Download or read book Plough Quarterly No 30 Made Perfect written by Molly McCully Brown and published by . This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whose lives count as fully human? The answer matters for everyone, disabled or not. The ancient Greek ideal linked physical wholeness to moral wholeness - the virtuous citizen was "beautiful and good." It's an ideal that has all too often turned deadly, casting those who do not measure up as less than human. In the pre-Christian era, infants with disabilities were left on the rocks; in modern times, they have been targeted by eugenics. Much has changed, thanks to the tenacious advocacy of the disability rights movement. Yesteryear's hellish institutions have given way to customized educational programs and assisted living centers. Public spaces have been reconfigured to improve access. Therapies and medical technology have advanced rapidly in sophistication and effectiveness. Protections for people with disabilities have been enshrined in many countries' antidiscrimination laws. But these victories, impressive as they are, mask other realities that collide awkwardly with society's avowals of equality. Why are parents choosing to abort a baby likely to have a disability? Why does Belgian law allow for euthanasia in cases of disability, even absent a terminal diagnosis or physical pain? Why, when ventilators were in short supply during the first Covid wave, did some states list disability as a reason to deny care? On this theme: - Heonju Lee tells how his son with Down syndrome saved another child's life. - Molly McCully Brown and Victoria Reynolds Farmer recount their personal experiences with disability. - Amy Julia Becker says meritocracies fail because they value the wrong things. - Maureen Swinger asks six mothers around the world about raising a child with disabilities. - Joe Keiderling documents the unfinished struggle for disability rights. - Isaac T. Soon wonders if Saint Paul's "thorn in the flesh" was a disability. - Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern. - Sarah C. Williams says testing for fetal abnormalities is not a neutral practice. Also in the issue: - Ross Douthat is brought low by intractable Lyme disease. - Edwidge Danticat flees an active shooter in a packed mall. - Eugene Vodolazkin finds comic relief at funerals, including his own father's. - Kelsey Osgood discovers that being an Orthodox Jew is strange, even in Brooklyn. - Christian Wiman pens three new poems. - Susannah Black profiles Flannery O'Conner. - Our writers review Eyal Press's Dirty Work, Steve Coll's Directorate S, and Millennial Nuns by the Daughters of Saint Paul. 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.
Download or read book The Deep Places written by Ross Douthat and published by Convergent Books. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • In this vulnerable, insightful memoir, the New York Times columnist tells the story of his five-year struggle with a disease that officially doesn’t exist, exploring the limits of modern medicine, the stories that we unexpectedly fall into, and the secrets that only suffering reveals. “A powerful memoir about our fragile hopes in the face of chronic illness.”—Kate Bowler, bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, D.C., to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain--a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which according to CDC definitions does not actually exist: the chronic form of Lyme disease, a hotly contested condition that devastates the lives of tens of thousands of people but has no official recognition--and no medically approved cure. From a rural dream house that now felt like a prison, Douthat's search for help takes him off the map of official medicine, into territory where cranks and conspiracies abound and patients are forced to take control of their own treatment and experiment on themselves. Slowly, against his instincts and assumptions, he realizes that many of the cranks and weirdos are right, that many supposed "hypochondriacs" are victims of an indifferent medical establishment, and that all kinds of unexpected experiences and revelations lurk beneath the surface of normal existence, in the places underneath. The Deep Places is a story about what happens when you are terribly sick and realize that even the doctors who are willing to treat you can only do so much. Along the way, Douthat describes his struggle back toward health with wit and candor, portraying sickness as the most terrible of gifts. It teaches you to appreciate the grace of ordinary life by taking that life away from you. It reveals the deep strangeness of the world, the possibility that the reasonable people might be wrong, and the necessity of figuring out things for yourself. And it proves, day by dreadful day, that you are stronger than you ever imagined, and that even in the depths there is always hope.
Download or read book Millennial Nuns written by The Daughters of Saint Paul and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More and more people-- especially millennials-- are turning to religion as a source of comfort and solace in our increasingly chaotic world. Rather than live a cloistered life of seclusion, the Daughters of Saint Paul actively embrace social media to evangelize, collectively calling themselves the #MediaNuns. In this collective memoir, eight of these Sisters share their own discernment journeys, struggles and crises of faith that they have overcome, and episodes from their daily lives. They offer practical takeaways and tips for living a more spiritually-fulfilled life, no matter your religious affiliation. -- adapted from jacket
Download or read book Dignity written by Chris Arnade and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A profound book.... It will break your heart but also leave you with hope." —J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy "[A] deeply empathetic book." —The Economist With stark photo essays and unforgettable true stories, Chris Arnade cuts through "expert" pontification on inequality, addiction, and poverty to allow those who have been left behind to define themselves on their own terms. After abandoning his Wall Street career, Chris Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald's. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America's Back Row--those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Row's values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as naïve. As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen she sees herself: "a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God." This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people who've been left behind.
