Author: Glen

Scientist Francis Collins Presents Compelling Case for Faith

I’m sit­ting in the green room (the room a speak­er uses to pre­pare for a speech or per­for­mance) just after Fran­cis Collins fin­ished a phe­nom­e­nal pre­sen­ta­tion on the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of faith and sci­ence.

He was astound­ing. If you haven’t read his book The Lan­guage of God then I rec­om­mend you pick it up. We’ll be putting a video of his pre­sen­ta­tion up soon at http://franciscollinstalk.stanford.edu

. If you’re impa­tient you can see one of a sim­i­lar pre­sen­ta­tion at MIT last year.

Our venue, Memo­r­i­al Audi­to­ri­um, seats 1,700. Our over­flow room, Bish­op Audi­to­ri­um, seats 324. We had to open five addi­tion­al class­rooms. I’m con­fi­dent we had at least 2,000 peo­ple turn out, but a police offi­cer pro­vid­ing secu­ri­ty was bold enough to sug­gest that the real total was 2,300.

My favorite part of the event? Look­ing at the pro­gram and see­ing six lines.

Wel­come: Lisa Ooi
PhD stu­dent, Chem­i­cal & Sys­tems Biol­o­gy

Intro­duc­tion: Pro­fes­sor William New­some
Chair, Stan­ford Depart­ment of Neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy the last house on the left online

Lec­ture: Dr. Fran­cis Collins
Direc­tor, Nation­al Human Genome Research Insti­tute

Those six lines sum up the whole event bril­liant­ly — many very bright sci­en­tists see no nec­es­sary con­flict between sci­ence and Chris­tian­i­ty.

Oh — if you’ve been fol­low­ing my blog for a long time, you might remem­ber Lisa Ooi’s name. She’s a long­time Chi Alphan who actu­al­ly lived with Paula and I for a brief sea­son. She did a great job and we’re very proud of her.

My sec­ond-favorite part of the event? Him show­ing the clip of him­self being grilled by Stephen Col­bert. Fun­ny stuff.

Big thanks to Chi Alpha’s co-spon­sors Inter­Var­si­ty Grad­u­ate Chris­t­ian Fel­low­ship blues broth­ers 2000 divx online (the real dri­ving force for this event), the Catholic Com­mu­ni­ty at Stan­ford, and the Ver­i­tas Forum divx push

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. We could nev­er have pulled off an event of this scale alone. A big spe­cial thanks to Amy Cham­bers and Kyle Heath who shoul­dered a ridicu­lous amount of the admin­is­tra­tive details, to Pete Som­mer for rais­ing a lot of mon­ey to make this hap­pen, to Kyle Pub­ols and Andrea Romero for run­ning micro­phones dur­ing the q & a so very well, to the many stu­dents who helped route peo­ple to over­flow rooms on an instan­t’s notice, and to Lena Ho, Xianne Leiong, Hilary Dyer, Isaac Pen­ny, and all those who sat through lengthy meet­ings to plan this whole thing. Oh, and Dr. Bill New­some did a tremen­dous job. And thanks to the Office for Reli­gious Life and Dean Scot­ty McLen­nan for giv­ing us per­mis­sion to go for it.

Final­ly, a spe­cial thanks to Clare Kasem­set who did a great job on the plan­ning side but fell ill at the last minute and was unable to make it to the event. Hope you enjoy the video, Clare. Get well soon.

I’ll try to get some pho­tos and more thoughts online lat­er. Right now I need to focus on get­ting ready to preach a ser­mon­ic per­spec­tive on the same themes tomor­row night. I’ve got some big shoes to fill.

When Copies Are Free, What is Valuable?

Kevin Kel­ly, an influ­en­tial thinker about all things dig­i­tal, just post­ed an essay called Bet­ter than Free.

It’s quite good.

The gist is that tech­nol­o­gy is mak­ing copies eas­i­er and eas­i­er to cre­ate. In fact, copies of most things are so cheap that they’re essen­tial­ly free.

In his words:

When copies are super abun­dant, they become worth­less.
When copies are super abun­dant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valu­able

…

Well, what can’t be copied?

