disciple, husband, father, college minister
The August 4th San Francisco Chronicle has a fascinating article on John Ashcroft called Son of a Preacher Man. The article is pretty factual, although the journalist’s dislike of Ashcroft’s value system shows through.
In case you didn’t know it, John Ashcroft (our current U.S. Attorney General) is an Assemblies of God layperson, and his father J. Robert Ashcroft was responsible for the founding of Chi Alpha.
Note: this was originally an excerpt from the article mentioned at the beginning. Since then, I’ve added a few others and I’ve also done some further research on most of the scientists.
In Scientists And Their Gods, Dr. Henry F. Schaefer (Christian, Nobel nominee, Stanford grad, and the third most-quoted chemist in the world) writes about the fact that there are many Christians who work in the hard sciences. I was particularly interested to note that three (four counting the author) have connections to Stanford.
Some notables:
Robert Griffiths, “member of our U.S. Academy of Sciences, Otto Stern professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University received one of the most coveted awards of the American Physical Society in 1984 on his work in physical mechanics and thermodynamics. Physics Today said he is an evangelical Christian who is an amateur theologian and who helps teach a course on Christianity and science.” (incidentally, he’s a Stanford grad)
Richard Bube “For many years, Bube was the chairman of the department of materials science at Stanford and carried out foundational work on solid state physics concerning semiconductors. He said:There are proportionately as many atheistic truck drivers as there are atheistic scientists.”
John Suppe, “Member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences and noted professor of geology at Princeton, expert in the are of tectonics, began a long search for God as a Christian faculty member. He began attending services in the Princeton Chapel, reading the Bible and other Christian books.”
Charles H. Townes “My candidate for the scientist of the century is Charlie Townes. (Of course, he is a friend of mine and there could be some bias here.) He did something fairly significant when he discovered the laser. He almost got a second Nobel Prize for the first observation of an interstellar molecule.”
Arthur Schawlow: “won a Nobel Prize in physics, 1981, serves as physics professor at Stanford and identifies himself as a Christian.”
Allan Sandage: “the world’s greatest observational cosmologist, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution, was called the Grand Old Man of cosmology by The New York Times when he won a $1 million prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.”
William Phillips yet another Nobel laureate. Read a fascinating article about him.
David Cole: a Berkeley biochemist. Couldn’t find a bio page on him.
Francis Collins: director of the Human Genome Project, the largest scientific project ever undertaken, Dr. Collins once said I’d call myself a serious Christian. That is someone who believes in the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection, and who tries to integrate that into daily life and not just relegate it to something you talk about on Sunday morning. (source) Incidentally, Collins was an atheist who became a believer after attaining his doctorate.
Arno Penzias said “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” (read more about him)
Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy at Harvard and a devout Christian, said “I can only imagine that God, as a powerful force in the universe, could put on many different faces. If God is in fact all-powerful, there’s no reason why this all-powerful force in the universe could not represent itself and relate to the self-conscious human beings, in some fashion, through communication with human beings. And how do you communicate? Through prophets of all ages.” (source)
Related Stories
last updated 5/21/2005: added Owen Gingerich
Hosting a prospective Stanford student while he checks out the campus.
Right now we’re blessed to have under our roof one Emil Geiger and one Vipur Sharma. Emil is a Chi Alpha student from Lousiana State University, and is hoping to get his master’s in engineering from Stanford.
It’s a lot of fun having them around (side note: they’re very appreciative of the XBox that the Southwest Missouri State Chi Alpha group blessed up with).
One of our chief goals is to integrate our biblical and academic perspectives on life. If you think it’s hard as an undergrad, just wait for grad school!
To help you out, Leader U has a special set of articles related to Christian scholarship.
Some that caught my eye:
Check out On Integrating Your Faith for a brief set of relections on combining your scholarship and spirituality. I liked the innovated idea of
I was also struck by The Calling of a Christian Professor (meaning a Christian professor at a secular school). If that’s what God is calling you to do, check it out!
Also consider The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. George Marsden argues that “Christian perspectives should make at least as much difference as feminist perspectives.” Hear, hear!
