Peter Mommsen – författare

In an election season, all political parties claim to champion freedom, which highlights the very different ways people think about what it means to be free. This issue of Plough Quarterly explores many dimensions of freedom: not only what people need to be freed from, but what we are set free to do. Contributors look at freedom in light of addiction, disability, asylum, religious liberty, modern slavery, dictatorship, conversion, workers’ rights, theology, the fine arts, and more.On this theme: Sohrab Ahmari reminds Christians of their long tradition of defending workers’ rights.Robert Donnelly reports on the welcome asylum seekers receive on the US southern border.Rosemarie Garland-Thomson considers the terrible freedom of choice a pregnant woman faces.John Barclay looks at freedom and slavery, metaphorical and literal, in the writings to Paul.Daniel J. Sims uncovers his own complicity and compromise in the global aid industry.Santiago Ramos realizes people living under dictatorship value books more than free people doJordan Castro recalls how he sought freedom in fiction and heroin, but found it elsewhere.Joonas Sildre shows how Arvo Pärt remained true to his art under Soviet rule.Pan Yongguang recounts how his church community escaped China together.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

In an age of health care and wellness industries and near-religious pursuit of fitness and self-optimization, what does “health” mean for the chronically ill? For people with disabilities or mental health challenges or neurodiversity? For the aging and dying? This issue asks what it means to live well despite the limitations and frailties of our bodies, and what, beyond the scope of medicine, is needed for our flourishing.On this theme: Aberdeen Livingstone learns when to battle, and when to accept, chronic illness.Malcolm Guite defends the responsible use of pipe and pint.David Zahl calls out the wellness industry’s false promise of optimization.Abraham Nussbaum learns the limits of psychotherapy from his first patient.Cristiano Dennani photographs survivors of the Bhopal chemical spill in India.Heather M. Surls visits a tuberculosis hospital in Mafraq, Jordan.Brewer Eberly considers direct primary care, an attempt to reset the doctor-patient relationship.Devan Stahl considers what the wounds of the resurrected Christ mean for people with disabled bodies.Sam Tomlin wishes church and school weren’t such hurdles for children with autism.James Mumford finds the twelve steps of AA work when other approaches to addiction fail.Other articles in this issue: Jessica T. Miskelly, monitoring ocean currents on an icebreaker off Antarctica, feels the planet breathe.Kelsey Osgood visits a Jewish-Christian-Muslim interfaith center after October 7.Terence Sweeney profiles a repentant slaveholder, Bartolomé de las Casas.Plus: new poems by A. E. Stallings, short fiction by Narine Abgaryan, book reviews, and more.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

What should we do with enemies?Jesus challenges us to love our enemies. In today’s swirl of hatemongering, political polarization, and online nastiness, even Christians have skirted this command or given it up as impossible or foolish. What does it really mean to love our enemies? And how might our lives and our world change if we did? In this issue we apply these tough questions to real situations, and hear from people who have put this command into practice in some of the toughest circumstances.On this theme: - Can we afford to love our enemies in a cancel culture?- What sort of enemies did Jesus expect us to love? - The problem with "love the sinner, hate the sin"- Channeling outrage while working with children displaced by war- What Coptic Christians know about praying for their persecutors- Two incarcerated friends defy a racist prison culture.- What about mental illness, when your mind becomes your enemy? - Students find ways to debate tough issues constructively.- A Russian Christian speaks out against the war in Ukraine.Also in the issue:- Maria Novella De Luca photographs Algerian women demining the Sahara.- Dana Wiser remembers civil rights activist Staughton Lynd.- Zena Hitz asks what we’d do with our time if we weren’t so busy.- Kathleen A. Mulhern gives advice for keeping the faith afterhours.- Susannah Black Roberts celebrates the life and example of Tim Keller.- Nathan Beacom call for reestablishing Lyceums in working-class towns.- Maureen swinger recounts the exploits of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

What is our place in nature?Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have has exercised unprecedented dominance over nature, with consequences that are now catching up with us. Many have pointed to Christianity as a culprit. Yet Christianity actually teaches that our relationship to nature should not be one of contempt or disassociation. Rather, according to ancient church tradition, nature is a book to be read, revealing truths about its creator and ours. At a time when many moderns are unsure of what difference, if any, marks us out from other living beings on our planet, and of what our place in the natural world ought to be, what might nature itself tell us about how to live within it?On this theme:Peter Mommsen asks if humans should live by nature’s laws.Colin Boller interviews farmers successfully shifting to regenerative agriculture.Caroline Moore introduces some of Britain’s amazing moths.Daniel Stulac wonders what the Promised Land means in Saskatchewan.Clare Coffey defends dandelions in lawns.Rhys Laverty reports on man’s battle with the sea at the Alderney breakwater.William Thomas Okie explores the old idea that plants reveal their uses.Greta Gaffin looks at our relationship to wolves, and Saint Francis’s.Norann Voll remembers lambing with her father.Tim Maendel finds peace by hunting.Erik Varden asks if the Christian teaching on chastity is unnatural.David McBride translates “The Leper of Abercuawg,” an old Welsh poem.Maureen Swinger watches meteor showers.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

