Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Book Review: Walking Gently On The Earth, Melanie Springer Mock

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "For that reason, I approached Walking Gently on the Earth with a healthy sense of skepticism, ready to be preached at again regarding the choices I’ve made about my family and lifestyle. Yet a few pages into Lisa Graham McMinn’s new book, I knew this exploration of sustainability would be different: more gentle, as the title itself suggests. McMinn, along with her daughter and co-writer Megan Anna Neff, examines the ways we can more readily nurture “God’s good gift”—that is, the earth and everything in it— through what McMinn calls “an ethic of care.” Although McMinn and Neff challenge …

Starbucks-Colored Glasses (From Just Moms: Conveying Justice In An Unjust World), Lisa Graham Mcminn

Faculty Publications - Department of World Languages, Sociology & Cultural Studies

Excerpt: "Sarah, my middle school daughter, finished her hot chocolate as I licked the last bit of foam from my mocha. We returned the white mugs to the counter and started our walk home. Glen Ellyn, the suburb next door, sits less than a mile from our house in Wheaton and is one of the wealthiest suburbs of Chicago.

In 1996, it also held the nearest Starbucks.

Wheaton ranks high on the affluent scale, too, and Mark and I found raising our daughters in Chicago's wealthy western suburbs a challenge. Our neighborhood, like most others, displayed well-landscaped front yards conspicuously …

Life Writing And Mennonite Identity - Review: Essay Of Mennonite Women's Memoirs, Melanie Springer Mock

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "Rhoda Janzen’s recent success is enviable, her hefty book deal with a prominent press and the publicity that followed her first memoir the kind of triumphs to which writers often aspire. Her book Mennonite in a Little Black Dress has – in its own way – brought Mennonitism to the mainstream, introducing readers (and plenty of them) to a religious sect that remains, to many, enigmatic and exotic. The book’s title alone is alluring, juxtaposing the long-held stereotypes about cape-dress-wearing and be-capped Mennonites with the startling image of a skimpy black shift, a modern emblem of sexy fashion: and …

The Search For God: Virginia Woolf And Caroline Emelia Stephen, Kathleen A. Heininge

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "As a Modernist follower of radical individualism, Virginia Woolf is thought to be antipathetic to religious thought; Woolf’s own spirituality, however, is certainly more complicated than most critics have allowed, especially in light of the influence of her aunt, Caroline Emelia Stephen, a well-known Quaker mystic and writer who rejected the established church in favor of a less traditional version of Christianity. The intellectual relationship between niece and aunt has been little discussed; aside from Jane Marcus’s “The Niece of a Nun: Caroline Stephen and the Cloistered Imagination” and Alison Lewis’s “A Quaker Influence on Modern English Literature: Caroline …

The Economics Of Bouncy Balls (Chapter In Just Moms: Conveying Justice In An Unjust World), Melanie Springer Mock

Faculty Publications - Department of English

Excerpt: "The fight ignites. One minute, my sons are chattering nonsense in the car's back seat, and the next, I can hear the thwack of fist against winter coat, then a barrage of retaliatory hits. Both boys stretch arms across the Subaru, seatbelts restraining them from a full-on war. Before I can even slow the car to intervene, Benjamin and Samuel are crying, each injured by flying limbs, jabs to the eye, well-placed kicks.

"What in the world?" I speak into the rearview mirror, guiding my car to the curb. "What in the heck is going on back there?" (I …