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ABSTRACT: The author uses three quotations from Jedediah Purdy’s ThisLandIsOurLandto structure her discussion of a commonwealth, the kind of politics needed today, and reciprocal flourishing. She surveys William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” and the dream of a “peaceable kingdom,” and ruminates on her family’s history in Pennsylvania, romantic Mennonite agrarianism, “restorative nostalgia,” settler colonialism, and radical visions of hope. The author observes that valuable themes persist in “our best old dream��”: e.g., the rationale for the Germantown Quaker PetitionAgainstSlavery(1688), was simply Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

If you draw a perfect X across the breadth of Pennsylvania, the lines will intersect just about where ThisLandis Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth[1] rests on my desk. Delivered as a series of lectures in New York City, Jedediah Purdy’s fine, narrative essays invite me, as stories often do, to reflect on my own place here in northern Appalachia. Not until I undertook a documentary poetry project that took me out to listen to people—really, anyone who cared to talk about their own experiences with gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking)—did I come to see how deeply I care about this place and to recognize what a rare privilege it is to live, even in the middle of nowhere, if your people have resided there for a long time. Particular memories stick and old dreams abide if you have been too stubborn, poor, religiously plain, or otherwise disinclined to move. Thinking alongside Purdy from this place, then, I look for whatever resources and experiences from here might orient us toward more just relationships with one another and the earth. All the while I wonder how a material commonwealth can be realized out of language—whether the words of human longing or law.

I

“. . . a commonwealth is not a gauzy utopian ideal: it is radical and practical.”[2]

Maybe the dream tracks back to the idea of Eden: Adam and Eve in the garden, naked and vegan, naming the beasts like poets speaking their truths, never needing to kill or till the earth for food or to shear or skin or sew their own clothing. The dream appears in the Sermon on the Mount as a list of reversals for “the blessed”—the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for righteousness’s sake. Not a fantasy projected into a life beyond this one but a possibility, the dream inspires us work to create a just and peaceable “kingdom of heaven” on earth. Except that we have to live on this earth in the meantime, the mean times.

A more specific dream of a commonwealth emerged around 1681 after King Charles II of England gave William Penn full proprietary rights to one of the largest tracts of land ever granted to an individual in the history of the world. The land came as payment for debts owed to William’s father, Sir Admiral William Penn, a Royal Navy Officer who established Jamaica Station at Port Royal, Jamaica, then sat in the House of Commons for a decade when he wasn’t visiting his confiscated estate in Ireland. The younger William Penn, trained as a lawyer and jailed for his Quaker beliefs in England, while still in his 30s dreamed of creating a province where religious dissenters and persecuted pacifists could live in peace with their indigenous neighbors. As for the Swedes already settled in what would become Pennsylvania, Penn wrote:

For you are now fixed at the mercy of no governor that comes to make his fortune great; you shall be governed by laws of your own making and live a free, and if you will, a sober and industrious life. I shall not usurp the right of any, or oppress his person. God has furnished me with a better resolution and has given me his grace to keep it.[3]

War, global capital, and empire underwrote Penn’s “Holy Experiment”—a peaceable dream realized through settler colonialism— which inspired leaders for as long as the Quakers were in charge here, about 80 years.

Among those whom Penn would invite to join his Holy Experiment were Mennonites who had moved up the Rhine Valley out of Switzerland into the Palatinate at the invitation of Elector Palatine Karl Ludwig, a grandson of England’s King James I. Having proven themselves capable of working marginal lands in the Jura Mountains, the Swiss Mennonites cleared forests, drained swamps, and restored Karl Ludwig’s fields and herds that had been destroyed by the Thirty Years’ War, in return for religious tolerance but not citizenship.

Mennonites from the Palatinate who were converted by Quaker preachers before they migrated to the New World were among those who drafted and signed the 1688 Germantown Quaker PetitionAgainstSlavery, which asserted the equality of enslaved Africans with all other people. The document is strange, written by immigrants not fluent in English and unfamiliar with Anglocentric colonial culture. Unlike the British Friends, Mennonites from Germany and Holland were unaccustomed to seeing slaves used in the production of wealth, so they recognized the contradiction between Quaker spiritual values and their everyday practice. Thereafter, the morality of slaveholding was debated among Friends in Philadelphia for nearly a hundred years, until in 1776 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting formulated a statement banning slaveholding in Pennsylvania. Rediscovered and preserved in 2005, the original 1688 petition remains important as the first universal human rights statement issued by Europeans in the New World, an inspiration to abolitionists.[4]

For as long as I can remember, Penn’s Holy Experiment has persisted as the cartoon of a dream repeatedly rendered by the early 19th-century Quaker sign painter Edward Hicks. Hicks’s 60-odd versions of the motif he called “The Peaceable Kingdom” depict a legendary meeting between William Penn with other Englishmen  and  Tamanend,  Chief  of  Chiefs and Chief of the Turtle Clan of the Lenni-Lenape nation in the Delaware Valley, with other Lenape chiefs of the Turtle Clan under the great elm tree at Shackamaxon. That encounter takes place in the background. Wild and domestic animals crowd the foreground, lion and lamb of Isaiah 11 at rest with a European child or several children near a river, surrounded by dense forest.[5] Serene beasts, farm animals, and sweet-faced white children dwarf the distant, mythic conversation between Europeans and the first people at a spot now marked within the boundaries of Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.

Although  “the  Great   Treaty”   is   mentioned   in   transcriptions of subsequent meetings between Penn and Lenape leaders, that first conversation was preserved only in oral tradition and various imaginative renderings. Neither transaction nor treaty, the conversation persists in memory and artistic depiction as a pledge of abiding friendship and commitment to peaceful cohabitation in the words traditionally attributed to Chief Tamanend, “for as long as the creeks and rivers run, and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.” In addition to the paintings by Hicks (and later Benjamin West, commissioned for public relations purposes by Penn’s sons), a Lenape wampum belt showing two figures facing one another is said to memorialize the agreement.