There are a num­ber of qual­i­ties that can’t be copied. Con­sid­er “trust.” Trust can­not be copied. You can’t pur­chase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It can­not be down­loaded. Or faked. Or coun­ter­feit­ed (at least for long). If every­thing else is equal, you’ll always pre­fer to deal with some­one you can trust. So trust is an intan­gi­ble that has increas­ing val­ue in a copy sat­u­rat­ed world.

Kel­ly iden­ti­fies 8 sim­i­lar dif­fi­cult-to-copy qual­i­ties which add val­ue to prod­ucts and ser­vices:

  1. Imme­di­a­cy: get­ting it now (as it is pro­duced or cre­at­ed)
  2. Per­son­al­iza­tion: get­ting it made just for you
  3. Inter­pre­ta­tion: hav­ing it explained in a way that makes sense to you
  4. Authen­tic­i­ty: know­ing it’s the real deal or a copy of the real deal (as opposed to a song being done by a cov­er band or some­thing)
  5. Acces­si­bil­i­ty: it’s con­ve­nient to expe­ri­ence
  6. Embod­i­ment: it’s some­thing you can expe­ri­ence on a unique­ly intense lev­el (you can shake the hand of the ath­lete who just scored the game-win­ning point, etc)
  7. Patron­age: you believe that by con­sum­ing it you’re enabling more of it (what­ev­er it is you val­ue) to be pro­duced
  8. Find­abil­i­ty: it gets on your radar some­how

Kel­ly is most­ly speak­ing about busi­ness in his essay, but it occurs to me that this is a pret­ty good check­list for min­istry.

A sea of min­istry copies is float­ing around your com­mu­ni­ty. There’s Chris­t­ian radio (car­ry­ing copies of some the best wor­ship music and preach­ing to be found), there’s Chris­t­ian tele­vi­sion (car­ry­ing copies), there are Chris­t­ian books and mag­a­zines (car­ry­ing copies of wise peo­ple’s opin­ions and Bible inter­pre­ta­tions), and there are blogs that give every­one the oppor­tu­ni­ty to inter­act with any num­ber of oth­er esteemed Chris­t­ian lead­ers. On top of that, there’s the mul­ti-site church move­ment which at its heart is about copy­ing min­istry.

And this is to say noth­ing of the min­istry clones that abound in every com­mu­ni­ty. You know the ones I speak of. They are the Star­bucks of church­es, the McDon­ald’s of min­istry. Each of them looks and feels the same no mat­ter what com­mu­ni­ty they nom­i­nal­ly inhab­it. They could care less whether they are in El Paso or Austin. They will treat Boston and Spring­field, MO alike.

In this copy-laden con­text, what true val­ue does your min­istry offer?

There are cer­tain­ly oth­er things we need to con­sid­er than Kel­ly’s list. Some of them are of exceed­ing impor­tance, such as whether we’re pro­claim­ing the gospel clear­ly and faith­ful­ly.

But his list still nags at me. It seems to me to be a help­ful way to exam­ine our­selves from a pure­ly prag­mat­ic per­spec­tive.

I think min­istries do well by these stan­dards. For exam­ple, most min­istries I know are strong at

  1. Imme­di­a­cy: peo­ple are there while we preach it — live. Our wor­ship team is per­form­ing — live. Our prayers are spon­ta­neous. Peo­ple are oper­at­ing in the gifts of the Spir­it — live and with­out rehearsal.
  2. Per­son­al­iza­tion: peo­ple are meet­ing with men­tors who are show­ing them how to under­stand the Bible giv­en their par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion in life (although they’re not usu­al­ly called men­tors — they’re usu­al­ly called youth spon­sors, sun­day school teach­ers, next-door neigh­bors, friends, co-work­ers, or some­thing else that’s not very trendy to be cal­lled)
  3. Inter­pre­ta­tion: peo­ple are not only giv­en a Bible, they’re giv­en a whole learn­ing envi­ron­ment with it — ser­mons, Bible stud­ies, Sun­day School, sem­i­nars, con­fer­ences, Chris­t­ian media, web­sites
  4. Authen­tic­i­ty: it’s become cliche to knock around the estab­lished church for being inau­then­tic, but I just don’t see it. Most peo­ple love their pas­tor for a rea­son. Notable exam­ples aside, most min­is­ters aren’t hyp­ocrites and are serv­ing up the goods of a life lived in humilty before God.
  5. Patron­age: giv­ing in the offer­ing pays the salary of the pas­toral team and allows the min­istries of the church to oper­ate. Giv­ing in offer­ings allows mis­sion­ar­ies to take the gospel around the world.

