Author: Glen

I just ran across this neat arti­cle on Pastors.com called Chris­t­ian Entre­peneurs Should Finance King­dom Work. Love the arti­cle, but he did­n’t list the names and phone num­bers of any Chris­t­ian entre­peneurs. 🙂

It sort of reminds me of the con­tent on The Haver­sham Lead­er­ship Forum, although he also focus­es on spe­cif­ic ways in which Chris­t­ian busi­ness­peo­ple should be dif­fer­ent from their sec­u­lar coun­ter­parts (and seems to be devel­op­ing an online church for Chris­t­ian busi­ness­peo­ple. Sad­ly, he does­n’t list any con­tacts either. 😉

We had sup­per tonight with Stan­ford physi­cist Dr. Ray Cow­an (also check his work home­page). He’s anoth­er per­son God has con­nect­ed us with. Ray is on the advi­so­ry board for Stan­ford Chi Alpha, and is a nice guy to boot.

I say he’s a Stan­ford physi­cist, but it’s a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed than that: he’s actu­al­ly paid by M.I.T. yet works at the Stan­ford Lin­ear Accel­er­a­tor. Evi­dent­ly there are only three or so real sites in the world you can do high-ener­gy par­ti­cle physics at (SLAC is one, Fer­mi is anoth­er, and CERN is the last of the real­ly big ones). So many of the peo­ple who work at these research facil­i­ties are actu­al­ly research physi­cists for insti­tu­tions in oth­er parts of the world. Inter­est­ing, no?

Ray’s a pret­ty neat guy: his hob­bies include read­ing, geol­o­gy, ham radio, local his­to­ry, gener­ic out­doorsy type activ­i­ties, and serv­ing as a vol­un­teer reserve police offi­cer when he gets the chance (he’s had to stop that because of his research sched­ule).

Also, Ray shared a unique method of cal­cu­lat­ing a 25% tip with me. Mul­ti­ply the pre-tax bill by 10 and divide it in half 3 times. That comes out to be the same as 10/8 (or 125%) and is pret­ty easy to cal­cu­late. How cool!

Final­ly, Ray informed that it would indeeed be pos­si­ble to cook a chick­en using the Stan­ford dish, so I’ll have to pass that on to Andrew and Kwasi as an add-on to our dis­cus­sion about it.

Accord­ing to a sur­vey spon­sored by the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Schol­ars, 3 out of 4 col­lege stu­dents report that their pro­fes­sors teach that moral­i­ty is deter­mined by indi­vid­ual and cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences (as opposed to uni­ver­sal moral prin­ci­ples to which we are all accoun­tible). The poll was con­duct­ed by Zog­by, and the detailed results are avail­able here.

This study only under­lines the urgency for cam­pus min­istry and for sol­id, intel­lec­tu­al­ly respon­si­ble dis­ci­ple­ship!

Thanks to the Stan­ford Chris­t­ian Fac­ul­ty for find­ing this fun­ny review of Stan­ford’s Memo­r­i­al Church.

This is part of the Mys­tery Wor­shiper series at the Ship of Fools web­site, where­in some­one walks into a church ser­vice and then posts an online review of it.

I men­tion the link because
a) it amused me and
b) I think it reveals some­thing about the state of reli­gious life at Stan­ford.

God has real­ly been open­ing up some neat doors for us. We just had one of Andrew’s friends, Kwasi Adu (rhymes with greasy sham­poo) over for sup­per. Kwasi is from Ghana, and his name means “Sun­day.” Evi­dent­ly every Ghan­ian (or at least every male Ghan­ian) is named for the day of the week on which they were born. How inter­est­ing…

Any­way, Kwasi and I have read a lot of the same books, so we had a real­ly good time talk­ing. He, Andrew, and I also had a fun time try­ing to fig­ure out whether or not you could cook a chick­en with a suf­fi­cient den­si­ty of radio waves. We decid­ed that you prob­a­bly could­n’t actu­al­ly cook it, but you could do some pret­ty unhealthy things to it.

After­wards, I gave Kwasi a ride home and met one of his room­mates, Nathan, who seemed open to check­ing out Chi Alpha. How cool!

I’ve been get­ting the Stan­ford Chi Alpha web­site ready for launch, and now it’s ready! You can vis­it it at http://www.xastanford.org/.

Here’s what I’ve post­ed so far:
*What Is Chi Alpha?
*What’s Impor­tant To Chi Alpha?
*What Does Chi Alpha Believe?
*What Does The Name Chi Alpha Mean?

One thing I’m very excit­ed about is that the stu­dents will be able to make posts as well, so this will be a true rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our com­mu­ni­ty!

Don­ald Knuth, a retired com­put­er sci­ence pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford, under­took a project many years ago to ana­lyze every chap­ter 3 verse 16 in the Bible. It’s sup­posed to be quite fas­ci­nat­ing, although I’ve not read it yet.

In any event, I just ran across the coolest thing on his web­site: John 3:16 in beau­ti­ful PDF cal­lig­ra­phy. The trans­la­tion is pret­ty neat as well.