Amana Church hosts winter symposium

AMANA — Amana Church will present a winter symposium on four consecutive Sundays beginning Feb. 11.

Each session will begin at 2 p.m. and will feature two speakers presenting various topics.

With a focus on people, places and events pivotal to Inspirationist-Amana community history, the first three Sundays will feature a series of 30-minute talks with PowerPoint presentations on research being conducted using the Amana Church and Amana Heritage Society archives, the church said in a news release.

The final week will feature the story of how the Inspirationist community interacted with the Meskwaki here in Iowa. A second presentation will feature stories and slides of Pine Ridge, South Dakota and the connections maintained by Amana Church members who have been working with Re-Member at Pine Ridge each summer for the past nine years.

On Feb. 11, Lanny Haldy will present “Don’t Stop the Presses: Book Production in the Community of True Inspiration,” and Emilie Hoppe will follow with “Let’s Go to Schwarzenau: An armchair visit to a little village with a big story.”

Haldy is the retired executive director of the Amana Heritage Society and the current Amana Church archivist. He is a longtime board member and past president of the national Communal Studies Association.

Hoppe is the publisher of Willkommen and the author of numerous articles about Amana, including pieces on Amana’s early leaders.

Janel W. Zuber will present “The Christian Metz Testimonies of 1833” Feb. 18. Hoppe will give the speech, “One Who Received the Light: E.L. Gruber and His Questions.”

Zuber is the translator of over a dozen books and manuscripts from the Inspirationist archive including the Inspirations-Historie Vols. 1, 2 and 3, inspired testimonies and the biographies and autobiographies of noted leaders.

Scheduled for Feb. 25 is “Power to the People: the Amana Millrace Slideshow” by Haldy and “A Sense of Place: the Inspirationists and Their Environment” by Peter Hoehnle.

Peter Hoehnle is a park ranger with the National Park Service working at Hoover Library in West Branch. He has a doctoral degree in history from Iowa State University and is the author of several books and many articles on Iowa history and Amana’s history.

On March 3, Hoehnle will present “Two Communities: The Meskwaki and the Inspirationists” and several church members will present “Seeing Pine Ridge.”

Amana Elders Mike Shoup, Kristie Yoder, Betsy Momany, Tony Berger and the Amana Church members presenting have made repeated visits to Pine Ridge, South Dakota. They will share photos and stories from their visits and will make fry bread to share.

Documents used to prepare for this symposium include many from the Amana Church Archive.

Three years ago, Amana Church archived documents were made available online. The inspirationistarchive.org was created by John Bendorf and Lanny Haldy and the Amana Church Publication Translation Committee to preserve important historical documents of the Inspirationist — Amana community and to make these available to the public.

It includes both German documents and those that have been translated from German into English. The documents include testimonies given by 18th- and 19th-century Werkzeug (inspired instruments) as well as digitized manuscripts and books.

It also contains information about all of the Community of True Inspiration Werkzeug, timelines and other interpretive tools. To explore go to inspirationistarchive.org.