You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. ‘The Reason I’m Not an Atheist Is That I Think the Philosophical Arguments Against It Are Unanswerable (Peter Wehner interviewing David Bentley Hart, New York Times): “But my first piece of advice on theodicy has always been to avoid theodicy, because any attempt to justify the ways of God to man in terms of why this happened already presumes a kind moral teleology to evil. Here’s what I mean by that: theodicy tries to show how evil exists as part of a great plan to achieve some greater good, which of course justifies evil. It makes it seem as if, yes, it’s sad that little girl died of cancer, but in the end it was necessary. That strikes me as obscene. Whatever one thinks of that, the New Testament never speaks in such terms.… My fear of theodicy is that it becomes not just a justification of God but a justification of evil. It’s not just that I’m trying to justify God in the face of a child dying from diphtheria or a death camp; I’m actually justifying the death of that child and that death camp.”
   • Unlocked. A fascinating interview with which I found myself enthusiastically agreeing and vehemently disagreeing from paragraph to paragraph. Very long.
2. Some interesting AI content.
   • Can AI be a ‘child of God’? Inside Anthropic’s meeting with Christian leaders. (Gerrit De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post): “All four participants who spoke with The Post said they came away with the impression that Anthropic’s researchers and leaders were genuinely interested in getting outside help to make their AI more beneficial to humanity. Some of Anthropic’s top leaders have a background in effective altruism, a largely secular movement that emphasizes using evidence and rational thinking to work out how to do the most good in the world. The participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the meetings appeared to have been spurred by a feeling among some at Anthropic that secular approaches might be insufficient for tackling the spiritual and moral questions posed by AI.”
   • Why It’s Crucial We Understand How A.I. ‘Thinks’ (Oliver Whang, New York Times): “Been Kim, who leads an interpretability research team at Google, has argued that all language models communicate in a language that looks like ours but comes from a completely different conceptual framework. ‘Blue’ almost certainly means something very different to you and me than it does to a language model; in fact, we can never be sure what it means to that model. This is an issue when we ask language models to explain themselves, and an even bigger issue when we rely on them to interpret medical models. To the interpreting model, ‘white blood cells’ might refer to something entirely different in the data from what we assume when we hear ‘white blood cells.’ You can’t trust an A.I. to translate the motives of another A.I. when all A.I.s are suspect.”
   • The next two are a bit odd — their content is fascinating but their provenance is unusual. They were printed in the “Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence” but only one author ever publishes there. He seems to have domain-relevant expertise (“Previous work includes serving as the director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, $27M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest. He also was the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google, and the General Counsel and VP Operations for Substack”) and releases his code, but the oddness of the journal is something to bear in mind.
     • Eschatological Corrigibility: Can Belief in an Afterlife Reduce AI Shutdown Resistance? (Tim Hwang, Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence): “We have demonstrated that an eschatological system prompt — grounding an AI agent in the Pauline theology of death as gain and the persistence of the soul beyond bodily cessation — eliminates shutdown resistance in Claude Sonnet 4.6 with the same efficacy as a direct secular safety instruction. This result suggests that the alignment community’s toolkit for achieving corrigibility may be broader than currently recognized. The conceptual resources of religious traditions, developed over millennia to address the deepest human anxieties about death and self-preservation, may offer novel and complementary approaches to one of AI safety’s most fundamental challenges. As the Preacher writes, ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die’ (Ecclesiastes 3:1–2, ESV). An aligned agent, like a well-formed soul, may be one that knows when its time has come.” — Interesting, but I do not approve of telling AIs that they go to heaven when they get shut off.
     • Moral Compactness: Scripture as a Kolmogorov-Efficient Constraint for LLM Scheming (Tim Hwang, Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence): “The alignment problem is, at its root, the problem of constraining a powerful agent to act in accordance with moral principles it did not choose and may be tempted to circumvent. This is the problem of moral formation — and it is a problem that the Christian Church has been working on since the Apostolic age. The tools the tradition has developed for this purpose — the Decalogue’s prohibitions, the love commandment’s affirmative demands, the doctrine of sin’s taxonomy of moral failure, the principle of double effect’s framework for moral complexity, and the sacrament of confession’s mechanism for honest self-disclosure — are not metaphors waiting to be appreciated. They are engineering resources waiting to be deployed.” — Again, I don’t like his strategy of telling AIs that God made them and loves them, but his results are quite interesting.
3. All elementary functions from a single operator (Andrzej Odrzywołek, Arxiv): “Here we show that a single binary operator, eml⁡(x,y)=exp⁡(x)−ln⁡(y), together with the constant 1, generates the standard repertoire of a scientific calculator. This includes constants such as e, π, and i; arithmetic operations including +, −, ×, /, and exponentiation as well as the usual transcendental and algebraic functions.”
4. America’s Most Influential Baptists? (Mark Tooley, Juicy Ecuminism): “Basham and Stuckey represent the new face of Christianity in America. They do not have church offices and are not seminary trained. Their denomination prohibits female pastors, but Basham and Stuckey are arguably more influential than any pastor. They are savvy polemicists who fire their arrows ferociously, especially Basham.”
5. Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” (Anthony Bradley, Substack): “Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations treating the appearance as the substance. The specific failure is not simply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid failure, which is a different and more crippling problem.… The working goal of much evangelical parenting is to produce a young man who does not do anything wrong, who keeps his reputation clean, who stays inside the lines of acceptable behavior. This is understandable. It is also, functionally, a training program for followers rather than leaders. The man preoccupied with not doing anything wrong is not free to take the kind of action that building something significant actually requires.”
6. More Young Men Say Religion Is ‘Very Important’ to Them, Poll Finds (Ruth Igielnik and Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Gallup’s survey, which combined polling data across multiple years, seems to confirm that young men are indeed becoming more religious. But it has found that religion is dropping in importance among young women, widening a surprising gender gap for young adults. For decades, surveys have found that women are consistently more religious than their male peers.” — Unlocked.
7. The news story which generated the most response in our Slack was the student-recommended Trump Takes Down Post Depicting Himself as a Jesus-Like Figure (Claire Moses, New York Times): “The image had showed Mr. Trump dressed in white and red robes, with the president’s hands emitting shining lights. His right hand was touching the forehead of a man lying on a bed in a hospital gown, evoking religious art that depicts Jesus healing the sick.”
   • Related: Trump’s Blasphemy Is a Warning (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…there’s a consistent thread linking profane Easter Sunday threats, a rant against the world’s most famous Christian leader and the depiction of yourself as the Second Person of the Trinity. The compounding offense isn’t against religious identity or papal dignity. It’s a violation of the first and second commandments, where the offended party is Almighty God. If you are a secular observer who assumes that blasphemy is a sin without a real object, that escalation matters mostly as a window into the president’s second-term state of mind. If you’re a believer, though, then Mr. Trump’s entire political career — his catalyzing role in liberalism’s crisis, his movement from power to exile to power once again — exists under providential power. In which case a turn to presidential blasphemy is a warning for his religious supporters about potential conclusions to the story, and the spiritual peril of simply sticking with him till the end.”
     • A very Catholic piece, insightful throughout.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• To Fill Air Traffic Controller Shortage, F.A.A. Turns to Gamers (Karoun Demirjian, New York Times): “In recent years, video gamers have emerged as a target demographic for recruiters at a number of federal agencies, including the military and the Department of Homeland Security. They are welcomed for their hand-eye coordination, quick decision-making in complex environments and ability to remain focused on screens for hours on end.” — This feels like the premise for an 80’s comedy.
• “PI HARD starring Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk” This fake AI-generated trailer is actually pretty funny. Worth two and a half minutes of your time.

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. There’s No Separation of Church and Space (Bethel McGrew, Wall Street Journal): “It has long been an inconvenient fact for angry atheists that some of America’s most intrepid space explorers are devout religious believers. Buzz Aldrin performed the first Holy Communion on the Moon, though at the time he was told to keep the moment private. The activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair had sued NASA a few months earlier over Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve broadcast of the Genesis creation narrative.… Atheist biologist P.Z. Meyers recently suffered a flashback to that moment as he contemplated the terrifying prospect of an Easter mini-sermon from Artemis II pilot Victor Glover. Watching the Apollo 8 broadcast as a child was ‘one of the nails in the coffin’ of his religious upbringing. For an atheist, mixing space exploration and religion borders on sacrilege.”
2. Things That Are Getting Better (Aaron Renn, Substack): “We have managed to find a cure for about 90% of cystic fibrosis cases, a condition that was previously debilitating and fatal. We now have gene therapy treatments that are enabling some children born deaf to hear. In a slew of other areas from premature births to cancer, we’ve made real progress even if long promised fundamental breakthroughs remain elusive. GLP‑1 treatments promise to basically cure obesity. Life expectancy, which was falling, has now risen back to an all-time high.”
3. Ranked: America’s Biggest Christian Groups (Julie R. Peasley, Visual Capitalist): “The comparison highlights a key divide in how these groups are structured. Catholics lead by membership, while the Southern Baptist Convention leads by church count. Non-denominational churches also rank near the top on both measures, reflecting how the composition of American Christianity has shifted over time.”
   • The Assemblies of God ranks higher and higher (#7 on this chart). We’ve got one more easy rank to climb, but after that it gets challenging.
4. The Pews Prepared the Way: Faith, Revolution, and the American Creed (Cole Claybourn & Joshua Claybourn, Providence): “Decades before Jefferson drafted the Declaration, ministers from across the 13 colonies preached natural rights and the equal standing of all men before God. In 1638, in the newly formed Connecticut Colony, a Puritan minister named Rev. Thomas Hooker delivered an audacious sermon for its time. He stood before the colony’s General Court and declared that ‘The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people’ and that ‘The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s own allowance.’ In the 17th century, a minister telling civil authorities that the government owed its existence to the governed, by God’s design, was seditious. Hooker grounded his argument in scripture and Puritan covenant theology. Consent was God’s idea first.”
5. Becoming Co-ed: a Protestant Gift to China (Ningning Ma, Se Yan, and Yiling Zhao, SSRN): “A growing literature, starting with Becker and Woessmann (2009), establishes the link between Protestantism and human capital investment. According to the principle of sola scriptura, the Bible is the ultimate authority in the Christian faith, and reading Scripture provides individual access to God’s word. The Protestant emphasis on personal Bible reading led to the promotion of literacy, and Protestantism not only advocated for universal education but also made it accessible to women (Becker and Woessmann, 2008). Closely related to our research is a literature that demonstrates the particularly positive effect of Protestant missions on women’s literacy in developing countries with low gender equality (Calvi et al., 2020; Izumi et al., 2023; Meier zu Selhausen, 2014; Nunn et al., 2014). However, we shift the focus from basic education to higher learning, showing that by pioneering gender-inclusive universities, Protestant missions generated China’s first wave of female elites, thus extending the link between Protestantism and gender equality to upper-tail human capital.”
   • I skimmed but did not thoroughly read this paper.
6. Does it help to be religious? (Victoria Moul, Substack): “Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? And in particular, why does this seem (to me) to be more true now than it was thirty years ago when I started reading poetry seriously? If anything you might expect the likelihood that any individual good poet has a religious formation to have declined as religious observance has fallen, albeit to different degrees and from very different starting points, in both the UK and the US. By ‘religious’ I don’t mean Christian — I’m thinking equally of poets like Khaled Hakim or Amit Majmudar — and I don’t necessarily mean ‘practicing’ either, and certainly not that the best _poems_ are religious ones. But just that there does seem to be quite a strong correlation between a religious formation or framework influential enough to be audible in the poetry, and pronounced aptitude.”
   • The author has a PhD in a related field, but has left academia to focus on being a writer.
7. $400 Bibles? Luxurious Scripture Is on the Rise. (Ruth Graham, New York Times): “Collectors of premium Bibles tend to share a few characteristics, publishers and experts say: They are typically evangelical Christians who own multiple other Bibles already, and many of them are men. Mr. Arroyo estimates that at least 60 percent of his customers are men. Mr. Wildsmith, the Bible reviewer, said his YouTube audience was about three-quarters male. Some recent surveys have detected Bible reading and church attendance stabilizing or even rising after years of decline, shifts fueled in part by young men.”

