The Christian Imagination

Harvard Business School has an article about Creativity in Business called Getting Down to the Business of Creativity. Read the entire article if you’d like to know more about their research.

Creativity, a quality more traditionally associated with artistic endeavors, has been slow to find its acknowledged place in the business world.

“Creativity does have a reputation for being magical,” says HBS professor Teresa Amabile. “One myth is that it’s associated with the particular personality or genius of a person—and in fact, creativity does depend to some extent on the intelligence, expertise, talent, and experience of an individual. Of course it does. But it also depends on creative thinking as a skill that involves qualities such as the propensity to take risks and to turn a problem on its head to get a new perspective. That can be learned.”

Another driver of creativity, motivation, is the locus of Amabile’s research. “The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business,” she says.

So what can managers and entrepreneurs do to promote a healthy, positive inner work life among employees? A pat on the back or a company Ping-Pong table is always welcome, but what Amabile and Kramer discovered was much simpler: People have their best days and do their best work when they are allowed to make progress.

Where there is no revelation, the people cast off restraint; but blessed is he who keeps the law. (NIV)
Where there is no prophecy the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. (NRSV)
Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. (KJV)
- Proverbs 29:18

The last version is the best known, though we generally leave off the last part. Since the Psalms heavily rely on Hebrew parallelism, we do them a disservice if we don’t quote the whole proverb, which isn’t hard really, since a verse generally contains the entire proverb.

The latter half of the proverb makes the point that following the law, staying within bounds, makes a person blessed or happy. The first part of the proverb addresses why people don’t keep the law.

Let’s look at the word vision. In Hebrew, it literally means vision, though there are different types, including divine communication. In different Bible versions, it is translated vision, revelation, and prophecy. Since these words are too often strictly associated with telling the future, I need to make clear that that is not what it’s talking about. The role of a prophet, according to Brueggemann, is to Criticize and Energize. The first part is to speak truth and break through people’s complacency. The second part is to inspire and rekindle the imagination.

Cast off restraint seems to be the most accurate translation of the rest. It means to loosen, and can even mean ignore. A person who is complacent, self-absorbed, and numb can easily do both.

I’ve been reflecting on the verse this past week, partially because I’ve rediscovered passion for some things that I had forgotten I was passionate about. I strive to be a good person. Admittedly, life sometimes seems like a series of todo lists and to-not-do lists. Knowing what is good for me doesn’t always inspire me to be good though. Sin can have an illusion of life to do, even if only briefly. Sin is the easier path. And when the stories I am sold from Christian vendors don’t stir my heart and help me see into the distance, my reasons to follow the law and restrain my life just aren’t compelling. When trying to do just what others tell me I should do, I feel like I lose a self of myself and who God created me to be in this world.

And when this visionary doesn’t have a real vision to take hold of, I descend into mediocrity…and stay there.

Apparently stepping out in faith towards a vision that resonates with my heart is a way to rise above mediocrity and get unstuck. So, another day on the journey…

Social networking and blogging is a phenomena, a poorly understood phenoma. So using The Cluetrain Manifesto and A Case Against Adolescence for reference, let’s discuss some background.

Mass production and mass media served to put power in the hands of less people. Mass production requires a large, relatively unskilled workforce. Mass media allowed the few to communicate message to the many. People, the masses, lost their voice.

Education, in many ways, followed suit. Mass education. Whether immature, mature, smart, athletic, all go through the same basic system at the same rate with the same people. The responsibilities given are largely menial. Grades are given in an artificial environment largely disconnected from the so-called real world. Sure, learning takes place, but what can be done with it? What meaningful responsibility is there? There are lots of restrictions though. There are far more now on teens than ever before. As Epstein says, adolescents are free to do immature things, but are not free to be adults with adult responsibility. Parents can be incredibly overprotective. While it’s better for a parent to care than not care, being protective isn’t the answer. Entering into their world and teaching them how to discern is.

Enter Social Networking. Now adolescents have a place to express themselves in a world where adults aren’t always telling them no, in a world that adults largely don’t understand. In MySpace, they have a space they can do what they want with and connect with the peer culture. Facebook did the same for college students. It connects us with each other. It’s not a replacement for social interaction, but a supplement. We can talk about what’s important to us and easily share it, publicly, with the world.

Blogs are part of this too, a more conversational way to express oneself, with the world. I’ve heard some talk about the pointless diatribes on blogs. Well, they don’t get it. A blog is not about being intellectually efficient, but about expression. I’ve heard that most bloggers are female. And based on what I’ve studied about female communication, women are more likely to put their emotions out there as a way to connect and release what’s going on inside. It’s not about the response, but about the expression (and this is, of course, not exclusive to women).

Yes, there are dangers to social networking, whether it be stalkers or putting too much private information out there. And yes, there are youth who are unwise online. But most use it to connect with their friends, not strangers. Many are also smart enough to limit who sees their private blog or at least use some discretion. The point: there are a lot of smart adolescents out there. Maybe that’s part of the problem though. It’s a world many adults don’t have the time, interest, or understanding to delve into, and being reactionary is just easier.

Lest it feels like I’m being too hard on post-adolescents, it is, honestly, hard to keep up on all this. This is a fast changing world. The world that adolescents are entering is not the adult world…it’s a world that doesn’t yet exist.

“But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”
1 Cor. 7:9

In case you didn’t know, people in the Western world are living longer than anytime in history. No longer is it a necessity to get married and have children as soon as possible lest our culture die out. In times when people died in their 30s or 40s, it was VERY important.

Now throughout history, trends relating to sex and marriage haven’t been constant, but as far as American history is concerned, we, as Christians, seem to miss something about sex.

By extending adolescence by having 12 years of schooling, and then 4 years (or more) of college becoming a rite of passage, and then considering people are living longer, marriage is now delayed. The high rate of divorce also contributes to the delay. The median marriage age is about 25ish, with many getting married in their late 20s. What does that mean?

It means that we, as Christians, are now expecting people to abstain from sex for over 10 years after they biologically are, in many ways, an adult. Even Paul, in an age when people, as a whole, died younger, recognized the power of the sex drive and advised people to marry if they burned with passion. Now, when teens are burning with passion, what are they supposed to do? How many parents want their children in high school or college to get married during those times? The point is not whether they have the maturity or whether it’s a good idea, but, rather, that we have really high expectations which the cultural structure itself makes difficult to live up to. Teens are put into a subculture where they spend most of their time with their peers and are told not to bow to peer pressure.

The Bible definitely makes it clear that sex is to be within marriage. But, we do have sexual desires, and we get to choose what to do with that. In Paul’s culture, a young marriage was an expectation. For Paul to say that singleness was an option for all, perhaps even preferred, and that there was an alternate family, was out-of-step with the culture. And if singleness is a valid option for a Christian, God’s grace must be sufficient to abstain. Evangelicalism almost seems to worship the ideas of marriage and family at times though, and that makes it hard to be single in many church environments. People want a narrative that does more than reflect the culture with a little Jesus thrown in. Thankfully many in the next generation are rejecting the narrative given them by the Church of the American Dream and are searching for a better one.