2017’s Top Ten

To farewell the old year, and ring in the new, here are our ten most popular articles published in 2017. Here’s to another year of great writing in Plough! (If the Winter 2018 Quarterly is any indication, we’re off to an excellent start.)

1. Building a Communal Church: An interview with Rod Dreher: What is the Benedict Option, why do we need it, and what does it demand of us?

2. Inwardness in a Distracted Age: Eberhard Arnold on the silence we need to hear God’s voice: “Today we must rediscover the importance of deepening our inner life, otherwise our work will become empty and mechanical, leaving our strength for action sapped at the core.”

3. The Hole in Wendell Berry’s Gospel: We can’t just go back to the garden, writes Tamara Hill Murphy. God’s Kingdom is much greater than an agrarian dream.

4. An Impossible Hope: Peace in the Middle East, between Christians, Muslims, Yezidis, and Jews? This seems like an impossible dream, but Stephanie Saldaña introduces us to three peacemakers who have dared to make this hope a reality, at risk of their lives.

5. The Teacher Who Never Spoke: “I wish you could have known my brother,” writes Maureen Swinger. How a severely disabled young man coached dozens of his peers into manhood.

6. The Two Ways: Rowan Williams revisits the Didache, an Early Christian document that teaches the absolute loyalty that we owe to Christ and His way.

7. Re-forming the Church: Five hundred years after Martin Luther, George Weigel discusses what it means to reform the Church.

8. Confronted by Dorothy Day: D. L. Mayfield on Dorothy Day’s radical witness of service and hospitality: “She became a guide into a wild new world of following Christ on a downwardly mobile path.”

9. Bonhoeffer in China: An interview with Yu Jie, Chinese activist dissident: “Bonhoeffer’s witness should provoke us to think about how to unite Christian faith with resistance.”

10. Activist Mystics: Grounded in an experience of God’s own love, mystical activism is the quiet revolution that transforms the world into the kingdom. Meet Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, the Beguines, and Henry Vaughan.

And one more favorite that we couldn’t resist sneaking in, Julian Peters’s artistic interpretation of “Little Gidding,” by T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration…”