“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!

“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!

“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.

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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.

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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.

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Society Fails People With Disabilities

Disability-rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson describes her daily experience of being disabled.

It's not that I'm ugly. It's more that most people don't know how to look at me. The sight of me is routinely discombobulating. The power wheelchair is enough to inspire gawking, but that's the least of it. Much more impressive is the impact on my body of more than four decades of a muscle-wasting disease.

recounts a similar experience:

Many of my friends and I have navigated the intrusive tedium of stares and interrogations about what happened to make us as we are. Those who require devices like white canes or wheelchairs can be fatigued by the attention we prompt. All of us with unusual shapes, gaits, or sensory habits carry the load of daily navigating a world not built with us in mind.

Across the West, over 60 percent of children prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted.

Iceland near 100 percent termination rates; Spain, France, and Germany 96 percent; Italy 93 percent; England and Wales 76 percent, and 67 percent in the US. The data varies significantly across different sources, but it has raised concerns among the bioethics community.

In Canada, large numbers of people with disabilities were given access to assisted suicide, sometimes even before they can access palliative care.

From 2019 to 2023, 42 percent of all MAiD deaths involved people needing disability supports, including more than 1,017 who never received those supports.

In Ontario in 2023, people with disabilities were the most likely people to die via MAiD.

Since patients in most Canadian provinces are usually eligible for palliative care services only during the last six months of natural life expectancy, Canadians with physical disabilities are possibly accessing MAiD before they can even avail themselves of end-of-life care.

writes for about Normand Meunier:

For want of a mattress, a man is dead. That’s the story, in sum, of a quadriplegic man who chose to end his life in January through medically assisted death. Normand Meunier’s story, as reported by the CBC, began with a visit to a Quebec hospital due to a respiratory virus. Meunier subsequently developed a painful bedsore after being left without access to a mattress to accommodate his needs. Thereafter, he applied to Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program.

“Changing the Shape of the World”

argues that society ought to change its shape to accomodate for people with disabilities, not the other way around.

One of the fundamental premises of disability politics is that social justice and equal access should be achieved by changing the shape of the world, not changing the shape of our bodies. Certainly, medical treatment and technology contribute to human flourishing and should be made available equally to all persons: where braces or prosthetics or surgical correction can help, by all means let them be employed. But a capacious justice calls for strengthening the accessibility infrastructure of the built and designed world rather than relying exclusively on medical normalization procedures that may not contribute significantly to our opportunities for making good lives.

Telling the story of her brother Duane, explains how living alongside those with disabilities reshapes one’s worldview:

Duane’s claim to be “someone who counts” didn’t depend on his being (to use Singer’s language) biographically aware of himself as having interests….

This wisdom is not in any ethics textbook. Those attempting to determine what is right or wrong for people like Duane ought to come live alongside – but only if they are ready to have some ethics applied in the reverse direction. That’s how dozens of young men came to experience this truth, which the utilitarian project rejects as an outmoded relic. These students thank Duane – my brother and theirs – for an education that completely overturned their judgments of value and success.

Design researcher , author of What Can a Body Do?, describes how she designs adaptive equipment for people with disabilities:

Some of the deeper stories about access really start with questions instead of framing disabled bodies merely as problems…. Starting design processes this way defies even the well-intended language of “inclusion.” Sometimes I think inclusion efforts presume a kind of central majority group of people and their willingness to graciously extend the canopy of their goods and services to other people. But the questions that disabled people bring to the world actually shake the very foundations of the status quo: What is an “independent” life? What’s behind the stigma – and alternatively, where might we find the dignity – in the universal experience of assistance, the forms of help in all of our private and public spheres? And most importantly: what is the ground of human worth?

Christians are called to imitate Christ, to shape their lives around him. Alice Hutton Sharp tells of an experience during Holy Week with her daughter who has disabilities.

This past Holy Week, our pastor asked if he could wash our daughter’s feet during the Maundy Thursday service. We sat at the front, and after the readings my husband pushed her wheelchair to the line of chairs that faced the congregation. He took off her shoes, took off her orthotics, took off her socks – all of which I had, as usual, resented while ushering my family out the door – and then our priest knelt down to greet her. Because she cannot see, he talked her through every step as he washed and dried her feet. On the day we remember Christ’s gift of himself and his command to follow suit, I watched my daily struggle fill with grace. In that evening service, ankle-foot orthotics were part of the imitation of Christ, the model of complete self-giving upon whom we all – no matter our abilities – entirely depend.

