Category: Stanford/Ministry News

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).

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!

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

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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!

I just ran across this fact on The S‑Files: the author of the nationally syndicated comic strip Rhymes With Orange is a Stanford alumnus!

That’s right: Hilary Price graduated from Stanford in 1995 with a degree in English. She sold her first cartoon to the San Francisco Chronicle for $35.

In another demonstration of Stanford’s worldwide influence, Stanford just hosted the 2002 World Pentathalon Championships and is currently hosting the Bank of the West tennis championship featuring players such as Venus Williams, Monica Seles,and Anna Kournikova.

To top it all off, Stanford will be the location of several of the 2012 Olympic games, should San Francisco win its bid to host them. In particular, swimming, diving and archery, track and field, softball, badminton and the pentathlon. Plus Stanford would be the site of the opening and closing ceremonies. Read a related article here.
Sweet!

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!