When the Oscar nominations were announced today, Hacksaw Ridge  — about Adventist World War II hero and Medal of Honor recipient Desmond Doss  — landed six. The film has been nominated for best picture and Mel Gibson for best director. Andrew Garfield, who plays Doss, got a best actor nomination.

Wintley Phipps, best known for his vocal music, has recorded more than 25 studio albums and has sung for six U.S. presidents. He has met with giants of our age from Nelson Mandela to Mother Teresa. For the last 20 years, a large part of his focus has been on the U.S. Dream Academy, an organization he set up to support the children of people in prison.

Adventist Forum will grow this weekend in the Southeastern United States. Ronald Lawson has worked to create a new Forum chapter based in Asheville, North Carolina. Professor emeritus at Queens College, CUNY, Lawson brings with him considerable academic prowess and forty years' experience as president of the Metro New York Adventist Forum. In this Spectrum Conversation, Lawson discusses his involvement in creating some of the earliest Adventist Forum chapters and his hopes for this youngest chapter.

Reinder Bruinsma may be retired as far as career goes, but at 74, this former pastor, teacher, and high-ranking administrator has viewed retirement as freedom to double down on what he loves most. He preaches, writes books, translates scholarly tomes, and from time to time, joins his local hiking club for a 10-mile hike along the canals.

This is the second part of a two part series of conversations between T. Joe Willey and former Seventh-day Adventist pastor and author of The White Lie, Walter T. Rea. Read the first part of this series here.

Can we hold something in the back of our head that we are absolutely sure about, and that most of the brethren stand with us on?—can we hold those things back and be true to ourselves? And furthermore, are we safe in doing it? Is it well to let our people in general go on holding to the verbal inspiration of the Testimonies? When we do that, aren’t we preparing for a crisis that will be very serious some day?

Fekede Gemechu, the man behind Ethiopia's Kalala Learning Village, talks about how the school and clinic started in 1996 and the thousands of students and community members who have been served by the social business.

Question: How did the Kalala Learning Village in Ethiopia begin? 

As a student at Andrews University at the end of the 1970s, I heard the names Vick, Weiss, and Hilgert mentioned, almost in a whisper, but they had been so effectively airbrushed out of the institutional history that I never learned why they were no longer there. Then Spectrum went online with its blog, and there was Dr. Herold Weiss, first in Spanish, then in English.

Venture-capitalist-turned-philanthropist Paul Dickau says ending hunger in San Bernardino is within reach. His nonprofit, Helping Hands Pantry, feeds up to 14,000 people a week and is giving away thousands of Christmas baskets this holiday season.

Tiffany Brown, new director of the REACH Columbia Union Urban Evangelism School, says this year's eight students are learning about Bible work, urban ministry, public speaking, cooking and more.