EMU began sending groups of students on study-semesters in the Middle East in 1984 and has never stopped sending groups on a near-annual basis, regardless of the prevailing socio-political situation. We know of no university in North America that rivals EMU for sustained number of years in the Middle East and number of students dispatched from the United States (more than 500). In late winter 2012, staff photographer Jon Styer ’07 and freelance writer Andrew Jenner ’04 spent 10 days documenting the study and work being done by EMU students and alumni in the Middle East. Most of the photographs and some of the reporting in this section of Crossroads emerged from Styer’s and Jenner’s trip. The four stories below are exclusively online.

• On the Importance of Being Cross-Cultural Pilgrims
• Risk-Taking: A Metaphor For Faith And Life
• Cross-Cultural As Career
• Life Changed as Prisoner of Israel
• Life is Messy, Acquiring Doubt (essay)

Here’s a story I heard on cross-cultural: a certain Israeli man had become disturbed with the moral implications of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank as he grew older. After the Second Intifada began in 2000, the Israeli Army activated its reserves and this man – a reservist, like nearly every Israeli man under the age of 50 – was called back to duty in the West Bank. With a conflicted conscience, the man obeyed his orders, but vowed it would be the last time he’d agree to shoulder his gun and perform military duties no longer entirely in line with his convictions. And he was right in a twisted way, because he was killed in action during that deployment.

Of course, that meant I was hearing all of this second-hand from a rabbi who’d been a friend of the man who’d been called back to duty. The rabbi told this story to my entire cross-cultural group as we sat on a rocky hillside in the far north of Israel overlooking the Hula Valley. It was a stunning fall day, clear, mild, breezy and bright. I remember an Israeli flag snapping in the breeze, blinding in the sun, the swaying pine trees, the gentle sunshine on the cool stones, birds chirping, all of it underscored by that sort of wrenching sadness that lurks at the intersection of grief and death and beauty.

The cross-cultural up to that point had already put me in a precarious emotional state. We’d just spent a few weeks in Palestine, touring the refugee camps, visiting houses reduced to rubble by Israeli missiles, listening to endless Palestinian appeals against the injustice of Israeli occupation, etc., etc. And then we’d spent a few weeks in Israel, touring the Holocaust museum, driving past restaurants and bus stops where Palestinians had blown up themselves and a lot of innocent people, listening to endless Israeli appeals against the injustice of Palestinian terrorism, etc., etc. It was a dissonant, battering experience; what seemed true and right one week would be cast into doubt the next. Today’s worthy cause was tomorrow’s foolishness. I’d spread my empathies in all sorts of contrary directions. I felt like I’d been through a storm.

We’d begun that day departing by bus from the kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee where we were staying, guided by the rabbi. We rode from place to place, and we’d get out, and he’d give little talks on non-cheery aspects of the 20th century Jewish experience and modern Israeli history – a heavy, depressing day generally. And then, that afternoon, to hear the tragic story of the rabbi’s friend as we sat perched above the Hula Valley, beneath whispering pines and gentle sunshine – it was the distillation of everything that had come before, goodness and horror, beauty and fear, hope and loneliness, all existing together in that specific moment and place.

The moral of the rabbi’s story about his friend’s death surprised me, though. Like his dead friend, the rabbi wasn’t altogether comfortable with the notion of military service, and also like his dead friend, the rabbi wasn’t at ease with the notion of not coming to the armed defense of his people, repeatedly abused by unfriendly neighbors. Sometimes, he said, life forces you into uncomfortable decisions. Sometimes, he said, friends don’t come home from deployments. And all of this is part of shalom, which he defined as the fullness of human experience: a time to be born and a time to die, to kill, to heal, to scatter stones, to gather them.