I think a lot of min­istries could use work on the oth­er parts of the list, how­ev­er.

  1. Acces­si­bil­i­ty: we too often make min­istry incon­ve­nient for the peo­ple we say we’re try­ing to reach. Our ser­vice times are funky. Our dress code is off-putting. Our lin­go is dif­fi­cult to decode.
  2. Embod­i­ment: too many church­es seem obsessed with mak­ing church as bland and palat­able as pos­si­ble. This is espe­cial­ly true of my Pen­te­costal com­rades: we’ve become embar­rassed about our spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. To them, I can only quote Curt Har­low: don’t tone it down, sin­cere it up. Make com­ing to church sig­nif­i­cant­ly more live­ly and reward­ing than watch­ing a church ser­vice broad­cast on a big screen tv at home with sur­round-sound.
  3. Find­abil­i­ty: not near­ly as many peo­ple know about your min­istry as you think. Exist­ing is not enough to pro­duce aware­ness.

So to my min­is­te­r­i­al friends, I pose this sim­ple ques­tion: in a world of copies, what makes your min­istry valu­able? Is it some­thing that can’t be copied out from under you?

The things I find myself obsess­ing over are all too often the things that are the most copy­able. Did my ser­mon sound like one of Rick Warren’s/John Ortberg’s/John Piper’s/etc? Does my wor­ship team sound like they just rolled off the Pas­sion Tour/IHOP Prayer Room/etc?

What I should be ask­ing is: if Rick War­ren set up on my cam­pus, would I still be adding val­ue to stu­dents’ lives? If Dave Crow­der decid­ed to lead wor­ship for anoth­er min­istry on my cam­pus, would I still be adding val­ue to stu­dents’ lives?

What’s not copy­able about what I’m doing?

Any­way, just some off-the-cuff thoughts inspired by his essay. Read the arti­cle ladykillers the down­load free .

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Using Yahoo! Go

A friend of mine is work­ing at Yahoo and he men­tioned that I should real­ly give the spe­cial Yahoo pro­gram for cell phones a try (just browse to mobile.yahoo.com with your cell phone and you should be prompt­ed to install it). So I down­loaded it and he’s right — it’s awe­some!

One of its nifti­er fea­tures is that it’s super-easy to upload pic­tures direct­ly to Flickr from my cell phone. So I’ve just uploaded some stuff I’ve been sit­ting on for ages.

Any­way, expect to see some more ran­dom pic­tures from my cell phone now and then in addi­tion to the pho­tos Paula uploads to our fam­i­ly gallery

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Typo at Stanford

I’ve been mean­ing to blog this for­ev­er, but I kept for­get­ting. On the first floor of the ren­o­vat­ed Old Union is an acrylic sign telling the his­to­ry of the build­ing.

For the longest time (months) it had a glar­ing typo (I think it’s been fixed since I took this pho­to). It real­ly amused me.
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If you have a hard time see­ing it, look under the word Union or click on the pic­ture to view it with the error high­light­ed.

It's Not About Me

Our Col­lege Win­ter Con­fer­ence

is this week­end, and I’m in charge. So for the last few days I’ve been bom­bard­ed with phone calls or urgent emails relat­ing to some minor cri­sis about the event. It reached a fever pitch yes­ter­day when I received a mes­sage about every ten min­utes (or so it seemed).

That’s not a big deal — it’s what you sign on for when you agree to direct a retreat or con­fer­ence.

How­ev­er, I also had to preach last night.

