Author: Glen

Dave Barry on France

I stum­bled across this cheeky lit­tle obser­va­tion at Glenn Van­der­burg’s Quo­ta­tions page:

[The French] have always hat­ed us, of course … but now they REALLY hate us, because our cul­ture has become so dom­i­nant that they’re hav­ing trou­ble com­plet­ing so much as a sin­gle sen­tence with­out using Amer­i­can words. They’re always blurt­ing out state­ments like: Le soft­ware de la hard­ware est un humdinger! And then they get so mad that they could spit.

I searched and dis­cov­ered that it’s from one of the fun­ni­est Dave Bar­ry columns I’ve seen.

Dana The Demander

Dana (who has new pho­tos up on our gallery, although the one you see is from the Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford gallery) has been devel­op­ing more and more of a demand­ing per­son­al­i­ty late­ly.

The one that amus­es me the most con­cerns her cere­al. She has a bag of Chee­rios that con­tains some dried straw­ber­ries and blue­ber­ries. She’s decid­ed that she likes those much more than the lit­tle toroids, and so she’s begin eat­ing just the fruit and then scream­ing at us in the hopes that we will pro­duce more dried fruit. In the event that we don’t imme­di­ate­ly bring forth said fruit, she begins scat­ter­ing her Chee­rios over the floor.

She’s also very par­tic­u­lar about when she wants to be picked up.

All in all, it’s very charm­ing. It can get drain­ing, but it’s real­ly quite charm­ing.

Truth Or Dare

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.

Robot Monkey Arms

As you may recall, sci­en­tists at Duke have fig­ured out a way to wire robot arms direct­ly into a mon­key’s brain, and that the mon­key can then use the arm quite effec­tive­ly.

There’s an update: the mon­keys seem to view the arm as a part of their own body.

That’s wild.

Expect some absolute­ly amaz­ing body-enhance­ment devices faster than you’d think but slow­er than you’d hope.

It made me think for a sec­ond: if I could direct­ly wire con­trol of any tech­no­log­i­cal device into my brain what would I choose?

Assum­ing I was lim­it­ed to one, I guess I’d pick a mul­ti­pur­pose wire­less I/O device. Like a blue­tooth con­troller but with way bet­ter secu­ri­ty.

That would rock.

What My Students Probably Do When I’m Not Looking

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.

Surprise Birthday Party

When I returned from church today I was gen­uine­ly shocked to find a house full of stu­dents wait­ing to wish me a hap­py birth­day.

I was touched.

Also, I got one of the coolest gifts I’ve got­ten in a long time. One of my stu­dents took a pic­ture of me play­ing with Dana, devel­oped it her­self, and framed it. It’s the kind of pho­to I’ll prob­a­bly wind up keep­ing on my desk until I don’t have a desk any­more.

Thanks to every­one for the Apples To Apples game, to Jin for bak­ing the cakes, to Desir­ae for shop­ping, and to Karen for the pho­to. Thanks to Paula for orga­niz­ing the whole decep­tive shindig and to who­ev­er did the dec­o­rat­ing. I’m sure oth­er peo­ple did things I don’t know about, and I’m grate­ful to them as well.

It was just great.

Today’s Students

There’s an arti­cle on cam­pus min­istry up on Reli­gion Jour­nal right now: Cam­pus Min­istries Look for New Meth­ods to Reach Amer­i­ca’s Sec­u­lar Gen­er­a­tion.

Noth­ing real­ly new, but a pret­ty decent overview of today’s stu­dents.

Birthday Desires

As a ser­vice to my friends and fam­i­ly, I glad­ly pro­vide the fol­low­ing birth­day wish­lists:

Glen’s Ama­zon Wish­list (most­ly books, although some oth­er stuff is there as well)

Glen’s Gen­er­al Wish­list (stuff not for sale on Ama­zon)

As always, these are just my every­day “I want to get these some­day” lists. They haven’t been espe­cial­ly con­coct­ed for my birth­day or any­thing. So some things might seem odd. Or even bizarre.

Spirituality In Higher Education 2004–2005

The Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty In High­er Edu­ca­tion project has released a new report for the 2004–2005 school year.

Some high­lights (and my thoughts):

80% of col­lege stu­dents attend­ed a reli­gious ser­vice with­in the last year.
MY THOUGHT: if they’re not com­ing back to the church it’s not out of ignorance–they don’t like what they see.

50% of stu­dents are “seek­ing” “con­flict­ed” or “doubt­ing” when it comes to their faith.
MY THOUGHT: that’s half my audience–is my min­istry struc­tured accord­ing­ly?

26% of fresh­men con­sid­er them­selves born again.
MY THOUGHT: they don’t know what that phrase means 😉

There’s a very read­able arti­cle, Reli­gios­i­ty Ris­ing On Cam­pus, that cov­ers the same data as in the offi­cial report.

Lisa Returns. Yippee!

Paula just found out that our friend Lisa is return­ing to Stan­ford to pur­sue her Ph.D. next year.

Lisa grad­u­at­ed a few years ago and we’ve sore­ly missed her. It’s going to be great to have her back on the Farm again. Paula was almost in tears (with joy) when she called to let me know.