Spectrum Blog

My Inaugural Experience

27 January 2009 | Nicole Frazier

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A couple of weeks ago, Oakwood University reported that one of its students, Nicole Frazier, had been selected to attend the Obama Inauguration as a University Presidential Inaugural Scholar.

This is her story.
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Wow! That’s the only word I can think of to describe this amazing experience. I was blessed to be a University Presidential Inaugural Scholar for this 2009 Inauguration. The program was incredible and lasted five days. Five thousand university students were chosen to participate in this grand occasion from all over the world. The first night of the program, the Inaugural Scholars got the opportunity to meet and greet. There were so many different people and countries represented. Luke Russert, the late Tim Russert’s son and co-host of the show “60/20 Sports”, spoke on the power of youth.

All of the Inaugural Scholars were guests at state-of-the-art hotels. I stayed in the Omni Shoreham Hotel, which was phenomenal. On the second day of the program, we were guests at the University of Maryland where General Colin Powell spoke. His regal, yet down-to-earth presence shocked me. He greeted the crowd and began a very organized and interesting speech.

General Powell spoke on leadership and the keys to being an effective leader. He mentioned that good leaders possess several qualities. They have vision, which they translate into goals. They organize themselves by measuring their strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of their opponents. They organize their forces, realize that they must sometimes make difficult decisions and that failure is probable, but a learning experience. He focused on one aspect of leadership—effective leaders understand that leadership is about followers.

After the lecture, we went to the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel for lectures. I attended the press panel where we got to ask a panel of journalists from the NY Times, NBC, ABC, and CNN questions. This was very informative, but I wish it was longer. I later went to a presentation by James Carville (Democratic Strategist/CNN) and his wife Mary Matalin (Republican Strategist/Former Presidential Adviser). This lecture was interesting and filled with many debates on issues like immigration, taxes, and youth community involvement.

After the headliner, the inaugural scholars headed toward the inaugural celebration on the National Mall. There were an estimated 1.4 million people in attendance. It was so crowded that people pressed together from the Lincoln Memorial past the reflection pool, the Veteran’s Memorial, all the way to the Capitol building. During the inaugural celebration, we enjoyed performances by John Legend, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, U2, Stevie Wonder, Garth Brooks, Usher, and others.

On Monday, we were special guests at a presentation by Al Gore at the University of Maryland. I really thought he would be stiff, but he was interesting and full of humor. He spoke on global warming, politics, and how we can positively impact the environment. After Al Gore’s speech, we went to two more presentations of our choice. I went to a presentation by Jon Seaton (Managing Partner/East Meridian Strategies) and Sarah Simmons (Director of Strategy for McCain’s campaign) out of curiosity. Their presentations were informative. One of the most interesting presentations for me was that of Robert Pinsky (pictured), the former U.S. Poet Laureate. His presentation was on the power and significance of self-expression in a democracy. I was able to speak with him and get an autograph and picture.

Inauguration Day was spectacular. I will always cherish the memories of that day. Not only was I able to witness the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States of America, but I was able to experience and participate in the feelings of optimism and jubilation. The crowds were ecstatic. There was energy in the air and a sense of American pride that was intense and unimaginable. On inauguration day, I got up at 1 a.m. and headed for the metro station with some friends. As I stood in the bitter cold among the ecstatic crowds, my thoughts rushed to the significance of that joyous occasion. Not only was this occasion significant to me because I am African American, but it signified a change in American politics and the way of thinking, as well as the role of youth as vital elements of change. There were so many people that even though we arrived early, we were only able to watch the festivities on a jumbotron. Even though the crowd was pressed together, people weren’t concerned with the many differences we had such as nationality, race, religion, or political views. We were truly one. As the festivities proceeded, the crowd increased with energy and zeal, especially when President Obama spoke. When the festivities had commenced, the same warmth could be felt as everyone made their way back.

I scarcely had time to rest because the Black-Tie Gala was hours away. My roommate and I quickly rotated dominating the restroom and getting ready. Finally, we got into the bus and headed towards the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Traffic was so heavy that, although we left the hotel at 6:30 p.m., we didn’t arrive until 9:00 p.m. Most of the roads were blocked, and the total city was chaotic but exciting. My friends and I decided to go to the Hirshhorn first. There was music, food, and beautiful abstract artwork. The evening was spectacular. After spending some time in the Hirshhorn, we went to the Smithsonian where there was a live band, airplanes, naval equipment, and artwork. I enjoyed this experience and would not trade it for anything. The friendships I made were priceless.

As I reflect back on my experience in Washington D.C., the words of President Obama ring in my ear. “It’s not a liberal America or conservative America, but it’s the United States of America.” Truly, I am proud to be part of this great country. I hope that the new administration, along with us—the people of this great nation—will work hard to restore America. As a young adult, I vow to be a part of this restoration process. In the words of J.F. Kennedy, “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

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Spectrum Passes One Million Pageviews!