At EMU, at Eastern Mennonite High School, in Mennonite Youth Fellowship, in Sunday School and all the other places up to that point where I’d received some sort of moral education, choices in life had always been framed as right vs. wrong, or good vs. evil. But there atop the cliff where the rabbi was talking about shalom, I had my first encounter with another potential moral framework for life: wrong vs. wrong. What if there are times when you’re confronted with options that all would be wrong in other contexts? What if, in a specific situation, it would be right to do wrong?

We’ve all done those little thought experiments that nibble at the edges of this concept: “If a crazy ax murderer broke into your home and began attacking your family, what would you do?” If you hold a general belief, as most EMU-affiliated people probably do, that it’s wrong to attack or injure people, and if you hold a general belief, as most EMU-affiliated people hopefully do, that it’s wrong to sit there and let ax murderers have their way with your family, you’ve kind of found yourself in a wrong vs. wrong situation. Sometimes people offer silly and insane suggestions – “share the Gospel with the ax murderer,” “give him a hug” – that purport to evade this wrong vs. wrong dilemma, but then the discussion just kind of trails off. We acknowledge the absurdity of the question. We say we hope something like that never happens to us.

There’s also the phrase “the lesser of two evils” that we employ in certain situations, like explaining why we voted the Democratic ticket. This one also subtly acknowledges that we’re faced sometimes with wrong vs. wrong situations, but not in a particularly serious sense; it’s a phrase generally used for laughs.

Life is messy, absolutes are subject to change, and truth can sound different on different days. Some people call this sort of thinking “wishy-washy,” some people would probably say it lacks “moral imagination,” some would probably say it ignores some sort of inscrutable, divine plan that some sort of inscrutable, divine being has supposedly invented for my life. And there’s probably some theological shortcoming in my understanding of what the rabbi meant by shalom. Sometimes I’m disturbed myself by the implications of this idea that Wrong and Right are entirely circumstantial. But I can’t escape it. It’s well and good and important to sit back and map out your own moral plan of action for when the ax murderers beat down the door, but it’s well and good and important to get out of your chair and step out into the muddy world, where there will be times to tear and to mend, and to weep and to laugh, love, hate.

The Middle East cross-cultural didn’t destroy my beliefs in right and wrong. The trip cut them down to size. It prepared me for compromise. It cast doubts in all sorts of directions. I hope this doesn’t sound too bleak: my experience didn’t throw me into despair, it just shifted my foundation.

Students Ponder Faith, Justice, Lifestyle and Policy in the Middle East

The spring 2012 Middle East cross-cultural group consisted of: Rachel Bell, Laura Bowman, Bridgett Brunea, Janelle Dean, Aaron Erb, David Everett, Paul Ferguson, Taylor Harrison, Anna Hershey, Emily Hodges, Andrew Hostetter, Ariel Kiser, Crystal Lehman, Karla Martin, Michelle Miller, Rebekah Nofziger, Travis Nyce, Krista Nyce, Katherine Pence, Morgan Porter, Joel Rittenhouse, Ellen Roth, Stephanie Shelly, Dan Sigmans, Linnea Slabaugh, Kierra Stutzman, Taylor Swantz, Hannah Swartz, Hannah Tissue, Chaska Yoder. Of the 30 students in this group, 18 are the children of alumni from classes in the late 1970s through mid-1980s, when cross-cultural study was new at EMU.

written by Andrew Jenner ’04
photographs by jon styer ’07

Spirits were high as the 30 EMU students on the 2012 Middle East cross-cultural marched merrily into the Judean desert. Guides had assured them of a short and easy stroll from the Mar Saba monastery to a Bedouin encampment, where a feast supposedly awaited. Spirits remained improbably high as the route wound up and down one rocky, barren hillside after another, and then again and yet again, no end in sight.

At last, the weary, hungry group of students crested a final and particularly treacherous slope to arrive at the Bedouin camp, only to discover that the Bedouins had not quite finished cooking. In fact, they had not even begun; dinner would not be served for some time.

