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The Noonday Demon
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Captivated by the First Church
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Sometimes I Wince at the Weight of your Hand
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Why We Work
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Readers Respond: Issue 22
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Buccaneer School
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The Unchosen Calling
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A Life beyond Self
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Insights on Vocation
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Monks and Martyrs
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A Love Stronger than Fear
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Now and at the Hour
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The Language of Frailty
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Icon and Mirror
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Dirty Work
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Oh, to Weld!
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Insights on Work
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Carl Sandburg’s “Buffalo Dusk”
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To-Do List
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Mercenaries out of the Gate
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Loneliness at College
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An Economy for Anything
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The Artist of Memory
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Poetry and Prophecy, Dust and Ashes
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Valor
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Editors Picks Issue 22
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Carl Sandburg
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A Difficult Love
![gray and tan painting brushstrokes](/-/media/images/plough/quarterly/2019/22autumnvocation/22cover/22coverhero200.jpg?la=en)
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A sanitation worker? There have got to be hundreds of more significant jobs we could have showcased: farming, nursing, relief work, teaching … At any rate, collecting the garbage can’t possibly be this guy’s vocation, can it?
![the front cover of Plough Quarterly Autumn 2019 Issue 22: Vocation](/-/media/images/plough/quarterly/2019/22autumnvocation/22cover/22coversmall.jpg?la=en)
Exactly. When designing this issue’s cover, we narrowed down our options to this one precisely because the work portrayed is not, in the eyes of our society, considered spiritual, highly-skilled, or particularly laudable. But the point is just that: career and vocation are not interchangeable terms.
As Peter Mommsen writes in his Editor’s Letter: “When the New Testament writers use the words translated in English as vocation or calling, they are never referring to work, much less to a particular trade or profession…. the New Testament knows only one form of vocation: discipleship.”
Artist Dean Mitchell hails from Pittsburgh. “I’m drawn to the humane,” he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1993. “But there is something more there. ... I do believe in God, and I do believe that when you create, something else can take over…. If that intention [in a work of art] is pure – to say something to humanity or to stir something in people – then you are tapping into another source beyond your control.”
![the front cover of Plough Quarterly Autumn 2019 Issue 22: Vocation](/-/media/images/plough/quarterly/2019/22autumnvocation/22cover/22coverembed.jpg?la=en)
Rosalind Stevenson is a graphic designer for the Plough Quarterly.
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