Another Life with Joy Marie Clarkson

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 establishe...

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.

Joy Clarkson discusses her new book, and the importance of metaphor. Why are metaphors important? How can they help us live well – and how can they go wrong? Why should we not think of ourselves as computers? And what does all this mean for our language about God? In the discussion, Joy and Susannah range widely through topics including apophatic theology, the inevitability of metaphorical languag...

William Thomas Okie says plants can talk; but is anyone listening?

Colin Boller explains how regenerative agriculture helps farmers care for the land and pay the bills.

Clare Coffey gives a defense of the dandelion, the plant that always comes back.

Matthew Scarince and Sebastian Milbank discuss Tolkien and technology. Susannah chimes in. Is J. R. R. Tolkien anti-technology? What is the relationship between magic and technology in the world of the Lord of the Rings, and in ours? What do the elves have to do with that? What can we tell by looking at the rings, the palantíri, the silmarils? Should the Lord of the Rings be read as a straightforw...

Daniel J. D. Stulac, a newcomer to Saskatchewan, searches for the Old Testament promise.

Caroline Moore has studied moths since she was a child. She writes how they showcase nature’s richness and vulnerability.

Alastair Roberts revisits the resurrection stories of the Old Testament. Jesus expected his followers to know that he was going to have to die and would then be resurrected – but, famously, they didn’t figure it out until it happened. What were Jewish expectations of resurrection, and where is the idea found in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible? Alastair discusses the hints and implications found...

Southern Baptist preacher Clarence Jordan (1912-1969) argued that true Christian fellowship as practiced by the early church demands sharing of material possessions, distribution of those goods, and racial equality.

Ross Douthat discusses why what is natural is not a guide to what is good. The idea that the natural world is to be worshiped can take many forms. Douthat and Peter Mommsen and Susannah Black Roberts discuss these forms, ranging from Wordsworthian spiritual experiences in a national park, to worshiping ancestral or local gods, to civic religions of left and right, to tarot card reading, to affirmi...

Heinrich Arnold writes that in the Bruderhof, as in any society, children flourish when family, school, and community align.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Alexander Raikin discuss euthanasia and eugenics. What has happened in the law and society in Canada since 2016 such that MAID has exploded, becoming one of the most common causes of death there? What is the relationship of national healthcare to this expansion? Alexander Raikin brings in a review of the statistics over the past decade or so. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson...

Leah Libresco Sargeant writes about Grace Russo and her philosophy of mending clothes with beauty.

Zena Hitz on our time, its value, and how we might spend it if we had more of it.

Stephanie Saldaña writes that though the members of her church have been scattered by war, the church lives on.

Adam Nicolson has been rehabilitating his farm in Sussex for many years now, and he discusses the difficulties and rewards of this, and the piece that he wrote about it for Plough’s issue on repair. They go on to discuss the topics of some of Nicolson’s books: Sissinghurst, the farm and garden owned by Nicolson’s grandmother, Vita Sackville-West; Homer; the pre-Socratic philosophers; and sailing.