The new, old piety has a blind spot.

Official publications show unmistakably that 1920’s-to-early-60’s piety is shoring up its dominance in Adventist culture. Fueled by stock phraseology—words like “earnest,” phrases like “revival and reformation,” sentences like “How many of you believe that we are living in the very final days of earth’s history…?”—this piety is in certain respects helpful. Revival is good. Reformation is good. A sense of urgency about the times, a wariness concerning the merely popular—both central in Elder Ted Wilson’s preaching—are good.

Many years ago, I noticed how often Ellen White referred to the “soul” in her devotional writings.

Despite learning a great deal from Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow in their recent book The Grand Design, in the end I was disappointed.

It’s not that their book lacked clarity. In the introduction they do say that their explicit purpose is to explore “Not only how the universe behaves but why.” They posit three framing questions for their rather short book (188 pages from Bantam books for around $14.00 on Amazon): “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? and Why this particular set of laws and not some other?” (p. 9-10)

Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul by Edward Humes (Harper Collins Publishers, 2007), recounts the battle between creationists and evolutionists that was fought in the town of Dover, Pennsylvania. As with most wars, it began with a skirmish. The school board attempted to introduce Intelligent Design (ID) into the ninth grade science curriculum. The science teachers refused.