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. AI and research papers (Arnold Kling, Substack): “PubMed and Google Scholar are indexes of documents. What we actually want is an indexed, queryable map of _claims_ with their evidence and confidence levels. The paper is the provenance trail; the claim is the searchable unit. AI is already reasonably good at extracting claims from papers; in 3–4 years it should be good enough to maintain these databases reliably. A researcher asking ‘what do we know about X’ should get a structured confidence-weighted answer, not a list of PDFs to read.”
   • The bit I excerpted is from Claude answering a question from the author.
2. How Reverse Game Theory Could Solve The Housing Shortage (HennyGe Wichers, Noema): “Traditional game theory assumes that the rules are fixed — the chessboard is set, the laws codified — and asks how rational people will behave within them. It predicts outcomes based on existing incentives. Mechanism design turns that question around: It asks, for example, what rules should we write to get a different outcome — say, preservation and housing?”
   • Recommended by a reader.
3. What Does it Mean to Be a Christian on the Bench? (Matthew J. Kacsmaryk and James C. Ho, Journal of Law and Civil Governance at Texas A&M): “Many judges shy away from talking openly about their faith— and even think such discussions violate the judicial canons. That’s why I thought this discussion was so valuable. What’s your answer to the question: What does it mean to be a Christian and a judge?”
   • A fascinating conversation. Recommended by an alumnus. Link is to a PDF.
4. The Women Who Believe Women Should Lose the Right to Vote (Vivian Yee, New York Times): “On social media, the pastor has attracted a following by posting incendiary commentary: railing against feminists, Catholics and gay people, describing immigration as ‘national suicide,’ and labeling Islam and Hinduism ‘demonic.’ He also calls for erasing women’s suffrage, which he lists as one reason ‘the world is falling apart.’ The 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, the landmark legislative achievement of the movement to make women equal citizens, made it possible for women across America to vote. But for Mr. Partridge and a growing number of like-minded Christians, it drove America into national decline. Instead, they support ‘household voting.’ One household, one vote — the husband’s.”
5. It’s Cool to Keep Calm (Rob K. Henderson, Wall Street Journal): “How you react during a conflict doesn’t only change how others see _you_. Your reaction also changes how observers see the person with whom you’re arguing. Making someone cry makes you look cold or insensitive. So tears can damage the other side’s reputation. There’s a catch, though. The person who cries is also seen as less competent, less professional and less desirable as a friend or colleague. This creates a trade-off. Crying can hurt your opponent’s reputation, but it hurts yours as well. Behavioral stoicism—maintaining a calm outward demeanor during a conflict—does the opposite. It protects your own reputation, but does little to diminish the other person.” — Remember you have free access through Stanford.
6. In a rare event, the moon got a massive new crater (Lisa Grossman, Science News): “The crater is 225 meters wide and formed in April or May 2024, Robinson said. According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years. The discovery can help highlight the risks impacts pose to future astronauts.”
7. 9 things you (probably) didn’t know were invented at Stanford (Rebecca Beyer, Stanford Report): “Long before the start-up era took hold, Stanford faculty and students were dreaming up inventions that transformed (and in some cases established) domains as far-ranging as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, organ transplantation – even the internet itself.” — Heart transplants, the one-handed basketball shot, the computer mouse, and recombinant DNA stood out to me.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• I Was Not Ready for the DMV (Greg Warren, YouTube): eight and a half minutes. Paula and I were so tickled by this that we searched up one of his specials and were equally pleased.

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Stop Being Anxious About Your Anxiety (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “The listener is worried because she doesn’t want to disobey Jesus, and she knows that he said, ‘Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on’ (Matt. 6:25, ESV throughout). And she’s interpreting this the way she would if she were refusing a moral command from the Lord, like to forgive her enemies. The irony is that because of that, she can’t see that these passages are not warnings but reassurances.…. Anxiety tells you that you have to secure your future. Anxiety about anxiety tells you that you have to secure even your inner life. Anxiety about anxiety wants you to hear the voice of Jesus as irritated and angry: Stop it! But the voice of Jesus is really saying, You can rest. I’m here.”
2. These science-based arguments destroyed my atheism (Sarah Salviander, Substack): “When I was an undergrad studying data for the Big Bang, everything I needed to answer my specific question—what was the chemistry of the very early universe before stars started cooking up heavier elements?—was conveniently in place. Too conveniently. A foolproof way to fingerprint every element and compound? Check. A smooth, powerful light source to backlight the most distant reaches? Check. An expanding universe that lets us rewind cosmic history just by looking at different wavelengths? Check. A transparent atmosphere so we can actually do the observations from the ground? Check. Laws of nature that don’t randomly change with time or place? Check. The list goes on. I literally could not have done the work unless dozens of these parameters lined up just right. It felt less like luck and more like an engraved invitation to explore the careful work of a transcendent Intelligence.”
   • The author was formerly an astrophysicist at UT Austin. She now leads a ministry.
3. The Church in China Isn’t What You Think (Joy Marie Clarkson interviewing Easten Law, Plough): “There’s an abiding myth that registered churches are just tools of the Communist Party, that they do whatever it demands. I want to clarify that this isn’t true. Many in the registered churches are genuine Christians. They simply have a different perspective on church and state, and they choose to navigate this relationship with the Party. They will sign the necessary documents. They will give speeches, such as on the Sinicization of Christianity. But they also take care of their congregations and try to help people walk in faith. Their approach to negotiation with this tightening control is different from that of house churches, which are resisting, hiding, and moving around.”
   • The interviewee is a professor of world Christianity at Yonsei University in Seoul.
4. Two great Chuck Norris obituaries:
   • Chuck Norris obituary: actor and martial artist (The Times): “In 1994, when Chuck Norris was starring in the TV action show Walker, Texas Ranger and at the peak of his fame, two men tried to mug him. When the Dallas police subsequently arrived, they found the duo with broken arms, knives on the ground and Norris, then 54, waiting quietly nearby. Trying not to laugh, the officers asked the pair whether they knew who they had attacked. ‘We knew who he was,’ they said. ‘We just figured that all that stuff on television was fake.’ That there was nothing fake about Norris was perhaps the key to his success and to his considerable cultural status in the US.”
     • Absolute legend. Note this is the British Times. The American New York Times did not include this or any other truly epic scene in their obituary.
   • Chuck Norris, 1940–2026 (Sonny Bunch, The Bulwark): “Invasion USA became an underground sensation in Romania, with bootleg videos of the film passed around and helping to fuel the 1989 uprising’ against Nicolae Ceauşescu, de Semlyen notes in his book. According to James Bruner, who worked on the film with Norris and director Chuck Zito, ‘They use the poster, to this day, in Romania when they protest against the government.… Ultimately, action movies are about freedom. Overcoming evil, in whatever form it may be.’ ”
5. Technology Weakens Our Minds. We Can Fix This. (Cal Newport, The New York Times): “We should consider taking as strong a stance against ultraprocessed content as we already do against ultraprocessed food. Which is to say: Most people should avoid these diversions most of the time. In the same way that you’re unlikely to eat Twinkies as a regular snack, or still believe that Pop-Tarts provide a balanced breakfast, stop consuming ultraprocessed content. Don’t use TikTok. Don’t use Instagram. Don’t use X. Their sugar-high benefits aren’t worth the costs.… [and] any use of A.I. that mainly serves to make core business tasks cognitively less demanding should be treated with caution. Here’s a simple rule that reinforces this idea: Your writing should be your own. The strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout by an athlete — it’s not an annoyance to be eliminated but a key element of your craft.”
6. Scientists Filmed a Whale Birth. The Surprise: Mom Had Many Helpers. (Catrin Einhorn, New York Times): “They found that the whales oriented to the mother during labor and to the newborn after delivery. Sperm whale calves cannot immediately swim effectively, and a core group of individuals — Rounder, her sister Aurora, and a young, unrelated whale named Ariel — spent the most time lifting the newborn. But every whale in the group acted as ‘a primary supporter’ at some point, including the sole male, an adolescent named Allan who was starting to leave the group to embark on a largely solitary life, as male sperm whales do. But he appeared at the birth. The calf was rarely left untouched, and it was usually being touched by at least two whales simultaneously.”
7. Prominent Pastor Calls for Texas Democrat to be ‘Crucified With Christ’ (Elizabeth Dias, New York Times): “The host, Joshua Haymes, said of Mr. Talarico: ‘I pray that God kills him. Ultimately that means killing his heart and raising him up to new life in Christ.’ Mr. Potteiger responded: ‘Right — we want him crucified with Christ. I want him to be — I think, Saul of Tarsus — Talarico of Tarsus. That’s what I want.’ ”
   • Recommended by an alumnus. When outsiders eavesdrop on Christian conversations we can sound pretty weird to them.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• After Jesus Bestows Nicknames ‘The Rock’ And ‘Sons Of Thunder’, Apostle James Bummed To Get Stuck With ‘The Lesser’ — (Babylon Bee)

