Another Life with Joy Marie Clarkson

Robert Donnelly meets the migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

Emmy Barth Maendel describes how, in just three short years, a sixteenth-century martyr founded a church that has endured to this day.

Heinrich Arnold describes how scripture tells an unfinished history of liberation.

Visual artist Hannah Rose Thomas, architect Charles Howell, and poet Malcolm Guite celebrate the freedom of coloring within the lines.

Dori Moody describes how poverty, chastity, and obedience bring a different kind of freedom.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson asks why parents are not spared the terrible freedom of having to choose whether to have a child with a disability.

Jordan Castro describes how he sought freedom in drugs and novels, but they couldn't save him.

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

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

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

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

Peter Mommsen asks what's the point of freedom?

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Mommsen asks how we can live well with technology?

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

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

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

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

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

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 cattle herds and the grazing systems they’ve established. Then Helen describes what led her to write her book on the work of the farmer’s wife, and addresses mothers, who are often the ones making choices about food that are linked to questions of sustainable agriculture. They discuss the concept of rewilding, and how that is not necessarily either possible or desirable – the landscape has not been wild for thousands of years – but that increasing complexity and biodiversity is both possible and necessary.

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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 theology, the inevitability of metaphorical language, Owen Barfield, Anthroposophy, Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, Suzanne Simard’s research on how trees communicate via fungal networks, and much more.

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

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

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

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? Should the Lord of the Rings be read as a straightforward critique of industrial society? How can the categories of mending and preservation be used to understand how the various heroes and heroines of Middle-earth go about shepherding this world into its next age, and how can those categories help us to do the same in our age?

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

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

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? Alastair discusses the hints and implications found throughout the text, from metaphors which point to Israel’s return from exile as a kind of political resurrection, to more literal expectations of life beyond death. He then discusses how we are to understand Christ’s resurrected body itself, and therefore ours: Saint Paul says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” and yet Jesus tells his disciples to notice that he has “flesh and bone.” What is a spiritual body? How did first century Jews think of flesh and spirit? And what can we expect?

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.

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 left and right, to tarot card reading, to affirming the Darwinian struggle for existence as a source of moral guidance. They discuss varying understandings of natural law, talk about euthanasia, and revisit Fight Club. Then they discuss whether Darwinism is compatible with the traditional idea of the Fall, and whether we should accept the teaching that human beings are made to not just live in harmony with the natural world but to transcend it.

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

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 over the past decade or so. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson then discusses the history of the euthanasia movement, beginning in the late nineteenth century with its connection to eugenics, through its fall into disfavor subsequent to its association with Nazism, through its rise again in the 1970s. What are the different kinds of arguments that have been used, and how can we think about those arguments? Raikin and Thomson then discuss the relationship between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia, and Thomson discusses the particular vulnerability of disabled people to pressure to choose MAID.

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

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

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

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; Homer; the pre-Socratic philosophers; and sailing.

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

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