By Chuck McKnight Pastor Larry Wright was leading a New Year’s Eve prayer service in a downtown Fayetteville, N.C., church when a man entered the building armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle. We know how these stories end. People die. Loved ones grieve. Social media becomes outraged. And then nothing changes. We wait for the story to repeat. But this time, the story went a bit differently. The man walked in with his gun in one hand and an ammo clip in the other. Pastor Wright says he was unsure whether the man had a round chambered in the rifle. […]

By Rachel Bergen , Young Voices Co-editor, Canadian Mennonite “In Canada, the picture we have of refugees is people from the other side of the planet coming here where it’s safe. Often [as refugees] they’re only 43 kilometres from their original home,” Rachel Regier says, who earlier this summer helped organize the first-ever Pedal for Peace in Saskatchewan. “That distance is keeping them from the life they would live if they could just be back home.” Before they ate their fill of rollkuchen, watermelon, farmer’s sausage and other traditional Mennonite food, a group of Saskatchewan Mennonites, inspired by this vision […]

By SunJu Lee Recently I had the privilege of meeting a group of women from Colombia who work with conscientious objectors in their country. The organization, Justapaz, works with the Mennonite Church of Colombia from an Anabaptist perspective, alongside other churches and social organizations. They support young men at different stages of the conscientious objection process if they are detained, imprisoned or if their cases go to court. In Colombia the duration of military service depends on the person’s educational degree and family social status, favoring the wealthy and well-educated. While the law requires two years of service, others have […]

Story as retold by Calvin Redekop This is a true story about a 19th century Amish-Mennonite farmer living with his family in Western Maryland. Benedict Miller had the reputation of a peacemaker. Some of his methods were both ingenious and humorous. The story of Benedict and a corn thief has been handed down seven generations in the Miller family. Benedict had a corn crib in his spring house loft with a ladder-stairway leading to it. One day he began to notice that corn was missing in his corn crib. Day after day, things grew worse, and finally Benedict decided to set […]

By M. Mumpande, T. Ngoma, and F. Ncube  They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory. They shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations. (Isaiah 61:3b-4) As in many vulnerable communities worldwide, farmers nervously await the rainy season each year in Binga District in Matabeleland North Province, Zimbabwe. When rains are sparse farmers are forced to plant several times. Normally, the rainy season starts in November. But in recent years, the heavy rain has not come […]

It is too easy to jump from beheadings to a justification of U.S. military actions against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

Watching Moore forget a dinner date in her early stages, making a video for her future self to find one day, or struggling to locate the bathroom in her vacation home, we see how the disease plays out.

The vote on the Senate floor last month was a first step. Still, too many members of Congress are content to deny the impact of human activity on our climate and do nothing.

In each of the past three years, more active military personnel have lost their lives to suicide than were killed in combat in Afghanistan.

Three of our Media Matters reviewers offer their “Top Ten” lists for 2014, each in their own format.