Who are the Mennonite greats of hockey?

 A Mennonite Olympic Ice Hockey Team?  Yep, We Could Do It!

In an effort to help answer that question, we have mined the lists of professional players and the rosters of teams for anyone who might, just possible might be of Mennonite ethnic or faith heritage. 

The process of identification is quite flawed… depending greatly on names, but in so doing, would likely miss someone whose mother was Mennonite but do not have a Mennonite last name.  

Those on the following list are believed to be professional hockey players in the NHL or Europe and are understood to be of Mennonite extraction based on secondary evidence such as being mentioned in a church bulletin, newspaper or other resource.

If anyone knows if they are or not, please let us know.  Also, please let us know of any others who are not on the list.

Thanks!  ~ Bruderthaler

Barkman, Jon, Steinbach, MB, CA

Bartel, Robin, Drake, SK, CA

Bergen, Todd, Prince Albert, SK, CA

Block, Kenneth Richard, Steinbach, MB, CA

Dyck, Ed, Moosemin, SK, CA

Dyck, Henry, Herbert, SK, CA

Dyck, Paul, Steinbach, MB, CA

Fast, Brad, Ladysmith, BC, CA

Fehr, Eric, Winkler, MB, CA

Friesen, Jeff, Meadow Lake, SK, CA

Friesen, Karl, Winnipeg, MB, CA

Funk, Michael, Abbotsford, BC, CA

Gage, Joachim, Vancouver, BC, CA

Goertz, Dave, Edmonton, AB, CA

Goertzen, Steven, Strong Plain, AB, CA

NYC - A Mennonite Landscape

Manhattan, New York, New York, 2013
 
Charlie Kraybill, born Mennonite, educated at Eastern Mennonite University, has made a home for himself while discovering a unique Mennonite landscape in the boroughs and urban canyons of New York City.

    Kraybill's friends on Facebook have long been treated to his particular vision and experience of North America's largest metropolis.  Kraybill has a way of cutting it down to size with a focus on what is otherwise often seen as the anonymous individual.  At the same time, his landscape tends to be defined by paths (streets, sidewalks, canyons, subway tracks) and set landmarks.

    To my mind, he moves beyond the hustle and bustle of 5th Avenue, Wall Street and Broadway to highlight the culture and quiet peace of those who call the city home.  Kraybill's NYC has more in common with the Paris of Renoir, Seurat and Erich Marie Remarque or the city of Edward Hopper and F. Scott Fitzgerald than the loud, boisterous lights, clubs and sirens so often brought out in contemporary television programming.  Kraybill's New York City is a place where a normal person might like to live, and where even a Mennonite might find a quiet, peace-filled lifestyle, and yet one that is always changing and never boring.

    One of his photographs seems to to indicate this sense explicitly by focusing in on the unmoving permanence of a potted, residential boxwood while the sights, sounds and brilliantly coloured yellow taxis whirr by in and out of frame, in and out of the context of the boxwood.

    In presenting a selection of his photographs on this blog, I have cautiously edited many of them to bring out colour, depth and contrast.  I often find this necessary for the digital blogs and images that are backlit on computer and cell phone screens.

    At the same time, one will note that Kraybill's native tone is much flatter, bringing out a style more reminiscent of the French Impressionists and Pointillists than the vibrant clarities of Visionaire, Vogue or even Gorski and Wall.  This ain't your Sex And the City or Devil Wears Prada photo-shoot.

    Enjoy and please contact Kraybill directly for use or questions relating to his work.

~ Bruderthaler

2nd & 6th at 16:25 pm

6th Avenue & West 4th at 21:42 pm

8th & 42nd at 02:26 am

8th Avenue below 15th Street at 22:00 pm

8th Avenue & 126th at 15:33 pm

14th Street at 19:30 pm

04 July, 2013

 A look at the present through the lens of the past.... 

