Cardinal Chronicle
BY MICHAEL PEÑA
For just over a year, campus community members have had the opportunity to walk a labyrinth painted on an 18-foot vinyl square that gets rolled out in Memorial Church every Wednesday. Tonight will be the first of three Wednesdays this quarter that the Office for Religious Life will keep the labyrinth out for an evening stroll, from 5 to 7 p.m. The labyrinth will be available during the same hours on the evenings of Feb. 22 and March 22. The labyrinth, which isn't a maze, consists of concentric circles that individuals can walk along as a way of quieting the mind, finding balance and aiding in meditation or prayer—while simultaneously approaching a rosette in the center. The labyrinth is normally available in the sanctuary every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and was originally dedicated in November 2004. Although often associated with Christianity, the use of labyrinths crosses religious and cultural boundaries and dates back thousands of years, Joanne Sanders, associate dean for religious life, has said.
Just in case you missed it, this month's issue of the Stanford Bookstore newsletter lists the 10 bestsellers for 2005. The top five fiction books were Zorro, by Isabel Allende; Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami; Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro; Eldest, by Christopher Paolini; and High Country, by Willard Wyman. The top five non-fiction books were The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond; Conspiracy of Fools, by Kurt Eichenwald; Are Men Necessary?, by Maureen Dowd; and A Different Universe (Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down), by Robert Laughlin.
But to hear it straight from an author, all are welcome to attend Firoozeh Dumas' talk to the Stanford University Women's Club next Wednesday at 2 p.m. She will discuss her book, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, which chronicles the author's move from Iran to the United States in 1971 at age 7. Dumas lives in Southern California but was spotted at a recent event in Palo Alto honoring Daniel Pearl, the foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal—and Stanford graduate—who was killed in Pakistan in 2002. The Jan. 25 talk is free and open to the public. It will be held at the Bechtel International Center. To attend, please RSVP by Monday to Ann Vosti, at (650) 493-6157, or at avosti@yahoo.com.
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