Review of A Joyful Pilgrimage: My Life in Community
[This is a] powerful, elegant memoir. ... By starting with her formative years rather than dropping us in the middle of things, [Emmy] does herself and her audience a service by giving us grounds to see her as a separate persona, a figure with both similar and different characteristics form her husband, which should inoculate us from the patriarchal tendency to wrap a wife up entirely in her husband's work.
This matters especially in the case of Emmy, because the founding and running of the Bruderhof (German for "a place of brothers") commune was very much a joint effort between her and Eberhard, and if you are searching for a case study of both the great joys and great obstacles of trying to create an intentional community from scratch, Emmy's memoir is a fantastic place to start. ...
From someone else's story we learn about what we as children of God value and why. And from Emmy Arnold's story, we learn about the necessity of building up one another, even if the unjust and broken systems around us continue to conspire to have that holy work come crashing down around us.
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Eric Atcheson