The trouble with ‘the Amish’
Posted on March 25th, 2009 in Amish Beliefs, Amish Culture
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 [...]
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Comparing Big Valley buggy ‘dashboards’ of the Byler, Renno, and Nebraska Amish
Posted on September 26th, 2008 in Amish Culture
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 [...]
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An Amish America Q-and-A with Professor Donald Kraybill
Posted on July 14th, 2008 in Amish Books and Media, Amish Culture
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 [...]
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Photos from the Martins in Poland
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 [...]
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An Amish ‘computer’?
Posted on April 8th, 2008 in Amish Culture
‘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 [...]
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Where Amish scooters come from
Posted on March 15th, 2008 in Amish Communities
‘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 [...]
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Dropping in on the ‘Polish Amish’
Posted on March 7th, 2008 in Mennonite & Anabaptist
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 [...]
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Swartzentruber to New Order: Donald Kraybill breaks down four Ohio Amish affiliations
Posted on November 26th, 2007 in Amish Culture
One of my favorite pieces on the Amish is a Donald Kraybill examination of the four main affiliations of Holmes County, Ohio. This work does a great job of describing the cultural variety found within the Amish world. Reading it one is reminded of the difficulty of making broad generalizations about Amish society. The Amish [...]
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