This piece was originally published on October 13, 2022 on the Anabaptist Historians blog
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.
This article was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of MennoMedia’s Leader Magazine. Illustration of George Blaurock generated using DALL-E by Tim Nafziger, August 26, 2024
As Mennonites and other Anabaptists prepare to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism, we are marking the anniversary of January 21, 1525, when George Blaurock and Conrad Grebel gathered with others for a secret meeting in the house of Felix Manz in Zurich, Switzerland.
Earlier that day these reformers had lost a contentious theological debate in the city. Zurich city council had declared their meetings illegal and ordered them to baptize all their unbaptized children. Yet those gathered felt the bible was leading them differently: baptism should be an adult decision upon confession of faith. Blaurock turned to Grebel and asked him to baptize him. As the story goes, Grebel obliged and Blaurock became the first Anabaptist: twice baptized.
But this story is only one part of the Anabaptist origins. It is a story that has been told to intentionally minimize the stories of other radical reformers.
Before we tell the full origin story, let’s go 499 years forward to another January morning, this one in 2024. It’s January 16 and over a hundred Mennonites are walking through the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. This is part of the Capitol complex: “temple of our Democracy” according to house speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Those gathered are part of a group called Mennonite Action calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. On a pre-arranged signal, they all sit down. It is a creative disruption, like Jesus’ nonviolent direct action in the temple in Mark 11:11-19. Rather than pulling out a whip, the Anabaptists sit down and began singing hymns until they are arrested by Capitol police.
Mennonite Action is building on the work of groups like Pink Menno, Community Peacemaker Teams and On Earth Peace. These are Anabaptist-rooted groups who have gone beyond conscientious objection to actively working for justice and peace. They have often faced pushback from Mennonites who are more focused on personal holiness and traditional ideas of nonresistance.
August 27, 2024 Anabaptism, Four Streams of Anabaptism Series, Mennonite Action, Nonviolence, Peace & Peacemaking, Politics, Power, Social movements Read more >
This essay was originally published in Anabaptist World in July 2022 as Quilts and Power: What Malcolm Gladwell is missing about Mennonites
On June 22, author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell published an essay on his participation in a Mennonite wedding in the town where he grew up in southern Ontario. Gladwell opens the piece by summarizing his previous coverage of Mennonites and expressing his deep affection for our community.
Gladwell writes enthusiastically that Mennonites are a “low power distance” culture. Power distance is a term from sociology that refers to the extent to which people of low status accept unequal distribution of power. In other words, Gladwell is saying Mennonites are wary of hierarchy. He says we have abandoned “the aggressive pursuit of status markers.”
Resisting political domination and illegitimate authority are at the core of Anabaptism. However, Gladwell’s public relations campaign on our behalf is problematic. Here’s why: Mennonites do have status markers, they are just different (sometimes) from those of dominant culture in the U.S. and Canada. If you advertise Mennonites as having no status markers, you set up false expectations that will lead to disillusionment by people who start attending Mennonite churches. (more…)
August 27, 2023 Mennonite Church USA, Politics, Power, Privilege Read more >
For the last few weeks I’ve been hearing a lot about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that can tell stories, write code and answers questions. My brother had told me he’d had it write code for him and then correct bugs in the code when he pointed it out to ChatGPT. I was intrigued. I’d experimented some with Stable Diffusion that generates art based on prompts and also with short stories written by AI, but the buzz on the internet seemed to indicate this chat bot was taking things to a new level.
This evening I finally sat down to try it out. I started by asking ChatGPT to generate some Amish romance stories set in space, which it dutifully did with fairly cliched results. Then I moved on to a a much more obscure sub-genre: Amish Cyberpunk. This is a microgenre of which I am a huge fan boy. There’s only three novels in it that I am aware, all by author Stephen Beachy. If you want to hear more about it, check out this podcast interview I did on his first Amish Cyberpunk Novel: Zeke and the Singularity.
I thought that Amish Cyberpunk would provide a novel challenge for ChatGPT: combining a well known religious community (which many of my ancestors were part of) with a well known science fiction genre. (more…)
December 13, 2022 Peace & Peacemaking, Stories, Technology, Theology Read more >
This was originally posted on Facebook on February 12, 2008.
I just read John McCain’s victory speech after today’s Republican primaries. This passage caught my eye:
It’s interesting to read this passage in light of Confessions of an Econonomic Hit Man by John Perkins which I’m just finishing. The book is a highly readable exposé of Perkin’s own role in America’s “mistakes” – actually America’s tremendous success in building a global corporatocracy. It’s this corporatocracy that has directly (see Mujahideen) and indirectly nurtured corrosive grievance into extremism. (more…)
February 12, 2022 Economics, empire, patriotism, Politics Read more >
In understanding the storming of the capitol one year ago today I’d like to focus on the framework of the “armed flash mob,” a term used by scholar Darrell Miller that connects with concepts introduced to me by Bill Wasik, an article in Wired magazine 10 years ago. I’m also drawing on the 40 minute NY Times’ documentary Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol (published June 30, 2021) that offers minute by minute analysis of January 6, 2021 drawn from thousands of primary sources including a lot of video from the rioters themselves.
