Tag Archives: creativity

by

Friday Link Love

Away we go:

~

Speed Creating — Dominic Wilcox

I included a link to this earlier in the week, but Wilcox’s stuff is so cool I just had to post it in Link Love. Whimsical! Practical! Genius!

At left is the foil bust.

~

Where Am I? The Middle Class Crisis of Place — Christianity Today

To exist at all, we must be somewhere. And as embodied creatures, we are implaced in specific contexts. Yet in contemporary culture, this aspect of human existence is threatened by what Bartholomew calls a “crisis of place” created by several elements of our technological society. To fully flourish as human beings—and to flourish as entire communities—Bartholomew argues, we need to recover the lost art of placemaking.

I especially like the spiritual/incarnational practices he suggests to recover a sense of Place.

~

How “Not Giving a ****” Can Really Help You a Lot — Improvised Life

Interesting videos with George Carlin and Louis C.K. (one of my favorite comedians) about truth-telling, authenticity and creativity. Obvious warning: both have potty mouths. If that bothers you, don’t send me letters clutching your pearls. Just don’t watch.

~

The Illusion of Choice — An Infographic

The statistics in infographics always needs to be taken with a grain of salt. However, the basic assertion is this: despite a dizzying number of media options today, 90% of what we read, watch or listen to is controlled by just six corporations.

~

And another graphic, Highways as the London Subway Map — Good Design

h/t Keith Snyder. I love maps, and this one is especially fun to look at.

~

I’m off to Big D on Sunday for the NEXT Church conference. I’ve been so focused on getting my workshop ready that I haven’t had a chance to get excited about seeing old friends and getting inspired for ministry. It’s going to be great! And if any of you Blue Room readers are coming, be sure and say hello.

by

Friday Link Love

We’re all over the place this week:

~

Barbie Trashes Her Dreamhouse — Carrie M. Becker

1/6 scale hoarder’s house. Awesome and disturbing:

~

Aurora 2012 — Vimeo (video)

Amazing. Good job, God.

Aurora 2012 from Christian Mülhauser on Vimeo.

~

Why Morning Routines Are Creativity Killers — Time

Imaginative insights are most likely to come to us when we’re groggy and unfocused. The mental processes that inhibit distracting or irrelevant thoughts are at their weakest in these moments, allowing unexpected and sometimes inspired connections to be made. Sleepy people’s “more diffuse attentional focus,” they write, leads them to “widen their search through their knowledge network. This widening leads to an increase in creative problem solving.” By not giving yourself time to tune in to your meandering mind, you’re missing out on the surprising solutions it may offer. (If you happen to be one of those perky morning people, your most inventive time comes when you’re winding down in the early evening.

~

Show and Tell: Six Ways to Teach Your Children the Faith — U.S. Catholic

“The” faith is the Catholic faith. But these simple approaches can be adapted for other contexts:

Try asking your kids what they thought of the Sunday homily. (If they answer, “It was the most boring thing I ever heard!” and you agree, consider saying so. Avoid insincere praise, which they can spot in a minute.) Ask them what they might have said about the gospel if they’d given the homily that day. They might surprise you.

~

And finally, just for fun… Parsing the President’s Spotify Playlist — Maddow Blog

There’s been plenty of snickering on Twitter and pop-culture blogs about the inclusion of not one, but two songs by former Hootie and the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker. I think of them as the playlist’s equivalent to the Affordable Heathcare for America Act: so bland and watered-down that you can’t believe anyone’s as worked up about them as they are. (And let’s be honest: you know these are some of the ones Obama selected himself. We like to think he’s Mr. Super Cool, but don’t forget, this is a guy who keeps his cell phone in a belt holster.)

I’m listening to it right now…

by

Friday Link Love

Just a few today:

~

Joy of Books — YouTube

I cannot fathom how long this took… but I’m glad they spent the time.

~

NOW we're talkin'!

New Playgrounds Are Safe… And That’s Why Nobody Uses Them — Atlantic

I couldn’t agree more. I can’t count the number of times I’ve stood at the bottom of a lame plastic slide just in case one of my kids flies off the bottom—because it happened to me when I was a kid—and then realized, “Who am I kidding? They’re going to grind to a halt halfway up and have to scoot their way off. Childhood today sucks.”

