Jeff Gundy – författare

In this fascinating seriesof narratives, many voices of Jeff Gundy's Amish and Mennonite forebearstrace their paths and chronicle their lives. Women and men speak in thesepages, telling their stories and linking themselves to each other, thepast, and the present. Gundy demonstrates that who he is--who we all are--isshaped by a past peopled with those who worked, loved, dreamed, and died.By sharing his community of memory, he makes us desire to seek out ourown.Using family photos, records,recollections, and historical research, Gundy follows seven generationsthrough time and space: from Bavaria and Alsace to Ohio to Illinois inthe 1830s; from frontier dwellings with dirt floors to homes with refrigerators.He also follows them intellectually, from a strict to a broader interpretationof religious doctrine in the 1870s, which led to a schism within the alreadysmall Mennonite community; from a long-standing position on pacifism andconscientious objection to some questioning of this stance during WorldWar II.

Creative non-fiction by a Mennonite poet that blends the history of the Amish and Mennonites, family history, and his own life story to look at how he might live in harmony with the Mennonite ideal to 'live in the world but not of it.'Part memoir, part family history, part meditation on history and the present, this work of creative nonfiction allows Jeff Gundy to ask what it should mean to "live in the world but not of it," as the traditional Mennonite saying recommends. As Scattering Point moves through time and space, it repeatedly questions how a modern, assimilated Mennonite poet and professor might live with some kind of fidelity to his tradition and to the promises and griefs of contemporary life.Scattering Point takes its title from Scattering Point Creek, which has its source on the author's family farm in Illinois. This book explores that place while also ranging widely from it and the Amish and Mennonites who have been associated with the area for nearly the last century. It traverses the Illinois prairie to churches and caves in Europe and incorporates family stories, soil geology, the architecture of cathedrals and churches, reflections on depression, and Mennonite martyrdoms and schisms. Scattering Point speaks of the great questions of history and religion, the quiet lives of Amish and Mennonite men and women whose histories are almost forgotten, and of our lives today.Readers of all backgrounds will see something of themselves in Jeff Gundy who writes, "I must admit it: I do love this world and, many, though not all, of the things in it," and whose quest is always for understanding that will allow us to "go back into the world more able to undertake the difficult work of loving it as we should."