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 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.
What the Amish Teach Us: Plain Living in a Busy World
By Donald B. Kraybill
Copyright (c) 2021
Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN13 9781421442174
Page Count: 182
Genre: Religion, Society
www.amazon.com