About the Benjamin Eby Lecture
The Benjamin Eby Lecture is an annual lecture that presents the research of a faculty member at Conrad Grebel University College. It is named after Benjamin Eby (1785-1853), a leading shaper of Mennonite culture in Upper Canada in the early 1800s. He and his wife, Mary, arrived from Pennsylvania in 1807. By 1812 he was an ordained bishop, and by 1813 the first Mennonite meetinghouse in the Waterloo area had been erected. Around 1815, he attended to the first school house building. He continued his outstanding leadership in the church and in education until near the time of his death, all while supporting himself financially as a farmer. It was Eby and a few people of similar stature who set the course of life in Waterloo County in the first half of the 19th century.
The Benjamin Eby Lecture is an annual lecture that presents the research of a faculty member at Conrad Grebel University College. The lectureship was named after Benjamin Eby for a number of reasons. Not least was Eby’s belief that the motivation to learn is a response to the Christian gospel. He loved books. Through his efforts many of them were printed. He wrote two primers for public school children, compiled the Gemeinschaftliche Liedersammlung, a new hymnal for Mennonites in Ontario, and edited a volume of articles by Anabaptist and early Mennonite authors. The latter is noteworthy especially because it preserves in a ministers’ manual the traditional worship practices of the (Old) Mennonite Church.
We are grateful for the financial support of Jim and Goldine Pankratz toward this lecture series. Jim Pankratz served as the Dean of Conrad Grebel University College from 2006 to 2014 and as Interim President in 2016-17. Strengthening academic programs and supporting faculty members in their teaching and research were priorities for Jim in his administrative roles.
Past Lectures
Eric Lepp (Fall 2024)
2024 Benjamin Eby Lecturer: Dr. Eric Lepp
Dr. Eric Lepp explores spaces of contact and the construction of a community that includes the ‘other’ in conflict-affected societies. He is particularly interested in counter-cultural, resistant, and unexpected spaces where peace is being enacted and imagined against a backdrop of division.
Reading socio-political experiences through graffiti and street art in conflict-affected societies.
Street art and graffiti can provide socio-political commentary and rich insight into societies, cultures, social issues, trends, political discourse, and spatial and territorial identities and claims. Through his field research in Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Canada, Dr. Eric Lepp will engage with graffiti as a spatial and temporal resource in societies undergoing social and political transformation.
Watch the lecture recording:
Maisie Sum (Fall 2023)
2023 Benjamin Eby Lecturer: Dr. Maisie Sum
This year's Benjamin Eby lecturer is Associate professor of music Dr. Maisie Sum. Maisie is an ethnomusicologist, educator, and performer. Her research and teaching combine a variety of fields, including ethnomusicology, anthropology, music analysis, performance, ritual studies, peace and conflict studies, psychology, and health studies. Maisie is also the general director of the University of Waterloo Balinese Gamelan.
Trace, Trajectory, and Truth: A Story of Morocco's Iconic Lute
The guembri is a symbolic artifact of the Black African diaspora in Morocco. An oblong gut-string lute crucial to a syncretic spiritual practice, it was shrouded in secrecy and taboo until the late twentieth century when it gained worldwide popularity. In the early 2000s, the guembri secured its status as an icon of the nation’s openness, diversity, and rich cultural history. Weaving together various strands of knowledge, Dr. Maisie Sum will situate the guembri within the social and musical fabric of contemporary Morocco and beyond to explore its enduring significance for culture bearers.
Watch the lecture recording:
Kate Kennedy Steiner (Fall 2022)
Music, Liturgy, and the Making of Medieval Scotland
Event Details:
Thursday, November 24, 2022, 7:30 PM
Chapel, Conrad Grebel University College
Today, Scotland’s patron saint, Andrew the Apostle, anchors Scottish national identity in an annual holiday on his feast day. But in the century leading up to the Scottish declaration of independence, the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, Saint Andrew’s significance expanded from that of a local saint to become the central figure in the foundation of Christianized Scotland. This lecture will feature the performance of medieval liturgical music made at the Cathedral of St Andrews to celebrate Saint Andrew’s relics, showing how liturgical music shaped history.
