There are at least a couple of articles in each issue that annoy me. But each of the annoying articles is one that I carefully consider and pray about: Why does it rub me the wrong way? How does it challenge my beliefs or values? Is it biblical or is the Bible being misconstrued? The articles achieve your goal of encouraging critical thinking; I encourage you not to jump into the fray of controversial topics for the sake of staying “relevant” or gaining followers who simply want to argue. There is enough of that online. I subscribed to the quarterly because of the gentle way you approach topics, and the peaceful way in which I can consider and meditate on each article. I truly believe many Christians are ready to consider the way of Jesus as loving, kind, and challenging. The way is narrow, but those of us walking along it should be arm in arm in love.
On Peter Mommsen’s “Dogs, Deer, Herons, and the Promise of Beauty”: Peter Mommsen’s essay on beauty keeps tightening the circle around the human observer.
What troubles me is how narrowly he casts the question of beauty – forever circling back to the human gaze, as though beauty itself waits to be blessed by our perception. To say that creation’s loveliness “means” something only insofar as it points to a divine artisan is to mistake beauty for a message. The maple woods, the heron, the deer – all go on being what they are, serenely indifferent to our categories of order or worship.
Beauty does not ask to be moralized or redeemed. It is not a signpost to the Creator, nor a mirror of human virtue or depravity – it precedes all that. The lichen on a boulder, the rot that feeds the forest floor, the glacier’s collapse into meltwater – each is beautiful because it simplyis. To imagine beauty as something that “summons” us is to subtract from its independence. The sacred is not granted by belief; it inheres in existence itself, in the unobserved gleam of things.
The forest does not become less beautiful when no one is there to pray in it; a parasite has its own elaborate form regardless of whether a theologian finds it edifying. To insist that beauty “must mean something” is to flatten the world into a set of symbols curated for a single species’ spiritual anxieties. The radiance of existence is older and less sentimental than that.
I consider Plough one of my three favorite Christian magazines, and I regularly recommend it to others. My critique comes from someone who is a supporter, an ecumenical Christian, who strives to love everyone without distinction.
I was enjoying your article until I reached the mention of Erika Kirk. I felt that the inclusion of such a controversial figure was distracting – at least it was for me.
I fully accept that truth is truth regardless of its source. However, given the deep concerns many Christians have about the theology promoted by Charlie Kirk and represented and embraced by his wife, I believe quoting her may distract readers from an otherwise excellent article.
On Ben Quash’s “Layers of Beauty”: I really appreciated this interview. Quash noted that the Old Testament contains passages which are aware that “the beauty of appearances can also be a perilous thing,” citing Absalom’s fatally long hair. A close inspection of 1 and 2 Samuel shows that all references to a person being beautiful in the David story are accompanied by the death of someone related to, or interacting with, the handsome person: David and Goliath, Abigail and Nabal, Bathsheba and Uriah (and her baby with handsome David). The big clue to the danger of relying on appearances appears in 1 Samuel 16:7, when Samuel is scolded for initially selecting one of David’s brothers based on appearance: “The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
On Brandon Vaidyanathan’s “My Mother’s Hidden Radiance”: “Presentability became the conditional price of love.” How true this statement often is! We do not fully engage with members of our families and society because they do not look or act like we think they should. I am reminded of the song by Dottie Rambo: “He looked beyond my fault and saw my need.” I pray that we will do as Christ does – look beyond fault, sickness, and behavior, and see people’s needs.
On Paul Kingsnorth’s “Six Ways to Resist 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, it suggests, and we now must get ourselves out of it by our own askesis, or self-discipline. I do not think Kingsnorth is a Pelagian. But to resist this ancient problem, we need something more than discipline and protest. We need grace.
On Natalie Carnes’s “Icon or Idol?”:Thank you for this thoughtful look at icons and idols; it brings out a theme I have noticed in myself and others. Those who grew up in one faith tradition may find meaning in another – I grew up in a church with no images but have discovered the beauty and meaning that can be found in them without being drawn to worship the images themselves. I’ve known others who moved in the other direction. I still regularly attend a church without images but often spend time in other places (for services or retreats) that include them.
On Charles E. Moore and Stanley Hauerwas’s “We Are the Alternative to War”: Hauerwas says that, as a Christian, he is committed to nonviolence and that he does not “have a foreign policy because [he’s] not a state.” I agree that 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 nonkilling world policy without diluting their commitment to nonviolence?