Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 367

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 the 367th install­ment, notable because 367 is a prime num­ber and also the largest num­ber whose square is com­posed of strict­ly increas­ing dig­its: 3672 = 134689.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Social­ism, Nation­al­ism, and Tolkien (Alec Dent, The Dis­patch): “In our time of unprece­dent­ed wealth and safe­ty, the once-defeat­ed foe of illib­er­al­ism has made a reap­pearence.… due large­ly to a lack of appre­ci­a­tion for how good we have things right now, a lack of under­stand­ing of how we got here, and a lack of under­stand­ing of how a rad­i­cal over­haul of soci­ety would alter the world as we know it.”
  2. The Despo­tism of Isa­ias Afew­er­ki (Alex de Waal, The Baf­fler): “…fight­ers protest­ed the deci­sion that they should con­tin­ue to serve with­out pay for two more years. A group of dis­abled vet­er­ans marched—there’s no verb that con­veys the deter­mined col­lec­tive motion of their wheel­chairs, arti­fi­cial limbs, and sticks—towards the cap­i­tal to demand their pen­sions. They were shot at with live ammu­ni­tion. Some were killed, oth­ers were arrest­ed and dis­ap­peared.”
    • I’d heard before that Eritrea was worse than North Korea in some ways, but this arti­cle real­ly drove it home. Wow.
  3. Why Peo­ple Are Los­ing Faith In Pub­lic Insti­tu­tions (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “…if you relied on the Post to tell you about the world you actu­al­ly live in, it would not have occurred to you that there is any oth­er side to the library sto­ry than the vir­tu­ous pink-haired queer librar­i­an and her allies ver­sus the mob of big­ots. If you are on the Left, isn’t it in your inter­est to under­stand why peo­ple are so upset, even if you don’t agree with them? Isn’t it in your inter­est to at least think about why the peo­ple of a town would rather defund their library rather than see it used in this way?”
    • This one is wild and Dreher, as they say, has the receipts.
  4. Can an Athe­ist Be a Moral Real­ist? (J. Budziszews­ki, per­son­al blog): “…I can’t see how you can be an athe­ist and a moral real­ist at the same time. It is like eat­ing a cake and still hav­ing it. If nat­u­ral­ism is true, then aren’t we just meat bags full of water with no dig­ni­ty? My friend says I am car­i­ca­tur­ing his posi­tion. Am I miss­ing some­thing, or is he?”
    • This is well argued. The author is a pro­fes­sor of gov­ern­ment and phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas.
  5. Trump should fill Chris­tians with rage. How come he doesn’t? (Michael Ger­son, Wash­ing­ton Post): “I know that peo­ple inspired by [Jesus] have done great things in the past — build­ing hos­pi­tals for the poor, improv­ing the rights of women and chil­dren, mil­i­tat­ing against slav­ery, car­ing for the men­tal­ly dis­abled, work­ing for a mer­ci­ful wel­fare state, fight­ing prej­u­dice, improv­ing glob­al health. But pre­cise­ly because these things have hap­pened, it is dif­fi­cult for me to com­pre­hend why so many Amer­i­can evan­gel­i­cals have reject­ed the splen­dor and romance of their call­ing and set­tled for the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal resent­ments of the hard right.”
    • Long and a bit ram­bly, nonethe­less inter­est­ing.
  6. Pub­lish­ing needs JK Rowl­ing to be a mon­ster (Vic­to­ria Smith, The Crit­ic Mag­a­zine): “The trou­ble with JK Rowl­ing is that she has done noth­ing wrong. Back in 2020, she wrote a care­ful­ly word­ed, com­pas­sion­ate piece about sex and gen­der.… This is a sit­u­a­tion in which the pun­ish­ment has cre­at­ed the crime and it’s one that is need­ed by mem­bers of the pub­lish­ing indus­try who have spent years embrac­ing the argu­ments of the most extreme trans activists while ignor­ing those of fem­i­nists. They need Rowl­ing to be a mon­ster. Oth­er­wise they might have to respond, not just to what Rowl­ing has writ­ten, but to the real­i­ties of the move­ment to which they have pledged alle­giance.”
  7. Died: Queen Eliz­a­beth II, British Monarch Who Put Her Trust in God (Dud­ley Delffs, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Queen’s love of the Bible and its gospel mes­sage led to her par­tic­i­pa­tion in the pub­li­ca­tion of a spe­cial book to com­mem­o­rate her 90th birth­day. Titled The Ser­vant Queen and the King She Serves.… Her Majesty per­son­al­ly wrote the fore­word, thank­ing read­ers for their prayers and good wish­es. ‘I have been—and remain—very grate­ful to … God for His stead­fast love. I have indeed seen His faith­ful­ness,’ she wrote. The book was dis­trib­uted to thou­sands of church­es across the UK and through­out many Com­mon­wealth coun­tries pri­or to the Queen’s birth­day in 2016. The book proved so pop­u­lar that the Bible Soci­ety had to print anoth­er 150,000 copies to meet demand.”

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 Big Data+Small Bias « Small Data+Zero Bias (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “Sup­pose you want to esti­mate who will win the 2016 US Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. You ask 2.3 mil­lion poten­tial vot­ers whether they are like­ly to vote for Trump or not. The sam­ple is in all ways demo­graph­i­cal­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the US vot­ing pop­u­la­tion but poten­tial Trump vot­ers are a tiny bit less like­ly to answer the ques­tion, just .001 less like­ly to answer (note they don’t lie, they just don’t answer).” I was stunned. From vol­ume 234.

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 366

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 the 366th of these mis­sives, which is not only the num­ber of days in a leap year but also  82 + 92 + 102+ 112.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. No Promis­es (Eve Tush­net, Plough): “In con­fes­sion you do not seek pri­mar­i­ly moral improve­ment but rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with God. The con­fes­sion­al is less a class­room and more a tryst­ing place. In my own life, my best cur­rent under­stand­ing of what I’m doing is not that I’ve turned away from drunk­en­ness and to absti­nence; absti­nence is an absence. It’s slight­ly more true to say that I am turn­ing from drunk­en­ness to sobri­ety: a path of peace. But it is most true to say that I hope to turn from drunk­en­ness to Christ. And this in all things: not from vice to virtue but from vice to God.”
  2. Humans Are All More Close­ly Relat­ed Than We Com­mon­ly Think (Scott Her­sh­berg­er, Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can): “…our most recent com­mon ances­tor prob­a­bly lived no ear­li­er than 1400 B.C.and pos­si­bly as recent­ly as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefer­ti­ti, some­one from whom we are all descend­ed was like­ly alive some­where in the world. Go back a bit fur­ther, and you reach a date when our fam­i­ly trees share not just one ances­tor in com­mon but every ances­tor in com­mon.… some­where between 5300 and 2200 B.C.,according to Rohde’s cal­cu­la­tions.”
    • If only there was an ancient and holy book which attest­ed some­thing sim­i­lar…
  3. Why Are We in Ukraine? (Christo­pher Cald­well, Clare­mont Review of Books): “The attempt to iso­late Rus­sia from the Amer­i­can world sys­tem has had a strik­ing unin­tend­ed consequence—the pos­si­ble found­ing of an alter­na­tive world sys­tem that would draw pow­er away from the exist­ing one. Twen­ty years ago, under George W. Bush, the Unit­ed States removed the Iraqi deter­rent from Iran’s neigh­bor­hood, trans­form­ing Iran overnight into a region­al pow­er. This year, under Joe Biden, the Unit­ed States has made Chi­na a gift of Russia’s exportable food and min­er­al resources. We are dis­play­ing an out­right genius for iden­ti­fy­ing our most dan­ger­ous mil­i­tary adver­sary and solv­ing its most press­ing strate­gic chal­lenge.”
    • In relat­ed news, these two arti­cles by Rod Dreher are the clear­est things I’ve seen high­light­ing the prob­lems Europe is fac­ing as a result of the Ukrain­ian war. Scary times.
    • Neron­ian Rul­ing Class Fid­dles While West Burns (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “As rich as the West is, it can’t keep its peo­ple warm in the win­ter by burn­ing cash. And so, Euro­pean house­holds are now being forced to ask if freez­ing in the dark for Ukraine is some­thing they real­ly want to do. This is not going to hap­pen to Amer­i­cans — but you should think about how you would react if this were you, and your elder­ly par­ents, and your kids. Yes, Putin is an SOB, but this is the real world.”
    • Can You Heat Europe With Von Der Leyen’s Hot Air? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “To be clear: Putin was wicked to invade Ukraine, and I wish Rus­sia would lose that war. But Rus­sia is not los­ing that war; the West is. It is unspeak­ably arro­gant for Ursu­la von der Leyen to say Putin is not being crick­et to use eco­nom­ics as a weapon of war, when she and the group of nations she leads have spent the last six months doing exact­ly the same thing to Rus­sia, only with­out much effect. Rus­sia, obvi­ous­ly, has the bet­ter hand — and it’s play­ing it. Again: we are ruled by fools who pre­fer sun­ny ide­o­log­i­cal dreams to cold real­i­ty … of the sort that’s going to hit Euro­pean homes and busi­ness­es very hard by Jan­u­ary.”
  4. Sub­ma­rine Cables and Con­tain­er Ship­ments: Two Imme­di­ate Risks to the US Econ­o­my if Chi­na Invades Tai­wan (Chris­tine McDaniel and Weifeng Zhong, Mer­ca­tus): “The poten­tial effects of a Chi­nese inva­sion of Tai­wan on the US econ­o­my are far greater than those of the Russ­ian inva­sion of Ukraine. Con­tain­er ship­ments to and from major ports in the region, as well as dig­i­tal flows, would be at direct risk. Chi­na and Tai­wan are also major sup­pli­ers and con­sumers for US major trad­ing part­ners around the globe from Japan and Ger­many to Sau­di Ara­bia. The effects of a cri­sis or block­ade would be felt by every major econ­o­my, which, in turn, would pro­duce addi­tion­al neg­a­tive effects for the US econ­o­my.”
  5. Octo­pus­es Don’t Have Back­bones — or Rights (New York Times): “…male blue-ringed octo­pus­es could use touch to rec­og­nize females they’d already mat­ed with. After bump­ing into a for­mer mate, the males fled, per­haps to avoid being eat­en. Such research sug­gests that octo­pus­es and oth­er cephalopods are smart and sen­si­tive.”
    • That’s a fun­ny excerpt. More seri­ous­ly, I thought this point was quite inter­est­ing: “Dr. Nie­mi said crit­ics have point­ed out that ani­mal care com­mit­tees have rarely denied approval to researchers. But in his expe­ri­ence, this is because com­mit­tees go back and forth with a sci­en­tist to revise the plan until it is accept­able.”
  6. Death in Navy SEAL Train­ing Expos­es a Cul­ture of Bru­tal­i­ty, Cheat­ing and Drugs (Dave Philipps, New York Times): “Sailors who enter the pro­gram bol­stered by steroids and hor­mones can push hard­er, recov­er faster and prob­a­bly beat out the sailors who are try­ing to become SEALs while clean, said one senior SEAL leader with mul­ti­ple com­bat deploy­ments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The inevitable effect, he said, is that a course designed to select the very best will end up select­ing only the very best cheaters, and steadi­ly fill the SEAL teams with war fight­ers who view rules as option­al. ‘What am I going to do with guys like that in a place like Afghanistan?’ said the leader. ‘A guy who can do 100 pull-ups but can’t make an eth­i­cal deci­sion?’ ” 
    • This sto­ry has INSANE details.
  7. New sto­ries on New Apos­tolic Ref­or­ma­tion, Sean Feucht keep assum­ing a right-wing takeover (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “…he doesn’t claim to be a pas­tor who’s expect­ed to take a qua­si-vow of prop­er­ty; he’s a rock musi­cian who does what oth­er enter­tain­ers do: Haul in the cash. He just hap­pens to have put a Chris­t­ian veneer on it all, and he’s doing for con­ser­v­a­tives what lib­er­al Hol­ly­wood elites have done for the Left for years.  If you look at Feucht in that light — as an astute enter­tain­er who wise­ly grasped peo­ples’ anger at church shut-downs in 2020 and exploit­ed it in a series of con­certs — his wealth doesn’t seem as unusu­al.”
    • I found this piece very inter­est­ing. At its best, GetRe­li­gion high­lights how news sto­ries in major pub­li­ca­tions get basic facts wrong about reli­gion (espe­cial­ly tra­di­tion­al reli­gions) and miss impor­tant insights as a result. This is one of their bet­ter pieces in a while.

