I meet many strangers on airplanes while traveling for EMU, and inevitably we ask each other, “Where do you live?” “I’m from the Shenandoah Valley,” always draws a positive and envious response, even if the person has never visited Virginia. “What a beautiful area of the country!” This issue of Crossroads shares the stories of […]
April 30, 2014 – 11:52 am
Talk about punching above your weight . . . Consider, EMU has never been large and still has just 900 traditional undergraduates enrolled, plus 600 other types of students (adult degree completion, master’s, seminary, etc.). This place is one-half the size of my old high school in Northern Virginia, and twenty-sixth the size of my […]
April 30, 2014 – 11:57 am
Hundreds of volunteers, many of them EMU alumni, are the backbone of four alumni-run, nonprofit charitable enterprises in Harrisonburg that funnel funds toward worldwide poverty alleviation, relief and development efforts. Gift & Thrift, and its used-book enterprise, Booksavers of Virginia, and adjacent Artisans’ Hope gift shop (all three in a small shopping strip an easy […]
Every Tuesday night, Dr. Linford Gehman ’59 still makes the trip from Bergton, back in the farthest mountain reaches of Rockingham County, to the hospital in Harrisonburg for continuing education seminars. Though he’s been practicing medicine for a half century, he’s got a medical license to keep up. He’s still seeing patients three days a […]
Not long after he’d come out of the closet, Mark was at a party with his friends. At some point that evening, a group of guys approached Mark and told him they suspected their roommate, Joe, was also gay. They asked if Mark would be willing to talk with Joe about this. 1 Mark thought […]
Every March, more than 800 students from the four local colleges, wearing t-shirts in their school colors, converge on downtown Harrisonburg to raise awareness about suicide prevention. Walk For Hope is just one of the community events that Randall “Randy” Hook ’95, MSW, is involved with as director of counseling services at Bridgewater College. Working under […]
David Whyte, an internationally recognized poet, author and expert in organizational development, came to campus in late February for an event highlighting the 20th anniversary year of the master’s in counseling program – the first EMU program outside of Eastern Mennonite Seminary to produce graduates at the master’s degree level. Whyte’s day-long workshop was attended […]
When Conley McMullen graduated from EMU in 1978, the aspiring botanist decided there would be no finer profession than to become a “gentleman scholar” at his alma mater like his mentors, Claire Mellinger and Gary Stucky. McMullen had taken just about every class that Mellinger taught, from plant taxonomy and physiology, through general ecology and ornithology. […]
