From the wheat fields and bargain stores of rural Manitoba, Ben and Helen Eidse were the first missionaries sent overseas by their conference. On the African savannah they partnered with the Chokwe-Lunda who taught them language, culture and proverbs, which Ben used to explain salvation. Helen delivered the leprosy cure, mothered orphans, cared for the excluded, sick and poor. Their partners helped establish 80 churches, translate the Bible and run 24 clinics. They deepened their faith in spiritual battle against sorcery and corruption. The Eidses sought to empower the powerless and raise a family despite revolution, disease and disability. Back in Canada, Helen took in the homeless and Ben became president of Steinbach Bible College. As first chancellor, he continues a counseling, healing prayer ministry.

Ben F. Eidse is Shakambangu, a messenger who announces the truth, so-named by the Lunda-Chokwe who appreciate his commitment to learning their heart language, proverbs and culture. He often began his messages with a Chokwe proverb about the kambangu bird who doesn’t speak empty words like the prairie chicken, but announces the first sliver of the moon. He was also called “Tata,” a wise elder and “blacksmith who equipped us, not with guns, but with the Word of God,” which he translated, with two Chokwe pastors/storytellers. Eidse is among the rare western students of Lunda-Chokwe language and culture, which spreads over nine countries of central and southern Africa. His unique and original research captures Lunda-Chokwe oral history in print, tracing that blended tribe’s origin stories and cultural values. The Disciple and Sorcery is his career study of Lunda-Chokwe worldviews, including family and clan values, sorcery practices and experiences of Biblical discipleship. His research hypothesis is that a culturally relevant biblical discipleship can deal effectively with the fear of sorcery and the temptation to use it to harm others. This book will particularly appeal to the Lunda-Chokwe people, as well as to anyone who treasures respectful insight into a traditional society.

Mennonites are often associated with food, both by outsiders and by Mennonites themselves. Eating in abundance, eating together, preserving food, and preparing so-called traditional foods are just some of the connections mentioned in cookbooks, food advertising, memoirs, and everyday food talk. Yet since Mennonites are found around the world – from Europe to Canada to Mexico, from Paraguay to India to the Democratic Republic of the Congo – what can it mean to eat like one? In Eating Like a Mennonite Marlene Epp finds that the answer depends on the eater: on their ancestral history, current home, gender, socio-economic position, family traditions, and personal tastes. Originating in central Europe in the sixteenth century, Mennonites migrated around the world even as their religious teachings historically emphasized their separateness from others. The idea of Mennonite food became a way of maintaining community identity, even as unfamiliar environments obliged Mennonites to borrow and learn from their neighbours. Looking at Mennonites past and present, Epp shows that foodstuffs (cuisine) and foodways (practices) depend on historical and cultural context. She explores how diets have evolved as a result of migration, settlement, and mission; how food and gender identities relate to both power and fear; how cookbooks and recipes are full of social meaning; how experiences and memories of food scarcity shape identity; and how food is an expression of religious beliefs – as a symbol, in ritual, and in acts of charity. From zwieback to tamales and from sauerkraut to spring rolls, Eating Like a Mennonite reveals food as a complex ingredient in ethnic, religious, and personal identities, with the ability to create both bonds and boundaries between people.

The experience of growing up without the opportunity to ever "put down roots" A fusion of voices and deeply personal experiences from every corner of the globe, Unrooted Childhoods presents a cultural mosaic of today's citizens of the world. In twenty stirring memoirs of childhoods spent packing, writings by both world-famous and first-time authors (many published here for the first time) make universal the story of growing up without the opportunity to ever feel rooted. Best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Pat Conroy, Pico Iyer and Ariel Dorfman contribute powerful and deeply personal accounts of mobile childhoods and the cultural experiences they engender. The memoirs touch on both the benefits and the difficulties of growing up in the ever changing landscape of diplomatic, military and other expatriate communities.

One of the main water resources for Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, the Apalachicola River begins where the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers meet at Lake Seminole and flow unimpedted for 106 miles, through the red hills and floodplains of the Florida panhandle into the Gulf of Mexico. Voices of the Apalachicola is a collection of oral histories from more than thirty individuals who have lived out their entire lives in this region, including the last steamboat pilot on the river system, sharecroppers who escaped servitude, turpentine workers in Tate's Hell, sawyers of "old-as-Christ" cypress, beekeepers working the last large tupelo stand, and a Creek chief descended from a 200-year unbroken line of chiefs.