How can we live well with tech, without it becoming our master?These days, the heady promises of Silicon Valley seem suspect: the internet didn’t bring all of humanity together; neither did smartphones or social media. We have long since stopped associating tech with utopian visions of global harmony, instead blaming it for distraction, polarization, addictions to porn and gambling, the trivialization of culture, loss of privacy and work-life balance, and fears that automation may push millions out of a job. Advances in artificial intelligence seem poised to bring us to the next technological watershed. It’s a good time to ask how we can learn to live well with tech, and how we might push back against technologies that shape humans in anti-human ways.On this theme:Find out why computers can’t do math and humans can.When parenting from prison, a little tech can make a big difference.Glucose monitoring systems transform life for children with diabetes.Should ChatGPT write sermons and prayers?From scrolls to scrolling, tech has changed the way Jewish people read scriptureWill AI bring the end of the world, or is it already here?An intentional community tries to be intentional about personal technology.Our struggle with technology goes back to the Tower of Babel in Genesis.A farmer praises a simple piece of technology – the rock bar.Also in this issue:A photo essay about children on the frontlines in UkraineA philosopher’s proposal for a gift economyThe winners of the 2024 Rhina Espaillat Poetry AwardInsights from Gerard Manley Hopkins, E. F. Schumacher, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, and Hannah ArendtReviews of Birding to Change the World, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and All Things Are Too SmallPlough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Is our work merely a way to put food on the table, or does it have inherent value? Should our work define us? Does it play too large a role in our lives? Does it make us feel more human, or less so? This issue explores the realities of work for people with various jobs, but also probes the reasons people work and what they hope to gain from their labor. From warehouse workers to poets, food delivery specialists to cloistered nuns, farmers to police officers, this issue considers personal, spiritual, and social aspects of one of the most basic human activities.On this theme: James Rebanks prepares to pass on the farm to his children.Benoit Gautier rides a shuttlebus with dislocated French warehouse workers.Shira Telushkin asks why young women today are becoming cloistered nuns.Ben Wray talks to food-delivery riders in three countries about their attempts to organize.John Clair, a police chief, wants policing to be about relationships, not statistics.Norann Voll tells how her father taught her to embrace her blue-collar roots.Maureen Swinger honors the unpaid and unheralded work of caring for an aging loved one.Alastair Roberts recommends the divine rhythm of work and Sabbath rest God established in Genesis.Also in this issue:Adam Nicolson finds a different sort of freedom sailing a sixteen-foot wooden boat.Alister McGrath explores the connection between detective fiction and the spiritual quest.Tish Harrison Warren introduces Stanley Hauerwas to new audiences.Christian Wiman shares a new poem about a glass-eyed monk.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Gone are the flat-earth days of scientific rationalism. Humans, it turns out, are naturally hungry for mystery, magic, faith. There have been laments about disenchantment and calls for re-enchantment. Many who forsake traditional religion are drawn to spiritualism and pagan beliefs and practices. Christians, meanwhile, have always affirmed that there is more than meets our eyes, that our world is teeming with angels and demons, powers and principalities, signs and wonders. The “supernatural” is real; in fact, it’s entirely natural. Whether you believe it or not, there are powers you should rightly fear, and one you should serve.On this theme: Joy Marie Clarkson debunks the idea that our world needs re-enchantment.Andrew Davison surveys the unseen world’s place in our cosmology.Alison Milbank considers the matter of angels as creatures like and unlike us.Carlos Eire talks about what drew him to accounts of flying saints.Fleming Rutledge says true preaching is letting the Holy Spirit speak through you.Rachel Pieh Jones recounts dreams of Jesus that changed two lives continents apart.Charles E. Moore tells a story of demon possession, revival, and miraculous healings that weren’t coincidental.Benjamin Crosby asks what “gifts of the spirit” should mark the follower of Jesus.Also in this issue:André Trocmé tells how his town offered sanctuary to thousands of Jews facing deportation.Anti-Nazi theologian Henri de Lubac has a message for today’s Christian nationalists.Mary Townsend gives up her smartphone and starts noticing things.Hannah Rose Thomas paints portraits of mothers who survived