How do you, as a pacifist Mennonite, justify playing a violent game like Halo? was the question I got through the telephone one lazy afternoon. I stopped for a moment, nervously chuckling. “Um, well, you see …”
How do you, as a pacifist Mennonite, justify playing a violent game like Halo? was the question I got through the telephone one lazy afternoon. I stopped for a moment, nervously chuckling. “Um, well, you see …”
It was the fifth time we had done this, share Denver as father and daughter. The spirits of the younger girl, going back all the way to the first trip when she was 13, hovered near, seeming almost as present as the married woman now plunging so quickly, to our mutual shock, toward age 30. This presence of my daughter as many different girls and women proved an opportunity to ponder the parenting journey …
Some of us are tired of all the vision talk in our congregations or the larger church. Others are interested but speak about vision in hushed tones, as though it’s a special gift reserved only for leaders and assorted charismatics. The truth is most of us take vision for granted. Vision is simply how we see things. We don’t realize the value of vision until we can’t see things any more …
When we gather each Sunday to worship the Triune God, we proclaim that God is in charge, which means that we are not. In doing this we follow an early Anabaptist belief in self-surrender (“Gelassenheit”), offering ourselves in service to God …
My parents, grandparents (both sides) great-grandparents and my great-great-grandparents all grew up on farms. But I grew up in an urban area of a small city, and today I live in Pittsburgh, Pa., part of the 20th largest metropolitan area in the United States …
Our relationship with our body often is wearisome, particularly in our “your-body-should-look-like-this” culture. And the idea of the body as a temple is prone to be purely theoretical, lacking any practical application in our daily lives. We may often leave connecting with God through a bodily experience to the mystics, finding ourselves uncomfortable with the mystical experience in general …
In the age of the professional military, it’s hard to know how to offer a relevant peace witness. We’re no longer called before draft boards. We don’t have to do anything to avoid military service. We just have to avoid signing up. In the meantime, we continue to fund wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with our tax dollars. Does an all-volunteer military make our witness obsolete?
It is time for top Mennonite leaders to take a dramatic new step and issue a daring new call for a vast expansion of Christian Peacemaker Teams. With only modest resources and less institutional support, CPT’s activities—and a host of other successful nonviolent campaigns in the last few decades—have demonstrated that nonviolence frequently prevents bloodshed and promotes justice. It is time for the Christian church—for the first time ever in our history—to invest large resources to test the possibilities of large-scale nonviolent campaigns …
