U.S. Artist Colonies: Creation Stories

Since the 19th century, artist colonies around the world have provided solitary time and space for creative individuals to work, often surrounded by inspiring natural beauty and, alternatively, the stimulating company of other artists. A brief discussion of five such colonies in the United States—Yaddo, MacDowell, Hambidge Center, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, and the Vermont Studio Center—reveals that, for all the differences, each is the legacy of visionary founders who believed it essential for society to ensure creativity by supporting creative individuals, a need more urgent the less other social institutions call us to our highest selves.     

Trinity and Creation

A theology of creation requires clarity about trinitarian doctrine, especially the relation of the one divine essence to the three persons, the distinction between immanent and transitive acts, and the indivisibility of God's outer works. The triune God is one undivided essence in an irreducible threefold personal modification. The persons of the godhead are distinguished from each other by mutual relations and by each person's proper characteristics; these relations constitute God's immanent perfection anterior to creation. The work of creation is a non-necessary, novel and voluntary work of the Trinity. As an outer work it demonstrates God's unity: the work of creation is not divisible into three distinct actions. But distinct and eminent appropriation of specific acts to specific persons is permissible if each person is understood as a mode of the one divine essence. Creation is thus a common work of the undivided three-in-one; there are not three creators, but three who create.     

Creation and End-Directedness

Does the act of creation show itself anywhere within the creation? A common contemporary ontology tends to see two possibilities for those who want to defend a notion of creation. The first is to argue that an original set of materials was brought into existence out of nothing by divine action a long time ago. The second, in the tradition of Paley, posits a specific divine action that oversees the development of some of the materials into entities with an end-directedness. Much contemporary energy focuses on the second possibility. The argument of the paper is that the ontology behind both of these possibilities, which limits itself to the notions of a creation of materials and the building of some of the materials into end-directed entities, conceals rather than reveals the idea of creation. The paper tries to show how an Aristotelian sense of nature, with its recognition of internal teleology and original spontaneity, offers a better starting point for coming up against the mystery of divine creative activity.     

Schema Creation in Programming

The creation of plan schemes is examined in a naturalistic, longitudinal study of problem solving. Ten novice programmers each wrote eight Pascal programs to solve a series of problems. Their protocols were analyzed to determine how declarative programming knowledge was used to create simple procedural program plans, and how the simple plans were used to create complex plans. Plan creation showed a process of backward development, from the goal to the plan focus, that port of the plan that directly implements the goal. Once defined; it is expanded to create the complete plan, showing backward development of plan parts from the focus. Once the plan is complete, it may be stored as a plan schema and retrieved in subsequent problem solving. The plan will then show forward development as it is implemented in schema order, the order in which plan pieces occur in the finished program. The change from backward development during creation to forward development after retrieval was strongly evident in the statistical analysis of the protocol data. Previous studies of novice programming, which showed only forward development, ore explained as special cases of this more general model, cases in which schema knowledge was available to the problem solver.     

Participating in God: Creation and Trinity

Books reviewed:
Samuel M. Powell, Participating in God: Creation and Trinity. Reviewed by Terry J. Wright Spurgeon's College, London