Category: Reviews

A Necessary Conversation

8 July 2021  | The Bible and LGBTQ Adventists: A Theological Conversation about Same-sex Marriage, Gender, and Identity, Alicia Johnston, self-published, 2021, 350 pages. Reviewed by Stephen Chavez, Silver Spring, Maryland. We Adventists, and, frankly, most Christians, have a complicated relationship with Scripture. “It’s not complicated,” we say. “When the Bible says, ‘The seventh day […]

A Book to Study, Not Read

30 June 2021  | Reviewed by Jack Hoehn Stephen C. Meyer is very easy to listen to and very understandable when he participates in the many debates he has had presenting the scientific basis of Intelligent Design. His two previous major books, Darwin’s Doubt (2013) and Signature in the Cell (2009), can both be read […]

Tired of Waiting: Women in Church and Society

7 April 2021 Hannele Ottschofski, Tired of Waiting: Women in Church and Society, Kindle Direct Publishing, February 2021, 188 pages. Reviewed by Reinder Bruinsma. The title of Hannele Ottschofski’s book Tired of Waiting: Women in Church and Society pointedly describes her concern. Ottschofski is a native of Finland, who later moved to Germany and has lived most of her […]

Will God Forgive Us for Our Theology?

A Book Review by Jack Hoehn   |  9 November 2020  | Dr. Richard Rice is a theology professor well known at Loma Linda University and before that at La Sierra University but likely better known outside Adventism than inside it. Perhaps this book can help change that.[1] The title of this review comes from the […]

Is Love a Choice or a Destiny?

David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell & Universal Salvation. Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 2017. Reviewed by Jack Hoehn  |  22 April 2020   | I had recently seen David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament (The New Testament—A Translation, same publisher and date as this book being reviewed) […]

Pursuit of Perfection

by Sam Chen | 16 November 2018 | “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944), French writer, poet, journalist, pioneering aviator It was still dark when he approached the monolith. He had gazed at it many times, but […]

Film Review: Operation Finale

by S.M Chen  |  12 September 2018  | “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), quoting 19th century clergyman Theodore Parker Certain events are so horrific, they deserve to be burnished in memory. And resurrected from time to time to remind younger generations. For, as Spanish […]

“My Son, Beloved Stranger” Revisited

by Carrol Grady |  28 August 2018  | Has it really been 30 years since that unforgettable day that divided my life into before and after? That day when I learned one of my three sons was a homosexual? When I felt that my world had fallen apart? My minister husband and I had recently […]

Film Review: Leave No Trace

by S.M. Chen  |  5 August 2018  | In 2004, the “Oregonian” ran a series about a father and daughter who had lived for 4 years in Forest Park, a 5200-acre public municipal park in the Tualatin Mountains west of Portland, OR. 5 years later, author Peter Rock published a novel, My Abandonment, based on […]

Would I Thrive in the Republic of Gilead?

by Stephen Ferguson  |  08 July 2018  | The world is abuzz with Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a new TV series that adapts the 1985 book of the same name by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. The series is now in its second season, and received an impossible 100% score on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. […]

Adventist Denominations: The Larger Picture

by Monte Sahlin  |  6 July 2018  | Handbook of Denominations in the United States, 14th Edition by Roger E. Olson, Frank S. Mead, Samuel S. Hill and Craig D. Atwood (2018, Abingdon Press). The 14th edition of the Handbook of Denominations in the United States came off the press in recent weeks. This is […]

RBG: A Film Review

by S.M. Chen  |  4 July 2018  | “No struggle can ever succeed without women participating side by side with men.” —Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) – lawyer, politician, founder of Pakistan RBG are the initials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A 97 minute documentary has been made of her life and career. Why should I view […]