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So sit back, kids, and let uncle Owen tell you about the time…

Jesus turned the water into wine…

The story is actually way better with words.

They think it forms the walls and lid for our minds and souls. The box shelters us from evil. Creativity — thinking outside the box — represents some kind of disruptive assault on all that is right and good.

We Christians have a hard time knowing when to be orthodox and when to be groundbreaking. There’s not much room for creativity when it comes to theology. It’s a set system. And that’s ok. But, it’s harmful to let our fixed theology calcify our minds.

The easy and lazy path is to be conservative in everything and fight change of every kind.

If you’re the kind of person that is threatend by change, I’m not judging you. I’m just inviting you to consider that you’re predisposition to favor the status quo (to be conservative) may be the function of other factors — your personality, your past experiences, your personal preferences.

In other words, if you don’t like Jackson Pollock, it’s not God’s fault.

Using God to back up your own ideas warps our world’s understanding of what God is like. And,  it makes you look silly:

“Christians are not always viewed as creative people, either by ourselves or the secular world. We tend to limit ourselves and what we are able to do with the talents and gifts God has given.

For example, for years may magazines and Sunday school publications bought their Bible art from a lithograph service. The little line drawings were safe, predictable, and dull. Then one publication decided to try something different. A Jewish artist was hired to illustrate Bible stories. She did an unusual job. The pictures seemed to come alive on the page. But no sooner had Christians opened their first issue than they began to write protest letters. “These pictures look too Jewish,” the letters declared. “The don’t feel Christian, you know. Some of the people in them aren’t smiling.” The artist’s work went into storage and the conservative readers breathed a sigh of relief; modernism had been stopped.

“In the world of art, we have chosen religious propaganda over genuine creative work. Yes, we are interested in pointing people to Christ, but that noble goal gets rather downgraded when we thing the Holy Spirit can’t work through excellence.” [1]

This is talking specifically about art, but the underlying principle applies to Christian’s aversion to change across the board. Using theology as a box to shelter us from having to make decisions about life in the contemporary world would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

Some of the most deeply spiritual and meaningful contributors to our understanding about God were also among history’s most creative minds. They did not view theology as a box. They saw it more as the mind’s north star. A fixed reference point essential for keeping their explorations of creation on a healthy course.

Theology didn’t hold them back. Theology wasn’t a protective shield from the harsh realities of life. Theology was their map to adventure and their guarntee that, wherever they might roam — physically, intellectually, creatively — all they had to do was look up to get their bearings and find their way home.

So, before we close the lid on a creative effort let’s consider: Is this really theology at stake?  Or, is this my box talking?

God is big. He doesn’t need our box. Let’s be conservative only when necessary.

[1] From: Creative Teaching Methods, LeFever, 1990

The project of learning has changed fundamentally in the past few decades. Not too long ago, much of education was a matter of learning how to find information. That’s no longer the case.

Thanks to the advent of the Internet, locating a wealth of information on any topic is as quick and easy as tapping a few words into your web browser.

Finding information is easy. Figuring out what to do with it is the new challenge. What sources are trustworthy? How do I prioritize what I find? What is the difference between fact and opinion? These are the kind of questions a contemporary education must prepare the learner to answer.

It’s true for academic subjects…and it’s true for the Bible, too. I can google “Jesus,” for example, with a few keystrokes. But fitting what I find into a helpful framework? That requires teaching:

“Perhaps it has not fully dawned on the preachers of our time that preaching needs to be preceded by strong programs of teaching. The preacher’s words fall on barren ground where the people have not first been taught how to…listen, how to weigh and evaluate, how to interpret the lines of Scripture that apper in the sermon — all these “how to’s” are the product of careful preparation, of teaching.” – Locke Bowman

Quoted in Effective Bible Teaching p. 38

That’s a good reminder. What learners really need from us as teachers is context. With a bird’s-eye perspective, students can filter inferior bits of info, map out the facts, and grasp the meaning.

Learning so big, you need a wide angle to fit it all in.

That’s exactly what Sarah worked on this weekend for the kids at church. It was amazing to watch her transform this drab grey room divider into a colorful display. Oh…and by the way? The entire thing can be folded and rolled away for storage.

High five, Wildwoman!

Now, just for fun, here’s Eric trying out some traditional Venetian appetizers on the banks of the world famous Grand Canal.

What would it take to get me to bite? Here are 10 ways to make soccer awesome.

