The nature of man is to pray to and praise his Creator. The early church fathers and mothers have something to teach us about what that looks like.
Month: June 2020
The Neglected Craft
Adam Carrington
Craftsmen. Some elicit our wonder with their artistry. Others go unnoticed, their work blending seamlessly into the landscape of our lives. We need both, of course. While the former add beauty to our world, those latter, ignored artisans make living possible, forming...
The Art of Dying
L.S. Dugdale
Plough: Can you describe your work? How has what you do changed over the last couple of weeks? Dugdale: My non-pandemic clinical life is as a primary care doctor. I also direct the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University, which focuses on the...
Justice and Race: What We Can and Cannot Change
Matthew Loftus
The problem of police violence against black people in America is outrageous—and often feels hopeless. It’s been the better part of a decade since protests in Ferguson, Missouri, first brought the issue into America’s broader national discourse. In that time an...
Verse Lines When the Streets Are on Fire
James Matthew Wilson
When society seems to be unraveling—with the empty waiting of quarantine, the chaos of policing gone wrong, and the frantic spectacles of riot—we ought all the more to spend time in contemplation. Poetry offers us an unusually capacious and comprehensive form for this.
The Atmosphere
Doug Sikkema
The most formative aspect of school might not even be on your radar. What if there were a school atmosphere in which children thrived because it felt a bit more like a home that was made for them?
From Ashes
Susannah Black
It’s a strange time to build. We’ve lived through what seem to be many worlds since February. They come in quick succession, as the layers of the everyday have been, so painfully, peeled back to reveal stranger and more frightening landscapes.
Read about the thinking behind the Breaking Ground project in this opening editorial, published when we first launched.
What Kind of Turning Point?
Mark Noll
Where the virus abounds, so does pontification much more abound. But thankfully so do scraps of genuine expertise, some informed analysis, and a lot of common sense, keeping pace with panic. How should we think responsibly about the future, and what wisdom does the historic church have to offer?
God and the Pandemic
N.T. Wright
Perhaps the most vital question of all, and one that should be near the top of serious conversations at the highest level between church, state, and all interested parties, is how we move back toward whatever the “new normal” is going to be. Some people have expressed...
Wendell Berry’s Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic
Gracy Olmstead
Individual health cannot ever be divorced from one’s larger membership with the earth and its various communities. But how does this apply to our current moment, in which we are all, in fact, physically isolated and segregated from each other? How do we begin to deal with the spiritual, physical, economic, and communal devastation caused by the COVID-19 virus? What ought we to remind ourselves of, and what ought we to remember in a more communal sense, going forward?