Another Life with Joy Marie Clarkson

Peter and Susannah talk with Christopher Tollefsen about his piece on the history and ethics of nuclear deterrence, and the prospect of an antinuclear movement post-Ukraine. They discuss Tollefsen’s conviction that nuclear war is a life issue.Then, they speak with Samuel Moyn about his new book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. Is making war more “humane” actually removing the urgency of actual pacifism? What if we simply aimed to have fewer wars? Have we given up on that?The gang get into it about Just War Theory, pacifism, the Peace and Truce of God movement, and many other things.

Peter and Susannah welcome Kim Comer, the editor of Plough’s European edition, and discuss the origins of the new Bruderhof communities in Austria. Welcomed by Cardinal Schönborn as part of the healing of the schisms of the Reformation, these communities are thriving.This leads them to the question of how past wrongs can be healed in general: how can we get past the “sins of the fathers?” Not by denying those fathers and not by wallowing in guilt, but by the deep forgiveness and transformation available in Christ.Then, Peter and Susannah speak with Anika Prather about her year of mourning with her children: many family members and friends died, of Covid, of murder, of suicide, of heart attacks. How can we parent our children through such incredibly trying times? How can we truly teach them to look to the hope of the resurrection of the dead?Then they discuss Dr. Prather’s life project: understanding and using the Classical tradition for racial reconciliation in America. This is another kind of “healing of history,” and Dr. Prather’s work in classical education is an ambitious attempt to tell the untold story of Black classicists and the influence of the great tradition on Black thinkers, writers, and activists.

Peter and Susannah talk with demographer Lyman Stone about falling birthrates and what humans need to thrive enough to have children.They discuss Thomas Malthus and the origin of the European demographic transition, as well as the origin of overpopulation fears, and about how those fears misunderstand the nature of human ingenuity.They cover the essential racism of so much “overpopulation” discourse, which even now is focused on “the wrong kind of people” having too many children. They discuss the issue of hard limits- surely there must be some point past which human population can’t grow, some actual environmental catastrophe? What then are we aiming for? How long should we plan for? Then they talk about whether the need for limits and the need for ambitious vision in human endeavor are in conflict with each other.Then they discuss what it takes, spiritually and culturally, for a society, for individuals, to believe that the world they are in, the family they are in, is one worth preserving.

Peter and Susannah speak with Eleanor Parker about Archbishop Wulfstan and his sermon in 1014 calling the English to return to fidelity with God and each other, in the face of the apocalyptic Viking invasions. They also discuss what happened after those invasions succeeded: Wulfstan worked with the new king, Cnut, to draft just laws for this new Viking-Anglo Saxon polity.Then, Peter and Susannah talk with extremely online illustrator and self-described mystical idiot Owen Cyclops about his journey from general weirdness to Christian weirdness. They get into his cartoon for Plough, and his interest in the specific American temper of Christianity, and how universal principles and teachings get refracted by different cultures.

Susannah and Peter discuss Peter’s lead editorial, “Hoping for Doomsday,” and cover some of the mysteries at the heart of Apocalypse: is it the end of the world? Why is it hopeful? What does it mean? What does it take to allow the supernatural hope of the New Heavens and the New Earth give your life meaning now, and what’s going on with Christians’ addiction to apocalyptic date-setting?Then they have a conversation with Ivan Rusyn, the president of the Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary in Kyiv, whose wartime experience has included sneaking back to his home in occupied Bucha to bring help to his neighbors.He describes the current state of the conflict and calls on Christians to help with pressing needs; he also describes the incredibly powerful experience of Christian and civic unity that the war has led to in Kyiv and across Ukraine.

Joseph Julián González and Monique González write that for the ancient Nahua and Aztec poets, the way to the holy runs through beauty.Read the article.

Dhananjay Jagannathan writes on good and bad music, morals, and why the sheer vitality of music can seem to spell danger.Read the article.

Composer Steven Michael Newby says African American spirituals aren’t just for Black churches. They are for everybody.Read the article.

Joseph M. Keegin explores Christian Hardcore music and its undoing.Read the article.

In this article drawn from her memoir With or Without Me, Esther Maria Magnis tells how her prayers were not answered when her father got cancer. Or were they?Read the article.