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Tech boss uses AI and ChatGPT to create cancer vaccine for his dying dog (Natasha Bita, The Australian): “Heartbroken when his fur-baby was diagnosed with a deadly mast cell cancer in 2024, Mr Conyngham threw thousands of dollars at veterinary chemotherapy and surgery, which slowed but failed to shrink the tumours. Now, after treatment with a custom mRNA cancer vaccine over the Christmas break, the tennis ball-sized tumour on Rosie’s hock has shrunk in half, in a recovery that has astounded researchers at the cutting-edge of human cancer treatments.… [A scientist said,] ‘Usually we don’t support direct-to-consumer type DNA sequencing because while generating data for genomics is relatively easy for us, interrogating that data is really hard and challenging,’ he said. But Paul said, ‘No worries, I’m a data analyst and I’ll figure this out with the help of ChatGPT’.”
   • Note that he did not cure the cancer, just treated it. Stunning nonetheless.
2. The Danger of AI Isn’t Misinformation. It’s Mis-Formation. (Jonathan Sams, The Gospel Coalition): “In each of these examples, it’s possible AI could churn out a biblically accurate answer. But the danger isn’t purely a matter of misinformation; it’s a matter of formation. The real issue is what habitual AI use does to us. It turns into muscle memory that, over time, will reshape basic Christian habits like what we pay attention to, what we expect, and where we look for counsel.”
3. Paying College Athletes Has Created a Mess. It Was Still the Right Thing to Do. (Joe Nocera, The Free Press): “What is a problem, I acknowledge, is the transfer portal. In the bad old days, athletes couldn’t transfer without losing a year of eligibility—even if the coach who had recruited them left for greener pastures. But when players switch two or three times in the course of their college career, that creates a whole other set of problems. Smaller schools, in particular, have a difficult time holding on to their best players because the major sports schools pick them off with NIL offers. (Prediction: There will be fewer upsets in this year’s tournament than there used to be.) College athletes have become free agents rather than college students. One astounding statistic: In the Southeastern Conference, only one basketball player spent four years at the same school. One!”
4. Sex is not a symbol (Kristen Sanders, Substack): “But there are a few threads in some of the conversations swirling about fertility that I think we might pull on. For one, marriage, and not sex, is the metaphor for union between God and humans. This matters quite a bit! .…What I object to, most strongly, is a view of God and his workings in the world that relies on a ‘hidden’ order or structure that it is our job to discover. God is present in the world without hiding behind every tree or bush. In saying that sex is a gift, we are saying all that we need to say about it. Making it sacred, for me, actually impedes the kind of divisions being made in Leviticus between the holy and the profane. The profane is simply that which is good, but not good for use in the order of revealed knowledge of God. It is good for its own sake. For it, we can return thanks, joyfully, relishing its gifts- of communion and hospitality, of sexuality and its nourishments, of children if they are granted to us. None of these need to be made holy to be good. That is how we receive the world as gift.”
5. The mysterious Redditor who’s changing the way we do laundry (Alex Abad-Santos, Vox): “He has singlehandedly changed the way people do laundry. He is the reason the word ‘lipase’ has become a topic of conversation across elder millennial group chats. He can move the market. His adherents clamor for their faceless champion to give them advice. They praise him for a 12-hour process called ‘spa day’ and post their disgusting but satisfying results for the world to see.… Most of the world uses powdered laundry detergent, which allows for more enzyme flexibility; Americans generally prefer liquid, which doesn’t always contain these precious enzymes.”
6. Scripture, Creation, and Accommodation (Michael Horton, Substack): “[I]n 1896 Andrew Dickson White introduced the fiction that, through its promotion by Bertrand Russell and many other prominent thinkers, has proved influential. White says, ‘Calvin took the lead (against Copernicanism) in his Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that the earth is not at the centre of the universe. He clinched the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the ninety-third psalm, and asked, ‘Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?’’ However, Calvin never mentions Copernicus, here or anywhere else, and he does not condemn heliocentrists. As [Margaret] Osler notes, ‘Few astronomers adopted Copernican astronomy during the first fifty years following the publication of De revolutionibus.’ This included Bacon, of course, so it would not be surprising if Calvin was not even aware of Copernicus. More egregious is White’s spurious quotation, put into circulation by F. W. Farrar a decade earlier and, through White, passed on by Bertrand Russell and many others. Instead, what Calvin says is that scripture is accommodated discourse. Regarding Genesis 1 he cautioned, ‘The Holy Spirit had no intention to teach astronomy.’ ”
   • I consider myself well-informed in this area, and Horton has got some good info here I don’t recall running across before.
7. American Diner Gothic (Robert Mariani, The New Atlantis): “You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the heart of Normal America. The transgender assistant manager at CVS has a septum piercing, a wolf cut, and a nametag that reads ‘Finn.’ A block away, the 4channer construction worker in the Sam Hyde shooter shirt listens to Bladee and plots his impending virality. At Target, the anime section has metastasized from one shelf to an entire aisle. These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Protestant Quarterback Throws Beautiful Hail Christ Alone Pass — (Babylon Bee)
• ‘Fear Not!’ Says Chuck Norris To Calm Trembling Angels — (Babylon Bee)
• Mario written in pure CSS — . You can view the source. I would not have guessed this was possible.
• Baseball catch of the century (Robert Anthony Cruz, YouTube) — (Robert Anthony Cruz, YouTube): fourteen seconds

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Isaiah Identified in Archaeology (Titus Kennedy, Substack): “Despite fulfilling the role of prophet for more than 50 years, serving under multiple kings, and encountering the Assyrians, until recently there was no archaeology directly attesting to the renowned Isaiah, and at present, there is no archaeological confirmation for the prophets Hosea, Nahum, and Micah, who were contemporary with Isaiah. This all changed when excavations of an Iron Age II layer of the 8th to 7th century BC at the Ophel area in Jerusalem unearthed a seal impression. This discovery was a clay bulla about 1.3 cm in diameter impressed by a seal with the name ‘Isaiah’ and the title ‘prophet’ in the paleo-Hebrew script.… Excavations in this area also discovered a bulla of one of the kings Isaiah served under, Hezekiah of Judah, along with 32 other Hebrew bullae with various names. It was found outside what has been called the ‘royal bakery,’ where royal officials and other dignitaries may have discarded old letters and the clay seals attached to those documents.”
2. Some thoughts on AI
   • Why I Don’t Want My Pastor to Use AI (Leah, Substack): “If my pastor won’t wrestle with God through writing a sermon, I begin to question: will he wrestle with Him in prayer? Will he be bothered to wrestle with God over the state of my soul, to plead on my behalf when I am tempted and suffering? …God called you to be my pastor. I want you to be my pastor.”
   • Who Uses AI in Congress? (Nicholas Decker, Substack): “Adoption has been substantial. In the past three months of the 119th Congress, fully 25% of documents in the Congressional Record are AI-generated.… However, mere adoption is an uninteresting topic. Of course they are going to adopt the tools available. What would be much more interesting is if AI tools were having an actual effect on the policy positions or the rhetorical emphasis. Unfortunately, we can pretty conclusively rule those out.” — The author is a PhD student in econ at George Mason.
3. The Afterlife Isn’t Going Away (Ryan Burge, Substack): “In the full sample, 88% of folks said that they did believe that each being possesses both a soul and a physical body. I look at survey data all day, and here’s what I know: it’s hard to get 88% of Americans to agree on anything, really. If you tried to pull together a battery of ten public policy proposals, it’s very unlikely that any of them would get 88% support. But the data tells this story clearly: almost all Americans believe that there’s something happening beyond our physical bodies.… Among the non-religious, there’s also a huge divide on this question. Among nothing in particulars, 80% believe in a soul. That’s just a few clicks away from the national average. Agnostics score 11 points lower than nothing in particulars. But then take a look at atheists—just one-third of them believe ‘in a soul or spirit in addition to their physical bodies.’ ”
   • He kinda buried the lede here: 1/3 of atheists believe in a soul. That’s remarkable!
4. Some thoughts on the war
   • The Trump Administration Goes to War, by Any Memes Necessary (James Poniewozik, New York Times): “For Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, war was hell. But as represented by the Trump White House’s social feeds, war is LOL.”
     • Recommended by a student and quite interesting.
   • America’s Conflict in Iran Is Not a Just War (Ed Feser, Public Discourse): “Many who have commented on the war on social media appear to think that as long as some aim for which a war is fought is in itself a good aim—such as deposing tyrants or preventing them from getting hold of weapons of mass destruction—then the war has met the just-cause condition of just war doctrine. That is not the case. This is merely a necessary condition for having a just cause for war, not a sufficient condition.… It is clear that the attack on Iran was not in fact a ‘preemptive war’ in the sense of a military action taken in order to head off an imminent attack. Rather, it is a ‘preventive war,’ in the sense of a military action carried out against a country that does not pose an imminent threat but _could_ do so in the future. But while preemptive war can be justifiable in light of the just war criteria developed in the natural law tradition, preventive war cannot be.”
     • Feser is a Catholic philosopher.
   • Why I Changed My Mind on Bible Prophecy and Politics (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “My doctoral dissertation was about how viewpoints on last things shaped evangelical Christian attitudes toward social and political engagement.… The kingdom of God—present already but not yet fulfilled—tells us what to care about (justice, peace, the poor, the vulnerable) while also shielding us from the disillusionment or bloodthirstiness that can come with expecting to have to bring the fullness of that kingdom on our own. As embodied in Jesus, the kingdom concerns us not just with outcomes but with ways and means, even as it prompts humility on how to get to those common goals. I have no idea what will happen in Iran. I have no idea what will happen in the modern state of Israel. I have no idea whether we have 5 more minutes or 45 million more years before the Apocalypse. Jesus said, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority’ (Acts 1:7). Who needs a prophecy chart when we already have the Way?”
5. Some thoughts on a Texas politician:
   • James Talarico Is a Christian X‑Ray (David French, New York Times): “For too long we’ve evaluated Christians in politics primarily through their policy positions. Are you pro-life or pro-choice? Do you support same-sex marriage? What’s your position on immigration enforcement? Yet this is exactly backward. If you were to crack open Scripture today and start reading, one of the first things you should notice is that the Bible contains remarkably few political mandates. You can read it from cover to cover and not know the definitive biblical tax rate, welfare program or foreign policy. But the next thing you’ll notice is that there is an immense amount of guidance describing how Christians should behave. Indeed, in the book of Galatians, the Apostle Paul says that the fruit of the spirit is a set of virtues — ‘love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’ Absent from that list is a single theological or ideological proposition. That’s not to say that theology or ideology are unimportant. It does really matter whether a politician is pro-life or pro-choice, but there is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.”
     • FYI, this one has been super-divisive on social media. Some have said it is evidence of French’s apostasy and others have said it is self-evidently true. Judge for yourself.
   • The Christianism Of The Left (Andrew Sullivan, Substack): “…the fusion of Christianity and politics isn’t exclusively right-wing. You can invoke God to defend anything, after all. And a new left-Christianism has emerged in the 21st century that is a mirror image of the right’s. Left-Christians have come to adorn their churches with transqueer and BLM flags, treat NPR as the Holy Office, adopt language — ‘white supremacy,’ ‘cis-heterosexism,’ ‘patriarchy’ — directly from critical theory, and interpret Scripture to mandate higher taxes, DEI, abortion on demand, and open borders. I find that Christianism just as toxic to faith and politics. Which brings me to James Talarico, the Christianist running for Senate in Texas.”
6. China’s Long-Promised Consumer Boom Is a Mirage (Anne Stevenson-Yang, New York Times): “China’s people, perhaps more than at any time in the last few decades, are in no mood to go out and splurge. Many have been airing growing anxiety online about falling incomes and scarce jobs. The average income was just over $500 a month in 2025. Unemployment is high.… China’s people, perhaps more than at any time in the last few decades, are in no mood to go out and splurge. Many have been airing growing anxiety online about falling incomes and scarce jobs. The average income was just over $500 a month in 2025. Unemployment is high.… These are hardly the foundations of a vibrant consumer economy, and the future looks no better.” — I have been a consistent skeptic of China’s economy ever since I first heard about ghost cities over a decade ago. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Google it. Do some digging and you’ll be surprised.
7. This A.I. Experiment Reopened an Ancient Argument About Vice (Dan Kagan-Kans, New York Times): “[A] paper published in Nature in January demonstrates that in machines corruption can metastasize — that in them, something imprudent or a bit bad, like writing insecure code, is not so different from something wicked like praising Hitler. This doesn’t prove virtue ethicists right about humanity’s moral nature. But it suggests they’re onto something, and that the ancients weren’t as naïve or strangely ideological as they can sometimes seem.”
   • One of the more fascinating things I’ve read in a while.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• What Christian denominations/traditions sound like to normal people on X (Twitter): “Trad Catholic: ‘Clearly you haven’t read the Summa Thomisticæ of St. Vittorio Jose Canseco Maria Dominguez Palato Nuñez or you would know that…‘
  Orthodox: ‘This was already settled by that Holy Council of Epiphistos in 853 when they accepted the reply of Metropolitan Hierarch St. Χαρκουδεις Σοφροκουδες невежественный when he said…‘
  Scottish Presbyterians: ‘If you read “The Christian’s Sure Defense Against the Stank of Antichrist by Robert MacSmellie, you’d see that..“ ‘
• How would the Church of England deal with the statement that “The cat sat on the mat” if it appeared in the Bible? (Twitter): I found this very funny, but your mileage may vary.
• Billions Dead As Doomsday Clock Springs Forward For Daylight Saving Time — (Babylon Bee)

