Combining an engaging style with scholarly support (including extensive notes plus bibliography and index), Perry Bush delicately balances critical assessment and affirmation of the Bluffton College's legacy of progressive Anabaptism and its place within Anabaptism.

Who better to tell the story of Ukraine than a kobzar, one of the country’s blind wandering minstrels that sang of its history and people? It is this iconic and entertaining figure, who walked the land and conveyed its traditions, that serves as the prism through which Taras Shevchenko composed his pioneering collection of poems, The Kobzar. The origin of the poems themselves is extraordinary. Written over a span of nearly 25 years, they mark many crossroads in Shevchenko’s life. They were composed in villages and cities, in prison and in exile; they are filled with Ukraine’s expansive steppes and verdant groves, peopled with decent individuals yearning for freedom and those who would deny it, and animated by trees, the moon and stars that converse. Shevchenko’s life from serfdom to exile and international artistic acclaim is the cloth from which each poem is cut. History and culture are intertwined with meditations on forgiveness and grace, religion and morality; the poems’ epic scope is complemented with lyrical reflections on subjects that include fame and fortune, love and lust, and the meek and mighty. Of these, family and home become overarching themes, which the poet considers to be of supreme value. As a foundational text, The Kobzar has played an important role in galvanizing the Ukrainian identity and in the development of Ukrainian literature and its written language. The first editions were censored by the czar, but the book still made an enduring impact on Ukrainian culture. There is no reliable count of how many editions of the book have been published, but an official estimate made in 1976 put the figure in Ukraine at 110 during the Soviet period alone. That figure does not include Kobzars released before and after both in Ukraine and abroad. A multitude of translations of Shevchenko’s verse into Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese, Bengali, and many others attest to his impact on world culture as well. The poet is honored with more than 1250 monuments in Ukraine, and at least 125 worldwide, including such capitals as Washington, Ottawa, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Moscow and Tashkent. Former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower unveiled the one in Washington.

Kobzar (Ukrainian: Кобзар, “The bard”), is a book of poems by Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevchenko. Taras Shevchenko was nicknamed The Kobzar after the publishing of this book. From that time on this title has been applied to Shevchenko's poetry in general and acquired a symbolic meaning of the Ukrainian national and literary revival. A complete collection of Ukrainian poems by Taras Shevchenko is called Kobzar too, after the title of Shevchenko's first book.

What does it mean to be Mennonite in the modern world? And what is the witness of a peace church that is always at risk of splintering? C. Henry Smith—son of an Amish family, erudite historian, urbane bank president, and pioneer of Mennonite scholarship—sought answers to these questions in the middle of the 20th century, and his answers reverberate through the church to this day. In this engaging narrative biography, historian Perry Bush chronicles Smith’s childhood in an Illinois farming community, his youthful turn toward intellectual inquiry, and his confidence that Anabaptist faith and life offer gifts to the wider world. By recounting the story of one of the foremost Mennonite intellectuals, Bush surveys the storied terrain of 20th-century Mennonite identity in its selective borrowing from wider culture and its tentative embrace of progressive reforms and higher education, and growing conviction that Anabaptism served as a taproot of Western civilization. Bush argues that Smith’s body of historical writing furnished a new generation of Mennonites with both an understanding of their shared past and the tools to navigate an ever-shifting present. Volume 49 in the Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History Series.

The centenary of America's declaration of war in 1917 is a fitting time to examine afresh the reaction of the American churches to the conflict. What was the impact of the war on the churches as well as the churches' hoped-for influence on the nation's war effort? Commenting on themes such as nationalism, nativism, nation-building, dissent, just war, and pacifism, this book provides a window into those perilous times from the viewpoint of Mainline and Evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Mennonites, Quakers, Mormons, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Also included are chapters on developments among American military chaplains in the First World War and the reaction of the American churches to the Armenian Genocide.

The wide-ranging story of Mennonite migration, theological diversity, and interaction with other Christian streams is distilled in this engaging volume, which tracks the history of Ontario Mennonites. Author Samuel J. Steiner writes that Ontario Mennonites and Amish are among the most diverse in the world—in their historical migrations and cultural roots, in their theological responses to the world around them, and in the various ways they have pursued their personal and communal salvation. In Search of Promised Lands describes the emergence and evolution of today’s 30-plus streams of Ontarians who have identified themselves as Mennonite or Amish from their arrival in Canada to the last decade. In Search of Promised Lands also considers how various Mennonite groups have adapted to or resisted evangelical fundamentalism and mainline Protestantism, and it identifies the nineteenth- and twentieth-century shifts toward personal salvation and away from submission to the church community. Volume 48 in the Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History series. Find out more about Ontario Mennonite and Amish history at the author’s blog.