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  Film Experts: Why Chris­t­ian Movies Are a Joke (Dou­glas Wil­son): “Ste­fan Malar­ney (Hot Tub Time Machine) made the obser­va­tion that Chris­t­ian film mak­ers sim­ply refuse to pick mate­r­i­al that is true to life. Andre Caproni (Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies) agreed, adding that unless we address the human con­di­tion with integri­ty, we are deny­ing some­thing essen­tial­ly spir­i­tu­al about our­selves.” For the record, this is satire. From vol­ume 233.

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 365

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 365, which is the num­ber of days in most years. In oth­er words, I’ve done the equiv­a­lent of work­ing on this email dai­ly for a year. In real­i­ty I just add a lit­tle bit every day as I’m read­ing things, but it’s still a big sta­tis­tic.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. I’m 30. The Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion Shack­led My Gen­er­a­tion. (Louise Per­ry, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stat­ing the obvi­ous: Sex must be tak­en seri­ous­ly. Men and women are dif­fer­ent. Some desires are bad. Con­sent is not enough. Vio­lence is not love. Love­less sex is not empow­er­ing. Peo­ple are not prod­ucts. Mar­riage is good. And, above all, lis­ten to your moth­er.”
    • Warn­ing: the head­er pic­ture is risque but the arti­cle is worth it. The author is not a Chris­t­ian and unsur­pris­ing­ly comes to some non-Chris­t­ian con­clu­sions — still fas­ci­nat­ing to see a force­ful sec­u­lar rejec­tion of the sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion.
  2. Racism-relat­ed:
    • Black cou­ple sues after they say home val­u­a­tion ris­es near­ly $300,000 when shown by White col­league (Justin Gam­ble and Vir­ginia Lang­maid, CNN): “Con­nol­ly and Mott lat­er re-applied with anoth­er lender, and ‘white­washed’ their home, accord­ing to the law­suit. This includ­ed remov­ing pho­tos of their Black fam­i­ly from the home, and hav­ing a White col­league present the prop­er­ty to the apprais­er. The suit claims this val­u­a­tion came back at $750,000, more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars high­er than 20/20 Val­u­a­tions’ appraisal of $472,000.”
    • In California’s largest race bias cas­es, Lati­no work­ers are accused of abus­ing Black col­leagues (Mar­got Roo­sevelt, Los Ange­les Times): “Though the agency tracks the race and eth­nic­i­ty of vic­tims, it does not com­pile offi­cial sta­tis­tics on offend­ers. Nor are there data­bas­es of pri­vate cas­es cat­e­go­rized by per­pe­tra­tors’ race. This makes it hard to gauge the extent of anti-Black hos­til­i­ty from Lati­no work­ers. But court fil­ings, vic­tims’ alle­ga­tions and employ­er records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Ange­les and San Fran­cis­co offices involved dis­crim­i­na­tion by Lati­nos, about a third involved white offend­ers and a third were unspe­cif­ic.”
  3. Chris­t­ian Polit­i­cal Ethics Are Upside Down (David French, The Dis­patch): “…both the Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ties are utter­ly depen­dent upon their most devout mem­bers for their elec­toral suc­cess. As I’ve not­ed before, non­white Democ­rats (and espe­cial­ly black Democ­rats) are among the most God-fear­ing, church­go­ing mem­bers of Amer­i­can soci­ety. At the same time, the Repub­li­can Par­ty would be irrel­e­vant with­out its own white Evan­gel­i­cal base. The bot­tom line is that Chris­tians in both par­ties have absolute veto pow­er over (at the very least) the party’s nation­al can­di­dates.”
  4. Silent cri­sis of soar­ing excess deaths grip­ping Britain is only tip of the ice­berg (Sarah Knap­ton, The Tele­graph via Yahoo News): “For 14 of the past 15 weeks, Eng­land and Wales have aver­aged around 1,000 extra deaths each week, none of which are due to Covid. If the cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry con­tin­ues, the num­ber of non-Covid excess deaths will soon out­strip deaths from the virus this year – and be even more dead­ly than the omi­cron wave. So what is going on? Experts believe deci­sions tak­en by the Gov­ern­ment in the ear­li­est stages of the pan­dem­ic may now be com­ing back to bite. Poli­cies that kept peo­ple indoors, scared them away from hos­pi­tals and deprived them of treat­ment and pri­ma­ry care are final­ly tak­ing their toll.”
  5. The Rise of the Work­er Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Score (Jodi Kan­tor and Arya Sun­daram, New York Times): “…two years ago, her employ­er start­ed requir­ing chap­lains to accrue more of what it called ‘pro­duc­tiv­i­ty points.’ A vis­it to the dying: as lit­tle as one point. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in a funer­al: one and three-quar­ters points. A phone call to griev­ing rel­a­tives: one-quar­ter point.”
  6. Good con­ver­sa­tions have lots of door­knobs (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “Con­ver­sa­tion­al affor­dances are things like digres­sions and con­fes­sions and bold claims that beg for a rejoin­der. Talk­ing to anoth­er per­son is like rock climb­ing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours. If you reach up, I can grab onto your hand, and we can both hoist our­selves sky­ward. Maybe that’s why a real­ly good con­ver­sa­tion feels a lit­tle bit like float­ing. What mat­ters most, then, is not how much we give or take, but whether we offer and accept affor­dances.” The author has a PhD in psy­chol­o­gy from Har­vard and is doing a post­doc at Colum­bia study­ing con­ver­sa­tions.
    • Relat­ed: Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be (David Brooks, New York Times): “…most of us are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly mis­tak­en about how much we will enjoy a social encounter. Com­muters expect­ed to have less pleas­ant rides if they tried to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger. But their actu­al expe­ri­ence was pre­cise­ly the oppo­site. Peo­ple ran­dom­ly assigned to talk with a stranger enjoyed their trips con­sis­tent­ly more than those instruct­ed to keep to them­selves. Intro­verts some­times go into these sit­u­a­tions with par­tic­u­lar­ly low expec­ta­tions, but both intro­verts and extro­verts tend­ed to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions more than rid­ing solo.”
  7. Put Down the Woke Man’s Bur­den (James Han­k­ins, First Things): “The Har­vard being whipped along by the admin­is­tra­tive caste, by con­trast, resem­bles the Children’s Cru­sade of the Mid­dle Ages: wrong cause, wrong army. And it ends up attack­ing the wrong ene­mies.” The author is a his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Har­vard.
    • Relat­ed: Harvard’s Sta­tus as Wealth­i­est School Faces Oil-Rich Con­tender in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas (Janet Lorin & Ser­gio Cha­pa, Bloomberg): “Oil reached a high of $120 a bar­rel ear­li­er this year as a result of a war-induced ener­gy crunch. The rev­enue is expect­ed to help nar­row the gap between the Texas system’s $42.9 bil­lion endow­ment and Harvard’s $53.2 bil­lion as of June 2021. ‘The Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas has a cash wind­fall when every­one is look­ing at a poten­tial cash crunch,’ said William Goet­z­mann, a pro­fes­sor of finance and man­age­ment stud­ies at Yale University’s School of Man­age­ment. ‘Adjust­ing your port­fo­lio for social con­cerns is not cost­less.’ ”

