Kirjahaku

Contemporary theologians tend to associate the Holy Spirit with the formation of local communities, social movements, and fluid relational networks—and not with institutions such as denominations or global church bodies. In this work, Jamie Pitts argues that this pneumatological-sociological picture misses important aspects of the Spirit’s work. Pitts draws on a wide range of theological and theoretical resources to depict the Spirit as organizing the complex, dynamic, and relationally entangled structures that constitute creation. Human organizing that seeks to participate in the Spirit can take a variety of analogous structural forms, including formal organizations or institutions. Organizational participation in the Spirit is not a function of an organization’s scale, mobility, or relative informality, but rather of its practical orientation toward the Spirit’s goals of life, solidarity, healing, and inclusive justice. A series of case studies clarifies and extends the implications of the argument in connection to organizing for environmental, gender, sexual, and racial justice. In the final chapter, Pitts addresses the role of a political theology of the organizing Spirit in imagining organizational alternatives to the global neoliberal order.

Contemporary theologians tend to associate the Holy Spirit with the formation of local communities, social movements, and fluid relational networks—and not with institutions such as denominations or global church bodies. In this work, Jamie Pitts argues that this pneumatological-sociological picture misses important aspects of the Spirit’s work. Pitts draws on a wide range of theological and theoretical resources to depict the Spirit as organizing the complex, dynamic, and relationally entangled structures that constitute creation. Human organizing that seeks to participate in the Spirit can take a variety of analogous structural forms, including formal organizations or institutions. Organizational participation in the Spirit is not a function of an organization’s scale, mobility, or relative informality, but rather of its practical orientation toward the Spirit’s goals of life, solidarity, healing, and inclusive justice. A series of case studies clarifies and extends the implications of the argument in connection to organizing for environmental, gender, sexual, and racial justice. In the final chapter, Pitts addresses the role of a political theology of the organizing Spirit in imagining organizational alternatives to the global neoliberal order.

To talk about migration is to talk about identity, both individual identity and the collective identities of communities of faith. Forced migration characterized and shaped the early Anabaptist movement-a movement created, in part to ensure religious freedom and the ability to practice faith as separate communities. This pattern of movement, originally meant to support a closed community, has resulted in a migration of theology, growing missions movements, and the spread of Anabaptism across the world.In this issue of Anabaptist Witness, authors explore ways in which migration has shaped identity as well as how identity has shaped migration and ways of being and belief, both in the past and the present. They also offer reflections on, and understandings from different perspectives around the world of, who we are as faith communities of migrants and people on the move.

In the midst of the ominous message that we are careening toward destruction, there are signs of hope everywhere in acts large and small that people are taking to mitigate the effects of climate change and restore damaged lands. Essays in this issue of Anabaptist Witness explore and propose some of these hopeful acts: community gardens in the Netherlands and Syria, environmental activism in the UK, the carbon impact of mission agency travel, and imaginative speech about God and the environment shaped by dialogue with indigenous communities and embracing "wildness" in one's soul.

The contributors to this issue of Anabaptist Witness have strained to see God amid experiences of suffering in mission, and in doing so they point to the hope of resurrection life. Articles, poems, and artwork address missionary suffering, mission that responds to suffering, and mission that causes suffering. Specific topics treated include Ausbund hymns, Sufi Islam, health crisis during ministry, marginalized indigenous communities in southern Mexico, and Mennonite participation in the Canadian Residential Schools program for indigenous children.