Glimpses of Mennonite History


Book Description







No Strings Attached


Book Description

No Strings Attached is the story of a Mennonite congregation in Indiana that existed for eighty-six years. The congregation began during the social and religious turmoil of the 1920s when some Mennonites in North America held to rigid doctrines and ethics implemented by central authority, and others operated with a congregational polity and became more assimilated into secular culture. The struggle between these two different understandings of faithfulness was most passionately played out in northern Indiana. Placing the narrative of this congregation within the context of 500 years of Mennonite history illustrates the grace and the tension that has both beset and empowered a unique group of people who began as radical reformers. Although no strings attached refers to the women's headwear during the 1920s, which had no strings, it could also be the story of the pastor eating lunch on the peak of the steep roof of the church building! Reflecting on stories of these Mennonite people is an invitation to move into the future with courageous hope. Believing and behaving differently has not prevented Middlebury Mennonites from treating each other respectfully, living in a community of love, joy, and peace, and offering God's healing and hope to each other and to the world.




Tradition and Transition


Book Description

This one hundred year story of the Amish church depicts the survival of the believers in the early part of the nineteenth century. Revealing the agony of the Great Schism of 1865 which fractured the Amish church, Yoder reveals the coming maturity of the Old Order Amish and the Amish Mennonites, who merged with the Mennonites early in the twentieth century. This book sheds light on the identity and heritage of faith and lifestyle of today's Amish and many Mennonites, and posits that although they hold in common the basic Christian faith, differences in their patterns of obedience remain.




Shipshewana


Book Description

A cultural history of a northern Indiana Amish community and its success in maintaining itself and resisting assimilation into the larger culture. While most books about the Amish focus on the Pennsylvania settlements or on the religious history of the sect, this book is a cultural history of one Indiana Amish community and its success in resisting assimilation into the larger culture. Amish culture has persisted relatively unchanged primarily because the Amish view the world around them through the prism of their belief in collective salvation based on purity, separation, and perseverance. Would anything new add or detract from the community’s long-term purpose? Seen through this prism, most innovation has been found wanting. Founded in 1841, Shipshewana benefited from LaGrange County’s relative isolation. As Dorothy O. Pratt shows, this isolation was key to the community’s success. The Amish were able to develop a stable farming economy and a social structure based on their own terms. During the years of crisis, 1917–1945, the Amish worked out ways to protect their boundaries that would not conflict with their basic religious principles. As conscientious objectors, they bore the traumas of World War I, struggled against the Compulsory School Act of 1921, negotiated the labyrinth of New Deal bureaucracy, and labored in Alternative Service during World War II. The story Pratt tells of the postwar years is one of continuing difficulties with federal and state regulations and challenges to the conscientious objector status of the Amish. The necessity of presenting a united front to such intrusions led to the creation of the Amish Steering Committee. Still, Pratt notes that the committee’s effect has been limited. Crisis and abuse from the outer world have tended only to confirm the desire of the Amish to remain a people apart, and lends a special poignancy to this engrossing tale of resistance to the modern world. “In this careful community study, Pratt (a professor and assistant dean at Notre Dame) analyzes the tension between assimilation and cultural distinctiveness among the northern Indiana Amish in the 19th and 20th centuries. . . . A worthy case study of resistance to change.” —Publishers Weekly




Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War


Book Description

Explores the moral dilemmas faced by various religious sects and how these groups struggled to come to terms with the effects of wartime Americanization-- without sacrificing their religious beliefs and values.







War, Peace, and Social Conscience


Book Description

John Howard Yoder is one of the best-known Mennonite thinkers on peace. But before Yoder there was Guy F. Hershberger, whose reflections on war, violence and peace helped Mennonites navigate perilous times in early to mid-20th century, and who also laid the foundation for what became the Alternative Service Program in the U.S. during World War II. In the 1960s, he played an important role in guiding the Mennonite church’s response to the civil rights movement—nudging them toward greater openness to Martin Luther King’s call for justice for African-Americans. In this definitive biography, Theron F. Schlabach shows how Hershberger helped Christians live their faith in a world beset by war and injustice, at the same time pioneering creative ways to engage pressing concerns such as civil rights, economic justice and capital punishment. Says Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School: “What Schlabach has given us is an invaluable, honest account of a life lived in the tensions of the Mennonite church as that church explored the implications of being a people committed to nonviolence. The resulting account is a crucial account not only of Hershberger’s life, but of Mennonite life—an accounting I hope non-Mennonites will find instructive because it may help them understand Mennonites, but more importantly how Mennonites help us better understand what being Christian entails.” War, Peace, and Social Conscience: Guy F. Hershberger and Mennonite Ethics was made possible through the generous support of Mennonite Mutual Aid and the Mennonite Historical Society.




Peace, Faith, Nation


Book Description

'Peace, Faith, Nation' tells the story of Mennonite and Amish life in nineteenth-century America -- stories of families, of churches, of communities. It tells of work and play, of moving and settling, of struggling with citizenship, of various means (including the Old Order ways) of church renewal. It is a Mennonite history but also an American history. At its heart it tells of response to the nationalist, individualistic, aggressive, and progressive spirit of America. Most Mennonites were quiet, peace-oriented, communal, and humility-minded. Yet the American spirit beckoned -- especially as it often came through Protestant revivalism and promised religious renewal.