They Really DO Change Our Lives…

I often tell people that Stanford alumni change our lives on a regular basis. I came across an unexpected angle on that today…

Stanford alumnus Tiger Woods is perhaps the best known (and loved) athlete in the world today. He’s also a key figure in clothing trends!

When Tiger Woods wakes up this morning, he will not have to think twice about his outfit. It was picked out for him a year and a half ago, just like the clothes he will be wearing Friday through Sunday at the U.S. Open at Olympia Fields.

It is all part of the marketing strategy for Nike Golf, which scripts Woods’ clothes for the majors and then ships the merchandise to stores around the country a couple weeks after each major. Woods’ popularity and the television exposure generated by the tournaments combine to increase sales of the selected items.

…

‘I was just inundated with phone calls after he wore [a short-sleeved mock turtleneck],” said Lynda Reis, the apparel buyer for Chicago Tennis and Golf. ”I could not believe the response. There have not been too many things I’ve had so many phone calls about. And the men will come in and say, ‘I don’t know if I’d wear it playing golf, but it looks so cool on him.”’

That’s not exactly what I had in mind when I told people about the influence of Stanford’s alumni, but it does illustrate the point in a bizarre sort of way. Tiger–a role model to us all.

Read about Tiger’s stylistic influence.

Intelligence vs Integrity

Andrew found an interesting article called Too Smart To Be Dumb.

Here’s an excerpt:

Reading [the relevance of intelligence] in a book review the other day reminded me (for reasons you’ll soon understand) of a car accident my wife and daughter were lucky to walk away from three years ago. A 16-year-old driving a new Lincoln coupe hit them at 70 mph–twice the speed limit–after careening off a hillside. Later that night the kid’s mother told me how shocked she was by the witness reports of his reckless driving. “But he got 1550 on his SAT,” she cried.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked.

It was no surprise to hear that she’s a college professor.

Like millions of intellectual elites and wannabes, this woman presumes an inherent connection between intelligence and goodness, and between intelligence and wisdom, as though there exists some objective domain of ethicality to which Mensa members are automatically admitted.

The article is primarily a political one, but it’s got a recurring theme that I found quite interesting: smart doesn’t imply moral. Read the article.

I Was Predestined To Believe In Free Will

Questions about free will ever keep you up at night? I just read a great rambling roundtable of an essay called Faith and The Science of Free Will.

It’s a response to an essay by John Horgan in the New York Times, which reads in part: A couple of books I’ve been reading lately have left me brooding over the possibility that free will is as much a myth as divine justice. The chief offender is The Illusion of Conscious Will, by Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard.… We think of will as a force, but actually, Dr. Wegner says, it is a feeling“merely a feeling,” as he puts itof control over our actions. I think, “I’m going to get up now,” and when I do a moment later, I credit that feeling with having been the instigating cause. But as we all know, correlation does not equal causation.

The exchanges (several people comment) are insightful, such as this one: My response to this is based on The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will, edited by Benjamin Libet (Imprint Academic, 2000). As I understand it, Libet was actually one of the scientists involved in the experiments that Dr. Wegner refers to. The fact that Libet’s position is nowhere mentioned makes me very suspicious of Wegner’s agenda.

The conscious will appears to be initiated by an unconscious brain event. If the experiment is correct, then this calls into question free will. But Libet says the conscious will can veto these subconscious decisions (see page 51 of The Volitional Brain). The conscious veto may itself have a preceding unconscious process. But this would become an unconscious choice of which we become conscious rather than a consciously causal event (52). The conscious veto is a control function, not just simply becoming aware of a wish to act. The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but rather to control whether the act takes place. The ethical implications of this are actually consistent with most ethical and religious systems. Most of the Ten Commandments are thou-shall-not commandments (54). The experiments cited by Wegner give us no indication that actions cannot be consciously controlled.

Pretty cool stuff. You can read an expanded version of the essay here.

Luis Trujillo, XA president, Helps Build Guatemalan Ministry Center

Check it out: our very own Chi Alpha president, Luis Trujillo, is in the Stanford Daily for helping to construct a community center for abused teens and others in Guatemala: Class designs facility for Guatemalan town.