Finally, you might want to check out Toward Integrating Your Life and Work for a challenge towards viewing scholarship as a vocation that matters to God.
This is sort of an offbeat post that caught my eye: dogs have rudimentary math abilities (CNN).
That’s right: Fido knows the difference between one and two. The research will be published in an upcoming issue of Animal Cognition final fantasy vii advent children divx download . For more details, check out the report on New Scientist.
Brief notes about my lunch with Forrest Beiser, pastor of Glad Tidings Church.
Today I had the good fortune of meeting with Pastor Forrest Beiser of Glad Tidings Church for lunch.
It was a great meeting! I’ll be speaking at their Wednesday evening service August 14th, building up to their big evangelistic rally with Bubba Paris of the San Francisco 49ers. How fun!
Incidentally, Glad Tidings has a long and distinguished history of ministry in San Fran. Among the many notable events that caught my eye, I thought it particularly cool that Bethany Bible College had its humble origins in this church.
God is faithfully bringing us into contact with people with whom we can partner to see Stanford reached with the gospel!
Movies about Stanford or featuring Stanford.
Here’s another window on Stanford’s influence: Stanford in Hollywood. Disclaimer: I haven’t seen these. I got them by searching for Stanford at imdb.com
.
Stealing Harvard is about one man’s life of crime to pay for his neice to attend the exorbitantly priced Stanford. Latest totals: $27,204 tuition + $4,450 room + $4,230 board. That’s $35,884 a year!
Invasion: Stanford 1991 A. D. features two alien janitors trying to take over the world after cloning two freshmen. It got a rating of 8.7 on the Internet Movie Database, but I’m thinking that with only seven votes the directors and producers cast them all. 🙂
In Orange County a bright student tries desperately to get into Stanford after his guidance counselor sends in the wrong transcripts by mistake. (thanks to Brad Lauster for noticing that I mistyped the movie name).
Interestingly enough, I couldn’t find references to any of these movies on Stanford’s website. I guess they’re not too proud of their movie representation…
Still, yet another (admittedly minor) way that Stanford is influencing our culture!
Check out the more significant reasons Stanford is one of the world’s most significant mission fields!
Yes, that’s right. Bono (of U2) has a favorite Bible translation. It’s The Message translated (some would say paraphrased) by Eugene Peterson.
Surprised Bono reads the Bible? Don’t be. Bono professes to be a Christian (albeit an unconventional one).
Musings on the economics of apartment complexes.
This is almost the last bit of news on my mom’s visit: she’s leaving Tuesday morning…
Today we went to church at Peninsula Christian Center, the church Paula and I have been attending since moving here.
Afterwards, we came home, had some PBJ sandwiches, and passed the afternoon listening to the Peninsula Symphony play a free concert at our apartment complex! Evidently Oak Creek apartments are a big sponsor of the symphony, so once a year they come do a free concert for us. Pretty cool.
That made me start thinking, however. How can an apartment complex afford to sponsor a symphony? The answer: pretty easily. Oak Creek Apartments has 759 units. Renting those at Bay Area prices means they’re taking in around 1.5 million dollars each month. Even if they had 50 employees and paid them $100,000 a year they still would clear around a million each month. Pretty neat business, that.
We wrapped up the day by grilling some steaks. Fun stuff.
A brief description of one of the most amazing aquariums in the universe.
Today we took my mother to visit Monterey Bay Aquarium and Santa Cruz Wharf.
As far as I’m concerned, Monterey Bay Aquarium is the best aquarium in the universe. It’s amazing! If you ever get a chance to visit it, you have to go. If they ever put the seven wonders of the world to vote, I’ll serously consider casting my ballot for this attraction. It is simply breathtaking.
After spending four hours in the aquarium, we were quite ready for supper at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company (yes, like in Forrest Gump). It was pretty neat, and the food was good. We even got our picture taken with a Forrest Gump impersonator!
Finally, we visited the Santa Cruz Wharf at the north end of Monterey Bay. It was pretty neat, although the sea lions weren’t too frisky.
Overall, it was a pleasant day spent roaming Northern California.