Cascadia Publishing House LLC

07/02/2024

“As I ponder Kris singing Merle's song as his own life fades and with the band Merle's death left behind, I find myself living at least briefly in a world in which only squares can have a ball yet with the hippies sing toward that grace still able to amaze.” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog

Actually no, I’m not from Muskogee, Oklahoma, where “We don’t smoke marijuana” and “where even squares can have a ball,” as country singer Merle Haggard celebrated. Still I&…

18/12/2023

At a time questions of conquest and violence are no less urgent than in biblical times, this guest post notes that “The Joshua story is crucial. It shows that territorial sovereignty is not possible without violence. As we read the trajectory of the biblical story, we get the sense that what Joshua sets up is a kind of experiment. Will it be possible to embody Torah in concrete life through controlling a particular territory that might be administered in just and peaceable ways?” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2487 by Ted Grimsrud, author of the Cascadia book God’s Healing Strategy.

One of the more challenging passages in the Bible is the story told in the book of Joshua. God’s chosen people enter the “promised land,” meet with opposition from the nations living there, and pro…

07/12/2023

Cascadia has released New Moves: A Theological Odyssey, by J. Denny Weaver, vol. 3 in the DreamSeeker Memoir Series https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/nm/nm.htm Drew G. I. Hart, who teaches at Messiah University, has said that Weaver's memoir is "A must-read for the pews and the classroom that ultimately should lead us to the streets.” And Janeen Bertsche Johnson, who took many courses from Weaver before becoming an Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary leader,observes that “Weaver examines the experiences, encounters, reading, and even rebukes that shaped and reshaped his theology throughout his life.”

Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.

17/08/2023

"Even before sunup more and more folks preemptively build beach cities of chairs, umbrellas, windbreakers, tents then leave. To crest the dunes is to wonder if an entire new megalopolis is springing up on the beach.” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog

Amid the tsunamis of cruelty drowning the planet, the day of endless kindness began as Joan and I watched Maine waves roll in for the last time. We unwrapped the breakfast sandwiches we had bought …

11/07/2023

This week we posted Meredith Sue Willis’ affirmation of Fences, by Cheryl Denise. Now Denise reports that she is helping to headline an evening of poetry and music on July 14 at Riversong in St. Jacobs, Ontario. Cheryl’s book is is a volume in Cascadia’s DreamSeeker Poetry Series, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/fences/fences.htm

Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.

10/07/2023

Affirming the latest poetry collection by Cheryl Denise, Fences, https://www.meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive225-229.html Willis observes that Denise “writes in a clean, apparently direct style, but underlying the family narratives and bright metaphors are sophisticated emotional depths. Fences is a volume in Cascadia’s DreamSeeker Poetry Series, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/fences/fences.htm

Cheryl Denise's world is at once full of rural pleasures and challenges like difficult tenants and taking care of recalcitrant sheep. She writes in a clean, apparently direct style, but underlying the family narratives and bright metaphors are sophisticated emotional depths. The poems are often narr...

24/06/2023

Today a memorial service at Scottdale (PA) Mennonite Church honored Daniel Hertzler, age 97, long-time editor, writer, and Mennonite church leader https://anabaptistworld.org/daniel-hertzler-gospel-herald-editor-dies-at-97. In his final 30 years, Hertzler wrote often for Cascadia Publishing House, including his final column in Kingsview and Co https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=881, scores of book reviews for DreamSeeker Magazine, On the Banks of Jacobs Creek: A History of the Scottdale Mennonite Churches (2019) https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/otb/otb.htm and two memoirs, A Little Left of Center (2000) and On My Way (2013) https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/omw/omw.htm.

In ON THE BANKS OF JACOBS CREEK, released by Cascadia Publishing House LLC, publisher of Anabaptist and Mennonite book, Daniel Hertzler tells the story, both sorrowful and inspiring, of how Scottdale (Pa) Mennonite Church emerged in 2003 from the opportunities and crises faced by two Mennonite congr...

