Category: Artbeat

U2, Bruce Cockburn, the Emerging Church Movement and Mennonites share one thing in common: each has been present, active and influential at the Greenbelt Christian Arts Festival. Established in 1974, it presently draws more than 20,000 people each year to the Cheltenham Racecourse in western England. Soon, it will cross the ocean. In 2011, the…

John Howard Yoder is one of the best-known Mennonite thinkers on peace. But before Yoder, there was Guy F. Hershberger, whose reflections on war, peace and violence not only helped Mennonites navigate perilous times in the early- to mid-20th century, but also laid the foundation for Yoder’s groundbreaking work. “Up until the arrival of Yoder,…

Have you ever felt abandoned by God? You pray, go to church and read the Bible, but God seems so far away. What’s going on? What’s happening, says Daniel Schrock, is the “dark night.” “This is something that Christians rarely talk about, but which many experience,” says Schrock, author of Dark Night: A Gift of…

If there is one thing Mennonites should know a lot about, it’s Menno Simons, the 16th century Anabaptist leader who gave their church its name. Myron Augsburger worries that the opposite is true. “I don’t think that many Mennonites today know as much as they should about him,” says the former president of Eastern Mennonite…

Immoral behaviour, competing religious and ideological beliefs and philosophies, church members and leaders who fail to live up to the high standards of the gospel: It sounds like what’s happening today, but it’s also the world that faced the first-century church. “The world of the first-century Christians is not that dissimilar from our own,” says…

Beginning in Winnipeg in the1920s, This Hidden Thing by Manitoba novelist Dora Dueck tells the moving story of Maria Klassen, a newly landed Mennonite immigrant. Maria becomes a domestic for a prosperous Canadian family in order to support her family as they struggle to build a life for themselves on a farm near the town…

As a boy, I couldn’t get enough of the Robin Hood legends. I read every book I could find on the subject and I loved the 1938 Errol Flynn film. While it’s true that Robin dispatched the Sheriff of Nottingham’s expendable soldiers without a second thought, these light-hearted tales about Robin and his merry men…

In 1633, the people of Oberammergau in Bavaria (now part of Germany) pleaded with God to save them from extinction. Not only had the Black Death—or plague—taken its toll in the village and surrounding area, but the Thirty Years War across Europe between Protestants and Roman Catholics had ended in deprivation and exhaustion for all.…

Gareth Brandt has written a personally grounded book on men’s spirituality as a resource for men’s prayer or discussion groups. His goal is to re-frame the basic contours of the field of men’s spirituality, which he considers neither practical nor biblically resonant. Brandt begins with his personal story and the quest for his own “unique…