Download or read book The Myth of Wu Tao tzu written by Sven Lindqvist and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'During the Tang dynasty, the Chinese artist Wu Tao-tzu was one day standing looking at a mural he had just completed. Suddenly, he clapped his hands and the temple gate opened. He went into his work and the gates closed behind him.' Thus begins Sven Lindqvist's profound meditation on art and its relationship with life, first published in 1967, and a classic in his home country - it has never been out of print. As a young man, Sven Lindqvist was fascinated by the myth of Wu Tao-tzu, and by the possibility of entering a work of art and making it a way of life. He was drawn to artists and writers who shared this vision, especially Hermann Hesse, in his novel Glass Bead Game. Partly inspired by Hesse's work, Lindqvist lived in China for two years, learning classical calligraphy from a master teacher. There he was drawn deeper into the idea of a life of artistic perfectionism and retreat from the world. But when he left China for India and then Afghanistan, and saw the grotesque effects of poverty and extreme inequality, Lindqvist suffered a crisis of confidence and started to question his ideas about complete immersion in art at the expense of a proper engagement with life. The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu takes us on a fascinating journey through a young man's moral awakening and his grappling with profound questions of aesthetics. It contains the bracing moral anger, and poetic, intensely atmospheric travel writing Lindqvist's readers have come to love.
Download or read book The Liturgy of Politics written by Kaitlyn Schiess and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A generation of young Christians are weary of the political legacy they've inherited. Could it be that the church's politics are shaped by its habits and practices? Contending that we must recognize the formative power of the political forces around us, Kaitlyn Schiess urges the church to recover historic Christian practices that shape us according to the truth of the gospel.
Download or read book Homage to a Broken Man written by Peter Mommsen and published by The Plough Publishing House. This book was released on 2004 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People who knew J. Heinrich Arnold (1913-1982) say they never met another person like him. In his presence, complete strangers poured out their darkest secrets and left transformed. Others wanted him dead. Author Henri Nouwen called him a prophetic voice and wrote of how his writings touched me as a double-edged sword, calling me to choose between truth and lies, selflessness and selfishness... Few knew Arnold's past, or could have imagined the crucibles he endured. Until now.
Download or read book Abide written by Macrina Wiederkehr and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Gospel of John Jesus directs us, Abide in me, as I abide in you. This book is an invitation to make the Word of God your home through the practice of lectio divina .Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB, encourages you to turn the words of Scripture over in your heart as a plough turns over the soil to welcome the seed. In these scriptural meditations, the piercing reflective questions and personal prayers lead the reader into a deeper relationship with the Divine. Aware that drawing near the Word of God requires a special kind of presence, the author invites you to breathe in the Word, wait before the Word, walk through the pages of Scripture as a pilgrim, and, finally, abide in an intimate and transforming communion with God. The format of the book lends itself not only to daily personal prayer and reflection, but to group faith sharing as well. Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB, (1939-2020), author of the popular A Tree Full of Angels (HarperCollins) and Seven Sacred Pauses (Ave Maria), was well known for her creative spiritual writings and retreat ministry. She was also a regular columnist for Stepping Stones, the Little Rock Scripture Study newsletter. She lived a monastic life for fifty years and made her home with the Sisters of St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Writing and retreat ministry were a part of her evolving call. Visit her personal blog at http://macrina-underthesycamoretree.blogspot.com/.
Download or read book Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution written by André Trocmé and published by The Plough Publishing House. This book was released on 2004 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: André Trocmé of Le Chambon is famous for his role in saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis during World War II. But his bold deeds did not spring from a void. They were rooted in his understanding of Jesus’ way of nonviolence – an understanding that gave him the remarkable insights contained in this long out-of-print classic. In this book, you’ll encounter a Jesus you may have never met before – a Jesus who not only calls for spiritual transformation, but for practical changes that answer the most perplexing political, economic, and social problems of our time.
