Skip to main content
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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
Blog

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

Subscribe

for new content notifications, access to video and audio conversations with our writers, and invitations to our events.

Blog

Disabling Ableism, Part 1: Redefining Models of Disability

“Take a look and see if you can see the differences here,” I said offhandedly to a student I was tutoring. As soon as I said it, I felt my face go red with shame. What would have been a perfectly unremarkable statement to any other student felt embarrassingly wrong when directed to the student…
October 24, 2023
Blog

Pushing Back the Animals: Rest for Hurrysick Relationships

Good, but way too busy. Semester’s a little crazy. When can I apply for sabbatical? So much for work/life balance. Hoping things slow down a little. These are responses from colleagues as we pass in the hall and offer a perfunctory, How are you?  We all seemingly bemoan time moving way too quickly – with…
October 23, 2023
Blog

Poetry as a Way of Life

Some years back, I started an experiment of sorts by sharing a poem each day on Facebook.This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at MoralApologetics.com. Circa 2016, social media was becoming increasingly acrimonious, and I thought such a practice might be one way to shine a small but persistent light and beat back…
October 19, 2023
Blog

The Rhythms of Imagined Faith

In the preface to her recent book on theological education, Elizabeth Conde-Frazier describes some of the repeating patterns that she experienced during her childhood as a member of a Latin@ church in New York.Elizabeth Conde-Frazier, Atando Cabos: Latinx Contributions to Theological Education (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). In her church, children were drawn into ministry early…
October 18, 2023
Blog

Con-Serving and Keeping a Habitable Earth

  We should so behave on Earth that Heaven will not be a shock to us. — Pastor Willard BontragerWillard L. Bontrager was pastor of the Coldsprings Mennonite Church, 1949–1994. See the last paragraph of this blog post for additional information. Expectantly, an avid gardener approached me after my presentation at a conference at the…
October 17, 2023
Blog

Are Hedonism and Hopelessness Overtaking Christian Students’ Ambivalence about Children?

I can still remember when I first encountered someone with strong convictions about overpopulation and children. I was a graduate student attending an Evangelicals for Social Action initiative, funded by the Pew Foundation (before it secularized). The wonderful program created by Joel Carpenter paired Christian graduate students with Christian faculty for intellectual mentorship. I am…
October 12, 2023
Blog

The Soul and ChatGPT

In the first lecture I give to students in my freshman writing class, I ask students to “consider the source” of their writing. I argue that writing begins from the building blocks of language, which are words. I explain to them my belief, based on my faith in the Bible, that all words come originally…
October 11, 2023
Blog

The Hell Dynamic

Lately, I have been especially attentive to outbreaks, like a rash, of what I call to myself the “Hell dynamic.” It is a spirit of domination and destruction, in that order. It begins with a struggle for power, exerted with greater or lesser straightforwardness. (This is “domination.”) It ends with a reckoning full of blame and…
October 9, 2023