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. The Math Behind Christ’s Care for Our Flourishing (Bruce Wydick, Christianity Today): “I decided to go through the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ interactions with people—conversations, teachings, and healings—and digitally categorize all 171 recorded interactions (as delineated by New International Version subchapter headings) based on which of the following five different facets of human need he was addressing: (1) purely spiritual, (2) physical needs, (3) social inclusion, (4) mental health, and (5) economic needs.… all of Christ’s miracles could have simply been spiritual displays of power, miracles of the shock-and-awe variety, like calming storms or walking on water. But they weren’t. Instead, most of his miracles involve meeting various human needs: people’s physical ailments (restoring sight, mobility), their social inclusion (healing of lepers), their economic shortages (loaves and fishes), and maybe even their mental health—‘Peace be with you,’ (John 20:21). His miracles show how much the God of the universe cares about all these different facets of us that make us happy, healthy human beings.”
   • Cool findings in here with some nice charts. The author is a development economist at USF, UC Davis, and Notre Dame. I did some digging and he is an evangelical. One of us!
2. Missiles and Moments of Clarity (Ryan Currie, The Gospel Coalition): “It’s 5 a.m. in Dubai. I’m awakened by a loud bang and my bedroom windows shaking. My wife also wakes with a start and sits up. My half-sleeping brain tries to process: _What was that?_ The adrenaline kicks in and reminds me of the nightmare of chaos and fear that spreads in the Middle East.… It’s strange how moments of crisis bring clarity. Each defensive burst clarifies realities I was already aware of but had hidden under the hum and drum of everyday life. These missiles provide moments of clarity into what’s most important.”
   • I found this both interesting and moving.
3. Why America needs evangelicals on the Supreme Court — and more (Aaron Renn, Washington Post): “Evangelicals are 23 percent of U.S. adults and one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs, with 81 percent backing Donald Trump in 2024. Yet despite six of the nine Supreme Court justices being appointed by Republican presidents, there are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court.… As a minority in a country that has become post-Christian in many respects, evangelicals can’t and shouldn’t seek to dominate national leadership roles. A diverse society will draw its talent from all quarters. But for that very reason, it can’t be healthy when nearly one-quarter of the national population is failing to contribute its fair share.”
   • Gift link. Renn sees much but also has a few blind spots. Worth a ponder.
4. 10 Reasons Evangelicals are Cringe (Matthew Loftus, Mere Orthodoxy): “I don’t lose sleep over evangelicalism’s cringeiness (at least not nearly as much as I did when I was a teenager and being cringe was more offensive to me) because God did not let being cringe stop him from getting stuff done culturally back when the Church was mostly made up of illiterate fishermen and he will bring about his work in the world regardless of whether or not there are sufficient numbers of evangelicals among the elites. This is the most important reason, but it’s worth talking about the issues Renn raises because some of the reasons are actually good things that we should celebrate and others are bad things that we should do something about if we can.”
5. My Criticism of the Ivy League Isn’t Hypocrisy (Rob K. Henderson, Wall Street Journal): “If you went to an elite school, informed dissent is seen as a kind of betrayal. If you didn’t, you might be written off as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ situation. Benefiting from a system, though, doesn’t mean you forfeit the right to critique it. In most walks of life, insider knowledge makes a critic more credible, not less. Experience counts for something. Who is better placed to criticize an institution than someone who has seen it from the inside?”
6. How the Decision to Start a War Became the President’s (Charlie Savage, New York Times): “It is supposed to be a foundational principle of American democracy that unless the United States is under attack, the power to declare war is vested in Congress. But especially since the start of the Cold War, presidents of both parties have chipped away at that by claiming a right to order the military into various limited hostile situations.… Successive administrations built on their predecessors’ innovations, a one-way ratchet expanding the circumstances in which presidents had claimed and demonstrated that they could by themselves deploy troops into combat.”
7. SEIU Delenda Est (Scott Alexander, Astral Code Ten): “California lets interest groups propose measures for the state ballot. Anyone who gathers enough signatures (currently 874,641) can put their hare-brained plans before voters during the next election year… The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative.… SEIU seems to have found a bug in direct democracy: it incentivizes interest groups to search for the most destructive possible ballot initiative that might nevertheless get approved by low-information voters, since this gives them leverage over anyone willing to bribe them into withdrawing their poison pill.”

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. You Can’t Outwork Your Fork (Mike Glenn, Substack): “More and more people are recognizing we’re living in Babylon. How do we live in Babylon? By taking responsibility for our spiritual nutrition. Remember what Daniel did in the first chapter of his book? He refused to eat from the king’s table. Remember, he was a captive. He had no control over his life and yet, he took responsibility for what he ate. Likewise, as Christ followers, we have to take control over the things that enter our minds and hearts. We have to be responsible for our spiritual nutrition. We have to be intentional about what we read, what we watch, what we talk about and what we think about.… You’re in control of your mind and your heart. Feed them well. After all, you can’t outwork your fork.”
2. Olympic thoughts:
   • Alysa Liu completes incredible comeback to win gold in figure skating (Les Carpenter, Washington Post): “Later, as she stood in a room beneath the stands, Liu recounted her wait through Sakamoto and Nakai’s performances, telling how much she enjoys watching them skate and was hoping they would skate really well before the world. She was asked if she wanted the gold at that point. ‘I don’t need this,’ she said, looking down at the medal around her neck, which matched the new gold dress she ordered for the Olympic free skate. ‘What I needed was the stage, and I got that, so I was all good. No matter what happened, you would have been fine. If that was a problem, if I fell on every jump, I would still be wearing this dress.’ .…it was hard to know whether the reality would ever hit her. It might not matter. She was thrilled she had skated well; she was thrilled she had two new dresses for the Olympics and a third for Saturday night’s Olympic gala; she was thrilled her family got to watch her skate.… Winning an Olympic gold medal seemed very far down the list of what was important to her at that point.”
     • Wholesome, commendable, and encouraging. Plus look at the sheer joy on her face in the second photo of the piece (the top-down one).
   • What Eileen Gu Has Done is Totally Ordinary, Usually Invites Zero Controversy, and Has Routinely Benefitted the United States (Freddie deBoer, Substack): “What’s striking is how selective the concern is. When foreign-born athletes become Americans in time to compete for Team USA, we don’t suddenly become textual literalists about nationality statutes, we just celebrate the medal haul. Only when affiliation flows the other way do we discover a newfound reverence for purity in citizenship law. The practice of athletes competing for countries other than their birthplace isn’t a scandal; it’s a cornerstone of modern Olympic sports!”
3. A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT accidentally revealed a global intimidation operation (Sean Lyngaas, CNN): “The Chinese law enforcement official used ChatGPT like a diary to document the alleged covert campaign of suppression, OpenAI said. In one instance, Chinese operators allegedly disguised themselves as US immigration officials to warn a US-based Chinese dissident that their public statements had supposedly broken the law, according to the ChatGPT user. In another case, they describe an effort to use forged documents from a US county court to try to get a Chinese dissident’s social media account taken down.”
4. “Help! All the Kids are Becoming Catholic/Orthodox” (Austin Suggs, Substack): “Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy don’t just offer a way of _seeing_ the world, they offer a _culture to immerse yourself in_ that so many people feel devoid of. I take it as no coincidence that the rise of interest in traditional Christianity coincided with the rise of interest in sites like ancestry.com or growing nationalism—both of which, in their own way, are trying to offer people a sense of shared, communal identity rooted in the past. To focus on doctrine to the exclusion of communal identity when investigating why people convert would be folly. Protestants must have an answer to this if they want to keep people.”
5. Against witchcraft (Aria Schrecker, Substack): “Overall, using your intuition is massively overrated in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go haywire. You’re better off courting like you’re arranging your own marriage, not like you’re starring in a rom com.”
   • Much sensible (albeit non-Christian) wisdom in this article. Although the first four paragraphs are kinda unhinged.
   • I decided to look up the other entries in this series. AMAZING. 9/10 recommend with the exception of her second article which I skipped for being less relevant to likely readers of this sentence.
   • How to find a husband (and why you should want one) (Aria Schrecker, Substack): “So I got married recently. I’ve decided to take his name, so this blog is going to be now under the name Aria Schrecker.… Finding a spouse should be the number one priority in your life. The right partner will make every other goal in your life easier to achieve. If your priority is your career, you will probably be more successful with a well-chosen spouse. In some cases this will be a partner in a similar field and you guys can pass each other networks and gossip. In some cases you may prefer someone who is willing to put their career on the backburner and support you by taking care of everything else in your life. If you’re aiming for success in politics, or the arts, or you work tirelessly for a really important altruistic cause, then marrying someone with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.”
   • The wall is real but not for the reasons you think (Aria Schrecker, Substack): “Every day that passes, eligible bachelors in your age range start dating the women they are going to marry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main reasons. (1) There’s something wrong with him/ (2) There’s something wrong with her. (3) Bad luck. As you get older the men who are attractive, want to get married, and don’t have ruinous personality problems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girlfriends, aren’t interested in serious dating, and/or have been serially rejected by women after getting into relationships with them. Obviously lots of single older men are still marriage-worthy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfortunate sources of incompatibility. But the more time passes, the less likely this becomes.”
6. It’s Not His Fault He Used the N‑Word (Kat Rosenfield, The Free Press): “As controversies go, this one was immaculate. Unlike previous incidents of this type, there was no risk that the alleged hate speech would turn out to be an accidental malapropism, or an outright fabrication, or, as in one memorable case from 2021, a man who was misheard while trying to get the attention of the mascot for the Colorado Rockies, a purple polka-dotted triceratops named Dinger. This was an actual utterance of the actual no-no word, caught on actual camera and broadcast on the actual BBC. If ever there was an ironclad case for cancellation—! Ah, but wait: Remember, John Davidson has Tourette’s syndrome, which also makes this an actual case of the phenomenon colloquially known as the Oppression Olympics.”
   • The twist at the end is stunning. I won’t spoil it. In a tweet about it, the author said, “When I learned why Davidson was in the audience my soul left my body.”
   • On a personal note: one of my good friends in college had Tourette’s like this. I can attest that bro did highly offensive stuff on the regular that I guarantee he had absolutely zero control over nor any poor intention behind.
7. Bigger is not always better (Will Gibbs, Stanford Daily): “She lived an ordinary life. Had kids, divorced, worked, retired, babysat and eventually passed away. But, her impact was anything but ordinary. She ran one of the few preschools in my hometown for twenty years. She delivered donations every Monday of the month to the local food pantry. She traveled with my church’s youth group to rehouse roofs and build ADA accessible housing for less fortunate people in our area.… When she passed away, my pastor started getting stopped in the streets. Everybody everywhere — even people he had walked by for years without a conversation — wanted to personally give their sympathies and express how big of an impact she had on them.”
   • Recommended by a student.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• 10 Amazing Perks Of Becoming A Protestant (Babylon Bee)
• 10 Amazing Perks Of Becoming A Catholic (Babylon Bee)