Download or read book Plough Quarterly No 16 America s Prophet written by Edwidge Danticat and published by . This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if Martin Luther King Jr., this name-branded, oft-sanitized preacher from Atlanta, is a prophet whose message America has yet to fully reckon with? Ten days before Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us." What if Heschel's words about King are true? What if this name-branded, oft-sanitized, Super-Bowl-ad-commercialized, National-Mall-memorialized preacher from Atlanta . . . is a prophet whose message America has yet to fully reckon with? This issue of Plough Quarterly looks at King's unfinished struggle against the three evils of racism, materialism, and militarism. Perspectives from Edwidge Danticat, Gary Dorrien, Brandon M. Terry, D. L. Mayfield, Eugene Rivers, and Susannah Heschel explore the ways King's message of nonviolence, justice, and love of neighbor still matters today: to refugees and immigrants, soldiers and veterans, preachers and prisoners, black lives matter activists and the white working class. Also in this issue: original poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye; reviews of new books by James Forman Jr., Steve Krivák, Jim Forest, and Christopher de Hamel; and art by Yvan Lamothe, Roberson Joseph, Barry Moser, Benny Andrews, Zoe Cromwell, Julian Peters, Asuka Hishiki, Mark Smith, Mary Kang, Marc Chagall,John Partipilo, Yuri Kozyrev, Vinicius Barajas, Iain Stewart, Giovanni Bellini. Plough 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.
Download or read book What Can a Body Do written by Sara Hendren and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.
Download or read book American Slavery as it is written by Theodore Dwight Weld and published by . This book was released on 1839 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Translating Your Past written by Michelle Van Loon and published by MennoMedia, Inc.. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncover the spiritual strength of your family story. We all have a desire to learn more about where we’ve come from, and technology has made this more possible than ever. But our family stories are more than a list of DNA results on a piece of paper or a bunch of fading Kodachrome images filling old photo albums. In an era often marked by both fragmentation in family and culture and a hunger to discover our genetic roots, our family stories—including the difficult, complex ones—can carry great spiritual strength. The desire to trace, interpret, and pass on our family’s history is embedded in Scripture from beginning to end—there are nine genealogies found in the book of Genesis alone. When we bring together the various threads of our family stories with Scripture’s insights, they can provide the key to decoding our identity and helping us discover our place in family, church, and world. In Translating Your Past, author Michelle Van Loon helps readers uncover how patterns and gaps in family histories, generational trauma, adoption, genetic clues and surprises, spiritual history, and the church help us translate our own pasts and understand why these stories matter. Each chapter includes questions designed for individual reflection or small group discussion, as well as an appendix of helpful tools readers can use to translate their own pasts and create meaning in order to transform their unique family history into living, faith-filled heritage.
Download or read book Called to Community written by Eberhard Arnold and published by . This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifty-two readings on living in intentional Christian community to spark group discussion. Gold Medal Winner, 2017 Illumination Book Awards, Christian Living Silver Medal Winner, 2017 Benjamin Franklin Award in Religion, Independent Book Publishers Association Why, in an age of connectivity, are our lives more isolated and fragmented than ever? And what can be done about it? The answer lies in the hands of God's people. Increasingly, today's Christians want to be the church, to follow Christ together in daily life. From every corner of society, they are daring to step away from the status quo and respond to Christ's call to share their lives more fully with one another and with others. As they take the plunge, they are discovering the rich, meaningful life that Jesus has in mind for all people, and pointing the church back to its original calling: to be a gathered, united community that demonstrates the transforming love of God. Of course, such a life together with others isn't easy. The selections in this volume are, by and large, written by practitioners--people who have pioneered life in intentional community and have discovered in the nitty-gritty of daily life what it takes to establish, nurture, and sustain a Christian community over the long haul. Whether you have just begun thinking about communal living, are already embarking on sharing life with others, or have been part of a community for many years, the pieces in this collection will encourage, challenge, and strengthen you. The book's fifty-two chapters can be read one a week to ignite meaningful group discussion. Contributors include: John F. Alexander, Eberhard Arnold, J. Heinrich Arnold, Johann Christoph Arnold, Alden Bass, Benedict of Nursia, Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt, Leonardo Boff, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Joan Chittister, Stephen B. Clark, Andy Crouch, Dorothy Day, Anthony de Mello, Elizabeth Dede, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jenny Duckworth, Friedrich Foerster, Richard J. Foster, Jodi Garbison, Arthur G. Gish, Helmut Gollwitzer, Adele J Gonzalez, Stanley Hauerwas, Joseph H. Hellerman, Roy Hession, David Janzen, Rufus Jones, Emmanuel Katongole, Arthur Katz, Søren Kierkegaard, C. Norman Kraus, C.S. Lewis, Gerhard Lohfink, Ed Loring, Chiara Lubich, George MacDonald, Thomas Merton, Hal Miller, José P. Miranda, Jürgen Moltmann, Charles E. Moore, Henri J. M. Nouwen, Elizabeth O'Connor, John M. Perkins, Eugene H.Peterson, Christine D. Pohl, Chris Rice, Basilea Schlink, Howard A. Snyder, Mother Teresa, Thomas à Kempis, Elton Trueblood, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.
