The traditional view of creativity is that it is unstructured and doesn’t follow rules or patterns. Would-be innovators are told to “think outside the box,” “start with a problem and then brainstorm ideas for a solution,” “go wild making analogies to things that have nothing to do with your product or service.”

We advocate a radically different approach: thinking inside the proverbial box, not outside of it. People are at their most creative when they focus on the internal aspects of a situation or problem””and when they constrain their options rather than broaden them. By defining and then closing the boundaries of a particular creative challenge, most of us can be more consistently creative””and certainly more productive than we are when playing word-association games in front of flip charts or talking about grand abstractions at a company retreat.

Our method works by taking a product, concept, situation, service or process and breaking it into components or attributes. Using one of five techniques, innovators can manipulate the components to create new-to-the-world ideas that can then be put to valuable use.

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As many of you know I am at Nashotah House in Wisconsin at the Anglican Church in North America’s Provincial Council (which just concluded yesterday with a Festival Eucharist””an inspiring and joyful worship). This morning they will begin their House of Bishops Meeting. I am present as an observer. Joining me at the Provincial Council was The Very Rev. Peet Dickinson, Dean of the Cathedral, and Mrs. Suzanne Schwank, a member of our diocesan Standing Committee. They returned this morning to South Carolina and I will stay on for the House of Bishops Meeting and return on a late flight Friday in order to be at St. Christopher Camp and Conference Center for its 75th anniversary this weekend.

As I told the Diocesan Council last month and said at various deanery gatherings, not to mention many parish forums, it has been my intention to attend various gatherings within what I’ve referred to as the Anglican Diaspora in North America to learn the various players and seek greater unity as may be appropriate. So when I met with Archbishop Robert Duncan at the recent New Wineskins Conference, he invited me to attend this Council as an observer and bring a delegation. This struck me as a good way to follow-up on my expressed intentions.

It has been an enlightening and, frankly, encouraging few days.

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On World Refugee Day we are urged to remember the millions of people who have been forced from their homes and homelands, out into a world that is unfamiliar, frightening and dangerous. This year we are especially asked to consider the impact on families who must care for each other despite having left behind every source of comfort and security. Under these desperate pressures families can find themselves pulled apart, creating deep suffering that doesn’t just hurt now, but wounds generations to come.

Providing sanctuary to the stranger has always been a core Christian value. Every day churches around the world care for people who have been forced into becoming ”˜strangers’. They offer a welcome to people who have been robbed of their homes, their societies and their cultures.

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The only thing that stands between the individual and a power-hungry government are what is known as “intermediate institutions.” Churches, civic associations, clubs, business groups, and especially families, are all institutions that claim a certain level of allegiance from individuals, and help us govern ourselves. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his masterful Democracy in America, they provide the best protection from an over-reaching government.

But when those institutions-especially the family–abandon their responsibility, the government is only too happy to step in. Too many parents have ceded their responsibility to disciple, educate, feed, train and care for their children to others, especially the government. The government has been talking to our kids about sex for years. So it’s not that difficult to see why they would think they have the prerogative to “fix” the consequences of that behavior also.

I’m not saying government is bad: it’s not, it’s biblically ordained for a specific purpose. And Chuck [Colson] described that purpose a few years ago: “I’ve said it until I’m blue in the face,” he said, “and I’ll say it until I’m purple: The biblical view of the role of government is to preserve order, restrain evil, and promote justice. Government has no legitimate interest in running car companies, the healthcare industry, or taking over student loans.”

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About 10 days ago I was speaking at a service in another large building in London, and I used the phrase about liberty under authority as being one of the ways in which we are structured to live in this country. I tried to suggest that we sit in a hierarchy of authority in this country that is presented in our constitution as beginning with God and cascading downwards through contemporary and historic institutions, with delegated powers, and which gives an environment of liberty, experiment and development in our nation, which is limited by authority and has boundaries.

But the trouble with that is that we always have to ask ourselves about the liberty to do what? About 30 years ago a famous Board of Trade enquiry into a takeover remarked that in that particular transaction everyone asked whether something was legal, and nobody ever asked whether it was right.

So we may have liberty to do all kinds of things, but are they good? Jesus in one of his best known stories, the story of the Good Samaritan, which I won’t repeat to you, because I am sure you all know it”¦ well I am not actually but I am still not going to repeat it to you. The story of the Good Samaritan gives, among other things, a parable of liberty used in association with financial power, to enable health and healing of someone who is wounded and struggling. In that parable liberty is at the service of love and gratuity, a free gift ”“ a picture of Jesus himself, of course, in his relationship to us.

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The summer solstice, 21 June, is one of the most important dates in the calendar for many followers of ancient religions, and it’s a special time for people in Greece who worship the country’s pre-Christian gods.

“I love the energy this place has,” says Exsekias Trivoulides who has pitched his tent on what he considers to be the holy site of Mount Olympus.

Trivoulides is a sculptor who studied art history and classics, and these days, he is living his passion….

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Assurances that a candidate for the episcopate who is in a civil partnership is living a celibate life may not be sufficient to qualify him for appointment to a bishopric, new guidance from the Church of England’s legal office said this week.

The revised guidance on the impact of the 2010 Equality Act on the selection of bishops follows the decision by the House of Bishops last year to lift the ban on celibate clergy in civil partnerships’ being put forward for the episcopate….

Like the old guidance, the new document explains that, while it is unlawful to treat a candidate to an office less favourably than other candidates because of his sexual orientation or civil partnership, churches and other religious organisations can apply requirements relating to sexual conduct, including a requirement not to be in a civil partnership “where that requirement is applied to give effect to the non-conflict principle”.

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After 25 years of consulting and researching local congregations, I have found four common approaches churches take to break attendance barriers regardless of size. There are certainly more than four possibilities, but allow me to evaluate these four more common approaches.

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Lord, increase our faith. Grant us to know in daily life something more of the faith that pleases thee; the faith that removes mountains; the faith that overcomes the world; the faith that works through love; the faith that makes all things possible. So may we prove more fully thine own faithfulness and receive the blessedness which thou hast promised to those who trust in thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Frank Colquhoun (1909-1997)

The LORD called Samuel a third time, and Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” Then Eli realized that the LORD was calling the boy. So Eli told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” Then Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” And the LORD said to Samuel: “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. At that time I will carry out against Eli everything I spoke against his family–from beginning to end. For I told him that I would judge his family forever because of the sin he knew about; his sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain them.

–1 Samuel 3:8-13

Global markets have fallen sharply after the Federal Reserve signalled it may begin to scale back its stimulus of the US economy later this year.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones dropped 354 points, or 2.3%, to close at 14,758, while the S&P 500 had its worst day since November 2011, shedding 2.5%.

European stock markets were down 3% or more by the close….

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The central feature of Obamacare ”“ getting the uninsured to sign up for health insurance ”“ is due to start on Oct. 1, less than four months away. But both the federal and state governments are behind in their preparations.

That’s the conclusion of two reports issued Wednesday by the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO) looking at the status of government efforts to set up online “exchanges,” or marketplaces, for both individuals and small businesses.

“Much progress has been made, but much remains to be accomplished within a relatively short amount of time,” said the GAO report on the establishment of “federally facilitated” health-insurance exchanges for individuals. Those are the exchanges being set up for the 34 states that opted not to set them up themselves.

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