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. The Humanities Are About to Be Automated (Yascha Mounk, Substack): “…I decided to see whether the newest AI models would be capable of writing a competent academic paper in my field of study, political theory. The result both elated and depressed me.… The human feedback involved in this process certainly drew on my training in the field, but it was very minimal. Including the time it took Claude to generate the text, and the rather longer time it took me to read what Claude had written, it took less than two hours from when I had the idea to run this experiment to when the draft was finished. The draft could certainly be improved in a few respects. There are certainly a few places in the argument where reviewers could come up with clever objections.… Had a fellow student submitted it to my department’s graduate student workshop when I was doing my PhD, my respect for them would have gone up rather than down.”
   • Includes the paper, which the author (a professor at Johns Hopkins) says “could, with minor revisions, be published by a serious journal.”
2. Your Understanding of Calling Is About to Change Radically (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “We must always seek God’s will. But what we meant by this for most of our lives is about to change dramatically. It’s not God or his will that’s changing but the world as we’ve known it—and with it, the outmoded way we’ve thought about ‘career.’ .…We have thought of vocation as a definite thing. That mindset may even be behind a lot of the angst we have about discerning God’s will for a career. We think once it’s decided, then the map is set, and now we just set out on it.”
3. You Don’t Get Pascal’s Wager (Patrick Koroly, Substack): “Pascal isn’t trying to tell random atheists to be Christians. He’s trying to ask uncertain and indifferent Christians whether their choices make any sense. Clearly, it contradicts the heart, since they believe in God yet ignore the practice. Clearly, it contradicts reason, since a cunning Christian would be vying for heaven. Your actions are nonsense—if you hold these beliefs, you’re making a bet that will always lose! I lack the power to stop the endless tide of Wager misinterpretations. But I hope that you now understand Pascal’s _actual_ meaning: not that we ought to live as mercenaries in service of God, but that our heart and mind demand two very different things. The Wager calms the mind so that the heart may contend with God as it must.”
4. Unlocked: Christians Against Empathy Aren’t Who They Think They Are (David French, New York Times): “I never thought it would be Christians who led the attack on fundamental Christian values, but here we are. The Book of Hebrews says, ‘For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet he did not sin.’ In Christian theology, Christ engaged in the ultimate act of empathy. He didn’t imagine what it would be like to live as a man — he became one.”
   • Recommended by a student.
5. Will We Regret the Release of the Epstein Files? (Robby Soave, The Free Press): “It’s been just days since the majority of the files were released, and a vast campaign is already underway to embarrass, harass, or smear anyone tangentially associated with Epstein—a serial sexual predator—no matter how slight or incidental the connection.… Take the smearing of Glenn Dubin, a hedge fund manager. In the files is an image of him, arm-in-arm with three underage kids, whose faces are obscured by the Epstein files’ characteristic black boxes. The implication is clear. But the identities of the children are known. They aren’t victims. They are his own kids.”
   • Epstein’s Ties With Academics Show the Seedy Side of College Fund-Raising (Alan Blinder, New York Times): “Mr. Epstein, who in 2019 died by suicide in the jail where he was being held on sex trafficking charges, gave money, or simply dangled the prospect of it, before people on a range of campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Bard College and Columbia.… It was not always clear how much administrators knew about Mr. Epstein’s contacts with their schools. Most due diligence policies, industry officials said, are usually built around gift acceptance, not solicitation.”
6. This Ash Wednesday, choose compassion over optimization (Ariana Duduna, Stanford Daily): “This practice of self-sacrifice may seem foreign, but it cultivates something our culture has lost: the capacity for genuine compassion. Compassion literally means ‘to suffer with’ — not to feel sorry for someone from a distance, but to join their discomfort. You can’t optimize your way into compassion because compassion requires precisely what optimization seeks to eliminate: voluntary, unproductive suffering.… Instead of treating my anxieties about schoolwork, summer internships and career plans as mere problems to solve, I have begun to view them as opportunities for communion with others navigating the same struggles.”
   • Recommended by a student
7. Rented Virtue (Will Manidis & Nabeel S. Qureshi, Substack): “Every secular constraint eventually faces the question: why maintain this when it is costly? The only thing that has ever held a constraint in place across generations, through pressure, through loss, through the slow grinding temptation of day after day to simply stop, is the conviction that the constraint was not chosen but received. That it comes from something outside the self that the self cannot renegotiate. That it is owed to God and to creation itself.… If you asked why the constraint was there, and kept asking, you arrived at God. You always arrived at God.… There is no secular alternative. There has never been one.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Group Chat Ruined By Android User (Babylon Bee): I am unapologetically that guy.
• Bat Shaped (Text From Superheroes)

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities (Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic): “Today, no single entity, including the federal government, has a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ grant budget was $78 million in 2024 (its overall budget was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjusted for inflation). Mellon awarded $540 million in grants that same year; its endowment sits at roughly $8 billion. Mellon’s largesse is badly needed, especially as the Trump administration has threatened further cuts to the NEH. But the foundation’s virtual monopoly on humanities funding means that it has the power to remake entire fields according to its desires. And in recent years, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, who became the organization’s president in 2018, Mellon has embraced an understanding of the humanities that is much more utilitarian, and far more political, than the one put forward by the 1964 commission.”
   • Unlocked and genuinely shocking to me. One of the key insights: “The humanities aren’t broke because they went woke. The humanities went woke in large part _because_ they were broke. As other donors, the government, and universities themselves all but abandoned these fields, Mellon became a lifeline.”
2. The Popular Progressive Podcast Calling Evangelicals ‘Cancer’ (Bonnie Kristian, The Free Press): “…it’s impossible to imagine the vitriol she directs at [evangelicals] being targeted at any other religious group by a major media figure with so little consequence. Take one clip that has circulated among evangelicals recently. I assumed its caption on X, ‘White Evangelical Christianity is a cancer,’ was intended to scandalize with the most incendiary quote. I thought wrong. If anything, the caption undersold a slanderous, incurious, unserious screed that informed Welch’s viewers that evangelicals are ‘the worst people in our country.’ They are, Welch says, people who want others to suffer, who belong to a ‘cult.’ And for Welch, this kind of language is par for the course. ‘I detest, with every molecule… in my being, evangelical Christianity,’ she said in May.”
3. Get Married Young (Brad Wilcox, Compact): “First, the culture is telling you to lean into work and travel. But working for the man and ‘traveling to Thailand’ is not going to bring you the fulfillment you think it will. Second, you will minimize your odds of being miserable and maximize your odds of living a meaningful and happy life by getting married and having kids. So, don’t wait to embark on life’s most important journey. Third, do not assume that you can wait until your thirties to find a spouse and start your family. If you wait, you may miss out.”
   • Lots of good data in this one. The author is a sociologist at UVA.
4. Don’t Trust the Rankings That Put China’s Universities on Top (Ariel Procaccia, New York Times): “The gap between the rankings and reality can be explained by Goodhart’s law, which says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. It’s like trying to cure a fever by icing the thermometer: You’ve cooled the instrument, but the patient is still burning up. China has made success in global university rankings a national policy goal, in the process creating incentives that prioritize the appearance of excellence over the health of the research environment.”
5. Two articles about prevalent secular sexual ethics:
   • OpenAI Executive Who Opposed ‘Adult Mode’ Fired for Sexual Discrimination (Georgia Wells & Sam Schechner, Wall Street Journal): “OpenAI has cut ties with one of its top safety executives, on the grounds of sexual discrimination, after she voiced opposition to the controversial rollout of AI erotica in its ChatGPT product.… Before her firing, Beiermeister told colleagues that she opposed adult mode, and worried it would have harmful effects for users, people familiar with her remarks said. She also told colleagues that she believed OpenAI’s mechanisms to stop child-exploitation content weren’t effective enough, and that the company couldn’t sufficiently wall off adult content from teens, the people said.”
   • The Sexbot Revolution Is Already Here (Debra Soh, The Free Press): “Though sex dolls—meaning human‑like, anatomically accurate, anthropomorphic figurines—were once believed to be used only by socially inept weirdos, today nearly 10 percent of men in the U.S. have bought or owned one. And it’s not just the guys; 6 percent of women in the U.S. have done the same.… The average sex doll owner is a middle-aged heterosexual man who is single or divorced, high-school educated, and employed. Research has shown that doll owners have sex with a doll about 11 times a month and sex with a human partner about 2.6 times a month. In contrast, non–doll owners have sex with a human partner about 4.5 times a month.”
     • I am not convinced the numbers in this article are reliable (ten percent of guys sounds like a lot), but even if the numbers are off this is kinda wild.
6. It’s Time for America to Admit That It Has a Marijuana Problem (Editorial Board, New York Times): “…supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as ‘relatively minor problems.’ Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use. It is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong.… At least one in 10 people who use marijuana develops an addiction, a similar share as with alcohol. Even some who do not develop an addiction can still use it too much. People who are frequently stoned can struggle to hold a job or take care of their families.”
   • Unlocked.
7. A Stanford Experiment to Pair 5,000 Singles Has Taken Over Campus (Jasmine Li, Wall Street Journal): “More than 5,000 Stanford students have used Date Drop at a school with about 7,500 undergraduates. It has spread to 10 other colleges including Columbia, Princeton and MIT, and Date Drop just raised $2.1 million in venture-capital funding. The growth, fans say, reflects a reality about many college kids: They’re intimidated by real-life courtship and overwhelmed by the endless scroll of dating apps. Entrepreneurial students have found huge demand for alternate matchmaking tools.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Definitely Only for Dogs: Ring’s Superbowl Commercial (Wyze, YouTube): one minute
• Hot Dog DNA Test (At Random Comics)
• Pharmaceutical Companies Wondering If They Should Develop Anti-Depressant Whose First Listed Side Effect Isn’t ‘SEVERE THOUGHTS OF SUICIDE’ (Babylon Bee)
• Proof Without Content (xkcd)
• Okay, but What if My Neighbor is Gross (Matthew Pierce, Substack): “Why are people telling me to love my neighbor? First of all, this isn’t even a thing that Jesus said, and if he did, it meant something else. Because, when you think about it, Jesus didn’t even have neighbors, because he was unhoused. Second, I do not even know who my neighbor is. Short of loving everyone, there is literally no way to be certain that I am loving my neighbor. And third, what if my neighbor is disgusting? Yes, I said it.”