In some versions of Hicks’s PeaceableKingdom, a young Christchild holding a grape vine nestles among the wild animals. A verse paraphrase of Isaiah 11 frames the image, sometimes cast in the future, sometimes in the past: sometimes dream, sometimes memory of the commonwealth. A retrospective version, now in the collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, refers directly to William Penn:

The wolf did with the lambkin dwell in peace

His grim carnivorous nature there did cease

The leopard with the harmless kid laid down

And not a savage beast was seen to frown

The lion with the fatling on did move

A little child was leading them in love;

When the great PENN his famous treaty made

With Indian chiefs beneath the Elm trees shade.[6]

In the syntax of these couplets, the wolf, leopard, and lion align with the British men, while the gentler lambkin, kid, and fatling seem to stand for the Indian chiefs. More could be said about the Lenape, characterized as “women” and peacemakers among North America’s indigenous peoples, but I will leave the scene there. What intrigues me is artistic repetition, persistent as nostalgia, stubborn as hope. All of the creatures—human and animal—appear to be equally serene gathered under the limbs of the great tree of life, of the knowledge of good and evil. “He began by making a league with the American Indians which were his neighbors. This is the only treaty between those persons and the Christians which has not been sworn to, and which has not been broken,” wrote Voltaire in 1764.[7]

Last spring, I spent a Saturday afternoon making phone calls to offer information and encouragement to voters who had received mail-in ballots for the upcoming primary election. As a number, name, and prompts popped up on my laptop, I’d hear a telephone ring somewhere in Philadelphia. If the person who answered stayed on the line to converse, the voice invariably registered as “Black” in my mind. The people who spoke with me were kind. Many had already returned their ballots. Nearly all agreed we need change. During the pandemic, homicide rates were soaring in the City of Brotherly Love, ranking it second only to Chicago.[8]

Sometimes people closed the conversation by saying, “Be blessed.” The phrase is a habit in some communities, a theological gesture, as only God can bless, or a simple wish for health and prosperity. In retrospect, I wonder whether this benediction alludes more literally to the Sermon on the Mount. Were those people wishing the well-intentioned “white” voice on a long distance call the blessings and curses of the Beatitudes? In these times of plague, hunger, inequity, and unchecked violence in the streets, might “be blessed” also be an imperative to join the poor in spirit, to mourn, to be meek, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure of heart, to be a peacemaker, and to be persecuted for righteousness’s sake?

II

“The ground that people stand on memorializes and divides them. What kind of politics could help people to turn and face one another?”[9]9

On a topographical map of eastern Pennsylvania, undulating concentric green lines trace the contours of foothills at the southern base of the Blue Mountain, which once served as a boundary between the British colony and French and Indian territory during the Seven Years’ War. Superimposed on that terrain are the outlines of tracts for which the first Amish settlers received survey warrants in the mid-18th century. Here’s my immigrant ancestor, Ulrich Speicher: 193½ acres warranted in 1752 and surveyed in 1755, beside a 13-acre tract surveyed for his son Michael in 1770. Apparently illiterate, Ulrich had scrawled a signatory mark beside his name on lists of men disembarking from the CharmingNancyat Philadelphia’s port in 1737. During the intervening 15 years, he probably worked off his passage and saved money to buy this land.

The map is held in an oversized folio, EarlyAmishLandGrantsinBerksCounty,Pennsylvania,published in 1990 by the Pequea Bruderschaft Library, an Amish outfit in Gordonville, Pennsylvania. A brief introduction to the book explains that the early Berks County settlers suffered “severe persecution” in their homeland because they would not baptize infants or worship God in a “state church.” Consequently, some were imprisoned, fined, even executed, and their children were taken from them and taught “the wisdom of the world.” They were compelled to flee from one place to another and worship in secret places, their religious books banned. “The government would not allow Anabaptists to own land. . . . This was the life of our forefathers in the European countries.” The author then describes the dangers of Atlantic crossings at that time—“In 1738, 600 emigrants died at sea and were buried in the depths of the ocean”—before praising the courage of the ancestors so determined to find a place where “they could live the life of a Christian.”

Explaining that Quakers were persecuted for their religion in England, the author further asserts that the land settled by Amish farmers was acquired from Penn himself “for a very reasonable price. His theory was to assist the poor people to find a home where religious freedom could be practiced.” In fact, Penn was dead by the time Amish settlers moved into the Tulpehocken watershed. The land was purchased from Thomas and Richard Penn, the grasping sons from the Proprietor’s second marriage. Has it always come down to a hunger for God and land?

The book of Amish land grants makes reference to previous human occupants of the area only once, by implication. A photograph of a stone house rests on the title page above the caption, “Hochstetler homestead, the site of the Hochstetler Massacre on September 21, 1757.” I will not recount that tale except to say that its persistent repetition in popular forms— children’s books, novels, even a Mennonite churchman narrating it for a celebrity on an episode of the television show WhoDo You Think You Are?— makes me think Mennonites need to control its meaning. The moral of that story always seems to come down to pacifist identity.[10]

On the edge of a farmer’s field in the Oley Valley near Reading, Pennsylvania, stands an oak tree, estimated to be 700 years old, that Lenape people hold sacred. They occasionally gather there to recall a time when their ancestors lived in that place and the tree had a powerful kind of medicine. In 2004 the Delaware (Lenape) Nation filed suit against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, seeking 314 acres of the more than a million acres appropriated by Thomas Penn through a notorious swindle orchestrated in 1737 known as “the Walking Purchase.” But the suit was dismissed. Some years ago, helping me to find my Amish ancestors’ land, historian John Ruth first showed me the Sacred Oak. I stretched my arms against the trunk for a photograph but could not reach even one-fifth of the way around, as I once held my arms partway around the old oak at Salm in the Vosges Mountains of what is now Alsace, France. Amish people had moved up out of Switzerland after 1690 and figured out a way to survive in that place, and their descendants finally became legal citizens and could own land there as a result of the French Revolution. They planted the tree in 1793 to commemorate their being granted special exemption from military service.

Around that time, a generation or two after Ulrich Speicher, the search for more and better land drove the Tulpehocken Amish west, as Lenape and other native people suffered what the Anabaptist ancestors had survived in Europe: hiding in secret places, forced migration, children separated from their parents and compelled to learn new forms of knowledge and faith.

In 1790, Amish people first arrived in the Kishoquillas Valley of central Pennsylvania, named for a Shawnee chief who befriended John Armstrong, an Irish civil engineer who came to Pennsylvania to work as a surveyor for the Penn family and later served as an officer in the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Now commonly called “Big Valley,” this is where my parents were born and raised, and where I lived briefly. As a boy, my father walked behind a horse and plow in those fields, sometimes pulling up arrowheads, quartz crystals, or limestone fossils studded with silver mollusks. What we call “mountains” around here—ridges, really—were once as high as the Himalayas. What we call “valleys” were once submerged under oceans. The earth holds it all, and we live on the layers, plowing, writing.

Mennonites from Lancaster County migrated north to settle unceded land along the Grand River in ��ݮ��Ƶ County, Ontario, after the Revolution. A man from Big Valley rode a horse to that settlement, sold it, and walked back—a distance of about 700 miles round-trip—twice, to gather enough money to buy land in Big Valley. That story is told to show how precious the place is, how hard we have worked—and how shrewdly mindful of markets we have been—as if such labor, like persecution, might somehow eclipse the memory of those others who also loved the place before us.

