Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy

Donald B Kraybill · Steven M. Nolt · David L Weaver-Zercher

mar 2010 · Wiley + ORM

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“This intelligent, compassionate and hopeful book” examines an Amish community’s extraordinary response to a horrifying act of violence (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review).
 
On October 2, 2006, a gunman named Charles Roberts entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He took ten schoolgirls hostage, killing five and critically wounding the others before taking his own life. To explain his motivation, he told the children, “I’m angry at God for taking my little daughter.”
 
By the following morning, as television crews swarmed the village, the Amish parents were already prepared to offer forgiveness. Soon, this extraordinary act of grace became a bigger story than the terrible crime that preceded it. Amish Grace explores the religious beliefs and habits that led the Amish to forgive so quickly.

The authors examines the importance of forgiveness among cloistered communal societies and ask why this act of forgiveness became news among secular society. With insight and compassion, the authors contemplate how the Amish community’s witness could prove useful to the rest of us.

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Donald B. Kraybill, Ph.D., is senior fellow at the Young Center of Elizabethtown College. Among his many publications, he has authored or coauthored numerous books on Amish society. The Young Center fielded hundreds of media calls in the week following the shooting. Steven M. Nolt, Ph.D., is professor of history at Goshen College. He has written extensively on Amish history and culture. David L. Weaver-Zercher, Ph.D., is associate professor of American religious history at Messiah College. His books on Amish life explore outsiders' fascination with and perceptions of the Amish.