Rachel Waltner Goossen is professor of history at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. In 2014, she was tasked by the Mennonite Church USA Discernment Group on Sexual Abuse and the Church to write a history of the abuse perpetrated by John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite theologian and ethicist. Her research resulted in the article, “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite responses to John Howard Yoder’s sexual abuse.” An excerpt is available online at The Mennonite. 

This article is in a more academic format than articles that we typically publish on our website, but we thought that the subject matter and research it presents would be of interest to readers of The Mennonite. This piece was originally published in the Journal of Mennonite Studies (vol. 34, 2016, pp. 247-259) and also ran on the Our Stories Untold blog. 

The phenomenon of religious leaders violating individuals over whom they have spiritual authority has become part of public discourse, and Mennonite organizations, long insensitive to the harms associated with sexual abuse, now promote policies aimed at prevention.1 Increasingly, sexualized violence is subject to legal penalty, reflecting broad cultural and legislative shifts occurring over the past several decades. Sexualized violence is now widely regarded to be a public health issue. This evolution began in the 1970s, when according to the historian Estelle Freedman, “[feminist] organizers reframed sexual violence not merely as a private trauma but also as a nexus of power relations and a public policy concern.”2

This historical context provides a framework for examining the legacies of Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder’s decades long patterns of sexual abuse.3 Cloaked in theological language and often targeted at women whose church and family upbringing had encouraged them to be reverential, his abuse was met with resistance from many Mennonite women, as well as out-migration of some of them from Mennonite churches and theological circles.

What might we learn from the experiences of the women who resisted Yoder’s abuse during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s? What were personal, professional, and other consequences for whistleblowers who objected to his efforts to groom and use them as objects of an ill-conceived theological “experiment”? An easier task, perhaps, is to focus on the enigmatic Yoder, speculating on why he did what he did, but doing so elides the responses his sexual abuse provoked from women and their allies who pushed back.4 How did some Mennonite women challenge Yoder, despite considerable power differentials? And when victim-blaming occurred, how did the body politic of Mennonite theology and church leadership fare? Despite the emotional, psychological, and spiritual turmoil engendered by Yoder’s abuse, evidence drawn from archival and oral history sources suggests that not all resistant voices fell on deaf ears. Some of the women who successfully challenged Yoder in the last decades of the twentieth century remained lifelong participants—and leaders—in Mennonite churches and agencies. During that same period, other women moved on, contributing theological, ministerial, teaching, and administrative abilities in settings beyond Mennonite institutional life.5

Since the 1990s, two Yoder-centric narratives have emerged to account for the extensive abuse perpetrated by this prominent Mennonite theologian. These interrelated narratives, focused on Yoder’s writings and actions, tend to obscure the public health activism pursued by some of Yoder’s victims. The first narrative dates to 1992, when Yoder’s behaviors became widely known and Mennonite officials sought to bring him to accountability. Leaders of the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, based in Elkhart County, Indiana, established a disciplinary process for Yoder. Over a four-year period they suspended his ordination credential, sought psychiatric diagnoses, considered possible restitution for victims, and in 1996 announced that his disciplinary process had concluded, recommending resumption of his teaching and writing in Mennonite settings.6 At the center of this early narrative is Yoder himself, widely regarded as a gifted leader with whom church officials sought reconciliation and restoration.

The second narrative, which critiques the first, took shape in 2013 and continues to the present, driven by a denominational focus on how Mennonite institutional culture permitted Yoder’s audacious sexual experimentation as an ordained leader, a faculty member and former president of Goshen Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana, and a tenured professor at the nearby University of Notre Dame. My recent scholarship, titled “’Defanging the Beast,” highlights the failure of Mennonite institutional challengers to adequately address Yoder’s abusiveness. Reconciliation between Yoder and many of the individuals harmed by his actions, I argue, never occurred.7 Like the earlier narrative, however, my previous scholarship emphasized Yoder’s thought and behavior, aiming to address what Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) president Sara Wenger Shenk has called “a renewed outcry for truth-telling about what really happened or didn’t happen in the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s.”8Yet these earlier narratives, steeped in the historical record, have tended to sideline the advocacy of women who pushed church officials to bring Yoder to accountability. A renewed focus on Mennonite women’s challenges to Yoder’s patterns of sexual abuse reveals how victims’ responses, over time, provided a foundation for reforms rooted in justiceseeking. But the marginalization that also occurred, through victim-blaming associated with many Mennonites’ deference to Yoder’s privilege and power, prompted some women to leave their Mennonite communities and institutions.9

