Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies

Thursday, October 19, 2017 • 7:00 pm • Susquehanna Room of Myer Hall

LECTURE
Beards, Bonnets, and Football: Eastern Mennonite University & Elizabethtown College, 1900-2000 

Long before the marshmallow rivalry with Messiah College, Elizabethtown had a quiet rivalry with a college in Virginia. Donald Kraybill explores some surprising connections, similarities, and differences between Eastern Mennonite University and Elizabethtown College. He also asks why the Brethren founded a college in Lancaster County but the Mennonites did not. Following the talk, Kraybill will sign his new social history of EMU, Eastern Mennonite University: A Century of Countercultural Education, released by Penn State University Press. 

Kraybill is senior fellow emeritus at the Young Center. He is the founding editor of Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies and the author or coauthor of numerous books on Anabaptist groups.

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Saturday, October 21, 2017 • Noon to 4:00 pm • Academic Quad

BRETHREN HERITAGE FESTIVAL

Participate in hands-on activities like making corn husk and yarn dolls, putting together old-fashioned wooden puzzles and playing classic outdoor games, and producing your very own batch of flubber to take home. Pedal the E-town Engineering Club bike to churn homemade ice cream and then enjoy it with other luscious treats, including homemade apple butter on fresh bread and popcorn from the historic Reist Popcorn Wagon. At the same time, learn more about the Anabaptists and Pietists and get the latest news about the current Young Center building project!

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Tuesday, November 14, 2017 • 7:30 pm • Hoover 212

PANEL PRESENTATION
Three Views of Reform: Luther, Calvin, Swiss Anabaptists  

Three scholars will mark the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation with a panel discussion examining the visions of Martin Luther, John Calvin and Swiss Anabaptists for reforming Christianity. The presenters will explore the three different paths emerging from this time of intense religious debate that continues to influence Christianity today. Vince Evener will explore how Martin Luther charted a course for reform distinct from Roman Catholic, Calvinist, and Anabaptist expressions of Christianity. Luther’s view of reform was built upon the foundational doctrinal claim that salvation comes by grace alone, through faith alone; from this foundation, Luther worked to transform individual and corporate Christian life in rich and complex ways, seeking to ensure that doctrine, devotion, worship, and social life expressed and cultivated Christians’ trust in God alone for eternal salvation, and even for temporal well-being. Mark Draper will address the ways in which the Reformed Reformations in Zurich and Geneva took on different forms from the Lutheran and Radical Reformations. He will also address the legacy of the Reformation in regard to the relationships among descendants of the various reformation movements. Jeff Bach will discuss how Anabaptists in Zurich envisioned a biblical vision of reform that incorporated faith in Christ’s grace and its power to lead believers in discipleship. He will also address the group’s choice to adopt adult baptism and form a community of discipleship.

Evener is instructor in Reformation and Luther studies at United Lutheran Seminary and the coeditor of Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe (due from Brill in 2018). He is completing a book manuscript titled “Enemies of the Cross”: Suffering and Salvation in the Reformation" and has published numerous articles on Luther and other reformers.

Draper is executive director of the Pense Learning Center at Evangelical Seminary and assistant professor of historical theology. His research interests include the history of evangelicalism and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelical social reformers and theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley and Gilbert Haven.

Bach is director of the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies and teaches courses on the history of Anabaptist and Pietist groups and communal societies at Elizabethtown College. He is the author of Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata and coauthor with Michael Birkel of Genius of the Transcendent: Mystical Writings of Jakob Boehme.

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Thursday, November 16, 2017 • 7:30 pm • Hoover 212

SNOWDEN LECTURE
Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Women’s Responses to New Media  

"[The Internet is] Satan's tool to draw our focus away from our trust in God." Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar, the Young Center's 2017 Snowden fellow, explores how Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Haredi) women cope with new media and their apparent contradiction with these communities' values and practices. While their discourses included similar framings of danger and threat, the two groups developed different patterns of use (and nonuse) of new media. The strategies applied by these women to negotiate the tensions between their roles as gatekeepers and agents of change—nonuse, control and setting limits—are analyzed as valuable currencies in the cultural and religious markets of their communities.

Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar is a senior lecturer at Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, teaching courses in research methods, communication, religion, and gender. She received her doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at Brandeis University in 2011-2012.