Better Masculinity, ChatGPT = HelloFresh, and the Meaning of Cities in the Bible
Plus a new plan for Three Things
Welcome to Three Things.
If you’re new to these parts, check out the About page. If you’ve been with us for a long time, you might notice that things look a bit different this month.
The email below is our monthly digest of three resources to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.
The Miscellany, which has always followed those three things, will now land in your inbox two weeks later.
Putting both elements in a single monthly newsletter was getting a bit too long-winded and we were getting word that some reader’s emails were getting cut off because of length. With the new twice-a-month plan, we can let each issue stretch out a bit more. Plus, you get more Three Things.
And now, on to the issue!
What is God’s Plan for Cities?
BibleProject on the significance of the city in Scripture
Christians easily become bored with the Bible. Frequently, that’s because we see it as a storehouse of facts that we need to download into our brains in order to fulfill a religious duty.
BibleProject engages the imagination with a different kind of knowledge. Through podcasts, videos, articles and courses, they provide resources for seeing how the vivid imagery and themes of the Bible weave together to tell a unified story that leads to Jesus. Their new video on the biblical theology of cities is no different.
Are cities bad or good, according to the Bible? They start out real bad. Cain, the first murderer, is the founder of the first city that eventually morphs into Babylon. But it doesn’t stop there. In the words of the video (edited by us for clarity):
Babylon is the biblical image of a monstrous, violent human city. And this is all tragic because the city is the opposite of the safe garden home that God originally put humans in.
Ancient cities have imposing walls for self-protection to keep resources inside, but the garden is protected by God with a spring at its center that flows out into rivers that share its goodness with all the land (Genesis 2:8-14). Babylon has a tower at its center to reach up to the heavens, while the garden has the tree of life at its center—God’s heavenly throne and presence touching down on the land. The mindset of the city is self-preservation and peace enforced by the threat of death, but the culture of the garden is peace through generosity because there’s always enough to go around.
The surprise of the biblical story is that God plans to bring his garden to the city.”’
Watch Cities in the Bible • God's Surprising Plan for Them over at BibleProject. You can go as deep into the subject as you want with the accompanying podcast series and resource page. Plus, if you are interested in this sort of thing, check out our course on the images of water, the garden, and mountains in the Bible, or subscribe to Pattern Bible, Andy’s new Substack.
ChatGPT is the HelloFresh of Learning
Alan Jacobs on AI tools in the classroom and beyond
We don’t aim to have a monthly post on AI, but it’s worth deepening our understanding of the topic du jour. Here’s Alan Jacobs, a professor in the Honors College at Baylor University, on how he would respond if asked about the best ways to use AI tools in the classroom.
Imagine a culinary school that teaches its students how to use HelloFresh: “Sure, we could teach you how to cook from scratch the way we used to — how to shop for ingredients, how to combine them, how to prepare them, how to present them — but let’s be serious, resources like HelloFresh aren’t going away, so you just need to learn to use them properly.” The proper response from students would be: “Why should we pay you for that? We can do that on our own.”
If I decided to teach my students how to use ChatGPT appropriately, and one of them asked me why they should pay me for that, I don’t think I would have a good answer. But if they asked me why I insist that they not use ChatGPT in reading and writing for me, I do have a response: I want you to learn how to read carefully, to sift and consider what you’ve read, to formulate and then give structure your ideas, to discern whom to think with, and finally to present your thoughts in a clear and cogent way. And I want you to learn to do all these things because they make you more free — the arts we study are liberal, that is to say liberating, arts.
Jacobs continues the apt analogy a bit later in the post:
[HelloFresh] might work out just fine for a while; it might not occur to you that you have no idea how to create your own recipes, or even adapt those of other cooks — at least, not until HelloFresh doubles its prices and you discover that you can’t afford the increase. That’s the moment when you see that HelloFresh wasn’t liberating you from drudgery but rather was enslaving you to its recipes and techniques. At that point you begin to scramble to figure how to shop for your own food, how to select and prepare and combine — basically, all the things you should have learned in culinary school but didn’t.
Read Technologies and Trust over at The Homebound Symphony. As always, Alan Jacobs’ book How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds is there to remind you how it’s done.
Men are Lost. Here’s a Map out of the Wilderness
Christine Emba with a positive vision of masculinity
Since the rise of the #MeToo movement in the mid-2010s, masculinity has reentered the cultural conversation with force.
On the left, masculinity is often seen as a problem and rarely referenced without “toxic” as a tag. Men simply need to shape up and stand down. On the right, a pro-male movement has bubbled up in response, claiming that men simply need to own their dominance and take charge.
In an important 6,500-word piece covering the state of the current debates over masculinity, Washington Post columnist and editor Christine Emba explains how both of these responses are insufficient:
The essentialist view — that it’s in men’s nature to be brave, stoic and in charge while women remain docile, nurturing and submissive — would be dire news for social equality and for the vast numbers of individuals who don’t fit those stereotypes. Biology isn’t destiny — there is no one script for how to be a woman or a man. But despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes.
What is distinctive about men? It’s a hard question to answer in the current climate, but Emba lands on tropes that consistently crop up in the literature — “risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating.”
Influencers on the right have found an audience by recognizing and exaggerating these tropes. … For the left, there’s room to elaborate on visions of these qualities that are expansive, not reductive, that allow for many varieties of masculinity and don’t deny female value and agency.
In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn’t denigrate women to do so. It’s a vision of gender that’s not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character, not just biology. And it acknowledges that certain themes — protector, provider, even procreator — still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.
Read or listen to Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness over at the Washington Post. For more from Christine Emba, check out her book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.
See you in two weeks for the new and improved Miscellany.
Before then, you’ll hear from us with another installment in the summer book club.