The sun was sinking fast, along with the temperature, and one could easily imagine serious discontent breaking out among the tired and now twice-deceived college students. Yet their moods stayed bright while they passed the time until dinner, chattering in small groups, entertaining themselves with complicated word games invented during their long hours of travel over the past weeks, rushing around with their cameras to photograph the haunting orange twilight on the rocky Judean hillsides they’d just straggled across.

There existed a special sort of intimacy in and among the group, a bond already formed through previous quintessential cross-cultural moments like this that can’t really be replicated anywhere back on campus. You have to be tired and sore and famished and stranded in the distant wastes of the Judean desert to experience and grow from this sort of thing – to be confronted with petty hardships, to weigh these against the real and persistent hardships of Palestinian life that you’ve spent the last month observing and participating in – and so to decide to enjoy this unexpected hour with friends before dinner rather than pout about an afternoon that’s gone off script.

And so went the group’s last night in Palestine, roughly at the half-way point of a trip that began in turbulent Cairo and ended in peaceful Rome, with significant focus on Biblical history, early Christianity, Jewish and Arab culture, and the ongoing conflicts in the Holy Land. The following morning would mark a significant transition, when a bus ride of a few short miles would carry them from the Palestinian town of Beit Sahour to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel – on the other side of a tall concrete barrier with a name, purpose and symbolism that depend entirely on who’s talking about them.

Bridging the Concrete Barrier

Dan Sigmans ’12

Having spent the previous three weeks living with host families in Beit Sahour, while studying Palestinian culture and issues, the difficulties of life under Israeli occupation loomed large in the students’ minds that night. The existence of suffering in the world was no longer an abstraction; their new Palestinian friends’ determination to celebrate life rather than despair had become an inspiration. The students acknowledged their ignorance about the region before they had come to see it for themselves, and wondered how they’d talk about it once they got back home without sounding like “crazy activists.”

“No matter who you get in conversation with [in Palestine], they’ll bring up the occupation and how it affects their life. You can’t talk about any other issues without talking about that issue,” said Dan Sigmans ’12. “You can’t just not talk about it.”

Days earlier, the group had visited Hebron, where Jewish settlements in the heart of the West Bank’s largest city exist as a volatile microcosm of the larger conflict between Jews and Arabs. After touring the city with Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers, who support non-violent Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, several students met a Jewish settler studying to become a rabbi, who was eager to share his own very different take on life and purpose and justice in Hebron.

“That was the first time I realized how elusive truth was going to be on this trip,” said Aaron Erb ’14.

Bridgett Brunea ’14 said the rabbinical student’s enthusiasm for sharing his story revealed a human side to the settlers – and cast the conflict between the two into even more ambiguous light.

“They have lives and families and hopes and dreams,” she said. “But they’re doing these awful things to the Palestinians.”

Aaron Erb ’14 (left, facing the camera)

Did Americans Do This Too?

Hannah Swartz ’14

On a different trip to Efrat, another Jewish settlement in the West Bank, the students met with a settler originally from Chicago who confronted them with the disconcerting observation that they too are settlers – isn’t the whole United States built on stolen land? Unable to offer any sort of reasonable rebuttal, the group had arrived at another waypoint of the Middle East cross-cultural: silent confusion.

“It’s hard for you to comprehend everything. It’s so emotionally draining,” said Hannah Swartz ’14.

There had been many such classic moments, and there would be more. They’d been through the lows, such as the unexpected necessity of crossing the Gulf of Aqaba on a ferry packed with hundreds of men from the region, when divergent cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality left EMU’s females feeling vulnerable. They’d been through the highs: the friendships they’d developed with their host families; the friendships they’d developed with one another; the time in Jordan when they’d sung a song together in a resonant stone chamber carved millennia earlier in the cliffs of Petra.

And they’d experienced the incredible weirdness of cross-cultural exchange: while climbing Mount Sinai, the group happened upon a band of Korean pilgrims singing a Korean rendition of “How Great Thou Art.” Several of the students joined them with American-style harmony in the chilly winter air on the slopes of a remote Egyptian mountain.

