Book Review: The Incredible Power of Grace

Title: The Incredible Power of Grace

Author: Roland R. Hegstad

Publisher; Review & Herald

Date: 2005

ISBN: 0-8280-1912-6

Length: 143 pages

Quote: “Strange, isn’t it, that the Bible so often stresses God’s tender forbearance rather than His wrath. It’s as if He wishes us to remember that the strength of the church does not reside in political power. The strength of the church resides in its avalanche of powerlessness.”

It’s hard for me to give this book a fair review. The church Hegstad meant may have been the entire Church Militant (all living Christians on Earth); the one he knew was the Seventh-Day Adventist church that sponsored the college I used to attend, where I was one year ahead of Hegstad’s daughter (who is mentioned in this book). That church is a powerful subculture with its own version of literate folks’ folklore, folk songs, foodways, healing traditions…and dialect. One of the rules of the culture was that books published by church-owned presses had to cover at least two dozen points of doctrine on which the church, at that time, agreed. In this book Hegstad, writing within and for the culture, relates his life to those points of doctrine. If you understand what he was trying to do, I think, the resulting book makes sense and is even rather well written.

At church the Hegstads were family friends. At school the daughter who was close to my age had few interests and no friends in common with me; one of those few common interests happened to be our major field of study, but curve grading motivated people with similar interests and talents to try to avoid being in the same classes. Since I'd moved off campus I barely saw the Hegstad girl. It's not relevant to the book review, but somebody Out There need to read it: When I went home at breaks Mother would always ask "And how are the Hegstads doing?" I had no idea how the Hegstads were doing. I felt pressured. I began to associate an unpleasant feeling with the mention of the Hegstads and thus to dislike the whole family, at home and at school--though I liked them in Florida. 

And then Roland Hegstad wrote another book. A controversial book. Cosmic Conflict presented the gospel story in cartoon form. It felt pleasant, in a way I'm not proud of now, to stand with those who said that the graphic version of any story could only be a parody of the real book.Cosmic Conflict did not sell well, nor did it become one of the books the church printing houses kept n the market. Hegstad also edited the news magazine Liberty, which I dismissed as a magazine for lawyers.

I became more interested in law around age forty, and more interested in graphic novels around age fifty, when young book buyers began asking for them. By the time I inherited this book from Mother, I felt no desire to avoid talking or thinking about the Hegstads. The Incredible Power of Grace sounds the way Roland Hegstad talked. As a result I think it's informative, entertaining, engaging, inspirational, and a fun read. 

You might think it’s scattered, narrowly denominational, or  confusing. \It’s not only a personal testimony, though it contains parts of one. It’s not a first book of Christian doctrine, written either to convert unbelievers or to edify new converts, either. To some extent it’s a typical Adventist’s testimony. Adventists are overwhelmingly upper-middle-class people. Many of them are very literate, very sophisticated, often world travellers, not infrequently polymaths with a half-dozen seemingly unrelated degrees and certifications, often multilingual and multicultural. The ones whose names are familiar outside their subculture have mostly been doctors , from the Kellogg brothers through Jethro Kloss to Ben Carson). Their personal stories really are stories about what they’ve read and learned as much as what they’ve seen and felt, so that a book full of research, Bible studies, news items, cultural references, and footnotes can indeed be an Adventist’s memoir…especially if that Adventist was the retired editor of a glossy, mass-distribution news magazine (Hegstad edited Liberty for most of his lifetime). But the shape of this book is not a memoir; it’s a Seventh-Day Adventist’s rather wide-ranging view of Christian doctrine, written, I think, mainly to edify new members of that denomination. It’s about the grace of God as that grace appears to Adventists, who see the specific doctrines of their church as aspects of God’s saving grace.

So this book begins with some unrelated short-short stories of how sad life is without faith, then proceeds through a coffee-snorting description of how the world would be different “if (you or) I were God,” into a serious consideration of God’s Judgment, God’s Incarnation, conversion, the Christian life as a matter of “making God look good,” what the Unpardonable Sin is and why, the Second Advent, the seventh-day Sabbath, and the brevity of life. For Adventists this is a very clear and logical way of saying either “Don’t you want to join our church now?” or “Aren’t you glad you did?” For non-Adventists…I don’t know. Read it, if you’re a complete non-Adventist, and tell me.

Since the book’s not on my display, and I see a lot of local book buyers demonstrating concern about the physical properties of a book, here’s what they want to know about The Incredible Power of Grace. It is a book that a geriatric patient could read after breaking both wrists. My copy was one of the half-dozen books my mother took into that situation. Hip-pocket size, lightweight, not terribly sturdy paperback binding, clear 11-point Bembo print. That's not classified as "Large Print" but the print looks large relative to the book.

New Book Review: The Guilt-Free Gourmet

Title: The Guilt-Free Gourmet

Author: Vicki B. Griffin

Date: 1999

Publisher: Remnant

ISBN: 1-891041-25-8

Length: 400 pages

Quote: “What is found within the pages of The Guilt-Free Gourmet is accurate, well researched health information and recipes that are almost totally free of harmful excitotoxins and other adulterating additives….a balance of nutrients that not only prevent disease but promote health and longevity.”

