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On Creative Process
“Creativity is the ability to produce an artifact or an idea that is both novel and useful given a particular social context. Researchers generally believe that creativity is a two-part process. The first is to generate candidate ideas and make novel connections between them, and the second is to narrow down to the most useful one. The generative step in this process is divergent thinking. It’s the ability to recall, associate and combine a diverse set of information in novel ways to generate creative ideas. Convergent thinking takes into account goals and constraints to ensure that a given idea is useful. This part of the process typically follows divergent thinking and acts as a way to narrow in on a specific idea.”
article in Superorganizers https://every.to/superorganizers/understanding-the-science-of-creativity?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
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A Prayer for the Founders
A Prayer for the Founders - written by Greg Lutze, founder of VSCO
Lord, we love you. We all have our plans, our dreams, our decks, our teams, but most of all, God, we just need you. Give us strength, give us courage, give us wisdom, give us love for people. We ask for silver and gold, not for our own gain, but so we may melt it into swords and spears so that we may fight for what is right and good and true. And if we have lost our way on this journey, tempted by fame and fortune, make us afraid of what we become and renew our hearts towards you. May we love others as we love you. Amen.
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David Brooks on faith
“It is sensing a presence, not buying an argument.” (in an article describing Buechner, but I love this)
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Buechner on paying attention
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
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Buchner on faith
“Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and through time.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction
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O Beauty, old yet ever new! Eternal Voice, and Inward Word.
-from a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, etched on the NY Public Library Bryant Square
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On Van Gogh, art, and depicting consolation even when we don't experience it ourselves
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“sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” - 2 Cor 6:10
Just thinking about the duality of life, and how God holds the both/and. Also thinking about Bonz. Today is Thanskgiving Day.
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Maya Angelou's beautiful poem on loss/death of a great soul
When Great Trees Fall
When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.
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What is a poet?
Soren Kierkegaard wrote that a poet is “An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”
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Gerson on depression - "the prison of sadness" but a perspective from the other side
“Like nearly one in 10 Americans — and like many of you — I live with this insidious, chronic disease. Depression is a malfunction in the instrument we use to determine reality. The brain experiences a chemical imbalance and wraps a narrative around it. So the lack of serotonin, in the mind’s alchemy, becomes something like, “Everybody hates me.” Over time, despair can grow inside you like a tumor.
“I would encourage anyone with this malady to keep a journal. At the bottom of my recent depression, I did a plus and minus, a pro and con, of me. Of being myself. The plus side, as you’d imagine, was short. The minus side included the most frightful cliches: “You are a burden to your friends.” “You have no future.” “No one would miss you.”
“The scary thing is that these things felt completely true when I wrote them. At that moment, realism seemed to require hopelessness.
“But then you reach your breaking point — and do not break. With patience and the right medicine, the fog in your brain begins to thin. If you are lucky, as I was, you encounter doctors and nurses who know parts of your mind better than you do. There are friends who run into the burning building of your life to rescue you, and acquaintances who become friends. You meet other patients, from entirely different backgrounds, who share your symptoms, creating a community of the wounded. And you learn of the valor they show in lonely rooms.
“Over time, you begin to see hints and glimmers of a larger world outside the prison of your sadness. The conscious mind takes hold of some shred of beauty or love. And then more shreds, until you begin to think maybe, just maybe, there is something better on the far side of despair…
”…Many, understandably, pray for a strength they do not possess. But God’s promise is somewhat different: That even when strength fails, there is perseverance. And even when perseverance fails, there is hope. And even when hope fails, there is love. And love never fails.
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“Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn.“ - Michael Gerson penned speech for GW Bush on 9/14/21, in National Cathedral, after 9/11.
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“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” - Mark Twain
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Reframing Obesity
ON why shaming and blaming and a focus only on “personal responsibility” is not the right framework for addressing obesity.
“People are simply told to eat more vegetables and exercise — the equivalent of tackling global warming by asking the public only to fly less or recycle. Diet gurus and companies mint billions off food and exercise fads that will ultimately fail.”
We need to think more about systems and environments than individuals. “…more commonly, obesity is believed to arise because of still murky gene-environment interactions.”
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How to think about a career crossroads
Follow values, not passion Learn through action, not rumination Craft the story of your job’s role in your life. …and more good thoughts.
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Darkness is not dark to God
Barbara Brown Taylor in her book Learning to Walk in the Dark:
“Even when you cannot see where you are going and no one answers when you call, this is not sufficient proof that you are alone. There is a divine presence that transcends all your ideas about it, along with all your language for calling it to your aid, which is not above using darkness as the wrecking ball that brings all your false gods down—but whether you decide to trust the witness of those who have gone before you, or you decide to do whatever it takes to become a witness yourself, here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.”
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from Jayber Crow
Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I have deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will. —Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
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Michael Wear: our souls and public life
I’ve said for many years that the state of our public life both shapes and reflects the state of our souls.
