tell the ver­sion of the sto­ry that the pub­lic hears – has the whip hand. What mat­ters, in oth­er words, is not truth and ideas in them­selves, but the pow­er to deter­mine both in the pub­lic mind. By con­trast, the old news­room ide­ol­o­gy seems cyn­i­cal on its sur­face. It used to bug me that my edi­tors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any per­son in pow­er was a lie. And the pur­suit of objec­tiv­i­ty can seem rep­til­ian, even nihilis­tic, in its abju­ra­tion of a fixed posi­tion in moral con­tests. But the basis of that old news­room approach was ide­al­is­tic: the notion that pow­er ulti­mate­ly lies in truth and ideas, and that the cit­i­zens of a plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy, not lead­ers of any sort, must be trust­ed to judge both.”
    • This one is very long but I found it com­pelling.
  5. Con­ser­v­a­tives are suing law firms over diver­si­ty efforts. It’s work­ing. (Julian Mark and Tay­lor Telford, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Ken­ji Yoshi­no, a law pro­fes­sor and direc­tor of the Meltzer Cen­ter for Diver­si­ty, Inclu­sion and Belong­ing at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, said tar­get­ing law firms is effec­tive because it can serve as a warn­ing to oth­er indus­tries. ‘If you sue a law firm, then the law firm gets up to speed very, very quick­ly on what is per­mis­si­ble and what’s imper­mis­si­ble,’ Yoshi­no said, not­ing that many law firms advise For­tune 500 com­pa­nies, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and non­prof­its. ‘It’s a way of get­ting the mes­sage out about peo­ple need­ing to flip over their poli­cies in a wide vari­ety of domains — not just fel­low­ships, but hir­ing, recruit­ing retreats and the like.’”
    • Inter­est­ing. I don’t remem­ber hav­ing seen this strat­e­gy (sue law firms to bring about broad­er cul­tur­al change) used by either the left or the right before. Is it an inno­va­tion or am I just not remem­ber­ing some­thing in his­to­ry?
  6. How 1 in 4 Coun­tries Restrict Reli­gious Con­ver­sion (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The USCIRF report grouped the laws into four cat­e­gories. First, anti-pros­e­ly­tiz­ing laws restrict wit­ness­ing of one’s faith in 29 nations, includ­ing in Indone­sia, Israel, and Rus­sia. In Moroc­co, for exam­ple, it is ille­gal to cause a Mus­lim to ques­tion his or her reli­gion. The sec­ond cat­e­go­ry of inter­faith mar­riage is restrict­ed in 25 nations, includ­ing in Jor­dan, the Philip­pines, and Sin­ga­pore. In Qatar, for exam­ple, if a wife con­verts to Islam but the hus­band does not, a judge may annul their mar­riage. Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment laws—the third category—in 7 nations restrict the right of an indi­vid­ual to for­mal­ly con­vert to anoth­er reli­gion, includ­ing in Iraq, Malaysia, and Turkey. Myan­mar, for exam­ple, requires con­verts to sub­mit an appli­ca­tion and be sub­ject to ques­tion­ing about the gen­uine­ness of the con­ver­sion. And final­ly, apos­ta­sy laws in 7 nations make con­ver­sion ille­gal, includ­ing in Brunei, Mau­ri­ta­nia, and Sau­di Ara­bia. In Yemen, for exam­ple, the pun­ish­ment is death.”
  7. A Kore­an Sect Tar­get­ed New Zealand Chris­tians. Did Church­es Respond Effec­tive­ly? (Will­liam Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors even­tu­al­ly con­vinced their recruits that God per­mits lying if it is done for ‘God’s will.’ Before Josh’s ses­sions com­menced in Jan­u­ary 2019, his men­tor warned him to keep them a secret, point­ing to Abraham’s silence before head­ing out to sac­ri­fice Isaac in Gen­e­sis 22. Josh con­coct­ed a sto­ry about teach­ing pri­vate gui­tar lessons three morn­ings a week, a lie he told his par­ents, his girl­friend, and Stu­dent Life col­leagues. When church lead­ers and a cam­pus staff work­er con­front­ed Josh with evi­dence that he was attend­ing Shin­cheon­ji class­es, his Shin­cheon­ji instruc­tors gave him step-by-step instruc­tions on how to deny his involve­ment. They even gave Josh pre-writ­ten let­ters express­ing ‘inex­plic­a­ble hurt and con­fu­sion’ about his fam­i­ly and friends’ accu­sa­tions and claim­ing that he was no longer involved in Shin­cheon­ji activ­i­ties. Josh sent the let­ter to the church yet con­tin­ued his class­es, and in May 2019 he ‘passed over’ into the group.”
    • Relat­ed: Escap­ing High-Con­trol Reli­gious Groups (William Chong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “[If a friend is in a cult,] try to main­tain the rela­tion­ship and com­mu­ni­ca­tion at all costs. Mak­ing direct state­ments like ‘You’re in a cult!’ or ‘You’re deceived!’ are not help­ful. Cult mem­bers have often been warned that ‘a man’s ene­mies will be the mem­bers of his own house­hold’ (Matt. 10:36), so to con­front their group will be to ful­fill prophe­cies giv­en to them by their lead­ers and fur­ther prove the group to be cor­rect. It’s impor­tant not to dri­ve them fur­ther into the group. Ask your­self what need the group is ful­fill­ing in your loved one’s life.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Why Do You Send This Email?

