Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Spring 1997

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring 1997, pp. 145-46.

Comments

Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Juhnke's candid biography of the SwissVolhynian educator, reformer, missionary, and Bethel College president (volume eight in the Cornelius H. Wedel series on Anabaptist and Mennonite history) is an appropriate companion to his earlier volume on Wedel himself. Juhnke follows up his study of one of the founding fathers of the German-American Mennonite community with this rich examination of a second generation leader caught between the idealism and isolationism of the founders and the newer attitude of practical accommodation to American ways.

Juhnke's well-integrated material on the origins, migrations, and doctrines of the various branches of the Mennonite movement serves as an introduction to the culture as well as an entrance into Kaufman's world. Outsiders will appreciate Juhnke's straightening out the mystifying overlaps of doctrinal and ethnic divisions within the Mennonite community which encompasses Swiss-Volhynians, Low Germans, Galicians, Prussians, traditionalists, conservative evangelicals, and progressives.

From their origins in the sixteenth-century Protestant movement fomented by Ulrich Zwingli, through religious persecutions that drove them to Alsace, then to Polish {later Russian} Volhynia, then in 1874 to South Dakota and Kansas, the Swiss-Volhynians maintained their ethnic and religious identity. Kaufman's ambition was to foster this sense of community while adding insights from the newly developing discipline of social science and from progressive theologians with whom he had come in contact at the University of Chicago.

Drawing on a long paper trail, interviews with family members, former students and colleagues, and Kaufman's own uncompleted autobiography, Juhnke documents the efforts of a "progressive apostle of the social gospel" as he maneuvers through the sharky waters of Mennonite doctrinal factionalism, American anti-German hysteria during the war years, and changing social values.

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