Amy Frykholm

In a crucial scene of Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila spends the morning thinking, has lunch, then thinks some more. Why isn’t this boring?

To give

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The old stereotype is that evangelicals are unable or unwilling to talk about sex. Lately, the reality is the opposite.

"If I walk into the room of a patient dying in faith, hope, and love, I feel I need to take my shoes off. It is that holy."

Thank you, Professor David Barash. In his first-year biology class, Barash begins with something he calls “The Talk.” He understands that a “substantial minority” of students come in unprepared by their religious backgrounds for the complexity and strangeness of evolutionary biology. They fear that the study of biology might challenge their “beliefs.” So he takes it upon himself to clear up what vestiges of William Paley and William Jennings Bryan remain among students.

Lars and the Real Girl shows the power of the visual medium to tell a theological story. I not only felt that I knew Lars, but that I knew myself through his fear of the tangles of relationship, his anxiety about the need to be transformed, and his desire to put transformation off as long as possible.

The point isn't the money; it's the risk.

This is a book about deep, protracted, unrelenting sadness, and it knows it.

J. M. Coetzee reportedly wanted readers to discover the title of The Childhood of Jesus after reading it. I thought of this often as I read it.

In her media column for the Century last month, Kathryn Reklis, a theology professor at Fordham University, wrote about the many times a day that social media asks her to watch a video and feel something. “You too will cry after watching this . . . 90 percent of people cry,” the Facebook post tells her. She argues that, while kitschy, these videos contain the power of shared feeling, and shared feeling is a step toward empathy and a further step toward compassion—and so, in essence, a social good. I am not sure I agree.

Ministry is one of the only professions besides writing where a person has daily need for poetry. Poetry refreshes and renews language and adds insight to stories we’ve heard many times. It can be woven meaningfully into sermons, and it bolsters the human spirit. But pastors often turn to the same poets over and over again, and time to explore new territory is limited.

"Poetry invites you to have an experience. It doesn't want you to drift away into inattention. It wants to grab you."

Three things I am reading this summer, and three that I am not.

What do rape, online bullying, hookup culture, MTV, child trapeze artists, and feminists all have in common? According to Wendy Shalit, they are all enemies of modesty.

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Owuor's novel wrestles with Kenya's bitter remnants of colonialism. Yet it suggests that the future can be shaped by people who are willing to incorporate the past with honesty and integrity.

For decades, community health clinics existed on the margins of the health-care world. Now they're critical to the system.

I recently interviewed cultural anthropologist and New York Times columnist Tanya Luhrmann about prayer and religious experience. After the interview, I asked her for some recommendations of books on prayer that are not "how-tos." What are some books that can help me understand prayer more conceptually and experientially?

“When I started out I was focused on whether God was or was not out there. Now I am much more comfortable with ambiguity.”