Editor’s Note: Jodi Nisly Hertzler writes occasionally for Another Way and is a college counselor and tutor. Jodi and her husband have three children. Last year, I took on the role of college counselor at the private school I work for. Somewhat daunted, I immediately immersed myself in as much information as possible, joining national and local organizations, attending conferences, visiting colleges, watching webinars, and reading everything I could find. I successfully muddled through my first year, and as I begin a new season with a fresh round of seniors, I am reminded of the anxiety students and parents experience as they traverse […]

Stop-motion animation has a long history as a medium for film. Once the primary method for movie monsters to careen across the silver screen, the technique has been kept alive by Aardman Animations—the British animation studio known for their television and movie franchise Wallace & Gromit. Just when the sheep seem to have mastered a cloak-and-dagger escape, someone “baas” and nearly gives the game away. Tradition or practicality (or both) dictates that their characters speak only in grunts and unrecognizable words, but with tone of voice, gestures, and images, they broadcast their emotions and intentions with clarity. Shaun the Sheep […]

How did you first learn—if you did—to can or freeze fresh garden produce to eat all year? Did you grow your own foods as a child? For many of us who were fortunate to grow up on farms with gardens, truck patches, and even orchards, the answer is: Growing and preserving our own food is as normal as brushing our teeth and taking out the garbage. It’s what people do. The cookbook even includes ways to use the tops of carrots, discarded corncobs, celery leaves, squash blossoms, onion stems, and more. I understand that not everyone grew up like this. […]

By Charissa Zehr A crisis is rarely made in a day, and there is no exception with the threat of mass deportations of Haitian migrant workers and Dominicans of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic (D.R.) to Haiti. The D.R. and Haiti have a centuries-long history of simmering tension that has at times boiled over. Almost two years ago, the D.R. Constitutional Court retroactively stripped citizenship from hundreds of thousands of Dominicans with Haitian ancestry. While some of the affected may have parents who migrated recently from Haiti, many have lived in the D.R. for decades and have few ties […]

Rather than encouraging people not to waste their time watching this month’s big blockbuster (Rogue Nation, which is entertaining and well-made but also shallow and ultimately supportive of our insane and evil “intelligence” communities), I have decided to encourage people to watch a relatively obscure and underrated gem called Mr. Holmes. At its heart, Mr. Holmes is about an aging Sherlock beginning to question the value of the logic and chemistry that have ruled his mind and his life. Mr. Holmes opens with a scene in a train compartment where a young boy sitting opposite Holmes is observing what he calls a […]

My colleagues came back from a recent churchwide Mennonite convention, and one of them placed a collection of small white crocheted crosses in our break room. The crosses were in little plastic bags with decorative cards taped on that read “Handmade in Homestead, Florida.” Knowing that D. J. places her crocheted crosses in her church offering basket as her offering to God adds an even richer dimension to this simple cross. My curiosity was immediately piqued. Having been to 22 such Mennonite conventions over the years, I’ve always felt the planned business conducted there wasn’t as important as the little conversations […]

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 […]

Take some witty dialogue from the 2007 movie Juno, mix with the movie-making madness of The Science of Sleep (2006), add teenage coming-of-age drama plus a diagnosis of cancer, and you have Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. A typical coming-of-age romance between an awkward adolescent boy and a cute young girl, but then we see the effects of chemo, and we quickly come back to reality. Greg Gaines, the Me of the title, describes the narrative early in the film as “this is a story of my senior year in high school and how it destroyed my life.” […]