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Feel Your Pain
Full text linkThe following is a collection of responses, critiques, and meditations on New England State University’s (NESU) recent decision to allow for the use of fully immersive, pain enabled virtual training environments (VTEs) in medical classrooms. This collection has been put together and edited by a team of student journalists to capture the wide range of feelings the campus community has surrounding the University’s decision. New England State University is the first academic institution in the world to allow pain enabled VTEs to be integrated into medical training.
Previous iterations of VTEs relied on visual and auditory cues, limiting user mobility, and context within the virtual environment to convey experiences of pain and other symptoms to users. These earlier versions were heralded as effective tools to cultivate empathy in clinicians. Students from a range of medical disciplines utilized this technology to better understand what their patients were experiencing. Pain enabled VTEs use haptic feedback suits and headsets to mimic a wide range of symptoms, including but not limited to, pain, nausea, and dizziness. Users within fully immersive, pain enabled VTEs are able to physically experience symptoms associated with a wide range of disabilities, illnesses, and diseases. 
Encountering the global church: From Mennonite culture to radical witness
Full text linkIn this article I recount two recent encounters with people from the Global South as a challenge to those of us Mennonites in North America who can let Mennonite culture supersede the radical call of discipleship to Jesus
How My Wife Got Brain-Hacked (Again)
Full text linkThis is the story of a man who finally bought an electric toothbrush for his wife’s birthday
Ahoy There! Rowing to Bombay
No full textA grad student is sent on a time travel adventure back to 1853. Adrian is "launched" in a dinghy in the middle of the Indian Ocean and awaits pick up by a passing barque. He is unprepared for what follows and his adventure does not end well as he is put off the ship
Tradition and hope: A Mennonite chain of memory
Full text linkThere is nothing wrong with being Mennonite based on theological convictions or because of ethnic heritage. But neither of these ways of understanding what it means to be Mennonite is adequate in 2025. Being Mennonite in 2025 is bigger than ethnicity and theology. I would like to propose a third option: being Mennonite is about belonging to a chain of memory—about claiming connection to a past, a present, and a future that we share
Embracing and contesting tradition and identity: Drawing on Paul for framing “Anabaptism at 500”
Full text linkThe entire Bible is arguably a complex expression of the constant process of constructing, interpreting, transmitting, promoting, and reworking received tradition, as it intersects with changing ecological, material, political, demographic, and cultural conditions. At some critical moments, the normally incremental process explodes into dramatic and disruptive transformations. Paul (also known in Scripture as Saul) embodies and represents one of these massive transformations. As a figure, Paul is himself also “traditioned” (transmitted to and received by us) in more than one version
Ministry in spite of: Telling and owning all of our calling story
Full text linkJust like we know a good salvation story involves the lost person eventually being found, we know that a story of call “goes down better” when it concentrates on the positive attractions of and affirmations toward ministry. The challenges to the call, the hesitations, the doubts (be they self-induced or external), the things that we carry with us and minister in spite of—these things generally don’t get talked about, or at least not publicly. In this way, we rob ourselves and those with whom we minister of a broader sense of what it means to be called and how to live our calls out on a day-to-day basis. Witnessing to a dynamic sense of call brings a more honest, Spirit-led, and spiritually insightful form of ministry to the body, especially when it comes to ministry across a range of abilities
Disability theology: A journey toward liberation
Full text linkDisability theology is not just about individual stories of healing or struggle. It is also about reimagining our communities so that all people—disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent—are valued and included. Liberation comes not in spite of our disabilities but through them, as we embrace the fullness of who we are and demand that our communities do the same
The gift of an ordinary life
Full text linkJesus modeled over and over what it means to see the whole human in every body. He modeled hospitality’s ultimate design, one that sees each human as equal in status, equal in worth, and fully able to be a part of God’s enlivening work in the world as part of a community. Through Jesus’s work, we can see one another in new ways, allowing for mutual relationship between us all. This is something that we keep working toward, together, in our bodies, in whatever shape they are in and with whatever abilities they have. Because in all of them, we are whole, and we belong to one body, the church