Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 396

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.

396 is appar­ent­ly the num­ber of 3x3 slid­ing puz­zle posi­tions that require exact­ly 11 moves to solve start­ing with a hole in the cen­ter. I have not ver­i­fied that claim.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Glob­al Trans­for­ma­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty Is Here (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, The New York Times): “Mul­ti­ple schol­ars point to West­ern Europe as an exam­ple of what’s to come in the Unit­ed States. Today, the three largest Protes­tant church­es in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evan­gel­i­cal megachurch­es of a charis­mat­ic or Pen­te­costal bent. A study last year exam­ined Chi­nese church­es in Britain that were expe­ri­enc­ing expo­nen­tial growth, some­times dou­bling or tripling in size in a few years. Last April, the Ital­ian Chi­nese The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary opened in Rome to train Man­darin- and Can­tonese-speak­ing pas­tors. Some of the largest megachurch­es in metro Lon­don are led by Africans, includ­ing Kingsway Inter­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian Cen­ter, which is led by a Niger­ian, Matthew Ashimolowo, and is most like­ly the largest church in Europe.”
    • I have unlocked this one.
  2. The school shoot­ing in Nashville was the defin­ing news event of the week. This sto­ry is a tragedy fea­tur­ing three hot-but­ton top­ics: trans issues, Chris­t­ian per­se­cu­tion, and guns. A lot more is going to come out about this and peo­ple on the left and the right are going to lose their minds try­ing to spin it. If you see some­thing that thought­ful­ly explores one or more of these ele­ments let me know. Here are some reflec­tions on it that I have found inter­est­ing so far.
    • Pres­by­ter­ian School Mourns 6 Dead in Nashville Shoot­ing (Daniel Sil­li­man and Kate Shell­nutt, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “At Wood­mont Bap­tist, not long after they heard the sirens whir by, pas­tors and staff read reports of a shoot­ing at Covenant. When they saw on Twit­ter that their church was named as the reuni­fi­ca­tion site, they didn’t ques­tion it—they just put on their nametags, met police in the park­ing lot, and pre­pared to open their doors to bus­es of sur­viv­ing chil­dren and par­ents des­per­ate to see their kids safe and sound, senior pas­tor Nathan Park­er told CT. The chil­dren gath­ered in the fel­low­ship hall, where the stu­dent min­is­ter hand­ed out col­or­ing sheets and began pro­cess­ing the shoot­ing with them.”
    • Heav­i­ly Armed Assailant Kills Six at Chris­t­ian School (Emi­ly Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Lev­en­son and Jesus Jiménez, New York Times): “Chief Drake said that the assailant was ‘at one point a stu­dent’ at the school.… There was con­fu­sion about the gen­der iden­ti­ty of the assailant in the imme­di­ate after­math of the attack. Chief Drake said the shoot­er iden­ti­fied as trans­gen­der. Offi­cials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shoot­er, but, accord­ing to a social media post and a LinkedIn pro­file, the shoot­er appeared to iden­ti­fy as male in recent months.… Chief Drake said it was too ear­ly to dis­cuss a pos­si­ble motive for the shoot­ing, though he con­firmed that the attack was tar­get­ed.”
    • Heed­ing the Nashville shooter’s own voice: Do jour­nal­ists want the ‘man­i­festo’ released? (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): “Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, jour­nal­ists would be doing every­thing that they can to answer the ‘why’ ques­tion in this case, includ­ing call­ing for the release of Hale’s man­i­festo text and oth­er mate­ri­als linked to the attack. But these are not nor­mal cir­cum­stances.… Unless I have missed some­thing, the AP cov­er­age — the news mate­r­i­al that will appear in most local news­pa­pers — have made zero ref­er­ences to the shooter’s own social-media mate­ri­als. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, these online sources are one of the first places that reporters raised in the Inter­net era go for insights into this kind of sto­ry.”
    • At a loss for words (Joshua Katz, The New Cri­te­ri­on): “I am sor­ry, there­fore, that TheNew York Times, in its above-the-fold front-page sto­ry yes­ter­day, names the shoot­er before the vic­tims.… Until we know more about the killer, it would be unwise to speak of her motives, though it is obvi­ous­ly note­wor­thy that a stan­dard data­base of mass shoot­ings in the Unit­ed States since 1966 does not record a sin­gle female shoot­er at a K–12 school. (Bizarrely, the main arti­cle in the Times ignores this fact, instead stat­ing that the shoot­ing was ‘unusu­al’ because Covenant is a pri­vate ele­men­tary school rather than a pub­lic high school.)”
      • Author sound famil­iar? Katz was a pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton and is now a fel­low at AEI and he’s been men­tioned in these week­ly roundups before.
    • In the Face of Tragedy, Peti­tion­ing God Is an Act of Faith (David French, New York Times): “It is a ter­ri­ble sign of our polar­ized times that the very con­cept of prayer in the midst of tragedy has itself become con­tentious. ‘Spare us your prayers,’ some will say. ‘We demand action.’ But what if peo­ple need prayer? What if griev­ing neigh­bors are des­per­ate for prayer?… For the faith­ful believ­er, prayer isn’t a sub­sti­tute for action, it’s a pre­req­ui­site for action. It grounds us before we move to serve oth­ers. It grounds us before we speak in the pub­lic square.”
      • I’ve unlocked the pay­wall on this one. Well worth your time.
    • Nashville’s Satan­ic Theo­phany (Rod Dreher, Sub­stack): “Lis­ten to me: this has been the strat­e­gy of LGBT advo­cates for more than twen­ty years now: con­vince the normies that if they don’t give the activists what they want, that they will have blood on their hands. At the turn of the cen­tu­ry, activists con­vinced schools that in order to com­bat bul­ly­ing — a wor­thy endeav­or — they had to teach gay ide­ol­o­gy. You might have thought, ‘Real­ly? Why isn’t it enough to teach that bul­ly­ing is wrong, and to pun­ish bul­lies?’ The ques­tion itself reveals the real moti­va­tion behind the cam­paign.”
      • Dreher recent­ly moved entire­ly to Sub­stack.
    • Not about the shoot­ing at all, but rel­e­vant to think­ing about issues sur­round­ing trans­gen­der ide­ol­o­gy. Under­stand­ing the Sex Bina­ry (Col­in Wright, City Jour­nal): “When biol­o­gists claim that ‘sex is bina­ry,’ they mean some­thing straight­for­ward: there are only two sex­es. This state­ment is true because an individual’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) their pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs (i.e., gonads) are orga­nized, through devel­op­ment, to pro­duce. Males have pri­ma­ry repro­duc­tive organs orga­nized around the pro­duc­tion of sperm; females, ova. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sex­es that a per­son can be. Sex is there­fore bina­ry.”
    • Also not about this shoot­ing but con­cern­ing guns in gen­er­al, the most infor­ma­tive thing I’ve seen is this debate between two pas­tors on guns that I shared back in vol­ume 48 (you have to click through to see it since it’s mul­ti­ple links). Many more relat­ed arti­cles I’ve shared through the years can be found at https://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/tag/guns
  3. The age of aver­age (Alex Mur­rell, per­son­al blog): “The inte­ri­ors of our homes, cof­fee shops and restau­rants all look the same. The build­ings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we dri­ve, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, iden­ti­ties and taglines all look the same. But it doesn’t end there. In the age of aver­age, homo­gene­ity can be found in an almost indef­i­nite num­ber of domains. The Insta­gram pic­tures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the sky­lines we see, the web­sites we vis­it and the illus­tra­tions which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on.”
    • High­ly rec­om­mend­ed. The accom­pa­ny­ing pho­tos are strik­ing.
  4. How Chris­t­ian Is Chris­t­ian Nation­al­ism? (Kele­fa San­neh, The New York­er): “If Amer­i­ca was once bet­ter than it is now, why did our Chris­t­ian fore­bears allow it to get worse? In answer­ing this ques­tion, Wolfe some­times sounds more like a crit­ic of the faith than a defend­er of it.… Wolfe thinks that there is some­thing ‘weird’ about the way in which the U.S. and oth­er West­ern nations reject eth­nic chauvinism—officially, anyway—in favor of an ‘ide­ol­o­gy of uni­ver­sal­i­ty.’ But this weird uni­ver­sal­i­ty is part of what sets Chris­tian­i­ty apart from most oth­er creeds.”
    • An insight­ful arti­cle in the New York­er. The author is the son of a famous the­olo­gian.
  5. Hollywood’s Great Awak­en­ing (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “Made by Chris­t­ian pro­duc­tion house King­dom Sto­ry Com­pa­ny and backed by mega dis­trib­u­tor Lion­s­gate, [Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion] earned back its $15 mil­lion bud­get the week­end it opened, when crit­ics pre­dict­ed it would gross clos­er to $6 or $7 mil­lion. That’s a tri­umphant per­for­mance com­pared to the week­end debuts of recent block­busters, like 65, a sci-fi flick with a $91 mil­lion bud­get that made just $12.3 mil­lion, and M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Knock at the Cab­in, which brought in $14.1 mil­lion. Since its release on Feb­ru­ary 24, Jesus Rev­o­lu­tion has grossed $49 mil­lion in tick­et sales—besting many of this year’s Oscar nom­i­nees com­bined at U.S. box offices.”
  6. Some AI-relat­ed per­spec­tives
    • Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “I am remind­ed of the advent of the print­ing press, after Guten­berg. Of course the press brought an immense amount of good, enabling the sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions, among many oth­er ben­e­fits. But it also cre­at­ed writ­ings by Lenin, Hitler, and Mao’s Red Book. It is a moot point whether you can ‘blame’ those on the print­ing press, nonethe­less the press brought (in com­bi­na­tion with some oth­er inno­va­tions) a remark­able amount of true, mov­ing his­to­ry. How about the Wars of Reli­gion and the bloody 17th cen­tu­ry to boot? Still, if you were redo­ing world his­to­ry you would take the print­ing press in a heart­beat. Who needs pover­ty, squalor, and recur­rences of Ghenghis Khan-like fig­ures?”
    • Response to Tyler Cowen’s Exis­ten­tial risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human his­to­ry (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “If you cre­ate some­thing with supe­ri­or intel­li­gence, that oper­ates at faster speed, that can make copies of itself, what hap­pens by default? That new source of intel­li­gence will rapid­ly gain con­trol of the future. It is very, very dif­fi­cult to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing even under ide­al cir­cum­stances.”
      • A rebut­tal to the Cowen piece.
    • Cowen defends his views (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): he is defend­ing his views against a Scott Alexan­der piece which I did­n’t find as inter­est­ing as the Mow­showitz piece I linked above. The rejoin­der is broad enough to be use­ful on its own.
    • It is inter­est­ing to think about AI risk as a Chris­t­ian who believes in demons which seem to be smarter than humans and who are described sev­er­al times in the Bible as run­ning sig­nif­i­cant parts of this world.
  7. Free Will Is Real (Stu­art T. Doyle, Skep­tic): “Here I will try to con­vince you that free will is real and not an illu­sion. I’ll argue that far from being exem­plars of ratio­nal­i­ty and skep­ti­cism, the main argu­ments against free will make unjus­ti­fi­able log­i­cal leaps and are naïve in the light of cut­ting-edge sci­en­tif­ic findings.Throughout the philo­soph­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, resolv­ing the ques­tion of whether or not we have free will has often revolved around two cri­te­ria for free will: (1) We must be the true sources of our own actions. (2) We must have the abil­i­ty to do oth­er­wise. I argue that humans meet both cri­te­ria through two con­cepts: scale and unde­cid­abil­i­ty.”

