Author: Glen

I was remind­ed how much our min­istry mat­ters as I reflect­ed on two very dif­fer­ent events at Stan­ford: the Ver­i­tas Forum and a cam­pus Play­boy shoot. The two played out like a real-life ver­sion of truth or dare.

First, truth. We were delight­ed to co-spon­sor The Ver­i­tas Forum at Stan­ford. We brought in lead­ing Chris­t­ian intel­lec­tu­als such as Dal­las Willard, Gary Haber­mas, and Michael Behe to engage stu­dents and fac­ul­ty in dis­cus­sions about life’s hard­est ques­tions and the rel­e­vance of Jesus Christ. It was incred­i­ble! The high­light for me was observ­ing Chris­t­ian philoso­pher Dal­las Willard debate Richard Rorty, one of the most influ­en­tial philoso­phers in Amer­i­ca today. The whole week was a pow­er­ful reminder that the Chris­t­ian faith is rea­son­able and wor­thy of care­ful inves­ti­ga­tion.

But we went from truth to dare as Play­boy came to town and stu­dents dis­robed to pose for the mag­a­zine’s annu­al col­lege issue. The Stan­ford Dai­ly urged read­ers to par­tic­i­pate, say­ing that prej­u­dice against pornog­ra­phy “is an unfor­tu­nate prod­uct of our soci­ety, and one that ought to be addressed.” The edi­to­r­i­al went on to make the case that Play­boy was a high-class, upstand­ing lit­er­ary mag­a­zine. (source)

The dif­fer­ence between the two events was inad­ver­tent­ly summed up by a hope­ful mod­el. When asked by a local paper about some con­se­quences of her deci­sion to pose, she said, “I guess I had­n’t thought it out too thor­ough­ly.” (source)

And so we’ll keep spon­sor­ing events like the Ver­i­tas Forum, we’ll keep host­ing Bible stud­ies in the dorms, and we’ll keep talk­ing about things like the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the Bible, because today’s stu­dents des­per­ate­ly need to be chal­lenged to think.

I stum­bled across this guide to steam tun­nel­ing at Stan­ford.

For those of you who aren’t famil­iar with the con­cept, steam tun­nel­ing is an old col­lege pas­time where­in stu­dents crawl around in the tun­nels that run under cam­pus.

I had two thoughts:
1) How cool.
2) I bet a large per­cent­age of my male stu­dents have done this.

I am very con­fi­dent of num­ber two because I know have stu­dents who have nefar­i­ous­ly rap­pelled down the side of build­ings on cam­pus. And that’s way less a part of the col­lege tra­di­tion than explor­ing tun­nels.

Andrew Wright, friend, fel­low blog­ger, and stu­dent in Chi Alpha, refers to a pos­i­tive impact I had on his life:

[Tobias] Wolff destroyed any resid­ual inter­est I still had in Ayn Rand and Objec­tivism, com­plet­ing the process begun by a series [of] sum­mer con­ver­sa­tions with Glen in 2002.

I hoped I was mak­ing sense back then. That was real­ly one of my first min­istry chal­lenges at Stan­ford. Andrew was our very first stu­dent in Chi Alpha (and he turned into our house­mate with­in weeks of our arrival).

It’s bit­ter­sweet see­ing him grad­u­ate in a few months. On the one hand, my job as a min­is­ter will be MUCH eas­i­er with­out Andrew ;), but on the oth­er hand he’s our last link to the begin­ning. We will have offi­cial­ly cycled a stu­dent gen­er­a­tion.

I was pret­ty heart­ened by his last para­gaph:

Com­menc­ing the last quar­ter at Stan­ford – the last 3 months of indis­cre­tion of my life, but to cram all of the fun and fol­ly of the past 4 years into one quar­ter would prob­a­bly kill me. Rather than resolv­ing to live it up, I’m hop­ing to end on a note that is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly reflec­tive and for­ward look­ing, a sort of tran­scen­dent Bud­dha-like coast­ing into the next high­er phase.

We’ll be watch­ing, Andrew. 🙂