Kicking us off with Quarterly Question is the inimitable Susannah Black Roberts. Susannah is a senior editor at Plough. She is a native Manhattanite. She and her husband, the theologian Alastair Roberts, split their time between Manhattan and the West Midlands of the UK. Susannah can be found on Twitter/X, on Substack, or foraging for elderberries.

You can ask Susannah anything, but if you need some inspiration, here are her specialist subjects:

• All things AI

• Christian Humanism

• Living on both sides of the Atlantic

• Foraging for blackberries, elderberries, apples, and other wild fruit, nuts, and berries

• Sailing and all nautical endeavours

• Oysters (growing as well as eating)

• having a large tribe-like extended family

Drop your questions for Susannah in the comments section here, and we’ll send you her answers at the end of November.

The great twentieth century novelist Elizabeth Goudge begins her wonderful biography of Saint Francis of Assisi by paying homage to the saint’s remarkable legacy.

Francis of Assisi . . . lived eight centuries ago and he died in early middle age, yet few of us in the Western world today, even if we know little about him, are not aware of him.

Like a fresh stream springing up in the desert he is the source of so many good things. His influence upon European music, art, drama and politics has been a study for many scholars, yet it is as a Christian that he matters to us, as a humble poor man who set himself to tread as closely as he could in the footsteps of Christ, perhaps as closely as any man has ever done, and by so doing shames us. Looking at him we see what it means to be a Christian, and what it costs. His story is not only endearing, it is terrifying. Yet without the fear and shame he would not have so much power over us, for we know in our hearts that what is worth having costs everything. And so his power lives on and we cannot measure it because it is nowhere near its end.

Something about Saint Francis, who died eight hundred years ago this month, feels prescient in every era that has followed after him, and Goudge’s explication of his influence on “art, drama, and politics” as well as on the theological imagination is entirely warranted. And decades on from her writing these words, the life of the Saint continues to stand as a rebuke of a culture that in many places has neglected to follow his example. Elizabeth Goudge’s book, My God and My All, is well worth reading if you haven’t read it yet.

In order to mark the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone (1181–1226), or Saint Francis, after “Francesco,” as his father called him, Plough’s spoke with editor of Orbis Books, Robert Ellsberg, about the Poor Man of Assisi and his enduring legacy.

There aren’t too many saints whose appeal reaches beyond the Catholic Church to such an extent as Francis’s does. What explains it? His life story? His theology?

I think Francis’s appeal, in his own time and since, has relied on the combination of his personality and the power of his witness – his personal appropriation of the Gospel. Francis set out to model his life on the teachings and example of Jesus, particularly the Beatitudes: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and so forth. Francis embodied these virtues, and demonstrated the deeply counter-cultural meaning of such a life, even in an ostensibly Christian culture.

At the same time, a good part of his impact came from the appeal of his personality – his joy, his spirit of freedom. For his immediate contemporaries there was something deeply attractive about him; people wanted to be near him and learn the secret of his joy. I think that attraction continues to hold across the ages, crossing confessional and religious boundaries, even among secular-minded people.

We’ve even got this adjective based on his name: “Franciscan.” What does it mean to you?

Poverty and simplicity of life are probably the most distinctive notes of the Franciscan charism. Francis was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi. His conversion began when he kissed a leper, and in that moment let go of a whole identity based on status, security and worldly success. In other words, he let go of the future his father intended for him, as well as the whole ethic of commerce and upward-mobility that marked a world emerging from the feudal era. He began to notice the poor and sick, and that attention to those on the margins prompted him to read the Gospel in a new way.

Francis’s father accused him of stealing from his warehouse to give alms to the poor and dragged him for judgment before the bishop in the public square. There Francis apologized, but then stripped off his rich garments and handed them to his father saying, “Hitherto I have called you father on earth, but now I say ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven.’”

Pope Francis, on becoming pope and taking his name from Saint Francis, said “Oh, how I wish for a church that is poor and for the poor.” Francis embodied that church. No doubt he took it to extremes. His was not the simple poverty of the monastery. He embraced the precariousness and vulnerability of the truly poor.

One day the bishop of Assisi questioned such radical stance. Francis replied, “My Lord, if we had possessions we should need arms for their defense. They are the source of quarrels and lawsuits and are usually a great obstacle to the love of God and one’s neighbor. That is why we have no desire for temporal goods.”

Francis turned worldly values upside down. Where others saw security, he saw captivity; what for others represented success was for him a source of strife, an “obstacle to the love of God and one’s neighbor.” He embraced Poverty as his bride – “the most beautiful in the world.”

Tell me more about his conversion from wealthy playboy to founder of a religious order. Didn’t he claim that God had spoken directly to him?

You are referring to the famous incident when, at an early stage in his conversion, he was praying in the dilapidated chapel of San Damiano. From a large crucifix over the altar he heard a voice say, “Francis, rebuild my church which, as you can see, has fallen into disrepair.” Francis initially took this call literally and began rebuilding the chapel with his own hands. It was only gradually that he saw this mission in a larger sense – renewing and rebuilding a church that had fallen into “worldliness.” His method of renewal was to call the church back to the radical image of Jesus.

To be sure, there had been precursors to Francis – notably Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant in Lyons who paid a priest to translate the New Testament and was shocked to discover Jesus’ teachings on riches and poverty. He gave up his property and gathered a movement of followers known as the Poor Men of Lyons. They were initially tolerated by the pope but fell into trouble when they violated an order to refrain from preaching. Afterward, they were harshly persecuted. Waldo died around 1205, just prior to Francis’s mission.

How did Francis escape that fate?

Around the same time as Waldo’s death, Francis and his original friars traveled to Rome to win approval from Pope Innocent III for their way of life. On meeting him, the pope supposedly remembered a dream in which he saw the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran (the cathedral of Rome) on the verge of collapsing only to see it being hoisted on the shoulders of a poor friar. Another story has it that one of the cardinals told the pope, “This man merely wishes us to live according to the Gospel. Now if we tell him that this surpasses human strength, then we are declaring that it is impossible to follow the Gospel, and blaspheming Christ, the author of the Gospel.” So Francis’s movement received papal approval. Maybe the pope truly saw in Francis a source of renewal in the church – perhaps one that was less dangerous operating with approval than without! In any case, Francis never disobeyed church authority and he instructed his friars never to preach without approval from the local bishop.

Over time, when somebody becomes popular, their message is often simplified, even oversimplified, diluted. In Francis’s case, it seems like he’s sometimes been reduced to the saint of garden statues and bird baths. Is this fair?

This is a common tendency. As Jesus said of the hypocrites, “You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous.” One sees this, say, with the commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. We are encouraged to celebrate his inoffensive “dream” while overlooking his radical critique of militarism, capitalism, and racism, stances which caused him, at the time, to be seen as a dangerous threat to the system.

In the case of Saint Francis, his reputation is often sentimentalized. From his care for creation and his famous preaching to the birds he becomes, as you put it, the patron saint of bird baths. Of course, Jesus himself becomes sentimentalized by many Christians, who don’t want to acknowledge the radical social implications of the gospel, and what Bonhoeffer called “the cost of discipleship.”

Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, presents an inspiring portrait of Francis’s winsome personality, his joy and simplicity, and his delight in the beauty of nature. But sentimental pictures of Francis tend to overlook his deep familiarity with the cross – the suffering of the sick and poor, the victims of war and violence, and his own personal sufferings. In his last years in particular he suffered from an eye condition and torturous treatments that left him almost blind. And then there was his experience of receiving the stigmata, the marks of Christ’s passion on his hands, feet, and side, which made it agony to walk. Francis’ identification with Christ extended to his passion. And yet it was in the midst of this suffering, that he composed his glorious hymn of praise, his Canticle to Creation.

Francis encouraged his brothers to welcome ridicule and persecution as a means of conforming to the folly of the cross. He taught that unmerited suffering borne patiently for love of Christ was the path to “perfect joy.”

What would you suggest as a starting place for someone who wants to learn more about Francis? Any particular recommendations as far as biographies go? Any must-reads? Personally, I’ve always loved Elizabeth Goudge’s My God and My All, which Plough reissued a few years ago.

There are innumerable accounts of the life and legends of Saint Francis. My first encounter came when I was in high school and came upon a copy of the classic The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, one of the very early compilations of his legends. I was raised in the Episcopal Church and didn’t grow up learning a lot about saints. I suppose I had seen those Franciscan bird baths you mentioned. But I’m not sure I realized he was a really famous guy. I felt I had discovered something – the idea that being a Christian meant trying to live like Jesus. I mentioned my excitement to one of my teachers and he said, “You don’t really believe that stuff, do you?” I’m not sure if I had the courage to answer, but my heart was saying “Yes!”

Most accounts of Francis’s life draw on these early legends and biographies, including the Life of Saint Francis by Thomas of Celano. At Orbis Books we have published a number of great books that introduce him and point out the relevance of his message today. One is Saint Francis and the Foolishness of God (Marie Dennis, et al., editors). There’s also Murray Bodo’s biography – a modern classic. It’s called Francis of Assisi: The Journey and the Dream. I would also recommend Ilia Delio’s Compassion: Living in the Spirit of Saint Francis, and Carlo Carretto’s I, Francis, and Leonardo Boff’s Francis of Assisi, which points out the significance of his “option for the poor.”

What about the written legacy of Francis himself? Did he write any books?

Francis himself was not a learned man. Later figures like Saint Bonaventure endeavored to translate his teachings into philosophical terms. But his original “rule” was essentially based on quotations from the gospels, which he set out to live as a rule of life. In that sense, he was a kind of living gospel.

He was not opposed to learning, as long as it did not threaten humility. “Let all the brothers preach through their deeds,” he said. One of the early controversies in the Order was whether the possession of books was a violation of poverty. However, it is said that Francis had great reverence for any writing, since it might contain the name of God. When asked why he collected even writings by “pagans” he said, “It is because the letters are there of which the most glorious name of the Lord God is composed.” In a similar way, he believed the name of God was inscribed in all people and in all of Creation, for those who knew how to read it.

Pope Francis (1936–2025) was the first pope to adopt the name of Saint Francis. Any significance there? Did it mark his program for the Church in any particular way?

When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio took the name Francis – the first pope in history to do this – it soon became clear that this was more than just a name; it implied an agenda. This was reflected right away in gestures of humility; for instance, his decision to live in a guest house rather than in the papal palace. But his concern was not just the practice of spiritual poverty. Like Francis, he recognized that the values of the Gospel are fundamentally contrary to what the world honors and counts as success. Thus, he challenged what he called “spiritual worldliness” – the dangers that come about when the church becomes infected by what the world counts as important, powerful, and effective.

In the spirit of Francis, he shifted the center of gravity in the Catholic Church from an emphasis on safeguarding orthodoxy to the practice of mercy. He called for an evangelizing church that steps out of its self-referential bubble to go the margins and peripheries, to “touch the wounds” of Christ in the world. Every form of renewal and reform should be driven by mission – proclaiming and bearing witness to God’s love in the world. This was expressed particularly in his advocacy for migrants and refugees, his strong statements and initiatives on behalf of peace, his ardent commitment to interreligious dialogue and friendship, and in his historic centering of Catholic social teaching on ecology and “care for the earth.” But his message was not simply addressed to Catholics or Christians; he engaged all people of good will in addressing the pressing challenges of our time. There is no doubt that in all of this, he was inspired by the spirit of Il Poverello – the Poor Man of Assisi.

Any thoughts on the relevance of Francis’s life and teachings with regard to the present moment in history? Some of the biggest issues on everyone’s minds these days seem specifically postmodern – AI and climate change, to name two. On the other hand, there’s a lot of stuff that humans have been dealing with forever: war, economic instability, political and religious polarization – and fear of impending apocalypse. Anything to be learned from a thirteenth-century friar on any of these fronts?

We are in a better position, these days, to appreciate some of the radical dimensions of Francis’ vision which speak directly to the needs of our time – for example, his ecological vision. He had a strong sense of God as our Creator – which implied kindship with all other creatures, and even with non-living elements of creation: wind, water, fire, the earth, and the stars. Toward the end of his life, he composed his “Canticle of the Creatures” in which he praised God for “brother sun and sister moon.”

But his message and witness extends in other ways. There is the example of his gesture, during the Crusades, of crossing the battlefield to meet personally in a spirit of peace and brotherhood with Sultan Malik al-Kamil in Egypt. It remains a striking witness to an encounter in friendship with people of other faiths.

And Pope Leo has continued the program of his predecessor: in his strong calls for peace and nonviolence, in his rejection of the traditional teaching of Just War, and especially in his document on AI, Magnifica Humanitas, in which he sets the preservation of human values against the construction of a new Tower of Babel.

But the Franciscan spirit extends far beyond the Franciscan family. I personally experienced this during the five years I spent working with Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker – a community that embraced voluntary poverty, the works of mercy, nonviolence, and care for creation. And one could point to the Community of Sant’ Egidio in Rome, which promotes the cause of reconciliation, serves the poor and the homeless and those with AIDS, and campaigns against the death penalty. Of course, other movements in the Christian tradition, including the Anabaptists, and certainly the Bruderhof, have, independently of Saint Francis, looked to the New Testament as a radical guide to personal and community life.

Taken altogether, Francis’s life and his relationship with the world – including animals, the elements of nature, the poor and sick, women as well as men – represented the breakthrough of a new model of human and cosmic community. And truly, for many men and women over the past 800 years, it was the example of Saint Francis that raised the question: “What if I were to live as if the Gospel were true?”

Again, this year marks the eight-hundredth anniversary of Saint Francis’s death. Anything you could say about how he approached it?

Francis died on October 3, 1226, and Franciscans celebrate this date as the memorial of his transitus – his “crossing over.” He felt no fear of death. When assured that his end was approaching, he asked to be carried to the Portiuncula, one of the first chapels he had restored. He had composed a new verse for his Canticle:

“Praised be you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death
from whom no one living can escape. . . .
Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,
for the second death shall do them no harm.”

Finally, he asked to be stripped and laid naked on the ground, where he breathed his last. His final words are addressed to all of us: “I have done what is mine; may Christ teach you what is yours.”

