Nightwatch

About this book

What would compel a journalist, raised in an affluent family in the South, to abandon his career and embark on a spiritual odyssey that would take him and his family to live among the Plain people of the prairies, the Hutterian Brethren. A thoughtful and spiritual memoir. What would compel a daily newspaper journalist, raised in an affluent family in the South, to abandon his career and embark on a spiritual odyssey that would take him, his wife, and young daughter to live among the Plain people of the prairies, the Hutterian Brethren? From 1995 to 2002, the author and his family gave up all claims to personal property, moved to Starland Colony in Minnesota, and joined the often contradictory Old World existence of the Hutterites, whose isolated farming communes stretch across the American Great Plains and the prairie provinces of Canada. In Nightwatch, the author explores the modern-day expression of Hutterianism, born amid the flames and persecution of the Reformation and transplanted in the 1870s from Russia to the western United States. This is a story not only of spiritual questioning, but an inquiry into what it is to be "strangers among strangers," looking at the inner callings that bring people together, and in some cases drive them apart.