And while I’m on the topic, why do parents say “Good job” when their kid reaches the bottom of a slide? “Way to be subject to gravity!”

~

How Do We Identify Good Ideas? — Jonah Lehrer

The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity. (The Beatles are the exception that proves the rule, although their subsequent solo careers prove that even Lennon and McCartney were fallible artists.) The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious gifts must still be able to sort their best from their worst, sifting through the clutter to find what’s actually worthwhile.

…But this raises the obvious question: How can we sort our genius from our rubbish?

The answer may surprise you… and it has implications for Sabbath, in my opinion.

~

Free Cabin P0rn 

I wish it weren’t called that, but whatever.

We talk a lot in our family about the idea of a “self house.” Caroline came up with the name at Christmas several years ago. She told Robert she wanted to give me my own small cabin in the backyard “where Mommy can go when she’s feeling mad.” Sigh. I was half dismayed that Mommy apparently gets mad often enough to need a whole separate building to contain it, half blown away by her idea, which let’s face it, is spot on. Who wouldn’t love a self house?

This site is full of self houses, and the story snippets are fascinating, the pictures arresting. I was reminded of my friend Karen, who recommended a book years ago about desert spirituality called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. OK, I then bought the book and never read it. But don’t you see the solace of fierce landscapes when you look through these photos?

Oh and Caroline, if you ever read this, here’s the one I’ve picked out:

~

And speaking of a space of one’s own, I’m off to Montreat on Sunday for a week of Preacher Camp. It’s an intense week socially, academically, and… gastronomically. (We eat out a lot.) But every night I retire to my own “cabin” of sorts, and it’s very very nice. And then by Friday I’m very happy to get back home to the chaos.

My papers are written and I can’t wait. Take care.

by

Friday Link Love

The Cult of Collaboration — Fernando Gros

Just jokin'. Sort of.

…We often need to collaborate in order to solve really big problems. And, as humans, we also need to work alongside other people to satisfy more basic emotional desires for community and belonging.

But, the hard slog of creating, innovating and thinking is something we largely do alone.

That’s something I totally agree with. And, it worries me that in many parts of society, including schools, we are not encouraging people to develop the skills required to work alone, for extended periods of time, on complex problems.

Add in the fact that smartphones mean that we need never be alone again, and this is an issue worth thinking about. Alone. Or together.

~

Religion for Atheists — Alain de Botton

We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this. We need to build a similar awareness into secular structures.
Religions are fascinating because they are giant machines for making ideas vivid and real in people’s lives: ideas about goodness, about death, family, community etc. Nowadays, we tend to believe that the people who make ideas vivid are artists and cultural figures, but this is such a small, individual response to a massive set of problems. So I am deeply interested in the way that religions are in the end institutions, giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life. There is nothing like this in the secular world, and this seems a huge pity.

The above link is to an FAQ about Botton’s TED talk on Atheism 2.0, which is outstanding and available here.

~

Pomodoro Technique

If you’re not familiar with the pomodoro technique for time management, it’s incredibly simple and very effective. I wrote Sabbath in the Suburbs primarily using techniques like this one.

Poke around the website to learn more about it, though for heaven’s sake, I don’t know why you’d need a $26 book to understand it, let alone the tomato-shaped timer, although it is cute.

~

And along the lines of time management:

The Biggest Myth in Time Management — Harvard Business Review

In a nutshell: That we can get it all done. (Comments are interesting, trying to diagnose “Brad’s” problem in the article.)

I think this simple realization has profound spiritual implications, way beyond simple time management. But then again, I would think that, I just wrote a book about Sabbath…

Have a good weekend. It’s a long weekend for us, what with teacher work days on Monday and Tuesday. We have our congregation’s annual meeting on Sunday, after which the kids and I head to Johnstown, Pennsylvania for a short visit with Robert’s grandmother.

by

Friday Link Love

Where did the week go? Oh yeah, to Baltimore for a planning meeting for the NEXT Church. Now that’s a group of folks with some big dreams for the church! Stay tuned… and if you are of the Presbyterian flavor, register today for the 2012 conference!