Robert Ellsberg is an award-winning author, the publisher of Orbis Books, and a former editor of the Catholic Worker newspaper.

Chris Zimmerman is a Plough editor and a member of the Bruderhof.

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.

Welcome to PloughStack’s Possibilities. 

This week marks three years since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7 and the start of the war in Gaza. Several failed ceasefires later, the conflict, which has led to the death of thousands, continues.

We are going to talk about a new Plough book, but first, here are some introductory thoughts based on another new book.

• Even for those of us who know little about Middle Eastern history and culture, it feels like unpredictable conflict in the region has been a constant for much of modern history. In his new and brilliant book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, historian (who knows a lot about the Middle East) makes this case quite strongly.

• He divides modern Middle Eastern history into “four key phases.”

• Each of these phases was full of turmoil and conflict. His book starts at the start of the twentieth century, recounting the fall of the Ottoman empire and the Armenian genocide, and ends in 2026.

In the face of such a long history of violence, what would an end to conflict even look like? That question is the subject of a new book from Plough published this week: On Reconciliation: What Israelis and Palestinians Can Learn from South Africa and Rwanda.

On Reconciliation

In Plough’s new book, author and peace activist Maya Savir invites readers to explore the process of reconciliation candidly and soberly, showing what it takes for peacemaking and restoration to unfold between peoples and within individuals after conflicts.

• She lays out the inspiration for her book here:

• Savir had thought that she had finished writing the book in 2023, but after the events of October 7, she knew she was not done.

• Savir appeared alongside Aziz Abu Sarah on Plough’s podcast, Another Life:

• Novelist Colum McCann praised the book:

• As did New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner :

I turn to right and left, in all the earth
I see no signs of justice, sense or worth:
A man does evil deeds, and all his days
Are filled with luck and universal praise;
Another’s good in all he does – he dies
A wretched broken man whom all despise.

—from Shahnameh by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (c. 940–1019)


By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when
we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing
us one of the songs of Zion.

—Psalm 137:1–3, (KJV)

Reason for Hope

Hope can be hard to come by when faced with the horror of the current conflict in the Middle East. But, to return book, hope is possible:

I encourage you to read Montefiore’s book. It is truly brilliant.

And of course, I would be failing at my job if I didn’t tell you to buy and read Maya Savir’s On Reconciliation. Reading it has given me more hope.

Plough-Share

Ruthann K. Johansen responds to Peter Mommsen’s essay, “A Friend For Life.”

Thank you for the insight, skill, and grace with which you weave together your family's experiences with Lee and the philosophical wisdom of Aristotle and the illustrations of friendship found in Jesus’ life and Christian scriptures. I look forward to each issue of Plough, and especially this forthcoming one on Friendship.

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

Herbsttag

Herr, es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
Und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
Gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
Dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
Die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Let fall your shadows on the sundials,
upon the fields let loose your winds.

Command the last fruits to be full;
give them just two more southern days,
Press them to perfection, and turn 
their last sweetness into strong wine.

Who has no house now, will never build again.
Whoever is alone now, long will so remain,
will wake, and read, and write long letters
and wander the alleys, up and down,
restless, as the leaves are drifting.

Transl. Chris Zimmerman

Some poems catch our fancy with a memorable image or turn of phrase; others seem to speak directly to our condition. Rainer Marie Rilke’s “Herbsttag” does both, displaying his mastery as a wordsmith and inviting us to go deeper – to ponder not only the bounty of the season, but also the harvest ripening in the fields of our heart.

Rilke asks no questions, but he leaves us asking our own: considering the seeds we have sown in the past year, and probing their yield; remembering the abundance of summer, and wondering whether we are adequately prepared for the coming cold.

The hands of time never stop. Changes tend to come on us unaware. Children grow up, loved ones pass on, friends move away. Windows of opportunity suddenly close. Doors that always stood open swing unexpectedly shut.

Suddenly it is too late to find shelter or set things straight; to make that journey you put off for years; to follow that secret yearning; to fan that long-smoldering spark. One day it will be too late to ask forgiveness (or to forgive); to mend that broken relationship; to say “I love you” one last time. One day you may open your mouth only to find that you no longer have a voice.

Rilke’s sturdy lines are not sentimental. They echo matter-of-factness. They reflect inevitability. True, there’s always the chance of another summer-like day. Maybe even two. But this is not the moment to be lulled to sleep. Because even the richest, most fruitful season of life cannot last forever, and “it is time.”

Share

Reminder!

If you haven’t yet taken part in our Wendell Berry Challenge, find out more about it below. If you have taken part, please send us pictures or a short write up about what you did. (Email info@plough.com.)

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

The Challenge

While Plough aims to inspire faith and action, it’s not often we present readers with an actual, hands-on challenge. But here’s one.

“A viable neighborhood is a community,” wrote Wendell Berry, who passed away on August 31, 2026, “and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.” In Berry’s honor, we’d like to invite you to plan and carry out some sort of local community-building event with your immediate neighbors in the next few weeks, and then let us know how it went.

What could that look like? Really, anything that serves to bring people together for camaraderie or service or feeding of the mind, body, or soul. Here are just a few ideas:

• Invite a couple neighbors over to read poetry or a play

• Convene for a themed potluck: breads and soups, taco bar, cookies, charcuterie boards, childhood throwbacks, bbq…

• Volunteer with friends at your local food pantry, gleaning organization, soup kitchen, public park, or community garden

• If you’ve got young kids, organize a library visit, or a play date or picnic at a local park or in your home

• Gather to discuss an essay or book. Wendell Berry’s “People, Land, and Community” (listen to him deliver the talk) or “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (read it here) might be good discussion starters)

• Offer to get together for gardening, home repair, cleaning, mending, yard work, or whatever fits your skillset.

• Figure out where you can plant a tree, and plant one. Or a few.

Really, we’d love to hear what you manage to pull together, however small-scale it may be. Please comment below or write to info@plough.com to share words (and pictures, if you like) of your Berryesque community-building experience!

As a participation prize, here is a printable version of the Wendell Berry poems that Plough published at the start of this year. Print them out to share with those who take part in your challenge.

The Partition Thins Wendell Berry

3.54MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

The Partition Thins

Six New Poems

By Jane Clark Scharl

The word “verse” has an agricultural past: it comes from the Latin word for “furrowing” or “turning up the soil.” Language, then, is a field ready for the plow; a poem is the careful turning up of that field. A poem must break up the dry outer crush of assumptions to expose the fertile soil underneath.

Wendell Berry, who died yesterday at the age of ninety-two, is well-known for many things. He is an essayist and novelist, a life-long farmer, and a great champion of the particular and human against impersonal, mechanized social and economic forces. He is also a masterful poet. For over sixty years, Berry has turned to verse to explore the rhythms and patterns that make up human life.

Last year, Berry sent us six poems that he wanted us to publish. In this series of poems, the guiding concerns of his life merge. Here plowing (and not just in a metaphorical sense – remember, Berry actually plows actual fields) turns up the field of memory and gives us a glimpse of the beauty that comes when we love a place and its people particularly and deeply.

The poems stand in relationship with each other. The fields of one poem become fertile soil for a meditation on language in the next, which in turn yields a prophetic vision in which “On the other side of the partition / the dead are living.”

The inevitable but startling unfolding of the poems and their interrelated themes is more than an imaginative discovery; it is a moral one. Throughout these poems, the speaker explores his changing relationship to the world he has loved with all his might. He discovers that even though he cannot stop time or keep the fields and land and the people he loves, he need not despair. Here is the final great turning of these poems: a turning away, at the last, from the things of this world only to discover that the things he has loved have been kept safe, “more alive, more essentially themselves,” on the other side of death. Perhaps, these poems suggest, death itself is simply another turning of the soil.

Read the poems here.

Can Love Take Sides?

The law of love excludes no one, but requires a choice from everyone.

By Wendell Berry

I recommend second thoughts about the possibility of a “side” of love, but current political rhetoric tends toward such an absolute division. The side of hate is composed of avowed racists; avowed racists have espoused an absolute, unexcepting prejudice against a kind of people; and so they may be called “the side of hate” rightly enough. That haters hate is morally as straightforward and uncomplicated as it can be. But they themselves are perceived by the side of love as a kind of people. And the side of love, as perceived by the side of hate, is a kind of people also, another kind.And so we have a confrontation of two opposite kinds of people, lovers and haters, each side as absolute in its identity as it can make itself, and they do not know each other. They cannot imagine each other. For the haters, this situation is wonderfully simple and entirely acceptable. They don’t need even a notion of consequence. They are there to oppose. That is all. The lovers, on the contrary, have everything at stake and the situation is clouded by moral danger.

Because the confrontation is between two categories of people who do not know each other, it will be easy for the side of love first to understand love merely as opposite and opposed to hate, and then to generalize this opposition as an allegorical battle of Love versus Hate, exchanging slogan for slogan, gesture for gesture, shout for shout. Then if nature and the rule of battle go unchecked, the side of love begins to hate the side of hate. And then the lovers are defeated, for they have defeated themselves. They have fallen into the sort of trap that Mr. Jefferson set for, among others, himself. If you say, “All men are created equal,” then adding “except for some,” the exception overturns the rule, and a great deal else along with it. Just so, love that hates has canceled itself. It cannot survive its hatred of hate any more than one can survive minus one. It is no more. Chaos and old night have come again.

With us, love has been reduced mostly to a popular word, easy to use to intensify a frivolous appreciation. “Oh, I love it!” we say when told of something really cute. Or it can be used as a handy weapon against the haters of whom we disapprove. Too bad. But love comes into our civilization – the Gospels being the source best known to me – as a way of being in the world. It is a force, extraordinarily demanding and humbling, dangerous too, for those who attempt to take it seriously.

As a force and a way of being, love is never satisfied with partiality. It is compelled, by its own nature and logic, to be always trying to make itself whole. This is why the Sermon on the Mount tells us to love our enemies. That is an unconditional statement. It does not tell us to fight our enemies in order to improve them or convert them by our love.

In practice, this commandment seems to cancel or delete “enemy” as a category of thought.

Read the rest of the essay here.

Do you have any thoughts, memories, or reflections on the life and work of Wendell Berry? Please tell us about them by commenting below!

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.

Welcome to PloughStack’s Possibilities. 

The End of Reading?

Recent months have brought much doom and gloom about the so-called “literacy crisis.” The poor reading habits of almost every demographic group have been bemoaned: “The kids aren’t reading.” “The dads aren’t reading.” “The students aren’t reading.” “Nobody’s reading!”

• The truth is that much of this pessimism is warranted. The National Endowment for the Arts reports that “fewer than half (48.5 percent) of all U.S. adults read a book of any type in the previous year. This figure compares with 52.7 percent of adults in 2017 and 54.6 percent in 2012.” That is shocking.

• Nobody should be celebrating this decline in reading rates. As the great literary critic wrote in his most recent book of essays, The Sealed Envelope: Toward An Intelligent Utopia:

  To suggest that humankind is now ready to leave behind verbal literacy, when only a tiny, fortunate fraction have savored its pleasurable possibilities to the full, is not hubris. It is fatuity; worse, cruelty.

• Knowingly or not, that cruelty is often pushed forward by faceless bureaucrats at universities. Sheila Limig’s essay for titled “The End of Books” describes the day when thousands of volumes from her university’s library were thrown in a dumpster. Rather than give up on books, she decided to fight.

  The speed of the digital world connives to make us feel ashamed of certain sorts of slowly won knowledge. But to persist in caring about books, and to do so in the face of those who tell us not to, is to fight for a world that takes knowledge seriously. That fight will have to happen on many fronts; preserving the library alone will not rescue reading. But it is a good place to begin. After all, it is easier to preserve than it is to create.

• brilliantly argues that what will keep the kids reading is teachers who have passion.

  Over the course of last semester, I became convinced there is a way out of this moribund strategy: We teachers must remain students — and model what we want to see. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.

Counterpoint

If you’re like me, you love a good graph, but, as pointed out recently on his Substack, some of the data behind the graphs on the literacy crisis is … well, uh, nonexistent.

• Part of the cause of this is that some researchers have failed to properly define what they are talking about.

  Definitions matter. ‘Literacy’ is not a single phenomenon; most literacy research focuses on levels of literacy, not an all-or-nothing claim about being literate or illiterate.

• He points to three crises that have seemingly been conflated.

  1. The overall literacy rates. These numbers are not as bad as NLI and the like say, but there is surely room for improvement.

  2. Problems in literacy education. So far, we haven’t discussed this at all.

  3. Building and sustaining a literate culture. This includes getting college students and other adults to read books.

• That’s not to say that there isn’t a literary crisis.

  It is true that people are reading fewer books—but that is largely a product of the fact that the biggest readers (college graduates, older people, women) have started to read less. They still read, but not as much as they used to. We can’t blame educational initiatives for this, as the timelines don’t line up. What is happening here, I posit, is a general abandonment of literary culture. It is no longer expected that the well-educated continue to read for pleasure; we have Netflix and YouTube now. When I go to a party, I’m more likely to be asked by my friends what shows I’ve been watching—they’re always baffled when I tell them I haven’t watched anything in a long time. Nobody wants to talk with me about the Graham Greene novels I’ve been consuming, and most of them haven’t heard of Graham Greene.

Books in Heaven

• Last week, considered whether there will be books in Heaven.

  We may feel something like the pleasure of conversing with George Herbert by reading his poetry; just as we may recognize something of ourselves in the misfit characters sketched by Flannery O’Connor. But perhaps that satisfaction will be subsumed into true relationship, true connection, and true conversation, in the resurrection – perhaps with those authors themselves, perhaps with others who enjoyed their books, perhaps with God himself.

  Subsumed, but not obliterated. Safe to say that the pleasures of a hearty breakfast will be subsumed at the resurrection, when the bodies of the elect “rise in glory.” And yet the risen Christ not only ate broiled fish but cooked it himself over a charcoal fire. God seems to take a special delight in taking our feeble productions and transforming them into images of his kingdom; there are few images has God made more his own than the book:

  “I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.” (Rev. 20:12)

• He is not the first to consider this. Here is C. S. Lewis in God in the Dock:

  “My friend said, ‘I don’t see why there shouldn’t be books in Heaven. But you will find that your library in Heaven contains only some of the books you had on earth.’

