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. Misunderstanding Porn (Matthew Loftus, Mere Orthodoxy): “There are many ways in which people misunderstand porn, but perhaps the best way to summarize the corrections necessary is to say that porn is not the same as physical sex and porn addiction is not merely a matter of sexual temptation.… Why can’t a porn addict’s habit be broken by sex with his wife? The simplest answer is to ask another question: could a Christian husband’s temptation to idolatry be broken by sex with his wife? Of course not. Neither would his anger or pride. It is like asking if a person addicted to cocaine could have their desire satisfied by eating a delicious steak.”
2. Accommodation Nation (Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic): “Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.… Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, ‘I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?’ This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.”
3. I Set A Trap To Catch Students Cheating With AI. The Result Was Deflating (Will Teague, Huffington Post): “I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.… Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know.”
   • Recommended by a student.
4. The Bible Is on Trial in Europe (Kara Kennedy, The Free Press): “Räsänen has been a member of parliament in Finland since 1995. She’s also a member of the nation’s Evangelical Lutheran Church—which in 2019 announced its official sponsorship of an LGBT Pride event. In response, she wrote: ‘How can the Church’s doctrinal foundation, the #Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?’ She posted this comment alongside a picture of the Bible verse Romans 1:27, which describes homosexuality as shameful: ‘Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.’ The next day, she opened her morning newspaper to find out that she was being investigated by police for hate speech.… During her time as minister of the Interior of Finland, between 2011 and 2015, she’d overseen the police. Now, they were interrogating her as an official part of an investigation—one that has dragged on ever since, finally reaching the Supreme Court of Finland last month.”
5. 4 Ways to Avoid Sexual Sin (Sam Allberry, Crossway): “Life has a grain to it. Like paper and wood, it has its own inbuilt directionality. The universe is fashioned in such a way that it has an underlying structure. It follows a certain pattern with certain contours. In order to live well we need to live in a way that runs with this grain and not against it. This is where the book of Proverbs comes in.”
   • Recommended by a student.
6. The Tragic Hysteria of Abortion (Bryan Caplan, Substack): “Yes, the vast majority of women who get abortions are glad they got them. But once they meet their babies, the vast majority of women denied abortions discover that they totally want their babies. This massive status quo bias makes it hard to simply ‘trust women.’ Which women should we trust — the ones who aborted, or the ones who couldn’t? But in the end, it is the women who were denied abortion who are more reliable. If shy people who don’t go to a party are glad they stayed home, and equally shy people who were pressured to go to a party are equally glad they went, the most natural interpretation is that the party-goers learned a valuable life lesson — and the home-stayers should have gone to the party.… Hysterically aborting your baby because you falsely believe the baby will ruin your life isn’t merely morally wrong; it is tragic. Why? Because before long, you almost surely would have loved that baby.”
   • An interesting approach to the abortion debate, especially since the author emphasizes that he is “an atheist of the highest order.”
7. As a Twin, I’m Offended by Cloning (Leonora Barclay, Persuasion): “Who wouldn’t want their precious companion back, especially in cute puppy form? Yet I’m cynical of the promise of pet cloning. It’s simply not true that clones are, in any meaningful sense, the same as the original. I’m an identical twin—a natural clone. Identical twins are even more similar to each other than a clone is to its DNA donor, because they often share the same upbringing and environment. Yet, as I know first-hand, that doesn’t mean our personalities are the same.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

• The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner Interviews Santa Claus (Mike Drucker, McSweeeney’s Internet Tendency): “I recently spoke with Santa Claus, who is currently coordinating his staff of immortal blue-collar elves, about the morality of children and his friendship with a creature whom many carolers consider a war criminal: Krampus.”
• In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon (Benji Edwards, Ars Technica): “On September 19, 1982, Carnegie Mellon University computer science research assistant professor Scott Fahlman posted a message to the university’s bulletin board software that would later come to shape how people communicate online. His proposal: use and as markers to distinguish jokes from serious comments. While Fahlman describes himself as ‘the inventor… or at least one of the inventors’ of what would later be called the smiley face emoticon, the full story reveals something more interesting than a lone genius moment.”
• I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar (Olly Hawes, The Guardian): “Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usual. Then something went wrong. There was a sharp piercing feeling. The knife was supposed to have been quietly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the lights go down.”
• Art Of The Deal: Man Negotiates Mechanic Down From $75 Oil Change To $2,000 Full Brakes And Rotors Replacement (Babylon Bee)

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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.