Creativity Creep

September 10, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

At The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman has some interesting stuff to say about “creativity creep”: Every culture elects some central virtues, and creativity is one of ours. In fact, right now, we’re living through a creativity boom. Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative—how else, we think, can we become fully realized people? Creativity is now a literary genre unto itself: every year, more and morecreativity books promise to teach creativity to the... Read more

Work less, do more, live better

September 9, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

Patience Schell reminds us that we might want to reconsider longer hours if we actually want to do good work: Some years ago, I heard that a colleague characterised me as “someone who didn’t work weekends”. This description was not meant as a compliment. It’s true that I make a concerted effort to keep something approximating normal working hours of 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. But I haven’t always worked like this. As a postgrad, I anxiously counted my hours and consulted with... Read more

Work/Life Separation

September 8, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

I frequently work from home, as does my husband, and it’s been a process of trial and error to figure out how to do that well. I wish I’d read this piece from 99U on work/life separation: Emotional traffic through that door moves in both directions: good news in one arena can lead to positive effects in the other, and vice versa. Unfortunately, this is true for negative scenarios too. Rather than pretending we live in a tidy world with... Read more

Why Can’t Men Be Friends?

September 5, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

Over at Christianity Today, they’re asking a provocative question: why can’t men be friends? As a single person, I acutely need intimacy and loyalty from my friends. I’m eager for them to say to me, “We love you because you’re ours,” without leaving an escape clause. Part of the reason I need that kind of friendship is because I don’t think marriage is in my future. I’m gay, and also committed to the traditional Christian view that marriage is the union of... Read more

Quotidian Magic

September 4, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

In The Curator, Josh Gotwalt writes about Boyhood, the movie that is turning out to be the talk of the year: In his essay, which Emily Belz cited in her review for WORLD, “E Unibus Pluram” David Foster Wallace critiques the stylized conceits of contemporary cinema and television as meretriciously catering to our desire to transcend our average daily lives. These hysterical collages are, in his words, “unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting … more lively.” We leave these films dazzled,... Read more

A Letter to My Younger Self: Three Crucial Needs in Your Life

September 3, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

Over at The High Calling, they’ve been running a series of “letters to my younger self.” I especially liked Bob Robinson’s letter: Not only was Richard good at what he did, he had developed a reputation for honesty and integrity. People knew that his word was solid and that they could trust him. His clients knew that they were going to make a quality product because he made sure that it was. As a result, P.S.I. became very successful. But... Read more

The Oldest Story: Broadchurch and True Detective

September 2, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

At Christianity Today, I wrote about Broadchurch and True Detective and the situation in Ferguson, and whether or not I am part of the problem: But there’s one very important thing both shows do, something that Christians, frankly, need to do better in their storytelling: they understand intuitively that sin is both a personal and a corporate matter. Sin is something in people’s hearts, and it’s also something that permeates a community. And when something goes wrong in a community, rarely is the perpetrator the only one... Read more

The Power of Privileged Words

September 1, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

Over at Christ and Pop Culture, Drew Dixon writes some powerful words about, well, words, in the wake of the Redskins kerfuffle: A gospel-centered perspective on words calls us to speak in such a way that prioritizes the impact of our words on our neighbors over our personal perception of them. Perhaps the greatest lie we have convinced ourselves of concerning our words is that they are not very powerful. James, however said that the tongue is like the rudder of... Read more

Bearing New Images: Miyazaki

August 29, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

Hayao Miyazaki has brought joy to people all over the world with his movies, like Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and Howl’s Moving Castle. But he’s retiring, and his studio is shutting down. So now’s the time to read a bit more – including some surprising truths about Miyazaki – here in The Curator: Through their triumphs, Miyazaki’s heroes are liberated. They soar—literally. All but two of his ten written and directed films feature an extended scene in which our heroes take flight,... Read more

Is It “Goodbye Evangelicalism” or “We Join You In Your Suffering”?

August 28, 2014 By Alissa Wilkinson

Thabiti Anyabwile wrote a remarkable post about Ferguson and the failure of movement evangelicalism: When James Cone wrote A Black Theology of Liberation in the late 1960s, he was attempting to provide a theological framework for understanding and guiding the feelings and actions of African-American protestors. He wrote in the wake of a deadly riot in Detroit. He felt a burden, a heavy weight to say something meaningful as a Christian. He felt, as many had before him, that if Christianity had... Read more