Amy Frykholm

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.

For Ben Quash, scripture and tradition are givens. Our task is to discover and reinterpret what we have been given.

This week, at a refurbished camp for oil and gas workers, the Department of Homeland Security officially opened a new detention center for women and children who cross the southern U.S. border. In DHS director Jeh Johnson’s view, this is a move to prevent people from crossing the border at all. He wants to stem the tide of “illegal migration,” and he believes that detention is one means to do so. “Frankly, we want to send a message that our border is not open to illegal migration, and if you come here, you should not expect to simply be released,” said Johnson. Let’s look at the positive side for a moment.

“Truth is in constant transit. The difference between a liberal and a conservative, I think, is the stomach you have for the journey.”

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?

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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.