For several decades, through the 1970s and 1980s, Yoder approached women with sexual invitations and intimidating behavior at the seminary, at academic and church conferences, and in homes, cars, and gathering places across the U.S., Canada, and a host of international settings. The women’s experiences varied widely. While each was acquainted with Yoder in some way, most of these women were not known to one another nor aware of Yoder’s sexual aggressiveness toward others. (One woman, married and much younger than Yoder, whom he surprised in the mid- 1970s with sexualized physical touching and who reacted with instant rebuke, later remembered the incident as deeply troubling: “It messes with the mind. I wondered, am I special to him? Is he lonely?”10)

Yoder justified his sexual approaches to women as theologically driven. He solicited help from female

students and others, describing his entreaties as part of an “experiment” in sexual ethics in which he and a circle of “sisters” tested ideas about sexual intimacy outside marriage. For approximately eight years, over the objections of his supervisor at the seminary, president Marlin Miller, Yoder offered biblical justifications for his behavior based on Jesus’ ministry to women and what Yoder termed “the freedom of the Gospel.”11 Yoder argued that his ministrations to women were potentially therapeutic, and although he lacked formal training in psychological counseling, maintained that he wanted to help women overcome feelings of taboo. He intended to “defang” (or tame) “the beast,” he said, helping Christians to reject notions of sexuality as “a beast or a slippery slope which is … uncontrollable.”12

Yoder’s speculative project, arising as part of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, coincided with widening societal expectations about consensual sex. Although sexualized violence against women in the United States did not intensify markedly during the sexual revolution, one leading historian of the era notes that “In the new sexual order, the standard for consent had to be renegotiated. Why would a woman say no if sex presumably resulted in no harm? And who would believe that a woman had withheld consent, given new expectations of participation in the sexual revolution?”13 At a historical moment when lines were blurring about what constituted permissible sex, Yoder exploited notions that loosening sexual boundaries portended no harm.

Carole Hull, who lived near the seminary and was an active campus participant while her husband pursued a Master of Divinity degree, was part of a second-wave feminist group of young seminarians who in 1973 convinced the school’s administrators to offer a class on “Women, Church, and Society.” Years later, Hull reflected that one of her major regrets about feminism arising in that period was that it was not able to contribute to Christian churches’ formation of a healthy theology of human sexuality, a theology of body-spirit wholeness. “Mennonites were then, and still are, caught up in a mind/body dualism which means that they were set up for abuse,” she notes. “In retrospect, John took freedom in that context, to abuse vulnerable people. He had a whole landscape to work in.”14 In the 1970s, as Yoder drew women into his confidential project, he targeted primarily Mennonite women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Many had grown up in families and religious contexts in which women were expected to set boundaries for sexual behavior. Embedded in this cultural tradition, which both predated and countered the sexual revolution, the trope of woman as temptress, some would argue, “set up women to distrust their own perceptions.”15

Although it remains unclear precisely how many women Yoder approached, an estimated one hundred or more experienced sexual violation. Some of Yoder’s extramarital relationships were consensual. By contrast, some women regarded his aggressiveness as coercive and deeply harmful, and they felt fear long after their encounters with him.16 Others whom he approached rebuffed his overtures and moved on, in some cases registering complaints with Yoder’s colleagues, often seminary president Marlin Miller.17

In 1984, Miller and a small group of confidantes at the seminary forced Yoder to resign. As a result of severance agreements designed to quell talk about why he was leaving, Yoder’s reputation as a peace theologian remained intact. His immensely influential book The Politics of Jesus ensured his fame, and he continued to lecture and publish widely on New Testament theology, Christian community, and nonviolence.18 By 1987, secure in his academic base at the University of Notre Dame, Yoder was serving as president of the Society of Christian Ethics.

