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About this blog:
Goshen College President Rebecca Stoltzfus offers regular and intimate reflections on campus, interesting people she’s met, conversations she’s part of and higher education today.
President Rebecca J. Stoltzfus, a 1983 Goshen College graduate, became president in 2017 after 15 years as a human nutrition scholar and administrator at Cornell University.
Email her: [email protected]
I am learning eagerly and rapidly about AI and how it might change our work at Goshen College for the good. At the same time, I want to bring into clear focus what it means to be human. At GC, we are followers of the way of Jesus, who was God expressed in human form: born into a body, living among us and experiencing physical death. My word for the year is human.
I would like a top-down God. What Christmas offers us instead is a bottom-up God.
Last week Pope Leo XIV issued his first major writing to the global Catholic church, an Apostolic Exhortation – an urgent word of encouragement – on love for the poor, Dilexi Te. As a Mennonite, this theme caught my attention.
We have experienced another hard week of gun violence in America. For me, it has been a week of intense emotions – heavy emotions as well as joy and hope. How do we escape the doom loop? How do we stop partaking when it is dished up to us from all sides of the media and culture that we swim in?
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.
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.
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.
Last week I had the privilege to participate in the 100th anniversary celebration of the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. This 100th anniversary coincided with the 500th anniversary of Anabaptism, with the joint theme, The Courage to Love.
Listening to Joe describe the lives of these earliest Anabaptist leaders, I was struck by the ways that passionate learning extends from Zurich 500 years ago to Goshen College today. Young thinkers of that day, including Grebel and Manz, gathered in the mornings to study and translate, and in the afternoons to discuss the emerging meanings of the texts. How exciting that must have been!
Last weekend, I had the privilege of making my final speech to our 2025 graduating class of seniors at our baccalaureate service. I will remember this class for their imagination, courage and enthusiasm. In planning this baccalaureate service, they chose the theme of joy. Here are a few of the thoughts I shared with them, as well as the gift I gave them.
I am asking myself, in this moment of alarming and rapid change, “what is it that I need to be learning?”
Photo by Ronak Valobobhai on Unsplash Recently Gallup published a global study of leadership from the perspective of followers. They surveyed people in 27 countries, asking them to describe a leader in any setting with the most positive influence in…
We are writing jointly, as a Mennonite pastor and college president, to explain and support a recent lawsuit filed to protect our religious freedom to practice our faith in the sanctuary on this campus.
My word for the year is RENEW. Renewal is part and parcel of the God-filled life. It is the stuff of life – we see it in the turning of the earth and the seasons and in death and birth.…
Today is national First-Generation College Celebration Day. Nearly half of our students are the first in their families to go to college, and many of our staff and faculty are similarly first-gen. I am the second generation in my family…
Last week, Dr. Wendsler Nosie brought us a gift and an invitation. The gift was his call to awaken to the sacred nature of the land. The invitation was to stand in solidarity with the Apache in their struggle to…
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” –…
If you are a college president, which I happen to be, your inbox is full of alarms and advice about the winds of conflict on campuses this fall.
I honor Anne Frank this Women’s History Month because hearing her voice speak across the decades through her house-turned-museum woke me up to the power of girls. My experience in those upstairs rooms made me see not only the world…
Jim Collins, author of the business books Good to Great and Built to Last, defined a Hedgehog Concept as what differentiates great companies from good ones. He writes, “A hedgehog concept is not a goal to be the best, a…
My word for the year is faith because it’s what I need. Faith is such a familiar word that it can sound bland, and so I’ll try to explain what I mean. Faith for me is the belief that God…
This year I am newly awake to the reality that Jesus was born in Palestine under the occupation of an empire. And yet, throughout the Gospel stories of the Nativity, in the face of empire, people seek the light. They…
The violence unfolding in Israel/Palestine is horrifying and heartbreaking. As a follower of Jesus, I stand for peace and am opposed to killing. And as Dr. Martin Luther King said, “There can be no justice without peace and there can…
It is no secret and no surprise: Goshen College has been in many ways subverted – turned from below – by our inquiring and passionate students and faculty and the transformational changes they have brought about. John D. Roth, professor…
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