An Amish Paradox: Diversity & Change in the World's Largest Amish Community

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.

Author: Charles E. Hurst, David L. McConnell
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 02/25/2010
Pages: 376
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.13lbs
Size: 8.94h x 6.12w x 0.88d
ISBN: 9780801893995

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 04/09/2010 pg. 21
Choice 01/01/2011
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2010 pg. 72

About the Author

Charles E. Hurst is emeritus professor of sociology at The College of Wooster and author of Social Inequality: Forms, Causes, and Consequences and Living Theory: The Application of Classical Social Theory to Contemporary Life. David L. McConnell is a professor of anthropology at The College of Wooster, coeditor of Soft Power Superpowers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States, and author of Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program.