Mennonite Farmers Hybrid Book Launch

Join Royden Loewen for the launch of Mennonite Farmers: A Global History of Place and Sustainability. This event features a conversation with Aileen Friesen (History, University of Winnipeg).

The launch will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream. The video will be available for viewing thereafter. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events at the store.

Mennonite farmers can be found in dozens of countries spanning five continents. In this comparative world-scale environmental history, Royden Loewen draws on a multi-year study of seven geographically distinctive Anabaptist communities around the world, focusing on Mennonite farmers in Bolivia, Canada, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States, and Zimbabwe. These farmers, who include Amish, Brethren in Christ, and Siberian Baptists, till the land in starkly distinctive climates. They absorb very disparate societal lessons while being shaped by particular faith outlooks, historical memory, and the natural environment.

Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.

Royden Loewen is Senior Scholar and former Chair in Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He serves on a number of Mennonite History and organic agriculture boards and is series editor of the “Ethnicity and Culture History Series” at the University of Manitoba Press. His books focus social and environmental history, mostly within Mennonite contexts. Roy and his son Sasha operate Millview Grain, a certified organic farm near Steinbach.

Aileen Friesen is an associate professor and a co-director of the Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She is also the executive director of the D.F. Plett Historical Research Foundation. Aileen is the author of Colonizing Russia’s Promised Land: Orthodoxy and Community on the Siberian Steppe, and the editor of The Russian Mennonite Story: The Heritage Cruise. She also edits the historical magazine, Preservings.