  ‘Which?’ I asked.

  ‘The ones you gave away or lent.’

  ‘I hope the lent ones won’t still have all the borrowers’ dirty thumb marks,’ said I.

  ‘Oh yes they will,’ said he. ‘But just as the wounds of the martyrs will have turned into beauties, so you will find that the thumb-marks have turned into beautiful illuminated capitals or exquisite marginal woodcuts.’”

• Of course, Scripture (Matt. 5:17) reminds us that not one jot or tittle of God’s law will be destroyed. In a way, it’s God keeping his old books.

  “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.”

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

— On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer by John Keats

Plough’s Short Fiction Contest

One way to resist the literary crisis (or crises) is to write fiction. To what end, you may ask. Well, this is the last week that you can submit to Plough’s inaugural annual short fiction contest, open to writers anywhere in the world.

The winning writer will receive a two thousand dollar award and the winning story will be published in Plough. In addition, up to three finalists will receive two hundred and fifty dollars as well as publication in Plough (print and/or online).

Plough is seeking short fiction that honors the mysterious nature of reality and finds transcendence and redemption in unexpected places. We are interested in the skillful use of fictional elements like magical realism and a traditional “tale” voice, but the contest is not limited to stories with these elements. Here are some authors we see as exemplary: Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Susanna Clarke, Toni Morrison, Isak Dinesen, Eugene Vodolazkin, Tim Powers, Karen Russell, and James McBride.

Judging will be blind. Plough editors will select ten to fifteen stories for further consideration, and then the editors will reach a consensus on the winner and finalists.

Submit your fiction here! The deadline is September 1.

Further Reading

• The Gospel in Tolstoy. As inspiration for your own fiction writing, why not acquaint yourself some short stories by the master of storytelling, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. This anthology shows how life and teachings of Jesus inspired some of Tolstoy’s best literary work.

• A History of the Island. Eugene Vodolazkin, internationally acclaimed novelist and scholar of medieval literature, returns with a satirical parable about European and Russian history, the myth of progress, and the futility of war.

Plough-Share

Here are two responses to the essay “Removal” by .

One from :

I have no children of my own. I have never known what it’s like to budget and plan for and worry about my children’s future. So I respond to Mr. Kane’s article with humility and trepidation. Perhaps I have no right to respond to it at all.

And yet, as he wrote, there are children in prison.

So I will say just this: I’m certain, given the way these things tend to work, that someday there will be documentaries about those children in prison. There will be books and feature films. There will be history lessons and museum exhibits. The whole country will look with horror on what we did to them: at the hot tents and the cages and the inadequate medical care that Mr. Kane wrote about, along with the maggot-ridden food and bad water and the confiscated art and writing supplies and the lights left on all night and so much else that various reporters have written about.

Every parent who pursues this work should know this: When their own children see these artifacts and memorials, they will live with that for the rest of their lives.

So please, Mr. Kane, choose wisely.

And another from Deborah Boisvert:

“Removal” hit me like none of your articles ever have before. I enjoy reading the pieces you publish, and I have found many of them to be powerful. This, however, was in a class by itself. I applaud Mr. Kane for his clear-eyed honesty, and pray for him in this dilemma.

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

America’s national anthem – “The Star-Spangled Banner” – is beautiful. But what if Americans could choose a second national anthem – one that would complement the first, and maybe even expand its poetic reach? Maybe the second anthem would be easier to sing? Maybe this other anthem would point to aspects of American history or identity that have been neglected or excluded – such as the Black American, Native American, or Hispanic experiences – or which developed after the “Star-Spangled Banner” was written during the War of 1812?

In today’s article, we ask a posse of Americans to weigh in.

• Vincent Lloyd argues for James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice And Sing.”

• points out that John Denver’s “Country Roads” is already recognized as America’s unofficial national anthem around the world.

• makes the case for an anthem from a musical: “Till We Meet That Day” from Ragtime.

• Church musician explains that “God Bless The U.S.A.” is the most singable alternative.

• is torn between “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “This Land Is Your Land.”

• wants “America the Beautiful” for its hymnic qualities.

• asks why we can’t just be happy with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

• Emily McGowan believes that Phil Ochs “Power and Glory” calls Americans to the best versions of themselves.

• And wonders whether any song could offer a better depection of the greatest American value than Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.”

Now it’s your turn! What would you recommend for our second anthem?

Have your say here! (Or comment below.)

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

Further down: 

Jason Blakely on Bob Dylan

Phil Klay on Mark Twain

Nathan Beacom on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hunter McClure on the King James Bible

In our Summer issue, Searching for the Soul of America, we asked if there is a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity in the same way that Homer does for Greece. Several suggestions were put forward by a posse of authors and poets.

• Walt Whitman:

• Robert Frost: ,

• Herman Melville:

• Tracy Chapman (particularly her song “Fast Car”):

• Laura Ingalls Wilder:

• William Carlos Williams:

• Hart Crane:

Two poets, Jane Clark Scharl and Christian Wiman, even argued that America has no Homer. The symposium caused much discussion, with many arguing for names not included on the list: Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, and Bob Dylan. Someone even suggested Shelby Foote, but he seems more like America’s Herodotus or Thucydides than America’s Homer.

We’ve compiled some of the best responses below, including some further responses that we commissioned from Jason Blakely, Phil Klay, , and .

But we also want to know what you think! Vote for who you think is America’s Homer here.

Bob Dylan is America’s Homer

By Jason Blakely

Of course, America has no Homer, and neither does any modern culture. But if I had to put forward a figure of the highest literary merit who – reminiscent of Homer – occupies a space of constant memorized, oral retelling of American lives and circumstances, it would undoubtedly be Bob Dylan. He unified the low and the high by taking French Symbolism, T. S. Eliot’s modernism, Walt Whitman’s explorations of the self, and Beat experimentations and fused them to the American songbook: the blues, country, and rock and roll. He returned poetry to the musical, bardic form that the Romantics had hoped for. As a gob smacked Allen Ginsberg described what he called “Dylan’s theory of singing or poetry”: it was to achieve “such a state of single-mindedness entering into his breath” as to become “one column of air.”

To a future generation, in a century or two, Dylan’s endlessly oral, iteratively expansive melding of the highest poetics to popular musical form may obviously place him in the literary canon. Melville and Shakespeare also took a while to catch on for being too “common” or “vulgar” in their art form, themes, tropes, and in their vernacular.

Of course, with any great artist we must avoid the ideological error of carving up their art into teams belonging to different ethnic groups and territorialized states. Great art is the common stock of all peoples and later generations. For example, there is a sense in which Shakespeare belongs to all English speakers and beyond as he also antedates nationalist ideology and cannot be contained in such walnut-sized divisions. He did help establish modern English, and in that sense all English-speaking countries are downstream from him. But he also spoke to literary artists who did not work in his language, from the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky to the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Dylan gets this humanistic common stock of all literature as he slyly implies in 1966’s Blonde on Blonde: “Shakespeare, he’s in the alley / With his pointed shoes and his bells / Speaking to some French girl / Who says she knows me well.” In Dylan’s art Shakespeare happily flirts with the French.

Put more bluntly: Homer is America’s Homer and Shakespeare is America’s Shakespeare, and you can rejoice that you are human and not cut off from deepest resonance with their art due to accidents of language and birth. But if the point is just greatest literary talent North America has produced – the one who tells its odysseys of wandering individualism, suffering and redemption with the most color, variety and verve – then I return to Dylan. He is still in his own words, “bringing it all back home.”

No Mark Twain?

By Phil Klay

How outrageous, how offensive, I thought, that not one of the people Plough asked to name America’s Homer decided on Mark Twain. Not that I would have picked Twain myself. Obviously, the choice is Walt Whitman, who gives us the ideal, heroic American in grand style. But still, someone ought to have wrongly named Twain, for propriety’s sake. In Twain we find ourselves, the great American types penned so vividly they become foundational myths. Which makes him sound like our Homer, if not for the fact that Twain’s great characters are not kings or warriors but outcasts, vagabonds, con-men, and the occasional Connecticut Yankee. And he’s not writing in an epic style because he’s too goddamn American for that. He’s on another level entirely.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is America’s Homer

By

Who is America’s Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare? What each of those men had in common is that they were narrative poets; I was surprised, therefore, that in the responses, no narrative poets appeared.

In America, we have only one great narrative poet, and for that reason alone his name should be mentioned: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow was the most influential and popular American poet of the nineteenth century, read in almost every household and schoolroom. His long narrative poems The Courtship of Miles Standish, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, and The Song of Hiawatha sought to paint a mythos of American origins. This last poem he wrote with the explicit dea of composing a national epic, and it is interesting that for this he chose to tell an indigenous story, replete with words in Ojibwe.

Perhaps most importantly, Longfellow is and was a people’s poet. Never the exclusive property of the academy, the urban salon, or the intellectual elites, he spoke to something in the ordinary, average American heart. A few years ago, I heard a college football coach tearfully quote him from memory. Each Christmas I hear his Civil War poem “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” in the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby. Some critics have chided him for his simplicity, but what we know about him from his contemporaries tells us that his sweet and sometimes simple poems came from a genuinely sweet and gentle heart.

In sum, because he is an epic poet, because he is a people’s poet, and because he sang an American mythos in order to uplift us into a better people, he ought to be in the conversation as America’s Homer.

The King James Bible is Our Homeric Text

By

What did Homer give the Greeks? He gave them gods, heroic types, an account of the significance of human action in relation to divine drama. Said otherwise, Homer brought Greekness into being. Any attempt to name the American Homer must therefore search out a text that has done something similar in kind and in degree for our own national consciousness. The American Homer in the relevant sense must precede America, must condition the possibility of there even being an America; great as he is, Melville is a product of our tradition rather than its originating master-craftsman.

For this reason, only one text can seriously claim the title of “America’s Homer”: The King James Bible. It is there, especially in the Old Testament, that we find the sources for the stately heights of American rhetoric, the chiaroscuro of violence, the dread of being singled out by an alien God for a mission whose success is promised but never clearly and finally evidenced. When Lincoln sought to stir his countrymen, he employed the register of this Bible; in the most moving scenes of Absalom, Absalom! (our national Oresteia), it is the King James that is the constant point of reference. The product of English hands, the KJV is nevertheless most properly ours—the hope of Genesis and the doom of Judges would not find a fitting audience until meeting the bountiful floodplains of the Mississippi and walking among the mangled dead strewn at Antietam.

Best of the Rest

Phil Klay argues for Whitman:

Whitman is our Homer
Melville our Aeschylus
Emerson our Plato
Grant our Thucydides
And Poe is our Edgar Allan Poe, because nobody else has anything like him.

agrees:

Walt Whitman. No one else comes close.

Caitlin Flanagan picks a less popular choice:

Faulkner. No question

debates the premise of the question:

It’s a ridiculous question. I am reminded of Ralph Wiley’s response to Saul Bellow’s “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?”: Proust is the Proust of the Papuans. In the same spirit, Homer is the Homer of the Americans. Note also that in forming his questions Bellow mentions two non-Americans: attempt to answer “who is the Tolstoy of the Americans” and you might not like what you find….

Framing the question in this way is engaging in almost every American intellectual vice at once: A massive inferiority complex with the Old World revealing itself in hilarious braggadocio (“we have, like, ten Homers over here!”) that poorly conceals justified insecurity (we have, in fact, zero Homers over here). An inability to understand the scope and scale of human history (part of what makes Homer Homer is that people have been reading him for three thousand years). An adjacent belief that everything that happened before America didn’t really count (“we have it in our power to begin the world over again” – immanentizing the eschaton from the beginning). And yet, as a whole, the question flinches before it can go all the way (come on, ask the question you know you want to: “what is the American King James Version?”) It makes you understand James and Eliot.

But, if we really have to do this, someone should have suggested that the American Iliad and the American Odyssey are not in fact by the same person.

points to three authors:

America has three authors who produced epics in the Homeric mode: Melville with Moby Dick, Faulkner with As I Lay Dying, and Cormac McCarthy with Blood Meridian.

argues for Hollywood!

I suggest Hollywood. I would certainly put the great directors ahead of Tracy Chapman on a list of people who “capture the American spirit, the American story, the American identity.” Surely John Ford and John Wayne are one obvious answer? Maybe Gone with the Wind. Frank Capra seems too uneven, but Billy Wilder might not be. What about Chaplin? Or Coppola? I don’t think Hitchcock has the necessary scale, somehow. Perhaps just “Hollywood’s Golden Age” as a whole is the best answer?

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.

Welcome to PloughStack’s Possibilities. 

We’re Disconnected from Nature

Here in New York, summer has almost arrived. The sun is out, the strawberries are ripening in our small garden plot, and our annual family bird list is growing ever longer.

As our agrarian title probably indicates to most readers, we at Plough are no strangers to the outdoors. (We even run an internship each summer that combines publishing and agriculture.)

However, many people today are increasingly disconnected from nature.

• A 2025 study shows that people’s connectedness to nature has decline 60 percent since 1800. As the Guardian reports:

  The modeling predicts an ongoing “extinction of experience” with future generations continuing to lose an awareness of nature because it is not present in increasingly built-up neighborhoods, while parents no longer pass on an “orientation” towards the natural world.

• This decline mirrors a similar decline in the usage of words related to nature in books and publications:

  While there is inherent uncertainty in using nature-related word frequency as a proxy for nature connectedness—given that linguistic trends may reflect broader cultural shifts or genre biases—the model’s alignment with this proxy is nonetheless remarkable. The ABM, which simulates human interactions with nature in an increasingly urban environment, closely mirrors the historical use of nature words in cultural products.

• According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average US adult spends around 90 percent of their time inside.

The Nature Cure?

• Studies, such as this one from 2014, have long documented the mental and physical health benefits of being in nature.

  Research suggests that contact with nature can be beneficial, for example leading to improvements in mood, cognition, and health…. [Our] meta-analysis shows that being connected to nature and feeling happy are, in fact, connected.