03/06/2023

In ” Do I Dare?” the new guest post from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog, poet Joseph Gascho touches on what has now become daring for some of us: hope in “that giant hand / that led my surgeon’s hand / for six whole hours.” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2450 . Gascho is author of the DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia poetry collection, Cornfields, Cottonwoods, Seagulls, and Sermons https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/ccss/ccss.htm

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. –Psalm 139:9-10 Do I dare to tell my Darw…

15/05/2023

“We get to the runway. I tell our seatmate there's no wrong answer but ask if he believes in God. He says yes. So we all breathe prayers.” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog

Even if we were having to fly into Newark during a late-season winter storm, we were fortunate to have been able to experience the sunny tropics in the first place. Our plane did run late due to th…

04/05/2023

Anabaptist World reports https://anabaptistworld.org/lenape-ask-pennsylvania-mennonites-for-land-to-bury-their-ancestors/ on a meeting at which “Lenape ask Pennsylvania Mennonites for land to bury their ancestors. Participating was John Ruth, who researched and reported on the story of his own “Mennonite Homestead on Lenape Land” in his Cascadia book This Very Ground. https://www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/tvg/tvg.htm. The meeting had emerged from a conversation in which “Ruth said, ‘My people have been living on your land for 300 years. We didn’t run you off or kill you. We prospered here. We have freedom. What can we do to help you?’ Thomas responded, ‘We need a place to bury our ancestors.’

The Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville, Pa., welcomed the Lenape (Delaware) tribe of Bartlesville, Okla., on April 12. After a potluck supper with local Mennonites, Chief Brad KillsCrow, tribal elder John Thomas, and tribal historic preservation officer Susan Bachor presented their request: l...

07/04/2023

Reviewing East of Liberal: Notes on the Land, by Raylene Hinz-Penner, in Anabaptist World https://anabaptistworld.org/footsteps-on-the-land-across-time/ Melanie Springer Mock says that “Even as she presses against prevailing mythologies, Hinz-Penner expresses gratitude for the land of her childhood, including the congregation that nurtured her. She admits that writing about Turpin Mennonite . . . is difficult, because while her church family was populated by ‘European settlers caught in the mythology of the doctrine of manifest destiny,’ the congregation is ‘also the reason I love the land and will spend the rest of my life trying to de-romanticize and de-colonize my own life.” https://www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/eol/eol.htm

Though I only lived in Kansas for six years, parts of me still consider Kansas home: the place where my faith was formed and my consciousness about Anabaptists realized. Perhaps because of this, reading Raylene Hinz-Penner’s East of Liberal: Notes on the Land feels like a homecoming, an opportunit...

28/03/2023

“I imagined all the healing that could be released if resources for kiteboarding, both literal and metaphorical, were so equitably shared across the weathier and poorer of us that we could all skim together on the Planet Earth team.” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog

As usual the news was filled with reporting on national divorcing of red and blue and infinite variations, enough said, as much of the world’s energy went into taking things apart. But in one…

21/02/2023

“In recent years I've read about research suggesting that in their own ways bees think creatively; spiders dream; trees communicate. And maybe, metaphor though this may be, little cows live caringly in our broken hearts.” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog: “Thankful for the Little Cow”

Ella, three years old, has been fascinated by the scar on her grandfather’s chest, where the surgeon literally took out my heart and fixed it before putting it back in. She particularly keeps…

04/01/2023

With cover designed by Gwen Stamm based on a painting by becca conrad-whitehead, Cascadia has released Fences, by Cheryl Denise, vol. 20 in the DreamSeeker Poetry Series https://www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/fences/fences.htm “These are poems,” observes Doug Van Gundy, “of reverence and gratitude, farm life and frustration, but regardless of their subject, Cheryl Denise's poems are full of heart and grace, reminding us that it is a blessing to be wonderfully, imperfectly, perfectly human.”

Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.