And lots of things to do with tofu that actually make the stuff taste interesting, too...but that’s if you’re gluten-tolerant. That’s the bad news. Vicki Griffin and daughter Gina have put together a wonderful collection of nutrient-balanced vegan recipes based on your ability to digest wheat and other whole grains (and also yeast) as primary proteins. If you did not inherit that ability, a minority of their recipes will still work (and they’ll taste pretty good), but the Griffins’ grain-based diet will not work for you. All bodies are not created equal.

For those who can use a grain-based diet that’s grown out of the Seventh-Day Adventist healing tradition, as taught at places like Hartland and practiced by doctors at places like Loma Linda, this is the ultimate, the best and biggest ever, of the Seventh-Day Adventist “cooking school” cookbooks. This one is so good that even the Griffins have thought it might have been too good a bargain and have tried letting it go out of print in order to market shorter books for similar prices.

Frankly, when I browse through this book, page headings like “Tender Gluten Steaks” and “Cheesy Tofu Scramble” bring a bitter taste to my mouth. Literally—all that whole wheat and nutritional yeast people dutifully munched in the 1970s Granola Period tended to become rancid and bitter very fast, especially in dutifully un-air-conditioned kitchens. And then when I remember how sick all that “health food” made me, and kept me, up to age thirty—how rare, and what a “high,” just not feeling sick all the time used to be in my wheat-stuffed undiagnosed-celiac youth…

Grandma Bonnie Peters bought multiple copies of this book. She gave one to me. I choked on it, emotionally, and rushed it out to the booth in the flea market that used to be the physical home of my bookstore. It sold within hours, to a trusted friend from whom I thought, “Oh well, if I do miss anything in it I can always buy it back”…and he wasn’t a bookseller, or a seller of anything, but a visitor to his home pounced on this book and had to have it, out of his kitchen, for a handsome profit he admitted. GBP apparently lent out her last remaining copy, couldn’t get it back, and started upbraiding and guilt-tripping me for not getting another copy for her, as online prices for this book started to enter the collectors’ range…

Well, finally I found a price I could afford to pay, from a legitimate charity store…in Michigan, y’all. I’m sure some correspondents will appreciate knowing that I was able to buy GBP a copy in aid of an organization that helps disabled residents of Michigan. I’m paging through the recipes again…

Now there is a lengthy section of “Health Helps,” over 100 pages in about the third quarter of the book, that may be read as preaching or nagging. (That, too, would have been found at a traditional S.D.A. “cooking school,” as taught by GBP and by her teachers and their teachers and so on back to Jethro Kloss’s day.) This is a true American Folk Tradition that happens to have developed among literate people, in close correlation with advances in medical science. Whatever your feelings about Adventists may be, their folklore is sociologically fascinating.

But let’s stick to the recipes, which begin without much of a preamble, on page four, with breakfast dishes. Finding the ones that are naturally gluten-free, that I could use as they appear, takes some searching. In addition to gluten, I personally don’t seem to tolerate coconut. I automatically substitute “shredded almonds” for “shredded coconut” in recipes. If you can either use coconut or allow that much substitution, you can use the very first recipe, “Regal Rice Pudding,” which is naturally 100% free from wheat gluten. The next naturally gluten-free recipe, “Almonds Ahoy Granola,” appears on page 13. The first one I personally can use with no editing is “E-Z Almond Milk,” on page 18. The first one that appeals to me is the “Garden Lentil patties” on page 38; the “Perfect Patties” on page 40 have a sweet and/or bittersweet taste, depending on whether you use real sorghum molasses (which I prefer) or the burnt cane-syrup residues sold in supermarkets as molasses, on which I’m less than keen, but I could eat them.

That's what reading this book is like for celiacs, pretty much, all the way through. We have to do a lot of editing.

The good news is that, according to Grandma Bonnie Peters, who is a vegan, it's easy editing. With other gluten-free vegan cookbooks, she says, she has to go to the health food store for things she doesn't normally have on hand. With The Guilt-Free Gourmet, she can use what she has.

She maintains that her "Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers" are her edited version of some of the Griffins' "loaf/burger" recipes. Which one or ones she won't say...I know Veggie Burgers involved pureed green beans, which may give some readers a hint.

I have finally bought her a copy to replace the one I inadvertently sold, using an Amazon giftcard I received for writing on non-book topics at some other site, and here's what I had to say about it on Amazon.

"
Seventh-Day Adventist "cooking schools" are a sociologically fascinating example of a folk tradition that developed among literate people, alongside scientific development. Church ladies would demonstrate cooking vegan, grain-based food for new members of the church and distribute recipe collections along with sweet, edifying thoughts about health and faith. Most of these collections were "published" by mimeographing or on privately printed cards. Over 250 pages of vegan recipes, over 100 pages of reflections (with lots of published references), and lots of nutrient data make "The Guilt-Free Gourmet" the biggest and best collection in this genre. You'll learn the secrets of making fruits, vegetables, grains, and nuts taste almost like the savory meats, tangy cheeses, and creamy desserts vegans miss...with minimal salt and no added MSG.