• This week, the New York Times encouraged readers to get outside for their health.

  We should add some leafy “greens” to our proverbial plates — by getting out into green spaces. Research suggests that being outdoors, even for short periods, can improve your health in many ways, among them reduced stress, better mood and higher levels of focus and memory.

• The “Nature Cure” which includes practices such as “forest bathing” has been held up by many as a useful practice to optimize your health.

  Dr. Suzanne Bartlett Hackenmiller, an obstetrician-gynecologist based in Cedar Falls, Iowa, began guiding patients in her practice through the Prairie Woods in Hiawatha Iowa…. She became a certified guide through the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy three years ago and tries to tailor her offerings based on the group she is leading. “I generally get a sense of where people are at. For some, it’s best for me to stick to the science, but others may literally want to hug a tree. The traditional tea ceremony at the end might turn some people off, so I’m conscious of that and adjust accordingly,” she says.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

— The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

Against the Nature Cure

The problem with the “nature cure” is not that it is wrong or ineffective. Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, I account it high time to get out into the June sunshine.

However, descriptions of the nature cure tend to explain the benefits of the natural world in the same extractive way that those who exploit the natural world do: Nature is a resource to be used, not a relationship to be nurtured.

• ’s essay for Plough, “The Myth of the Nature Cure,” is the inspiration for today’s newsletter. As she writes:

  The nature cure is only another iteration of the ways in which we exploit our environment for human gain, in which we seek to mine the hills and dredge the seas for the green gold of well-being. If we go to nature expecting it to heal us, we are not going to it for its own sake. Our relationship becomes entirely transactional. We expect medical treatment from it, not companionship…. I never want to go to the lake and expect it to fix me. I would not ask this of any friend, human or otherwise. So why would I ask this of our nonhuman neighbors I claim to love so much? I love nature for itself, not for what it gives me. To care only for what it gives me is not love.

• Writer Alydia Catherine Ullman travels to Tintern Abbey, the setting of Wordsworth’s great eponymous poem, and reestablishes her relationship with the natural world, the Lord, and her sister:

  Traveling to Tintern did not teach new truths; it pulled back veils. That hilltop moment was a reassuring message that the Lord is good, his world beautiful, my sister a precious soul, and this life meant for a love that ever deepens and renews. And these relationships, shared loves, and promises to keep knowing each other actually do make the whole world more dear. Or at least, that is what Wordsworth concluded. His closing lines address Dorothy, declaring that he loves beauty and nature more because of her:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  Nor wilt thou then forget,
  That after many wanderings, many years
  Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
  And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
  More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

• One man who definitely has a right relationship with nature is Wendell Berry. Writer Anne Ryan writes about his Sabbath poems.

  These poems are a record of Berry’s Sunday morning habit, walking his small hillside farm in Kentucky, and, if inspiration strikes, writing a poem about his thoughts. Berry explains that he is a “bad-weather churchgoer,” preferring, when the Sunday weather is nice, to be out walking in the woods, over hills, and along streams.

• Like Berry, believes that the way to conserve the natural world is to start to love it.

  The real challenge is to learn to take threats to the environment personally, that is, to feel in a concrete way the threat to the particular places that we love and not to global abstractions. Conservation originates in love: love of family, of home, of country, of creation, even self-love, to start with. Without being in nature, how can we love it? Without loving it, how will we be galvanized to protect it?

• Writer points out that the the birder has inherited man’s original task: to name the creatures.

  Naming is an act of love … because knowing the names of the creatures around us enables us to see them…. Whereas to the casual observer that group of winged creatures are just a bunch of birds, to the birdwatcher each individual speaks the name of its kind. Once each species has become visible and distinct through a seeing that leads to naming, its particular traits can become visible and known. Each species has particular requirements – its ecological niche – which need to be provided for it to flourish.

• As Saint Francis describes in The Canticle of the Creatures, our relationship with nature ultimately brings glory to God.

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind,
  and through the air, cloudy and serene, and every kind of weather,
  through whom You give sustenance to Your creatures.
  
  Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water,
  who is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.
  
  Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
  through whom You light the night,
  and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong.
  
  Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth,
  who sustains and governs us,
  and who produces fruit with colored flowers and herbs.

Further Reading

• Water at the Roots: Poems and Insights of a Visionary Farmer. In a society uprooted by two world wars, industrialization, and dehumanizing technology, Philip Britts turns to poetry to reconnect people to the land and one another.

• My God and My All: The Life of Saint Francis of Assisi. Legendary author Elizabeth Goudge retells the captivating story of the world’s favorite saint.

Plough-Share

Reader Megan from California responds to Galen Watts’s essay, “The Gods of Modernity”:

The author states, “There have been murmurings about a Christian revival, about youth flocking back to the churches. What should we make of these claims?” I would urge everyone to go forth and seek the answer! My own experience quite surprised me.

In early 2024 a friend and I began meeting once every other week or so, our children tagging along, seeking to extend on-the-go hospitality to members of our community and perhaps find opportunities to share the good news or encourage other believers. We would find some corner of a busy plaza or park to tuck ourselves into with a little table (beautifully decorated by my friend) with free literature and a sign reading “Free Hot Chocolate, Free Prayer.” (As the weather warmed up, we switched to lemonade.) When we first spoke to a teenager, I was surprised at the level of openness he expressed. Lovely conversations took place, with the chance to bear the burdens of other believers through prayer. Each journey forth brought us in touch with a new believer or two! The assistant pastor at our small church began to get involved, and was soon invited to the local high school to disciple believers. A youth discipleship group has started at our church and is going strong. And every week, our prayer chain rejoices over new family members in Christ – at first a few, but within months, over one hundred!

Praise God!

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

Jonathan Swift’s genius was to be understood by everyone. He was so insistent that his prose be plain enough for all readers that he once had his works read aloud to two servants. As each paragraph was read, he checked to see what they did and did not understand, and the work was edited until it was quite clear to the lads in livery. This care for the common reader made Swift one of those writers whom you will find quoted in everyday situations. When the Swift scholar Irvin Ehrenpreis was working in Dublin library, a young stack boy asked him who he was studying. “Ah yes,” said the boy on hearing Swift’s name, “burn everything English except their coals.”

Swift’s plainness became his greatest influence on later writers. T. S. Eliot once said the Drapier’s Letters were essential “to anyone who would be well-read in the literature of England.” Adam Smith certainly seems to have admired them. We know he rated Jonathan Swift among the best authors, and this line, taken from the first Letter, is sure to have influenced Smith:

… for my own Part, I am already resolved what to do; I have a pretty good Shop of Irish Stuffs and Silks, and instead of taking Mr WOOD’S bad Copper, I intende to Truck with my Neighbours the Butchers, and Bakers, and Brewers, and the rest…

That is Jonathan Swift in 1724. Adam Smith famously wrote in 1776 about our propensity to truck and barter, and of the butcher, brewer, and baker’s regard to their own self-interest. This little echo is characteristic of Swift’s great influence on those who followed him. It is the small source of a great river. Almost everyone knows some Swift. Most children have seen a picture, if not a film, of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. Samuel Johnson, notoriously hostile to Swift (his great rival), said that once you had thought of the little people and the big people all the rest followed naturally. But this is not so.

The great pleasure of reading Swift is that his plainness is by no means simple. As the quotation chosen by that stack boy shows (taken from the 1720 pamphlet A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture), Swift was vicious in a good cause. He loved to let a sentence or paragraph unspool, like a fly making concentric circles above its landing place, before whipping down at the end with a snap. Consider the description of how Lilliputians order their writing on the page:

I shall say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England.

Swift is the master of a slow build-up and sudden turn of phrase that turns an innocent list into a vicious twist. The Travels is often discussed as a book of ideas, which it no doubt is, but it is also incredibly funny. The humor is essential to its moral organization.

The first book, the visit to the land of Lilliputian dwarves, is a sublime satire on the machinations of politics. Having worked in the British Parliament for two years, I find it screamingly funny – better than P. G. Wodehouse. Last year, I listened, as an experiment during a dismal train journey, to an audiobook version narrated by David Hyde Pierce (the actor who played Niles Crane in Frasier). Pierce gets the rhythms just right and I was helpless with laughter in Charing Cross Station. Swift benefits from being read aloud and will presumably continue to flourish in this new age of audio and video.

The political humor of the first book is remarkably relevant today. In Lilliput, Gulliver is visited by Reldresal, principal secretary for private affairs, who explains that the country is plagued by political partisanship. He tells Gulliver that “for about seventy moons past there have been two struggling parties in this empire, under the names of Tramecksan and Slamecksan, from the high and low heels of their shoes, by which they distinguish themselves.” It is thought that the king favors the low heels, because “his majesty’s imperial heels are lower at least by a drurr than any of his court (drurr is a measure about the fourteenth part of an inch).”

The best is yet to come. The two parties are so at odds, they cannot even dine together. The high heels have more numbers, but the low heels have all the power. But this might change because the king’s son, the heir to the crown, has “one of his heels … higher than the other, which gives him a hobble in his gait.” The wife of the actual heir to the crown is known to have found this passage hilarious when the Travels were published. Reldresal goes on to relate the terrible religious civil wars Lilliput has experienced, all because of a dispute about whether an egg ought to be cracked at the big end or the little end. The real twist comes when we are told the religious text that inspires this dispute: “that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.”

In each of Gulliver’s first three voyages, this deceptive simplicity creates great pleasure. When the King of Lilliput’s palace catches fire, and Gulliver has the quick-thinking idea of urinating on it, we can conclude, as my old college tutor said, that Swift doesn’t mind pissing on the palace. But the humor becomes darker as we keep traveling. In Brobdingnag, the queen and her dwarf get a good deal of coarse enjoyment from bullying Gulliver (who is a dwarf to them). Several times, while the queen is diverted, Gulliver is in jeopardy. When, in the third voyage, he meets the wizards who can call up any shade of the dead at command, one of the requests Gulliver makes is political.

I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large Chamber, and a modern Representative in Counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an Assembly of Heroes and Demy-Gods, the other a Knot of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen, and Bullies.

Now the comic twist at the end is unfunny. To call the English Parliament “a Knot of Pedlars, Pick-pockets, and Highwaymen” is good sport, and the sort of thing that modern so-called satirists still fill their days with. The final addition of “Bullies” has the same effect of bringing a twist to the list, but now it is a sharp turn away from humor. Swift jokes, but he really means it. In a poem written toward the end of his life, Swift says he “lashed the vice.” In passages like this, one chuckles along and then feels the lash at the end.

This is an inversion of the earlier pattern. In the first part of the Travels, what is serious becomes hilarious, whereas more and more in the third part, what is funny becomes grim. On arrival in Laputa, Gulliver observes the practice of flapping. The Laputans are so absorbed in their abstract speculations that unless a servant flaps them in the face with a bladder full of peas, “they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others.” There are many stories from history of the great men of ideas who are unable to complete basic tasks, like J. S. Mill being unable to flag a taxi or find a seat on a train without much dithering and worrying. Swift’s humor takes the Laputans to a great extreme of this comic trope.

And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel.

Kennel here means gutter and has the usual Swiftian effect – the humor builds slowly but unrelentingly toward that final image of the “intense speculator” being washed up in the gutter. But the joke cannot last long. Real human misery results from this sort of narrow inwardness. As he tours Laputa, Gulliver meets with a set of horrors.

Their houses are very ill built, the walls bevel, without one right angle in any apartment; and this defect arises from the contempt they bear to practical geometry, which they despise as vulgar and mechanic; those instructions they give being too refined for the intellects of their workmen, which occasions perpetual mistakes. And although they are dexterous enough upon a piece of paper, in the management of the rule, the pencil, and the divider, yet in the common actions and behaviour of life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people, nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music.

And their worries about the heavens given them a perpetual anxiety.

These people are under continual disquietudes, never enjoying a minute’s peace of mind; and their disturbances proceed from causes which very little affect the rest of mortals. Their apprehensions arise from several changes they dread in the celestial bodies: for instance, that the earth, by the continual approaches of the sun towards it, must, in course of time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us.

Swift mocks – but do we laugh? These worries mean the Laputans cannot sleep quietly nor “have any relish for the common pleasures” of life. The first thing they ask each other in the morning is about the sun’s health. They have a deeply irrational appetite for these speculations even though it keeps them in a state of angst. Swift writes: “This conversation they are apt to run into with the same temper that boys discover in delighting to hear terrible stories of spirits and hobgoblins, which they greedily listen to, and dare not go to bed for fear.” Again, this has the quality of a joke, but it is by now getting too dark for us to enjoy it in the same manner as the absurdities of Lilliput. When Gulliver descends from the flying island of Laputa to the town of Lagado below, conditions are truly miserable.

The next morning after my arrival, he took me in his chariot to see the town, which is about half the bigness of London; but the houses very strangely built, and most of them out of repair. The people in the streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. We passed through one of the town gates, and went about three miles into the country, where I saw many labourers working…. I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want.

This is all drawn straight from the life of Ireland that Swift observed around him every day. The firm and common-sensical Christianity that lies just under all he writes was profoundly offended by the terrible human misery caused by England’s political domination of Ireland – the British government was like Laputa, hovering over its dominions, threatening to crush them, leaving the people starving, wild, and in rags. Swift is still lashing the vice, and it isn’t funny. His simple prose has become a means of indignation. The problem at hand isn’t complicated and requires no clever writing.

In the final voyage, to the land of the ultra-rational Houyhnhnms, this movement from laughter to horror is brought to a more vicious conclusion than anything else Swift wrote. He is famous today for the viciously satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal, in which, irate at Ireland being so compliant with English domination, and irked by his own exhortations having no effect, he advises people to eat their babies as a food substitute. A Modest Proposal is wickedly satirical, though there is a serious point being made that few can miss. But in the Travels, the satire gives way to the depiction of wickedness.

