What the Amish Teach Us: Plain Living in a Busy World

n What do the traditional plain-living Amish have to teach twenty-first-century Americans in our hyper-everything world? As it turns out, quite a lot! It sounds audacious, but it's true: the Amish have much to teach us. It may seem surreal to turn to one of America's most traditional groups for lessons about living in a hyper-tech world--especially a horse-driving people who resist progress by snubbing cars, public grid power, and high school education. Still, their wisdom confirms that even when they seem so far behind, they're out ahead of the rest of us. Having spent four decades researching Amish communities, Donald B. Kraybill is in a unique position to share important lessons from these fascinating Plain people. In this inspiring book, we learn intriguing truths about community, family, education, faith, forgiveness, aging, and death from real Amish men and women. The Amish are ahead of us, for example, in relying on apprenticeship education. They have also out-Ubered Uber for nearly a century, hiring cars owned and operated by their neighbors. Kraybill also explains how the Amish function in modern society by rejecting new developments that harm their community, accepting those that enhance it, and adapting others to fit their values. Pairing storytelling with informative and reflective passages, these twenty-two essays offer a critique of modern culture that is provocative yet practical. In a time when civil discourse is raw and coarse and our social fabric seems torn asunder, What the Amish Teach Us uproots our assumptions about progress and prods us to question why we do what we do.

Essays include: 1. Riddles: Negotiating with Modernity n2. Villages: Webs of Well-Being n3. Community: Taming the Big I n4. Smallness: Bigness Ruins Everything n5. Tolerance: A Light on a Hill n6. Spirituality: A Back Road to Heaven n7. Family: A Deep and Durable Bond n8. Children: At Worship, Work, and Play n9. Parenting: Raising Sturdy Children n10. Education: The Way It Should Be n11. Apprenticeship: An Old New Idea n12. Technology: Taming the Beast n13. Hacking: Creative Bypasses n14. Entrepreneurs: Starting Stuff n15. Patience: Slow Down and Listen n16. Limits: Less Choice, More Joy n17. Rituals: A Natural Detox n18. Retirement: Aging in Place n19. Forgiveness: Pathway to Healing n20. Suffering: A Higher Plan n21. Nonresistance: No Pushback n22. Death: A Good Farewell