Home Arts & Culture Festschrift honours Katie Funk Wiebe

Festschrift honours Katie Funk Wiebe

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kfwOn Apr. 24, the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission, Tabor College, and the Center for MB Studies (CMBS) in Hillsboro, Kan., sponsored a launch for a book celebrating a Mennonite writer with 2,000-plus published articles and books to her name: The Voice of a Writer: Honoring the Life of Katie Funk Wiebe.

“To have my writing recognized may not mean all my ideas are accepted, but it helps to know I and other women are not now trespassers,” Katie told the more than 100 people who attended the launch.

The book contains essays on Funk Wiebe’s contribution to the life of the church, a sampling of Funk Wiebe’s writing, and 98 pages of bibliographic information on the prolific author. In addition to a 30-year run as columnist for the Christian Leader and a career as an English professor at Tabor College, Funk Wiebe has authored several memoirs, including her latest, You Never Gave Me a Name: One Mennonite Woman’s Story.

“Katie has had a huge impact not only on Mennonite Brethren, but also on the Mennonite world,” says co-editor and director of the Canadian CMBS, Doug Heidebrecht.

Pictured are the event organizing committee (l-r): contributor Peggy Goertzen, co-editor Doug Heidebrecht, Katie Funk Wiebe, contributor Don Isaac, and co-editor Valerie G. Rempel.

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Beverly Holmskog November 29, 2016 - 18:34

I recall the sadness and some degree of disbelief from reflecting on my own life where I experienced a more open arena for the place of women’s gifts of the Spirit to build the church, when Deborah Penner, then a student and currently Professor of English at Tabor College, talked with me about the women without names — first noted about wives of Mennonites in cemeteries in Europe and Ukraine in earlier years, and later found still true in Nebraska and elsewhere in Mennonite circles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To me, this was not a request for some late recognition, but as a request to be thought of as a human beings with hearts and minds to be noted participants in the building of families, communities, and certainly in the communal worship of God. I am so grateful for spirit in which Katie Wiebe. and those who championed her contributions, made to our twenty-first century world.

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