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 Too much trans­paren­cy makes the world more opaque. (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The demand for trans­paren­cy seems so innocu­ous. Who could be against greater trans­paren­cy? But trans­paren­cy is inim­i­cal to pri­va­cy. And we care about pri­va­cy in part, because we can be more hon­est and truth­ful in pri­vate than in public.”First shared in vol­ume 233.

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 364

a mix of links more rar­i­fied and more spicy than nor­mal

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, the 364th install­ment, can also be expressed as the sum of con­sec­u­tive primes: 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. One Man­ner of Law (Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, Harpers): “Almost fifty years ago, I learned by pure acci­dent that a code of law was drawn up in Mass­a­chu­setts in 1641 that sub­stan­tial­ly antic­i­pat­ed the Bill of Rights. I hap­pened to read a let­ter to the edi­tor in the New York Times that men­tioned the Mass­a­chu­setts Body of Lib­er­ties. I had a PhD by then and was sup­pos­ed­ly an Amer­i­can­ist by train­ing, yet I was learn­ing of this for the first time. When I final­ly read these laws, I won­dered why the nar­ra­tive of Amer­i­can his­to­ry did not begin with them.”
  2. The Girls Who Resist­ed Boko Haram (Jonathon Van Maren, First Things): “While the world demand­ed their return, the cap­tive girls were under relent­less pres­sure to con­vert to Islam and mar­ry mil­i­tants cho­sen for them. They were threat­ened with behead­ing or bru­tal slav­ery if they refused. Many of the girls, par­a­lyzed with fear, suc­cumbed. Oth­ers buck­led under the brain­wash­ing of a mil­i­tant assigned to incul­cate them into the doc­trines of Islam. He forced the ‘daugh­ters of infi­dels’ to take hours-long class­es in which they mem­o­rized the Quran. The girls were told that if they mar­ried, they would receive homes, slaves, and hon­or. In secret, the girls shared Bible pas­sages and prayed fer­vent­ly togeth­er for strength and res­cue. They sang hymns into their hands and cups of water to sti­fle the sound.”
  3. Why I Left Acad­e­mia (Since You’re Won­der­ing) (William Dere­siewicz, Quil­lette): “…it wasn’t so much that I want­ed to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly than every­body as that I want­ed every­body to be treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly. I want­ed the rules to change; I played by the ones that I thought we should have. I insist­ed on behav­ing as if I exist­ed in an envi­ron­ment that val­ued teach­ing as much as schol­ar­ship and intel­lec­tu­al­ism as much as spe­cial­iza­tion. Where open­ing the eyes of a hun­dred under­grad­u­ates was worth as much as super­vis­ing one more dis­ser­ta­tion, and pub­lish­ing an essay in a peri­od­i­cal that’s read by tens of thou­sands was as valu­able as adding one more item to the pile of dis­re­gard­ed stud­ies.” This is quite good, more rel­e­vant to the human­i­ties than to the sci­ences. 
  4. I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medi­um Real­ly Is the Mes­sage (Ezra Klein, New York Times): “Amer­i­cans are cap­i­tal­ists, and we believe noth­ing if not that if a choice is freely made, that grants it a pre­sump­tion against cri­tique. That is one rea­son it’s so hard to talk about how we are changed by the medi­ums we use. That con­ver­sa­tion, on some lev­el, demands val­ue judg­ments. This was on my mind recent­ly, when I heard Jonathan Haidt, a social psy­chol­o­gist who’s been col­lect­ing data on how social media harms teenagers, say, blunt­ly, ‘Peo­ple talk about how to tweak it — oh, let’s hide the like coun­ters. Well, Insta­gram tried — but let me say this very clear­ly: There is no way, no tweak, no archi­tec­tur­al change that will make it OK for teenage girls to post pho­tos of them­selves, while they’re going through puber­ty, for strangers or oth­ers to rate pub­licly.’ ”
    • Relat­ed: When Bots Write Your Love Sto­ry (Samuel D. James, Sub­stack): “That machines are telling us par­tic­u­lar sto­ries about our world is one of the main rea­sons I keep com­ing back time and again to dig­i­tal cul­ture, epis­te­mol­o­gy, and the­ol­o­gy. Our default pos­ture toward the Inter­net is still, to this day, a pos­ture of intu­itive belief: to gen­uine­ly accept that what we see on the screen is a piece of ‘real life,’ rep­re­sen­ta­tive of some­one who is real­ly some­where. And in many cas­es, of course, this is more or less true. But there are also very real cas­es where the inten­si­ty or the vivid­ness of what we see online is dis­pro­por­tion­ate to its weight or valid­i­ty out­side.”
    • Relat­ed: Speech With­out Account­abil­i­ty: Reck­on­ing with Anony­mous Chris­t­ian Trolls (Patrick Miller, Mere Ortho­doxy): “…there is at least one clear ana­log to anon speech in the Bible that I have not yet touched on: the speech of the ser­pent in Eden. He was the first char­ac­ter in Gen­e­sis to con­ceal his iden­ti­ty in order to cri­tique a person—God him­self. The first anon words in human his­to­ry set human his­to­ry on fire.”
      • This piece is far too long, ram­bles need­less­ly, and at one point says some­thing I think very sil­ly. Nonethe­less, I read to the end with inter­est. The best parts were the reflec­tions on anonymous/disguised speech in the Bible.
    • Relat­ed: The Seat of Mock­ers (Bri­an Matt­son, Sub­stack): “The defend­ers and prac­ti­tion­ers of smash-mouth incen­di­ary rhetoric insist that we must do this so as to ade­quate­ly com­bat the world and the infil­tra­tion of world­li­ness into the church. It seems to me that in real­i­ty, it is the world and the infil­tra­tion of world­li­ness into the church.” This is quite good, and I found it by fol­low­ing a link in the pre­ced­ing point.
  5. Some links relat­ed to the ongo­ing sex­u­al rev­o­lu­tion, most­ly crit­i­cal:
    • Chris­tians Vol­un­teer­ing Pro­nouns? (Andrew T. Walk­er, Amer­i­can Reformer): “We should name the pro­noun issue for what it is: A lan­guage game. Lan­guage is about nam­ing real­i­ty. Pro­nouns of any sort are instru­ments that indi­vid­u­als use to wield pow­er. Pro­nouns pos­sess pow­er only because the cul­ture we live in deems one’s cho­sen indi­vid­ual iden­ti­ty to be absolute­ly cen­tral to who one is. Pro­nouns serve the sub­jec­tive self, so if one rejects another’s cho­sen pro­nouns, it is doubtless­ly inter­pret­ed as reject­ing the person’s attempt at self-descrip­tion and self-auton­o­my. That’s what this is all fun­da­men­tal­ly about—creating a pri­vate field of real­i­ty defined by the wish­es and fan­tasies of indi­vid­u­als who know they can pro­voke sub­mis­sion for fear of can­cel­la­tion. We should be clear-eyed about this and refuse to go along with it.”
    • Zoophil­ia: The Last Taboo Will Fall (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Seri­ous­ly, how do you stop legal­iz­ing zoophil­ia, espe­cial­ly in a pop­u­lar cul­ture in which inter­nal bar­ri­ers with­in the mass­es will have been bro­ken down by wide­spread hard­core pornog­ra­phy? ‘What does my neigh­bor’s habit of being corn­holed by his Ger­man shep­herd have to do with my mar­riage?’ say the nitwit lib­er­tar­i­ans. ‘Ani­mals can’t con­sent!’ squeal the nitwit lib­er­als, though I hope they have the sense not to say so with their mouth full of ham.”
      • This is a well-doc­u­ment­ed piece and the updates at the end are very much worth read­ing, espe­cial­ly the Scalia quote.
    • I Regret Being A Slut (Brid­get Pheta­sy, Sub­stack): “I know regret­ting most of my sex­u­al encoun­ters is not some­thing a sex-pos­i­tive fem­i­nist who used to write a col­umn for Play­boy is sup­posed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a ‘slut’ and sleep­ing with a lot of men is not the only behav­ior I regret. Even more dam­ag­ing was what I told myself in order to jus­ti­fy the fact that I was dis­pos­able to these men: I told myself I didn’t care. I didn’t care when a man ghost­ed me. I didn’t care when he left in the mid­dle of the night or hint­ed that he want­ed me to leave. The walks of shame. The black­outs. The anx­i­ety. The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empow­ered. Look­ing back, it isn’t a sur­prise that I lied to myself. Because from a young age, sex was some­thing I was lied to about.” This is in no way a Chris­t­ian arti­cle — but it is inter­est­ing.
    • Mon­key­pox And The Face Of Gay Promis­cu­ity (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I remem­ber being told by the media that gay men were vast­ly more promis­cu­ous than straight men because soci­ety com­pelled them to be. Nor­mal­ize homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and grant same-sex mar­riage, and that would change. I nev­er believed it because I knew per­fect­ly well that gay men were insane­ly promis­cu­ous not because they were gay, but because they were men. An ordi­nary male unre­strained by reli­gious or moral scru­ple, and faced with a wide vari­ety of will­ing part­ners who demand no emo­tion­al com­mit­ment, or even to know one’s name, before hav­ing sex — that man will like­ly behave exact­ly as most gay men do.”
      • WARNING — the pic­ture in the link is jar­ring. The com­ments at the end are quite inter­est­ing and not at all what most observers would expect — Dreher real­ly does appre­ci­ate his audi­ence even when they dis­agree with him.
  6. ‘Dis­turb­ing’: Experts trou­bled by Canada’s euthana­sia laws (Maria Cheng, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Cana­da prides itself on being lib­er­al and accept­ing, said David Jones, direc­tor of the Anscombe Bioethics Cen­tre in Britain, ‘but what’s hap­pen­ing with euthana­sia sug­gests there may be a dark­er side.’”
  7. As India marks its first 75 years, Gand­hi is down­played, even derid­ed (Ger­ry Shih, Wash­ing­ton Post): “Today, at ral­lies of Hin­du nation­al­ist hard-lin­ers, Gand­hi is rou­tine­ly vil­i­fied as fee­ble in his tac­tics against the British and over­ly con­cil­ia­to­ry to India’s Mus­lims, who broke off and formed their own state, Pak­istan, on Aug. 14, 1947. On social media and online forums, exag­ger­a­tions and false­hoods abound about Gandhi’s alleged betray­al of Hin­dus. And in pop­u­lar films and the polit­i­cal main­stream, Gand­hi and Jawa­har­lal Nehru — the first prime min­is­ter — are side­lined, while nation­al­ists who advo­cat­ed the force of arms have been ele­vat­ed.”

