When I hear people talking about “God-given rights,” I wonder why it always seems to take human bloodshed to secure those rights.

Iron-Jawed Angels (2004) vividly portrays the exhausting struggle that American suffragettes endured to secure a woman’s right to vote, and forces us to confront the inequality and injustices we tolerate—even propagate today.

Imagine that a brilliant contemporary of Martin Luther such as Melanchthon or Erasmus had written a book entitled The Great Reformation which explored the revolution occurring in the Christian church of their time. If they had our modern self-analyzing sensibilities, they might have traced their own theological fault lines and placed them within the larger tectonic activity created by the universe shattering discoveries of Copernicus, the earth shaking explorations of Columbus, and the empowering invention of Gutenberg.

One of the most significant developments within Christianity in recent years is that of the "Emergent Church." It is a controversial movement (some say it is not really a movement) that has spawned literature on both sides of the swelling debate. Roger Oakland has added to this literature with his anti-emergent book Faith Undone: the emerging church...a new reformation or an end-time deception.

Cast your vote. But before you do, be sure you understand the issues. Your vote counts, and the stakes are high.

Six years ago, my son did what many 4-year-olds do. He got very interested in dinosaurs. This curiosity led to books, questions, and for me, an excuse to finally pursue some questions I had wondered myself. I was fortunate indeed that one of the books I chose in pursuing my interest was Finding Darwin’s God.

If you have ever watched comedian Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO (yeah right, what good Adventist watches HBO?), it will probably not surprise you that I saw two people walk out of his new documentary, Religulous, within the first ten minutes. Maher courts controversy. He’s opinionated, brash, and he is funny as [a word that his movie mocks extensively].

It is evident from the beginning to the end of The Character of God Controversy that coauthors Steve Wohlberg and Dr. Chris Lewis hold unswervingly to the conviction that God is love. At the same time, in their effort to combat what they see as an increasingly threatening idea among Adventists that God doesn’t kill, Wohlberg and Lewis conclude with an air of finality, essentially “God is just and God kills. Deal with it.”

The Faith Club, by Ranya Idilby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner, is a book I’d heard about for awhile and was anxious to read. It’s the story of three women — one Muslim, one Jewish, one Christian — who began meeting together to talk about their three faiths, to explore differences and find common ground.

For two young brothers, Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) and Damian (Alex Etel), the death of their mother, moving to a new home and starting in a new school forces them to adapt to very difficult circumstances for children of nine and seven years. But when a large duffel bag stuffed with money literally falls from the sky landing squarely on Damian’s newly-built cardboard castle, the challenges multiply exponentially in the 2004 film Millions.

Karen Armstrong’s passion in The Bible: A Biography is clearly to call believers to engage prayerfully and creatively with their sacred text. She appeals to both Jews and Christians, reminding them that “midrash and exegesis were always supposed to relate directly to the burning issues of the day, and the fundamentalists should not be the only people who attempt this.”