Wheat gluten is the primary source of protein for many vegans. For about two-thirds of humankind it's healthy. The majority of recipes in "The Guilt-Free Gourmet" feature wheat gluten. Nevertheless, I know gluten-free cooks who swear by this cookbook as their primary reference, having found it easy to adapt the Griffins' recipes to suit their requirements. The secret recipes for "Grandma Bonnie's Allergy-Ease Veggie Burgers," made with no wheat, corn, yeast, soy, citrus, or animal-derived products, were adapted from loaf/burger recipes in this book. "Grandma Bonnie" herself says that lots of gluten-free cookbooks feature more elaborate, expensive recipes but "The Guilt-Free Gourmet" has more simple, easily used or adapted recipes for things she can make without going to the health food store.
"

Here's another comment on some other things on Amazon. Seventh-Day Adventists traditionally call the products of the Worthington and Loma Linda food companies "health foods." Then they bicker about that among themselves, because Fri-Chik and Choplets and Prime Stakes and Big Franks and Bolono and Wham and Prosage and so on all contain lots of MSG in addition to the wheat gluten. All of these "vegetarian meat analogs," the ones sold in tins on Amazon and the frozen ones sold only in real stores, are tasty and low-fat, but...if you joined the church you'd soon hear, "Worthington and Loma Linda foods are designed to be healthier than the things meat eaters eat." If the church was big enough (and lucky enough) to have an official Health & Temperance Minister like GBP the person would add, "At the 'cooking school' Sister Peters will be demonstrating how to make healthier 'health foods.'"

Thanks to the Griffins, non-Adventists can now learn how to make that kind of "health foods."

To buy it here, send $10 per copy + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to either of the addresses at the very bottom of the screen (down below the Amazon giftcard widget), and we'll send the Griffins $1.50. (If you send a U.S. postal money order, you don't send a surcharge to me because you pay it at the post office.)

Book Review: The Guilt-Free Gourmet

A Fair Trade Book



Title: The Guilt-Free Gourmet 

Author: Vicki B. Griffin

Author's web site: https://www.lifestylematters.com/

Date: 1999

Publisher: Remnant

ISBN: 1891041258

Length: 400 pages 

Illustrations: graphics on every page, some food photos

About Vicki Griffin, The Guilt-Free Gourmet, and Griffin's related video presentations (not sold on Amazon), this web site is of two minds.

Grandma Bonnie Peters used the recipes in this book to launch her undercapitalized, therefore short-lived, but widely appreciated line of Allergy-Ease Foods. She and Griffin have met, and approved of each other. Though most of Griffin's recipes aren't gluten-free and she actually recommends using more grain protein in the diet, GBP maintains that she was able to base delicious gluten-free, sugar-free, vegan, corn-free, soy-free, yeast-free, and even citrus-free recipes on Griffin's recipes. Well, she obviously based them on something, and some of them certainly are delicious.

Seventh-Day Adventists have long been identified with a healing tradition that features vegan cooking. It was at S.D.A. "sanitaria" and school cafeterias that classic American foods like peanut butter, Postum, and cornflakes were invented. These places were also the home of traditional Adventist vegan dishes like pecan loaf, cashew casserole, and soybean sausage. For the majority of humans who can digest wheat gluten, and can be healthy vegans for years, getting their B-vitamins from a healthy balance of yeast organisms helping them metabolize wheat, this culinary tradition is as healthy as it is palatable. 

Traditionally the recipes for the seasonings that made "vegan meat analogs" (like Morningstar Farms') so successful, so distinctly not meat yet so satisfyingly reminiscent of meat, were handed down to new members of the church in "cooking schools." (GBP teaches in those.) But there was never any real reason not to publish them to the masses. Vicki Griffin persuaded a publisher to market S.D.A. culinary traditions to the health food crowd. It worked. "New" copies of this first, apparently risky, small-publisher-type book are currently selling for ten times their original value on Amazon. 

I, shall we say, formed an emotional allergy to Seventh-Day Adventists during my churchgoing early years. I look at Griffin's tense, furiously cheerful manner on the video and recognize the all too typical S.D.A. who may believe that we're saved by Jesus Christ alone, but we need to be saved from introversion if we've inherited it. I've known too many women like that. Typically slim, healthy, energetic, well preserved, and in theory attractive, they exude an unmistakable--though subtle--pheromonal odor of tension and dissatisfaction with themselves, or with anyone they really, deep down, do manage to like. They're drawn to people who accept their quieter, calmer personalities, but they've not really accepted their own personalities; they've internalized a need to push, nag, blame, boss, and bully those people toward a social style as miserable as their own. However healthy their recipes may be, therefore, a meal eaten at their tables (and how they urge visitors to their churches to eat at their tables!) will be sickening.

Griffin also overstates her claims and oversimplifies her findings. Many cases of clinical depression are in fact symptoms of physical illness, and often that illness is what Dr.Kathleen Desmaisons calls sugar sensitivity. Hyperactivity is often a food reaction. The perceptual distortions involved in some cases of autism and even a few cases of schizophrenia are associated with food reactions. Wonderful psychological and psychiatric benefits can come from improving an individual’s diet, but I still find it very unlikely that all the behavior problems at a certain school were “completely cured” by changing the menu in the cafeteria. Some children are going to feel worse not better, and perform worse not better, when they're given “healthy bagels” instead of potato chips; I'm one of them. However, the simple way to cure all the behavior problems at a school is to make attendance a privilege contingent on appropriate behavior. Make attendance a privilege, withhold that privilege from problem kids, and you will have well-behaved kids even if the cafeteria serves nothing but peanut butter sandwiches, with the options of taking it or leaving it.

