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Making art ‘like breathing’ for B.C. illustrator
For Dona Park, making art is the equivalent of eating, sleeping and breathing. She does it every day because she needs to. The 24-year-old attended Goshen (Ind.) College, from which she graduated with a double major in fine arts and history in 2017. She is now a freelance artist based in Abbotsford, B.C., where she…
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Extending the table
On May 14, Breslau Mennonite Church hosted an iftar meal after sunset, marking the end of the daily fast for Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan, a season of fasting, prayer, reflection and charity observed by millions of Muslims around the world. Each week during Ramadan, a different church in Waterloo Region hosted an…
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Worshipping across cultures
Every year, Rockway Mennonite Collegiate in Kitchener, Ont., facilitates worship services at churches in the area, to build bridges between the school and its constituency. This year, the senior choir students had a particularly moving experience when they sang and led worship at Kitchener’s Chin Christian Church, a member congregation of Mennonite Church Eastern Canada,…
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Giving back
“We’ve experienced a lot of humbling stories,” says Phyllis Roth of her participation in the Saskatchewan Valley Hospital home-building project, but one story in particular stands out. When Roth and a group of friends began building a home as a fundraiser for the new Saskatchewan Valley Hospital Foundation in Rosthern, they hoped local businesses would…
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Vegan Mennos
Type the words “Mennonite vegans” into your search engine and you likely won’t come up with much. But being a Mennonite vegan is very doable, whether you are culturally Mennonite or not. And with a birth name of Carrie and a married name of Steven, I am clearly not culturally Mennonite. Why did we go…
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Easy Beans recipe
Vegan cooking can be as easy or challenging as you want to make it. I’m a “10-minute—five ingredient” kind of gal so here is a crockpot bean recipe that takes minutes to make. If you put it together in the morning, it will easily be ready for supper. (Read the accompanying Gathering Around the Table article, “Vegan…
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‘I just want to help people’
Like many of his peers, Nathan Bartel is fielding questions about what he plans to do after graduation. But, unlike some of them, he has a ready answer. He wants to be a firefighter. Bartel grew up in Arnprior, Ont. His older brother, Emerson, has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which, he says, “gave me a different…
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Pacifism and the art of theatre combat
Jacqueline Loewen just spent the weekend riding a motorcycle as a stunt double for a science-fiction TV show and will be rolling on the ground with strangers tomorrow, choreographing combat for Shakespeare in the Ruins’ production of Hamlet. Jacqueline Loewen. Loewen, 36, is well-versed and well-known in the theatre world. She is an actor, stunt…
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Canadian faces of MDS in Texas
What do you get when you put Mennonites from all over Canada, and from all sorts of different Mennonite conferences and churches—along with Christians from other denominations—in the same place? A Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) unit—that’s what. In February, I visited volunteers in three communities in Texas hit by Hurricane Harvey in 2017—La Grange, Bloomington…
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What resilience looks like
From dealing with disaster to mental health recovery, partners of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in Nepal and their beneficiaries demonstrate resilience. That was the theme of MCC’s first-ever trekking learning tour. From April 1 to 19, participants from all over Canada and the United States hiked around Nepal, taking in the vistas while visiting MCC…
