Stanford Memorial Church

[4] The church's first chaplain, David Charles Gardner, began a tradition of leadership which has guided the development of Stanford University's spiritual, ethical, and academic relation to religion.

[13] In 1890, Jane Stanford visited her friend Maurizio Camerino in Venice, an artist with a reputation for producing high-quality mosaics; she and her husband had met him years earlier during one of their many trips to Europe.

[24][25] When the earthquake hit the church, the crossing structure moved independently from the rest of the building, gouging gaping holes in the roofs over the east and west transepts, the nave, and chancel.

[31] The building's crossing received a tiled hipped roof and an oculus, which lit the interior of the church, and was added above the renovated dome, which had a frescoed ceiling decorated with bronze designs as opposed to the gold leaf present before the earthquake.

[32] The four mosaic angels in the pendentives, which decorated its high rounded walls directly below the church's dome and served as the setting beds for hundreds of thousands of tesserae, were severely damaged.

[25] The angels' damage caused large chunks of mortar and glass to fall to the floor 80 feet (24 m) below, while other sections "were left hanging by the sheer geometry of their arched shape".

The university hired a team of contractors, structural engineers, architects, and conservation specialists to develop a renovation plan, which was paid for by a $10 million fundraising drive.

They had to fill the void with more than 470 tonnes of concrete and several layers of reinforcing steel in order to improve the walls' stability, an accomplishment the Alliance called "one of the most challenging retrofit feats implemented at Stanford".

[33][25] [note 6] The renovators found a piece of the original mosaic from the vestibule wall, which had a Chi Rho design, in the foundation, and inserted it into the Communion Table in the chancel, linking the current building with the pre-1906 church.

Cuninggim insisted that the university's administration and trustees were responsible because they had interpreted the non-sectarian clause in Stanford's charter in "a negative and restrictive fashion rather than as enabling the tolerance and the flourishing of many religious faiths on campus".

Gardner's successor, D. Elton Trueblood, whose goal was the establishment of a non-denominational graduate school in religious studies at Stanford, taught classes about the philosophy of religion.

[29] Harvey credited Napier for making the church a popular meeting place on campus for undergraduates and for turning it into "Christian theater—the introduction of jazz and other types of experimental worship as well as provocative preaching".

[45][50] Trueblood was also a professor of philosophy of religion at Stanford and established the university's first major in religious studies;[37] his tenure there provided him with "the public visibility and financial freedom that made a national ministry possible".

Trueblood and his wife hosted monthly Friends meetings in their home, and met weekly with Orthodox Jewish students in the vestry of Stanford Memorial Church.

[66] Muslim dean Sughra Ahmed was appointed in 2017, for the purpose of, as Provost Persis Drell stated, to assist "the Stanford community develop a broader understanding of the Islamic faith, particularly at this time".

He attended St John's College, Cambridge, where he was an organ scholar, and earned two doctorates at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he served on staff as a pianist and conductor.

[9] The original designs for Memorial Church and much of the university were made in 1886 by prominent American architect Henry Hobson Richardson; when he died that same year, his student Charles A. Coolidge completed them.

[25] After Jane Stanford's legal difficulties after her husband's death were resolved, she hired San Francisco architect Clinton E. Day to review and update the church's blueprints.

[15] Jane Stanford's taste and knowledge of both contemporary and classical art is evident in several aspects of the plan, appearance, and architecture of the church, which "dazzle the eye yet also produce an atmosphere of quiet contemplation".

[75] In the Stanford University press release about the 1992 gift of three watercolor studies for the church's mosaics, Paoletti's design for the facade is described as "Christ Welcoming the Righteous into the Kingdom of God", based on Matthew 25:34.

[78] Jane Stanford has been described as having a "Victorian aversion to blank space"[83] and so created a church that is "a dimly lit cavern of glowing mosaic surfaces ... and vibrant, stained-glass windows".

The doors open up into a narthex or vestibule decorated with mosaics on the walls, illuminated by the many colors of the stained glass windows, and stone carvings on the architectural details.

[91] To the west side of the chancel stands brass lectern in the form of a reading angel, which Jane Stanford brought from Europe and dedicated to her husband on the anniversary of his birth in 1902.

[96] The installation of the windows at Stanford Memorial Church was the largest commission awarded to an American stained glass artist at the time, and the project is "considered the finest example of Lamb's work".

[97] Stanford chose the life of Christ for the windows' theme, inspired by the religious paintings by European master painters such as Frederic Shields and Gustave Doré.

The windows in the nave above the east arcade depict the following Old Testament figures: Abraham, Hagar and her child Ishmael, Moses, Pharaoh's Daughter, Joshua, and Deborah.

One of the reasons she chose mosaics was because of the similar weather in Italy and Northern California, where the moderate climates and rainy seasons in both settings protect the images from erosion and clear the pollution that accumulates on many buildings in large cities.

[68][note 27] The presence of high-quality organs makes Stanford an ideal location for accomplished musicians, and the sanctuary one of California's best settings for instrumental and choral performance.

[109] Although the Stanfords were religious and viewed "spiritual and moral values as essential to a young person's education and future citizenship", they were not formally committed to any Christian denomination.

As many as 150 weddings or renewal ceremonies take place in the church each year, for current and former students and their children or grandchildren, for Stanford faculty and staff members, and for others connected to the university.