Whom shall I hate? Whom shall I reproach or commend? Whom shall I exclude from full participation in the life of my church or community?

You may read part one of this conversation here.

“Mark you this, Bassanio, the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
—from “The Merchant of Venice”

The devil can do this, and so can his legion of lackeys.

Anyone (as we saw) can call up a key text from scripture in support of owning Canadians.

When radio commentator Laura Schlessinger recently backed up a contentious claim with a key-text argument—Leviticus says so; that settles it—a college teacher from Virginia responded with mock gratitude, and then asked for further advice.

I thought I was all done with my "Adventist mini series," but guess what? I'm not. I have one more thing to say. The last post of this series was my list of the seven things I didn't like about Adventism. It corresponded with an earlier one of 7 things I liked about Adventism.

(To really get the whole picture, please read the posts here and here.)

For background on this post, I refer the reader to my early post.

There were many things about the Adventists that I discovered during my 10 year sojourn that I liked tremendously. Many of these things still stick with me and inform my belief and practice today-- even though I don't talk much about it all. Let me name my 7 favorite things:

I guess it was my review of a recent biography of William Miller--predictor of the end of the world on October 22, 1844--that has made it clear to me that it is time that I "come clean" on my journey through Seventh-day Adventism. It wasn't just a little "foray"-- though I rarely mention it to anyone. Nope. I was an elder in the church and was employed as a teacher (as was Irene) in SDA church schools.

New Testament professor John Dominic Crossan discusses the dangers inherent in Christian fundamentalism.