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Messiah College professor edits book on Amish expert

	"Writing the Amish: The Worlds of John A. Hostetler," edited by David Weaver-Zercher Click on image to download print-quality version
	David Weaver-Zercher, associate professor of American religious history at Messiah College Click on image to download print-quality version

GRANTHAM, Pa. ( May 27, 2005) — From the early 1960s to late 1980s, John A. Hostetler was the world’s premier scholar of Amish life. On June 1, Penn State University Press, along with the Pennsylvania German Society, will release “Writing the Amish: The Worlds of John A. Hostetler,” edited by David Weaver-Zercher, associate professor of American religious history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.

“Hostetler came on the scene when people assumed the Amish were dying, but instead of dying they grew and, just as significantly, became one of America’s most renowned religious groups,” Weaver-Zercher said. “Hostetler was the premier scholar during the time when the Amish went from being a little known Pennsylvania German sect to a widely renowned cultural icon—the kind that comedians and politicians can refer to, and everyone knows who they’re talking about.”

In the late 1990s, Hostetler donated his papers to Penn State University, near his Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, birthplace. After Hostetler’s death in 2001, Penn State University Press decided to publish a compilation of his scholarly works and approached Weaver-Zercher, author of “The Amish in the American Imagination,” to be the volume’s editor.

“Writing the Amish” begins with a foreword by Hostetler’s daughter, Ann Hostetler, who is an English professor at Goshen College, in Goshen, Ind. The first part of the volume, “Perspectives on John A. Hostetler, includes four essays about Hostetler’s life and work, including one by Hostetler himself.

Born into an Old Order Amish family in 1918, Hostetler participated in Mifflin County Amish life until he was 11 years old, when his father was ex-communicated from the Peachey Amish Church. The Hostetler family then moved to Iowa, where they continued to attend an Amish church. When Hostetler was 17 years old, he decided not to join the Amish church and instead became Mennonite, largely due to his interest in higher education. In the early 1950s, he wrote his master’s thesis on his Mifflin County Amish birth community, and he continued to write about the Amish for the rest of his career.

“Hostetler’s Amish scholarship stood head and shoulders above the rest during the 1960s and 1970s,” said Weaver-Zercher, “and his life reveals the challenges ethnographers face as they document different ethnic groups. That Hostetler was born into an Amish family, and continued to have many Amish friends and relatives, both enabled his work as an ethnographer and complicated it.”

Additional reflective essays include “The Redemptive Community: An Island of Sanity and Silence,” by Donald B. Kraybill, distinguished professor and senior fellow at the Young Center at Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pa.; “Plain Folk and Folk Society: John A. Hostetler’s Legacy of the Little Community” by Simon J. Bronner, a distinguished professor at Penn State University; and a biographical essay by Weaver-Zercher, “An Uneasy Calling: John A. Hostetler and the World of Cultural Mediation.”

The second part of “Writing the Amish” includes 14 writings by Hostetler written between 1944 and 1989, including one unpublished piece, a letter Hostetler wrote and mailed to Amish bishops in 1944.

“Hostetler wrote the letter when he was in the Civilian Peace Service,” Weaver-Zercher explained. “In it he questioned the practice of shunning, arguing that the Amish have no business shunning those who, like his father, leave their Amish communities but remain faithful Christians.”

Weaver-Zercher hopes his book will advance appreciation for Hostetler’s contributions to Amish scholarship, and also illumine the challenges of ethnographic work.

“It’s important for ethnographers to reflect on what they do and how they do it. It’s also important for the larger public to recognize the difficult tasks that ethnographers face as scholars and educators,” said Weaver-Zercher. “This book should help to catalyze that discussion.”

About Messiah College

Messiah College, a private Christian college of the liberal and applied arts and sciences, enrolls more than 2,900 undergraduate students in 50 majors. Established in 1909, the primary campus is located in Grantham, Pa., near the state capital of Harrisburg. A satellite campus affiliated with Temple University is located in Philadelphia.

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ARTICLE DATE: FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2005
ARTICLE NUMBER: MC-072--05