Amish Culture

Do Amish farm children hold the key to preventing asthma? For some time now, the Amish have been known to have lower rates of asthma. But in a new academic paper released yesterday (New England Journal of Medicine), researchers have discovered a key difference in Amish children, who typically grow up on small family farms […]

Continue Reading Amish Farm Children May Help Solve Asthma Puzzle

The 2016 Amish conference (“Continuity and Change: 50 Years of Amish Society“) kicked off today, and I heard that it got off to a good start. Unfortunately, my plans to attend changed, and I have to miss this one. If you’re like me and wish you could be there, there is some good news. We’ve […]

Continue Reading 2016 Amish Conference: Watch 3 Talks Live Here

On June 9-11, the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College will hold a wide-ranging conference devoted to the Amish. “Continuity and Change: 50 Years of Amish Society” is the name of the event. Here’s the description from the Young Center website: The international conference will focus on changes and consistency within […]

Continue Reading Jeff Bach on the 2016 Young Center Amish Conference

The Ortman Chiropractic Clinic can be found in the small town of Canistota in southeastern South Dakota. As described in this piece in Mennonite World Review (“For Amish, long trip to chiropractor can be fun”), the clinic is noteworthy for the many Amish and other Anabaptist people it draws: The Ortman Clinic, which celebrated its centennial in 2015, has […]

Continue Reading Some Amish Travel 1000+ Miles For Chiropractor Visit

That’s the question Kelsey Osgood asks in a longform article for the Atlas Obscura website. Long or medium-term readers of this site know that joining the Amish has been a frequently-covered topic here, including posts on Amish converts in Maryland and Maine, or on joining the Amish later in life. There have also been numerous reports from Anne, […]

Continue Reading Is It Really Possible To Become Amish?

A few weeks ago, a fire broke out in a home in the Harmony Amish settlement, the largest in Minnesota. A bishop and his 18-year-old-son lost their lives. Since that time, both the local Amish community, as well as English neighbors (for anyone new, “English” is the term most, but not all, Amish use to refer […]

Continue Reading English Aid Amish After Minnesota House Fire

There’s a nice story making the rounds about a man named Matthew Secich who recently joined the Amish community at Unity, Maine. If the name of that community rings a bell, you may have seen it discussed here before. Here is one reader’s account of a visit to the settlement, and a look at what makes the […]

Continue Reading An Unusual Amish Convert Story In Unity, Maine

As we close the books on the last day of 2015, it’s always nice to take a look back at the previous 365. Every year has its ups and downs. I hope yours was overall a good one, and that 2016 is only better. Here on the blog, I’ve collected some favorite posts from the previous year. In […]

Continue Reading Favorite Posts Of 2015

Do young Amish men drive motor vehicles? For most non-Amish adolescents, acquiring a license at age 16 or thereabouts–usually followed by a beater of a car–is an assumed rite of passage. For Amish youth–many of whom enjoy freedoms similar to that of non-Amish during their “running around” years–the choice is not so obvious. While it’s safe […]

Continue Reading Jim Cates: Aaron and The 1964 Lincoln Convertible

Most Amish speak a dialect known as Pennsylvania German or Pennsylvania Dutch as their primary language. It’s generally not used as a written tongue, though that doesn’t mean it’s not written, in one form or another, from time to time. And so today we have a list of terms for you to guess (or if you […]

Continue Reading Do You Know These 10 PA Dutch Carpentry Words?