Yu Jie - Böcker

On December 10, 2010, on stage in Oslo City Hall, an empty chair sat before more than one thousand people, holding only the medal and diploma of the year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner. A larger-than-life photo of a smiling Liu Xiaobo hung in the background.This striking image is now known throughout the world. But who is Liu Xiaobo? For the first time, this biographyby renowned Chinese author and close friend Yu Jie offers a first-hand look into the man behind the empty chair. Dissident, prisoner, poet, scholar, Liu was compelled by intolerable circumstances to embark on a campaign of intellectual dissent, becoming in the course of his journey a leading human rights activist and one of the most important political figures in modern history.In the quarter century since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, Liu has been unable to lead a normal life. In thisfirst authorized biography, Yu traces an extraordinary man’s odyssey, from growing up in the northeast and Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, through his meteoric rise in Beijing’s intellectual circles and his pivotal role in the Tiananmen protests and subsequent imprisonments, to the founding of the controversial Independent Chinese PEN and groundbreaking Charter 08, his poignant relationship with wife Liu Xia, and winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. It is also a love story between two poets who, though separated by three hundred miles and eleven years behind bars, are united in their persistence to speak truth to power, inspiring countless others.

To give hope in uncertain times, this issue of Plough profiles people who have lived courageously.In unsettling times such as these, being told to “take courage” can sound like a grim joke. Yet courage is precisely what we’re in need of today: courage to stand by the truth, and courage to stand by the gospel’s claim that everyone belongs to God, because Jesus has overcome the world. To inspire such courage – and to guard against a failure of nerve or of imagination – this issue of Plough highlights people who have lived courageously.In this issue:• Chinese dissident Yu Jie looks at the challenges facing the church in China.• Cuban pastor Raúl Suárez reveals how encounters with Christians thawed Fidel Castro’s atheism.• Plough pays tribute to NYPD Det. Steven McDonald, who forgave the young shooter who paralyzed him.• Maureen Swinger tells how a young man with severe disabilities became an exceptional teacher.• Evangelical activist D. L. Mayfield finds an unsettling role model in Dorothy Day.• Comic artist Julian Peters illustrates T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.”Plus:• Insights on courage from Teresa of Avila, George Bernard Shaw, Meister Eckhart, and Mother Teresa• Original poetry by Christopher Zimmerman• Reviews of Martin Scorsese’s Silence, Mark Sundeen’s The Unsettlers, and Craig Greenfield’s Subversive Jesus• Profiles of Thomas Müntzer, Traudl Wallbrecher, and the Sisters of Life• Art and photography by Nikolay Ge, Boris Ivanovich Kopylov, Taisia Afonina, Wayne Forte, Dave Beckerman, Luca Sartoni, Wu Guanzhong, and Sadao WatanabePlough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.