The story of the Old Order Amish parochial school movement in Indiana detailed by Stepehn Haroff. From its beginnings in 1948 through 2002, readers are invited into the school at numerous points, to sit in on classes, school programs and impromptu celebrations.

A cultural history of a northern Indiana Amish community and its success in maintaining itself and resisting assimilation into the larger culture. While most books about the Amish focus on the Pennsylvania settlements or on the religious history of the sect, this book is a cultural history of one Indiana Amish community and its success in resisting assimilation into the larger culture. Amish culture has persisted relatively unchanged primarily because the Amish view the world around them through the prism of their belief in collective salvation based on purity, separation, and perseverance. Would anything new add or detract from the community’s long-term purpose? Seen through this prism, most innovation has been found wanting. Founded in 1841, Shipshewana benefited from LaGrange County’s relative isolation. As Dorothy O. Pratt shows, this isolation was key to the community’s success. The Amish were able to develop a stable farming economy and a social structure based on their own terms. During the years of crisis, 1917–1945, the Amish worked out ways to protect their boundaries that would not conflict with their basic religious principles. As conscientious objectors, they bore the traumas of World War I, struggled against the Compulsory School Act of 1921, negotiated the labyrinth of New Deal bureaucracy, and labored in Alternative Service during World War II. The story Pratt tells of the postwar years is one of continuing difficulties with federal and state regulations and challenges to the conscientious objector status of the Amish. The necessity of presenting a united front to such intrusions led to the creation of the Amish Steering Committee. Still, Pratt notes that the committee’s effect has been limited. Crisis and abuse from the outer world have tended only to confirm the desire of the Amish to remain a people apart, and lends a special poignancy to this engrossing tale of resistance to the modern world. “In this careful community study, Pratt (a professor and assistant dean at Notre Dame) analyzes the tension between assimilation and cultural distinctiveness among the northern Indiana Amish in the 19th and 20th centuries. . . . A worthy case study of resistance to change.” —Publishers Weekly

The story of the Old Order Amish parochial school movement in Indiana detailed by Stepehn Haroff. From its beginnings in 1948 through 2002, readers are invited into the school at numerous points, to sit in on classes, school programs and impromptu celebrations.

Offers an overview of the Amish and Mennonite communities in Indiana, describing the traditions, beliefs, and contributions of each community and discussing their impact on the state's history.

Train Up a Child explores how private schools in Old Order Amish communities reflect and perpetuate church-community values and identity. Here, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner asserts that the reinforcement of those values among children is imperative to the survival of these communities in the modern world. Surveying settlements in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, Johnson-Weiner finds that, although Old Order communities have certain similarities in their codes of conduct, there is no standard Old Order school. She examines the choices each community makes—about pedagogy, curriculum, textbooks, even school design—to strengthen religious ideology, preserve the social and linguistic markers of Old Order identity, and protect their own community's beliefs and values from the influence of the dominant society. In the most comprehensive study of Old Order schools to date, Johnson-Weiner provides valuable insight into how variables such as community size and relationship with other Old Order groups affect the role of these schools in maintaining behavioral norms and in shaping the Old Order's response to modernity.

The essential introduction to Amish life and culture. There seems to be no end to our fascination with the Amish, a religious minority that has both placed itself outside the mainstream of American culture and flourished within it. Yet most people know very little about the nuanced relationship the Amish have with society or their own communities. Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork and collaborative research, Steven M. Nolt’s The Amish: A Concise Introduction is a compact but richly detailed portrait of Amish life. In fewer than 150 pages, readers will come away with a clear understanding of the complexities of these simple people. Writing in engaging and accessible language, Nolt explains how the Amish at once operate within modern America and stand very much apart from the world. Arguing that Amish life is shaped equally by internal and external social, political, and economic contexts, Nolt explores Amish identity as emerging from a complex cultural negotiation with modernity. He takes on much-hyped topics such as Rumspringa and reveals the distinctive Amish approach to technology. He also explains how Amish principles stand in contrast to contemporary American values, including rational efficiency, large-scale organization, and Western notions of individuality. Authoritative, informative, and illustrated, this guide provides a vivid introduction to a way of life many find fascinating but few truly understand.

In this new edition of The Amish and the State Donald Kraybill brings together legal scholars and social scientists to explore the unique series of conflicts between a traditional religious minority and the modern state. In the process, the authors trace the preservation—and the erosion—of religious liberty in American life. Kraybill begins with an overview of the Amish in North America and describes the "negotiation model" used throughout the book to interpret a variety of legal conflicts. Subsequent chapters deal with specific aspects of religious freedom over which the Amish and the state have clashed. Focusing on the period from 1925 to 2001 in the United States, the authors examine conflicts over military service and conscription, Social Security and taxes, education, health care, land use and zoning, regulation of slow-moving vehicles, and other first amendment issues. New concluding chapters, by constitutional expert William Ball, who defended the Amish before the Supreme Court in 1972 in the landmark Wisconsin v. Yoder case, and law professor Garret Epps, assess the Amish contribution to preserving religious liberty in the United States.

Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork and collaborative research, The Amish: A Concise Introduction is a compact but richly detailed portrait of Amish life. In fewer than 150 pages, readers will come away with a clear understanding of the complexities of these simple people.

Explores the moral dilemmas faced by various religious sects and how these groups struggled to come to terms with the effects of wartime Americanization-- without sacrificing their religious beliefs and values.

Exploring a subject that is as important as it is divisive, this two-volume work offers the first current, definitive work on the intricacies and issues relative to America's faith-based schools. The Praeger Handbook of Faith-Based Schools in the United States, K–12 is an indispensable study at a time when American education is increasingly considered through the lenses of race, ethnicity, gender, and social class. With contributions from an impressive array of experts, the two-volume work provides a historical overview of faith-based schooling in the United States, as well as a comprehensive treatment of each current faith-based school tradition in the nation. The first volume examines three types of faith-based schools—Protestant schools, Jewish schools, and Evangelical Protestant homeschooling. The second volume focuses on Catholic, Muslim, and Orthodox schools, and addresses critical issues common to faith-based schools, among them state and federal regulation and school choice, as well as ethnic, cultural, confessional, and practical factors. Perhaps most importantly for those concerned with the questions and controversies that abound in U.S. education, the handbook grapples with outcomes of faith-based schooling and with the choices parents face as they consider educational options for their children.