Great social reforms are not achieved by good people; technological advances are not made by good people; medical breakthroughs are not discovered by good people; military victories are not masterminded by good people.

During my thirty hour journey from Entebbe to Huntsville this week, I had plenty of time to reflect on my most recent African experience. In addition to assessing the educational and residential needs of orphans in Kampala, I was one of two main speakers for a vibrant prayer conference in Masaka.

"A multitude of Walla Walla University students joined local community members and concerned citizens at Shelter for Freedom’s headlining event on Saturday night, January 16, 2010, filling Whitman College’s Cordiner Hall for the screening of the documentary film Cargo: Innocence Lost, Martin Surridge reports.

My husband and I live in the Napa Valley region of northern California, renowned for its vineyards. Every year we revel in watching the vineyards recover from pruning with new growth that will later adorn the Fall with lavish color.

Optimism? Pitch it in the dumpster.

I hate it when someone says to me, “Thank you for your patience.” It usually means that I have every reason to be impatient and that someone is trying to make me be patient when I have no desire to be.

Delayed at an airport at Christmas time, unable to do anything about it, faced with the incompetence of airline employees, I get impatient. Who wouldn’t? After all, isn’t impatience in the face of injustice a good thing?

Some years ago an Adventist friend told me about his being invited to participate in an exorcism.

In August 2009, Spectrum welcomed its newest team member, David Trim—a scholar with a wide variety of interests and a very unique area of specialty. Here is a sampling of discussions on European Adventism, race relations in the British church, and religious violence.

RD: You have quite an international background. You are British, but you were born in India and you grew up in Australia. Where do you consider yourself to be from? How do you bring to together your various ethnic identities?

I have been thinking lately about the violence of rhetoric. Not violent rhetoric, but the violence that is often lurking just beneath the surface of our language, our reasoning, and our ways of arriving at truth.

If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces.

- Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized

I have a friend who gets a little testy whenever the topic of poverty comes up. He particularly resents that poor people might get a hand from government.

“They should just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, like I did,” he says.