Being inter­rupt­ed every ten min­utes does not lend itself to robust ser­mon prepa­ra­tion. I’m very par­tic­u­lar about my ser­mon prepa­ra­tion rou­tine. I like to research my top­ic thor­ough­ly, write out what I intend to say word for word, and then rehearse it (at least once, prefer­ably twice). When speak­ing in the evening, I usu­al­ly man­u­script in the morn­ing and rehearse in the after­noon. That did­n’t hap­pen yes­ter­day.

The bot­tom line is that I walked into last night’s meet­ing less pre­pared for a ser­mon than I have been in years. I felt cer­tain that the mes­sage was going to be a flop.

While deliv­er­ing it, I felt as though I was fum­bling for words and ram­bling inco­her­ent­ly.

But at the end of the evening, one stu­dent prayed to receive Christ and anoth­er prayed to reded­i­cate her­self to Christ.

It was a hum­bling reminder that it’s not about me and my prepa­ra­tion; it’s about God using bro­ken ves­sels to achieve His will.

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Science, Faith, and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes­ter­day we were giv­ing away free home­made choco­late-chip cook­ies on White Plaza, and we got all sorts of won­der­ful reac­tions. My favorite was from a mas­ter’s stu­dent in engi­neer­ing who grabbed a cook­ie and then looked at the poster next to the cook­ie pile.

It was an adver­tise­ment for the upcom­ing Fran­cis Collins talk watch corvette sum­mer online the man who would be king online down­load

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down­load bar­bie of swan lake movie . If the name does­n’t ring a bell, Collins coor­di­nat­ed the Human Genome Project that decod­ed human DNA. He’s also a fol­low­er of Christ.

Any­way, this guy just stared at the poster for about a minute, befud­dle­ment sprawled across his face. He looked at the pic­ture of Collins on the cov­er of Nature mag­a­zine. He read his sci­en­tif­ic cre­den­tials. And then he read the top­ic of the lec­ture again. Then he sort of mur­mured, “Wait. This can’t be right. This does­n’t make any sense.”

So we explained that yes, Fran­cis Collins real­ly is one of the world’s lead­ing geneti­cists. And yes, he real­ly does believe in Jesus. And he’s going to be talk­ing about it Stan­ford.

The stu­dent said he’d be there, and I hope he does show up. He seemed quite earnest. There are a lot of stu­dents on cam­pus who don’t allow them­selves to con­sid­er God seri­ous­ly because they assume that sci­ence and faith are by def­i­n­i­tion opposed to one anoth­er. We hope that by show­ing them a world-class sci­en­tist who loves God we can dis­pel some of that prej­u­dice.

I love this job.

Congratulations, Aaron "Rhodes Scholar" Polhamus!

Chi Alpha @ Stan­ford offi­cer Aaron Pol­hamus was just award­ed a Rhodes Schol­ar­ship

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(see page 10 of the doc­u­ment). That means he gets 2 or 3 years to study at Oxford — ful­ly sub­si­dized. The Stan­ford Dai­ly has a brief write-up

on it which quotes Aaron at some length.

Being a Rhodes Schol­ar is a big deal — some notable recip­i­ents of the award include Bill Clin­ton, Wes­ley Clark (the gen­er­al turned politi­cian), Robert Reich, Daniel Boorstin (the his­to­ri­an), physi­cist Bri­an Greene (yeah, the one who writes the cool books about sci­ence), George Stephanopou­los, cur­rent Louisiana gov­er­nor Bob­by Jin­dal, and scads of con­gress­man and sen­a­tors. Oh, plus Kris Kristof­fer­son (real­ly).

So con­grats, Aaron!

Love and Tolerance

Last night at Chi Alpha’s week­ly meet­ing we had a guest speak­er — mis­sion­ary Mark Orfi­la. He’s been serv­ing for over a decade in east­ern Europe and has been think­ing very deeply about Amer­i­can cul­tur­al val­ues and how they relate to the King­dom of God.

He said a lot of very help­ful things last night, but I think the most help­ful went along these lines (the thoughts are his but the words are mine):

If I had to choose between tol­er­ance and hatred, I’d choose tol­er­ance hands-down.

