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 ...

John Howard Yoder went to Europe after the Second World War as a young volunteer. Yoder worked as an aide in a children's home in Elsace, France and completed his doctorate under Karl Barth in Basel, Switzerland. Because of his incomparably clear and sharp thinking he quickly became one of the most sought after speakers on pacifism at seminars as he worked towards an Anabaptist renewal of the church.In this context Yoder succeeded in reopening the theological debate on Christians a...

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....

"Of very few people can it be legitimately said that their work fundamentally reconfigured the landscape of two theological disciplines. But if there is anyone in recent memory who would be worthy of such an accolade, it is John Howard Yoder. The two disciplines are, of course, theological ethics and biblical studies--though Yoder would cringe at their separation, and his work was both explicitly and implicitly a prolonged exercise in maintaining their indissoluble union. For him, to hear ...

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 ...

We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers...against spiritual wickedness in high places. —Ephesians 6:12This small but important book by Hendrik Berkhof ushered in a wave of studies on the powers spoken of in the New Testament, profoundly influencing William Stringfellow, Jacques Ellul, Marva Dawn, Walter Wink, and many others. John Howard Yoder brought it to an English-speaking audience for the first time in this translation, and drew from ...

The ambitious and accessible essays collected in this volume were presented by John Howard Yoder during an extensive visit to South America in 1966. Reflecting and also subverting the acknowledged "faddish" attempt to address the revolutionary nature of Christianity, these lectures provide an illuminating snapshot of Yoder's vibrant initial encounter with Latin American Christianity. In these lectures, he thematically addresses the shape of the free church, the Christian practice of peace,...

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...

Big business makes big money selling a phony notion of what we want and need as sexual people. Ads insist that certain products will make us more sexually appealing. But what we really want and need is true intimacy—the knowledge that we matter to another person and are loved for who we are. We all are sexual beings, all of our lives, and relate to each other sexually all the time. God marvelously made us this way. Using the metaphor of sexuality as a good gift from God, this book offers C...

Our purpose is to analyze whether it is truly the case that a Christian pacifist position rooted not in pragmatic or psychological but in Christological considerations is thereby irrelevant to the social order.-John Howard YoderThese words by John Howard Yoder set the course of his pathbreaking treatise, The Christian Witness to the State. Yoder's novel contribution to the debate concerning the church's and the Christian's calling is his starting point. He insists that Chr...

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...