In A Magazine!

A few months ago Eliz­a­beth Svo­bo­da sent me an email ask­ing if she could come and inter­view a few of our stu­dents for an arti­cle she was writ­ing on spir­i­tu­al­i­ty on the col­lege cam­pus. So she came to one of our par­ties and chat­ted with us.

I’m pleased to announce that the arti­cle is final­ly here: School Spir­it quotes a few of us–read it and see who you rec­og­nize!

We’re Geniuses (With A Preference For Bright Colors)

Our neigh­bor just referred to Paula and I as genius­es.

Which is some­thing, giv­en that she has a Ph.D. in ear­ly Amer­i­can his­to­ry and her hub­bie has one in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing.

I sus­pect the com­pli­ment was more in ref­er­ence to Paula’s prac­ti­cal wis­dom than any­thing else, but I’m still going to be telling all my friends that my genius neigh­bors think we’re smart, too. 😉

Now if only I can get Pablo to come around–he’s the oth­er Ph.D. neigh­bor and he’s not quite con­vinced that I’m sane. His wife, Sri, has a great respect for Paula, though.

The les­son learned: Paula makes me look good and I should keep her.

The oth­er les­son rein­forced: there sure are a lot of peo­ple with doc­tor­ates around here (in fact, 1/3 of adult Men­lo Park res­i­dents have at least a mas­ter’s degree).

PneumaBlogs

Rich Tatum, the BlogRo­dent, has cre­at­ed a list of Pen­te­costal blog­gers he finds inter­est­ing.

Any­way, I made the list.

Thanks to Earl Creps for the heads up (and thanks to Rich for the link).

New Orleans

Quite a few peo­ple have con­tact­ed Paula and I because they know we’re from Louisiana and they’re con­cerned about our rel­a­tives and friends.

Thank you.

For those who might be curi­ous but haven’t con­tact­ed us, our imme­di­ate rel­a­tives were hard­ly affect­ed. Extend­ed fam­i­ly mem­bers and friends all sur­vived but some lost every­thing.

When I was a kid we used to joke about how stu­pid it was to build a port city below sea lev­el. Every year it seemed that New Orleans would have a near miss with a hur­ri­cane and we’d start jok­ing about how dumb we Cajuns were. We knew with all the cer­tain­ty child­hood pro­duces that New Orleans would be wiped off the map one day.

Of course, when you’re a kid you don’t real­ly think about all the suf­fer­ing such a cat­a­stro­phe will entail. The news out of New Orleans is stag­ger­ing. The scari­est thing is that it could eas­i­ly have been much worse. Times like these remind us of just how frail and frag­ile all of human­i­ty’s accom­plish­ments real­ly are.

Any­way, all this leads me to won­der what jokes kids in Cal­i­for­nia make about the “Big One”. New Orleans final­ly got a bul­let it could­n’t dodge. I won­der when Cal­i­for­ni­a’s is com­ing… I hope I’m not here to see it.

Con­voy of Hope is doing a fine job of help­ing peo­ple. If you’ve been want­i­ng to give in some way, I know sev­er­al peo­ple who work for the out­fit and can assure you that they’re doing a stand­out job.

Sacrifice a Song

We’re now offer­ing brief med­i­ta­tions on the Bible that you can down­load to your portable MP3 play­er. Our chal­lenge is sim­ple–sac­ri­fice a song. Take the time you would spend lis­ten­ing to one song and turn that snip­pet of time into a prayer oasis in the midst of your day.

Right now we’re think­ing about the prayers that the apos­tles prayed and how they can serve as exam­ples for us. Our hope is to make it easy for you to include prayer in your dai­ly sched­ule.

You can lis­ten to a sam­ple (now fixed)
[FLASH]http://xastanford.org/playmp3.swf?mp3=http://xastanford.org/podXAsts/podXAst‑2.mp3,200,35[/FLASH]

We’re using a tech­nol­o­gy called pod­cast­ing, which is just a fan­cy way of deliv­er­ing MP3 files to your iPod (or oth­er Mp3 play­er) over the inter­net.

If you use iTunes, just click on ‘Advanced’ and then ‘Sub­scribe to Pod­cast.’ Enter http://xastanford.org/podXAsts/ into the box that pops up. That’s it–you’re done!

If you don’t use iTunes but like to lis­ten to MP3s, down­load the free iPod­der, instead.

Check out our podX­Ast archives!

Why Not Atheism?

I noticed that the web­page Why Athe­ism? is very pop­u­lar on Pop­u­li­cious and so I decid­ed to give it a look. There’s a lot of legit­i­mate crit­i­cism that can be lev­eled against Chris­tian­i­ty and against the philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments that many Chris­tians use to explain their faith, and so I always seek to learn from sites like this. And I did learn a lit­tle.

But most­ly, I was just shocked at how poor the lev­el of argu­men­ta­tion was. Giv­en that the page is so pop­u­lar, I fig­ured it would be a “best of breed” exam­ple.

‘Fraid not.

His argu­ments are most­ly against posi­tions that most thought­ful Chris­tians (at least, the ones I inter­act with) don’t actu­al­ly hold. I don’t have time to com­pose a detailed rebut­tal of his essay (actu­al­ly a tran­scribed speech), but as I have spo­ken on the gen­er­al theme before I can high­light some inad­e­qua­cies.

