March 22, 2010 issue
Dusting off neglected history
Bethel to host conference on Mennonites and modernity
By Bethel College staffPage:
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NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — Scholars from Europe and North America will gather at Bethel College in June to shine a light on a neglected area of Anabaptist and Mennonite history.
The Vladimirov, Russia, forestry unit, about 1895. From the 1870s until World War I, many young Mennonite men in Russia did alternative service, similar to Civilian Public Service in the United States. The man with the guitar is identified as Heinrich Steingart of Neuhalbstadt, Sagradowka, and the others are unidentified. — Mennonite Library & Archives, Bethel College
“Marginal or Mainstream?: Anabaptists, Mennonites and Modernity in European Society” will take place on the Bethel campus June 25-26.
Earlier surveys of 16th-century European history mostly ignored Anabaptists. Today, Anabaptism in the 1520s and 1530s has made its way out of the confines of denominational history and into standard textbooks.
By the 1540s, however, the lights go dim and Anabaptist-Mennonite history retreats to its corner — a deficiency the Bethel conference aims to address.
Starting in the 16th century, Mennonites in Europe presented an example of an alternative community that was Christian, pacifist and separate from the state. This forced people in the societies where Mennonites lived to grapple with their assumptions about the proper behavior of citizens.
The conference will look at such questions as the following:
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To what extent did Mennonites, despite often being a margin-alized community, provide models or stimuli for important developments in European economics, politics, religious practice, gender relations or other areas?
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What did Mennonites have to offer that interested, aided or offended the world?
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How did Mennonites experience and help to shape industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, imperialism, feminism, republicanism, nationalism and Enlightenment rationality?
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Or, were most Mennonites happy to stay on the margins of European modernity?
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Comments
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I'm interested in attending the conference if non-specialist visitors are welcome. The only professional items I've published on Mennonites are Nafziger, "Economics," Mennonite Encyclopedia, 1990, v. 5, pp. 255-258. Eds. Cornelius J. Dyck & Dennis D. Martin. Scottdale; and Nafziger, "The Mennonite Ethic in the Weberian Framework," Explorations in Entrepreneurial History/Second Series, 11, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 1965), 187 204.
Please send me registration information.
E. Wayne Nafziger University Distinguished Professor of Economics & Editor, Journal of African Development 312 Waters Hall Kansas State University Manhattan, Kansas 66506-4001, U.S.A. Phone: 1-785-532-4579
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