And of course I'd rather enjoy a leisurely breakfast with hand-ground blue corn meal pancakes, delicately flavored Virginia-grown sorghum molasses, and tea brewed from hand-picked herbs dried over the fireplace, than grab a Mountain Dew and Fritos for breakfast on a road trip. Of course I wouldn't try to eat "road food" every day, or recommend that anyone else do. Even so, I’ve never noticed that having a Mountain Dew and corn chips for breakfast prevented me from being able to add, or spell, or follow directions, or even drive...actually, even that “healthy bagel” wouldn’t prevent me from doing those things, although it would make me discouraging (and noisome) company. 

The thing is, I used to take friends to the Allergy-Ease Foods Test Kitchen. We'd be alone with GBP and possibly some of the grandchildren. I'd think, "Five dollars for soup, salad, and a sandwich? Best deal in Kingsport! What's wrong with the people who aren't packing into this place?" I suspected the relentlessly educational pro-vegan posters and Vicki Griffin videos were part of the problem. I kept imagining ways Griffin could have made her video (and her cookbook) less unappetizing. I would rather eat plain hash browns, or even "yeast-flavored hash browns," than "Healthy Hashers!" any day. Maybe it's the exclamation point that reminds me that, if you have candidiasis, yeast-flavored hash browns are not health food. 

Instead of repeating the story that feeding children even one nutritious meal a day is going to teleport today’s schools back to the days when school attendance was always a privilege not a right, which is about as credible as repeating “Billy chanted ‘Rain, rain, go away’ for six hours and then it stopped raining,” she could just use the Power Point screens for recipes and the video track for the physical movements people copy in order to follow the recipes. A little objectivity, an awareness that people who are going to sprinkle yeast on their hash browns have already heard that that might be good for them, would do so much for this book.

One person's food is another person's poison. Whatever Griffin was eating was obviously working for her body, and still is; a glance at the book or the video was enough to establish that, especially if you knew that she was, in fact, out of college when she wrote it--and still is. Gina Griffin was her grown-up daughter, and Vicki Griffin still looks great. But I remember eating that kind of food. I remember being skinny and flabby and sallow and sick all the time, because I was eating that kind of food. I remember forcing myself to act cheerful and energetic, undoubtedly being even more annoying than Griffin in her videos, when I actually felt cheerful and energetic maybe one day every two or three months. 

But it is undeniably tasty, low-fat, and vegan. So, if you don't have special dietary restrictions other than a desire to cook something vegan, or if you don't mind editing around your own dietary restrictions, The Guilt-Free Gourmet is a good cookbook. You get lots and lots of recipes, many alternatives for veggie burgers and fat-free dressings and low-calorie fruit desserts. You learn the seasoning secrets to create your own "meat analogs," without the preservatives and artificial flavorings that are inevitably added to the Worthington, Loma Linda, and Morningstar Farms products in the supermarket...or even without the wheat gluten on which those products are based.

In my quest for restricted-diet meals that people who are not on a restricted diet can enjoy too, I’ve bought many cookbooks, transferred the interesting recipes to my files, and put the books up for resale. I don’t currently own a copy of Griffin’s cookbook; I recommended it highly and sold it fast. 

The trouble was that this book hasn't been reprinted. Instead, a shrewder publisher offered to publish Griffin's recipes in a series of less complete, more expensive books. That's the way they're currently being sold, and they're not even showing up on Amazon. The original, valuable cookbook is semi-rare now.

So, it's a Fair Trade Book. Secondhand copies in good condition aren't fearfully expensive--yet. To buy it here, thus showing due respect to both Griffin and me, send $10 per copy + $5 per package (i.e. $15 for one copy, $25 for two copies shipped together) to either address at the bottom of the screen. Out of this we'll send $1.50 per copy to Griffin or a charity of her choice.

Book Review: Sixty Ways to Energize Your Life

A Fair Trade Book

Book Title: Sixty Ways to Energize Your Life

Author: Jan and Kay Kuzma, et al.

Authors' web page: http://www.familymattersministry.com

Date: 1998

Publisher: Review & Herald

ISBN: 0-8280-1411-6

Length: 120 pages

Quote: "The simple formula of John 3:16 had become a 100-pound backpack. But Jesus set the record straight."

This is not a logically organized or methodically written book, nor is it easy to review, but here's a quick summary. The sixty ways, as best I can figure them out, are (in order):

