The Amish and Technology

What do you know about the Amish of Geauga County, Ohio, the fourth-largest Amish community? Over 15,000 Amish live here. Yet the settlement kind of gets overlooked, especially with Holmes County so close. Among the buggies, windmills, and laundry lines of Geauga County, you’ll find something not often seen in other communities: the classic ice vending freezer. A friend who recently visited Geauga describes there being “hundreds” of them “all over the…

Amish use of technology often puzzles outsiders.  This is exacerbated when observers see Amish using a piece of technology that doesn’t seem to fit their notion of what the Amish should be. Simply put, people are disappointed when they discover the Amish aren’t as “Amish” as they expected, due to the technologies they allow.  Sometimes this leads to accusations that Amish have “betrayed their roots”…

The full schedule for Amish America: Plain Technology in a Cyber World has now been posted, along with paper abstracts and event descriptions. The conference will take place June 6-8, 2013 at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College (Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania). From the conference main page: The conference will include more than 100 presentations in a variety of formats—plenary lectures, academic papers, panel…

In closing a recent post on Amish use of solar and wind power, I joked: Maybe one day we’ll observe Amish buggies rolling down the road, plastered with solar panels, or with whirling wind turbines planted on their roofs. The first part of that tongue-in-cheek prediction is actually closer to reality than one might think, at least for some Amish. A reader shares a photo of a solar…