A land controversy captures in microcosm the forces endangering the Amish and Mennonite culture, faith, and livelihood.

This compassionate examination of the dilemmas facing the Amish and Mennonite communities in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania focuses on the controversy surrounding construction of a 600-unit retirement complex on prime farmland. When two Mennonite businessmen who have given up the old ways join forces with local township officials to push the development through, a coalition of Old Order Amish, Old Order Mennonites, and "English"-the Amish term for their non-Amish neighbors-rises up against the inevitable. Through interviews, personal accounts, and news-paper reports of the controversy, Randy-Michael Testa traces the cultural and economic erosion that is undermining a unique minority's ability to maintain its ways. Ed Worteck's evocative photos capture a physical destruction indicative of greater moral decay. The interplay of politics, deception, bigotry, and beleaguered faith succumbing to the age of technology vividly portrays "a place struggling to keep its spiritual dignity, a place where modernity thunders over tradition, as time races ahead."

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RANDY-MICHAEL TESTA is Assistant Visiting Professor of Education at Dartmouth College and author of After the Fire (1992). ED WORTEK's photographs have exhibited extensively. He is Professor of Art and Communication at Goucher College.