Brandon M. Terry

What if Martin Luther King Jr., this name-branded, oft-sanitized preacher from Atlanta, is a prophet whose message America has yet to fully reckon with? Ten days before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us.” What if Heschel’s words about King are true? What if this name-branded, oft-sanitized, Super-Bowl-ad-commercialized, National-Mall-memorialized preacher from Atlanta . . . is a prophet whose message America has yet to fully reckon with? This issue of Plough Quarterly looks at King’s unfinished struggle against the three evils of racism, materialism, and militarism. Perspectives from Edwidge Danticat, Gary Dorrien, Brandon M. Terry, D. L. Mayfield, Eugene Rivers, and Susannah Heschel explore the ways King’s message of nonviolence, justice, and love of neighbor still matters today: to refugees and immigrants, soldiers and veterans, preachers and prisoners, black lives matter activists and the white working class. Also in this issue: original poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye; reviews of new books by James Forman Jr., Steve Krivák, Jim Forest, and Christopher de Hamel; and art by Yvan Lamothe, Roberson Joseph, Barry Moser, Benny Andrews, Zoe Cromwell, Julian Peters, Asuka Hishiki, Mark Smith, Mary Kang, Marc Chagall, John Partipilo, Yuri Kozyrev, Vinicius Barajas, Iain Stewart, Giovanni Bellini. 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.

A landmark reinterpretation of the civil rights movement that challenges reductive heroic narratives of the 1950s and 1960s and invigorates new debates and possibilities for the future of the struggle for liberation.We are all familiar with the romantic vision of the civil rights movement: a moment when heroic African Americans and their allies triumphed over racial oppression through courageous protest, forging a new consensus in American life and law. But what are the effects of this celebratory storytelling? What happens when a living revolt against injustice becomes an embalmed museum piece?In this innovative work, Brandon Terry develops a novel theory of interpretation to show how competing accounts of the civil rights movement circulate through politics and political philosophy. The dominant narrative is romantic. This “arc of justice” narrative is found in popular histories, the speeches of Barack Obama, and even the writings of the liberal philosopher John Rawls. Despite being public orthodoxy, these romantic visions are exhausted and unpersuasive on their own terms. The breakdown of the authority of this history of justice has created space for a rival ironic mode, embodied in the political ideas of Afropessimism. While offering a sympathetic critique, Terry ultimately finds Afropessimist thought self-undermining and unworkable.Instead, he argues, the civil rights movement is best understood in tragic terms. By challenging the attachment to triumphant pasts, Terry demonstrates that tragedy exemplifies what the civil rights movement has been and can still be. Provocative and original, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope offers an optimistic political vision without naïveté, to train our judgment and resilience in the face of reasonable despair.

Is there a better way than capitalism? A much-cited recent poll found that more young Americans have a positive view of socialism than of capitalism. There’s a sense of newly opened possibilities: Might this be the moment for a mass movement of solidarity to overthrow the tyranny of concentrated power and wealth? But what exactly is this cause? Socialism’s champions know how to take effective whacks at capitalism, but diagnosis is not yet the cure. This issue of Plough springs from a conviction that there is a better answer beyond capitalism and socialism, a freely chosen life of sharing and caring that overcomes economic exploitation, a way of life that is both thoroughly practical and independent of the state. This vision is much older than Adam Smith and Karl Marx; it lies at the heart of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and throughout the New Testament, as well as in the writings of the Old Testament prophets. It is exemplified by the communal life of the first church in Jerusalem, in which “all who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44–45). Also in this issue: poetry by Jane Tyson Clement; reviews of books by Jennifer Berry Hawes, Robert Macfarlane, Emily Bazelon, and John Connell; and art and photography by Wassily Kandinsky, N. C. Wyeth, Deborah Batt, Kari Nielsen, Chris Arnade, William Morris, Hilzías Salazar, Amedeo Modigliani, Benjamin Meader, Bianca Berends, Elise Palmigiani, and Danny Burrows. 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.