Marvin Blickenstaff was my piano professor at Goshen when I began as a first-year student in the fall of 1979. Seeing him, and listening to his teaching and performance, transported me back to my 17-year-old self – a strange and vivid experience that was both disorienting and orienting.
News
Anniversary of anguish
Oct 11 2024
As we pass the anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, we are witnessing the predictable horror that unfolds when the arithmetic of revenge – “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” – is taken as an exponential license to crush and exterminate.
The Hamas attack killed 1,200 people, and 254 people were taken hostage from Israel. As of today, 70 of the hostages are known or believed to be dead, and 101 are still in captivity. More than 40,000 Gazans have been killed in the retaliatory attacks by Israel, Gaza’s infrastructure has been decimated, and famine is unfolding. The conflict has recently widened geographically to involve Lebanon, and politically and militarily to Hezbollah and Iran.
Last week, Liam Minielly published an opinion piece in The Record, our student newspaper, detailing how arms deals from the United States are enabling the Israeli attacks. Without debating the disparate words being used to describe this war effort, which include terrorism, counter-terrorism, self-defense, and genocide, there is no possibility that the ongoing violence is bringing about a solution.
The question before us, on this anniversary of anguish, is how we might act for peace. I offer you these beginning ideas. Please add to them.
- Actively imagine peace, pray for peace, long for peace.
- Study peacemaking. Peacemaking can be art, or social work, or science, or music, or theology or wherever your passions lie!
- Courageously examine how the impulses toward retaliation and revenge act in your own life.
- Act in solidarity with the nonviolent resistance movements happening in Palestine and Israel and around the world. Write to your political leaders. Speak in support of the families and heritages of our Middle Eastern students, colleagues and friends.
- In the face of this suffering, embrace life! Be gratefully attentive to the daily acts that we can do that are life-giving to ourselves and one another.
We cannot succumb to the illogical arithmetic of violence and hatred. Even small actions for peace are a source of hope.
Rebecca Stoltzfus, president
My 17-year-old self
‘Freedom for everyone’
Every day is a good day to learn a little more about history. Today, Juneteenth, is an especially good day to listen to a story that has shaped our present day through a long and painful struggle for freedom. In the words of Opal Lee, the grandmother of Juneteenth, the freedom we celebrate through the telling of this story is freedom not only for enslaved people, or Black people, or Texans, but for everyone.
The contemporary, creative work of the Gospel
When Kevin and I set out on a learning tour about Anabaptists in Switzerland and Germany, we were prepared to hear stories of persecution and cruel executions. What has surprised me are the stories of ecumenical reconciliation and active love that continue to spring forth from the Anabaptist movement 500 years later.