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  Hav­ing Kids (Paul Gra­ham, per­son­al blog): “I remem­ber per­fect­ly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the abil­i­ty to take off for some oth­er coun­try at a moment’s notice. That was so great. Why did I nev­er do that? See what I did there? The fact is, most of the free­dom I had before kids, I nev­er used. I paid for it in lone­li­ness, but I nev­er used it.” First shared in vol­ume 233.

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 363

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 num­ber 363, which can be rep­re­sent­ed as 31 + 32 + 33 + 34 + 35

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Why aren’t smart peo­ple hap­pi­er? (Adam Mas­troian­ni, Sub­stack): “My grand­ma does not know how to use the ‘input’ but­ton on her TV’s remote con­trol, but she does know how to raise a fam­i­ly full of good peo­ple who love each oth­er, how to car­ry on through a tragedy, and how to make the per­fect pump­kin pie.… Exclud­ing this kind of intel­li­gence from our def­i­n­i­tions doesn’t just hurt our grandmas—it hurts us too. If you don’t val­ue the abil­i­ty to solve poor­ly defined prob­lems, you’ll nev­er get more of it. You won’t seek out peo­ple who have that abil­i­ty and try to learn from them, nor will you lis­ten to them when they have some­thing impor­tant to say. You’ll spend your whole life try­ing to solve prob­lems with clev­er­ness when what you real­ly need is wis­dom.”
  2. New York City’s Largest Evan­gel­i­cal Church Plans Bil­lion-Dol­lar Devel­op­ment (Emi­ly Belz, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “On 10.5 acres of church land, the pro­posed vil­lage would include thou­sands of units of afford­able hous­ing, a trade school, a super­mar­ket, a per­form­ing arts cen­ter, 24/7 child­care for night-shift work­ers, senior liv­ing facil­i­ties, and oth­er ameni­ties designed to revi­tal­ize the East New York neigh­bor­hood.”
    • But I thought church­es were leech­es on soci­ety exploit­ing their tax-exempt sta­tus with­out help­ing their com­mu­ni­ties! I’m sure some­one told me that once. 
  3. When mix­ing faith with fur­ries, things can get hairy (Riley Far­rell, Reli­gion News Ser­vice): “…Chris­tians in the fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty are cau­tious about who knows about both their fur­ry and faith­ful selves. Chris­t­ian fur­ries inter­viewed for this sto­ry, includ­ing lead­ers of the group that calls itself the Chris­t­ian Fur­ry Fel­low­ship, asked to be anony­mous, fear­ing ‘doxxing’ from with­in the large­ly sec­u­lar fur­ry com­mu­ni­ty for their Chris­t­ian iden­ti­ty and ostra­ciza­tion from their pro­fes­sion­al lives for their fur­ry hob­by.”
    • This was by far the most unex­pect­ed arti­cle I read this week. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing here. I draw your atten­tion to my dis­claimers.
  4. Fact-Check­ing Ran­dall Balmer’s Urban Leg­end on the Real Ori­gin of the Reli­gious Right (Jonathan White­head, The Gospel Coali­tion): “By the ear­ly 1970s, Evan­gel­i­cals, Catholics, and oth­er reli­gious vot­ers had dis­cov­ered that pol­i­tics would not leave them alone. Then their con­cerns about abor­tion, gov­ern­ment over­reach in schools, sec­u­lar human­ism at the FCC, and an unre­spon­sive ‘born again’ Pres­i­dent all merged into a sin­gle out­let, cre­at­ing a tor­rent of Repub­li­can vot­ers in 1978 and beyond.”
    • I post­ed a debunk­ing of this claim a while ago, but this one is quite good. And the claim gets repeat­ed enough in cer­tain cir­cles that debunk­ings should be repeat­ed as well.
  5. There Is a Sec­u­lar Case for Life (David French, The Dis­patch): “Amidst a squadron of reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tive lawyers, there was a sin­gle athe­ist pro­gres­sive. He was beard­ed, disheveled, and qui­et, but when he spoke every­one fell silent. Every­one leaned for­ward to hear what he had to say. His name was Nat Hentoff. He was a writer for the Vil­lage Voice; he’d pub­lished in Play­boy. He was a pro­gres­sive civ­il lib­er­tar­i­an. He was also one of the most per­sua­sive pro-life voic­es in the land.”
  6. Yearn­ing for a Banana Repub­lic (Jon­ah Gold­berg, The Dis­patch): “When seri­ous peo­ple talk seri­ous­ly about chang­ing a regime, they’re talk­ing about chang­ing the sys­tem of gov­ern­ment. Regime change in Iraq meant get­ting rid of a total­i­tar­i­an, ter­ror­is­tic dic­ta­tor­ship, not sim­ply replac­ing Sad­dam Hus­sein with a more pli­able and coop­er­a­tive tyrant. America’s regime isn’t on any bal­lot. Sym­bol­i­cal­ly, it is the bal­lot. More prop­er­ly, it is the con­sti­tu­tion­al sys­tem that requires our lead­ers to be elect­ed.”
    • This is straight fire. Not espe­cial­ly par­ti­san but def­i­nite­ly polit­i­cal. Gold­berg is a tremen­dous word­smith.
  7. 1st syn­thet­ic mouse embryos — com­plete with beat­ing hearts and brains — cre­at­ed with no sperm, eggs or womb (Nico­let­ta Lanese, Live Sci­ence): “To achieve this feat, the researchers used only stem cells and a spin­ning device filled with shiny glass vials.”
    • The title is, I think, poor­ly word­ed. These are not embryos assem­bled from raw mate­ri­als; rather, the researchers suc­cess­ful­ly mor­phed a stem cell into an embryo. Which is also amaz­ing!

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  Evangelicalism’s Silent Major­i­ty (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “One of my big take­aways from report­ing on evan­gel­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties is that, con­trary to some stereo­types, evan­gel­i­cals are some of the most glob­al­ly mind­ed peo­ple in Amer­i­ca. They donate to char­i­ties that do exten­sive aid work over­seas. They’re exposed to oth­er coun­tries through mis­sion work or human­i­tar­i­an trips.” First shared in vol­ume 232. (sad­ly, this is pay­walled)

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 362

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.

