{"id":3331,"date":"2010-08-17T22:56:14","date_gmt":"2010-08-17T21:56:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3331"},"modified":"2010-08-17T23:05:17","modified_gmt":"2010-08-17T22:05:17","slug":"the-strange-world-of-the-amish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=3331","title":{"rendered":"The strange world of the Amish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just finished watching the last of the four fascinating television programmes in a Channel Four series called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.channel4.com\/programmes\/amish-worlds-squarest-teenagers\">&#8220;Amish: The World&#8217;s Squarest Teenagers&#8221;<\/a>. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.channel4.com\/programmes\/amish-worlds-squarest-teenagers\/articles\/who-are-the-amish\">Amish<\/a> are an amazing religious community, based almost totally in the United States, who effectively live life as their predecessors did when they emigrated from Switzerland in the 1700s &amp; 1800s.<\/p>\n<p>They have an interesting practice called<a href=\"http:\/\/www.channel4.com\/programmes\/amish-worlds-squarest-teenagers\/articles\/rumspringa\"> &#8216;Rumspringa&#8217; <\/a>which allows teenagers to experience things normally forbidden before deciding whether to be baptised into the Amish community (which apparently some 85% do).\u00a0 The Channel Four series took five young Amish men and women on &#8216;Rumspringa&#8217; and exposed them to four very different British families.<\/p>\n<p>Years ago, while on a holiday in the USA, I visited an Amish community in the Lancaster County of Pennsylvania. As a secularist and modernist, my lifestyle is a million miles from theirs. Yet I admire their non-materialistic and family-orientated way of life with its powerful sense of community and morality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just finished watching the last of the four fascinating television programmes in a Channel Four series called &#8220;Amish: The World&#8217;s Squarest Teenagers&#8221;. The Amish are an amazing religious community, based almost totally in the United States, who effectively live life as their predecessors did when they emigrated from Switzerland in the 1700s &amp; 1800s. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-current-affairs","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3331"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3344,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3331\/revisions\/3344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}