Resting in the shadow of hope
Categories: Feature ArticlesRecently, I read a book that unsettled my sense of hope. In her memoir I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown, a racial-justice…
On babies and politics
Categories: Feature ArticlesIt used to be that the tinsel and lights of Christmas didn’t dare emerge until the black cats and orange pumpkins of Halloween were stripped from the shelves. But this…
New hymnal will be ‘part of the fabric of our lives’
Categories: Feature ArticlesIt’s the result of an idea proposed over a decade ago and the culmination of more than four years of intense work. It includes close to a thousand hymns and…
Faith forged in disorientation
Categories: Feature ArticlesThis is an unprecedented time. Unprecedented—it’s a word we’re hearing a lot in the last few months. The sense of disorientation has been palpable, from eerily empty streets to new…
Expanding the reconciliation tent
Categories: Feature ArticlesAlthough I’m a pacifist who has never voted Conservative, I support the Conservative-led campaign to put a war hero’s face on the $5 bill. All the more so after speaking…
Copyright matters
Categories: Feature ArticlesLife is funny. When something breaks down in the church, whether an oven or an elevator, we fix it. And if we can’t fix it, we buy a new one.…
Selling generosity
Categories: Feature ArticlesWhen I am asked what I do for a living, I often say, “I show people how much fun it is to give their money away.” That elicits a better…
Hooked on volunteering
Categories: Feature ArticlesEileen Klassen Hamm recalls how, as a young adult, she considered a Mennonite Voluntary Service term to be a good and natural thing to do. “It was an earlier era,…
In a perfect storm
Categories: Feature ArticlesYears ago, I saw a movie about a fishing crew caught at sea when two storms and a hurricane converged to create a “perfect storm.” I have been reminded of…
The twilight of Mennonite radio
Categories: Feature ArticlesManitoba’s airwaves are full of Mennonite radio. I began to notice this last year when I started hosting a radio program for Canadian Mennonite University (CMU), where I also work. …
A beautiful tapestry of yellow
Categories: Feature ArticlesI have a problem with dandelions. Late spring is high season for dandelions, when those bright-yellow blooms make their presence in yards and fields abundantly clear. Within a month or two,…
Open to us a door
Categories: Feature ArticlesWhen Hymnal: A Worship Book came out in 1992, “What is This Place” was chosen to be the lead hymn in the collection. The first line describes the church building…
Anxiety
Categories: Feature ArticlesAs the effects of COVID-19 grow, I am observing a variety of emotional reactions in myself and others. COVID-19 touches everyone’s life. If it isn’t personal illness or loss, we…
Encounters with the church in Cuba
Categories: Feature ArticlesSixteen Anabaptist Christians from Canada and the United States came to Cuba from Jan. 12 to 16 to learn about the church there. I was one of them. Jack and…
Well rooted, well winged
Categories: Feature ArticlesFor most of us, the biblical canon with its 66 “books” has always been a given, inherited from the past, our parents and churches. We have not concerned ourselves very…
Love in the time of COVID-19
Categories: Feature ArticlesThursday, as I sat down to a board meeting for the Micah Mission, a restorative justice organization in Saskatoon, I got the news that the Juno Awards show was being…
Out of holy weakness, mysterious power arises
Categories: Feature ArticlesI could not have predicted the responses I got when I asked 15 Mennonite Church Canada pastors—all women—how they would explain the meaning of the cross and resurrection to a…
‘Marvellous . . . yet so repulsive’
Categories: Feature ArticlesSoren Kierkegaard once famously said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” So often it’s only after we’ve lived through something that we can look…
A call to strengthen our core
Categories: Feature ArticlesA year ago I asked my oldest daughter, who was in the middle of a master of physiotherapy program at the University of Manitoba, to help me figure out what…
Who was I that I could hinder God?
Categories: Feature ArticlesUpdate: In October 2020, Mennonite Church Eastern Canada announced the termination of the ministerial credentials of John D. Rempel, on the basis of ministerial sexual misconduct. To learn more, see ‘Credentials…
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