IN THIS ISSUE During the past fifty years, Mennonites in North America have participated in a literary renaissance unparalleled since the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century. Today, as then, the flourishing of Mennonite literature has emerged against the backdrop of remarkable economic affluence and steady cultural assimilation. Today,…
IN THIS ISSUE In his landmark book The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, From the Civil Rights Movement to Today (Basic Books, 2005), Charles Marsh argues that the earliest goal of the Civil Rights Movement was not merely to break down the walls of racial segregation but to…
IN THIS ISSUE In the two decades spanning the movie "Witness" (1985)–which first introduced the Amish to a mass audience–and the dramatic story of Amish forgiveness following the Nickel Mines school shootings in 2006, the Amish have become a familiar feature in American popular culture. Yet that same familiarity has…
IN THIS ISSUE In January of 1926, three young professors at Goshen College began to publish a supplement to the student newspaper devoted to topics in Mennonite history, which they called the Review Supplement. Over the course of the next eighty years, The Mennonite Quarterly Review went on to establish…
IN THIS ISSUE In June of 1906 the Goshen College Alumni Board took action to create a special set of shelves in the college library devoted to Anabaptist-Mennonite history. The handful of books that graced those shelves marked the beginning of the Mennonite Historical Library. Since those humble origins 100…
IN THIS ISSUE If it is true, in a phrase adapted from William Shakespeare, that ?politics makes strange bedfellows,? then perhaps no one should have been surprised by a wire-service photograph from the 2004 presidential election that depicted a group of plain-garbed Amishmen enthusiastically greeting President Bush at an airport…
IN THIS ISSUE Confessions of faith have played an ambiguous, often-contested role throughout the sweep of Anabaptist-Mennonite history. On the one hand, strong voices within the tradition have consistently raised doubts about the value of confessional statements, albeit for very different reasons. The spiritualist impulses evident in the Dutch Collegiant…
IN THIS ISSUE In a short novella titled Cecelia’s Sin, the Southern Baptist minister and peace activist William Campbell tells the story of a young Anabaptist woman in the Netherlands who is determined to document the martyrdoms of her fellow believers by committing their stories to print. When the authorities…
IN THIS ISSUE Now that memories of the polarized rhetoric of the 2004 presidential campaign are receding, it may be a good time to revisit a longstanding theme in the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition: the nature of the church’s witness to the state. Few topics have evoked more scholarly attention in the…
IN THIS ISSUE It is one of the great ironies of church history that the Christian tradition most closely linked today to the principle of nonresistance had an acrimonious birth and has been the source of contentious debate for nearly five centuries since its beginnings in the early 1520s. Already…