Kate Kennedy Steiner combines her interests in music, ritual practice, narrative history, and communal identity in her research on medieval music. She received an M.A.R. in liturgical studies at Yale Divinity School and a PhD at Princeton University with a dissertation on music and liturgy in medieval St Andrews, offering new insight into an important collection of medieval polyphony. Her published work includes an article on music for a Scottish saint in Plainsong and Medieval Music, and an edited volume of meditations on Scriptural songs, Come, Let us Sing to the Lord. She has held postdoctoral fellowships as a teaching scholar at Valparaiso University and as a Mellon Fellow at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies. As a professor of music at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, she teaches courses on music history, focusing on music making in social contexts. She also directs the Church Music and Worship program, teaching courses on Christian worship and music, directing the Chapel Choir at Conrad Grebel University College, and leading the Worship Apprenticeship Program.
Karen Sunabacka (Fall 2021)
Composing Louis Riel's Dream: Exploring the history of the Red River Settlement through family stories and music
This year's Benjamin Eby Lecture will be take place virtually on Thursday, October 21, 2021, at 7:30 PM.
When Karen Sunabacka was 3 years old, her Métis grandmother gave her a book titled Riel’s People: How the Métis Lived by Maria Campbell. Karen always knew she was Metis.
Her Grandparent’s farm, near Selkirk, Manitoba, was a gathering place for the local English Métis community and Karen with her siblings spent countless hours dancing, fiddling, and exploring the rural prairie landscape. As Karen’s love of music grew, she found herself being trained by and composing in the European Western Art Music Tradition. She was enthralled by this rich musical heritage and didn’t quite know how to bring this together with her Métis roots. Yet her heritage is both Settler and Indigenous and her family sits at the intersection of two very different world views.
This can sometimes be an uncomfortable space. Her grandfather’s family was racist towards her grandmother’s family, and this dynamic was present in every generation of her family, beginning in the early 1800’s. How does one make sense of this ever present conflict? A conflict that continues within the Canadian landscape, institutions, and social structures. In more recent years Karen has started exploring this intersection by telling family stories in her musical compositions. This has brought her, and her audiences, a new awareness of the history of the Red River Settlement and her family’s place within it. During the Eby Lecture, Karen will discuss her heritage, a number of her compositions, her inspiration for the pieces, her collaborations with her mother Joyce Clouston, her challenges, and the ways the pieces have been received.
Carol Penner (Fall 2020)
#MennonitesToo: Sexual Violence and Mennonite Peace Theology
The #MeToo movement has placed sexual violence in the spotlight and Mennonites are asking; “What does it mean to be people of peace when sexual abuse and assault is woven into the fabric of our own communities?” Through a survey of church periodicals, I will show that some Mennonites have been working on this topic for almost fifty years. My lecture will outline the themes and methods of this grassroots practitioner-based theology, and it will argue that periodicals not only inform the church, they shape it too, offering good news in the face of violence.
Lecturer
This year’s 2020 Eby Lecture will be presented by Carol Penner, Assistant Professor of Theological Studies. It is also the C. Henry Smith Lecture and it is being delivered virtually at Bluffton University and Goshen College. The C. Henry Smith Peace Lecturer is selected each year by a committee from Bluffton University and Goshen College. The lectureship financially supports research into peace traditions, and is awarded each year to a faculty member from a Mennonite College.
Event Details
This year's Eby Lecture will be a virtual event. The lecture will be presented via the Grebel YouTube channel, with an online discussion session to follow.
Date: Thursday, November 12, 2020 at 7:00 PM
Mark Vuorinen (Fall 2019)
Alicia Batten (Fall 2018)
Reina Neufeldt (Fall 2017)
Jeremy Bergen (Fall 2016)
Troy Osborne (Winter 2016)
W. Derek Suderman (2014)
Susan Schultz Huxman (Fall 2013)
Earlier lectures
For more information on the lecture, contact Birgit Moscinski or call at 519-885-0220 x24264.