Aiming for Relationships

By mid-morning the following day, the bus had dropped the group off along a busy street just below Jaffa Gate and the yellowed stone walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. Weighed down with backpacks and suitcases, they shuffled uncertainly down the sidewalk toward Jerusalem University College, where they would spend the next weeks of their trip studying Biblical history and geography. The bus roared off into traffic, the crowds on the sidewalk bustled around and through them, and a new moment had begun.

Morgan Porter ’13

At this point in the trip it was tempting, said several students, to be judgmental, to not approach the people they’d encounter on this second half of their trip with open hearts and minds. It would be tempting, but they knew it would be wrong. They’d come to listen and learn, and they had been warned this might not be easy.

“My job isn’t to choose sides right now,” said Morgan Porter ’13, shortly after her arrival in Jerusalem.

As the group settled into their new surroundings, the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” occurred to Brunea with new meaning and urgency. Jesus would approach “the other side” with love, she said, and she would try to do the same.

“It’s a really awesome challenge for my faith. . . . I’m looking forward to the chance, to hear their stories and to recognize that this [land] is their home, too,” she said.

The group began its stay at Jerusalem University College with morning classes and afternoon tours of the Old City, later traveling throughout Israel to visit other significant Biblical sites. Following a period of free travel, they returned to Jerusalem to begin studying Judaism and contemporary Jewish issues, this time based at the Ecce Homo convent inside the Old City walls. A number of students identified their stay at Ecce Homo as the highlight of the trip’s second half, when their classes were regularly interrupted by ear-splitting calls to prayer from a nearby minaret. From the convent roof, they could see the grey dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque, perched on Temple Mount directly above the Western Wall, overlooked from the east by the Mount of Olives.

“It’s like no other place in the world,” said Sigmans.

On the Trail of Jesus

Later stops on the trip included a stay at a kibbutz in the Galilee and a four-day, 40-mile hike along the Jesus Trail (a trail tracing Jesus’ footsteps from Nazareth to Capernaum, co-founded by David ’04 — who was on the 2002 Middle East cross-cultural — and Moaz Inon, an Israeli friend of his). The cross-cultural concluded with study of early Christianity in Greece and Italy, before returning to EMU in late April.

Bridgett Brunea ’14

As she had expected, Brunea found it difficult at points to sympathize with Israeli perspectives on the conflict. At the same time, she was surprised to encounter numerous Israelis hoping to find a just and peaceable solution to the problem.

“It was really energizing to learn how many people there are really working for good change,” she said.

Looking back on the entire cross-cultural, Swartz recalled her surprise at the hospitality Palestinians extended to her as an American, even as they criticized her government’s role in supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestine. During the second half of the trip, she realized that she also needed to separate individual Israelis from the actions of their government and military.

“People have been willing to forgive my ‘American-ness’, so I should be willing to forgive Israelis for what their government has done,” said Swartz.

This emphasis on individual relationships emerged as a major lesson for the students on the trip. After their return, several described newfound appreciation for human connections that exist between people and defy stereotypes, and that create a foundation of respect between people, even when they disagree with each other.

“I may not always like what people do to one another . . . but you have to be willing to see the humanness of [everybody],” Brunea said.

This was just one of several lessons with broad life implications the students brought home with them. After looking down on Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives and hiking from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee, and standing on the shore where Jesus called his first disciples, they read the Bible with new eyes and a vivid understanding of its physical setting. Likewise, the region and its place in today’s world have come alive. Their ears perk up when a story from the Middle East comes on the radio; they read stories in the newspaper with greater interest and understanding.

Worldlier Outlook

“I feel like I care more about the world in general,” Swartz said.

Ellen Roth ’13

A certain jadedness and frustration also accompanied the group home. The seeming intractability of conflict in the Middle East, and the toll it continues to exact on the people who live there, left the group feeling exhausted, even tempted at times to allow the easy rhythms of life at home to push their challenging and complicated experience from their minds.

