Building Communities of Compassion:

Mennonite Mutual Aid in Theory and Practice

ed: Willard M. Swartley; Donald B. Kraybill

This volume offers the first sustained and scholarly assessment of the history, theology and practice of Mennonite mutual aid.

Long noted for their peacemaking, Mennonites have been less known for those efforts to care for each other whose twentieth-century expressions have roots in the Anabaptism of the 1500s. Here Mennonite scholars from a variety of disciplines highlight this Mennonite distinctive.

At times informally, now often formally, Mennonite communities have sought and found ways to express mutual compassion in times of need. Carefully and sometimes colorfully, thirteen authors tell the intriguing story of the rise and transformation of Mennonite aid.