Newly accessible archival sources have shed light on the ineffective institutional processes devised in response to reports of misconduct. For two decades, Mennonite administrators, committees, and task forces responded—mostly informally—to women who sent letters of complaint, phoned, or appeared in person. No one called in law enforcement, no legal charges were brought, and although several parties consulted attorneys, no lawsuits were filed.19

In 1992, a group of eight Mennonite women, led by Martha Smith Good, then campus pastor at Goshen College in Indiana, and Carolyn Holderread Heggen, a mental health professional living in Albuquerque, gathered in Elkhart, Indiana, for an intense weekend. After first becoming acquainted with each other, the women identified themselves to an Elkhart-based Mennonite task force investigating Yoder, as being among those who had experienced his sexual advances. This group of eight women, which included ministers, missionaries, and faculty members of Mennonite institutions, offered detailed and credible accounts of Yoder’s sexual misconduct extending back nearly two decades. These whistleblowers warned the task force about the dangers that Yoder continued to pose to students at the University of Notre Dame and elsewhere.20

Heggen in particular, a counseling psychologist specializing in sexual abuse prevention, had devoted significant time, through the 1980s and ’90s, trying to persuade Mennonite administrators to call Yoder to accountability. One of Heggen’s acquaintances, Goshen College faculty member and nurse Ruth Krall, had introduced her to Good at a conference in 1991, and the two had begun to strategize about enlarging their circle to include other victims. Krall had long known about Yoder’s abusiveness through her work as a clinician, and she had met with women faculty members at nearby colleges—St. Mary’s College and the University of Notre Dame—in discussions about Yoder’s sexual misconduct.21 As part of her professional training in the 1970s, Krall had taken the “Nightingale pledge,” a statement of ethics used in the nursing profession, which emphasized caring for the injured:

Those of us in the 1970s women’s health movement needed to create language because the existing language was so hostile to victims of sexual violence … . I am part of an entire generation of feminist women who … changed the way the surrounding culture has understood rape …. We changed it from a sexual/slut model to a violent/victimization model.22

As part of her activism, Krall had written to seminary president Miller in 1983, alerting him that many women had become aware of Yoder’s continuing abusiveness, adding that a sexist culture at the Mennonite school undergirded the administration’s complicity.23 Krall’s challenge led Miller to make further inquiries, resulting in confirmation that several young women at the University of Notre Dame had recently contemplated filing a lawsuit against Yoder following abusive behavior on that campus.

Equipped with this new information and concerned about the potential for scandal, Miller resolved to force Yoder from Goshen Biblical Seminary.24 Within a year, Yoder was gone from the seminary, although he retained his tenured position at the University of Notre Dame and moved into full-time teaching there. Miller’s administrative response to Yoder’s long history of sexual abuse— arranging for his resignation from the seminary through a negotiated severance package while encouraging him to retain his tenured position at Notre Dame—was, in the context of the 1980s, a typical mode of dealing with faculty sexual abuse. At educational institutions large and small, college presidents and overseeing boards frequently offered offending faculty members a “golden parachute” to exit their campuses.25

While Krall was pressuring Miller to change the seminary’s culture, Heggen was challenging Yoder in response to his unwanted sexualized behaviors toward her. He had surprised her with physical coercion after becoming acquainted with her during a trip to New Mexico and had later sent her a sexually graphic letter and invitations to meet him at upcoming academic conferences.26 Ruth Krall, who for many years had advocated for Yoder’s victims, credits Heggen’s tenacity in calling Yoder out: “The major mover and shaker in the Yoder narrative is Carolyn,” Krall asserts. “Without her persistent, creative, and courageous work, none of this would be history at all.”27 Heggen, married with three young children and pursuing graduate studies in New Mexico, had earlier taken courses at AMBS. But through the 1980s and beyond, professional aspirations and geographic distance positioned her differently from women studying on the seminary campus: “John saw me as the ringleader, the trouble maker for him. He knew I never hoped to be ordained nor did I ever intend to be hired by a Mennonite institution—so I had less fear than most…. I suspected he thought if he could intimidate me into fearful silence many of his troubles would go away.”28

