Susan Jamison has a problem. Newly hired as the Outreach Director of Fragrant Hills Church, her primary task is to build healthy partnerships with local immigrant congregations. Susan quickly realizes the complexity of the cultures involved, her unpreparedness to relate to them, and her church's lack of readiness to thrive in a multicultural society. Discovering few sources of practical guidance, she quickly feels overwhelmed and inadequate.Will Susan be able to build healthy partn...

John Yoder traces the arc of a life journey that takes him into worlds so far removed from his Amish boyhood that he could scarcely have imagined them. The journey would take him from Virginia's pastoral farmlands to the remote wildness of Ontario's far North, from the sands of Southern Africa's Kalahari Desert to Central Valley of California and the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains, then to the wide-open spaces of the Kansas prairies before returning "back east," nearer to the place of his ...

Binding and loosing, baptism, eucharist, multiplicity of gifts, and open meeting; these five New Testament practices were central in the life of the early Christian community. Some of them are still echoed in the practice of the church today. But the full social, ethical, and communal meaning of the original practices has often been covered by centuries of ritual and interpretation.John Howard Yoder, in his inimitably direct and discerning style, uncovers the original meaning of th...

Between 1971 and 1996 the late John Howard Yoder (1927-1997) wrote a series of ten essays revisiting the Jewish-Christian schism in which he argued that, properly understood, Jesus did not reject Judaism, Judaism did not reject Jesus, and the Apostle Paul's universal mandate for the salvation of the nations is best understood not as a product of Hellenization, but rather in the context of his Jewish heritage.This posthumous collection of essays is arguably his most ambitious projec...

John Howard Yoder's classic book first published in 1971, includes a treatment of Jewish pacifism, bibliographies, an index, and three new appendixes: Speaking Truth to Power, Quaker Political Witness; The Spectrum of Nonpacifist Postures; and Nonviolent National Defense Alternatives. Yoder points out assumptions, strengths, and shortcomings of each pacifist position. He brings clarity to the many-sided conversations about peace, nonviolence, war, proliferation of arms, and power politics....

Power and Politics in the Book of Judges studies political culture and behavior in premonarchic Israel, focusing on the protagonists in the book of Judges. Although the sixth-century BCE Deuteronomistic editor portrayed them as moral champions and called them “judges,” the original bardic storytellers and the men and women of valor themselves were preoccupied with the problem of gaining and maintaining political power. John C. Yoder considers the variety of strategies the men and women of ...

Jesus created around himself a voluntary society that was counter to everything his society knew or expected. Jesus gave his members a new way to deal with offenders, with violence, with money, with leadership, with a corrupt society. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, and an enlarged understanding of what it means to be human.This is the original revolution: the creation of a distinct community with its alternate set of values and its coherent way o...

In this volume of essays John Howard Yoder projects a vision of Christian social ethics rooted in historical community and illuminated by scripture. Drawing upon scriptural accounts of the early church, he demonstrates the Christian community's constant need for reform and change. Yoder first examines the scriptural and theoretical foundations of Christian social ethics. While personally committed to the "radical reformation" tradition, he eschews "denominational" categorization and addres...

In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism.

In the historic meeting held in 1527 at Schleitheim, Switzerland, an ad hoc group of Anabaptists worked through fundamental disagreements and emerged with a consensus on seven points of faith that became known as the Schleitheim Confession. Also known as the Brotherly Union, this text constitutes one chapter from The Legacy of Michael Sattler.

Tradition has painted a portrait of a Savior aloof from governmental concerns and whose teachings point to an apolitical life for his disciples. How, then, are we to respond today to a world so thoroughly entrenched in national and international affairs? But such a picture of Jesus is far from accurate, argues John Howard Yoder.Using the texts of the New Testament, Yoder critically examines the traditional portrait of Jesus as an apolitical figure and attempts to clarify the true im...

**The complete works of one of the most significant theologians of the Reformation.This book contains the complete writings** of Balthasar Hubmaier, including his discussion of three marks of a true church: water baptism of adults, the Lord’s Supper, and fraternal admonition.This is the fifth volume in the Classics of the Radical Reformation, a series of Anabaptist and Free Church documents translated and annotated under the direction of the Institute of Me...