With this quote from environmentalist Aldo Leopold inscribed on their T-shirts, 29 students and five faculty members from Eastern Mennonite High School in Harrisonburg, Va., headed westward on July 9, 2007, in our quest to create a land ethic. After traveling 22 days and nearly 8,000 miles through 22 states and nine National Parks and Monuments, we returned, tired but transformed …
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 …
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 …
