Plough Quarterly No. 8


Book Description

From Jordan to Germany, the influx of refugees is straining goodwill to the breaking point. This issue of Plough Quarterly focuses on the second half of Jesus' Great Commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. We found love of neighbor demonstrated by Christians and Muslims in ISIS-controlled Syria, and by volunteers who continue to welcome refugees despite growing public hostility. Here in election-year America, how do we as citizens live out love of neighbor in relation to immigrants? To the unborn threatened by abortion, and to their mothers? To prisoners, especially those held in solitary confinement for unconscionable terms and those on death row? To the victims of crime, and to the law enforcement officers charged with keeping the peace? To our youth, who are the ones most gravely harmed by our culture's gender confusion? On all these fronts and many others, love of neighbor makes claims on us. But shouldn't it start within the fellowship of believers, the church? When this happens, we can bear one another's burdens - for example, those of the soldier returning from war, or the coworker battling an addiction. Perspectives from Navid Kermani, Neil Shigley, Denise Uwimana, Gerhard Lohfink, Michael Yandell, Teresa of Ávila, C.S. Lewis, John Stott, Matthew Loftus, Nathaniel Peters, Eberhard Arnold, Richard J. Foster, and Annemarie Wächter are sure to stimulate reflection and discussion. Then there's new poetry by Laurie Klein, book reviews, a children's story by Laura E. Richards, and world-class art by Dean Mitchell, Aristarkh Lentulov, Alex Vogel, Michael D. Fay, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Marc Chagall, Vasilij Ivanovic Surikov, and Sekino Jun'ichirō. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus' message into practice and find common cause with others.




Plough Quarterly No. 4


Book Description

This issue of Plough Quarterly explores our relationship with the natural world. Hear from leading scientists, farmers, writers, activists, theologians, and artists who have set their hearts and minds and hands to caring for the earth for generations to come. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, fiction, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus' message into practice and find common cause with others.




Value and Vulnerability


Book Description

Value and Vulnerability brings together scholars of many religions—including Catholicism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Islam, and Humanism—to identify and examine conceptions and interpretations of dignity within different religious and philosophical perspectives and their applications to contemporary issues of conflict, such as gendered, religious, and racial violence, immigration, ecology, and religious peacemaking. Value and Vulnerability also includes response chapters that clarify and refine these interpretations from interfaith perspectives. Through this volume, Matthew R. Petrusek and Jonathan Rothchild offer recommendations for advancing the conversation about dignity within and among traditions and for addressing urgent global issues and threats to dignity. Together, Petrusek, Rothchild, and the contributors create a comparative framework constituted by seven questions: What sources justify dignity’s existence, nature, and purpose? What is the relationship between the divine and human dignity? What is the relationship between dignity and the human body? Is dignity vulnerable or invulnerable to moral harm? Is dignity inherent or attained? Is dignity universal and equal? Is dignity practical? Through its systematic, comparative, interdisciplinary, and practical dimensions, Value and Vulnerability fills in the gaps in contemporary theological, philosophical, and ethical discourses on dignity. Contributors: Matthew R. Petrusek, Jonathan Rothchild, Darlene Fozard Weaver, Kristin Scheible, Karen B. Enriquez, Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, Christopher Key Chapple, David P. Gushee, Aristotle Papanikolaou, Zeki Saritoprak, William Schweiker, Hille Haker, Nicholas Denysenko, Terrence L. Johnson, William O’Neill, Victor Carmona, Dawn Nothwehr, OSF, and Ellen Ott Marshall.




Provincializing Global History


Book Description

A microhistory of eighteenth-century systemic change that places ordinary French lives alongside global advances Provincializing Global History explores the subtle transformation of the coastal province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, James Livesey unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.




Introduction to Christian Ethics


Book Description

All Christians read the Bible differently, pray differently, value their traditions differently, and give different weight to individual and corporate judgment. These differences are the basis of conflict. The question Christian ethics must answer, then, is, "What does the good life look like in the context of conflict?" In this new introductory text, Ellen Ott Marshall uses the inevitable reality of difference to center and organize her exploration of the system of Christian morality. What can we learn from Jesus' creative use of conflict in situations that were especially attuned to questions of power? What does the image of God look like when we are trying to recognize the divine image within those with whom we are in conflict? How can we better explore and understand the complicated work of reconciliation and justice? This innovative approach to Christian ethics will benefit a new generation of students who wish to engage the perennial questions of what constitutes a faithful Christian life and a just society.