Download or read book Plough Quarterly No 26 What Are Families For written by Ross Douthat and published by . This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a family and what is it good for? Story 1: Families are in crisis, and the cause is moral breakdown. We urgently need a deep renewal of our family culture, supported by public policies that strengthen traditional marriage and encourage childbearing. Story 2: Families are in crisis, and the cause is capitalism. We need structural changes in society so that all families can flourish: parental leave, guaranteed healthcare, flexible work hours for parents, restorative justice. What if both these stories are true? This issue of Plough reflects on what a family is and what it is for, so that the transformations needed to solve the crisis of the family start from a firm basis, not a nostalgic ideal or progressive theorizing. As always, we take as a starting point the teachings of Jesus. It turns out his idea of family values might not be what people think. He calls us to extend our natural love for our biological family to a vast new throng of siblings - a family of many ethnicities and cultures that includes the widowed, the unmarried, the outsider, and the stranger. In this issue: - Ross Douthat asks what is stopping people from having the one more child they desire. - Edwidge Danticat says families are not nuclear. - Gina Dalfonzo reveals what singles know best about the church as family. - Norann Voll remembers a Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust and married a German. - W. Bradford Wilcox and Alysse ElHage report on how the Covid pandemic has impacted the family. - Noah Van Niel asks whether masculinity is OK anymore. - Cardinal Christoph Schönborn reflects the burden of family history, celibacy, and monument toppling. - Sarah C. Williams pinpoints the source of feminist pioneer Josephine Butler's daring. - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks begins the story of marriage 385 million years ago in a lake in Scotland. - Zito Madu recalls how his father's amazing storytelling saved the past from oblivion. You'll also find: - M. M. Townsend on what Louisa May Alcott and Simone de Beauvoir had in common - A special announcement about Plough's new poetry contest: the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award - A reading from G. K. Chesterton - Two new poems by Rachel Hadas - Reviews of Eric Edstrom's Un-American, Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law's Prison by Any Other Name, Brian Doyle's One Long River of Song, and Martín Caparrós's Hunger Plough 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.
Download or read book Church Community Is a Gift of the Holy Spirit written by Ian M. Randall and published by Regent's Park College, Oxford. This book was released on 2014 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the spirituality of the Bruderhof community. It gives particular attention to Eberhard Arnold (1883-1935) and a small number of people around him, including his wife Emmy and her sister Else von Hollander, who founded the first Bruderhof community in Sannerz, Germany, in 1920. The argument made here is that the Bruderhof was formed as a consequence of a concern for a number of aspects which were seen as related: authentic evangelical spirituality, community of goods instead of private property, openness to the Holy Spirit, a simple form of church life that sought to draw from the New Testament, and "the way of peace." This study explores these themes both in the early Bruderhof period and also in an important recent Bruderhof publication, Foundations, and relates them to the Anabaptist tradition.
Download or read book Plough Quarterly No 20 The Welcome Table written by Edwidge Danticat and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food - how it's grown, how it's shared - makes us who we are. This issue traces the connections between farm and food, between humus and human. According to the first book of the Bible, tending the earth was humankind's first task: "The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed" (Gen. 2:8). The desire to get one's hands dirty raising one's own food, then, doesn't just come from modern romanticism, but is built into human nature. The title, "The Welcome Table," comes from a spiritual first sung by enslaved African-Americans. The song refers to the Bible's closing scene, the wedding feast of the Lamb described in the Book of Revelation, to which every race, tribe, and tongue are invited - a divine pledge of a day of freedom and freely shared plenty, of earth renewed and humanity restored. In the case of food, the symbol is the substance. Every meal, if shared generously and with radical hospitality, is already now a taste of the feast to come. Also in this issue: poetry by Luci Shaw; reviews of books by Julia Child, Robert Farrar Capon, Peter Mayle, Albert Woodfox, and Maria von Trapp; and art by Michael Naples, Sieger Köder, Carl Juste, André Chung, Ángel Bracho, Winslow Homer, Raymond Logan, Sybil Andrews, Cameron Davidson, and Jason Landsel. Plough 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.
