EARLY ANABAPTISM IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Past, Present, and Future at 500 Years
July 22-24, 2025
KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Horizons of Expectation: Space, Sense, and Religious Reform in a Globalizing Age
Tuesday, July 22, 2025 • 7 p.m.
Nicholas Terpstra
The idea of “horizons of expectation” emerged in literary theory as a way of expressing how the cultural conventions of a place or period shaped how people read texts and situations. In the “long sixteenth century,” every horizon was thrown into flux as Europeans struggled to come to terms with a larger globe, unknown peoples, apocalyptic expectations, and ecclesiastical uncertainties. Did the profoundly uncertain horizons of the Reformation period shape how many groups and individuals used space and sense to recover some semblance of certainty?
Nicholas Terpstra is professor of history at the University of Toronto, where he has worked on questions of religion and social change in the early modern period. In books, articles, and essay collections, he has explored themes in civic religion and the care of marginalized peoples, the experience of religious refugees in the early modern period, and the Global Reformation. His most recent publication is Senses of Space in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press: 2024). In 2024 he was appointed provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto.
PLENARY SESSION
Lost and Living Pasts: Early Modern Histories and Global Mennonite Belonging
Wednesday, July 23, 2025 • 10:30 a.m.
Kat Hill
Hill will explore the early modern pasts of the Mennonite world seen in the context of the contemporary global Mennonite community. Drawing on work on early modern Anabaptism and Prussian Mennonites, and subsequent migrations to the Russian Empire, across the Atlantic and beyond, this presentation will examine both the importance of these early modern Anabaptist worlds in shaping emerging Mennonite identity but also the use and deployment of memories of these pasts as Mennonites migrated. From genealogies that trace family origins or histories of the early modern Anabaptism, through to objects that recall early modern worlds, Hill will consider the importance of lost and living pasts of early Anabaptism for Mennonite ideas of belonging.
Kat Hill is an author and researcher based in the Highlands of Scotland. Her work focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in various contexts from non-conformist religious communities, including Mennonites in Europe, America, and the Global South. She is the author of the prize-winning book Baptism, Brotherhood, and Belief: Anabaptism and Lutheranism, 1525-1585 (Oxford University Press, 2015). Her second book, Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter, was released by William Collins in 2024 and has been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.
PLENARY SESSION
Constructing a Multi-Textual Anabaptist Theology from an Indonesian Perspective
Wednesday, July 23, 2025 • 7 p.m.
Danang Kristiawan
Constructing Anabaptist theology amid the diversity of existing Anabaptist communities and theologies will involve various tensions, between universality and particularity, between togetherness and unique local identity, between globality and locality. Within the globality of Anabaptism there is diversity, but even within local Anabaptist communities there is plural and interrelated complexity. Therefore, constructing Anabaptist theology is a multi-textual conversation that puts into conversation various texts: scripture, the sixteenth-century Anabaptist tradition, texts of the local context (culture, local traditions, experience of community, other religious or spiritual texts), and the history of the local Anabaptist community itself. The multi-textual conversation is intertwined in an appreciative, critical, and mutually transformative way among the various texts to create a dynamic theological construction. This presentation will present an experimental multi-textual approach to Anabaptist mystical theology from an Indonesian perspective, and especially from a Javanese perspective, where mystical understanding from the sixteenth-century Anabaptist tradition, Javanese mysticism, and interreligious mysticism will be put in a creative conversation to construct an Indonesian Anabaptist peace theology.
Danang Kristiawan, who was born and raised in Indonesia, is a pastor in the Gereja Injili di Tanah Jawa (GITJ), the oldest Mennonite church conference outside Europe and North America, and teaches Anabaptist history and theology at the Mennonite seminary in Pati. His primary academic interests include interreligious dialogue, religious history, pastoral pedagogy, and Anabaptist theology. Kristiawan is passionate about bringing Anabaptist-Mennonite theological and historical teaching to Indonesia in ways that translate more accurately into this cultural context.
PLENARY SESSION
The Future(s) of Anabaptist History: Global Perspectives and Methods
Thursday, July 24, 2025 • 10:30 a.m.
Elizabeth Miller
Today Anabaptists can be found on every continent, with some of the most rapid growth among communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As this tradition has been adapted in diverse contexts, new historical questions and methods have emerged in succession. What are some of the questions and approaches guiding research and the study of Anabaptist history globally? What can the approaches being developed in many global contexts--often at a grassroots level--tell us about potential future directions for Anabaptist history?
Elizabeth Miller is the director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism and assistant professor of history at Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana. Before arriving at Goshen College, she worked with Anabaptist churches in Colombia and Ecuador for nine years with Mennonite Central Committee. Miller is the author of Desde el principio anabautistas: La historia de las iglesias menonitas y hermanos menonitas en Colombia, 1946-1975 and, with Lisa Weaver, of Let the Children Come to Me: Nurturing Anabaptist Faith Within Families. She lives in Goshen with her husband and two children.