The annual issue of Bethel College’s journal Mennonite Life is now live for 2024. The current issue of the online-only journal can be viewed at ml.bethelks.edu
During this calendar year, Mennonite communities across the Great Plains of North America are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the migration of thousands of Mennonites from the Russian Empire.
In this issue of Mennonite Life, Mark Jantzen and Rod Ratzlaff offer versions of talks they gave earlier this year as part of the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum in Goessel, Kan., year-long marking of the anniversary.
Rachel Pannabecker, lead researcher, introduces the Indigo Textile Project, which is a piece of Kauffman Museum at Bethel College’s commemoration of the anniversary.
And Mark Jantzen also describes the work of one prominent immigrant to Marion County, Kansas, Wilhelm Ewert, to defend the Anabaptist principle of nonresistance against another Mennonite pastor shortly before Ewert left Europe for America.
The 2024 issue also has Bethel College archivist John Thiesen’s look at a “German Mennonite Western” from the 19th century; Tabor College professor Chris Dick’s article about the socialist vision, in the early 20th century, of a radical young newspaper editor, J.G. Ewert; and Maxwell Kennel’s interviews Ron Tiessen, author of the novel Menno in Athens (Pandora Press, 2022).
The essay section rounds out with the two Hartzler Bible Lectures given at Bethel College in March of this year by César García and Sandra Báez of Mennonite World Conference – a reminder that while North American Anabaptist history might be cradled in a relatively small piece of eastern Europe, today’s Anabaptist community literally circles the globe.
The 2024 issue also contains reviews of 10 recent books, comprising two treatments of what it means to face climate change and commit to care for creation; a collection of essays on Mennonite literature; three volumes of poetry; a deep history of family land in Oklahoma that has its author wrestling with settler colonialism; a discussion of “theapoetics” in Mennonite literature; a follow-up to the popular 2015 “Naked Anabaptist” that looks at “New Anabaptists”; and a set of essays “toward a Mennonite dramaturgy.”
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel ranks at #23 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of “Best Regional Colleges Midwest” for 2023-24. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see https://www.bethelks.edu
