Kerry Fast The final post in our “Women Talking” series comes from Dr. Kerry Fast. She has a PhD from the Department of Religion, University of Toronto. She has published several articles about Old Colony and is currently working on a research project on Steinbach Pride. I have been asked to write about the religious lives of Old Colony women in Bolivia.[1] But I want to do more than that. I want to rethink what religious lives are. I, therefore, focus not so much on what Old Colony women believe and the meaning of specific religious practices they engage in (e.g., kneeling in prayer) as what ..read more

Rosanna Formanek Hess Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) was active in post-World War 2 (WW2) relief ministries, caring for tens of thousands of refugees across Western Europe. The distribution of packages, sent from Mennonite congregations in the United States, brought joy, hope, and gratitude to their recipients, Mennonites and non-Mennonites alike. Many of those beneficiaries found donors’ names and addresses in their packages and wrote letters expressing their sentiments. During those years, my grandparents, John and Mary Godshall Forman, attended the Franconia Mennonite Church, in Franconi ..read more

This week’s post comes from Anabaptist Historians’ contributor Rebecca Janzen. She is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Dr. Janzen is a scholar of gender, disability and religious studies in Mexican literature and culture whose research focuses on excluded populations in Mexico.   This blog post will contextualize Women Talking by examining the events on which it is based and alluding to the history of the portrayals of Old Colony Mennonites across the Americas. Women Talking (dir. Sarah Polley, 2022) is based on Mir ..read more

Starting tomorrow, March 9, and running weekly through April 13, Anabaptist Historians will feature a series of posts around the theme of “Women Talking: The Dilemma of Fight or Flight for Historic Female Anabaptists.” Using as its starting point the critically acclaimed film, Women Talking, this series features the work of female contributors as they explore the stories of women throughout Anabaptist history who faced the decision—to varying degrees—of challenging or leaving the religious communities of which they were a part. Its intent is to highlight the work of female scholars and the his ..read more

In 2019 the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietists Studies at Elizabethtown College purchased the Clarence E. Spohn Collection. Spohn, a life-long resident of Ephrata, worked at the Ephrata Cloister from 1968-1996, serving as Museum Educator from 1988-1996.  The collection includes rare imprints from printers active in Ephrata from 1745 to about 1830, as well as artifacts pertaining to the Ephrata community (Ephrata Cloister), records and notes pertaining to legal transactions about the property, and Spohn’s copious research notes.  The collection is the single most important group ..read more

By Samuel Boucher When leaving the gates of our tightly knit Mennonite community, and we´re often asked, ¨What’s your nationality?¨ in a language, we may or may not understand well, the answer becomes messy very quickly, ‘I’m Mexican, holding a Canadian citizen, I don’t really speak Spanish or English, I speak Plautdietsch which is a non-written language, and the High German written language I was supposed to learn I didn’t really learn.1 On a cold February morning during the Canadian winter, the bedroom window was completely frosted. I shuffled out of my make-shift bed in the home office of ..read more

John Thiesen The Mennonite Library and Archives recently received a box of papers of Heinrich H. Epp (1857-1933), who was a minister in the Bethesda Mennonite Church in Henderson, Nebraska, for many decades and elder of the congregation 1910-1924. As I unpacked the box, a folded-up document caught my attention when I noticed the signature “Maggie Leonard, Mennonite Mission, Darlington, Ind. Terr.” Margaret/Maggie Leonard, first person baptized at Darlington, Oklahoma, mission in 1888; this photo probably taken while she was attending school in Halstead, Kansas (Mennonite Library and Archives ..read more

The Mennonite/s Writing conference was September 30 to October 2, 2022 at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana. It was a meaningful space for me of cross-pollination, listening and learning. Here are a few highlights for folks who weren’t able to attend and might be interested. You can read the full schedule here. Thursday  On the afternoon of September 29 Julia Kasdorf and Steven Rubin led us in a four hour pre-conference workshop on documentary photography. They were inspired by the work of writers and photographers funded during the Works Progress Administration. As part of the workshop t ..read more

Pandora Press has had an interesting history leading up to the present, and this year has seen significant changes in its leadership, vision, and publishing model. Founded in the 1990s by C. Arnold Snyder, an historian at Conrad Grebel University College, and continued by Christian Snyder in the 2010s culminating with the publication of Jo Snyder’s The Vegan Mennonite Kitchen, Pandora Press is now – as they say – under new management. Following many fruitful conversations with Christian Snyder in 2021, as of January 2022 I am now the Director of Pandora Press. To say the very least, I am thril ..read more

Richard, first I’d like to congratulate you! The publication of Menno’s Descendants in Quebec has been a long time in the making! Could you speak a bit about your background? You grew up in Quebec, in the home of a United Church of Canada minister and have worked as an ordained United Church minister, pastoring a joint Anglican and United Church parish in Northern Quebec. You have also trained at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and have been a member of both Mennonite Church Eastern Canada (Mennonite Church Canada) and are now with the Mennonite Brethren. In all of this you have told m ..read more