Nature and the Environment in Amish Life

Nature and the Environment in Amish Life

Author: David L. McConnell

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2018-11-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 142142617X

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The first comprehensive study of Amish understandings of the natural world, this compelling book complicates the image of the Amish and provides a more realistic understanding of the Amish relationship with the environment.


Creation and the Environment

Creation and the Environment

Author: Calvin Redekop

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2003-04-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0801876729

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Recent years have seen a shift in the belief that a religious world-view, specifically a Christian one, precludes a commitment to environmentalism. Whether as "stewards of God's creation" or champions of "environmental justice," church members have increasingly found that a strong pro-ecology stand on environmental issues is an integral component of their faith. But not all Christian denominations are latecomers to the issue of environmentalism. In Creation and the EnvironmentCalvin W. Redekop and his co-authors explain the unique environmental position of the Anabaptists, in particular the Mennonites. After a brief survey of the major forces contributing to the word's present ecological crisis, Creation and the Environment explores the uniquely Anabaptist view of our relationship to what they see as the created order. In rural Amish and Mennonite communities, they explain, the environment—especially the "land"—is considered part of the Kingdom God plans to establish on earth. In this view, the creation is part of the divine order, with the redemption of humankind inextricably linked to the redemption and restoration of the material world. The well-being a purpose of creation and human history are thus seen as completely interdependent. Contributors: Donovan Ackley III, Claremont Graduate School • Kenton Brubaker, Eastern Mennonite University • Thomas Finger, Claremont Graduate School • Karen Klassen Harder, Bethel College, Kansas • James Harder, Bethel College, Kansas • Lawrence Hart, Cheyenne Cultural Center, Clinton, Oklahoma • Theodore Hiebert, McCormick Theological Seminary • Karl Keener, Pennsylvania State University • Walter Klaassen, Conrad Grebel College • David Kline, Holmes County, Ohio • Calvin W. Redekop, Conrad Grebel College • Mel Schmidt • Dorothy Jean Weaver, Eastern Mennonite University • Michael Yoder, Northwestern College, Iowa.


Almost Amish

Almost Amish

Author: Nancy Sleeth

Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1414326998

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The author looks to Amish lifestyle and values as a model on which to base calmer, more focused, more faithful lives.


An Amish Paradox

An Amish Paradox

Author: Charles E. Hurst

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2010-04-05

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0801897904

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Winner, 2011 Dale Brown Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College Holmes County, Ohio, is home to the largest and most diverse Amish community in the world. Yet, surprisingly, it remains relatively unknown compared to its famous cousin in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Charles E. Hurst and David L. McConnell conducted seven years of fieldwork, including interviews with over 200 residents, to understand the dynamism that drives social change and schism within the settlement, where Amish enterprises and nonfarming employment have prospered. The authors contend that the Holmes County Amish are experiencing an unprecedented and complex process of change as their increasing entanglement with the non-Amish market causes them to rethink their religious convictions, family practices, educational choices, occupational shifts, and health care options. The authors challenge the popular image of the Amish as a homogeneous, static, insulated society, showing how the Amish balance tensions between individual needs and community values. They find that self-made millionaires work alongside struggling dairy farmers; successful female entrepreneurs live next door to stay-at-home mothers; and teenagers both embrace and reject the coming-of-age ritual, rumspringa. An Amish Paradox captures the complexity and creativity of the Holmes County Amish, dispelling the image of the Amish as a vestige of a bygone era and showing how they reinterpret tradition as modernity encroaches on their distinct way of life.