Plough-Share

Reader Patricia Stevenson responds to ’s piece on learning to be a burden:

This is such a necessary proclamation, but also posed to us so beautifully. It reminds me very much of ’s recent book The Dignity of Dependence. That politeness is doing harm and not good really struck me. My mother is eighty-three and in good health, but my siblings and I are caring for her in a way we did not ten years ago, i.e., she requires more time, more attention, more patience, etc. We frequently reassure her she is not a burden – but as points out – she is, not that that is a bad thing, but it is more honest. We love her very much and tell her our care for her now is no different than her care for us when we were young children. But I do struggle with feeling the weight of the extra care, especially as my mom seems to not recognize the greater effort and only asks for more. I’ll be saving this essay, sharing it with my siblings, and meditating on it in the weeks to come.

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“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.

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Friendship Is Declining

• describes the Twenty-First Century as the Anti-Social Century:

Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data. Between [1965] and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20 percent ... Among unmarried men and people younger than 25, the decline was more than 35 percent.

• Studies show Gen Z and millenials can’t afford the financial costs of friendship:

Financial pressures are putting a strain on social connections with 44 percent of Gen Z and millennials reporting they’ve skipped major social events because of cost.

Only 18 percent of Gen Z and millennials budget for activities with friends – while 59 percent say their financial goals are impacted by this spending.

Are Politics Dividing Us?

• A 2022 poll showed that politics had hurt the friendships or family relationships of nearly one in five voters:

Close to half of the voters in the survey also acknowledged making judgments about other people based on their politics. Forty-eight percent of those polled said that knowing a person’s political views told them either a lot or a little about whether someone was a good person.

• Consider this letter to a New York Times advice column:

My husband and I moved into an apartment complex recently. We befriended some of our new neighbors ... One couple – whom we like a lot – has provided no information about their politics. We have no idea where they stand! The state of the country is very important to us, and we are willing to socialize only with people who support our beliefs. Should we continue to see this couple whose politics are a mystery, or should we tell them where we stand and see how they react?

• David Corey argues that you should never lose friends over politics:

Politics and friendship are deeply connected … How we understand what politics is has an effect on the kinds of friendships we are likely to enjoy. And, conversely, how we understand friendship will affect our practice of politics….

Friendship is an intrinsic good, while politics is an instrumental good. Thus, to lose a friendship over politics suggests that something is deeply disordered in our souls.

Where Do We Rebuild Friendship?

Perhaps, we need more nonpartisan spaces where friendships can form.

• David Demaree suggests that playing games with others can provide this space:

These pickup games were approachable too. If someone wanted to join, simply standing at the side of the court reserved a spot in the next game. A community emerged among the regulars: casual pre- and post-game small talk grew into friendships, with the guys exchanging numbers and hanging out outside the gym. Play bonded people who would never have crossed each other’s paths otherwise.

• describes his work with the Lyceum Movement, a revival of an old American program, as a nonpartisan space:

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.

• suggests that hobbies can provide a space for civic friendship:

The beauty of hobbies is that they do not have to be politically charged. My liberal female cousin from Montana loves to hunt and fish. My conservative male friend from New Jersey loves to do yoga and pottery. My friend described to me how his pottery teacher was “very liberal.” But political ideology wasn’t a prerequisite to participate. In fact, during the class, conversations were “much more likely to be about life and work” and my friend learned how to make beautiful cups, bowls, and vases.

• welcomes the return of the neighborhood tavern:

In recent times, taverns have faded alongside so many other relics of slow living. Thankfully, the trend is starting to reverse. Across the country, chefs are abandoning the Sisyphean task of running high-end big city restaurants and returning to why – and what – they started cooking. Here, the harbingers of the new golden age of the old-school American tavern.

• describes how the English pub provides such a space:

What is it about an inn, what we in England would call “our local,” that is so beneficent? It is open, it is welcoming, it is in every sense a public house, which is where the term “pub” comes from. It is therefore a place where different people from the same community, with all their differences of background and politics and personality, can find a convivial space to meet one another.

• Or can politics itself become a place of nonpartisan dialogue? Playwright and former president of Czechoslovakia Václav Havel describes such a vision of politics:

I favor “anti-political politics,” that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favor politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative. (“Politics and Conscience,” 1984.)

