Different stages
Most people know Johnny Wideman as a playwright and the artistic director for Theatre of the Beat, the social justice-oriented troupe behind plays like This Will Lead to Dancing and Yellow Bellies. Now Wideman has released To Aid Digestion, a collection of 26 original short stories and poems. Canadian Mennonite called the 30-year-old at his…
Converting to Catholicism
It’s not every day you meet a Mennonite whose faith journey has led him to the Catholic church, but that’s James DeGurse’s story. Baptized as an infant in the Anglican church, DeGurse spent his formative years at Douglas Mennonite Church in Winnipeg. After worshipping at an Anglican church for a year or two, he began…
A biblical call—to justice and peacebuilding
Jessica Reesor Rempel enjoys bringing people together and helping them find meaning. She recalls an incident just before Christmas a few years ago, when she was thinking about going into ministry. She was home with her siblings and their partners on the family farm in Markham, Ont., and everyone was about to go for a…
Christian media production done right
When The Fantasy Makers, a new documentary, premiered at Winnipeg’s Real to Reel Film Festival last month, the credits included the name of a young Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) student: Josh Heida. Heida, 24, worked as an assistant editor on the documentary that explores the impact fantasy pioneers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and George MacDonald…
From Goshen to Peru and back again
Born in Portland, Ore., and raised in Goshen, Ind., singer-songwriter Sadie Gustafson-Zook is currently pursuing a master’s degree in jazz voice at Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass. Last summer, she released I’m Not Here, her first album of original material. The 23-year-old wrote a handful of the album’s eight songs during a study-service…
Accessing different realms of musical exploration
Since Luke Nickel was young, his parents instilled in him the value of thinking critically. He recalls one conversation—the exact topic escapes him—during which his father said to him and his siblings, “I don’t care what you think about it, as long as you think about it.” “It didn’t matter what conclusion we came to,…
‘The tensions of taking Scripture seriously’
Scripture is a massive, ancient, messy archive of God’s relationship with humanity that many claim to interpret correctly. But with such diverse understandings of the Bible, how can Christians approach it with humility while granting God’s words authority over their lives? How can young people take Scripture seriously in an increasingly secularized world? These questions…
An openness to learning is the first step
Kim Penner graduated last November with a PhD in theology from the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto. Canadian Mennonite called Penner at her home in Waterloo, Ont., to ask her about her dissertation, “Discipleship as erotic peacemaking: Toward a feminist Mennonite theo-ethics of embodiment and sexuality,” and what her work has to offer…
Unfiltered Falk
For most comedians, delivering unfiltered material means cursing a blue streak. For Matt Falk, it means something else entirely. “Stop looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror trying to find the thing that makes you beautiful, ’cause you’re not gonna find it, okay?” the rotund comic tells the audience during a bit about body image…
On the court and in the classroom
Growing up just south of Winnipeg in Morris, Man., I was involved in sports starting in elementary school. I participated in many school sports but invested most of my time in basketball, playing competitively from Grade 5 until Grade 11. In Grade 10, I began playing club volleyball, and continued into my graduating year. It…