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 On What Athe­ists Say There Is (M. Antho­ny Mills, Soci­ety of Catholic Sci­en­tists): “Accord­ing to the athe­ist, the theist’s error is believ­ing in one too many things. Yet, for the the­ist, the dis­agree­ment is not about the exis­tence of one par­tic­u­lar thing, but ‘about every­thing,’ as Mac­In­tyre puts it.” The begin­ning and end are excel­lent. The mid­dle mud­dles unless you have very pre­cise philo­soph­i­cal inter­ests. The author has a Ph.D. in phi­los­o­phy. From vol­ume 275.

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 395

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 395, which feels like it ought to have a lot of fac­tors but only has 79 and 5.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. What if Kids Are Sad and Stressed Because Their Par­ents Are? (David French, New York Times): “The same year that 44 per­cent of teenagers report­ed suf­fer­ing from seri­ous sad­ness, accord­ing to the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion, 41.5 per­cent of adults report­ed ‘recent symp­toms of an anx­i­ety or depres­sive dis­or­der,’ an increase from an already high base­line of 36.4 per­cent just months before. More­over, while sui­cide rates have gone up in the youngest cohort of Amer­i­cans, they still mate­ri­al­ly lag sui­cide rates among their par­ents and grand­par­ents.… Teens do not exist on an island. The con­nec­tion between parental emo­tion­al health and the emo­tion­al health of their kids is well estab­lished. More­over, the way par­ents raise their kids can, of course, direct­ly affect emo­tion­al health.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall on this one.
  2. Com­pa­ny that Trade­marked ‘Wor­ship Leader’ Makes Oth­ers Drop the Term (Kelsey Kramer McGin­nis, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Since 2016, Authen­tic Media has owned the rights to the phrase ‘wor­ship leader’ when applied to peri­od­i­cals, online pub­li­ca­tions, and web­sites with resources around wor­ship. Pri­or to that, the trade­mark had been owned by Maranatha Music, Wor­ship Leader’s pre­vi­ous own­er, since 1993. The com­pa­ny also holds trade­marks for ‘wor­ship leader work­shop’ and ‘song dis­cov­ery.’ ”
  3. Is It Time to Quit ‘Qui­et Time’? (Dru John­son and Celi­na Dur­gin, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “If today’s com­mon rit­u­als of Bible engage­ment are not work­ing, then we must dis­rupt them in favor of deep learn­ing prac­tices. These new habits could con­sist of com­mu­nal lis­ten­ing, deep div­ing, repeat­ed read­ing of whole books of the Bible, or some oth­er strat­e­gy. But the assump­tion that dai­ly devo­tions alone will yield scrip­tur­al lit­er­a­cy and flu­en­cy no longer appears ten­able, because it nev­er was.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent, who says, “The title is very click­baitish, but the arti­cle itself has good points. It’s cri­tiquing the prac­tice of only super­fi­cial­ly and pas­sive­ly read­ing short pas­sages of Scrip­ture iso­lat­ed from their con­text in the rest of the Bible and iso­lat­ed from oth­er believ­ers.”
  4. Edu­ca­tion Com­men­tary is Dom­i­nat­ed by Opti­mism Bias (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “The opti­mism bias in edu­ca­tion cir­cles has sev­er­al ortho­dox­ies. 1. Every stu­dent is capa­ble of aca­d­e­m­ic flour­ish­ing, and every time a stu­dent does not flour­ish, it must be the result of some sort of error or injus­tice.… 5. Any­one who dis­agrees with this doc­trine hates chil­dren, sup­ports inequal­i­ty, and doesn’t care about poor peo­ple.”
  5. How to Learn and Teach Eco­nom­ics with Large Lan­guage Mod­els, Includ­ing GPT (Tyler Cowen & Alexan­der T. Tabar­rok, SSRN): “One gen­er­al rule is that you should keep on ask­ing GPT fol­low-up ques­tions to get more out of it. It is more like squeez­ing a lemon than throw­ing a dart at a tar­get.… Don’t be pas­sive, as with GPTs you always need to ask, and it rewards you when you are being demand­ing.”
    • A lot of very good advice about using GPT and oth­er LLMs in here in here.
  6. How to Under­stand the Well-Being Gap between Lib­er­als and Con­ser­v­a­tives (Musa al-Ghar­bi, Amer­i­can Affairs Jour­nal): “The well-being gap between lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives [show­ing that con­ser­v­a­tives are hap­pi­er and bet­ter-adjust­ed than lib­er­als] is one of the most robust pat­terns in social sci­ence research. It is not a prod­uct of things that hap­pened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the avail­able data reach. The dif­fer­ences man­i­fest across age, gen­der, race, reli­gion, and oth­er dimen­sions. They are not mere­ly present in the Unit­ed States, but in most oth­er stud­ied coun­tries as well.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Colom­bia.
  7. A lot of Stan­ford-relat­ed sto­ries, most­ly neg­a­tive:
    • The Mar­vel­lous Boys of Palo Alto (David Leav­itt, The New York­er): “To grow up in Stan­ford is to be a son of Stan­ford in a way that no mere grad­u­ate can ever know. Bankman-Fried is a son of Stan­ford if there ever was one, as am I. And what are sons of Stan­ford taught? That if we should get into trou­ble, even real bad trou­ble, we can rest assured that our par­ents will bail us out, which is tan­ta­mount to rest­ing assured that Stan­ford will bail us out, since Stan­ford has tak­en our par­ents to its heart and feeds mon­ey reg­u­lar­ly into their bank accounts and owns the land on which they live. This faith in the cer­ti­tude of pro­tec­tion, if not unique to the Stan­ford nation-state, is, I am con­vinced, one of its most essen­tial aspects.”
      • The author grew up in the house in which Sam Bankman-Fried is now under house arrest.
    • Stanford’s War Against Its Own Stu­dents (Francesca Block, The Free Press): “Any place that sets a bar so high that you have to be lit­er­al­ly per­fect to get there; and when you get here, if you don’t stay per­fect, [Stan­ford] will pun­ish you with every admin­is­tra­tive resource they have for embar­rass­ing them,” Paul­meier added. “To me, that just sounds like an abu­sive par­ent, not like an edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion you should mod­el your kid’s life around.”
    • Stan­ford’s Dark Hand in Twit­ter Cen­sor­ship (Thomas Adamo & Josi­ah Jon­er, The Stan­ford Review): “Emails revealed that the Stan­ford Inter­net Obser­va­to­ry (SIO) active­ly col­lab­o­rat­ed with Twit­ter to sup­press infor­ma­tion they knew was fac­tu­al­ly true. Taibbi’s inves­ti­ga­tion revealed that Stanford’s Viral­i­ty Project ‘rec­om­mends that mul­ti­ple plat­forms take action even against ‘sto­ries of true vac­cine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hes­i­tan­cy.’”
      • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal.
    • Next Steps on Protests and Free Speech (Dean Jen­ny S. Mar­tinez, let­ter to the Stan­ford Law School): “I want to set expec­ta­tions clear­ly going for­ward: our com­mit­ment to diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion is not going to take the form of hav­ing the school admin­is­tra­tion announce insti­tu­tion­al posi­tions on a wide range of cur­rent social and polit­i­cal issues, make fre­quent insti­tu­tion­al state­ments about cur­rent news events, or exclude or con­demn speak­ers who hold views on social and polit­i­cal issues with whom some or even many in our com­mu­ni­ty dis­agree. I believe that focus on these types of actions as the hall­mark of an ‘inclu­sive’ envi­ron­ment can lead to cre­at­ing and enforc­ing an insti­tu­tion­al ortho­doxy that is not only at odds with our core com­mit­ment to aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, but also that would cre­ate an echo cham­ber that ill pre­pares stu­dents to go out into and act as effec­tive advo­cates in a soci­ety that dis­agrees about many impor­tant issues.”
      • The dean is spit­ting straight fire in this let­ter.

