Amy Frykholm

"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.

“I am fascinated by the war between what is best in our natures and what is worst.”

Ron Rash’s stories emerge from the Smoky Mountains, where his protagonists often reach for a mystery beyond their own understanding.

"Everybody thinks the church stopped supporting science with Galileo. That's a myth tied up in the politics of the 19th century."

A federal judge ruled recently that the three U.S. detention centers currently holding more than 2,000 women and children seeking asylum from Central America have three choices: Release just the children, leaving their mothers incarcerated. Entirely reform the detention center environment so that it’s not longer like a prison.  Release everyone.

"One of the powers of debt is to isolate us. We have to overcome that isolation, and it's tricky."

In her 11th novel Toni Morrison returns to the foundation of most of her fiction: childhood and its traumatic effects.

Past efforts at "character education" have operated with a shallow understanding of character. The Expeditionary Learning model goes deeper.

Read the main article on the Expeditionary Learning model.

Seven Laws of Salem

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Last year, the U.S. took thousands of "family units" into custody at the southern border. Nearly every woman cites violence as the reason she fled.

Early last summer, the Obama administration opened a detention center in the remote town of Artesia, New Mexico, in order to detain Central American women who cross the southern border with their children. The facility was a centerpiece of the administration’s policy of family detention, which aims to “send a message,” as Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson said, that asylum seekers from these countries are not welcome.

"People sometimes come in guarded and defensive. But they want to be understood, and they want to minister well."

"Students don't have time for electives. Rather than change the curriculum, we embedded a discussion of religion and science in the classes they already take."

When the congregation starts reciting the creed, I do one of two things: argue with it in my head, or zone out and stop listening.

This summer I am going to be teaching at a Kenyon College writing workshop designed for clergy who want to hone their writing skills for conversations beyond their congregations and denominations. The program, Beyond Walls, is envisioned as an interfaith conversation with writers and clergy from both Jewish and Christian traditions. I will be teaching essay writing along with Rodger Kamenetz, and he and I each have an essay in this month’s Beyond Walls e-mag.

“Two things about my own life became clear: I really did understand both sides, and I didn’t understand them at all.”

At the end of Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel Lila, the title character envisions heaven in an intensely communal way. In light of that communal vision, Century associate editor Amy Frykholm gathered together three avid Robinson readers—Rachel Stone, Peter Boumgarden, and Amber Noel—for a conversation about the novel.