“I don’t want to go back to where I was before I took this trip . . . but at the same time, how do you not feel so emotionally drained?” asked Swartz.

Before Porter spent a semester in the Middle East, she vaguely felt she wanted to be involved in “saving the world.” A few months in a particularly messy and tormented part of the world, though, led her to reevaluate the idea.

“I don’t have to save the world,” Porter said. “I can focus on [saving] one thing and be okay with it.”

Days after the group’s return – a frenzied time of graduations and goodbyes atop the stress of readjustment to life at home after a cross-cultural – Ellen Roth ’13 said she expects the experience will remain a lifelong influence. Seated in the coffee shop on campus, she said she has no idea whether her future life or work will involve her directly with the people and places she visited in the Middle East. She’s certain, though, that broader themes from the trip – appreciation for the simpler lifestyles of the people she met along the way, heightened sensitivity to injustice, new awareness of the effects of American policies elsewhere in the world – will guide her in the future.

“I definitely want it to influence how I conduct my life,” Roth said. “There are so many things [in my life] I want to reconsider.”

— By Andrew Jenner ’04. Read about his conflicted reactions to his 2002 Middle East cross-cultural.

In the early fall of 2010, workers installed the largest solar deployment in Virginia on the Hartzler library roof. It has the capacity to generate104.3 kilowatts of electricity from 328 high-efficiency photovoltaic panels and is projected to eliminate more than 6,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions over 35 years.

AN ESSAY HEADLINED “A Climate-Change Activist Prepares for the Worst,” published in the Outlook section of the Washington Post one recent Sunday (Feb. 27, 2011), sparked 444 online comments before the Post closed the discussion. The essay also prompted more than 1,800 people to recommend it via Facebook.

The writers of the 444 postings were sharply divided, perhaps 35 to 65 percent.

About one-third expressed some degree of agreement with author Mike Tidwell, executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He described steps he had taken recently to try to protect his home and family against the effects of devastating climate change, including stockpiling food, investing in an emergency generator, and taking skeet-shooting lessons. The shooting lessons were in case he needs to protect his family due to anticipated social unrest caused by climate-related food shortages – and this is despite calling himself “fundamentally a pacifist.”

The remaining two-thirds of the Post readers who commented online thought Tidwell was nutty – or pursuing a leftist-environmentalist agenda – and dismissed his worries about the pace at which earth seems to becoming uninhabitable. (Tidwell’s executive assistant is Nathan Kauffman ’10.)

Tidwell opened his February article with these words:

Ten years ago, I put solar panels on my roof and began eating locally grown food. I bought an energy-efficient refrigerator that uses the power equivalent of a single light bulb. I started heating my home with a stove that burns organically fertilized corn kernels. I even restored a gas-free lawn mower for manual yardwork.

As a longtime environmental activist, I was deeply alarmed by new studies on global warming, so I went all out. I did my part.

Tidwell went on to explain, however, that he feels “we’re running out of time” to avert the physical and social upheavals that will result from global warming.

Fourteen months earlier (Dec. 6, 2009), the Post’s Outlook section published another essay by Tidwell in which he criticized the “go green” movement for leading people to believe that small changes in one’s personal lifestyle would add up to ultimately rescuing the planet. He said personal changes – like the way he used a Prius and ate a “low-carbon-footprint vegetarian diet” – are drops in the proverbial bucket.

He challenged his readers: “No more compact fluorescent light bulbs. No more green wedding planning. No more organic toothpicks for holiday hors d’oeuvres . . .

“Instead of continuing our faddish and counterproductive emphasis on small, voluntary actions, we should follow the example of Americans during past moral crises and work toward large-scale change.”

AGREEMENT ON BEING GREEN?

Given the divided readership of the Washington Post, it seems safe to assume that the readership of Crossroads is not united on the subject of climate change.

