If the Mennonite and Amish have anything to offer about romance, it’s this: a heavy book of death and torture, a love letter to all their pursuers, their captors and executioners. Consider the love language of these people something similar to a moaning, choking agony addressed at the universe. Call it holy desperation. Call it devotion. Call it belief in inherent dignity. This is real Amish romance, as real as it gets, a three-hundred-year love affair with life, with the sacredness of life. Forget bonnet books. Forget modernity. It’s all white noise inside the roar of eternity.
Writes my father, pertinent to much and also nearly nothing at all, “Amish wives and husbands will continue to give the world children, trained and formed, who are unable to kill other humans and who are unable to kill for the state.”(Via Hopkins). Wonderful, beautiful point. (Although plenty of religions that don't ban war celebrate and respect their martyrs. But still, great point.)
However, that's just the ending. The beginning starts with a description of the sub-genre of contemporary Christian fiction, Amish Romance novels. I have totally either read some of these Amish romance novels that Rachel Yoder. The weird thing about this review is that the author seems to think that the creation or readership of Amish romance novels has something to do with Amish people, either as producers or consumers of this literature.
I honestly doubt that that's the case--I always imagined they were written by someone in the movement of Christian culture that sought to take everything being done in the secular world and do it "Christianly"--music, books, paintings (this is where Thomas Kinkaid came from, right?), bracelets (WWJD), etc. And I always imagined they were read by the consumers of culture who shared that perspective: Christian romance can set itself in the Wild West, on the Canadian frontier, in Bible times with leather sandals, or in Lancaster county. It doesn't make much difference. And it doesn't say very much about the setting that it was chosen as a setting for a Christian romance novel.
(The author of Rachel's Secret, which Rachel Yoder refers to in her piece, also wrote books set in Ireland, the mountains, early America, a tiny Irish village during the potato famine, and a little mining town. Beverly Lewis, who wrote a trilogy that includes The Shunning, also wrote series called "Abram's Daughter series," "Annie's People series," "The Courtship of Nellie Fisher series," "Home to Hickory Hollow Series," etc. Now, I'm too lazy to look up where each of these is actually set, but you get the idea: it's set in the past. Which is romantic.)
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