Plough-Share

Reader Bruce Wearne responds to ’s piece on masculine virtues:

I appreciate your effort to counter the manliness ideology that seems to think that Trump’s “Christian Nationalism” is the epitome of Christian virtue … Your article uses the term “we.” Yet I note that your essay doesn’t include the word “woman,” “girl,” or “female.” …

If Jesus is role model for “blokes,” … what is the Son of God for girls and women, and why should that question matter? So I guess I’ll be waiting to read how a girl or woman responds to your article by her understanding of how she overcame the commercialized idolatry that would reduce her (a co-equal image bearer of the LORD) to a sweet, pretty Barbie doll “thing.” The use of the term “virtue” plays a big part in your contribution, but learning what it means to be a man must involve learning how to relate to women and vice versa ... How do you read Romans 1:18-32? I read it as the exposé of what happens to friendship in all kinds of malformed ways when male virtues as much as female virtues are idolized. Thanks again! Keep at it!

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“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.

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The World Is at War

The wars that have dominated the first half of the 2020s show no sign of stopping.

• War breaks out in the Middle East. US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran killed the country’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28. Since then, conflict has continued across the region.

The U.S. and Israeli militaries pounded Iran and its allies for a third day on Monday as the widening attacks across the Middle East drew in more players and risked spiraling into a full-blown regional war.

• The Ukraine war has entered its fifth year. Ukrainian diplomat Dmytro Kuleba writes in a symposium for the New Statesman:

Like nature, war is a merciless teacher – not only of individuals, but of entire nations. The Ukrainian people have learned not to give up, even as hope wears thin.

• “Open war” breaks out between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Pakistan bombed major cities in Afghanistan [on Friday, February 27], including the capital Kabul, with Islamabad's defense minister declaring the neighbors at “open war” following months of tit-for-tat clashes.

• The war in Gaza drags on:

Progress in the Gaza peace plan has stalled over disagreements on how Hamas should be disarmed, with Israel threatening to go back to full-scale war if the condition is not carried out quickly.

Does War Even Work?

Recently, the Financial Times’ columnist Janan Ganesh argued that, under modern conditions, land wars are futile:

When did a major state last unambiguously win a land war on a significant scale? …

The world seems to be living through a trend that, if it holds, could scarcely be more profound: the increasing ineffectiveness of war. There is a pattern of military failure, or at least frustration, which covers democratic aggressors and autocratic ones, wars close to home and wars on distant continents, wars against other sovereign states and wars against irregular forces.

What About Pacifism?

Pacifism is a commitment to peace and opposition to war.

• Christian pacifism is a tradition that goes back right to the first Christians, including the Church Father Justin Martyr.

We ourselves were well conversant with war, murder and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools.… Now we cultivate the reverence of God, justice, kindness, faith, and the expectation of the future given us through the Crucified One. (Dialogue with Trypho, 110)

• A contemporary advocate of Christian pacifism, Stanley Hauerwas, tells Plough that pacifism is a way of life that requires community:

As a Christian committed to nonviolence, I often say that I don’t have a foreign policy because I’m not a state. The very assumption that I have to know how to find a solution to the war in Ukraine is already a set of presumptions that misdescribe what it means to be nonviolent.… We need to be a people that witnesses to the God who gives us an alternative to war, and that alternative is us.

• In our pages, William Fleeson writes about a pacifist army chaplain in Ukraine:

Mykola Korobtsov … signed up to serve as a military chaplain immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.… For four years, he has made deliveries, prayed prayers, preached sermons – in short, everything necessary to meet the needs of soldiers and civilians in the area.

Everything, that is, except bear arms himself.

• For , Plough editor points to Christ’s pacifism:

At the heart of Christian pacifism is imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ. To fulfill his mission, the New Testament suggests, Jesus chose a defenseless path that took him unresistingly to torture and execution; likewise, his disciples are to “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Jesus’s words from the three synoptic Gospels). Those who claim to follow Jesus, says the First Letter of John, “ought to walk in the same way he walked.” We’re to imitate a God who, despite his omnipotence, chose to overcome evil not through force but through a radically vulnerable form of love.

• Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold, argues that pacifism is more than just not killing:

If we really want peace, we must represent it in all areas of life. We cannot injure love in any way or for any reason. So we cannot kill anyone; we cannot harm anyone economically; we cannot take part in a system that establishes lower standards of living for manual workers than for academics. We must spurn anything that breeds hatred or oppression.

