What does it look like to be a thermostat instead of a thermometer in a polarized world? That’s one of the questions driving the work of Dr. Jacob Alan Cook, assistant professor of Christian ethics at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and director of the Doctor of Ministry in Peacemaking and Social Change Program. In his latest piece for Christian Ethics Today, Jake draws on social science, Scripture, and decades of conflict transformation practice to offer something rare: concrete, theologically grounded strategies for depolarizing ourselves before we try to depolarize anyone else.
Publications
“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” James Baldwin asked that question in 1963. Dr. David F. Evans, Professor of History and Intercultural Studies and Associate Dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary, picks it up in a new piece for Presbyterian Outlook.
Drawing on his 2025 book “Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement,” Evans argues that diversity and inclusion initiatives too often leave oppressive structures intact. What’s needed, he writes, is something more: building new structures rooted in love, solidarity, and the Black freedom tradition.
What happens when someone in power demands something that violates your dignity? In a recent article for Anabaptist World, Eastern Mennonite Seminary faculty member Courtney C. Joyner reimagines the biblical story of Queen Vashti through a first-person narrative that centers courage, agency, and refusal. In the Book of Esther, Vashti is remembered for a single act. She says no to the king鈥檚 command to display herself before a room full of drunken men. In Joyner鈥檚 retelling, that moment becomes a powerful exploration of dignity, fear, and the risk of reclaiming one鈥檚 voice.
Dr. David Evans, professor of history and intercultural studies and associate dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary, delivered a guest sermon on radical solidarity on Sunday, Feb. 8, at First United Methodist Church of Evanston, Illinois.
Seminary professor鈥檚 new book examines the disconnect between Black freedom fighters and their white allies
When Eastern Mennonite Seminary Professor David Evans set out to write his book about religious white progressives in the fight for Black freedom, he didn鈥檛 expect that his main thesis would flip by nearly 180 degrees. But after seven years of research and writing, Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement is just weeks away from publication. The book offers an unflinching history of white allies鈥攏amely Clarence Jordan, Dorothy Day, and Ralph Templin鈥攁nd the fracturing relationships that followed when their strategies and philosophies didn鈥檛 align with Black leaders and communities.
The book of Revelation is often seen as violent and apocalyptic, but what if its truest message is one of resistance rooted in peace? In his recent article, Rev. Dr. Timothy Reardon invites us to read Revelation through the lens of faithful, active nonviolence. Drawing on voices like Brian Blount and Elizabeth Sch眉ssler Fiorenza, he reveals how the Lamb鈥檚 鈥渨ar鈥� is not waged with weapons, but with witness, and how that witness invites the church to speak boldly and live differently.