Amy Frykholm

"We do not shame a company," says Sister Nora Nash of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. "If there is shaming, the company brings that on itself."

"I hope the shootings in Oak Creek will lead to interfaith education around the state," says Scott Anderson, director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches. "There is a hunger for this kind of engagement."

It has been a rough year for the state of Wisconsin. A painful and divisive recall election of governor Scott Walker tore the state apart in the spring. Then last week a lone gunman killed seven people, including himself, and wounded three others at a Sikh temple outside Milwaukee.

In a recent interview with the Century, historian David Hollinger talks about his preference for the phrase “ecumenical Protestants” to describe non-evangelical mid-20th-century American Protestants, instead of the more frequently used terms “liberal” and “mainline.” “Ecumenical” refers to a specific, vital and largely defining impulse within the groups I am describing. It also provides a more specific and appropriate contrast to evangelical. The term evangelical comes into currency in the mid-century to refer to a combination of fundamentalists and Holiness, Pentecostals and others; ecumenical refers to the consolidation of the ecumenical point of view in the big conferences of 1942 and 1945. I appreciated this shift in vocabulary because I have long disliked both the terms “liberal” and “mainline” to refer to whatever-kind-of-Protestant it is that I am.

At the 2009 G8 conference, $22 billion was pledged to agricultural development and food security. This year it was only $3 billion.

Ten years ago, I studied readers of the then popular Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic novels. If I conducted that study today, I would potentially have access to far more objective data about readers than I did. How quickly do they read? Where do they stop reading? What passages do they mark? Do they write notes in the margins? E-books are providing companies with the opportunity for all of this information and more about people who use e-readers like the Nook and Kindle.

"Ecumenical leaders of the 1960s took a series of risks," says historian David Hollinger, "asking their constituency to follow them in directions that many resisted."

A man stumbled into church drunk and bleeding from his hand. "I have hepatitis C," he said. I remembered this as I read Richard Beck's book Unclean.

Steven Pinker says human beings are becoming less violent. But his larger point seems to be that everyone should think like he does.

Margaret Farley’s Just Love: A Framework for a Christian Sexual Ethics is at #16 on the current Amazon sales list. When is the last time a sane, scholarly, carefully argued and theologically rich book of sexual ethics ranked that high? I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it was recent. (Four out of the top five on the Amazon list are versions of Fifty Shades of Gray. If only those readers would open up Farley!) To make matters even stranger, the book is six years old and used mostly in seminaries and at religious institutions. The flurry of interest was provoked by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Though comprehensive sex ed is effective, fear of controversy keeps many schools from implementing it. But support may be gaining ground.

When Nicole Chaisson teaches kids about sexuality, she doesn't have to worry about the state legislature. But that doesn't make her task simple.

In a recent interview with the Century, Michelle Alexander, the civil rights lawyer and author of The New Jim Crow, wonders about the stigma in many churches attached to people who have been recently released from prisons. “The deep irony,” she says,” is that the very folks who ought to be the most sensitive to the demonization of the ‘despised,’ the prisoners, have been complicit and silent.” But the kinds of conversations that Alexander’s book seems to demand are very difficult to have--in churches and outside them.

Is there an anti-birth control shift taking place among evangelicals? If so, do their arguments mirror Catholic thought?

It is difficult to know what to say in response to Mona Eltahawy’s explosive article on the experience of women in Middle Eastern countries. She writes about a level of institutionalized brutality that demands that readers pay attention. At the same time, she doesn’t say anything new, nothing that wasn’t already made too vividly clear during the Arab Spring.

"The U.S has created a vast legal system for racial and social control, unprecedented in world history. Yet we claim to be colorblind."

Last week, a friend handed me a novel off his shelf and said simply, “Read it.” I did, almost immediately, and I was captivated.

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In a recent interview for the Century, African Methodist Episcopal bishop Vashti McKenzie spoke to Joan Harrell about her use of social media in ministry as well as her vision for a church focused on social justice. You can hear Harrell’s complete interview with McKenzie on her podcast, Empowering Voices.

This spring, the most interesting question for me about the Occupy movement isn't whether it will find focus or whether it will revive or whether it will make a difference in the election. What I want to pay attention to is the ongoing and generative outpouring of creative politics. The Occupy movement is rich in unedited signs. In my mind, creative placarding will forever be its legacy.

“There is the danger of protecting ourselves from God by striving to be passive. The ‘I’ is very active in its attempt to surrender.”