I’ll look at each term in the phrase “armed flash mob” in detail in the context of that day.
We’ll begin by understanding how the insurrectionists on January 6 functioned in ways familiar to scholars of mob behavior. One of the key moments in the storming of the capitol happened at 12:50 pm. “Day of Rage” covers this moment in detail starting at about 10:00 in the video. They emphasize the role of the Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs and his brief conversation with Ryan Samsel, a Trump supporter who was the first to approach the police and challenge them. While leaders like this played an important role, it is important to understand the broader context of the crowd dynamics (both in this moment and as things escalted) to violently attack police. (more…)
January 6, 2022 Journalism, Polarization, Police, Power, Social Media, Social movements, Technology, Violence Read more >
This was originally published by Tim Nafziger in Jesus Radicals on December 18, 2010
The arrest of Assange and attacks on Mastercard, Visa and Paypal by “Operation Payback” have garnered far more attention than the cables themselves. Their denial of service attacks shut down these major sites by loading the site over and over again very quickly. The real world equivalent might be a huge crowd of people showing up to the mall with no intentions of shopping so that no one could get in to shop.
The New York Times quoted one Internet guru comparing Operation Payback to the battle at Lexington that started the Revolutionary war in the United States. (more…)
Photo: Participants at the February 2017 Hope for the Future gatherings. From left to right: Rafael Barahona, Calenthia Dowdy, Ann Jacobs, Evelin Gonzalez and Colleen Whigham-Brockington. Photo by Jenny Perez Castro.
This piece was originally published in June 2017 in The Mennonite magazine.
It’s been seven months since I last wrote in this space about the results of the U.S. presidential election. Since then the broader shape of Trumpism has become clearer: there is a growing wave of misogynist and openly white supremacist groups in the United States that are emboldened to target women, Muslims, immigrants, black people and many others.
For many of us who are white, this feels new and different, but for peoples indigenous to this continent and for people of color, this is simply a highly visible form of what they’ve faced for a long time. My friend Dr. Joe Pruitt recently told me the story of his father, a black man, who fled the south after he received lynching threats due to his friendliness with white women. Closer to home and more recently, my friend Raul Lopez talked about visiting the Ojai valley in California, where I live. As a young man (10 years ago), he and his friends were followed around by white men in white pickup trucks who made it very clear he that he and his friends were not welcome. That hatred is invisible to me as a white person. (more…)
February 15, 2021 antiracism, Mennonite Church USA, Peace & Peacemaking Read more >
This post was co-written by Tim Nafziger and Mark van Steenwyk in 2017 (see original) in response to the backlash against anti-fascists actions in Charlottesville, Virginian in August 2017. We’re reposting it with a new title because it feels even more relevant today as we watch the white liberal response to the burning of the police precinct building in Minneapolis last night. If you’re not a pacifist, see what happens when you substitute the word “liberal” for “pacifist.” If you aren’t Mennonite, consider what our message might look like to your own community.
This is the second in a series of pieces we’ve co-written. This article builds on our first together in 2010: Oppression analysis on its own isn’t enough: Becoming an Ally
In the last two months, in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, we’ve read many white people in my Mennonite community and others committed to nonviolence reiterating their commitment to peace. In a recent article for Anabaptist historians, Tobin Miller-Sherer describes these “smug and satisfied declarations about the superiority of nonviolence” as “bumptious.” This is a good word because Mennonites are extremely skilled at being proud in a humble way.
Why? Let’s take a closer look.
White Mennonites are eager to love their Neo-Nazi enemies who showed up in Charlottesville on August 12, but Mennonite pastor Isaac Villegas calls us to be more honest about who their enemies are: (more…)
May 29, 2020 Nonviolence, Polarization, Police, Police Brutality, Politics Read more >
This morning’s NY Times piece, “How It All Came Apart for Bernie Sanders” is a must read for every supporter of the Sanders campaign. It’s not a pleasant article, but learning from mistakes is critical collective work, even when it happens in a painful public way. While the focus of my political work has not been electoral campaigns, I think we have to recognize that the Bernie movement is inextricably tied to electoral politics. So it must, to some extent, submit to measuring itself by that framework, which is the focus on the NY Times piece. It must also grapple with a grasroots movement measuring stick as well given that the campaign claimed that mantle. Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin do not speak that language and so I will try to do some extrapolation work from their journalism. (more…)
March 21, 2020 empire, Politics, Power, President Read more >
This poem was written two and a half years ago when I heard of the assasination of Michael J Sharp in the Congo. This poem previously published here. MJ was a contributor here on YAR for a few years. You can read his blog posts here.
We planted lima beans the morning after
villagers found MJ’s body.
