The word “humanitas” immediately conjures up images of the human community or what it means to be human. But it runs much deeper than this and encapsulates the mandate of our Centre and the unique role of Anabaptism in the larger Christian landscape and global community. Humanitas is a Latin noun with links to the Greek concepts of philanthropia, or the love of what makes us human, and paideia, or education. In this sense, the Centre exists as a forum for wrestling with many of today’s pressing issues and challenges related to a shared human existence and living in a human community from an Anabaptist-Mennonite perspective.

Many early Anabaptist leaders were trained in the studia humanitatis, the Humanist curriculum of the day that gradually replaced the medieval trivium and quadrivium of Scholasticism and elevated classical disciplines to guide their intellectual pilgrimage into what it means to be human. Early 16^th-c. Anabaptism is also often characterized as neither Catholic nor Protestant (riffing off of Walter Klaassen’s classic study) and was heavily influenced by a number of movements, trends, and sources within Roman Catholicism. These include German Mysticism, Humanism, Benedictine monasticism, the Devotio Moderna, Brethren of the Common Life, various forms of asceticism, and the Church fathers, among others.

Adopting the name “Humanitas” signals that our Centre exists to engage the greater Christian tradition out of which Anabaptism developed as we continue to engage the wider Christian community today within which Anabaptism offers a unique and important voice.

Humanitas Anabaptist-Mennonite Centre offers an Anabaptist perspective to many of today’s challenges and ongoing conversations. We aim to operate within a rigorous multi-disciplinary academic environment that is nevertheless accessible to the wider Mennonite and Christian community. To fulfill this objective, Humanitas sponsors on-campus and off-campus lectures and other public events, organizes conferences and symposiums, and promotes and disseminates scholarship in a number of research areas from an Anabaptist-Mennonite theological point of view.

Humanitas Anabaptist-Mennonite Centre seeks to fund important research projects and aims to establish a network of research fellows—including unfunded and funded, emerging and seasoned—that will integrate the unique combination of Anabaptist-Mennonite beliefs, practices, experiences, and perspectives to the questions that animate a variety of academic disciplines. As a Centre of Trinity Western University, Humanitas operates under the guiding principle that addressing the many challenges and questions that inspire meaningful dialogue and intellectual curiosity in a variety of scholarly fields requires credible resources and academic diligence expected of a top-tier University.