The Promise of Peace: Dare to Experience the Advent Hope
Except for two years of rural ministry in Idaho and Oregon, and four years as a founding editor of Insight magazine, Charles Scriven has studied, taught, preached or led on college campuses for almost 30 years.He serves now as president of Kettering College of Medical Arts, a part of Kettering Health Network in Dayton, Ohio. At this religiously diverse Adventist institution he has had plenty of opportunity to think about how to be Adventist in the midst of difference. He worked on the book at odd hours over most of his tenure at the college. The themes were challenging enough, and mattered enough to his own spiritual development, to make the writing feel at times, he says, like a kind of prayer.Before Kettering, Scriven lived near Washington, D. C., a city he first became familiar with during his twenties while he was working on Insight magazine. Here he was pastor of the Sligo Seventh-day Adventist Church on the Columbia Union College campus; then he served for eight years as the college s president. Earlier, he taught at Walla Walla University in Washington State.Scriven is a graduate of Walla Walla, and also of the Adventist Seminary at Andrews University. He earned his doctorate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA. His dissertation was published as The Transformation of Culture: Christian Social Ethics after H. Richard Niebuhr. He has also written (besides several booklet-length reflections) The Demons Have Had It: A Theological ABC.Scriven has three children, one a teacher in southern France, one a nurse in Tennessee, one a benefits analyst with Adventist Healthcare in Maryland. He is married to Rebekah Wang, a physician, and he appreciates (among many other things) her knack for keeping him in touch with the better angels of his nature including whatever angel induces you to actually finish what you start. (The Promise of Peace was eight years in the making.)For fun, the author reads. He loves theology and history, and dabbles in politics and literature. He claims to have achieved mediocrity in both golf and tennis. He appreciates baseball enough to say (and half-believe) that life begins on Opening Day.