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Robert Johansen, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Peace Studies at Notre Dame University, responds to our interview with Hauerwas:

I feel renewed commitment to following Jesus’s nonviolence after reading this interview.… I agree that with Hauerwas Christians “cannot kill,” and that certainly following Jesus’ way of nonviolent love is more important for Christians than to follow the demands of any state’s foreign policy. However, could not Christians support a world policy if it aimed to do justice and love mercy? Indeed, if such a policy could be formulated – I believe it can – could not Christians endorse measures for doing justice and loving kindness as a way of walking humbly with God? Couldn’t they support a non-killing world policy even though they are not a state, and without diluting their commitment to nonviolence?...

If some Christians endorsed such a policy while simultaneously remaining true to Jesus’ way of loving and forgiving rather than killing at the request of Caesar, their policy endorsement need not interfere with faithfully following the Messiah. On the contrary, such Christians might more fully manifest that they “are the alternative to war.”

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“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you’re in despair and 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 Plough’s Possibilities. Each week, we’ll be putting new possibilities and unexplored opportunities before seemingly intractable situations.

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Convenience Has Its Downsides

Every new app, device, or program is offering something faster, quicker, easier.

• Food & Wine reports that take-out is now the primary way people eat at restaurants:

A whopping 75% of restaurant traffic consists of takeout orders, according to a new report by the National Restaurant Association. And they better hope that food is delivered quickly: Nearly 95% of consumers deem speed as “critical” to the experience, while 90% see it as the top priority …

• Last year, Walmart shoppers demanded more convenience – and the company obliged:

Walmart is profiting from the desire of consumers to stay home and have goods delivered to them, CEO Doug McMillon told investors during a conference call Thursday. The retailer’s revenue from Walmart Plus—which offers free delivery for $12.95 a month—jumped year-over-year by double digits in the fiscal fourth quarter.

• David Zahl lamented one downside of this optimization craze last year:

In theory, [online homework programs are] supposed to make communication between teachers and students easier. Rather than print out an assignment and hand it to your teacher, you just click to turn it in. And yet I spend as much time troubleshooting the various homework programs on my sons’ computers, updating the software, and filling out endless two-factor authentications as I do helping them with their homework. It is a crazy-making experience that leaves everyone frustrated, tired, and not remotely in the mood for learning.

Of course there are obvious benefits that come with this new economy of convenience (like getting your prescriptions delivered to your door), but are there more serious downsides or consequences?

• According to a recent article by , our love of convenience is a direct cause of declining fertility rates.

Their aversion to parenthood was existential – a feeling that children were too much of a challenge. One woman told of her hyperawareness of the daunting nature of motherhood from parenting blogs and how-to books.

Friction-maxxing

One way to push back against this culture of convenience and ease is friction-maxxing.

• As described in a recent article by of The Cut:

Friction-maxxing is not simply a matter of reducing your screen time, or whatever. It’s the process of building up tolerance for “inconvenience” (which is usually not inconvenience at all but just the vagaries of being a person living with other people in spaces that are impossible to completely control) – and then reaching even toward enjoyment. And then, it’s modeling this tolerance, followed by enjoyment and humor, for our kids.

• Jezer-Morton offers a few suggestions for how to friction-maxx:

Stop using ChatGPT completely. No, it does not have good ideas for meal planning. Buy a cookbook. Text your friends for advice. Go to Trader Joe’s. Come on. Let your kid experience a bit more independence than they did last year, and self-soothe while you worry about them until eventually you stop worrying so much. (You will always worry a little bit; worrying is friction and there’s nothing wrong with it.)

On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?

— T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

Lent

Christians have long understood the benefits of leaning into inconvenience, especially during the forty days of Lent (which began last Wednesday).

During Lent, fasting from food, from technology, from convenience, helps Christians remember the suffering of Christ.

• The start of Lent, Ash Wednesday, is particularly focused on Christ’s suffering and our own mortality. Tish Harrison Warren writes about Ash Wednesday:

Jesus calls the weary to himself. He does not call the self-sufficient, nor those with the proper religious credentials or perfect, Instagram-able lives. He calls those exhausted from toil, from just getting through the day. He calls those burdened with heavy loads, those weighed down by sin and sorrow. It is these, not the confident and successful, to whom Jesus says, “Come to me.”

• The forty days of Lent mirror the forty days of Christ’s temptation in the desert. Christopher Snook writes in our pages about preparing for our own temptations:

It would seem that the Lord was preparing himself to confront the devil not by extraordinary feats but by the daily work of daily life at home in Nazareth — in the words of an old hymn, “the trivial round, the common task.” And perhaps this is instructive as Lent begins. It may be that hiddenness and smallness, the humble life of love and prayer wherever we find ourselves, is where we will learn not to grasp life but to receive it.

