Mennonites In Canada 1939 1970 A People Transformed

When war broke out in 1939 Canadian Mennonites were overwhelmingly a rural people. By 1970 they had largely completed one of the greatest 'migrations' in their history - the transformation from a rural to an urban community. In this third and final volume of Mennonite history in Canada, T.D. Regehr shows how the Second World War challenged the pacifist view of Mennonites and created a population more aware of events, problems, and opportunities for Christian service and personal advancement in the world beyond their traditional rural communities. Regehr describes how the war also initiated the urbanization process and brought in its wake a new wave of Mennonite immigrants, with different traditions and values, from Europe.

T.D. Regehr shows how the Second World War challenged the pacifist views of Mennonites and created a population more aware of events, problems, and opportunities for Christian service and personal advancement in the world beyond their traditional rural communities.

Covers the Mennonite experience in Canada from the time of the first documented immigrants in 1786 to the Niagara Peninsula in Ontario from Pennsylvania through the conclusion of World War I.

This booklet expands upon Regehr's lectures in which he argues that demographic and political shifts in how Mennonites engage the Canadian federalist democracy leave today's Mennonites with an uncertain hermeneutic. The Mennonites are no longer exclusively ethnic. A demographic typology includes those who are ethnic and committed to the Mennonite church, ethnic and non-churched, non-ethnic and part of the Mennonite church, or ethnic and part of another denomination. Concurrent with this demographic shift, the politics of Canadian Mennonites has changed from alternating swings of martyrdom and patronage, to a disproportionately high representation in elections and candidacies--roughly one-quarter of the recent Manitoba provincial candidacies. --From the Foreword by Dan Wessner

Presents an illustrated A-Z reference containing more than 300 entries related to immigration to North America, including people, places, legislation, and more.

Between the 1920s and the 1940s, 10,000 traditionalist Mennonites emigrated from western Canada to isolated rural sections of Northern Mexico and the Paraguayan Chaco; over the course of the twentieth century, they became increasingly scattered through secondary migrations to East Paraguay, British Honduras, Bolivia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Despite this dispersion, these Canadian-descendant Mennonites, who now number around 250,000, developed a rich transnational culture over the years, resisting allegiance to any one nation and cultivating a strong sense of common peoplehood based on a history of migration, nonviolence, and distinct language and dress. Village among Nations recuperates a missing chapter of Canadian history: the story of these Mennonites who emigrated from Canada for cultural reasons, but then in later generations “returned” in large numbers for economic and social security. Royden Loewen analyzes a wide variety of texts, by men and women – letters, memoirs, reflections on family debates on land settlement, exchanges with curious outsiders, and deliberations on issues of citizenship. They relate the untold experience of this uniquely transnational, ethno-religious community.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a few closely related families established a utopian community in Canada’s smallest province. Known officially as B. Compton Limited but described by a journalist in 1935 as "Prince Edward Island’s unique ‘brotherly love’ community," this utopia owed its longevity to the cohesion provided by its communal organization, dense kin ties, and long-held millenarianism – and to a decidedly pragmatic approach to business. All Things in Common demonstrates how "un-utopian" such a community could be while problematizing the contention that the inevitable end of all utopian experiments is a full-blown dystopia. Beginning with a compelling backstory and locating the Compton community in the historiography of North American utopias, the author goes on to explore the community’s business endeavours, its religious, familial, and transgressive aspects, and its brief period of international fame before assessing the factors that led to its dissolution in 1947. Providing a strong narrative framework, All Things in Common draws on rich family and archival records and diverse secondary sources, concluding with a consideration of the community’s legacy for its alumni and their descendants.