Diversity among the Amish

Ira Wagler grew up in Canada and Iowa Amish communities.  I like to link to his posts now and again, because his writing is very good and he offers a particular insider’s insight thanks to his Amish background. In one recent post, Ira offered his interesting take on the Lancaster County Amish, and the north-south [...]

Continue reading Ira Wagler on South-End Lancaster County

A recent re-read of a piece by Steven Nolt in Mennonite Quarterly Review–‘Who are the Real Amish?  Rethinking Diversity and Identity among a Separate People’– made me recall a common dilemma when discussing our Plain neighbors. ‘The Amish’ is a moniker that tries to do more than it really can, which is blanket a group [...]

Continue reading The trouble with ‘the Amish’

Freelancer Geoff Williams has written an interesting article on the Amish, credit cards and the credit crunch.  Geoff asked me for an estimate for the number of Amish with credit cards and so I took my best shot at it, basing my figure on the raw numbers I had seen while selling books in five [...]

Continue reading The Amish and credit

Big Valley, Pennsylvania is home to three main Amish groups–the Byler Amish, Renno Amish, and Nebraska Amish. They’re often known by the color of their buggies–yellow, black, and white, respectively. The somewhat fancy dash of a Byler Amish buggy.  Yes, those are keys hanging on the right.  You’ve got to start the horse somehow. Some [...]

Continue reading Comparing Big Valley buggy ‘dashboards’ of the Byler, Renno, and Nebraska Amish

Donald Kraybill has written and edited over 20 books and dozens of professional articles on the Old Order Amish, Mennonites, and other Anabaptist peoples, and is the Senior Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In addition to his current projects, Professor Kraybill has spent [...]

Continue reading An Amish America Q-and-A with Professor Donald Kraybill

It’s the ‘long weekend’ in Poland (a combination of the traditional May 1st communist worker’s holiday and Poland’s May 3 constitution day), and I’ve just paid another visit to my friends Jacob and Anita Martin, whom I’ve written about a few times on the blog. The Martins, who’ve lived in Poland since 1993, struggled a [...]

Continue reading Photos from the Martins in Poland

‘Made specifically for the plain people by the plain people’. The Classic boasts ‘unequaled safety’.  It is ‘Not just a locked computer’, promising ‘No modem, no phone port or Internet connection, no outside programs, no sound, no photographs, no games or gimmicks’. The ad is found on page 3 of this year’s Lancaster County Business [...]

Continue reading An Amish ‘computer’?

‘Sylvan’, one of my Amish friends in Lancaster County, runs a scooter workshop in addition to milking cows. In Lancaster County and related settlements, you rarely see bicycles–in Lancaster, for instance, there are only a few church districts I’m aware of that seem to allow them. I’ve also seen scooters in use among the Amish [...]

Continue reading Where Amish scooters come from

Tomorrow I hit the road to pay a visit to Jacob and Anita Martin, an American couple that has been portrayed as Amish in the national media here in Poland.  The Martins have graciously allowed me and a group from Krakow’s Jagiellonian University to stay a couple days at their home in a village about [...]

Continue reading Dropping in on the ‘Polish Amish’

I quite liked this story on a Sugarcreek, Ohio man who was raised Amish and is now planning to attend medical school at Ohio State (no longer online).  Obviously, it’s not typical for someone who only went through eight grades to have such high educational goals.  In fact, Andy Yoder completed his GED and is [...]

Continue reading Raised Amish, headed to Med school