Two Minds Blog

The poet Annie Dillard died last week at the age of 81. She was a writer who applied deep theological reflection to her detailed observations of the natural world, with works that include novels, poems, prose, journalism, and autobiography, resulting in her receipt of a National Humanities Medal in 2015. Her writings have been compared to those of Thoreau, Woolf, and even William Blake. In reading the various tributes to Dillard's work, I recognized that she was another early influence on Two Minds Theory. In particular, her book Holy the Firm is  one that I first read as an undergraduate at Valparaiso University, and one that has remained my favorite piece of writing over the ensuing 33 years. This little book (only 66 pages in the first paperback edition) is classified under "Nature/Philosophy," and  often described as a meditation on theodicy, the problem of how a good God allows evil things to occur. And it is that, but not only that. It is also a book about writing...

  Creativity is a defining human characteristic, but it is also notoriously hard to pin down. I recently wrote about the benefits of diverse perspectives in solving real-world problems, which reminded me of the psychology literature on measures of creativity. We psychologists specialize in measuring characteristics of people that are hard to define, like intelligence or personality. But within the broad literature of psychological testing, creativity is a particularly tough nut to crack. Dr. Teresa Amabile of the University of Iowa pointed out that all studies of creativity begin with a significant "criterion problem," in other words, how do we define the thing that we want to study? To some extent, whether or not a work is "creative" is in the eye of the beholder. In my own Master's thesis on creativity, I operationally defined creativity as "being a student in art school," which I compared to "being a business student." But are artists i...