Amy Frykholm
Hard lockdown
There is a line in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine that has come back to me recently: “After Columbine, it really sucked being a student in America.”
Since the Newtown shooting, my son’s school has gone into “hard lockdown” mode twice.
On reading a weird monk joke about underwear
As I mentioned before, I’ve been reading this strange book called The Spiritual Meadow, written by sixth-century wandering monk John Moschos. One of the last stories in the book was as relevant to my daily existence as any story I have read in a long time. I have only the vaguest idea what it means, but I do know it’s another weird monk joke. And this one was aimed directly at me.
The story goes like this: In the ancient city of Antioch, the church had various kinds of social services. “A man who was a friend of Christ” used to gather supplies and give them out to people in need.
Non-necessary reading
This year, I have decided to make space for more non-urgent reading. This is reading that isn’t about keeping up with work-related issues or the latest, best writers....
Near picks
“Anyone who reads independently and spiritedly is going to carry an eclectic canon around in his head,” writes Christian Wiman. “That is half the fun of it all.”
For the past five years or so, I have had the responsibility of coming up with the novels to put on the Century’s list of Christmas picks for fiction. At first I was baffled by this job. Did I have to read every new book?
Weed debates and root problems
I didn’t vote for Amendent 64, which legalized marijuana for recreational use in my home state of Colorado. I had mixed feelings about it. When marijuana was legalized for medical use in 2000, the effect on my small mountain community wasn’t something to celebrate. The majority of people who got licenses for medical marijuana were young men under the age of 34. At least legalization for recreational use will put a stop to that farce.
Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry
In this strange, insightful and layered little book, Elaine Scarry argues that Clinton Rossiter was right: the nuclear age means a state of "chronic emergency."
Three common distortions about poverty
It is true, as a Century editorial recently argued, that poverty did not get the attention...
The poor are still with us: Peter Edelman, policy advocate
"I don't think we have laid the ground for a national conversation on poverty. People just don't know the facts."
What are productive ways to talk about climate change?
Earlier this year, the Century published a piece by an environmental scientist on just how radical the current shift in CO2 levels are—from the perspective of 50 million years. As I was working with that scientist, Lee Vierling, on the piece, we struggled to find a language that he and I and readers of the Century could share.
He wanted something that was fluid and scientifically absolutely accurate. He also wanted to be certain that he was not using scare tactics.
Fit for ministry: Addressing the crisis in clergy health
Being a pastor is bad for your health. The Clergy Health Initiative aims to study this problem and begin to correct it.
Oh, the farmer and the shepherd should be archetypal enemies
By now, we are all familiar with what liberation theology and Catholic social teaching have called the Bible’s “preferential option for the poor.” But what about a biblical preferential option for the rebel?
In a new book by biblical scholar Yoram Hazony called The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture—which I learned about from Jonathan Yudelman’s review—the story of Cain and Abel receives a reading different from any I have heard.
Bad sermons?
At a reception to launch a new collection of Lucille Clifton’s poems (The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010), the editor of the volume, Kevin Young, described coming across a folder in Clifton’s archives at Emory University. The folder had been labeled “Unpublished Poems.” That label had been scratched out and replaced by something like, “Poems that really aren’t that good and should probably just be thrown away someday.” That label too had been scratched out and replaced with “Bad poems.”
The reading congregation: Editor Christopher Smith
"In 2010 we decided to do a quarterly print magazine," says Englewood Review of Books editor C. Christopher Smith. "We felt like we were moving against the cultural tide."
Weird monk jokes
I have lately been reading stories of the desert monastics, collected by the monk John Moschos in the seventh century. I don’t think I get it.
My pattern has been to feel slightly offended—sometimes even disgusted—by a story, and then walk away from it, wander around for awhile and finally realize that the story was probably a joke. In its own context, the main thing it elicited was probably laughter. But for me the humor is so strange, so wry, so unexpected that I don’t perceive it for hours.
Investing in change: Nora Nash, shareholder activist
"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."
From ignorance to engagement: Scott Anderson on interfaith relations in Wisconsin
"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."
Scott Anderson on interfaith relations in Wisconsin
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.
Rename the mainline?
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.