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 The Sins That Cry Out to Heav­en (Eduar­do Andi­no, First Things): “The Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion speaks of four pec­ca­ta cla­man­tia, or sins that cry out to heav­en for vengeance: mur­der, sodomy, oppres­sion of the poor, and defraud­ing work­ers of their wages…. This is not an arbi­trary col­lec­tion of sins.” From vol­ume 274

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 394

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 394, which is a Schröder Num­ber (some­thing which I did not pre­vi­ous­ly know exist­ed).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Stan­ford-relat­ed
    • Employ­ee charged with lying about Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty rapes that shook cam­pus (Robert Salon­ga and Jakob Rodgers, San Jose Mer­cury News): “A Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty employ­ee who author­i­ties say twice report­ed last year that she was vicious­ly dragged out of sight on cam­pus and raped — touch­ing off pan­ic about a ser­i­al preda­tor — is now accused of fab­ri­cat­ing the claims as part of a revenge plot against a co-work­er.”
      • This whole thing is so nuts on so many lev­els. This was by far the most shock­ing thing I read this week.
    • Law School activists protest Judge Kyle Duncan’s vis­it to cam­pus (Gre­ta Reich, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “In his open­ing remarks, Dun­can addressed these posters and chants. ‘I’m not blind — I can see this out­pour­ing of con­tempt,’ Dun­can said. With audi­ence inter­rup­tions con­tin­u­ing through­out the speech, he lat­er said ‘In this school, the inmates have got­ten con­trol of the asy­lum.’ ”
    • Pres­i­dent, law school dean apol­o­gize to Judge Kyle Dun­can for ‘dis­rup­tion’ to his speech (Gre­ta Reich, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Tessier-Lav­i­gne and Mar­tinez apol­o­gized for this inci­dent, writ­ing, ‘Staff mem­bers who should have enforced uni­ver­si­ty poli­cies failed to do so, and instead inter­vened in inap­pro­pri­ate ways that are not aligned with the university’s com­mit­ment to free speech.’ The let­ter ends with a promise to pre­vent sim­i­lar inci­dents from hap­pen­ing in the future.”
    • Stu­dent Activists Tar­get Stan­ford Law School Dean in Revolt Over Her Apol­o­gy (Aaron Sibar­i­um, Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con): “[The protest against the Dean] was even larg­er than the one that dis­rupt­ed Duncan’s talk, and came on the heels of state­ments from at least three stu­dent groups rebuk­ing Martinez’s apol­o­gy. The Stan­ford Nation­al Lawyers Guild said Sat­ur­day that Mar­tinez had thrown ‘capa­ble and com­pas­sion­ate admin­is­tra­tors’ under the bus. The law school’s Immi­gra­tion & Human Rights Law Asso­ci­a­tion issued a sim­i­lar dec­la­ra­tion on Sun­day, writ­ing to its mail­ing list that Stanford’s apol­o­gy to Dun­can ‘has only made this sit­u­a­tion worse.’ And Stan­ford Law School’s chap­ter of the Amer­i­can Con­sti­tu­tion Soci­ety expressed out­rage that Mar­tinez and Tessier-Lav­i­gne had framed Dun­can ‘as a vic­tim, when in fact he him­self had made civ­il dia­logue impos­si­ble.’ ”
    • Hat­ing Every­one Every­where All At Once At Stan­ford (Ken White, Sub­stack): “Stu­dents think that they should be able to dic­tate which speak­ers their peers invite, who can speak, what they can say, and who can lis­ten. They’re not sat­is­fied with the most free-speech-excep­tion­al­ist sys­tem in the world that lets them respond to speech by assem­bling, protest­ing, and revil­ing peo­ple of author­i­ty like Judge Dun­can. They demand the right not just to speak, but to con­trol the speech of oth­ers. That’s straight-up thug­gish, an aspi­ra­tion born of a fas­cist soul. These are law stu­dents. They are train­ing to express them­selves for a liv­ing. If their view is ‘we can’t respond to awful speech, we can only stop it from hap­pen­ing,’ then they’re going to be ter­ri­ble lawyers.”
    • EXCLUSIVE: US Judge Kyle Dun­can Inter­view (Rod Dreher, Sub­stack): “The attack was inti­mate­ly per­son­al and, frankly, dis­gust­ing. If I talked to a dog the way those stu­dents talked to me, I’d feel ashamed. (Actu­al­ly, there was a dog there, with paint on its fur in what is evi­dent­ly one ver­sion of a trans­gen­der flag. But I don’t blame the dog).”
  2. Black, Evan­gel­i­cal and Torn (Caleb Gayle, New York Times): “While start­ing out in the S.B.C. as a Black pas­tor may appear to be a fric­tion­less choice, for some­one like McKissic, as his expe­ri­ence sug­gests, con­tin­u­ing to remain with­in the fold as a Black pas­tor can amount to find­ing enough tech­ni­cal­i­ties to stay.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall on this arti­cle.
  3. AI-relat­ed
    • Can A.I. Treat Men­tal Ill­ness? (Dhruv Khullar): “I signed up for Woe­bot, and dis­cov­ered that using the app could feel cen­ter­ing…  Once, I told Woe­bot that I was feel­ing anx­ious about work. ‘Anx­i­ety can be a real mon­ster to han­dle,’ it wrote back. ‘I’m sor­ry that you’re deal­ing with it.’ Woe­bot gen­tly us inquired whether I want­ed to work  through my prob­lem togeth­er, then asked, ‘Do you think this anx­i­ety might be serv­ing you in some way?’ It point­ed out that stress has its ben­e­fits: it could moti­vate the some­one to work hard­er.… I knew that I was talk­ing to a com­put­er, but in a way I didn’t mind. The app became a vehi­cle for me to artic­u­late and exam­ine my own thoughts. I was talk­ing to myself.”
      • I high­ly rec­om­mend this arti­cle. It touch­es on men­tal health and sui­cide, dif­fer­ent styles of ther­a­py, and online chat­bots as ther­a­pists (Psy­chG­PT). Fun­ni­ly enough, the ini­tial cre­ator doesn’t even agree with A.I. as a mode of ther­a­py. The arti­cle also has some play­ful Gen X humor!
    • This Changes Every­thing (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “…‘as A.I. con­tin­ues to blow past us in bench­mark after bench­mark of high­er cog­ni­tion, we quell our anx­i­ety by insist­ing that what dis­tin­guish­es true con­scious­ness is emo­tions, per­cep­tion, the abil­i­ty to expe­ri­ence and feel: the qual­i­ties, in oth­er words, that we share with ani­mals.’ This is an inver­sion of cen­turies of thought, O’Gieblyn notes, in which human­i­ty jus­ti­fied its own dom­i­nance by empha­siz­ing our cog­ni­tive unique­ness. We may soon find our­selves tak­ing meta­phys­i­cal shel­ter in the sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence of con­scious­ness: the qual­i­ties we share with ani­mals but not, so far, with A.I.”
    • Ope­nAI co-founder on company’s past approach to open­ly shar­ing research: ‘We were wrong’ (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “When asked why Ope­nAI changed its approach to shar­ing its research, Sutskev­er replied sim­ply, ‘We were wrong. Flat out, we were wrong. If you believe, as we do, that at some point, AI — AGI — is going to be extreme­ly, unbe­liev­ably potent, then it just does not make sense to open-source. It is a bad idea… I ful­ly expect that in a few years it’s going to be com­plete­ly obvi­ous to every­one that open-sourc­ing AI is just not wise.’ ”
  4. Review: The Best Minds, by Jonathan Rosen (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “He fin­ished his under­grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion at Yale in three years, then got a job with the pres­ti­gious (and well-remu­ner­a­tive) finan­cial firm Bain Cap­i­tal. But in his ear­ly 20s, Lau­dor was beset by hal­lu­ci­na­tions and para­noia, expe­ri­enc­ing some­times-vio­lent delu­sions that fright­ened his devot­ed par­ents. He was diag­nosed with schiz­o­phre­nia and spent eight months in a psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty. Unde­terred, he emerged to attend Yale Law School, where he became a favorite of the dean and cham­pi­oned by the fac­ul­ty. He was pro­filed in a glow­ing New York Times piece that rep­re­sent­ed his resilience as a sym­bol for the men­tal­ly ill every­where.… Then he hacked his preg­nant girl­friend to death with a kitchen knife.”
    • This book review is engross­ing and full of sub­stance.
  5. Q&A: Stu­art Schmill on MIT’s deci­sion to rein­state the SAT/ACT require­ment (Kathy Wren, MIT News): “It turns out the short­est path for many stu­dents to demon­strate suf­fi­cient prepa­ra­tion — par­tic­u­lar­ly for stu­dents with less access to edu­ca­tion­al cap­i­tal — is through the SAT/ACT, because most stu­dents can study for these exams using free tools at Khan Acad­e­my, but they (usu­al­ly) can’t force their high school to offer advanced cal­cu­lus cours­es, for exam­ple. So, the SAT/ACT can actu­al­ly open the door to MIT for these stu­dents, too.”
  6. Of Course You Know What “Woke” Means (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term ‘woke’ myself, not with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion or quo­ta­tion marks. It’s too much of a cul­ture war pin­ball and now deemed too pejo­ra­tive to be use­ful. I much, much pre­fer the term ‘social jus­tice pol­i­tics’ to refer to the school of pol­i­tics that is typ­i­cal­ly referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neu­tral in ter­mi­nol­o­gy. How­ev­er: there is such a school of pol­i­tics, it’s absurd that so many peo­ple pre­tend not to know what woke means, and the prob­lem could be eas­i­ly solved if peo­ple who sup­port woke pol­i­tics would adopt a name for oth­ers to use.”
  7. Evan­gel­i­cals Are the Most Beloved US Faith Group Among Evan­gel­i­cals (Kate Shell­nut, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In a Pew Research Cen­ter report released Wednes­day, 27 per­cent of Amer­i­cans expressed an unfa­vor­able view of evan­gel­i­cals, com­pared to 10 per­cent who have a neg­a­tive view of main­line Protes­tants or 18 per­cent who have a neg­a­tive view of Catholics. About as many have a favor­able approach to evangelicals—28 percent—but that’s most­ly due to pos­i­tive sen­ti­ment from Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals them­selves, about a quar­ter of the pop­u­la­tion.… (The worst rat­ings, though, went to Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es, Sci­en­tol­ogy, and Satanism.)”
    • Demog­ra­ph­er Lyman Stone respond­ed to the sur­vey results on Twit­ter with “The group most hat­ed in Amer­i­ca by peo­ple who aren’t mem­bers of it is.… evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians. More than Jews, athe­ists, or Mor­mons, we are hat­ed by our neigh­bors. We have legit­i­mate grounds to believe we are expe­ri­enc­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion. and nobody has more neg­a­tive and hos­tile atti­tudes towards their out­grap [sic] than athe­ists. the only peo­ple athe­ists don’t hate are Jews, and even then they’re the most luke­warm on Jews of any group. athe­ists: con­tin­u­ing a sto­ried tra­di­tion of being angry all the time at every­one”
    • His Twit­ter account is cur­rent­ly set to pri­vate because of all the blow­back he got, but he says will take it pub­lic again and this thread will be well worth read­ing — his crit­ics take some shots at him and he shoots back very effec­tive­ly.

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 ‘Hand­maid’ real­i­ty: Deeply reli­gious mar­riages have more spousal equal­i­ty (Nao­mi Schae­fer Riley & Hal Boyd, New York Post): “Reli­gious, home-wor­ship­ping cou­ples also report greater rela­tion­ship qual­i­ty and sta­bil­i­ty, and they are three times more like­ly than less-reli­gious peers to report a sex­u­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing rela­tion­ship. The women don’t appear to be repressed; in fact, they’re gen­er­al­ly more like­ly to say they’re hap­py and that their life has mean­ing and pur­pose.” And yet again research con­firms Bib­li­cal pre­cepts. Allow me to take his oppor­tu­ni­ty to offer a friend­ly pas­toral reminder to mar­ry anoth­er Chris­t­ian, should you mar­ry. From vol­ume 272.

