Fall 2019 · Vol. 48 No. 2 · pp. 189–191
Book Review
Education with the Grain of the Universe: A Peaceable Vision for the Future of Mennonite Schools, Colleges, and Universities
ed. J. Denny Weaver. Eugene, OR: Cascadia, 2017. 362 pages.
Education with the Grain of the Universe, edited by J. Denny Weaver, professor emeritus of Bluffton University, is comprised of conference papers from an event held at Bluffton University in 2015. The primary title invokes the book’s radical insight and call and offers a crisp invitation to an educational vision based in a double theological claim. It makes a courageous confession to the grain of the universe as flowing in stream with God’s ongoing creation. It also references a common understanding of Mennonite faith, thought and community as alternatives to the grain of the world’s most dominant impulses. The book’s subtitle, A Peaceable Vision for the Future of Mennonite Schools, Colleges, and Universities, conveys the challenge and hope to which the editor and authors aspire: a claim to peace as the grain of God’s creation, of the gospel revealed in Christ Jesus, and of the heart of Mennonite education.
In responding to Education with the phrase, “radical insight and call,” I support the collection’s call for ongoing root change, as is germane to the Anabaptist faith tradition’s defining story of Radical Reformation. This phrase also connotes strong commendation, which I will qualify as residing in the act of reaching for non-dichotomizing and non-essentializing forms of education that flow with the grain of God’s peace. I need also admit that I would find the collection more compelling were it to contain more direct wrestling with what the very grain of the peace of God is understood to be; this would alleviate positivistic understandings of pacifism and {190} non-violence towards which, at least in small part, the book inclines.
From the book’s title I had anticipated an engagement with educational vision on an institutional front, including the likes of why Mennonites create and sustain educational institutions, how Mennonite learning communities generate unique contributions to notions of virtue, knowledge, community, spirituality, and discipline, and what priorities of program and ethos, community, personhood, ecology, etc., such institutions might be challenged to carry forward. While there are a few hints towards these directions, the collection’s twenty short essays are focused less on matters of institutional mission than on topics arising within areas of scholarship with historical strength in Mennonite schools. The collection is organized in six parts: Theology and Ethics, The Bible, Ecclesiology, Literature from the Margins, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Local Applications. In a short conclusion, Weaver acknowledges a dearth of attention to areas such as science, economics, the arts, cross-cultural education, and relationship with government. While he rightly acknowledges the limits of any particular project, the collection left me desiring attention to a peaceable vision through these and other fields of study that have become core to the offerings of most Anabaptist institutions but not necessarily to the schools’ reputations.
The possible co-existence of being in step with the grain of the universe and at the same time flowing upstream to the world’s dominant impulses confesses to a God who lives in and through all and to a Christ who is present always with those who are marginalized. Challenges to boundaries of inclusion and exclusion form a primary thread and strength of the collection. I appreciate the willingness of several authors to admit of their own vulnerability as they seek ways ahead through polarized views regarding what it is to be faithful to God. For example, Benjamin Bixler and Daniel Shank Cruz state a desire to be open and empathetic to all parties and to revelations from God gleaned from those with whom they disagree. These authors also lament the seeming impossibilities of relationship across opposing perspectives in today’s world, both within and outside the church. In exploring the margins, I am compelled by the clarity with which several authors expose expressions of Mennonite identity that have become concomitant with whiteness, mainstream privilege, and white supremacy. This insight is particularly striking in a collection featuring mostly American authors and contexts given that, based on relative differences between military and peace distinctives in Canada and the United States, Canadian Mennonites tend to see American Mennonites as standing apart from and not in tandem with the dominating political and cultural orders. I trust that engagement with marginalization will remain a prime topic within Mennonite reflective work; along the {191} way I hope that we will give more attention to differentiating between margins defined by exclusion and ignorance and margins defined by choice. Miriam Toews (whose work is discussed in Rebecca Janzen’s article on Mennonite and Mormon women’s life writing) might call such exploration a complicated margin.
I will highlight two more provocative essays from this collection. In “Thinking of Myself as Your Servant is a Bad Idea,” Malinda Elizabeth Barry challenges misappropriations of a term Mennonites tend to love: “servant leader.” (Does your spine tingle when you sing, “Will you let me be your servant?”) Barry critiques an anti-leader bias within Mennonite communities, and introduces the well-known phrase “priesthood of all believers” to call out a priestly leadership function that might enable Mennonite communities to be unshackled from the harms of overzealous servanthood. In “Why the Academy should go to Church,” Gerald Mast asserts indistinguishable and misguided purposes of both liberal arts and sciences and professional education streams, both of which he views as caught up in the pursuit of personal success, upward mobility, and freedom from vulnerability. He urges the academy to go to church, that is, to be compelled to face flaws and failings. Our learnings might best reside in asking how and where we see the lion lying with the lamb, which is to say, how and where education compels voice and vulnerability towards friendship.
In sum, the book awakens the feeling in me, “You had to be there.” I do not say this dismissively; rather, I invite you to read and learn from the reflections in Education, and from there to organize events that will entrust the grain of the universe to future times of Mennonite education.
