photo: Rob Ward Richard Stevick, author of Growing up Amish: The Teenage Years, describes eck balle, or cornerball, as ‘the plain peoples’ equivalent of NCAA March Madness.’ From Growing up Amish: ‘Until the 1950s, cornerball flourished among most of the Pennsylvania Dutch communities, both plain and fancy. Although the “fancy” or “church Dutch” eventually abandoned the game, it still thrives among the plainest Amish groups…
Today was the annual auction in Lancaster County benefiting The Clinic for Special Children. The clinic, founded by Dr. Holmes Morton and located in Strasburg, PA, serves Amish and Mennonite children with rare genetic ailments (and others from outside the Amish and Mennonite community as well). There was a large turnout today at the auction house at Leola, and much to keep one busy, including…
photo: Stanisław Ciok Flipping through a recent issue of the Polish news magazine ‘Polityka’, I had a chance to read an article about the Roma people, perhaps better known Stateside by the more colloquial ‘Gypsies’. Entitled ‘Romofobia’, the piece describes the challenging situation of the 8 million-strong Roma minority living within Europe. Poland, where I live for a good chunk of the year, has a…
The Old Colony Mennonites are Anabaptist cousins of the Amish. Today their population numbers in the hundreds of thousands. But most of them live outside the United States. So compared to the Amish, they are much less well-known in this country. The bulk of Old Colony Mennonites live in Latin America, in countries including Bolivia, Mexico, and Paraguay, as well as some in Canada. For that…
They live about as far back in as you can get, two miles down a mud road, deep in the heart of a serene pine-and-birch forest. The neighbors are mostly friendly, and Jacob has worked out a deal with one of them – a big-city transplant and a bit ‘unhandy’ when it comes to farming – to manage and use a cow and some of…
It looks like Anita and Jakub, the ‘Amish in Poland’, are back in the news again. The Pennsylvania/Indiana-transplant couple, who settled in a village not far from Warsaw 14 years ago, appeared on the national talk show ‘Rozmowy w Toku’ (roughly, ‘Conversations in Progress’) tonight. Kind of an odd place to find an Amish family, but again, we’re not sure exactly what their particular brand…
This one goes back a couple years, but really surprised me when i first found it. An English-language Polish weekly, the Warsaw Voice, reported back in 2000 that a few families, apparently of an Amish or Mennonite persuasion, had settled in a village not far from the capital. The arrival of the families apparently caused quite a stir: one villager ‘ran from house to house…
Genevieve at prariebluestem.blogspot.com has shared some local insight in a piece about the influx of Amish and Mennonites into the Kentucky community where she lives. Kentucky Plain People In Christian County live not only Amish but Old Order Mennonites, who also travel by horse-and-buggy and share many similarities with the Amish. It seems a wide variety of other Mennonite designations are active in the area…
A link (no longer online) to some nice photos of Anabaptist-related peoples in South America, by Jordi Busque. Jordi says that the family in An Amish family in the jungle moved to Bolivia from Tennessee in the mid-1990’s. Apparently they identify themselves as Amish. Jordi adds that there is another family like them, about an hour’s walk away. Is this family in fellowship with any…
Most Amish look alike to the man on the street. In reality the group is surprisingly diverse. Though tied by a set of core beliefs, the Amish have no national governing body, no pope nor patriarch. The individual congregation, guided by its bishop, decides its own rules and customs. This decentralized approach, along with a widely varying tolerance for progressive ideas, creates many different ‘flavors’…