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The One Who Transcends Taxes and Time

Editor's Note: This post is written in honor of today's date on the Western Church calendar: the Feast of the Ascension Every April, I teach students about taxes. The class isn’t Accounting, but Physical Chemistry. These aren’t monetary taxes mandated by written laws, but energetic taxes mandated by the physical laws of chemistry and thermodynamics.…
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Never Let Them See You Sweat: Being Transparent in the Classroom (Part I)

“Never let them see you sweat!” This phrase was introduced into our cultural vocabulary in 1984. Gillette Company launched a series of antiperspirant commercials where famous athletes, performers, and celebrities followed a similar script, as evidenced by comedian Elaine Boosler:“There are three nevers in comedy. Never follow a better comedian. Never give a heckler the…
May 11, 2026
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Virtue-Spotting Spotting: A Conversation with an Undergraduate Researcher on Research and Christian Virtues

I (Paul Kim) love mentoring undergraduate research. Something about teaching undergraduate students to refine the academic and professional skills normally reserved for their more advanced counterparts, combined with the eagerness and appropriate level of fear that younger students might bring into the first-time experience of joining a research lab, makes the research mentoring experience uniquely…

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A Christian Appraisal of Academic Titles

I have been thinking about academic titles this past semester (as is evident from my blog post at the beginning of the academic year and my Ph.D. student’s post yesterday about his experience of my experiment).  How fitting, then that the semester should end with the twitter-stirring controversy sparked by an op-ed about the academic…
December 17, 2020
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Shocking Our Socks off the Mantle

Annoyed by plump plastic Santas perched on suburban lawns, I was suddenly struck by the relevance of my scholarship to cultural conceptions of Christmas. In my November CSR blog, I discussed the need for Christians to avoid an “economy of exchange” in their vocabularies about salvation, and this time of year we can’t help but…
December 14, 2020
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Government for the Time Being: An Advent Reflection

Hallelujah! For the Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth!  So begins the most acclaimed moment in the most acclaimed Christmas oratorio ever written.This post is adapted from William S. Brewbaker III, “Government For the Time Being,” in Austin Sarat, ed., Legal Responses to Religious Practices in the United States: Accommodation and Its Limits (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012),…
December 11, 2020
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Polarization and the Academy

One of the clearest conclusions we can take away from the 2020 election season is that political and ideological polarization has continued to be one of the most powerful forces in our social life. In recent days, I have seen a variety of calls for us to come together as a people, or as a…
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December 9, 2020
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More Than (Art and Orthodoxy)

In the early centuries after Christ, myriad heresies peeled free of the doctrinal core, curling attractively, then blanching and withering. They were like eddies swirling off a current, spiraling prettily and then dissipating. Or like whorls of smoke from a pipe. Such things were attractive precisely in their divergence from the core. They were Life…
December 7, 2020
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Does God Pick the Winner of the Super Bowl?

The work of a Christian scholar is bound to the questions of the Christian community, those questions that rise up from the “fear and trembling” by which all Christians work out their salvation and whose answers, however incomplete, form the basis of the account of the hope that is in us all. This means that…
December 4, 2020
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Reflections on How to End a Semester

This semester seems to be ending in stages. We planned to send students home at Thanksgiving and teach the remainder of the semester online. Then a spike in COVID infections in the wider population and a state shutdown of schools and universities in response pulled us out of the classroom a week early. Some semesters…
December 2, 2020
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How Can a Christian be a Scientist?

I used to ask this question as a student. It took me a while to get to know the University staff who were Christians. I was aware of pressing ethical issues and controversial questions about science and the Bible; I knew science was a demanding career that might compete with church commitments; I knew some…
November 30, 2020