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

Disclaimer

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

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 431

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 431, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is South Korea Dis­ap­pear­ing? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “[South Korea cur­rent­ly has] 0.7 births per woman. It’s worth unpack­ing what that means. A coun­try that sus­tained a birthrate at that lev­el would have, for every 200 peo­ple in one gen­er­a­tion, 70 peo­ple in the next one, a depop­u­la­tion exceed­ing what the Black Death deliv­ered to Europe in the 14th cen­tu­ry. Run the exper­i­ment through a sec­ond gen­er­a­tional turnover, and your orig­i­nal 200-per­son pop­u­la­tion falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re near­ing the kind of pop­u­la­tion crash caused by the fic­tion­al super­flu in Stephen King’s ‘The Stand.’ ”
    • Unlocked. The declin­ing birthrate is tru­ly one of the world’s most impor­tant long-term sto­ries. One of the rea­sons is that it will self-cor­rect, but the way that it will self-cor­rect will trans­form soci­eties.
  2. Soft Occultism (Patri­cia Patn­ode, The Amer­i­can Mind): “The new, default spir­i­tu­al iden­ti­ty for young peo­ple in the West is soft occultism, or casu­al witch­ery. This iden­ti­ty can eas­i­ly accom­pa­ny an exist­ing reli­gious affil­i­a­tion, and often does since it is so obvi­ous­ly inte­grat­ed in most aspects of mod­ern West­ern cul­ture.… Sur­veys and sci­en­tists have repeat­ed­ly found that peo­ple who have reli­gious beliefs, espe­cial­ly those who attend a for­mal house of wor­ship, tend to be hap­pi­er than those who don’t. Despite this, soft occultists pre­fer to buy puri­fy­ing green juices and par­tic­i­pate in pseu­do-reli­gious gath­er­ings. They go to Pilates class but not church, med­i­tate on per­son­al ener­gy but don’t pray. Take vit­a­min sup­ple­ments but not com­mu­nion. Sit through ther­a­py but not con­fes­sion.”
  3. The For­got­ten Dis­pute that Could Ignite a War in South Amer­i­ca (Fran­cis­co Toro, Per­sua­sion): “Yes­ter­day, Venezue­lans vot­ed in a non-bind­ing ref­er­en­dum to annex the Esse­qui­bo ter­ri­to­ry, a stretch of jun­gle that makes up around two-thirds of the land­mass of Venezuela’s east­ern neigh­bor, tiny Guyana. Des­per­ate for a win amid a new­ly unit­ed oppo­si­tion and a chron­i­cal­ly sick econ­o­my, the left­ist dic­ta­tor­ship of Nicolás Maduro dust­ed off a musty old dis­pute to fan the nation­al­ist flames. As a mat­ter of inter­na­tion­al law, Maduro has no leg to stand on. A mil­i­tary adven­ture into Esse­qui­bo is improbable—Venezuela’s mil­i­tary remains laser-focused on the one thing it does well, and that’s traf­fick­ing cocaine, not fight­ing wars. But dic­ta­tor­ships are inher­ent­ly unpre­dictable, and the prospect of a mil­i­tary adven­ture is send­ing jit­ters around the region.”
    • Some help­ful back­sto­ry.
  4. San­tos’ Cameo Earn­ings Exceed His House Salary (John John­son, News­er): “San­tos’ House salary stood at $174,000, and Semafor reports he has ‘lined up more than that sum’ in just his first 48 hours on the Cameo plat­form.”
    • This sto­ry seems to sum­ma­rize some­thing impor­tant about the soci­etal moment we are liv­ing in. I invite you to draw your own con­clu­sions about what that impor­tant some­thing is.
  5. What The Algo­rithm Does To Young Girls (Freya India, Per­sua­sion): “…I believe we have some per­son­al agency. But I also believe that a 12-year-old’s mind is no match for a giant cor­po­ra­tion using the most advanced AI to manip­u­late her behav­ior. Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncon­trolled glob­al social exper­i­ment. We were the first to have our vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and inse­cu­ri­ties fed into a machine that mag­ni­fied and refract­ed them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algo­rithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our iden­ti­ties. Con­vinced us we were sick.”
  6. The Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dents (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Over­all this was a dark day for Amer­i­can high­er edu­ca­tion. I want you to keep in mind that the incen­tives you saw on dis­play rule so many oth­er parts of the sys­tem, albeit usu­al­ly invis­i­bly. Don’t for­get that. These uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dents have solved for what they think is the equi­lib­ri­um, and it ain’t pret­ty.”
    • You can find the video of the Har­vard, MIT, and Penn pres­i­dents’ Con­gres­sion­al tes­ti­mo­ny eas­i­ly with a search if you haven’t seen it yet. Here is the spe­cif­ic snip­pet Cowen is com­ment­ing on.
    • Relat­ed: Stan­ford con­demns calls for geno­cide of Jews (Car­o­line Chen, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Stan­ford ‘unequiv­o­cal­ly’ con­demned ‘calls for the geno­cide of Jews or any peo­ples’.… The state­ment opened with acknowl­edg­ment of ‘the con­text of nation­al dis­course,’ amid nation­al con­tro­ver­sy over a Wednes­day con­gres­sion­al hear­ing where the pres­i­dents of Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia appeared to evade ques­tions on dis­ci­plin­ing stu­dents who called for the geno­cide of Jew­ish peo­ple.”
  7. The Prob­lem­at­ic Inklings (G. Con­nor Salter, Mere Ortho­doxy): “Of course, see­ing some­one as a saint makes it hard to believe the per­son had flaws. It’s not easy to admit that the Inklings—Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and their friends who met week­ly to share their writings—weren’t the per­fect heroes revered in Chris­t­ian home­school guides. But even­tu­al­ly, we must rec­og­nize that everyone’s life is com­pli­cat­ed.”
    • Sur­pris­ing details I did not know, most­ly about some of the less famous Inklings.

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 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.