Donald Kraybill

Donald B. Kraybill (born 1945) is an American author, lecturer, and educator on Anabaptist faiths and culture. Kraybill is widely recognized for his studies on Anabaptist groups and in particular the Amish. He has researched and written extensively on Anabaptist culture. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Elizabethtown College and Senior Fellow Emeritus at Elizabethtown's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.

Early life and education Kraybill was born in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, in 1945 to a Mennonite family and grew up on dairy farms in Mount Joy, Lampeter and Morgantown. His surname Kraybill is a form of the name Graybill which is a typical Mennonite and Amish name, first recorded in America in 1728. He graduated from Lancaster Mennonite High School in 1963. He was provost of Messiah College from 1996 to 2002 before returning to Elizabethtown in 2003.

The NEH grant enabled the researchers to investigate the Amish experience at the national level, giving attention to geographic expansion, the growth of diversity, changing conceptions of identity and evolving patterns of interaction with the larger society. The team also explored how the Amish have contributed to shaping the identity of a nation that made exceptions in the areas of education, Social Security, and child labor for a religious minority living on its cultural margins. The project resulted in a website; an international conference, The Amish in America: New Identities and Diversities, held in 2007; and a book, The Amish.

Kraybill is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Elizabethtown College and Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies.

Kraybill retired in 2015 and planned to continue his research in his retirement. He also served as a consultant for the PBS show The American Experience series The Amish.

Book projects include Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (Jossey-Bass, 2007), a discussion of the Amish response to the school shooting at Nickel Mines, and The Amish Way: Patient Faith in a Perilous World (Jossey-Bass, 2010), an exploration of Amish spiritual life and practices, both with coauthors Steven M. Nolt and David L. Weaver-Zercher. Kraybill also authored Concise Encyclopedia of Amish, Brethren, Hutterites, and Mennonites (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), which provides basic information about these four Anabaptist groups in North America, and coauthored (with Karen M. Johhson-Weiner and Steven M. Nolt) The Amish, a comprehensive description and analysis of Amish life and culture.

In 2014 he published a book related to five beard-cutting attacks on Amish people in eastern Ohio in the fall of 2011, which led to the arrests of sixteen members of a maverick Amish community in Bergholz, Ohio. Kraybill assisted federal prosecutors in understanding Amish beliefs and practices and served as an expert witness at the federal trial in 2012. He wrote a book about the attacks, investigation, trial, and aftermath: Renegade Amish: Beard Cutting, Hate Crimes, and the Trial of the Bergholz Barbers. In August 2014, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the hate crimes convictions, a ruling that generated much response.

Kraybill was selected to research and write a centennial history of Eastern Mennonite University, his alma mater, that was published in 2017. In 2021 he wrote What The Amish Teach Us published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and simultaneously released a podcast What I Learned From The Amish with producer Elizabethtown College student Eric Schubert.