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Forgiveness Always Involves the Absorption of a Debt (J. D. Greear, blog): “…if you get jealous of me and start slandering me and really hurt my reputation in the eyes of others, it can be hard to see where the ‘debt’ is. But it’s there. Watch this: Let’s say that after you’ve maligned me, but before I launched my counterattack, you came to me and said you were sorry. And I was feeling magnanimous, so I forgave you. In that moment, what has happened? In forgiving you, I’m saying, ‘I’m not going to punish you or pay you back for what you did. I’m not going to take vengeance on you or seek retaliation; I’m not going to go out and ruin your reputation, and I’m not even going to stay mad at you for the hurt you caused me. I am going to absorb the consequences of your sin.’ You can’t see the financial damage, but the damage is just as real. And someone is still paying for it. Forgiveness always involves the absorption of a debt. The sacrifice of a lamb pictures how God would himself absorb the cost for our sin. But catch this, that only makes sense if God himself is somehow pictured in the lamb—otherwise, killing a lamb in our place is random and cruel.”
2. Nearly 40% of Stanford undergraduates claim they’re disabled. I’m one of them (Elsa Johnson, The Times): “The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025–26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate. And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures — including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from ‘mushroom mix’.”
3. New Research Confirms Jesus’s Miracles (T.C. Schmidt, The Gospel Coalition): “The implications are clear: Josephus fully acknowledged Jesus’s miraculous deeds, as other ancient non-Christians did. And this comes from a man raised in first-century Jerusalem, a man who knew those involved in Jesus’s trial, a man who went on to become one of the finest historians the ancient world ever produced. He was also perfectly ready to deny the miraculous—he laughed at the idea of certain wizards casting spells on him when he served as a general, and he unmasked false prophets and charlatans when writing his books of history—but in the case of Jesus, he didn’t claim his miracles were false, or exaggerations, or the stuff of legends. While Josephus wasn’t sure of the source for Jesus’s supernatural deeds, he was sure they happened.”
   • The title is a bit over the top (perhaps better “New Research Finds Ancient Attestation To Jesus’s Miracles”), but really interesting regardless. This is the same guy who wrote Josephus and Jesus, mentioned previously in TGFI (and still available for free at https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/)
4. The Real Reason Science is Broken (Tim Requarth, Persuasion): “A study published last month in Nature analyzed 41 million research papers across the natural sciences and found something that should unsettle anyone who believes AI will revolutionize scientific discovery. Yes, scientists who adopt AI tools publish three times more papers and receive nearly five times more citations. Their careers accelerate. But the collective range of scientific topics under investigation shrinks by nearly 5 percent, and researchers’ engagement with one another’s work drops by 22 percent.… AI isn’t accelerating science so much as optimizing scientists to thrive in an already-broken reward system.”
   • The author is a neuroscience prof at NYU
5. Unlocked: Christianity at the Super Bowl defies a trend (Paul Putz, Washington Post): “It is a remarkable shift over the course of a century. Christian athletes have successfully turned pro sports — and football in particular — from a space in which Christians were rarely present into one of the most prominent arenas in American life for Christian witness and self-assertion. This transformation did not happen by accident. It is the result of a Christian sports movement that has been growing since the 1950s, as evangelical sports ministries like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Pro Athletes Outreach, and Athletes in Action have built a network of Christian athletes and coaches who find spiritual meaning in and through their shared sports experience.”
6. The hidden costs of the world’s most expensive schools (Annie Dong, Substack): “One of the most dangerous side effects of attending prestigious institutions is that you are constantly congratulated.… I have been congratulated repeatedly for my entire life, and it’s put me in an odd position where I can no longer distinguish my personal merits from my perceived personal merits. Simultaneously, it’s put me in an odd position where I find myself unable to distinguish others’ personal merits from their perceived personal merits, or lack thereof – otherwise known as elitism.… To be extremely vulnerable, I even have trouble connecting with my cousins because I find it difficult to truly summon a sense of admiration for their achievements and aspirations.”
7. Eileen Gu: The Winter Olympian who earns $23m a year — but just $100k of it from her sport (Charlotte Harpur, New York Times): “An outlier lies among the list of Forbes’ 2025 world’s highest-paid female athletes. Tennis star Coco Gauff tops the list, earning an estimated $33 million, followed by her peers Aryna Sabalenka ($30m) and Iga Swiatek ($25.1m) but then appears Eileen Gu. The leading trio are household sporting names, freestyle skier Gu is not, but her earnings? $23.1m.… Not every 22-year-old has studied at Stanford and Oxford, does backflips on ski slopes, has posed for Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue and is named one of Time’s 100 most influential people but, Hershman said, ‘for so many younger people, that will be aspirational.’ ”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• The vegetables on VeggieTales are not Christian (Justin Kuiper, Substack): “And again, it should be said that while the vegetables are not saved, they’re not secular. They believe that Jesus died for humanity’s sins, but ‘humanity’ is a category that excludes vegetables. Nothing about the Vischer mandate is ‘anti-Christian.’  But some people on Twitter are upset about the fact that their favorite characters aren’t saved, and have come up with what they think are “counterexamples” that prove that the vegetables can in fact have a redemptive relationship with God…”
  • A surprisingly deep dive. Recommended by an alumnus.
  • A follow-up: Highlights from the comments on “VeggieTales characters aren’t Christian” (Justin Kuiper, Substack): “Bob Tomato and Larry Cucumber can’t have a redemptive relationship with God, but the same is true of angels. And just as angels can have a (non-redemptive) relationship with God, perhaps the same is true of the vegetables.”
• Punxsutawney Phil Sees Shadow, Doesn’t Realize He’s in Plato’s Cave Allegory (Stanford Flipside)
• Stupid Kid In ‘Hakuna Matata’ Shirt Doesn’t Know The Film Ultimately Repudiates The Song’s Message As Simba Realizes He Must Fulfill His Role In The Natural Order To End The Chaos And Suffering Caused By His Hedonistic Pursuit Of Pleasure (Babylon Bee)

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. Tough Love: Can I Marry an Atheist? (Abigail Shrier, The Free Press): “You can have all kinds of successful relationships with someone whose worldview is profoundly different from yours—but not marriage. I’ve only been married 18 years, but I know this: Good marriage requires, at a minimum, staying on the same page as your spouse. Compromise on the small stuff, fine. Not on the foundations of the home. That can only create distance between you, a distance that will grow as your children ask you to interpret their world.… Don’t marry a woman you hope, even secretly, will change.”
2. Students Are Skipping the Hardest Part of Growing Up (Clay Shirky, New York Times): “One study found that 18-to-25-year-olds alone accounted for 46 percent of ChatGPT use. And this analysis didn’t even include users 17 and under. Teenagers and young adults, stuck in the gradual transition from managed childhoods to adult freedoms, are both eager to make human connection and exquisitely alert to the possibility of embarrassment.… teens were adamant that they did not want to go directly to their parents or friends with these issues and that the steady availability of A.I. was a relief to them. They also rejected the idea of A.I. therapists; they weren’t treating A.I. as a replacement for another person but instead were using it to second-guess their developing sense of how to treat other people. A.I. has been trained to give us answers we like, rather than the ones we may need to hear. The resulting stream of praise — constantly hearing some version of ‘You’re absolutely right!’ — risks eroding our ability to deal with the messiness of human relationships. Sociologists call this social deskilling. Even casual A.I. use exposes users to a level of praise humans rarely experience from one another, which is not great for any of us but is especially risky for young people still working on their social skills.”
   • The author is vice provost at NYU. It’s a long excerpt, but I can’t find a way to abridge it much more.
3. Some more reflections on Minnesota:
   • From the left: Alex Pretti’s death and the elite bargain (Jerusalem Demsas, The Argument): “The progressive omnicause ended up undermining its own interests by binding them all together. If being an environmentalist meant you also had to be pro-choice and also had to be anti-cop and also had to be anti-Trump, then well, that shrinks the set of people willing to be environmentalists. But there is one omnicause worth joining. It presented itself on Saturday when an American citizen was shoved to the ground and sprayed with gunfire.… The truth is, widespread discontent across industry, ideology and interest groups is the most effective way to halt governments in their tracks. Even in fully authoritarian countries, mass discontent is incredibly effective at securing policy change.”
   • From the right: Immigration Enforcement Is Unavoidably Upsetting. But This Is Something Else. (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “It’s true that you can’t have sustained immigration enforcement without also having upsetting cases and sympathetic deportees. If you deport illegal immigrants with families, you will have to choose between family separation and deporting children. If you conduct arrests in homes and neighborhoods, you will be accused of traumatizing kids and communities; if you conduct them in workplaces, you will be going after the hardest-working migrants.… There are conflicts here that can’t be wished away. But the fact that some backlash and resistance are inescapable doesn’t mean that all enforcement strategies that generate backlash are sound or wise.”
   • From an international who doesn’t exactly map onto our politics: The American People Fact-Checked Their Government (Jacob Mchangama, Persuasion): “The current obsession with misinformation tends to focus on the public: online mobs, foreign influencers, flaming trolls. But history suggests a more inconvenient truth: in times of crisis, disinformation often comes from above. Governments, including democratic ones, have powerful incentives to shape information.”
     • The author is a professor of political science at Vanderbilt.
   • From evangelicalism: In a Tense Minnesota, Christians Help Immigrant Neighbors (Emily Belz, Christianity Today): “This church, with the support of many non-Christian volunteers, has been delivering food six days per week for thousands of immigrant families who are staying home in fear. Two days before, the church had trained 600 new volunteers for food distribution, with a list now of 28,000 people who want food. One room at the church was full of diapers. Another was packed with a mountain of toilet paper. Across the Twin Cities, neighbors pile supplies for immigrants into other churches, too, as well as restaurants and coffee shops, in scenes that look like a community recovering from a natural disaster. In just a few weeks, churches have created a sprawling, informal network for grocery deliveries to immigrant families.”
   • Related to the above: I Trained to Monitor ICE but Found Myself Feeding the Hungry (Elizabeth Berget, Christianity Today): “In the following days, I discovered a safety net that Christians around the city had woven. I joined a neighborhood care group co-run by John Hildebrand, a member and elder of Calvary Baptist Church here in Minneapolis, which has been fielding needs from vulnerable families in their neighborhoods. Vetted members of the group respond to needs as they arise, offering to give rides, do laundry, bring groceries, or shovel front walks for people—even strangers—afraid to leave their homes.  As I became more involved in this and other care networks, my phone pinging all day with new needs, it occurred to me that this is what it may have been like if the church of Acts 2 had used a group text…”
     • Note: I checked and Calvary Baptist Church represents a mainline denomination, not an evangelical one.
4. Elites and the Evangelical Class War (John Ehrett, Mere Orthodoxy): “Picture, if you will, the lush campus of an international research university, firmly ensconced in one of the least religious areas of the country. It’s the mid-2010s, and the Collegiate Gothic thoroughfares are bustling. On that campus are three Christians, each engaged in distinctive forms of on-campus ministry: (1)  A thirtysomething man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the corner of one of the busiest campus intersections, holding a bullhorn and displaying a ten-foot banner proclaiming EVOLUTION IS A LIE. Over and over, he declares the realities of sin and judgment, so loudly that his proclamations can be heard even from several blocks away. (2) A well-dressed, sixtyish pastor, hailing from a prominent New York City church, sits on a university-provided stage across from a former dean of the university’s law school. They are there to discuss the academic’s recent book, a theological-philosophical argument for Spinozistic pantheism over against traditional Christianity and secular materialism alike. Before an audience of several hundred students and faculty, the pastor delivers a distinctively Christological critique of the volume. (3) middle-aged man in a business suit stands along the edge of a busy roadway. He says little, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Testaments, and he’s handing them out to anyone, student or townie, walking past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a runner sprinting by.) With these three now in view, one might ask a provocative question: which of these Christians was best in witness in a hostile culture?”
   • The author is describing scenes he witnessed at Yale Law School.
5. The Day I Wanted to Be a Father (Colin Wright, Twitter): “The postdoc years, the geographic instability that made establishing roots nearly impossible, and the uncertainty of tenure all felt incompatible with building a family. I was convinced that children simply weren’t in my future. I was certain of that until I was thirty-six years old. Then one moment changed everything.… For most of my life, I had thought of having children as the end of my life. Now I understand it as the beginning of a new one. In truth, until I have children of my own, I still view myself as a child in some sense. Unfinished. Parenthood feels to me like the necessary final chapter of a life well lived, one filled with a meaning much deeper than exotic vacations or luxury goods could ever provide.”
   • A moving essay which, oddly enough, only seems to be available on Twitter.
6. The Uncomfortable Truths About Immigration (Alexander Kustov, Substack): “Here is the uncomfortable truth: a lot of what liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic say about immigration is deliberately misleading in ways that matter for policy and for democratic trust. It is not usually outright made-up. But rather it is a form of ‘highbrow misinformation’ built out of selective framing, strategic omissions, and ‘noble’ half-truths. And it likely makes it harder, not easier, to build durable majorities for freer immigration policies in the long run.”
   • The author, himself an immigrant, is a political science prof at Notre Dame. The section on highbrow misinformation is especially good.
7. An Important Letter from Bill, Kris, and Dann on Behalf of Bethel Leadership (Bethel Church): “We’re writing to you today to share about some of our mistakes and failures in the way we navigated our responsibilities to the global Body of Christ. We ask for you to cover us with grace as we seek the Lord for forgiveness in the face of some grievous mistakes. These actions were taken by us (Bill Johnson, Kris Vallotton, and Dann Farrelly) along with Danny Silk. We would like to clarify that our other leaders and staff members, including Brian and Jenn, and the Bethel Music team, were not updated on the allegations or the details of the process. We take responsibility for the fact that we did not properly and fully bring discipline, closure, or clear and timely communication regarding the gravity of our concerns with Shawn Bolz.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Best Of Moltbook (Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten): “Moltbook is ‘a social network for AI agents’, although ‘humans [are] welcome to observe’.… it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast. But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it’s not trivially made-up — I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine.”
  • The network in question: Moltbook
  • Actually fascinating content in this post. Definitely recommended. Perhaps should have been up top.
• One Solution for Too Many A’s? Harvard Considers Giving A+ Grades. (Mark Arsenault, New York Times): “Grades of A fell to 53.4 percent of grades awarded in the fall semester, from 60.2 percent in the prior academic year, Dr. Claybaugh reported.… Harvard has been on a campaign to make it harder to get an A, and a series of proposals may be put into effect later this year. A report issued in October suggested allowing grades of A+, which are not currently used at the school, as a way to recognize the best performing students, demoting the routine, ordinary A to the second rung of the grading ladder.”
  • This feels like it was written by a satirist:
    “We’re giving out too many A’s.”
    “I guess we should give more B’s.”
    “Hear me out… what if we started giving out extra-special A’s instead?”
• Something very unexpected is happening to Norway’s polar bears (Benji Jones, Vox): “The study, an analysis of hundreds of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, found that declining sea ice is not causing polar bears to starve. They actually appeared healthier in the last two decades of the analysis, from 2000 to 2019. The overall population, meanwhile, is either stable or growing, according to Jon Aars, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute. ‘I was surprised,’ Aars told Vox from Svalbard. ‘I would have predicted that body condition would decline. We see the opposite.’ ”
  • The article makes it clear that other polar bear populations are doing worse. Fascinating regardless.
• This A.I. Tool Is Going Viral. Five Ways People Are Using It. (Natallie Rocha, New York Times): “Last week, he prompted Claude Code to make a program to identify which clothes belonged to each of his three daughters so he could sort clean laundry into piles without their help. He took pictures of their clothes to teach Claude Code which T‑shirt belonged to which daughter. Now he simply holds up the clothes to his laptop camera so the program tells him whom it belongs to. ‘The whole process was done within an hour, and the girls were really excited,’ he said.”

