My parents liked to joke that theirs was a “mixed marriage” because she was a Russlander Mennonite and he was a Kanadier Mennonite. It was only funny to that tiny subset of the population who was both in the community enough to know the difference and out of the community enough to think it a … More Watch your Language
Last Saturday, when I was getting revved up for a full day at a fake Mennonite relief sale, I made the mistake of logging on to Twitter. Even before I could see if anyone else was tweeting about MCC or speculating as to when hymn-singing would be allowed again, I saw that the word Amish … More Nope, not us. But thanks for all the love.
Have you heard things about Mennonites from a possibly unreliable source? Maybe you’ve heard bits of information about us from different seemingly credible sources, people you thought ought to know what they were talking about. But those sources contradicted each other. You’re not looking for graduate-level disputations on the origins of Anabaptism or religion in … More A list of people who have the right to speak about Mennonites, ranked by degree of entitlement to speak.
A number of years ago, my daughter’s grade school class was given the task of preparing and presenting a short speech to the class about their personal family history. No problem. We’ve got that covered. Or, we did until a week or so before her turn when one of her classmates presented and told the … More An Ignorance Both Deep and Wide
This post first published in July, 2015 under a different title (But am I a real Mennonite?). In addition to changing the title, I have also corrected a typo. Every now and then a blog post gets derailed. This one, for instance, was intended to be a little glossary of Mennonite insider language, a guide … More The Great Mennonite Identity Crisis
I wrote this post last year for Canada Day. I’ve tinkered with the cocktail a bit but have otherwise mostly left it as it was. I am a Mennonite who lives in Canada. Or perhaps I’m a Canadian who is Mennonite. Sometimes our cultural stereotypes get blurred and it’s hard to tell whether I’m being … More Happy Canada Day, Mennonites!
This post was previously published on the old site in January 2015. If you know other Mennonites, you might have heard that before. In every relationship/acquaintanceship, with a Mennonite, there will come a time when it is necessary to have “the talk.” I believe, dear reader, that we have come to that time. If you’ve … More Not That Kind of Mennonite