“If you own land, you have blood on your hands,” the late Jewish- American writer Jerome Badanes told me years ago when I came to know him at an artists’ colony. “Since the formation of Israel, the most significant cultural contribution of the Jews has been the invention of the Uzi!”[11] Blinded by romantic Mennonite agrarianism, I found his words almost impossible to absorb, and only now can I hear in his reference to “blood and land” the genocidal resonances and consequences of settler colonialism.

By the end of the 19th century, groups of Amish people, enabled by the Homestead Act, departed from the settlement in Big Valley for Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, and Oregon, places recently taken from tribes in the west. For most who stayed behind, land did not come easily. Both of my parents were born on tenant farms owned by absent, worldly landlords. Not until the prosperity of World War II could their fathers purchase modest homesteads. As a child I spent summers in Big Valley, and my affection for Holstein cows, pasture streams, a full and fragrant hay mow, and the barn that burned in 2001 has long fueled my writing. Considering the power of nostalgia in politics after the end of communism in eastern Europe, historian Svetlana Boym diagnoses the variety of nostalgia (nostos [home place] + algia [ache]) I feel, brooding as I often do on “the ambivalences of human longing and belonging.” This nostalgia she calls “reflective” and suggests that it has some uses beyond the production of literature, among them the interrogation of another kind of nostalgia she calls “restorative.”[12]

Restorative  nostalgia  makes  dubious  truth  claims  that  prop  up traditions that probably never existed, at least not in the pure forms it recalls. It fuels populist political movements with slogans such as “Make America Great Again,” whether championed by Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Trump’s restorative nostalgia underwrites the ideology of far-right groups that seek to expel or exclude outsiders with a rationale similar to the “blood and soil” ideology of the ��ölkischmovement that opposed modernity from the late19th century to the Nazi era in Germany and today inspires alt-right “Folkish” groups in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. When I recently drove by my Spicher family’s home farm in Big Valley,

I noticed a large Trump campaign sign stood in front of the implement shed. It was placed there by the local Republican party, my resident cousin told me apologetically (at least acknowledging the Amish Mennonite tradition of non-involvement in national politics), contending that it’s easier for farmers when the Republicans are in charge. Our home place is now the largest dairy in the county. Two Spicher brothers farm more than 900 acres, renting and owning some of the fields our grandfather tenant-farmed in the 1930s. They haul daily tanker-loads of milk to a grocery chain bottling plant to the east and a Land-O’-Lakes butter factory to the west. Almost 600 milk cows and 600 heifers produce enough manure to generate electricity for the dairy and five households, with some left over to sell back to the grid.

My cousins employ three local “retired” crop farmers and a crew of six short, dark-skinned men who live in a trailer on the property and milk the cows. I noticed bicycles propped against the side of the trailer—to ride to the milking parlor? Or to the Dollar Store, the Sharp Shopper, or the thrift shop down the road? The men come from rural parts of central America and are good with animals, I’m told. One has lived in Big Valley for six years without returning home. Two brothers on this farm and another on a dairy over the mountain send their wages home to a father who intends to purchase a coffee plantation in Guatemala. I guess these details were shared with me to show that those gentle herdsmen from the countryside have more in common with their employers than meets the eye.

Like the man who walked to Ontario to trade horses, my cousins have found a way to work an unpredictable, tight market and secure the family farm. Their workers come from a country where wealth distribution is among the most unequal in the world, and where crises caused by climate change are among the most severe. What contradictions do these men notice on the Spicher farm? Or are they solely focused on earning the funds impossible to obtain at home? More than three-quarters of the indigenous population in Guatemala lives below the poverty line, mostly in rural places where malnutrition stunts almost half the children.[13] Remittances sent home by workers living abroad were expected to account for 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2020, nearly all coming from the United States.[14] In the global economy, any place can be a borderland.

About 30 miles from the Spicher farm, I live in a small town that serves as the governmental seat of Centre County, named for its central position in the Commonwealth, one ridge and a narrow valley south of the Allegheny Front, the western edge of the old English colony. When people spoke three European languages in Bellefonte, this place was also crossed by an east-west trail used by Lenape hunters driven westward, and an important north-south trade route for the Haudenosaunee, or Nations of the Iroquois Federation that extended from upstate New York to the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Early Presbyterian settlers, themselves driven by religious and land disputes in Scotland and Ireland, found maize growing in clearings already planted in these valleys. When the newcomers thrust plows in the ground, they hit iron ore, so ore mining, limestone quarrying, lumbering became our first extractive industries, fueling the region’s earliest iron furnaces and forges.

The Allegheny Front also marks the edge of the Marcellus Shale Formation, the largest natural gas field in the United States, extending from New York to Tennessee, roughly mapping onto coal fields, and developed in the 21st century through horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking). “Eminent Domain” is the term local judges use to grant access to land the owners have refused to lease to drilling and pipeline companies. “Criminal contempt” is the ground on which one judge sentenced a woman to three months in our county jail because she allegedly baited bears and mountain lions to interfere with construction of the pipeline that will haul liquefied natural gas to the port at Philadelphia for export to Scotland.[15] Game wardens say that the last mountain lion around here was shot well before the 20th century, yet the creatures persist in myth and personal testimony, figures of faith like God, a student once wrote in an essay. When I sent a poem to the woman in jail, she replied that she’d like to embroider samplers of all the nice things people had written to her during her incarceration. About a mile from my home, a 48-inch natural gas pipeline lies buried under a cornfield. Compressor stations posted along the right of way keep the gas moving to urban markets; the pipeline passes under the Big Valley Spicher farm.

In September, the local newspaper confirmed what we felt all summer around here: hottest days since 1892, nearly six degrees warmer than last year and combined with a drought in July and August, the likes of which we haven’t seen in at least 60 years. One farmer told me he measured eight- tenths of an inch of rain in all of July, whereas a typical summer sees about an inch a week. He stood on a hill on his farm at the foot of Harry John Mountain and pointed to eight farms that once were dairies; seven of those, including his own, can no longer support a herd of milk cows. Not wildfire in the West or hurricanes flooding countries in Central America, collective crises caused by the climate emergency, these quiet catastrophes—also caused by raising temperatures—are mostly experienced as personal failures: debt and bankruptcy, shame for having made the wrong choice somewhere. One man wondered if it was “maybe a hundred-year cycle.” Someone else blamed Michele Obama and her push for healthier school lunches that serve unsavory skim milk and kill the taste for dairy.

Whatever nostalgic claims I may lay on the Spicher home farm, I moved to Bellefonte to take a job at Penn State, a public land grant institution established in the 19th century and endowed by “Indian removal” and federal sales of vast territories in the west. Unlike the wives of some farmers around here, I do not work on campus to stabilize a fluctuating agricultural income or provide employer-funded health insurance for my family. In recent elections, Centre County shows up as a blue island in the rural red sea stretching from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Here, as elsewhere in the US and Canada, cities occupy a tiny sliver of the land mass but are home to a majority of the voting population; cities generate the media, control wealth, graft off the young people, and consume nutritious agricultural products from the country, define the values of the dominant culture, and write its laws and regulations. Cities create “the wisdom of the world.”

