Making Down Syndrome: Motherhood and Kinship Futures in Urban Jordan draws on ethnographic research conducted primarily in Jordan’s capital city of Amman to explore how the label and identity of Down syndrome is gaining increasing cohesiveness. Focused on the experiences of mothers, who serve as an entry point for understanding broader family dynamics and choices, the book argues that practices and ideologies of care play a central role in making Down syndrome’s embodied and political realities. They do so through the momentum of kinship futures, or futures imagined through the prism of kinship roles and relations, which shape how families organize and distribute care between and beyond kinship networks and under conditions of economic and political uncertainty. By approaching everyday life in Jordan through the lends of disability, Making Down Syndrome offers new insights into how people navigate structures of family, gender, power, inequality, and precarity, all while trying to maintain hope for and cultivate better futures.
Adam Nicolson; Gracy Olmstead; Christian Wiman; Kelsey Osgood; John Kempf; Leah Libresco Sargeant; Ian Marcus Corbin; Iván Bernal Marín; Phil Klay; Edmund Waldstein; Alfred Nicol
When we read the book of nature, what do we read there? “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all,” says a well-known hymn. This issue of Plough celebrates the creatures of our planet – plant, animal, and human – and the implications of humankind’s relationship to nature. But if nature can be read as a book that reveals the wisdom of its Creator, it also reveals things less lovely than stars and singing birds – a world of desperate competition for survival, mass extinctions, and deadly viruses. Is such a world a convincing argument for the Creator’s goodness? Turns out Christians and skeptics alike have been asking such questions since long before Darwin added a twist. Are we moderns out of practice at reading the book of nature? And if we forget how, will we fail to read human nature as well – what rights or purposes our Creator may have endowed us with? What then is there to limit the bounds of technological manipulation of humankind? This issue of Plough explores these and other fascinating questions about the natural world and our place in it. In this issue: - Sussex farmer Adam Nicholson evokes centuries of handwork that shaped the landscape of the Weald. - Gracy Olmstead revisits the land her forebears farmed in Idaho. - Ian Marcus Corbin tries walking phoneless to better note the beauty of the natural world. - Amish farmer John Kempf, a leader in regenerative agriculture, foresees a healthier future for farming. - Leah Libresco Sargeant offers a feminist critique of society’s war on women’s bodies. - Iván Bernal Marín visits Panama City’s traditional fishermen. - Maureen Swinger recalls to triumphs of second grade in forest school. - Edmund Waldstein questions head transplants and the limits of medical science. - Kelsey Osgood says it’s natural to fear death, and to transcend that fear through faith. - Tim Maendel lifts the veil on urban beekeeping along the Manhattan skyline. You’ll also find: - An essay by Christian Wiman on the poetry of doubt and faith - New poems by Alfred Nicol - A profile of Amazon activist nun Dorothy Stang - An appreciation of Keith Green’s songs - Insights on creation from Blaise Pascal, Julian of Norwich, Francis of Assisi, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Christopher Smart, Augustine of Hippo, The Book of Job, and Sadhu Sundar Singh - Reviews of The Opening of the American Mind, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to put their faith into action. Each issue brings you in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art to help you put Jesus’ message into practice and find common cause with others.
Molly McCully Brown; Victoria Reynolds Farmer; Edwidge Danticat; Stephanie Saldaña; Kelsey Osgood; Christian Wiman; Amy Julia Becker; Ross Douthat; Eugene Vodolazkin; Sarah C. Williams; Isaac T. Soon; Leah Libresco Sargeant
Whose lives count as fully human? The answer matters for everyone, disabled or not.The ancient Greek ideal linked physical wholeness to moral wholeness – the virtuous citizen was “beautiful and good.” It’s an ideal that has all too often turned deadly, casting those who do not measure up as less than human. In the pre-Christian era, infants with disabilities were left on the rocks; in modern times, they have been targeted by eugenics.Much has changed, thanks to the tenacious advocacy of the disability rights movement. Yesteryear’s hellish institutions have given way to customized educational programs and assisted living centers. Public spaces have been reconfigured to improve access. Therapies and medical technology have advanced rapidly in sophistication and effectiveness. Protections for people with disabilities have been enshrined in many countries’ antidiscrimination laws.But these victories, impressive as they are, mask other realities that collide awkwardly with society’s avowals of equality. Why are parents choosing to abort a baby likely to have a disability? Why does Belgian law allow for euthanasia in cases of disability, even absent a terminal diagnosis or physical pain? Why, when ventilators were in short supply during the first Covid wave, did some states list disability as a reason to deny care?On this theme: - Heonju Lee tells how his son with Down syndrome saved another child’s life.- Molly McCully Brown and Victoria Reynolds Farmer recount their personal experiences with disability.- Amy Julia Becker says meritocracies fail because they value the wrong things.- Maureen Swinger asks six mothers around the world about raising a child with disabilities.- Joe Keiderling documents the unfinished struggle for disability rights.- Isaac T. Soon wonders if Saint Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was a disability.- Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern.- Sarah C. Williams says testing for fetal abnormalities is not a neutral practice.Also in the issue: - Ross Douthat is brought low by intractable Lyme disease.- Edwidge Danticat flees an active shooter in a packed mall.- Eugene Vodolazkin finds comic relief at funerals, including his own father’s.- Kelsey Osgood discovers that being an Orthodox Jew is strange, even in Brooklyn.- Christian Wiman pens three new poems.- Susannah Black profiles Flannery O’Conner.- Our writers review Eyal Press’s Dirty Work, Steve Coll’s Directorate S, and Millennial Nuns by the Daughters of Saint Paul.Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.
When Laura Curtis Bullard wrote the novel Christine in 1856, she created one of antebellum America's most radical heroines: a woman's rights leader. Addressing the major social, political, and cultural issues surrounding women from within an unusually overt feminist framework for its time, Christine openly challenges a social and legal system that denies women full and equal rights. Christine defies her family, rejects marriage, and leaves a job as a teacher to embark on her career, rewriting the script for a successful nineteenth-century heroine. Along the way, she recreates domesticity on her own terms, helping other young women gain economic independence so that they, too, have the autonomy to make their own choices in love and life. One of the triumphs of the novel is the author's ability to create a sympathetic heroine and a fast-paced plot that intertwines vivid scenes of suicide, destitution, and an insane asylum with theoretical and political discussions—so skillfully that the novel successfully appealed to otherwise hesitant middle-class readers.
