“The press,” writes Franklin Klassen, editor of Chaco-Press, a new monthly newspaper published in the Menno Colony of the Paraguayan Chaco, “is the conscience of a society. When offenses happen, the press must sound the alarm.”
Scores of Mennonite writers, poets, scholars and lovers of literature will gather at Fresno (Calif.) Pacific University in March for the seventh “Mennonite/s Writing Conference.”
On Nov. 16, 1885, Louis Riel, a political and spiritual leader of the Métis people of western Canada, was executed in Regina, Sask., on the charge of treason.
As new forms of electronic communication continue to raise doubts about the future of print, one Anabaptist-Mennonite periodical is defying the odds.
In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, a political scientist, suggested that communities can sometimes form even though their members never encounter each other face-to-face. What matters is that members perceive themselves to be part of a group, joined by a mental image of the things they have in common.
In a recent congregational report to The Philippine Witness, the bimonthly newsletter of the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite (better known as the Holdeman church) mission outreach to the Philippines, Randall Plett, pastor of the Christian Light Mennonite Church in Sapang Palay, posed a heartfelt question. Why were the fruits of nearly 30 years of mission efforts so meager?
In the aftermath of World War II, Christians on all sides of the conflict were forced to ponder the sobering consequences of modern warfare. The sheer devastation of the war — symbolized by the firebombing of Dresden and the use of atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — raised new questions about the logic of “just war” arguments.
In the summer of 1963, David Wagler and Joseph Stoll, two Amish farmers, were threshing oats in a field close to Aylmer, Ont. They reflected on the need for more literature that spoke to the interests and concerns of their Old Order community.
In 1997 a group of ministers from the Conservative Mennonite Conference formulated a resolution lamenting the conference’s “theological drift” from its “historic moorings.”
GUATEMALA CITY — More than 120 Mennonite leaders from 19 countries gathered at a Catholic retreat center Feb. 10-14 seeking a shared identity and hope in a context of poverty, violence and competing religious currents.