But we’re not fac­ing a bina­ry choice — we have a whole range of options avail­able to us. And tol­er­ance can’t be the ulti­mate good in a soci­ety for two rea­sons: one philo­soph­i­cal and one prac­ti­cal. There must be some­thing high­er of which tol­er­ance is a spe­cial case, because if tol­er­ance is the high­est good then you have a real prob­lem — how do you han­dle the intol­er­ant mem­bers of your own soci­ety? If you tol­er­ate them, then you allow intol­er­ance to flour­ish. If you don’t tol­er­ate them, then you pro­mote intol­er­ance your­self. Either way intol­er­ance sneaks into your soci­ety. That’s the philo­soph­i­cal approach. But there’s an even big­ger prac­ti­cal prob­lem. Who wants to be tol­er­at­ed? Don’t we all want more than to be put up with? Tol­er­ance is a neg­a­tive virtue — it’s about what we don’t do to peo­ple. I won’t hit you, I won’t insult you, I won’t stig­ma­tize you. It’s a pecu­liar inverse of the gold­en rule — tol­er­ance tells us not to do to oth­ers what we don’t want done to us. It cre­ates a dis­tance between us and nev­er forces us to cross it.

The prob­lem with tol­er­ance for a Chris­t­ian is not that it sets the bar too high but that it sets the bar too low. We are called to love one anoth­er; in fact, we are even called to love our ene­mies. And rather than mere­ly respect­ing the dis­tance between us, we are called to treat them the way we wish they would treat us. Tol­er­ance is a poor sub­sti­tute for love. If it’s the only offer on the table I’ll take it, but in most sit­u­a­tions we should demand more (espe­cial­ly of our­selves).

Thanks for the clear think­ing on a cru­cial sub­ject, Mark.

Scanning a Directory For PHP Errors

My fel­low web geeks might find this script, php-check down­load home on the range movie , use­ful. It recur­sive­ly scans a direc­to­ry check­ing PHP files for syn­tax errors.

Just copy it some­where in your path (like /usr/local/bin) and chmod it to 755.

I wrote the script because I edit PHP using Notepad++, so it’s easy for small typos to enter my scripts. I need­ed a quick way to scan a direc­to­ry after upload­ing revised files.
I wrote it in PHP so that those who need it will also know how to cus­tomize it.

[php]
#!/usr/bin/php
?php // php-check ver­sion 1.0 // recur­sive­ly scans a direc­to­ry for .php files and runs php ‑l on // them (php ‑l checks for PHP syn­tax errors) // revi­sions at http://glenandpaula.com/wordpress/archives/2007/10/31/scanning-a-directory-for-php-errors/ if (php_sapi_name()!=‘cli’) { die(“This util­i­ty can only be run from the com­mand line.\n”); } $counter=0; $errors=false; func­tion scan_dir($dir) { $counter=0; $dh=opendir($dir); while ($file=readdir($dh)) { if ($file==’.’ || $file==’..’) con­tin­ue; if (is_dir($dir.’/’.$file)) { $counter+=scan_dir($dir.’/’.$file); } else { if (substr($file, strlen($file) — 4) == ‘.php’) { $counter++; $output=shell_exec(“/usr/bin/php ‑l $dir/$file 2>&1”);
if (substr($output,0,2)!=‘No’) { // skips the “No syn­tax errors in …” mes­sage
$errors=true;
echo $out­put;
}
}

}
}
return $counter;
}
if ($argc!=2) {
die(“Usage: php-check dirname (usu­al­ly php-check .)\n”);
}

if (!is_dir($argv[1])) {
die(“Argument must be a direc­to­ry. The most com­mon usage is php-check .\n”);
}

$counter=scan_dir($argv[1]);

echo “$counter files checked\n”;
exit($errors);
?>
[/php]

This is a quick and dirty script — there are prob­a­bly some bugs in it. User beware.

If you find it help­ful, you might also want to check out scripts like PHP CodeSnif­fer

or PHP Beau­ti­fi­er.down­load robot chick­en star wars dvd

We Just Felt Our First Earthquake

We just felt our first earth­quake!

It only took us 5 years liv­ing in the Bay Area.

Appar­ent­ly it was this one mys­tery alas­ka movie down­load .