25 January 2009 | Alexander Carpenter

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Since we launched about 14 months ago our new Spectrum site has had:

1,032,651 Pageviews

371,576 Visits

171,328 Visitors

Of course, the visits/visitors number is high as it measures IP addresses, not actual noses. But still.

Here's a graph from Compete.com that measures daily attention over the past 90 days among three Adventist media properties that have made changes in the last year.

Average time spent on each site.

Thanks to all of you for making this site a success. We've got some new features we'll be rolling out. But we want to hear from you.

What keeps you coming back?

Road Trip to Elko: Cowboy Poetry

25 January 2009 | Laura Lamar

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Just after Christmas my friend Anne invited me to join her on a road trip to Elko, Nevada, in the middle of winter. Elko is in the Great Basin, and winter temperatures peak at what we Northern Californians consider bone-chilling lows. So--what's in Elko during the last week of January?

Since 1985, Elko has been home to the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering. This--perhaps unknown--bit of culture is nonetheless a big, wholesome slice of all-American pie. Poets and musicians, craftspeople and cowboys, ranchers
and scholars, storytellers and artists, filmmakers and piano players, all gather to celebrate a unique bit of western culture.

I was first introduced to cowboy poets by my husband Max, who loves all things western. What's the draw? The myth--or code--of the west might be defined as romantic, in a moral sense. This is a world of old-fashioned right and wrong, of ethical behavior that might seem dated in our urban-centric modern culture. But the "cowboy way" is also laced with
self-deprecating irony and big dollops of humor.

True-to-form, when I asked Max if he would accompany Anne and I, he declined. Not because this isn't something we've wanted to do for years, not because he wouldn't love to go, but because his commitment to his job and his personal integrity would not allow him to take time off work just for fun. In true cowboy lingo, he said "No, you girls go. Have fun. And tell Anne, I ride for the brand!"

We leave in less than a week. We've decided to go all out, girl-style, and take at least three changes of clothes--all western wear--per day. Lest this be a mere Thelma-and-Louise style jaunt (I hope we make it home alive!), we have given ourselves assignments.

Anne, a travel-writer (among other things; I'll let her introduce herself to you) plans, naturally, to write. I'm a graphic designer, and the art director for Spectrum magazine; I plan to shoot lots of photos and try to capture the look and feel of this other world.

Bonnie Dwyer, editor of Spectrum, has invited us to blog our trip, and let her know if there is any spiritual content to cowboy poetry. I believe I can already answer Yes; but I'll be keeping my ears open and let you know the temperature of the spirit that we find, in Elko, in the middle of the winter.

Exploring the History of Christian Visions

25 January 2009 | Alexander Carpenter

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How, in this age of scientific rationalism, can we begin to understand religious visions and mystical experiences--now being reported by a growing number of people on the nightly news, across the internet, and by word-of-mouth?

Dr. Lisa Bitel and Dr. Michael A. Arbib discuss visions from the Middle Ages to today, especially the tensions between cultural, spiritual, and neurological explanations for extraordinary sights, and consider new ways to understand these mysterious phenomena - Los Angeles Public Library

Three New (Interesting) Blogs in Adventism

25 January 2009 | Alexander Carpenter

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Here are three recent members in the Adventist blogoshere. I think that what makes these bloggers especially interesting is the very personal focus of their writing. They write from experience.

1. Trinidad. Adventist. Gay?

Twenty-something. Male. Trinidadian. Have same-sex attractions. Love God. Here to help. Please understand that because Trinidad and Tobago is such a small place I can't be too descriptive; especially since I am a Seventh-Day Adventist. They all know one another!

Trinidad. Adventist. Gay?
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2. John McLarty, Pastor, North Hill Adventist Fellowship, Edgewood, WA, reflects on a book given out by his conference president to all the pastors, Why We're Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be):

I am puzzled by the book. It is clear that one of the authors' major concerns with the Emergent Church is their downplaying of eternal torment. Both authors return to this repeatedly throughout the book. Of course, we Adventists applaud the Emergents for their "seeing the light" on this doctrine.

The larger concern of the author, however, though he never uses the word, is epistemology. He insists we take the inerrant Bible as our guide. He argues the Emergents have no clear authority--not the Bible, not the Church, not "their church", not the Holy Spirit. It is not only that the Emergent movement is intentionally doctrinally amorphous. It is that the movement insists there is no proper way to be definite about any truth.

Reading the quotations DeYoung cites, I am reminded of classic apophatic theology but without the stability and wisdom offered by deep connections with the history and traditions of the Christian Church. Emergent authors question all theological affirmations while appearing to uncritically make strong ethical, social and political affirmations. I am sympathetic to the social concerns characteristic of the Emergent movement, but I think DeYoung's criticism of their epistemology is apt.

