Amish Obsession
Today I was standing in our college's library when a student of mine walked up and greeted me. I was standing by the shelves of New York Times bestseller books that our library displays, and he asked me if I was looking for a book. I joked, "If you want to read a good book, read mine. Ha, ha, don't read this trash," pointing to the bestsellers.
My book is NOT a bestseller. I hope it's not trash. However, whenever I go to the CBD website to check on where it stands, I notice that all the "Christian" bestsellers in fiction seem to be about the Amish people--or better, young Amish women.
I watched a Hallmark movie the other night based on one of them, called The Shunning. I liked the movie, although it had some plot holes which I will not discuss in case someone wants to watch it. But it got me to wondering about the Amish obsession in Christian fiction.
I have been to Lancaster, PA. It was back in the '80s, and a friend and I were up there and took a detour through the area. She wanted to take a photo of a little boy in his severe black clothes on a scooter (a real scooter, that his body had to provide the energy for), but the little boy had been trained to ignore, quite definitely, us outsiders and he was having none of it. It is a beautiful, green, well kept area whose ecology has clearly benefited from the Amish farming practices. It felt like the cleanest place I had ever been up to that point (since then I have been to Bavaria, also very clean).
My questions about the obsession with Amish in what's passing today as "Christian" fiction (I don't believe in that title, but that's a post for another day) also seem to motivate Eric Miller in this article on Christianity Today
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/april/loveamishromances.html
I especially like his paragraph: "For all these authors' focus on the Amish, there's not a whole lot of evidence of a searching study of them, not of the sort serious fiction at least would require. At their worst, the writers seem to turn to the Amish opportunistically, using them as an adequately alien, adequately familiar community to imaginatively work out persisting cultural and theological questions."
My first question of fiction is always, is it good fiction, does it tell a good story well, not how does it make me feel, or how does he preach the gospel.
My book is NOT a bestseller. I hope it's not trash. However, whenever I go to the CBD website to check on where it stands, I notice that all the "Christian" bestsellers in fiction seem to be about the Amish people--or better, young Amish women.
I watched a Hallmark movie the other night based on one of them, called The Shunning. I liked the movie, although it had some plot holes which I will not discuss in case someone wants to watch it. But it got me to wondering about the Amish obsession in Christian fiction.
I have been to Lancaster, PA. It was back in the '80s, and a friend and I were up there and took a detour through the area. She wanted to take a photo of a little boy in his severe black clothes on a scooter (a real scooter, that his body had to provide the energy for), but the little boy had been trained to ignore, quite definitely, us outsiders and he was having none of it. It is a beautiful, green, well kept area whose ecology has clearly benefited from the Amish farming practices. It felt like the cleanest place I had ever been up to that point (since then I have been to Bavaria, also very clean).
My questions about the obsession with Amish in what's passing today as "Christian" fiction (I don't believe in that title, but that's a post for another day) also seem to motivate Eric Miller in this article on Christianity Today
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/april/loveamishromances.html
I especially like his paragraph: "For all these authors' focus on the Amish, there's not a whole lot of evidence of a searching study of them, not of the sort serious fiction at least would require. At their worst, the writers seem to turn to the Amish opportunistically, using them as an adequately alien, adequately familiar community to imaginatively work out persisting cultural and theological questions."
My first question of fiction is always, is it good fiction, does it tell a good story well, not how does it make me feel, or how does he preach the gospel.
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