It’s summer. Time to relax. Sit back. And enjoy meeting new friends! Like Jessica, Liz and Lydia in The Sisters of Sugarcreek. They’re an unlikely trio of English and Amish ladies who find themselves in the direst circumstances. The kind of happenings which could lead them to total despair or to become the best of […]
My daughter got married a few months ago. She’d known her now-husband for a few years, but because of his work schedule and my travel schedule, we hadn’t had a Thanksgiving together until this year. She made us all pose for a selfie, which she posted with the comment, “First Thanksgiving with the family.” My […]
For most of us, it’s hard to separate what we think about the Amish from a mental picture of the rolling hills of the farm and a team of Belgian workhorses pulling a plow. There can be no doubt that historically the Amish have been farmers. The persecution they faced in the seventeenth and eighteenth […]
A Love Made New, the third book in my Amish of Birch Creek series, is set in the fictional town of Birch Creek, a small Amish community near Holmes County, OH. Over the years I’ve made several visits to Holmes and Middlefield (Geauga County) and I’ve enjoyed every visit. One of my favorite things to […]
If you’re in church on a Sunday morning, are you hoping for fast, upbeat music or something slow and thoughtful? The latest music by contemporary Christian artists or the hymns of Charles Wesley or Fanny Crosby? My forays into writing historical Amish stories have taken me into the traditional Amish songbook—the Ausbund. Still in use […]
How about a fun quiz about the Amish? No peeking at the answers! And no Googling! 1. How many US states have a significant Amish population? A. 9 B. 17 C. 30 D. 42 2. How many Amish settlements (geographic communities) are in the US? A. 251 B. 502 C. 617 D. 713 3. How […]
“Would you want to live like the Amish?” As a writer of Amish-themed fiction, I sometimes get this question. I also see chatter about it on sites where readers of Amish fiction gather. The first thing that comes to most people’s mind are things like electricity, computers, and television. (I do love my Netflix.) Then […]
Mission trips, outreach strategies, evangelistic campaigns, discipleship programs, new church plants, contemporary worship styles—for many denominations, these are the backbone of church growth efforts. Yet few of them come close to how rapidly the Old Order Amish are growing. The most conservative of all the Amish groups, the Old Order do not actively evangelize. In […]
Hope is a word we use casually. We hope for nice weather. We hope for that check to arrive in time. We hope to meet a deadline. We hope someone else will keep a promise made to us. We hope there will be no traffic jam on the way to an important appointment. We hope […]
Jakob Ammann was a tailor. Most of us likely imagine he was a farmer, and perhaps he did farm, but the fact that he was a tailor may have played a role in the way his views developed. A little background: The roots of the Anabaptists, or “rebaptizers,” go back to the early 1500s. Huldrych […]