Creativity - #1

I have always been interested in creativity and how/why some people seem more creative than others. In the next few posts I will be providing research I have accomplished and my thoughts on it.

One of my major papers at Tabor was on Christians and the Intellect. Here is an excerpt:

I was listening to Ravi Zacharias on his radio program last week during which he made a remark which surprised me so much, I missed the point of his sharing. He stated while reading the People magazine he learned a specific fact. I did not remember anything after his statement because I was trying to ‘get my brain around’ the thought of Ravi Z. reading People magazine. I consider Ravi Z. one of the few Christian intellectuals in the world today, so I asked myself, “Why was he reading People magazine?”
Two answers which came to me were: 1) He was reading it to understand where secular culture was and where it is headed or 2) He was putting diverse information in his mind which could be used later as a connection for a creative thought. The second answer reminded me of the research I have done on ‘creativity.’ The research revealed evidence that creative people read, talk, debate, and consider many diverse subjects or types of information. This exercising of the mind will provide many different ideas which can be used to create connections of diverse information into a new idea, a creative thought.
As I was contemplating the research on creativity and how Christians need to improve the use of the mind and develop Christian thinking, I was impressed by how similar the steps to develop creativity and the intellect are and how they need to be developed in Christians. Reviewing what Moreland provided as an important practice for developing the mind shows how close developing creativity is to it. He states, “It is no less true of becoming a deep, careful thinker in general exercised regularly, trained to acquire certain habits of thought, filled with an increasingly rich set of distinctions and categories.” This author believes the way a person acquires the ‘rich set of distinctions and categories’ is through the acquiring of diverse types of information and allowing it to be connected together during the exercising of the mind, which would be a creative thought. (Moreland, 104)
Moreland, J.P. "Love Your God With All Your Mind, The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul" Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1997