Mennonite Central Committee. - More-with-less: a world community cookbook

Doris Janzen was such a nice person! my mother remarked. We were having one of our weekly phone conversations, and I had mentioned Doris Janzen Longacre. I was living in New York and had discovered that the more-with-less message of Men- nonites was connecting with a wider group of people who promoted justice in everyday living.

Earlier that week I had flipped through a Tools for Social Change catalog from Syracuse Cultural Workers and found a poster that boldly proclaimed, Do justice. Learn from the world community. Cherish the natural order. Nurture people. Nonconform freely. The words were written by Doris Janzen Longacre and reprinted by permission of Mennonite Publishing Network.

While the bold statements actually appeared in Longacres other book, Living More with Less, it was this booka collection of recipesin which Longacre laid the foundation for thinking differently about food. I sat down and took another look at More-with-Less Cookbook. My copy was a Christmas present from my parents the year I started working on my masters degree in peace studies at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. That Christmas I skipped past all the introductory material and went straight for Alice and Willard Roths Whole Wheat Pineapple Muffins. Now, several years later, I made my way back to the beginning and read Longacres ethical analysis of the worlds food system. I was reading with the eyes of a trained theologian who in junior high loved my home economics classes and wondered why my parents had planted grass in the backyard where a garden used to be. Balancing nostalgia with my own experience of difficult choices, I understood that Christian ideals must always be in conversation with real life.

When the conversation is deep and authentic, I believe it can lead to renewal in our communities. In the seven years since that phone conversation with my mother, I have been studying and writing about Doris Janzen Longacres work. Its an exciting time to be learning more, because so many people are searching for meaningful ground to stand on in our tumultuous, globalized world. In More-with-Less Cookbook and Living More with Less, Longacres voice resonates with prophetic witness and pastoral concern for her neighbors both in North America and around the world. We are in a time when her witness is leading to community renewal, the primary ingredient of prophetic faith.

• First, as ethicist Robin Lovin describes it, prophetic faith avoids both sentimentality and despair by trusting lifes meaning and goodness in the face of real struggle and injustice.1
• Second, according to theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, prophetic faith carefully discerns and clearly denounces violence and injustice.
  • First, as ethicist Robin Lovin describes it, prophetic faith avoids both sentimentality and despair by trusting lifes meaning and goodness in the face of real struggle and injustice.1
  • Second, according to theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, prophetic faith carefully discerns and clearly denounces violence and injustice.

    But it must also speak to the way religion can distort itself to ignore injustice or even make it sacred.2

  • Third, Reinhold Niebuhr writes that prophetic faith is made up of two related acts: our expressions of gratitude for creation and our expressions of contrition for sinful actions. These two acts, he explains, are the best and only foundation for moral action in the world.3