• soybeans
• exercise
• singing
• observing one full day of rest from your regular business
• parks (only the chapter about parks turns out to be more about the day of rest)
• simplifying your life
• believing that hardships are supposed to make people stronger (??)
• believing that hardships will melt away in Heaven
• self-examination
• an article that starts with a story about adopting a child and then shifts in the direction of Being Saved (even though this book was distributed only to Christian audiences)
• weight control
• going to parks on your day of rest (again)
• "giving up the bulge" that may be "keeping you from reaching your desired goals"
• brushing teeth before bed, or maybe this chapter is about avoiding sins
• exercise (again)
• breaking addictions
• fresh air, or maybe this chapter is about prayer
• appreciating nature
• getting away from sensory overload
• grieving for a stillborn baby, or maybe this chapter is about Salvation (again)
• believing that there is some sort of "blessing" about Alzheimer's Disease (??)
• praying for healing
• spending time with family
• avoiding the commercial media on your day of rest
• believing that feeling guilty will help you to "accept" other people
• getting more calories from the complex carbs in vegetables rather than from saturated fats
• eating for health
• scheduling time to relax (again)
• having a cardiac procedure called ablation, or maybe this one is about meditating on the love of Jesus
• delegating work
• losing weight (again)
• believing that the unique learning experience of a brain-damaged patient has something to do with the "God-given possibilities" in every person
• teaching children about "the built-in benefits of choosing to live by [God's] principles"
• giving away money
• gardening
• exercise (again)
• forcing laughter as a therapeutic exercise
• sunshine
• occupying your mind with learning something rather than gossipping about people
• exercise for flexibility (again)
• getting enough sleep
• intimacy
• cheerfulness
• sweat
• believing that "God will stand by my side in my most embarrassing moments"
• learning to cook
• exercise (again)
• training yourself not to worry
• pushing your physical limits
• believing in faith healing for cancer
• believing in faith healing for loneliness
• believing that you can deny passing emotions a chance to become long-term "feelings" (???)
• believing that somehow your life will exude perfume if it's been "broken" enough (?!?!)
• drinking enough water
• practicing integrity
• not compromising your principles
• trying to balance physical health with "the social, the intellectual, and the spiritual" aspects of life
• trying to avoid stress by repressing "negative feelings"
• believing that the purpose of good health is "to serve others better"
• making New Year's resolutions to be healthier next year

The book was actually written this way on purpose; people who feel that their energy is very low are presumed to be scatterbrained types with very limited attention spans and a need to be reminded.

I don't try to sell books unless I believe they have some value. There are people for whom Sixty Ways to Energize Your Life may be helpful. I have to warn readers, though, that I'm not one of those people, and if you're a typical book lover (as distinct from a typical yuppie) you might not be one of them either.

For me, personally, the fatiguing effect of being around Seventh-Day Adventists became overwhelming when I had mononucleosis. This physical illness produces the usual flu-type symptoms, plus swollen lymph nodes, but its most noticeable symptom is weakness and fatigue. Talk about "chronic mononucleosis" in the 1980s prompted doctors to remind us that all mononucleosis is "chronic" in a sense; the virus that causes the symptoms is lurking dormant in the livers of most adults, and may resurge under stress. I've been free from symptoms of mono for twenty-some years, but when I spend time among Adventists that all-prevailing weariness starts to return. Sixty Ways to Energize Your Life explains why. So there may be some other readers of this book for whom the most helpful tip would be: "Avoid people like the Kuzmas."

I find that the most useful tip for dealing with emotions (mine, or someone else's) is the Five F's Rule: Fix Facts First--Feelings Follow. There's a tendency for too many Christians to bog down in the feelings. I think this is what St. James had in mind when he described a ragged, hungry beggar coming to a church and being told "Depart in peace, may you be warmed and fed" (presumably somewhere else). This isn't helpful; it isn't Christian love; it is what the Bible calls "vanity." You can pray for the beggar's peace of mind if you like, but what you've been told to do is fix the facts--sharing food and clothes with him. God can take care of the beggar's soul. What God has appointed the Earthly Body of Christ to do is take care of his body.

I also find that much stress can be avoided by giving up the attempt to like everybody. "Accept people"? What does that mean? All those other people who happen to go to the same church, work in the same business, or take classes at the same school with you have not been shipped to you C.O.D. Nor have you been shipped to them. It's easier to get along with people when we give up the pretense that all behavior is equally "acceptable," and just show respect by leaving each other alone.

Even more stress can be avoided by giving up the burdensome belief that every manure pile has to contain a pony somewhere. Life is easier on our hands and backs, and smells nicer, when we learn that ponies are usually found at the other end of the paddock, and are more likely to visit our end when we stop sorting through the muck and just chuck it out.

So for me, personally, this book has little to say that's useful. And my experience of Seventh-Day Adventists who try to take the Kuzmas' advice about emotions seriously is that they're not good role models of how to deal with stress; they are frazzled. They think they're supposed to feel as chatty, bouncy, and perky as a teenager with severe attention deficiency disorder, all the time, and at the same time be responsible adults who hold jobs and bring up children. Since this is impossible, they're guilt-ridden and apt to snap at any suggestion that they actually try doing the things Jesus did for people, which did not include nagging at those people about their "feelings."

That said, I need to add that large-scale studies have shown that Adventists who follow the traditional teachings of their denomination on things like diet, exercise, rest, temperance, and stewardship are measurably healthier than the general population. Thin vegetarians rarely have heart attacks; lifelong nonsmokers rarely have lung cancer. Using the practical, factual parts of the Kuzmas' advice really might energize your life.

The Kuzmas are still alive. Still active. Seventy-something. Well preserved. Maybe their approach to social life and emotional wellness works for them. Being an introvert, I can't really claim to know how extroverts survive--or why--but I have observed that it's not typical for extroverts to be active and well preserved if they live beyond age seventy. So, are the Kuzmas real examples of extroverts for whom these psychological ideas offset extroverts' natural tendency to age fast and die "old" at an early age? I have no idea.