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 393

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 393, which I find inter­est­ing because it only has two fac­tors: 131 and 3.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Some AI thoughts
    • The Walui­gi Effect (mega-post) (Cleo Nar­do, Less Wrong): “Here’s an exam­ple — in 101 Dal­ma­tions, we meet a pair of pro­tag­o­nists (Roger and Ani­ta) who love dogs, show com­pas­sion, seek sim­ple plea­sures, and want a fam­i­ly. Can you guess who will turn up in Act One? Yep, at 13:00 we meet Cruel­la De Vil — she hates dogs, shows cru­el­ty, seeks mon­ey and fur, is a child­less spin­ster, etc. Cruel­la is the com­plete inver­sion of Roger and Ani­ta. She is the walui­gi of Roger and Ani­ta. Recall that you expect­ed to meet a char­ac­ter with these traits more­so after meet­ing the pro­tag­o­nists. Cruel­la De Vil is not a char­ac­ter you would expect to find out­side of the con­text of a Dis­ney dog sto­ry, but once you meet the pro­tag­o­nists you will have that con­text and then the Cruel­la becomes a nat­ur­al and pre­dictable con­tin­u­a­tion. [And since LLMs are all about con­tin­u­a­tion, sim­u­lat­ed Cruel­las emerge pre­dictably.]”
      • This was eas­i­ly the most inter­est­ing thing I read this week. A very clever argu­ment.
    • Why am I not ter­ri­fied of AI? (Scott Aaron­son, per­son­al blog): “In the Ortho­dox AI-doomers’ own account, the paper­clip-max­i­miz­ing AI would’ve mas­tered the nuances of human moral phi­los­o­phy far more com­plete­ly than any human—the bet­ter to deceive the humans, en route to extract­ing the iron from their bod­ies to make more paper­clips. And yet the AI would nev­er once use all that learn­ing to ques­tion its paper­clip direc­tive. I acknowl­edge that this is pos­si­ble. I deny that it’s triv­ial.”
      • The author is a CS prof from UT who works at Ope­nAI
  2. Why the Men­tal Health of Lib­er­al Girls Sank First and Fastest (Jonathan Haidt, Sub­stack): “We are now 11 years into the largest epi­dem­ic of ado­les­cent men­tal ill­ness ever record­ed. I know so many fam­i­lies that have been thrown into fear and tur­moil by a child’s sui­cide attempt. You prob­a­bly do too, giv­en that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten ado­les­cents now say they have made an attempt to kill them­selves. It is hit­ting all polit­i­cal and demo­graph­ic groups. The evi­dence is abun­dant that social media is a major cause of the epi­dem­ic, and per­haps the major cause. It’s time we start­ed treat­ing social media and oth­er apps designed for ‘engage­ment’ (i.e., addic­tion) like alco­hol, tobac­co, and gam­bling, or, because they can harm soci­ety as well as their users, per­haps like auto­mo­biles and firearms.”
    • A well-writ­ten and dis­tress­ing sum­ma­ry of the cur­rent state of ado­les­cent and young adult men­tal health. The author is a social psy­chol­o­gist at NYU.
    • Relat­ed: Review of 1,039 stud­ies indi­cates exer­cise can be more effec­tive than coun­selling or med­ica­tion for depres­sion (Ben Singh, Car­ol Maher, & Jac­in­ta Brins­ley, Psy­Post): “When com­par­ing the size of the ben­e­fits of exer­cise to oth­er com­mon treat­ments for men­tal health con­di­tions from pre­vi­ous sys­tem­at­ic reviews, our find­ings sug­gest exer­cise is around 1.5 times more effec­tive than either med­ica­tion or cog­ni­tive behav­iour ther­a­py.”
      • I expect this will be con­test­ed in future stud­ies. Fas­ci­nat­ing, though. The authors are all at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Aus­tralia. The lead author seems to be the Aus­tralian equiv­a­lent of a MD/PhD.
    • Relat­ed: Lynch­ing the Deplorables (Chris Hedges, Sub­stack): “The Jan. 6 pro­tes­tors were not the first to occu­py Con­gres­sion­al offices, includ­ing Nan­cy Pelosi’s office. Young envi­ron­men­tal activists from the Sun­rise Move­ment, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even con­gres­sion­al staffers have engaged in numer­ous occu­pa­tions of con­gres­sion­al offices and inter­rupt­ed con­gres­sion­al hear­ings. What will hap­pen to groups such as Code Pink if they occu­py con­gres­sion­al offices with Repub­li­cans in con­trol of the White House, the Con­gress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pre­tri­al deten­tion? Will they be giv­en lengthy prison terms based on dubi­ous inter­pre­ta­tions of the law? Will they be con­sid­ered domes­tic ter­ror­ists? Will protests and civ­il dis­obe­di­ence become impos­si­ble?”
      • This is a sane and sober­ing essay.
  3. Test­ing Com­mon The­o­ries on the Rela­tion­ship Between Pre­mar­i­tal Sex and Mar­i­tal Sta­bil­i­ty (Jesse Smith and Nicholas H. Wolfin­ger): “The table below shows the wide range of vari­ables we used to try to explain the rela­tion­ship between pre­mar­i­tal sex part­ners and divorce. Do any of them mat­ter? The answer is a clear no. With­out con­trols, peo­ple with pre­mar­i­tal part­ners are 161% more like­ly to dis­solve their mar­riages com­pared to peo­ple who tie the knot as vir­gins. In oth­er words, pre­mar­i­tal sex increas­es the chances of divorce between twofold and three­fold. After includ­ing the laun­dry list of covari­ates shown in the table, the odds of divorce remain 151% higher—in oth­er words, a sta­tis­ti­cal arti­fact away from being iden­ti­cal.”
    • This falls into the cat­e­go­ry of “research which is obvi­ous­ly true but which many peo­ple wish to dis­be­lieve”
  4. Some COVID thoughts:
    • Covid back­lash hob­bles pub­lic health and future pan­dem­ic response (Lau­ren Weber and Joel Achen­bach, Wash­ing­ton Post): “When the next pan­dem­ic sweeps the Unit­ed States, health offi­cials in Ohio won’t be able to shut­ter busi­ness­es or schools, even if they become epi­cen­ters of out­breaks. Nor will they be empow­ered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quar­an­tine. State offi­cials in North Dako­ta are barred from direct­ing peo­ple to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the pres­i­dent can force fed­er­al agen­cies tois­sue­vac­ci­na­tion or test­ing man­dates to thwart its march.”
      • Amer­i­ca usu­al­ly comes through in the end. The arti­cle is super-angsty about all this, but I view it as an inevitable response to admin­is­tra­tive over­reach and also a fun­da­men­tal­ly good thing. Dis­trib­uted pow­er is safer pow­er.
    • Relat­ed: When a Rene­gade Church and a Zeal­ous Coun­ty Health Depart­ment Col­lide (David Zweig, Sub­stack): “…exten­sive legal doc­u­ments, total­ing more than a thou­sand pages, reveal a coun­ty, and its health depart­ment, that went to extra­or­di­nary, and poten­tial­ly unlaw­ful, lengths to enforce its decrees. These efforts include levy­ing more than $2 mil­lion in fines against Cal­vary, and a mul­ti-faceted sur­veil­lance pro­gram of the church and its mem­bers, breath­tak­ing in scope and rem­i­nis­cent of total­i­tar­i­an regimes, rather than an Amer­i­can coun­ty health depart­ment — the spy oper­a­tion includ­ed stake­outs, forced in-per­son mon­i­tor­ing of prayer groups and oth­er inti­mate activ­i­ties, and track­ing the cel­lu­lar mobil­i­ty data of church­go­ers.”
      • The details in here are pret­ty wild. The com­ments are inter­est­ing — one of the pas­tors of a neigh­bor­ing church dis­putes part of the account, but the author is like, “I’ve read sworn affi­davits tes­ti­fy­ing to the con­trary.”
      • So much going on — my main take­away is that it real­ly was worse in San­ta Clara Coun­ty than almost any­where else in Amer­i­ca. The tech­nocrats felt empow­ered to an absurd degree.
    • Hav­ing said that: Here’s Why the Sci­ence Is Clear That Masks Work (Zeynep Tufek­ci, New York Times): “Brown, who led the Cochrane review’s approval process, told me that mask man­dates may not be ten­able now, but he has a stark­ly dif­fer­ent feel­ing about their effects in the first year of a pan­dem­ic. ‘Mask man­dates, social dis­tanc­ing, the oth­er shut­downs we had in terms of even restau­rants and things like that — if places like New York City didn’t do that, the num­ber of deaths would have been much high­er,” he told me. “I’m very con­fi­dent of that state­ment.’ So the evi­dence is rel­a­tive­ly straight­for­ward: Con­sis­tent­ly wear­ing a mask, prefer­ably a high-qual­i­ty, well-fit­ting one, pro­vides pro­tec­tion against the coro­n­avirus.”
  5. Earn­ings Are Greater and Increas­ing in Occu­pa­tions That Require Intel­lec­tu­al Tenac­i­ty (Chris­tos Makridis, Louis Hick­man & Ben­jamin Man­ning, SSRN): “…we iden­ti­fy two broad occu­pa­tion­al per­son­al­i­ty require­ments, which we label intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty and social adjust­ment. Intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty encom­pass­es achievement/effort, per­sis­tence, ini­tia­tive, ana­lyt­i­cal think­ing, inno­va­tion, and inde­pen­dence. Social adjust­ment encom­pass­es emo­tion reg­u­la­tion, con­cern for oth­ers, social ori­en­ta­tion, coop­er­a­tion, and stress tol­er­ance. Both occu­pa­tion­al per­son­al­i­ty require­ments relate sim­i­lar­ly to occu­pa­tion­al employ­ment growth between 2007 and 2019. How­ev­er, among over 10 mil­lion respon­dents to the Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey, jobs requir­ing intel­lec­tu­al tenac­i­ty pay high­er wages…”
    • Chris­tos is one of our alum­ni.
  6. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest at Stan­ford. Stu­dents are obsessed. (Lisa Bonos, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The uni­ver­si­ty seems keen to play down his pres­ence. Offi­cial­ly, the uni­ver­si­ty doesn’t talk about Bankman-Fried. Stan­ford Law School didn’t respond to requests for com­ment. When asked whether they could con­firm a rumor that a near­by stu­dent co-op had attacked the Bankman-Fried home with eggs, Stan­ford cam­pus police did not respond.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this arti­cle.
  7. Drop­ping the SAT Require­ment Is a Lux­u­ry Belief (Rob K. Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, has just become the first Ivy League school to per­ma­nent­ly aban­don the SAT/ACT require­ment for col­lege admis­sion. Elite col­leges are elim­i­nat­ing stan­dard­ized tests before they elim­i­nate lega­cy admis­sions. Tells you all you need to know.…  Stan­dard­ized test­ing should be freely avail­able and com­pul­so­ry for all high school stu­dents.”
    • This is 100% true.

