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Jun 14, 2024 | 
digitalliturgies.net | Alastair Roberts |Susannah Black Roberts |Aaron M. Renn
Note: The discussion post for Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World is coming early next week. Today, I’d like to publish a guest essay by my friend . A version of this essay originally appeared at Alastair and ’ newsletter The Anchored Argosy. ’s ‘three worlds’ model of American secularization has received considerable attention since his article ‘The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism’ was published in First Things.
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May 21, 2024 | 
plough.com | James Rebanks |Helen Rebanks |Peter Mommsen |Susannah Black Roberts
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 established.
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Apr 16, 2024 | 
plough.com | Joy Clarkson |Susannah Black Roberts
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?
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Mar 19, 2024 | 
plough.com | Alastair Roberts |Susannah Black Roberts
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?
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Mar 5, 2024 | 
plough.com | Ross Douthat |Peter Mommsen |Susannah Black Roberts
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 affirming the Darwinian struggle for existence as a source of moral guidance.
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Feb 26, 2024 | 
plough.com | Susannah Black Roberts
In AD 653 Byzantine Emperor Constans II ordered the arrest of Pope Martin I, and with him, an elderly monk named Maximus. The pope had been elected four years earlier against the emperor’s will, and had called a council to deal with the most pressing theological issue of the day: Did Christ possess a human will as well as a divine one? The council said yes; the emperor disagreed. Put on trial, the pope and Maximus both refused to recant.
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Feb 7, 2024 | 
plough.com | Adam Nicolson |Susannah Black Roberts
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.
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Jan 10, 2024 | 
plough.com | Sohrab Ahmari |Matthew Sitman |Susannah Black Roberts
Matthew Sitman and Sohrab Ahmari discuss friendship across political divides. Both men have made their careers in political media and have made significant changes in their politics over the course of their lives – in Sohrab’s case, very publicly. These changes have affected some friendships and have left others intact. Sohrab and Matt and Susannah discuss the phenomenon of friendship that transcends politics, how difficult that can be, how painful when it doesn’t work, but how good when it does.
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Jan 9, 2024 | 
mereorthodoxy.com | Susannah Black Roberts
My dear Wormwood,I’m pleased to hear that your patient has begun thinking of his Twitter use as a kind of chivalric act, equivalent to taking part in an actual war. Sloth and wrath are powerful weapons on our side, as, of course, is self-righteousness.
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Dec 16, 2023 | 
plough.com | Susannah Black Roberts
And I, a human being, neither ablazewith the strength of strong lions nor learned in their exhalations, remaining in the fragilityof the weaker rib, but filled with mystical inspiration, saw …In the winter of 1148, in Trier in Germany, Pope Eugenius III found himself with a manuscript, a half-finished work of a curious nature.
