The October 2025 issue of Anabaptist World includes several mini reviews of recent memoirs and personal reflections on theology.

A memoir by the author of the novel Mennonite Soldier, Lover’s Quarrel: The Mennonites and Me: A Testimony (Masthof Press) covers Ken Yoder Reed’s journey from a Mennonite farm in Lancaster County, Pa., to being an entrepreneur in San Francisco. Reed alternates between a novelist’s detailed descriptions and scenes of conflict and a preacher’s call to follow God’s way as revealed in scripture. Reed attended Eastern Mennonite College (now University), where he fed his dream of becoming a famous author. During the Vietnam War, he did alternative service as a conscientious objector in Japan. Back in the States, he worked in Mennonite publishing, then published his first novel, which caused a furor among conservative Mennonites. He met his wife, Kathy, and later they moved to California, where they helped form Haight Ashbury Mennonite Fellowship. Reed writes about his turmoil in finding his calling, and he ends up running a business providing temporary workers. His story stops abruptly, and he appends a cursory summary of his joining a Presbyterian church that leaves its denomination because of its liberal stance toward LGBTQ+ people. In the middle of the book, he mentions that Kathy died in 1997 but says no more. I wanted more about that. — Gordon Houser

In communities across North America, homeless encampments have sprung up — and so have calls from politicians and annoyed residents to remove them. For David Driedger, lead minister at First Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, Man., that’s not a solution. Instead, those tents, tarps and shopping carts should be seen by everyone — and especially Christians, since they can show a way to salvation. That’s the argument he makes in Nothing Will Save Us: A Theology of Immeasurable Life (Pandora Press). According to Driedger, people who are seen as nothing by society are not only people loved by God but also people with whom Christians can encounter God, discover truth and see how some structures of society are set up in such a way that some people, despite their best efforts, simply can’t move forward or get ahead. In Philippians, the Apostle Paul wrote that Jesus “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.” Similarly, Driedger says, Christians should empty themselves of their stereotypes about people who are poor and marginalized in order to truly see and hear what God is saying through those who are seen as nothing, including at their encampments. — John Longhurst