When we asked readers to “tell us your path to ‘going green’” on the back cover of the fall/winter 2010-11 issue of Crossroads, we received a flurry of contributions from alumni who are putting solar panels on their roofs, riding bikes or walking instead of driving a mile or so, growing as much of their own organic food as possible, and building well-insulated homes from local materials.

Nobody wrote in to say: “Bah-humbug. It’s fine to drive huge gas-guzzling vehicles, live in mammoth McMansions, eat seafood that is flown half-around the world to our dinner tables and that is also in danger of extinction, and remove mountain tops to extract coal to power our electricity-hungry homes and businesses.”

Yet, even in the absence of messages from readers uninterested in “going green,” there are certainly tens of thousands of us who don’t choose to live as simply as Martha Ann Burgard  ’66 in Alabama or as self-sufficiently as Mary Beth  ’72 and Lester  ’71 (MA-religion  ’94) Lind in West Virginia.

A few of the environmentalists interviewed for this issue have opted not to have children, believing that over-population, with concurrent consumption, is part of the problem. They would agree with Paul Hawken, founding owner of a $75 million company specializing in garden supplies. After operating his company from 1979 to 1991, he wrote a book arguing that “the drive for unrestrained economic growth … has become the most important problem facing humanity.”

The primary concern is that a world of over six billion people striving for material satisfaction is drawing ever more heavily from finite supplies of natural resources to fuel an economic growth model destined to lead to an ecological disaster and global poverty without precedence.

Those who disagree with Hawken tend to hold the opposite view on “unrestrained economic growth.” They believe the innovativeness and expansiveness of capitalism hold the key to solving the problems facing humanity and the rest of the natural world, including possibly climate change (without necessarily conceding that this is an actual problem to be solved).

Andrew K. Jenner ’04, a freelance writer who is largely responsible for the reporting on pages 8 through 36, suggested that we follow up this issue of Crossroads by inviting readers to discuss “going green” in the form of a moderated online blog. We have set up a forum for discussion, open until June 1, 2011, at.

While we invite discussion, we must confess that a clear majority of EMU’s current administrators, faculty, staff and students seem to be arrayed on the side of those who believe the preponderance of scientific evidence of major climate change and who wish to reverse climate change or at least responsibly address its devastating effects.

As one Washington Post reader wrote in response to Tidwell’s article: “The precautionary principle would suggest that we do what we can to protect our own survival, even if it [climate change] is not human-caused… There is no room for honest disagreement, the science is clear; but were there room for disagreement, there is no excuse for not acting… just in case.”

EMU president Loren Swartzendruber, DMin, was one of 98 signatories – many affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities – on a document issued in February 2006 called “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action.”

The statement made four points: (1) human-induced climate change is real; (2) the consequences of climate change will be significant, and will hit the poor the hardest; (3) Christian moral convictions demand our response to the climate change problem; and (4) the need to act now is urgent – governments, businesses, churches, and individuals all have a role to play in addressing climate change, starting now.

EMU’S PUSH FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Since the 2007 founding of EMU’s Creation Care Council – made up of representatives from all parts of campus – every corner of EMU is reshaping itself to be more “green.”

In the spring of 2008, the EMU board of trustees decided that all new buildings at EMU would meet basic LEED standards, at a minimum. (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.) This decision followed presentation to the board of semester-long research by 14 students in a “Green Design” class taught by science professors Douglas Graber Neufeld and James (Jim) M. Yoder ’94, who both did their PhD dissertations on topics related to the environment.

In the fall of 2010 EMU became host to the largest solar deployment in Virginia, with capacity to generate 104.3 kilowatts of electricity from 328 high-efficiency photovoltaic panels on its library roof. The lead visionary for the project was Tony Smith, PhD, co-director of EMU’s MBA program and CEO of a private company called Secure Futures.

