UNITED STATES
Mennonite Life
Stephanie Krehbiel
ISSUE 2015, VOL. 69
YODER IN CONTEXT
I first encountered Ruth Krall’s work at the same time that many Mennonites did, in 2013, with the release of the third volume of her online series of books on religious sexual violence, The Elephants in God’s Living Room. That volume, more than any work that came before it, brought attention to the John Howard Yoder’s sexual violence as a symptom of a systemic problem, enabled by negligent institutions and a religious culture that elevated male leaders and devalued the lives of sexual abuse victims.
While theological scholars of Yoder were mostly unreceptive to Krall’s book, it hit the crumbling institutional wall of silence around Yoder’s abuse with an enormous shove. Within less than a year of its release, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and the Mennonite Church USA Archives in Goshen granted historian Rachel Waltner Goossen access to numerous sealed files on Yoder. Goossen’s work made clear what many Mennonite women and abuse survivors had known for years: Krall was a central figure challenging the Mennonite institutional players who enabled and covered up Yoder’s violations of women.
Krall started out as a nurse, and her clinical background has never ceased to be the ethical ground on which she stands. As a young woman, Krall was on a fast-track career in psychiatric/community-health nursing and administration. In 1974, she was a member of the first class to be certified by the American Nurses’ Association as a psychiatric/mental health clinical nurse specialist – the forerunner of today’s certified nurse practitioners. But her formative experiences as a counselor for rape victims left her with a desire for a better understanding of the roots of violence, which led her to a doctorate in theology and ultimately to 20 years of teaching in Goshen (Indiana) College’s peace, justice and conflict studies program, which she helped to design.
Krall’s work experiences inside and outside the religious academy put her in contact with both abusers and victims. Seeking to understand this phenomenon, she turned to emerging Roman Catholic literature about priest sexual abuse of the laity and institutional clericalism. Through the work of Catholic anti-abuse activists such as Father Tom Doyle and Richard Sipe, Krall added an ecumenically minded analysis of clericalism to the knowledge she had already accrued from second-wave feminism and the women’s health movement.
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