Category: Stanford

note for every­one who’s not a new stu­dent: there’s a new stu­dent ori­en­ta­tion thingee hap­pen­ing today and on our pro­mo pieces I promised them that we’d have some read­ing rec­om­men­da­tions for them

So you’re com­ing to Stanford–that’s great! I know you’ve got a lot to read and do before you arrive, but I’d like to sug­gest some books you real­ly need to check out.

How To Stay Chris­t­ian In Col­lege by J. Budziszews­ki. If you only read one book from this list, make it this one! The author lost his faith while an under­grad and regained it after attain­ing his doc­tor­ate, and he’s packed this book full of extreme­ly prac­ti­cal advice!

The Diver­si­ty Myth by Peter Thiel and David Sacks. This book is all about Stan­ford and its agen­da when it comes to reed­u­cat­ing stu­dents (writ­ten by two Stan­ford grads). I need to pref­ace my rec­om­men­da­tion with sev­er­al dis­claimers: you should keep in mind that these guys have a huge ide­o­log­i­cal axe to grind and that there are always two sides to every sto­ry. In addi­tion, the book is about a decade old, and so some of the details are no longer accu­rate. Final­ly, they’re not writ­ing from a Chris­t­ian per­spec­tive. Even after all those qual­i­fi­ca­tions, I rec­om­mend that you read this book before you show up for your first day at Stan­ford. In case you’re curi­ous, the title comes from the authors’ con­tention that there is no true diver­si­ty on cam­pus.

Final­ly, con­sid­er read­ing The Spir­it of the Dis­ci­plines by Dal­las Willard. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Some peo­ple find it dense, and if you fall into that cat­e­go­ry I rec­om­mend The Life You’ve Always Want­ed as an alter­nate. Either of these books will help you learn a life-chang­ing lesson–that there’s a dif­fer­ence between try­ing to be like Jesus and train­ing to be like Jesus. If all you do is try, you can kiss your faith good­bye once you go to col­lege. If what do now is begin to train, you can thrive spir­i­tu­al­ly at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty!

You might also want to check out pre­vi­ous posts we’ve made on Tips for New Stu­dents, Becom­ing Wise In Col­lege, and Books Every Edu­cat­ed Chris­t­ian Should Know.

These are notes from a lec­ture I pre­sent­ed on “Reli­gion In the Max­im Soci­ety” in Ron Howard’s class on Vol­un­tary Social Sys­tems (no class web­site that I could find).

In case you’re won­der­ing, a max­im soci­ety is one in which every law flows from the max­im that “peace­ful, hon­est peo­ple have a right to be left alone.” It is a the­o­ret­i­cal soci­ety with­out any coer­cion and with max­i­mal free­dom. If you weren’t in the class, this won’t make much sense to you–my apolo­gies. I put this online to help out the stu­dents from the class, not to edu­cate the Inter­net at large about my hypo­thet­i­cal mus­ings on the­o­ret­i­cal soci­eties.

If you were in the class, these notes should be close to what I said but not com­plete­ly iden­ti­cal. Two rea­sons: I did­n’t deliv­er my notes ver­ba­tim and I tweaked one or two points in response to some of the ques­tions that let me know where I had been unclear. Also, in these notes I have attempt­ed to pro­vide all my sources and to hyper­link any ref­er­ences to make it easy to check me out.

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Aca­d­e­mics Often Ignore Reli­gion (fool­ish­ly)
In the world of aca­d­e­mics, reli­gion is often over­looked. This point is illus­trat­ed quite strik­ing­ly by British econ­o­mist Ernst Schu­mach­er in the open­ing lines of his book A Guide For the Per­plexed:

On a vis­it to Leningrad some years ago I con­sult­ed a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see sev­er­al enor­mous church­es, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When final­ly an inter­preter came to help me, he said: “We don’t show church­es on our maps.” Con­tra­dict­ing him, I point­ed to one that was very clear­ly marked. “That is a muse­um,” he said, “not what we call a ‘liv­ing church.’ It is only the ‘liv­ing church­es’ we don’t show.”

