Janet Kauffman (born June 10, 1945) [1] is an American novelist, poet, and mixed media artist who has also been a civil rights, environmental, equal rights, peace, and social justice activist. [2]
Kauffman was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on June 10, 1945. [3] [4] She was raised on a tobacco farm in a predominantly Mennonite community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where she says she was inspired at an early age by the social justice beliefs held by the residents she encountered there.
Kauffman later incorporated the beliefs she formulated in Lancaster, Pennsylvania into her written works and academic pedagogy, focussing on issues such as agricultural pollution, civil and equal rights, climate change, environmental ethics, risks to ecosystems, and the preservation of peace. [5]
During the early part of her academic career, she received training in poetry writing, and became a published poet in her mid-30s. [6] Kauffman then pursued her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Chicago. After completing a dissertation on Theodore Roethke, she was awarded her degree in 1972. [7]
Kauffman subsequently relocated to Michigan, where she became a member of the faculty of Jackson Community College and taught classes in creative writing, feminist studies, and literature. During this period of her life, she shifted her writing focus to fiction, and received critical acclaim for her first short story collection, Places in the World a Woman Could Walk. She also served as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan from 1985 to 1986. [8]
A member of the English Department faculty at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in Ypsilanti, Michigan, beginning in 1988, she continued to teach there until her retirement in 2008. [7] [9] Explaining her writing to Jean Jackman to the Detroit Free Press in 1989, Kauffman said:
You can't be a woman writer today without being a feminist writer, if that means attending to matters of order, matters of power. I think the excitement in fiction today is about changes in defining structure and order. All literature is political. It has to be, even when writers are trying not to make it so. [10]
Since the 1980s, she has tended a farm near Hudson, Michigan, where she was a hay farmer for more than a decade before restoring her property's wetlands and securing a conservation easement. In 2001, she and fellow Hudson farm owner Lynn Henning organized a "tour de manure" to raise the public's awareness about the environmental threats posed by latge-scale, industrial dairy farming operations. [11] In 2019, she donated the majority of her property to the ACRES Land Trust to preserve the grasslands, stream, wetlands, and woods there with the goal of creating an environmental sanctuary for researchers and the general public. [12]
Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
Machinery | 1986 | Kauffman, Janet (April 14, 1986). "Machinery". The New Yorker. Vol. 62, no. 8. pp. 32–34. | ||
Mennonites are a group of Anabaptist Christian communities tracing their roots to the epoch of the Radical Reformation. The name Mennonites is derived from the cleric Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland, part of the Holy Roman Empire, present day Netherlands. Menno Simons became a prominent leader within the wider Anabaptist movement and was a contemporary of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). Through his writings about the Reformation Simons articulated and formalized the teachings of earlier Swiss Anabaptist founders as well as early teachings of the Mennonites founded on the belief in both the mission and ministry of Jesus. Formal Mennonite beliefs were codified in the Dordrecht Confession of Faith (1632), which affirmed "the baptism of believers only, the washing of the feet as a symbol of servanthood, church discipline, the shunning of the excommunicated, the non-swearing of oaths, marriage within the same church", nonresistance, and in general, more emphasis on "true Christianity" involving "being Christian and obeying Christ" as they interpret it from the Holy Bible.
Pennsylvania Dutch or Pennsylvania German is a variety of Palatine German spoken by the Pennsylvania Dutch, including the Amish, Mennonites, Fancy Dutch, and other related groups in the United States and Canada. There are approximately 300,000 native speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch in the United States and Canada.
Plain people are Christian groups in the United States, characterized by separation from the world and by simple living, including plain dressing in modest clothing. Many plain people have an Anabaptist background. These denominations are largely of German, Swiss German and Dutch ancestry, though people of diverse backgrounds have been incorporated into them. Conservative Friends are traditional Quakers who are also considered plain people; they come from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds.
Anabaptist theology, also known as Anabaptist doctrine, is a theological tradition reflecting the doctrine of the Anabaptist Churches. The major branches of Anabaptist Christianity agree on core doctrines but have nuances in practice. While the adherence to doctrine is important in Anabaptist Christianity, living righteously is stressed to a greater degree.
Joan Louise Barfoot is a Canadian novelist. She has published 11 novels, including Luck (2005), which was a nominee for the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Critical Injuries (2001), which was longlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, Exit Lines, was published in 2009.
Sarah Klassen is a Canadian writer and retired educator living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Klassen's first volume of poetry, Journey to Yalta, was awarded the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 1989. Klassen is the recipient of Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and Klassen's novel, The Wittenbergs, was awarded the Margaret McWilliams Award for popular history.
Amish Mennonites came into existence through reform movements among North American Amish mainly between 1862 and 1878. These Amish moved away from the old Amish traditions and drew near to the Mennonites, becoming Mennonites of Amish origin. Over the decades, most Amish Mennonites groups removed the word "Amish" from the name of their congregations or merged with Mennonite groups.
