John Howard Yoder is one of the best-known Mennonite thinkers on peace. But before Yoder there was Guy F. Hershberger, whose reflections on war, violence and peace helped Mennonites navigate perilous times in early to mid-20th century, and who also laid the foundation for what became the Alternative Service Program in the U.S. during World War II. In the 1960s, he played an important role in guiding the Mennonite church’s response to the civil rights movement—nudging them toward greater openness to Martin Luther King’s call for justice for African-Americans. In this definitive biography, Theron F. Schlabach shows how Hershberger helped Christians live their faith in a world beset by war and injustice, at the same time pioneering creative ways to engage pressing concerns such as civil rights, economic justice and capital punishment. Says Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School: “What Schlabach has given us is an invaluable, honest account of a life lived in the tensions of the Mennonite church as that church explored the implications of being a people committed to nonviolence. The resulting account is a crucial account not only of Hershberger’s life, but of Mennonite life—an accounting I hope non-Mennonites will find instructive because it may help them understand Mennonites, but more importantly how Mennonites help us better understand what being Christian entails.” War, Peace, and Social Conscience: Guy F. Hershberger and Mennonite Ethics was made possible through the generous support of Mennonite Mutual Aid and the Mennonite Historical Society.

Sir Michael Howard traces the pattern in the attitudes of liberal-minded men and women in the face of war, from Erasmus to the Americans after Vietnam, and concludes that peacemaking is a task which has to be tackled afresh every day of our lives.

The first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Winner, 2015 Américo Paredes Book Award, Center for Mexican American Studies and South Texas College. Felipe Hinojosa's parents first encountered Mennonite families as migrant workers in the tomato fields of northwestern Ohio. What started as mutual admiration quickly evolved into a relationship that strengthened over the years and eventually led to his parents founding a Mennonite Church in South Texas. Throughout his upbringing as a Mexican American evangélico, Hinojosa was faced with questions not only about his own religion but also about broader issues of Latino evangelicalism, identity, and civil rights politics. Latino Mennonites offers the first historical analysis of the changing relationship between religion and ethnicity among Latino Mennonites. Drawing heavily on primary sources in Spanish, such as newspapers and oral history interviews, Hinojosa traces the rise of the Latino presence within the Mennonite Church from the origins of Mennonite missions in Latino communities in Chicago, South Texas, Puerto Rico, and New York City, to the conflicted relationship between the Mennonite Church and the California farmworker movements, and finally to the rise of Latino evangelical politics. He also analyzes how the politics of the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and black freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements captured the imagination of Mennonite leaders who belonged to a church known more for rural and peaceful agrarian life than for social protest. Whether in terms of religious faith and identity, race, immigrant rights, or sexuality, the politics of belonging has historically presented both challenges and possibilities for Latino evangelicals in the religious landscapes of twentieth-century America. In Latino Mennonites, Hinojosa has interwoven church history with social history to explore dimensions of identity in Latino Mennonite communities and to create a new way of thinking about the history of American evangelicalism.

Issued in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response.

Perhaps the most inclusive, sweeping, and insightful history ever written about the North American Mennonite saga. Both authors are eminent historians. Royden Loewen is Professor of History, with a chair in Mennonite Studies, at the University of Winnipeg. Steven M. Nolt is Professor of History at Goshen (IN) College. Both authors of this book bring to the task the insights of "social history." As such, they focus on people in many geographical environments rather than on institutional development and theological controversy. Readable, understandable, and incisive. Appeals to all ages and all groups.

How have Americans sought peaceful, rather than destructive, solutions to domestic and world conflict? This two-volume set documents peace and antiwar movements in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Although national leaders often claim to be fighting to achieve peace, the real peace seekers struggle against enormous resistance to their message and have often faced persecution for their efforts. Despite a well-established pattern of being involved in wars, the United States also has a long tradition of citizens who made extensive efforts to build and maintain peaceful societies and prevent the destructive human and material costs of war. Unarmed activists have most consistently upheld American values at home. Opposition to War: An Encyclopedia of U.S. Peace and Antiwar Movements investigates this historical tradition of resistance to involvement in armed conflict—an especially important and relevant topic today as the nation has been mired in numerous military conflicts throughout most of the current century. The book examines a largely misunderstood and underappreciated minority of Americans who have committed themselves to finding peaceful resolutions to domestic and international conflicts—individuals who have proposed and conducted an array of practical and creative methods for peaceful change, from the transformation of individual behavior to the development of international governing and legal systems, for more than 250 years. Readers will learn how individuals working alone or organized into societies of various size have steadfastly campaigned to stop war, end the arms race, eliminate the underlying causes of war, and defend the civil liberties of Americans when wartime nationalism most threatens them.

A war is always a moral event. However, the most destructive war in human history has not received much moral scrutiny. The Good War That Wasn't--and Why It Matters examines the moral legacy of this war, especially for the United States. Drawing on the just war tradition and on moral values expressed in widely circulated statements of purpose for the war, the book asks: How did American participation in the war fit with just cause and just conduct criteria? Subsequently the book considers the impact of the war on American foreign policy in the years that followed. How did American actions cohere (or not) with the stated purposes for the war, especially self-determination for the peoples of the world and disarmament? Finally, the book looks at the witness of war opponents. Values expressed by war advocates were not actually furthered by the war. However, many war opponents did inspire efforts that effectively worked toward the goals of disarmament and self-determination. The Good War That Wasn't--and Why It Matters develops its arguments in pragmatic terms. It focuses on moral reasoning in a commonsense way in its challenge to widely held assumptions about World War II.

What does it mean to be Mennonite in the modern world? And what is the witness of a peace church that is always at risk of splintering? C. Henry Smith—son of an Amish family, erudite historian, urbane bank president, and pioneer of Mennonite scholarship—sought answers to these questions in the middle of the 20th century, and his answers reverberate through the church to this day. In this engaging narrative biography, historian Perry Bush chronicles Smith’s childhood in an Illinois farming community, his youthful turn toward intellectual inquiry, and his confidence that Anabaptist faith and life offer gifts to the wider world. By recounting the story of one of the foremost Mennonite intellectuals, Bush surveys the storied terrain of 20th-century Mennonite identity in its selective borrowing from wider culture and its tentative embrace of progressive reforms and higher education, and growing conviction that Anabaptism served as a taproot of Western civilization. Bush argues that Smith’s body of historical writing furnished a new generation of Mennonites with both an understanding of their shared past and the tools to navigate an ever-shifting present. Volume 49 in the Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History Series.

First published in 1922 during the "Red Scare," by which time Jane Addams's pacifist efforts had adversely affected her popularity as an author and social reformer, Peace and Bread in Time of War is Addams's eighth book and the third to deal with her thoughts on pacifism. Addams's unyielding pacifism during the Great War drew criticism from politicians and patriots who deemed her the "most dangerous woman in America." Even those who had embraced her ideals of social reform condemned her outspoken opposition to U.S. entry into World War I or were ambivalent about her peace platforms. Turning away from the details of the war itself, Addams relies on memory and introspection in this autobiographical portrayal of efforts to secure peace during the Great War. "I found myself so increasingly reluctant to interpret the motives of other people that at length I confined all analysis of motives to my own," she writes. Using the narrative technique she described in The Long Road of Women's Memory, an extended musing on the roles of memory and myth in women's lives, Addams also recalls attacks by the press and defends her political ideals. Katherine Joslin's introduction provides additional historical context to Addams's involvement with the Woman's Peace Party, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and her work on Herbert Hoover's campaign to provide relief and food to women and children in war-torn enemy countries.