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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…
May 8, 2026
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The Brazen Serpent: Healing Through Sacred Art

(The following is an excerpt from the author’s new book, Church Beautiful: Sacred Art and Spiritual Healing, available now from Cascade.) Finding What’s Missing We live in a broken culture. Levels of distrust and anger are high. Among young people, especially, clinical depression and anxiety are woefully common. Patterns of self-isolation – the deliberate “checking…
May 6, 2026
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Generative AI, Market Values, and the Christian College

I’ll begin with a concession: by the standards that tend to govern education today, widespread employment of generative AI tools seems a marvelous idea. As colleges respond to the “enrollment cliff” by embracing market values and selling commodified diplomas to prospective student-consumers, a promise of the ability to leverage generative AI tools to synergize human-bot…
May 5, 2026

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The Struggle for Soul in Christian Higher Education: Burtchaell was Right, and I Was Wrong, Part II

In yesterday’s post, I recounted Burtchaell’s argument about the threats to Christian higher education and my response recorded in the book, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.Robert Benne Quality with Soul : How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI:…
February 16, 2024
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The Odd Experience of Romance

I had the pleasure of addressing the St. Andrew’s Society of Savannah on November 30, 2023, on the occasion of their 286th St. Andrew’s Day Dinner. A friend had suggested me as the speaker because I had written a three-volume biography of C. S. Lewis. Lewis was a lovely man with many fine qualities, but…
February 14, 2024
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Holy Grails and Trendy Water Bottles: On Desire

This year, at my daughter’s suburban, mostly upper-income middle school, a certain kind of water bottle has become au courant. It is expensive and unwieldy, but there’s a sense that one can’t do without it. I found out today that another, nearby middle school (no surprise) is aflutter about the same bottle. To be deprived…
February 13, 2024
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Faith and AI on Film: Lessons for Christian Educators

It has been just over a year now since ChatGPT’s release, and the shock waves from that seismic event keep rippling through society at large. One means of measuring its impact on our collective imagination is by the number of notifications my faculty inbox has received for professional articles and workshops on generative AI, or…
February 12, 2024
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Problem Solving Theory versus a Different Kind of Critical Theory

In a well-known essay on the study of international relations, political scientist Robert Cox made a useful distinction between what he calls “problem-solving theory” and “critical theory.” Cox’s distinction articulates something pretty commonsensical, which is why I assign excerpts from his essay in lots of different classes that have nothing to do with international relations.…
February 6, 2024
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Spoiled Hopes and Recovered Dreams in The Holdovers

Once upon a time, Paul Hunham,Played, in a command performance, by Paul Giamatti. the lead character of Alexander Payne’s recent film The Holdovers,The Holdovers is now available for streaming on Peacock. thought he could make a difference. That’s why he went into teaching in the first place. He felt a calling to prepare students for…
February 5, 2024