Featured

It’s Not All Good, Man
Churches are in decline. How should Christians respond?
Karen Kilby
Essay
How Solzhenitsyn Found Faith
As a prisoner in the gulag, the great Russian author discovered a hard truth about good and evil.
Gary Saul Morson
Essay
The Critique of Religion
Marx called Christianity the opium of the people. What if it isn’t the religion he thought it was?
King-Ho Leung
Essay
Grieving for Peace in Israel and Palestine
Israelis and Palestinians who lost family band together to promote an end to the violence.
Chris Zimmerman
Report
Short Story: Sieidi
In all the years since, I’ve never regretted what we did.
Fiction

The Moral Beauty of Middlemarch

George Eliot’s masterpiece teaches us to live faithfully a hidden life.
George Scialabba
Essay

Insights

The Gods of Modernity
Max Weber claimed today’s world is disenchanted. Actually, it’s teeming with new enchantments.
Galen Watts
Essay
The Asbury Outpouring
Asbury University’s president talks about the ongoing effects of the student spiritual revival in 2023.
Timothy J Keiderling
Report
Mother Mary in Cuba
After decades of Communist suppression of religion, I found marks of faith in my mother’s hometown.
Margarita Mooney Clayton
Personal History
Knowing What Time It Is
What will our politics look like after Christianity? A tour of the post-religious right.
John Ehrett
Essay
The Church in China Isn’t What You Think
A scholar of Chinese Christianity dispels some common myths.
Easten Law
Interview
The Fight Against Mammon
In the febrile atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, Plough’s founding editor sets Jesus’ gospel against the gods of wealth and war.
Eberhard Arnold
Essay

Web Exclusives

Elegy for Sammy Basso
The life of a young man with a rare genetic condition stretches our understanding of what it means to be human.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Everyone Is Eventually a Burden
As laws permitting medically assisted death advance, how will we learn to accept diminishment rather than kill ourselves?
Matthew Burdette

Secrets of the Vanishing Church

What’s behind the numbers of declining faith participation?

Ryan Burge
Lyman Stone

Thirteen False and Debilitating Ideas

Over fifty years ago, two dozen theologians met in Hartford and identified thirteen heresies threatening the church. You may find them familiar.

Nathaniel Peters

Arts & Letters

Poetry Comic: Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”
A graphic artist interprets the Welsh poet’s masterpiece about nature, time, and lost youth.
Julian Peters
Comic
A Tang Dynasty Ceramic Horse
It stands on all four hooves, just stopped / as if before a cliffside topped / with waving grasses like its mane.
Benjamin P. Myers
Poetry
Pear Trees in Winter
To see the orchard stand undressed and cold, / shivering before the blue mountain, trunks dark
Benjamin P. Myers
Poetry
Afterwords
High summer throbs and buzzes like a light / bulb burning out, the fields all full of wings.
Benjamin P. Myers
Poetry