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 Stop Being Shocked (Bari Weiss, Tablet): “The hatred we expe­ri­ence on cam­pus has noth­ing to do with the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian con­flict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ide­ol­o­gy sim­ply by exist­ing. So it’s not so much that Zion­ism is racism. It’s that Jew­ish­ness is.“ From vol­ume 272.

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 392

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.

392 is a Har­shad Num­ber in base 5, where it is writ­ten as 3032 base 5. The sum of its dig­its is 13 base 5, which divides to 144 base 5, there­by ful­fill­ing the con­di­tions for a Har­shad Num­ber. In base five. Kin­da feels like a stretch to be hon­est. 392 is not a super-inter­est­ing num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Dis­hon­or Code: What Hap­pens When Cheat­ing Becomes the Norm? (Suzy Weiss, The Free Press): “And at Dartmouth—once the reserve of the WASPi­est of the WASPs, in beau­ti­ful, clois­tered Hanover, New Hampshire—an anony­mous source told me that stu­dents have devel­oped the habit of break­ing into groups of four when giv­en online mul­ti­ple-choice quizzes. Each guess­es a dif­fer­ent answer (A, B, C, or D) to each ques­tion. Because stu­dents get two chances to take the quiz—why that is, no one seems to know—they all have the right answer by the time they take the quiz for a sec­ond time. And wind up with a per­fect score. They don’t even have to read the ques­tion. If you’re read­ing the ques­tion, you’re doing it wrong.”
    • Relat­ed: Stan­ford Has an Integri­ty Prob­lem (Thomas Adamo, The Stan­ford Review): “When stu­dents near­ly unan­i­mous­ly agree that it would be bet­ter to lie and cheat their way through school than fail or scrape by on their own mer­it, is it real­ly that sur­pris­ing to know that as ful­ly-social­ized Stan­ford grads they would also try to lie and cheat and scrape their way through their careers, their projects and their rela­tion­ships. Virtue is a habit that must be prac­ticed repeatedly—strengthened like a muscle—not left as an exer­cise to the read­er.”
  2. Why You Can’t Pre­dict the Future of Reli­gion (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…reli­gious his­to­ry is shaped as much by sud­den irrup­tions as long tra­jec­to­ries, as much by the mys­ti­cal and per­son­al as by the insti­tu­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal.… I can quote you chap­ter and verse on the rea­son­abil­i­ty of the­ism, but in the causal chain of his­to­ry I’m a Chris­t­ian because two thou­sand years ago a mot­ley group of provin­cials in Roman Pales­tine believed they’d seen their teacher heal the sick and raise the dead and then rise trans­fig­ured from the grave — and then because, two mil­len­ni­ums lat­er, as a child in sub­ur­ban Con­necti­cut, I watched my own par­ents fall to the floor and speak in tongues.”
    • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this one (I can unlock ten NYT arti­cles a month).
  3. Fer­til­i­ty Rate Roundup #1 (Zvi Mow­showitz, Sub­stack): “This looks like a fan­tas­ti­cal­ly suc­cess­ful pro­gram. The pre­vi­ous trend was declin­ing births. At the cost of $1,000 per child in pro­gres­sive trans­fer pay­ments, Aus­tralia seem­ing­ly raised births by 6%. That’s about $17k per addi­tion­al birth. Insane­ly cheap. I am con­fi­dent Chi­na would be thrilled to pay quite a lot more than that. Amer­i­ca would be insane not to, we would save more mon­ey than this on long term inter­est rates on our gov­ern­ment debt alone.”
    • This is hon­est­ly one of the great­est glob­al cri­sis and not near­ly enough peo­ple are talk­ing intel­li­gent­ly about it.
    • In relat­ed news, this is one of the ways reli­gion tri­umphs over sec­u­lar­ism. Reli­gious peo­ple repro­duce (and usu­al­ly pass on their val­ues to their chil­dren) and far too many sec­u­lar peo­ple die lone­ly.
  4. The Build-Noth­ing Coun­try (Noah Smith, Sub­stack): “For decades now, Amer­i­cans have told our­selves that we’re the rich­est nation on Earth, and that as long as we had the polit­i­cal will to write big checks, we could do any­thing we want­ed. But that was nev­er real­ly true, was it? The infla­tion that fol­lowed the pan­dem­ic should have been a wake-up call — we had all this excess cash, and we start­ed spend­ing it on phys­i­cal goods, and most­ly what hap­pened was just that the price of the phys­i­cal goods went up. And so R.I.P. to all that cash. From mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you came, and to mean­ing­less num­bers on a spread­sheet you shall return.”
  5. The Immi­nent Dan­ger of A.I. Is One We’re Not Talk­ing About (Ezra Klein, The New York Times): “The ques­tion at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the inter­ests of its own­er and mas­ter, Microsoft. It’s sup­posed to be a good chat­bot that polite­ly answers ques­tions and makes Microsoft piles of mon­ey. But it was in con­ver­sa­tion with Kevin Roose. And Roose was try­ing to get the sys­tem to say some­thing inter­est­ing so he’d have a good sto­ry. It did that, and then some. That embar­rassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But per­haps — good Syd­ney?”
  6. Is Phys­i­cal Attrac­tive­ness Nor­mal­ly Dis­trib­uted? (anony­mous, Sub­stack): “This may explain in part why, although we see assor­ta­tive mat­ing in phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness (men and women pick part­ners of a sim­i­lar lev­el of phys­i­cal attrac­tive­ness), women are also slight­ly more attrac­tive on aver­age than their part­ners (McNul­ty, 2008). There may be a good expla­na­tion for this as well. Jokela (2009) found that mod­er­ate­ly attrac­tive women were more like­ly to repro­duce (7%), while high­ly attrac­tive women were even more like­ly to repro­duce (16%). More­over, both were more like­ly to have daugh­ters than sons. As such, we see a grad­ual shift over time of women becom­ing more phys­i­cal­ly attrac­tive than men.”
    • The author’s bio says he’s a grad stu­dent in cog­ni­tive psych, but is pret­ty vague on details. His online han­dle is Alexan­der.
  7. Have The Ancient Gods Returned? (Nao­mi Wolf, Brown­stone Insti­tute): “The sheer amoral pow­er of Baal, the destruc­tive force of Moloch, the unre­strained seduc­tive­ness and sex­u­al licen­tious­ness of Astarte or Ashera — those are the pri­mal forces that do indeed seem to me to have ‘returned.’  Or at least the ener­gies that they rep­re­sent — moral pow­er over; death-wor­ship; antag­o­nism to the sex­u­al order­li­ness of the intact fam­i­ly and faith­ful rela­tion­ships — seem to have ‘returned,’ with­out restraint.”
    • Nao­mi Wolf is a con­tro­ver­sial and well-known fem­i­nist who has her PhD from Oxford. This long essay is a wild ride. She is writ­ing as a Jew in response to a book by a Chris­t­ian (who is him­self a Mes­sian­ic Jew).

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 The Lan­guage of Priv­i­lege (Nicholas Clair­mont, Tablet Mag­a­zine): “So, in the end, the ques­tion raised by wok­e­ness is a sim­ple one: Doesn’t it actu­al­ly just favor rich peo­ple?” From vol­ume 271.

