Amy Frykholm

Joy Williams’s stories disarm, bewilder, and awaken us.

Amazon sells books at their brick-and-mortar stores, but that's not why they want me to come.

The delight I felt while reading this book needs further interrogation, because its stories deal with troublesome subjects.

"I've learned a lot from working with trees. More important, I've worked with people on imagining how to love each other."

 

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The physical reality of her son, the very tangible way that he is a part of her, will not go away. He is with her everywhere she goes.

In the latest issue of the Century, I profiled a family awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on President Obama’s expansion of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and its extension to DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents). On Thursday, the Supreme Court voted in a 4-4 tie, which means that the case reverts to the lower court ruling, against the program.

Once gay men were identified in public as the primary victims of and imagined cause of the disease, it became a moral crisis rather than a medical one.

Life in limbo for an immigrant teen

"The biggest driver of success against global poverty is economic growth—but not any kind of economic growth."

"Maybe 5 percent of refugees are ever resettled. Meanwhile, human life is always more than survival."

U.S. immigration policy has long used the imposition of trauma and the dynamics of fear as weapons.

Forty percent of the food produced in the U.S. ends up in landfills. Meanwhile, people are hungry. Daily Table tries to address both problems.

In the latest issue of the Century, Philip Jenkins writes about how the veneration of Mary cuts across religious difference in Egypt. Egypt was the place where Mary first lit up the imaginations of Christians, but apparently her appeal is not limited by culture or religious heritage. Lately I’ve come across a couple of enchanting books that illuminate this for me.

Like many others, I have lived the last few weeks from one devastating news event to the next, aching for the people lost and left hurting from mass shootings, trying to imagine myself into the shoes of refugees and those caught in the Syrian War, letting the pain of Paris, San Bernardino, Colorado Springs, and the U.S. presidential campaign compound my sense of the world’s terrors, wondering if I can do something to stop the madness. But while these thoughts have been in my head, I encountered, or re-encountered, a powerful song.

"The Qur'an is like a stream of divine consciousness. The literal meaning of the Qur'an is never the literal meaning of the Qur'an."

"Academics tend to think reaching a broader audience means dumbing things down. It has to do instead with the ability to dramatize."

When I was baptized at 12, I refused what Baptists call “the right hand of fellowship.” I wanted the water but not the fellowship.

A few years ago, I spent some time in Williston, North Dakota, to witness the social effects of the oil boom on this small town. While I was there, I went to Concordia Lutheran Church and talked with then-pastor Jay Reinke about his Overnighters program. This was an attempt by Reinke—we can’t quite say it was an attempt by the church—to provide a space where people could sleep. In Williston, I learned that Jesse Moss was working on a documentary about the program. Recently I finally watched that award-winning film, The Overnighters. I have been haunted by it ever since.

Karl Giberson offers a cultural history of the Bible's first human. It's an intriguing and unsettling story.