What does our public life say about us? What does the broader public take away from how Christians act, and how they are represented, in public? The health of our politics is not determined, in the end, simply by the positions we take or which party is in power, but by the kind of people we are.
The problem in our public life is that, increasingly, Christians view public life and politics as a forum for conflict and antagonism, rather than service. Meanwhile, the public is losing confidence that Christians have or intend to make a positive contribution to our public life. The question is not whether Christianity will influence our future together as Americans, but how Christianity will influence our nation’s future. The future of American democracy is inextricably tied to the character of Christianity in this country.
Our hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus in public life, for the good of the public. This vision can be realized. Now is not the time for Christian passivity or frantic action, but for joyful confidence. This is the beating heart of The Center for Christianity and Public Life
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"how a teacher inspired me to give my greatest effort in pursuit of learning"
Max Anderson on the best teacher he ever had…and the gift of rigorous feedback paired with the chance to do it again.
The Weekend Reader - 10/31/22 postscript
Another transition this week is at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, which lost its leader, Ashton Carter, to a sudden heart attack. Carter (pictured above) served in Defense Department for multiple administrations, and for two years served as Secretary of Defense under President Obama. A Rhodes Scholar and a PhD physicist, Carter was widely respected on both sides of the aisle and was often recognized as the smartest guy in any room he entered. He was also a kind man who cared about mentoring young people.
Ash Carter was one of my favorite professors as a graduate student at the Kennedy School. He taught American National Security Policy, where a group of 20 or so of us got to meet with him twice a week to think deeply about America’s interests in the world.It was difficult to get a seat in his class, but those who did got to hear first-hand about our professor’s nuclear negotiations with the North Koreans and the strategic imperative of shifting the U.S.’s foreign policy focus to the East. I got an A+ in the class and I know that’s a horribly braggy thing to write but I’m happy to say about it because a) it was known as one of the harder classes at the school and b) I think it was the only such grade I ever got as a grad student. For me that course was less about my natural mastery of it and more about how a teacher inspired me to give my greatest effort in pursuit of learning.
Ash was a great teacher, not just because he had so much experience to share, but because he gave us the opportunity to practice with intense feedback. Every couple weeks Professor Carter would have us write a two-page policy memo, the kind that might find it’s way to a president’s desk. It couldn’t be longer than two pages, because time is of the essence. Yet if the memo failed to go deep in that limited space, it was a failure. And I mean failure. His standards were high. He said they were White House standards. I had never had so much red ink splashed on my work as a student, either in grad school or in college. He found every weakness in my arguments. He noticed what I didn’t say. He even ruthlessly slashed through grammatical errors. At the end of the day, he demanded better than what I was delivering. But then he gave me the chance to show I could be better. Central to Ash’s teaching approach was to do two grades for each memo. He had of us re-write our memos for re-grading, with the benefit of his feedback, to see if we would “get” the advice he was giving. And for me that made all the difference. His approach was fair and it was motivating. He had made me rise to the occasion like no other professor ever did.
I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from some incredible people and some of the “names of our age.” Carter is not a name that I would expect many readers to have remembered. But he is one who in my book deserves recognition, more than some others with more widely-known profiles. I will remember him for the leadership he displayed in serving our country, and for the teaching he did in our classroom. I know if he were reading this he’d have red pen edits all over the place. And for some reason, that brings me some comfort.
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On Falling asleep to audiobooks
“It’s very late-stage capitalism, of course, to sit there or lie there in your envelope of sound, your private entertainment capsule, technologically sealed and cerebrally catered to, fiddling with the volume. But being read to is ancient. I love a podcast—the chitchat, the colloquy—but this is deeper: the reading voice, the singular storytelling voice, thrums in the memory tunnels of the species. When I’m listening to an audiobook, I’m being entertained like a tired ploughman. I’m being lulled, bardically lulled, like a drunken baron at a long feast table, pork grease shining on my chin. I’m being quieted like a child. I’m being spellbound like a face caught in firelight.”
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Remembering Fred Buechner - by Alan Jacobs
https://blog.ayjay.org/remembering-fred-buechner/?utm_source=ayjay&utm_medium=email
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Career as stewardship
“A career viewed through the lens of stewardship is a career that isn’t chiefly about you. What stewards work with is not their own, but they are given what they need to fulfill what God asks of them.”
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On miracles and Reason for God:
I’m thinking of Bonz, not being healed in this world…but restored in heaven.
“We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’s miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.” - Tim Keller, The Reason for God
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There’s a passage in Anna Karenina in which Kitty gives birth to her first child. Levin, the new father, immediately thinks: “Now the world has so many more ways to hurt me.”
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Alan Hirch on church as mission:
“If evangelizing and discipling the nations lie at the heart of the church’s purpose, then mission, not ministry, is the true organizing principle of the church. Experience tells us that a church that aims at ministry seldom gets to mission, even if it sincerely intends to do so. The church that aims at mission will have to do ministry, because ministry is the means to mission.”
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