Mennonite Weekly Review

Articles : Robert Rhodes

Feb. 2, 2009 issue

• Hutterite elder says good-bye

  Occasionally, I have a recurring dream from the six years our family spent in a Minnesota Hutterite colony. Some Hutterites and I are fishing on Dean’s Island, a flood-prone peninsula of farmland on the Mississippi River north of Memphis, Tenn., and near the Arkansas town where I grew up.

Jan. 7, 2008 issue

• Considering a life lived for others

  Four days before Christmas, a woman I went to high school with was killed in an automobile accident in the West African country of Mali. Though I did not know her as an adult, I had heard from others about some of the work she had been doing with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control — some of the most important work I can imagine someone being called to do in this age of AIDS and looming global pandemics. Her death, an untimely caprice of fate and happenstance that befell her family in the season of joy and celebration, has caused me to ponder what any of us does with this one and only life we have.

Dec. 24, 2007 issue

• Mennonite’s research contributed to Nobel award

  FORT COLLINS, Colo. — When former Vice President Al Gore and a United Nations environmental panel received the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec. 10, an ecologist who is a member of Fort Collins Mennonite Church had a hand in the research that helped garner the award.

Dec. 17, 2007 issue

• ‘Preaching Peace’ spreads nonviolent message

  LANCASTER, Pa. — Attending a conference on peacemaking in Minneapolis in October, Lutheran pastor Rolf Olson didn’t know he was about to be challenged to use some of the lessons he had learned right away.

Dec. 10, 2007 issue

• Communal churches still carry appeal

  Many churches in today’s disconnected world preach a gospel of “building community” or of functioning as a “true community of believers.” What this really means varies as widely as the people in those churches, all of whom bring their individual needs and concerns to that effort to come together.

• Long-running radio ministry to go silent Dec. 30

  ORRVILLE, Ohio — A weekly Mennonite radio ministry that began in 1936, making it the longest-running program of its kind in the country, will go off the air following its Dec. 30 broadcast.

Nov. 26, 2007 issue

• A new challenge in mental health care

  The contradictory realities of caring for the mentally ill and putting them in jail have become tragically intertwined in America. A half century after Mennonites helped introduce sweeping changes in mental hospitals, a need for similar reform in mental health care now has come to light in the nation’s prisons and in other places where bureaucracy has been allowed to trump compassion in the care of the emotionally disturbed.

Nov. 12, 2007 issue

• Language, landscape central to Canadian novelist

  NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — Perhaps a key achievement of Rudy Wiebe’s new memoir is his evocation of the “polyglot world of languages” the award-winning Canadian novelist grew up in and the role these languages played in his formation as a writer.

Nov. 5, 2007 issue

• Financial deficit recorded by MC USA convention

  NEWTON, Kan. — An estimated $175,000 shortfall in revenue from the Mennonite Church USA assembly held in San Jose, Calif., in July was not unexpected, according to MC USA’s associate executive director.

• MDS to assist after California fires

  AKRON, Pa. — Mennonite Disaster Service has sent a team to the site of recent wildfires in Southern California to determine how MDS can respond.

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