Ronald L. Numbers (1942–2023)

As a lifelong Seventh-day Adventist, I grew up hearing "Mrs. White says..." but not really understanding the theological, historical, and cultural impacts Ellen White held over the Seventh-day Adventist Church until I got to college. And now, I believe this volume provides an interesting and multi-faceted examination of her writings, life, theological impact, and cultural impact upon a denomination that is simultaneously known and unknown in the world.

For me, as an academic and literary scholar, the chapter on culture proved the most fascinating. To this day, I have encountered people in the SDA church reluctant to read "fiction," simply because White wrote extensively against it. And I think the author brought up an interesting point--here, her own lack of formal education probably did not assist her in coming to literary fiction that rose above the sensationalist stories and pulp romances that were more easily accessible than more enduring works.… (más)

I strongly suspect that this book is a waste of paper. I expected it to be more organized, but it is just a bunch of disconnected essays by various people "debunking" some straw man myth about science. These very short essays set up some myth that people who actually are interested in the topic do not really subscribe to and then try to attack that myth, often in a vapid and ineffective way. Better to go to some sort of real work on any of these subjects than to waste your time on these mini-essays with their cheap shots and footnotes.

The first essay "That there was no scientific activity between Greek Antiquity and the Scientific Revolution" is just a terrible start, in part because it lacks a definition of scientific activity. It also uses the fact that Caesar sent for a Greek scholar from Alexandria when he decided he needed to reform the calendar to demonstrate that there was no scientific activity in the Roman Empire This strikes me as too ludicrous an argument to argue with. Read Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board" for a better treatment of the importance of the library of Alexandria in antiquity.… (más)

Like many anthologies, this book was a mixed bag. The debunking of certain myths was very helpful, particularly "Medieval Christians taught that the Earth was flat," "Copernicanism demoted humans from the center of the cosmos," and "Descartes originated the mind-body distinction." The book may be worth a gander for those chapters alone. The more the writers got into twentieth- and twenty-first century live wire issues, though, the less helpful I found it. The Intelligent Design chapter, for instance, I found rather gratuitous and out of line with the rest of the book. Throwing around terms like "fundamentalist," "traditionalist," "freethinking," and even "creationist" is so often a recipe for disaster, sadly even when one is a historian...

Still, even the chapters on Scopes and global creationism had a few helpful points, and it's a useful book in a "troubling the waters" sense.… (más)