Michigan Mary asks: What are the standard burial rituals for the Amish? Who/what digs their graves? Takes care of their cemeteries? We’ve hit on this topic on a couple of occasions, so I may just direct you to these previous posts: on the Amish funeral, and Amish cemetery. As to who digs graves, that would be other Amish, by hand using shovels. Members of the…
Giving new meaning to the term? From the Lagrange County IN Amish settlement. More on the Amish phone.
Thursday came and went, unsurprisingly, with no change in the stance of Amish in Graves County, KY over the SMV triangle. So another group of Amishmen were sent to jail yesterday (looks like 10 this time, though it’s a little unclear from reports), with sentences from 3 to 13 days. As with the Amishmen jailed last September, the men had refused to pay fines for failure to…
I have a favorite pair of shoes. They’re cold-weather hikers, originally waterproof but after a few years of use, not so much anymore. That’s not the problem, though, as apparently a tiny hole has appeared, somewhere, in the sole (where exactly, I haven’t been able to determine). However it lets enough water in that walking around on a rainy day or on wettish pavement soon…
Osiah Horst grew up in an Old Order Mennonite family in Canada. Osiah’s father Isaac wrote a column for a local newspaper which eventually grew into the book A Separate People: An Insider’s View of Old Order Mennonite Customs and Traditions, a witty and incisive look at Old Order Mennonite society. Isaac penned 2 dozen books and many columns, before passing away in 2008. Osiah…
Rita asks: I’ve seen the comments about teens, during Rumspringa, driving cars. How do they get a permit, practice time, license and money to buy a car without the parent’s assistance? We’ve discussed Amish youth getting their first buggies, but what about cars? First off, some Amish youth do in fact drive, and some Amish parents have no choice but to concede car driving to…
Here’s a neat story I missed during Christmas, worth taking a look back at. A couple reasons why–one, it’s about an Arkansas Amish community–and you don’t hear too much about Amish in Arkansas, owing to the small size and remoteness of the Natural State Amish population. Two, it ties in with an issue we discussed earlier this week–challenges created by obstacles like busy roads running through Amish…
Mona asks: How do the older people date/marry after a spouse dies? Or even the younger spouses who may lose a spouse to an accident, etc.? Divorce is taboo in the Amish church, but Amish people do fairly often remarry after a spouse dies. If you look through an Amish publication like The Diary for instance, you can find a monthly record of marriages, with several…
A controversy has erupted in a small New York Amish community (near Marathon in Cortland County, 1 hr S. of Syracuse) over busing of Amish schoolchildren. New York state law requires busing to be provided to private school students as well as those attending public schools. This would include the local Amish community. The issue has to do with Amish kids mixing with non-Amish children….
Some may have heard that Stephen Scott passed away suddenly last week. Stephen was a member of the Old Order River Brethren church, an Anabaptist researcher and the author of numerous books on Anabaptist topics, such as Plain Buggies and Why Do They Dress That Way? I came to know Steve at the Young Center at Elizabethtown College in 2008, and catching up with him…