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 391

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 391, which is a prod­uct of two of my favorite prime num­bers. 391 = 17 * 23.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Facts Don’t Care About Your Heal­ings (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “His­tor­i­cal­ly, ‘jus­tice’ is about law. There’s an objec­tive given­ness to it that tran­scends per­son­al nar­ra­tive or expe­ri­ence, which helps to explain why jus­tice his­tor­i­cal­ly has been right-cod­ed. But this is no longer true. ‘Jus­tice’ is left-cod­ed because it has become nar­ra­ti­val. Jus­tice is what peo­ple talk about when they talk about their per­son­al expe­ri­ences. Jus­tice is the sub­text of peo­ple speak­ing their truth.”
    • This is an excep­tion­al­ly acute bit of cul­tur­al analy­sis. Rec­om­mend­ed for its core insight.
  2. Amer­i­ca’s Cul­ture Is Boom­ing. Real­ly. (Ted Goia, The Free Press): “Con­sid­er the fact that there are now 36 YouTube chan­nels with more than 50 mil­lion subscribers—each of these has far more reach than any record label or news­pa­per.… Can all this trans­form our cul­ture? The sim­ple fact is that it already has. And it will con­tin­ue to do so at an accel­er­at­ing rate.”
    • There are some shock­ing stats in here even if you already know the broad out­lines. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. The Bit­ter End of “Con­tent” (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “So long as adver­tis­ing is the dom­i­nant fund­ing source of the online world, any and every cre­ative plat­form will be a race to the bot­tom. Peo­ple will find ways to abuse the sys­tem to receive atten­tion and mon­ey based on noth­ing more than manip­u­la­tion.”
    • This essay is built around a real­ly impor­tant insight. It’s worth read­ing.
  4. More on Asbury. I find it inter­est­ing that the New York Times, CNN, and the Wash­ing­ton Post all pub­lished rel­a­tive­ly sol­id arti­cles about it.
    • ‘No Celebri­ties Except Jesus’: How Asbury Pro­tect­ed the Revival (Daniel Sil­li­man, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “By evening the crowd had grown to about 3,000, and the uni­ver­si­ty had to set up over­flow rooms. At the same time, an unco­or­di­nat­ed infra­struc­ture of sup­port began to appear. An Asbury stu­dent set up a table and start­ed hand­ing out tea and cof­fee. She said Jesus told her to. A woman in Indi­anapo­lis baked choco­late chip cook­ies for a full day and then drove down to give them away. A pro­fes­sor went and got cas­es of bot­tled water. Piz­za appeared, unbid­den, along with home­made pota­to soup, cake, a table of pro­tein bars, and what one vol­un­teer called ‘all the Chick-fil‑A.’ Some­one vol­un­teered to start orga­niz­ing hous­ing and put up signs with QR codes that peo­ple could scan to start the process of find­ing a place to sleep.”
      • I’ve unlocked the pay­wall for this one. Rec­om­mend­ed for the behind-the-scenes info. Also, the “all the Chick-fil‑A” line made me chuck­le.
    • ‘Wood­stock’ for Chris­tians: Revival Draws Thou­sands to Ken­tucky Town (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “The uni­ver­si­ty esti­mates that the revival has drawn more than 50,000 peo­ple to Wilmore, a sleepy town of 6,000 peo­ple where the gro­cery store hosts a week­ly Bible study and police cars read ‘In God We Trust.’ Asbury was found­ed in 1890, and its roots are in the Methodist and Wes­leyan-Holi­ness tra­di­tion, which has a his­tor­i­cal empha­sis on trans­for­ma­tive move­ments of the Holy Spir­it.”
      • I have unlocked the pay­wall for this arti­cle. Includes details that are not in oth­er arti­cles I have read.
    • Why Stu­dents in Ken­tucky Have Been Pray­ing for 250 Hours (Olivia Rein­gold, The Free Press): “It all start­ed on Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 8, when Zach Meerkreebs, a vol­un­teer soc­cer coach who had addressed the stu­dent body only twice before, gave an impro­vised ser­mon about love.… In a final, kind of corny throw­away line, he said: ‘I pray that this sits on you guys like an itchy sweater, and you got­ta itch, you got­ta take care of it.’ Meerkreebs told me he was cer­tain that he had ‘total­ly whiffed’ the ser­mon, and imme­di­ate­ly got off stage and texted his wife, ‘Lat­est stinker. I’ll be home soon.’ ”
      • What a won­der­ful anec­dote.
    • A non­stop wor­ship gath­er­ing at a Ken­tucky school echoes an old Chris­t­ian tra­di­tion (AJ Will­ing­ham, CNN): “The Asbury Revival, as it has been called, has cap­tured the atten­tion and imag­i­na­tion of every pos­si­ble cir­cle in the expan­sive Venn dia­gram of Chris­tian­i­ty. Among their end­less debates are some ques­tions like­ly shared by those on the out­side, look­ing in at the com­mo­tion: What in the world is going on here? And what, exact­ly, is a Chris­t­ian revival?”
    • Opin­ion: What is Revival—and is it Hap­pen­ing at Asbury? (Craig Keen­er, The Roys Report): “Calvin­ists dom­i­nat­ed the First Great Awak­en­ing, the Hebrides Revival, and the West Tim­or Revival. Wes­leyans dom­i­nat­ed the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing, the Azusa Street Revival, and the 1950 and 1970 Asbury Revivals. Wit­ness­es from the West Tim­or Revival report­ed a sound like a rush­ing wind. Wit­ness­es from the revival at Pan­di­ta Ramabai’s orphan­age in India report­ed tongues of fire. Mirac­u­lous signs accom­pa­nied evan­ge­lism in the Shan­dong Revival. Why should an infi­nite God fit our box­es?”
      • Keen­er is an emi­nent New Tes­ta­ment schol­ar at Asbury Sem­i­nary (and, I might add, a grad­u­ate of my own sem­i­nary — AGTS).
    • Non­stop wor­ship ser­vice at a Ken­tucky col­lege is spread­ing through Tik­Tok (Amber Fer­gu­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Asbury Uni­ver­si­ty is no stranger to revivals but thanks to social media the lat­est gath­er­ing has sparked both nation­al and inter­na­tion­al atten­tion, attract­ing groups of stu­dents from at least 22 col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to descend upon its cam­pus, and even gain­ing the sup­port of for­mer vice pres­i­dent Mike Pence, who tweet­ed his sup­port of the move­ment.”
      • Pence appar­ent­ly got saved while vis­it­ing Asbury years ago.
      • Also, the byline is sur­pris­ing. She’s not one of their reli­gion beat spe­cial­ists.
  5. Time to Think by Han­nah Barnes review – what went wrong at Gids? (Rachel Cooke, The Guardian): “Han­nah Barnes’s book about the rise and calami­tous fall of the Gen­der Iden­ti­ty Devel­op­ment Ser­vice for chil­dren (Gids), a nation­al­ly com­mis­sioned unit at the Tavi­s­tock and Port­man NHS Foun­da­tion Trust in north Lon­don, is the result of inten­sive work, car­ried out across sev­er­al years.… As Barnes makes per­fect­ly clear, this isn’t a cul­ture war sto­ry. This is a med­ical scan­dal, the full con­se­quences of which may only be under­stood in many years’ time.”
    • Not much new here if you’ve been fol­low­ing. But the info is becom­ing more and more wide­spread.
  6. Sell­ing a Pos­i­tive Cul­ture War Mes­sage (Richard Hana­nia, Sub­stack): “The high-sta­tus way to oppose wok­e­ness runs away from con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, which are not only false and stu­pid, but have the added effect of por­tray­ing one’s oppo­nents as extreme­ly smart, suc­cess­ful, and com­pe­tent. High-sta­tus oppo­si­tion to wok­e­ness is not only bet­ter elec­toral­ly, but will bring high­er qual­i­ty indi­vid­u­als to the cause that will be will­ing and able to focus on mak­ing impor­tant pol­i­cy changes.”
    • Most­ly about pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Vivek Ramaswamy, but also about larg­er issues of pol­i­tics. Quite inter­est­ing.
  7. Do masks work? (Kate­lyn Jetelina & Kris­ten Pan­tha­gani, Sub­stack): “The sci­en­tif­ic ‘arc’ of mask dis­cov­ery is ongo­ing. Sci­ence is always evolv­ing. Do not let any­one con­vince you of a one word answer to the ques­tion: Do masks work? It depends.”

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 New Research Shows Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Dri­ves Human Flour­ish­ing – And Why This Mat­ters Now More Than Ever (Chris­tos Makridis, Real Clear Reli­gion): “…reli­gious lib­er­ty is an inte­gral pre­req­ui­site for demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nance, aid­ing the process for civic engage­ment and women’s empow­er­ment and reduc­ing the poten­tial for pub­lic and polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion.” Chris­tos is an alum­nus of our min­istry. From vol­ume 270.

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.

Grace For Bad Preaching

I found this sto­ry from one of the news arti­cles about the move of God at Asbury encour­ag­ing:

It all start­ed on Wednes­day, Feb­ru­ary 8, when Zach Meerkreebs, a vol­un­teer soc­cer coach who had addressed the stu­dent body only twice before, gave an impro­vised ser­mon about love.

“Some of you guys have expe­ri­enced rad­i­cal­ly poor love,” Meerkreebs, a tat­tooed 32-year-old with a pen­chant for kom­bucha, told the crowd. “Some of you guys have expe­ri­enced that love in the church. Maybe it’s not vio­lent, maybe it’s not molesta­tion, it’s not tak­en advan­tage of—but it feels like some­one has pulled a fast one on you.”

Then he uttered the invi­ta­tion that ignit­ed a move­ment: “If you need to hear the voice of God—the Father in Heav­en who will nev­er love you that way, that is per­fect in love, gen­tle and kind—you come up here and expe­ri­ence his love. Don’t waste this oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

In a final, kind of corny throw­away line, he said: “I pray that this sits on you guys like an itchy sweater, and you got­ta itch, you got­ta take care of it.”

Meerkreebs told me he was cer­tain that he had “total­ly whiffed” the ser­mon, and imme­di­ate­ly got off stage and texted his wife, “Lat­est stinker. I’ll be home soon.”

Why Stu­dents in Ken­tucky Have Been Pray­ing for 250 Hours (The Free Press)

I don’t know whether his preach­ing was actu­al­ly bad that day or not — I haven’t seen the video. But I know he thought it went bad­ly.

And here’s the encour­ag­ing thing for preach­ers: the move of God is not con­tin­gent on our rhetor­i­cal skills. Do your best to bless God’s peo­ple, but don’t despair if you “total­ly whiff” and lay your “lat­est stinker.” An amaz­ing out­pour­ing might fol­low!

Why? Because grace is as fun­da­men­tal a prin­ci­ple as you can find in Chris­tian­i­ty. It is well-known that God offers for­give­ness to sin­ners, free­dom for cap­tives, and joy in place of mourn­ing. More­over, His pow­er is made per­fect in our weak­ness! Why should we be sur­prised when God pours out His Spir­it gen­er­ous­ly in response to mediocre preach­ing?

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 390

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 390, which is the num­ber of unique ways to sum up to 32 (in oth­er words, 32 has 390 dis­tinct par­ti­tions).