~

Nothing is Impossible — YouTube

Beautiful and inspiring:

~

Physics, Miracles and Witchcraft: 50 Years of A Wrinkle in Time — Big Think

I recently read A Wrinkle in Time to the girls and was re-astounded at its beauty, complexity and depth:

What [L'Engle] seems to have intended to do is add a new twist (wrinkle?) to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Those, too, combine fantasy with a religious message; The Magician’s Nephew even includes an element of planet-hopping sci-fi. But while the Lewis of Nephew was a veteran children’s author who knew, metaphysically speaking, where he stood, the L’Engle of Wrinkle was a relative newcomer, and there’s something less slick and complacent about her universe. Blend pagan myth with Christian themes and you’re repeating an old formula; stir in large quantities of secular literature and modern science, and you get a more intriguing, more volatile chemistry.

There’s also a discussion of a pivotal scene in the book (one of my favorites), which may be ”the single most outrageous scene in classic children’s fiction.”

~

Most Runway Models Meet the BMI Criteria for Anorexia — Daily Mail

A magazine dedicated to plus-size fashion and models has sparked controversy with a feature claiming that most runway models meet the Body Mass Index criteria for anorexia.

Accompanied by a bold shoot that sees a nude plus-size model posing alongside a skinny ‘straight-size’ model, PLUS Model Magazine says it aims to encourage plus-size consumers to pressure retailers to better cater to them, and stop promoting a skinny ideal.

Lots of very arresting photos of a beautiful “plus-size” model.

~

Tackling “Wicked” Problems — Faith and Leadership

There are hard problems, and there are wicked problems:

Steve Jobs was a master at dealing with wicked problems, and when he came back to Apple [in 1996], it was in a very bad place. They had the success of the Macintosh, and then they really struggled.

Most CEOs would come back and say, “How do I sell more computers? We’ll have to expand the number of consumers who are interested in my products. We’ll have to hire a chief marketing officer.” It’s a hard problem — “How do I sell more computers?”

Jobs came in and asked different kinds of questions about what could that company even be. He famously said his objective was to make a dent in the universe. He asked, “How do I transform how people interact with each other and the devices that enable them to communicate?” It’s a totally different kind of thing.

I talk about this all the time in the church. We are very good at avoiding the wicked problems by asking the wrong questions: how can we halt membership decline? How do we get young people back to church? Wrong questions.

~

Mike Rowe Answers Your Questions — Reddit

This is a couple years old, but couldn’t help but share. We love Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs in our house:

Oodles of fun anecdotes, commentary, and yes opera singin’. Also, his answer to “Is there any chance you’ll stop having sex with my wife in her dreams? It’s getting pretty old, Mike” is so elegant, it would have made Archimedes jealous.

~

May you all have a dreamy weekend.

by

The Wonderful Wooden Board

Tiny Church has a large sheet of plywood on a base, which makes it a movable wall with great flexibility of use. One side is covered in cork… actually, it’s partially covered in cork. Someone ran out of cork sheets, so the bottom has a ragged look to it.

But the other side is painted a pale yellow. When I first arrived I thought This is a little weird but I’ve used it in worship as a prayer wall, and for other random things.

Right now it’s our CROP Hunger Walk commitment board. Our CROP walk coordinator and I were talking about how hard it is to come up with new ways to inspire participation. It tends to be the same folks every year. But realistically, the number of folks who can do the walk is pretty limited.

So this year we’re using the board as a place to encourage alternate means of support. We’re posting one flyer for each walker with the person’s name at the top. On that sheet are places for people to sign up to do other tasks to support that person. Of course people can sponsor a walker with $$, but we’ve also added the opportunity to be a prayer partner for a walker, or to provide lunch for a walker on the day of the walk. (We’ve always found it a challenge to get ourselves fed between church and the walk.) I’m hoping this means that everyone from the homebound nonagenarian to the busy mother of twins plus an infant can be involved in some way.

Wooden board =  tool for ministry.

At any rate… a friend posted the following image on Facebook last night. Something like this will definitely make an appearance on the board:

What do you need today?

By the way, you can sponsor our family for the CROP walk here.

by

Thursday Link Love

Oh my goodness, link love on Thursday! Why not. Emerson said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

I learned that from a Nike commercial.