I would recommend, though, that if you are or know an extrovert who's about to flame out, you consider the advice in Sixty Ways to Energize Your Life for whatever it may be worth to you/him/her. In theory, if some people could take this advice to heart, it might not only energize their lives but save their lives.

This is a Fair Trade Book. If you buy it here, by sending $5 per book + $5 per package for shipping to salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com, we'll send the Kuzmas or a charity of their choice $1. If you buy ten copies, you send us $55 and we send the Kuzmas or their charity $10.

Book Review: Wedgwood

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Wedgwood

        
Author: Marilyn Thomsen

Author's Linked In page: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/marilyn-thomsen/29/832/7bb

Subject band's recent recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtUZ2N-jGws

        
Date: 1996

        
Publisher: Pacific Press Publishing Association

        
ISBN: 0-8163-1343-1

        
Length: 176 pages including black-and-white photos

        
Quote: “The banjo has never been baptized.”

        
“Wedgwood” was the name of a gospel group; this book is one long interview with the three singers who formed the core of the group. They are Seventh-Day Adventists (one of them is a minister). The surprising thing, for baby-boomers raised outside the church or for post-boomers, is that they used to be very controversial.

        
Say what? Well, as Marilyn Thomsen explains in the book, conservative Christians have been wary of the music industry. There has been some feeling that if people are singing for God’s glory more than their own, they shouldn’t try to promote their records and make their names household words. Church musicians are expected to be modest even on stage, rather like classical musicians, wear plain dark clothes, have the spotlights and microphones closer to their instruments than to their faces, and be remembered, if they travel beyond their own neighborhood church, as “that nice group of visitors from wherever-it-was.” The Wedgwood sang nice sing-along songs that were regarded almost as teaching records. Kids weren’t supposed to scream with excitement over the three regular guys who first became known as the Wedgwood Trio. They were supposed to listen to the songs—mostly the religious songs, although the group recorded some ordinary folk songs too—learn the harmonies, and be able to sing those songs around campfires, without bringing a tape player along. And so they did.

        
More recent original songs by Michael Omartian, Amy Grant, and Del Delker, who are mentioned in this book, and Andrae Crouch, who is not, also went through this folk process. I learned those songs from people with whom I sang, on stage, around campfires, or while waiting for school events to happen. It was not considered necessary to give the original composers and performers credit, even though those people were alive and recording and could have used the publicity. The little four-year college I attended for two years had an official school song. Nobody ever sang that. When my classmates met other young Adventists most of us, musicians or not, would share a few songs, and the song my classmates always taught other people to sing in our own peculiar way was our version of Andrae Crouch’s song, “The Blood.” I think I might have heard one guy mention that Andrae Crouch had written that song, once, before singing it on stage.

        
How bad is this? Should musicians be encouraged to think that they “own” songs? Can songs be “owned”? Should recording studios rake in millions from selling records by keeping some musicians from being heard and subjecting others to a level of stress and overwork that ought to have been covered somewhere in the Geneva Convention, in order to make a few people, not necessarily “the best” so much as the most willing to be tortured for the sake of music, into superstars? Is it possible that the Adventist church’s reluctance to recognize stars, whatever it cost “Wedgwood” and the recording studios, was actually the best thing for Bob, Don, Jerry, and the others who occasionally performed with “Wedgwood”?

        
Thomsen doesn’t seem to give this question much thought. Maybe you have to have been a young musician, maybe one who actually appreciated the Adventists’ tradition of giving musicians plenty of exposure without actually spotlighting any of us, to think about it. I wanted to sing, to travel, to harmonize and jam with lots of interesting people. I wanted to be recognized wherever I went, and paid whenever I was doing more, musically, than everyone else present was doing. But I wanted to have a job, a life, and eventually a family, too; much less health and sanity.

        
The question to which Thomsen and the Trio, Jerry Hoyle, Bob Summerour, and Don Vollmer, devote more attention was the 1960s question summarized by the quote above. Had folk music “been baptized”? Even allowing that spirituals and folk gospel songs might have expressed genuine Christian faith in some “low” churches, were these “hootenanny” songs serious enough to express the faith of Adventists? Maybe a very formal arrangement of a folk song, sung in the standard solemn manner and overtrained voice, occasionally, would show that the church empathized with “uninstructed musicians,” but wouldn’t any toe-tapping or rhythm-strumming be more likely to awaken animal feelings rather than inspiring reverence?

        
This question always seemed silly to me, but even in the 1980s some Adventist musicians were still agonizing over it, and in the 1960s the question of which musical influences could be tolerated in a Christian performance really burdened Bob, Don, and Jerry. Eventually their disagreements about whether electronic devices could be used onstage would fracture the Trio. On pages 92-96 Bob recounts how Don refused to sing anything with the “contemporary” sound that “sounds angry and arrogant and vain to me.”  So, after a tearful soul-searching session even “Sensitive New Age Guys” probably had to be Adventists to endure, he was replaced by Gary Evans.

        
The Wedgwood modernized their sound because two out of three of the Trio thought God wouldn’t mind an occasional electronic effect or even a drum. The amazing thing, to me, is that none of these three men seemed to consider that their audience liked a certain sound. Adventists spent so much energy arguing about the morality of music that they ignored the question of who was listening.

