A tale of two hills outside Lalibela
Two hills, sitting side by side in a valley outside of Lalibela, Ethiopia, have a story to tell. One hill is brown, its vegetation stripped away by livestock and deforestation. Deep gullies are carved through the hillside, where the unprotected soil was washed away by the rain. Trees have disappeared, cut down for firewood. Look…
Selling thrift by the pound
Volunteers who work at any of the many Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) thrift stores know the sorrow of unsold goods: clothing that hangs around for more than a month or dishes that don’t move out the door to grace someone’s table. The Generations Store in Waterloo, Ont., had a “We want your quality thrift goods,…
Faith leads to composting
Donning my biology lab coat and goggles, I push through the bustling crowd of eager campers who are anxiously waiting to sing for their lunchtime mail delivery, and I raise my hand in the air. “Ready?” I ask. “One, two, three!” And the crowd of 80 bursts into an enthusiastic, barely organized uproar. “Teka’s Bokashi…
Farmers, thinkers, eaters
Agriculture is changing. Perhaps it always has been. Markets realign. Tastes shift. Ideas evolve. Climatic conditions rearrange. Mennonites are part of the change—as farmers, thinkers and eaters. Joanne Thiessen Martens notes another change. She grew up on a farm near Austin, Man. Then she studied agro-ecology out of an interest to work overseas, which she…
Living with a carbon footprint conundrum
Jane Fonda received lots of criticism last year for travelling to Alberta to criticize future pipeline construction. Media outlets, including the Winnipeg Free Press, noted the apparent inconsistency between her comments about fossil-fuel extraction and how she flew to Alberta, used a helicopter to tour the oilsands, had her voice amplified by a microphone powered…
Watershed discipleship
What does a transformative, earth-honouring Christianity look like at ground level and lived out in daily action? Reforms of personal habits—such as recycling, eating locally and shopping responsibly—are important steps. But we’ll need to embody a more vibrant Christian environmental ethic if we are to become the people God yearns for us to be, and…
Mysticism for toddlers
I was happy to discover another gem of a children’s book on the subject of faith at my public library recently: it’s called The Song of Francis, written and illustrated with beautiful, vibrant collages by Tomie dePaola.[1] It’s another one of my son’s current favourites. The story is about the Christian monk and mystic Francis…
‘Shaping a sustainable future’
Even urban Mennonites lay claim to an agrarian heritage. According to many speakers at Rooted and Grounded: A Conference on Land and Christian Discipleship, held last month at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), this is important despite the urbanity of most Mennonites and North Americans in general. More than 170 academics, farmers, pastors and laypeople…
Care for creation and environmental justice
When Bob Lovelace, a chief of the Ardoch Algonquin of Northeastern Ontario, wrote about his people’s struggle over uranium exploration on their land, he did so from a Canadian maximum security prison. To protect their traditional territories from uranium exploration, the Ardoch Algonquin had set up roadblocks. For his part in the nonviolent resistance, the…
Removing Mountains
Mountaintop removal. Tar sands. Mass destruction of earth and creation for sake of getting at the coal and oil underground. While there are inevitably complexities for each community facing companies that look for energy sources in their neighbourhoods, and there are no simple stories, on an instinctive level I know it’s wrong. Why are societies…