What a week, folks. I’ve been blasting through the book as best I can, and still hope to get it done by Thanksgiving. But here are a few things I enjoyed during my many coffee breaks:

Can Do (Maira Kalman)

I love Maira Kalman. I have her illustrated Strunk and White and it makes me happy. This piece is not new, but new to me. A hymn to America’s inventiveness.

“Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message.”

~

Behind Door Number Three (Peter Rollins)

Connecting Occupy Wall Street and our tendency to settle for the status quo.

~

What Happened to Downtime? (Scott Belsky)

Soon enough, planes, trains, subways, and, yes, showers will offer the option of staying connected. Knowing that we cannot rely on spaces that force us to unplug to survive much longer, we must be proactive in creating these spaces for ourselves. And when we have a precious opportunity to NOT be connected, we should develop the capacity to use it and protect it.

I love his suggestion to “Protect the state of no-intent.”


Articles like this challenge and convict me… and also affirm that it’s a fiercely important thing to be practicing Sabbath keeping. And writing about it. Hat tip to Ruth for this one.

by

Friday Link Love

A few random things…

Ice Art

 

Greenpeace got artist John Quigley to partially recreate da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on a melting ice pack near the North Pole. Nicely metaphorical, dontcha think?

~

Overshoot on Your Salary Request to Get the Best Offer

With any luck, I won’t be negotiating another salary from scratch any time soon. But I was intrigued by this approach:

Asking for a ridiculously high salary—even when offered as a joke—can get you a much higher salary offer than if you stay within the typical salary range for a job, the Harvard Business Review suggests.

I’m wondering whether this approach works in other areas of life!

~

Choices for Change

This is an article for church leaders on how to catalyze change, but it has good thoughts for anyone needing to make a shift in his or her life: “When you want to change, you have two choices: think your way into acting or act your way into thinking.”

~

If It Feels Right…

This David Brooks column has been making the rounds among my Facebook friends:

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

[more at the link]

At least one commenter suggested that people of all ages are not necessarily good at talking categorically and philosophically about moral issues… but they are still good and moral people. What do you think?

~

Hope it is an excellent weekend for everyone.

by

Friday Link Love

Tonight we celebrate Robert’s birthday with a trip to the Arlington Drafthouse to see this guy:

Wyatt Cenac

We’re pretty psyched.

In the meantime, here are some links to keep you busy:

Don’t Give Up: The Inspirational Letters Project

The eternal truth of a lot of creative work: 3% of the time you are on fire, and 97% of the time is a messy slog. The key: persist, despite all the difficulties…

These are letters from animators at Pixar and elsewhere to an aspiring animator… the response prompted him to start a spinoff called the Inspirational Letters Project. As you would expect, they are visually interesting.

~

King’s God: The Unknown Faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King denied the ontological divinity of Jesus, didn’t think heaven/hell were literal places, saw the Bible as myth, rejected the bodily resurrection of Jesus (beginning at the age of 13), rejected original sin, and more. In other words, a liberal theologian.

On that topic, I’m sympathetic with James McGrath, who laments that many of the “new atheists” are putting forth criticisms of Christianity and the Bible as if they are new and original, when in fact many theologians have been saying similar stuff for centuries, including MLK, it would seem. (I also note that the comments on McGrath’s post are largely substantive and respectful. Kudos to him.)

~

Don’t Just Do Something: Stand There

 

Numerous writers, artists, poets and musicians have testified to the virtues of such idleness in their own creative lives. It was when he was completely alone, Mozart wrote in a letter, “say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when [he] could not sleep,” that his ideas flowed best and most abundantly…

Such testimony is not just plain good sense; it is good science too. In a recent article in Discover magazine, the journalist Stephen Johnson reported on a conversation with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. The cognitive part of our brain works very fast, Damasio explained. “So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names in just a few hundredths of a second.” But the emotional part of our brains works very differently, and there is precious little evidence that this is going to change. Tasks that have to do with empathy and imagination, with slow-growing qualities like love and fidelity and ethics, will continue to develop in their own sweet time.

~

Kurt Andersen: Our Politics Are Sick

I love Kurt Andersen’s Studio 360; it’s one of my favorite podcasts. “Creativity, pop culture and the arts”: what’s not to love?

He nails this metaphor in my opinion:

The American body politic suffers from autoimmune disorders.