        
The difference between people who like a loud, intense sound or a soft, subtle sound, a solid bass or a soaring treble, an entire piece of all-percussion music or a pure melody without percussion, lots of harmony, no harmony, piano, guitar, trumpet, banjo, clarinet, or hammer dulcimer, all or any or none of the above, is probably hard-wired into the individual brain. I imagine that God might be glorified by a Christian rock concert with heavy drums and spontaneous solo dancing in the aisles; it’s my own personal taste for that sort of thing that is limited. I’m sure Bach intended God to be glorified by his harpsichord concertos, but I remember enjoying one, even on an old monaural record, in the office until a once well-known Christian radio personality, who was much older and more devout than I, walked in and gnashed her teeth.

        
God is not limited to one body with one set of ears. God may well, and probably does, appreciate any sounds believers make in God’s honor. But, hello? People who bought records because they loved the sound of three voices, guitar, banjo, and bass were likely to stop buying records when they didn’t know what to expect but knew it was going to include electric guitars and drums. The Wedgwood had succeeded in reaching a large audience for a folk-country type of Christian songs, and they lost that audience when they started performing more contemporary rock-type songs. Other Christian rock performers were already the favorites of that audience, which was small in the early 1970s. The Wedgwood had an audience of their own...and they lost most of it.

        
In the 1990s, Bob, Don, and Jerry made a comeback. It didn’t set the world on fire. Adventists are still Adventists. The men had kept their voices and remembered how to play the instruments that had made them semi-famous. As the cover of this book shows, their look and sound had “matured”—no  teen heart-throbs here, but in folk and country music grey hair is an asset.

        
Their choices of songs are unusual, but representative of their tradition. When the Adventist church separated from the various Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist churches to which members had previously belonged, some attempts were made to compose distinctively Adventist hymns that reflected what were then the distinctive beliefs of the church. The fate of these hymns was surprising. Perhaps separatism was not what Adventists were meant to achieve, or to want. During the 1980s I remember learning, and singing, one song about the early Adventist movement as such that seemed interesting as an historical ballad; “I Saw One Weary” fits into the history of American folksongs along with “Cross the Plains with Your Hand Cart” or “Paddy Works on the Railway.” But Adventists’ own favorites were not the distinctively Adventist songs—just as main­stream American folkniks’ real favorites were not the determinedly “American” songs of the late eighteenth century, as “Green Grow the Lilacs” and “Wondrous Love” tended to be preferred to “Hail Columbia” or “The American Vicar of Bray.” Most of the songs Adventists loved to sing are of pre-Adventist or non-Adventist origin.

        
Don Vollmer’s list of the top ten Wedgwood songs (on page 153) reflects this generalization. The popularity of “Shall We Gather at the River” is in a sense peculiarly Adventist. In many churches “Shall We Gather at the River” is a sad funeral song. For Baptists and Adventists it is a cheery song that suggests baptism first and resurrection second, and is sung in a lively, upbeat manner. Only one song on the list is an Early Adventist composition, “How Sweet Are the Tidings,” and even that one owes much of its popularity to a bubbly tune that originally celebrated “my blue-eyed Bonnie Eloise.”

        
Are these recordings worth looking for and listening to? I’d say they are. I’d say they might even be worth re-releasing. Students of world music should have the opportunity to experience the distinctive Adventist folk tradition, which is American of course, but a unique sub-genre of American.

Since 1996, the members of Wedgwood have continued performing and recording. They even have an official web site, but it's still under construction and doesn't open properly. There's also a page for them and their albums at http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/the_wedgwood_trio .

Wedgwood is, however, out of print and not available as a new book through the Adventist Book Center website, so it's eligible to be offered here as a Fair Trade Book. When you send salolianigodagewi @ yahoo.com $5 for the book + $5 for shipping, we'll send Marilyn Thomsen or a charity of her choice $1. If you buy four copies, which will fit neatly into one package, you send us $20 for the books + $5 for shipping, and we send Thomsen or her charity $4. 

SDA TEA: Can the Mix Work?

Patricia Evans e-mailed this invitation to the last of three public events intended to explore the common ground between some Seventh-Day Adventists and some Tea Parties. For me, these are two separate circles of acquaintance; I'm interested in meeting people who even have both circles of acquaintance, much less belong to both. If anyone living reasonably close to Gate City cares to drive out to Moneta to attend this, I'd love to go along!

"Did you know that the Founders believed that passing debt to future generations was immoral?

Did you know that by 1835, fulfilling those beliefs, even after fighting the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the United States was debt free? (well, almost...only $32,733 or about 2/10ths of one cent per person)

Did you know that by 1905, only 114 years after ratification of the Constitution, the United States, with only 6% of the population and 5% of the land area was producing over half of almost everything in the world?

Please join us this Saturday the 28^th  at 2:00 to re-discover the 28 principles of liberty that our Founders deemed essential for any society that wishes to remain prosperous and free!

We will have light refreshments about midway through the presentation. If you’ll be joining us please click  HERE so Cathy will know how much grub to rustle up.