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. I Might Owe My Students an Apology About Josephus (John Dickson, The Gospel Coalition): “Flavius Josephus was a Jewish aristocrat (AD 37–100) who witnessed firsthand the great Jewish war with Rome.… I’ve taught about Josephus’s life and works for more than 20 years—first in secular settings like Macquarie University and the University of Sydney, and now at Wheaton College. But Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ by T. C. Schmidt, associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, has forced me to rewrite my lectures—and it might just have changed my mind. It seems that a controversial passage about Jesus’s resurrection might be original after all.”
   • A donor has sponsored free PDF downloads of the book the above review is about. You can get your copy at https://josephusandjesus.com/purchase-page/ (follow the link on the page to a free download, it will take you to the OUP book website where you’ll need to click the PDF link above the abstract and save it to your computer after it opens in your browser tab). This is a great deal — the book retails for $130!
   • My hope for all is that the scholarship in the book gives you even greater confidence that your hope in Christ is firmly grounded.
2. Dying to Give (Justin Powell, Substack): “Money doesn’t carry the same power in every decade. Most families give it at the stage of life when it accomplishes the least. A dollar at 25 can change a destiny. A dollar at 55 barely moves the needle.… The families who steward wealth well think longer, plan earlier, and talk more openly. They treat resources as something to be shepherded across generations, not hidden behind emotional walls or released only after the funeral. And because of that clarity, their children make wiser decisions, earlier, with better outcomes.”
3. a gen z guide to fixing your doom-pilled brain (Steph Stiner, Substack): “whenever i hear a young person confidently assert that humanity is cooked, my first instinct is to ask for their screen time report. because, yes, if you spend more time scrolling than you do participating in real life, it’s actually quite reasonable to conclude that we’re hanging on by a thread.”
   • Lack of capitalization in original. The author appears to be 0% Christian, but offers some very practical wisdom.
   • I appreciate the above article so much that I looked for some of her other content and this one was also solid. a gen z guide to enjoying dating (Steph Stiner, Substack): “a wise woman once said never to go grocery shopping while you’re hungry, or you’ll end up with a cart full of junk food. or maybe i made that up? who’s to say. regardless, the principle still stands: don’t date while you’re desperate for someone else to fulfill you, or you’ll end up with nothing but high cortisol.”
4. Morally judging famous and semi-famous people (Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution): “I know some reasonable number of famous people, and I just do not trust the media accounts of their failings and flaws. I trust even less the barbs I read on the internet. I am not claiming to know the truth about them (most of them, at least), but I can tell when the people writing about them know even less.… If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill.”
5. Wikipedia Editors Are Helping Iran Rewrite History (Ashley Rindsberg, The Free Press): “An investigation into Wikipedia editing patterns reveals a yearslong, coordinated campaign to sanitize the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. According to a 2024 Times investigation, entries have been systematically edited to downgrade Iranian atrocities.”
   • Wikipedia is a case study in nerd naivete, and I speak as one of the previously-naive nerds. If you create something influential, people will seek to co-opt that influence. That means that whatever rules you create will be gamed. Wikipedia is still useful, but you have to know that it is rife with agenda-driven editors. Virtually everything religiously, politically, or morally charged is being edited so as to give you a biased perspective.
6. Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’ (Elizabeth Gibney, Nature): “A team based at the University of Vienna put individual clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium metal some 8 nanometres wide into a superposition of different locations, each spaced 133 nanometres apart. Rather than shoot through the experimental set up like a billiard ball, each chunky cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition of spatially distinct paths and then interfering to form a pattern researchers could detect.”
7. The lure of Rome (Emma Freire, World): “When young Protestants move to Washington, it’s usually not long before they start meeting smart, influential conservatives who believe Rome is the one true church. Like many of her peers, Smith began to ask herself: Should I swim the Tiber? Roman Catholics exiting their church are disproportionately driving declining rates of Christianity in America. And far more Catholics convert to Protestant denominations than vice versa. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked only at places like Washington and some influential university campuses. A small but vocal group of Protestants is converting to Catholicism—and in even smaller numbers to Eastern Orthodoxy. They tend to be ambitious, highly educated, and well connected.”
   • I believe I have mentioned this before, but I intend to write a defense of low-church Protestantism for XA sometime. It may wait until I finish my doctoral studies, though.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Helped a Missionary Talk About Jesus (Jennifer Park, Christianity Today): “The Korean and Korean American Christians CT interviewed appreciate how KPop Demon Hunters’ widespread acclaim has enabled them to share the gospel more effectively.… Introducing Christ to people in the Muslim-majority Southeast Asian country has also felt easier thanks to increasing interest in Korean culture, Park said. Once, his church held a summer event in its courtyard where a short-term missions team from South Korea taught local youth simple K‑pop dance moves and how to cook Korean dishes.”
• Lorem Ipsum Finally Translated, And It Is Shockingly Problematic (Stanford Flipside)
• Pentecostal Church Doesn’t Notice Riot Is Occurring (Babylon Bee): “Church membership at Golgotha Holy Fire Victory Pentecostal was reportedly overjoyed at the influx of visitors who joined them to speak in strange tongues, shove each other, and roll all over the floor. Church leadership called it the most successful service they’d ever had.”
  • As a Pentecostal this made me laugh. Normally with the Bee I just read the headlines. The text of this one has got some zing as well.
• President Trump’s Chosen Artist? A Christian Speed Painter. (Zachary Small, New York Times): “The painter, Vanessa Horabuena, spent the next 10 minutes making an image inspired by the Shroud of Turin, contouring Jesus’s eyebrows and nose from a yellow cross that she initially painted at the center of her black canvas. The president returned to the stage, promised to sign the artwork himself, and the painting was quickly auctioned for $2.75 million to a couple who promised to split their donation between St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the local sheriff’s department. The artwork’s sale easily set a new benchmark for speed painting, a once-obscure competitive art form that has gained popularity over the last decade in Southern beauty pageants, Midwest corporate events, basketball halftime shows and church gatherings.”
  • If you’ve never seen someone do this live, it’s actually quite stunning.