Liberal Adventist
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3. Rajmund Dabrowski, Communication Director at the world headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist Church Church writes about Barack Obama's inauguration, meeting Benicio Del Toro after a special screening of Che and the terrible injustice of Mugabe:

. . .once again, Archbishop Tutu pricked my conscience with a challenge - this time to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Zimbabwe. Starvation, cholera, apathy and hopelessness of a land whose innocent victims are countless children and women all are crying to high haven.

This week's end topped my anger and my resolve with a news feature in The New York Times about scores of desperate and destitute Zimbabwe children whose plight takes them from hell into South Africa's milieu of the "unwelcome" and resentment.

Pushing the Borders
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Are you following some interesting (not just new) blogs around Adventism these days? Share them in the comment section below.

Reviewing. . .Adventist World

25 January 2009 | Andrew Hanson

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January 2009
Vol. 5, No. 1

GENERAL COMMENTS
I continue to be impressed by the ”new look”. It allows editors and tech staff to more comfortably handle illustration, advertisement, and format issues. In addition, this issue has lots of other things to recommend it including a Bouquet tossed in the direction of Angel Manuel Rodriguez! Check it out!

Vietnam has granted the Adventist Church Official Recognition.
“The last Adventist out of Saigon, Le Cong Giao, center, initiates the Communion service marking the government’s recognition of the Adventist denomination in Vietnam. About 130 delegates met in Ho Chi Minh City October 22 to 24 to approve the denomination’s reorganized Vietnamese Mission.” There are six Adventist church buildings in Vietnam and about 100 registered Adventist groups meeting in homes.

(Editor’s Note) It is amazing that Vietnam would have anything to do with the US after the war in which our “Christian” nation killed 2,000,000 Vietnamese, indiscriminately bombed, Ho Chi Minh City, and spread millions of tons of Agent Orange over its ecosystem and population. “Forgiveness” is a word we Americans have yet to comprehend. Perhaps the Vietnamese can be our teachers.

Jan Paulsen is traveling the world in his attempt to hold the Adventist Church together. His conversation with Bill Knott is chronicled in A Dynamic Church for Difficult Times is one more brave attempt to “keep the Adventist ship afloat”. The next General Conference President needs to listen carefully to what Paulsen has to say.

“Because previous GC sessions decided not to ordain women to gospel ministry, women haven’t had the same access to leadership positions. . . There’s no question that there has to be a more deliberate effort to correct that. We simply have to be more deliberate in choosing women as members of the General Conference Executive Committee. We also have to include more young lay professionals under age 35—not because they fill a leadership role in the church, but because they bring competencies and skills we very much need as we do the church’s business. We also need to ensure that they can serve for an adequate length of time—perhaps up to 10 years—so that they can function as productive and contributing members of the Executive Committee.”

When Allan R. Handysides and Peter N. Landless remind us that when our Global Church Preaches an Antismoking Message, it benefits the entire world.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report on tobacco for 2008, a person dies because of tobacco usage every six seconds. Tobacco kills between a third and a half of all the people who use it, and the 5 million who die each year from its consequences represent one tenth of all deaths in the world annually.

Of the world’s current population, 500 million will die of tobacco’s effects, and the twenty-first century could witness tobacco killing 1 billion people.

Secondhand smoke has serious health consequences. Some 46,000 cardiac deaths and 3,400 lung cancer deaths per year in the United States alone are attributed to secondhand tobacco smoke. The 200,000 episodes of childhood asthma, 71,900 preterm deliveries, and 24,500 low-birth-weight infants calculated to be a result of secondhand smoking in the U.S. surely give pause for reflection.

The Bounty and the Bible: How the Adventist message found its  way to Pitcairn Island and stayed by  Herbert Ford  and Wilona  Karimabadi is a brief history of the island’s secular and religious history. The story isn’t always pretty, and it has never been and is not today a “tropical paradise”. “Pitcairn Island has received worldwide attention during  the last several years as reports of alleged criminal activities  and subsequent legal trials have been covered by the media. Seventh-day Adventists on the island and throughout the  world church are working toward bringing healing and reconciliation to those involved.”

Ministering the “Techie” Way by Carolyn Sutton and Cindy Waterhouse-Wheeler
is a nontraditional—but effective way to minister to a local and worldwide parish. This is brilliantly conceived, inexpensive evangelism. One can only imagine what fantastic things might happen if local, member supported organizations like Light Stream International and Terri and Ko Saelle’s ministry to the Hmong communities in the US (An Evangelistic Paradigm Shift) were funded like the traditional, ineffective and expensive evangelistic efforts like Share Hope, set to launch satellite events from Myrtle Beach on January 20.