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been giv­en a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and uni­ver­si­ty I had been giv­en maps of life and knowl­edge on which there was hard­ly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the great­est pos­si­ble impor­tance to the con­duct of my life. I remem­bered that for many years my per­plex­i­ty had been com­plete; and no inter­preter had come along to help me. It remained com­plete until I ceased to sus­pect the san­i­ty of my per­cep­tions and began, instead, to sus­pect the sound­ness of the maps. (E.F. Schu­mach­er, A Guide For the Per­plexed page 1)

Today I want to help you take a look at the like­ly nature of reli­gion in a soci­ety in which all laws flow from the max­im, “Peace­ful, hon­est peo­ple have the right to be left alone.”

Or, to flesh out the terms in the max­im: “Peo­ple who do not use force on oth­ers and who ful­fill their con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions to oth­ers have the right to not be coerced.”

Such a soci­ety is a sta­ple in the genre of sci­ence fic­tion. As a sci­ence fic­tion fan, I’m always amazed at the wide­spread assump­tion in such tales that reli­gion will have at most a mar­gin­al role in future soci­eties, and that if reli­gion does sur­vive it will be in a vir­tu­al­ly unrec­og­niz­able form.

The rea­sons for such an assump­tion are myr­i­ad, and I could spend the rest of this class peri­od rais­ing and coun­ter­ing them.

I’ll give you just two rea­sons why such an assump­tion is naïve.
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Reli­gion and the Max­im Soci­ety”

Heads up–there’s a cult active at Stan­ford. One of Andrew’s friends was approached this week by a group called “Stu­dents For the Truth at Stan­ford.”

They are a part of the “Local Church” found­ed by Wit­ness Lee. The ver­sion of the Bible they hand out is called “The Recov­ery Ver­sion.”

This is not sim­ply anoth­er Chris­t­ian group like Cor­ner­stone or Inter­Var­si­ty. Those are won­der­ful groups that are good to be involved in (obvi­ous­ly, we’d pre­fer you plug into Chi Alpha, but that’s just ’cause we want to know you).

This group is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent. The Local Church is known for demand­ing absolute and unhealthy obe­di­ence from its fol­low­ers. Here’s my coun­sel to you: groups like this mess up your life. If some­one approach­es you, give them absolute­ly no infor­ma­tion about your­self or where you live. Be polite but firm.

Here are some links you can inves­ti­gate:

Crit­i­cal Per­spec­tives
Apolo­get­ics Index
Liv­ing Truth Min­istries
Chris­t­ian Research Insti­tute

Their Per­spec­tive
Stu­dents For The Truth At Stan­ford (does not seem to be active­ly main­tained)
Liv­ing Stream Min­istries
Bibles For Amer­i­ca

Tomor­row’s Big Game will mark the 20th anniver­sary of The Play.

What is The Play? A moment of total humi­la­tion for Stan­ford at the hands of Cal. It’s pret­ty fun­ny, too.

Cal’s The Play memo­r­i­al page con­tains video clips of the horror–you should real­ly check it out!

You might find this inter­est­ing: some of our very own have web­sites!

Jim­my Lim’s web­site is You ALWAYS Sing the First Line of a Blues Song Twice

Shaowei Lin’s web­site is Banana­World

Paula and I share a site: Glen & Paula Davis (although it’s more of a pro­fes­sion­al than a per­son­al site)

Any­one else out there with a home on the web?

There are plen­ty of Chris­t­ian fac­ul­ty here at Stan­ford. Don’t believe me? Check out the Stan­ford Chris­t­ian Fac­ul­ty Fel­low­ship direc­to­ry. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, the major­i­ty of them appear to be in the phys­i­cal and life sci­ences. Stuff that in your the­o­log­i­cal pipe and smoke it…

Be sure to check out The Jour­ney With Jesus, a set of mus­ings by Dan Clen­denin about what Jesus would look like in con­tem­po­rary soci­ety.down­load night on earth divx

I men­tioned this on my per­son­al web­site, but I thought it would also be of inter­est to the stu­dents at Stan­ford XA. Don­ald Knuth, a retired com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford, under­took a project many years ago to ana­lyze every chap­ter 3 verse 16 in the Bible. It’s sup­posed to be quite fas­ci­nat­ing, although I’ve not read it yet.

In any event, I just ran across the coolest thing on his web­site: John 3:16 in beau­ti­ful PDF cal­lig­ra­phy. The trans­la­tion is pret­ty neat as well.