Creativity is all the rage these days: what it is, how you develop it, the various ways in which you express it. A slew of bestselling books, including my favorite Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, offers insight into the nature, origin and application of our fundamental, foundational, and phenomenal ability to engage in creative acts. While the approaches and analyses differ somewhat at various points, one of the major points of convergence revolves around destroying the myth of the “solitary genius.” Creativity doesn’t, in other words, happen in a vacuum – creative ideas are always inspired, nurtured, cajoled, and...

I’ve been reading a fascinating book of late by just this title: How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. This team of a father who is a political economist and son who is a philosopher has shed some very helpful light on my questions about money, happiness, and the Christian life. While I’m only about a third of the way through the book, one very interesting discovery for me has been to learn that the first proponents of capitalism actually viewed it not as the salvation of humankind but as a necessary evil to be endured until humanity evolved. I found this incredibly interesting, particularly given...

Make that “Pictures of the Week”! Whatever claims Memorial Day may have to marking the beginning of summer, to me it doesn’t really seem to get going until the first week of July. So much of what is quintessentially summer – from picnics and fireworks to sporting competitions – seems to take place this week. So here are five pics that hardly tell the full tale of this first full week of summer — I mean, no European Cup, Olympic Trials, or Wimbledon! — but nevertheless certainly hint at all that’s been going on. I hope you are having a grand summer! July 3, 2012. Fireworks light up the sky...

I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for cultural flashmob events. I know they’re contrived – how else do you get the great footage? – but I still love the way they startle a random group of people and bring them together as a group, a body, joined partly, I’m sure, by curiosity but also, I think, be the sheer beauty of the event. In this case that event is a 100 member orchestra playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” It was sponsored by Banco Sabadell, Spain’s fifth largest bank, this past May to sponsor the 130th anniversary of its founding. Another favorite flashmob was the dance of “Do...