Steven M. Nolt

Doors Cracked Open

History & Biography

“As the only foreigners living in Luzhou during the 1980s, Martens Friesen and Zehr witnessed the initial, tentative opening of post-Maoist China. Along the way, their years there teaching English also opened doors in their own lives, revealing questions and possibilities of identity, faith, and friendship. In Doors Cracked Open, they offer the gift of stories—insightful, entertaining, vulnerable—of cross-cultural encounters and self-discovery.”

Living in the World

History & Biography

“In Living in the World, Ronald Jantz traces the spiritual and geographic journey of the people who became the Church of God in Christ Mennonite. Along the way, he invites readers to consider with him how a tradition of nonconformity and nonresistance shaped Christian communities in the past and asks what it might mean for our contemporary context. A thoughtful meditation on faith and culture across time.”

Shadows

Fiction

“Through the contrasting points of view of her protagonists, Evie Yoder Miller marvelously calls to life the mounting uncertainties that emerged for peace church people in a nation descending in Civil War. Along with military and political perils, there is family tumult, church conflict, and neighborhood tension. An evocative portrait of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.”

The Good War That Wasn’t—and Why It Matters

Ethics, Culture & Social Issues

“Ethicist Ted Grimsrud asks us to look past the romanticism, the myth-making, and the nostalgia that have grown up around the Second World War and make a clear-eyed appraisal of the conflict's real costs. Employing classic just war theory, Grimsrud shows how the U.S. war effort fell far short of that theory's minimal criteria. Then, drawing on the insights of Christian pacifism, he proposes alternatives--applicable then and now--for building communities of resistance that treat all life as precious.”