362 feels like a num­ber that should have lots of fac­tors, but it’s only got the prime fac­tors 2 and 181.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Explor­ing AI-Assist­ed Bible Study (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “I prompt­ed GPT‑3 to gen­er­ate text for each chap­ter in the Bible in each cat­e­go­ry. For exam­ple, the prompt to gen­er­ate a prayer was: “Write 5 prayers inspired by John 3 in the Bible. Remem­ber that the events described here are in the past. First include a short obser­va­tion or les­son for each prayer, and then write a per­son­al prayer relat­ed to the les­son.”  I reviewed the gen­er­at­ed text to avoid (or at least min­i­mize) unhelp­ful or hereti­cal con­tent. I accept­ed about 90% of GPT‑3’s sug­ges­tions on its first pass and regen­er­at­ed the rest until it gave me some­thing use­ful. It cost about $150 over six weeks to gen­er­ate this con­tent, which con­sists of 71,062 gen­er­a­tions and 1.1 mil­lion words.”
    • This is the same guy who gen­er­at­ed the AI Bible art­work I shared recent­ly (these and oth­er exper­i­ments of his are avail­able at http://www.openbible.info/labs/).
  2. What an Over­ly Pes­simistic View of Amer­i­ca Gets Wrong (Yascha Mounk inter­view­ing Eboo Patel, Per­sua­sion): “If every insti­tu­tion found­ed by a faith com­mu­ni­ty in your city dis­ap­peared overnight, preschools, hos­pi­tals, and uni­ver­si­ties would be gone. YMCAs would be gone, places where AA groups meet would be gone. Half of your social ser­vices would prob­a­bly be gone. It feels to me that reli­gious iden­ti­ty diver­si­ty should be at the cen­ter of our nation­al con­ver­sa­tion, and I’m curi­ous as to why it’s not.” This con­ver­sa­tion is full of wis­dom and I high­ly rec­om­mend it.
  3. Peo­ple Are Dat­ing All Wrong, Accord­ing to Data Sci­ence (Seth Stephens-Davi­d­owitz, Wired): “Good roman­tic part­ners are dif­fi­cult to pre­dict with data. Desired roman­tic part­ners are easy to pre­dict with data. And that sug­gests that many of us are dat­ing all wrong.”
    • From lat­er in the arti­cle: “…how a per­son answered ques­tions about them­selves was rough­ly four times more pre­dic­tive of their rela­tion­ship hap­pi­ness than all the traits of their roman­tic part­ner com­bined.”
  4. A Cru­cial Court Case Expos­es the Dark­ness of America’s Worst Indus­try (David French, The Dis­patch): “If some­one want­ed to cre­ate a sys­tem that was designed to facil­i­tate the dis­tri­b­u­tion of child pornog­ra­phy, videos of rape and oth­er kinds of abuse, or revenge porn, it would be hard to con­struct a more effi­cient sys­tem than MindGeek’s. And the sheer amount of MindGeek’s traf­fic and the vol­ume of the down­loads demon­strates that Porn­hub and oth­er sites are inject­ing poi­son into Amer­i­can life at an indus­tri­al scale.”
    • A stu­dent rec­om­mend­ed this piece from a month ago in addi­tion to the above: The Fight to Hold Porn­hub Account­able (Shee­lah Kol­hatkar, The New York­er): “Pschorr was sur­prised by the lack of reg­u­la­tion in the U.S. ‘It was always inter­est­ing for me as a Ger­man to see that, in the U.S., you’d get I.D.’d if you went to a bar, and if you’re not twen­ty-one you get in big trou­ble,’ he said. ‘But if you want to con­sume porn all you have to do is click ‘Yes, I’m 18,’ and you’re in the realm of dirt.’ ” I found this arti­cle inter­est­ing because it por­trays Chris­tians both favor­ably and unfa­vor­ably in short order.
  5. How Did a Two-Time Killer Get Out to Be Charged Again at Age 83? (Rebec­ca Davis O’Brien & Ali Watkins, New York Times): “A home­less shel­ter work­er and peo­ple close to Ms. Ley­den ques­tioned whether, despite her gen­der iden­ti­ty, Ms. Har­vey should have been placed in a home­less shel­ter for women, giv­en her his­to­ry of attack­ing and mur­der­ing them.” Read that sen­tence slow­ly. Wow. And the last eight para­graphs are jaw drop­ping.
  6. A large new study offers clues about how low­er-income chil­dren can rise up the eco­nom­ic lad­der. (David Leon­hardt, New York Times): “Church­es and oth­er reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions may have some lessons to teach oth­er parts of soci­ety. Although many church­es are socioe­co­nom­i­cal­ly homo­ge­neous, those with some diver­si­ty tend to fos­ter more cross-class inter­ac­tions than most oth­er social activ­i­ties. Churchs [sic] have low­er lev­els of what the researchers call socioe­co­nom­ic ‘friend­ing bias.’ ”
    • Sad­ly there isn’t more info on the reli­gious dynam­ic, even though this sec­tion of the newslet­ter is called “How Church­es Shine”
    • Although this is a NYT piece, it is not pay­walled because it is from their morn­ing newslet­ter.
  7. Non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al Church­es Are Adding Mil­lions of Mem­bers. Where Are They Com­ing From? (Ryan P. Burge, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “What is dri­ving the growth of non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al church­es? While in the past it result­ed from a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of indi­vid­u­als leav­ing a main­line tra­di­tion, now it looks like non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al con­gre­ga­tions are increas­ing by tak­ing in peo­ple who were raised Catholic—which is about a quar­ter of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion.”

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 Prob­lem Isn’t the ‘Mer­it,’ It’s the ‘Ocra­cy’ (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “The Amer­i­can sys­tem of gov­ern­ment was built on the assump­tion that the most salient polit­i­cal divides would reflect geog­ra­phy, not ide­ol­o­gy or class. The sen­a­tor from Mass­a­chu­setts would share bonds in com­mon with the lay cit­i­zen­ry of Boston that he did not share with a sen­a­tor from South Car­oli­na. On the nation­al sphere this would allow him to rep­re­sent the inter­ests of his con­stituents as if they were his own. This has proven more true at some times in Amer­i­can his­to­ry than oth­ers; yet because of the way Amer­i­can politi­cians are elect­ed, this sense of rep­re­sent­ing the inter­ests of a geo­graph­i­cal­ly bound­ed group of peo­ple is more true in the polit­i­cal are­na than in most oth­ers.” First shared in vol­ume 232

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 361

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 361, which is also the num­ber of inter­sec­tions on a Go board.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Actu­al­ly Good AI-Gen­er­at­ed Bible Art with DALL·E 2 (John Dyer, per­son­al blog): “The GPT‑3 prompts I used evolved over time, but this one is emblem­at­ic: Sug­gest 5 unique con­cept ideas for a work of visu­al art inspired by Luke 14:7–11 (do not pick the place of hon­or) in the Bible. Include art direc­tion and a spe­cif­ic medi­um and artist to emu­late. Include artists from a vari­ety of eras, styles, and media. Try for an unusu­al per­spec­tive. Title, year, medi­um. Descrip­tion.”
    • Some of these are stun­ning. Rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. Reli­gion Is Dying? Don’t Believe It (Byron R. John­son & Jeff Levin, Wall Street Jour­nal): “Data from five recent U.S. pop­u­la­tion sur­veys point to the vibran­cy, ubiq­ui­ty and growth of reli­gion in the U.S. Amer­i­cans are becom­ing more reli­gious, and reli­gious insti­tu­tions are thriv­ing. Con­sis­tent with some pre­vi­ous stud­ies but con­trary to wide­ly held assump­tions, many peo­ple who report no reli­gious affiliation—and even many self-iden­ti­fied athe­ists and agnostics—exhibit sub­stan­tial lev­els of reli­gious prac­tice and belief.”
    • The authors are pro­fes­sors of social sci­ence and epi­demi­ol­o­gy, respec­tive­ly. I one hun­dred per­cent believe this report. The so-called “rise of the nones” is most­ly the result of con­fir­ma­tion bias by sec­u­lar aca­d­e­mics and jour­nal­ists who find reli­gious­ly com­mit­ted peo­ple annoy­ing.
    • This WSJ arti­cle (which I think is pay­walled) is based on the freely avail­able schol­ar­ly arti­cle: Are Reli­gious “Nones” Real­ly Not Reli­gious?: Revis­it­ing Glenn, Three Decades Lat­er (Levin et al, Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Jour­nal of Research on Reli­gion): “The use of words and phras­es such as none, no reli­gion, and not reli­gious to describe this group of unaf­fil­i­at­ed indi­vid­u­als is thus inap­pro­pri­ate, inac­cu­rate, and mis­lead­ing.”
  3. Which Sins Are Feed­ing Your Sin of Lust? (David Powli­son, Cross­way): “Tom con­cen­trat­ed all his atten­tion on one mar­quee sin that sur­faced spo­rad­i­cal­ly, defin­ing and ener­giz­ing all his guilty feel­ings. But that nar­row­ing of atten­tion served to mask far more seri­ous, per­va­sive sins. As a pas­tor, friend, or oth­er coun­selor, you don’t want to con­cen­trate all your ener­gies in the same place Tom did. There were oth­er, deep­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for grace and truth to rewrite the script of this man’s life.”
  4. A Media-Fueled Social Pan­ic Over Unmarked Graves (Jonathan Kay, Quil­lette): “It’s now been 14 months since the orig­i­nal announce­ment was made about pre­sumed graves in Kam­loops, and no phys­i­cal evi­dence has been unearthed. No graves. No corpses. No human remains.… I’ve been in jour­nal­ism for a quar­ter cen­tu­ry, and have wit­nessed plen­ty of bizarre con­tro­ver­sies with­in my trade. But I’ve nev­er wit­nessed any­thing sim­i­lar to this phe­nom­e­non. It’s like one of those case-stud­ies in mass hys­te­ria and pop­u­lar delu­sion that you read about in his­to­ry books.”
    • This is not a claim that bad things did­n’t hap­pen. It’s more of a claim that the spe­cif­ic bad things that are alleged did­n’t hap­pen or that they did­n’t hap­pen on the scale wide­ly report­ed.
  5. Chi­na relat­ed:
  6. NHS will SHUT its con­tro­ver­sial Tavi­s­tock trans­gen­der clin­ic for chil­dren after damn­ing report warned it was ‘not safe’ (John Ely and Lau­rence Dol­limore, The Dai­ly Mail): “It fol­lows an announce­ment last month that every child treat­ed for gen­der dys­pho­ria in the last decade will have their med­ical records scru­ti­nised to see if NHS care is caus­ing them more harm than good.”
  7. Hot Takes Don’t Belong in Church (Chris Nye, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “So long as we are cre­at­ing a palat­able state­ment for social media or Sunday’s ser­mon, we are not pray­ing, wor­ship­ing, or orga­niz­ing our­selves for mean­ing­ful action. But in today’s cul­ture, the appear­ance of moral­i­ty is more impor­tant than moral actions, and speak­ing is more high­ly val­ued than pray­ing.”
    • This is full of good points. Chris is an acquain­tance of mine.