III

“These are the terms in which a commonwealth is possible: a way of living in which our survival and flourishing do not prey constantly and involuntarily on the lives of others, in which instead, my flourishing is the condition for your flourishing, and yours reciprocally of mine.”[16]

In this sophisticated interdisciplinary study, Mark Elliott models how to track a single theme across the breadth of Judeo-Christian Scripture and its history of interpretation, offering an impressive retrieval of an idea with a surprising ability to synthesize the biblical tradition. Elliott’s working definition is that providence is “God taking care of things, which involves responding to humans in need and difficulty as well as ongoing supply of the goods of creation, and this according to some intentional, even planned action” (11). Such taking-care is expressed both in the life of the planet and its creatures and in the long journey of human history, which God mysteriously nudges/invites/leads/directs (one of the open questions of this volume is which verb to use) towards its ultimate goal (also an open question). Belief and trust in providence, elusive as it may be, is a legacy Christians should not easily relinquish, Elliott contends.

The book’s introductory chapter illustrates, by way of literary and historical reference, the modern and postmodern resistance to providential thinking, not merely as a corollary to atheism or emotional reaction to horrendous evil but simply as “prevalent popular disgust with explanation” (4). Still, Elliott’s first task in rehabilitating providence is not so much apologetic as exegetical; he must demonstrate that it is not an import to a biblical thought-world but is inherent to it, even if the Greek term pronoia(providential care, forethought) and its cognates have limited range in the canon. Not that the book is some ponderous word-study. Rather, it is a fast- moving conversation—almost too fast-moving—around a concept expressed in the Bible under a wide range of terminology and motif, including the “face,” “hand,” “sight,” “will,” “kingdom,” “blessing,” and “fatherhood” of God.

Chapter 2, “Alternative Themes to Providence,” continues to carve out a space for the topic over against a cluster of competing theological emphases, including original creation, ongoing creation, divine rest, and eschatology. Chapter 3 takes another step nearer the primary biblical witness by discussing conceptual matters related to divine action: overlap between Greek philosophical perspectives and biblical theology, the significance of the kingdom of God, and modes of God’s presence, guidance, and saving activity. The discussion ranges freely, even dizzyingly, across material from Romans to the Psalms, and the Gospels to Revelation, while engaging disparate scholarly perspectives past and present.

A reader with limited time and interest might choose to segue directly from the introduction to Chapters 4 and 5, which are the real heart of the book: an intelligently selective survey of both Testaments through the lens of the main theme. This pair of chapters would make a wonderful resource for a preaching series on providence, or indeed for any exegetical preaching, when combined with the book’s extensive Scripture index and bibliography. Elliott interacts widely with the narratives of Abraham and Joseph, Saul and David, and Esther; with the providential logic of the Prophets, including providence in judgment; and with the broad affirmations and poignant complaints of such Wisdom texts as Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The subsequent New Testament chapter moves from a nimble framing of Jesus’s death within the providential paradigm of Joseph (“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” [Gen. 50:20 RSV]) to a sustained focus on the book of Acts, arguably the most providence-conscious text of Christian scripture. Not only does it repeatedly portray a triune God interacting with the historical flow of events for the benefit of individuals, groups, and the church at large, it also highlights within its narrated preaching (e.g., Acts 2:23, 3:21, 14:17, 17:25-27) the general and specific providential action of this God.

The author’s conclusion continues the assertion of his first two chapters against competing themes and outlooks, most notably Thomistic grace-in-nature and the potent literary categories of tragedy and comedy. A chief opponent is the “subjectivizing” construal of providence as more about human beings than about God: providence as a therapeutic “construct of faith to keep the soul feeling consoled that there is meaning in life” (199) and as a role human beings assign themselves in the presumed hiddenness or absence of deity. While such an ongoing defense of the book’s central theological motif is valid, one might nevertheless wish for a few pointers on connecting the dots to practical and ethical reflection for the life of faith— certainly as regards global hot topics such as ecology and food security but also in relation to common concerns like money, health, and prayer. To be fair, an adequate treatment of these might require a companion volume along the lines of “Providence Applied.” Elliott does nudge readers, here and there, in the direction of prayer and practical relational faith in his own understated fashion (e.g., “Should one pray for peace in the Middle East if one hasn’t had some sense of answered prayer in smaller matters?” [23]). This is true up to the closing pages: “Christian faith trustsin the living God, with a very sober form of ecstasy” (220). Christianity’s model prayer for providence —“Our Father …, your kingdom come”—is one basic expression of that way (221).

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles ���� Book Reviews

Laura Schmidt Roberts, Paul Martens, and Myron A. Penner, eds. RecoveringfromtheAnabaptistVision:NewEssaysinAnabaptistIdentityandTheologicalMethod. New York: T&T Clark, 2020.

This volume’s title suggests that Harold Bender’s “The Anabaptist Vision” has left a deadly wound or become a source of debilitating addiction. The reader might then expect that the essays collected therein will diagnose these wounds or addictions and show a decisively different path forward for those affiliated with Anabaptism. (The cover image, an unfortunate selection, suggests as much: A solitary flower, tall and unblemished, stands amid a patch of dead and withered blooms.) There is no editorial introduction and this leaves us with, besides the title, only the unsigned back matter to tell us what purpose unites these essays. This material heightens the promise of an Anabaptist theology in a radically new register: “these essays refuse the determinative categories of . . . Bender’s The AnabaptistVision. . . in an attempt to liberate Anabaptist theology and identity from the constricting vision appropriated and reformulated by Yoder.”

An introduction may not be necessary for every essay collection, but it is a perplexing omission from a book that purports to advance such a critically bold theological program. Absent an introduction, the opening essay by Paul Martens, one of the editors, has the effect of (appearing to) set the agenda and make concrete what sort of liberation from Bender’s “Vision” we might expect. Martens sketches a preliminary case for how Bender’s theological categories, which attempted to transcend “the particularities of Mennonite experience” in order to create a theological Anabaptist identity, ended up making an abstraction and therefore a distortion of the church and the Christian life, especially once these categories ended up in Yoder’s hands (13). He then concludes, in what reads more as a foreshadowing of what is to come than as a summation of his argument, by declaring that Yoder’s theological vision is “impotent to address the challenges that we face” (16).