(26 Jun, 2013)    It has been an interesting two days for SCOTUS... the results being more-or-less meh for both sides...  and a hardening of pre-existing, yet increasingly impermeable, social, political and religious national divisions.  A sad legacy on this 150^th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50^th Anniversary of the Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington, both aimed at ending many related and not dissimilar divisions.

  Perhaps the most significant result is not necessarily that voting discrimination on racial, linguistic and economic grounds will now be winked at by powerless Federal overseers but that so many American states still prefer to look backwards into the darkness of Dixie’s Confederacy rather than towards the light of the Constitution of the United States for inspiration and political understanding.  A dread day has descended for all descendants of those who gave their lives, including a President, horribly assassinated, for the vision of a nation unified in rights, dignity and liberty for all and for all children of all immigrants who came to this country in the increasingly dubious hope of liberty and justice for all. 

 

  Similarly, while the Prop 8 decision places limits on the right to interfere in state politics by third parties, but together with the DOMA overruling, leaves our nation equally divided again along similar geographic and political lines between those states that practice, celebrate and recognize freedom, equality and due process for all, and those who would restrict the rights of their fellow citizens based on the social, economic and religious  prejudices of an increasingly minority privileged political class.

  It seems to me that we have seen established today, two Americas:  One that is the home of the brave, land of the free and a beacon of light and welcome to the world, against an America that continues to persist in those most egregious political errors of our history -- a Confederacy grounded in and inspired by a love and toleration for institutionalized inequality and voter intimidation between classes of supposedly and naturally free and equal citizens, all in the name of a privileged caste and a privileged religion. 

  While I would like to celebrate the hopes and victories of friends and family today, I find my joy tempered with the sadness of apostate clerics  chanting divisive propaganda and slogans in hopes of resurrecting the ghosts of the White Sheets and the Grey Army to obscure and rend the vision of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, LaFayette and the Adams, or to turn blind, intolerant, bigoted eyes to the historical and natural customs of the majority of those First Nations whom God prior-established in this land as a hope, inspiration and example to those immigrants, and to all lovers of liberty, community and equality in this land, into two separate and unequal Americas. 

  Intolerable. 

  Let me clarify, lest some mistake this for a mere rant, this is not a SCOTUS failing.  SCOTUS, like Providence, is merely giving us over to the results and consequences of our own limitations as a body politic and mutually responsible, if increasingly hostile and unequal, community of citizens. 

  150 years after the battles of Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga, 150 years after Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, 150 plus 1 years after the Siouan Uprising for freedom and self-determination, and 50 years after MLK, Jr. promulgated his dream of America to America, we find ourselves divided now as much as ever, but worse, for now too many of us have not learned from the past but continue to strive for a privileged caste of unequal citizens and incompatible states.

  We now perpetuate and encourage these divisions in pursuit of caste and inequality, but not in the naïvité of our forebears, but rather in the hardened consciences of those who knowingly and willfully deny the promise of America to ALL Americans.

  Today, as for no other day in the past, increasing numbers of our fellow world citizens look upon the light and promise of a divided America with the same reaction  ~ meh. 

  Let’s fix this.



6:14 pm -
later, similar tho'ts from other sources ... 


Meyerson, Harold, "Start the Border Fence in Norfolk, Va.," Washington Post

The Onion "Supreme Court Leaves Final Decision On Gay Marriage In Capable Hands Of Texas, Alabama, Georgia"

Mennonite Garden Walk at Macalaster College

Sunday perambulation and fastpa in St Paul's Mac-Grove neighborhood ... 

Prayers and Grace by Menno Simons

Prayers for Mealtime

Een christelijcke benedictie voor, een gracias na den eaten

For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. 

I Corinthians 3.11

Courtesy Herald Press, Scottdale, PA (1984), Menno Simons, Author (c. 1557), Leonard Verduin, translator (1955), H. C. Wenger, editor (1955), The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, c. 1496-1561, p 955-958, Herald Press.