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 This Cul­tur­al Moment (pod­cast): I lis­tened to this pod­cast about fol­low­ing Jesus in the post-Chris­t­ian world upon the rec­om­men­da­tion of some alum­ni and a stu­dent. It’s quite good. Def­i­nite­ly start with episode 1. First shared in vol­ume 231.

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 360

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.

360 is, of course, the num­ber of degrees in a cir­cle. It’s also due north on a com­pass.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The God Gap Helps Explain a ‘Seis­mic Shift’ in Amer­i­can Pol­i­tics (David French, Sub­stack): “Count­less polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al issues don’t have a clear ‘Chris­t­ian’ pol­i­cy solu­tion, yet when a party’s mem­bers per­ceive it to be the par­ty of Amer­i­can Chris­tian­i­ty, then the plat­form is wrong­ly infused with reli­gious fer­vor, even on issues (like tax rates, gun pol­i­cy, envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­cy, for­eign pol­i­cy, and count­less oth­ers) where the cor­rect reli­gious answer is far from clear.”
    • The excerpt is not the main point, which is also good. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed.
  2. I’m a Scam Pre­ven­tion Expert, and I Got Scammed (Natasha Lupinia, per­son­al web­site): “This scam went against every­thing I thought I knew about social engi­neer­ing attacks. The caller was pro­fes­sion­al, knowl­edge­able, patient, and easy to under­stand (con­nec­tion issues notwith­stand­ing). He had so much infor­ma­tion about me already that, even know­ing how easy it is to find sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion about peo­ple, I was inclined to take him at face val­ue…”
    • Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  3. A clus­ter of links which touch on com­mon col­lege sce­nar­ios:
    • Bomb­shell alco­hol study fund­ed by Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion finds only risks, zero ben­e­fits for young adults (Chloe Tay­lor, For­tune): “Researchers said that for peo­ple aged between 15 and 39, the rec­om­mend­ed amount of alco­hol that could be con­sumed before risk­ing their health was ‘a lit­tle more than one-tenth of a stan­dard drink.’ They defined a stan­dard drink as 3.4 flu­id ounces of red wine or 12 flu­id ounces of beer.”
    • When We Con­sent, We Shouldn’t Feel Ter­ri­ble After, Right? (Emma Camp, New York Times): “Con­sent edu­ca­tion takes already anx­ious, inex­pe­ri­enced young peo­ple, and gives them a sim­plis­tic, bina­ry way of under­stand­ing sex. It’s no sur­prise then that many of us have absorbed the mes­sage that sex is a straight­for­ward trans­ac­tion with lit­tle room for com­pli­cat­ed feel­ings — and that we’re con­fused when we expe­ri­ence the inevitable com­pli­ca­tions that sex­u­al inti­ma­cy brings.”
      • A cri­tique of uni­ver­si­ty mes­sag­ing around sex. It does­n’t say all I would like, but it accu­rate­ly iden­ti­fies prob­lems with the cur­rent sys­tem.
    • First base is hook­ing up, sec­ond base is talk­ing, third base is going on a date and fourth base is dat­ing (Rob Hen­der­son, Sub­stack): “In terms of attrac­tive­ness, the bot­tom 80% of men are com­pet­ing for the bot­tom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are com­pet­ing for the top 20% of men.”
      • Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
    • Pro­nouns: Progressivism’s Pre­pos­ter­ous Plight (Farhana K, Tra­vers­ing Tra­di­tion): “With­out the abil­i­ty to define a woman as female, for exam­ple, encroach­ment into women’s only spaces will become com­mon­place. There is no way for the state to pro­tect the needs and wants of women, because noth­ing is essen­tial to being a woman and no defin­i­tive fea­ture of women that require such pro­tec­tions, because a woman is any­one who defines them­selves as one. Yet for the Mus­lim woman who abides by the shar’i com­mands to veil from unre­lat­ed men and min­i­mize phys­i­cal con­tact, increas­ing­ly decon­struc­tive atti­tudes to gen­der will pose a clash that few pol­i­cy­mak­ers and mem­bers of the pub­lic have had the strength to accom­mo­date.”
      • Inter­est­ing to see a Mus­lim per­spec­tive.
  4. The Great Fic­tion of AI (Josh Dzieza, The Verge): “…it might not be such a bad thing to have to apply a Tur­ing test to every­thing I read, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the more com­mer­cial­ized mar­ket­ing-dri­ven cor­ners of the inter­net where AI text is most often deployed. The ques­tions it made me ask were the sorts of ques­tions I should be ask­ing any­way: is this sup­port­ed by facts, inter­nal­ly con­sis­tent, and orig­i­nal, or is it coast­ing on pleas­ant-sound­ing lan­guage and rehash­ing con­ven­tion­al wis­dom?; how much human writ­ing meets that stan­dard?; how often am I read­ing with enough atten­tion to notice? If this is the epis­temic cri­sis AI-gen­er­at­ed text is going to bring, maybe it’s a healthy one.”
    • I found this one super inter­est­ing and some­what amaz­ing.
  5. The Hypocrisy of Elites (Erik Toren­berg, Sub­stack): “…we see this every­where: elites pro­mote body pos­i­tiv­i­ty — the idea that being over­weight is healthy — while being most obsessed with main­tain­ing per­fect health. Elites pro­mote sex­u­al inde­pen­dence and polyamory, yet them­selves are most like­ly to be monog­a­mous in sta­ble long-term rela­tion­ships. Elites com­plain about over­pop­u­la­tion and car­bon foot­print, but they’re the ones hav­ing the most kids and inflict­ing the largest car­bon foot­print.”
  6. The Fall of His­to­ry as a Major–and as a Part of the Human­i­ties (Tan­ner Greer, per­son­al blog): “Amer­i­can cul­ture has lost faith in his­to­ry as a vehi­cle for under­stand­ing the human expe­ri­ence. Our high cul­ture ques­tions the very con­cept of shared human expe­ri­ence. It is hard for history—or any of the humanities—to flour­ish in a world that does not put much stock in the human. By adopt­ing inter­sec­tion­al ide­ol­o­gy as their own, the pro­fes­sion­al human­ists have con­firmed that they do not believe in the promise of their own dis­ci­pline. And if they do not believe in it…. why should any 18 year old stu­dent?” This is an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly insight­ful essay.
  7. 33 Prob­lems With Media in One Chart (Nick Rout­ley, Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist): rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. I now know what astro­turf­ing is.

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 Dis­hon­esty of the Abor­tion Debate (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “The argu­ment for abor­tion, if made hon­est­ly, requires many words: It must evoke the recent past, the dire con­se­quences to women of mak­ing a very sim­ple med­ical pro­ce­dure ille­gal. The argu­ment against it doesn’t take even a sin­gle word. The argu­ment against it is a pic­ture…. The truth is that the best argu­ment on each side is a damn good one, and until you acknowl­edge that fact, you aren’t speak­ing or even think­ing hon­est­ly about the issue. You cer­tain­ly aren’t going to con­vince any­body. Only the truth has the pow­er to move.” First shared in vol­ume 227. I know I shared this recent­ly in light of the Dobbs deci­sion, and it is def­i­nite­ly worth shar­ing again.