Each of the next  four  essays  proceeds  to  emphasize  positively the “Anabaptist” practice the hermeneutic community—other classic Anabaptist themes, like discipleship and peace, are also prominent—only with reference to those indebted to Yoder rather than to Yoder himself (Karl Koop is an exception). There is an opening to a critique of the hermeneutic community when Stephanie Burns implies that the process of hearing every voice often makes LGBTQ Mennonites feel “further erased and victimized,” but she misses the opportunity and falls back on the (Yoderian!) tropes of inclusivity and “the community as the authority” (80, 89). I have no wish to tell anyone to read or cite Yoder. However, if the program is to recover from his damaging theology and its lasting influence on Anabaptism, attention to how we can salvage this apparently still important Anabaptist practice from the otherwise “impotent” thought of its most prominent and substantive propagators is necessary.

In fact, the majority of these essays’ self-articulation, as well as the sources they cite and the commitments they display, clearly indicates that they are not engaged in a project of rejection of and recovery from Bender’s “Vision.” They instead join with many other Anabaptist thinkers, going back at least four decades, who are modestly engaged in what Laura Roberts elaborates on as a critical “retrieval and reinterpretation” of an Anabaptist tradition that includes “The Anabaptist Vision” (48). On these terms, a number of fine contributions emerge.

Carol Penner performs a great service to those of us who have not attended a Mennonite/Anabaptist Women Doing Theology conference by providing an inspiring and theologically insightful history of these events that displays their feminist and Anabaptist methods. Karl Koop uses theology and history to promote an understanding of Anabaptist identity rooted in family semblances rather than essences, while proposing that we move forward “in an Anabaptist key” with a core emphasis on discipleship ontologically grounded in Christ’s person (25). Jeremy Bergen critiques denominationalism and argues that Anabaptists best understand their “distinctives” as gifts to help all “Christians turn ever again to Christ” (125).

R. Bruce Yoder’s argument for the pertinence of the contextual theology of 20th-century Mennonite missions will be of great use to those interested in Mennonite missionary activity and theology. Paul Doerksen outlines a theological method of restlessness, hoping to redirect our theology to God rather than identity formation. Melanie Kampen’s hard-hitting critique of contextual and “inclusive peace theology” is distinct (94). She argues for a trauma-informed, critical-contextual theological method that begins by asking “Who is suffering?’ rather than starting with Scripture, tradition, or Jesus (99).

Unfortunately, these otherwise helpful essays have been effectively (if not by intent) conscripted to Paul Martens’s theological project. The book’s inaccurate framing—at whatever editorial level these framing decisions were made—does little to help us identify, understand, reckon with, or recover from the violences of Yoder’s theological thought and legacy. It does not help us discern how “The Anabaptist Vision” is, or need not be, entangled in that legacy. It may actually inhibit such work, to the extent that it obscures and confuses how dependent and closely related our theology is to Yoder’s.

This includes the way such framing mutes Kampen’s voice. Her essay is radically critical of “The Anabaptist Vision,” and accordingly her critique of contextual and inclusionary politics reads also as a profound critique of most of this book’s other contents, with Martens’s essay as a possible exception. It is not just that, as the back matter tells us, the other essays “hold together the importance of Scripture, tradition, and the lived experience of the Christian community,” which to me seems perfectly amenable to “The Anabaptist Vision,” whereas according to Kampen’s statements she has, at most, limited use for any of these. More significant is the way those essays either expressly articulate or assume an inclusive and dialogical account of the Christian life, with Christ at the center mediating us to each other even as we mediate Christ to one another. If I understand Kampen—her account is quite abbreviated— it is precisely this model that maintains structures of marginalization and violently silences the voices of victim-survivors. However, the presentation of these essays makes it seem as though Anabaptists can keep on doing what they have always done, more or less, while taking Kampen’s critique in stride.

Table of Contents | Foreword | Articles ���� Book Reviews

Elizabeth Soto Albrecht and Darryl W. Stephens, eds. LiberatingthePoliticsofJesus:RenewingPeaceTheologyThroughtheWisdomofWomen.New York: T&T Clark, 2020.

In LiberatingthePoliticsofJesus,twelve female activists, scholars, lay leaders, and ministers associated with the Anabaptist tradition show how peace theology is renewed in liberative ways through women’s wisdom and experiences. The contributors share emphases on embodied knowledge, narratives, truth-telling, and resistance to oppression in the pursuit of nonviolence, peace, and reconciliation in patriarchal and racist societies. They also reflect differences among their lived experiences, identifying their social locations as Black, Latina, and white women in the contexts of Colombia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States. Creating a dialogical space with such different voices in race, career, and region is a unique contribution to peace theology. The collection of essays invites readers to critically reconsider understandings of the cross as voluntary suffering in Anabaptist peace theology.

In line with other authors, co-editor Elizabeth Soto Albrecht argues that “a theology of suffering” fosters a culture of tolerance for human-made pain (56). With a critique of the abstract view of suffering in the dominant peace theology, she proposes “a politics of suffering” and just praxis that dismantles concrete oppressions in everyday life such as sexism, racism, and classism (54). Similarly, Linda Gehman Peachey points out the danger of pursuing peace while neglecting the actual pains and needs of the oppressed. Highlighting God’s act of solidarity with the marginalized, she interprets the cross as subversive resistance to injustice (124-25). In her interpretation of the cross, Hilary Jerome Scarsella engages more specifically with the Mennonite context of John H.  Yoder’s  serial  sexual  violence.  Arguing that Jesus’ crucifixion entails sexual assault in his culture, she calls for reconceptualizing peace theology in terms of sexual violence and political solidarity with survivors (165). These three contributions provide concrete examples of how traditionally dominant Anabaptist views can be reoriented from women’s perspectives.

Decentering Eurocentric assumptions running through dominant peace theology is another key feature of this book. Nancy E. Bedford argues that John H. Yoder’s politics of Jesus is founded on “the implicitly white Jesus” (24). The tendency of Euro-American theologies, which often code Jesus as a white man by omitting his “Brownness” or “Blackness,” is also seen in Yoder’s theology and leads it to “white space” (22-23). Considering the problematic gender dynamics in his abuses, Bedford argues that Yoder’s “‘politics’ of gendered and raced ‘revolutionary’ subordination” fails to lead his white male readers to decentralizing their privilege (24).

Furthermore, Carol Penner highlights “white biases”’ and the power disparities between white women and women of color, which were addressed in the Mennonite Central Committee Women’s Concerns Committee Report (40-42). Alongside white women, Mujeristas, womanists, and Asian women contribute to reimagining power relationships and strategizing the use of power in Anabaptist communities (43). Black church traditions are also brought into peace church theology by Regina Shands Stoltzfus, who argues that to build sustainable community in a racist context “[l]earning to love Black body is a critical step” (99). These works, integrating racialized Anabaptists’ stories into peace theology, invite readers to think about how to build anti-racist communities and form renewed identities as Anabaptists in disproportionally gendered and racialized societies.

