How media help sustain religions across distance is an important question. As Michael Clay Carey points out, all religions have a diaspora. Jews are dispersed throughout the world, Catholicism is growing in the global south (e.g., South America, Asia, and Africa), and most Muslims live outside the Middle East. So, it behooves us to explore the role of media in maintaining commitment and identity in these religious communities. This study of the expanding Amish diaspora in the United States taps into Benedict Arnold's conceptualization of imagined communities and his idea that media act symbolically more than pragmatically to create assumptions and assurances that communities exist. While Arnold focuses on community in the context of nationalism and colonialism, Carey folds his ideas into an analysis of an Amish newspaper as an instrument of community maintenance. How the newspaper as a cultural artifact chronicles Amish life is the monograph's main objective. Unfortunately, the author's theoretical contribution is overstated due to an ambitious leap from newspapers to assumptions about complex phenomena such as religious community and diaspora. Because these concepts are thinly elucidated at the outset, the author's conclusions are, at the end, more descriptive than theoretical.Community, and specifically religious community, has strong developing literatures. As Editor of the Journal of Media and Religion, I have observed a crucial pitfall by media studies researchers; they address a religious media question without adequate attention to the anthropology and sociology of religion. Carey's study is mediaheavy, but religion-light. Missing are the foundational concepts that could have strengthened the study. Missing are Weber and Durkheim, who see religion as providing morality for community cohesion, with or without newspapers. Also missing is the Chicago School of Sociology, particularly George Herbert Mead and Robert Park. Their field studies in Chicago reveal that religion is often a protection from outside threats, an aspect of community Carey overlooks. Community is a complex concept; his article omits indispensible ideas such as network, plausibility structure, strong ties and weak ties. Referencing sociologists Claude Fischer and Barry Wellman would have provided sharper tools of disection yielding a more concise analysis of the data, placing it in the larger context of Amish community and ritual. Unfortunately, the sociology of religion literature gets short shrift.His view of community is flat, as if The Budget tells us all we need to know regarding why the Amish coalesce despite geographic expansion. For Weber, Protestant community underscores work. Catholic community emphasizes ritual. Whether The Budget uncovers something unique about Amish culture is doubtful, at least at the theoretical level. Carey's comparison of The Budget with Facebook and Twitter because of the personal nature of most scribe letters tips the reader off to a superficial notion of community. Media and religion researchers have already concluded that social media rarely by themselves, alter faith communities with long histories. That is, the larger sociology of community literature, going beyond the nod to Arnold's Imagined Communities, would have enriched the investigation.A study of 78 newspapers, however, has something to offer. The research is more valuable as an anthropology of Amish artifact than a theoretical treatment of community. Analysis of The Budget yields a few things of note. The dominant themes, a credit to the researcher, are identified systematically. Of particular interest is the spirituality and worship theme. That writers must refrain from preaching is provocative and unique among conservative Protestants. Emphasis on face-to-face assembly, while not surprising, invites further inquiry given the ubiquity of new media. In contrast, the traditions theme, with references to the iconic horse and buggy outnumbering new technology references such as email, is intriguing. …