the Srebrenica massacre.The winning poems in Plough’s fifth annual Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Nature is so beautiful it must mean something. Christians have seen in the beauty of creation a sign of the beauty of the Creator; the natural world teaches us to know the “author of beauty.” But anyone who starts thinking more seriously about beauty soon runs into more troubling aspects.We’re more awash with images than ever before, many of them doctored or artificial. Any idealized beauty that excludes humankind’s imperfection and vulnerability is prone to becoming inhuman. And even the wholesome beauty of nature or the fine arts is only a partial truth in a world where children starve or are trafficked to abusers. Yet stubbornly, beauty remains. Through trees, gargoyles, paintings, and fellow humans, the writers in this issue ask hard questions to deepen our understanding and appreciation of the good, the true, and the beautiful.On this theme:Natalie Carnes revisits Christianity’s love-hate relationship with sacred art: Are those icons or idols?Brandon Vaidyanathan says his mother’s mental illness changed the way he sees human beauty.Sean Rubin tells how his mother found Jesus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Sergio Bermudez views Paris from the perspective of Notre-Dame Cathedral’s grotesques and gargoyles.Cardinal Christoph Schönborn reflects on Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement during a conclave.Ben Quash looks at how beauty has shaped Christian imagination, from Absalom’s hair to English gardens.Philip Holsinger sees the future of El Salvador in one bright, carefree child.Caitrin Keiper searches for meaning in the loss of her unborn baby.Chris Voll profiles a sculptor who left a promising career to care for his dying father.Also in this issue:Six new poems by Wendell Berry.Paul Kingsnorth offers six ways to resist the Machine.The Bruderhof’s rule about gossip was written in 1925. Does it still work?Discover LesslieNewbigin, who reimagined the role of a missionary.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Christianity shaped the West, bringing conquest and religious strife but also the modern ideals of emancipation, human rights, and democracy. Now Christendom’s influence is waning, and many churches are seeing decline in membership. What happens if we lose the Christian teaching that each human being is made in the image of God, and that humankind, in all its diversity, is one whole. This issue of Plough looks at the social, political, and cultural implications, reminding readers that Jesus brought more than a religion and that this is not how his story ends.On this theme: Karen Kilby asks how Christians should respond to churches in decline.Galen Watts argues that modernity has replaced traditional religion with other gods.King-Ho Leung posits that Marx misunderstood Christianity.John Ehrett shows what right-wing politics looks like without Christian moorings.Gary Saul Morson recounts how Solzhenitsyn found faith in the gulag.Margarita Mooney found faith alive in Communist Cuba.Easton Law dispels some common myths about the church in China.Graham Tomlin recounts Blaise Pascal conversion from cultural Christian to true believer.Also in this issue: George Scialabba finds moral exemplars in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.Francis Young tells a story in which a mystical white reindeer appears.Chris Zimmerman interviews Israelis and Palestinians who have lost children to the conflict.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Education has become too narrowly focused on academic success and future earning potential. But creative schools and individual teachers are finding ways, new and old, to reverse this trend. From kindergarten to university, writers in this issue of Plough step back to look at education as the holistic task of forming healthy, responsible, passionate humans, and share success stories from the front lines.On this theme: Alex Sosler on innovative schools where students learn a trade and study the humanities.Brit Frazier on becoming a local volunteer firefighter.Peter Gray on why free play is essential.Anthony Garces-Foley on why he chose to teach in a public school.Stephanie Ebert on reading children scary fairy tales.Patrick Tomassi on Lernvergnugenstag, when teachers get to teach what inspires them.Tim Maendel on a public high school that raises deer and fish.Phil Christmas on why everyone still needs literature.Benjamin Crosby on how Christian teaching gets passed on.Frederick K. S. Leung on why math is not merely instrumental.Also in this issue:Rabbi Meir Soloveichik on hearing God in the subway.Grace Hamman on Sister Penelope, mentor to C. S. Lewis.Paul Coleman on religious persecution in Nicaragua and Finland.Reviews of Edwidge Danticat’s We’re Alone, John Inazu’s Learning toDisagree, and H. G. Parry’s The Magician’s Daughter.New poems by Claude Wilkinson. Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

