Dunkard

ON AUGUST 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia's Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania.

Other prominent topics include foreign missions in Nigeria and China, fundamentalism, the Dunkard Brethren schism of 1926, women's activity in the church and the origins of Brethren Voluntary Service.

These are the Mennonites, Church of the Brethren (also called Tunkers or Dunkards), Hutterites, Doukhobors, and the Society of Friends or Quakers.

As members of a splinter segment of the Dunkards, or German Baptist Brethren, established in 1708 by Alexander Mack, we were a minority presence in an overwhelmingly Orthodox and Roman Catholic community.

Dunkers, who practiced three-time immersion baptism, were also referred to as Tunkers, Dunkards, and Brethren.

Surely the members of the historic peace churches-Quakers, Dunkards, Mennonites and Brethren-were not advocated of such things.

In various parts of the United States, members of Anabaptist religious communities, Hutterites, Amish, Dunkards, Apostolic Christian, and Old Order Mennonites believe in the simple life and reject some or most of the modern world.

The Studebakers had long been Dunkards, members of a German-American Baptist sect that believed in brotherly love and despised war.

Eventually the state hosted the Moravians, the Schwenkfelders, the Brethren (also known as the Dunkards, or Dunkers), and the more communal, esoteric Society of the Woman in the Wilderness and the Ephrata Community.