• This Lent, Plough has a revised and expanded edition of Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter. It takes the reader from the start of Lent all the way to Pentecost with reading by writers from the entire Christian tradition, from Søren Kierkegaard to Edith Stein.

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Reader Michael Nacrelli responds to “Why God Doesn’t Need Psychedelics,” Joseph Murphy’s argument for real Christian mysticism over the drug-induced alternative.

A psychedelic experience neither forces nor guarantees an encounter with God, but it can have the effect of opening one's mind to rediscovering a sense of awe and wonder at the created world and our very existence. Such was the case in my spiritual journey and that of others I've known. This doesn't mean that psychedelics are a means of saving grace, but I think they can make one more receptive to common grace, which can then draw one closer to receiving saving grace. They are not a substitute for the special revelation of the gospel, but they can awaken a desire for spiritual truth.

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Till next week!

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you’re in despair and 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 Plough’s Possibilities. Each week, we’ll be putting new possibilities and unexplored opportunities before seemingly intractable situations.

Subscribe now

Assisted Suicide

… has been legalized in New York State. Under the new law, doctors will be able to prescribe lethal poison to patients with a prognosis of six months or less. New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, laid out why she supports the law last December:

I watched my own mom die from ALS. I watched that vicious disease steal away the strong woman who raised me as it took her ability to walk, to eat, to speak and, ultimately, to live. I am all too familiar with the pain of seeing someone you love suffer and feeling powerless to stop it.

At the same time, there are individuals of many faiths who believe that deliberately shortening one’s life violates the sanctity of life. I understand and respect those views. But as I have spoken with people tormented by pain, I have come to see this as a matter of individual choice that does not have to be about shortening life but rather about shortening dying. And I do not believe that in every instance condemning someone to excruciating pain and suffering preserves the dignity and sanctity of life.

It’s OK to Be a Burden

Last Monday, we published an essay by Jaimie Wright, who was able to convince her mother not to kill herself.

Assisted suicide offers the dying a mirage of control, and it eliminates physical suffering on one’s own terms. In wanting to avoid becoming a burden to us, my mom sought to shield us from her suffering and ours. I needed her to understand I would suffer more knowing she was unwilling to permit us to suffer with her and to accompany her in her dependence until God called her home. In determining that she was a “burden” to us, she was taking away our ability to provide compassionate care. She also was asserting that her life only had worth when she was productive.

Many assume that pain and nearness to death are the reasons driving people towards assisted suicide; however, in reality, loneliness and the fear of being a burden are always among the top reasons given by those seeking assisted suicide. As Wright notes:

People who received assisted suicide in Oregon in 2024 listed loss of autonomy as their top concern. Total dependence on others is frightening. Being vulnerable, though, is part of being human, and love can flourish when the dying allow their families, friends, and hospice professionals to provide compassionate care and affirm their worth.

We’re All Dependent Beings

The thing is, as Plough contributing editor wrote a few years ago, dependence is a fundamental human condition.

It would be fairer to say that dependence is our default state, and self-sufficiency the aberration. Our lives begin and (frequently) end in states of near total dependence, and much of the middle is marked by periods of need.

Sargeant has written on this more extensively in her recent book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. You can read an excerpt here.

A Culture of Dependence

How do we build one?

• Churches Oppose Suicide, first and foremost, as Ben Crosby argued in Plough:

Surely one does not lose one’s dignity by being disabled or seriously ill! Churches that choose – in contradiction to the entire history of Christian pastoral care – to forgo any sort of strong moral judgment, failing to teach their people that some choices are right and others are wrong, end up simply parroting the messages of broader Canadian culture.

• Christians Model Care. Many have already been doing so. The Hawthorne Sisters provide palliative care for those with terminal cancer diagnoses. We wrote about them in our pages:

When the patients arrive, Sr. Stella Mary says, they come very broken, physically and emotionally. It’s not just the knowledge that they are dying, but the fear of being a burden, the sorrow at not being able to take care of their families. Many come from hospitals that may have treated them as irritants. Because the patients are poor, they linger in hospitals long after a richer patient would be discharged. Their poverty means that most nursing facilities won’t accept them, so they are stuck in limbo, unable to be safely discharged, until someone makes a call to the sisters.

For the sisters, there is no sense of regret about not knowing their patients as they were in their full strength. “We don’t have expectations ‘They always did this …’” Sr. Stella Mary says. “We’re here to learn who they are at this point in time.”