A Stanford architecture class is playing a vital role in the construction of a community center and school in Amatitlan, Guatemala. Designing all aspects of the project from dormitories to a church and retreat center these students will show their work at a professional presentation to potential clients and contributors on Monday.

The Guatemalan facility will be a campus for the Center for the Restoration of Women and the Socially Disregarded, also referred to as the CEREM project, after the Christian organization sponsoring its development. The center will act as a residential center and school for homeless children and former prostitutes, as well as a church and place of retreat.

…

One of the amazing things about CEREM is the people who started it, said Luis Trujillo, another teaching assistant who is also acting as the client representative responsible for communicating the facilitys needs to student designers. They have really challenged me to give all that I have. You dont do this because you feel sorry for these people, but rather you do it out of love for them and the potential that you see in them.

Luis has actually been the key player in this thing from start to finish. He’s got a marginal role in the article, but Luis is the guy who set the ball in motion, hooked CEREM up with the Stanford class, and has generally been pushing to make it happen!

Way to go, Luis! We’re proud of you: getting a Stanford class to design a Christian ministry center is an awesome way to leverage the gifts and opportunities God has given you.

UPDATE: there’s another article on the Stanford website that covers the project from a slightly different angle. It also gives Luis a little more prominence (well-deserved, I might add).

Driving Through The Redwoods

Last weekend Paula and I were preaching up in McKinleyville, CA (almost all the way to Oregon). On the way, we had a chance to drive through the giant redwood trees (literally). car_drive_through.jpg

If you’ve never seen the trees before, it’s hard to understand how large they are. They get to be over 350 feet tall, over 2,000 years old, and weigh up to 1.7 million pounds! car_by_trees.jpg

We even got some cool shots of us in some tree trunks. glen_in_tree.jpg

No, we didn’t try to count the rings…paula_on_tree.jpg

A Busy Season Winds Down

Whew–I spoke three times today and participated in a religious discussion group! I’m a little drained. Worst of all was that my first engagement was two hours away, and I only had about two hours between my first and second appointment (which was back here at Stanford)! We really had to book it.

Fortunately, we’re at the end of a busy season. Last weekend I was in Springfield helping to script a miniseries (no, really) that Chi Alpha is going to burn onto CDs and distribute to college students all across America. I got back and went to preach in Modesto that Sunday. Monday Paula and I drove up to the Lake Mendocino sectional fellowship, and today I had all those speaking engagements… *whew*

That makes it almost two months that Paula and I have been running around like chickens with our heads cut off. It was really starting to affect my speaking: I’d say that none of the presentations I gave today were A‑quality. They were all B‑range. Soon I should be able to recharge and do better.

I feel kind of guilty. I should be a better model for my students, but this season of hectic activity was pretty much necessary… *sigh*

Oh well, at least it’s over (I think).

Jesus, Ethics, and Us

these are notes from a class presentation I gave in Ron Howard’s class The Ethical Analyst about ethics in Christian perspective

The Hidden Danger of Ethics Classes
There is a great but hidden danger in classes such as this. By spending hours debating moral issues we too often train ourselves for rationalization instead of righteousness. There is no point in trying to understand good unless we also seek to be good!

Why Should We Care What Christianity Says?
Today it is common to regard Christianity as morally bankrupt. This is nave and represents massive prejudice.
Continue reading “Jesus, Ethics, and Us”

Great Day!

Today I had the opportunity to go and just spend some time on campus watching students in their natural habitat. I was expecting to just sit down and set up my laptop and work on sermon prep and making some phone calls all day, but instead I bumped into students I knew everywhere I turned around!

Kwasi biked by after I set up, and then I bumped into Shaowei upstairs, and shortly after that I bumped into Jimmy and a friend of his named Winona I hadn’t met before. Jimmy and I talked for several hours about all sorts of stuff, and then Song showed up.

Song and I talked about different ways to raise money for missions–he’s planning to bike across America this summer. I hope it works out, ’cause it sounds really cool.