In some cases, these efforts represent renewed interest in initiatives begun decades ago. Five faculty membersjoined with students in the early 1970s to launch the Earthkeepers club, which was mainly focused on recycling newspapers.  Retired biology professor Kenton Brubaker ’54, PhD, one of the founders of Earthkeepers, recalls using the proceeds from selling newspapers to a recycling firm to buy a van, a front-end loader and a pre-fabricated metal building to pick up and store newspapers, as well as to start a compost pile for gardening east of the Suter Science Center.

The 1970s is also when EMU planted an arboretum and experimented on its own land with the best way to treat soil for maximum vegetable production.

Recycling of paper, glass and plastic is now integrated into the work of EMU’s Physical Plant Department, which collects these materials by bicycle rather than van. Earthkeepers, now run by students, continues to work at composting – student volunteers collect discarded food and biodegradable paper from the dining hall for composting near the Suter Science Center. They also join with others in running Food & Farming Week each year.

In 1986, EMU took the risk of installing an innovative, but then-unproven, closed-loop heating and cooling system in the newly built Campus Center. Designed by LeRoy Troyer, an Indiana architect who was raised Amish, the building has withstood the test of time in being a model of energy efficiency. Physical plant director C. Eldon Kurtz ’76 estimates that the center saved EMU $3 to $4 million in energy costs its first ten years of use.

REDISCOVERING ROOTS OF THE LAND

Reaching even deeper into EMU’s history, in the decade after it was founded in 1917, EMU had pig pens, cows, poultry sheds, corn fields, and vegetable gardens on its grounds, with students fresh off the farm who knew how to deal with such matters. Ironically, however, most of these students were more interested in reducing their need to do manual labor to survive. They wanted to engage in more intellectual pursuits, rather than remaining bound to the farms of their ancestors.

In the 30th anniversary edition of Living More with Less (Herald Press, 2010), Sheri Hostetler, pastor of the First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, advocates rediscovering the knowledge of self-sufficient people, who are often the oldest generation: “People over the age of seventy and those who have come more recently from countries in the global South have experienced life in societies not based on cheap oil. Thus they have skills and stories about how to live more self-sufficiently, sustainably, and locally.”

EMU has embraced a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) – called “Peace with Creation” – whereby every undergraduate learns about the importance of good stewardship for creation and reflects on ways that he or she can help. First-year students are given writing assignments on the topic and sustainability is threaded into the coursework of every major.

As part of this QEP, cross-cultural trips are being retooled to increase environmental awareness. Vice-president and undergraduate dean Nancy Heisey, PhD – who has committed to using public transportation when possible and to walking to destinations a less than a mile or so from her home or campus – will be leading a trip in the summer of 2011 where the students travel (to Montreal) by train instead of by airplane.

Biology professor Jim Yoder led a trip to New Zealand in the summer of 2010 that included a tour of a geothermal power plant. The group also studied how New Zealand is dealing with invasive species, especially rats and possums, to restore its bird populations.

TO ENGAGE IN POLITICS OR NOT?

Most of the people featured in this issue of Crossroads are focused on “being the change they want to see,” to borrow Gandhi’s words. They believe that change necessarily begins with oneself and in one’s community – as in the slogan “act locally, think globally” – and that such grassroots changes can result in a shift over time in larger socio-economic paradigms.
Writing in a book published in 2000, Mel Schmidt applauded the record of Mennonites and their institutions for practicing what they preach in terms of living in a responsible manner. But he criticized their traditional reluctance to address issues at the macro or policy level:

By their faithful track record on peace and justice issues, as well as their historical love of the land, Anabaptist/Mennonite faith communities have earned the right to speak out on environmental issues but are quite content to be die Stillen im Lande [quiet of the land] – an irony of our time.

This is puzzling and mystifying, particularly in view of the fact that even the most isolationist groups among them will dig in their heels and take tough political stands on controversial issues when the need is clearly present…Even more puzzling, perhaps, is the nearly total absence of any identifiable Anabaptist/Mennonite political activity in an area that one would think is near and dear to their hearts – sustainable agriculture.

