About Me

Hey, Marnie herecollaborator, lover of words, lay theologian, walking enthusiast, and Wendell Berry evangelist.

I’ve lived in British Columbia, Manitoba, and currently reside in Toronto, Ontario, but I’ve also lived on the road, driving around Canada and the US with my family for a year of my childhood to learn to live with less. Sounds like a long time ago, but believe me: it changed my life. 

On ‘The Big Trip,’ we not only encountered the beauty of North America, but the diversity of people. Growing up in the Mennonite Brethren tradition, we sought out churches to visit everywhere we went, and through that my eyes were opened at an early age to the ways that different stripes of Christians work together… or don’t.

This piqued a lifelong interest in how people who are different from each other can form meaningful relationships – to collaborate, worship, work, eat, or play together.

This interest has taken me into environmental communications, refugee settlement work, food justice programming, and always back to storytelling. 

As a writer, I focus on themes of: justice; polarization; othering; us-and-them; climate change; creation care; environmental issues; social theory and critique; Christian theology; migration and settlement; and human relationships. 

The long and short of it is this: 

Warmly,

Marnie

What I Do

Develop: curricula, resources, and workshops

Write: essays, poems, prayers, litanies, reflections, sermons, memoir pieces, worship resources, curricula, et cetera

Preach: from an Anabaptist, post-Evangelical, and just-peace perspective

Facilitate: small to medium group workshops, Faithful Climate Conversations, collage-based workshops, Adult Education sessions, and more

A few of my favorite things (an incomplete list)

Kelly Latimore’s icons, but especially his paintings of sticks in snow

Bruce Cockburn – the only music you need when the world is ending

Ivan Illich and his insistence on carrying a candle around

The 2006 Canadian Living recipe for challah

Alexander Calder – mainly because of The Calder Game but also because how could you not be moved by a giant piece of steel in THAT red paint?