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    gray and tan painting brushstrokes

    Covering the Cover: Vocation

    By Rosalind Stevenson

    September 19, 2019
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    A sanitation worker? There have got to be hundreds of more significant jobs we could have showcased: farming, nursing, relief work, teaching … At any rate, collecting the garbage can’t possibly be this guy’s vocation, can it?

    the front cover of Plough Quarterly Autumn 2019 Issue 22: Vocation

    Exactly. When designing this issue’s cover, we narrowed down our options to this one precisely because the work portrayed is not, in the eyes of our society, considered spiritual, highly-skilled, or particularly laudable. But the point is just that: career and vocation are not interchangeable terms.

    As Peter Mommsen writes in his Editor’s Letter: “When the New Testament writers use the words translated in English as vocation or calling, they are never referring to work, much less to a particular trade or profession….  the New Testament knows only one form of vocation: discipleship.”

    Artist Dean Mitchell hails from Pittsburgh. “I’m drawn to the humane,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1993. “But there is something more there. ... I do believe in God, and I do believe that when you create, something else can take over…. If that intention [in a work of art] is pure – to say something to humanity or to stir something in people – then you are tapping into another source beyond your control.” 

    the front cover of Plough Quarterly Autumn 2019 Issue 22: Vocation
    Contributed By

    Rosalind Stevenson is a graphic designer for the Plough Quarterly.

    Contributed By RosalindStevenson2 Rosalind Stevenson

    Rosalind Stevenson is the magazine designer for Plough. She lives at Fox Hill Bruderhof in Walden, New York.

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