When Gulliver arrives in the Houyhnhnm country, he encounters the Yahoos, hairy, filthy creatures, part men, part monkey, who climb up in the trees and defecate all over him. They are base and vile, full of appetites and lacking reason. The Houyhnhnms, in contrast, are creatures of (supposed) pure reason, modeled on the tame horse in Socrates’s image of the soul in the Phaedrus. Gulliver is a gull for the idea that the Yahoos are despicable and the Houyhnhnms are ideal. He falls into a deep error of thinking that the Yahoos are inferior beings who are rightly enslaved. This happens because he knows himself to be something of a Yahoo. The Yahoos so resemble humans that one of them tries to sleep with Gulliver.

In his admiration for the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver loses all sense of morality. After he has lived among them for several years, Gulliver attends a “grand assembly” of the Houyhnhnms, at which they discuss “the only debate that ever happened in their country.” These supposedly rational beings have no word for lie, no concept of opinion, and never try to compel each other. And yet, “The question to be debated was, ‘whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?’”

The phrase “the face of the earth” echoes biblical references to genocide (Genesis 6:7: “I will destroy man who I have created from the face of the earth”) and the meaning here is unmistakable. Having enslaved the Yahoos, the rational Houyhnhnms also wish to exterminate them. Their rationality has led them to an extraordinary and vile hubris. Gulliver says, a few chapters earlier, that having seen the similarity between himself and the Yahoos, he came to lower his estimation of humankind as against the Houyhnhnms.

I must freely confess, that the many virtues of those excellent quadrupeds, placed in opposite view to human corruptions, had so far opened my eyes and enlarged my understanding, that I began to view the actions and passions of man in a very different light, and to think the honour of my own kind not worth managing.

No such reflection upon himself or the Houyhnhnms is made when he hears of their wish for genocide. Gulliver’s contribution is to suggest castrating the Yahoos rather than killing them outright. He becomes a willing participant in their enslavement and extermination.

I mentioned a custom we had of castrating Houyhnhnms when they were young, in order to render them tame; that the operation was easy and safe; that it was no shame to learn wisdom from brutes, as industry is taught by the ant, and building by the swallow (for so I translate the word lyhannh, although it be a much larger fowl); that this invention might be practised upon the younger Yahoos here, which besides rendering them tractable and fitter for use, would in an age put an end to the whole species, without destroying life.

We end the book feeling pity for Gulliver, rather than repulsion. He is mistaken, naive, irrational, and something of a fool. But at this moment, he is reprehensibly stupid. Swift, of course, speaks to us beyond Gulliver, satirizing the practices of his own society, and critiquing colonialism. What started as a joke has ended as an exhortation. Swift said he wrote the Travels to vex the world and, in his movement from hilarity to genocide, he has created a work of frustrated humor. The more we laugh to begin with, the sharper the turn at the end.

This piece was originally published on Plough. You can also find it on ’s Substack, .

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.

Welcome to PloughStack’s Possibilities. 

Educational Decline

Graduation season is upon us. We are happy for the grads, but the state of education is dire.

• New reporting from the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project shows a precipitous decline in reading and math scores in schools around America over the past ten years.

• While the pandemic certainly had an effect, the New York Times pointed out that the decline began before 2020.

  [M]any districts have experienced a long-term slump in student achievement, not just a blip during the pandemic. From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024. Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly. The new data shows that scores inched upward in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground.

AI and Education

• And now students are being hit with the AI revolution. A study from RAND shows that use of AI by middle and high school students is on the rise.

  Between May and December 2025, the percentage of middle school, high school and college students using AI for homework rose from 48% to 62%. The increase was driven largely by middle and high school students, as use among college students remained relatively steady.

• Because of the prevalance of AI, many teachers are having to reassess they way the assign work. As the New York Times reports:

  In the era of artificial intelligence, take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police for integrity that many educators have simply stopped assigning them. Instead, in a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read – the type of writing that AI struggles to credibly produce.

• Universities are also affected. After holding to their “Honor Code” for 133 years, Princeton University will now require all in-person exams to be proctored.

  The policy proposal cites AI and personal electronic devices as major catalysts behind the policy shift. “The ease of access of these [AI] tools on a small personal device have also changed the external appearance of misconduct during an examination,” it reads, making cheating “much harder for other students to observe (and hence to report).”

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;
Much favoured in my birthplace, and no less
In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,
I was transplanted ...

— The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Is Educational Revival Possible?

It’s hard to get past the negative headlines, but this is the newsletter where we try to put forward at least one or two positive possibilities. So, here’s to trying.

How is education saved from this decline? With the challenges that come with AI, how do schools and educators forge a path forward?

• One flourishing venture that we at Plough are proud to support is the Catherine Project. Each week, thousands of Catherine Project readers meet on Zoom or in person to discuss great works of literature, from Shakespeare, to Sophocles, to Confucius. As its founder wrote in our pages four years ago:

  In the world of institutional higher education, humanistic learning is ever more difficult to find. Perhaps it will help institutions to change their tune if movements like ours grow large enough. If they do not, we help to shape communities that do not depend on the university system alone for their intellectual engagement. Our studies benefit anyone, whatever their career path or lack thereof. Universities are wonderful, but they are not necessary in themselves for human flourishing.

• Since its founding, the project has grown, with the help of over 300 volunteers, to offer over 950 courses, serving nearly 5,658 unique readers from over fifty countries. Blogger is one of them:

  I’ve never been a book club person…. Even when another friend put together a non-fiction book club, I dabbled for a few weeks and then dropped out. But last week, I attended my first meeting of an online reading group…. When I browsed the catalog over the spring, a lot of [the Catherine Project’s] offerings, frankly, sounded awfully daunting, but I did find an eight week seminar on Wuthering Heights…. I don’t know that joining reading groups about old books is the answer for everyone, but you ought to try something.

• One thing Chat GPT cannot do is craftsmanship. Perhaps we need more trade schools teaching true craft that emphasizes quality and beauty. The American College of Building Arts (ACBA) does this. As writes:

  Rather than teach quick, easy processes with cheap materials, ACBA aims to train men and women to create and preserve beautiful, lasting structures. As you walk around its small campus underneath an overpass in downtown Charleston, you notice that the building is decorated with projects from students and professors. Architectural carpentry students made the entry doors. A chandelier made by blacksmiths hangs over the entryway. When I visited, students were working on a plaster installation. These final projects “proved” students belonged to the guild and could enter the workforce performing quality work worthy of respect.

• The Bruderhof’s high school, the Mount Academy, offers similar programs for high school students. continues:

  The Mount Academy is not a technical school or prep school; it’s also not a music conservatory or athletic powerhouse. Yet it is all of these things. Its philosophy consists of “head, heart, hands.” It offers students opportunities to grow into their full human capacities and interests; its classes and clubs include welding, dance, agriculture, environmental science, art history, woodworking, and culinary arts. Students may read Plato or Shakespeare during the morning and then participate in a more hands-on activity in the afternoon, such as constructing a modular house for Habitat for Humanity in the school parking lot.

• The College of Saint Joseph the Worker, a new school in Stuebenville, Ohio, looks to form students into “committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor.” ’s Emma Green recently profiled them:

  Students would take classes on subjects such as the New Testament, advanced geometry, and rhetoric, and earn a liberal-arts degree in Catholic studies. At the same time, they would specialize in one of four trades – carpentry, HVAC, electrical work, or plumbing – and work toward a certificate that signalled their expertise. The school was called the College of St. Joseph the Worker, named for Joseph, Mary’s husband and the patron saint of laborers.

Further Reading

• The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education. A cohort of educators make the case for liberal learning.

• Where Children Grow by Friedrich Froebel. The inventor of kindergarten offers wisdom on children’s education.

Plough-Share

Professor reviews Plough’s The Memoirs of Andre Trocme, the newly translated diary of a French pastor who resisted the Nazis and offered sanctuary to thousands of Jews facing deportation to concentration camps.

As I contemplate this long memoir, what strikes me is that the primary through-line is not the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, which occupied a relatively brief period of time in the life of André Trocmé. Even in the several chapters that deal with the war years, the rescue of Jews occupies a relatively small amount of the memoirist’s attention. It is as if it all occurs off-stage, and indeed, it did, by design — the Jews were hidden, secretly, in remote locations for the most part.

When Trocmé writes of the war years, we learn about so many other things, including pastoral struggles, issues with the local school, personality conflicts, family challenges, and local headaches. But above all we learn of the struggle to survive in a wartime environment first under collaborationist Vichy French officials, then under the thumb of the marauding Germans, then in prison, then back home but with the emergence of enemy paramilitaries, and then the rise of French resistance fighters (also quite dangerous), and then the chaos after D-Day, when it takes a scorecard to keep track of all the people with guns and all the stupid deaths.

This is a reminder that among the occupational hazards of studying the Holocaust is that one can tend to zero in so tightly on what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish people, or trying to do, in a given location, that you kind of forget everything else that was going on during a massive social and political and human crisis in the same place at the same time.

If one were to ask André Trocmé himself what his life was about, taken as a whole, it is clear that his answer would be his commitment to Christian nonviolence. Trocmé was constantly in trouble with someone — church authorities, political authorities, men with guns — because he would not hate whom everyone else hated, and he would not kill whom everyone else at that place and time said it was appropriate to kill. And he would not, as a pastor, allow anyone, from church or state, tell him what he could teach or preach about this or any other matter.

Read an excerpt from the memoir here.

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.

Welcome to PloughStack’s Possibilities. 

The Discourse

It’s a familiar story: social media has destroyed civil conversation; people can’t disagree agreeably anymore; everyone is siloed in their own way of thinking and never hears serious dissenting voices. It’s not wrong. But another story is true as well. Rhetoric has grown more vitriolic. Anger has become a social currency. And dishonesty is priveleged with clicks. This combination of apathy and outrage shapes much of our public culture.

• According to a Gallup poll, most Americans agree that political rhetoric has gone too far.

• In an essay for the New York Times, Iranian-American writer Nick Mafi explains how social media makes everything – tulips, bombs, face masks, nachos, and the dead – all carry the same weight.

  On the first Saturday morning in April I sat on my sofa in Brooklyn, drinking coffee, and watched the B1 bridge outside Tehran partly collapse on my phone. Iranian engineers had spent years building it.… An American bomb cut it in half while families nearby were celebrating Sizdah Bedar, the Persian holiday known as Nature Day. Reports say that at least eight people were killed.…

  Below that video, Instagram showed me an ad for a Dr. Dennis Gross anti-aging face mask. Below that, an old college classmate arranging tulips on her kitchen island. Below that, a nurse at a hospital in Tehran carrying newborns through the debris. Below that, a video of nachos and lobster rolls and everything else someone ordered at Yankee Stadium on opening day.

• argues that social media users are posting incorrect statements to garner engagement.

  There is a growing power to being wrong. If people enjoy criticising opinions that they don’t share, then chances are they will love the opportunity to correct someone who has made an error. That’s just basic human psychology: we are a pedantic species, prone to boorish condescension (especially on the internet). And it hasn’t taken long for creators (many of whom might just be pre-programmed bots, spewing content the way my dog sprays a lamppost) to realise that, in the great game of engagement, little errors perform very well.

• In a new paper, points out that social media is actually “parasocial media.”

  When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize ... Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated…. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.”

• However, none of this is a new problem. As Daniel Goodman explains, Søren Kierkegaard made similar criticisms of the media culture of his age.

  “A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity,” Kierkegaard writes. “Nothing ever happens, but there is immediate publicity everywhere.” Where earlier generations had to risk everything on decisive choices (good or bad), the reflective age thrives only in appearance – reacting, commenting, and circulating impressions in an endless loop.

• Public opinion, Kierkegaard suggests …

  functions like an acidic pool: every act and thought which enters it is dissolved into a uniform solution. What emerges is a flat, standardized output where nuance is reduced to metrics and authority is measured by the size of the count. What remains is not genuine collective life, but a mass of unreal individuals “held together as a whole,” yet “never united in any actual situation.”

  For Kierkegaard, the despotism of “the public” represents not democracy’s realization but its grotesque fulfillment: a leveling power that smooths out real differences in the name of equality and replaces personal responsibility with the mere illusion of engagement.

We are the hollow men 
We are the stuffed men 
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together 
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass 
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.

—“The Hollow Men,” by T. S. Eliot

Rebuilding Conversation

How do we move away from tabloid and clickbait and towards honest and meaningful social behavior?

• Kierkegaard thinks that we need a purpose that we care about passionately. As Daniel Goodman explains:

  What Kierkegaard sees as missing in the modern age is passion – not mere intensity of feeling, but a single, unifying purpose that gathers and orders a person’s whole life. Without such passion, existence breaks apart into disconnected fragments, each governed by its own narrow concerns. The virtues no longer form a coherent character; they wander separately, untethered from any central commitment. In this condition, even the possibility of true, wholehearted virtue – or even genuine sin – fades away, replaced by a confusion of contradictions, postures, and incompatible “principles.” Moral noise only increases, as each fragment insists on its own limited standard of right and wrong, with nothing higher to integrate them. As Kierkegaard remarks, “There is nothing for either the good or the bad to talk about, and yet for that very reason, people gossip all the more.”

• Kierkegaard suggests that “the true character born of ‘inwardness’” is a the antidote to a culture of vapidity and shallowness. As Goodman writes:

  Here, a self is sufficiently formed and unified to hold its shape, as if “engraved,” rather than constantly redrawn by shifting opinion….

  Kierkegaard … believed that the path forward was not to avoid self-conscious reflection but to go through it, to face it honestly. The true remedy was not to join the right faction or fine-tune the machinery of opinion, but to confront a deeper affliction. The true crisis was spiritual….

• He continues:

  The highest form of individuality, then, is not to stand apart from others but the courage to “stand alone before God.” He calls each of us by name as the distinct person he made. And this calling is not reserved for the brilliant, the heroic, or the rebellious; it is “equally near every person.” No one is excluded, because the very reason we exist as selves is to live in relation to God. God takes the “single individual” far more seriously than we dare to imagine. Before Him, the crowd dissolves, and only the individual stands – fully known, fully exposed.

“Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.”  — Saint Paul, The Letter to the Ephesians

• Kierkegaard has his successors. The cross-partisan organization Braver Angels works to foster spaces where this “highest form of individuality” can be brought out. As their former Chief of Staff, , describes:

  This is our pitch: a space for fruitful conflict, with an equal emphasis on both words. I’m proud of the work we do, but much of the credit belongs to our participants. Plato conceived the role of the teacher as helping students recollect what they already possess, and I think our debates work the same way. We offer a venue where students bring the best of themselves – I’m a midwife, not a ringmaster.

• ’s Lyceum Movement does similar work.

  In its time, the lyceum was a way for neighbors to form relationships around a common pursuit of learning. This is eminently good for a community. In the process of shared learning and intellectual exploration, trust and shared understanding grow, and a habit of cooperation in search of a shared good, the good of knowledge, is formed.

  In the midst of a confusing turmoil of online noise, the lyceum offers a place to think about first principles and about the stories we share. We hold lectures, panels, classes, and community conversations in a relaxed social atmosphere. Human beings have always needed this, whether in the Greek agora or a Boston tavern; we need a place to pursue the fundamental human desire to know with our neighbors.

• Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold, argued that differences clarify rather than divide, and true agreement comes only through the Holy Spirit.

  We have never found it disturbing when people have come to us representing convictions that differ from ours. On the contrary, that is more fruitful than if we had no chance to hear opposing ideas. We believe that a free exchange of ideas can help people to recognize the truth, thanks to a Spirit that does not originate with us human beings. Then, no matter how diverse our opinions may have been, through the ultimate truth we will all be united. Each one will bring from the storehouse of his earlier convictions those elements that are true, and he will find these again. And the more varied our different backgrounds are, the richer the fruits of this diversity will be. A united conviction can never be produced by forcing anyone to comply. Only the Holy Spirit with His power of inner persuasion leads people from freedom of opinions to true unity.

Further Reading

• Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Plough’s collection of the writings of the great Danish philosopher

• “Kierkegaard’s Attack on Cultural Christianity,” Daniel Goodman’s previous piece for Plough

Plough-Share

Reader Jeffrey Moore responds to ’s essay, “The Weight of a Tender Conscience”:

This is an issue that I have struggled with for years mostly due to my natural disposition and tendencies, but at times aggravated by the church even when a gospel of grace is clearly taught. I have in mind those times when books like Don't Waste Your Life (Piper) or Radical (Platt) were making the rounds when I was a young Christian in college or those books on personal holiness like Not Even a Hint (Harris) that contributed to a hyper-scrupulosity. I don't blame those books and much good came about from them and admittedly my disposition could skew their impact on me and I imagine for others too. It has been helpful in the last few years to see more writing like this article that help highlight something I suspect many suffer with and help to cast a clearer vision for what ordinary, faithful Christianity looks like.

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

For as long as men have marched off to war, they have called on their gods to justify the use of force – and that holds just as true for the Israelites of the Old Testament as for the Greeks of Homer’s epics. Christians, too, have long upheld this tradition, eagerly appropriating divine inspiration for the battle at hand and protection for their troops while praying for death and destruction to rain down on their enemies.

Given this history, it’s no surprise that voices at the Department of War have described the ongoing conflict with Iran as a “crusade” for Jesus on par with the crusades of the Middle Ages – in other words, a “godly” mission, even if it might necessitate (so it has also been said) the destruction of an entire civilization. Nor is it any surprise that such a claim has brought an ancient controversy back to the fore: the never-ending question over what constitutes a just war – and whether, for followers of the Prince of Peace, there can even be such a thing.

Personally, it has also had me thinking about those original crusaders, as illustrated in the storybooks of my childhood: those horsemen in shining armor who rode off from exotic cities like Canterbury and Florence – steeds whinnying and pennants flying – and crossed the Mediterranean and the deserts of the Levant to liberate Jerusalem from the infidels and claim it for Christ. That was always the gist. Even Selma Lagerlöf’s beautiful legend The Sacred Flame hewed to it, ignoring the inconvenient realities of bloodshed and homing in on the main character’s zeal for the Lord.

There was, however, one memorable exception: a book on the life of Francis of Assisi, which summarized the story of how this gentle friar traveled to the Middle East on a very different mission, and with very different results. Years later, as a history teacher, I came across fuller, more nuanced accounts of what really happened when, in 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, this courageous saint crossed enemy lines and entered the Muslim encampment at Damietta in the Nile Delta to speak with Sultan Malik al-Kamil. Afterwards, Francis left Egypt with a most improbable victory – and left us with a powerful example of what dialogue between Christians and Muslims can look like.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, let me recommend Paul Moses’s brilliant 2009 book, The Saint and the Sultan. A journalist, Moses became fascinated with what he calls the “the very long view” on Christian-Muslim relations in the aftermath of 9/11, as the Bush administration’s Iraq war was gaining steam, and found Francis and the Sultan to be deserving subjects for his research. For a less academic, more poetic approach, check out Elizabeth’s Goudge’s classic spiritual biography of Francis, My God and My All.

If you’re skeptical about how applicable such an ancient story might be vis-à-vis the complexities of today’s world, so was Moses. And yet, as he convincingly argues, we dismiss such unlikely twists and turns of history at our peril. As he said in a 2017 interview in Commonweal:

I think one has to be careful about taking events from the distant past and applying them to the present, but I do see a lot of value in holding up Sultan al-Kamil as a model for Muslims and Francis for Christians.

I think Francis offers a certain method of peacemaking … that can be applied to any dispute, including a geopolitical one. I once met a friar in Assisi who had arranged separate meetings with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev before a summit in the 1980s, urging each man to see the other as a human being. He adopted the method from Francis’s example in Egypt.

Another short excerpt from Moses’s interview that bears quoting here jumped out at me because of its relevance for today. Reminding us of the futility of standing on the sidelines and lobbing criticism at policymakers, whether in Washington, DC, or anywhere else, he suggests that each of us has a role to play in working for world peace:

We have to get to know people who differ from us. Otherwise, nothing will change. We don’t need to wait for leaders of government, church, or the punditocracy to do that for us, either. It’s something individuals can do, and if enough of us do it, we’ll see the boundaries start to fade. I guess I am an optimist, but I think that can apply to race relations, or to political divisions.

Moving on from Saint Francis, there are plenty of other, more recent attempts to quench the ancient fires of political and religious tension that bear contemplating. One that has long fascinated me is the story of the Tibhirine monks of Algeria as told by filmmaker Xavier Beauvois in his prize-winning 2010 docudrama Of Gods and Men. On the one hand, it movingly depicts the way a group of French Trappists built up a thriving community in their adopted country – and an oasis where countless Muslim indigenes found spiritual succor, educational opportunities, and free medical care. On the other, it raises unsettling questions about the cost of laying down one’s life for one’s brothers, and the meaning of that thorny injunction in the Sermon on the Mount about blessing one’s persecutors.

For another take on the same story, see this excerpt from Johann Christoph Arnold’s book Why Forgive? (Plough, 2015). Focusing on Christian de Chergé, the prior of the group, this retelling includes excerpts from the remarkable letter he wrote to the radical Islamists whom he correctly predicted would one day kill him.

To anyone familiar with my community – an Anabaptist branch from the tree of the so-called historic peace churches (think Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites) – it may seem obvious that we would admire the legacy of such forebears as Francis of Assisi and Christian de Chergé. Unbelievably enough, one of our own – Eberhard Arnold, the founder of the Bruderhof – began his spiritual journey as a stalwart German who not only defended his country’s declaration of war in August 1914, but celebrated that conflict as a reflection of the Kaiserreich’s highest values and a divinely inspired battle against the supposed spiritual and cultural inferiority of anything non-German (and especially all things English).

Earlier that summer, Arnold had been preparing a book for publication. When war first broke out, it was almost ready to send to the printer. Now, however, he completely revised it, introducing strong nationalistic overtones. Titled Der Krieg: Ein Aufruf zur Innerlichkeit (The War: A Call to Inwardness), it was a patriotic invitation to contemplation, and its army-gray cover sported a billowing cross-bearing flag – the German imperial standard. The first chapter opened with a claim that the war was a “crucial battle for freedom of conscience.”

Fast-forward to the end of the war four years later, and Arnold, who later disavowed such a stance as “the greatest nonsense,” had turned from ardent patriot to even more ardent pacifist.

Chief among the influences that changed him and his wife, Emmy, were personal experiences of suf­fering connected to the war. For one thing, her sister, a decorated war nurse who worked near the front, saw the agony of the wounded on a daily basis, and the finality of death on the operating table.

Aside from this, in 1915, Arnold’s older brother, a soldier, was fatally wounded, leav­ing a young widow and a son. In 1918, his wife lost her brother (also a soldier) to tuberculosis.

Then there was Arnold’s volunteer work with the Relief Action Committee. A student counselor, he made regular visits to army hospitals – and often emerged shaken. As Emmy recounted in her memoirs, “He was often extremely depressed when he came home, and told us of the suffering, the anguish, the torment­ed consciences, and the various atrocities the veterans had described to him.” Speaking for both, she added that “the questioning voice of our own consciences was becoming clearer and more audible too. How could it be possible for a Christian – indeed, for any human being – to take part in the mass murder that people call war?”

In a public lecture Arnold delivered in November 1917, he stated that “Satan himself” was instigator of the war. Less drastically but perhaps more significantly, he began to rework his book to remove its nationalistic overtones. The following July, a new edition appeared. The title was now Innenland (Inner Land), and the packaging was different too. Instead of an imperial flag, the dark green cover bore a golden phoenix, the ancient symbol of resurrection and rebirth.

By 1920, the year the Arnolds established what is now known as the Bruderhof, they had both become outspoken pacifists. But that was only part of the story: in searching for a deeper, more holistic understanding of what the discipleship of Christ entails, both had become certain that it could never mean merely living a life in opposition to the evils of the day – whether militarism, materialism, or anything else. Following Jesus had to mean building up something positive in place of those things; and it was this conviction that led them to build up a communal life rooted in the vision of the peaceable kingdom prophesied by Isaiah. To them, as to us who now live in the community they founded, this seemed to be the most decisive response, whenever and wherever a government rattles the sabers and calls for blood.

Speaking of putting one’s energies into a new way of living, rather than simply protesting old ways, the seventeenth-century Quaker George Fox once admonished his fellow believers to “be patterns, be examples in all countries and places, wherever you go, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people and that you may walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone you meet.” A few years earlier, he had written (to the English Crown, no less) in a similar vein, saying that his aim was to “dwell in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.” In other words, to oppose war by addressing the root causes of conflict – lust, greed, and violence – within oneself.

As we engage in that continuing inner battle, whether apart, as individuals, or together, as churches and communities, coalitions and movements, it goes almost without saying that wars and rumors of wars will continue to dominate the headlines. Jesus himself indicated this. But he can’t possibly have meant to excuse us for folding our arms in weariness or resignation. After all, he called on his followers to be peacemakers and said that one day the meek will inherit the earth.

That’s what I’m holding out for, and I’m sure millions of others are too: the day when (back to that vision of Isaiah) a little child shall lead the way into a new order of creation where the wolf lies down with the lamb, and (why not ask for more while we’re at it?) a new society arises where Christians, Jews, and Muslims – all earth’s peoples, regardless of race or creed – live at peace with one another.

And so, to conclude, let me offer just one more quote: a favorite from Daniel Berrigan that revisits the theme I opened with – the human tendency to call on God to defend one’s actions – and reflects the sort of bold resistance that is part and parcel of striving for a new world:

In the name of the Gospel, I condemn today the speech of power politics, the speech of military murder, the language of religious mystification, all language that indicates the death of the mind, the studied obscenity, the speech that pretends to human dignity and truth while in fact it brings down the world. And I recommend in the name of the Gospel modesty and loyalty, the springs in the desert; all the hidden efforts of unseen men and women to live with human indifference, to bear with crisis, to bind up wounds, to be patient and long-suffering.

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.

Welcome to PloughStack’s Possibilities. 

The Revival That Wasn’t

The last year has brought much talk of a religious revival and a return to Christianity in both the United States and in the United Kingdom. But over the last months, that narrative has lost some of its steam.

• The report detailing a “quiet revival” in the United Kingdom was pulled after researchers found flawed results.

  YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were “fraudulent.” It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error.

• A report by Axios from 2025 predicts a high number of church closures in the United States.

  The US could see an unprecedented 15,000 churches shut their doors this year, far more than the few thousand expected to open, according to denominational reports and church consultants. The unprecedented contraction, expected to continue over the next decade, risks leaving gaps in communities nationwide – particularly rural ones, where churches often are crucial providers of food aid, childcare and disaster relief.

• In The Atlantic, writes that even while demographic data shows that the departure of young people from the church is slowing, they are still departing.

  Younger Americans are the least religious age group by many metrics. Members of Gen Z are less likely than people in other generations to profess belief in God without doubts.… Gen Zers are also the least likely to attend religious services regularly and the most likely to never attend them. Many weren’t brought up religious, and many of those who were have left the faith. Only 28 percent of adults born in the 2000s to highly religious families remain highly religious, according to Pew. And despite the claim that Gen Z men are leading a resurgence in traditional Christianity, they in fact are simply leaving the Church at a slower rate than women are.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear,
And naked shingles of the world. 

—“Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold

Rebuilding the Vanishing Church

What are some practical steps to take to hold back the “long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith? We interviewed demographers and to get their insights.

• Perhaps, incorporating more religious activities at home will help.

  : For a parent who attends church regularly and says religion is very important, the amount of religious activities they’re doing at home with their kid – such as leading prayers and talking about the faith – still predicts a 25-percentage point difference in the odds that the child as an adult is still in the faith … Just bringing the kids to church is not enough. Ultimately religion is a product of the hearth.…

  If nothing happens at home, kids don’t stick around. But for kids who attend church regularly and whose parents lead religious activities at home more than three times a week … retention rates through age thirty are over 90 percent.

• Or maybe it’s marriage.

  : Marriage is the big thing that alters people’s religious identification one way or the other. There’s a tendency to see this as a shallow conversion.... But as someone who converted around the time of my marriage, allow me to speak a word in defense of converting for a hot babe.

