Extending DreamSeeker Magazine with Mennonite (and more!) posts on faith and life, opinion, stories, The original DSM mission statement continues to apply.
Kingsview & Co is an extension and recreation of two streams of writing: one stream is my Kingsview columns, going back through several incarnations. The first version started in the now-defunct Christian Living in the 1980s, when the late editor David E. Hostetler, to whom I’ll always be indebted, invited the column. The second stream, flagged by “& Co” is that Kingsview & Co will also function a
s an extension of DreamSeeker Magazine. DSM, a quarterly magazine founded in 2001, was released in both paper/online versions into 2011 then moved entirely online until going on hiatus in 2012 because as full-time seminary dean I no longer had enough time to edit. With Kingsview & Co, DSM resumes publication but in this blog format and continuously, as posts are available, rather than in the prior quarterly format. My hope is that this approach will allow me to use the limited time I have for writing/publishing to offer both my own and guest blog posts as schedule permits. As has always been the case, addressed will be a range of topics and approaches, from political, cultural, and theological or denominational reflections to personal or family stories, often centering on but not limited to Anabaptist-Mennonite visions and realities. As I concluded when writing the statement back in 2001, “Roxana Robinson urges us to consider the possibility that even in—maybe especially in—a new millennium, ‘love still drives us; we still need it as the moving force in what we read.” Let the dreamseeking, heartfelt and passionate and filled with love, begin.”
—Michael A. King, blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co and DreamSeeker Magazine
Disclaimer: Although inevitably my thinking is affected by the activities—and often riddles—I face as dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, truly the views expressed in posts I write or edit are my own and don’t speak for EMS. I’m very grateful for ways EMS activities plunge me into the issues of the day. I’m also regularly aware of the rich diversity of the EMS context and that in these postings I represent one limited and fallible voice, not the official positions of EMS or the larger Eastern Mennonite University of which EMS is one division.
In these poems Poet Clarissa Jakobsons celebrates
the sea, ocean spray, clam shells, cypress trees, and so much more as “A heron gulps one whole” and “I summersault
into waves for the longest night.”
Seaweed Footprints on Cape Cod When the moon’s shadow covers clouds sunset eyes swell in sheep-sheared vastness and the black spotted pelican skims lullabies each evening. At the pier fishermen lur…
“For some reason this particular bunch of lovely red roses was cheaper than another bunch which I figured was just a different variety. But the cheaper ones looked great, what was not to like, why not be a good steward of precious resources? Or as some might less charitably put it, a cheapskate?” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2535
Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.
“We were sitting, that night, in a country in which some loved ‘only squares can have a ball’ and others loved the possibility that Merle's song is at least partly the satire Kris may think it to be. Yet the song transcends the divisions.”
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&…
Guest essayist Ted Grimrud wrestles with an exceptionally knotty issue: “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 proceed—with God’s direction and often miraculous support—to kill or drive out the previous inhabitants. The book ends with a celebration that now the Hebrew people are in the Land, poised to live happily ever after.”
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…
After what could have been one more tit-for-tat conversation with a claim-the-beach-with-empty–chairs vacationer, “We reflected on how good it felt to make peace and how often these days we egg each other on instead of paying attention to the inner voices nudging us back to kindness.”
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 …
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
The writer of Psalm 104 had an appreciation for wild things. I have a somewhat limited appreciation for wild things. If they threaten my garden, as do woodchucks and raccoons, I go after them. If t…
He survived six hours of surgery, Joseph Gascho tells us in this guest poem, then wonders whether he dares share this with his Darwin and Dawkins friends: “Do I dare to think / it was no dream, that gentle, giant hand. . . .?”
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…
“‘Sorry folks. There is a problem with a seal . . . no bearing on flight safety . . . need to research if policy will let us fly. . . . If we go back, we'll time out and this crew won't be able to take you to Newark. . . .’ All 150 or so of us are trying not to cry. I'm reminded of my youngest granddaughter: I need a time out so I can go back into my bed and use my pacifier.”
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…
"So I did love watching as the kite surfers fluttered across the waves like butterflies used to before so many went extinct along with their habitats."
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…
My granddaughter “is no longer a baby but she lives closer than I do to what William James once memorably described: 'The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion. . . .'"
