The PloughCast

America's theologian isn't worried about the death of cultural Christianity.

Food-delivery bike riders in London, Berlin, and Copenhagen are pushing back against their algorithmic bosses.

In a year wracked by violence, I remember the crucifixion to find comfort.

Why do we work? The dream of a truly human economy spans millennia, from Genesis to Marx to Martin Luther King.

A high-school science teacher and his students practice conservation in the woods and ponds of upstate New York.

The mysterious friend of C. S. Lewis teaches how to know and be known in Christ.

My kids already know the world is not safe. Will dragons and goblins make it worse?

Dhananjay Jagannathan defends the spiritual worth of liberal education at Columbia University.

For decades, Stanley Hauerwas has been provoking Christians with his insistence that if they would only follow their Master, it would impact all areas of life, from the personal to the societal. In his new book, *Jesus Changes Everything*, his timely and prophetic voice speaks to another generation of followers of Jesus tired of religion as usual. On March 4, 2025, Stanley Hauerwas, Brian Zahnd, and Charles E. Moore had a conversation about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus today. The event was co-sponsored with the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies and Acts 2 At Duke. Get the book here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/bible-studies/jesus-changes-everything

A Bruderhof teacher applies lessons from her mentors and Homer in her classroom and beyond.

How do you teach Christian basics to those who think they know all about it?

Faced with a Nazi takeover, the first Bruderhof school took refuge in Liechtenstein.

Learning that one's job might soon be eliminated by the emergence of an overhyped new technology puts one in good company.

A priest joins her local volunteer fire department.

A priest joins her local volunteer fire department.

A new crop of innovative schools encourages all students to use their minds and their hands.

Peter Mommsen asks whether our society has lost sight of how to raise young humans.

Pan Youngguang describes how his persecuted house church chooses to flee together as a community.

Santiago Ramos points out that in a dictatorship, literature nurtures freedom. In a democracy, does it matter?

Maureen Swinger describes an old school bus's transformation into a space for coffee and camaraderie.

Robert Donnelly meets the migrants seeking asylum in the United States.

Emmy Barth Maendel describes how, in just three short years, a sixteenth-century martyr founded a church that has endured to this day.

Heinrich Arnold describes how scripture tells an unfinished history of liberation.

Visual artist Hannah Rose Thomas, architect Charles Howell, and poet Malcolm Guite celebrate the freedom of coloring within the lines.

Dori Moody describes how poverty, chastity, and obedience bring a different kind of freedom.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson asks why parents are not spared the terrible freedom of having to choose whether to have a child with a disability.

Jordan Castro describes how he sought freedom in drugs and novels, but they couldn't save him.

John M.G. Barclay explores how Paul's letters probe the paradox of freedom through love.

Sohrab Ahmari asks what happened to the Christian tradition of supporting workers' rights?

J. Daniel Sims, an insider, reckons with complicity and compromise in Cambodia's aid industry.

James Wood tells his conversion story and asks: Is commitment just for suckers?

Peter Mommsen asks what's the point of freedom?

Alastair Roberts describes how our struggle with technology starts in Genesis.

Matthew Loftus reminds Western donors not to send junk to his Kenyan hospital while stressing that they do depend on Western excess.

Simon Oliver argues that some goods and services have value beyond their market price.

David Schaengold argues that computers can't do math and the human mind is a marvel that no machine has matched.

Brian Miller, an East Tennessee farmer, praises a simple piece of technology.

Peter Mommsen asks how we can live well with technology?

Arlie Coles asks if large language models should write sermons and prayers.

Andrew Zimmerman tells how the Bruderhof community tries to be intentional about personal technology.

Matthew Loftus reminds Western donors not to send junk to his Kenyan hospital while stressing that they do depend on Western excess.

J. L. Wall describes how the way we read scripture has changed and the way that it has remained the same.

Robert Lee Williams tells how even a little tech in prison can make a big difference.

James and Helen Rebanks talk about raising sheep and cattle in the Lake District. James describes the landscape where their families have lived for six hundred years, and how they have begun practicing regenerative agriculture as a way of restoring the land that recent conventional agriculture had damaged. He gives details about the sheep and cattle herds and the grazing systems they've established. Then Helen describes what led her to write her book on the work of the farmer's wife, and addresses mothers, who are often the ones making choices about food that are linked to questions of sustainable agriculture. They discuss the concept of rewilding, and how that is not necessarily either possible or desirable – the landscape has not been wild for thousands of years – but that increasing complexity and biodiversity is both possible and necessary.

Tim Maendel describes his love of hunting and the connection it gives him to the human species' natural history.

Rhys Laverty writes about the Alderney Breakwater, a crumbling jetty in the Channel Islands that protects a way of life.

Norann Voll learned some of life's most important lessons from her father while caring for sheep.

Peter Mommsen asks if humans should live by the laws of nature.

In an excerpt from her book, Joy Marie Clarkson explores the natural metaphors that we use. Are you a tree, she asks, or are you a potted plant?

Greta Gaffin asks if humans should return to nature, and looks to the lives of two saints who taught us to make peace with it instead.

David McBride introduces his new translation of The Leper of Abercuawg, a thousand-year-old Welsh poem in which an outcast seeks comfort in the wild.