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 359

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.

359 is the 72nd prime num­ber, and is also what is known as a Sophie Ger­main prime because if you dou­ble it and add 1 the result (719) is also prime.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Is Faith The Ene­my of Sci­ence? (Glen Scriven­er, Twit­ter): a good 90 sec­ond video
  2. I Don’t Want to See a High School Foot­ball Coach Pray­ing at the 50-Yard Line (Anne Lam­ott, New York Times): “How do peo­ple like me who believe entire­ly in sci­ence and rea­son also believe that prayer can heal and restore? Well, I’ve seen it hap­pen a thou­sand times in my own incon­se­quen­tial life. God seems like a total showoff to me, if per­haps unnec­es­sar­i­ly cryp­tic.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing op-ed.
  3. On mas­culin­i­ty:
    • Against the Extrem­ism of the Amer­i­can Mas­culin­i­ty Debate (David French, The Dis­patch): “While there are many mil­lions of men and boys who do quite well in our coun­try, the vast major­i­ty of our nation’s young men are falling behind their female peers. I quot­ed this sta­tis­tic in my last newslet­ter, but it’s worth quot­ing again: Men account for 70 per­cent of the decline in enroll­ment in Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.”
    • So Jor­dan Peter­son post­ed a video mes­sage to the Church. Mes­sage to the Chris­t­ian Church­es (Jor­dan Peter­son, YouTube: eleven min­utes. It’s gen­er­at­ed thoughts:
    • Church: Where Are The Men? (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Peter­son means it lit­er­al­ly when he com­plains here that most church­es offer noth­ing for young men. Men feel unwant­ed in these fem­i­nized precincts, and there is often noth­ing much to attract or hold them to con­gre­ga­tion­al life.” This post is LONG and ven­tures deep­er into church his­to­ry than I expect­ed it to.
    • Jor­dan Peterson’s “Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es” Is Non­sense (Tyler Huck­abee, Rel­e­vant): “He’s found an audi­ence and that’s fine, but when Peter­son steers out­side of his lane, you can tell. And on Wednes­day, Peter­son veered well out­side of his lane with this ‘Mes­sage to Chris­t­ian Church­es.’ It is ridicu­lous.”
    • Cross­ing the Jor­dan (Matthew Hosier, Think­The­ol­o­gy): “There is much about this mes­sage that I find salu­tary and invig­o­rat­ing. As I say, it made me laugh and cry and cheer. Although, with­out clar­i­ty about the aton­ing work of Christ on the cross, with­out a prop­er notion of grace, Peterson’s appeal rep­re­sents only a robust Pela­gian­ism and is there­fore insuf­fi­cient to deal with our most fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. Pela­gian­ism does not offer a solu­tion to the prob­lem of orig­i­nal sin; at best it can ame­lio­rate the symp­toms, not cure the dis­ease.”
  4. Book Review: The Man From The Future (Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexan­der): “…after a life­time of cul­tur­al­ly-Jew­ish athe­ism, he wished to be bap­tized. His daugh­ter attrib­uted her father’s ‘change of heart’ to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small prob­a­bil­i­ty of gain­ing a bet­ter after­life is worth the rel­a­tive­ly triv­ial cost of a deathbed con­ver­sion. Even as his pow­ers desert­ed him, John von Neu­mann remained a game the­o­rist to the end.” Fas­ci­nat­ing through­out.
  5. Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl that led to Indi­ana abor­tion draw­ing inter­na­tion­al atten­tion (Bethany Bruner, Mon­roe Trombly, Tony Cook, The Colum­bus Dis­patch): “A Colum­bus man has been charged with impreg­nat­ing a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose trav­el to Indi­ana to seek an abor­tion led to inter­na­tion­al atten­tion fol­low­ing the Supreme Court’s deci­sion to over­turn Roe v Wade and acti­va­tion of Ohio’s abor­tion law.”
  6. Whose breath are you breath­ing? (Farah Han­cock, Radio New Zealand): “At 5737ppm, the equiv­a­lent of one in every sev­en breaths I took on the bus was air oth­er peo­ple had breathed out. I texted a friend: ‘OMG, the read­ings are so high I may as well let the oth­er pas­sen­gers lick my face!’ I was being a lit­tle gross, because even accord­ing to a sci­en­tist, it is a lit­tle gross. ‘You can think of it as spit par­ti­cles, tiny spit par­ti­cles are what you are breath­ing in,’ says Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land aerosol chemist Dr Joel Rinde­laub. ‘It’s breath back­wash that gets peo­ple infect­ed.’ ”
    • First, “breath back­wash” is a mag­nif­i­cent term. Kudos. Sec­ond, I’m pret­ty sure the math is more com­pli­cat­ed than the arti­cle makes it seem. I would nonethe­less love see­ing CO2 meters in pub­lic places.
  7. How Uni­ver­si­ties Weaponize Fresh­man Ori­en­ta­tion (Abi­gail Antho­ny, Nation­al Review): “Ide­al­ly, fresh­man ori­en­ta­tion should be a pro­ce­dur­al, social assim­i­la­tion to famil­iar­ize stu­dents with the resources the uni­ver­si­ty offers and how to access them. How­ev­er, Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty under­took a mis­sion to present incom­ing stu­dents with sex­u­al, moral, and polit­i­cal guid­ance, whol­ly omit­ting wide­ly held per­spec­tives and effec­tive­ly insu­lat­ing pro­gres­sive views from intel­lec­tu­al tri­al. More­over, atten­dance at these events was com­pul­so­ry, thus con­sti­tut­ing an ide­o­log­i­cal haz­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • The lines in this checker­board pat­tern are straight (Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s work on some ran­dom blog)
  • Turn­about (The Far Side)
  • Down Mem­o­ry Lame (Load­ing Artist) — relat­able
  • Humans Will Believe Any­thing They Hear (Bengt Wash­burn, YouTube): six min­utes. Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. It sound­ed famil­iar so I searched the archives and saw I shared it back in vol­ume 310. It was def­i­nite­ly worth watch­ing again!
  • “Eat the Rich” ice cream truck sells $10 pop­si­cles shaped like Bezos, Musk, oth­ers (Khristo­pher J. Brooks, CBS News): “An artists’ col­lec­tive in Brook­lyn is sell­ing pop­si­cles shaped like bil­lion­aires includ­ing Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with the tagline ‘Eat the Rich.’ But the $10 price tag on the frozen treats has some peo­ple point­ing out the irony of crit­i­ciz­ing the world’s wealth­i­est while engag­ing in ‘peak cap­i­tal­ism.’ ” Warn­ing: auto­plays unre­lat­ed videos.
  • BMW starts sell­ing heat­ed seat sub­scrip­tions for $18 a month (James Vin­cent, The Verge): “Car­mak­ers have always charged cus­tomers more mon­ey for high-end fea­tures, of course, but the dynam­ic is very dif­fer­ent when soft­ware, rather than hard­ware, is the lim­it­ing fac­tor. Charg­ing more for high-end fea­tures feels dif­fer­ent when you already own them In the case of heat­ed seats, for exam­ple, BMW own­ers already have all the nec­es­sary com­po­nents, but BMW has sim­ply placed a soft­ware block on their func­tion­al­i­ty that buy­ers then have to pay to remove.” Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus. This actu­al­ly prob­a­bly belongs up in the seri­ous cat­e­go­ry because it’s an omen of the future.

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Church, inten­sive kin­ship, and glob­al psy­cho­log­i­cal vari­a­tion (Schulz et al, Sci­ence): “…we pro­pose that the West­ern Church (i.e., the branch of Chris­tian­i­ty that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church) trans­formed Euro­pean kin­ship struc­tures dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages and that this trans­for­ma­tion was a key fac­tor behind a shift towards a WEIRD­er psy­chol­o­gy.” At the time I first shared it I said, “This is real­ly inter­est­ing if it holds up.” I did a quick lit­er­a­ture church and the result seems to be hold­ing. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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 358

