Saving People From the Fiery Pits of Hell? A Review of “The Very Worst Missionary”

Excerpt: As a Christian college student several decades ago, I knew without a doubt that the holiest, most sanctified majors on campus where those preparing their graduates for overseas missions. This probably explains the small twinges of guilt I felt when others gushed about their longing to serve God on the mission field. Nothing about that vocation seemed appealing to me, nor did the yearly short-term missions trips the college hosted, when vanloads of students travelled to Mexico or flew to other far-away locales to offer children a week of Vacation Bible School, or to build an outdoor baño

Raising Spiritual Kids in the Age of Instagram

Excerpt: The call came in to our harvest-yellow kitchen when I was fourteen. I stood at the breakfast bar with my family\u27s also-yellow phone pressed to me ear, winding and unwinding the twisted cord while listening to Tamara, my erstwhile friend. She wanted me to know I was nice enough, but that everyone in my ninth-grade class agreed I needed to get some new clothes already. And that I definitely needed to get a new hairstyle, because my short curls were really ugly (except she used an expletive in place of really )

Life Writing and Mennonite Identity - Review: Essay of Mennonite Women\u27s Memoirs

Excerpt: Rhoda Janzen’s recent success is enviable, her hefty book deal with a prominent press and the publicity that followed her first memoir the kind of triumphs to which writers often aspire. Her book Mennonite in a Little Black Dress has – in its own way – brought Mennonitism to the mainstream, introducing readers (and plenty of them) to a religious sect that remains, to many, enigmatic and exotic. The book’s title alone is alluring, juxtaposing the long-held stereotypes about cape-dress-wearing and be-capped Mennonites with the startling image of a skimpy black shift, a modern emblem of sexy fashion: and so, it seems, entirely not Mennonite

Book Review: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home

Excerpt: An honest admission: When I first saw Rhoda Janzen’s new book featured in Time magazine and in The New York Times, my initial impulse was toward envy—unadulterated, green-as-possible envy. As a fledgling writer who grew up in a close Mennonite community, I often dreamed of creating a humorous memoir about my religious upbringing, complete with satirical observations about the peculiarities of Mennonite culture. Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress was the book I always wanted to write. That the author had received a good bit of publicity for her work only intensified my shade of green. After finishing Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, however, I’m convinced the book is misnamed, and that the publisher added “Mennonite” to the title as a clever marketing tool: the cache of a seemingly exotic religious sect being used to sell a different type of story. Certainly Mennonites play a role in Janzen’s book, but only as a quiet thrum to a much larger, more complex and more compelling story about the author’s spiritual quest to discover the self she had lost, and the results of her efforts

Book Review: Letters and Life by Bret Lott

Excerpt: Lott’s newly published book, Letters and Life, limns and amplifies the themes expressed in “Genesis.” Letters and Life enters into a centuries-old conversation about what it means to be an artist and a Christian, relying on what has already been written about the Christian artist to expand and deepen our notions of faith and art, showing that, like the child-narrator in “Genesis,” the artist in creation imitates God

Book Review: Walking Gently on the Earth

Excerpt: For that reason, I approached Walking Gently on the Earth with a healthy sense of skepticism, ready to be preached at again regarding the choices I’ve made about my family and lifestyle. Yet a few pages into Lisa Graham McMinn’s new book, I knew this exploration of sustainability would be different: more gentle, as the title itself suggests. McMinn, along with her daughter and co-writer Megan Anna Neff, examines the ways we can more readily nurture “God’s good gift”—that is, the earth and everything in it— through what McMinn calls “an ethic of care.” Although McMinn and Neff challenge readers to be more considerate of the earth and its people, their challenge is measured by the sense that living sustainably should not create a heavy burden to be suffered through, but instead provide a richer existence, one worth celebrating

Reigniting the Firebrand Heart

Excerpt: From the very first pages of her memoir, Assimilate or Go Home, I felt an affinity with D.L. Mayfield. Perhaps I recognized my students in Mayfield’s idealism and innocence, a missionary fervor that burns brightly in many undergraduates who attend Christian universities like the one where I teach. Perhaps I saw in her narrative my own youthful firebrand heart when, as a senior in college, I longed to get arrested protesting injustice; imagined sitting in a jail, even, believing such activism would show how deeply my convictions ran and how ardently I loved Jesus

Book Review: Bonnet Strings: An Amish Woman\u27s Ties to Two Worlds and Others

Excerpt: In Entering the Wild, Janzen narrates the process of crafting these hymns; and I found this chapter, titled “Three Women and the Lost Coin: How Three Women Found Me,” the memoir’s most compelling. In 1990, Janzen was asked to be on a committee to recreate a Mennonite hymnal that might “nourish . . . congregations for twenty years or more.” The committee, wanting to include several hymns honoring the feminine characteristics of God, turned to Janzen. Janzen describes encountering the work of three mystic women—Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, and Mechtild of Magdeburg—and nding there “the possibilities of devotion and celebration that opened windows to my own imagination.

Life Is Not a Pro/Con Proposition: A Review of Kassi Underwood’s “May Cause Love”

Excerpt: In many ways, contemporary abortion debates have managed to do just that: objectifying women who have abortions by politicizing their experiences. May Cause Love compellingly reveals that life doesn’t always follow ideology, as Adichie says, and that sometimes, when faced with a monumental decision, women need support, guidance, and a safe community who will listen closely, rather than judge harshly. Because every woman’s story about abortion has the power to change the world, if only we have the ears, and the heart, to listen

On Becoming a Family: Melanie\u27s Story of Benjamin\u27s Adoption, 2002

Excerpt: I became a mother in the back of a taxi cab. No sit-com cliché, this. The taxi was a late-model, jacked up Honda, its plush chairs bedecked by delicate white doilies. Traffic dared not impede my driver, a silently brooding young man who weaved between Cyclos and motorcycles freighted by fruit, vegetables, live chickens, entire families. I sat tensely in the backseat, holding my son, incredulously wondering into what I had just gotten myself