Plough Quarterly No. 26 – What Are Families For?

by Ross Douthat, Edwidge Danticat, Sarah C. Williams

What is a family and what is it good for?

Story 1: Families are in crisis, and the cause is moral breakdown. We urgently need a deep renewal of our family culture, supported by public policies that strengthen traditional marriage and encourage childbearing.

Story 2: Families are in crisis, and the cause is capitalism. We need structural changes in society so that all families can parental leave, guaranteed healthcare, flexible work hours for parents, restorative justice.

What if both these stories are true? This issue of Plough reflects on what a family is and what it is for, so that the transformations needed to solve the crisis of the family start from a firm basis, not a nostalgic ideal or progressive theorizing. As always, we take as a starting point the teachings of Jesus. It turns out his idea of family values might not be what people think. He calls us to extend our natural love for our biological family to a vast new throng of siblings – a family of many ethnicities and cultures that includes the widowed, the unmarried, the outsider, and the stranger.

In this
- Ross Douthat asks what is stopping people from having the one more child they desire.
- Edwidge Danticat says families are not nuclear.
- Gina Dalfonzo reveals what singles know best about the church as family.
- Norann Voll remembers a Jewish woman who escaped the Holocaust and married a German.
- W. Bradford Wilcox and Alysse ElHage report on how the Covid pandemic has impacted the family.
- Noah Van Niel asks whether masculinity is OK anymore.
- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn reflects the burden of family history, celibacy, and monument toppling.
- Sarah C. Williams pinpoints the source of feminist pioneer Josephine Butler’s daring.
- Rabbi Jonathan Sacks begins the story of marriage 385 million years ago in a lake in Scotland.
- Zito Madu recalls how his father’s amazing storytelling saved the past from oblivion.

You’ll also
- M. M. Townsend on what Louisa May Alcott and Simone de Beauvoir had in common
- A special announcement about Plough’s new poetry the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award
- A reading from G. K. Chesterton
- Two new poems by Rachel Hadas
- Reviews of Eric Edstrom’s Un-American, Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s Prison by Any Other Name, Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song, and Martín Caparrós’s Hunger

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.

112 pages, Paperback

Published November 17, 2020

About the author

Ross Gregory Douthat is a conservative American author, blogger and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor at The Atlantic and is author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005) and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party (Doubleday, 2008), which David Brooks called the "best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is likely to head." He is a film critic for National Review and has also contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, the Claremont Review of Books, GQ, Slate, and other publications. In addition, he frequently appears on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv. In April 2009, he became an online and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice on the Times editorial page. Douthat is the youngest regular op-ed writer in the paper's history.