Andrew Shamy is a writer and learning experience designer committed to helping people live out the depth and beauty of the Christian faith creatively and authentically in every area of life. He has a Master of Arts in Theology from Regent College, Vancouver, and worked at Venn Foundation as a Senior Teaching Fellow from 2013-2024.
Andrew’s particular areas of theological interest are creation, culture, the arts, and Christian teaching. He writes regularly on these themes through his substack, Imagining Otherwise. He has co-authored two books, The Insect and the Buffalo and The Hare and the Tortoise, and contributed regularly to Common Ground. He developed curricula for the Venn Summer Conference, Residential Fellowship, and Vocational Programme, and taught at Summer Conference and on the Vocational Programme. To learn more about his learning design practice visit his website.
Andrew is married to Rachel Kitchens and they live in Auckland with their two daughters, Ella and Georgia, and son, James. He worships at St James Church, Māngere Bridge.
It almost qualifies as a genre of its own, writers writing about writing. Just about any author you can name has had a go.
I think one of the things that definitely shapes the whole experience and process that I want to take people on as a director is that through the work, I want be a living witness to Jesus in the work that we do, and to make sure that for everybody in that experience, that all their mana is recognised, that they are uplifted, and that they find it a really positive experience.
To winter well, then—to receive the gift of winter with delight and gratitude—is a moral act. It is to enact one of the primary callings of human life.
I had not expected to be told the world was ending. The advertisement pinned to the hessian noticeboard in the dorm common room alongside posters for open mic nights, African drum circles (this was 1999), and a one-woman play at the local student theatre had mentioned only a summer job opportunity in Boston.
One of the marks of Christian celebration is an exuberant naming of why we rejoice. Celebration is a meaningful and just thing to do, even in troubled times, because the deep truth abides: all creation bears witness that God in Jesus has triumphed over darkness.
So often we miss it. Harried and distracted, dazed by the seasonal onslaught of tinsel and faux snow and forced cheer—Happy Holidays!—we stumble into Christmas and out again without really reckoning with the meaning of it all: the strangeness, the scandal, the world-transfiguring joy.
The driver of the white convertible rests one arm casually on the steering wheel. He has long hair and is wearing bracelets.
My office window overlooks a green lawn, which runs for perhaps ten metres before plunging into a gully.
“Certain things,” writes philosopher Josef Pieper, “can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and of life.”
My focus this morning is a story that sits at the heart of the Old Testament understanding of faith. It is a story about an old man asked to kill his own son by God, the story of Abraham and Isaac, of Abraham’s lonely walk to Mount Moriah, and his willingness to sacrifice his son there.
I’ve been dreaming of line graphs. The perilous upward snaking of them; the longed for levelling off. My phone tells me my screen-time is up 9% on last week; it was up 15% the week before that.