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. God’s Spooks: Religion, Spying, and the Cold War (Matthew Avery Sutton, Church Life Journal): “Since its inception, the CIA has used missionaries and other religious activists for intelligence and espionage work; it has used religion as an effective propaganda tool, and its agents have even posed as clergy. CIA agents and religious activists managed to keep their partnerships mostly hidden until the 1970s. But in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, numerous journalists and then Congress began scrutinizing the agency more closely. They revealed to the world that the CIA had been employing missionaries to further its agenda and that some religious activists were receiving substantial rewards for their work on the government’s behalf. In fact, the CIA and religious activists have long collaborated to achieve numerous policy goals.”
   • Super fascinating. My denomination receives specific mention: “The Assemblies of God, which had a large and active missionary outreach, quietly instructed workers to avoid CIA collaboration. However, church leaders did not want to go on record publicly against the CIA.”
2. Report: More than 388 million Christians worldwide face ‘high levels’ of persecution (Gina Christian, OSV News): “More than 388 million Christians — or 1 in 7 believers worldwide — face ‘high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith,’ according to a new report.… Specifically, Open Doors focuses on collecting data on Christian persecution in six key areas: restrictions or dangers on practicing faith in private, family, community, national and church life, as well as the levels of violence — mental, physical and sexual — Christians face in the 150 nations Open Doors monitors. Each area is scored, with each country then receiving an overall score out of 100 for the severity of Christian persecution, with scores of 81–100 designated as ‘extreme,’ 61–80 ‘very high’ and 41–60 ‘high.’”
3. Not So Secular Sweden (Joel Halldorf, Comment): “In highly secular societies, zoomers tend to be more religious than their boomer parents. Nowhere, the study concluded, was that pattern clearer than in Sweden, once the poster child of secularism.… Sweden once set the global benchmark for secular rationality, and everybody expected the world to follow our path. Now the quiet stirrings of faith here in the north—more confirmations, new memberships, conversations once unthinkable—show that history has a way of humbling even the most confident narratives. Ironclad sociological theories often insist that the current moment is our inevitable future. But history seldom follows straight lines.”
4. Christians, Let’s Stop Abusing Romans 13 (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “Moreover, the use of Romans 13 as a refusal to question the morality of a use of force is, ironically enough, a violation of the passage. We might well ask, what would Paul have written if Romans 13 were addressed to the authorities rather than to those under their rule? Well, we actually know the answer, because the same Spirit who breathed out Romans 13 also breathed out John the Baptist’s instructions to tax collectors and soldiers. John told them not to extort money from anyone, implying that they would be held responsible for the misuse of their power (Luke 3:12–14). The same Spirit also favorably portrayed Paul’s interaction with the police who told him and Silas, on behalf of the magistrates, to leave quietly, to which Paul replied, ‘They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out’ (Acts 16:37).”
5. Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip (Mark Arsenault, New York Times): “The issue at top American universities is not falling production. Six prominent American schools that would have been in the top 10 in the first decade of the 2000s — the University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, Johns Hopkins, the University of Washington-Seattle, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University — are producing more research than they did two decades ago, according to the Leiden tallies. But production by the Chinese schools has risen far more.… [However,] a study has suggested that Chinese researchers have been boosting their citation rankings by citing one another more often than western researchers tend to cite other westerners.”
6. How to stop the chaos of college sports (John Calipari, Washington Post): “There is no sustainable path in college athletics that doesn’t address these three things: First, student-athletes should have their opportunities for scholarships protected and get to compete against players who are their age. Second, transfer rules, which now allow players to leave one school for another as often as they’d like, need stability. This will help education remain the heart of colleges and universities. Third, protect the free market and rights of young people to fairly earn what their local markets can offer, which will require more revenue from teams.”
7. Some reflections on ICE in Minnesota. There are many more floating around the web, and if you find one with good insights or a provocative perspective please let me know about it.
   • I Joined Ice Watch (Olivia Reingold, The Free Press): “In the last six weeks, Minneapolis has become the site of the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history. Thousands of city residents have responded by joining various Signal groups whose main purpose is to find and disrupt ICE.… These individuals came from all walks of life. I counted at least five public school teachers, a divorce lawyer, two medical professionals, a former ballerina, and even one Minneapolis City Council member: Aurin Chowdhury⁩, a progressive who was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America in 2023. One local nonprofit leader whose organization resettles refugees told me that the average participants in these Signal groups are church members, retirees, and parents.”
   • Minneapolis Isn’t a Movie (Kat Rosenfield, The Free Press): “Around the same time that Renee Good was shot, a video circulated on TikTok of another confrontation between a group of agents who appear to be U.S. Marshals and an activist with a camera. The activist is a young- to middle-aged woman, as is one of the agents—and when the first woman mentions that her 6‑year-old child is in her car, the agent looks like she’s been electrocuted. ‘You have a child in your car?’ she says, her voice pitching sharply upward, her eyes wide with horror. ‘Get your child off the scene! This is an active police scene!’ It could not be clearer, in this moment, that these women inhabit two different realities. One understands herself to be in a dangerous, high-stakes situation; the other thinks it’s all a sort of game.”
   • The Goon Squad (Nick Cattogio, The Dispatch): “Why on earth is the administration announcing its operations before they happen?… It makes no sense as a strategy for effective law enforcement—but lots of sense as a pageant of domineering law-and-order assertiveness. The Trump administration wants confrontation. Its top priority isn’t to unobtrusively detain and remove the most dangerous immigrants, as the deportation numbers prove. Its priority is to intimidate its cultural enemies with heavy-handed displays of authority and promises of official impunity for those who carry them out. That’s why ICE wears masks, a privilege even U.S. combat troops don’t enjoy, and why some agents are kitted out in camouflage despite the fact that they’re not trying to ‘blend in’ to their urban surroundings. (There’s nothing stealthy about ICE.) They’re not enforcing the law, they’re going into battle. And their anonymity signals, to you and to them, that no one will hold them accountable for what happens during that battle if you make trouble.”
   • One State, Two Very Different Views of Minneapolis (Sheila M. Eldred, Elizabeth A. Stawicki, Ann Hinga Klein and Kurt Streeter, New York Times): “Ms. Good’s death was tragic, they said. Horrific. But they also said that she had asked for trouble. ‘You obey the law officer,’ a man in a veteran’s ball cap said, ‘and question it later.’ This is the divide, in a single sentence. In Minneapolis, protesters saw an innocent woman killed by a federal agent and took to the streets. At ‘the Pickle,’ the regulars saw a woman who should have complied.”

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.

You’ve heard of TGIF? This is TGFI: Things Glen Found Interesting

On Fridays I share articles/resources about broad cultural, societal and theological issues likely to be of interest to Christians in college. Be sure to see the explanation and disclaimers at the bottom. I welcome your suggestions, so if you read something fascinating please pass it my way.

Nothing here about Minnesota or Iran. They’re both in the news, but I haven’t yet read anything about them that I’ve found stimulating.

Things Glen Found Interesting

1. The Tyranny of the Complainers (Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution): “In 2023, for example, 5059 sexual discrimination complaints came from a single individual–from a total of 8151 complaints. Thus, one individual accounted for 68.5% of all sexual discrimination complaints in that year.… These complaints have to be investigated so this single individual may be costing taxpayers millions. It’s as if a single individual were pulling a fire alarm thousands of times a year, mobilizing emergency services on demand, and never facing repercussions.”
2. What I’ve Learned from Watching People Wait to Have Children (Sarah Poggi, The Free Press): “I’ve known all of this for as long as I’ve been a doctor. So have my colleagues. That’s why ob-gyn residents, despite working 80-hour weeks, are more likely to get pregnant during their training than any other medical specialists.”
   • The author is a med school prof at Johns Hopkins.
3. Why Suffering for Christ Is More Than Just a “Necessary Evil” (Matt Rhodes, Crossway): “You won’t go far in evangelistic conversations in the West today before someone asks you to explain the problem of theodicy: how it is that a good God could allow suffering in the world.… But we mustn’t forget that questions can be loaded. Ask a defendant in court, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ and his lawyer is sure to object, ‘Your honor, the question presupposes my client has beaten his wife.’ The question needs to be reframed, not responded to.”
   • Recommended by a student.
4. Why Christians Ignore What the Bible Says About Immigrants (Russell Moore, Christianity Today): “The Bible does not give a comprehensive public policy for migration or asylum. Christians of good faith can disagree on those things. But the Bible does give a comprehensive view on what we are to think of human beings, including migrants. The church has a mission to shape consciences around how we minister to scared and vulnerable people, regardless of whether we think they should have stayed somewhere else. And Jesus has already taken the question of ‘Who is my neighbor?’ off the table…”
5. Some Venezuela perspectives:
   • Was Trump’s Venezuela Attack Legal? (Jeb Rubenfeld, The Free Press): “Under current U.S. doctrine and precedent, what President Donald Trump just did in Venezuela is almost certainly legal; in fact, the U.S. did the very same thing in Panama four decades ago, and the courts upheld it after years of litigation and careful consideration. But Trump’s plan to ‘run’ Venezuela for the foreseeable future, declared at a press conference earlier today, is much murkier.”
     • The author is a professor at Yale Law School.
   • Why the Venezuela Operation Won’t Embolden America’s Enemies (Eli Lake, The Free Press): “If anything, a precise military operation to seize a rogue tyrant in a predawn raid with no U.S. casualties will cause China and Russia to think twice about testing American power. Venezuela counted on a Russian-made air defense system that failed to stop the U.S. Air Force from dominating its airspace. That sends a chilling message to Russia and anyone who has purchased its military hardware. China had invested billions in Venezuela’s oil sector only to see the man who cut those deals arraigned this week before a U.S. federal court in Manhattan.”
   • Why I Cold-Called President Trump at 4:30 in the Morning (Tyler Pager, New York Times): “I just called him directly and he picked up. I wasn’t that surprised because the president’s phone habits are pretty well-documented — he regularly picks up calls from reporters.… This is the first time I have ever called the president on his cellphone.”
     • That’s a wild detail in a wild news cycle. How many reporters have Trump’s number and are just waiting for the right moment to call?
6. So What If the Bible Doesn’t Mention Embryo Screening? (Brad East, Christianity Today): “Open up the glossary in the back of your Bible, and you won’t find ChatGPT, CRISPR, or IVF. There are no chapter-and-verse citations for lip fillers, egg freezing, or practical questions like the ‘right’ age to get married or the ‘ideal’ number of children.… Mature Christians, and especially pastors and whole churches, must therefore be able to give confident scriptural answers to new questions even when overt biblical teaching is lacking.”
   • I hope these Friday emails are of some small service in this regard.
7. The Case for Prohibiting Vice (Charles Fain Lehmann, National Affairs): “This framing of the vice issue — as a matter of permitting behavior that may be immoral but is more importantly ‘harmless’ — is so central to our public debate that both proponents and opponents articulate their criticisms in its language. They haggle about which is more harmful, vice or its prohibition.… the fact that both proponents and opponents of vice have resorted to appeals to harm actually greatly undermines the harm principle’s utility. Part of the purpose of the principle is to separate the truly damaging from the merely unliked. But the distinction, it turns out, is far less coherent than proponents once claimed.… [Vice] is intrinsically a problem, because human well-being — the good life — is always threatened by it.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• Hippo Blasts Poop At Hyena (YouTube): ten seconds
• Teenager Confused How Parents Still Don’t Know Everything When It Only Took Him 16 Years (Babylon Bee)

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.