Customer Reviews

Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love reading, and read voraciously. However, every once in a while, a book comes along that surprises me with its excellence. Amish Grace is one of those books.

In the aftermath of the October 2, 2006, massacre at the Nickel Mines School, much was made about the quick response the Amish made in forgiving the shooter. However, there were also many questions asked, and many dubious conclusions drawn from their forgiveness. As such, three experts on the Amish community talked with the Amish themselves, and sought to gain a true understanding of the Amish, their faith, and their forgiveness.

Overall, I found this to be a wonderful book. The authors do a great job of giving an in-depth explanation of Amish forgiveness in the context of their lives and theology (which are not truly separable). It gave me a much more deep understanding of the Amish than I had gained from many other books. Having been raised with the Anabaptist faith ever at my elbow (Mennonite, in my case), I never had a true feeling of otherness from the Amish that many people seem to feel, but now I more truly understand that feeling than I ever had before.

But, don't get me wrong, this is not a dispassionate, academic book. The tragedy that occurred that day echoes and reechoes throughout the book, and the Amish forgiveness is shown to have come from deeper within them than some people seem to think.

Overall, I found this to be a wonderful book. It helped me to understand the Amish intellectually, and it helped me to look at myself and my faith more deeply. I give this book my highest recommendations.

This book achieves what most books don't. It combines a rich well of scholarly research on the part of three academicians without sacrificing the soul of what occurred at Nickel Mines during and after the event. In addition to being well researched the book has a poetically lyrical and haunting quality that honors, reflects, and conveys the hearts, souls, and minds of the Amish community. One of the most difficult things a writer can achieve is to step out of the way and allow the pictures and voices tell the story without the writer's ego coming into play. This is what was achieved in this book. I haven't been grasped by anything this powerful in a long time. It challenges me to try to live with intentionality each day and continue to struggle with what forgiveness looks like in the ordinary moments and encounters of my life.

Amish Grace is a truly amazing and grace-filled book that will reach out to every reader. Written by three known scholars in the areas of Amish culture, history and religion - the early chapters recount the horrifying events of October 2, 2006 at the Nickel Mines Amish schoolhouse. The agony in reading these first few pages quickly gives way to the amazing story of sudden Amish forgiveness in the wake of tragedy. The authors, writing in one clear and concise voice - lead us through the story that emerges - how can they have forgiven such cruelty so quickly and what does this mean to each one of us? The violence of Nickel Mines has been described by the Amish as their 9/11. What role would such forgiveness have played as we each address the pain of 9/11. While this book does not attempt to solve the ongoing debates over such forgiveness, it goes a long way to help us understand the argument and determine what forgiveness may mean to each of us. This book is a must read on many levels - whether you are a student, teacher, parent, married, single, Christian, non-Christian - we are all human and this book is beautifully written on a human level. Amish Grace is an easy read and paints a broad enough picture that anyone can find the application of forgiveness in their own life - road-rage ring a bell? This is the kind of book that people will stop and ask you about as you read in the airport, doctor's office, and at home. It is also the kind of book that you will be more than happy to share as well.

This book is extaordinary, one of the most worthwhile I've read in the past five years. For starters, it is well written. Its prose is crisp, fresh and readable---even rewarding to read out loud.

The next thing to note is the authors' comprehensive knowledge of their subject, which includes not only the events of the Nickel Mines disaster but also the hearts of the Amish people. Their empathy for and rapport with the Amish community are what make this book possible. Though they are social scientists with impressive credentials, they obviously care for the Amish people and have earned their trust. When they quote, one can be confident that their quotes are valid examples of attitudes within the Amish community.

What is perhaps most important is that they have used a teachable moment, albeit a tragic one, to write a probing inquiry into the nature of forgiveness, To their credit they come up with no easy answers, although they do clarify what forgiveness is not. For one thing, it is not easy. It does not mean that the victim forgets or that the perpetrator cannot be punished. It is not the same as reconciliation, which only takes place if the perpetrator repents.