Magdalene Redekop investigates an artistic “renaissance” that has been ongoing since the 1980s and ’90s among Mennonites in Manitoba. Transitioning smoothly between rigorous literary criticism and a personal memoir-like voice, she explores how and why the arts have flourished among Mennonites in the Canadian prairies and traces Mennonite “accents” discernible in writing, music, and visual artwork. She also shares stories about her experiences growing up in a rural Kanadier Mennonite family, and reflects  on  her  relationship  to  Mennonite  journey  with  clowning as a dramatic art form and presents her clown persona, Sush Binks—the “only living descendant” of the fictional Mennonite Sarah Binks, the main character in Paul Hiebert’s 1947 novel (118-23).

The author posits that several “roots” support this Mennonite renaissance: the influx of Russian Mennonites with distinct cultural/arts interests in the 1920s (here she notes the research of Harry Loewen, Al Reimer, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Robert Zacharias); the creative friction that resulted from Kanadier Mennonites (1880s migrants) and Russländer Mennonites living side by side; the sheer number of Mennonites in Manitoba; the rise of postmodernism in the 1980s (a proposal of Hildi Froese Tiessen); and the evangelically-influenced Revival movement that swept through Manitoban Mennonite communities of the 1950s, which Redekop contends was traumatic for many and therefore shaped the Mennonite narratives of several artists well established by the 1980s (32-33).

The first half of the book explores concepts of “border zones,” “insider” and “outsider” representations of Mennonitism, and the place of nostalgia in Mennonite artistic reflection. The second half focuses on literary, musical, and visual arts. Redekop explores this artistic renaissance as a Mennonite “crisis of representation,” and engages with Mennonite artmaking in light of her view that “cultural identity is dialogical” (xv, etpassim). She sees the artist as “trickster” and contends that artists of Mennonite background often seek out, or are situated at, points of intersection with other groups in Manitoban society. She calls such “contact zones” the spielraum(play space) where creative sparks fly due to friction with other cultures, ideas, and contexts. In her study of non-Mennonites’ efforts to represent Mennonitism and how they relate to Mennonites themselves, she takes up media ranging from photography and dance performance to the Low German film StelletLicht(2007) and Glenn Gould’s experimental CBC radio program, TheQuietintheLand(1977). With memory culture in mind, she grapples with “time warp” or “a-chronicity” (a blurring or mutability in the recollection and representation of historical events), one of the accents she perceives.

Redekop makes extensive use of examples from literature, exploring the poetry and prose of Rudy Wiebe, Sandra Birdsell, Di Brandt, Patrick Friesen, Sarah Klassen, Miriam Toews, and many others. While she acknowledges her own literary specialization, she does not shy away from case studies focused on music and visual art. She explores Mennonite values of “shunning the world” and asceticism in relation to music traditions among Manitoban Mennonites. Testing the concept of Mennonite music and exploring nostalgia in relation to hymnody, she considers several composers, conductors, and musicians, and analyzes the commission and performance of non-Mennonite Victor Davies’ MennoniteConcerto (1975). She also observes that most of the beloved “Mennonite hymns” are borrowed from Lutheran, English, and American hymn traditions. Finally, she turns to visual artists, considering “iconoclash” and concerns about idolatry in Mennonite historical tradition. She highlights the importance of further research on Mennonitism and art in the Dutch Republic, and then proceeds with personal and theoretical reflections on artwork of contemporary Canadian artists such as Wanda Koop, Gathie Falk, and Ray Dirks.

Although the author states that it is not her aim to offer an exhaustive selection of artists and examples, she nonetheless offers a very useful overview of many main players in the arts over the past several decades. This macro view runs parallel with careful close readings and individual artwork analyses, ensuring that readers get a taste of many of the artists’ works for themselves.

Redekop emphasizes the importance of the “cultural” or “secular” Mennonite” in Canada. She is right to highlight this categorization, which is relevant to many major Canadian Mennonite artists. However, readers from other countries, and anyone not familiar with the current cast of characters on the Manitoba arts scene, should understand that many of these artists are still actively, “religiously,” Mennonite. Several of those named are practicing Mennonite church members (as are many other Mennonites working in the arts in Manitoba who are not mentioned). It is not only “secularized” Mennonites who have turned to the arts.

Jesusandthe Forcesof Death coversatopicthattheauthorhasbeenruminating since his doctoral studies, attested in the precision and clarity with which he engages the subject. The book draws on the literary evidence of the Gospel authors to demonstrate that for them, against scholarship suggesting Jesus “abandoned this external [Jewish ritual purity] system in favor of interior spiritual realities” (xii), Jesus is very much a law-observant Jew. The central argument in support of this thesis revolves around ritual purity: the manner in  which  Jesus  interacts  with  the  ritually  impure  highlights  that  Jesus "abolishes the force that creates the ritual impurity in the person he meets” (6).

Chapter 1 lays out the essence of that force, namely death, and how it relates to ritual purity: the three major sources of ritual impurity—“lepra,” abnormal genital discharge, and death itself—represent the forces of death (16); God is holy and immortal (17); what is holy must be the “antithesis of death and mortality: life” (17); impurity regulations thus concern maintaining life with God (18); and apocalyptic transformation constitutes hope for deliverance from sources of impurity (19-20).

Of concern  in  chapter  2, the  description  of  the purification  and Temple presentation of Jesus in Luke 2:22 has been considered at odds with Torah instruction: Leviticus 12:2-4 only specifically calls for the purification of the mother after a baby’s birth, while Luke 2 seems to articulate a plural subject is needing purification. Thiessen argues that some Jewish circles— Luke included among them—did interpret Lev. 12 to mean that even the child may be impure and require purification.

Mark’s dealing with the man with leprais the primary focus of Chapter 3. This chapter clarifies that leprais not equivalent to “leprosy” as sometimes translated, but is instead a “minor medical condition” (54) with

a key symptom of white, flaky skin (46-7). The condition, nevertheless, as described in Lev. 13-14, is associated with death (51), and was thus believed to cause ritual impurity. Present-day individuals living with skin ailments, such as psoriasis, may find unnecessary the analogy to Jesus performing a miracle akin to using “dandruff shampoo” (54). In Mark 1:40-45, according to Thiessen, the reason that Jesus becomes angry is that he naturally desires to “rid people of what causes their ritual impurities” (63).

Chapter 4 deals with ritual impurity caused by genital discharges, specifically the abnormal twelve-year flow of a woman as narrated in Mark 5:25-34 and her healing by Jesus. Lev. 15:25-30 serves as primary governing regulation. Lev. 15:31 indicates that entering sacred space in this state would result in death, and therefore the restriction is based in compassion, to save life. In other words, to suggest that Jesus heals the woman out of compassion in order to abolish the ritual purity system is a false dichotomy (89-90).

