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Mideast dialogue programs fall short
“Deeply rooted in our Mennonite psyche is this idea that peacemaking is as simple as sitting across the table from someone and hearing their story,” says Joanna Hiebert Bergen, chair of the Mennonite Church Manitoba Palestine-Israel Network. But Hiebert Bergen, along with a significant number of Palestinian academics and other former civil society workers in…
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The unend of this story
How many sermons do you remember from 25 years ago? Likely not many. Even the most meaningful and formative sermons from long ago tend to fade and become less a specific memory and more an unrecallable influential moment; a ripple whose impact remains but becomes indistinguishable the further life goes beyond that moment. I’m sure…
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Learning why
When campers first roll down our narrow road into the tall, tall trees, they are usually thinking about themselves: Will I have fun? Will I be scared? When they return, they often begin to think about the people that surround them: Who will be my counsellor? Will the kids in my cabin be nice? When…
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Binding and loosing in an age of division
For the past three years, the United States has been my home, and in the U.S., division is impossible to ignore. Liberals on the left, conservatives on the right. Of course, Canada is not immune to these divisions, and neither is the church. In this context, what hope does the church have of discerning the…
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Circling back to simplicity
I’ve been thinking about simplicity. Are today’s Canadian Mennonites committed to faith-motivated simple living? Am I? I first encountered the spiritual discipline of simplicity 20 years ago when I read Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. I had grown up in fundamentalist Baptist churches that were legalistic about what our minds needed to believe and what…
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Call-in style discussion series spotlights nonviolence in a time of war
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Karen Ridd was struck by how many people around her immediately called for military troops to be sent. “In those moments it becomes really hard as a pacifist to find ways to speak into that conversation, when we know there are atrocities happening,” says the Menno Simons College instructor…
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The song of Mary
Mary, whose heart is full of things to ponder, goes to see her older relative Elizabeth in the hill country. Both are pregnant. Both are in on the secret of the Messiah. They are brimming with possibility and responsibility. They have both surrendered in a visceral, physical way to the flow of divine will. Mary…
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To set a soul aflame
One of my abiding critiques of the progressive church circles I inhabit is that they often lack what I call existential urgency. God is, we think, very interested in our positions on social issues and is very eager to affirm our journey through various constellations of identities, but God is not so much interested in…
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David Klassen
David Klassen of Rosenfeld, Manitoba, age 83, poses for an informal portrait at a family reunion. The photo is from a 1955 article in The Canadian Mennonite, which frequently published articles about family reunions and wedding anniversaries as matters of wider interest to the Mennonite community. The articles contained such details as the family’s history…
