My current book project, The Amish and Us: What America’s Most Persistent Counterculture Tells Us About Ourselves, is a trade book introduction to Amish life, but an introduction with a difference. Along with exploring the Amish commitment to spurn ten different technologies or trends—for instance, cars, televisions, modern fashion, and higher education—it holds up a mirror to contemporary American life, explaining how the technologies and trends that the Amish spurn shape the rest of us in ways that frequently go unnoticed. Readers of The Amish and Us will learn a great deal about the Amish, but they’ll also learn about themselves, the cultures they inhabit, and how things came to be this way.

On the Amish side of things, The Amish and Us does the following: (a) it embeds Amish people and their lifestyle in American cultural currents from the late nineteenth century to the present; (b) it answers the questions that outsiders most frequently ask, such as “Why do the Amish accept rides in cars but refuse to drive them themselves?” (c) it enables readers to imagine what it would feel like to live an Amish life in contemporary America; and (d) it introduces readers to actual Amish people who speak to the rewards and hardships of living an Amish life.

But that’s only the half of it, because The Amish and Us is also about “us.” Each chapter toggles back and forth between Amish practices and more mainstream American practices, placing them in their historical contexts, giving voice to their critics and defenders, and excavating their effects. When did owning an automobile become common? What did its early proponents promise it would bring, and why did the Amish say no? Now, a full century later, what are the car’s actual effects on Americans’ lives?

Questions like these lie at the heart of each chapter, enabling readers to reflect upon their own lives, and American culture as a whole, even as they learn about America’s most persistent counterculture: a network of rural communities that have managed to escape many of the social ills that pervade so much of rural America.

I’m also in the early stages of another book: a cultural and religious history of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. In it I’ll be exploring the nexus of faith, farming, food, and nostalgia, and the way the county’s residents have traded on the notion of the county’s piety at the expense of more complicated realities. The image of Lancaster County’s wholesomeness has been especially pronounced in the tourist industry, though other entities have helped to promote this image: a “garden spot,” set apart by God for godly people, beginning with William Penn and other religious dissidents and culminating with the Old Order Amish. The experience of the county’s non-white residents will be considered against the backdrop of this cultivated image.