The matter of ritual impurity caused by death itself is the focus of chapter 5. Thiessen observes that from the account of the deceased girl in Mark 5 and subsequently in Matthew 9, to the widowed mother in Luke 7, to Lazarus in John 11, the moment of death is pushed farther into the past, amplifying Jesus’s powers to purify (113, 121). This chapter ends with the poignant observation that Jesus no more rejects ritual purity than do Elijah and Elisha (121) on the occasions they perform miraculous revivification.

Chapter 6 examines demonic or pneumatic impurity. Only vestiges of this kind of impurity are observed in the priestly literature of the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Numbers 5:11-31). Nevertheless, an abundance of literature associated with demons is available throughout the ancient Near East, the Second Temple period, and rabbinic literature, a survey of which indicates that demonic beings were associated with evil (138) and were regarded as a force opposing God (139). The chapter surveys Gospel accounts of Jesus’ exorcisms, concluding with Thiessen’s proposal that the writers “might have been implying that the holiness of Israel’s God was housed in the person of Jesus in a way that actualized God’s control over the demonic forces that plagued humanity” (148).

Chapter 7 addresses the perceived contradiction that Jesus breaks Sabbath laws by healing on the Sabbath. Here, Thiessen discusses examples of Jesus (or his disciples) working or healing on that day and contends that Jesus makes arguments that are “legally defensible” (155). In particular, Jesus follows an argument shared among Jewish circles that saving life and showing mercy take precedence over Sabbath observance.

The book concludes where it began, confirming that ritual impurity was “of fundamental importance” (179) for the Gospel writers. The conclusion also concretizes the argument that Jesus is introduced into the world as a “powerfully contagious force of holiness” (179), to overcome the forces of impurity and death.

An appendix discusses the debate over whether Jesus rejects Jewish dietary laws in Mark 7: the Gospel of Mark argues that since handwashing is not a commandment of God, Jesus and his disciples adhere closely to following God’s commands.

This volume is a must-read for understanding Jesus as a Jewish individual living in the ancient Mediterranean world of the first century CE. To identify how ritual impurity and the forces of death are connected helpfully illustrates how the Jesus of the Gospels is not eschewing ritual purity but is instead combating the forces of death associated with such impurity. Topics are explained in detail yet in a way that is clear to readers whether from scholarly or other contexts. The consistent methodology used in each chapter may seem repetitive, but this helps make each chapter self- contained and allows for reading individual chapters separately. The use of comparative materials, including those from the ancient Near East, Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic literature, is also a welcome element.

In SpeakingofGod, pastor-theologian Anthony Siegrist offers a unique and compelling introduction to theology for the everyday Christian. Like a sightseeing tour bus, this book provides a “drive-by” look at a wide range of topics. Using the canonical structure of Scripture as his map, Siegrist covers an astonishing range of biblical, theological, and historical material. The stops are brief, the depth of content limited, and the topics are engaged with a sense of arbitrariness (“while we’re here, let me point this out…”). Yet, like any good tour, Speakingof Godgives readers the theological “lay of the land” in little more than two hundred pages, clearly hoping they will go on to explore the stops in greater depth.

In the first two chapters, Siegrist introduces foundational concepts (such as canon and hermeneutics) and lays out his goal: to enable readers “to join the conversation about being a faithful and imaginative follower of Jesus” (23). He then begins the theological journey in the book of Genesis, with discussions of the nature of God, humanity and fallenness, and the concept of mission (linked to God’s calling of Abram). Exodus points to redemption and formation—both for ancient Israel and contemporary Christians. Quick stops in the historical, wisdom, poetic, and prophetic books prompt discussions of such topics as pacifism, theodicy, syncretism, and the extent of God’s control of the world. Chapters on the New Testament introduce important concepts such as incarnation, recapitulation, reconciliation, Christology, and theories of atonement. Explanations of the nature of the church and the shape of the Christian life are rounded out with an introduction to eschatology and the book of Revelation. Along the way, diverse Christian historical figures are introduced, from the mystics to Martin Luther King, Jr.

The whirlwind tour finishes with a discussion of the task of theology—a chapter one might expect to come at the beginning of a book like this rather than at the end. However, this approach is effective and well-reasoned: the first chapters have not only conveyed information but demonstrated howto think theologically, in conversation with Scripture, experience, tradition, and reason (the Wesleyan quadrilateral). In this final chapter, the author pulls back the curtain to reveal the tools he has been using all along—thereby empowering readers to follow his example in their ongoing theologizing.

SpeakingofGodbrings together a pastor’s heart and a scholar’s intellect. Siegrist knows the needs and questions of real people in the 21st century and can lead them into the richness of Christian history, theology, and Scripture in language they will understand. His explanations of complex topics are simple and easy to comprehend. He anticipates and addresses doubts and critiques, provides forays into humor and anecdote without being overbearing, and avoids the extremes of emotivism and “Bible- thumping” that he decries early in the book (17). His narrative framework is appropriate in today’s postmodern environment, where explicit truth claims are met with suspicion.

The author’s approach to theological controversies is refreshingly fair and measured. He presents different perspectives in an even-handed way, yet he also recognizes the importance of careful theological thinking, showing how topics that may seem trivial at first (e.g., the precise nature of Christ’s humanity and divinity) should not be dismissed as irrelevant (169). His Anabaptist influences are revealed in his “one-story,” Christocentric approach to Scripture and his emphasis on shalomand social justic��—as well as his gracious, down-to-earth approach.

Readers cannot realistically expect Siegrist to cover all topics or perspectives in such a short volume. Yet there are additions that could have made an excellent book even better. For instance, his discussion of sexuality (205-208) fails to cover the LGBTQ+ conversation so important to today’s church and society. While perhaps not central to the book’s purpose, it seems a missed opportunity to explain various Christian viewpoints in the author’s fair and equitable way. Additionally, while key terms are highlighted throughout the book, a glossary would be help readers get a handle on theological language.

A Pilgrim People is a book rich in experience and practical advice organized around the urgency of the Catholic Church’s committing itself to non- violence. It is divided into three sections on diaspora, the witness to diaspora—being a pilgrim church—in scripture and church tradition, and peacebuilding respectively.

Several points stand out in the way Gerald Schlabach orients the Catholic reader to nonviolence. One is the testimony of recent popes, especially after Vatican II (1962-1965), regarding the untenability of just war theory under the conditions of modern warfare, in which the loss of innocent life is assumed. Another is a deft and accurate rereading of Augustine, assumed to be a founding figure in Christian just war theory. While that theory comes to be associated with notions of Constantianianism, Christendom, and a Christian nation-state, Augustine always maintained the provisionality of politics and the exile identity of God’s people (183- 89). As the perfect society, the church only looks to such arrangements as analogues; it recognizes its own perfection as bound up in its participation in the mystery of the divine trinitarian community.