  • We don’t claim that our mys­ti­cal expe­ri­ences should be as con­vinc­ing to oth­ers as they are to us. But we do assert that they are avail­able to you and should be includ­ed in the evi­dence you con­sid­er.
  • We believe in the Big Bang. Our ques­tion is, what went bang? In oth­er words, the Big Bang explains a lot about the state of the uni­verse today, but it does­n’t tell us where it itself came from. All that it tells us is that the uni­verse had a begin­ning, and our argu­ment is that there was also a begin­ner who must be fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent than the uni­verse which was begun. He rebuts some weak ver­sions of this argu­ment, but there are much stronger ver­sions to inter­act with (such as those offered by William Lane Craig).
  • A lot of Chris­tians believe in one of the many the­o­ries of evo­lu­tion. In fact, I’d say most of the well-edu­cat­ed Chris­tians that I know are quite cer­tain that the earth is bil­lions of years old and that species change over time. They’re divid­ed on whether or not nat­u­ral­is­tic expla­na­tions ade­quate­ly explain the ori­gin of life. It would be nice for our cause if such expla­na­tions could be shown to be inad­e­quate, but it’s hard­ly essen­tial.
  • His response to the argu­ment from moral­i­ty miss­es the point com­plete­ly. We don’t claim that peo­ple can’t invent moral systems–it’s obvi­ous that they do so all the time. The cen­tral claim we are mak­ing is that moral­i­ty is only mean­ing­ful as a con­cept if there is more to real­i­ty than mat­ter and the forces that oper­ate upon it. More­over, we assert that any moral sys­tem which ignores this is nec­es­sar­i­ly arbi­trary and inad­e­quate.
  • The claim that there is no evi­dence Jesus ever exist­ed is so ridicu­lous I’m tempt­ed not to respond to it, but giv­en that it is being recit­ed with dis­cour­ag­ing fre­quen­cy I’ll direct your atten­tion to a list of extra­bib­li­cal, nonChris­t­ian wit­ness­es to Jesus who wrote before 200 A.D..
  • Since what seems to be dri­ving his site is a fear that Chris­tians have some plan to install some sort of theo­crat­ic gov­ern­ment in Amer­i­ca, I’d just like to make it clear that we believe in a sep­a­ra­tion of church and state–because the state cor­rupts the church. And besides, it’s a Bib­li­cal idea (1 Tim 2:1–2 — a prayer that the gov­ern­ment would leave Chris­tians the heck alone).

Any­way, he says a lot more in his essay. I cer­tain­ly haven’t respond­ed to it all, nor have I respond­ed thor­ough­ly to what I did take time to respond to. It’s most­ly the same-old, same-old stuff you hear if you’ve done any inves­ti­ga­tion at all into the exis­tence of God (there is evil there­fore God’s attrib­ut­es are con­tra­dic­to­ry, the Bible is stu­pid, reli­gion always oppos­es progress, etc, etc).

If those argu­ments both­er you a lot then dig around on the sites I linked to above and also lis­ten to some of the rel­e­vant lec­tures at Veritas.org. There are rea­son­able answers to peo­ple’s ques­tions.

Any­way, I guess I was just shocked that this page is so pop­u­lar. I expect­ed bet­ter of it.

Unspoken

I just learned that friend and fel­low Assem­bly of God min­is­ter Char Blair has set up a blog. She has a min­istry to young peo­ple con­fused about their sex­u­al iden­ti­ty. You go, girl!

Hospitality Central

Dana has been get­ting quite confused–it seems that every morn­ing she wakes up to find some­one new in the house.

Four nights ago Andrew spent the night. Three nights ago it was Katie. Two nights ago it was Will & Jen Kli­er (inci­den­tal­ly, I helped them set up a new Word­Press blog while they were here: TheK­liers).

And in that whole mix we went out to lunch twice with alum­ni: Gareth and Eliz­a­beth.

She’s warmed up to every­one pret­ty quick­ly, but I sus­pect that today she’ll be hap­pi­er since this morn­ing arrives with­out strangers and we’re not plan­ning to trav­el any­where.

Lindsey Hawley

Lindsey HawleyI met Lind­sey this June while teach­ing at a con­fer­ence in Spring­field, MO. She was plan­ning to go and work with Chi Alpha at UT Austin. The doors closed on her at the last minute and she was try­ing to fig­ure out what to do.

Their loss is our gain, as she’s decid­ed to come and work along­side Paula and I here at Stan­ford! Every­one who’s worked with her in the past has incred­i­ble things to say about her char­ac­ter and her com­pe­tence. We’re very excit­ed, and we can’t wait until she’s able to move down here from her Alaskan home.

There are still a few hur­dles to be over­come (approval from var­i­ous com­mit­tees, rais­ing her fund­ing, etc), but we don’t fore­see any prob­lems. It will prob­a­bly take about a year to get every­thing worked out, and then she’ll be join­ing us here on the Farm.

update: she’s launched her own web­site: Life With Lind­sey.

New photos of Dana

Punk Rock DanaI have just added a few new pho­tos of Dana to the pho­to gallery. They do not do her jus­tice, she is tru­ly cute and fun­ny.