Perhaps he didn’t know them as well as he thought, he writes. The only non-Christian among Bob Jones’ students that night moves to Lancaster, attends law school and practices for a few years. Whatever he said, I wasn’t going to be manipulated. And Wagler, in the plain suit from his Amish-Mennonite extended family, remains seated, altar call after altar call: “I wouldn’t do it just because everyone else was. calls for student after student to stand - to convert, to confess, to demonstrate they are Christian. It’s easy to root for him in chapel as Bob Jones Jr. At the fundamentalist citadel, he proves to himself that he can survive rule-oriented Christianity and own his contrarian persona. A professor recommends him to Notre Dame, “a gleaming city of secular academics,” but Wagler opts for Bob Jones University. Wagler first takes his readers along on his journey through higher education. But whatever self-pity there was in Growing Up Amish is gone. Wagler is still the general manager of a building supply company in Lancaster County, Pa. These are no breezy lessons about ex-Amish life or an author’s second proof of literary genius. It’s not that Wagler’s journey gets easier.

That is where Broken Roads: Returning to My Amish Father picks up. It left readers with Ira back in Daviess County, “tired and done” as he now admits, a 27-year-old with adventures and grief worth many more decades. Despite the peace in his leaving, the book felt bitter at times. He wrestled with, rejected and forced himself to embrace the Amish culture until, by the end of his first bestselling memoir, Growing Up Amish, he left for good. It is in that context of Amish ambition, moral certainties and generational burden that Ira grew up. Family Life magazine, a mixture of opinion, morality and practical advice deeply influential to the Old Order Amish since 1968, was his brainchild. One of them was David Wagler, Christian’s grandson and Ira’s father. Discontent, sometimes, often with the rest of the Amish world.

the shameful stain of his suicide would haunt his seed forever,” his great-grandson, Ira Wagler, writes.

Growing up amish a memoir ira wagler