Heggen, like Martha Smith Good, had directly rebuffed Yoder’s sexual advances, but before the two women became acquainted with each other, each had experienced isolation and self-doubt; they had “agonized over what possible role we had played in his assumption that we were open to sexualizing the relationship with him.”29Heggen had struggled to recall whether her choice of clothing might have provoked lascivious behavior, though modesty was her habit. Remembering her high anxiety over Yoder’s inexplicable actions toward her, she finally concluded that “both days [during Yoder’s work-related trip to Albuquerque] I wore outfits in which Mother Teresa would be comfortable walking the streets. Further, there was nothing I said or did which could have reasonably been interpreted as intentionally seductive.”30 By the early 1990s, Heggen was speaking regularly to Mennonite audiences as a consultant on sexual abuse, and she knew that female victims (and in some cases, their husbands), speculated that a woman’s appearance or demeanor might have elicited sexualized behavior. Increasingly, her professional training, along with actively enlisting women to join her and Good in pushing for Yoder’s accountability, led her to critique victim-blaming.31 Her perspective, that the church was ill-served by the scapegoating of women, would gain currency in the decades to come.32

In 1992, the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference, basing its actions in part on the testimony of the eight women who had identified themselves to the Mennonite task force in Elkhart as having experienced Yoder’s sexual misconduct, suspended his ordination credential. As the conference’s disciplinary process with Yoder began, Heggen told conference officials: “We would all want [John] to know that none of us have tried to destroy or hurt him or his family. Yes, they have all been hurt but we are not to blame. His inappropriate behavior over the years has resulted in this pain for him and his family … . We don’t contend that we did everything right in this process. Frankly, we had no models to emulate. We did the best we knew how with the insight we had at the time.”33

Four years later, in 1996, after the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference ended its disciplinary process with Yoder, Heggen expressed regret that she and others had never pressed the denomination to establish a victims’ support group. During the four years of Yoder’s disciplinary process—as friends and colleagues of Yoder expressed concern for his wellbeing—some of the women who had spoken out about his abuse struggled in emotional isolation. Still living in Albuquerque, Heggen was dismayed when “angry, hateful letters came accusing me of trying to ‘destroy a good man,’ of ‘giving the church a bad name’ and of ‘seducing an important man.’”34 By 1996, as Yoder was readying for a return to the Mennonite congregation in Elkhart where he held membership, Heggen, pained by blame expressed in the Mennonite press and elsewhere, had withdrawn her membership from her Mennonite church and affiliated with a Disciples of Christ congregation.35

After Yoder’s death in 1997, Heggen returned to the Mennonite Church, and she maintained communications with a widening network of victims and allies. Not all women aggrieved by Mennonite institutions’ failures took the same path. Some departed their Mennonite churches and communities, an exodus with varied consequences for those who left and those who stayed. As the peace scholar and activist Lisa Schirch argues, during the last several decades of the twentieth century

[P]atriarchal structures did not protect women in the church. Since Yoder assaulted many of his female students and rising female church leaders, his actions directly impacted a generation of women’s leadership. The continuing absence of women in so many centers of pacifist theology in Mennonite institutions today means that new generations of pacifist theologians may also not…take into consideration the privilege and entitlements that males enjoy.36

From the perspective of many women who remain active in Mennonite settings, as well as others who have affiliated elsewhere, the dismantling of patriarchal structures in Mennonite institutions is long overdue. Phyllis Bixler, a retired Mennonite professor of literature, notes that she has had a “visceral reaction” to Yoder’s legacy of sexually abusing women, because, she said, “it excavates the anger I felt growing up knowing that my dreams of certain kinds of church leadership (I wanted to be a pastor) were not open to me.” Yoder’s theological writings, she added, granted “the church an amazing amount of power, a power which is ripe for abuse in many, many ways … . It is the kind of abuse that occurs when the reputation and perceived survival of the church seem more important to many of its leaders than justice toward its victims.”37 Renewed discussions of Yoder’s abuse, she adds, opens old wounds for many women who, like her, grew up in churches that emphasized female submission.38 Canadian theologian Susie Guenther Loewen argues that “Yoder’s actions have affected the Mennonite theological landscape … ensuring that there is a generation of female academic theologians missing … . It’s a devastating loss.”39 Mennonite commentator Ruth Anne Abrahams of Texas offers this assessment: “[A]n atmosphere where women were disenfranchised from public church leadership created this bitter fruit … . This story speaks to the great loss of talented, spiritually inclined women in the last fifty years. These are women who would have provided real leadership to the Mennonite Church.”40