A large question that lurks in the background is how the Amish do it when other Christian groups preach it but seldom practice it. One obvious answer is that the Amish habitualy think forgiveness, refer to it in all of their church services, and teach it to their children from the ground up. In their close-knit communities, doing so may well be a necessary survival tool

The question that follows in our therapeutic society is, "How can forgiveness be healthy when it requires suppression of feelings, feelings that we normally think should be ventilated?" And then, "Can what works for the Amish really be applied outside the Amish community?" I am not sure, but as a clinician I am impressed by the evidence that ventilation may not be as essential a therapeutic technique as I had thought.

Of course, the notion of forgivenes also raises other big questions. Are some crimes or sins too heinous to forgive? Does forgiveness simply enable the perpetrator to continue his destructive pattern? These questions and other are addressed by the authors, who always use the Amish as their point of reference. They never stoop to simplistic answers. At the same time, they suggest that the simple approach of the Amish has alot to teach all of us.

This book is a grace note in an age of religiously fuelled hate crimes and suicide bombings. It is not only about how the Old Order Amish found it within themselves to forgive the killer of their young girls, it is also one of the best books on religion and ethics that I have ever read.

If the reader learns one thing from the Nickel Mines school shooting, it is this: "the Amish commitment to forgive is not a small patch tacked onto their fabric of faithfulness. Rather, their commitment to forgive is intricately woven into their lives and their communities."

The Amish take the Lord's Prayer to heart. If they themselves wish to be forgiven, they must forgive.

"Amish Grace" gives an account of Charles Carl Roberts IV and the instruments of cruelty and death that he brought to the small Nickel Mines schoolhouse on October 2, 2006. But as the authors put it, the biggest surprise "was not the intrusion of evil but the Amish response." How and why the Amish forgave the killer in their midst is the main focus of this book.

One of the contrasts I couldn't help drawing from this story was the Amish response to the murder of their children, versus the way John Walsh, dedicated host of "America's Most Wanted" reacted to the murder of his six-year-old son, Adam. Since that horrible day in 1981, Walsh has devoted himself to bringing criminals to justice, and has been instrumental in rescuing abducted children. In 2006 President Bush signed a new bill into law that changed how Americans protect their children against sexual predators such as Charles Carl Roberts IV. The law is called "The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act."

If John Walsh had been Amish, would any of these good and necessary deeds have been accomplished? On a more personal level, were the stricken Amish parents better able than Mr. Walsh to live with their grief because they forgave their children's killer?

In the course of writing this book, the authors develop answers to questions such as the above, from the Amish and non-Amish point-of-view. They don't preach. They don't resort to sociological mumbo-jumbo. They tell the stories of good people, who are also fallible human beings. They conclude that "Amish-style forgiveness can't be strip-mined from southern Lancaster County and transported wholesale to other settings. Rather, the lessons of grace that the rest of us take from Nickel Mines must be extracted with care and applied to other circumstances with humility."

This is a thoughtful, well-written book.

There are few traditional virtues more questioned today than forgiveness. Cynics dismiss it as a sign either of weakness or manipulation. Legalists see it as irrelevant. Civil contractarians view it as something that must be earned. And many Christians pay lip service to it but regard it as a highly impractical response to aggressors. In short, forgiveness isn't on too many radars.

That's why the world was so captivated by the Amish response to the Nickle Mines shootings in October 2006. When the Amish community not only forgave the shooter but also went out of its way to embrace the shooter's family, the novelty of the response both startled and puzzled conventional society. To clear up some of that puzzlement--and, presumably, to help reinvigorate our culture's regard for forgiveness-- Kraybill, Nolt, and Weaver-Zercher wrote Amish Grace.

The first part of the book is a straightforward account of the Nickle Mines shooting that a reader can just as easily get from newspaper and internet archives. The third, in all honesty, comes across as more filler than anything else, throwing together as it does essays on Amish shunning, a rather repetitious chapter on forgiving, and a rather vague chapter on grace. The heart of the book is the middle section, which explores forgiving in the Amish context and briefly compares it to other accounts of forgiving.

