ADVENTIST REVIEW: Serving the Faithful Since 1849

This week is the first in the newsstand for Adventist Review, which has been published since 1849. The masthead describes the publication as "the general paper of the Seventh-day Adventist Church" (it sure looks like a magazine to me). It's published 36 times a year by the church's busy Review and Herald Publishing Association in Hagerstown, MD, and has a curious publishing schedule: every Thursday except the first Thursday of the month. The Seventh-day Adventists publish a lot of magazines, and several are already in the newsstand, including Vibrant Life, Message, Guide, Insight and Archaeological Diggings. Right now I'm looking at the November 10 issue of Adventist Review, which is squarely aimed at church members. The articles are almost all spiritual in nature, dealing with the individual's relationship with God and filled with quotations from scripture. In an interesting essay, a college professor recalls one of her graduate school classes in epidemiology. Each student was called upon to develop an interactive learning experience with the other students. Her classmates had no clue how to proceed, but her presentation wowed the professor, who demanded to know where she had picked up the teaching techniques. She told him it was from her years of classes at a Seventh-day Adventist Sabbath school―what in common Christian parlance is called "Sunday school"―which she reflects were successfully designed to encourage students to actively participate in their own spiritual development. She promised her professor that she would loan him some of the resource workbooks from the Sabbath school, but warned him that they would differ strongly with his views on evolution. The issue also carries a couple of interesting letters to the editor about an interview that the magazine recently ran with Rickey Smith, a Seventh-day Adventist who was also a contestant on "American Idol." They both asked what is apparently a very important question to church members: was Smith able to "keep the Sabbath" during his stint on the show? The interviewer, Kimberly Luste Maran, replied that while the question never came up during the interview, subsequent communications with Smith indicated that the show was rehearsed and taped on weekdays. An annual subscription to Adventist Review (36 issues) is $36.95 from the publisher; you can get a sample copy from us for $2.59.