In Oregon we vote by mail. A couple of weeks before the election, we receive our ballots and a big, thick “Election Guide” to help us make rational, informed decisions …

I learned from Jeff Smith, the Frugal Gourmet of TV fame, that “frugal” doesn’t mean cutting back or using only lower-cost ingredients …

I dread the anticonsumption rhetoric that becomes especially shrill at Christmas. Here is my argument for consumption mixed with a measure of thought and intelligence …

Mennonites don’t talk much about consumer desire. Some of us are good at consuming, and others are just as adept at critiquing such consumption …

What word associations do you make with “Holy Spirit”? Speaking in tongues? Sanctification? Pentecostalism? Prophecy? Charismatic? Mystical? Spiritual? Inspiration of Scripture? Based on Jesus’ words to the disciples in John 14-16, I suggest still another one—contextualization …

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 …

In a nutshell, this is what I think matters when we look at the book of Revelation. What are we looking for when we look at Revelation? And what does Revelation tell us about the way to see this “little round planet” and this “big universe”? …

This past summer I “plant sat” for Gretchen, my neighbor. She had nine beautiful tomato plants and two promising green pepper plants. That was a lot next to my single patio tomato in a five-gallon bucket …