  People didn’t fall in love with Jesus first because of his teachings. They fell in love with him because he fed them and healed them and did good things. That is, they fell in love with a man and then they came to believe what he taught. In a similar way, I think most of us have had the experience of a disagreement with our spouse – a disagreement that with anyone else would be a nonstarter; you wouldn’t even listen. But when it’s your spouse, you have to listen. And sometimes, you’re persuaded…. I think that’s what’s really going on with “romance conversions.”

• Perhaps, encouraging Christian behavior will help.

  : Belief isn’t necessarily what brings people into church. When we ask people what their belief in Jesus was when their church attendance went down from one life stage to the next, their belief barely changed. They didn’t stop going because they stopped believing.

  They still believe. It’s just that something else happened in their life to make them stop going. There’s this idea that people will believe and then they’ll start behaving. But this is backwards. They start behaving and then they start believing over time. That’s the pattern.

• Loving your non-Christian neighbor might be a first step.

  : Often humans are not persuaded by rational things. They are only able to listen to the argument once the person who’s making it really matters to them. Love is a key door through which people encounter new ideas and can take them seriously.

• Perhaps, part of the solution is closing stores on Sunday.

  : Blue laws, which are laws restricting what businesses can operate on Sundays, have a known effect of increasing religious attendance. A recent study tracked the relationship between declining religious attendance and “deaths of despair” by drugs, alcohol, or suicide. It found that the uptick in deaths of despair was preceded by declining rates of church attendance – and that those rates were affected by when states repealed their blue laws. If you allow stores to sell alcohol and be open on Sundays, fewer people attend church.

• : “Having kids and keeping them in the faith…”

  …is the easiest way to keep your religion viable for generations of people. Trying to convert people to religion is insanely difficult, no matter how much money you throw at it, no matter how much training you give. I mean, Latter-day Saints do more evangelism than anybody else, and their evangelism rates are pitifully low. Those Mormon missionaries who go on two-year trips have an average of two to four total conversions in their entire two-year mission. You are not going to convert your way out of a fertility crisis.

• A church’s beliefs might help, also.

  : Why did the mainline get old? It’s because they didn’t have a lot of babies. And why didn’t they have a lot of babies? Partially because they adopted beliefs and values that were consistent with a smaller family size. They became more tolerant of the broad category of sexual nontraditionalism – sex outside of marriage, delayed marriage, eventually LGBTQ identity and behavior, abortion, things like that. These denominations developed low fertility rates in response to specific choices about social positions.

  It is worth reflecting on if churches ate their seed corn. As you would expect from the fact that most people don’t make huge conversions, denominational growth or decline in the long run is mostly predicted by fertility. And fertility behaviors in the long run are mostly predicted by a denomination’s position on a set of social values around sex and family. There is a real substantive inevitability that “liberal religion” is not long-run sustainable.

• Maybe getting creative about evangelism is part of the solution:

  : When we were missionaries in Quebec, one of our most effective evangelism programs was a Google ad campaign we ran for people in Montreal. When they would Google things like “I’m lonely” or “I’m sad,” it would put up an ad for our church saying, “Hey, would you like to talk to a pastor?” We got so many emails, and ultimately several people converted and joined the church and became active members who tithed and ran for church offices.

Plough-Share

responds to ’s column on making your job time-travel-proof:

I know this is meant to be, uh, provocative, but I do wonder what's wrong with the idea of education that helps you adapt to new work. (I don't think this is the most valuable reason to student philosophy, but phil undergrads often do well at a variety of careers.)

Part of what's interesting about humans is the way we can do many things: one can be a radiologist who writes poetry, a lawyer who writes theology, and so on. So I don't see this as flitting from one skill set to another, I see this as expressing a human capacity to learn and grow and apply different skills at different times.

It also seems to me that the phenomenon of someone having a very narrow professional skill is pretty modern. I think I'm a better software engineer because of my philosophy background, and I hope that if I need some new way of making money, that my experience will be valuable. I think it's harder when humans are trained on very specific skills. If you only know how to make a certain widget, or you've been a longshoreman and the docks are closing, it's tough – I don’t know the answer, but also this is not at all a new problem.

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a PloughStack column.

These five words were the death of tens of thousands of millennial arts careers ambitions – spoken by mentors, parents, girlfriends, gurus, and pot noodle eating immersive theater set designers desperate to actually be able to start chipping away at their student debt and possibly one day afford daycare and diapers: You should learn to code.

It is very obvious, at the moment, that you should not learn to code. You should not have learned to code. There will be no jobs that you can get with that skill. You would have been far better sticking with your immersive theater set design ambitions.

The whole approach was wrong. Being realistic was a bad idea. Figuring out what skills you would need in the future was apparently a foolish endeavor because the thing about AI is that you don’t need any skills in the future, or rather, there is a default future to which you are being pushed if you are not a total weirdo in which you will not need skills to do any job you may have to do, which means that people won’t pay you much to do that job.

And the 2010 approach – well yes we can see that we don’t know what skills will be needed in The Twenty First Century Workplace so we will instead focus on teaching kids to Learn How To Learn so that they can Leanly and Agilely Pivot – is equally disastrous, in part because it’s not how the human life cycle is designed. We are not designed to flit from one entire skillset to another, one entire field to another, chasing the Current Thing, until finally that last new Thing comes out and we realize that we are too old to reskill once again and so we have to sell ourselves as protein to younger people, or whatever the endgame is in this vision of a working life (it’s unclear to me.) We’re instead meant to go from apprentice to journeyman to master in whatever our work is, getting better and better, getting wiser, so that when we are old masters and training the next generation of apprentices, we have something to give. The obligation of piety that the youth have towards the aged is meant to be a natural and economically sensible response.

The solution here is obviously to become a total weirdo.

I have a suggestion as to how precisely to do this: a career planning framework that I genuinely think will serve you in better stead than anyone who is currently in your inbox saying bro please just pay me $99 to teach you how to prompt LLMs bro please just trust me, you have to claim dominion, this is for the kingdom, if you don’t learn to use these tools then the woke left will force you into a reeducation camp and also something very bad will happen that has to do with China.

My proposition is simple: You should time travel proof your career.

If there’s a job or skill or career that you can do and get paid for, ish, now, and could have also done in 1750 in London, and ideally could have also done in 400 in Cappadocia, you’re good to go. That means no, don’t be a data engineer. What is that. No one knows what that is.

What follows is my list of Time Travel Proof Careers.

• Cook

• Actor/other performer

• Priest

• Doctor

• Midwife

• Magazine journalist (this sneaks in just under the wire; Addison and Steele started the Spectator in I think 1709 or so)

• Novelist

• Writer of learned treatises

• Librarian

• Artist

• Farmer/Rancher/Gardener

• Bartender/innkeeper/waitress

• Lawyer (unfortunately)

• Any of the various kinds of Smiths or Wrights or equivalent (blacksmith, coppersmith, wainwright, cooper, cobbler, tailor, jeweler, tentmaker, carpenter, and so on)

• Hairdresser

• Spy

• Servant

• Sailor

• Any kind of Monger or equivalent (cheese, coster, fish, iron; also any other kind of shopkeeper)

• Teacher of any kind

• Architect/Builder

• Dairymaid

• NB Gadfly does not count; you can of course be a gadfly in any age but it is not a job and you should not expect to get paid for it; if however you would like to be paid for a similar career, you can always be a Sophist.

(For another perspective on this, read Rory Groves’ book, Durable Trades.)

Anyway, that’s my list. It is incomplete; I admit that. And yes there are things on it (eg. Lawyer) that are among the professions that you keep hearing are about to disappear. But I must stick to my method: there were lawyers when our Lord walked the streets of Jerusalem, and I think there will be lawyers until He returns.

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

Welcome to ’s Possibilities.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

It’s Holy Week, and millions of people around the globe are living through war.

• The war in Iran shows no signs of slowing down with Kurdish forces poised to attack on the Western border of the country.

  “We just have to put our boots on, and we’re ready,” said Rebaz Sharifi, a commander of forces under the Kurdistan Freedom Party. His party is one of several Iranian Kurdish groups driven from their homes throughout four decades of insurgent efforts against Iran.

• argues that the mafia-esque structure of Iran’s government keeps it in control.

  Iran’s sprawling security apparatus isn’t solely held together by ideology. It is underpinned by a system of economic incentives that make the regime’s collapse a direct threat to the livelihood of its acolytes.

  Since its founding, the Islamic Republic has built a tentacled ecosystem that controls more than half of the economy and acts as a powerful protection policy for the regime. It rewards loyalists with cash and careers and other opportunities in exchange for crushing dissent and staying true to the regime, say academics and analysts who study the Iranian regime.

• Gaza, Ukraine, and other war zones also drag on with no end in sight. Are these interminable wars the new reality? argues that they are.

  The proliferation of cease-fires in the place of lasting settlements is a symptom of the pessimistic politics of our time. We have become so acclimatized to the age of forever wars that we seem to have forgotten to hope for true peace — that is, a positive peace, a peace with justice.

• As Christ described in his prayer over Jerusalem, the world is full of violence and division.

  O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

  (Matt. 23:37—39, ESV)

In the face of all this conflict and suffering, prayer is needed more than ever. We need to “put off sense and notion,” as Eliot writes, and “kneel where prayer has been valid.”

Pray Without Ceasing

• Ukrainian theologian grapples with the purpose of his unanswered prayers for peace in Ukraine.

  We’re doing the same thing as the ancient psalmists – questioning God’s silence and wrestling with the hard questions. What do you do with your faith when prayers for a just peace seem to go nowhere? How do you make sense of God’s ways when you’ve been crying out for protection for four years and it feels like he’s not listening? How do you take those unanswered prayers and let them build your faith instead of destroying it?…

  Perhaps unanswered prayers aren’t divine rejection but sacred invitations – calling us beyond simple prosperity into deeper partnership with God’s mysterious purposes? Jesus, how do we discover that your silence often cradles your most profound responses in the long nights of our souls and seemingly unheard prayers for peace?

• Ellen Koneck recounts the pain of trying to pray after the death of her brother.

  I suppose I knew that God was in the dark room with me, or was the dark room, surrounding me. I knew that God sat, quiet, still, almost absent, almost dead, inaudible breath but yet alongside me. God who died and teeters near death with us. God who mourned and continues to mourn with us. My only God, the only God I could bear or bother with. I beckon her, my former, faithful self, to join me here, to trade in language and ritual and everything we’ve known for this beatific blackness.

• Dorothy Day writes that prayer is a fitting response to every situation.

  I have been overcome with grief at times, and felt my heart like a stone in my breast, it was so heavy, and always I have heard, too, that voice, “Pray.”

  What can we do? We can pray. We can pray without ceasing, as Saint Paul said. We can say with the apostles, “Lord, teach me to pray.” We can say with Saint Paul, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” (Acts 9:6).

• describes the new found faith of Blaise Pascal

  The first thing apparent in Pascal’s new intensity of faith is an instinct to pray…

  The whole account is in the form of a prayer. Pascal’s is an encounter, not with the God of the philosophers, the divine architect of the universe, a God at the end of a logical argument, but the God of Jesus Christ, who, as C. S. Lewis once put it, is “alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband.”

• Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel pushes us to see prayer as more than just an intellectual exercise:

  The goal of prayer is not to translate a word but to translate the self; not to render an ancient vocabulary in modern terminology, but to transform our thoughts into thoughts of prayer. Prayer is the soul’s imitation of the spirit, of the spirit that is contained in the liturgical words.

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Father Zossima reminds us to

  be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it that will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education …

  At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of people’s sin, and asks oneself whether one should use force or love and humility. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once and for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

Plough-Share

Reader Susan Lipps reflects on Karen Kilby’s essay on how Christians ought to respond to the church’s decline with a metaphor from the world of viticulture:

Every year, the farmer (vinedresser) cuts off branches that have served their purpose. They have been fruitful. But, here's the thing: the farmer always leaves two buds at the base of the cane for the next year's harvest. There is a particular sadness in seeing the canes piled up in the middle of the rows and the vine standing bare and exposed. But, if you get up close, you will notice that the farmer has been quite careful in the pruning to leave hope for the future harvest. There is much more to say, but holding sadness and hope together is seen in this metaphor. We can hold them both together, and they do not cancel each other out.

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

Welcome to ’s Possibilities.

Religion Is Still Declining

Despite recent news of a return to faith in America, rates of religion are still declining.

A recent Gallup poll shows that the number of those who say religion is important in their life is declining while the number who say it has little importance continues to rise.

Almost 30 Percent of the population of the US identifies as having no religion.

The long-term decline in the Christian share of the population and growth of religious “nones” is demographically broad-based. There are fewer Christians and more “nones” among men and women; people in every racial and ethnic category; college graduates and those with less education; and residents of all major regions of the country.

documents the decline in religion in his new book, The Vanishing Church.

Churches that occupy the middle space are quickly becoming few and far between. And there’s little reason to believe that the declines will slow down. According to their own records, half of the members of the Episcopal Church have celebrated their 65th birthday, while just 13 percent of members are under the age of eighteen.

considers the decline in his mainline denomination, which is not unlike many other denominations.

I am thirty-two years old, and the church in which I am ordained, the Episcopal Church, has a mandatory retirement age of seventy-two, meaning that I have up to forty years of ministry ahead of me. I fully expect my denomination to be nearly unrecognizable at the time I reach retirement age. Our denomination is overwhelmingly old and white, and mostly made up of small churches in parts of the country that are not growing; our failures at evangelism and retaining the people born in our church mean that demographers predict that our numbers will hit zero around 2040.

“Spiritual but Not Religious”

While institutionalized religion is declining, spiritual belief of some kind remains:

• 86% believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.

• 83% believe in God or a universal spirit.

• 79% believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can’t see it.

• 70% believe in an afterlife (heaven, hell or both).

Becoming the Creative Minority

introduces our new issue, After Religion:

Despite their demographic insignificance, [the first Christians] possessed a remarkable confidence. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger put it (borrowing a phase from Arnold Toynbee), they were a “creative minority,” whose power lay not in numbers but in their spiritual vitality and transformed lives….

