For a brief, happy spell, I had a tutoring job at our public elementary school down the road. Reading, writing and doing math with 20 third graders, I could bore my ideas into their little sponge minds. Even after a statewide funding cut eliminated the tutoring program, the regular teacher let me come back to help out.
No doubt, it was the highlight of my trip to Italy. Anyone who has seen it knows what I mean. The Creation of Adam, the central image in a long line of frescoes that grace the narrow ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo’s portrayal of the Creator’s finger reaching out to touch the finger of humanity is one I keep returning to, even some 20 years later. It is, for me, one of the most powerful images of God. In it I see that we are not only lovingly created but that our own creative acts are an extension of that love. In the midst of those acts we emulate the Creator. In this way, our creativity becomes holy work.
From the first week of his life as an Amish baby until today as a 91-year-old inventor and entrepreneur with more than 65 patents to his name, Eldon Hostetler has surprised his community and his world.
More than 250 Bible school leaders took part in seminars on that subject during the Africa Association of Bible Schools . . .
Swiss Mennonites are raising funds to preserve the castle as a museum honoring the memory of Anabaptists who were imprisoned and tortured there as heretics between the 16th and early 18th centuries.
Carlson, a junior peace, justice and conflict studies major at Goshen College, served at the Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center (Wi’am) in Bethlehem this summer.
It sprung, she said, from an attempt to “seek solidarity and mutual support, based in the prophetic role of the churches to engage in political advocacy.”
John Stiles parked his one-man caravan at Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church in late July. It had previously occupied a corner of a parking lot 25 miles away near Inman at Hoffnungsau Mennonite Church, a link in an Anabaptist oasis chain stretching across the Great Plains.