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    Plough Quarterly No. 44: Why Be Healthy?

    Summer 2025

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    Featured Articles

    All Articles

    Editorial

    What Is Health? My grandfather’s best summer was the one he spent dying.

    Dispatch

    Healing at Annoor A hospital in Mafraq, Jordan, cares for patients with tuberculosis.

    Essays

    Chronically Healthy, Chronically Ill Living with a chronic illness, I’ve traveled between the kingdom of health and the kingdom of sickness. Against Self-Optimization The wellness industry sells you a version of yourself it can’t deliver. Hope lies elsewhere. What My First Psychiatric Patient Taught Me Sharon could hardly leave the house. She showed me the wonder and limits of therapy. The Return of the Family Doctor The direct primary care model aims to put relationships over profit. Abraham’s Warring Children After October 7, can a Muslim-Christian-Jewish center in Abu Dhabi make any difference? In Defense of Pint and Pipe Smoking and drinking carry known risks. Here’s why I haven’t given them up. What Families with Autistic Children Know For parents of neurodiverse children, church and school can be another hurdle.

    Personal History

    A Disabled Savior The wounds of a resurrected God help us live with ours. Desire, Use, Repeat An addict looks for a way out.

    Reading

    Health Is Belonging Four thinkers stretch our understanding of disease and its remedy.

    Poetry

    Poem: “On the Staten Island Ferry” “She’s beautiful,” says the girl, “even though she’s green!” Poem: “The Stump (Athens, Greece)” Why had they planted a dead stump? Poem: “It Could Be Worse” It could be worse, my dear, it could be worse.

    Fiction

    Merelots: Armenia’s Day of the Dead “What use do the departed have for liturgy?” an Armenian mother reflects on a visit to the grave of her stepson, in this short story. Tights If only I had grabbed warm tights for her. During a lull between explosions, she darted out to grab warm clothes, and her daughter chased after her.

    Editors’ Picks

    Visions Under the Serviceberry Tree Robin Wall Kimmerer envisions a new economy in her book The Serviceberry. Heroines of the Reformation In Merry Wiesner-Hanks’s book Women and the Reformations, nuanced narratives show both the flaws of heroines and their tenacity. The Revenge of the Fox Spirit Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife is a delightful blend of genres: detective story, romance, and fairy tale.

    Family and Friends

    Growing Roots in Portugal A small intentional community moves continents and finds new neighbors. Orthodox Stonemasonry A crew of master builders build houses using old methods.

    Community Snapshot

    Little Person, Big Welcome Bringing home a baby on the Bruderhof is no small affair.

    Interview

    In Pursuit of Homefulness The biblical understanding of health is not biomedical.

    Portfolio

    The Faces of the Bhopal Disaster Forty years after history’s worst industrial accident, survivors still live in its shadow.

    Report

    In Deep Water off Antarctica On an icebreaker off the coast of Antarctica, I felt a warming planet’s pulse. The Exploitation of Immigrant Care Workers Hidden in plain sight, foreign health aides in UK care homes face exploitation.

    Forerunners

    The Repentance of Bartolomé de las Casas A slaveholding colonizer becomes a defender of the Indigenous.

    Featured Authors

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    cover of Plough Quarterly Health Issue

    About This Issue

    In an age of health care and wellness industries and near-religious pursuit of fitness and self-optimization, what does “health” mean for the chronically ill? For people with disabilities or mental health challenges or neurodiversity? For the aging and dying? This issue asks what it means to live well despite the limitations and frailties of our bodies, and what, beyond the scope of medicine, is needed for our flourishing.