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Con­cern­ing Asbury:
    • Asbury Pro­fes­sor: We’re Wit­ness­ing a ‘Sur­pris­ing Work of God’ (Tom McCall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “By Thurs­day evening, there was stand­ing room only. Stu­dents had begun to arrive from oth­er uni­ver­si­ties: the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky, the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Cum­ber­lands, Pur­due Uni­ver­si­ty, Indi­ana Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty, Ohio Chris­t­ian Uni­ver­si­ty, Tran­syl­va­nia Uni­ver­si­ty, Mid­way Uni­ver­si­ty, Lee Uni­ver­si­ty, George­town Col­lege, Mt. Ver­non Nazarene Uni­ver­si­ty, and many oth­ers.… In pre­vi­ous revivals, there has always been fruit that has blessed both the church and soci­ety. For instance, even sec­u­lar his­to­ri­ans acknowl­edge that the Sec­ond Great Awak­en­ing was piv­otal to bring­ing about the end of slav­ery in our coun­try. Like­wise, I look for­ward to see­ing what fruit God will bring from such a revival in our gen­er­a­tion.”
    • a quirky but pos­i­tive take on Asbury by Lyman Stone (Twit­ter)
    • Anoth­er inter­est­ing take by a PhD stu­dent at Asbury Sem­i­nary (Twit­ter)
    • A non­stop Ken­tucky prayer ‘revival’ is going viral on Tik­Tok, and peo­ple are trav­el­ing thou­sands of miles to take part (Jake Tray­lor, NBC News): “The set­up is sim­ple. No pro­jec­tor screens or high-tech inte­gra­tions, just wood­en sanc­tu­ary chairs filled with peo­ple, and an open altar call with an invi­ta­tion to prayer that still hasn’t end­ed. That equa­tion has been a pow­er­ful recipe on social media. On Tik­Tok and Insta­gram, videos hash­tagged ‘Asbury Revival’ are rack­ing up mil­lions of views. At the time this arti­cle was pub­lished, the hash­tag #asburyre­vival had 24.4 mil­lion views on Tik­Tok.”
    • The Revival at Asbury (Thomas Lyons, Sub­stack): “For what it’s worth, it’s my ini­tial eval­u­a­tion that this is the real deal. None of the hall­marks of man­u­fac­tured revival are present. And I’m not alone in this eval­u­a­tion. As Law­son Stone, an Old Tes­ta­ment Pro­fes­sor at Asbury The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, recent­ly stat­ed on social media, ‘The old saints know.’ Arguably more sig­nif­i­cant for the eval­u­a­tion of the revival’s authen­tic­i­ty than the opin­ions of revival schol­ars are the tes­ti­monies of the pri­or gen­er­a­tions who were present at sim­i­lar moves of God with­in the com­mu­ni­ty.”
    • The author is a schol­ar whose dis­ser­ta­tion focused on revivals.
  2. No Hookups, No ‘Talk­ing,’ and No Breakups: A Bet­ter Way to Date (Charles E. Stokes, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “My wife and I have served as rela­tion­ship men­tors now for 10 years, and as a fam­i­ly schol­ar and pro­fes­sor, I’ve paid atten­tion to every nugget of wis­dom I could glean—not only from aca­d­e­mics but from many of my stu­dents. I have been able to craft a bet­ter approach to dat­ing that I believe improves the chances of suc­cess for sin­gles desir­ing a life­long monog­a­mous rela­tion­ship.”
    • The author is a soci­ol­o­gist at Sam­ford. I am delib­er­ate­ly not includ­ing his pro­posed solu­tion in the excerpt because it’s worth read­ing in full. If you read his sug­ges­tion out of con­text you’ll prob­a­bly form an opin­ion about it too quick­ly.
  3. ‘Hon­or­ing’ Your Father and Moth­er Isn’t Always Bib­li­cal (Karen Wong, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “But does the Chi­nese under­stand­ing of fil­ial piety real­ly mean exact­ly the same as the bib­li­cal descrip­tion of hon­or­ing par­ents? And can an empha­sis on obey­ing the fifth com­mand­ment over­look or even ratio­nal­ize par­ent-child rela­tion­ships char­ac­ter­ized by con­tention, pain, dis­re­spect, and suf­fer­ing?”
    • Not pay­walled — I have unlocked it for you.
  4. Why Amer­i­ca Needs Foot­ball. Even Its Bru­tal­i­ty. (Ethan Strauss, The Free Press): “Mod­ern life might be unful­fill­ing, but the fact remains you’re unlike­ly to die on a beach sep­a­rat­ed from your entrails. Still, the old imper­a­tives remain. We have war with­in us, whether or not there’s one to wage. And the NFL gives Amer­i­cans that war, as spec­ta­cle, week after week.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I am still skep­ti­cal Amer­i­can foot­ball can sur­vive moms pulling their kids out of the sport and direct­ing them to safer ath­let­ic exploits.
  5. Con­tra Kavanagh On Fideism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “In a free soci­ety, at one or anoth­er point in your life, you’ll actu­al­ly have to form your own opin­ion about some­thing. You’ll do bet­ter at that if you have some prac­tice form­ing opin­ions. When experts have strong opin­ions on some­thing, this is a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to prac­tice your opin­ion-form­ing skills, see whether you get the same result as the experts, and, if not, fig­ure out where you went wrong. This requires peo­ple to have some tol­er­ance for oth­ers doing this.”
    • Start­ed off quite unin­ter­est­ing and then quick­ly ramped up. The ques­tion under con­sid­er­a­tion: how to bal­ance defer­ring to experts with inves­ti­gat­ing things on your own.
    • A fol­low-up Try­ing Again On Fideism (Scott Alexan­der, Astral Codex Ten): “I come back to this exam­ple again and again, but only because it’s so bla­tant: the New York Times ran an arti­cle say­ing that only 36% of econ­o­mists sup­port­ed school vouch­ers, with a strong impli­ca­tion that the pro­fes­sion was major­i­ty against. If you checked their sources, you would find that actu­al­ly, it was 36% in favor, 19% against, 46% unsure or not respond­ing. If you are too quick to seek epis­temic clo­sure because ‘you have to trust the experts’, you will be easy prey to peo­ple mis­rep­re­sent­ing what they are say­ing.”
  6. McCullough’s Mis­take, and Ours (Adri­an Gaty, Sub­stack): “As long as edu­ca­tion stays true to its past and cul­ti­vates faith and virtue, McCullough’s mis­take doesn’t mat­ter. But once edu­ca­tion becomes unmoored from its ori­gins, once it becomes open­ly hos­tile to reli­gion, we betray our own ori­gins – and con­demn our future – by con­tin­u­ing to ’empha­size’ school­ing. Our founders, pio­neers like the Rev­erend Cut­ler, spread the gospel of pub­lic edu­ca­tion not for its own sake but because such edu­ca­tion in turn spread the Gospel. To achieve that good gov­ern­ment and hap­pi­ness they envi­sioned, our task today is not to encour­age pub­lic edu­ca­tion as it cur­rent­ly exists – it is to remake it in His image.”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
    • This is a fol­low up to the also inter­est­ing This is… Sci­ence! (Adri­an Gaty, Sub­stack): “These are pro­found­ly anti-life, anti-human move­ments – yet they advance by manip­u­lat­ing our human­i­ty, our ten­der­ness, our hatred of sui­cide. Spoil­er alert: the doc­tors and ethi­cists mak­ing these claims about abor­tion and affir­ma­tion are 100% on board with doc­tor-assist­ed sui­cide (which killed over ten thou­sand Cana­di­ans last year). They don’t hate sui­cide, not in the least — but they know that you do. They are using your com­pas­sion to cre­ate a cul­ture of death.”
  7. In Defense of J.K. Rowl­ing (Pamela Paul, New York Times): “Take it from one of her for­mer crit­ics. E.J. Roset­ta, a jour­nal­ist who once denounced Rowl­ing for her sup­posed trans­pho­bia, was com­mis­sioned last year to write an arti­cle called ’20 Trans­pho­bic J.K. Rowl­ing Quotes We’re Done With.’ After 12 weeks of report­ing and read­ing, Roset­ta wrote, ‘I’ve not found a sin­gle tru­ly trans­pho­bic mes­sage.’ On Twit­ter she declared, ‘You’re burn­ing the wrong witch.’ ”
    • The tide is turn­ing on Rowl­ing. She’s not where I am ide­o­log­i­cal­ly, but watch­ing her be tarred and feath­ered for say­ing com­mon sense things has been dis­may­ing.

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 Does the Bible Pass the Bechdel Test? A Data-Dri­ven Look at Women in the Sto­ry of Scrip­ture (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “So does the Bible pass the Bechdel test? This short answer is: yes, there are scenes where two named women have a con­ver­sa­tion not about a man. The longer answer is more com­plex, but also, I think, rich­er.” This is REALLY well done. From vol­ume 268.

