Another Life with Joy Marie Clarkson

Ashley Lucas on the story of Russell Maroon Shoatz, a former Black Panther who spent three decades in solitary confinement, and the reckoning with violence past and present.Read it here: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/criminal-justice/the-end-of-rage

Edwidge Danticat on the stories that anchor us, the homes we build with words that no separation can take away.Read it here: http://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/immigration/home-is-not-just-a-place

Russell Moore discusses the future of Christianity and the church in a rapidly secularizing society. He explores why young people in particular are “losing their religion.” The reasons, he argues, are not just the cultural hedonism that Christians usually blame, but lie closer to home: young people realize that too often the church itself doesn’t really believe what it claims to believe.Read it here: http://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/witness/integrity-and-the-future-of-the-church

Peter and Susannah tackle our hardest listener questions: What are your hesitations about Christendom? Do you think that all national borders are unchristian? What IS the Bruderhof doing about Afghan refugees? Is it OK for a community to have insiders and outsiders? Is Plough just a bunch of SJWs?Then, they revisit the question of the reality of nations - What’s important about national identity? Is it always dangerous? How is it related to family identity? How can we love, be rooted in, and derive some of our identity from imperfect - profoundly imperfect - countries?  Then we move into speculation. Do nations have specific angels looking out for them? Is there such a thing as a national calling in history? If so, what is America’s?

Peter and Susannah discuss Christian nationalism, and whether there might be a good version of this thing which so many books have recently been at pains to dismiss. They also talk about the reality of the bad version: Christianity which is nothing more than a tribal signifier.Then they talk about Oscar Romero as a potential model for an “integralism” which would be attractive to both Anabaptists and Roman Catholics.Russell Moore comes on to discuss the church’s own infidelity as a cause of plummeting enrollment, and Susannah presses him on what the relationship of church and state ought to be.

In 1972, Russell Maroon Shoatz went to prison for the murder of a police officer. He spent 29 years in solitary confinement. Ashley Lucas, whose own father was imprisoned when she was growing up, reported and wrote a deep-dive piece on Shoatz’s life, his ongoing activism on behalf of Black liberation, and his relationship with his family.Pete and Susannah speak with Ashley about the process of writing the piece, and about the various issues that Shoatz’s life and story bring up. Can we acknowledge the wrongness of the murder, the pain of the murdered man’s family, and at the same time see the man behind the convict?The episode also features Russell’s son, Russell III. He tells the story of the two fathers in his life: the imprisoned former Black Panther, and the police officer/minister who adopted him.

Peter and Susannah welcome Tara Isabella Burton and Dhananjay Jagannathan to discuss the intersections of their recent pieces. Tara’s cosmopolitan upbringing led her to yearn for the connectedness of place, and yet she’s cautious about the potential dark side of that chthonic urge.Meanwhile, Dhananjay’s immigrant story and thoughtful loyalty to the America of the American idea will not let him dismiss patriotism.Then, John Milbank brings us to the deepest of deep roots, with a full-throated defense of a nation that is linked to a place, and which is not based on an idea. His piece is a hymn to the mythic geography of England.

Peter and Susannah speak with novelist, journalist, and Iraq vet Phil Klay about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the folly of nation-building, and the promise of soft power. Then they welcome historian Tom Holland, author of Dominion, to discuss the difference Christianity made to the mind of the West and the idea of Empire. What is the unique capacity Christianity has for appealing to both fighters and pacifists? How have those two strands in its history woven together, and what can we make of the profound subversion of Roman ideals of power represented by the Cross?And in what sense can virtually every person in what was once Christendom call him or herself a Christian? Wokeness, Holland claims, can best be understood as a Christian heresy; Hitler, the head of the first movement to thoroughly repudiate Christianity not just institutionally but in principle, becomes a substitute for Satan. And we begin to look to the most marginalized, the most powerless, as Christ figures. 

Are national cultures something God values? What do we owe the sojourner? And is there something to this idea of Christendom? In this episode of The PloughCast, Peter and Susannah talk about Peter’s lead editorial’s controversial anti-Esperanto take, the perils and joys of Christian nationalism, and whether it’s coherent for an Anabaptist to be in favor of the idea of Christendom.Then, they welcome Plough’s favorite integralist, Pater Edmund Waldstein, to discuss his piece on the natural law case for welcoming refugees, what relationship that has to the Gospel imperative to do so, and how to think about those obligations in relationship to the integrity of the cultures and places and people who receive those sojourners.Also covered: Gustav Landauer’s surprising atheist Jewish anarchist pro-Christendom position, the relationship between the nation and the political state, and how to think about national borders.

Father–son relationships in The Mandalorian and Return of the Jedi sagas illustrate meekness as a healthy model for manhood.Manly Virtues by Noah Van Niel: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/community/leadership/manly-virtues