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Reader Tonya Reading responds to “My Mother's Hidden Radiance,” ’s essay about learning to see his mother’s beauty despite her mental illness.

Your words described so well what’s it’s like to live with someone with mental illness. You provide a powerful testimony of the daily struggle to accept those we encounter, and those we live with, as God’s children in whom He delights.

I’m the parent of two internationally adopted children who due to genetics, culture and environment have faced challenges each day. I’m painfully reminded by reading this piece that my expectations and comparisons have hurt me and them more than their own capabilities.

Reading it will help me recalibrate and watch for the light.

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

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Till next week!

“Possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Meaning: when you’re in despair and 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 Plough’s Possibilities.

Subscribe now

“Another Life Is Possible”

… is Plough’s tagline. It’s a simple and hopeful phrase that goes back to the 1920 mission statement of our publishing house, written by Plough’s founding editor, Eberhard Arnold:

The mission of our publishing house is to proclaim living renewal, to summon people to deeds in the spirit of Jesus, to spread the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16) in the social distress of the present day, to apply Christianity publicly, and to testify to God’s action in current events. We must get down to the deepest roots of Christianity and demonstrate that they are crucial to solving the urgent problems in contemporary culture. With breadth of vision and energetic daring, our publishing house must steer its course right into the torrent of contemporary thought. Its work in fields that are apparently religiously neutral will lead to new relationships and open new doors.

Each week, we’ll be putting new possibilities, unthought ideas, and unexplored opportunities before seemingly intractable situations.

The Dawn of a New Economy?

We’re being told that big changes are coming. We might never need to work again.

• AI infrastructure is changing the economy, AI can code on its own, and soon, computer scientists and engineers might find themselves out of a job. So suggests , writing about “the Fall of the Nerds”:

A generation … trained themselves to make their brains act like computers; it’s hardly surprising that computers eventually rose up and reclaimed their core competence.

• At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, tech oligarch Elon Musk suggested that in the near future “Everyone on Earth will have a robot,” and people will not need to toil in order to survive.

Another Economy Is Possible

Our utopian prophets are probably wrong: we will always have to work. But an automated economy might force us to ask deep questions about the purpose of work, education, and life itself.

Some guides in this endeavor:

• Nature could serve as a model for the economy. In our pages two years ago, British theologian Simon Oliver updated the idea of a “gift economy” for modern times:

Nature is a gift of creation within which the human person receives her life as gift. … Trade may be necessary and markets inevitable, but there can be no ultimate commodification or reification, because market economies are always reliant upon the more fundamental economy of creation as gift.

• Nature is ambiguous, however. Maybe nature is not the best model for a new economy. In a recent review of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, professor William Thomas Okie writes:

[The book] sidesteps the question of whether gift economies can only exist in the shadow or ruins of such large-scale systems. … Looking to the natural world for models of moral economy is perilous, whether it is the grim winner-takes-all vision that Kimmerer critiques, or the harmonious mutualism that she cheers. On a planet where some 40 percent of all animal species are parasites, where eating means that someone else dies, all flourishing is mutual only if our definition of “flourishing” includes piracy, cannibalism, and countless painful deaths.

• Maybe a new economy requires a new culture — and a new education. Sometime Plough contributor and classics professor writes about a Great Books education focused on serving the person, rather than the workforce:

The notion that students should mainly be acquiring “skills” or “competencies,” so prevalent in high-level discussions of education policy and in ranking school systems, rings hollow to anyone who has ever cared enough to become a teacher: one teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves.

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Reader Layton Friesen responds to “Six Ways To Resist the Machine,” Paul Kingsnorth’s lecture at a Plough event at Harvard about his new book Against the Machine:

This is a bold vision that resonates deeply with me. However, I have one worry. Mr. Kingsnorth’s writing on the Machine as it stands here shares with much anti-modernist writing the hint of Pelagianism. We have created this mess and we now must get ourselves out of it by our own askesis. I do not think Kingsnorth is a Pelagian. But in order to resist this ancient problem, we need something more than discipline and protest. We need grace. We need to know how we can find forgiveness for the sins of the Machine. What does that even look like? How can I personally be forgiven and find God's grace of mercy in the midst of this culture when I can't seem to escape it?

Augustine, the great bane of Pelagianism everywhere, wrote in The City of God, “Our righteousness also, though true righteousness insofar as it is referred to the true ultimate good, is in this life only such as to consist in the forgiveness of sins rather than the perfection of virtues.”

How, I ask, can I be forgiven for the sins of the Machine when I cannot escape it?

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

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Till next week!