Still, many women impacted by Yoder’s legacy of abuse have gained some measure of healing through truth-telling. In 2012, for example, Carolyn Holderread Heggen—still active in Mennonite denominational and congregational life—persuaded Sara Wenger Shenk, the newly installed president of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, to open an inquiry into Yoder’s decades-ago abuse at the school. Heggen also convinced Shenk to seek documentary evidence for a fuller historical accounting. Ervin Stutzman, executive director of Mennonite Church USA, supported these efforts, committing denominational resources and leadership toward transparency. Thus, a decade and a half after Yoder’s death, Heggen’s persistence—coupled with the actions of other Mennonite women who came forward to name Yoder’s abuse—resulted in Mennonite Church USA’s appointment in 2013 of a Discernment Group to reexamine Yoder’s deeds and Mennonite institutional responses. These initiatives have resulted in denominational leaders apologizing publicly for historic failures in addressing sexual abuse.41

Two decades ago, the noted theologian Delores Williams contended that “All women … have developed strategies that have helped us arrive sane at our present social and cultural locations. [Yet] there has been little … conversation among women for the purpose of swapping stories about the nature of these survival strategies.”42Mennonite women’s comebacks to sexual violence by a renowned leader, however, reveal that speaking out, helped along by turning cultural and legal tides condemning sexual abuse, made a tangible—and for some, a profound—difference.

How did women challenge Yoder? It took time, but they “swapped stories,” taking personal and professional risks to find receptive listeners. In so doing, women dissenters within and beyond Mennonite congregations, institutions, and agencies, sought to bend the body politic toward justice.

Notes

Washburn University provided funding for this study through a Faculty Research Grant. The author thanks Carolyn Holderread Heggen, Ben Goossen, and two anonymous readers for comments on earlier drafts.