Christians today, if demoralized, can take courage from these forerunners in the faith. Church decline and the de-Christianization of culture and social institutions are painful and, from a Christian perspective, plainly bad for human beings. But, according to our faith, they aren’t the end of the story. Today, as always, our vocation remains the same: to live already now as citizens of the New Jerusalem.

In her essay for After Relgion, Karen Kilby points beyond strategy for the church’s salvation:

It’s sad, dispiriting, and depressing at times to see diminishment in the churches around us. But sadness and bleakness can never be the whole story. We do what we have it in us to do, we appreciate and rejoice in the elements of new growth and possibility we can detect even in the midst of diminishment, and finally, we trust that the Holy Spirit will not abandon the church. We know that its ultimate future, together with the future of all things and all manner of things, does not depend on our own best analyses and strategies.

also points towards hope:

I don’t know what my church body will look like when I retire, or how many of the congregations … will still exist. The scope of the crisis sometimes feels too heavy to bear. But Jesus makes it all worthwhile. Amidst the trials of ministry today, I have so many precious stories of God’s grace and power, tenderness and love, both in my life and in the lives of those I have served as pastor. Our God is good and he is faithful, even when we are faithless. To paraphrase the old hymn, his grace has brought his church this far and his grace will bring it home.

Also in our new issue, Galen Watts describes the work that being the “creative minority” takes. And it’s not a new struggle for Christians:

In the world we inhabit today, to live by the gospel requires principled conviction, concerted discipline, and purposeful community. In a sense, the task is much harder than it once was. And this is indeed a sobering thought. Yet it’s worth remembering that Christianity emerged into a world not unlike our own – where jealous gods warred for our attention and loyalty. Thus, in a deeper sense, it is no harder now than it ever was to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

A pope and a prophet? Pope Benedict XVI acknowledges the problem of the decline of religion, but argues that a church of faith will emerge:

From the crisis of today, the Church of tomorrow will emerge – a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning….

In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a smaller society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members….

But the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world…. I am certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power … but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.1

Plough-Share

responds to King Ho Leung’s piece about Marx's critique of religion:

King-Ho Leung’s argument with Marx’s view of religion is the predictable one; like most, it repeats part of the latter’s most famous utterance – that religion is “the opiate of the people” – but takes it out of context by ignoring the important sentence that precedes it in which Marx acknowledges that it is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Marx’s critique is not so much anti-theistic as anti-illusory; he goes on to aver that to the extent religion provides illusory happiness, it will eventually awaken the demand for real happiness. His point is well made. And well taken: given the historical state-sanctioned christianization of capitalism by the institutional church, it is hardly surprising that so many seekers for truth have grown disenchanted with (and often denounced) both down through the centuries out of a desire to better follow Christ.

Do you have any comments or questions – or new possibilities? Send them our way:

Leave a comment

Till next week!

“With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought,” wrote Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold. 

Welcome to Torrents, a  column. Our first piece is a Lent and Easter playlist from Chris Zimmerman.

When it comes to the visual arts, the tradition of bringing the Easter story to life is every bit as rich as that which celebrates Christmas. Dozens of great painters and sculptors have left us a crucifixion, a Pietá, or both.

When it comes to music, however, the scales swing decisively in favor of Christmas. Still, there are plenty of options for Easter, especially if we consider larger choral works. Aside from Parts II and III of Handel’s Messiah, and Bach’s settings of the Passion according to St. Matthew and St. John, he left two shorter tributes to Holy Week – the ravishing Palm Sunday cantata (BWV 182) and the equally beautiful cantata for Good Friday (BWV 4) – as well as his joyous, trumpet-studded Easter Oratorio.

Then there’s the Stabat Mater, a stirring thirteenth-century poem attributed to Jacopo da Todi which describes Christ’s anguish on the cross, and Mary’s as she watches him, and ends with an extended plea for mercy directed to both mother and son. Wikipedia lists more than sixty composers who have set this classic text to music. Two bear special mention here: Antonin Dvorak, who penned his version in the aftermath of unimaginable personal tragedy – the deaths of his first three children – and left us a setting notable for its dramatic force; and Emanuele d’Astorga, an obscure eighteenth century Sicilian. His version, while modest in scope, shines with a melodic and harmonic radiance that has earned it a devoted following.

Two other works that will reward the listener at this season are Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ (composed first for orchestra, and then reworked three times: for string quartet, for piano, and finally for soloists, chorus, and orchestra) – and Theodore Dubois’s oratorio by the same name. In addition to their heartfelt depiction of Christ’s suffering, both portray his promise of eternal life to the Good Thief, and the earthquake that convulsed Golgotha at the hour of his death.

As for carols and hymns, there seem to be far fewer for Lent and Easter, than for Advent and Christmas. To fill that gap, and to inspire an hour or two of contemplation (or relaxed listening) I cobbled together a playlist that highlights several personal favorites. If you’re ready to dive right in, the full playlist is below. For a more detailed introduction, keep reading.

My list opens with a piece that calls to mind Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem on what we now call Palm Sunday: Orlando Gibbon’s “Hosanna to the Son of David,” an early seventeenth century gem and a finely crafted example of polyphonic writing.

Next come two settings of “All In The April Evening,” a Victorian hymn from the English choral tradition. In it the writer, on seeing a flock of sheep, is reminded of the Lamb of God. The first setting is the original, for choir; the second is an arrangement for brass by one of the storied “colliery bands” that once dotted England’s industrial landscape and kept music – and a sense of community – alive in countless mining towns.

Three arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s poignant “Legend,” which relates an imaginative incident from the childhood of Christ, form the next set on my list. The first is for choir, in English translation; the second is a somber interpretation for brass. The third is a memorable rendition of the original, sung in Russian.

Next comes the “Merchant’s Carol,” a haunting oddity from The Oxford Book of Carols. In it a group of wayfarers comes across the crowd that welcomes Jesus into Jerusalem with loud hosannas – and later follows him to Golgotha. There, though he is now being mocked and humiliated as the “sport of men,” they are struck by his silent, noble bearing, and note that he was “most kingly dying.”

Also from The Oxford Book of Carols: another old English song, “The Moon Shines Bright.” Folk-like in its simplicity, it reminds us that “We shall never do for Jesus Christ / what he has done for us,” and that “The life of man is but a span / and cut down in its flower. / We’re here today, tomorrow gone, / the creatures of an hour.”

Jumping the Atlantic and several cultural divides, we come to the next two songs. Both traditional spirituals, they showcase the unparalleled artistry (and five-octave range) of the famed contralto Marian Anderson, first by means of “Ride On, King Jesus” and then by her dark, mournful delivery of “Were You There?”

It’s back to the Late Renaissance for the next piece, the final chorus of Heinrich Schütz’s 1666 Matthäuspassion (St. Matthew Passion). With solemn fervor rising from hearts pained by Christ’s sacrificial death, the choir thanks and praises him, then begs him to have pity “on us poor sinners.”

Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” might be the musical heart of Good Friday – it is easily the best- known setting of a fourteenth century Latin poem honoring the “one true body,” which, fatal injuries notwithstanding, deserves eternal glory. Eucharistic in tone, it speaks of Jesus as our nourishment at the hour of death.

Johannes Brahms takes the stage next, with two classics from the Romantic Era: “In Stiller Nacht” depicts Christ’s silent night of anguish at Gethsemane, under a pallid moon; and “Magdalena” recounts Mary Magdelene’s encounter, early on Easter morning, with the risen Christ.

Next on the list is a pillar of the Passiontide canon: “O Haupt Voll Blut und Wunden” (“O sacred head, now wounded”). A sturdy Lutheran tune still sung in churches worldwide, it will be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the chorales that punctuate Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

After this comes an old French carol, “Love Is Come Again.” If there is a song in this list for Holy Saturday (the day of Christ’s entombment), this would be it: the text is rife with biblical images – the grain of wheat that must be buried, and the new green shoot it sends forth, for example. It culminates in an expression of reassurance that “When our hearts are wintry, / grieving, or in pain, / Thy touch can call them / back to life again.”

“Christ Ist Erstanden” (“Christ Is Arisen”) is next. An ancient monastic chant, it was used by Bach as the compositional basis for his chorale “Christ Lag in Todesbanden” (“Christ Lay in Death’s Dark Prison”) and for his Good Friday cantata by the same name.

Once again jumping centuries and continents, the list takes us next to the middle of America’s folk revival, with Odetta’s “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down.” Sung one moment with a mellow, yearning ache, and the next with grit – even a touch of defiant rage – this number was recorded live at Carnegie Hall in April 1960, with the choir of Harlem’s Church of the Master providing the back-up vocals, and Bill Lee (Spike’s father) on the double bass. It’s hard to think of a more rousing testament to faith in the Resurrection – Jesus’, and that of the human body generally.

It’s back to Tchaikovsky for the next piece, “The Angel Cried Out.” Borrowing a text central to the celebration of Easter in the Orthodox tradition (and based on a passage from the Gospel of John), the composer takes us with Mary to Christ’s grave, first in the half-light of dawn, and then in the brightness of an angel who – compellingly depicted by high sopranos – addresses the weeping woman and exhorts her to rejoice, since “He is risen from the dead!”

Rounding out our playlist, we have a sprightly German number, “Die Ganze Welt” (“The whole bright world rejoices now”); a soaring Dutch hymn tune “This Joyful Eastertide,” whose text is a finely-wrought poem by the Cambridge vicar George Ratcliffe Woodward; and “The Lord is Ris’n Indeed.” A joyous anthem composed by William Billings (1746–1800) a Bostonian of humble origins with no formal musical training, it brims with the confidence of its final lines: “Thine’s all the glory, man’s the boundless bliss.”

Finally, there is Randall Thompson’s perennially popular “Alleluia” (1940), a mid-century masterpiece of a cappella choral writing. Especially for those who traditionally avoid alleluias during Lent and Holy Week, they are all the more the announcement of the joyful season that begins at Easter.

Happy listening. And if I missed any of your favorites, send me an email.

Learn about Plough.

Subscribe to our magazine.

Browse our books.

This week, Plough’s Spring issue, After Religion, launches online. For those of you that are print subscribers, your print copies should be arriving soon if they haven’t already. If you are not a print subscriber and would like to become one, here is a link to a 50-percent-off discounted subscription. If you are outside the US and Canada, go here to subscribe.

To whet your appetite for After Religion, I’ve put together an annotated table of contents for the issue. There is much to look forward to!

Subscribe to Plough for 50-percent-off

“What Comes After Religion” by Peter Mommsen

1700 years on from Constantine, the project to forge a Christian society is in retreat. reminds us that Christ taught that “the gates of hell will not prevail” against his church in the long run, because he is the Lord of history and will one day return to make all things new.

“It’s Not All Good, Man” by Karen Kilby

How should Christians respond to a church in decline? Some say that church decline is actually not that bad, that Christianity needs to return to its pre-Constantinian smallness to reflect Christ’s true teaching. Karen Kilby argues that such an approach is wrong.

“The God’s of Modernity” by Galen Watts

Today’s world is not disenchanted. It is furiously enchanted. makes the case that, although modernity may seem secular, it has just found new gods to worship.

“The Asbury Outpouring” by Timothy J. Keiderling

What has happened at Asbury Theological Seminary after the outpouring in 2023? Timothy J. Keiderling talks with the university’s president about the ongoing effects of the revival.

“The Critique of Religion” by King-Ho Leung

What if Christianity is not the religion we thought it was? King-Ho Leung points out that Christianity is both a religion and a critique of religion. It calls into question the ways we have come to take the existing order of the world for granted.

“Mother Mary in Cuba” by Margarita Mooney Clayton

After decades of Communist suppression of religion, still finds marks of faith in her mother’s homeland.

“Knowing What Time It Is” by John Ehrett

What will our politics look like after religion? The possibility that Christians may stand alone in the future, accepted by neither right nor left, no longer seems far-fetched. argues that any victory for “conservatism” or “liberalism” won through forfeiting the Christian ethic of active love will prove a pyrrhic one.

“The Church in China Isn’t What You Think” by Easten Law

Plough’s speaks with , a professor at South Korea’s Yonsei University, about the church in China. Over the course of their conversation, he dispels some common myths.

Subscribe now

“Pascal’s Night of Fire” by Graham Tomlin

One night in 1654, Blaise Pascal had a spiritual experience that would change his life. It turned his faith from apathy to true belief. explores what changed for Pascal, and what this suggests about what distinguishes a believer from a cultural Christian?

“How Solzhenitsyn Found Faith” by Gary Saul Morson

Gary Saul Morson describes how the Russian novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn became a Christian. As Solzhenitsyn famously said, the line separating good and evil passes through every human heart.

“Grieving for Peace in Israel and Palestine” by Chris Zimmerman

Parents Circle – Families Forum is an organization that brings together Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children in the conflict. Together, they promote an end to the violence. Plough’s Chris Zimmerman speaks to some of the parents.

“Sieidi” by Francis Young

In fiction, a short story by tells of a young employee of Norway’s National Museum and a strange Sámi artifact.

“The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch” by George Scialabba

argues that perhaps “the greatest repository of moral beauty in English literature” is the voice of the narrator in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who teaches us to “live faithfully a hidden life.”

“The Fight Against Mammon” by Eberhard Arnold

In the Weimar Republic, Plough’s founding editor sets Jesus’ gospel against the gods of wealth and war. Many of his compatriots were ready to write off a Christianity that had blessed imperial conquest and, with rising inequality spawned by industrialism, sought to appease the poor with the promise of heaven. Knowing all this, Arnold demonstrated how the teachings of Jesus were directly applicable and relevant – as they are today, despite another century of war, capitalist excess, and Christian complicity.

“Singing in Community” by Maureen Swinger

At the Bruderhof, music is worship, fellowship, and fun. Plough’s Maureen Swinger describes how the Bruderhof’s eclectic mix of songs came together.

“A Gadfly of God” by Susannah Black Roberts

Justin Martyr, like Socrates before him, was convicted of being an atheist. Plough’s recounts the philosophical quest that Justin undertook which leads him to faith in Christ and ulimately brings about his martyrdom.