The rotund little green dumplings
nestling to the damp earth
He nestled in a shallow grave with Zaida and Betu
along the road from from Bukonde to Tshimbulu in Kasai.
In a few weeks those dumplings will bust up, burst out
and wind their way above our highest hedges.
So this is what it feels like when a friend
(smiling smart blackjack shark, wisecracking lark, goofball genius, fingernail biting adventurer, rainbow vacuum salesman, globe-trotting strategist, adorable hunk, creative critical mind, mass grave documenter, consummate UN professional, Johnny Walker philosopher, lock picking ninja, Mennonite golden boy, rebel leader networker (at church), slightly bespectacled gadget nerd (according to the New York Times if you trust them), loyal comrade, Hot Doug’s line-waiter, burnt out social justice warrior, charismatic conversationalist, noble old soul, pugnacious puppy trainer, binge watching Netflix enthusiast, reconciliator, frequent flier, subversive prankster punk, bright brave peace worker, canny researcher, francophone fish, dummie teller, smooth talking soccer jock, sarcastic lover, humble impresario, fast talking militia deserter recruiter, board game geek, persistent investigator, fiercely independent expert, earnest-really-doing-that-swords-to-plowshares-thing-we-all-talk-about-doing-in-a-way-that-makes-us-feel-a-little-awkward-but-we’d-never-admit-it type, tuxedoed porsche driver, cherry eating long-distance trekker, bantering buddy, authoritarian undermining report writer, box free thinker, charming diplomat, cool calm calculated political operator, lovable troublemaker and texas hold-em chip supplier)*
becomes a seed.
*Thanks to all of you who have contributed to this compilation of memories of MJ on social media and elsewhere over the past two days. Each story shines new light on his life for the rest of us. This poem is expandable. Feel free to leave your own alliterative adjective and noun pairs in the footer.
Two years after the election of Donald Trump as the next president in the U.S. it is easy to feel like there’s nothing left to say. However, I want to engage with my family of faith: Mennonites stretched across this country and far beyond who are committed to living out Jesus’ call to shalom: peace with justice.
Understanding where we are
One way of understanding the transition we are in is that we have moved to a higher awareness of the structural injustice we have in the U.S. over the last two years. For some of us, this is very scary. For others of us, it might be energizing to realize that now everyone can clearly and unmistakably see the power of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism and homophobia in our country. At the same time, it’s clear that LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, people of color, and those with high health care needs are bearing the brunt of the Trump presidency.
I was a reservist with Christian Peacemaker Teams living in London in 2005 during the kidnapping of Norman Kember, Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney and Tom Fox. Today is the 13th anniversary of the date they were taken.
On that last day of ordinary time
Norman, Harmeet, Jim and Tom walk across a parking lot
in Baghdad and get into a van.
Years later, Jim can’t remember “those last, unremarkable motions.”
The next morning (the first Sunday of Advent)
The BBC called me at noon.
The voice at the other end of the line was chasing rumors:
We heard that four members of Christian Peacemaker Teams were kidnapped.
What do you know?
What if Christians took the same risks for peace…
The van exits the lot, abruptly stops;
Men with big guns open the door,
shove the four to the floor
and into the tomb.
This post was originally published on my blog for The Mennonite two years ago
This week we’ve seen audio of Donald Trump’s bragging about sexual assault open up a nationwide conversation about rape culture, which is the set of beliefs and ideologies which blame victims of sexualized violence and normalize sexualized violence, often by men (for more, see this series of definitions).
U.S. Presidential elections are like conversations around a giant water cooler. For a brief time the themes in the elections shape our conversations in the U.S. (and beyond) for better or for worse. These spaces are an opportunity for us.
In the last day, three more women have stepped forward to describe Trump groping, assaulting and kissing them without consent. These accounts join a long list of existing allegations against Trump by women. Two of these stories were reported in The New York Times and one in People magazine.
September 21, 2018 Sexism, sexual abuse, Social movements Read more >
Note: This piece was first published two years ago on my blog for The Mennonite. It was written in response to the 2016 shooting of police offers in Dallas by Michael Xavier Johnson.
In the wake of the shootings of police and civilians in Dallas, many voices are blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and the growing opposition to police violence and white supremacy. But now more than ever we need movements of committed, militant nonviolence.
Shootings like the one in Dallas grow out of what scholar Ron Mock calls corrosive grievance. These are grievances that build up over time around injustice that is not addressed: the injustice of the mass incarceration of black men in our country, racial inequality in of the U.S. education system and the healthcare system and many other layers of systemic racism. For more, watch this 2 minute video from Mennonite training organization Roots of Justice:
Grievances about these injustices become corrosive when people feel powerless and unheard. In his blog post yesterday Mennonite activist theologian Ched Myers reminded us of John F. Kennedy’s observation along these lines 55 years ago: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
September 10, 2018 Nonviolence, Social justice, Tactics Read more >