1. Cf. Paul Schrag, “On Sexual Abuse, a Vow to Tell the Truth,” Mennonite World Review, 4 July 2015, http://mennoworld.org/2015/07/04/news/sexualabuse-we-resolve-to-tell-the-truth/ and Rich Preheim, “Mennonites Apologize for History of Sex Abuse Following Theologian John Howard Yoder Scandal, Washington Post, 7 July 2015, http://www.washingtonpost. com/national/religion/mennonites-apologize-for-history-of-sex-abusefollowing-theologian-john-howard-yoder-scandal/2015/07/07/9fdb2092- 24b7-11e5-b621-b55e495e9b78_story.html.
2. Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 276; see also Stephanie Krehbiel, “Breaking Open the Structure of Sexual Violence: An Interview with Ruth Krall,” Mennonite Life 69 (Spring 2015), http://ml.bethelks.edu/issue/vol-69/article/breaking-open-the-structure-ofsexual-violence-an/.
3. Rachel Waltner Goossen, “‘Defanging the Beast’: Mennonite Responses to John Howard Yoder’s Sexual Abuse,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 89 (January 2015): 7-80.
4. Recent perspectives on Yoder’s sexualized behavior in light of his theological contributions include “Theologian in Contradiction: An Interview with Hans-Jürgen Goertz on John Howard Yoder’s Radical Pacifism,” trans. J. Alexander Sider and Jonathan R. Seiling, Conrad Grebel Review 33 (Fall 2015): 382-83, and Karen V. Guth, “Doing Justice to the Complex Legacy of John Howard Yoder: Restorative Justice Resources in Witness and Feminist Ethics, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 35 (Fall/Winter 2015): 119- 39.
5. See, for example, Sharon Detweiler, “John Howard Yoder: My Untold Story after 36 Years of Silence, Our Stories Untold, 9 January 2015, http://www.ourstoriesuntold.com/john-howard-yoder-my-untold-story-after- 36-years-of-silence-2/.
6. “Disciplinary Process with John Howard Yoder Draws to a Close,” 1996, MC USA Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference John Howard Yoder Files, II-05-019, Mennonite Church USA Archives, Goshen, Ind.
7. Goossen, “‘Defanging the Beast,’” 72-73; 78; Rachel Waltner Goossen, “Campus Protests and John Howard Yoder, 1985-1997,” Mennonite Life 69 (2015), http://ml.bethelks.edu/issue/vol-69/article/campus-protests-andjohn-howard-yoder-1985-1997/.
8. Sara Wenger Shenk, “Revisiting the Legacy of John Howard Yoder,” https://www.ambs.edu/publishing/ 2013/07/Revisiting-the-Legacy-of-JohnHoward-Yoder.cfm.
9. Ruth Krall, email to author, 29 July 2014, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 15.
10. “Maureen” (pseudonym), interview with author, 11 July 2014.
11. John Howard Yoder, “Affective Resources for Singles,” July 1977, p. 12, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) Marlin E. Miller Files on John Howard Yoder, X-18-001, Mennonite Church USA Archives, Goshen, Ind.
12. “Summary of Ad Hoc Consultation,” March 17, 1982, AMBS Marlin E. Miller Files on John Howard Yoder, X-18-001.
13. Freedman, 277.
14. Quotation from conversation with Carole Hull, Wichita, Kansas, 11 April 2015, notes in the author’s possession; also, Hull email to author, 26 July 2015, in the author’s possession.
15. Quotation from David B. Miller and Sara Wenger Shenk, “Disciplining the Mind—Intellectual Power Within the Community of Faith,” typescript, 1 July 2015, p. 4, in the author’s possession. See also Goossen, “‘Defanging the Beast,’” 30-32.
16. Betty Hochstetler, interview with author, 5 June 2014; John G. Kaufman, interview with author, 5 June 2014, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series 2, Box 1, folder 21, Mennonite Church USA Archives, Goshen, Ind. Hochstetler and Kaufman served on Yoder’s Accountability and Support Group, appointed by the Church Leadership Commission (CLC) of the Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference. See also “Questions,” compiled by Carolyn Holderread Heggen, et al., Spring 2014, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 2, and “Confidential Statement,” February 21-22, 1992, p. 4, AMBS Marlin E. Miller Files on John Howard Yoder, X-18-001.
17. Nearly a decade after Yoder left AMBS, Miller acknowledged that he knew of some forty women who had experienced Yoder’s sexual misconduct. Addendum to CLC minutes, 9 December 1993, MC USA Indiana-Michigan Mennonite Conference John Howard Yoder Files, II-05-019.
18. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972); rev. ed., 1994.
19. To date, University of Notre Dame officials have refused to comment publicly on their institution’s involvement. Soli Salgado, “Yoder Case Extends to Notre Dame,” National Catholic Reporter (June 19-July 2, 2015): 15.
