Peter Mommsen

“Jesus’ generosity explodes the philosophers’ careful boundaries around friendship, extending it to the virtuous and unvirtuous alike.” @PeterMommsen plough.com/articles/a-friend…

“Readers of C. S. Lewis’ s *Four Loves* might assume intellectual friendships to be the highest form of friendship, but this was not that, even though Lee read more widely than you might have guessed (he loved Tolkien). Both men found ways to meet each other halfway. Lee came to our school concerts and learned a grudging appreciation for Beethoven; my dad got into stock car racing.” @PeterMommsen plough.com/articles/a-friend…

While Plough aims to inspire faith and action, it’s not often we present readers with an actual, hands-on challenge. But here’s one. “A viable neighborhood is a community,” wrote Wendell Berry, who passed away on August 31, 2026, “and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.” In Berry’s honor, we’d like to invite you to plan and carry out some sort of local community-building event with your immediate neighbors in the next few weeks, and then let us know how it went. Learn more at the PloughStack: ploughstack.substack.com/p/a…

“‘I should have died in Vietnam instead of living the thousands of deaths that I have,’ Lee sometimes said. He told my dad that during the war, he’d had a Vietnamese wife, Chi, and a daughter, Le, both now dead. The horrors of war, and the ways he had failed both his Vietnamese family and his American children, were ever present to him. ‘I can never forgive myself,’ he would repeat, and no words could comfort him.” @PeterMommsen plough.com/articles/a-friend…

“Jesus’ generosity explodes the philosophers’ careful boundaries around friendship, extending it to the virtuous and unvirtuous alike.” @PeterMommsen plough.com/articles/a-friend…

“If friendship is existentially important, what does it involve? In the *Ethics*, it consists ‘more in loving than being loved.’ The friend is “another self”; friends share ‘one soul.’ Friends ‘mold’ one another toward virtue by the practice of ‘mutual correction.’ A true friend wishes good things for his friends for their own sake, not for his own benefit. He will labor for them, and at need, he will die for them.” @PeterMommsen plough.com/articles/a-friend…

The great American writer addresses the thinning partition between this life and eternity. Remembering Wendell Berry today: plough.com/articles/six-new-…