Donald B. Kraybill

I work in technology research. In my office, I have currently four screens for two laptops in addition to my smartphone. I have over 20 years of formal education. I'm not exactly against technology and make a strange candidate to study the Amish. Regardless, I'm deeply religious and see limits in what technologies can give us. I like living off the grid when possible. Technology, to me, should always be a means, and never an ends. That's why I picked up this book about the Amish, to see what show more secrets they can provide about living in the modern world.

Author Donald Kraybill is a professor at a Pennsylvania college from a Mennonite background. He has spent most of his career in research exploring how the Amish negotiate with the modern world. They don't exactly reject it and make use of its conveniences whenever it serves their common, religious life. But they don't shy away from saying no when a technology would interrupt their communal life.

For example, they will ride in a car to visit a physician in a neighboring town or in an emergency. Yet they won't own one because it would cause their towns to lose their close-knit community. Or they don't like noisy phones in homes because they would interrupt a peaceful, prayerful environment. Yet allured by their immense convenience, they allow a common line in a booth at the end of a street for outgoing calls.

Kraybill is fascinated with this negotiation with the modern world, a trait that's not entirely alien to other forms of religious practice. Part of any religious order, in my experience, is learning to use things "rightly" - whatever that means - instead of indiscriminately. He has spent a career listening in on this negotiation and thinks we all have something to learn from it. He covers not only technology and entrepreneurship, but also forgiveness, suffering, death, and parenting.

Those who feel pulled away from a spiritual center in today's world - and who doesn't at times? - will most benefit from understanding how the Amish make sense of a complex environment. I will never be as agrarian as they are nor as focused on strict, communal limits. But I can still admire and appreciate them from afar. This book gave me close access to achieve that through a scholar's lens, and I better appreciate the self-discipline required to hold things together in today's complex world. show less

In 2011, members of a breakaway group of Amish in Ohio began attacking Amish who were perceived to be critical of their leader. They forcibly cut their beards and cropped their hair in a series of nighttime attacks; the attackers were subsequently arrested and tried under federal hate crime legislation, a first both for the Amish and for the U.S. as a whole. Donald Kraybill, one of the experts who testified at the trial, here recounts what led up to the attacks, their ramifications for and show more context within broader Amish society, and the legal theory that led the attacks to be classed as a hate crime even while taking place in an intra-community context.

This is a solid read, but one that I found somewhat disappointing. I'm sure that there are many obstacles in the path of Kraybill being able to really cover the emotional stakes and fallout of what happened—the vast majority of Amish would never speak to an outsider about their feelings, even a sympathetic ear like Kraybill's—but this felt somewhat two-dimensional. Kraybill also had a tendency to briefly reference what seemed to this non-expert reader to be very non-Amish behaviour—the discovery of weed and a bag of cocaine in an Amish bishop's house; an older Amish woman saying "Bullshit!"; and so on—and then to move on without explanation or expansion. I was very like, hold up! I've never had to imagine an Amish person on coke before! I need some time to process this! show less

Amish scholar Donald Kraybill takes a look at lessons the rest of the world can learn from the Amish. He opens and closes the book discussing the "riddles" of the Amish as they interact with the greater society--how they embrace some things or aspects of things but not others. Some lessons focus on the importance of community and living and working in a society that helps its neighbors. Others focus on the importance of the family and value of each member. Some show the effectiveness of show more their eighth grade educations in a society that wants more. Some focus on their selective use of technology and how it should not take over our lives, distracting us from things more important. Many of the lessons focus on their faith--how they take the Word of God to heart and can find strength and comfort knowing God is in control even in the midst of extreme difficulty. I appreciated the author's approach to helping non-Amish persons understand the "Plain people" and perhaps even gain some valuable insights into how society can function when we put faith in God first, valuing the family and the community. It makes me long for a simpler time in a more caring community although I won't be removing the electricity from my home anytime soon! show less

Having gone over to the US for a wedding in Luray, Virginia, Hannah and I decided to extend our stay by booking a week, almost at random, on a farm in rural Pennsylvania. It turned out to be a beautiful eighteenth-century cottage predating the Declaration of Independence, and lying in the heart of Amish country – low, slightly hilly land, spread with vast fields of corn, yellow wheat, green soybeans, occasional tobacco, grain silos poking up on the horizon, covered wooden bridges and show more horse-drawn buggies on the backroads, white-tailed deer darting across the highway in nervous groups, turkey vultures circling overhead, chow-chow and shoofly pie chalked up on the wall of every roadside diner we passed.

Having done none of our usual pre-trip research (forward planning nowadays basically doesn't extend much further than working out how to keep two small kids occupied on a nine-hour flight), we were completely taken aback when we realised that not only could we follow overheard conversations in the Pennsylvania German used by Old Order Amish families, but that it sounded exactly like the Swiss German we've been trying to learn at home. This turned out to be for the very good reason that the Amish who originally settled here were Swiss – indeed, in that particular area, many came from the small towns along the south shore of Lake Zurich where we now live. Even the local surnames were the same as those familiar to us at home. It was incredible.

I had somehow not known that the Amish are really Swiss Anabaptists in all but name (a name that is itself taken from Jakob Ammann, who was from near Berne). Along with half of Europe's persecuted religious minorities, the early Amish and other Mennonites headed across the Atlantic when William Penn announced that he'd be allowing complete freedom of religion throughout his territory (monotheists only, terms and conditions may apply).

Although this book warns against the idea that Amish society is a kind of frozen museum, it's hard not to escape the tempting conclusion that when you look at these farmsteads you're seeing a snapshot of Swiss community life from the early 1700s. It's a lifestyle that has managed to preserve its essentials remarkably well, and despite early predictions that it would soon die out, the number of Amish has risen steadily, thanks mainly to the huge birth rate – Kraybill notes that among the Amish, it's not unusual for someone to have more than seventy-five first cousins, and many grandmothers have more than fifty grandchildren. This makes for a very sociable, community-oriented life, and I must say, ill-informed and over-romantic though I am, as I drive around the area the Amish way of life does not seem unappealing. (Now I just have to do some more much-needed reading on the Swiss Reformation….) show less