This Is a Christian Grace Before Meals, Together with a Prayer of Thanksgiving After Meals – Intended for all Genuinely God-fearing Folk, and Moreover Intended to Be Taught to Their Children from Childhood on, in Order That They May Learn to Fear the Lord, May Learn to Know Him, and to Walk in His Commandments All Their Days, to the Praise and Glory of the Lord and to the Salvation of Their Souls.  Amen.

Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

I.       A CHRISTIAN GRACE BEFORE MEALS

    O give thanks unto the Lord, said David, for He is good.  For His goodness and mercy endureth forever.  O taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that trusteth in Him.  O fear the Lord, ye His saints, for there is no want to them that fear Him.  The rich He sends away empty, but they that fear the Lord shall have lack of nothing.  He giveth food to those that fear Him.  He remembers His covenant forever. 

    Thou shalt eat the labor of they hands; happy shalt thou be and it shall be well with thee.  They wife shall be as a fruitful vine in the innermost part of thy house; thy children like olive plants round about thy table.  Behold, thus shall the man be blest that feareth the Lord.

    I have been young and now I am old, says David, and have never seen the righteous forsaken nor his seed begging bread, even as Thou hast, O Lord, demonstrated to the children of Israel.  Thou hast given them bread from heaven and water out of the flinty rock in the wilderness forty years long.  O Lord, Thou hast fed Elijah with flesh and with bread byt eh ravens morning and evening – also by the widow of Zarephath in that the meal did not diminish in the jar nor the oil in the cruse for a long time, according to the word spoken by the Prophet Elijah, the Tishbite – and by the angel of the Lord, with bread and with water under the juniper bush when he fled before Jezebel.  O Lord, Thou has fed Daniel in the den of lions in Babylon by the angel of the Lord, and by the Prophet Habakkuk with the victuals which he had prepared for his reapers.  Habakkuk spoke saying, Daniel, Daniel, take of the food which God has sent to you.  And Daniel spoke saying, And, Lord, Thou art ever mindful of me and dost not forsake those that call upon Thee and love Thee.  And he rose up and ate.   O Lord, Thou has so wonderfully, and unexpectedly, and, according to the Word of the Lord spoken by Elisha the prophet of the Lord, fed those of Samaria when the hunger was so great that the women (by nature quite pitiful, as Lamentations has it) did sod and eat their own children, even as at Jerusalem.

    O Lord, Thou hast with five barley loaves and two fishes fed about five thousand men, not counting women and children – twelve basketfuls remaining – by the power of Thy prayer of blessing and thanksgiving.  What is impossible with men is possible with God.  This , Lord, Thou Thyself hast declared.

    Therefore, Thou has in the Gospel taught Thy children that fear Thee saying, Take no thought for thy life, what ye shall eat and what ye shall drink, nor for the body what ye shall put on.  Is not the life more than food and the body than raiment?  Consider the birds of the heaven.  They sow not, neither do they gather into barns, and your heavenly Father feeds them nevertheless.  Are you not much more than they?  Which of you can add one cubit to his stature by being careful for it?  And why do you take thought for raiment?  Consider the lilies of the field how they grow.  They toil not, neither do they spin – I ay unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  If God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into oven, would He not much more do such for you, O ye of little faith!  Therefore, do not be filled with care saying, What shall we eat?  Or, What shall we drink?  Or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?  After these things do the Gentiles seek but your Father knows that ye have need of all these things.  Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.  Be not therefore anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.  It is enough that every day carries it own burdens, as Christ says.

Charles King speaks on Odessa: Genius & Death in a City of Dreams

Uruguay's 2012 address to UN Council on Sustainable Development

2013 MCC Relief Sale Pre-Auction, Minnesota

Faith Mennonite Church

Minneapolis, MN

02 June, 2013

Total:  $3,945.00

Goal:  $3,000.00

 Home-made Tweibach $40.00 / doz; Rhubarb Pie $200.00 .