Plough Quarterly Magazine

Plough is thrilled to announce its inaugural annual short fiction contest, open to writers anywhere in the world. The winning writer will receive a two thousand dollar award and the winning story will be published in Plough. In addition, up to three finalists will receive two hundred and fifty dollars as well as publication in Plough (print and/or online). Plough is seeking short fiction that honors the mysterious nature of reality and finds transcendence and redemption in unexpected places.

Walt Whitman Joseph M. Keegin [.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Homer and Hesiod,[.small-caps] Hegel notes, “gave to the Greek gods their names and their form,” but only the former concerned himself too with heroes. Both of Homer’s great poetic epics open with divine invocations directed at human objects: “Sing the rage of Achilles, goddess,” Homer demands at the outset of the Iliad; “Tell me of the man, Muse,” begins the Odyssey.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Monticello is on a mountain.[.small-caps] From the ridge around the home, forested hills undulate into the blue line of the horizon. Grapevines snake around a long arbor. Lawns and flower gardens surround the palatial home, itself a graceful melding of white Grecian columns and hearty American brick.[.article__paragraph--cap] When I stood there, the air was crisp and clear – an early fall coolness that hadn’t chilled into winter.

From Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People, this week’s featured book (ebook free for subscribers). Christian community made my years as an unmarried person very rich – so rich that marriage snuck up on me. I lived for four years in a household on Mount Auburn Street in the heart of Cambridge’s Harvard Square. Depending on the year, four to six post-college twenty-somethings ate together, prayed together, and entertained friends together.

From Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants for His People, this week’s featured book (ebook free for subscribers). Christian community made my years as an unmarried person very rich – so rich that marriage snuck up on me. I lived for four years in a household on Mount Auburn Street in the heart of Cambridge’s Harvard Square. Depending on the year, four to six post-college twenty-somethings ate together, prayed together, and entertained friends together.

When a lawyer approached Jesus with what he thought was a clever question, asking which commandment in the law was the greatest, he was not merely testing Jesus’ rabbinic knowledge. He was asking something that every thoughtful person eventually asks whether they realize it or not: when everything is on the line, when the pressure is on, and when I do not know what to do, what is the one thing I must get right?

In the year 1816, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, today the best-known collection of stories about King Arthur and the Round Table knights, was brought back into print for the first time in 182 years. This book, and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, published three years later, proved instrumental in making the nineteenth century a century of medieval revival. In the decades that followed, poets and artists seeking cultural renewal employed the Middle Ages as a model.

“As the whispers became louder, which they did from that time every minute, they became more threatening.

The remarkable record of a long, faithful, creative life, Wendell Berry’s collected Sabbath poems span over forty-four years, from 1979–2023. These poems are a record of Berry’s Sunday morning habit, walking his small hillside farm in Kentucky, and, if inspiration strikes, writing a poem about his thoughts. Berry explains that he is a “bad-weather churchgoer,” preferring, when the Sunday weather is nice, to be out walking in the woods, over hills, and along streams.

Rain poured down and a chorus of voices mingling with percussion echoed from one brightly lit front porch, breaking the evening quiet along a residential street in Rio de Janeiro’s northern zone. A dozen men sat on stools, strumming string instruments and beating drums of all shapes and sizes, singing their hearts out. At first glance, the scene would have appeared to be a classic roda de samba – a traditional Brazilian gathering where musicians sit in a circle to perform samba.