It’s a metaphor, but it’s not a joke. I’ve read a lot about autoimmune diseases — the literal, medical kinds, also disconcertingly on the rise — because several members of my family have them. At some point, our bodies’ own immune systems went nuts, mistaking healthy pieces of our anatomies — a pancreas, a thyroid, a joint — for foreign tissue, dangerous enemies within, and proceeded to attack and try to destroy them. It’s as close to tragedy as biology gets.

Which is pretty much exactly what’s been happening the last decade in our politics. The Truthers decided the U.S. government was behind 9/11. Others decided our black president is definitely foreign-born and Muslim. Tea Party Republicans are convinced his administration is crypto-socialist and/or proto-fascist. The anti-Shariah people are terrified of the nonexistent threat of Islamic law infecting American jurisprudence. It’s now considered reasonable to regard organs and limbs of the federal government — the E.P.A., the education department, the Federal Reserve — as tumors that must be removed. Taxation itself is now considered a parasitic pathogen rather than a crucial part of our social organism.

Brill.

~

The Procrastination Flowchart

I resemble that.

~

And finally, Steve Job’s 2005 Commencement Speech to Stanford. Wise and touching. I wish him well.

 

 

 

 

by

Friday Link Love

A few things to enjoy/chew on:

The Art of Jim Denevan

Love the art Jim does in sand—some whimsical, some vaguely unsettling.

~

In Which I Am Part of the Insurgency (Emerging Mummy)

There is a war on women, argues the author:

The battles go from the rape tactics of war in Sudan to the sex trafficking of eastern Europe, from the pervasiveness of girlie-girl hyper-sexualised stealing of childhood to the proliferation and acceptability of pornography.

I am even beginning to wonder if the evangelical culture war about “biblical” womanhood – narrow stay-at-home vs. working, from complementarian vs. egalitarian (full disclosure: unapologetic egalitarian here) – is disingenuous at best and neutering half the church at worst and, to be honest, completely missing the point. [MaryAnn: wonder no more. It is all of those things.]

If it is a war on women, I can’t be Winston Churchill. I am not the one leading the charge and very few listen to my small voice with its strong Canadian accent. I may not be a Katie Davis or a  Christine Caine or a Dorothy Day. I may not be a Nancy Alcorn, let alone a Mother Theresa or an Oprah Winfrey or any other well-known woman fighting some small or large battle in this war against our sisters, mothers and daughters, our friends. Our big voices of freedom and workers for the wholeness of women stand as the generals and governments, the tacticians and leaders are our Allied forces.

No, I am not that important. I am small. 

And my life is a bit small.

So I will be the French Resistance. 

I will be the small underground movement, the insurgency, the one taking every opportunity, however small, to strike a blow for the Kingdom’s way of womanhood.

I would like her to unpack “Kingdom’s way of womanhood,” but I really like the image of the French Resistance, the idea of being subversive in place.

~

If Men Are Working Just as Much as Women, Why Do Women Still Feel Like They’re Getting the Shaft? 

Here is a discussion of a recent Time Magazine article (subscribers only) that deals with the amount of work men and women do each week. You may remember The Second Shift, published in the 1980s, that showed that women worked 15 hours more per week than their partners. Now that gap has shrunk to, basically, nothing. Men still work more hours outside the home, and women still do more housework, but the total amount of work done is the same.

So why does it still feel radically unbalanced to many women, the Time article asks? The blog post, written by a stay-at-home dad, explores some possible reasons. I will add another possibility: the work men do at their offices is “hidden”—that is, women who are working part-time, or who don’t work outside the home, don’t really see the fruits of that work on a daily basis. The fruits come in the form of a paycheck every two weeks (hopefully). By contrast, the housework is in plain view, every single day: the meals they cooked, the toilets they scrubbed. I can understand how that would contribute to a feeling that the men do “nothing around here, it’s all up to me.” Doesn’t mean it’s right.

~

Amusing Ourselves to Death

A graphical comparison of the ideas of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as expressed in the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

Example: ”Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism.” Which vision do you think has played out more fully?

~

Barna: Trends in Religion

For my clergy friends: Church volunteerism is down 8% over the past 20 years.

“And in 1991, just one-quarter of adults (24%) were unchurched. That figure has ballooned by more than 50%, to 37% today.” More at the link.