The Witness of the Brothers


Book Description

This extraordinary history of the Bruderhof shows how its commitment to religion, family, and community has enabled it to maintain its way of life since its inception over ninety years ago. Although Yaacov Oved identifies social tensions in the movement, he still considers it to be a shining example of communal stability.After the horrors of World War I, German adolescents sought new directions in the form of youth movements. Young people from bourgeois families rejected materialism, celebrated nature, and longed for a simpler life. Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, a couple from an affluent background who identified fully with radical pacifist youth circles, fused the German Christian socialist youth into a new movement. They settled a commune in Sannerz known as "The First Bruderhof," whose members shaped their lives according to their faith.The Bruderhof supported itself by publishing, printing, and providing reliable child care services. In 1937, responding to Nazi harassment, and to escape conscription, they fled to Liechtenstein and England where they provided shelter for many Jewish refugees. World War II forced them to emigrate further afield. They went to Paraguay and, eventually, to the United States. Sociologists, theologians, anthropologists, and psychologists alike will find The Witness of the Brothers to be a valuable resource.




Homage to a Broken Man


Book Description

People who knew J. Heinrich Arnold (1913-1982) say they never met another person like him. In his presence, complete strangers poured out their darkest secrets and left transformed. Others wanted him dead. Author Henri Nouwen called him a prophetic voice and wrote of how his writings touched me as a double-edged sword, calling me to choose between truth and lies, selflessness and selfishness... Few knew Arnold's past, or could have imagined the crucibles he endured. Until now.




The Patient Ferment of the Early Church


Book Description

How and why did the early church grow in the first four hundred years despite disincentives, harassment, and occasional persecution? In this unique historical study, veteran scholar Alan Kreider delivers the fruit of a lifetime of study as he tells the amazing story of the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Challenging traditional understandings, Kreider contends the church grew because the virtue of patience was of central importance in the life and witness of the early Christians. They wrote about patience, not evangelism, and reflected on prayer, catechesis, and worship, yet the church grew--not by specific strategies but by patient ferment.




Moral Injury


Book Description

Moral injury has developed in earnest since 2009 within psychology and military studies, especially through work with veterans of the U.S. military’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A major part of this work is the attempt to identify means of healing, recovery, and repair for those morally injured by their experiences in combat (or similar situations). What this volume does is to provide insight into the identification of moral injury, the development of the notion, attempts to work with those affected, emerging ideas about moral injury, portraits of moral injury in the past and present, and, especially, what creative engagement with moral injury might look like from a variety of perspectives. As such, it will be an important resource for Christian ministers, chaplains, health care workers, and other providers and caregivers who serve afflicted communities.




The First Political Order


Book Description

Global history records an astonishing variety of forms of social organization. Yet almost universally, males subordinate females. How does the relationship between men and women shape the wider political order? The First Political Order is a groundbreaking demonstration that the persistent and systematic subordination of women underlies all other institutions, with wide-ranging implications for global security and development. Incorporating research findings spanning a variety of social science disciplines and comprehensive empirical data detailing the status of women around the globe, the book shows that female subordination functions almost as a curse upon nations. A society’s choice to subjugate women has significant negative consequences: worse governance, worse conflict, worse stability, worse economic performance, worse food security, worse health, worse demographic problems, worse environmental protection, and worse social progress. Yet despite the pervasive power of social and political structures that subordinate women, history—and the data—reveal possibilities for progress. The First Political Order shows that when steps are taken to reduce the hold of inequitable laws, customs, and practices, outcomes for all improve. It offers a new paradigm for understanding insecurity, instability, autocracy, and violence, explaining what the international community can do now to promote more equitable relations between men and women and, thereby, security and peace. With comprehensive empirical evidence of the wide-ranging harm of subjugating women, it is an important book for security scholars, social scientists, policy makers, historians, and advocates for women worldwide.