I want to know how to pray. It’s December 2021. Advent. A season of waiting. Everything is waiting. Waiting for the pandemic to be over. Waiting for our leaders to start acting like we’re in a climate emergency. Waiting for our hemisphere to tilt back into the light. We are hunkered down for our second COVID Christmas, separated from what we need most: each other. Meanwhile, in British Columbia, the city of Abbotsford is under water. The town of Merritt has been evacuated. Fifteen thousand people across British Columbia have fled their homes. 628,000 chickens have drowned. 420 dairy cows and ..read more

Puff U2’s “One Tree Hill” is a hymn that is both grief-laden and hope-filled, a hope shaped by Christological themes (“U2’s Mennonite string section,” May 5). I was looking forward to reflections on the intersections between the faith and spirituality of U2 and Mennonite faith and spirituality. That would have been rich. What I experienced instead was a puff piece touting that Russian Mennonites are no longer locked into a cultural backwater. We have made it. Some of us have played with what many consider the greatest rock and roll band in the world. It was a piece more suited to a magazine f ..read more

I’m not certain this is a good idea, but I’m going to tell you about four things in this issue of the magazine that don’t sit well with me. If that seems counterintuitive to you, it does to me too. Some intuitions are worth countering. I’ll circle round at the end to dial back the tension. First, I feel uneasy about articles written in a way that might sideline readers who do not share the “progressive” assumptions of the writer. Josiah Neufeld’s feature feels too much like this to me, though he does mention the Wet’suwet’en leaders who want activists to butt out. Writing that overlooks ..read more

Puff U2’s “One Tree Hill” is a hymn that is both grief-laden and hope-filled, a hope shaped by Christological themes (“U2’s Mennonite string section,” May 5). I was looking forward to reflections on the intersections between the faith and spirituality of U2 and Mennonite faith and spirituality. That would have been rich. What I experienced instead was a puff piece touting that Russian Mennonites are no longer locked into a cultural backwater. We have made it. Some of us have played with what many consider the greatest rock and roll band in the world. It was a piece more suited to a magazine f ..read more

Menno House was formed by a group of young Mennonite students and recent graduates living in Toronto in 1956. The aim was to provide support and community to Mennonite students in the city. The group became involved in youth leadership at Toronto United Mennonite Church. Young Mennonite women attended events, though the residence remained open only to men. One resident estimated that “hundreds of people” lived at Menno House during its lifetime; in addition to the core group, some came for short-term courses or the MCC “Students-in-Industry” summer work-study program. For more historical phot ..read more

I recall sitting through church services as a child, being even more bored with the pastor’s long prayer than I was by the sermon. During the sermon I could look around at people and out the windows, but during the prayer I had to sit even more still, with my head down, looking only at the floor. As a young adult learning about worship in the Anglican church, I was initially surprised by the reverence given to the Book of Common Prayer, which sat right beside the Bible and the hymnal in the pew racks and was used more often than the other books during worship. With time, I learned to apprecia ..read more

The world has become heterogeneous. We live in an era of cultural boundarilessness. Go to the nearest McDonald’s and see who is sitting there. Tune into CBC’s My Farmland, in which a Chinese immigrant family move to rural Saskatchewan. (I also know a Korean Mennonite family, farming in the barren land of New Brunswick.) In this cross-cultural context, I see no excuse for a church not to be culturally heterogenous. To say, “No, our church is in a rural area or, no, our community is so small,” seems a bit thin. Thom S. Rainer, the founder of Church Answers and author of Autopsy of a Deceased Ch ..read more

Sarah Hodges-Kolisnyk approaches art through the lens of storytelling. “My journey as an artist and a curator has always been linked to exploring the world and sharing stories with others,” she says. “I approach everything with a questioning and a searching for the story, and hoping those stories bring people together.” Since April 2022, Hodges-Kolisnyk has served as director of the Mennonite Heritage Centre (MHC) Gallery at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) in Winnipeg. She is the gallery’s second-ever director, following the retirement of founder Ray Dirks in July 2021. Born and raised in ..read more

A recent fire forced the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Furniture Thrift Store in Winnipeg to temporarily close its doors due to smoke and water damage. A vacant house beside the shop went up in flames on May 11, just after 1 a.m., with the cause of the fire still under investigation. Laurie Goetz, store manager, told Canadian Mennonite the store will be closed for approximately a month. Their stock was not severely affected, as the furniture and fabric appear in good condition and Goetz’s team is working on assessments and repairs as needed. The blaze had more of an impact on the building ..read more

Nearly 100 years have passed since 21,000 Mennonites fled disease, starvation and violence in some of the same areas now experiencing war in Ukraine. Many came to Southern Manitoba, and their trauma quietly came with them. In the last year, I took a sabbatical from my work as a counselling therapist at Brandon University in Brandon, Manitoba, to interview Mennonite women about the intergenerational impact of the trauma experienced in southern Russia in the 1920s. The people who migrated are gone, but their daughters and granddaughters, who I interviewed, carry stories of horror far beyond wha ..read more