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…
Three items for you today. First, David Arment returns with a little slice of life from Amish Indiana. Drivers in cold-weather climates use winter tires to get a better grip in snowy and icy conditions. Going by David’s account today, there must not be anything like that for Amish buggy horses (winter shoes?), which led to a small challenge for one family. Then, reader Jerry shares a…
I hope everyone had a safe and restful Christmas holiday. Snow arrived in my area at 11 pm the evening of the 25th, making it a last-minute White Christmas. Coming later this week, look for a guest post from a new voice out of Indiana, as well as “Favorites of 2014”. Today, Serving the Amish author Jim Cates returns with the first of a two-part look at…
1001 Questions & Answers On The Christian Life is an important little text which concisely lays out Christian beliefs as understood by the Amish. The book, first published by Pathway Publishers in 1992, was created with the input of over 20 members of the Amish ministry and lay people in various communities. It is based upon an older text (written in 1907) called 1000 Questions and…
My calendar tells me it’s officially winter now, which may be what inspired me to start a log fire the other day (even though it wasn’t really fireplace-cold weather yet). In fact, I’ve got another crackler going as I write this post, since I love fires so much. Again not so much for heat purposes as much as for the smell and sound (I suspect I’m…