It Is Finished by Rolf Pohler has difficulty explaining why Jesus had to die. I suspect that the difficulty lies in the basic atonement and satisfaction premise of his argument and Fundamenrtal Belief #9 of the Adventist Church. (I mean, Jesus could have died to save any repentant angel who was taken in by Lucifer and saved all this earthly mess, right?)

“But what was it then that made atonement and satisfaction—and therefore the death of Jesus—necessary? Is it the profound disgust that God, the Perfect and Holy One, feels for all injustice? Is it the disregard for His just and holy law (Rom. 7:12)—the reflection of His character—that must be punished? Do we feel something of the same indignation—indeed, the “righteous anger”—that God feels in the face of the million-fold presence of sin and appalling injustice (John 3:36; Rom. 1:18 ff.; 1 Thess. 1:10; Rev. 6:16 f.)?

“But that doesn’t mean that Jesus was trying to placate an angry God and move Him to be benevolent toward us. After all, it was the Father Himself who sent His Son into the world “that we might live through Him” (1 John 4:9 ff.). It was not necessary to win God over for us; He already was on our side. God does not love us because Jesus died for us; Jesus died because God loves us. God’s love is the reason and source, not the result or effect of the atonement.”

Ellen White: Who Was She?
Ellen White was more than “The Little Woman Who Talked About Jesus”. James R. Nix provides a brief, bland biography of a woman who deserves a more intelligent and personal account of her life. Ellen established our Church, survived the death of two of her children and the bullying of men more interested in establishing an organization than in warning the world of the soon coming of her Lord and establishing a theology based on New Testament truths. The other woman in the picture accompanying the article (I assume it to be her twin sister) is not identified and their relationship is not discussed.

The Gospel According to Mary
Angel Manuel  Rodríguez tackles the question, “Is Mary, the sister of Martha, the same as Mary Magdalene?” and he does a pretty good job. Unfortunately, he confuses the issue by his first statement: “We know little about this Mary [of Bethany], unless she is identified with Mary Magdalene.” And later he goes on to speculate about how the two Marys might possibly be the same, even though “no historical evidence exists to support the position that they are the same person.” Rodriguez’ further speculation about this issue “cannot provide a final answer to the question.”

In his concluding paragraphs Rodriguez notes that Mary Magdalene played a “significant role in the gospel narrative. She almost became the disciple par excellence. She witnessed Jesus’ death on the cross (Matt. 27:55, 56; John 19:25) and accompanied His body to the tomb (Matt. 27:60, 61). On Sunday morning she was the first to get to Jesus’ tomb, and, seeing that it was empty, went and informed the disciples that someone had taken away Jesus’ body (John 20:1, 2).”

He concludes with the words, “If the resurrected Savior used women to proclaim  to the male disciples that He was alive, we should also  make full room for women in the proclamation of the  eternal gospel.”

Way to go, Angel!

Justice vs. Simian - We Are Your Friends

25 January 2009 | DJ ؟pekdrum

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Here comes an earworm from Justice. . .

The classic French D.J. duo's 2003 remix of Simian's "Never Be Alone."

Fast Adventist News

24 January 2009 | Alexander Carpenter

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More Loma Linda School of Medicine graduates got there from Pacific Union College than any other school.

Seventh-day Adventist member of Congress, Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) spoke at the March for Life in DC.

Flooding in Fiji takes lives, destroys property and impacts mission;
President of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the West Indies is appointed Jamaica¹s sixth Governor General;
Adventist academics meet to discuss how the Christian faith can best tackle modern day issues and problems;
ADRA assist early school leavers to acquire workplace skills in Gatton, Queensland;
Current and former brass band members of Beulah College raise thousands of dollars for the band and school during a reunion;
600 attendees at the 17th four day Polish Adventist congress in Melbourne are joined by 1000 viewers on the internet.

The Food and Drug Administration and Washington Adventist Hospital collaborate.

Pastor Bernie reports from the biennial North American Division Ministries Conference.

A evangelical church that meets on Saturdays and follows some Jewish rituals, confuses some.

Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) wins big award for HIV/AIDS radio drama in Malawi.

Southern Adventist University continues to have record enrollment.

A physician at Loma Linda University's new Heart and Surgical Hospital performed the facility's first robotic-assisted surgery this week.

And success continues at the City of Loma Linda's community garden:

In the beginning, word spread slowly through the community and demand was so light that gardeners were allowed a second plot to grow more food if they wanted it. But as word got out and food prices rose, the garden filled up and the city developed a 30-name waiting list of would-be gardeners, said Joanne Heilman, executive assistant to the Loma Linda city manager.

"Especially this past year, the way the economy has gone, a lot of people are looking for resources," Heilman said. "This is one of them."

The garden is so successful the city has opened a second one, with at least 15 plots, on the east side of Evans Street near Loma Linda University, she said.