The whole time I was growing up, I watched Richard Showalter from afar. In some ways our childhoods followed similar trajectories. We both lived for a time in the mountains, both knew what it was like to live in Mennonite communities and to look back into those communities from the outside. But Richard was always just a little older, a whole lot wiser, and way more adventuresome than I was.
When we were adults, I kept watching as Richard made critical choices to engage. He rose to one challenge after another—teaching and pastoring and living in Kenya and the Middle East. He became the president of a college and of a mission agency. And he wrote books. Richard, I could tell, wasn’t afraid to be different, but he also seemed to know how to avoid hyper-partisanship, to reach across differences for relationship.
Like I had as a kid, I kept right on trying to learn from Richard, a person ahead of me on the path. And so when he agreed to read Yoder School and comment on it, I was delighted.
“Yoder School is an extraordinarily insightful memoir of an inter-culturally-seasoned Anabaptist educator journeying from an Amish Mennonite mountain school in Maryland through urban mazes of Michigan and beyond. Her razor-keen excellence in educational pedagogy, fusing love for students with inspiring them to learn, forms a page-turning narrative.”
—Richard Showalter, Columnist, Mennonite World Review, and Writer, Teacher, Mentor
Apple to Apple 