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…
Pentecostal J. Terry Todd “shows me what it can look like when Christians today behave as those first book-of-Acts Christians did, seemingly drunk but with Spirit not spirit. That fills me with appreciation for ways in our half-blind and fumbling ways Joan and I, one burned by one form of Pentecostalism, one healed by another form of it, then both of us discovering mutual inspiration and healing at the nexus of salvation and shadows, have found each other.”
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…
In "At Summer's End, A Moment of Wild Surprise," Margaret Renkl more than delivers on the promise of her title. She offers a tender, lyrical look at the transition into autumn.
As equinox nears, the lovely cycle life is happening just behind the place in my garden where the goldenrod and the asters look so beautiful together.
“I stumbled across a version of ‘Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy,’ by The Lower Lights, about whom I knew nothing. I got goosebumps. I turned up the sound. I let the music fill my home and soul. I looked for more Lower Lights music and found many gems. Then I looked up the group’s background. I was startled to learn that they are . . . Latter-day Saints.” In a series of ongoing reflections by participants in multiple Christian traditions, here’s my Anabaptist-Mennonite response to Robert Millet 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…
“However,” says Farris Blount, “I do not believe we can avoid the fact that Jesus was a social revolutionary if we look at the scriptures and His engagement in His world.” In a series of ongoing reflections by participants in multiple Christian traditions, this post is participant and Kingsview & Co writer Michael A. King's Anabaptist-Mennonite response to Farris Blount on his Black Church tradition. 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…
“Reading Sarah Lancaster's insightful overview of Wesleyanism and keeping in mind its United Methodist denominational expressions took me back to when it was my responsibility to articulate overlaps between Mennonite and United Methodist teachings and values.” 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…
“All of which is to say this: I certainly have long loved such hymns. But it was Gehrz who helped me more fully understand that through them I was experiencing aspects of a Pietism that did indeed help save my life.” 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…
“What a poignant, moving story of pursuing something he doesn't know how to name David Gushee offers us in ‘One Account of a Baptist Way of Following Jesus.’ Yet one thing becomes clear to his younger self once raised Catholic as he tries out a Sunday morning service, a Sunday evening service, a Monday night Bible study at a Southern Baptist church: In this paradigm young David is not a Christian.” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2209
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…
“For me the solution, if such it was, to the quandary came from choosing in my twenties to try out whatever it meant to follow Jesus. I'd aim to follow Jesus whether or not I always believed there was a Jesus to follow and whether or not I had any confidence that Jesus was in my heart.” In a series of ongoing reflections by participants in multiple Christian traditions, this post 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…
Made it to AAA baseball, Joseph Gascho tells us in this guest poem, but “what might have been had I played / Little League at five, had Dad paid / someone to show me how to throw, / had been molded from a different mix of DNA.” http://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2179
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…
“So my story is a variant on what Balmer reports, as he tells us of formally departing his ‘evangelical subculture’ within which his own father had long been a pastor to become an Episcopalian and to feel ‘as though I had come home.’ Amid differences in our journeying, I do see much to appreciate here. https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2149
Reading Randall Balmer’s post on why he left evangelicalism to become Episcopalian reminded me that way back when, as a young Christian committed to my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, I was also ex…
Here during this season of seeking the Light is a moving juxtaposition of literally wrestling to see. Yet amid the challenges there is light. Describing the history of retinitis pigmentosa she shares with her sisters, in this guest post Miriam Blank reports, “I think there were ways that our lives ran on different tracks, and our blindness didn’t join us together as much as it could have. But now, a doorway has opened and something sweet is happening as we listen.” http://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2151
Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.
