Amish women, Hutterite journey, survival of Amish explored at Elizabethtown College

February, March lectures at Young Center

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Vi Dutcher

ELIZABETHTOWN, PA (02/08/2014)(readMedia)-- Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies is the location for winter discussions on women's literacies, a harrowing journey during the World War I and the persistence of the Amish.

The free lectures take place at 7:30 in the Young Center's Bucher Meetinghouse. Contact: Young Center at youngctr@etown.edu or 717-361-1470

Thursday, February 20 -- Kreider Lecture: "Amish Women's Literacies"

Vi Dutcher, professor of rhetoric and composition and director of the writing program at Eastern Mennonite University, discusses the literacy practices of female members of a particular northeastern Ohio Amish community.

Whether it be writing as a scribe for a newspaper column, making cards to send to shut-ins, handing down time-honored recipes to younger women, contributing to a circle letter, writing poetry for friends and family members, or writing a letter to "The Blackboard Bulletin" editor in order to impart wisdom to a young Amish woman teaching school, a northeastern Ohio Amish woman practices literacy that is both public and private and always sacred.

Thursday, February 27 -- Lecture: "Narrating the Harrowing Journey of Four Hutterites During the Great War"

Duane Stoltzfus, professor of communication at Goshen College and copy editor for "The Mennonite Quarterly Review," presents highlights of the story of four Hutterite men who were chained in the dungeon at Alcatraz when they refused to perform military service during World War I.

The experiences of David, Joseph and Michael Hofer, and of a brother-in-law, Jacob Wipf, came to be regarded as exhibit-A among accounts of prisoner abuse during the war. Two of the Hofer brothers died at Fort Leavenworth in 1918.

Thursday, March 20 -- Kreider Lecture: "Why Have the Amish Survived? A Synthesis"

The persistence of the Amish has attracted scholars' attention for more than 70 years. Hundreds of studies that contribute in some small way to answering the question: 'Why have the Amish survived?' have been published by those in the social sciences and humanities.

Cory Anderson, a doctoral candidate in rural sociology at Ohio State University and founding coeditor of the new "Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies," has synthesized all known academic Amish-focused publications since 1942 and presents a theory that integrates the diverse foci of this research question.

An internationally recognized scholarly research institute, the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College conducts and promotes research about and interprets the life, faith and culture of Anabaptists and Pietists through public lectures, resources, exhibits and conferences. The Center is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies: www.etown.edu/centers/young-center

Read about additional events at Elizabethtown College.

Elizabethtown College, located in historic Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is a private coed institution offering more than four dozen liberal arts, fine and performing arts, science and engineering, business, communications and education degrees. Learn more: http://www.etown.edu/about/

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