A third strength is a concession regarding peace church readings of the Sermon on the Mount: that we have read Jesus’ injunctions as “antitheses rather than triads” (252). In binary readings, one opposes “nearly impossible ideals” (252) to “moral despair that calls itself realism” (253). (Schlabach has Reinhold Niebuhr especially in mind with that last phrase.) Following Glen Stassen, the author sees Jesus’ teaching as inviting transformative initiatives that break out of vicious cycles towards “just peacemaking” (253). This reading aligns well with a heavy emphasis throughout the book on political involvement and practical wisdom. Yet another example of orienting the reader to nonviolence is the extensive practical advice given in the third section, from cultivating hospitality that begins with being a good guest (226-35) to direct practices like supporting nonviolent civil disobedience and fostering just and sustainable economic development (267-72).

The build-up to this culminating section primarily concerns diaspora. This emphasis creates a severe tension for the reader: Is the book really about nonviolence (or just peacemaking), or is it about diasporic identity? One way partly to square this circle is to insist that the church does not havean ethic, it is an ethic, which Schlabach does, with Stanley Hauerwas’s help

at one point (57) and Benedict’s at another (197). Nonetheless, the book is very interested in the church’s relationship to the culture around it (always in local contexts), to issues of indifference, assimilation, and “respectful evangelization and inculturation” (110). Such a question is arguably a third theme vying for primacy, though it can be said to emerge out of that of diasporic identity.

Schlabach is as thought-provoking on diaspora as on just peacemaking. Above all he wants to dispel any illusions of a church neatly aligned with the phenomenon of the nation-state (see esp. 109-12), and he enlists Karl Rahner’s reflections on Vatican II—as consolidating the Catholic Church’s self-understanding in this regard—to good effect (95-99, 121-30). Less satisfying is his appeal to globalization as a natural comparison point for a church that needs to remember that it is a community in exile. Globalization is, after all, just another political construct, one of which global capital and the media are particularly fond. Schlabach is aware of the awkwardness of the comparison and reminds readers of wise reflections by John Paul II on problems attending the identification of a globalized environment (88-90; cf. 209-13).

Nevertheless, references to globalization appear in two of three supporting theses proffered early and on the back cover as well. They read like a gesture to a reality knowable in its own right, rather as his ongoing allusions to natural law (culminating in an afterword to the second-last chapter) suggest the notion of a self-contained, knowable nature (naturapura) that has no place in Catholic natural law theory. Nature, like politics, is always already caught up in a reality that includes a supernatural dimension, which is why exile is such an important part of the church’s self-understanding.

Recognition of the church’s diasporic, exile condition comes through very strongly in the book’s middle section. Starting with the call of Abraham to be “a blessing for others” (136) and his place in “God’s social change strategy” (140-49), Schlabach finds in scripture an indissoluble tie between diaspora and the call to be “a sacrament for the world” (189–93). He then traces the theme of exile in works from TheShepherdofHermas(2nd-cenutury) to The City of God.He stresses the importance of the Jewish diaspora, of “contacts embedded in social and familial networks” (167), to the spread of Christianity, drawing fresh attention to Rodney Stark’s scholarship in the process: “‘Jewish Christianity played a central role until much later in the rise of Christianity [than we have thought]’” (168). From its beginnings, the Church has exhibited a “fixed-yet-fluid identity” (177), and has been “invitational” (177), “multicultural” (177), “a transnational nation” (177), attractive to women, protective of its offspring, caring for the sick, and, at its heart—though this has not always been evident—oriented towards peace.

This collection of stories by the inaugural director of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Canada’s Ottawa Office provides a unique window into Mennonite political engagement in the Canadian context. It is an important companion to Keith Graber Miller’s analysis of the first 25 years of MCC’s Washington Office, as well as to historical studies of MCC Canada by Esther Epp-Tiessen and Mennonite involvement in Canadian politics by T.D. Regehr.

The Ottawa Officewasacontentiousexperimentwhenitwasestablished in 1975, and Janzen had to marshal his expertise as a political scientist and Mennonite church leader to figure out how MCC could meaningfully speak into public policy debates, while simultaneously explaining this work to MCC and its diverse stakeholders. Although Mennonites had long engaged the Canadian government to navigate their own interests, speaking out on behalf of others was still relatively new terrain. One way of reading this book is to view it as a sustained argument or justification for MCC’s advocacy efforts. It should put to rest any doubt that this work was worthwhile.

Janzen has narrated 50 out of what could have been hundreds of stories drawn from his 33 years of leadership in the Ottawa Office and grouped them together in 18 thematic chapters. Some chapters focus on topics of Canadian political debate such as capital punishment, Constitutional reform, or major policy reviews. Other chapters are global in nature, providing glimpses into advocacy related to Vietnam and Cambodia or Palestine and Israel through trips taken and delegations hosted. Two of the more substantial chapters gather multiple stories that shed light on two of the most prominent instances where the Ottawa Office made a difference: enabling the private sponsorship of refugees by churches and community groups, and securing Canadian citizenship for Mexican Mennonites.

Just as insightful are chapters that delve into administrative topics such as correspondence with Prime Ministers, “organizational maintenance,” and “other international work.” There are reminders throughout the book that, in addition to serving as MCC’s voice to the Canadian government, the Ottawa Office supported MCC programs in many practical ways—Janzen was clearly an institutional thinker and doer at many levels.

Apart from sharing interesting details that lie behind particular advocacy initiatives, the most significant contribution of these stories is that they collectively illustrate Janzen’s approach to trying to effect change in the Canadian political context. In many ways, this approach reflected the broader ethos of MCC. For example, from the outset the Ottawa Office’s advocacy was rooted in longstanding MCC program priorities and partnerships, and Janzen’s main role was to serve as a connector and translator in order to make programmatic insights relevant and impactful in the realm of governmental policies.

Furthermore, as in other contexts, MCC’s presence in Ottawa was rooted in relationships: for Janzen this meant building relationships with countless civil servants, elected officials, and political staffers that were genuinely personal as well as professional. Although it may have been an experiment, under Janzen’s leadership the Ottawa Office was playing the long game from the start, never compromising the effort to build trust and credibility for the sake of splashy wins. These relationships also gave Janzen unique insight into the character of political actors that, far from breeding cynicism, left him with a positive view of both their intentions and the role that the Canadian government could play.

The approach to advocacy evident in the Ottawa Office’s first 33 years also reflected the character and particular gifts of Janzen himself. For example, the oversized portfolio of issues that he somehow managed to juggle with care and attention to detail points to a compassionate and generous spirit, not to mention an incredible work ethic. And his fluency in Low German enabled him to take up citizenship issues faced by Mennonites from Mexico, a significant contribution that continued beyond his retirement.