What’s a guy to do? The NBA is a question mark. There’s no NFL in sight. Tiger has a bum knee, and there’s not even any tennis on ESPN 2 right now.

It’s down to baseball, bowling, and lawn darts. When you’re sitting there seriously considering getting into lawn darts you know you’re just a hunger crazed shell of a man.

And then there was soccer. And I almost doused the tough ol’ sport with ketchup and tossed it down the hatch. Almost. I guess a starving person won’t eat just anything.

So, what would it take for me to serve up a healthy helping of soccer?

1. Pyrotechnics.
2. A hockey-like penalty system. David Beckham gets a yellow card? Yawn. David Beckham gets a 5 minute major for fighting? Oh yeah.
3. Also, fighting.
4. Sometimes you can use your hands. What if the ref would blow the whistle every so often, initiating a period of crazy mayhem where players could pick up the ball and run like heck.
5. Ties? This is America. In America we have the winners and the people the winners ripped off. Tie games remind us of land wars in South Central Asia. Those memories makes us angry. And we’re already angry because we have to watch soccer. Not good.
6. The dodge ball round. If the game ends after exactly 90 minutes (see #8 below) and the score is even, I say we end it with a game of sudden death dodge ball. Each team puts their best player in the middle of the center circle. Last player standing wins it for the team.
7. 5-on-5. There’s too much team work and patience with the current arrangement. There are 22 people running around out there! According to my multi-sport analysis, the number of players fielded is inversely proportional to the number of points scored per game. Soccer clearly needs more points. The only sport that scores less points is golf — and that’s because they’re trying for negative numbers.  Shrink the field and the number of players. That’s how I spell GOOOOOOOAAAAAAL!!!
8. An actual, predetermined, defined ending to the game. Soccer is missing that last-second-shot game-winning-field-goal as time expires thing that makes people stay to watch the second half.
9. No out of bounds. Play off the walls like indoor soccer. Better yet, let fans scramble for loose balls out of play and throw them back into play. Now THAT’S home field advantage. Who doesn’t like a little audience participation?
10. Ultraviolet light. MLS becomes BLL — Black Light League. You had me at black light.

• This girl had no option to chose that “none of the children are bad.” She was forced to make a value judgment.
• Lack of variables. No other visual characteristics like hair color/length, eye color, clothing or even position of light and dark illustrations in the line-up were introduced in the line of questioning. Would the girl have made a different choice if the darker-skinned illustrations where wearing purple dresses and the survey taker’s favorite color happened to be purple? The survey doesn’t rule out these possibilities.
• Because of the lack of variables introduced, no correlation can be drawn between the girl’s choices and her racial attitudes. It’s scientifically useless.

Since this survey did not introduce any other possible variables – say, asking the same question but with the illustrated children arranged in a different order in the visual, for example – the survey isn’t scientifically conclusive.

But then, why would a black child point to the light-skinned child as being “good” or “smart”?

The survey’s results say that even black children pointed to light-skinned illustrations as being the “good” or “smart” children. How could it be anything but the child reflecting a belief that light-skinned individuals are somehow better then them or, at least, better off socially?

Here’s something else to consider. Children are not able to think abstractly at this young survey-takers’s developmental stage. When she is picking a child out of the line up, she isn’t drawing abstract conclusions about value based on skin color. Quite the opposite, she sees herself as a “good” and “smart” child, so she picks the illustration that “is like me.” (If you watch the video, you’ll see this is the case.)

This survey could just as easily be viewed as a measure of a child’s self-esteem than a test of his/her views on an abstract race construct.  Why would a black child pick a light-skinned illustration as the “good” one? Maybe his or her parents and teachers have sent the dark-skinned child negative self-esteem messages. Therefore, the “good” child is the one that is opposite to them. That’s a self-perception that would fall on the shoulders of parents, teachers, and other influences in the child’s life.

Since the survey didn’t test for these possible variables for the responses it gathered, it’s interesting but scientifically useless. Again, this is not a defense of any kind of racist behavior. But, in the race to call young Americans “racist” I’m just flipping on the yellow light of caution.

Just because this survey is labeled “science” doesn’t mean it’s the genuine article.

Filed under: communication, culture, education, research Tagged: CNN ]]> http://wildthoughts.net/2010/05/18/tonight-cnn-races-to-call-american-children-racist-not-so-fast/feed/ 2 wildnotes