05/12/2022

he cover design by Gwen M. Stamm, based on a photo and aerial map of Raylene Hinz-Penner's childhood home, points to the gridwork settlers imposed on Indigenous Kansas lands. Movingly the author tells both of her love for the land and her awareness that it was taken from others. As Elaine Enns, co-author Healing Haunted Histories puts it, in East of Liberal: Notes on the Land https://www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/eol/eol.htm "Hinz-Penner offers an engaging personal and political narrative that explores the contradictions, myths, and resilience of what we call her landlines, bloodlines, and songlines."
Cascadia Publishing House Anabaptist and Mennonite Books

Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.

03/12/2022

Cascadia has released East of Liberal: Notes in the Land, by Raylene Hinz-Penner, vol. 2 in the DreamSeeker Memoir Series https://www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/eol/eol.htm Julia Spicher Kasdorf says, “Beautiful and deeply researched, this meditation on a farm on the Oklahoma panhandle took a lifetime to write. From the Inland Sea, to Coronado’s exploits, to Comancheria, to the Dust Bowl, to her parents bent on farming after World War II, it is a love song to place and the story of one thoughtful person’s change of heart and mind.”

Summary (also available through PDF flier): Through elements of memoir, history, and philosophy of land use, a lover of her Mennonite farm childhood looks critically at farming’s impact on the land, comparing settler values of land ownership to those of first peoples who see themselves as owned ...

11/10/2022

“Intertwining with classic Anabaptist themes in my church experience were already evangelical and fundamentalist influences. Then yet another stream was added: the charismatic renewal movement. Abruptly all manner of settled ways of praying and worshiping and thinking were unraveled. It could be said that, to echo Todd’s memorable wording, a form of Pentecostalism was making its transgressive appearance.” In a series of ongoing reflections by participants in multiple Christian traditions, this post is the Anabaptist-Mennonite response to J. Terry Todd on his Pentecostal tradition.

For a year I’ve been the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer made a main presentation o…

25/08/2022

Reviewing in Anabaptist World https://anabaptistworld.org/what-would-the-lenape-say/ Rachel Waltner Goosen says this of John Ruth’s Cascadia volume, This Very Ground, This Crooked Affair: A Mennonite Homestead on Lenape Land: “Deeply rooted in geography, history and culture, this volume throws open questions about the layering of identities and conflictual relation to homelands — past, present and future. While this story is profoundly local, it sensitizes readers to specific and horrific colonial legacies of violence in other times and places, by bookending the Lenape legacies with nudges to further reflection.” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/tvg/tvg.htm

Historian, Pastor and Pennsylvania native John L. Ruth has long interpreted European and American Mennonite history to appreciative audiences. Like his earlier projects, this book is framed as a story. (He calls it a “musing,” to highlight imaginative dimensions of envisioning the past.) Yet it ...

10/08/2022

“Eventually . .. . I learned more nuanced understandings of other traditions. However, I have less often encountered sensitive interpretations of Latter-day Saints history and beliefs. It has been a privilege then to participate in conversation with such a generous sharer of his tradition as Robert Millet.” In a series of ongoing reflections by participants in multiple Christian traditions, this post is the Anabaptist-Mennonite response to Robert Millett on his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tradition.

For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her…

27/06/2022

Cascadia’s BranchWood Books imprint has released Little Girl Squirrel Watches TV https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/lgs/lgs.htm Little Girl Squirrel loves to watch TV. But there is no TV in her nest. What to do? She finds an old chipmunk tunnel. She uses it to get into PawPaw's basement where there is a TV. One night PawPaw finds her there. Now she's in trouble. But please please please let her watch TV she begs until PawPaw allows an hour of TV each midnight--and ends up watching along with hundreds of squirrels. Illustrators Kadyn Hamilton-King and Maya Hamilton-King, the author's grandchildren, were the first to figure out what Little Girl Squirrel was up to and to create the drawings showing it.

Released by BranchWood Books imprint of Cascadia Publishing House LLC, publisher of Anabaptist and Mennonite books, Michael A. King's LITTLE GIRL SQUIRREL WATCHES TV tells of how Little Girl Squirrel negotiates watching an hour of TV each midnight in PawPaw's basement.”