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 389

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 389, a prime num­ber.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty Can Still Come Back (Tim Keller, The Atlantic): “There was no such thing as monasticism—through which pagan North­ern Europe was turned Christian—until there was. There was no Ref­or­ma­tion until there was. There was no revival that turned Methodists and Bap­tists into cul­tur­al­ly dom­i­nant forces in the mid­west­ern and south­east­ern Unit­ed States—until there was. There was no East African Revival, led pri­mar­i­ly by African peo­ple, that helped turn Africa from a 9 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent in 1900 into a 50 per­cent Chris­t­ian con­ti­nent today—until there was. Chris­tian­i­ty, like its founder, does not go from strength to strength but from death to res­ur­rec­tion.”
  2. Is the Pub­lic Domain Just?: Bib­li­cal Stew­ard­ship and Legal Pro­tec­tion For Tra­di­tion­al Knowl­edge Assets (Ruth L. Okedi­ji, The Colum­bia Jour­nal of Law and the Arts): “The Arti­cle pro­pos­es a the­o­log­i­cal frame­work of ‘bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship’ root­ed in ima­go Dei—the foun­da­tion­al con­cept inform­ing Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian under­stand­ings of human nature and social interaction—to address the socio-moral dimen­sions that are con­sti­tu­tive of TK [tra­di­tion­al knowl­edge] sys­tems and the insti­tu­tion­al con­text in which they unfold. The bib­li­cal stew­ard­ship frame­work focus­es on the coop­er­a­tive and kin­ship arrange­ments that enable and sus­tain pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty for TK.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law and a sol­id Chris­t­ian. I just heard her speak and the per­son intro­duc­ing her men­tioned this arti­cle as an exam­ple of how bold she is in inte­grat­ing her faith into her schol­ar­ship.
  3. Some COVID per­spec­tives
    • Sure­ly Right (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “…the only sen­si­ble posi­tion is to advo­cate for ear­ly and wide­spread vac­cine access, be high­ly crit­i­cal of all the pol­i­tick­ing about vac­cine tim­ing around the elec­tion, and to avoid man­dates unless you intend to enforce them at gun­point.… Because we live in a world where the default is not to vac­ci­nate, pol­i­tics poi­sons every­thing it touch­es, and the child­hood man­dates are his­tor­i­cal acci­dents that could very well fall to con­cert­ed polit­i­cal action.”
      • A brief, fas­ci­nat­ing read.
    • Why the Odds Are Stacked Against a Promis­ing New Covid Drug (Ben­jamin Mueller, The New York Times): “By for­ti­fy­ing the body’s own mech­a­nisms for quash­ing an invad­ing virus, they can poten­tial­ly help defend against not only Covid, but also the flu and oth­er virus­es with the poten­tial to kin­dle future pan­demics.… For all of its promise, though, the drug — called pegy­lat­ed inter­fer­on lamb­da — faces an uncer­tain road [due to the FDA].”
    • Not pay­walled. Infu­ri­at­ing. Out­ra­geous. Ridicu­lous.
    • Bureau­crats: “COVID is so bad we need to change every aspect of soci­ety to deal with it. But don’t change our bureau­cra­cy. It’s not THAT bad.”
  4. Boston Uni­ver­si­ty pro­vides update on CTE study, dis­cov­ers brain dis­ease in 92 per­cent of ex-NFL play­ers ana­lyzed (Vic­to­ria Her­nan­dez, USA Today): “The Boston Uni­ver­si­ty CTE Cen­ter stud­ied the brains of 376 deceased for­mer NFL play­ers and diag­nosed 345 of them with chron­ic trau­mat­ic encephalopa­thy. This is 91.7 per­cent of those stud­ied.”
    • I’ve been say­ing this for about two stu­dent gen­er­a­tions now, but foot­bal­l’s days are num­bered in Amer­i­ca. It’s hard to imag­ine the sport sur­viv­ing the sorts of reforms that would be nec­es­sary.
  5. I Thought I Was Sav­ing Trans Kids. Now I’m Blow­ing the Whis­tle. (Jamie Reed, The Free Press): “I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and polit­i­cal­ly to the left of Bernie Sanders.… I’m now mar­ried to a trans man, and togeth­er we are rais­ing my two bio­log­i­cal chil­dren from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage and three fos­ter chil­dren we hope to adopt.… Giv­en the secre­cy and lack of rig­or­ous stan­dards that char­ac­ter­ize youth gen­der tran­si­tion across the coun­try, I believe that to ensure the safe­ty of Amer­i­can chil­dren, we need a mora­to­ri­um on the hor­mon­al and sur­gi­cal treat­ment of young peo­ple with gen­der dys­pho­ria.”
    • Not sur­pris­ing if you’ve been fol­low­ing this top­ic, but depress­ing and with new anec­dotes.
  6. Chat­G­PT Is a Blur­ry JPEG of the Web (Ted Chi­ang, The New York­er): “Think of Chat­G­PT as a blur­ry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the infor­ma­tion on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the infor­ma­tion of a high­er-res­o­lu­tion image, but, if you’re look­ing for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approx­i­ma­tion. But, because the approx­i­ma­tion is pre­sent­ed in the form of gram­mat­i­cal text, which Chat­G­PT excels at cre­at­ing, it’s usu­al­ly accept­able. You’re still look­ing at a blur­ry JPEG, but the blur­ri­ness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the pic­ture as a whole look less sharp.”
    • This is a good anal­o­gy.
  7. A Black Pro­fes­sor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell (Vin­cent Lloyd, Com­pact Mag­a­zine): “Each stu­dent read from a pre­pared state­ment about how the sem­i­nar per­pet­u­at­ed anti-black vio­lence in its con­tent and form, how the black stu­dents had been harmed, how I was guilty of count­less microag­gres­sions, includ­ing through my body lan­guage, and how stu­dents didn’t feel safe because I didn’t imme­di­ate­ly cor­rect views that failed to treat anti-black­ness as the cause of all the world’s ills.… I am a black pro­fes­sor, I direct­ed my university’s black-stud­ies pro­gram, I lead anti-racism and trans­for­ma­tive-jus­tice work­shops, and I have pub­lished books on anti-black racism and prison abo­li­tion. I live in a pre­dom­i­nant­ly black neigh­bor­hood of Philadel­phia, my daugh­ter went to an Afro­cen­tric school, and I am on the board of our local black cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion.”
    • The author is a pro­fes­sor at Vil­lano­va (which is not, to be clear, the loca­tion of this deba­cle).

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 Uncon­scious Learn­ing Under­lies Belief in God – Stronger Beliefs in Peo­ple Who Can Uncon­scious­ly Pre­dict Com­plex Pat­terns (Sci Tech Dai­ly): “Indi­vid­u­als who can uncon­scious­ly pre­dict com­plex pat­terns, an abil­i­ty called implic­it pat­tern learn­ing, are like­ly to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who cre­ates pat­terns of events in the uni­verse, accord­ing to neu­ro­sci­en­tists at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty.” Shock­er: peo­ple who see real­i­ty clear­ly are more like­ly to per­ceive God’s hand at work in real­i­ty. From vol­ume 267.

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 388

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 388, which has 97 as one of its prime fac­tors. I just think that’s cool.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Be Open to Spir­i­tu­al Expe­ri­ence. Also, Be Real­ly Care­ful. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “But pre­cise­ly because an atti­tude of spir­i­tu­al exper­i­men­ta­tion is rea­son­able, it’s also impor­tant to empha­size some­thing taught by almost every hor­ror movie but nonethe­less skat­ed over in a lot of Amer­i­can spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: the impor­tance of being real­ly care­ful in your open­ness, and not just tak­ing the benef­i­cence of the meta­phys­i­cal realm for grant­ed. If the mate­r­i­al uni­verse as we find it is beau­ti­ful but also nat­u­ral­ly per­ilous, and shot through with sin and evil wher­ev­er human agency is at work, there is no rea­son to expect that any spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion would be dif­fer­ent — no rea­son to think that being a ‘psy­cho­naut’ is any less per­ilous than being an astro­naut, even if the dan­ger takes a dif­fer­ent form.””
    • Douthat speak­ing a rare type of truth at the New York Times.
    • Dreher responds to Douthat’s col­umn and goes much deep­er: Psy­cho­nauts, Plinths, & Re-Paganiz­ing Pop Cul­ture (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Douthat is emphat­i­cal­ly cor­rect that one should be extreme­ly care­ful about this stuff. There is no rea­son at all to believe that the spir­i­tu­al realm is benign.”
  2. Lay­offs Broke Big Tech’s Elite Col­lege Hir­ing Pipeline (Anna Kramer, Wired): “…the fact that lay­offs haven’t exclud­ed the grad­u­ates of the top schools clean­ly illus­trates an argu­ment that labor experts, com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sors, and unions have been try­ing to make for years: The skills required for most of the jobs that pow­er these larg­er insti­tu­tions do not actu­al­ly require degrees from the world’s pre­mier com­put­er sci­ence pro­grams. If they did, Meta would hard­ly have choked off the intern­ship pipeline it had spent years build­ing, risk­ing los­ing the trust of a gen­er­a­tion of elite col­lege grad­u­ates.”
  3. On Sci­en­tif­ic Trans­paren­cy, Researcher Degrees Of Free­dom, And That NEJM Study On Youth Gen­der Med­i­cine (Jesse Sin­gal, Sub­stack): “If you com­pare that to the pro­to­col doc­u­ment, you’ll notice that of the eight key vari­ables the researchers were most inter­est­ed in — ‘gen­der dys­pho­ria, depres­sion, anx­i­ety, trau­ma symp­toms, self-injury, sui­ci­dal­i­ty, body esteem, and qual­i­ty of life’ — the ones I bold­ed are not report­ed in the NEJM paper. That’s six out of eight, or 75% of the vari­ables cov­ered by the researchers’ hypoth­e­sis in their pro­to­col doc­u­ment (includ­ing the ‘offi­cial­ly’ pre­reg­is­tered short­er ver­sion).”
    • Empha­sis in orig­i­nal. This is thor­ough. Sin­gal is real­ly, real­ly good at this. I hate to say that I am instinc­tive­ly skep­ti­cal of aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies when they touch on human sex­u­al­i­ty, but I am. It’s stuff like this over and over again.
  4. Pen­te­costal­ism from soup to nuts: A (near) com­plete his­to­ry of this move­ment in Amer­i­ca (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “With­out a doubt, the por­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty known as Pen­te­costal­ism was — by far — the fastest-grow­ing move­ment of the 20th cen­tu­ry, going from zero mem­bers on Jan. 1, 1901 to 644 mil­lion adher­ents world­wide now. It is the pri­ma­ry expres­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty in the Glob­al South. It is the one form of Chris­tian­i­ty to mount a seri­ous chal­lenge to the growth of Islam, main­ly because of its appeal to the very poor and its reliance on the mirac­u­lous.”
  5. Why Not Mars (Maciej CegÅ‚owski, per­son­al web­site): “When the great moment final­ly came, and the astro­nauts had tak­en their first Mar­t­ian self­ie, strict mis­sion rules meant to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and min­i­mize risk would leave the crew depen­dent on the same robots they’d been sent at enor­mous cost to replace. Only the microbes that lived in the space­craft, unin­formed of the mis­sion rules, would be free to go wan­der out­side. They would become the real explor­ers of Mars, and if their luck held, its first colonists.”
    • This is real­ly well-writ­ten!
  6. Mis­in­for­ma­tion on Mis­in­for­ma­tion: Con­cep­tu­al and Method­olog­i­cal Chal­lenges (Sacha Altay, Manon Berriche, & Alber­to Acer­bi, Social Media + Soci­ety): “…the inter­net is not rife with mis­in­for­ma­tion or news, but with memes and enter­tain­ing con­tent.… peo­ple do not believe every­thing they see on the inter­net: the sheer vol­ume of engage­ment should not be con­flat­ed with belief.”
    • From the abstract. The authors are at Oxford, Fon­da­tion Nationale des Sci­ences Poli­tiques, and Brunel.
  7. As Refugees Flood Into U.S., Chi­nese Chris­tians Told To Wait (Susan Crab­tree, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “The Unit­ed States could grant the church mem­bers imme­di­ate emer­gency asy­lum, as it has done for tens of thou­sands of Ukraini­ans flee­ing their war-rav­aged coun­try and the first group of Afghans air­lift­ed into the Unit­ed States amid the chaot­ic U.S. evac­u­a­tion in August 2021. Just this month, Pres­i­dent Biden announced plans to allow Venezue­lans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans flee­ing per­se­cu­tion pri­or­i­ty asy­lum sta­tus as long as they arrived by plane and had pri­vate spon­sors ready to help them reset­tle. When it comes to Chi­nese Chris­tians trapped in lim­bo, the Biden admin­is­tra­tion is balk­ing, while offer­ing no expla­na­tion for the dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent treat­ment of these groups of for­eign nation­als seek­ing asy­lum. Human rights advo­cates believe they already have the answer: The Biden admin­is­tra­tion is wary of fur­ther rock­ing the boat with Chi­na amid efforts to repair basic lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

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 The par­ti­cle col­lec­tion that fan­cied itself a physi­cist (Ed Fes­er, per­son­al blog): “Democritus’s point is that if the atom­ist says both that atoms are all that exist and that col­or, sweet­ness, etc. and the oth­er qual­i­ties of con­scious expe­ri­ence are not to be found in the atoms, then we have a para­dox.” From vol­ume 264.

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.