Summer is a great time for catching a movie, and a bevy of new films debuting this summer make for a busy season. While big name films like the sixth installment of the Harry Potter series have moviegoers all abuzz, some of this summer's most consequential films might not be coming to a theater near you...yet.

During a memorial service Tuesday for the late singer Michael Jackson, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, stood before a packed Staples Center in Los Angeles with millions more watching on television and unveiled a bill that would honor Michael Jackson the humanitarian.

Today expressions of grief continue to pour in from around the world at the sudden loss of pop superstar Michael Jackson. Jackson's life might be described as anything but normal, but it was Sabbath, he says, that provided sanctuary from the stages of Hollywood and the crowds of concert halls, and offered times of normalcy.

BREAKING NEWS: Two men with ties to Adventist education made headlines this week in unrelated cases involving allegations of sex with minors. One charge involved the principal of the Eastern Shore Junior Academy in Sudlersville, Maryland. The other involved the former boys dean at Ozark Adventist Academy in Gentry, Arkansas.

In part one of this two-part series, I took note of the fact that individuals coalescing around the “Educate Truth” banner have thus far neglected the most fundamental task--qualifying what they mean by “truth.” I noted that in Genesis, there are two distinct creation accounts that have two unique understandings of creation and of God. This suggests a need for more specificity when we talk about "the truth" of creation.

Under the somewhat pretentious title, “Educate Truth,” a movement seeking to reign in academic freedom in Adventist higher ed is gaining momentum on the Internet. Many proponents of the “Educate Truth” movement have added their name to a petition addressed to Adventist church leaders.

At a time when an Adventist lawyer from California is creating buzz over his book on "the Seventh-day Adventist angle on Dinosaurs" (Spoiler alert: Ellen White reveals the origin of dinosaurs in a "cryptic" comment on amalgamations between man and beast, i.e. genetic engineering), the unveiling of a new primate fossil in New York's American Museum of Natural History, invites us to think on several pressing questions.

Environmental stewardship. Interfaith dialogue. Community outreach. Organic gardening. Feeding the Hungry.

Each of those undertakings is challening in its own right. But for Amy Lee and the Tulsa First SDA Church, a Hiram Edson-like vision in a field led to an opportunity to do them all at once.

"I was out walking and saw an empty field and thought, 'That would be a wonderful place for a garden,'" says Lee.

The opening sequences of Disney's Earth (see trailer) come at you like the opening lines of a book on Intelligent Design. The iconic shot from outer space of the sun cresting the rim of the blue planet fills the screen as James Earl Jones, in his rolling bass voice, describes how perfectly positioned to support life is our earth.

Earth is the first title from Disney's new division, Disneynature. Released on Earth Day 2009, Earth attempts to provide something for everyone.

It's a sign of the times when Rosemary Radford Ruether, one of the most significant feminist thinkers of all time, takes the platform in an Adventist institution. Ruether, in addition to being a feminist, is a Catholic scholar who favors women's ordination and women's reproductive freedom.

It is also telling that when Ruether stood to speak on ecofeminism last Saturday afternoon in the La Sierra University Church, which can hold over 1,000 people, fewer than 150 people sat in attendance.