I was in Baghdad during Holy Week of 2004, the week the stupidity of the Iraq war became unavoidably obvious. On Palm Sunday, the day the people of Jerusalem took to the streets to welcome a messiah they did not comprehend any more than we do, thousands of Moqtada al-Sadr’s followers shut down central Baghdad’s streets, protesting the arrest of a top aide and the closing of al-Sadr’s newspaper …
My neighbor is a master gardener and demonstrates her growing skill with more elaborate, more beautiful gardens every year. Before she studied gardening, her backyard was an overgrown, poison ivy-infested hillside sloping down toward the St. Joseph River …
Mennonite Church USA has committed itself to being “missional.” What does that mean? And what is the responsibility of leadership in leading the church into being missional? …
Mediaculture first appeared in the Feb. 17, 1998, issue of a new magazine called The Mennonite. In that column I outlined the purposes of the column and wrote, “We swim in an ocean of media and culture without thinking about it or analyzing how it might affect us” …
The economy is in recession. Our denomination is shrinking in size; membership is aging. This is the milieu in which Mennonite Church USA looks for a new executive director—the top staff position in the church …
The economic crash of 2008 was essentially a spiritual problem of unregulated greed and uncontrolled selfishness—the dark side of free market enterprise …