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 358, a num­ber whose base 3 rep­re­sen­ta­tion ends in its base 7 rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 3583 is 111021, and 3587 is 1021.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Cul­ture War That More Chris­tians Should Be Fight­ing (Tish Har­ri­son War­ren, New York Times): “But the peo­ple who debate the moral­i­ty (or lack there­of) of Dis­ney or Hob­by Lob­by rarely dis­cuss how much paid time off these com­pa­nies pro­vide employ­ees or whether they pay a liv­ing wage or what the wealth dis­par­i­ty is between their top and bot­tom earn­ers or whether they have ade­quate mater­ni­ty leave poli­cies or how much a cor­po­ra­tion finan­cial­ly gives back to a com­mu­ni­ty.” Rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent.
  2. The Sur­pris­ing Case for Mar­ry­ing Young (W. Brad­ford Wilcox, Insti­tute for Fam­i­ly Stud­ies): “Our analy­ses indi­cate that reli­gious men and women who mar­ried in their twen­ties with­out cohab­it­ing first — a pat­tern which describes Joey and Samantha’s path to the altar to a ‘T’ — have the low­est odds of divorce in Amer­i­ca today.”
  3. I should have loved biol­o­gy (James Somers, per­son­al blog): “In the text­books, aston­ish­ing facts were pre­sent­ed with­out aston­ish­ment. Some­one prob­a­bly told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoul­ders, say­ing how crazy that was.”
  4. Con­cern­ing abor­tion and the Supreme Court:
    • Chris­tians Should Rejoice Over Dobbs (Carl True­man, First Things): “Nobody of whom I am aware, for exam­ple, regards the lib­er­a­tion of Auschwitz in 1945 as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing. No child freed that day was par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned that his lib­er­a­tors were mem­bers of the Red Army, act­ing on Stalin’s orders. Yet the Red Army was engaged in a mil­i­tary action that, in the long term, would lead to the noto­ri­ous Iron Cur­tain divid­ing Europe. Nobody regards the fall of Hitler as a moral­ly ambigu­ous thing, even though it was only made pos­si­ble by the Amer­i­cans and the British strik­ing a deal with Joseph Stal­in. Yes, Trump is obnox­ious, but he isn’t Stal­in, and he did deliv­er on the abor­tion issue. Dobbs is a moment for joy.”
    • Here’s the Sur­pris­ing Back­sto­ry of the Down­fall of Roe v. Wade (Mark Hem­ing­way, Real Clear Inves­ti­ga­tions): “…con­ser­v­a­tive activists have long argued the pro-life move­ment was a moral cause on par with the civ­il rights move­ment – and ignor­ing the strate­gies com­mon­ly used to get the Supreme Court’s atten­tion would amount to uni­lat­er­al dis­ar­ma­ment in a lot of impor­tant legal bat­tles.”
    • SCOTUS Jus­tices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cit­ed Her Boss­es to End Roe (Kara Voght & Tim Dick­in­son, Rolling Stone): “In the shad­ow of the high court, across the street from its cham­bers, sits a clus­ter of unas­sum­ing row hous­es known only to the ini­ti­at­ed as ‘Min­istry Row.’ The strip is host to evan­gel­i­cal polit­i­cal groups that have spent the past sev­er­al decades push­ing Belt­way con­ser­v­a­tives to embrace the reli­gious right’s polit­i­cal caus­es…”
    • In a Post-Roe World, We Can Avoid Pit­ting Moth­ers Against Babies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, New York Times): “The first per­son to see us was anoth­er ultra­sound tech­ni­cian. Her voice got sharp when I asked if our baby had a heart­beat. ‘It’s not a baby, don’t talk like that,’ she told me, as I lay on the table. Her voice soft­ened a lit­tle, ‘You don’t have to think of it that way.’ For her, part of pro­vid­ing care was deny­ing there was any room for grief. But when the sur­geon came in, he began by express­ing his con­do­lences. He talked about our options, he talked about our baby as a baby.”
    • There’s a fol­low-up at My Ectopic Preg­nan­cies (Leah Libresco Sargeant, Sub­stack): “I want­ed to write about Camil­lian to describe not just what is allowed but what can be offered to par­ents who are los­ing their child when the doc­tors acknowl­edge their child as a child, rather than min­i­miz­ing their loss.” This one is a sad reminder of how cru­el peo­ple can be.
    • Angry about Roe, many jour­nal­ists focus on cri­sis preg­nan­cy cen­ters as vil­lains behind it all (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “Like, the CPCs have out­wit­ted the abor­tion clin­ics when it comes to fig­ur­ing out what many preg­nant women real­ly want and it’s clear the abor­tion facil­i­ties have suf­fered finan­cial loss­es as a result. How about ask­ing peo­ple at the lat­ter hard ques­tions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad mar­ket­ing deci­sion that was? Hint: It might have to do with the free ultra­sounds offered by the CPCs. Offer­ing this ser­vice was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it real­ly cried out for cov­er­age. But, you know. That wasn’t news.”
    • ‘The Pro-Life Gen­er­a­tion’: Young Women Fight Against Abor­tion Rights (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “Young women whose activism is not con­nect­ed to reli­gious belief are rel­a­tive new­com­ers to the move­ment, where they make up a small but bois­ter­ous niche. Kristin Turn­er start­ed a chap­ter of a youth cli­mate group in her home­town, Red­ding, Calif. Her Insta­gram bio includes her pro­nouns (she/they) and sup­port for Black Lives Mat­ter. She describes her­self as a fem­i­nist, an athe­ist and a left­ist. At 20, she is also the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor for Pro­gres­sive Anti-Abor­tion Upris­ing, whose goals include edu­cat­ing the pub­lic about ‘the exploita­tive influ­ence of the Abor­tion Indus­tri­al Com­plex through an anti-cap­i­tal­ist lens.’”
  5. See­ing Like a Finite State Machine (Hen­ry Far­rell, Crooked Tim­ber): “In short, there is a very plau­si­ble set of mech­a­nisms under which machine learn­ing and relat­ed tech­niques may turn out to be a dis­as­ter for author­i­tar­i­an­ism, rein­forc­ing its weak­ness­es rather than its strengths, by increas­ing its ten­den­cy to bad deci­sion mak­ing, and reduc­ing fur­ther the pos­si­bil­i­ty of neg­a­tive feed­back that could help cor­rect against errors.” The author is a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Johns Hop­kins and I hope he is cor­rect.
  6. Why I’m Giv­ing Up Tenure at UCLA (Joseph Man­son, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “Grad­u­al­ly, one hire at a time, prac­ti­tion­ers of ‘crit­i­cal’ (i.e. left­ist, post­mod­ernist) anthro­pol­o­gy, some of them lying about their beliefs dur­ing job inter­views, came to com­prise the department’s most influ­en­tial clique. These mil­i­tant fac­ul­ty mem­bers recruit­ed even more mil­i­tant grad­u­ate stu­dents to work with them.”
  7. Trans­gen­der-relat­ed:
    • Trans­for­ma­tion of a Trans­gen­der Teen (Sarah Eekhoff Zyl­stra, Gospel Coali­tion): “Mar­tin Luther King Jr. talks about the long arc of jus­tice,” said Falls Church Angli­can rec­tor Sam Fer­gu­son, who has spent time with mul­ti­ple tran­si­tion­ing young adults and their fam­i­lies. “The Bible also envi­sions the long arc of redemp­tion, which aims at the res­ur­rec­tion of the body. There is continuity—the end reflects the begin­ning. Our Cre­ator doesn’t need to start over. If your child has an XY chro­mo­some, then he’ll be raised from the dead as a male. We need to work along the arc of redemp­tion, not against it.”
    • Pro­nouns and Cas­es Involv­ing Trans­gen­der Par­ties (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son): “For a bit of the fac­tu­al back­sto­ry, which may be rel­e­vant because it may illus­trate how use of pro­nouns might col­or read­ers’ per­spec­tive: Peti­tion­er C.G. was found to have sex­u­al­ly assault­ed a 14-year-old boy (whom the opin­ion calls Alan, a pseu­do­nym) who had been ‘diag­nosed with autism’ and who was appar­ent­ly work­ing in school at three grades below his age lev­el. At the time, C.G., who was 15 and who would a year lat­er be 300–345 pounds and 6’4” or 6′5″, was appar­ent­ly per­ceived by peo­ple, or at least by Alan, as male.” For a lit­tle more on the case: No First Amend­ment Right to Legal Name Change (Eugene Volokh, Rea­son).

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Uh oh! (The Far Side)
  • Study Finds 92% Of Cal­i­for­ni­ans Who Flee The State Don’t Sur­vive First Win­ter (Baby­lon Bee)
  • A Clas­sic (The Far Side)
  • Magi­cian Dan White Proves Fate Real­ly Exists (The Tonight Show, YouTube): ten and a half min­utes.
  • Fright­en­ing But 100% True Facts About Guns (Baby­lon Bee, YouTube): four min­utes. The first part is the fun­ni­est, it drags a lit­tle at the end.
  • Tru­ly Hum­bled to Be the Author of This Arti­cle (David Brooks, The Atlantic): “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and espe­cial­ly if you’re around the high-sta­tus world of the achieva­trons, you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the basic rules of the form. The first rule is that you must nev­er tweet about any event that could actu­al­ly lead to humil­i­ty. Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I went to a par­ty, and nobody noticed me.’ Nev­er tweet: ‘I’m hum­bled that I got fired for incom­pe­tence.’ The whole point of humil­i­ty dis­play is to sig­nal that you are hum­bled by your own mag­nif­i­cent accom­plish­ments. We can all be hum­bled by an awe­some moun­tain or the infini­tude of the night sky, but to be hum­bled by being in the pres­ence of yourself—that is a sign of tru­ly great humil­i­ty.”

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How I Got Rich On The Oth­er Hand (Derek Sivers, per­son­al blog): “It’s not how much you have. It’s the dif­fer­ence between what you have and what you spend. If you have more than you spend, you’re rich. If you spend more than you have, you’re not. If you live cheap­ly, it’s easy to be free.” This is real­ly sim­ple and real­ly true. Empha­sis in the orig­i­nal. First shared in vol­ume 226.

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.