Now available! June 2024:
The Essential Dale Suderman Reader: Journals, Essays, Letters, Interpretations,
edited and with a foreword by Daniel Born
The Essential Dale Suderman Reader draws from essays, correspondence, personal journals, and newspaper columns written by one of the most dynamic Mennonite thinkers of his generation. A Kansas native, Suderman served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam during the Tet offensive and returned to the United States a committed peace activist. His voice embodies both gonzo journalist wit and comic gravitas. He saw the world as a country boy and then embraced his Chicago citizenship. He would boldly affirm his Christian faith and gay identity. To read him is to travel the terrain of war, social class, men’s studies, addiction, urban street life, and political engagement. Running through it all is ringing affirmation of friendship as the cardinal virtue, and of the timeless pleasures of conversation and introspection. This volume will introduce new readers to one of the enduring and unique voices in the American Anabaptist tradition. It is essential reading for pastors, educators, therapists, addictions counselors, and peace activists.
It includes eight essays by some of his closest colleagues, who grapple with the meaning of his life and achievement: Keith Harder, Elva Suderman, John Kampen, Ben Hartley, Tim Nafziger, Ruth Harder, Clint Stucky, and Delbert Wiens.
Dale Suderman (1944-2020) graduated from Tabor College and earned a master’s in religion from Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. Coauthor of a hardboiled crime novel with Daniel Born, Unpardonable Sins (2021), published under the shared pen name David Saul Bergman, he wrote essays and articles that appeared in publications including The Post-American, The Common Review, The Mennonite, Books & Culture, and the Hillsboro Free Press, where his regular column, “View from Afar,” was a popular feature.
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Unpardonable Sins
(Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2021)
By David Saul Bergman
(the pen name for the literary collaboration of Daniel Born and Dale Suderman)
John Reimer, a Mennonite preacher in Lakeview, Chicago, might be on the downslope of his ministerial career. At least that’s how he feels most days. Then one morning in March a hungover waitress at the Melrose diner tells him to look into the murder of a bike messenger at North Pond—and begs him to keep the cops out of it. Before too long Reimer is making tracks through Chicago, asking a lot of questions, and leaving many people uncomfortable. Reimer encounters a menagerie of characters in his beloved city—among them a brooding detective who trusts Reimer’s instincts; a Moody Bible Institute drop-out trying to stay on his antipsychotic medication; a charismatic alderman; and the church moderator, Nancy Huefflinger, an attorney who knows when to swagger and when to turn on the charm. Complicating things is Reimer’s despair for his wife Vi, in hospice with an incurable neurological disease, and whose condition has shaken his faith to the core. When Reimer figures out that whoever killed the young man at North Pond is coming after him, too, he must summon all his inner resources—including some he didn’t learn in seminary—if he wants to survive.
The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel
(University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
Daniel Born explores the concept of liberal guilt as it first developed in British political and literary culture between the late Romantic period and World War I. Disturbed by the twin spectacles of urban poverty at home and colonial imperialism abroad, major novelists--including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and H. G. Wells--forged ethical responses that are best summed up in the idea of liberal guilt. This was a zone of ideas that followed the collapse of theistic belief but preceded the rise of twentieth-century therapeutic culture.“An outstanding analysis of how novels explore the moral issues raised by Britain’s urban poverty and imperialist ventures. Born argues convincingly for the continuing value of these novelists’ liberal conscience, which although essentially post-Christian is distinctively moral in its discernment of evil and human responsibility.” —John Barbour, Saint Olaf College
“The title . . . does not do justice to this compact, readable, politically and philosophically sophisticated work.”
—Deborah Martinson, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920