Authors /

Amy Frykholm

The Century contributing editor is the author of five books, including Wild Woman: A Footnote, the Desert, and my Quest for an Elusive Saint.

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Features

Coffee justice in Mexico

Café Justo’s alternative to the fair trade model keeps the means of production—and most of the profit—in the local community.
Books

A world with no boundaries

Russian writer Ludmila Ulitskaya’s stories of love and defiance escape the plane of realism.
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A Refugee’s Feast: the story of Maria Skobtsova with Amy Frykholm (S3:E8)

 “Love is a very dangerous thing.”
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Love and desolation: The story of Matushka Olga Michael with Meagan Saliashvili (S3:E7)

“Blessed Olga said, ‘God can create great beauty out of complete desolation.’”
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The story never meant to be told: The suppressed history of African American religious women with Shannen Dee Williams (S3:E6)

“When confronted with the silenced past, the greatest responsibility of the historian—and the most radical thing any person can do—is to tell the story that was never meant to be told.” 
Features

The slow work of dialogue

For 20 years, Mennonite scholars from North America and Shi’a scholars from Iran have met periodically to build bridges.
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Who wrote the Bible?: Enslaved people and the New Testament with Candida Moss (S3:E5)

“Once we accept biblical collaboration as fact and recognize its participants as oppressed human beings who nevertheless had agency, we are forced to confront a truth that can be unsettling to some readers of scripture: that the meaning of the Bible is fluid.”
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Intelligence moved by love: Thecla as philosopher with Dawn LaValle Norman (S3:E4)

“Thecla shows us how women could be important models, not only insofar as they overcame their femininity, but in their femininity, as models for men and women.”
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The women around Augustine with Kate Cooper (S3:E3)

“This is an enslaved girl in Africa in the fourth century. Just talk about lost voices. And yet this child is literally creating the theological groundwork for the greatest of Latin theologians”
Features

In search of Rumi’s live heart

Looking for an Arabic translation of a favorite line, I found myself on a treasure hunt.

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The Samaritan Woman’s Well of Interpretation with Caryn Reeder (S3:E2)

“Sin is not part of the story.”
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There’s Something about Mary Magdalene, with Elizabeth Schrader Polczer and Diana Butler Bass (S3:E1)

“What if the text was changed to suppress Mary Magdalene as not only the first witness of Jesus in John 20, but as the Christological confessor, which would make her a central character in the Gospel of John? Not one of several women, but a central character.”
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S3 Bonus Episode Back to the Desert: Mary of Egypt with Amy Frykholm

“As Christianity moved to an empire-based movement, women lost a lot of power. So it makes sense that they would have gone into the desert, looking for ways to pursue their path in Christianity in ways that allowed them greater freedom.”
Books

What do people who’ve lost everything bring with them?

Stephanie Saldaña reminds us that refugees carry a whole world inside them.
Features

An architecture of care in Calais

At the Maria Skobtsova House, refugees and volunteers work to counteract the cruel logic of the refugee crisis.
Interviews

Searching for home in the world’s religions

“Why is it that being a Buddhist Christian is often flagged as a problem,” asks theologian John Thatamanil, “but being a capitalist Christian is not?”

More by Amy Frykholm ›