A little piece of an interview with an Ohio Old Order Amish friend, ‘Leon’, speaking back in September of sports, cars and other matters adolescent: ‘When we first started we were 18-and-under’ Leon explains, talking about his softball team, ‘and we won the state of Ohio tournament, went down to Texas, and won the world tournament–Amish guys, Amish boys, 18-and-under.’ ‘I think I was 22…
Being a well-known non-resistant group, people sometimes wonder if the Amish use guns for hunting. John at the Spokesrider has posted a few questions on this topic, which I’ve been meaning to get to for a while (thanks John!). I remember while in the Arthur, Illinois settlement a few years ago being surprised to learn that the Amish do use guns for hunting. Since that…
Taxes, puppy mills, cream-cheese muffins – I just looked down the list of posts for the last couple weeks and realized that the Amish have been the subject of a good bit of controversy recently. Most of it fairly tame. But this one made me do a double-take. Apparently tempers got hot at the championship game of the Regency Hockey League in Lancaster County last…
Eli Stutzman, convicted murderer and father of ‘Little Boy Blue’, was an exile from the ultraconservative Swartzentruber Amish group. When you read words like ‘secretive’, ‘closed’, and ‘backward’ in the same sentence as ‘Amish’, the writer, rightly or wrongly, is often referring to this sect. Wayne County, Ohio, where Stutzman originated, has a high number of Swartzentruber members, with quite a few spilling over into…
“The only treasure we can take with us to heaven is our children.” This came from a mother of five in Holmes county, Ohio, but it could have been just about any Amish parent. For the Amish, children are a blessing, not a burden.  Large Amish families are common. America has gone from being an agrarian to an industrial and now a post-industrial nation. We…
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’…