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

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

Mennonites and Wilderness

Mennonites and Wilderness

ne Wiltness

      Faith Mennonite’s sermon on 02 September was “Learning from the Wilderness,” (Deut 4:1-2, 6-9; Mark 7:1-8; 14-15, 21).  Dan Leisen and Gerald Schlabach spoke on their wilderness experience at the International Boundary Waters, a popular national wilderness area that excludes all forms of modern convenience that do not run on muscle power alone.  I took two observations away from this presentation – both men departed from my traditional understanding of the Deuteronomy passage as pertaining to the development of the interior life of the individual and of the congregation.  Instead, they focused on the rules that allow you to enter the wilderness, such as “Leave no trace.”

    Heidi Wall Burns wrote her masters’ thesis at Iowa State on changing perspectives of “wilderness” in United States’ literature – indicating and exploring shifts between fear and terror to Romanticism and Exploitation to Preservation.  Leisen and Schlabach would seem to be representative of the latter.

    Similarly to American culture, the Mennonites have gone through many different periods of fear and romanticism regarding wilderness.  The 1860s and 1870s were decades of unrest in the frontier amongst the Cherokee, Sioux and other Western tribes – the Custer incident occurred as late as 1876 – two years after the initial immigration of Russian Mennonites to Nebraska and Kansas.  The Sioux Uprising of 1862 enabled Federal troops to evict the tribes from treaty lands in southwestern Minnesota, further opening up space for Mennonite expansion into that area as well.