The Capital News Service (CNS) is a wire service based at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. CNS covers news at the state capital in Lansing and across Michigan for member papers from September to early May. The circulation of the combined member papers is one of the largest in the state—larger than the Detroit Free Press. The service is headed by Eric Freedman, a Pulitzer-winning reporter formerly of The Detroit News. Correspondents are selected from undergraduate and master's students within the School of Journalism and College of Communication Arts and Sciences by an application process. During each semester, correspondents report on state government, politics and public policy for daily and weekly newspapers and online news outlets across Michigan.
Julia Mae Spicher Kasdorf is an American poet.
The Northkill Amish Settlement was established in 1740 in Berks County, Pennsylvania. As the first identifiable Amish community in the new world, it was the foundation of Amish settlement in the Americas. By the 1780s it had become the largest Amish settlement, but declined as families moved elsewhere.
John A. Hostetler was an American author, educator, and scholar of Amish and Hutterite societies. Some of his works are still in print.
The Amish, formally the Old Order Amish, are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships with Swiss and Alsatian origins. As they maintain a degree of separation from surrounding populations, and hold their faith in common, the Amish have been described by certain scholars as an ethnoreligious group, combining features of an ethnicity and a Christian denomination. The Amish are closely related to Old Order Mennonites and Conservative Mennonites, denominations that are also a part of Anabaptist Christianity. The Amish are known for simple living, plain dress, Christian pacifism, and slowness to adopt many conveniences of modern technology, with a view neither to interrupt family time, nor replace face-to-face conversations whenever possible, and a view to maintain self-sufficiency. The Amish value rural life, manual labor, humility and Gelassenheit.
The Amish, who are a denomination of Anabaptist Christianity, believe large families are a blessing from God. Amish rules allow marrying only between members of the Amish Church. The elderly do not go to a retirement facility; they remain at home. As time has passed, the Amish have felt pressures from the modern world; their traditional rural way of life is becoming more different from the modern society. Isolated groups of Amish populations may have genetic disorders or other problems associated with closed communities. Amish make decisions about health, education, and relationships based on their Biblical interpretation. Amish life has influenced some things in popular culture. As the Amish are divided into the Old Order Amish, New Order Amish, and Beachy Amish, the way of life of families depends on the rule of the church community to which they belong.
Over the years, as Amish churches have divided many times over doctrinal disputes, subgroups have developed. The "Old Order Amish", a conservative faction that withdrew in the 1860s from fellowship with the wider body of Amish, are those that have most emphasized traditional practices and beliefs. There are many different subgroups of Amish with most belonging, in ascending order of conservatism, to the Beachy Amish, New Order, Old Order, or Swartzentruber Amish groups.
The Heralds of Truth is a religious Organization founded by Daniel Milland Okitoi in 2023. It is the first periodical of the Soroti Church (SC) and was also presented to Deng Garang in Nyumanzi Refugee Settlement as the Heralds of Truth during Global Youth Week of Prayer. Milland presented the Heralds through Deng Garang Kuir of Nyumanzi, Block B,in 2024, when Milland's own company, Daniel Milland Okitoi & Deng Garang (later left the work to Youth, The Adventists in Nyumanzi took over the work in Nyumanzi, in all Blocks. The work was left to the Adventists Youth and Church Board at large in 2024.
Amish dolls are a type of rag doll and a popular form of American folk art, which originated as children's toys among the Old Order Amish people. While some Amish dolls have faces, the majority of them do not, to emphasize the fact that all are alike in the eyes of God.
Christmas Carol Kauffman was an American author of Mennonite Christian literature. Kauffman was best known for her semi-biographical novels, and her writings were largely based on the life stories of people she met through the mission work she performed with her husband, pastor Nelson E. Kauffman. She is mother of James Kauffman.
PS Keystone State was a wooden-hulled American paddle steamer in service between 1849 and 1861. She was built in 1848 in Buffalo, New York, by Bidwell & Banta for ship-owner Charles M. Reed of Erie, Pennsylvania, and operated as part of his "Chicago Line". A luxuriously furnished palace steamer, she operated between Buffalo and Chicago, Illinois, while also making stops at various other ports. She was built for the passenger and package freight trade, frequently carrying both wealthy passengers and European immigrants who desired to settle in the Midwestern United States. Due to the Panic of 1857, Keystone State and several other paddle steamers were laid up. When the American Civil War began in 1861; she was refurbished, and put back into service.
L. Jean Willoughby was an American politician.
In August 1989, Lawrence John DeLisle killed his four children by driving the family station wagon into the Detroit River in Wyandotte, Michigan. A jury found DeLisle guilty of four counts of first-degree murder after a trial in June 1990. In year-end polls of Associated Press newspapers, the DeLisle case ranked as the No. 7 news story in Michigan in 1989 and the No. 6 story of 1990.