20. Additional details of the experiences of the eight women who met with the Prairie Street Mennonite Church/John Howard Yoder Task Force in February 1992, and the task force’s sympathetic response, appear in Goossen, “‘Defanging the Beast,’” 53-57. Although the women met face-to-face with the task force, identities of most of them—except for Carolyn Holderread Heggen and Martha Smith Good—have remained confidential.
21. Krall, The Elephants in God’s Living Room, Vol. 3, 2014, http://ruthkrall.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-Elephants-inGod%E2%80%99s-Living-Room-Vol-3-%C2%A9.pdf; Ruth Krall, email to author, 29 July 2014, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 15.
22. Krall quoted in Krehbiel, “Breaking Open the Structure.”
23. Krall to Marlin Miller, 9 September 1982, AMBS Marlin E. Miller Files on John Howard Yoder, X-18-001.
24. Miller to Evelyn Shellenberger, 3 January 1984, p. 3, AMBS Marlin E. Miller Files on John Howard Yoder, X-18-001.
25. Over the past three decades, similar administrative responses have persisted in North American higher education; see Sarah Brown, “Why Colleges Have Trouble Handling Professors Who Harass,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 30 October 2015, p. A-12.
26. Goossen, “‘Defanging the Beast,’” 54; Tom Price, “Theologian’s Future Faces a ‘Litmus Test’,” The Elkhart Truth, 12 July 1992, B-1; B-3. Price used pseudonyms for women who, more recently, identified themselves as having been among the eight who told their stories to a Mennonite church panel in 1992; Heggen was “Tina.” The Elkhart Truth’s series on Yoder is available at http://peacetheology.net/john-h-yoder/john-howard-yoder%E2%80%99ssexual-misconduct%E2%80%94part-five-2/.
27. Krall, email to the author, 30 July 2014, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 15.
28. Heggen, email to author, 30 June 2014.
29. Martha Smith Good and Carolyn Holderread Heggen, letter addressed “Dear Sister,” 1991, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 2.
30. Heggen to John Howard Yoder Accountability and Support Group, 2 February 1994, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973- 2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 2.
31. Heggen, Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1993); Carolyn Holderread Heggen, “Misconceptions and Victim Blaming,” The Mennonite (August 2014): 31. See also Ada SchmidtTieszen, “A Mountain-Top Experience: Impetus to Confront Yoder’s Violence against Women,” Mennonite Life 69 (Spring 2015), http://ml.bethelks.edu/issue/vol-69/article/a-mountain-top-experienceimpetus-to-confront-yode/.
32. On victim-blaming, see also Lisa Schirch, “To the Next Generation of Pacifist Theologians,” 4 March 2015, Our Stories Untold, http://www. ourstoriesuntold.com/to-the-next-generation-of-pacifist-theologians/.
33. Heggen to Atlee Beechy and Mary Mishler, 9 Dec. 1992, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 2.
34. Quotations from Heggen letter to Mary Mishler, 28 June 1996, Rachel Waltner Goossen Collection on John Howard Yoder, 1973-2014, HM1-049, Series I, Box 1, folder 2.
35. Ibid. C.f. Winifred Waltner, letter to the editor, Mennonite Weekly Review, 19 March 1992, p. 4, and Debra H. Bender, letter to editor, Mennonite Weekly Review, 2 April 1992.
36. Schirch, “To the Next Generation,” 4 March 2015, http://www. ourstoriesuntold.com/to-the-next-generation-of-pacifist-theologians/.
37. Bixler quotations from comment to Shenk, “Revisiting the Legacy,” 11 September 2013, https://www. ambs.edu/publishing/2013/07/Revisiting-theLegacy-of-John-Howard-Yoder.cfm.
38. Ibid.
39. “Remembering Yoder Honestly,” Young Voices, 29 September 2013, http://youngvoices.canadianmennonite.org/ articles/rememberingyoderhonestly.
40. Comment to Sharon Detweiler, “John Howard Yoder: My Untold Story, Our Stories Untold, 9 January 2015, http://www.ourstoriesuntold.com/johnhoward-yoder-my-untold-story-after-36-years-of-silence-2/.
41. Notes from conversation with Sara Wenger Shenk, Elkhart, Ind., 17 March 2014, in the author’s possession; Rich Preheim, “AMBS on Abuse: ‘We Failed You,’” Mennonite World Review, 23 March 2015, http://mennoworld.org/2015/03/23/news/ambs-on-abuse-we-failed-you/; Preheim, “Mennonites Apologize.” In 2015, the Discernment Group disbanded, and the MC USA Executive Board announced its intention to “appoint a new group to carry forward the work of education and prevention of sexual abuse” across the denomination; see Jenny Castro, “Abuse Discernment Group Ends Work,” Mennonite World Review, 26 October 2015, p. 3.
42. “Womanist/Feminist Dialogue: Problems and Possibilities,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9 (Spring-Fall 1993): 66-73.