New additions to the 2013 Mennonite Booklist

Eunice Adorno - Las Mujeres Flores (The Flower Girls:  Mennonites in Mexico) (2012)

    Mennonite lovers of art books often have to settle with beautiful prints of Mennonite and Amish quilts, photographs of barns, or the more picturesque photo journals of our Hutterite and Amish cousins.

    Mexico City-photographer Eunice Adorno is changing all this with her photographic journal of the lives of Mennonite girls in Mexico's isolated Nuevo Ideal communities (colonies) in Durango and La Onda, Mexico.

    Many Russian Mennonites left homes in Saskatchewan and Manitoba in 1922 as the Canadian government began to require greater assimilation into Anglo-Canadian culture and greater tolerance of patriotic inculcation in the then-become mandatory public schools.  Today, some 90,000 Mennonites call Mexico home.  In fact, Mexico is becoming a new global center for Russian Mennonite literature, cinema and cultural development -- though many Mexicans will continue to think of their quiet, German-speaking neighbours as the fond originators of quesa Mennonita, now often marketed by Mexican grocers as queso chihuahua.

    Adorno similarly recommends the photography of Larry Towell as a heavy influence on her work.  Check out Towell's photographic collection in The Mennonites (2000).

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John M. Barry,  Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul:  Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012)

John M. Barry's Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul:  Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012) is an effective and informative look at how religious dissent and a reactionary intolerance in the early Massachusetts colony gave rise to the developed principle of religious freedom in the modern United States. 

    Many Americans and Anabaptists tend to forget or overlook the contributions of the Dutch Mennonites in shaping the attitudes and doctrines of the Pilgrim settlers.  Perhaps their influence on religious dissent in the Massachusetts Bay colony settlements helped establish this democratic principle on American soil well before the first Mennonites and Amish arrived in New York or Pennsylvania.