Old Order Amish Beliefs about Environmental Protection and the Use of Best Management Practices in the Sugar Creek Watershed

Old Order Amish Beliefs about Environmental Protection and the Use of Best Management Practices in the Sugar Creek Watershed

Author: David E. Widner

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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The Sugar Creek Watershed (SCW) of Holmes, Stark, Tuscarawas, and Wayne counties, Ohio is currently one of the most polluted watersheds in the state. There are several small municipalities that influence the overall condition of the watershed, but the primary problem is non-point source pollution from the many farms in the Sugar Creek region. There are highly mechanized farms that utilize modern technology (machinery, chemicals etc.), and there are farms (Amish) that are of a more primitive nature that rely on animal power and animal waste. Both of these farm types contribute to the non-point source pollution problem in the SCW, but the focus of this particular study are the Old Order Amish farms that are in the SE corner of Wayne County, the SW corner of Stark County and the NE corner of Holmes County Ohio. Complicating the problem has been the removal of riparian buffer zones from a large portion of the SCW, and a historical ignorance of the importance of maintaining a clean water supply. The cultural and religious beliefs of local societies have a big impact on the level of concern about environmental issues. Numerous efforts have been made to educate the local population about the importance of restoring the environmental health of the watershed, but very little has been done to determine the environmental beliefs of the Old Order Amish.


The Lives of Amish Women

The Lives of Amish Women

Author: Karen M. Johnson-Weiner

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1421438704

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Aimed at anyone who is interested in the Amish experience, The Lives of Amish Women will help readers understand better the costs and benefits of being an Amish woman in a modern world and will challenge the stereotypes, myths, and imaginative fictions about Amish women that have shaped how they are viewed by mainstream society.


Mennonite Farmers

Mennonite Farmers

Author: Royden Loewen

Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0887552617

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Mennonite farmers can be found in dozens of countries spanning five continents. In this comparative world-scale environmental history, Royden Loewen draws on a multi-year study of seven geographically distinctive Anabaptist communities around the world, focusing on Mennonite farmers in Bolivia, Canada, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Russia, the United States, and Zimbabwe. These farmers, who include Amish, Brethren in Christ, and Siberian Baptists, till the land in starkly distinctive climates. They absorb very disparate societal lessons while being shaped by particular faith outlooks, historical memory, and the natural environment. The book reveals the ways in which modern-day Mennonite farmers have adjusted to diverse temperatures, precipitation, soil types, and relative degrees of climate change. These farmers have faced broad global forces of modernization during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from commodity markets and intrusive governments to technologies marked increasingly by the mechanical, chemical, and genetic. As Mennonites, Loewen writes, these farmers were raised with knowledge of the historic Anabaptist teachings on community, simplicity, and peace that stood alongside ideas on place and sustainability. Nonetheless, conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, race, and local values, they put their agricultural ideas into practice in remarkably diverse ways. Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.


Outdoor School

Outdoor School

Author: Diane Borsato

Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Published: 2021-05

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9781771622844

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Outdoor School features recent works of contemporary environmental art and writing by more than twenty-five Canadian and Indigenous artists who propose radical new ways of thinking about and being outdoors together.


When the English Fall

When the English Fall

Author: David Williams

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2018-07-03

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1616208090

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A riveting and unexpected novel that questions whether a peaceful and non- violent community can survive when civilization falls apart. Again, all are asleep, but I am not. I need sleep, but though I read and I pray, I feel too awake. My mind paces the floor. There are shots now and again, bursts here and there, far away, and I cannot sleep. I think of this man in his hunger, shot like a rabbit raiding a garden. For what, Lord? For stealing corn intended for pigs and cattle, like the hungry prodigal helpless in a strange land. I can hear his voice. When a catastrophic solar storm brings about the collapse of modern civilization, an Amish community is caught up in the devastating aftermath. With their stocked larders and stores of supplies, the Amish are unaffected at first. But as the English (the Amish name for all non-Amish people) in the cities become increasingly desperate, they begin to invade nearby farms, taking whatever they want and unleashing unthinkable violence on the gentle communities. Written as the diary of an Amish farmer named Jacob who tries to protect his family and his way of life, When the English Fall examines the idea of peace in the face of deadly chaos. Should members of a nonviolent society defy their beliefs and take up arms to defend themselves? And if they do, can they survive? David Williams’s debut novel is a thoroughly engrossing look into the closed world of the Amish, as well as a thought-provoking examination of how we live today and what remains if the center cannot hold.