From Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago: It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In ( Read more... )

• Southwestern Adventist University ends it's no blacks allowed policy in 1967, 4 years after MLK's I Have A Dream speech.
  http://www.swurecord.net/news.php?storyid=1722
• Bob Jones University ends its ban on interracial dating in 2000, 37 years after MLK's I Have A Dream speech. 
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University#Racial
• 2008, ( Read more... )

I walk through Academic Plaza (our quad) on my way from the bus stop to my office. Today there was a giant wall stretching the width of the plaza with giant 6ft images of aborted fetuses in various states of disarticulation. Signs with the words "Warning: genocide photos ahead" were placed about the plaza, and Nazi swastikas and holocaust imagery ( Read more... )

I was recently reminded of this quote from a teenage Friedrich Nietzsche. The world changes with age. What happens, then, to the promises of our youth?
"I have already experienced so much-joy, sorrow, cheerful things and sad things-but in everything God has safely led me as a father leads his weak little child. . . I have firmly resolved within ( Read more... )

To Autumn
--John Keats

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,         5  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel ( Read more... )

The Bible doesn't have a title. We call it the Bible, or sometimes the Holy Bible, but of course the word Bible comes from a Latin word that just means book. In fact, when you use the word Bible outside of this building you have to know who you are talking to, because, as it turns out, there isn't just one Bible. There are Bibles. Our Old ( Read more... )

Drug stores make me nervous. You would be hard pressed to find a higher concentration of blush-inducing "personal products". I frequently run into cute girls there, too. It's a little like a date movie cobbled together from embarrassing high school experiences:

I found her in the pharmacy section, two boxes in her hand, trying to decide whether ( Read more... )

Critics of LSU and church leadership's handling of this affair frequently accuse administrators at LSU (or church leadership, or the biology department, etc.) of not disclosing the beliefs of LSU's biology faculty and what is taught in the biology classrooms. (For example, Dr. Ingo Sorke included this attack against Dr. Wisbey in his Re- ( Read more... )

Another of my contributions to Spectrum's summer reading group.

--snip--

My idea of a spiritual leader is someone whose questions are harder than mine and who will admit it in group discussion. This disqualifies most pastors I've had. Maybe all pastors I've had.

I've grown up entirely within the Adventist church. When we do church, we always ( Read more... )

The spare brain cycles I have had to spend recreationally in the last month instead of going to this blog have gone to Spectrum Magazine's summer reading group. It's an online book club with some Adventist intellectuals like Zane Yi and Dr. Lisa Clark Diller over on the Spectrum Blog. We're reading a chapter a week of Jim Belcher's Deep Church, a ( Read more... )