‘We didn’t get out soon enough.’ In an article (no longer online) from the Toledo Blade, an Amish patriarch talks about moving from a liberal settlement to a more conservative one. This grandfather of 82 laments losing his two oldest boys to the world. Had the family moved sooner, they may have avoided the influences that caused his sons to leave the faith. The Amish…
The Amish don’t use ‘thee’, ‘thine’, or ‘thou’, as you might think after watching Weird Al’s video. Neither do they speak like Alexander Godunov or Jan Rubes did in Witness. Check that, at least one Amishman today does–but he was born in Germany and converted to the faith in his 20’s. They mostly speak English like any rural Americans would. Though you could say there…
The Amish famously refuse anything that smacks of government dependence. They opt out of Social Security, agricultural subsidies, Medicaid, Medicare, and generally any sort of public welfare program. Strangely, this is news for Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services. Ohio has the largest Amish population in the nation, by far. Yet they recently decided that the Amish needed to step up their Food Stamp…
In the Amish world, when disaster strikes, you help your neighbor. Sometimes that means going two or three states away to clean up. And it’s not just Amish helping Amish–after all, in the grand scheme of things, you, English person, are a neighbor too. Amish often travel to help non-Amish rebuild after hurricanes, such as the Hugo storm in the early 90’s. Amish were active…