Featured

Money-Free Medicine
What’s it like to practice medicine in a community where doctors don’t charge and patients don’t pay? Plough interviews two Bruderhof physicians.
Interview
Science and the Soul
How does the mind relate to the brain? What about the soul? This question is central to my professional life.
Essay
What’s a Body For?
My body is the exterior expression of that interior personal reality that Scripture names the “heart.”
Essay
Let Me Stand
My sister died of an opioid overdose. But first, she forgave me.
Essay
Begotten Not Made
What are we to think about the possibility of genetically engineering future generations?
Essay
Perfectly Human
My daughter Cerian’s life ended an hour before she was born. She taught me so much about beauty, worth, and the gift of being.
Sarah C. Williams
Personal History

Insights

Patient Perspective
I truly believe this form of community is an expression of the kingdom of God, of how he wants us to care for one another.
Essay
Adirondack Doctor
I am an old-school family physician who has spent the last thirty-eight years in the center of upstate New York’s Adirondack Park.
Essay
The End of Medicine
Christians should oppose euthanasia. But we also need to start showing real concern for those who feel they have no other option.
Reuben Zimmerman
Essay
All Sorts of Little Things
A dialogue of compassion, a binding of ourselves together in love, might be all we have left.
Stephanie Saldana
Cecile Massie
Essay
The Measure of a Life Well Lived
What is the measure of a life well lived? Clare Stober asked herself this question at her father’s death, and then the deaths of three close friends seemed to hold out an answer.
Clare Stober
Essay
Beyond Racial Reconciliation
As I come closer to the end of my journey, I am aware that community development can only take us so far – because this is a gospel issue.
John M Perkins
Reading
Christ the Physician
“For because we could not come to the physician, he has vouchsafed to come to us himself.”
Augustine of Hippo
Reading
On Being Ill
Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.
Inklings
On Eternal Health
A deaf fifteenth-century nun searches for the meaning of suffering and infirmity.
Teresa de Cartagena
Inklings
Our Task Is to Live
We dare not give up on those who are sick and dying, for it belongs to our human dignity and calling to nurture life.
Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt
Inklings

Web Exclusives

Repenting for Healthcare Inequality
“Can you please help me?” The woman on the other end of the phone was crying. “I’m twenty-four weeks pregnant, and I’ve been having terrible headaches.”
Marilyn R. Gardner
In Defense of Medical Conscience Rights
The principles of liberty and tolerance require freedom of the medical conscience.
The Medicated Soul
For mental illness, a Christian doctor prescribes prayer, pills – and a big dose of community.
Matthew Loftus

Arts & Letters

To Be Plucked by a Strange or Timid Hand
This grip of patience, after the scythe / cuts in. Most have dropped – relieved – / into gathering arms – brusque, adequate, / but this foolish remnant holds their roots.
Poetry
Carry Me
My desire is to make present and visible people who have been culturally marginalized, people who many view as profoundly “other.”
Another View
Siegfried Sassoon’s “Before the Battle”
A watercolor illustration of Siegfried Sassoon’s “Before the Battle.”
Julian Peters
Comic
Readers Respond: Issue 17
Josiah Royce and a Beloved Community built on Christ. Seeing neighbors in those beyond our neighborhoods, and even borders.
Forum