Category: Stanford/Ministry News

A recent news item high­lights the need for spir­i­tu­al renew­al at Amer­i­ca’s col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties. Stu­dents lie.

More to the point, Dr. Joseph Fer­rari (who teach­es psy­chol­o­gy at DePaul Uni­ver­si­ty in Chica­go) has dis­cov­ered that they lie to avoid the con­se­quences of not doing their assign­ments on time. 70% of the time an assign­ment is late, the accom­pa­ny­ing excuse is a lie designed to get them off the hook.

Ladies and gen­tle­man, I give you the next gen­er­a­tion of Enron exec­u­tives…

San Fran­cis­co just moved one step clos­er to host­ing the 2012 Olympic Games. As I men­tioned in my ear­li­er post, if San Fran lands the games Stan­ford will be the cen­ter­piece of the cer­e­monies!

The Unit­ed States Olympic Com­mit­tee has select­ed two final­ists to com­pete with one anoth­er for the hon­or of being the Unit­ed States nom­i­nee to host the 2012 Games: San Fran­cis­co and New York.

Read more about it: pro San Fran­cis­co spin, pro New York spin.

There’s a fas­ci­nat­ing excerpt from a Sun­day School les­son taught by Con­doleeza Rice in which she dis­cuss­es her faith in God. If you did­n’t know, she was the provost (chief bud­get and admin­is­tra­tive offi­cer) of Stan­ford pri­or to becom­ing Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor.

Dr. Rice is a believ­er, and since she’s been so close­ly acquaint­ed with Stan­ford I thougth the inter­view was wor­thy of men­tion. Thanks to blogs4God for the link.

Just anoth­er exam­ple of Stan­ford chang­ing the world!

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.

Pro­fes­sor Chris­t­ian Smith of UNC Chapel Hill wrote an inter­est­ing arti­cle for Books & Cul­ture called Force of Habit attempt­ing to explain a tena­cious anti-reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ty among many fac­ul­ty.

Sev­er­al anec­dotes effec­tive­ly high­light his the­sis: anti-reli­gion is still alive and well among the uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­so­ri­ate. Par­tic­u­lar­ly anti-Chris­tian­i­ty, which dis­dains a faith nei­ther exot­ic nor “sub­al­tern” enough to mer­it the admi­ra­tion of intel­lec­tu­als.

After spout­ing some very con­fus­ing soci­o­log­i­cal ter­mi­nol­o­gy, he uses a con­cept called habi­tus to account for this con­sis­tent triv­i­al­iza­tion of faith. They way Smith uses it, habi­tus seems to mean an idea car­ried for­ward by momen­tum rather than mer­it.

In par­tic­u­lar, the notion of habi­tus helps to explain some curi­ous fea­tures of aca­d­e­m­ic anti-reli­gion. One is that none of the anti-reli­gious fac­ul­ty I know as indi­vid­u­als are nasty peo­ple out to make reli­gious believ­ers feel bad. They’re smart, inter­est­ing, moral­ly seri­ous, and well-inten­tioned. I prize my rela­tion­ships with them. They’re not aim­ing to be anti-reli­gious, anti-Chris­t­ian. They don’t have to try. It just comes nat­u­ral­ly to them, almost auto­mat­i­cal­ly, as if from a fun­da­men­tal pre­dis­po­si­tion.

I’d have to say that’s been my expe­ri­ence: the irre­li­gious among the cul­tured elite seem gen­uine­ly shocked when they dis­cov­er some­one that they pre­vi­ous­ly con­sid­ered thought­ful and well-educt­ed is pos­sessed of a deep and abid­ing faith. They’re flum­moxed.

More impor­tant­ly, this habi­tus is infec­tious. The most per­ni­cious strug­gle I see stu­dents engaged in springs from a per­cep­tion that smart peo­ple just don’t believe in God.

That’s hard to bat­tle: it’s not as though there’s an actu­al argu­ment being made here. It’s just an atti­tude picked up by osmo­sis. That’s one of the rea­sons I try to bring infor­ma­tion on intel­li­gent believ­ers to their atten­tion such as a list of liv­ing famous Chris­t­ian sci­en­tists and infor­ma­tion on Chris­t­ian fac­ul­ty at Stan­ford such as Don Knuth.