John M.G. Barclay explores how Paul's letters probe the paradox of freedom through love.Plough

Sohrab Ahmari asks what happened to the Christian tradition of supporting workers' rights?Plough

J. Daniel Sims, an insider, reckons with complicity and compromise in Cambodia’s aid industry.Plough

James Wood tells his conversion story and asks: Is commitment just for suckers?Plough

Peter Mommsen asks what's the point of freedom?Plough

Alastair Roberts describes how our struggle with technology starts in Genesis.Plough

Matthew Loftus reminds Western donors not to send junk to his Kenyan hospital while stressing that they do depend on Western excess.Plough

Simon Oliver argues that some goods and services have value beyond their market price.Plough

David Schaengold argues that computers can’t do math and the human mind is a marvel that no machine has matched.Plough

Brian Miller, an East Tennessee farmer, praises a simple piece of technology.Plough

Peter Mommsen asks how we can live well with technology?Plough

Arlie Coles asks if large language models should write sermons and prayers.Plough

Andrew Zimmerman tells how the Bruderhof community tries to be intentional about personal technology.Plough

Matthew Loftus reminds Western donors not to send junk to his Kenyan hospital while stressing that they do depend on Western excess.Plough

J. L. Wall describes how the way we read scripture has changed and the way that it has remained the same.Plough

Robert Lee Williams tells how even a little tech in prison can make a big difference.Plough

James and Helen Rebanks talk about raising sheep and cattle in the Lake District. James describes the landscape where their families have lived for six hundred years, and how they have begun practicing regenerative agriculture as a way of restoring the land that recent conventional agriculture had damaged. He gives details about the sheep and cattl…

Tim Maendel describes his love of hunting and the connection it gives him to the human species' natural history.Plough

Rhys Laverty writes about the Alderney Breakwater, a crumbling jetty in the Channel Islands that protects a way of life.Plough

Norann Voll learned some of life’s most important lessons from her father while caring for sheep.Plough

Peter Mommsen asks if humans should live by the laws of nature.Plough

In an excerpt from her book, Joy Marie Clarkson explores the natural metaphors that we use. Are you a tree, she asks, or are you a potted plant?Plough

Greta Gaffin asks if humans should return to nature, and looks to the lives of two saints who taught us to make peace with it instead.Plough

David McBride introduces his new translation of The Leper of Abercuawg, a thousand-year-old Welsh poem in which an outcast seeks comfort in the wild.Plough

Joy Clarkson discusses her new book, and the importance of metaphor. Why are metaphors important? How can they help us live well – and how can they go wrong? Why should we not think of ourselves as computers? And what does all this mean for our language about God? In the discussion, Joy and Susannah range widely through topics including apophatic t…

William Thomas Okie says plants can talk; but is anyone listening?Plough

Colin Boller explains how regenerative agriculture helps farmers care for the land and pay the bills.Plough

Clare Coffey gives a defense of the dandelion, the plant that always comes back.Plough

Matthew Scarince and Sebastian Milbank discuss Tolkien and technology. Susannah chimes in. Is J. R. R. Tolkien anti-technology? What is the relationship between magic and technology in the world of the Lord of the Rings, and in ours? What do the elves have to do with that? What can we tell by looking at the rings, the palantíri, the silmarils? Shou…

Daniel J. D. Stulac, a newcomer to Saskatchewan, searches for the Old Testament promise.Plough

Caroline Moore has studied moths since she was a child. She writes how they showcase nature’s richness and vulnerability.Plough

Alastair Roberts revisits the resurrection stories of the Old Testament. Jesus expected his followers to know that he was going to have to die and would then be resurrected – but, famously, they didn’t figure it out until it happened. What were Jewish expectations of resurrection, and where is the idea found in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible? Al…

Southern Baptist preacher Clarence Jordan (1912-1969) argued that true Christian fellowship as practiced by the early church demands sharing of material possessions, distribution of those goods, and racial equality.Plough

Ross Douthat discusses why what is natural is not a guide to what is good. The idea that the natural world is to be worshiped can take many forms. Douthat and Peter Mommsen and Susannah Black Roberts discuss these forms, ranging from Wordsworthian spiritual experiences in a national park, to worshiping ancestral or local gods, to civic religions of…

Heinrich Arnold writes that in the Bruderhof, as in any society, children flourish when family, school, and community align.Plough

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Alexander Raikin discuss euthanasia and eugenics. What has happened in the law and society in Canada since 2016 such that MAID has exploded, becoming one of the most common causes of death there? What is the relationship of national healthcare to this expansion? Alexander Raikin brings in a review of the statistics ove…

Leah Libresco Sargeant writes about Grace Russo and her philosophy of mending clothes with beauty.Plough

Zena Hitz on our time, its value, and how we might spend it if we had more of it.Plough

Stephanie Saldaña writes that though the members of her church have been scattered by war, the church lives on.Plough

Adam Nicolson has been rehabilitating his farm in Sussex for many years now, and he discusses the difficulties and rewards of this, and the piece that he wrote about it for Plough’s issue on repair. They go on to discuss the topics of some of Nicolson’s books: Sissinghurst, the farm and garden owned by Nicolson’s grandmother, Vita Sackville-West; H…

Norman Wirzba writes that our homes and workplaces should nurture and celebrate life.Plough

Adam Nicolson tells of reversing the destructive agricultural damage done to his farm in the past.Plough

Christian Wiman writes that the “if” is what any honest faith looks like in this life.Plough

Zohar Atkins discusses the real meaning of tikkun olam. Susannah and Zohar discuss the contemporary progressive vision of this idea, which means (or does it?) “to repair the world.” Where did that contemporary interpretation come from? And what was the original meaning? They go through the Rabbinic concept of Tikkun as equity, as a kind of emergenc…

Carlo Gébler writes that we should try to repair the lives of others, even if things in our own lives seem broken.Plough

Words written by Clarence Jordan, founder of Koinonia Farm, a pacifist interracial Christian community in Georgia, taken from a Plough book, The Inconvenient Gospel.Plough

Kurt Armstrong writes that not everyone can build skyscrapers; someone has to address that damp spot on your kitchen ceiling.Plough

Matthew Sitman and Sohrab Ahmari discuss friendship across political divides. Both men have made their careers in political media and have made significant changes in their politics over the course of their lives – in Sohrab’s case, very publicly. These changes have affected some friendships and have left others intact. Sohrab and Matt and Susannah…

Benjamin Crosby, a young minister in a declining church, looks for reasons to hope.Plough

In a short story by Narine Abgaryan, survivors of war in 1990s Armenia find a reason to go on living.Plough