Which are the most friendly Amish communities? Yes, to answer that question we do have to generalize. But I think it’s true that Amish communities can take on a certain character. If you’ve visited more than one Amish community and met enough people, you may have noticed this. People in some places just seem more happy to see you than in others. Below are my (non-scientific) choices for “most…
Jim Cates returns today with a look at Amish lay leaders, the National Amish Steering Committee, and solving problems outside the courts. Part one of Jim’s discussion of Amish and politics can be found here. — Politics Is the Art of Looking for Trouble The entire quote (by Groucho Marx, no less) actually goes “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing…
From Syracuse.com: RICHLAND, N.Y. — Black horse-drawn buggies were parked outside a wooden house where Amish people were crowded inside — laughter and the smell of food spilled out of the front door Saturday afternoon. When Levi Swartzentruber came to the door though, his green eyes watered at the mention of his 6-year-old son Jonathan L. Swartzentruber. He died after being hit by an SUV…
I met Bob by accident, or fate, hard to know which it was. He and I spent three hours together one Sunday morning in September, walking the countryside, my Sunday shoes getting wet from the dew. He was a good listener, but he often got bored and wanted to run. He is young so you have to forgive his wandering attention. Bob has four legs…
Do you know who’s under the weather in your community, who just had a baby, or where to get a good deal on a sewing machine? If you were Amish and received the church newsletter, you’d have all this information at your fingertips. While wider-audience papers like the Budget and Die Botschaft have multi-state and national reach, papers such as the Lancaster Gemeinde Brief (covering Lancaster…
As you might have heard, Amish are constantly starting new communities – about once every 2-3 weeks. But not every new Amish settlement makes it. Some attract dozens of families and last decades before dwindling to zero. Others muster just a few short years before economics, church struggles, or other factors send settlers on to new pastures, or back to the old. Don Burke recently visited a newly-extinct…
Cost, comfort and other factors influence where an Amish family decides to have its babies. We’ve previously looked at Amish-friendly birthing centers and home birth as popular options. But many Amish mothers in fact do what most English families do, and welcome their new bundles of joy in conventional hospitals. This Hillsdale Daily News article was written, in part, to report on the first birth of 2015 at the Hillsdale Community…
An Illinois Public Media news blurb tells of a change in Illinois law in the new year that will benefit Amish with reservations about photo-based identification. Representative Adam Brown (R-Champaign) says it took some work to develop a solution to please both the state’s Amish and law enforcement: The new ID’s [sic] that serve as driver’s licenses for operators of horse-drawn buggys [sic] use a fingerprint instead….
Amish author Benuel Blank once wrote that the Ausbund, the centuries-old Anabaptist hymnal, is “not to be considered a holy book like the Bible”, but that it has nonetheless been very influential for Amish and their spiritual kin. Passing along a description of the book, Blank calls it “music for the soul, rather than music for the ear”. In use since the 1500s, the Ausbund continues to…
Here on the final day of 2014, I thought it would be a nice cap on the year to share links to favorites of the past 365 days. Below you’ll find those posts which got a lot of comments or otherwise good response from you, plus some of my personal favorites. Wherever you are today, I hope your year went as well as it could have–and that…