To anyone familiar with Amish culture and the Anabaptist tradition, it comes as no surprise that community, humility, exemplification of Christ's love, the centrality of the Sermon on the Mount, and forgiving in order to be forgiven are the foundations on which Amish forgiving is based. The authors of Amish Grace do a good job in sketching them out. They do a less impressive job, however, of discussing the general nature of forgiveness or some of the very real questions raised by philosophers and theologians about its nature. Is forgiveness an internal act or overt behavior? Must an aggressor express remorse as a condition for forgiveness? Can we forgive on behalf of others? Are we sometimes obliged to withhold forgiveness for the good of the aggressor? These broader sorts of questions are at best touched on without being explored.

Ultimately, then, Amish Grace is a primer for those who know nothing about the Amish. It's also a good resource for readers who are curious about but have never thought much about forgiveness. For deeper reflections on the nature and value of forgiveness, readers must turn elsewhere. Recommendations would include Trudy Govier's Forgiveness and Revenge, Robert Enright and Joanna North's Exploring Forgiveness, and Jeffrie Murphy's Getting Even.

The practical value of this book for me, a religion professor at a liberal-arts college in Maryland, is that it is the right length and has the right concentrated focus to use in my undergraduate course in American religious history. Through the prism of this one terrible event, the authors are able to examine much of value concerning Amish history, culture, and ethics. In that regard, this roughly 200-page book might be more useful than a history of the Amish which is twice the length of Amish Grace.

As a matter of fact, I learned much from this book, so it will prove valuable in my own reflections and my own life, not simply in my career as a professor.

The authors are excellent writers and careful teachers. They take on weighty subjects but know just how to sort out the important issues and explain the challenging ethical and theological points--without ever coming across as if they have all the answers.

By the way, I was particularly intrigued by the ways in which the Amish differ from many of today's evangelical Christians.

This is a good book in every sense of that adjective. Great to see that it's enjoying a wide readership.

I just finished Amish Grace and wanted to express how much I enjoyed reading it. Just as he's done in previous works, in Amish Grace Donald Kraybill provides a thoroughly understandable context within which the reader can make sense of Amish behaviors that at first appear incomprehensible.

This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the nature and wisdom of forgiveness as seen through the eyes of the Amish. There are plenty of lessons for us all here in this book.

I've just ordered additional copies so I might share them with my teaching colleagues and students.

Congratulations to Kraybill, Nolt, and Weaver-Zercher on this most important book.

While I am not 'religious' when one uses the term, as it is so often these days by the media, I am very much Quaker/Mennonite in my views, and the Amish no matter what sect, are much like Quakers and how one is taught from birth to forgive. One walks the talk rather than talk talk talk. Actions speak louder than words.

Doesn't mean one forgets. One simply forgives, because its both biblical and because its healthy and ones body is the temple of God. To not forgive would almost be a sin. Although some will actually remind us that it is a sin.

What I like so much about the book, is how its a great tool for enlightening those who dare read it. As Americans and I speak as one, we seem to live in a society that is so judgmental and wanting some type of radical even mean spirited action when we read, see or hear of something wrong.

And from a Biblical point of view the author reminds the reader that forgiveness is rooted in the scripture going back to Joseph in the Old Testament when he was sold into slavery in Egypt. Or Christ who on the cross said 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do.'

Also like the book because my family has been effected by crime. My husband was hit and later died, after being hit my a drunk driver who never in all the years since the accident/crime, ever said he was sorry. Yet, my husband insisted we not hold a grudge, and that we forgive and hope that the young mans life would be better, not worse.

Like the author and the book, it came down to the Lords Prayer and 'Forgives us our sins/transgressions/failings as we forgive those who sin/transgress/fail against us'. How can we expect mercy and grace if we don't offer it ourselves?

Amish Grace should be read by everyone, especially anyone who claims to be a Christian. This work is interesting, informative and balanced. It does an excellent job of covering Amish beliefs. Maybe more importantly, Amish Grace also tells of the struggles that the Amish go through to live their faith. They are portrayed as flesh and blood people, not tourist curiosities. As a practicing Catholic I was surprised at how closely Anabaptist teaching on forgiveness mirrors the teachings of my church. All Catholics should read about forgiveness in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Charity in the section on Theological Virtues and Section V in Part Four where the Our Father is explained.) We are required to act just as the Amish do. Sadly, our secular environment often gets in the way.
I highly recommend Amish Grace, a work that will move you and give you much to ponder over.