Past Events
Thursday, September 22, 2011 • 8:00 am to 5:00 pm
CONFERENCE
The Power of Forgiveness: Lessons from Nickel Mines
Using the fifth anniversary of the tragedy at Nickel Mines as a backdrop, this one-day conference will explore the moral dilemmas arising from violence and the potential power of forgiveness for personal healing and restoration of relationships.
The conference will benefit counselors, therapists, pastors, leaders, and others interested in the process and potential of forgiveness.
The keynote address will be given by L. Gregory Jones, vice president and vice provost for global strategy and programs at Duke University and senior strategist and professor of theology at Duke Divinity School. Widely recognized as a scholar and church leader on forgiveness and reconciliation, Jones is the co-author of Forgiving As We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace (with Celestin Musekura) and the author of Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis.
View schedule, speaker, and registration information.
Thursday, September 22, 2011 • 7:30 pm
Leffler Chapel
PROGRAM
The Enduring Power of Forgiveness
Steve Nolt and Terri Roberts will address “What I’ve Learned about Forgiveness” and Kenneth Sensenig will discuss “The Worldwide Witness of Nickel Mines” during this event that follows the conference on forgiveness.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011 • 7:30 pm
Bucher Meetinghouse
LECTURE
Anabaptism and the Netherlands: A Model of Toleration
Jeff Bach, director of the Young Center, will explore how Anabaptists in the Netherlands moved from feared religious sect to respectable citizens to advocates for tolerance for Anabaptists in other parts of Europe.
In addition to serving as Young Center director, Bach teaches courses on the history of Anabaptist and Pietist groups and communal societies. He is the author of Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata and co-author with Michael Birkel of Genius of the Transcendent: Mystical Writings of Jakob Boehme.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 • 7:30 pm
Bucher Meetinghouse
LECTURE
An Amish Paradox: Diversity and Change in the Holmes County, Ohio, Amish Settlement
The authors of the 2011 Dale Brown Book Award winner, An Amish Paradox, will discuss their reasons for and methods and experiences in studying the Holmes County Settlement in Ohio. They will focus on the dialectic and dilemmas that characterize Amish attempts to adapt and yet stay true to their cultural and religious heritage in the areas of family, education, economics, and health care. They will also comment briefly on the Amish community as a model for and its future in American society.
David L. McConnell is professor of anthropology at The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. His research interests include social and cultural change, the indigenization of modernity, and the anthropology of education. Charles E. Hurst is emeritus professor of sociology at The College of Wooster, where he taught for 38 years.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 • 7:30 pm
Bucher Meetinghouse
LECTURE (rescheduled from September 8)
Civil War-Era Anabaptists and the Modern Nation-State
Steve Longenecker, professor of history at Bridgewater College (Va.), will discuss the growth of national government during the Civil War and the consequences of this for Anabaptists. Newly empowered by a popular cause, conscription, civil religion, and sheer size, the worldly kingdom became much more threatening to traditional Anabaptism nonconformity.
Longenecker is a specialist in American religious history and the author of Shenandoah Religion: Outsiders and the Mainstream, 1716-1865 and The Brethren during the Age of World War: The Church of the Brethren Encounter with Modernization, 1914-1950. His current research project is the religious history of antebellum and Civil War-era Gettysburg, Pa.
Thursday, November 17, 2011 • 7:30 pm
Bucher Meetinghouse
SNOWDEN LECTURE
Thrill of the Chaste: Tracing the Ancestry of the Amish Romance Novel
The birthdate of the Amish romance novels is frequently given as 1997, when Beverly Lewis’s blockbuster novel The Shunning was published. But the first Amish romance novel had appeared almost a century earlier, and Amish-themed novels continued to appear in ensuing years, refracting many of the social, religious, and literary movements of the twentieth century. Valerie Weaver-Zercher, the Young Center’s Snowden Fellow for Fall 2011, will discuss the connections between recent Amish-themed novels and much older novels of the same genre.
Weaver-Zercher is a writer and editor whose work has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, Orion, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, and Sojourners, and other venues.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 • 7:00 pm
Bucher Meetinghouse
LECTURE
The Unchristian Slave Trade: Brethren and Slavery
The Brethren were strong opponents of slave holding. Some Brethren even paid for slaves in order to free them. However, a few rare individuals held slaves. Jeff Bach will examine these tensions among Brethren, especially in the period just prior to the Civil War.
Jeff Bach is director of the Young Center and associate professor of religious studies at Elizabethtown College. He is the author of Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata and co-author of Genius of the Transcendent: Mystical Writings of Jakob Boehme.
Thursday, February 23, 2012 • 7:00 pm
Bucher Meetinghouse
LECTURE
Communal Peace during World War I
Ryan Long will discuss the challenges facing Hutterite colonies during World War I. The Hutterites used the events of the war to strengthen their identity and reconnect to their history, actions that secured their future as a separate communal society in North America.
Ryan Long is a 2011 graduate of Elizabethtown College with a major in religious studies
Tuesday, March 20, 2012 • 7:30 pm
Bucher Meetinghouse
PROGRAM
Starvation Volunteer: A Conversation with an Elizabethtown Alum
Robert Willoughby ’47 will discuss his experience as a conscientious objector during WWII and his participation in U.S. government research on human starvation. (This program is co-sponsored by the Center for Global Citizenship, the Open Book Initiative, and the Office of the Dean of Faculty.
Thursday, April 19, 2012 • 6:00 pm
Susquehanna Room of Myer Hall
ANNUAL YOUNG CENTER BANQUET
The annual Young Center dinner gives faculty, staff, students, church leaders, and other friends of the Young Center the opportunity to socialize and learn about the Center’s activities and programs.
A reception for Durnbaugh Lecturer Rod Janzen will be held at 5:30, preceding the dinner.
Thursday, April 19, 2012 • 7:30 pm
Susquehanna Room of Myer Hall
DURNBAUGH LECTURE
The Hutterites in 2012
Rod Janzen will give an introduction to the life of this growing population of 50,000 communal Anabaptists. The presentation will include a brief history of the Hutterites, a discussion of their essential beliefs, and a review of their present challenges.
Rod Janzen is Distinguished Scholar and professor of history at Fresno Pacific University, where he has taught for the past 22 years. Since 1999 Janzen has served as editor of Communal Societies, the academic journal of the Communal Studies Association. He is the author of a number of books that deal with communal, Anabaptist, and/or utopian societies, including The Hutterites in North America, published in 2010 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Friday, April 20, 2012 • 10:00 am to 2:00 pm
Young Center
DURNBAUGH SEMINAR
Aspects of Hutterite Life: Communal Christianity and 21st-Century Challenges
Rod Janzen will continue his discussion of the Hutterites by focusing in greater detail on important characteristics of contemporary Hutterite life as well as major conflicts, including the influential attraction of evangelical Protestantism and recent divisions.
