Word: wente
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Rhoda Janzen went away to college, she was determined to leave her past behind. But unlike the average independence-minded freshman, Janzen was Mennonite - a member of a small, strict Christian denomination with only 110,000 members in the U.S. She went on to earn a Ph.D. from UCLA and become an English professor. But in 2006, at age 43, a personal crisis sent her back to her Mennonite roots in Fresno, Calif. Janzen has written a new book about her unusual journey, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress (Henry Holt). TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs reached Janzen...
...feel a sense of differentness when you were growing up? I felt so different. I went to public school. I didn't know anything about pop culture or song lyrics or dancing or anything like that. I was embarrassed for how I dressed and was embarrassed that I didn't have that same cultural knowledge. It didn't occur to me that the Mennonites might have something that other people were missing. (See pictures of John 3:16 in pop culture...
...sort of critical year, a crisis year. My husband of 15 years announced one day that he was leaving me for a guy named Bob, whom he had met on Gay.com. Then, six days later, I was in a car accident. I was a mess, really, so I went to the only place I could figure out to go that wouldn't cost much, and that was home to the Mennonites...
...what was it like when you first went back? I had expected to sleep in, hole up out of self-pity, but my mother was so busy and cheerful that I didn't have time for any of that. The very first morning, when I was still jet-lagged, she stuck her head into my old bedroom and said, "You want to help me make pie-by-the-yard? I picked up a big bag of Granny Smiths!" I found it comforting to snap back into old patterns, with my mom presiding over the kitchen in her safari apron. Trailing...
...Second-guessing of the original invasion was rampant in the Soviet debate. "I am not going to discuss now whether we did the right thing by going there," Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze said in January 1987. "But it is a fact that we went there absolutely not knowing the psychology of the people or the real situation in the country." (The U.S. has "not sufficiently studied Afghanistan's peoples whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley," says McChrystal's August assessment...