Author: Glen

The Groves of Academe: When Disrespect is Respectful

Darryl Hart, academic dean at Westminster Theological Seminary, weighs in with a contrarian perspective on Christian academics in an essay titled The Groves of Academe: When Disrespect is Respectful.

Well, contrarian for an evangelical.

He argues that modern universities have no place for Christian scholarship, and appropriately so: If believing scholars could recognize hostility to faith as the academy’s highest form of flattery, in other words, if they could acknowledge the ways in which Christ and culture are legitimately at odds, they might understand why some habits die hard. They might even discover the plausibility of certain anti-religious prejudices.

Incidentally, this essay is a response to Force of Habit and Special Pleading (both are also quite interesting, and take different perspectives).

Why Americans Don’t Like Evangelical Christians

I just read a very interesting article by The Internet Monk explaining Why Everybody Hates Us.

It’s a thoughtful and well-written essay. Here’s a representative excerpt:

Here’s my list of why evangelicals are among the most disliked persons in America:

1. Christians endorse a high standard of conduct for others and then largely excuse themselves from a serious pursuit of such a life. Jesus is the most admired person in history, but evangelicals are far more likely to devise ways for Jesus to be like us than for us to be like Jesus.

If it hasn’t struck you lately that you do the very thing you condemn others for doing (Romans 2:1), urge others to do what you don’t do or excuse in yourself what you require in others, then you probably don’t get this article at all.

Our Sneaky God

God brings us together with a Stanford student.

God is sneaky. I’m pretty sure that’s not in the Bible (unless you read a very loose translation), but I’m convinced of the fact. He tells us to be wise as serpents, and He models that for us.

For example, today Paula and I shared at a church in Burlingame, CA called Three Cities Assembly. The San Francisco Forty-Niners had a playoff game today, so I was expecting the attendance to be a little bit down. Other than that, I wasn’t expecting anything unusual.

God had other plans, though.

After the service, it’s customary for a missionary guest speaker to be available to shake hands and chat with people. I met the head of anthropology for Wycliffe Bible Translators after the service today–that was pretty cool. I also met a guy who used to be in a Chi Alpha group led by some friends of mine in Stockton, CA. That was also pretty cool. It’s not unusual to meet very cool people after the service.

I also met one of my upstairs neighbors, which was pretty surprising (and cool).

The best was yet to come, however.

Towards the end of the goodbyes, I met a young man named Charles who was visiting the church for the first time. Charles is a first-year Stanford grad student, and even though Burlingame is a good 25 miles away from Stanford he decided to visit the church today because he used to know Pastor Herndon back when they both lived in Las Vegas (Charles was actually in Jay’s youth group).

Charles has been trying to find a church that can accomodate his crazy student schedule: every third or fourth Sunday he won’t be able to go to church. Today he learned about Chi Alpha @ Stanford and he was able to hear me preach.

I guess he liked what he heard, because he’s planning to join us for worship on campus this Tuesday!

How providential of God–to bring us to the same church at the same time and arrange a connection. He’s sneaky I tell you…

International Students at Stanford

Students from around the world come to study at Stanford.

I came across this information regarding international student enrollment at Stanford. Some of the information is a year or two out-of-date (which surprised me–it seems like this could be dynamically generated from a database and be 100% accurate at all times).

1/3 of all grad students are international, as are 1/20 of all undergrads. That works out to something like 20–25% of all Stanford students hail from another country.

The Top Ten Foreign Nations (among graduate students)

  • China
  • Korea
  • India
  • Canada
  • Taiwan
  • France
  • Japan
  • Singapore
  • Turkey
  • Mexico

Talk about potential for global impact!

Minor Site Tweak

I get even more Flash-ified.

I just redesigned the site navigational system using Flash. It should degrade gracefully (meaning that if you can’t run Flash, you should still be able to use the site).

Now that the site navigational system is in Flash, I can do some pretty cool things with it. I’ll try to restrain myself from doing anything too obnoxious (but I’d like to do some cool stuff that still loads quickly… feel free to post links to sites that you think use Flash well in the comments).

I’m still hoping to post some book musings soon. We’ll see…

Whew–one long day

driving to churches all day long

Yesterday Paula and I got up at 5:30am to drive to a church in Salida to share with them about our ministry, and then we drove to Sonora to share at that church.

We didn’t get home until 11:30 at night!

Still, we had a great day. Both the churches were swell (although very different).

I’ve been meaning to post some reflections on books I’ve read lately. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to do that sometime tonight…

Happy New Year!

Woohoo–we’re back!

salt2002.jpgWe just got back from Chi Alpha’s Winter Conference yesterday. Wow!

It’s hard to summarize a multi-day conference in a such a brief posting, so I’ll content myself with observing that the worship and the teaching were both top-notch, and the campground itself was stunningly beautiful. The overwhelming majority of students that we talked with were having significant spiritual experiences. It was very cool.

Also, I had the opportunity to teach a workshop called “Reasonable Answers to Honest Questions” (in which we talked very frankly about handling doubts and intellectual challenges to the faith) and I was also able to facilitate a seminar called “the Idea Exchange” (in which we just shared neat ideas from one campus to another).

Although the drive back was nearly eight hours and we were quite tired, we decided to have a joint New Year’s celebration. We met in one of the student’s apartments and had a jolly old time!

P.S. Expect website updates to return to their usual frequency (once or twice a week).