A dramatic true story of a man refined by fire, a Bruderhof pastor whose spiritual legacy continues to touch thousands.Can our wounds become our greatest gift? Bruderhof pastor J. Heinrich Arnold was a broken man. Yet those who knew him said they never met another like him. Some spoke of his humility and compassion; others of his frankness and earthy humor. In his presence, complete strangers poured out their darkest secrets and left transformed. Others met him with hatred.Writer Henri Nouwen called him a “prophetic voice” and wrote of how his words “touched me as a double-edged sword, calling me to choose between truth and lies, selflessness and selfishness. . . . Here was no pious, sentimental guide; every word came from experience.”Who was this extraordinary yet simple man? In this gripping and richly spiritual book, Peter Mommsen tells the dramatic true story of the grandfather he hardly knew. Read it, and you will never look at your own life the same way again.Gold Medal Winner, 2016 IPPY Book of the Year Award in Biography, Independent PublishersSilver Medal Winner, 2016 Benjamin Franklin Award in Religion, Independent Book Publishers Association

This issue of Plough Quarterly explores our relationship with the natural world. Hear from leading scientists, farmers, writers, activists, theologians, and artists who have set their hearts and minds and hands to caring for the earth for generations to come. Bold, hope-filled, and down-to-earth, Plough Quarterly features thought-provoking articles, commentary, interviews, short fiction, book reviews, poetry and artwork to inspire everyday faith and action. Each issue brings together essential voices from many traditions to give you fresh insights on a core theme such as peacemaking, biblical justice, children and family, building community, man and woman, nature and the environment, nonviolence, or simple living. Starting from the conviction that the teachings and example of Jesus can transform and renew our world, it aims to apply them to all aspects of life, seeking common ground with all people of goodwill regardless of creed.

Main Description: This issue opens with the story of Melania and her real estate-magnatehusband, who decide to divest themselves of their entire wealth. These earlyChristians, who sold off their many estates and freed eight thousand slaves,were only exceptional in the amount they gave away. Jesus, after all, hadadvised a rich man, “Go, sell yourpossessions, and give the money to the poor.” And he emphatically warned thatyou cannot serve two masters: you cannot serve God and money. What does thatmean for Christians today, in a society and economy premised on theaccumulation of capital? How can we resist and subvert the power of money?On this theme:- Clare Coffey looks at how multilevel marketing commodifiesfriendship.- Sharon Rose Christner describes what happens when a Vatican palacebecomes a homeless shelter.- Alastair Roberts writes in praise of Mary of Bethany’s extravagantlove.- A photojournalist asks what’s left of the Cuban Revolutionseventy years after it began.- Jack Bell revisits William Cobbett’s spirited defense of thevanishing British commons.- Maria Weiss finds pain and friendship in the forced community ofa leper colony.- Maureen Swinger reveals the joys and pitfalls of owning twenty-twocars (collectively).- Robert Lockridge describes what he’s learned running a pay-as-you-cancafé.Also in the issue: - The winning poems in the 2023 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Awardcontest- An excerpt from Eugene Vodolazkin’s new novel, A History of the Island- Reviews of Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Thin Places, Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs,and Jennifer Banks’s Natality- Readings on Christianity and money from Eberhard Arnold, Peter Riedemann, Nicolai Berdyaev, Basilof Caesarea, Maria Skobtsova, C. S. Lewis, and Dorothy DayPlough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faithto the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews,poetry, book reviews, and art.

Our writers celebrate the work of repair – of objects, relationships, communities, and landscapes – and reckon with its limits.Consumers campaign for a “right to repair” in protest of products’ wasteful “planned obsolescence.” Repair cafés spring up, in which old-timers teach greenhorns to mend clothes and appliances. But much more than our possession stand in need of repair. For some, the Jewish phrase tikkun olam – to repair the world – may have become little more than a secular social justice mandate, not unlike the Christian cliché “God has no hands but ours.” Yet while we wait on God to repair the cosmos, there are indeed countless ways one can participate in this work, whether one is a mother, a handyman, a farmer, an artist, an teacher, or a pastor. The work may not be glamorous, but it calls forth our creativity and holds its own rewards.On this theme:- A handyman settles for humble work and doesn’t wish more for his children.- A mother mends her daughters’ clothes into extravagant works of arts.- A pastor in a declining denomination asks where to start repairing the church.- A farmer says a restored landscape will be more than it was before.- Yazidi, Rohingya, and Uyghur survivors of sexual violence find ways to reclaim their dignity.- Painter Makoto Fujimura says artists don’t fight culture wars, they make culture.- Prisoners and staff say prisons don’t rehabilitate, but education in prison just might.- A schoolteacher says education requires family, school, and community.- A church that prays in the language of Jesus, scattered by war, lives on in new places.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.