Schmidt asked why the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition based in Washington DC has no institutional Mennonite presence or overt Mennonite support.

Referring to the More-with-Less Cookbook, he wrote, “The publishing of cookbooks is not to be demeaned. Responsible consumption is at the core of our efforts to save the earth. But, having done this one thing well, have we neglected to do other things just as needful?”

Recent graduate (2010) Nathan Kauffman may exemplify interest among a small minority of alumni in tackling environmental problems via political involvement. Kauffman went from majoring in history and social science at EMU to working full-time for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He had interned for this group while spending a semester at EMU’s Washington Community Scholars’ Center. This internship paved the way for him to be hired as its special projects person and executive assistant to Mike Tidwell, the man who wrote the provocative Post article.

Kauffman has become accustomed to preparing talking points for reference and distribution, donning a business suit, and knocking on the doors of state and national legislators in the mid-Atlantic region. He and his colleagues recently (Feb. 2011) succeeded in persuading the Virginia General Assembly to pass legislation that will establish a revolving loan fund to help Virginians install solar energy projects on their homes. He then turned his attention to the Maryland General Assembly and legislation to help create off-shore wind farms.

Kauffman is the only alumnus found by Crossroads to be working full-time to improve environmental policies at the state or national levels. (If there are others, please let us know at Crossroads@emu.edu.) Sharing a basement apartment in Northwest Washington with Josh Brubaker ’06 (grad student at American University), Kauffman says it is not feasible for him to practice the kind of sustainable lifestyle – a vegetable garden, solar panels, bicycling everywhere – described elsewhere in Crossroads. Living in “the District,” as locals refer to it, however, does enable Kauffman to function without owning a car.

“It’s impossible to totally devote yourself to everything simultaneously,” he says. “I am working on policy, and it takes almost all of my time, and other alumni are living in truly sustainable ways, and it takes a lot of their time.

“Making policy is hard, and biking everywhere and gardening are hard. If you try to do everything, you end up being ineffective. At some point you have to throw your lot in with something and commit to it.”

At the local level in Harrisonburg, EMU senior Jakob zumFelde has worked with the New Community Project to encourage city planners and elected representatives to support a pathway for pedestrians and bicyclists to safely travel from the northwest corner of the city to downtown.

Outside of the political arena, alumni certainly have worked on projects with wide environmental impact – Catherine Mumaw ’54, for example.

In 1981-82, Mumaw visited Mennonite Central Committee units in northeast Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Jamaica, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya, and Somalia to research appropriate technologies used by women for their households. This led to Mumaw’s involvement in international conferences in which solar cooking was a topic of discussion. From 1989 to 1995 she was an advisor to Solar Box Cookers International, which is responsible for more than a half million inexpensive solar cookers in use around the world. (For more information, visit www.solarcookers.org.)

But Mumaw, along with a few of the scientist-alumni listed on pages 33-36, seem to be the exceptions. Most environmentally aware alumni of EMU have chosen to work in their own backyards – either literally or in their immediate communities.

FOR THE THEOLOGICAL ANGLE

In this issue of Crossroads, we did not attempt to delve into the widely varied views on the Biblical basis of “creation care,” or the lack thereof. That would have required a double-sized magazine or a book-length manuscript.

Anyone interested in this topic is invited to read Creation & the Environment – An Anabaptist Perspective on a Sustainable World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), with conversation-stimulating chapters by 14 authors, including three EMU-linked professors. Calvin Redekop, a sociologist and Conrad Grabel College professor (emeritus), edited the book. You may also enjoy reading Redekop’s chapter “Religion, Leadership, and the Natural Environment: The Case of American Evangelicals” in a new book edited by his son, Benjamin W. Redekop, Leadership for Environmental Sustainability (Routledge, 2010).

For regularly updated information, visit the Evangelical Environmental Network at www.creationcare.org.