America: A Miracle That Changed the World

Discover the 28 Principles of Liberty that our Founding Fathers deemed essential for a society to remain free and prosperous

When:

Saturday, March 28^th  2:00 – 6:00 or so

Where:

Smith Mountain Lake Seventh-day Adventist Church

10802 Moneta Rd.

Moneta, VA 24121

Maps

Google    Bing    Yahoo    Mapquest

Hosts and Contact:

Chuck & Cathy Angier

434-927-5030

434-688-2208 (cell & text)

cangier@fairpoint.net

PLEASE don’t hesitate to contact us. Email contact will probably be more productive than phone, but either is fine.

With Blessings,

Chuck & Cathy


--

"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."  - Thomas Jefferson

"

Events This Web Site Probably Should Report On But Won't

Two sets of Tea Party events this month have caught my attention; I regret having to miss them because they're just a little too far from home. I would get up early and join a car pool if someone was going to any of these things.

First, from Patricia Evans: no link, so I'll just paste in the whole e-mail...

"Our Founders KNEW that we would struggle to keep the republic and that only a moral, religious, educated and informed people could sustain it.  Their wisdom is painfully obvious given our current state of affairs.

Please join us for “America: A Miracle That Changed the World” , a 3-part seminar to re-discover God’s blessing of liberty through exploration of 28 Principles of Freedom our Founders deemed essential to any society that desires to remain at peace, prosperous and free.

Event:

America: A Miracle That Changed the World

Discover how 28 Principles of Liberty, in just 224 years, has done more to advance the global human condition than anything before!

When:

Saturday, March 14^th 2:00 – 6:00 – Part 1

Saturday, March 21^st 2:00 – 6:00 – Part 2

Saturday, March 28^th 2:00 – 6:00 – Part 3

Where:

Smith Mountain Lake Seventh-day Adventist Church

10802 Moneta Rd.

Moneta, VA 24121

Maps, Get directions here:

Google    Bing    Yahoo    Mapquest

Hosts and Contact:

Chuck & Cathy Angier

434-927-5030

434-688-2208 (cell & text)

cangier@fairpoint.net

PLEASE don’t hesitate to contact us. Email contact will probably be more productive than phone, but either is fine.

Please RSVP:

An RSVP will help us ensure that everyone has a seat. Please RSVP HERE  and include the number of people attending.  Contact information would be helpful also.  Thank you!


--

"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty."  - Thomas Jefferson"

If I know Seventh-Day Adventists, and I do, I can fairly well predict where the seminar's going, but it would be interesting to watch Adventists and Tea Partiers interact. (Two different groups of people, both of whom are likely to be wary of stereotypes that misrepresent them as having more in common than they do...which might or might not keep them from appreciating how much they do have in common.)

The other set of events is displayed on Publius Huldah's web site: 

https://publiushuldah.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/phs-article-v-convention-nullification-events-in-kentucky-north-carolina/

Recommended to Republicans. 

If any readers are able to make it to any of these gatherings, please report! 

Book Review: Prepare the Way

Title: Prepare the Way

        
Author: Joe Engelkemier

        
Date: 1971

        
Publisher: Review & Herald Publishing Association

        
ISBN: none, but click here to find it on Amazon

        
Length: 367 pages

        
Quote: “May God bless you as you help ‘prepare the way’ for the promised outpouring of God’s Spirit.”

         
Prepare the Way is a daily devotional book in which a college chaplain meditates on Bible passages, usually in the context of college life, although the book is meant to be used by adults too.

        
It was, however, meant primarily for the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination. Page one refers to a college: Adventist readers know where the college is located (it has since upgraded to a university). Also on page one, there’s a letter from an “academy”; non-Adventist readers might envision a military school; wrong, “academy” is the standard name for S.D.A.-operated prep schools. Also on page one, most Christians are likely at least to recognize “be one of the 144,000,” “in the New Jerusalem,” and “the power of another Pentecost” as Biblical Language. Many Christians won’t recognize Selected Messages and Evangelism as two of the slower-selling works of Ellen White.

        
Page two is much the same. You might not be familiar with “Autumn Council” or with The Ministry magazine, but you can work out that they’re part of the organization of a denomination.

        
Then on page three...whoa! “It was in 1755 that the first great sign of the return of Jesus—the earthquake foretold in revelation 6:12—took place. Then came the dark day, May 19, 1780. Following this in 1798, the 1260-year prophecy ended...” This is a precis of the S.D.A. interpretation of Bible prophecies; if you’ve studied the prophecies in a different church, or not at all, page three of Prepare the Way may not make much sense to you. You might not even recognize “Wrote the servant of God in 1868” as an older S.D.A. cliche for “As Ellen White wrote.” (Theoretically other Christian authors might have been referred to as "the servant of God," but Adventists would be prepared to expect it to be Ellen White, and would probably recognize the quote.)

Thousands of Adventists who knew and liked Chaplain Engelkemier are still active, and would love to explain everything in this book to a bewildered reader. If you are either an Adventist who appreciates this style of writing, or a non-Adventist who would like to, this book is for you. 

A Google search shows that Joe Engelkemeier died around the time I sold the copy of this book I physically owned, so Prepare the Way is not a Fair Trade Book, although we can still sell it online for $5 + $5 shipping. You may find a better deal online, although this book is not easy to find online.