New books by faculty

Professor of History Steve Nolt and Professor of Sociology and Director of International Education Tom J. Meyers co-authored Plain Diversity: Amish Cultures and Identity (May 2007, Johns Hopkins University Press).

“Plain Diversity: Amish Cultures and Identity” is the result of a four-year study conducted by Nolt and Meyers on all of the Old Order Amish communities in Indiana. “Since most of the scholarship on Amish society had focused on groups in Pennsylvania, there was a major gap in the literature on Midwestern Amish,” said Nolt.

“We were intrigued by the relationship of diversity and unity, and as we searched for a model to make sense of it, decided that our study was really about Amish culture more broadly than Indiana,” Nolt said. “Our book draws on the rich array of Indiana examples to document Amish diversity, but it suggests ways of thinking about Amish culture and values that are national in their implications.”

The book is the sequel to a book Meyers and Nolt published in 2005, “An Amish Patchwork” (Indiana University Press).

Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies Dean Johnson co-edited Seeking Peace in Africa: Stories from African Peacemakers (April 2007, Pandora Press).

A conference held in Kenya in 2004, called the Watu Wa Amani (“people of peace”) Historic Peace Church Consultation in Africa, created an opportunity for sharing and addressing issues related to overcoming violence and building peace, especially in the context of Africa.

This book is made up of the stories told there, both of the despair created by violence and of the hopeful acts of peacemaking. In addition, a DVD was released last year, produced by Goshen College.

Johnson and three others involved in the conference edited the book.

A collaborative work by two experts in Anabaptist studies examines the deadliest war in America and provides a window into the moral dilemmas of pacifists during military conflict.

Professor of History Steve Nolt co-authored Mennonites, Amish and the American Civil War (October 2007, Johns Hopkins University Press) with James O. Lehman, librarian emeritus at Eastern Mennonite University. It describes the various strategies used by the sectarian religious groups in responding to the North-South conflict and the effects of war on these communities.

Contributing to the accounts of the Anabaptist experience, the authors focus on moral dilemmas Mennonites and Amish faced that tested the very core of their faith: How to oppose both slavery and the war to end it? How to remain outside the conflict without entering the American mainstream to secure legal conscientious objector status? In looking at this epoch-defining event, the authors covered the relationship of faithfulness and relevance and responsibility and idealism involving the conflicts Mennonites and Amish faced to emphasize that their positions were not without their own set of difficulties.

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