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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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Empathy is Not a Bad Word, Really

"Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ." Galatians 6:2-3 is the foundation I use to introduce my research to students related to empathy. To me, the verse exemplifies empathy. Empathy is often defined as the ability to understand another’s emotions and experiences. What is often missing from this affective…
April 28, 2026

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An Accidental Visual Reminder of Humility

I have an image pinned to the noticeboard by my desk that resulted from a moment of incompetence but seemed worth keeping in view. It was generated while working on data during a recent research project. With a team of colleagues (Steve McMullen, Kara Sevensma, and Marj Terpstra), I was investigating the impact of technological…
November 3, 2022
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 Are Your Students Quiet Quitting or Imbibing Hustle Culture? Consider a Third Way

Despite working with college students well beyond Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour “mastery” threshold and being a parent of three between the ages of 18-24, I (Kenman) regularly stumble while trying to span the generation gap. This divide became apparent again on a recent trip to see my older daughter. Perfectly overlapping academic calendars and Covid shutdowns…
October 28, 2022
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Working at Home, Calling, and Vocation

One of the significant changes to come out of the COVID pandemic was the increased prevalence of working at home (or remotely at other locations). Many of us have now experienced prolonged periods of work at home, and as might be expected, people have varying opinions on how much they like it. The phenomenon of…
October 25, 2022
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Public Libraries as Places of Hope

I did not plan to start a career in in public libraries. In fact, when I applied for a job at my local library, my only intention was to make a bit of money during my last semester of seminary before jumping into “real ministry.” Of course, in his providence, God’s lessons and plans for…
October 24, 2022
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Star Shake, Glass Break, All to the Good

In the mythology of modern art, there are a few old chestnuts that get repeated again and again. There is the time Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear and then bore witness through confessional portraiture. There is the time Pablo Picasso unveiled his first masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and declared it an “exorcism.” (For…
October 21, 2022
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A Few Words in Favor of Reticence

Reticence is not much of western virtue. In Shakespeare's King Lear, the words of Edgar, son of the Earl of Gloucester, to “speak as we feel, not what we ought to say” illustrate the tragic cost of withholding one’s authentic thoughts and feelings toward others and perhaps even more tragically from oneself. After all, pulling…
October 20, 2022