Author: Glen

Yeah—that’s me atop the pedestal that usu­al­ly holds The Thinker. We were walk­ing across cam­pus and I saw that it was tem­porar­i­ly vacant, so I just had to jump up and have my pho­to snapped!

Doing a lit­tle research, I learned that Auguste Rodin orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed The Thinker as part of his mas­ter­piece The Gates of Hell. The fig­ure sat atop the gates and reflect­ed on the fate of the damned.

Yikes! I sup­pose that makes Stan­ford a good site for The Thinker—there’s cer­tain­ly an ample sup­ply of lost souls to pon­der.

And so Paula and I are here to give him less to think about. Pray for us as we rep­re­sent Christ on this strate­gic mis­sion field!

Inci­den­tal­ly, you’ve prob­a­bly seen The Thinker at oth­er loca­tions: that’s because there are 25 cast­ings of the famous enlarged ver­sion.

Sculp­ture fol­lows dif­fer­ent rules for repro­duc­tion than oth­er art forms: there are sev­er­al ‘orig­i­nals’. That was news to me: if you’re inter­est­ed read more here.

Stan­ford stu­dents are the 12th hap­pi­est stu­dents in Amer­i­ca.

How inter­est­ing. A few thoughts:

1) We beat Cal by 7 points. 🙂
2) I won­der what mea­sure they used to deter­mine hap­pi­ness? Is it relat­ed to the fact that we’re the 19th most gay school in Amer­i­ca?

Accord­ing to this sur­vey, we’re also one of the most Demo­c­ra­t­ic schools in Amer­i­ca.

We also have the 13th nicest dorms in Amer­i­ca, the 15th most beau­ti­ful cam­pus, and the 15th best rela­tion­ship with our host com­mu­ni­ty (which makes me think the sur­vey­ists were smok­ing crack, because the town/gown rela­tions here seem a might strained to me…).

I would nev­er have found this sur­vey had not Andrew Carea­ga lament­ed his school’s despair and Mean Dean pon­tif­i­cat­ed on his pro­fes­so­r­i­al pos­si­bil­i­ties. Thanks!

the fol­low­ing is a rough para­phrase of a very cool encounter that occured just hours ago

The scene: I’m sit­ting at my desk, think­ing about what to put on our web site when I receive a phone call:

“Hi–my name is Aileen, I’m a stu­dent at Stan­ford and I live in Oak Creek. I saw your web­site and had some ques­tions about Chi Alpha. It looks like you believe in being filled with the Holy Spir­it. Do you?”

Me: “Wow. [long con­ver­sa­tion, skip a lot of stuff] How did you come across our web­site?”

Aileen: “I did a search for Oak Creek Apart­ments and your web­site came up.”

The bot­tom line: we wound up invit­ing Aileen (a Sin­ga­pore­an Ph. D. stu­dent study­ing the biol­o­gy of can­cer) over for sup­per. We had a great time!

God is con­tin­u­ing to arrange divine appoint­ments for us to facil­i­tate min­istry among the stu­dents at Stan­ford!

I just found out that Stan­ford has a cen­ter called Bio‑X.

Is it just me, or does that sound like some sort of shapeshift­ing super­hero?

In real­i­ty, Bio‑X is arguably the most ambi­tious inter­dis­ci­pli­nary bio­science research effort in the world. (source)

There’s an inter­view with Matthew Scott, chair of Bio‑X, on the Stan­ford web­site. In it, he talks about his hopes for the super­hero-monikered pro­gram.

One sec­tion I found par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing:
We have a bioethics expert, Hank Greely [pro­fes­sor of law] as a mem­ber of the Bio‑X Lead­er­ship Coun­cil, and he will be advis­ing about this. Many issues are like­ly to come up — issues of access to health care, debates about the mean­ing, prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions, and dan­gers of new tech­nolo­gies, or genet­ic pri­va­cy — all kinds of things arise, some of them eth­i­cal issues and some of them sci­en­tif­ic issues with social impact, not strict­ly eth­i­cal.

Hmm… if I had to pick eth­i­cal issues relat­ed to inter­dis­ci­pli­nary genet­ic and bio­log­i­cal research, access to health care would not be the very first thing on the top off my head.

Still, it sounds like a tremen­dous­ly impor­tant research project–giving me anoth­er occa­sion to repeat our ral­ly­ing cry–today they learn, tomor­row they lead. These future lead­ers must be reached with the gospel!

Here’s a bizarre lit­tle annoy­ance: no one from Stan­ford can dial my tele­phone num­ber (or my wife’s). When­ev­er they try it asks for an autho­riza­tion code!

I called the IT depart­ment at Stan­ford to let them know, and they’ve been very help­ful. They seemed just as sur­prised at the news as I was.

Let’s see–what could account for this min­istry hin­der­ment. Could it be… Satan? (sound­byte)

Anoth­er note on those amaz­ing stu­dents at Stan­ford: the under­grads are engag­ing in orig­i­nal, fund­ed research.

How wild is that?

One stu­dent fea­tured in the sto­ry is doing research on the dowry sys­tem in Ker­ala, India. “My cousins, who are of mar­riage­able age, are vic­tims of the sys­tem, and if my par­ents had not come to the States, there’s a good chance I would have been also,” she said. “I was a bit both­ered by always read­ing about Ker­ala as the mod­el state. I knew it had its good and its bad, like every­where else … but this dowry sys­tem, a very present bad, is one I’m inter­est­ed in learn­ing about more, under­stand­ing and con­tribut­ing to stop­ping it.”

Yet anoth­er rea­son we feel so pas­sion­ate­ly that Stan­ford is a strate­gic mis­sion field. I said it before, and I’ll say it again: today they learn, tomor­row they lead.