2023’s Top Ten

Here, in ascending order, are the ten most popular articles Plough published in 2023, based on the number of readers online.

10. Selling Friends by Clare Coffey

Multi-level marketing (MLM) calls for what Aristotle calls friendship of utility, in which two people are bound together by their usefulness to each other, or their common pursuit of utility. This is what your online friend’s hyperingratiating sales pitch is trying to achieve, if clumsily and one-sidedly. Your friend is trying to maintain a friendship with you in hopes that you will buy her product. But for the most successful MLM saleswoman, friendship is not the means to the sell; it is the thing being sold.

9. My Mind, My Enemy by Sarah Clarkson

I was seventeen when my mind became my enemy. I still find it hard to describe the experience of mental illness, of having a psyche you cannot control. From one day to the next, I found that this friend of my childhood bombarded me with almost uninterrupted images of explicit violence, sexual perversion, and disaster. What I saw was so real, evoking such a physical reaction of panic and such a pervasive sense of shame that I became almost unable to cope with normal life. I barely slept. I withdrew from my plans for college. My sense of self disintegrated. My health broke. My mind, this most intimate of companions, had become my enemy, and she was formidable.

Photograph by Andrey Metelev. Used by permission.

8. The Library at Home by Zito Madu

It was important to my parents that we have a library at home. After years of moving around, including across continents, when we finally settled in the house where my parents still live today, an entire room was set aside to be the library. It was tremendously impractical with our family of eight, with everyone doubling up to fit in the limited space. The use of another bedroom would have alleviated pressure, but my parents refused that possibility. The room was the library and that was that.

Photograph by Haley Carman.

7. Just Your Handyman by Kurt Armstrong

Some people know how to build high-rise towers. Is this what I should aspire to? My life and my work are so tiny. I feel constant pressure, almost entirely of my own making, to be more driven, to aspire to larger public work, something grander, more life-changing. When I see what others are capable of, I feel like I should do more: expand my business, build homes rather than just fixing them. Build more, earn more, write more, do more, be more. Am I doing enough? Should I be doing more? And what should I want for my son? How pleased I would be to watch him exceed everything I am and the things I can do. Is it my job to push him to aim higher, strive for more?

Raymond Logan, Dad’s Drill, oil, 2020. Used by permission.

6. Zero Episcopalians by Benjamin Crosby

It is a strange time to be a young minister. 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.

Photograph by Vyacheslav Lopatin / Alamy Stock Photo. Used by permission.

5. A Father’s Legacy to His Son – and His Country by Robert Ellsberg and Chris Zimmerman

In October 1969 my father, Daniel Ellsberg, took me out for lunch and told me about his plans to copy what became known as the Pentagon Papers. His intention was to make them available to Congress, and he had some hopes that this might help end the war, though it would involve the risk of prison. He had been sharing with me books and writings by Gandhi, Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., and other teachers of nonviolence, so I understood what he was talking about it. He asked if I would help him. So that afternoon I spent the day at a Xerox machine copying top secret documents. I was thirteen.

One last trip to the beach – father and son near Berkeley, California, April 2023. Photograph courtesy of Robert Ellsberg.

4. Living with Religious Scrupulosity or Moral OCD by Alan Noble

Growing up evangelical, I was taught that your personal conscience is law. God uses the Holy Spirit to guide and convict us through our innermost selves. So when the conscience speaks, not to listen is a sin. What nobody told me was that your conscience, or what feels like your conscience, can be entirely mistaken through no fault of your own. Just like it’s possible to feel no guilt when you should, it’s possible to feel guilt or anxiety or shame over things that you shouldn’t feel bad about at all. Nobody warned me about moral scrupulosity, the type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) I suffer from. Nobody warned me how anxiety and fear can take the thing you care about most – your faith – and turn it against you.

Photograph by Majid Rangraz.

3. Where Are the Churches in Canada’s Euthanasia Experiment? by Benjamin Crosby

“Sophia,” a fifty-one-year-old woman who suffered from multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), could not obtain an apartment that would meet her needs. While MCS is difficult to manage, symptoms can improve significantly with decent housing. “The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless, and a pain in the ass,” she said in a video a few days before she was killed via MAID in February 2022.

Photograph by Andrey Metelev. Used by permission.

2. God’s Purpose in Your Pain by Rick Warren

Both believers and unbelievers experience trials. But Christians have a hope to hold on to that not only comforts us, but also empowers us to bless others. What is our hope in pain? It is the promise of God that he can bring good out of anything, even pain, if we trust him.

Vinicius Barajas, Easter Triptych II, 2018. Used by permission.

1. What Is Time For? by Zena Hitz

What is leisure, and why is it necessary for human beings? The leisure that I am interested in is not the first thing you may imagine: bingeing Netflix on the couch, lounging at the beach, attending a festive party with friends, or launching yourself from the largest human catapult for the thrill of it. The leisure that is necessary for human beings is not just a break from real life. What we are after is a state that looks like the culmination of a life. Let’s pause and ask ourselves: What parts of our lives seem to be the culminating parts, the days or hours or minutes where we are living life most fully? When do you stop counting the time and become entirely present to what you are doing? What sorts of activities are you engaged in when this takes place?

Brian Kershisnik, Divine Intervention, oil on canvas, 2016. Used by permission.