22/06/2022

“I was ridiculed as a first-grader for not bearing toy guns in a school play because my peace-committed Mennonite parents forbade it. I feel in my bones the traumatic potential of mistreatments and marginalizations. I resonate with your statement that ‘In Jesus, we see someone who is our kin, as He lived as a minority under Roman oppression under constant threat of retaliation, ultimately resulting in His death at the hands of the state.’ However, precisely because for me and many in my tradition the age-old persecutions involved primarily beliefs, not race, I struggle fully to understand. . . .” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2278

For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her…

27/05/2022

“As I learned during my seminary dean days . . . both the United Methodists and Mennonites are committed to peacebuilding and principles of social justice. Both traditions take seriously the way of peace taught in the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus who stressed love of enemies.” In a series of ongoing reflections by participants in multiple Christian traditions, this post is the Anabaptist-Mennonite response to Sarah Lancaster on her Wesleyan/Methodist tradition. https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2242

For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her…

03/05/2022

Cascadia has released Anabaptist Political Theology After Marpeck, edited J. Denny Weaver, Gerald J. Mast, Trevor Bechtel https://www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/marpeck/marpeck.htm “In recent years scholarship on Pilgram Marpeck, and the Covenanter community to which he belonged, has undergone a profound transformation. This collection of creative essays explores one dimension of that new research, highlighting especially Marpeck's ongoing relevance to the pressing question of the church's witness in the public square. I highly recommend this book.” —John D. Roth, Professor of History, Goshen College

Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.

26/04/2022

“In his stirring rendition of “A Week in the Life of a Pietist,” Christopher Gehrz illumined for me the reality that a fair amount of what I’ve experienced as just part of my heritage is indebted to Pietism. I needed barely to read more than that one of my favorite hymns, “Children of the Heavenly Father,” has Pietist roots to grasp this. New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2263

For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her…

25/04/2022

Cascadia releases ANABAPTIST POLITICAL THEOLOGY AFTER MARPECK, edited J. Denny Weaver, Gerald J. Mast, Trevor Bechtel - https://mailchi.mp/6f6eaa032359/u0q8z9w2tz-5416741 "The essays here can help Christians navigate our own time, fraught as it is with dubious alliances between Christianity and all manner of worldly distractions. . . ."—Barry Hankins, Professor of History, Baylor University

16/04/2022

Cascadia releases THIS VERY GROUND, THIS CROOKED AFFAIR: A MENNONITE HOMESTEAD ON LENAPE LAND, by John L. Ruth. "A bold, frank, honest account of how Pennsylvania Mennonites . . . got entangled in colonization policies that dispossessed the Lenape (Delaware) Indians. . . . Ruth provides a model for truth-telling . . . about other communities established . . . on lands taken from Indians." — Marvin E. Kroeker, Author, Comanches and Mennonites on the Oklahoma Plains - https://mailchi.mp/93ff656fcb03/u0q8z9w2tz-4873618

30/03/2022

“I keep wondering how David [Gushee] the Christian leader who emerged from the lost boy envisions both honoring the historical emphases he values and dreaming onward, including, as he observes, toward a ‘social, ethical, political vision.’” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2209

14/02/2022

“It's interesting to note that Wesley Granberg-Michaelson joins the significant number of "Respectful Conversation" partners reporting having made some sort of journey beyond or at least through evangelicalism as part of embracing their current tradition.” In a series of ongoing reflections by participants in multiple Christian traditions, this post, new from the Cascadia's Kingsview & Co, is the Anabaptist-Mennonite response to Wesley Granberg-Michaelson on his Reformed tradition." https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2169

For a year I’m the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer makes a main presentation on her…

07/02/2022

In ” AAA Baseball,” the new guest post from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog, poet Joseph Gascho poignantly narrates what almost was but wasn’t yet might have been http://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2179 Gascho is author of the DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia poetry collection,Cornfields, Cottonwoods, Seagulls, and Sermons https://www.CascadiaPublishingHouse.com/ccss/ccss.htm

The pitcher on the local team was a farmer boy who sometimes had to leave the game bottom of the seventh to milk the cows. He had a wicked curve, but no control. Thought it was something I could do…