Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye

NOTES

NOTES Chapter One. Cathedrals, Churches, Caves I must thank Amber Rife for her energetic and ingenious help in researching this chapter, and the Ohio Arts Council and Bluffton College for support that made my trip to Europe possible. 1. “Anabaptist,” which literally means “rebaptizer,” originated as a term attached to the early groups by their enemies. No Mennonite, Amish, or related group officially goes by the name of “Anabaptist,” but the word remains the generally accepted umbrella term for those groups and the movement from which they came. Identifying the Zurich group as the singular origin is itself an oversimplification, but a convenient and usual one. 2. The best introductory studies of early Anabaptism are J. Denny Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of SixteenthCentury Anabaptism (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1987), and Arnold Snyder, Anabaptist History and Theology: An Introduction (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 1995). 3. Among many treatments of the Münster episode, see Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist, and Snyder, Anabaptist History. Anthony Arthur’s, The Tailor-King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster (New York: St. Martins, 1999), is a full and accessible account. 4. The Complete Works of Menno Simons (Elkhart, Indiana: 1871), 1, 81b. 5. This poem first appeared in Mennonot, a small magazine “for Mennos on the margins,” and is included in my book Rhapsody with Dark Matter (Huron, Ohio: Bottom Dog Press, 2000), 55–56. 6. The Schleitheim Confession, 5th ed. (Crockett, Ky.: Rod and Staff Publishers, 1985), 2. 193 7. Gerald Biesecker-Mast, “Anabaptist Separation and Arguments Against the Sword in the Schleitheim Brotherly Union,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 74, no. 3 (July 2000): 394. 8. John H. Yoder, trans. and ed., The Legacy of Michael Saltler. (Scotsdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1973), 39. 9. Steven M. Nolt, A History of the Amish (Intercourse, Penn.: Good Books, 1992), 35–36. 10. Jacob Ammann’s 1693 letter may be found in John D.Roth, ed. and trans., Letters of the Amish Division: A Source Book (Goshen, Ind.: Mennonite Historical Society, 1993), 31–32. 11. Ibid., 58, 65. 12. Ibid., 75. 13. Ibid., 96. 14. William Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 126. 15. G. C. Sellery and A. C. Krey, Medieval Foundations of Western Civilization (New York, London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1929), 273. 16. The Very Rev. Dr. H. D. M. Spence-Jones, The Secrets of a Cathedral (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1914), 59. Spence-Jones does not identify the source of this quote, but on the following page he introduces another quote with “Again, to quote another’s words” and offers this note: “They will be found, with many like words, in a most interesting and suggestive series of papers on ‘French Cathedrals,’ which appeared in the Times of August and September 1912.” 17. Sellery and Krey, Medieval Foundations, 120. 18. Spence-Jones, Secrets, 62. 19. Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1966), 167. 20. Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, “The Sacred Cave,” in Sacred Places (1998), , August 12, 1999. 21. Thieleman J. van Braght, The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians (1660; trans. Joseph F. Sohm, Scottdale, Penn.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1984), 563. 194 Notes to Chapter One 22. See Susan Biesecker-Mast and Gerald Biesecker-Mast, eds., Anabaptists and Postmodernity (Telford, Penn.: Pandora Press, 2000), for essays from a conference on this subject held in 1998 at Bluffton College. My essay “(In)visible Cities, (F)acts of Power, (Hmm)ility, Fathers and (M)Others: Anabaptism, Postmodernity, and Mennonite Writing” is included in this collection. 23. Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (1949; Ashfield, Mass.: Paris Press, 1996), 40. 24. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), 69. 25. Leonard Gross, ed., Golden Apples in Silver Bowls: The Rediscovery of Redeeming Love, trans. Elizabeth Horsch Bender and Leonard Gross (1702; Lancaster, Penn.: Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, 1999), 34. 26. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. John A. Kouwenhoven, (New York: Random House, 1950), 133. 27. Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 41. 28. Gross, Golden Apples, 115. For a fuller exploration of the idea of “growing souls,” see chapter 7. 29. William Blake, Jerusalem, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 138. 30. Julia Kasdorf, Eve’s Striptease (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 63. Chapter...