Featured

Warriors on Stage
A veteran asks if theater can help heal the moral injury of soldiers returning home from the battlefield.
Scott Beauchamp
Essay
The Beauty of Belonging
Wherever people build, decorate, and shape things with a view to belonging, a kind of order emerges.
Roger Scruton
Essay
The Sacred Bonds of Sound
Have the sounds of worship been lost in translation? Sarah Ruden on the importance of silence and sound in scripture.
Sarah Ruden
Essay
It Could Be Anyone
A Muslim writer contends with two Christian paintings: an ancient icon of the Virgin Mary, and Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew.
Navid Kermani
Essay
All About Light
If an icon is about anything at all, it is firstly about light.
Fadi Mikhail
Essay
I Did Not Leave
Poet Cozine Welch Jr. takes us behind bars to look – truly look – at the men who stand in the prison common room.
Cozine Welch Jr.
Poetry
The Last Christians in the News
News commentary and media coverage of Plough’s book, The Last Christians by Andreas Knapp.
A Man of Honor
People with same-sex attraction who want to follow Jesus may be among the most important witnesses of our time.
Essay

Insights

Return to Appalachia
When funding cuts endanger the arts program in their Appalachian hometown, two graduates of Parsons School of Design return to teach art in a barn.
Susannah Black Roberts
Doers
Making a Work of Art
Each great artist’s vision sprang from the conviction that life could be better, richer, and truer than it was.
Reading
The Business of the Artist
The church should use a decent humility before the artist, whose business it is to serve God in his own technique and not in somebody else’s.
Dorothy L Sayers
Reading
The Creative Process
The artist must never cease warring with society, for its sake and for his own, to show the loneliness of birth, suffering, love, and death.
James Baldwin
Reading
Insights on Beauty
Insights on the nature of beauty, from Jacques Maritain, Dorothy Day, Basil of Caesarea, and Annie Dillard.
Inklings

Web Exclusives

The Wound Incarnate: Death, Art, and Immortality
At their best, art and faith make us aware of the wound incarnate, the sacred weakness of an eternal God who entered our finite world.
Chanterelles
The chanterelles lie in the rain-soaked leaves / like orange hibiscus flowers …
Poet as Neighbor
A review of Kindest Regards by Ted Kooser. Kooser’s poems train us to notice to what we might be tempted to ignore.

Arts & Letters

Giant Picnic
An anonymous installation artist held a picnic at a giant table that spanned the border fence between Mexico and California. His table had eyes…
Another View
Excerpt: Mandela and the General
Will the freedom struggle end in a bloodbath? Only two men can avert it…
John Carlin
Oriol Malet
Comic
Covering the Cover: The Art of Community
A closer look at the cover for Plough Quarterly 18.
Covering the Cover