Category: DOC Thoughts
Creativity and Problem Solving
I am lucky, blessed to have several peers in ministry that are friends. Between us we read many websites each day and come across interesting articles. We are an eclectic group. My thanks to Randy for the forward of this article from Newsweek online. It highlights the need for a liberal arts education, but moreover a change in the educational standards that are devolving in the public school system. If teachers are judged, promoted and salaried based on how well students do on standardized testing, then one day teachers will be removed from the classroom altogether. There is more to teaching than memory work and more to being a grounded, educated person than a score on the SAT. I took the SAT once. My score was 770. I am lucky that the TCU admissions people read my references and looked at whatever else they did beyond my SAT. Our culture, government and denomination needs divergent and convergent thinking right now.
The Creativity Crisis
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman | Newsweek.com | July 10, 2010Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” He recalls the psychologist being excited by his answers. In fact, the psychologist’s session notes indicate Schwarzrock rattled off 25 improvements, such as adding a removable ladder and springs to the wheels. That wasn’t the only time he impressed the scholars, who judged Schwarzrock to have “unusual visual perspective” and “an ability to synthesize diverse elements into meaningful products.”
The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. There is never one right answer. To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).
Really? Crime Against Faith. Really?
When I saw this, “Vatican Says Women Priests a ‘Crime Against Faith,'” I thought I was reading a headline from The Onion, but after further review this is an actual news story posted on the Telegraph.co.uk — then I kept reading. Headlines like this are why our “liberal” denomination’s practice of Christian faith is important. We are an oasis for those that discover that they can no longer journey in faith in their current denominational expression of Christian faith. There will be many in Catholicism that will applaud this move as a necessary protection of orthodox faith and the many are will be primarily in developing countries or are in post-industrial countries so invested in the institutional Catholic church that their very identity as well as their world view is challenged by the idea of women priests. The people in the pews that practice orthodox Catholic catechism are good people, but Pope Benedict XVI and the men that protect him, and orthodox Catholic faith, are segregating themselves from the rest of practicing Christianity. Not to mention that the Pope, as the Vicar of Christ, by extension just claimed that women ordained into Christian faith and those that recognize their ordinations are Christian criminals. Has he read the New Testament? Mary Magdalene went and told the men, who were hiding, that she has seen the risen Christ? Really?
Vatican Says Women Priests a ‘Crime Against Faith
by Fiona Govan | Telegraph | 15 July 2010The new rules issued by the Vatican puts attempts at ordaining women among the “most serious crimes” alongside paedophilia and will be handled by investigators from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), considered the successor to the Inquistion.
Women attempting to be priests, and those who try to ordain them, already faced automatic excommunication but the new decree goes further and enshrines the action as “a crime against sacraments”.
Read the New York Times reporting:
Vatican Rulse Equate Pedophilia and Ordaining Women
by Rachel Donadio | The New York Times | July 15, 2010VATICAN CITY — The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.
he decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.