Donald Kraybill has written and edited over 20 books and dozens of professional articles on the Old Order Amish, Mennonites, and other Anabaptist peoples, and is the Senior Fellow at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In addition to his current projects, Professor Kraybill has spent recent months in locations from Texas to Vancouver promoting Amish…
Unlike the typical Catholic priest or Protestant pastor, the Amish minister is unpaid and does not take up formal theological training. Ministers are selected from among the baptized males of the church, in an often emotional process of voting and drawing lots. They are in many ways responsible for the spiritual welfare of their church (more on Amish church districts). Thus being a minister is…
Just what do the Amish do for a living nowadays? The Amish have long been connected with farming. But in reality, this association has become less and less accurate over the past few decades. Published in 1995 (second edition 2004), Donald Kraybill and Steven Nolt’s Amish Enterprise documents one of the most significant changes in Amish society, the shift from agricultural to entrepreneurial pursuits. Today,…
Fireworks and cookouts are the name of the game today. And some Amish people will no doubt be participating in one, the other, or both. But as you’d expect, secular holidays take a backseat to church-sanctioned ones in Amish America. Generally speaking, Amish that are more in tune with the American mainstream (say, by virtue of their occupation, or church affiliation) would be more likely…
Kevin at the Amish Cook blog has already posted on this issue but I found it so compelling I wanted to pass it along. This Wall Street Journal article examines the situation of a Pennsylvania Old Order Mennonite father of 11 children, nine of whom suffer from rare, genetically-inherited medical ailments. The father, who in keeping with Old Order belief is uninsured, has paid around…
Here on the Euro side of the pond, the quadrennial European Football Championships are scrapping along nicely, with the continent in a frenzy for the sport that we Yanks most readily connect with Pele, Maradona and now the flamboyant Mr. David Beckham. Back home, looks like the NBA has been having a nice series. I’m sure some Amish have had a glance in the paper…
‘No motive for the deed is known, as he was wealthy and popular.’ Reporting of long ago can seem…a bit, well, simplistic, can’t it? As in, what was the reporter’s thought process? Wealth? Check. Popularity? Check. So what was this Shrock fellow’s problem? What else could there have been to life? This is from a 1903 New York Times article. Shrock, whatever his troubles may…
Just been flipping through the blog’s back pages and came across a post on the Amish and gasoline prices from May of last year. Gas was around three-and-a-quarter then. “Yikes, that’s high”, people were saying. I guess we’re at four bucks now… My main point on that post was that rising gas affects the Amish in a number of ways. The Amish are plugged into…
From Lancaster, Pennsylvania, through Ohio and Indiana and on out to other long-established settlements in Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas, we tend to associate the Amish with the nation’s middle latitudes. Since their earliest years in America, the Amish have gravitated to the cooler climes of these corn and dairy regions. However, the Amish have also had a long history of attempting to settle America’s southern…
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…