“One could go on and on about who believed what, belonged to whom when and for how long, evicted one group or joined another. As addressed in my response to Orthodoxy, long unfolding Anabaptist-Mennonite diversification seems only to have gathered momentum in Mennonite Church USA, to which I belong.” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2065
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 …
In this post, I tell of how Lutheranism, though with its own challenges, helps me think through “circumstances in which Mennonites seeking to be ‘without spot or blemish’ have generated communities that have policed boundaries of the quest, excommunicated congregants perceived to be non-repentant sinners, and risked crushing grace under law. In her memoir The Merging. . . my aunt Evelyn King Mumaw tells how her parents” were excommunicated for helping to establish a Sunday school. https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2059
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 …
"Communion can make you weak. Ill. Dead. When I was eighteen I learned at last how one of my father's most precious loved ones had died. He had been hospitalized in the 1950s for depression even as many Mennonites saw depression as entailing spiritual failure. This peace-committed Mennonite farmer then said he felt better, checked himself out, took a shotgun to one of his fields, and shot himself. A family take was that he had a very sensitive conscience.” From the new Kingsview & Co post, “Is the Actual Body of Christ the Wafer? Blood? Community?” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2037
In her “Respectful Conversations” post on Roman Catholicism, Christina Wassell (interestingly enough an Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism) foregrounds the Traditional Latin Mass as …
“I still relive the weeks my parents forbade my taking part in a first-grade play that included bearing fake weapons. I've remained haunted by the near-contemptuous look on my teacher's face, seeming to say that my family's values were not only strange but idiotic. . . . But I had less idea how to nurture a spirituality that would empower such practices.” From the new Kingsview & Co post, “Orthodoxy and Anabaptist-Mennonitism in Respectful Conversation.” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=2012
Some months ago Harold Heie, with whom I had once co-edited Mutual Treasure: Seeking Better Ways for Christians and Culture to Converse, asked me to consider being the Anabaptist-Mennonite contrib…
Writing at https://blog.cmcrosedale.org/why-stopping-the-bad-isnt-good-enough/ Phyllis Swartz, Kingsview & Co contributor and author of the Cascadia memoir Yoder School https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/ys/ys.htm, explores “Why Stopping the Bad Isn’t Good Enough.” Swartz observes, “Good kids, that’s what we want. So we post rules and plan consequences and reward behaviors to stop the bad. But this isn’t enough.”
Cascadia Publishing House LLC, an Anabaptist-Mennonite publisher, releases books for Anabaptist, Mennonite, Christian, and general readers.
"Um Michael, how was I supposed to know a chair with red webbing turned upside-down in the middle of the lawn was your love for me? Really?"
https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=1966
I’m not the perfect husband. I know, I know. Everybody knows that. I wasn’t really asking for examples. I don’t need more data. It is, yes, stipulated. Still I was trying to offer…
Would that Kingsview & Co had gotten to publish this column! A wonderful example of writing from the heart as the author tells us about the kindnesses offered by a UPS driver and how he in turn learned that a life he feared was too small could become much larger. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/style/modern-love-he-delivered-for-me.html
How my UPS man went from annoyance to emotional lifeline.
As I move from the days when a résumé was vital to a future in which little but the eulogies may matter, I’m struck by the thinking of Steven Petrow, who “begins with poignant examples of what his parents' tombstones say. His dad's describes, ‘Journalist and Professor’; his mom's testifies, ‘Beloved by all.’” New from Cascadia’s Kingsview & Co blog: “Presence and Love Dancing by the Dead-Ash Fire“ https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=1932
In her new poem “Winter Colors,” poet Julia Baker Swann spies this: “When I go out the moss grey sky is a complex churn. /
I would need violet, black, and even a dab of rose to paint these layers.” https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/?p=1918
I hear a slow summer wind in this sponged carpet of russet needles under my feet. Smoldering burnt orange around silver tree roots and evergreen. Husks of tall blonde meadow grasses sway in the bar…
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Kingsview & Co is an extension and recreation of two streams of writing: one stream is my Kingsview columns, going back through several incarnations. The first version started in the now-defunct Christian Living in the 1980s, when the late editor David E. Hostetler, to whom I’ll always be indebted, invited the column. The second stream, flagged by “& Co” is that Kingsview & Co will also function as an extension of DreamSeeker Magazine. DSM, a quarterly magazine founded in 2001, was released in both paper/online versions into 2011 then moved entirely online until going on hiatus in 2012 because as full-time seminary dean I no longer had enough time to edit. With Kingsview & Co, DSM resumes publication but in this blog format and continuously, as posts are available, rather than in the prior quarterly format. My hope is that this approach will allow me to use the limited time I have for writing/publishing to offer both my own and guest blog posts as schedule permits. As has always been the case, addressed will be a range of topics and approaches, from political, cultural, and theological or denominational reflections to personal or family stories, often centering on but not limited to Anabaptist-Mennonite visions and realities. The original DSM mission statement continues to apply. As I concluded when writing the statement back in 2001, “Roxana Robinson urges us to consider the possibility that even in—maybe especially in—a new millennium, ‘love still drives us; we still need it as the moving force in what we read.” Let the dreamseeking, heartfelt and passionate and filled with love, begin.” —Michael A. King, blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co and DreamSeeker Magazine
