Artandicon's Blog

  • Never surrender!

    “Never give up! Never surrender!” This is my favorite quote from the 1999 sci-fi parody film Galaxy Quest. As a fan of Star Trek, I love the heroics of the storylines and the movie’s devoted fans. What sets this spoof story apart is how an alien culture has modeled its entire identity on the “historical…

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  • Weaving a Life Story

    Weaving is a metaphor for our life’s story and journey. We envision the weaver in charge of the colors, designs, and textures of the finished fabric. The weaver’s goal is to produce a beautiful product. We often think we are in charge of our own destiny, as “The Weaving Song” by Carolyn Hester, in which…

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  • Learning, Growing and Thriving

    In most adults, learning and thinking plateaus and then begins to decline after age 30 or 40. The old adage, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” takes on new meaning in regards  to creativity. People after this age start to perform worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as processing speed, the rate at which someone…

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  • The Iconography of the Nativity

    What Makes a Nativity Scene? The gospels remind us the story of Christ’s birth isn’t necessary for our salvation. Only our faith in Christ’s saving work for us on the cross is necessary “to transform our humble body that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables…

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  • Light Overcomes the Darkness

    “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” —John 1:5. Some of us can hear these words with hope, two thousand years after John’s gospel was first written. These words come as a ray of hope, like a flashlight’s beam bursting into a collapsed mine to let imprisoned workers know…

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  • The first bright light of creation must have been an awesome sight. Of course, only God was there to see it or hear it. The earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep. Genesis 1:3 tells us, “Then God said, “Let there be light;” and there was light.” I have…

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  • The Creating God

    In the dead heat of summer, our gardens aren’t putting forth the fruit of our planting. Maybe the animals of our neighborhood have made their too frequent nightly visitations, so our harvest is skimpy. We can forget God is a both a creating god and a recreating god as well. The first words of the…

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  • The Witness of the Cross

    We are a people who follow Jesus, “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and (who) has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God,” as the writer of Hebrews 12:2 reminds us.…

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  • THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN THE SCHOOLS

    When does an image become a meme? Or an icon, an idol, or a shibboleth? I ask those questions, and then have go about defining them. We all know what an image is—a representation of something which actually exists. An icon is the Greek word for image, but to become a venerable image, it must…

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  • Entertaining Angels Unawares

    One of my favorite icons is the Rublev Trinity of 1411, which represents the three angelic visitors who came to Abraham and Sarah’s tent in the wilderness. They stopped there on the way to Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities known for their lack of hospitality to strangers, so the largess Abraham showed by preparing a…

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