Generally speaking, this week’s published lesson study gives an excellent general discussion of the prophetic gift as experienced in both testaments. My comments for the most part state that much more could be said about the gift—which may, at times, surprise us—regarding the diversity of its manifestations and the type of people used by God.

When I suggest that the primary cause of our current economic difficulties is our frequent failure to integrate in theory and practice what Adam Smith (the eighteenth century so-called “father” of capitalism) meant by sympathy and self-interest, I have in mind things like these influential paragraphs that economics Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman published forty years
ago:1

The Sabbath School lessons for this quarter are an apology for the prophetic ministry of Ellen G. White. Given the role Mrs. White has played in Adventism, both while alive and after her death, we have become accustomed to going through one such exercise every few years. This is perfectly legitimate and understandable.

The word pander comes from Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde, in which a character named Pandarus is the go-between who schemes to obtain the consent of his niece Criseyde for a relationship with Troilus, on whose part the attraction is solely physical.

Last Sabbath, I sang in my church’s choir. We don’t usually have a choir—just at Christmas to sing the favorites from Handel’s Messiah. The occasional church choir is always a fascinating affair. Pew warmers turn prima donnas, while former collegiate choristers discover that “atrophy” applies to vocal cords, too.

La Sierra University professor Kendra Haloviak gave students in her “Seven churches of the Apocalypse” graduate seminar this assignment: Interview a pastor who conducted a non-traditional Revelation seminar in the last three years.

Ministerial student Lambert Trinidad spoke to Guillermo Gucilatar, a pastor, evangelist, and administrator from the Philippines who recently retired in Southern California.

On July 2, my fourth grandchild was born in Baltimore. His grandparents immediately made the six-hundred-mile trip to see him and celebrate his birth. Arriving at his home, congratulating the parents, and holding the newborn in my arms was a moment that will remain forever engraved in my memory. The joy of the moment was compounded by the knowledge that he was a healthy baby with a wide-open future. With much gratitude, we thanked God for Danielito. The visit to Baltimore was a historic event in the life of our family.

Let me be frank. I have never really appreciated the talk about union with Christ—or at least, not until recently. I have blamed my aversion on Mr. Ashbaugh, my academy English teacher. At the time, many of my friends and I found him rather eccentric.

William Kristol, neoconservative leader and Weekly Standard editor, believes that the time has come to rethink capitalism. “It will be important, over the next four years,” he writes in the November 24 edition of his journal, “to fight to save free-market capitalism from the Barack Obama administration.