Keyword: lectures

2025 Friesen Lectures Series | Anabaptist Peace Witness - Historical Significance and Today's Mission (videos)

2025 John and Margaret Friesen Lecture Series is a two-part installment titled, "Anabaptist Peace Witness – Historical Significance and Today's Mission," with Dr. Astrid von Schlachta, Head of the Mennonite Research Center and lecturer at the University of Regensburg. The lectures took place on Thursday, January 23, 2025 at CMU.

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Upcoming lectures at CMU will highlight Anabaptist peace witness

"Why did Anabaptists and Mennonites take up arms all of a sudden? Where are the limits for Christians to participate in social developments? Where must the often very quiet voice of minorities not be silenced?" These are some of the questions Dr. Astrid von Schlachta, head of the Mennonite Research Center and lecturer at the University of Regensburg, Germany, will address at the 2025 John and Margaret Friesen Lectures.

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2024 John and Margaret Friesen Lectures - Revisiting the Mennonite Experience in Ukraine (2 videos)

The 2024 Friesen Lectures are unified by a geographical context and dedicated to understanding the history of Mennonite communities in Ukraine. Addressing diverse themes from distant historical periods, Ukrainian professor Dr. Nataliya Venger provides listeners with the opportunity to immerse themselves once again in the unique world of Mennonite history in both a remote and more immediate historical perspective.

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2023 J.J. Thiessen Lecture with Dr. Willie James Jennings (video)

with Dr. Willie James Jennings
Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies, Yale Divinity School

Recorded October 27, 2023

[ news release ]

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2023 John and Margaret Friesen Lectures with Dr. Dr. Gary K. Waite (videos)

These interconnected lectures foreground the neglected role played by Dutch Mennonites in the development of new ideas in theology, scripture interpretation, social and religious organization, the promotion of religious toleration, and in technology, science, and philosophy.

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2022 J.J. Thiessen Lecture Series - Picturing the Bible: How Artists Tell the Story (videos)

Contrary to what is often assumed, both Christians and Jews made pictorial art for their worship spaces no later than the early second century CE and have continued to do so through history. From the first, these artworks were never simply decorative but drew upon stories from both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. As such, they served and still serve an exegetical and even theological purpose and not simply an illustrative one.

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2022 John and Margaret Friesen Lecture Series "Reading Mennonite Writing Now" (videos)

Mennonite literary studies in North America is in a period of transition, with new scholarly avenues opening as critics respond to a fast-growing body of Mennonite fiction, poetry, and life writing. What does Mennonite literature look like today, and how can we read it most productively?

Robert Zacharias

Dr. Robert Zacharias is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at York University in Toronto, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Mennonite Studies. He is editor of After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America (2016), and author of Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature (2012). His new book, Reading Mennonite Writing: A Study in Minor Transnationalism, is forthcoming this spring from Penn State University Press.

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2021 J.J. Thiessen Lecture Series - Mediation and the Immediate God (videos)

In this lecture series, amplified in a forthcoming book, Mediation and the Immediate God (Darton, Longman, and Todd 2022), Edith M. Humphrey pursued a long-standing debated question: how we can both say that God has a direct relationship with each Christian, and that God uses others in order to bring us to health and glory? Guided by key scriptural passages, and key understandings of this topic and these passages, we  probe the significance of intercessory prayer and our mutual dependence in the body of Christ.

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2019 J.J. Thiessen Lectures with Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford (videos)

With Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Georgia Harkness Professor of Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, IL 

Why does it still matter to think about and to talk about Jesus Christ, as the theological discipline of "Christology" seeks to do? This lecture series will explore some of the material implications for our life together of the ways Jesus is envisioned in our contexts. Christology matters in concrete ways both for followers of Jesus and for non-Christians who are affected by the convictions and actions of those who claim a Christian identity.

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Upcoming public lecture to explore Anabaptism in Guatemala

"How do we live as a transnational Mennonite community when some within the community are implicated in the harm done to others? How do we live out the authentic witness of early Anabaptism?" These are some of the questions Dr. Patricia Harms will raise at the 2019 John and Margaret Friesen Lectures at Canadian Mennonite University (CMU).

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